EN VANAVOND NEMEN WE BABEL (AND TONIGHT WE TAKE BABEL) (Hans Van Den Boom, 1977)
'Comparisons are reductive. And the critical game of trying to describe a piece of art by naming two others is not only lazy, but cheating. If I were to say that this film is a blending of...
View ArticleBEAT STAR (George Pammell, 1960)
The first thing you have to do is get an audience with Donald P. Impressario. He's the main brain. He has a stable of lads, all with names conveying undoubted star power. Some will tell you that you...
View ArticleMONA (Lance Adams, 2012)
Jeff Hudson (Patton Oswalt) is thrilled when he lands a job as a writer for Bona Comics. He's been drawing and self-publishing his own titles for years with little success, and this opportunity is...
View ArticleLE BOTOX (Jean Champi, 1957)
In the 54 years it has taken to officially arrive in this country (this country being, variously, America, the USA, or some virtual construct located in both, either or neither) Le Botox (1) hasn’t...
View ArticleANDY WARHOL'S RYAZANTSEV (David Salle, 1970)
If one were to compile a book of pictures of the Soviet star Tanya Ryazantsev (and indeed someone has, but it might not count: as the evidence is absent from the web in body of image and of thought. He...
View ArticleFUTUR (Piotr Janas, 1958)
'Forty years and I have learned nothing, nothing useful, about the people, factories, politics and personalities of Hackney. The name has declined to a brand identity. A chart-topper: worst services,...
View ArticleCHOCOLATE CASSETTE (19--)
My dreams are gone. I awoke with a phrase in my head that I knew was the key to unlocking a whole narrative, and repeated it to myself many times. I came up with an abbreviated set of codewords to help...
View ArticleBABY SHOWER (Leo Katzenberg, 1977)
Todd Rundgren stars in this oddity (produced by Blake Edwards) about a man who, taking the advice of a successful gigolo (Cliff Robertson), begins gatecrashing baby showers in the Cincinnati area,...
View ArticleJACKY (Jean Antoine, 1993)
'Obviously narration is only an act of memory; on the other hand, it holds nothing in reserve for future use; it merely derives a little pleasure from the states of dread by trying to formulate them as...
View ArticleM.JAINET'S ETERNAL ZIGZAG (Francois Lepin Eziot, 1949)
Plotwise, this is as simple as those early cinematic experiments entitled Tennis Match or The Motorcar Departs:A man is pursued, endlessly, across borders. We pick up our sympathies from the details:...
View ArticleGOONER (Peter Harris, 1996)
'Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.' Joyce Carol Oates'The recurring image, the one that says more than...
View ArticleMENSCH VERSUS MITTWOCH (MAN AGAINST WEDNESDAY, F.G. Hoch, 1930)
There is a sequence in F.G. Hoch's Mensch Versus Mittwoch in which protagonist Eli, played with brilliant care by Emil Jannings, leaves a bar drunk and walks down a Berlin alleyway. He is set upon by...
View ArticleI DREAM OF 'TO THE BRINK' (Peter Davies, 1988)
A boy (Matthew Rhys) dreams about a television show that he is convinced must be real, so rich is the detail in his head. He spends a day walking around his small Welsh town, asking people if they have...
View ArticleMATHEMATISCHE (GEOMETRIES, Cecil Franck, 1960)
This hypnotic film from the solipsistic eye of Cecil Franck is part of a larger exercise in narrative and mind-mapping that the filmmaker returned to throughout his career. Essentially an internal...
View ArticleLANDFILL (George Eliott, 1974)
Locals debate the meaning of a quarry in a poor small town in the Midlands. It is 1969, and the swinging sixties, a media hologram only filled in with hindsight, hasn't been seen here. A gargoyled...
View ArticleSCALA QUARANTA (Beppe Nona, 1963)
This cannot be approached like other Nona films: Scala Quaranta, sensing our critical apparatus even when our advance is silent, hastily retreats into the undergrowth. Its enigmatic figure belies a...
View ArticleTHE LIBRARY AT QUEEN OF ALL SOULS (Leo McCarey, 1955)
'Once you permit those who are convinced of their own superior rightness to censor and silence and suppress those who hold contrary opinions, just at that moment the citadel has been surrendered.'...
View ArticleELVIS HAS LEFT THE BILL (Bobby Hope,1982)
Bobby Hope (pronounced /huːp/, like hoop, but with a slightly Dutch 'y' sound in between the two o's, like a crooked nose being framed by two ever-open eyes) has made over a thousand films. He does so...
View ArticleTHE SEARCHERS (Lars von Trier, 2009)
[This review is a near word-for word rewrite of Gavin Smith's review of Gus van Sant's Psycho in the February 1999 edition of Sight & Sound, with all references to those films replaced by ones to...
View ArticleOLDER HOUSES (John Hinckley, 1987)
A young man visits a childhood home.'Crossing the road with several other people. The house where we lived between 8 and 14 is here, on a busy main road. In my dream, I know that we have sold part of...
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