Set at the death of the samurai age, Japanese master Nagisa Oshima's first feature in 13 years charts the disruption of a militia barracks by the arrival of Ryuhei Matsuda's androgynously beautiful young swordsman. A partial return to the erotic obsession of In The Realm Of The Senses, it's a bleak but mesmerically beautiful movie where realism balances with dreamy stylisation.
Enduringly popular epic, directed with vigorous panache by Richard Fleischer. Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis are terrific as the feuding half-brothers, sons of hugely-bearded Viking warlord Ernest Borgnine, and there's an admirable amount of rowdy quaffing, hearty pillaging and general mayhem.
Steve Buscemi's 1996 writing/directing debut, by turns subtly hilarious and desperately sad, is a scruffy, rambling tour of barfly life, wherein his shiftless mechanic becomes an ice cream salesman and romances a much-too-young-for-him Chloe Sevigny. The tagline—"One man's search for... who knows what"—perfectly captures its loaded small-town shrug. Bruisingly good.
Screened on TV last Christmas, this celebrity fundraiser for the Peter Cook Foundation features a host of comedians including Michael Palin, Rik Mayall, Angus Deayton and Dom Joly (reprising the one-legged Tarzan sketch) and, unfortunately, Josie Lawrence and Griff Rhys-Jones. A fitfully amusing parade of the old and new, worth purchasing if only for the excellent, pithily epigrammatic Jimmy Carr.
Dick Lester's faithful two-part version of Dumas' adventure tale has truly imaginative action sequences, a cracklingly witty screenplay by George MacDonald Fraser, swashbuckling heroes (Oliver Reed, Frank Finlay), OTT villains (Faye Dunaway, Christopher Lee), a fantastic supporting cast (everyone from Charlton Heston to Spike Milligan) and a visibly huge budget. Wonderful stuff.
Hal Ashby's deceptively sunny direction of Robert Towne and Warren Beatty's sex-comedy screenplay is brimful of Barbie hair, open shirts and Triumph motorcycles, as libidinous pompadour George (Beatty) juggles four Beverly Hills sirens with his own nascent career plans. Yet the oppressive setting (Nixon's '68 election night), Beatty's stunningly lugubrious performance and his eventual comeuppance all feed a brash vein of cynicism that shapes the entire movie.
