The issue of Basque separatism simmers unresolved in Spain, where Julio Medem's documentary has aroused controversy for its alleged one-sidedness. The director's technique is unsubtle. He's rounded up countless talking heads, sat them in chairs in front of attractive Basque scenery, and got them to talk to camera about the complicated political, historical and social issues involved. The result is somewhat tedious and confusing.
The ingredients are there: Nicolas Winding Refn (Pusher) directs John Turturro and James Remar in a (minimal) script by the late Hubert Selby Jr, with Eno scoring. Yet somehow this just doesn't gel as it wades through its slow pretensions. Turturro's a recently widowed security guard, obsessive over photos and CCTV as he seeks his wife's killer. Intelligent, but rather drab.
Aussie heist thriller about crooked Guy Pearce's relationships with his two partner-in-crime brothers and his wayward wife, Rachel Griffiths.
The team scheme to rip off the bookies, but Pearce and Griffiths are in top gear and make roadkill of any flaws in the plot. Bitter, tough and funny.
Sam Fuller's explosive pulp classic, a red-menace thriller, pitched near hysteria from start to finish. Richard Widmark's lone-wolf pickpocket winds up caught between the Feds and the Reds when he unwittingly lifts stolen microfilm from Jean Peters, a hooker being used as a courier by a Soviet spy ring. Thelma Ritter's loveable stool-pigeon suffers one of the great movie deaths. Definitive Fuller, definitive noir.
It's 1967 and Terry meets Julie under a Wessex downpour as opposed to a Waterloo sunset. John Schlesinger addresses Thomas Hardy's torrid melodrama of love, betrayal and sheep farming with the epic cinematographic sweep it deserves, while the tension between Christie and her three suitors-the doomed Peter Finch, the stoical Alan Bates and, of course, the dastardly Terence Stamp is spellbinding.
Following last year's release of his earlier work, this is an artfully presented set of Polanski's commercial breakthrough movies—Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown and The Tenant. Given a ready-made yarn with a thread, he could concentrate on brewing his own unique, dislocating atmospheres and obsessions, and did so brilliantly.
"I'm not sure if it's a comedy or a tragedy," shrugs actor Jean-Claude Brialy in Une Femme Est Une Femme, "but it's a masterpiece." Not wrong there. This hyperactive 1961 ground-breaker, even more than the mesmerising Alphaville, is everything that's wonderful about early Godard. Later, he became obsessed with semiotics, deconstructing to the point where only the fanatical could go with him. But here, in the post-Breathless era, high on success and confidence, he's brushing excess flecks of genius off his coat.
Although Vol 1 delivered gloriously demented energy, crazy-paving style and a skyscraper body count, Tarantino purists lamented the lack of wordy dialogue and funky gristle that would have made it a full Quentinburger with cheese. Well, here it all is in Vol 2. Sure, Uma'n'Keith (Carradine) share enough sassy lines and high-kicking homicides to hold you, but the conclusion still whimpers when it should bang.
When it was released in his native Hong Kong in August 1990, John Woo's brutal Vietnam-era epic Bullet In The Head was a box office disaster. Speaking to Uncut in April 2003, Woo remembered: "When we did the premiere, people just walked out...I felt totally exiled."
Coming just over a year after the brutal massacre of students in Tiananmen Square, it's perhaps no surprise that the movie—called Die xue jie tou in Woo's native Cantonese, aka Bloodshed In The Streets—was too complicated, too downbeat, too pessimistic. And it is.
