Worth a look: Paul Schrader directs a Harold Pinter adaptation of an Ian McEwan novel, in Venice, in 1990. Rupert Everett and Natasha Richardson are trying to revive their marriage on holiday, but fall under the sinister influence of sadomasochists Christopher Walken and Helen Mirren. Venice is deeply cinematic, but Schrader opts for much nudity and is clearly in love with Everett. Creepy.
Controversial in its day (1967), Joseph Strick's bold stab at Joyce's unfilmable novel was (echoing the book) banned in Ireland until as recently as 2001. This year will see the 100th anniversary of "Bloomsday": as a warm-up, watch this intriguing, prescient art movie, vividly stalking Bloom and Dedalus around Dublin, then committing the last half hour to Molly (Barbara Jefford) and her lusty soliloquy.
One of the turkeys which derailed Peter Bogdanovich's career. Hubris-fuelled on the back of runaway success, he cast other half Cybill Shepherd as the Henry James heroine who flits around 19th-century Europe falling in love and dying. The costumes are fine, but there's no feel for what was anyway a mediocre James story, and no momentum. Cybill's a fish out of water. A pretty folly.
In tandem with her recent, more rock-oriented collaborative albums (corralling everyone from Damon Albarn and Jarvis Cocker to Billy Corgan), Faithfull has pursued her other career as a torch singer, the regal ruin of her pristine '60s folk voice now the perfect expression of seen-it-all wisdom/ennui. In the company of pianist Paul Trueblood and at the end of a world tour (recorded at the International Jazz Festival in '97), she's bawdy, wry and always wrenchingly expressive: in short, quite the best exponent of this sort of thing.
