KinoSis

In my blissful youth, I watched lots of obscure and unorthodox films on late-night TV that ended my dogma of what good cinema was like and, it might be said, changed me a bit. Among those, the 1970s sci-fi films in particular were hypnotic. Phase IV, Zardoz, A Boy & His Dog, Silent Running – jarring music, lackadaisical pace, sere mood, subdued acting, muted action. These odd little wild-cards, scrutinised on a square-foot screen in silent darkness, frequently with a reception that looked like a swarm of angry bees in a snowstorm, were mesmerizingly different to movies from before their historical moment and after it; they felt as alien as you might in fact think films about aliens should do. They tantalised me and felt like they had slipped through a net of homogeneity. But I did not see Quintet at that time. If I had, I might well have announced “possibly a bit too heterogenous” (or words to that effect) and this, I submit, would have been admirably fair of me. As American films

Journeys, turning points, the crucial epiphanies of personal growth when someone learns something improving about themselves - these warmly charming moments are, of course, irritating to watch at the best of times, but particularly in comedy films, so the very few comedies so heartless as to skip all that are accordingly the ones that stand out in our affections. This one is kind enough to be precisely that cruel. It comes out at the pre-kaboom period of transition between the naughty 90s and the, I suppose, actual 00ies, where the fad of dark comedy crime film finally gets too self-conscious about its own assumptions to carry on with itself any more. At first glance, it’s just a film noir spoof with some neat tricks but it’s actually one of those interesting little movies that surreptitiously says a lot of unflattering things about American society, and who, I ask, is to say wrongly? It turns out that spoofing the femme-fatale pulls a Jenga brick which collapses the fragile tower of

Everyone talks about two bits in Birth   – one, Nicole Kidman goes to the opera, and the camera holds in a close-up on her face for two long minutes, in an obvious Dreyer homage. Two, Kidman takes a bath with a ten-year-old boy and the mood is tenser and less innocent than ideally one would like it to be given the bounds of propriety. Will bath-time become paedo sexy-time? A kid-man for a Kidman.  Now I know what you’re going to say – “I’m giving this one a wide berth!” Well, you know what, just grow up a bit please, this is a serious film and we’re not going to dwell on those scenes anyway. Everything to say about them has been said, not that there's loads to say. In fact, hundreds of thousands of words of deep musings about this film are already available , but I think mine will show - pregnant pause - more natal care.  The design of Birth is perfectly clean and uncluttered. A precocious child declares that he’s the reincarnation of an upper-class Manhattan woman’s dead hus

Great pains are taken throughout this mid-70s Clint Eastwood hit (and it was a massive hit, think about that) to assure the audience that the hero of the title is anti-racist and anti-war. And looking back on it now, it’s easy to see why Eastwood, who directed the film, was so careful on that point. Based on a novel by violent KKK member Asa Carter, the movie recasts the Confederates as the good guys and is generally taken to be the type of right-wing propaganda movie that paved the way for Reagan’s victory. Eastwood plays a vigilante who wants revenge on the US government for a war-crime - by Union soldiers - who kill his family in the first scene, and at first glance it adds to a string of 70s Westerns known as thinly disguised condemnations of the Vietnam War: Soldier Blue, Little Big Man, Ulzana’s Raid. It also fits neatly into the post-Watergate suspicion of government, like that decade’s spate of paranoid conspiracy thrillers. But its heart is with the far right of American ra

Auteur directors can’t seem to resist melodrama. Todd Haynes did it with Far From Heaven, Schrader with Forever Mine, Lumet with Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. There’s loads of examples. They love it. Probably it’s because whackadoo crazy plots give them more legroom than boring dopey realism, without them having to make art-films that nobody watches. De Mille, Minnelli, Sirk and Ray were doing this at the exact point that Europeans said Hollywood was dumb (loveable, but dumb) and it was time to do something entirely different – and the Europeans thereupon made the greatest films of all time. The 70s saw the American backlash, recrowning realism as the one true monarch of cinema, and so auteurism since then has been all about working within those confines. Melodrama is one acceptable mode of testing the walls of the cell. Iñárritu (look at the trouble I’ve gone to there! Not really - cut and paste) sort of joins the melodrama club but takes the clichés of daytime TV movies a

This movie (and it is a movie-movie, about a woman who never grows older and what that does to her love-life) is, mostly, a really transporting little flight of fancy, plus some problems, and the main problem is that I hate voiceovers and this film has an appalling over-reliance on a particularly self-defeating one. In one section in particular, it could have been a ravishing ten-minute modern silent film, full of impressionistic imagery and classic montage, and we would have quite serenely got all the relevant points, but it is defiled by a rubbish voiceover with lots of pseudo-science reducing it to visual filler. Nonetheless, the director Lee Toland Krieger (nothing else of consequence) has an eye and clearly loves cinema. Scene upon scene comes to us gifted with unexpectedly memorable shots, and the cumulative effect is not only of a gratifyingly and valuably old-fashioned classical film, but it’s also as reminiscent of the 1970s stylised infatuation with classic Hollywood (perha

Can I interest you in a Marxist condemnation of British imperialism? This silent film sees Pudovkin reaching out, decades ahead of Mao, to “the periphery”, to the potential for revolution in Asian peasants rather than the factory workers of the cities. This wasn’t the main line to take, but it was still something Lenin had talked about, so it wasn’t a deviant heresy. The opening scenes have the striking naturalism of an ethnographic documentary, then it turns into an action film, then shifts again to gorgeously cold portraiture of Westerners, richly dripping with satirical contempt of imperial power's facades. While the opening scenes alone feel like a truer use of cinema than the huge preponderance of what's been released in the last few years, with the solemn shots of the desert, the weathered faces of the Tibetan peasants and the instant intimacy and realism of their lives, we don’t have to wait long to find out we’re watching some proper left-wing shit, with an amazin

“Condors Aren't Buried Every Day” - to which one can only say, how true that is. This Colombian obscurity (not obscure in Colombia, apparently) is an almost plotless, low-budget film that puts to shame many over-praised epics on the same theme – which is the nature of power and evil (yes, that's all). At first the film seems maybe amateurish in its refusal to develop its course with any plot-twists, but that absence is the clue to what the director Francisco Norden has done. Plot summary tends to be dead weight in a discussion about a film's virtues, but here there is so little of it that we’ll need to dig in to see the point.   It tells the story of “the Condor”, an asthmatic, middle-aged bookseller in a loveless marriage (he can’t stand to see his wife naked) who is mocked and dismissed for his political views by the liberals who at first have power in the small town where he lives. All the rich successful people in town are Liberals and treat him with contempt as a

Unlike the constant anxiety faced by nervously sweating white directors as they await the imperious verdict of critics on their latest performance in the gladiatorial arena, a black film director enjoys the guarantee that he or she is pre-destined to get thumbs down either way. When McQueen made two films not about race, he was criticised for trying to assimilate into Hollywood by not upsetting American conservatives, whereas when he made a film directly about race, he was criticised, naturally, for trying to assimilate into Hollywood by playing to coastal liberals. What could be less controversial than a film condemning slavery? Of course it won the Oscar. Sheer commercialism. His first two films were much better. They were much more dangerous.  Basing Hunger and 12YAS on true events puts McQueen at a bit of a distance from high-modernist art films of the Holy & Divine Era, but the sheer seriousness and political obviousness of them made both films feel like proper films wer

OK, so, yes, as a first impact, it’s a cinephile’s love-snuggle. The opening scenes to Otto Preminger’s classic Western are a glorious extravagance of background activity soaked up in magisterial camera sweeps. One far from soon forgets that first sequence with a cocky tracking shot through a vibrantly recreated tent town at night, ostentatiously packed with a parade of bustling events going on in the middle distance as Robert Mitchum strides through this world. I especially like the puckish insouciance of staging a whole minor drama with sumptuously gowned ladies being helped off a carriage stuck in the water, which goes unacknowledged by Mitchum and the other character he’s speaking to. There’s colour splashed all over Preminger’s compositions like an abstract expressionist, like when Marilyn Monroe talks backstage with her boyfriend and the screen becomes a casually glowing pattern of vivid dabs here and there.  A lot of this fades away when we leave town and head out to the f

David Thomson, in his Biographical Dictionary, doesn’t like Kim Basinger and asks “Is she even that good looking?” I thought this was slightly offensive and wildly unobservant. If her film Nadine has one basic problem, it’s that it doesn’t really play up her naturally wow glamour. Here they’re trying, in a vehicle made just for her, to make her a safe “relatable” mainstream actress, attractive but not too intimidatingly hot, more of a Southern comedienne. Jeff Bridges plays a roguish cad we’re supposed to like, but only do because it’s Jeff Bridges. Establishing him as a two-timer gives us the most inventive scene in the whole film, done almost in one take and seemingly designed to win a bet: proof that you can, albeit briefly, do a French farce in a mobile home. It’s the best bit of the film and the best bit of the scene is a split-second deadpan from Basinger. It’s all over too soon. There are a few other laughs and neat touches here and there, but considering she was the most eye-

A film by Philip Haas of a John Hawkes novel I briefly considered for my “top 50 novels since ‘68” list but culled. I wish I could call it a draw – what the film loses from the novel’s intricate literary game-playing and layers upon layers, it gains in immediacy and concreteness. But I can’t – once again, the film of a novel is not as good as the novel, because There’s So Much More In The Novel. In fairness, there’s not vastly more in the novel, but I do miss what was left out. This far from trivialises the film, though. It’s still a fucked-up movie from a fucked-up book with all the same creepy unease, all the uncomfortably unsexy sexuality, all the atmosphere, so mysteriously indefinable, and those intimations of Gothic horror peeking from the edges, only just kept at bay by the sun.  The basic set-up is this: Cyril (beautifully played by Charles Dance) may or may not be a charming psychopath, or he may just be a very woke, hyper-mature, forward-thinking guy who has transcended