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’...

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...