Two recent limited editions from Second Sight approach horror from very different angles – classic Hammer Gothic in Terence Fisher’s Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974), and contemporary Right-wing violence in Jeremy Saulnier’s Green Room (2015).
Criterion’s new release presents a stunning restoration of Jean Eustache’s intimate epic The Mother and the Whore (1973), a bleak epitaph for the failed promise of social change which climaxed and crashed with the May 1968 uprising in Paris: a few years later, the film’s characters are adrift and trying to rebuild a sense of themselves in a society which has rejected them and their dreams.
It’s that time of year again – have to look back and think about whether the time I’ve spent watching movies has been worthwhile. Here, I glance back at eleven disk releases which stood out for me.
Following the international success of La dolce vita (1960), Federico Fellini faced a crisis of confidence fuelled by the expectations of producers, critics and audiences waiting to see what he would do next; plunging into that uncertainty he transformed creative paralysis into the defining film of his career, an exuberant, prodigiously inventive fantasia which reinvented him as an artist. Throwing off the last traces of Italian Neorealism, in 8½ he embraced the messy chaos of life which became his enduring theme in all the films which followed. Criterion’s 4K restoration once more makes the film fresh and vital.
Part eight of my review of what I saw at the Fifth Hong Kong International Film Festival covers my introduction to the great Greek filmmaker Theodoros Angelopoulos, who addresses the fraught political history of 20th Century Greece in four thematically rich and visually stunning features made between 1972 and 1980.
Yet more notes on recent viewing, featuring horror – both high and low end – some documentaries and action movies, gritty realism and slick fantasy … eclectic and somewhat random.
In this, the longest section of my notes from the Fifth Hong Kong International Film Festival, I cover the English-language films from Britain, Australia and the U.S., which include documentaries, mainstream movies, films about sexuality and toxic chauvinism, class conflict and ennui.
A few more of the movies I’ve been watching this Fall – the feature-length versions of Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse homages; David Fincher’s breakthrough thriller Se7en; David Wickes’ two-part TV movie about history’s most famous serial killer Jack the Ripper; Chuck Norris tackling an army of terrorists single-handed in Joseph Zito’s Invasion U.S.A.: John Carpenter’s disappointing remake of Village of the Damned; William Malone’s stylishly confused on-line thriller fear dot come; and Maurice Devereaux’s effective low-budget horror about the Biblical apocalypse End of the Line.
Part eight of my review of what I saw at the Fifth Hong Kong International Film Festival covers German films groaning under the weight of history and the pressing need to construct an identity free of the past.
Recent viewing includes a mix of horror, sci-fi and social commentary, from George A. Romero’s Bruiser (2000), about an office drone whose social invisibility enables him to exact revenge on his abusers, to a pair of Mexican Gothic fantasies about a vampire count; from an Aussie Indiana Jones rip-off to late effects artist David Allen’s passion project The Primevals, left unfinished at his death in 1999 but now completed by his friends.