Sight & Sound. 08/06.

That face is beginning to look awfully familiar. At any rate, there's an animation special with pieces on A Scanner Darkly, naturally, as well as Cars, Renaissance and Princess in the new issue of Sight & Sound, but none of those are online. Even so, there's an animation timeline, beginning in 1832 with the Phenakistoscope and moving along to Disney's buyout of Pixar. Quite an interesting browse, and it's also evidently a "longer version of what features in the magazine."

"For the first time in more than 15 years (I'm excepting the remarkable box office for Flowers of Shanghai in France), Hou's critical standing is being matched by popular success," writes Tony Ryans. "It's an interesting and surprising turn of events, since Three Times is in no fundamental way different from other recent Hou Hsiao-Hsien movies."

Jonathan Rosenbaum on Les Amants réguliers (Regular Lovers): "[Philippe] Garrel might be regarded as a kind of romantic luxury only a culture such as France's can fully support, or perhaps envision: relatively free from most commercial restraints, including many of the usual obligations associated with telling a story; surviving on the fringes of art cinema while retaining the same overall ambitions; defiantly remaining, as New York admirer Kent Jones put it in the title of one appreciation, 'Sad and Proud of It'."

Philip Kemp: "The centerpiece of the great trio of films directed by [Carol] Reed at the height of his career, The Fallen Idol has suffered neglect in recent years, its quiet murmur drowned out by the melodramatic reverberations of its predecessor and successor, Odd Man Out and The Third Man."

Reviews:

• Linda Ruth Williams on Mary Harron's "glorious biopic of the queen of softcore bondage," The Notorious Bettie Page.

• For Tim Lucas, there's a sequence in "Jonathan Weiss's uncompromised adaptation of JG Ballard's 1970 novel The Atrocity Exhibition [that's] like discovering where film truly stands, or could, 40 years beyond Antonioni and Godard, 30 past Roeg, 20 after Greenaway. Weiss's film is 21st-century cinema."

• For Michael Brooke, The Death of Mr Lazarescu "depicts as rich a human comedy, in the Balzacian sense, as anything in recent cinema."

• For Edward Lawrenson, The Science of Sleep "never satisfactorily coheres... But what a dazzling display."

Posted by dwhudson at July 18, 2006 2:46 PM