Sight & Sound. March 07.

"What I was actually filming was the collapse - the 'fall' - of an increasingly ineffective and impotent protest movement," Peter Whitehead tells Paul Cronin. "As a group, the anti-war activists were fragmenting, crossing some kind of threshold, tipping over into something more radical. The breakdown of legal protest and the shift to calculated political anarchy were just around the corner." Cronin revisits The Fall and Whitehead's abandonment of filmmaking soon after its completion.

Amy Taubin meets Steven Soderbergh to ask him about The Good German, but not before placing this new film within the context of an iconoclastic career, a "filmmaking tear that rivals the speed records of Godard in the 1960s and Fassbinder in the 1970s," a "marathon within the belly of the beast."

Reviewed in the new issue of Sight & Sound:

• "The only feature ever distributed by the oddly named Aries Documentaries, Murder à la Mod seemingly vanished off the face of the Earth after playing at a single New York City theater," writes Tim Lucas. Now, thanks to Something Weird Video, Brian De Palma's second feature (and his first ever theatrical release, however limited) is out on DVD.

• Linda Ruth Williams on Dreamgirls: "[P]erhaps the greatest pleasure comes from its honesty as a musical."

• Ryan Gilbey: "There is no nice way of saying it: The Bridge is a downer."

• Michael Atkinson: "Famously plagued by production shutdowns, fleeing producers, a slashed budget and the unceremonious exit of its original stars (Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett left, apparently in tandem, to star in Babel), The Fountain emerges from its own purple haze as unarguably the wackiest Hollywood movie of 2006. That is, the most unintentionally ridiculous pap."

Posted by dwhudson at February 19, 2007 9:41 AM