Sight & Sound. April 07.

You'd like to read this, wouldn't you: "Is today's American indie cinema anything more than a refuge for slumming stars in tales of dysfunction and depression, funded by the very system it supposedly opposes? Mike Atkinson reports plus Amy Taubin, Howard Feinstein, B Ruby Rich and Hannah McGill offer their pick of US indie highlights." So would I. Unfortunately, it's not one of the pieces from the April issue that Sight & Sound has deigned to put online.

But fine. We do get to read David Thomson reflecting on which films Bud, the 11ish boy of Terence Davies's The Long Day Closes, might have seen and which it would have been impossible for him to have seen before he lounges "beneath the funnels of projected light where Beowulfs of cigarette smoke wrestled" and watches Doris Day in Love Me or Leave Me. Then: "What Davies has created is not so much a celebration of those old movies as an oratorio on radio. It's a bit of an illusion that the American films stand near Bud's bed as his ancestors or ghosts. What the film really comes from is Humphrey Jennings and Listen to Britain."

Ali Jaafar on Days of Glory: "[W]hile Eastwood deconstructed the story of the planting of the Stars and Stripes at Iwo Jima and Spielberg raised the technical bar in capturing the horrors of war, it is [Rachid] Bouchareb who has proved that cinema can still make a difference."

Reviews:

• Tim Lucas on Yasuzo Masumura's Red Angel, just out on DVD: "Much as Blind Beast seems shocking to western sensibilities for the dark extremes of erotic fetishism it portrayed onscreen in 1969, this somewhat earlier film contains correspondingly intensive scenes in which bloodsoaked operating theatres are indistinguishable from abattoirs, the gruelling dramatisations of amputations somehow made more horrible by Kobayashi Setsuo's elegant black-and-white Daieiscope cinematography, beautifully preserved in Fantoma's spotless 2.35:1 anamorphic transfer."

• "Lee Myung-se certainly has no more commitment to the martial-arts genre than Zhang Yimou does, but he has a more credible history than Zhang of playing with genre for his own ends - and nobody has ever accused him of being opportunistic or insincere in his work," writes Tony Rayns. "Duelist is not his finest hour, but it develops an erotics of swordplay which is original, distinctive and finally rather touching."

• "Some [Aki] Kaurismäki aficionados might think Lights in the Dusk a disappointment after the more immediate appeal of The Man without a Past," concedes Ginette Vincendeau. "Nevertheless, Lights in the Dusk is a highly original, strangely fascinating and self-assured work by Finland's best-known film-maker and one of the most important auteurs in today's European art cinema."

• Ryan Gilbey: "The self-consciously gritty spirit of US independent cinema, and the marshmallow softness of the inspirational issue movie, are fused to unusual effect in Half Nelson, the story of Dan Dunne, a Brooklyn teacher who puts the 'high' into junior high."

Posted by dwhudson at March 19, 2007 2:05 PM