Sight & Sound. October 07.

Kind of cute: Eastern Promises opens the London Film Festival on October 17, right? So the October issue of Sight & Sound opens with "Eastern Promise," Nick Roddick's survey of contemporary Romanian cinema. Celebratory as it is, the piece ends on a note of warning: "However great the acclaim that greets its films internationally, a national cinema without a national audience is living on borrowed time."

This month's cover is enticing, but the three-piece package on Control (which opens in the UK on October 5, that is, well before the LFF) is not online. If it's any consolation, this entry is still being updated (and a Toronto index is forthcoming, by the way).

"I think since 9/11 there has been a desire on both sides for more hostility, a cruder division of the world into right and wrong," Michael Winterbottom tells Ali Jaafar, who sees in A Mighty Heart a film "marked by contradictory tensions on almost every level."

"Considering the challenges it poses, Syndromes and a Century is an exceptionally easy and pleasurable watch," writes Tony Rayns. "The more you pinpoint the film's central dualities - female/male, country/city, sunlight/electric light, then/now and so on - the more it starts to sound like one of Apichatpong's gallery pieces or installations: an art object rather than a movie. The paradox is that it plays just fine in the cinema." Also: "[I]f Death Proof isn't a proper grindhouse movie, what is it? First and foremost, it's a game of two halves - sort of like an Apichatpong Weerasethakul film, but less so."

Tim Lucas reviews The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On, Hara Kazuo's acclaimed documentary on Okuzaki Kenzo, "a Pacific War veteran, one of only 30 survivors of a thousand-strong regiment, who dedicated his post-war life to forcing other survivors of Hirohito's imperialistic campaign to admit the crimes they committed against their fellow men in order to emerge alive.... The day after viewing it, while watching television, I happened to surf past Master of the World, a 1961 film of Jules Verne's 1886 novel Robur-le-Conquérant starring Vincent Price, and was struck by many pronounced parallels. Okuzaki, I realised, was Robur come to life, a man who felt world peace must be achieved by any means necessary, his soul so eclipsed by that quixotic quest that he failed to see the monster he had become and the common sense that peace can only be achieved by living in peace." On a related note, John Adair agrees that the film "serves as a cautionary tale to those so deeply angered and embittered by the injustices of the world."

"The giant of the French star-system, the man who has made more than 170 films, the star of Le Dernier Métro and Cyrano de Bergerac, had lately become known primarily for his dodgy, though lucrative, business ventures, his speeding offences and his cameos in blockbusters like La Vie en rose," writes Ginette Vincendeau. "The Singer, by young director Xavier Giannoli, gives [Gérard] Depardieu a wonderful opportunity to display his colossal talent (and physique)."

Posted by dwhudson at September 25, 2007 2:06 AM