Sight & Sound. November 07.

Online, the new issue of Sight & Sound opens with a questionnaire. The four questions: "What is Bresson's significance for you?," "What is your favorite Bresson film and why?," "What, if anything, have you borrowed from Bresson's cinema?" and "What do you see as Bresson's true legacy?" Following Michael Brooke's quick primer, filling out the form are Olivier Assayas, Bruno Dumont, Paul Schrader, Eugène Green and Aki Kaurismäki.

Nick James looks back on the Venice Film Festival: "This has been a strong year for American cinema, but a weaker one for its alternatives. And if festival director Marco Müller's program reflected that problem, it was so rich in star-encrusted excitements - most of them packed around the opening weekend to satisfy anyone departing for Toronto midweek - that we can already say that Venice has trounced its main rival, the nouveau riche Rome festival, in both the quality of the selection and the glamor it flaunted."

Reviews:

• Written and produced by Robert L Joseph and directed by Charles Crichton, The Third Secret "perhaps belongs most of all to cinematographer Douglas Slocombe, in whose filmography it stands as the third panel of a psychologically themed triptych, following John Huston's unjustly neglected Freud (1962) and Joseph Losey's masterpiece The Servant (1963)," writes Tim Lucas. "Like those earlier films, The Third Secret embodies an exciting time in movie history when the delineation of character became more penetrating, less concerned with star iconography, more self-aware, self-conscious and conflicted."

• "As his first film explicitly centred on male homosexuality, The Witnesses marks a watershed in [André] Téchiné's career," argues Ginette Vincendeau.

• Superbad, writes Ryan Gilbey. "The movie treads identical ground to American Graffiti (1973) and Dazed and Confused (1993), but what distinguishes it is a post-Porky's sensibility that simultaneously satirises and celebrates pre-PC smuttiness."

• "James Mangold's achievement is to fashion his remake of 3.10 to Yuma in a traditional, yet compelling way," writes Geoffrey Macnab. "The screenplay does depart from Delmer Daves's 1957 original (which was based on an Elmore Leonard short story), but the changes it makes are more to expand the scope of the story than to distort it."

Posted by dwhudson at October 22, 2007 8:23 AM