Sight & Sound. December 07.

"With two films about to be released theatrically in the UK and a 50th-birthday retrospective scheduled at BFI Southbank, Tsai Ming-Liang seems suddenly back with the wordless, delinquent version of a vengeance," writes Roger Clarke in the new issue of Sight & Sound. "As well as the vaudeville and pornographic pleasures of The Wayward Cloud (2004) - like The Hole (1998), but with watermelons - British audiences will now get to see I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (2006), Tsai's first feature made in his native Malaysia. It's the latest in a series of cinematically refined, intensely personal films from one of the key figures of Taiwan's second-generation New Wave, whose members include the rather better-known Ang Lee."

"This magazine doesn't often look at television matters, but Channel 4 has had such an impact on UK culture since it crash-landed in 1982 into a staid broadcasting world that its silver jubilee can't be ignored. To assess its history and worth to us all, Alkarim Jivani talked to some of those involved in its creation."

Reviews:

• "Regardless of how one feels about Breathless - whether one sees it as a trashy pastiche or as the moment when self-consciousness first dawned in the cinema - it is in many ways one of the movies' most compelling invitations to dreaming," writes Tim Lucas, reviewing the "typically magnificent Criterion offering."

• Tim Robey on Into the Wild: "[E]ven [Sean] Penn's more indulgent flourishes seem to enhance the film's keen feeling. With its swooping hunger for landscape and new experience, it plunges headlong into the giddy, passionate convictions of its hero, then pulls back to show us what he's missing - and how badly he is missed."

• "The Darjeeling Limited isn't just complacent, though it is that: the stock elements employed by [Wes] Anderson for more than a decade - slow-motion shots set to 1960s British pop, former writing partner Owen Wilson as a melancholy loser, robotic tracking shots that glide sideways for comic effect, excitable whip-pans - have never felt less inspired, or more like a safety-net," writes Ryan Gilbey.

• Lisa Mullen on Lagerfeld Confidential: "[L]ike a favored puppy, the filmmaker revels in his privileged access to his master. And since Lagerfeld turns out to be an extraordinarily clever and monstrously interesting character, the film can hardly fail to be diverting."

Posted by dwhudson at November 19, 2007 11:03 AM