Sight & Sound. Jan 08.

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, you'll remember, tops Sight & Sound's "Films of 2007," the results of the magazine's annual poll (and again, you can download the handsome collection of dozens of individual ballots as a PDF). As much as I'd have liked to be more original about it, Cristian Mungiu's Palme d'Or and European Film Award winner will be at the top of my own year-end list as well. And now it's S&S's "Film of the Month" for the January issue. Ben Walters: "A technical tour de force, gripping in its awful banality and not without deadpan wit, the film works as a companion piece to Cristi Puiu's The Death of Mr Lazarescu (winner of Un Certain Regard in 2005); together, they form mordant bookends to life, stringent redresses to sentimental fantasies of birth and death."

Jonathan Romney reviews another film that'll be going on my list, Jacques Rivette's Don't Touch the Axe, "a surprisingly faithful adaptation of Balzac's 1834 novel La Duchesse de Langeais, the central part of his trilogy L'Histoire des Treize - the conspiracy motif of which provided the underpinning of Rivette's vast experimental drama Out 1 (1971).... Elegantly staged and meticulously paced, right down to the suspensefully extended penultimate act..., Don't Touch the Axe, for all its austerity, offers a more satisfying and direct emotional reward than many of Rivette's films."

Tim Lucas follows up (well, in a way) his choice of If... as the top single-feature DVD of the year with a review of Lindsay Anderson's own followup, O Lucky Man!: "[N]owhere else in cinema will you find such a bleak worldview infused with such infectious, ebullient, indomitable joy, attentive to the magical propensities of life even when at its darkest."

One more review before popping up to the features. Mark Fisher notes the references to Taxi Driver and The Catcher in the Rye in The Killing of John Lennon and notes that "the film works best as an analysis of assassination as plagiarism. Chapman appears as a kind of bad but spectacularly successful postmodern author, synthesising his influences not into an act of artistic production, but murder, acting out in the (hyper) real what had previously only happened on the page and on the screen."

"Wenders's early work proved that the spirit of the American road movie could be imported into films that were truly European," writes Nick Roddick. "It wasn't a case of pastiche, like Sergio Leone's Westerns - rather, this was a genuine reinvention, the assimilation of the language of one culture with the experience of another. From his 1970 graduation film Summer in the City (dedicated to the Kinks) to his 1984 Palme d'Or-winner Paris, Texas - and maybe even up to Wings of Desire in 1987 - Wenders reworked American cinema tropes (with just a hint of Ozu) into something profoundly European."

And editor Nick James talks with Ang Lee about Lust, Caution. For Lee this one and Brokeback Mountain "are almost like sister works. At the age of 45, I started to have a midlife crisis because of the way I was living out my childhood fantasy. So I got into subject matter I'd never paid attention to before, namely romance. Both films are based on stories that are not much more than 30 pages long, both tales of impossible romance written by gutsy women."

Posted by dwhudson at December 18, 2007 7:36 AM