Sight & Sound. Feb 08.

"How is Inglorious Bastards going?" Sight & Sound editor Nick James asks Quentin Tarantino before they get into it over Death Proof. But it's a relaxed, meandering conversation, too.

The first part of the BFI Southbank's Burt Lancaster season runs throughout February. Philip Kemp considers the career: "Through all Lancaster's best roles - and through his own personality - there runs this element of ambiguity. Lindsay Anderson spotted it early on, noting "this odd mixture of violence and decency, this goodwill that has not quite found a satisfactory channel of expression.'"

In Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, "Andy and Hank can't help but evoke memories of Biff and Happy Loman in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman: they can't accept that they are failures or that they haven't managed to be the sons their father wanted, hence their decision to countenance deeds that risk ruining not only their own lives but those of everyone close to them." Geoffrey Macnab gets a few words with Sidney Lumet.

Reviews:

• Roland West's 1929 Alibi "would seem to have everything going for it," writes Tim Lucas. And he lists its assets; they're impressive. But "it fails to conjure a story of sufficient substance or irony to warrant such impressive treatment" as Kino gives it.

• Ben Walters and JM Tyree on No Country for Old Men: "Conventional narrative models demand an obstacle between the hero and the object of his desire; in the Coen brothers' films, that obstacle is usually the hero's stupidity."

• Kieron Corless on Our Daily Bread: "[Nikolaus] Geyrhalter's film is kin to Workingman's Death, the 2005 film by Michael Glawogger (another of the current crop of dazzling Austrian documentary film-makers unaccountably overlooked by British distributors), in its immersive focus on people at work, its reluctance to editorialise and its often mesmerising rhythms and imagery." Related: Phil Hoad talks with Geyrhalter for the Guardian.

• Tony Rayns on Still Life: "Plenty of earlier Chinese movies have looked at the human and social cost of the Three Gorges Dam (from Zhang Ming's Rainclouds over Wushan, 1995, to Yan Yu and Li Yifan's documentary Before the Flood, 2005, the latter also shot in Fengjie), but Jia [Zhangke]'s film is the first to rhyme the loss of a very ancient human settlement with the transience and fragility of human relationships in general."

Posted by dwhudson at January 26, 2008 12:09 PM