Sight & Sound. April 08.

"Mizoguchi's late period films, with their tragic stories of delusion, suffering and injustice, were very well received in the west," writes Alexander Jacoby in the new issue of Sight & Sound. "By contrast, his films set in the present day (one half of his works produced during the 1950s) were less widely distributed and appreciated.... In the intervening decades critics such as Noel Burch and Yoshimoto Mitsuhiro have argued that western writers in the 1950s, viewing Japanese cinema through a distorting lens of liberal humanism, were approaching the material from an inappropriate standpoint. But the truth is more complex than this."

"That such an over-explanatory, super-macho shoot-'em-up as José Padilha's Elite Squad won the Golden Bear for Best Film says much about the quality of this year's Berlinale," writes Nick James in an overview of the disappointing Competition lineup.

But for Jonathan Romney, Elite Squad "was one of the few features in competition that you could have an argument about. It may not be entirely new in terms of film language - the manic editing, the bronzed-earth tones of the photography and the bursts of favela hip-hop are all strictly in the wake of City of God - but Padilha's film bristles with cinematic energy and narrative complexity."

"Most of the more rewarding movies screening outside this year's Berlin competition were modest in budget, scale and ambition," writes Geoff Andrew.

The Koji Wakamatsu retrospective was a highlight of the Forum for Tony Rayns: "He vindicates his entire career with United Red Army... Thanks to scarily convincing performances and a Peter Watkins-like objectivity in the telling, this gets as close as anyone will ever need to understanding how extremist groups function and why they end up imploding. Wakamatsu knew, liked and worked with some members of the group in the 1960s; he tells their story partly to write a history that's already almost forgotten but mainly to inform present-day drones that kids not so long ago lived and died for their beliefs."

Agnès Varda's "work stands resolutely outside the trends and precepts of her national cinema, her films unfolding from the perspective of an earth-mother rather than a grand-mère," writes Tim Lucas. "The first thing one notices about her films, dipping into La Pointe courte, remains a consistent quality throughout the total selection: Varda is more interested in community than in the individual, interested in drama only to the extent that it provides stimulus for her documentarian mill."

Maria Delgado on The Orphanage: "This is a movie whose power and emotional pitch lie in the understated: the discreet performances, the lack of special effects, the laconic script. Yes, one can quibble over an unnecessary prologue, a drawn-out séance and a sentimental final sequence, but these are minor flaws in a poignant film that looks to the past and the world beyond to illuminate the realities of the present."

"California Dreamin' is a heavily fictionalised version of a real event, and an impressively ambitious undertaking for a debut feature," writes Kieron Corless. "Above all it's often just very funny, then sad, and finally tragic - [Cristian] Nemescu it seems could handle it all, and had he lived, there's no doubt he had an outstanding career in front of him. What a terrible loss."

Kate Stables on The Flight of the Red Balloon: "Finding a serene and contemplative beauty in the quotidian world has long been Taiwanese master-minimalist Hou Hsiao Hsien's stock in trade. This delicate, deceptively low-key tale of a Parisian single mother's attempts to pull herself out of emotional chaos is his first European movie, but it develops several of the motifs of 2003's Ozu-inflected Café Lumière."

Posted by dwhudson at March 26, 2008 8:21 AM