Sight & Sound. May 08.

"While the current Anglophone appetite for French cinema is squarely auteurist, what gets released here is shaped by distributors' preferences, prejudices or habits. Though a handful of distributors are known to pick up wild-card titles, the number of films that slip through the net is considerable - and regrettable, when you realise how many careers we never manage to track at close range." While you'll find most of Sight & Sound's "French cinema now" special in the May issue only in the print version, online, Jonathan Romney offers "a selection of interesting titles and names from the last decade or so that have never got beyond festival exposure."

Related: "The French cinema industry is booming - or so it seems. French cinema, as an art form, is struggling - or so we are told. A paradox?" asks John Lichfield in the Independent. "Yes, but all facts and arguments about the French movie industry, the only full-service movie industry in Europe, are confusing.... An independent report published recently by a group of movie professionals ('The Club of 13') protested that the public cash was being lavished on commercial block-busters (which did not really need it) or first-shot, experimental art movies (which frequently did not deserve it). Middling budget projects that had a chance of being both good and popular were being squeezed out, the report said."

Back in Sight & Sound, Kent Jones argues that The Wire, "a critics' darling since its inaugural season in 2002, more or less lives up to its hype as the greatest thing to hit television since The Honeymooners. For most of its near 60-hour duration, this cross-hatched portrait of the drug economy in Baltimore, Maryland, plausibly unfolds as one ongoing work as opposed to the usual theme and variations. Not that it isn't a struggle."

Tim Lucas reviews the Eclipse package, The Delirious Fictions of William Klein, but we'll get to that in the next entry.

"Belgian filmmaking over the last decade has enjoyed a remarkable creative renaissance, especially in the area of realist cinema," writes Ginette Vincendeau. "Following in the footsteps of the Dardenne brothers and Lucas Belvaux, relative newcomer Joachim Lafosse offers in Private Property an impressive low-key family drama, helped in no small part by the presence of Isabelle Huppert in the central role."

Roger Clarke reviews The Go Master, "a graceful, exquisite film about the complex relationship between China and Japan; it is also a film about one man's spiritual quest and his intensely personal love-hate relationship with the board game at which he so obviously excels. Taiwanese actor Chang Chen (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Happy Together) plays the man himself, appearing in almost every scene, in one of the great and unheralded central performances of recent years."

Mark Sinker on Manufactured Landscapes: "The thrill of vicarious terror - at such landscapes and such mass social convulsions - is after all a classic Romantic trope, with its heyday in England's Industrial Revolution: the Sublime. Back then it was a very western worship of the nature-demons as they threatened and invigorated settled society; the emotional and mythological energies drawn on here aren't so different; the times really perhaps are."

Posted by dwhudson at April 19, 2008 6:35 AM