Puffball.

"The release today of the movie Puffball is timed to honour the impending 80th birthday of its distinguished director, Nicolas Roeg," notes Mark Lawson in the Guardian. "But the screening date also marks another cinematic anniversary: it's exactly 35 years since Roeg's masterpiece, Don't Look Now, introduced what remains one of the most celebrated movie sex scenes: an extended, fragmented, ecstatic encounter between a naked Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland.... But the journey between the two films shows the change in the relationship between moviegoers and erotic material."

"Puffball, sad to say, is a borderline disaster, a preposterous carnal burlesque that catches the one-time visionary looking woozy and exhausted, his pants metaphorically around his ankles," adds Xan Brooks.

"Time was when a new Nicolas Roeg film would have been a proper date for the diary," writes the Independent's Anthony Quinn. "Now it's about as welcome as a new Woody Allen."

"Roeg is a matchless director of mystery, but this gloomy psychodrama, adapted from a Fay Weldon novel by her son Dan, flirts dangerously with corn," writes James Christopher in the London Times.

"Roeg conjures reasonably lightly with Weldon's teasing feminist-inflected, ‘Wicker-Man'-lite allusions, blending a naturalistic, psychologically heightened shooting style with sexual frankness and gynaecological inserts," notes Wally Hammond in Time Out.

"No one could call this Roeg's best work but it still shows us a director who, though now 80, has a few tricks up his sleeve," offers Derek Malcolm in the Evening Standard. "Donald Sutherland, almost a Roeg regular, has a couple of scenes as Liffey's visiting boss, but I'm not quite sure why."

With Eric Rohmer's The Romance of Astrea and Celadon and Manoel de Oliveira's Belle Toujours set to open in September, Geoffrey Macnab notes that, yes, directors who carry on working well past 70 are indeed a historical rarity.

Earlier: Steve Rose's interview with Roeg.

Posted by dwhudson at July 18, 2008 5:42 AM