Sight & Sound. August 08.

"Who killed the double bill?" asks Jane Giles. "And when did our days or nights become so short that the very idea of going to the cinema to watch four to six hours of brilliantly compatible or creatively contrasting content became impossible?" A quick history of creative repertory programming in London follows as an introduction to the heart of the new issue of Sight & Sound, nine pages of fantasy "Dream Tickets," put together by 52 critics and programmers and downloadable as a PDF.

Also:

"Uruguayan cinema was all but unknown in Britain when Juan Pablo Rebella and Pablo Stoll's wry, low-key Whisky (2004) broke out of the festival circuit to achieve a modest commercial release," writes Michael Brooke. "El baño del Papa (The Pope's Toilet) offers many of the same pleasures, but while the earlier film stuck rigorously to a Kaurismäkiesque minimalism in both dialogue and mise-en-scène, the newer film is more expansive and much closer in tone and content to Luis García Berlanga's Welcome, Mr Marshall! (1953), one of the acknowledged classics of Spanish-language cinema. If it plays like a more realistic spin on Berlanga's masterpiece, El baño del Papa's basis in fact (the Pope's 1988 visit to Uruguay) absolves it from the charge of slavish imitation." Earlier: Michael Guillén's take.

"Houdini was not your usual leading man material - short, woolly-haired, compactly built with an impressively large head and an intense, brow-knitted expression that almost never relaxed - yet he managed to overcome his odd appearance and mannerisms through sheer personal magnetism. You can't take your eyes off him." Tim Lucas on Kino's collection, Houdini: The Movie Star.

"James Marsh is known to British audiences for fashioning elegiac works from archive film (Wisconsin Death Trip) and interviews (The Burger and the King) alike," writes Catherine Wheatley; "more recently he has demonstrated a gift for crafting a tautly-strung thriller with his 2005 fictional turn The King. These elements resolve in his enthralling new documentary Man on Wire, a film that will surely elicit gasps of wonder from its audiences as it recounts the story behind Frenchman Philippe Petit's high-wire walk between the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center on 7 August 1974."

"[W]ith so much about WALL•E presold before we even enter the cinema, it seems a bit much to expect reviewers to champion a film backed by a lucrative Hollywood brand," writes Andrew Osmond. "Annoyingly, WALL•E - from Finding Nemo director Andrew Stanton, who previously had a less auteurist cachet than Ratatouille's Brad Bird - is exceptionally good. In fact it's one of Pixar's best films, ranking alongside Toy Story 2 (1999) and The Incredibles (2004)."

Posted by dwhudson at July 19, 2008 3:48 AM