Sight & Sound. September 08.

That new issue of Sight & Sound I mentioned earlier today? It's online now, or at least a good bit of it is, starting with David Thomson's piece on Terrence Malick's Badlands and "the vital question of whether we are 'with' these kids or whether we are studying them - to which it's surely reasonable to reply 'can we try both?' For myself, I still love Badlands and feel haunted by its unlikely clash of immediate horror and long-distance wistfulness. But that's the problem we have to address."

"In the four decades since Titicut Follies (1967) initially classed him with practitioners of Direct Cinema, [Frederick] Wiseman has gone far beyond that movement's oddly celebrity-oriented preoccupation with in-the-moment truth," writes Nicolas Rapold. "He has achieved his own form of realism in work of consistent richness and variety to produce films which are both social documents and great art."

Updated through 8/17.

"The Banishment continues the examinations of the family and of masculinity in crisis that [Andrei] Zvyagintsev began in The Return," writes Julian Graffy. "This is a story of greater moral complexity than that of The Return, but with greater ambition comes risk.... Above all the film's dramatic narrative twist is clumsily rendered. Intended to disorientate, it comes over as contrived." More from Ryan Gilbey in the New Statesman: "The first 90 minutes of the film is a killer. The last hour dies on the screen before our eyes." Earlier: Reviews from Cannes 07.

"One of the fascinations of stop-motion animation - the frame-by-frame movement of three-dimensional figures - is that each of its practitioners, from Ladislas Starewitch to Ray Harryhausen to Phil Tippett, has generated styles of movement and modes of storytelling entirely their own," writes Tim Lucas. "The same can be said of contemporary Japanese animator Kawamoto Kihachiro (born 1925), whose puppets borrow principles of construction from the likes of George Pal and Jiri Trinka yet somehow convey an illusion of life and breath found nowhere else in the history of this artform.... As an introduction to the filmmaker, The Exquisite Short Films of Kihachiro Kawamoto is dazzling but also unsteadying in its diversity."

Hellboy II: The Golden Army is "not great [Guillermo] del Toro - the gleeful Mexican's filmography has so far glowed when he's adhered more feverishly to the morally stressed, ordeal-by-imagination realm of folk art (as in Cronos, The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth) than to graphic-novel jazziness," writes Michael Atkinson. "But it's unfair to bludgeon Hellboy II for the crimes of the culture it inhabits - it's a breeze to watch, undemanding of empathy, constantly inventive in its monsters and always ironic."

Reviewing Shane Meadows's Somers Town, Mark Sinker keeps getting pulled "back to The Knack":

Ann Jellicoe's original play was first performed at the Royal Court Theatre in 1962, the venue that had nurtured Angry Young Kitchen Sinkism as a theatrical movement - and in its virtuoso dizziness pushed back hard against AYKS' rather bogus heteronormative muscularity, its kneejerk of atomised social realism as unfreedom. The shift became culture-wide: the Beatles in their escapist success would make a visionary prophet of poor silly Billy Liar, demonstrating the arrival of horizons shut to British working-class youth since the closing of the Colonial Office. And Richard Lester of course set the skimmed tone and style for the Beatles films.

Somers Town ghosts a conflicted echo of a similar pushback, Meadows refusing some of the ways his earlier, grimmer work has been read.

Related: James Mottram talks with Meadows for the London Times.

Updates, 8/15: Neil Young collects Somers Town linkage and writes, "For my money it's more satisfying and consistent than Meadows's big box-office breakthrough, autobiographical, BAFTA-winning skinhead saga This Is England - though his masterpiece remains the shattering Dead Man's Shoes (2004)."

Craig McLean talks with Thomas Turgoose for the Telegraph.

More reviews of The Banishment: Peter Bradshaw (Guardian), Dave Calhoun (Time Out), the Evening Standard and Sukhdev Sandhu in the Telegraph, where Rebecca Davies talks with Zvyagintsev.

And Hellboy II: Peter Bradshaw (Guardian) and David Gritten (Telegraph).

"[T]here is something that sets [Somers Town] apart, and it comes from how it was developed, and, more keenly, how it was funded.... [The advertising agency] Mother and Meadows have managed to pull off a surprisingly difficult trick - making a film that is credible and watchable, which also serves as 85-minute ad." Creative Review's Eliza explains.

Update, 8/16: Rosanna Greenstreet talks with Meadows for the Guardian.

Update, 8/17: Hermione Hoby takes a walk around Somers Town with Thomas Turgoose for the Observer.

Posted by dwhudson at August 14, 2008 3:17 PM