Sight & Sound. Dec 08.

Of the pieces collected so far in the entry on how The Baader Meinhof Complex is playing in the UK, the one I'd recommend most is Philip Oltermann's for the Guardian on the intense dialogue between German culture and the Red Army Faction throughout the 70s and early 80s. Andrea Dittgen's article for the new issue of Sight & Sound, then, might be read as a companion piece, with its quick rundown of RAF-related films that have appeared in the following years and its brief summing up of German reaction to this one.

Manoel de Oliveira "is certainly a great director, although in a singular way. Critics have compared him to the likes of Buñuel and Dreyer, yet his films remain outside the canon. Wilfully uncommercial and hard to see outside festivals, these eccentric works can be elusive even at their least obscure." A chronological guide from Jonathan Romney.

The first two features of Tajikistan's "most distinctive auteur," Djamshed Usmonov, "The Flight of the Bee (1998, co-directed with the Korean Min Hun) and Angel on the Right (2002) were low-key comedies of manners in whicha schoolteacher and an ex-convict, respectively, tried to achieve harmony with their local communities in general and female relatives in particular," writes Michael Brooke. "Parts of his third feature To Get to Heaven First You Have to Die suggest a similar tone and narrative trajectory, but it's sparer, bleaker and much more unsettling; more reminiscent of Jerzy Skolimowski's Deep End (1970) and Krzysztof Kieslowski's A Short Film About Love (1988)."

"For all its epic pretensions and grandeur, How the West Was Won is really just a Debbie Reynolds movie with some whopping guest stars," writes Tim Lucas. "One supposes the film's continuing popularity is a matter of 'you had to be there, then', and it's perhaps most entertaining when viewed with its informative, nostalgia-driven audio commentary activated."

"Hurried into production by Ridley Scott after the unpredicted success of American Gangster, Body of Lies is a feverish adaptation of the novel by Washington Post journalist David Ignatius," writes Roger Clarke. "The story is mainly set in Jordan, and though Scott's visual dynamism is very much upfront from the beginning, the script by William Monahan (The Departed) is too often marred by clumsy expositions, weak dramatic constructions and a general lack of anything resembling emotional punch."

Kate Stables on Choke: "Rather like Victor's innumerable sexual episodes, this is a quick and dirty movie - it was shot in three weeks, and it looks like it - but [Clark] Gregg's light touch and actor-led approach compensate in some measure for the rather everyday visuals and flashback-spattered structure."

Posted by dwhudson at November 15, 2008 10:53 AM