Sight & Sound. Jan 09.

Like lists? How about 50 critics' worth, spread out over 76 pages, downloadable as a nifty PDF? "We have chosen to make much of 2008 because it seems such a watershed moment for cinema criticism and reviewing," writes Sight & Sound editor Nick James. "In crude terms for film quality, the year has already had the raspberry in these pages. But collectively our contributors beg to differ.... So how is it that in the so-called 'critics crisis' year (which happens also to be credit-crunch year, and endangered-arthouse-distribution year) the critics want to recommend so much?"

Also in this new issue:

Tim Lucas on The Quare Fellow (1962), based on a play that'd been a hit in Ireland a few years before: "It's a loose and overly sober adaptation that is nonetheless worth seeing for Sylvia Syms... While almost everyone else pitches their performance at an overly earnest, virtually sloganeering level, making the film as much an anti-capital-punishment pamphlet as an entertainment, Syms imbues her scenes with the sense of danger and wrenching human ambiguity the picture needs to function as compelling drama."

"Stretches of The Man from London may hint that [Béla] Tarr is caught in a... creative impasse..., but the peculiar pleasures of his cinema are still to the fore," writes Michael Brooke.

Tim Robey on Summer: "The beckoning pull of memory shapes Kenny Glenaan's third feature, after the made-for-TV Gas Attack (2001) and the Simon Beaufoy-scripted Yasmin (2004).... The film's main virtue is economy - there's hardly a wasted shot."

"Asif Kapadia's 2001 debut feature The Warrior remains one of the most singular and adventurous enterprises in recent British cinema: a dazzling fusion of traditional Indian imagery with martial-arts action and the stylised starkness of the Sergio Leone Western." Jonathan Romney: "Far North is nothing if not adventurous and shows the same thirst for exploration that made The Warrior such a stirring anomaly."

Posted by dwhudson at December 17, 2008 8:12 AM