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Month: May 2018

Film Review: Pandora’s Box BFI Reissue

Film Review: Pandora’s Box BFI Reissue

Published May 30, 2018 By Lee Hill

Reviewed by Lee Hill

Film critics are known for superlatives with a shelf-life that makes the average fruit fly seem like one of the immortals. As newspapers and magazines became as quaint as brass rubbings, fewer critics make any money from what they do and being asked to contribute a blurb for a sub-adolescent comic book tie-in, paint-by-numbers rom com or earnest biopic now qualifies as a career high, I can appreciate the scepticism that some readers might have when I say Pandora’s Box should be an essential part of any film goer’s diet. This new digital reissue of GW Pabst’s 1929 masterpiece is not just one of the best films of 2018, but one of the greatest ever made.

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Film Review: Zama

Film Review: Zama

Published May 24, 2018 By Lee Hill

Reviewed by Lee Hill

Zama is a sly historical anti-epic that deconstructs the expectations and assumptions viewers often bring to a certain kind of prestige film. Writer/director Lucrecia Martel’s first feature since The Headless Woman in 2008, follows the tragicomic efforts of a loyal colonial magistrate to maintain dignity as his superiors and those he rules treat him with contempt or indifference.

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Screenwords Meets The Makers Of Mansfield 66/67

Screenwords Meets The Makers Of Mansfield 66/67

Published May 20, 2018 By Linda Marric

Interviewed by Linda Marric

We speak to P. David Ebersole and Todd Hughes, the married couple behind the intriguing new documentary about Hollywood camp legend Jayne Mansfield.

One of the most talked about stars of the classical Hollywood era, Mansfield was at one time as famous and as sought after as Marilyn Monroe. Regarded by many as one of the most recognisable sex symbols of the studio era, Mansfield had it all, fame, money and a solid Twentieth Century Fox contract, but it was her dealings with infamous Church Of Satan leader Anton LaVey and her consequent violent death in a car accident which has turned the former starlet into the stuff of legend. In their film Mansfield 66/67, directors  P. David Ebersole and Todd Hughes attempt to get behind the legend  and the legacy she left behind.

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Film Review: Filmworker

Film Review: Filmworker

Published May 17, 2018 By Lee Hill

Reviewed by Lee Hill

When Stanley Kubrick was alive, little was known about his working methods due to his unwillingness to participate in publicity beyond the release date. As the gaps between films  grew, Kubrick’s reclusiveness added to the mystique that his canon was created in near perfect, seemingly infinite and almost magic conditions of freedom and possibility. Since Kubrick died in 1999, the mythic aura around Kubrick remains, but we now know more about how his films were made. His archives are accessible to students and scholars at the University of London for the Arts and in coffee table book form via Taschen. An exhibition on Kubrick has traveled the world and new DVD releases abound with lavish extras, the most famous of which is Jan Harlan’s A Life in Pictures.

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Film Review: A Cambodian Spring

Film Review: A Cambodian Spring

Published May 16, 2018 By Lee Hill

Reviewed by Lee Hill

On paper, a two hour plus account of a land dispute in Cambodia sounds like a worthy documentary subject, but also like being forced to eat all your vegetables. The reality is that A Cambodian Spring works on the senses like a sly thriller with close to the bone reminders of how many developers flaunt the law and human rights in collaboration with governments ducking responsibility (see also Grenfell Tower Fire). Chris Kelly’s film is a heart-breaking look at how those with the least are driven to super heroic feats of activism. It is also a sobering study of how an unchecked free market drains the souls of local communities and corrupts the legal protections a civil society should never treat lightly.

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Film Review: Revenge

Film Review: Revenge

Published May 11, 2018 By Luke Channell

Reviewed by Luke Channell

The rape-revenge genre is a challenging place to start for any new director, yet Coralie Fargeat knocks it out of the park with her super-stylish, blood-splattered debut feature Revenge. It’s scarcely believable that this is Fargeat’s first film, such is the assurance and distinctiveness of her direction. Fargeat’s confidently approaches the often-maligned rape-revenge genre, making subtle but invigorating changes to its tropes. The result is a taut, visceral experience with a refreshingly feminist perspective.

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Redoubtable: Screenwords Meets Director Michel Hazanavicius

Redoubtable: Screenwords Meets Director Michel Hazanavicius

Published May 9, 2018 By admin

Nadia Bee talks to director Michel Hazanavicius about his latest film Redoubtable. 

A cheerfully iconoclastic film, Michel Hazanavicius’s Redoubtable has provoked both ire and delight. Jean-Luc Godard is considered such a key figure in both European culture and political history that to treat him with levity is outrageous to some, and just deserts to others. Hazanavicius has said that critical responses have, at times, been as if he’d peed on the Sistine Chapel.

The late 1960s marked a turning point in Godard’s career as a filmmaker. He was already well-known for his brilliantly innovative approach to film form, and for his political engagement. He then took film form much further, with his 1967 film La Chinoise – an adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s novel The Possessed. It starred his then wife, Anne Wiazemsky. Wiazemsky had been Robert Bresson’s muse, and acted in his film – held by some to be the greatest film of all time – Au Hasard Balthazar (1966). While still very young, she was already a person of note in France, in her own right.

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Film Review: Mansfield 66/67

Film Review: Mansfield 66/67

Published May 9, 2018 By Lee Hill

Reviewed by Lee Hill

After Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield is the other mythic blonde bombshell that haunts Hollywood’s past and present. Her fame mainly rests on her comedic roles in two Frank Tashlin films, The Girl Can’t Help It (1956), arguably the first truly visionary rock n’ roll movie, and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter (1957). Typecast as a well-endowed bimbo, Mansfield tried to do more serious work, but earned most of her wealth as a nightclub performer and in many cases, for simply showing up to be Jayne Mansfield. She was married four times and her third and fourth husbands, Mickey Hargity, a former Mr. Universe and father of Law and Order regular Marisa Hargity, and Matt Cimber, an Actors Studio veteran and film director, are worthy of documentary treatment themselves.

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Film Review: Entebbe

Film Review: Entebbe

Published May 8, 2018 By Lee Hill

Reviewed by Lee Hill

A glance at the Wikipedia entry for Operation Entebbe, the 4 July 1976 raid by Israeli commandos into Uganda to rescue 106 passengers of a hijacked Air France flight from Tel Aviv to Paris, reveals a depressing number of near forgotten films, made-for-TV movies, documentaries and other fictions inspired-by. The historical record somehow remains unsullied by these attempts at a greater truth (read: mega-box office success and maybe an Emmy or Oscar). Viewers of a certain age – old enough to remember the news reports of the time as well as Hollywood’s unseemly haste to release Victory at Entebbe with Burt Lancaster, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Dreyfuss before the year was out – are forgiven for rolling their eyes at another docudrama about these events.

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