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Homo homini lupus” – man is a wolf unto man – could be the motto of this film. In this triptych of associatively connected parts, man and nature become intertwined, with legends, rural beauty and romance as the main ingredients in the mix. In the first part, which probably takes place shortly after World War II in the Aosta Valley in Northern Italy, Tomasso and Arturo roam the woods. They hunt, collect mushrooms and steal food and clothing from abandoned huts. Until fate intervenes in the form of an encounter with armed villagers. Tomasso reappears in the second and third parts. More than half a century later, the woods where he hid are teeming with wolves. Visitors to the taverns tell one another stories about a legendary wolf that stalked beautiful girls. This doesn’t stop local beauty Ariane from going into the woods to investigate.Read More »

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Robert Altman’s brilliantly freewheeling satire on the country and western music industry made little impression on the American box office in 1975. This was the year, remember, when a giant shark in Jaws inaugurated the modern blockbuster era. But three decades on, Nashville feels like one of the outstanding accomplishments of ‘New Hollywood’. 24 characters – including singers, musicians, agents, publicists, journalists, and assorted wannabees and hangers-on – converge on the capital of Tennessee, as a confused nation prepares to celebrate its bicentenary.Read More »

For those who were young, living under the delusions of love and soft drugs in Paris, May 1968 – even if the guitar is still playing, they can’t hear it any longer.Read More »

Plot: A clumsy, bumbling plumber finds his true calling as a successful manufacturer of bathroom facilities.Read More »

Plot: Joel and Priscilla have been in love since they were children. Mark announces his engagement to her without obtaining her permission. While Joel and Mark are at sea Mark is abandoned in Singapore by the Ship’s Mate Finch who, upon their return, convinces the townspeople that Joel abandoned his brother. Joel escapes jail, takes the ship to Singapore, finds his brother insane with drink and returns him to the ship. There is a mutiny.Read More »

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Rostislav sitting on the beach with friend Peter philosophize about who is he – a creation of God or the Devil. Their conversation is interrupted by a naked man from a nearby nudist beach “Paradise”, which is looking for a doctor. At this point it appears that the doctor is both an experimental film’s director.Read More »

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Vive La France by Serge Bozon, a heady experiment full of soul that more than delivers on the allegorical chutzpah of its title. On receiving a troubling letter from her husband, a soldier in the First World War, Camille (Sylvie Testud) sets off to find him incognito, chopping her coif and wrapping her boobs to pass as a lad of 17. Deep in a forest landscape rendered with limpid concentration by cinematographer Céline Bozon, she falls in with a clutch of soldiers mobilized to the front. Or so it seems: Strange things are afoot in La France—like the spontaneous performance of twee, jangling ballads, rendered on scrap-yard acoustic instruments and sung, from an unabashed female perspective, by the harmonizing grunts. Weirder than the arrival of these inexplicable neo-retro-folk jams is how seamlessly they fit into Bozon’s melancholic war fable. Which is to say La France invents a curious and confident hybrid mode to accommodate, even reconcile, disparate modes and strategies: war film and musical, elegiac and avant-garde, cerebral and poignant, rigorous and flexible.Read More »

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There was a joke at Sight & Sound of old, that the designer was holding up the layouts because he needed to ‘kern the folios’ – that’s to say, he was recalibrating the space between the numerals informing us what page we’re on. See for yourself how needful a task this might be – and welcome to the micropolitics of the division of labour in the print-based communications industry, where what the words say is only a part of where brain-time is spent. Helvetica is a san-serif typeface – like the adjacent credit matter, rather than this sentence, it lacks those nice little spikes at letter-ends – and what’s lovely about Gary Hustwit’s documentary is that it not only gets across the passions, absurd and detailed, that shape this world (passions about effects few of us can name and some never notice at all) but also sketches a timeline in changing technologies and fashions over a half-century.Read More »

An audiovisual amalgam which, carrying on from its predecessor, Histeria de España (Spain’s Hysteria), turns the Catalonia and Spain of the independence process upside down. With Kikol Grau as the film’s Chief Minister and the most irreverent voices from the native landscape (Carlo Padial, María Cañas, etc.) making mischief, it presents recent events and hysterical historic images that are blended into a cocktail that makes for a terrible hangover. It is a choral portrait that is above all ludicrous and tragic, starring figures from popular culture ranging from Alfredo Landa and Heidi, through to Pastis & Buenri, Sergio Ramos and even Top Gun.Read More »