Venice 2010 : Golden Lion odds

9-2 Black Venus (Kechiche), 5-1 Black Swan (Aronofsky), 6-1 Norwegian Wood (Tran), 9-1 Meek’s Cutoff (Reichardt), 11-1 Thirteen Assassins (Miike), 12-1 Silent Souls (Fedorchenko), 16-1 Miral (Schnabel), 16-1 Somewhere (Coppola), 16-1 Attenberg (Tsangari).
20-1 bar.

Read the full article »

August 2010 (III): ‘The Secret in Their Eyes’ [7/10] – upcoming

.

Read the full article »

AUGUST 2010 (II): ‘Mother’ [6/10]; ‘The Illusionist’ [7/10]‘; ‘Dog Pound’ [6/10] — all upcoming

Read the full article »

AUGUST 2010 : ‘Knight and Day’ [6/10]; ‘Salt’ [3/10]; ‘The Cincinnati Kid’ (1965) [5/10]

… from Richard Barthelmess to Lew Ayres, Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, Lionel Barrymore, Victor MacLaglen, John Garfield, James Cagney, Joel McCrea, Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Alan Ladd, George Raft, Humphrey Bogart, Charles Laughton, Paul Robeson, Charles Boyer, Orson Welles, James Stewart, Richard Widmark, Glenn Ford, Frank Sinatra, Yul Brynner, Anthony Quinn, Jack Lemmon, Rod Steiger, Charlton Heston, Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster and Paul Newman.

Read the full article »

for this week’s TRIBUNE magazine : ‘The Maid’ [7/10]

South American cinema has long had a ongoing fascination with the relationships – sometimes warm, sometimes tricky – between maids and their employers, not least because residential domestic staff aren’t by any means the preserve of the rich in several of the continent’s societies.

Read the full article »

Edinburgh 2010 supplementary : AFTER THE WAVE

all now online : ‘Savage Messiah’ [8/10]; ‘Private Road’ [7/10]; ‘The Squeeze’ [7/10]; ‘The Final Programme’ [7/10]; ‘Saved’ [7/10]; ‘Privilege’ [6/10].

Read the full article »

POLISH SAILOR SEEKS NEW HORIZONS : an interview with Norman Leto

I think that Geraldine Chaplin’s lifeshape is very beautiful, actually. I’d rather expect to get a thank-you from her for that instead of trouble, but she hasn’t seen it yet…

Read the full article »

in memoriam : BRUNO S. (1932-2010)

On his way out, I thanked him for his efforts and apologised for by substandard German. Upon which he treated me to a kind of solo private “spoken word” performance, in Deutsch, which I reckon was to do with the construction of the Tower of Babel.

Read the full article »

for this week’s TRIBUNE : report from the Wrocław Film Festival (‘Era New Horizons’), Poland

The result is a bit like Charlie Kaufman (Adaptation), Stanislaw Lem (Solaris) and Michel Houellebecq (Atomised ) collaborating on an 1970s Open University spoof: a range of computer graphics – from the basic monochromes of the pre-Spectrum era to the more painterly abstractions of the present day – guide us through rather gracefully through our very unreliable narrator/protagonist’s spiky, brainiac preoccupations.

Read the full article »

for this week’s TRIBUNE magazine : ‘Eccentricities of a Blonde Haired Girl’ and ‘undertow’ [both 6/10]

In other creative fields, the closest relatively recent parallels include cartoonist and painter Boris Yefimov, who remained active until his death at 108 in 2008; painter Alphaeus Philemon Cole, who exhibited up to the age of 103 (he died nine years later, in 1988); and poet Sasha Krasny, who published new poetry collections at 108 and 111, passing away in 1995 at 113.

Read the full article »