The latest Sight & Sound is out, with the following contributions from yours truly:
Testosterone (p.74) – the first in what promises (or threatens) to be a whole series of contemporary Polish films turns out to be an ensemble piece about various fronts in the sex war, shot in a style that’s none too subtly indebted to Reservoir Dogs;
Tough Enough (p. 76) – I’d almost forgotten I’d written this, as it was commissioned months ago but the film’s UK release kept getting postponed. Anyway, it’s a German slice of Loachian social realism about a Berlin teenager forced to move to and cope with a very different environment after his mother is thrown out by her rich boyfriend;
12:08 East of Bucharest (p.77) – I’d first seen this a year ago in a massive open-air cinema at the Sarajevo Film Festival (where it was the opening night attraction), but this slyly satirical look at unreliable memories (of the intentional and unintentional kind) proved just as funny when seen in a Soho screening room;
Harold Lloyd: The Definitive Collection (p.84) – a real labour of love, this: I watched all nine discs in Optimum’s new box set avidly and was hungry for more by the end;
Bellissima (p. 85) – review of Masters of Cinema’s edition of Visconti’s neorealist comedy with Anna Magnani as the pushy mother of a deeply reluctant child;
Blue (p. 85) – review of Artificial Eye’s edition of Derek Jarman’s swansong. They could have cheated and just delivered a continuous digital blue, but this was clearly sourced from a film print, and the specks and scratches work well with Jarman’s hand-tooled aesthetic;
Distant Voices Still Lives (p. 85) – review of the BFI’s definitive edition of one of the old BFI Production Board’s greatest artistic triumphs: it hasn’t dated at all;
Irezumi (p. 86) – review of Yume’s DVD of Yasuzo Masumura’s startlingly vicious quasi-feminist melodrama, which appears to be getting its first UK release: it’s hard to imagine the BBFC of 1966 passing it uncut);
Silence (p. 87) – review of Masters of Cinema’s edition of Masahiro Shinoda’s Shusaku Endo adaptation, about the persecution of Japanese Christians and Portuguese missionaries in the early 17th century.
