2009: Antichrist

Lars von Trier is a director that has nothing on his mind but to deliver extreme emotional experiences to his audiences. That's fine with me, though in this shocker - about a couple retreating to the woods after their son's death - at times he's trying a little too hard. Even so, the somewhat Lynchesque film, which features the usual imagery like imposing trees, insects, talking foxes and a woman cutting her clit off - is a coherent and attractive audiovisual system. (7)

1964: Seance on a Wet Afternoon

The film about professional psychic talking her beta husband into kidnapping so they don't have to be middle class anymore and then offering her services as a medium to the kidnappee's parents suffers a little from a heavy-handed exposition but is otherwise good all around. (7)

1997: Insomnia

A cop goes to northern Norway, where the sun never sets, to investigate the murder of a young woman. Not the most untroubled man to begin with, he can't sleep. Slow descent towards madness, morally questionable behaviour. Special mention for the camera work: To call the colouring pale would be an understatement; rather, there seems to be an abundance of light on the screen. Good, off-kilter neo-noir. Or blanche. Well, you get the idea. (7)

1957: Les Espions

The director of a small psychiatric clinic in rural France accepts lots of money from someone claiming to represent the US secret service, and the next day lots of strangers have moved in, taking over the clinic uttering more or less vague threats about what will happen if he resists. It's a cool premise for a movie, but the lack of clarity about who is on whose side tends to create confusion rather than suspense or surprise. (6)

1968: Targets

Peter Bogdanovich's debut as a film director is visibly low-budget and self-consciously camp. The parallel stories about an aging horror star - played by Boris Karloff - who's tired of acting and a detached young man who turns into a killer really shines when it cuts down on the talking, primarily in the two extended shooting scenes. As a whole, it gives you a real sense of time and place. Great final shot. (7.5)

2010: Shutter Island

The first half or so of Scorsese's film about two agents investigating on a kind of Alcatraz for the criminally insane has an extremely well-crafted plot, but the ending is extremely poor - indeed, my enjoyment of the film was heightened because I discounted early hints about the ending thinking that they couldn't possibly go for something that lame. Also, Scorsese generally doesn't seem at the top of his game, the music's poor and the back projections' quality made me wonder whether they were intended as a deliberate hommage to Hitchcock. Having said all that, of course if Martin Scorsese directs a thriller based on a Dennis Lehane book it's going to be a good film. (7)

2003: Monster

When Charlize Theron's performance as Aileen Wurmos in Patty Jenkins' biopic about the multiple murderer is discussed, variants of the idea "daring to be ugly" are bandied about a lot. In fact, "daring to be ugly" is one of the most undaring things a good-looking actress can do, because, as the reaction to Theron's performance showed, even if you convincingly demonstrate the role is beyond your reach, soon it's going to rain accolades. Good filmmakers would get a lot out of this meaty topic even with a less than stellar cast, but writer-director Jenkins goes straight for made-for-TV aesthetics and concentrates the rest of her energy on making a political statement of the killer-as-victim variety. Having said all that, a turkey it's not. (5)

1963: Shock Corridor

Anticipating David Rosenhan, a journalist, hungry for the Pulizer Prize, fakes insanity to be admitted to a mental hospital and find out who killed one of the patients in a case that remains unsolved by the police. A nice idea for a film, but it's given the trashy treatment here. Neat rain effect towards the end, though. (5.5)

1978: The Deer Hunter

This is probably the best-known film I was going to see but hadn't yet, but even so I learned I knew very little about it: Though I was aware that the film started in the soldiers-to-be "real" lives in the US (which is a nice touch) I was surprised to learn it takes almost an hour before we get to Vietnam (which is too long, given that the "American opening" isn't all that interesting). This is the best section of the film, featuring a really gripping Russian roulette scene, but then, after another forty minutes it's back to the USA and then back to Vietnam and back to the US again.

During this whole in-out, accompanied by the kind of sensitive problem music Liberace might have come up with, we learn that the Robert de Niro character was really into shooting deer before he went to Vietnam but when he comes back, he refrains from doing so. This is meant to convey either that he has learned violence is no fun or that the Vietcong have antlers; I'm not sure which.

In the end they all sing "God Bless America". Amen to that: Let's hope that in the future America gives its Oscars to better films. (5.5)

2002: 24 Hour Party People

The story told of the Manchester music scene (with particular emphasis on Joy Division and the Happy Mondays) told as the biography of Tony Wilson, founder of both Factory records and The Haçienda. The film constantly violates the rules of traditional storytelling - such as Wilson turning to the camera to point out that some people insist the events just depicted never have happened - so you can call this postmodern if you like, but it is certainly an easily digested and fun ride through the years with a somewhat weird yet likable host and a visual style befitting the topic. (7.5)

The Greatest Films of the Noughties, #7: The Virgin Suicides (2000)

Directed by Sofia Coppola; written by Sofia Coppola, based on the novel by Jeffrey Eugenides; cinematography by Edward Lachman
97 mins.; 1.85:1; colour; language: English
At Wikipedia, IMDb (7.2), Metacritic (76)


A group of men remember the events that transformed their lives forever, and not for the better: Back in their youths, in a 1970s US suburb, there were five unattainable girls, and they killed themselves.

The film starts with a suicide attempt by the youngest one, Celia, and once she succeeds, the girls' parents isolate their daughters even more than they had before. Later, after the girls have broken a curfew, they'll take them out of school. The unattainability, of course, only heightens the boys' fascination with them. And that's what the film is about: Despite the film's title (identical to that of Jeffrey Eugenides' novel it's based on), the film is not so much about the five sisters but about the boys' fascination with them, or, to be more precise: their memories of their fascination with them. "Some readers (in my experience they were mostly women) were frustrated with Eugenides' book for the way it fixated on the men's view of the women instead of the women themselves," writes Stephanie Zacharek. The film does not change this focus. Complaining about it is a little like complaining that Einstein made no contributions to the theory of evolution. The 95% of the film that are set in the 1970s should be seen not as a depiction of reality, I think, but rather as a depiction of rememberance.

That interpretation is certainly fueled by the film's atmosphere: Drenched in pastel and accompanied by the ambient music of brilliantly chosen collaborators Air, the movie's positively dream-like, seeming at times to be set underwater. I've seen a thousand pictures set in American suburbs, but none of them made them look like a world apart. This one does.

In the film's most impressive sequence, we learn that one of the young men finally attains what he desires, and that it fucks up his life forever. Take heed, o young ones!

1942: Cat People

A man marries a Romanian immigrant despite her telling him some mumbo-jumbo about "cat people". Then she starts acting funny - is it just a mental health problem or is she turning into one of those mysterious cat persons?

This setup makes the film into a strange hybrid of marriage drama and horror film, not really succeeding on either front. Yes, the film features some nice shadowplay and many examples of the trick of drawing attention to something because we don't see it (later perfected in Blair Witch Project), but it also features tedious dialogues and a poor narrative structure. (5.5)

1943: I Walked with a Zombie

The nurse Betsy Connell is hired to care for Jessica Holland, who lives with her husband on a Caribbean island where they do the voodoo. Jessica appears to be caught in a state of constant sleepwalking. Is it a mental illness - or is Jessica a zombie? - The film is only 68 minutes long, but especially in the first half it appears that's too much for the little story there is. Though it's considered a minor classic, I found it to be just the B-picture that it actually is, although the last three or so minutes are really strong. (5.5)

1973: Sisters

A man and a model meet and take a liking to each other, but she does not tell him that she has an ex-husband that looks like John Waters' mean brother and a - formerly siamese - twin. Soon a reporter and a detective are investigating a case. - This is one fine screenplay by Brian De Palma and Louisa Rose, quite deliberately written in the Hitchcock mode, but the director De Palma's work, although by no means bad, is not of the same quality as is on display in the later, and equally Hitchcockesque, masterpiece Dressed to Kill. Certainly recommended, though. (7.5)

1956: The Wrong Man

Not only dealing with someone wrongly accused of a crime, but even called The Wrong Man, the 1956 film starring Henry Fonda might sound like the quintessential Hitchcock movie. But it is not; there are no McGuffins, no showdowns in famous places, no breathtaking blondes and there is next to no suspense. Rather, it is a small, nitty-gritty b/w film shot almost entirely in closed spaces and led one blogger to speculate that Hitchcock may have been influenced by Italian neorealism. Also, it is no stretch to read the film an indictment of the workings of the 1950s US criminal justice system. All in all, it is pretty much the antithesis of Hitchcock's previous offering, the Technicolor blockbuster that was The Man Who Knew Too Much, and accordingly tanked at the box office. Though nicely noir in aesthetic terms, the movie suffers a bit from the story's predictability. (7.5)