Film Reviews by TE

Another beautifully composed, elemental film by Deepa Mehta.

'Water' is set in 1938 and depicts a key stage in India's move forwards from cruel superstitions towards a more humane society. The references to Gandhi, and a climactic scene with Gandhi at the railway station, all point towards a future when the position of women might be improved.

At the same time, Mehta makes clear that in the 21st century there is still a long way to go.

The central theme is embodied in an 8 year old girl who has been subjected to an arranged marriage. The adult husband dies from a sudden disease, so the child is placed in a communal home for widows (a woman is supposed to be so much a possession of her husband that she "half dies" on becoming a widow).

Mehta does a great job of making the women in the home very real and earthy.

As in her other films, the visual compositions are very beautiful.

If you like tricksy films (such as 'Memento') you will enjoy this single-hander sci-fi.

It's interesting to note how far special effects have come over the last 10-15 years. Here the external scenes, set on the far side of the Moon, look very crude as they were filmed in miniature studio tableaux and presented as real.

The use of the emojis for the interface screen with 'Gerty', the computer, also looks dated and over-simplified..

The story line itself is, however, clever and engaging enough to sustain interest. Like Tarkovsky's masterpiece 'Solaris', it examines the idea of multiple personalities and the power of memory, but it never becomes anything more than a comic book version of that film's profundity.

Absorbing tale from one of Turkey's finest film directors, Reha Erdem.

There is a mythic quality to this depiction of a wandering 'Holy Fool', a character common in Islamic literature and philosophy. This one calls himself Kosmos and there are many playful links between real life and signs from the heavens.

Everything is ambiguous after Kosmos's initial heroic rescue of a child. Is he a healer! Is he a charlatan? Is he an honest man? Is he a thief? Does he have special powers?

The answers are always: 'yes' and 'no'.

The wintry cinematography is excellent, and the film is full of interesting and unusual sound effects, including the weird ululations that Kosmos and a beautiful young woman use to communicate with each other.

What a joyful experience this is!

This film of the Broadway concert is right up there with the very best ever movie representations of live music. Prepare to laugh, cry, dance and sing in the privacy of your own living-room.

The musicianship and choreography are superb, and the sound quality is state-of-the-art.

The Critc Review below goes into much more detail, but suffice to say that this is utter delight from start to finish. Initially the viewer is not quite sure what to expect, so when it ended I went back to watch the beginning again, and stayed hooked for a complete second run.

Yet another 'horror' film that depends almost entirely on darkness as a substitute for more subtle visual and sonic effects. It is often quite a challenge to work out what is going on.

The subject is dementia and the creepy house is used as a clunky metaphor for the unravelling mind of the oldest of the three female leads. However, any serious examination of dementia is scrapped in favour of cheap scare tactics and lingering shots of impenetrable shadows.

There is clearly meant to be some commentary about the mystic bond between grandmother, daughter and granddaughter, but this becomes grimly laughable when the two younger women are forced to beat the living daylights out of the grandmother, before pulling all her hair out and cradling her in a sinister embrace.

There is nothing original here and the only unsettling aspect is the inflated seriousness of the interviews in the disc extras.

An enjoyable, intriguing oddity from Tom Kingsley and Will Sharpe.

The film is held together by an excellent performance from Chris Langham, whose comic style is well suited to the mock documentary format.

There are many laugh-out-loud moments and one-liners, often tinged with darkness and an air of surreal humour. The word "quirky" often hides a multitude of sins, but here it is saved by a lightness of touch and a sense of genuine originality.

The one exception is Simon Amstell's affectedly silly turn as an oddball therapist. His scenes could all have been edited out to the film's benefit.

Kingsley has gone on to make cult tv comedies (Stath Lets Flats and Ghosts) and Sharpe has done similar with Flowers, though his performance in Giri / Haji has to be his best work to date.

This film would be a courageous enterprise today, so it is sobering to think that it was made some 23 years ago.

Cinemas in several Indian cities were attacked by rightwing extremists, opposed to the depiction of lesbianism as a valid choice for women imprisoned within a rigid patriarchal culture.

The film is about desire and the extent to which we have the right to make choices in life. It is part of a trilogy, with 'Water' and 'Earth'.

Deepa Mehta tells the story with sensuous grace, and the film is full of beautifully composed, richly textured frames.

Shabana Azmi, as Radha, gives a magnificent performance, full of power and integrity.

Fascinating documentary which will hopefully go some way towards making Penny Slinger's art much better known.

The film concentrates on her work in the late 1960s through to the early 1980s, when she was very much part of the avant garde in the UK art world. Her surreal collages from that period hold just as much power today as when they were created, and, unlike some work from that time, they have not dated in content. Her politically committed feminist stance is also just as necessary and as provocative as it was in the 1970s.

The film is mercifully fairly short on 'talking heads' and long on examples of Slinger's work.

The disc contains lots of good material in the extras too.

Slinger dipped out of the art world life in the mid-1980s. At first it felt a little frustrating that the film skates over her life since then. However, from the extras, and from a look at her publications over the last 20 years or so, it does appear that her early work is decidedly her best.

A super-heated crime movie that does a workmanlike job of keeping the interest going throughout.

If anything the sheer pace makes for shallow characterisation. In particular, it's hard to see why the wife, Sylvia, remains supportive to her violent gangster of a husband for as long as she does.

Even after he has burned down her friend's salon, murdered one of his friends and generally been at the centre of gory mayhem, Sylvia turns down police help and tries to go it alone.

But it's a serviceable enough tale for a rainy lockdown afternoon.

The best sections of this very good documentary are those which focus on Robbie Robertson's early days.

The footage of Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks is a treat, as are the details surrounding the coming together of Robertson and Levon Helm, and the subsequent formation of the Band.

There are also interesting insights from Robertson's wife, Dominique.

As with the Band members themselves, the film reaches a high point in the initial sweet days in Woodstock, along with the Basement Tapes and the first two brilliant albums.

Once the darker stuff starts to happen the film loses its way. There's a strong sense of "a lot left unsaid".

In many ways this is a fine primer for people coming to the Band for the first time. Hopefully it will ignite their interest as there is so much sublime music and so many stories (both good and tragic) packed into the lives of Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, Garth Hudson, and Levon Helm, as well as Robbie Robertson.

Watch 'The Last Waltz', and read 'Across the Great Divide' by Barney Hoskyns.

One of the great films about childhood and the often painful interactions between children and the adult world around them.

The director, Reha Erdem, captures a vivid sense of place in the small, rural Turkish community. This is partly achieved via careful observation and partly by some magnificent cinematography.

The main theme is flawed masculinity. Erdem shows how patriarchy distorts the relationship between father and son, whilst all the time the huge phallic presence of the minaret dominates every aspect of life in the village.

The initial pace of the film is deceptive and as each stage of the day (the prayer calls in reverse) unfolds, we see more and more of the intense emotional lives of the children.

This is a film that deserves to be much better known.

A curious mixture of a film!

The first third is a leisurely portrayal of an elderly lone hunter, travelling the winter forests of Northern Maine in his mobile home. Tom Berenger does a fair job of establishing this surly, impassive, haunted character.

There's quite a genre in American movies where someone stumbles across a hold-all containing millions of dollars from a botched heist or a drug deal gone wrong.

The power of wishful thinking!

It's when the action starts that this film careers off the rails. The bad guys appear from nowhere and the whole thing descends into truly amateurish, completely unrealistic gun play. The second half of the film suggests that the makers ran out of money, or maybe that's just a charitable interpretation of the mess.

At least there are some fine shots of the snow bound woods to sustain the viewer.

To enjoy this brisk, bright love story you have to get past the casting of English actors as Irish characters. Once you switch off that nagging issue an interesting period piece is revealed.

This is Ireland approaching the cusp of major change. The bustling, free-thinking morality of the city is set against the doctrinal Catholicism of rural Ireland. Kate's painful progress through a relationship with an older man mirrors this social and cultural upheaval.

Rita Tushingham brings good energy (and big round eyes) to the role of Kate, and Peter Finch is well cast as the suave, man-of-the-world English writer.

The film is based on an Edna O'Brien novel and the moral territory is familiar from many of her books, but this treatment retains a pleasing freshness and zip.

A superb, unflinching examination of the profound damage caused by war.

In the UK we are used to seeing the Japanese in WW2 portrayed as uniformly cruel and inhuman. And there is no denying the extremes of barbarism practised in the POW camps.

However, 'The Burmese Harp' is based around a more nuanced understanding of the Japanese culture and mentality. Ichikawa doesn't shirk from showing the stubbornly warlike and violent side, but we also see the presence of soldiers who accept defeat with realism and hope for rebuilding in the future.

Music is the central metaphor. Music is shown to have the power to cross national boundaries and to inspire the positive aspects of human nature. The scene where Private Mizushima's unit surrenders in choral unison with their captors is transcendent.

Mizushima becomes the moral conscience of the film, and Ichikawa resists the temptation for a soft ending as Mizushima treks off into a harshly redemptive future.

This is an elegaic film that stands in its own right, but which is enhanced by an awareness of Angelopoulos's earlier films.

Nearly all of the director's monumental works are beautifully nuanced investigations of Greek history in the 20th century. This historical enquiry is always set within absorbing narratives.

The latter point is never truer than here in 'Landscape in the Mist', where we follow two children on an emotionally scouring quest to find their father.

The cinematography is brilliant, and is at least as full of memorable scenes as the earlier works.

Made in 1988, 'Landscape in the Mist' also throws a beam forwards in time to anticipate the desperate struggles of refugees and asylum seekers in Europe in the 21st century.