Film Reviews by Cato

Don't really know my ancient Greek history that well to follow this film, although the locations were very grand, being shot in Turkey and Syria. Pasolini brings in Maria Callas as Medea, but apparently she didn't speak Italian and her words were dubbed throughout. The actor who played Jason is so so (apparently Richard Burton nearly took the part, wonder what he would have made of it). Anyway, it all seemed a long muddle to me. Wouldn't recommend it unless you're very interested in the subject.

A good, if somewhat unlikely plot, it was good watching on a cold windy night, especially as we were watching Manhattan in the winter. The music seemed a little over the top at times, rather like it was a test to tell which opera each of the pieces were taken from. The nasty was very nasty (Andreas Katsulas), looking very Dracula like, and the whole thing was very well done, but now looked it's thirty plus years.

Apparently this film was "found" quite recently after having been lost some decades before. It's a mysterious offering, and if you find the actresses rather demure to begin with, by the end you will certainly be shocked, as there is plenty of spine tingling on the way. Angela Pleasence is the most unlikely of the characters to have been a suspect, but watch and you will certainly be surprised. Often the way in "whodunnit"s, but this is a clever film, and I wasn't surprised that the director was Spanish, as that country has a history of rather sadistic stories on the cinema front. Not to be sneezed at though. Peter Vaughan is the man of mystery lurking around in the grounds of the very scary house, with it's threatening trees surrounding a somewhat forbidding lake. The film is reminiscent of Polanski's "Repulsion", and some think it may even be an improvement on that classic psychological thriller. You have been warned.

I saw this film when it first came out, and it certainly hasn't aged that much in nearly twenty years. It's just as amusing, brilliantly acted, and the directing is top rate. Of course Ben Kingsley steals the show, and Ray Winstone is in superb form - in fact everyone in the cast is great. Ian McShane looks and acts as though he ought to have been in The Godfather. I'm surprised that Jonathan Glazer has surprisingly made only two (very good) films since.

This is a long film, 155 minutes to be exact. There is no let up from the relentless grimness of two people's lives on their down at heel farm. The weather mirrors their gruesome existence, combining with a score of tragic descendant music that further adds to the monochrome reflection of the inexorable fate of their lives. The only positive behaviour that is shown is from the poor man's daughter; -her actions and speech show some optimism and the viewer will feel a great sympathy for her.

A long watch, but I must say that the poor horse acts her part very well.

This film is set in the front seat of five cars in Tehran. The reason for the claustrophobic surroundings is that the cars are all driven by women, and their passengers are women in four cars and a boy in the other. The boy is the son of the first woman in the film, and she is divorced from his father. The reason for him being in the car is that she is driving the boy to school. He is not a pleasant boy and is very angry with his mother. Another reason for him being there is that the director, Abbas Kiiarostami, wants to show us is that in Iran, and indeed all over the world, some men are not always particularly nice to women. The other women have passengers who are all treated quite badly by men, although in the passage about the prostitute, this woman seems to be very fatalistic and worldly about the opposite sex.

It is a riveting film, and although the women seem to be well off enough to be able to drive good cars, they appear to be trapped in a system which men rule. Hence the claustrophobia.

A semi documentary about a woman who is found dead in a London flat. The people speaking to the camera are acquaintances, some of them lovers, from the woman's life, but the film of the subject and the friends she moved with is acted . The director, has pieced together an astonishing film, and watching it will probably bring tears to most people's eyes, as it did to the people she knew. What I couldn't really make out was how a person could have been left for three years without any of the people she knew trying to contact her. Very mysterious.

This is a good early 60's film about three criminal types who want to rob the army of a great deal of money by pretending to be soldiers. The leader is Stanley Baker, who plays the guy who's made all the plans for the break in, but I don't think I've ever heard an actor who's spoken his lines so quickly, so much so that you're not quite sure what he's on about until the action begins in earnest. However, it's a good story but you know it'll all end in tears. This is a stiff upper lip British film after all.

I'd read the blurb and the comments and knew that I was in for an hour and a half of scariness, and it certainly was pretty frightful at times, especially when the shrill music shrieked at moments of a pretty fearsome film.

The setting of the film is pretty gruesome, to say the least, and I couldn't really understand why the poor woman didn't leave the awful flat straight away, but then we wouldn't have had the film would we. Anyway, certainly a very scary film.

This amazing film seems to follow one day on this hard, unforgiving island, home to a small group of people who inhabit the barren but beautiful surroundings. Fishing is their main occupation, and boats their main form of getting about. Their lives were hard but they appeared content with what they caught in the ocean and what they managed to till from the sparsely productive land, The woman who appears in the main film is in the accompanying offering, shot in the 70's, 40 years older but still as pleasantly happy in her hard surroundings. There are also some very interesting films on the disc shot by Flaherty of work in the 1930's in mills, coal mines and potteries of industrial England.

A wonderful and powerful 1930's film.

Almost 50 years old, but not showing it's age, this is a wonderful film of someone who was very important in the history of dancing. Made by one of our finest directors, Karel Reisz, the lead part is from Vanessa Redgrave, who throws all she has into this great film. A fascinating offering of an earlier time in the arts.

Rather in the Ken Loach style of film making, where things are certainly not right in society, this 60's tale set in northern France follows the progress, or more like the decline of a young boy, through the poor cards that people have forced him to play with, to react against the life he has been dealt. What makes the film so astounding is that the acting is so brilliant from the whole cast, especially from Francois, the boy, and the old couple who take him on to be fostered, that you think you're watching a documentary. The director, Michel Terrazon, helped by his producer Francois Truffaut, states that the story is based on his own upbringing, which of course may have made the film so realistic to watch. A brilliant film, which certainly ought to have been seen by more people than apparently watched it.

This was the first film directed by the eminent Italian director, Bernardo Bertolucci, made when he was 21 years old. It was written by another Italian director, Pier Paulo Pasolini, and follows the investigation of various men who were seen after the death of a woman in the outskirts of Rome. What makes the film so important is the cinematography, by the director and Sergio Citti, who together have made the film so beautiful to watch. From the opening scene of pieces of torn up paper floating around the dead woman to the end when all the suspects are seen against the harsh wilderness of the riverside, this film can be seen as a significant opening to Bertolucci's career. Not to be missed if you are a fan of 60s Italian cinema.

Intriguing and apparently important Chinese film. After a frenetic opening wherein a young woman is being transported to her wedding in a cart by a band of Chinese men, the film settles down to her life in a brewery. Everything goes well in that she marries one of the young men, but trouble looms when the Japanese army raids the Chinese group, who are severely abused and killed. The time is obviously from the last century, most likely during the 2nd world w1ar. As I've noted before, the action is carried out in a very frenetic fashion, but there is a rather sad end, as often seems to happen in these films. And herein lies something I've noticed in Eastern films, and that's the seemingly Sado/Masochistic ways in which they live! There really doesn't appear to be any break in the frantic nastiness. Enjoy, if you like that sort of thing.

Some pretty nasty horror bits, but a very OTT story. I must admit that the girls acted extremely well, and that the sounds were extremely atmospheric. I must say though, that I didn't really care how the story ended.