Cast: Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson

Director: Catherine Hardwicke

Screenplay: Melissa Rosenberg

Running time: 2 hrs 2 mins

Genre: Romance/Horror



CRITIQUE:


Since the first advent of bloodsuckers into the screen, from the German Expressionist Nosferatu to Dracula’s oft-repeated reign, vampires have been the black-clad, fanged creatures that inhabit the dark corners. And since vampirism is really a metaphor for illicit sexual hedonism, cinematic leading men of the same species began looking like either Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise in Interview with the Vampire – so audience of the female kind can expel a carnal sigh. Twilight, a fledgling saga that’s phenomenally massive to adolescent girls in the Stateside, continues this tradition. Stephanie Meyer provides the source material, impossibly good-looking bloodsuckers, angst-ridden heroine, gloomy, mist-wrapped backdrop – and Thirteen director Catherin Hardwicke conveys the vision. Honestly, has anyone in this Earth seen enough of The Lost Boys and The Covenant?


Stewart and Pattinson makes for an endearing screen couple, but where teenage girlies think of this as an outlet for young passion, Twilight suffers for its lack of novelty. It is laden with clichés – the vampires are distractingly flour-faced, pallid and ashen, as though the make-up department believes it is de rigueur for these undead humans; a fresh flesh (Bella) moves into new town, falls in love with local high school hunk who is so mysterious that everyone in the campus knows what he exactly was. This is a material that Nicholas Sparks used to specialise in. And the American high school environment is ridden with stereotypes that you can almost indentify personalities without even looking: the know-it-all Asian, the loner, the ‘cool’ gang – the introduction of Edward Cullen and Co results in a slow-motion pageantry ‘American High School’ movies typically employ.


Even the romance barely soars, it’s clammy and awkward, with Pattinson trying to give his best shot at the supposedly emotionally-tormenting scene in the forest, Stewart mainly appropriates, but there is no poetry here. There is a slight push of European aesthetic by playing Debussy as a classical piece, but it remains a soundtrack-infested Hollywood manufacturing. The visual exposition of Edwards as a vampire as he bathes in the sunlight is cringing: rule number one in the vampire book, they burn under the sunlight. Since Meyer is reportedly unorthodox, it’s visible in the plotting where it becomes laboured. The only complexity comes in when renegade trio of vampires arrive, and the film’s main villain James is appallingly one-dimensional. Its climax has the visual thrill of a Saturday sitcom. To those who hasn’t seen this, might as well skip it, and rather watch the best vampire film for years, the Swedish atmospheric masterpiece Let The Right One In.


VERDICT:

A lush cinematography aside – Twilight barely works because it’s a poorly assembled, post-modern pile of twaddle. Has anybody noticed that this is Anne Rice-lite, by way of The O.C. via The Lost Boys alley? And at times, it descends into Mormonic vampire soap opera.



RATING: D

Cast: Nicolai Burlyayev, Valentin Zubkov

Director: Andrei Tarkovsky

Screenplay: Vladimir Bogomolov

Running time: 1 hr 36 mins

Genre: Russian Film/War/Drama



CRITIQUE:


Russian filmmakers will always have a place in the history of cinémathèque. Such is the case of master-auteur Andrei Tarkovsky, Alexander Sukorov’s mentor-cum-inspiration, whose debut film Ivan’s Childhood takes its place as one of the greatest war films ever made – or to further enhance its essential status, one of the greatest works of art that provides a thesis against war. This is such a compelling film without descending into sentimentality; every scene fine-tuned with power, ramming home its message, whilst never sacrificing poetry at its bleakest and ironically most beautiful form. This ranks up there along with Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows as one of the most defining movies about childhood.


The titular Ivan is a 12-year old boy who willingly employed himself into the Russian front, who also becomes a useful tool for the army as he could penetrate the enemy lines (meaning swimming beyond dangerous waters, swamps and marshlands) without being seen. But this is not how the film starts; rather it show Ivan in an idyllic scenery, a sun-dappled landscape free from the devastation of war, suggesting an unspoiled past. Then it cuts into appalling scenery of a ravaged land, Ivan skilfully treading war-torn terrain. We later learn that he is doing this to avenge the death of his family, killed by the Germans during the occupation. He survives along a group of officers, hiding in a cave-like underground headquarters, all becoming either his father or brother. But then he is incessant, transforming into one of cinema’s most powerful child performances, Nicolai Burlyayev relentless as Ivan. See the scene where he compels the head officer that he should he stay in the front; this is shocking as it is devastatingly moving – a child forced to think and act mature to bring justice to his murdered family. To him, the world is black-and-white, and in a child’s understanding, only this final act would deliver redemption. Ivan’s childhood is a lost one, an innocence robbed, and this is to say that this film is an indictment to any war of any form – that wars are really fought by children, as they grow up in trauma, self-destruction and lost innocence and youth.


Tarkovsky frames this story in a pitch-perfect cinematography, finding exquisite beauty in his most desolate visions: the sun twinkling behind the flaming war remnants, the falling, glowing debris in the swamp scenes, the fluid camera tracking of a lover’s episode in woodland. And of course, who would forget the closing scene of Ivan in a beach with his mother and a childhood friends, running along the sand. It hammers home its most painful, poignant message: this is a future that would never, ever happen.


VERDICT:

An exceptional work by Russian master Tarkovsky. Ivan’s Childhood is definitely one of the greatest anti-war art movements of the century, ranging from the works of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. This is a compelling portrait of lost childhood, both devastating and lyrical.



RATING: A+

Cast: Billy Crudup, Malin Akerman, Patrick Wilson, Matthew Goode, Jackie Earl-Haley

Director: Zack Snyder

Screenplay: David Hayter

Running time: 2 hrs 43 mins

Genre: Action/Adaptation



CRITIQUE:


Clearly, for a source material that’s considered to be “the greatest graphic novel of all-time” by Time Magazine, there’s something astoundingly impressive about Alan Moore’s cultural reworking. For an average superhero narrative, Watchmen is avant-garde. It’s ambitious, complex and befuddling – not three ordinary words you can usually link to a ‘superhero’ story. Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight has recently annihilated the guidebook and elevated the genre into something seriously superlative – the pressure on Watchmen is an extremely large one. Having endured the scorching fires of development hell, passing through Aronofsky to Gilliam to Greengrass, and even the diabolical court battle between Warner Bros and Fox, somebody who’s just done with bloody Spartan battles arrives at the studio doors and pretty much saved the day. Zack Snyder, ever the visualist, the purveyor of über-slow-motion sequences (one can even press the slow-button watching The Matrix scenes) and tantalising graphic art, seems the man for the job – it’s quite a stunning vista: the parched, solitary landscape of Mars, the obliterated look of New York, the dark noirish backwash of its city. High on art concept, but then seems untidy in its narrative execution.


Watchmen’s main obvious strain is the source graphic novel’s density, multi-strand stories weave together with major plots, sub-plots, history plots, character plots. Suffice to say, there’s a lot of plot going on in one film. And it’s very apparent that Snyder and Co wrestled with this aspect (no wonder why more capable-if-experienced directors skewered away), and this shows some stress in the picture. The central story revolves around a group of superhero has-beens, shown in an inspired montage of an alternative Nixonian America to the tune of Bob Dylan’s ‘Times They Are A’Changing’, who are all entirely fucked-up either because of their own human nature or mankind don’t need them anymore. America is at Cold War with Russia, with the paranoia of nuclear weapons. One stand-out performance here is Billy Crudup’s neon-glowing ‘übermensch’, to use Nietszche’s term, Dr Manhattan, employed by America as an ultimate weapon. There is a hint of sadness and gentility in Crudup’s portrayal that even though he’s CGI-filtered, cock-and-balls hanging out, he harbours a certain nihilist philosophy, a derision of mankind’s nature that he becomes disabled with human emotion. Another intriguing creation is Jackie Earl-Haley’s Bogart-esque Roscharch. Fresh from his Oscar nomination from Little Children, he injects a noir hard-boiled detective into Roscharch with sub-zero morality, with a memorable mask that constantly shifts to encapsulate his constantly-changing emotions. Along with him is Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s The Comedian, whose death sets the plot into motion; a loose-cannon whose testament in life is to have the last laugh (there’s a clever scene of his character-arc narration that gives depth to this character). However, the rest are either silly or caricature-like. Malin Akerman as Silk Spectre comes tantalisingly close to being a porn pin-up star with kinky boots fetish, with a rather poorly-done sex scene with Patrick Wilson’s Nite Owl’s aircraft with ‘Hallelujah’ as the choice music background. Even Matthew Goode, as perfectly cast as he is, seems a misnomer – his Ozymandias-slash-Adrien-Veidt remains a cardboard cut-out character. All these characters’ back-stories crisscross around each other, and the execution of tale threads lay heavy and laboured. One evident scene is the funeral of The Comedian, where suddenly everyone is indulging in flashbacks.


RATING:

Watchmen has moments of pure ambition, dazzle and folly all entwined together making an uneven motion picture. It stays in the right side of watchable, if not dizzyingly layered and byzantine – although this is no masterpiece.



RATING: B-

Cast: Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, Gene Hackman

Director: Arthur Penn

Screenplay: David Newman

Running time: 1 hr 54 mins

Genre: Western/Crime/Drama



CRITIQUE:


Upon its release, Bonnie and Clyde drew a massive divide amongst its critics. One Bosley Crowther of New York Times slated it as a “cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick comedy” trailblazing the film’s many detractors. Such commentary was only expected at a time when there were still those that confronted new radical ideas. But change was at course in the face of American society. Nevertheless subversive, Bonnie and Clyde shocked American audiences of its sheer bloody violence that it welcomed a new dawn of filmmaking. It’s bye-bye traditional studio pictures. Hello, New Hollywood. To put it succinctly, it kickstarted the new era dominated by magnificent portraits of the death of the American dream: The Graduate, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Taxi Driver and The Godfather.


Owing much to the French New Wave, thanks to this piece of film that reinvented Hollywood perception, elevating it alongside European art cinema, it could stand proudly beside Jean-Luc Godard’s A Bout De Souffle as a gun-and-gangster picture (this screenplay was offered first to Godard, but went on to make Fahrenheit 451 instead). Freewheeling in form and light-hearted in approach, it somehow drew an image of ‘cool’ of the criminals or outlaws, humanising them but never sentimentalise their personas. Based on real account of a pair of bankrobbers who embarked on a robbing-cum-killing spree during American Depression and caused a sensational rampage in good ‘ol Texas, the titular couple were also odd lovers who kept their passions behind their guns. The awkwardness in the only bed scene was absolutely palpable, spectacularly handled with prolonged silences and Beatty’s utterance: ‘I told you I’m not a loverboy.’ Of course, he was impotent and Dunaway met this with a twitch on her lips.


Death hangs on this picture as naturally as tragedy is like a second skin to outlaw movies. But it never hurries to get there, Penn making sure the film is rollicking from comedy to drama, sexual innuendos to shootouts. Most of all, perhaps what really astonished audiences at the time was its characters’ controversy: here are criminals who are glamorised, with a pretty-boy but impotent hero and a heroine that spawned a new gangster fashion chic out of berets and maxiskirts – paramount to Jean Seberg’s posh haircut in Breathless. These were Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway going down to history as screen legends. And come the death scene, it’s horrifyingly brutal yet strangely lyrical – influencing from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to The Godfather.


VERDICT:

The epitome of exhilarating filmmaking, uninhibited and celebratory – Bonnie and Clyde paved the way for the American New Wave circa late 1960s and 70s. It’s brilliant, bold, bolshy and beautiful.



RATING: A+

Cast: Sigourney Weaver, John Hurt, Ian Holm

Director: Ridley Scott

Screenplay: Dan O’Brannon

Running time: 2 hrs 4 mins

Genre: Sci-Fi/Horror



CRITIQUE:


In the late 1960s, Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey redefined science-fiction. Since then, the ripples undulated towards the cinema of the intergalactic. Most of the successful Hollywood films that followed were about space frontiers, and it was in the late 70s that George Lucas introduced Star Wars, which would later create decades of sequel hoopla and millions of fanboy cults. But at the turn of the decade arrived Ridley Scott’s Alien – a film that had set the blueprint for the sci-fi-horror genre, incalculably imitated but never bettered. Until now, with the exception of James Cameron’s superb follow-up Aliens, Scott’s seminal monster-in-the-dark creature-feature remains to be the craftiest, brilliantly made science-fiction-cum-horror movie of all-time. And to add to its genre-bending ability, it’s also a cracking slasher movie, but in space, that is. Be reminded, the land of America at the time was at the phase of Area-51-extraterrestial paranoia – so how would a simple plot of a space crew being sent to a distant planet to investigate a distress call, lands on the bosom of alien breeding, the alien (almost unseen) kills off everyone, of course except Ripley, the heroine, be so effective? It’s because Scott invested in his production design and his thrill mechanism. The groundbreaking set designs had been the stuff that Gothic comic-book fans’ dreams are made of, dark, ghoulish and unapologetically sinister. And Scott and cohorts did not rush to get to the exciting bits, just for the sake of showcasing their genius creation: the Alien. From the stylish opening credits, spaceship in space, to the discovery of the anomalous terrain – audience expecting for guttural moments had to wait for it to come – nevertheless making this extraordinary because unlike many less-spectacular horror movies, they indulge in orgiastic misuse of violence, whilst Alien is that bogeyman in the dark shadows, you barely see it, and it knows how to build up tension. Even the camerawork glides and slides in and out of tubes, passageways, and tunnels of the ship like a grim, eerie poetry. Like great sci-fi films, there are elements of claustrophobia explored, loneliness and man’s greed to explore every nook and cranny of the universe it dwells in, yet in Alien, one of cinema’s feistiest heroines was born in the form of Ripley, a tempestuous performance by Sigourney Weaver, who still remains as one of the most convincing female leads in cinematic history. It’s because she only believes one thing: destroy anything that compromises human existence. And we, humans, really root for her.


VERDICT:

Extraordinarily groundbreaking sci-fi-horror masterpiece. Alien might be slow-burning to some – but that is no flaw, in fact, it’s the film’s secret asset.



RATING: A+

Cast: Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy

Director: Richard Linklater

Screenplay: Richard Linklater, Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy

Running time: 1 hr 27 minutes

Genre: Romance


CRITIQUE:


Hardly ever romantic comedies do get sequels. Even the great ones remain singular. This argument contends that you can never make a sequel to When Harry Met Sally or Annie Hall. But this deceptively simple concept of boy-meets-girl has a strangely familiar conceit that since the predecessor took place before a sunrise in Vienna, of course, there’s still a sunset to glimpse. And this one is just gorgeous. Like watching sunsets, the closure of a day, the dying of the sun in its blazing glory, bathes the picture in a mesmerising glow that’s all romantic, ironic and poignant at the same time – Before Sunset is that all-too-rare of a sequel because it’s even better than the first one. The abrupt meeting in a Euro-train has been done and dusted, but 9 years later, Jesse and Celine meet once again in a twist of fate, as exceptional as lightning strikes the same place twice. He has become a writer, and she has become an environmental activist. He has written a book about that episode 9 years ago, she has been trying to forget it, but despairingly fails. But all is not revealed straight away. Just like its former, the whole movie is spent walking, talking, schmoozing; but this is a technical achievement, its grounded cinematography tries brilliantly to capture these two people in real-time, as though the entire running-time seems to follow the exact timing of their conversations, from start to finish, and Linklater obviously shuns any erratic form of editing, making this a natural walkabout and talkathon. With the help of Hawke and Delpy this time, the dialogues are enigmatically engaging, their subject matters more adult and human – philosophy, sex, sleep-patterns, personal life, his married life, in which he described “running a nursery with someone you’ve dated before”, anxieties, her loneliness and being numbed – Hawke and Delpy’s characters feel so real they’re very tangible humans, they seem to be barely acting at all. But it’s those years of uncertainty, detachment, pain, and adult angst that gives this picture a more intelligent approach, a more realistic, more visceral in its emotionality. The result is poignant, emotionally urgent, and exquisitely structured. There’s no pretensions; perhaps its pseudo-ambiguous ending might put people off, as Celine utters in a Nina Simone smoky voice: “Baby, you’re gonna miss your plane.” And he responds: “I know.” It’s heart-warmingly palpable.


VERDICT:

Before Sunset is, to borrow Vonnegut’s words, like a bug trapped in the amber of a moment. It lingers in the mind, and it’s a film worth to be treasured.



RATING: A

Cast: Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawke

Director: Richard Linklater

Screenplay: Richard Linklater

Running time: 1 hr 41 mins

Genre: Romance/Comedy



CRITIQUE:


The greatest romantic stories of all-time are those that are left unconsummated. That’s how romanticists believe, anyway. That love of the truest nature is more exquisite when it’s never achieved. Brief Encounter, Casablanca, and – er... Titanic – have shown us how devastating yet awfully painful and passionate love can be. Whilst Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise isn’t certainly an all-out epic of tragedy and romance, it’s a microcosm of the unassuming romantic-comedy, a film form that is oft-exploited, undervalued, and looted by none other than either J-Lo or Kate Hudson. Perhaps there’s a miniature percentage of the world’s population who would willingly sit down and watch an entire 90 minutes of two people talking, walking, arguing, flirting, frolicking – in other words, more Godardian than say, Spielbergian. People who love films where nothing much happens will lap this one up. But this simple premise of an American backpacker Jesse wooing an unknown yet attractive French student Celine on a train to Paris, both getting hitched at the beautiful Vienna, starts an uncompromising conversational picture that is more honest, more rewarding, more intelligent than all J-Lo and Kate Hudson rom-coms put together. There isn’t much as a story than these two characters unfolding the essence of their lives, as a means to an end await in the horizon (the pair spends the whole day and night together until sunrise, hence the title, as he flies back to America). The dialogues unfurl naturally, and the chemistry between Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy is sparkling, unmatched. These two twentysomethings eschews sex, terrified to enter the sordid, fleeting territory of one-night-stands, and what happens is a profound, intricate moment in Vienna that’s going to be imprinted into the lives of these characters as they carry on in their lives. Their vaguely planned meeting in the same city after six months is pitched out between them – but of course, it doesn’t happen. And that supposed meeting doesn’t matter, as Linklater opts for a rather offbeat conclusion, like real life, we never know what would happen next.


VERDICT:

A brief encounter that is the defining moment of these two star-crossed perfectly-matched couple, Before Sunrise is a naturalistic affair. You don’t even recognise Hawke and Delpy performing, they embody the Jesse and Celine as two impeccably convincing real-life characters.



RATING: A-

Cast: Marilyn Monroe, Jane Russell

Director: Howard Hawks

Screenplay: Charles Lederer

Running time: 1 hr 27 mins

Genre: Musical



CRITIQUE:


Howard Hawks, one of the most eminent directors of the Hollywood golden era, hopping from one genre to another, the gangster (Scarface), the melodrama (Only Angels Have Wings), the comedy (Bringing Up Baby), the film noir (The Big Sleep), and in 1953 reunited with star Marilyn Monroe for the musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes – which evidently created some dazzling ripples into the musicals of our age. The classic sequence of the sultry Monroe clad in a pink gown with sparkling jewelleries strutting to ‘Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend’ have not only inspired Madonna to create ‘Material Girls’, and fashioning a music-video homage, but also was performed to spectacular effect by Nicole Kidman’s Satine in the orgiastic Bohemian musical Moulin Rouge! Nevertheless, despite of its show-stopping sequences, co-pin-up girl Jane Russell joins sex symbol Monroe, in this pompous, wonderfully stupid film. Of course, the highlights stand out, with blazing colours like neon signs (Pink! Red! Orange!), the vertiginous often stilted music pieces seem like Monroe and Russell’s vehicle to blare some lungs and show-off some curves. The plot of two best-friends-cum-showgirls, albeit with very polar attitudes, Russell a sensible, level-headed woman, whilst Monroe an idiotic blonde bombshell loony for money (take it this way, a modern version would be Paris Hilton), is very ordinary, given less importance. Editing requires to dissolve from one moment to the next – hence the enhancement of musical setpieces, from the giddy (a gang of half-naked men performing athletics next to Russell), pointless (characters Lorelei and Dorothy starts singing in a Parisian café), to the guilty pleasure (Monroe, adorable and innocuous, an onscreen persona she would be famous for, dancing to the finale). Before we forget, the blond-and-brunette duo is then photocopied in a more recent reimagining, the stylish Chicago, and like both films’ men, they are all just puppets, no less than objects of manipulation.


VERDICT:

A passable piece of entertainment circa 1950s. Howard Hawks is never really a musical director, but it’s Marilyn Monroe who saves the show.



RATING: B-

Cast: Alex Frost, John Robinson

Director: Gus Van Sant

Screenplay: Gus Van Sant

Running time: 1 hr 21 mins

Genre: Drama



CRITIQUE:


At the sight of Elephant, one could inevitably surmise a dreadful sigh of ‘not another American high school movie’. Not blameworthy, the poster illustrates a picture of a blonde lad receiving a girl’s kiss with the words ‘an ordinary high school day’ just below it. Surely a winner of the Palme D’Or at Cannes circa 2003 could not be so average, not in the hands of Gus Van Sant. Not your common Hollywood director, Van Sant picks up the John Hughes school-teens guidebook, swathes it with a Brian De Palma élan minus the glorified violence, and mounts an über-indie picture that socially and spatially explores the incongruence of youth-life via fragmented, yet interlinked, Tarantino narrative. But still this remains a very Van Sant affair: lingering, tracking shots of its multiple-strand characters, from a yellow-haired eccentric with a father-issue to a sport jock to the awkward, bespectacled misfit, characters walk through corridors and the dark, morally-grimy story unfolds. Just when clichés start to form, Van Sant relentlessly shoves them back down by intercutting a shot of a darkening sky, almost portentous to the heart of its subject matter: teenage violence. Yes, its title only serves as a MacGuffin (Elephant refers to an idiom about an ‘elephant in the room’, which means ‘truth that is ignored’). The culprits are shot in a very ordinary environment, two teenagers who decides to bring guns into school and indulge in a shooting spree. Whilst based on the Columbine High School Massacre, this story is told without pretentions, no reasons, and deliberately fragmented the whole egregious event to capture the delirious, unexplained matter of the tragedy. In fact, Van Sant barely props character backgrounds to explain these two culprits’ social psychology, and rather gives us snippets of hints: bullied at class, possessed with classical music, video-game shooting and possibly with homosexual issues (these two guys share both a snog and a shower). Whereupon these aspects do not necessarily fit together, Van Sant never explains why. Perhaps even these characters are beyond his comprehension, making Elephant a perplexing study on what causes our youth of today to go wayward.


VERDICT:

More arthouse filmmaking, an exercise on style, narrative and time continuum – that explains why this is not your average ‘American high school movie’. Elephant draws a massive divide on its audience, but undeniably remains a provocative pseudo-realistic indictment on the American gun-culture and teenage violence.



RATING: A-

Cast: Gudrun Geyer, Alexei Ananishnov

Director: Alexander Sokurov

Screenplay: Yuri Arabov

Running time: 1 hr 13 mins

Genre: Drama/Foreign Film



CRITIQUE:


Russian master-auteur Alexander Sokurov’s first foray into his proposed ‘family trilogy’, Mother and Son, at its slow, palpitating heart – is like watching death in slow motion. The emasculating, numbing pain of losing a loved one, the gentle decay of human life, a mother’s wordless waltz into mortality and a son’s difficult farewell; all of these dark, depressing subject matters are used to an elegant, meditative foil to Sokurov’s masterly visual palette, frames tinted with amberish glow, oft skewed angles, warped planes of fields, and blurry edges. This paints an elegiac look into a nostalgic world of a distant countryside peopled by two human beings that feel so familiar to our existence. The result is a universal exploration of tragedy, told in an unhurried, dialogue-restrained narrative: a dying mother is afraid to vanish in the world, a son finds it hard to let go; to anyone who understands the endless theme of a mother’s undying love to a son, and vice versa, will find this moving and poignant. And for those who lacks depth, or finds it hard to take in cinematic artforms, stay far away from this. As an arthouse piece, there’s more philosophising and aestheticising over mere plotting, emotions are implicit rather than explicit. We are shown more than being told. Hence its achingly beautiful use of visuals like a painter’s work, Sokurov using all sorts of lenses, glasses, blurred optics, fish-eyes to capture a surrealistic world, and the glorious capture of natural sounds, the howling wind, a snap of thunder, the echoes in the air like ghosts whispering – and that excruciating beauty of a crop field swaying and dancing along the sweeping gales. Morbidity aside, this is death seen as a something perennial, natural and an exquisite fading of humanity.


VERDICT:

One has to appreciate Sokurov for daring to be distinctive in his cinematic art-form, peerless from his monotonous contemporaries – a philosopher in his storytelling, a painter in his visual canvas, a poet in his misé-en-scene. Mother and Son is an achingly heartrending exploration on human sorrow.




RATING: A-

Cast: Marlon Brando, Eva Marie Saint

Director: Elia Kazan

Screenplay: Budd Shulberg

Running time: 1 hr 48 mins

Genre: Drama



CRITIQUE:


Before Marlon Brando started sporting a ‘tasche and looking deadly serious donning the Don suit, he had once been the finest paradigm of the Method acting during the Studio era, and in On The Waterfront, a gritty urban working-class drama, he snagged his first Oscar triumph, which he could have nabbed earlier in his career in his role in A Streetcar Named Desire if not for Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen. This win is truly deserved, in a mesmerising, carefully controlled performance, playing the inarticulate Terry Malloy, whose tough, nitty-gritty exterior hides a sympathetic core. After being indirectly linked to a murder of a dockyard worker, he develops a reluctant relationship with the murdered man’s sister played by Saint, and transforms from a hard-knock ex-boxer to a sensitive fighter for social justice. His speech “I could have been a contender...” remains a celebrated moment, but it is really the film’s realism, the portrayal of the dockyard environs in chiaroscuro cinematography consolidates this as a naturalistic period piece, in vein to the Italian Neorealist depiction of The Bicycle Thieves.


VERDICT:

On The Waterfront is an important piece of cinema, with Brando’s career-defining performance, but the film remains only seminal rather than completely, staggeringly powerful.



RATING: B+