Reviews

Ronin is a genuine achievement and should be compulsory subject matter in every film school programme, for it is one of the few movies in the history of the medium to have no plot whatsoever and still be allowed to waste millions of dollars on cast, stunts, and locations.

Instead of settling into one of Hollywood's golden gated retirement homes, Frankenheimer ventured out to dummy-direct this no-brainer and collect a fat check, propped up by a devoted cast of living dead eager to get a piece of the cake.

In lieu of a film, this magnificent bunch turned in an elaborate ad for German cars, and everyone lived happily ever after.

Boring, stupid and not remotely funny US teen dung.

It's hard to believe that Kevin Smith was hailed as an Indie director, unless the etiquette applies exclusively to films that make a point of scraping the bottom of the barrel.

The Weinsteins certainly deserve Guantanamo for hyping this sort of self-indulging manure.

And the IMDb rating for this anal regressive bomb would seem to indicate that a long, dry fart in a mall will do for most American publics.

If anything, Smith is the Osama bin Laden of film.

Run for cover!

It's the fifties. The streets of L.A. are run by a hard-nosed elite squad of the LAPD who kick around the undesirables with the approval of their hierarchy and little, if any, regard for the law. Max Hoover (Nick Nolte), the leader of the pack, is a Jack Gittes type with violent mood swings but, would you have guessed, a tender core. When a gorgeous brunette (Jennifer Connelly, yelp) is found dead, Hoover is faced with his secret love life. In order to solve the case, he will have to come clean... Mulholland Falls is an expensive-looking go at a well-rehearsed genre that started with Chandler and had its heyday with Polanski's never equalled Chinatown (1974). The sets in this modern retro noir are lavish, with a special mention for the countless exteriors, helping to create a more or less credible atmosphere. The acting and dialogues are, well, appropriate though characteristically over the edge, which is likely to turn off some viewers but is a seemingly inevitable corollary to the species. So where's the hitch? Of all things, the plot stinks. When, in Chinatown, Robert Towne's screenplay skillfully interweaves its back story (a real estate scam) with the main intrigue (murder case), solidly anchoring the film in real-life history, Mulholland Falls clumsily attempts to construct a link with 1950s nuclear bomb testing in the Californian desert and fails miserably in doing so. The result is more of a hoax than a story, which has the wild bunch cross swords with the Atomic Energy Commission and half the US Army, culminating in a frighteningly moronic ending and a no less far-fetched resolve. Mulholland Falls (cryptically named after a minor incident in the film) is all surface and no depth, which is a shame considering the budget and cast at its disposal.

A Norwegian mystery thriller that tries hard, very hard, to be clever. Nicholas Ramm (Reidar Sorensen) is a cynical city cop dispatched to an end-of-the-world province to solve a double murder. He is confronted with the Nordic version of omerta and must learn that the whole hicktown has conspired against him. Though on the outset, it seems like it has many ingredients going for it, 1732 Hotten was recklessly turned into a grade-A stinker by a bunch of taut overachievers. For one, everyone in the film, right down to the faintest supporting act, is a confirmed and heavily overdrawn nutcase, which despite the partly good acting becomes unbearable after just ten seconds. The music score, a poor man's Tom Waits (is that a pleonasm?) imitation, is the most annoying single piece of dreck ever to come out of a synthesizer; worse, it mostly kicks in for no reason other than making you beg your ears fell off. The same goes for the camera work, which is hardly ever purpose-driven and instead veers off into some of the most complacent film academy mannerisms to-date. The transitions, takes, and cuts are so deliberately arty that it hurts a blind man's eye, while the few physical action scenes look downright ridiculous. The fundamental problem with this film is that there's too much of everything: too much madness, too much bigotry, too much mystery, too much cynicism... And just when you think you're finally over it, this silly little cockroach of a film turns into a hideous monster, topping all the incoherences it's been churning out by staging one of cinema's most infuriatingly deceptive ends. I do sympathize with the Norwegian fraction that has expressed its anger on this site. Not that you'd necessarily expect a naturalist depiction of rural Norway – but even if your option is atmosphere, there has got to be some credibility. Excentricity has to be authentic, too. Director Karin Julsrud should burn all her Lynch and Coen tapes and go fishing.

Sixteen years before the unforgettable Unforgiven (1992), Eastwood delivered this genre classic, at a time where New Hollywood had confidently taken over and, outside of Italy's fledgling film industry, Western was no longer on the agenda. America's self-understanding as a conquering nation had been dealt a traumatic blow in Vietnam, and hence, tales of fearless and god-fearing conquistadors seemed at best inappropriate. Well into his transgressive Dirty Harry stints, Eastwood plays one Josey Wales, a farmer who is caught in the horrors of the Civil War and turns against his tormentors with a vengeance. The figure of Wales, which shares essential features with both the earlier Harry Callahan and the later William Munny, is the epitome of an Eastwoodian character, freighted with a moral ambiguity that is still likely to puzzle viewers today. A constituting factor of his lone riders is the outward defiance of authority where it is deficient, providing the moral justification for an individual to take the law into his hands. Josey Wales was unjustly harmed by the Union forces (who represent the State) and will fight them down come what will. Incidentally, Eastwood's positive depiction of Natives throughout his career fits in neatly with this ethical code, the State having stripped them of their rights, calling for individual action outside the boundaries of the law, or self-empowerment, if you will. Both the Natives and Josey Wales are outcasts, and by way of this ostracism, forced to become outlaws. The general feel of this film, like so many others, reflects Eastwood's no-nonsense directing. After all, he boasts a reputation for making swift decisions, doing with few takes, and coming in below budget. The opening credit scenes are a case in point here: instead of lengthy battle scenes, Eastwood has his bunch of guerrilla fighters ride across the landscape and shoot at random, enough to convey the essence of their action. The plot serves this purpose as well: a brief (pre-credits) introduction (Wales's family killed by the Union forces during a raid on his farm) serves as the inciting incident and must suffice to lay down the hero's motives. From here on, we may concentrate on Wales's adventures and, eventually, his inner conversion. It takes an immaculate female to bring this conversion about, a virgin who can be seen as the embodiment of the hippie movement and a Catholic figure of redemption alike – a perfect incarnation of Eastwood's trademark double entendre.

Lame TV soap opera which was subsequently deemed good enough to go theatrical. Beats me. Famous for his Oscar-winning low-budget hit Marty (1955), Delbert Mann tries – without much apparent conviction – to deliver an honest adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's famous novel, and fails woefully in pretty much every account. The film's main flaw is the thoroughly "unecht" depiction of German society in the dying Kaiserreich, of military drill, and of war in the trenches in general. In substance, everything seems to have been magically softened, as if late 1970s TV spectators were not to be bothered with too much ugly stuff in between commercials. Accordingly, Mann's version is nowhere near the mother of antiwar films, the eponymous 1930 mega-buster directed by Russian-born Lewis Milestone, crafted in close collaboration with Remarque and with the German-born head of Universal Pictures, Carl Laemmle, who secured the rights to the book shortly after it had been published (and hit the 1,000,000 copies mark). The uncut version of this epic milestone delivers a powerful tale of both physical and moral deprecation that digs deep into the black heart of human nature, and for all its early talkies' acting, makes its successor look like a sanitized romance. In Mann's unworthy update, none of the actors comes across as German, the costumes and set feel awkward all the way through, and the war action is anything but realistic. Worse, even by technical standards – travelling shots, special effects, editing, and yes, even sound – this feel-good version would have had a lot to learn from early filmmakers. Add an endless trickle of tiresome dialogues, a virtual absence of directing and a schlepping plot, and you get a tedious telly drama that lacks true interest. Don't settle on this ersatz if you can lay your hands on the real thing.

Replete with blatant contradictions, Cast Away serves as a highly interesting case study of Hollywood's dominating mood and the psychological repressions of mainstream American (and, by extension, so-called western) society. Its main tag line being that you need to free yourself from the material world in order to achieve true personal freedom, it paradoxically links all emotions to objects from the material world (volleyball, soda drink, ice cubes, skating shoes, football franchises, car etc.) – hence the shameless product placement that has rightly spurred harsh criticism, though cause and effect are certainly hard to disentangle. The plot itself illustrates this inherent struggle between materialism and spiritualism: the part dedicated to the protagonist's inner developments, devoid of musical score and with little dialogue (monologue, in fact), is squeezed in between two very talkative and, to say the least, corny accounts along the lines of before/after. However, what Zemeckis and Hanks attempt to achieve in the long run is no less than the reconciliation of both worlds. At the end of the inward journey stands the morale that consumerism and personal emotional fulfillment are only seemingly opposites. They can be pacified provided the individual, precisely by identifying with the objects he produces – by humanizing them, as it were (Wilson) – gains detachment from the the material world and, more prosaically, transcends the ugly things in life. And what better way to hit that home than to use real, existing brands that every movie goer in the western hemisphere can relate to? (In a way, the question as to whether or not the makers of the film should have preferred imaginary brands has no incidence.) In this perspective, Zemeckis's tale is the diametrical opposite of Robinson Crusoe, who chose to live as a free individual, distrustful of what he perceived as civilisation, whereas Chuck Noland's sole aspiration is to return amidst his peers after an incidental cathartic incursion into the cavernous shell of his inner life. In other words, where Defoe outlines utopia, Zemeckis casts dystopia. As such, the metaphor spun here constitutes a deliberate attempt to rid the sphere of culture of its persistent, though mostly latent or repressed, bad conscience when it comes to financial issues getting in the way of artistic license. Similarly, it exempts audiences at large from having to resolve the negative equation of art vs commerce, of spirit vs money, etc, thus consolidating the conservative liberal economical stance so well embodied by Tom Hanks and FedEx alike. Quite openly it says that you shouldn't feel guilty for liking products as they are part of your emotional fabric – a semantic twist more commonly known as branding. The other dominating theme in Noland's emancipation is masculinity. The character's deep psychological turmoil is chastely symbolised by the island, with its moist cavern and erect mountain. The underlying assertion is that Noland needs to crawl out of his allegedly safe hole and climb the phallic hill to restore his deficient masculinity, the very premise to reintegrate a self-assertive modern society. Ultimately, his restored maleness allows him to let go of his former love, who returns to her new family and thus reinstates (Christian) moral order embodied by the institution of marriage. In line with this bigot mentality, sexuality is alway only addressed in germ-free metaphors. Have you noticed that the lush atoll is practically devoid of animals other than meaty crabs and the occasional fish? Where are the birds, snakes, worms, spiders and the armies of undefined crawling species that you're entitled to expect in the wild? Artistically speaking, the film has a handful of redeeming qualities, one being obviously its sheer length, the freedom it takes to deploy its story, thin by modern action standards, while nonetheless omitting or merely evoking certain episodes or riddles, a choice which runs counter to current cinema viewing habits. (Incidentally, that is precisely why so many people on this site have complained about the missing suicide attempt, the undisclosed content of the parcel and the open end; it would seem that today's movie goers can no longer bear that something is not explained to them didactically, explicitly.) But all things considered, the contrite redemption theme used to validate a consumerist society and its ethic corollary, fundamental religious values, makes Cast Away a disturbing illustration of a dominant (white male) ideology. As such, it is clearly propagandist, in all senses of the word.

Amid a slur of controversy, aptly launched by a string of indie directors enthralled by Harmony Korine's previous movie, Kids, the newly declared genius director was encouraged to deliver yet another account of life in white trash America, set in a fictional town hit by a tornado. Rather than following a classic plot line, Korine paints loose episodes that were strung up to form an kaleidoscopic picture of the hopeless ennui that he claims has taken hold of the underdog classes in the US. But what all too obviously sets out to convey a shocking representation of the underrepresented in an apocalyptic society is by no means more than the pathetic yelp of a premature tween, deeply in love with Kurt Cobain and, mainly, himself. While Kids may have had a raw and unaltered intensity about it – the emphasis being on the word "may" – this follow-up is way too constructed to claim the virtues of innocence, ranging from the clumsily composed stills to the half-scripted dialogues and acting, which pay tribute to Korine's exalted brainwaves rather than a reality, however constructed or abstracted. Inebriated by his supposed artistry, Korine shows considerable contempt for his subjects, to judge f.i. from a scene where he stars himself, pretending to expose his inner bleedings to a black gay midget (no less) while trying to convince the man to have sex with him. By accumulating embarrassing and flawlessly boring scenes, our whiz kid ends up with a classic freak show, a both unreflected and utterly pretentious piece of fake cinéma d'auteur which owes credit to his great mentor Gus van Sant, who himself is often mistaken for an untypical (implying: great) filmmaker. It is interesting to note that, apart from the Sundance circuit, Korine found widespread acceptance in the contemporary art world, part for his use of video in film and part for the alleged critical stance of his films. In both cases, the art hipsters have failed to notice that noteworthy experimental film is usually characterised by a rare quality – reflected purpose, that is. Korine is typical US artsy fluff, and anyone with intellectual expectations and curiosity will leave it to the MoMA curators of this world to figure out why anyone is supposed to bother with a brain midget's poetry album of mainstream American teenage mal de vivre.

Frenzy, as even its title suggests, is something like a late Psycho. Not only does it follow a sexual abuser killing young women and his attempts at keeping up the facade of normalcy, but the parallels extend to the formal level as well. For one, the plot is so constructed that (for the viewer) doubts as to who the killer is hardly arise, shifting the tension on the actual murder sequences and, partly, on the final resolve brought about by the second, weaker, male character. In both films, the accent is furthermore on graphic violence, only slightly diffused by artful camera direction, enabling Hitchcock to shock audiences and induce a lurid sense of "it could happen to you", so typical of pulp fiction – but equally of Hitchcock. This becomes most evident in the much talked-about receding shot where the apartment in which a crime is committed becomes just another anonymous spot in the big city maze, the "place near you", and is furthermore emphasised in the dexterous connecting scenes where, quite literally, pub talk is left to speculate on the killer's motives, with either the real or the presumed perpetrator standing by. In hindsight, Hitchcock's decision to use a cast of nobodies proves a wise one, as it greatly contributes to paint a near realist picture of life in a popular London district, notwithstanding delusive claims that the city was, by that time, all colours and swing. Admittedly, this is Hitchcock's London, but then Antonioni's, for instance, the film epigone of 60s London, is by no means exclusive of other, grayer realities, here used to the right effect. And while Frenzy has evident flaws, which prevent it from keeping you riveted to your seat, it has enough classic moments to draw from. In this line of thought, the famous strangulation episode must rank high in Polanski's list of all-time favourite rape/murder scenes, while the black humour of the potato/corpse tête-à-tête, from today's viewpoint, has a distinct whiff of Tarantino comedy. More conventional, and by all accounts more facetious than Psycho, Frenzy is an all-too-savvy compendium of all the ropes used in Hitchcock's previous films, a synthetic chart of the language he created and left up for grabs for generations of filmmakers to come.

Anyone foolish enough to think that this is not one of the best movies ever to have been made – embodying the very essence of what makes cinema stand out among all other cultural forms of expression – should stick to Matrix, Disneyland and Diet Coke. Pointing out its historic inaccuracy is simply redundant as it never claimed to be a documentary, and biopics generically put an emphasis on story development rather than truthfulness (cf. JFK, Patton, etc.). Lamenting the movie's pace is, at best, indicative of your dwindling attention span – you might as well ask yourself if the Bible's too long. Finally, bemoaning the over-the-top acting of the entire cast, but most notably O'Toole, is an anachronism as you're dealing with pre-method-acting Hollywood and there's no concern whatsoever with realism, let alone naturalism; besides, the film, more than anything else, is a psychological portrait meant to express (as in "expression") the inner turmoil of its main protagonist in the face of events bigger than life. Not to forget that O'Toole's character is ripe with homo-erotic innuendo, and subsequently his struggle against his inner demons must also be read as a self-denial of his sexuality, as is made obvious in the rape scene. Indeed, not least thanks to O'Toole's ethereal performance, T.E. Lawrence is portrayed as an outsider in every sense of the word, a pariah of both worlds whose acceptance he is desperately seeking. One of the countless merits of Lean's desert western is to make evident this struggle of the individual against society and conventions – but also its shortfalls –, revealing itself in extreme situations that command extreme feelings. And rather than serving up an insipid happy end (as it would no doubt have to were it produced today), Lawrence of Arabia tells of the factual prevalence of pragmatism over ideals, of society over the individual, of tribalism over humanity, and not least, of war over peace – a gloomy message that couldn't possibly be more to the point, here served by a Homeric plot, a legendary score, sweeping photography, and immortal actors.

An obvious Hepburn/Tracy vehicle, riding on the couple's real-life romance, Adam's Rib suffers from a blatant absence of plot and, come to think of it, pretty much anything that makes a good film. Adam and Amanda Bonner, respectively attorney general and lawyer, take sides in a courtroom battle over a woman's case who cooled her husband's adulterous ardour by clumsily trying to shoot him down. Sure enough, the legal joust spills over into the counsels' private life, with Hepburn making a case for women's rights and Tracy trying to compete on traditional, i.e. "manly" legal grounds. What could have been a pacey screwball classic quickly turns into a humdrum romance-cum-esprit playlet deludingly relying on desperately "witty" colloquy and the chemistry between the two stars, foggily directed by an uninspired George Cukor, who must have been crying secretly in between takes. Though Tracey and Hepburn are on cruise control mode, there's only this much anyone could have siphoned out of a virtually non-existing intrigue, and after a somewhat upbeat beginning, it all drifts off into precocious women's lib rhetoric, most of it obstructing any further development of the story. Worst of all, the side plot – the couple's friend, a viscerally annoying wannabe songwriter and singer openly courting Miss Hepburn – is about the patchiest piece of script you've come across, shredding this hapless comedy into bits of fluffy dinner talk and cack-handled situation comedy. The truth of the matter is that, right from the start, Cukor follows the wrong cue, when he decides to stage a gender fight by settling on the obvious option, which is Hepburn siding with the betrayed female and Tracy defending the shot-at husband. This is of course a wild and foolish guess, but Billy Wilder, in his heyday, would have likely tackled the same story by going head first for a reversal of roles, perfidiously casting Tracy as a reluctant champion of the "weaker sex" instead, which in itself could have sparked off a firework of quiproquos and story twists and, incidentally, prevented anyone involved in this weakling from trying to get away with a routine job. For all those tender souls who keep fooling themselves about the grand cinema of olden days, and how everything was so much better in those days, this is shattering proof that futility is timeless.

This late Billy Wilder flick, one in a series of European productions that were to close the curtain on his long-running career, is in a way as rancid as the smell surrounding the main character it portrays, a storyboard synthesis of several real-life movie stars ranging from Garbo to Dietrich. Drawing on biographical accounts of the secluded lives of geriatric Hollywood divas from the Golden Age of post-War cinema, Wilder clumsily attempts to weave in an intrigue, which never really takes off as it is hopelessly drowned in tiresome dialogues, seemingly endless takes, fatuously clichéd characterisations and across-the-board foul acting (with the notable exception of William Holden). Though the starting premise may sound appealing – a nostalgic glimpse on a waning period in the history of film replete with rumor-ridden accounts of the lives of the rich and famous – it falls miles short of a feature-length story. Wilder must have sensed this as he was going along, since he spends considerable time on paraphernalia and frighteningly lame side acts, the worst of which is undoubtedly Mario Adorf casting a shrewd Greek hotel manager, literally crumbling under a make-up that turns him into Manuel of the Fawlty Towers series – minus the slapstick. What could have been an insightful commentary on Wilder's own professional milieu, feeding on the filmmaker's unique experience, ended up as a sluggish conspiracy plot leading to an anticlimactic half-hour long resolve with a distinct TV feel to it. Film buffs should probably see it, because it shows where Old Hollywood went in the 1970s while a brat generation took over the studios and set an entirely different pace. Billy Wilder deserves credit for trying to find his own in this new environment, but Fedora is a somewhat dispiriting example of an aging cinéaste grappling with his own glorious past.

Shockingly inane product placement for Tom Cruise, Audi, Bulgari, and Sydney Harbour Bridge (best actor). We're talking the end of cinema as a medium here. If there still is something called "film", and if that something is supposed to require more than a single brain cell to be understood, then this is not a film properly speaking. Lamer than even the recent 007s, this self-advertisement vehicle paid for by one of the century's biggest professional frauds is a 24-fps example of the money-fueled hubris of latter-day US cinema. It is the sick blossom of a decomposing society in its final stages, which has come to confuse MTV with music, McDonald's with food, and Saddam with Satan. Cruise and Woo have inoculated audiences world-wide with their lethal Chimera virus. If Scientology is right, they will burn in hell for having killed intelligence.

A classic of French pre-War cinema, Carnival in Flanders by the great Jacques Feyder is the most devious and cruel satire you might ever come across. Set in early 17th-century Flanders, which had previously been under Spanish rule, the story opens with shots of a busy village preparing for the yearly carnival, when the news break that the Spanish Duke Olivares and his troops plan to stay in town. At the prospect of looting and raping militia men, the flabby mayor of the well-to-do provincial nest called Boom volunteers, as he puts it, "to sacrifice" himself: his plan to pretend he has just passed away, thus hoping to convince Olivares to bypass the mourning town, is eagerly adopted by his timorous menfolk. But while the males go about staging the mock funeral, the women, led by the mayor's energetic wife, take over the action and, in turn, decide to "sacrifice" themselves to the soldiers. What follows is a grand tale of sexual libertinage and deception with a "happy end" of sorts where virtually no-one is redeemed. (The original title, La Kermesse héroïque, literally The Heroic Fête, operates in much the same way as Milos Forman's early satirical masterpiece, The Fireman's Ball, 1967, and the parallels are numerous; no doubt Forman had taken a second look at Feyder's Kermesse during his studies.) What immediately strikes one today is Feyder's directness in exposing his characters' human flaws, which is hardly subdued by the general satirical tone. The way adultery, homosexuality and eroticism but also greed, cowardice and deceit are depicted leaves one speechless at times, and certainly wondering how political correctness and all sorts of profit policies and conservatisms have infested modern-day cinema to a point it would no longer dare think to produce anything like this. Not to speak of the 1930s Hollywood counterparts, for which Feyder would have been light years off the mark, proving the point that there was and still is such a thing as the "French cultural exception". Apart from the latent debauchery creeping out into the open from the cozy interiors of a model town, the film also has multiple strings of side puns that keep its pace up at all times – from spot-on character studies (the mayor, the artist, the butcher...) to hysterical history sidekicks (using a fork for the first time, Spaniards wondering what "beer" is, impious remarks on Dutch painting...). Most strikingly, it is a hallucinatory mockery of the Dutch and their supposed idiosyncrasies: avarice, Protestant pragmatism, self-righteous "middle-class" rule, bogus worldliness, you name it. This goes to such an extent that it has been repeatedly claimed that Feyder had intended an allegory of the Dutch's collaboration with the German occupier in WWI – and from today's perspective, one is tempted to grant it visionary power as well, since substantial parts of the Flamish-speaking population of Belgium were eager supporters of Nazi rule. This assumption makes sense once you've witnessed the cold-blooded irreverence and unmasked sarcasm Feyder uses to unmask his species, which is surpassed only (in literature) by the untouchable Molière. Clearly, all formal issues had to serve this main objective – the Vaudeville acting, the picturesque film set, the matter-of-fact filming, and not least the purpose-built dialogues. So, although you should not expect a formidably audacious experiment in film-making, you will be treated a deliciously immoral chamber piece on sexual banter and other not so politically correct behaviour. Released in 1935, it is also a cruel reminder of how conservative the world – and its cultural output – has become as of late.

First things first: A Hard Day's Night is astonishingly overrated as is, in my humble opinion, the band's music - not their actual impact on pop culture and stardom, mind you. This starchy marketing gadget is trying very hard to be a comedy, yet it is not remotely funny, unless Hallmark greeting cards make you roll in the aisles. Richard Lester's cutesy story would be half redeemed if it had some kind of historic, i.e. documentary value but since it chose to be an intelligence-defiant fictionalised account, it tells mainly of the inexistent acting skills of all involved and the inanity that comes with unrestrained business opportunism. After all, history shows that similarly shameful efforts done in subsequent decades, to name but ABBA: The Movie (1974) and the oft-discussed Can't Stop the Music (1980), have all failed in their ambition. But while these still had some unwitting qualities (the former for showing 1970s Australia and giving a fair account of the hype that surrounded the Swedes, the latter, a scatty exposition of the Village People get-together, for leaving turkey fans with arguably the best worst movie of all times), the Beatles plot is plain boring and, to some extent, an arrogant monument in self-indulgence. Come to think of it, A Hard Day's Night is maybe closer to another career spin-off, namely Madonna: Truth or Dare (1991), in that it is a crass experiment in public masturbation. It is therefore no wonder that Lester went on to direct such capital works as Superman II and III, and was still licking McCartney's boots when the 1990s and Visa-sponsored tours came around. Many have argued that the image is a great black-and-white grain, but I would retorque that such assertions are tantamount to celluloid fetishism. Face it: it's the sort of statement that invariably comes up when all bridges have been burned. In Bed with the Beatles, in any case, is all work, no fun.

A young and inexperienced cop in Berlin sheds his innocence when he is drawn into a series of bloody murders commissioned by a mysterious tattoo fetishist. While a rather untypical product of mainstream European cinema, this first major effort by director Robert Schwentke is nonetheless a good indicator of where young German filmmakers are heading to. It would seem that most of the local filmschool hipsters have been molded by the same standard principles in story and production design that make for occasional good but, alas, also a majority of awful Hollywood flicks. This propensity may be best observed in the seminal TV crime series Tatort (Scene of the Crime), where aspiring cinematographers get a chance to work hands on – Schwentke, for his part, directed three episodes. Though the "cinematic" feel and level of "professionality" of these 90-minute small screen pictures have certainly gone up in the past ten or so years, you have to be alarmed at how interchangeable and, arguably, dull they have become. Tattoo is an ambitious Tatort. It is in a way very mature – scarily so. It's all neatly timed, the story and plot are textbook, the locations well-casted (most likely the only film set in Berlin that does without the usual tourist vistas), the travellings elaborate, the picture is crafty, the soundtrack heavily suggestive etc. But, as the French say, the mayonnaise doesn't blend. In fact, the director's intentions (making a gritty Euro urban thriller) are as subtle as ripping someone's skin off to get his tattoo. (By the way, the idea is by no means new – the 1968 French comedy Le Tatoué with Jean Gabin and Louis de Funès treated this subject in a far more refined way.) Unlike his famous US predecessors, Tattoo never hits the right tone and, worst of all, lacks genuinely creepy moments and an overall tension. "They say a person's house is a mirror to his soul..." See, that's the sort of dialogue, along with some fluffy art talk about 17th-century Japanese tattoo masters, that'll strangle any movie to a pathological death. This general impression extends to the actors who desperately try to come to terms with their storyboard characters. Germany's shooting star August Diehl as an unlikely specimen of a new generation of techno-dancing big city cops delivers a wholly unconvincing performance. Christian Redl is your cynical old school detective with a chip on his shoulder, and lacks depth. Nadeshda Brennicke does her best to play a Kraut version of the femme fatale, which is obviously far from enough. (Well, she is half redeemed once she's dropped her skirt.) And while all this is still more or less acceptable for a late Saturday night telly flick, the end clearly isn't. What happened there? Where was the teacher to get Schwentke to revise his homework? But apart from that glitch, let there be no doubt that this German model pupil is off for a great Hollywood career shooting commissioned box office busters by the dozen. Good riddance, if you ask me.

A mere shadow of its conceptual predecessor Zelig (in the Allen film typology), Sweet and Lowdown is proof that the mockumentary method is not a guarantee for a successful plot. For one - and despite an honest acting performance - it's very, very tedious having to watch Sean Penn playing guitar and suspend your disbelief, especially when even a side character like the bass guitar player acts like he's never even seen an instrument before. Something's gone terribly wrong with the story as well; from the onset, you're left wondering where it's heading at. Meek puns are badly delivered and poor dialogues try hard to be funny; Uma Thurman's overblown performance is just one example here. Generally speaking, you get the feeling that not much time was wasted on character design, which is all the more problematic as the entire film hinges on one central figure. Of all things, the comments are redundant and spoil much of the potential fun. Worst of all, an off-screen character comment (inner dialogue) pops out of nowhere near the end of the film, making you wonder what went wrong in the story design that had to be somehow recovered in the editing. Amateurish, to say the least. Of course, like so many Allen movies, this one has also quite a few things coming its way, most notably set design and image. And unlike his cheaper flicks, we're awarded a string of atmospheric exterior location shots. But in the end, it simply doesn't add up. You just don't make an entire movie on a one-sided caricature of a character. And it certainly looks like Allen couldn't make up his mind on the genre of film he wanted to make. Just as Emmet Ray is second to Django Reinhardt, this Woody Allen doesn't live up to himself.

Invisible car? Did I see an invisible car with James Bond aboard? (Rhetoric question, you might argue, but you haven't seen the film, so don't talk.) Did I get into the wrong bill? Did I see Matrix downloaded? Who let a Kiwi get a hand on Her Majesty's crown jewels? Who led Halle Barry to believe she was an actress? Who made Brosnan look like Jesus (Mel Gibson)? Why were the CGI made on a Commodore? Why get a six year-old to write dialogues? How many extra-super-special features can a car have before it ceases to be just that? Who stole the humour? Who needs Madonna? Who can spend their lifetime doing loathsome stuff like this and feel good about it? Why did I even bother writing about this garbage? Rhetoric question, etc.

Of all things, The Curse of the Jade Scorpion is a smart piece of unadulterated nostalgia. Replete with false bottoms, this endearing and highly subjective homage to pre-War screwball comedy is a treat for anyone who thinks that cinema has something to say about collective representations and the substantial role it has played therein, and continues to do. Claiming that 60-year-old Allen is an unconvincing womanizer comically misses the point, just like the oft-repeated criticism of the pervasive anachronisms (as, most notably, in the lingo). For Allen surely never intended to come up with a "historic" movie that had an "authentic" feel. After all, and thank God or Allen's mother, Allen is not Spielberg. How could any of these dim-witted critics have missed the point that the plot revolves around a magician, an epitome of the fake? Allen's 1940s setting is nothing less than a compendium of the collective (conscious and unconscious) imagery associated with that time, shaped by the emerging medium of that time and its subsequent self-representations. By an irreverent reversal of proof, you could say that the film ultimately reflects the bitter-sweet view of an aging filmmaker on the goings of his trade, which is all the more worthy considering the current state of mainstream American cinema. Grant you that the dialogues are in part redundant, as are some of Allen's and Hunt's antics, and that the "message" (love strikes blind) is of no groundbreaking consequence, but if you are interested in the history and workings of film (and actually TV series), this Jade is a gem.