Film Reviews by MonsieurK

Garrone's dazzling version of Pinocchio is the only film to have caught the tone of Collodi's book - a neo-folkloric mixture of madcap humour, melancholy and tenderness. I can't understand why other reviewers here have complained about the English-language dubbing, when the DVD gives you the option of watching the original Italian version with English subtitles, which is obviously preferable.

The self-satisfied, avaricious, stone-hearted upper classes of Mexico City get their comeuppance when the underclass strikes back, but the underclass turns out to be nothing more than a mob of vengeful rapists, murderers and thieves – with a few tokenistic exceptions, who inevitably get slaughtered, as do the few tokenistically decent rich people. The New Order is no order at all – it's bloody anarchy. That's the Big Idea of this puerile and meretricious little film. Like Gaspar Noé - to whom he's often compared – Michel Franco obviously regards himself as something of a provocateur. But Noé's films do occasionally have a ghastly kind of panache, whereas New Order has absolutely nothing to commend it.

One wouldn't expect great subtlety from anything derived from Lionel Shriver's silly novel, but the crudity of this film is really remarkable. There's barely a single believable scene in the entire thing, as two ludicrously mismatched adults (he's an obtuse dimwit and she's an ex-"adventurer", we're supposed to believe - which just seems to mean that she's written some guidebooks) struggle to deal with a child who is borderline satanic virtually from the outset. Virtually their only attempt to address their son's behaviour is to consult a doctor whose perfunctory examination of the boy is every bit as absurd as the parents' inability to discuss the situation. Every single character is a badly drawn cartoon (the mother's lumpen workmates are a particularly ridiculous gang of caricatures), and the splashes of blood-red that appear as a visual motif throughout the film epitomise the heavy-handedness of the whole enterprise. I very much liked Lynne Ramsay's early films, but this is utterly woeful.

To classify Khrustalyov, My Car! as a ‘comedy’ is to push the word almost to breaking point. Yes, this film is intermittently humorous, but Aleksey German’s humour is of the grimmest kind. For most of its two and a half hours (the length is entirely necessary), Khrustalyov, My Car! is not so much a satire as a nihilistic carnival. It’s less arduous than the hellish Hard To Be a God, but it’s clearly the work of the same creator. Scene after scene is crammed with hyperrealist quasi-documentary detail (the use of monochrome has the effect of giving almost equal status to every piece of the image), but the narrative proceeds with something like the illogicality of a dream. It’s a combination of two entirely different modes, and I don’t know of any other director who has achieved anything quite like it. There is rarely a moment in which the camera comes to rest, or in which one knows precisely what is happening or why. People talk (or shout) over each other constantly, and the meaning of their utterances is often opaque. A Russian speaker, with some knowledge of the history of the period, would obviously find the text less elliptical, but the barrage of verbal and visual information would be no less overwhelming. The death of Stalin – recreated in appalling detail – doesn’t occur until the final stages of the film. Before we get there, we spend a lot of time in an overpopulated kommunalka. These communal apartments were created by the Soviet Union as a solution to the urban housing shortage, and were conceived as utopian dwellings in which each family unit would be subsumed into the greater family of the socialist community. In German’s film, the kommunalka is a kind of bedlam in which it is all but impossible to function as an individual. Khrustalyov, My Car! is a nightmare, but what it gives us is a collective nightmare, rather than the torments of any individual sufferer. In some respects, it might be compared to Pasolini's Salò: it has just one scene of (extreme) sexual violence, rather than the remorseless depravity depicted in Pasolini’s film, but they are similar in the bleakness and relentlessness of the director’s vision. At times, the madness, the chaos and the misery of Khrustalyov, My Car! are barely endurable, but I think it’s a magnificent thing nevertheless. It does something that only cinema can do, and only Aleksey German could have made it.

For me, Amarcord ranks with La Dolce Vita and 8½ as the very best of Fellini - an apparently effortlessly fluid blending of the carnivalesque and the tender, of the deeply personal and the political. One quick factual correction - FG's review complains that the DVD obliges you to watch the dubbed English-language version. It doesn't. The set-up options allow you to select the Italian version with English subtitles. And the sound quality is perfectly fine.

A film so flamboyantly bad that at times I found myself laughing. The direction is hackneyed and the script veers between the banal and the preposterous - there's barely a cliché of the genre that doesn't get an airing here. That said, a more subtle actor than Nicole Kidman might have made something of this low-grade material. Her performance here, however, is ridiculously histrionic. Instead of plausible characterisation, we're presented with an impersonation that's nearly all surface: but dead eyes, greasy hair, wrecked complexion, shambling gait and near-catatonic mumbling are not enough. The rawness that some reviewers have praised in this film I found to be wholly bogus. Kidman is at her best, I think, playing characters for whom life itself is a performance - as in To Die For, for example. Here, the relentless self-consciousness makes the character profoundly unbelievable.

For me, the films of Claire Denis tend to fall short of the intellectual heft to which they obviously aspire, and I found this one especially weak - I think the New Yorker review hits the nail on the head: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/high-life-reviewed-claire-deniss-disappointing-journey-into-space. But the two previous one-star reviews are peculiarly inaccurate. Yes, the baby is central to the opening twenty minutes. But she cries for ninety seconds, in total. Literally, ninety seconds.