Reviews

This is an appallingly inept film made by a production team who did not respect or even understand the source novel. It is a book about hate and poverty and pain. The whole point of the novel is that the mother corrupts the boy into being as slyly evil as she is. The director plays this as comedy! complete with dropped trouser gags, crass blue lighting, and ubiquitous crashes of thunder to complete the farce. The whole is completely miscast by a team of poor players who have the subtlety of sledgehammers. The film is full of crass moments which aren't in the book, such as the dreadful wink-wink wraparound. The ending has been changed! and made happy! Watch instead the 1971 version, which is true to the spirit and the themes of the original novel, with perfect settings and a magnificent cast, playing with the right amount of seething resentment and ripening rage. The only flaw with the 1971 film is that it is too short.

This film topped the British box-office for two weeks and in doing so made Ken Russell the most successful filmmaker in Britain in the 1970s. It was his fifth No.1 hit in that decade. Guy Hamilton had four No.1s (Bond films), Sam Peckinpah had three No.1s; no one else had more than two. Ken Russell also spent longer at Number one than Spielberg, whose two No.1 hits, Jaws and Close Encounters, failed to match the record set by The Music Lovers (1 week at No. 1); Devils (Eight Weeks at No.1); Tommy (14 weeks); Lisztomania (2 weeks) and this. Valentino is not one of Russell's masterpieces, but there are mightily glorious things to see here.

It seems that camcorder cinema is here to stay, so Ken Russell has made a film with his camcorder that re-writes all the 'Dogma' rules; an astonishingly inventive, powerful, rude, gory, inspired and funny film, full of colour. Some of the acting is a little too large for my liking, not least from Ken himself as the keeper of an asylum asked to take charge of a rock singer who may or may not have murdered his wife. It ends with the Usher family being reborn as the ghosts of mischievous children, and a Fall of the House of Usher staged with such wit and imagination I almost fainted with astonishment and laughter. A midnight movie classic!

This is the most beguiling British film about childhood since Kes (1969), a slowburning look at days in the life of a small boy on the brink of adolescence. He has adolescent encounters, including an uneasy bath with an unpopular older girl, but he's very much a pre-adolescent child, with all the helplessness and vulnerability that that means. Lynne Ramsay's great strength as a filmmaker is an ability to recreate the world as seen through her characters' eyes. From with the deprivation, the film is set on a housing estate during a binman's strike, she finds moments of real beauty - a joyfully filmed tumble in a hayfield - and strikingly surreal moments, such as a backward boy's pet mouse flying to the moon on a balloon. If Ratcatcher has a forerunner, excepting Ramsay's own award-winning shorts, it is not The Bill Douglas Trilogy, a semi-still life of a Scottish slum boy, which it eclipses completely, but the great hand-crafted films of Lindsay Anderson: This Sporting Life; If..., and O Lucky Man!

Erik Poppe's Oslo is a multi-racial, graffiti-covered anywhere-city like Manchester or Berlin or Paris. As a portrait of wasted youth, Schpaaa is a better film than its Anglo-French equivalents, La Haine and Human Traffic. It's an angry film full of love for a group of people without love. A lean film telling a human tale with a perfectly apt cinematic style: snapshots of scenes in the last weeks of two young teenagers before their aimless anti-social behaviour catches up on them. It's a film of wonderfully human moments, such as the grins on the boys' faces when Jonas returns from an unexpected ride in a car from which he was stealing; the resignation on a young boy's face when he approaches the door of his dysfunctional home. The highlight is a beautifully acted scene when Jonas, having been kept behind by the supply teacher for falling asleep in class, pretends to be his own best friend, and naughtily tries to get the 'too careful' teacher to touch a hollow on his head.