New Titles, July, 'Norwegian Wood', 'My Dog Tulip', 'The Trip'

Vietnamese director Tran Anh Hung has a distinct curiosity about the significance of music, both in everyday life and in cinema. A recurring scene from his gorgeous 2000 film ‘At the Height of Summer’ saw a young couple waking each morning to the strains of the Velvet Underground’s ‘Pale Blue Eyes’ and engaging in a ritualised early-morning ballet of stretches and ablutions. At a pivotal moment in his wistful and agonisingly poignant new work – a thoughtfully abridged adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s lilting 1987 chronicle of late-teen neurosis in 1960s Tokyo – a young woman, Naoko, who’s still traumatised by the suicide of a schoolyard sweetheart, breaks down when a friend casually strums through a rendition of The Beatles’ torch song ‘Norwegian Wood’. The idea that something as ephemeral as a pop song could release a storm cloud of sorrows encapsulates the objectives of this film. It asks: how can we ever really be sure of love without understanding the hidden impulses of others? And what’s the point of love if death’s cruel hand can swipe at any moment?

My Dog Tulip

This gently episodic film by Paul and Sandra Fierlinger manages to say more about man’s relationship with dogs in a single, lush frame than ‘Marley and Me’ would if it were to run on a loop until the end of time.

It’s attentively adapted from a memoir by the late British wit JR Ackerley, which offers – in infinitesimal detail – the mucus-slathered trials of life with his fusty Alsatian bitch, Tulip, in 1950s Putney. Ackerley’s bone-dry prose is the epitome of self-flagellating, post-war Englishness, recalling at once the instructional irony of George Orwell’s essays and the arch, self-effacing out-loud-thoughts of Alan Bennett.

Other New Stuff

Limitless

Way Back, The

Made In Romania

The Trip

Archipelago

L'Amour Fou

Company Men

Macbeth (2010)

July, New Titles, 'Carlos The Jackal', 'The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest'

Continuing a pattern of switching between subdued ensemble dramas (‘Summer Hours’, ‘Late August, Early September’) and balls-out ‘global’ techno-thrillers (‘Demonlover’, ‘Boarding Gate’), French director Olivier Assayas returns with a hulking, seething, intermittently sublime, five-and-a-half hour film in which he manages to draw together elements from both of these distinct styles.

‘Carlos’ is the lightly fictionalised biopic of Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, known to the world – but not in this film! – as Carlos the Jackal, and it comes across as the mother of all New Yorker profiles writ loud and large on the screen. Central to the film is a passionate, technically complex (he’s fluent in half a dozen languages) performance from Venezuelan actor Edgar Ramirez who feels like the perfect, paunchy mouthpiece for Carlos’s fervent, if flawed, gunboat Marxism.

Covering the period between his joining the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in 1970 and his capture in Sudan in 1994 (as he was being treated for a varicose vein on one of his testicles), the film works best when it presents information visually rather than with swathes of ideological discourse. The highlight is a masterly rendering of Carlos’s raid on an OPEC meeting in Vienna in 1975 for which Assayas orchestrates detail in such a way that it speaks about the politics, fears, tactics and ambitions of all involved. Elsewhere, small episodes – such as the gun-toting capture of Baader-Meinhof wildcat Gabriele Kröcher-Tiedemann – feel like they’ve been included purely for the sake of thoroughness.

Assayas doesn’t try to reflect too audaciously on Carlos ‘the man’, though he does paint him as someone whose single-minded focus on political goals was partly fuelled by raging sexual desire. (NB: The film is also screening in a more compact 158-minute version.)

Other New Stuff This Week

GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET'S NEST, THE (2009)

MECHANIC, THE (2011)

HALL PASS (2011)

OTHER GUYS, THE (2010)

BARNEY'S VERSION (2010)

KING'S SPEECH, THE (2010)

WAITING FOR SUPERMAN (2011)

WARRIOR'S WAY, THE (2010)

I SAW THE DEVIL (2010)

YOUNG AT HEART (1954)

MARRIAGE ITALIAN STYLE (1964)

INSIGNIFICANCE (1985) CRITERION

MAKIOKA SISTERS, THE (1983) CRITERION

SUDDEN FEAR (1952)

HIS KIND OF WOMAN (1951)

TOPPER RETURNS (1941)

Coming Soon

Steve Coogan's THE TRIP

NORWEGIAN WOOD

ARCHIPELAGO

Anton Chekhov's THE DUEL

Tony Gatlif's KORKORO

KISS ME DEADLY Criterion

ZAZIE DANS LE METRO Criterion

THE MUSIC ROOM Criterion

BLACK MOON Criterion

PEOPLE ON SUNDAY Criterion

DIABOLIQUE Criterion

NAKED KISS Criterion

RED SHOES Criterion

PATHS OF GLORY Criterion

LE BOSSU (1960)

BETT'S BATH & OTHER STORIES

TINTIN & THE MYSTERY OF THE GOLDEN FLAME

CHEKHOV COMEDY SHORTS

ON TOUR

LUNCH HOUR (BFI)

THE MUSIC LOVERS

SET THE PIANO STOOL ON FIRE

WARD NO. 6

DEEP END (BFI)

July, New Titles, 'Farewell', '127 Hours', 'Biutiful'

Farewell

The Farewell affair was an espionage plot that unfolded in the USSR, France and the USA between 1981 and 1983.

Sergei Gregoriev (Emir Kusterica), a KGB operative hungry for change, begins feeding secrets to Pierre Froment, a French engineer in Moscow, who in turn takes them to François Mitterrand (Philippe Magnan), who passes them to Ronald Reagan.

While in Moscow, the households of Gregoriev and Froment come under increasing strain from their secret professional – and personal – lives. ‘Farewell’ boasts a strong cast – Willem Dafoe pops up as a CIA chief and Niels Arestrup plays his French counterpart – and is strong on life in Soviet Moscow. That rare thing nowadays, a Cold War thriller, reminiscent of 'Gorky Park'.

127 Hours

There’s little more gruesome and extreme than the story of Aron Ralston, an American outdoors nut who in 2003 went canyoning alone in Utah without telling anyone where he was going. James Franco plays the frenetic 27 year old as an experience junkie and sociable loner. He bombs through the desert on a mountain bike leaving a trail of dust behind him. He meets girls in the wilderness, makes them laugh and leaps into underground lakes with them before saying goodbye. He bounds over gulleys. Then he misses his footing, slips into a canyon and a boulder follows him down, pinning his arm to the wall just as he lands on his feet. He’s trapped, and the film’s kineticism turns in on itself: like Ralston, its energy is stuck in a hole.

Biutiful

Bardem plays Uxbal, a grafter who shuttles between corrupt police, Chinese sweatshop owners and illegal African street hawkers. He brings comfort to the bereaved by passing on messages from the deceased, while at the same time coping with his estranged wife’s bipolar disorder and facing the shadow of serious illness himself.

Other New Stuff in July

IT'S ALWAYS SUNNY IN PHILADELPHIA SEASON 4 (2008)

BLOW OUT (1981) CRITERION

SOMETHING WILD (1986) CRITERION

PALE FLOWER (1964) CRITERION (REGION 1)

BEETLE QUEEN CONQUERS TOKYO (2011)

BIUTIFUL (2010)

METROPOLIS (1927) MADMAN RESTORATION

YOGI BEAR (2010)

WHITE MATERIAL (2009)

WE ARE WHAT WE ARE (2010)

CATFISH (2010)

TAMARA DREWE (2010)

HEART OF GLASS (1976)

TOM WAITS UNDER REVIEW 1971-1982 (2008)

RABBIT HOLE (2010)

127 HOURS (2010) BLU-RAY

127 HOURS (2010)

BLACK SWAN (2010)

GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY, THE (1966)

STORY OF THE KELLY GANG, THE (1906)

TRASH HUMPERS (2009)

HOLY ROLLERS (2009)

BLUE VALENTINE (2010)

DISTRICT 13 ULTIMATUM (2010)

REIGN OF ASSASSINS (2010)

HOWL (2010)

ROUTE IRISH (2010)

SUSPIRIA (1977)

GNOMEO AND JULIET (2011)

SEASON OF THE WITCH (2011)

UNKNOWN (2011)

UNKNOWN (2011)

UNKNOWN (2011) BLU-RAY

ADJUSTMENT BUREAU, THE (2011)

HEREAFTER (2010)

HEREAFTER (2010) BLU-RAY

FAREWELL (2009)

INTERLUDE (1957) MADMAN DIRECTOR'S SUITE

DAY OF THE OUTLAW (1959)

PRINCESS OF MONTPENSIER, THE (2010)

AGE OF REASON, THE (2010)

SANCTUM (2011)

SANCTUM (2011) BLU-RAY

PIANOMANIA (2009)

TREE, THE (2010)

I AM NUMBER FOUR (2011)

RANGO (2011)

FASTER (2010)

INSIDE JOB (2010)

AND EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE FINE (2010)

LEAVING (2009)