Wes Anderson's new film is utterly absorbing and a sheer delight. With nothing to dislike about it, its only fault is that it ends at all. A flippant facile soupcon perhaps, but warm blooded, cuddly, rather pink and fluffy, a variety of canapés with no main course, and very saucy for a teenage love story. Filled with too many characters,  some that are hardly drawn, it leaves major actors with almost nothing to do, but who's quibbling.
Its diametrical opposite in contemporary cinema is surely Bela Tarr's latest and final film, the lugubrious 'The Turin Horse' in which a rural farmer is forced to confront the mortality of his faithful beast of burden, which appears to be the same animal the philosopher Nietzsche went mad over.
It was with passionate relief that cinemagoers worldwide greeted the news of Bela Tarr's retirement, and this his last film reminds us all why. One of the great bores of contemporary cinema, Mr Tarr has proved a leading light in the post-modernist movement that aims to drive audiences out of picturehouses by occupying the austere high ground with minimalist scriptless plotless one-eyed studies of inactivity.
 Unlike the cine-revolutionaries of the early Seventies, he has no interest in the erotic, the stylish, the witty or the political. In its place, we endure a morose contemplation of utter banality and non-event. This is what awards committees reward in our time, but Bela has finally wearied of wearying everybody. Perhaps he was supported like Tarkovsky, Sokorov and Tsai Ming Liang by generous state subsidy. Perhaps that support has waned. Without it, work like this could never have got made, and there will be those in the West who admire this staunch dreariness simply because it could never get funded in our ruthless free-markets.

(PS The allusion to Nietzsche's horse in the title is purely tendentious, a meretricious attempt to secure funding.)

More Titles For October
ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA (2011) REGION 4
SEPARATION (1968)
GET THE GRINGO (2012)
MOONRISE KINGDOM (2012)
NOSTALGIA FOR THE LIGHT (2010)
PRIVATE ROMEO (2011)
REC: GENESIS (2012)
TURIN HORSE, THE (2011)
WHITE VENGEANCE (2011)
WOMAN IN THE FIFTH, THE (2011)
CALL THE MIDWIFE (2012)
PUBERTY BLUES (2012)
INNOCENT SORCERERS (1960)
PRIMROSE PATH (1940)
TAKING FATHER HOME (2006)
STORY OF A CHEAT, THE (1936)
QUADRILLE (1938)
PEARLS OF THE CROWN, THE (1937)
DESIRE (1937)