ALEXANDER BISLEY warms to Laurie David, global warming activist with Hollywood pull, and the impetus behind Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. She talks about documentary filmmaking, saving the world, and reeling in husband Larry.

Larry David/USA/2002; R4 (2-disc)
Warner Bros, NZ$49.95 | Reviewed by Alexander Bisley

Lumière Associate Editor Alexander Bisley’s weekly DVD column, ending its run in The Dominion Post today, continues on The Lumière Reader.

A SIGN of Curb Your Enthusiasm’s mana is the talent that sign up to satirise themselves. In Season Three Larry David goes to New York to be in a pastiche of a Martin Scorsese New York gangster movie. The real Scorsese appears with his lively rat-a-tat-tat. While he’s away from LA, Larry’s mother dies. When he gets back his dad says everyone was at the funeral but they didn’t want to disturb him. Larry is understandably upset, but soon uses the bereavement to avoid social engagements he doesn’t want; which are most of them. Shameless as ever, he uses the situation to get his long-suffering wife Cheryl to be intimate with him.

John Frankenheimer/USA/1966; R4 (2-disc SE)
Warner Bros, NZ$19.95 | Reviewed by Tim Wong

LOATHING and ignorant of motorsport I might be, John Frankenheimer’s Grand Prix may just make a late convert out of me yet: with bracing race sequences combusting with the velocity of an earth re-entry, the thrill of the chase has never made for such exhilarating viewing. Envy those who saw it in the sixties, in Cinerama, projected in 65mm up large – everything from mind-blowing to nauseating, by all accounts. Relishing the old boy, pan-European allure of the Formula One’s halcyon days, the film globetrots between nine race meetings on the F1 calendar, from the pomp of Monaco on the French Riviera, known for its challenging street circuit and tax-free benefits, to the circumstance of Monza, Italy, with its hazardous banked corners and parochial Ferrari cult.

Reviewed by Gautaman Bhaskaran

MANOJ Night Shyamalan appears so desperate to create novelty that he slips in his latest film, Lady in the Water, disappointing audiences and his new producer, Warner Bros. The movie took the lowest ever box office collection for a Shyamalan work during its first weekend in the U.S.

A roundup of the current best and rest in film and DVD. In this installment: Match Point, Keeping Mum, Breakfast at Tiffany's (Anniversary Ed.), The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, An Inconvenient Truth.

Sam Peckinpah/USA/1969; R4 (2-disc SE)
Warner Bros, $19.95 | Reviewed by Brannavan Gnanalingam

“PECKINPAH makes epics about failures”. But with four crooked men striding purposefully to save their captured friend, Peckinpah re-wrote the rules of Westerns and in an instant, became a star himself. The Wild Bunch is the classic riposte to the idealism of the 60s – with amoral and self-interested desperadoes existing in a brutal, corrupt and greedy society. There’s no peace and love here – it’s all cynically shattered by rivers of blood, throat cuttings and scorpions being eaten up by armies of ants.

Reviewed by Tim Wong

A FRENCH-animation sensation touted as the must-have accessory to A Scanner Darkly’s colouring book malaise, Renaissance is, rather deflatingly, a die cut of razor-edged silhouettes inked by a Frank Miller wannabe: the contrast’s blown out, the mid-tones erased, while any trace of CMYK has virtually been obliterated from its bromide sci-fi fantasy. Literally rendered in black and white, it’s a Photoshop bender of warped image levels and stencilled-in vectors with no grey area in between. Technical marvel aside (its animators employ motion capture and a great eye for urban modernist sprawl), this is a film that wields its visual metaphor for dystopia a little too eagerly: stripped of colour, it’s also diluted of any real soul, where detail is lost in its opaque recesses, spectrum is nonexistent, and dimension is veiled behind curtains of stark white.

Congratulations to V. Braun of Auckland, winner of The West Wing: The Complete Fifth Season, courtesy of Warner Bros. Home Video. Your prize will be mailed shortly. Thanks to the many who entered.

Radio Active 89FM's Handle the Jandal 2006: The National DIY Music Video Competition makes good with its annual award ceremony. The spectacular commences Wednesday September 20th, 7pm @ the Embassy Theatre. Tickets $15 for Active Card holders; $20 otherwise, from Radio Active, Rex Royale, Real Groovy and the Embassy Theatre. Media release follows.

Media Release | September 15th, 2006
The DOCNZ Documentary Film Festival has announced this year’s winners. Please find below details of the awards in eight categories:

Reviewed by Tim Wong

LET’S NOT burn Christophe Gans at the stake just yet: though wildly ambiguous (are Japanese-inspired narratives in this genre anything but?), and guilty of squandering the talents of Radha Mitchell (and Deborah Kara Unger for that matter), his rendition of Silent Hill makes for vastly superior viewing as a visual adaptation. Whereas the survival horror milieu of nerve-wringers Resident Evil and Doom was lost in translation by two incompetent, insipid filmmakers oblivious to the source material at hand, Gans grafts every wrought iron texture, squalid interior, and hellishly deformed creature from the video game’s malaise with obsessive glee. The aesthetic is spot on.

George Clooney/USA/2005; R4
Magna Pacific, NZ$29.95 | Reviewed by Shahir Daud

IT MAY BE McCarthyism’s allegory to the modern day Patriot Act and the treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay that makes George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck relevant, but it’s his incisive attack on the television news industry that resonates most vividly. In a sobering opening speech, Edward R. Murrow (an absolutely picture perfect David Strathain) suggests that television itself is being used to ‘distract, delude, amuse and insulate us’.

A local digital feature currently in production, the makers of The Player and the Advocate – described as "a comedy set in Wellington 1601AD" – invite the local filmmaking community to attend the first reading of their feature film treatment on Sunday, October 1st, 4pm at Kapito Cafe (76 Willis St, Wgtn). The reading is scheduled to last 45 minutes, with 15 minutes feedback. Entrance is free. To learn more, peruse playerandadvocate.co.nz or see below.

Our final dispatch of the year concludes our Telecom New Zealand International Film Festivals sortie. The festival roadshow continues, albeit in scaled-down format, throughout a number of regions nationwide until the end of November. See nzff.telecom.co.nz for dates and corresponding programme information. Those wishing to overview our three-month coverage should study the Festival Debrief, a summary of all TNZIFF features, reviews, form guide, and column entries for 2006.

Final Updates: IMOGEN NEALE talks to Emily Barcley, returning to the screen in We The Living, a new short film travelling the country as part of the Homegrown: Works on Film programme; and, in our post-festival overview, the editors and contributors list their Festival Favourites; SIMON SWEETMAN completes Week Two of his Festival by Day excursion; JACOB POWELL breaks down the 39 films he saw into Post-Fest Wrap #1; TIM WONG attempts to decipher the good from the great in Post-Fest Wrap #2; DAVID LEVINSON discovered the balance between art and life was as precarious as ever in Post-Fest Wrap '06.

The Festival Reader now returns to normal transmition.

Fenton Bailey, Randy Barbato/USA/2005; R4
Magna Pacific, NZ$tbc | Reviewed by Simon Sweetman

IN 1972 the porn movie Deep Throat was made. The film starred Linda Lovelace, and was named after her special talent. By today’s standards the movie is barely smutty – aside from the close-up on the titular act. In fact, it’s downright boring as a movie – a kitsch-classic at best – but the story behind that story is deeply fascinating. And so, Inside Deep Throat attempts to shed some light on this morally dark tale.

No rest for the wicked, it seems: barely a month out from the chaos that was the Telecom New Zealand International Film Festivals, more programming wizardry is set to hit our screens. Currently showing: the Jasmax Film Festival 2006, celebrating architecture via a selection of films and documentaries at Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin cinemas until Sept 7; the Date Palm Film Festival, surveying Middle Eastern and North African cinema in Wellington (Paramount, 6-13) and Christchurch (Regent, 14-18) this September; the Silent Film Festival, Opotiki, since been and gone, but a modest and welcome addition to scene no less; DOCNZ, Australasia’s only international competitive documentary film festival, now in its sophomore year, and opening this Thursday in Auckland (7-17) before travelling to Wellington (25-Oct 4), Christchurch (12-15) and Dunedin (26-29); the Vegetarian Film Festival, coinciding on Oct 8 with World Vegetarian Day; and always likeable, the Cathay Pacific Italian Film Festival 2006, bridging the country from Auckland (Oct 4) through to Dunedin and back up to Hamilton by November's end. Also rumoured: the return of the Korean Film Festival (last seen in 2004). More reportage to follow in the coming months. As usual, browse the corresponding festival websites for all essential information.

Alex Gibney/USA/2005; R4
Magna Pacific, NZ$29.95 | Reviewed by Ewan Kingston

IN DECEMBER 2001, a company named by Fortune magazine as “America's most innovative” for six consecutive years filed for bankruptcy. Its stock had fallen from ninety dollars per share to a mere fifteen cents. The next month, the US Department of Justice began a criminal investigation of the company. Enron: the Smartest Guys in the Room is the tale of Enron's downfall, and an investigation of what it means for society.