BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: Fuller’s personal favourite.

SAM FULLER started off in journalism at the age of twelve. He was a copy boy, then a crime reporter by the age of seventeen. You can feel his newspaper experience seeping into this film, a passion for the ink, the machinery the people. While Park Row is certainly minor Fuller, and a little problematic, it is also possibly the most purely enjoyable film of this year’s Film Society programme thus far.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: Samuel Fuller goes to war.

DESPITE Samuel Fuller’s Fixed Bayonets ostensibly being based on John Brophy’s novel (which was previously filmed in 1943), you can feel the grip of Norman Mailer’s 1948 opus, The Naked and the Dead. Men whose fears are viciously exposed in battle, the atavistic ignorance demanded of good soldiers, and the dynamics of soldiers tested to the breaking point by particular circumstances. In fact, Fuller even includes inner monologues by the actors – a non-too subtle approach – but one that emphasises the flicker of humanity in a de-humanised and cruel environment. It’s a highly masculine world, but one where man and environment (in spite of its obvious studio setting) become scarcely distinguishable.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: Maggie Cheung’s swansong.

FORMER CRITIC, French director Olivier Assayas, is one of France’s most erratic talents. When he is good however (Irma Vep), he is simply fantastic. Clean, while certainly not hitting the giddy heights of Irma, is a quietly compelling and fascinating tale. Its central pleasure, of course, is a stellar performance by the brilliant Maggie Cheung.