DARREN BEVAN previews the APO’s “Return of a Night at the Movies”, performing June 14 at the Aotea Centre.

AFTER 19 years of cinematic Indiana Jones silence, there was always going to be some trepidation about whether the new movie lived up to the gloss of the trilogy we all remembered when we were young. So at the Cannes Film Festival this year, it was no surprise that audiences packed out the screening of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull – but it was perhaps also no surprise that as the lights dimmed some members of the audience chose to sing John Williams’ original score aloud.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: an existential end.

I’M STILL convinced Antonioni’s films can be reduced to three shots and an ending. However, it is fair to say The Passenger is much more beguiling than some of Antonioni’s other work, and hasn’t dated anywhere near as badly. In fact, it’s probably the definitive Antonioni film – full of philosophical, metaphysical, and semiotic concerns. It was also a film that spent decades in limbo due to its star, Jack Nicholson, owning the rights and keeping it tight. For a highly complex text, it’s also plain silly and humourless, but that doesn’t stop it being one of the highpoints of film modernism. You’ll probably need to write a PhD on it to fully unpack it.

A roundup/recap of the current best and rest in film and DVD. In this installment: Street Kings, I’m Not There (Film); Mandela: The Living Legend, We’re Here to Help, Death at a Funeral, Barking Dogs Never Bite (DVD).

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: deserted youth.

ANTONIONI infuriates the hell out of me. There are some utterly amazing moments in his films – his use of space and architecture is simply remarkable, his visual sense makes me a magpie to his shiny images, and some of his artistic conceits appeal to the cynical prankster in me (mainly his endings, and his playing with narrative expectations). I also like some of his ideas, to be fair. However, he’s also as dated as rotten fruit, and he’s also the type of director whose films you can reduce down to three shots and a final scene – this’ll probably tell you everything you’ll need to know in the film.

Reviewed by Brannavan Gnanalingam

TODD HAYNES seems to be in a constant quest to not be pinned down to a particular style. He can move from the icily brilliant Safe, to the overheated Sirkian melodrama (the masterpiece Far From Heaven) with absolute ease. However, I’m Not There is quite something, the ultimate post-modern exercise chock-full of pastiche, myths, parodies. The film is a parade of chameleon identities, of musical and visual samples, a freewheelin’ farrago through time and space. The film works because of the sheer chutzpah of Haynes’ vision, even if it’s a vision that will infuriate many Dylan fans and non-fans alike.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: German devastation.

THE REAL-LIFE story of Anneliese Michel has inspired people from Hollywood’s The Exorcism of Emily Rose to Public Image Ltd., but Hans-Christian Schmid’s take on the events is austere and ultimately, extremely unnerving. The ghost of Fassbinder has haunted the German fiction films of the Film Society this year, and Requiem is no different – the drab surroundings, the intensity of the mise-en-scène, the ruthless view of institutions and bourgeois sensibilities were some of the great German director’s key concerns. Admittedly Requiem is much more sympathetic to its characters than Fassbinder was to his, but the film succeeds by showing the ‘extraordinary’ events through a gruelling realism. This isn’t a horror film, but a descent into madness. Of course, this approach wouldn’t have worked nearly so well without the astonishing acting performance of Sandra Hüller as the afflicted girl.

GAUTAMAN BHASKARAN previews the 61st Festival de Cannes, beginning this week.

IN A WAY, Cannes has managed to pull a rabbit out of the hat, and the selection of films is as good as it was in 2002. That year, we saw City of God, About Schmidt and The Pianist, and the edition that will open May 14 has some of modern cinema’s best helmers, such Clint Eastwood, Steven Spielberg, Woody Allen and Atom Egoyan.

At the Human Rights Film Festival, the trials of Ethiopian women who give birth. By BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.

CHILDBIRTH sounds painful enough, without having to worry about giving birth without any medical or institutional help. That’s precisely what happens to millions of women around the world, and the documentary A Walk to Beautiful looks at a particular consequence of this lack of care. Mary Olive Smith’s documentary examines the medical condition of fistula, which leaves many women in the world incontinent, leaking urine and faeces uncontrollably. The resulting societal discomfort at these women’s conditions leads to them being ostracised. And the sad thing is, it’s not too hard to fix, but countless women are forced to endure the discomfort and the shame.

Out of India, GAUTAMAN BHASKARAN considers the current Indian and Bollywood Cinema.

THE CANNES International Film Festival is undoubtedly the Queen of it all. Anybody who is somebody in the world of cinema loves to be there. To unspool on May 14, the Festival has had no Indian movie in Competition since 1994, the year Malayalam director Shaji N. Karun’s Swaham (My Own) was included. What is worse, there has been no Indian entry in A Certain Regard since Murali Nair’s Arimpara (The Mole) screened in 2003.

At the Human Rights Film Festival, Mexico’s objects of labour. By HELEN SIMS.

Maquilapolis refers to the huge industrial district in Tijuana, just past the border between Mexico and the USA. The factories of large, mostly US, corporations dominate the landscape. They attract internal migrants from all over Mexico seeing work. They function on the basis of mass production by cheap labour and substantial tax breaks granted by the government. Under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) raw products come into Mexico, are turned into items like televisions and pantyhose and then the finished items are sent back for distribution in the US. Although this system results in jobs for Mexicans, the “maquiladoras” who work in these factories, they see more detriment than benefit to themselves as a result of the workings of free trade.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: girls on film.

THE TIMING of screening this film probably couldn’t have better. In a week when the world’s media got in a tempest over fifteen-year-old Miley Cyrus’ photo shoot for Vanity Fair because she had the temerity to show her bare back (suggesting she wasn’t wearing a bra). The media got into a lather over the fact that Annie Liebowitz decided to photograph a sexualised fifteen year, drawing in puritanical and art-for-art’s-sake arguments from both sides. If Bettina Blümner’s documentary on three fifteen-year-olds, Pool of Princesses, is anything to go by, the media’s response to Cyrus is far too simplistic and superficial (not to mention sexist). Blümner captures that liminal space between childhood and adulthood in the documentary, the time when people are all too grown-up and self-aware, but still all too naïve and innocent.

At the Human Rights Film Festival, colonialism still rules. By BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.

LAST DECEMBER, I ended up in, of all the places in the world, Western Sahara. Its landscape is a remarkable visage, the ocean creeping up to a desert so vast that a whisper and a shout would be the same thing. But even here, the torrid, cruel landscape provoked such strong feelings of belonging for its inhabitants, that I couldn’t help but share the joy that the wonderful Sahrawis I was travelling with felt about their earth. And they told me about the tragedy unfolding in the impassive wilderness, of a people dispossessed since colonial times, and forgotten by the Western world. It is within this backdrop that Fecci and Bloeman’s documentary, Western Sahara: Africa’s Last Colony is made.