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.

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.

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.

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.