Mozjoukine

We see so little Chinese animation and that often gets confused with Japanese Manga - in revenge for days past when Samurai film like Tomu Uchida's Lightning Swords of Death would get passed off as another Kung Fu Klassic? The excellent Art College 1994 was a total surprise, so the arrival Zhigang Yan's Da Yu / The Storm raises hopes. This one is not a heavily rotoscoped modern piece like that but a magic and mythology adventure that immediately invites comparison with a lot of the Japanese items. To add a bit more interest, director Zhigang made 2017's Dahufa, the first Chinese animated film to be self censored PG 13.

What turns up is at first an anti-climax. The manga material we see is generally faster paced, more elaborate and easier to follow. This one kicks off with painted title backgrounds which, in the manner of Chinese live action costume films, gives us a bogus historical sketch of the background. I didn't retain enough to be able to follow the ensuing action.

What is discernable is a kind of Moses fable, where peasant Daguzi retrieves Mantou, a baby found in a floating cradle, and raises it as his own child. We pick up where the kid is in a wooden helmet minus one horn which provides a convenient perch for the magic flying puff ball that accompanies him. Various picturesque factions (umbrella men, poisonous jellieel blobs, insect masked soldiers and pointy hat musketeers) are in combat. Chinese elements are discernable. There's a horse-riding girl commander who is very King Hu but the action is dominated by the big black boat which looks like a WW2 Submarine but turns out to be the transport of a spooky Chinese Opera Company, carried about on the legs of a giant mechanical spider.

The peasant falls victim of the blobs or is it the umbrella men and while the factions fight each other, the kid tries to rescue him. The cartoon figures are often familiar and the animation is less elaborate than a lot of what we see but this one does have its proper share of striking concepts and occasionally the simplified drawing catches attention - the storm as static grey clouds which flash with lightning or Mantou trying to retain his protector by standing on his shadow while he is consumed by paint dab black flames.

It left me with the impression that what we were seeing, with all its unresolved plot lines, was part one of a piece which might or might not be resolved with a further film. This one never really emerges from the shadow of Miyazaki (it's encouraging to see The Boy and the Heron is getting a long run here) whose characters are more clearly delineated and involving no matter how fantastic their activities might become. However, the imagery of The Storm is strong enough to carry the running time and leave us curious about the makers' other work and by extension the Chinese animation industry. It's another film that lifts a corner of the curtain between us and that nation's immense movie output.

Here's a surprise - a French silent made about five years into the period of maturity ushered in by The Birth if a Nation and said to be their first colour feature.

It's another piece in the Kismet, Hassan, Arabian Nights tradition with loads of sex & sadism mixed in with the juvenilia. This one is clearly a prototype of the Korda Thief of Baghdad - all seeing eye reveals the princess etc.

Basic plot has despot Sultan Vermoryal dispatch three agents to bring him back wonders. His lecherous dwarf entertainer Frankeur is suitably contemptuous, urging "the delicious death of strangulation," and the pair of twin sisters, rounded up to join the harem girls, face thirty lashes or beheading with the big sword if the couriers don't show up within three days. The benign neighbouring sultan cherishes his beautiful daughter Dhélia, who is accompanied by her childhood guardian Marcel Lévesque Meanwhile wandering Prince Sylvio De Pedrelli, at one stage found chewing a rose, spots Dhélia and the pair are smitten, with her mounting his gift emerald in the medallion she carries.

An imposing young Gaston Modot no less is the most enterprising of the couriers, climbing walls and diving off cliffs into the ocean. He gets into a punch up with De Pedrelli, who is mustering support among the bazar idlers and the prince is stabbed in the encounter. However his rescuing the dwarf creates an ally.

Back at the palace, while the headsman is preparing, the couriers return. The giant diamond offer by the first is dismissed - off with his head. The second has brought back an all-seeing glass (one foot telescope) and is excused but Gaston is on top of the game using the glass to show Princess Dhélia to Sultan Vermoryal, who sets about carrying her off, leaving her grief stricken dad to wander the land.

Her royal admirer however determines to rescue the glamorous prisoner, recruiting (a sizeable party of) market men, who disperse goat herds and pour over the walls and foliage in their way, while hapless Princess Dhéhlia is threatened with drowning in the palace pond because she won't come across. Rescued at the last moment, she joins the prince and embraces the dwarf in gratitude. He is immediately transformed into a handsome youth, the witch's curse on him dissolved by the required kiss of a virgin.

The nice people end happily. Fade out on the royal couple, with the father's inverted reflection on the lake behind them.

The piece is sophisticated technically, cutting closer for dramatic effect, even if they sometimes do get direction of travel wrong. They have a unit shoot striking silhouette scenes of the call to prayers or the rider at night. The effective device of inserting key scenes (with Dhélia) on a limbo background did not continue in productions.

The stencil colour got some stick from contemporary reviewers for spoiling the work of the cameramen and it does show a distracting fringing on scenes like swimming in the blue water, where they gave up on outlining the character and he looks like he's in a perpetual oil slick. Similarly fading in on material, where the tinted areas already show, looks ugly but impressively they can manage to get two shades of red in the one image. Black skin is particularly effective in the process.

Ciminez in the South of France is rung in for the Mysterious East with Turkish writer Naplas homing in on the Villa Lisberg and it's boorish Moorish decors, fountains and Lion Statues.

The harem girls in their see-through shirts are a notably non-shapely lot, as people observe about the Broadway chorus girls of the same time. Despite such shifts in taste and her hair-loose do, plump Dhélia does manage to project voluptuous. Outside Modot, the rest of the cast is non memorable. His comeuppance seems to have been sheared out of the copy.

While it's crude, by comparisons with the Fairbanks and Korda films in the same tradition soon to come, this one manages to hold attention on it's own merit and is a fascinating piece of film history.

The Cinémathèque Fraçaise Henri site is running a particularly excellent restoration.

This black and white two reel "experimental" short emerged from the underground films movement of the nineteen sixties, which gave it some non theatrical airing at the time.

A silent opening takes us into shots of the stage production by the Living Theatre Company along with domestic scenes, all delivered in grainy, double exposed and occasionally inverted images.

Alessandra/ Sandra Cardini had a quite extensive career as actress and costume designer in Italian feature films.

IF THE CONSCIENCE REBELS was Undistinguished in the company of the frequently outrageous and inventive offerings that shared program space with it.

We should note that Feng Xiaogang's third Fei cheng wu rao / If you Are the One film has opened with a 2024 date on the credits.

While critics were documenting the persistence of Zhang Yimou and his Gong Li cycle, Feng Xiaogang wowed his home ground viewers with a succession of productions that impressed both his intended audience and the small number foreign enthusiasts who discovered him. We heard about a Theme Park with rides based on his hits. He made the first Chinese IMAX film.

Feng was one of the filmmakers whose career managed to run level with the home video cycle. Enormous numbers particularly of DVDs were pressed to meet the demand of the audience which poured into his films. Sure enough quantities of these made it to Australia where they ended up in the Asian food store sale bins going for chump change. He is probably the only major filmmaker on whom I managed to find every title from his 2004 Tian xia wu zei / A World Without Thieves onwards.

The films that pulled me up short were the first two enormously popular If You Are the Ones. These were movies in which it was glorious to be rich. You Ge, the leading man, who also appears as the star of the work of other major Chinese filmmakers, including Zang Yimou, Ann Hui and Chen Kaige, is not a conventionally handsome man, something he emphasizes by appearing with his head shaved and wearing wire rimmed glasses. We first see his character in formal clothes, falling down drunk at a rich person reception. He's the opposite pole to the conventional idealised Maoist hero and his exploits confirm that - speed dating, a luxury cruise, a Catholic Church confession, attending a mob funeral and enjoying the whole mechanism of Conspicuous Consumption. The audience gasp seeing his luxury pool deck at night. No shonky CommieColour here either - full spectrum wide screen lab work.

The sequel makes this point even more firmly, continuing the central relationship - romance would be putting it too strong - with glamorous air hostess Shu Qi and rushing to the funeral of his magnate friend who proves to still be alive but wanting to share the ceremony with friends before his fatal ailment strikes.

Maybe that one has a certain stiffness showing the age difference central couple but it is even more of a show stopper as a consideration of the China of it's day. Much pondering on the place of the rich. ("we take their money and humiliate them") with the industrialist pleased that his pre-teen daughter is reading Marx with approval. "Better a Communist that a miser." Exactly what message we are meant to take away from it all is hard to tell.

There are constant back references to the first two films in the new production - another visit to the Four Sisters bar run by the sixty year olds, whose photo as glamorous juveniles stands in the foyer, the recap of the rich man's sombre final scene, another appearance by his daughter and by the gay candidate who joined Ge's speed date line, saying there wasn't any specific prohibition against him. The film's unspoken subject is the passage of time.

Particularly interesting is the fact that Feng puts up the future as what we see in the Barbie movie, of which we can consider this the first of a line of rip-offs headed towards us. The pastel shades and fringe science fiction details signal this. Add in an epilogue where the lead duo appear as themselves (think Stanley Kwan's Centre Stage) discussing the way their world has changed since the first movie. Pirandello in Chinese.

As promised in the earlier films, the lead characters marry in 2030, but part when she joins the international rubbish clearing group. The ecology theme is underlined with shots of driving the highway through a spectacular wind farm. The new movie however homes in on A. I., with scientist Wei Fan having perfected the making of simulated humans and providing Ge with a duplicate of Shu to meet (most of) his companion needs in that spectacular Hainan Province mountainside home we remember from the last movie, now reminding us of Shi with a wall of the ten years of post cards she has sent

Ah, but there's more - think Hoffman, Lubitsch and Patricia Roc in Bernard Knowles 1949 The Perfect Woman. A comparison between the two films is a good indicator of growing sophistication in film making. One of the most deft touches is Feng managing to put the big surprise across to the audience just before the on-screen characters catch on. The still so attractive Shu Qi differentiates her original and fake selves impeccably. The split screen effects work and the performers' participation can't be faulted.

Apparently, If You Are the One 3 has not had the anticipated block buster success of its predecessors, which is to be regretted.

Feng Xiaogang has been a film maker in eclipse since the uneasy reception to his I Am Not Madam Bovary - with its depiction of petty corruption - one of the things the regime is supposed to be hammering. He's done a soppy New Zealand romance, TV serieses, his lead performance in Mr. Six and a new Cell Phone movie. This is hardly an extension of the line of his former exceptional work - compare Madam Bovary, Aftershock. Assembly and Youth. If You Are the One 3 should have been be a step in the right direction. Not a film for everyone but one for the serious audience to prioritize.

This Sabatini adaptation is set in 1651 Merrie England, with Puritans disrupting May Pole Dancers.

Roistering Norwood (Elvey's Sherlock Holmes) and his Royalist buddy recount his back story, where the evil brothers killed his family and took over his ancestral home. "Had my son lived, men would have no cause to call me The Tavern Knight."

We get the well staged battle, which comes with a reasonable supply of foot soldiers and cavalry but is made less imposing by lack of camera movement.

After this, Norwood takes a newcomer under his protection and, in the older man's debt, the youth is bound by oath to act as he directs, no matter if it goes against anything he holds dear - hmm!

Action shifts to Castle Marleigh, Norwood's one time family manor, now controlled by the murderous brothers. Norwood finds himself doing Cyrano & Roxanne with the young man's intended, who is given to chasing butterflies. Soon heavy steel weapons are being handled like the characters mean real harm.

We get a chase with a spectacular - possibly unintended - horse fall along with with some attempts as stylish handling, like the reduced frame for the flash back and iris intro scenes. A telling close-up of the door knock compares with the pistol silhouette in Elvey's Bleak House.

For all it's limitations, archaic handling and content, this one still moves along effectively enough to hold attention.

Companion to Saslavsky's Ceniza al viento, this handsomely mounted weepy is a curiosity, with John Alton's claimed presence most likely in the abrupt eruption into atmospherics of the finale, complete with hat wearing gangsters throwing their shadows and filling the frame with menacing close up groupings.

The nicely sparse iron cage women's pokey doors open (get it!) to release Libertad gone grey. Flash back takes us to her young as an musical theatre entertainer ("Frou Frou" number on stage) and her affair with Irusta/Raul the artist from the rich family.

The wedding dolls in the street suggest a happy pairing and we get the nice "Pianito de juguete" number performed with toy instruments. She gives birth to a baby boy. Problems with money and the hostile family ensue.

After a debtor montage, Libertad goes back on the boards where the husband shows up and a shooting accident has her on the run. The child ends in the hands of the nun in the white habit.

Back in the present, Libertad is shunted off to the Porte de Servicia of the wealthy household where the child has grown. Further drama with the gangster element and tragic outcome.

The handling is sophisticated, with costumes, settings and fluid dimensional compositions showing accomplished film form. Libertad's numbers are agreeable enough and she is attractively filmed. The support make little impression and the tear drenched plot, taken seriously by all, drains away any respect the craft aspects may earn.

The most interesting aspect is finding John Alton working in the noir style yet to establish itself in Hollywood.

I'm a survivor of the time when these detective series episodes offered the most reliable nights at the movies, familiar characters in familiar plot formulas.

Looking at THE FALON'S ALIBI, last but one of Tom Conway's exploits as the Michael Arlen character and remake of an earlier entry, is a not altogether welcome reminder of how routine the pattern was.

Super urbane Falcon Conway here cancels his flight booking to come to the aid of blonded Maria/Paula Corday, who slips him the word "Help" on a news paper cutting. Hired companion to irritating dowager Esther Howard, Corday's afraid of being implicated in the theft of her employer's diamonds after a previous robbery and her own assessment that revealed the gems as fake. Recall the Guy De Maupassant plot. Insurance rep. Emory Parnell hovers, to Conway's scorn.

The action moves from the race track to a plush down town Barbary Towers hotel, complete with out doors pool, night club live show, upper-floor Broadcast studio and evil-doers on the fire escape at night. Occasionally shirtless, Tom the Falcon figures it out by having a robbery conspirator rush back to his room, when a fire is set there and Tom confronting the local fence. Complications from slinky singer Jane Greer two timing twitchy husband Elisha Cook jnr. With her band leader. Minimal noir trimmings include location shots of traffic at night and killers taking shots at our hero.

Very post WW2, Leo McCarey's director brother busily fills the screen with wide lapel suits, cut away cars, unfunny comics & glamorous women, who Tim Holt would get to squire through his adventures. (Myrna Dell particularly registers in her walk on) This one is not short on production value, as with the lengthy track that reveals Greer doing her number in the lavish ball room. Twitchy K. G. R. Deejay Cook jnr. Gives the only memorable performance.

Chen Zho's new The Invisible Guest/Man tian guo hai has had a success in its Chinese home market. Well, we know that, while failure is an orphan, success has many parents. Turns out that this one is the offspring of Oriol Paulo's 2016 Contratiempo, the biggest-earning Spanish film yet to play in China, which has been transcribed here with a sex change but still retaining its slick production values. While it was not all that impressive in the Hispanic original, Contratiempo has also subsequently been re-birthed in South Korea as Confession, Il Testimone Invisibile in Italy and as the Indian Badla, along with Evaru, a Telugu variation.

If you want to go back further into the lineage you can say giallo thrillers and yes (well everyone has) Hitchcock and Dial M. For Murder, with not a little of the nastiness of Agatha Christie.

We kick off with an obviously digital wide shot of a resort hotel in the jungle. The sub-titles version is not location specific but we get a couple of monkeys and the police all speak English while the cast perform in Mandarin.

The narrative keeps on twisting back and forward as sleazy cop (current heart throb) Greg Han Hsu extorts glamorous Janine Chung-Ning Chan, philanthropist new wife of the heir to an industrial empire, over the locked room murder of her former lover, with whose blood covered body she was found in a hotel suite. The price goes up as he dumps more damning documentary evidence on the table and she shifts ground in describing the back story of the guilty couple's responsibility in the killing of a local businessman, with whom they had had a traffic accident on the way to their illicit rendez vous. Now a body is missing and Kara Wai, the man's grieving widow craves revenge. Lies accumulate and are exposed. Flash backs reveal lots of visceral stuff with the characters soaked in rain, mud and blood.

The Invisible Guest's texture is polished, with gleaming luxury contrasted with the meager circumstances of the working class characters, and there are flourishes like the exaggerated sound effects as material is produced or the jagged montages of incidents recalled. Han Hsu walks in front of the lettering of the main title on his way to the appointment. The count down to the release of incriminating proof is shown at intervals, as a screen display, but they forget about that. This recalls the tech-savvy detail that characterised the Spanish film.

Director Chen Zhuo was in the cast of Feng Xiaogang's 2007 Ji jie hao/ Assembly. The leads may prove useful juveniles. The Witness for the Prosecution twist did take me in. Here they are stuck with being glamorous. Despite its showy qualities, the film is a discouraging glimpse of what the Chinese industry considers popular entertainment.

JOSEFINA arrives as New Spanish cinema, a first feature from the director-writer team of prize winning shorts.

Roberto Álamo (QUE DIOS NOS PERDONE) appears as a put upon middle-aged Madrid prison guard who has to take the bus to work, when the aging car he's trying to nurse through another ten years breaks down on him. There he helps Almodovar lead Emma Suárez, visiting mother of an inmate, find her lost cell 'phone. This leaves him with her number and the pair make nervous contact.

After the pains they take to set this up convincingly, the casual way Álamo creates a fictitious daughter to justify his presence - a name from a wall graffiti, encountering a girl prisoner - is an odd change of pace.

The film wants us to feel the couple's pain and uses restraint, plausible detail (appliance repairs, the omelet delivered to the son with a slice missing) and uniformly excellent performances to do this.

The defeated leads, him alone in his dead parents' home, her caring for a paralysed husband and scraping a living doing clothing repairs, are not the standard popular movie leads, though we have been there before in the films of Mike Leigh and Tennessee Williams. Álamo's mother's porcelain ducks are uncomfortably close to a glass menagerie.

In the Dogma style, director Javier Marco has gone on record as wanting to avoid the artifices of editing and re-recorded sound and it's scenes like the sustained takes of the pair alone in the bus shelter which give the production its special quality. Apparently a parallel version with voice-over commentary to cover the long silences exists.

Hollywood's depiction of oil-rich Indians gets steadily more sinister, from the genial cameos in the silent De Mille Forbidden Paradise, through indigenous custodian Pedro Armendariz in the 1947 Tulsa, to the exploitations of Giant and the fifties Cimarron. Nothing there to compare with the grimness of the new Killers of the Flower Moon, a real downer this one.

Martin Scorsese, approaching the end of one of the movies' most impressive careers, takes what he does with a not inappropriate seriousness. It's about ninety minutes before we adjust to the dim color scheme and the initially genial Robert De Nero's plot which the audience is likely to know from the advance publicity. The montage of native American bodies, getting dumped in the mud, pretty much sets the tone, complete with open-air autopsy and grave robbing. There's the motif of sinister looking Europeans pouring from the rail line, becoming part of a menacing winning of the West. We get a mention of the 1921 Tulsa race riots, where blacks are the victims.

At three hours plus, Scorsese fields his two super star regulars at the head of a massive unit. We thought Jack Fisk (Phantom of the Paradise) was dead. Scenes like the striking opening downwards shot of the tree branch roofed lodge are set against the severe Masonic meeting room. It comes as a surprise to find cameraman Rodrigo Prieto (Barbie) representing a later generation.

The Eric Roth and David Grann plot follows the parallel stories of Leonardo di Caprio back from the WW1 trenches, and the Osage Nation, who looked like having the last laugh when the sparse land, they'd been re-settled to, proved to be gushing Texas Tea. They become the richest nation per capita on earth - scene of gleaming black, oil-splattered celebration, which foreshadows the climaxing dance figures outlined in the shimmer of fire.

Attention settles on Bob's nephew De Caprio running a hire car service in the muddy street frontier city, that would have been in character with the De Mille film. Lots of scene-setting, like the main street vintage car race or the vision which has the red-painted spirit warrior come for mother Tantoo Cardinal. This brings Leo into contact with Lily Gladstone, daughter of one of the new rich Osage families, whose share of revenue is growing as her relatives die in mysterious circumstances. Despite her inexperience, Gladstone's authenticity comes through from the "handsome devil" scene they improvised. "Squaw Man", that's something I'd never call another man." The marriage, marginalised children, TB diagnosis and De Caprio's inept setting up De Niro's succession of murders by sub-human henchmen, bribed by a red Buick Roadster insurance scam, are contrasted with the tribal leaders seething with rage at the lack of a recognisable enemy they can fight.

By the time Gladstone gets up from her sickbed to join the tribal delegation to President Hoover, audience sympathies are inflamed and it takes some delicate handling to retain status for De Caprio. A Scorsese festival interview cites the Montgomery Clift character in The Heiress as his model. The game has changed. Time was only the enterprising or the privileged few got to see these. The buzz here is watching quiet-spoken proto F. B. I. Man Jesse Clemmons (Power of the Dog) matching genial De Nero as the grotesque plots unravel. This black comedy carries us into the re-staged True Life Radio Program finale, complete with actors striking up the sponsor's Lucky Strikes and announcer Sorsese having the last word.

One-off films, which give masters of their craft a chance to work on important subjects, are pretty rare now. We ought to value each one.

Hearts sink as we open with young Susanne Parrett whistling her pet kangaroo (that clearly resents the one occasion she has to pat it). WHEREVER SHE GOES combines the things that were wrong with the drab post-war English movies with the things that were wrong with naive Australian Cinema, what there was of it. We get a cast whose experience is largely in radio, lots of local colour, notably in the declining gold mining community of Kalgoorlie, and that cherished scenario where one of Australia's own achieves worldwide prominence.

The film is a fictionalised (we are told at the start) account of the childhood of then-famous concert pianist Eileen Joyce, conveniently giving us a local with some star value, a setting that is exotic to world audiences and a chance to lay on lots of classical music, which veteran Ernest Irving manages to use to underpin some of the location action quite effectively.

Young Suzanne Parrett shows a promise, that was sadly never realised, as the child of itinerant parents Muriet Steinbeck and Nigel Love. She encounters a swagman who is (of course) also an artist ("Swaggies are real people who live working about the country"). Overnight she masters the harmonica he gives her, starting her off on her musical ambitions where she (of course) shows exceptional talent. A shift to Kalgoorlie generates some bland drama. Mum Steinbeck has to live in a tent and cook with a kerosene Primus stove and Dad Lovell has to abandon his get rich schemes on a fellow no-hoper's mining leases and come on wearing a tie "I can work for a boss as well as the next man." Young Eileen/Susannne finds herself doing harmonica numbers and playing the battered piano in the boozer to get the sixpence the nun music teacher demands for lessons and buy scores from the snotty music store owner. This escalates to a campaign, where the scrubbed-up miners run a coins in the tin campaign to raise the expenses of the trip to the comic city audition, which (she of) course aces.

We are then treated to a montage of programs to grown Eileen's International and Australian concerts, climaxed by an uncharacteristically spectacular finale drawing back from her playing the packed Albert Hall's Steinway.

All this does finally gets to be quite endearing, coming closer to the Children's Film Fund BUSH CHRISTMAS than Co-producer Ealing's ponderous Colonial epics of the day, like EUREKA STOCKADE or THE OVERLANDERS. Director Michael Gordon is proficient rather than inspired, bringing up a light on Parrtett's face as she spots the piano, and the production only occasionally gets away from the expatriot crew - shot of the kids jiggling against a studio truck cabin to suggest driving, the pub verandah singer out of synch with his track. Leading local cameraman George Heath comes off best, making his filter effects emphasise the striking cloudscapes behind bush and mine scenics, though we remain aware of the use of lighting units.

Fat & forty Juliana Cuervos has seen her sisters married off to leave her still slogging away in her mother's bridal shop, where her needlecraft is a sustaining element. With only a three-legged street dog to lavish affection on, it seems life has passed her by but the fast talking fabric salesman shows up and it looks like a happy ending is in sight.

That's not this picture. Cast and production are more than adequate but the tear jerking plotline is not going to deliver any real validity.

We see very little from Venezuela that this has some curiosity value but it's hard to believe they don't have something more substantial than this in the line-up.

Thoroughly routine studio A feature, which only belatedly develops any traction as a winning Simone Simon & Don Ameche interact.

A labored plot has Collier as the pensioned-off owner of a fish cannery, now run by sons Young and Ameche, becoming involved with French cabaret star Josette/Birrell. Having just separated him from a hat check girl, they ship him out of town on a bogus business trip and Birrell follows, leaving Lahr's Silver Moon night club, where she was booked, without an attraction till (also incidentally French) wardrobe girl Simon, who sings in the local choir, is rung in as the absent star - would be elegant number where she lip-synchs the song about dropping petals in the diners' glasses. Under the predictable misunderstanding, Young attempts to romance Simone and Ameche becomes jealous and showers her with fur coats till it's all sorted out with a big production number.

Ameche is more at ease of the two brilliantined leading men and all Simon's charming is wasted. The recognisable comics labor long and unproductively with unfunny lines and undercranked pratfalls. Handling is mechanical with high key lighting, process backgrounds and unconvincing yacht models accommodating the slack foreground action. Some fun in spotting the celebrities to be - Robert Lowry, Chaney Jr.

Nothing remarkable in this poor example of the Hollywood production line, which Dwan took over at short notice.

Peruvian sitcoms are not something we get faced with every day so Margarita has curiosity value. Bright colours and loads of the pre-teen charms of Francisca Aronsson are the selling points but what we get the most of is sad sack Giovanni Ciccia, who is in every scene and practically every shot. The comedian needs better material to make any impression.

Ciccia is a freelance ad man (we don't get to see much of his work) on whom middle age is bearing down. His major compensation is inappropriately blonde and lively Maria Grazia Gamarra. On the day of his big presentation, ex-wife Vanessa Saba dumps their young daughter Aronsson on him, after a fight with the girl.

Our hero's narcoleptic chum César Ritter tries to help out and in desperation gran Yvonne Frayssinet is called in for a trip to the local Tattos franchise super market, where they adopt a stray dog that they detour to the vet and welcome into the household, over Ciccia's objections. The animal proves to have no comic potential. Meanwhile fetching neighbor Melania Urbina and Ciccia become an item, despite her inability to park in her allocated space and Ritter has an attack of the crazies because he gets woken up during one of his doze offs.

Of course, everything goes pear shaped and then resolves happily - shots of a family excursion to Paris. It's about as interesting as it sounds and limited by a lack of Peruvian locating material.

A good idea - maybe a couple, handled ham fistedly.

The opening traffic light routine is like the whole film, offering comic possibilities that never eventuate. Kross (BALLOON) is recruited into the secret police through whose ranks he rises and is planted as a spy to root out subversives among the malcontents squatting in a run down area. They are of course more appealing than the hero's colleagues and he finds himself involved with a couple of young women willing to get naked for him. Which one gets to be his wife of thirty years and what effect will the release of his coveted personal file have?

Another film (LE DOULEUR, DER PASFALSCHER) where the past has gone kaki.

Unclear narrative (the man with the model guillotine?) leaves the scene setting as the strongest element of this medium length narrative, the last of Epstein's silent shorts.

Starting with a tent show where the fakir reads cards and warns Ferté (La GLACE A TYROIS FACES), we get into the story of visiting his mother Perrot in rural Livilliers - stacking the hay, piglets. In the morning the gendarmes take him away arrested for the murder of the banker boss of his fiancée Dhélia (regular star of the films of Roudés).

Images of the fair with its blow up skirt side show attraction and night time lights, contrasts with the city traffic and parked bicycles, visible through the open bank door to make the piece a nice record of the time.

Generally well filmed, even with its group of out of focus close ups.

The copy on the Cinémathèque Française Henri site is sharp and runs at the right speed though it's captions are in French.

In 1989, the protestors outside The Revealers Bookstore & peep shows harass booth girl Caito Aase on her way in for a day performing for coin in the slot customers.

Manager Bishop Stevens still hasn't fixed the door. However this happens to be the day of the Apocalypse and Aase finds herself locked in the building with Shaina Schrooten, the protestor girl she exchanges insults with as she arrives, and menaced by yukky unclean (digital) spirits.

The two characters are given motivation. As she gets more covered in dirt and gore, Schrooten resents the humiliations being piled on her. "All my life I've lived as if he was watching." Their growing together is quite involving. Staging of the scary journey is passing convincing and till an ending which is a bit of a let down.

As exploitation fringe film making goes, this one shows quite a bit of skill. It's not hard to imagine those involved doing something more substantial.

Hopes of a tense crime piece drawing on a regional setting, on the model of MARSHLAND, are set up in the early stages of director Iñaki Sánchez' 2nd feature but elements like the Eco. Plot and remote, canal-rutted setting give way to familiar melodrama - the pill popping wife, dead child and swarthy, menacing locals who stand about while we wait for them to mutter "We don't like strangers here!"

Fresh from saving a wetland in Brazil, bearded agronomist Raúl Arévalo arrives at La Laguna Blanco where the water levels are dropping each year. Local matriarch Susi Sanchez tells him these are good people. (always a bad sign) We know the appealing dog, that we don't see enough of, is a goner and Arévalo's distrust of all those shot guns will prove justified.

Park Ranger Joaquín Climent, who is disturbingly tolerant of poachers, carries off the acting honors though spooky home help Susana Merino registers firmly enough to liven up the ending. The accomplished Roberto Alamo is wasted and Paz Vega, making the transition from glamorous to serious, just comes over as grating.

Drone shots of the terrain, driving the roads through its marshes and herons circling at dusk help but they'd be more effective if they were less murky.

THE MAN OF GOLD is said to be the one surviving Alex Korda Hungarian film. It was made at the end of the boom in local production caused by the country's isolation during hostilities and is notable more as an example of the work of those involved than an achievement.

Oscar Beregi, their leading actor, comes on in a curly wig which shifts when he clutches his brow and manages to exude some authority with clever bits of business like intimidating sword stick armed Jenõ Horváth while keeping his hands behind his back or covering Ica von Lenkeffy's eyes when his own guilt overwhelms him.

She would shortly be Emil Jannings' Desdemona. On hand is Lili Berky in excessive eye shadow. The cast also figure in the Michael Curtiz' Hungarian silents.

Plot has Captain Beregi aiding the escape of Pasha Gyula Szöreghy and his daughter Margit Makay across the Donau pursued by a canon firing Turkish Galley and villainous police spy Gábor Rajnay. The Pasha perishes when the boat sinks but Beregi manages to save his jewel box and deliver the girl to the family of Horvath & Mari K. Demjén. With the jewel box as incentive, they take her in but place her as a servant in the home, to the concern of their daughter Berky.

Beregi has intuited that the Pasha's real treasure is hidden in the star and sickle wheat sacks on the half sunken boat and, getting the rights to those, uses this wealth to become an influential officer.

He obtains the hand of Makay, though she is sought by Captain Gusztáv Vándory. However Beregi's affections are captured by island squatter family girl von Lenkeffy, who he protects from blackmailing now one eyed Rajnay, who will fall foul of the law and be condemned to the galleys.

All is not well in the Beregi home where he has taken in Berky and her mother who conspire to denounce him to Makay. However she remains loyal, despite the damning testimony of vengeful Ranjav.

All ends conveniently happily.

Though elaborately decorated, the film lacks the complex staging of the Cutiz films - one shot taken through an open door. It will appeal only to the curious.

The copy, which is claimed to be incomplete, is nicely restored with music and tinting and running at what appears to be the intended speed.

SKIN IN FLAMES is pretension at the movies run amok. You can tell what you're in for when we get the image of the naked black female Christ- figure earl on. The piece then develops through parallel (or are they) dialogues between celebrity photographer Jaenda and journalist for the emerging 3rd. World country's one surviving newspaper, Lidia Nené and pervert U. N. official Fernando Tejero and his black mistress Ella Kweku which for no particular reason end with them in the same space. The film is big on perverse detail.

The issue of photographers from wealthy countries exploiting their colonial subjects got a much better innings in movies around the 1983 mark - UNDER FIRE etc. In case we haven't got it, the shot of the naked Vietnamese girl running with napalm burns is included in the material projected on the characters half way through.

This one is nasty, exploitative and awkward - a bad combination.

English speaking writer-director Antoine Barraud comes on like a film buff, saying he started reworking KRAMER vs KRAMER but the film shifted to The CAT PEOPLE & VERTIGO. Closer to the mark is the forties Bette Davis A DOUBLE LIFE which was re-tooled for Dolores de Rio as LA OTRA and picked up again by Davis as DEAD RINGERS with the left over Kramer V. Kramer elements occasionally visible here.

The opening sets the tone with Virginie Efira center of attention in an up market store choosing which outfit to spend her mum's cash gift on - torn between the one the money will cover and a super chic fishnet number. She collapses and staggers off. It really takes more clues to place the Efira we then see navigating between two families, one with well off music world husband Bruno Salomone who squires her to Valérie Donzelli recitals with their two boys and one with rugged Quim Gutiérrez whose daughter calls her "Mummy" while he takes on the odd jobs she finds him.

The arrangement is bound to come ungummed and that's what happens with people she met as one character showing up at the other lot's parties, a traffic cop running her in for a fake I. D. and Virginie's mum Jacqueline Bisset (!) and dad François Rostain on a visit that confuses them and ends with them flying her back to Salomone. We knew it was going to end in tears.

This one is long, complex and demanding and Efira is center screen for most of it. The two leading men are shadowed and attention shifts to the kids, the parents and shady forger Nadav Lapid when they come on. The technical work is polished and we can see a lot of money on the screen.

A few years back Efira was endearing when she appeared with Benoît Poelvoorde in FAMILLE A LOUER and Le GRAND BAIN but now carrying big movies herself, she is stretched.

Engaging but finally soft centered account of screw-up orphan Adams, with a horror of old people confirmed by his run in with a mean shopping granny that gets him sentenced to Community service at the Maison de Mimosas retirement center, where he moves from antagonist to associate of the oldies exploited by a crooked manager.

Multi skilling Adams manages to engage but Depardieu takes over the piece's focus and without him it loses momentum. Mylène Demongeot who we remember as a teenager and as Steve Reeves' love interest!

Nice performances and OK look with the designer of Depardieu's CYRANO participating.

This routine fifties thriller is an anti-climax to the silent mountaineering adventures Luis Trenker fronted for Arnold Fank and films under his own, earlier direction though, dubbed and visibly aged, he is still able to carry Ferzetti a few yards on his shoulders and do the action star moves of the final shoot out.

Trenker and the feather in hat lot are crossing the mountains with packages of watches and drugs. Bogus tourist cop Nazzari and his lieutenant Ferzetti, who Trenker has brought down from a mountain injury, are under cover in the Dolomites trying to catch murderous cocaine smugglers.

Gabriele sparks well turned out blonde hotel maid Hold, who the local gropes unsuccessfully, while Amadeo visits the chalet of the motorist city woman, actually an agent of the bald, mustached nasty, given to polishing his cigarette case on his sleeve.

The leads go on a climb together which is the most interesting element of the film though pallid stuff without the ice axes, avalanches and spiked boots of the earlier films. Their half-hearted bonding, after a climbing accident, doesn't stop Nazarri using his secret short wave radio, hidden in the hay barn to call in the armed troopers while Mareschale Urzo rounds out the city duo. The pursuit on the mountains develops into a battle between the light machine guns of the forces and the mountaineers' shot guns and side arms with fatal consequences.

There is a bit of sunny alpine scenery with goats foregrounding the peaks, which is closer to HEIDI than DRAMA on the MATTERHORN. We also get a bit of studio mountain for no particular reason. The work is more like Nazzari's melodramas than anything we've seen from it's director and Amadeo is top billed and gets most screen time.

Production values are adequate, with a few attempts at atmosphere as when the mountain men set out at night through the searchlit trees where the (smoke bomb) mist is blowing. The leads register well enough but the support is poor.

Th e presence of members of Pietro Germi's team emphasise the similarity to his work of the day though this one is inferior to that also.

This one is an involving companion piece to Ladji Li's 2019 LES MISERABLES - immigrants struggle while the gendarmes hover round their mass housing. Plausibly eleven year old Maël Rouin Berrandou can't wait to quit school but his three brothers make dodgy role models and their comatose mother in the bedroom needs constant care.

The pressure is to become a pizza delivery boy but, while painting the corridor on a bogus educational leisure project at the school where he's still enrolled, Berrandou encounters Judith (CAMILLE REWINDS) Chemla's small singing class, recognising the Italian opera arias his late father used to play.

Between going look out for drug runs, beach soccer and getting roughed up by his family, our hero edges towards being an Arab Billy Elliot. The plausible surface, engaging characters and inconclusive ending all give this conviction. Despite the grim material it manages to be lively entertainment.

Skillful handling uses available light and real locations effectively giving the impression of a realistic texture.

This one starts as a rather labored re-working of "The Wizard of Oz", gets tired of that and switches to a Japanese WELCOME TO THE STICKS.

It opens with the winning Haru telling us she tells has the perfect life, great home in Tokyo, great boy friend Tomoya Nakamura and a great job in his company - and then she finds herself transferred to their theme park in provincial Kumamoto.

The first thing that happens there is that she and fellow new recruit Amane Okayama get involved in a bomb plot that turns out to be a prank. It ends with her using her martial arts training on the Starman lead of the live stage show to the delight of the audience. This goes with her finding herself assigned to menial work though she's got a degree.

Naturally the fellow workers, who she takes for local buffoons, become winning and her work is actually training in the best Shaolin Temple tradition, as she finds her project she thought supervisor Hidetoshi Nishijima (DRIVE MY CAR) had dismissed, has been commended. Together they master smiling, never running and keeping municipal vehicles off the lot along with collecting lost children and setting up light displays. She even comes through on a night time re-opening of the rides for a delayed bus full of cranky girls. "You made people happy. This is your job."

When she finds Nishijima is about to leave, she comes up with a world record hot air baloon release to send him off. However a suspicious, glasses wearing visitor dumps a pipe bomb in the office, which means Nishijima must take up the balloon to dispose of it - great shot of it passing Haru on the tower.

The bright colors, appealing players and the winningly presented Ozland/Greenland Theme Park background are suitably feel good but the film lacks the convincing connection with reality which would make it involve.