Colin MacCabe Movies

This Japanese documentary represents director Nagisa Oshima's entry in the British Film Institute commissioned series, "Century of Cinema," designed to be a collection of the personal opinions of renowned international filmmakers concerning the cinema of their native countries. It is entirely comprised of B&W stills and short film clips. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

In 1994, the British Film Institute commissioned a set of films to mark the centenary of the movies. They would trace the history of several national cinemas, and the BFI's choice for interpreting the history of American film fell to director Martin Scorsese, a longtime champion of film history and preservation. Scorsese's approach to his subject is director-centered, as he examines the tension inherent in the struggle of an artist wishing to make a personal statement against the collaborative nature of films and the commercial pressures of the Hollywood moviemaking factory. Segments of this series are devoted to the director as storyteller (examining narrative devices in the Western, gangster film, and musical), illusionist (technical tricks), smuggler (imbedding personal messages), and iconoclast (bucking the system to make films his own way). The series is replete with telling clips, not just snippets or shots, but entire scenes which illustrate Scorsese and co-director Michael Henry Wilson's points. Other filmmakers, including John Ford, Francis Ford Coppola, Billy Wilder, and Orson Welles, are seen in archival footage or interviews created for the series, offering their own take on the art of filmmaking. Scorsese doesn't discriminate between filmmakers with glossy reputations and those who always worked on the fringe of public awareness. If anything, he goes out of his way to champion mavericks like Samuel Fuller whose "visceral cinema" never enjoyed box-office success or awards. Personal Journey was first shown on British TV, released in limited fashion to theaters in the United States, and shown here on TV as well. A tie-in book was published in 1997 by Miramax Books; it contains the entire script for the series, excellent black-and-white stills, and dialogue from some of the clips. ~ Tom Wiener, All Movie Guide

This entry in the British Film Institute-sponsored international centenary celebration of cinema -- in which noted directors make a film that exemplifies their country or region's cinematic history -- represents continental Africa. Unlike many other series filmmakers, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, a native of the Cameroons, chose not to make a creative documentary, but rather a satirical narrative debate between the characters Cinema and Cineaste about the movie preferences of African audiences. Do viewers prefer to see serious African art films (the kind that populate international festivals) or American action features? ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Writer/director Derek Jarman injects his patented iconoclasm in this biography of Renaissance artist Michelangelo Merisa da Caravaggio. Nigel Terry plays the title role, whom (according to Jarman) essentially told his own life story in his paintings. Caravaggio travelled among thieves and prostitutes, many of whom were his models. He once killed a man, kept a deaf/mute child as a virtual slave, and squandered every penny he ever made. That we should care anything about so miserable and obscure a personality is a tribute to Jarman's filmmaking savvy--and the number of elements from his own well-publicized life that he injects into the film. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

This documentary is New Zealand expatriate actor and filmmaker Sam Neill's moody entry in the British Film Institute commissioned series, "Century of Cinema," designed to be a collection of the personal opinions of renowned international filmmakers concerning the cinema of their native countries. The film is highly charged with Neill's conflicting emotions about his country, which according to his film, still suffers greatly, cinematically and culturally, from an identity crisis. Through film clips, Neill analyzes not only the earliest years of Kiwi cinema, but also its heyday during the 1950s when it first gained international attention. He also presents a rather dark analysis of the films of contemporary New Zealand. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Internationally renowned French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard offers this documentary for his entry in the British Film Institute commissioned series, "Century of Cinema," designed to be a collection of the personal opinions of renowned international filmmakers concerning the cinema of their native countries. Godard spends much of his documentary questioning the validity of the centennial celebration as can be seen, even in the title of the film which patently avoids the number "100." Godard begins with having his old friend, the actor Michel Piccoli, coming to visit the Swiss lakeside hotel where the director is staying. Piccoli is the representative of the French national centennial committee and is not prepared for the rigorous intellectual interrogation Godard has in store for him. The questions are hard to answer and are designed to point out Godard's feeling that the timing of the celebration is off, and that the French filmmakers, who invented cinema, have become complacent in allowing American films to dominate the minds of international audiences so that the average French citizen will know the names of Madonna and Arnold Schwarzenegger, but will know nothing of Annabella, Dita Parlo, or Jacques Becker. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Set in 1940s England, Distant Voices/Still Lives is a compassionate look at a radically dysfunctional family. The son and his mother must endure the casual and overt cruelties of the bull-necked father. The ongoing abuse takes its toll in the form of failed marriages and misguided attempts at seeking security outside the family unit. As was the case with his earlier short subject trilogy (The Children, Madonna and Child, Death and Transfiguration), director Terence Davies based much of the material on his own life, combining rheumy-eyed cynicism with soft-edged nostalgia (the musical track, drawn from popular wartime songs, is particularly evocative). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Adlyn (Dona Croll) is a woman preacher married to the pastor of a large church for Caribbean blacks living in Britain. She has lived for years with a guilty secret: her son's real father is not the man she's married to. When the boy's real father (who has been living in the U.S.) shows up for the funeral of a church elder, he wants to see his son. Now she has to decide how to handle revealing the truth to her boy, and what she will say to the members of her congregation. This film is notable in that it is made by members of the British Caribbean immigrant minority, and is about their lives in Britain. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

Melancholia is a British suspenser, filmed and financed in Germany. Jeroen Krabbe plays a German art critic who in more turbulent times had been a radical activist. Krabbe's past collides with his present when a London political figure is marked for assassination. With only the slightest tinge of conscience, Krabbe agrees to pull off the killing. It is always a pleasure to see leading lady Susannah York, even in the morally ambivalent circumstances of Melancholia. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The line between story and reality is blurred in this arch drama. While waiting for a plane at an airport on an island in the Scottish Outer Hebrides, a group of would-be passengers are entertained by a stranger's long tale of a romance in Venice between a secretary and a singing Italian peasant, illustrated by his on-the-spot screening of his black and white film about that romance. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

In the late '60s, the tone of American horror films began to shift in the wake of the startling success of George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead -- horror films became gorier, bleaker, and began to subtly reflect the political and social upheaval gripping the country. Through the '70s and '80s, films like Last House on the Left, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Halloween held a distorted mirror up to American culture, reflecting its fear and chaos in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate. The American Nightmare is a documentary that looks at the transgressive horror films of the '60s and '70s and the people who made them. Directors Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper, and David Cronenberg, special effects man Tom Savini, and film critics Tom Gunning and Adam Lowenstein are among those interviewed by director Adam Simon. The American Nightmare was produced for the premium cable outlet The Independent Film Channel. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Terence Davies' blissful, evocative and non-narrative follow-up to his Distant Voices, Still Lives follows a few months in the life of 12-year-old Bud (Leigh McCormack), in impressionistic snatches of his everyday existence growing up in the Liverpool of 1956. Bud's world is influenced by his mother (Marjorie Yates), his older sister Helen (Ayse Owens), and his older brothers John (Nicholas Lamont) and Kevin (Anthony Watson). Bud is a lonely and quiet child whose moments of solace occur when he sits in rapture at the local cinema, watching towering and iconic figures on the movie screen. The movies give Bud the strength to get through another day as he deals with his oppressive school environment and his burgeoning homosexuality. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide