Cinema

I shall never forget my first encounter with Abel Gance’s Napoleon. I saw it under the most unpromising circumstances — fragments of the great original, shown on a home projector, 25 years after its original release. Yet those fragments changed my life. I was 15, still at school in Hampstead, and already obsessed by the cinema. My parents had given me a projector for my 11th birthday. Since the only films available to me were silent films, I found myself immersed in the rarefied atmosphere of a forgotten art. As home movies were being abandoned in favour of television, I found a surprising number in London’s junk shops. Among the

As a documentary-maker, Werner Herzog is a master of tone. His widely parodied voiceovers — breathy, raspy, ominous — are cunningly ambivalent. The interviews he conducts are seldom less than strange, often shocking, and the pacing and tenor of his films are subtly modulated. Never more so than here. Lo and Behold is divided into chapters. The first is a fairly conventional documentary about the beginnings of the internet. Herzog talks to the people in California who made the first computer-to-computer connection in 1969, asking them reasonable questions and generally making them seem like comfortable, all-round good guys. This is then subverted by the appearance of Ted Nelson, a cyber-pioneer

Walking along the Brighton seafront, I was struck by posters advertising endless tribute acts; among them Suspiciously Elvis, the Small Fakers and The Kinx. The Edinburgh Fringe is much the same. Shows this summer include Dirty Harry: The Ultimate Tribute to Blondie and Billie Holliday: Tribute to the Iconic Lady Day. Or how about Gary Bland’s Mr Romantic: A Tribute to Johnny Mathis — ‘an insight into Mathis’s career, and how Mathis’s music has been a big part of Gary’s life through love, heartache and laughter’. The theatre at Edinburgh, too, is full of remakes. Fancy Dan Choo-Park’s The Song of Beast (after Hamlet), where the Prince of Denmark is teleported to

Captain America: Civil War is the 897th instalment — or something like it — in the Marvel comic franchise. This time round, the superheroes take sides, with the marketing asking if you’re #TeamCap or #TeamIronMan but not if you’re #TeamNeither, as would be most useful in my case. I swear this is the last Marvel film I will see as I never get anything out of them and whatever I say only sets the fans against me, which is not what you want at my age. I only attended this one because I had read the American critics (and some of the British ones who’d had a heads up). They

Oculus Rift. It sounds like something from a science fiction novel, and in many ways it is. Its release this week is the first stirring of a future stuffed with virtual reality headsets. The hope of its Californian engineers and their bitcoin backers is that we, the consumers, will soon use them to spend a whole lot of time outside of our lives. Strap the goggles to your face, position the headphones over your ears, press the on button, and — bzzzztp — you’re in a different world. The question is, who will create these worlds? The first prototype of the Oculus Rift was built five years ago by an

The big hitter this week is, of course, Batman v Superman, but if you want to learn something new, and meet characters that’ll stay with you long after, well, get yourself to Court. This is an Indian courtroom drama in which the wheels of justice grind so slowly you’ll want to scream, and now I can see I haven’t sold this well. ‘What do you fancy seeing at the cinema, dear? A courtroom drama in which the wheels of justice grind so slowly you’ll want to scream? Shall I book, or will you?’ But Court’s lassitude is kind of its point. It is one of those film in which not

Les pêcheurs de perle Met Opera Live This is the first production at the Metropolitan of Bizet’s early opera for a century, and it isn’t hard to understand why. What a tawdry piece it is, the kind of thing that might have been written deliberately to get Edward Said’s goat. Musically it contains one gem, the unforgettable duet for baritone and tenor, unforgettable any time you’ve heard it for at least a week. Bizet obviously knew when he was onto a good thing, for he recalls the tune countless times in the course of the opera. It has no motivic significance, but since he seems unable, in this opera, to

English has all sorts of emotive metaphors for how we feel about the ground. We’re floored. Or well grounded. Or earthbound. Life’s a minefield, so watch where you step. Stay on your toes. One moment we’re walking on air, next brought down to earth. Which is not at all the same as being down-to-earth. We have a fractious, if necessary, relationship, then, with the floor. Dancers even more so. If you were watching the Bolshoi’s live cinema relay of Giselle on Sunday, you will have seen its hyper-exquisite prima ballerina Svetlana Zakharova come clattering down in a most unghostly fashion in Act 2. Giselle has floored many a ballerina —

It’s one thing to make the most boring film in cinema history — at least you can kid yourself at the outset that it might turn out differently. It’s quite another to lovingly recreate the same film half a century later, shot by eye-bleeding shot, but that’s exactly what I’ve been doing, I’m proud to say. I say shot by shot, but since Andy Warhol’s Empire consists of a single locked-off shot of the Empire State Building running to 8 hours 5 minutes in black-and-white yawn-o-vision, that’s not much to write home about. Nor is the rest of the movie, from almost any popcorn-munching perspective you can think of. With

With Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing you’d be minded to think that’s it, that’s the Indonesian genocide (1965–66) done, but now he’s returned with a second film that is equally stunning, equally riveting — in its horrifying way — and equally unforgettable. To have one such film in you, but two? I think it is now safe to conclude: there are good documentary makers and there are excellent documentary makers and then there is Joshua Oppenheimer, who is amazing. The Act of Killing showed Oppenheimer tracking down the ageing, unrepentant, positively gleeful members of the Indonesian civilian militia who, with the approval of the army and government, carried out

This season of live Met relays got off to a most impressive start, with an electrifying account of Verdi’s tenth opera and first really great, though uneven piece, Macbetto (as I think it should be called; that’s what the central figure is called throughout). Fabio Luisi showed that he is far more at home conducting Verdi than Wagner — though his Bruckner performances are also magnificent. What made this the most stirring performance of Macbetto that I have seen was the strength of Željko Lucic’s performance in the title role. It is almost a cliché that the most interesting figure in the opera is ‘Lady’, as Verdi called her, but

So it turns out the revolution will be televised after all. ‘Brand’, a full length documentary about the comedian turned political activist Russell Brand, is heading our way next year. The multi-millionaire comedian—who is dating a scion of the Goldsmith family—used a recent appearance on Newsnight to call for the overthrow of the state, claiming ‘profit is a filthy word’. It sounds like we are in for a treat: ‘This feature documentary film promises to follow his spiritual and biographical journey from comedian turned film star, and husband of pop star, to his present incarnation, following his realisation that he had, in Russell’s own words, “embraced the superficial and doped