Reviews
Film round-up
Those wanting another dose of fantasy after Prince Caspian should head into The Mist (cert 15; 127 mins), a Stephen King story adapted by Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile). Its TV drama style does wonders for the actors' performances. Thomas Jane and his son are trapped in an isolated supermarket outside which lurks a terrible presence. The effects are to die for, but more terrifying are Jane's fellow trapped humans, egged on by the end times religious nut Marcia Gay Harden.
The other new film to seek out is Standard Operating Procedure (cert 15; 116 mins). The documentary maker Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line, The Fog Of War) uses his Interrotron camera to cross examine members of the military involved in the notorious photographs of humiliated Iraqi inmates in Abu Ghraib prison. He also uses technology to construct a timeline of the photographs they took. Brutal but meticulous, it's at once a cinematic masterwork and a newsworthy timebomb.
The serviceable French wartime espionage thriller Female Agents (cert 15; 116 mins) has Sophie Marceau as part of an Allied crack team under the wing of the Churchill's Special Operations Executive in Nazi-occupied France. Based on fact, it's good in parts if ludicrously contrived in others.
The heroine and various unfortunate male protagonists of the low budget US film Teeth (cert 18; 93 mins) grapple with her Vagina Dentata. The 'vagina with teeth' is allegedly a symbolic staple underpinning horror films involving maws (think: Jaws), but this dumps the metaphor in favour of something more literal.
The likeable and strangely compelling A Complete History Of My Sexual Failures (cert 18; 89 mins) is a record of the young documentary maker Chris Waitt asking former girlfriends why they dumped him. One, obsessed with legal niceties, will only talk to him via a computer sound system from behind a screen!
Finally, two DVD releases of note. The Bill Douglas Trilogy (1972-8, cert 15; 175 mins) is an extraordinary and impressive dramatic evocation of growing up in an austere Scottish mining town, made on a shoestring. The word 'trilogy' is bandied around all too easily by Hollywood these days, but this BFI-funded entry reminds us that it can mean something far more significant.
In Man With A Movie Camera (1929, cert U; 68 mins), the composer Michael Nyman provides a new score for the Russian director Dziga Vertov's silent classic about post-revolutionary urban life, and its machines and infrastructure.
Jeremy Clarke
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