Sight & Sound. March 09.

By David Hudson on 02/23/2009

A Stanley Kubrick season opens at BFI Southbank on Saturday and runs through March 25, occasioning a rare online sampling of Sight & Sound's cover package.

"Few Kubrick films have been well, or even usefully reviewed on their original release (Philip Strick's notice of '2001' in Sight & Sound is an honourable exception) because they need a couple of viewings to percolate," writes Kim Newman. "Coming after the controversial, futurist 'A Clockwork Orange,' which has many similarities in its plot arc with 'Barry Lyndon,' the 'new Kubrick' seemed tame in its retreat to history, to proper buttons on uniforms, to beautiful still lives and a respectable, little-read classic source. It remains the least-seen of his major works, but its stock is rising - and it may yet come to be classed as the most rewarding of Kubrick's films. Scorsese has called it: 'one of the most emotional films I have ever seen.'"

Brian Dillon talks with Jane and Louise Wilson, whose "Unfolding the Aryan Papers," on view at the BFI Southbank Gallery through April 26, commissioned by Animate Projects as a response to the Stanley Kubrick Archive. It focuses "on material relating to 'Aryan Papers,' Kubrick's unmade film of Louis Begley's 1991 novel 'Wartime Lies,' the story of a young Jewish woman, Tania, and her little nephew, who pass themselves off as Catholics in Nazi-occupied Poland."

Editor Nick James on the four "Red Riding" novels: "Don't think kitchen-sink, neorealism or even poetic realism. David Peace's world is a much darker place, a circle of hell comparable to that of James Ellroy or the Gaspar Noé of 'Irréversible.'... And the three films screenwriter Tony Grisoni and Revolution Films have fashioned from the quartet are each, in their different ways, as startling - visceral, fragmentary, impressionist-noir responses way beyond what we're used to from British crime cinema." Saturday sees a special all-day screening of all three at BFI Southbank.

"Leave it to Criterion to manufacture an absorbing two-disc set from a couple of lesser auteur films based on the same creaky bestseller and documentation addressing some of the principal director's other, better movies." Tim Lucas on "Magnificent Obsession."

Tom Tykwer's "The International" is "one of the most entertaining espionage dramas in an age," argues Samuel Wigley.

"'Gran Torino' is a fascinating if flawed revisiting of the themes and persona of Eastwood's urban crime movies of the 1970s," writes Kate Stables. "['Dirty' Harry] Callahan's aggressive inviolability, that terse disdain for the politically correct, and his obsession with getting the job done, all resurface here, their alpha-male resonance laid over elements that Eastwood has explored throughout his long body of work: questions of race, masculinity, and the uses and abuses of violence."

"A departure from his recent, claustrophobically intimate dramas - 'Uzak' and the marital break-up story 'Climates' - Nuri Bilge Ceylan's 'Three Monkeys' is the latest European art-cinema variation on the film noir tradition, in the lineage that runs from Visconti's 'Ossessione' (1943) to Béla Tarr's 'The Man from London' (2007)." Jonathan Romney: "The central triangle of motivations - father's weakness, mother's erotic folly, son's vengeful anger - quietly reaches a pitch of intensity closer to classical tragedy than to classic noir."