Somehow both rugged and smooth, embodying American values yet often turning up his collar against them, Robert Redford – who died on 16 September, aged 89 – was one of the biggest movie stars of the post-war period, as well as a stalwart, transformative supporter of independent film.
In the summer of 2005, Robert Redford, who died this week, attended the Karlovy Vary Film Festival in the Czech Republic, to collect a life achievement award. And his appearance in front of the media coincided with a startling news story that was rippling around the world.
Westerns had long been popular with German cinema audiences, some of the most successful being early 1960s West German adaptations of novels by Karl May, a slippery late-19th writer whose books were hugely admired by Hitler. East Germany’s state-run studio DEFA responded by producing The Sons of Great Bear (Die Söhne der großen Bärin) in 1966, the first of East Germany’s "Indianerfilme".
That difficult second documentary – or if you will, “rockumentary” – seems to have been especially challenging for Spinal Tap, since it arrives no less than 41 years after its predecessor, This Is Spinal Tap. The latter has become renowned as a definitive artefact in rock’n’roll history, a smartly deadpan portrayal of a deeply cretinous British heavy metal band in the throes of a shambolic American tour.
It can be a hostage to fortune to title anything “grand”, and so it proves with the last gasp of Julian Fellowes’s everyday story of posh folk at the turn of the 20th century. The Granthams are facing a lowering of their status, and it’s time to move on out.
From its ambiguous opening shot onwards, writer/director Jan-Ole Gerster’s Islands is a tricksy animal, which doesn’t just keep you guessing about its characters and plot, but about what kind of film it is we’re watching.
It takes its time before tiptoeing into noir territory, specifically the kind that swaps nocturnal shadows for sun-bleached locations, where characters are led astray less by racy dialogue and treachery than heat-induced lethargy, tinged with lust.
You won't find Sam Riley lying at the pool in a holiday resort – unless it's for work. "I'd rather stay home to be honest", says the Berlin-based Yorkshireman, who plays a washed-up tennis player turned coach living on the Canary island of Fuerteventura in Jan-Ole Gerster's slow-burning psychological thriller Islands. "I'm sure it's great to drop the kids off for a while and enjoy some peace and quiet. But my idea of relaxation is quite different."
The Coen brothers’ output has been so broad-ranging, and the duo so self-deprecating, that critics have long had difficulty getting their arms around them. Telling stories of distemper in the American heartland, with the occasional drive-by hit on Old Hollywood, they defined indie cinema for a generation and then perhaps single-handedly released it from its ghetto and merged it into the mainstream.
“I never abandoned you,” says Jule (Ophélia Kolb; Call My Agent!) to her 10-year-old daughter Claire (Jasmine Kalisz Saurer), setting a fairly low bar as far as motherhood is concerned.
Can a film’s classic status expire, or be rescinded? If it can, I’d say The Graduate is a potential candidate.