S. Moment

6-0, 6-0, 6-0 to Caine, 19 Mar 2008

The first time I watched this, I'm not embarrassed to say, I just didn't get it at all. Being a huge fan of the Anthony Shaffer/Joseph L. Mankiewicz version, all I noticed -- through my tears, and between sighs -- were Harold Pinter's drastic alterations and the frosty overall tone. "Surely there's enough misery in the world," I told my cat, "without necessitating the surgical removal of every ounce of pleasure from two hours of delightfully witty entertainment." The cat concurred: "CCTV and homoerotic overtones are no substitute for good, old-fashioned belly laughs. Meow!"

It was only when I watched it a second time that I realised there are more good things than bad on offer,… Read more

Argento's best since "Opera", 16 July 2007

I don't find myself saying this about most recent Dario Argento - where the holes in the plot only widen under scrutiny - but, though flawed, this film actually improves with repeated viewings. We'll have to wait and see how his conclusion to his "Three Mothers" trilogy turns out but, for the time being, this is easily his best work starring his daughter Asia. The previous "Trauma" was little short of an absolute mess in which, whatever good intentions he may have started out with, Dario struggled to tie his anorexic heroine to the ludicrous plot. With "The Stendhal Syndrome" he deals again with psychological illness, this time more successfully despite the somewhat trivial nature of the… Read more

Hardly essential but pleasant enough, 10 July 2007

This CD mops up some of Feist's collaborations and a smattering of remixes of tracks from her superb album "Let It Die". There's some nice stuff here but the casual fan could certainly live without this. The first two tracks - a solo piano version of "One Evening" by Gonzales and a stripped down acoustic cover of the Bee Gees' "Inside & Out" from a BBC session - are gorgeous. A pity the latter is spoiled by peak-level distortion; the BBC engineer should have been shot.