The Latest Film Reviews from The Arts Desk

The Arts Desk’s film reviews this week have an international flavour, from festivals in Sarajevo and Odessa to movies from Kyrgyzstan and Paris.

First of this week’s movie releases is ‘Sarah’s Key’. Matt Wolf observed that the lingering power of Gilles Paquet-Brenner's film rests almost entirely on its harrowing subject matter – the holocaust – and the two leading female performances. Mélusine Mayance is full of strength as the little girl Sarah who survives the French internment camps, and Kristin Scott Thomas imbues her role as the modern-day journalist trying to piece together Sarah’s story with intelligence, raising the standard of the occasionally mawkish, contrived material.

In stark contrast, Veronica Lee found ‘Horrid Henry’ to be one for the kids only. Based on Francesca Simon’s hugely successful books, it has plenty of fart gags to keep children entertained, but for the adult viewer it’s less appealing. The script is leaden, the plot makes little sense and not a great deal happens. However, there are occasional laughs, a host of quality actors and all too brief cameos, and Theo Stevenson as the eponymous Horrid Henry is not only impressively multi-talented, thinks Lee, but also rather adorable, given that he spends the film trying to save his primary school from being closed down.

Further afield, The Arts Desk headed to Sarajevo for a fine film festival with a unique atmosphere. Characterised by open-air screenings where evidence of the siege is all around, the festival and the Balkan films it celebrates are suffused with dark memories of the past, yet the people are ebullient, creating an odd tension. Demetrios Matheou noticed the predominance of young, disaffected first-time directors, and his pick of the films ranges from a prize-winning Bulgarian road trip movie to a documentary following a heroic group of librarians during the siege.

Meanwhile Tom Birchenough found himself in Odessa, watching a Monty Python retrospective as part of the Odessa International Film Festival. Unsurprisingly, absurdist humour seemed to be the overriding theme of the event. Aside from picking out his stand-out films from the festival, Birchenough also pays tribute to the work of Odessite director Kira Muratova before setting off to explore the sights of this former Tsarist port city, including the Opera House and the famous Potemkin Steps.

Watching a rare film to come out of Kyrgyzstan, Jasper Rees found much to admire in Aktan Abdykalykov’s ‘The Light Thief’. Set in a poor rural community where electricity is scarce, Svet-Ake takes it upon himself to steal this precious commodity from the rich in order to supply the poor. As a devastating story of geopolitics and exploitation, the film packs a real punch, but at the same time, at only 75 minutes long and capturing the gentle pace of village life, it’s also a light, lyrical piece.

Ronald Bergan offered up an appreciation of French film director Jean Renoir, focusing on his return to France in 1953 after 13 years in exile, when he was critically and commercially in decline. Until ‘French Cancan’ that is, his musical comedy about the man who founded the Moulin Rouge. Benefiting from a return to Renoir’s Montmartre roots and the talent he gathered from various cabaret bars, the film outdoes many of the contemporaneous American musicals. Combining some of Renoir’s most technical and creative sequences, rich evocations of the ‘Belle Époque’ era and profound explorations of sacrifice and relationships, it’s the director’s homecoming masterpiece.

Lastly, this week’s DVD releases included Zoltán Huszárik's 1971 ‘Szindbád’, a gem of a film relatively unknown outside of Hungary until recently, about one man’s pursuit of pleasure, which Kieron Tyler found elegiac and captivating; and ‘A High Wind in Jamaica’ which Thomas H Green came to full of nostalgia from his own childhood, only to find that this tale of a kindly pirate had dated badly.

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