The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 9

MOVIE GUARDIAN Thursday January 7 1988 9 -BRIEFING- cttSflns 5s Sim tsfln (SltiaQ2Il The chief distinction of Near Dark (Cannon, -Panton Street etc, 18) is that it's a latterday vampire movie, co-written and directed bv a woman. Kathryn Special interest There's a tribute to the late Georges Franju on Tuesday at the Scala, King's Cross. Three of his films receive rare screenings Les Yeux Sans Visage, Judex and Thomas L'Imposteur. There is a second day of tribute on Friday week to Irene Handl, who also died recently. Absolute Beginners, The Rebel and The Italian Job are the films on show.

Sunday week sees a retrospective of the highly imaginative animation of the Brothers Quay, together with a film of which they might well approve Paradjanov's remarkable The Colour Of Pomegranates. At the Ritzy, Brixton, several of last year's best films are being shown, among them House Of Games, River's Edge and, on Derek Malcolm reviews The Beekeeper, Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle and the other releases THEO ANGELOPOULIS, Greece's one world-class filmmaker, may never again make a film quite as resonant as The Travelling Players of 1975, but his almost obsessively personal The Beekeeper (Renoir, 18) will certainly find its way on to at least some of 1988's Ten Best lists. Angelopoulis has never made a less spectacular film than this gone are the long, swirling takes that remind us of his original debt to Jancso. But his technical control is still absolute, and the emotional force thereby engendered can still work small miracles on the mind. He calls The Beekeeper "a film on the silence of history, of love and of God" and it does seem to unfold as much out of the Greek urban landscape as from the inner recesses of its leading character's mind.

Marcello Mastroianni plays the beekeeper in question, a quiet and morose retired teacher who, after attending his daughter's wedding, meets a beautiful young hitch-hiker (Nadia Mourouzi) and transfers his incestuous feelings for his now-married child on to her. Mastroianni's stoic countenance seldom relaxes as the film's awkward journey of self-discovery progresses, so that you often have to use your own imagination about his increasingly desperate state of mind. But the sense that he is faced an object of desire who plays on his susceptibilities with a mixture of innocence and cruelty is very strong. Just occasionally, before the traumatic finale, Angelopoulis bursts the dam of pent-up emotions such as when, in the most erotic scene of the film, the girl noisily makes love to a young soldier she has picked up as the sleepless older man listens in a ferment of jealousy from the next bed. But this is a film which sustains atmosphere and mood largely through imagery rather than incident, and Arvanitis, the cinematographer, looks at both the characters and the small towns through which they pass with an eloquent eye for wintry detail.

The Beekeeper gains its strength, like The Travelling Best films Little Dorrit (Curzon West End): Christine Edzard's two-film exposition of Little Dorrit, Dickens adaptation with an all-star cast and a real sense of early Victorian England. House Of Games (Cannon Haymarket and Screen on the Green): David Mamet's compulsive psychological thriller my best American film of last year. The Dead (Lumiere): Huston's highly recommendable last film, expertly taken from James Joyce's The Dubliners. Jean De Florette (Curzon Phoenix) and Manon des Sources (Curzon Mayfair): Claude Berri's tribute to Pagnol's Provencal books and films, with Depardieu, Montand. Housekeeping (Renoir): Bill Forsyth's first American film, in which Christine Lahti eccentrically brings up her two adolescent nieces in Idaho.

Wish You Were Here (Odeon, Haymarket): David Leland's popular debut, with Emily Lloyd starring triumphantly as gutsy teenager encased in fifties seaside resort. Cry Freedom (Odeon, Leicester Square): Richard Attenborough on Steve Biko's friendship with Donald Woods, and the perfidy of apartheid. Sarraounia (ICA Cinema): Med Hondo's epic on Central African history and a tribal queen who heat a French colonial expedition. Best on TV Heat And Dust (tonight, C4, 9.30pm): James Ivory's ironic 1982 story of India past and present, with Julie Christie, Greta Scacchi and Shashi Kapoor. The Killing Floor (tonight, C4, 11.55pm): Bill Duke's 1984 powerful dramatisation of events leading up to Chicago race riots of 1919.

Subway (Friday, C4, 11.30pm): Luc Besson's stylishly quirky romantic thriller set in the tunnels of the Paris Metro, with Christopher Lambert and Isabelle Adjani. Le Caporal Epingle (Friday, BBC-2, 11.25pm): Renoir's 1961 anti-war classic, with Jean-Pierre Cassel as the all-too-human POW corporal, determined to escape. Rancho Notorious (Saturday, BBC-2, 2pm): A Marlene Dietrich day on the channel begins with Fritz Lang's famously eccentric 1952 Western with Marlene as saloon-keeper and Arthur Kennedy bent on revenge. At 3.25pm there's The Devil Is A Woman (1935), in which she plays a beautiful vamp. At 10.05pm, the Film Club shows two earlier Sternberg-Dietrich vehicles Blonde Venus and Dishonoured, with Dietrich as a beautiful spy.

Beautiful-looking films too. The Servant (Tuesday, BBC-2, 9.00pm): Joe Losey's 1963 powerful reworking of the Robin Maugham novel, written by Pinter and well-performed by Dirk Bogarde, James Fox, Wendy Craig and Sarah Miles. Come Back To The Five And Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (Wednesday, C4, 10.00pm): Robert Altman's vivid 1982 film of Ed Graczyk's theatre success with Sandy Dennis, Cher and Karen Black celebrating the 20th anniversary of Dean's death in small Texas town. Ul 1IJ.W. nil hi iiriiif The eye of the bee-holder Marcello Mastroianni is The Beekeeper throwaway if you set it against Rohmer's test.

But as sual the simplicity is deceptive. The naturalness of the performances and the fluency of the filming allow an acorn to grow into some sort of tree. It is rather like eavesdropping on two very ordinary lives, and not finding them quite so ordinary after all. This is the antithesis of most cinema which succeeds in making the extraordinary seem all too commonplace. All the same, one does wonder nowadays, as Rohmer becomes more fashionable the harder he tries to go against the current grain, whether he is not becoming, perhaps in mute protest, like a miniaturist determined to paint on ever smaller canvasses.

What is quite certain is that you won't see another film like Bigelow, who made the independently-financed The Loveless, here pushes her way into me industry proper witn a tau tale about a restless farmboy whose Arizona tryst with a beautiful stranger turns into a nightmare of blood-sucking. Adrian Pasdar and Jenny Wright act the plot out with as much conviction as they can muster, and Bigelow orches trates an increasingly violent fantasy with some appreciation of how to make it look good through visuals that catch the eye. The Woo Woo Kid (Prince Charles and various is a gently ironic, slightly Woody Allenish account of the early life and times of Sonny Wisecarver who, in his mid-teens in the 1940s, ran off with first one arid then another married woman. His case, as you may have read in yesterday's Guardian, was a curious one. He hit the headlines in a big way as a precocious sex symbol and was punished quite severely by the courts, despite the cheerful complicity of the older women concerned.

Phil Robinson's film, in which Patrick Dempsey, Talia Balsam and Beverly D'Angelo each give fresh performances, summons up the period with some charm but, in the end, seems too lightweight to examine an extraordinary story with much depth. Another Comic Strip double bill lands at the Scala at the end of the week, and is distinctly better value than the last. The Strike has a Hollywood producer taking over a serious screenplay about the Miners' Strike and casting Al Pacino and Meryl Streep as Mr and Mrs Scargill. Written and directed by Peter Richardson and Pete Richens with a fine eye for filmdom's dafter detail, it has a splendid finale which has Scargill appealing in person to the House of Commons with the aid of a crippled child and much tearful sentiment. The Yob, written by Keith Allen and Daniel Peacock and directed by Ian Ernes, has a vilely pretentious promo director and a congenital yobbo mixed up in a David Cronenberg-like teleportation experiment.

UB40 are involved and the observation of contrasting wings of our wonderful eighties society is at times murderously accurate. I note that one reads The Independent, the other The Jack Nicholson is unlikely to miss out on a best actor nomination for his role as a down-and-out trying to come to terms with his past in Ironweed, in which he's on screen in almost every scene; William Hurt should figure again, as the attractively dumb newscaster in Broadcast News; and while the Academy seldom honours comedies, Steve Martin stands a good chance with Roxanne. Most interesting outside possibility is Marcello Mastroianni for the rakish part which won him best actor at Cannes in Dark Eyes. Broadcast News may well figure again in the best actress stakes, with a nomination for Holly Hunter (previously seen in Raising Arizona) as the news producer, for which she won as best actress from the New York Film Critics. Cher shouldn't have any trouble getting a nod for her performance as an ItalianAmerican divorcee in Moonstruck; Glenn Close may well be the only major nominee from the year's most talked about American film, Fatal Attraction, in which, as someone said, "she plays the Aids while Meryl Streep, playing a bum against Nicholson's bum in Ironweed, should pander to the Academy's liking for female stars deliberately made up to look ugly.

Coming into the reckoning in the last few days is our own Emily Lloyd for her first ever film role, in Wish You Were Here. She has just won the National Film Critics' best actress award, but the film's US distributor has, so far, been noticeably reticent about spending money advertising her. The winning of an Oscar happens through a strange nexus of luck, timing and, most importantly, money. Academy members are, on the whole, too rich to be bought, but distributors can, and must, buy their attention to have any chance of nomination, let alone winning.It's money well spent. Despite what Fredric March may have said about those kitch little statues, they do mean something.

Dollars, and millions of 'em, not that they're worth much these days. Chris Goodwin is US Editor of Screen International and is currently writing a book about David Puttnam's year running Columbia Pictures. Msmey wellll sjpeimtt Even before the Oscar nominations are in the wheeling and dealing has begun. Chris Goodwin on this year's hopefuls nnniBiii i Ji8 i i i i "GENTLEMEN of the Academy and fellow suckers," belched a drunken Fredric March, interrupting Janet Gaynor's Oscar acceptance speech in A Star Is Born, "I got one of those for a Best Performance. They don't mean a thing.

People get 'em every year." This year, for the 60th time, they'll get 'em on April 11, while the nominations will be announced in Los Angeles on February 17 at 5.30 in the morning, to catch the early evening news in Europe and to help boost the box-office of the nominated films playing there. To qualify films need to play for a week in Los Angeles before December 31. And yet, there must be something in it. This year, as ever, the major studios will set new spending records trying to per this until he strikes again. You're never quite' sure, when watching Joseph Ruben's The Stepfather (Cannons, Haymarket and Tottenham Court Road, whether to take this story of a psychopathic family man, literally loving his family to death, seriously or not.

But that's true of most horror thrillers these days. What this example succeeds in doing better than most is entertaining through sheer uninhibited style. There are also good performances all round, especially from Terry O'ftuinn as the unhinged paterfamilias. Such a story teeters on the edge of incredibility, but the film is so tightly controlled and enterprisingly scripted that it remains exceedingly watchable throughout. generally sentimental Academy voters, the film is undoubtedly the most tenaciously produced of any of this year's front-runners, and it is the producer who wins best picture.

Unlike Spielberg or Brooks, who were handed the money on a plate by Warner Bros and Twentieth Century Fox respectively, Thomas took three years to put together the $25 million he needed for the film, mainly from European banks. He also managed not only to persuade the Chinese authorities to allow the film in as the first major foreign film to be shot in China, but also to let him shoot it within the Forbidden City. Unfortunately, Thomas has kept a very low profile in the influential Los Angeles press which focused almost exclusively on director Bertolucci. A good Hollywood press agent, perhaps the one Sean Connery has hired to help his best supporting actor chances for The Untouchables, might help take Thomas up to the podium on April 11. Christopher Lambert in Subway, Channel 4, Friday Sunday week, Elem Klimov's Come And See, which makes Platoon and Full Metal Jacket look a little tepid as war epics.

His Farewell is also shown on that day. Huston, DeMille and Jean Arthur are among those to whom the National Film theatre pays its respects this month, but the most important retrospective, because we know -so little about this director, is that accorded to Hiroshi Shimizu of Japan. This season reaches Four Seasons Of Childhood, one of his most famous films, on Sunday. There's a special preview of Richard Attenborough's Cry Freedom at the Tyneside Cinema on Saturday, followed by an interview with Donald Woods, the newspaper editor whose books inspired the film. The main film next week there is Alan Clarke's Rita, Sue And Bob Too, and on Tuesday there is a discussion with Andrea Dunbar who wrote the script from personal experience.

From Monday for a week in the smaller cinema is Spalding Gray's Swimming To Cambodia, a one-man show that's especially recommended. Donald Woods is at the Edinburgh Filmhouse tonight for another preview of Cry Freedom, where Fellini's revived La Dolce Vita then continues its run till Tuesday after which Jim McBride's The Big Easy, very successful at last year's Festival, then has an 11-day run. Derek Malcolm If, i'J Ui 8 "GOES STRAIGHT INTO MY YEAR'S ItNBtST AlaianierWaiii; -LONDON EVE. STANDARD In the Hitchcor.k sure-fire winner" wJones-STARBURST chorus has not yet begun. In the second, the two girls are-iu Paris, where there is an argument with a recalcitrant waiter at a cafe.

In the third, also in Paris, the town girl helps a shop-lifter to get away while Reinette tries to outface a hustler. Finally, the talkative country girl sells one of her paintings to a Parisian dealer despite vowing to remain silent for a day. Rohmer shot the film very cheaply, improvising the screenplay as he went along, and says it is not one of his Comedies and Proverbs. It simply contrasts the attitudes of the two girls one with stricter, more conservative principles than the other but both with a mind of their own. To be truthful, Reinette And Mirabelle does look a little and best director nomination this year, nor on James Brooks's bitter-sweet newsroom drama Broadcast News which opened here at the end of last year.

Although Empire Of The Sun has already won the influential National Board of Review D. W. Griffith Award for Best Picture and their best director award, the Academy has always had difficulty in giving awards to Spielberg's films, such as The Color Purple. They gave him the honorary Irving Thalberg last year as recompense. Broadcast News swept the New York Film Critics' awards, winning best picture, best director and best screenplay.

More interestingly, the LA film critics chose John Boorman's Hope And Glory for best picture, best director and best screenplay, which helps put it in the picture for Oscar accolades. It also won best director and best screenplay from the National Society of Film Critics. The same body chose John Huston's last film, The Dead, as their best picture. And Hollywood tipsters expect Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor may well show in the best picture stakes. The other films most often talked about here as potential best picture and director nominees are the delightful comedy, Moonstruck, directed by Norman Jewison and starring Cher (it'll undoubtedly get a best screenplay nomination), and Stanley Kubrick's Vietnammer, Full Metal Jacket.

Outsiders include Wall Street; Sir Richard Attenborough's Cry Freedom on which Universal is lavishing many Oscar dollars in the, probably forlorn, hope of bolstering its lacklustre US box-office; Hector Babenco's first film since Kiss Of The Spider Woman, Ironweed, starring Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep. A real long-shot is Swedish director Lasse Hallstrom's My Life As A Dog which doesn't qualify for best foreign language film, because "MORE SHNGS THAW A "This sleek brilliant box Players, from its matchless ability to anchor its tale within a geography that lends it extra resonance. It is certainly Angelopoulis' best of recent years, and in a way his most revealing. Eric Rohmer's Four Adventures Of Reinette And Mirabelle (Chelsea.PG) is, on the face of it, as slight a film as he has ever put before us. There are a quartet of interconnecting episodes, each with the same two characters in-volved- a country girl (Reinette, played by Joelle Miquel) and a denizen of Paris (Mirabelle, played by Jessica Forde).

In the first episode in the tells Mirabelle that she must experience "the blue hour" before dawn when the night sounds of the countryside stop but the dawn suade that small body of Academy voters, around 3,500, to vote for their films. An Oscar campaign can quite easily cost $250,000. Big stars' and producers' contracts frequently oblige the studios to spend specified amounts on Oscar campaigns. And with top actors and actresses able to command several million dollars a film, winning an Oscar can turn a relative unknown into a millionaire almost overnight. Gambling is banned in Los Angeles, which is why Las Vegas is there in the desert.

If it wasn't, you couldn't get particularly good odds right now on Steven Spielberg's adaptation of J. G. Ballard's Empire Of The Sun "Spielberg's first British film" one critic here dubbed it picking up a best picture MtiiitlA.I'i -UOtvfO Ji.SO 8 JANUARY BRUNSWICK SQ.WC1 RUSSEUSOUABE IUBE TELf PHONE 8378402 HSHwHI' A Film by THEO ANGELOPOULOS best road movie since PARIS TEXAS." JuhnGillftt.LFF'Sfi Grtek dlaloiueEniltsli submits FROM FRIDAY JANUARY 8 RENOIR lUNIWICKSaWCI RUSSEUSOUARETUK TIUPHONM37MOa In the Oscar frame Emily Lloyd in Wish You Were and Sebastian Rice-Edwards in Hope and Glory A film by ERIC ROHMER QOOGOOlDOfJ (DG mmmmmsm SARRAOUNIA "Performed to timeout "Funny, TREAT" city limits THE WARRIOR QUEEN An epic of African cinema by Med Hondo it was released the year before last in Sweden, but is the highest grossing foreign language film this year in the US. Unfortunately both The Last Emperor and Hope And Glory face a typical Hollywood problem. While neither film was actually produced by Columbia during David Puttnam's brief tenure, Puttnam gave the go-ahead for Columbia to distribute The Last Emperor in the United States, while Hope And Glory came to the studio while he was in charge.

No one has outright accused the new management at Columbia of not giving their full support to the two films in their Oscar bids, but some commentators have voiced suspicions that they may not be prepared to back them fully for fear that winning Oscars would reflect too well on the Puttnam regime they are now keen to discredit. While the broad historic sweep of The Last Emperor may make it not quite engaging enough to win either best director or best picture from the NOW! 'Salute the first African Daily Moil 'A wicked slice of surreal magic, stirringly city Limits tngliih subtitles An Artificial Eye Release FROM FRIDAY a Mm a k. A A I 3513742 MARCELLO MASTROIANNI in THE BEEKEEPER, i rm mmsm EDINBURGH Cameo eCMJWW HAYMARKET OXFORD Phoenh STREATHAM Odeon SEE LOCAL PRESS FOR DETAILS FROM TOMORROW ISjNRito0" BARBICAN Cinema CAMBRIDGE Arts BIRMIHAMtWeon COVENTRY Odeon BRENTFORDWatermans DUBLIN Savoy LIVERPOOLOdeon MUSWELL HILL Odeon NEWCASTLE Odeon FUMAT 1.20 3.45 (.10 8.40.