Picks for '86

Rip It Up, Issue 114, 1 January 1987, Page 20

Picks for 'B6

MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE Director: Stephen Frears . Pakistani writer Hanif Kureishi gives us a vision of Thatcher’s Britain as a country rife with racial tensions and underpinned by capitalist corruption. The surprise is that Laundrette is a.rather sly comedy, . delivered with all the snap, crackle and punch of television at its best (it was originally made for Britain’s Channel Four). REPO MAN Director: Alex Cox ; Directors from Wim Wenders to David Byrne seem intent on showing us that Texas is a pretty bizarre place; Cox’s debut film goes quite a few steps further in presenting a crazed, comic book picaresque tale with young Emilio Eztevez thrown together with crazed nuclear scientists, laconic repo .men and burnt-out ex-hippies. Look no further for the best soundtrack of the year — the Burning Sensations’ version of Jonathan Richman’s .‘Pablo Picasso’ is well worth the price of the disc. VAGABONDE Director: Agnes Varda t The French director’s account of the last few desperate weeks of a young woman derelict is a relentlessly bleak film, without the slightest trace of the sentimentality that now seems to impinge on some of Bresson's films. The cast iS made up of a good many nonprofessional players'and the script fragmentary to say the least, but Varda’s rigorous sense of structure ensures that the film does not release its hold on the viewer until its final images have faded. THE OFFICIAL STORY Director: Luis Puenza The Official Story shows another side of South American cinema, far removed from Babenco’s flashier Kiss of the Spider Woman. In Puenza’s film there are no theatrical fantasies or flamboyant characters, just the depiction of one woman (the superb Norma Aleandro) slowly coming to terms with the reality of fascist oppression as it surrounds her. RE-ANIMATOR Director: Stuart Gordon With George Romero appearing to have lost his comic touch in Day

of the Dead, Re-Animator proves that gore and giggles are not mutually exclusive entities. Adapted from an atypical H P Lovecraft opus, this film is a delightful spoof, sustained with just the right sense of style, from Jeffrey Coombs’s and David Gales’s magnificently fruity performances as the evil arch-rivals to Richard Band’s outrageous purloining of Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho score. THE PURPLE ROSE OF CAIRO HANNAH AND HER SISTERS Director: Woody Allen Whereas The Purple Rose of Cairo explores the same vein of quirky fantasy that created Zelig and Broadway Danny Rose, Hannah and Her Sisters lightens the soul-searching of his earlier Interiors into contemporary American Chekhov. That Allen can encompass two such different films without sacrificing his integrity is indication enough of his genius, and the same can also be said for Mia Farrow’s transcendent performances (matched in Hannah by a magnificent cast). AFTER HOURS Director: Martin Scorsese In the 19th century, the Americans created the genre of the Innocent Abroad: with After Hours Scorsese shows that SoHo can be every bit as confusing for his young hero as Europe might have been in Twain’s day. The plot kicks off with a chance meeting in a fast-food restaurant, a S2O bill which flies out the window of a cab cements the confusion, and soon Griffin Dunne’s nervous word processor operator is in the clutches of all manner of eccentrics, artists and assorted sinister types. The logic is inexorable in its loony way, and Scorsese never lets the pace give up for a second. DREAMCHILD Director: Gavin Millar As with My Beautiful Laundrette, this is really a writer’s film, in this case the work of Dennis Potter. Potter’s bitter-sweet blend of Lewis Carroll fantasies and the realities of New York in the 30s, as seen through the eyes of the elderly Alice, doesn't quite come off, but the beautiful realisation of the Victorian scenes, Coral Browne’s knowing performance and Jim Henson’s post-Tenniel beasties are more than enough to be grateful for.

William Dart