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Men In Black 3

It’s not a sequel that needed to be made, but thanks to the charm of its leads and a tone that harks back to the wit and humour of the original, it’s a pretty enjoyable trip.

Bel Ami

The excellent female support cast saves this patchy effort, which is let down by its leading man and a flat screenplay.

The Dictator

A disappointing, often repulsive and mean-spirited mess of a film with seemingly only one real criterion on its agenda: to shock and offend.

The Woman In Black

Packed with atmosphere, this old-fashioned but deftly told ghost story delivers ample chills and thrills.

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Cave Of Forgotten Dreams (Film)

by Mark Demetrius | September 19, 2011 16:06 | Edited September 19, 2011 16:08

Making superb use of the 3-D, and marked by Werner Herzog’s idiosyncratic sensibilities, this contains enough captivating moments to make it a must-see.

Every film by the veteran German director Werner Herzog (Aguirre: The Wrath Of God, Grizzly Man, Encounters At The End Of The World) is quite different, yet they're all unmistakeably his. This one is a documentary about the cave art at Chauvet-Pont-D'Arc in Southern France. Only discovered in 1994 - and generally seen since only by archaeologists, palaeontologists and the like - these are quite simply the oldest known paintings in the world. They're 32,000-years-old, and yet are so pristine that they've been mistaken for recent forgeries. In a project of logistical brilliance, Herzog and his crew have recorded them on film, and in 3-D. This is, for once, no mere gimmick, but the ideal way of showing them in all their glory, and of reflecting the way that they play with the cave-wall surfaces which form their "canvasses."

 

Most of these figures are of animals, many now long-since extinct - mammoths, European lions, cave bears - while others never did exist, such as an ambiguous Minotaur figure. Astonishingly enough, some feature a kind of "proto-cinematic" illusion of movement: witness the eight-legged bison. These are extraordinary treasures, about which a procession of scientists and other experts give their personal perspective. Some of them, it must be said, come across as unintentionally funny or nerdy. And there is a point where the film threatens to become a rather dry and academic lecture.

 

Then, just when it seems that Herzog might be getting a bit linear and less idiosyncratic in his old age, the film takes a wild lurch to encompass something about mutant albino crocodiles and nuclear reactors. Somehow, in context, it's just about pertinent. So, believe it or not, is a brief film clip of Fred Astaire dancing to his own shadow. Cave Of Forgotten Dreams is only occasionally as spellbinding as it should be, but it would be a mistake to miss it.