The Eight Mountains (2022)
Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide
The lifelong friendship between two men is mapped out across the passing years and against breathtaking mountain scenery in this gentle, Italian-language epic. Meeting as kids in a remote Alpine village, Pietro and Bruno bond over their passion for scrambling the peaks. Life and parental aspirations are to take them in different directions, but they are reunited in their thirties with the project to renovate a mountain cabin together; their relationship now underscored with deep affection but also an unspoken rivalry. From a 2016 novel by Paolo Cognetti, husband-and-wife directing team Felix Van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch have created a bromantic drama of vertiginous melancholy.
The Three Musketeers (1973) / The Four Musketeers (1974)
Where’s it on? Blu-ray
Richard Lester brought more than a dash of the manic energy of his Beatles films A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and Help! (1965) to these two colourful adaptations of Alexandre Dumas’s D’Artagnan novels. In fact, the Fab Four were once in Lester’s sights to star, but when the films – shot back to back – eventually came to fruition in the 1970s we got Michael York, Richard Chamberlain, Frank Finlay and Oliver Reed as the daredevil musketeers, and Charlton Heston and Christopher Lee as the villainous Cardinal Richelieu and his ally, the Comte de Rochefort. Released on UHD and Blu-ray for their 50th anniversary, these peppy adventures endure as feasts of swashbuckling fun and lavish period detail.
Juggernaut (1974)
Where’s it on? Talking Pictures TV, Sunday, 10pm
By a quirk of fate, the film that Lester made between the releases of his two musketeers movies is getting a late-night outing on Talking Pictures TV on Sunday. A tense highlight of the 1970s disaster movie cycle, Juggernaut sees a terrorist demanding a huge ransom lest he set off the bombs he’s planted on a luxury transatlantic liner. Richard Harris leads the bomb disposal unit, Omar Sharif plays the steely-nerved skipper, and – in proper disaster movie fashion – the supporting cast is packed with familiar (mainly British) faces, including Anthony Hopkins, David Hemmings, Ian Holm and Michael Hordern.
The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970)
Where’s it on? BFI Player
No fewer than seven Dario Argento films have been added to BFI Player this week, including all three parts of his so-called animal trilogy – an unholy trinity of fetishistic thrillers with an animal in their title and a mysterious black-gloved killer at their centre. The first of these is Argento’s debut feature, in which an American writer living in Rome turns investigator after witnessing a brutal killing – in a startling opening set piece in a white-box gallery. The Bird with the Crystal Plumage borrows bits and pieces from Hitchcock and Antonioni, but its lurid violence and stylised set-pieces in turn shaped Italy’s wave of giallo thrillers and, beyond that, the American slasher movie. It remains a masterclass in using the camera to create an air of menace.
Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power (2022)
Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide and BFI Player
In this invigorating cine-lecture, feminist filmmaker Nina Menkes examines the ways in which male perspectives and desires behind the camera have shaped depictions of women in the movies. Drawing on the notion of the male gaze explored by Laura Mulvey in her groundbreaking film-theory essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Menkes uses a host of clips – from Vertigo (1958) to Raging Bull (1980) to Wonder Woman (2017) – to demonstrate how the history of cinema is also a history of eroticising the female body. Her argument goes that the representational power imbalance on screen is paralleled off-screen in the industry’s track record of sexism and harassment. Among the talking heads are Mulvey herself and directors including Julie Dash, Penelope Spheeris and Eliza Hittman.
