Film Reviews

Dir: Percy Adlon/West Germany/1985/86 mins/subtitles Lps: Marianne Sägebrecht, Eisi Gulp German title: Zuckerbaby Marianne is 38, fat, lonely and depressed. She works as an undertaker's assistant handling corpses, and this causes her to be looked on with disdain. One day, hearing the rock 'n' roll song 'Sugar Baby', she is reminded of her lost youth and shakes herself from her lethargic state. She sees a young underground train driver and instantly falls in love with him. Determined to meet him, she takes five weeks holiday and sets about tracking him down by any means possible. This film can best be described as a sad comedy. Marianne presents an image of hopeless stagnation, out of which she is broken by her love-at-first-sight for the married 25-year old Eugen, so that she can recapture her lost youth. We can only sympathise with Eugen who gallantly copes with her hideously excessive weight, true love overcoming all bounds for the two unfortunate and rather ineff...

Blond, blue-eyed Rutger Hauer stars in two films on this season's list. In Bladerunner he steals the show from Harrison Ford as replicant Roy Batty; while in The Hitcher he is the show, a magnificently malevolent performance which led to him being described as 'everybody's favourite psycho'. Not entirely true, perhaps, but that film and those such as Blade Runner and Wanted: Dead Or Alive could have led a lesser actor to being typecast as menacing villains. Not so Mr Hauer: he claims now to be finished with playing bad guys for a while, a sad loss (if only temporary) of one of cinema's greatest miscreants. However, he has proved himself perfectly capable of handling more elegant rôles: Coco Chanel's lover in Chanel Solitaire , Theresa Russell's husband in Nic Roeg's Eureka (if that can be described as elegant), the romantic hero in Ladyhawke . With what he will follow his latest film, Wanted: Dead Or Alive , we shall have to wait and see, but his event...

  Dir: Douglas Trumbull/USA/1971/90 mins Lps: Bruce Dern, Cliff Potts, Ron Rifkin, Jesse Vint The year is 2001, and the Earth has been devastated by nuclear war leaving its remaining plant life entrusted to a fleet of spacecraft. Due to cost cuts it is decided to scrap this project to refurbish the earth, by jettisoning the remaining forests. However Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern), convinced of the importance of the mission, disposes of the other three crew members of the spaceship 'Valley Forge' before they manage to jettison the final biosphere. Now alone and with one remaining forest Freeman flees from the rest of the fleet with only the company of the spacecraft's three drones. During this time he trains the drones to tend the forest and, to keep him amused, he teaches them to play cards. The film's director Douglas Trumbull, helped by his experience on Stanley Kubrick's k's 2001: A Space Odyssey , created the special effects but did not over-use them. The soun...

  Dir: Richard Marquand/USA/1985/109 mins/Dolby stereo Lps: Glenn Close, Jeff Bridges, Peter Coyote, Robert Loggia A tense courtroom thriller, with newspaper editor Jack Forrester (Jeff Bridges) on trial for the murder of his rich wife, found knifed to death along with her maid in what appears to be a ritual killing. Glenn Close is Teddy Barnes, the defence attorney who reluctantly takes on the case, and, against her better judgement, becomes emotionally involved with her client. Jagged Edge moves rapidly along, playing with expectations and assumptions. The court scenes, whilst dominating a considerable part of the film, are as exciting and dramatic as the most physical of thrillers, interspersed with Teddy's developing relationship with Jack and her doubts and insecurities about her job. As the story reaches its powerful, tantalising conclusion, the suspense becomes unbearable, the real identity of the murderer remaining undisclosed until the last few seconds of the film. And thr...