Film reviews: Corman’s World: Explots Of A Holywood Rebel | The Woman In The Fifth

Alistair Harkness casts his eye on the rest of this week’s new releases

Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel (15)

Directed by: Alex Stapleton

Rating: ***

AS ANYONE who has watched any Roger Corman films will know, their outlaw sensibility and out-there storylines are usually better in theory than in practice. Nevertheless, as this comprehensive, decades-spanning documentary shows, without him, American cinema over the last 50 years would far poorer. That’s partly because his give-anyone-a-chance production house served as a de facto film school for the likes of Martin Scorsese, Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda, Ron Howard, Jonathan Demme, Joe Dante, John Sayles and James Cameron (among many others). A lot of those key collaborators are extensively interviewed here, and even though first-time director Alex Stapleton’s approach is (appropriately) fairly nuts-and-bolts, she gets some good stuff, including teary reminiscences from Nicholson as well as Scorsese revealing that Corman offered to fund Mean Streets – provided he made it as a blaxploitation movie. She also reveals Corman to be a man with a genuine social conscience.

Indeed, as much as he’s considered a purveyor of schlock, part of his well-documented dismay at the way Jaws and Star Wars encroached on his livelihood was based on a genuine abhorrence of the fact that their success legitimised the spending of tens of millions of dollars on monster movies when such vast sums could, in his view, be put to better use solving society’s many problems.

The Woman in the Fifth (15)

Directed by: Pawel Pawlikowski

Starring: Ethan Hawke, Kristin Scott Thomas, Joanna Kulig

Rating: **

HAVING already provided the source material for last year’s compelling French curio The Big Picture, another Douglas Kennedy novel provides the inspiration for this similarly enigmatic, though sadly not as intriguing, Parisian tale of broken dreams and existential despair. Ethan Hawke riffs on the book-devouring romantic idealists that were his stock-in-trade at the start of his career to play Tom, a washed-up lecturer and never-quite-made-it novelist whose arrival in Paris to reconnect with his estranged daughter and hostile ex-wife triggers a psychological breakdown in which reality and fiction become impossible to distinguish. Holing up in a squat/hotel after losing all his possessions, his new abode – and his burgeoning relationship with its shady owners – is exactly the kind of romanticised bottom-rung underworld a bad writer would come up with, while his interactions with the emotionally damaged muse (Kristin Scott Thomas) of an obscure Hungarian writer underscore his pretensions at the other end of the scale. Unfortunately, Brit director Pawel Pawlikowski (My Summer of Love) can’t make any of this particularly gripping and, despite some committed performances, it’s too lacking in atmosphere to work as the Polanski-esque psychological mystery it clearly wants to be.