Shadows and Fog (1991)

Woody Allen's star-studded comedy (even Madonna appears), filmed in black and white and filled with visuals recalling Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, had critics calling it an homage to German Expressionist cinema, but to what end is not clear: when John Cusack's brothel patron sighs, with Nietzschean bleakness, "There's no point to anything," he seems less to be musing on existence than reviewing the film itself, especially after so much of the comedy proves only intermittently amusing and the plot - in which Allen's Kleinman is enlisted, Kafkaesque-style, into a disorganised vigilante street gang hunting a serial killer - feels like just another Woody Allen contrivance; the late turn to weighty talk of God and man and his volitional and unvolitional or natural and unnatural impulses lands as a sudden lofty flourish atop prolonged tedium.

★★☆☆☆

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Evita (1996)

This film version of Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical attempts to reduce decades of Argentinian history into two hours of Tim Rice's bawdy rhyming couplets and because of this is an almost unwatchable movie-length rock opera music video featuring, among other embarrassments, suited Argentinian statesmen rapping to funky synthesizers, Antonio Banderas drifting around as a everywhere narrator who often has to nod and look unembarrassed as he waits a beat or two for the music to let him finish what he is saying, bawdy rhymes about Argentina's reverred/abhorred Eva Peron played by an out-of-her-depth Madonna and, the musical's biggest sin, apart from repeated scenes shot on the balcony of the Casa de Rosa, an almost entirely absent Buenos Aires.

★☆☆☆☆

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