CARRIE - Follows 'The Shining' as another one from my favourite film ever list, an easy classic that again attests to the seventies / eighties reverence for Stephen King. Maestro Brian Depalma is so manipulative that it's hard to know which side he's on - do his sympathies lie with poor old Carrie White, or is he getting off on the shitstorm of suffering that surrounds her (and by the end, everyone else)? We sense a bit of a sneer. But he's an arch stylist too, and in the last half fashions a breath taking dive into fully orchestrated horror, full of unbearable tension, tragic sensibility and a plethora of imagery that now seems immortal. Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie are similarly unforgettable.
OPERA - Obviously all Dario Argento's work is quite operatic, if that means his films are made up of impressions and gestures so loud they seem constantly on the verge of breaking out into a yodel (not an operatic term, but I am a philistine). Fittingly, this one's about a bloated high tech modernist version of MacBeth complicated by some bloody off-stage killings, and, as always, the star is the camera, floating through a multitude of unlikely iterations of space and movement. He's lucky when he can get performances that match his lust for mad stylistic excess - not sure that's the case here, the film seems split between its startling visuals and drab characterisation, but do you care? I don't, 'Opera' is disjointed and zany but above all visionary, and, whether it's showing us a mass raven onslaught, a blue tinted trip down a spiral staircase or a random pulsating brain, it's not often I watch something that makes me go "yeah!... huh?" pretty much minute after minute.
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