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Martin Paule's Micro Movie Reviews: A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H-I-J-K-L-M-N-O-P-Q-R-S-T-U-V-W-X-Y-Z-

Z

The page for the letter "Z" does not include many films, but just one film, called "Z", directed by Constantin Costa-Gavras deserve a page at least to do justice, and justice it is all about; this film is set in Greece against the backdrop of an impending coup. When a charismatic left wing politician returns to the country to participate in the political process, the thugs dispatched by various the right wing elements murder him, in public, and the generals and the cops set out to cover it up while a simple prosecutor sets out to uncover the conspiracy, revealing the structure of oppression and injustice. Apparantly, Costa-Gavras was going to direct The Godfather, but the deal fell through after he refused to accept a politically ambivalent script that was handed to him. Costa-Gavras is better known in the US for his 1982 film Missing (a simple American father, played by Jack Lemmon, trying to locate a son who is "missing" in Chile, and in many ways, like the Missing, Z dramatizes the individual's struggle against brutal, self-righteous power. The film won both New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Picture and an Academy Award as Best Foreign Film, and it also started to accumulate greater relevance in the US as the country moved toward a straight collision course in the wake of the John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations. The newly restored DVD offers interviews with the director and Vassilis Vassilikos, who wrote the novel, which was itself based on the 1966 "Lambrakis Affair" in Greece. (TP)

Zed And Two Noughts, A
Directed by Peter Greenaway who made the decidedly strange and fetishistic, "The Cook, The Thief, The Wife & Her Lover". This one may be even a bit stranger; it involves two scientist brothers who lose their wives in a freakish auto accident and who then become utterly absorbed by death and
decay. If you think of it as more a series of striking visual images than a movie in the traditional sense, you'll be rewarded, I think. By the way,
Greenaway's "Prospero's Books" and "The Draughtsman's Contract" are equally strange and potentially involving if approached in the right frame of mind.
 

Zero Effect