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Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg’s Performance was shot in July 1968, but its release was postponed by a skittish Warner Bros. until August 1970. The timing couldn’t have been better, since the film not only perfectly encapsulates Swinging London’s faith in “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll” but also effectively hammers the last nail in the counterculture’s coffin. As a sort of epilogue to the Rolling Stones’s disastrous concert at Altamont, Performance illustrates precisely what can happen in the void left gaping open when performers stop performing.

The film’s title is aptly overdetermined. Reclusive rock star Turner (Mick Jagger) is obviously one kind of performer. But performer, in British slang, also refers to mobsters like Chas (James Fox). In the film, the worlds that these two men inhabit collide and entwine in fascinating fashion. Over the course of the first half, which is dedicated to delineating...

Review by Roger Carpenter

By 1971 Peter Fonda was an icon of the counterculture. He’d starred in the LSD quickie The Trip as well as the pioneering biker film The Wild Angels. He was fresh off of Easy Rider and ready to spread his wings and show the viewing public that he was more than a pot-smoking hippie biker with his directorial debut, The Hired Hand.

The Hired Hand tells the story of Harry, a wayward soul who married too early and took off to see the world with his two buddies, Arch (Warren Oates) and Dan (Robert Pratt). After years in the wilderness, the three determine to head to California and the Pacific Ocean, but Dan unexpectedly dies along the way and Harry (Peter Fonda) decides it’s time to head home, to the wife and infant daughter he left seven long years ago. But will she take Harry back,...

Writer-director Gee Malik Linton has disowned this drama about a woman who sees angels, and it’s easy to see why

In the mid-90s, the director Donald Cammell disowned his final film Wild Side after producers at Nu Image recut it as an embarrassingly sleazy lesbian erotic thriller. After the director’s death, the screenwriter China Kong and the editor Frank Mazzola reconstructed Cammell’s original vision and the result was a revelation – a film that bore little or no relation to the producers’ bastardised incarnation. The same may (or may not?) be true of the Jamaican-American writer-director Gee Malik Linton’s debut feature Daughter of God, which surfaces here in a shambolic Lionsgate-approved version under the new title Exposed, with directorial chores now pseudonymously credited to “Declan Dale”.

Originally envisaged as a surreal, bilingual sociopolitical drama centring on a Latina woman (Ana de Armas) who believes that she’s been visited by angels,...

By Alex Simon

Cars have been a staple of motion pictures since the earliest Keystone Kops two-reel comedies a century ago, usually providing fodder for chase scenes and general mayhem. Whether they’re breaking land-speed records, flying through the air defying laws of aerodynamics, or driven by intrepid heroes pursuing bad guys, cars and movies go together like…well, like movies and popcorn.Like movies and tickets. Like cars and tickets. Wait…let’s just get on with the list, shall we?

Here are the ten coolest cars in movie history, in no particular order:

1. Rendezvous: 1976 Mercedes-Benz 450Sel 6.9

Director Claude Lelouch mounted a camera on his 1976 Mercedes and tore through the early morning streets of Paris at breakneck speeds, cheating only slightly in post-production by overdubbing the sound of a Ferrari 275 Gtb engine with that of his Benz’s. Three people were in the car, with Lelouch at the wheel,...

Where does a maverick film-maker such as Nicholas Ray go after directing Rebel Without a Cause? Back to school, says Geoffrey Macnab

Nicholas Ray wasn't the sort of film-maker ever to go quietly into retirement. The maverick director behind Rebel Without a Cause, Johnny Guitar and Bigger Than Life possessed a notoriously cussed temperament and, despite being one of Hollywood's best-paid directors in the 1950s, was perennially broke. Dogged by financial and health problems until his death in 1979, the last few years of his life were especially turbulent. Nonetheless, as a world premiere of the restored version of his experimental film, We Can't Go Home Again, at the Venice film festival has made clear, the 1970s were far from a lost decade for Ray. In fact, amid the chaos, he undertook some of his most radical and adventurous work.

We Can't Go Home Again is just what you would expect...

Corey Allen had a sterling half-century film career, but he's still best-known for playing Buzz, the cool kid who does the chicken run with James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. No wonder – those scenes are the tragic, prophetic heart of the film

There was a lot more to Corey Allen than the chicken run in Rebel Without a Cause. For instance, he had a piercing, nasty scene with Claire Bloom in The Chapman Report (a picture no one looks at any more). He had moments in Nicholas Ray's Party Girl and Richard Brooks's Sweet Bird of Youth. Thereafter he became a highly competent director on television – where competence is far more valued than creative originality – and he won an Emmy for an episode of Hill Street Blues. He was also an acting teacher. But Buzz was what we remember, and it's a tribute to just how potent...

Six surviving cast-members of Rebel Without a Cause (1955) are celebrating the film's 45th anniversary by getting together to discuss the experience in public. Dennis Hopper, who was just 18 when he played a gang member in the 1955 classic will be joined by cast members Corey Allen, Steffi Sidney, Jack Grinnage, Beverly Long, Frank Mazzola and screenwriter Stewart Stern. The six will watch a screening at the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art, before leading a discussion on the making of the movie and their experiences of working with James Dean, who was killed in a car crash a month before the movie opened.