Year: 1978 Director: Charles Burnett

As there won’t be another Sight and Sound poll before 2032, there’s no need to rush through the top fifty finest films of all time. Yesterday’s watch, recommended by a friend’s son, was perhaps the most obscure film in the top 50: Killer of Sheep was certainly a new one to me.

The film’s genesis is pretty remarkable. It was made on weekends over four or five years with a largely non-professional cast. Writer and director Charles Burnett submitted it as his masters thesis – the cinematic equivalent of turning in OK Computer as a Music Tech MA graduation final project. Once finished it was acclaimed at the Berlin Film Festival but was unreleasable as Burnett had stuffed the soundtrack with greats from a century of jazz and soul, but neglected to secure the rights to any of the music. Eventually film curators cleaned up the print and sorted the rights. It’s hardly widely available still – your only – cough – legal option a pricy secondhand dvd. A quick google however will reveal numerous online options, the one we ended up watching had subtitles but was fine.

The film itself is in black » Continue Reading.

Year: 2024 Director: Alex Garland

This is an extremely well-made film that is also extremely annoying and frustrating. Its genesis appears clear enough: after the Trump assault on the capitol in 2021 zeitgeist-recycler Alex Garland clearly thought that there was a great idea for a movie. Fast forward three years and we have the first January 5th film, in cinemas before the end of the story is even known. We start with Nick Offerman as a President who has staged some kind of coup and is embattled in a civil war against the ‘Western Forces’ – ie California, and unlikely secessionist partner Texas.

Garland drops us into the middle of this conflict as feted war photographer Kirsten Dunst – none too subtley named Lee Miller, and her correspondent buddies resolve to go to Washington to interview the President before he’s exiled, executed or worse. Before they can get out of the hotel however a young apprentice female war photographer Cailee Spaeny who Lee saves in a bombing outrage, turns up to hitch a starry-eyed ride. I cannot tell you how personally annoying I found her character. Not only does she follow Lee around like a sad puppy, she’s a hipster » Continue Reading.

Year: 1959 Director: Francois Truffaut

After a bit of a hiatus I’ve dropped down the list a bit to the last one in the self-imposed limit of the top 50 in the Sight and Sound 2022 poll. I can’t believe in the previous decades this nouvelle vague classic was not much higher, and can only think that it’s critical fashion rather than anything intrinsic to the film that has caused it to lie in fiftieth place. A huge gap in my film education about to be filled as I’ve never seen it.

Francois Truffaut’s full feature debut, this plays almost like a first novel, in which ‘write about what you know’ rules. The episodic adventures and descent of Antoine closely parallel (we’re told) Truffaut’s own life. Far more interesting to me on first viewing is its clear role in the youthquake that was shaking up western culture as the wartime babies became teenagers. Antoine is a magnificent addition to the role call of angry young men (and they were almost all men) that were pushing aside their elders, sick and tired of the rigid society of the immediate post-war era. He’s been compared to Holden Caulfield, to James Dean in » Continue Reading.

Year: 2023 Director: Jonathan Glazer

When I went to see Schindler’s List in the nineties the couple next to me had brought popcorn and cokes, perhaps looking no further than the Spielberg name. Their refreshments remained untouched throughout the film. This I have always thought summed up the issues around Holocaust cinema very succintly.

I have to admit I thought at first I would not go and see Zone of Interest. Glazer can stand in for Spielberg: an auteur making his Holocaust movie on first take seems to lead more in the direction of Life Is Beautiful or The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (both unwatched by me) than Shoah. Have we not had enough Holocaust films. There’s even a whole new genre of fiction ‘inspired by true stories’ such as The Tatooist of Auschwitz, The Tailor of Dachau concentration camp’ and so on.

And yet. Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism are on the rise. As it slips from living memory works of art that tell these stories will become more important, otherwise other stories contesting the magnitude, purpose or basic facts of the Holocaust will be unchallenged. However, if you enter this arena as a film-maker then the bar » Continue Reading.

Year: 1990 Director: Abbas Kiarostami

The seventeenth greatest film of all time, according to critics in the 2022 Sight and Sound poll, is not an easy film to see. Not on any streaming service (including the BFI Player) currently. The Criterion Collection edition is helpfully embedded on the wikipedia page for the film, so we watched that.

The con artist is an enduring film trope – what’s more natural to act out than a scene in which one person (at least) is already acting (‘lying for money’). From The Night of the Hunter, Hustle and The Grifters to Bowfinger (a film which bizarrely can be seen as kin to this masterpiece) film has been fascinated by er the grifter and the con artist.

Kiarastami’s starting point is a real story. A poor man struggling to feed his family, Hossain Sabzian, is sitting next to a well-dressed woman on a bus when she notices his book, a screenplay written by a famous Iranian film director, Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Quick as a flash he says he is Makhmalbaf and soon has an invitation to visit the woman’s family. Over the next few days he insinuates himself into her household, under the pretext of » Continue Reading.

Year: 1956 Director: John Ford

New Year – so rather than tackle anything new it’s another film from the Sight and Sound 2022 critics poll of the best films of all time. If Meshes of the Afternoon, a 15 min black and white silent short, was one of the most obscure then the film one spot above it in 15th place, The Searchers, is one of the most familiar. John Ford’s 1956 Western stands in that period where the genre was in transition, from the straightforward studio films with its reliable cast of heroes and villains to the cynical and nihilistic spaghetti westerns of the sixties.

John Wayne made a career playing the cowboy hero, and provides a magnetic central focus as an ex-confederate soldier who returns to the home of his brother. The opening action sees the menfolk lured away from the house by Native Americans, enabling another Comanche raiding party to loot, kill and most significantly kidnap Wayne’s two young nieces. Wayne and the adopted brother of the family Martin spend the entire rest of the film looking for these missing girls.

No need to rehash the plot further but instead talk about what Ford does in » Continue Reading.

Year: 1943 Director: Maya Deren

If there’s a prize for least-seen film on the Sight and Sound 2022 poll then number 14 I am sure would be in with a shout. Meshes of the Afternoon is a 14-minute black and white silent film from 1943, made by avant-garde US/Ukrainian film-maker Maya Deren. Deren plays the protagonist, a young woman who returns home and sees a mysterious hooded figure. She falls asleep in a chair and in a series of dream-like replays of her return home a number of actions are repeated: she sees a mysterious hooded figure with a mirrored face. She opens the door with a key, and later on the key reappears from her mouth. She goes up a flight of stairs and lifts the needle from a record playing on a portable phonograph. There are telephones around the house off the hook and bread and a knife. Later on a doppelganger of her appears, and a man who she attempts to injure. In the final scenes she appears again in the chair now dead. If David Lynch had never made films perhaps this film would not have the current prominence it has, though clearly a film that » Continue Reading.

Year: 1962 Director: Agnes Varda

Cleo from 5 to 7 is number 14 on the 2022 Sight and Sound Poll, another big climber from 207 in 2012. Another female directed film, after Jeanne Dielman at 1 and Beau Travail at 7. It’s (almost) a real-time film, following French pop singer Cleo around Paris from 5pm to 6:30pm as she awaits the results of a medical test.

And what a breeze this film is. Florence, Cleo is her stage name, is first seen at a tarot reading, where the predicted results of her test are not seen by the cards as good. She meets her maid (a fabulous channeling of Lynn from Alan Partridge energy) in a cafe and goes hat shopping. This first third is fabulous flaneuring – streets, cafes, taxi rides, shops, pavements all crammed full of interest. Director Varda was a cinematographer and each shot is immaculately framed, despite a loose and dynamic feel to the camework.

The energy drops in a long scene at her bijou flat – who wouldn’t want a swing and a coterie of kittens in their living room? – as firstly her older lover and then her Rogers and Hammerstein drop by » Continue Reading.