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: 2021 Director: Joel Coen

I’m having a bit of a Macbeth week and have watched two film versions.

First up I watched The Tragedy Of Macbeth directed by Joel Coen (2021). Loved it. To be honest, there are very few Shakespeare screen adaptations I don’t think are worth watching. He’s a decent writer, that Shakespeare chap, and his works translate to screen even better than stage, imho. (His prologue to Henry V calls the stage “an unworthy scaffold”. Well, I call big bucks screen adaptations “a worthy scaffold”.) I didn’t get into him via dull, reluctant reading-round-the-class at school or going to the theatre (as if!), but by watching the films. I like watching his plays performed with subtitles activated and sometimes with the original text to compare with. I’m not so keen on the “old school” screen adaptations, Olivier, Welles, Gielgud, Burton etc. The old black and whites. Funnily enough though, The Tragedy of Macbeth is in black and white, and boy is it beautiful to watch. The combination of lighting and shadows, the crisp clear cinematography and the austere, timeless sets (it was shot entirely on a soundstage) make it a visual treat. That’s its main » Continue Reading.

Year: 2023 Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

Part 1 – What it is

It is a stunning visual trip where almost every frame would be worthy of saving to keep on your wall, whether it is set in Victorian London, the slums of Alexandria or a Parisian whorehouse.

It is an astonishing, committed, all-in central performance by Emma Stone as Bella Baxter.

It is the story of Bella Baxter, the brain of an unborn child transplanted into the skull of her suicide mother by the brilliant, if mad, surgeon Godwin ‘God’ Baxter.

It is the story of Bella’s accelerated sexual, linguistic and intellectual development from baby to adult woman.

It is film which some will dismiss based on sexual themes played out by a character with the mind of an infant. ‘What a pretty little retard!’, says God’s student assistant McCandless on first meeting Bella, before falling in love with her.

It is a film which will strongly split opinions. After seeing the film I saw a screen grab of Google Reviews where about 45% gave the film 5*, 40% gave it 1* and the small remainder were evenly split among the middling scores. Both The Guardian and the Daily Mail gave » 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.

Year: 1984 Director: Jonathon Demme

I’ve had a quite a history with Stop Making Sense (SMS). Way back in December 1983 I was visiting by brother in San Francisco and we saw the show at the San Francisco Auditorium. Standing up the front we watched the whole thing unfold as they wheeled out the staging and as additional performers came on stage. It was a cracker of a show.

The album came out they day I was to fly back, so I landed in Australia with probably the first copy on the continent. I think it the following day that I was back on air with my African and roots radio show. I figured that from Fear of Music on the Heads were close enough to African to warrant inclusion. So, I played it. The whole lot, both sides, stopping only to flip the disc. For the only time in my 8 years on air the switchboard was flooded. At least it proved to me that some was actually listening.

Come January 1984 Talking Heads are coming out to Oz for a festival and did a show in Melbourne. So off I go again. Much less of the » Continue Reading.

Year: 1929 Director: Dziga Vertov

Numbers one to eight on the Sight and Sound 2022 poll are – diverse in time, language and theme – broadly feature films. Scripts, actors, costumes and sets telling a story. Number nine is a different beast altogether – a hour-long documentary film chronicling urban life in twenties Soviet Union – AKA The Man With a Movie Camera, directed by Dziga Vertov in 1929. Arising out of techniques developed in his earlier ‘kino-pravda’ newsreels in the twenties, Vertov’s hour-long silent film sought to create a completely new film language without any reference to other art-forms like literature, theatre or painting.

The structure of MWAMC is fairly straightforward: there’s a very ‘meta’ opening in which we the audience in the cinema see the audience assemble in the cinema, the band tune up, the projectionist fire up the projector and so on. Sadly no DVD version in which we assemble on the sofa, Pringles and beer to hand, while someone feeds the disc in and tries to sync up the sound bar.

Then the film itself follows the rhythm of a day in the life of a Soviet city – compiled from shots in Mosow, Kiev » Continue Reading.

Year: 2001 Director: David Lynch

There’s been a slight hiatus in assembling the watching party, but last night we sat down to enjoy the eighth best film ever made – which according to the Sight and Sound 2022 poll is Mulholland Drive (or Dr). It’s place as the apex of the Lynch canon appears now unquestioned, above Blue Velvet and er Dune. All the more mysterious that this was his last film that in any way could be called a mainstream feature film. Inland Empire, his next, was shot on digital film and independently distributed.

The basic structure of Mulholland Dr. is straightforward: after a car crash a nameless young woman wanders through LA in shock, eventually ending up at new-actress-in-town Betty’s flat. Staring at a poster the amnesiac calls herself Rita and the two women investigate the circumstances behind her crash. In a parallel plot, maverick film director Adam is trying to prevent a mysterious gang taking control of his current movie, including insisting that an unknown actress called Camilla Rhodes play the lead.

As ‘Rita’ and Betty follow the trail, there are a host of familiar Lynch tropes, including the small man who spoke backwards in Twin Peaks » Continue Reading.

Year: 2023 Director: Christopher Nolan

Unless I’ve missed it, I don’t think anyone has attempted a review of this so far, so I thought I’d start the ball rolling. I don’t have a massive amount to say about the film, but I’ll give you a brief run through of my thoughts.

The basic background to this is that it’s a biopic of J Robert Oppenheimer, the slightly eccentric individual who was in charge of the Manhattan Project. He had a bit of a moral crisis after his work led to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings (although I understand in real life his change or heart was maybe a bit more complex and ambiguous than is portrayed here), and then in the 50s he was blacklisted and victimised under the McCarthy communist witch-hunt stuff.

In the hands of a traditional, safe director it might have made a dull but worthy straightforward story. In the hands of Christopher Nolan, as expected, you get something a bit different. Opinions will vary (and it certainly seems to have gathered a few fans and ecstatic critics) but personally I didn’t think it quite worked.

At the heart of it, the reason is simple and easily » Continue Reading.

Year: 1953 Director: Yasujiro Ozu

After Citizen Kane and Vertigo Tokyo Story is the fourth greatest film of all time, according to the 2022 Sight and Sound poll. It was third in 2012, and fifth in 2002. The plot is simplicity itself: an aged mother and father (68 is seen as a venerable age) from western Japan visit their grown up children in Tokyo for the first time. Neighbourhood doctor Koichi and beauty salon owner Shigi both regard the parents visit as an interruption to their busy lives with their own children and jobs. Noriko, the widowed wife of another son posted missing in WW2, is far more selfless with time and trouble. An effort to pack the parents off to a seaside resort in the guise of treating them is a complete failure, and the parents are practically hurried out the door back home.

The first half of the film sets out an entry point as a generational comedy, but the story pivots on two parallel scenes resulting from the parents return from the resort. The father hooks up with some former colleagues, and they get steaming drunk in a geisha bar, proclaiming their disappointment with their offspring. Their » Continue Reading.

Year: 1915 Director: Claire Denis

Beau Travail is like Jeane Dielemann another recent film to leap up the Sight and Sound survey. In 2012 it was a lowly 79. In 2022 it’s number seven and second in my odyssey through the 2022 poll. I did say I was not watching these strictly in order, next up will be In the Mood for Love (no 5). Nobody surely needs another review of Vertigo (2) Citizen Kane (3) or Space Odyssey (7). It’s a tight 90 minutes and doesn’t waste a second.

The story is loosely derived from Melville’s Billy Budd (as the Britten Opera, which appears in the soundtrack, is too). In place of the ship our closed institution is the barracks of an elite French troop of foreign legion troops based in Djibouti. The time of the film is not specified, but as Djibouti became independent from France in 1977 I am guessing sometime in the early seventies.

Sargeant Galoup has decades of exemplary military service, and rules his troop like the perennial drill sergeant figure by being the most masculine, hardest, fittest man amongst them. His bond to the captain is challenged by the arrival of new recruit Sentain » Continue Reading.

Year: 1975 Director: Chantel Akerman

If only there was a musical equivalent to the Sight and Sound once in a decade poll of the world’s greatest films. Imagine 1,639 music critics, academics, curators and archivists from across the world submitting a top-ten poll. If nothing else it creates a list against which all others can be measured. No chance.Sigh.

So, anyway onto the Sight and Sound greatest films of all time list. The 2022 list delivered a thunderbolt by proclaiming Chantel Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman 23, Rue Du Commerce, Bruxelles number one. Vertigo, the top one last time, falls to two and Citizen Kane is at three. Surely no-one needs a write-up of either of these but Jeanne Dielman I hear you say. What on earth is that. Take this as the start of an impromptu series working its down the films on the list newer to me, and probably to you too. So no 2001 (no 6) or The Godfather (12) but absolutely yes to Beau Travail (no 7). Can’t promise they will all be in strictly rank order as some are as short as 14 mins, others weigh in at over three hours.

We have a brand new » Continue Reading.

Year: 1972 Director: Danish Television

An annual screening of a Dead concert had a hiatus for 2 years due to COVID but was back this year featuring their concert at theTivoli in Copenhagen during their famous Europe 1972 tour. Pretty tight and in tune, one drummer and Jerry not a junkie this was pretty much peak period Dead. though OOAA.This was the tour with all the clown masks bought before the tour at a novelty shop. These days they looked a bit creepy with all the horror /serial killers shows with clown masks. Fun fact the roadie kept the masks for years but he kept them in a box that was exposed to sunlight so they have all melted.

The concert was filmed for a TV broadcast – the sound was excellent , the video looked a bit like a VHS tape transfer so, given this is touted as a fully restored high definition version, the previous extant copies must have been a bit rough.

An audience of less than 20 at our showing and just one “chick” dead dancing in the aisle.I expected more people but there were there other showings.

A gaunt Pigpen opened the show with It » Continue Reading.

Year: 2021 Director: Eskil Vogt

Like everyone normal, I have a mentally curated list of ‘outstanding performances by unknown kids in foreign language films’. Au Revoir Les Enfants, My Life As A Dog, Pelle The Conqueror, Cinema Paradiso, etc. I’d have to add The Innocents to that list. Especially one Alva Brynsmo Ramstad as a profoundly autistic girl and Rakel Lenora Fløttum as her sister. Utterly convincing and captivating performances from both of them. I came across the film because it was placed number one in Rotten Tomatoes list of “best horror films of 2022”. I’m not sure I’d consider it a horror film. It has none of the genre’s cliches; no jump scares or blood and gore or poorly lit scenes (it’s mostly set outside in the comfortingly bright daylight). What it does have is a great build-up of tension. In Kevin Maher’s review in The Times he wrote: “Finally, a film for grown-up audiences who are sick of watching superhero movies and feel that cinema has been ruined by superhero movies but, all the same, quite fancy watching one last superhero movie as long as it’s a superhero movie for grown-ups.” Calling it “a superhero movie” is way » Continue Reading.

Year: 1991 Director: Oliver Stone

This isn’t so much a review of the film itself, but more just that I want to scribble down a few thoughts after watching this for the first time since I saw it 30 years ago in the cinema.

I’m interested in what people think of the film, and of The Doors themselves, and whether Oliver Stone does them justice here.

It’s pretty derided, isn’t it, this movie? The very model of how to make an overblown, ridiculous rock biopic, and taking itself far too seriously. And yet… It must have done something right because when I saw this as a teenager it absolutely blew me away and (along with Pink Floyd’s The Wall) solidified in my head the archetype of the alpha male rock star: that ‘elegantly wasted’ thing, an old head on young handsome shoulders (with leather trousers and a six pack) going on a voyage of self discovery and excess, too cool for the square that is trying to box them in. Is there any one among you who also saw this as a teenager and is going to deny the big effect it had on them?

As we get older, of » Continue Reading.

Year: 2021 Director: Pablo Larraín

What I was expecting:

1.) A solid biopic with a decent-enough performance from the Pope of Mope, Kristen Stewart — basically a big-screen version of The Crown.

What I got:

1.) An intense, claustrophobic, hallucinatory psychodrama, more Mulholland Drive than The Crown.

2.) A prowling camera that turns Sandringham into The Overlook Hotel and the Royal family into the sinister, watchful islanders from The Wicker Man.

3.) A performance from Kristen Stewart that is definitely excellent and intuitively leans into the unexpected weirdness of the whole thing, but still didn’t impress me quite as much as Emma Corrin in The Crown.

4.) A film that often gets in its own way, conveniently forgetting Diana’s own aristocratic roots in its rush to emphasise her outlier credentials, overlooking the fact that she spends almost no time – over Christmas! – with the two boys to whom she is supposedly devoted, and inadvertently inviting you to share the Royal family’s frustration at her frankly flaky behaviour.

5.) A sublimely skronky score from Jonny Greenwood.

6.) Beautiful, understated supporting turns from Sally Hawkins, Sean Harris And Timothy Spall.

7.) A film that, impressive though it often is and » Continue Reading.

Year: 2021 Director: Dennis Villeneuve

I am surprised that no-one has yet reviewed Dune, so here we go. We saw it at the IMAX in Birmingham and would certainly recommend that you see it on the biggest screen possible. It’s an utterly immersive visual and sound experience. It will be no surprise, and has been much noted, that Villeneuve can craft a visual world like no-one else currently in film. Whatever you thought of the plot of Bladerunner 2049, it looked amazing from start to finish, as did Arrival in turn before it. There’s very little actual outer space , and the visuals of the movies are dominated by the vast open sand and rock scapes of Arrakis, appearing even dryer by contrast with the lush Northern European grasslands of the Atriedes homeworld, and the murky storm and rain of the Harkonnens. Moving through these three worlds are armies, medieval in feel, transported by enormous spaceships whose weight is so oppressive they appear to be sculpted from stone rather than metal. By contrast the ornithopthers hop, buzz and flit around the world.

In terms of plot Dune is so well known that there’s perhaps not much to add here. I » Continue Reading.