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Three Vampires Walked the Earth

Long, long ago, in a time before US and WMD and AI etc, three vampires walked the earth, though only at night. Since then, technologies have emerged that can dilute the perils of daylight and the three have thrived, enabled in sundry ways to exercise their powers beyond what was ever imagined. In the Middle Ages, the oldest of them, Deathly Tyrant, also known as Drac Terror, could only spread…

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With the Flow

Though I have vivid childhood memories of being taken to Snow White and Bambi, I rarely felt inclined towards animation in later years. So seeing Flow the other day, at a friend’s suggestion, was a pleasant surprise. In a world devoid of humans, where rising floodwaters have left houses and at least one whole city abandoned, a group of animals struggles to survive. They don’t have names, they…

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Hard Truths & A Real Pain

As Pansy, in Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s performance is a tour de force, and must have been exhausting, certainly one to admire, but never likely to win hearts or awards. To begin with Pansy suggests something of the stand-up comedian whose outrageous spleen-filled rant has just veered off into reality, but the relentless anger and ill humour lead nowhere, except perhaps to…

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The Brutalist

THE BRUTALIST Where are we when The Brutalist begins? There’s a young woman facing an invisible questioner, but she won’t speak. She seems anxious, frightened perhaps. Elsewhere, in semidarkness, someone struggles through a melee of people thrown this way and that, directionless yet somehow purposeful, assailed by a banging, clashing cacophony of noise. We are amid the scrambling urgencies of…

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The Brutalist

THE BRUTALIST Where are we when The Brutalist begins? There’s a young woman facing an invisible questioner, but she won’t speak. She seems anxious, frightened perhaps. Elsewhere, in semidarkness, someone struggles through a melee of people thrown this way and that, directionless yet somehow purposeful, assailed by a banging, clashing cacophony of noise. We are amid the scrambling urgencies of…

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Up Wollstonecraft Street and Down with Rhodes

Up Wollstonecraft Street and Down with Rhodes

I originally posted this in 2015, when the issue of the Rhodes statue erupted. And I had some thoughts on street names as commemoration which I think are worth returning to, now that various Labour councils plan to review these as well as reconsider monuments. It’s high time for this conservative country to confront the past at street level.

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Turning to Burton and Apollinaire

Turning to Burton and Apollinaire

All week I’ve been listening to a new Radio 4 series, ‘The New Anatomy of Melancholy’, which takes Robert Burton’s insights in his Anatomy of Melancholy(1621) as the comparative basis for an exploration of mental illness in present-day Britain, in particular the experience of depression. It’s very timely, though probably prepared before the Covid lockdown, and comforting, because, in its emphasis…

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Emblems and Anthems

Last night, as people repeatedly shouted ‘Freedom!’ on the radio, and on Channel 4 News I watched the jubilation at a working-class pub in South Shields, the angry, irrational part of me came to the fore and shouted back: Fools! Damn your stupid eyes! Of course, these triumphalists are not the ones to blame for yesterday’s sad outcome. I just needed to shout at them. In the years since the…

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Film Highlights of 2019 and Films Re-seen

Film Highlights of 2019 and Films Re-seen

Film highlights of 2019

Pedro Almodróvar’s Pain and Glory

Jafar Panahi’s 3 Faces

Once Upon A Time in Hollywood

Always controversial, often dislikeable, Tarantino nonetheless succeeds again. His satire on Tinseltown heroics is hugely funny and entertaining.

Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite

Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma

Transit: how the past lives in the present and the present constructs the past. Another…

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What Kind of Nationalism Won?

What Kind of Nationalism Won?

There’s no good way of thinking about this election outcome. I still feel numb, weirdly detached from the cold reality of it. Perhaps I’m unconsciously waiting for some remedy to be found, though I know this is futile. We all need defences when on the brink of despair and depression. Maybe it’s too soon to contemplate what lies ahead? The shape of things to come is ugly, for sure.

Since the exit…

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Almodóvar's Pain and Glory

Almodóvar’s Pain and Glory

I think this is Almodóvar’s best film since Volver, and probably even better than that energetic women-centred comedy thriller. Pain and Gloryfeatures familiar Almodóvar themes of romantic love, passionate desire, friendship and the mother-son relationship. But the director is about to turn 70 and there’s a new theme: the one about being old. And this is the best film I’ve ever seen about ageing,…

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Remembering (and Mis-remembering) Tiananmen

This is what I blogged five years ago on the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Today is the 30th. Last weekend I saw Jia Zhangke’s film, A Touch of Sin, in which he continues to show us how life in China is shaped by the economic and social upheavals initiated in the 1980s. In Platform (2000), set on a remote edge of the Great Wall as that decade proceeds, and Still Life (2006),…

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High Life

High Life appears to deny us the sensory pleasures we have come to expect from the films of Claire Denis, whether it’s the vibrant light and colour of Chocolat and Beau Travail (filmed respectively in Cameroon and Djibouti), the busy emotional warmth of 35 Shots of Rum or the comedy of Let the Sunshine In. As I watched this stark film I felt both gripped and reluctant. Afterwards I decided it…

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3 Faces: Panahi's Iran

3 Faces: Panahi’s Iran

Cinema has an honourable history of exiles: directors, actors, writers, producers and others with the diverse skills involved. Some 3000 left Austria and Germany when the Nazis came to power, or soon after, most of them ending up in Hollywood. McCarthyist blacklisting brought Hollywood refugees to London and Paris. Pinochet’s Chile and the Argentinian Junta drove the likes of Raúl Ruiz, Valeria…

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After Life

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life is now on at the BFI in a season of his films. Of those I’ve seen, the most recent being Shoplifters, this is his best. It’s extraordinary.

In a shabby building surrounded by autumnal trees, a benign and diligent bureaucracy presides over the arrival of the newly dead. This is a place of transition where a new intake is received routinely every Monday morning.…

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Goodbye Agnès Varda

Agnès Varda died today, aged 90. Seeing her just a few months ago in her last film, Faces Places, so full of life and spirit, I imagined she would have at least another decade ahead. She seemed to be planning an exhibition as her next project. It’s ridiculous to talk of someone’s premature death at 90, but that’s how it feels. Had she made only Cléo from 5 to 7, one of the defining films of the…

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McCarthy/Trump

I’m reading Robin Robertson’s wonderful The Long Take, both a novel and a poem in which Walker, a young man traumatised and haunted by his experiences of the Normandy landings, heads for the US rather than return to his native Nova Scotia. In search of work and a new life, he makes his way from New York to Los Angeles and San Francisco. Along with the characters who populate them, the streets of…

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