Search Results

“... A middle-aged man​ looks insistently at a young woman. He doesn’t speak. He is smiling slightly, playing with her, but also seeking to trouble her. After a moment she says: ‘If you want to have a staring contest with me, you will lose.’ After a much longer moment he laughs. Has he found his match? Does she understand him, or does she just know how to play this particular game? The film in which this scene occurs, and in which a whole series of versions of it are offered to us, is Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread, hailed as a masterpiece by some critics and viewers and deemed an annoying waste of time by others ...”

“... There is​ something very Far Eastern about this,’ William Empson says in Some Versions of Pastoral, meaning the manner of Marvell’s poem ‘The Garden’. The remark is mildly intriguing but pretty loose, and even if we think of Empson as having the thought while he lectured to his Japanese students before he wrote it down, the Orient still seems stereotyped and far away ...”

“... The​ first feature-length film by RaMell Ross, Hale County This Morning, This Evening, has been praised for creating a new genre within the documentary form and evoking with unusual clarity the life of a particular community. I wouldn’t dispute the general sense of these claims, but there is something too grand and final about them, an implication that we know what the film is about and how it works ...”

“... Spike Lee​ , as befits a film school graduate, is a master of montage. His cuts and juxtapositions often say more than his dialogue does, perhaps more than any dialogue could. This is especially marked in BlacKkKlansman, which has been widely hailed as Lee’s return to form after a spell in the movie wilderness. The film opens with a shot of a railway yard littered with bodies, wounded, dead and dying ...”

“... The film​ begins with some anxious jokes about the changing times. The ancien régime is mentioned, meaning both the political order before the Revolution and yesterday’s state of play in French publishing and digital media. The possibility is floated that Twitter will usher in a new golden age of the epigram, make brevity the soul of wit again, rather than give people permission to ramble for ever in short bursts ...”

“... The meanings​ of its title sit a little heavily on I’m Thinking of Ending Things, originally a novel by Iain Reid, which Charlie Kaufman has now adapted as a movie (on Netflix). Out of context, I’m Thinking of Ending Things strongly suggests the possibility of suicide. In context too, as it happens. However, in both Reid and Kaufman’s versions it also evokes time, ageing, dementia, loss, what things look like before they go ...”

“... Lee Daniels’s​ The United States v. Billie Holiday (on Sky Cinema) hesitates a little about what kind of movie it is. Is it about the war on drugs, with Holiday’s career as an important instance in its history? Or is it about Holiday, with the war on drugs as part of the background? When we read a title card at the beginning of the film telling us that in 1937 the US Senate failed to pass an anti-lynching bill, and then another at the end stating that a similar bill considered in 2020 ‘has yet to pass’, Holiday’s repeated singing of ‘Strange Fruit’ feels like a political rather than a musical event, and we are clearly in the first movie ...”

“... Shaka King’s​ Judas and the Black Messiah (available on Amazon Prime) leaves us in no doubt as to who is the more interesting character. This preference is obscured (or perhaps highlighted) by the fact that the actors playing the two parts (LaKeith Stanfield and Daniel Kaluuya) have both been nominated as ‘best supporting actor’ at this year’s Oscars, as if there were no main role, or it might be dangerous to say which it is ...”

“... Much of​ Ridley Scott’s Napoleon feels like an unintended essay on the art of cinema. The good bits, and there are quite a few, make up a silent film with some noise. The terrible bits are over-simplified soap opera, where people talk and are supposed to have feelings. Critics and scholars have complained about ‘historical inaccuracies’, but the most interesting deviations from fact are not that ...”

“... Ingmar Bergman’s​ Fanny and Alexander is currently back in cinemas, forty years after its first release in Sweden. Both early and late on in the film, there is talk of a ‘little world’. On the first occasion, the world is the theatre; on the second, it is the family. There are plenty of links between them, and several subsets of each (magic lanterns, puppets; morally casual households, grimly puritanical ones ...”

“... Ayellow bus​ takes tourists around a remote island to visit sites associated with a great director’s life and work. Another director takes this location as the setting for a troubled and troubling film about screenwriting. We are watching Mia Hansen-Løve’s latest film but one, Bergman Island (2021). Reality serves as a film historian without help from anyone except the inventors of the tour, but surely Hansen-Løve, who wrote and directed the movie, is going too far when she has the words ‘Bergman Safari’ painted on the side of the bus ...”

“... Cinema,’ Christian Petzold once said in an interview, ‘always tells the stories of people who do not belong anymore but who want to belong once again.’ ‘Always’ seems a bit of a stretch, but the idea is interesting. Petzold thinks of John Wayne in The Searchers – ‘also a ghost’, he says – and we could add James Stewart in Vertigo struggling to bring back to life a woman who isn’t dead ...”

“... Reflecting​ on Megalopolis, a film he first envisaged in the 1970s and filmed (mostly in Georgia) in 2022, Francis Ford Coppola recalled thinking about a famous definition offered by Jean-Luc Godard: a film is composed of a beginning, middle and end, although not necessarily in that order. With a little tweaking the phrase helps us to contemplate this sprawling new movie ...”

“... opens, as the tale does not, with a stress on the imagination. ‘Do you have an imagination?’ Michael Redgrave asks, as the feckless playboy uncle who wants the children off his hands. But he’s not glancing at the development of the story, he merely wants to know if Miss Giddens (the character is unnamed in the tale) can see herself in the job he wants ...”

“... the way we imagined the 1960s when we thought they were still the 1950s. Larry Gopnik, played by Michael Stuhlbarg with a fine capacity for recurring surprise, as if he were Clark Kent who kept forgetting he had another identity, is an assistant professor of physics at the local university. He is just coming up for tenure, and one form of the petering-out ...”