Category: film

From https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/polls/martin-scorsese-winning-sight-sounds-best-films-2023-poll-with-killers-flower-moon

I love this simple little shot. Talking, but in two different directions – at cross-purposes, perhaps — not directing any emotion towards the other, in a bedroom with the ambience of a prison cell.

A 25-minute film wherein an old telephone pole in Iceland is chopped short and a treehouse is built on top of it, finished and maintained by three young siblings. Fixed POV throughout.

I shot this frame just for the colours:

This is a wonderful little film. Shot over eighteen months, with the director’s own kids (and, I suspect, on or adjacent to their own home), it’s kind of everything. It’s the seasons. It’s kids being weird and shitty. It’s kids working together, often badly. There’s even some dramatic tension in the last half, that actually hooked me – really cleverly done and really effective. And it’s utterly beautiful. I’m so glad I found this film today. I watched it on MUBI.

Clever restructuring of the top of the play and a very clever introduction of the three witches:

The thing is shot in a 21st Century Britain, but in Lear’s first appearance, his clothes evoke Stalin. That is a really interesting choice and a signal of his opening, brutal scene.

Above, also Karl Johnson as the Fool.

An object lesson in how “mainstream” art slowly eats what was once “avant-garde.”

I once watched an episode of CSI with a sequence of William Petersen slowly washing down a bloody autopsy table with Sigur Ros’ “Svefn-g-englar” playing over the top of it, and thinking that just twenty years earlier it would have been a short art film.

A short directed by Bi Gan. A strange black cat does a scarecrow a favour and burns him to death. The black cat puts on the scarecrow’s coat and hat and goes on a journey to investigate three “weirdoes” who might know what “the most precious thing in the world” is. He recharges a robot who dispenses heartbreak candy to orphans, gives an eye to a woman who eats special noodles to delete her memory (a stunning, surreal image of memory regained, here), and a demonic slot machine balanced on a drum that eats souls one note at a time has a secret. And the cat’s quest is not what it seems. There are wonderfully unexpected visual tricks all over this piece – it’s a delight of invention. A scene that slowly starts to seem like a David Lynch bit turns out to have forced perspective stunts and a great colour-filter gag in it. Every moment is richer than you expect. I watched it on MUBI, but I’m sure it’s knocking around elsewhere, and it’ll be the best ten minutes of your life that day.

Adapted by writer Conor McPherson, staged by Ian Rickson and directed for film here by Ross MacGibbon. It showed up on BBC Four one night, and I clicked over to it because it features my previous collaborator Richard Armitage, and he’s always revelatory when he stretches a bit. UNCLE VANYA was at the Harold Pinter Theatre in 2019 – I have a feeling I knew about that? Turns out this was shot during lockdown, when Covid closed the theatre it was being performed in. They decided to preserve the staging and performances by forming a bubble and shooting the play in a hybrid of theatre and film. The hybridity is seen in examples like breaking the fourth wall — when members of the cast address the audience, they would have stepped forward, perhaps been isolated, but film allows for the close-up, making those fourth-wall monologues more intimate and fluid. The shifting between methods is often electrifying, and creates a real dynamism in crucial scenes like Vanya with the gun.

The set is stunning. Autumnal glory, both beautiful and promising decay. Toby Jones is magical, Richard Armitage pairs his intensity with some carefully-observed, heartbreaking little motions. and Roger Allam is, as ever, a delight to watch. But the writing! The adaptation is timeloose – sometimes with the sound of the nineteenth century, sometimes explosively contemporary. This fits VANYA, a turn-of-the-century piece sitting on the pivot point between past and future. And, my god, it flows and crackles and surprises.

Immediately after watching it, I went to see if there was a physical edition. Here’s the UK listing and here’s the US listing. It’s currently a tenner in the UK and 15 in the US! Bargain.

A lyric essay in film form, directed by Jessica Beshir, exploring the use, rituals and grim realities of and around khat culture in Ethiopia. It is a remarkably beautiful, hazy film, shot entirely in monochrome, moving around its world in slow stoned tread. The film’s intoxicated lens makes for an impressionistic swirl of lives and experiences, rather than a documentary’s focus and hard edges, and is all the better for that.

There are moments that made me just sit still and be in the lives of the people recorded here: the man explaining in slow drugged cadence that the taste of coffee has changed since they started growing more khat, for some reason, transfixed me.

I watched FAYA DAYI on MUBI, a subscription service you can check out at this link here, and Criterion put it out on blu-ray.