Top ten films of 2022

28 February 2023 ~ Mark Allison ~ Leave a comment

After two years of pandemic-related uncertainty, movies finally got back on their feet in 2022. Cinemas were open, and stayed that way with plenty of pictures to fill them, from mega-budget crowd pleasers like Joseph Kosinski’s Top Gun: Maverick to Charlotte Wells’ devastatingly personal debut Aftersun. Meanwhile, streaming services continued to grow and multiply, delivering another serious awards contender in the form of Netflix’s First World War drama All Quiet on the Western Front. After the triumph of Apple TV+’s CODA at least year’s Oscars, it’s clear the streamers are prepared to compete with traditional distributors for awards as well as audience.

In any case, it’s been another delightfully diverse year for film fans, and while I could never claim to have been entirely comprehensive in my viewing habits, I hope this list manages to scratch the surface of the fantastic range of movies that graced all screens big and small last year.

As usual, narrowing down my ten favourite films proved an agonising task. So, briefly, a few honourable mentions for those which only just missed the cut: Clio Bernard’s Ali and Ava is a tender love story set against a kitchen-sink milieu; Tár, Todd Field’s first film in 16 years, is a complex and quietly unsettling character study, with another virtuoso performance from Cate Blanchett; and as someone who’s never been a huge fan of Baz Luhrmann, I didn’t have particularly high hopes going into Elvis, but three hours later I was in floods of tears.

Now for the top ten…

10. Top Gun: Maverick

Dir. Joseph Kosinski

In what feels like dire times for the action blockbuster, Tom Cruise has emerged as the genre’s saviour. Who knew that a belated sequel to Top Gun, Tony Scott’s thoroughly mediocre 1986 actioner, could be so refreshing? Drawing heavily on Michael Anderson’s 1955 war epic The Dam Busters and placing a welcome emphasis on practical stunt work, Top Gun: Maverick is a finely-tuned machine for generating excitement; an exhilarating spectacle of steel and sweat which demands to be seen on the largest and loudest screen possible. Cruise stars alongside a compelling cast of hot shot pilots, lead by a charismatic Miles Teller, who provide some character and a sense of human jeopardy amidst all the aeronautical adventure – elements sorely missing from many of the cookie-cutter blockbusters which typically clog up multiplexes.

9. The Duke

Dir. Roger Michell

Originally premiering at the 2020 Venice Film Festival, The Duke finally received a wide release in early 2022 after a lengthy covid-induced delay. In the intervening months, director Roger Michell sadly died, turning this into a final, posthumous release. It’s a worthy swansong for the veteran British film-maker, telling the stranger-than-fiction story of a 1961 art theft from the National Gallery. Much more than another tired brit-com, The Duke is a beguiling fable about moral courage and the personal costs of activism, anchored by charming performances from Helen Mirren and Jim Broadbent.

8. The Northman

Dir. Robert Eggers

An old-fashioned historical epic with a contemporary twist, The Northman is a gloriously bloody Viking revenge story which takes no prisoners. Director and co-writer Robert Eggers builds a deeply immersive portrait of a medieval society whose values and beliefs are entirely alien to our own. There are few compromises for modern sensibilities, Eggers never disguising the fact that his characters are brutal, vicious people doing what they must to survive in an unforgiving world. Alexander Skarsgård’s fearsome lead performance is similarly uncompromising, bringing a wolfish ruthlessness to his vengeful Viking prince, Amleth.

7. Emily

Dir. Frances O’Connor

Andrew Dominik’s film Blonde caused controversy last year with its lurid and heavily fictionalised account of Marilyn Monroe’s interior life. A more interesting take on the biopic was was Frances O’Connor’s Emily, which renders a similarly fictionalised vision of 19th-century author Emily Bronte. Like Blonde, Emily is not to be taken literally as an account of Bronte’s life; there are wild deviations from historical fact alongside ghostly, supernatural touches of which the author herself would be proud. O’Connor, in her directorial debut, uses Bronte’s story to examine the trauma of bereavement and heartbreak, and the catharsis of finding renewal and vindication through art. It’s an eerie, elemental film which makes striking use of the Yorkshire landscape and its inclement conditions, with a commanding performance fro Emma Mackey at its centre.

6. All Quiet on the Western Front

Dir. Edward Berger

Those expecting a faithful adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s original novel are likely to be disappointed. Although a few character names and sequences have been retained, the narrative of this new German-language picture bears only a passing resemblance to Remarque’s 1929 anti-war tome, or its lauded 1930 Hollywood film adaptation. On its own terms, however, Edward Berger’s modernised take is a brilliantly brutal parable which gives a fresh perspective on the absurd horror of the First World War. Taking place predominantly within the final few days of the conflict (one of many departures from the book), the film cleverly contrasts tense armistice negotiations with the mud and gore of the front line. The sequences of trench warfare are some of the finest ever put to film, depicting the mobile and mechanised fighting of the late-war period which is seldom explored in cinema.

5. Decision to Leave

Dir. Park Chan-wook

An unashamed Alfred Hitchcock pastiche, this serpentine mystery-thriller from Park Chan-wook is another ingeniously plotted and visually delectable tour-de-force from the Korean master of suspense. Insomniac Busan detective Hae-Jun (Park Hae-il), an impressive yet curiously pathetic homicide cop, finds his professional and personal convictions in conflict when he investigates the beautiful Seo-Rae (Tang Wei) for the murder of her husband. It’s a familiar tale of a weary detective obsessed with his young, female suspect, but any expectations that come with this well-worn setup are swiftly upended by a series of mischievous plot machinations. It’s less explicitly brutal than much of Chan-wook’s oeuvre, but packs no less of a punch.

4. Aftersun

Dir. Charlotte Wells

A film about memory, and a woman’s efforts to understand the father she loved but hardly knew. 11-year-old Sophie (Frankie Corio) is on summer holiday with her young father, Calum (Paul Mescal), whose outward affection barely conceals a profound and destructive inner torment. Director Charlotte Wells adopts Sophie’s child’s-eye-view, offering a fragmented and contradictory vision of her father. His repressed anguish is brilliantly communicated by Mescal, providing brief yet intense glimpses at the suffering that lies beneath his affable façade. Structured as an extended flashback, much of what we see seems obscured behind a veil of remembrance, and the distinction between fact and fantasy is blurred. Gregory Oke’s cinematography contributes to this brilliant ambiguity, mixing handheld DV cam footage with vibrant 35mm. It’s a heartrending film which builds towards a kinetic and emotionally exhausting conclusion, with the most powerful final shot of the year.

3. The Worst Person in the World

Dir. Joachim Trier

Julie is woman in her late-twenties whose life stretches out before her. Boundless opportunities present themselves, both romantic and professional, and she moves between them with abandon, yet nothing quite seems to stick. The Worst Person in the World captures the ennui and uncertainty of early adulthood, alongside the intensity of feeling that comes with each new fork on the road. To this end, Director Joachim Trier adopts a malleable approach to time; the birth and decay of an entire relationship might unfold within a brief vignette, while at another point the ecstasy of early love appears to stop time entirely.

2. Everything Everywhere All at Once

Dir. Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert

A family drama, inside a martial arts movie, inside a science-fiction adventure, Everything Everywhere All at Once is a film which, as the title suggests, has a lot going on. From the film-making duo known collectively as “Daniels,” this is an anarchic and original take on the “multiverse” concept which has formed the basis of several recent blockbusters, but there’s a humanity to this film which sets it apart from its big-budget cousins. The action choreography is slick and the psychedelic special effects are spectacular, but amidst all the multi-dimensional mayhem, this is an intimate and moving portrait of a family falling apart and putting itself back together again. The central cast of Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan, and Stephanie Hsu form a remarkable triumvirate, their performances bouncing off one another and across dimensions with equal grace.

1. The Banshees of Inisherin

Dir. Martin McDonagh

Click here to read my full, 5-star review

It was with excitement and a hint of trepidation that I first heard Martin McDonagh was to reunite with Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, stars of his superb 2008 dark comedy, In Bruges – for my money, one of the best films this side of the millennium. I needn’t have worried; The Banshees of Inisherin is no mere re-tread of past glories, but a bold and complex meditation on some of life’s most uncomfortable questions. Farrell and Gleeson sizzle opposite one another with career-best turns, while McDonagh’s dialogue is as caustically witty as ever. The script moves deftly from hilarious farce into something approaching horror, offering profound reflections on everything from masculinity to civil war and death along the way. A very funny film with a heart black as stout.

Top ten films of 2021

15 March 202215 March 2022 ~ Mark Allison ~ Leave a comment

It might be hard to remember now, but cinema got off to a gloomy start in 2021. As the year began, big screens across the world were once again closed amidst another coronavirus-induced lockdown. Of course, if movies have taught us anything, it’s when things are at their bleakest that the cavalry comes riding over the crest of the nearest hill. Sure enough, as we gradually re-emerged into a freshly vaccinated world, a gratifying glut of fantastic films followed to end the drought and reaffirm our faith that cinema isn’t going anywhere. From the stupendous, IMAX-enhanced spectacle of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune to the sumptuous charm of Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, the films of 2021 illustrated the viscerally beguiling power of the cinematic experience when we needed it most.

Due to the closure of UK cinemas throughout the first few months of the 2021, many of my favourite films might technically have premiered in 2020 or been recognised in last year’s awards season, but as I couldn’t get round to them before now, they are being featured here. It’s my website, I make the rules.

As testament to this crowded field of brilliant films, I am doling out a few honourable mentions for some exceptional works which didn’t make the top ten: Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel featured an ensemble of fine performances alongside gripping medieval world-building, all cruelly overlooked by cinema-going audiences; Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir: Part II was a moving depiction of grief and rebirth through art, if not surpassing the original film then at least providing an essential companion; and Céline Sciamma’s Petite Mamam took the sublime innocence of a child’s-eye-view to the complexities of bereavement, motherhood and coming-of-age.

And without further ado, here are the top ten…

10. No Time To Die

Dir. Cary Joji Fukunaga

While audiences are used to James Bond saving the world from nuclear/viral/electromagnetic armageddon, this year it was cinema itself that needed saving – and as usual there was only one man for the job. Following a distressing series of delays, the 25th 007 adventure defied all the odds and proved well worth the wait, giving the global box office a much-needed shot in the arm in the process. Bringing Daniel Craig’s term to a devastating yet totally satisfying end, No Time To Die provided all the requisite globe-trotting thrills that fans expect, but anchored to a poignant emotional core. It fulfils the promise of Craig’s 2006 Bond debut Casino Royale, forging an utterly singular path while remaining steeped in the vision of original 007 author Ian Fleming. James Bond will return, but it is no exaggeration to say he will never be the same again.

9. Sound of Metal

Dir. Darius Marder

Cinema is capable of transporting audiences into the farthest depths of space or across the reaches of human time, but perhaps more remarkable is its ability to offer new ways of understanding the world in which we already live. The experience of deafness is communicated with brilliant insight in Darius Marder’s Sound of Metal, which follows heavy metal drummer Ruben Stone (Riz Ahmed) as he deals with a sudden loss of hearing. Ahmed, all-too-often relegated to supporting roles in Hollywood productions, flexes his muscles as a leading performer here with a nuanced portrait of a man stubbornly clinging to a life which has already deserted him. Meanwhile, the Oscar-winning sound design sound design offers a frighteningly convincing aural glimpse of the physical sensations of hearing loss. More than the story of one man, however, the film is an earnest tribute to the astonishing work done by support networks within the deaf community.

8. Spencer

Dir. Pablo Larraín

The second instalment of Pablo Larraín’s “famous ladies with sad lives” series, Spencer is a fairy tale which imagines Princess Diana as a damsel in distress at Sandringham for Christmas 1991, with her Prince Charming also her captor. Kristen’s Stewart’s beguiling central performance and Jonny Greenwood’s discombobulating score represent two sides of the same coin, working in sync to provide an insight into Diana’s confused and tyrannised mental state. But the film’s secret weapon is Timothy Spall, a towering chameleon of an actor whose performance as Equerry Major Alistair Gregory provides an oppressive symbol of the stifling authority and custom from which Diana is desperate to escape.

7. The Green Knight

Dir. David Lowery

Arthurian legend has been served poorly by the big screen in recent years, from Antoine Fuqua’s relentlessly mediocre King Arthur (2004) to Guy Ritchie’s execrable King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017). The Green Knight is perhaps the first effort to escape the long shadow of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. David Lowery conjures a surreal and immersive vision of an fantastical chivalric kingdom – a visually enrapturing land of wandering giants, roaming bandits and seductive apparitions. Dev Patel follows up his fantastic turn in Armando Iannucci’s David Copperfield with an equally charismatic leading performance. Much like its medieval source material, The Green Knight is an enigmatic, conceptual work which leaves itself open to interpretation – occasionally inscrutable, but always wondrous.

6. Drive My Car

Dir. Ryusuke Hamaguchi

No Time to Die might contain the longest pre-titles sequence of any Bond film, but it pales in comparison to the 40+ minutes of setup which precedes the opening credits of Drive My Car. Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s languidly paced drama is epic in both its length and ambition, using a broad canvas of richly complex characters to tell an intensely insular story of grief and self-renewal. Hidetoshi Nishijima plays a recently widowed theatre director embarking upon a bold multi-lingual adaptation of Chekov’s Uncle Vanya, while unresolved anguish simmers below his composed exterior. The restorative and yet evasive power of communication sits at the heart of Hamaguchi and Takamasa Oe’s powerful script – this is a world in which everyone talks so much and yet says so little, for want of a receptive ear. Unfortunately, the Beatles song of the same name does not feature.

5. The Card Counter

Dir. Paul Schrader

For those seeking a film about a hard-drinking, ex-military loner with a traumatic past on a quest for redemption (and who isn’t?) then the oeuvre of Paul Schrader will leave you spoilt for choice. It’s a preoccupation which goes back at least as far as his script for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), and The Card Counter offers little deviation from this well-worn path – indeed, it treads particularly similar ground to Schrader’s last film, 2017’s excellent First Reformed. As Alan Partridge once said, “people like them, let’s make some more of them,” and despite its thematic familiarity, The Card Counter is a triumph. Oscar Isaac is a captivating yet brilliantly unsettling presence as gambler and former US Army torturer William Tell, whose gnarled psyche casts a darkly oppressive pall over the whole film. Beneath this gripping character study sits a vicious indictment of the modern United States as a declining power; a country which brutalises itself and others abroad while decaying from within.

4. Licorice Pizza

Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson

A jaunty coming of age story set amidst the seedy chaos of early 70s Los Angeles, Licorice Pizza is something of a back-to-basics effort from Paul Thomas Anderson. The setting recalls the sun-baked seventies glitz of 1997’s Boogie Nights, while the tone hews more closely to Anderson’s 2002 romantic comedy Punch Drunk Love than the weightier material he has tackled since then. Cooper Hoffman and Alana Haim star as two friends, Gary and Alana, separated by a decade in age and even further in their outlook on life, who nevertheless find themselves inexplicably drawn to one another as they navigate treacherous border between adolescence and adulthood. Despite their lack of prior acting experience, there is an electric and utterly believable chemistry between the two leads, effortlessly capturing the confused jumble of emotions and expectations which define early adulthood. In usual Andersonian style, the film eschews narrative convention as the central relationship unfolds over a series of hilariously unlikely episodes which feel like half-remembered and well embellished anecdotes from a misspent youth.

3. Another Round

Dir. Thomas Vinterberg

Following four teachers and friends who decide to experiment in staying slightly drunk during working hours, Another Round is a brilliantly nuanced study of how and why boozing dominates so much of our lives, despite what it does to us. Taking an ambivalent view on Denmark’s social alcoholism, director and co-writer Thomas Vinterberg doesn’t shy away from the most miserable and destructive outcomes of alcohol, but he also isn’t afraid to admit that getting hammered can be an awful lot of fun. Vinterberg’s unvarnished perspective extends an affectionate empathy to his characters – despite their foibles, there is a genuine and infectious warmth between the four friends at the core of the film, which challenges preconceptions about who or what an alcoholic really is. Choosing to ask questions about our relationship with alcohol rather than pontificate, Another Rounds trusts its audience to reach their own conclusions.

2. The Power of the Dog

Dir. Jane Campion

Returning to the elemental style of her 1993 masterpiece The Piano, Jane Campion’s first film in 12 years is an enigmatic fable of masculinity on the fringes of civilisation. The Power of the Dog unfolds on a ranch in 1920s Montana, where the inhabitants of this unforgiving world are like the jagged, rocky landscape which surrounds them – formed, or deformed, by the extreme pressures of their environment. Benedict Cumberbatch gives the best performance of his career as the tyrannical rancher Phil Burbank, brilliantly communicating an ambivalent cocktail of grief, self-hatred and vulnerability, barely concealed by his antagonistic, machismo façade. Filmed on New Zealand’s Maniototo Plain, the rugged scenery is framed in its oppressive vastness by Ari Wegner’s stunning cinematography, while Jonny Greenwood’s understated and gently mournful score is typically masterful.

1. The Father

Dir. Florian Zeller

My favourite film of any year is usually a film I’d be happy to watch repeatedly. In the case of The Father, I’m not sure if I’ll ever be ready to see it again. Placing audiences inside the mind of Anthony, a man living with dementia, the film is a heart-breaking glimpse into the experience of an isolating and confounding condition. Director and co-writer Florian Zeller has adapted his own play to the strengths of the big screen, pulling his audience across time and space to powerfully disorienting affect. But it’s Anthony Hopkins’ astounding central performance, for which he deservedly won an Oscar last year, which propels the film through our Earthly firmament into another realm of brilliance. He embodies his namesake character with a palpable depth of personality and life – every withering remark, confused tirade or mournful sob betraying the underlying agony of a man feeling his lifetime of experiences, relationships, passions and achievements slowly fade to nothing.

Top ten films of 2020

1 February 20211 February 2021 ~ Mark Allison ~ Leave a comment

To paraphrase Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, it would require a great philosopher and historian to explain 2020 – let it suffice to say that it’s been a largely unpleasant ordeal for all involved. When it comes to movies, much of the year was defined by what we didn’t see; from the 25th James Bond adventure, No Time To Die, to Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch and Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, blockbusters have found their release dates postponed, sometimes repeatedly, into 2021 and beyond. We can only hope that there are still cinemas left by the time these films deem it safe to emerge.

But despite the enormity of the last year, there remained plenty of great pictures to carry us through, on both the big and small screens. Indeed, 2020 was the year that television streaming came to dominate our consumption of new cinema, with the likes of Netflix, Amazon, and even the BBC gobbling up the rights to films which found themselves suddenly bereft of a conventional theatrical audience. The jury is still out on how positive, and permanent, this shift will prove to be.

But while all of us miss the spectacle and grandeur of a proper cinema auditorium, a great movie will captivate an audience just as effectively in a cramped living room as a packed IMAX. This is certainly true of each of my picks for the top ten films of 2020.

10. The Personal History of David Copperfield

Dir. Armando Iannucci

The third film from director Armando Iannucci, David Copperfield marks a departure from the caustic political satires for which the Scottish funnyman is known. Condensing the 600+ pages of Dickens’ novel into a running time just shy of two hours, the film is a breathlessly funny romp through Victorian Britain, but with an eye focused squarely on the country as it appears today. The supporting cast is a perfectly pitched ensemble featuring talent young and old, but it’s Dev Patel’s magnetic lead performance around which the film rotates. A celebration of Britishness at its most warm and inclusive, David Copperfield proves that even the most storied works of classic literature can be given new life when adapted for the screen.

9. Soul

Dir. Pete Docter, Kemp Powers

Pixar are no longer the safe bet they once were, as a recent spate of lacklustre sequels has dulled their once illustrious name and threatened their position at the forefront of American animation. It’s a relief, then, to report that Soul is a jubilant return to form. Director Pete Docter, a veteran of the studio and architect of their last great film, 2015’s Inside Out, has again delivered all the wonder and emotional depth of vintage Pixar. It helps that the film takes heavy visual and thematic cues from one of my favourite films, Powell and Pressburger’s 1946 masterpiece A Matter of Life and Death. Indeed, Soul is an unashamedly philosophical work, and its ambition in tackling big existential questions is matched only by its visual inventiveness. For anyone suffering a crisis of confidence in themselves or their accomplishments, this is a much-needed paean to the simple joys of being alive. For the children in the room, there’s a talking cat.

8. Red, White and Blue

Dir. Steve McQueen

The first of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology series to make my list, Red, White and Blue tells the story of pioneering police officer Leroy Logan and his mission to force change from within the institutionally racist Metropolitan Police Force. The film asks searching questions about the relationship between the police and the communities they serve, and doesn’t presume to have any answers beyond the conviction that change must come. Finally freed from the shackles of disappointing Star Wars sequels, John Boyega provides a powerful leading turn which reasserts his claim as one of Britain’s most exciting young performers. His Logan is an utterly believable figure who straddles doubt and conviction, the essential goodness and compassion of his character struggling to contain the righteous rage bubbling beneath. Amid the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement and recent demonstrations of anger against police brutality, it feels trite to call Red, White and Blue “timely”, but it provides a vivid and essential perspective on the unending struggle against racism in one of our most powerful public bodies.

7. Mank

Dir. David Fincher

A film about the making of the greatest film ever made was always going to be a tall order, but David Fincher isn’t one to shy away from a challenge. Six long years since his last feature, 2014’s Gone Girl, Fincher has brought to screen a script penned by his late father, Jack Fincher, charting the career of Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman J Mankiewicz. It’s simultaneously a celebration of the creative process and a condemnation of the corruption which lay beneath Hollywood’s golden age. Shot in sumptuous monochrome by cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt (what a name) and utilising an archaic mono soundtrack, the film is filtered through a reverent nostalgia for the era it depicts, without whitewashing its vices. Critics may quibble about the factual accuracy of its narrative, but Mank joins a pantheon of great movies about the movie business.

6. On The Rocks

Dir. Sofia Coppola

Reuniting director Sofia Coppola with star Bill Murray for the first time since their masterful 2003 collaboration, Lost In Translation, On The Rocks is another delicately incisive and brilliantly funny study of cross-generational understanding. Rashida Jones plays a procrastinating writer who suspects her husband of infidelity and, against her better judgement, enlists her womanising father (Murray) to investigate. Their ensuing misadventures swiftly begin to reveal more about their own relationship than anything the husband may be up to, while Jones and Murray are perfect foils for one another in these central roles. So much of their relationship is revealed through what goes unsaid, as their apparent closeness belies a deeper, obscured estrangement which is slowly interrogated throughout the film. Casting an eye upon the buried insecurities and parental hang-ups to which all of us would rather not admit, On The Rocks is a light yet quietly profound caper on the complexities of family.

5. Portrait of a Lady on Fire

Dir. Céline Sciamma

It’s difficult to separate Portrait of a Lady on Fire from the circumstances in which I first saw it. Little did I know at the time, it was to be my last experience in a cinema before the oncoming Coronavirus pandemic forced the closure of every screen in the country. The memory of this screening has sustained me throughout the past few months of drought, as Céline Sciamma’s stunning film represents everything I love about the cinematic experience. It’s a tender depiction of a passionate but lamentably fleeting romance between an artist and her subject. Sciamma herself has referred to the film as a “manifesto about the female gaze”, and as such she crafts a refreshingly frank and sympathetic vision of lesbian sexuality. The emotional and physical longing of new love is captured in excruciating intensity, along with the deep and emotionally disfiguring scars which are left by its passing. Bearing the same power of the inclement waves which smash against the rocky, windswept outcrop of the film’s setting, Portrait of a Lady on Fire is an awe-inspiring ode to the overwhelming joys and pains of love, which will you shivering and shell-shocked by the final reel.

4. Mangrove

Dir. Steve McQueen

As the opening gala of the London Film Festival, Mangrove was the showpiece of Steve’s McQueen’s Small Axe anthology. Tracing the Metropolitan Police’s vindictive campaign against Notting Hill’s Mangrove restaurant and it’s owner, Frank Critchlow, the film is an explosively impassioned tour-de-force of a legal drama. Simultaneously the story of a community under siege and of one man’s reluctant charge at the spearhead of a struggle he never wanted to fight, the film vividly captures the cheerful vibrancy and oppressive cruelty that went hand-in-hand for people of colour late 60s/early 70s West London. Amid the typical trappings of the courtroom drama, there are beautifully idiosyncratic touches which bring to mind McQueen’s background as a visual artist, such as the strangely intoxicating visual of a fallen colander ceaselessly rocking back and forth on the floor of a kitchen following a violent police raid. In the same year that Aaron Sorkin’s enjoyable but by-the-numbers Trial of the Chicago 7 resorted to melodramatic monologues and orchestral swells to illustrate it’s righteous outrage, McQueen’s brilliance as a visual storyteller stands alone.

3. Da 5 Bloods

Dir. Spike Lee

One of the most important and brilliantly incendiary American film-makers of the last thirty years, Spike Lee has nevertheless had a somewhat uneven filmography. Fortunately, Da 5 Bloods sits closer to the Do the Right Thing end of the spectrum than that of Oldboy. This is Lee at his most exciting and confrontational, posing complicated questions about America’s past and present. Following four black Vietnam veterans as they return to the country in which they fought as youths, the film dissects the legacy of the Vietnam War and adopts it as a lens through which to view the complicated racial and cultural divisions of Trumpian America. Meanwhile, Delroy Lindo provides my favourite male lead performance of the year, his physically imposing presence and outward machismo gradually crumbling to reveal a shattered and exhausted soul. It’s a cine-literate work which wears its inspirations on its sleeve, dropping knowing references to the likes of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Apocalypse Now. Indeed, alongside it’s political proselytising, Da 5 Bloods indulges itself in action and adventure genre thrills, particularly as it unfolds a marvellously outlandish final act.

2. Saint Frances

Dir. Alex Thompson

Written by and starring Kelly O’Sullivan, Saint Frances is a tender coming of age comedy for millennials in their mid-thirties. Focusing on the messier and more complicated aspects of modern womanhood, the film paints a warm and embracing picture of femininity which feels boldly honest. Despite dealing with a number of taboos and hefty issues, O’Sullivan’s consistently funny script retains a deft lightness of touch and evinces guffaws at even its bleakest moments. Alongside the screenwriter’s charismatic lead performance, 6-year-old Ramona Edith Williams commands the screen as the eponymous Frances, while Jim True-Frost delivers a hilarious cameo which will delight fans of The Wire. Tackling everything from the existential abyss of working a dead end job, to abortion, depression, and the relentless anxiety of parenthood, Saint Frances throws its arms round the audience in an uncompromising embrace. At a time when the basic rights of women across the world are under attack and archaic stigmas are being reinforced, the affirmative spirit of Saint Frances is all the more welcome.

1. Education

Dir. Steve McQueen

This was the final instalment in the Small Axe anthology to reach British televisions, and Steve McQueen saved the best for last. Education is a fierce exposé of a cruel and callous schooling system which condemned the life chances of a generation of disproportionately black children. Young newcomer Kenyah Sandy is a revelation as Kingsley Smith, an absentminded 12-year-old boy who finds himself discarded into a school for the so-called “educationally subnormal”. Equally spectacular is Sharlene Whyte’s performance as Kingsley’s exhausted mother, Agnes, whose gradual discovery of her son’s neglect leads to one of the most powerful and heart-breaking moments in all of the cinema released last year. Indeed, the film is not just a denunciation of a segregationist education policy, but a celebration of the men and women of British-West Indian communities who mobilised to fight the injustice being done to their children.

Beyond the Education‘s significance as an historical testament, it is a technically exquisite work of cinema. The painterly elegance of cinematographer Shabier Kirchner’s camera work and McQueen’s penchant for unbroken single takes lends the visuals a rich and arresting texture, regardless of the domesticity of the film’s setting. A prolonged and affecting musical sequence in the second act, to name one example, betrays a greater depth of meaning than a thousand lines of dialogue.

Despite it’s individual brilliance, Education should not be considered as a purely singular work, but as one weave within the rich tapestry of McQueen’s Small Axe anthology. Having shone a series of piercing spotlights onto the black British experience, Small Axe contributes to a much-needed refocusing and reappraisal of our country’s history and who we are today. It is a triumph and a cultural landmark which will be studied and celebrated for decades to come.

How have cinemas survived?

8 April 20208 April 2020 ~ Mark Allison ~ Leave a comment

The Coronavirus lockdown has threatened cinemas like never before, but it’s not the first time their future has been in doubt. From Nazis to Netflix, clued-down looks at how theatrical film exhibition has survived more than a century of challenges.

edwin-hooper-Q8m8cLkryeo-unsplash — The World Theatre, Kearney, Nebraska. Photo by Edwin Hooper on Unsplash.

Cinemas are currently facing an unprecedented crisis. In Britain, for the first time in over 80 years, every screen in the country has been forced to close, putting thousands of jobs and the future of an entire industry at risk. According to the Hollywood Reporter, global box office losses could reach $17 billion if the lockdown continues to the end of May. With streaming services already nipping at the heels of theatrical exhibitors, it’s impossible to say what the landscape of film distribution will look like mere months from now.

However, this is not the first time that cinema operators have had to weather a storm. Movie-going has been a ubiquitous pastime for more than a century, and in that period the silver screen has faced repeated slumps in attendance and challenges from other media. From Nazi air raids to the rise of Netflix, cinemas have always been forced to adapt to sudden calamity and rapid changes in consumer habits – and so far they have managed to survive.

krists-luhaers-AtPWnYNDJnM-unsplash — Photo by Krists Luhaers on Unsplash.

Cinemas first emerged in the last years of the 19th century and quickly became the diversion of choice for the young, urban working classes. By the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, there were 4,000 locations across the UK, and their grip upon the nation’s social life was only tightened with the advent of talkies and Technicolor in the 1930s. In the words of historian AJP Taylor, cinema was ‘the essential social habit of the age’.

The first challenge to this supremacy arrived with the Second World War. When Britain declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939, every picture house in the country was immediately closed by order of the Government, fearing their vulnerability to aerial bombing. This quickly provoked outrage; the playwright George Bernard Shaw, for one, penned an angry letter to The Times asking, ‘‘what agent of Chancellor Hitler is it who has suggested that we should all cower in darkness and terror ‘‘for the duration’’?’ The importance of cinema for both civilian and military morale was quickly recognised, and within a month every screen across the country was once again open for business.

In the end, the war years turned out to be something of a golden age for the country’s cinema industry, as the miseries and privations of war encouraged audiences to seek refuge in the glamour of the movies. Attendance grew steadily throughout the conflict, eventually reaching an all-time high of 1,635 million in 1946 – this was despite the 160 cinemas destroyed by enemy action. Film exhibitors may not have appreciated it at the time, but these were halcyon days, as the postwar era brought renewed attacks upon the dominance of the silver screen.

The BBC had issued the world’s first regular television transmission on 2 November 1936, and within two decades this new technology became a common feature – arguably the feature – of family living rooms. The growth of television, combined with the spread of central heating, made staying at home a more attractive prospect for Britain’s movie-going masses. Audiences declined steadily from 1948, as did did the number of cinemas. From a peak of 4,700 venues in 1946, this fell to 3,050 by 1960 and 1,971 by 1965.

To combat this precipitous decline, the film industry turned to the sort of spectacle and technical innovation that couldn’t be equalled by their small screen competition. Colour pictures became more common, while the 1950s also saw a brief craze for 3D movies along with the introduction of various widescreen processes like Cinerama, VistaVision, CinemaScope, and Ultra Panavision. While these developments helped movies to retain their edge, the first real victim of the television boom was the once-mighty newsreel industry, which could not hope to match the immediacy of TV news. British Paramount News closed in 1957, followed by Universal and Gaumont British in 1959. In 1960, the Newsreel Association of Great Britain and Ireland ended all operations, whilst the fatal blow was finally dealt in 1969 with the closure of British Pathé.

sean-benesh-6Nbo9Pn0yJA-unsplash — Photo by Sean Benesh on Unsplash.

The innovations of the fifties may have slowed the rot in theatrical exhibition, but the worst was still yet the come. Audiences continued to tumble precipitously, and fell to a record low of just 54 million admissions in 1984 – a collapse of 95% from their 1940s heyday. Indeed, the 1980s are widely recognised as the nadir of the British cinema industry, as the advent of home media with VHS and Betamax brought Hollywood blockbusters into living rooms just months after their big-screen premiere. Meanwhile, TV soaps and sitcoms arguably replaced cinema as the nation’s favoured mass entertainment; on Christmas Day 1986 over 30 million viewers watched Eastenders‘ Dirty Den serve divorce papers to his wife Angie.

As audiences fell, so too did the number of screens to serve them. By 1984 there were just 660 sites left in the UK, often in an unloved and dilapidated condition. The following year, film academic Geoffrey Nowell-Smith warned, ‘there is now an imminent danger that British Cinema as we know it, will have effectively ceased to exist within the decade.’ Amid this downturn, hundreds of grand movie houses were demolished or converted into bingo halls, pool clubs, or places of worship (the preservation of these often ornate, art-deco constructions continues to fuel controversy).

Things seemed dire, but salvation was close at hand. Imitating developments in American suburbs, AMC opened the UK’s first multiplex in Milton Keynes in 1985. Called The Point, it was a futuristic, pyramid-shaped structure of glass and steel. Inside were ten cinema screens and a snack bar selling an indulgent range of food and drink, while the courtyard outside had ample space for parking the family saloon.

The Point brought about a revolution in British cinema’s fortunes, and how it did business, as a wave of new establishments based on the same model were rapidly constructed. These buildings were cleaner and better maintained than many of the decaying old city-centre cinemas with which audiences were familiar, and their greater number of screens meant that they could, in theory, show a broader range of films. By 1990 there were 41 such cinemas with 411 screens between them, while nationwide cinema admissions had nearly doubled to 97.37 million.

Thanks to continued investment, audience attendance rose consistently over the following decade, and since 2001 the annual total has never dipped below 150 million. Of course, there were some losers in this brave new world. The explosion of out-of-town multiplexes did cause closures among independent cinemas which were unable to adapt their existing buildings. Meanwhile, many cinéastes have argued that rather than expanding consumer choice, these multi-screen behemoths have actually restricted the selection of films on offer, dedicating their plethora of screens to the latest American blockbusters and little else.

jake-hills-23LET4Hxj_U-unsplash — Duke of York’s Picturehouse, Brighton. Photo by Jake Hills on Unsplash.

But the fact remains that the multiplex saved the humble cinema from terminal decline, and the industry has enjoyed reasonably good health ever since. Indeed, despite the rise of fresh competition in the form of HD television and streaming services like Amazon Prime and Netflix, cinema admissions have remained relatively steady over the past 20 years, while in 2018 British cinemas had their best year since 1970, selling 177 million tickets. Cinema sites have also continued to multiply; more than 30 opened in 2019 alone, bringing the total across the UK to 840.

While theatrical film distributors, particularly those in France, wring their hands about the threat from Netflix, there is little evidence that cinema’s days are numbered. In fact, a recent study in the US by consultancy EY found that those who stream movies more regularly are also the most enthusiastic cinema-goers. Perhaps in recognition of this, Netflix has recently been increasing its presence in cinemas, partnering with Curzon in the UK to handle limited big-screen releases of Netflix-produced movies like Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman and Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story. All this suggests a future in which cinemas and streaming giants can coexist in relative harmony.

Admittedly, the 90-day window that has traditionally existed between a film’s premiere in cinemas and its arrival on home media is increasingly looking like an archaism within our on-demand culture. But just as cinemas have continually evolved over the last hundred years, they will persist in doing so against the new challenges of the digital age. Phil Clapp, the CEO of the UK Cinema Association, argued as much in a recent letter to the Financial Times, observing that, ‘the supposedly imminent demise of the cinema sector due to streaming has its echoes in the predicted impact on the business of TV, VHS and DVD.’

Throughout the catastrophes and innovations of recent history, cinema-going has proved to be a difficult habit to shake for the British public. The ongoing outbreak of COVID-19 has challenged the industry like never before, but there is something special about the cinematic experience which keeps audiences coming back. When the lockdown is finally lifted and we all emerge bleary-eyed from our homes, it won’t be long before we head back into the welcoming darkness of a movie theatre.

Top Ten… Westerns

26 March 202026 March 2020 ~ Mark Allison ~ Leave a comment

Westerns have been a constant presence in cinemas since the dawn of celluloid. Their enduring appeal is easy to understand, transporting audiences to a lawless time unrecognisable from our own, where the fate of every individual was in their own hands. The vast prairies, mountain ranges, and dense forests of the American Old West are always a sumptuous backdrop for cinematic adventures, even if they are often filmed in a Spanish desert or an Italian studio. Indeed, despite the thoroughly North American setting, westerns have been made across the world and taken innumerable forms. To limit my scope for this list, I’ve adopted a fairly strict definition of “western” – that is, films set during the time of the Old West and featuring gunslingers. That leaves out neo-westerns like the Coens’ No Country For Old Men (2007), space westerns like Star Wars (1977) and Outland (1981), or period dramas with a western setting, like Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (2007).

The final form of my top ten still may not satisfy purists, and I’ve even surprised myself in places. While Italian spaghetti western pioneer Sergio Leone makes four appearances on the list and Australian auteur Andrew Dominik enters the top five, American masters John Ford and Howard Hawks failed to make the grade at all. As such, I’d like to give honourable mentions to Ford’s The Searchers (1956) and Hawks’ Rio Bravo (1959), both classic westerns which helped to shape the Hollywood golden age of the genre.

As Eli Wallach’s Tuco says in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, “When you have to shoot, shoot, don’t talk.” In the spirit of being quick on the draw, here are my top ten western films:

10) High Noon (1952)

Dir. Fred Zimerman

Often interpreted as a leftist parable on the injustices of the Hollywood blacklist, High Noon is a timeless story of singular moral courage in the face of popular cowardice. The archetypal tough guy of classic Hollywood, Gary Cooper, delivers an Oscar-winning performance as Marshal Will Kane, a small-town sheriff shunned by his community and forced to stand alone against a marauding gang of gunslingers. This story is given a deeper resonance by the fact that the film’s screenwriter, Carl Foreman, was subsequently chased from the United States and blacklisted by the House Un-American Affairs Committee for prior membership of the Communist Party. And yet, the redoubtable Marshal Kane has often been quoted as a hero by reactionary and conservative figures, from Ronald Reagan to Tony Soprano. Perhaps therein lies the secret to the High Noon‘s enduring appeal. Whether Communist or Republican, all of us like to imagine ourselves with Kane’s fortitude, standing for what’s right against all the odds and the sneers of lesser men.

9) The Wild Bunch (1969)

Dir. Sam Peckinpah

Hollywood’s answer to the spaghetti westerns of Italian cinema, The Wild Bunch is a blood-drenched odyssey through the dying days of the Wild West. Morally ambiguous and shockingly violent, Sam Peckinpah’s revisionist western was perfectly pitched for the counter-culture generation. It stands alongside Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Easy Rider (1969) as a film which heralded a new era in American film-making, eschewing the moralistic conventions and sanitised bloodshed of classic westerns. It’s influence would be felt far outside the western genre, as Peckinpah’s radical use of slow-motion and montage editing techniques had a pervasive impact on action cinema.

8) Unforgiven (1992)

Dir. Clint Eastwood

Clint Eastwood’s swansong to the genre which made him a star, Unforgiven is a melancholy story of a faded gunslinger and the violent past which haunts him. David Webb Peoples’ haunting screenplay deconstructs the glamorous ideal of the gunslinger, delving into the physical and mental scars wrought by a life of violence. It depicts a ruthless Old West totally divorced from the glories of John Ford pictures and Lone Ranger comics, where survival has more to do with luck than the speed of your draw and outlaws are executed ingloriously in an outhouse rather than in a blaze of glory. As Eastwood’s William Munny tells a young bandit, “It’s a hell of a thing killing a man. You take away all he’s got, and all he’s ever gonna have.”

Dir. Sergio Leone

Not just the best western on this list, but probably the greatest film ever made. Having cut his teeth on the low-budget escapades of A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More, Sergio Leone was finally given the chance to stretch his legs into genuinely epic territory. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is a sprawling story of three gunslingers on the hunt for buried gold during the American Civil War. Clint Eastwood is an effortlessly cool presence in his third and final turn as The Man With No Name, but it is Eli Wallach’s Tuco, the ugly of the film’s title, who shines as one of cinema’s most fascinating anti-heroes. Wallach’s electric performance imbues an otherwise repugnant and amoral figure with a deep sense of tragedy, placing a complex character study at the film’s emotional core. On a technical level, it is impossible to name a more exquisitely made picture. Leone’s customarily gorgeous cinematography pays equally loving attention to the the craggy terrain of the Spanish desert and the sun-charred crevices of Clint Eastwood’s face. The action on screen unfolds at an overwhelming scale, with thousands of extras and colossal sets provided courtesy of the Spanish Army, but Leone never loses his grip on the palpable, sweaty intimacy which pulls his audience into the rugged world of the film. And, of course, there’s Ennio Morricone’s musical score; a sweeping, utterly singular symphony which evokes both the splendid grandeur and fearsome barbarity of the Old West.

Top ten films of 2019

15 February 202015 February 2020 ~ Mark Allison ~ 1 Comment

As a new decade dawns and we look back on the last 12 months, it can be tough finding much to be positive about. The rise of fascism continues unabated and the world is on fire, but amidst all the horror, at least we got some good movies. With the Academy Awards having just past, it’s now the time of year for my annual appraisal of the best that cinema had to offer in 2019.

In many ways, it felt like a landmark year for the film industry. The increasing monopolisation of blockbuster cinema by the Walt Disney Company, and its emphasis on franchise-driven spectacle, has caused alarm among some cinéastes. Martin Scorsese himself started a debate on how we can even define the term “cinema” in this newly corporatised landscape. Despite these valid concerns, 2019 was still an exciting year to be a film fan. From the experimental and independent work of British directors Mark Jenkin and Joanna Hogg, to the epic scale of Sam Mendes’ new First World War epic, there was plenty of variety to be had in multiplexes. In fact, it wasn’t always necessary to journey to the cinema to see the best new releases; streaming behemoth Netflix continued its assault on Hollywood, producing films from the likes of Scorsese and Noah Baumbach (securing a place on my coveted top-ten list in the process). Narrowing down my favourite films of the year into a shortlist of just ten has proved to be an agonising experience, and a testament to the maxim that there is never a bad year in cinema.

Unfortunately, as I have limited myself to ten films, there are several which failed to make the cut but nevertheless deserve an honourable mention. Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade, although technically a 2018 release, didn’t arrive in UK cinemas until April 2019. A sympathetic coming-of-age story about the perils of adolescence in the social media age, my eyes were damp for most of the running time. One of the most anticipated pictures of the year was Quentin Tarantino’s latest and, as the director insists, penultimate film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Hugely atmospheric and featuring career-best performances from Leonardo Di Caprio and Brad Pitt, it’s an uneven but uncompromising love letter to the cinema of Tarantino’s youth. James Mangold’s Le Mans ’66 (known as Ford v Ferrari in the US) was a masterclass in old-fashioned, crowd pleasing film-making. Exhilarating and pleasingly practical racing sequences are anchored by charismatic turns from Christian Bale and Matt Damon, both of whom provide charmingly wobbly regional accents. And finally, Noah Baumbach returned with Marriage Story, a touching and nuanced chronicle of an artistic couple and their young son navigating a divorce from opposite ends of the United States.

Without further preamble, here are clued-down’s top ten films of 2019…

10. The Souvenir

Dir. Joanna Hogg

First love isn’t always romantic – sometimes the confused intensity of youthful romance can leave scars which persist for a lifetime. The Souvenir is a powerful account of a toxic relationship between a young film student, Julie, and an enigmatic older man, Anthony. Director Joanna Hogg has been forthcoming about the autobiographical nature of the film; from minor furnishings in Julie’s flat, to whole conversations between the two lovers, much of what we see is a facsimile of the director’s experience as a young film student in early 1980s Knightsbridge. As such, the film exhibits the tenderness of an open wound. Banal comments and imperceptible gestures carry a weight of immense meaning, much thanks to a vulnerable lead performance from Honor Swinton Byrne (daughter of Tilda Swinton, who plays Julie’s mother in the film). Grappling with Hogg’s emergence as an artist, The Souvenir is ultimately a study in self-identity and artistic expression, and how those creative impulses can be stifled by those you love the most and then rediscovered in the face of personal tragedy.

9. 1917

Dir. Sam Mendes

The disappointing 2015 James Bond adventure, Spectre, opens with an impressive single-take action sequence which is undoubtedly the highlight of the film. Little did anyone know at the time, but this moment of technical showmanship was a dry-run for director Sam Mendes’ next film. 1917 isn’t the first movie to digitally stitch its shots together to appear as one unbroken take – Iñárritu’s Birdman pulled the same trick in 2015 and was awarded Best Picture for its trouble – but it is probably the most compelling use of the technique yet. Following two corporals as they race to deliver a message across enemy lines, the film is a Homeric Odyssey through the devastation of the First World War. There’s a surreal and episode quality to proceedings, a feeling emphasised by the unrelenting gaze of the camera and real-time structure of the story. Comparisons to a video-game are not completely off the mark, but nor are they necessarily a criticism. Watching 1917 is a formidably immersive experience, from the thunderous sound design to Roger Deakins’ stupefying cinematography, everything works to bring the audience closer to the trenches and shell-pocked fields of Northern France. Crucially, this technical tour-de-force is grounded by the sympathetic characters who drive the story, particularly George Mackay’s powerful performance as L/Cpl Schofield. He provides a human face to the vast and incalculable suffering of a conflict which has long since passed from living memory.

8. Little Women

Dir. Greta Gerwig

The seventh adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 novel, Little Women is a masterclass in the modern period drama. Following her superb 2017 directorial debut, Lady Bird, writer/director Greta Gerwig has breathed life into the classic text with an exuberant sense of pace and a reappraisal of the novel’s relevance for contemporary audiences. The ensemble cast is bursting with some of the most exciting young talent currently working in Hollywood, with Saoirse Ronan, Florence Pugh, and Timothée Chalamet all following up a recent run of star-making turn with typically magnetic performances. Meanwhile, stalwart actors Laura Dern and Chris Cooper provide multi-faceted supporting appearances which leave an impact out of proportion to their screen-time. Gerwig’s script adopts a gently daring non-linear structure, which distinguishes the film from prior adaptations and expedites the narrative into a comfortable two hours. I’m less convinced by the addition of a meta-narrative in the third act, which interweaves the character of Jo March with biographical details from Alcott’s own life, but it’s to the film’s credit that it endeavours to push the boundaries of its source material without losing sight of its core themes.

7. Monos

Dir. Alejandro Landes

Capturing the child’s-eye-view of war is never an easy prospect, but recent years have seen a number of excellent films focusing on the horrors of child soldiery, from Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire’s Johnny Mad Dog (2008) to Cary Fukunaga’s Beasts of No Nation (2015). With Monos, director Alejandro Landes looks at the ongoing brutality of the Colombian civil war from the perspective of a small group of teenage guerrillas. Little time is wasted explaining the history or details of the conflict, focusing instead on the lived experience of the teenagers at the centre of the story. The petty squabbles and clumsy romances of adolescence are contrasted violently with the brutality of war, while the squalid reality of their existence is presented in uncomfortable detail. It’s fantastically visceral film-making which overwhelms the senses, whether the inescapable chill of a desolate hilltop outpost or suffocating heat of a rainforest encampment. The heady experience is heightened by a discombobulating score from British composer Micah Levi. Essential viewing, just make sure that you have time to lie down afterwards.

6. Pain and Glory

Dir. Pedro Almodóvar

The latest film from veteran Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, Pain and Glory follows a chapter in the life of Salvador Mallo, a reluctantly retired film director depressed by physical decline and personal loss. Borrowing elements from Almodóvar’s own experiences, it’s a loosely autobiographical look at the ennui of early old age and finding renewal through art. Much of the film’s power rests on a centrepiece performance from Antonio Banderas, reuniting the actor with the director who launched him to stardom some three decades ago. It’s an unshowy turn rooted in subtle glances and minute gestures, in which his very posture communicates a lifetime of physical and emotional pain. Despite the script’s introspective tone, Almodóvar constantly switches gears and moves his character into fresh territory. Mallo’s story is structured almost as a series of vignettes, echoing the restless dissatisfaction and search for meaning in his own life, while a parallel timeline follows his childhood in a sequence of flashbacks. Both of these threads, seemingly unconnected at first, are eventually tied together in one of the most satisfying final shots of the year.

5. Parasite

Dir. Bong Joon-ho

The first film not in the English language to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, Parasite is the movie on everyone’s lips at the moment. Although the Oscars have an admittedly sketchy record when it comes to picking the film of the year, this is surely to go down as one of the most deserving victors. A cutting satire of inequality and economic apartheid in modern South Korea, Parasite is a richly layered film which refuses easy categorisation and demands reinterpretation of every image and character. Director Bong Joon-ho moves deftly between acutely observed comedy and chilling psychological thrills, with each shift in tone following as a completely natural development in the serpentine plot. Similarly, Jung Jae-il’s exhilarating score dances between styles, from sinister and militaristic drum beats to baroque-inspired strings, while Hong Kyung-pyo’s crisp cinematography brilliantly contrasts the claustrophobic squalor of a crowded basement dwelling with the bright, clean space of a wealthy mansion. Between Parasite and the recent successes of Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden (2016) and Lee Chang-dong’s Burning (2018), Korean cinema is currently enjoying a well-earned moment in the sun among mainstream western audiences.

4. Bait

Dir. Mark Jenkin

Much of the publicity around Bait focused on the archaic technology with which the film was made. The 16mm monochrome cinematography and post-synced audio certainly harks back to a bygone era, but the substance of the story deals with fiercely contemporary concerns around the decline of the English fishing industry and the slow death by gentrification of the communities that supported it. This conflict between old and new, between the obsolete and the advanced, permeates through Bait in both it’s technical achievements and storytelling. Charting the tensions between locals and second home-owners in a Cornish fishing village, it’s a riveting and timely study of the division and inequality which has come to characterise so much of life in modern Britain.

3. Knives Out

Dir. Rian Johnson

Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017) was not only one of the best blockbusters of the last decade, it also established writer/director Rian Johnson as a film-maker unafraid to bend the expectations of his genre in pursuit of a good story. With his latest film, Johnson has drawn heavily on the work of Agatha Christie, but Knives Out distinguishes itself as a thrillingly contemporary take on the classic whodunit. It has all the tropes one might expect of a Poirot or Miss Marple story; a Gothic mansion, a quirky detective, and a smorgasbord of suspects, motives, and clues which all spiral towards a satisfying, final-act reveal. Underneath this slickly plotted murder mystery, however, is a caustic satire of the privilege and greed endemic to Trumpian America. Johnson’s script is also one of the funniest of the year, full of cutting exchanges and knowingly haughty monologues, and matched with a charismatic set of performances. A perfectly pitched ensemble cast is led by Daniel Craig, who savours the opportunity to stretch himself as the outrageously accented and flamboyantly dressed gentleman sleuth, Benoit Blanc. Just as Craig was due to hang up his holster as James Bond, he’s found another iconic character who is sure to be sustained in sequels to come.

2. Uncut Gems

Dir. Josh and Benny Safdie

If the exit poll of the 2019 general election was the most stressful thing I watched in the last year, then Uncut Gems takes a comfortable second place. Following on from their excellent 2017 thriller Good Time, the Safdie brothers have crafted another hyperactive assault on the senses. It follows a hilariously intense few days in the life of Howard Ratner, a self-destructive jewellery store owner and chronic gambling addict, as he risks all he has in the pursuit of the score of a lifetime. Adam Sandler gives easily his best performance since Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2002 drama Punch Drunk Love, demonstrating what the much-maligned actor is capable of when paired with film-makers who appreciate the depth of his talent. The supporting cast is similarly impeccable, with newcomers and non-actors alongside rising stars and veteran performers, while a sharp script imbues every character, no matter how minor, with a sense of authenticity. The fast-paced dialogue is elevated by the Safdies’ dizzying camerawork and Daniel Lopatin’s relentless score, all of which combine to bum-clenching effect. Uncut Gems may have been inexplicably overlooked by almost every major awards body this season, but it’s a delightfully exhausting film which confirms Josh and Benny Safdie as two of the most exciting film-makers of their generation.

1. The Irishman

Dir. Martin Scorsese

Rumours of The Irishman‘s production floated around the internet for at least a decade before the project came to life, and it was always difficult to entertain as a realistic prospect. The idea that Martin Scorsese would team up with Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci for one last gangster movie, when all four were into their seventies, seemed fanciful at best – and misguided at worst. We all saw what happened when the ageing has-beens of 80s action cinema tried a similar trick with The Expendables. Could The Irishman, with its septuagenarian cast and crew, ever amount to more than a tired echo of former glories?

Of course, you would have been a fool to bet against Scorsese. Those expecting a rerun of Goodfellas or Casino were to be disappointed, as The Irishman arguably owes a greater debt to Sergio Leone’s elegiac 1985 crime epic, Once Upon a Time in America. Unfolding over the course of three-and-a-half sumptuous hours, it’s a deliberately paced story following the gangsterisation of American politics in the mid-twentieth century and the personal costs of surviving in such a world. De Niro stars as the eponymous Irishman, Frank Sheeran, and delivers his best performance this side of the millennium. It’s a quietly devastating role that follows the gradual hollowing out of a man, his sense of humanity slowly eroded by decades of violence and a perverse code of criminal honour. Pacino, meanwhile, is at his scenery-chewing best as infamous union chief Jimmy Hoffa, all hoarse screams and flailing arms, but it’s Pesci who is given the opportunity to move outside his comfort zone, with astounding results. As mob boss Russell Buffalino, he is a controlled and commanding presence who belies a deeper, calmly psychotic menace. It is a subtle role totally divorced from the highly strung villains for which Pesci was known in his prior collaborations with Scorsese, and yet no less threatening.

The last ten years have produced some of Scorsese’s finest and most varied work, and it seems appropriate that he should conclude the decade by returning to the gangster movie milieu with which he is most identified. Ultimately a rumination on the ravages of time and coming to terms with one’s legacy during the twilight of life, The Irishman is as much a commentary on Scorsese’s own career as it is a study in the life of a criminal. More than a great film, it is a deconstruction of the myth of the American gangster – the final word on the crime film from the genre’s own Godfather. A masterpiece.

“I never knew the old Vienna before the War” – The Third Man and coming to terms with the post-war world

10 November 2019 ~ Mark Allison ~ Leave a comment

As The Third Man turns 70, we delve into what it tells us about Britain and the building of a new global epoch

Cities rarely look as good as they do in the movies. The intoxicating power of the urban sprawl has been a focus of film classics since the dawn of cinema, from the Berlin underworld in Fritz Lang’s M (1931) to the scum-ridden streets of New York in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976). Carol Reed’s 1949 masterpiece of British film noir, The Third Man, is similarly entwined with the city of Vienna. The ruined boulevards and subterranean passages of the Austrian capital provide a perfectly murky stage for a cynical tale of crime and corruption during the birth of the Cold War.

It’s a war-torn town with dark cobbled streets and racketeers lurking inside every shadow. The palpable crookedness of the environment is even felt in Robert Krasker’s Oscar-winning cinematography, with dutch angles and extreme closeups fostering a constant sense of unease – accompanied, of course, by a timelessly evocative zither score from Anton Karas.

But The Third Man‘s Vienna is so much more than an atmospheric setting; it captures a changing world in a period of political and economic turmoil. The film arrived only a few months after the Berlin airlift; a time when the allied coalition which had defeated the Nazis was beginning to break apart. An uneasy detente had given way to open animosity between the Communist Eastern bloc and the capitalist West. As an occupied city in the former Third Reich, Vienna was at an epicentre of these tensions, and as such it provided a perfect microcosm of this post-war global order which was still in its infancy.

The importance of the film’s volatile political context is foregrounded in a brilliantly sardonic opening narration, provided by director Carol Reed himself. In character as a seedy black-market racketeer, Reed explains how Vienna had been divided into various sectors under the control of American, Soviet, British and French forces respectively. “What a hope they had,” he comments, “all strangers to the place and none of them could speak the same language.” The Third Man, then, is not just the story of a city, but of a whole new world which had been born from the ashes of the Second World War.

Amid this unfamiliar geopolitical landscape, the film seems preoccupied with the role of Britain on the world stage, and how this once-mighty nation might come to terms with the newly emergent supremacy of the United States and the Soviet Union. Acclaimed novelist Graham Greene adapted the screenplay of The Third Man from his own novella, but made one crucial change from page to screen. His characters Holly Martins and Harry Lime, respectively the protagonist and the villain of the drama, were recast as Americans rather than Britons. This change had obvious commercial implications for a British film pitching itself to the US box-office, but placing two American characters so centrally within a European story also reflected the growing dominance of the US in world affairs.

Indeed, Holly Martins is not just an American citizen, but a writer of the most American of genres, the Western. As he barges brashly into the Viennese underworld with all the tact of a gunslinger, it falls to the chief British authority in Vienna, Major Calloway (Trevor Howard ), to act as his guide. Against the determination of the American, however, Calloway can only stand by and feebly offer advice as Martins wades further and further out of his depth.

At the same time as Calloway’s sincere guidance is largely disregarded by the visiting American, the British officer also finds himself overridden by his Russian counterparts. The Soviet wing of Vienna’s international police are eager to deport Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli), a Czechoslovak national living under false documents, and Calloway’s protests in her defence go largely unheeded. Finding himself subject to the whim of more powerful and well-resourced rivals, Calloway’s predicament would have been familiar to British authorities across the globe at the time of the film’s release. Throughout the late 1940s, an exhausted British Empire had acquiesced to Soviet demands in Eastern Europe, granted independence to former colonies in India, Burma, and Ceylon, and indebted itself to the United States via the Marshall Plan. If Harry Lime is the third man of the film’s title, then Britain had become the third power, dwarfed by the economic and military might of the planet’s chief capitalist and communist states.

Despite this diminished influence, the British retain the moral prerogative in the world of The Third Man. Calloway is a stern but ultimately good-natured figure, upholding the rule of law but making exceptions wherever there is the imperative to do so, as evidenced in his kind treatment of Anna. Likewise, his Cockney enforcer, Sergeant Paine (Bernard Lee), is an affable personality – a keen fan of Martins’ westerns and always courteous to Anna, even when duty requires him to raid her property. These values may appear out of step with the world around them, but the rarity of such ethical integrity is exactly what makes it seem so valuable. This is contrasted with the cocky self-assurance of Holly Martins, the nihilistic greed of Harry Lime, or the inhumane bureaucracy of Soviet liaison officer, Brodsky. Here, Greene’s script may be suggesting a new role for Britain within a world of ideologically opposed superpowers; neither as bold as the Americans nor as efficient as the Russians, but nevertheless a voice for decency and reason in a polarised landscape.

Carol Reed wasn’t the only film-maker to be questioning Britain’s identity in the immediate post-war era. Powell and Pressburger’s majestic 1946 fantasy, A Matter of Life and Death, focused on the Anglo-American partnership which had emerged as one of the defining traits of the post-war West. But where that film had ended on an optimistic note of cooperation and cross-cultural romance, The Third Man strikes an altogether more bitter tone. At the film’s conclusion, Martins chooses to ignore Calloway’s parting advice to “be sensible”, and he is left alone in a foreign city with his love unrequited and a far bleaker future than when he had arrived. Perhaps it’s a suitable metaphor for the disappointment of the European post-war project, which had seen the rapid disintegration of the new United Nations into two opposed monoliths on either side of an iron curtain.

If this is a disheartening picture, it represents only the opening salvo of a Cold War which would persist for another four decades and trigger a series of protracted proxy conflicts around the globe. The role that Britain would play in this tumult was still unclear, and in many ways it remains so. As the The Third Man celebrates its seventieth birthday and the UK faces another crossroads in its relationship with the world, the film’s image of a belittled yet outward-looking nation within a chaotic world remains familiar.

Top ten films of 2018

23 February 201915 February 2020 ~ Mark Allison ~ Leave a comment

This Sunday heralds the arrival of the 91st Academy Awards, and with it the interminable horror/delight of the annual movie awards season draws to a close. In honour of this fact, I’ve assembled a list of my ten favourite films of the last twelve months – and it’s been another fantastic year for film fans of every variety. Untested film-makers like Boots Riley and Bradley Cooper dazzled audiences with spectacular directorial debuts, while experienced masters like Lynne Ramsay and Paul Schrader returned to screens in stellar form. As a human being with responsibilities and limited time on this Earth, I can’t claim to have been comprehensive in my selection, but I nevertheless hope that I’ve distilled a varied range of the brilliant films which have graced our screens this year, and shed light on a few lesser-seen gems in the process.

10. Mission: Impossible – Fallout

Dir. Chris McQuarrie

Far and away the best blockbuster I’ve seen this year, the sixth instalment in the Mission: Impossible franchise is a masterclass in big-budget action cinema. Now approaching his hundredth birthday, Tom Cruise continues to astound as the world’s most charismatic crash-test dummy, but it’s the slick work of writer/director Christopher McQuarrie which sets the film apart from its competitors. The plot is a plainly absurd mixture of well-worn genre tropes and contrived techno-babble, but it works perfectly as a stage for the most awe-inspiring stuntwork and special effects since 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road. It’s exciting, crowd-pleasing cinema which doesn’t require leaving your critical faculties at the door, and I can’t wait to see what McQuarrie does next with his next two Mission: Impossible sequels, due for back-to-back release in 2021 and 2022.

9. If Beale Street Could Talk

Dir. Barry Jenkins

Adapted from James Baldwin’s acclaimed novel, If Beale Street Could Talk is a love story which chronicles the black experience in modern America, in both its joy and its injustice. Following on from his stunning 2016 directorial debut, Moonlight, director Barry Jenkins has again demonstrated a knack for immersive cinema, pulling his audience through the frame into an authentic vision of 1970s Harlem. The characters who populate this world are compelling and full of life, while Nicholas Britell’s delicate score provides a sultry backdrop. The result is a deeply atmospheric experience which pays tribute to the human capacity for love and denounces our complicity in cruelty and prejudice. For a much more eloquent and insightful perspective on the film than I could ever produce, I heartily recommend checking out Tayler Montague’s review for Little White Lies.

8. A Star is Born

Dir. Bradley Cooper

It’s not often that remakes are among my favourite films of the year, but there’s a reason A Star is Born is now in it’s fourth iteration. As an exploration of the music industry, its themes are simultaneously contemporary and timeless. Making his directorial debut, Bradley Cooper has offered a deeply affecting meditation on art, artist, and how celebrity can bring about both the making and the destruction of a person. But all this would be meaningless if the romance at the centre of the film didn’t feel utterly believable. Both Cooper and Lady Gaga are astonishing in the lead roles, disappearing into their characters and fizzling with chemistry during intimate moments as well as bombastic musical numbers. Significantly, the film’s tactful depiction of male mental health feels relevant and essential at a time when such conversations are much-needed.

7. Sorry to Bother You

Dir. Boots Riley

In the best possible way, Sorry to Bother You is one of the strangest films I have ever seen. It drifts between razor-sharp satire of modern capitalism and python-esque absurdist comedy – and often both at the same time. With shades of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and Jordan Peele’s Get Out, Sorry to Bother You is a consistently hilarious but damning critique of the consumerist rat-race in which we all live. Writer and director Boots Riley, a veteran rapper and activist but unproven film-maker, helms the film with a lightness of touch which results in an enjoyably surreal experience, despite the script’s earnest subtext. Constantly second guessing its audience, Sorry to Bother You is not the film you expect going in, nor is it the film you think it is after watching for an hour – and you won’t see anything like it this year.

6. Widows

Dir. Steve McQueen

Steve McQueen has never been known to shy away from sensitive subjects. His previous films have dealt with the Northern Irish troubles, sex addiction, and slavery, and Widows follows in a similar vein. The film confronts the issues of politics, race, gender, and violence which plague modern America, but all within an exciting and deftly executed crime thriller. Adapted from Lynda La Plante’s 1983 ITV television series, Widows masterfully follows the heist movie textbook, complete with a chalkboard planning sequence, a vehicle chase, and a last minute twist, but McQueen gives the genre a contemporary makeover. It’s probably his most accessible film yet, but that doesn’t mean it has any less to say. All this is supported by a magnificent ensemble cast including Viola Davis, Elizabeth Debicki, Liam Neeson, Colin Farrell, and Robert Duvall, and a typically aggressive score from Hans Zimmer.

5. First Reformed

Dir. Paul Schrader

No one makes films about disturbed and reclusive men like Paul Schrader does, and First Reformed marks a welcome return to form for the seasoned film-maker. It’s a slow-moving and deeply contemplative film which stars Ethan Hawke in a career-best performance as Reverend Toller, the pastor of a small-town church who has become a husk of himself following the death of his son and collapse of his marriage. As he tries to reconcile his faith with the cruel and decaying world he sees around him, Toller finds a new and obsessive purpose upon meeting an expectant mother called Mary (no points for subtlety there, Paul). There are undeniably shades of Travis Bickle in Toller, but the quiet rural parish of First Reformed is a world away from the scum-filled streets of Taxi Driver‘s New York. More than a character study, Schrader’s script examines the role of faith and the church in a world on the brink of environmental collapse, and a discomforting sense of impending disaster appropriately permeates the whole film. What begins at an unhurried pace gradually builds in intensity until a breathless climax and the best cut-to-black ending of 2018.

4. The Favourite

Dir. Yorgos Lanthimos

The reign of Queen Anne has never been a popular arena for cinema, and it feels appropriate that the idiosyncratic talents of Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos should be directed towards this neglected era with The Favourite. As usual, he brings his subtly disorientating camera work and an acerbic script, but this time he’s joined by three fine leads in the form of Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz, and Emma Stone, who bounce off each other with alacrity. It’s a subversive take on the costume drama; from the foppish absurdity of almost every male character to the liberal use of the word “cunt”, this certainly isn’t Pride and Prejudice. Although the results are generally hilarious, there are sudden and very effective moments of tragedy which are handled masterfully by Lanthimos and give real depth to characters who might otherwise seem caricatured. It’s also fantastic to see Olivia Colman receiving the roles and recognition she deserves as one of this country’s finest actors. Having followed her career since the days of Peep Show and That Mitchell and Webb Look, it’s difficult not to feel a peculiar sense of pride in watching her ascent to international stardom.

3. Cold War

Dir. Paweł Pawlikowski

Probably the most difficult film of the year to find on Google, Cold War perfectly demonstrates the simple power of visual storytelling. Following the tumultuous romance of two lovers in Communist-era Poland, the film is an epic tale which spans across years and borders, as the two suitors drift passionately, and often destructively, through each others’ lives. Despite this tremendous scope, the film runs slightly less than an hour and a half in length, an admirable effort in brevity from co-writer and director Paweł Pawlikowski. Above all, he is a film-maker who understands the primacy of the image as a means of telling his story, avoiding the need for lengthy exposition or protracted dialogue. Each frame of the film is more beautiful than the last, but more impressive is how these images capture the unspoken intensity of true love and the cruel world which seeks to extinguish its spirit. The power of Pawlikowski’s approach would have been dulled were it not for the subtle work of his two lead performers, Tomasz Kot and Joanna Kulig, who, with barely a word, communicate both the excitement and melancholy of love.

2. Roma

Dir. Alfonso Cuarón

A loosely biographical tale of a housemaid in early 1970s Mexico City, Roma is a study of both the personal and the political, and how these two worlds intertwine in powerful but almost imperceptible ways. The experience of a single woman, and the family for which she works, is placed against a sweeping historical backdrop of economic and social turmoil, without ever losing focus on the human drama at its core. Newcomer Yalitza Aparicio is a revelation in the central role, while the film around her is crafted with Alfonso Cuarón’s trademark finesse. Every movement of the camera is executed with a deliberate, almost ethereal omniscience, placing the viewer into an strangely voyeuristic role. As a Netflix production, Roma also represents a turning point in how major films are made and distributed; the much-maligned streaming service is knocking on Hollywood’s door.

1. You Were Never Really Here

Dir. Lynne Ramsay

Eight years since her last feature, We Need to Talk About Kevin, director Lynne Ramsay has again proved herself to be one of the finest film-makers in the business. Visually dazzling with a dark and uncompromising character study at its heart, You Were Never Really Here simply could not have been made by anyone else. Joaquin Phoenix is a brutish and enthralling presence as Joe, a violent enforcer barely clinging to his grip on reality, who must embark on a rescue mission into a depraved underworld he cannot begin to comprehend. Ramsay’s films have always had a preoccupation with the internal experiences of her characters, with their singular perspectives providing a stark new lens through which to see the world. As such, every shot in this film is filtered through Joe’s confused and erratic psyche, enveloping everything in a suffocating intensity. The effect is heightened by Paul Davies’ cacophonous sound design and Jonny Greenwood’s entrancing score, and it all combines into a sensory assault which is experienced as much as it is watched. It may clock in at a lean 89 minutes, but You Were Never Really Here is a film I haven’t stopped thinking about for almost a year.

The Revolution devours its children: Sergio Leone’s Duck, You Sucker

30 June 20186 July 2020 ~ Mark Allison ~ 2 Comments

The year 1968 was defined by political radicalism and civil unrest. From the May demonstrations in France to the American civil rights movement, a wave of anti-authoritarian protests and riots swept much of the world, even reaching behind the iron curtain of the USSR. In Italy, home of director Sergio Leone, almost all the country’s universities were rapidly occupied by a predominantly left-wing counter-culture movement known as “Sessantotto”. This was a period of unprecedented civil strife in the post-war world, and film-makers had never had it so good.

It was against this tumultuous backdrop that Leone, along with collaborators Sergio Donati and Luciano Vincenzoni, devised another of his spaghetti westerns as a follow-up to his acclaimed “Dollars” trilogy and the upcoming Once Upon a Time in the West. This next project was to be set against the chaos of the Mexican Revolution around the year 1914. It followed a great heritage of films about the conflict, but where those had typically charted the revolutionary heroics of Pancho Villa or Emiliano Zapata, this was to tell the story of two luckless bandits stuck in the middle.

The result was the curiously titled Giù la testa, or “Duck your head”, which arrived in Italian cinemas in 1971. This became Duck, You Sucker for the English-language release, although later American prints carried the title A Fistful of Dynamite to capitalise on the popularity of Leone’s first western, A Fistful of Dollars (1964).

Despite this awkwardly enforced association, Duck, You Sucker is a much harsher and more cynical film than any of Leone’s earlier work. In many ways, it feels like a conscious reflection on the director’s career thus far. Where he had previously deconstructed the tropes of classic Hollywood westerns in his “Dollars” trilogy, here he critiques the archetypes found in his own films, and how they, in turn, had influenced contemporary Hollywood. As such, Duck, You Sucker is a fascinating example of self-reflection from one of history’s great film-makers, and a cruelly underappreciated work in the western canon.

With this in mind, it may come as a surprise that Leone never intended to direct Duck, You Sucker himself. He had hoped that Once Upon a Time in the West would be his final statement on the western genre, and wanted instead to focus on an adaptation of Harry Grey’s prohibition-era crime novel The Hoods (this would eventually become 1984’s Once Upon a Time in America). A series of alternative directors were approached to helm the project, including Peter Bogdanovich, Sam Peckinpah, and Leone’s long-term assistant director Giancarlo Santi. In fact, the latter was ten days into shooting when a series of on-set problems forced Leone, reluctantly, to step behind the camera himself.

Having been coerced into another Western, Leone seems to have been determined to cast the film in a very different mould from his previous efforts. The film’s opening moments make perfectly clear that this is not the light-hearted hijinks of his “Dollars” trilogy, nor the romanticised heroism of existing films on the Mexican Revolution.

Our protagonist, Rod Steiger’s hapless bandito Juan Miranda, is introduced urinating onto an ant-hill in the film’s first shot, and within moments he has robbed a stagecoach, executed a man in cold blood, and raped a terrified woman. A ruthlessly amoral character, Juan is a far cry from Tuco, the lovable rogue played by Eli Wallach in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, and this brutality sets the tone for the rest of film’s world. Instantly, Leone is asking his audience to cast aside their romanticised preconceptions of the gunslinging Old West in which his films exist.

The film shortly introduces us to its secondary protagonist, John Mallory, an expert dynamiter and veteran of the Irish struggle for independence (in one of the film’s many anachronisms, he carries a flag marked “IRA”, an organisation formed years after the story takes place). Played with an admittedly questionable accent by James Coburn, John seems to be cut from the same cloth as Clint Eastwood’s morally ambiguous “Man With No Name” archetype, but a series of flashbacks reveal a darker truth to his past. By the film’s climax, John is discovered to have murdered his best friend while escaping from British authorities in Ireland. Now finding himself embroiled in the Mexican Revolution, he continues to seek atonement for this personal betrayal committed in another, distant war.

James Coburn and Rod Steiger as John and Juan, two bandits caught in the middle of the Mexican Revolution

A tenuous friendship is formed between these two characters, but the essential contrast between them is made clear in their conflicting perspectives on the ongoing revolution. John is an idealist; in his pocket he carries a copy of The Patriotism by Russian Revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin, and he appears willing to sacrifice himself for a greater good. Juan, on the other hand, has no such creed, nor any inclination to selflessness. His only allegiance, he insists, is to himself and his own family. Of these two perspectives, Leone seems to sympathise with the latter, who’s world view is made explicit in an impassioned speech delivered mid-way through the film:

“I know all about the revolutions and how they start! The people who read the books go to the people who can’t read the books, the poor people, and say, “We have to have a change.” So, the poor people make the change. And then, the people who read the books, they all sit around the big polished tables, and they talk and talk and talk and eat and eat and eat. But what has happened to the poor people? They are dead! That’s your revolution!”

Juan’s speech is vindicated later in the most tragic of circumstances, when his entire family are slaughtered while resisting government troops. However, this is not to suggest that the film is on the side of the oppressive authorities. Indeed, emphasis is placed on the brutality dealt by government forces, with a number of lengthy sequences depicting massacres and summary executions.

Throughout all these events, the specifics of the Mexican Revolution and the various factions fighting it are only alluded to in vague terms. Rather, the conflict appears to stand for the concept of revolution in a generic sense. An opening quotation from Mao Zedong (which was removed from the American release) states that “The revolution is not a social dinner, a literary event, a drawing or an embroidery; it cannot be done with elegance and courtesy. The revolution is an act of violence.”

The sentiment of this quote is echoed in the brutality of the film’s violence, in stark contrast to the stylised, larger-than-life gunplay of Leone’s earlier westerns. In depicting the bloody massacre of civilians and combatants alike, the film makes clear that revolutions are never clean, nor is the violence inherent to them in any way honourable. In short, revolution is a dirty business, and anyone proposing such a thing from the comfort of an Italian university should understand the consequences.

If Duck, You Sucker has a philosophy, it might be best described as something approaching nihilism, or at least individualism. When caught in a revolution, Leone seems to argue, the best option is to look out for number one – in other words; duck, you sucker! Indeed, Leone himself called the film a “reverse Pygmalion” story; the intellectual revolutionary (John) meets an uneducated petty criminal (Juan), and it is the simplistic, selfish world view of the latter which appears to win out.

Such a cynical interpretation of the Mexican Revolution caused controversy in Mexico itself, where the film was banned until 1979. This was hardly a proportionate response, as Leone is evidently more concerned with elaborate action set-pieces than he is with politics. A lengthy bank-robbery-turned-prison-break in the second act is one of the finest sequences of his career, accompanied by an unusually jazzy yet typically masterful score from composer Ennio Morricone.

With Duck, You Sucker, then, Leone continues the cinematic finesse of his previous westerns while exploring more thematically interesting territory, with occasionally refreshing results. The stylised, almost balletic violence which characterised his earlier work is exchanged for a grittier and less glamorous atmosphere. Likewise, his characters are no longer appealing archetypes but flawed and thuggish killers.

In the years between the first conception of Duck, You Sucker in 1968 and its release in 1971, much had changed. At the same time as the world was in turmoil, Hollywood had experienced a revolution of its own. Taking influences from European cinema, a new wave of young American auteurs were pioneering a fresh style of film-making which cast aside the taboos and stuffiness of the old Hollywood. In this vein, westerns like The Wild Bunch and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (both 1969) had drawn upon Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns to popularise a new form of so-called “revisionist” western. These films thrived on moral ambiguity, anti-authoritarianism, and stylised violence, and they appealed to cinema audiences living in a world of rapid social and political change.

Much as John Mallory is atoning for his past in Duck, You Sucker, Sergio Leone is likewise reflecting upon his own influence on world cinema. The irreverence with which he had portrayed violence and cruelty in his “Dollars” films had helped to transform not just the western genre, but the very way in which Hollywood operated. Having pioneered this new western for the counterculture age, Leone seems to ask, “Is this what you really want?”

The 2018 clued-down Movie Awards

25 March 201825 March 2018 ~ Mark Allison ~ Leave a comment

Say what you like about the last year, but it’s been a marvellous time for movies. Whether you’re into blockbusters, art house, or anything in between, there’s been something for every film fan, and it feels unfair to single out any one film or film-maker for praise – but that’s why I’m here. Below you will find my nominees and winners for the best achievements in film of 2017/18.

Best Film

Nominated

Call Me By Your Name

John Wick: Chapter 2

The Death of Stalin

Get Out

Nominated

Paul King and Simon Farnaby – Paddington 2

Armando Iannucci, David Schneider, Ian Martin and Peter Fellows – The Death of Stalin

Scott Frank, James Mangold and Michael Green – Logan

Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber – The Disaster Artist

Winner

James Ivory – Call Me By Your Name

Adapted from the novel by André Aciman, James Ivory’s screenplay for Call Me By Your Name is an affecting, delicate, and occasionally painful portrait of a fleeting summer romance. In a story where the characters rarely have the words for what they truly feel, Ivory manages to communicate their innermost desires and conflicts. It articulates the confusing and overwhelming sensation of being in love, and the inevitable agony of knowing that it must come to an end. The power of the script lies in its abstraction, functioning as both an intimate study of gay discovery and sexuality, and a universal tale of love, passion, and heartbreak.