Museum Hours

  My Letterboxd account confidently provided a detailed thematic breakdown of the 225 films viewed this year: Quite what to make of this is somewhat less clear. Either I broke the algorithm or my ideal film is a low key, droll, genre hopping, weird, relationship drama with philosophical pretensions. Which might actually stand as a description of my favourite film of the year.  Certainly, on review, 2024 turns out, slightly surprisingly, to have been a strong year. So even before reaching the top 10 there are another ten films very worthy of note: On Becoming A Guinea Fowl   The Dead Don't Hurt   Green Border    The Outrun   Good One Showing Up   The Holdovers   Femme   The Settlers   Blackbird, Blackbird, Blackberry   Then the top ten in traditional reverse order: 10.  Janet Planet  Wonderfully understated, subtle examination of our perception of connection to others seen most profoundly in the determination of a teen...

  Orbital  by Samantha Harvey is a short book about which the only complaint is perhaps that it should be even shorter, so that the lapidary sheen on this multifaceted jewel might be yet more polished for even greater effulgence; a confit for which even slower cooking might have reduced the constituents into a yet deeper and more refined reflection of their parts. As a piece of fully immersive metaphysics, Orbital probes away at our perspective on ourselves and our planet, on our simultaneous insignificance and grandeur, and on the need for a true sense of awe rather than the gimcrack variety applied in a ludicrous diminished form to the flashy and superficial attention grabbing detritus of modern existence. So why would a short piece about six people orbiting the earth in a space module open with a reproduction of Velasquez's 'Las Meninas'?  In short, because it is a 17th century painting (more on the baroque sensibility later) profoundly concerned with perspective, in w...

  "There was a silence, as if the fountain felt embarrassed or rebuffed. Then the fountain was suddenly a porcelain soup tureen, with frilled and ruffled edges. It just metamorphosed, even while she was continuously staring at it, the way an animation might transform - and Celine realised as she stared at it in amazement how disturbing she always thought soup was. Perhaps, she wondered, it was the way soup has no edges, or the way the elements which are contained in it are unprovable and undefined." The legendary film director, Andrei Tarkovsky was obsessed by pools of water, particularly the almost limitless movement that is possible within them. 'Nothing is more beautiful than water.' 'It transmits movement, depth, changes'. The most thoroughgoing treatment of this observation may be in his film  Nostalgia. With extraordinary composition of shot, Tarkovsky's obsession with water in buildings and confined spaces - particularly the sulphur pool - is plumb...

  One of the most joyful rediscoveries this year was Percy Adlon's  Bagdad Cafe  which in a wonderfully surreal manner captures the magic, literal and figurative, that a most unlikely outsider brings to the moribund, allowing them to realise what they have been missing through their obsessive introspection and to grow through the recognition of the value in difference. Could there possibly be a message in there? In the 'they do still make'em like that' category the outstanding example was the  The Three Musketeers: D'Artagnan  which was pure pleasure from the tip of its épée to the handle of its poignard, running full tilt with the ridiculousness of the plot half way round France and back across the Channel without pausing for breath. Hats are worn with an angle of jaunt worthy of an Expressionist noir, swords are barely ever in a scabbard, panelling is chewed liberally and Eva Green's use of her belle poitrine auditions it for separate billing in the cast list....