Museum Hours

  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....

  Expecting a gore fest of violence, degradation and societal breakdown? Instead we have a completely immersive social realist drama with rounded, fully recognisable people. Just people from 250 years ago. The Gallows Poll pulls off the extraordinarily hard trick of meshing (rather than mashing) language which conveys both a sense of the period but also the feeling that these are people like us.   The result is unique in achieving a kind of demotic drama that is true to experience but does not fetishise authenticity or worry about mixing modern and period language and terminology. Somehow it’s both of the time and universal to the experience of common people.  And it's vivid and funny (so very, very funny), and touching and ridiculous. A world which we enter in media res with no guardrails and just a requirement to pick up the cadence and the rhythm of what is happening. To just listen to these people talk. And how they talk. The dialogue and the delivery are amazing. The...

  Cinema going returned.  My love for French cinema was confirmed. My appreciation of the serious, austere and not necessarily ultimately uplifting was present and correct. Vicky Krieps continued to suggest that she is one of the most astounding actors at work at the moment ( Corsage , Hold Me Tight and Bergman Island to add to other stellar outings). Also confirmed was the urgent need to correct weaponised nostalgia and simple stories in favour of complexity, criticism and a warning that the siren voices of creeping social and political authoritarianism have to be confronted.  The usual 10 - 1 ranking follows but there are several films which only just missed the cut which deserve a mention particularly  Corsage ;  Il Buco ;  Bergman Island ;  Flux Gourmet  and  The Quiet Girl . 10. Parallel Mothers :  A tremendous performance from Penelope Cruz who is on screen for almost the entire running time anchors this film which is a stonking g...

  "Everybody’s crazy What’s your excuse baby? Standing in the middle waiting for something to happen." Ah, the lost and greatly lamented Veronica Falls one of my favourite jangly, indie, bubblegum, breathy, Sixties crossed with a Noughties take on Britpop inflected New Wave, covertly energetic, bands. A niche category but a good one. The song is about indecision and prevarication; everyone is as uncertain as everyone else. But perhaps it is also about paralysis in the face of things that are just too big.  In the case of the song, approaching someone you kinda like.  In the case of many humans in the early 2020s, the sense that perhaps everyone really is crazy makes one feel that actually standing in the middle isn't the worst place. The trouble is that the crazies might catch up with you anyway. Waiting no longer feels like just waiting for the weekend, for something to turn up or even to improve. The notion that things might actually get better seems fanciful in itself....

  A book  set  in the past which speaks so loudly to our present times as to be  shouting in our faces. Except that it would do so in the most understated and droll manner behind a distinct partina of politeness and perhaps just a little condescension at our inability to appreciate the true architectonics of our financialised economy and society. One in which transactions are all ultimately mediated through money. It would be unforgivable to say too much about the plot because there are so many delights to be savoured from the gradual unfolding of a series of ventriloquised perspectives on nominally the same events in which who is saying what and why is constantly in play. There is also much joy to be had in considering who might be the model for some of the people at the heart of the novel, notably Andrew Bevel whose ambition to 'bend and align' reality so that he is always shown to have been, well, right is so reminiscent of so many powerful men and their equally p...

  At the end of a year in which we all felt rather at the mercy of things much bigger than ourselves, here is my list of the ten best new films that I saw in 2021 (including some at festivals which have yet to be released in the UK) which provided some comfort that humans at their best (and goodness knows we've seen plenty of humans at their worst particularly in what seems to be an ongoing death spiral for liberal democracy in one of the homes of cinema at the behest of a pathetic narcissist who just can't accept that he lost) can entrance each other with empathetic appreciation and aesthetic wonders. In other words the genius of cinema at its best lies in its recognition of the plurality of experience - the very thing that the know nothing reactionaries and authoritarians around the world want to deny us.  Generally, a very strong year probably at least in part because of titles being held up by the pandemic (or more precisely, and sadly, the early waves of the ongoing pande...

  Take things seriously doesn't mean being serious about them all of the time.  In contrast, considering the entire world to be an exercise in irony reduces everything to the purported laugh, the trolling or the rise.  Its ultimate expression is deeply political: the real is so subordinate to the virtual that a country can be ruled from a phone. Real pain is inflicted entirely gratuitously in the name of  slogans, memes and the most prosaic bigotry.  ' Every day we were seeing new evidence that suggested it was the portal that had allowed the dictator to rise to power. This was humiliating. It would be like discovering that the Vietnam War was secretly caused by ham radios, or that Napoleon was operating exclusively on the advice of a parrot named Brian."   Yet the portal (Lockwood's term for the internet) is also the means of growth and development and escape for many. The virtual also has in itself a certain beauty.  No One I...