Return to Form

In this episode, Ralph and Owen journey into the spectral wastes of British film, asking: what went wrong, and what is to be done? Through kitchen sink realism, folk-horror spooks, socially-engaged documentarians, materially-inclined avant-gardism, and more than a handful of oddballs, the situation seems as underwhelming as it was in 1927, when Kenneth Macpherson opined that “it is no good pretend...

This week, we’re slipping into the proverbial cinematic pool with a brief pitstop in Bradley Cooper’s Bernstein-biopic Maestro and a longer look at a luscious new restoration of Lou Ye’s Suzhou River (2000). We also figure out what it means to be ‘Shanghaied’.

In a year when so much felt so over, film seems so beautifully back. Casting their eyes over twelve months, four festivals, and countless hours of chthonic kino encounters, the boys sat down to boil the broth of 2023; setting out to identify their top 10 films of the year. Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6hdAjXtGPpeQTCcuJ3KNmH?si=Ud_f__90TOSa28tzYPA5GQ Listen on Apple: https://pod...

Jean Eustache is hard to pin down. A French auteur who combined the brevity of Bresson with the romantic rambling of Rohmer. Eustache often preferred telling to showing. Yet somehow these moments of gossip and reminiscence are powerfully cinematic. A spell is cast with judicious editing, subtle performances and gentle fades to black. After a short break the boys return to send new vibrations down...

LFF may be over, but the takes are not. For their final derive through the halls of contemporary arthouse film, Ralph, Owen, and George take stock of flicks both fair and foul: Jonathan Glazer’s tautly rigorous Zone of Interest, Molly Manning Walker’s spring-breaky debut How to Have Sex, Moin Hussain’s service station sci-fi Sky Peals, Wim Wender’s flabby kunstlerfilm Anselm, Linklater’s poorly-ai...

Battered and broken, their eyes barely staying open, Ralph and Owen are joined by Berlin correspondent George MacBeth for a second heaving helping of LFF. The stakes are high, covering the likes of Radu Jude’s towering DO NOT EXPECT TOO MUCH OF THE END OF THE WORLD, Steve McQueen’s uneven symphony of OCCUPIED CITY, Mortezai’s unexpectedly bracing EUROPA, Scorcese’s *shrugging emoji* KILLERS OF THE...

Un-reel city, under the brown fog of winter (well, autumn) dawn – a crowd flowed over Picadilly Circus, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many. Apologies to T.S. Eliot, but London Film Festival 2023 has landed – banging the slush from its shoes, clapping its hands together, and inviting us to step inside the cheugy rooms of Picturehouse bloody Central for two weeks of untapped film. F...

Plumbing the murky and anodyne depths of German modernity, Christian Petzold – leading light of the Berlin School; protege of artist-filmmaker Harun Farocki – has a bafflingly uneven reputation. The highs are thrilling and poised; the lows, schlocky and off-note. Why so inconsistent? To separate the sauer from the succulent, the boys – joined by George MacBeth – set out on a long-distance road tri...

Owen and Ralph discuss Edward Yang - the golden boy of the Taiwanese New Wave. Yang rose to fame with elliptical films like Taipei Story and The Terrorisers - which depicted intimate relationships, strained by modernity and Taiwain’s unique east/west ambivalence. His dense period piece A Brighter Summer Day established a fascination with family dynamics, which he pushed further with his canonised...

Last weekend we dreamed in celluloid, in three-strip technicolor and, crucially, on NITRATE. The BFI's new, hopefully regular, festival dedicated to cinema's technical heritage was a triumph - give or take an opening night. The boys sampled some exhilarating expanded cinema on 16mm by Malcolm Le Grice, some dicy nostalgism from Mark Jenkin, and of course Blood and Sand, Rouben Mamoulian&#3...

The greatest film ever made? Laurels like these come with their own anxiety of influence. Taking pole position in 2022’s decade-awaited Sight & Sound top 100 films list, Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman – a 3-hour ‘structural’ film centered on the habitual rituals of everyday, gendered labour – was an unexpected ‘winner’ (whatever that means). Between sex work and schnitzel, the boys unpack precis...

This week Owen and Ralph discuss the early works of a living legend, the Polish auteur Jerzy Skolimowski. His recent poly-form donkey parable EO has led to a BFI retrospective and the long overdue Blu-Ray release of his first four features, made in 1960s Poland. These films and the London-based Deep End represent Skolimowski at his boldest and best. With depth and blocking worthy of Welles or Fell...

This week the boys caught the millennium bug, immersing themselves in films made at the turn of a new technological era. In the late nineties & early aughts filmmakers who dared to dance with digital video could capture compressed, constricted and chaotic footage, often surreptitiously and with new energy. By 2023 the revolt has been contained and the film industry once again dictates what con...

Mia Hansen-Love’s latest is a dementia drama with a twist of romance. Always attuned to the intimate she blends naturalistic dialogue with Sirkian melodrama, with affecting performances from Lea Seydoux, Melvil Poupaud and Pascal Gregory. The spectre of Rohmer holds rather than haunts this luscious European arthouse gem. After the long Berlinale hangover One Fine Morning jolted the boys out of the...

This week, the boys went on ‘sabbatical’ to Hammersmith; peering under the hood of contemporary Polish film as part of Kinoteka Film Festival. They were reasonably delighted by Anna Kazejak-Dawid’s Ostlundian holiday comedy ‘Fucking Bornholm’ and predictably bored by Marta Minorowicz’s sombre grief feature ‘Illusion’. A review of the Jerzy Skolimowski retrospective is ahead.

This week, we’re taking a closer look at the impressionistic and (later) avant garde filmmaking of Germaine Dulac – particularly that which occupied her activities during the 1920s. For her, this was about “integral filmmaking” (as she called it): the rhythmic collision (and superimposition) of dissonant images and ideas. Clergymen, ballet dancers, fountains, machines. If it all sounds ‘so far, so...

The boys are at the bottom of the Berlinale barrel, and their wallets, and despite a strict diet of doner kebabs they're still struggling to find something meaty in the programme. This time joined by George MacBeth they pore over the last morsels and reflect on the festivals offerings. Reviewed: Berlinale intro 0:00:00 Afire/Roter Himmel (Christian Petzold) 0:00:35 Music (Angela Schanelec) 0:15:08...

Festival-fog is taking its toll on the boys, so they sympathise with the angst of many of Berlinale's fraught faces: Willem Defoe’s trapped thief in Inside had them on the edge of their seats, while Vicky Krieps had them on the edge of walking out in Margarethe von Trotta’s Ingeborg Bachman biopic. But ultimately it was Franz Rogowski's double Berlinale outing, as both a flirty filmmaker in Ira Sa...

As dark clouds empty themselves over Berlin the boys hit a proverbial buffet of international Arthouse cinema - filling their plates with all kinds of quivering delicacies. But not everything goes down easy. In this first instalment we discuss: Berlinale intro 0:00 Manodrome (Trengrove) 1:20 Reality (Satter) 18:17 The Shadowless Tower (Lu Zhang) 30:10 Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything (Emil...

Orson Welles has secured his place in the filmmaking firmament. But Citizen Kane (1941) – with all its magnate malarky – can roundly overshadow everything he turned his hand to in the decades that followed; his films torn to shreds by philistine producers and Hollywood suits. What remains is a roster of some of the 20th century’s most ebullient and sublime films – from the Magnificent Ambersons (1...

Paul Mescal and Franky Corio star as a father and daughter on their hols in Turkey in the much-hyped feature debut of Charlotte Wells. Despite wearing Chantal Akerman’s influence on her sleeve Wells fails to conjure the formal flare of her heroine, leaning on a few set pieces, some sloppy cinematography and a very dodgy score. Even after 100 minutes under the projection lamp, neither Ralph nor Owe...

This week the boys are joined by screenwriter James King to discuss one of the most disctinctive voices in world cinema. An audacious arthouse alchemist who wears his influences on his sleeve, an access-all-areas immersion architect who raise moments of intimacy to the level of holy miracles, and a lover of landscape who lingers with as much curiosity on the hills of the Morelos as he does the con...

The arrival of sound opened a proverbial can of worms in the mute halls of cinema. For ten furious years (1930-1940), the ‘talkie’ would make and break itself again and again. The names are in the history books: Lang, Clair, Lubitsch, Dreyer, Mamoulian, Berkely, Vigo, Mizoguchi, von Sternberg, Hawks, Ford. Etc! But over these same years, cinema would begin to ossify – “where the experiments of 193...

'The slightest movement sends reverberations through the viewer' said Scorsese of Greece's old master auteur. The boys locked in for punishing schedule of yearning and distance in snowy and misty conditions. As winter comes down the tracks, why not warm your hands under the projection lamp and witness the transcendent imagery of Theo Angelopoulos. Films covered include: Landscapes in the Mist, The...

This week, the boys complete their New Horizons derive; casting a wide net over the work of Cornish filmmaker Mark Jenkin. Between the devil and the deep blue sea, they set sail for Enys Men (his latest) before dipping their oars into Jenkin’s preceding forays into hand-cranked celluloid (Bait and Bronco’s House). Questions. What’s eating contemporary British filmmaking, and how can we escape the...