the funeral (d. abel ferrara w. nicholas st john)

Ferrara's The Funeral feels like a riposte to Coppola's Godfather. Socialist mafia battles with capital. Socialist mafia goes anti-catholic in speakeasies and whorehouses. But mafia is mafia and no matter your politics or your licentiousness, family is going to family and the villains are going to do the dirty. In truth, at a hundred minutes, it feels as though Ferrara needed at least twice the running time to tease out all the angles his story opens up. Three brothers all have their stories to be told, the narrative has to skip backwards and forwards in time, and the female characters, played by Sciorra, Rosselini and Mol are given greater protagonism than any, apart from Keaton, in Coppola's version. This is all great, and  Gallo shows what a star he might have been, but ultimately the film is always chasing the narrative's tail. Nevertheless, it's an absorbing piece of filmmaking, a worthy and undervalued addendum to the Italo-American lexicon of mafia movie making.

7 días de enero (w&d juan antonio bardem, w. gregorio morán)

Madrid, January 1977. Shortly following the death of Franco, Spain stands at a crossroads between continued autocracy (military dictatorship) and democracy. In the era when democracy meant something. Bardem’s film looks at events in the city that took place over the course of a week, when the military killed protesting students and committed a massacre of trade union activists and lawyers in Calle Atocha. Who will prevail? We know the answer to this question now. Democracy returned to Spain, and the events of the film played a part in that process. It seems astonishing that for nearly forty years, Spain was under the rule of Franco. The film is at its strongest when it shows the far right as they come together in antiseptic social surroundings or at masculine military gatherings which terminate with ‘patriotic’ singing. At other moments the film feels overlong and lacking the focus of the other film of Bardem I watched not so long ago. It feels as though the filmmaker is seeking to cram in as much information as he can. However, the importance of the film on a political level transcends its aesthetic limitations. At a time when the USA seems to be encouraging its own neo-fascist secret police to do whatever they want, it’s important to be reminded why the extreme right is so dangerous. Because it believes it has an entitlement to take the law into its own hands. One suspects the likes of Vance would have got on very well in Franco’s Spain. 

caught stealing (d. darren aronofsky, w. charlie huston)

Aronofsky has always been a visceral director, the one constant on his complex, bumpy filmmaking ride. He’s made several movies which are in their way seminal. Pi was a masterclass in low-budget first film making. Requiem for a Dream genuinely pushed at boundaries of taste and cruelty in a way few US movies ever do. Mother! Was one of those authorial ventures (like The Fountain) that few filmmakers are ever given budget to go for, and Black Swan has emerged as a low-key classic and regular touchstone for alt-pysch drama, referenced mucho in industry script development labs. Caught Stealing doesn’t lack for the director’s visceral verve. The recreating of nineties NY, pre-Guiliani, with plenty of CGI images of the twin towers laced in, adds to the vibe. Sadly, around the point where Zoe Kravitz is killed off, the narrative begins to flag. The last half or so is a case of going through the motions, kicking and screaming. Caught Stealing feels like an assemblage, with some lovely cameos (Bad Bunny! Doctor Who!) and plenty of colour, but it can’t quite leap through the hoops of a third act whose denouement feels as though it might have been generated by AI. 

the fraud (zadie smith)

Hard to know how to place The Fraud. It’s a novel about London, about Victorian England, about being a writer, about slavery, about being black in a white world. It’s also about being a Scottish spinster who has a kinky relationship with her cousin and is in a menage a trois with the cousin’s wife. That’s before we get to the narrative spine of the novel, which is the recounting of the factual scandal of the Tichbourne Claimant which shook up Victorian Britain. There’s a lot going as the novel jumps around 40 years of history, looking to land punches left, right and centre. Sometimes they land, but at other times it feels as though the novel’s most urgent themes run the risk of getting lost in the wood of highbrow entertainment, as Smith wrestles with a sickening heritage whilst keeping the reader amused. 

land of the snowmen (norman lock)

Land of the Snowmen is said to be written by George Belden, who participated on Scott’s disastrous 1905 mission to Antarctica. Belden and his fellow explorers go quietly mad in the icy wastes. They have visions and are visited by ghosts. Belden documents all this with a wry, tragic charm. It’s not going to end well. However, despite being attributed to Belden, the book is clearly a capricious work of fiction. Belden is an invention and the whole account is a work of the imagination of the writer Norman Lock, attributed as editor. This is a winsome project, steeped in the myths of the explorers, albeit a wispy, snowy thing. 

seconds (d. john frankenheimer, w. lewis john carlino, david ely)

Seconds has a bravura opening sequence. A distorted face in close up. Approximating the surreal. It triggers a lengthy sequence, the likes of which the algorithms would surely nix nowadays, as a suburban banker comes home to receive a call from a dead friend. This will eventually lead to the man’s death and subsequent reincarnation, as Rock Hudson, a socialite painter. It’s an out-there premise for an out-there movie. There are several scenes which could be straight out of The Substance. But Frankenheimer uses extended narrative beats to go further. A Bacchanalian Californian wine-pressing festival. A party that is reminiscent of Antonioni’s La Notte. There’s a Fellini-esque air to much of the action, underpinning the supernatural premise. Although it’s deliberately slow-paced, the director luxuriating in the extended sequences, there’s a relentless sense of madness which seems to inhabit Hudson, whose  woodenness makes the weirdness all the stranger, all the more off-beat. It’s far from a perfect film but it’s fascinating to see in this and Mickey One the kind of psychological complexity these sixties-era USA directors were reaching for, a complexity which got left by the wayside when Lucas and the marketing boys came to town.

mickey one (d. arthur penn, w. alan surgal)

Penn’s maverick film is all Beatty, jazz score, close-ups. Giant faces loom up out of the screen in black and white, like mountain ranges. The film uses dissolves, fast edits, foregoing regular dramatic scenes for something with shaper edges. The audience is asked to play catch-up as it tries to keep up with the story of Beatty’s paranoia, a comedian who’s got on the wrong side of the mob. It’s filmmaking which is dazzling and exerts a modernism not just stylistically but also in the way it presents its leading man, a lothario who’s gone off the rails, stepbrother to James Caan’s Sonny. Beatty is all wired tension, constantly on the brink of overacting, just as everything in this remarkable film is in danger of going over the brink. Like the weird Yves Tinguely sculpture whose destruction is given an entire sequence with no narrative significance, it’s a machine with so many bells and whistles that you lose count of them all. And yet in this excess, in the intricacies of the edit, the jazz score, featuring Stan Getz, in the machinations of the plot, there lurks a film which feels unique, a high point in the transition from stylised black and white to the lurid colour schemes of the seventies. 

dr strangelove (w&d. kubrick, w. terry southern, peter george)

My mum and dad went to see this film on one of their first dates at the Kilburn Classic Cinema. The bomb didn’t get them, although the fear was very real back then. I suspect they came out laughing at Peter Sellers, rather than being gripped by paranoia. Not something my dad suffered from excessively. Sellers’ Group Captain Lionel Mandrake is a delicious comic construction, every inflexion spot on, eyebrows raised at the perfect moment as he grapples with Sterling Hayden’s unhinged General Ripper. In truth, the film is highly theatrical, switching between three locations, the airforce base, the war room and the plane that will drop the bomb. It feels more like comic strip agit-prop than a serious critique of nuclear policy, (see The War Game), glued together with some beautiful shots of B52 bombers flying over Siberia. It’s a long way from Kubrick’s later heavyweight filmmaking, but the combination of humour and fear is always engaging. 

reminiscences of a journey to lithuania (d.jonas mekas)

Mr Amato urged me to accompany him to watch a film by Mekas, a name I have often come across without ever sitting down to watch a film of his. The film takes places in three sections. Mekas in New York, post war, seeking to come to terms with exile. Mekas’ return voyage in 1971 to Lithuania. And, as a coda, a short section on the visit to Vienna which followed the Lithuania trip.

The filmmaking style is informal, homemade. Mekas went everywhere with his camera and filmed everything. His elderly mother, a trip to the Catskills, the dance after the meeting of the collectivist farm. In many ways it seems prophetic of the current era, where everyone documents everything, and lives are captured and mapped out as they are lived. Or at least, a curated version of a life. The images are grainy, beautiful, jagged. It is an assemblage, an act of editing, pulling together the loose strings of the journey to form a tapestry. It is also a cine pobre, stepsister to the Poor Theatre or Arte Povera. Mekas reveals you don’t need a team and lights and gaffers to be a filmmaker, and as such the film reveals how cinema is capable of becoming an egalitarian art form. The other side of that coin is one no-one foresaw in 1972: everyone in the whole wide world is a filmmaker now. What Mekas reveals in the film is the need to both edit and curate. Images acquire another kind of weight/ humour/ magic, when juxtaposed with other images. There’s a difference between a visual information soup and a visual poem. 

faraway the southern sky (joseph andras, tr. simon leser)

Curiously, Faraway the Southern Sky is billed as a novel. It tells the tale of a narrator who is researching the years that Ho Chi Minh, who at that stage went by various alias’, spent in Paris. The novel recounts the narrator’s wandering through Paris as he seeks out the sites where Ho lived, and digs into the archives to find documentation of his time in the French capital, from 1918 to 1924. It is full of observations from the time of the author’s writing, about the gilets jaunes, about the changes to the geo-dynamics of Paris since Ho’s day. It doesn’t feel like a novel. It feels like the account of a flaneur with an interest in Marxism, the colonial struggle and the workings of power. It is a slight book, but anchored around the search for Ho Chi Minh, it is captivating. The level of espionage and state security around Ho, at that point no more than a dreamer, an anti-colonial wannabe, is striking. The police state was not invented by the Nazis or the Chinese or Trump. It has been around forever. Ho comes across as an elusive, idealistic soul, almost a flaneur in his own right. 

mulholland drive (w&d lynch)

Amidst all the playfulness and Lynchian tropes, there’s a classic hard-boiled LA detective story at play. LA is a city defined in no small degree by the idea of the detective, from Chandler to Elroy to Altman to Houston to Polanski to (even) Pynchon. The list could go on. The subtext of is that, in a city of power and image, there are secrets, things hidden behind the arras. In Mulholland Drive, Lynch gleefully joins the party. His heroine sets out to uncover a mystery and in the process she finds herself drawn into peril. As ever with Lynch it’s not quite that simple: the heroine has an alter-ego who might or might not be her in another dimension. Is she the author of the killing she is trying to solve? The questions add a piquancy to the story, steering it away from the formulaic. But the narrative drive of the mystery propels the movie through the directorial detours and flights of fancy. Lynch also reveals another LA, the Latino city that lies beneath the WASP creation. A different kind of tragic past which takes the viewer to places where Anglo Hollywood normally fears to tread.

a weekend in new york (benjamin markovits)

Almost a decade ago I read You Don’t Have to Live Like This by Markovits, which I remember as a wistfully astute dissection of Obama era USA. Ten years on any US idealism that might have existed has been subsumed by the geriatric administrations of Biden and Trump. A Weekend in New York sees the writer focusing on a family weekend in up market New York, as a B-List tennis player competes at the US Open and his intellectual powerhouse family come to watch. The book, as the title would suggest, is set over a single weekend, before the tennis player’s opening match on the Monday. Markovits takes us in painstaking detail through the hours, switching his attention from one family member to the next. The family bickers and their vulnerabilities are put on show. Markovits isn’t interested in conclusions, there is no real narrative (we never learn the result of the tennis match), rather his is a snapshot of a world, perhaps Knausgaard-esque (not having read the big K) or Woolfian. It’s faintly addictive, perhaps like watching a tennis match, as the reader’s head turns from side to side, but these are not easy characters to engage with, with their lightly-taken sense of privilege, their views of Central Park and expensive brunches. These people are on the fringes of the rulers of the western world, nabobs in an imperial system, but the writer seems to shy away from casting any kind of judgement, as if he were another family member, unwilling to rock the boat. The most intriguing strand in the book is the one around the elder bother, Nathan, who is investigating the legal framework for the state’s right to unilaterally assassinate via drone strike. It feels as though, in this era of para-legal playstation killing, Markovits is touching a nerve that is both fascinating and urgent, but he pulls his punches, and the novel leaves us little the wiser with regard to the issue or the state of the nation under discusion. 

Ps - publishing this at the time of the US Open happening, it does feel as though Markovits might have delved more into the world of tennis, the hook upon which the novel is hung. The excesses of the tennis circuit, the unbridled arrogance of globalisation, the egos… it all feels as though it would be ripe for the author’s analytical intelligence. 

güeros. (w&d. alonso ruizpalacios, w. gibrán portela, alan page)

In some corner somewhere I had been advised that Güeros was one of the top films of the 21st c so I went on an expedition to the underbelly of cinema, the Sala Chaplin, which is a story in itself, and caught it, running into Felix, both of us noting that the Cinemateca was un poco flojo in its programación this week. If this is an anecdotal, cotidiano entrance to this review, then that feels just right. Güeros is more or less a 24 hour trip through a day in the life of Mexico City (DF), from the badlands to the occupied university to a posh restaurant to the out of town high rise estate. And much more beside. Ruizpalacios endows the film with a visual poetic which means a cabbage can have as much weight as a brick. There’s the best of the  film school aesthetic at work, a joy in detail and the close-up, all lovingly framed in black and white. The narrative feels like it owes a debt to Los Detectives Salvajes, as Tomás, his older brother, Sombra, their friend Santos and finally the charismatic student leader, Ana, go on a mission to find a lost singer with a stylised name, a man who made Dylan cry. The story goes round bends and down dales (with the use of a beaten up car fundamental in the sprawl of DF) and the film retains a lyrical, affectionate feel. There are some very simple get-outs - ie at once point to escape from danger the crew just run away and get in a car and drive off, which reminds us screenwriters that sometimes you don’t need to overthink the narrative: if the film has engaging characters, visual flair and the sense of an ending, you can cut the odd corner. Ruizpalacios, I note, went on to make the arthouse hit, The Kitchen, co-written by none other than Arnold Wesker, so he’s a shrewd customer, and a great addition to the amazing Mexican canon of the 21st century.