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.