Category: Films
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Writing history
History is what we write about our past—it’s the origin story a culture constructs for itself, from a variety of sources and through a variety of media. With Mangrove, from his Small Axe series of films, Steve McQueen is writing history, as much as he is filming historical fiction. Although…
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Funny enough to be real
Black comedy crime dramas with inconclusive endings are almost a genre of their own now. The trick is to keep populating them with well thought-out characters and convincing concrete details, rather than leaning on tropes—in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri Martin McDonagh nails that, making a film which is continually…
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The good, the bad, and the oblivious
Watching John Ford’s acclaimed Western The Searchers gave me occasion to note how incomplete my education in cinema is, and how hard it can be to bridge the cultural distance between the third decade of the twenty-first century and the Golden Age of Hollywood. Put simply, although I could appreciate…
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Incoherent gold
Gold is a recurring symbol in American cinema, a useful stand-in when directors want to establish a dialectic between self-interest and sociality. Spike Lee makes knowing and witty use of this history in Da 5 Bloods, most obviously when a Vietnamese criminal informs the protagonists that he and his crew…
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Fragments of story
So much discourse and tale-telling has entered our small house through the tiny window of our television—no bigger than the screen of a large laptop. It isn’t the ideal way to see cinematic work, but in recent months it has been the only way. Near the beginning of England’s first…
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Complexities of service
With The Caine Mutiny, Humphrey Bogart continued his drift away from movie-star roles, playing a part in which his character appears weak, unlikeable, cowardly and possibly lacking in mental stability. The film is an ensemble piece, which gives as much screen time to his co-stars, and which locates the narrative…
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Unquestioned liberalism
There’s a kind of nostalgia for the Cold War, almost in the same way that British culture incorporates a nostalgia for WWII. Some people miss the simplicities of that time—the black and white morality that was sold to them by their governments, which while no more substantial than the bizarre…
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Oozing style and charm
In our trawl through Humphrey Bogart’s oeuvre we’ve been sticking to the best known movies—he acted in over seventy films. The African Queen is one of the most famous. It is relatively exceptional in several ways. For one thing it was shot largely on location in Africa, an unusual choice…
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Outside in the Village
A musician’s life is usually precarious, especially if you’re attempting to work as a featured artist. Llewyn Davis, as played by Oscar Isaac, is no exception to this rule. He has no home, no stable relationships, no money, few gigs, and no recording contract. He does have a large stack…
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A bleak disturbance
Humphrey Bogart reputedly occupied something of a lonely place among his Hollywood peers—although he had his good friends, Louise Brooks, in a 1967 essay, wrote of his ‘isolation among people’. In fact, she suggested that the part he played in Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place was close to his…
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Craft and language
Coen Brothers genre pieces are rarely without an ironic twist or two, a knowing nod to the implausibilities of the conventions, or some acknowledgement of the shortcomings of of the genre’s paradigmatic works. True Grit is still recognisably a Coen Brothers movie, but it’s a much more straightforward homage to…
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We don’t need no stinking…
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is a film that’s been lurking in my brain since childhood, having been on the BBC’s regular repeat cycle in the 70s and 80s. ‘We don’t need no stinking badges’ is a famous misquote from the movie, which has been replayed everywhere from Broadway…
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Everlasting uncertainty
Having watched a lot of Coen Brothers movies lately, I’m starting to see their kind of purposefully aimless plotting as a norm, and when watching other films in which narrative incident seems arbitrary, it’s easy to ascribe them the same kind of inexplicability. Shit happens. Random happenstance springing from shambolic…
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The past present serious tense
Roger Deakins’s brilliant cinematography has been conspicuous in some of the Coen Brothers’s films—in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, for example, which is not one of their strongest releases, or the black and white The Man Who Wasn’t There, which was. But in other movies it’s just quietly excellent, conveying…
Oliver Arditi 