Category: Films
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None of this matters
The Big Lebowski is such a legendary movie that it’s almost embarrassing to admit this is the first time I’ve watched it. It possesses all the accoutrements proper to a cult film: sold-out repertory screenings, enthusiasts quoting large contiguous chunks of dialogue at each other, multiple regular fan conventions, and…
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A play on the screen
I think of Shallow Grave as a film I know, but on reflection I think I saw it once, on TV, within a couple of years of its original release. It’s Danny Boyles’s first feature, Ewan McGregor’s cinematic debut, and an early milestone in the careers of Christopher Eccleston and…
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Reunion tour
Unspecified possibilities are the stuff of optimism. At the end of Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting, when Renton strolls off into the sunset with a bag of cash, we don’t know what will happen next for him, but we know he’s decided to choose life. He’s going to go and find fulfilment,…
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Filmic mythology
If the daft comedy Raising Arizona was a film made of style, with Miller’s Crossing the Coen Brothers showed that the same basic material could still be used to construct something dark and serious, much as it had been in the Classical Hollywood era. Every shot, every line of dialogue,…
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Socks off
Clever, metatextual movies don’t have to be intellectual or gnomic: sometimes they can just be hella entertaining. The most obvious way in which this occurs is through generic playfulness, which is the beating heart of Knives Out: ‘this is a murder mystery’ is written through it like the name of…
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Style over easy
Joel and Ethan Coen’s second feature-film, Raising Arizona stands in stark contrast to their first, Blood Simple. It’s an extremely silly movie, constructed from bright colours, slapstick, overacting, babies and optimism. It lacks the strong defining images that structure Blood Simple, but is nevertheless a very visual narrative, in which…
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Past presence
Mike Leigh, film maker. That feels a much more appropriate term than director or writer: although there are many other minds at work in his movies, in all those elements of production which are crucial to rendering his worlds so seamless and complete, it is clearly Leigh’s vision that animates…
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Story in fragments
So, what to do with yourself when you’re confined to your house during a global pandemic? Watch all of the Coen Brothers’ films in release order, obviously. Although we actually started in the middle by re-watching Fargo so that Spawn could start watching the TV series with us. But now…
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Caricatures on parade
I’ll come clean. Although I have some idea what it’s like inside a book by Charles Dickens, I’ve never actually read one. I started a few in my teens, but there wasn’t anything about their openings that made me want to read on, and nothing I’ve heard anyone say about…
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Character profiles
The characters in Uncut Gems are busy. We see them from the side, metaphorically and often literally, brushing past the viewer, utterly absorbed in the complex and frantic business of living their lives. The camera’s narrative eye just drops into the middle of their confusing, interwoven existences, and watches as…
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Forty-three years well-spent
When I was seven years old, I passed into another world, and I have never fully returned to this one. That world, or more accurately those worlds, are to be found in a galaxy far, far way, and although everything you could say about them seems utterly lacking in credibility,…
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Having the wrong fun
Although I spend much of my working life judging books by their covers, The Manchurian Candidate offers an object lesson in not judging movies by their posters. It presents itself as a kind of gritty, serious, political thriller, and is a remake of a pretty well-known 1960s film, which I…
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Explaining the wrong man
We all tell ourselves stories. This happened because that happened. At this time of my life I was on a great quest for whatever. All these bad things happened because so-and-so was out to get me. Once upon a time there was a child, who learned x, y and z,…
Oliver Arditi 