It’s eight years to the month since I read Robert Harris’s novel Conclave, yet it made enough of an impression for me to be interested in seeing the film adaptation. I think I bought a copy of the book for my mum. Anyway, the novel—and therefore the film—concerns the political machinations of the conclave of cardinals as they meet to elect a new pope. Various factions fight for dominance, with the main schism between those who think that the church should return to older traditions and those who believe that it should become more inclusive. Wendy, who came with me, hasn’t read the novel.

We both enjoyed the film: we were impressed by the cinematography, the music, the sound design, and the casting. We were also both impressed by the dialogue, which felt true to life, and Wendy felt that the twists and turns in the plot were well-paced. It was an enjoyable couple of hours, and I felt that it made the most of its source material.

Our main criticism is that the film is a self-contained curiosity. Much like the novel, it doesn’t seem to have much to say about the world outside of the church: it is quite insular. It’s not a film that either of us will still be pondering a week later—but I suspect we’ll still remember it as a good evening out.

This is a short French film by Coralie Fargeat, first released in 2014. I streamed it elsewhere, but it turns out that you can also now watch it on YouTube:

It is set in present-day Paris. Residents can choose to have a ‘chip’ implanted which allows users to see themselves and their fellow users with their ‘dream’ bodies, for twelve hours per day. It’s a commentary on how parts of our society are obsessed with physical appearance.

It won lots of awards, but I thought that didn’t say much beyond the obvious, that a person’s qualities are more than skin-deep. I saw Jennifer Haley’s one-act play The Nether at the Duke of York’s Theatre in London around the same time as this film was released. The play has a similar conceit, but leaned into exploring ethics in a much more interesting and memorable way: instead of focusing merely on romance, it used the theme of child abuse to raise deeply uncomfortable questions—though I suppose it was three times the length.

I’m not sure the film did much for me.

It’s a couple of years since I read Claire Keegan’s short novel Small Things Like These, but I haven’t forgotten it. I was curious to see how it would translate to film. Is it really possible to capture on celluloid the world of meaning in questions like…?

As they carried on along and met more people Furlong did and did not know, he found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another?

Can this sentiment be acted?

The worst was yet to come, he knew. Already he could feel a world of trouble waiting for him behind the next door, but the worst that could have happened was also already behind him; the thing not done, which could have been done—which he would have to live with for the rest of his life.

I’m not certain whether it’s possible, but I don’t think this film achieves it.

This is a fine film, though not one without issues. It’s a little longer than it needs to be, and there are some cinematic choices (wobbling cameras, bits out of focus) that made me feel unpleasantly nauseated. I may also be the last person in Britain who’s just not that convinced by Cillian Murphy’s acting—I didn’t really ‘believe’ him in this role. I also wasn’t convinced by Emily Watson’s characterisation, though I think that may have been because her part was a little overwritten: it felt like her underlying evil was written so obviously that it bordered on being a little camp. There was a point where I almost expected an exaggerated wink. Eileen Walsh, on the other hand, was pitch-perfect.

It was, though, an understated and visually arresting portrayal of the plot of the book: a man sees a hint of something evil, and must decide whether to prioritise doing the right thing or protecting himself and his family. It’s a mafia tale with nuns added, which shines a light on a shameful part of the history of Ireland and the Catholic Church.

As far as I’m concerned, though, the book’s plot was secondary to its message. It’s a book about quiet evil and quiet resistance and the moral decisions each of us makes. It strikes me that this form of cinema is a very literal medium, and that in the last year or so of watching films, I’ve noted three ways of subverting that. One is to make the film consciously and obviously abstract (like the wonderful Poor Things); another is to be operatic about it, focusing on moments of intensely expressed emotion and don’t worry so much about the literalness of the plot; and the third is to make clever use of a soundtrack to link figurative illustrations to allegorical ideas. It felt to me as though this film did none of those things: it just ended up being a film constrained to its plot, with seemingly no pressing desire to share a universal message.

For that reason, I’d recommend the book over the film—which is a more clichéd conclusion to a blog post about a film based on a book than I’d prefer to write.

The hit film Atonement, based on Ian McEwan’s novel, was partly filmed in Redcar, including the famous five-minute walkthrough of the Dunkirk beach. To commemorate the even, the film’s director (Joe Wright) and producer (Paul Webster) unveiled this steel sculpture by Lewis Robinson.

The artwork is successfully photo-bombed by sportswear brand Discipline. The juxtaposition of the boneheaded slogan ‘attitude wins the game’ with a tribute to a film about the complexity of profound guilt, reconciliation and the impossibility of true atonement is certainly eyebrow-raising.

Most of my childhood cinema memories are of occasional trips with friends to Southport’s ABC Cinema. It had two screens to choose from, the schedule for each published in the local paper. The tickets were traditional little stubby paper things which were torn in two on entry, the usher retaining one half by piercing it with a needle attached to a string.

I even remember, on at least one occasion, my friends and I taking handwritten notes from our parents to confirm we were appropriately aged to see a particular film—which seems a remarkably lax form of enforcement even for the 1990s.

I don’t have many memories of going to the cinema as a younger child. But in June 1993, when I was eight years old, Steven Spielberg’s film Jurassic Park was released. In the build up to the UK release, there had been much feverish discussion and media speculation about what age classification the BBFC would give the film. It was eventually, not uncontroversially, awarded a PG certificate—though with a special note attached that it

contains sequences which may be particularly disturbing to younger children or those of a sensitive disposition.

In the modern world, it’s a 12A—but that didn’t exist in 1993. I remember being delighted by the PG decision, and I was very keen to see the film. I can’t recall who took me in the end, but I do remember that I didn’t see it at the cinema—I saw it at Southport Theatre, which used to occasionally show films.

These memories have been stirred by the news that the very projector which showed me that film has just been preserved as historically important during the demolition of Southport Theatre.

I found this a bit mind-boggling at first: the theatre was built in the 1970s, so the projectors would probably have been only 20 years old when Jurassic Park came out—how could they possibly be historic? But then I remembered that 1993 is 31 years ago, the projectors are over half a century old, and time is a funny old thing.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

I suspect the fact that I recognise Chiwetel Ejiofor mainly from the British Airways safety video does not reflect well upon me, even as someone who doesn’t watch many films. But now I also know him for Rob Peace, a film for which he wrote the adaptation of the book, directed, and starred in, playing the titular character’s father.

This is a biographical film. Rob Peace is shown to be a precocious child born to a poor, black family in the US in 1980. During his childhood, his father is imprisoned for murder, though his family has doubts about the safety of the conviction. With a lot of hard work, Peace ends up securing a place at Yale. He begins to sell drugs while there to fund his father’s appeal, and the discovery of this plot puts paid to his desire to pursue a doctorate.

He moves onto a real estate career through which he intends to improve the neighbourhood in which he grew up, though his longer-term plans are scuppered by the financial crash. He once again takes to selling drugs in order to refund the money his friends had invested in his venture, though he is shot dead in the process.

Biography is hard, and it seems to me that biography on film must be even harder: how do you cram a life into a couple of hours? This film doesn’t quite crack that nut: it’s tonally uneven, and it does a lot of ‘telling’ rather than ‘showing’, sometimes in quite peculiar ways. For example, we are told that Peace has a particular talent for bringing people together and that a party he has organised has an attendance list drawn from many different social groups, rather than shown this. He has a romantic relationship which we don’t see enough of to be truly invested in, but also shown more than just a ‘hint’ of. Some of the choices struck me as downright odd.

The other issue with this film—and it’s surely one of the challenges of biography—is that I don’t think it gets the balance right between the focus on its subject and the ripples of influence they have. Everything here is focused on Peace: we don’t really get to understand and appreciate his positive impact on others (though his housing project, for example), nor any negative impact (upon the people to whom he sold drugs, for example). This left it feeling a little bit insular, and it felt like this undercut the film’s attempt to meaningfully dive into some of the bigger social challenges the film raises.

But, nevertheless, I enjoyed this. This didn’t completely work for me, but I would like to see more of this sort of thing: it was close to being excellent.

The film was carried by its main star, Jay Will, who is magnetic and completely believable in the role. He must surely have a huge acting career ahead of him. Weirdly, I thought the weakest link among the actors was Ejiofor himself, whose character seemed utterly inconsistent from scene to scene—though perhaps this was more the fault of his writing than his acting.

I think this is worth going to see.

I don’t know much about cinema, and the critics seem to have enjoyed this film, so you may want to take my view with a pinch of salt… but I did not enjoy this “psychological thriller”.

The film is set on an island where a unique flower grows. This flower induces amnesia in those who come into dermal contact with it or ingest it. In an astounding coincidence, ingestion or injection with the venom of a species of snake native to the same island acts as an antidote.

A tech billionaire hires a workforce to kill the snakes on sight, lures women to the island, exposes them to the flower, and violently rapes them, leaving them with no memory of the event. These are not the actions of a criminal mastermind. You can already see the slithering flaw in this genius’s plan—I suspect you are not psychologically thrilled.

You may even have exported from that scenario a neatly packaged solution to the genius’s oversight—but, alas, you’re in danger of spoiling a plot point in the very last scene of the film.

But plot isn’t everything: perhaps I enjoyed the cinematography, the emotional set pieces, and the allegory? I’m afraid not.

The cinematography was poorly matched to the script. Extremely violent, distressing scenes were graphically realised, only to be undercut by lines of dialogue that made the cinema audience laugh out loud. There is something maniacal about about filming scenes disturbing enough to warrant a trigger warning before the start of the film and yet undercutting their impact to this degree.

The script also didn’t deliver on emotional set pieces. There’s a scene in which the antagonist repeatedly yells ‘I’m sorry’—a moment that every cue suggests is supposed to tense and emotionally charged—yet it is so utterly absurd and overcooked that it, too, raised a notable titter from the audience at my screening.

Allegory, it seemed to me, was absent. Or, at least, in light of the peculiarly pitched ending, there was no allegory I was interested in unveiling: it seemed to be sailing close to suggesting that financial success represented outsized recompense for suffering unfathomable trauma—and that inflicting abuse was a reasonable trade-off for securing that reward. Others have mentioned the film’s sharp take on gender politics and wealth inequality—I didn’t see what they saw.

I’d say something about the acting, but the script was so leaden that I don’t think even the world’s best actors could have saved it. Those who were cast certainly couldn’t, but it feels wrong to criticise them for that.

As I say, this interpretation seems to swim against the mainstream of critical opinion, so I might be talking nonsense—perhaps I missed the point.

But for me, the biggest failure of all in this film was that it was mindlessly boring. It’s been a long time since I last walked out of a film partway through, but I came close to doing so during this one. I can’t recommend it.

I streamed this 1995 Richard Linklater film after an online recommendation engine—I can’t remember which one—suggested it would be a good fit for me.

As you may know, it follows an American boy called Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and a French girl called Celine (Julie Delpy), both in their early 20s. They meet on a train, and spontaneously decide to alight together in Vienna, spending the night walking around the city and talking.

It was very warmly received in the 90s, and has been called one of the most romantic films of all time. My feelings were mixed.

This is a dialogue-heavy film: the whole thing is basically a single conversation between Jesse and Celine. This is exceptionally well-written and true-to-life, and the two actors have strong chemistry. I found it engrossing.

The problem—if it is a problem—is that the film doesn’t escape its confines. There’s a lot of naïve chat between the couple, the sort of cod philosophy of carefree wealthy twenty-somethings. Other than the viewer, there’s nothing within the film that’s at a remove from their perspective. This felt indulgent, and I vacillated between finding it charming and suffocating. I still don’t quite know whether I liked it or not: I wouldn’t describe it as romantic so much as a portrayal of a naïve idea of romance. It reminded me of Heather Rigdon’s Young & Naïve in sentiment, though the couple in the film—unlike the song—are the same age.

In the end, it’s hard to conclude that a film that had me glued to the screen and left me with lots to ponder is anything other than a success. Two sequels have also followed in the two decades since, and I plan to seek them out—which is surely an indication of recommendation.

It is, though, very much a film of its time. The gender politics have moments of real discomfort for one thing—so your mileage may vary.

In November last year, the FT’s Associate Editor Stephen Bush encouraged readers of his daily political email to see the film How to Have Sex, which he called ‘a peerless film about friendships, relationships and consent’. It has been on my ‘to watch’ list ever since, and I’ve finally got around to streaming it.

The film follows three sixteen-year-old girls, played by Mia McKenna-Bruce, Lara Peake and Enva Lewis, as they go on a boozy holiday in the party town of Malia, Crete, with the express intention of engaging in casual sex. It’s hardly a spoiler to reveal that, at least for the central character played by Mia McKenna-Bruce, this intention is fulfilled—but that this leads to some complicated and often dark emotional places. The film is understated, and somehow both devastating and yet, by the end, weirdly uplifting.

This is a film that is observational rather than judgemental. The acting and cinematography are so astoundingly good that it feels at times indistinguishable from an artfully constructed observational documentary. All three of the female leads have the capacity to communicate profound shifts in emotional states with the slightest change of expression. They must surely all be on the road to becoming giant stars.

It’s a film which I think I could watch over again and see entirely different things within it. It’s also one of very few films I’ve seen where I’ve thought that the medium is essential: I can’t imagine this working as well as a novel, for example, the ambiguity of seeing events and emotions makes it.

I concur with Stephen Bush: this is peerless.

Sixty years before this film was released, James Burge QC found himself in court defending Stephen Ward in the trial associated with the Profumo affair. He famously described his client as ‘a man with an artistic temperament and obviously with high sexual proclivities leading a dissolute life’.

Ira Sachs’s Passages, released last year, features a central character could be similarly described. Sixty years on, however, the social outrage is mostly absent, and there’s no hint of political intrigue in this story. And so we’re left with ninety minutes of modern Parisian melodrama, a loose love triangle that I found neither interesting nor absorbing.

I don’t really mean to lay into it too much: it’s clear that the film is held in high regard by critics, so it must surely have a lot of technical merit, even if it didn’t stand out to me. The film had the feel of a passion project for the director and cast, and in that sense, I’m glad that it exists. The cinematography was impressive, capturing Paris beautifully, and the performances were compelling, even if the characters didn’t resonate with me.

It just wasn’t for me. Sitting on the sofa, my mind kept wandering, and it took some effort not to just give up on the film around the 30-minute mark. For all its abundant qualities, I simply didn’t feel any personal connection with it. Your mileage may vary.