A year on from watching the Royal Northern Sinfonia accompany Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights, Wendy and I returned to see them repeat the trick with Chaplin’s 1936 follow-up, Modern Times.

I don’t think I’ve seen Modern Times before. The programme for this performance leaned into a narrative around automation and drew a comparison with the current debate about the future of work in the context of artificial intelligence. I found this a bit reaching: I saw the film more as a commentary on capitalism and the Great Depression.

You may already know the plot: Chaplin’s Tramp is sacked from his job at a steel mill after the pace and repetitive nature of the work produces a nervous breakdown. He meets a girl, they plan a life together, but he bounces in and out of employment and prison. It’s a mostly-silent comedy romance, scored by Chaplin.

Not knowing the film, I was disappointed by the score, which seemed to draw heavily on the jazz standard Smile. You may chuckle knowingly: as I’ve since discovered, the score came first, and combined with lyrics inspired by the film, it became Smile only two decades or so later.

Modern Times was brilliant, particularly in its physical comedy, but I thought it lacked a bit of the warm innocence of City Lights. It also had less emotional range: Modern Times didn’t have the profound melancholy and longing of City Lights: it was an altogether lighter affair, despite its political message.

But the film was only half the experience. The Royal Northern Sinfonia performed as brilliantly as always, and as with last year’s example, really brought the film to life.

We had a great time.

I steamed this 2023 Finnish film, which is by Aki Kaurismaki, who is apparently a noted filmmaker, though he’s unsurprisingly unknown to me.

I was attracted to it in part by its very manageable 80-minute running time. It turned out to be a beautifully made, understated and gentle romantic comedy. To me, it seemed tonally similar to a Charlie Chaplin film: think meaningful glances and swelling strings (the varied soundtrack is a highlight). But it is set in present-day Helsinki.

Throughout the film, we hear radio news reports regarding the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which made me reflect on how different that horrific war must feel in a nation on Russia’s border.

A gentle film it might be, but it doesn’t shy away from difficult subject matter: alcohol addiction, exploitative zero-hours contracts, and chronic loneliness are all major themes. It’s also genuinely funny: I laughed out loud while sitting alone.

Fallen Leaves was understated, warm, and full of heart. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I caught this film in the cinema last week, knowing nothing about it in advance. It’s taken me a while to write about it simply because I’m struggling for anything to say.

The film is set in United States suburbia in 1960, and it follows the relationship between two mothers who are next-door neighbours after one of their sons dies. It’s described as a psychological thriller. The main characters are played by Jessica Chastain and Anne Hathaway, who by their names I recognised as very famous actors, but whose faces I wouldn’t have recognised. I did recognise The Good Wife‘s Will Gardner, Josh Charles, as one of their husbands.

The word that springs to mind to describe this film is ‘bland’: there’s just not a lot to it. The plot’s a bit silly, which I suppose is somewhat fun in a ‘surely they’re not going to… oh, they did’ kind of a way, but I didn’t feel invested in any of the two-dimensional characters. I kept looking at my watch with a sense of resignation.

I suppose this just wasn’t for me.

The Zone of Interest is Jonathan Glazer’s critically acclaimed, double-Oscar-winning, triple-BAFTA-winning adaptation of Martin Amis’s novel. It is a bona fide nailed-on success of British cinema that everyone who knows anything about film says you should watch. In this post, I’m going to tell you that I didn’t think it was very good, but I know nothing about filmmaking.

The film is set during the Holocaust in the area around the Auschwitz concentration camp. The central character is a fictionalised version of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of the camp. The film focuses on his domestic life in the family home next to the concentration camp, and the impact of his career progression on his family life. The viewer is never taken inside the camp, though we do hear atrocities being committed in the background of scenes, and see the rising smoke from the crematoria.

Let me first say that I streamed this at home, which was clearly not the best way to experience the film, as it translates poorly to a small screen and to TV speakers. The film often uses distant shots where the action is quite hard to make out on the small screen. The dialogue is German, and the subtitles (which are burned-in) were slightly too small to comfortably read. In many scenes, the contrast of the white text on a light background failed me. The sound design is hard to appreciate in this setting, too. If you’re going to see this, see it in a cinema.

I don’t usually engage with works of fiction about the World Wars, with some notable exceptions. I tend not to enjoy them: the totality of the experience of war is so difficult to capture that I often find them trite. I’m not therefore able to set this film in any sensible artistic context, which might mean that I’m missing a lot of what’s in it.

The film seemed to be making a point about ‘othering’. The family was portrayed as seeing Jews as a ‘problem to be solved’. The Jews who worked in the house were mostly ignored or were casually taunted in horrifying ways about the spreading of their ashes. This point was driven home by the mother-in-law character, who had a personal connection to a Jewish woman and who couldn’t hide her horror at events.

However, focusing on ‘othering’ in a context where such division is already institutionally enforced seems an odd choice. The narrative fascination with ‘othering’ typically lies in the transition into ‘otherness, a process glaringly absent here due to the pre-existing, state-imposed separation. If we accept that the Jewish community had already been ’othered’ by the state, then it somewhat lets the individual characters off the narrative hook in terms of not acknowledging the screams, the shots, the rising smoke.

It strikes me that it would have been better to use the setting to make a point about the universal nature of humanity, but this is weirdly excised. Living in a place surrounded by the sounds of atrocities would surely make people anxious about what if the screams were from this side of the wall? For example, if you were sending your children out to play in a garden where the background is gunshots and screaming, even if you’d blocked that out through continual exposure, surely you’d naturally worry that you wouldn’t hear your own injured child? And, surely, that would lead you to reflect on humanity? It’s strange that the chillingly mundane impact isn’t even observed, let alone explored.

This film doesn’t offer explanations, and nor could it: but if we take it as a work of fictionalised observation, it’s a peculiarly framed one.

Towards the end of the film, there’s a section of present-day footage of cleaners at work in the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. This footage is haunting and emotive, but I think it’s entirely inappropriate to use footage of the site of death of thousands of people, as well as their personal effects, to lend emotional heft to a fictional piece. It felt immoral.

And maybe, in the end, this just wasn’t a film for me.

A year ago, a visit to the Rijksmuseum’s Vermeer exhibition left me completely astonished.

Obviously, it’s the paintings that are the star here. That unexpected, indescribable presence, the astounding attention to detail, the lifelike quality. They really are utterly unbelievable, completely astonishing.

I was so unexpectedly bowled over by the exhibition that I did something I’ve never done before with any exhibition: I went back the next day. I was so surprised by the strength of my own reaction that I couldn’t quite believe it, and wondered if I’d just been tired or overawed at being back at the beautiful Rijksmuseum. But no: the paintings really are spectacular, unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.

This weekend, Art Fund members—myself included—are being treated to the opportunity to stream the film version of the show, created by Exhibition on Screen. And so, last night, I found myself settling on the sofa to watch.

I was impressed. Obviously, seeing paintings on TV is not nearly the same as standing immediately in front of them. Many of the things I liked about the exhibition, such as its spare use of commentary and explanation which really allowed the work to sell itself, wouldn’t lend itself to film.

Yet, the film really did a fantastic job of bringing across that ineffable quality in Vermeer’s work, the arresting way they pull in the viewer. The experts featured in the film explain that this is partly attributable to Vermeer’s use of light, as I thought when I saw them. They also point out that Vermeer’s brushstrokes are invisible: an attribute I hadn’t noticed independently, though I suppose it should have been obvious.

It was an hour and a half well spent. That the opportunity to watch the film appealed even after seeing the exhibition twice made me reflect on quite how big an impact that once-in-a-lifetime show had made on me. As I said last year, Vermeer got inside my head; he clearly hasn’t left yet.

‘A bit of madness is key,’ sang Emma Stone in La La Land, ‘to give us new colours to see.’

In Poor Things, she proves it: the film is absurd, unhinged, and glorious. It’s my favourite film of the year so far, and one I wouldn’t have seen in a million years were it not for this project.

Our setting is a steampunkish, retrofuturistic version of the Victorian era. The plot centres on Stone’s character, Bella Baxter. The film’s Victor Frankenstein-esque character, Godwin Baxter, played by William Defoe, pulls a pregnant suicide victim from the Thames. The victim’s brain is removed and replaced with that of the foetus, and Bella Baxter is created. We follow her growth and development, her betrothal, and her decision to run away with another man.

The set-up makes this sound like a horror film: it’s not. Horrific things happen, but they are treated lightly and comedically. This was a film that had me grinning almost from beginning to end, even as Bella repeatedly stabbed a face with a scalpel.

Poor Things is a completely realised comedic fever dream. Everything about it is pitch-perfect: acting, set design, score, costumes, cinematography, it all adds up to a mesmerising whole. This is a film that embraces its form: sections are in black and white, sections are shot in a circular format, sections use a disorienting fish-eye lens. I am lucky to have seen in on the big screen, and would recommend that others do the same. It looks and sounds gorgeous.

Using its absurd world, the film has interesting observations to make on so many things, from feminism, to parent-child relationships, to the ethics of sex work, to the harmful straightjacket of polite society, to paedophilia. It is wonderfully, delightfully, inspirationally and insightfully odd. It’s richly and outrageously crazy.

Stone’s performance is nothing short of astonishing perfection. I cannot begin to imagine how someone can even attempt to inhabit such a gloriously weird character, with such a wide developmental arc. Stone brings Bella to life, making sense of a totally mad sketch of a character. It is unbelievable.

The other performances are also universally excellent. Of particular note, Vicki Pepperdine made a giant impression from a tiny part, not least with the surely immortal line, ‘She grabbed my hairy business!’

I enjoyed this from the first frame to the last. I’d happily watch it again.

Wicked Little Letters is a frothy comedy film that has been heavily trailed for months. As in the trailer, the comedy relies on the assumption that prim and proper 1920s characters using unexpectedly foul language is inherently funny. I think that it is, to a point, though perhaps not funny enough to support a whole film.

To my mind, the stand-out feature was Isobel Waller-Bridge’s score, which lifted the whole production, imbuing it with a sense of drama and emotion even when the script was a bit lacking. Waller-Bridge’s compositions also underpinned some fantastic musical/visual puns that were among the funniest bits of the film.

Unfortunately, the plot is a bit of a letdown. It concerns some expletive-laden poison-pen letters received by Olivia Colman’s character, and whether the police have correctly identified the sender, Jessie Buckley’s character—if not, who might it be? The answer is practically telegraphed from that start, so tension doesn’t really build, and the case is solved on-screen peculiarly early in the film in any case.

Now, I’m hardly the morality police, but allow me a paragraph on the wonky social ethics of the piece. I was irked. The film is written in such a way that we’re clearly supposed to judge the central characters with modern eyes, and sympathise with Buckley’s less buttoned-up, more ‘modern’ character who is harshly judged by the standards of the time. But despite the film being vaguely about the ridiculousness of the patriarchal society of the 1920s, we don’t see the main patriarch (Timothy Spall’s character) suffer any comeuppance for behaviour that—by modern standards—is domestic abuse. The script comes perilously close to making a joke of bullying and controlling familial relationships. It’s as though we’re invited to judge the women by 2020s standards but the men by 1920s standards. It’s uncomfortable.

But look, this is light comedy tosh: I don’t think we’re expected to think that hard. Let’s just laugh at Olivia Colman swearing a bit more. Most of the characters are two-dimensional clichés, as I suppose we ought to expect, and there are a few laughs along the way. Come for the chuckles, stay for the music. It’s fine.

When I’ve been cooking recently, I’ve been mildly frustrated by struggling to find the right spices. Spice pots all look the same, and it’s difficult to find the correct one when they’re all stuck on a cupboard shelf. I’ve been wondering in idle moments whether I should buy a spice rack.

There’s a scene in The Iron Claw which features a wall-mounted spice rack quite prominently in the back of the shot. It looked awfully dated. It put me off.

All of which is to say: my mind was wandering as I watched this film. It didn’t hold my attention.

In fairness, it’s another film I picked by time slot, and which I otherwise wouldn’t have seen. It’s based on the true—and desperately tragic—story of the Von Erich family of wrestlers. This is ‘wrestlers’ in the sense of American wrestling, not some kind of Greco-Roman oily business.

In a nutshell, Fritz Von Erich—an overbearing father-figure—is a former wrestler who moves into the business side of the industry. He pushes his sons to become wrestlers and to seriously strive for the world title. Various tragedies befall the family. The film ends.

The film has received numerous positive reviews from audiences and critics alike, so don’t let anything you’re about to read put you off seeing the film. I don’t claim to know what I’m talking about, I’m just a bloke who sat in front of a screen for a couple of hours.

This is a story evidently based on tragic real events. Yet, the tragedy didn’t translate to the screen, mostly because it felt like a cast of crudely drawn cartoon characters. I had no emotional connection with any of them.

The film is sold as a reflection on toxic masculinity, but that also didn’t come across for me, for much the same reason. Characters who say things like ‘men don’t cry’ and ‘if we’re the strongest, the toughest, nothing can hurt us’ seem like satirical caricatures, not incisive social commentary. A man crying at the end of the film does not have the redemptive power that the script-writers imagine it has.

The film makes no attempt to reconcile its suggestion of 1980s hypermasculinity with the high camp of the wrestling industry itself. There are balletic scenes in the ring and discussions of choreography before bouts, but the characters discuss them entirely in terms of fighting. The film acknowledges that wrestling is a sort of theatrical performance, but never fully explains itself. This undercuts the main narrative of the film, which is about winning the world title, because we never really get to understand how that is achieved. There’s no explanation of who writes the ‘scripts’, or on what basis, or how our heroes might influence that outside the ring.

There were two stand-out performances.

Maura Tierney, who (despite a dazzling career) I know primarily as Maddie Hayward from The Good Wife, is wonderful. The film hints at an observation about faith—in God or in wrestling—which is achieved entirely through shots of a crucifix and Tierney’s face. The persistence of faith is a rich seam, and I wish they’d leaned into it further.

Michael Harney almost stole the show with a role which I can only assume was a creation for the film, a combination of television sports presenter and business advisor. Harney equipped his character with an unruffled warmth combined with a professional detachment from the emotion of the events happening around him. He became of beacon of sanity and depth.

I’ve noted that others have called this the performance of Zac Efron’s career. I thought his character was too crudely drawn for anyone to be able to perform it greatly. But I did spend a lot of the film marvelling about how much he looked like Rob Lowe, and low-key fantasising about a reboot of The West Wing.

The Iron Claw wasn’t for me, but other people think it’s the bees knees, so maybe you’d enjoy it.

What is there to write about a film that has already had so much written about it? Emerald Fennell’s comedy / psychological thriller has seemed to divide viewers, some thinking it’s just a bit silly, and others thinking it’s a masterpiece. I thought it was both, and therefore neither.

If you’re unfamiliar, the plot concerns a young lad from Prescott, Oliver, taking up a place at Oxford University. He is marginalised by the wealthy, entitled majority of toffs. After he confides that his social background is especially challenged, and that his father has suddenly died, a popular wealthy student, Felix, invites him to spend the summer with his family at their ancestral country mansion, Saltburn. Weirdly obsessive and comically macabre events ensue.

After the film was repeatedly recommended to me by friends, I streamed it at home. I suspect this isn’t the best way of experiencing it: the cinematography was the biggest star of this film. Aside from the odd misfire (there were a few too many ‘reflecting’ shots for me), it was aesthetically remarkable.

There were also some brilliant acting performances. Rosamund Pike entirely inhabited the character of Lady Elspeth, effortlessly treading the line between comedy and psychodrama. I also loved Archie Madekwe as Farleigh, a part that offered much more depth than his character in Gran Turismo. And Alison Oliver brought a beautifully unhinged quality to Venetia, which rescued some desperately uneven writing for that character.

I wasn’t sold on either of the two lead actors, though. Jacob Elordi’s performance was a bit flat, which was a problem when playing a ‘magnetic’ character. Barry Keoghan is a 31-year-old actor who didn’t read as an 18-year-old character. The less said about his ‘Scouse’ accent, which intermittently became his native Irish, the better.

But the main issue with the film was the writing: the plot was indecisive, the dialogue was startlingly stodgy, and the film as a whole seemed uncertain about its message. I’m not sure what I was supposed to take away from it.

There were several scenes which were clearly intended to shock, as though to lift the writing. These fell flat: the resolution of the plot undermined them, and the casting of a far-too-mature Keoghan considerably undercut the weirdness factor.

The comedy also falls flat. Fennell misunderstands what the rest of us find funny about people with inherited wealth. Fennell thinks it’s funny that, despite their wealth, the family live in closeted chaos. They don’t appreciate their wealth: despite a library, they all read Harry Potter. They care only for their own: they don’t know the names of their footmen. Their knowledge is limited by their experience: they don’t know where Liverpool is.

But none of that is funny, it’s just irritating. Fennell even seems to expect us to find the idea of fancy dress among the wealth amusing, as though ‘normal people’ imagine the fabulously wealthy to be clad in nothing but the latest designer clobber at every given moment.

At the risk of being a boorish man explaining a joke, the comedy lies in the absurdity of the assumption of entitlement. It is amusing that the owners of stately homes fail to appreciate the weird myopia of their ancestral claims: ‘it’s ours because it’s been in the family for generations’, without recognising that it’s also been in the community for generations, and the wealth only exists because of historic abuse of that community and its less fortunate inhabitants. The assumption that only their family, or only their class, are of worthy of consideration is ripe for ridicule, and is such a jarring contrast to the way most people live their lives as to be intrinsically funny.

To labour the point, there is no humour in Pike’s character not knowing the location of Liverpool. The humour ought to flow from the underlying assumption that she will never need to know where that is: an arched eyebrow, a dismissive ‘very well’, a look of profound disinterest; all would have served the script better than a brief discussion of whether Liverpool is by the sea. And hence, the comedy doesn’t land.

In Saltburn, Richard E Grant plays the same ‘unhinged wealthy father’ role that seems to be his stock-in-trade now: you could slot in one of his scenes from The Lesson and no-one would notice. Indeed, the thriller-ish elements of the plot are strikingly similar: they’re both about outsiders spending time in wealthy people’s country houses, where dark things happen. Heck, both have a rich kid called Felix as a central character. It’s remarkable that they were released only a few weeks apart.

For my money, The Lesson was the better film overall, though it received only a fraction of the media coverage of Saltburn. The Lesson may not have had the shock factor of Saltburn’s more unhinged scenes, but it had far more to say, and it said it more assertively. And the soundtrack of The Lesson blows the overdone, clichéd score of Saltburn out of the water.

So: Saltburn. It’s difficult to forgive a film that lacks both a coherent plot and meaningful insights, no matter how beautiful it looks. It ends up feeling just a bit disappointingly run-of-the-mill, a bit scripting-by-focus-group, a bit mass-market, a bit average. I’d hoped for better.

I went to see this film starring Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal, Claire Foy and Jamie Bell as the latest outing in my cinema project. It was directed by Andrew Haigh. I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect from it, but found myself blown away.

At heart, this is a carefully crafted film about the nature of our relationship with our parents. Foy and Bell play the parents of the protagonist, Scott, who were killed when he was twelve years old. In the course of the film, Scott is able to travel to see his parents and talk to them again, frozen at the age they were when they died. Because we don’t really know how this is happening, it is unclear whether Scott is interacting with his parents as they really were, or whether he is seeing his own perception of them—plus his hopes and fears of their judgements of his later life—reflected back at him.

This sounds like a terribly complicated plot, but it isn’t really: it is brushed over, and the focus is almost entirely on the emotions of the relationships. In that sense, the film reminded me a lot of opera. We’re left not worrying about how the characters reached any given point in the plot, but left just to contemplate the emotions of the moments.

And there is a real emotional heft in this film: I felt a bit like I’d been hit by a truck when it ended, and I’ve never heard so many people weeping in a cinema auditorium. Never before have I sat in a screen where no-one—absolutely no-one—moved a muscle when the credits appeared; there was just stunned silence until the house lights came back up.

All of the acting was brilliant in this film, coupled with some brilliant cinematography and a desperately evocative soundtrack. There is nothing I’d change. It was a perfect package and an absolutely remarkable film. I’d highly recommend it.