On Friday evening, Wendy and I crossed the glassy Tyne to see Stefan Geiger conducting the Royal Northern Sinfonia. The occasion was a performance of Charlie Chaplin’s score to his 1931 silent film, City Lights. The film played out on a screen above the orchestra. This was our first time back to the Sage since the pandemic, and it was delightful to be back in a venue that holds so many happy memories for us.

I’m pretty sure I’ve seen City Lights before. But, it is one of those films with such cultural relevance that perhaps I’ve just seen so many clips and references to it that I think I’ve seen it before. I’ve certainly never paid much attention to the score, and I wasn’t aware that Chaplin had ever written music. As Geiger pointed out in his opening remarks, Chaplin wrote, directed, produced, edited, starred in and scored the film, surely marking him out as a genius.

The experience of seeing the film with the score performed live obviously drew our attention to the music to a much greater degree than usual. The score is notable for its melancholy, which might not be expected in a comedy film. The Royal Northern Sinfonia performed it beautifully.

This was also, I think, my first experience of seeing a Charlie Chaplin film with an audience—and perhaps even my first time seeing a silent film with an audience. I was struck by how the laughter of the crowd—and especially the final “ahh”—became part of the soundtrack in itself, and made for a genuinely shared experience.

This was a lovely night out.

This recently Oscar-nominated film by Charlotte Wells has been on my ‘to watch’ list for a while, after I saw a trailer at the cinema. It follows a depressed 30-year-old on holiday in Turkey with his 11-year-old daughter, from whose mother he has separated. It is set some time in the 1990s, I think, with camcorder footage spliced into the film at times.

Later, it is revealed that the film is from the perspective of the daughter after she has grown up. She is looking back at her memories of her dad as she reaches the age that he was on this holiday. We’re left to ponder whether her memories are accurate.

It is a very personal film, one where not much happens, but the power is in the (mostly unexpressed, mostly repressed) emotions of the piece. Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio give astonishingly natural performances throughout. Wells also plays with the cinematography in ways that underline and support the unspoken emotions: some sequences are bright and dreamlike, others have characters sometimes seen only at the edges of frames.

And yet… for whatever ineffable reason, whether to do with the film, or the conditions in which I watched it, or my mood at the time, or some combination of things… it didn’t emotionally reel me in. I felt like I was watching a film, not like I was involved in the characters’ lives. It felt a bit consciously clever to me, at a remove from the viewer.

I wasn’t quite as taken with this film as were many of the professional reviewers, but I still enjoyed it.

I’ve finally caught up with this much-lauded 2021 film starring Stephen Graham, and really wasn’t taken with it. It is a film set in a restaurant during a pre-Christmas rush, and is seemingly filmed in a single continuous take. As the name implies, it follows Graham’s character as the stress and tension slowly build to, well, boiling point.

I felt that there was far too much foreshadowing through the film, to the point where it became predictable. The responses to events in the film didn’t strike me as especially authentic, with minor inconveniences sometimes seeming to cause a larger response than major events. And I wasn’t convinced by the filming method either: there were ponderous scenes outside the main setting, which felt like they were inserted solely to give the main actors a break. I did not get the sense of a convincing continuity of action at times when the camera was elsewhere.

So, unfortunately, this didn’t do it for me. If, for some godforsaken reason, you are desperate to see a film set in a restaurant, The Menu—admittedly a very different type of film—knocks the socks (or perhaps the chef’s hat) off this one.

Boiling Point is available to stream on Netflix.

Luke O’Neil recommended 2022 film The Menu in Welcome to Hell World, saying

Do not read this piece if you haven’t seen the film yet. In fact I’d recommend watching it without knowing anything at all if you can.

I followed his advice. When I pressed play on the stream, I didn’t even know the film’s genre. I assumed (correctly) that it had the excellent Anya Taylor-Joy in it, as she was in the header image at the top of Luke’s post. I knew it had a running time of 1h 48m because I needed to know if I had time to watch it. But I knew nothing else.

I agree with Luke that this is probably the best way to watch it: having looked at reviews and descriptions since, I would have been put off, and would have thought it wasn’t for me.

So, I will say little more about it, apart from that it was excellent in both writing and performance. I’m pleased that news of the film totally passed me by, and that Luke’s blind recommendation encouraged me to watch something I’d never normally choose.

Wendy and I have been to see Todd Field’s Tár at the beautiful, historic Tyneside Cinema. As you may know, it stars Cate Blanchett giving the performance of a career as Lydia Tár, an impossibly famous American conductor and composer.

Tár is set in the present day: it is a film rooted in now, exploring many of the cultural issues of our time. Its theme seems to be the extent to which one can separate art from the producer(s) of the work: can we still enjoy Bach’s music even when we know that he wasn’t an especially virtuous person? In a particularly inspired comment on these questions, the film’s credits roll at the start of the film.

On another level, this is the frequently told story of the ‘great man’, the genius whose eccentricities leave personal disaster in their wake. Only this time the ‘great man’ is a ‘great woman’, and after watching the film, both Wendy and I found ourselves second-guessing whether our judgement was different as a result.

It is a film full of symbolism, but also a film acted with such authenticity as to be completely believable. There is a scene near the start in which Tár is interviewed on stage by Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker (playing himself) and I wanted the interview to keep on running to learn more about herself and her career. I was completely immersed, my disbelief entirely suspended.

I thought it was brilliant.

Tár is in cinemas now.