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Contents January 2018
42
Frances McDormand: the power of saying no
The actor’s superb performance as a grieving mother powers
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. By Dan Callahan PLUS
Kelli Weston talks to the film’s director, Martin McDonagh
REGULARS
5 Editorial The long and the short of it
Rushes
6 On Our Radar: forthcoming film
highlights across the UK
8 Preview: Jason Burke admires
Sonia Kronlund’s The Prince of
Nothingwood, a documentary about
filmmaking in Afghanistan
9 The Numbers: Charles Gant finds
audiences loving Loving Vincent
11 Dispatches: Mark Cousins can’t
find the words – but may have
come up with a solution
48
FEATURES
18
COVER FEATURE
The films of 2017
Nick James introduces our review of the
year, and we print a selection of 40 critics’
responses from the 188 taking part in the
poll. PLUS Michael Ewins on the genius of
Twin Peaks: The Return, and Kelli Weston on
Jordan Peele’s timely social thriller Get Out
48
The skin game
Recent revelations of sexual misconduct
in the film industry can’t help but inflect
our view of The Deuce, a TV series that
tracks the sex workers and smut peddlers
of 1970s New York through the early days
of the porn industry. By Hannah McGill
52
Trail of blood
Miike Takashi’s supernatural samurai
drama Blade of the Immortal is the latest
brilliant addition to a career that has always
resisted easy categorisation. By Tom Mes
56
Mad dogs and Englishmen
From his early roles as punks, skins and
dreadlocked criminals to his remarkable
portrayal of Winston Churchill in Joe
Wright’s Darkest Hour, Gary Oldman has
shown a chameleon-like ability to inhabit
his characters. By Graham Fuller
62
Another dimension
As a new stage version of Rod Serling’s
classic sci-fi/fantasy series The Twilight Zone
opens in London its influence feels more
pervasive than ever. By Dick Fiddy
Wide Angle
12 Profile: Quintín celebrates the
intimate, marginal art of the French
critic and director Pierre Léon
14 Primal Screen: Bryony Dixon
keeps on taking the tableaux
17 Festival: Kieron Corless finds the
Viennale as rigorous and bold as ever
111 Letters
Endings
112 Mark Cousins relishes the fabulous last 52
line of Billy Wilder’s The Apartment
January 2018 | Sight&Sound | 1
 presents December 2017

A selection of our limited edition Blu-rays from 2017:

Some of our forthcoming limited edition Blu-rays for 2018:

Buy direct from powerhousefilms.co.uk

 EDITORIAL
Editor
Nick James
Editorial Nick James
Deputy editor
Kieron Corless
Features editor
James Bell
Web editor
Nick Bradshaw
Production editor
Isabel Stevens

THE LONG AND THE SHORT OF IT

Chief sub-editor
Jamie McLeish
Sub-editors
Robert Hanks
Jane Lamacraft
Researcher
Mar Diestro-Dópido
Credits supervisor
Patrick Fahy Recently, a film producer challenged me to write an
Credits associates editorial about storytelling. I like a challenge, especially
Kevin Lyons
Pieter Sonke when it kicks against my own prejudices, for I’m not
James Piers Taylor
Design and art direction
fond of the way the word ‘storytelling’ is sometimes
chrisbrawndesign.com used to restrict the possibilities of film. People often say
Origination
Rhapsody
films and TV are all about storytelling and I counter
Printer that by asking them to consider, for instance, city
Wyndeham Group
symphony films like Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie
BUSINESS Camera (1929) where there is no story, or series like
Publisher
Rob Winter
Twin Peaks: The Return (see feature on page 33) where
Publishing coordinator story is subordinated to mood and moment. It would be
Natalie Griffith
Advertising consultant
easy, also, to cite the general neglect of a story ‘through
Ronnie Hackston line’ in many superhero films. “When you are talking
T: 020 7957 8916
about profit margins that have to be nine digits,” said
What if the length of a moving-image
M: 07799 605 212
E: ronnie.hackston@bfi.org.uk David Fincher recently, “you are invariably going to work doesn’t matter? It seems to be
Newsstand distribution crush out storytelling as a cultural imperative.”
Seymour
T: 020 7429 4000 Todd Solondz’s Wiener-Dog (2016) reflected this
already true. In the home binge
E: info@seymour.co.uk change in its treatment of Danny DeVito’s screenwriting universe, length can now be variable
Bookshop distribution
Central Books
professor Dave Schmerz; his students think he’s out of
T: 020 8525 8800 touch – “probably got the box-set of Curb Your Enthusiasm,” That italicised half-sentence is a pretty good description
E: contactus@centralbooks.com
they sneer. Schmerz’s storytelling mantra – “What if? of cinema storytelling. Storytelling films, no matter how
Sight & Sound is a member of the
Independent Press Standards
Then what?” – epitomises traditional screenwriting realist, always show an idealised version of reality. It is
Organisation (which regulates the UK’s teaching, a pithy version of Robert McKee’s famous often argued that the novella and short story adapt better
magazine and newspaper industry).
We abide by the Editors’ Code of course, with its vaunting of the three-act structure, drawn to the screen than the novel. Eileen Chang’s story ‘Lust,
Practice and are committed to
upholding the highest standards of from the oppositions of crisis and catharsis in Aristotle’s Caution’ comes to mind as brilliantly adapted by Ang
journalism. If you think that we have
not met those standards and want to Poetics. Whatever their value, there’s no question McKee’s Lee, or Nikolai Leskov’s ‘Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk’,
make a complaint please contact
rob.winter@bfi.org.uk. If we are unable
ideas have become unfashionable, even if they remain which William Oldroyd effortlessly reimagined in the
to resolve your complaint, or if you the basis of much screenwriting education. north of England in Lady Macbeth. Conversely, we can all
would like more information about IPSO
or the Editors’ Code, contact IPSO on But what if we take the ‘What if?’ mantra and apply think of examples of film adaptations of novels that feel
0300 123 2220 or visit www.ipso.co.uk
Sight & Sound (ISSN 0037-4806)
it to the changes in the moving image industries too flimsy when compared with their long-form series
is published monthly by British Film illustrated by our 2017 Films of the Year poll? What antecedents. I would even put Tomas Alfredson’s
Institute, 21 Stephen Street, London
W1T 1LN and distributed in the USA would the question be? My first choice would be, ‘What otherwise admirable adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier
by UKP Worldwide, 3390 Rand Road,
South Plainfield, NJ 07080 if the length of a moving-image work doesn’t matter Spy (2011), with its terrific Gary Oldman performance
Periodicals Postage Paid at South any more?’ It seems to be already true. In the home (see feature on page 56), in that category.
Plainfield, NJ
binge universe, length can now be extremely variable, On the other hand, O’Connor suggests that good
POSTMASTER: Send address changes
to Sight and Sound c/o 3390 Rand just as it was when cinema was born. Keen watchers short stories are usually set among what he calls
Road, South Plainfield NJ 07080.
Subscription office:
of Fincher’s Mindhunter will have noticed each episode submerged populations – doctors, priests, prostitutes,
For subscription queries and sales of is of a different length. You also have successful short teachers (you could add police psychologists and
back issues and binders contact:
Subscription Department episode series like Fleabag (2016-), and we’ve always screenwriting students). Team-based movies do this, of
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Abacus e-Media had movies that weigh in at over three hours, like Fred course, but it’s equally true of long-form series like The
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Wiseman’s Ex-Libris, the longest in our poll this year. Wire (2002-08), which changed its focus on different
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So let’s draw a line under ‘What if?’ and get to ‘Then professions as it moved from season to season.
E: sightandsound@abacusemedia.com what?’ Because films and TV series, despite my earlier What reading O’Connor suggests most to me is that,
Annual subscription rates:
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caveat, do mainly tell stories, and what matters with if filmmakers can now go to any lengths (sorry), then
15% discount for BFI members stories is how they grab you and their lasting impact. there may be a simple piece of analytic work to be done
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Copyright © BFI, 2017

The producer who challenged me suggested I read Frank on distinctions of theme, tone, effect and background
The views and opinions expressed
in the pages of this magazine or on O’Connor’s terrific 1962 book The Lonely Voice: A Study that could help them decide what length to go for. If
its website are those of the author(s)
and are not necessarily those of the
of the Short Story, in which he describes the different O’Connor has his own mantra in terms of how short
BFI or its employees. The contents
of this magazine may not be used
effectiveness of novels, novelettes and short stories. They stories grab you and their lasting impact, it would be
or reproduced without the written too can slip their categorisations in terms of length (some that they should try to achieve the effect of this quote
permission of the Publisher.
The BFI is a charity, (registration
Chekhov short stories could be novelettes, etc) but less from the ur-text of the short story form, Gogol’s ‘The
number 287780), registered at so in terms of approach. O’Connor argues compellingly, Overcoat’: “And from that day forth, everything was
21 Stephen St, London, W1T 1LN
“We recognise the merits of a short story… in terms of as it were changed and appeared in a different light to
plausibility. By this I do not mean mere verisimilitude… him.” When movies or TV do that to you, you know
but an ideal action worked out in terms of verisimilitude.” the form is alive and kicking, whatever form it takes.

January 2018 | Sight&Sound | 5


Rushes
ON OUR RADAR
S Slapstick Festival
25-28 January, various venues, Bristol
It’s that time of the year when the clowns take
over Bristol. Highlights of the 14th edition of
Slapstick include a strand dedicated to Buster
Keaton (pictured above in 1924’s Sherlock Jr),
marking the centenary of his screen debut; a
celebration of British silent cinema’s ‘queen of
happiness’ Betty Balfour; and an event saluting
European cinema’s lost clowns. Many of the
screenings are presented by comedians, including
lifelong Laurel and Hardy fan Lee Mack, who
will be introducing one of the comedy duo’s
gleeful carnage sprees, the long-thought lost
and newly restored The Battle of the Century
(1927). Bringing your own pie is optional.
6 | Sight&Sound | January 2018
NEWS AND VIEWS
X Ingmar Bergman retrospective
January – mid-March, BFI Southbank, London
Gear up for a philosophical start to the year
with the BFI’s retrospective of the existential
Swedish master who believed film was the only
artform able to pass “deep down into the dark
rooms of our souls”. The season, which marks
the writer-director’s centenary, includes more
than 50 features and multiple TV series. Liv
Ullmann, who appeared in many of Bergman’s
most acclaimed films, will offer her insights into
the auteur, while younger directors also share
their enthusiasm – such as Richard Ayoade, who
introduces a screening of Persona (which is on
rerelease across the UK from 1 January, with nine
other touring Bergman titles to follow). And if you
can’t wait until then, Bergman’s interpretation
of Mozart’s exquisite opera The Magic Flute
(1975, right) previews at BFI Southbank in
December before its February rerelease.
 T Ava
Out now, mubi.com
French director Léa Mysius’s debut (below)
– a coming-of-age tale full of twists and in
possession of a weird rebellious spirit much like
its idiosyncratic 13-year-old loner protagonist
– was a film Sight & Sound thought deserved a
UK cinema release, not least because it was shot
on 35mm and makes full use of the medium’s
texture and saturated colours. Sadly that’s not
the case, but at least British audiences have a
chance to see Mysius’s strange take on female
sexual awakening in December on VOD.
S Agnès Varda box-set
Out now, Curzon Artificial Eye
The firecracker of the French New Wave
(above) was none too impressed with her
recent honorary – and only – Academy Award
(“It’s the side Oscar. The Oscar of the poor”).
Thankfully, this side of the pond she is being
offered a more meaningful tribute this month: a
EYEVINE (1)
Blu-ray box-set of eight of her classics complete
with shorts and extras and a 100-page booklet.
X Overnight Film Festival
2-4 February, Queens Hotel, Eastbourne
Putting a spin on your average festival is this
weekend-long film slumber party which takes
over a Victorian hotel on Eastbourne’s seafront,
installing projectors in the ballroom (right) where
tour groups normally gather. Guest curators this
year include the experimental classical composer
Shiva Feshareki and author and journalist Zing
Tsjeng. Early whispers of the selection include
Joel DeMott and Jeff Kreines’s under-seen
teen doc Seventeen (1985) and a compilation
of animator Norman McLaren’s shorts.
S Pandora’s Box
BFI Film Classics, out now
In 1929, Louise Brooks and G.W. Pabst, two
unlikely collaborators – a Hollywood hedonist
and one of Europe’s most serious directors
– united to produce this dazzling tale of the
downfall of Brooks’s fiery, beguiling, yet naive
showgirl Lulu (above). It would be the creative
zenith of both their careers and of the waning
silent era. Long overdue is a BFI Film Classic on
the film: “A masterpiece that has been mistreated
and misunderstood,” according to the book’s
writer, Sight & Sound regular Pamela Hutchinson.
The close study places Pandora’s Box in its
historical context, while also examining how
the film is regarded now, through the prism of
Brooks’s fame and her writing.
X London Short Film Festival
12-21 January, various venues across London
Showcasing the variety of contemporary short
filmmaking, the annual event returns for its
15th edition with many impressive thematic
programmes and, for the first time, a competition
strand with an international jury (headed by
French surrealist Lucile Hadzihalilovi´c). A
birthday celebration of LSFF alumni-turned-
feature-filmmakers includes early shorts by
Alice Lowe and Peter Strickland; meanwhile, a
collaboration with the Guardian and Headlong
Theatre entitled ‘Brexit Shorts’ commissions
eight films (including Abi Morgan’s The End,
right) from scriptwriters and actors across the UK
which highlight the nation’s growing divisions.
Compiled by Isabel Stevens
January 2018 | Sight&Sound | 7
 RUSHES PREVIEW

AFGHAN STARS
Sonia Kronlund’s The Prince of
Nothingwood shows how much
more there is to Afghanistan
than extremism and conflict
By Jason Burke
In the opening shots of The Prince of Nothingwood,
few viewers will be looking at the background.
They will be watching Salim Shaheen, the
exuberant, larger-than-life director and star who
is the subject of this excellent film. Travelling
from Kabul, the capital, he and his actors have
just arrived in Bamiyan, a central Afghan
province of astonishing natural beauty. They
have taken a United Nations plane because the
war makes it impossible to drive. Shaheen is,
with typical brio and bonhomie, telling local
men why he has come and what he hopes to
film there. A showing is organised. There is little
need: Shaheen’s work – 111 films in a career
spanning four decades – is already known, at
least in Afghanistan, though it is fair to say
that his international exposure is minimal.
In the background of those opening shots,
there is the stunning empty pale blue sky and a
skyline of yellow hills and cliffs. This is where the
famous Buddhas of Bamiyan once stood. These
giant statues – 37m and 50m high respectively
– dated back a thousand years or so, to the days
when Bamiyan was a thriving stop on the Silk
Routes and the site of a major Buddhist centre of
learning. In March 2001, the Taliban, who had
been in power in much of Afghanistan since
seizing Kabul in 1996, destroyed the statues.
This act of cultural vandalism, controversial Dancing on the edge: film director Salim Shaheen, left
even within the Islamist movement, was in part
influenced by foreign Islamist extremists such as refreshing. Afghanistan has long suffered from these years that much of Kabul was laid waste
Osama bin Laden who were based in the country being seen in the West as a conflict, not a country. and 60,000 people killed in the capital, not by
at the time. But it also served local political The conflicts present in the film are those of the Soviets or their allies but by fellow Afghans.
purposes. This spectacular act of violence, filmed an earlier period. Shaheen, who is in his early Among these casualties were nine of Shaheen’s
by local journalists invited by the Taliban, made 50s and has only a rudimentary level of literacy, actors and crew, killed in a rocket attack on his
the movement’s grip on Afghanistan appear began his prolific career with films about the studio in 1995. Others died in the strike, including
much stronger than it really was, especially in war against the Soviet occupiers, which lasted a ten-year-old girl who was eating an apple – the
places like Bamiyan. It also motivated existing from 1979 to 1989. In one he played a spy half-eaten fruit was found in her severed hand.
supporters, and frightened enemies. In short, “between the mujahideen [resistance] and the Images of the casualties flicker across a screen
it terrorised, mobilised and polarised. The government” who is exposed and killed. In in the Kabul home where Kronlund is filming.
9/11 attacks on the US, launched by bin Laden Bamiyan he is shooting a film about his own When a reluctant President Trump decided to
just six months later, had the same aims. childhood and youth which shows his early reinforce the US military presence in Afghanistan
The Prince of Nothingwood – the name comes enthusiasm for dance, song and cinema, as well earlier this year, he was reportedly persuaded to
from Shaheen’s own self-deprecating comparison as the beatings he suffered from his family as do so by images of young Afghan women wearing
between the low-fi, low-budget Afghan industry a result. Like hundreds of thousands of other miniskirts in Kabul in the 1970s or 1980s. The
and Holly-, Bolly- and Nollywood – takes the young Afghan men, Shaheen, overweight and West’s interest in gender relations in Afghanistan
viewer on a careful, affectionate and intelligent artistically inclined, was conscripted into Afghan has had significant consequences, good and bad.
journey through the few limited parts of government forces who did much of the fighting Kronlund’s film includes footage of laughing
contemporary Afghanistan still accessible to against the mujahideen; this experience too is women without headscarves in roughly the
a foreign filmmaker seeking to spend time reproduced in his typical over-the-top style. same period. But of course, it was only in Kabul
on the ground with a subject. The insurgency A second conflict that features in Nothingwood and a few other major cities, and only among
underway in much of the country – as bloody is the civil war that followed the departure of the well-educated middle-class women, that such
now as it has been for a decade or more – does Soviets. This lasted for half a dozen bloody years behaviour was possible. In rural areas, where the
not appear in any substantial direct way. Footage until the Taliban emerged to defeat all the warring vast majority of the population lived, conservative
of the aftermath of a suicide bombing, which factions. Shaheen points out that it was during traditions remained very strong. This divide was
occurred while Sonia Kronlund and her team and is a powerful driver of the insurgency. Such
were working elsewhere, reminds the viewer of The war is largely distant, which reforms are seen as Western innovations, and
the price paid by civilians every day. The soldiers resistance to them is conflated with nationalism.
and police in Bamiyan are an important part of is refreshing as Afghanistan has Hence the former Taliban fighter who professes
the backdrop of Nothingwood – Shaheen uses their
Kalashnikovs as props at one point for his own
long suffered from being seen in the to be an admirer of Shaheen’s patriotism. The star
and director himself does not permit Kronlund
shoot. But on the whole the war is distant. This is West as a conflict, not a country to film his two wives or many daughters, though

8 | Sight&Sound | January 2018


his sons are free to appear not just before the
French filmmaker’s camera but in his own films.
Kronlund’s exploration of gender and sexuality
is more subtle and sensitive than many.
Qurban Ali is one of Shaheen’s principal
actors. He plays female roles and, with an
extrovert effeminacy, men too. There is a
long Afghan tradition of such role-playing,
and none of those watching the shoots in
Bamiyan appear in the least bothered by his
blurring of gender. In fact, they delight in it.
Conversational asides cleverly investigate the
exclusion of women from public space, as well
as attitudes to women who might want to act,
particularly in ‘doubtful’ roles such as dancers.
Yet for anyone who knows Afghanistan, the
greatest pleasures in this clever, understated
and enjoyable film are the landscapes. There are
the urban scenes of a cold, muddy Kabul which,
though much changed since my first visits in the
1990s, is still recognisable as the gritty, tough,
historic and deeply cultural city which has
survived everything thrown at it for five centuries
or so. These scenes are by necessity filmed
mainly from a vehicle, to avoid the unwanted
attention of kidnappers or killers. And there
is Bamiyan, with its snow-topped mountains
and extraordinary light, and the gaping holes
in the cliffs where the Buddhas once were.
The Prince of Nothingwood is released
i in UK cinemas on 17 December and is
reviewed on page 92
THE NUMBERS
LOVING VINCENT
By Charles Gant
When the Bristol Watershed booked Loving
Vincent, the venue’s cinema curator Mark
Cosgrove recalls, “I thought it was a nice,
small film, with a really interesting story
behind it, about how it was made.” Cosgrove
initially programmed the innovative hand-
painted animation at two showtimes per
day in his venue’s smallest screen, but
as the release date approached, advance
ticket sales encouraged him to promote it
to a bigger room, and with all showtimes.
The decision proved wise: Loving Vincent
had more than 1,000 admissions at the
Watershed that weekend, more than double
the next best film (Blade Runner 2049). Five
weeks later, the total is up to 4,141, placing
Loving Vincent as Watershed’s fourth most
successful film of 2017, after Moonlight,
La La Land and The Death of Stalin.
At the ICA in London it’s been a similar
success story, with consistently high
admissions across the first six weeks of
play. It’s now the venue’s most successful
film of 2017, ahead of Moonlight. “It’s been
incredible,” says ICA head of film Nico Marzano.
At least initially, the film’s success at these
two venues was not very typical. Leaving aside
the live relay of its National Gallery premiere
event from the BFI London Film Festival,
Loving Vincent debuted with a rather soft
£100,000 from 101 cinemas. At that point,
few would have predicted its current total of
£814,000 – even if you deduct the £174,000
contributed by the premiere event, that’s still
an impressive 6.4 times the opening number.
UK distributor Altitude was always
clear about the film’s likely appeal,
according to marketing boss Lia Devlin:
“We all just fell in love with the concept
of a hand-painted film, completely
unique, the world’s best-loved artist, and
technically it just had a real wow factor.”
Altitude pitched the film at audiences who
had embraced quality adult animations; at
fans of culture biopics such as Mr. Turner
ADULT-SKEWED ARTHOUSE ANIMATION AT THE UK BOX OFFICE
Film
A Scanner Darkly
The Illusionist
Persepolis
Loving Vincent
Anomalisa
Belleville Rendez-vous
Waltz with Bashir
Your Name
The Red Turtle
Chico & Rita
*gross at press time
From ear to eternity: Loving Vincent
(2014); and at art lovers who had visited
cinemas to see gallery events in the Exhibition
On Screen series. Unlike many distributors, who
only permit short bookings and one-offs deep
into a film’s run, Altitude showed flexibility,
and had reached a hefty 284 cinemas at press
time. James Warren, marketing and publicity
manager, explains: “We have a general policy of
letting those smaller venues book as soon as
possible, so they can benefit from the noise we
are making from our marketing and publicity.”
For Marzano, the ICA’s particular
success with Loving Vincent also relates
to current conservative programming
trends in independent exhibition. Curzon
Bloomsbury did very well with the film, as
did Greenwich Picturehouse, but overall
it is individual independent cinemas –
rather than the boutique chains Curzon,
Picturehouse and Everyman – that dominate
the film’s list of top performing sites.
“This is an important aspect of the
story,” says Marzano. “Independent films
struggle to find space currently. It’s not
surprising that you are talking to me, to
Mark at Watershed, and Jason Wood [at
HOME Manchester] is someone else doing
an incredible job supporting independent
cinema. That is the reason why Loving Vincent
became such a success story for certain
venues. We are the venues taking risks.”
Year Gross
2006 £995,867
2010 £942,019
2006 £902,651
2017 £814,047*
2016 £763,126
2003 £740,726
2008 £704,249
2016 £606,610
2017 £491,376
2010 £261,446
January 2018 | Sight&Sound | 9
 EL
US INE SS • ARI
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HA M LET GOES C O WBOYS
DIS E • R A D
W S IN PARA H ÈM E • LENING • JUHA
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M AR I UNION OR Y GI R N A • D R
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S HM EN T • CAL HE M A T R SC AR S IDE O F HOPE
I T U R
RIM E AND PUN G O A M ERICA • K E CA RE OF YO
V R E • THE OTHE
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GR AD COWBO A IKA SHOW • H E D U SK • LE P AGE BOO
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 RUSHES DISPATCHES
LOST IN TRANSLATION
The prints of rare international
film classics are often available
for screenings, but lack subtitles
– here’s how we can change that
By Mark Cousins
My story this month
is about a bottleneck
and a proposal. The
bottleneck is a problem
that has dogged the
film world for years,
but is seldom talked about. Try to show rare
foreign films and, again and again, you find that
there’s no subtitled copy. As a result, the work
of every arts cinema, every festival that shows
world films and every good movie historian
has been slowed or curtailed. We are seeing a
narrower range of films than we could be.
In trying to show films from Bulgaria, Romania,
Albania, Japan, Egypt, India and China over the
years, I’ve found that there are often decent prints,
often digitised. As I’m lucky enough to be known
a bit in the film history world, archives will send
me Blu-rays or DVDs of the rare films in which
I’m interested. It’s the lack of English subtitles that
prevents us showing great films in our country.
Of course movies can be electronically
soft-titled – subs temporarily projected from
a computer – but that’s time-consuming and
costly for one screening. For years now I’ve
been arguing that instead of spending money
to fly a filmmaker in, we should put the cash
into making good burnt-in or .srt subtitles on
ILLUSTRATION BY NATE KITCH
digital copies of films. I know audiences like
live Q&As with directors, but they are one-offs.
Add English-language subs to a Blu-ray of, say,
one of the brilliant Bulgarian films of Binka
Zhelyazkova, and it is showable everywhere
English is spoken. I realise, of course, that English
is only one language, but it would be a major start.
How do we widen the bottleneck? With
something which could be called the World
Cinema Crowd Subtitling Project, or something
snappier. My proposal would work like this:
a WCCSP website is established. It has four
registers. The first is a list of films that have decent
prints but which are currently unsubtitled. This
list would be compiled by archives, historians,
programmers, journalists and film lovers.
The second register would be a list of linguists
prepared to offer their time to translate one, or
part of one, of the films from the first list. I realise
that translation is a paid profession, but I believe
that there would be, for example, university
language departments that would see such
translation as a teaching exercise; that retired
linguists or those who do not do it as their job
might be prepared to offer some of their time for
fun or the fulfilment of helping a film to be seen;
and that more than a few film fans around the
world, of many ages and backgrounds, might also
want to contribute to this crowd-subtitling effort.
The third register would be a list of checkers
– language experts and film historians who
would evaluate and edit the subtitles that have
been generated. The fourth register would be
a catalogue of rights holders – the archives,
companies or individuals who own the copyright
to the films for which the subs are being prepared.
Rich film archives can probably afford to do
their own work in this area, but poorer ones
(ie, most of them) will be appreciative. They,
My proposal for crowd subtitling,
in the spirit of Wikipedia, is fairly
cheap, boldly internationalist
and would be a quick win
perhaps with others, would prepare screenable,
subbed Blu-rays of the films, which would
carry the WCCSP logo and thanks to those
who prepped the subs. These Blu-rays would be
made available to historians and programmers
at the discretion of the rights holders.
The website would have a ‘donate’ button
for non-linguists who would like to contribute
to the work. The WCCSP could also apply
for some project funding from cultural and
philanthropic organisations. As I write this I
hear from Markus Nornes, whose book Cinema
Babel: Translating Global Cinema has some of
the best writing on the subject. He tells me of
Viki, a well-organised Chinese fan subbing
site, in which beginners time the subtitles and
more experienced translators make and check
them. And www.moviesubtitles.org and www.
opensubtitles.org are already a large resource.
The result of a WCCSP? A world of cinema
would open up. New names would enter the
canon. Indian and Egyptian cinema, to take
just two examples, would come to the fore for
English-language cinephiles like never before. Of
course, decaying films are a far bigger problem.
But everyone who cares about cinema knows
that, and is aware that the main problem in film
restoration is cost. My proposal, in the spirit of
Wikipedia, is considerably cheaper, is boldly
internationalist and would be a quick win, in that,
as I’ve found, many of the prints are sitting there.
Would these proposals unblock? If the
answer is yes, and if there’s willing, do we need
an organisation to administer the project?
Maybe Sight & Sound or the BFI could manage
the website? Or a major university that teaches
languages and film? Or a film festival, like my
old hunting ground the Edinburgh International
Film Festival, or the BFI London Film Festival,
or the Toronto International Film Festival?
The gauntlet is down, fellow film fans.
January 2018 | Sight&Sound | 11

Wide Angle
PROFILE
MARGINAL ADVANTAGE
Working at the edge of film
culture, Pierre Léon creates
complex, ambiguous cinema that
celebrates family and friendship
By Quintín
According to the French film critic and director
Pierre Léon, film history has generally been
reduced to a relatively small group of canonical
films, which alters at such a slow pace that entire
realms of cinematic life are lost in the process. The
idea makes you think of the celebrated poll of the
100 greatest films that Sight & Sound publishes
every decade, and of what gets lost every time
that particular canon is revisited and reaffirmed.
In Loin de Manhattan (‘Far from Manhattan’,
1980 ), a film by the French director Jean-Claude
Biette, satirical reference is made to an art
magazine called Shapes and Colours, in which vain
critics write irrelevant articles on fashionable
subjects – the magazine’s name seems to allude to
S&S. Pierre Léon has written a book about Biette
called Jean-Claude Biette: le sens du paradoxe (Jean-
Claude Biette: The Meaning of Paradox, Capricci,
2013), and made a documentary (Biette, 2011). In
the book, León describes Biette’s filmography as
“un moment de cinéma” – a singularity that film
history usually overlooks and leaves behind.
For Léon, these moments de cinéma have no
fixed length; they can extend over time, or be
Family affair: Pierre Léon
12 | Sight&Sound | January 2018
EXPLORING THE BIGGER PICTURE
represented by just one film. A true history of
cinema would be one which corrals all of these
moments – an ideal at odds with the S&S poll.
Paradoxically, a moment may include other
moments; Biette’s oeuvre is part of a secret
wing of French cinema, virtually unknown
in English-speaking countries, especially the
UK. This moment doesn’t have a manifesto, or
a name, or even a defined group of members;
rather, it’s a loose web of people and films linked
to the evolution of marginal cinema in France.
Léon’s book on Biette works as an introduction
to this fragile phenomenon, which includes the
work not only of Biette and Léon, but of other
filmmakers, from Paul Vecchiali in the 80s to
Serge Bozon in the last decade. What they share is
a refusal to stick to the principal routes that post-
nouvelle vague cinema still takes – a route typified,
in Léon’s words, by “the political radicalism
that followed in the wake of May ’68, and the
restoration of the cinéma de qualité française”. Or to
put it another way: neoclassicism and aesthetic
compromise. The alternative paths included the
cine pobre of Adolfo Arrieta, the work of some of
the second-generation filmmakers of the nouvelle
vague, such as Jean Eustache and Luc Moullet, as
well as the experiments of Jacques Rivette and
even the aesthetic conception of Rivette’s old
comrade (and later adversary) Eric Rohmer.
Biette’s work is at the core of all this. He was
born in 1942 and died relatively young in 2003.
Each of his seven films, from Le théatre des matières
(‘The Theatre of Materials’, 1977) to Saltimbank
(2003), forms a kind of artistic counterpart to the
search for a new critical language undertaken in
the film journal Trafic, which Biette co-founded
with the critic Serge Daney in 1987. His films all
feature a creative type – painter, theatre director,
writer or philosopher – who refuses to speak
about his work, or indeed his life. Surrounding
him are journalists, critics, disciples, admirers
and other parasites who want to discover the
artist’s secret in order to further their careers,
in effect trapping him or her in a web of media
and academic triviality. Biette’s cinema is
sustained by the Brechtian ironic distance his
characters assume, as well as the secret that
structures his film’s storylines. This secrecy is
a deliberate strategy to protect the ‘singularity’
from the encroachments of the spectacular.
Biette’s films are all driven by a powerful, almost
absurd impulse towards freedom. This peaks in
Le Complexe de Toulon (‘The Toulon Complex’,
1996), in which the protagonist, played by Jean-
Christophe Bouvet, abandons Paris because of its
choking intellectual, artistic and family milieu
in order to seek freedom in London, working
Pierre Léon’s films are informed
by his particular mix of cultures
– French cinephile passion and
Russian literary erudition
as a sommelier and dating a man. Ironically,
Biette thought that London meant freedom,
but few seem to have noticed his work there.
Pierre Léon was born in 1959, far from London
and Paris – in Moscow, where his father was the
Russia correspondent for the French communist
paper L’Humanité. He spent his childhood in
Russia, arriving in France as an adolescent. All
his films are informed by his particular mix of
cultures – French cinephile passion and Russian
literary erudition (he is a renowned translator of
Dostoevsky), as well as his fondness for music.
His first attempt at making a fiction film, in 1988,
was Deux dames sérieuses, an adaptation of Jane
Bowles’s novel Two Serious Ladies. It was shot on
a poor video format and no proper print exists, in
part because Léon never owned the rights to the
book or the music. But it was somehow rescued in
2016, and shown at the Cinémathéque française
and, last November, at the Mar del Plata Film
Festival, where Léon had his first retrospective.
Friends and family were cast and crew, and the
film was shot in one flat, two walls of which were
repainted each weekend to recreate the novel’s
multiple locations. The film is precarious, uneven,
amateurish and hard to define, but nevertheless
reveals a very determined filmmaker in search
of beauty and mystery in the midst of absurdity.
After starting to write for Trafic and acting in
his friend Biette’s feature La Chasse gardée (‘The
Private Hunting-Ground’ or ‘Sphere of Influence’,
1993), Léon’s next film was Li per li (1994), in
which a group of men gather at a farm. They
seem to be a patrol of some undefined army,
attached to each other by a pact, and commanded
by a character called ‘The Captain’. One of them,
played by Léon himself, is regarded as a sort of
traitor; he is humiliated and put in charge of
inferior duties such as cleaning and cooking.
But nothing really dramatic happens: the actors
talk, stroll around the landscape and sing. There
is a sublime moment when one of the cast,
Renaud Legrand, sings the Italian pop song of the
title in the open air. The casual viewer may be
puzzled: is this group of people working to save
the world? Looking for forgiveness? Is the film
meant to evoke the isolation of Léon’s own group
of friends, family and collaborators from the
rest of the cinematic world (the film proclaims
itself a “féerie critique”, a critical enchantment)?
Family is at the core of Léon’s oeuvre in more
than one sense. His brother Vladimir, also a
filmmaker, often turns up as actor and singer,
and his mother, sister and grandmother make
occasional appearances. Pierre and Vladimir
made a documentary about their father, Nissim
dit Max (‘Nissim, known as Max’, 2004), a
sensitive portrait of the French Communist
party as a family during the Cold War. More
than this, family – and a sense of estrangement
from the ordinary world – is the thematic core
of Léon’s filmography, especially his adaptations
of Russian authors. He has made faithful
translations of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya (1997)
and Dostoevsky’s The Idiot (2009) and looser
versions of two more Dostoevsky novels: The
Adolescent (2001) and Léon’s last but one feature,
Deux Rémi, deux (2015), based on The Double.
This last is an eerie but delightful comedy
about a young man (Pascal Cervo) who discovers
Moment of truth: Françoise Lebrun in Pierre Léon’s documentary Biette (2011)
that someone identical to him is trying to
replace him in his job, in his house, even with
his girlfriend, who is his employer’s daughter.
While the first Rémi is eccentric and shy, his
double is far more sinister. There is an unease in
Deux Rémi, deux, an ambiguity around the nature
of the film itself; at the same time, León again
tells a story of the protagonist’s fears of being
deprived of the affection of those around him.
This fear is at the core of Léon’s filmography,
bespeaking a frailty and a desperate need for
family ties. But in the parable form that Léon
deploys in Li per li and Déux Rémi, deux and other
films, his aim is to construct a different sort of
imaginary family for his main character, one that
will not mistreat or disappoint him in the end.
Looking at the cast of Deux Rémi, deux, we
note the presence of several filmmakers and
critics: Bozon himself, film historian Bernard
Eisenschitz, directors Pascale Bodet and Patricia
Mazuy, producer Jackie Raynal, director Martial
Salomon. This is part of the other family that
Léon has built, a group of friends who collaborate
in each other’s work and belong, somehow, to the
moment. In Guillaume et les sortilèges (‘Guillaume
and the Spells’, 2007), maybe Léon’s most joyful
film, a teenager from the provinces stays at
his aunt’s apartment in Paris. When the aunt
leaves town, ghosts of all sorts invade the place.
This family of ghosts becomes a substitute
for the boy’s blood family: they welcome the
teenager to the mysteries and delights of life,
Pascal Cervo in Deux Rémi, deux (2015)
quoting philosophers and singing songs. It’s
another féerie, a féerie civile, as Léon states in
the title sequence, or an adult fairytale.
But all of Léon’s films are enchantments;
peaceful encounters with mystery, the spirits,
the ghosts and the fairies that do not recognise
themselves explicitly as such. Even a film like
Par exemple, Eléctre (‘For Example, Electra’, 2013),
born out of rage at the lack of funding for his
films, shows in a comic light the producers who
refuse to finance his projects. Jeanne Balibar
sings the emails she sends to them, while Léon
himself goes to see them in ridiculous outfits.
Léon’s early films cultivated what we might call
the Biettian hermetic mood, but his later ones
have become more and more luminous, more
open and more coherent by virtue of the fact that
they’re made, so to speak, at home. In fact, Léon’s
oeuvre looks more like the building of a culture
than a filmography. A big part of that culture
is provided by his partner Renaud Legrand, art
director, costume designer, actor, scriptwriter,
co-director, singer and song composer, as well as
friends like Eva Truffaut and Balibar – all those
people he collaborates with just so the films can
channel Lèon’s pleasure in the tradition of the
family celebration, in which three generations
sing, dress up, and put on homemade plays.
It’s as if the actors (professional or amateurs, it
matters little) are playing at being themselves,
trying to transmit the infantile pleasure of stage
and musical games among friends. Imagine
a child remaking films by John Ford and
Straub-Huillet, exaggerating their solemnity
and hieratic attitude to lend a comic touch.
This gathering of family members, actors and
technicians in each film is part of a tradition in
cinema, from Ford to Fassbinder, from Renoir
to Ozu. Léon has taken this tradition and made
one of its finest expressions. He has invented a
cinema of kindness and pleasure, that shapes
that cinematographic moment we are trying
to define, as if his work were able to make
reparation for the many years of collective
ostracism and critical injustice experienced
by all those forgotten filmmakers. And in so
doing, Léon has revealed to us the happiness of
making cinema at the margins of the polls.
Translated by Mar Diestro-Dópido
January 2018 | Sight&Sound | 13
 WIDE ANGLE PRIMAL SCREEN
THE MOVING PICTURE SHOW
Research has brought to light
a forgotten early film genre
– the recreation on film of
scenes from classic paintings
By Bryony Dixon
When we think of how art (the painterly kind)
intersects with film we might immediately think
of biopics of famous artists – usually a clunky way
of representing one visual medium in another.
But very early film had a more direct, imitative
relationship with art, based on a simple delight in
making famous pictures move. We see a similar
impulse presented as a spectacular attribute
of magic in the Harry Potter films. Do you
remember how cool it was when the characters in
newspaper articles and paintings in the corridors
of Hogwarts came to life? How soon we get used
to such novelties. Perhaps only Dumbledore and
Nicholas Flamel can cast their minds back 120
years ago, when moving pictures were born in to
the muggle world; but if you were living in those
times the term ‘living pictures’ might have meant
two things to you; one was an entertainment
recreating with living bodies, costumes and
lighting a work of fine art – a tableau vivant; the
other was the latest novelty of the age – film.
In both forms the primary inspiration was the
narrative art work, usually old master paintings.
Like the tableaux vivants of upper-class soirées
and popular theatres, the early films recreated
famous scenes, a format suited to their short
running time. Some of these source paintings
were of iconic events – the death of Nelson or
the murder of Marat in his bath; many were
Bible stories or popular book illustrations, such
as those by Gustave Doré or James Tissot. As
with the tableaux, classical art was occasionally
used to justify ‘tasteful’ nudity, and the films
wandered into the realms of the erotic.
Enthusiasts for very early films have long
been aware of fine art as a source; but a new
piece of research, presented by Valentine Robert
of the University of Lausanne in the form of
a film show, brings together for the first time
a significant number of the paintings and the
surviving films. Her programme, premiered at
the Pordenone silent film festival this year, is
Take two: Jean-Louis Gêrome’s The Duel After the Masquerade (1859)…
14 | Sight&Sound | January 2018
Distil
Di
Distillled
til l d wisdom:
Distilled wiisdo
sdom:
d m: Dewar’s
Dewar’
Dewar’s 1894
1894 whisky
whi
wh
hisk
i ky advert…
isky adve
ad
dvertt
elegantly put together and works well on the big
screen – starting with the original art works and
proceeding with the films, sometimes in different
versions by different filmmakers. The examples
pose many questions. One question Robert asks
in her catalogue note is, “Who is copying who,
and where is the original?” Her answer is that the
question is irrelevant: “Early cinema’s remakes
of tableaux vivants represent the culmination
of an aesthetic of reproduction that reigned
in visual culture around 1900. Every medium
reproduced and renewed the same images,
which were treated as models to be repeated.”
She gives the example of Alphonse de
Neuville’s painting Les Dernières Cartouches
(1873), recreating an incident of desperate
heroism from the Franco-Prussian war of
1870, which was re-used in engravings,
sculptures, photography, theatre and film.
Classical art was occasionally
used to justify ‘tasteful’ nudity,
and the films wandered into
the realms of the erotic
…and the 1902 Pathé Frères film version
…and the 1900 film version
The continuous process of reappropriation is
nicely illustrated by my favourite meta example,
a parody of this process – a faux old master
painting called ‘The Whisky of his Forefathers’
by Matthew B. Hewerdine, commissioned
in 1894 with commendable perspicacity by
the distiller Dewar’s to lend its advertising a
veneer of antiquity. In the picture, a kilted laird
is seated among the portraits of his ancestors,
who are climbing out of their frames to drink
a toast with Dewar’s Scotch. The painting was
adapted by the Edison Company that same year
for the Kinetoscope, becoming the first-ever
advertising film; in 1897 a projectable version
was made, and shown on the side of a large
building in New York. A more elaborate version,
The Spirit of His Forefathers (1900), was made by
the British Mutoscope & Biograph Co on large
format 68mm film. Robert’s film/slide show
ends with that 1900 film, re-presented within a
1977 TV advert. In 2015 Dewar’s had its finger
on the pulse with a virtual reality 360-degree
film for its latest campaign: on it goes.
i
For more about Valentine Robert’s
programme, see giornatedelcinemamuto.
it/tableaux-vivants ILLUSTRATION BY MICK BROWNFIELD WWW.MICKBROWNFIELD.COM
 THE BEST OF 2017

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A THRILLING READ
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WIDE ANGLE FESTIVAL
REVOLUTIONARY ROAD
Overshadowed by the death of
former artistic director Hans
Hurch, this year’s Viennale was
nevertheless a stellar event
By Kieron Corless
“I am not interested in film culture. What
interests me is revolution. That sounds old-
fashioned, but I am interested in changing the
world.” That startling declaration was made
by the former artistic director of the Vienna
International Film Festival, Hans Hurch, whose
sudden death in July at the age of 64 shocked
his innumerable friends and staunch admirers
on the international film scene; though I barely
knew him in person, I definitely count myself
among the latter. I only started visiting the
Viennale in the latter half of Hurch’s 20-year
reign, but was immediately seduced; it seemed
by some distance the best film festival I’d
been to, an irresistible draw every autumn.
If we ask ourselves why, the answer seems all
too clearly bound up with Hurch’s personality,
the core of which the curator Thomas Miessgang
identifies, in a beautiful, brilliantly perceptive
tribute essay in this year’s festival catalogue,
as a certain “immoderateness” – “not in the
sense of exorbitance and self-indulgence –
money was never important to him – but as a
refusal to take as his measure the existential
possibilities offered by the public, politics and
culture… Immoderateness as a renunciation of
bad compromises, consensual backslapping,
and secret agreements to the parties’ mutual
benefits, based on the mafia model.”
In other words a kind of incorruptible rigour,
which I rightly or wrongly connected in my
mind to Hurch’s longstanding friendship with
Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, and his
veneration of their films (he had worked as their
assistant in his younger days). That rigour, it
seemed to me, flowed palpably through every
element of the festival programme like a live
current; but his genius was that the festival never
felt remotely high-minded or elitist. If anything,
pleasure was the watchword, the pleasure of
exploring and sharing the artistry in every facet
of the medium. And this pleasure was inherent
not just in the films themselves. Hurch might not
have thanked me for saying it, but the Viennale
has also been the most brilliantly branded and
marketed film festival – the stylish, covetable
festival bags, the mini-trailers by top-flight
directors, the cool, eye-catching catalogue covers:
all this too has surely been a part of its appeal.
This year’s edition was headed by Hurch’s close
friend Franz Schwartz, who pledged to make
a programme in Hurch’s image; and, despite
the late loss of an important sponsor, he was
as good as his word. Three films in particular
stood out for me. The first, directed by Vienna-
based filmmaker Johann Lurf, who works as a
projectionist in one of the city’s cinemas, has as
its title the symbol . Having made a name for
himself with numerous shorts, this was Lurf’s
first feature-length work: it consists of 97 minutes
of shots of the night-sky lifted from the entire
history of cinema across a vast range of countries
Affonso Uchoa and João Dumans’s exceptional Araby
and genres (not just sci-fi), in their original
formats with accompanying dialogue and music.
What quickly becomes apparent is how
layered the film is: an astonishing research project
that produces multiple flickers of recognition, but
also a sensual, sensory flow of arresting images
and sounds so skilfully edited together that you
can simply surrender to them. At other moments
you find yourself pondering the different ways
in which the universe is figured across times and
cultures, and the variety of emotions, fantasies,
fears and ideas projected on to it. That oscillation
between immersion and a more detached gaze
gives the film a kind of structuring tension and
force that for me more than justified its duration.
The other two outstanding films I saw in
Vienna were both profoundly moving social-realist
depictions of hardscrabble working-class lives,
Rigour flowed palpably through
the Viennale like a live current;
but Hurch’s genius was that it
never felt high-minded or elitist
Much mourned: Hans Hurch
which were elevated by recourse to fable, lyricism
and myth. Moon Spins Between Land and Sea (1997)
directed by Giuseppe M. Gaudino, was part of a
welcome special programme on the immense
flowering of Neapolitan cinema in the decade
from 1991 to 2001, curated by Maria Giovanna
Vagenas. The film depicts the lives of a family of
poor fishermen forced to relocate and rebuild their
lives after an earthquake, thrown into relief by
vivid digressions into a haunted mythical space
revealing often tragic scenes from ancient Rome.
The film is only 20 years old but seems like an
object from a more distant time, partly because its
experimental way with form, narrative and visual
textures feels more in keeping with the 1970s it
depicts. It is for sure a strange beast; wild and free,
but simultaneously disciplined, never losing focus
on the plight of its characters, the dramas and
obsessions that animate and undermine them.
Where better to end than with the exceptional
Araby (Arábia), c0-directed by Affonso Uchoa and
João Dumans – one of the best films this year. The
first 20 minutes are deceptive, setting the audience
up for a narrative about the life of a young boy,
Andre, in the southern Brazilian state of Minas
Gerais. Then Andre discovers a notebook-diary
and the film switches abruptly into a road movie
in which the writer of the notebook, itinerant
worker Cristiano (superbly played by Aristides
de Sousa), recounts in voiceover criss-crossing
the state performing various menial jobs, making
friends in similar straits, finding a lover, but all
of it temporary. Gradually, physical fatigue and
isolation inflect his view of the world, partly
held in check by his growing capacity to express
his thoughts in writing, the low-key lyricism
of which gives the film the almost fabular
dimension signalled by its title. It’s rare indeed
that working-class people are portrayed with such
insight and empathy in cinema; the understated
ending, ultimately a simple black screen, exudes
a monumental sadness that left me reeling.
January 2018 | Sight&Sound | 17
FILMS OF
THE YEAR
2017 has seen disruption on many fronts – race, gender and technology among them – and the
films voted for by critics in our annual poll reflect the anxieties afflicting the world in general
and the film business in particular. But there is room, too, for slowness, silence and sheer beauty
By Nick James
In introducing our poll results, I admit that the question
‘How great was your film list?’ can hardly claim to be the
major focus of what happened in film and television in
2017. Even before the sexual assault allegations against
Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey and others in the mov-
ing image industries had broken, the year had already
shaped itself around political issues of identity, diversity
and representation. It’s fitting, then, that all these matters
are reflected in our winning title.
Jordan Peele’s Get Out made its first impact at Sun-
dance in January. We realised that it was going to win our
poll in mid-November, about the same time it was nomi-
nated for the Golden Globes in the Comedy or Musical
category. Nothing could beat Peele’s own dead dry Twit-
ter response to the Globes’ tone-blind decision: “Get Out
is a documentary.” The film was, of course, sold as a hor-
ror film and it is a true body horror, which plays off the
objectification of and desire for ownership over the black
body by white people and whose comic edge is fraught
with the question, ‘Why am I laughing?’ In a year when
world politics was truly frightening, and most politicians
frighteningly powerless, Get Out resonated across genre
boundaries like no other title.
It’s the politics of the industry that are reflected in our
second-placed title – this is the first time a TV series has
been placed so high (I should note that this year we ac-
tively encouraged our 188 contributors to offer selections
from all forms of moving image works). Had it been any
series but Twin Peaks: The Return, it might have been seen
as proof that television has supplanted cinema. But David
Lynch is such an icon of both cinema and TV that he self-
separates from that debate. Eighteen hours of Lynch work-
ing with Mark Frost – both, it seems, given utter freedom
of expression – puts the series in cinephile heaven with
18 | Sight&Sound | January 2018
Jacques Rivette’s Out 1 (1971) and in TV heaven with Fass- In a year when
binder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980): who can say which
represents the more adventurous use of the long form? world politics
So gorgeous and sweepingly pleasurable is our third- was truly
placed film, Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name,
that it’s hard to think of it as political at all. It is, however, frightening, and
a plea for love under potentially restrictive and danger- most politicians
ous conditions, being a poetic portrait of a holiday ro-
mance between American archaeologist Oliver (Armie frighteningly
Hammer), who’s visiting his professor in northern Italy, powerless,
and Elio Perlman (Timothée Chalamet), the professor’s
teenage son. In the breezy exactitude of its performances, ‘Get Out’ resonated
its perfect choices of shot and its editing flow it is more across genre
like a classical European arthouse film than
anything boundaries like
you would associate with more recent arthouse cinema. no other title
Our next two choices were much closer to what the
early 21st century has produced in that line. Lucrecia
Martel’s oneiric saga of an 18th-century official waiting
patiently for advancement that never comes, Zama, and
Valeska Grisebach’s Western, a study of German building
workers trying to co-exist with locals in a remote Bulgar-
ian village, are brilliant and very distinctive examples of
a more contemplative form of cinema that now seems to
be slowly vanishing from our screens.
The standard question, ‘Was it a good year for cin-
ema?’, is harder than usual to answer and, given the
pressing importance of television series and VR, it begins
ILLUSTRATION BY ALEX WILLIAMSON
to seem too narrow. In terms of film, it is instructive to
look at which festivals premiered which titles. Sundance
had more influence this year than in any I can remem-
ber, premiering Get Out, Call Me by Your Name, Francis
Lee’s God’s Own Country, David Lowery’s A Ghost Story
and Yance Ford’s deeply personal documentary
Strong Island. Cannes in 2017 maintained its usual
January 2018 | Sight&Sound | 19
2017 THE YEAR IN REVIEW

dominance of our lists – it previewed Twin Peaks It was moving to TOP 40 FILMS OF 2017
and showed a dozen of the titles in our Top 40. Ber-
lin had a stronger-than-sometimes programme, which see ‘Dunkirk’ stake 1 Get Out Jordan Peele
2 Twin Peaks: The Return Mark Frost, David Lynch
included Aki Kaurismäki’s nostalgic wish-fulfilment its huge budget 3 Call Me by Your Name Luca Guadagnino
refugee comedy The Other Side of Hope. Yet Ildikó Enye-
di’s distinctive Golden Bear winner On Body and Soul is on the belief that 4 Zama Lucrecia Martel
nowhere to be seen in our list. Nor are Michael Haneke’s people can watch, 5 Western Valeska Grisebach
sketchy black comedy Happy End, an astonishing fall 6 Faces Places JR, Agnès Varda
from grace in terms of this poll, and Todd Haynes’s Won- register and 7 Good Time Benny Safdie, Josh Safdie
derstruck, both from Cannes. Their absence suggests respond to human 8 Loveless Andrey Zvyagintsev
a consensus among critics that a couple of years ago I
would have said was hard to find. behaviour without 9 Dunkirk Christopher Nolan
= The Florida Project Sean Baker
Venice premiered the fourth-placed Zama – albeit, the usual reliance 11 A Ghost Story David Lowery
oddly, out of competition – and showed Guillermo del
Toro’s fabulous The Shape of Water, Martin McDonagh’s on dialogue 12 120 BPM Robin Campillo
deadpan triumph Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, = Lady Macbeth William Oldroyd
Fred Wiseman’s magisterial Ex Libris: New York Public Li- = You Were Never Really Here Lynne Ramsay
brary and Darren Aronofsky’s tour de farce mother! (I’ve 15 God’s Own Country Francis Lee
no room here to distinguish who out of the annual Tellu- 16 Personal Shopper Olivier Assayas
ride-Venice-Toronto bunfight showed which film first.) = The Shape of Water Guillermo del Toro
But perhaps Venice’s most distinctive contribution was
= Strong Island Yance Ford
to devote a whole island to virtual reality works – though
19 I Am Not Your Negro Raoul Peck
Cannes made its own substantial bid by presenting Ale-
jandro González Iñárritu’s VR piece Carne y arena (Flesh = Lady Bird Greta Gerwig
and Sand), which won the Mexican director a Special Os- = Let the Sunshine In Claire Denis
car, the first awarded to a work in this format. Iñárritu’s = Moonlight Barry Jenkins
piece got one vote in our poll, and a few other VR works = mother! Darren Aronofsky
were also acknowledged – baby steps for a new format. = Mudbound Dee Rees
That so many terrific films are listed here would have 25 The Other Side of Hope Aki Kaurismäki
surprised me earlier in the year, when the feeling was
= Silence Martin Scorsese
that the A-list festivals weren’t sparkling quite as they
27 Blade Runner 2049 Denis Villeneuve
should. That notion was destroyed by the terrific buzz
around the BFI London Film Festival, which exploited = Ex Libris: New York Public Library Frederick Wiseman
to the full the advantage of being a ‘greatest hits’ event. = I Am Not a Witch Rungano Nyoni
Our highest placed non-festival title, Christopher No- = The Levelling Hope Dickson Leach
lan’s Dunkirk, might be seen as the flagship of resistance = The Square Ruben Ostlund
to digital film. But it wasn’t just the thrill of seeing all 32 The Death of Stalin Armando Iannucci
that Imax-format film footage intercut with 65mm, the = The Handmaid’s Tale Bruce Miller
palpable authenticity of the analogue image form; it was
= The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
also moving to see a film so influenced by pre-sound cin-
ema, one that staked its huge budget on the belief that Noah Baumbach
people can watch, register and respond to human behav- = Nocturama Bertrand Bonello
iour without the usual reliance on dialogue. But the ques- = A Quiet Passion Terence Davies
tions wouldn’t go away: what does it mean to be proud of NORTHERN LIGHTS = Raw Julia Ducornau
Florence Pugh in William
being British at this sticky moment for national pride? Oldroyd’s Northumberland- = Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Should the film have been more aware of the presence of shot Lady Macbeth (top
Martin McDonagh
colonial troops of other races on the beaches? This was a left), and Josh O’Connor as
a farmer in Francis Lee’s = The Vietnam War Ken Burns, Lynn Novick
year when, no matter how powerful the film, aesthetics Yorkshire-set God’s Own
= The Work Jairus McLeary, Gethin Aldous
couldn’t escape from political concerns. Country (top right)

20 | Sight&Sound | January 2018


THE YEAR
IN REVIEW
Please note: below are 40 critics’ lists of their top films of 2017, out of
a total of 188 responses on which the poll on page 20 is based. The
remaining lists and highlights are online at bfi.org.uk/sightandsound
RAYMOND BELLOUR
Writer, France
I Had Nowhere to Go Douglas Gordon
Western Valeska Grisebach
Zama Lucrecia Martel
Ex Libris: New York Public
Library Frederick Wiseman
Demain et tous les autres
jours Noémie Lvovsky
ANNE BILLSON
Critic, Belgium
Legion Noah Hawley
I Am Not Your Negro Raoul Peck
Valerian and the City of a
Thousand Planets Luc Besson
May God Save Us Rodrigo Sorogoyen
L’Amant double François Ozon
For years I’ve been waiting ng for a
superhero movie to break free of the
formula and push the genre re into more
fruitful territory; I’m still waiting, but
Noah Hawley’s Legion was the nearest
hanger,
thing I’ve seen to a gamechanger,
albeit played out via eight episodes
on TV. Peck’s documentary y I Am Not
Your Negro marshals the intelligence
telligence
and clear-eyed compassion n of
the thrillingly charismatic James
Baldwin into an alarmingly y pertinent
commentary on modern America.
Valerian and the City of a
Thousand Planets received a critical
and commercial drubbing,, but
displays more exhilaratingg comic-
book action and dazzling visual
nger
inventiveness in its little finger
than all of this year’s Hollywood’s
ywood’s
SF blockbusters laid end to o end.
May God Save Us was one ne of two
outstanding Spanish thrillers ers
starring Antonio de la Torre re
her
that I saw this year (the other
was The Fury of a Patient
Man) which follow in
the footsteps of 2014’s
Marshland by hitching genre nre
plotting and a vivid sense
Moonlight
of time and place to an unflinching
dissection of toxic machismo. And
L’Amant double was my ‘Preposterous
Thriller of the Year’: sexy, demented,
stylish and offering two hilarious
Jérémie Reniers for the price of one.
My favourite season of 2017
was a programme of 60s and 70s
Czech fairytales at Offscreen Film
Festival in Brussels, showcasing
the work of Juraj Herz (best known
for 1969’s The Cremator) and his
contemporaries: all new to me, but
film magic at its most beguiling.
ELA BITTENCOURT
Critic and curator, Brazil/US
The Woman Who Left Lav Diaz
Baronesa Juliana Antunes
People Power Bombshell: The Diary
of Vietnam Rose John Torres
Dragonfly Eyes Xu Bing
Lover for a Day Philippe Garrel
Baronesaa struck me as
a relatively new and vital
hybrid narrative – one
in which Juliana
Antunes made
clear narrative choices to highlight
(and partially create) the women’s
sense of purpose and agency.
I’ve been binge-watching Philippe
Garrel’s films and soon may echo
Michael Sicinski, who said on
Letterboxd that plots are melding
together. Michael asks if in his latest
film Garrel is capable of self-critique
(since he so clearly identifies with the
main protagonist). For me, it’s been
more useful to ask whether Garrel is
capable of showing empathy towards
both his male and female characters. I
think he is, no small feat as the women
in Lover for a Day are betrayed but
also betray. I cherish Garrel’s ability
to sustain paradoxical positions, and
particularly his honesty – after all, we
have stepped into the 21st century
with barely a dent in the middle-
aged male/young female mythology,
with the same endless portrayals
of male sexuality as barely touched
by time, biology or psychological
maturity (while women’s sexualities
are doomed to early decrepitude,
unless they are transgressive). Auteur
cinema has been as reluctant to
thoughtfully re-evaluate this myth
as Hollywood has. Garrel provides
a welcome dose of lucidity.
Writing about Lav Diaz’s The
Woman Who Left in the Village Voice,
I mentioned Brechtian distance and
irony, though as time passes Horacia
seems closer to sainthood than she
does, for example, to Mother Courage’s
pragmatic, crisis-honed ethos. This
could be off-putting, yet Diaz’s affinity
with Tolstoy and, temperament-wise,
even more so with Dostoevsky, is hard
to resist: there is such deep empathy in
Dostoevsky for anyone downtrodden,
regardless of how florid the speech or
drunken the behaviour, that an ethics,
a solidarity of class emerges. In today’s
neoliberal world this closeness has
been collapsing. It may be then that
the real allure of Diaz is cultural and
social nostalgia (at least for Western
viewers). I’m still thinking of Horacia’s
stalled – and then tragically fulfilled
– revenge, what it means from her
position as a woman, and the fact
that it is so clearly drawn as class
revenge of the meek and powerless
against the ruthless and all-powerful.
Reverberations through time and
collapsing time frames, as well as the
glory of film surfaces, is also the appeal
of John Torres’s People Power Bombshell:
The Diary of Vietnam Rose, an ambitious
film that merits further analysis.
I have read critiques of Dragonfly
Eyes accusing it of questionable
morality in its use of security videos
uploaded to the internet. The property
rights of such videos are no doubt
murky. Yet Xu Bing’s film is a unique
record of our times and the tortured
zeitgeist of postmodern mass culture,
in which, so Fredric Jameson tells us,
everything devolves into a pastiche.
Each year, a number of the
most adventurous films are shorts:
Vando Vulga Vedita by Andréia Pires
and Leonardo Mouramateus, Pia
Borg’s Silica and Makino Takashi’s
On Generation and Corruption.
CARLO CHATRIAN
Artistic director, Locarno Festival, Italy
Twin Peaks: The Return
Mark Frost, David Lynch
Zama Lucrecia Martel
Zam
Call Me by Your Name Luca Guadagnino
Thre Billboards Outside Ebbing,
Three
Missouri Martin McDonagh
Miss
Jeannette Bruno Dumont
Jean
Twin
Tw Peaks: The Return is without
doubt
dou the work that made the
biggest
bigg impression on me this year.
IAN CHRISTIE
Professor of film and media history at
Profe
Birkb
Birkbeck College, London, UK
Silence Martin Scorsese
Silen
Lady Macbeth William Oldroyd
The Party Sally Potter
Moonlight Barry Jenkins
Moo
The Wandering Soap Opera
Telenovela Errante)
(La T
Raúl Ruiz, Valeria Sarmiento
Ra
Hardly in order of presumed
m
merit, from a year when I seemed
t miss most of what others
to
w seeing. But these are all
were
un
unexpected achievements.
Sc
Scorsese’s long-planned study of
fa in adversity joined his earlier
faith
T Last Temptation of Christ (1988)
The
an Kundun (1997) to make a
and
kind of trilogy, in which we feel
ki
the pain and the incongruity of
belie
believing the improbable,
and also understand the
January 2018 | Sight&Sound | 21
2017 THE YEAR IN REVIEW
9= The Florida Project Full of compassion
and curiosity about its characters’ fragile lives,
this memorable drama establishes Sean Baker
as among cinema’s most original chroniclers of
childhood. Kate Stables, ‘S&S’, December 2017
9= Dunkirk Christopher Nolan has shifted out
of cerebral overdrive and rediscovered a welcome
directness and simplicity... The payoff, in terms of
sheer emotional and visceral impact, is immense.
Philip Kemp, ‘S&S’, September 2017
8 Loveless What makes ‘Loveless’ the
outstanding film at Cannes is its careful,
relentless visual style. Somehow Zvyagintsev
feels more contemporary even than Michael
Haneke right now. Nick James, ‘S&S’ Cannes report, July 2017
22 | Sight&Sound | January 2018
arguments against. It’s also
a brilliant study of what
we used to call brainwashing.
Lady Macbeth was simply the most
unheralded feature debut of this or
any recent year, making Leskov’s
grim story of a woman’s bloody revolt
against social and sexual constraint
seem urgent and, well, English.
And who would have thought that
Sally Potter had a bitingly mordant
social comedy up her sleeve, with
the finest ensemble acting from an
extraordinary cast? No doubt Moonlight
benefited by being seen against the
flimsy backdrop of La La Land, but it’s
still a milestone in America coming to
terms with growing up black and gay.
And The Wandering Soap Opera – am
I allowed to vote for a film started in
1990, but only completed in 2017, of
which I’ve only seen part, while it was
undergoing restoration in Santiago?
From what I saw – and the subsequent
recognition in Locarno – I’m
confident this is another posthumous
Ruiz triumph, lovingly brought to
fruition by Valeria Sarmiento. Chile,
for Ruiz returning after the fall of
Pinochet, was a country of fictions
and evasions, here represented by
the collision of four improbable
telenovelas, whose characters and
storylines keep overlapping. And a
reminder that there are still more Ruiz
discoveries and restorations to come.
No room, alas, to hail or argue
with Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk,
an extraordinary sensory tour de
force that managed to be remarkably
claustrophobic in portraying an
event usually thought to have
been played out in all too open
spaces. Or to salute Willie Doherty’s
oblique, elegiac memorial to the
1916 Easter Rising, Loose Ends,
shown at Matt’s Gallery in July.
MICHEL CIMENT
Positif editor, France
The Other Side of Hope Aki Kaurismäki
The Shape of Water Guillermo del Toro
The Square Ruben Ostlund
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing,
Missouri Martin McDonagh
Wonder Wheel Woody Allen
In alphabetical order.
ASHLEY CLARK
Critic and programmer, BAMcinématek,
US
120 BPM Robin Campillo
Good Time Ben Safdie, Josh Safdie
Love Is the Message, the
Message Is Death Arthur Jafa
Mudbound Dee Rees
Nocturama Bertrand Bonello
These days at the cinema, I’m
looking for total immersion, and
all five of my picks hypnotised me,
then gripped me like a vice from
start to finish. So did a handful of
others unlucky not to make the
final cut: Jordan Peele’s vicious and
much-needed satire of sham white
liberalism Get Out – a genuine
cultural phenomenon; Warwick
Thornton’s brutal revisionist Aussie
western Sweet Country; and Jairus
McLeary and Gethin Aldous’s
unique, desperately moving prison
documentary The Work. Florence
Pugh’s astounding turn in Lady
Macbeth was a magnetically vindictive
and authoritative treat. And, of course,
there was Twin Peaks: The Return,
which wasn’t really television or
cinema, but an uncanny law unto
itself: terrifying, profound, endlessly
unsettling and, best of all, hysterically
funny (“Hello-o-oo!”), I didn’t want
it to end. Anyway: got a light?
GEOFF DYER
Writer, UK
Dunkirk Christopher Nolan
The Vietnam War Ken Burns, Lynn Novick
The Rider Chloé Zhao
Loveless Andrey Zvyagintsev
Hostiles Scott Cooper
JEAN-MICHEL FRODON
Critic, curator and professor, France
Félicité Alain Gomis
Ismael’s Ghosts Arnaud Desplechin
Ex Libris: New York Public
Library Frederick Wiseman
In the Last Days of the
City Tamer El Said
Faces Places JR, Agnès Varda
I’m sorry there is no place for 120
BPM nor for I Am Not Your Negro,
for Kawase and Hong Sang-soo or
Garrel and Téchiné. And Sharunas
Bartas’s Frost, and Amos Gitai’s
West of the Jordan River. I’m also
sorry I can’t think of a really great
American fiction, except maybe
Detroit (is it a fiction?). Ah, yes! The
fascinating Upstream Color (2013).
I’m sorry you English speakers
will probably never see Jean-
Gabriel Périot’s Lumières d’été. And
not forgetting the mesmerising
first feature by Chinese director
Xuebo Wang, Knife in the Clear
Water. Whatever many say, cinema
is alive, diverse and kicking.
RYAN GILBEY
Critic, New Statesman, UK
Aquarius Kleber Mendonça Filho
Elle Paul Verhoeven
Daphne Peter Mackie Burns
Call Me by Your Name Luca Guadagnino
Personal Shopper Olivier Assayas
SIMRAN HANS
Critic, the Observer, UK
Good Time Ben Safdie, Josh Safdie
Angels Wear White Vivian Qu
God’s Own Country Francis Lee
A Fantastic Woman Sebastián Lelio
Machines Rahul Jain
Lots of good films this year, but
few instant classics for me. Still, here
are five that made me jolt
upright before leaning into
THE YEAR IN…
AMERICAN INDEPENDENT CINEMA
In an age of infinite choice and perpetual crisis, it gets harder and harder for independent filmmakers to break through
all the noise. Even so, quality will out – and 2017 prepared the way for future excitements. By Violet Lucca
Idol of the Twilights: Robert Pattinson lending his star power to the Safdie brothers’ Good Time
It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when
‘independent’ went from being a signifier
of how a film was made to a rather
nebulous marketing term connoting
‘edginess’ or simply something not based
on established intellectual property. But
even when questions of authenticity were
at the forefront of critical discourse, self-
promotion was a crucial part of being an
independent filmmaker. That fact was
largely born out of financial necessity
(less money means that one person has to
perform multiple roles) and the need to
break through the rest of the noise (good
luck getting anyone else to care about your
movie if you can’t make it seem worth
watching). Now that directors of all scales
have to compete with TV, video games and
the infinite choices of the internet (a portal
to all sorts of raw talent), that question of
grabbing people’s attention has become
especially pressing. The feast-or-famine
approach of many media outlets only
accentuates this – if Suicide Squad (2016)
underperforms at the box office, Hollywood
movies are dead for good; if this year’s
Wonder Woman makes a lot of money,
movies are back and better than ever. It’s
nonsense, but symptomatic of the sense of
crisis that pervades culture and politics.
There are several strategies working
Now directors have to compete
with TV and the internet, the
question of grabbing attention
has become especially pressing
‘independent’ directors and their publicists
employ to deal with these challenges. For
filmmakers, the most tried and true method
is to cast a star to get financing and their built-
in audience, as seen this year in the Safdies’
Good Time (platinum Robert Pattinson), Matt
Spicer’s Ingrid Goes West (platinum Aubrey
Plaza), Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird (Saoirse
Ronan and Laurie Metcalf), and Dustin Guy
Defa’s Person to Person (Michael Cera, Tavi
Gevinson and Abbi Jacobson). Although
some of those names are extremely niche,
their fanbase is on the young and devoted
end of the spectrum – all of the Twilight fans I
watched Cosmopolis (2012) with stayed until
the very end.
Another way of getting attention is to
cast a different type of (in)famous person:
New York City-based programmers and/or
critics. The Metrograph cinema’s Jake Perlin
(previously glimpsed in Noah Baumbach’s
While We’re Young, 2014) has cameos in
Alex Ross Perry’s Golden Exits and Person to
Person; Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Dan
Sullivan was also in Golden Exits, as well as
Matías Piñeiro’s Hermia & Helena (but got
cut out of both); writer and Museum of the
Moving Image programmer Eric Hynes is
in Person to Person; Nick Pinkerton was in
Golden Exits (also cut out); even I did a bit
part in a movie over the summer. I have
no right to argue that these appearances in
any way influence the films’ likelihood of
being programmed or reviewed favourably,
especially given that I too am friends with
everyone on the above list, and have a
great deal of respect for their opinions and
professionalism. However, the list bespeaks
connections and relationships that aren’t
available to filmmakers outside New York.
The French New Wave also engaged in
such cross-pollination, with largely positive
results; that being said, I don’t believe any
of the films I’ve mentioned thus far are as
wildly inventive as the Cahiers crew’s or the
Left Bank’s, and few if any seem likely to be
remembered in 30 years’ time, let alone five.
‘New waves’ are most often just that: a quick
splash that crashes into nothingness.
Looking at the subject matter of these
films (overwhelmingly straight, middle-
class white people problems) and style
(two were shot by Sean Price Williams),
it’s easy to write off the independent films
of 2017 as a homogeneous waste of time.
Nevertheless, variations on a familiar
melody can be edifying, as fans of Eliza
Hittman’s sparse and hushed Beach Rats
will assure you. Good Time was in fact a
very good time despite not reinventing
the wheel, and Dee Rees’s Mudbound
contained painterly compositions and
an epic breadth that seems to belong to a
different era – despite the fact it was based
on a book club book. With startling clarity,
both Good Time and Mudbound subtly
deconstruct systemic racism in the US:
one through the larceny of white, outer-
borough scumbags (who successfully frame
and ransack the apartment of an African
immigrant), the other through an African-
American soldier’s bitter return to the Jim
Crow South. Assuming the Safdies and Rees
have their 2017 triumphs rewarded with
more resources, the truly exciting year for
independent cinema will be coming some
time in 2019 or 2020. Take it as a reason
to keep going, despite the darkness of our
perpetual state of crisis.
January 2018 | Sight&Sound | 23
2017 THE YEAR IN REVIEW

THE YEAR IN…

BRITISH CINEMA
A bumper harvest of accomplished and original British films – what more could anyone ask for? But look a little
deeper into the success, and it is clear that British filmmakers are working under heavy constraints. By Nick James

It was, according to many critics, a terrific

year for new British cinema. Occasional
Sight & Sound contributor Ryan Gilbey,
for example, wrote an enthusiastic piece
for the Observer in October under the
headline ‘Fresh, diverse and earthy: 2017’s
great debuts from UK film directors’. My
colleagues at the BFI London Film Festival
encouraged that view, championing Daniel
Kokotajlo’s spare and harrowing study
of a Jehovah’s Witness family, Apostasy;
Rungano Nyoni’s impeccably conceived
portrait of a persecuted young Zambian girl
banished from her tribe, I Am Not a Witch;
Peter Mackie Burns’s portrait of a millennial
urban woman, Daphne; and Michael
Pearce’s Jersey-set thriller Beast (which I
regret I still need to see). Gilbey also looks
back to other recent triumphs such as
Francis Lee’s passionate rural romance
God’s Own Country; William Oldroyd’s
spare, imagistic adaptation of Leskov’s Lady
Macbeth, transposed from Mtsensk, Russia,
to the North of England; and Hope Dickson Cooking up a storm: Emily Beecham in Peter Mackie Burns’s Daphne
Leach’s paean to loss and the land, The
Levelling. There is clearly much to celebrate real-life contemporaries complain that she making any significant impact, and a big
here, and I don’t want to spoil the party, but is too cushioned a character – she has her reason is that the films that get through
something in the way Gilbey marshals his own home, close to work, in ultra-expensive the incredibly tortuous process are the
argument indicates how we expect British London – to properly represent the urban ones focused on survival, the will to exist:
cinema to succeed only in small ways. experience of most people. having a point to make becomes a luxury.
I think he hints, too, at more troubling The strong undercurrent of simmering And of course we continue to make and
assumptions about what’s achievable. anger in films like The Levelling and Daphne market films that trade off Britain’s past
“Three acclaimed first features have isn’t directly targeted at a political enemy. glories – Victoria and Abdul and the like – no
been set far from the metropolitan whiff At the core of my caveat to this year of great matter that they feel utterly out of place in
of sourdough and miles from the nearest British films, then, is this question: where today’s Britain; they’re eagerly consumed by
yoga studio,” Gilbey wrote, referring to is the fury at what’s being done to us by Downton Abbey fans at home and abroad.
God’s Own Country, Lady Macbeth and The corporations and politicians? We have the Today’s Britain is better summarised
Levelling. That remark leads to a quote from weakest, most divisive government of my by what Michael Pearce told Gilbey about
Leach: “Rich middle-class people tend to lifetime, yet there is no flow of films that upset Jersey: “I always had this impression of the
live in London… they tend to be the people our leaders or those who influence them the duality of the place as a child. There was this
who make films… so there’s a lack of belief way that so many films have successfully idea that it could be a beautiful playground
that anyone would be interested in rural done with previous governments. Of course, but also somewhere that could be stifling
stories.” It’s a good point in a year when the it generally takes at least two years for a film and suffocating.” One further restraint on
populations of the UK’s capital city, as well to be made, so maybe film is too unwieldy UK cinema is well known. Because most
as Northern Ireland and Scotland, where a form to be politically effective in the films have to be financed piecemeal, and
Leach lives, seem to be at loggerheads with age of social media. Yet a huge number of often involve sales agents and distributors
the rest of Britain over Brexit. But urban/ films stamped ‘UK’ have been released this in advance, nearly all films now, no matter
rural or metropolitan/provincial divides year. That is the business triumph of today. who makes them, are compromised to a
are surely far less pressing than class However, most of them come and go without degree because so many interested parties
and money. Daphne is a good illustrative have a say in the script and the edit. In
case. The struggles of the female central
In a year of great British that sense, an outright angry film has little
character to survive in the relentless (and films, where is the fury at chance of coming through unscathed and
relentlessly cool) urban workplace are the kind of personal-political undercurrent
seen from a fresh perspective, and the film
what’s being done to us by achieved by the splendid films above may
is well brought off, but some of Daphne’s corporations and politicians? be the best we can hope for.

24 | Sight&Sound | January 2018

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97 Journal of Film
Journal of Film Preservation
10.2017 Preservation The Journal of Film Preservation is published
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of moving image archival activities. Articles
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2017 THE YEAR IN REVIEW
the screen – five complete
worlds I lived in for their
individual running times. The
joyously depraved Good Time is the
one I suspect will stand the test of
time: it feels both old and new, and I
remember experiencing its frenetic,
buzzing energy rip through my entire
body while watching. As soon as it
finished, I wanted to watch it again.
MOLLY HASKELL
Author and critic, US
Lady Bird Greta Gerwig
I, Tonya Craig Gillespie
The Meyerowitz Stories (New
and Selected) Noah Baumbach
Logan Lucky Steven Soderbergh
One Mississippi Diablo Cody, Tig Notaro
Noir revelations (previously unseen
by me): two by Robert Wise, Born to
Kill (1947) and Blood on the Moon (1948,
western with Robert Mitchum);
Raw Deal (1948) by Anthony Mann.
Let’s hear it for baddest dame Claire
Trevor but also for good girls Barbara
Bel Geddes and Marsha Hunt.
J. HOBERMAN
Critic, US
Zama Lucrecia Martel
Streetscapes [Dialogue]
Heinz Emigholz
The Vietnam War Ken Burns, Lynn Novick
Nocturama Bertrand Bonello
Get Out Jordan Peele
JOANNA HOGG
Filmmaker and curator, UK
I Am Not Your Negro Raoul Peck
Manchester by the Sea
Kenneth Lonergan
Silence Martin Scorsese
The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits
of John Berger Bartek Dziadosz, Colin
MacCabe, Christopher Roth, Tilda Swinton
Write When You Get
Work Stacy Cochran
ALEXANDER HORWATH
Critic and curator, Austria
Good Time Ben Safdie, Josh Safdie
Western Valeska Grisebach
First Reformed Paul Schrader
Casting Nicolas Wackerbarth
Let the Sunshine In Claire Denis
My choices are all films of the
present. Which is too bad, because the
cinema of 2017 was equally strong
in staging for us the presentness
of the past, as demonstrated by
Wonderstruck (Todd Haynes),
Mademoiselle Paradis (Barbara Albert),
Closeness (Kantemir Balagov), The
Shape of Water (Guillermo del Toro)
and Zama (Lucrecia Martel).
NICK JAMES
Editor, Sight & Sound, UK
Get Out Jordan Peele
Call Me by Your Name Luca Guadagnino
Zama Lucrecia Martel
Western Valeska Grisebach
The Venerable W Barbet Schroeder
26 | Sight&Sound | January 2018
7 Good Time A movie that moves at the
instinctual speed of fight-or-flight. As pure a
piece of filmmaking in an adrenal vein as has
been seen since the heyday of the late, great Tobe
Hooper. Nick Pinkerton, ‘S&S’, December 2017
6 Faces Places Has lightness and richness all
at once – one of the few films that might have you
bouncing out of the cinema at the end, despite the
fact that Varda is also gently guiding us towards
her own end. Nick James, ‘S&S’, July 2017
5 Western A sly incorporation of tropes and
iconography drawn from classic westerns.
Grisebach’s vision is undeniably romantic,
but never does she allow herself to slip into
sentimentality. Giovanni Marchini Camia, ‘S&S’ online
Obviously, politics in subject
matter and in the industry were
of far more consequence than
aesthetics this year. Thus politics
have affected my choices of films
more than usual. In particular,
Schroeder’s documentary about
genocide in Myanmar, The Venerable
W, makes my list as much because
of what it reveals as for its power as
a film, or its place in the director’s
‘Trilogy of Evil’. Jordan Peele’s Get
Out, too, which I saw for fun one
weekend, also resonated so much in
this time of xenophobic and racist
resurgence that it had to be included.
Aesthetics fought back, if you
like, with Guadagnino’s superb
Call Me by Your Name, a sumptuous
holiday of a film steeped in romance
and near perfectly conceived and
performed – I needed that this year.
Of course it is a gay male romance
in a strong year for them, with God’s
Own Country a powerful rival.
All of us at S&S took so much
pleasure in presenting Lucrecia
Martel’s oneiric saga Zama at the BFI
London Film Festival in October that it
too became a shoo-in for me. I always
like to leave one place for a film of
quieter achievements, and I doubt
that Valeska Grisebach’s Western could
have been more nuanced in its portrait
of builders in a strange environment.
Perhaps, after all, aesthetics still have
the upper hand in my mind, if not
in the world. My one huge regret is
that my sixth choice, Guillermo del
Toro’s brilliant The Shape of Water,
a real delight, did not write itself
in. That’s entertainment, I guess.
Other films that grabbed me
include Faces Places, Dark River, You
Were Never Really Here, Loveless,
A Fantastic Woman, The Square,
120 BPM and Three Billboards
Outside Ebbing, Missouri.
KENT JONES
Writer, filmmaker and festival director, US
Mindhunter David Fincher, Asif Kapadia,
Tobias Lindholm, Andrew Douglas
Faces Places JR, Agnès Varda
Phantom Thread Paul Thomas Anderson
Wonderstruck Todd Haynes
Arthur Miller: Writer Rebecca Miller
NASREEN MUNNI KABIR
Critic and curator, UK
Newton Amit Masurkar
Dunkirk Christopher Nolan
Redoubtable Michel Hazanavicius
L’Atalante (restored version) Jean Vigo
Newton is the second film of
a young Indian director, Amit
Masurkar, and is beautifully nuanced
and smartly written about what
democracy means in remote parts
of India. Excellent characters and
a very thoughtful film that has
good performances and a layered
screenplay without taking
itself too seriously.
THE YEAR IN…
BLOCKBUSTERS & FRANCHISES
Hollywood’s conviction that bigger is better has led to some bloated, bland franchise fodder this year, but hints of
originality and humour still crept through – and it looks like the women are storming the barricades. By Leigh Singer
Prime Amazon: Gal Gadot as Diana of Themyscira in Wonder Woman
“I see a really huge franchise here –
honestly, as big as Star Wars,” Ridley Scott
told the BBC on Alien: Covenant’s May
release. “I’m trying to open it up. This is not
an innocent plan.”
Setting aside the logic in comparing
age-restricted horror to family-oriented
adventure, Scott is guilty merely of
following the modern blockbuster trend.
World-building and retro-fitting are now
obligatory for any self-respecting, globe-
conquering franchise. When it works – and
here’s where Marvel and DC have a head
start, with decades of comic book material
to plunder – it can be serially addictive. And
lucrative.
By contrast, one-time box-office
juggernauts whose sequels look clumsily
cobbled together, suffered. Although
foreign box office has long bolstered,
even justified, Hollywood’s production
line, domestic performance still shapes
perceptions about viability. So while the
latest, frankly lacklustre instalments
of Pirates of the Caribbean, Transformers
and Alien, or reboots of King Arthur and
The Mummy – a flop that may well have
already buried Universal’s planned ‘Dark
Universe’ classic monsters series – all earned
more overseas than at home, US critical and
commercial apathy connotes failure.
Elsewhere, the savvier usual suspects
succeeded largely by attempting to diversify
in substance and/or style. To quote their
predecessor Frozen, for the first time in
forever, Hollywood’s two biggest domestic
hits, Beauty and the Beast and Wonder Woman,
were female-led stories (and likely soon
joined by The Last Jedi’s heroine Rey). Disney’s
ongoing live-action revisions of its animated
catalogue are arguably a safe bet; though
Beauty and the Beast proudly flagged up
allegedly daring credentials, namely blink-
and-miss moments of mixed-race embrace
and gay affirmation. Both tropes, incidentally,
featured in Alien: Covenant with more screen
time and less fanfare.
Meanwhile Diana of Themyscira’s belated
cinematic debut – no one ever mentions
Wonder Woman’s official moniker –
For the first time in
forever, Hollywood’s
two biggest domestic hits
were female-led stories
decades and multiple movies after her
contemporaries Superman and Batman,
was the year’s biggest, brightest surprise.
If the film itself may be flawed, director
Patty Jenkins and star Gal Gadot’s warm,
compassionate approach deftly avoids
macho, fanboy-driven triumphalism
without stinting on spectacle. One
hopes that this trailblazing isn’t merely
assimilated into DC’s overarching Justice
League boys’ club.
Male superheroes scarcely ceded the
spotlight, however, providing twists
on patented formulas. Hugh Jackman’s
Wolverine swansong Logan blended film
noir and western genres to impressively
gritty effect. Marvel continued their more
comedic approach and ethnically diverse
casting. And if Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.
2 and Spider-Man: Homecoming upheld
the studio’s habitual ‘young white male
director’ template, hiring half-Maori
comedian/filmmaker Taika Waititi infused
Thor: Ragnarok with welcome deadpan Kiwi
humour, injecting fresh life into what was
once The Avengers’ weakest link. Promos
for Ryan Coogler’s 2018 Afrofuturistic Black
Panther give hope that this expansiveness
won’t be a one-off.
In terms of standalone hits, today’s most
reliably original epic auteur, Christopher
Nolan, again bucked trends. Despite the
World War II setting of his three-strand,
ticking-clock survival thriller Dunkirk,
Nolan’s intricate, modernist approach
resisted its inbuilt nostalgia value, a factor
otherwise exploited by so many current
blockbusters: the 1970s and 80s-inflected
settings of Kong: Skull Island and Stephen
King adaptation It; Edgar Wright’s retro-
fuelled car movie Baby Driver; or Harrison
Ford recreating yet another signature role in
Blade Runner 2049.
Indeed, alongside numerous callbacks
to the original, Blade Runner 2049’s CGI-
enhanced rejuvenation of Sean Young’s key
character, following 2017’s digital de-ageing
of Pirates of the Caribbean’s Johnny Depp
and Guardians of the Galaxy’s Kurt Russell,
epitomises so many modern blockbusters:
utilise futuristic visual effects to constantly
recycle stories (and, now, even stars) from
the past, and thus manufacture the ideal,
virtual reality – an eternally rebootable
present where franchises never die.
January 2018 | Sight&Sound | 27
2017 THE YEAR IN REVIEW
THE YEAR IN…
LATE WORKS BY VETERAN FILMMAKERS
There was something of an elegiac feel to aspects of the year, marked as it was by a number of long-held passion projects
that finally made it to the screen by a generation of auteurs approaching the end of their careers. By Philip Concannon
Keeping faith: Martin Scorsese with Andrew Garfield on the set of Silence
Warren Beatty made headlines this year, but
for all the wrong reasons. The confusion
that led to La La Land being handed the Best
Picture Oscar instead of Moonlight injected
a jolt of genuine drama into a typically
staid awards ceremony and became one of
the year’s most talked-about moments. But
how many of the millions watching agog
were even aware that Beatty, the man who
opened the envelope, had released a movie
just a couple of months earlier? Rules Don’t
Apply opened in the US on more than 2,000
screens at the end of 2016 and flopped.
When it arrived in the UK a few months
later, it was again met with a shrug.
Had the moment for the film passed?
Beatty had wanted to direct a film about
Howard Hughes for decades, and there’s no
doubt the role would have suited him better
25 years ago, when he still had the power to
get major studio pictures greenlit. But there
was something fascinating about watching
79-year-old Beatty in this role, playing off
his own persona as the ageing lothario.
For many of us, it was simply a pleasure
to see him on screen again, 15 years after
his last performance; but perhaps that
absence was part of the problem. For a lot of
cinemagoers, he was yesterday’s man.
Every director has their passion project,
and some spend decades pursuing their
white whale. This year, we got to see
28 | Sight&Sound | January 2018
Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Endless Poetry, the
second part of his planned autobiographical
trilogy, and Terry Gilliam finally rolled
cameras on The Man Who Killed Don Quixote
(due in 2018, barring calamity), but the
film that stoked most cinephile excitement
came at the start of the year: Silence, Martin
Scorsese’s long-awaited adaptation of
Shusaku Endo’s novel. In stark contrast to the
dynamic and decadent The Wolf of Wall Street
(2013), Silence found the director in ascetic,
contemplative mood, wrestling openly with
the questions of faith that have been threaded
through so much of his work. The film is a
profound artistic achievement, but audiences
stayed away in droves. Scorsese is now
making his next film for Netflix, raising the
fearful prospect that we may have seen this
master’s final big-screen statement.
Ex Libris: New York Public Library is unlikely
to be Frederick Wiseman’s last film (41 films
in 50 years suggests he doesn’t take much
time off), but it did have the feel of a career
summation. A natural climax for his recent
cycle of films focused on education, culture
and community, Ex Libris shows how the
Scorsese’s next film is for
Netflix, raising the prospect that
we may have seen this master’s
final big-screen statement
NYPL acts as a hub and often a lifeline for
people of all ages and backgrounds. No
other film in 2017 offered such an inspiring
vision of individuals and organisations
striving to make lives better. Agnès Varda
also brightened the lives of everyone she
met this year, as she and her charming
young co-director JR rambled around France
in the wonderful Faces Places. It’s a lovely,
uplifting movie but towards the end caught
me unawares with a burst of wrenching
emotion, as Varda recalled younger days
with her great love Jacques Demy, and
considered her friendship with Jean-Luc
Godard. Varda and Godard are now the only
two directors of the French New Wave still
with us. The end of an era feels imminent.
On the subject of the nouvelle vague, it
was a shock to see Jean-Pierre Léaud, the
perennially youthful face of that movement,
as the wheezing, decrepit monarch in The
Death of Louis XIV. It was a reminder that it’s
not only directors who consider their legacy
in their twilight years; The Death of Louis XIV
was directed by Albert Serra, but one could
make a case for Léaud as the film’s co-auteur.
You could say something similar about John
Carroll Lynch’s Lucky – so perfectly attuned
to Harry Dean Stanton’s unique sensibility
and screen persona that, watching it just
weeks after his passing, in September, it
felt like an elegy. What a bittersweet joy to
see Stanton in this rare lead role, sharing
the screen with his old friend David Lynch,
another artist who revisited his past this
year, in Twin Peaks: The Return, and who took
the opportunity to push his art – indeed,
the medium of television – into bold new
territory.
More than a year has passed since
we lost Abbas Kiarostami, but I felt the
sting of his death again as I watched
his final film 24 Frames. A meditative,
entrancing and wonderfully imaginative
experiment in still and moving images, it
is the work of a man who never stopped
exploring the boundaries between truth
and fiction, or looking for new ways to
play with our perception of the world.
The film’s incremental emotional force is
overwhelming as each frame is counted
down. We become keenly aware that we
are watching the final images that Abbas
Kiarostami will ever offer us, and we should
cherish every minute.

A lover’s discourse: Juliette Binoche in Claire Denis’s Let the Sunshine In
EHSAN KHOSHBAKHT
Curator and filmmaker, Iran/UK
Wajib Annemarie Jacir
24 Frames Abbas Kiarostami
Makala Emmanuel Gras
A Journey Through French
Cinema Bertrand Tavernier
The Other Side of Hope Aki Kaurismäki
DENNIS LIM
Critic and curator, US
Twin Peaks: The Return
Mark Frost, David Lynch
Zama Lucrecia Martel
Western Valeska Grisebach
Streetscapes [Dialogue]
Heinz Emigholz
The Day After Hong Sang-soo
Plus 10 short/medium-length
films/moving-image works (in
alphabetical order): Aliens (Luis
López Carrasco), Barbs, Wastelands
(Marta Mateus), Braguino (Clément
Cogitore), Cosmic Generator (Mika
Rottenberg), Electro-Pythagoras:
A Portrait of Martin Bartlett (Luke
Fowler), Filter (Jaakko Pallasvuo),
Flores (Jorge Jácome), Onward Lossless
Follows (Michael Robinson), What
Weakens the Flesh Is the Flesh Itself
(James Richards and Steve Reinke),
Where Do You Stand Now, João Pedro
Rodrigues? (João Pedro Rodrigues).
DANA LINSSEN
Critic and curator, The Netherlands
Let the Sunshine In Claire Denis
Faces Places JR, Agnès Varda
Western Valeska Grisebach
Zama Lucrecia Martel
Wonder Woman Patty Jenkins
Wham. Bam. Without further
ado and much consideration, an
all-female top five (and I could have
included others like Kelly Reichardt’s
Certain Women, Fiona Tan’s Ascent,
Julia Ducournau’s Raw). There is
only one criterion: which of last
year’s films would I like to see again
right here and now and in what
order. Films that blew my mind,
stole and broke my heart, left me
wondering what life is all about.
As always I enjoyed my
explorations into the cinematic
outside cinema’s movie palaces and
black boxes: Alejandro González
Iñárritu’s VR installation Carne y
arena at the Prada Foundation in
Milan; Julian Rosefeldt’s Manifesto
at the Holland Festival and his In the
Land of Drought at the Berlin König
Galerie; Errol Morris’s Wormwood;
Alexander Kluge’s Pluriversum in
Essen and his collaborative piece
The Boat Is Leaking. The Captain Lied
in Venice; the meeting of the eyes
of Apichatpong Weerasethakul and
Cao Guimarães (what a discovery!)
in the Locus exhibition in EYE
Amsterdam; and Kurt Hentschläger’s
stroboscopic SOL installation at
Berlin’s CTM Festival. My eyes
are still processing, resonating,
reflecting the afterimages of all that.
MIGUEL MARIAS
Critic and teacher, Spain
Lover for a Day Philippe Garrel
The Lion Sleeps Tonight
Nobuhiro Suwa
The Apple of My Eye Axelle Ropert
This Is Our Land Lucas Belvaux
Let the Sunshine In Claire Denis
As always, I find this survey
too early and too restrictive. At
least one film I like as much
as these five and there are six
more that almost made it...
ADRIAN MARTIN
Critic, Spain
Sweet Dreams Marco Bellocchio
Twin Peaks: The Return
Mark Frost, David Lynch
Hermia & Helena Matías Piñeiro
Nocturama Bertrand Bonello
47 Meters Down Johannes Roberts
TV is where it’s happening, in
the world of binge-watching and
downloading that has only a tenuous
relation with either old-fashioned
TV channel spectatorship, or cinema
as we have known and loved it:
Twin Peaks: The Return, Top of the
Lake: China Girl, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,
Mindhunter, Girls, Blindspot, GLOW,
Glitch, The Deuce, Better Call Saul...
While, in the diffuse realm of
international film culture (writing,
programming, audiovisual essays,
DVD/Blu-ray extras, etc), the really
important development has been
not in the out-of-puff merry-go-
round of film festivals (with their
endlessly recycled canon of the same
‘greats’), but the massively increased
visibility of the terrain known as
‘women and horror cinema’: as
production, as discourse, as politics.
The architectonic plates of high and
low culture are shifting once more...
DANIELA MICHEL
Director, Morelia International
Film Festival, Mexico
The Shape of Water Guillermo del Toro
Carne y arena Alejandro
González Iñárritu
Loveless Andrey Zvyagintsev
The Other Side of Hope Aki Kaurismäki
Faces Places JR, Agnès Varda
ANDREA PICARD
Film curator, TIFF; artistic director,
Cinéma du Réel, Canada/France
Western Valeska Grisebach
Zama Lucrecia Martel
On the Beach at Night
Alone Hong Sang-soo
Araby João Dumans, Affonso Uchoa
Occidental Neïl Beloufa
JAMES QUANDT
Curator and critic, Canada
The Boat Is Leaking. The
Captain Lied Alexander Kluge
Jean Vigo restored films Jean Vigo
Zama Lucrecia Martel
Western Valeska Grisebach
The Nothing Factory Pedro Pinho
Alexander Kluge’s contribution
to the exhibition The Boat Is Leaking.
The Captain Liedd at the
Fondazione Prada
in Venice, which
interleaves Kluge’s
films and videos –
including some of
us
ma
the final work of cinematographer
Michael Ballhaus – with photographs
by Thomas Demand and stage
designs by Anna Viebrock, is a
bracing reminder of the veteran
director’s wit, compassion, political
acumen and formal audacity.
BEN ROBERTS
Head of the BFI Film Fund, UK
God’s Own Country Francis Lee
Twin Peaks: The Return
Mark Frost, David Lynch
You Were Never Really
Here Lynne Ramsay
Get Out Jordan Peele
Blade Runner 2049 Denis Villeneuve
A year for grand cinema – the
old fashion and the new fashion –
including Lynch’s 18-hour magnum
opus. Mostly bleak stuff, with God’s
Own Country offering the rainbow.
JONATHAN ROMNEY
Critic, UK
Columbus Kogonada
Blade Runner 2049 Denis Villeneuve
Zama Lucrecia Martel
The Florida Project Sean Baker
Jeune femme Léonor Serraille
In a year short on artistic
innovation, but in which inhumanity
and horror seemed to renew
themselves with fiendish invention
almost daily, the films that counted
were those that rediscovered joy
and faith in the simple complexities
of human character, tenacity and
capacity for joy. The Florida Project
and Léonor Serraille’s joyous Jeune
femme (with a superb lead by Laetitia
Dosch) fit this bill to a tee, as did a
film that – generically familiar as
it might seem – got right under my
skin when I saw it in Rotterdam,
Kogonada’s Columbus, sa
beautifully executed small
town story about architecture
and people who love it.
Other humanist affirmations,
of every conceivable stripe, came
from Agnès Varda and JR (Faces
s Xavier Beauvois (the so-old-
Places),
fashioned-it’s-new Les Gardiennes),s
Sebastián Lelio (A
Fantastic Woman, with
Blade Runner 2049
January 2018 | Sight&Sound | 29
2017 THE YEAR IN REVIEW
a fantastic performance from
Daniela Vega), and of course the
eternally soft-hearted but politically
hard-edged Aki Kaurismäki (The
Other Side of Hope). Other films that
counted for me, for similar and other
reasons: Félicité (Alain Gomis), Ex
Libris (Frederick Wiseman), Western
(Valeska Grisebach), 120 BPM (Robin
Campillo), Pedro Pinho’s factory floor
quasi-musical The Nothing Factory
and Antonio Méndez Esparza’s
vitally-of-the-moment US-set low-
budgeter Life & Nothing More.
Blade Runner 2049 – of course, not
least because you worry that we’ll
never see its ambitious like again;
and Dunkirk – this from an avowed
Nolan sceptic. And, Dunkirk apart,
the most brazenly kinetic film of
2017, the Safdies’ Good Time.
The films I most want to see again:
Zama, and Sergei Loznitsa’s grievously
underrated A Gentle Creature.
My personal Season in Hell (was it
really only two hours?): The Hitman’s
Bodyguard, but fair enough, what did
I expect? Most self-important and
joyless of the year: George Clooney’s
Suburbicon (expect a glut of blindingly
obvious Dark Heart of America pics).
Old Man’s Folly of the year: Claude
Lanzmann’s Napalm. Not-So-Young-
Man’s Folly: mother!, a film that only
a mother could love, although even
Ma Aronofsky might have drawn
a discreet veil over this one.
4 Zama The film demands that its viewer give up on waiting for
meaningful events and narrative advancement. In their place, an immersion
in textures, sounds and affects comes to dominate. Erika Balsom, ‘S&S’ online
30 | Sight&Sound | January 2018
JONATHAN ROSENBAUM
Critic and teacher, US
24 Frames Abbas Kiarostami
Let the Sunshine In Claire Denis
Mudbound Dee Rees
Faces Places JR, Agnès Varda
Twin Peaks: The Return
Mark Frost, David Lynch
Sorry not to have room for Marjorie
Prime (Michael Almereyda), The
Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
(Noah Baumbach) and Professor
Marston and the Wonder Women
(Angela Robinson). And I still haven’t
seen Alexander Payne’s Downsizing.
SUKHDEV SANDHU
Associate professor,
New York University, US
Faces Places JR, Agnès Varda
Two Tone in Five Hoods Neil Kulkarni
Dead the Ends Benedict Seymour
Mind on the Run: The Basil
Kirchin Story Matt Stephenson,
Alan Jones and Harriet Jones
Gingerella (RockaFela) Alex Reuben
FERNANDA SOLORZANO
Critic and curator, Mexico
Loveless Andrey Zvyagintsev
Blade Runner 2049 Denis Villenueve
Devil’s Freedom Everardo González
Mindhunter David Fincher, Asif Kapadia,
Tobias Lindholm, Andrew Douglas
Faces Places JR, Agnès Varda
I regard 2017 as a year of despair,
so my choices are influenced by
a sense of gloom. A case in point:
the magnificent Loveless, a story
about separated parents in today’s
Moscow, whose joint search for
their missing child only exacerbates
their emotional isolation. The film’s
arid landscapes and cold palette
underline the theme of sterility.
Unlike other films that have recently
portrayed detached individuals,
Zvyagintsev doesn’t resort to
irony or deadpan. Honest in its
bleakness, this film offers no truce.
Aside from the great visuals and the
flawless reworking of the original
myth, the long-awaited sequel to
Blade Runner was melancholy at
its best. Villeneuve tapped into
today’s global sense of alienation
and estrangement; the yearning
for real experiences and for
any trace of humanity is even
stronger than in the first film.
It is telling enough that the finest
Mexican horror movie of 2017 was
not a fiction film but a documentary.
A thought-provoking essay on
endemic violence, Devil’s Freedom
gathers conversations with victims
and perpetrators of horrible crimes.
To protect themselves from reprisals,
they wear cloth masks that cover their
faces. The visual effect is sinister, but
even more disturbing is the fact that
the masks homogenise individuals
who one would put on opposite
sides of the moral spectrum. Rather
than dividing them into ‘guilty’ or
‘innocent’, the film suggests that
everyone is prey to a broken system.
I still have to build a rational case
on why I binged on Mindhunter like
I hadn’t in a long time on a TV series.
Sure, the topic is compelling – the
origins of criminal profiling of serial
killers – but the series’ real strength
might be the carefully choreographed
scenes where criminals and FBI
agents hold a mirror to each other.
A counterpoint to the darkness
depicted in all these films, Faces Places
is a warm and uplifting documentary
on the way that images (photography/
cinema) pay tribute to ordinary
experiences and ‘common people’.
These, in return, have inspired great
artists like Agnès Varda, who along
with visual artist JR went on a road
trip across France to make this film.
Their odd friendship is also a topic
(and a contrast to the rudeness
displayed by Jean-Luc Godard towards
Varda in one heartbreaking scene).
HEATHER STEWART
Creative director, BFI, UK
Get Out Jordan Peele
Faces Places JR, Agnès Varda
Call Me by Your Name Luca Guadagnino
The Vietnam War
Ken Burns, Lynn Novick
Mudbound Dee Rees
I only included films that
touched me and made me think.
Otherwise Lucrecia Martel’s Zama
was delirious and mad and great;
William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth
was one of the best first features I’ve
seen in a long time (great writing
from Alice Birch); Lady Bird also
great writing; Dunkirk was the best
cinematic experience; and too late
for the poll, but I just caught up
with On Body and Soul, a fantastic
film from Ildikó Enyedi, with great
cinematography from Máté Herbai.
AMY TAUBIN
Critic, US
Spoor Agnieszka Holland,
assisted by Kasia Adamik
Get Out Jordan Peele
Mudbound Dee Rees
Beatriz at Dinner Miguel Arteta
The Other Side of Hope Aki Kaurismäki
The only way I could keep the list
to five was to leave out an equally
strong list of documentaries: Quest
(Jonathan Olshefski), Faces Places
(Agnès Varda and JR), Tony Conrad:
Completely in the Present (Tyler Hubby),
Four Sisters (Claude Lanzmann), The
Venerable W (Barbet Schroeder).
ANNE THOMPSON
Critic and curator, US
Dunkirk Christopher Nolan
Blade Runner 2049 Denis Villeneuve
The Shape of Water Guillermo del Toro
Lady Bird Greta Gerwig
Darkest Hour Joe Wright
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2017 THE YEAR IN REVIEW

DAVID THOMSON good one for French films, but a new Théo & Hugo Olivier Ducastel- Cannes winner The Square, its title
Critic, US Varda is always to be celebrated, even Jacques Martineau being a fittingly fungible metaphor
The Vietnam War Ken if Faces Places is not her best. Marie- 4 Days in France Jerome Reybaud for the morphing of cinema’s
Burns, Lynn Novick Francine is also not Lemercier’s best Staying Vertical Alain Guiraudie screen shape into ever diminishing
Personal Shopper Olivier Assayas work, but a mainstream feminist My Life as a Courgette formats (TVs, computer monitors,
Top of the Lake: China Girl comedy by and about a middle-aged Claude Barras tablets, cell phones and – funniest
Jane Campion, Ariel Kleiman woman that makes you laugh is Western film culture has always of all – watches). As a result, the
Let It Fall: Los Angeles still rare enough. Redoubtable also had a decidedly liberal, humanist five best films I saw in 2017 nearly
1982-1992 John Ridley made me laugh and has a wonderful slant but this wasn’t usually a all failed to achieve the cultural
mother! Darren Aronofsky performance by Louis Garrel, problem until 2017 when that stature and impact they deserve.
even though the female character slant deranged critical thinking. In
NOEL VERA is disastrous and it’s not, alas, an the US, wide praise for the utterly NEIL YOUNG
Critic and curator, Philippines adaptation of Anne Wiazemsky’s mediocre Wonder Woman seemed Critic and curator, UK/Austria
Twin Peaks: The Return book (who sadly died recently). based entirely on the inference of Araby João Dumans,
Mark Frost, David Lynch Beyond French cinema, Detroit media folk who, for embarrassingly Affonso Uchoa
Silence Martin Scorsese made a strong impression, which partisan reasons, were desperate Miss Kiet’s Children Peter
A Quiet Passion Terence Davies I expected from Bigelow; and the to claim victory for any female Lataster, Petra Lataster-Czisch
Respeto Treb Monteras II surprise of the year was The Nile Hilton figure. This pathetic delusion came No’i Aline Magrez
Okja Bong Joon-ho Incident, a contemporary Egyptian from an obvious topical, political Western Valeska Grisebach
As time goes on, the idea of a noir thriller (even though it’s shot in basis, but it had a terrible cultural On Generation and Corruption
best films of the year list seems Casablanca and is a Swedish/Danish/ effect: the unrivalled best film of Makino Takashi
increasingly anachronistic; some of German/French production). the year A Quiet Passion, Terence “We walked through the flaring
the best films I saw include Rivette’s Davies’s biography of poet Emily streets, jostled by drunken men and
sublime Out 1 (1971), Claire Denis’s KELLI WESTON Dickinson, had depth, beauty and bargaining women, amid the curses
sensuous Trouble Every Day (2001), Film writer, UK intelligence but was ignored in of labourers, the shrill litanies of
Mikhail Red’s (son of Filipino indie I Am Not a Witch Rungano Nyoni favour of a third-rate comic book shop-boys who stood on guard by
legend Raymond Red) visually striking Get Out Jordan Peele movie that primarily appealed to the barrels of pigs’ cheeks, the nasal
Birdshot (2016) and Ken Russell’s still Logan James Mangold superficial, juvenile empowerment chanting of street-singers, who sang
outrageous The Devils (1971). None The Shape of Water Guillermo del Toro fantasies that many wanted to a come-all-you about O’Donovan
came out in 2017 (though they’re Paddington 2 Paul King see take effect in the real world. Rossa, or a ballad about the troubles
available in one form or another) Escapism was never so tragic. in our native land. These noises
and at least one is arguably not a ARMOND WHITE Movies are no longer a populist converged in a single sensation of
feature. And I managed to see Jacques Film critic, National Review, OUT artform. But has art failed in this life for me: I imagined that I bore
Tourneur’s Stars in My Crown again Magazine, US political climate? That seemed to my chalice safely through a throng
but with so much deeper an impact A Quiet Passion Terence Davies be the point of Ruben Ostlund’s of foes.” – James Joyce, ‘Araby’
it’s as if I saw it for the first time.
But sticking to the limits of the
exercise: Bong’s film had a nice mix of
comedy and pathos while managing
to skewer the food industry and its
well-hyped products (Black Angus,
anyone?); Monteras’s is not just a
well-made Filipino indie but the
first to directly take on President
Duterte’s murderous regime.
Scorsese’s exploration of spirituality
and suffering may be his late
masterpiece; after this it’s difficult to
know if he has anything major left to
say. Lynch’s is not just a summation
of his work (combining the black-
and-white experimental approach
of Eraserhead with the baroque
details of Dune and the emotional
directness of The Straight Story) but a
clever parody of sequels and reboots
(making hungry where it most
satisfies) and a disturbing treatise on
the violence men visit on women.
In the flood of recent biopics,
Terence Davies’s A Quiet Passion
quietly soars above the rest. One
of the world’s greatest filmmakers
taking on the life and work of one of
America’s greatest poets? A must-see.

GINETTE VINCENDEAU
Professor of film studies, UK 3 Call Me by Your Name A study of youthful desire and physical
Faces Places JR, Agnès Varda
The Nile Hilton Incident Tarik Saleh passion. Sexy, gorgeous and sharply observed, with performances of vivid
Detroit Kathryn Bigelow
Redoubtable Michel Hazanavicius
emotional sincerity choreographed into a stalking game of love and lust.
Marie-Francine Valérie Lemercier Pamela Hutchinson ‘S&S’, November 2017
The year was not a particularly

32 | Sight&Sound | January 2018

 2 TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN
DAVID LYNCH & MARK FROST
Fly the coop: Kyle MacLachlan reprised his role as Special Agent Dale Cooper, who must find his way back to reality after 25 years trapped in the Black Lodge
THE STARS
By Michael Ewins
“Watch and listen to the dream of time and
TURN AND
space.” As well as cryptic advice to Twin
Peaks’ stoic Deputy Hawk (Michael Horse),
this line from The Log Lady (Catherine E.
A TIME
Coulson) offers succinct direction on how
to watch the new episodes of David Lynch
and Mark Frost’s iconic series. Spoken as
PRESENTS she cradles her log, which could have been
inspired by the limbs of a fallen tree climbed
ITSELF
by Maya Deren in At Land (1944), her words
recall an instruction from Deren’s own 1946
volume Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film.
“Space must be given meaning over time.”
Twin Peaks: The Return, which aired on
Showtime in the US (and Sky Atlantic in the
UK), was originally green-lit by the network
for nine episodes, but the series doubled in
duration after Lynch’s reinstatement; a rift
over budget constraints had led to his brief
departure from the project. As production
was so cloistered, it’s hard to know if Lynch
and Frost added to their 400-page script
or instead, like a potter brushing slip to
wet clay, used their newly granted time as
opportunity to ingrain discrete patterns
and textures within the larger narrative: a
low-frequency hum trapped in the walls
of the Great Northern hotel; Jerry Horne
(David Patrick Kelly) wandering baked
through Twin Peaks’s outer limits; or the live
acts at the Roadhouse (aka the Bang Bang
Bar), which serve as a tonal bridge between
episodes. Often, Lynch will prolong a scene
just to enjoy how the particular cadence of
an actor’s voice rings around the room.
Even more than its uncannily synthetic
FX – like the creature Experiment, modelled
by dancer Erica Eynon and then computer-
generated, but appearing like a finger-formed
wax figure – it’s this emphasis on
material expansion, of experimenting
January 2018 | Sight&Sound | 33
2017 THE YEAR IN REVIEW
with canvas, that relates The Return to
Lynch’s plastic arts, an area in which
he has practised since the release of Inland
Empire (2006). In that film, Lynch folded
space and time into one Möbius strip-like
fabric, but with the advantage of longform
programming, The Return’s narratives
unravel across several traversable planes
that, in a fantastic corruption of Aristotle’s
desis-lusis (binding-unbinding) principle
– which dictates that resolution should
follow complication in a tragedy – allows
events to be rearranged, recontextualised,
or completely reversed over its duration.
Twenty-five years after ABC’s Twin Peaks
(1990-91), The Return resumes with FBI Special
Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) in the
Black Lodge – the extra-dimensional purgatory
where he was detained at the end of series
two. After sinking through the floor of the
Red Room and passing through a mysterious
glass box in Manhattan, Cooper lands feet-first
on the balcony of a concrete edifice in a vast
mauve-tinted ocean. Inside he is met by the
eyeless Naido (Nae Yuuki) and guided to a
large industrial power outlet that hoovers up
and then deposits him, finally, in a Nevada
housing project where sleazy insurance
agent Dougie Jones (also MacLachlan) has
been hiding out with prostitute Jade (Nafessa
Williams). Following a “tingle” in his left
arm, Dougie suddenly vomits up a glob of
meat and pops out of the mortal plane, with
Cooper reappearing through a wall socket
like a string of charcoaled, still-smoking
spaghetti, taking Dougie’s place in the world.
Parallel to Cooper’s dimension-hopping, his
evil Lodge doppelganger Mr. C – who was set
loose on Earth after the agent’s internment – is
captured by police in South Dakota, and FBI
Deputy Director Gordon Cole (Lynch), along
with agents Albert Rosenfield (Miguel Ferrer)
and Tammy Preston (Chrysta Bell), is called in
to investigate their colleague’s reappearance.
Following their ominous encounter with
the drawling, glassy-eyed Mr. C, Albert
tracks down Cooper’s former confidante
Diane (Laura Dern), who joins the FBI on an
investigation that will lead all the way back
to the origins of the ‘Blue Rose’ (a designation
for cases including the supernatural).
Back in Nevada, Cooper/Dougie – who
is now borderline catatonic – is guided
by the Lodge to win a small fortune at the
Silver Mustang casino before finding his
way home to Dougie’s vexed wife, Janey-E
(Naomi Watts), and their young son Sonny
Jim (Pierce Gagnon). As he shuffles through
work at the Lucky 7 firm, ‘Dougie’ also
experiences visions of the Red Room’s MIKE
(Al Strobel), who pleads with the somewhere-
dormant Cooper, “Don’t Die!” Meanwhile
(or perhaps on another timeline altogether),
following a shadowy, almost Tourneur-like
34 | Sight&Sound | January 2018
Death is not the end: the ‘Woodsmen’ revive Mr. C (MacLachlan) after a shooting in episode eight
The theme of loss permeated
every moment, and revealed
itself as the focus of what
could be Lynch’s final work
prison break, Mr. C continues his journey
to Twin Peaks, where Sheriff Frank Truman
(Robert Forster), Hawk and Deputy Andy
(Harry Goaz) are investigating a missing
clue from the old Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee)
case. “It has to do with your heritage,” The
Log Lady tells Hawk. “Laura is the one.”
In its early hours, many complained about
The Return’s ‘slowness’, a misnomer that
fails to register how time moves differently
through, and makes distinct impressions
in each space. In the place on the mauve
Carel Struycken as The Fireman
Nae Yuuki as the eyeless Naido
ocean, time trips and lapses in a stuttering
rhythm, refusing the identification of a
‘present’ moment; the soft whooshing in
the Black Lodge elongates pauses that are
already weighted with caution; and in
Audrey Horne’s (Sherilyn Fenn) ‘house’,
time stretches interminably across the same
limited sequence of shot/reverse-shot. As
Lynch returns to these locations, he honours
another of Deren’s lessons: “For an action
to take place in time,” she continues, “is not
at all the same as for an action to be created
by the exercise of time.” By watching The
Return over its allotted 16-week schedule
(no binging here!), we not only became
familiar with patterns in space, composition
and decor – like the house of Sarah Palmer
(Grace Zabriskie), unchanged since Laura’s
death – but we also came to have a different
expectation of time; of how it will move in
each space, for these characters, in this mood.
In episode two, during a meeting between
Cooper and Laura in the Red Room, Lynch
offered the first insight into the implications
of time in The Return. The mise en scène
and staging mimics their fateful meeting
25 years ago: the same Venus de’ Medici
statue, twin floor lamps, even the precise
rhythm of her (reversed) footsteps. Space
has remained the same, but time has filled
it in – it has been given “meaning over
time”. Lynch frames his actors in the same
shots as two decades ago, but these angles
now emphasise the changes to their bodies
and faces. “Do you recognise me?” she asks.
“Are you Laura Palmer?” he replies. She
confirms that she is. “I am dead… yet I live.”
The next time we see Laura, she looks
again like her younger self. In fact, she is her
younger self, in black-and-white footage
retconned from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with
Me (1992). Like Orpheus reaching out to
Eurydice, the older Cooper extends his hand
to Laura’s, and the shot slowly blushes with
colour. “We’re going home,” he says. But
when they finally arrive ‘home’ in the series’
last scene, Laura has become Carrie Page, a
troubled waitress from Odessa, Texas. They
ascend the steps to Laura’s house and knock
on the door, but are met by new residents, the
Tremonds. In his final attempt to save Laura –
whose death is already determined – Cooper
reopens a narrative whose closure is foregone,
beginning another cycle of drama that will
therefore have need of an ending (and so
another beginning). Standing in the blacked-
out street, Cooper asks, “What year is this?”
In this world, the 71-year-old Lynch sees
one thing clearly: time is a theme of loss. That
loss would haunt The Return was known long
before its premiere, preceded as it was by
the deaths of beloved actors Miguel Ferrer,
Catherine Coulson and David Bowie (FBI Night flight: Agent Cooper, Diane (Laura Dern) and Gordon Cole (David Lynch) face the darkness
Agent Phillip Jeffries). But from its very start,
with Cooper’s migration into Dougie’s now
stupefied soma, to the stomach-plummeting
déjà vu of its finale, this theme permeated every
moment of the series and revealed itself as the
focus of what could be Lynch’s final work.
Almost every character in The Return
experiences a loss of some kind: in one
tender digression, Andy and Lucy Brennan
(Kimmy Robertson) wave farewell to their
son Wally (Michael Cera), a motorcycle kid
whose ‘dharma’ lies well beyond the bounds
of Twin Peaks; Buckhorn school principal
Bill Hastings (Matthew Lillard) deals with
the death of his partner Ruth, whose severed
head was found atop the body of Major Briggs
(Don S. Davis); Audrey remains stranded
in a kind of Buñuelian limbo (possibly the
coma she was left in at the end of season
two); and in a heartbreaking moment,
the Twin Peaks sheriff’s office falls silent
to honour the passing of The Log Lady. Baddest man in the whole damn town: MacLachlan also plays Cooper’s evil Lodge doppelganger Mr. C
But loss occurred most profoundly in
Nevada. When the ‘real’ Dougie is zapped into
the Red Room, he is met by MIKE and told,
“Someone manufactured you for a purpose.”
The word ‘manufacture’ may recall the
churning industrial backdrop of Eraserhead
(1977), but in her essay ‘The Merging of
Bodies and Artifacts in the Social Contract’,
Elaine Scarry scratches a deeper itch in the
Lynchian psyche (and remember that one of
Lynch’s first shorts, 1973’s The Amputee, saw
him as a nurse tending to Catherine Coulson’s
leg stumps): “We make material artifacts in
order to interiorize them: we make things
so that they will in turn remake us, revising
the interior of embodied consciousness.”
For Lynch, a long-time practitioner of
transcendental meditation, “embodied
consciousness” leads to self-governance and
inner peace, and its loss is the fear he
grapples with throughout The Return Simple minds: MacLachlan’s third role was as the innocent Dougie Jones, with Naomi Watts as Janey-E

January 2018 | Sight&Sound | 35

2017 THE YEAR IN REVIEW

– especially in the mentally infirm

Dougie, a “material artifact” who, as well
as honouring Lynch’s hero Jacques Tati, enacts
a stark projection on the possible ailments of
advanced age. Like the abstracted bodies in
Lynch’s animated short Six Men Getting Sick
(1967), ‘Dougie’ is stuck on the same loop of
gestures and responses, learning words by
mimicry (“Hell-o-o-o-o-o-o!”) and shuffling
through space like a slow-motion pinball.
Scarry’s ‘remaking’ has always been central
to Lynch’s career – consider the doppelgangers
and amnesiacs of Lost Highway (1997) and
Mulholland Drive (2001), or that Möbius strip
travelled by Laura Dern in Inland Empire – but
it has never been so clearly located as a concern
of ageing, reflection and regeneration as in
The Return, right down to the recasting of
characters like The Arm (Michael J. Anderson
has become a fuzzing electric tree with gristly You can’t go home again: MacLachlan and Sheryl Lee in the series’ haunting final scenes
brain-face), and Phillip Jeffries (Bowie, perhaps
fittingly, is now a giant kettle-like machine transitional flicker or ghost, and the sound of Diane, and leads Laura back ‘home’, is he, too,
that pumps out clues in wisps of steam). electric scratches and static manipulation. “remade”? Is it his purity that naively leads
In its astonishing eighth episode, Lynch After the blast, Lynch transitions to an Laura Palmer/Carrie Page to revisit the site of
even ‘remakes’ a real-world event – the enormous building in the mauve ocean a now-buried trauma, or is it his prurience, an
Trinity bomb test on 16 July 1945 – to rewrite where The Fireman (Carel Struycken) and obsession with the blonde dead girl who, like
Twin Peaks history. From the ridge of a far-off señorita Dido (Joy Nash) witness the event in Kim Novak in Vertigo (1958), can be rescued,
canyon, Lynch’s camera pushes toward and New Mexico with horror. The Fireman walks remade and re-tortured on an endless loop?
eventually penetrates the mushroom blast, to an empty room and begins to levitate, In Lynch’s cinema, the body is a fragile
painting a digital Pollock of atomic matter shortly before gold light begins to pour and endlessly corruptible space that
swirling and splitting in furious patterns, from his head. From the light comes an orb, carries the scars and traumas of time, and
intercut with fire fields that pop with cones handled by Dido, and at its centre is the image no body is more traumatised, a greater
of light and expulsions of dirt sucked up from of Laura, a light to counteract the darkness victim of time, than Laura Palmer’s.
the blast point. Suddenly the image fades to that Trinity has just visited on the world. But for all of its nihilism, The Return also
the ‘Convenience Store’, which in a sputtering Lynch has always smeared the line between made several memorable pleas for love and
montage introduces the Woodsmen, those good and evil in his work – especially in the empathy – like the gorgeous, Otis Redding-
sooty beings who protect Mr. C and Black struggle between prurience and purity in scored union of Ed (Everett McGill) and
Lodge spirit BOB (Frank Silva) from harm. his male protagonists – but they have never Norma (Peggy Lipton) – and to keeping the
Finally, the aforementioned Experiment been so clearly conceived as interdependent body safe. “I don’t like people selling their
vomits up a thick curdling substance that forces as in The Return. ‘Dougie’ and Mr. C blood to eat,” whispers Carl Rodd (Harry Dean
includes, in a bulbous, tumour-like shell, personify Good (a lime-green jacket) and Evil Stanton, who died a few weeks after the series
BOB. In this mind-bending sequence – which (Kenneth Anger leather) in a literal, almost ended), faced with a Fat Trout resident who
some fans have speculated is the birth of parodic fashion, but their shared source is is struggling to get by. In the series’ sagest
the Black Lodge – Lynch fully exploits the our beloved boy scout Coop, and it is at least a advice, he urges simply, “Keep your blood.”
harshness of digital editing; the racking of part of him that “interiorizes” their bodies. So Twin Peaks: A Limited Event Series
files that leave no remnant of life behind, no when the true Cooper returns, reunites with i is out now on Blu-ray and DVD

Pretty in pink: the casino girls, including Amy Shiels as Candie (centre) At long last love: Everett McGill and Peggy Lipton as Ed and Norma

36 | Sight&Sound | January 2018

 1 GET OUT
JORDAN PEELE
Trust no one: photographer Chris Washington, played by Daniel Kaluuya, is up against the duplicity and ruthlessness of white America in Jordan Peele’s Get Out
THAT
By Kelli Weston
Spoiler alert: this essay reveals plot details
A chilling warning frames Jordan Peele’s
SINKING directorial debut Get Out. Even before the
audience understands it explicitly, they
FEELING
surely feel it intuitively. A young man –
Andre Hayworth (Lakeith Stanfield), we
find out later – has just been abducted
in the middle of the night, in a suburb of
all places. An ominous melody follows
this abrupt and mysterious assault,
hinting at the danger ahead. The chorus
whispers, “Sikiliza… Kwa Wahenga” –
Swahili for ‘listen to [your] ancestors’.
The film unfolds through the eyes of
black photographer Chris Washington
(Daniel Kaluuya), an orphan, seemingly
unmoored; for convincing as it is, the
British actor’s American accent betrays no
specific regional graces. As Chris and his
white girlfriend Rose Armitage (Allison
Williams) head to the countryside to meet
her parents, it appears he leaves only his
best friend Rod (Lil Ren Howery) behind to
feel his absence. Once they arrive, much of
the humour and horror that occurs during
the weekend at the Armitages’ arises from
Chris’s isolation. Perhaps without knowing
it, he desperately seeks community, someone
he can understand and who understands
him in return, someone who can raise his
numbers, for historically black people do
not fare well in thrillers, particularly when
surrounded by white people in the woods.
What begins as a present-day Guess Who’s
Coming to Dinner (1967) soon descends into
something far more insidious, more
in line with Rosemary’s Baby (1968).
January 2018 | Sight&Sound | 37
2017 THE YEAR IN REVIEW
Rose and her parents Dean (Bradley
Whitford), a neurosurgeon, and Missy
(Catherine Keener), a psychiatrist and skilled
hypnotherapist, seem well-meaning enough
– her aggressive brother Jeremy (Caleb Landry
Jones) less so – yet Chris finds himself subject
to a barrage of microaggressions. Jeremy
comments on his physique and likens him
to a “beast”. Dean insists that he would have
voted for Barack Obama a third time. At
the Armitages’ annual garden get-together,
white guests fondle him and ask invasive
questions about his body and sexual prowess.
It’s no wonder Chris longs for allies. But each
time he encounters another black person
– the groundskeeper, the maid and finally
Andre, who now goes by the name Logan
and arrives at the Armitages’ as the partner
of a much older white woman – there is
something disturbing about the encounter.
They all behave strangely – not unfriendly,
but also not quite genuine. Things take an
even more bizarre turn when Chris tries to
take a photo of Logan with his phone. The
camera flash sends Logan into a panic; his
nose bleeds and he grabs Chris, shaking
him and frantically screaming, “Get out!”
As it turns out, the Armitages have
been dealing in black bodies. That is, they
have been lobotomising black people and
transplanting the brains of ageing white
people into them. Only a sliver of the host’s
consciousness remains, immobilised in
a dark, endless void that Missy calls “the
sunken place”. It is from this sunken place
that Andre, or what is left of him, briefly
emerges, roused by the camera flash.
Already, ‘the sunken place’ has effectively
replaced the colloquial expression ‘Uncle
Tom’ as a way of describing those black
people perceived to have betrayed their
community, either in ideals or actions. It is
the more generous term, for it suggests not
duplicity, but brainwashing or conditioning
beyond the perpetrator’s control. Such is the
impact of Get Out, a film that has provided
new language for thinking about race simply
by considering the essence of black anxiety.
Before the arrival of Get Out, it was
George A. Romero’s Night of the Living
Dead (1968) – one of Peele’s many stated
influences alongside Rosemary’s Baby and
The Stepford Wives (1975) – that came as
close as any film to representing the ever-
present danger of existing in a black body,
when its hero Ben (Duane Jones) survives
a zombie onslaught only to be killed by
white vigilantes. If Romero, at least publicly,
often shied away from the film’s political
connotations, Peele wholeheartedly embraces
the implications of his. Get Out blatantly
engages with black suspicion of white people,
or perhaps more accurately with black
fear of white cannibalism, a fear that has,
38 | Sight&Sound | January 2018
Breaking the chains: Chris finds himself at the centre of a modern-day slave auction in suburbia
naturally, plagued the former ever since her
introduction to America. Because for all its
contemporary trappings, Get Out may well
be the most penetrating cinematic depiction
of slavery, from the nature of the institution
to its far-reaching psychic consequences.
Peele himself has said as much of the film:
“The real thing at hand here is slavery… it’s
some dark shit.” Kaluuya has called the film
“12 Years a Slave: The Horror Movie” and
journalist Steven Thrasher wrote an online
piece for Esquire titled, ‘Why Get Out is the Best
Movie Ever Made About American Slavery’.
Earning its distinction as a social thriller
‘Get Out’ has provided new
language for thinking about
race simply by considering
the essence of black anxiety
Chris descends into ‘the sunken place’
(Peele’s own favoured categorisation), the film
deftly connects the theft and exploitation of
black bodies past to present, from slavery to
sports, showing how the American tradition
of profiting from them continues to this
day. Chris does not know it at the time, but
the Armitages’ annual get-together is not
really a party at all, it is a slave auction. The
invasive questions, the preoccupation with
his body, the groping – all these resemble the
business of slave markets. Much has been
made too of the central role cotton plays
in his grand escape. After Chris has been
‘bought’, the Armitages confine him to a
downstairs chamber, where he is strapped to
an old chair and forced to watch a television
programmed with Missy’s hypnosis. He
stuffs the cotton spilling from the chair into
his ears, blocking out the television’s audio
cues, so when Jeremy comes to collect him
for the operation, he can break free. ‘King
Cotton’, the staple crop of the South – a crop
so vital it fuelled the expansion and continued
horror of slavery – ironically becomes his
saviour, enabling him to exact his revenge.
It should be noted that Get Out was
shot in Alabama, a state whose own bitter
racial history in many ways mirrors the
themes Peele sought to emphasise. But he
sets his film in a New England-like milieu,
thereby directly implicating those northern,
presumably liberal, white Americans for
their complicity in racist structures, if not
their own outright racism, which is far less
publicised than their southern brethren.
There is a vicarious excitement to watching
a thriller, done well, in which the protagonist
is flung from their safe everyday life into a
world of peril, and perhaps white audiences
experience Get Out much the same as any
other thriller in that regard. But for black
audiences, the experience must be nothing
short of validation. So much of the film’s
tension mirrors real life in all its hostility
and violent carelessness toward the raced
body. At the very least, black audiences
recognise all too well the unfortunate
position Chris finds himself in, forced to
navigate a predominantly white space where
his blackness quickly becomes a spectacle.
When he meets blind art dealer Jim Hudson
(Stephen Root), for a moment Chris is
relieved; his blindness comes as a welcome
reprieve. If this man cannot see his race, he
cannot possibly judge him for it. Hudson
clearly becomes a symbol of a ‘colour-blind’
or post-racial society, the kind of false liberal
fantasy that inspired Peele to make the film
in the first place. But later Hudson will cast
the winning bid to inhabit Chris’s body;
he is impressed by Chris’s ‘eye’, his gift for
photography, a talent he himself never
possessed even when he could see. When
Chris asks him why they choose black people,
Hudson laughs and tells him that his race
makes no difference. “I want your eye, man!”
In this way Peele reveals the emptiness
of the post-racial promise. Slavery, in the
beginning, was not about race either. Ta-
Nehisi Coates, author of Between the World and
Me, has written, “Race is the child of racism,
not the father.” Racism was born out of the
necessity to justify the assault and abuse
of bodies that were black. Hudson cannot
see how his intent to violate and destroy
the man to exploit the fruits of his body is
itself evidence of his faith in his own pre-
eminence, his own supremacy. Ultimately,
only he benefits from his colour-blindness.
Chris does not. And what of that gaze Jim
covets so much? Chris has used it, as the
early scenes of the film reveal, to capture
black people living: a pregnant black belly,
a black man clinging to bags of balloons.
Director Jordan Peele on location during the shoot for Get Out
Murder in suburbia: Chris with his girlfriend Rose, played by Allison Williams, in Get Out
Surely his perspective cannot be divorced
from the man himself, but Hudson does not
appear to consider that the talent and the
man are one and the same. For him, for all
the bodysnatchers the Armitages supply, the
skill exists purely in the muscles and bone,
and they need only bend it to their will.
Outside of the film, modern debate over
the white gaze and appropriation has
argued that the success of white supremacy
has resulted in history being forgotten
and ownership – or rather, authorship –
misplaced. Get Out expressly addresses the
fears of a people from whom much has been
taken and follows their fear to its logical end:
a people afraid of being snatched themselves.
Womanist scholar bell hooks explains,
“The overriding fear is that cultural, ethnic,
and racial differences will be continually
commodified and offered up as new dishes
to enhance the white palate – that the Other
will be eaten, consumed, and forgotten.”
Their ancestors could not know what the
future held for them, but the descendants of
these people carry the knowledge of a not so
distant past in which bodies like theirs fed
an insatiable appetite, and therefore dread
what form such an appetite might take next.
Even though Chris eventually escapes,
Get Out turns out to a be a film far more
cynical than its equally grim predecessor,
Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave (2012),
a somewhat more straightforward look
at the evils of slavery. Solomon Northup
(Chiwetel Ejiofor) is kidnapped from his
home in New York and sold into slavery in
1841, where he endures and is forced to bear
witness to unspeakable horrors until one
stranger’s kindness secures his freedom.
Solomon spends those 12 years trusting
different white people, almost all of whom
betray him, until his hopes are eventually
rewarded. Samuel Bass (Brad Pitt) succeeds
in getting a letter from Solomon to friends
back home. In Get Out, every white person
Chris trusts, from Rose to Jim Hudson,
deceives him. Even so, Chris cannot bring
himself to kill Rose (and interestingly,
Missy’s death is also not shown, which may
say something about the power of white
femininity in the framework of such a black
male-driven text). Ultimately Chris is saved
by Rod, his best friend, whose concerned
investigations into his whereabouts
bear fruit at just the right moment.
At the end the two black men
ride away together and the chorus
returns. Listen to your ancestors.
This is an edited version of an essay that
i appears in the new BFI Compendium
‘Who Can You Trust?: The Thriller in Film
and Television’
January 2018 | Sight&Sound | 39
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FRANCES
MCDORMAND
THE POWER
OF SAYING NO
The American actor has always excelled when playing tough, quick-witted characters –
often with a comic edge – and in ‘Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri’ she gives the
performance of her life playing a no-nonsense mother on the trail of her daughter’s murderer
By Dan Callahan
At age 60, Frances McDormand has been given what might
be the leading role of her life in Martin McDonagh’s
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. She plays Mil-
dred Hayes, the mother of a murdered girl who takes a
very hard-ass attitude to finding the killer and kicking
the local police into action. McDormand has said that
she wanted to play this part “like a man”, and one man
in particular: John Wayne. The image of Wayne is hard
and implacable, but he could be very tender with women
and male friends on screen. McDormand herself has an
implacable image, but she has moments so instinctively
and deeply tender in Three Billboards that she makes Mil-
dred into an earth mother.
Mildred dresses like a kind of punk janitor, and she is
prone to physical violence and burned-out regret. In a
scene in which Mildred tells off a priest in a very elabo-
rate way, McDormand delivers her lines with steady,
deadly, and nearly off-hand force. When she finishes
with the priest, leaving him flabbergasted, Mildred has
a look on her face that says, “Did I just do that and get
away with it?” She is such a juicy part that most actresses
would have chewed a lot of scenery while playing her,
but McDormand holds back.
As an older woman, McDormand has embraced her in-
stinct for a femininity at odds with the Hollywood norm,
scorning make-up and frills. She is tough, and so doesn’t
need to put it on, but ‘acting tough’ seems to tickle her. Ev-
erything about her is blunt, unfancy, no-nonsense and un-
convinced. And that quality she has can sometimes edge
into something withdrawn, private and almost anti-social,
which is why she is so stirred by the outcast Mildred.
42 | Sight&Sound | January 2018
McDormand has been most comfortable as a member MILDRED, PIERCED
of an ensemble, and so has often taken small roles. In the Frances McDormand mixes
tenderness with extreme
late 1990s she joined the Wooster Group, an experimen- toughness as bereaved
tal theatrical company based in downtown Manhattan, mother Mildred Hayes
and there is a side of her that seems to dislike the atten- in Martin McDonagh’s
Three Billboards Outside
tion that comes with playing a leading part. She is still Ebbing, Missouri
best known by most people as the pregnant cop Marge
in Fargo (1996), for which she won a Best Actress Oscar
for what could have been viewed as a supporting role in
terms of screen time.
In Fargo, it was clear that McDormand had developed
a style that you see in lots of the best supporting actors
– she needs to get many things across to the audience
as quickly and cleanly as possible, without star man-
nerisms or fuss. Her mind definitely works much faster
than most people’s, and her work is very quick, too. On
screen she is quick-witted, quick to see a joke, and yet
usually not quick to take offence. She is grounded and
steady, and that groundedness can sometimes begin to
seem evasive. But when she does stop to register grief or
love or something slower in tempo, she is often far more
touching than performers for whom these things seem
to come as a natural privilege or right.
In the scene in Fargo when her old classmate Mike
Yanagita (Steve Park) confesses his loneliness to Marge,
McDormand is able to find a real and disturbing bal-
ance between remembered affection and the way that
Marge’s good nature gets worn into defensiveness very
quickly. McDormand does not play the scene sentimen-
tally, as most performers would be tempted to do.
Instead, she basically withdraws from Mike (she
January 2018 | Sight&Sound | 43
FRANCES MCDORMAND THREE BILLBOARDS…
In ‘Three practically climbs up physically into the Diet
Coke she is sipping), and that urge seems to be
Billboards’, McDormand’s own.
McDormand has When it is revealed that Mike lied to Marge and has
psychiatric problems, McDormand lets us see how
said she wanted Marge fights against being unsettled about this – it is not
to play the part an attractive thing she is portraying here, but it is very
human. In order to do her job well, Marge can’t give in to
of Mildred Hayes such feelings of dismay. At the end of Fargo, Marge says
‘like a man’, that she “doesn’t understand” the greed that could make
someone murder for “a little bit of money”, and this is
and one man an easy way out for the audience and for Marge. McDor-
in particular: mand shows Marge’s need for complacency without
judging it. But a tougher movie might have interrogated
John Wayne that need.
BEHIND THE MASK
McDormand was born in Illinois, and was adopted by a
pastor and his wife, who had other adopted kids. They
moved around the country a lot, and so McDormand got
a chance to hear lots of regional accents that would come
in handy for her later. Any religious training she might
have had seems to have only deepened her natural scepti-
cism. When she was a teenager, her birth mother offered
to meet with her, but McDormand declined.
She studied drama at Yale and started to work in the
theatre before getting her first film role in the Coen
brothers’ Blood Simple (1984), a violent noir in which
McDormand’s young face was open to the events of the
twisty plot. She established a personal and professional
relationship with Joel Coen that has lasted ever since,
44 | Sight&Sound | January 2018
and he has often cast her in his films, sometimes in small
or thankless parts.
McDormand got a Tony nomination in 1988 for play-
ing Stella in a revival of A Streetcar Named Desire, support-
ing Blythe Danner’s Blanche. Could McDormand have
played Blanche then, or would she have wanted to? (She
did play Blanche in 1998 in Dublin, and got negative re-
views.) Certainly she is a more natural Stella, earthy and
maybe even earthbound. She earned an Oscar nomina-
tion for supporting actress for Mississippi Burning (1988),
in which she offered a three-dimensional portrayal of
an abused wife in spite of schematic writing. McDor-
mand was a strong-minded lead for Ken Loach in Hidden
Agenda (1990), and was a snappy presence in Robert Alt-
man’s Los Angeles mosaic Short Cuts (1993), uninhibit-
edly scratching her behind in her first scene.
Of all the actors in Short Cuts, McDormand really
catches the loose and vagrant nastiness and humour of
Altman’s tone, and she is an ideal performer for the direc-
tor because he is also no-nonsense and a little rude and
doesn’t like or believe in prolonged scrutiny of a charac-
ter. Her Betty, who is having an affair with Tim Robbins’s
motorcycle cop, protects herself by putting on a deadpan
face that is like a mask that allows no entry, and this trait
is shared by many of McDormand’s women.
When she won her Oscar for Fargo, McDormand
strutted up to the podium in a self-consciously mascu-
line style that showed her discomfort with so much at-
tention. She played a series of smaller parts afterward
and got a supporting actress Oscar nomination for her
mother in Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous (2000), a
 woman of substance and moral scruples who does not
approve of her young son’s pursuit of a journalism career
in the decadent world of rock music. That part, as writ-
ten, is too cute and neat, but McDormand was able to
play against that with the speed of her delivery and her
good-humoured impatience. She made a real person out
of a contrivance.
Far better was her literary dean in the Michael
Chabon adaptation Wonder Boys (2000), a married
woman who is carrying on an affair with a shaggy pro-
fessor (Michael Douglas) and is pregnant with his child.
McDormand is very believable as a word addict in that
movie, as someone who always wants to be reading. Her
overactive mind had worthy material to digest here,
and she is given vividly conflicting emotions to play. In
Wonder Boys, she is often trying to hold her hurt emo-
tions down or in, which is a very touching and winning
mode for her.
In 2002, McDormand played her most challenging
and unexpected lead role in Lisa Cholodenko’s Laurel BROTHERLY LOVE
Canyon. As Jane, a hedonistic record producer with a McDormand, who plays
Mildred in Three Billboards…
strait-laced son named Sam (Christian Bale), she was (opposite), has been a
pushed way beyond her tough and moralising comfort regular presence in films
zones. Jane is a woman who very much still lives the late- co-directed by her husband
Joel Coen: as Marge
1960s lifestyle in California: drugs, sex and rock and roll. Gunderson in Fargo (1996,
When Sam comes to visit her with his girlfriend Alex above); in her debut, Blood
(Kate Beckinsale), Jane is in the midst of jamming with Simple (1982, left), and
with Brad Pitt in Burn After
some male musicians, and she giggles when she says her Reading (2008, below)
son’s name. The giggle could be partly attributed to mari-
juana use, but it also says a lot about how detached Jane is
from conventional feelings.
McDormand is often filmed in Laurel Canyon in
full-length shots so she can use her whole body, and
Cholodenko views her as a very sexual figure. Jane is
enamoured with a younger musician named Ian (Ales-
sandro Nivola), who tells her, “I know you’re madly in
love with me,” to which she snaps, “That’s irrelevant.”
JUST SAY NO
But Cholodenko doesn’t let McDormand get away with McDormand as a dean
just swatting down her feelings here. having an affair with Michael
Ian is attracted to Alex, and Jane’s morality is shown Douglas in Curtis Hanson’s
Wonder Boys (2000, below);
as slippery enough to accept this, up to a point. In a very as a mother in Cameron
tense scene in which she kisses Alex in a pool as Ian watch- Crowe’s Almost Famous
es, McDormand is like a poker player wondering if she has (2000, below, right); and
with Richard Jenkins as
put too much money down. When Jane finally draws a the sour lead in Olive
line and stops the inappropriate three-way vibe that has Kitteridge (2014, bottom)
developed, McDormand herself seems to draw a line
under behaviour that might threaten and unsettle her.
She played Diane Keaton’s sister in Something’s Gotta
Give (2003), a thankless task, and she supported Charlize
Theron in North Country (2005), picking up another sup-
porting Oscar nomination. But she was far more intrigu-
ing as the irrepressible Linda Litzke in the Coens’ Burn
After Reading (2008), in which she gave a very broad and
original comedy performance. The shock here comes
from the brainy McDormand making just a slight adjust-
ment to her natural fast rhythm to suggest vast stupidity
and vulgarity.
Linda works at a gym called Hardbodies; she wants to
“reinvent” herself with plastic surgery and believes in
“the power of positive thinking”. Her attempt to barter
classified government material for money leads to disas-
REX FEATURES (3)

ter, but she emerges blithely unscathed. Grotesque as this

character sometimes is, Linda is always a believ-
able American type, and McDormand approaches

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FRANCES MCDORMAND THREE BILLBOARDS…
the unusual opportunity she has been given with
zest. Linda is the exact opposite of Marge in Fargo,
and is never meant to be a popular heroine.
The David Lindsay-Abaire play Good People finally
earned McDormand a Tony in 2011 – a sentimental ve-
hicle that she somewhat redeemed with a show of blue-
collar smarts. And then she picked up an Emmy for the
miniseries Olive Kitteridge in 2014 for playing a distinctly
sour woman. Cholodenko directed her again for this
series, and McDormand has said she kept wanting to
make Olive more of a supporting character in the narra-
tive. She has also admitted that Cholodenko had trouble
getting her to reveal softer sides of Olive. For whatever
personal or creative reason, McDormand insisted on
hewing to a line of starchy disapproval throughout most
of the series, and this became a little monotonous over
four hours of playing time.
But the exciting thing about McDormand is that
you never know quite what to expect from her. It can
be hard to discern just who she is and what she wants
in her work, which varies so widely from role to role.
McDormand has said that her husband Joel Coen once
told her that the only power an actor usually has comes
from saying no. And so in Olive Kitteridge and now Three
Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, McDormand is saying
no to the camera a lot, as a sort of corrective to what is
expected of actors on screen.
When she says she wanted to play Mildred in Three
Billboards as a man, perhaps what McDormand means
is that she wanted to play her without any behaviour
that is meant to be ingratiating. She has a moment
in that movie when Mildred wonders if there is a God
and if our actions have consequences, and McDormand
makes a ‘yikes’ facial grimace as she says it. Maybe this
is something personal that she has snuck into her work
here, some residue from her youth with religious people,
a kind of way station between moral Marge and amoral
Linda Litzke. This grimace represents better than any-
thing else the power McDormand has when she says and
insists on the word ‘no’.
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is
i released in UK cinemas on 12 January and will
be reviewed in our next issue
46 | Sight&Sound | January 2018
TO CATCH
A KILLER
Martin McDonagh, writer-director of
‘Three Billboards…’, talks about truth,
comedy, the capacity for change, and
working with Frances McDormand
By Kelli Weston
Having made his name as a playwright in the
1990s, over the last decade or so the 47-year-
old London-born Irish writer-director Martin
McDonagh has concentrated more and more
on film: though he still writes for the stage
(Hangmen premiered at the Royal Court,
London, in 2015), he has described himself as
“a film boy”, and spoken of his “respect for the
whole history of films and a slight disrespect
for theatre”. His first film Six Shooter (2004)
The exciting won the Oscar for best live-action short; he
followed that with the darkly comic feature
thing about In Bruges (2008), starring Colin Farrell and
McDormand is Brendan Gleeson as hitmen awaiting orders
in the incongruously beautiful Belgian
that you never city. Seven Psychopaths (2012) again starred
know quite what Farrell – this time with an ensemble cast that
included Woody Harrelson, Christopher
to expect from Walken and Sam Rockwell – as a screenwriter
her. It can be hard who inadvertently gets mixed up in the
criminal underworld in Los Angeles.
to discern just McDonagh’s third feature Three Billboards
who she is and Outside Ebbing, Missouri tells the story of
Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand),
what she wants embittered by the brutal murder of her
in her work teenage daughter. Impatient with what
she sees as an incompetent police force,
including the well-meaning Sheriff
Willoughby (Harrelson) and bumbling,
racist officer Jason Dixon (Rockwell), Mildred
pays for three billboards outside her small,
sleepy town emblazoned with the slogans:
“Raped while dying”, “And still no arrests”
and “How come, Chief Willoughby?”
What follows is not a typical story of
‘one woman’s fight’ but a study of grief
and rage, and how that rage threatens
to redeem all who are touched by it.
Kelli Weston: In the past you’ve tended to make
male-centred films and plays. Did you approach
Three Billboards… as a woman’s story?
Martin McDonagh: I wanted to make as
strong a female lead character as possible.
My early plays [such as The Beauty Queen of
Leenane, 1996] did have some strong women
leads, but in my films I hadn’t really done
much of that, to my shame. But I wanted
to readjust the balance. I think Mildred is
EARTHED MOTHER
McDormand’s most the strongest part I’ve written as a character
challenging lead role came – let alone the strongest female part.
as Jane, a sexual, hedonistic KW: Did you have Frances McDormand
record producer and mother
in Lisa Cholodenko’s Laurel in mind while writing the script?
Canyon (2002, above) MM: In my head it was written for Frances.
I didn’t tell her anything about it, but I had
her voice in my head while I was writing it
the whole time. So we sent it to her as soon
as we were in a position to make it. And she
said yes pretty quickly. But if she had said no,
I don’t know what we’d have done because I
can’t imagine anyone else doing what she did.
KW: Were there any particular
performances of hers that were in
your head when you were writing?
MM: I’d always loved Blood Simple [1984], and
obviously everyone loves Fargo [1996]. But
I’d seen her on stage a couple of times, too,
and those performances had an impact. But
it’s not just her onscreen characters; it’s her
offscreen attitude and persona which is kind
of what I was trying to tap into, too – that she
doesn’t play the Hollywood game, that she’s
her own woman, and she won’t do the usual
kind of awards season stuff and all that kind
of baloney, that’s the kind of determination
that I was equally writing about, I think.
KW: At the centre of this film is a horrible
rape. How did you approach this subject?
MM: Frances and I always wanted to keep the
tragedy and horror of that in mind. As much
as there are parts of the film that are comic,
at heart it’s the tragedy of this murdered girl.
So that was always on our minds, almost
as if it was a real person – to keep the truth
of that horror alive throughout the film.
At the very end it’s the only time she can
crack a smile because the horror of what’s
happened to the daughter is always there.
KW: How difficult is it to walk the line
between tragedy and comedy?
MM: I guess it’s the way all my stuff comes
out. It’s always going to be there, that balance,
that tension. It feels natural to write that way
and direct that way. In the edit I found we
had a few more scenes that were maybe on
the comic side. I got rid of a few of those. But
even in a comic scene in this film, everyone
is playing it truthfully. So on the day, on set, it
was never about, “Is this going to be funny?”
It was about, “Is this going to be true?” And
hopefully the comedy can take care of itself.
KW: I felt the film had a sympathy toward
even its most flawed characters, like Jason, or
Mildred’s ex-husband Charlie [John Hawkes]. Is
it important to have that sympathy as a writer?
MM: Saying ‘a sympathy’ is too strong. I don’t
know if I would be sympathetic toward Sam’s
character or John Hawkes’s character. But I
was trying to see the capacity of people to
change – whether or not that’s true in the real
world. I think that was a good thing to try to
find in this story because it starts from such
a bleak place that if everyone stayed in the
same place they started from, it would be a
pretty grim story. Combine that with the fact
that you’re trying to see them as real people
and people are not just one thing. It’s not just
that Sam’s character, for instance, is a violent,
Support your local sheriff: Martin McDonagh with Woody Harrelson, as Sheriff Willoughby
racist cop but also to step back a little bit
and try to see how he got to that place, why
he is that way, and to ask “Can he change?”
So it’s not being sympathetic to any of his
views or his behaviour; it’s trying to be a little
more open to the hope of change, I guess.
KW: Did you embrace the political implications
of a film about incompetent policemen, made
at this particular moment in American history?
MM: The script was written eight years ago,
so it wasn’t a direct response to anything
that’s been going on in Missouri in the last
couple of years. But definitely my attitudes
toward that subject were all there in the
original script, and they’re all there on the
screen now. I was almost surprised at how
much hope there is in the film because I’m
not sure if I had that much hope in real
life. But it’s worth it to try and get to that
place. To think that people can change
or to think there is light at the end of the
tunnel. Whether or not there is I don’t
know, but it’s good to put a film like this
out there at this time because there is so
much anger and rage in the country.
KW: As an audience, how are we meant to
read the scene where Sam and Mildred use
the N-word and joke about police brutality?
MM: In that scene Frances is trying to show
up how racist and inept and crass Sam’s
character is, and she pulls him into the trap
of seemingly being politically correct. So
it’s a scene that – hopefully – displays the
stupidity of Sam’s character, in a very pointed
and tricky way; but I think most people
have gotten the proper message from that.
I was almost surprised at how
much hope there is in the film
because I’m not sure if I had
that much hope in real life
KW: You once said that a good film is “grounded
in good acting”. How do you approach working
with your actors – is there a lot of collaboration?
MM: There was a lot of collaboration, there
always is. There aren’t any script changes,
but my thing is to cast the best actors
around and try to get out of the way. But
there’s never any need to work on the script
together to change it. It’s all about just talking
through the characters with them, and me
explaining where I was coming from with
the character, and then taking on board what
they think about it. So, for Woody and Sam’s
performances, I couldn’t say they were heavily
directed by me; they’re such great actors
they’re going to take that stuff on themselves.
KW: What was it like to watch McDormand
work, and did she capture what you were
looking for while you were writing the script?
MM: She totally brought it to a fantastic new
place. You hope, of course, that you’ve done
enough work on the page and that there’s
enough life in the character for it to work. But
you never know until a brilliant actress comes
on and blows you away with it. I remember, it
was about a week into shooting that she did
the scene with the deer [as Mildred is planting
flowers beneath one of the billboards, a deer
appears, and she starts talking to it about
spirituality]. Until that we’d done all the
angry stuff and I knew 100 per cent that
Frances could do all the angry stuff almost
in her sleep and all of that was brilliant. But
for the character to really work we need to
see more. There are only two places in the
film where she’s on her own and she can be
sad – where we can see where the rage comes
from, that it comes from a sad, broken place.
And she nailed that so beautifully in every
single take with the deer scene. I remember
thinking from that point on: “We’ve definitely
got an amazing performance here.”
January 2018 | Sight&Sound | 47
The recent revelations of widespread sexual
misconduct in the film industry can’t help but
cast a light on the experience of watching ‘The
Deuce’, a series which tracks the sex workers
and smut peddlers of 1970s New York
through the early days of the porn industry
By Hannah McGill
“Do you like this look? I could wear my hair in a shag like
that.” A woman and a man are in bed together. She’s
showing him a magazine photograph of an actress. “I bet
I could do what she does, too,” she continues. “I act every
night, don’t I?” Her partner is unsettled, and not because
he doesn’t like the hairdo. “In that movie, she ain’t got no
pimp,” he says. “You know that’s bullshit, right? It’s fine
for pretend, but it would never work on the street.”
The woman, Lori, is a young prostitute; the man, C.C.,
is her pimp; the actress is Klute-era Jane Fonda – and the
48 | Sight&Sound | January 2018
layered ironies of a fictional hooker coveting the praise
garnered by a real actress for her portrayal of a fictional
hooker take a moment to unpick. For the characters in
HBO’s The Deuce, which tracks sex workers and smut ped-
dlers through the early days of Manhattan’s porn movie
industry, there’s a both-ways bleed between reality and
‘for pretend’. A mob grunt sits engrossed in a paperback
copy of The Godfather. The grindhouse cinemas of ‘the
Deuce’ – better known as 42nd Street – show strictly cen-
sored sex films to customers who freely engage in the
real thing as they watch. More specialised punters pay to
watch porn being shot, but it’s a con; the cameras aren’t
real. “If the cops bust him, he says he’s making art,” one
watching woman tells another of the director. “Harvey’s
always thinking like that – he’s always one step ahead of
everyone else with this shit.”
Wait – who? The character bears the surname Wasser-
man, but it’s hard to avoid thoughts of another Harvey.
Harvey Weinstein could once have laid claim to
being “one step ahead of everyone” in the movie
ROTTEN APPLE
The Deuce is set in New
York in 1971, a time when
prostitutes like Candy
(Maggie Gyllenhaal) and
Ashley (Jamie Neumann)
worked on 42nd Street

January 2018 | Sight&Sound | 49

THE DEUCE
business, but autumn 2017 has seen his name
forever recast as shorthand for power misused for
carnal ends. The Weinstein allegations chimed with a
feminist discourse increasingly insistent that things are
worse than they seem: that spectacular achievements
by a small number of women mask ever more yawning
inequality; that not only upfront misogynists, but osten-
sibly progressive men are gatekeepers for patriarchal op-
pression; that the appointment of a chauvinist boor to
America’s highest office was no shocking anomaly, but
par for the course.
The ensuing climate – in which accusations of sexual
misconduct have been levelled at multiple prominent
figures, and the ethics of the entire entertainment in-
dustry questioned – casts a strange light on The Deuce.
It feels like a thing out of its time, and not only because
its evocation of its 1971 setting is so precise. The Deuce
feels anachronistic because its frank foregrounding of
pimps and pornographers is such a tonal clash with a
culture suddenly preoccupied with calling out the sub-
tlest whiffs of male privilege and rape culture. Its upfront
nudity is even more confronting, in a discursive milieu
that recently subjugated every aesthetic achievement
and philosophical provocation of Denis Villeneuve’s
Blade Runner 2049 to umbrage over its comparatively
minimal use of exposed female flesh.
And with anxiety around sexual misbehaviour extend-
ing beyond private interactions to the treatment of actors
on set and on camera, the line between reality and ‘for pre-
tend’ is blurrier than ever. Last Tango in Paris (1972) is now
regarded by many less as a film and more as the record of a
crime, owing to the re-evaluation of remarks made by star
Maria Schneider and director Bernardo Bertolucci about
the shooting of one of its sex scenes. After autumn 2017,
can we watch screen sex without tales of systematic indus-
try-wide abuse putting a crimp in our suspension of dis-
belief? To be clear, no negative reports have surfaced from
the set of The Deuce, and Weinstein is not involved in its
production or distribution. But in worrying about Lori, the
character, ought I also to be worrying about Emily Meade,
the 28-year-old actress who plays her? Was she coerced by
older and more powerful people into showing her breasts,
and simulating sex? Might she come to regret it? And if
she did, would that be any of my business?
The morality of the Weinstein scandal and its after- r-
shocks is complicated by the fact that press and public ic
interest contains a hefty measure of prurience. Sexual al
gossip has clickbait appeal; stories about beautiful ac- c-
tresses are a pretext to print pictures of beautiful actress- s-
es. Similarly, mainstream movies and TV shows about ut
sex work and sex crime have long played a double game: e:
tut-tutting at exploitation, but gaining part of their own wn
appeal from illicit thrills. It’s a double standard of which h
the sex-shop proprietor in The Deuce is angrily cognisant. nt.
Busted for selling hardcore films under the counter, he
points out that similar content is screening publicly on n ac
the same street. “That’s a documentary,” states one of the he
cops. “This here – it ain’t right.”
That cop, so confident of his moral distinctions, s,
would fit right into a current social media discourse se
that delights in stern distinctions between what is and nd
s’.
isn’t ‘right’ – in the senses of both ‘correct’ and ‘virtuous’.
The death of Hugh Hefner in September 2017 spawned ed
multiple articles consigning the Playboy founder to the he
50 | Sight&Sound | January 2018
‘The Deuce’ status of an abusive pimp. Hefner’s particular case aside,
the sticking point of such a judgement is, of course, its
doesn’t seek to erasure of the agency of the women involved in pornog-
romanticise raphy and sex work. Here is a deep fault-line in current
feminism: whether there can be such a thing as a sex
porn, but it worker by choice. On one side, feminists who regard
does highlight sex work as inherently exploitative and demeaning;
on the other, feminists to whom sexual freedom is sac-
its permanent rosanct and includes the freedom to sell sex. It’s a deli-
proximity to and cate balance, to advocate for women’s autonomy while
demanding they eschew certain forms of work and self-
influence upon expression. The risk of infantilisation is high. Since the
mainstream Weinstein revelations, and the mass social media shar-
ing of sexual assault experiences that followed them,
culture the matter of women’s free will has become a far wider
conversation. Must a woman be protected? Is she always
vulnerable? Might she appear to be consenting, when in
fact she’s not? It’s a strange time to be a woman who’s
never felt particularly threatened or sidelined by men.
It’s possible to be fully on board with the spirit of a social
movement, but uncomfortable with some of its rhetoric
and assumptions. If some men have been alarmed to find
themselves judged complicit in behaviours they would
ne contemplate, some women have equally felt ill-
never
ali
aligned with the developing archetype of a voiceless
vic
victim of unstinting sexual threat.
The Deuce shows us neither ‘enslaved’ nor ‘empowered’
pr
prostitutes, but hard-bitten, humorous, complex women
wh reasons for being in what they call “the life” are as
whose
va
various and messy as anyone’s reasons for being in any-
th
thing. To some extent, a conventional Hollywood-style
va
value system applies to the show’s female characters:
we know that Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Candy is going to be
gra
granted a rich inner life, because she’s played by a name
actress, and one with a high-end cerebral reputation to
bo college dropout Abby (Margarita Levieva) and ear-
boot;
ne journalist Sandra (Natalie Paul) get a particular kind
nest
of narrative attention because they’re conventionally
be
beautiful, their characters aren’t hookers and they’re love
int
interest for important male characters. But here’s what
all the female characters in The Deuce have in common:
th are never mysteries for men to unravel, vamps for
they
th to escape, or victims for them to save. They also
them
know, and mock, those stereotypes. And the show is hip
to another truth well-known to women: that the high-
est concentrations of misogyny may be detected not
amid oiks, but in educated, politically aware men, and
in art that they produce. When Abby leaves the Deuce
for a night to see a college boyfriend and his buddies, the
choice of movies they present is revealing: “Straw Dogs
or Play Misty for Me?” Mainstream movies by respectable
directors, in each of which – whatever one makes of the
detail of their gender politics – entertainment is drawn
from a woman becoming a problem for a man, and her
body a target for violence. Abby, seemingly more at
home amid the porno flicks, leaves.
Does The Deuce absolve itself of the charge of
objectification by flaunting its familiarity with the con-
cept? Not in the eyes of the American campaigning or-
ganisation the National Center on Sexual Exploitation,
which has accused HBO and showrunners David Simon
and George Pelecanos of “contributing to a culture of
sexual entitlement that will produce future Harvey Wein-
steins”. There’s a direct sort of truth to this that’s not the
one the author intends. We might quibble over whether
and how a TV show treating sex workers like human
beings increases sexual entitlement, but there’s a clear
familial relationship between the porn culture depicted
in The Deuce and the legitimate movie business that made
Weinstein’s name. Weinstein himself liked to claim that
his love of arthouse cinema began when he attended a
screening of The 400 Blows (1959) in the hope that it was
a porno; in The Deuce, sex films jostle for marquee space
with Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970) and Dario Argen-
to’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970). Then there’s
technology. It’s possible to argue, as the British TV series
Pornography: The Secret History of Civilisation did in 1999,
that rather than pornographers opportunistically co-opt-
ing visual media, those media developed in response to
the hunger for pornography. The printing press. The peep
show. Photography. Home video. High-speed broadband.
If the market for naked bodies didn’t directly precipitate
these advances, it sure as hell was there at their inception.
The fascination mainstream film and TV bears with the
sex industry isn’t just about a shared weakness for female
flesh: there’s a kinship, also, to do with reading people’s this kind of environment here?” Five years or so after The DIRTY WORK
secret wants, and finding distinctive ways of fulfilling Deuce is set, Donald J. Trump partnered with the Hyatt The Deuce introduces a
range of downtown New
them. The Deuce doesn’t seek to romanticise aspects of Corporation to purchase the Commodore Hotel at 109 Yorkers, including (clockwise
porn in the manner of Boogie Nights (1997), The Notori- East 42nd Street and turn it into the Grand Hyatt New from opposite, top):
ous Bettie Page (2005) or The Nice Guys (2016), but it does York. In any process of gentrification, developers benefit Margarita Levieva as student
Abby and James Franco
highlight its permanent proximity to and influence upon from the risqué rep of an area beloved by misfits and law- as barman Frankie; Emily
mainstream culture. When Candy develops an interest in breakers, while ensuring that any real risk is cleaned up Meade as new-in-town Lori
making rather than just appearing in porn films, her jour- for the comfort of the well-to-do. There’s an analogy there and Gary Carr as her pimp
C.C.; Lawrence Gilliard Jr as
ney behind the camera is not just a reminder of the part to what Bob and Harvey Weinstein did with independent policeman Chris and Natalie
played by women in porn production. Candy-as-director cinema: appropriated its counterculture cool, and made Paul as journalist Sandra;
also holds up a tarnished mirror to the driven fanboy di- it safe for mainstream audiences. Peter Biskind called his and Dominique Fishback as
prostitute Darlene
rectors – Coppola, Spielberg, Scorsese, De Palma – who 2004 book on Miramax Down and Dirty Pictures, but kept
were early in their careers at the time The Deuce is set, and the real dirtiness – the rumours he heard of Weinstein
whose combination of cerebral cinephilia, hipster cachet abusing women – off the page; he “didn’t feel it was all
and commercial smarts would blaze a trail both for David that relevant” to “a business book”. But just as the ‘clean’
Simon’s gritty screen style and Weinstein’s vision of an can’t be separated from the ‘dirty’ or the real from the ‘for
underground-inflected mainstream cinema. pretend’, business transactions have never been wholly
Sex, drugs and violence are just part of the picture in separable from sexual ones. The Deuce knows that. The
The Deuce. Those markets are set to underpin and facili- mogul in the Oval Office knows it. Post-Weinstein screen
tate much bigger deals. “All these properties sitting here culture is learning it.
vacant,” laments mobster Rudy Pipilo (Michael Rispoli). The Deuce is available now on Sky Atlantic
“You think this area’s ever gonna grow while you have i in the UK, and on HBO in the US

January 2018 | Sight&Sound | 51

TRAIL OF
The tirelessly prolific Japanese director
Miike Takashi’s brutal supernatural samurai
drama ‘Blade of the Immortal’ is the latest
brilliant addition to a restless, genre-switching
career whose hallmark has always been
its resistance to easy categorisation
By Tom Mes
52 | Sight&Sound | January 2018
Blade of the Immortal is Miike Takashi’s third collaboration
with producer Jeremy Thomas, following 13 Assassins
(2010) and Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai (2011). It’s not
a coincidence that all three are samurai films, the genre
with which Western audiences still mostly identify Jap-
anese cinema. Both earlier films implicitly or explicitly
evoked past cinematic glories: both are remakes of films
from the 1960s, one of which was an acknowledged mas-
terpiece, while the title 13 Assassins, as well as the film’s
plot structure, inevitably calls to mind Kurosawa Akira’s
Seven Samurai (1954).
Blade of the Immortal, about a samurai condemned to
everlasting life, is based on the manga of the same name
by Samura Hiroaki, published in English by Dark Horse
BLOOD
Comics in the US. While not a remake, it too is reminis-
cent of the genre’s rich past, particularly the films of the
1970s, when the blood had turned a Technicolor red and
filmmakers were pushing the boundaries of what was
permissible in terms of explicit onscreen violence – a
style of film best exemplified by the popular Lone Wolf
and Cub films, about a wandering assassin and his infant
son, with which Miike’s new film shares more than a su-
perficial resemblance.
Those are the facts. The oft-repeated claim that it is
Miike’s 100th film, on the other hand, is mostly clever
marketing. But Blade of the Immortal is the 100th directo-
rial credit listed for Miike by the Internet Movie Data-
base, and that apparently is good enough for virtually
the entire global film press, which has eagerly echoed SWORDS AND SORCERY
the press release. Miike Takashi’s Blade of the
Immortal, a blood-spattered
But then, who else is counting? It is difficult to think of tale of a samurai condemned
another filmmaker whose filmography is as expansive to everlasting life, is the
as Miike’s, a director who has been racking up an almost director’s third collaboration
with the British producer
unparalleled volume of work since the two straight-to- Jeremy Thomas
video titles that launched his directorial career in 1991:
Eyecatch Junction, a comedy about three female traffic
cops who decide to combat criminals with gymnastics;
and Lady Hunter: Prelude to Murder, an action film about
a female ex-soldier who becomes embroiled in the kid-
napping of a diplomat’s child. Theatrical films, straight-
to-video features, TV productions, music videos,
web series, documentary, animation, stage plays,
January 2018 | Sight&Sound | 53
MIIKE TAKASHI BLADE OF THE IMMORTAL
even the trailer for another director’s film – there
is nary a form of audiovisual storytelling that
Miike hasn’t directed. It’s easy to lose one’s way among
such a plethora of titles and forms. The question, really, is
not who is counting, but what it is they count, and why.
It would seem logical that we do not include music
videos or episodes of television series among a list of
feature films, yet the 100 titles on that IMDb list (which,
it must be noted, is incomplete) feature a large number
of exactly such productions. And if we leave these out,
shouldn’t we include Tennen Shojo Man, a 1999 TV mini-
series consisting of three feature-length episodes? And
if we do, does it count as one credit or three? Kumamoto
Stories is a compendium of two shorts and one medium-
length film, made at one-year intervals and intended for
museum screenings, yet released on video in Japan as a
single title. The medium-length episode is just over one
hour, so perhaps it could count as a feature after all, but
that would mean neglecting its two companions, there-
by ignoring the scope and thus the nature of the project.
Then there is the issue of production modes and dis-
tribution patterns that are unique to V-Cinema, the Japa-
nese straight-to-video market, where a single film is often
shot as a three-hour-plus feature, which is then edited
into two parts for separate video release, while a single
ssen-
digest version receives a theatrical release that essen-
uliar
tially serves as advertising for the videos. This peculiar
situation occurs several times in Miike’s filmography.aphy.
Do these count as one film or two?
Our habitual tools for categorising films and
filmmakers seem woefully inadequate for an encom- com-
veral
passing approach to Miike (and, by extension, to several
decades of Japanese film production and distribution). ion).
The critic Tony Rayns once appropriately described bed
Miike as “a law unto himself”. More recently, the notedted
American scholar of Japanese cinema Aaron Gerow ow
devoted an entire essay to the difficulty of studying ng
Miike, observing that even the director’s style resiststs
our preferred paradigms for understanding cinema, a,
demonstrating, on the one hand, an excess of dizzy- y-
ing editing that sets him apart from art cinema, yett
on the other hand often featuring long takes that at
defy his inclusion in the postmodern MTV-style. Just ust
as Miike, with a good decade’s worth of selections at
54 | Sight&Sound | January 2018
Cannes, Berlin and Venice under his belt, seems comfort-
ably poised to enter the world cinema pantheon, it seems
we have a problem.
But perhaps we shouldn’t be too shocked to find that
Miike defies easy categorisation. After all, his interna-
tional breakthrough Audition (his 32nd work as a direc-
tor) made an impact precisely because it refused to follow
expectations. It was made for that purpose, in 1999, the
same year as many other projects hoping to benefit from
the massive success of the Nakata Hideo-directed J-hor-
ror touchstone Ring (1998). Two of the production com-
panies behind Audition had been involved with the Ring
cycle, and Audition was set up as a horror movie to follow
in its footsteps, but also to consciously deviate from the
J-horror template. Based on a novel by Murakami Ryu, a
specialist in very adult tales of fractured human relations
and urban despair, Audition demonstrates a conspicu-
ous lack of supernatural elements and ingredients that
would appeal to the teen demographic which helped
make Ring a hit. Miike was chosen as a director because
Perhaps we he was not, at that time, associated with the horror genre:
he had been active predominantly in yakuza films and
shouldn’t be had occasionally reached a wider mainstream audience,
shocked to find as with the theatrical films Andromedia (1998), a science
fiction film that was a vehicle for an all-girl pop group,
Miike defies easy and White-Collar Worker Kintaro (1999), an adaptation of
categorisation – a popular manga about a heroic corporate worker who
is also a single father.
his breakthrough The result is well known: Audition’s cautiously paced
‘Audition’ made first hour contributes to the sensory impact of the sub-
sequent climactic violence, which sidestepped the ex-
an impact pectations of international film festival and art cinema
precisely because audiences as they settled into the familiar beats of a
placid relationship drama, only to have that comfortable
it refused to follow rug violently pulled from under them. Yet this carefully
expectations weighed interplay between languid drama and unremit-
ting violence would be largely obscured during the film’s
subsequent shelf life as one of the foundational pillars of
the Asia Extreme wave.
The rise of Asia Extreme coincided with the growth
of the DVD format, which, thanks to significantly lower
production costs in comparison with VHS cassettes,
had favoured the development of a sell-through market
rather than one for rental. The releases under Tartan
Films’ Asia Extreme label were firmly a product of the
D age: branded as a new kind of film for a new kind of
DVD
m
medium, they were collectable, recognisably packaged
c
commodities.
As the widespread adoption of DVD facilitated the
s
spread of films from the festival circuit to a wider audi-
e
ence, the medium also shifted the balance of power in
th gatekeeping process: distributors moved ahead of
the
fe
festival programmers, and both were ahead of the crit-
ic Asia Extreme proved that power was firmly in the
ics.
h
hands of the distribution sector, as Tartan and such
c
competitors/imitators as Optimum Asia and Premier
A fuelled a generic discourse of weird, wonderful and
Asia
d
dangerous exotic thrills, identifying and focusing on
t
textual similarities – ie, violence – in films from quite
d
diverse cultural and industrial backgrounds, to create
a convenient category that was swiftly adopted by sec-
ti
tions of the press.
This inverted the process that had taken place at
fi festivals over the past decades: where festivals had
film
elevated popular genres to the respectable middle-brow
category of art cinema or world cinema, Asia Extreme
transplanted films from the ranks of art to a self-con-
structed category of ‘dangerous’ genre cinema. Miike
formed what was in many ways an ideal object. Genre
productivity facilitated the rapid construction of an Asia
Extreme canon. This canon had an ambivalent yet sym-
biotic relationship with the auteurist inclinations of film
festival programming and film criticism: while works
marketable by their genre alone provided the meat and
potatoes, a top layer emphasised the prestige of auteur
credentials. Thus, the extensive back catalogue of genre
films by Miike provided a treasure trove for Tartan and
other international distributors, which invariably brand-
ed their DVD releases of even the most obscure of the di-
rector’s straight-to-video potboilers with the strapline,
“From the director of Audition.”
Once maligned for creating a faux-genre that empha-
sised dangerous Orientalist thrills over formal finesse,
cultural specifics or artistic relevance, the Asia Extreme
model looks positively archaic in today’s more dispersed
media distribution landscape, which offers no routes for
the convenient demarcations of the DVD age. Yet, several
of the talented filmmakers whose diverse creations Asia
Extreme once lumped together like offal for the meat
grinder have survived by continuing to do what the
Tartan label and its derivatives sought to obscure. For
his diverse and idiosyncratic style of filmmaking, Miike
has gone on to wider individual recognition as an auteur
of world cinema, resisting the discourse to which he
seemed so ideally suited. Throughout his international
career, he has set himself apart by refusing the categori-
sation that is part and parcel of festival exposure and
international distribution, interspersing his excessively
violent films with the likes of the whimsical fairytale The
Bird People in China (1998).
What eventually saw Miike become a fixture of the
A-list festivals was this adeptness at a wide variety of
genres, as witnessed by the selections made by program-
mers at Cannes, Berlin, and Venice: the surreal ‘yakuza
horror’ Gozu (Cannes in 2003); the expressionistic ho-
moerotic prison drama Big Bang Love: Juvenile A (Berlin
in 2006); the English-language Sukiyaki Western Django
(Venice in 2007), a hybrid of chanbara (a sword-fighting
movie) and western; the samurai epic 13 Assassins
(Venice in 2010); the contemporary action film Shield of
Straw (Cannes in 2013); and Blade of the Immortal (Cannes
in 2017).
With the filmmaker firmly embedded in this position,
not least thanks to his longstanding partnership with
Jeremy Thomas and the strategic might of sales agent
Celluloid Dreams, it seems only a matter of time before
he receives that still elusive major award which will MURDER BY NUMBERS
complete the process. The canonisation of his back cata- The films of Miike Takashi
(opposite, below) have
logue – the hallmark of any auteur – is now in progress, spanned a range of genres,
with comprehensive retrospectives having taken place including (below from left)
in Italy, Brazil and Spain (a complete Miike retrospective samurai action films (13
Assassins, 2010), yakuza
remains a technical and logistical impossibility due to dramas (Dead or Alive 2:
the absence of quality prints of many of his V-Cinema Birds, 2000), whimsical
works), as well as the rerelease of choice titles in the fairytales (The Bird People
in China, 1998) and horror
form of prestigious Blu-ray packages. British distributor (Audition, 1999, opposite)
Arrow is particularly active in the latter field, and with
the company now moving into theatrical releasing with
Blade of the Immortal, it generates a continued stream of
fresh publicity that nurtures the already fertile soil for
the company’s back catalogue rereleases.
And so, as certain titles are lovingly restored for pris-
tine digital editions while others are left to languish in
vaults (if not disappear altogether due to the often neg-
ligent archival practices of many Japanese film compa-
nies), we are currently witnessing the formation of the
Miike canon out of those, more or less, 100 titles. All
canons are by their nature reductive: Arthur Conan
Doyle wrote a lot more than Sherlock Holmes stories, but
it was those tales, reread over generations, that assured
the author’s immortality. Cinema has not been around
for quite as long as literature, but if we take the notion of
‘generation’ to mean platforms for the diffusion of films,
this gives us a great many, more or less subsequent, ‘gen-
erations’ to consider, on which films are released and
rereleased (including festival selection, theatrical exhi-
bition, satellite television, rental videotape, sell-through
videotape, DVD, Blu-ray, curated programmes and retro-
spectives, terrestrial television, pay-per-view and video-
on-demand). Such a model also takes into account the
crucial role of gatekeepers in selecting the titles to be
released or shown on each successive platform and how
these are to be promoted – with the invention of a ‘100th
film’ jubilee, for example.
How the films are to be discussed, though, is another
matter. Critics, scholars and historians are gatekeepers
too, whose function is arguably to provide a counterbal-
ance to the distribution sector’s more overtly market-
driven actions. Selection may be inherent in canon for-
mation, but if attempts at categorising one of the leading
filmmakers from one of the oldest, most productive and
most revered filmmaking nations in the world takes the
shape of a succession of misrepresentations, perhaps this
is a sign that we should stop thinking of film culture as a
game of forcing square pegs into predefined round holes,
and focus instead on the actual circumstances under
which films are made, spread and viewed.
Blade of the Immortal is released in UK cinemas
i on 8 December and is reviewed on page 76
January 2018 | Sight&Sound | 55
GARY
OLDMAN
MAD DOGS AND ENGLISHMEN
From his early roles playing punks, skins and dreadlocked criminals to his remarkable portrayal
of Winston Churchill in Joe Wright’s World War II drama ‘Darkest Hour’, Gary Oldman’s
extraordinary career has been marked by a chameleon-like ability to inhabit his characters
By Graham Fuller
Though Gary Oldman has long been commended for his
elastic range as an actor, few could have foreseen that
the man who once played Sex Pistol Sid Vicious would
give one of the screen’s most persuasive impersonations
of Britain’s wartime prime minister Winston Churchill.
From the self-destructive Sid – a surprisingly gentle, do-
mesticated performance – to the saviour of the nation in
the crisis month of May 1940 is an astounding stretch,
notwithstanding the three decades between Alex Cox’s
Sid & Nancy (1986) and Joe Wright’s Darkest Hour. Even al-
lowing for Oldman’s maturation as an artist and as a man,
his ability to inhabit Churchill so accurately and with
such emotional resonance was a reach beyond reasonable
limits, and it raises the question: could Laurence Olivier,
Alec Guinness, or Daniel Day-Lewis have pulled it off?
It might be said that Sid to Winston is no more of an
extension than Oldman metamorphosing from the bul-
lying (but craven) skinhead Coxy in Mike Leigh’s Mean-
time (1983), the cocksure Joe Orton in Stephen Frears’s
Prick up Your Ears (1987), or the hangdog Lee Harvey
Oswald in Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991) into the impassive
George Smiley of Tomas Alfredson’s Tinker Tailor Soldier
Spy (2011) – a role drily originated by Guinness. Oldman
is one of only a few actors who warrant being called ‘cha-
meleon-like’, in most cases a description glibly used as
56 | Sight&Sound | January 2018
a synonym for ‘versatile’. But his Smiley demonstrated FINEST HOUR
something more unusual than his ability to play several Gary Oldman’s mesmerising
portrayal of Winston
kinds of characters. Oldman created the MI6 man with a Churchill in Joe Wright’s
different approach to acting than that he had used before. Darkest Hour (opposite)
In the past he had relied upon two main styles. He had perfectly captures not just
his physical presence but
either channelled his own opaque, often neuroticised his belligerence, fury and
persona, in films as diverse as Honest, Decent and True oratorical power
(1985), The Firm (1988), Chattahoochee (1989), Heading
Home (1990), Romeo Is Bleeding (1993), as James Gordon in
three Batman films, and even as Sirius Black in four Harry
Potter outings. Or he had opted for flamboyant mimicry,
sometimes aided by elaborate makeup, in, for example,
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), True Romance (1993), Im-
mortal Beloved (1994), The Fifth Element (1997), Hannibal
(2001) – and Tiptoes (2003), in which he was credible as
a dwarf. In Tinker Tailor, he stripped away all artifice to
portray Smiley as a man who is at once repressed, disap-
pointed, world-weary and so professionally disciplined
that he has taught himself to bite back all emotion lest he
betray himself. It was an extraordinary minimalistic per-
formance, a virtuosic display of near expressionlessness
– though Oldman’s George was a degree less hardened
than Guinness’s. In Alfredson’s film, greater play is given
to Ann Smiley’s adultery than in the seven-part
series directed by John Irvin, and its disillusioning
January 2018 | Sight&Sound | 57
GARY OLDMAN DARKEST HOUR
effect on George is subtly palpable in Oldman’s
performance.
Oldman’s Winston represents a triumphant return
to flamboyance. His performance is the centrepiece
of Wright’s definitive film about Churchill’s war lead-
ership. Darkest Hour is as much a companion piece
to Wright’s own Atonement (2007) – with its bravura
Dunkirk tracking shot – as it is to Christopher Nolan’s
recent Dunkirk. It is a rousing account of the decision by
the newly appointed prime minister to fight on against
Germany in late May-early June 1940 rather than agree
to the urging of Lord Halifax (gamely played by Stephen
Dillane), and to a lesser extent the former prime minis-
ter Neville Chamberlain (Ronald Pickup), that Britain
enter negotiations with Hitler on the back of the French
capitulation and the retreat to the Channel coast of the
British Expeditionary Force following its defeat in France
and Flanders.
Absent from a rowdy debate in the House of Com-
mons, Churchill is first seen taking breakfast in bed in
his private residence – the scene neatly setting up the
idea that he will rise like one of the “lions after slum-
ber” in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poetic call to action ‘The
Masque of Anarchy’ (albeit as an establishment pugilist
rather than a non-violent anarchist). He’s soon roaring at
his new personal secretary Elizabeth Layton (Lily James)
for typing in single-spaced rather than double-spaced
lines, causing her to run from the room in tears. This
incident did take place – no matter that Layton didn’t
become Churchill’s personal secretary until May 1941.
It’s an acceptable shuffling of chronology, since Layton
gives younger viewers, who might not know much
about Churchill, an attractive identity figure. Less suc-
cessful, however, is the foisting on Layton of the role of
witness to Churchill’s unconvincing personal soften-
ing at the height of the Dunkirk crisis. There is a weak
moment of humour when she tells Churchill that his V-
for-Victory sign, initially made with his thumb and two
folded fingers facing inwards, tells him that this means
58 | Sight&Sound | January 2018
With Oldman, “Up your bum!” (it doesn’t, of course); mild vulgarity is
all well and good, but this coy scene costs the film a little
you’re never gravitas. An overly sentimental moment comes when
quite sure if Layton tells Churchill that her soldier brother has died
overseas, and then asks him why he is studying her. “I’m
you’re going to just looking at you,” he says, Oldman’s voice oozing trea-
get passivity cly compassion. Two other encounters that persuade
Churchill not to agree to peace talks under Mussolini’s
or dynamism, aegis – an unexpectedly matey chat with the incensed
working-class King George VI (Ben Mendelsohn), and a ride on the tube
when Churchill polls his fellow passengers – seem im-
characters or plausible yet are acceptable within the film’s universe.
outrageous These scenes scarcely impair the power of Oldman’s
performance, though it might be observed that Churchill
escapist is over-needy, if not a little infantilised, in his interaction
entertainments with his wife, Kristin Scott Thomas’s Clemmie (it echoes
his joking admission that all babies look like him). It is
hard to square the warrior with the childlike spouse
or the sweet grandfatherly type, yet worth noting that
Layton alluded to such inconsistency in her book, Mr.
Churchill’s Secretary (originally published in 1958 under
her married name Elizabeth Nel): “That great man – who
could at any time be impatient, kind, irritable, crushing,
generous, inspiring, difficult, alarming, amusing, unpre-
dictable, considerate, seemingly impossible to please,
charming, demanding, inconsiderate, quick to anger and
quick to forgive – was unforgettable. One loved him with
a deep devotion. Difficult to work for – yes, mostly; love-
able – always; amusing – without fail.”
That passes as a reasonable review, too, of Oldman’s
portrayal, omitting only his rendering of Churchill’s
belligerence, fury and oratorical power. Like a captain
of industry, dominated by his wife but formidable in
the company of men, Oldman’s Churchill overawes,
SPY GAMES
In Tomas Alfredson’s Tinker not without difficulty, his war cabinet and the outer
Tailor Soldier Spy (2011), cabinet, eventually overturning Parliament’s scepticism
Gary Oldman offered a with his rhetoric. Watching Oldman deliver Churchill’s
virtuosic display of near
expressionlessness as MI6 calculatedly matter-of-fact 4 June “We shall fight on the
officer George Smiley (below) beaches” speech to the House of Commons in a bellicose
growl sent more shivers down my spine than any speech
I’ve heard in a movie since Kenneth Branagh brought his
oboe-like voice to the St Crispin’s Day speech in Henry V
(1989). Nationalism may be an unqualified evil, but love
of country dies harder in the breast.
Oldman’s oration is not identical to Churchill’s. Given
the cinema’s need to exaggerate, the peroration – “We
shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall
fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with grow-
ing confidence and growing strength in the air, we
shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We
shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing
grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets,
we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender” – is
understandably more heightened than Churchill made
it and different in nuances. Oldman underemphasises
the word ‘air’, to which Churchill gave a rhetorical (even
aristocratic) lift, and thunders out the word ‘surrender’,
which Churchill downplayed. Despite these changes,
the speech remains thrilling.
It has been open season for actors playing the mature
Churchill in recent years, Oldman joining the likes of
Brian Cox (Churchill, 2017), Michael Gambon (Churchill’s
Secret, 2016), John Lithgow (The Crown, 2016-), Timothy
Spall (The King’s Speech, 2010), Brendan Gleeson (Into the
Storm, 2009), Rod Taylor (Inglourious Basterds, 2009) and
David Ryall (Le Grand Charles, 2006). They in turn have
followed in the footsteps of Richard Burton (The Gather-
ing Storm, 1974), Timothy West (Churchill and the Gener-
als, 1979), Robert Hardy (numerous portrayals, perhaps
most memorably inWinston Churchill: The Wilderness
Years, 1981), Bob Hoskins (World War II: When Lions
Roared, 1994) and Albert Finney (The Gathering Storm,
2002). How soon before Jim Broadbent and Toby Jones
are given a crack?
Oldman is a slighter figure than these actors, but
he hauls his added bulk around with aplomb, nailing
Churchill’s hurried short stride, as well as his aggres-
sive posture of standing with his palms pressed flat into
his back, so that his arms are akimbo behind him. With
expert prosthetic work by Kazuhiro Tsuji, Oldman be-
comes the most Churchillian of Churchills when he irri-
tatedly compresses his lips so the lower one is a long rub-
bery stripe or juts it out in moments of anger or defiance,
or when he’s in repose. Very occasionally the camera
glimpses Oldman peeking out of Churchill’s Humpty
Dumpty face in medium close-ups, but he disappears
entirely in profile shots, which accent the protruding
lip and the character’s sparse ash-coloured hair (oddly
touching when it’s uncombed): you’d swear Churchill
had been resurrected. Of course, none of the padding
or prosthetics or facial or verbal mimicry – Churchill’s
habit of pronouncing ‘Nazi’ with a short ‘a’ so it rhymes
with ‘jazzy’ – would matter if Oldman didn’t capture HEROES AND VILLAINS
the precise aura of the old bulldog or show how he dra- Gary Oldman (above from
left) as the vampire in Bram
matically used his posh, reverberant lisp, more forceful Stoker’s Dracula (1992),
than Halifax’s and the King’s ‘r/w’ rhotacism, to hammer the dreadlocked pimp Drexl
home a point or get his own way. Churchill’s public per- Spivey in True Romance
(1993), police officer James
sona apparently belied his self-doubts, which Darkest Gordon in Batman Begins
Hour lays bare in some of Winston’s conversations with (2005) and (below) Winston
Clemmie, and his solitariness, which Wright evokes by Churchill in Darkest Hour
isolating him in lit rectangles – a lift compartment, a
window – in fields of black.
Wright also lends metaphorical weight to the notion
of Churchill “walking with destiny” by having him leave
his cab to walk toward the Houses of Parliament to make
the climactic speech during the second of two rhyming
slow-mo left-to-right tracking shots that show ordinary
British people going about their business. (These shots
test credibility much less than the tube train sequence.)
Wright is blessed with a performance that not only an-
chors his directorial showmanship but also spiritually
conveys Britain’s need to resist the temptation of a deal
with the devil. As Churchill, slamming the table, bellows
frustratedly at Halifax, “When will the lesson be learned?
You cannot reason with a tiger when your head is in its
mouth.”
Assessing Oldman in The New Biographical Dictionary
of Film, David Thomson writes, “After a dozen or so films,
did the public have a better idea of Gary Oldman’s own
personality than before he began? That is not ingrati-
tude, merely a way of observing that Oldman seems like
a blank, anonymous passerby… who waits to be occu-
pied by demons.” Thomson’s rhetorical question raises
the matter of whether we want to feel we know stars,
or are content to be wowed by performances that have
nothing much to do with them as individuals. Probably
the former is true for most of us and we may delude our-
selves we’re on virtual nodding terms with actors who
project their own personalities into their roles time and
again – Marlene Dietrich, Cary Grant, Robert De Niro,
George Clooney, Cate Blanchett, Emma Stone. Even
something of Day-Lewis’s charm and elegance and Tim
Roth’s feralness and street grit – to name Oldman’s closest
peers – come through more than occasionally.
With Oldman, you’re never quite sure if you’re going
to get passivity or dynamism, or characters who show
vestiges of the sometimes shy, sometimes bold working-
class boy born in New Cross, south-east London, in 1958
and raised in a broken home, or characters who are out-
rageous escapist entertainments, such as True Romance’s
frightening (and very funny) dreadlocked drug dealer
Drexl Spivey, a brief Tarantino-scripted acting master-
class, or Dracula, incarnated by Oldman as a medieval
warrior in lobster-shell armour, as the insectoid
ancient, and as the dreamy undead count who
January 2018 | Sight&Sound | 59
GARY OLDMAN
ALL THE YOUNG PUNKS
(Clockwise from top left)
Gary Oldman in Mike Leigh’s
Meantime (1983), Alan
Clarke’s The Firm (1988),
Stephen Frears’s Prick up
Your Ears (1987) and Alex
Cox’s Sid & Nancy (1986)
For Oldman,
acting is a chronic
need. Not all
of his films are
worthy of his
talent, but no film
can be completely
dull when he
is involved
60 | Sight&Sound | January 2018
DARKEST HOUR
stalks Winona Ryder’s Mina in 1897 London.
Harry Potter’s Sirius Black, anguished but more
‘street’ than one might have expected, and the seething
Bex, whose addiction to the buzz of football hooligan-
ism destroys his middle-class existence in Alan Clarke’s
The Firm, both smell of the unforgiving London Oldman
grew up in. It is the dank world, too, of the powerfully
grim Nil by Mouth (1997), Oldman’s sole film as writer-
director, a semi-autobiographical memoir about a dys-
functional family cursed by addiction and domestic vio-
lence that was influenced by Clarke and to a lesser extent
Mike Leigh.
The actor’s strange mix of shyness and cockiness is ap-
parent in the likes of Les Blair’s Honest, Decent and True,
in which he is a sexually immature working-class artist
betrayed by his ad copy-writer flatmate; Colin Gregg’s
We Think the World of You (1987), as the sailor lover of the
J.P. Ackerley character (Alan Bates); Nicolas Roeg and
writer Dennis Potter’s Track 29 (1988), as the mother-
loving boy-man dreamed up by a lonely housewife; and
Prick up Your Ears. In the last, his mercurial Joe Orton,
whose meekness as a Rada student and aspiring writer
seduced and mentored by Kenneth Halliwell – “I’ll never
catch up,” Orton complains – is replaced by overwhelm-
ing confidence, the fruit of his becoming a famous play-
wright and promiscuous cottager. Unlike Orton, Oldman
has never been comfortable with fame.
Another comparison: whereas Day-Lewis clearly has
no overwhelming desire to act, or has denied the im-
pulse, in Oldman, acting is a chronic need. He is constant-
ly working, with more than 60 film credits on IMDb, as
well as voiceovers for video games and television work,
including bit parts in Knots Landing (1989) and Friends
(2001). Not all of his films are worthy of his talent, but no
film can be completely dull when Oldman is involved.
That need may be driven by restless energy or his tough
early life, or the same demons – to use Thomson’s word
– that meant Oldman had to overcome alcoholism. His
career was frontloaded with exceptional performances,
a benefit, perhaps, of working with British directors like
Leigh, Clarke, Cox, Blair, Frears, Roeg, Martin Campbell
(Criminal Law, 1988), Mick Jackson (Chattahoochee), Tom
Stoppard (Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, 1990) and
David Hare (Heading Home).
Moving to America, he worked with Oliver Stone on
JFK and Francis Ford Coppola on Bram Stoker’s Dracula,
but could not expect to work with directors of that cali-
bre throughout his Hollywood career. It says much for his
reputation and peculiar genius, however, that he became
a necessary staple in the Harry Potter and Batman films.
Sometimes – as in True Romance and Lawless (2011), in
which he was larger than life dispensing death as a ver-
sion of the Prohibition-era gangster Pretty Boy Floyd – he
has unbalanced entire films with his brilliance.
Is Darkest Hour Oldman’s finest hour? Underneath
the make-up and the Churchillian bombast, there is
refinement in the performance, but I wouldn’t want to
say it is better than his Tinker Tailor turn, or those he gave
in The Firm or Prick up Your Ears. It ought to win him the
Best Actor Oscar at last, and it ought to show thousands
of younger viewers, if they go to see the film, that in 1940
one man’s will stood between Britain’s security and the
Nazi yoke. It’s a movie that doubly puts us in the pres-
REX FEATURES (1)
ence of greatness.
Darkest Hour is released in UK cinemas on
i 12 January and will be reviewed in our next issue
ANOTHER
DIMENSION
The influence of Rod Serling’s sci-fi/fantasy series ‘The Twilight Zone’, which ran on US television
from 1959-64, has always been pervasive, but as a new stage version arrives in London, its
legacy feels more powerful than ever, surfacing in everything from ‘Black Mirror’ to ‘Get Out’
By Dick Fiddy
“There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known
to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless
as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and
shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies be-
tween the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowl-
edge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area
which we call ‘The Twilight Zone’.”
The Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling’s own explana-
tory monologue delivered over the simple but insistent,
immediately memorable theme music that introduced
each new episode of his groundbreaking series perfectly
set the mood for events that followed each week. The Twi-
light Zone, which was first broadcast in 1959 and contin-
ued to 1964 in its original run, explored the outer limits
of storytelling and had an enormous influence on both
film and television – becoming a phenomenon that still
resonates across popular culture today.
Rodman Edward Serling was born on Christmas Day
in Syracuse, New York, in 1924. Though his name would
become synonymous with The Twilight Zone, Serling had
already established himself as a writer of high regard
before the series was first broadcast. After serving as a
paratrooper in World War II, he worked in Cincinnati as
a radio writer before joining the local TV station WKRC
where, from 1951, he wrote for The Storm, a live drama
anthology series not a thousand miles away from The
Twilight Zone.
The 1950s were the so-called ‘golden age’ of the Ameri-
can TV single drama, during which prestigious, hugely
ambitious productions were performed and broadcast
live, and often written by an emerging generation of fine
writers (Paddy Chayefsky, Tad Mosel, Reginald Rose, Gore
Vidal) and performed by equally impressive actors (Paul
Newman, Marlon Brando, James Dean, Natalie Wood,
Joanne Woodward).
Serling staked his place in that list of fresh new talent
when he penned ‘Patterns’ for the Kraft Television Theatre
anthology series in 1955, a powerful business drama that
proved so successful it became the first US drama to be
repeated due to public demand (as television was all live
at the time, the original cast was brought back to perform
the play again). The script earned Serling the first of his
six Emmys, his stock rising even further the following
year when his script ‘Requiem for a Heavyweight’ for
the live television show Playhouse 90 – based on his ex-
62 | Sight&Sound | January 2018
periences boxing in the forces – also picked up an Emmy
and a Peabody Award, the first ever given to a television
script.
But Serling’s status didn’t prevent him having battles
over the content of his scripts. Despite the ambition of
50s US TV drama creators, the reality was that they were
held accountable by industry watchdog the Federal
Communications Commission, as well as sponsors and
network chiefs. Big brands wanted to associate them-
selves with prestigious TV drama strands but were natu-
rally wary of controversial content as pressure groups
could organise boycotts of the brands.
In 1956 this happened to a Serling project, ‘Noon on
Doomsday’, made for the United States Steel Hour anthol-
ogy series. Serling had intended the play to mirror the
1955 lynching of 14-year-old African American Emmett
Till in Mississippi and the subsequent acquittal of the
men responsible, but he knew the network would never
sanction anything overt, and chose his angle carefully. “It
struck me at the time that the entire trial and its after-
math was simply ‘They’re bastards, but they’re our bas-
tards,’” Serling wrote in 1957. “So I wrote a play in which
my antagonist was not just a killer but a regional idea. It
was the story of a little town banding together to protect
its own against outside condemnation. At no point in the
conception of my story was there a black-white issue.”
Instead, Serling made his victim a Jewish pawnshop
owner and chose to concentrate on how the townsfolk
rally round the malcontent killer. But an ill-advised com-
ment to a reporter who remarked on the similarities to
the Till case meant that the press quickly saw through
the smokescreen. Before long, the White Citizens’ Coun-
cils in the South had organised a hate-mail campaign
and threatened a boycott of the network, resulting in
massive changes to the script before broadcast. Serling
was incensed by the finished production, saying later, “Its
thesis had been diluted, and my characters had mounted
a soap-box to shout something that had become too
vague to warrant any shouting.”
Noting that such instances of networks and sponsors
running scared were becoming more commonplace, Ser-
ling speculated that he’d have had more freedom if his
words were spoken not by a Democrat or a Republican
but by a Martian. It was a ‘eureka’ moment. Serling
envisaged a new kind of series in which a fantasti-
TALES FROM THE DARK SIDE
The Twilight Zone enabled
creator Rod Serling to
address polemical issues
without drawing the
attention of the censors,
sometimes offering a clear
moral lesson, such as his
exploration of beauty in
the episode ‘The Eye of the
Beholder’ (below)

January 2018 | Sight&Sound | 63

ROD SERLING THE TWILIGHT ZONE

cal setting would enable him to tell his stories of

racial conflict, corrupt business and the fragility
of the American Dream without incurring the attention
of the censors and the fears of the sponsors and the net-
work. The seed of what would become The Twilight Zone
had been sown.
In 1957 Serling arrived in Hollywood as the days of
live television broadcast from New York were waning,
and the filmed weekly series (made in California) was
beginning to take centre-stage. He began working on his
idea of a classy anthology series in which big ideas could
be smuggled under the radar. The idea that he wanted
to create a ‘fantasy’ show was met with incredulity by
many of his peers, who saw it as a step down for TV’s
hottest writer of searing, serious drama, but Serling per-
severed. He decided to road-test the idea with a script for
Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse called ‘The Time Element’,
which aired in 1958. Although it made little impact on
the ratings, it received an enormous amount of mail
from the public, and convinced the previously scepti-
cal CBS that the full series was worth a try. With Buck mont and Matheson became important contributors. The idea that
Houghton on board as producer, The Twilight Zone was The show debuted on 2 October 1959 and would run for
green-lit. 156 episodes, 92 of which were written or adapted by Ser- Serling wanted to
The deal meant Serling was contractually committed ling (the original 30-minute running time expanded to create a ‘fantasy’
to provide 80 per cent of the scripts for the first series of hour-long episodes in its fourth season before returning
The Twilight Zone but needed other writers to provide the to half-hours for its fifth and final season). show was met
remainder. Here he struck lucky, for California in the Although the episodes could vary wildly in theme, with incredulity
1950s was home to a new breed of speculative fiction setting and story, one of the great strengths of the series
and fantasy writers. Many of them met informally but would be a remarkable consistency in tone. The scene by many, who
regularly and were known as The Group or the Southern was set each week by Serling’s opening monologue, saw it as a step
California Sorcerers. Fahrenheit 451 writer Ray Bradbury though he was – at least initially – a reluctant host.
was the unofficial father figure of the outfit, which at Orson Welles had been sought for the role but his salary down for TV’s
times would include Richard Matheson, Charles Beau- would have seriously compromised the show’s budget hottest writer
mont, Robert Bloch, William F. Nolan, George Clayton and after others were suggested or tried, it was decided
Johnson and John Tomerlin. Serling invited writers to Serling should introduce them himself. He spoke out of
development meetings to see if they were a good fit for the side of his mouth and didn’t always enunciate clearly,
his proposed half-hour series and some of the core mem- but his apparent awkwardness, allied to his clipped, terse ONCE UPON A TIME
bers of The Group attended, and quickly realised that delivery, set the tone for what followed with almost hyp- Rod Serling (above) wrote
in Serling they had a kindred spirit, as his ideas of com- notic power. 92 Twilight Zone episodes,
including ‘Time Enough at
bining recognisable social situations with the fantastic The tales were suffused with irony or melancholia, Last’ (below left), about a
mirrored many of their own. Beaumont, Matheson and dealing with the fantastic in a mundane way or the mun- man after an apocalypse, and
Bradbury all decided to write for The Twilight Zone. In the dane in a fantastical way. They explored social issues, ‘Walking Distance’ (below
right), about an ad executive
long run Bradbury only had one teleplay produced for psychological meditations and emotional dilemmas, all returning to his childhood
the series and famously fell out with Serling, but Beau- disguised as fantasy, horror or sci-fi dramas. Serling had home

GETTY IMAGES (5)/ALAMY (1)

64 | Sight&Sound | January 2018

realised his dream of tackling controversial issues with-
out interference from outside influences. His wasn’t the
only anthology series on the air that used intellectual
doorways to explore dark ideas – Alfred Hitchcock Pres-
ents (of which Serling was a fan) had been running since
1955 – but The Twilight Zone was more serious than the
sometimes tongue-in-cheek Hitchcock vehicle (the tone
of which was likewise set by the host’s introductions).
Initial worries about the appeal of the show proved
unfounded and within two months it had found its feet
and was attracting a decent-sized (20 million-plus), loyal
audience, with certain episodes becoming national talk-
ing points. Classic storylines are still remembered fondly:
such as ‘Walking Distance’, in which Gig Young is an ad
executive who magically returns to his own childhood
and learns a valuable lesson; or ‘To Serve Man’, in which
gentle, attentive aliens are revealed to have a sinister pur-
pose; or ‘Time Enough at Last’, in which a post-apocalyp-
tic world has a silver lining for a compulsive reader (Bur-
gess Meredith) who has finally got enough time to enjoy
all the books he covets but is thwarted by a cruel twist of
fate when he breaks his reading glasses. This last exam-
ple highlights another of The Twilight Zone’s triumphs,
the fact that many of the episodes have downbeat, mel-
ancholic, unhappy or at best ambiguous endings.
The Twilight Zone’s influence was – and remains –
massive. A generation of filmmakers and TV creators
made works inspired by Serling and his landmark
series, many of whom were not alive when it first aired
(Vince Gilligan, Matthew Weiner, J.J. Abrams, Chris
Carter and Stephen King have all cited the show). The
original series maintained a presence on US TV long
after its initial transmission, with regular reruns and
reboots (1985, 2002). Steven Spielberg and John Landis
made a feature version in 1983, and Halloween Twi-
light Zone marathon TV screenings became an annual
fixture. (In the UK the series was never networked in
the 1960s but appeared sporadically in different ITV
regions: Anglia in 1962, London, Scotland and Tyne
Tees in 1964, before a BBC screening in the 80s and later
screenings on Channel 4).
The long shadow cast by the show is still with us. Com-
mentators reporting on the unpredictable nature of the
world in which we live, still routinely ask whether we
IN THE ZONE
The influence of The Twilight
Zone (pictured above in the
episode ‘To Serve Man’)
can be clearly felt in Charlie
Brooker’s Black Mirror,
the fourth series of which
features ‘Arkangel’ (below),
directed by Jodie Foster
are living in a ‘twilight zone’. In a timely move, for the
first time the show is to be officially adapted for the stage,
debuting in London at the Almeida Theatre in Islington
with a view to a subsequent Broadway run, in a produc-
tion written by Anne Washburn and directed by Olivier
Award-winner Richard Jones. A forthcoming reboot, re-
cently announced by CBS All Access, is reputedly to be
masterminded by Jordan Peele, whose own recent film
Get Out (see page 37) has been likened to an extended
Twilight Zone episode. (Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions is
reportedly working on the project, with Marco Ramirez,
the writer of TV shows The Defenders and Daredevil, set to
pen scripts and serve as showrunner).
And of course Charlie Brooker’s hugely popular Black
Mirror (2011-) series, which returns to Netflix for its
fourth season in December, has been called “The Twilight
Zone for the Digital Age”, and owes Serling’s series an un-
mistakeable debt, something Brooker has happily admit-
ted. As he told GamesRadar magazine in 2013: “Serling…
realised that metaphorically he could say things that the
corporate sponsors would not allow him to say… It feels
to me that if you want to address technology a way to do
it is extrapolate it from where it is. That was what The
Twilight Zone did: it would take things they were con-
cerned about in the present moment and crank them
up. It would present these irresistible ‘What if’ ideas, and
then play them out in a way that when it would hit the
right height was really chilling… They were like good
little campfire stories, and TV doesn’t do that very often.”
Serling died in 1975, aged 50, of complications fol-
lowing a heart attack – it didn’t help that he was a chain-
smoker. A eulogy was given at his funeral by another
creator of a durable – some may say indestructible – fran-
chise, Gene Roddenberry of Star Trek fame: “No one could
know Serling, or view or read his work, without recognis-
ing his deep affection for humanity, his sympathetically
enthusiastic curiosity about us, and his determination to
enlarge our horizons by giving us a better understand-
ing of ourselves.” The vibrant afterlife of the show he cre-
ated was a twist that not even Serling could have seen
coming.
The Twilight Zone plays at the Almeida Theatre,
i London, until 27 January. Series four of Black Mirror
is available on Netflix in December
January 2018 | Sight&Sound | 65
 Congratulations to
Talking Pictures TV
on your National Freeview launch – Channel 81
Babcock Media Services is delighted to partner with
Talking Pictures TV, delivering vintage films expertly
in all aspects - since 2015
@talkingpicstv @babcock_media

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88 Molly’s Game
Delightful though it is to have a flawed, recalcitrant
female heroine, this feels over-egged. Molly Bloom isn’t
a crusading Karen Silkwood or Erin Brockovich but a
poker fixer who got addicted to big bucks and fast company

68 Films of the Month 74 Films 98 Home Cinema 106 Books

January 2018 | Sight&Sound | 67

The Disaster Artist
USA 2017
FILMS OF THE MONTH
Director: James Franco
Certificate 15 103m 40s
Reviewed by Matthew Taylor
“You’re tearing me apart!” In 1955, James Dean
screamed this deathless line to electrifying
effect in Rebel Without a Cause, giving voice to
the frustrations of a generation. In 2003, Tommy
Wiseau, oddball creator and star of legendary
travesty The Room, screamed it again, provoking
audience derision, a few thousand online memes
and, ultimately, the transformation of his
magnum opus from costly ($6 million) failure
into lucrative midnight-movie phenomenon.
Erstwhile co-star and bosom buddy Greg Sestero
recounted the film’s shambolic making and his
curious friendship with Wiseau in a 2013 book,
The Disaster Artist, the manifold absurdities of
which have now been rendered on screen in
hugely engaging fashion by James Franco and
writers Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber.
In what’s easily his most arresting work in front
of the camera to date, Franco plays Wiseau,
with his younger brother Dave as Sestero; theirs
is a skewed, not-quite-Hollywood bromance,
which the film follows over half a decade.
“You don’t want to be good, but great,”
proclaimed Wiseau in his director’s statement
for The Room. The Disaster Artist keenly latches
on to the pathos inherent in Wiseau’s fervent
belief that he was truly making great work,
a classic for the ages – only recently has he
claimed, unconvincingly, that the film was
actually conceived as a black comedy. The
Room bombed on its release, but Wiseau paid
to keep it in prolonged circulation, infamously
promoting it via a giant Los Angeles billboard
featuring his lugubrious visage next to an RSVP
telephone number. At the time of writing, the
edifice has returned to Highland Avenue, with
Franco’s face instead looming over the road.
After a prelude where celebrity talking heads
are unanimous in their disbelief that The Room
exists at all, we move to late 1990s San Francisco
and a first meeting between Wiseau and
Sestero, both attendees at an uninspiring acting
workshop. Moved by Wiseau’s deranged reading
of A Streetcar Named Desire, the 19-year-old Sestero
befriends the considerably older man, whose
exact origins and enormous independent wealth
remain cloaked in mystery. Taken aback by his
impulsive whims – an impromptu 300-mile
pilgrimage to the site of James Dean’s fatal crash, a
strident recitation of Shakespeare to the perplexed
patrons of a diner – Sestero accompanies Wiseau
to his pied-à-terre in LA, both men dreaming of
their big Hollywood break. But while Sestero
secures an agent (a cherishable cameo from
Sharon Stone), Wiseau’s hulking frame,
eccentric demeanour and unplaceable accent
prove limiting at auditions. In one excruciating
encounter, he accosts a producer (Judd Apatow),
who tells him starkly that never “in a million
years” will he make it – “But after that?” croaks
Wiseau with a straight face. “I wish we could
just make our own movie,” laments Sestero. And
thus The Room is born, a feature entirely funded
out of Wiseau’s own pocket. He will direct and
play the tortured lead, while Sestero – somewhat
revealingly – is cast as the duplicitous best friend.
Of course, The Room only hobbled to
completion in the first place thanks to Wiseau’s
68 | Sight&Sound | January 2018
own money – it’s unlikely that anyone else
would have seized on his script, a sub-Tennessee
Williams farrago riddled with tin-eared dialogue,
wild tonal lurches and narrative brick walls. The
Disaster Artist recounts how Wiseau used his
apparently bottomless pit of money to purchase,
rather than rent, a whole suite of camera
equipment – virtually unheard of in the industry.
In exchange, the aghast facilities company offers
its tiny backlot as studio space. With misplaced
revolutionary spirit, Wiseau insists on shooting
on film and digital simultaneously – “It’s just
not done,” says a dumbfounded technician. The
budget even extends to a director’s bathroom,
erected in the middle of the set with just a
flimsy curtain to preserve Wiseau’s modesty.
Uproariously ham-fisted scenes from the
original that have since become well-worn
YouTube staples are lovingly recreated, with
Wiseau’s increasingly erratic behaviour – fluffed
lines, inappropriate laughter, the insistence
on close-ups of his backside (“I have to show
my ass to sell the movie”) – exasperating a
near-mutinous crew. Chief among them is
Seth Rogen’s combative script supervisor
Sandy Schklair, a seasoned pro slumming it on
Wiseau’s set (Schklair claimed to have directed
most of the film himself before walking off
the production). The faintly homoerotic bond
between Wiseau and Sestero, meanwhile
– already significantly tested when Sestero
moves in with girlfriend Amber (Alison Brie)
– curdles ever more under the arc lights.
According to Sestero, Wiseau experienced
an epiphany during a screening of The Talented
Mr Ripley (1999), and came to fixate on that
film’s elusive antihero while shooting The Room.
James Franco acutely expresses
his character’s self-delusion – it’s
a fastidious portrait of a man
who seems terminally oblivious
to how off-putting he can be James Franco as director Tommy Wiseau
Indeed, there is a hint of Ripley-esque social William Faulkner (As I Lay Dying, 2013) and
vampirism in the relationship between Wiseau Cormac McCarthy (Child of God, 2013), directing
and Sestero, a notion The Disaster Artist astutely himself just as Wiseau did; the meta aspects
plays up. While it’s suggested that Wiseau can be are intensified even more when you learn that
an embarrassment and liability for Sestero, even Franco reportedly directed the film in character.
impacting on his career potential, the younger As the misbegotten auteur, he pulls off a
man remains happy to take his inexhaustible sensational physical performance, meticulously
money and enable his narcissism. He’s also capturing Wiseau’s bizarre mannerisms and
conscious that Wiseau’s inspiration for The peculiar vocal rhythms, without descending
Room’s histrionic betrayals comes from a deeply into lazy mimicry. If Franco occasionally sails
personal place, perhaps even mined from the close to the broad goofiness familiar from his
implied envy, resentment and separation anxiety prior collaborations with Rogen, he also acutely
lurking around the edges of their friendship. expresses the character’s essential otherness
Wiseau can be controlling, too: in a pivotal scene,
his pig-headed intransigence leads Sestero to
miss out on a promising television gig alongside
Malcolm in the Middle-era Bryan Cranston
(playing himself) – the part depends on Sestero
maintaining his beard, which Wiseau demands
he shave off for a risible ‘surprise’ in the film.
The Disaster Artist is the second project by
Franco to excavate another film’s production,
following 2013’s Interior. Leather Bar, which
reimagined lost scenes from William Friedkin’s
Cruising (1980). There’s something intriguing in
Franco, a frequent and prolific multihyphenate
on disparate work ranging from wacky comedy
(2005’s The Ape) to ambitious adaptations of Seth Rogen (second left) as Sandy Schklair
 FILMS OF THE MONTH
and oddly poignant levels of self-delusion – Credits and Synopsis
it’s a fastidious portrait of a man who seems
terminally oblivious to how off-putting he can
Producers Cinema present in Juliette Danielle San Francisco, 1998. At an acting workshop, 19-year-old
be. At the opposite end of the showy spectrum, James Franco association with Josh Hutcherson Greg Sestero befriends Tommy Wiseau, an eccentric,
the younger Franco is affable company as the Vince Jolivette Good Universe a Philip Haldiman
independently wealthy older man of indeterminate
Evan Goldberg Point Gray/Ramona Jacki Weaver
clean-cut straight man to his sibling’s moody Seth Rogen Films production Carolyn Minnott origin. Inspired by Tommy’s passion and lofty ambitions,
Svengali, persuasively conveying Sestero’s arc James Weaver A film by James Paul Scheer Greg accompanies him to Los Angeles, where the two
Co-writers Franco Raphael Smadja hope to break into Hollywood. While Greg secures an
from impressionable young pup to enervated Scott Neustadter Executive Producers Sharon Stone
handler of his friend’s mania. Meanwhile it’s agent, Tommy’s oddball presence and thick accent
Michael H. Weber Scott Neustadter Iris Burton
Based on the book Michael H. Weber Bryan Cranston see him laughed out of auditions. Tommy is told by a
amusing to see Jacki Weaver and other screen The Disaster Artist: Toby Emmerich himself producer that his chances of stardom are nil, and is
stalwarts cast as no-name actors whose brief My Life Inside the Richard Brener Judd Apatow rankled by Greg’s decision to move in with girlfriend
CVs suggest that the experience of making The Room, The Greatest Michael Disco producer Amber. In 2001, Tommy reveals to Greg his plans for
Bad Movie Ever Made Dave Neustadter
Room may have put them off the craft for good. by Greg Sestero, Alexandria McAtee Dolby Digital
‘The Room’, an entirely self-financed feature that he
Remarkable films have sometimes risen from Tom Bissell Roy Lee In Colour will direct and star in. Greg agrees to play Tommy’s
Director of John Powers [2.35:1] best friend and nemesis in the film. Tommy and Greg
the ashes of defeat – consider Lost in La Mancha Photography Middelton hire a crew including seasoned script supervisor
(2002), a brilliant documentary forged from Brandon Trost Nathan Kahane Distributor
Sandy Schklair, who quickly becomes a thorn in the
Editor Joe Drake Warner Bros. Pictures
Terry Gilliam’s Don Quixote debacle, or David Stacey Schroeder Erin Westerman International (UK) dictatorial Tommy’s side. Problems beset the lengthy
Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. (2001), a masterwork Production Designer Kelli Konop shoot, and the cast and crew are frustrated by Tommy’s
salvaged from a dumped TV series. While The Chris Spellman Hans Ritter amateurish approach, constant lateness and excessive
Music demands. Schklair exits the production after frequent
Room is unlikely to be reappraised any time soon, Dave Porter
Production Cast clashes with Tommy. Greg is offered a major TV
its afterlife as raucous roadshow ritual denotes opportunity but, because of Tommy’s rigidity with the
Sound Mixer James Franco
some kind of victory, albeit surely a pyrrhic one, Coleman Betts Tommy Wiseau shooting schedule, is unable to take it. Greg and Tommy
for Wiseau. In this sense, both The Room and The Costume Designer Dave Franco fall out when the film finally wraps. In 2003, Tommy
Brenda Greg Sestero
Disaster Artist prove exceptions to the old adage hosts a premiere of ‘The Room’, and is mortified when
Abbandandolo Seth Rogen
that you can’t polish a turd: while Wiseau saw Sandy Schklair the film is met with derisive laughter. However, Greg
Production Alison Brie convinces him that the reaction can be turned to the
his ‘disasterpiece’ evolve beyond his imagining, Companies Amber film’s advantage: in subsequent years, ‘The Room’ gains
Franco, for his part, has spun tragicomic gold A24 and New Line Ari Graynor notoriety as a cult phenomenon.
from the most tragic of base materials.

January 2018 | Sight&Sound | 69

FILMS OF THE MONTH
Ride with the devil: Christian Bale as the Native American-hating Captain Joe Blocker, tasked with escorting a Cheyenne chief back to his tribal homeland
Hostiles
Director: Scott Cooper
Reviewed by Philip Kemp
Spoiler alert: this review reveals key plot details
Hostiles wears its conscience on its sleeve – rather
too blatantly at times. Towards the end of Scott
Cooper’s film, a veteran US soldier, Master
Sergeant Thomas Metz (Rory Cochrane), who
at the outset has been seen boozily reminiscing
with his old comrade Captain Joe Blocker
(Christian Bale) about their shared good old days
slaughtering ‘savages’, solemnly tells a Native
American woman, “Our treatment of the natives
cannot be forgiven” – and this in 1892. We’ve
previously had advance warning of this kind of
anachronistic liberal piety, when Blocker and
Metz, along with the Native American family
70 | Sight&Sound | January 2018
they’re escorting back from New Mexico to their
homelands in Montana, arrive in Fort Winslow,
Colorado, where another of Blocker’s old army
comrades, Colonel Ross McCowan (Peter Mullan),
is CO. At dinner that evening, Mrs McCowan
(Robyn Malcolm) launches into a harangue
about the condition of the Native Americans
that could have been scripted by Oxfam, until
her embarrassed husband silences her.
All this feeds into the moral rehabilitation
of Blocker, whom we first meet watching with
satisfaction as his men round up a lone, unarmed
Apache and drag him along the ground with a
noose around his neck while his wife and child
scream in desperate appeal. Blocker – who,
we’re told, is said to have taken “more scalps
than Sitting Bull himself” – starts the film with
a visceral loathing of Cheyenne chief Yellow
Hawk (Wes Studi, impassively dignified), the
man he’s been ordered to escort by presidential
decree, excoriating him as a ruthless killer. No
sooner are he and his party clear of Fort Berringer,
their starting point, than Blocker orders Yellow
Hawk and his son Black Hawk to be placed in
chains for the journey. But by the time the chief
dies, 1,000 miles further on and some two hours
later, Blocker can gaze grief-stricken into his
eyes and tell him, “A part of me dies with you.”
Psychological and emotional journeys of this
kind have shown up before in Cooper’s work.
In his directorial debut, Crazy Heart (2009), Jeff
Bridges’s broken-down, booze-addicted country
and western singer meets a young reporter, played
by Maggie Gyllenhaal, who offers him a chance at
redemption. There’s a similar pattern in Out of the
Furnace (2013), Cooper’s previous collaboration
with Bale, in which the actor’s mill-worker
protagonist, fresh from jail, sets out to rescue his
brother from a merciless thug. And in the present
film, Blocker’s change of heart is paralleled by
that of Rosalee Quaid (Rosamund Pike), whose
first reaction to seeing the chief and his family
 detracts from the film’s more positive qualities.
The action scenes are powerfully and vividly
shot, especially the opening pre-credits sequence
in which we see Rosalee’s rancher husband and
all three children brutally slaughtered by the
Comanche as she only narrowly escapes, clutching
her dead baby’s blood-soaked body. The emotional
impact of this scene effectively prepares us for
Blocker’s hatred and contempt for all Native
Americans: his attitudes may well be appallingly
racist, but not, we have to concede, wholly
unmotivated. Furthermore, Cooper suggests that
they feed into something deeply embedded in
the American psyche. Following the Comanche
massacre and before we even meet Blocker, there
flashes up on the screen a quotation from D.H.
Lawrence: “The essential American soul is hard,
isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”
The acting, when the more didactic elements
of Cooper and the late Donald Stewart’s script
don’t get in the way, is consistently effective, with
honours going to Pike as the bereaved Rosalee.
When the soldiers find her sitting in her burnt-
out ranch house, the bodies of her slaughtered
children lying tenderly blanketed beside her, her
anguished quietness is more heart-wrenching
than any hysterical outburst could be. Bale, with
his wounded stare, brings off the shift in Blocker’s
character as convincingly as could be expected.
In one of the film’s edgiest scenes, he confronts
Philip Wills (Ben Foster), the prisoner condemned
to hang for murdering a Native American family.
“It could just as easily be you,” Wills tells him
The plot’s predictability, and
the intermittent sense that
we’re being fed a civics lesson,
regrettably detracts from the
film’s more positive qualities
Credits and Synopsis
Produced by Music Donald Stewart
Scott Cooper Max Richter
John Lesher Sound Designer
Ken Kao Craig Berkey Cast
Screenplay Costume Designer Christian Bale
Scott Cooper Jenny Eagan Captain Joseph
Based upon a Stunt Co-ordinator J. Blocker
manuscript by Doug Coleman Rosamund Pike
Donald Stewart Rosalee Quaid
Director of Production Wes Studi
Photography Companies Chief Yellow Hawk
Masanobu Takayanagi Waypoint Jesse Plemons
Editor Entertainment, Le soldier
is to scream with horror. Before long, however, Tom Cross Grisbi Productions Adam Beach
she’s bonding with his womenfolk, who lend her Production Designer Executive Producers Black Hawk
clothes, and helping them with the washing-up. Donald Graham Burt Will Weiske Rory Cochrane
(Which gets her kidnapped by some fur trappers, Fort Berringer, New Mexico, 1892. Veteran US cavalry
but no matter.) By the film’s final scene, she has captain Joseph Blocker, approaching retirement, is
adopted the only surviving member of the family, charged by Colonel Biggs with escorting Cheyenne chief
Yellow Hawk’s young grandson Little Bear. Yellow Hawk (who’s dying of cancer) and his family back
We’ve seen this plot trajectory in previous to their homelands in Montana. Blocker, who loathes
Native Americans and has killed many, at first refuses the
westerns, of course: in John Ford’s classic The assignment, but reluctantly capitulates when his pension
Searchers (1956) and, less solemnly, in Clint is threatened. With him he takes his right-hand man
Eastwood’s The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976). More Sergeant Tom Metz, Corporal Henry Woodson and two
recently, and in a very different historical context, younger soldiers, West Point graduate Lieutenant Rudy
it showed up in Martin Zandvliet’s Land of Mine Kidder and Private Philippe DeJardin. Once away from the
fort, Blocker has the chief and his son Black Hawk placed
(2015), in which Roland Møller’s virulently in chains. En route they encounter rancher Rosalee Quaid,
anti-German Danish sergeant gradually comes who’s seen her husband and three children slaughtered
to experience near-fatherly feelings for his by the Comanche, and take her with them. Blocker
exploited young German charges. But all this disregards Yellow Hawk’s warnings that the Comanche
means is that almost from the outset of Hostiles will attack again. They do; with the aid of Black Hawk and
we have a broad idea of what’s coming. Yellow Hawk, the attack is repelled, though Dejardin is
killed and Woodson badly wounded.
This predictability, and the intermittent sense In Fort Winslow, Colorado, they pick up a condemned
that we’re being fed a civics lesson, regrettably
with a malevolent grimace, and Bale’s contained
reaction shows that the sneer has hit home.
The overwhelming glory of Hostiles,
FILMS OF THE MONTH
though, is Masanobu Takayanagi’s widescreen
cinematography. With New Mexico and
Colorado depicting both themselves and adjacent
states, he brings a rich, sweeping majesty to
his landscape long shots, a lyrical sense of vast
untamed spaces that recalls the classic era of the
western. Time and again the distant prospect
of a row of riders crossing a deep verdant valley
or silhouetted against the skyline conjures
up memories of Sam Peckinpah or Anthony
Mann. If Takayanagi – who’s already proved
his worth on Silver Linings Playbook (2012) and
Cooper’s previous film Black Mass (2015) – isn’t
nominated for an Oscar on the strength of
this, there’ll be something seriously amiss.
But if there’s one major oversight in this film,
for all its epic scope, it’s that despite its sincerely
felt subject matter, everything is seen throughout
from the viewpoint of the white folks. We’re
only ever shown the Native Americans from
the outside, whether as shrieking killers (the
Comanche) or as dignified, empathetic individuals
with their own values (Yellow Hawk and his
family) – in other words, much the way Native
Americans have always been shown in the vast
majority of westerns. Of their own perspectives
we learn little or nothing. It’s significant that in
the film’s concluding scene, the only survivor of
Yellow Hawk’s family is its youngest member –
the child Little Bear, who’s being taken off to be
brought up by a white woman (Rosalee), and who
by way of a farewell gift is presented by Blocker
with a copy of Caesar’s Gallic Wars – in Latin.
Native American culture, one suspects, won’t get
much of a look-in in this boy’s future education. In
a film that makes such an eloquent and evidently
heartfelt plea on behalf of America’s native
peoples, their mistreatment and marginalisation,
it feels as if an opportunity has been missed.
Master Sergeant Moon Deer In Colour
Thomas Metz Tanaya Beatty [2.35:1]
Peter Mullan living woman Part-subtitled
Lieutenant Colonel Ryan Bingham
Ross McCowan Sergeant Malloy Distributor
Scott Wilson Robyn Malcolm Entertainment Film
Cyrus Minnie McCowan Distributors Ltd
Timothée Chalamet Pilou Asbaek
Private Philippe Stephen Lang
DeJardin David Midthunder
Ben Foster buffalo man
Philip Wills Paul Anderson
Jonathan Majors John Benjamin
Corporal Henry Hickey
Woodson Bill Camp
Q’orianka Kilcher Scott Shepherd
criminal, Philip Wills, convicted of murder, and his guard,
Sergeant Paul Malloy. When they move on, Woodson is
left behind at the fort. Rosalee, whose initial horror at the
sight of the Native Americans has turned to friendship,
is kidnapped, along with Black Hawk’s wife Elk Woman
and her sister Living Woman, by three fur trappers. Black
Hawk, Yellow Hawk and the soldiers rescue them, killing
the trappers. Metz tells Blocker he’s had enough and
leaves. Wills kills Kidder and escapes; Blocker finds his
body and Metz’s, the two having shot each other. As the
group arrives in Montana, Yellow Hawk dies. While the
survivors are building a cairn for him, rancher Cyrus
Hoade and his three sons arrive, armed, and order the
party off their land. In the shootout, all the Hoade men
are killed, along with Malloy, Black Hawk, Elk Woman and
Living Woman.
At the train station in Butte, Montana, Blocker – now
in civilian dress – sees off Rosalee and Little Bear, Yellow
Hawk’s young surviving grandson. As the train pulls out,
Blocker decides to board it.
January 2018 | Sight&Sound | 71
FILMS OF THE MONTH
Winds of change: Zhao Tao as Tao with Liang Jingdong as Liangzi in Jia Zhangke’s three-strand multi-generational portrait of modern China
Mountains May Depart
People’s Republic of China/France/Japan 2015
Director: Jia Zhangke
Certificate 12A 126m 23s
Reviewed by Nick Pinkerton
The nature of change is both constant and
abrupt, and this is nowhere truer today than
in the People’s Republic of China, whose
hurtle from cloistered tradition to WeChat
postmodernism writer-director Jia Zhangke
has made it his imperative duty to document.
One day you find with a start that years have
passed and a new world has gone up around
you while you’ve been too distracted to hear
the ongoing noise of its building – a rude
awakening approximated by the temporal
leaps of Jia’s latest, Mountains May Depart.
Jia has done something to this effect before, in
his sprawling Platform (2000), though previous
intrepid attempts to reconcile nostalgic ache
and the acceleration of history through timeline
play by Hong Kongers Stanley Kwan and Peter
Chan, in Rouge (1987) and Comrades: Almost
a Love Story (1996) respectively, may have led
the way. Platform began at the tapering-out
of the lunatic Cultural Revolution, following
from there through the gradual infiltration
of Western pop culture into Chinese life.
Mountains in a sense picks up where Platform
left off, at a moment when there’s still some
72 | Sight&Sound | January 2018
shine on imported pop, and begins with an
exuberant group dance to the Pet Shop Boys
song ‘Go West’. From here the film’s story goes
on to span a period of 25 years, broken into
three segments set in 1999, 2014 and 2025, the
last almost entirely in Australia, Jia’s address
of the Chinese diaspora experience. In this
space the movie touches on three generations
of Chinese: the twentysomethings of 1999,
Tao (Zhao Tao) and her two suitors Jinsheng
(Zhang Yi) and Liangzi (Liang Jingdong); Tao’s
father, a veteran of at least one of China’s wars;
and the child she has with Jinsheng, played as a
boy by Rong Zishan and in his teenage years by
Dong Zijian. Each section is distinguished by its
aspect ratio: 1999 is in the 1.33:1 Academy ratio;
2014 in 1.85:1; and 2025 in widescreen 2.35:1.
This format-shifting, once largely a relic of the
silent era, has begun to resurface in the digital
age in films such as Life of Pi (2012) and The Grand
Budapest Hotel (2014). There is no clear film-
historical motivation, of the kind that cued those
in Wes Anderson’s picture, for Jia’s shifts, but the
ever-expanding frame may be seen to underscore
the movie’s abiding, anxious preoccupation with
freedom, also evident in Jia’s scene construction –
he frequently inverts the traditional ‘establishing
shot to close-up’ order, ending scenes instead
with a long step back to situate characters in
their (often imposingly barren) environments.
He also gets jarring and sometimes exhilarating
effects from placing certain scenes in unexpected
proximity – the image of Tao giving birth, for
example, is immediately preceded by DV footage
of a coal truck losing part of its load as it struggles
to free itself from a ditch, a moment with no clear
narrative function. This is one of several instances
where Jia has inserted documentary material
that he shot with cinematographer and long-
time collaborator Yu Lik Wai during the years
covered in the movie. (Elsewhere, for instance,
an ecstatic disco dancer captured more than a
decade ago is dropped into a pivotal club scene.)
Jia and Yu have, unsurprisingly, made a movie
of taciturn eloquence, always sure-footed in
negotiating its discursive narrative construction,
even as it sometimes wobbles at the level of
performance. Jia has been the proverbial fair-
haired boy of the international festival circuit
for the run of the 21st century, and though
Mountains May Depart didn’t exactly break
this streak, its last chapter – the first extended
passage of primarily English-language cinema
the filmmaker has directed – has raised mild
concerns. The difficulties here are more or less
self-evident. Dong acquits himself well enough
in a part that calls for outpourings of emotion,
but this doesn’t efface one’s awareness that he
speaks without a trace of the appropriate accent
after his character has purportedly spent a
decade in Australia. The relationship between
May-September lovers Dollar and Mia (Sylvia
Chang) seems to spring from thematic rather
than physical necessity. And in imagining a

Jia’s filmography may tend
towards the austere, but there’s
every evidence here that the stern
student of Bresson is tapping a
melodramatic vein, making a
direct appeal to audience emotion
Wheel of fortune: Zhang Yi and Zhao Tao as husband and wife Jinsheng and Tao
near-future, Jia has been wary to avoid anything independently arrived at the same western points
that might trouble the Chinese censors, even of comparison for Jia’s love-triangle melodrama
tossing in a couple of bits that suggest the PRC’s that I did, Giant and Written on the Wind, and
FILMS OF THE MONTH
ascendancy over old commonwealths and being placed in the company of James Dean
republics: Australia circa 2025 has repealed laws and Robert Stack does Zhang Yi no favours.)
to become a gun nut’s paradise, while the US Where Mountains May Depart cuts cleanest
dollar is said to be in freefall against the rising and deepest, perhaps unsurprisingly, is when
renminbi. (These concessions are undercut by the it’s focused on Zhao Tao, Jia’s partner and
visual contrast between cloudless blue Oceania creative collaborator since they met during the
skies and steel-grey China, but nevertheless casting of Platform. In the opening chapter of
the officials took the bait – Mountains May their latest, the frame at times seems eagerly to
Depart got its mainland multiplex run.) follow her slightest move, as though the camera
Despite its flaws, I feel protective towards is under the influence of the same magnetic
the film’s maligned third chapter, for it finds attraction that has captured her two swains. In
Jia feeling his way into undiscovered country, the film’s central section, her raging evocation
and the very awkwardness of this exploration of grief at a parent’s death provides the movie
tends to add to the rising sense of poignancy, with its emotional core, the sense of home that
capped by a coup de cinéma reunion with you can’t go back to. She finally returns for a
Tao, seen in a bookending scene, dancing by coda that’s as tender a gift as a director has ever
herself to the song of her youth on a slagheap. given a favourite actress – and the other way
However, a feeling of goodwill can only go so around. It focuses on the quiet preparation of
far towards forgiving the presence of clumsy dumplings and the loud transports of song,
lines such as Dollar’s taunt to father Jinsheng: those fragments of culture just small enough
“It’s like Google Translate is your real son.” to cling on to against the currents of time.
The conception of Jinsheng’s character is in fact
the weakest element in Mountains May Depart, Credits and Synopsis
and any buckling that occurs in the third section
is predicted by the oversights that occur while
laying dramatic groundwork in the first, in which
Producers Office Kitano Cast
Ren Zhonglun presentation Zhao Tao
Tao must make her choice between poor-but- Jia Zhangke Office Kitano, Shen Tao
Nathanael Karmitz MK Productions, Zhang Yi
affable Liangzi and Jinsheng’s capitalist carnivore. Liu Shiyu Xstream Pictures, Zhang Jinsheng
As introduced, Jinsheng is a cipher, a transparent Shozo Ichiyama Shanghai Film Liang Jingdong
Written by Group Corporation, Liang Jangjung,
sociopath and a stand-in for everything glib and Jia Zhangke Runjin Investment ‘Liangzi’
shiny and ruthless that will emerge in the new Director of Supervised by China Dong Zijian
Photography Film Co-production
China of the 21st century, with precious little Yu Lik Wai Corporation
Zhang Daole, ‘Dollar’
Sylvia Chang
beyond his brand-new Volkswagen to recommend Editor Shanghai Film Mia
him as a suitor. Zhang Yi fails to imbue his Matthieu Laclau Group Corporation, Rong Zishan
Production Xstream Pictures Zhang Daole
character’s arrogance with even an undercurrent Designer (Beijing), MK as a child
of the sexual danger that might go some way Qiang Liu Productions, ARTE Liang Yonghao
Original France Cinéma Liu Liu
towards explaining Tao’s eventual choice. Soundtrack With the Yuan Wenqian
None of this is necessarily a demerit in a Yoshihiro Hanno participation of
Sound l’Aide aux cinémas Dolby Digital
filmography like Jia’s, which tends towards Yang Zhang du monde, Centre In Colour
the austere and the oblique. But there’s every Costume Designer national du cinéma [1.37:1]
Li Hua et de l’image
evidence here that the stern student of Bresson Subtitles
is tapping a melodramatic vein, making a direct ©Xstream Pictures
animée, Ministère
des Affaires Distributor
appeal to audience emotion – hence his key (Beijing)
Production
Étrangères et du
Developpement
Arrow Films
employment of pop songs (by Sally Yeh as well as Companies International,
Pet Shop Boys), those vehicles of inchoate longing A Shanghai Film Institut français
Chinese
theatrical title
Group Corp./ Beijing Runjin Shan he gu ren
and nostalgia. Never developing a sense of
some potential to be corrupted, the relationship
Xstream Pictures/
MK Prods./Beijing
Investment, Office
Kitano present
between Jinsheng and Tao lacks anything like Runjin Investment/
pathos, with Jinsheng verging on the ridiculous in
his final scenes, wearing a pasted-on moustache.
China, 1999. Up-and-coming capitalist Zhang Jinsheng
competes with coal-miner Liang Jangjung (‘Liangzi’)
(I note that the critic Jonathan Romney has for the love of local beauty Tao. Jinsheng wins her over.
An embittered Liangzi refuses Tao’s wedding invitation,
and leaves town. Tao bears Jinsheng a child.
Fifteen years later, Liangzi has a family of his
own. He suffers from a bad cough, and returns to
his hometown for medical attention. Cancer is
diagnosed. Looking for money to pay for Liangzi’s
treatment, his wife approaches Tao, now separated
from Jinsheng and their son Daole (‘Dollar’). When
Tao’s father dies, Dollar pays his mother a rare visit,
and she learns that he, Jinsheng and Jinsheng’s new
wife plan to relocate to Australia.
In 2025, Dollar is studying at a university in
Australia. He claims to have forgotten both his
estranged mother and his native language. Aimless,
he decides to drop out of college. He begins a
romance with his Chinese language professor
Mia, who acts as an interpreter in his contentious
conversations with his father, whose behaviour has
become paranoid. Dollar and Mia together plan and
then cancel a trip to China. Instead they go to the
seaside, where Dollar invokes his mother’s name.
Across the ocean, Tao, who now lives quietly alone,
appears to hear him. She dances on a slagheap to the
Pet Shop Boys song ‘Go West’.
January 2018 | Sight&Sound | 73
 A Bad Moms Christmas
Directors: Jon Lucas, Scott Moore
Certificate 15 104m 5s
Reviewed by Pamela Hutchinson
The awkwardly phrased title tells us that relaxed
parenting is now an entertainment franchise.
REVIEWS
So let’s all celebrate A Bad Moms Christmas, with
repeats of the most enjoyable scenes from the first
film – an orgy of destruction in a supermarket
is transferred to a shopping mall, a husband-
and-wife therapy session becomes mother-and-
daughter counselling – all draped in tinsel and
spray-on snow. For emphasis, many of these
sequences are played bafflingly in slow motion,
as if the exquisite joy of a humble food fight
cannot be savoured in real time. This follow-up is
once again written and directed by The Hangover
trilogy’s Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, and is largely
a tribute to the dubious success of the original
film and its rousing tagline: “Screw perfection”.
Amy Mitchell (Mila Kunis), the beleaguered
working mother from the first film, is newly
husband-free and enjoying a sexually fulfilling
relationship with handsome single dad Jessie.
However, she explains at length, all is not
tickety-boo, because she and her friends Kiki
and Carla are drowning in the arduous and
unfairly gender-biased work of preparing for
Christmas. The sequel swiftly drops this feminist
complaint (subject matter better tackled in
BBC2’s Motherland, anyway) in favour of a more
sentimental proposition: the volatile relationship
between mothers and daughters. Thus Amy is
at odds with her own ‘bad mom’ Ruth, whose
neuroses exaggerate Amy’s struggles with
perfectionism; Carla battles a yet more feckless
and libidinous version of herself in rock-’n’-roller
Isis; and mousy Kiki attempts to extricate herself
from her tragically clingy mother Sandy.
As in Bad Moms, the supporting actors steal
the show. Kristen Bell as frumpy Kiki and
Kathryn Hahn, especially, as the outrageously
candid beautician Carla, continue to bring
filthy humour and some welcome anarchy to
accompany Amy’s earnest maternal musings.
Happily, Hahn’s bravura comic delivery has
Credits and Synopsis
Produced by Christopher Lennertz & Scott Moore
Suzanne Todd Sound Executive Producers
Written by Matthew Nicolay Bill Block
Jon Lucas Costume Designer Mark Kamine
Scott Moore Julia Caston Wang Zhongjun
Director of Wang Zhonglei
Photography Production Felice Bee
Mitchell Amundsen Companies Donald Tang
Edited by STXfilms and Huayi Robert Simonds
James Thomas Brothers Pictures Adam Fogelson
Production Designer present a Suzanne Oren Aviv
Marcia Hinds Todd production Mila Kunis
Music A film by Jon Lucas
US, present day. Newly single mother Amy, housewife
Kiki and free-spirited Carla are preparing for their
respective family Christmases when their mothers
arrive for the holiday. Kiki’s mother Sandy is clingy,
while Carla’s mother Isis is a deadbeat gambler
looking for money. Amy’s mother Ruth is a highly
critical perfectionist who imposes her own ideas of
the perfect Christmas on her daughter’s household.
The three friends meet at the mall and decide to put
a stop to their mothers’ interference. So instead of
going to see ‘The Nutcracker’, Amy takes her children
and parents to an indoor trampoline park with Kiki,
Carla and their families. Here, the three grandmothers
meet and Amy and Ruth confront each other in a
vicious game of dodgeball. Kiki takes her mother
74 | Sight&Sound | January 2018
Deck the malls: Hahn, Kunis, Bell
earned her a nicely worked romantic storyline
in this sequel, as Carla falls for well-endowed
striptease artist Ty while waxing his scrotum.
The older generation muscle in on the
plaudits, too. Cheryl Hines is mostly grating
but rapidly sinister as the unhinged Sandy.
Susan Sarandon neatly underplays her ageing
rocker-mom Isis, though proves herself game
for the task of both pratfalling and engaging in
the film’s obsession with erotic dancing, which
spreads from an X-rated visit to Santa’s grotto
to Ty’s routines and an end-credits sequence in
which the whole (adult) cast gyrate. If you don’t
want to see Kenny G rub his crotch with his
saxophone, exit early. But the film belongs to
the wondrous Christine Baranski, majestically
comic as imperious mother-from-hell Ruth,
whether offering a snappy critique of Amy’s
many failings or parading her maternal virtues
via grand, expensive gestures – ‘breakfast
candy’ for her grandchildren, an outlandish
festive diorama on the lawn. She even allows
her magnificently pursed lips to quiver in
the inevitable reconciliation, when bad
moms realise that they can be bad daughters
too, or bad grandmothers, or all three.
Cast Justin Hartley In Colour
Mila Kunis Ty Swindel [2.35:1]
Amy Mitchell Christine Baranski
Kristen Bell Ruth Distributor
Kiki Susan Sarandon Entertainment Film
Kathryn Hahn Isis Distributors Ltd
Carla Dunkler Oona Laurence
Jane Mitchell
Jay Hernandez
Jessie Harkness Emjay Anthony
Dylan Mitchell
Cheryl Hines
Wanda Sykes
Sandy
Peter Gallagher Dr Karl
Hank
to a counselling session, but Sandy leaves. Carla
meets Ty, an attractive man, at work, but Isis disrupts
their date. Ruth forces Amy and her children to
accompany her in competitive carol-singing, leading
to a confrontation between the two women, after
which Ruth promises to let Amy enjoy the Christmas
she wants. On Christmas Eve, Isis leaves Carla after
borrowing a large sum of money; Sandy reveals
that she has bought the house next door to Kiki’s,
leading Kiki to demand her own space. Ruth throws
an extravagant party at Amy’s house; Amy shuts
the party down. The three grandmothers meet up at
church for Midnight Mass, where Amy reconciles with
Ruth. The families celebrate Christmas together, Ty
arrives and the grandmothers leave for Las Vegas.
Battle of Soho
United Kingdom 2017
Director: Aro Korol
Certificate 15 100m 42s
Reviewed by Nikki Baughan
For a film with such a combative title, this
documentary proves a surprisingly passive
experience. In turning his camera on London’s
Soho, once the epicentre of cultural expression
and now an increasingly homogenised real-estate
mecca, music-video director turned filmmaker
Aro Korol shines a light on the devastating
impact of corporate gentrification. Yet with
zero archive footage and little in the way of
editorial discipline, his film veers from heavy-
handed sentimentality to narrative incoherence.
It may be that this freeform approach is
intended to reflect Soho’s legendary refusal to
conform but, with no obvious point of access
for a wider audience, Battle of Soho seems more
vanity project than effective documentary.
The film opens with a salacious voiceover
from the late artist Johnny Deluxe, explaining
the centuries-old lure of the area. “Once upon a
time there was a Soho,” he drawls. “A legendary,
mythological, dangerous but intoxicatingly
existent Soho.” As he goes on to recall the glory
days of what interviewee Stephen Fry later calls
“the kingdom of bohemia”, Korol’s camera stalks
the streets and alleyways cloistered between
Oxford Street and Shaftesbury Avenue. Yet it’s
not the biggest of areas, and Korol runs out
of room way before the rambling narration
comes to an end. And so we see the same
pavements over and over again – by day, by
night, shot from below with dizzying depth of
field – while bemused pedestrians bustle past.
This odd opener sets the tone for a film that
is noble in intent yet padded way beyond its
natural shape. The lack of archive footage of
Soho’s heyday is a major problem; the only link
to the area’s eclectic past is through the rose-
tinted remembrances of those who experienced
it. True, there are many fascinating anecdotes
and astute viewpoints among them; individuals
from burlesque performer Rubyyy Jones to
rubber-clad conceptual artist Pandemonia speak
of the freedom Soho has given them to express
themselves, and they mourn the loss of its
unique identity. “There’s no space for people who
think differently,” laments designer Arkadius.
Yet there’s no sense here of any narrative
oversight. Interviewees are allowed to ramble
on, making the same point several times over,
or segueing into stories that are irrelevant and
– catastrophically for any documentary – dull.
Deluxe, for example, talks at extreme length
about his council landlords installing a new
bathroom light, in a story whose point about
diminished social housing is lost in the blather.
In keeping with Korol’s determination to
romanticise Soho, there’s scarcely a mention of
its less savoury elements; the fact that it built
an identity and economy on the objectification
of its sex workers, for example, or that it was
a violent place for many visitors. Only 1980s
pop star Marilyn offers any kind of balance,
suggesting that social evolution is something
to be embraced – though his views are laced
with an obvious personal bitterness about
his own treatment in Soho’s gay clubs.
Despite its geographically specific title, Korol
also uses his film to shout about cultural erosion
in other areas of the capital, including Camden

Bohemian rhapsody: Battle of Soho
and Vauxhall, focusing particularly on how the
construction of Crossrail is reshaping many parts
of the city. While the point is sound, one wishes
Korol had chosen to tell a single story well – the
passionate campaign to save iconic LGBTQ
venue Madame Jojo’s, for example – instead
of taking such a scattershot approach. This
haphazard feel is made even more pronounced
by a bizarre and overbearing score, which
blends everything from jaunty jazz to ethereal
panpipes at often woefully inappropriate times.
By the time the film ends, with an extended
sequence of choreographer Lindsay Kemp
rolling about on an Italian beach in a dance that
may symbolise something or nothing, Battle
of Soho is itself dancing on the edge of farce.
Ultimately, while the passion of those who
continue to fight for Soho is to be admired, this
film is an overstuffed exercise in nostalgia, whose
wilful disdain for context or form undermines
the important message at its heart.
Credits and Synopsis
Producer Phil White Aro Korol
Aro Korol Sound Recordist
Director of Andrea Cremonini In Colour
Photography [2.35:1]
Aro Korol ©The Aro Korol
Editor Company Ltd Distributor
Aro Korol Production Blue Dolphin
Art Director Company
Pawel Rosinski The Aro Korol
Original Company presents
Soundtrack Executive Producer
Filmmaker Aro Korol presents a portrait of London’s
Soho, once a place of cultural expression but now
an increasingly gentrified real-estate hotspot.
Through extensive interviews with those who have
traditionally considered Soho their stomping ground,
from artists and drag performers to LGBT activists,
as well as those campaigning to save the area’s iconic
venues from corporate redevelopment and Crossrail
expansion, Korol explores how the march of progress
can change an area beyond all recognition and have
a devastating impact on the people who live there.
Better Watch Out
Australia/USA 2016
Director: Chris Peckover
Certificate 15 89m 9s
Reviewed by Violet Lucca
Despite being stuck with an instantly forgettable
title, Better Watch Out is a plum addition to the
REVIEWS
Yuletide horror genre. Like Black Christmas (1974),
Chris Peckover’s film is intimately concerned
with the pathology of young, angry white
men, and manages to be truly disturbing while
remaining within the realms of believability.
Suburban preteen Luke (Levi Miller) is randy
for his babysitter Ashley (Olivia DeJonge),
and while his parents are attending some
interminable holiday party, he plies her with
a bottle of bubbly and hangdog sweet talk.
(Ashley already has a boyfriend, but Luke assures
her she’s too good for him – the classic ‘creep Window pain: Olivia DeJonge, Levi Miller
pretending to be a nice guy’ line of attack.)
His romantic interludes are interrupted by a submissive girl to serve his needs, and refuses
the sound of shattering glass and glimpses to accept that the blonde, conventionally
of a masked man with a shotgun prowling beautiful Ashley would dare to reject him. (He
around the house. After Luke grabs his dad’s also wants to humiliate any man who’s gotten
Glock (and Ashley’s leg), it’s revealed that the close to her, and does so with wild aplomb.) He
home invader is in fact Luke’s dorky best friend has no qualms about perpetrating violent and
Garrett (Ed Oxenbould) in disguise – Luke has immoral acts to cover up things that haven’t
orchestrated the whole thing to make himself gone his way; nothing is sacred, save for his own
look heroic and get into Ashley’s pants. She self-interest. In an age when many children
gives him a good dressing-down, as he has put in the US insist they have ADHD to get an
both of them in physical danger. He responds Adderall prescription (abusing the drug to get
by knocking her unconscious, and when she good grades) and their parents gladly assent,
wakes up, she finds herself duct-taped to a chair. Better Watch Out quietly taps into this particular
The roiling sadism that lies under Luke’s mindset in a way few narrative films dare to.
cute sweater vest dominates the rest of the film, It’s heartening to note that Peckover keeps
gradually escalating into some darkly comic things suspenseful and never shoots Ashley’s
gross-outs (including one inspired by Home Alone). body in a scopophilic manner, continually
Aside from his explicitly stated urges, Luke’s resisting the objectification Luke attempts to
actions are likely fuelled by the perfectionism and force on her. She’s a regular teenage girl, no
entitlement handed down to him by his parents smarter and no dumber, who ultimately rises to
– their spacious home and neatly manicured the challenges of some spectacular circumstances.
lawn provide a model incubator for it. (During a She provides a welcome alternative to the
quick clean-up towards the end of the film, Luke physically unbreakable superwomen of comic-
adjusts and readjusts the Christmas reindeer book films or the predictably unpredictable
lights on the roof: his parents would spot straight female characters of Netflix’s formulaic faux-
away if these were even slightly out of place.) cult TV programming. Although the ending
Rather like the Proud Boys – the alt-right/alt- leaves itself open to a sequel, let’s hope Peckover
lite organisation that “venerates the housewife” and co-writer Zack Kahn explore a different
and believes “the west is the best” – Luke wants part of the zeitgeist next time round.
Credits and Synopsis
Produced by Production Patrick Warburton Suburban America, present day, shortly before
Brett Thornquest Companies Robert Lerner Christmas. Seventeen-year-old Ashley arrives at Luke’s
Brion Hambel Storm Vision Virginia Madsen
Sidonie Abbene Entertainment Deandra Lerner house to babysit. Luke’s mother instructs her to give
Paul Jensen and Best Medicine him a sleeping pill, as he’s been sleepwalking again.
Written by Productions present In Colour After Luke’s parents leave, strange things begin to
Zack Kahn a Chris Peckover film [2.35:1] happen: a pizza is delivered, though no one has ordered
Chris Peckover Financed by Alceon
it; a brick is thrown through an upstairs window. Luke
Story Entertainment Distributor
Zack Kahn Partners Pty Ltd Universal Pictures and Ashley go to find Luke’s father’s gun. However,
Director of Executive Producers International Ashley discovers that the prowler is in fact Luke’s friend
Photography Steven Matusko UK & Eire Garrett in disguise – all part of a plan to make Luke
Carl Robertson Shane Abbess look brave so that he can impress and seduce Ashley.
Edited by Lorenzo De Maio Festival title
Julie-Anne De Ruvo Film Extracts Safe Neighborhood She yells at Luke, and he knocks her down the stairs. He
Production Designer The Bind (2011) ties her to a chair and starts playing truth or dare with
Richard Hobbs her and Garrett. He forces her at gunpoint to invite her
Original Music Score boyfriend Ricky over. When Ricky arrives, Luke tapes
Brian Cachia Cast
Production Sound Olivia DeJonge
him to a chair too, eventually killing him. Ashley almost
Recordist Ashley escapes, but is knocked out. Garrett gropes Ashley, so
Mark Cornish Levi Miller Luke kills him. Luke invites Ashley’s ex-boyfriend over
Costume Designer Luke and frames him for the murders. He stabs Ashley in the
Anna Cahill Ed Oxenbould
neck, then gets into bed, pretending that he has slept
Stunt Co-ordinator Garrett
Andy Clarke Aleks Mikic through the evening’s events thanks to the sleeping
Ricky pill. His parents arrive home. Luke sees Ashley being
©SVE BMP Safe Dacre Montgomery put into an ambulance – she used duct tape to bind her
Holdings Pty Ltd Jeremy neck wound, preventing her from bleeding to death.
January 2018 | Sight&Sound | 75
 Bingo The King of the Mornings Blade of the Immortal
Brazil/USA 2017 Japan/United Kingdom/South Korea 2017
Director: Daniel Rezende Director: Miike Takashi
Certificate 18 140m 56s

Reviewed by Pamela Hutchinson Reviewed by Roger Clarke

Spike-haired children’s favourite Bozo the Clown This is the 100th feature
first appeared on TV in 1949 and became a See Feature from Miike Takashi, a figure
REVIEWS

massive sensation once the show was franchised on page 52 in world cinema who has
across the US and then around the globe. After no peer in fecundity and
decades of delighting children, his distinctive occasional exceptional quality.
bounce and chuckle reached a more adult It’s Miike’s first samurai film since Hara-Kiri:
audience in the form of the character he loosely Death of a Samurai (2011), and isn’t what you’d
inspired in The Simpsons: boozy, lecherous Krusty call a classic swordplay movie – it contains too
the Clown. Bingo: The King of the Mornings falls many modern grotesque and fanciful elements.
somewhere between the sweet slapstick of Bozo Miike first caught the world’s attention in
and the venality of Krusty. It’s a comic biopic 1999 with the pin-sharp J-horror refinement
of sorts, a fiction informed by the life story of Audition; two years later, a publicity stunt for Ichi
Arlindo Barreto, the former softcore porn star the Killer saw special-edition sick bags handed
who portrayed Bozo on Brazilian TV in the 1980s. out to critics at the Toronto International Film
Bingo is the first feature directed by Daniel Festival. Most of Miike’s movies have failed to
Rezende, an acclaimed editor (City of God, The find distribution in the UK, and at the same time
Tree of Life), and it’s an enthrallingly seedy rise- we have reached a point where a retrospective
and-fall tale in the Scorsese mode, with a punchy, would be almost overwhelming. Miike is
kitschy aesthetic borrowed from the primary like Japanese cinema’s permanent migraine
colours of children’s television sets and the headache: a painfully brilliant and painfully
glaring neon of nightclub decor. Vladimir Brichta Joking apart: Vladimir Brichta, Tainá Müller problematic director who never goes away.
stars as Augusto Mendes, a porn actor hoping Working with UK producer Jeremy Thomas
to find work in the mainstream of Brazilian to Bingo betrays an outsized personality and for the third time on a jidaigeki film, Miike has
showbiz. His young son Gabriel (Cauã Martins) a man perpetually hungry for attention and to some extent gone back to basics with Blade
wants him to appear in a children’s film, but sensation. His other appetites, for women, of the Immortal. Spurts of bodily fluid, once a
he has his eye on a lucrative recurring role in a booze and cocaine, will hobble his career, but trademark, are notably absent. Filmed in black-
soap opera. When he attends a casting call for a it’s his addiction to the spotlight that defines and-white, the first few minutes of the film call
soap at a TV studio, he spots a queue of clowns him. When he misses Gabriel’s birthday to mind the past glories of Japanese cinema,
auditioning for the role of Bingo, and scents the party, his son poignantly rings into Bingo’s as our hero Manji (played by pop idol Kimura
chance to reach an even broader audience. live phone-in to point out that his father plays Takuya) fights and kills 100 men, before a
Brichta, whose Joker smile is so dazzlingly with every other kid in Brazil except him. mysterious old crone infects him with some
broad as to be diminished rather than accentuated Rezende may be best known for his cuts, but it genre-heavy ‘blood worms’ (see also Guillermo
by the clown makeup, is a captivating actor, is the unbroken tracking shots that distinguish del Toro’s The Strain) to make him unkillable.
clearly relishing this exuberant role. The Bingo’s style. Scenes set on the studio floor are As is often the way with this kind of
same could be said for Augusto: his Bingo sails captured in single, impressively choreographed supernatural gift, ‘Hundred Killer’ Manji’s
close to the wind on live TV, humiliating a sweeps; towards the end of the film, digital immortality does not mean an avoidance of pain
child bully to win over the kids, and dropping trickery creates a gliding shot from the scene or scarring, and indeed over the centuries he will
some occasionally risqué improvisation into of a bloody accident to the patient in bed in a become nothing but an unrecognisable mass of
his routine to amuse the adults. Pointedly, he hospital across the city. While the cliché of a granulated tissue. Perhaps he realises this, for he
gains the part by tickling the crew with an clown’s tears inevitably appears here, the most withdraws from society and becomes a hermit.
obscene joke in Portuguese at the expense of memorable bodily fluid spilled is the blood from Fifty years pass. He is visited by a girl, Rin (Sugisaki
the uncomprehending American executive. Augusto’s red nose, evidence of his pre-show Hana), who wants to hire him to exact revenge on
The excessive energy that Augusto brings cocaine bump, dripping directly on to the lens. the rogue samurai group who murdered her father.
Luckily for her, she’s the spit-and-image of Manji’s
Credits and Synopsis dead sister, so Manji accepts the commission.
But in fact the rogue samurai turn out to have a
Produced by Produced with public Angélica Brazil, the 1980s. Augusto, a divorced actor appearing genuine grievance, and by the end of the film it
Caio Gullane funds operated Ana Lücia Torre in softcore porn, promises that for once he will make is no longer clear who the enemy really is – the
Fabiano Gullane and managed by Marta Mendes
Debora Ivanov Agência Nacional do Emanuelle Araújo a film that his young son Gabriel can watch. When story is more about class war and establishment
Written by Cinema - ANCINE Gretchen attending a casting call for a soap opera, he stumbles treachery than loyalty and dojos, which is
Luiz Bolognesi BRDE - Banco Pedro Bial on an audition to play Bingo the Clown, the host of a where Miike departs from his early forebears.
Script Collaborator Regional de Armando, director popular US TV series for children, which is transferring
Fábio Meira Desenvolvimento of TV Mundial
to Brazil. He gets the part, after mocking the producer Kimura gives his character a wiry, neurotic
Director of do Extremo Sul, Domingos
Photography FSA - Fundo Setorial Montagner in Portuguese during his test. His first appearance as unhappiness. His existence is nothing but
Lula Carvalho do Audiovisu-al, Aparicio, clown Bingo is a flop, and though he blames the cheesy script, countless muscle-shearing regenerations, and the
Editor Agência Nacional do Soren Hellerup he apprentices himself to a circus clown to improve power of endurance is hardly the power of force –
Márcio Hashimoto Cinema - ANCINE Peter Olsen his physical comedy. He begins to improvise on set,
Art Director Investor: BB DTVM Fernando Sampaio if anything, his skills appear to have deteriorated
which works, though his material is sometimes risqué.
Cássio Amarante Sponsor: AB Nando, clown
As Augusto becomes a bigger star, and Bingo triumphs
since he was ‘alive’. The deceptively sweet face of
Original Soundtrack Concessões, Protégé Cauã Martins
Beto Villares Executive Producers Gabriel Mendes in the ratings, he neglects Gabriel and overindulges Sugisaki, meanwhile, is little troubled by either
Sound Recordist Ana Saito in alcohol and cocaine. He attempts to seduce the derangement or anger as she portrays both the
Jorge Rezende Gabriela Tocchio In Colour
Costume Designer Claudia Büschel [2.35:1]
director, Lúcia, a teetotal Christian, but she rejects sister who has lost her mind and the combative
Verônica Julian Caio Gullane Subtitles him. Frustrated at not being able to reveal that he is practitioner of Mutenichi-ryu who seeks vengeance.
the famous Bingo, Augusto writes the treatment for a Various battles with grotesque foes pepper
©Gullane/Warner/ Distributor soap opera in which he will star under his own name,
Empyrean Cast Miracle but by now his drinking is out of control. Augusto’s the long landscape of blasted heaths and blood-
Production Vladimir Brichta Communications soaked dojos (the film runs for almost two and a
Companies Augusto Mendes, mother, an actress who was attempting her own TV
A Gullane production ‘Bingo’ Brazilian comeback, dies while he is on a binge. He is sacked half hours). At one point, Manji battles a fellow
In co-production Leandra Leal theatrical title when his drug use causes his nose to bleed on air. immortal, older than he is, who has adopted the
with Warner Bros. Lúcia Bingo O Rei Gabriel is taken away after Augusto’s neglect puts him
In association with Augusto Madeira das Manhãs mien of an animated corpse – which is perhaps
in danger. After accidentally cutting his wrist, Augusto
Empyrean Pictures, Vasconcelos
stops drinking. He performs at Lúcia’s church as Bingo.
also Manji’s destiny. Finally, he tracks down the
TV Cultura Tainá Müller
androgynous leader of the rogue samurai, whose

76 | Sight&Sound | January 2018

 Brawl in Cell Block 99
USA 2017
Director: S. Craig Zahler
Certificate 18 132m 14s

Reviewed by Anton Bitel

Spoiler alert: this review reveals a plot twist
“I’m not really interested in the economy,” says

REVIEWS
Bradley Thomas (Vince Vaughn) at the beginning
of Brawl in Cell Block 99. Intercepted by his boss
Dean in front of the car repair shop where he
works, Bradley – who will come to be defined by
his stoic resignation in the face of harsh realities
– is cutting short Dean’s excuses for laying him
off, even if America’s downsized economy is, in a
way, this film’s principal subtext, much as it was
in David Mackenzie’s neo-western Hell or High
Water (2016). Bradley, who has a poetic turn of
phrase to match his brute strength, then arrives
home to discover that his wife Lauren (Jennifer
Carpenter), still not over the trauma that a recent
miscarriage has wrought on their marriage, has
been having an affair. In a rage, he proceeds to
take apart Lauren’s car with his bare, bleeding
fists, before calmly entering their low-rent house
(festooned with US flags) and announcing that
they “should start again, try to have another
baby”, and declaring that he is going to commence
working again as bagman for drug dealer Gil
(Marc Blucas) until they are back on their feet.
My sword is my bond: Sugisaki Hana If this sequence shows Bradley at what we
imagine is rock bottom, trying to claw his way out
followers sport modern haircuts and have a Crane shots are used as little as possible, of a cyclical trap of addiction (both the Thomases
range of weapons at their disposal so outlandish as is wire-fighting. Beginning in magisterial are recovering alcoholics), exclusion and financial
and impractical that nothing like them has monochrome, the film turns to colour at the straits, the next time we see him, 18 months later,
been seen on screen since the gynaecological moment of immortality, when Manji is, as it were, all his efforts working for Gil appear to have
instruments in David Cronenberg’s Dead not in Kansas, or Kyoto, any more. Violence is paid off. He is now living with Lauren in a much
Ringers (1988); they seem more like eruptive mostly close up, with regular DP Kita Nobuyasu bigger home, she is pregnant again, and they are
thought-forms in steel than actual weapons. occasionally pulling back to show the full happy together just waiting for their child to
The film is based on a famous manga by post-mortem horror. Great attention is paid to arrive and their American dream of family and
Samura Hiroaki, which was begun in 1993 soundscape and foley capture, and the more comfort to be fully realised. Yet the film’s title
and continued for 19 years. Miike is not outlandish special effects – such as the blood promises a certain prison-bound trajectory, and
intimidated. He has said in interviews that he worms shooting out from a severed wrist to when Gil orders Bradley to work with two men
doesn’t much read manga these days, but he’s drag back a detached hand – are rarely used. in the employ of new Mexican meth supplier
certainly a master of translating it to cinema. That Miike’s 100th film should rest Eleazar (Dion Mucciacito), he is soon in trouble
He’s not hidebound by two-dimensional ideas within his top ten is a relief to anyone who with the law, and headed for a relatively brief
and dawdling manga introversions, and is so admires his protean qualities. If ever there stint (but long enough to ruin his relationship
profoundly practised in the skills of cinema was a need to step up to the mark, this was with his new daughter) in, well, not cell block
that he finds an equivalence with ease. it. Long live Miike, the hundred killer. 99, but a modern medium-security detention
centre. Eleazar’s reach is long, however, and when
Credits and Synopsis Lauren and their unborn baby come under serious
threat, Bradley – undeniably a criminal, but also
Produced by Nakamura Jun Kodansha, J Storm, Okawa Nao Kuroi Sabato Dolby Digital
essentially a decent man with a moral compass
Jeremy Thomas Costume and Recorded Picture Aranami Osamu Kuriyama Chiaki In Colour and – finds himself racing once more to the bottom,
Saka Misako Character Design Company, CJ Hyakurin Black & White in a new hellhole where he must rely not only
Maeda Shigeji Maeda Yuya E&M, OLM, KEN Mitsushima [2.35:1]
Screenplay Swordfight ON Inc., GYAO Cast Shinnosuke Subtitles on his native wits but also on the sheer physical
Oishi Tetsuya Choreography In association with Kimura Takuya Magatsu Taito violence that he has long been suppressing.
Based on the manga Tsujii Keiji Rakueisha, Toei Manji Kaneko Ken Distributor
by Samura Hiroaki Deguchi Masayoshi Studios Kyoto Sugisaki Hana Shido Hishiyasu Arrow Films Brawl in Cell Block 99 is the second feature
Cinematographer Led and distributed Rin Asad/Machi Yamamoto Yoko written and directed by S. Craig Zahler, and those
Kita Nobuyasu ©“Blade of the by Warner Bros. Fukushi Sota Yaobikuni Japanese
Edited by Immortal” Film Pictures Japan Anotsu Kagehisa Ichikawa Ebizo theatrical title
who recall the grotesque body horror in the
Yamashita Kenji Partners Executive Producers Ichihara Hayato Shizuma Eiku Mugen no junin third act of his ‘weird western’ Bone Tomahawk
Production Designer Production Kameyama Keiji Shira Tanaka Min (2015) will be expecting this latest feature to
Matsumiya Toshiyuki Companies Yoshiba Osamu Toda Erika Habaki Kagimura
Music Film Partners: Warner Peter Watson Otono-Tachibana Yamazaki Tsutomu somehow end not only in the titular cell block
Endo Koji Bros. Pictures Japan, Jeong Tae-Sung Makie Ibane Kensui but also in an explosion of visceral carnage. Zahler
Recording TV Asahi Corporation, Okuno Toshiaki Kitamura Kazuki
certainly does not disappoint, nor hold back.
Japan, the Edo era. Manji is a samurai in the service of known as the Itto-ryu, who seek to change the social For though Bradley has a crucifix prominently
a shogun. One day, in a moment of rage, he turns on order of Japan. Asano’s daughter Rin wants revenge tattooed on the back of his shaven head, and
his corrupt fellow samurai and dispatches six of them. and is advised to seek out the legendary ‘Hundred enters prison with pierced hands and feet, the
In doing so, he also kills the husband of his vulnerable Killer’. She finds a dishevelled and depressed Manji
sister Machi, and the incident upsets the balance living in eremite squalor in the countryside. Manji
way that he will eventually perform his ritual
of her mind. With a bounty on his head, Manji kills takes on the Itto-ryu, who are trying to do a deal acts of worship – in what is a sort-of Christian
another 100 men after they entrap him and murder with the establishment, and fights a fellow immortal parable of fall and redemptive self-sacrifice – is
Machi. An old woman comes to his aid, infecting him who has a poison that can disable their kind. But through the backs of other men’s skulls.
with ‘blood worms’ that appear to make him unkillable. finally Manji sides with Anotsu, head of the Itto-ryu, The build-up to this transition is slow and
Fifty years pass. A powerful dojo is attacked and the when it becomes clear that the establishment has
deliberate. The film begins in a place
master Asano killed by a new group of young samurai double-crossed them. A lengthy showdown ensues.
of social realism and then shifts to a

January 2018 | Sight&Sound | 77

 A Caribbean Dream
United Kingdom/Barbados 2017
Director: Shakirah Bourne
Certificate PG 82m 27s

Reviewed by Nick Pinkerton

On stage or screen, any ambitious contemporary
mounting of a Shakespeare play is likely to
REVIEWS

employ a hook of some kind to shake up the

familiar material, and writer-director Shakirah
Bourne puts hers right in the title of her
adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The
scene of A Caribbean Dream is Barbados, where
Bourne cut her teeth working on run-and-gun
independent productions, including two-and-
counting Payday films, among the island’s
very few homegrown blockbusters. On the
strength of these early successes, Bourne has
strung together funding enough to command
the grounds of the 18th-century Fustic House
in the northern parish of St Lucy, where
much of her film takes place, and to assemble
a mixed Anglo-Barbadian cast and crew.
The course of true love never did run smooth,
and the course run in translating Shakespeare
to the cinema is rarely less rocky. Conjuring
up a distinctly Bajan Bard, Bourne has made
culturally specific alterations where possible:
spouge music peps up the soundtrack; the play-
within-a-play performed by Quince, Bottom
and company has been changed from the
story of Pyramus and Thisbe to a piece of local
The demon clink: Vince Vaughn folklore, the tale of King Ja Ja and Young Becka;
and several ‘stolen’ scenes set at the Crop Over
contemporary prison setting that is no almost cartoonish world, recognisable only from festival are incorporated into the action. The
less realistic. But by the time Bradley has other genre movies, is also a generic repetition of colourful carnival costumes do something to
violently manipulated his way into cell block the same traps that have afflicted Bradley since engild the night, though more often the efforts
99 in a different, maximum-security/minimum- the film’s beginning, right down to conspicuous to create an atmosphere of enchantment with
freedom facility, the film has crossed over to the verbatim iterations of several lines of dialogue. It is strung-up Christmas lights result in a distinctly
realms of pure genre, complete with a sadistic almost as though, no matter the filmic vocabulary garden-party look, and cinematographer
warden (Don Johnson), a fixer played by king of of Bradley’s American nightmare, he can never Robin Whenary hasn’t got chops enough to
Euro-exploitation Udo Kier, a kung-fu-fighting escape the reality of the underlying economics, disguise the movie’s budgetary limitations.
goon (Jonathan Lee), an underground Korean and his different, mostly downwardly mobile In imagining the realm of the fairies,
abortionist (Tobee Paik) and ultra-gory slayings misadventures are always just variations on the Bourne seems perhaps to be under the spell of
in a hidden prison-within-the prison that is also same themes of abandonment, hopelessness Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle’s 1935
a torture chamber. Yet this entirely artificial, and resiliently rugged individualism. film of the same play, or to have absorbed
its widespread visual influence from some
Credits and Synopsis other second-hand source. Unfortunately,
the creative resources simply aren’t here for a
similarly lapidary approach to the material.
Produced by Sound Mixer A film by S. Bradley Thomas Mr Irving Devon Windsor
Dallas Sonnier Mikhail Sterkin Craig Zahler Jennifer Carpenter Clark Johnson Jill A more instructive guiding light might have
Jack Heller Costume Designer Executive Producers Lauren Thomas Detective Watkins Jonathan Lee been Matías Piñeiro’s recent no-budget Hermia
Written by Vanessa Porter Will Staeger Marc Blucas Udo Kier Johnny Mu
S. Craig Zahler Stunt Co-ordination Michael Antinoro Gil placid man Tobee Paik & Helena, which did honour to Shakespeare’s
Director of Drew Leary Rebecca Sanhueza Mustafa Shakir Don Johnson doctor text by almost totally discarding it, distilling
Photography Marco J. Henry Andre Warden Tuggs Adam Mucci
Benji Bakshi ©BCB99, Inc. Nate Bolotin Thomas Guiry Pooja Kumar Dean
something of the emotional essence of the play
Editor Production Nick Spicer Wilson Denise Pawthur and decanting it into a totally different vessel.
Greg D’Auria Companies Jack Nasser Dion Mucciacito Victor Almanzar In Colour
Production Designer Assemble Media, Joseph Nasser Eleazar Pedro [1.85:1]
Piñeiro created a remarkably sensual film
Frederick Waff Cinestate and IMG Will Evans Geno Segers Calvin Dutton on the cheap by devising an intimate visual
Songs and Score Films present in Roman Sean Distributor language of insert shots and by using as raw
Composed by association with Willie C. Carpenter Michael Medeiros Munro Film Services
Jeff Herriott Realmbuilder Cast Lefty man with materials only what was at hand – his friends
S. Craig Zahler Productions Vince Vaughn Fred Melamed mismatched eyes from Buenos Aires and New York City, and the
New York, present day. Tow-truck driver Bradley Thomas In jail, a visitor known as ‘the Placid Man’ tells Bradley
streets, flats and parks of his two hometowns.
is laid off work, and on the same day discovers that that he must kill Christopher Bridge, an inmate in cell An air of clenched charm lies heavy over A
his wife Lauren has been unfaithful – a response block 99 of the Redleaf maximum-security prison,
to a recent miscarriage. Though angry, Bradley or the abducted Lauren and her unborn baby will be
tells Lauren that he wants to try again to make a harmed. After hospitalising two guards, Bradley is
family with her, in a bigger house, but that to do so transferred to cell block 12 of Redleaf; he instigates
he must go back to working for drug dealer Gil. a yard brawl, which results in him being moved to cell
Eighteen months later, Bradley and Lauren are block 99. Brutalised there, he realises that Christopher
living in a better house and she is pregnant. Gil Bridge doesn’t exist: Eleazar, also now an inmate,
has a new business partner, Eleazar, and Bradley is orchestrating his revenge for his financial losses
must reluctantly work alongside his hotheaded and incarceration. Bradley overcomes his guards,
henchmen. When a drugs pick-up is raided, Bradley kills Eleazar’s three henchmen and forces Eleazar
stops the henchmen killing the policemen. Bradley to call the Placid Man and order Lauren’s release.
is arrested; his refusal to name his associates Bradley then kills Eleazar, and waits resignedly to
earns him seven years at a detention centre. be executed himself by brutal warden Tuggs.
Fairy game: Keshia Pope, Sam Gillett

78 | Sight&Sound | January 2018

 Daddy’s Home 2
USA 2017
Director: Sean Anders
Certificate 12A 99m 32s

Caribbean Dream, from the laboured twinkle Reviewed by Anna Smith

of Patrick Michael Foster’s peeping Puck to The 2015 comedy Daddy’s Home saw alpha male
the chintzy whorls of CG fairy dust. In brief Dusty (Mark Wahlberg) lock horns with his

REVIEWS
flashes, however, there are hints of another, children’s new stepfather Brad (Will Ferrell). But,
altogether livelier movie – in the rudely real with their rivalry effectively resolved in the first
moments at the Crop Over festival, or the film, this festive sequel – again directed by Sean
image of Keshia Pope as Helena, her neon-pink Anders – must gather kindling to inflame the
ensemble showing bright against the forest at fire. Step forward Mel Gibson as Dusty’s father
night. Once these have passed, one is only left Kurt, a former astronaut who pours scorn on
with a movie that neither turns its limitations mild-mannered Brad and his father Don. With
into strengths, as Piñeiro’s did, nor has the raw the extended family gathered for Christmas,
charm of amateur exuberance, as in Quince and sparks fly, but they are best when serving a
Bottom’s play, taunted by Theseus and Hippolyta comic purpose rather than a dramatic one.
in proto-Mystery Science Theater 3000 style. As with the first film, the comically gifted
That Bourne has hoisted herself from Ferrell provides most of the laughs as man-child
a tiny Bajan filmmaking scene on to an Brad, whose accident-prone nature entertains
international stage shows impressive drive on a basic level, whether he’s being knocked Dad’s barmy: Mark Wahlberg, Will Ferrell
and hustle, but if the true intent of A Caribbean on the head by a swing or electrocuted in the
Dream is all undoubtedly for our delight, pursuit of a Christmas tree (“Did Brad die again?” victory for audiences of a liberal disposition.
the results are something else entirely. asks a child at one point). He’s also involved Elsewhere, it’s a case of middle-class problems
in the only sentimental moments that feel that are seriously hard to care about, from a
Credits and Synopsis remotely genuine: those between him and fight about a thermostat affecting heating
his father, tenderly played by John Lithgow. costs in a huge house to an argument about
After an amusing first appearance, Gibson’s who will split an unexpected $20,000 bill
Produced by Caribbean Film Aden Gillett
Melissa Simmonds Productions Ltd Theseus hostile, selfish character has nowhere to go: no (with their large homes and lavish cars, there’s
Lynette Eastmond Executive Sonia Williams redeeming features, no path to redemption. And a sense that any of these adults could easily
Written by Producers Hippolyta
Shakirah Bourne Christian Roberts Simon Alleyne once again, wives Sara and Karen have little afford it). Product placement is as liberal as it
Adapted by Keith Morris Peter Quince role to play outside of the men’s arguments – was in the first film, and while the conclusion
Shakirah Bourne Lorna Gayle
Melissa Simmonds Bottom the
though there is an odd scene in which the pair preaches inclusivity and community values, it
Inspired by William Cast fisherwoman go shopping and Karen reveals an interest in also functions as an evangelical advertisement
Shakespeare’s Jherad Alleyne Angelo Lascelles
A Midsummer Lysander Hook
shoplifting (a remnant of the cutting-room floor, for the Church of Cinema. After a bust-up in
Night’s Dream Marina Bye Ishiaka McNeil perhaps?). Played by Victoria’s Secret model a nativity scene, the family split and reunite
Director of Hermia Line Alessandra Ambrosio, Karen is supposed to be a with the festive hordes in a heavily branded
Photography Keshia Pope Matthew Murrell
Robin Whenary Helena Sinker bestselling author, but this seems to be an excuse multiplex on Christmas Day. Brad takes to his
Editor Sam Gillett Levi King to have her scribbling in a book while looking makeshift pulpit in the foyer and proclaims the
Liz Webber Demetrius Phil/events manager
Art Director Ahwe Birdman Patrick Michael beautiful rather than actually talking. There is importance of sharing the joy of entertainment
Leandro Soto Ahwe Birdman Foster a token gesture to gender parity when daughter with both family and neighbours – along
Music Composer Mikkel Broby Puck/butler
Andre Woodvine little boy
Megan turns out to be the gun fan, rather than with a generous helping of popcorn and cola.
Sound Recordist Anthony Troulan In Colour her brother, though given that this is used to In a self-congratulatory note, Daddy appears
Jim Greenhorn Egeus [2.35:1]
Costume for Adrian Green
support Kurt’s pro-gun position, it’s a hollow to be most at home in the cinema itself.
Mortal World Oberon/head Distributor
Luna Blandford of gardening Verve Pictures Credits and Synopsis
Susannah Harker
Production Titania/head of
Company housekeeping
Produced by Executive Producers Distributor Suburban US, the present. Brad and his wife Sara
Will Ferrell Molly Allen Paramount have a baby, Griffy. Brad amicably shares parenting
Present-day Barbados, in a dream imagining. Father Adam McKay Sean Anders Pictures UK
Egeus hopes to wed daughter Hermia to Demetrius, Chris Henchy Mark Wahlberg duties with Dusty, the biological father of Sara’s other
but Hermia loves Lysander, while the spurned Helena John Morris Stephen Levinson children, Megan and Dylan, who live with Sara and
carries a torch for Demetrius. Meanwhile, word Kevin Messick Brad. Brad’s sensitive father Don arrives for Christmas
Written by at the same time as Dusty’s macho dad Kurt. Along
of a talent show to be held on the occasion of the Sean Anders Cast
marriage of Duke Theseus and Queen Hippolyta with Dusty’s wife Karen and her daughter Adrianna,
John Morris Will Ferrell
attracts the attention of a group of fishermen, led Based on characters Brad Whitaker they spend Christmas together in a grand log cabin in
by Peter Quince; they decide to launch an amateur created by Mark Wahlberg New England. The trip has been orchestrated by Kurt,
production based on the Barbadian folk story of King Brian Burns Dusty Mayron who seeks to cause tension between Dusty and Brad,
Director of Linda Cardellini whom he feels is a weakening influence on his son.
Ja Ja and Young Becka. In the nearby jungle, fairy Photography Sara
king Oberon feuds with his queen, Titania. To avenge Julio Macat John Cena Initially, Kurt succeeds: Dusty and Brad disagree
himself on his wife, he sends henchman Robin ‘Puck’ Edited by Roger about how best to advise Dylan about girls, and
Goodfellow to make her fall in love with a jungle beast Brad Wilhite John Lithgow Brad inadvertently fells a pylon while trying to get a
Production Designer Don Christmas tree, with costly results. Dusty suspects
through the use of a magic potion. Puck’s bumbling Clayton Hartley Mel Gibson
instead sends Titania into the arms of Quince’s star Music Kurt
that the reason Don has come to visit without his wife
player, Bottom, who is dressed as a Blackbelly sheep; Michael Andrews Scarlett Estevez is because they are divorcing. During an outing to an
Puck also causes both Demetrius and Lysander, Supervising Megan improv night at which Don is selected to go on stage,
dosed with the same potion, to transfer their Sound Editors Owen Wilder Dusty suggests they improvise around the subject of
Andrew DeCristofaro Vaccaro ‘divorce’. Don breaks down, revealing his secret, and
affections to Helena. The following morning, thanks Darren Sunny Dylan
to Puck’s machinations, Titania, Bottom and Lysander Warkentin Alessandra Brad is furious with Dusty. Brad invites Adrianna’s
awaken in the belief that the previous evening’s Costume Designer Ambrosio father Roger to the cabin, goading Dusty. All the men
events were only a dream, though Demetrius remains Carol Ramsey Karen fall out and take their families off for Christmas, but
Scarlett Estevez an avalanche means they are stuck and spend the day
besotted with Helena. This sets the stage for a triple ©Paramount Pictures Megan
wedding – of Theseus and Hippolyta, Hermia and Corporation Didi Costine
together in the cinema. After a group rendition of ‘Do
Lysander, and Helena and Demetrius – at which Production Adrianna They Know It’s Christmas?’, Brad persuades everyone
Quince, Bottom and company finally perform their Companies to make up. Brad meets his mother at the airport
play. The result is so badly staged as to be deemed Paramount Pictures Dolby Digital and discovers that she is now with hero pilot Chesley
presents a Gary In Colour ‘Sully’ Sullenberger. Brad refuses to acknowledge
a comic success, and the dramatis personae Sanchez production [1.85:1]
retire to bed, sent off by Puck’s benedictions. his new stepfather, and a fresh rivalry is born.

January 2018 | Sight&Sound | 79

 The Dinner
USA/United Kingdom 2016
Director: Oren Moverman
Reviewed by Hannah McGill
“It’s Gettysburg! You’re going back to Gettysburg!”
So one spouse challenges another part-way into
REVIEWS
this merciless tragedy of manners. In literal terms,
Paul (Steve Coogan) is reminding his wife Claire
(Laura Linney) of the time when a visit to the
Civil War battleground, his long-term research
interest, triggered a breakdown. Metaphorically
speaking, the reference is a characteristically
bombastic one for a film hell-bent on equating
family secrets and rivalries with the degradation,
savagery and waste of the battlefield. A bit much?
Perhaps – but restraint is no more a feature of
the emotional tone here than it is of the menu
with which Paul and Claire are presented at the
film’s titular meal. A Michelin-starred foodie
mecca provides the wholly inappropriate
setting for a secret family meeting with Paul’s
brother Stan (Richard Gere) and Stan’s wife Kate
(Rebecca Hall). The two sets of parents must
decide whether to come clean about their sons’
involvement in a grim thrill-killing – a prospect
complicated by the fact that Stan is in the throes
of running for state governor. Should they go for
full disclosure, or attempt a closing of ranks?
Delicate palates be warned: showy nihilism
gets splurged all over this conundrum like
ketchup on a steak. The kind are weak, the strong
are brutes, the smart are cynical dilettantes and
the successful are smug sell-outs. Even the one
area where the film credits human beings with
some selfless impulses – love – is presented
as a cruel malady that overrides our free will
and disables our morality. When Paul tells
Claire that he loves her, he follows it up with,
“I really do – it’s pretty much unbearable.”
A lot of things are pretty much unbearable to
Paul. He is an American who loathes America,
a proud teller of harsh truths who doesn’t raise
“painful things” with his wife, and a liberal
who secretly resents the indulgence afforded
to his black adopted nephew. Coogan plays
this navel-fixated misanthrope with admirable
attention to emotional detail – but like all
of the film’s finer elements, his performance
feels swamped by an onslaught of character
information and repetitive dialogue scenes.
Ironically for a film that wants us to roll our
eyes at the spoiled complacency of wealth,
Credits and Synopsis
Produced by Editor Companies
Eddie Vaisman Alex Hall Code Red presents
Julia Lebedev Production Designer a ChubbCo and
Cotty Chubb Kelly McGehee Blackbird production
Lawrence Inglee Production in association with
Screenplay Sound Mixer Protagonist Pictures
Oren Moverman Felix Andrew Executive Producers
Based on the novel Costume Designer Leonid Lebedev
by Herman Koch Catherine George Angel Lopez
Director of Olga Segura
Photography ©Tesuco Holdings Ltd Eva Maria Daniels
Bobby Bukowski Production
Affluent urban America, the present. Paul and Claire
Lohman meet Paul’s brother Stan, a congressman
and candidate for state governor, and his wife Kate
at a high-end restaurant. The subject for discussion
is the hitherto secret involvement of their respective
sons, Michael and Rick, in the killing of a homeless
woman. Stan favours full disclosure to the press, while
Claire and Kate insist that the family should keep
the secret. By listening to his son’s phone messages,
80 | Sight&Sound | January 2018
Just desserts: Richard Gere
excess is the keynote of the storytelling – and
dyspepsia swiftly sets in. Despite having equipped
itself with the neat ready-made structure of
an elaborate dinner separated into courses,
the film can’t commit to the sort of economy
that would have given it impact. Flashbacks,
overlong and tackily colour-graded, pull us
away from the claustrophobia of the dinner
table, and handhold us towards conclusions
that might better have been left ambiguous.
Such narrative pushiness presumably
represents an effort to include as much of Herman
Koch’s source novel (already filmed twice, as
Het Diner, 2013, and I nostri ragazzi, 2014) as
possible – but subtlety is sacrificed as a result. The
film hits its stride when it rests its attention on
the characters and their versions of events, and
allows us to judge their reliability or otherwise for
ourselves. A concise and revealing scene between
Paul and Claire lets us know in one breath that
he lies about negative childhood experiences,
and that those experiences have genuinely
damaged him. A monologue from Hall’s brittle
trophy wife Kate shows us that she has both
suffered and sacrificed, and that she is the kind
of person who very much enjoys letting it be
known how much she has suffered and sacrificed.
The best moments here serve to remind us that
big ideas benefit from space to breathe; and fine
actors tend to require minimal lily-gilding.
Cast Nina Chloë Sevigny
Richard Gere Michael Chernus Barbara Lohman
Stan Lohman Dylan Heinz
Laura Linney Seamus Davey- In Colour
Claire Lohman Fitzpatrick [1.85:1]
Steve Coogan Rick Lohman
Paul Lohman Charlie Plummer Distributor
Rebecca Hall Michael Lohman Vertigo Films
Katelyn Lohman, Miles J. Harvey
‘Kate’ Beau Lohman
Adepero Oduye Joel Bissonnette
Antonio
Paul discovers that Claire has arranged with Michael
to pay off a potential witness, Rick’s adopted brother
Beau. But Beau refuses the money, believing that
the police should be told. After much bickering, and
flashbacks detailing the historical complexities of the
brothers’ relationship, Kate talks Stan into deferring
his decision. Paul leaves the restaurant, finds Beau and
threatens him with a rock. Beau runs away. The other
adults arrive. Paul lies to them about what happened.
Dolores
USA 2017
Director: Peter Bratt
Reviewed by Hannah McGill
A high-end package with lots of stirring musical
montages and VIP talking heads, Dolores is
an unabashed bid to secure icon status for its
subject, unionist and community organiser
Dolores Huerta. While it doesn’t offer a
hugely detailed account of the ins and outs
of labour relations in the US – more taking
for granted our broad agreement that paying
workers peanuts and denying them rights is
to be discouraged in civilised societies – it does
provide a most engaging portrait of a woman of
seemingly limitless conviction and charisma.
The only daughter of a labour-activist father
and businesswoman mother, both of Mexican
heritage, Huerta claimed from her parents a fierce
sense of social justice and a refusal to be held back
by her gender. She married young, had children,
and when that union failed, married again and
had more. When she began the work that was to
define her life – setting up, with César Chávez,
the organisation that would become United Farm
Workers – Huerta was in the throes of her second
divorce and had seven young offspring. Four more
would follow, from a relationship with Chávez’s
brother Richard that was never formalised by
marriage but endured until his death in 2011.
Is Huerta’s tally of 11 children – the same
number as was produced by her friend and
associate Bobby Kennedy – relevant to her
story? Her children, many of whom feature
here, certainly think so. “There’s scars there,”
one daughter admits of her mother’s frequent
and prolonged absences. Another speaks
movingly of how the children would fight to
drink in as much of their mother’s presence
as possible whenever she was around.
Gratifyingly, rather than merely allowing it to
serve as added emotional colour, the film follows
up the matter of Huerta’s prolific parenthood in
interesting ways. A mutually beneficial exchange
of perspectives is reported by Huerta and Gloria
Steinem, who met as second-wave feminism was
Labour struggles: Dolores Huerta
 Happy Death Day
Director: Christopher Landon
Certificate 15 96m 12s

gaining traction, with Huerta opening Steinem’s

eyes to the plight of Latino farm workers, and
Steinem challenging Huerta’s traditionally

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Catholic opposition to abortion. Much later,
when Huerta is beaten by San Francisco police
during a demonstration, her children rally round
to ensure that she has constant company in
hospital. “When you think of all the times that
I left them alone,” marvels the now 87-year-old
Huerta, “with different people, sometimes with
complete strangers – and yet they all got together
to take care of me.” The film also notes that
her kids have all followed her into education,
labour organising and related pursuits.
Huerta herself comes across as driven to the
point of obsessiveness; as magnetic as any movie
star, and averse to either fawning over others or
lavishing credit on herself. In copious archive
interviews, she appears awkward or uncertain
only when directed towards personal trivia. Asked
what she would do with $5,000 that had to be
spent only on herself, Huerta won’t look beyond
donating it to her union (“That would be spending
it on myself. This is my life’s work, this is the
reason I live.”) She hadn’t budged on this years
later, when the city of San Francisco awarded her
$825,000 in damages for her injuries: the money
went straight into setting up a foundation for the
training of community organisers and lobbyists.

Credits and Synopsis

Groundhog slay: Jessica Rothe

Produced by Sound Design Regina K. Scully
Peter Bratt Bob Edwards Janet MacGillivray
Brian Benson Wallace Reviewed by Philip Kemp the sorority (who, in a satisfying moment, gets
Written by ©The Dolores Huerta
Peter Bratt Film Project, LLC In Colour Spoiler alert: this review reveals a plot twist the benefit of a glass of chocolate milk), Charles
Co-written by Production [1.78:1] Happy Death Day makes not the least effort to Aitken as Tree’s shiftily adulterous prof/lover,
Jessica Congdon Companies
Director of Carlos Santana Distributor
conceal its lineage. Almost from the get-go this Ruby Modine as her sardonic roomie Lori, and
Photography presents in DocHouse is quite blatantly Groundhog Day reworked as a Israel Broussard as Carter, the endearingly nice
Jesse Dana association with
Editor 5 Stick Films
slasher movie. It even tosses in a cheekily explicit guy in whose bed she keeps waking up. But it’s the
Jessica Congdon Fiscally sponsored nod to Harold Ramis’s 1993 cult film in its final humour and pacing that keep the film diverting.
Music by/ by San Francisco scene, when the heroine’s new boyfriend tells It’s soon evident that Death Day is as much dark
Score Produced, Film Scoeity
Orchestrated and Executive her that her story “reminds me of Groundhog comedy as horror movie – a mix that glances back
Conducted by Producers Day. You know, the movie? With Bill Murray?” to 1980s classics such as the original Fright Night –
Mark Kilian Carlos Santana
“Who’s Bill Murray?” she asks blankly. and there are moments when Tree is even allowed
A documentary portrait of the Mexican-American
The moment is typical of Christopher Landon’s to derive a degree of fun from her predicament:
community organiser and union leader Dolores feature, which maintains a likeably flip tone as when she realises that, since nothing she does
Huerta. throughout, working ingenious variations on its will be retained in anyone’s memory longer than
Born in New Mexico in 1930, Huerta initially trains generic slasher material (underground car parks a few hours, she can happily take the morning
as a teacher, but is drawn to community activism and nocturnal pedestrian underpasses inevitably walk from Carter’s dorm to her sorority house
by the poverty she encounters. Meanwhile, her
feature, as does the old what’s-behind-the-shower- stark naked, and even fart in public. And after
two short-lived marriages produce seven children.
In her mid-twenties, Huerta begins working with curtain gag) and never taking any of it seriously Carter, in whom she’s confided, gets her to write
fellow community organiser César Chávez, and for a second. So Death Day isn’t particularly scary, down a list of possible suspects, she starts avidly
the pair co-found the National Farm Workers and clearly isn’t meant to be – the pleasure lies in playing private eye, spying on each of them and
Association, later to become United Farm Workers. the games it plays with its basic storyline, along unearthing their secrets. (This allows for a sweet
Huerta also forms a relationship with Chávez’s the way mixing in enough offbeat humour and encounter later on with a would-be boyfriend,
brother Richard; they have four children together.
Dolores and other activists describe how, amid the
whodunnit twists to keep us entertained. As Caleb Spillyards’s slightly stalkerish Tim.)
accompanying tumult of the civil-rights movement, multiple-murder victim Tree Gelbman, Jessica By this stage in the action the time-loop has
their campaign for better pay and conditions for Rothe succeeds – as did Murray – in making speeded up, since evidently we’ve got the idea,
predominantly Latino farm workers turns them into us like her even while she’s still in her initial and a dozen or so death days are allowed to
public figures, respected by some and reviled by contemptuous mode, and increasingly so as she zip past in about as many minutes before the
others. Huerta’s children discuss the impact of her
gradually becomes warmer and more empathic. narrative slows down again as we approach
frequent absences from family life. In 1988, during a
demonstration in San Francisco against the policies (A scene with her depressive dad, though, when the end. Here’s where Landon and Lobdell start
of President George Bush, Huerta is beaten by police we learn that she only became a selfish sorority pulling twists on us, as Tree thinks she has nailed
and badly hurt. She sues the city and wins damages. bitch because her beloved mom died three years the identity of her killer and heads off to turn
When César Chávez dies five years later, Huerta is back, feels like a chunk of motivation too far.) the tables on the supposed culprit. But first she
not selected to lead the UFW. She chooses to step Screenwriter Scott Lobdell, taking a break has to abort the mission out of consideration for
away, and uses her compensation money to set up
the Dolores Huerta Foundation, which continues
from X-Men duties, serves up a deftly sketched- someone else – and then, when it seems that the
to train lobbyists and community organisers. in supporting cast, notably Rachel Matthews perpetrator has been unmasked and her
as the smugly self-appointed moral arbiter of life can continue, she finds herself back

January 2018 | Sight&Sound | 81

 Hi-Lo Joe
United Kingdom 2017
Director: James Kermack
Certificate 15 93m 21s

at the temporal ground zero of Carter’s Reviewed by Lisa Mullen

bed and realises she has to guess again. Writer-director James Kermack’s debut feature
The basic Groundhog Day concept has, of is a peculiar thing, best described perhaps as
REVIEWS

course, been much reworked, often in thrillers a screwball tragedy, in which quick-talking
– Tom Twyker’s Run Lola Run (1998), Duncan banter and farcical misadventures lead not to
Jones’s Source Code (2011), Doug Liman’s Edge of the consolation of a perfectly constructed happy
Tomorrow (2014) – not to mention numerous TV ending, but to an increasingly urgent conviction
dramas, most notably the episode ‘White Bear’ in that love is a terrible thing and all who succumb
the 2013 season of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror. to it are doomed. The plot is a ponderous essay on
And only this year we’ve had Ry Russo-Young’s the need to sort yourself out before you can have a
Before I Fall, which took an almost identical proper relationship with anyone else, and the film
idea to Death Day (high-school student Zoey seems almost touchingly surprised and impressed
Deutch is repeatedly killed) but – ill-advisedly, by this insight. But iffy characterisation is the
as it turned out – tried to play it straight and fatal flaw here. We are asked to believe that the
serious. But Landon, who scripted four sequels protagonist, Joe (Matthew Stathers), is first of all
in the increasingly weary Paranormal Activity superficially loveable (which he really isn’t) and
found-footage series and directed the last of then that he is haunted by unspecified demons
them (Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones), and an undiagnosed mental illness, which never
has latched on to the essential absurdity of the quite rings true. The trouble is that, despite the
concept, as indeed did Ramis, and revitalised it fact that we witness him suffering from recurring
with a teasingly irreverent spin that invites us nightmares and intermittent suicidal thoughts,
all to enjoy the game. Many happy returns! Joe’s problems never really make an impact on
the rest of the film, which is mostly content to
Credits and Synopsis observe him and his long-suffering girlfriend
Elly (Lizzie Phillips) as they put in a strong pitch
for the title of World’s Most Annoying Couple.
Produced by Pictures presents Charles Aitken
Jason Blum a Blumhouse Dr Gregory Butler Much of the film plays out like an extended
Written by production Jason Bayle version of one of those cheesy ‘time passing’ Wrong to write: Matthew Stathers
Scott Lobdell A Christopher David Gelbman
Director of Landon film Phi Vu sequences in which vignettes of a couple having
Photography Executive Ryan sex/watching TV/throwing food at each other pieces, with everything cranked up to 11, and no
Toby Oliver Producers Laura Clifton
Edited by Angela Mancuso Stephanie
while laughing are spliced together to a musical context. When the film deals with life’s big issues
Gregory Plotkin John Baldecchi Caleb Spillyards soundtrack. Joe, when he is not drinking beer – something it is all too eager to do – the tooth-
Production Couper Samuelson Tim
Designer Jeanette Volturno
and being pointlessly rude to people, makes his gnashing feels unearned because it comes out of
Cecele M. De Stefano Seth William Meier In Colour living as a children’s entertainer, and likes to an emotional void. This is a shame for the leads,
Music [2.35:1] take his work home with him in the form of a who do a decent job with what they’re given, and
Bear McCreary
Supervising Cast Distributor pathological compulsion to crack jokes and put it’s also a shame for Kermack-the-director, who
Sound Editor Jessica Rothe Universal Pictures on funny voices. Elly, for some reason, laps all shows promising flashes of visual style but should
Trevor Gates Theresa International
Costume Designer Gelbman,‘Tree’ UK & Eire this up – until it dawns on her that Joe is totally have had a quiet word with Kermack-the-writer
Meagan McLaughlin Israel Broussard dysfunctional as an adult human being, and long before the first lens cap came off. This is
Luster Carter
Ruby Modine
besides, she no longer finds his fart jokes funny. ironic, because when the film finally decides what
Production Lori Will their relationship survive? Who cares, as it is about, it turns out to be about how important
Companies Rachel Matthews
Universal Danielle
long as they don’t live anywhere near me. writing is. And perhaps that is the key to why
It’s not all larks and japes; there is emoting. this script doesn’t hang together. For Joe, putting
Stathers and Phillips manage this quite nicely, pen to paper is mere therapy; good screenwriting
US, present day. University student Theresa (‘Tree’)
Gelbman, having been drunk the previous night,
but they do it in scenes that look like audition is actually much harder than that.
wakes up on her birthday in the dorm-room bed
of a young man who introduces himself as Carter. Credits and Synopsis
Scornfully leaving, she heads back to her sorority
house, where her roommate Lori gives her a one-
candle cupcake. Tree dumps it and heads for a class Producers Mark Nutkins Stefania Fantini Executive Producers Joe Dixon Kermack
James Kermack Editors Costume Supervisor Nic Franklin bruiser young Joe
given by her married lover, Dr Gregory Butler, then
Keerthi Suresh Carlo Taranto Iona Oliver Smith Nicola Martin James Kermack
attends a sorority lunch presided over by bossy Mark Nutkins Robert Avery Luke Hammersley Joe’s dad In Colour
Danielle. That night, en route to a party, Tree is William Hunter Howell Art Directors ©Sonder Films Ryan Oliva [2.35:1]
fatally stabbed by a figure wearing a sinister baby Julien Loeffler Jess Elcock Production Black Eyes
mask – and wakes in Carter’s bed on her birthday Fabrice Smadja Hugo Lopez Castrillo Companies Cast Lizzie Phillips Distributor
Writer Music Composer Sonder Films Gethin Anthony Elly Parker OurScreen
morning. That night the masked figure kills her again. James Kermack Benjamin Shielden & Featuristic Alex Matthew Stathers
Tree eventually realises that she’s constantly Director of Production Sound Films present Tom Bateman Joe Ridley
fated to relive the same day, only to be killed each Photography Recordist A James Kermack film Tony Noah James
night in various ways by the same masked figure
– and that this won’t stop until she works out London, present day. Elly arrives at a party at a stranger’s nightmares, nor the suicidal fantasies that sometimes
who her killer is. Gradually, while her death days house to discover that the host is her ex-boyfriend Joe. overtake him. Eventually, Elly grows impatient with his
continue, she learns to treat people – including her At his urging, she is reluctantly persuaded to rekindle jealous rages and unreasonable demands, and when
estranged widowed father – with more consideration, their affair, at first casually but eventually on a serious she becomes accidentally pregnant it is obvious that
while she and Carter become mutually attracted. basis. Elly is attracted by Joe’s energy and humour, Joe is not ready for fatherhood. They agree that she
Tree comes to believe that a serial killer, Joseph though she finds it disconcerting that he seems to have will have an abortion, but the relationship does not
Tombs, under police guard at the local hospital, no plans for his own life beyond their relationship, and recover. Even when Joe finally admits to his battles with
may be responsible, but even after shooting him has phases when he drinks too much and becomes mental illness, he refuses to seek medical treatment.
dead she still wakes on the same fateful birthday emotionally detached and distant. For his part, Joe After many ultimatums, Elly leaves him. Forced to
morning. She finally realises that Lori, jealous of tries harder and harder to amuse her and distract her confront himself alone, he turns to writing; he fills a
her affair with Gregory, tried to poison her with from her misgivings; he works part-time as a children’s notebook once given to him by his late father, and finds
the cupcake, then killed her in multiple ways. entertainer, and uses clowning and performance as his that self-expression alleviates his symptoms. Cured
They fight, and Tree kills Lori. Again she wakes in default approach to any difficulty. He does not tell Elly of depression, he is finally able to let Elly go and even
Carter’s bed – but at last it’s the next morning. about the frightening black-eyed figure who haunts his attends her wedding to another man to wish her well.

82 | Sight&Sound | January 2018

Human Flow Jigsaw
Germany/People’s Republic of China/USA 2017 USA 2017
Director: Ai Weiwei Director: The Spierig Brothers
Certificate 18 91m 49s

Review by Ben Nicholson Reviewed by Kim Newman

From its title alone, you get a sense of the The aesthetic of the Saw films has always
intricate balancing act at the heart of this feature- been post-industrial – with repurposed scrap

REVIEWS
documentary debut from renowned Chinese metal fashioned into Heath Robinson-style
artist Ai Weiwei. Many documentaries about contraptions which work as death-traps despite
the plight of refugees opt for specific stories – their creator’s insistence that all are escapable
an understandable decision to elicit empathy if a subject shows proper contrition, clings
in the face of a global crisis, the magnitude of to life even while enduring extreme pain
which is incomprehensible for most people. and pays close attention to the instructions
After all, a photograph of a child’s body lying issuing from a mini-cassette recorder.
face down on a Turkish beach is not only more Series icon John Kramer, aka Jigsaw, was
immediately emotive, but also far easier to introduced in James Wan’s Saw (2004) as an
process than a tally of the dead, continually apparent corpse, and revealed to be a cancer
ticking higher on a newsfeed. The title Human patient aggrieved by the way those around him
Flow is suggestive both of a comparable intimacy were squandering the gift of life. Incarnating
and something more lyrical and contemplative, Jigsaw with milk-faced menace, a monotone
something more holistic, even theoretical. rasp and an elegant melancholy, bit player
It does not eschew the individual but does Tobin Bell seized a chance to leap up from the
communicate a desire to meditate on the bigger Ordinary people: Human Flow floor (where he spent most of the first film) to
picture of displacement in the modern world. become something like a star. Over the course
At a basic level, this is done through the film’s refugees, but we’ve zoomed out to understand of seven films, climaxing in Kevin Greutert’s
loose structure, which does not restrict itself to the wider situation. This shot sets the stall Saw 3D (2010), Kramer taught a series of harsh
a single migration or route but visits sites across for much of what is to follow: beautiful and life lessons, despite the inconvenience of being
more than 20 countries. The first sequence takes immaculately considered images designed technically dead from the third film on.
in a distressingly familiar situation, in which an to inform discourse as much as to tug on In defiance of all apparent logic, Kramer is
overloaded boat makes landfall on a Greek island, heartstrings. Ai and his many cinematographers back in this franchise relaunch. After a teasing
but attention subsequently turns to Bangladesh, – including one Christopher Doyle – return build-up, he appears, pulling strings (often talking
Jordan, Kenya, Afghanistan and North America, to this airborne motif, making canny use of through a creepy puppet) and tripping traps for
along with further forays on the trail into Europe. drones. They provide swooping surveys of a fresh set of unlucky contestants. Meanwhile, a
Interviews with expert commentators appear unfathomably large refugee camps, bombed-out parallel police investigation turns up evidence
next to those with refugees; there are quotations cityscapes or snaking columns of those seeking (DNA under the fingernails, the wrong corpse
from, among others, The Dhammapada, Mahmoud a better life. Even after repeated use, the images in a grave) that he is still alive. The resolution
Darwish, Baba Tahir and John F. Kennedy. remain striking for giving the undeniable sense of this paradox is a canny nod to the history
The aim is to articulate the commonality of scale. In some instances, top-down views of the series, with cleverly planted clues and a
of these myriad struggles, not to reduce the offer something that seems almost abstract at payoff that plays fair while leaving the option of
refugees to faceless hordes but to convey the first – tiny coloured dots on a sandy backdrop springing a different surprise next time round.
enormity and import of this global challenge. suddenly taking the form of children playing. Each of the series tackles a slightly different
The film opens with a serene aerial shot There are warnings from interviewees and concern – the consequences of drunk driving
looking directly down on to a blue ocean, into newspaper headlines dotted throughout the in Saw III (2006), the invidious American
which a small boat soon ploughs. The focus of film, about the dehumanising effects of refugee health-insurance business in Saw VI (2007)
the composition is still the boat of desperate status. The choice, then, to present a multitude – and tailors traps to suit the editorial. Here,
of huddled masses could potentially compound a vagueness as to the collection of unrelated
Credits and Synopsis the issue, but Ai is careful that the film is not too sins under indictment turns out to make plot
academic. Amid the passionate dialogue, there sense but slightly blunts the thematic effect.
are perfectly captured moments that are deeply Away from the factory or clinical spaces of
Producers Niels Pagh Andersen Thomas Wouters
Ai Weiwei Composer moving. A tired mother laments that “nobody earlier films, these games are played in a barn,
Chin-Chin Yap Karsten Fundal ©Human Flow UG has shown us the way”; two brothers break with straw on the ground and dangerous tools
Heino Deckert Sound Recordists Production
Written by Mohammed Bahar Companies down in tears in each other’s arms, overcome all around – going for a farmyard-of-horror
Chin-Chin Yap Srdjan Bajski Participant by all they’ve lost and endured; a man stands in feel that evokes John Mackenzie’s classically
Tim Finch Stelios Bouziotis Media presents in
Boris Cheshirkov Benedikt Gaussling association with
a long line of refugees holding a sign that says, transgressive British public information film
Cinematographers Carl Gierstorfer AC Films an Ai simply, ‘Respect’. These glimpses of despair, Apaches (1977) as the unwary blunder to their
Ai Weiwei Yves Goossens Bara Weiwei production
Murat Bay Tasos Karadedos A film by Ai Weiwei
resilience, sadness and sometimes levity see the doom via an abandoned grain silo, various rusty
Christopher Doyle Oguz Kaynak Executive mass dissolve into the background and acutely implements and a disassembled motorbike.
Huang Wenhai Johannes Kunz Producers expose our shared humanity. A similar effect is In a final turn of the screw, the most
Konstantinos Koen De Leeuw Andrew Cohen
Koukoulis Malik Mehran Jeff Skoll achieved by the director’s own position in front
Renaat Lambeets Charles Menger Diane Weyermann of the camera – engaging relationships with
Li Dongxu Zenon Panosiflis
Lv Hengzhong Kiriakos Poukamisas Dolby Atmos several refugees appear in fleeting vignettes.
Ma Yan Rico Prauss In Colour Ai’s work regularly draws attention to the
Johannes Pedro Mauricio Part-subtitled
Waltermann Santos
labour of creation. Action and process behind
Xie Zhenwei Marijn Thijs Distributor works such as Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn and
Zhang Zanbo Lajos Wienkamp Altitude Film
Editor Marques Entertainment
Sunflower Seeds are as important to the observer
as the aesthetic merit of the final product. For his
A documentary made by the artist Ai Weiwei, monumental sculptural work Straight, knowledge
investigating the global refugee crisis. The film of the effort that went into straightening 200
begins with Syrian refugees arriving by boat on the tonnes of mangled rebar from collapsed schools
Greek island of Lesbos with the help of aid workers. after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake is not just
From there it follows Ai over the course of a year additional context, but integral to the poignancy
as he explores the migrant crisis in more than 20
countries, from France and Germany to Bangladesh, of the piece. Human Flow equally balances the
Kenya, Hungary, Slovenia, the US and Mexico. director’s own act of bearing witness with his
resultant challenge to audiences to do the same. Screamcatcher: Matt Passmore

January 2018 | Sight&Sound | 83

 Justice League
USA 2017
Director: Zack Snyder
Certificate 12A 119m 54s

obviously dangerous component (a Reviewed by Kim Newman Snyder’s world after her much more successful
shotgun shell) is misunderstood – Jigsaw ‘Phase One’ of Marvel Comics’ ongoing cinema solo vehicle. Sadly, the script just makes Diana
has turned it into an instrument of mercy, project climaxed with 2012’s The Avengers a timid wet blanket, passing on her previous
REVIEWS

which will be ruined if used for murder. Only (aka Avengers Assemble), which drew together role of being surprisingly fresh to Ezra Miller’s
when the new cop and the coroner – echoing storylines from multiple movies to unite the hyper-caffeinated Flash, who is plainly Whedon’s
the private eye and the doctor of Saw – find publisher’s major characters as a fractious favourite. Shoehorning in Jason Momoa as half-
the barn and are caught in their own purpose- team. Ironically, the initial impetus for Stan Atlantean warrior Aquaman and Ray Fisher as
built trap is there technological progression Lee and Jack Kirby’s radical 1961 revision of half-machine Cyborg is managed with relative
from the saws, wires and springs of a decade the superhero comic was the strong sales of ease, but neither gets a showing that builds
ago, as a ring of laser scalpels is deployed in an DC Comics’ staid but popular Justice League of much anticipation for their solo films. Cyborg,
innovative, almost surreally appalling manner. America, a team-up book with its most iconic, promoted from DC’s junior justice league Teen
Australian directors Peter and Michael Spierig lasting characters. This prompted Marvel to Titans on the grounds that there haven’t been
have shown ambition in their genre work try its own team title, Fantastic Four, which enough major non-white characters, is literally
(Undead, Daybreakers, Predestination) and follow counterprogrammed by having a quartet of out of his league here, though his doodads and
Darren Lynn Bousman and Greutert (who stays heroes act like an often dysfunctional family. cyber hook-ups keep resolving plot problems.
on as editor) into the arena. The knack of directing The squabbles between the hothead Human It’s an even messier saga than Dawn of Justice,
a Saw sequel isn’t bringing a different sensibility Torch and the self-loathing Thing showed up the with a tiresome and whiskery macguffin in which
to the franchise but building on what Wan and co- comradely rivalry of the Flash and Superman three magic boxes must be brought together for
creator Leigh Whannell wrought – which means as trivial and painless. The format worked so evil, then prised apart for good. One of them also
more and more extreme deaths and also fresh and well that Marvel did it again in The Avengers brings Superman back after his death in the earlier
strange supporting characters (Hannah Emily and X-Men, eventually inspiring DC to reshape film, but the League then leave the thing lying
Anderson is outstanding as the perky Jigsaw fan Batman, Superman and company as Marvel- around unprotected so that baddie Steppenwolf
who assists at autopsies and maintains a museum type ‘flawed’ characters given to pummelling – a minor Jack Kirby creation, who is only the
of Kramer’s death-traps) and a commitment to each other or expressing diametrically opposed harbinger of barely mentioned big bad Darkseid
convoluted yet satisfying, twist-laden storylines. philosophies to such an extent that actual – can cop it to juice himself up for a desultory last-
A continuation of the signature horror franchise villains tended to become superfluous. reel scrap in which yet another nebulous, ranting
of the first decade of the 21st century, Jigsaw In its current cinema iteration, DC is still humanoid giant (Ciarán Hinds does the voice this
pulls off the trick – but there’s a sense that playing catch-up – with the late-in-the-day input time) in a ridiculous helmet is piled on by smaller
follow-ups will need to pay close attention to of Marvel defector Joss Whedon, brought in to heroes until he is swallowed by his own plot hole.
real-world horrors if they are to compete with script (and direct additional scenes when Zack He is then sucked out of the film to make space for
the true Saw successor, the Purge series. Snyder stepped down due to a family tragedy) and a bunch of codas, including Marvel-style mid- and
add some of the snap of his Avengers assignments. post-credits stings that resurrect that old Flash-
Credits and Synopsis Nevertheless, the new film still has to follow Superman contest and make a tentative start
Snyder’s glum, all-but-humourless Man of Steel on assembling a Legion of Doom (the JLA’s evil
(2013) and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice opposite numbers), without recruiting anyone
Directed by Production Hannah Emily
The Spierig Brothers Companies Anderson (2016) – dutifully getting a snarl out of a revivified from the stuck-off-to-one-side Suicide Squad.
[i.e. Peter Spierig Twisted Pictures Eleanor Bonneville Henry Cavill (cursed with a bizarre CGI upper Considering that Justice League brings
Michael Spierig] presents a Burg/ Tobin Bell
Produced by Koules/Hoffman John Kramer, ‘Jigsaw’ lip to get rid of a moustache grown for another together five lasting icons of pop culture (and
Greg Hoffman production Laura Vandervoort role) as Superman turns nasty and beats down Cyborg), this really ought to be a market leader
Oren Koules Produced in Anna
Mark Burg association with Paul Braunstein
five assembled lesser heroes. Perhaps even more – but, as it stands, Marvel has done better with
Written by Serendipity Ryan of a problem is that Justice League also has to throwaways such as Guardians of the Galaxy
Josh Stolberg Productions and Mandela Van
Pete Goldfinger A Bigger Boat Peebles
bring Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman back into than DC has with its strongest players.
Director of Executive Mitch
Photography Producers Brittany Allen Credits and Synopsis
Ben Nott Daniel Jason Heffner Carly
Editor James Wan Josiah Black
Kevin Greutert Leigh Whannell Edgar Munsen
Production Stacey Testro Produced by Director of Rodeo FX Executive Producers Ezra Miller Menalippe
Designer Peter Block In Colour Charles Roven Photography ShadE VFX, LLC Christopher Nolan Barry Allen, ‘The Flash’ Ingvar Sigurdsson
Anthony Cowley Jason Constantine [2.35:1] Deborah Snyder Fabian Wagner TeamWorks Digital Emma Thomas Jason Momoa Mayor
Music Jon Berg Edited by Vitality Visual Effects Jim Rowe Arthur Curry, David Thewlis
Charlie Clouser Distributor Geoff Johns David Brenner Stunt Co-ordinators Ben Affleck ‘Aquaman’ Ares
Production Cast Lionsgate UK Screenplay Richard Pearson Eunice Huthart Wesley Coller Ray Fisher Sergi Constance
Sound Mixer Matt Passmore Chris Terrio Martin Walsh Damon Caro Curtis Kanemoto Victor Stone, ‘Cyborg’ Zeus
Daryl Purdy Logan Nelson Joss Whedon Production Designer Daniel S. Kaminsky Jeremy Irons
Costume Designer Callum Keith Story Patrick Tatopoulos ©Warner Bros. Chris Terrio Alfred Dolby Atmos
Steven Wright Rennie Chris Terrio Music Entertainment Inc. Diane Lane In Colour
Detective Halloran Zack Snyder Danny Elfman and RatPac-Dune Martha Kent [1.85:1]
©Lions Gate Clé Bennett
Based on characters Sound Design Entertainment LLC Cast Connie Nielsen Some screenings
from DC; Superman Scott Hecker Production Ben Affleck Queen Hippolyta presented in 3D
Films, Inc. Detective Keith Hunt
created by Jerry Chuck Michael Companies Bruce Wayne, J.K. Simmons
Siegel, Joe Shuster; Costume Designer Warner Bros. ‘Batman’ Commissioner Distributor
A North American city, present day. Police officer Batman created by Michael Wilkinson Pictures presents Henry Cavill Gordon Warner Bros. Pictures
Halloran and forensic pathologist Logan Nelson Bob Kane, Bill Finger; Visual Effects in association Clark Kent, Ciarán Hinds International (UK)
Wonder Woman Scanline VFX with RatPac-Dune ‘Superman’ voice of Steppenwolf
separately investigate a gruesome murder that created by William MPC Entertainment an Amy Adams Amber Heard
seems to be the work of John Kramer, the ‘Jigsaw Moulton Marston: Double Negative Atlas Entertainment/ Lois Lane Mera
Killer’ – though Kramer has officially been dead for Justice League of Weta Digital Limited Cruel and Unusual Gal Gadot Joe Morton
ten years. On a remote farm, five new victims – all America created Method Studios production Diana Prince, Silas Stone
by Gardner Fox Pixomondo A Zack Snyder film ‘Wonder Woman’ Lisa Loven Kongsli
of whom have been responsible for the deaths of
innocents – are tormented by elaborate death-traps. Five thousand years ago, an alliance of Amazons, Amazonian Diana Prince (Wonder Woman), Atlantean
Halloran and Nelson both locate the farm, only to find Atlanteans and the Tribes of Men repulsed Arthur Curry (Aquaman), plus speedster Flash
ten-year-old corpses and realise that the new victims alien warlord Steppenwolf from Earth, and and half-machine Cyborg. Using one of the boxes,
are part of a re-enactment of a hitherto unknown divided his power source into three box-shaped the team revive Superman, who is initially hostile
Jigsaw game. When both men are locked into laser items concealed by each of the allies. but soon joins the fray. Steppenwolf is defeated
death traps, Halloran triggers Nelson’s – and the In the present day, Steppenwolf returns to Earth in a huge battle. Bruce Wayne sets about making
pathologist is apparently killed. But it turns out that and sets about collecting the boxes. In the absence the Justice League a semi-permanent institution,
Nelson is Jigsaw’s newest disciple and has faked his of the recently deceased Superman, Bruce Wayne but Lex Luthor – Superman’s arch-nemesis –
death. He triggers the laser, and Halloran is killed. (aka Batman) recruits a team of heroes including begins to put together a league of his own.

84 | Sight&Sound | January 2018

Love, Cecil
USA/United Kingdom 2017
Director: Lisa Immordino Vreeland
Certificate 12A 99m 6s
Reviewed by Nick Pinkerton
In Love, Cecil, as so often with artist biography-
documentaries, most of the real creative heavy
lifting has already been done by the film’s
subject. Through the course of a transatlantic
career that spanned from a golden youth in the
1920s to the rise and fall of the 1960s and ’70s
counterculture, Cecil Beaton tirelessly recorded
that which he saw and loved in photographs,
drawings, watercolours and a droll, precise prose
style. An English aesthete of the generation that
produced several distinguished exemplars of the
species, including Harold Acton and Beaton’s
own stated “enemy” Evelyn Waugh, our central
character was a passionate lifelong lover of
bright and beautiful things. The fruits of that
love affair are visible throughout Love, Cecil, and
to see them thus arrayed is the source of much
of the pleasure the film provides – though if
this is the main draw, it is reasonable to ask if
the whole production might not have been
better off instead as a nice coffee-table book,
allowing one to pore over the images at leisure.
In fact, it can also be had in that form, with
the same title, and from the same author, Lisa
Immordino Vreeland. Love, Cecil is Vreeland’s
third feature documentary, after 2015’s Peggy
Guggenheim: Art Addict and 2011’s Diana Vreeland:
The Eye Has to Travel, whose subject appears
in archival footage here in conversation with
Truman Capote, and who also happens to
be the filmmaker’s grandmother-in-law. The
moving-picture version of the Beaton project has
some added inducement in that it allows one
to see the subject speak and to see him spoken
of by a battery of notables, including David
Hockney, Isaac Mizrahi and Leslie Caron (the
latter wore Beaton-designed costumes in Gigi).
These eminences’ camera sittings are cut down
into easily chewed soundbites, and the whole
affair moves along with a reasonable amount of
spring in its step, opting for the ever-expedient
chronological route, with occasional digressions
to cover Beaton’s personality traits, including
the less flattering ones: his wry, turncoat
bitchiness, his social climbing and so forth.
Credits and Synopsis
Producer Music A Fischio Films
[A film by] Phil France production in
Lisa Immordino Re-recording Mixer association with
Vreeland Jon Tropea Sotheby’s, Matador
Narration from Content, Hot &
Cecil Beaton’s Diaries ©A Dandy Sunny Productions
Director of Production LLC Completed with the
Photography Production support of Women
Shane Sigler Companies Make Movies, Inc.
Edited by A film by Lisa Executive Producers
Bernadine Colish Immordino Vreeland Jonathan Gray
A documentary biography of photographer, illustrator,
reporter, raconteur, costume designer and aesthete
Cecil Beaton, recounting his life through archive
material, recitals from his many published diaries,
interviews with admirers, friends and acquaintances
and extensive excerpts from his visual art.
Born to a well-off mercantile family in London in
1904, Beaton is from an early age effeminate and
gender-nonconforming, drawn to the trappings of
glamour. After his outrageous personality flourishes
at Cambridge University, he launches himself as a
society photographer, joining the ranks of the so-called
Bright Young Things. With newfound confidence he
Fashion nous: Cecil Beaton
An attentive reader may have noticed that
nothing I’ve said so far goes beyond the realm
of whisper-faint praise, which isn’t an accident.
Vreeland hasn’t made an incompetent piece
of work here – in fact, it’s quite hard to make
a documentary that goes down this easy – but
Love, Cecil is a film that lacks any urgent reason
for being. Beaton is hardly in need of rescuing
from oblivion, no more obscure today than
you might expect of any artist who’s been dead
for nearly four decades – indeed, a New York
exhibition a few years ago devoted to his time
in the city was quite the success. In her haste to
diligently visit all the very same life milestones
covered in Beaton’s Wikipedia entry, Vreeland
passes up opportunities to dig more deeply
into aspects of the bygone world that produced
him – for example, the casual anti-Semitism
rampant in his social set, which cost him dearly
when it was discovered that he’d slipped the
word ‘kike’ into the margin of a Vogue spread.
(That Beaton muse Wallis Simpson was an
enthusiast of fascist Oswald Mosley goes
uncommented on.) Perhaps even more deadly
for a film about an arch-dandy, the movie’s
original images are entirely undistinguished
interstitials. A prim primer, when the
occasion demands splash and panache.
Mark Lee Mata Hari (1931) Distributor
Jennifer Stockman Gigi (1958) Studiocanal Limited
Debi Wisch On a Clear Day
Jay Peterson You Can See
Bobby Kondrat Forever (1970)
Jack Turner
Charles Finch narrated by
Film Extracts Rupert Everett
My Fair Lady (1964)
Dames (1934) In Colour
Gold Diggers (1933) [1.78:1]
travels to New York and obtains a valuable contract
with ‘Vogue’ magazine, though this is ended when an
anti-Semitic slur is discovered in the margins of one
of his layout illustrations. In wartime, Beaton works as
a correspondent and cheerleader for the Allied cause.
Rehabilitated, he embarks on a new career designing
for the Broadway stage, which leads to the film versions
of ‘Gigi’ (1958) and ‘My Fair Lady’ (1964). Despite
passionate attachments to figures including Greta Garbo
and Olympic fencer Kinmont Hoitsma, Beaton lives
for much of his life as a bachelor, keeping up a pace of
furious productivity until a stroke in the mid-1970s leaves
him greatly diminished, preceding his death in 1980.
Lu over the Wall
Japan 2017
Director: Yuasa Masaaki
Certificate PG 112m 22s
Reviewed by Andrew Osmond
A parent choosing a cartoon film for his or
her children may view Japanese titles with
REVIEWS
understandable suspicion. Although anime has
a far family-friendlier reputation than it once
did, anime films that look like they’re made for
children can be deceptive. They may mutate into
bewildering allegorical journeys (Spirited Away,
2001) or teenage dramas (2015’s The Boy and the
Beast, this year’s Napping Princess); the whimsical-
looking In This Corner of the World (2016) had
decidedly adult, fleetingly horrific content.
Anime is no longer seen as being all about X-rated
‘manga movies’, but even its gentle fare can stray
well outside the safety nets of Disney and Pixar.
Lu over the Wall is an exception; it’s very
much a children’s film, though not entirely.
It will remind non-anime aficionados of
Disney’s Lilo & Stitch (2002), while Ghibli fans
will think of Ponyo (2008). Like Ponyo, Lu is
set in a modern-day Japanese fishing village,
where a boy encounters a magic sea being
with the personality of a little girl. Both films
culminate with the villages being spectacularly
flooded, but with no loss of life – a fantasy that
inevitably looks different in a Japanese film
made post-2011, when the Tohoku earthquake
and tsunami killed more than 15,000 people.
Even Lu, then, is not ‘simply’ a children’s film.
Moreover, while the boy in Ponyo was a primary
schooler, Lu takes the viewpoint of a withdrawn
teenager, Kai, angered by his parents’ divorce. His
meeting with the mermaid Lu is presented overtly
as therapy. Lu, drawn with a manically beaming
face and a fish’s body, just wants to dance, sing and
befriend people, and teaches Kai and eventually
everyone else to let go of their resentments,
regrets and blocks to their self-expression.
The fact that Lu is a child and a cartoon
character lets her get away with being a Manic
Pixie Dream Girl. Her sheer joyous energy
is legitimately delightful, whether she’s
The sweetest girl: Lu over the Wall
January 2018 | Sight&Sound | 85
 The Man with the Iron Heart
France/USA/United Kingdom/Belgium/Hungary 2017
Director: Cédric Jimenez
Certificate 15 120m 3s

jumping up from the sea to grin at Kai Reviewed by Henry K. Miller

through a window or leaping around in The conceit of Laurent Binet’s 2009 novel HHhH,
dances that turn everyone else into revved-up which recounts Jan Kubis and Jozef Gabcik’s
REVIEWS

cartoon dancers too. Her sweetest scene, though, mission to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich, one
is more restrained; she visits the shore to go on an of the principal architects of the Holocaust,
evening walk with Kai, who teaches and teases her in Prague, in June 1942, is that Binet, who
as if she’s a beloved little sister. Because this scene makes his presence felt in every sentence, is
feels so natural, the film doesn’t seem hypocritical concerned that he is performing an “ignominious
in its later scenes, which criticise the adult transformation” by giving historical reality the
characters for synthesising Lu’s cuteness into a “bright and blinding veneer of fiction”. In telling Streets of fire: Jason Clarke
brand to bring prosperity back to their town. his own purportedly non-fictional story, Binet
After an engaging first half, the second part of describes watching various fictional Heydrichs mass murder of anonymous Poles, cut to Lina
the film is surprisingly sloppy, though not fatally in films ranging from Fritz Lang’s Hangmen Also looking a bit miz in the bath, cut to a sex party.
so. At one point, a girl vanishes and the villagers Die (1943), partly scripted by Bertolt Brecht, to The rest of the film, covering Kubis and
fear Lu has eaten her. The main characters are Eric Rohmer’s Triple Agent (2004). “Everyone Gabcik’s insertion by parachute, the planning
given ample time to explain the mistake, but don’t finds it normal,” he writes, “fudging reality of the assassination, its nearly botched
get round to it until Lu is facing a terrible fate. The to make a screenplay more dramatic”. So it execution, and the dreadful aftermath, suffers
flood finale is clumsy, too. The deluge in Ghibli’s is with rather leaden irony that Binet’s novel from having been done as recently as last
Ponyo was a natural development of the film’s has been travestied in just this way on its way year, in Anthropoid (2016), and before that
wonder; here it’s unconvincing, being a curse to the screen as The Man with the Iron Heart. in Operation Daybreak (1975). Anthropoid was
triggered by Lu’s peril even after she has been The first third of the film is given over to the far from ideal, but it at least showed the
saved and the film has reached its natural end. rise of Heydrich (Jason Clarke) within the Nazi Czech resistance’s understandable reluctance
At least the animation in the flood finale may party and state, after an advantageous marriage to follow London’s orders, knowing that
appease fans of the director, Yuasa Masaaki, who to the aristocratic Lina (Rosamund Pike), first severe reprisals would follow, as indeed they
may be dismayed by how ‘mainstream’ Lu looks. as Himmler’s right-hand man in the SS, then did. Here again, The Man with the Iron Heart,
Yuasa directed this year’s The Night Is Short, Walk as the organizer of the Einsatzgruppen (death which concocts a spurious suspense narrative
on Girl, and is celebrated for his adult, anarchic squads) which followed the German armies into in which Heydrich is shown hunting the
sensibilities. Actually, Lu’s look works well; the Poland and Russia, and then as the convenor parachutists, is unserious about the history.
brightly coloured characters have cheerfully of the Wannsee conference in January 1942, Heydrich’s funeral (or one of them: he had
zany expressions that let them stand out from which formalized the policy of genocide against two) is intercut with the razing of Lidice, which
the flattened backdrops. The first half – especially Europe’s Jews. Reality is fudged, but without in fact took place after both, ending with a crane
its quietly funny mer-dog – occasionally echoes drama, and without insight into the springs shot over the lovingly maintained column of
the 2014 Irish cartoon Song of the Sea. The either of Heydrich’s evil, or of the systemic evil German war-vehicles, presumably seldom out
second half has bursts of wilder animation, such of Nazi Germany. There is no straightforward of use, as they leave the burning village behind
as a giant walking shark – Lu’s father – who way to adapt Binet’s highly self-conscious them. The sequence unwittingly encapsulates
catches fire as he lunges through the town, and novel, but the filmmakers might have taken the film’s moral idiocy: it manages to grant
a beautiful, near-abstract flashback in which its cue – part of a long tradition now – that the Heydrich a deathbed scene, with his tearful
a drowning diver encounters a mer-creature representation of the Holocaust poses ethical wife looking on, but nothing comparable for
who seems both monstrous and angelic. questions which demand a serious response. Nazi Germany’s victims, who are reduced
Instead, we have a sickening scene of the to day-players in their own tragedy.
Credits and Synopsis
Credits and Synopsis
Producers TOHO Animation, Fuji Suzumura Kenichi
Yamamoto Koji Animation Studio, Ashimoto Teruo Produced by Filmnation Cast The life of Reinhard Heydrich is recounted in flashback,
Okayasu Yuka Science SARU Ilan Goldman Entertainment, Echo Jason Clarke from his naval career in 1920s Germany; through
Ito Junnosuke Executive In Colour Daniel Crown Lake Entertainment Reinhard Heydrich his sacking over a sexual indiscretion; his marriage
Screenplay Producers [1.78:1] Screenplay and The Weinstein Rosamund Pike
David Farr Company present to the aristocratic Nazi Lina; his recruitment by
Yoshida Reiko Kenji Shimizu Subtitles Lina Heydrich
Yuasa Masaaki Ota Keiji Audrey Diwan a Legende Films Jack O’Connell Himmler to head up the SS’s intelligence arm, the
Director of Yuasa Masaaki Distributor Cédric Jimenez and Red Crown Jan Kubis SD; his involvement in the Night of the Long Knives,
Photography Arai Akihiro National Based on the production Jack Reynor the Hitlerites’ internal putsch against the SA, in
Batiste Perron Amusements novel HHhH by a co-production with Jozef Gabcik
Laurent Binet Mars Film, France
1934; his command of SS death squads during the
Editor Mia Wasikowska
Tan Ayako Voice Cast Japanese Director of 2 Cinéma, Carmel, German invasions of Poland and Russia in 1939-
Anna Novak
Art Director Tani Kanon theatrical title Photography C2M Productions, Stephen Graham 41; his appointment as effective Reichsprotektor
Ohno Hiroshi Lu Yoake tsugeru Laurent Tangy HHHH Limited, Nexus Heinrich Himmler of Bohemia-Moravia in 1941; and his convening
Music Shimoda Shota Rû no uta Editor Factory, BNP Paribas Thomas M. Wright of the Wannsee conference in January 1942,
Muramatsu Ashimoto Kai Chris Dickens Fortis Film Finance Valcik
Production Designer with the participation which laid the ground for the systematisation
Takatsugu Emoto Akira Abigail Lawrie
Sound grandfather Jean-Philippe of Canal+, Ciné+ and Libena Fafek of the Holocaust; down to his assassination by
Kimura Eriko Kotobuki Minako Moreaux France Télévisions Gilles Lellouche Czechoslovak partisans in June that year in Prague.
Animation Director Yuho Music with the support Václav Morávek The story of Heydrich’s assassins, Jan Kubis and
Ito Nobutaka Shinohara Shinichi Guillaume Roussel of Taxshelter from
Sound Federal Government
Jozef Gabcik, is then told in flashback, from their
Lu’s father Dolby Digital
Production Saito Soma Cedric Deloche of Belgium and Tax training in Scotland onwards. Having parachuted
In Colour
Companies Kunio Alexis Place Shelter Investors [2.35:1] into occupied Czechoslovakia in late 1941, the two
Marc Doisne Produced with men find homes with Czech families, and begin
Costume Designer the support of the Distributor relationships, Kubis with Anna Novak, Gabcik with
A Japanese fishing town, present day. Withdrawn Olivier Beriot Hungarian State Lionsgate UK
Executive Producers Libena Fafek. Meanwhile, Heydrich cracks down on
teenager Kai encounters Lu, a friendly mermaid ©Legende Films, Red Bob Weinstein the Czechoslovak resistance, led by the ‘Three Kings’.
French theatrical title
resembling a little girl. Lu’s joyful personality brings Crown Productions, Harvey Weinstein Kubis and Gabcik plan their mission with the last of
HHhH
Kai out of his shell, but she is eventually seen by the Mars Films, France David C. Glasser them, Václav Morávek, until he too is discovered and
public and exploited to revive the town’s fortunes. 2 Cinéma, Carmel, Glen Basner
C2M Productions, Doug Mankoff
takes his own life. Heydrich almost survives Kubis and
After an accident, the townsfolk denounce Lu as Gabcik’s attack, and in the aftermath German forces
HHHH Limited, Nexus Silver Tabatznik
a monster, imprisoning her and her father (a giant Factory, BNP Paribas Gary Podell massacre the villagers of Lidice. Having tortured
shark). This triggers a magic curse, unleashing Fortis Film Finance Film Extracts members of the resistance, the Germans track
a flood. However, Kai and his friends free Lu, and Production Sunrise A Song of down Kubis and Gabcik to a church crypt in central
she and her fellow mer-people save the town. Companies Two Humans (1927)
Prague; after a long gun battle, both are killed.

86 | Sight&Sound | January 2018

Marie Curie The Courage of Knowledge Menashe
Germany/Poland/France/Belgium 2016 USA/Canada/Poland 2017
Director: Marie Noëlle Director: Joshua Z. Weinstein
Certificate U 82m 2s

Reviewed by Ginette Vincendeau Reviewed by Hannah McGill

Rarely has such an inspiring subject given birth to Spoiler alert: this review reveals a plot twist
such an uninspiring film. The Polish-born Marie If the unequal distribution of domestic labour

REVIEWS
Curie (1867-1934), née Maria Sklodowska, was a in general, and of parenting responsibilities
truly exceptional figure, both as a scientist and a in particular, is a frequent concern of art and
fighter for women’s rights. Not only did she win activism alike, the overwhelming contention
two Nobel Prizes (in physics and chemistry) for is that women are required to contribute too
her pioneering work on radioactivity, she was much and men permitted to do too little. The
also the first woman professor at the Sorbonne, more traditional, religious and rule-bound the
against fierce resistance by the male French society, goes the assumption, the more this
scientific establishment, who blocked her Burning bright: Karolina Gruszka will apply. We may acknowledge the broad
election to the Academy of Sciences. All this accuracy of the generalisation, while noting
she accomplished while raising two daughters, For instance, it is thrilling to see her at a scientific the negative assumption it perpetuates: that
taking an active part in their education and congress, the only woman among a sea of men in parenting is a burdensome chore from which
struggling to finance her research, especially suits, conversing as an equal with Albert Einstein society’s most powerful members will naturally
after the death of her husband Pierre Curie. In (who professes his admiration for her), yet the film free themselves unless compelled not to.
an interview, the film’s German director Marie spends more time with her on the beach and on Menashe takes an alternative and invigorating
Noëlle Sehr (credited as Marie Noëlle) declared her budding romance with Langevin. Noëlle has perspective: that a culture that clings to a gendered
that she meant her film “to encourage women said that she wanted to show the great scientist was division of reproductive labour is robbing its
to study science because we are no less talented also a woman, and there precisely lies the problem. men of their right to be fully engaged carers, no
than men”. Indeed. But while one applauds the Less than the biopic of a genius who happens to be less than it might be robbing its women of their
ambition, the resulting film sadly disappoints. a woman and who fights for women’s rights, this economic or artistic potential. The eponymous
One problem derives from the director’s is the story of a figure who may be a great inventor widower – played by Menashe Lustig, whose
conventional vision of the biopic of a female but is nevertheless repeatedly brought back to her personal life also provided script inspiration – has
professional figure, invariably placing the female identity in the most conventional terms. been required by the conventions of his Hasidic
personal – and especially the feminine – above Another issue is the aesthetic bias of the community to hand over the rearing of his son
all other considerations. The film focuses on film. Marie Curie privileges decorative shots Rieven to relatives until he remarries. Menashe
the period of Curie’s life between her two Nobel with chiaroscuro lighting and complicated – a schlubby, hapless sort rather than a practised
Prizes. We begin in 1903, when Marie (Karolina framings, and long, slow takes, especially of warrior for social change – resists this expectation
Gruszka) and her husband Pierre (Charles Curie looking moody to a melancholy musical in a mild sort of way. Remarry in haste? Give
Berling) travel to Stockholm to collect their soundtrack. The slow rhythm, distanced Rieven over to the smug brother-in-law he doesn’t
joint prize in physics, and we end in 1911 when camera and subdued performance by Gruszka even like? Quite simply, he would prefer not to…
she earns, singly, her second Nobel Prize. mean that the film completely fails to exploit The film, Joshua Z. Weinstein’s fiction-
In between, the film concentrates on her marital the excitement of scientific discovery or the feature debut after many outings as a director
bliss; her grief when Pierre dies in a road accident energy of Curie’s battles with a hostile male and cinematographer of documentaries, steers
on a Paris street; her warm relationship with her establishment. Curie’s enlightened approach to wisely clear of any mawkish idealisation
daughters and caring for her father-in-law. It also children’s education, her courage in taking on either of Menashe’s parenting skills or of the
gives a lot of space to her affair with fellow scientist patriarchal bigotry and French xenophobia, not importance of tradition. Instead, it sketches out
Paul Langevin (Arieh Worthalter), depicted in a to mention her scientific brilliance, are noted, a persuasively ambiguous clash of agendas, in
predictable way, as is Langevin’s jealous wife (Marie but they make little impact within an altogether which it’s far from clear either that Menashe is a
Denarnaud). Translating scientific discovery to underwhelming cinema experience. This is a fully capable homemaker or that Rieven would
the screen is admittedly difficult, but there is little film one would have liked to like, but a proper be better off elsewhere, and in which the boy
attempt here to engage with Curie’s actual work. tribute worthy of Marie Curie it is not. himself is authentically torn and indecisive.
The matter of Menashe’s late wife Leah is also
Credits and Synopsis unsentimentally handled, to perversely moving
effect. Amid the comings and goings about
paternal access, we almost forget that Rieven
A Film Produced by Composed and support of FFF - Glory Film, Perathon Cast Albert Einstein
has lost his mother, until he performs a quietly
Marie Noëlle Sehr Orchestrated by FilmFernsehFonds Medien, Schubert Karolina Gruszka Jan Frycz
Mikolaj Pokromski Bruno Coulais Bayern, Deutsch- International, Marie Curie Ernest Solvay devastating little song at her memorial
Ralf Zimmermann Sound Recording Französisches Sepia Production, Arieh Worthalter Sabin Tambrea
Original Screenplay Philippe Minitraité FFA/CNC, Climax Films Paul Langevin August Gyldenstople service. Ruben Niborski is terrific casting
Marie Noëlle Vandendriessche DFFF - Deutscher In collaboration with Charles Berling
Andrea Stoll Costume Design Filmförderfonds, BR - Bayerischer Pierre Curie In Colour
French Dialogue Christophe Pidre PISF - Polnisches Rundfunk, Schubert Iza Kuna [2.35:1]
Marie Noëlle Florence Scholtes Filminstitut/Polish Music Publishing, Bronia Subtitles
Director of Malgorzata Zacharska Film Institute, BNP Paribasfortis Malik Zidi
Photography MBB - Medienboard Film Finance André Debierne Distributor
Michal Englert ©P’Artisan Berlin-Brandenburg, A film by Marie Noëlle André Wilms Swipe Films
Editing Filmproduktion/ Krakow Festival Office Financially supported Eugène Curie
Isabelle Rathéry Pokromski Studio/ KBF, Belgian Federal by BR, FFF, DFFF, Daniel Olbrychski German
Marie Noëlle Glory Film/Schubert Government’s Tax MBB, FFA, BNP Emile Amagat theatrical title
Lenka Fillnerova International/ Shelter Scheme, Paribasfortis Film Marie Denarnaud Marie Curie
Final Cut Perathon/ MEDIA Programme Finance, CNC, Krakow Jeanne Langevin
Hans Horn Climax/Sepia A P’Artisanfilm, Film Commission, Samuel Finzi
Production Design Production Studio Pokromski Lodz Film Gustave Téry
Eduard Krajewski Companies co-production Commission, PISF Piotr Glowacki
Original Music With the in co-production with

Paris, 1903. The scientist Marie Curie and her husband
Pierre have received a Nobel Prize for their work on
radioactivity. Marie gives birth to a second daughter
and she and Pierre pursue their research, struggling to
find funding. After Pierre is killed in a street accident,
Marie continues her research while looking after her
daughters and caring for her father-in-law. Despite
giving an impressive lecture, she struggles to be
accepted as a professor at the Sorbonne, and though
she is the only woman at a prestigious international
conference in Belgium, she faces the misogyny
of the faculty and the scientific establishment in
Paris. She begins an affair with her colleague Paul
Langevin. His jealous wife reveals the affair to the
press, leading to a scandal in which Curie is (falsely)
accused of being Jewish. Nevertheless, she is awarded
a second Nobel Prize in 1911 and gives a rousing
acceptance speech accompanied by her daughter.
Parental control: Menashe Lustig

January 2018 | Sight&Sound | 87

 Molly’s Game
USA 2017
Director: Aaron Sorkin
Certificate 15 140m 8s

as the boy, not only because he is one of Reviewed by Kate Stables “the world’s most decadent man-cave”. Onscreen
the film’s finer actors, but also because the Fast talk, in its literal sense, has always been overlay graphics of the bluffing hands explain
contrast between his dark, delicate features and Aaron Sorkin’s speciality. From A Few Good Men stylishly how a hardened poker professional
REVIEWS

those of the rotund, red-headed Lustig poignantly (1992) through The West Wing (1999-2006) to is bankrupted by Bloom’s far wealthier clients.
implies the genetic legacy of the lost Leah. The Social Network (2010) and Steve Jobs (2015), But when Bloom is arrested by the FBI and the
Beyond Lustig and Niborski, the performances the screenwriter’s characters pelt through smart- film strays from a poker procedural, the pace
can tend towards the wooden or overly emphatic, mouthed dialogue at Formula One speeds. So it’s threatens to slacken. Sorkin keeps up the tempo
presumably because Weinstein has prioritised no surprise that his directorial debut, an enjoyably by intercutting Bloom’s game-running ascent
casting authentic Yiddish speakers from Hasidic zippy adaptation of the real-life memoir of ‘poker with her legal fight, a timeline structure he also
communities over acting virtuosos. The shuffling princess’ and infamous game runner Molly used in The Social Network. As she jousts with Idris
handheld camera, low lighting and perpetually Bloom (and his first female protagonist) runs Elba’s drily exasperated lawyer, the film is eager
aggrieved mood also render the film a little dim on a welter of words. Borrowing from Goodfellas to establish her as a doughty loner with a moral
and sluggish, particularly in its middle section. It (1990), Jessica Chastain’s rapid, rattling narration code. Unwilling to hand over her clients’ names
never quite settles on whether it’s a comedy that’s unpacks the heady, hidden world of high-stakes to the FBI, fearing the damage it will do to their
short on jokes or a drama that keeps its characters poker dens, where buy-ins can be $250,000 a families and reputations, she refuses to bargain.
at arm’s length. But Lustig’s utter conviction player at the top end, and movie stars, venture Delightful though it is to have a flawed,
in the title role, and the determined sympathy capitalists and oligarchs try to best each other. recalcitrant female heroine, this feels over-egged.
and flexibility with which Weinstein plays the Chastain, who portrayed similarly driven Bloom isn’t a crusading Karen Silkwood or Erin
value of tradition against the importance of professional women taking on risky quests Brockovich but a poker fixer who got addicted to
active fatherhood, is gently stirring nonetheless. in male-dominated fields in Zero Dark Thirty big bucks and fast company. Similarly, the film
“Do you have so little faith in me?” Menashe (2012) and Miss Sloane (2016), is a good fit for won’t reveal the real-life Hollywood hotshots
asks his rabbi, as he argues for his right to keep the laser-focused Bloom. Whether fixing her who packed her games, rendering it less buzzy
his son with him. “Do you have so little faith intense, determined gaze on players or lawyers, than the memoir, which did. What enlivened
in the Torah?” the older man fires back. fighting her corner for lucrative ve tips or The Socia
Social Network was Sorkin’s tart take on
The film’s closing scene retains its ambiguity: her stubborn principles, she’s the Facebo
Facebook’s real-life founders. Here instead
Menashe has adopted the traditional hat and very model of the highly educated, ated, we geget Michael Cera’s moody ‘Player X’, a
coat he previously eschewed, but it’s unclear super-articulate over-achieverss caref
carefully generic Hollywood star, insistent
whether this is his path to the expected that Sorkin loves to play with. on m manipulating the game because “I don’t
remarriage or his part of an agreement whereby essive
Too bad, then, that her expressive like playing poker, I like destroying lives.”
single fatherhood will be allowed. performance is cluttered with For a film about female resilience and
narration, childhood flashbacks ks tenaci
tenacity, it’s also got something of a father
Credits and Synopsis and cutaways to archive footage ge fixa
fixation, positioning Elba’s Charlie as the
demonstrating the finer pointss ‘go
‘good’ father who fights Bloom’s corner
of mogul skiing. (Before she wh
while she’s estranged from Kevin Costner’s
Produced by ©Shtick Film, LLC Rieven
Alex Lipschultz Production Yoel Weisshaus began running poker games, d
dysfunctional psychologist dad. Still, it
Traci Carlson Companies Eizik Bloom was an aspiring Olympic ic d
delivers Elba the grandstanding, take-
Joshua Z. Weinstein Maiden Voyage, Meyer Schwartz
Daniel Finkelman Where’s Eve, Sparks the Ruv skier, felled by an accident.) n
no-prisoners defence to prosecutors
Yoni Brook Next, Autumn Sorkin adroitly captures the th
that Sorkin does so well. If we suspect
Written by Productions, In Colour
Joshua Z. Weinstein Mongrel [1.85:1]
rush of her scrambling, self- th
there’s rather more complexity and
Alex Lipschultz International Subtitles made success in establishing co
compromise in Molly Bloom’s tale than
Musa Syeed Supported by IFP, US
Cinematography in Progress, Fixafilm, Distributor
h
has found its way on to the screen,
Yoni Brook Jerome Foundation, Vertigo Films Jessica Chastain tthat’s the hand we’ve been dealt.
Joshua Z. Weinstein Rooftop Films,
Edited by Great City Post
Scott Cummings Executive Credits and Synopsis
Art Directors Producers
Laura Moss Adam Margules
Carlen May-Mann Danelle Eliav Produced by Pictures production Justin Kirk Various times between 2003 and 2015, Los Angeles
Royce Brown Chris Columbus Mark Gordon A Mark Gordon Jay
Music Eleanor Columbus
and New York, seen in flashbacks and flashforwards.
Amy Pascal production J.C. Mackenzie Los Angeles, 2003. Molly Bloom’s world-class
Aaron Martin Matt Jackson Executive Producers Harrison Wellstone
Dag Rosenqvist Written for the Leopoldo Gout Graham Greene skiing career is ended by an accident. She becomes
Supervising Cast Screen by Stuart M. Besser Judge Foxman estranged from her father. Her boss Dean forces her
Sound Editor Menashe Lustig Aaron Sorkin Film Extracts Samantha Isler to run his underground high-stakes poker game for
Ian Stynes Menashe Based on the book Scott Pilgrim Vs. Molly as a teenager
Ruben Niborski wealthy celebrities.
by Molly Bloom The World (2010) Bruno Verdoni
Director of Sausage Party (2016) Pat
New York, 2013. Arrested for running an illegal
Brooklyn, New York, the present. According to the Photography Youth in Revolt Lizzy Declement game, a now infamous Molly persuades reluctant
rules of his Hasidic Jewish community, widower Charlotte Bruus (2009) skate rental woman lawyer Charlie to defend her. She refuses to turn
Menashe must hand his son Rieven over to his Christensen Crystal Fairy & The Daoud Heidami over her client files.
Edited by Magical Cactus hot dog vendor In 2005, after Dean stops paying her, Molly takes
brother-in-law Eizik’s household so that the boy
Alan Baumgarten and 2012 (2013) Randy Noojin
can remain in a two-parent family until Menashe Josh Schaeffer Plaza doorman his clients and sets up her own weekly game, earning
remarries. Though Menashe goes on a few dates Elliot Graham a high income from tips. Her key client, movie star
organised by a matchmaker, he has no desire to marry Production Designer Cast Dolby Digital ‘Player X’, pushes her to snare ultra-rich players. Two
again. His wish is to raise Rieven alone, but his rabbi David Wasco Jessica Chastain In Colour years later, professional player Harlan loses $1.2
Music Molly Bloom [2.35:1]
will not permit it. After a minor dispute with Eizik, Daniel Pemberton Idris Elba
million at her game. Molly refuses Player X’s proposal
Menashe defies the rabbi and takes Rieven home with Re-recording Mixers Charlie Jaffey Distributor to cap her lucrative tips. He sacks her as the game
him. A succession of domestic problems culminates Scott Millan Kevin Costner E1 Films runner. Molly sets up her own high-stakes New York
in Rieven hurting his head, and Menashe reluctantly Gregg Rudloff Larry Bloom game at the Plaza Hotel. For the first time, she takes
Costume Designer Michael Cera an illegal rake-off of the bets, to cover herself as the
returns him to Eizik. However, he persuades the rabbi
Susan Lyall player X
to let him, rather than Eizik, hold the memorial dinner Jeremy Strong game’s ‘bank’. Soon, the Mafia wants a stake in the
for his late wife. Though Menashe burns the food, ©MG’s Game, Inc. Dean Keith game; Molly is beaten and robbed when she refuses.
the dinner ultimately goes well. The rabbi remains Production Chris O’Dowd Betrayed by two clients, she is arrested by the FBI.
opposed to Menashe living alone with Rieven, but Companies Douglas Downey Molly fights Charlie’s proposal to soft-pedal her
Entertainment Bill Camp
the boy expresses his own desire to be with his One and The Mark Harlan Eustice
involvement in the game to the FBI. He makes a deal
father. Menashe begins to live a more orthodox Gordon Company Brian d’Arcy James with the FBI. Molly is reconciled with her father. She is
life, donning the traditional black hat and coat. present a Pascal Brad convicted, fined and sentenced to community service.

88 | Sight&Sound | January 2018

Mountain Mudbound
Australia/USA/Canada/Germany/United Kingdom 2017 USA 2017
Director: Jennifer Peedom Director: Dee Rees
Certificate PG 73m 34s Certificate 15 134m 18s

Reviewed by Michael Hale musicians tuning up (the film is a collaboration Reviewed by Adam Nayman
In 1960, the American novelist and with the Australian Chamber Orchestra), as a The sprawl of Dee Rees’s Mudbound is strategic.
environmentalist Wallace Stegner wrote to Hollywood star readies himself for voiceover In adapting Hillary Jordan’s 2008 novel about

REVIEWS
the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review duties, so one could be forgiven for suspecting the intersecting lives of two sharecropping
Commission extolling governmental protection an aesthetically awe-inspiring but ruinously families entrenched in the Mississippi Delta
of the wild. The final sentences of the Wilderness sentimental prestige documentary – March in the mid-1940s – far removed geographically
Letter, as it came to be known, stated: “We of the Mountains, if you will – is in the offing. and economically from the post-war boom
simply need that wild country available to us, However, while its visual elements are regularly that launched America into being a 20th-
even if we never do more than drive to its edge – sometimes literally – breathtaking, Mountain is century world power – the director has opted
and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring also a nuanced meditation that could find a wide for fidelity. Working with co-screenwriter
ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part audience if distributed in mainstream cinemas. Virgil Williams, she has retained the book’s
of the geography of hope.” Stegner’s words, With a dynamism made possible by advances unique narrative device of splitting its point
articulating and weighing the emotional and in drone technology, the film reveals mountains of view across six different protagonists.
spiritual value of wild places, find a present-day alternately as places of stately splendour and Mudbound’s plurality of first-person
analogue in the writings of Robert Macfarlane, perilous exposure. Principal cinematographer narrators, all introduced early on and present
whose 2003 book Mountains of the Mind forms Renan Ozturk has recorded a wide variety for the duration, is a form of choral storytelling
the backbone of this new documentary from of adrenaline-charged footage, which is with some built-in pitfalls: it threatens to
Australian director Jennifer Peedom. supplemented by a skilfully assembled archival spread the characterisations thin, disperse
Peedom’s previous film, Sherpa, detailed section on mountaineering history and cuts from viewer sympathies and flatten out a visual
the 2014 climbing season on Mount Everest, existing mountain films that will be familiar to medium until it becomes a book-on-tape. But
during which 16 Nepalese Sherpas died in an many thrill-seekers and YouTube aficionados. Mudbound weathers the risks inherent to its
ice avalanche while preparing a route to the Excerpts show us American uber-climber conception and turns them, for the most part,
peak for commercial climbers. In the aftermath Alex Honnold achieving a state of grace while into strengths. That it works as well as it does
of the tragedy, the Sherpa guides refused to free-soloing (climbing without a rope) the is a testament not only to Rees’s developing
resume work on the mountain for the rest of the sheer rock face of El Sendero Luminoso in skills as a dramatist – she is a filmmaker who
year, much to the chagrin of expedition owners Mexico, and Danny Macaskill’s jaw-dropping maturely subordinates style to story – but also
unable to get their outraged wealthy clients to mountain-bike ride across the Cuillin Ridge her savvy casting and handling of actors.
the promised summit. With Mountain, Peedom on the Isle of Skye. Their exploits gain greater The two central clans in Mudbound are less
chooses to remain at altitude, contemplating meaning here, their human story dwarfed by a study in contrasts than an example of how
the majesty of the titular landform and enchanting landforms that, as the film notes, superficial differences belie common emotions
examining humanity’s relationship with it. “were here before we were even dreamed of. They and humanity, an observation that’s also close
The opening credits show eminent classical watched us arrive, they will watch us leave.” to a thesis statement. City mice Henry and Laura
Macfarlane has distilled his 306-page book, McAllan (Jason Clarke and Carey Mulligan) are
Credits and Synopsis which details the history of man’s fascination white, while Hap and Florence Jackson (Rob
with mountains, into a few minutes of Morgan and Mary J. Blige) are black, which
poetic voiceover script, read by the suitably accounts for the latter couple’s subservient
Producers the Australian narrated by
Jennifer Peedom Government through Willem Dafoe craggy-voiced Willem Dafoe and interspersed position on the grounds of the decaying cotton
Jo-Anne McGowan the Producer Offset throughout the 74-minute film. Remarkably farm where they all live and work. The gradual
Words by/ and Screen Australia In Colour
Narration Script by Madman, DCM, [2.35:1] little of the book’s essence has been lost, thanks feelings of solidarity between the two households,
Robert Macfarlane Dogwoof to the artful combination of visuals and a notable forged out of a mutual experience of poverty
Written by In association with Distributor
Jennifer Peedom Sherpas Cinema, Dogwoof
soundtrack. The timeless feeling of beauty and anxiety over the fates of family members
Robert Macfarlane Camp 4 Collective, and perfection inspired by one sequence of fighting overseas, offsets the ingrained racism
Principal Definition Films,
Cinematography The North Face
mountain vistas is sublimely accentuated by of their cohabitation, with the exception of
Renan Ozturk Australian Chamber the accompaniment of Beethoven’s Emperor Henry’s spiteful, bigoted Pappy (Jonathan
Editing Orchestra, Stranger Concerto, while the tension of more precarious Banks), whose presence makes him a stand-in
Christian Gazal Than Fiction Films
Scott Gray Developed and scenes is heightened by a jagged original score. for unreconstructed Southern ignorance.
Music financed with While the film takes an unequivocally Mudbound’s plot kicks into gear when both
Richard Tognetti the assistance
Sound Design of Australian romantic approach to mountains, it doesn’t families welcome far-flung favourite sons back
David White Government, shy away from casting a critical eye on the home from military service. Henry’s sweet-
Screen Australia
©Stranger Executive
colonial thinking that underpinned early natured brother Jamie (Garrett Hedlund) and Hap
Than Fiction Producers mountaineering exploits and that continues in and Florence’s son Ronsel (Jason Mitchell) return
Films, Australian Paul Wiegard
Chamber Orchestra David Gross
a different form today. A Western newspaper from the front scarred by combat experience
and Definition Stephen Boyle headline declaring Everest conquered, following and eager to try to heal on American soil: the
Films Pty Ltd Martyn Myer Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary’s two men’s friendship promises a fresh start in
Production Renan Ozturk
Companies Anson Fogel successful ascent in 1953, reveals an attitude a community riven by racism. But instead of
Screen Australia Tim Kemple that contrasts with the reverence shown to the catharsis, Mudbound’s story offers only fresh
and The Australian Stevie Meier
Chamber Orchestra Eric Crossland mountain by people living in its shadow. The conflict for its fighting men, recasting the Delta as
present a Stranger Dave Mossop shots of huge queues of affluent novices being an ideological war zone where Ronsel’s heroism
Than Fiction Films Malcolm Sangster
production Film Extracts
shepherded slowly up the world’s highest peak abroad buys him no leeway with the locals,
In association with Meru (2015) are among the most impactful in the film. serving instead to stoke their prejudice (especially
Camp 4 Collective Epic of Everest Commercialisation of the wild, even by when it’s revealed that he had a relationship with
and Sherpas Cinema (1924)
The producers The Conquest of those who love it most, is a complicated issue. a white woman while stationed in Germany).
acknowledge Everest (1953) Peedom’s project succeeds in conveying the There is, perhaps, something deterministic
the support of
allure of mountains, while also underlining about the way that Mudbound grinds forward
A documentary, narrated by Willem Dafoe, examining their importance to us. Stegner’s letter played a towards tragedy – a lack of spontaneity
humanity’s ongoing fascination with mountains, major role in the passage of the Wilderness Act, that could strike some viewers as properly
particularly since the first successful ascent of Mount which enshrined significant reserves across the solemn and others as boringly stolid. But Rees,
Everest in 1953. The film shows present-day activity
US. With wild places throughout the globe now whose debut feature Pariah (2011) possessed
on mountains across the world, revealing it to be
thrilling but often dangerous and commercialised. under unprecedented pressure, Mountain can be an irrepressible energy, controls the
part of a contemporary geography of hope. material smartly instead of getting stifled

January 2018 | Sight&Sound | 89

 Murder on the Orient Express
USA/United Kingdom 2017
Director: Kenneth Branagh
Certificate 12A 113m 47s

Reviewed by Henry K. Miller

It is a striking and instructive fact that the 1930s
Golden Age of Detective Fiction left scarcely
REVIEWS

any cinematic trace at the time. The detective

story, as Dorothy L. Sayers wrote in these pages
in 1938, is not the same as the thriller, and
its typical solution, being verbally explained
rather than visually presented, is “quite wrong
for the screen”. But what did Dorothy L. Sayers
know about detective stories? This is the second
big-screen adaptation of her consoeur Agatha
Christie’s 1934 bestseller, after Sidney Lumet’s
all-star 1974 version, and there was a television
version as recently as 2010. Its denouement vies
with that of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd for the
title of most-spoilered of all time; you don’t need
to have read or seen it to know whodunit.
Kenneth Branagh has gone all out for visual
presentation, shooting in 65mm and jamming
in massive landscape shots, as the titular train
passes through the Balkans, whenever he can.
Jerusalem, in the film’s prologue, and Istanbul,
whence the train departs, are spectacular,
Weathering the storm: Mary J. Blige, Carey Mulligan and the only thing wrong with the avalanche
that halts it somewhere in Yugoslavia – in the
by it. She makes directorial choices and probably her best work to date. She’s well book it’s a mere snowdrift – is that it isn’t more
that lean into the inexorability of the matched by the plausibly thick and charmless frightening. While Branagh is wise to leave the
narrative, arranging her images with a stark, Clarke, as well as the stoic, unrecognisable Blige. stranded train on a great big rickety wooden
mythic clarity that suggests a modern parable Mitchell, who was terrific playing the rapper structure on the side of a mountain, looking
without undermining the general sense of Eazy-E in Straight Outta Compton (2015), excels in suitably metaphorical and very vulnerable
realism. At times, Rachel Morrison’s widescreen a part that requires a carefully measured mixture to rock slides etc, he has missed a trick in not
cinematography evokes the scale and palette of charisma and reticence; the way that Ronsel’s putting it in actual danger. But the real problem
of Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978), natural-born confidence and intelligence are is when we have to go inside the train and get
albeit with a slightly less burnished lyricism; threatened and repressed shrinks the story’s through the boring and drearily acted story.
moments of beauty here are real but fleeting. wider-scale implications about the psychology The success that detective stories have had on
What really lifts the heaviness of Mudbound’s of subjugation down to human size. The only screen is largely down to their protagonists, and
story over the top is the near-uniform excellence bum notes in the ensemble are struck by Banks, the business of going from suspect to suspect is
of its cast, starting with Mulligan, whose typical, who has been more lazily directed than his often as wearying as Sayers suggested it would
distracting mannerisms are held in check. She co-stars and represents the kind of blunt-force be. At one point, Branagh intercuts three separate
plays Laura as a woman whose adaptability to dramaturgy that Mudbound for the most part interviews in a vain attempt to liven things
farm life is more about survival instinct than avoids; his hammy acting is a flaw that proves up. The 1974 version is not Lumet’s best film
enthusiasm: it’s a complex characterisation the effectiveness of everyone around him. of the mid-1970s, and the location footage is
drab by comparison with the work of Branagh’s
Credits and Synopsis effects team; nor do his cast deliver career-best
performances, but they attack their roles with
vigour: Lauren Bacall enjoys herself, and Albert
Produced by Mako Kamitsuna film in association Dan Steinman Jason Clarke Dolby Atmos
Sally Jo Effenson Production Designer with Macro Media, Teddy Schwarzman Henry McAllan In Colour Finney and Ingrid Bergman have a memorably
Cassian Elwes David J. Bomba Armory Films, Black Jennifer Roth Jason Mitchell [2.35:1] funny scene together. Branagh’s interpretation
Carl Effenson Music by/Music Bear pictures Poppy Hanks Ronsel Jackson
Charles D. King Co-producer An Elevated Films Dee Rees Mary J. Blige Distributor of Poirot starts badly and is ingratiating
Kim Roth Tamar-kali and Joule Films Kyle Tekiela Florence Jackson Curzon Artificial Eye where Finney was (perhaps excessively)
Christopher Lemole Sound Mixer production David Gendron Rob Morgan
Tim Zajaros Pud Cusack This production Ali Jazayeri Hap Jackson
eccentric, but it’s no disgrace; however, with
Screenplay Costume Designer participated in Virgil Williams Jonathan Banks few exceptions his scene partners, especially
Virgil Williams Michael T. Boyd the New York Robert Teitel Pappy McAllan
Dee Rees State Governor’s George Tillman Jr Garrett Hedlund
the young ones, are an anodyne bunch.
Based on the novel ©Mudbound Office of Motion Ted Sarandos Jamie McAllan Moreover, Branagh should have stuck to
by Hillary Jordan Investments, Inc. Picture & Television Dylan Arnold acting. Whenever he isn’t shooting the train
Director of Production Development’s Carl Atwood
Photography Companies Post Production Cast Kerry Cahill itself, he seems completely unsure where to
Rachel Morrison Netflix presents Credit Program Carey Mulligan Rose Tricklebank
Edited by a Netflix original Executive Producers Laura McAllan

Mississippi, the 1940s. Laura and Henry McAllan
purchase a farm in Marietta in the hope of raising a
family there, but learn on their arrival that the house
has been sold to others. They are therefore forced to
live on the grounds as tenants, where they share space
with, and gradually befriend, an older African-American
couple, Hap and Florence, who work as sharecroppers.
The two families help each other to weather the
harshness of farm life, but Henry’s racist father Pappy
remains sceptical and angry towards Hap and Florence.
Henry’s brother Jamie returns home from wartime
military service, as does Hap and Florence’s son Ronsel;
the two men quickly become drinking companions
and bond over their experiences. Jamie carries a torch
for Laura, who is drawn to him as Henry becomes
increasingly volatile. Ronsel’s return provokes the
locals, and he is captured by members of the Ku
Klux Klan – led by Pappy – who have discovered
that he fathered a baby with a white woman while
in Germany. Jamie tries to save Ronsel from torture
but is forced instead to determine the method of
his friend’s punishment. To save him from death, he
tells the Klansmen to cut out Ronsel’s tongue. Ronsel
survives and later reconciles with his child, despite
being mute. Jamie kills Pappy and he and his brother
bury the body while Hap and Florence watch.
Taint your wagon: Olivia Colman, Judi Dench

90 | Sight&Sound | January 2018

 Paddington 2
Director: Paul King
Certificate PG 103m 23s

put the camera – never a problem with Lumet. Reviewed by Kate Stables believes that if you are “kind and polite, the
There are eye-catching overhead shots, endless Come the hour, come the bear. Into a British world will be right”, and an unnerving stint
travelling shots, arbitrary tilts, the works, cinema displaying a Brexit-tuned fascination in the prison kitchens befriending Brendan

REVIEWS
but none of it coheres, there’s no consistent with isolationist past glories (Dunkirk, Darkest Gleeson’s violent cook Knuckles highlights his
point of view, and the music is amped-up and Hour, Churchill) comes the triumphant second grace under pressure. Director Paul King and
obvious. In one especially poorly conceived outing of the beloved British icon who’s not only his co-screenwriters Simon Farnaby and Jon
shot, we walk through the carriage after a migrant, but from a different species altogether. Croker balance Paddington’s hapless clowning
Poirot has delivered some dramatic bit of This charming, more narratively satisfying with a Chaplinesque positivity and pathos.
information, with each character stiltedly sequel jerks Paddington Bear out of the Browns’ There’s even a nod or two to Modern Times (1936).
delivering his or her reaction in turn – which happy Notting Hill household after he’s Heartfelt without being homiletic, the film
is more or less the film in a nutshell. wrongfully imprisoned for stealing a pricey cheers Paddington for his unfailing decency.
vintage pop-up book of London, which he’d Underpinning this, a combination of
Credits and Synopsis been saving up for, wanting to send it to his masterly detailed CGI and Ben Whishaw’s
Anglophile Aunt Lucy in Peru for her 100th nimble voicework (honed from 120 hours
birthday. The very model of a resourceful migrant, of recording) makes Paddington an utterly
Produced by Finance LLC Josh Gad
Ridley Scott Production Hector MacQueen he’d taken on barbering and window-cleaning engaging character. Childlike in his directness,
Mark Gordon Companies Derek Jacobi odd jobs, replete with clipper disasters and he retains his ursine instincts, suddenly slurping
Simon Kinberg Twentieth Century Edward Henry
Kenneth Branagh Fox presents a Masterman soapy-water slapstick sequences highlighting at the marmalade-daubed head of a barbershop
Judy Hofflund Kinberg Genre/ Leslie Odom Jr his well-intentioned eagerness and community customer, for example. His creators’ best work
Michael Schaefer Mark Gordon Doctor Arbuthnot
Screenplay Company/Scott Michelle Pfeiffer
feeling. The real thief, waning West End star isn’t in the dynamic, family-friendly chases,
Michael Green Free production Caroline Hubbard Phoenix Buchanan, is by contrast a comic when he’s riding a dog or walking a steam-
Based upon the A Kenneth Daisy Ridley confection of vanity and solipsism, played with train roof tethered by toffee apples. It’s when
novel by Agatha Branagh film Miss Mary
Christie Made in association Debenham fruity, cravat-wearing élan by Hugh Grant in a a fleeting expression or phrase shows a depth
Director of with TSG Marwan Kenzari piece of inspired, self-mocking casting. As the and vulnerability rarely seen in animated
Photography Entertainment Pierre Michel
Haris Zambarloukos Executive Olivia Colman camera swoops over his drinks table, we see characters. One particularly upsetting exchange
Film Editor Producers Hildegarde Schmidt that it’s cheekily cluttered with silver-framed of looks with Sally Hawkins’s Mrs Brown ranks
Mick Audsley Aditya Sood Lucy Boynton
Production Matthew Jenkins Countess Elena headshots of Grant in his floppy-haired heyday. close to Toy Story 3 in the tear-jerking stakes.
Designer James Prichard Andrenyi The pop-up book, fluidly animated as a paper Paddington’s London – a benign, picturesque,
Jim Clay Hilary Strong Manuel
Music Garcia-Rulfo
wonderland of London landmarks recalling retro-styled city whose twinkling steam fair,
Patrick Doyle Biniamino Marquez the 2D paper cut-outs of Ivor Wood’s 1970s pastel-stuccoed streets and cute heritage
Supervising Cast Sergei Polunin Paddington TV series, triggers Buchanan’s greed prison suggest W11 via Wes Anderson – is also
Sound Editor Tom Bateman Count Rudolph
James H. Mather Bouc Andrenyi as acutely as it sparks the small bear’s generosity. rendered as a Remainer redoubt. Bear-hating
Costume Designer Kenneth Branagh Buchanan’s man-of-many-disguises search neighbour Mr Curry, an officious one-man
Alexandra Byrne Hercule Poirot Dolby Atmos
Visual Effects Penélope Cruz In Colour and through photogenic London landmarks for ‘community defence force’, is a divisive, fear-
MPC Pilar Estravados Black & White the pop-up book’s clues to a hidden fortune mongering figure: “We opened our hearts,
Raynault VFX Willem Dafoe [2.35:1]
Stunt Co-ordinator Professor Gerhard Part-subtitled forms one witty, albeit slender, narrative and all along he was robbing you blind.” But
James O’Donnell Hardman thread, alongside the Brown family’s amateur Paddington’s multicultural quarter is both
Judi Dench Distributor
©Twentieth Princess Natalia 20th Century Fox
detective work on his trail. But the film’s real enriched by and grateful for the bear’s daily doses
Century Fox Film Dragomiroff International (UK) quest is the challenge a rough and hostile of friendship. Mr Curry’s mind may be closed,
Corporation and Johnny Depp prison poses to Paddington’s values. He firmly but the neighbourhood hearts remain open.
TSG Entertainment Edward Ratchett

In 1934, famous detective Hercule Poirot, Credits and Synopsis

having defused a volatile political situation in
Jerusalem, returns to London aboard the Orient
Express. His fellow passengers include Ratchett, Produced by Production Designer with Anton Capital Didier Lupfer Peter Capaldi Dolby Digital
David Heyman Gary Williamson Entertainment S.C.A. Mr Curry In Colour
a sinister American who tries and fails to recruit Written by Composer With the participation Hugh Grant [2.35:1]
him as a bodyguard. Poirot hears mysterious Paul King Dario Marianelli of Canal+, Ciné+ Cast Phoenix Buchanan
goings-on in the night. The next morning, the Simon Farnaby Sound Designers and Amazon Prime Hugh Bonneville Madeleine Harris Distributor
train having been stranded on a Yugoslavian Paddington Glenn Freemantle Instant Video Henry Brown Judy Brown Studiocanal Limited
Bear created by Niv Adiri A Heyday Films Sally Hawkins Samuel Joslin
mountainside by an avalanche, Ratchett is
Michael Bond Costume Designer production Mary Brown Jonathan Brown
found dead in his bunk from 12 stab wounds. Director of Lindy Hemming Executive Producers Brendan Gleeson Imelda Staunton
Poirot’s friend Bouc, a director of the railway Photography Rosie Alison Knuckles McGinty voice of Aunt Lucy
company, persuades the reluctant detective to Erik Alexander Wilson Production Jeffrey Clifford Julie Walters Michael Gambon
investigate. Poirot quickly establishes that Ratchett Editors Companies Alexandra Ferguson Mrs Bird voice of Uncle Pastuzo
Mark Everson StudioCanal presents Derbyshire Jim Broadbent Ben Whishaw
was, in fact, the infamous Cassetti, a kidnapper Jonathan Amos in association Ron Halpern Mr Gruber voice of Paddington
who murdered the three-year-old heiress Daisy
Armstrong but was acquitted before fleeing to London, present day. Paddington Bear lives with the Mr and Mrs Brown break into Buchanan’s house and
Europe. By interviewing the other passengers Brown family in Windsor Gardens. In his friend Mr discover his disguises. Paddington reluctantly joins
in turn, he also establishes that all of them had Gruber’s antique shop, Paddington spots a vintage a jailbreak in a hot-air balloon with Knuckles and
connections to the Armstrong family, and therefore pop-up book of London, once owned by the star of two other inmates. Later, abandoned by them, he
sufficient motivation to murder the victim. Kozlova’s steam fair, and wants to send it to his Aunt phones the Browns, who deduce Buchanan’s plan.
Poirot assembles the suspects in the mouth of Lucy in Peru for her 100th birthday. Paddington At Paddington station, Paddington and Buchanan
a railway tunnel, and tells them he has deduced takes on odd jobs to earn the money to buy the book. board the departing steam-fair train. The Browns
that all of them killed Ratchett. He gives them His neighbour Phoenix Buchanan, a has-been actor, chase them on another train. Buchanan’s clues reveal
two options: turning themselves in, or inventing disguises himself as a tramp and steals the book treasure hidden in the fair’s steam organ. The Browns
a scenario in which Ratchett was killed by an from Mr Gruber’s shop – he knows that it points clamber aboard the train and fight Buchanan. He traps
unknown assailant who escaped – in which case to clues left on various London landmarks, which Paddington in an uncoupled carriage, and sends it into
they will have to kill Poirot first, with his pistol. will lead to hidden treasure. Paddington chases a lake. Mr Brown knocks out Buchanan. Mrs Brown
Daisy’s grandmother Caroline Hubbard, who Buchanan and is arrested for the theft and jailed. dives into the lake, but can’t release Paddington.
organised the conspiracy against Ratchett, instead Heavily disguised, Buchanan finds clues on Tower His convict friends aquaplane in and rescue him.
tries to shoot herself, but the pistol is empty. Bridge and in St Paul’s cathedral. The Brown family Paddington wakes up after being ill to find that
Poirot decides to let the murderers go free. mount a ‘Free Paddington’ campaign. In prison, his grateful neighbours have clubbed together to
Disembarking from the train at Brod, he is summoned Paddington’s marmalade sandwiches, and his kindness, fly Aunt Lucy to London for a holiday. Buchanan
to the Nile, where there has been a murder. win over Knuckles, the cook, and the other convicts. stages a lavish musical number in prison.

January 2018 | Sight&Sound | 91

 The Prince of Nothingwood
France/Germany 2016
Director: Sonia Kronlund
Certificate 15 86m 17s
Reviewed by Nikki Baughan
As conflict in the Middle East
See Rushes, rages on, and an increasing
REVIEWS
page 8 number of filmmakers
shoulder their cameras in acts
of defiance and desperation,
western audiences have become all too familiar
with the resulting images of devastating
inhumanity and destruction. While French
journalist-turned-director Sonia Kronlund
may point her camera in the same direction as
the likes of Restrepo (2010), Hell and Back Again
(2011) and Korengal (2014), her feature debut
The Prince of Nothingwood paints a markedly
different portrait of a region under permanent
siege. Much like Havana Marking’s Afghan Star
(2009), which went behind the scenes of the
country’s controversial TV talent show Pop Idol,
it’s a film that digs determinedly under the rubble
to find some joy and even hope amid the chaos.
In an early example of her sparing, well-used
voiceover, Kronlund explains that she has
been visiting Afghanistan for several years,
reporting on the relentless daily horrors of
suicide bombs, acid attacks and massacres. When
she heard about filmmaker Salim Shaheen,
however, a light suddenly bloomed in the
darkness. “I thought there must be something
I had missed,” she says. “A force, a belief. A sort
of resistance that I wanted to learn about.”
A force of nature is perhaps the best way to
describe Shaheen, a larger-than-life character
(both figuratively and physically) who has made
more than 100 films in Afghanistan during the
years of war and extreme Taliban oppression.
Despite the limited resources available to him –
there’s a reason why he terms the local industry
‘Nothingwood’ – and the ever-present dangers
inherent in flouting Taliban law and filming in
areas where gunfire and shellings provide a deadly
soundtrack, Shaheen and his team continue to
churn out cheap, cheerful, Bollywood-inspired
movies for an appreciative local audience.
When Kronlund starts filming Shaheen,
he is in the process of making four movies
simultaneously, two of which are based on
his own life – it’s an endeavour that will take
him into some of the most dangerous regions
of the country. Often on screen, Kronlund is
a sympathetic presence, probing Shaheen
with a gentle yet focused line of questioning;
this, together with their shared love of
cinema, allows for the flowing of intimate,
easy conversations, which gradually cut
through the Afghan filmmaker’s showy
exterior to reveal his tumultuous past.
Riotous, often hilarious scenes of Shaheen
with crowds of adoring fans, screaming
directions at his haphazard band of actors (one
memorable scene involves hefty star Qurban Ali
riding a miniature horse), are contrasted with
sequences in which he recounts the violence
that has shaped his life: targeted as a child for
his love of cinema, drafted into the Afghan
army at 17 and the only survivor of a vicious
attack on a military outpost. (He lived through
the latter by playing dead, a trick he learned
from his childhood moviegoing.) Elsewhere,
Shaheen and his team recall a bombing that
disrupted the shoot of an early movie; despite
92 | Sight&Sound | January 2018
Wonderstruck: Salim Shaheen
losing several cast and crew members, the
bandaged survivors returned to finish the film.
Indeed, despite their matter-of-fact tone, honed
by decades of living with conflict, this threat of
violence and even death remains ever present,
and it’s something Kronlund is painfully aware
of. While never less than professional, she is
also, at times, understandably anxious about her
surroundings, a reminder that this joie de vivre
atmosphere could, at any moment, be shattered,
regardless of Shaheen’s continuing reassurances to
the contrary. “While Shaheen and I were playing
‘the fearless man and the fearful woman’, there
were several attacks on the country,” Kronlund
sombrely observes, intercutting her footage
with bloody newsreel to emphasise the point.
Nevertheless, Shaheen refuses to be derailed
from his cultural calling, and it’s clear he believes
filmmaking to be an important weapon in the
fight for the future of Afghanistan. This is also
a view expressed in Kronlund’s supporting
interviews with members of his team and with
his appreciative fans, who credit his work with
being both an escape and a learning experience.
And, in one telling sequence, a masked Taliban
member speaks about his desire for a strict
adherence to Sharia law – including a complete
ban on the making and watching of films –
Credits and Synopsis
Produced by Emil Klotzsch of Eurimages, CNC
Laurent Lavolé Tobias Fleig - Centre National du
Cinematography Cinéma et de l’Image
Alexander Nanau ©Gloria Films, Animée, German
Eric Guichard Made in Germany Federal Film Board
Editor Production FFA, Creative Europe
Sophie Brunet Companies - MEDIA Programme
George Cragg Gloria Films presents of the European Union
Sound in co-production with With the support
Matthieu Perrot Made in Germany of Film and Media
Hassan Shabankareh With the participation Fund NRW, Région
A documentary made by French journalist Sonia
Kronlund, who has spent years visiting war-torn
Afghanistan, reporting on the everyday horrors of
suicide bombs, attacks and massacres. After hearing
about local filmmaker Salim Shaheen, who has made
and distributed more than 100 movies during the
conflict, Kronlund follows him and his ragtag team as
they embark on the simultaneous production of four
while simultaneously admitting his love for the
Shaheen movies he trades on the black market.
Aside from Shaheen himself, it’s the
towering Ali who is the most interesting
presence here. He is married, with children,
but his feminine manner and love of dressing
in women’s clothes speak to a private persona
that, while never explicitly acknowledged,
would undoubtedly make him a target in
his ultra-conservative community. For him,
it’s clear, Shaheen’s films offer an essential
outlet, emotionally as well as artistically.
While The Prince of Nothingwood may be rather
formulaic in approach, and Shaheen’s films
themselves somewhat archaic in style and subject
– women, for example, have no roles beyond being
singing, dancing, simpering love interests for
Shaheen’s own portly heroes – it’s impossible not
to be swept up by this documentary’s charismatic
subject. Though Shaheen might not have the
power to change Afghanistan’s fortunes (an
assessment with which he may well disagree), his
tenacity, generosity and spirit are the embodiment
of a people who have never stopped hoping for
change. He also provides a timely reminder that,
whatever the circumstances, it’s essential never
to give up, never to surrender and, above all,
always to leave your audience wanting more.
Île-de-France Audiovisuelle du CNC In Colour
In association with Developed within [1.85:1]
Cineventure the framework of the Subtitles
With the participation Eurodoc programme
of Pyramide With the support of Distributor
A film by Sonia Creative Europe - Vertigo Films
Kronlund MEDIA Programme of
A Gloria Films the European Union, French theatrical title
production Région Île-de-France Nothingwood
Funding from Fonds in partnership
d’Aide à l’Innovation with the CNC
new features, two of which are based on Shaheen’s
own tumultuous life. As they travel to regions still
ravaged by war, roping in local soldiers and equipment
to make more of the low-budget, feelgood Bollywood-
esque movies for which Shaheen is famous, Kronlund’s
conversations with the filmmakers and their audiences
reveal the power of cinema to unite a divided people,
offering both an escape and a sense of hope.
Sanctuary
Ireland 2016
Director: Len Collin
Reviewed by Alex Dudok de Wit
Until recently, people with an intellectual
disability in Ireland were banned from having
sex unless they were married. Sanctuary aims to
show up the injustice of the law. Very worthy –
but right-on sermonising this ain’t. Thoughtful,
nuanced and fun, it subverts received ideas about
disability in its very approach to filmmaking.
Adapted from Christian O’Reilly’s play of
the same name, the film centres on a group of
disabled people living in Galway. On a cinema
outing, two of them – Larry (Kieran Coppinger)
and Sophie (Charlene Kelly) – sneak off to a
hotel for some intimacy, with the connivance
of their carer Tom (Robert Doherty). Though
acting out of sympathy, Tom knows that he
has broken the law, and he spends the rest of
the film performing damage control as his
charges wander off unsupervised into the city.
The disabled characters are played by disabled
actors, who also performed in the play as part
of the Blue Teapot Theatre Company. The
scenes between Larry and Sophie are intercut
with witty vignettes in which their friends
roam around Galway, discussing life, love and
popcorn. The mundanity of their conversations
is spiced with comedy (an offbeat pub scene
brings to mind Roddy Doyle) and pathos (as
when one character admits to suicidal thoughts).
O’Reilly developed the script from discussions
with his cast; this lends a clear ring of truth
to the dialogue, and the actors, evidently at
ease together, nail its emotional range.
There is something gently radical about
this. Films about intellectual disability tend to
focus on gifted individuals, presenting talent
and handicap as two sides of a coin (the autism
documentary Life, Animated is a recent example).
Or disabled characters serve to redeem others by
imparting lessons in simplicity and emotional
honesty – a spin on the trope of the ‘Magical
Negro’, perhaps. At best, such films feature
disabled actors (The Eighth Day). At worst, they
call in showboating Hollywood stars to do
Credits and Synopsis
Produced by Joe Conlan in association with
Edwina Forkin Sound Recordist/ Bord Scannán
Written by Mixer na hÉireann
Christian O’Reilly Michael Lemass and in association
Director of Costume Designer with Blue Teapot
Photography Sonja Mohlich Theatre Company
Russell Gleeson Funded by the
Editor ©Zanzibar Films Broadcasting
Julian Ulrichs Production Authority of Ireland
Production Designer Companies with the Television
Eleanor Wood Zanzibar Films Licence Fee
Composer presents RTÉ
Present-day Ireland. Larry is a young man with
Down’s syndrome who lives with his mother in
Galway. He visits a home for people with intellectual
disabilities, where he furtively delivers money to
Tom, a care worker. Tom takes Larry and the residents
– including Sophie, a young woman with severe
epilepsy – to the cinema. During the film, Tom, Larry
and Sophie sneak out and head to a nearby hotel.
Tom uses Larry’s money to book him a room,
believing that he and Sophie just want some time
alone. When Larry asks Tom for a condom, he
hesitates: under Irish law, intellectually disabled
people cannot have sex unless married. Larry
convinces him to turn a blind eye. Tom leaves;
Larry proposes sex to Sophie, but she panics
Non-conformist: Kieran Coppinger
the job (Rain Man). But Sanctuary conforms
to no stereotype; it is about people wanting
to lead ordinary lives on their own terms.
There are clichés: films on this subject are
all too reliant on the narrative formula of the
grand day out. But through this device, Sanctuary
poignantly sketches the cloistered confines of
the characters’ lives: everyday objects are new
to them, and their reference point for many
things is television – EastEnders for sex, Casualty
for medical emergencies (amusingly, O’Reilly
has written for both shows). It also evokes the
contradictory views of disability found across
society – and even in some individuals. Though
largely progressive, Tom admits that he cannot
bear the thought of Larry and Sophie having sex.
The repeal of the law in March has taken
the sting out of Sanctuary’s political punch,
but the film has another message for cinema.
While disabled actors are generally held to low
standards, experimental companies such as
Blue Teapot are slowly changing perceptions
in theatre. On this evidence, filmmakers
ought to partner with them more often.
Executive Producers Patrick Becker Michael Hayes
Mary Callery Andrew Peter
Siobhán Ní Ghadhra Valerie Egan Karen Murphy
Alice Clare
Frank Butcher
Cast William In Colour
Kieran Coppinger Paul Connolly [1.78:1]
Larry Matthew
Charlene Kelly Emer Macken Distributor
Sophie Sandy Guerilla Films
Robert Doherty Jennifer Cox
Tom Rita
and explains that she has been abused in the
past. Larry calms her down and they have sex
– unprotected. They profess their love for each
other and decide that they want a family, but
acknowledge that they face social obstacles.
Meanwhile, some residents leave the cinema to
look for the missing three. They get distracted: two
go to the pub and two end up in a shopping centre.
Tom returns to the cinema to find them gone. He
rounds them up and leads them back to the hotel
room. When the residents realise that Larry and
Sophie have had sex, one becomes agitated. Amid
the chaos, Sophie has a seizure and is rushed to
hospital. Tom learns that there will be an inquiry
into his misconduct. He takes the residents home.
Secret Superstar
Director: Advait Chandan
Certificate 12A 149m 57s
Reviewed by Naman Ramachandran
Most of the films and television series produced
by Bollywood star Aamir Khan highlight
REVIEWS
social issues, and are told in a manner that
make the subject matter accessible to general
audiences. Taare Zameen Par (2007) dealt
with the neglect faced by dyslexic children;
Peepli Live (2010) looked at farmer suicides;
and the TV series Satyamev Jayate (2012-14)
featured a range of hot-button topics.
Secret Superstar, written and directed by
debutant Advait Chandan, is no different. On
the face of it, the film is a winning tale about
Insia, a young girl who wants to break free from
the shackles of her strict father’s control and
become a singer, but it also packs in several
other subjects. Chief among them is domestic
abuse. Insia’s father Farookh appears to be a
decent enough man, but he simmers with a
brooding rage that periodically erupts into
physical violence against his wife Najma.
Education is a favourite topic for Khan, as
was demonstrated in Taare Zameen Par and
2009’s 3 Idiots (in which he starred), and it
features again here. Secret Superstar depicts
corporal punishment in schools and the
tyranny of private tuition – in a country
with a population of 1.3 billion, many Indian
parents enrol their children in after-hours
classes to give them a better chance in the
employment market. The film also explores how
uneducated wives stay in abusive marriages
simply because they have no other option; it
even raises the spectre of female infanticide.
If all this makes Secret Superstar sound like
a litany of complaints, it’s not. The issues are
present and real, but the central tale of a talented
girl overcoming the odds to pursue her musical
dream is never lost from sight. The excellent
casting helps. Zaira Wasim, who made her debut
as a young wrestler in last year’s Dangal, is pitch
perfect as Insia, as are Meher Vij as her mother
and Raj Arjun in the difficult, unsympathetic role
of her father. Khan, meanwhile, despite being
one of India’s most bankable stars, headlining
four of the all-time top-ten Bollywood hits, cedes
centre stage, as he did in Dangal, serving the script
rather than his stardom by relegating himself to
the supporting role of a vain composer who helps
Insia’s nascent career. Secret Superstar is, then, one
of the few films that both educates and entertains.
Secret Superstar is also the latest addition to the
growing number of Bollywood films that place
strong female protagonists front and centre, in an
industry known for its overreliance on heroes. In
2017 alone, Anushka Sharma was the top-billed
star in Phillauri, Swara Bhaskar in Anaarkali of
Aarah, Aditi Inamdar in Poorna, Vidya Balan in
Begum Jaan and Tumhari Sulu, Sridevi in Mom,
and Kangana Ranaut in Simran. The fact that at
least half of these films were viable at the box
office proves that producers are finally paying
attention to female audiences. While Secret
Superstar had the star charisma of Khan to pave
its way to box-office gold, the strong box-office
performance of the woman-oriented Lipstick
Under My Burkha, featuring the stories of four
diverse women, none of them marquee names,
is heartening, proving that India appreciates all
stories, not just the ones featuring male stars.
January 2018 | Sight&Sound | 93
 Shot Caller
USA 2015
Director: Ric Roman Waugh

Reviewed by Anton Bitel

It begins with a dissonance between sound and
image. We hear in voiceover the nuanced letter,
REVIEWS

filled with tenderness and pain, that Jacob Harlon

(Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) has just written to the
beloved teenage son he has not seen in ten years
and may never see again. Yet after the camera
pans through a prison interior to cell 13, we
see Jacob’s forearm, covered in the tattoos that
signify his allegiance to the Aryan Brotherhood
(alongside the name of his wife and son). Indeed,
what makes Shot Caller so compelling to watch,
aside from its twisty thrills and convoluted
plotting, is the way in which it allows its
characters to be both members of vicious, racist
I have a dream: Zaira Wasim gangs and also loving fathers and husbands.
These are all layerings that the convicts’ identities
Credits and Synopsis have accumulated, like the extensions of their
sentences or the expansion of permanent ink
across their bodies, inscribing the constraint of
Produced by Production Subtitles
Aamir Khan Companies the fateful trajectories that they barely control.
Kiran Rao Zee Studios presents Distributor Fatalism is key here. Shot Caller opens in
Zee Studios Aamir Khan Zee Studios
Akash Chawla Productions International medias res, with Jacob about to be released on Divided he stands: Nikolaj Coster-Waldau
Written by parole, even as the man in the cell next door
Advait Chandan
Cinematographer Cast is found hanging. Yet only Jacob’s neighbour up for himself and choose a gang for protection,
Anil Mehta Zaira Wasim has truly escaped, for Jacob himself, in his it was unlikely he would make it alive to the end
Editor Insia Malik determination to survive and ensure that no of his sentence – and membership comes at the
Hemanti Sarkar Meher Vij
Production Najma Malik harm comes to his family, must successfully price of further criminal actions and constant
Designers Raj Arjun broker an arms sale for his gang, with the police exhibitions of fealty to an ideology that, though
Suman Roy Farookh Malik
Mahapatra Tirth Sharma and even one of his own comrades circling to far from his own, he has soon perfectly embodied.
Pallavi Bagga Chintan Parekh stop this happening. The number of the motel Written and directed by Ric Roman Waugh
Music Kabir Shaikh
Amit Trivedi Guddu Malik room where he is residing temporarily is the (Snitch, 2013), Shot Caller is a time-leaping saga
Lyrics Farrokh Jaffer same as the number of the cell where he was last of one man caught in a machine that breeds
Kausar Munir Badi Aapa
Sound Designer & Aamir Khan
interned, underlining the notion that he remains hardened, if internally conflicted, criminals –
Location Sound Shakti Kumaarr a prisoner to his destiny whether inside or out. and by witnessing Jacob’s own divided loyalties,
Pritam Das This tense storyline unfolds even as an intricate we are left with the impression that the gang’s
Costume Designer In Colour
Priyanjali Lahiri [2.35:1] sequence of flashbacks shows us how Jacob came other members and even its ultimate ‘shot caller’,
to be incarcerated. He started out as a white-collar Jerry ‘the Beast’ Manning (Holt McCallany),
Gujarat, India, the present. Fifteen-year-old financier and family man, but from the moment are as much double-dealing products of the
Insia lives with her engineer father Farookh, her
homemaker mother Najma, her younger brother
he was sent to prison for his involvement in a fatal penitentiary’s culture as Jacob himself. Jacob’s
Guddu and her great aunt Badi Aapa. Farookh is a drunk-driving accident (the number 13 encoding bloody ascent to the top is simultaneously
strict father and an abusive husband, and Najma his bad luck), his fate was sealed. As his own a descent, in a claustrophobic thriller that
is often the victim of domestic violence. Insia is a lawyer made clear, if he did not immediately stand is also a j’accuse to the US penal system.
gifted singer and songwriter, but cannot pursue
her dream of a musical career because of Farookh’s
disapproval of everything except academic pursuits.
Credits and Synopsis
When Farookh goes on a business trip, Najma
sells a family necklace and buys Insia a laptop. Produced by Waugh film Dolby Digital Los Angeles, present day. Out drunk one night with
Insia uses it to record videos and upload them to Michel Litvak Executive Producers In Colour his wife and two friends, financier and family man
YouTube, though she hides her face with a hijab for Gary Michael Walters Jeff Skoll Jacob Harlon crashes his car, causing a fatality. Sent
fear of her father finding out – her identity is known Jonathan King Jeffrey Stott Distributor
Ric Roman Waugh Lisa Zambri Altitude Film to prison, he quickly learns that to survive inside
only to her classmate Chintan, who’s sweet on her, he must join the Aryan Brotherhood for protection;
Written by Matt Rhodes Entertainment
and Najma. Insia’s videos go viral and she becomes Ric Roman Waugh Tucker Tooley this entails smuggling drugs and murdering other
a media sensation. She comes to the attention of Director of inmates when ordered. During an organised riot in
over-the-hill Bollywood composer Shakti Kumar, who Photography
the yard, Jacob intervenes to protect Herman Gómez,
leaves a message asking her to contact him. Using Dana Gonzalez Cast
Editor Nikolaj Coster- leader of the Southern Mexicans, and is caught on
Chintan’s phone, Insia gets in touch with Kumar and Michelle Tesoro Waldau camera stabbing Gómez’s attacker, thus earning
he sends her a plane ticket to Mumbai. With Chintan’s Production Designer Jacob Harlon, ‘Money’ himself a longer sentence in a maximum-security
help, Insia escapes from school and flies to Mumbai Guy Barnes Omari Hardwick facility. There he wins the trust of Jerry ‘the Beast’
to record a song for Kumar, and is back by the time Music Ed Kutcher
Antonio Pinto Lake Bell Manning, the Aryan Brotherhood’s ‘shot caller’, and
school ends for the day. The song is a failure, but is ordered to keep a low profile until he gets out.
Production Kate Harlon
Insia convinces Kumar to record a more melodic Sound Mixer Jon Bernthal Released on parole after ten years, Jacob is ordered
version, which becomes a sensation across India. Darryl Frank Frank Costello, by Manning, on threat of harm to Kate and their son,
Discovering that Najma has sold the necklace, Costume Designer ‘Shotgun’
to broker an arms deal between Afghan War veteran
Farookh beats her, and orders Insia to destroy the Kelli Jones Emory Cohen
Stunt Co-ordinator Howie Howie and Gómez’s gang. Jacob’s parole officer
laptop. He informs the family that they are moving Freddy Bouciegues Jeffrey Donovan Kutcher, who is using Jacob’s former prison buddy
to Saudi Arabia, where Insia is to be married. With Bottles Frank ‘Shotgun’ as an informant, knows that Jacob is in
Kumar’s help, Insia again flies to Mumbai, meets ©Shot Caller Evan Jones on the deal – but Jacob in turn knows that Frank is an
with a lawyer and obtains divorce papers for Najma. Film, LLC Chopper
Production Benjamin Bratt informant. On the night of the deal, Jacob kills Frank,
Just before checking in for the flight to Saudi Arabia, and deliberately leaves a phone trail for Kutcher and
Companies Manny Sanchez
Najma summons her courage and leaves Farookh. Bold Films presents Holt McCallany his men to intervene. Arrested again, Jacob returns
She and the children attend an awards ceremony, in association Jerry Manning, to maximum security, and kills Manning to prevent
where Insia has been nominated for best singer. Insia with Participant ‘The Beast’
the murder of his own family. Now Jacob is the gang’s
doesn’t win, but the winner gives her the award. Media a Ric Roman
shot caller, and will never see Kate or his son again.

94 | Sight&Sound | January 2018

Stronger Thank You for the Rain
USA 2017 United Kingdom/Norway/Germany/The Netherlands/
Director: David Gordon Green Qatar/Sweden/South Africa 2017
Certificate 15 118m 49s Director: Julia Dahr

Reviewed by Philip Concannon Reviewed by Michael Brooke

The best shot in Stronger occurs early in the A film about climate change that’s not so
film, as Jeff Bauman (Jake Gyllenhaal), who much about its alleged human exacerbation

REVIEWS
has lost both his legs in the 2013 Boston terror as about its undeniable human cost, Thank You
attack, is having the dressing on his wounds for the Rain focuses primarily on the life of
changed for the first time. Director David Kenyan farmer turned climate activist Kisilu
Gordon Green focuses on Gyllenhaal’s face as Musya, his wife Christina and their seven
he looks away and winces with every painful children as they cope with a weather system
movement, his bandaged stumps out of focus that alternates unprecedentedly lengthy dry
in the background. He’s alone in the shot until spells with brief periods of rain so torrential as
girlfriend Erin (Tatiana Maslany) enters the to be just as destructive.
frame to support him, and the image of their two As Norwegian documentary-maker Julia Dahr
faces pressed together is a simple but effective explains at the start, she met the charismatic and
visual expression of the love and determination articulate Musya while mulling over the structure
that will help this couple through their ordeal. and content of her project, and invited him to
Stronger is at its most compelling when it participate – and Musya was savvy enough to
focuses on Jeff and Erin, but the tension in the film request a camera to record his own video diary at
comes from the fact that they are rarely allowed potentially crucial times when Dahr and her team
to be alone. When Bauman was photographed might not be available. Accordingly, although
being carried from the scene of the bombing, the Dahr retains a sole directing credit, this follows
lower half of his legs destroyed by the blast, he Fight back: Jake Gyllenhaal an explicit acknowledgement of joint authorship.
was celebrated as a symbol of the city’s unity and It’s easy to divine who was in charge at any given
resilience, a personification of the ‘Boston Strong’ verge of pushing too hard. The film is also frank moment: Musya’s autobiographical footage is
slogan that had been embraced as a rallying cry. about the physical and emotional toll that coping handheld and often awkwardly framed, while
He is a reluctant hero, however, thrust into the with disability takes on both of them, through Dahr’s equivalent is more measured and elegant.
spotlight before he has even had a chance to mundane tasks such as getting into bed or going But this beauty is deceptive. A night full of
come to terms with his own trauma. When he is to the bathroom, which is particularly refreshing stars can be revelatory to someone from a light-
invited to carry a Boston Strong flag at a Bruins after watching Andy Serkis’s anodyne Breathe. polluted urban environment, but Musya points
hockey game, he tolerates the attention with These aspects of Stronger are so admirable out that a clear sky spells bad news for him, as it
some awkward waves and a rictus grin, before that it makes you wish the whole movie were suggests that the present drought will continue.
a PTSD flashback causes him to lash out at Erin better. While the central relationship is depicted Even the arrival of rain, initially greeted with
as soon as they are away from the public’s gaze. with nuance and authenticity, the supporting ecstasy, swiftly becomes alarming as Musya’s roof
Screenwriter John Pollono, working from cast are painted in broad strokes, with Miranda is wrenched off by the wind. A man who lives
Bauman’s 2014 autobiography, doesn’t soft-pedal Richardson overplaying badly as Jeff’s alcoholic off his own land with next to nothing in the way
his character flaws. The Jeff Bauman we see on mother. Pollono and Green also settle for more of modern conveniences (the film doesn’t stint
screen is frequently thoughtless, selfish and prone familiar narrative beats as they get closer to the on the backbreaking effort involved), Musya
to self-pity, and his on-off relationship with Erin finish line, pushing for an emotional uplift that isn’t one to be swayed by airy back-to-nature
complicates the straightforward ‘love conquers feels obligatory rather than earned. A climactic romanticism, especially when his children are
all’ narrative that we might have anticipated. scene, in which Jeff throws out the first pitch sent home from school because he can’t afford the
The supportive-partner role is too often an at a Red Sox game and is then surrounded by fees. In another misleadingly beautiful sequence,
afterthought in biopics such as this, but Maslany’s people who tell him how much he has inspired he home-schools them by lantern light while
heartfelt performance allows Erin to emerge as a them, feels particularly cheap and hackneyed. musing about what being a good father entails
character in her own right, and her low-key work It’s a shame that a film often distinguished – unlike many fellow villagers, he opts not to
seems to have a tempering effect on Gyllenhaal, by an unexpected grit and complexity relocate to the city in search of temporary work,
who is always committed but constantly on the should end in a way that rings so false. as he feels that his physical presence is of more
value to them than potential extra income.
Credits and Synopsis When Musya visits Dahr’s native Oslo for
the first time, the film contrasts sharply
different lifestyles that are partly defined by
Produced by Production Sully In 2013, Jeff Bauman is among the crowd at the
Todd Lieberman Companies Nathan Richman finish line of the Boston Marathon, waiting to greet
David Hoberman Lionsgate presents in Big D
Jake Gyllenhaal association with Bold Lenny Clarke his ex-girlfriend Erin Hurley. As she approaches, a
Michel Litvak Films a Mandeville Uncle Bob bomb explodes. Jeff is rushed to hospital, where
Scott Silver Films/Nine Stories Patricia O’Neil his legs are amputated below the knee. When he
Written by production Aunt Jenn regains consciousness, he tells the FBI that he came
John Pollono A David Gordon Green Katharine Fitzgerald
face-to-face with the bomber; when his description
Based on the book Executive Producers Aunt Karen
by Jeff Bauman, Gary Michael Walters Danny McCarthy helps them capture Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, he is hailed
Bret Witter Riva Marker Kevin as a hero. After leaving hospital, Jeff struggles to
Director of Anthony Mattero cope with the media attention. Erin moves into the
Photography Peter McGuigan Dolby Digital apartment he shares with his mother Patty, who insists
Sean Bobbitt Nicolas Stern In Colour
Editor Jeffrey Stott [2.35:1] on booking media interviews against their wishes.
Dylan Tichenor Alexander Young During his rehabilitation process, Jeff’s relationship
Production Designer Distributor with Erin is rekindled, but when he makes a guest
Stephen H. Carter Lionsgate UK appearance at a hockey game, the event triggers a
Music Cast breakdown. He begins drinking heavily, missing therapy
Michael Brook Jake Gyllenhaal
Production Jeff Bauman appointments and getting into fights. Erin tells Jeff
Sound Mixer Tatiana Maslany that she is pregnant; when he says he isn’t ready to
Chris Gebert Erin Hurley be a father, she breaks off the relationship. Jeff meets
Costume Designers Miranda Richardson Carlos, who helped him after the explosion, and a few
Kim Wilcox Patty Bauman
Leah Katznelson Clancy Brown days later the two men throw out the first pitch at
Jeff Bauman a Red Sox game. After the game, Jeff is surrounded
©Stronger Film Sr, ‘Big Jeff’ by fans, who tell him how he has inspired them. Jeff
Holdings, LLC Richard Lane Jr and Erin reconcile and prepare to start a family.
Adaptation: Christina Kisilu, Kisilu Musya

January 2018 | Sight&Sound | 95

 Wonder
USA 2017
Director: Stephen Chbosky
Certificate PG 113m 1s

the surrounding climate. Whereas Kenya Reviewed by Lisa Mullen

is dry and parched, Norway is frozen to the It was the dead dog that did it for me. In a film as
point where Musya observes that the inhabitants gloopily sentimental as this, it’s hard to pinpoint
REVIEWS

seem to require substantial amounts of electricity the exact moment when the schmaltz turns
merely to stay alive – but he’s inspired by the truly sulphurous, but I’m fairly sure it’s around
noticeably greater level of camaraderie and the time that an entirely blameless and hitherto
organisation, which helps fund the purchase of perfectly healthy pet is suddenly rushed off to the
a motorbike to enable him to spread his message vet’s, diagnosed as terminally ill and euthanised,
further afield. Back in Kenya, his advantage is for no narrative reason at all. In a different,
that he not only speaks the language of the other slightly better film, the deceased mutt might
villagers but can use the unforced metaphors have functioned as an emotional focal point of
they’ll instantly grasp. The drawback, though, is some kind, a containable mini-tragedy to make a
that this generates no extra income, so his family warring family snap out of it and pull together as
must work even harder to keep things going in his a team for a change. But no, even such ready-made
absence. Christina acknowledges the importance plot clichés are too much to ask. In a film entirely
of his campaigning work, but is entitled to devoid of tension, conflict or jeopardy, killing the
the occasional resentful monologue, and even dog to a soundtrack of swelling strings is just a He will overcome: Jacob Tremblay, Julia Roberts
Musya’s ambitions are momentarily checked cheap way of further wetting the already sodden
when circumstances force him to sell his last goat. cheeks of the susceptible. The unsusceptible and loveably witty, and teenage sisters (Izabela
Unsurprisingly, there’s no pat conclusion: will be forgiven for reaching for the umbrella. Vidovic) will be sweet-hearted and cute. Indeed,
Musya knows that tangible results will take Yet resistance is the exact opposite of what this for a film that supposedly promotes inclusion
decades, and he sometimes wonders whether film is after. It’s a theoretically heartwarming and tolerance, the range of acceptable action and
he’s making any difference at all. Dahr contrives tale about Auggie (Jacob Tremblay), a shy reaction here is wincingly slender. How does one
a climax of sorts when he’s invited to address ten-year-old boy with facial differences, who succeed in this bizarrely robotic society? If boy,
the 2015 United Nations Climate Change triumphs over the prejudice and bullying of be clever and brave. If girl, be pretty and nice.
Conference in Paris, rubbing shoulders with his new schoolmates to become a popular Do not be complex, do not be sceptical, do not,
world leaders and celebrities, but all this does and successful member of the community. no matter what you may look like, be different.
is confirm his suspicions (briefly underscored Its purpose, presumably, is to ask audiences In the past, stories for children that examined
by a baleful glimpse of Donald Trump’s to confront their own preconceptions and to illness and difference found room for real distress
concurrent presidential campaign) that engage empathetically with the plucky kid. But and unease – think of The Secret Garden, or Heidi,
those who think globally are unlikely to have the emotional manipulation is so relentless and or even, for that matter, Stuart Little. In contrast,
much impact on those who act locally. But it coercive that it risks having the opposite effect: Wonder seems to be machine-tooled for the era of
would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. instead of involving us, the film tends to remind the tear-jerking Christmas ad and the shareable
us of its own egregious artifice. Auggie doesn’t Facebook vignette. This odd-looking child was
Credits and Synopsis really have to overcome any difficulties, because eating his lunch all alone. You won’t believe what his
he lives in a sunlit world where difficulties can classmates did next. The algorithms of the culture
never persist. (Affluent) parents (Julia Roberts, industry churn out this premasticated sludge,
Produced by ZDF/ARTE, Banyak Sabine Bubeck-Paaz
Hugh Hartford Films, Differ Media Owen Wilson) and (private school) teachers and the relevant parts of our brains twitch
Written by Made possible with In Colour (Mandy Patinkin) will have endless reservoirs of obediently, bathing us in oxytocin and softening
Julia Dahr funding & support [2.35:1]
Hugh Hartford of Norwegian Film Part-subtitled patience and wisdom. Bullies will be bested at the us up to buy whatever it is they are selling. But
Original Idea Institute, Fond for first try. Small boys with facial differences will surely films have better, more powerful and more
Julia Dahr lyd og bilde, Fritt Distributor
Director of Ord, ESoDoc, Good DocHouse
be eternally cheerful, preternaturally intelligent interesting ways of addressing our emotions?
Photography Pitch, dok.incubator
Julie Lunde In association with
Lillesaeter EO, Al Jazeera,
Credits and Synopsis
Editor Goldsmiths,
Adam Thomas University of London
Composer In co-production Produced by a Mandeville Films/ Millie Davis New York, present day. Ten-year-old Auggie Pullman has
Chris White with ZDF in Todd Lieberman Lionsgate production Summer severe facial differences due to a genetic condition, and
Sound Designer collaboration with David Hoberman Executive Producers Elle McKinnon has always been home-schooled because his parents
Svenn Jakobsen ARTE, UR, AfriDocs Screenplay Jeff Skoll Charlotte
With the support Stephen Chbosky Robert Kessel have been wary of exposing him to bullying. However,
©Banyak Films of Creative Steven Conrad R.J. Palacio Dolby Digital they decide that he should now join mainstream
& Differ Media Europe - MEDIA Jack Thorne Alexander Young In Colour education and attend a carefully selected prep school.
Production Programme of the Based on the novel [2.35:1] At first, the other pupils avoid Auggie; one boy in
Companies European Union by R.J. Palacio
A co-production with Executive Producer Director of Cast Distributor
particular, Julian, bullies him and encourages others
Photography Julia Roberts Lionsgate UK to do so. Nevertheless, Auggie makes a friend, Jack,
Don Burgess Isabel Pullman and soon impresses the teachers with his intelligence.
Mutomo, Kenya, the 2010s. Norwegian documentary- Editor Owen Wilson At Halloween he overhears Jack making disparaging
maker Julia Dahr gives local farmer Kisilu Musya a Mark Livolsi Nate Pullman remarks about him to Julian, and breaks off their
Production Designer Jacob Tremblay
camera to make a video diary of his life as he and his Kalina Ivanov August Pullman, friendship. He becomes more withdrawn and, even
family cope with the effects of a changing climate, Music ‘Auggie’ when Jack tries to apologise, cannot get over the
including significantly reduced rainfall and violent Marcelo Zarvos Izabela Vidovic hurt. Meanwhile, his sister Olivia is feeling vulnerable
storms that damage Musya’s house and cause Production Olivia Pullman, ‘Via’ in high school because her best friend Miranda has
Sound Mixer Mandy Patinkin
widespread flooding. Instead of seeking alternative gone off with another group of girls. She meets a
Kelly Zombor Mr Tushman
income elsewhere, Musya stays at home, educating Costume Designer Daveed Diggs boy, Justin, and finds a new interest in drama, which
his seven children and teaching his fellow villagers Monique Prudhomme Mr Browne ultimately brings her back together with Miranda.
about the need to plant more trees to adapt the Sonia Braga Auggie’s friendship with Jack is saved when
landscape to new environmental realities. A trip ©Lions Gate Films Grans Jack punches Julian for bullying Auggie – Julian’s
Inc., Participant Danielle Rose
to an Oslo conference with Dahr secures funding Media, LLC and Russell behaviour is exposed, and he leaves the school.
for a motorbike for Musya, which will allow him to Walden Media, LLC Miranda At a nature camp, Auggie and several of his
spread his climate-change message; however, his Production Nadji Jeter classmates are attacked by boys from another
resentful family has to work harder in his absence. Companies Justin school, and his bravery garners him more respect
Lionsgate presents Noah Jupe
An invitation to address the 2015 UN Climate Change in association with
and friendships. By the end of the film, both Auggie
Jack Will
Conference in Paris merely convinces Musya that the Participant Media Bryce Gheisar and Olivia are popular and successful. Auggie wins
outside world has other priorities. His work goes on. and Walden Media Julian a special prize for being an inspiration to others.

96 | Sight&Sound | January 2018

ADVERTISING FEATURE
ANIMATING THE
SCIENCE FICTION
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By J.P. Telotte, Oxford University Press,
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1895: Seven Days in Mayhem
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High time to reassess the career
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TAINTED LOVE
Screening Sexual Perversion
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This is the first critical anthology
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September 2012| Sight&Sound | 97
 Home cinema
HOME CINEMA
Getting medieval on your ass: Max Wall (as King Bruno the Questionable), Deborah Fallender, Derek Francis and Michael Palin
O FRABJOUS DAY!
Scrubbed up by modern
technology, Terry Gilliam’s
solo directing debut can now
be seen in all its filthy glory
JABBERWOCKY
Terry Gilliam; UK 1977; Criterion; Region B Blu-ray;
Certificate 12; 105 minutes; 1.85:1. Features: interviews,
commentary, original opening sequence, sketch-to-
screen comparison, poetry reading, trailer, booklet.
Reviewed by Philip Kemp
In the pre-credit sequence of Terry Gilliam’s
solo directing debut, Jabberwocky, a poacher in
the forest is gorily slaughtered by an unseen
monster. Given that the unlucky guy is played
by Terry Jones, co-director of Gilliam’s only
previous feature-directing gig, Monty Python and
the Holy Grail (1975), it’s as graphic a declaration
of independence as could well be imagined.
As he mentions several times in his
commentary, Gilliam saw Jabberwocky as “a
reaction against The Holy Grail”, adding that he
regarded his Monty Python background as “a bit
98 | Sight&Sound | January 2018
of a millstone”. “I wanted to create my own world
without being Pythonic,” he tells us. Nevertheless
he includes fellow Pythons in his cast: not only
Jones’s opening cameo, but Michael Palin as
the film’s gormless hero. (Palin also shares the
disc’s commentary.) And though it has a slightly
more coherent plot than the Python movies,
much of Jabberwocky’s style and humour has a
distinctly Pythonesque feel to it, not least in its
anti-Hollywood view of the Middle Ages (shared
with Holy Grail) as a relentless morass of mud,
blood, piss, shit, starvation and mindless cruelty.
Much to Gilliam’s annoyance, the film was billed
by its US distributor as Monty Python’s Jabberwocky.
The third Python in the cast-list is Gilliam
himself, as another briefly glimpsed victim of the
monster (apparently because he was standing
in for Dudley Moore, who dropped out at the
last moment). Otherwise the film is stocked
with stalwarts of British screen comedy: John
Le Mesurier, Harry H. Corbett, Warren Mitchell,
Bernard Bresslaw, Annette Badland, John Bird
and, in a performance of relishably tetchy gum-
sucking senility as King Bruno the Questionable,
the great music-hall veteran Max Wall.
Filmed at a couple of Welsh castles – Pembroke
and Chepstow – and on Shepperton sets
cannibalised from the production of Oliver!
(1968), with costumes purloined from Alfred the
Great (1969), Jabberwocky looks surprisingly good
considering its modest budget (about £500,000).
An early scene where the hapless Dennis (Palin)
rows his coracle across a lake to woo his lumpen
love-interest (Badland) succeeds, thanks to Terry
Bedford’s lensing, in looking nothing short of
lyrical. At other times Gilliam puts the pervasive
medieval gloom to richly atmospheric use.
All these visual elements come up as good as
new in the scrupulous 4K restoration carried
out by the BFI’s National Archive and the Film
Foundation, with funding from the George Lucas
Family foundation. (Quite possibly better than
new, in fact – in a few scenes wires are now visible
It shares with Monty Python’s
‘Holy Grail’ a view of the Middle
Ages as a morass of mud, blood,
starvation and mindless cruelty

where they evidently weren’t meant to be.) The
film is presented in its original aspect ratio of
1.85:1, restored from the original camera negative
and other original elements, and the image
repair was completed at L’Immagine Ritrovata in
Bologna. The soundtrack has been remixed, too,
in 5.1 surround sound, by André Jacquemin at
Redwood Studios, London, again from the original
monaural magnetic multitracks, using iZotope
RX software to lend clarity and vibrancy to the
dialogue, music and effects. With Gilliam himself
involved in the restoration process, Jabberwocky
has surely never looked or sounded better.
The film, as expected, displays all of the
director’s cartoonish energy, even if at times
his relative inexperience shows in some shaky
narrative structure and repetitive gags, faults
that he would largely have corrected by the
time he came to direct Time Bandits (1981) and
Brazil (1985). But there’s no lack of inventively
emetic humour, often courtesy of Charles
Alverson’s script (co-written with Gilliam):
an inn called The Queen’s Haemorrhoids, a
passing reference to the Blessed Sisters of St
Alopecia, a cheery hawker selling “Hot roasted
rats – only a farthing!” Also some impressively
choreographed set pieces, as when Dennis’s
well-meaning interference succeeds in
demolishing an entire armoury workshop.
Gilliam, as he readily admits in his
commentary, wears his borrowings on his sleeve.
Hieronymus Bosch and Brueghel paintings
introduce the post-title action, the spirits of
Gormenghast and Spike Milligan hover over the
whole production and King Bruno is celebrated
as “conqueror of Freedonia” (a nod to the Marx
Brothers’ 1933 Duck Soup). Parodies abound: when
the monster attacks, the DeWolfe score rips off
the shark’s theme in Jaws (1975), and another
scene sends up the “I am Spartacus!” moment
from Kubrick’s epic. But despite the title, and
even though he’s granted a final credit (“Thanks
to the Rev Charles Dodgson for the use of the
poem”), there’s not really much of Lewis Carroll in
Gilliam’s movie. The poem is quoted two or three
times, and the Jabberwock itself, a cross between a
dragon and a monstrous chicken, owes something
to Tenniel’s classic illustration; but of the subtler
fantasy practised by Carroll there’s little trace.
Still, as one of the generous stack of extras we
get Palin and Badland sharing an enthusiastic
reading of Carroll’s poem between them. There’s
also a documentary, Jabberwocky – Good Nonsense,
featuring lively interviews with Gilliam, Palin,
Badland and producer Sandy Lieberson; a further
interview with DP Terry Bedford; another with
designer Valerie Charlton on ‘The Making of
a Monster’; a ‘sketch-to-screen comparison’
showing pages from Gilliam’s sketchbooks; a
slightly rejigged opening sequence, and a teasing
trailer. The shared voiceover commentary
is good value, too, with Gilliam and Palin
amicably interrupting and mocking themselves
and each other, swapping memories of what
seems to have been a fairly chaotic shoot. In
the booklet Scott Tobias contributes a detailed
and appreciative essay, noting the film’s
departures from Pythonic conventions.
New releases
THE BATTLE OF THE ANCRE
AND ADVANCE OF THE TANKS
Geoffrey Malins; UK 1917; Imperial War Museum;
multi-region DVD/Blu-ray; 67 minutes; 1.33:1;
two scores, archive films, featurette, booklet
Reviewed by Pamela Hutchinson
Geoffrey Malins’s phenomenon The Battle of
the Somme (1916) showed British cinemagoers
how the ‘war to end war’ was being waged,
offering an unprecedented connection to distant,
terrifying events. His follow-up The Battle of the
Ancre and Advance of the Tanks was filmed in
autumn 1916 at the bloody, prolonged close of the
Somme campaign, and released early in 1917.
The sequel is more tightly constructed and
cinematically shot. The primary focus is on
the soldiers: working, resting, waving at the
camera as they march through mud, deep
and slick. There are wounded men, including
one memorable bandaged Tommy struggling
to light a cigarette while lying supine on a
stretcher, and deep shots that reveal the cramped
conditions of the trenches. However, there
is cheering camaraderie among the troops
and even between enemies. Second to the
human stars are the magnificent tanks, which
demonstrate their fearsome strength. Right
down to the haunting final images of soldiers
caught in silhouette, preparing for an attack,
this is a rare document of life on the front line.
Disc: The film has been sumptuously restored
by the Imperial War Museum, with impressive
detail and missing sections restored. Two
musical scores are provided: Laura Rossi’s
subtle, lyrical orchestral composition, and the
medley of music recommended for the 1917
screenings, compiled by Stephen Horne. A short
documentary and illustrated booklet provide
masses of information about the film, restoration
and music. A quirky wartime propaganda
cartoon and a short actuality made by Malins
at the front in January 1916 complete the set.
BEGGARS OF LIFE
William A. Wellman; US 1928; Kino Lorber; Region A Blu-
ray; 81 minutes; 1.33:1. Features: audio commentaries
by William Wellman Jr, and Thomas Glasz, director of the
Louise Brooks Society; booklet essay by Nick Pinkerton.
Reviewed by David Thompson
“An epic of hobohemia,” declared the Paramount
publicity department. But though Beggars of
Life (1928) was directed by the great William
Wellman, fresh from the Oscar-winning Wings
(1927), and top billing went to actor Wallace
Beery, today – and this is the first official rerelease,
almost 90 years on – the film is most celebrated
as the best of those made in her homeland by
the elusive screen legend Louise Brooks.
The screenplay derives from the
autobiography of a popular writer of the 1920s,
Jim Tully, whose experience of running from
sexual molestation while an adolescent into a
life as a hobo is mirrored in the fate of Nancy,
HOME CINEMA
Brooks’s character. The film opens with a young
vagrant (Richard Arlen) stumbling across a
murder scene. As Brooks explains she is an
orphan who was driven to shoot her adoptive
parent after he tried to rape her, Wellman
powerfully holds a constant dissolve between
her face and the events she recounts. It’s just
one of many brilliant examples of the narrative
fluidity of his direction in a film packed with
tense scenes as the couple join a hobo gang
on the railroad in search of their dreams.
Following Beggars of Life, made when she
was 21, Brooks would cross the Atlantic and
star in the film for Pabst for which she is best
remembered, Pandora’s Box (1929). Her career
was a rocky one – she hated Hollywood,
refused to play the studio game and in personal
relationships was a law unto herself. And yet
Brooks’s entirely natural performing style
and fabulous looks make her seem far more
modern than most of her contemporaries. In
Beggars of Life she mainly appears disguised as
a man – a gender challenge that is evidently
more arresting today than it was at the time.
Disc: While the only existing 35mm print
is not perfect, it has been finely restored
(a sound version of the film is lost). The
music track is rather ‘salon’ in its style, but
sounds authentic. There are two separate
commentaries – Wellman’s son is mainly
anecdotal, while Glasz has certainly done
his research and is highly informative.
THE BIG KNIFE
Robert Aldrich; US 1955; Arrow Academy; Region B
Blu-ray; Certificate PG; 111 minutes; 1.85:1. Features:
commentary by Glenn Kenny and Nick Pinkerton; Saul
Bass on titles; television promo; theatrical trailer; booklet.
Reviewed by Robert Hanks
It’s arguable that it was a mistake, artistically and
pragmatically, ever to try to film Clifford Odets’s
stage play about the spiritual void of Hollywood.
Pragmatically, because it put a big crimp in Robert
Aldrich’s career: he was fired midway through
filming The Garment Jungle a couple of years later
when, the rumour ran, Columbia’s Harry
S. Cohn finally cottoned on that Aldrich
Richard Arlen, Louise Brooks in Beggars of Life
January 2018 | Sight&Sound | 99
 New releases
had directed The Big Knife, and he had taken
HOME CINEMA
Rod Steiger’s portrayal of a lachrymose,
hectoring studio boss personally. Artistically,
because Odets’s drama, jammed up with would-be
profound dialogue and over-determined incident,
always feels as though it still belongs on stage.
Still, we can be grateful that the mistake was
made. For one thing, it’s doubtful that without it
the Coen brothers could have made either Barton
Fink (1991) or Hail, Caesar (2016 – note how
closely Tilda Swinton’s twin gossip columnist
sisters resemble Ilka Chase’s Hedda Hopper
figure here). For another, it features some really
remarkable acting, both remarkably good and
remarkably bad. The central character is Charlie
Castle, a huge Hollywood star struggling with
the loss of his ideals and his marriage, hemmed
in by a studio system that wants to own him
body and soul. Odets based Charlie on John
Garfield, who created the role on Broadway in
1949, and it’s not hard to imagine Garfield in
the lead here; but he died, aged 39, three years
before the film was made, and the role went
to Jack Palance. Aldrich is reported to have
blamed him later for the film’s critical and
commercial failure, though that didn’t stop
him giving Palance the lead in Attack! a couple
of years later. In any case, Palance, cast against
type, grabs the opportunity to show his range,
and is a revelation: virile, charming, vulnerable
– qualities he was rarely given an opportunity
to show off. He isn’t always comfortable with
Odets’s wordiness – though who would be?
If you were looking for a scapegoat, though, a
titanically blustering, hammy Steiger makes
a better candidate (you can see why Cohn was
upset). At least he makes you appreciate Wendell
Corey’s understated studio fixer, undermining
Charlie with oddly feminised endearments
(“Kitty”) and dismissive stereotyping
(“warrior minstrel with a forlorn hope”).
The most interesting acting comes from
the women: Ida Lupino, warm, dignified
and intelligent as Marion Castle, struggling
against her husband’s hollowness and her
own devotion; Jean Hagen as a Hollywood
wife, grasping, vampish and sly, a more sinister
version of Lina Lamont in Singin’ in the Rain
(1952); and Shelley Winters as a failing starlet
who holds a secret that could kill Charlie’s
career dead. Her complaints about the morality
of film studios – “You gotta be a girl with a good
figure to know” – haven’t lost any topicality.
Disc: Glenn Kenny and Nick Pinkerton’s
commentary is informative and critically acute,
underneath lousy sound quality. Ernest Laszlo’s
photography and Frank De Vol’s intermittently
luscious score both come across crisp and smooth.
LON CHANEY: BEFORE
THE THOUSAND FACES
A MOTHER’S ATONEMENT / IF MY COUNTRY
SHOULD CALL / THE PLACE BEYOND THE WIND
Joseph De Grasse; US 1915/1916/1916; Undercrank Prods;
region-free DVD; 20/24/39 mins; 1.33:1. Features: new scores.
Reviewed by Michael Atkinson
Only a handful of iconic movie stars deserve and
receive this kind of obsessive cataloguing – the
kind that preserves every shred of appearance,
even if, as in this disc’s case, it entails supporting
100 | Sight&Sound | January 2018
performances in fragmented versions of the 118
films, mostly lost, Lon Chaney made during the
teens. Chaney is worth it – arguably the most
naturally expressive male actor of the day, he
would surely have had an eye-catching career
regardless of the era in which he worked, and
regardless of the monster-movie make-up legend
that was woven around him. The films here, all
melodramas Chaney made under contract to
Universal (two of which were discovered in the
now-famous Dawson City cache), are pure film
history, workaday remnants of the Griffithian
era when syntax was rudimentary but smooth,
and film stories were saturated with Victorian
angst about chastity. The movies, each missing at
least one reel (out of three or five), are formulaic
affairs with morality-tale narratives, but tend to
be set in the California mountains, giving the
uncredited cinematographer ample opportunity
to exploit the rocky, sun-soaked lake country.
This may be before the radical-transformation
stage of his career, but Chaney is a different shape
in each film, as in turn a young ‘half-breed’, a
bearded geezer, and a white-haired patrician.
Disc: The films are relics, fighting nitrate decay,
as you’d imagine. Historical supplements
of some kind would’ve been nice.
FRAGMENT OF FEAR
Richard C. Sarafian; GB 1970; Powerhouse/Indicator;
Region-free Blu-ray; Certificate 15; 95 minutes; 1.85:1.
Features: author David Kipen on screenwriter Paul Dehn;
interview with assistant director William P. Cartlidge; radio
spots, trailer, image gallery; booklet notes by Johnny Mains.
Reviewed by Trevor Johnston
Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) and
Dario Argento’s Deep Red (1975) are often seen
as companion pieces because both place leading
man David Hemmings in some befuddlement
at the heart of a murder mystery. This rather-less
lauded programmer brings more furrowing of
the brow from the always watchable lead, as a
London-based writer developing a persecution
complex when he burrows too deep into the
apparent killing of his elderly aunt on a visit
to Pompeii. Adapted from a novel by John
Bingham (the former MI5 operator John Le
Carré has named as an inspiration for George
Smiley), it’s a film clearly aiming at giving the
genteel pleasures of the British whodunnit a
post-Swinging London makeover: Hemmings’s
protagonist has just penned a notable account
Fragment of Fear
of his experiences escaping from drug
addiction, and future Vanishing Point (1971)
director Richard Sarafian was presumably
drafted in to give it a bit more stylistic chic.
In the event, Sarafian waits until the final reel
before dipping into his New Wave trick-bag,
but does pretty well elsewhere with the neatly
turned dialogue and on-point performances
from a cast of British reliables. With Paul Dehn’s
script alternately endorsing and undercutting
Hemmings’s conspiracy theorising, it’s an
engrossing affair for the most part – not least in
exposing the class-driven machinations of British
law enforcement – building to a finale that’s
hysterically indecisive or exquisitely ambiguous
depending on your point of view. Certainly an
enjoyable revival, if not quite top-drawer, and
Hemmings’s remarkable facility for appearing
at once convincingly earnest and worryingly
shifty was rarely given a better showcase.
Disc: A fine transfer which highlights the craft
of esteemed British cameraman Oswald Morris,
with plenty of sun-splashed colour in the
Pompeii-set opening reel before the scene shifts to
the resplendent murk of 1969 London. The lack
of a commentary track perhaps suggests a film
that no one was quite willing to go in to bat for,
but there are still worthwhile video supplements
in author David Kipen’s profile of top British
screenwriter Paul Dehn and gossipy recollections
from first assistant director William P. Cartlidge,
revealing director Sarafian’s on-set imbibing
and implying that Hemmings didn’t actually
read the full script until well into the shoot!
FRANTZ FANON:
BLACK SKIN WHITE MASK
Isaac Julien; GB 1996; BFI; Region-free Blu-ray and DVD dual
format; Certificate 12; 70 minutes; 1.66:1; Features: stills gallery;
Between Two Worlds (Mark Nash 1992, 27 mins); booklet;
downloadable PDF of extended essays and archive materials.
Reviewed by Kelli Weston
British artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien can
reasonably call this year a triumph: Looking for
Langston (1989), his cinematic ode to American
poet Langston Hughes, was recently honoured at
the Victoria Miro Gallery in London; and this year
marks the 20th anniversary of Frantz Fanon: Black
Skin, White Mask, his lyrical, heartfelt meditation
on the short life of the Martiniquais theorist.
By the time he turned 30, Fanon, a psychiatrist
and dedicated revolutionary, had already
published one of the era’s most influential texts
on race, Black Skin, White Masks (1952), from
which the film takes its title. He did not live to
see The Wretched of the Earth (1961) become a
political force, having died of leukaemia shortly
after publication; but this was to be his most
notable work, in which he advocates violence in
the struggle for decolonisation and liberation.
The film recycles many of the same docudrama
techniques Langston employs: archival footage,
interviews with Fanon’s brother and son among
others, and dramatic reenactments with a
poised Colin Salmon, gazing piercingly into
the camera, as Fanon himself. Salmon makes a
seductive Fanon, seamlessly embodying a man
both emboldened and haunted by the duality of
his identity. The film honestly challenges
his complicated ideology regarding the
Rediscovery
HAMMER HORROR
Otakar Vávra’s drama about 17th-
century witch hunts had clear
resonances in 60s Czechoslovakia
– and has other resonances today
WITCHHAMMER
Otakar Vávra; Czechoslovakia 1969; Second Run;
Region- free Blu-ray; Certificate 15; 107 minutes; 2.35:1.
Features: filmed appreciation by writer and film historian
Kat Ellinger; Otakar Vávra’s short film The Light Penetrates
the Dark (Svetlo proniká tmou, 1931); Booklet featuring
a new essay by writer and film critic Samm Deighan.
Reviewed by Pamela Hutchinson
With the phrase ‘witch hunt’ bandied around
misguidedly in the film industry at the present
time, it is rewarding to explore more apt uses of
the metaphor in cinema. While Carl Th. Dreyer
protested that his Day of Wrath (1943), made
during the Nazi occupation of Denmark, had
no deeper political meaning, its tale of a 16th-
century woman suspected of witchcraft resonated
deeply with wartime audiences. Jonathan
Rosenbaum wrote that it “may be the greatest
film ever made about living under totalitarian
rule” and suggested it as an influence on Arthur
Miller’s The Crucible. That play, first performed in
1953, used the Salem witch trials of 1692-3 as an
allegory for the contemporary communist panic
in Hollywood and the McCarthyite practices of
condemnation and allegation without evidence.
Otakar Vávra’s Witchhammer also takes witch
trials as its subject and appeared at a time when
satanic themes were in vogue in horror cinema,
from Michael Reeves’s Witchfinder General (1968)
to Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and
Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971). However, this
starkly photographed gothic drama is more
concerned with the oppressive regime in 1950s
Czechoslovakia and the activities of the secret
police than with trends in horror cinema. Vávra
was inspired, in particular, by the 1952 show trial
of Rudolf Slánsky, former general secretary of
the Czech Communist party, along with several
other senior party members: “I experienced it. I
saw how he became a puppet… how it is possible
to manipulate a man to the point where he prays
for his own death.” Shot in 1969, Witchhammer
can also be read as passing comment on the
period of ‘normalisation’ and tighter political
control that followed the Prague Spring.
Witchhammer’s clearest stylistic neighbours
are the stark monochrome photography of
Bergman and Dreyer. Josef Illik’s CinemaScope
cinematography contains several haunting
images, memorable among them faces contorted
with pain and stakes set out for witch-burning
at dawn. The film’s keynote is coolness rather
than lurid sensationalism, though, despite
its gothic trappings and scenes of torture and
nudity. There’s also a throwback to Benjamin
Christiansen’s silent-era drama-documentary
Häxan (1922), which sets out satanic lore only
to debunk it. In Witchhammer, a goblin-like
Burn notice: Witchhammer
older man with black teeth, shot in a gloomy
close-up, interrupts the narrative to spout
aphorisms about witchcraft, a bleak reminder
of how seriously these claims were once taken.
Set during the 17th-century Northern Moravia
witch trials, Vávra’s film is an engrossing,
dialogue-heavy story of a community ripped
apart when an old woman is spotted stealing a
communion wafer from church. An inquisitor,
Boblig von Edelstadt (Vladimír Smeral), is
brought in by the local countess to rout the
satanic pollution. Wielding a copy of the
‘Malleus Maleficarum’, or ‘Witchhammer’, a
15th-century Latin text, he sets about extracting
testimony under torture. From the outset it is
clear that the confessions Boblig records are
false, elicited only by the agony of thumbscrews
and the Spanish boot, but he consolidates his
authority with each conviction. As the local
priest Krystof Lautner (Elo Romancík), whose
growing resistance to the witch hunt forms
the spine of the story, eventually says to the
The film’s keynote is coolness
rather than sensationalism,
despite its gothic trappings and
scenes of torture and nudity
Elo Romancík and Sona Valentová
HOME CINEMA
inquisitor: “You may have power, but power
and truth are two different things.” Boblig is,
of course, the real demon infecting the village,
his nightly drunken banquets as unwholesome
a spectacle as his imagined black masses.
Smeral plays him with a grisly sneer, a petty
tyrant who demands massages from his flunky
and utter compliance from fellow judges.
Following the ‘Malleus Maleficarum’, which
contends that women are naturally more
susceptible to temptation, Boblig’s victims are
mostly female, including a young cook Zuzana
(Sona Valentová) who is involved with Lautner.
Witchhammer portrays the witch hunt as an
essentially misogynist exercise, which may
partly reflect the input of Vávra’s co-writer: Ester
Krumbachová, many of whose screenplays,
including Daisies (1966) and Valerie and Her Week
of Wonders (1970), tackle female oppression,
totalitarianism and the supernatural. The opening
sequence combines a scene of young women
bathing together with the goblin-man intoning
that “the womb of woman is the gateway to
hell”. The defiance of the first three women
burned alive on Boblig’s orders, proclaiming
their innocence as the flames rise, inspires a
local clergyman to doubt the trials’ veracity, and
Lautner’s special sympathy for Zuzana catalyses
his confrontation with Boblig. A video essay by
Kat Ellinger on this Second Run release of the film
delves into the subject more deeply, including the
precedent set by the resilience of female politician
Milada Horáková at her own trial in 1950.
Remastered in HD and presented here on
Blu-ray for the first time, Witchhammer’s crisp,
and frequently disturbing, images gleam, despite
occasional specks. The disc also contains the
aforementioned video essay, a fascinating article
by Samm Deighan, new subtitles, and Vávra’s
first film, an experimental short from 1931, The
Light Penetrates the Dark, a tribute to electricity.
It’s a fitting addition to the main feature, which
is likewise a plea for enlightenment.
January 2018 | Sight&Sound | 101
 Television by Robert Hanks
BETJEMAN: THE COLLECTION
HOME CINEMA

A PASSION FOR CHURCHES / MEETING POINT:

JOHN BETJEMAN’S ABC OF CHURCHES (TWO
EPISODES) / JOURNEY TO BETHLEHEM / A
BIRD’S EYE VIEW (TWO EPISODES) / ONE MAN’S
COUNTY: CORNWALL / FOUR WITH BETJEMAN
– VICTORIAN ARCHITECTS AND ARCHITECTURE
Edward Mirzoeff / Kenneth Savidge / Christopher
Martin / Edward Mirzoeff / Michael Croucher / David
Cheshire; UK 1974/1960-61/1966/1969 /1964/1971;
BBC/Simply; Region 2 DVD; 370 minutes; no certificate;
4:3. Extra: partial episode of Meeting Point on the
church of St Michael and All Angels, Rycote.
No poet in the modern age has left as lasting a
mark as John Betjeman – something that would
be true even if not a word of his verse survived.
Through his numerous television appearances he
was an effective advocate for styles of architecture
largely written off as kitsch, outdated or simply
ugly, and he conferred aesthetic legitimacy on
the bourgeois, the suburban and the domestic
(though his verse often descried the emptiness
and morbidity that could underlie those modes).
Si monumentum requiris… check out Prince
Charles’s design for living at Poundbury in Dorset
or the newly scrubbed up, shop-rich glory of St
Pancras Station, where his statue stands. And
anybody wanting to understand England today
could make a good start by watching some
Betjeman: his Englishness, his conservatism, his
love of the C of E, even his nostalgia seem, as we
exit the European Union under the leadership of
a daughter of the vicarage, very contemporary.
The programmes included here (none of them
new to home video) don’t have the wide appeal
of his hymns to steam-trains and suburbia,
but demonstrate that intelligent criticism can
make excellent television. The best thing is Four
with Betjeman, a series of appreciations of nine
favourite architects. Though the come-on is a
little whimsical and bombastic – Betjeman opens
each programme standing in front of the Albert
Memorial, wearing a straw boater; the soundtrack
is slathered in Elgar – the viewer is being seduced
into watching unusually close architectural
reading, with Betjeman finding evidence of
character or architectural credo in the positioning
of windows and the design of umbrella stands. His
judgements can be odd – such as his preference
for curlicued mock-medieval typography
over the legibility of modern signage – but the
detail and the easy authority are riveting; and
Betjeman’s passion for his theme is always
clear without him ever having to announce,
in the modern style, “I’m passionate about…”
The church programmes show a similar
level of engagement and expertise. The ABC of
Churches was a project for BBC West Country that
meandered over several years, with Betjeman
anatomising a different parish church for each
letter of the alphabet. The first two episodes are
here, both from 1960 (Betjeman did, eventually,
complete the alphabet in 1967); part of the final
episode, in a rather wobbly tape, is included
as an extra. A Passion for Churches is odder and
more personal, the architecture taking second
place to the spiritual feelings the buildings
are supposed to contain, and the remnants
of parish life in corners of rural Norfolk.
A Bird’s Eye View was a multi-authored series
Betjeman: The Collection He was an advocate for
styles of architecture largely written off as ugly, and he
conferred aesthetic legitimacy on the suburban
of aerial travelogues over Britain. While it looks
quite lavish, the tourist board aesthetic smothers
Betjeman’s commentaries, and at times the
unspoken question that lurks behind his remarks
is ‘Will this do?’ The two episodes are partnered
with an edition of a 1964 series One Man’s County,
for which Betjeman chose Cornwall. Though
the episode is directed by Michael Croucher,
it is notable that it ends on a shot of Tintagel,
and the information that the series editor was
John Boorman: the seeds of Excalibur (1981)?
Disc: The quality source material – video tape,
film, black and white, colour – varies widely:
nothing here is unwatchable or inaudible;
nothing is crying out for a Blu-ray transfer.
The details given on the liner, and apparently
copied by Amazon and other online sellers, are
incomplete and wrong: the details and timings
above are as accurate as I can manage.
OUT OF TOWN, VOLS. 1 AND 2
George Egan (vol. 1); UK 1980-81/1986; Southern TV/
Network; Region 2 DVD; 825 /756 minutes. Extras:
Vol. 1 – unbroadcast 21st anniversary programme; two
editions of Southern Gold, regional archive TV programme
presented by Fred Dinenage; A Tribute to Jack Hargreaves
(1994); Learning to Fish; Summer in Kite’s Country (1967).
Vol. 2 – Hargreaves LPs from the 1970s: Know Your
Fish, Know Your Dog, Know Your Pony, Country Walking;
National Audio Visual Aids Library film Living with a Dog;
A Yorkshire Childhood (1980); The Ocean Racers
For more than 20 years, Jack Hargreaves and
cameraman Stan Brehaut went out shooting
footage of rural pursuits – angling, shepherding,
horse trading, fairs, markets. Back in the studio, in
a mocked-up countryman’s shed, Hargreaves – a
successful TV executive mocked up as a full-time
countryman – chatted unscripted to camera, and
commentated on Brehaut’s (silent) films. The
format was cheap, simple and highly successful,
thanks to Hargreaves’s depth of knowledge
and fluency (the Fast Show caricature of him as
expectorating Bob Fleming was very unfair).
Though each programme is just over 20 minutes
long, at their best they provide a languorous
and surprisingly effective interruption to the
rhythms of everyday life: slow TV avant la lettre.
Disc: The quality is not wonderful, but that
doesn’t detract from the charm. Volume 2
contains straight-to-video versions Hargreaves
made in the mid-80s, which have fresh
commentaries from him but reuse old footage.
SHOESTRING: THE
COMPLETE SERIES
1979-80; BBC/Network; Region 2 DVD;
1083 minutes; certificate 12; 4:3
Shoestring seems to have been conceived as an
attempt to import the laid-back West Coast vibe
of The Long Goodbye (1973) or The Rockford Files
(1974-80) to the UK; and the premise – private
detective hired by local radio station as ‘private
ear’, sorting out listeners’ problems – would
make far more sense in the thriving local radio
economy of the US than it does in Bristol. Eddie
Shoestring is overburdened with eccentricities
(compulsively draws caricatures of people he’s
talking to; ex-computer whizz; history of mental
illness) that don’t add up to a character; plots and
dialogue tend to the sketchy; and late 70s sexual
politics can get rather depressing. But Trevor
Eve, as Eddie, still projects a certain hangdog
charm, and it always looks good – indeed, for all
its aspirations to Californian hipness, it is really
a forerunner of that genre of handsomely shot,
location-rich, class-conscious provincial dramas,
from Morse to Midsomer, that has held the British
cop show in thrall for the last three decades.
Disc: Reasonable transfer from
decent source material.

102 | Sight&Sound | January 2018

New releases
experiences of women of colour, the
hypocrisy underlying his criticisms (he
questioned the mental agency of black women
in romantic relationships with white men
while himself having relationships with white
women) and even, at times, his appropriation
of the symbols that oppressed them. Fanon’s
similarly limited ideas about homosexuality
receive somewhat less examination.
The film is no less an emotional labour 20 years
on. Cementing his place as one of the brightest
luminaries in a continuing fight for liberation,
Julien also presents us with the man, and the
pain his loss wrought on those who loved him.
Disc: If some of the film’s cinematic flourishes
can seem dated, the visual sharpness of the
remastered edition more than compensates for
that. Additional features include a gallery of stills,
producer Mark Nash’s 1992 short Between Two
Worlds, and a fully illustrated booklet with essays
by Julien, Nash and cultural theorist Stuart Hall.
GEORGE A. ROMERO
BETWEEN NIGHT AND DAWN
THERE’S ALWAYS VANILLA /
SEASON OF THE WITCH / THE CRAZIES
George A. Romero; USA 1971/1972/1973; Arrow Video;
Region B Blu-ray and Region 2 DVD dual format; Certificate
18; 93/104/103 minutes; 1.33:1/ 1.33:1/ 1.66:1. Features:
audio commentary by Travis Crawford; documentary
featurette Affair of the Heart: The Making of There’s Always
Vanilla; archive interview with Romero; location gallery with
commentary; memorabilia gallery; trailer / Alternative
extended version; audio commentary by Travis Crawford;
conversation between Romero and Guillermo Del Toro;
interview with actress Jan White; alternative opening
titles; location gallery; memorabilia gallery; trailer / Audio
commentary by Travis Crawford; documentary featurette
Romero Was Here: Locating The Crazies; interview and Q&A
with actress Lynn Lowry; audio interview with producer
Lee Hessel; behind-the-scenes footage; alternative
opening titles; image galleries; trailers & TV spots.
Reviewed by Nick Pinkerton
The coarse discourse has ground down
the towering figure of George A. Romero,
posthumously, into something more manageable,
a kind of genre-world Stanley Kramer who
used allegorical horror films to slip liberal
nostrums to rowdy redneck drive-in crowds.
Any actual submersion in Romero’s cinema
reveals something far more dark and difficult,
however, and a new set gathering three films
that he turned out with his crew of Pennsylvania
collaborators between better-known Dead
movies offers a welcome opportunity to dive in.
Packaging these lesser-known works as
‘Between Night and Dawn’ almost encourages
one to interpret the movies as rehearsals for
canonical works to come, and there are some
grounds for this. The background yammer of
talk radio in counterculture romance There’s
Always Vanilla predicts the more pointed use of
the same in Martin (1978), while the handling of
frenzied crowds in the quarantined small town
setting of The Crazies seems like a dry run for
the ambitious Dawn of the Dead (1978). But these
are also films that stand on their own two feet,
and deserve consideration on their own terms.
There’s Always Vanilla is off-key when striking
its final note of wistful regret, but until then the
Why the long face, Modigliani? Montparnasse 19
movie betrays Romero’s deep romantic streak,
given full expression in his kingly Knightriders
(1981). Making picturesque use of the bridges
and inclines of his adoptive hometown, Romero
almost does for working-class Pittsburgh what
Manhattan (1979) did for idle Manhattan, while
including an extended sequence involving the
dropout protagonist and his square dad on an
overnight bender that’s the final word on louche
life in a medium-large town in the early 1970s.
Vanilla star Raymond Laine also has a choice
part in Season of the Witch, but it’s Jan White
who’s firmly at the centre of the movie, playing
an unfulfilled housewife who begins a dalliance
with younger man Laine – and the dark arts.
Recurring dream sequences allow Romero,
acting as his own cutter and cinematographer,
to show off the full fiery force of his montage,
depicting the torments of a woman desperate
for a touch of magic while trapped on a mean
material plane, making the film a sort of feminine
thematic companion to Martin. The same harried
suspicion that the contemporary world has
become essentially uninhabitable animates The
Crazies, a St Vitus’s square dance set in motion
when a chemical weapons mishap unleashes
a sudden epidemic outburst of violence in
rural Pennsylvania which doubles as a study
in interdepartmental government bungling
and death-by-red-tape suffocation. To reduce
this mêlée to a teachable moment metaphor
betrays the furious fact of Romero’s chaotic art:
he didn’t deal in bromides, but in strychnine.
Discs: Straining at the seams with
features, including a great many which
return to original shooting locations, as is
appropriate to a regionalist like Romero,
often valued for perceived generalities
but valuable because of his specificity.
MONTPARNASSE 19
Jacques Becker; France 1958; Arrow Academy; Region B
Blu-ray and Region 2 DVD dual format; Certificate PG; 108
minutes; 1.66:1. Features: documentary Jacques Becker and
the Artistic Condition; appreciation by Ginette Vincendeau.
Reviewed by Geoff Andrew
Originally to have been made by Max Ophuls, this
account of the final years of Amedeo Modigliani
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had a troubled genesis. Becker, going through a
tricky time personally and professionally, took
on the project – at Ophuls’s behest – reluctantly.
Worse, Ophuls’s co-scenarist Henri Jeanson
tried to sabotage the movie upon learning that
Becker had made changes to the original script.
Inheriting Gérard Philipe as his leading man also
proved problematic for the director, who liked
him a lot but found him prone to perform in a
higher register than the understated naturalism
he preferred. In short, the omens were not good.
Yet the finished film remains very effective,
for all that it is a familiar tale of a struggling artist
underrated during his lifetime. One can see why
Ophuls would have been drawn to the story: two
central themes are the transience of happiness
(much of the narrative focuses on Modigliani’s
relationship, potentially redemptive but inevitably
troubled, with the younger Jeanne Hébuterne)
and the baleful importance of money, of which
Modigliani had very little. But Ophuls and
Becker could hardly have been more different
stylistically, and Becker characteristically steers
clear of baroque ornamentation, opting instead
for a dowdily grey, rather austere brand of poetic
realism. The post-World War I Montparnasse
of ‘Modi’ and his friends – including critic and
occasional lover Beatrice Hastings (Lilli Palmer)
and patron/agent Léopold Zborowski (Gérard
Séty) – has little of the romance associated with
‘gai Paris’: the streets are stark, the garrets and
cafés cramped, the police viciously censorious
of the artist’s now-celebrated nudes, and the
art world represented in part by Becker’s most
flagrant and metaphorically resonant invention,
the appreciative but ruthlessly money-hungry
buyer Morel. Brilliantly incarnated by Lino
Ventura – best known, of course, for playing
gangsters – this character is invested in the final,
highly fictionalised scenes with a near diabolical
power. And then there is Modigliani himself. For
this writer, at least, the improbably cast Philipe
mostly succeeds in negotiating the constant shifts
between handsome, attractive charm and drunken,
(self-)destructive egotism. (The artist’s drug-
addiction and tuberculosis are barely mentioned.)
Touching yet never sentimental, it’s a
heartfelt performance; did Philipe, who
January 2018 | Sight&Sound | 103
 New releases
would himself die from cancer a year after
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the film’s release, have an inkling of his

future? Hard to say; it’s possible, however, that
Becker, whose previous two films had been fairly
routine entertainments, felt some sympathy
for the plight of an underappreciated artist.
Disc: A decent if overlong French documentary
features interviews with, among others, Françoise
Fabian, Anouk Aimée and Jean and Sophie
Becker. Ginette Vincendeau’s appreciation
covers much the same ground more concisely.

THE PHILADELPHIA STORY

George Cukor; USA 1940; Criterion Collection Blu-ray/
Region B/2; Certificate PG; 112 minutes; 1.37:1; Features:
Audio commentary by Jeanine Basinger (from 2005),
featurette on Hepburn’s role in the film’s development,
‘In Search of Tracy Lord’, Katharine Hepburn interview
on ‘The Dick Cavett Show’, Excerpt from George Cukor’s
interview on ‘The Dick Cavett Show’, Lux Radio Theatre 1943
adaptation of the film, featurette on the film’s restoration.
Reviewed by Kate Stables
“She doesn’t play in The Philadelphia Story; she
is The Philadelphia Story” was Variety’s verdict
on Katharine Hepburn’s perfect fit for one of
the greatest film comedies. That Hepburn’s star
turn in the hit Broadway play and the movie
reignited a career reduced in 1938 to ‘Box Office
Poison’ is well known. But several of the extras
included here uncover just how bespoke it was,
right down to Hepburn’s involvement in the
play’s composition, and her insistence on hiring
George Cukor. His graceful opening up of the
play, and his nimbly witty switches of mood
and tempo within scenes, are smartly unpacked
in Jeanine Basinger’s detailed, well-ordered
commentary. As is cinematographer Joseph
Ruttenburg’s visual artistry, shown off nicely
in this luscious 4k restoration. Especially the
soft shadows and sequin sparkles of the night-
time garden love scene, probably the “prettiest
sight in this fine, pretty world”. A transitional
‘comedy of remarriage’ that’s more romantic
than screwball, it gifts Hepburn’s judgemental
socialite Tracy an exhilarating erotic freedom, but
cheerfully humiliates her to get its neat, faintly
Shakespearean ending. Cary Grant, as the ex-
husband covertly steering Tracy’s transformation,
is an understated delight, a purveyor of deadpan
lobs, dry observations and quietly piercing
reaction shots. Jimmy Stewart’s cynical reporter,
unwound into adoration by drink and giddy
charm, brought him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar
for his crisply comic flirting with Hepburn. It’s a
film with, as Stanley Cavell noted, a raging thirst
for talk. As their verbal class warfare sparks into
mutual attraction, Stewart woos her with words as
heady as the champagne that drops their defences.
Disc: A gorgeous transfer, the outcome of a
painstaking restoration. Among the extensive
extras, most of which centre on Hepburn’s role
in the project, the most charming is her reluctant
but energetic exchange with Dick Cavett.
PLAY DIRTY
André De Toth; UK 1969; Twilight Time; Region-free
Blu-ray; 118 minutes; 2.35:1; Features: Isolated
music & effects track; original theatrical trailer.
Reviewed by Nick Pinkerton
One of a squadron of imitators launched by the
Three amigos: Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn and James Stewart in The Philadelphia Story
success of Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen (1967),
sand-in-the-teeth World War II North African
theatre actioner Play Dirty distinguishes itself by
staying very, very true to its title. In the annals of
the war movie, you will be hard-pressed to find
another film so completely invested in exploring
the grinding discomfiture of workaday soldiering.
Melvyn Bragg’s script follows a special unit of
reprobates under the putative command of
Michael Caine’s crisply cravated Captain Douglas,
an out-of-his-depth Royal Engineers dandy, as they
embark on a sneak attack mission to blow up an
Afrika Korps fuel dump. Short on talk and long on
detail work, the movie in large part is absorbed in
recording the purely practical business of warfare:
defusing a mine, snipping and shimmying
through a barbed-wire perimeter, and changing
flat tyre after flat tyre after flat tyre. The grand
finale tactical assault is a show-stopper – De
Toth’s experience as both a visual effects man and
second-unit director stand him in good stead here
– but for my money the movie’s most distinctive
set piece comes earlier, when De Toth dedicates
more than ten minutes of screentime to the
arduous, touch-and-go business of lugging several
military vehicles up the steep side of a plateau
using a winch-and-cable system. This scene is the
fulcrum of the ongoing power struggle between
the outsider Douglas and the group’s unofficial
leader, Nigel Davenport’s mercenary Cyril Leech,
whose personality befits his sobriquet. The men
eventually reach something like a truce, united
in their position at the wrong end of the chain
of command and their betrayal by the top brass,
defined throughout by preening vanity and the
highest British attention to the wrong detail.
Disc: Image a great leap forward on previous
home video releases, not to speak of the orange-
hued 35mm print that gave me my last viewing,
with an isolated music track for those inclined to
groove to the Michel Legrand score, which makes
occasional ventures into rugged atonal territory.
SEE NO EVIL
Richard Fleischer; US 1971; Indicator/Powerhouse
region-free Blu-ray; 89 minutes; Certificate 15; 1.85:1;
Features: alternative UK Blind Terror cut;
interview with Norman Eshley; original
theatrical trailer; image gallery: booklet
Reviewed by Christina Newland
For a Hollywood studio director who had
been at the helm of Doctor Dolittle (1967),
Richard Fleischer sure had a taste for the
darker underbelly of human behaviour. His
twisted psycho-sexual serial killer film (The
Boston Strangler, 1968) and his quietly British
examination of sex-murderer John Christie (10
Rillington Place, 1970) put him in the pantheon of
American directors fascinated by grisly crime.
See No Evil is a nasty, suspenseful potboiler
about a blind woman (Mia Farrow) visiting
her family in the English countryside when a
cowboy boot-wearing madman (Alan Arkin)
assails her. She is trapped and hunted in a
home which she soon discovers is full of the
corpses of her loved ones, her ordeal filmed
by Fleischer with grim sadism. With the
ratcheting tension of Elmer Bernstein’s score
and Fleischer’s excellent visual construction –
slow zooms to chilling reveals, well-laid traps
to which the sightless woman is prone to fall
victim at any moment – the sensationalist
scares are enjoyable, if a little cheap.
In the meantime, Fleischer intelligently
plays with audience prejudice about the
identity of the killer and the presence of some
local gypsies. Although the narrative feints
and dodges a few too many times for willing
suspension of disbelief, it’s solid thriller
material. While not of the calibre of The Boston
Strangler, See No Evil is an interesting addition
to Fleischer’s grim oeuvre from this period.
Disc: The near 40-page booklet is full
of fascinating supplement materials,
including an interview with Fleischer.

104 | Sight&Sound | January 2018

Lost and found
ADIEU PHILIPPINE
OVERLOOKED FILMS CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE ON UK DVD OR BLU-RAY
Jacques Rozier’s 1962 debut saw
him hailed as one of the stars of
the nouvelle vague – yet for decades
it has been almost forgotten
Reviewed by Adam Batty
In an alternative universe Jacques Rozier is
a name as closely identified with the French
New Wave as that of Claude Chabrol or Jacques
Rivette. Though not as prolific as many of his
contemporaries, Rozier was a considerable
figure in the new cinema that swept across the
continent at the turn of the 1960s (it is estimated
that some 120 feature films by first-time directors
were produced in France in the years between
1958 and 1964). Jean-Luc Godard described Adieu
Philippine, Rozier’s 1962 debut, as “brilliant”, and
François Truffaut raved about the film, calling
it “the clearest success of the new cinema”; yet
somehow it has been all but forgotten, especially
outside France. The film did open in the UK,
in 1965, and even screened on television here
in the late 1960s, but it has never had a home
video release of any kind in Britain or the US.
At the heart of Rozier’s feature stands a three-
pronged love affair, between Michel (Jean-Claude
Aimini), a young Parisian who works as a
television technician and who is weeks away from
being called up for national service in Algeria,
and two friends, Juliette (Stefania Sabatini) and
Liliane (Yveline Céry). Midway through the
picture, and tired of the complications he has
brought about himself, Michel flees to Corsica
for a vacation; the girls follow him. Told using
the filmic tools and devices familiar from
other nouvelle vague films, Adieu Philippine is a
masterpiece of the jump-cut and illicitly captured
street photography, and a sharp portrait of the
seemingly never-deeper generational divide.
This notion of a generational divide is
pushed to the fore in a particularly memorable
sequence in which footage of Michel and his
friends going for a spin in their new ride, a
second-hand automobile, is cross-cut with
scenes of an evening meal being prepared by a
group of older relatives. As the two moments
converge, the flighty humour that underpins
both scenes gives way to an altogether more
subdued conversation on the fate of the young
men heading for war: a bold opening title plate
has already informed us that we are six years
into the war in Algeria. Their meal of ‘pig’s head’
makes for an ideal metaphor for the unique
strand of stubbornness that seems to attach itself
to family debate. In an amusing aside which will
resonate with audiences in 2017, one character
defuses concerns over contemporary US-Soviet
frictions by predicting that the two superpowers
will come together in fear of the rising Chinese.
A subplot which sees an older film producer
taken in and inspired by the passionate and
youthful television technician is a reminder of
HOME CINEMA
Adieu Philippine, hello sailor: Stefania Sabatini, Yveline Céry and Jean-Claude Aimini
The film was abandoned by a (1956) and the follow-up Blue Jeans (1958), Rozier
was a natural heir to the first round of nouvelle
frustrated producer –he literally vague filmmakers. Rentrée des classes, which tells
the story of a young schoolboy playing truant,
binned the reels after Rozier was compared to Jean Vigo’s Zéro de conduite
missed his release deadline (1933) and, later, Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1958),
and featured heavily in magazine articles and
the way relationships actually worked between newspaper opinion pieces celebrating the
the producers and the young filmmakers of the coming jeune cinema at the end of the 1950s.
nouvelle vague. Indeed, this is how Adieu Philippine Like Rohmer, Rozier had a feel for coming-of-age
came to be. Producer Georges de Beauregard, stories, and he would go on to make exemplary
hot off the success of Godard’s Breathless (1960), pictures concerned with the folly of youth.
was on the hunt for other new talent in which Having shot Adieu Philippine in 1960, Rozier
to invest the capital he drew from the Godard found himself caught in the post-production
film. Godard suggested that the producer try limbo familiar to many of the nouvelle vague.
Jacques Demy, who would go on to make Lola Adieu Philippine would eventually be abandoned
(1961) for Beauregard, and Rozier, an old friend by a frustrated de Beauregard – it’s been said that
of Godard’s. Having made something of an the producer quite literally binned the reels of
impact with his debut short Rentrée des classes the uncut film after Rozier missed his release
deadline. Martin Kernitz, noted collaborator of
Agnès Varda and Godard, helped to finish the
WHAT THE PAPERS SAID film at the latter’s request for release in 1962, and
Adieu Philippine would be well received when it
finally reached the screen. The hugely influential
‘L
‘Large claims have been Fédération Française des Ciné-Clubs named it
made for this film in
m the best film of the year, and Cahiers du cinéma
France and elsewhere,
F featured it on its front cover and named it the
but comparisons with
b fourth best feature of 1963, behind now canonical
((for instance) the work of classics by Hitchcock, Godard and Buñuel.
Jean Vigo seem altogether
J Rozier would go on to have an impressive
ttoo weighty for its flimsy career, albeit one more understated than many
superstructure to bear...
s of his contemporaries. His work of the 1970s
This
Th
Thi said,
his said
id hhowever,
oweve Adieu Philippine is often and 1980s, headlined by the loose triptych
genuinely fresh and enjoyable... Rozier’s of Du côté d’Orouët (1971), The Castaways of
technique of playing each sequence to a Turtle Island (1976) and Maine Ocean (1986),
musical theme gives the film a continuity is rightly held in high regard, though these
which means that, as in a Hollywood films too remain under-seen outside of France.
musical, the dull patches can to some Screenings took place in New York in 2014,
extent be concealed’ and the Toronto International Film Festival
Tom Milne ‘Monthly Film Bulletin’, Nov 1965 restored Adieu Philippine in 2015, but further
plans for the film have yet to be announced.
January 2018 | Sight&Sound | 105
 Books
BOOKS
The Norman conquest: Mailer in his station house psychodrama Beyond the Law (1968)
ALPHA MAILER
THE CINEMA OF
NORMAN MAILER
Film Is Like Death
Edited by Justin Bozung, Bloomsbury, 336pp,
ISBN 9781501325519
Reviewed by Nick Pinkerton
There was a time, so I’ve been told and so I
believe, when the title of film director was
considered just about the most desirous in
the world, and seemingly everyone was eager
to take it unto themselves. This number
included the brightest lights of the literati,
who records show as taking up cameras en
masse – Alain Robbe-Grillet and Marguerite
Duras and Susan Sontag and Guy Debord and,
pertinent to our concerns, Norman Mailer,
jug-eared all-American existentialist and
pugilistic public intellectual of the 1960s.
The tireless performance of his persona had
made Mailer a natural ham; as Gore Vidal once
put it in an interview: “Tell me somebody’s
favourite actor when he was ten years old,
and I’ll tell you who he is. Could Norman
Mailer have existed without John Garfield?”
The shakedown and breakdown of social
performance would be central to Mailer’s abrupt
106 | Sight&Sound | January 2018
and intense midlife turn to filmmaking, which
produced early wiseguy jape Wild 90 (1968),
station house psychodrama Beyond the Law
(1968), underground epic Maidstone (1970), and
the Provincetown sex-noir Tough Guys Don’t Dance
(1987). These films, the first three of which star
Mailer himself, and the theoretical framework
from which they sprang are the focus of a new
volume compiled by Justin Bozung, identified
as a researcher, archivist and card-carrying
board member of the Norman Mailer Society.
Over the course of 19 chapters, Bozung’s
The Cinema of Norman Mailer allows for a
spectrum of voices to sound off on the title’s
stated subject, though perhaps unsurprisingly
the loudest one belongs to Mailer himself,
who never could resist dominating his
‘communal’ improvisation exercises. Mailer is
here represented by two interviews given on
his cinema, the first from 1970 and the second
from 1987, as well as his two substantial pieces
of writing on filmmaking, ‘Some Dirt in the
Talk’ and ‘A Course in Film-Making’, though
choice selections from each find their way into
the essays of other contributors – I lost track of
the number of times I ran across quotables like
“commando raids on the nature of reality”.
This is to be expected, for the book’s
contributors are, as a group, parsing a limited
volume of existing written material referring
to Mailer’s films. Where the films have been
considered at all it is usually in a disbelieving or
scornful tone, a situation that has perhaps begun
slowly to change as much of the contemporary
nonfiction filmmaking worth paying attention
to is located at the same intersection of fiction
and documentary elements (particularly
cinéma vérité ) where Mailer, in his cinema,
arranges for head-on collisions. One tireless
champion of this body of work has been Jonas
Mekas, who lured Mailer to screenings at his
Film-Makers’ Cinematheque in the mid-1960s,
initiating the writer into the mystery cult of
the New American Cinema, and whose The
Brig (1964), as well as the early output of John
Cassavetes, might make the most approximate
precedent to Mailer’s approach to filmmaking.
Among the included essays are several which
locate parallels to Mailer’s cinema in other,
better validated bodies of work. In a shared
affinity for “the primal, visceral, and intuitive”,
The book’s loudest voice belongs to
Mailer himself, who never could
resist dominating his ‘communal’
improvisation exercises
 David Sterritt discovers a proximity between the
independently developed methods of Mailer and
Jean-Luc Godard, an admirer of Mailer’s who cast
the American as the star of his King Lear (1987) –
Mailer stormed off the Swiss shoot, though not
before securing financing for Tough Guys from
Godard’s producers, Yoram Globus and Menahem
Golan. Catriona McAvoy describes the play of
Dostoevskian duality in Beyond the Law, with
its exploration of the symbiotic relationship
between suspects and cops. And Bozung himself
casts Wild 90 as a kind of blowhard Brooklyn
cousin to Waiting for Godot – a persuasive reading,
though curious for neglecting any mention of
the very public tug-of-war that Mailer had with
his responses to Beckett’s play in the pages of
the Village Voice. Two of the finest pieces, Maggie
McKinley’s ‘Mailer Interrogates Machismo’
and Sarah Bishop’s ‘The Life and Death of the
Celebrity Author in Maidstone’, are dedicated to
the study of Mailer’s ongoing deconstruction of
his bozo brawler shtick and its element of play-
acting, betrayed in his statement that “there is
hardly a guy alive who is not an actor to the hilt”.
Along with pieces written from across the
safe span of years, there are contributions by
participants in and firsthand witnesses to the
Mailer maelstrom. Son Michael’s recollection of
the Maidstone shoot contains no more insights
than one would expect from memories of a
then five-year-old, but quite a different story is
‘Mailer’s Movie Maja and Dark Lady Revealed’
by Lee Roscoe, the writer-director’s longtime
mistress and one of the stars of Beyond the Law.
Roscoe’s memory piece is written with verve and
a distinctly feminine braggadocio that’s every
bit a match for Mailer’s male strain, offering a
colourful but remarkably clear-eyed assessment
of the shoots of both that film and Maidstone, as
well as of her 12-year relationship with Mailer,
recounted without sentimental haze or undue
recrimination. (James Toback, however, makes
a cameo, very much in character.) Finally, John
Bailey recalls his work as cinematographer on
Mailer’s Tough Guys Don’t Dance, a sui generis
melodrama of which the photography was nearly
the only praised element on release – though it
is also treated to re-evaluation in these pages, in
James Emmett Ryan’s exegesis of how “Mailer’s
comic-gothic-horror-existential-transgressive
exercise shows that the pleasure-seeking classes
of 1980s America are witness to and participants
in a disorienting reconfiguration of values” and
Scott Duguid’s contextualisation of the film
as a response to the physical culture-obsessed
Reaganite reconfiguration of masculinity.
Amid various texts portraying Mailer
as bellwether and capturer of zeitgeist in a
bottle, one may wish for more hard-headed
formal analysis to offset the theoretical flights
– in particular, Mailer’s approach to editing,
which he discusses with avidity and the ample
employment of skiing metaphors, is a subject
for further research. This is a minor quibble,
MICHAEL CHIKIRIS (1)
though, for this volume is a massive stride
towards reclaiming an important, insubordinate
group of films, snarling curs that look still more
fierce in our muzzled cultural climate.
A DANCE WITH
FRED ASTAIRE
By Jonas Mekas, Anthology Editions, 464pp,
ISBN 9781944860097
Reviewed by Mark Webber
Jonas Mekas should not need any introduction
to readers of this magazine. A tireless advocate
for a personal form of cinema, he helped to
cultivate an entire movement of post-war
independent filmmaking, and then ensured
its ongoing legacy, through initiatives such
as Film Culture magazine, the Film-Makers’
Cooperative and Anthology Film Archives.
Along the way, he has also created his own
remarkable body of film and video work.
In recent years, Mekas has been embraced by
the contemporary art world. For the 2015 Venice
Biennale he exhibited film stills on the windows
of a 16th-century palazzo that now houses a
branch of Burger King. A series of photographs
taken during his internment in displaced persons
camps in Germany, prior to his transportation
to the USA by the United Nations in 1949, was
shown at this year’s Documenta in Kassel,
Germany, alongside Douglas Gordon’s film on
the same period, I Had Nowhere to Go (2016).
The latter is based on the book of Mekas’s
early diaries, recently reissued in a spate of
publication projects that includes a new edition
of Movie Journal – The Rise of the New American
Cinema, 1959-1971, Scrapbook of the Sixties,
A Dance with Fred Astaire, the forthcoming
Conversations with Filmmakers, and the long-
awaited second volume of diaries covering the
New York years from the 1950s onwards.
A Dance with Fred Astaire is described as a
“visual autobiography”, and it’s the images, which
occupy more than half of its 450 pages, that set
this book apart. Amid reproductions of notes
from Louise Brooks, Anaïs Nin, Allen Ginsberg
These anecdotes are the folk tales
of the New American Cinema
and its environs, destined
to be told and told again
Hollis Frampton, Mekas, Florence and Ken Jacobs
and Norman Mailer are fascinating photographs
and documents that have, thanks to the author’s
BOOKS
pack-rat nature, survived through the decades.
The menu for Peter Kubelka’s 21-dish dinner
to celebrate the baptism of his godchild, Mekas’s
daughter, announces that testicles will be served
at 1am, some nine hours after the first course.
A lawyer’s letter contains Salvador Dalí’s view
of Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963) – “an
excellent mystical erotic creation” so powerful
that he felt it should not be widely shown –
presumably written in response to a request
for a statement that could be used as part of a
critical defence for that film’s infamous obscenity
trial. A 1954 court summons issued to Mekas’s
brother Adolfas orders an appearance before a city
magistrate at 2nd Street & 2nd Avenue, the very
same building that is now the home of Anthology
Film Archives. Serendipity and coincidences
run through A Dance with Fred Astaire, just as
they must do in the author’s life. (It’s confusing
that the publisher of this book – Anthology
Editions of New York – has no connection
with the organisation that Mekas founded.)
Mekas has always been a storyteller and
his writing style has not deviated much from
the informal tone of his legendary column in
the Village Voice, which began in 1958. Recent
episodic videos such as Sleepless Nights Stories
(2011) and the year-long 365 Day Project (2007)
are each composed of vignettes that function in
a similar way to the dozens of brief anecdotes
and diary entries that provide this book’s textual
content. Some are new; others have appeared in
print before. They are the folk tales of the New
American Cinema and its environs, destined
to be told and told again, with variations or
embellishments, as the memories fade.
There are those, and I’m one of them, who
tire of the mileage made in more mainstream
media of Mekas’s associations with the great and
good – the Lennons, the Kennedys, Warhol, et
al. It’s an angle, but far from the most significant
aspect of his life. Many such personalities were
his acquaintances before they achieved fame or
notoriety as prominent figures of 20th century
culture. Mekas in effect sponsored both Yoko
Ono and Nam June Paik’s settlement in the
USA, and his friendship with fellow Lithuanian
George Maciunas brought him into the orbit
of the radical artists and musicians involved
in the avant-garde art collective Fluxus. The
continual need for patrons to support various
enterprises made it necessary for Mekas to reach
out to wealthy individuals, whereas others,
including prominent auteurs of narrative cinema,
approached him seeking insight into the avant
garde that he so enthusiastically promoted.
Many of the accounts collected in this book
document the development of that movement,
but other more personal reflections are equally
expressive. The final entry (‘On Happiness’)
is particularly moving in its evocation of
Mekas’s poetic filmmaking and humanist
disposition. After tendering all this historical
detail, the author looks back on all the hard
work, regretting nothing and describing the
simple pleasure of eating a plate of grapes.
January 2018 | Sight&Sound | 107

ISHIRO HONDA
A Life in Film, from Godzilla to Kurosawa
By Steve Ryfle and Ed Godziszewski, Wesleyan
University Press, 336 pp, ISBN 9780819570871
Reviewed by Jasper Sharp
Despite unleashing Japan’s most formidable
BOOKS
movie franchise, Honda Ishiro has avoided
much in the way of sensible critical
consideration, overshadowed by the monster he
created and the special-effects artist who gave it
physical form, Tsuburaya Eiji. Yet no Japanese
director’s work has enjoyed such widespread
global circulation. As authors Steve Ryfle and
Ed Godziszewski point out, Godzilla (1954)
was the first foreign film in the post-war era
to be widely released to mainstream cinemas
across North America, and laid the ground for
international theatrical distribution and regular
television broadcasts of Honda’s subsequent
science fiction and kaiju (literally ‘strange
beast’) classics, including The Mysterians (1957),
Mothra (1961) and Destroy All Monsters (1968).
Japanese critics, who originally dismissed such
genre films as ‘okosama ranchi’ (children’s lunch),
are as much to blame for Honda’s airbrushing
from the canon as Western authors. After all,
Tanaka Tomoyuki confessed,
‘I tied Honda to special effects
movies. If I hadn’t, he might have
become a director like Naruse’
NO WAY BUT THIS
In Search of Paul Robeson
By Jeff Sparrow, Scribe UK, 304pp,
ISBN 9781911344292
Reviewed by Tara Judah
Just last year, Paul Robeson’s rich timbre
reverberated once more in auditoriums across the
UK, thanks to a new digital restoration of The
Proud Valley (1940). The film casts Robeson as
David Goliath, a drifter with a voice of gold. That
such an outsider should align himself with Welsh
coal miners – both in the film and in real life – had
only a little to do with their choir and his strong
set of pipes. The US-born, college-educated son of a
former slave was not just a talented vocalist for
hire, he was a global icon and towering working-
class hero both on and off screen.
It’s the off-screen character, civil rights activist
Robeson, that Australian writer and broadcaster
Jeff Sparrow is interested in. Working in a trade
union bookshop in the 1990s, eyeballing a never-
ending supply of second-hand books, the Robeson
legend “seized hold” of Sparrow. Espousing the
value of histories too easily tossed away, Sparrow
is an advocate for the printed word, making the
case for the importance of books as a gateway
to discovery before getting down to the subject
at hand. But what follows is not the story of a
self-made movie star. Instead, it’s part socialist
enquiry, written with an almost hagiographic
approach and laced with just enough grit and
sincerity to rouse politically engaged readers.
Trying to walk more than a mile in Robeson’s
footsteps, Sparrow traces his history across
108 | Sight&Sound | January 2018
Honda’s most famous creation, Godzilla (1954)
much of his directorial input was cut from early
international releases, which were dubbed and
re-edited with additional scenes shot by American
distributors. And the local and global profitability
of his films saw Honda pigeonholed by his
studio Toho for the second half of a career that
culminated with Terror of Mechagodzilla (1975).
Ryfle and Godziszewski redress the balance
by shining the spotlight equally on the little-
seen and rarely discussed early war films, sports
biopics, rite-of-passage romances, women’s
pictures and salaryman dramas, which together
comprise almost half Honda’s filmography. As
Japan’s first major attempt at science fiction,
Godzilla was a substantial departure from
Toho’s studio staples of the time. His immediate
follow-up, for example, the romantic drama
Love Makeup (1955), followed a plot, about lovers
reunited in the aftermath of war, similar to
Naruse’s Floating Clouds, released by Toho but a
North Carolina, to New Jersey and New
York before heading to London and Wales,
through fascist Spain and all the way to
Russia. Sparrow takes us with him as he walks
through the literal ashes of Robeson’s past.
Told in three parts – ‘Genesis’, ‘Exodus’ and
‘Revelations’ – No Way But This… is a book of
testament to the persistence of racial inequality
and social injustice in America and further afield.
This is a moral project for Sparrow, and he charts
similar terrain to Ava DuVernay’s documentary
13th (2016) as he talks of the unrest in Ferguson,
Missouri, that followed the killing by police of
Michael Brown, and of the astonishing number of
incarcerated African Americans today – as he
writes, “more black people were deprived of their
liberty in the twenty-first century than at the
height of slavery”.
Sparrow emphasises just how exceptional
Robeson had to be to make it: literally bruised
and beaten by whites playing high school
football; unable to get a stenographer to take his
dictation when he graduated as a lawyer; stripped
of his passport by the FBI and prevented from
working in the country he was not allowed to
leave – Robeson may well have been the most
famous black man in the world, but that fame
came with grave and unfair responsibility.
When he did succeed, his critics held him
under a microscope. Criticised for playing
negative stereotypes, even when those were
the only roles available (presuming they could
be wrestled from blacked-up white actors), he
began to find the pressure too much. He was
terrified when he took to the stage to play the
coveted and career-defining role of Othello.
Those looking for anecdotes and insights
week later, and featuring two of its actors, Okada
Mariko and Nakakita Chieko. Core members
of Naruse’s regular crew were involved in the
production of Godzilla, while Honda’s producer
(and Nakakita’s husband) Tanaka Tomoyuki
once confessed, “I am responsible for tying
Honda to special effects movies. If I hadn’t, he
might have become a director just like Naruse.”
He might also have enjoyed a similar career
to Kurosawa, the lifelong friend with whom he
shared a one-room apartment while both were
apprentices at the newly formed PCL in the
early 1930s (assimilated to form Toho in 1937),
had he not been drafted just a year after joining
the studio. Honda lost years to active wartime
service, returning to filmmaking as an assistant
on Kurosawa’s Stray Dog (1949) and making his
debut feature, The Blue Pearl (1951), long after
Kurosawa’s first film in 1943. Honda’s greatest
admirer later famously coaxed him out of
retirement to serve as his righthand man on all his
films from Kagemusha (1980) onwards. Less well
known is that he originally had Honda earmarked
as director for his script of Throne of Blood (1957).
Where the authors really triumph is in
the wealth of information provided about
the autobiographical, historical and cultural
context to Honda’s work, alongside anecdotal
recollections from his family and former cast and
crew members. The impression gained from this
impressively researched tome is of a self-effacing
yet highly accomplished director with his own
distinctive vision, who despite being hamstrung
by the success of his most famous film managed
a career that fully justifies the comprehensive
and in-depth consideration provided here.
into Robeson’s screen career and personal life,
however, will be disappointed – Sparrow is no
traditional biographer. But, for readers whose
appetites include Welsh mining towns, the
Spanish Civil War and a little insight into the
gulag, Sparrow’s account not only soars, it sings.
Robeson may well have been the
most famous black man in the
world, but that fame came with
grave and unfair responsibility
Paul Robeson in The Proud Valley (1940)

MY ADVENTURES
WITH SATYAJIT RAY
The Making of Shatranj Ke Khilari
(The Chess Players)
By Suresh Jindal, Harper Collins, 218pp,
ISBN 9789352771028
Reviewed by Philip Kemp
Shatranj Ke Khilari (The Chess Players, 1977) was
Satyajit Ray’s first and almost only film in Hindi
– or rather in the closely related language of
Urdu. (The other exception was the 45-minute
made-for-TV Sadgati – Deliverance, 1981 – which,
like The Chess Players, was adapted from an
original by the Hindu writer Premchand.)
It’s also Ray’s only feature film to portray
real-life characters. The action is set in 1856
in Lucknow, capital of the kingdom of Oudh,
whose monarch, Wajid Ali Shah, much prefers
poetry, music, dancing and the company of his
400-odd concubines to the tedious business of
ruling. This provides an excuse for the British
Resident General Outram (a fine portrayal of
stubborn Scots bemusement from Richard
Attenborough), representative of the rapacious
East India Company, to depose the king and
annexe his prosperous realm. Counterpointing
this are the doings of two local aristocrats,
obsessed beyond all reason with playing chess
and oblivious to what’s happening around them.
Ray’s producer – and the author of this book
– was the Bollywood-based Suresh Jindal. A
relative newcomer, he had enjoyed a hit with
his first film, Rajnigandha (1974), and on the
strength of it approached Ray to suggest he made
a film in Hindi. Ray had several good reasons
to hesitate. Fluent in Bengali and English, he
felt his Hindi was limited by comparison. The
Bombay film industry, he was well aware,
AMERICAN GOTHIC
Six Decades of Classic Horror Cinema
By Jonathan Rigby, Signum Books, 384pp,
ISBN 9780995519138
Reviewed by Kim Newman
With this expanded revision of his 2007 study,
Jonathan Rigby completes a trilogy, fitting
American Gothic between English Gothic and
Euro Gothic. Of course, nothing is ever truly
finished in genre history. There remain fertile,
underexplored fields of gothic cinema from
Latin America and Asia. More immediately,
the other books take in a sweep of history
from Georges Méliès (or, in the case of English
Gothic, Robert W. Paul) to the present day,
but, faced with a daunting number of films
and filmmakers from the most consistently
productive industry on the planet, American
Gothic covers the history of US horror cinema
(essentially, a Hollywood story) from inception
(the first title mentioned is The Cavalier’s Dream,
from 1898, “75 feet of film… showing an old
witch turning into a young beauty together with
an appearance from Mephistopheles himself”) to
1960, bringing down a curtain just before what
David Thomson called “the moment of Psycho”
and a series of upheavals in genre which might
profitably be assessed in a More American Gothic.
The cut-off point in the previous edition was
regarded his international stature with envy and
mistrust. And making a film on this scale, with
Hindu actors in most of the lead roles, would
be costly; as it turned out, The Chess Players was
by some way the most expensive film he ever
directed – and his biggest financial failure.
Jindal tells the story of this ambitious, ill-fated
production from his first visit to Ray’s study in
Calcutta (“like a combination of a Renaissance
atelier and an alchemist’s lab”) through the
hazardous process of setting up and shooting
the film to its dispiriting aftermath. Quoting
lavishly from the correspondence between
himself and ‘Manik-da’ (the nickname by which
Ray was widely known), he recalls Ray’s initial
aversion to the historical character of Wajid Ali,
his exhaustive and painstaking research, the
various setbacks and mishaps that delayed the
start of the project. With the shoot finally under
way, Jindal pays tribute to the mood established
by the “always calm and soft-spoken” director:
“The sets had the serenity of an ashram.”
Then, around 100 pages in, things become
less idyllic. Jindal’s account is sparing of detail,
but it seems bad blood is engendered between
the Hindu and Bengali contingents in the crew.
A pay cheque gets delayed. The quality of hotel
accommodation is complained about, and
there’s a row about a bill for 43 rupees (about
50 pence). Jindal is blamed for all this, gets
shouted at by Ray, and finally withdraws from
the post-production process as he “simply could
not bear to face the vitriol of the crew”. Much
of this ill-feeling, he suggests darkly to Ray,
can be attributed to the “established mafia”.
Matters scarcely improve once The Chess
Players is ready for release. All the five Indian
distributors who had agreed to handle it back out,
complaining that it’s an art film that won’t make
any money. Other, less advantageous distribution
deals are eventually struck, but it’s as though
I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957)
a little earlier, with Reginald LeBorg’s retro-
styled monochrome The Black Sleep (1956), a
knowing reunion of faded names from American
horror’s most prolific period (Bela Lugosi, John
Carradine, Basil Rathbone, Lon Chaney Jr) in
an old-fashioned, out-of-step-with-the-decade
mad-science melodrama. It might be construed
as holding out a baton that was taken up by
Hammer Films – in a key moment in English
Gothic – in its much more energetic, colourful
manner, with new-minted horror stars Peter
Cushing and Christopher Lee, by Terence
Fisher’s The Curse of Frankenstein (1957). That
there’s a jinx on the film. Hostile comments in
the Indian press suggest it isn’t critical enough of
the British and, in a letter, Ray cites a comment in
India Today from actor-producer Shashi Kapoor,
adding, “I can’t imagine a meaner statement
from someone who is supposed to be among the
more decent and intelligent of Bombay actors.”
Frustratingly, we don’t learn just what Kapoor
said; and yet more enigmatically, we’re told a
BOOKS
subsequent mooted collaboration between Ray
and Jindal “fell through due to an unforeseen
betrayal by someone close to both of us”.
Rather less than a complete picture, then.
But the book’s sustained by the warmth and
affection of Jindal’s portrayal of Ray, his open-
hearted admiration for his legendary mentor.
“He was, and remains, the most important of
my many great teachers during this lifetime.”
Jean-Claude Carrière contributes an appreciative
foreword, and there’s a fluent, informative
introduction from Ray specialist Andrew
Robinson. A generous 36 colour plates include
fascinating pages from Ray’s shooting notebooks.
Regrettably, though, there is no index.
Ray during the filming of The Chess Players
makes for a neat link with the other books, in
that the LeBorg film is tired (though Carradine
and some cellar mutants enliven proceedings
eventually) while contemporary English and
Euro horror titles – among others, Franju’s Eyes
Without a Face (1959) was in the works – were
invigorated. But stretching the American Gothic
era a few years allows for a look at the distinctive,
and certainly energetic high jinks of I Was a
Teenage Werewolf (1957) and its tabloid cycle.
Rigby has interesting things to say on
familiar topics like the cornerstone works of
stars Lon Chaney, Boris Karloff and Lugosi, and
creatives Tod Browning, James Whale and Val
Lewton. He is especially good at identifying
those time-resistant moments which can still
shock unsuspecting audiences who mistakenly
assume old horrors must now seem tame – the
climax of The Unholy Three (1925) is “among the
most jaw-dropping in silent cinema”) and even
the otherwise marginal Sh! The Octopus (1937)
delivers a “brilliantly achieved” transformation
scene. As useful is the near-obsessive evaluation
of numberless (though Rigby has a good go at
numbering them) old dark house comedies – with
or without sliding panels, scheming heirs and
real or fake gorillas – and an eye for unexpected
recurrences like the blips of rejuvenation horror
provided by the ‘monkey gland’ movies of the
1920s (The Young Diana, 1922; One Way Street,
1925) and their echo three decades later (The
Wasp Woman, 1959; The Leech Woman, 1960).
January 2018 | Sight&Sound | 109
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FEEDBACK
READERS’ LETTERS
Letters are welcome, and should be
addressed to the Editor at Sight & Sound,
BFI, 21 Stephen Street, London W1T 1LN
Email: S&S@bfi.org.uk
REALMS OF GOLD
I was surprised that neither your interview
with Armando Iannucci (‘Room at the Top’,
S&S, November 2017) nor your review of The
Death of Stalin in the same issue mentioned
Jack Gold’s 1983 film for Channel 4 Red
Monarch. Adapted from the memoirs of KGB
defector Yuri Krotkov, it seems to cover much
the same territory. I haven’t seen Iannucci’s
effort, but highly recommend the Gold.
Glenn Smith Eastbourne
A BITTER TASTE
Armando Iannucci’s “latest comic masterpiece”
– according to your critic (Reviews, S&S,
November) – is neither comic nor a masterpiece,
but it is highly distasteful. Would Iannucci have
made such a film about the Third Reich and
Hitler? Do the survivors of Stalin and Beria’s
atrocities and their descendants find the film
“uproariously funny but painfully close to the
bone”? I think not. What next – Carry on Pol Pot?
Nick Whiting By email
SPOILING FOR A FIGHT
Your magazine is as brilliant as ever but the recent
review of I Am Not a Witch (S&S, November)
irritated me. Any review must feature some
plot points, but was it strictly necessary to spell
out how in one of the final scenes a “sheet-
wrapped body in a field” is that of Shula. Did
we really, absolutely have to be told that, and
without a spoiler warning? Surely, if such
details are essential then a reader can find them
in the synopsis at the bottom of the page.
Graeme Hulks By email
JAPANESE FAN
I greatly enjoyed Alejandra-Armendáriz-
Hernández’s appreciation of Tanaka Kinuyo
and Alexander Jacoby’s piece on Japanese
actresses (‘Tears and laughter: female stars of
golden age Japanese cinema’, S&S, November).
I would like to call attention to two other
essays on the subject: Catherine Russell’s ‘Three
Japanese Actresses of the 1950s: Modernity,
Femininity and the Performance of Everyday
Life’, on Hara Setsuko, Takamine Hideko and
Sugimura Haruko, in CineAction 60 (2003), and
my own profile ‘The Prickly Power of Haruko
Sugimura’ in Cinemaya 45 (autumn 1999).
Arthur Nolletti Jr Massachusetts
THE USUAL ASPECTS
Following Peter Herbert’s letter about our aspect
ratio playout (‘Home stretch’, Letters, S&S,
November) , we have been working with Peter
to understand why he was having problems.
The fix turned out to be simple: he had to adjust
the settings on his set-top box (Virgin TiVo, in
this case) to view Talking Pictures TV correctly.
Peter has since let us know that he’s very
pleased with the presentation of our channel.
Talking Pictures TV broadcasts a mix of aspect
ratios to accommodate the 16:9 modern ads and
LETTER OF THE MONTH
GUT REACTION
After all this wait, what does Blade Runner
2049 offer? A reprise of the original’s
gorgeously miserabilist mise en scène and its
cocktail of thin philosophising and designer
violence, combined with the new elements
of drearily self-important pacing and a
clever and ultimately satisfying inversion of
the ‘Is Deckard a replicant?’ conundrum.
However, in his thoughtful review (Films
of the Month, S&S, December), Tim Hayes
raises a broader and very troubling concern:
he asks whether two female technological
constructs in the film reflect the misogyny
of the filmmakers or the misanthropy
of their fictional manufacturer. It is a
variation on an old question. The line may
be hard to define, but considering together
both the act portrayed and the manner
of presentation can sometimes help
resolve things. Consider the following.
the 4:3 films. Hidden signals tell TV sets and
set-top boxes which aspect ratio to display. To
enjoy Talking Pictures TV at its best, adjust your
TV Aspect Ratio setting to Auto; in addition,
you must adjust your set-top box (Sky, Virgin or
Freeview) to match your television’s screen shape
– 16:9 or 4:3. This will enable your TV to display
the correct aspect ratio automatically. The Auto
setting will work for all broadcast signals, and
will not affect your viewing of other channels.
We have published this information
on the FAQs page on our website
(talkingpicturestv.co.uk/faqs/).
The Talking Pictures TV team
DARKNESS VISIBLE
In his otherwise fine article, ‘The air-conditioned
nightmare’ (S&S, November), Adam Scovell
does not mention the contribution of Gordon
Willis to all three chapters of Alan J. Pakula’s
Niander Wallace (Jared Leto) examines
his ‘new model’ replicant – established as
female via a lingering shot of her naked
body. Discovering that she is incapable
of reproducing, he touches her stomach,
pronounces her a “barren pasture…
empty” and kills her – by slicing into
her lower abdomen with a scalpel as
she stands naked before him. We see –
twice – blood flowing copiously down her
thighs, and she falls dying to the floor.
The same character insight could
have been conveyed very differently.
The combination here of act and its
presentation certainly got me over the
line: this was the most jaw-droppingly
misogynistic scene I have encountered
in a long time, an astonishing failure of
judgement on the part of the filmmakers.
David Lane London
‘paranoia trilogy’: Klute, The Parallax View and All
the President’s Men. Willis was well acquainted
with the darkness beneath sunlit surfaces,
alternating the overexposed, home-movie-
like celebration of the family outside with the
internal shadowed dispensation of favours by
Don Vito Corleone on his daughter’s wedding
day. Willis photographed all three chapters of The
Godfather as well as Manhattan (1979), Stardust
Memories (1979) and Zelig (1983). It is surely no
accident that Conrad Hall in the documentary
celebration of cinematographers Visions of Light
(1992) refers to Willis as “the prince of darkness”.
Christopher Nelson & Enrico Calligari By email
Additions and corrections
December 2017 p.59 Brakes: Certificate 15, 88m 8s; p.65 The Florida
Project: Certificate 15, 111m 28s; p.68 Jane: Certificate PG, 89m 56s; p.70
Lost in Paris: Certificate 15, 82m 45s; p.73 No Stone Unturned: Certificate
15, 110m 39s; p.79 Trophy: Certificate 15, 109m 40s; p.92 the picture
caption misidentified the male figure with Bette Davis in Now, Voyager
as Paul Henreid. It was in fact John Loder.
January 2018 | Sight&Sound | 111
 ENDINGS…
THE APARTMENT
The final line of Billy Wilder’s
comic gem is a beautiful, matter-of-
fact deflection of one of the great
expressions of love in cinema
By Mark Cousins
To be honest, this is the one page in Sight & Sound
I hardly ever read. I much prefer the beginning
of a film, the opening of its window, than its
closing. The end of a movie is like the end of a
party, like a comedown. I don’t want it to happen.
Either that or I’d like it to happen sooner. I wish
I’d walked out of Dunkirk a few minutes before
its credits rolled; the same for most films by
Steven Spielberg. If I ruled the movie world, all
films would end either with a phone ringing,
or a kettle boiling, or an apple being peeled.
Grace notes. I’d even stop the brilliant Call Me
by Your Name a bit earlier, with the snow falling
and before the phone rings. So shoot me.
I feel like an interloper on this page, but how
could I resist the invitation to write about the
ending of Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960)?
Twenty years ago I named my production
company, Shut Up and Deal, after its last line.
It’s the film I’ve watched most in my life. I
wrote the introduction to the screenplay
when it was published by Faber & Faber.
When you’ve loved something for a long
time – let’s say your whole adult life – you can
either see deep into its core, or you’re blinded by
its beauty, and by your own history with it. My
own sense of love, of Manhattan and of cinema
is so entwined with The Apartment that I can’t
see it from any distance. But I’ll have a go.
112 | Sight&Sound | January 2018
The story, of course, is about two people who
work together in a New York skyscraper. She
operates the elevators. He rides them every
day to his number-crunching salaryman job.
It’s like a vertical car pool. The final shot of the
film lasts about 90 seconds. It’s New Year’s Eve.
He’s packing up to leave his apartment; she’s
just been disappointed by the realisation that
her older boss, whom she thought she was in
love with, is Eisenhower America in a nutshell.
She arrives at the first man’s apartment. A lot
happens in those 90 seconds. He tells her that
he loves her, that he absolutely adores her (note
to readers – when you tell someone you love
them, add that phrase). And, as if she hasn’t heard
him, or has and knew that it was coming and
so isn’t surprised, or because her being in this
apartment on this night with this man and in
this dress is just so perfect that she’s incapable
of shock – she doesn’t react to his expression
of love, one of the great expressions of love in
cinema. Instead, she says, “Shut up and deal.”
To the outside world they are two losers,
Fran Kubelik and C.C. Baxter, Shirley MacLaine
and Jack Lemmon. He lets out his apartment to
his male colleagues so that they can shag their
girlfriends. They live in a world of people who
take and people who “get took”. Sex is commodity
in this midtown, mid-century Manhattan.
People are cynical or self-exploit. If these 90
My own sense of love, of
Manhattan and of cinema is so
entwined with ‘The Apartment’
I can’t see it from any distance
seconds were, say, a poem rather than the end of
a narrative film, we might be able to isolate, and
see more clearly, some things about the scene in
their own right: Lemmon’s almost non-sexual
anxiety. The fact that Fran is both witty and
traumatised by all the crap men she’s known.
The apartment itself – a big, drab knocking-shop
and refuge which contains hints of modernism,
such as the Picasso poster on its walls. The music
– fin de siècle and Viennese-y – gestures to the
Mitteleuropean world that Wilder knew well.
The clothes: she slips off her coat and we see
a cocktail dress. And her ‘shut up and deal’ – a
deferral, a choice of play and innocence over sex.
The camera moves in to a two-shot at the end
of the 90 seconds, but if it had pulled out and
craned through the window into the world,
what would it have discovered? White flight
from New York. The Port Authority proposing
the construction of the World Trade Center. The
end of Beaux-Arts New York and its replacement
by Mies van der Rohe’s International Style.
The consequences of the world and ideas of Mr
Sheldrake, the boss Fran loved. A world before
Stonewall. Further afield, JFK was getting elected,
the Pill was approved in the US, Africa was
decolonising, and the Jet Age was beginning.
That’ll be Fran and C.C.’s world if they live
together and love together. They won’t be
hippies. They won’t go to Woodstock. They’re
not trendy. They’re hurt, beautiful and feel
dirtied by the world in which they work.
Half a century later, in their eighties, would
RONALD GRANT ARCHIVE (1)
they vote for Donald Trump? Possibly.
i
A new 4K restoration of The Apartment
is released on Blu-ray by Arrow Academy
on 11 December
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