Frederick Wiseman Obituary

Stretching from 1967 to 2023, Frederick Wiseman’s filmmaking career was a model of consistency. From the unprepossessing titles onwards, Wiseman stripped his portraits of institutions and communities down to their essentials. There is no non-diegetic music in Wiseman films to help guide our emotions, there is no voiceover narration, there are no onscreen captions to add context to what we are seeing, and there are no interviews with the participants. It is documentary filmmaking in its purest form. “His movies are stylistically ur-vérité,” Errol Morris wrote in a Paris Review essay in 2011, before adding, “but Wiseman’s films prove a simple principle. Style does not determine content. Wiseman has never been a straight vérité ‘documentarian.’ He is a filmmaker and one of the greatest we have.”

Read the rest of my obituary on the BFI website.

Saipan Review

 

For Irish football fans of a certain age, the phrase “You can stick it up your bollocks” is etched in our collective memory. This was captain Roy Keane’s parting shot to manager Mick McCarthy as he left the Irish squad one week before the start of the 2002 World Cup. Anyone living in Ireland then will recall the hysteria that ensued as this issue divided the nation, a period that Saipan evokes with its opening montage of TV and radio soundbites. “This is like our Princess Diana,” one interviewee says, which didn’t feel like an overstatement at the time.

Read the rest of my review at Sight & Sound

Essay on Bernardo Bertolucci's Novecento

Written for the now-discontinued Eureka blu-ray edition in 2016.

In August 1974, Gideon Bachmann arrived in Italy to report on the production of Bernardo Bertolucci's Novecento for Sight & Sound. He had planned to spend one day on the set, but ended up staying for a whole week, with a diary of his experiences being published in the magazine a few months later. After a couple of days spent watching Bertolucci at work, taking note of the impressive scale (and spiralling cost) of everything, and growing frustrated at his failure to secure an interview with the director, he wrote, “What is it that makes film directors so sure of their value? Whence this presumption of being involved in an activity that must take precedence over other human obligations? Haven't we perhaps allowed them too much mythology, too much adoration?”

Cut to three years later. The fruits of Bertolucci's labours were finally presented to the paying American public in November 1977, but only after a long, acrimonious and very public battle between the director and his producer Alberto Grimaldi. The 315-minute version of Novecento shown at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival was whittled down to a relatively skimpy 195 minutes by Grimaldi, conscious of his contractual obligations to Paramount. Grimaldi had banned Bertolucci from the editing room, prompting the director to take legal action to protect his vision. “That isn't my film; that's a trailer, a travesty,” Bertolucci exclaimed in the press when asked about the new cut commissioned by his producer. “My friend is surrounded by sycophants who tell him he is God,” Grimaldi responded. “It started with Tango.”

The film made by a director after enjoying their first enormous success is a test. A few years before Michael Cimino went off the deep end and killed a studio with Heaven's Gate, Novecento was viewed as the prime example of a wunderkind being given his freedom and running for the hills with it. Last Tango in Paris was not only an astonishing critical and commercial hit in 1972, but a film that was instantly seen as a cinematic landmark, a breakthrough in adult artistic filmmaking. Following the more modest but still widely admired The Conformist and The Spider's Stratagem in the previous years, this was the kind of achievement that has other filmmakers heaping praise on the director (“How dare I make another film?” Robert Altman said, “My personal and artistic life will never be the same.”), has every actor lining up to work with him, and has studios throwing money in his direction in the hope of reaping the same artistic and financial rewards. Where does a young director go in that situation? Bertolucci decided to go big. Although his film is titled 1900 in many countries, a more accurate translation of Novecento is Twentieth Century, which immediately gives you a sense of the scale of his ambition.

Novecento was briefly mooted as a six-part series for Italian television, although what small screen in the mid-1970s could have contained the scope of Bertolucci’s images? This is self-consciously an epic work, large in every sense, and it’s no coincidence that Bertolucci begins his tale on January 27^th 1901, with the announcement of the death of Giuseppe Verdi. The director is taking his lead from Verdi and telling his story in an operatic register, demanding grand, emotive performances from his actors (compare the dignified restraint Burt Lancaster exhibited in Visconti’s The Leopard to his work here), and instead of finding a consistent rhythm or narrative flow throughout the film, he focuses on staging loosely connected individual sequences that each build to a crescendo and aim to enrapture the viewer with their swelling melodramatic fervour. No wonder Pauline Kael spent much of her famous New Yorker review marvelling in equal parts at Bertolucci’s brilliance and foolhardiness, before summing up the film’s appeal by stating that “Next to it, all the other new movies are like something you hold up at the end of a toothpick.”

But despite the gigantic size of Novecento, Bertolucci’s flirtation with the idea of presenting it on television is telling. He wanted his socialist epic to be a film that spoke directly to the masses, a film that bypassed intellectual analysis and worked on a level of pure emotion, through arresting images and rousing rhetoric, culminating in a climactic speech being delivered directly into the camera. The film can be blunt and even crude in its approach, with Bertolucci taking a broad strokes approach to his storytelling, and the people we see in the film are less characters than symbols. His two protagonists Alfredo Berlinghieri (Robert De Niro) and Olmo Dalcò (Gérard Depardieu) are born into different classes on the same day in 1901. Alfredo is the scion of a bourgeois landowning family while Olmo is the bastard son of a peasant, and as the film charts their fluctuating fortunes and enduring, if complicated, friendship over the subsequent half-century, it becomes clear that the weight of history rests heavily on their shoulders. Through these two characters – plus a third, Attila, who we meet a little later – Bertolucci’s microcosmic film aims to show us the changing face of Italian politics, industry and class across five decades. Novecento pits the proletariat against the bourgeoisie and the communists against the fascists in a struggle for the country’s soul, and there is no doubt whose side the director is on.

Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo’s 1901 painting The Fourth Estate, which is shown under the opening credits, sets the visual tone, with Bertolucci and Vittorio Storario shooting the communists and the peasant masses as heroic figures throughout Novecento. They are noble, dignified, the salt of the earth; they work, eat, sing and dance together; they are a community. When faced with superior force during the workers’ strike of 1908, they band together and lay down in the road against the armed soldiers on horseback. When four men are killed in a building burned by fascists, they carry the charred bodies through the streets in protest, unafraid of reprisals. When women working in the fields take up pitchforks against the fleeing fascists on Liberation Day in 1945, they sing, “Even though we are women, we are not afraid,” a song that became popular again among left-wing Italian women during the strikes and demonstrations of the 1970s – Bertolucci linking then and now.

Compare this with the way Bertolucci shoots the fascists. It’s hard to think of many more despicable characters in the history of cinema than Attila Mellanchini. Played with leering, eye-popping intensity by Donald Sutherland and egged on by his Lady Macbeth-like wife (Laura Betti), he’s a grotesque embodiment of fascist ideology; a sadist and pervert who gleefully attacks children, animals and old women and is responsible for the most violent and upsetting moments in the film. Attila is the only fascist who really exists as a character in Novecento and therefore he acts as a representative for the entire order. On the few occasions when Attila does get his comeuppance – his humiliation escalating from straw to horse shit to pitchforks – it’s always the collective that rounds on him, but Attila is not in fact acting alone, he has a whole support network behind him, and you could even argue that, despite his cartoonish villainy, he is not Novecento’s true villain.

A key scene in Novecento takes place inside a church, where the landowners meet to discuss the growing unrest among the peasants. They agree to employ a private army of Blackshirts to maintain control, and thus, the fascist movement in Italy is born, with the links between the church, the bourgeoisie and the fascists being explicitly made. When his father dies, Alfredo becomes the padrone, inheriting the increasingly violent Attila along with the land, but he can do nothing to curb his fascist attack dog. Right from the start of Novecento, when both Alfredo and Olmo are boys, Bertolucci keeps finding ways to show us Alfredo’s inferiority in contrast to his lower-class friend. From comparing their penises (Alfredo’s foreskin is too tight) to daring to lie on the tracks as a train passes overhead (Alfredo flees at the last minute), to the fact that Olmo leaves to fight in the war, returning as a man, while Alfredo dresses as a soldier but stays at home, having been kept out of harm’s way by his rich father. Alfredo is fundamentally weak, and it is this weakness that allows fascism to flourish on his watch.

On a number of occasions he is encouraged to take action against Attila and stand up for Olmo and the peasants, often by his wife Ada (Dominique Sanda, whom Angela Dalle-Vacche suggested only exists in the film to deflect attention from the homoerotic tension between Alfredo and Olmo), but all Alfredo can do is look away and withdraw. Even when Olmo is taking a vicious beating from the fascists, Alfredo hesitates, only stepping in when the danger has passed. When he finally dismisses Attila towards the end of the film, Alfredo knocks on the peasants' doors and proclaims his action as if expecting applause, but it is too little, too late. Alfredo is not a fascist, but as he is told throughout the film, he is something even worse; a landowner who pays lip service to the needs of those in his care but who ensures his own protection above all else. He is an enabler.

Bertolucci has spoken of Novecento as being a film partially born from a sense of guilt, the guilt of being a member of the Italian Communist party but hailing from bourgeois origins. Thus, for all of its sprawling and outsized ambitions, the character of Alfredo makes this a deeply personal epic for the director, and reminds us of an era when such films were possible. Even in the mid-1970s, however, it's hard to believe that a major American studio could invest millions of dollars in a five-hour Italian epic replete with shocking violence and full-frontal nudity, not to mention the explicit celebration of communist values that occurs at the end of the film. Novecento's finale led to accusations of political naïveté on the part of the filmmaker, with the fascists being run off and the peasants putting Alfredo on trial, but Bertolucci insisted this was less naïveté than hope. “In my film the trial of the landowners seems to be taking place in 1945, but in reality it is situated in the future. It is a dream,” he told Le cinéma italien in 1978. “This entire sequence is an anticipation; it is a dream of something yet to be”; but the utopian vision of the sequence is complicated in the film's closing moments.

Olmo steps in to save Alfredo from execution, insisting that the padrone, the cause of their ills, is now dead, and Alfredo Berlinghieri should be allowed to walk away as a living testament to the padrone's demise; the villagers celebrate with songs and the triumphant waving of red flags, cheering as if the country is now theirs, but this celebratory mood is short-lived. The provisional government arrives to confiscate their guns, and as Alfredo is rescued by Olmo, he tells his old friend with a wry smile, “The padrone is still alive,” before the two begin tussling once more in a futile, comical manner. The country does not yet belong to the people, there will always be a padrone, and the struggle continues.

The Best Films of 2025

25 – Here (Robert Zemeckis)

Here arrived in UK cinemas on a wave of hostile reviews, most of which struck me as very wide of the mark once I’d seen it. The film presents us with a single perspective, setting up an immobile camera that gazes at a fixed point in space, while in front of it time passes back and forth; we go from the age of the dinosaurs to the age of COVID, spending most of our time in the corner of one house where generations of a single family will grow up. Zemeckis has always tended to invite scorn and scepticism with his sentimentality and his fascination with technology, but I think the tools that he uses in Here serve to create a melancholy portrait of American life in the 20th century; it's a story about lost time, frustrated ambitions and foregone dreams. I found it to be an odd, endearing and sincerely moving film, one that – like his similarly lambasted Welcome to Marwen – deserved better than to be so flippantly dismissed.

24– Sirāt (Óliver Laxe)

If I was ranking these films purely in terms of the experience I had watching them, then Sirāt would be sitting comfortably in the top five. This is a movie that needs to be seen on the big screen, not just for the booming sound mix, but for the experience of watching it with a packed audience, all of whom gasped in unison at a couple of significant dramatic developments. After I had stepped away from the intensity of the cinema and began to contemplate Sirāt in the cold light of day, I felt less certain about it. Laxe does an incredible job of creating and sustaining a sense of tension, and he toys with our emotional state with sadistic glee, but does it ultimately amount to anything more than a few cheap tricks? I still harbour the suspicion that this is a skilled but hollow piece of showmanship, but I can’t deny that it was an exhilarating time at the movies and something I would unhesitatingly recommend to anyone, and that’s not something to be sniffed at.

23 – Twinless (James Sweeney)

In the first twenty minutes of Twinless, James Sweeney had already done enough to get me interested. I was intrigued by the film’s wry depiction of grief and friendship, by Sweeney’s confident framing and editing, and by his onscreen chemistry with Dylan O’Brien. Then Sweeney played his hand, revealing the true nature of his premise, and I was totally hooked. It’s one of the sharpest acts of rug-pulling that I’ve seen in a while, and Sweeney manages to keep delivering the laughs while developing an unsettling sense of tension. It’s a tight, intelligently directed film and O’Brien is outstanding in a variety of ways. Aisling Franciosi also deserves a mention, as a character who initially appears to be a one-note office bimbo before revealing herself to be the smartest and most perceptive person involved in this situation. Don’t read anything about Twinless, just watch it.

22 – Direct Action (Guillaume Cailleau and Ben Russell)

Direct Action is a film that was long in the making. For much of the past two decades, protestors have resisted attempts to build an airport in the French region of Notre-Dame-des-Landes, an action that was strongly opposed by local residents and farmers. Squatters have occupied the region and refused multiple attempts at eviction, finally triumphing in 2018. Direct Action explores what happens after such a victory has been achieved, following the day-to-day life of the community that has formed on this land. Shot on 16mm, the film immerses us into their activities, from mundane aspects of their work and leisure to ongoing attempts to maintain vigilance against incursions into their territory. Direct Action unfolds across four hours, and it offers an engrossing study of quotidian work that goes into keeping a protest movement alive.

21 – Marty Supreme (Josh Safdie)

This was the year of the Safdie separation. Benny made the Mark Kerr biopic The Smashing Machine with Dwayne Johnson, while Josh made Marty Supreme, which feels a lot closer in spirit to the Safdies’ previous works. Like Good Time and Uncut Gems, Marty Supreme is a portrait of a charismatic hustler desperately striving to keep his dreams alive while constantly running on the brink of total collapse. I don’t think it quite manages the sustained level of intensity that those films achieved, there are parts of this two-and-half-hour film that feel baggy and unfocused, but there are long stretches of phenomenal filmmaking. The table tennis scenes are electrifying, and there is no question that Chalamet’s swaggering lead performance is the best work of his career to date. Marty Supreme is definitely my preference from 2025’s two Safdie offerings, even if separately they both seem to lack the special sauce that made their movies tick.

20 – Henry Johnson (David Mamet)

The other night I watched Lindsay Anderson’s 1975 film In Celebration, and I wish it was common practice to make a film with the original cast of a play – not a filmed recording of the stage production, but an actual film. That’s what David Mamet did with the cast of his 2023 play Henry Johnson, and the result is one of his best films. Henry Johnson consists of four scenes, each of which is a two-hander, following Henry (Evan Jonigkeit) as he is arrested for fraud and goes to prison, where he falls under the spell of the cunningly manipulative and endlessly philosophising Gene (Shia LaBeouf). As always with Mamet, everything is a con game and a power struggle, and the dialogue here is so classically Mamet, which brings out the best from these actors. All four of the film’s conversations are compelling to watch, but the opening one between Jonigkeit and Chris Bauer is almost a perfect short film in itself, one that builds to a terrific punchline. It’s good to have Mamet back on film.

19 – Seven Veils (Atom Egoyan)

Another project that began life in the theatre, Seven Veils was sparked by Atom Egoyan’s commission to direct a production of Salome for the Canadian Opera Company in 2023; an opera he had first directed in 1996. He created this film while working on the opera, with Amanda Seyfried playing Jeanne, the young director developing a new Salome for the stage, while trying to get out from under the shadow of her mentor’s 1996 production of the same show. This story stands at the crossroads of so many of Egoyan’s familiar obsessions, particularly the themes of family, history, trauma and technology, which are touched upon through the home movie footage of Jeanne’s childhood and her Zoom conversations with her estranged husband. The experience of simultaneously making Salome and Seven Veils seems to have invigorated this director, who makes a number of interesting choices and finds arresting compositions throughout. Egoyan’s recent work has been erratic to say the least, but he’s close to something like his best form here. 

18 – Train Dreams (Clint Bentley)

Train Dreams tells the story of a man who lived from the late 19th century to the mid-20th century, and his life was unremarkable in most respects. Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) is a logger who spends months away from his young family as he clears the great forests and helps to build the railroads that will transform the nation. Edgerton’s finely judged performance beautifully captures the nature of this humble, hardworking man, whose life is blighted by a terrible tragedy but must find the strength to carry on. Grainier is a man of few words, but the silences are filled by Will Patton’s ruminative voiceover, or a marvellous cameo from a gregarious William H. Macy, who talks of the natural splendour of the world and wonders what mankind will do to it. Train Dreams can sometimes evoke better films – The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford comes to mind, as does the work of Terrence Malick – but Adolpho Veloso’s camera finds poetry in the images, and the film has a cumulative effect, with the small and apparently insignificant moments of Grainier’s life building to a powerful climax.

17 – The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendonça Filho)

The Secret Agent plunges us into a vividly realised depiction of 1970s Brazil, where corruption, death and paranoia are everywhere. Fleeing the big city, Marcelo (Wagner Moura, magnificent) finds refuge among other political dissidents hiding out in Recife, but the net – in the shape of hitmen despatched by a powerful enemy – is closing in. What I particularly relish in Filho’s films is the way he sustains a high degree of tension in the central narrative while allowing his film to sprawl casually in multiple directions. We get a surreal interlude involving a zombie leg, we spend a lot of time in and around the local cinema, and he gives ample time to an amazing ensemble of character actors, including the late Udo Kier in his final screen role. Filho has ambition, daring and talent to spare, and his films are exhilarating in their formal brilliance and eccentric touches. I hope the success of The Secret Agent drives people towards discovering his earlier work, especially the documentary Pictures of Ghosts, which feels like a companion piece.

16 – Oslo Stories: Dreams (Dag Johan Haugerud)

There were three films in Dag Johan Haugerud’s Oslo Stories series – Dreams, Love and Sex – and I loved them all. These films had no connective tissue aside from their setting and the fact that they each explored different aspects of relationships, but in each film Haugerud showed himself to be skilled and incisive writer, allowing his characters to articulate their insecurities and pain, and work through their problems together. If I had to pick one, then I’d select Dreams as my personal favourite, primarily for the way it captures a palpable sense of what unrequited longing feels like through its sensitively handled story of a schoolgirl falling in love with her teacher. There is real intelligence in the way Haugerud handles each of these films, directing with patience and with an eye for the way the surrounding city adds so much to these stories in terms of life and atmosphere.

15 – If I Had Legs I'd Kick You (Mary Bronstein)

If neither of the Safdie brothers’ individual films quite delivered that electric charge of anxiety and dread this year, we had Mary Bronstein (wife of the Safdies’ regular collaborator Ronald Bronstein) to deliver it in spades. Bronstein gets us uncomfortably close to a woman coming apart at the seems; the camera is thrust right into Rose Byrne’s face, and she responds with one of the year’s truly great acting performances. Her character Linda is described as “stretchable” by her daughter, but she is clearly at breaking point, having been left by her husband to cope alone with their daughter’s unspecified illness, and with the pair being forced to live out of a motel when the ceiling caves in and floods their home. The whole film teeters on a funny/nightmarish knife-edge and we are right there with Linda at every strenuous moment, with Byrne earning our empathy despite making no attempt to make to make her more sympathetic or soften her questionable behaviour. I was very disappointed with how little bite Nightbitch had when exploring similar themes last year, but If I Had Legs I'd Kick You doesn’t hold back and it's a bracing experience.

14 – Highest 2 Lowest (Spike Lee)

High and Low is probably my favourite Akira Kurosawa film, but the best compliment I can pay to Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest is that I hardly thought about the original film at all as I was engrossed in this one. Lee makes the material typically his own. It takes a while for the film to warm up, but it shifts gears magnificently in the ransom money switcheroo, which Lee stages against the backdrop of the Puerto Rican Day parade and with Yankees fans piling onto the train as another complicating factor. Highest 2 Lowest is reconfigured as a contemplation of what one sacrifices through success, when you're living in an ivory tower and losing touch with real life, and Washington is unsurprisingly tremendous as the mogul brought down to street level. His climactic face-off with A$AP Rocky (so good in both this and If I Had Legs I'd Kick You) is superbly acted and staged. I was fortunate enough to see Highest 2 Lowest on the big screen and it played brilliantly for a sold-out audience. Dumping it onto streaming was a joke.

13 – Roofman (Derek Cianfrance)

This is another film that should have been a bigger hit, and a few years ago it would have surely found an appreciative audience. It’s hard to think of many American studio releases this year that were as crowd-pleasing and satisfying as Roofman. Cianfrance directs a lighter touch than we’re used to seeing from him with this material, and he handles it all perfectly, finding plenty of knockabout humour in the absurdity of Channing Tatum hiding out in Toys R Us, but also locating a real emotional core in his growing relationship with Kirsten Dunst. There’s a genuine interest in the texture and nuance of people’s lives here in a way that reminded me of the work of Jonathan Demme, and I found myself completely involved in the final third, which builds to something that feels authentically emotional in a way that Cianfrance’s earlier movies have pushed too hard for. Tatum and Dunst are doing some of the best work of their careers in this film and I wish more people had seen it.

12 – Landmarks (Lucrecia Martel)

When I interviewed Lucrecia Martel in 2018, she told me she was finishing a documentary on the murder of Javier Chocobar. That ‘finishing’ apparently took the best part of seven years, but thankfully, a Lucrecia Martel film is always worth waiting for. Chocobar, a leader in Argentina’s indigenous Chuchagasta community, was killed in 2009, with footage of his murder subsequently being uploaded to YouTube. In Landmarks, Martel follows the murder trial and also explores the story of the Chuchagastas, digging deep into Argentina’s colonial history. As you would expect, this is a brilliantly edited film, with Martel skilfully weaving together courtroom footage, interviews with members of Chuchagasta community, archive footage, and photographs into a wholly absorbing and moving portrait of a shameful history. Landmarks is also notable for containing the finest use of drone footage that I’ve seen in a film since Michael Bay’s Ambulance. Martel’s first documentary is a film that deserves to stand alongside her already exceptional body of work.

11 – Silent Friend (Ildikó Enyedi)

Three stories taking place across the span of a century. In the first, set in the 1920s, an aspiring female student strives to make progress at the male-dominated University of Hamburg; in the 1970s, a young man with a crush on a fellow student is asked to look after her botanical project while she’s away; and finally, a visiting academic finds himself stuck on campus when COVID strikes, with only a grumpy security guard for company. Each of these tales explores means of communication in some way, not only between people, but between humanity and the natural world. These characters actively seek a way to understand and interact with the trees around this building, and Enyedi’s direction of these scenarios is simultaneously playful and thoughtful. Silent Friend is aesthetically rich (switching between 35mm, 16mm and digital for her three eras) and Enyedi cuts crisply between each narrative in a way that sustains our interest in each while letting them attain a cumulative resonance. An imaginative, consistently surprising and thoroughly engaging film.

10 – Young Mothers (Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne)

Do we take the Dardennes for granted these days? Once upon a time, the release of a new film from these Belgian brothers was a major event, but their last few films have had small releases and no fanfare, and Young Mothers is another that seemed to sneak out this year to collective shrugs. This is baffling to me, because I was floored by their latest picture and I remain in awe of what the Dardennes can achieve onscreen, which is the kind of empathetic filmmaking that so few other contemporary filmmakers appear to be capable of. Young Mothers is the brothers’ first true ensemble piece, and through the varying experiences of these teenage mothers and mothers-to-be, they tell stories of children failed by their parents and striving to avoid making the same mistakes. Their filmmaking is deceptively nondescript in its style – and Young Mothers lacks the urgent narrative drive and tension of their prior work – but the unaffected performances they draw from the young cast are so real, and the film had me in tears on multiple occasions.

9 – Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier)

I love the way Joachim Trier so swiftly gives us an understanding of these characters, the house they live in, and their shared history at the start of Sentimental Value. There is little that’s new in the themes that he is exploring here – strained familial relationships, the artist as a bad parent, attempts to find catharsis and healing through art – but it’s the execution of these notions that elevates everything. He and his co-writer Eskil Vogt create characters who feel authentic and nuanced, and each of the interactions between these individuals is superbly written and performed. It would have been easy for Trier to focus attention on the family’s drama and have the supporting role of a American actress act as some kind of comic relief, a cheap spoofing of Hollywood stardom, but Elle Fanning’s performance as Rachel, an earnest actress aware she’s out of her depth, is one that I found extremely touching. Trier draws first-rate performances from every member of his cast, and his style feels so intuitive and effortless at times. This is a wonderfully enjoyable and satisfying film.

8 – Afternoons of Solitude (Albert Serra)

After the screening of Afternoons of Solitude that I attended, Albert Serra took part in a Q&A (being a Serra Q&A, it was more of an extended monologue) where he discussed the way they stitched microphones into the matadors’ outfits for this documentary. But where, I wondered? When you see one of these matadors being hoisted and squeezed into his clothes by his team of helpers, there barely appears to be enough room for him. These backstage glimpses into the matadors’ world are fascinating and often comical (they resemble women from period dramas, being forced into corsets ahead of a ball, which rather undermines all the macho posturing) while the footage that Serra captures in the arena is simultaneously engrossing and repulsive. Serra doesn’t consider the ethics of this sport, he simply presents it to us and allows the matadors’ own words to highlight what ridiculous figures they are, with their endless self-aggrandising talk of their “big balls” and how courageous they are for slaying an animal already weakened by multiple blows. Afternoons of Solitude is a tough film to watch, but it's masterfully filmed and edited.

7 – Blue Heron (Sophy Romvari)

This is by far the best debut film I saw in 2025. I haven’t seen any of the short films that Sophy Romvari has made prior to this, but I’ll be seeking them out now as she shows incredible filmmaking instincts in this sensitively crafted feature. Blue Heron is clearly a deeply personal work, telling the story of a family dealing with their eldest son’s increasingly dangerous and unpredictable behaviour, and the first half of the film is seen from the perspective of this teenager’s eight-year-old sister. I was so completely drawn into this drama, I was thrown off balance a little by the sudden narrative switch that Romvari makes halfway through the picture, shifting the perspective to the now-adult Sasha, a documentary filmmaker, but this second half of the film finds fresh and equally intriguing ways of exploring these painful memories. Blue Heron is a beautifully directed film, with some astonishingly imaginative and expressive camerawork, and Romvari gradually adds layers of meaning and emotion into its carefully constructed framework, until it culminates in a place that is very moving and cathartic.

6 – It Was Just an Accident (Jafar Panahi)

Jafar Panahi’s body of work over the past 15 years has been one of the wonders of modern cinema. Having been arrested and received a twenty-year ban from making movies in 2010, he has responded with boundless determination, wit and imagination, producing a series of formally inventive and self-reflexive works. Panahi has tended to star in these films, but with It Was Just an Accident he stays behind the camera and shows his virtuoso directorial skills in crafting a riveting and morally complex thriller. A group of ex-prisoners discover the whereabouts of the jailer who used to torture them and they plot revenge, but do they have the right to take justice into their own hands? Can they really do this to a man who has a young family? Do they even have the right man? Panahi creates a scenario dripping with ambiguity and dread, but he also laces it with a tone of dry, dark humour. As is usually the case with Panahi, It Was Just an Accident was filmed in secret, but it doesn’t feel like a film shot on the fly. The shots are beautifully composed – the use of a car’s red lights in the finale is particularly potent – and the haunting ending is hard to shake.

5 – The Love That Remains (Hlynur Pálmason)

After making the magnificent period piece Godland, my favourite film of 2022, Hlynur Pálmason has returned with something more intimate and contemporary in The Love That Remains. What the two films have in common is a fascination with the capturing the passage of time; The Love That Remains was filmed across the span of a year, allowing us to see the seasons change during the film. A quick summary of this film would describe it as charting a year in the life of a family as the parents go through a separation, but while most filmmakers would make that split the dramatic thrust of the narrative, here it's simply something that is happening, and it's given no more or less importance that the mother’s artworks, the father’s work on a trawler, or the children’s construction of a model for target practice. This is a film assembled from fleeting moments – all caught in vibrant 35mm images – and everything about it feels incredibly lived-in, organic and real, but Pálmason is always ready to surprise us with unexpected comic interludes and surreal touches. It’s another wonderful and entirely fresh film from someone who is fast becoming one of my favourite working directors.

4 – Magellan (Lav Diaz)

Those Lav Diaz fans who feel short-changed by the fact that Magellan is a mere 160 minutes long may be heartened to hear the rumours that the director has an eight-hour version that he is currently tinkering with. In the meantime, this released version will certainly suffice as a masterful and completely involving portrait of the 16th century Portuguese explorer. The film captivates from its opening frame, in which an indigenous woman is suddenly startled and stares directly at the audience, aware of being watched by outsiders. Diaz depicts the invasive force of colonialism through a series of expeditions across two decades; towards the start of the film, we see the aftermath of a conquest, with bloodied bodies strewn across a beach, and the later scene in which Magellan’s men gather and destroy the villagers’ religious icons before making them worship the cross is one of the year’s most indelible sequences. Diaz has a recognisable star for the first time in Gael García Bernal, but there’s not a performance that feels out of place, and there’s no moment when you don’t feel fully transported to this time and place. The compositions created by Diaz and Artur Tort (who also shot Afternoons of Solitude this year) are endlessly striking. It’s a stunning film. 

3 – The Testament of Ann Lee (Mona Fastvold)

The team behind The Brutalist returns with another film about an immigrant arriving in America and trying to build something that lasts. I found The Testament of Ann Lee to be equally impressive and even more accomplished. The story of Ann Lee, who started the Shaker religious movement in England in the eighteenth century before taking it to the US, is a fascinating one, and Fastvold’s telling of it is bold and imaginative. Amanda Seyfried plays her with a fierce intensity – you completely believe in her religious fervour – but she also shows us how Ann’s development of faith and her renouncing of sex was rooted in the unbearable trauma of birthing and losing four children. Everything about The Testament of Ann Lee feels entirely so vivid and alive. It’s such a stunning recreation of this period, and the musical numbers – developed by Daniel Blumberg from traditional Shaker hymns – that are woven into the fabric of the film are completely rapturous. The Testament of Ann Lee is an astonishing, singular vision, and I felt like my whole body was vibrating when I emerged from the cinema after seeing its projected from 70mm. 

2 – Measures for a Funeral (Sofia Bohdanowicz)

Sofia Bohdanowicz and actress Deragh Campbell have collaborated on a series of films over the past decade featuring the character Audrey Benac. Measures for a Funeral is the climactic film in that cycle, and it’s their most ambitious and accomplished film to date, shooting in widescreen and telling a story that stretches across Canada and Europe. The film has elements of documentary and essay film as it reflects Bohdanowicz’s own investigation into the early 20th century violinist Kathleen Parlow, and her attempt to stage a production of Opus 28, a work written for her that was never performed, but she turns these real-life elements of research and inquiry into a compelling and inventive drama. Campbell is wonderful as the prickly, troubled protagonist, following the thread of this investigation in part as a means of avoiding dealing with her grief over her dying mother. The piece of music that Measures for a Funeral centres on is frequently described as a ‘minor’ work, but when we see it finally being performed in the film’s final stretch, having seen what went into making this moment a reality, it becomes something spine-tingling and transcendent. 

1 - One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson)

How thrilling it is to see Paul Thomas Anderson working on this scale, and working with such an exhilarating sense of freedom. One Battle After Another is unquestionably his most mainstream-friendly and crowd-pleasing film to date, but he hasn’t jettisoned any of his idiosyncrasies in the process. The film has an unusual, undulating rhythm, a willingness to fill out the frame with eccentric supporting characters, and a deep love of goofy humour. This is by some distance the funniest film of the year, but it’s also the most dynamic and exciting, and I’m staggered by Anderson’s control of pacing, which makes this 162-minute movie zip by even as he introduces languid stretches and digressions. One Battle After Another felt like a film alive to the current moment as soon as it was released, but at its core Anderson is moved by the story of a father desperately trying to protect his daughter, and Leonardo DiCaprio’s comical/tender performance is a career high from one of our greatest actors. I loved every twitch and grimace in Sean Pen’s blissfully funny performance; I loved the sense of community embodied by Benicio del Toro’s casually brilliant turn; I loved Teyana Taylor’s incredible screen presence, which reverberates through the movie long after she has left. Above all else, I loved seeing a filmmaker in full command of his material, giving us a feast of a movie that is constantly changing shape and springing surprises in a way that few filmmakers would even dream of. One Battle After Another was also the last film I watched in 2025, as I revisited it on a splendid 70mm print this week, and like most of Anderson’s films, it only improves on multiple viewings; this time, I found it even funnier and more moving than I did the first time. I have a feeling I’ll be re-watching this for many years to come.

My Cinema Discoveries of 2025

At this time last year, I lamented the fact that I hadn't seen as many films in cinemas as I had in previous years. For various reasons, I made even fewer cinematic discoveries in 2025. I had a lot on my plate this year and I even failed to make my usual trip to Bologna in the summer, which is always a source of rich great celluloid revelations. Hopefully I’ll get the opportunity to get back there in the summer of 2026, but who knows. Life doesn't appear to be getting easier or less busy anytime soon. Anyway, I saw 97 older films in cinemas this year, 76 of which were on 35mm, with nine on 16mm and one on 70mm. 63 of these screenings were first time viewings, and some of the most interesting and enjoyable are listed below.

40 – Sun Valley Serenade (H. Bruce Humberstone, 1941) – BFI Southbank, 35mm

This film was screened as part of a Dorothy Dandridge season, but I’d forgotten she was supposed to be in the film by the time she finally showed up almost an hour in. Dandridge and the Nicholas Brothers appear out of nowhere to perform Chattanooga Choo Choo and then they promptly disappear. It’s a short cameo, but undoubtedly a highlight of this musical (the song was nominated for an Oscar), which is primarily a vehicle for Sonja Henie, who is much more comfortable on the ice than as a romantic lead. Henie plays a wartime refugee who immediately falls in love with John Payne, but the pair have no chemistry, and her single-minded pursuit of this apparently uninterested man comes off as psychotic rather than endearing. Milton Berle has a few amusing one-liners but his shtick wears thin. The whole film is elevated by the beautiful climactic number, which features Henie and a number of skaters performing on a reflective black ice rink.

39 – The Toll of the Sea (Chester M. Franklin, 1922) – BFI Southbank, 35mm

This film is notable for a couple of reasons. For one thing, it marked the first leading role of 17 year-old Anna May Wong’s career. She plays Lotus Flower, who rescues an unconscious American sailor from the sea, falls in love with him, and then gives birth to his baby after he leaves for home, leading to some very awkward scenes when he returns years later with his American bride. Frances Marion’s simple script was loosely inspired by Madame Butterfly. The existing prints run for less than an hour and the final reel is missing, so to compensate for that loss, footage of the sea was filmed in the 1980s and spliced onto the end of the print, an approach that works quite well. The other reason The Toll of the Sea is is significant is that it is the earliest surviving film shot in the two-color Technicolor process, which gives its images a unique and quite captivating hue that I enjoyed discovering on 35mm.
 
38 – Tom Thumb (George Pal, 1958) – BFI Southbank, 35mm

This lively adaptation of the Brothers Grimm fairytale cleverly creates the impression that Russ Tamblyn is small enough to fit in the palm of one’s hand, although the most impressive effect of all might be Tamblyn’s athleticism, which is shown off impressively in the sequence where Tom dances with all of the toys. Those toys are brought to life by the stop-motion work of director George Pal, who developed his technique through his popular Puppetoons series in the 1940s, and the craftsmanship is first-rate all over this picture, from Georges Périnal’s cinematography to Tom Howard’s Oscar-winning visual effects. Pal once dreamed of Laurel and Hardy playing the villains in this long-cherished project, but Terry-Thomas and Peter Sellers do a good job as a pair of bungling and bickering crooks.
 
37 – Rich and Famous (George Cukor, 1981) – BFI Southbank, 35mm

Pauline Kael caused some outrage with her review of this film when she suggested that Jacqueline Bisset's seduction by a young man played “more like homosexual fantasy.” Some accused Kael of trying to out the closeted director, but having seen Rich and Famous, I can see what she was getting at. There’s a lot about this movie that feels ridiculous and doesn’t quite make sense, but it’s largely buoyed along by the enjoyable performances from Bisset and Candice Bergen as college roommates whose lives take wildly divergent paths over the next two decades when one becomes a critically acclaimed author and the other a wealthy writer of trashy romance novels. It’s a glossy soap opera and there are stretches where I lost interest, but it has enough humour and elegance to make it worthwhile. As a sidenote, George Cukor’s last film was Meg Ryan’s first film, which feels like a weird collision of two very different eras.

36 – The Romantic Age (Edmond T. Gréville, 1949) – BFI Southbank, 35mm

Edmond T. Gréville’s Brief Ecstasy was one of my favourite discoveries of 2024, so I jumped at the opportunity to catch another Gréville picture this year. This film also goes by the title Naughty Arlette, as Arlette (played by Mai Zetterling) is the consistently disruptive and flirtatious French schoolgirl whose eyes light up hungrily when Hugh Williams becomes the new art teacher at her all-girls’ school. She becomes determined to seduce him, and he doesn’t exactly put up a great deal of resistance for all his outward show of annoyance with her. This central relationship puts the film into tricky territory but everything is largely played for laughs, and Arlette gets her comeuppance with a comical spanking. Perhaps it's not a great movie, but further proof that Gréville had the knack for making films with a lively spirit and imaginative use of space.

35 – The Naked Truth (Mario Zampi, 1957) – BFI Southbank, 35mm

The Naked Truth stars Dennis Price as a muckraking journalist who digs up dirt to blackmail public figures, so four of his victims concoct plots to murder him. This is a solid comic premise that throws up a couple of amusing set-pieces, particularly as the various independent plotters have a habit of getting in each other’s way; I especially enjoyed watching Peggy Mount and Joan Sims attempt to dispose of a corpse, only to discover that they had drugged the wrong person.  Terry-Thomas is very funny as the luckless Lord Mayley, who keeps inadvertently becoming the victim of others’ plans, while Peter Sellers takes the opportunity to try on a variety of accents and disguises, at one point pretending to be an Irishman to buy explosives in a pub.
 
34 – El Cid (Anthony Mann, 1962) – BFI Southbank, 35mm

I’d seen chunks of El Cid when I was a child and it was on TV for what seemed to be the whole of Sunday afternoon, but I had never been able to sit through it. In truth, I got a little fidgety during this screening, although the big screen is certainly the only way to appreciate the awesome scale of this film. Charlton Heston is not exactly the most convincing choice to portray the 11th century Spanish hero, and I found the narrative a little tiresome to follow, with its murky character motivations and longwinded conversations. What I did respond to was Mann’s direction. He stages some magnificent scenes utilising the full resources of this gargantuan production and he creates a number of arresting frames, in one case using a split-diopter to striking effect. Mann also fully understand the power a Sophia Loren close-up can bring to a picture. El Cid can be a bit of a slog but it does have a very strong ending.
 
33 – White Squall (Ridley Scott, 1996) – BFI Southbank, 35mm

Along with 1492: Conquest of Paradise and G.I. Jane, this is one of the three underwhelming films Scott made after Thelma and Louise, before the success of Gladiator put him back on top. It’s easy to see why White Squall has slipped into relative obscurity. The devastating storm that imperils the ship and gives the film its title doesn’t occur until the third act, and prior to that we have to struggle through a rather flimsy coming-of-age tale that feels like it’s striving to be a seafaring Dead Poets Society – it even has a “Captain My Captain” finale – but the storytelling is disjointed and the characterisation is weak, with even Jeff Bridges struggling to bring much dimension to his role as the ship’s captain. However, when the storm does hit, it’s a genuinely impressive and terrifying spectacle, and a dazzling display of practical filmmaking on a grand scale. White Squall shimmered beautifully on this pristine 35mm print and it made me yearn for the days when Scott’s films were so polished and carefully lit, rather than the flat multi-camera digital setup he favours these days.
 
32 – The Lost Man (Robert Alan Aurthur, 1969) – BFI Southbank, 35mm

Before watching The Lost Man, I didn’t know that this was a loose adaptation of Odd Man Out, but the connection started to become clear once Sidney Poitier had been wounded in a heist and had to seek refuge from the police. This is an interesting role for Poitier, playing an impassive militant crook who has planned this robbery for the purpose of funnelling money towards the black revolutionary movement, he strikes a much tougher and more complex figure than he had been in most of his films to date. The Lost Man isn’t directed with enough flair or tension to grip all the way to the finish line, but it does have its virtues. The heist itself is very well staged, and the film possesses a strong sense of location, with the score from Quincy Jones adding a good deal of atmosphere. 
 
31 – The Comedians (Peter Glenville, 1967) – BFI Southbank, 35mm

Although it has a poor critical reputation, I enjoyed this Graham Greene adaptation, which places a series of interpersonal conflicts against the backdrop of Papa Doc’s brutal regime in Haiti. The film does a decent job of showing the corruption and atrocities that occurred under that regime in a frank manner, and it’s a pleasure to watch this cast of screen legends at work. Roscoe Lee Browne, Paul Ford, Lillian Gish, James Earl Jones and Peter Ustinov are all excellent in their supporting roles, and while the Burton and Taylor scenes don’t create much of a spark, the scenes that Burton shares with Alec Guinness are superb. In particular, there’s one quiet conversation they share in a graveyard towards the end that’s magnificently acted. The Comedians could have perhaps done with a slightly more exciting director, but it’s a better film than its reputation suggests.  
 
30 – The Tango Lesson (Sally Potter, 1997) – BFI Southbank, 35mm

In this film, the two leads are played by first-time actors playing versions of themselves. Director Sally Potter is the filmmaker developing a new project in Paris while her London home is being renovated. There, she meets dancer Pablo Verón, with whom she starts taking tango lessons and develops a romantic relationship. In truth, the performances given by these inexperienced actors are the film’s weakest element, and the drama surrounding their romance unfolds in a series of scenes that are often flat and cheesy. However, Potter makes the most of the dance numbers, staging a number of beautiful sequences with the help of the great Robby Müller. He shoots most of the movie in lustrous black-and-white, which is often spellbinding, particularly in these dance on the banks of the Seine with the lights of the city in the background, and he also gives the film an occasional jolt of vibrant colour with the imagined scenes from Potter’s unmade film. A fun detail from the end credits: Müller's apprentice on this film was a young man named Hoyte van Hoytema.

 
29 – The Squeeze (Michael Apted, 1977) – Cinema Museum, 35mm

If I was casting the lead detective role in a 1970s British film, Stacy Keach would not have been the first name on my list of possibilities, but he is surprisingly effective as the shambling, drunken cop Jim Nabors, who needs to sober up quickly when his ex-wife is abducted and held for ransom. ‘Surprisingly effective’ is a term we could use for Freddie Starr too, an unexpected choice as Keach’s loyal buddy who provides a very good supporting performance. The Squeeze is an exceptionally seedy and bleak affair, immersing us in a series of grubby hideouts and gloomy pubs, although some its street scenes have a vivid sense of life, especially when shooting around Notting Hill. The film’s ugliest scene forces Carol White to perform a horribly protracted striptease for her captors, but the film also gives us far more Stacy Keach's naked body than you may be expecting.
 
28 – Someone to Love (Henry Jaglom, 1987) – ICA, 35mm

Someone to Love is notable for marking the last screen appearance of Orson Welles, who appears right at the end of the film, with Henry Jaglom clearly shooting fifteen minutes’ worth of the great man as he sat in a theatre and then rather awkwardly splicing it into the climax of his feature. The rest of the film is a loose, improvised affair in which Jaglom invites a large group of friends to an abandoned theatre that’s about to be torn down, and subjects them to interviews about their loves lives and the difficulty involved in finding and sustaining a relationship. These conversations are often thoughtful, probing, poignant and funny, and Someone to Love is always engaging viewing as it rambles along, before Orson pops up at the end to offer his thoughts on men, women and love in a changing society.
 
27 – The Decks Ran Red (Andrew L. Stone, 1958) – BFI Southbank, 35mm

A black-and-white film, although the title appears in a dripping red font, suggesting much bloodshed ahead. Inspired by a real 1905 incident, The Decks Ran Red is set on a ramshackle freighter where a couple of sailors (Broderick Crawford and Stuart Whitman) concoct a plot to scuttle the engines and murder everyone on board before submitting an insurance claim of a million dollars on the stricken ship. Having just been flown in to replace the previous captain, who died in mysterious circumstances, James Mason stands in their way, and the stage is set for a very involving thriller. Stone uses the layout of the ship intelligently to ramp up the cat-and-mouse tension – in some ways, this feels like a forerunner of Die Hard or Under Siege – but what’s most memorable about The Decks Ran Red is the complete absence of music. Instead we just get the sound of the ship and the sea as backdrop to the action, and it’s extremely effective.
 
26 – Hard to Handle (Mervyn LeRoy, 1933) – BFI Southbank, 35mm

James Cagney is in his element as the fast-talking publicity hound Lefty Merrill, who is always chasing the next big score. The film opens at a dance marathon where Lefty is anticipating a big payday, but his partner flees with the prize money, leaving him with heavy debts to pay. The big opportunity he spies is in the grapefruit racket, which is an amusing irony, as that was the fruit he shoved into Mae Clarke's face in The Public Enemy two years previously. Hard to Handle is a sprightly pre-Code comedy driven by a terrifically dynamic Cagney and a scene-stealing Ruth Donnelly as his prospective mother-in-law, but it also works as a sharp portrait of widespread Depression-era desperation and those who were quick to exploit it.
 
25 – Now Barabbas Was a Robber (Gordon Parry, 1949) – BFI Southbank, 35mm

An early screen appearance from Richard Burton is the main draw of this low-key British drama, but Burton – saddled with a limited character and a shaky Irish accent – is actually one of the least compelling characters on show. Adapted from William Douglas Home’s stage play, Gordon Parry’s film looks at prison life from a variety of perspectives. These men are serving time for a variety of crimes – which we glimpse in flashbacks – and some of them have years left to run while others can see freedom coming into view, but the most compelling characterisation belongs to Richard Greene as a man waiting for execution and forming a bond with the guards and chaplain watching over him. The film has a clear point of view on the inhumanity of capital punishment, but Now Barabbas Was a Robber is not strident or polemical. It’s an empathetic, character-driven piece, populated by a collection of excellent British character actors.
 
24 – The Frontier Experience / The Boy Who Liked Deer (Barbara Loden, 1975) – BFI Southbank, Digital/16mm

For many years, Barbara Loden has been discussed as the director of a single film, 1970’s terrific Wanda, but that’s not the whole story. These two shorts were made as educational films for the Learning Corporation of America, and they are both made with great care and intelligence. Written by Joan Micklin Silver, The Frontier Experience tells the story of a pioneer family living through their first year in Kansas in 1869, with Loden taking the lead role as the mother who has to keep the family together during a harsh winter. Loden’s direction is simple but potent, expressing the loneliness and desolation of this family’s surroundings. Her other short The Boy Who Liked Deer packs a real punch. It’s the story of a teenage tearaway who thinks nothing of the consequences of his behaviour, until he sees the impact that his vandalism has on both his teacher and his beloved deer. It’s a smartly made and very moving piece of work.
 
23 – Movie Movie (Stanley Donen, 1978) – BFI Southbank, 35mm

It’s not hard to see why Movie Movie was a flop in 1978. Making a picture celebrating decades-old film styles was always going to be a risking proposition in the 1970s, but doing so after Star Wars had changed the whole landscape killed any chances of Movie Movie finding an appreciative audience stone dead. What’s most interesting about Movie Movie is the way it predates Airplane with its absurdist spoof humour; Donen gleefully sends up every cliché of the boxing melodramas and the Busby Berkeley-style musicals of the 1930s. Dynamite Hands and Baxter's Beauties of 1933 are presented as a double-feature (with a fake trailer for a film called Zero Hour in between), and most of the same actors appear in both films, with George C. Scott having a grand old time as boxing trainer Gloves Molloy and dying impresario Spats Baxter. The gags come thick and fast but the actors play it dead straight, and the craftmanship on show in both films is pretty dazzling, with Donen flexing some of those old musical muscles in the second feature, which boasts a show-stopping appearance from Ann Reinking.
 
22 – Latino (Haskell Wexler, 1985) – ICA, 35mm

How remarkable it is that LucasFilm only produced two movies in 1985, and they were Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters Haskell Wexler’s Latino. Having made the documentary Target Nicaragua: Inside a Secret War in 1983, Wexler revisited Nicaragua for a dramatic feature that again explores America’s role in the Contras' war against the Sandinistas, with US Green Beret Eddie Guerrero (played by Robert Beltran) slowly starting to question his orders as he sees what is happening on the ground. The film is dramatically a little thin and it could use a more compelling screen presence than Beltran in the lead, but Wexler’s determination to places us in the centre of events and capture a real sense of authenticity onscreen is impressive. Latino is an admirably angry and potent piece of filmmaking.
 
21 – A Place to Go (Basil Dearden, 1963) – BFI Southbank, 35mm

I spent part of this year thinking about the work of Basil Dearden as I contributed an essay on him to the book Great Expectations: British Postwar Cinema 1945-1963. One film that fell outside the purview of that piece was A Place to Go, but it’s another reminder of the vital perspective that this still-underrated director always brought to his films. A Place to Go is a drama about a family living in East London in the early 60s, and the narrative is concerned with young wide boy Mike Sarne falling in with a criminal element, but Dearden’s real interest clearly lies in the social changes that were occurring in this area at the time. This was the era of slum clearances, with families being forced out of the dilapidated homes they had lived in for years and being moved into brand-new high-rise flats, and Dearden captures the poignancy of this progress, particularly through a tender performance from Doris Hare as the mother crestfallen to leave her home of thirty years. A Place to Go was shot on location, and it’s an invaluable snapshot of how the streets I'm so familiar with once looked.
 
20 – The 16mm Films of Harry Hill (Harry Hill, David Leister, Peter Orton, 1996-1999) – BFI Southbank, 16mm

Over the course of three years, Harry Hill made these films in his garden with his friends and family serving as the cast. They were mainly used as filler for the intermissions as his live shows but they have rarely been seen since, so it was a treat to discover them at this special screening. I particularly liked The Boy with the Big Face, in which a boy is slapped by a lollipop lady’s sign and his resultant massive round head makes him the target of mockery from his peers. Another highlight is Jaws 5, in which Harry finds the shark from Spielberg’s Jaws washed up on the beach and sends him on a stand-up tour of English clubs in an attempt to revive his career, while Spielberg himself is on the hunt in a shark detector van. As you’d expect from Hill, these shorts are silly, slapdash and frequently hilarious.
 
19 – Park Lanes (Kevin Jerome Everson, 2015) – Barbican, Digital

One Sunday this past February I spent the day watching people work. Park Lanes is a documentary filmed in a Virginia factory where bowling lanes are constructed and assembled, and it has been made to reflect the structure of a working day. The film runs for eight hours, beginning with workers arriving at the factory, observing their various tasks, watching them take their lunch break, and then back to work before they head home at the end of the day. Why would anyone watch this, you ask? Well, it’s pretty absorbing viewing. Once I got into the film’s rhythms, I found it to be transfixing, and aside from a few minutes when I nipped out to grab another coffee and use the toilet, I was happy to sit there for the whole duration. Park Lanes allows us to see every step that goes into the making of a bowling lane, and you come away with a real respect for the people who do this intricate work every day.
 
18 – Landscape in the Mist (Theo Angelopoulos, 1988) – ICA, Digital

After waiting years for the opportunity to see the work of Theo Angelopoulos on the big screen, I frustratingly couldn’t make it to as many of the ICA’s retrospective screenings as I wanted to, and I struggled to connect with some of the films I did see. The Travelling Players is brilliantly crafted, although its dense interweaving of Greek history left me feeling confounded for much of it. Landscape in the Mist is the one that really clicked with me. The story is simple, following two children as they travel to Germany to seek the father they have never met, encountering both kindness and cruelty from adults along the way. As ever, Angelopoulos composes magnificent long takes, but there’s an emotional reach to this film that I didn’t get from many of his others, particularly in the unforgettable ending.
 
17 – Improper Conduct (Néstor Almendros and Orlando Jiménez Leal, 1984) – ICA, 16mm

A curious thing happened when I bought my ticket for a film called Improper Conduct at the ICA. The film advertised was a 1994 drama about sexual harassment in the workplace, but when the screening started it quickly transpired that we were instead watching a documentary about Fidel Castro’s persecution of intellectuals, dissidents and homosexuals. The film consists of interviews with those who fled Castro’s regime and are now residing in the US or Europe, and their testimonies of the repression, fear and torture that they experienced in Cuba carry a powerful emotional charge. It’s an exceptional and completely enthralling documentary, and it's was a particularly revelatory discovery considering I had no idea of this film’s existence before the screening started.
 
16 – The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Vincente Minnelli, 1962) – BFI Southbank, 35mm

For the character of a Latino ladies’ man – a role once played by Rudolf Valentino – Vincente Minnelli wanted Alain Delon, which makes sense. MGM wanted Glenn Ford, which makes much less sense. The miscasting of the the stolid 46 year-old Ford as an avowedly neutral playboy who faces a crisis of conscience as war rages around him is just one of the missteps that this drama makes. Ford stars alongside Paul Henreid and Ingrid Thulin (looking unhappy, and dubbed by Angela Lansbury), but the one actor who really makes an impression is Lee J. Cobb, who rants and raves forebodingly and introduces the concept of the four horsemen before promptly dying in the prologue. Stuck with a story and a leading man he didn’t care for, the director said he simply focused on making the film as visually stunning as possible, and every scene is shot with astonishing flair and vibrancy, with Minnelli's masterful blocking of crowd scenes in particular standing out. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse was a notorious critical and commercial flop in 1962, but it was a sensational experience to discover it on this gorgeous 35mm print.
 
15 – Way Down East (DW Griffith, 1920) – BFI Southbank, 35mm

Way Down East runs for almost two and a half hours, and in truth, there’s a solid twenty minutes of mugging from one-note supporting characters that I could have easily done without, but whenever Griffith ignores the comic relief and focuses on his star Lilian Gish, the film is magnificent. In this moralistic melodrama, Gish plays the poor girl from the country who travels to the home of a rich relation in search of support, winds up being tricked into a sham marriage and impregnated by a dastardly cad, and is subsequently left to fend for herself through one tragedy after another. The film is full of floridly overwritten title cards, but one of the most simple leads into the film’s climax: "Then the storm." Watching Gish clamber about on ice floes in sub-zero temperatures is a incredible way for this film to end, especially when you read about the gruelling experiences she had doing it for real.
 
14 – Pirosmani (Giorgi Shengelaia, 1969) – BFI Southbank, 35mm

Niko Pirosmani was a Georgian painter whose work was only celebrated after his death. While he was alive, he worked mundane jobs and painted scenes from everyday Georgian life, often trading his artwork for food and board, which is why they frequently decorated taverns. In Giorgi Shengelaia’s Pirosmani, which unfolds in a series of elliptical, understated scenes, we see how this man’s sole purpose was to live and paint. He had no instinct for money, and in fact his attempt at running a grocery store unravels in a comical fashion because he keeps giving food away to those who need it. Pirosmani is modestly scaled and presented in a straightforward manner, and it is a moving celebration of a man went unrecognised in his own time but is now widely celebrated as one of his nation’s greatest artists. My favourite scene comes towards the end, when he is locked in a room and told not to leave until he has finished a painting; the villagers continue with their celebration, completely forgetting about him, and when they finally unlock the door they find he has created something astonishing.
 
13 – Time of the Heathen (Peter Kass, 1961) – Close-Up, Digital

For much of the first hour of this film I was intrigued but it didn’t seem to be doing anything I hadn’t seen plenty of times before. It’s the story of a drifter named Gaunt (John Heffernan) who flees into the forest having been falsely accused of a rape that he actually witnessed, and when he runs he takes the woman’s mute son with him. Time of the Heathen was obviously shot on an extremely low budget, and there are limitations in the filmmaking and acting that are familiar from films put together on a shoestring, but Peter Kass has an extraordinary ace up his sleeve. An opening title card tells us that the story is taking place four years after Hiroshima, but I had forgotten that by the time Kass staged the hallucinatory and nightmarish sequence of wartime horror that gives the final third of the film an apocalyptic mood. Far from being something that felt familiar; by the end, I was convinced that I had never seen anything quite like The Time of the Heathen. 
 
12 – On Approval (Clive Brook, 1944) – BFI Southbank, 35mm

This was the only film ever directed by the actor Clive Brook. After watching On Approval – which Lindsay Anderson called “The funniest British comedy ever made” – his failure to progress in this field feels like a terrible loss. It’s a battle of the sexes comedy with two mismatched couples forced to spend a week together in Scotland, and the actors take great pleasure in delivering the script’s rapid-fire bitchy dialogue: "You needn't try to lock your door, Maria. Only the rain will want to come in." The material is already very funny, but what really elevates the film above the standard romantic comedy fare is Brook’s inventive filmmaking. He sets the tone at the start of the picture with a ridiculous newsreel prologue, and there is so much fun to be had in his framing, pacing and visual gags. Quite why Brook never again stepped behind the camera, or even acted in movies again for almost two decades, is beyond me.
 
11 – Unfinished Business (Gregory La Cava, 1941) – BFI Southbank, 35mm

Another gem from Gregory La Cava, who surely stands as one of the most under-appreciated directors of his era. This is a dazzling film in both its formal elegance and how strikingly mature and progressive it is in the way it navigates the complexities of doomed relationships. Irene Dunne plays Nancy, who is seduced and then abandoned by Preston Foster, for whom she maintains an unrequited love, and then impulsively marries his drunken brother Robert Montgomery. As is so often the case with La Cava – who favoured a loose, improvisational style – the performances feel alive and the characters bounce off each other with a thrilling ease. The story takes a number of surprising and dramatic turns, and there are marvellous moments scattered throughout the picture. My favourite directorial touch occurs during a party, where news of a scandal is whispered across the room, the camera following the thread of this tale as it spreads from one person to another like a virus.
 
10 – Strongroom (Vernon Sewell, 1962) – BFI Southbank,  35mm

This low-budget British drama begins with a simple heist plotted for a Saturday morning, just before a bank closes its doors ahead of the bank holiday weekend. Of course, it all goes awry, but the way things go cataclysmically wrong is handled perfectly by director Sewell. He creates a situation where the criminals are desperate to get back into the bank but are prevented from doing so, and where a couple of the bank’s employees are trapped in the vault, trying to maintain their rapidly diminishing air supply, and over the course of eighty taut minutes he squeezes maximum tension out of this scenario. There are terrific character turns all the way down the cast, but Colin Gordon and Ann Lynn are particularly good as the bank manager and his secretary, who have always had a cold, formal relationship, but find a different connection in these grave circumstances. It’s a riveting thriller, with a gut-punch of an ending.
 
9 – The Liberation of LB Jones (William Wyler, 1970) – BFI Southbank, 35mm

The great William Wyler ended his career with this film, and I’m always a little anxious about  seeing one of the masters of Golden Age Hollywood trying to engage with the gritty realities of the New Hollywood era. His adaptation of Jesse Hill Ford’s 1965 novel The Liberation of Lord Byron Jones tackles racism in Tennessee, with Roscoe Lee Browne starring as the funeral director who seeks a divorce from his wife after accusing of having an affair with a white police officer, an action that has horrific consequences as the cop tries to cover up this scandal. A brilliant Lee J. Cobb and Lee Majors plays the bigoted local lawyer and his idealistic nephew respectively, while Yaphet Kotto is an ex-con out for revenge. Wyler takes a forthright, clear-eyed view of this material, and The Liberation of LB Jones is one of the most uncompromising films about race from this era, with some of the violent acts still carrying a shocking power.
 
8 – Hurlevent (Jacques Rivette, 1985) – ICA, 35mm

Jacques Rivette’s work has seen a notable increase in visibility in recent years thanks to a number of restorations – I now have blu-rays of the long unavailable Out 1 and L'Amour fou sitting on my shelf, which is something I scarcely could have imagined just over a decade ago. One of the most obscure works still in need of rediscovery is Hurlevent. For this screening the ICA imported the only 35mm print they could find, and presented it with live subtitles. It’s a little surprising that this film is so little-known, because it’s certainly one of his shorter and most accessible films, and in fact it is an adaptation of Wuthering Heights. Rivette focuses on the first half of the book and takes a stripped down approach to the aesthetic style, but he has such a keen sense of the shifting dynamics between these characters, and his incorporation of some brilliantly crafted dream sequences is incredibly powerful. One hopes this film receives the same treatment as the rest of Rivette’s oeuvre soon. It deserves to be much more widely seen and acclaimed.
 
7 – Westward the Women (William Wellman, 1951) – BFI Southbank, 35mm

Robert Taylor stars as the man tasked with guiding 100 women from Chicago across unforgiving terrain to California, where they are promised as brides to the men who have settled there. This premise may seem to give the women little agency in their own affairs, but Wellman’s film finds ways to enrich their characters and push them beyond the boundaries of what might be expected of a traditional woman’s role in a 1950s western. This is a tough and gripping film and at times the characters’ journey appears to be a hopeless one. We lose a number of them along the way and Wellman ensures we feel the impact of their loss, while the ones that finally make it to their new lives in California have been forever changed by their odyssey. Wellman stages some fine action set-pieces – including an attempt to get the wagons down a rocky ridge that’s reminiscent of The Wages of Fear – and his decision to forbid cinematographer William Mellor from extensive use of filters emphasises the harshness of the barren wilderness they are wandering through.
 
6 – Last Summer (Frank Perry, 1969) – BFI Southbank, 35mm

I’ve been a fan of everything I have seen directed by Frank Perry, but I was wondering when I would ever get the opportunity to see Last Summer, a film that appears to have slipped out of circulation entirely. So while many people were clamouring to see the original print of Star Wars at this year’s Film on Film festival, I was overjoyed to see Last Summer in the programme, being screened from one of the few 35mm prints that still exists. There’s a distinct end-of-the-sixties vibe to this film, as a group of teenagers, free of adult supervision, spend their summer days enjoying their freedom and trying to get laid. The two boys (Richard Thomas and Bruce Davison) are easily controlled by the confident and manipulative Sandy (Barbara Hershey), and they form a tight-knit trio, which is thrown off by the arrival of the awkward outsider Rhoda (Catherine Burns). The film’s carefree tone gradually darkens, leading to a very sad ending. The performances are strong, but the film is stolen by the Academy Award-nominated Burns, whose monologue had the entire BFI audience holding its breath.
 
5 – Ludwig (Luchino Visconti, 1973) – BFI Southbank, 35mm

The BFI’s Luchino Visconti retrospective was named Decadence and Decay, and that’s an apt way to sum up this epic film. Ludwig is a portrait of Ludwig II of Bavaria, who is better known by the sobriquet The Mad King. In Visconti’s depiction, he doesn’t come across as entirely mad, at least not initially, just a man who has been thrust into a role he is ill-equipped for and uninterested in. Ludwig would rather build castles and fund his favourite artists (notably Richard Wagner) than deal with affairs of state. Seen in its full 237-minute version on a lush 35mm print, Ludwig is slow and stately, but I found it entirely absorbing and occasionally surprisingly funny – there’s a hilarious segment where Ludwig essentially holds his favourite actor hostage, forcing the exhausted thespian to perform classic roles on demand, and I love the scene where Romy Schneider searches for Ludwig in his many castles and can only cackle at the ridiculous opulence of it all. As the king, Helmut Berger has a suitably detached and haunted quality, growing increasingly wild-eyed and paranoid, bearing his blackened teeth, in the film's second half as the cabinet plots his removal. As ever with Visconti, Ludwig is overwhelming in its aesthetic splendour and indulgence.
 
4 – City of Pirates (Raúl Ruiz, 1983) – ICA, 35mm

Raúl Ruiz reportedly embarked upon City of Pirates after feeling that his previous film The Three Crowns of the Sailor had been too commercial. No chance of any such description being applied to this film. Ruiz wrote the script using a technique of automatic writing immediately after he had woken up, and the film feels like something that has sprung up unfiltered from the subconscious. There is a narrative of sorts running throughout the picture, in which Melvil Poupaud makes his screen debut as a 10 year-old who claims to have murdered his own family and ends up proposing to Anne Alvaro, but the film unfolds with a languid dream logic. Ruiz incorporates so many different cinematic techniques to give every scenes a startling look, and seen on a beautiful 35mm print, it was easy to succumb to the strange and overwhelming atmosphere of curiosity and dread that the film conjures up. I can't recall the last time I saw a single film that made me gasp so frequently at the brilliance and imagination of its compositions.
 
3 – Doomed Love (Manoel de Oliveira, 1978) – ICA, 35mm

Doomed Love could be seen as a ‘Late Style’ film, given the fact that director Manoel de Oliveira was around 70 years old when he made it, but the fact that he went on making films for another 34 years somewhat confuses that definition. There is a stately quality to this film, which achieves, better than almost any other film I can think of, the effect of reading an epic 19th century novel. Inspired by events that occurred in his own family’s history, Camilo Castelo Branco’s 1862 novel Amor de Perdição tells the story of two young lovers, whose passion for each other is thwarted by their feuding families. De Oliveira leans heavily on the use of a narrator to relay some of these facts to the audience, but his careful blocking and beautifully lit compositions draw the viewer in. The version we saw was the 262-minute theatrical presentation rather than the (heavily criticised at the time) 287-minute television version, and I was completely under its spell for the entire running time, right up to the heart-stopping final moments.
 
2 – Chelsea Girls (Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey, 1966) – BFI Southbank, 16mm

A unique cinema experience for a one-of-a-kind film. Chelsea Girls consists of twelve reels capturing Factory regulars as they sit around and talk, but the reels are projected side-by-side, with the sound muted on one reel at a time. In his dismissive review, Roger Ebert wrote, "Like so many other elements of Andy Warhol’s world, it has little intrinsic worth. You must have the faith before you go into the theater; you must be, as the used car dealers say, 'pre-sold'." But as someone who has been bored by some of Warhol’s experiments in the past, I found this surprisingly fascinating viewing. It’s a testament to the natural charisma of many of the participants that they manage to captivate for almost three and a half hours, even when they are doing next to nothing. These vignettes are often mundane but occasionally quite funny and frequently compelling, with the unpredictable Ondine – the self-styled “Pope of Greenwich Village” – introducing a genuine sense of tension into his climactic encounter with Ingrid Superstar.
 
1 – La Région centrale + *Corpus Callosum (Michael Snow, 1971 / 2002) – ICA, 16mm

How often do you emerge from a cinema with your head spinning, having just witnessed something that felt genuinely new? This year I had that experience twice over a single weekend. Prior to the ICA’s weekend celebrating the work of Michael Snow, I had only seen one of his films – the entrancing Wavelenth – and Snow’s fascination with the possibilities of camera movement is expanded upon in La Région centrale. For this film, Snow decamped to a mountain in northern Quebec, where he set up a camera attached to a robotic arm pre-programmed to move in a variety of ways. The resulting film is an extraordinary thing to experience. It’s disorienting, thrilling and completely captivating across three hours. La Région centrale reconfigures your conception of cinematic space, and what’s remarkable is how it never feels redundant or repetitive, even though all you’re looking at is shots of the rocks or the sky as Snow’s camera lurches in a multitude of directions.
 
The following day I re-encountered Snow, but this time he was marching into the digital age. Snow was in his 70s when he made *Corpus Callosum, but he embraces the new creative options offered by digital technology with an almost childlike enthusiasm. As his camera tracks laterally across scenes of work and domestic life, Snow distorts the image and adds graphics to create a series of surreal visual gags; his actors shrink and expand, items explode and disappear at random. In the most remarkable sequence, Snow presents us with a family sitting in a garishly decorated living room, and as he manipulates the image in countless ways, he leaves us wondering what on earth is real and where the artifice ends, which is a question that resonated particularly powerfully at a time when our faith in the truth of what we see has become so compromised. Watching Michael Snow’s films with a packed audience restored my faith in cinema to expand my horizons and continually question what is possible in this medium. It's an experience I will always cherish.