The Seed of the Sacred Fig

Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig is a portrait of three women who live in the shadow of their family’s patriarch. The film opens with Iman (Missagh Zareh) being appointed as an investigating judge in the Revolutionary Court in Tehran; it's a role that will earn him a significantly higher salary and allow him to move his family to a bigger house in a better community. Iman has toiled as a lawyer for years and sees this as his overdue reward, but his more high-profile role comes with dangers. “You must be irreproachable,” his wife Najmeh (Soheila Golestani) warns their teenage daughters, Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki).

Read the rest of my review at The Skinny

Hard Truths

We’ve all had days when you wake up in a funk and feel like everyone was put on earth specifically to antagonise you, but that’s every day for Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), the protagonist in Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths.

Read the rest of my review at The Skinny

"It's not deeply thought-out politics, just surface-level G7 stuff, because that seems to be what the G7 is about." - An Interview with Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson

The first thing you’ll probably notice about the new Guy Maddin film is that it doesn’t look much like a Guy Maddin film. For more than three decades, Maddin’s signature has been his delirious adoption of early cinema aesthetics allied to a surreal sense of humour, but Rumours – which Maddin co-directed with regular collaborators Evan and Galen Johnson – looks shockingly like an ordinary movie. This is no ordinary film, however, and beyond the deceptively placid surface there is all manner of weirdness to contend with. Set at the annual G7 summit, where the world’s most powerful people meet to discuss the pressing issues of the day, the film casts these world leaders adrift in a genuine crisis that their diplomatic skills have left them woefully unprepared for. As they attempt to draft a joint statement on this unspecified apocalyptic scenario, these increasingly ragged politicians spend much of Rumours wandering aimlessly in the fogbound forest, encountering bizarre situations that could only have come from the minds of Maddin and the Johnsons. Rumours is consistently surprising and hilarious, and it will hopefully draw a whole new audience to this unique filmmaker's work. I met Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson at this year's London Film Festival to discuss it.

I just saw the poster outside and I like that you've got "The official motion picture of the G7" as the tagline on there.

Guy Yeah, we just made this claim. We were surprised that our distributor let us say that.

I was wondering if you’d have to get clearances for something like that.

Evan No, there's a joke at the beginning of the movie that we consulted with the leaders in the making of it, and I think we got a note from one distribution person who suggested that you can't say that. But we said it!

Guy I say, G7 lawyer up!

I've been a fan of your work for a very long time, but I never imagined I'd see one of your films getting a wide release with a Universal logo at the start. It feels kind of crazy.

Guy It does, I have to admit I'm in total agreement with you there. But it's a very pleasant feeling. It feels like a strange dream.

You guys have been working together for around a decade now.

Guy A little more, yeah.

Has the process changed at all?

Evan I think the process always starts the same way and the reason the outcome looks different this time is simply because of the subject matter that we chose. Guy is someone who has an established style – although it has changed over the years, it should be said, it was different in the aughts than it was in the early 90s in certain rhythmic and textural ways – but he's always up for wanting to try new things. It's almost shocking to me, it's kind of inspiring.

Guy Yeah, there's no way to justify using archaic, early part-talkie film vocabulary units in something set in the present. I did a bit of that in My Winnipeg where I was mixing memory with present day and fear of the future and stuff, so I had an excuse. I also wanted the challenge of going...the word 'normie' isn't right, but just something that would have fewer alienating effects.

Galen Or alienating effects located in different places.

Guy Oh yeah, it's still plenty alienating.

I mean, it has been described as your most accessible film, but it's still a film that has masturbating zombies, so I guess accessibility is graded on a different scale.

Guy Well that's where the door opens wide. That's the audience to go for. Come on in everyone, plenty of room in here!

So how does the scripting process work? Evan, you've got the sole screenplay credit, but obviously you guys collaborate to develop the story, so what's the process for putting this together?

Evan Everything comes out of the fact that we spend a lot of time together watching movies and just working on stuff. There's stuff that doesn't get off the ground, scripts that bloom and then collapse, and we throw them away. The G7 idea was a subplot in another script we had, and when we decided we were actually going to write this movie we had already talked about the G7 a lot, we'd even written some scenes. I have the sole screenwriting credit because I wrote most of it, but things that these guys wrote and said in previous versions definitely snuck in here and there. We talked about the plot trajectory, we knew where it was going to go, we talked about the characters. I'm the one who wrote the dialogue, because it's really hard to write dialogue in a group, I think.

Guy Yeah, he wrote the dialogue, and I think the credit exactly reflects what happened. We discussed the story, he went away, and he came back with pages of the script.

Evan Especially with seven characters, you need to get the momentum going, because you can turn your brain off a little bit.

Guy You went into a trance, it seemed like.

Evan Well, the dialogue came up very quick, like pages and pages and pages and pages per day.

Guy In real time!

Evan Because they were talking to themselves. Once you get the characters and their names – we were actually talking in another interview about how important names are, like, if you misname a character, I think you're doomed, it sucks. But if you get the right names, you're just ready to go, and we felt we knew these people because of their names. Like, we had the nationalities as well, which also helps, and character is more than just nationality and name, but you have to start somewhere and you learn. It was really nice to just learn from the characters where we are going rather than telling them where to go. That's sort of how it was written. That's why it has an ambling quality, right? I don't think there was another way for us to do it.

Guy So the names came first, with the exception of our Canadian Prime Minister, as I recall now. I can't remember what his name used to be, but we already had a starting point because the part was written with the actor Roy Dupuis in mind, and we knew who he was. I think we were told by some clearance lawyer or something that his last name had to change, but his first name, I think, stayed the same. I can't remember what it was, but they did a search and found out there were five really litigious people in the world with exactly the same name, so we had to change it. I was annoyed, but I now can't remember what that name was.

I guess when you're making a film about the G7, there's the temptation for the audience to look at it and try to identify the metaphors and the allegories. You make a joke about that with the French President trying to come up with his own allegories for what's going on, but was that something you were conscious of and perhaps trying to steer away from?

Galen Yes, absolutely trying to steer away from it.

Evan Steer away from it, and yet it's sort of like the steering away is the subject, like a failure to cohere in meaning or something is what the movie is about. That seems a bit cheap, like you can always say, “the theme of the movie is bad movies.”

Galen But it's right there in the title, Rumours. It's like, nothing is confirmed.

Evan Yeah, exactly. We wanted the neoliberal hollowing out that is G7 summits, the empty spectacle and how to make an engaging movie about that, but it means you kind of have to avoid meaning when you can in creative ways. Or you can goad people, like, tempt people into thinking, is this a symbol? No, it isn't. And sometimes it is! That's the other thing. There are obvious things in there that are metaphors. There are big, clunky, obvious metaphors symbols in the movie, and yet at times we try to deny that that's true.

Guy Yeah, at times the movie takes on a colouring book-like simplicity.

That's how you get the big audience.

Guy It's called pandering. Feed them a bit more colouring book.

You’ve talked about moving away from the silent era or early talkie style and you've gone for more of a B-movie vibe here. You can also definitely feel the influence of Buñuel in this picture. Were you looking at any particular films or directors for inspirations as you were making this?

Galen I think for the opening stretch we just wanted to base it in reality, so we were sort of inspired by the YouTube videos of G7 summits that we saw. A colour palette that was very flag-like, sort of bright and primary, and then once night falls, the fog does the heavy lifting of the atmosphere. I guess that's what suggests B-movies like John Carpenter or something like that.

Evan I guess it's quite soft. There's a lot of soft glow in the movie, soft focus. A little bit of soap opera. There’s a kind of purplish haze, some sickly colours, unnatural colours, I guess, which aren't very Buñuel. I mean when Bunuel shoots in colour, it's quite... It's pretty drab. It's stark.

The Buñuel influence feels more present in the theme of the film. These absurd characters trapped and wandering in circles.

Evan Yeah, and he's a favorite director of ours. I've said it before, but I'm always nervous to even mention his name because I don't want to presume that we're in his company, but he's definitely an inspiring figure. The Exterminating Angel in particular, the circular wandering of that movie indoors, and then obviously Discreet Charm has some great outdoor wandering as well. He's a filmmaker who is an expert in frustration, and I think frustration was on our minds, as it always is making movies. It's so frustrating.

One of the other big differences for you guys in this is that most of your previous films are made on these very artificial sets, whereas here you're on location, you're out in the woods. How did you adjust to that? It’s quite a different way of making movies.

Guy Yeah, I didn't adjust well at first. These location scouts are like forever and you don't even see your location because you’re scouting during the day, but we shoot at night with fog, so it looks completely different. It's tricky, but it's so expensive to build a forest in a studio that doesn't look super chintzy.

Evan We got lucky with some of our forest locations that look like sets, like there's one where you bathe it in purple light and then it doesn't really look like a real forest, it looks like a soap opera set.

Guy Yeah, that's where we were most comfortable.

Galen Strangely, even though the forests are huge and incredibly detailed, because they're real, it didn't even look like an expensive set.

Evan You're cheap in nature, that's the goal. Yeah, Guy didn't enjoy the scouting process.

Guy I don't like scouting. But I was sceptical that at night any of this stuff would make any difference, like, picking one patch here and then another patch 40 miles away.

Galen Well, I think it would make a difference, you just don't know what the difference would be.

Guy Plus my thighs were sweating. I was allergic to something.

Evan But a couple of the forest locations were perfect. We loved them.

Guy No, no. I stand corrected. Scouting made a big difference. When you fill everything with fog it makes no difference, but we always wait for the fog to blow away or have no fog at all.

Evan If we had the money and the logistics were simpler, we would have shot it all in a set, probably. Some other script maybe.

How do you work with actors? You’ve got an ensemble of very different actors here and in terms of having three directors on set, how do you communicate what you want with them?

Guy It ended up being easier in this case. One person would talk to the actors most of the time, and that was Evan in this case, for whatever reason, maybe his temperament and the way he got along with the actors. I was worried that with three directors there the actors might be like spoiled children and play one director against the other, but that was never a problem. These people were really wonderful and they consulted with each other a lot.

Evan I think you talked to the actors as much as I did, you just didn't talk about the movie or the previous take. It wasn't like specific to the scene or anything.

Guy Yeah, I made a point of getting to know them, it would get them in the spirit. But where most of our directing together happened was when we were at the monitors together watching a take and talking about whether we liked it or not. Then maybe I would go out and talk to the DOP about the look of something, but I think in the director on actor thing it was mostly Evan. Galen and I were concerned with the many other things to be concerned about.

Galen And also sometimes you guys would just give me a mission. You'd say, “I don't know if I like that. So go tell Charles [Dance] this.”

Guy Yeah, because we were terrified of Charles.

I want to ask you about some of the actors in particular. You said you wrote the role of the Canadian Prime Minister for Roy Dupuis. I know him from The Forbidden Room but I don't really know him from much else. I believe he's a much bigger star in Canada.

Guy In French Canada.

Galen He's medium-big in English Canada too but in French Canada he's enormous, like Brad Pitt.

Guy He's literally had to move out to the country to be less harassed, or just not harassed at all.

And this idea of portraying him as a heroic ladies man, this kind of alpha-male lothario, is that an expression of Canadian pride?

Guy It was in casting him. He just showed up with a man bun!

Evan We wrote for him and we know him a little, but we didn't know him super well. We just wrote what we thought Roy would be like as a Prime Minister.

Guy And he could run for Prime Minister and sweep Quebec.

Evan It's another character where you give him the name and the haircut and he writes himself and you follow him wherever he goes. It's always funny. We're Canadians and we're used to needing a Canadian star for our government financing, and Roy is our favourite Canadian star. We knew we wanted him to be a kind of leader and the idea that Canada would be leading was funny because we're like the 7th most important G7 country. Although interestingly – or possibly not interestingly – Canada was invited to the G7 under Pierre Trudeau, because Pierre Trudeau was the most bilingual world leader in French and English and they wanted someone who could help lead the group, so Canada was added.

Guy And he was actually charismatic.

Evan He was a forceful world leader so he was sort of the alpha of the group. He had more experience than the others. Was it Gerald Ford? I think it was Gerald Ford at the time.

Guy He was busy tripping up stairs all the time.

Evan So there's some historical truth to the idea, but for us it was a joke about Canada.

As ridiculous as the film is I got the sense that you've done a fair bit of research on G7 history. There's a lot of references to historical speeches in the film and G7 trivia. It seems like you’re authorities on the subject now.

Evan Yeah, we wanted the movie to be full of G7 inside jokes, G7-specific language.

Galen Not politics, but just the surface of the G7.

Evan It's not deeply thought-out politics, just surface-level G7 stuff, because that seems to be what the G7 is about. It’s very surface-level, almost like beauty pageants. But yeah, there's a lot of surface-level research rather than deep thinking about policy or anything, because I don't think there's much deep thinking about policy that goes on with these summits.

That's the thing that makes me wonder why there hasn't been a film on this subject before, because it is so much about the image and the pageantry. I remember there was an article a few years ago talking about how all these conservative politicians did a kind of power stance with their legs apart. It looked so comical and you wonder, do they not realise how it comes across?

Guy No, but it's intentional, it's performative. These leaders didn't grow up with these power stances, they go to power stance school like they went to charm school, baby-kissing school, flesh-pressing school. Yesterday I was doing an interview with Cate, who actually has a lot of experience hobnobbing with world leaders and politicians at the UN summits and things like that, and she's obviously an observer of people, and she's just convinced that these people learn these performative tricks the moment they decide to enter politics. I wonder if there are just people you can hire.

Evan They hire body language experts, don't they?

Guy I'm sure. “Don't make your face too big.” That's like when Justin Trudeau adopted the Korean stance, the wide stance, to make himself shorter so he could be the same height. It's an act of courtesy to your Korean host to make yourself the same height as them so sometimes that means spreading your legs about six feet apart.

Galen Yeah, it caused a kerfuffle back home in the Canadian media. What the heck is he doing? He's actually just being deferential to his hosts.

Guy So the performative has different vernaculars in different countries.

Another actor I loved in the film was Denis Ménochet. He’s always great but we’re so used to seeing him play these intimidating, taciturn kind of characters, and it’s so much fun to see an actor like him cut loose in a way I haven't really seen before. How did you arrive at the choice to cast him in this role?

Galen With him, we thought he was brilliant and he came highly recommended and we were like, this guy can do this. He can just do it. We'll hope it works. And we were not disappointed at all. That guy is a genius.

Guy Ari Aster recommended him and we quickly got enthusiastic about it, and then he went beyond anything we expected, not just on screen but in prep. His character is revealed as being obsessed with building Western Europe's largest sundial, and Denis, in prep for the role, wrote a really beautiful essay on sundials, in character.

Galen Not to include in the movie, just to get into the character. It was really something.

Evan He's a very fun actor to work with. He's very different. Charles always refers to himself as an actor for hire, no fuss, he'll just say the lines and he nails them. If you want him to say the line a little faster, you say, “a little faster, Charles,” and he says, “Right-o,” and does it. But Denis is not like that. If you want Denis to say a line faster and you ask him to say the line faster, he says, “What? Like…what? What?!” and then the next take is ruined because he's looking at you like, “Fast?!” You have to speak to him, not quite in character, but you do have to be like, “Can you believe he said that, Denis? He said that to you. Are you going to take that?” and then he gets riled up. He's always unpredictable and very intuitive.

The film suddenly feels very current with the idea of an AI chatbot being so central to the climax.

Galen No, it was not really as hot a couple of years ago when we wrote this. This was pre-Chat GPT blowing up that we wrote this, and then that blew up and we're like…oh God. It seems like we're bandwagon jumping now.

Evan It came just quite naturally. I think we needed like a late second act turn to send some of them back to the house, the chateau. You need that setback. I think it came out of like a writing session where we were like, what if they get a text that says help? Well, who would send the text? And then the chatbot came out of that. It was just a practical. Of course, now it definitely seems like a sexual entrapment chatbot is the kind of thing that might end the world, and it's a nice stupid way for humanity to end. We thought it was fitting. But no, I think in fact we're always a little nervous when there’s something of the moment, we’re like, oh no, that means in six months it's going to be dated badly. But hopefully not.

And finally, Guy, I know you've been working on 4K restorations for some of your earlier films. I think you've done Tales from the Gimli Hospital and Archangel.

Guy And Careful, my third feature, is going to be restored.

What's it like going back to these films that you made decades ago and working on them again?

Guy I thought it would be worse because I really don't like watching my old movies much. They're just huge inventories of regrets and mistakes and things like that, and then the end credits are like reading cenotaphs of dead and lost friends and failed relationships, they're all accusing me of a life misled. But actually going in and getting a chance to bring out details that I had long ago forgotten, or had disappointed me by not being visible, just with colour correction and things like that, it's been richly rewarding. It’s a little bit terrifying sometimes because a lot of the work is done before I come in, and so there'll be a young colourist who'll have worked on the movie for two weeks, but someone who has never seen a film before. “So I dialled out all that grain…”

Galen The idea of restoring a Guy Maddin a movie is kind of funny.

Guy I know, I remember thinking they were restoration proof, and now here I am!

Evan Didn't someone take out the audio ambient piece?

Guy Yeah, which I went to a lot of trouble to put in! That was on Archangel, all the optical crackle was removed, and on Gimli Hospital all the film grain was removed. So it actually took a lot out of me, I was getting really exasperated.

When I spoke to you before, you said that you'd always tended to go back and re-edit your films to make them shorter. Your ideal director's cuts would always be shorter.

Guy Always, no, that is true.

Did you have the urge to go back and tinker with these?

Guy I tightened those restorations up a little bit.

Evan Gimli Hospital's a little shorter. Is Archangel a little shorter?

Guy Yep, shorter by few minutes. I didn't remove any scenes or anything, just tightened the pace.

Galen So many dozens of fades to black...

Guy I was obsessed with just the narcotic pleasure I got from a very long, slow fade to…not to black, but to a milky grey, and then with the audio equivalent of milky grey playing. I tightened some of those up, because three seconds of those at a time does just as well as twenty seconds, so I was able to shorten them.

There’s only so much milky grey that people can take, I guess.

Guy Yeah, I took six minutes out of it, and it still reads like there's too much milky grey.

Rumours is released in UK cinemas on December 6th

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat

1960 has been described as The Year of Africa, as a wave of political change spread across the continent and led to 17 nations declaring independence. Among the most contentious of these was the case of the Congo, which announced its determination to emerge as a free nation under the leadership of the charismatic Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba on June 30th. Three days before losing control of its colony, Belgium privatised the Union Minière mine, the prime source of the country’s enormous potential wealth, and within seven months Lumumba would be assassinated following a Belgium-backed coup d’état. So much for independence.

Read the rest of my review at Little White Lies

Silent Sherlock: Three Classic Cases

Numerous actors have portrayed Sherlock Holmes on the big screen over the course of the past century, but nobody comes close to Eille Norwood, who starred as Arthur Conan Doyle’s legendary sleuth in 45 shorts and two features for Stoll Pictures between 1921 and 1923. The entire Stoll Collection of Sherlock Holmes films is currently being restored by the BFI, and the first fruits of that invaluable effort were screened at this year’s London Film Festival Archive Gala, which took place in the suitably Victorian surroundings of Alexandra Palace.

Read the rest of my review in Sight & Sound

A Beginner's Guide to Marielle Heller in the London Film Festival

The London Film Festival is around the corner again, and I'm excited to be a part of the programme this year. I'm a great admirer of Marielle Heller's films The Diary of a Teenage Girl, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, and on October 15th I'll be presenting The Beginner's Guide to Marielle Heller, in which I'll be talking through the different qualities she has shown in each of her films to date. This is an opportunity to get acquainted with Heller's work ahead of the UK premiere of her new feature Nightbitch, and as it's part of the LFF For Free programme, it won't cost you a penny! More details of the event can be found here.

That They May Face the Rising Sun

“Does anything happen, or is it the usual heavy going?” a novelist is asked about his latest book in That They May Face the Rising Sun. “Not much drama,” he replies, “more day-to-day stuff.” This response acts as a wry self-commentary on Pat Collins’s film. That They May Face the Rising Sun is concerned with the everyday lives of a small group of characters in a lakeside village in the west of Ireland. A few things do happen in the film – a wedding, a death – but there is little in the way of standard drama and conflict, and no firm narrative shape beyond the passage of time and the changing of the seasons.

Read the rest of my review in Sight & Sound

Fallen Leaves

Coming six years after Aki Kaurismäki announced his retirement from filmmaking, Fallen Leaves feels like a return to very familiar territory. The director’s last two features were unusually explicit in their commentary on the social issues of our time, with both Le Havre (2011) and The Other Side of Hope (2017) engaging directly with Europe’s migrant crisis. Kaurismäki’s new film harkens back to the small-scale stories of ordinary Finns with which he made his reputation; in fact, it has been labelled a belated fourth instalment of his Proletariat Trilogy, which consists of Shadows in Paradise (1986), Ariel (1988) and The Match Factory Girl (1990).

That’s not to suggest Kaurismäki is turning away entirely from current events. In Fallen Leaves, every time Ansa (Alma Pöysti) switches on the radio, she hears another grim update from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a conflict that weighs heavily on the Finnish psyche thanks to the country’s shared border with Russia. The precarious state of labour rights in the modern world is also at the forefront of Kaurismäki’s thoughts here. Ansa works as a supermarket shelf-stacker until she is reprimanded for giving expired food to a homeless man and taking a microwave meal home for herself rather than throwing it into the garbage as instructed. Employed on a zero-hours contract, Ansa is summarily dismissed with no compensation – and it was perhaps serendipitous that on the same day this reviewer watched Fallen Leaves, the Central Organisation of Finnish Trade Unions (SAK) began a series of strike actions in protest at the newly elected right-wing government’s proposed changes to workers’ rights and welfare benefits.

Read the rest of my review at Sight & Sound

Peeping Tom: inside the restoration of Michael Powell’s shocking serial killer drama

If you associate Michael Powell with lush Technicolor dreams or spirited love stories and adventures, then Peeping Tom (1960) will undoubtedly come as a shock. Made three years after he and Emeric Pressburger parted company, Powell’s portrait of a serial killer stars Karlheinz Böhm as the young cameraman who murders women with the sharpened end of his tripod while capturing their agonised final moments on film. The way Powell implicates the viewers’ own voyeurism makes it a uniquely disturbing and provocative experience.

When critics saw Peeping Tom, the response was instant and vitriolic. The film was an aberration, a stain on the reputation of its great director, and the best thing for everyone would be for it to be disposed of and forgotten as quickly as possible. As Michael Powell wrote in his memoirs, the film’s producers gave the critics what they wanted: “They yanked the film from the Plaza, they cancelled the British distribution, and they sold the negative to an obscure black-marketeer of films who tried to forget it, and forgotten it was, along with its director, for twenty years.”

Thankfully, Powell lived to see the critical tide turn on Peeping Tom, and in the years since the director’s death in 1990, its reputation has continued to grow, as has much of Powell and Pressburger’s body of work, thanks in part to the ongoing promotion and restorations undertaken by his friend and admirer Martin Scorsese and Powell’s widow Thelma Schoonmaker. It was Scorsese who spearheaded the rediscovery of Peeping Tom, getting it screened to wide acclaim at the New York Film Festival in 1979 and re-released the following year. He brought Powell over to share in the new reactions to the film, paying for the flight to New York, which Powell couldn’t otherwise have afforded.

“To create anything, whether it’s writing or painting or music or dance or cinema, you have to be obsessed,” says Scorsese. “But one can cross the line into danger, easily. Michael Powell didn’t just understand that danger – he lived it. And he actually expressed it in cinematic terms.

“Unlike The Red Shoes, set in the grand world of high culture, Peeping Tom is set at the rock bottom level of low culture, with a protagonist who has already crossed the line. On a plot level, it’s about a serial killer who murders women as he films them. On a deeper level, it’s a portrait of self-destruction by means of cinema – the lenses are scalpels, the splices real cuts that bleed, the celluloid razor wire, and the light of the projector blinding.”

This year, Peeping Tom will be back in the spotlight with a new 4K restoration by The Film Foundation and the BFI National Archive in association with StudioCanal. Ahead of its premiere at the London Film Festival, I spoke to some of the other key players involved in the restoration to find out what goes into such a project.

Read the rest of my article at Sight & Sound

The Future Tense Review

A flight from London Stansted to Dublin Airport takes around 75 minutes. It’s a routine journey that the Irish-born, London-based filmmakers Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor have taken plenty of times, but something about this one feels different. “The ever-present noises of populism and nationalism have moved to the foreground, impossible to ignore,” says Lawlor. While the motivation for this trip is to scout locations for a film, they are also exploring the possibility of a new home in Ireland. As they weigh their growing discomfort with the UK against their ambivalent feelings towards their homeland, their position in the clouds over the Irish Sea is an apt metaphor for their state of being – halfway between two islands, and not entirely sure where they belong.

Read the rest of my review at Sight & Sound

The Swimmers Review

Many athletes have overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles to achieve their dreams of competing at the Olympic Games, but few can tell a story to match Yusra Mardini’s. Having fled war-torn Syria in August 2015, Yusra and her sister Sarah embarked on a dangerous smugglers’ route across the Aegean Sea in a flimsy dinghy with eighteen other refugees. When the boat’s motor failed and it began taking on water, the two sisters tethered themselves to the craft and swam towards land, hauling their fellow refugees behind them for three hours. It was an astonishing feat of endurance and survival, and the fact that Yusra then went on to swim at Rio 2016 – a stateless competitor in the newly formed Refugee Olympic Team – is the kind of happy ending that only the most shameless screenwriter would dream up.

Read the rest of my review at Sight & Sound

Causeway Review

It is characteristic of Causeway’s restraint that we never see the incident that caused army engineer Lynsey (Jennifer Lawrence) to return from Afghanistan with a severe brain injury. Even when she describes the traumatic experience of being in a vehicle blown up by an IED, she talks about it dispassionately, as if she is describing something that happened to somebody else. As Lynsey must relearn some basic motor functions, we might expect the film to focus on the arduous nature of her physical recovery, but Causeway moves past her period in a rehabilitation centre (featuring a tiny gem of a supporting turn from Jayne Houdyshell) before the first quarter of the film has elapsed.

Read the rest of my review at Sight & Sound

Genre highlights at BFI London Film Festival 2021

Most of the conversations (and the longest queues) at the London Film Festival tend to be centred around the high-profile gala screenings, whether they’re the big studio pictures gearing up for the Oscar race or arthouse fare on the festival circuit, but there are plenty of smaller films worth talking about if you delve deeper into the programme. This year’s festival opened with Jeymes Samuel’s The Harder They Fall, a boldly revisionist take on the western, and one that set the tone for a series of films that tried to look at familiar genres in a fresh way.

Sometimes these films can look extremely familiar at first glance. The screenplay for Inexorable could easily have been the template for a glossy ‘Nanny from Hell’ Hollywood thriller in the mid-90s. Instead, the Belgian director Fabrice du Welz takes the film in a different direction. Shooting on Super 16mm, he has made something that feels grainy, rough and intimate, despite the palatial surroundings of this family’s country retreat. The hangdog Benoît Poelvoorde is Marcel, a writer who has failed to deliver a second novel in the twenty years since his hit debut Inexorable, and Mélanie Doutey is his wife and editor Jeanne, who is also the daughter of his late publisher. “I feel like a usurper” Marcel admits after moving his things into his former father-in-law’s office, but the real usurper is walking up the driveway in the shape of Gloria (Alba Gaïa Bellugi).

This is a classic interloper plot, with a stranger arriving to expose the fissures in a family that apparently has it all. Du Welz doesn’t make any attempt to disguise how unhinged Gloria is – she gives herself a black eye to expedite the family’s sympathy and acceptance – but the true reason for her fixation on Marcel, whose novel she has memorised, remains under wraps until the end. It perhaps stretches credulity that Marcel and Jeanne would be so trusting and immediately hand childcare responsibilities over to Gloria, but Du Welz and his actors make these characters real people with raw, complicated emotions, and when we reach the inevitable bloody finale, it feels messy and tragic for all concerned rather than exciting or cathartic. Inexorable may be a film uninterested in sticking rigidly to the Hollywood playbook, but Du Welz does acknowledge his influences, giving special thanks to John M. Stahl and Gene Tierney in the end credits.

Read the rest of my article on the BFI website

The London Film Festival 2021 - The Dance / Hit the Road / Munich: The Edge of War / Money Has Four Legs

The Dance (Pat Collins)

A young girl stands on a table, facing an accordion player with the head of a ram. A curtain is pulled back, to reveal the intimidating sight of twelve black-clad figures wearing masks. This is the atmospheric opening to MÁM, the dance work created by choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan that opened at the O’Reilly Theatre in Dublin in September 2019. Eight weeks before that opening night, Keegan-Dolan sat in a community hall in Dingle with nothing but twelve dancers and the desire to create something. None of them had any idea what the show that resulted from their work together would be. Pat Collins’ new film The Dance documents that creative process, following the intensive process of collaboration and exploration from which a fully formed show was gradually born. Keegan-Dolan’s practice is to create a space of complete freedom, where every idea has value, and where people can try anything. Their exercises are sometimes reminiscent of the theatre troupe’s games in Rivette’s Out 1, and might appear comical to an outsider, but Keegan-Dolan’s approach is all about encouraging them to experiment with conviction: “Whatever you do, even if it’s the most ridiculous thing in the world, do it as if it’s the most serious thing in the world.” Collins observes the company’s work with a straightforward objectivity that recalls Frederick Wiseman, but he also uses his camera to achieve a real sense of intimacy, and his camera is always alive to the movement of bodies and the electricity of interactions. Where the Wiseman comparison falls down is with The Dance’s brevity, as it runs just over 93 minutes and flows beautifully, with some incisive editing from Keith Walsh, who earns a shared credit block with the director. One thing we don’t get is a sense of the audience reaction – I’d be particularly intrigued to learn what an invited audience thought of their unfinished preview – but that would go against Keegan-Dolan’s ethos, as he tells his dancers to avoid thinking about anything outside of what they’re doing. The act of creation in itself is everything.

Hit the Road (Panah Panahi)

Panah Panahi is the son of the great Iranian film director Jafar Panahi, and on the evidence of Hit the Road, his debut feature, Panahi Jr. is a born filmmaker. Like his father, who spent plenty of time shooting in cars recently in films like Taxi Tehran and 3 Faces, Panah Panahi appears at home on the road. His film follows a family on a journey, the purpose of which is unclear for a long time. The four members of this family – and their sickly dog – are crammed into the tight confines of their car, and Panahi displays an uncanny knack for framing and a playful imagination from the start, with the six-year-old younger brother (Rayan Sarlak) idly playing out the film’s opening score on a piano that he has drawn onto his father’s leg cast. Hit the Road is full of such eccentric comic moments, but there is also a growing gravity to the picture, with an undercurrent of uncertainty and fear being embodied by the older brother (Amin Similar) and the mother (Pantea Panahiha) as they get closer to their mysterious destination. Outside of the car, Panahi shows he has an equal facility with panoramic shots, staging a couple of brilliant sequences late in the film where the characters appear as tiny figures moving across the landscape. The younger brother finds himself being tied to a tree during one of these scenes, complaining about it at some volume, and I’m sure many viewers will see that as a fitting fate for a character who never shuts up. I found him to be mostly very funny and the distinctive characteristics of the four people in this car allows Panahi to find interesting and contrasting emotional textures throughout the film. I think Hit the Road has some pacing issues and not all of the director’s eccentric ideas land, but I loved its ambition, its sense of humour and its tender heart, and I am excited to see whatever either Panahi does next.

Munich: The Edge of War (Christian Schwochow)

Signed in 1938, the Munich Agreement annexed the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia to Germany and – as was widely believed at the time – settled Hitler’s territorial claims in Europe, preventing the prospect of another war. As we all know, this treaty was merely a postponement, as Hitler invaded Poland a year later, but that knowledge is a problem for Christian Schwochow’s Munich: The Edge of War. This adaptation of the novel by Robert Harris revolves around an attempt to smuggle a document out of Germany that reveals Hitler’s true plans for Europe, but given the fact that we know what happened and when, the actual relevance of this document getting into the hands of the British feels diminished, and the film suffers from a chronic lack of tension. There’s a bit of cat-and-mouse business in Munich as George MacKay and Jannis Niewöhner attempt to avoid suspicion while behaving very suspiciously, and Schwochow throws in a fight scene between MacKay and August Diehl that feels hilariously perfunctory, but mostly the film just trundles along with little energy and style (Schwochow’s direction is all coverage and close-ups). Jeremy Irons has fun in his role as an arrogant and doddery Neville Chamberlain, but the permanently stricken-looking MacKay lacks the charisma to carry off the lead role. Things are better on the German side of things, thanks to  Niewöhner’s passionate performance and the always welcome presence of Sandra Hüller, but Ulrich Matthes doesn’t work at all as Hitler (although, having played Goebbels in Downfall, we can congratulate the actor on his promotion). Regrettably, Sandra Hüller’s role is the only half-decent spot for a woman in sight. Jessica Brown Findlay spends a few minutes nagging MacKay for focusing on the impending war over his family before being written out of the movie, Liv Lisa Fries is an appealing presence in flashbacks before – you’ve guessed it – being written out of the movie, and Anjli Mohindra is left playing a deeply unconvincing plot device.

Money Has Four Legs (Maung Sun)

The title comes from a proverb that is brought up halfway through this film: money has four legs, meaning you’ll never catch it if you’re chasing it, and there is no escape if money is chasing you. Money is just one of the problems that young filmmaker Wai Bhone (Okkar Dat Khe) is facing as he tries to make his directorial debut. His script has already been pulled apart by the censorship board, which has looked unkindly on any scenes involving sex, violence, bad language (“Try replacing this word with fothermucker”); he has to deal with actors who won’t show up, and don’t know their lines when they do; and above all else, he has to cope with the well-meaning interventions of his drunken brother-in-law. This knockabout satire plays like a Burmese version of In the Soup, with Wai Bhone facing one obstacle after another before resorting to burglary and blackmail to try and clear his debts and finish his film. The pacing is perhaps a bit too leisurely and the film is beset by some obvious budget and talent limitations, but there are some very funny scenes here, notably the build-up and execution of the bank heist. Maung Sun also includes a number of sly meta gags, like a false start for the end credits before the story has been wrapped up, and a dream sequence interrupted by the admonishment: "You're a supporting character, you're not allowed a dream sequence!" The film’s real ending is surprisingly resonant, being reminiscent of Kubrick’s The Killing but given a wry comic spin thanks to the obliviousness of the two central characters.

The London Film Festival 2021 - Boiling Point

Expanding on the BIFA-nominated short film of the same name that he made in 2019, Philip Barantini’s exhilarating Boiling Point takes us behind the scenes at a busy east London restaurant in the run-up to Christmas, on a night when seemingly everything is going wrong for head chef Andy Jones (Stephen Graham). When the film opens on Andy he is already stressed and running late, and when he arrives at Jones & Sons in Dalston, the news that a visiting hygiene inspector has downgraded his restaurant from a five-star rating to a three (largely as a result of Andy’s failure to maintain proper paperwork) sets the tone for the evening. Tensions in the kitchen continue to rise when it is revealed that Andy has also forgotten to make a substantial meat order, and by the time celebrity chef and former colleague Alastair Skye (Jason Flemyng) has turned up for dinner with a notorious food critic (Lourdes Faberes) on his arm, we can see what the film’s title is getting at.

Read the rest of my review at Sight & Sound

The London Film Festival 2021 - The Alleys / Memory Box / The Outlaws / See for Me

The Alleys (Bassel Ghandour)

“Enough with the stories,” one character tells another towards the end of The Alleys. First-time director Bassel Ghandour certainly has plenty of stories to tell, and at the start of the film his camera moves through the intertwined back alleys of the Jordanian capital Amman. This is, the narrator tells us, a place where “a story spreads like wildfire,” and The Alleys is one of those movies where multiple narrative threads cross paths, and where a series of fateful decisions set into motion a chain of events that has tragic consequences for almost everybody. The plot is kick-started by two young lovers, Ali (Emad Azmi) and Lana (Baraka Rahmani), who have to meet in secret – with Ali climbing into her bedroom – to avoid Lana’s stern mother Aseel (Nadira Omran). When Aseel discovers that their nocturnal trysts have been recorded by an unknown voyeur, who attempts to blackmail her, she turns to the widely feared local gangster Abbas (Munther Rayahnah) to find the blackmailer and warn off Ali. In many respects, the characters are stock archetypes, but Ghandour – who co-wrote Naji Abu Nowar’s Theeb in 2014 – has a knack for swiftly introducing and defining character details, and he has cast his film well. Munther Rayahnah is a commanding presence as Abbas, and Maisa Abd Elhadi comes into her own as the film progresses, being the beneficiary of a flashback that shows Hanadi to be just as vicious as her boss. Ghandour has clearly constructed his narrative meticulously, but he also gives himself a lot of loose end-tying to do in the final act, which is is the one part of The Alleys that feels sluggish and labouriously contrived, and the late reveal of our omniscient narrator as a peripheral player in the drama feels like a too-cute trick that doesn’t come off at all. As a director Ghandour shows little visual flair, and while he undoubtedly has gifts as a storyteller, perhaps he could have used a more experienced director at the helm to bring such an ambitious screenplay to life with a little more finesse.

Memory Box (Khalil Joreige and Joana Hadjithomas)

There's something very appealing about the tactile nature of the photographs, journals and cassette tapes that teenager Alex (Paloma Vauthier) studies to illuminate her mother's past in this film. In stark contrast, the digital 'memory box' of her generation – the mobile phones that she uses to share her mother’s story with her friends – seems so ephemeral. The directors of this film, Khalil Joreige and Joana Hadjithomas, employ some neat visual trickery to bring these items to life: photographs run together creating a kind of flipbook effects that leads into a flashback; when a character in a photograph is shown firing a gun, the muzzle flare appears to burn a whole in the corner of the frame. Through these techniques the filmmakers create something that exists somewhere between the lived experience of Maia (played as an adult by Rim Turki, as a teen by Manal Issa) and Alex’s own projections of the past, which have been evoked by the recollections she is poring over. The scene that best exemplifies this is a beautiful shot of Maia and her lover on a motorbike, serenely gliding down the street, unperturbed by the explosions that illuminate the sky around them. Khalil Joreige and Hadjithomas don’t quite quite do enough to illuminate these characters – it feels like we’re just getting scraps – and the film spends a lot of time developing a sense of mystery around Maia’s broken relationship with her one-time best friend Liza, before just letting it fizzle out. Memory Box is at its best in the way it evokes a sense of what it was like to grow up in Beirut in the 1980s, and the film has a genuinely moving ending, that depicts the catharsis and reconciliation that’s achievable for those who engage with the past instead of burying it out of sight.

The Outlaws (Henrik Martin Dahlsbakke)

The Outlaws begins at the end, with the two fugitives having apparently reached the point of no return. Mikael (Filip Berg) and Johannes (Åsmund Høeg) are at the wheel of a car, both stunned and wounded, and a line of police are standing in front of them, with guns drawn. From here, writer-director Henrik Martin Dahlsbakken flashes back to see how they got to this point, but their journey doesn’t follow a straight road. Dahlsbakken has chopped his narrative up into fragments, and he has pieced them together out of order, creating an impressionist portrait of two men on the run. We see how they got together, with the more sophisticated and focused Mikael picking up the softer Johannes by the side of the road, and we get further flashbacks to Johannes’ own past before their meeting. These scenes focus on his days logging in the Norwegian wilderness, when he developed a homoerotic longing for workmate Peder (Benjamin Helstad), which leads to a burgeoning affection for Mikael. But I don’t think we really get much of a sense of these two men beyond this, and I can’t see the benefit in presenting the film in this way. The Outlaws can’t develop any forward momentum or sustain any tension as it leaps – seemingly at random – back and forth between time periods. Dahlsbakken is clearly trying to capture fleeting moments and sensations, and he is aided in this attempt by some lovely cinematography from Oskar Dahlsbakken, but the film is hazy on details and it’s even weirdly fuzzy on point-of-view. Johannes appears to be or protagonist, with his character being given marginally more shading, but the intermittent voiceover narration is provided by Mikael, who remains a cipher in most request. In its surprisingly skimpy 79 minutes, I never felt that The Outlaws was giving me anything to hold on to.

See for Me (Randall Okita)

See for Me is a solid thriller in the Wait Until Dark mould, which is distinguished from other entries in the 'blind woman in peril' genre by the casting of a real blind woman the lead role. Skyler Davenport is very good as Sophie, who stubbornly resists the help of others and tries to find ways to use her blindness to her advantage, but who comes to rely on the telephone guidance from Kelly (Jessica Parker Kennedy) when three crooks break into the house where she's cat-sitting. The script by Adam Yorke and Tommy Gushue follows a familiar template and the characters are thin – the crooks are cut wholesale from the Panic Room template – but I welcomed the way they tried to complicate Sophie's character, and in fact the film is at its most compelling when it briefly suggests that she might join the crooks for a cut of the loot. Part of me wishes See for Me had gone further down that road instead of going where I always thought it was going to go. Still, Randall Okita manages to sustain a certain degree of tension as Sophie is pursued around this apparently labyrinthine home, with Kelly – first seen guiding her online colleagues through a shoot-em-up video game – pointing the way and helping her turn the tables. The camerawork is efficient, particularly the use of wide shots to show cat and mouse in different parts of the house, and the score by Joseph Murray and Lodewijk Vos has a propulsive effect. I don’t think Okita quite has the chops to generate the kind of nail-biting ride this premise may have engendered in more accomplished hands – I kept waiting for him to really turn the screw and ramp up the tension and excitement – but it’s an engaging and accomplished 90-minute thriller that finds a few new wrinkles in familiar material.

Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor on Rose Plays Julie

“Who are you?” Those are the words we see scrawled on a Post-it Note towards the end of Rose Plays Julie, and it’s a question that goes to the heart of Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor’s work. Since making their feature debut with Helen in 2008, this filmmaking team has explored the slippery nature of identity and the way past traumas can shape our present lives, and Rose Plays Julie is their most potent examination of these themes yet. This quietly riveting film follows a young Irish woman named Rose (Ann Skelly) who adopts a new persona as she tracks down her birth mother, Ellen (Orla Brady), and subsequently discovers the shocking truth about the circumstances of her conception.

Read the rest of my article at The Skinny

Sight & Sound - February 2020

I've got a couple of articles that I loved writing in the latest issue of Sight & Sound. During last year's London Film Festival, I had the opportunity to meet the great Willem Dafoe to discuss his new film The Lighthouse and to look back at one of the most adventurous careers in the business. Aside from his latest film, our conversation touched on his pursuit of fresh challenges, his relationship with Abel Ferrara, his thoughts on distribution and television and more, and he was such an engaging and thoughtful interviewee. I also really enjoyed interviewing The Lighthouse director Robert Eggers and Dafoe's co-star Robert Pattinson for this feature.

Elsewhere, you can read my report from the set of Terry Gilliam's The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. I spent a memorable day in Portugal watching Gilliam shoot his long-awaited film back in 2017, and now it's finally reaching UK cinemas I'm delighted to be able to share my experience. If you'd like to read an interview with Terry Gilliam that doesn't solely consist of him ranting incoherently about political correctness, then this is the article for you!

I also reviewed a couple of new releases: 1917 and Queen & Slim. You can read all of this in the February issue of Sight & Sound, which is on sale now.

Luce

“I just wanted a normal family,” Peter (Tim Roth) tells his wife Amy (Naomi Watts) towards the end of Luce. “Our lives didn’t have to be a political fucking statement.” Unfortunately for Peter, Luce is the kind of movie where everyone’s life is a political statement. Julius Onah’s film tackles questions of prejudice, privilege, code-switching, sex and race in 21st-century America, and the characters spend much of the running time declaiming the script’s themes at each other in lieu of having genuine conversations. Luce was adapted from the 2013 play by J.C. Lee, who co-wrote the screenplay with Onah, and the pair can’t disguise its stage origins, though there are enough intriguing hooks here to pull viewers in.

Read the rest of my view at the BFI

The Irishman

“As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster” Henry Hill states at the start of Goodfellas. “To me being a gangster was better than being president of the United States.” Martin Scorsese has often shown us the seductive glamour of a life of crime; the wealth, the status, the power that draws his characters to it like a moth to a flame. One of the most iconic sequences in his work is the tracking shot in Goodfellas that follows Henry and Karen as they are led through the back entrance of The Copacabana to be seated at a prime table while all the schnooks wait in line. Scorsese played a similar game in Casino, dazzling us as his camera weaves through the backrooms where an unimaginable amount of cash flows daily, much of it into the counters' pockets. Both of these films end with violence and death, but before the crash, Scorsese invites us feel the vicarious thrill of the criminal lifestyle, allowing us to understand these men through the lives they've chosen to lead.

The Irishman is a different proposition from the start. There's little glamour here, the style is restrained and the environments are more mundane. The film may begin with a trademark Scorsese tracking shot, but the location we’re gliding through on this occasion is a nursing home, which is the place where the film begins and ends. It slowly makes its way through the corridors until it settles on Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), who then tells us his story over the course of the next three and a half hours. Steven Zaillian's screenplay is structured like an old man's memories, drifting back and forth in time, from one anecdote to the next, until it coalesces in its final hour into a staggeringly moving portrayal of grief and guilt, but despite the length and the measured pacing, The Irishman never drags. Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker are in complete command of this material, and there's hardly a moment that isn't captivating.

This is a film about a tumultuous period in American history with The Bay of Pigs, the Kennedy assassination, Watergate and more unfolds in the background, and with Jimmy Hoffa (brought to life with ferocious and hilarious bluster by Al Pacino) being a key figure, but at its heart, it's a story about friendship and betrayal. The spine of the film is a road trip taken by Sheeran and crime boss Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci) as they travel to a wedding in 1975, making stops along the way so Bufalino can settle some business and Sheeran can reminisce. The road is dotted with markers, like the truck stop where he and Bufalino first met, some time before the older man took Sheeran under his wing and drew him into his criminal network as a loyal soldier. In Pesci's previous collaborations with Scorsese, the actor has played livewire characters with hair-trigger tempers; from the minute he appears we await his foul-mouthed, violent outbursts with trepidation. His Russell Bufalino is a different beast, and even more chilling. Watchful and quietly authoritative, he never loses his temper and never raises his voice. He's this film's equivalent of "Paulie might have moved slow, but it was only because Paulie didn't have to move for anybody," and he's a man who can pass a death sentence as easily as uttering the simple words “It's what it is.” One telling detail is the wariness Frank's daughter Peggy (played as a child by Lucy Gallina and later by Anna Paquin) exhibits towards this family friend. She can see the bottomless darkness behind his avuncular facade.

Peggy has no such qualms with Hoffa, seeing him as both a kindle uncle with whom she can share an ice cream, and an inspiring figure, fighting for a better deal for the working man. Although The Irishman is very much a film about men, Peggy quietly emerges as a key figure for giving us a different perspective on Frank. From the moment she sees her father beat a man in the street as a young child, Peggy acts as a silent witness throughout the film. She watches him leave the house at strange hours, she sees the kind of company he keeps, she reads about brutal slayings in the news and connects the dots. It might seem strange that an actress of Anna Paquin’s calibre has been handed a background role with no dialogue, but her silence is what lends the role its enormous power, and when she does finally speak her few words they cut Sheeran to the core. Her simple act of asking “Why?” is the moment when The Irishman shifts gears and delves deeper into questions of death, sin and mortality than Scorsese has ever gone before.

Throughout The Irishman, minor characters are introduced with title cards, detailing the date and method of their death – “shot four times in the face in his kitchen” or “blown up by a nail bomb under his porch.” They are already dead men when we meet them, and this is ultimately a film about confronting the inevitable, however it comes. Most of the men who choose this way of life get gunned down, blown up or meet their end in some similarly grisly fashion, but those who don’t end up wasting away in prisons; once-intimidating figures now physically and mentally diminished. I can’t stop thinking about one particular gesture in this film, a palsied hand raised as an elderly character says “You’ll see…you’ll see…” before being wheeled out of the film for good. The climactic forty minutes of The Irishman are as pitiless a study of ageing as you’re likely to see, with every scene being marked by death and the lingering weight of a failure to make amends for past misdeeds.

It’s in this final hour that Robert De Niro does his best work in the film; in fact, it’s hard to recall the last time he gave a performance this rich, nuanced and powerful. For much of the film De Niro seems willing to act as a quiet anchor for this epic; a self-effacing straight man for more attention-grabbing turns from the likes of Pacino, Pesci, Stephen Graham (wonderfully pugnacious, sharing two killer scenes with Pacino) and Ray Romano. But as the film moves into its closing stages, and these figures start to disappear from Sheeran’s life, De Niro’s performance as a man haunted by guilt and regret is revealed as a monumental piece of work. At times, the tormented emotions inside him seem to leave him incapable of speech, the words haltingly stumbling out of his mouth in one gut-wrenching scene as he attempts to make a phone call. 

This is every inch a Martin Scorsese picture, a true late-career masterpiece, but perhaps we should regard De Niro as a co-auteur on the film, a driving force in the same way he was with Raging Bull. It was him, after all, who brought the material to his longtime friend and collaborator in the first place, and it’s tempting to view The Irishman as their Unforgiven; a melancholy reflection and recontextualization of their previous work together in this genre, which has now spanned more than 45 years. From the young punks of Mean Streets, through the flashy and ruthless gangsters of Goodfellas and Casino, to the weary old men of The Irishman; it’s a Four Seasons-like quartet that explores propulsive thrill and ultimate emptiness of criminal life with a staggering clarity and force, with the sobering and haunting ending to this film feeling like a perfect final statement. We leave Frank where we found him, in the nursing home, but this time it’s after hours. He has nobody to comfort him, nobody to hear his stories, nobody who remembers the men who defined his life. He can do nothing but sit and get lost in his still-painful memories while he waits for the end, all alone in the still of the night.