To mark the release of Christopher Nolan's
Dunkirk, Little White Lies magazine asked me and my Badlands
Collective colleagues Ian Mantgani and Craig Williams to write a
manifesto celebrating the continued relevance and importance of celluloid and old-school filmmaking techniques.
The resulting article can be found in the latest issue of the
magazine, where it is accompanied by wonderful artwork by Nathalie
Lees, but you can also read it online now at LWLies.com.
This weekend I was invited to discuss the many highlights (and occasional lowlights) from this year's Il Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna on the Silent London podcast. You can hear me chatting with Pamela Hutchinson and Pete Baran about Med Hondo, Helmut Käutner, Ivan Mosjoukine, Cary Grant and more by following the below link:
Silent London
No two experiences of Il Cinema Ritrovato will be the same. The festival’s vast and eclectic programme offers so many options for the curious film fan, there’s really no right way to navigate it. Some will choose to revisit old favourites screened from original prints or restored copies, while others will focus on rare titles and unknown quantities. Treats are to be found in every corner of the festival, along with a number of very difficult choices. On a single evening in Bologna, you could see one of the following: D.A. Pennebaker introducing Monterey Pop on Piazza Maggiore’s huge screen; the Austrian silent film Die kleine Veronika presented on a carbon projector; or a new restoration of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, with Dario Argento himself in attendance. It’s not always easy being a cinephile.
Read the rest of my article at Mostly Film
Whatever happened to Bruno Dumont? After seven films that established his reputation as one of the most uncompromising and provocative filmmakers on the arthouse circuit, his 2014 miniseries P’tit Quinquin was a bewildering change of pace. It still looked and felt like a Dumont film, but the dour tone of his previous work had shifted into a lighter mode, and he displayed an unexpected gift for eccentric comedy. P’tit Quinquin was something truly unique, a film that seemed to act as both a parody of his own ultra-serious work and an ambitious attempt to explore his usual themes in a fresh way.
But if you thought Dumont would revert to type after scratching his comic itch, think again. Slack Bay is pure slapstick. The tone is set early on with the appearance of two detectives, played by Didier Després and Cyril Rigaux, who bear an uncanny resemblance to Laurel and Hardy. The gap-toothed Després is so corpulent his every movement prompts squeaky sound effects, as if his joints are straining under pressure. And Dumont clearly recognises the time-honoured comic value of a fat man falling over – Després spends much of the film tumbling down sand dunes with his wide-eyed colleague scampering after him.
Read the rest of my review at Little White Lies
Churchill. The stark one-word title immediately brings an iconic image to mind. A bulldog-like character resting on a cane, a Homburg hat on his head, a cigar jutting out from his mouth, his hand raised in a victorious two-fingered salute. It’s a figure so familiar we might feel we know everything there is to know about the man already, not least because Brian Cox’s decent impersonation is just the latest in a seemingly inexhaustible run of TV and film portrayals.
Director Jonathan Teplitzky makes much use of this iconography in Churchill, often shooting Cox in profile or as a distinctive silhouette, but Alex von Tunzelmann’s screenplay attempts to dig beneath the surface and to reveal different aspects of the man during one of the turning points of World War Two.
Read the rest of my review at Little White Lies
