Kitano on Kitano

Following a wildly successful run of distinctive, genre-bending films, stretching from the late-eighties into the early-2000s, Takeshi Kitano turned his camera inwards with a trilogy of semi-autobiographical metadramas designed to interrogate his work, his life, and his public persona. I’ve long been a fan of Kitano, but I’ve never, for whatever reason, been able to muster much enthusiasm to seek these ones out. Having recently watched Broken Rage, a film that riffs on Kitano’s history in gritty crime dramas and slapstick comedies, it feels as if now is a good time to look back at the films he made about himself, or at least a version of himself, and try to make sense of them. As always with Kitano, it’s impossible to know who or what you’re going to get.

Takeshis' | 2005

A successful actor and a failed one, doppelgängers of one another, briefly come face-to-face in the back room of a TV studio before parting ways. Noting the similarity, they each imagine the life of the other to such an extent that reality folds in on itself. Scenes are repeated in new contexts, actors appear in different roles, and the same images return again and again as these two lives start to converge: a sad clown, a bloodied gangster, a caterpillar in a bouquet of flowers. Each man dreams of the other, and then the dreams dream too. But they all end in disappointment. Kitano uses this dovetailing structure to imagine another life, free of the violence that made his name, but it always manages to creep back in. He's a product of that violence and cannot imagine a world without it, as much as he wants to escape from it. A film of artistic exhaustion from a filmmaker in crisis. An attempt by Kitano to make sense of it all by plunging into himself and bouncing back out again. And so, it starts and ends with a gunfight. 

Glory To The Filmmaker! | 2007

Anything but glory. An imagined Kitano, dragging around a perpetually arch-browed dummy of himself, is scrambling for ideas for what to do next: Ozu sells, so let’s do that. Or J-horror, or science-fiction, or martial arts, or a nostalgic ode to childhood. Anything for the market, just not the gangster films he’s vowed to leave behind. He’s good at that. He’s done it for years, and audiences want to see them. Kitano presents fragments of these films and they all feel somehow wrong. Parodic. Insincere. Tired. Nothing works. He fails, again and again, struggling to connect to material that doesn’t suit him. And so, in exasperation, he throws everything into a bizarre, high-concept slapstick comedy that blends it all into one movie. That movie, in the end, is this one. An absurd, freewheeling work of self-deprecation and frustration, but equally a film in which an artist eventually stops aiming for success and follows his instincts, just to see what happens. And if what happens is anything to go by, filmmaking for Kitano is an act of total madness. At the film’s end, he asks his doctor how his brain is. The doctor simply replies: “Broken.”

Achilles and the Tortoise | 2008

At first, a simple portrait of the artist as a young man, with tragedy and adversity forging in him a resolute commitment to art as a means of survival. And all signs point to a major talent on the verge of breaking through. Time passes. He keeps painting, but nothing changes. His work doesn’t sell. He tries again, and that doesn’t sell either. Again and again. Kitano, whose own paintings are used in the film, frames this Sisyphean pursuit of financial success as an increasingly desperate and destructive one. The more he studies art, the further he gets from it, and the more he listens to the critiques of an art dealer, the more derivative his work becomes. Even as his failures tear his family apart, he keeps trying. The next one will be the big one, and then all of this neglect will have been worth it. A film about escaping reality while striving to capture it in art, as well as a lacerating portrait of a man who can no longer tell the difference between artistic expression and the ephemeral whims of the market.

Letterboxd Reviews #4

It’s been a while since I published a compendium of Letterboxd reviews so, of course, here are two at once. In the past couple of years, I’ve been writing more and more on Letterboxd, Mostly just brief snippets and short texts, but I like them all, however small, however fragmented they may be, and I’m keen to keep a record of them here. So here we go. Part two of a bumper crop. In case you missed it, here's part one. The texts in this post were written between September 2024 and February 2025, and are presented in alphabetical order. I hope you enjoy reading them. 

Bad Day at Black Rock | John Sturges, 1955

A nation scarred by war: the men who fight come back with a pain that drives compassion; the men who can't are left with nothing but hate and anger, and nowhere to aim but home. Flowers grow through the dust of the desert from unmarked graves, but nobody picks them. There's no place for beauty in Black Rock, but there can be. A film about rebuilding America by rooting out the darkness. The flowers are there, it's just a matter of finding them.

The Conformist | Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970

A man trying again and again to assimilate into whichever crowd will have him, only he doesn't fit anywhere, never able to flow with the currents of anything beyond self-preservation and stuck in a spiral of people dancing around him, enjoying a rhythm he can't find. A spare part of a man at best, and, when it comes down to it, an impotent one. Lacerating in its depiction of how fascism serves as the most appealing shortcut to power for worthless men like this, men who crave a feeling of importance without having to do anything to earn it. Men who have meetings in large offices in marble buildings, their voices reverberating loudly to no one. It's so easy to sound important in a cavernously empty room.

Cloud | Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2024

An online world of slippery motivations and directionless anger brought into reality by the shattering of the illusion of anonymity. A lack of culpability dragging everyone closer to hell. Kurosawa fills it with frosted glass, dirty polythene, tattered curtains; obscured windows into other worlds. Usernames and aliases, lies and scams. The shift to violence comes when the fog clears and the masks slip, and one true fact brings the whole thing down. All that's left is a void of money where love used to be, and the only thing that sparks a smile is a symbol on a screen changing from "for sale" to "sold".

Golem | Piotr Szulkin, 1979

Shadows and blindness, and a total lack of information. A fake man's desire to understand a world in which everyone knows more than he does, as he's pushed deeper into a maze by the lure of learning something. Fix this watch, carry this oven, poison those birds. But no questions, just demands. No choices, no alternatives. A lot of narrow staircases, thin corridors, grey concrete streets. One path laid out for him. Blunt, bleak, crushing. Everyone has cataracts but the eye doctor is dead.

Hard Truths | Mike Leigh, 2024

Leigh has always had a thing about potted plants, and flowers in vases, and here they are again. Life without life, separated from nature and reliant on human care and attention. A big, empty house, all light but no air, and no decoration. Just sanitised surfaces and people tiptoeing between them, scared to leave a mark or make a sound. Everyone exists in the orbit of Pansy (another flower). Her defeated husband, who fixes radiators in other people’s homes, and her son, always wearing headphones, who wants to fly. Elsewhere, her sister and her nieces are always warm, always out in the world, enjoying life. For Leigh, it’s impossible to be happy without letting life in. When Moses buys his mother flowers, she anxiously puts them in a vase, only for Curtley to throw them into the overgrown garden when she leaves the room. This home is no place for flowers. And so it goes on.

In The Wake | Takahisa Zeze, 2021

A police procedural, with a murder investigation framed as a search for justice of a different kind. Zeze spends very little time on the police work, focusing instead on building all these characters from the horrors of the 2011 tsunami, and the pain they have had to endure in the nine years after. Everyone has lost something, and so everyone understands the impulses that drive such murders. Choices in context, and Zeze exhaustively draws that context for everyone involved. A bit too contrived in its linking of all these people, but an immensely powerful study of corruption and inhumanity all the same — visualised beautifully by the fully dressed but faceless mannequin decorating the office of a politician running for office on a ticket of welfare reform.

Pale Flower | Masahiro Shinoda, 1964

Blank faces, slumped shoulders. Life as a succession of larger and larger bets, and searching for thrills within the rigid systems and protocols of high-stakes card games and yakuza turf wars. A film about playing games to feel alive, and playing with nothing to lose. Prison is just time spent somewhere else. Financial losses mean nothing. And so everyone hurtles towards oblivion, trying to feel something in the process before there's nothing left to feel.

Rancho Notorious | Fritz Lang, 1952

A quest for revenge borne from tragedy. A film that opens with a kiss and ends with a death, all loaded with emotion, but Lang muddies the waters by having it all play out under the fake skies of a different kind of world. Corrupt politicians held in custody on election day by the men set to take their place. A rigged game in a makeshift casino designed to make winners feel lucky. Everything is predetermined. Even this man's revenge becomes an obligation, something that he will achieve simply because he has nothing else to do but achieve it. And so the seasons pass. Summer comes round again and the chase continues in perpetuity. He thinks he's acting out of love but that's long since rotted away. He can only gesture towards it, faking and weaponising it as he moves further and further away from the man he used to be. His only propulsion is revenge. And once that's gone, there's nowhere left to go.

Suzhou River | Lou Ye, 2000

Stories as mythical creatures, their allure stemming from an unquashable mystery. Mermaids probably aren't real, but maybe they are. Maybe doppelgängers are, too. A wounded man tells a story of lost love, first through his own eyes, and then through someone else's. Imagined events, told perhaps as self-deception, perhaps as a way to make a painful reality less banal, or perhaps because this is how things really happened. It’s impossible to know anything with certainty. A glimpse of a mermaid in a muddy river, flowing endlessly past the shells of derelict buildings and seen through the imprecise lens of a handheld camera. Everything is true and nothing is. All there is to do is find a glimmer of something to hold on to in the mystery. And isn’t that why we tell stories?

Tausend Augen | Hans-Christoph Blumenberg, 1984

Surveillance and voyeurism as routes to hell, numbing all feeling from life and pushing people towards a catatonic pursuit of money but nothing to spend it on. Only engaging with the world with curiosity brings happiness, be it watching movies or sketching people or going to zoos or dancing. Also features Jean-Marie Straub delivering a lecture on marine biology, and Wim Wenders stealing a VHS copy of Dr Mabuse the Gambler from a video store. A truly alien object.

Letterboxd Reviews #3

It’s been a while since I published a compendium of Letterboxd reviews so, of course, here are two at once. In the past couple of years, I’ve been writing more and more on Letterboxd, Mostly just brief snippets and short texts, but I like them all, however small, however fragmented they may be, and I’m keen to keep a record of them here. So here we go. Part one of a bumper crop. In case you missed it, here's part two. The texts in this post were written between April 2021 and September 2024, and are presented in alphabetical order. I hope you enjoy reading them. 

The 400 Blows | Francois Truffaut, 1959

A brutal portrait of "adult" life built entirely from inference and assumption. Antoine sets the table for dinner without thinking because he knows what will happen if it's not set. He tells lies, not to avoid responsibility but to buy himself time, to prolong his moments of peace a little longer. A film about crushed hope, and holding on to something as a means of staying alive. The rules are the rules. Nothing will change, and obedience is death, so rebellion is all that's left for a boy who wants to live. And failing that, running. Leaving it all behind in search of something better. Of course he ends up on a beach, both a dream and a prison, offering a world of possible futures without any means of reaching them. Faced with everything and nothing all at once, how do you know where to go?

A.K.A. Serial Killer | Masao Adachi, 1975

A man of Japan. Places and words intertwined to contextualise the biography of a mass-murderer within the spaces he may have inhabited. No attempt to diagnose this man, no speculation or sensationalism. Just the places, as mundane as any others, the facts of this man's life, as they're known, and the four murders he committed, across four cities, with the same gun. Adachi builds an equation and leaves the answer blank but shows his working anyway.

Ambulance | Michael Bay, 2022

An interesting counterpoint to Tony Scott’s Unstoppable, partly in terms of its unwavering commitment to a high-octane, fast-cutting visual style, but specifically in terms of its approach to transportation. As a filmmaker, Scott seems most at home on a train, with everything headed in one direction and geographically mapped from station to station. The dramatic tension stems from an ability to foresee and predict a situation, prepare for it, and deal with it: a steep bend ahead, another train on the track. It's more methodical than Bay, whose approach is almost entirely the opposite. He’s most at home on the road, with infinite moving parts causing chaos. There’s freedom on the highway, so nothing is controllable or predictable. A tyre could blow out, or traffic could build up, along with a million other possibilities. The drama of Bay’s work comes from an ability to react to situations as they happen and maintain that forward momentum at any cost, and his chaotic visuals provide enough of a sense of what's happening. It doesn't matter where you are, just that things are moving forwards. And just as Scott knows the track has to end somewhere, Bay knows that all roads can lead to any destination. Whether you can see it happen or not, one way or another, A will always lead to B in the end.

The Boy And The Heron | Hayao Miyazaki, 2023

Several traumatic experiences befall a young boy in quick succession and he retreats into formalities and silence, rehearsed gestures in public that give the impression of normality while he's lured into a well of sadness, in which a chaotic encounter with a magical world filled with magical creatures threatens to overwhelm him. The boy has to face this world and its bizarre rules and rituals, in all their labyrinthine complications, and by doing so he comes to terms with the fact that controlling this chaos will not save him. The only way to manoeuvre through grief and pain and parakeets is by rolling with the punches and finding a way to live with reality, not as it ought to be but as it really is — and then life can go on.

The Fog | John Carpenter, 1980

It’s dangerous to cherry-pick your history. The fog billows in from the ocean as a small coastal town celebrates its centennial. A spectacle first, a glowing freak of nature drifting against the wind, and eventually an inexplicable threat — a brutal reminder of a long-buried past, but the party carries on regardless. The local radio station broadcasts from a secluded lighthouse, but only at night, the soothing voice of host Adrienne Barbeau the perfect soundtrack for rest and relaxation, and an empty church is only ever occupied for business or shelter. The priest's warnings fall on deaf ears. Illumination is an afterthought. Anything unworthy of a party or a statue remains lost to history. Stay asleep.

Interstellar | Christopher Nolan, 2014

Arguably the peak of Nolan's obsession with time as a dramatic device. And it is an obsession. A film about time past and passing, ghosts and echoes, crops and wrinkles. Everything is reduced (or elevated) to seconds, minutes, decades. The dust rolling in over the hills, the waves cresting on the horizon. Getting closer. For Nolan, there is no greater commodity than time and so it hurts like hell to lose it. Recorded messages from children left behind and a flooded engine on a distant planet are one and the same. Painful reminders of all the seconds, minutes and decades that aren't ever coming back.

Labyrinth of Dreams | Gakuryu Ishii, 1997

Routines repeated again and again and so the mind wanders. Images keep coming back: a ticket punch, the passing of clouds, driving rain and steam; and letters of warning based on feelings and vibes linger on the mind, pondered in silence as something to do on a boring day at work. A longing for adventure, for excitement, for the possibility of danger just to break the tedium. Rumours create reality and the truth is decided, not proven. "If only he was a normal person". And maybe he is. A film about the folly of building a house on sand, without ever denying the possibility that all of it may actually be true.

The Last Duel | Ridley Scott, 2021

Blood, metal, sweat and mud, as expected, but far more interestingly a Rashomon-aping structure that allows subtle differences in remembered details (a falling slipper, a kiss, a saved life) to gradually reveal these men to be narcissistic, monstrous and, frankly, deranged. This being Ridley Scott, it's a film about power structures, and each man's account is an attempt to position himself as somehow more worthy of power and adoration than the other. One man assaults the other's wife and it's he who has been wronged. His wife doesn't come into it. It's only in Comer's account of events that we even see her as a person, someone who thinks and feels and exists on her own, and not as an object for a man to valiantly die for or kill for. That this film ends on her perspective and ends as it does is quite damning, I think, of both the systems that serve to provide men the opportunity to act as heroes in the name of justice, but equally that the only justice at all for the survivors of such crimes exists within these same systems. "The truth does not matter. There is only the power of men".

The Life of Jesus | Bruno Dumont, 1997

Bike helmets and roaring engines, the contrast between safety and menace. One minute, a gang of local white boys are thoughtfully counselling a grief-stricken friend or trying to teach a bird to sing, and the next they’re muttering racial slurs in the direction of a family speaking Arabic in a café. In this village, compassion for the community and hatred towards anyone outside of it is totally normal, and there are no consequences for the casual acts of violence that keep perceived outsiders in the margins. Dumont loads the film with accidents waiting to happen (health scares, reckless driving) that never actually come to anything, and these charmed lives give a horrible air of inevitability to how this ultimately comes to an end.

Red Eye | Wes Craven, 2005

There's a moment early on in which a young girl travelling alone for the first time flippantly (and awkwardly) tells her coddling mother: "I'm eleven, not nine", and the ghosts of 9/11 really linger all over the film. Craven builds a palpable fear of air-travel even before Murphy starts making threats: bad weather, rude passengers, delays, turbulence; even the mechanical process of shutting the doors and the screeching roar of take-off feel designed to emphasise just how much faith we put into engineering and skilled labour when we step onto a plane. But then this is really all about a lack of control, or specifically how to take back control of a situation in which the deck is stacked against you. For Craven, the scars of the past give resilience in the present, and the persistence of an increasingly resourceful McAdams, in her unshakeable desire to push back against the transparent demands and cat-and-mouse games of an increasingly frantic Murphy, ultimately serves to remove him of all of his charm and menace and control, and transform him into a squeaky-voiced, prat-falling idiot, outwitted, outmatched, and completely out of his depth, laying on the floor as sirens blare in the distance, looking up at her as she stands defiantly over him.

Red Line 7000 | Howard Hawks, 1965

At the track, Hawks shows the commentators, the pit-crew, the drivers, their loved ones, but never the crowd. This isn't racing as spectacle but racing as vocation, as profession; racing as obsession, where the risks are known, winning is the only goal, and other people have to hope they come home. Crash after crash after crash. The odds are against them, and yet they keep racing. A perfunctory funeral, well-trodden and numbed to sentiment. The risks are known. It happens too often. Crash after crash. Women watch through their fingers in the stands, and the men just go home, back to a facade of a normal life at the Holiday Inn, waiting for the next race to start. Neither love nor danger are enough to stop them. And so they keep racing.

Targets | Peter Bogdanovich, 1968

The work of a young man with an old heart. A real death of America movie, in which an aging actor reckons with his status as a relic of a bygone era and plans to leave it all behind, while a young suburban family man suddenly snaps and embarks upon a killing spree. Bogdanovich's suburbs are pristine and empty, all pastel-painted homes, beige chinos and white plimsolls, well-maintained lawns, a facade of peaceful living where everyone has access to guns and ammunition and the birds just keep on singing. As long as the surface is calm the rest can be ignored, left to simmer until it’s too late. And it is too late. The young man, politely and superficially ignored by his family, amasses an arsenal and takes to the streets. Meanwhile, Karloff, an effortlessly charming and melancholic man, reminisces about the good old days with a young director, played by Bogdanovich, and laments what Los Angeles has turned into. He’s a man without a future, too, but at least he has an audience of people willing to listen to him talk about it. Maybe a little too academic for my taste but certainly an effective piece of work, and there are some wonderful moments when Bogdanovich loosens the shackles — particularly Karloff’s magnetic recitation of an old ghost story in defiance of a shock-jock’s inane line of questioning, and the extraordinary sequence at the drive-in, with attendees trying to warn each other about an active shooter without drawing attention to themselves by opening their car doors.

Terrorizers | Edward Yang, 1986

A film about gravity, of sorts, in which the weight of a city pulls everything down into the ground and leaves its inhabitants to fight for their place in the clouds. Pot plants and fish tanks, barriers and veils, lies and tricks. Everything held at a distance to make the inevitable more palatable. Only those at the bottom seem to feel the pain of the crush, and so their climbs of course become more desperate. Blood signifies death, vomit life. Nobody feels anything in the end. A brutal scramble for fluids.

International Film Festival Rotterdam 2025

International Film Festival Rotterdam 2025 | #1

It’s freezing in Rotterdam in January and Albert Serra is feeling it. “It’s so cold, it’s hard for me to go to the cinema,” the Catalan director, draped in a heavy coat, told the sell-out crowd before a Saturday night screening of Afternoons of Solitude. It’s an odd place and an odd time to be watching a film about bullfighting, but this late-winter climate certainly helps to emphasise its position as something of an alien transmission. The film follows Andrés Roca Rey, a superstar matador, and his team as they move from bullfight to bullfight over the course of several months, with long takes observing all the processes and routines that come with it. Serra captures the long car journeys between fights with a camera fixed to the back of a headrest in a Rolls Royce SUV, pointed squarely at Roca Rey as he sits in an awkward closeup with everyone else looming in the background. Elsewhere, a lingering camera emphasises the time he spends getting ready in opulent hotels, underlining the complexity and flamboyance of this clothing and the awkwardness of putting it on and taking it off. And then there are the bullfights themselves, violent, tense, and extremely drawn out so as to make visible every gesture, every sound and every detail, with unblinking ferocity. 

A film of interiors, where even an arena in the pouring rain becomes a private space, sealed off from the world, existing only between a man and his art. Much like Howard Hawks did with Red Line 7000, Serra never shows the crowd, keeping their gasps, their cheers, and their boos off-screen. This isn’t about spectacle or entertainment, but a ritualistic study of one man’s obsessive pursuit of perfection, for his own benefit and nobody else’s. Again and again he gets in the ring, goading creatures that could easily kill him (and on multiple occasions, they almost do), only to do it all again the next time, and the next. He’s never happy, constantly critiquing the minutiae of his performance or the length of time it took for a bull to die after his killing blow. But he continues, with help from his sycophantic team, who relentlessly inflate his ego and build his confidence (“what balls you have!”). 

It’s easy to see Serra’s interest in this world. His characters tend to be powerful, regal, and hubristic, but ultimately fragile, and Andrés Roca Rey is certainly of this lineage, much like the aging Casanova of Story of My Death, the bed-ridden king in The Death of Louis XIV, and the increasingly irrelevant De Roller of Pacifiction. The only difference is that while these men are all fading forces, Roca Rey is at the peak of his powers. The best bullfighter in the world. A man of great violence and great fragility, whose artistry requires him to exude arrogance while risking his life. If anything, it’s bullfighting that’s fading around him. A fascinating and barbaric tradition, increasingly out of place in the modern world, but still able to draw an audience. And so, as long as the crowd keeps baying for blood, people like Andrés Roca Rey will continue to refine their art until there’s nobody left to watch it.

The day after seeing Albert Serra’s film, I saw Wei Shujun’s equally sun-drenched I Dreamed A Dream on a night just as cold, or maybe even colder than the last. The film, receiving its world premiere at the festival, follows five rappers pushed together as part of a competitive audition process and left marooned at a beach resort while they wait (and wait) for a mysterious director to arrive to start shooting a film with them. There’s nothing much for them to do, so they just hang out on the beach, working on their tans and watching Wild Strawberries on a laptop, all at the request of the director (named Godod, of course) but communicated to them via his irritable assistant, whose role is to keep them focused and make sure they stick around. As their boredom intensifies, and their wait goes on, they each begin to have dreams that can barely be distinguished from reality. One of the men imagines himself as the director, shooting a scene and impatiently delivering vague notes to his actors. Another has a flirtatious back-and-forth with a woman in a bar in fluent French, while another tries to leave the hotel and go home, in spite of the increasingly desperate and theatrical pleas of the director’s assistant.

Shot quickly as a self-described stop-gap between other projects, I Dreamed A Dream has the feel of being made up on the fly. Time passes, and nothing really happens. Scenes stretch out in long takes, lingering as if waiting for something that never arrives, offering no escape from the monotony. And then, suddenly, another place, another time, another situation to navigate. In this state of suspended animation, stuck on an island, in hotels and on beaches, all these men have is each other, and Wei emphasises this camaraderie throughout, showing them writing songs together, hanging out together, and rallying together to make fun of the director’s assistant. In these long scenes, there’s no fixed point of view. The camera observes the group as if filming a documentary. But in dreams, each of the men has his own perspective. A set of images designed to reveal something personal that isn’t necessarily visible in the collective. Wei offers no interpretation of these dreams. They just drift in and out, much like the rest of it. Time passes, and everything blends together, be it dream and reality, performance and reality, fact and fiction. A beguiling puzzle-box from a fascinating new voice.

2024 in Cinema

If a cinematic year delivers new works by David Cronenberg, Jia Zhangke, Albert Serra, and Mike Leigh, four filmmakers I’ve spent a great deal of time with over the past fifteen years or so, is it possible to summarise it without having seen a single one of them? And not just these four, but several others, too. Dozens of films I’ve wanted to track down but for one reason or another haven’t yet been able to. The answer is, of course, yes. Yes it is possible, but I’m certain that this roundup, more than any of the others I’ve written over the past decade, will be one I look back on as being frustratingly incomplete. A fragment of a fragment. A skim of a year that most likely demanded a much closer read than I’ve been able to give it. 

It’s rare that I feel as if I’ve missed more than I’ve seen, certainly in terms of the major films, which perhaps isn’t fair to the films I did manage to see, but I’m leaving 2024 with the impression that there’s still so much more left to unearth. Thankfully a year’s worth of cinema doesn’t just disappear because the calendar ticks over, and I’ll be able to see the majority of these films eventually. It’s just a lot harder to keep up with them all retroactively. The bigger ones, like Here, or The Brutalist, will inevitably be released in cinemas in the coming months, and a few others will end up on streaming services sooner rather than later. But not all of them. Plenty will be lost in the shuffle. And a new year brings its own cinema, its own riches to mine, and so the pile continues to grow. For the sake of keeping track, I’ve felt the need to list everything that has piqued my interest from the past twelve months that I've not seen yet. At the time of writing, it has fifty-two films on it.

A backlog like this is usually the sign of a strong year, and from what I’ve seen I’d say it’s been a pretty good one. I did my usual trek around Europe for a couple of festivals (Berlin, Ghent, London), caught a few interesting new releases and one-off screenings, and made some exciting discoveries at home. Another year of the same routine, and while familiarity and structure isn’t necessarily a bad thing, I am once again wishing I’d managed to mix things up a little more than I did. But, then again, life has moved on for me. When I started this blog in 2015, I was twenty-four and able to spend as much time as I wanted immersed in cinema. I’m thirty-three now, and I just do not have the same time or the same energy to roll the dice anymore. I spent a lot of my time in my early twenties as a prospector, diligently taking the time to sift through the silt and the mud to find an occasional nugget of gold. As I’ve entered my thirties I’ve become a card counter, trying to game the system as much as I can in order to spend what little free time I have as wisely as I can. Aside from the odd misstep, this has largely worked for me, and I’ve still ended up seeing a decent number of good movies. I can’t really complain too much about that.

With all that in mind, it feels as if this year has been one of dilemmas, of balancing the scales of one’s own conscience. A look of horror suddenly spreading over a new father’s face as he’s forced to confront the consequences of his actions in Juror #2. A smirk of uncontainable joy passing over the face of an online reseller as he watches his stock of fake designer handbags sell out in real time on a screen in an empty room in Cloud. A glimmer of resigned sadness etched on the face of a woman at the precise moment she realises just how much she risked for the sake of a dream that was never going to happen in Three Friends. And the desirous glances made by a priest across a dinner table towards a mysterious young stranger in Misericordia. A year of faces, and facades, and how, when it comes down to it, they’re the first thing to give the game away.

But of everything, I’ve returned most frequently to the closing moments of Leos Carax’s It’s Not Me, in which several veiled puppeteers work to recreate a scene from Mauvais Sang, set to David Bowie’s Modern Love, with the marionette from Annette, not out in the streets of Paris but in a studio, with a revolving backdrop and a treadmill, and the uncannily expressionless face of a puppet. In some ways, this is a work of archaeology on the part of Carax, but it’s also a step into the future. A new way to keep the old ghosts alive. The past is the past, but it can exist again as something new. Yes, some part of it is lost, but something else takes its place. I think this is where I’m at as 2024 draws to a close. A happy card counter, keeping an ear to the ground, seeing what I can, noting what I can’t, and being okay with the balance. So while I’ve not covered as much ground as I’ve perhaps wanted to this year, I think I’m in a pretty good place all the same.

In alphabetical order:

A Traveller’s Needs | Hong Sang-soo

The Cats of Gokogu Shrine | Kazuhiro Soda

Cloud | Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Favoriten | Ruth Beckermann

Grand Tour | Miguel Gomes

Juror #2 | Clint Eastwood

Megalopolis | Francis Ford Coppola

Misericordia | Alain Guiraudie

7 Walks With Mark Brown | Pierre Creton, Vincent Barré

Sleep With Your Eyes Open | Nele Wohlatz

Super Happy Forever | Kohei Igarashi

Three Friends | Emmanuel Mouret

__________

Ten discoveries, of which seven were watched at home; two in London; and one, Herzsprung, in Berlin, as part of the festival’s retrospective strand, screened to a full-house in the CUBIX in Alexanderplatz with the director and lead actors present for an all-German Q&A. It’s rare that I see something without any semblance of context, but that’s what I did with Herzpsrung, and that intangible curiosity was rewarded ten times over. A spectacular reminder that beneath the canon lies some truly extraordinary movies. A nice incentive to keep digging.

In chronological order:

My Darling Clementine | John Ford, 1946

Silver Lode | Allan Dwan, 1954

Rio Bravo | Howard Hawks, 1959

Stolen Kisses | Francois Truffaut, 1968

American Graffiti | George Lucas, 1973

The Village of Mist | Im Kwon-taek, 1983

Herzsprung | Helke Misselwitz, 1992

Kamikaze Taxi | Masato Harada, 1994

Mahjong | Edward Yang, 1996

The River | Tsai Ming-liang, 1997

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Against all odds, I’ve managed to keep my monthly newsletter, Strange Days, running for another year. It’s been nice to get back into the habit of writing on a consistent basis again, and I think I’m a lot better off because of it. If you’re inclined to keep up with what I’m reading and playing and watching and listening to, then please feel free to pore over the archive here, and subscribe if you'd like to.

Elsewhere, I think it’s fair to say that I, and many of you, I’m sure, have been gradually checking out of social media, but in the spirit of keeping an ear to the ground I’m not entirely done just yet. I have a Bluesky account that I use sporadically to post screenshots of movies like it’s 2014, and for now it’s serving its purpose. I have to say it’s difficult to muster much enthusiasm for it, but I’ll be there for a little while longer.

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Best Albums (5 old, 5 new)

Long Season | Fishmans, 1996

Fantasma | Cornelius, 1997

A Demonstration | Kolya, 1999

The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place | Explosions in the Sky, 2003

Origami | Ichiko Aoba, 2011

Tigers Blood | Waxahatchee, 2024

If I Don’t Make It, I Love You | Still House Plants, 2024

All Hell | Los Campesinos!, 2024

You Never End | Moin, 2024

GNX | Kendrick Lamar, 2024

I didn’t dig too deeply this year, or too widely. In terms of live music, I saw Explosions in the Sky in Brighton, Death Cab For Cutie and Phoenix (and several others) at All Points East, and Ichiko Aoba and Cornelius at the Barbican. I’m hoping to see more and hear more in 2025.

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I read twenty-five novels in 2024, which is up from zero last year. Rediscovering my love of reading has been a wonderful thing for me, and I can only imagine that this will continue. I’m currently half-way through Mo Yan’s Big Breasts and Wide Hips (1996), which would almost certainly have made this list if I’d been able to finish it in time.

In chronological order:

Another Country | James Baldwin, 1962

Portnoy’s Complaint | Philip Roth, 1969

The New York Trilogy | Paul Auster, 1987

The Black Dahlia | James Ellroy, 1987

American Psycho | Bret Easton Ellis, 1991

Kafka on the Shore | Haruki Murakami, 2002

The Road | Cormac McCarthy, 2006

The Vegetarian | Han Kang, 2007

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead | Olga Tokarczuk, 2009

Small Things Like These | Claire Keegan, 2021

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If you’ve made it to the end of this roundup, thank you. It really does mean a lot to know that someone reads these things. As the year comes to a close, all that’s left for me to say is that I hope you’re well, and happy, and that you can find the time to take a break over this festive season. All the best for 2025.

London Film Festival 2024

London Film Festival 2024 | #1

Visions of fear. In Neo Sora’s Happyend, the Japan of the future is under attack from the natural world. An impending earthquake has been forecast, and this society lives in its shadow, with its threat used as a means for right-wing politicians to impose invasive rules and laws in the name of public safety. Follow the rules and survive. Break the rules and put everyone in danger. A culture of fear, in which to not abide by the rules of the group is the same as acting against it. And so racism flourishes, and violence, and hate, and the cycle of fear perpetuates itself. The generations that lived through Fukushima keep voting in the fascists, and the young have to live with their choices. Sora centres the film around a group of students in a Tokyo high school in the early 2040s (a date gleaned only from a few posters on the wall) as they try to live normal teenage lives: hanging out, listening to music, smoking, falling in love, breaking rules. But all in a constant state of invisible anxiety, waiting for an inevitable disaster that never comes. Alarms sound regularly on phones and rooms shake again and again. But it’s never as bad as it could’ve been. Maybe the next one will be.

Following an elaborate but seemingly harmless prank, which their headteacher tellingly and po-facedly describes as an act of terrorism, an AI driven surveillance system is launched in the school, tracking the students’ every move and penalising any rule breaking within the scope of its many, many cameras. This school is a microcosm of Japan, and these teenagers, not content to be placed under scrutiny, are forced to confront reality. Sora frames the film directly from the student’s eyes, and portrays their political awakenings exactly as they would experience them: messily, fervently, urgently. A first step into the real world, taken wholeheartedly with the intent to change things for the better. And they do drive change, just not on their terms. And so Happyend becomes a film of firsts: loves, heartbreaks; and first encounters with the slipperiness of an authoritarian political hierarchy willing to do anything to stay in power.

A similar desire to break free from (very different) forces of control is the driving force behind Miguel Gomes’ Grand Tour. Set in the 1910s, Edward, a British diplomat, waits on a pier in Rangoon for his fiancée, Molly, to arrive on a boat from England. He hasn’t seen her for seven years, and has doubts about the idea of marrying her. Impulsively, he runs away, jumping on the first boat out of town and embarking on a sprawling journey across Asia, stopping in Singapore and Bangkok, Manila and Saigon, Shanghai and Osaka. On and on. City after city after city, never staying in one place for long before moving quickly onto another. Gomes first shows Edward’s attempts to escape, and then jumps back to Molly as she, not to be deterred, chases after him, picking up his trail again and again as he fruitlessly tries to shake her off. 

He chooses to run. She chooses to follow. A film about the ability to practise one’s own autonomy in a continent colonised by outsiders. An irony not lost on Gomes, who frequently underlines this outsider’s perspective by cutting between narrative images shot on a soundstage, vivid and ghostly, and documentary footage of the same locations in the present day, some in black and white, some in colour. All combining to form a stereotypical depiction of the countries and cities that Edward and Molly once passed through a century before: mopeds, puppet shows, mahjong, fortune tellers, martial arts displays; touristic images to create an outsider’s view of Asia as one single, amorphous entity. For Gomes, this colonial gaze is how Edward and Molly, perhaps unwittingly, turn the continent into a playground. A film viewed through the eyes of two people who think they know these places but haven’t even begun to understand them. And as they find themselves moving through China, through Chengdu and beyond, deeper and deeper inland and further and further from the port cities that opened up the world for them, they separately begin to lose their bearings, their senses, and, ultimately, themselves. A romantic film that morphs and shifts into a perilous one. A century of misunderstanding, of false confidence built on hubris, held within one man’s fear of the world he left behind, and an embrace of a world he will never make sense of. A century of refusing to engage, coming home to roost.

Film Fest Gent 2024 | #1

Film Fest Gent 2024 | #1

There are an astonishing number of bikes in Ghent. Dozens and dozens and dozens of them at a time, all chained up in racks or on fences outside cafés and bars and train stations and cinemas, anywhere they fit, or clunking and whirring over cobbled streets day and night alongside a few trams and fewer buses and even fewer cars. The city is calmer because of it, even its bustling historical centre, where scores of tourists crowd and linger in front of cathedrals while locals zip silently between them on their bicycles. There's not much of a roar, of a drone. It’s all very peaceful, very simple, very slow. A nice place to walk around in, to have a beer in, to get lost in. And, as it turns out, to watch films in, which is how I ended up in Belgium in the first place. To watch films in a new city and to get lost in new streets. In the four days I was in town for Film Fest Gent, I ended up getting lost plenty of times, and managed to see eleven films. Some good, some less so. But all worthwhile in one way or another. The ones that hit the hardest were all about the same sense of aimless wandering that I was hoping to find for myself.

It would make sense to start with Tsai Ming-liang’s Abiding Nowhere, a film specifically about walking for the sake of walking. The tenth and supposedly final film in his Walker series, which began in 2012, Abiding Nowhere tracks in extended long takes the protracted movements of a monk, barefoot and dressed in vivid red robes, as he glacially walks through a series of spaces in and around Washington, D.C., starting in a forest before moving onto the city and its landmarks. Tsai cuts between the walker and another solitary man as he separately passes through many of the same spaces, but not at the same time, and the two men never cross paths. After more than a decade, the fundamentals of the Walker films are well established, and besides some subtle variations, like an occasional companion or a cut or a pan within the frame, very little has changed. Little except, of course, the locations. Washington D.C. isn’t as busy or as vibrant as Tsai’s previous cityscapes of Hong Kong or Marseille or Tokyo, with the monk more often than not framed against tastefully graffitied walls and sterile marble buildings. But Tsai fills these bland spaces with the cacophonous roar of planes and cars, all constantly screaming past off-screen. Modes of transport in stark contrast to the walker’s slow journey on foot, and an incessant reminder of the speed of modern life. As the monk moves, the world moves past him, again and again, leaving him behind. He’s still walking while the other man, having covered much of the same ground already, eats noodles on his own in his sparse, silent hotel room. The planes keep flying and the cars keep driving. Tsai isn’t particularly interested in assigning meanings to these images, and Abiding Nowhere is, as with the rest of the Walker series, a film about the simple act of observation. A film of watching how the world reacts to the walker, and of how he keeps walking in spite of all the noise, all the chaos, all the reasons to move faster. In an accelerated world, slowness will always be an act of defiance.

In Steven Soderbergh’s Presence, observation is the only thing possible. Filmed entirely from the perspective of a ghost haunting a suburban American home, the film plays out as a series of vignettes in which this ghost drifts aimlessly around the confines of the building and watches life unfold for the family who’ve just moved into it. As they settle into their new house, the tensions and traumas that brought them there are gradually revealed, or eavesdropped upon by the ghost, and it’s not long before they begin to sense an intangible presence: first as a feeling, of being watched, of not being alone, and later as witnesses to the inexplicable. Soderbergh’s camera functions as the ghost’s eyes, and these sensory encounters are presented as a direct response to the ghost’s proximity to members of the family. At one point, for example, a teenage girl suddenly stops in her tracks and spins around in startled surprise, expecting to see something, but of course there's nothing there. However, the close up of her face at this moment suggests that not only is the ghost in the room with her, just as she thought, right in front of her, looking straight at her, but that she was briefly able to perceive its presence, too. It’s a startling inversion of a classic jump-scare, in which the fear of being discovered is replaced by the fear of being watched by something impossible to comprehend. As the fragmentary narrative begins to fall into place, Soderbergh starts to explore the limitations of such an invisible perspective. Eventually, the ghost is rendered a passive observer to a terrible situation in which it cannot intervene but equally cannot turn away from, and so the scene plays out in a frustrating, excruciating long-take as things get worse and worse, while the ghost frantically tries to intervene. These moments reminded me of Brian De Palma’s Blow Out, which, perhaps coincidentally, I saw for maybe the dozenth time as part of the festival’s retrospective strand the following day, a film in which a sound technician hears a murder in real time but cannot do anything to prevent it. In Presence, the dangers are seen as well as heard, and viewed in extreme close up. And yet being an observer is still not enough. A brutal study of powerlessness.

There’s a similar sense of dread and desolation lingering over Kohei Igarashi’s Super Happy Forever. A man wanders aimlessly around a luxurious but near-empty tropical beach resort in the days before its closure, dragging his feet, looking miserable. He throws his phone in the sea mid-call. He asks a bewildered hotel receptionist whether they’ve found a red baseball cap he lost five years ago. And he abruptly leaves a conversation to perform a karaoke version of Bobby Darin’s Beyond The Sea. His behaviour is erratic to say the least, and it’s only a matter-of-fact comment in passing that reveals the reason for his unhappiness: his wife died a few days ago. Igarashi builds the film backwards from there, starting with this man’s grief and jumping back to five years earlier, to show how he and his wife met for the first time at this hotel and fell in love. Details from the present (the baseball cap, the room number, Beyond The Sea) are given their significance by the past. But they aren’t shown as memories. Igarashi adds a dimension of objectivity by jumping back in time to show the beginnings of this romance in flashback from her perspective, not his, and it has the effect of corroborating everything we’ve learned from him about their relationship. In the present, he explains how he first saw her in the hotel lobby, and in the past, we see this situation play out through her eyes in exactly the way he described it. There are no inflections, inconsistencies. No embellishments. And so the image becomes more concrete, more believable. And more powerful because of it. A film in which the present is enriched by the past, again and again, and so this love builds and builds through every new detail, towards an inevitable tragedy. A sad, straightforward love story told from end to beginning and one that, in its final gestures, begins to move forwards, onwards into an uncertain but hopeful future somewhere beyond the sea. 

Twister | Jan de Bont, 1996

Twister | Jan de Bont, 1996

The calm before. The first four shots of Jan de Bont’s Twister (1996) set an ominous tone. Empty landscapes in rural America, dwarfed by the sky above, darkness closing in. A gentle evening punctuated by the chirps of crickets. The fading remnants of the day’s sunlight slowly smothered by clouds. There are no people in sight, just their creations: a small farm and a pumpjack, a truss bridge across a river, a barbed-wire fence; each designed to give man some kind of hold over nature: to farm it, to traverse it, to segment it. And then, finally, a shot of the cloud-filled sky above a distant row of trees. Uncontrollable, unpredictable, unknowable. A constant, looming presence, beautiful and terrifying in equal measure. And then a crash of lightning tips the scales. Man has conquered the land and the threat now comes from above. The wind starts howling and the calm is over.

Challengers | Luca Guadagnino, 2024

Challengers | Luca Guadagnino, 2024

Tennis is an inherently cinematic sport, not just in its ability to create narrative, but also in its tragedy. A sport in which it’s possible to win more points and more games than your opponent and still lose; or lose more and still win. A sport about winning the points that matter. It’s in this idea that Guadagnino roots the film. A sport, and a film, about fluid contexts and constant reinvention, grinding down your opponent and preying on their weakness. Tennis and life, indistinguishable from one another. Winning at both is playing the game to win, and deciphering the points that matter from the ones that don’t. Come onnnnnnnnnnn!

2023 in Cinema

A year of considering the variables. I watched The Long Good Friday for the first time in the spring and its final moments have stayed with me all year. A man lost in the present with absolutely no idea how he got there, coming to terms with the end of the road as street lights stream past in the background. A grimace of clenched teeth. A lot of the films I’ve loved this year are in one way or another about people who have misread the room, or no longer understand what’s in front of them, and I don’t know why these kinds of films keep resonating with me. Perhaps it’s part of some drawn-out crisis of my early thirties. A lot of things in my life have changed this year, in joyful ways for the most part, but not exclusively, though it doesn’t feel as if I’ve had much time to savour the highs or the lows as much as I should have. Things keep happening, again and again, and the weeks roll by a little faster. I’m not lost in the chaos, by any means. I’m not Harold Shand, cogs whirring, frantically trying to make sense of how I got here, powerless to change anything. And yet the image keeps coming back to me all the same.

In terms of things I have been able to control, I’ve had a necessarily quiet year of film-watching. I’ve wanted to disengage a little and just enjoy the things that I want to enjoy, without the noise, and broadly I’ve done that. I’m on pace to end the year with an average of about one film every two days, which, by any measure, is still far too much cinema, but it’s a start. It’s definitely been nice to ease off and do other things with my time. In saying that, though, I’ve still been to all the usual festivals: Berlin in February, Edinburgh in August, London and Vienna in October; each one equal parts fun and frustrating in its own way, but I’ve enjoyed them all to varying extents. I’m starting to wonder whether this part of my life is winding down a little. As much fun as it is to lose myself in a city for the sake of cinema, the festival experience isn’t as exciting to me now as it was a few years ago. Maybe I’m becoming too familiar with these places. I’m quite keen to go somewhere else in the new year.

In September, I spent a weekend in Christchurch watching a dozen or so horror movies on 35mm at Grindfest. I’m by no means a film purist, and I still don’t know why I decided to go to this in the first place, but seeing great movies like John Carpenter’s The Thing and Tobe Hooper’s Lifeforce, and deranged oddities like Brian Trenchard-Smith’s Dead End Drive-In and Stephen Carpenter and Jeffrey Obrow’s The Kindred, on a big screen with a hyper-engaged audience was a lot of fun, to say the least. Elsewhere, the jarring double-feature of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady and Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma at the BFI on a Saturday evening in January was a real joy, as was seeing Akira Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala for the first time in a decade at the same cinema a month later, on 70mm no less. I didn’t get up to London as much as I’d like to have done this year, so other highlights are thin on the ground, but in September I left work early and jumped on the train for a surprise screening at the Prince Charles that turned out to be John Sayles’ Lone Star. I wish I did spontaneous things like this more often. I knew absolutely nothing about the film, even after the surprise was revealed, and found it to be a wonderful, knotty piece of work about, of course, and among other things, an unexpected challenge to an already accepted reality. Everything can change and sometimes it does.

This is a sentiment that has echoed through the films that have moved me the most from the year. Unexpected challenges to reality. I’m thinking about the forest fires burning elsewhere and getting closer in Afire. The lost memories of a man’s past played back to him on a cinema screen in an incomprehensible present in Close Your Eyes. An actress’s sudden realisation that her attempts to understand the complexity of the woman she’s playing in a movie have been nothing more than shallow mimicry and tickbox research in May December. An anguished scream towards a stolen future in The Beast. And, most specifically of all, a young boy’s reckoning with the fact that taking control of the chaos of his life will not save him from it in The Boy and the Heron. It’s a matter of finding a way to live with your own reality, not as it ought to be, not as it used to be, but as it is now. And then life can go on.

And I think that’s where I find myself in December: looking back on a year of letting life in. Maybe that’s why The Long Good Friday has stayed with me. Not so much for its bleakness, but for the simple fact that I’m not a passenger in my own life like Harold Shand. As turbulent and chaotic and messy and sad as this year has been in places, I feel better than ever for pushing through it. Everything can change and sometimes it does. I’m finally somewhere close to where I want to be. Let’s see what 2024 holds.

In alphabetical order:

Afire | Christian Petzold

The Beast | Bertrand Bonello

The Boy And The Heron | Hayao Miyazaki

Close Your Eyes | Victor Erice

Do Not Expect Too Much From The End of The World | Radu Jude

Evil Does Not Exist | Ryusuke Hamaguchi

Following The Sound | Kyoshi Sugita

Here | Bas Devos

Last Summer | Catherine Breillat

May December | Todd Haynes

Music | Angela Schanelec

Oppenheimer | Christopher Nolan

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Some discoveries from a scattershot year. Scattershot by design, I think, in the sense that I’ve started to just watch anything regardless of how much context I have for it. I feel like I’ve been accidentally limiting myself over the past couple of years by focusing on the filmmaker rather than the films, so I’m not doing that anymore. Watching movies really shouldn’t be that complicated. I don’t need to see the deep-cuts of directors I don’t really care about before moving on to other things. Who cares!

In alphabetical order:

Bend of the River | Anthony Mann, 1952

Daisy Kenyon | Otto Preminger, 1947

Four Nights of a Dreamer | Robert Bresson, 1971

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes | Howard Hawks, 1953

The Heiress | William Wyler, 1949

The Long Good Friday | John Mackenzie, 1980

La Recta Provincia | Raul Ruiz, 2007

The Shop Around The Corner | Ernst Lubitsch, 1940

Trust | Hal Hartley, 1990

Violent Saturday | Richard Fleischer, 1955

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A musical snapshot. Ten albums: five new, five old; all of which were new to me, and all of which have hit me pretty hard at some point in the past year. I think I’m too close to know what this list says about me, if it says anything at all, but I’m sure I’ll make more sense of it one way or another in a year or two. Or maybe it’s just a list of ten albums I like.

In alphabetical order:

After The Magic | Parannoul, 2023

A Promise | Xiu Xiu, 2003

The Disintegration Loops | William Basinski, 2002-2003

Halos of Perception | Lisa Lerkenfeldt, 2023

Javelin | Sufjan Stevens, 2023

The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We | Mitski, 2023

Paper Airplanes, Paper Hearts | Everyone Asked About You, 1997-2000

Smoochy | Ryuichi Sakamoto, 1995

Transatlanticism | Death Cab For Cutie, 2003

trip9love…??? | Tirzah, 2023

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I relaunched my newsletter a couple of months ago. It’s called Strange Days, and so far I’ve been framing it as a round-up of what I’ve been doing over the past month. It’s mostly film, of course, but I’ve also written about a Yoshitomo Nara exhibition and Super Mario Bros. Wonder, too. I don’t know how it’s going to evolve in 2024 but for now I’m having a great time with it. You can sign up here if you’d like to.

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If you've made it this far, or if you just scrolled to the bottom, I hope you have a wonderful festive season. Speak soon.