The complexity of Lillian Hellman’s characters is fascinating. Our position towards each one of them is constantly teased. And as we are torn between conflictual feelings of comprehension, sympathy, or hatred, a harsh sociopolitical message starts to bite and take shape in the back of our minds.
The whole final act is no less than astonishing. In its climatic epilogue, Bette Davis’s monstrous Regina Giddens looks down from the once imposing staircase of the sumptuous family house as they were about to crumble. Her final words for her fleeting daughter are as bitter, brutal, honest—but also disillusioned—as she’s always been. And as the film itself is. ‘Alexandra, I’ve come to the end of my rope. Somewhere there’s got to be what I want too. Life goes too fast. You can go where you want, do what you want, think what you want. I’d like to keep you with me but I won’t make you stay. No, I won’t make you stay.’ Young Alexandra, now an adult, is not less of a determined woman than her mother is in a time led even more by men than today. ‘You couldn’t, Mama,’ says young Alexandra, now an adult, and not less of a determined woman. ‘Because I don’t want to stay with you. Because I’m beginning to understand about things. Addie said there were people who ate the earth and those that stood around and watched them do it. And just then Uncle Ben said the same thing. Really the same thing. Tell him from me, Mama, I’m not going to watch you do it.’ But have we started to understand about things too, or have we accepted to be the ones who eat the earth? Or worse, become those who watch?

I was about to cancel and indulge in an evening at home full of spectacular acts of grumpiness, but then I thought better of it. Watched as part of a program curated by Gaspar Noé for Picturehouse at the end of a day of shit, I can definitely say it had a pleasant if temporary numbing effect on my battered nerves.
In an interview with Charlie Rose, Renzo Piano once said that when an architect makes a mistake, he or she does it for a long time. This note has been stuck in my mind ever since, somehow placing itself closer to cinema than it was indeed intended to be. Sunset Boulevard is like an old building perfectly constructed, that has no mistakes to carry to these days, but its heartbreaking glory as a film, its dramatic ambitions, and candid sense of humanity. There is no such thing as ageing for a great work of art. Like many of its era, Sunset Boulevard seems to have been shot with that confidence flowing in its steaming veins of celluloid.

There are a couple of scenes in the first Don Camillo that make me cry all the times, be it from laughter or emotion. In one, Don Camillo is summoned by the Bishop for having taken part to a fight. He allegedly threw a big table into a bunch of ‘red’ civilians who were making fun of him, knocking all fifteen of them out barehanded. More incredulous than irate at the Reverend’s misconduct, the Bishop asks him to lift his desk to prove that what they say is true and that he acted alone. Almost effortlessly, Don Camillo grabs the bulky piece of furniture and raises it above his head. ‘Now throw it!’ Says the Bishop amazed. Don Camillo hesitates, then obeys. The desk crashes on the floor noisily, making a huge painting fall from the wall. A couple of assistants rush alarmed into room to check that His Excellency hasn’t been hurt. ‘Nothing happened, it was me,’ says candidly the old Bishop. ‘Don Camillo made me angry and I temporary lost my temper.’
Later in the film, the old teacher is on her deathbed. Knowing to have reached the end of her days, she has called Peppone and Don Camillo to make arrangements for her funeral. She has taught to everybody in the village and deserves a particular regard. On her coffin, she would like to have the Italian flag. Not the current republican one, but that of the recently deposed king. Confident she will have her final wish granted, she passes. The following day, the matter is discussed by the municipality. Most of the councillors are firmly against it. ‘As mayor,’ says Peppone, ‘I completely support your position. But in this town,’ he continues, ‘the communists rule, not the council, and as a communist I say that this dead is worth more than all of you alive. She will have the flag that she wanted.’ Then he turns towards Don Camillo, who’s silently enjoying the moment. ‘Unless the reverend has anything to add.’ ‘I will go with whatever the mayor decides!’
It might not be flawless from a strictly cinematographic point of view, but if there’s a film that more than others made me fall in love with cinema, it is right Don Camillo. Guareschi’s dissecting eye is so sharp and accurate to make the famed transpositions to his work resonate today as they did then.
Here is one of the few perks of having grown up in a remote time before streaming existed.

As an aside, I had never noticed that Don Camillo wears a pair of Doc Martens just like mine. Ante and post litteram skinheads, say.

Towards the end of a conference held at Cannes for the twentieth anniversary of Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino mentioned that as part of a personal periodic review of the state of cinema, he had recently asked a group of friends who, in their opinion, were the ten most exciting active filmmakers—with that meaning those whose best work they believed was yet to come. Intriguingly, Richard Linklater was on everyone’s list. If only for lack of familiarity with his work, I doubt he would have made it on mine—and yet, if one of his has ever brought me close to share the enthusiasm farsightedly expressed by Tarantino’s circle, it is certainly this. Apollo 10½ is one of those rare films that make me feel nostalgic for an age that I have not lived. Saudade is probably the word I am after—one I always loved.
Such a straight use of the rotoscope technique, to which I have been severely allergic since when I saw as a kid Bakshi’s The Lord of the Rings, seems for once perfectly placed and greatly synergic with the gorgeous postcard aesthetics.
Radiating a charming, if not literal, labour of love sense, Apollo 10½ is made to stay and grow—a cuddling dream whose memory can endlessly be revived, every time a little more palpably.

Struck. Alive. My scepticism shattered. Ninety percent of it. Maybe eighty.
Nonetheless excited. My thoughts in progress. My heart beating.

Two main things bug me of Titane. In scattered order, one is how it strives to make the audience cringe with images that are intrinsically cringing. This obsessive nipple business, the expository gruesomeness of a surgical intervention, a self inflicted fracture, an attempted abortion with a hairpin, or the needle of a syringe in the battered bruised skin. It feels a bit like a cheeky shortcut à la Dick Dastardly of Wacky Races. ‘Muttley, do something!’
The other is that it seems to juggle more themes than it can actually handle, ultimately looking like someone who moshes at a party and is too drunk to even rub somebody else’s shoulders.
And yet, enduring its unwelcoming scratchy surface is not an effort that doesn’t pay off. Titane is also full of highly inspired moments and scenes of sheer cinematic bravura. Alexia chasing down the stairs one of her unlucky victims at a house party, for instance. Her improvised dance on top of a fire brigade truck that causes the embarrassment of her agitated, masculine colleagues. Or when Vincent finds her hiding in a wardrobe, wearing, as it turns out, the same yellow female dress his real son used to steal from his mum. ‘They can’t tell me you’re not my son.’
I also didn’t mind Titane’s apparent holes, the unclear connections between its parts, whether of flesh or metal. I found it actually a good example of how narrative and visuals can synergically convey the perception of a vivid thread without necessarily giving all the explanations. It’s a very delicate balance that a few filmmakers know how to achieve without sounding pretentious or unfocused, but rather subtle, honest, and excitingly unpredictable.

Every time I watch Ben Whitley’s fungal revue, I get to a point—normally within the first ten minutes—where I wonder how is it possible that I liked it so much the last I saw it. With the same punctuality, an indefinite stretch further into the film, I always find myself completely enthralled.
However paced by a few attractive lines and scraps of dialogue—after being threatened that he will never leave the field, the mildly uncombed Whitehead says, ‘Then I shall become it! I shall consume all the ill fortune which you are set to unleash! I shall chew up all the selfish scheming and ill intentions that men like you force upon men like me and bury it in the stomach of this place!’—A Field in England doesn’t carry any particularly profound message and doesn’t indulge in pretentious ostentations of auteurism. Rendered more grey than monochrome by manifest digital vices, its tin-plated b/w never comes across as cinephile rhetoric but feels perfectly attuned to the narrative, besides offering a clever contrast to the garish imaginary of psychedelia.
One of the most intriguing collaborations between Wheatley and Amy Jump to date, A Field in England feels instead as a candid act of cinema whose uneducated instincts happen to feed a most genuine experimental attitude.
Whereas the prologue is occasionally spoiled by some awkward comedy attempts—like a soldier awakening from apparent death saying, ‘Did someone mention ale?’—the film puts soon itself together replacing the facetious with the witty and the ironic. Even preposterous moments—like a character materialising from a post pulled out of the ground in a sort of asymmetric tug of war—seem to find their place within the surreal context.
As for the entire psychedelic sequence, it’s nothing short of an intoxicating if raw work of visual bravura, which in my mind relates to the most energising piece of advice I’ve ever heard given. Speaking about the fear of not doing the right thing—or at least not what seems right in the eyes of someone in a hierarchical position to judge—Paul Thomas Anderson once said, ‘Just don’t give a fuck, that’s kind of the best thing to do.’ That, in many ways, is exactly the spirit A Field in England seems to be fuelled by. Bizarre, flawed, brazen, inspiring.

There is a rare creative lucidity to the defecatory madness of Hard to Be a God. I would be lying if I claimed to have fully grasped its essence, though cogency is hardly a quality the author appears to be after. What comes through clearly in his Bruegelian delusion is what he once declared, that he was interested in nothing but ‘the possibility of building a world, an entire civilisation from scratch.’
Converted from native colour stock to a strikingly grim b/w, Aleksei German’s apocalyptic orgy of rot and rain demands a certain degree of cinephile stamina—but not for nothing. Its exhaustingly slow pace and murky narrative convey a palpable sense of stillness, anguish and oppression, likely intended to evoke the dereliction of Stalinist Russia while stirring broader reflections on human nature.
What more than anything seems to shape the intellectual and metaphorical core of the film, are its visceral cinematographic idiosyncrasies—the camerawork, specifically. Crisp, spherical lenses wander through the delirious carnival like one-eyed, crooked creatures, seamlessly shifting in and out of POVs and seeking physical contact with props and bodies. Characters often emerge from behind the camera, à la Klaus Kinski in Herzog’s Aguirre—unexpected, unwelcome, occasionally staring straight at us, delivering sporadic, nonsensical fragments of lines or lovely guttural grunts. There is an almost uncomfortable sort of urgency to all this—one difficult to articulate in words yet strangely addictive.
However arcane and strenuous, Hard to Be a God is the monumental work of a master. It touched me like great art does, leaving me beguiled, inspired—and eager to take a long, warm shower.

A series of stunning views of the misted mountains. A chill air of cobalt, deer antlers in the distance. From the electric quietness, a nicely choreographed drone shot tracks an off-road vehicle, then a second, climbing up a dirt slope to join a bigger group on a plain. Hunters, or rather poachers, and the breathtaking sight of a majestic dawn in the valley.
The opening scene of Spoor is nothing I hadn’t seen before, but its beauty is arresting nonetheless. The same can’t be said about the rest of film, a pot of genres ranging from dark comedy to environmental drama with some nostalgic nods at Murder, She Wrote and a cringing touch of Mission: Impossible, leading up to a slightly preposterous bucolic utopia for a merry epilogue. Likewise, its narrative looks like that of a television drama in search of an identity, that constantly chases facts rather than letting its characters be, and breathe, outside of the self-contained world it sets.
Some directorial choices certainly show talent and skills that go beyond the box, but still won’t save the film from being utterly ordinary, and its ambitious contents from coming across hardly more profound than a sign at the zoo. Don’t touch the animals.

Pitch black in the woods. An amber glow sketches nervous lights and shadows on the leaves. Then trees bend and fall, light as ears of wheat. The trunks break without resistance producing painful crackles. A giant is walking through, a monster is devouring them. Not far from the images evoked, two enormous bulldozers are revealed as they aggressively make their way into the forest. Demented beasts of metal. An ambiguous opening scene of arresting beauty that turns for a moment this very world, and the film, into a fantastic place of scary creatures.
Suddenly switching to semi documentary telling, and more so as the story unfolds, Fire Will Come is somewhat stylistically and narratively incoherent. And yet there’s more to it than the unescapable nostalgic feeling aroused by the copious Galician rain and its gorgeous dark green mountains. It is a laconic rural tale of solitude and defeat, discreet like those who live silently, and silently take the fated blows of incomprehension, injustice, and nature.