It’s a stone-cold classic.
Leeds Film Festival always has a stand of ‘retrospectives’ – older films they’re bringing back to the festival. In recent years I’ve tried to be a bit picky about which of these I go to, restricting myself to either things that are super rare and hard to see, or that are dramatically cinematic and cry out for the big screen.
It’s arguable that The Third Man falls into the latter camp, but only just. The 4K restoration looks nice, but still a little fuzzy round the edges, and there were a few moments when I questioned whether I was getting a better experience in the cinema than I would at home (compare against seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey on an enormous screen at the town hall. That was a huge difference from watching at home).
But this is quibbling. The film is great. The glasses of schnapps. The cigarettes. The heavy wooden coats. The stiff-upper-lip Brits. The chase sequences down bombed-out streets. The sewers.
An absolute joy to watch.
This was just so, so good. It’s the sort of film that for a good while I tended to shy away from as being too heavy, too glum, but it’s such a mistake. This is an excellent entry in the canon of Muslim-family-dramas-where-someone-is-gay. See also The Blue Caftan.
It’s a pretty familiar setup: we have a strong-willed, opinionated grandmother - loved, tolerated and resented in equal measures - we have long-suffering daughters, playing second fiddle to their brothers, never quite good enough to be accepted, and then we have the feisty, independent granddaughter - living in France, free from the shackles of Tunisia, seen with a mix of resentment and jealousy by those who remain.
It’s a funeral that brings them all together. 6 days of each other’s company, of probing the habits of their dead son/brother/uncle, of hushing up investigations for the sake of avoiding gossip. The tensions build and simmer. It’s a very well-paced film. Highly recommended!
Rafael Manuel’s extraordinary debut is a razor-sharp satire of wealth and exploitation in the Philippines, every shot perfectly manicured as the fairways in the elite country club where it’s set.
Isabel, a 17-year-old from the rural north, gets a new job pampering powerful men, but soon uncovers the ugly truths behind the veneer of luxury as she encounters the patriarchal director of the club and uncovers her country’s history of violence.
This is a decent new entry in the documenting-gross-inequality subgenre. I very much liked the quote from the director about golf courses being a silent violence committed against a land.
There are parts of this that are lovely. It has an episodic, Greek epic feel about it — we encounter different characters going about their lives, absurd little vignettes of life amongst the servants of the country club.
Unfortunately, it’s incredibly slow and the dramatic tension only really ramps up at the very end of the film. I don’t want to spoil anything, but I felt it pulled its punches rather: it had the chance to explode from its reserved, mannered start into something quite cutting but never quite does. Still a very enjoyable watch.
Oh, but the pine trees are not happy.
Show, don’t tell. It’s easier said than done, especially in documentary cinema, which so often feels like an extended news report. I’m all for an essay film, but Daughters of the Forest was far from it and much the better for it.
The film revolves around two indigenous women in different Mexican states, both balancing between their communities and the call of academia. They’re keen to write down the knowledge of their ancestors and parents, but wary of perpetuating a cycle of exploitation — academic strip mining of local knowledge that moves on without even paying its way with so much as a bottle of mezcal.
Oh. And the mushrooms. So many mushrooms. Some edible. Some loco. Some white. Some blue. The footage of fungi is astonishing.
It’s a powerful film with a strong message that manages to never feel preachy. (Although I guess I’m already in the choir.) Add in a very nice soundtrack by Hannah Peel and I’ve got my first five stars of the festival.
There are quite a lot of bands I had no real expectation of seeing.
These tend to be the ones that had split up either before I’d heard of them or before I could reliably go to gigs.
Over the years, a good number of these have played special anniversary gigs - one off shows to celebrate the passing of a large number of years since their albums.
Though these shows always come with a hint of “Oh God I’m old now”, it has meant the opportunity to see a whole bunch of bands I narrowly missed first time round.
The Research! Camera Obscura! (And booked in the next year both The Sunshine Underground AND Forward, Russia - very excited!).
But Black Box Recorder? They remained firmly in the list of bands I never expected to see.
Unlike most of the others mentioned, who I read about in the NME when slightly-too-young to get to gigs - especially the many indie-friendly 18+ venues - Black Box Recorder had pretty much stopped in 2003.
I’d never heard of them at that point.
Instead, I got into them from the soundtrack of the fabulous Monkey Dust animation.
As well as being rude, clever and wickedly funny, Monkey Dust had an absolutely incredible soundtrack.
From the opening tune, Eels’ That’s Not Really Funny to melancholy chunks of Goldfrapp, there was a lot of great music in there, but it was a haunting female vocal that really stuck with me, murmuring “It’s only the end of the world…”. I looked them up. Black Box Recorder.
They did 3 albums. They’re all great. There are some top B-sides too. Sarah Nixey’s “opiated debutante tones” (thanks Wikipedia) carry a whole bunch of songs about cruelty, greed and turn-of-the-century life in England.
It was an absolute joy to discover that being liked by Billie Eilish (!) has brought them renewed attention and got them a big London show, for which the Brudenell, Leeds was the warm-up gig.
It also meant the crowd was a weird mix of ages - with a large part of it in their 40s and a significant number of children (OK, OK, they were probably late teens, but they looked like children)
I don’t really do gig reviews. It was great. Of course it was.