Cinema

The screen begins on black; a slow reverse zoom reveals that we're looking at a laptop screen during a Zoom meeting. We think we’re watching a film reflecting the realities of Covid. But it’s 2016, and the black screen in the middle (reading “instructor” in the lower right-hand corner) belongs to our protagonist, Charlie (Brendan Fraser). He’s teaching an online English class, going through the motions of a job that means very little to him. His world is dark and painful; he doesn’t want to let anyone in. After he logs off, we see his enormous body masturbating to gay porn. His orgasm triggers a heart attack that feels like the punchline to a cruel joke, but it plays as anything but that.

As a film critic and historian who's written for Sight and Sound since 2011, I like to think that the greatest films of all time are always on my mind, but, in truth, they were particularly on my mind last summer. Last July, I received the official word that I was among the select group of critics picked to partake the Sight and Sound critics' poll to decide the greatest films ever made; a survey the British magazine first convened in 1952 and has repeated on a once-per-decade basis ever since. In the weeks before my deadline to vote, I meditated on what constituted a great film with unusual intensity and self-reflection.

Quiet in the feature film world since the 2018 release of First Man, Damien Chazelle returns to the Hollywood-centric beat that brought him success in La La Land for Babylon, perhaps his most ambitious film yet. Opening in a raucous Hollywood party at the height of the Roaring Twenties, through a series of tracking shots, Chazelle introduces us to the three central characters of the film. Manny Torres, played by Diego Calva in his breakout role, attempts to navigate the atmosphere as an aspiring, wide-eyed Mexican immigrant who dreams of leaving his lowly assistant work to become something more. This allows Manny to serve as the surrogate for the audience.

“Who asked for this?” asked the New York Times in November of the coming Avatar sequel, The Way of Water. Not me. I’m not the audience for this film. I did not contribute to Avatar's $2.92 billion global box office. I don’t, for example, post in the "Tree of Souls" forum, which has 2,093 members (a tiny number). Does Avatar have an army of fanatics waiting to be unleashed at the box office? I don't know anyone obsessed with Avatar, do you? Is it as meme-friendly as Minions: The Rise of Gru? No. Will it draw as many teens as an MCU movie? Probably not. Avatar does not have the built-in fanbase you need to carry a franchise. It requires a global audience — it needs mainstream buzz. It needs the press raving that it's a "visual masterpiece." But is that enough?

Later this week, probably the world’s greatest living film director will celebrate his eightieth birthday. However he celebrates — whether in the company of friends and family in his no doubt opulent Manhattan home, or working on his eagerly awaited new film Killers of the Flower Moon — Martin Scorsese can reach his milestone age in the confidence that his position in cinematic history is assured forever. For a man so steeped in the art and practice of filmmaking — and who has made several excellent documentaries about movies — it must be intensely gratifying for Scorsese to be aware that he is that rarest of persons, a living legend, whose contributions to film will live forever.

Something happened in American society between the release of Bros last weekend and 2018, when Bohemian Rhapsody, the biopic of gay, HIV-positive Queen front man Freddie Mercury, grossed $900 million at the box office. Comedian Billy Eichner’s gay romcom barely eked out a pathetic $4.8 million on opening night, around the same amount that Ellen "Elliot" Page spent on flannel shirts and Groucho Marx glasses last year. Why the disparity in box office takings? Well, American moviegoers became deeply homophobic. That’s according to Eichner himself, who wrote on Twitter following the paltry opening weekend numbers, “That’s just the world we live in, unfortunately.

Catherine Called Birdy is written and directed by Lena Dunham and it’s a medieval comedy about a 14-year-old girl resisting her father’s attempts to marry her off while yearning to do all the things women aren’t allowed to do. (She would especially like to attend a hanging, for example. And also ‘laugh very loud’.) It most put me in mind of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, as it has that spirit, but it does not share that timeless brilliance. It’s fun, and endearing, and the patriarchy gets a good kicking which, as you know, is my favourite thing. But it feels like one joke or sketch that’s been dragged out for nearly two hours. It’s fine, yet forgettably so. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

The Forgiven is based on the novel by Lawrence Osborne and stars Ralph Fiennes (terrific) and Jessica Chastain (ditto) as a wealthy British-American couple driving to a weekend-long party in a luxurious Moroccan desert villa when they hit and kill a young local boy on the road. Oops. What the film adds up to, I cannot say, as it isn’t clear. Who is forgiven? Is anybody? It’s ethically ambiguous and you have to do your own moralising, which is always a drag. (Note to filmmakers: I’m old, I’m tired, please spoon-feed me.) But it’s a compelling, tense journey even if it’s a pitiless one. Human nature doesn’t come out of this at all well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Beast is, the blurb tells us, a ‘pulse-pounding thriller about a father and his daughters who find themselves hunted by a massive rogue lion intent on proving that the savannah has but one apex predator’. Whether this was ever intended to be a serious film, I cannot say, but it’s fun in its schlocky, gory, silly way, doesn’t outstay its welcome (it’s barely 90 minutes) and will satisfy anyone who has ever yearned to see Idris Elba wrestle a lion and then punch it full in the face. Not my dream especially, but each to their own. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Katia and Maurice Krafft were both born in the 1940s in the Rhine valley, close to the Miocene Kaiser volcano, though they didn’t know each other as children. They met on a park bench when they were students at the University of Strasbourg, and from that moment on, according to their joint obituary in the Bulletin of Volcanology, ‘volcanic eruptions became the common passion to which everything else in their life seemed subordinate’. They married in 1970, formed a crack team of volcano-chasers, équipe volcanique, and set off to get as close as they possibly could to the very edge of every fiery crater, to collect samples and data and just to be there, ecstatic with the enormity of it all, like a pair of mad moths drawn into a candle flame.

We’re doing multiverses now. Last weekend, a friend dragged me to see Marvel’s latest product, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. For two hours I watched characters earnestly talk about their trauma, and then fly around firing jets of coloured magic at each other, and then more pompous trauma talk, like five-year-olds playing at adult emotional life, and then more joyless beams of coloured magic. I left the cinema muttering like a deranged war veteran. ‘Someone needs to be punished for this. We need show trials. We need to make them suffer for what they’ve done.’ My friend spoke, but I could barely hear him. I stared at an empty space roughly 50 metres behind his head. ‘You. You brought me here. You did this.

It is a depressing statement on the banality of the film industry that the death of actor William Hurt, at the age of seventy-one, was marked by at least one obituary stating, “Avengers star dies.” Hurt, who appeared in several Marvel films as the military character Thaddeus Ross in his latter-day career, did indeed appear in the mega-grossing Avengers films Infinity War and Endgame, and I very much hope that he received some tiny portion of the films’ enormous box office receipts in recognition of his appearance. But to describe Hurt’s life and work as defined by his Marvel roles reminded me of the great Alan Bennett line about his sexuality: “It’s like asking a man who has just crossed the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Evian water.

The actor never knew they would use a real horse’s head. This was May 1971 and John Marley was preparing to perform in the most infamous scene in The Godfather, playing the corrupt movie producer who wakes up to find a horse’s head in his bed. Reportedly, Marley assumed this would just be a plastic prop. But the director, Francis Ford Coppola, had other ideas. In a note to himself, Coppola observed: ‘If the audience does not jump out of their seats on this one, you have failed.’ So he quietly sent an assistant to a dog-food factory to pick up a genuine head, newly hewn from the shoulders of a racehorse. She brought the stinking object back in a freezer box and it was slipped into the bed with Marley for maximum authenticity.