TRANCE

2013; directed by Danny Boyle; adapted by Joe Ahearne and John Hodge; 97 mins

When Trance came out, it seemed to garner mediocre reviews, which was a surprise in light of the ongoing Danny Boyle love tsunami that had started with Slumdog Millionaire and continued on through 127 Hours and that incredible Olympic opening ceremony. I love this movie! Not only that but this is my favourite of Boyle’s movies from the last decade*, alongside T2 Trainspotting. It’s just enormous fun! It’s proper, naughty, violent, sexy, twisty, turn-y entertainment for grown-ups and what’s wrong with that?

SORRY WE MISSED YOU

2019; directed by Ken Loach; written by Paul Laverty; 100 mins

It’s both wonderful and sad that Ken Loach‘s work has taken on a new, reinvigorated, popular oomph. He started the decade slightly wobbly with Route Irish but has gone from strength to strength, culminating in his second Palme d’Or win for I, Daniel Blake which really made a splash on the public consciousness, certainly in Britain if not around the world. Whilst Sorry We Missed You hasn’t taken off quite so much at the box office, it’s every bit as great a slice of filmmaking (perhaps even a little better).

1917

2019; directed by Sam Mendes; written by Sam Mendes and Krysty Wilson-Cairns; 119 mins

When I reviewed The Revenant four years ago, I was very reticent about being the contrarian but the fact of the matter was, I didn’t like that movie. I thought it was massively overrated and didn’t tell me very much beyond its director’s lust for glory. Whilst Sam Mendes doesn’t have the overriding ego of Alejandro González Iñárritu, 1917 is very much the same case. It’s not all that, sadly.

HAPPY NEW YEAR, COLIN BURSTEAD

2018; directed by Ben Wheatley; written by Ben Wheatley and cast; 95 mins

A new year, a new Ben Wheatley movie! A family disaster movie with as many allegorical avenues as mother! but more jokes. If you’re English and you don’t see anything of yourself in any character herein, you must live a very cosy, self-deluded life. Happy New Year, Colin Burstead allows you to laugh at twats acting like the twats that twats inevitably act like but also puts you through the wringer of your own guilt and mistakes and believe me, certain passages certainly hit where they were meant to.

THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH

1934; directed by Alfred Hitchcock; written by Charles Bennett & D.B. Wyndham-Lewis and Edwin Greenwood & A.R. Rawlinson and Emlyn Williams; 75 mins

Well, here’s one motion picture which just goes to show that you can’t trust old Johnny Foreigner! Got to keep an eye on the perishing scoundrels, eh? A good old British film from Alfred Hitchcock in which emotions are kept to a minimum and one’s upper lip is favoured in any crisis.

THEY SHALL NOT GROW OLD

2018; directed by Peter Jackson; 99 mins

My late grandad Bertie was a gunner on one of the landing craft that transported troops to Omaha beach on D-Day and apparently the whole operation was a big laugh for them. According to him, there was a bet going among the landing craft crews as to who could get the most troops across the channel. That’s not the usual narrative we expect. Of course, to have been a soldier actually on the beach that day would’ve been awful but we forget that soldiers have a different view of war to us.

MR. JONES

2019; directed by Agnieszka Holland; written by Andrea Chalupa; 119 mins

This is the kind of big movie I prefer. A story I don’t know from a perspective I’ve never seen. The Ukrainian famine of 1932-33 (or, Holodomor) was the result of yet another of Stalin’s horrific policies which used the utopian shroud of Communism to further betray the ideals of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky. Enforced collectivisation of the Ukraine sent all their food to Moscow, condemning millions to death. We’ve seen and gotten thoroughly sick of the middle class western journalist narrative however, screenwriter Andrea Chalupa, a Ukrainian, has found a new slant on it.

A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH

1946; written and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger; 104 mins

My wonderful girlfriend got me the Criterion blu-ray of this glorious movie so I feel obliged to review it for her. I made that sound like a chore. It’s not. That’s two birthdays in a row she’s knocked it out of the park. Last year, it was the Mark Thomas Box Set and now this! I need to up my game.

LIFE IS SWEET

1990; written and directed by Mike Leigh; 103 mins

I tried watching Life is Sweet years ago and couldn’t quite make it all the way through because it genuinely felt like this was the one Mike Leigh film that actually leant over into caricature and grotesquerie. The love for it from others is so strong, though, that I had to finally watch all of it (plus, it’s the one of Leigh’s films I haven’t seen and I am a sad completist).

HIGH LIFE

2018; directed by Claire Denis; written by Claire Denis & Jean-Pol Fargeau and Geoff Cox; 113 mins

Well, Star Trek – this ain’t! The magnificent Claire Denis gives us a Ken Loach movie in space. A mouldy, grubby prison movie that features almost every human excretion there is: sweat, blood, piss, spunk, even breast milk is in there. Not quite by the bucketload but as near as dammit. High Life is a smashing together of the political and the existential as disaffected, transient criminal kids are sent off towards the infinity of black holes. Of course, thinking about it afterwards, there are a ton of undercurrents, connections and subsequent theses which reveal themselves. More than I can sensibly unpack here but whilst I don’t think it’s Denis’s best, it really is something else.