Nightmare Alley was released in an age where such glossy films full of stars, commercial ambitions, and no cosplays, have probably gone, however temporary, who knows, out of fashion. Shame, because catching up with it only now, I realise that it deserved a lot more attention—mine, to start with—and that despite drawing from classic noir material, it is a lot closer to our days than its stylish appearance might lead to think. Better phrased by Martin Scorsese, who even wrote a heartfelt article¹ to persuade people to put the bloody remote down and go see it in a cinema, ‘Guillermo is certainly speaking from and to his own time, but he’s doing so in the idiom of a time gone by, and the urgency and despair of then overlaps with the urgency and despair of now in a way that’s quite disturbing. It’s like a warning bell.’
To an equally relatable contrast, Nightmare Alley’s haunted souls roam in a surreal land of wonders. The aesthetics of the film are so meticulously designed to let their perfection give way to an almost alienating feeling. Richly packed with gorgeous antiques, every set looks like a recreated environment in a history museum or a model inside a snowglobe. Of course they are great, and yet indulgently artificial in their vintage warmth, especially for the gritty notes of the subject.
The story unfolds at a slow pace through a lengthy first act, though before I know, the film has switched to a completely different tempo. The tension grows from lazy golden-lit cinema déjà-vus, including what seemed to me a slightly forced homage to one of the most memorable moments from Goodfellas—‘Go on, go on, around the corner,’ says the fishy Clem to Stan, indicating a mattress where he could crunch for the night—to near hart-attack intensity as our hero’s foolhardiness paves him the way to self-destruction. On the one hand, Nightmare Alley seems to try and give more answers than it should, or if anything than I wanted. I didn’t need to know about Stan’s past to connect with the character. Nor I needed the hilarity of the epilogue—more apt to a short film anyway—to close the circle. But on the other, I was fine not to know the details of what the spine-chilling Ezra Grindle really did to his lovers, or the meaning of the fantastic creature in the jar. My imagination works well enough, and it feels great when a director is aware and knows how to feed it.

1. Los Angeles Times, 22 January 2022.

Time rewinds as nature, in the shape of a quince reversing from rot to ripe, is the only reliable witness. Diários de Otsoga—that I only realise on writing, and not without disappointment, be the word agosto spelled backward, not the name of an exotic Portuguese location—transcends both the concept of metacinema and lockdown project. The latter, incidentally, a cinematic aberration. The fictional forming and shifting relationships among the three young protagonists, the surreal limitations and uncertainties of the epidemic, and life on set with its petty crimes such as stealing a pair of socks or a bottle of milk from the fridge, organically blend into an all but surprising solid body. Maureen Fazendeiro and Miguel Gomes challenge the fears of an unprecedented time, dextrously walking the line between sheer randomness and fine dramatic improvisation to convey a poetic mix of melancholy, innocence, and joy. Interviewed at the TIFF, Gomes is brutal but right in saying that most of the films that tried to be creative within the covid constraints are not, and are boring. Shot on film, shot by people, not solo with depressive means like a mobile or a webcam, Diários de Otsoga is quite the opposite. However they did it, the result is electrifying.

If he always keeps you dreamin’
You won’t have a lonely hour.
If a day could last forever,
You might like your ivory tower.

While the economic boom of North Italy’s Sixties is turning most people’s stares up at the brutalist marvels of wealth and progress, a team of young speleologists goes the opposite way—south and down, chasing the mystery of an unknown abyss. While their descent slowly progresses, an old shepherd squeezes a few drops of water from a wet cloth into the mouth of a dying man. As his last breath is taken, the explorers reach the bottom of the hole. A puddle of water, and a beautiful gesture made in silence, as if the place demanded a certain religious respect—that’s the end of it.
Michelangelo Frammartino’s cinema is one of echoes and poetic connections. His sensitivity reminds me of Apichatpong Weerasethakul. The clarity of his camera language is staggering as the beauty he frames—nothing, so he says, compared to that of the actual location. Discreet, perhaps neglected, like the world he portrays is one the brightest directors of our time.

Not even once I blinked,
I couldn’t miss a single frame.

I let my breathing join the sounds
of men and beasts, the noise of stones
as they get swallowed by the earth,
the electric stillness of a time
remote in summer.

My heartbeat echo
the eternal pulse of life and death,
and nature.

So for now you just call me something personal like, Jesus Christ.
I’m not Christian, I’m sorry your children died.

The screenplay for C’mon C’mon is a pretty exciting read—the draft I have, not quite the final, but close enough. The dialogues sport the witty sharpness that only comes from the pen of a writer. Some will be nuanced by a more real if less eloquent tension, once shot. The situations are perfectly relatable, often touching—the electric feel that art gives when it seems to have reached inner places we only thought we knew. Moving from the specific to the chorus and back is strangely visual on the page, where questions are posed to diverse children letting the word improv be a clue to the world their unscripted answers will unfold. One in particular scared me, took me by surprise, made me reflect on how the world will look like after I am gone—different.
Mike Mills explores hidden ties between listening, remembering, future, and control, giving us something sensory to cling to—a sound recording gear, mobile phones, classical music. Ten-year-old Woody Norman is brilliant, in fact, inspiring. His natural performance sets the bar and the style, the other actors seemingly trying to catch up and do their best to play along. The low-contrast, bright b/w feels like a great choice to bring different cities, people, and experiences under the same silvery sky. Some aerial views of LA and street photographs of NYC are particularly stunning. I would so love to visit New Orleans!
And yet I wonder if said all this is still OK to not have loved C’mon C’mon so madly—perhaps a film that relying too much on what really is a non-exceptional extraordinariness, shows how taking life to the screen straight, even with the support of unquestionable talent, is not enough to get an exceptional film.

O death, rock me asleep,
Bring me the quiet rest.
Let pass my weary guiltless ghost
Out of my careful breast.

Spencer is not as irreverent as it might appear, or at least not in the way it seems. If there’s anything it encourages to reflect on it isn’t much the unsympathetic gazes of the Royals, as the hypocrisy of a culture that allows people to live in captivity, only pretending to really question itself. However golden the bars, they are nonetheless those of a cage.
Even if Kristen Stewart’s performance alternates some excellent moments, especially non-verbal, with less convincing ones where the acting almost looks blurred by the effort of finding the absolute right mannerisms, and even though the slightly uncomfortable unrealistic and verbose eloquence that shapes many of the dialogues in the draft I read have survived here and there throughout the shot script (like a convoluted metaphorical dissertation on the tenses or a monologue where she improvises as a pheasant lifestyle guru)¹, there is very little to go around. Spencer is a magnificent film.
Pablo Larraín’s take on a material that could have easily led to tatty results; the supporting actors’ blazing display of bravura (I would watch any film that has Sean Harris, Sally Hawkins or Tim Spall in it); Claire Mathon’s photography, whose sensibility had already enchanted me in such wonders as Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Stranger by the Lake; and above all the phenomenal music composed by Jonny Greenwood. Everything works as a whole and seduces even those like me who didn’t think they needed the umpteenth speculation on poor Princess Diana. The beauty of Spencer is just as toxic as art can be.

1. To be anal, and for my own record, I also wonder if such lines as, ‘It doesn’t fit with my mood, it should be black, black to contrast the pearls,’ (referring to a sea-green satin dress she is supposed to wear to Christmas Eve dinner that incidentally will end up matching the color of the pea soup served that evening) or, ‘They dream but they are able to wake up, I am not allowed to wake up,’ (punctuating what Maggie just said, that people dream of being her) or again Diana’s sarcastic reply to a maid offering help, ‘How can you help me? No one is here to help me,’ could have dropped the redundant elaboration of the concept in second half to a more natural and even more effective result. But again, I genuinely just wonder. Other lines, like Diana’s first meaningful utterance as she drives in the middle of the British nowhere, ‘Where the fuck am I?’ or when she replies, ‘Oh yes, terribly,’ to William asking if she likes them getting mad at her, or later on when she wittily remarks, ‘All set, as if everything has already happened,’ are brilliant.

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.

Herzog, Pasolini, Leone, Olmi, Alice Rohrwacher, even Nicolas Winding Refn—and of course the Taviani brothers, as any time a grumpy peasant, and a loner, is seen on screen. If so many critics have felt the tactless urge to compare it with with the works of such a prestigious host of filmmakers, it can’t be solely because they had nothing else to say—Re Granchio does encourage comparisons. And yet, being the fortunate fantasy of some passionate cinephiles prone to respectful homages, doesn’t mar in the slightest its value.
Like the folktales handed down by the elderly, often enriched by the extra glass of wine, Re Granchio is a crafty patchwork of different styles and narratives. Elaborating a fragmentary legend running among the regulars of an actual hunt house who meaningfully appear in the film as a sort of passing on the baton, Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis go to the roots of storytelling to create the enigmatic character to whom artist Gabriele Silli lends his towering figure and magnetic stare. A drunkard, a free spirit and a fine thinker, a charlatan, a traveller, or a criminal, Luciano is the ousted nobody, an improbable and scruffier Ulysses who takes us from Tuscia to the edge of the world, incarnating the very essence of the romantic hero—the adventurer of his own life, struggling through and against his ineludible idiosyncrasies in search of atonement.
No matter how messy or flawed, Re Granchio’s genuine candidness and evocative imaginary are too attractive to let wordy scrutinies or presumptuous intellectual ejaculations get in the way—this is just cinema in its truest and most poignant incarnation. Aren’t we, after all, following too un cangrejo, persuading ourselves, step after step, that it is showing us the way?

‘Svanì per sempre il sogno mio d’amore.
L’ora è fuggita, e muoio disperato.
E non ho amato mai tanto la vita.’

Whether real or ingeniously faked, filmmakers have been recursively attracted over the decades by telling a story in one continuous take. Having made it more achievable than in Hitchcock times, digital cameras have recently renewed the interest. But only a few have succeeded where many haven’t gone beyond making it look like a nerdy gimmick. Boiling Point easily stands out amongst the former. For once, it does feel narratively apt being able to follow the action in its hectic and erratic authenticity. Tons of television programs have made us relatively acknowledged on the hardships behind the double swinging doors of a restaurant kitchen, but rarely fiction has managed to dramatise the atmosphere so vividly. Scripting the entire piece even where improvisation seems to be taking place, Philip Barantini brilliantly mixes near documentary elements with captivating individual characters’ backstories. Professional and personal dynamics intersect and clash and overlap, to truly exhilarating cinematic results.
From the opening tracking shot on Stephen Graham marching to work while apologising on the phone for some parental negligence of his, what makes Boiling Point immediately resonate—with me at least—is its tragic being a rather accurate depiction of our brave modern life, and not even much in a parodic or caricatured way. No need to reach the extents of drugs and booze abuse—although again, both more round the corner than they may seem—to get trapped by an unhealthy form of addiction. ‘I need to stop,’ says chef at some point, sweaty and exhausted. Well, I promise I am not being rhetorical by saying I could clearly hear my own voice pronouncing it, with Scouse accent too.

There is a certain clunky patchiness to Koberidze’s ambitious digressions, as if he was too besotted with his intuitions—some arguably quite striking—to be able to distil them into something truly exhilarating. The same apparent lack of focus seems to extend to the aesthetics of the film, making it look at times like the work of a cinephile revealing too much of his influences. Koberidze mentioned Russian director Aleksandre Rekhviashvili—regrettably unknown to me—as one, while I couldn’t help discerning traits of Paolo Sorrentino’s lyricism and Yorgos Lanthimos’ absurdist sense of humour.
And yet, as I find myself more and more bewildered by the discreet observations of the human and beastly creatures of the ancient city of Kutaisi, I realise that it is right because of its naivety that What do we see seduces.
In and out of urban folktales and personal idiosyncrasies, I slowly get what Koberidze said in an interview¹, finding it thoroughly inspiring. ‘For me, to make a film is to film the things that interest me, not necessarily just a story. I really like to go out sometimes and make pictures and watch what’s going on. I think there are enough fairy tales and secrets in the things you can see everywhere.’ Which kind of echoes a brilliant quote from Russian animator Yuri Norstein, also mentioned by Koberidze. ‘The simpler the story, the more time you have for the film.’

1. Interview: Alexandre Koberidze, Jessica Kiang (Film Comment, 12 October 2021).