A seductive music sinuously guides the camera through an atelier mixing the characters with the mannequins, instantly setting the tone of the film and somehow the rules of its game. Cut to an exterior shot in a stormy night. The red sign of a fashion house breaks and falls dangling in the wind—an ancestral image of lifelessness that will be restaged right at the end by a scarlet receiver. It only took me the opening to know why I had fallen in love with this film so madly the first time I saw it despite its flaws and my little interest for the genre.
Blood and Black Lace has the unrealistic impeccable rationality of a giallo and the dramatic stylisation that only works in comics. Massimo and Cristiana could be the characters of an episode of Diabolik, with which incidentally the film shares the same contempt for a certain greedy, smartly dressed nouvelle bourgeoisie and the use of exotic names to create a vaguely international nowhere feeling. On the same note, Mario Bava doesn’t mind shooting around recognisable landmarks, but goes for the less known—like the Appian Way or the beautiful church of San Giorgio al Velabro. Rome of course is never explicitly mentioned.
The dialogues are pretty bad. Despite the efforts of the dubbers the performances are patchy to say the least. In a time when the best talents had bigger names to chase and genre films were obscured by what were considered more serious titles, Mario Bava often had to work with less experienced artists. And yet, for some perverse reason, this almost adds to the quirky charm of the film.
What’s really captivating of Blood and Black Lace are its aesthetics and mise-en-scène. Bava’s virtuoso pictorial approach and ‘silly colours,’ as they were described at the time by some conservative critic, inspired legions of filmmakers in the decades to come. The obsessive use of colour red might be an obvious choice for a horror film, but its impact is nevertheless effective—it certainly takes a master to revert a cliché to pristine state.
Towards the end of the film, the operator hits a mannequin while advancing in the ominously empty atelier. Deliberate or not, what may have been a mistake turns out emphasising a distinctive trait of Bava’s filming style—the physical presence of the camera as a ghostly yet palpable entity.
There is a fantastic night shot where the church of San Giorgio is gently lit by the moonlight. A garish pump station logo glows aggressively next to it, and further to the right a flashing neon sign reads ‘dancing’. As often in the history of cinema, budget and creativity not only lie on very different paths. They literally go in opposite directions. Against all odds—that’s how the most valuable works get done after all. And this is one of those.

At the end of the opening of the highly anticipated, eponymous ballet The Red Shoes, the film doesn’t linger so much on the raving response of the audience. It cuts instead to a very intimate moment. The empty space of a dance studio is made indefinitely big by mirror walls. Reflected in the far back of the room, we glimpse a door opening and the tiny figure of Vicky entering. The familiar space suddenly seems huge, mysterious, somehow inhospitable—perhaps a metaphor for how success has just changed the scale of the world around young Vicky. In the still silence, she warms up, stretches at the bar, ready to get back to work as if nothing happened. When the first soloist and the choreographer join her, they celebrate with soundless smiles and respectful gestures of affection. No one utters a single word as if protecting the fragility of the moment—and the sanctity of dancing. This scene will stay with me forever. It is not just moving. In foreboding the unknown that’s bound to come, it almost holds an element of suspense. The discipline, the dream, and the ultimate innocence of the artist even in front of art itself.

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 it, 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 by it.
However paced by a few attractive lines and scraps of dialogue—such as ‘You cannot escape the field, Whitehead! / 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. One of the most intriguing collaborations between Amy Jump and Ben Wheatley to date, it is instead a candid act of cinema whose uneducated instincts happen to feed the most genuine sense of experimentation.
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 that has been pulled out of the ground through a sort of asymmetric tug of war, seems to find their place in the surreal context.
The entire psychedelic sequence is an intoxicating, if raw, work of visual bravura that relates in my mind to the most clever advice I have ever heard giving. Speaking about the fear of not doing the right thing—or at least not right in the eyes of someone who might have the power to judge it so—Paul Thomas Anderson once said, ‘Just don’t give a fuck, that’s kind of the best thing to do.’ Which is right the spirit A Field in England seems to be fuelled with. 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 feature the author seems to be after. What clearly reads in his Bruegelian delusion is rather what he once declared, to not be interested in anything but ‘the possibility of building a world, an entire civilisation from scratch.’
Converted from native colour stock to a stunning, silvery b/w that reminded me at times of Ben Wheatley’s digitally photographed A Field in England (coincidentally released the same year), German’s apocalyptic orgy of rot and rain demands a certain degree of cinephile stamina, but not in exchange for nothing. Its exhaustingly slow pace and murky narrative convey a palpable sense of stillness, anguish, and oppression, that are likely meant to evoke Stalinist Russia’s dereliction while stirring broader reflections on human nature.
The camerawork is enthralling. Crisp spherical lenses wander throughout the delirious carnival seamlessly shifting in and out of POVs, often framed by bizarre objects in the foreground to an alienating effect. Characters emerge from behind the camera à la Klaus Kinski in Herzog’s Aguirre, occasionally staring straight at us, delivering random lines or lovely guttural grunts.
However arcane and strenuous, Hard to Be a God is the monumental work of a master. It left me singularly fascinated, inspired, and eager to take a long, warm shower.