All posts by NotesonFilm1

About NotesonFilm1

Spanish Canadian working in the UK. Former film journalist. Lecturer in Film Studies. Podcast with Michael Glass on cinema at https://eavesdroppingatthemovies.com/ and also a series of conversations with artists and intellectuals on their work at https://josearroyoinconversationwith.com/

THE BAD SLEEP WELL/ Warui Jatsu Hodo Yoku Nemuru (Akira Kurosawa, 1960)

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Another extraordinary crime film from Akira Kurosawa, this one dealing with corporate corruption. What I found most remarkable was the story-telling, of which the opening scene is an extraordinary example. It starts theatrically with a group of waiters making a greeting line in front of a lift. The doors slide open, and we get a wedding party. The door opens again and this time it’s a whole gaggle of paparazzi, who will act as a Greek chorus, doing quite a bit of exposition, telling us who the main characters are, filling in background, contradicting or elaborating upon what the characters themselves are telling us. It’s a wedding, a happy occasion but after the first 30 seconds the drama begins. We see that the bride is crippled, walking on crutches with one foot higher than the other. The father is the head of the corporation. The groom is poor. Did he marry her just for her money? As the wedding banquet proceeds, the police arrive, we see messages of an imminent arrest passed around and on top of it,  the brother says if the groom doesn’t make his sister happy he’ll kill her. After the nervous applause dies down, the wedding cake gets brought in. But there are two, one of them a scale-model of a building where a man jumped off the seventh floor, with a rose marking the exact spot, linking the current scandal and some of the top managers who work there to the previous one where they had worked at before. As one of the journalists says at the end of the opening scene, ‘A funny wedding, the best one-act play I ever saw’. ‘A one-act play,’ says another. This is merely a prelude’. And indeed a newspaper appears on the screen, ‘A big scandal unfolding. Police raid Dairyu. A chain of investigations’. The main narrative is well and truly on its way. It’s fantastically told visually (the choice of shots and compositions), musically (the abruptness with which the music often stops), the use of close-ups to single out individuals, how every beat in the story adds information whilst increasing the drama.

It is really superb and so is the rest of the film. A revenge film in which Mifune seeks to avenge his father’s death by destroying the life of the father of his wife. It’s supposedly influenced by Hamlet, though I can at best detect a loose resemblance. The themes are however Shakespearean, a man destroying his life to keep his position, a young man seeking to write wrongs who commits even worse ones, a wife torn between love for her husband and duty to her father. It’s a film where no one wins except the viewer.

 

Tony Zhou has a very fine short essay on Kurosawa’s compositions in The Bad Sleep Well, which you can see here.

PS I see now from wiki that ‘ Francis Ford Coppola has listed The Bad Sleep Well as one of his favorite films, citing the first thirty minutes of the film “as perfect as any film I’ve ever seen” and used it as inspiration for the wedding sequence in the 1972 Oscar-winning gangster drama The Godfather,’ which makes all kinds of sense.

José Arroyo

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 479 – The End of Oak Street

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The End of Oak Street puts Mike in mind of the sort of disposable but likeable films he watched on video as a child, although they didn’t tend to cost $85 million to make. Writer-director David Robert Mitchell conspicuously apes Steven Spielberg with a family, a suburb, a dinosaur invasion, a large pile of poo and a lot of 1980s nostalgia. We debate whether the film’s derivativeness, charmless performances, ropey CGI and poor plotting are outweighed by its genuinely effective set-pieces and its success as uncomplicated monster-movie fun. The End of Oak Street is far from good but if you watch it on VHS when you’re eight years old, just as Mike did with The Pagemaster and 3 Ninjas, it’ll probably stay with you forever.

Listen on the players below, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Spotify, or YouTube Music.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

 

STRAY DOG/ NORA INU (Akira Kurosawa, 1949)

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I’d only really been familiar with Kurosawa’s famous samurai films. The post-war noirs in the BFI’s box set have been a discovery: the more I see of them the more my admiration for Kurosawa as a filmmaker grows.

STRAY DOG is a re-teaming of Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura from DRUNKEN ANGEL (1948). Mifune plays a young cop whose knapsack gets stolen on the bus. Inside it is a Colt revolver with seven bullets. It’s now being used to kill innocents. How many will have to die before the weapon is recovered? Will the cop survive his guilt?

Kurosawa is a master of conveying the elements themselves. Here it’s the heat and humidity of a Tokyo Summer, exacerbated by  having a killer on the loose. People perspire, wipe their faces, sigh with tiredness (see the gorgeous montage below).

As the two investigators move from suspect to suspect, we get a panorama of post-war Tokyo society, all the low-lifes, criminals, prostitutes, dancers’ all with  lives that exceed the activity or profession society defines them for; poor people without space; professionals on low incomes and their way of life, a rich lady who shuts her window to a crimes she’s witnessing before returning to her piano, a young dancer for whom a dress has become a symbol for a different kind of life, wished for but forever out of reach. In fact the killer ends up being someone not unlike the young inspector, a war vet whose also had his knapsack stolen, as a result left desperate and derelict, who ends up making bad choices.

The last chase scene is exciting, beautiful and expressive. Both men now handcuffed together, occupying the lower third of the frame, as young innocent children walk in the background at the top of the frame singing, and then the thief begins to weep at the choices he’s made. It’s gorgeous and moving (see clip below), as is the whole of the film. I’ve included frame grabs from some of the compositions to illustrate the variety, originality and expressiveness of Kurosawa’s compositions, which continue to astonish me.

The incredible extended montage from the beginning.

The moving and beautiful final chase scene (above)

Examples of the compositions (below)

José Arroyo

Thinking Aloud About Film: Pastor Hall (Roy Boulting, 1940)/ Obsession (Edward Dmytryk, 1949)

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Pastor Hall (Roy Boulting, 1940)/ Obsession (Edward Dmytryk, 1949)

 

Richard I talk about two films screened recently at Cinema Rediscovered in Bristol, that will be touring around art cinemas this Autumn and will also be released through Indicator.

 

PASTOR HALL is an early anti-Nazi film that somehow feels very timely now. A small village in Germany, a happy recognisable place, patriotic, is taken over by a platoon of stormtroopers and suddenly young women are being brutalised, jews have their homes destroyed and even the Pastor is in trouble. Based on a true story about how German pastor Martin Niemöller got sent to Dachau concentration camp for criticising the Nazi Party. In the podcast we discuss how the film raises questions of morality, ethics, collaboration, resistance, how easily it lends itself to current events in the US now, and how much people knew about concentration camps then.

 

OBSESSION is a British noir in which Robert Newton kidnaps his wife’s lover to murder him at a later date and commit the perfect crime. It’s directed by Edward Dmytryk (FAREWELL MY LOVELY, CORNERED, CROSSFIRE) then on the run from the House of Un-American Activities and finding temporary shelter in the UK. We discuss it as a noir, as a British film, and praise the way the film uses the bombed out setting, London in ruins as setting for a life in ruins, an Empire dissolving and Americans walking ‘our’ streets and stealing ‘our’women.

 

Two old films that feel newly relevant and are worth looking forward to.

 

The podcast may be listened to here:

The podcast may be listened to here:

The podcast may also be listened to on: Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

“The Silent Village” which Richard mentions in relation to Pastor Hall is available for free in the UK online  on BFI Player:

https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-the-silent-village-1943-online

Pastor Hall screenedd at Film House in Edinburgh August 9th and 10th as part of Cinema Rediscovered on Tour..

José Arroyo

Drunken Angel/ Yoidore Tenshi (Akira Kurosawa, 1948)

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A noir that well showcases Kurosawa’s capacity for film poetry and a young Toshiro Mifune at his most beautiful. Mifune is Matsunaga a small-time Yakuza who runs everything that can be turned to crime in the shantytown of the lower-depths of some part of derelict post-war derelict. At the centre of the neighbourhood is a swamp, a dirty, disease-ridden dump with umbrellas and other waste jutting out, a symbolic setting for all the low-lifes that live around it. Matsunaga has got TB. An alcoholic doctor in the neighbourhood called Sanada(Takashi Shimura), can cure it. If only Matsunaga would listen. But Matsunaga is trapped within ideologies of yakuza masculinity: he’s afraid and can’t show it. The word ‘coward’ is enough to drive him to extraordinary violence. Moreover, the yakuza who ran the neighourhood before him is coming out of prison and will challenge him for his turf. It’s not a good time to be ill and to be scared. Matsunaga is having difficulty living up to socially acceptable ideas of masculinity much less a yakuza code. Mifune looks so beautiful here. Cinematographer Takeo Ito and Kurosawa fill him from below, to show off his long pompadour, lit to highlight the symmetry of his face, a body that once evoked power and is now diseased, the terror that follows the peacocking. But is he the drunken angel or is the doctor who’d have a swank practice if he wasn’t so alcoholic and so fundamentally kind. Kurosawa brings in nightclub number and dream sequences. He uses mirrors and inventive, unusual compositions. He is not afraid to symbolise or to linger over the swamp, or over a song, or over a space that seems dead only to become anticipatory, a setting for action. A very beautiful film.

The Young Yakuza collapses as the old gangleader shows up to be no. 1, through a swamp that is full of junk but surrounded by music. Part of why Kurosawa is a poet.

Lingering over a corridor

 

Images from film that illustrate the above:

José Arroyo

THE LADYKILLERS (Alexander Mackendrick, 1955)

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A friend recently reminded me that THE LADYKILLERS is set around King’s Cross, with St. Pancras visible in so many of the external shots. So when I saw the disk at the shop earlier today, I thought I’d revisit. The area is unrecognisable from now. A fat-faced Peter Sellers in an early film role and Herbert Lom, with hair, are recognisable but both look so different than they did in their Inspector Clouseau heyday. And what’s with Alec Guiness’ odd prosthetics make-up? It’s thought to be patterned after Kenneth Tynan but I see him more as a cross between Nosferatu and his henchman, and rather unnecessary. None of this ultimately detract from the ingeniousness of the comedy which Alexander Mackendrick directs with a very pleasing combination of the macabre and the endearing. A shared sense of good manners and propriety is the very basis of William Rose’s screenplay, the rationale for each plot development, and the film is unthinkable without it. I suppose it’s part of what makes Ealing Ealing. I saw it in the Studio Canal disc, and it looks wonderful, but the default is German, which makes watching things, particularly the extras, irksome, as none of the main titles are translated; a bother when they offer essential information on the disc. Stil, the three-strip technicolour looks wonderful.

 

José Arroyo

Caught Stealing (Darren Aronofsky, 2025)

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Why hasn’t this been a hit? It’s got an extraordinary cast (Matt Smith, Liev Schreiber, Regina King, Carol Kane, Vincent D’Onofrio, Bad Bunny) a big new star at his most desirable (Austin Butler) and a heterosexual couple (Butler and Kravitz, whose every move is a thrill) that has great chemistry and smoulder and sizzle in each scene. Plus a cute cat. The plot, a combination of Long Goodbye/ After Hours/ duck out of water narrative in which Butler’s neighbour asks him to look after his cat and unwittingly lands him in a heap of trouble with two rival gangs over money and drugs is deftly handled, the action is good, it’s got laughs. Darren Aronofsky’s only fun film, shot with considerable flair and style. At any other time, this should have been a big hit. Probably, with better marketing, at this time also: I hate the poster. I missed it in Montreal, it’s no longer playing in Birmingham and had to make a special effort to see it amidst the few screenings still on offer in London. It was worth the trouble and I recommend.

 

José Arroyo

LE CERCLE ROUGE (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1970)

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‘All men are bad’ says a Judge in LE CERCLE ROUGE (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1970), ‘they’re born innocent but are quickly corrupted. In this film, two of the main ones are crooks: Corey (Alain Delon) just released from prison; Vogel (Gian Maria Volonté) recently escaped capture and on the run. The two others are cops: Inspector Mattei (André Bourvil) who’s chasing Vogel; and Jansen (Yves Montand) now an alcoholic and open to a heist. All are lonely: the inspector returning home to his cats, Corey returning from prison to find his girlfriend with an old crony and his apartment full of dust; Jansen alone battling nightmares brought on by alcoholism; Mattei, is in hiding. They get together for a heist at Boucheron on the Place Vendome, a triumph, only to be caught and shot by the Inspector and his men at the end. It’s a beautiful, fatalistic film, the mood constructed by the framing, wide, but sparsely peopled. On this viewing, what I noticed most was sound. It has no extra-diegetic music that I can detect. Most of it is heard in the nightclub scenes. There are a few moments where I’m unsure but I attribute the soft jazz to the car radio. There are entire scenes with the only sound we hear is diegetic and then singled out – brough to the fore singly — for narrative purposes: the sound of footsteps, or doors unlocking. All of this adds to the loneliness and alienation evoked by the imagery. Yet none of this adds up to futility. It’s as if each of the main characters, unafraid of death, find purpose and meaning in doing what they do best, even if it contravenes social norms and ends in the red circle we’re warned off in the opening title. Women in this film signify merely sex and betrayal. This is a marvellous disc, by Studio Canal, showcasing its first restoration, the 140 minute version beautifully shot by the great Henri Decaë, with lots of extras, including an introduction by Ginette Vincendeau.

 

On a side note, it’s surprising how little Melville appears in film noir festivals considering how he is one of the greatest directors in that particular vernacular.

José Arroyo

THE PHATOM OF THE MONASTERY/ EL FANTASMA DEL CONVENTO (Fernando de Fuentes, 1934)

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Two men are in love with the same women but only one is married to her. The trio lose track of time when walking in the countryside and find shelter in a monastery, where Brothers of the Order of Silence assure them they’re safe so long as they don’t harbour ill intent. Since one man is in love with the partner of the other and since she loves him back in spite of the vows that bind her, they’re already off to a bad start. A very beautiful restoration, rich blacks, a gradation of whites, of a prototype of the haunted house film, this one with more religious overtones than most as rationale for the supernatural, and with an understated but nonetheless central misogyny at its heart: the woman brings in evil and potentially death to the house of God. One offshoot of the genre – the haunted house – here meets another – the mummy film – as we’ll find out that these monks who go about their chores at night, spend their days as mummies in coffins. It struck me whilst watching this film how often books and knowledge are posited in film as both the source of evil and the way of over-coming it.  A handsome-looking film, well-plotted, with a rich concept and striking imagery, and as one of the end titles reminds us, made entirely in Mexico. Another handsome disk from Indicator with an interesting introduction, rich in context from Abraham Castillo Flores and audio commentary (which I have yet to listen to) from Stephen Jones and Kim Newman.

José Arroyo

FRIDA KAHLO: THE MAKING OF AN ICON

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I loved the Frida Kahlo exhibition at the Tate. I have had friends gripe that the exhibition is lacking some of her most famous paintings, which is true, but then it also has some smaller, lesser seen works. Besides, the clue is in the title FRIDA: THE MAKING OF AN ICON, and this the exhibition does superbly. We see her clothes, her jewellery, films of her in her house, how she was painted by her contemporaries, most famously by her husband, Diego Rivera. How and why she was taken up by pop cultures globally. The exhibition ends with these huge glass cases showing the hundreds of books written on her in the past few decades, dolls, merchandising, the posters of films about her. Her connection to liberation struggles, Marxism, Surrealism, feminism, queer cultures, indigenous cultures, Mexicanidad and its connections to broader Latin American cultures etc. It’s a great exhibition. Her painting is central but not the main focus of the exhibition; and how she became an icon and why she remains one is well illustrated and fascinating.

Others have argued that it doesn’t have a main narrative thread, which I also don’t agree with. The exhibition is  chronological from ‘construction/ self-construction, the first room, to the Fridamania of the last room. In between we see how the one led to the other though works ‘On the Other Side of the Border’, Neo-Mecicanisms, A Pro-Activist Legacy, etc. Some were bothered by the recurrent mention of ‘gender fluidity,’ finding it too obvious.  There’s clearly needed by some people; and also ‘Gendered dialogues’ on her iconicity is a running thread through the exhibition. I would also have liked to have seen more of her most famous works but still appreciated how the exhibition accomplished its own goals. And brilliantly so.

José Arroyo

LA LLORONA (Ramón Peón, 1933)

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Friends who teach in the areas of Latin American cinema will be interested in LA LLORONA (Ramón Peón, 1933), ostensibly the first horror film made in Mexico in the sound era. It begins with a man who dies in front of a church apparently seeing a ghost and sets up a discussion of superstition vs science. It then cuts to a child’s fourth birthday party where a father tells his son of a curse on the family where the firstborn son gets killed at four years old. This is then explained through a tale where Hernan Cortés betrays the mother of his child, whom he’d seduced but refused to wed, in order to marry a Spanish aristocrat. In response, the woman kills her four-old son, then herself and curses his lineage. So this is a tale of the crazed woman, the vengeful woman. Half-way through the film the story is told again through the tale of La Llorona, this time through an indigenous woman whose Spanish lover betrayed her and she too kills her son and herself and curses the family. But in this indigenous retelling the story also becomes a metaphor for the Spanish conquistadors killing off the indigenous population and the rape of Mexico. La Llorona is Mexico herself. It’s a fascinating film, lots of attempts at camera movement, some of it a bit stodgy, lots of double exposure for the ghost parts, and interesting contrast between imagery of the conquistadors with their fanned collars and Mayan imagery. It’s a very teachable film that should lead to lots of interesting discussion in an excellent disk from Powerhouse with lots of history, and context and an audio-commentary from Stephen Jones and Kim Newman.

José Arroyo

 

POPPERS (José María Castellví, 1984)

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I had never heard of POPPERS (José María Castellví, 1984), until I came across it on the marvellous box set of Spanish ‘S’ classified films of the transition, EXORCISMO: DEFYING A DICTATOR AND RAISING HELL IN POST-FRANCO SPAIN.  And it’s a discovery: a punk/new wave proto queer film made at the height of the Movida Madrileña. It’s about a punk musician who finds his girlfriend flirting with another guy during one of his sets and, before he knows it, he’s stabbed him. Cut to two years later when he’s mysteriously released from prison. It turns out the father of the boy he killed wants in turn to kill him. But not in any old way, no; he wants to organise a hunt, with a coterie of his most perverse rich industrialist friends as the hunters and with the young punk killer as the hunted. The film does posit a new generation out of control versus the old Francoist guard, steeped in power, privilege, and, in this film at least, perversion. In this type of film in this period, a beautiful woman wearing as little as possible is necessary to ensure financing and distribution. Giannina Facio, who later went on to wed Ridly Scott is that woman here, though she’s of so little interest to the main narrative that she’s dropped in as killer/accomplice, love interest and not given much else to do. Miguel Ortiz, whose first film this is, and who wears less than she does, is the punk and real object of the film’s desire:  the narrative starts off with a close-up of his chest.  The film is beautifully designed, steeped in queer S/M imagery, with surrealist touches (a horse giving birth in a palace, a church (Madrid’s Almudena Cathedral, before it was finished) decked out with 18th century furniture in which farm animals walk through, a herd of goats barely separated from mad dancers in the nightclub scenes. Castellví was a famous photographer of huge stars (Sara Montiel, Carmen Sevilla, etc) undressed for Interviu magazine as well as – for a while – Julio Iglesia’s personal photographer, so the film looks ravishing. It’s very interesting to consider it next to other queer films of the period such as LAW OF DESIRE (Almodóvar, 1987), which was also designed by Javier Fernández. The title has no bearing on the film except by association.  It is the intoxicant most sniffed in gay nightclubs of that period. It’s not a great film, perhaps not even a good one, but few bring up the queer structure of feeling, even with its alibis and delusions, of that particular place and time better. It would make an interesting double-bill with Tony Scott’s THE HUNGER, which visually at least, looks like an influence. Alfredo Mayo, one of the icons of Francoist cinema, is the leader of the hunters.

 

 

José Arroyo

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 478 – Spider-Man: Brand New Day

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We’ve tuned out of Marvel on the podcast for a little while, but one of the eternally entertaining superheroes, Spider-Man, reignites our interest with Brand New Day. With Doctor Strange having cast a spell at the end of 2021’s No Way Home to make the entire world forget Peter Parker, for reasons that Doctor Strange presumably cast another spell to make us forget, Peter, newly isolated, returns to fighting street-level crime in New York City while pining for his old relationships and suffering severe headaches. Can he revive his former life? Surely it wouldn’t be a Marvel film if an enormously significant, cliff-hanging event had permanent consequences.

Still, even for those as cynical as it’s possible to be about the MCU, Brand New Day has plenty to recommend it. It aims for thematic depth – though how fully that’s achieved is up for discussion – and is genuinely moving. Indeed, certain moments move the audience to cheer and applaud, which in turn moves Mike to harrumph bitterly. Destin Daniel Cretton, directing his second MCU entry following Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, demonstrates a gift for working with actors and a strong instinct for staging action, although Cineworld does its best to undermine those virtues with its poor projection.

We also return to our discussion of IMAX and The Odyssey, asking whether the frame’s envelopment of the visual field impedes filmmakers’ ability to express through composition and framing, and considering whether there’s something fundamentally anti-democratic about making films whose fullest form can only be experienced at a handful of cinemas around the world.

Listen on the players below, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Spotify, or YouTube Music.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

 

Cinema Rediscovered 2026 Wrap-Up.

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As ever Richard and I loved attending this year’s edition of Cinema Rediscovered at the Watershed in Bristol. They do so many things for the city and for cinema; bringing in so many venues into the festival;  offering young people the opportunities to programme, to get experience with criticism, to learn about Bristol as a cinema city (Mark Fuller’s wonderful walks), familiarise themselves with different histories (Rosie Taylor’s equally wonderful talk on 9.5mm film; the Queen Kelly programme with Pamela Hutchinson’s superb introduction, and in two different venues, so one can explore different cinemas in Bristol) and so much else. In this podcast Richard and I go through the programme day by day, speaking on all the events we attended (everyone will have a slightly different experience of Cinema Rediscovered), praising much (Different Ways of Seeing panel, the Cruising pop-up, many of the individual films, with ANNIE GIVES IT THOSE ONES, a particular highlight for borth Richard and I) and offering some criticisms which we aim to be constructive (is it time to let go of the 70s, rogue or not? Might the comic book adaptation strand have been better shaped and signalled; might connections between films in the programme have been better highlighted). That said, another brilliant year, it’s tenth! Here’s to many more. Congratulations to Mark Cosgrove, Maddie Probst and the dozens of other people who made it all possible.

The sound problem with ‘In The Soup’ mentioned by Richard has been identified and fixed for the rerelease”

The podcast may be listened to below:

The podcast may be listened to here:

The podcast may also be listened to on: Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

 

José Arroyo and Richard Layne

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 477 – The Odyssey

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Realising his dream of shooting an entire film on 70mm IMAX stock, Christopher Nolan adapts Homer’s ancient Greek poem The Odyssey, a vast mythological epic and one of the foundational works of Western literature. We haven’t seen it in full IMAX but IMAX Digital, the pretender to the IMAX name that nonetheless offers the best screen in Birmingham, which for three hours immerses us in the story of a war hero’s attempt to return home and handle his past.

Other than the film’s tempo and structure, which tell the story swiftly and non-chronologically, but without ever losing us, we don’t agree on much. For José, it’s beautiful to look at; for Mike, the visual pleasures are few and far between. José likes the performances across the board; Mike expresses serious reservations about some of them. We also discuss the disappointment of the final action scene, the extent to which the film treats the Greek gods as real, Zeus’ law and how well the film represents ancient Greek culture and ways of thinking, and whether its explicit contextualisation of the story as a metaphor for PTSD is earned.

Listen on the players below, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Spotify, or YouTube Music.

My first impressions after seeing THE ODYSSEY for the second time, the first in IMAX 70mm, is that it’s more richly a film about morality for immoral times. The 1.43 IMAX 70mm ratio and the huge screen make it a more intimate epic. One is immersed in these faces, often shot in two-shot, medium close-up, close-up. It’s amazing to see the preponderance of these shots in an epic. One is instantly immersed in these thinking, feeling beings. Focus pull doesn’t seem easy in this format and often the frame goes in and out of focus when in movement, which adds to the lack of clarity in the character’s understanding. There is a lot of shooting through screens, particularly in the scenes with Penelope, which have a similar effect. Mike was telling me the other day that in an interview with cinematographer with Hoyte van Hoytema, he discusses the compositional restrictions of the format, how everything important has to be shown in the centre of the frame, and this viewing experience confirms it. The screen is so huge, and one is so immersed, everything important happens at the centre of the frame. Of course this the begs the question of the experience in digital widescreen IMAX and whether that’s a diminished experience, and if so how.
In this viewing I particularly appreciated Travis Scott as The Bard in the opening; the calm, elegant strength of his bearing and the way he says the opening lines:’ “A face… a fleet… a war… a man… a thought… a trick… a trick to break the walls of Troy… and burn it screaming to the ground!”, and which reinforces my disagreement with those accusing the film of being tokenistic with people of colour (including Wilson).
Maybe because of the format, I also found the film more moving (Leguizamo on Odysseus’ return; the exchange between father and son, coded and clear; the husband’s return, each emotional beat achieved by the actors at their peak; and I liked Tom Holland much more this time around, the callowness, lack of strength, powerlessness, etc being part of the character, though I do think the final exchange in that scene of recognition could have been better handled. But this is quibbling. A serious film about our times, beautiful, delicate, exciting. The image of the cyclops clearly taken from Goya’s Saturn Devouring his son becomes even more potent this time around. Also seeing it at the BFI’s IMAX brought out all the sound work on the film, a work of art on its own, a sharpening of feeling. I think it a better film this second time around and now want to see it once more.
Third time seeing The Odyssey, in yet another format, 70mm. at London’s Picturehouse Central. It becomes clear that the only design proper in relation to composition is in the IMAX 70mm format, the rest is mere cropping, with some of the beauty and story-telling lost in translation to other formats. I still loved seeing it, now with other episodes eliciting emotion, this time, for example, those last lines of the siren scene, ‘What you want most is what you can’t have, and what you can’t have is what you already had and lost’, which seem straight out of a noir. What comes into sharper focus on this third viewing is the ingeniousness of the structure, the telling and re-telling of the Trojan Horse scene, by different people and at different times, its play with time, point-of-view, reliability, and then re-told again to Penelope at the end, just at that moment and related to the scene where Odysseus return Antinous his shame, just as he’s acknowledge, perhaps by confessing to Penelope, unburdened himself, of his own. And doesn’t that whole set up with Penelope, the way, she’s photographed, now convey both cloister and confessional? I find it brilliant. It does now seem that when most people refer to the weakness of the script they’re really saying they don’t like the dialogue, primarily Tom Holand saying Mom and Dad. I’ve noted no references to structure, imagery or sound design when detractors reference a script. Sometimes, as Richard Brody commented recently, the process of translation encompasses translating written words into sounds and images, sometimes images and sounds are part of the script, and the process, perhaps more of realisation in another medium, which I suppose is also a process of translation, if of another type or degree.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

THE ODYSSEY at Cineworld.

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Mike and Jen, who I saw it with, responded differently, and to different degrees. They certainly didn’t like it as much as I. Online, one already sees backlashes to the good reviews it’s been getting, the absurd positions attention-seekers often deploy (‘Nolan is the worst director in history!’), well-meaning but half-baked political positionalities (boycott the film because part of it was filmed in Morocco occupied Western Sahara). I found it beautiful, entertaining, a successful attempt to make one of those ancient rune-y texts people go to to seek answers newly relevant (about marriage, father-son relationships, duties and responsibilities, home and exile, the individual vs the community, drugs and trauma, ptsd and the rule of law, etc), and inclusive. The MAGA twits are already in a snit over the casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen. There’s been less mention of the wonderful uses of Elliot Page as Sinon. I loved seeing Samantha Morton, Robert Pattinson, magical movie goddesses like Charleze Theron and Zendaya play legendary magical beings, John Leguizamo, and I think Matt Damo is superb. I’m not sure Tom Holland succeeds in conveying that move from callow youth to someone ready to be King, but that and some of the action sequences, particularly the ending one, would be my main quibbles. It’s a film to see on a big screen. I’m booked at the London IMAX. I also want to see it on 35mm at the Warwick Arts Centre. Podcast will follow.

José Arroyo

Minions and Monsters (Pierre Coffin, 2026)

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Saw MINIONS AND MONSTERS yesterday and it is a film buff’s delight; Muybridge, Meliês, the Lumières, Harold Lloyd, Chaplin, Keaton, all get referenced; and jokes are made of those references visually and aurally. In fact, the pidgin dialogue (I can pick out bits of Spanish, French, German and Italian) is as witty as the use of music and visuals. It’s like a whole history of cinema ( Citizen Kane, Casablanca, gangster films, monster movies, ad nauseum) is brought out and dusted off with the intent of making the audience laugh. And it succeeds, as much with children as with adults. A delight. I’d be surprised if this wasn’t used in future film courses to illustrate bits of  film history and aesthetics.

José Arroyo

Thinking Aloud About Film: Death of A Cyclist/ Muerte de un ciclista (Juan Antonio Bardem, 1955)

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Part of the Juan Antonio Bardem cycle of films screened at Bologna and available to see through a marvellous Criterion Edition.

An adulterous couple run over a cyclist in a deserted road and run off in fear of their affair being found out. The cyclist dies. An epicene art critic claims to have seen them and starts a blackmail scheme. What are they willing to do to protect their wealth,  family name and social standing? What are the effects of murder on an already tainted love? A noir influenced by neo-realism that uses striking compositions and innovative editing to create an atmospheric and scathing social critique, where the circus is rendered equivalent to the Church, tenement subsistence living is contrasted to upper class life where charity fundraisers focus on the festivities rather than the cause. Made at the height of the Franco era. Lucia Bosé post Antonioni and at the height of her fame is the Garboesque enigmatic femme fatale. We discuss all of this and more in the podcast below. It won the International Critics Award in Cannes in 1955.

The podcast may be listened to here:

The podcast may also be listened to on: Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

 

Some of the articles discussed in the podcast may be accessed here:

David Melville Wingrove in Senses of Cinema may be accessed here:

My extended blogpost on the film, with clips and iimages, may be accessed here 

The Cinematograph article Richard mentions several times may be found here

The Ritrovato page on the film may be found here

José Arroyo

PARTY GIRL (Nicholas Ray, 1958)

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In his magisterial work on Nicholas Ray, NICHOLAS RAY, AN AMERICAN JOURNEY, surely one of the greatest works on film studies, Bernard Eisenschitz writes that PARTY GIRL (Nicholas Ray, 1958) was met with a ‘unanimously condescending critical reception in the United States’ and that French critics, ‘adopting an extremist stance within AUTEURIST theory, were of the opinion that Ray had here perfected his method. Time and distance permit one to see both points of view and for me now it falls somewhere in between.

 

Surely, the film’s greatest pleasures are those provided by an auteurist lens: the originality of the CinemaScope compositions, the architectural use of space, the striking and dramatic uses of colour within the colour scheme (from red, to blue, to green); the persistence of themes of alienation – Vicky Gaye (Cyd Charisse) is the Party Girl who sells herself for money; Thomas Farrell (Robert Taylor) is the gangland lawyer who sells his skills to the higher bidder. Their tired worn impassive faces evoke the toil this has taken on them. Ray uses their impassivity to evoke life leaving substance; until they fall in love of course and love re-ignites, redeems and changes.  All the compromises of before, both necessary and deadening, can be cast aside…though Ray being Ray, compromise, corruption, sell-outs…well, that’s life’s daily challenges.

One of the fascinating things about this film is how the mise-en-scène embroiders that impassive central duo – and not just with composition, camera, movement and colour – but with other traditions of acting: the ebullient ‘method’ of Lee J. Cobb and Corey Allen, John Ireland’s liveliness – all immensely watchable though only Ireland feels true; and this juxtaposed with much of the rest of the cast, in a polished style that would become standard TV issue. It’s worth noting that Ray is full of praise for Taylor, stating that he worked like ‘a true method actor’. What is evident to me is that Ray uses him most effectively, though whenever he says a line, I can always think of five ways of being more interesting with them, and ten stars who could double that number. The Warner Archive print is gorgeous; the film’s central equivalence between selling sex and selling legal advice is one that stays with me. Ray is not responsible for filming the musical numbers (choreographed and directed unimaginatively by Robert Sidney), a pity, as the film would have been better had they been more coherently, visually and thematically integrated into the rest of the film. The Warner Archive print is gorgeous. The film is set in 30s Chicago though the viewer only knows because they’re told; what they see is pure 50’s.

 

José Arroyo

 

Pamela Hutchinson on THE CURSE OF QUEEN KELLY (New York, Sticking Place Books, 2025)

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When I read THE CURSE OF QUEEN KELLY, I wrote to Pam Hutchinson, its author: ‘I found it it so much fun to read — a rarity! And it’s narrative techniques, those one associates with the 19th century novel — old fashioned but that seems radically original in a film book — engaging the reader with the use of ‘you’ — or other forms of direct address ‘we will now turn to,’ having cliff-hangers at the end of chapters… It’s truly brilliant and engaging and knowledgeable. Gives one a sense of the sheer FUN of learning about film history’.

That I enjoyed the book so much was one reason for wanting to do a podcast with Pam on it. The other reason is that Cinema Re-Discovered is hosting two screenings of the ‘Cursed’ film,  its UK premiere — 98 years after production formally ended –on Saturday 25 July, 14.05, at the Watershed, Bristol.Followed by another screening the day after,Sunday 26th of July at 13:00 at Curzon Clevedon (which boasts a Christie organ), both screenings hosted/introduced by Pam herself.

I begin the podcast with citing the book’s first paragraph:

‘“A naughty little number”

‘This is a story of how not to make a film. A story about three people who should have known better – people we could dismiss as a spendthrift, a swindler and a sadist, but who are far more interesting than that. They almost made a movie, but succeeded in creating a legend. This is the story of how a 1920s movie star, a businessman, and an artist set out to make an impossible film, the infamous Queen Kelly, of how they hit breaking point and threw it all away. It is also the tale of how that star spend the rest of her life trying to save the trio’s beleaguered infant.’

The podcast then proceeds to discuss that spendthrift/movie star, swindler/businessman, and sadist/ artist, the production of the film and then the various efforts to re-constitute it into the version we will all be able to see at CINEMA RE-DISCOVERED.

A fun and informative podcast that may be listened to here:

The podcast may also be listened to on: Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

José Arroyo