Thursday, January 2, 2025

People don't live like the people in We Live in Time. Yes, they fall in love. They have children. They get sick. Yet real life is a forward march; cinema of this breed is a dainty skip across the stepping stones.

Tobias (Andrew Garfield) has reached rock-bottom. Having climbed out of his depression bath, the crumbs of his HobNob depression meal still at the corners of his mouth, he discovers there isn't a single, functioning pen or pencil he can use to sign his divorce papers. And so he hobbles out of his hotel room in nothing but a dressing gown, only to be promptly hit by a car driven by Almut (Florence Pugh), the future love of his life.

Read the full review here. 

Out this week: 

Succumb to the darkness with Robert Eggers's stunning Gothic horror Nosferatu (*****). Or, check out RaMell Ross's artistically daring adaptation Nickel Boys (*****), Asif Kapadia's thorough and expansive drama-documentary 2073 (****) or John Crowley's romantic drama We Live in Time (***). 

Written by Clarisse Loughrey

Where does history live? In documents, artefacts, bones? Or in memory, that fragile, boundless state we try to express in fragments, in talk or on the page, but ultimately take to our graves? It's the question that shapes RaMell Ross's Nickel Boys, a more artistically daring literary adaptation than almost any other of its peers. His film is a feat of full-bodied immersion, using a point-of-view camera, finely tuned sound design, and cinematic illusion to create a reality that takes hold of and then never quite leaves its audience's souls.

What it isn't is a mere translation to the screen of Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel, The Nickel Boys – it's testament to why and how we tell stories about the past and its traumas. Whitehead's book is a fictionalised account of a friendship forged by two Black students at Nickel Academy, a so-called "reform school", a euphemistic turn of phrase used to describe a juvenile penal institution. It's a storyteller's effort to approximate memory in the face of the monstrous weight of fact: in 2012, a mass, unmarked grave was uncovered on the grounds of the Florida School of Boys, containing 55 identifiable burials, with evidence of a documented 100 deaths at the school.

Each is a story now lost to memory. Nickel Boys honours them through the twin figures of Elwood (Ethan Herisse, with Ethan Cole Sharp as his younger iteration) and Turner (Brandon Wilson), who view their fates under very different lights. Elwood, who we're introduced to first, grew up in a world tinted by optimism – amid talk of the march from Selma to Montgomery, with Martin Luther King Jr at its head; television footage of the Apollo space programme; and the promise by a teacher that, at the HBCU Elwood is set to attend, there are textbooks without racial epithets to cross out. Turner, meanwhile, was moulded by a harsher reality, as hinted by a choppy montage of an open boxcar speeding across the landscape. We're offered no evidence of home.

But the preciousness of their friendship, in the face of it all, reaches a kind of revelatory crescendo in the scene where Elwood's grandmother Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, a luminous beacon of hope), arrives at the Academy to see him. They've hidden him away from her. Come up with flimsy excuses about why he can't accept visitors. But she finds Turner, this boy like him and entirely unlike him, finds out they're friends, and embraces him anyway. Elwood and Turner carry pieces of each other with them.

Read the full review here. 

A document of where I've gone and the things I've seen 

Tuesday, 31 December
At rest.

Wednesday, 1 January 

At rest.

Thursday, 2 January 

At rest. 

A scene from 'Phantom Thread' 

If you were put in charge of mapping out the career of Luchino Visconti, you'd likely label Rocco and His Brothers (1960) as the bridge between two stylistic land masses. In the rearview mirror, you'd see his foundational neorealist films – namely Ossessione (1943), usually recognised as the very first in the movement – while ahead would lie the operatic The Leopard (1963), a turn somewhat influenced by his success as a stage director.

But it's a tension that illuminates Rocco and His Brothers, rather than complicates it. At its roots, we see how the urban capitalistic drive slowly destroys the harmony between widow Rosaria (Katina Paxinou) and her sons: Simone (Renato Salvatori), Ciro (Max Cartier), the Luca (Rocco Vidolazzi), Rocco (Alain Delon), and Vincenzo (Spiros Focás). They are immigrants from the agricultural south of Italy, come to Milan in the hope of new, ameliorated lives.

But Visconti presents that moral decay, specifically within the violent, jealous Simone, as both a literary force (influenced by Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Idiot) and a biblical one. Inevitably, someone has to suffer for all these sins and, as the cruelty of the world often dictates, it is a woman – Annie Girardot's Nadia, a sex worker who rejects Simone and falls for Rocco, whose bruised unsentimentally is so striking under Girardot's guidance. She's shunned by Rocco on the roof, and between the spires, of a Gothic cathedral. When she finally succumbs to her awful fate, she throws her arms out in a crucifixion pose. Rocco and His Brothers bristles with its own mourning of humanity's innocence, beautifully articulated when Rocco utters: "We're no longer in God's grace. We're our own enemies."

'Rocco and his Brothers' opens in selected cinemas and will be simultaneously available to stream on BFI Player from 3 January.

Julianne Moore and Todd Haynes attend the 59th Venice Film Festival at the Lido September 2, 2002 in Venice, Italy.

(Photo by Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images)

Kazuo Mori's A Certain Killer and A Killer's Key will be released next Friday on Limited Edition Blu-ray, for the very first time to the English-language home video market. I'll be tackling A Certain Killer. 

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