I'd tried to watch Blue Velvet a few times before now and I'm pretty certain I never quite finished it when I was younger. That's perhaps understandable: it's a film that seeks to repel, just as much as it asserts that what lies beneath 'normality' is itself repellant. And it does an excellent job of both of those things.
The most noteworthy performances are from the secondary characters: Dennis Hopper as the unhinged criminal Frank Booth, and Isabella Rossellini as…
I'd wanted to see this in cinemas back in 2019. The trailer was so striking: it laid out a very clear vision of what the film was to be – punky, unforgiving, visually arresting. Unlike a lot of films, True History of the Kelly Gang lives up to the promise of that trailer.
It's another astonishing performance from the ever-reliable George MacKay as the conflicted, conditioned and compromised anti-hero Ned Kelly. Split broadly into three chapters, the film does an…
This was utterly great; one of my favourite #FridayFilmClub entries so far.
The film focuses on the life of Violet Stoneham, an English teacher in Calcutta. As an Anglo-Indian, she's caught between two worlds: she's not embraced as readily as some of her other colleagues, being passed over for promotion and quietly cut out of many staff room chats. To be fair, she never seems like the most dynamic of teachers: her class tend to run wild as she recites…
This ended up as our Sunday evening viewing precisely because we'd returned from the ABBA Voyage concert in London the day before: and far more so than Mamma Mia! (which just feels like a jukebox musical), Muriel's Wedding skillfully uses the incredible cataloge of ABBA's music to create moments with real emotional heft. The Waterloo sequence is punch-the-air joyful; there's a wistfulness to the beach scene that makes Fernando the perfect choice. And Dancing Queen (surely the most iconic and…
