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The Falling 2014
A dreamy, oestrogenic mystery in a girls' school in 1960s England, where pupils start fainting for no apparent reason. This film is the result of Carol Morley's obsession with ‘mass psychogenic illness’ (better, if less accurately, known as mass hysteria), a phenomenon still not well understood, and one which overwhelmingly affects girls over boys. Is it because they're inherently more suggestible? Or because they talk to each other more, and share symptoms?
Morley's film offers a few breadcrumbs for other…
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The Pigeon Tunnel 2023
Conversations – interrogations, if you prefer – are at the heart of John Le Carré's novels, where the process of trying to tease information from someone occupies the place that car chases or gun fights have in other people's work. So it's ironic that this documentary feels, fundamentally, like a rather unequal interrogation, where the subject is clearly in a different league from the man interviewing him.
And it's not that Le Carré is deliberately evasive. He seems fairly genuine…
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The Canterbury Tales 1972
Not as successful as The Decameron, partly because some authenticity is lost by seeing all these supposedly English medieval peasants speaking Italian (though there are some brief, dubbed appearances from such unexpected locals as Robin Askwith and Tom Baker).
In a way Pasolini already seems to be starting to look like a parody of himself – though there is still something refreshingly open and unjudgemental about the ribaldry he puts on screen. The ordinariness of the naked bodies he splashes over…
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Persona 1966
I loved this beyond words. So much so that I feel genuinely frustrated that I didn't see it years ago, that it wasn't part of my internal imagery when I was younger. It's a film with an amazing expressionist sensibility and all kinds of technical brilliance in the lighting, the blocking, and the strange facial choreography that Bergman uses in his close-ups – but unlike so many similar films, it doesn't feel at all cerebral. It's a film to be felt,…
