Rocketman (Dexter Fletcher, 2019)
I confess to not paying that much attention to Reginald Dwight — although there was no escaping his persecution by The Sun when he sued or his Diana anthem and he cowrote with Tom Robinson — oh and he had those photos at t’Tate. Although, curiously, I’ve always enjoyed his songs when I’ve heard them. I knew the brief outline of his life story and … Continue reading →
Sunset (Napszállta, Nemes László, 2018)
I saw the start of this film twice, as the Curzon screwed up the subtitles: a painting of the kind of four or five storey streets we associate with nineteenth century Vienna or Budapest or Paris, with the light fading to night and electric interiors coming into view. To be precise, it is 1913 Budapest, the other capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire and a young woman is trying on hats, barely acknowledging the helpers, staring indifferently into mirrors. Again, with sound — the newest model, the oldest, the most à la mode — and then she announces she’s there for a job.
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Harald Sohlberg: Painting Norway (Dulwich Picture Gallery)
Everyone knows The Scream, but Norway’s favourite painting is a remarkable nighttime mountainscape, by Harald Sohlberg. I’d been struck by his incredible yellow skies in paintings either side of doorways in Kode 3, just before the French Impression era Munch room, and again by his work at the Oslo National Museum, but he was still at number five in my top five Norwegian artists. Dulwich — who made me take notice of Nikolai Astrup — now brings Sohlberg to the UK, making it two Norwegian exhibitions at once.
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Tolkien (Dome Karukoski, 2019)
The author biopic has a real problem to navigate — we want to know what they get their crazy ideas from but it turns out they just lived it.
Picture Tom Eliot wandering down King William Street and some passing bloke in a Stetson says, “Bloody cruel month, April.”
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High Life (Claire Denis, 2018)
This is not alas the big screen version of the classic Alan Cumming-Forbes Masson-Siobhan Redmond sitcom, but Robert Pattison is no Alan Cumming and Juliette Binoche is no Forbes Masson. What we have is sf that suffers in the name of art, with Silent Running, Stalker and Sleeper wizzed in the blender with a crapper version of The Black Hole dribbling out of the jug.
Edvard Munch, Love and Angst (British Museum)
This is a slice of Edvard Munch’s career — one of my top five favourite Norwegian artists — between about 1890 and 1910, which perhaps doesn’t make sense without knowing the rest of his career. For a start, there is a Norwegian habit of repeating the same motif in a way I’ve not seen with other artists other than Picasso. Munch has several paintings of Puberty or The Vampire, for example, and this raises questions about whether he is obsessively exploring a theme, seeking out the perfect version, displaying artistic unity or exploiting the design for maximum revenue. Or all of the above.
Subject to Change 