2023 Queer Film Challenge no 23: a film from Za's Queer Films Everyone Must See list.
Also 52 films by women 2023: 65/52.
Slava Tsukerman's impeccably weird film is the Billy Pilgrim of cinema, unstuck in time to the extent that even its ostensible flaws - the stilted performances, the dated effects - only increase its metamodern appeal. If it was made by a modern indie director working in a deliberate retro-kitsch style, it's hard to see what the difference…
After making Unfair! to protest against the 1971 Industrial Relations Act, B.S. Johnson reteamed with the Association of Cinematograph, Television and Allied Technicians for this short documentary recording a mass protest march against the Act. His original idea was a feature with the title Here Comes Everyone!, a line from his beloved James Joyce, but it fell through. What remains is a detailed, well-shot document of a protest of enormous scale that has, nevertheless, fallen out of the history books.…
Too often, when we wonder who the Greatest Living Englishman is, we forget that Nick Park asked Dreamworks for thirty million dollars to make an internationally-released feature-length film about marrow-growing contests in Lancashire and they said yes.
I was going to add a caveat to this review, to say that perhaps it wasn't a 4.5 film, but if you're queer, or if you're from one of those towns - you know, the ones with shops that you've never seen without the shutters down, the ones whose people are said to be "workshy" by people on TV despite the fact that some of the older residents still have scars on their head that they got from literally, physically…
