The phrase “male gaze” was coined by the British film theorist Laura Mulvey in 1975 and has become a standard tool for analysing a film’s gendered content. What director Nina Menkes has set out to show in Brainwashed is that the techniques that create the male gaze have entered cinema’s DNA and become standard across the genders, for makers and watchers alike. “It’s like a law,” she says. This is bad news for us all, she argues, not just cineastes.The documentary uses as its framework a 2018 lecture Menkes gave to her film production students at CalArts in Los Angeles. We cut to and from it Read more ...

In Mark Jenkin’s haunted Cornwall, time warps and bends. He is a child of Nic Roeg’s Seventies masterworks (Walkabout, Don’t Look Now, The Man Who Fell To Earth), whose kaleidoscopic slivering of time expressed an elliptical, sensual mind. Jenkin too has built his own time and space with self-described “seemingly crazy” antique techniques, limiting him to clockwork, 16mm film and post-synch sound.In this follow-up to his debut, Bait, a ship sunk in 1897's flotsam bobs into 1973, premonitory of a new sinking, remembered on a crackling radio report from now. The otherwise Read more ...

I can still (just) remember Saturday morning cinema being a thing, only because my big brother was old enough to attend weekly sessions at the local ABC and I was too young to go. He would presumably have watched several of the films in this latest BFI collection, all produced by the Children’s Film Foundation.This state institution produced 55-minute features designed for Saturday screenings from 1950 up until the late 1980s, when dwindling audiences and the popularity of Tiswas rendered it obsolete. Funding came from the Eady Levy, a 5% tax on box office receipts intended to support Read more ...

The ne plus ultra of donkey films remains Robert Bresson’s heartbreaking Au hazard Balthazar (1966). Veteran Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO, premiered at last year’s Cannes Festival, is a very loose variant, Skolimowski revealing in a booklet interview with David Thompson that Balthazar “was the only film at which I really shed a tear at the end”.Watching the earlier film after seeing EO highlights how very different the two films are. Bresson’s donkey is seen very much through the eyes of the humans who variously love and abuse him, while Skolimowski shows us a confusing, often Read more ...

Filmed ballets involve a different way of watching: you may know a piece well, but you aren’t used to staring into its lead dancers’ eyes as they perform their roles. Not all dancers give good close-up, either. But a new film by the Oscar-winning director Asif Kapadia of Akram Khan’s Creature, made for English National Ballet in 2021, has transformed the original live version into a moving drama.Creature still isn’t an easy watch. It’s set in a vast murky room with high ceilings and wooden planks for walls. Outside, when the side doors occasionally open, there is blindingly white light and Read more ...

Another box-set from the BFI full of Bergman treasures, from core catalogue classics such as Fanny and Alexander (1982), Cries and Whispers (1972), Autumn Sonata (1978) and Scenes from a Marriage (1973) to less well-known films such as After the Rehearsal (1984) and From the Lives of Marionettes (1980).There are no comedies here – late mid-life brought out the full darkness of the Swedish director’s palette – although Fanny and Alexander both delights and shocks as it combines a characteristic lightness of touch, including a much-loved farting uncle and a child’s eye view of adult rituals, Read more ...

Unlike the black and white Bait, Mark Jenkin’s highly acclaimed previous film, Enys Men (stone island in Cornish) is full of colour. Strange, saturated colour that doesn’t look quite real: a deep blue sea, a bright red raincoat, yellow gorse against brown bracken. And the flowers around which this abstract plot revolves don’t look real either. Such elongated stems and waxy white petals look like they come from outer space, not a windy Cornish coastline.Jenkin says the film, though not a direct homage to low-budget horror films of the 1970s, was created using a similar production process, and Read more ...

Greg Urbanski, Gary Oldman’s long-term producing partner, tells us on the commentary track that no film company wanted to touch the script of Nil by Mouth. Oldman was riding high as an actor in 1996, renowned for his shape-shifting performances as Sid Vicious and Joe Orton in the UK, and Lee Harvey Oswald, Beethoven and Dracula in the US. But moving into the director’s seat was seen as career suicide, especially with Oldman’s highly personal screenplay about working class family life in South London lacking star names. Luc Besson, who had had a big hit with Oldman in Leon Read more ...

The BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas series first consisted of eight short films broadcast between 1971 and 1978, five of which were adaptations of short stories by MR James.Shot on 16mm film instead of videotape, most were directed by documentary maker Lawrence Gordon Clark. Itching to move into drama, Clark had persuaded the controller of BBC to let him make an adaptation of James’s The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral. And, despite a tiny budget, the 45-minute film is a triumph. The chills are suggested rather than explicitly shown and offset with black humour, Robert Hardy’s Archdeacon, Read more ...

The New York-based Scottish writer-director Charlotte Wells's feature debut Aftersun is a sublime example of how an opaque style can be wedded to an ambiguous storytelling technique without cost to psychological truth. Though the movie is minimalistic on every level except its retrospective late Nineties Turkish seacoast setting, which Wells resists exploiting too pictorially, her mastery of film language is so uncanny as to make exposition almost redundant. Nothing much happens in Aftersun beyond a pre-teen’s first kiss and what might or might not be her young father’s first or second Read more ...

The British folk horror wave of the late Sixties and early Seventies wasn’t impervious to American influence. Though Roddy McDowall (1928-98), the director of The Ballad of Tam-Lin (1970), was born in Herne Hill, he was as Hollywood-steeped as its London-based star Ava Gardner.McDowall is best-known as a prolific actor (How Green Was My Valley, The Planet of the Apes films) and photographer than for his only foray into filmmaking. He can't be faulted for dynamism and sensitivity, even if some of the inexperienced actors needed more guidance.The medieval Scottish Border romance Tam Lin (Child Read more ...

The London Film Festival ended with the announcement of assorted prizes, all well-deserved. My colleague Demetrios Matheou has already written here about the Chilean political thriller, 1976, which won Best First Feature, and we’ll be writing in depth about the  Best Film winner, the Austrian historical drama Corsage, when it opens at the end of the year. I was most pleased that All that Breathes was awarded the Grierson Award for Documentary. This moving, subtle, and beautifully made portrait of two brothers in Delhi who dedicate their lives to saving Read more ...