oil Archives - Jeremy C. Processing

Director – Martin Scorsese – 2023 – US – Cert. 15 – 206m

*****

A returning WW1 veteran marries into Oklahoma’s Osage Indian tribe at the time of the Osage Indian Murders – plays the 2023 London Film Festival which runs from Wednesday, October 4th until Sunday, October 15th, and will be out in UK cinemas on Friday, October 20th

At slightly over 80 years of age, Martin Scorsese has now been making movies for over 60 years. Like his last, fictional, narrative feature The Irishman (2019), this one is pushing three and a half hours. I always have issues with films that long: the vast majority are that way due to director’s ego and / or inability to tell a story concisely. Some of them might have been better suited to a TV mini-series ( a medium in which, incidentally, Scorsese also works). Yet if you try and imagine Killers Of The Flower Moon cut down in length, it’s difficult. Maybe you could take out the frame story – the performance of a crime drama on the radio on the subject of the Osage Indian Murders – but that sets the scene nicely at the start and takes you back out of the movie equally nicely at the end, so it would be a shame to do so.… Read the rest

Three Colours: Blue
(Trois Couleurs: Bleu)

Director – Krzysztof Kieślowski – 1993 – France – Cert. 15 – 94m

*****

A woman who survives the car crash which kills both her composer husband and their young daughter finds herself financially secure and free to do…nothing – 4K restoration is out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 31st

This represents the first part of a trilogy based on the three colours of the French national flag, with each film representing one of that nation’s three values of liberté, égalité, fraternité (liberty, equality, brotherhood). I first saw the film on its UK release back in 1993, for which I interviewed Kieślowski. It’s possible I’ve seen it again in the interim. These days, the trilogy is elevated to the status of a cinematic masterwork. As a young thirtysomething, I remember feeling quite mixed about it. But your perception of these things can change with time, and watching the film again in 2023, in full, restored 4k glory prior to reissue on Blu-ray, I was far more impressed with it than when I first saw it.

For one thing, on this occasion I’m not seeing it for the first time, so the brief appearance (in the courtroom sequence) of Karol Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski) and Dominique (Julie Delpy) immediately conjures the second film Three Colours: White (1994) in which those characters are the two main protagonists, which wasn’t the case on first viewing when no-one knew what was coming in the second and third films, the third being Three Colours: Red (1994).… Read the rest