My last viewing update was towards the end of July, so I thought I’d better get on with posting this one before the year ends.

As you can see, my viewing has not been bountiful in the second half of the year. Summer tends to be more about the outdoors for me these days, but in actual fact I was unwell in August to such a degree that it knocked me off my stride with all planned projects (cinematic and otherwise). As a result, my viewing (and reading) has been somewhat haphazard in the remainder of the year.

Fantastic Mr Fox (Wes Anderson, 2009) was a re-watch – and part of an attempt to amuse a niece and nephew during the school holidays (although “Becca, that doesn’t happen in the book / that character isn’t in the book” was a recurring refrain from my nephew) – but all of the rest of the features were first time viewings. The stand-outs were: Tout le monde aime Jeanne / Everybody Loves Jeanne (Céline Devaux, 2022), All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (Laura Poitras, 2022), and I Know Where I’m Going! (Powell and Pressburger, 1945).

Tout le monde aime Jeanne (currently available on MUBI) is a kind of romcom on the surface, but on a deeper level is about grief, as a moment of very public failure for Jeanne (Blanche Gardin) leads to an emotional unravelling and a delayed reckoning with her mother’s suicide a year prior. Jeanne’s inner thoughts (a nagging, sardonic, and critical voice) are rendered as animations, which I found amusing and original, and Laurent Lafitte is a hoot as the former school classmate who starts off as an eccentric irritant but across the running time reveals himself to be empathetic and attuned to Jeanne’s inner turmoil.

All the Beauty and Bloodshed (currently available on BBC iPlayer) stands as both a career overview of photographer Nan Goldin and an up-close-and-personal ride-along to her activism in campaigning for the Sackler family‘s name to be removed from art museums and galleries. As the film makes clear, she is someone who has endured a catastrophic level of personal loss but she is indefatigable in what she is willing to take on (and risk) in the name of what she sees as morally right.

Press coverage of the BFI’s Powell and Pressburger season was what inspired my viewing of I Know Where I’m Going! (and also my viewing of The Spy in Black (Michael Powell, 1939)), an Archers production that I’d somehow never caught up with before now. My first viewing was via an old DVD and the second was of the new restoration, available for free on the BFI Player. It casts a spell, and now vies with A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Black Narcissus (1947), The Red Shoes (1948), A Canterbury Tale (1944), and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) [what a run of films they had in less than a decade!] for a place in my top 3 Powell and Pressburger productions (which likely changes on a daily basis). I wish that Roger Livesey had made more films.

The last film that I’ll single out is the last one I watched: Attica (Stanley Nelson, 2021), which is currently available on BBC iPlayer as part of Storyville. The uprising at Attica is referenced in various films and books (not least Dog Day Afternoon (Sidney Lumet, 1975)), but I’d never known the detailed background or the full horror of what subsequently unfolded at the hands of the authorities (who were so confident in their position of impunity [sadly true] that they filmed and photographed what they did when they retook the prison). Difficult but necessary viewing.

I’ll round up the year as a whole, and my plans for 2024, next week.