This BFI compilation looks back to an age when an evening at the cinema was a proper night out, the main attraction preceded by a short supporting feature. Nine spooky and macabre examples are included here, though the set earns its four stars by dint of excellent documentation and historical significance rather than cinematic brilliance.
The French Canadian director Denis Villeneuve is best known for mainstream films like Sicario, Arrival, and Blade Runner 2049, stylishly expressive in their harnessing of alienating terrains, notably deserts and plains.
Given Dylan’s last album of originals was in 2012, and his standards phase had concluded with a slightly meandering three-disc set in Triplicate, expectations of anything other than an archival release or new tour announcement from Dylan in 2020 were low – until, that is, some weeks into the first lockdown, when his longest ever song dropped out of a clear blue sky.
Crash, David Cronenberg’s dazzling, daring, disturbing adaptation of JG Ballard’s novel about car crashes and sex is one of the most infamous of all cinema cause celebres.
The film's premiere in Cannes in 1996 caused an extraordinary ballyhoo, with then Evening Standard critic Alexander Walker writing a review with the headline "a movie beyond the bounds of depravity" and jury president Francis Coppola declining to join his fellow jury members in awarding the film a special jury prize.
If there’s been one thing that has coloured the UK music scene in 2020, it’s been the lack of any type of performance in front of a living, breathing and sweating audience for much of the year. Who was to know back at the beginning of January that we would only have about nine weeks to get in all of our gig-going? Fortunately, I managed to see a handful of concerts during this time and the most glorious by a country mile was Slipknot’s show in Birmingham.
Among the glints of light in this overcast year, one particularly bright one has been the state of British soul music. Not just in the sense of good records released, although there’ve been plenty of those – but something significantly deeper: a contextualisation, an acknowledgement and a pride in the rich history and unique talents of these islands.
This year of all years – surely – we need music which takes us to better, happier places. And the new album from Norwegian-born saxophonist/composer Marius Neset does that. It also gives us a bit more hindsight and context as to what his two previous albums involving large ensembles were all about.
I’ll leave it to others, better placed, to unpack 2020’s gruelling impact on so many. But one of its side effects was the elevation, alongside food and television, of recorded music. It became a salve, a focus, a locus of social media blather about what was getting us through. Lockdown ears were lifted by a heady gumbo of new discoveries and old favourites. Certainly, my best-of-year lists are overfull. There’s nothing I'm taking a punt on; it’s all lived stuff, revelled in.
Leave a 78-year-old ex-Beatle locked down for long enough, and this what he comes up with: a sequel to his two previous wholly solo albums, cooked up in his Sussex home studio. The results find the once derided, “Thumbs Aloft” McCartney’s slow creative redemption nearly complete.