Category Archives: Gaspar Noé

BFI LFF 2012: Post Tenebras Lux

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The first movie Shades of Caruso saw at the London Film Festival was Enter The Void way back in 2009, and even though I understand the argument that it is merely a hollow exercise in style over substance with nothing to say, to a certain extent it has haunted my experiences of the festival. Every film seen since then has had to live up to the overwhelming experience of watching that intentionally exasperating but technically peerless transgressive afterlife fantasy. Even when we saw Black Swan (my film of 2010), Darren Aronofsky namechecked Gaspar Noé’s movie and begged the audience to see it as soon as possible; aptly, considering how immersive and nightmarish both films are.

Carlos Reygadas’ Post Tenebras Lux was one of my wildcard movies for this year, a controversial and negatively critiqued anti-narrative movie with a distinct, experimental visual style; a description which brought back memories of Enter The Void. Like a junkie chasing the orgasmic feeling of that first high, I booked a ticket for this with absurdly high hopes. Long story short: this is not an intense visual trip designed to evoke an emotional response through a flow of imagery and sound, more a collection of vignettes that evoke a mood of gloom, obliquely hinting at a narrative either torn apart by random editing, or creating a narrative-by-inference through its seemingly fractured Expressionist structure which demands you engage with it intellectually.

So this is how this is going to go. I haven’t seen Reygadas’ other films yet, so have no frame of reference there. I’m not up on experimental film techniques, and couldn’t tell Stan Brakhage from Matthew Barney, so there’s very little I can say about Post Tenebras Lux in terms of how it fits in with contemporary art-house cinema, or Mexican culture, or pretty much anything, and attempts to do so will expose me as the terrible fraud I’ve tried to hard to hide from you, Dear Reader. All I can do is say what I think Reygadas’ lengthy crawl through atemporal context-less montage means. Because I’ve seen some say it makes little sense, but it seemed pretty straightforward to me, though in the most unstraightforward way imaginable. (Spoilers from here on, obvs.)

There are a few interpretations that occurred to me as my mind whirred throughout, but the thing that struck me quickly is that this jumble of imagery is intentionally structured no matter how perplexing it might seem, and though this might seem like an unimportant or mundane observation, it made me want to parse the movie instead of writing it off. After a recent frustrating experience with Alain Resnais’ You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet — which is similarly obscure but didn’t strike me as deserving of much interpretive effort — early on I suspected Post Tenebras Lux was within my grasp. A shot of lightning flashing above a field intercuts with light flashing in a room; one scene linked to another in an abstract manner. Order, of sorts. I can work with that.

First we see a young girl called Rut in a field with cows and dogs and horses (donkeys?); she splashes around in puddles, calling out names, her face framed by Reygadas’ PTL-Cam, as I’ve decided to call his 1:33 Academy aspect ratio imagery with its perplexing blurred edge which effectively shrinks the image down even further. The sky darkens and she remains there, alone, calling out for her mother, as a storm flickers on the horizon and thunder rumbles. From here we see the interior of a darkened house. A door opens, and a luminescent red “silhouette” of the Devil walks out, carrying a toolbox, his genitals visible as he paces through the house, into a room in which a man and a woman sleep. A young boy sees this, says nothing.

So we’ve got a religious reference, and we can see the movie through that frame, with Catholic/Christian imagery as a likely Rosetta Stone. From here much of the movie focuses on the family life of Juan and Natalia, and their children Rut and Eleazar (Reygadas’ real-life daughter and son), non-linearly following them as they live and play and argue. Natalia says very little, while Juan bosses adults around, viciously beats up one of his dogs, attends an AA-meeting held in the house of his handyman Seven, where he admits he’s addicted to internet pornography. He’s a vile human, to be honest. Seven isn’t much better; he admits to abusing his family while addicted to drugs; he is now an exile from them. So now we have isolation and warped masculinity.

Adding to these planks we get seemingly pointless cuts to a young team of English schoolboys preparing to play a rugby match, two old men argumentatively playing chess while two other men outside talk about bartering and doing work on a house, more dog abuse from a loathsome guy who hires Seven to cut down a huge tree to spite his sister, and most bizarrely, a wedding ceremony filled with pretentious chatter about literature which cuts to a bath-house in which a man is aggressively penetrated offscreen while a roomful of people dispassionately sit around. Juan and Natalia are there. They leave, find another room — named after Duchamp, though they first pass through Hegel — where Natalia has sex with a man while a naked woman strokes her head and talks to her about love and beauty.

Of all the peculiar associations from one scene to the next created by these juxtapositions, this blunt satirical dig at the pretensions of the wedding guests, civilised on the outside but animalistic, carnal and cruel on the inside, seemed the most obvious of them all. Reygadas has, to this point, been making clear points about the viciousness of humans, cruelly beating dogs, asserting dominance over other humans, fighting and fucking and hiding all of this behind a veneer of culture and ownership; desire mutated into voracious, soulless hunger. The adults are lost, miserable, alone. Only Rut and Eleazar are free and innocent, but their corruption is imminent, as the grandmother handing out money and urging boys to become businessmen shows. Adulthood is empty, a bleak journey to a dead end, a fate to be dreaded.

Commerce, bartering and organised dances of dominance and competition (sport as metaphor for the assertion of canine Alpha Male superiority) are the only ways in which the men in this world can communicate; even the discussion about literature comes down to a display of pompous brinkmanship. Nature is subjugated, ignored, treated like an inconvenience or a commodity, and civilisation is an pointless exercise in hiding our greedy nature, all interaction reduced to the owning of things or people. The men here are endlessly cruel, the women ignored or admired only for their beauty, denied agency by the controlling men. Juan tells his wife at one point that he will fuck her later; when she says she has an infection he replies, “That’s what the back door is for”. A human race led by bullying Alpha males; uncaring, ugly, incapable of empathy.

Reygadas has said this is semi-autobiographical, and I’d like to assume that the nastier elements of this are exaggerated expressions of self-loathing or horror at the worst excesses of masculine cruelty, taken as snapshots from moments in his life, or fictional representations set in the countries he has lived in; that macho hostility tainting his past like a spray-can adding graffiti to his memories. Without knowing more about him I can only go on suspicion of what his imagery is meant to symbolise; that the PTL-cam is meant to emphasise the loneliness of the characters, their dislocation from the world and people around them, or acting as a bubble that they are trapped inside, keeping them separate from the nature they were once a part of in their youth.

I also know nothing about Reygadas’ faith, but if a Devil is going to wander into the movie, glowing with crimson light like a stop sign, the Bible is obviously important. We start with a young girl naming animals, we get the sense that the characters here have been expelled from nature/paradise, and Juan seemingly resents his female counterpart for slights we do not understand; either “traditional” misogyny or the anger of Adam towards Eve. We see a tree (of knowledge) about to be cut down. We see a Devil in a house; a snake in a familial setting who will corrupt those he finds there. We see Sodom and Gomorrah in a bath-house, we repeatedly hear a coming storm (Juan’s rage perpetually on the horizon), and after Seven’s final crime we see rainfall almost as powerful as that during a flood.

We also see a man (Juan? It’s hard to tell) take his son and daughter on a boat-trip through reeds, conjuring up images of Moses as a child; once at their destination the man teaches the daughter how to shoot ducks, once more exerting deadly dominance over nature, teaching his offspring these cruel ways. Packs of dogs run throughout like something from The Omen. Flies crawl over the characters from time to time; the Devil is the Lord of Flies, after all. And at the end we see Juan shot by Seven (the number of God, if Frank Black and this Wikipedia page are anything to go by), then forced to convalesce, helpless in his bed, reliant on his family to support him and keep him occupied.

The terrible father, brutaliser of animals and heartless dominator of women, finally reflects on his life, and his dream is of his youth, when he loved “all the things”. He returns to a state of love and innocence, an epiphany brought on by his metaphorical death (I doubt that it is a real death even though his son says, in a subsequent scene, that he has died). Juan can only now understand love and the thought of companionship with his fellow man when he is threatened by its loss; he comes back to life after death, which is caused by the betrayal of a friend. So here is Juan is Jesus, betrayed by Seven / Judas, and not long after this the traitorous handyman takes his own life by pulling his own head off in one of the most mystifying moments in the whole film.

But is Reygadas linking religion (the Roman Catholicism of his native Mexico) with subjugation of women, the oblivious and misogynist rule of the patriarchy, the death or corruption of the human soul, the loss of innocence and the terrible loneliness of life badly lived? It’s one thing to make a movie criticising masculine cruelty, but adding religious imagery (a masculine Devil) inevitably links the two. Is this why the movie is such a perplexing jumble of meaning? Can he only rage against these things through some coded message for fear of angering his countrymen or clergy? Have I been reading too many Dan Brown novels? Or is the movie intentionally vague to create some kind of universality, a collage of painful moments that will chime with a larger number of audience members?

Or is Seven the Devil? He’s a handyman, and the Devil who creeps through the house is carrying a toolbox; a detail I didn’t spot until chatting with two complete strangers after the screening. Are the falling trees prior to Seven’s suicide a sexual reference? Is his head coming off in an orgasmic splurt of blood a reference to ejaculation? Why are there so many references to cultural artifacts (Spider-Man, R2D2, Buzz Lightyear, etc.), none of which are from Mexico? Is this a dig at cultural imperialism? How much of this is a cry of rage directed outwards, not inwards? What significance does the inclusion of Neil Young’s “It’s A Dream” have, other than the obvious meaning? Is Juan and Natalia’s awful singing intentional? And did so many dogs have to suffer?

I’m going to have to go back to this, a lot. This is a more precise movie than even Reygadas will accept, I’m sure of it. The fact that it’s about the cruelty and ignorance of men, and the animal nature of humans which roils beneath a ridiculous facade seems bluntly obvious, but whether this goes further to be a veiled comment on the influence of religion, or the corruption of Godly purity by the brutality and desperation of men fighting for supremacy over each other is something I can only suspect. And there are other interpretations; ecological collapse caused by our hubris (the shot of Frederic Edwin Church’s painting ”Floating Iceberg” hints at this), cultural invasion, a wish for a return to innocence expressed by creating a work as mystifying as the world seems to a child.

I also wondered if this is a retelling of the Bible itself, beginning with the naming of the animals in Genesis, ending with a flood representing the disasters that will destroy the world a la Revelations, and even featuring an epilogue in which the young proclaim that they must team up to win, which could refer to the armies of God who will battle Satan’s forces after the Rapture. The knotted chronology — which could be Reygadas re-ordering his life to match the Bible’s order — also made me think of Philip K Dick’s Exegesis and the idea that The Empire Never Ended, that time stopped 2000 years ago and we are still living under the rule of the Roman Empire, trapped in a futile, desperate cycle of cruelty. Or maybe this is me running past Reygadas’ point at light speed.

Beyond my clumsy attempt at deciphering the text, does Post Tenebras Lux even have any worth as a movie? If you’re here for uplift, as suggested by the title (Latin for “After Darkness, Light), it’s in short supply. The jumbled timeline suggests that perhaps Juan’s near-death experience has softened him, but who knows how much of this is meant to be real. There is none of the immersive flow of Enter The Void; I had hoped to sink into a state of hypnotised pleasure like I did with Noé’s film, but that’s my problem. It has aesthetic merit but little emotional connection, and for much of its running time it’s an angry yell at human nature and the forces that distort our better selves; The Tree of Life stripped of Terrence Malick’s optimism, or his time-spanning vision, or his belief that love is the prime mover in our universe.

Maybe this is Reygadas’ riposte to Malick’s movie, removing the notes of redemption and replacing them with pessimism. If this is meant to be semi-autobiographical, then it’s depressing to see Reygadas so despairing that he negates himself, either through narrative death, mundane rebirth, or relentless flagellation. But being a bit of a downer is no mark against it, and it is so bold, so formally abstract, that it fascinated me. It might work for others, as long as the viewer is willing to meet it on its own terms. Post Tenebras Lux may not slide satisfyingly into place in the imagination like a linear narrative movie but the process of watching, unpacking, twisting and reshaping it until it almost fits into the mind is its own pleasure.

And as for its bleak message, maybe Juan does learn enough that he can save his children from losing their innocence. Maybe a cycle can be broken. After all, the final moment of the film belongs to a young rugby player stating clearly that it is teamwork that will allow them to win. The reflexive conflict at the heart of human interaction goes on, borne of our suppressed animal nature which either battles with the teachings of religion or supplements its divisive, negative elements, forcing us to resort to tribalism that can only enhance our detachment from our fellow man, but in the childlike belief in companionship and trust comes an end to the loneliness that blights everyone in the movie. Perhaps that was Reygadas’ ultimate message.

BFI LFF 2010: Black Swan

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When writing about the London Film Festival I like to compare and contrast in order to convey the mentally claustrophobic experience of seeing so many movies in such a short space of time. My reaction to one bleeds over into another, or informs my thoughts on both: watching both Biutiful and Essential Killing in one miserable afternoon linked them together in a way that only an exorcist could break apart. Connections grow, parallels become obvious, and the Festival becomes a blob of mushed-up celluloid instead of a series of discrete cinematic events. (This metaphor makes more sense in my head.)

And yet one movie stood out so far from the rest that it’s hard to connect it to any other, despite similarities of theme or execution. Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan is a bomb that detonated in the middle of the festival, and nothing else could have the same impact: even Miike’s 13 Assassins paled in comparison. Early reports suggested Aronofsky had made something special, but on the page it sounded uninspiring: a ballet dancer gets a bit depressed when the pressure is on to deliver a radical new version of Swan Lake. So far, so Suspiria / Red Shoes. However, nothing could have prepared me for this assault on my senses, this barrage of hallucinogenic beauty that rendered me insensible, shaking and hyperventilating and frenetically applauding as the credits rolled.

Aronofsky has hinted at this ability before: his use of repetitive loops of imagery in Pi and Requiem for a Dream had a kind of hypnotic, rhythmic effect, and it was evident in The Fountain albeit in a less staccato form. Here he has combined his facility for creating propulsive, dialogue-free set-pieces as in his early films with the confrontational realist photography of The Wrestler and a narrative that can provide the sense of awe felt during the final moments of The Fountain: a fusion of all of his best work. No one else can end a movie as well as Aronofsky, and Black Swan tops everything else he has done.

The less you know about Black Swan, the better, but it’s safe to say the film is about talented ballet dancer Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman), chosen to play both the Swan Queen and Black Swan in a new production of Swan Lake directed by lascivious maverick Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel). It’s a role she might not have the ability to pull off, and her fears threaten to consume her. Her drive to succeed is stoked by the awful behaviour of her possessive and controlling mother (a magnificently creepy Barbara Hershey), sending her into a tailspin of paranoia and suspicion exacerbated by the arrival of Lily (Mila Kunis), a free-spirit who embodies the sexuality Nina has suppressed but must harness in order to portray the Black Swan. Her grasp on reality begins to slip as the night of the first performance approaches, a process depicted by Aronofsky through unreliable imagery, nausea-inducing sound effects, subtle but nasty body horror, and mirrors, mirrors, mirrors.

A good case can be made that Aronofsky is using obvious tricks to convey Nina’s unravelling mental state, but when they are as effective as this, it doesn’t matter – if you’re willing to give yourself over. As with Christopher Nolan’s Inception, the use of easily recognisable imagery (e.g. mirrors in Black Swan to denote fractured sense of identity, elevators to denote movement between different levels of consciousness in Inception) allows the audience to swallow information on a gut level while the movie focuses on delivering story through action, not exposition. Yes, Inception‘s first hour is taken up by explaining the rules of the movie, and Black Swan spends some time explaining the story of Swan Lake in detail, but the payoff for being led by the hand early on is that Nolan and Aronofsky can later use thematic visual short-cuts with confidence that we are clued-up and ready for the ride.

Both movies end with long setpieces that would not be possible without these oft-criticised compromises, if they can even be called that. When did we become so jaded that the use of universally recognised shorthand to allow viewers to absorb information on a subconscious level is considered a bad thing? The benefit is immense: both Nolan and Aronofsky have created unforgettable experiences, riveting barrages of pure cinema that start calmly before galloping towards logical but unexpected conclusions, leaving the audience exhausted and grateful. As with last year’s Inglourious Basterds, both of these movies made me excited in a way no other works of art ever could. The sense of propulsion, of being rushed through the imaginations of two genuine artists without a chance to catch my breath, was truly thrilling.

The one thing Black Swan has over Inception is one truly magnificent performance. Natalie Portman excels as Nina, going to unbelievable physical and emotional lengths to depict the dancer’s paranoia and confusion. I doubt even her fans were aware that she could pull off a performance as wrenching and brave as this: it’s as if Brando had done dozens of relatively unchallenging movies before On The Waterfront, or De Niro had started out in the woeful crud of his later years before showing up in Mean Streets. Portman is that good. I’m genuinely amazed that she hasn’t already been given every acting award going, just to save time. It’s the performance of the year, and Black Swan wouldn’t be the masterpiece it is without her at its centre.

Every aspect of the movie is almost perfect. Kunis and Hershey do career-best work, and Cassel triumphs over some unfortunate underwriting through sheer charm alone, with some fantastic moments coming late in the film. Soundtrack composer Clint Mansell has the unenviable task of fleshing out Tchaikovsky’s masterpiece and by God he pulls it off, playing off Tchaikovsky’s themes in the non-ballet scenes and wisely leaving the original music to power the stunning dance sequences in the final act. It’s the kind of bravura score that converts people into classical fans: the crescendo in the last few minutes will likely knock you sideways. Matthew Libatique’s naturalistic, monochrome photography is also worthy of note: it’s gritty and unaffected but still conveys the grandeur of the Swan’s tale, effortlessly eluding the dancers and giving the audience a closer look at the art of dance than is usual. It’s the key to the immersive nature of the film.

That might be the reason some people have found Black Swan unpalatable. Most of Aronofsky’s influences are obvious — Hitchcock, Powell/Pressburger, Argento, Verhoeven and Cronenberg are all present and correct — but it’s telling that Aronofsky, in his truncated presentation before the screening, made reference to Gaspar Noé’s Enter The Void. Without prompting he segued into elaborate praise for Noé’s nightmare vision, recommending that everyone see it as soon as possible (yet another reason to praise Aronofsky). This recommendation seemed odd: Black Swan seemed, from trailers and clips, to be conventionally filmed compared to Noé’s bold project, which put us inside the mind of its protagonist by using a remarkable soundscape and innovative visual effects to convince us we were experiencing a final journey into a nightmare world beyond the grave.

Aronofsky can’t use the same tricks as Noe, but he comes as close as you can. Portman is constantly onscreen, those searching cameras pushing close in on her, the stunning sound design cranked up as far as possible so we are surrounded by music, noise, the cracking of her body as she punishes herself for her art. The audience winced and gasped with every flexed toe, clipped nail, and stretched ligament. As with Noé’s kaleidoscopic work, you see how redundant 3D technology can be when a truly brilliant filmmaker has the ability to draw you into his or her protagonist’s POV. When Black Swan was over my head swam: rushing out of the cinema to complete a prior engagement was made almost impossible by the disconnect between the real world and the world in which I had been submerged. The sense that we are trapped with Nina inside her madness is palpable: critics say overwrought, I say overwhelming, brave, unique.

There’s good reason to expect that Aronofsky’s gleeful mixing of high and low culture will annoy some, and his use of imagery may smack others as unsubtle. Fair enough, but if I can convince one person that the tide of positive reviews that have poured forth over the past few days are a true measure of this mesmerising work, and not just the product of empty hype, I will be happy. Aronofsky has aimed straight at the gut as much as at the brain and heart, and in the process has created a dark fairy-tale of unbelievable power. It’s the best film of the festival, and the best film of Aronofsky’s career: a pure fusion of sound and image of such mastery that everything else released this year stands cowering in its shadow.

Listmania ‘09! The Best Movies Of The Year

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For the longest time it seemed like 2009 would be a truly dreadful year in film, perhaps as a consequence of the writers’ strike last year. By the end of it I felt like we’d had a pretty good run, once the summer was over. The early months were a desert with only Coraline making a dent in my memory, but by the time December rolled around with the release of Avatar, it felt like a more rounded experience. Even better, though we had a few horribly delayed releases (such as Up, which was disgracefully held back from UK release for six months), there are only a few movies that have yet to be released over here that have attracted our attention, and even then we’re not that bothered. The most frustrating omissions were our own fault. Jane Campion’s Bright Star came and went so quickly we missed out on seeing it, as did Lone Scherfig’s An Education. Sherlock Holmes came out this week but illness and schedule clashes mean we will be seeing it in 2010. It’s frustrating, but compared to last year’s maddening delays in seeing Rachel Getting Married and Synecdoche, New York, it’s nowhere near as bad.

So anyway, here are my top 25 movies of 2009, in order. Hopefully soon I will get to post my bottom 25. It was depressingly easy to complete that list.

Best Movies of the Year:

25. Adventureland

Greg Mottola’s coming-of-age story is good enough to make me forgive it for being a coming-of-age story (a sub-genre I have little time for). Sensitive performances and a perfectly judged tone set it apart, and I expect second and third viewings will cement it as a favourite in the future.

24. A Christmas Carol

Though Charles Dickens’ novel suffers from being adapted too many times, this version was loyal enough to the source material to stand above the rest. Robert Zemeckis cleverly used his performance capture technology to create a world that looks like a living painting, and — for the most part — his thoughtful direction and stately command of pace are refreshingly old-fashioned.

23. Red Cliff: Part Two

A crushing disappointment after the genius of the first installment, John Woo’s epic finale to the Three Kingdoms story was hobbled by tedious subplots about the horrors of war, as well as an unsatisfying final confrontation with evil Prime Minister Cao Cao. Still, there were enough superb moments to save it, including an enormous conflagration, hardcore badassery from the heroes, and entertaining cunning from Zhuge Liang.

22. White Material

Working as a comment on racial identity, colonialism, and the guilt that attends it, Claire Denis’ movie is a fascinating and thought-provoking experience. It also serves as a fantastic thriller, with its air of imminent collapse building to a nerve-wracking conclusion. Isabelle Huppert is mesmerising as the plantation owner who dooms all around her with her arrogance.

21. Zombieland

While vampires became a singularly obnoxious cinematic plague, zombies went from flavour-of-the-month to pariahs. Nevertheless, Ruben Fleischer’s apocalyptic comedy was a delightful surprise, perfectly cast and thoroughly entertaining. It also featured the cameo appearance of the year, and one best left unspoiled.

20. The Brothers Bloom

For a few minutes Rian Johnson’s con-trick drama seems like a precious and finicky conglomeration of obnoxious post-Anderson tricks and tics, but thankfully it becomes a warm and humane antidote to David Mamet’s cerebral dominance of the sub-genre. The key to its appeal is an endearing central performance from Rachel Weisz, whose enthusiastic embrace of the brothers’ tricksiness grounds the film even while the plot spirals off in unexpected directions and Johnson’s camera flies around with such exuberant unpredictability. Despite faltering slightly in the final act, its ambition and seriousness of purpose were a resounding success.

19. A Serious Man

The Coens excel at taking on unorthodox projects and surprising their fans, but they also rely on a set of narrative tricks that repeat from movie to movie. A Serious Man was no different, with their familiar exploration of our cosmic insignificance coming into play again. Nevertheless, here their tricks felt fresh again, matched as they were to a plot revolving around morality and heavenly punishment. Casting unknown actors was possibly the masterstroke: it certainly made the movie feel like nothing else out there. It ranks as their most entertaining and most challenging film since The Big Lebowski.

18. Ponyo on a Cliff by the Sea

Remarkable to think that Hayao Miyazaki is capable of making movies even lighter and more whimsical than anything he has previously offered us. At times Ponyo can feel too fluffy, and longueurs plague the second half of the film, but these minor errors are easily forgiven in the rush of incredible images. Ponyo’s mid-movie escape from the clutches of her misguided father is among the most visionary and exhilarating setpieces of recent times, aided by the Wagnerian stings of Joe Hisaishi’s beautiful score.

17. Coraline

Henry Selick’s stunning adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s book is a feast for the eyes, as technically impressive as anything committed to film this year by Digital Domain, ILM or BUF. It’s also one of the scariest films of the year, one of those rare childrens’ movies that is unafraid to terrify its audience. Some of the imagery lingers in the memory with the upsetting persistence of the worst nightmares. Also great was the delicate use of Digital 3D. In the year of Avatar, it’s worth remembering that Selick and his team figured out how to use the technology to subtly enhance the viewing experience before anyone else.

16. The Hurt Locker

By the midpoint of 2009, it honestly felt as if the writers’ strike of 2008 had left us in the middle of a drought. Nothing truly exceptional had been released, and so when Kathryn Bigelow’s superb war thriller came out it was leapt upon as if it were a fusion of Paths of Glory and Apocalypse Now. Third act problems drain some of the energy from it, but even so, no other movie about the Iraq war has done so much to capture the futile stupidity of it, nor made such a pointed comment about the deranging effect it has had on our psyche. That it is also a nerve-wracking thriller is a welcome bonus.

15. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

Expectations for Werner Herzog’s crime thriller were low, with only those few of us who revel in the unpredictability of Nicolas Cage holding out any hope. Thankfully Herzog surprised everyone with this demented triumph. Though it could have been turned into a conventional tale of depravity and redemption, Herzog, Cage, and writer William Finkelstein have little interest in following a traditional path, sketching all kinds of entertaining madness in the margins. It helps that Cage was let off the leash. His intense level of commitment to the project is the key to Bad Lieutenant: POCNO‘s success. Welcome back, you mad bastard.

14. Drag Me To Hell

While Sam Raimi’s gleeful homage to EC Comics-style moralising concerned one young woman’s efforts to avoid being sent to hell, this felt like Raimi had escaped from the kind of big-budget purgatory that he had once railed against. Though still obviously made with more money than he had once had at his disposal, Drag Me To Hell was a return to Raimi’s anything-goes ethos. No other movie made this year tried so hard to generate a response in the audience, and it was almost entirely successful. A regression for the genre, maybe, but an incredibly entertaining one.

13. Where The Wild Things Are

It looked like we would never get to see Spike Jonze’s unconventional adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s book. When it finally arrived, critical and popular opinion seemed to split right down the middle. Post-release discussion seemed to focus on subjective accounts of how the movie resurrected very specific memories of childhood, with those who were unmoved by the movie stating that it just didn’t speak to them personally. The vision of Jonze and Dave Eggers is certainly gloomy, repetitive, unfocused and pretty unappealing, but I cannot lie: early scenes brought back horrible memories from my youth, and the unflinching depiction of Max’s confused rage rocked me to my core.

12. District 9

Viewed as an allegory about apartheid-era South Africa, Neill Blomkamp’s low-budget SF action film gets tangled up in clumsy metaphorical dead-ends and ill-judged racial stereotyping that blunts the message. Seen as a misanthropic denunciation of venality across all races and species, it becomes far more palatable. Blomkamp’s exciting and imaginative tale takes the audience down unexpected paths, skillfully building to a finale of surprising emotional resonance. I won’t lie: the final sacrifice of one character made me sob.

11. Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs

The most pleasant surprise of 2009. Clone High creators Phil Lord and Chris Miller did the same as Spike Jonze — take a beloved but slight children’s book and adapt it into a new format with a drastic change of tone — but veered off in a different direction. Perhaps Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs accomplished less than Where The Wild Things Are in terms of illuminating the mental turmoil of childhood, but while it “merely” sets out to entertain, it did that with amazing success. Gleefully irreverent, pro-nerd, and willing to poke fun at every awful convention of lazy cookie-cutter filmmaking, it is also arguably the funniest comedy of the year.

10. Up

It’s tempting to leave Up off the list as punishment for manipulating adult audiences into crying miserable tears of mourning for an adorable animated couple and, by extension, ourselves. Nothing else this year moved us as much as that magnificently rendered and utterly devastating opening montage. The level of storytelling talent on display was humbling. The rest of the movie was wonderful too, building on that resonant set-up to deliver a winning adventure, featuring the funniest animal characters of the year. An emotionally exhausting film, but a life-affirming one.

9. Fish Tank

Avoiding the tawdry cultural voyeurism of the works of overrated ghouls such as Mike Leigh or Lee Daniels is the least of Fish Tank‘s many achievements, though one we can be most grateful for. It is also a compelling exploration of youth culture as seen through the eyes of a confused child on the cusp of adulthood. Katie Jarvis’ Mia is a fascinating and sympathetic character, aware that she is trapped in a life that offers her nothing, but eager to escape with her dignity intact. Unfortunately, she’s incapable of avoiding making some terrible mistakes along the way. It also has the grip of a thriller, cleverly changing tone in the final act without sacrificing believability. Yet another classic from Andrea Arnold.

8. Public Enemies

It’s possible to reduce Michael Mann’s adaptation of Bryan Burrough’s exploration of the 1930′s crimewave to just a period retelling of Heat, with Johnny Depp’s Dillinger and Christian Bale’s Melvin Purvis as dapper versions of McCauley and Hanna, but that would miss out on his deft commentary on the narcissism of these criminals and how new technologies increased popular fascination with the outlaw. Mann marks the moment where demand for titillation grew to the extent that public attention began to fuel the events that it demanded, and this fine, exciting crime thriller ends on a memorable moment where popular culture begins to eat itself.

7. Antichrist

Lars Von Trier has finally appeared to let his obnoxious mask of superiority drop long enough to tell a tale informed by his recent nervous breakdown, and the result is one of the most affecting and disturbing horror films of recent times. Conjuring an atmosphere of dread even more upsetting than anything that master of mood Hideo Nakata could create, Von Trier pits man against woman, and humanity against nature. No one wins, except anyone brave enough to endure this remarkable and starkly beautiful nightmare vision of a world — and a grief-stricken mother — gone mad.

6. Fantastic Mr. Fox

How bold of Wes Anderson to take the work of a respected author and bolt his own style of preppy, fussy humour onto it, and your acceptance of this depends fully on your acceptance of his shtick. To those of us in love with that viewpoint — and that obsessive attention to amusing detail — Fantastic Mr. Fox was yet another success, playing with the same themes of redemption and forgiveness as his previous movies while being just as sassy and fleet-of-foot as his non-animated work. It also works as a satire on the habitual anthropomorphism of the usual animated fare, with these characters being both more human and more bestial than anything populating the movies of Disney and Dreamworks.

5. A Prophet

No matter how much Jacques Audiard maintains he was not making a political statement with this movie, his rousing prison thriller proved to be as multi-layered as the best crime movies of recent times. Malik El Djebena’s growth from callow youth to crime kingpin is fascinating and weirdly inspirational, while the world he lives in is filled with detail about identity politics, French correctional failings, and racial tensions in Europe. It’s also nail-biting, beautifully judged, and performed to perfection.

4. Avatar

While armchair critics fall over themselves to dismiss this movie for being too predictable  – a criticism that is being applied with more force than with any other movie released this year – the story is told with enough energy to forgive its clunkiness. James Cameron has always been a master with pace, and here he succeeds in manipulating the audience with a magician’s touch, delivering a groundbreaking visual tour de force into the bargain. Viewing it in Digital 3D IMAX is an unforgettable and thrilling experience.

3. Enter The Void

What James Cameron aimed to do in 3D, Gaspar Noé managed in 2D just months before. His tale of one man’s journey through death is the joint most immersive movie experience of the year, a terrifying and exhilarating cinematic experiment of enormous emotional power, and a technical marvel to boot. Any reservations about its pacing problems are swept away as Noé brings an obsessive rigour to his visual template: a first-person viewpoint that doesn’t falter at any point. That this brave experiment still has no distributor is criminal. If it ever becomes the Midnight Movie phenomenon it deserves to be, make every effort to see it on the biggest screen possible.

2. In The Loop

Armando Iannucci and the Thick of It gang brought their wonderful TV show to the big screen in style, expanding its scope to include the bureaucrats and fools of America, complete with the same venality, paranoia, and incompetence. Funnier even than the original series, it was also densely plotted but lighter than air: a feat of screenwriting to match that of Martin McDonagh with In Bruges last year. None of that would matter if the new cast members were not as talented as the original crew, but the US contingent adapts to the semi-improvisational style with aplomb. A triumph that rewards repeated viewings.

1. Inglourious Basterds

More than any other movie made this year, Inglourious Basterds surprised us all with its piercing intelligence, seriousness of purpose, and deft gameplaying, all of which are applied to an emotionally complex revenge plot that confounds the viewer at every turn. Much has been made of Tarantino’s effort to make a movie in which cinema has the last laugh and reality is forced to bow to its power, but less has been said about his continued facility with character. To the immaculate roll-call that includes Jules Winnfield, Vincent Vega, Jackie Brown, Mr. White, The Bride and Stuntman Mike can be added Shosanna Dreyfus and Hans Landa, the most compelling and haunting characters of the year. Tarantino has every right to be proud of this movie: it is, quite simply, his masterpiece.

Best Documentary: Soul Power

Considered as a sister project to Leon Gast’s When We Were Kings, Jeffrey Levy-Hinte’s documentary about the music festival that ran alongside the Rumble in the Jungle offers up yet more fascinating footage of Muhammad Ali in his prime, sparring with mouthy opportunists and talking about the potential impact of the forthcoming event. It also shows how the festival almost sinks under a tide of ego and bureaucracy. The worst thing that can be said about the movie is that it doesn’t show enough of the festival itself, but even then you still get to see thrilling performances by The Spinners, BB King, Miriam Makeba, and James Brown at the height of his powers. Stingy though the amount of concert footage is, it’s still some of the best music you will ever hear.

Most Embarrassing Admission of the Year: Okay, Soul Power was actually the only documentary I saw this year. Nevertheless, don’t let that put you off seeing it. Even if I’d seen a dozen documentaries this year, I doubt any of them would have been as fun or fulfilling as that one.

No time to dally with small talk: on with the listmaking! More to come when I get the time…

What I Did At The London Film Festival (So Far)

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We walked on a red carpet on Monday. I felt like an interloper, especially clad in hobo jacket, Converse, and Green Lantern T-Shirt, but it was still a weirdly thrilling moment. Getting tickets to the first UK performance of Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant! (oh, that infuriating exclamation point…) was an accident of timing, not an attempt to rubberneck at a glamour collision, but it’s fine. The London Film Festival seems to be pretty casual. Only Soderbergh, writer Scott Z. Burns and producer Gregory Jacobs were dressed to the nines, and even then they seemed relaxed. Seeing Soderbergh delighted daisyhellcakes, who has had terrible luck spotting celebrities in the past (so far she’s seen Johnny Vegas, Bill Bailey, Jeffrey Archer and Queen Nigella), but refused to take a picture of the great man, stating that it would be gauche. As I’d seen the Enter The Void audience eagerly snapping away at Gaspar Noé last week, I figured it would be okay, but after taking this blurry picture…

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…I convinced myself that the final stutter in Soderbergh’s short speech was caused by him spotting me and thinking, “Dude, that’s totes gauche.” For the record, I’m sorry Mr. Soderbergh. I liked Solaris, if that’s any consolation.

The lack of a distribution deal for Enter The Void is making me unbelievably sad. Attending that screening was something I did on a whim after seeing Drew McWeeny become so enthusiastic, and now I realise that if I hadn’t gone I might never have had the chance to see it on the big screen. Just yesterday Edgar Wright was tweeting his frustration at having missed it, and it threw my good fortune into perspective. Is there any way to start a campaign to save it from oblivion on DVD, when the only distribution deal it has seems to be getting a release in Finland next April? As the version I saw was seemingly different from those at Cannes and Toronto, perhaps it’s still being fine-tuned, and then it will be put on the market again. Certainly there are longueurs at about the 100 minute mark, but I’m not sure what could be removed without ruining the flow.

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The one thought I had would be for the Prince Charles Cinema to stump up for their very own print. Despite its punishing length, this is the perfect midnight-screening cult movie in waiting, with massive appeal to counter-cultural audiences and cinephiles who can understand what Noé is trying to achieve (a group that excludes J. Hoberman and Variety’s Rob Nelson, who completely missed the point of the movie). It would take time for them to get their money back, as the buzz on this film has yet to grow properly, but it would be a wise investment. Unless it did suddenly get a distribution deal and the film turned up elsewhere, but still, right now, it’s not looking too good.

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Sadness over the fate of that one movie aside, the festival has been extremely enjoyable so far. Even the one movie I’ve not liked — Jason Reitman’s disappointing Up In The Air, which I hope to write about soon — has its pleasures, especially the terrific performances from George Clooney and Anna Kendrick. For the most part audiences have been great too, with enthusiastic responses to The Men Who Stare At Goats and The Informant! reminding me why seeing movies at the cinema can be a rewarding experience, though Mr. Honking McOverlaugh who sat behind us during The Informant! was a bit of a trial. Yes yes, it’s a very funny film, but Mr. Soderbergh is sitting at the back of the room and even your guffaws cannot reach that far, especially when my eardrums are absorbing 90% of the sound energy.

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It’s not all roses, though. If you’re a new reader visiting this site after searching for info about London Film Festival screenings, please can I beg you to do the right thing and arrive at the screenings with plenty of time to spare? If you’ve not already picked up your tickets, there can be terrible queues, and that’s after navigating the barriers, security guards, and photographers blocking the pedestrianised roads of Leicester Square. The movies have tended to start a few minutes late, but there are no trailers or adverts, so if a film is supposed to start at, say, 16:15, the film will be on the screen at around 16:20, and arriving at 16:30 is going to piss a lot of people off. Oh, and the tickets have allocated seat numbers on them FOR A REASON. This message is directed at the numerous people who seem to love sitting wherever they want, and then look put out when they are evicted from their seats by ushers not long after the film has already started. I’m looking at you, selfish idiots who figured sitting by me was the thing to do and then ruined the start of Enter The Void and White Material, with extra bonus fuck you’s to the couple who turned up late at White Material and then left their phones on. Assholes.

I’ve had fun with the odd connections between the movies I’ve seen so far. The Informant! and Claire Denis’ White Material are centred by main characters (played with great skill by Matt Damon and the incredible Isabelle Huppert respectively) whose inability to see the dire consequences of their behaviour dooms them. In Soderbergh’s movie Mark Whitacre’s insanity is played for laughs for the most part, though those laughs run out by the end as you realise the man is so deeply embedded in his fantasy life that he doesn’t even seem capable of keeping track of it. Maria Vial — the protagonist of White Material — is in just as much denial, but perhaps even to the extent of not recognising her own cultural and ethnic background. Her ambiguous actions in the final moments of the film could be the product of derangement or berserk revenge, but whatever their origin, they were enough to deeply upset the lady sitting next to me. She seemed traumatised, poor dear.

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Other connections abound. Jason Bateman teams up with Jason Reitman again for Up In The Air, and also features in Extract, which I’m hoping to see tomorrow. Melanie Lynskey appears in Up In The Air and The Informant!, and is similarly weak in each movie. Clooney appears in The Men Who Stare At Goats and Up In The Air, and co-produced The Informant! Up In The Air and Up (which I saw again on Sunday, though it was not part of the festival) is about men who find escape in flying, and learn to connect with others. The protagonists of White Material and Enter The Void are often filmed from behind: in White Material as a representation of how Maria is hiding her true face from herself and others, and in Enter The Void as a consequence of the PoV conceit. Enter The Void and The Men Who Stare At Goats features talk of esoteric beliefs, as well as the use of hallucinogens.

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That was one of the things that annoyed me most about Goats. While Enter The Void took the use of hallucinogenic compounds seriously, Goats used it as a stupid punchline, with characters acting as if they were drunk and high-lariously falling over a lot and talking about how hungry they are. Goats was a lot of fun, but the relentlessly silly tone made it hard for the film to shift gears in the final act when we see the negative consequences of letting a bunch of insecure New Age dipsticks into the army. What was, in Jon Ronson’s excellent book, a sobering portrait of US psy-ops torture techniques gone weird is here transformed into a slapstick romp with one minute of “Oh noes, war is bad” added to give the protagonists something to fight for. The book still manages to be funny, but Ronson’s a skillful enough writer to juxtapose the wacky with the awful. Here it’s shoehorned in, and seemingly only to give a dramatic edge to the Larry Hooper (Kevin Spacey) character arc that suddenly appears midway through the movie. Writer Peter Straughan does some good work in translating the oddness of Ronson’s book into movie form, and keeps the funniest material mostly intact, but the artificial three-act structure and neatness of the final few minutes smack of laziness. Still, it remains very entertaining, and what it gets right it really gets right. Jeff Bridges — as New Earth Army leader Bill Django — perfectly channels the craziness of First Earth Battalion leader Jim Channon…

…and first-time director Grant Heslov is good enough to recreate the pictures shown in Channon’s manifesto: a lovely touch. It feels like the film will touch on all aspects of the insanity of war in a similar way to Clooney’s previous Gulf War film Three Kings, but even with the addition of warring Blackwater-esque security forces and asides showing Clooney and Ewan McGregor wandering through Iraq getting into scrapes, it never fully takes off. I’d still recommend it, though. As with Up In The Air, Clooney does miracle work holding everything together. It’s easy to forget what a great film star he is. He does comedy and drama equally well, and now he’s removed almost all of his tics, he can excel at both over-the-top dopey comedy or subtle and moving character work. We’re lucky he’s around.

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My recommendation for The Informant! is much stronger. Though we were exhausted while watching, and were sitting in the Odeon West End which — unlike the Vue West End which is showing the majority of films — is not air-conditioned, it turned out to be almost as good as we had hoped. Spoilery trailers and press releases have given away the delusional nature of Mark Whitacre, but Soderbergh and ace writer Burns hide the depth of his craziness until a wonderful final act where everyone involved in the Lysine price-fixing investigation is shocked by his slowly unravelling web of lies. The cast doesn’t have a single weak link, with an unexpectedly complex performance from Matt Damon at the heart of the movie, but I have to give special props to Scott Bakula, who is particularly affecting as the enthusiastic FBI agent whose career goes awry thanks to Whitacre’s deceptions. His increasingly heartbroken face adds a bittersweet note to the zany proceedings. Props also to Joel McHale in his first dramatic role: weird seeing the snarky Soup host playing straight man to Damon.

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I also heartily recommend White Material, but I’m still processing that one, so I won’t go on about it too much, except to say that a) Claire Denis has a mastery of pace and atmosphere that would shame other directors, but then you probably already knew that, and b) Christopher Lambert was good enough to make me partially forgive him for his dire performance in Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales. I can lay the blame for that on Kelly, I guess. He doesn’t really know what he’s doing, after all.

How Gaspar Noé Broke Open My Head

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The great controversialist Gaspar Noé appears to be a very nice, softly spoken man who keeps making films that polarise audiences. Seul contre tous and Irréversible are notorious enough that I already have a very distinct idea of what Noé’s movies are like without having seen them. This is an embarrassing admission. An attempt to see Irréversible was abandoned through lack of backbone, leading me to see Confessions of a Dangerous Mind instead. Nice enough movie. Nothing particularly memorable about it, other than Hott Sam Rockwell’s performance. Still, it irks me that I didn’t see Noé’s movie, that I thought it would be too much for my sensitive constitution.

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Before the first London Film Festival screening of his latest movie — Enter The Void — Noé chatted to us via a typically British mic (i.e. unreliable and sporadically malfunctioning), briefly describing his battle to get the movie made, before doing something a filmmaker will rarely do: he gave us the key to understanding the movie. “Watch the expression of the woman in the final shot. The very final shot. Keep looking at her. It changes everything. It’s very important.” I assume with great confidence that everyone in the audience did keep their eye on that final face, but it did not answer anything. It’s possible to watch that scene and have wildly divergent ideas of what just happened, as evidenced by the muted chatter of my fellow filmgoers as they filed out of the screening.

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That expression is viewed by Oscar (or rather “The Soul That Was, At One Point, Within Oscar’s Body), a drug-dealer making a paltry living in Tokyo, and portrayed by Nathaniel Brown in the very few shots we see of him. His only goal in life is to protect his sister — Linda, played by a seemingly drowsy Paz de la Huerta — after they are both orphaned in a car crash, but in doing so he seems to have effectively damned them both. While making what seems to be a simple drug transaction, Oscar is killed by the police, and then leaves his body to go on a journey through the afterlife that tallies with a description of The Tibetan Book of the Dead given early in the film by Oscar’s best friend Alex (Cyril Roy). However, is this death, or a DMT hallucination? And if it is death, where does the journey begin and end? There’s enough ambiguity here to fuel discussions for years.

My own interpretation (which I won’t include here, in order to keep this as spoiler-free as possible) seems to differ from others I’ve heard. All that can be said with certainty is that if you’re willing to give yourself over to it, Enter The Void is a revelatory experience, and the most immersive expression of a person’s viewpoint ever made. Noé’s dedication to presenting lead character Oscar’s point of view is already impressive enough — even down to adding blinking and breathing in early scenes — without then killing him and showing his afterlife experience from the same perspective, albeit now with the laws of physics being no obstacle. The camera floats over the characters, flies through the air above Tokyo, flows through walls, dips into people’s head’s to experience their perspective, and bursts back and forth through time. It’s disorienting, terrifying, liberating.

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Comparisons have been made to Kubrick’s 2001 — there is even a direct reference to the Stargate sequence in one throwaway shot — but Noé’s visuals also invite comparison to Ken Russell’s Altered States, and especially Doug Trumbull’s Brainstorm. Trumbull’s attempts to create a hallucinogenic post-death sequence to end all such sequences was scuppered by budgetary troubles and technological restrictions. Enter The Void manages to do what Trumbull dreamed of, to the point that one visual conceit employed by Noé — having the camera move from one light to another to convey a passage of time from one nightmare vision of the future to another — is very similar to the way the camera reviews moments from Louise Fletcher’s life in Brainstorm, passing through a lattice of lights, each containing a single memory.

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Before the movie began, Noé described his experiences with hallucinogenic drugs, which he believed had never been replicated properly onscreen, and had been trying to make Enter The Void for years. Until now no one had the technology to accurately depict the experience, but also no one had the single-mindedness to film something as ambitious as this. His formal daring — unmatched by anything else I’ve seen in a while — sadly overwhelms his story, which is as dreary as his presentation is beautiful. The humdrum couplings and binges, indifferently acted, are written with depressing inarticulacy. As the audience’s eyes and ears are hypnotised by everything else, the heart is left unmoved for large stretches, particularly during the long nightmare sequence. It doesn’t help that this is one of the worst performed movies I’ve seen since 300. Perhaps that’s the regrettable downside of filming in such a way that for much of the movie you can only see the tops or the backs of the actors’ heads.

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These flaws could have wrecked the movie, but it is saved by the relentless visual flow, beautifully rendered by Buf, and the hypnotic sound design by Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter. If you let it, this throbbing ebb and flow of sound and vision will carry you through any longueurs, dazzling you with astonishing model work that makes Tokyo look like a tilt-shifted playground that gives off its own ambient thrum. All of these atmospherics pay off with a bravura final act that fully engages all senses and emotions. Tipping over completely into pure visual fantasy, Oscar completes his journey through death, and Noé – with endearing sentimentality, not to mention the use of an image that drew amused gasps from the very British audience — brings us to a conclusion at once expected and surprising. Perhaps understanding that the experience of watching the movie is liable to leave his audience in a state of mental disarray, Noé cares enough to bring you out of his dreamstate with a final image and two title cards that act as a slap in the face. Very thoughtful of him.

It’s doubtful that Gaspar Noé would appreciate the comparison, but last year’s Speed Racer was another formal experiment in replicating a particular experience — the Wachowskis with the visual conventions of Japanese anime, Noé with his subjective hallucinatory experiences — which managed to transcend its mundane plot by sheer effort. The Wachowskis and Noé found their movies treated with indifference or hostility by the critical community, and had difficulty finding audiences for their projects: literally in the case of Enter The Void, which has no US distributor at the moment.

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The subject matter of this movie is liable to alienate many people for very different reasons than those that made Speed Racer the pariah of 2008′s summer season. While that was a candy-coloured action movie containing a sweetness and innocence that failed to connect with critics. Enter The Void is excessively unpleasant for much of its running time, featuring violent death, graphic sex, and a scene in an abortion clinic destined to achieve notoriety. This kind of unflinching visceral imagery is relentless enough to fuel criticism that Noé is nothing more than a provacateur. To do so would be to ignore the very specific plot structure that is set up early in the movie, as Alex explains to Oscar the distinct stages of the post-death experience as detailed in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. If you’re going to endure a vile nightmare after death, Noé is going to make you experience it. And then some. This point seems to have flown over some critics’ heads, as well as the very obvious fact that the PoV never shifts from Oscar. We experience what his consciousness experiences in one unbroken 155 minute blast, not a melange of images, as some seem to think.

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Whenever something as purely sensory as this comes along, it’s easy to complain that the flash hides an empty core, but even if it did — which I don’t believe it does — why should we dismiss something that succeeds so completely at generating a mood, or a mental state, or a new form of telling a story, just because it offends our sensibilities, or celebrates sub-cultures that are considered beneath contempt? The mundanity of the subject matter is easily forgiven when a filmmaker goes to such extreme lengths to bombard your senses, or has such loyalty to his vision that he will change the language of cinema to do it. This is a movie to feel and experience, much as Lars Von Trier’s Anti-Christ achieves such complete mastery of mood that any reservations are swept away. Save the pondering for later, once you’ve reached the end of Noé’s trip. Last year my exhortations to see Speed Racer on the biggest screen possible — preferably IMAX — fell on deaf ears, but — if this gets an international release — the imagery of Enter The Void demands to be seen in a cinema with the best projection and sound system possible. Sit in the middle of the cinema. No popcorn. Take a bottle of water and a catheter. Drop a tab (actually, don’t drop a tab. It will probably negate the hallucinatory properties of the movie and make you think you’re watching something mundane, like a Mike Leigh movie). Keep your eyes open like Alex in A Clockwork Orange. Prepare for awe.