Straight Outta Crouch End

I'm not a morning person - so, when my children wake me up at 6:53 of a weekend, I have contrived a ritual of tea and biscuits and books in bed, which buys me some slumber time and crucially delays running-after-them-while-pretending-to-be-a-hungry-monster time until, ooh, 8:15? The boys are at their most cherubic at this hour, and often when I return to the bedroom from the kitchen with my tray of biscuits and incredibly strong tea, I catch them having a cuddle and a natter together (what can they be talking about? They don't know anything yet!) under a great heap of covers, propped up against a bank of pillows.  On Sunday of last week I left them together under the duvets, blearily checked my phone, put a teabag in my cup, and reported some tweets I had received overnight, calling me a paedophile. I returned to the bedroom, dug out a book to read with my sons, bid them budge up in bed, and deleted another message I had received, which was simply a picture of a woodchipper. ...

 It may be a sign of the times: at the moment you can see three films in British cinemas that centre on a threat to a home or community. Alice Winocour’s film Disorder is a more straightforward  variation on the storied Home Invasion genre - but The Club, Pablo Larrain’s evisceration of the Catholic church, and Robert Eggers' horror film The Witch, also play on this theme in different ways.The differences between the films - in the way they utilise this format, the way they reflect our fears and insecurities - are telling about contemporary political concerns.  Disorder focuses on Vincent, an ex-soldier with PTSD, played by Matthias Schoenaerts, who takes a security job looking after the wife and son of a shady businessman in their luxury villa. For reasons which aren't entirely clear - and which, to its detriment, the film doesn't investigate - the house will become the scene of a vicious siege, aiming to harm the businessman's wife and child. As the film progresses, V...

 One of the hardest adjustments I have had to make, as a viewer and critic, is in understanding (and reminding myself) that a film can be anything at all. What I considered cinema when I was a young actor and cinephile - that is, the films I read about in my big book of cinema, and the magazines I bought every month - was a narrow, totally conventional concept of film. A director, making a fictional film with a proper story, dialogue, a cast playing roles, with music and sets and credits. That cinema is still my meat and drink, of course; but realising the possibilities of film, the ways in which it can twist and turn, and branch out, and surprise us, has helped me enormously to think about the choices that directors make. Recording a podcast episode last year I chanced on the films of Margaret Tait, a poet of the movies whose brief films, mere snippets, are like gasps of fresh mountain air; these are little poems, evocations, fancies. Her 'Portrait of Ga' is like a picture-poe...