Return to Form

Paul Mescal and Franky Corio star as a father and daughter on their hols in Turkey in the much-hyped feature debut of Charlotte Wells. Despite wearing Chantal Akerman’s influence on her sleeve Wells fails to conjure the formal flare of her heroine, leaning on a few set pieces, some sloppy cinematography and a very dodgy score. Even after 100 minutes under the projection lamp, neither Ralph nor Owen were feeling the burn.

This week the boys are joined by screenwriter James King to discuss one of the most disctinctive voices in world cinema. An audacious arthouse alchemist who wears his influences on his sleeve, an access-all-areas immersion architect who raise moments of intimacy to the level of holy miracles, and a lover of landscape who lingers with as much curiosity on the hills of the Morelos as he does the concrete jungle of Mexico City.

We also speak in depth about the new Sight and Sound Greatest Films of All Time poll and Chantal Akerman's triumphant placing on it. To skip to the main event find us at 12-minute mark!

The arrival of sound opened a proverbial can of worms in the mute halls of cinema. For ten furious years (1930-1940), the ‘talkie’ would make and break itself again and again. The names are in the history books: Lang, Clair, Lubitsch, Dreyer, Mamoulian, Berkely, Vigo, Mizoguchi, von Sternberg, Hawks, Ford. Etc! But over these same years, cinema would begin to ossify – “where the experiments of 1930 became the shortcuts of 1939”. That’s Eugene Kotlyarenko, speaking in this episode – because he joined us for this episode; clearing a path through the whisper-singsong-chatter-belly laugh-screeching of the decade that made cinema cinema.

'The slightest movement sends reverberations through the viewer' said Scorsese of Greece's old master auteur. The boys locked in for punishing schedule of yearning and distance in snowy and misty conditions. As winter comes down the tracks, why not warm your hands under the projection lamp and witness the transcendent imagery of Theo Angelopoulos. Films covered include: Landscapes in the Mist, The Travelling Players, Suspended Step of the Stork, Voyage to Cythera, Eternity and a Day, The Hunters and The Beekeeper.

This week, the boys complete their New Horizons derive; casting a wide net over the work of Cornish filmmaker Mark Jenkin. Between the devil and the deep blue sea, they set sail for Enys Men (his latest) before dipping their oars into Jenkin’s preceding forays into hand-cranked celluloid (Bait and Bronco’s House). Questions. What’s eating contemporary British filmmaking, and how can we escape the leery lobster-pot of hauntological homages and atavistic hauntings? Derrida’s spectres – Fisher’s ghosts. They’re knocking on the door and asking for a cup of sugar. Maybe it’s time we told them to get lost.

In their 2nd despatch from Wroclaw, Owen, Ralph and George cover James Benning’s new structural state of the nation United States of America, Claire Denis’ dodgy lockdown drama Both Sides of the Blade, David Cronenberg’s speculative surgery sci-fi, Michel Franco’s existential Acapulco ennui in Sundown and Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s poignant road movie Broker.

The boys are back in town, and the town is Wroclaw, Poland - a sweaty Mecca for cineastes across Europe. Joined by frequent guest George MacBeth, Ralph and Owen dissect Ruben Östlund’s new caustic cruise comedy, Jerzy Skolimowski’s dizzying tale of a downtrodden donkey, Lukas Dhont’s tender childhood tragedy and Ulrich Seidl’s formidable Rimini. Garnish your pierogies and settle in for our first round…

All good things must come to an end. The first of those is our four-episode season on Jean-Luc Godard, coming to a climatic halt with this hour-long chat with a jetlagged Daniel Neofetou. We did Godard the essayist, covering the dense thickets of his Mark Kermode-baiting wonders: IMAGE BOOK, GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE, and FILM SOCIALISME.

And the second ‘end’ is MUUB TUBE itself. For seventy-odd episodes, we’ve talked about some of the greatest films ever made. We’ve also done some mids. That, ladies and gentlemen, is showbiz. Now for something else.

See you around, we hope.

Ralph & Owen

Between the brooding, overcast skies of LA VIE DE JESUS (1997) and the molten media-sploitation of FRANCE (2021), French filmmaker Bruno Dumont has worn many (often contradictory) hats. But for this one-time enfant terrible of French arthouse cinema, a persistent thread can be carefully picked out. And to begin the work of that tangled unpicking, the boys enlist the support of arch Dumontian George MacBeth. Together, they embark on a careening, freestyle foray through the land of Dumont - from verbal tics and inflating stomachs to car crashes and divinely levitating coppers. It’s an in-depth and necessary look at one of contemporary cinema’s most thrilling auteurs. Strap yourselves in: this is ‘Slow and Furious: Normandy Drift’.

The promise of a Raúl Ruiz film is almost irresistible, vivid colours, dynamic camera movement, non-linearity, pirates! And yet his unique films are little-seen, not quite canon. Ralph and Owen took a bold voyage through his seafaring 1983 classics City of Pirates and Three Crowns of a Sailor and ponder, were these ravishing ripples redolent of an undiscovered new wave, or is it all just naval gazing?