If by any chance you read my recent ‘best of 2024’ post, you may have noticed, among the new musical releases, the inclusion of an album entitled Relations, attributed to Thomas Strønen, Craig Taborn, Chris Potter, Sinikka Langeland and Jorge Rossy. That would be a rather eccentric line-up for a group – a Norwegian percussionist, … Continue reading It Takes Two to Tango… or the Magic of Musical Duets
I’ve been posting my ‘best of the year’ lists since I first started writing here in 2016, and on each occasion I felt a need to mention in passing the state of the UK and of the world. Well, we may have got rid of the wretched Tories, but what with Trump, Musk et al, … Continue reading My Best Movies, Music, Books, etc, in 2024
So it's December again. For quite a few years now I've posted recommendations for recent BluRay/DVD releases, CDs and books that might prove useful for anyone wondering what to buy as gifts for Christmas; they appear to have been popular, so here we go again. (I myself find choosing presents enormously difficult, so I’m always … Continue reading Movies, Music and Books for Christmas… and Beyond
For me at least, there could be few BluRay releases more welcome than a new boxed set of four classic crime serials by Louis Feuillade. ‘Louis who?’ you may be wondering, and not without reason, even if the French filmmaker was enormously successful back in the 1910s, i.e. in the years when the cinema was … Continue reading Crime, Conspiracy and the Prospect of Chaos: Four Filmic Triumphs from Louis Feuillade
What with Arve Henriksen and Harmen Fraanje soon to appear at the London Jazz Festival, I’ve been revisiting their album Touch of Time, together with a more recent release featuring the great Norwegian trumpeter performing alongside Danish drummer Daniel Sommer and Swedish bassist Johannes Lundberg. Sounds and Sequences is apparently the second album in a … Continue reading Back to ‘Jazz’? Back to Ornette!
Back in 2008, a couple of days after Clint Eastwood’s Changeling had premiered in Cannes, I interviewed him about the film. During the small talk before we discussed the movie, I mentioned in passing that I’d been sitting just in front of him the day before at the Festival’s tribute to the great Portuguese director … Continue reading Another Fine New Eastwood Movie – See It While (If?) You Can
It’s strange: the Norwegians Trygve Seim and Frode Haltli undoubtedly count among my favourite musicians, and both – the former a saxophonist, the latter an accordionist – have been mentioned fairly frequently on this website. (Indeed, Haltli featured in my very first blog.) Nonetheless, while preparing a few notes for the following piece about Our … Continue reading Their Time: Trygve Seim and Frode Haltli on Stunning Form
No longer a programme advisor to the BFI London Film Festival, I haven’t yet seen many movies in this year’s edition (now underway and continuing until Sunday 20th October), but there are a few films I've already caught which I feel I should recommend. I’m sure there are others well worth investigating (I myself am … Continue reading Four Recommendations for the London Film Festival
In early 2021, writing about Godfrey Cheshire’s book of interviews, Conversations with Kiarostami, I bemoaned the fact that there were so few decent books (in English, at least) about the late and very great Iranian filmmaker, photographer, poet and artist Abbas Kiarostami (1940-2016). Several years on, the situation has hardly changed, which is why I’m … Continue reading Cinematic Genius Surveyed: ‘In the Time of Kiarostami’
Now in UK cinemas and by far the finest fiction film I’ve seen this year, About Dry Grasses is utterly characteristic of the longer, more recent works by the great Turkish writer-director Nuri Bilge Ceylan; at the same time it’s so engrossing throughout that it feels remarkably fresh from beginning – a brazenly Ceylanesque long … Continue reading ‘About Dry Grasses’: the superb new film by Nuri Bilge Ceylan
notes and observations by Geoff Andrew 