The Week in Cinema: 17/06 -- 23/06

-- a selection of short-form reviews of the films I have watched this week --

George Harrison: Living in the Material World (dir. Martin Scorsese, 2011)

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Tenderness and wonder sit at the fore of Martin Scorsese 208-minute opus, a love letter to the unique career of the third and “quiet Beatle”, George Harrison. Over its enormous running time – one that does not depreciate from its quality, or perceptiveness – does Scorsese graph Harrison’s odyssey from small-town Liverpool to Beatlemania fame, before looking to his embrace of individualism, in the shape of Hindu-aligned spirituality and landscape gardening. Harrison’s songs (notably from All Things Must Pass) exhibit a similar strain of quiet discovery, at once separate from the Lennon/McCartney/Ringo collective and again hinting at, or defined by, such history. Of the entire film, the final segment – his cancer, acceptance of moving beyond himself, and bereaved reflections from friends and family – left the longest imprint on my mind. Dhani Harrison, his sole child, remembers being told to skip school by George, as well as him telling a policeman to “Fuck off”; Ringo narrates the final words spoken by George to him, offering support (“Want me to go with you?”) in his time of need; or even, with his second wife, Olivia Arias, musing on how, in death, George was a source of light. Such thoughts and memories tell of the many, personal relationships he formed over his life, existence as much completed by those who journey alongside as it is by the individual themselves. Affecting and quietly provocative, George Harrison: Living in the Material World is a perfect ode to the mind, beauty and workings of the late Beatle.

The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (dir. Terry Gilliam, 2018)

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Terry Gilliam finally lands the airborne, long-delayed Don Quixote project, as documented in Lost in La Mancha, in a highly-satisfying, if crumpled, shape. Jonathan Pryce, as the faux-Quixote character, is wonderful as the gleeful madman, partnered with Adam Driver’s movie-director figure, turned Sancho, who begins to share in the fantasy of the other. It is glorious filmmaking, a whirl of ingredients – cinema, theatre and animation brought together in a colourful blend – that, even if they don’t cohere as Gillian once envisaged, twenty-five years ago, still deliver a remarkable interpretation of Cervantes’ classic text. Electric, bizarre and phantasmagorical.