What Year Is This?

Apologies for the radio quiet over the past couple of weeks.

I’ve been very busy of late, between freelance projects and real-life, and Hope Lies at 24 Frames Per Second does tend to suffer at these times. I’m looking at a couple of ways to rectify this, with one idea being to go back to Hope Lies being a more casual blog, and a site that captures more fleeting thoughts. We shall see.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been obsessing over the Budd Boetticher collection released by Indicator on Blu-ray. I was only loosely familiar with Boetticher prior to this set, but I’ve been very impressed, both with the quality of the films and the quality of the presentation. I’ve also enjoyed Eureka’s recent release of Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s No Way Out, which features a remarkable and lengthy documentary on the American filmmaker.

Theatrically I caught A24’s Hereditary, which has arrived in cinemas with a near deafening chorus of hype. Unfortunately my own screening was accompanied with a near-deafening chorus of disruption and distraction, and while I appreciated a number of the film’s elements, especially the cinematography, everything else fell flat next to the real-world interruptions. I may revisit it one day.

Anyway, the aim is to place a piece like this up every  couple of days. Let’s see if I stick to it…