24 frames per second

You like recipes? Here’s one:

• Take a serious subject — what do revolutions and revolutionaries look like in the long term? How much of your identity is tied into what you believe?
• Add a generous portion of zaniness and absurd comedy that wouldn’t be out of place in a Discworld novel or a Monty Python sketch or a Coen Brothers film. Come on, don’t be stingy, add some more, it’ll taste better, trust me.
• Pour in a couple of shots of a background score that feels like a nearly three hour thesis on how it felt watching the shower scene in Psycho.
• Two shots of a brilliant ensemble performance.
• A shot of awareness that screwball and thriller can have the same pacing.

Mix well and serve in a tall glass.

When asked to describe the flavor, nobody’s gonna be able to get past ‘flavourful’ because, well, it tastes like so many things so what do you narrow it down to?

A “revolutionary” in hiding calls a secret hotline to get details of a rendezvous. Identity verification involves a series of passphrases being exchanged. Trouble is, the man is so baked, he can barely remember where he is, let alone all those phrases. Now imagine this conversation happening in the tone of a call center conversation on a doom loop.

Imagine a relentless background score that mostly involves a finger camped on one key on a piano long enough to claim squatter’s rights. And yet, you walk out thinking, Jonny Greenwood deserves an Oscar for this.

Imagine a story about groups of people fighting the state machinery, and the one thing that’s never in doubt is the fact that these anti establishment movements seem to exist only as long as the state doesn’t deem it absolutely expedient to crush them. And yet, you find yourself laughing out loud and often. And still walk out thinking about the film’s politics.

Imagine a film with three Oscar winning actors playing specifically etched characters so splendidly that, when you simply see them walk, their very gait feels like a distillation of their biography. Those are three of the six names on the poster. The other three are equally splendid, and give you shades of world weariness, quiet strength and resourcefulness, and sheer animal magnetism. There’s not even a weak line reading, let alone a weak performance.

That cocktail recipe from the beginning? We need to give it a name. How does “Film of the Year” sound?