Three Films Make A Post: Well, they blew up the Chicken Man in Philly last night Edition

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere (2025): Scott Cooper’s Springsteen biopic focussed on the making of “Nebraska” (certainly one of my favourite albums of all time) is a deeply frustrating experience. At its best, this is a calm, meticulous and thoughtful portrayal of the creative process, and about trying to go forward when something in one’s past always holds one back.

At its worst – all too often – this just dumps the greatest hits of biopic clichés onto that better movie, the kind of bullshit neither life nor art deserve and that runs against the attempts at truthfulness of the film’s good third. It doesn’t exactly help that the the film’s ideas about psychology tend to the reductive or even the outright stupid, and that Cooper also likes to do things like show Springsteen looking up at a mansion on a hill and then cut to him writing “Mansion on the Hill”, as if the writer/director were either an idiot or assumed his audience to be.

It Was Just An Accident aka Yek tasadof-e sadeh (2025): Whereas this is Jafar Panahi channelling quite a bit of his own suffering under the Iranian regime into a movie that is never going for the simple and the easy and transfiguring what must be a lot of actual pain into a film of astonishing compassion with even those the director would have every right to see as beyond having any right to be treated with it.

Also included are moments of righteous anger turned righteous art, complex characterisation of characters a film like Cooper’s above would have treated as walking, talking tropes, genuinely riveting discussions of the morals of vengeance and mercy, and emotions genuine yet still filtered through the thoughtful complexity of these discussions. There’s also a dry sense of dark humour running particularly through the middle act that’s often actually delightful.

Here We Come A-Wassailing (1977): Coming to something rather different, this short-ish BBC documentary directed by great British folk rock musician Ashley Hutchings (whose Albion Band also scores the film) looks at various local yuletide/midwinter/Christmas traditions in different villages on the British Isles. It’s an often fascinating document of rites that by the time this was shot were curiously disconnected to the actual life of those people still holding to them. What must have been deeply meaningful at one point to the communities involved here looks like a nice lark to get up to while getting very, very drunk – to be lost in the next decades, and then in parts revived again through new generations stumbling onto the traditions and filling them with hopefully new meanings.

In any case, it’s fantastic just to be able to see some of this stuff, to speculate on the meanings these traditions might have had, and to watch people enjoy doing pretty damn strange things that would puzzle anyone living farther away than three villages over.