Meredith Taylor, Author at Filmuforia

Rotterdam International Film Festival 2025

Celebrating its 54th Anniversary, the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) takes place from 30th January until 9th of February 2025 with thirteen premieres competing for the top prize in THE TIGER COMPETITION.

Wondrous is the Silence of My Master (2025)

Dir: Ivan Salatic | Montenegro | 131’

Ivan Salatić’s striking and cerebral drama finds the leader of a small group of 19th-century Montenegrin rebels forced to retreat to warmer climes in southern Italy in order to cure himself of tuberculosis. But in doing so, he longs for his homeland.

Wind, Talk to Me (2025)

Dir: Stefan Djordjevic | Serbia | 100’

Stefan Djordjevic originally planned to make a film about his ailing mother, but following her death he shifted focus to encompass his whole family with this profoundly moving first feature, which sees him return home to the warm embrace of his loved ones.

Vivital

Noëlle Bastin | Baptiste Bogaert | Belgium | 109’

Noëlle Bastin and Baptiste Bogaert’s gloriously dry comedy, which finds two cops attempting to calm local villager’s concerns over an increasing number of suicides in their otherwise peaceful community, is also a disarming and frequently charming portrait of country life.

Tears in Kuala Lumpur (2025)

Dir: Ridhwan Saidi | Malaysia | 100’

Inspired by the iconic Malaysian singer and actor P. Ramlee, Ridhwan Saidi’s contemplative paean to Kuala Lumpur surveys a relationship that has ended through ruminative recollections that exist somewhere between a memory and a dream, while the city remains in a constant state of architectural and cultural change.

First Person Plural (2025)

Dir: Sandro Aguilar | Portugal | 119’

Mateus and Irene plan to celebrate their wedding anniversary at a tropical retreat, but are separated on the eve of their departure, and forced to question their relationship and how they relate to their troubled son, in this enigmatic and strikingly beautiful third feature from Sandro Aguilar.

Perla (2025)

Dir: Alexandra Markarov | Austria |

Perla, a gifted painter with an equally talented musician daughter, is living comfortably in early-1980s Vienna when she receives a call that rejuvenates ghosts from her past in communist Czechoslovakia, and she must risk everything in order to move on with her life.

In My Parents House (2025)

Dir: Tim Ellrich | Germany | 95’

A therapist whose interests lie in alternative ways to help the sick and infirm is forced to balance the demands of her professional life with those of her ageing parents and older brother, in Tim Ellrich’s sensitive but uncompromising drama.

Guo Ran (2025)

Dir: Li Dongmei | China | 90’

In Li Dongmei’s chamber drama, a young couple live in a small apartment in the city. He earns little and she’s pregnant. Through their brief exchanges and moments of solitude, it becomes clear that their relationship has, without realising, edged towards crisis point.

The Great History of Western Philosophy (2025)

Dir: Aria Covamonas | Mexico | 73’

In Aria Covamonas’ scabrously funny satire, combining animation styles that blend pop and political imagery with a fantastical, painterly aesthetic, societal foundations are rocked to the core as a cosmic animator is forced, under Chairman Mao’s watchful gaze, to make a film about Western philosophy.

Fiume o Morte! (2025)

Dir: Igor Bezinović | Croatia |

Through dramatic reconstruction and documentary asides, Igor Bezinović captures the spirit of Italian poet, playwright, journalist, aristocrat and army officer Gabriele D’Annunzio, and the nascent fascism in his attempts to forge a new state in the aftermath of the First World War.

Blind Love (2025)

Dir: Julian Chu | Taiwan | 145’

An unexpected kiss unburies memories and longing for Shu-yi, a mother quietly holding her family together despite her unhappiness. As her rebelling son Han grows drawn to the enigmatic Xue-jin, Shu-yi rekindles her past connection with the same woman in this tenderly crafted exploration of family dynamics, identity and desire.

Bad Girl (2025)

Dir: Varsha Barath | India | 115’

From her journey through high school and college, then out into the wider world, Ramya’s dream of finding the perfect guy is obstructed by societal mores, strict parents, unrequited love and the untrammelled chaos of her own mind, in Varsha Bharath’s naughty and affecting comedy.

The Tree of Authenticity (2025)

Dir: Sammy Baloji | Democratic Republic of Congo | 75’

Photographer and visual artist Sammy Baloji’s fascinating film essay explores the Democratic Republic of Congo’s colonial history and its ecological significance. Drawing on research from the 1930s, the film highlights the Congo Basin’s vital role in consuming carbon dioxide and shaping global environmental balance over a century.

IFFR FROM 30 JANUARY UNTIL 9 FEBRUARY 2025 | featuringTHE TIGER, BIG SCREEN AND TIGER SHORTS COMPETITIONS

The Universal Theory (2024)

Dir: Timm Kröger | Cast: Jan Bülow, Olivia Ross, Hanns Zischler & Gottfried Breitfuss | Germany Fantasy Thriller 118′

Timm’s Kröger’s seductive but rather arcane neo-noir envelops us in intrigue and sublime black and white images in the Swiss mountains where a German post graduate student is attending a physics conference in the early 1960s. Inveigled into a string of mysterious medics he falls for a charismatic pianist called Karin and witnesses a series of grisly murders. A lofty Hitchcockian and Mahleresque score heightens the tension, goading the complex plot forward – something to do with Cold War conspiracies and radioactivity – and leading us to expect more than is actually delivered. Best known for shooting The Trouble with Being Born, Kroger’s latest foray into directing, and scriptwriting alongside Roderick Warich, is certainly ambitious. The Universal Theory is a bewildering film to fathom out, but one that looks and sounds absolutely terrific.Certainly worth a watch. Let me know if you work it all out @MeredithTaylor

IN UK & IRISH CINEMAS FROM FRIDAY 13 DECEMBER

A Complete Unknown (2024)

Dir: James Mangold | US Musical Drama 2024

“Well, I wake up every morning/Fold my hands and pray for rain/I’ve got a headful of ideas/That are driving me insane” – ‘Maggie’s Farm’, 1965

Bob Dylan has often said that in the early phase of his career, he didn’t so much write songs as pull them out of the air; it seemed to him that they were already somewhere out there, fully formed, waiting to be found, and all he had to do was write them down.

It sounds a bit fantastical, but maybe that’s how an artist with an indisputable vocation feels when they’re in the grip of the first fine careless rapture. James Mangold’s excellent and engrossing film focuses on this period of Dylan’s life, giving us a compelling portrait of the artist when his creativity was at its most volcanic.

Some might object that the movie doesn’t explain how, exactly, you get to hitch this kind of ride in the first place, but you’d probably have to position your camera right inside the artist’s psyche to have any hope of doing that, and Dylan’s own ‘out of the air’ theory suggests that, even if it you could, maybe not all that much of significance would be revealed.

Timothée Chalamet convincingly embodies the restless turnover of personas which accompanied this early outpouring – every bit as headlong and chameleonic as that of Bowie, but less obviously theatrical. Impassive and vigilant, Chalamet’s Dylan seems to be soaking up everything while giving out very little: except, of course, in the form of the songs.

Cryptic as he appears, the film succeeds in giving us the sense that a lot of contradictory ideas are churning in Dylan’s mind at any given time, with no strong urge to resolve them. Just as he wants to maintain his relationship with Sylvie Russo, the bright spark of a girlfriend who helped awaken his political awareness, he craves a connection with Joan Baez, the glamorous princess of the folk movement.

Then, almost as soon as he’s forged an alliance with her, he wants to blast his way out by steering his music in directions which – again, paradoxically – are simultaneously more populist and far more esoteric than anyone else, especially in the folk scene, imagined possible. At the same time, he genuinely doesn’t see any real difference between blues, folk, R ‘n’ B, rock ‘n’ roll, country, symbolist poetry, and anything else that grabs him. It’s all self-expression, right?

The film thrives on these tensions as it builds towards the notorious 1965 Newport festival when Dylan’s unveiling of his electric music supposedly sent many die-hard folkies into terminal conniptions. While relishing the disruptive effect of his new style on some audience members, though, some part of him seems genuinely and hurt and baffled by the vengeful uproar they aroused to this day.

Dylan has said that when he arrived in New York, he wasn’t planning to become a folk singer. The scene he dropped into, while impeccably high-minded and historically important in a host of ways, also had its smothering and didactic side. White people weren’t supposed to sing the blues. People who drew their repertoire from life on the land shouldn’t sing whaling songs. Etc.

The folk movement was always on the look-out for ‘authentic voices’ to convey its social and political ideas to a wider public. As the movement’s de facto torch-bearer, Pete Seeger provided much of its drive and energy. Often unfairly dismissed as a gormless old fuddy-duddy, Edward Norton’s performance restores Seeger’s dignity, intelligence and benign energy. This was an admirably ethical man. But he felt that the primary function of art was to serve social and political goals. He could see the potential of the charismatic, hugely talented Dylan. And he wanted to mould him.

The young minstrel chafed against expectations he saw as staid and ossified. Which makes sense. When you’ve written “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” once, you may not feel like writing it over and over again, no matter how much Pete Seeger wants you to. Particularly if your muse is drawing you in ever wilder and more demanding directions.

The film ends as it begins, with the artist travelling alone to meet some as-yet unmapped future. Time has revealed Dylan’s political affiliations as inchoate and non-denominational, with songs like “Joey” and “Hurricane” suggesting that he was always more interested in weaving outsider myths than probing too deeply into the realities behind them.
This movie is obviously a labour of love in which everyone concerned is performing at peak levels. Along with committed performances, it renders set-pieces like street scenes in early 60s Greenwich Village and concerts at Carnegie Hall and in open countryside in thrillingly believable and visceral ways. It’s not easy to play recognisable people with high public profiles, but Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez and Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash more than justify their places alongside Chalamet, with Elle Fanning as a touching and feisty Sylvie Russo.

After a brief, brilliant, early blaze, a lot of poets quickly wink out of existence. Chatterton died at 17, Keats at 25. Rimbaud, one of Dylan’s key influences in his transition to more abstract and personal material, stopped writing at 19. Dylan Thomas, also clearly important to the young Robert Zimmerman in a variety of ways, managed to stumble on into his late 30s.

Many have said that even if Dylan had been killed in the famous motorbike crash of 1966, when he was 25 (which the timeline of A Complete Unknown doesn’t quite reach), he’d already created a body of work of towering cultural significance. But, at 83, Dylan continues to perform and record, his career now edging towards an astonishing 65 years.

Possibly the mixture of hard-bitten, cynical opportunist and sensitive, idealistic romantic – along with a good few other things – goes some way towards explaining this longevity. And, quite possibly, Dylan is just as surprised about it as everyone else. Ian Long

IN UK CINEMAS FROM 17 January 2025

September 5th (2024)

Dir: Tim Fehlbaum | Cast: Peter Sarsgaard, John Magaro, Ben Chaplin, Leonie Benesch, Zinedine Soualem, Georgina Rich, Corey Johnson | US Thriller 94’

September 5 takes us back to a time when news events were broadcast exclusively on official news channels in the pre-digital age. It recalls how a dedicated team at ABC Sports covered live footage of the 1972 Munich Olympics terrorist attacks when eleven Israelis were killed due to lax security.

In his impressive third feature German director Tim Fehlbaum captures all tension and nail-biting dread of that fated day on 5th September when accuracy and professionalism were paramount in getting the facts first, but crucially correct. Involving a plethora of technical equipment and a great deal of nouse these news-gatherers overcame considerable hurdles to deliver up to the minute on air coverage as it unfolded.

Peter Sarsgaard is at his best as the terrier-like head of the news team Roone Arledge. The film also stars a fractious Ben Chaplin (Marvin Bader); and Leonie Benesch as Marianne Gebhardt, a local German translator. John Magaro plays team newbie Geoff Mason who turned up for an ordinary day’s work that turned into something quite extraordinary.

All this plunged Germany back into humiliation at the time when the country was still coming to terms with the public shame of the Second World War when many thousands of Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust. And Marvin was himself the son of a victim. A really riveting watch that feels timely despite it happening more than fifty years ago. @MeredithTaylor

IN CINEMAS FROM JANUARY 2025

I Know Where I’m Going

Dir: Michael Powell | Cast: Wendy Hillier, Roger Livesey, Pamela Brown. Uk Drama 90’

If ‘Black Narcissus’ conclusively demonstrated Michael Powell’s skills as a director by recreating India at Pinewood, ‘I Know Where I’m Going’ anticipated it by managing to take Roger Livesey to the Outer Hebrides without him ever leaving England.

Although apparently dissimilar the opposing temperaments of Powell & Pressburger dovetailed beautifully as exemplified by this film combining Powell’s Celtic bravado with Pressburger’s Austro-Hungarian romanticism.

After looking askance at Powell’s recent kinky shenanigans in ‘A Canterbury Tale’ the critics on this occasion positively turned over and purred, James Agee grudgingly declaring it free of their liabilities “inordinate ambition, bumptiousness, and a general unevenness of judgment”. @RichardChatten

Saint-Ex (2024)

Wri/Dir: Pablo Agüero | Cast: Louis Garrel, Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, Sergej Onopko, Yseult, Blanche Redouloux | France Drama 98’

The French writer and poet Antoine de Saint-Exupery has always held a special place in the French collective imagination with his wartime death shrouded in mystery. Rather like the English artist Eric Ravillious, who lost his life off the coast of Iceland, the Petit Prince writer also disappeared at sea when his plane vanished during a reconnaissance mission over Corsica in July 1944 ,

Here, in commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the writer’s loss, the Argentine director Pablo Aguero puts a poetic spin in a reverie that recalls the time during the 1930s when Saint Ex and his childhood friend Guillaumet (Cassel) were pioneering aviators risking their lives in the line of duty to deliver mail between Europe and South America on Aéropostale, a vital service and one of the many that saw men putting their country first. Faithful to Saint-Ex himself this airborne drama evokes the same spirit and fantasy elements of his work enhancing the poignancy of a tender story of friendship and sacrifice, inspired by Saint-Exupery’s 1939 novel Terre des Hommes .

Guillaumet, whose dedicated wife Noelle is delicately brought to life by Diane Kruger when Saint-Ex attempts to rescue his colleague who also went missing, during a postal delivery. Saint-Ex is transformed from a the boyish dreamer who crafted Le Petit Prince into a Gallic hero worthy of his place in French history.

Rather than opting for a straightforward biopic about Saint-Ex and his life, Aguero brings magic realism into a whimsical tale of courage, endeavour and captivating beauty enhanced by Claire Mathon’s sumptuous images of cloud formations, sunsets and misty seascapes over Patagonia and the Andes mountains. @MeredithTaylor

Lee (2024)

Dir: Ellen Kuras | US Biopic 117′

Best known for her staggering images of the Second World War Elizabeth ‘Lee’ Miller (1907-77), aka Lady Penrose, was an American photographer and photojournalist who started life as a fashion model in the New York of the 1920s before becoming a war correspondent for Vogue magazine.

One of the most memorable images, taken by her wartime collaborator David E Sherman, a Jewish-American photojournalist, pictures the nude Miller in Hitler’s empty flat in Munich, nonchalantly lounging in the bath, her boots, caked in mud from a visit to Dachau, resting symbolically on the edge. Winslet, who plays Lee with her signature conviction and gusto, is the best thing about a rather underwhelming affair that skips between episodes of this enterprising woman’s life as a creative force who transformed her talents from modelling to photography and art finishing up as a celebrity chef.

The focus for debut feature director Ellen Kuras is Miller’s time as war correspondent for British Vogue during the 1940s’. The film sets the scene in 1930s Paris where the young Miller is fancy free before meeting her husband Anthony Penrose (Alexander Skarsgard) and moving to London where the dark clouds of war are looming. Desperate for a role, she gets one from Vogue editor Audrey Withers. (another nuanced turn from Andrea Riseborough) and we experience the full clout of her talent from then onwards.

Enriched by some of Miller’s iconic photos with witty titles: ‘You Will Not Lunch in Charlotte Street Today’ depicting a smoke-filled street where a sign pinned to a tree reads simply: ‘Unexploded bomb’ the film showcases Miller’s talent and unique female gaze that produced images that captured ‘a thousand words’ at a time where female combat photographers were banned. The director, an Oscar-nominated cinematographer, here acknowledges not only the power of the image but also Lee’s undeniable contribution as a woman.

The film touches on key protagonists such as David E Sherman (Andy Samberg), and the tragic Solange d’Ayen (Marion Cotillard), Miller’s girlfriend in Paris, without really fleshing them out in the context of her life. Her husband Anthony Penrose barely gets a look-in. And why not cast an English actor to portray an edgy English lord when there are hundreds of them who would have been more convincing in the role? While not perhaps the definitive biopic on Miler, Ellen Kuras, an Oscar nominated cinematographer in her own right, certainly recognises her valuable contribution. @MeredithTaylor

NOW ON SKY

From Roger Moore with Love (2024)

Dir: Jack Cocker | UK Doc 90

Who was your favourite Bond?. If the answer is Roger Moore (1927-2017) then this new BBC-commissioned documentary offers fascinating insight into the real man behind the legend.

Directed by Jack Cocker, the film traces back to Sir Roger Moore’s modest early life in South London revealing how his innate charm charisma, along with his acting skills, would make him an international star and a much loved household name in a career that spanned over thirty years.

After training at RADA in 1945 Moore made his professional debut in Perfect Strangers alongside Robert Donat and Deborah Kerr. After a stint as a knitwear model in the early 1950s, Moore headed Stateside to take on television roles until he signed with MGM in 1954 with a string of support performance allowing him to rub shoulders with the likes of Lana Turner and Kirk Douglas. The 1958 TV series Ivanhoe, shot in England, was a great success, but the role of Simon Templar in The Saint from 1962-69 would mark his transition to international stardom with an idiosyncratic raised eyebrow becoming his hallmark. He then played alongside Tony Curtis in The Persuaders! until James Bond took over in the Seventies and early1980s. His final role was in Janos Edelenyi’s 2016 drama The Carer alongside Emilia Fox and Brian Cox.

From Roger Moore with Love is enlivened by Moore’s own diaries, family photographs and ample footage from his early childhood right through to his final interviews on TV chat show ‘Parkinson’ shortly before his death at 89. The film describes his early marriage to South African dancer Doorn van Steyn, his turbulent life with famous singer, Dorothy Squires, and how he eventually become a family man with Italian actress Luisa Mattioli and their children Geoffrey, Deborah and Christian, who talk about happy times with their parents’ A list celebrities and friends. Moore finally married heiress Kristina Tholstrup and served as a goodwill ambassador at UNICEF for 27 years. Talking heads include his close friends Joan Collins, Pierce Brosnan, Nanette Newman, Christopher Walken. Jane Seymour who were clearly very fond of him.

So Roger Moore was naturally suave and genial but he also emerges as polite, considerate and possessing the same tongue in cheek humour as Cary Grant, never taking himself too seriously, but never losing sight of the right opportunity to progress his career. One contributor recalls having so much fun on set when Moore was involved they had to build in more time, even when the set caught fire during The Spy Who Loved Me in 1977. @MeredithTaylor

FROM ROGER MOORE WITH LOVE – in UK cinemas 13 DECEMBER

Careful (1992)

Wri/Dir: Guy Maddin | Comedy drama 100’ 1992

The tales produced by Canadian director Guy Maddin often resemble silent films and his first in colour looked as if it had been tinted.

Resembling a fanciful parody both of German expressionist cinema and of Tyrolean mountain drama it tells a very tall tale – literally as in one scene the characters exchange vital information in which the altitude makes the air so thin their conversation is constantly interrupted by yawns – with a deceptively deadpan tone partly born of necessity since fear of starting avalanches prevents the citizens of Tolsbad from speaking above a whisper. @RichardChatten

NOW ON DIGITAL PLATFORMS

Savanna and the Mountain (2024) Laceno d’Oro Film Festival 2024

Dir: Paulo Carneiro | Portugal Doc 74’

In the ‘wonderful kingdom’ of Covas do Barroso, a peaceful Northern Portuguese mountain village, life was sweet until something started spooking the horses according to this pastoral parable premiering at Cannes 2024.

And horses aren’t stupid. In fact they’re the first notice the subtle changes that the villagers decide to investigate way up in the mountains above their homes. This is a film about the power of the people. Their determination to stand up and activating against un-democratic change, especially when it challenges their environment and their threatens their way of life.

Eco Documentarian Paulo Carneiro is well known on the festival circuit for his similarly themed short Water to Tabato in 2014 and his first feature-length documentary in 2018, Bostofrio où le ciel rejoint la Terre. The Portuguese director Portuguese filmmaker was back in the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight sidebar with a hybrid doc re-enactment filmed on a shoestring budget – and none the worse for it – that sees local villagers getting together to stop a government incentive aimed at extracting lithium via their contractor Savannah Mines.

The locals stage colourful demonstrations marching with uniforms, mock swords and banners bearing the slogan “A mafio do litio” (The lithium mafia). They even kidnap a suspected mineworker and put him in a barrel – just for fun. Throughout the country environmentalists and opposition parties echo their sentiments and the government takes note, at least for a while. But that’s not the end of the villagers’ fight against the mining company. And it’s still raging on today. A generous, darkly funny film that nonetheless has serious undertones. @MeredithTaylor

WON A SPECIAL MENTION AT THIS YEAR’s LACENO D’ORO FILM FESTIVAL, AVELLINO 2024

Maria (2024)

Dir: Pablo Larrain | Cast: Angelina Jolie, Pierfrancesco Favino, Alba Rohrwacher, Valeria Golino, Haluk Bilginer, Stephen Ashfield, Valeria Golino, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Vincent Macaigne, Lydia Koniordou, Angelina Papadopoulou | 2 hours 3 minutes

Pablo Larrrain has captured the essence of female icons Princess Diana and Jacky Onassis. Now her rival Maria Callas comes under the spotlight in this wistful portrait of lost love and longing. Maria is about a diva not at the height of her powers but at her swansong, four years after her final performance, she misses music and fills the aching gap with medication while planning to sing again, against the advice of herr doctor (Vincent Macaigne). Like a swan gliding through water Maria is a graceful elegant drama full of swooning arias and tearful reflections on what was, and could have been played with supreme finesse by Angelina Jolie with just a hint of a Greek accent.

With his vintage lens Ed Lachmann evokes the soft mauve tinged lustre of this twilight era for the Greek goddess of opera who inhabits a palatial Paris apartment in 1977. The mournful tragedy tells of failed marriage, miscarriage and doomed romance. But there’s an autumnal warmth emanating from Maria’s glacial persona that makes her appealing. One gets the impression she would be amusing company with her acerbic grasp of reality and witty one-liners. She garners respect with her high standards, professionality and fear of losing dignity. We feel for her as a woman who has risen to the top of her and now only sees an emotional abyss with only her pet poodles, her housekeeper and butler for company. Alba Ruhrwacher and Pierfrranceso Favino are perfectly cast as the adoring dedicated domestic duo, tirelessly moving Maria’s piano around to suit her whims, and confiscating her carefully hidden tablets squirrelled away in pockets and handbags.

The days pass languorously with Maria giving interviews to a French journalist Mandrax (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and practicing her ‘return to form’ with a respectful pianist (Stephen Ashfield). There are magnificent musical forays with Maria in her full splendour. Black and white flashbacks reflect on her unhappy childhood with a grasping mother (Lydia Koniordou) and her brief love affair with Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer), who arrogantly ousted her husband. Onassis seems to have been her soulmate, although they never married, that role went to Jackie.

This is a production enhanced by its costumes and set designs from Massimo Cantini Parrini and Guy Hendrix Dyas respectively. With her mannequin figure Jolie showcases a selection of exquisite gowns and Seventies fashions as she saunters slowly through the French capital . In a soigne corner cafe she sips espresso on the terrace in full view of le tout Paris: “I come to restaurants to be adored” she informs the waiter. @MeredithTaylor

ON RELEASE FROM 10 January 2025

Bunny Lake is Missing (1965)

Dir: Otto Preminger

Otto Preminger’s last film in black & black provides confirmation that as a general rule those he made in black & white were better than those in colour.

Here working with a British cast spanning decades of acting talent ranging from Finlay Currie to Anna Massey, despite Preminger’s reputation for self-serving sensationalism here the general mood is subdued, especially Laurence Olivier, who does an impressive job of suppressing his tendency to ham.

In the later stages madness increasingly takes over and among the various eccentrics on view Noel Coward manages to stand out as Carol Lynley’s poisonous landlord. @RichardChatten

NOW ON DIGITAL PLATFORMS

American Star (2024)

Dir: Gonzalo Lopez Gallego | Spain 107’ 2024

A stylishly slick but formulaic film sees Ian Mcshane (now 81) booted and suited in Fuerteventura as a soulful professional hitman called Wilson.

The canary island provides a suitably inhospitable widescreen backcloth for this curio that feels less and less like a thriller the more it plays out as a drama with some dark humour and a gently lilting score from Remate.

Wilson, a gravelly voiced tattooed war veteran, is there to do away with ‘the target’ who is not at home when he turns up at his swanky modernist villa to kill him. Instead a young French woman is swimming in the pool. So Wilson roams aimlessly about the moon-scaped island and ends up playing pool in a nearby bar and quaffing vintage whiskey served to him by said French girl (Nora Arnezeder) Gloria, who apparently works there and offers him lunch with her mother a wonderfully drole Fanny Ardant, who is no fool when she meets the suave silver fox.

Softening elements arrive in the shape of Wilson’s gauche and shaggy-haired sidekick Ryan (Adam Nagaitis) who turns up from Lancashire offering to help, instantly lowering the tone along with an irritating little boy called Max (Oscar Coleman) who hangs around the hotel. The American Star of the title turns out to be a vast and rusting shipwreck that provides a scary interlude when it starts creaking ominously in the waves.

The film showcases McShane’s talents as an affable and intuitive killer who knows how to charm the birds and the boys but can still be brutal when necessary. For once he gets a leading role and carries it off with style in director Gonzalo López-Gallego’s visually appealing offbeat thriller. @MeredithTaylor

Gangster No. 1 (2000)

Dir: Paul McGuigan | UK Thriller 103′

A sweary bit of brutal British gangster violence offers a stylish depiction of the Kray Brothers’ era, elevated to a cult classic by a watchable cast of Paul Bettany, Malcolm McDowell, Saffron Burrows and David Thewlis.

Writing credits go to Sexy Beast team Louis Ellis and David Scinto whose original screenplay is adapted by Johnny Ferguson as a betrayal and revenge story following Bettany’s rookie gangster through the Sixties early Seventies when he morphs into social misfit McDowell, never quite vanquishing his boss Freddie Mays (Thewlis) whose spunky onscreen lover Burrows kicks ass as Karen. @MeredithTaylor

Vertigo Releasing is planning to release the title across digital platforms on 13 December 2024.

Rebel Without a Cause (1955)

Dir: Nicolas Ray | Cast: James Dean, Natalie Wood | US Drama

‘Rebel Without a Cause’ started life as a modest black & white exploitation item about disaffected youth, but allied to Nicholas Ray’s flair for colour and penchant for melodramatics – heightened by Leonard Rosenman’s dissonant score – ultimately emerged in widescreen & colour as an ambitious vehicle for an emerging star.

It’s been observed that the youngsters display more careworn than their parents and they certainly seem to derive little satisfaction from a life of cheap thrills and mindless violence; which is why it’s a cathartic moment when James Dean finally has to take the conciliatory role with Plato at the film’s conclusion.@RichardChatten

NOW ON DIGITAL PLATFORMS

Rumours (2024)

Dir: Guy Maddin, Evan & Galen Johnson | Canada 118′

Cult Canadian director Guy Maddin is an auteur in his own right with an eclectic stash of avant-garde films under his belt and a loyal fanbase. Recently he joined forces with Evan and Galen Johnson and here joins them for a curious pulp horror outing worth seeing only for its stellar cast.

It all starts off rather straighforwardly in a lakeside gazebo in the grounds of a German castle at a G7 conference hosted by Kate Blanchett’s spritely president Helga Ortmann. She is joined by Denis Menochet (for France); Charles Dance (bizarrely for the US) a pigtailed and horny Roy Dupuis (Canada) who proceeds with his offbeat powers of seduction; Nikki Amuka-Bird (for the UK) Italy’s Rolando Ravello and Takehiro Kira (Japan). The motley crew start work on a crisis paper until proceedings take a deep dive into Dr Strangelove territory.

During their arrival Ortmann has proudly showed the heads of state the recently discovered remains of a prehistoric body perfectly preserved in a nearby peat bog. And this atavistic relic gives rise to a strange turn of events that doesn’t quite live up to expectations. But never mind about that, the cast makes this a worthwhile, if overlong, watch with some witty exchanges debating the world as it grinds to a holt ecological, socially and spiritually @MeredithTaylor

Rumours – In UK cinemas 6th December from 6th December 2024

Nocturnes (2024)

Dirs: Anirban Dutta, Anupama Srinivasan | Doc, India. 81’

The world of moths is probed in this peaceful and poetic new documentary set in the dense forests of the Eastern Himalayas on the border of Bhutan and the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh where their life spins on the phases of the moon.

For just ten days leading up the new moon these mysterious nocturnal creatures whizz frenetically in all directions drinking the nectar of flowers. All this activity is to generate heat.

Filmmakers Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan try to identify the moths as thry settle on a bluish softly glowing light screen during the hours of darkness. What emerges is a hazy tableau buzzing with life of different shapes and sizes.

Meanwhile back in the lab the ecologists must try and make sense of why so many moths species use the nighttime to engage in their vital life process. What they do know is that for the last 300 million years the hardy creatures have held our planet together. There are so many different species,, around 160,000 compared to 17,500 types of butterflies. Sadly they are often considered poor relations of their butterfly cousins. Yet adorned with silvery wings and striking colours they have a distinct allure of their own and follow the moon guided by its phases as they go about their nighttime forays for food.

Lulled by a gossamer often eerie score of ambient – sounds of the forest that vibrates with all kinds of life from birds to elephants, this is very much a sensory film and you may drift off into a pleasant reverie.

In the soothing nocturnal soundscape, Manis a quantitative ecologist, leads a mission to take stock and catalogue every type of Himalayan moth in order to better understand the impact of so-called climate change. With her assistant Bicki, who belongs to the indigenous Bugun community, she has decided to focus on the hawkmoth. With digital cameras the two start to photograph the moths as they are drawn into the light. There’s a strange allure to the Death’s-head hawkmoth, so called because its upper thorax resembles a skull.

A beguiling film that once again showcases the stunning biodiversity of the natural world celebrated by two pioneering ecological filmmakers. @MeredithTaylor

NOCTURES won the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award at SUNDANCE 2024

Nosferatu (2024)

Dir: Robert Eggers | US Horror 133′

The name ‘Robert Eggers’ used to have critics gagging with anticipation. His early offerings The Witch and The Lighthouse were well received , even The Northman had a certain gritty appeal, but once again this indie filmmaker may have sold his soul to the devil with a pale also-ran remake of Murnau’s 1922 original, and Werner Herzog’s 1979 outing based on Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula.

Remember how Tomas Alfredon’s Let the Right One In was killed stone dead by the US remake Let Me In.? Sadly the same is true here. A star-strewn cast of Bill Skarsgård, Nicholas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin, Ralph Ineson and Willem Dafoe fails to set the night on fire and does nothing to lighten the load of this torpid period potboiler that splutters its way towards the finishing line growing shriller and more gory by the moment, and further sapping our enjoyment with a running time of over two painful hours.

True to the Gothic genre, the focus here is the sexual allure of the vampire, but although Corrin does a good job of moaning, Skarsgard’s Count Orlok just looks too ludicrous to seduce even the most susceptible victim so encumbered is he with the over wrought costume and make-up. Looking more like Freddy Kreuger while struggling, unsuccessfully, to pull off Gary Oldman’s eerie vocal delivery that won him best actor in Dracula (1992). All this stifles the supernatural mystery and sheer terror engendered by Kinski and Max Schreck.

Called simply Nosferatu this is at best an ertsatz piece of horror that sucks elements from previous outings offering an over-laboured melodrama that starts off promisingly with Jarin Blaschke’s visual wizardry and shadow-play and an evocative original score from Robin Carolan, but soon sinks under the sheer weight of it own bloodlust.

Eggers’ version fails to add anything of its own except for lashings of gore and sensationalism: the 2024 update lacks both the subtle resonance and beauty of Werner Herzog’s visionary Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) or the sheer terror of Murnau’s 1922 ethereal shocker A Symphony of Horror. It may well excite avid horror fans or those new to the ‘Nosferatu’ stable, but Eggers over eggs the omelette with his lurid treatment: a more subtle approach would have delivered another welcome addition to the canon. @Meredith Taylor

IN CINEMAS FROM THE 1ST JANUARY 2025

A Different Man (2024)

Dir: Aaron Schimberg | Cast: Sebastian Stan, Renate Reinsve, Adam Pearson | US Drama 112′

Looks aren’t everything. A man who blames his lack of success on his appearance soon finds out that his problems are more than skin deep in this persuasive portrait of identity and self-loathing.

This incisive and intelligent third feature for US writer director Aaron Schimberg won him a Silver Bear at Berlinale 2024. Fresh from his role as Donald Trump Sebastian Stan gives a nuanced turn as budding actor Edward who suffers from neurofibromatosis (on screen and in real life). Alongside him is The Worst Person In the World’s Renate Reinsve

In New York Edward (Stan in prosthetics) is absolutely miserable and we really feel for him, struggling alone to carve a career as an actor in lowkey instructional videos about physical deformity. Neighbour Ingrid (Reinsve), a writer, is his saving grace. But their relationship is only platonic prompting Edward to go for experimental surgery to cure his condition

There would be no point in this film if everything was fine and dandy. but it’s safe to say Edward soon becomes the man of his dreams in the shape of Guy, although his emotional reality is quite different. ‘Be careful what you wish for’ as the saying goes. But Guy seems chipper at first enjoying his transformation and informing all and sundry that his former self committed suicide.

Discovering later that Ingrid has written a play about her friend Edward, he decides to audition for the part only to find out that he has a competitor in the shape of Oswald (Pearson, who really has neurofibromatosis), and he becomes fascinated.

Schimberg covered similar territory with his 2019 comedy Chained For Life which also also starred Pearson. He explores his subject with integrity and humour never looking for easy answers or preconceived ideas. But like many physical conditions, how can anyone really know how it feels unless they are directly affected.

Reinsve is once again effervescent as a woman who is so wrapped up in her own work she fails to really engage with Edward on anything but a superficial level, appearing not even to acknowledge his deformity, until a surprising turn of events in the third act.

Oswald is an ebullient self-possessed character who gives us much food for thought as Guy reflects on his own personality and how it held him back despite his deformity. Stan on again shines as he takes on two roles with consummate ease and aplomb. @MeredithTaylor

NOW IN UK CINEMAS

JFK (1991)

Dir: Oliver Stone | Cast: Oliver Stone, Kevin Costner, Walter Matthau, Jack Lemmon | US Drama 183’

Not to be trusted as history – John Frankenheimer’s TV movie ‘Path to War’ is much fairer to LBJ – but amply compensating for the childish bombast of most of Oliver Stone’s oeuvre, ‘JFK’ deservedly won Academy Awards for photography and editing.

A lot of dirty linen has since come out about Kennedy, while Jim Garrison is simplistically portrayed as played by Kevin Costner as a bespectacled, pipe-smoking everyman, while feminists may take issue with Sissy Spacek’s thankless role as Garrisons’s whiny wife. The greatest casting coup has to be Gary Oldman as Lee Harvey Oswald – the principal villain naturally being a Brit – with Donald Sutherland coming close.

New Orleans is very well used as a location, but paradoxically the meticulous attention to period detail creates a false sartorial impression since the action manages to continue into the late sixties without any of the men growing shaggier. @RichardChatten

NOW ON DIGITAL PLATFORMS

The Brutalist (2024)

Dir/Wri: Brady Corbet | Cast: Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pierce, Alessandro Nivola, Raffey Cassidy, Joe Alwyn | US Biopic Drama 235′

Brady Corbet’s exhilerating epic imagines the life of a penniless Hungarian architect who arrives in America having the fled Nazi concentration comps where he was forcibly separated from his wife due to red tape.

Recalling and reinforcing his tour de force in The Pianist Adrian Brody is once again magnificent, in the lead role of László Tóth, a enigmatic character whose creative energy and initiative shapes the foundations of post-war America as he revives his once illustrious career in this engrossing piece of filmmaking. The film is so exciting because it confirms that Cinema as a form of artistic expression is still alive and kicking thanks to Brady Corbet who won Best Director at Venice.

The title could refer to Brutalism as a style of architecture that showcases the bare beauty of the building materials, such as marble, over the decorative design, as seen during the Belle Epoque. Or it could refer to the rich client that Toth meets when he arrives in New York emerging from the depths of the immigrant ship that brought him from worn torn Europe. Guy Pierce is Harrison Lee Van Buren, a wealthy but quixotic industrialist who recognises and envies Toth’s brilliance and vision that shows up his own innate lack of style and sensitivity. This unleashes dark forces within the American that project as contempt. he continually undermines Toth’s efforts to deliver the project while, at the time applauding and encouraging his artistic talents and exquisite attention to detail. A metaphor for America’s gradual decline into mediocrity.

Tóth is at first welcomed and given board and lodging by his cousin Attila (Nivola) who has converted to Catholicism, and offers him a job in his Philadelphia furniture store. But Toth allure and magnetism stirs up unsettling feelings in Attila’s American Catholic wife who suggests sexual impropriety with her inlaw and this forces the architect back onto the streets where he meets Gordon (de Bankolé) who becomes his only male friend. Toth emerges as an imperfect hero with temper and his reliance on opioid drugs as a result injury during him time in Dachau makes him all the more human

Van Buren and his family are deeply antisemitic and embody the same fear and deep-seated envy that had given rise to the Holocaust in Nazi Germany and was now seeping into Wasp America and whipping up an unsettling xenophobic in its cosy community whose cultural mediocracy resented anything new or different such as European culture and finesse.

Despite his vast wealth Van Buren exerts his authority over Toth by employing a project manager to cost-cut and knit-pick on the massive project to design a vast community centre in the town in memory of his late mother. This undermines Toth’s artistic control of the scheme and causes angry confrontations between the parties with tragic results.

The Brutalist is a thrilling and confident adventure that lives up to its three and a half hours running time filling the screen with its dynamic storyline and artistic flair, yet there is also a mysterious quality at play that makes it all the more enthralling, along with a daring and discordant score.

Brody’s Toth embodies the creative personality that is by turns vulnerable and confident, and his indomitable wife Erzsébet (Jones), a gifted writer, is equally endowed on the creative front as the two soul mates drive each other forward with their deep and enduring love anchored by mutual suffering. Their orphaned niece Zsófia (Cassidy) is denigrated in a plot involving a sexual encounter with Harry (Alwyn), Van Buren’s conniving son.

Corbet and his co-writer Mona Fastvold seem to be basing their narrative on a real story but the fact that it is all entirely fictional adds another dimension capturing the imagination as we cast our minds back through the possible sources for his extraordinary creative inspiration. @MeredithTaylorr

THE BRUTALIST is in UK Cinemas from 24 January 2025 |

Run Silent Run Deep (1958)

Dir: Robert Wise | Cast: Burt Lancaster, Clark Gable, Brad Dexter | US Drama

Over the years Robert Wise has shown a bewildering versatility, and occasionally tried his hand at war movies, a genre in which you might even include ‘The Sound of Music’.

This particular example has been pejoratively labelled ‘Run Noisy, Run Shallow’, but Wise’s experienced editing keeps things moving despite the confined setting.

Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster – the latter working for his own production company – make an unlikely team and as usual spend more time fighting among themselves rather the Japanese. While Russell Harlan does a good job photographing what must be every cameraman’s worst nightmare. @RichardChatten

NOW ON DIGITAL PLATFORMS

Becoming Hitchcock – The Legacy of Blackmail (2024)

Dir: Laurent Bouzereau | Doc 72′ 2024

A new documentary exploring the Hitchcock’s debut career in England during the 1920s and 1930s is directed by Laurent Bouzereau and narrated by American radio host and film critic Elvis Mitchell.

As the title suggests the first part of this dense doc is dedicated to his first British talkie Blackmail (1929) highlighting the English director’s predominant style as a visual filmmaker whose talents and enjoyment lay in setting up the scene and crafting the interplay between light and shadow. For Hitchcock image was king and drove the narrative forward with the dialogue coming second. By his own admission he found writing a task.

Blackmail, starring Andy Ondra as a woman who kills in self defence, was first released in 1929 as a talkie with although the first part is largely silent with minimal dialogue, the silent version following,

Hitchcock always made an appearance in his own films suggesting he possibly wanted to be an actor, but this was far from the case. So he always staged these vignettes early on in the narrative so as not to draw the viewer’s attention away from the film as a whole.

Becoming Hitchcock moves steadily through its paces with a focus on lead actors and main themes: of violence, intrigue, blackmail and, of course, love, with the thriller being a particularly English passion. Hitchcock was also a master of psychology and his villains were invariably charming and often smiling as they inveigled their victims.

So the spoken word was of lesser consideration for Hitchcock. But for Bouzereau the opposite is true. The film’s narration is verbose and dominating. The radio celebrity talks continuously throughout the film as if reading from a prepared script, with plentiful images and black and white sketches added almost as an embellishment, and clearly emphasising Mitchell’s talent for broadcasting. Becoming Hitchcock would perhaps work better as a radio broadcast. The criticism here is the lack of time given over for quiet reflection, let alone digestion, in a spare running time of 72 minutes.

A shame, also, that Bouzereau chose an American rather than an English voice to narrate this quintessentially English story, given that the Leytonstone-born Hitchcock spent a good fifteen formative year’s crafting his career in Blighty before moving across the pond in 1939 and taking US citizenship in1955. @MeredithTaylor

NOW ON BLURAY FROM 13 DECEMBER 2024

45th Cairo International Film Festival Awards | 2024

The New Year That Never Came won the Golden Pyramid for best film at Cairo’s 45th International Film Festival (CIFF). The dark comedy unfolds on the cusp of Romania’s 1989 revolution and took the ‘Horizons’ award for best film along with the Fipresci prize at this year’s Venice Film Festival. It was written and directed by Romania’s Bogdan Mureșanu.

Russia’s Natalia Nazarova won the Silver Pyramid award for Postmarks, an upbeat drama about a woman with cerebral palsy whose life changes when she meets a sailor. A special mention was awarded to Alina Khojevanova and best actor was won Maxim Stoyanov.

The Bronze Pyramid award for the best first or second film by a director went to Brazil’s Pedro Freire for drama Malu. The lead Yara De Novaes, was award the best actress prize.

Egyptian melodrama Spring Came Laughing, took the Henry Barrakat Award for its director Noha Adel. The film also won best artistic contribution, the Salah Abu Seif Award for best director and the Fipresci prize.

The Arab film prize was awarded to A State Of Passion– which also won the Special Jury Prize for Feature Documentary. Abu Zaabal 89 took the Best Feature Documentary Award.

Earlier in the festival, Hussein Fahmy, President of CIFF, expressed his enthusiasm for a new agreement emphasising the festival’s commitment to fostering international cooperation in the film industry with partnerships that aim to spotlight Egypt as a global cinematic hub, offering extraordinary filming locations and modern infrastructure. The aim is to continue attracting major international productions to the region, and supporting the film industry locally and globally, while promoting Egyptian culture and heritage on the world stage.

In a related announcement, the festival revealed a new collaboration with Media Production City, aiming to expand opportunities for cinematic production and establish Egypt as a central hub for global filmmaking. @MeredithTaylor

45th CAIRO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | 13-22 NOVEMBER 2024

Conclave (2024)

Dir: Edward Berger | Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Isabella Rosellini, Bruno Novelli, Carlos Diehz, Sergio Castelitto, Lucian Msamati | Drama 120′

The pope is dead. But his death is surrounded in controversy in this tense thriller and lugubrious papal conspiracy thriller from German director Edward Berger (All Quiet on the Western Front).

When Ralph Fiennes is in the cast we are always in good hands and he doesn’t disappointment as the suave yet sombre Cardinal Lawrence, dean of the cardinals’ college, who is ostensibly the manager of a power struggle to elect a new pope in the Vatican. Intricate twists and turns keep even the most demanding viewers on the edge of their seats with themes of treachery and sexual impropriety at heart of the narrative.

After the sudden death of a fictional, unnamed pope (Novelli), Lawrence must take control of the voting process. Three candidates quickly emerge as leading contenders. They are the liberal minded Cardinal Bellini (Tucci); a radical Cardinal Adeyemi (Msamati) and the wildly traditional Cardinal Tedesco (Castellito). A forth hopeful is the Canadian, Cardinal Tremblay (Lithgow). A mysterious latecomer then rocks the boat in the shape of Cardinal Benitez (Diehz) who claims the late pontiff intended to nominate him in the running before his untimely death.

But a final outcome is going to be prickly and full of pitfalls as rumours fly in the clandestine corridors of power and mud soon flying at each each candidate. But whether it will stick is the ultimate question.

An intelligent scrip,t written by Peter Straughan and based on the 2016 page-turner by Robert Harris, plays fast and loose with cannon law. Lawrence soon confesses doubt at his being a suitable future pope due to issues connected to prayer.

But there are some far more outré reasons why his fellow candidates may fall at the last hurdle, and these include one candidate’s sexual impropriety and another’s anatomy. These setbacks add a refreshing modern-day spin to the matter at hand.

Lawrence posits that the ultimate sin is certainty, and this elevates the narrative and provides the film with a visionary concept on which to ponder. An elegantly crafted and chewy piece of filmmaking.@MeredithTaylor

NOW ON RELEASE IN THE UK | CONCLAVE PREMIERED AT VENICE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2024 |

Madanyia (2024) Cairo International Film Festival 2024

Dir: Mohamed Subahi | Sudan, Doc 75′

A lively documentary despite its tragic subject matter charting the history of modern Sudan through the lives of three people in today’s Khartoum.

The country has experienced turbulent upheavals but on the streets of the capital there is an indomitable spirit at play. Here ordinary people are striving for democracy buoyed by their sunny enthusiasm and determination to bring about change. To keep us appraised of Sudan’s recent history the director makes ample use of inter-titles with key dates and historical facts.

Acting as his own DoP and editor Mohamed Subahi sets the scene at a pivotal moment in the Sudanese Revolution that began in December 2018. The three are campaigning in various local movements but their interweaving stories are full of positivity and hope, and the mood is enhanced with vibrant camerawork by Subahi and his co-DoP Algaddal Hassan who capture the febrile intensity and the passion of the Sudanese youth who aspire towards a fully democratic republic irrespective of creed and colour. Sadly, the only violence seem to come from the authorities. Despite ugly scenes that see the police opening fire, the people press on with their peaceful protest, terrified out of the lives. @MeredithTaylor

CAIRO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2024

They Will Be Dust (2024) Cairo Film Festival 2024

Dir: Carlos Marques-Marcet | Cast: Alfredo Castro, Angela Molina, Monica Almirall | Spain 106mins

Euthanasia is a hot topic at the moment with The Room Next Door taking the Golden Lion at Venice 2024 and now this end of life drama from Spain’s Carlos Marques-Marcet who puts a positive spin on the subject winning an award Toronto and Valladolid only weeks later.

The film is so upbeat and pragmatic it incorporates jaunty dance sequences and even are aria from Maria Callas into the storyline that kicks off with a histrionic outburst from Claudia (Molina), an actor who has been struck down with a brain tumour and is quickly calmed down by her theatre director husband Flavio (Castro) in their comfortable home. Many may find the comedy treatment inappropriate but it suits the emotional pitch of a couple who are facing up to the final years with jokey humour and dignity.

Claudia wants to go to Dignitas Switzerland but Flavio refuses to left be left alone and opts to die by her side. But their daughter Violeta (Batet) is not convinced, and finds herself engaging in persuasive debate between her parents in a discussion that give the drama potent emotional freight although the subject is not played out with quite the same rigour as the feeling that erupt.

Such is their devotion to one another that Claudia and Flavio decide to renew their vows with some cringeworthy moments for their extended family. It’s always awkward and faintly embarrassing when long-term couples insist on egging the omelette by imposing their declarations of devotion and undying love for each other on their nearest and dearest. But these two are so wrapped up in one another they fail to notice or even care. And in some ways this adds grist to the drama that plays out, as predicted, with an airing of privately shared songs as so on.

When Claudia is asked by the clinic to provide a “playlist to die to” it soon becomes clear that she is very much a diva who wants her ‘swansong’ to be a memorable performance for everyone in the family whether appropriate or not. Veteran actor Molina certainly gives gusto to her dying character as the star turn of this intense and intelligent film. It may not be everyone’s cup of tea @MeredithTaylor

CAIRO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | Special Screening

All We Imagine as Light (2024) Cairo International Film Festival 2024

Dir/Wri: Payal Kapadia | Cast: Kani Kusruti, Divya Prabha, Chhaya Kadam, Hridhu Haroon | India Drama 110′

Writer-director Payal Kapadia‘s Mumbai set feature All We Imagine As Light was the first Indian film to compete for the Palme d’Or in nearly three decades; an impressive achievement for a first time filmmaker, especially an Indian woman who went on to win the Grand Prix in 2024.

The last time an Indian film made it into the main competition was Shaji N Karun’s Swaham in 1994. Sadly it went home empty-handed losing out to Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. Kapadia’s poetic yet powerful documentary, A Night of Knowing Nothing, won the Golden Eye for best documentary at Cannes in 2021.

Unfolding in two parts and shifting deftly from realism to reverie All We Imagine As Light centres on two women caught in impossible love stories in modern day Mumbai. Prabha, a nurse, shares a flat with Anu, yet they hardly know each other and are further constrained from forming a friendship due to shameful secrets that trap them from sharing their personal lives. Both women are disappointed by love, for differing reasons, and this emotional claustrophobia pervades the first part of the drama.

There’s nothing brash or bossy about these characters they both bear their difficulties with restraint and modesty. Anu, a Hindu, is in love with a Muslim man and forced to conceal her relationship due to societal constraints. All the two of them want is to make love but this is frowned upon, even nowadays.

Prabha is caught in an arranged marriage with a man who has since cleared off to his village. One day, out of the blue, a rice cooker arrives in the post, supposedly from her estranged husband. This innocent gift sends Prabha into a deep depression, opening up fresh wounds of romantic disillusionment and upsetting her emotional equilibrium once again. She is a married woman constrained by all the ties that it implies, but the disappearance of her husband leaving her lonely and desperate.

The second part of the film brings an uplifting almost dreamlike tonal shift that sees the women freed from their inertia when they set off on a road trip to a beach resort where a mystical forest creates space for dreams to be unleashed.

Kapadia’s film touches on traditional themes of abandonment, religious intolerance, female friendship and sexual liberation that are still all too relevant in today’s India with its impressive technical and financial advances: Men are free but many women are still sadly stuck in the dark ages. Meanwhile in the West men and women are enjoying the freedoms of gay marriage, gay parenthood, and sexual transitioning. A thoughtful, richly thematic and beautifully captured film enhanced by a magical score and two sensitive performances from leads Kani Kusruti and Divya Prabha. @MeredithTaylor

IN CINEMAS FROM 23 NOVEMBER 2024

Spring Comes on Laughing (2024) Cairo International Film Festival 2024

Dir/Wri: Noha Adel | Cast: Main cast: Reem Safwat, Rehab Anan, Carol Ackad, Kawthar Younis | Egypt/France. 2024. 96mins

Conflict is never far away in this female centric film inspired by a poem from Egyptian Salah Jahin that begins ’Spring came on laughing but finds me in sorrow’.

A first feature for Egypt’s Noha Adel, screening at this year’s Cairo International Film Festival, shows how an upbeat anodyne conversation can suddenly take a turn into darker more confrontational territory when four women get together to discuss their lives, loves and dreams in Cairo. Tonally the drama feels rather one note with emotions running high and often out of control, each person raising their voice but not really listening to the another.

The film is made up of four spring-set tales and a wrapping finale. It opens with Salwa (Sally Abdou) and her daughter Reem (Reem Safwat) meeting their elderly neighbour Mukhtar (Mukhtar Younis) and his son Shady (Shady Hakim) for afternoon tea. A polite cultural exchange of views about theatre, cinema and literature suddenly turns tense when someone says the wrong thing, and the dynamic switches from convivial tete-a-tete to pistols at dawn. .

The next segment takes place in May at a birthday lunch for Zazou (Rehab Anan). The entente cordiale once again turns sour in a celebration that should have been joyful. These women seem intent on jumping down each other’s throats, and when a simple misunderstanding causes offence, longterm friends turn into sworn enemies.

The previous month, in April, the scene is set at a beauty salon where one of the staff, Abeer (Reem Al Aqqad) is suddenly accused of theft, unearthing a litany of petty grievances as souls are bared in no uncertain terms, and events turn histrionic. A March wedding is then disrupted when Kawthar (Kawthar Younis), an uninvited guest, makes an unwelcome appearance much to the consternation of the bride Lili (Carol Ackad).

Sometimes feeling like four short films welded together, rather than a cohesive whole feature, Spring Comes on Laughing feels repetitive with the same grievances being aired and the same hysterical soul-searching. The women want to project an image of success and satisfaction but this is only skin deep. Scratch the surface and they are actually dissatisfied, angry and negative, especially about the men in their lives. This chaotic vibe is accentuated by Sara Yahia’s mobile camera that ducks and dives in an attempt to keep up with the mayhem.

So a brave attempt at allowing women to air their views but a space for calm contemplation and measured debate, rather than continuous hysteria, would be have been most welcome. MeredithTaylor

CAIRO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2024

The Beggar | Al Shahat (1973) Cairo International Film Festival 2024

Dir: Houssain El-Din Mustafa | Egypt, Drama 122′

The Beggar is a lyrical love story directed by Houssaim El-Din Mustafa who looks at one man’s search for the meaning of life in 1970s Cairo.

This seventies cult classic really captures the era with a score of hits from Marc Bolan (“Jeapster for your Love”), Semprini and even Jimi Hendrix. A nightclub singer croons Shirley Bassey’s “Something in the Way He Moves”; a teenager rocks false eye lashes and black ‘kinky boots’. There’s snogging in bed, cleavages aplenty (and that’s just the women). There’s even a product placement for Johnny Walker whisky.

Sexual jealousy, infidelity and religion must have been provocative themes in the Middle East back then, yet Egypt emerges as a fun, permissive place to be, at least for middle classes. But what starts as a lighthearted comedy often drifts into dark melodrama. These tonal shifts are managed with dexterity, the humour giving way to some emotionally fraught scenes in chintzy domestic settings by the Nile with a riverside panorama that shows the 5-star Cairo Sofitel still under construction.

The focus is Mr Omar (Mahmoud Moursy), a sharp-suited lawyer caught in a midlife crisis and a loveless marriage to Zeinab (Maryam Fakhruddin). The stooge is his beret-toting, pipe-smoking friend Mr Mustafa (a sort of Egyptian Jacques Tati) who introduces him to nightclub singer Miss Margaret. Things move fast, but sadly married men are not her bag, and Omar realises his predicament.

The lawyer then meets Belly dancer Warda at the Capri Nightclub. And he’s smitten. Put off by his marital status and kids, Warda also turns him down. So Omar vents his frustration by accelerating at top speed when driving her home: it’s a clever psychologic ploy that uses terror to create sexual tension allowing Omar to finally get his leg over. Trying to change his life, he creates a kitsch love nest with a wardrobe full of the latest fashions for Warda, but soon, as predicted, he loses interest.

Omar’s problem is not clearly sexual frustration, but a lack of self-realisation. Financial success is not the only goal in life. Wracked with guilt at lying to his wife and daughter, and unfulfilled by his romantic encounters, the lawyer gives up his practice to a former colleague Osman, and turns to Sufism in the hope of enlightenment, amid scenes that use magic realism to push home the spiritualism of this branch of Islam.

The Beggar is an intelligent and entertaining film despite its rather convoluted and confusing ending. Seventies Egypt is still a man’s world where most women are seen as simpering side-kicks, happy to stay and home and look after the children, even though some are outwardly emancipated in the creative industry. Interestingly the director highlights the close father/daughter relationship that sees Omar, by his own omission, as his teenager’s close friend, and not just her loving her father. @MeredithTaylor

CAIRO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2024

The State of Passion (2024) Cairo international Film Festival 2024

WriDirs: Carol Mansour, Muna Khalidi | Doc 89′

Filmmakers Carol Mansour and Muna Khalidi are close friends of the Abu Sittan family and explore from an intensely personal angle the life and work of Palestinian doctor Ghassan Abu Sittah who works tirelessly to save lives in his native Gaza.

Hassan is actually based in London where he runs a Harley Street clinic specialising in complex lip surgery. But when duty calls he jumps on a plane to the region and provides emergency support, just as he has done during five conflicts involving Israel, as well as in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen.

An opening segment makes uses of mobile phone footage and storyboarded images to introduce the well known surgeon who is passionately driven in a humanitarian cause to treat survivors of airstrikes and bombs blasts during the recent conflict in Gaza that has touched so many lives.

There are interviews with his mother and wife Dima who describe their fears of living with a close loved one whose life puts him in danger every single day. The film them scrolls backwards and forwards describing his childhood and education and his determination to become a doctor.

Avoiding sensationalism the directors follow Ghassan’s emergency surgery in the only single functioning hospital in the war zone where he is forced to choose which victims are worth saving. He remembers one night performing six amputations involving children. The injuries are brutal and indiscriminate so he operates a tough triage system. Sometimes only limbs are discovered in the rubble. There is a cemetery dedicated to children’s appendages.

In scenes of utter devastation we witness bomb sites strewn with tee-shirts and plastic shoes that have literally melted in the heat of the blasts. Gruelling, almost unwatchable scenes in the aftermath to an incursion bear witness to the broken bodies and blood-soaked floors. No family is left untouched by the ghastly events.

Most recently he has been lobbying in the UK parliament for end to the genocide, citing Israel’s purported use of white phosphorus in attacks on children and babies. Together with his solicitor he is mounting a war crimes case. And it’s here that the documentary claims the Israelis are trying to discredit his efforts. @MeredithTaylor

CAIRO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2024

Film Restoration and Production in Egypt | Cairo Film Festival 2024

A pioneer in the African and Arab world Egyptian cinema has an impressive legacy that dates back to the 1890s. With over four thousand features, shorts and documentaries produced across the region, the country’s film industry has been a cornerstone of creativity showcasing the nation’s cultural heritage and creating a bridge between the generations.

Flaws are removed by hand | copyright Filmuforia.com

Many of these film classics are being restored to their former glory at the Egyptian Media Production City, on the outskirts of the capital Cairo. This vast hub stretches over two million square metres in addition to one more million square metres located within the Media Free Zone. EMPC is home to ninety state of art film studios, where new films and series are currently in production. These services contribute to providing Arab and foreign production companies with all the necessary facilities for shooting their films including sound stages, backlots and a state of the art Dolby Atmos studio for sound mixing.

In the Heritage Restoration Centre a team of highly experienced craftsman undertake the process of restoration of TV and classic films which includes repairing and correcting flaws, cleaning, scanning and transforming into digital content. This gives cineastes and newcomers to classic cinema the chance to experience films for the first time in high resolution formats.

colour correction before and after at EMPC | copyright Filmuforia.com

This year’s Cairo International Film Festival presented fourteen newly restored classics for screening in their own special strand. Festival president, director and actor Hussein Fahmy, is fully supportive of the restoration of classic cinema and is currently committed to restoring a further ten films at the Egypt Media Production City. @MeredithTaylor

CAIRO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2024

Colour correction process

Passing Dreams (2024) Cairo International Film Festival 2024

Wri/Dir: Rashid Masharawi | Drama 81’

An intelligent and thoughtful film kicks off this year’s CAIRO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL Passing Dreams is a feature-length Palestinian film written and directed by Rashid Masharawi. Upbeat and full of optimism throughout the film follows Sami, a 12-year-old boy, who embarks on a journey across Palestine with his uncle (Ashraf Barhom) and teenage cousin Maryam (Emilia Massou)

It will be an eventful voyage of discovery – of each other, and the people the meet along the way who share their stories reflecting the difficulties of restrictive life and a thwarted existence. So what starts as a family-centred road movie broadens out into a complex study of this Middle Eastern country and its hopes and aspirations in the occupied territories.

The trip will take them from a refugee camp in the West Bank, where Sami lives, to other Palestinian cities such as Bethlehem, the Old City of Jerusalem, and Haifa all atmospherically captured in Duraid Munajim’s limpid camerawork and set to a lilting score from Johanni Curtet.

Significantly the pigeon is carrying a ring bearing a small blue pearl, a keepsake from Sami’s grandma to help him through life. In some ways this pigeon comes to represent hope and the future, so finding it is vital to keep Sami’s dreams alive. Sometimes there’s a safety in hope: It can suspend us from to need to achieving anything but brings us closer to our each other in the process. And that’s surprising upshot of this tenderly crafted latest feature from the award-winning Palestinian filmmaker. @MeredithTaylor

THE CAIRO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL | 13-23 NOVEMBER 2024

Flow (2024)

Dir: Gints Zilbalodis | Animation 75′ 2024

There a several apocalyptic animated films on at the moment. Dreamlike, dazzling and enchanting they capture tragedy from the perspective of two species forced to adapt and collaborate with the animal kingdom in order to survive.

In some ways this is a metaphor for upheaval in our human world but seen through the eyes of cute furry creatures the impact of the parable is somehow softened and made accessible to both young and old.

The Wild Robot pictures an appealing robot forced into a motherly role of guiding a vulnerable fledgling gosling through the first days of its life on a desert island.

In Flow a solitary black cat is forced out of his bosky base in a forest and embarks on an intrepid odyssey when his home is devastated by a flood. Rather like in the bible story of Noah’s Arc, Flow must team up with the others and make the best of the situation. The emphasis one again is kindness and empathy.

Seen entirely from the point of view of nature and animals this is a simple but engrossing story that requires nothing of the audience but to watch and listen to the ambient sounds as the images glide by.

The previous outing by director Gints Zilbalodis, Away (2019), was an almost entirely solo effort, with the Latvian animator crafting the entire film from storyboarding to score and sound editing. This new feature – that also made its debut at Annecy Animation film festival – is more ambitious but has the same delicate look.

Zilbalodis builds a strange 3D world where giant statues of cats tower over the trees; there are relics from a world that humans once built. After a torrential flood of biblical proportions all the cities are drowned under water, and the cat finds himself with a dog, a capybara. Soon they are joined by a bird and a lemur and gradually begin working together.

Flow is entirely free of dialogue but Zilbalodis avoids sentimentality or anthropomorphism in this gentle depiction of the animal kingdom face to face with so-called ‘climate change’. @MeredithTaylor

NOW IN CINEMAS

Queer (2024)

Dir: Luca Guadagnino | Cast: Daniel Craig, Daan de Wit, Jason Schwartzman, Drew Starkey, Henrique Zaga | US Drama 135′

Luca Guadagnino’s Queer is a study of a defeated American man living in exile in 1950’s Mexico, unsure of himself and in need of human love and contact. His fragile state will lead him into a relationship with a younger man.

Based on the semi-autobiographical life of William S Burroughs, the novella ‘Queer’ was troubled after the success of his 1951 debut ‘Junkie 1951’ as Burroughs battled withdrawal symptoms from heroin addiction linked to his resurgent libido. ‘Queer’ would be shelved and dismissed by its author until after the success of ‘Naked Lunch’ in 1959. Rewritten from discarded fragments and published in 1985, the financial success of Queer would support the writer until his death in 1997.

Given the troubled nature of the book, Guadagnino and scriptwriter collaborator Justin Kuritzkes have bravely tackled source material although problems have not entirely escaped the filmmakers.

Guadagnino is at his most effective drawing sensitive performances from actors involving focused material. Arguably his best film so far is Challengers (2024) with its focus on doomed relationships resulting from wrong decisions at the heart of a three-way relationship.

Queer establishes a vivid first half in the sensuous stylised recreation of a seedy Mexican City inhabited by a coterie of restless, rootless characters with visible on-screen references to both Cocteau’s Orphee and Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano as another study of a doomed man struggling with addiction.

The second half of Queer moves to Ecuador in South America where the American continues to not only search for his inner self-worth but also the drug Yage with powers to bring enlightenment. These were sparse references in Burrough’s writing which are fleshed out by Guadagnino as a mish-mash of frenzied hallucinations involving a witchcraft doctor in a jungle where the queer relationship with his lover starts to collapse. The film begins to resemble The Spiral Road (1962) in which Rock Hudson and Burl Ives sweat it out with black magic and hallucinations on an Indonesian jungle-based 1961 studio set.

Guadagnino confirms his skill with sensitive character relationships and uniformly fine acting from an ensemble cast including Drew Starkey as the male lover, Jason Schwartzman reviving his career as an ageing camp man, and a startling cameo by Lesley Manville. It is however the central performance of Daniel Craig that holds Queer together and brings the disjointed meandering structure of the film together.

Playing William Lee, a washed-up exiled American forced to live for legal problems in downtown Mexican City, he wastes away his time frequenting sleazy bars with coded 1950s gay networks. Craig is fearless as he continues to shake off his James Bond persona with a sensitive edgy performance, much as Sean Connery took on with films like The Hill and The Offence.

As in the novel, Queer never finally resolved the central characters’ troubled battles with desire and obsession. It is Craig who provides the film with a beautiful final coda focusing on the face of a defeated lost soul, accepting the inevitability of death which equals the haunting final close-up of Julie Christie as a junkie adrift in Robert Altman’s 1971 McCabe and Mrs Miller. These two final closeups make for beautiful, sublime connections. Peter Herbert

QUEER premiered at Venice Film Festival and screened during the London Film Festival 2024

The Haunting (1963)

Dir: Robert Wise | Cast: Julie Harris, Claire Bloom, Richard Johnson | Thriller 1963

Like ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’ Robert Wise’s ‘The Haunting’ received the backhanded compliment of an unnecessary remake and with Jack Clayton’s ‘The Innocents’ qualifies as the second of probably the two finest achievements of the horror genre of the sixties, and despite competition from the vivid colour of Hammer Films they provide definitive proof that the proper medium for ghost stories was black & white.

Plainly the work of a director who cut his teeth under Val Lewton, Wise employs modern refinements like infra-red photography. The acting is consistently good, with the transferral of the film’s viewpoint from the opening narration of Dr Markway to the use of interior monologues by Julie Harris particularly effective. The single scariest moment has to be when Rosalie Crutchley smiles; and the fact (SLIGHT SPOILER COMING:) that the final line is given to the previously flippant Russ Tamblyn underlines the gravitas of the conclusion. @RichardChatten

Viet and Nam (2024)

Dir: Truong Minh Quy | Drama 129′ 2024

Truong Minh Quy’s VIET AND NAM closed this year’s Bfi London Film festival as Eight Postcards from Utopia opened with bold challenging conceptual filmmaking. These are contemporary films confronting the sometimes-tortured psyche of respective nations with filmmakers looking for answers from past histories while opening up the possibilities of the future. Viet and Nam is a dark but strangely illuminating film reflecting in part on how the “American war “of 1955/1975 in Vietnam has repercussions decades later with a sense of history underlying the film’s fusion of both written /spoken poetry linked to sensitive visual imagery.

The spirit of slow cinema filmmakers such as Lav Diaz and Tsai Ming-liang is also evident although these sequences are edited into shorter segments creating a rich range of texture. The focus rests on two young Vietnamese men who express love for each other most deeply in the darkened spaces of coal mines where both are making a living through low paid work as a way to escape national poverty. At home they try to reconcile difficult relationships with fathers and families, discreetly avoiding drawing attention to the nature of a same sex relationship. With damaged lungs and Cocteau like line drawings burnt into cuts as tattoos, the two naked bodies of the lovers are sometimes barely perceived as intimate sources of lighting that appear to merge both bodies into one. Poetry references include descriptions of beaches as graveyards for the crushed crumbs of seashells. In the film’s final sequence, the two attempt to leave Vietnam in a shipping freight container on an ocean filled with as much beauty and danger as the cold forbidding earth from where they are escaping.

For Minh Quy, the sea becomes another forbidding and dangerous space with the two lovers locked in a floating freight container adrift. The surreal spirit of Jean Cocteau along with the power of Frank Borzage is evident and this is another creative work inspired by the idea of souls made great by adversity. Although Vietnamese authorities have banned Viet and Nam for “gay content” and negativity, there is nothing negative about this film and its beautiful incandescent mapping of redemption through the power of love.

Peter Herbert

PREMIERED AT CANNES and the BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | In UK cinemas early next year.

Gladiator II (2024)

Dir: Ridley Scott | Writer: David Scarpa | Cast: Paul Mescal, Pedro Pascal, Joseph Quinn, Fred Hechinger, Lior Raz, Derek Jacobi, Connie Nielsen, Denzel Washington | Action drama 148’

Ridley Scott delivers another ambitious and robust epic that combines moments of contemplation and intrigue with monumental set pieces in the Colosseum. The bloody battle scenes complete the swashbuckling spectacle with some unsubtle use of CGI.

Paul Mescal’s Gladiator is more soulful than his swaggering counterpart Russell Crowe who was cocky and convincing in the Oscar-winning original. That said, this sensitivity adds a modern twist to a tale set in Numidia and Ancient Rome. The Caesar brothers are a weird gay couple who simper and saunter around their sumptuous palace, one of them rocking a monkey permanently clasped to his shoulders like a living stole. And these contemporary touches ensure a refreshingly novel feature that remains a reassuringly true follow-up to the 2000 action drama.

Gladiator II opens with a sensational sea-based sequence as a fleet of Roman warships powered by oars and sails storms its way to attack a port city in North Africa defended by Lucius (Mescal). General Marcus Acacius (a muscular Pedro Pascal) is at the helm and in the ensuing battle conquers the city capturing Lucius who loses his wife to a single arrow, motivating him to seek revenge.

Taken prisoner with other soldiers and transported back to Rome (where he was born) he falls into the hands of Macrinus (Washington) and his gladiatorial trainer, the brutish Vigo (Lior Raz). But Lucius is a dab hand at fighting off his assailants in the arena (including some savage CGI baboons) and soon wins over the crowd. Macrinus has backed a real winner.

Meanwhile Lucilla and Acacius are planning a goodwill mission to free the gladiators from cruel slaughter under sibling emperors Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger) whose reign of terror knows no bounds, with further campaigns planned in India and Persia. And this is where Derek Jacobi comes in as Gracchus. He joins Lucilla and Acacius in the plot to restore Rome to its former glory when Lucilla’s fondly remembered father, Emperor Marcus Aurelius held sway. But someone is eavesdropping in the wings.

Meanwhile Lucilla realises that Lucius is the child she sent away from Rome for protection. Now she is torn between loyalty to her husband, a war hero of supreme dignity, and love for her child who vows to kill Acasius to avenge his beloved wife in a tragic chain of events that provides the story with its heart-punching denouement.

David Scarpa (who also scripted Napoleon and All the Money in the World) picks up from where David Franzoni started in Gladiator, twenty four years ago, with characters from back in the day and welcome roles for veterans Derek Jacobi and Tim McInnerny (as Thraex) and a camped-up Matt Lucas as master of gladiator ceremonies Cassius.

Denzel Washington is the star turn and brings a welcome dash of sly humour as the exotic-looking Macrinus, a scheming former slave who earned his freedom and is now pimping out a stable of young gladiators while plotting to improve his status even further by aligning himself to the Caesars.

Paul Mescal certainly looks the part with his beefy muscles bulging through the leather straps of his butch rigout. Emerging as the true exiled son of Russel Crowe’s Maximus and Lucilla (the regal Connie Nielsen, once again desperately trying to regain the trust of a man). But his lack of conviction diminishes the peerless performance he throws around in the arena. An actor well known for his intensity Mescal certainly simmers with rage and revenge but emotionally the Irish heartthrob is as vulnerable as a baby. His Lucius certainly delivers the words but seems unconvinced by them in a role that Crowe played with gutsy masculinity. But then again the dialogue offered him is minimal and mostly restricted to clipped statements.

Where he does shine is in contemplative exchanges with Ravi (Alexander Karim), another former slave and gladiator who cashed in his chips but now serves as a doctor and spiritual healer. Mescal is clearly better suited playing soulful metrosexuals of All of Us Strangers and Aftersun. Rakish heroes are not for him. @MeredithTaylor

GLADIATOR II is in UK CINEMAS FROM 15 NOVEMBER 2025

One to One: John and Yoko (2024)

Dir: Kevin McDonald and Sam Rice-Edwards | UK Doc 90′

Kevin McDonald and Sam Rice-Edwards’ One to One: John & Yoko is an assemblage of archival film and aural recordings, exploring the life and times of John Lennon and Yoko Ono who after the breakup of The Beatles in 1969 left an affluent lifestyle in rural England with preference for the edgy life style offered by New Yok of the early 1970s.

There are many telling details including how Ono felt about the way she was viewed by The Beatles, the background behind benefit concerts including support for child victims of the Willowbrook Scandal and comparisons with the exile and return of Charlie Chaplin to USA happening alongside Lennon’s own fight with immigration authorities. Both Lennon and Ono were fascinated by the growth of Television as an early form of social media which they saw as replacing the traditional family routine of sitting around a fireplace as the centre of family life.

Difficult relationships with activists like Jerry Rubens, which ended after differences involving the use of force became problematic, are covered along with both Lennon and Ono settling into more conventional family life with the arrival of a son that would culminate in tragedy. The death of Lennon is fleetingly referred to by the filmmakers.

Documentary assemblage is not the film’s only function as One to One develops in its second half as a visual essay and a chronicle of times past, reflecting the present. The life of Lennon and Ono in America was a key cultural element of the times which involved a highly contentious war in Vietnam, movements about race and gender and the rise of students with acts of protest. This was reflected by a rich tapestry of music which Lennon and Ono added to with songs like Give Peace A Chance and Imagine.

One to One contains vivid contemporary footage linked to the election of 1972 which provided the Republican Richard Nixon with a landslide victory against the Democrats which he would lose two years later after the disgrace of Watergate. Parallels with today and 2024 America are felt as the film progresses into a thought-provoking visual essay and chronicle of our times, raising questions as to how much has changed between 1972 and 2024. With music as a force to not only imagine but also give peace a chance, it could be argued that this was much more organic and easier in 1972 than in 2024. Peter Herbert

ONE TO ONE premiered at Venice and London Film Festivals 2024 | Coming to UK Cinemas in 2025

Peter Herbert

London Film Festival 2024 | Peter Herbert looks back

Peter Herbert found the LONDON FILM FESTIVAL in rude health in its 68th year with an impressive offering of 252 films in a rich slice of contemporary cinema alongside a smaller but effective archival strand. It would be impossible to see all of these films over 15 days but Peter managed 12 films mostly without UK distribution including a couple of exceptional films which were all worthy of screening.

Various strands and themes became apparent as the days rolled. One is the fascination to divide films into chapters both orderly and disorderly which in some cases works though not always.

Another observation is the growing power of documentary archival film assemblage and how this is moving into new forms of film essay cinema for some of the worlds key filmmakers. Here are Peter’s views and comment on twelve films viewed over twelve days.

Radu Jude and co-writer/director Christian Ferencz-Flat’s Eight Postcards From Utopia (below) was made over a period of seven years using film clips compiled from advertisements as a commentary on Romania’s transition from communism into capitalist democracy with entry into the European Union in 2007.

Steve McQueen’s Blitz opens with powerful emotional scenes of mother love set against the carnage of the bombing of London during the blitz of WW2. The ‘blitz’ of London and other parts of England by Nazi Germany killed over forty three thousand people and damaged two million houses during a short but intense blitz during 1940/1941 – although for McQueen this is background so as to foreground personal stories of characters impacted by the upheaval of war.

Alain Guiradie’s Misericordia (main pic) is a perfect new companion piece to Stranger by the Lake from 2013. The earlier film is arguably one of gay cinemas seminal films that turned a lake with forest woodland into a gay Garden of Eden/stroke evil. Created with a rigorous visual sound scape, the earlier film moved from dawn into night over a single day as a range of characters experience all of the life forces of love, life, sex and death. Guiradie returns to aspects of the earlier film with Misericordia which opens with a man travelling by car from the city into a remote rural French village. He has come to express condolences for his well-liked, respected former boss who the film intimates was also his long term secret lover. Warmly welcomed by the dead man’s widow who may or may not have known of the relationship, he is viewed with growing suspicion by the dead man’s son and disturbs members of the local community including local cops and an ageing priest with secrets who ventures into the forest collecting mushrooms but gets more than bargained for. The forest becomes for Guiradie another garden of beauty and doom filmed with his characteristic natural sound, lighting and no music bar the sounds of nature. The film mixes drama and comedy with razor sharp precision, unravelling sacred and profane twists to relationships with a few additional red herrings. After a series of over complicated films that preceded and followed Stranger By the Lake, Guiradie is back in control.

Grand Tour (below) which won for the Portuguese’s filmmaker Miguel Gomes the Best Director award at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival and has been reviewed on Filmuforia . These are additional notes prior to its world-wide release in the new year. Grand Tour offers consummate filmmaking which will take viewers on a journey into new places and far away states of mind.

Gomes was inspired by two passages from W Somerset Maughan’s 1930 travel writing The Gentleman in the Parlour and the film book ends its tale of an obsessive passion of one for another which will never be reciprocated with an approach that is beguiling and disturbing. Acknowledging F W Murnau’s Tabu (1931), Gomes uses the delirious quality of quasi monochrome, tinged with real or subdued colour to create his vision built mainly on studio sets alongside location filming. Another source of inspiration is Josef Von Sternberg and in particular the crazy amour fou between Dietrich and Cooper on a studio conceived vision of Morocco (1930).

Coincidentally Japanese director Kohei Igarashi ‘s Super Happy Forever was made concurrently and shares similar structure, themes and musical references. The two films will make for interesting crossover viewing.

Roshan Sethi’s A Nice Indian Boy is a feelgood film edited into chapters with titles including love, music and family, for no obvious reason as it unfold its story about two gay men Naveen (Karan Soni) and Jay (Jonathan Groff) as they hesitantly but gradually fall in love.

Kevin McDonald and Sam Rice-Edwards’s One to One: John and Yoko is an assemblage of archival film and aural recordings, exploring the life and times of John Lennon and Yoko Ono who after the breakup of The Beatles in 1969 left an affluent lifestyle in rural England with preference for the edgy life style offered by New Yok of the early 1970s.

Sergei Loznitsa’s The Invasion is one of the outstanding films of the festival. The director, born in Russia and raised in Ukraine is a documentary/fiction filmmaker who since 1996 has built up a recognisable collection of twenty one documentaries and four fiction films.

Yasuzo Masumura’s Manji (1964) was screened in the reduced but vital archive section of this year’s festival and received a masterly well informed, passionate introduction from Robin Baker, the BFI head of Cultural Partnerships, and Miki Zeze from Japanese distribution company Kadokawa who plan to restore and release other films from the fifty plus films made by Masumura (1924-1986).

The 42-minute Leos Carax featurette It’s Not Me (below) uses chapters to structure a self-portrait of the director’s thoughts as a freewheeling stream of conscious cut up of images and sound. This doesn’t exactly bring coherence to its visual story board concept although the film, inspired by the cut-up sound and image style of late Godard and Histoire du Cinema in particular, emerges a sparkling spinning disco ball of a film. Clips include Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter and a very beautiful sequence from Murnau’s Sunrise also uses extensive still archival photographs to explore and comment on ideas and themes relating to the massive gap and change that bridge creativity during the transition of the 20th and 21st centuries.

After the films screening at the ICA, the 64-year-old Carax discussed how he feels that it is now up to and the right of new artists to explore where creativity is heading particularly in the current state of challenging world-wide change and upheaval.

Along with scenes capturing how the camera eye captures movement, extracted from copious clips from his films including The Night Is Young, Bad Blood (1986) and Les Amants du Pont Neuf (1991), there are also sequences that gaze at the beauty of youth with the life experience of actors who were once younger (Juliette Binoche and actor Denis Lavant ) and whom we see age in clips from films before our very eyes.

The film is not afraid to tackle the darker sides of the creative personality with at least one contentious reference to Roman Polanski and his early years marked by the holocaust, with a link to his later notoriety that damaged his late career. There is little time to stop and question Carax and some of his reasoning during his hellzapoppin of free-flowing thoughts but at the heart of the film he remains a positive force.

After the final credits there is a treat in the form of an ode to joy involving the beautiful puppet from Annette and the music of Bowie singing Modern Love. A modern film indeed.

Luca Guadagnino’s Queer is a study of a defeated American man, living in exile in 1950s Mexico, unsure of himself and in need of human love and contact which which will draw him into a relationship with a younger man.

Maura Delpero’s Vermiglio opens with a family fast asleep while a new day dawns on the remote hillsides of the Trentino-Alto Adigo region of northern Italy. The family awakens to the daily routine of a village community including a father as head of family who prepares to open a classroom while shepherds tend to animals. There is little to suggest these are the last years of WW2 although there are ominous sounds of warfare in the distance. The tone changes with the arrival of a soldier who has deserted the army and will stir up the awakening feelings of a young woman bringing heartache and trauma to family and herself as well as to a wider range of village and city communities.

Truong Minh Quy’s Viet and Nam closed the festival – as much as Eight Postcards from Utopia opened it – with bold challenging conceptual filmmaking. These are contemporary films confronting the sometimes-tortured psyche of respective nations with filmmakers looking for answers from past histories while opening up the possibilities of the future. Viet and Nam is a dark but strangely illuminating film that fuses written and spoken poetry with sensitive visual imagery. Peter Herbert

BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL OCTOBER 2024

The Invasion (2024)

Dir: Sergei Loznitsa | Doc 2024 145′

Sergei Loznitsa’s The Invasion is one of the outstanding films of the festival. The director, born in Russia and raised in Ukraine, is a documentary/fiction filmmaker who since 1996 has built up a recognisable collection of 21 documentaries and 4 fiction films.

The Invasion opens with a mass for the dead and divides into chapters filmed during recurring four seasons linked to cycles of life including a wedding, funeral, communal baptism ceremonies, children at school, rifle training, abandoned dogs turned feral, recovery from wounds as well as the delivery of food.

The film is created out of 25/30 commissioned documentary short films supervised by Loznitsa between March 2022 through to early 2024. All the sequences employ Loznitsa’s characteristic natural soundscapes with neither music or narration and all filmed mid shot and long distant wide screen camera viewpoint without closeups.

These are not ordinary times though, as all the films are of people living everyday life during the Russian invasion of Ukraine that started on 24/2/22. Unlike other current documentaries made on the battleground or directly filmed inside war zones, this is more about an invasion felt, heard but not shown directly as if for the Ukrainian’s people this is an enemy which dare not speak its name.

Harrowing scenes of real time footage of severely wounded bodies being cared for by nurses and doctors showing neither blame nor anger become silent, quiet testaments to the power of others to heal and repair. In one of the most powerful sequences, books are bound with rope, transported into trucks and wait in a queue to be thrown onto conveyor belts.

Titles sporadically appear on the screen: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekov as they move alongside titles of philosophy, science and religious books. All will be destroyed and the viewer left to decipher the value and meaning of how what we love and learn from can also be systematically erased when countries suffer during warfare. At one point an elderly man muses that after 32 years of independence, life in Ukraine still feels like 1942.

Loznitsa is a filmmaker with archival knowledge of his country. With The Invasion he has created a moving requiem of resilience and resistance with febrile cross over links between sensitive fictional stories about people (A Gentle Creature and Donbass) and harrowing archival documents including the record of genocide massacre in Bab Yar Context 2021. He is a filmmaker who may well be unable to rest until life in Ukraine returns to normal.

Peter Herbert

THE INVASION won the In Spirit of Freedom award at Cannes 2024 and premiered at London Film Festivals 2024 | coming to UK cinemas in 2025

The Haunted Castle (1921)

Dir: F W Murnau | Germany. 1921

Described by Siegfried Kracauer as “a crime picture visibly influenced by the Swedes” and itself a probable forerunner of La Regle du Jeu, the plays of Agatha Christie and Gosford Park, Schloss Vogelod is superficially more realistic than one might expect from F. W. Murnau, although the bizarre dream sequence depicting a huge hand reaching in through a window would alone qualify it as one of his fantasies.

Murnau’s films usually concerned themselves with the grotesque and the predicament of outsiders; but the casual elegance of Hermann Warm’s oppressively large sets and the immaculate dress of the occupants more properly belong to the world of Marienbad. @RichardChatten

NOW ON DIGITAL PLATFORMS

Manji (1964)

Dir: Yasuzo Masumura | Japan, Drama 1964

Manji was screened in the reduced but vital archive section of this year’s BFI London Film Festival and received a masterly well informed, passionate introduction from Robin Baker, the BFI head of Cultural Partnerships, and Miki Zeze from Japanese distribution company Kadokawa who plan to restore and release other films from the 50 plus films made by Masumara (1924-1986).

Manji (alternative title All Mixed Up) is a stylish semi comic melodrama bristling with wide screen colour elegance as it unfolds the wayward obsessions and perverse game playing between two couples making this treatment of a foursome daring for its time.

Masumura worked from a script by established film maker Kaneto Shindo in what was to be the first of his three films based on the novels of Jun’ichiro Tanizaki. Reflecting influences that the director learnt from working with Kon Ichikawa, films like Ichikawa’s 1959 feature Odd Obsession act as a kind of strange bedfellow companion piece to Manji.

Masumura was deeply fascinated by Yukio Mishima and suicide pacts involving poison and blood are weaved into the film’s beguiling chess board game of dangerous games that lovers play. The beauty of the 4k restoration invites interest to explore more of his work which is always one of the pleasures gained from archive screenings. Peter Herbert

SCREENING DURING LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2024

A Nice Indian Boy (2024)

Dir: Roshan Sethi | Cast: Karan Soni, Jonathan Groff | India, Drama 2024

Roshan Sethi’s A Nice Indian Boy is a feel good film edited into chapters with titles including love, music and family, for no obvious reason as the story, about two gay men Naveen ( Karan Soni) and Jay (Jonathan Groff), unfolds as they hesitantly but gradually fall in love.

With Indian family traditions to be honoured and a marriage to be arranged that will involve familial consent this is a comedy with a slice of social comment that finds perceptive moments of depth. These are linked to a brother/sister relationship and in particular to Jay, who is a white gay man, raised by adoptive Indian parents and how this will impact on his Indian partner’s family and friends.

The film is based on a Canadian stage play quite possibly derived from a real-life situation which places A Nice Indian Boy rather neatly into a gender-based social comedy. Feelgood traditions of Brit films like My Beautiful Launderette and Unicorns mixed with a dose of the original successful concept in My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

Themes relating to class, love, gender and social cohesion/division of a universal nature provide the film, which is mostly soft and generous in tone, with moments of observant introspection aided by the skilful handling of the film’s entire ensemble casting. Peter Herbert

LONDON FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW 2024 | A UK release is set for early 2025

Blitz (2024)

Dir: Steve McQueen | Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Paul Weller, Elliot Heffernan | UK Drama 2024

Blitz Steve McQueen’s Blitz opens with powerful emotional scenes of mother love set against the carnage of the bombing of London during the blitz of WW2. The ‘blitz’ of London and other parts of England by Nazi Germany killed over forty three thousand people and damaged two million houses during a short but intense blitz during 1940/1941 – although for McQueen this serve as background to foreground personal stories of various characters impacted by the upheaval of war.

Saoirse Ronan is a mother living with her father (Paul Weller) and mixed-race child (Elliot Heffernan) on a Stepney Green council estate in London’s East End. Many of these sequences, held together by a lyrical fast moving camera ducking and diving with sharp editing, build up vivid scenes of families living together, the women working in ammunition factories with life constantly interrupted by sirens prefiguring bombs forcing evacuation into underground train stations.

As the film progresses it shifts tone with the child’s evacuation into the countryside. This upheaval of the mother/son relationship allows McQueen to explore well-known interests including the importance of popular music as barometers of cultural identity.

There are a number of powerful sequences about racism involving black and marginal communities as they were in England during this of time. The film also provides a mixed bag of sequences that veer between Dickens’ Oliver Twist with a glimmer of Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress as the boy navigates his dangerous journey through London, encountering a range of grotesque old school vaudeville villains played by Stephen Graham and Kathy Burke. The film brings back memories of Children Film Foundation films of the 1970s with children pitted against often adult social problems, and a sequence of child abuse exploitation recalling Freda Jackson as a menacing cruel wartime landlady in Daniel Birt’s No Room at the Inn (1948).

The trouble here is that it is difficult to decide whether McQueen is playing these scenes with sense and sensibility – or sentimentality. The skill with his actors is undeniable, as is his visual storytelling with intriguing moments that recall Mc Queens original gallery installation period. This includes a visual reference to Dead Pan 1997 where McQueen stands avoiding a collapsing wall, as well as static screen shots of light and bombs creating textured wallpaper patterns.

At its best, Blitz recalls another film about the loss of childhood viewed through adult eyes. This is Alexander McKendrick’s thoughtful journey film Sammy Going South (1964) about a boy travelling across Africa during the 1956 Suez crisis in a picturesque journey where he is reunited with a remotely-remembered Aunt. Unfortunately, McQueen’s content is less controlled than McKendrick’s and by the time it reaches its final redemption scene of mother and child love, Blitz feels more mannered than moving. Peter Herbert

https://www.peterherbert.online

https://theartsproject1.wixsite.com/theartsproject

LONDON FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW 2024 | In UK Cinemas November 2024

Hard Truths (2024)

Dir: Mike Leigh | Cast: Marianne Jean-Baptiste, David Webber, Jonathan Livingstone, Tuwaine Barrett, Michele Austin | UK Drama 97’

Not an easy film to watch but certainly true to its title. Mike Leigh’s latest brings together all the negative elements of urban life today for a black family. Lacking the gentle humour and endearing characters of Life is Sweet or Secret and Lies, Hard Truths pictures the coal face of middle-age misery for hard working mum Pansy (an obdurate Marianne Jean Baptiste) whose only joy is her spotless North London home and comfy settee. An oafish out-of-work son Moses (Barrett) lounges around upstairs, and a loveless marriage to decent manual worker Curtley (Webber) offers little respite from her days of endless depression where everything gets on her nerves and communication only leads to ugly confrontation, even with her easygoing sister Chantal (Austin). Pansy needs to find some joy or salvation in her life, but somehow she can’t. Brilliant characterisation and performances all round but not many laughs in this plangent portrait of despair. @MeredithTaylor

HARD TRUTHS IS NOMINATED FOR THE GOLDEN GLOBES and BRITISH INDEPENDENT FILM AWARDS 2024

Heretic (2024)

DirWri: Bryan Woods, Scott Beck | Cast: Sophie Thatcher, Hugh Grant, Chloe East | US Thriller

Hugh Grant turns to talents to psychological horror as the bad guy in this warped and unnerving three hander.

Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East play two young Mormon missionaries who arrive at his spooky house in a remote rural backwater. Mr Reed (Grant) is charm personified. Inviting the girls in for blueberry pie he oozes brisk appeal as an erudite married man Reed claiming his wife is baking in the kitchen: Mrs Reed never appears.

We all know how psychopaths gain the confidence of their victims from films about Ted Bundy, John Christie and Dennis Nilsen. But Reed has a different agenda that grows more sinister and disarming as the creepy feature directed by A Quiet Place’s Scott Beck and his regular co-writer Bryan Woods unfolds with increasingly chilling consequences accompanied by a pithy script and an iconic score that screams cognitive dissonance .

With a patronising rictus on his face Reed calls the Mormons’ bluff with reverse psychology and academic bluster, mansplaining the various religious persuasions and encouraging an intelligent debate which he manipulates with patronising ease. Turns out his views are quite radical. Reed is laid back, glib and plausible, but the girls are out of their depth, paralysed with fear as Heretic gradually descends into the realms of horror with plenty of gore, girly jump cuts and possibly even AI or this could be just an Act of God. @MeredithTaylor

NOW IN UK cinemas |NOMINATED FOR A GOLDEN GLOBE 2024

Bedlam (1946)

Dir: Mark Robson | Boris Karloff, Anna Lee | US Fantasy horror

Evidently a subject close to his heart, the film with which Val Lewton concluded his series of low budget but intelligent horror films for RKO was one of the few on which he actually took a writing credit, albeit under his pseudonym ‘Carlos Keith’, with results so raw that the British censor paid it the backhanded compliment of banning it outright.

Lewton bore his erudition lightly but he displays moments of sly wit as when moving pictures are shown to be the idea of a patient in a lunatic asylum and he demonstrated the lethal effects of applying coat of gold paint to the skin over ten years before Ian Fleming had the idea in ‘Goldinger’.

As the asylum director, Boris Karloff plays one his most fiendish, leering villains, and comes to a satisfactorily grisly end; while Anna Lee is charmingly different as the heroine. @RichardChatten

Never Look Away (2024)

Dir: Lucy Lawless | With Christiane Amanpour, Margaret Moth | US Doc 85′

A swashbuckling CNN combat camerawoman and trailblazing female icon; the unbelievable, yet entirely true, story of award-winning journalist, Margaret Moth, is brought to vivid light by acclaimed actress and activist, Lucy Lawless, in her directorial debut.

An inspirational and unflinching biography, which includes both testimonials from the people who knew and worked with Moth, and dramatic footage from the war zones she covered, Never Look Away delves into the life and work of an incredible woman, a true pioneer known for her tireless work to capture catastrophic events and atrocities on film, no matter the risk.

After her first assignment to cover the riots that followed Gandhi’s assassination in India, she would go on to travel to the heart of the most dangerous conflicts in the world including the Persian Gulf War, the Bosnian War and the 2006 Lebanon War. However, underneath her fearless persona, candid interviews with colleagues and family reveal a self-destructive and emotionally fraught woman who would struggle when anything got in the way of her appetite for adrenaline and efforts to document the worst of humanity.

Never Look Away is in UK cinemas from 22 November 2024

UK Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8s0rPcU_OiA

Bread and Roses (2024)

Dir: Sahra Mani, US 2023 90′

Breaking news from Afghanistan: the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice has decreed that women’s voices are now considered awrah, a term connoting nakedness or ‘that which must be covered.’

Female voices may no longer be heard in public: particularly by other women, who must refrain not only from singing songs, but even from reciting the Quran in the presence of females. “When an adult female prays and another female passes by, she must not pray loudly enough for them to hear,” the Minister, Mohammad Khalid Hanafi, declared. “And how could they be allowed to sing if they are not even permitted to hear each other’s voices while praying?”

In some areas of the Western press this immemorial edict, only now unearthed by the diligent scholarship of the Taliban (whose name, after all, translates as “students, or seekers of knowledge”), is being called “bizarre” and “absurd”. But it’s perfectly rational from the Taliban’s perspective. For the twenty years in which they were out of office, they had to watch as a generation of Afghan women benefited from a reasonable measure of education and freedom, and aspired to an entirely new range of goals.

The new declaration of awrah is very obviously calculated to mute this group and prevent them from spreading their knowledge to younger cohorts (one suspects that speaking, rather than singing, is the real issue here). A curtain must be drawn across their experience, and the possibility of different forms of life and thought expunged from the record.

Bread and Roses focuses on three women whom the Taliban would very much like to silence. They are representatives of those whose condition improved before the American military pulled out in 2021 (a decision made during the Trump administration, but enacted by Joe Biden) and who are now fighting against the shameless war of revenge being waged by the Taliban against half the country’s population.

Indomitable but kindly activist Taranom Seyedi is forced to leave the country and eke out life in a meagrely appointed safe house in Pakistan: cold, penniless, lacking proper washing facilities, and surrounded by hostile wild animals. “We are the future presidents of our country,” she reminds the women with whom she shares the house. One day this may come true, but right now it seems a far-off dream.

The gentle and reserved Sharifa Movahidzadeh previously worked as a government employee, but is now reduced to the boring pursuit of sewing garments to pass the time and staring out across the cityscape of Kabul from the roof of her family house, where she is mostly confined.

The term “bright spark” could have been specifically coined for the intensely likeable Zahra Mohammadi, who makes wearing colourful clothing and perfume part of her rebellion. Despite coming from a conservative background, she qualified as a dentist and started her own practice, but now the Taliban has closed down all female-run enterprises. Zahra begins to organise activists on her former premises; she is arrested and sees women she knows tortured so badly that they are virtually unrecognisable.

The courage and dignity of all three women is outstanding, but it begs the question – why should anyone be obliged to lead lives that require such massive reserves of fortitude? Why can’t they simply… live, like the rest of us?

The film shows women protesting against the closing of schools, and water cannons and tear gas being used against them. it shows armed Taliban fighters brutalising defenceless demonstrators, and threatening to kill a woman who has been arrested for continuing to speak. If the moral imbecility of all this isn’t enough, a few simple statistics illustrate the insanity of the regime on a merely practical level.

Afghanistan has the highest fertility rate in Asia, with 4.5 children being born on average to every Afghan woman. The current population (around 35 million) is estimated to reach 47 million by 2025, and 76 million by 2050.
The country’s Gross Domestic Product declined by more than a quarter in 2021 and 2022, and there’s no sign of any significant recovery on the horizon.
Meanwhile the rate of participation in the labour force among males is 69.1%.
Among females, it’s 4.8%.

But it would be wrong to think that disaster is inevitable, or even that the Taliban are the natural rulers of Afghanistan: a highly complex nation riven with tribal and ethnic divisions. Their first period of control lasted just five years, and one can only hope that their second will not only be shorter, but also their last. Bread and Roses is an important document, and it should be seen.
@_i_a_n_l_o_n_g_

In selected UK cinemas | Apple+ TV | CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | GOLDEN EYE 2023

UK Jewish Film Festival 2024

This year’s Jewish Film Festival offers a chance to discover a spectacular range of films exploring Jewish and Israeli life and culture throughout the UK and all over the world.

Taking place from 7 – 17 November in select venues all over London, and nationwide throughout November in Glasgow, Manchester, Bath, Birmingham, Brighton, Bristol, Leeds, Liverpool, Nottingham, Oxford and York. The festival will open at London’s Curzon Mayfair with Jesse Eisenberg’s Golden Globe nominated comedy drama A REAL PAIN (2024).

The Festival will close with Shira Piven’s THE PERFORMANCE. Adapted from an Arthur Miller short story it stars Robert Carlyle and follows a troupe of American tap dancers on a tour of Europe in 1937.

There is also a chance to see THE SPOILS a powerful new documentary that delves into the flight for the restitution of Nazi-looted art. The film reveals the complexities in the ongoing battle for justice in art ownership amidst the rise of the far right in Germany.

The film’s focus is the story of German-Jewish art dealer Max Stern, who escaped Germany during the Second World War and settled in Montreal, becoming one of Canada’s leading art dealers. The Düsseldorf City Museum planned an exhibition in honour of Stern for 2018, but the exhibition did not go on view until 2021, delayed by discussions about art restitution and how the project was being handled. The Spoils highlights the challenges faced in honouring Stern’s legacy against the backdrop of a larger crisis in the art world.

Selected features and short films are also available online.

UK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL 2024

Francis Lederer Season: Maman Colibri (1929)

This November and December the Austrian Cultural Forum celebrates the long and colourful life of Francis Lederer (1899-2000).

Austria’s answer to Maurice Chevalier, Lederer’s international career spanned the silent era and continued well into the 1970s. A selection of four films will be screened to reflect his best known performances, including Maman Collibri

THE AUSTRIAN CULTURAL FORUM | LONDON SW7 | 21 NOVEMBER 2024

Cairo International Film Festival 2024 | 13-22 November 2024

Cairo International Film Festival is internationally accredited as the oldest and only continuously running film festival in the Arab world, Africa, and the Middle East. Taking place from 13th November to 22nd November the 45th edition is led by its President Hussein Fahmy and his director Essam Zakaria.

This year’s celebration will include 194 films from 72 countries around the world and will open with the World Premiere of Passing Dreams (in competition) directed by Palestine’s Rashid Masharawi and starring Ashraf Barhom, Emilia Masson and Adel Abu Ayyash who plays a young boy pursuing an elusive carrier pigeon across Palestine believing it will return home.

Passing Dreams (2024) courtesy of Cairo International Film Festival

The Golden Pyramid Award – International Competition 2024

An international jury headed by Danis Tanović will decide on the winning film in this competition strand. Helping him are Ahmed Hafez (Editor, Egypt), Andrea Pallaoro (Director, Italy), Ángela Molina (Actress, Spain); Aisha Ben Ahmed (Actress, Tunisia); Anocha Suwichakornpong (Director, Thailand); Sylvie Pialat (Producer, France).

Moondove (2024)

INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION

Competition hopefuls include this year’s top titles: Julie Delpy’s Meet the Barbarians (2024); Golden Globe nominated Memoir of a Snail, an enchanting anime with intergenerational appeal. There’s also another chance to see Constance Tsang’s Cannes 2024 awarded drama Blue Sun Palace.

Premieres include Necmi Sancak’s Ayse (2024), a family drama set against the changing face of Istanbul; 4 O’Clock Flowers, the feature debut from Egyptian fimmaker Khedija Lemkecher; and Moondove written, directed and produced in 2024 by award-winning filmmaker Karim Kassem.

4 O’Clock Flowers (2024) courtesy of Cairo International Film Festival

Arze (2024)

HORIZONS OF ARAB CINEMA

The latest Palestinian feature documentaries will compete in this section that includes the Best Palestinian film award.

Amongst the titles Carol Mansour and Muna Khalidi’s A State Of Passion: Ghassan Abu Sittah, raises the profile of British-Palestinian reconstructive surgeon, Ghassan Abu Sittah, who worked tirelessly around the clock for over a month in the casualty department of Gaza’s Al Shifa and Al Ahli hospitals.

Mahmoud Nabil Ahmed’s Gazan Tales, centres on the lives of four men in the Gaza Strip and Maxime Lindon’s Holidays In Palestine follows 30 year old Shadi, an activist who leaves France to return to his village in Palestine.

Other films in this selection include Diaries from Lebanon (2024) a Berlinale-winning documentary looking at the tragedy unfolding in and around present day Beirut; and Mira Shaib’s feature debut Arze (2024) a family drama that sees a single mother and son struggling to survive in the city after they lose their source of revenue: a scooter.

The Second Wife (1967)

CAIRO CLASSICS

Celebrates a selection of international cult classics included renowned director Salah Abouseif’s timeless masterpiece of Egyptian cinema The Second Wife, (1967) – a microcosm of Egyptian country life is reflected through the story of a corrupt mayor who controls the village. Stars Suad Hosny, Salah Mansour and Shukri Sarhan.

CAIRO FILM FESTIVAL | TRIBUTES 2024

THE GOLDEN PYRAMID – HONORARY TRIBUTE

Yousri Nasrallah – Director and Writer, Egypt

In a film career spanning over four decades, Nasrallah began as a film critic for the Lebanese newspaper Al-Safir. In 1982 he was an assistant to filmmaker Youssef Chahine in the film An Egyptian Story, followed by Goodbye Bonaparte, for which he co-wrote the screenplay. He soon became one of the leading protagonists of the auteur cinema movement with dramas such as the epic love story Bab el Shams (2004/5). Nasrallah is the first Egyptian filmmaker to chair the short film jury at the Cannes Film Festival. Other collaborations include working with German director Volker Schlöndorff and Syrian director Omar Amiralay.

FATEN HAMAMA – EXCELLENCE AWARD

Danis Tanović – Film director, producer, screenwriter – Bosnia & Herzegovina

The Bosnian film director, producer and screenwriter studied piano at the Sarajevo Music Academy before enrolling at the Academy of Performing Arts in Sarajevo. However, in 1992, the siege of the city forced him to stop studying and instead to turn his talents to documentary films, which he continued in Belgium after a spell at the Institut Supérieur des Arts in the Belgian capital.

Tanovic went on to write and direct the 2001 Bosnian feature No Man’s Land, which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, the European Film Academy Award for Best Screenplay, the César for the Best First Feature film, and a the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film amongst others. His filmography also includes Iron Picker (2013), Tigers (2014), Death in Sarajevo (2016), which was awarded the Silver Bear at the 66th Berlin International Film Festival. He is the only director from Bosnia and Herzegovina to win an Oscar.

FATEN HAMAMA – EXCELLENCE AWARD

Ahmed Ezz – Actor – Egypt

After studying English at Ain Shams University. Ezz embarked on a film career gaining international recognition with his breakthrough in A Teenager’s Diary directed by Inas El-Degheidy in 2001. Roles in blockbuster films include Private Alexandria (2005), The Hostage in 2006, and Transit Prisoner in 2008, all directed by Sandra Nashaat. Other performances include the big budget war film The Passage about the Arab-Israeli War of Attrition, his first collaboration with the great director Sherif Arafa. The two worked together for a second time in The crime (2022), and in the same year, he presented the film Kira And Jinn with director Marwan Hamed in their first collaboration.

Cairo Film Connection (CFC) also takes place during the festival (17-20 Nov). The 10th Edition comprises a series of eighteen projects in their development stage. The selected works include six from Egypt, two each from Tunisia, Iraq, and Lebanon, and one each from Kuwait, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco, and Algeria.

CAIRO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL | 13 – 22 NOVEMBER 2024

Bird (2024)

Dir/Wri: Andrea Arnold. UK/France. Drama, 119 mins

A lyrical spadeful of social soil soaked in the English countryside and served up with a dash of magical realism is the best way to describe this latest feature from Andrea Arnold.

Set in her native Kent on the fringes of Gravesend on the Thames estuary Bird makes multiple visual references to its avian-themed title but also features butterflies, bees, horses, foxes and dogs along with a cast of British actors, a German, Franz Rogowski, being the standout. He plays the titular hero Bird, a charismatic wayfarer who will soon come to represent everything decent and honourable in this squalid corner of broken Britain where living off the State has become an acceptable social norm.

Arnold’s Cow, a devastating documentary portrait of a dairy farming in the 21st century, came to Cannes Film Festival several years ago but went home empty-handed. Bird stands to gain more leverage due to its international stars Rogowski, and Barry Keoghan who plays Bug, a selfish, tattooed layabout who fathered a kid (Hunter) at fourteen, and is now set to be a granddad and an accidental father to his savvy young daughter Bailey (Nykiya Adams in a stunning debut).

Apart from the animals, Bird is a chaotically poetic film full of music, dancing and fighting (courtesy of its male contingent). Coldplay, Fontaines D.C. and Sophie Ellis-Bextor all feature in a rambling storyline that centres on twelve-year-old Bailey who lives in a dingy seaside flat with Bug and her slightly older brother Hunter (Jason Edward Buda) who is also heading for teenage fatherhood. None appear to do a day’s work or have anything approaching a job. Bug’s plan is to harness the slime of his recently purchased Colorado River toad which exudes a pricey hallucinogen he can flog on the black market.

So Bailey is forced to make her own life until she befriends Bird after falling asleep in a field full of daisies beside the M2 – and these scenes are particularly gorgeous to look at; Arnold knows how to ‘smell the roses’ cinematically-speaking and Bird is a film that takes itself slowly along the byroads, alighting on nature in all its summery beauty as well as the dregsville domestic interiors, not to mention bodily functions. Is Bird for real? – at one point Bailey gives him a Chinese burn just to check, but he’s the nearest thing to a decent bloke she’s ever come across and so begins their subtle love affair.

Arnold’s 2009 feature Fish Tank embarked on a similar scenic journey for its lost heroine but this time the English filmmaker heads in an unexpectedly new and inspired direction, and this really makes the film special although thematically we’re on traditional territory. The handheld camera may leave you in a daze but that’s all part of the slightly unreal life these drifters lead. @MeredithTaylor

NOW AVAILABLE ON MUBI from Friday

The Problem with People (2024)

Dir: Chris Cottam | Cast: Colm Meaney, Paul Reiser, Lucianne McEvoy, Jane Levy, Dés Keogh | Comedy drama 102′

The film starts so reassuringly in the Emerald Isle with its stereotypical green landscapes stretching out to a lakeside in county Wicklow, all set to the lilting sound of the fiddle. What follows is a scrappy saga that gradually loses steam in championing that ’special relationship’, Americans fondly seeing Ireland as some sort of idyllic fatherland. Apart from a few minor gags, there’s none of the caustic wit of Martin McDonagh here. The Problem with People is directed by German-born Chris Cottam. Wally Marzano-Lenevich co-writes with Paul Reiser who also stars.

Back in the distant past two Irish cousins fell out and one moved to Brooklyn never to return. On his deathbed the Irish descendent’s fondest wish is to reunite the family, once and for all. So it falls on his son Ciáran (Meaney) to invite his New York-based cousin Barry (Reiser) to patch things up, although the two have never met. Warmly greeted by the locals on his arrival, Barry sees the benefits of Ciáran’s bucolic existence. But the bonhomie is short-lived. When the father dies his Will incudes Barry in half of the estate, creating a rift that spreads throughout the village.

Subplots involve Barry’s gay daughter (Levy) who soon joins the party and forms a bond with Ciaran’s ex-wife (McEvoy. The characters are given a contemporary twist but the plotlines are largely implausible with clunky dialogue lacking authenticity. With its strong cast, The Problem with People works best as a riff on family relationships, grief and remembrance with arguably greater appeal for US audiences than those on this side of the Atlantic. @MeredithTaylor

ON RELEASE IN CINEMAS IN UK AND IRELAND.

Jamaica Inn (1939)

Dir: Alfred Hitchcock | Cast: Maureen O’Hara, Robert Newton | Drama 108’

Hitchcock’s period dramas tend to get a bad press but ‘Under Capricorn’ at least is worthy of considerable respect.

‘Jamaica Inn’ – the last of the British phase of Hitchcock’s career and the first of three adaptations of made of the work of Daphne du Maurier – was even included in the book ‘The Fifty Worst Movies of All Time’ and both Hitchcock and du Maurier personally disliked it; in the case of the latter probably not helped by liberties taken like the addition of Sir Humphrey Pengallan.

Possibly Hitchcock’s most violent film, this rollicking yarn boasts sumptuous production design, mobile photography by Harry Stradling, a bizarrely made up performance by Charles Laughton as Pengallan (although he predictably proved difficult to direct, especially since it was made for his own company), a game young heroine played a by Irish actress Maureen O’Hara, who gets an ‘Introducing’ credit and promptly accompanied Laughton to Hollywood; and distinctive supporting contributions from Leslie Banks, Robert Newton, Emlyn Williams, Marie Ney, Basil Radford and Hay Petrie, to name but a few; and a memorably harrowing scene at the conclusion in which Stephen Haggard pleads for his life. @RichardChatten

NOW ON DIGITAL

Stolen Hours (1963)

Dir: Daniel Petrie | Cast: Susan Howard, Michael Craig, Diane Baker, Edward Judd | UK Drama 97’

That rarest thing, a remake that improves upon the original.

Prefaced by an elegant title sequence by Maurice Binder to the accompaniment of Mort Lindsay’s melancholy score, the treatment throughout is much more subtle than it was in ‘Dark Victory’

Susan Hayward is a more robust presence as the heroine, and at the ending isn’t required to compete with the music as Bette Davis had had to with Max Steiner.

Being made in Britain probably contributed to it being more understated, where shot in sumptuous colour it makes good use of Cornish locations and gains added poignancy from the fact that Hayward herself also later died in eerily similar circumstances. @RichardChatten

NOW ON TAKING PICTURES TV

The Divided Island (2024)

Dir: Cey Sesiguzel | Prod: Andreas Tokkallos | 90′

Many may remember flicking through holiday brochures back in the early 1970s when Famagusta, Northern Cyprus, was still a thriving resort and a popular location to enjoy a sunny break. Since then the beach has been abandoned although one company now offers tours of the deserted area from the Ayia Napa.

2024 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Turkish invasion that led to bloodshed dividing the island into Greek and Turkish sectors. Turkish Cypriot filmmaker Cey Sesiguzel and his Greek producer Andreas Tokkallos try to put history into context offering an unbiased view with reportage from archival footage and the recollections of those whose lives where torn apart of that tragic day in July 1974.

But the Turkish Cypriot question had for a long time been a source of friction. The division was deeply-rooted in conflict that dated back to the 1570 Ottoman Conquest and the Island’s era under British rule that led to the Republic of Cyprus in 1960. All this culminated in a Greek military-financed coup d’etat that eventually came to a head when the Turks invaded in 1974.

Sesiguzel and Takkallos make a brave attempt to flesh out the complicated historical context by adopting a ‘made for TV type’ format with facts, views from expert witnesses and personal outpourings making it often feel like a didactic lecture rather than a dynamic and cinematic piece of filmmaking. @MeredithTaylor

NOW ON RELEASE.

Juror #2 (2024)

Dir: Clint Eastwood | Wri: Jonathan Abrams | Cast: Nicholas Hoult, Toni Collette, Zoey Deutch, Chris Messina, Kiefer Sutherland, J.K. Simmons, Gabriel Basso, Cedric Yarbrough, Leslie Bibb, Francesca Eastwood, Amy Aquino, Adrienne C. Moore | US 113’

The truth can be a dangerous thing as Nicholas Hoult finds out in Clint Eastwood’s chewy courtroom drama. Informative and complex rather than nail-biting Juror #2 is an absorbing film with its intelligent look at the US justice system in all its anomalies and unpredictable uncertainties.

In Savannah, Georgia Hoult is Justin Kemp, a squeaky clean family man and recovering alcoholic who finds himself called up for jury service in a high-profile murder trial that brings to light a chilling realisation: the poor guy was actually there at the scene of the crime. His wife Allison (Deutch) is about to give birth to their first child after a previous miscarriage, adding further anxiety to an already stressful state of affairs.

The man in the dock, James Sythe (Basso), was out drinking with his girlfriend (Eastwood’s daughter, Kendall Carter) on the night of the crime. He’s been charged with her subsequent death by Faith Killebrew (Colette), a confident county prosecutor, who is also campaigning to be the new district attorney.

So while Sythe’s life hangs in the balance, Justin is paralysed by a moral dilemma as it dawns on him that the ‘deer’ he hit that night was actually the victim. Should he come clean, or stay quiet and protect his own family – that’s the predicament.

Juror #2 is not just about a murder trial, it’s about a man’s sense of justice and moral probity. It explores the growing guilt and suspicious behaviour that comes into play as his character plunges further and further into a state of emotional turmoil. Hoult is rather good as the culpable party – he starts to blush and shake as he reaches out to his solicitor friend Larry Lasker (Sutherland) for insight and support. Clint and his writer Jonathan Abrams ask us all “what would you do in the circumstances”?

Sixty years after Clint was bewitching us in A Fistful of Dollars (1964) his versatile career as actor, director, producer and composer continues to flourish. About time one of the big festivals gave him a tribute. @MeredithTaylor

ON RELEASE FROM 1 NOVEMBER 2024 |

Lake George (2024)

Dir/Wri: Jeffrey Reiner | Shea Whigham, Carrie Coon, Glenn Fleshler, Max Casella | US Thriller 98′

With a gun to his head an ordinary man called Don is forced into a hitman gig in Jerry Reiner’s neat little Neo noir B-movie.

The plot is simple and well-executed from the get-go and hooks you in with its appealing central duo. Ex-con softie Don (Whigham) has done time and is now ready to collect his share of the money from L.A. gangster Armen (Glenn Fleshler). But Armen has other plans in store for Don and they involve him killing Armen’s ex Phyllis (Coon).

So Don, looking for an easy way out, agrees to kill Phyllis. But after taking her to the Adirondack foothills near Lake George there’s an unexpected twist. Unable to pull the trigger, put-upon Don combines forces with middled-aged Phyllis and the unlikely pair of grifters hatch a plan to get the money back, and more.

There’s always an audience for a decent thriller and Lake George is certainly watchable with its plausible plot, snappy dialogue and pristine production values from a veteran director and producer of TV fare such as Fargo and High Fidelity. Here he re-works a classic noir format with a feisty female and a world-weary petty criminal who just wants to retire gracefully.

A caustic dark vein of humour tempers some of the more violent episodes particularly the one where Don and Phyllis stage a robbery and find themselves witnessing a rather bizarre sex scene interrupted by a dog. The ludicrous sums involved are so minimal this only adds to the comedy as the two amusing desperados try to swing things to their advantage against the odds in some shady circumstances. @MeredithTaylor

TRIBECA PREMIERE 2024 | COMING TO NETFLIX

Hot Fuzz (2007)

Dir: Edgar Wright | Cast: Simon Pegg, Cate Blanchett, Bill Bailey, Martin Freeman , Bill Nighy, Bill Cornish, Billy Whitelaw, Timothy Dalton, Jim Broadbent, Paddy Considine | Uk Comedy 121’

‘Hot Fuzz’ belongs to that select group of movies that on its original appearance received a lukewarm critical response, but by the time it reached television had already deservedly achieved cult status.

When it first hit cinemas critics sniffily compared this gleeful spoof of everything from the Avengers episode ‘Murdersville’ to ‘The Wicker Man’ unfavourably with Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg’s previous collaboration, ‘Shaun of the Dead’, but it sounded fun so I went to see it anyway and was certainly not disappointed.

Particular thought has gone into the casting, with Cate Blanchett’s unbilled cameo being particularly memorable. @RichardChatten

NOW ON DIGITAL RELEASE

Misericord (2024) Valladolid Film Festival 2024

Dir/Wri: Alain Guiraudie | Cast: Félix Kysyl, Jean-Baptiste Durand, Catherine Frot, Jacques Develay, David Ayala | France, Thriller 102′

All over France the village bakery is becoming a thing of the past. Many places don’t even have a local bar anymore and Alain Guiraudie mourns the demise of rural life in his latest, a comic thriller, exploring repressed sexual desire and the power of the Catholic Church in a leafy French backwater.

Guiraudie’s sinister 2013 debut Stranger by the Lake, follows a familiar theme of the outsider coming to town and disrupting the status quo. But this time with a delicious twist.

It all begins with a funeral in a remote village in Aveyron, near Toulouse. The family come together to revisit past and present. The deceased, Jean-Pierre, ran the local bakery but his troubled son Vincent (Durand) is in no state to take over and his widow Martine (Frot) is in disarray. But she soon cheers up when Jeremie (Kysyl) arrrives to pay his respects. He used to work in the bakery as a teenager but has long left the village. Vincent is not keen to see him, and is irritated when his mother welcomes Jeremie back into the fold, inviting him to stay.

There’s a whiff of Claude Chabrol to this dark little dramady that sees the tight knit locals flitting between each other’s households, their apparent friendliness couching a savage air of mistrust. And while keeping their motives and backstories hidden, Guiradie keeps the tension taught through the fleeting expressions that flicker across the faces of Martine, her son Vincent, their friend Walter (Ayala), local vicar Father Grisolles (Develay), and particularly Jeremie who is the most expressive of the lot.

Clearly things have gone on in that close community, although outwardly they all appear to be straight; Martine and her husband Jean-Pierrre, Jeremie purportedly with a girlfriend back in Toulouse. But when Jeremie runs into Vincent in the woods, their rough horseplay seems to have suggestive undertones, and soon ends in tragedy whereupon Jeremie is forced to cover his tracks. He then bumps into Father Grisolles, picking mushrooms, who seems a bit too keen to offer Jeremie a lift. Jeremie makes a swift exit then swings by to catch up with his old friend Walter. After a few beers, he strips off and propositions him, Walter chasing him away with a rifle. The two later fluff over the episode, on the grounds of being drunk.

So all these interactions are ambiguous but somehow suggestive of a fluid sexuality at play. Félix Kysyl is particularly good at being all things to everyone in his role as Jeremie. For the local gendarmes, he is the number one suspect in Vincent’s disappearance, and yet his implicated guilt always appears to be the elephant in the room during questioning, his presence seems to unearth unwanted elements of guilt and remorse that have lain buried in this small community for many years.

Although they all trust in the eminence grise, Father Grisolles, we soon begin to realise that he is a subversive force, but not necessarily a force for evil as we soon discover in the film’s gripping third act where Jeremie will find salvation where he least expects it in the moody and muted autumn tints of this suspenseful and slyly amusing thriller. @MeredithTaylor

Misericordia’ wins top prize; Spain’s indie success; MISERICORD In UK arthouse cinemas from December

Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers (2024)

Dir: David Bickerstaff | Prod: Phil Grabsky | UK Art Doc

Exhibition On Screen is a series of documentary portraits of painters and their iconic works. It goes behind the scenes at major galleries and museums – this time London’s National Gallery – offering detailed insight from experts and curators and dramatised scenes that bring the artists to life.

David Bickerstaff and Phil Grabsky already highlighted the Vincent Van Gogh’s letters with his brother Theo,(1853-90) in the 2015 documentary Van Gogh A New Way of Seeing. This time they once again bring the letters to bear with a lyrical look at works from the artist’s most vibrant, less sensational, period when he discovered the power of colour and sunlight during a two-year sejour in the South of France.

Through forty seven paintings and fourteen drawings, the focus here is Van Gogh’s imagination as a visual poet rather than the tragedy of his personal life. The theme of lovers dominates in the opening room with his portrait of “the lover”, lieutenant Paul Milliet, the Zouave regiment soldier who Van Gogh saw as a ladies’ man. The artist was clearly aware of his seductive powers: “Milliet’s lucky, he has all the Arlésiennes he wants, but there you are, he can’t paint them, and if he was a painter he wouldn’t have any.”

La Berceuse 1889

This image is paired with that of the “the poet” – his Belgian artist friend Eugène Boch (Musée d’Orsay, Paris) whom he considered a more sensitive soul, framing him against an azure background of stars. In the middle of these two works is a picture of two embracing lovers strolling through a shady park, in fact the public park opposite the famous yellow house Van Gogh rented in Arles and shared, at one point, with Gauguin during 1888-9 when he painted ‘The Yellow House’, and ‘The Bedroom’.

During this time he also depicted his short spells in the local asylum just outside Saint-Remy-de-Provence. These stays, when he stopped working altogether, enabled Van Gogh to recuperate and recalibrate his emotional state before getting back to work with renewed vigour. Far from the troubled madman he is so often depicted as, this exhibition and film lays bare the artist as a sensitive and deeply poetic soul uniquely able to convey the beauty of his surroundings on canvas.

Central to the exhibition is the spectacular ‘Starry Night over the Rhone’ (main picture) and Self-Portrait further illustrating his successful time in Arles.

With valuable contributions from art specialists and curators: Christopher Riopelle, Lachlan Goodie, The Times’ critic Rachel Campbell Johnson and others, the film also offers a detailed look at detailed marks and brushwork from a selection of rarely seen paintings from private collections all over the world. ‘The Poet’s Garden’, ‘The Trinquetaille Bridge’ and ‘The Public Garden, Arles’.

Poets and Lovers shows how Gogh had started to build his work into a series that could work together. An example of this is the so-called ‘triptych’, with two of the Sunflowers surrounding ‘Madame Roulin Rocking the Cradle’ (La Berceuse) from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The National Gallery owns the ‘Sunflowers’ on a yellow background, which is displayed with one of Van Gogh’s two versions on a blue background, this one on loan from the Philadelphia Museum of Art. All the three paintings are displayed on one wall.

Ironic, then, to think that Van Gogh was unable to sell his work during his lifetime, relying on the financial support of his brother Theo, when Nowadays his paintings go under the hammer for eye-watering amounts of money, even running into the millions.

Enriched with dramatised sequences this is a spectacular film to watch and keeping re-visiting about Van Gogh’s hopeful and productive time in the South of France. @MeredithTaylor

ON RELEASE FROM 6 NOVEMBER 2024

Man’s Favourite Sport? (1964)

Dir: Howard Hawks | Cast: Rock Hudson, Paula Prentiss, Maria Perschy, John McGiver | US 120’

Although Howard Hawks was something of an anachronism by the 1960s and ‘Man’s Favourite Sport’ is usually overlooked by critical assessments it compares favourably with Hawks’ classic comedies, complete with an appearance by veteran Hawks player Roscoe Karns.

Rock Hudson may be no Cary Grant, but then, who is? Paul Prentiss though is woman enough for both of them, and after spending much of the story dressed (presumably intentionally) as a bluestocking gets to model Edith Head’s most unusual creation in the form a wetsuit (“Can you get out of the water wearing that?” Hudson asks) which cost $10,000 but you’ll definitely agree was certainly worth every penny. @RichardChatten

NOW ON APPLETV

The Outrun (2024)

Dir: Nora Fingschiedt | cast: Saoirse Ronan, Saskia Reeves, Stephen Dilane,

Saoirse Ronan is the star of this dour character drama set in the Orkney Islands where she plays a struggling alcoholic in a dysfunctional family.

Some people have terrible lives and really suffer to keep on the right path but why do we lionise those who resort to drugs and drink to keep going when there are so many who manage to triumph through sheer grit and determination in the face of tragedy and strife.

Saved by some the ethereal landscapes and some watchable performances from Ronan, Saskia Reeves, and Stephen Diane (as her parents) you nevertheless come away wondering why this overhyped, plotless and un-involving film with its jump cuts to dismal London and gorgeous nature shots needed to go on for two whole hours. The seals are the highpoint of a sad but otherwise rather average portrait of addiction based on a memoir by Amy Liptrot. @MeredithTaylor

NOW IN CINEMAS THROUGHOUT EUROPE

Dreaming Dogs (2024) Viennale Film Festival 2024

Dir/Wris: Elsa Kremser, Levin Peter | Doc 77′

A wonderful dreamy opening with a classical score glides is thought the night streets of Moscow, a dog called Dingo looking wistfully out of the windows of a car. And then we are in the midst of a flowery meadow. And Dingo is nursing a leg wound.

A close knit family of stray dogs and the homeless keep themselves going in the urban wastelands just south of Moscow. A post industrial web of factories has gradually ground to a semi-halt. Where once machinery whirled at peak production the pace has slowed, and the stream of workers who kept the stray dogs alive with regular titbits has now dwindled to a bare handful: one woman called Nadja and seven dogs.

Shot from the animals’ point of view a co-dependency blurs as these two species live in close proximity, each lending the other succour and sustenance, emotional and physical. Snow gradually arrives to chill this union of souls in the bleak midwinter but the two continue to protect each other against the biting cold giving the old woman something to live for in her fight for survival. But Nadja is also desperate to free herself from this modus vivendi and become independent and her struggle eventually culminates in a parting of the ways.

Austria’s Elsa Kremser and Germany’s Levin Peter made their first appearance on the arthouse scene with their 2019 debut Space Dogs, another cinematic riff that explored Moscow’s canine world through a magical story of Russia’s first space bound dog (Laika) returning to Earth as a ghost. Dreaming Dogs is resolutely land-based but there’s a spiritual dimension in this union of souls that elevates the film to a timeless essay that explores man – or woman – and a best friend who has adapted itself over the centuries as a method of survival. The directors accompanied the group over a period of three years that saw woman and beast survive in a minimalist existence against a background of financial collapse and societal crisis. @MeredithTaylor

VIENNALE FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | 17-27 October 2024

Natalie Granger (1972)

Dir: Marguerite Duras | Jeanne Moreau, Lucia Bose, Gerard Depardieu | Drama, France

Marguerite Duras is not exactly renowned as a crowd pleaser, I didn’t really expect to enjoy this film – especially since it was shot in drab black & white with probably deliberately inexpressive acting by the leads – when I dutifully sat down to see it, but in its playfully sinister way it proved quite diverting.

Lucia Bose and Jeanne Moreau play two women in early middle age, who live together alone, whether siblings or lovers never being made clear.

Perhaps the film’s highlight involves a young Gerard Depardieu as a washing machine salesman nervously attempting to interest the two women in purchasing a new model. The two ladies just stare and constantly contradict him, and one is never sure if they intend to rape him or kill him. @RichardChatten

The Room Next Door (2024)

Dir/Wri: Pedro Almodovar | Cast: Julianne Moore, Tilda Swinton, John Turturro | Drama 108’

Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton are the Oscar-winning stars of this penetrating character drama that sees two writer friends reunited in the current day after they first met in the 1980s.

Martha (Swinton), suffering from cancer, has decided to end her life after a terminal diagnosis and asks Ingrid (Moore) to stay in the room next door in a rented holiday home, where she intends to take an illegal pill procured on the dark web.

Euthanasia is a hot topic in the news at a moment when many find themselves alone, estranged from family or friendless, when faced with an unbearable illness. In his first film in English Pedro Almodovar bravely tackles a highly emotive subject head on, and he clearly fervently believes in it. And this is not the first of his films about facing fears and doubts, Pain and Glory explored the subject back in 2019, but that was more autobiographical. Here he projects the idea onto a female friendship, his stock in trade, as we saw in Women on the Verge and Talk to Her amongst others.

It’s also true to say that Almodovar’s films always feel slightly angst-ridden, even his comedies. There is always deep-seated anxiety and a Hitchcockian undertone to his work and The Room Next Door revisits the same territory, with the same dull, discordant primary colours, in a story that takes place in lonely woods and alienating New York skylines.

Even when Tilda’s character is upbeat it all feels desperately doom-laden, with Moore cast as her ever faithful friend, even though the two haven’t seen each other for decades. The false bonhomie Ingrid exudes in her efforts to gee her friend along is forced and quite frankly false, unless she has an ulterior motive of using this experience as material for her next book. The two of them get along like the Bobbsey Twins with rarely a cross word or a confrontation – quite something considering their lack of closeness; but maybe this lack of an intimate past is what’s needed to accompany someone to their demise.

Moore’s character is a ‘yes woman’; an eternal martyr who seems to take the weight of Martha’s angst on her delicate shoulders. Meanwhile Martha quite understandingly veers from depression to acceptance – and sometimes even relief – at her impending doom. And that’s the film’s most valuable take-away. Tilda has never looked so drawn and dissipated than in this latest incarnation which she embraces full-heartedly in a tour de force that feels brave and unflinching.

With the help of these two experienced actors Almodovar manages to convey his ideas on euthanasia and death with subtlety and restraint in a tribute to all those forced to suffer the indignity of dying a slow and painful death. Few of us are frightened of death but what we dread is the pain and loss of control and dignity, and this is also the thrust of Almodovar’s nuanced narrative. @MeredithTaylor

THE ROOM NEXT DOOR | GOLDEN LION winner VENICE 2024

Robert Kramer Retrospective | Viennale 2024

This year the Viennale are screening a retrospective of American filmmaker Robert Kramer, who comes from roughly the same stable as Chris Marker and Jonas Mekas in his style and ideology.

We are told in the festival press brochure that Robert Kramer (1939- 99) first appeared on the scene in the early 1960s when he became a leading proponent in the independent film movement of the era, most of his work was political and from a left-wing perspective.

Growing up in New York City he studied philosophy and Western European history at Swarthmore College and Stanford University where he became engaged in leftwing politics, working first as a community organiser in Newark, and then as a reporter in Latin America.

Before moving back to the States his first film arrived, a short entitled. The People’s War, the first of a trilogy exploring the radical left, and here the focus is on the guerrilla movement in Venezuela. In New York he founded Newsreel, an underground media collective which produced some sixty documentaries and short films about radical political subjects and the anti-war movement.

It was during this time that Kramer developed his highly distinctive cinematic style, a blending of fiction and documentary filmmaking. By the early 1980s he had moved to France, where his work was treated much more seriously than in his homeland and remained there until he died in 1999.

THE EDGE, the second of Kramer’s trilogy on the ‘Radical New Left’ is shot in black and white on 35mm and sees a cast of non-pros play a group – nine men, four women – of rather pleasant and well-spoken ‘young revolutionaries’, the men dressed conservatively in sports jackets, white shirts and ‘slacks’ (as they used to call them back in the day). Mostly un-employed and directionless (one is potter, another works in a factory) they are disgruntled in a very passive way, and their gripe centres on the US government’s intensification of bombing Vietnam. A placid lot, they mooch around town and on windy beaches, talking endlessly of a desire to change the world, but none of them looks like they could kill a fly.

Eventually, Dan, the most disenchanted, is galvanised into action in his goal to kill the president. His thought processes are worked up over six days, announced in intertitles, and sadly end in tragedy but the tone is thoughtful and tentative throughout rather than vehement or angry. Worth seeing for the period details. @MeredithTaylor

In The Country (1967) and ICE (1969) make the trilogy, screening at this VIENNALE 2024

Nightbitch (2024) Viennale Film Festival 2024

Wri/Dir: Marielle Heller | Cast: Amy Adams, Scoot McNairy, Arleigh Snowden, Emmett Snowden, Jessica Harper | US 98′

Amy Adams’ character in Nightbitch is a stay-at-home mum, looking after a planned child in a well-appointed suburban house. But she hasn’t reckoned with the effect on her psyche of 24/7 life with a toddler while dealing with an inattentive, mostly absent husband. She feels her IQ shrinking by the day, and her identity – bound up with her now-stalled, but previously burgeoning, career as an artist – dissipating.

Facile musical afternoons at a local library and encounters with uninspiring women with whom she has little in common other than the brute fact of motherhood only increase her frustration. Not even comfort food, in the form of chunky fritters fried in great dollops of butter (Adams has bulked up considerably for the role), seems to help.

And as her anger builds, she notices that it is accompanied by some strange physical changes: thick hair sprouting on her back, rows of teats on her torso, even the beginnings of a tail…

Dogs and wolves have frequently been used in stories to illustrate the wild or unbound side of human nature – which is perhaps strange, given the rigidly hierarchical, pack-based nature of canine social organisation. The figure of the werewolf looms large here. In films like The Company of Wolves and Ginger Snaps it serves as a metaphor for the rawness of female adolescence; in Wolf, as a tonic for the diminishing powers of an ageing literary editor, played by Jack Nicholson.

But Nightbitch isn’t by any means a werewolf film, or really a horror film at all. There’s no sense that Adams’ character has been infected with a supernatural curse, or otherwise inducted into a lineage of monsters. She’s never shown to be a danger to anyone else, least of all her son, with whom she’s unfailingly sweet – no matter how many provocations the narrative hurls at her – and writer/director Marielle Heller mostly downplays the tale’s few weird or gory moments.

The story feels more like a slice of magical realism – the kind of thing which, in their wilder moments, a John Updike, John Cheever or Donald Barthelme might have come up with as a metaphor for suburban angst.

The three major characters are nameless, suggesting that Heller is aiming for an exemplary or prototypical picture of the nuclear family, as seen from “Mother’s” perspective: a point-of-view signalled by the preternaturally careworn Scoot McNairy’s designation as “Husband”, rather than the more standard pairing of “Father”.

The narrative is carefully slanted in Mother’s favour, and doesn’t delve into the privilege at work in her choice to take time out of her career for her child’s formative years – and still to feel radically discontented. And, typically of US cinema, her relatively opulent house is almost assertively antiseptic: a show-home rather than a place where people actually live, with little human grain, much less the scruffy or bohemian touches one might associate with an artist.

To call the scope of the film limited would be to undermine its strongly expressed core message: that the battles, victories, defeats and sacrifices played out by women at the domestic level are not just visceral and atavistic, but the very foundation of human life. However, the story doesn’t find a way to escalate its concerns into something truly compelling, and its third act is mostly concerned with the successful balancing-out of Mother’s relationship with Husband rather than anything more dark or gripping.

Having said this, the relationship between Mother and the hugely charming Son (actually played by twin brothers Arleigh and Emmett Snowden) is one of the joys of a film which also provides a generous amount of laugh-out-loud comedy. The playful bond between them is so palpable that I wasn’t the only person at my screening who wondered whether Son was in fact Adams’ own child. Adams’ performance is superbly nuanced, and to be relished. Where others might have chewed the scenery, she signals oceans of exasperation with the subtlest tilt of her head and lift off an eyebrow. @_i_a_n_l_o_n_g

SCREENING AT VIENNALE 2024 | IN UK CINEMAS 6

Ian Long is a screenwriter and story consultant, and runs workshops on the ‘Deep Narrative Design’ of storytelling.

Helene Thimig | Viennale Film Festival 2024

This year’s Viennale Film Festival pays tribute to Vienna’s homegrown star, the actress Helene Thimig, born in Austria when it was still Austria-Hungary.

Helene Thimig (1889-1974), a member of a well‐known Viennese theatrical family, made her debut during the Weimar republic, starring in Gustav Ucicky’s 1932 romantic drama Man Without a Name. Fleeing Nazism with her second husband, the producer Max Reinhardt, he directed her in Franz Werfel’s theatre production The Road of Promise in 1937. They had already met in 1917.

A successful film and stage career followed with performances in around eighteen Hollywood outings. After the war she returned to Vienna to combine work on the stage, cinema and TV both in Austria and Germany until her death at 84.

MAN WITHOUT A NAME (1932) Gustav Ucicky (Austria) ***

Weimar Germany is the setting for this wartime drama, shot in Babelsberg studios and inspired by the Balzac novel Le Colonel Chabert. Helene Thimig plays Eva-Marie, the wife of a successful businessman Heinrich Martin (Werner Krauss) conscripted into the First World War in 1914 where he is reported dead. In actual fact he is merely shell-shocked and reappears years later in 1932, his memory intact, to discover Eva-Marie has re-married his close friend, who has taken over his business. Not Ucicky’s finest film but Thimig gives an impressive performance in her screen debut.

THE HITLER GANG (1943) John Farrow (US) ***

Along with The Great Dictator this gangster film is one of the first biopics about Adolf Hitler, made when he was still alive and kicking. It pictures him as a machiavellian figure determined to thwart other politicians as a means to controlling Germany, setting the seeds of Nazism.

John Farrow directs on a shoe string budget, but none the worse for it. Hitler’s rise to power starts in a military hospital at the end of the Great War, with Germany forced to its knees, and ends on the eve of World War II. The soon to be Fuhrer, played by a spirited Bobby Watson, joins the National Socialist Party infiltrating as an army spy in an ambitious narrative that takes in the Beer Hall Putsch, the writing of Mein Kampf and the burning down of the Reichstag.

The Jews are implicated in Germany’s defeat in the First World War, and although there is no mention of the Death Camps we get a good feel for Hitler’s psychopathic tendencies with the mysterious death of his niece Geli Raubal (played by Poli Dur) leaving us wondering if she actually committed suicide or whether Hitler was responsible. Helene Thimig plays Geli’s mother Angela in a small but not insignificant role. A solid script and decent cast make this worth watching.

STRANGERS IN THE NIGHT (1944) Anthony Mann (US) ****

Anthony Mann’s B movie runs for just under an hour but packs a palpable head of steam as a 1940s-set feminist psychodrama with timely references to the current social media phenomenon of ‘catfishing’ It’s a jaunty affair that kicks off with William Terry as injured serviceman Johnny Meadows thriving on letters received from an enigmatic ‘Rosemary Blake’. Cut to a hilltop mansion where Helene Thimig is convincing as crippled psycho Hilda Blake doting on a portrait of her (fictitious) daughter Rosemary, and terrorising her put-upon assistant Miss Miller (Barrett), and her new physician Dr Ross (Virginia Grey), a woman she rejects rudely for not being a man.

Thimig really excels in a sinister performance, controlling her submissive friend Ivy and inveigling all around her including Johnny who has made a bee-line to the mansion to find his ‘lover’ Rosemary whose portrait will ultimately provide the gruesome denouement. A really entertaining thriller with gowns by Oscar-nominated Adele Palmer.

ISLE OF THE DEAD (1945) Mark Robson (US) ***

Boris Karloff stars alongside Helene Thimig in this inspired horror outing that derives its eerie atmosphere from the gruesome twosome and Jack MacKenzie’s subtle lighting effects and shadow play. Written and produced by Val Lewton, it sees an international cast (Jason Robards, Ernst Deutch, Ellen Drew) dying one by one while quarantined on a Greek island during the Balkan War of 1912. But Karloff soon discovers the plague isn’t the only danger in this remote outpost. Thimig plays a Greek peasant woman, once again creating a sinister presence as ‘Madame Kyra’ influencing Karloff’s austere but patriotic general into believing that one of their midst is a demon. And it ain’t a man. Gripping stuff despite its 71 minute running time.

THE ANGEL WITH A TRUMPET (1948) 138’ ****

Hartl pulls out all the stops in this gorgeously filmed romantic epic set in the late 19th century, charting the ups and downs of an upper class family of Viennese piano-makers during fifty years (1888-1948).

Often seen as an Austrian national story, the various allegorical aspects are embodied in the characters and the house itself, a classical mansion with the figurine of a trumpeting angel over its front door. The house represents Austria and shots of the little white angel appear at regular intervals reminding that all is well, even when it’s not. There are moonlight scenes, musical interludes, romantic trysts, duels and family gatherings with the men in full military regalia, not to mention flags unfurling against darkening skies, representing the Nazi’s arrival (the with scenes of destruction in wartorn old Vienna. The family will weather all this stoically until the 1940s.

Often drifting into melodrama the 1948 feature is based on the much darker novel of Ernst Lothar who rewrote the book in English while in exile in the US, and this spawned another 1950 outing narrated by Jack Hawkins and starring Wilfrid Hyde-White along with some members of the original cast in minor roles.

Lothar was a great friend of Max Reinhardt, but Hartl’s film is more triumphant and lyrical than the novel and stars Paula Wessely, Maria Schell and Helene Thimig, who once again plays a matriarch. It’s not a significant role but one that offers dignity as the stately chatelaine of the double fronted villa in old Vienna.

The story unfolds from the perspective of Henriette Stein, a Jewish academic (played by Wessely) who has had a ‘light-hearted’ affair with Crown Prinz Rudolf (Fred Liewehr) who then commits suicide at Mayerling. Henriette comes to live in the house when she then marries the piano manufacturer Franz Alt (Attila Horbiger), on the rebound. It’s a marriage of convenience (for her at least) that provides a family. But their union will soon lead to deception, murder and ultimately, death as Austria’s eventful history plays out.

Decision Before Dawn | copyright TCM

DECISION BEFORE DAWN (1951) ****

This spy movie by Anatole Litvak, adapted from George Howe’s novel Call it Treason is not in this year’s Viennale tribute to Helene Thimig, but I thought it was worth including with its eclectic cast and Oscar nomination in 1952 Academy Awards. Thimig plays alongside Hildegard Knef and Dominique Blanchard. According to our critic Richard Chatten, Basehart is top-billed, his observations bookended the film, but the real star is Oskar Werner – beset as usual with doubts – as the ironically nicknamed ‘Happy’.

Like earlier Hollywood productions shot in Germany this goes for a harsh, monochromatic realism. Unlike them, it’s actually set back during the war itself from the point of view of the Germans (most supporting cast consisting of authentic locals, including fleeting glimpses of youthful versions of Klaus Kinks and Gert Frobe) at the point when it had finally sunk in on the majority of them just what a terrible mistake they had made in electing Hitler.

CINEMATOGRAPHY : HELENE THIMIG | VIENNALE FILM FESTIVAL 2024

A Real Pain (2024)

Wri/Dir: Jesse Eisenberg | US Comedy 90′

Jesse Eisenberg) and Kieran Culkin are the ultimate odd couple in this autobiographical buddy comedy road movie .

Benji and David are cousins meeting again after years apart. They were once close buddies and have decided to join a tour group and go in search of their beloved grandmother’s former home in Poland. David, in particular, wants to get to grips with his family history and explore how his own emotional issues rank compared to those who suffered during holocaust.

But tensions soon surface as the two revisit their childhood in this hilarious and insightful and self-assured second feature, written by Eisenberg who deftly combines comedy and pathos and directs a solid cast featuring Will Sharpe and Jennifer Grey .

Benji (Culkin) is brash and emotionally open but totally lacking in self-awareness while his banner ad-salesman cousin is a thoughtful and sensitive, missing his wife and little daughter and confessing to a touch of homesickness. It’s a dynamic that offers both humour and awkwardness. We tend to root for David as the most respectful of the two, although Benji’s blind-sightedness provides cringeworthy elements yet points to a deep sadness in his life as a kid who never seems to grow up, but would never admit to it. He’s an unstable character who thrives in momentary relationships but manages to hit off with Jennifer Grey’s divorced mothe.

Clearly this group trip is fraught with memories of a tragic past treading on delicate ground involving visits to concentration camps and ghettos. Although A Real Pain is a film that explores our collective past as a universal family. All this cries out for decorum and sensitivity that the blundering Benji seems to lack in spades, although the men clearly love each other deeply, and this comes out particularly for David. Will Sharpe, as the group leader, tries desperately to iron over the interpersonal cracks with platitudes in this cleverly calibrated threesome.

At one points Benji rails at the seemingly hypocritical fact of them all travelling First Class in a train that, back in the grim past, could have carried their ancestors to their terrible graves. But he also suggests that his fellow trippers leave a commemorative stone on appropriate gravestones, in line with tradition. This idea does not go down well with the new owner of their grandmother’s former home who considers it a possible tripping hazard for the old woman who now lives there.

Eisenberg really fleshes out the rest of the tour group here, including a Rwandan refugee (Kurt Egyiawan) who has converted to Judaism and a recent divorcee (Grey) who bonds with Benji’s offbeat take on life, although the final scene is a telling reflection on his state of limbo “Anyone could be a friend”. @MeredithTaylor

SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL WALDO SALT SCREENWRITING AWARD | SCREENING DURING VIENNALE FILM FESTIVAL 2024

The Hunger (1983)

Dir: Tony Scott. | Dir: Catherine Deneuve, David Bowie, Susan Sarandon, Cliff De Young | Horror 97’

Although this glossy adaptation of Whitley Streiber’s novel was originally greeted with raspberries posterity has been kind to ‘The Hunger’, and today it continues to enjoy cult status on the strength of its sapphic chic and the star power of its three leading players.

Catherine Deneuve is a worthy successor to Delphine Seyrig in ‘Daughters of Darkness’, as a glacial blonde lipstick lesbian in chic shades who employs Delibes to seduce Susan Sarandon who describes her as “different, she’s…European”; while the scene where David Bowie’s (age inconveniently catches up with him) swiftly became a classic. @RichardChatten.

EMILIA PÉREZ (2024)

Dir: Jacques Audiard | Wris: Jacques Audiard, Thomas Bidegain, Léa Mysius | Cast: Edgar Ramirez, Selena Gomez, Zoë Saldana, Adriana Paz | France, Musical thriller 129′

It’s hard to imagine someone as dapper and debonair as auteur Jacques Audiard creating rip-roaring films that travel to the badlands of France, India and now Mexico. But beauty and sensitivity is always there a core of his work and this is particularly so in his latest, a vibrant musical thriller, EMILIA PÉREZ.

Zoe Saldaña is Rita, a hard-working Mexico City lawyer held back by her gender and Latino background not to mention a demanding mother and a long-held desire to have a family herself. Despite all this she keeps singing and smiling (in dazzling dance routines) until an offer she can’t refuse comes along that will ultimately lead to salvation of sorts in the shape of frightening cartel boss Manitas del Monte (Gascon).

The mission is well -paid but perilous: to organise the crime lord’s disappearance, relocate his wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and family safely to Switzerland and make him the woman of his desiring. Enter Israeli plastic surgeon Dr Wasserman (Mark Ivanir), the man for the job.

Karla Sofia Gascón is a knockout in a brilliant transgender role that sees her morph from macho Manitas (with gold teeth) to steely but vulnerable EMILIA PÉREZ in a range of bold and boosterish Saint Laurent outfits and a set of pearly white nashers.

This timely tale is often a bit fuzzy around the edges in a script co-written with Lea Mysius and Thomas Bidegain. But Audiard brings all the strands together in a tense adrenaline fuelled denouement that certainly packs a punch despite setbacks along the way. Emilia Perez makes it clear that blood is still thicker than water, even though the water element is all about our need to be loved and find meaning in life even if that means pushing the boundaries out. Emotions run high for all the characters and the heat is palpable with a lush spectrum of dazzling colours in the desert setting.

Exuberant musical interludes somehow add zest to this raunchy ride through Mexico (entirely filmed in a studio) driving the story forward in a similar vein to Annette although here the score is from French vocalist Camille and composer Clement Ducol. @MeredithTaylor

Now in cinemas in France, and the UK from October 25. Streaming on Netflix Nov 13, 2024.

The Opera! (2024) Rome Film Festival 2024

Dirs: Davide Livermore, Paolo Gap Cucco | Cast: Valentino Buzza, Mariam Battistelli, Vincent Cassel, Fanny Ardant, Caterina Murino, Rossi De Palma, Angela Finocchiaro | Italy 106′

Fans of opera will adore this cinematic hybrid opera imagination of Orpheus et Eurydice. The film is inspired by the Greek tragedy with music originally created by the bohemian composer Gluck. A high-profile cast fused the world of film and opera: Vincent Cassel, Caterina Murino, Fannie Ardant, Rossy de Palma and award-winning Italian soprano Mariam Battistelli.

This new creation from stage director Davide Livermore and creative director Paolo Gep Cucco, also contains instantly recognisable arias from Verdi, Puccini, Rossini, Mozart, Vivaldi, Band with pop classics such as Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s The Power Of Love thrown in for new audiences.

Premiering at this year’s Rome Film Festival the film really dazzles as a piece of entertainment, even if you’re not keen on opera. Cucco created the recent production of Aida, the first opera in the world exclusively made up of video scenes, that played at the Sydney Opera House.

This film was shot in Prodea Led Studios in Turin and is one of the first on-set virtual production. LED panels are used as a backdrop for a set on which video or computer-generated imagery can be displayed. It’s a new departure for filmed entertainment and certainly works well for this kind of production offering audiences the chance to experience the colour, vibrancy and musical clout of opera without the exorbitant prices.

The Opera! Is also one of the acclaimed fashion house collaborations. Dolce&Gabbana created the costumes: Fanny ardent looks resplendent in a white suit, with a black moon glowing against a burnished copper background. Other fashion collaborations include Bad Lurhmann’s Romeo and Juliette: the Montegues were kitted out in Prada and the Capulets in D&G for the respective houses. Almodovar’s recent Strange Way of Life was costumed by Anthony Vaccarello for Saint Laurent. Not forgetting, of course, Giorgio Armani’s slick suits in Paul Schrader’s 1980 classic American Gigolo. @MeredithTaylor

THE OPERA! World premiered at the recent ROME FILM FESTIVAL 2024

The Land Where Winds Stood Still (2023)

Dir: Ardak Amirkulov | Kazakhstan Drama 98′

ThIs haunting and atmospherically shot arthouse drama imagines the steppes of Kazakhstan during the deadly Soviet regime of collectivisation when it was claimed that no one would be hungry or poor during the Soviet famine of the 1920-30s.

Approximately one third of the Kazakh population purportedly perished, according to sources. The era is stunningly brought to life by Ardak Amirkulov in sultry black and white images that focus on the poetic and pitiful suffering of the people rather than resorting to sensationalism or melodrama.

The focus is Jupar, a starving herder woman, who embarks on a journey to find the place of her birth in the Land of Still Winds. With her two young children she is forced to scavenge for food in the bleak landscape. She comes across a dead horse and preserves a joint in salt to provide food for her two children as they travel through a barren wasteland. Vultures circle above them preying on the moribund bodies of people and animals.

Along the way she meets Baimukhan, a Soviet employee hated by everyone in the village. He has fallen into a ditch and Jupar helps him out, although we are not entirely sure why she shows him mercy.

Beautifully composed shots linger over a landscape where sickness prevails. Jupar is just one one of the victims of this cruel regime that has robbed the people of their farms, harvest and cattle promising an equality that never happened, instead they are reduced to poverty, and pitted against one another, the weak often poisoned and eaten by the strong who offered them contaminated crops. In one scene an old woman shares some millet with Jupar and her boys. But when they are sick they realise this was merely plan to kill them to satisfy her own hunger.

Just one of the setbacks in a gruelling journey where Jupar is forced to struggle against the forces of evil in the shape of wolves, birds of prey and the Red Army, all emblematic of the suffering Kazakhs faced during this harsh period of Soviet history. @MeredithTaylor

CRITICS’ PICK WINNER TALLINN BLACK NIGHTS 2023

Warm Nights on a Slow Moving Train (1987)

Dir: Bob Ellis | Cast: Norman Kaye, Wendy Hughes | Australia, Drama 91’

This Australian drama starts deceptively quietly as music teacher Wendy Hughes quietly picks up an unassuming little salesman played by Norman Kaye, which proves something of a red herring as Kaye is never seen again.

What then follows resembles ‘Looking for Mr Goodbar’ as Miss Hughes resumes her travels and turns into a regular chameleon, her appearance transformed as she adapts to every new man.

The most extraordinary development comes when she is enlisted in a conspiracy to assassinate a conservative politician whose eye she catches by vigorously joining in a performance he’s giving of ‘The Internationale’, which ironically enlists your sympathy for the intended victim since few real conservatives would have the wit to declare “I hate the sentiment – as you know – but I love the tune!” @RichardChatten

The Circus (1928)

Dir: Charlie Chaplin | Cast: Merna Kennedy, Al Ernest Garcia | US 72’

It was probably inevitable that Chaplin would eventually set a film in a circus and the film that resulted was a typically painstaking job but since has remained one of his least known although it compares well with his earlier work.

It begins with a song sung by Chaplin himself but fortunately the score that follows doesn’t deliver the sentimentally that threatens and a couple of sequences makes good use of a xylophone.

Although we only fleetingly see the pugnacious little runt of earlier days when he imagines he’s kicking his boss up the backside the emphasis is largely on slapstick with Charlie making good use of a hall of mirrors and early doing a memorable impression of a mechanical clown. @RichardChatten

Look into my Eyes (2024)

Dir: Lana Wilson | US Doc

This observational documentary about psychics doesn’t make any judgements. Simply, it offers the audience a chance to make up their own minds about whether those who seek insight or guidance are disillusioned, lonely – or even bored – and are looking for solace and inspiration.

Choppy excerpts of seven New York ‘unconventional healers’ talking to their clients flash before our eyes: A medic shares her deep anxiety over witnessing the death of a child; a film creative has chosen to combine his psychic power with his screenwriting; another was inspired to develop her spiritual gift by the films of John Waters. For the most part the clients are looking for direction in their careers, their family relationships or their love lives.

While being a genuine source of comfort and fascination for some – seeking psychic help to understand an animal seems bizarre: one woman is keen to known why her Boston Terrier hates being on a lead. The psychic’s answer is banal: “Dottie (the dog) says there’s a lot of anxiety to it”. Spending money to to scope out your dog is clearly a ‘thing’ in New York.

Most people take their sessions really seriously, yet the questions they ask often come across as faintly absurd or even facile in the scheme of things. There are few ‘life or death’ concerns, although one man does want to find out about a connection with his dead father.

When someone has died in tragic circumstances there’s an understandable need to try and find answers beyond the grave, but few interviewed seemed really distraught or desperate for clues. One client wants clarity about the feelings of a young man who killed himself. The psychic asks whether the cause of death involved breathing. And when the client reveals the man hung himself, the response is almost ridiculous: “Well, that would be a breathing issue,” It’s difficult not find this vaguely hilarious. But is Wilson (best known for her Taylor Swift outing Miss Americana) really seeking to amuse. It seems so with this funny but often rather moving film.

Through personal experience I can testify to the powers of a particular psychic: their insight was remarkable and invaluable, so I’m no sceptic. In the UK psychic services are considered an ‘entertainment’ in line with the Fraudulent Mediums Act of 1951. @MeredithTaylor

AT THE BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL from 10 OCTOBER 2024

Eternal Visionary (2024) Rome Film Festival 2024

Dir: Michele Placido |  Cast: Fabrizio Bentivoglio, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Federica Luna Vincenti, Giancarlo Commare, Aurora Giovinazzo, Michelangelo Placido, Ute Lemper | Italy, Drama

Ute Lemper, Fabrizio Bentivoglio and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi star in this lyrical classically styled biopic about Avantgarde Sicilian maestro Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936).

Antonietta Portulano, his wife, suffered poor mental health despite outliving him for several decades in an asylum. His turbulent family relationships and controversial stance on fascism were also a constant cause of conflict and sadness throughout his career, and his desperate love for a young actress and muse Marta Abba tantalised him until his dying day.

Reflecting back over his life the film opens in 1934 on a train to Stockholm to receive a Nobel Prize for Literature. In Fabrizio Bentivoglio’s soulful turn Pirandello comes across as philosophical and wistful in reminiscing over the many colourful and inspirational personalities he had occasion to work with. And these sequences are evocative of the past in Michele D’Attansio’s assured camerawork lifting the film into another dimension as it moves seamlessly from Sicily to Berlin, Rome, America and beyond.

The drama really gets into the spirit of Pirandello’s wild imagination with ‘staged’ excerpts from his theatre pieces in Italy, and Germany during the Weimar years. The ghosts of an entire existence pass before his eyes: the stormy bond with his children who clearly felt diminished by his genius and the public scandal caused by the subversive nature of his stage productions.

Pirandello never rages but simply looks back with sorrow as he reflects on his emotional world. He was clearly an artist of great humanity with his passions, his obsessions and his most intimate existence trapped between his explosive and impossible love for Marta and his tormented relationship with his wife Antonietta’s painful illness. Once again we witness how unhappiness can be transformed into creativity and a source of comfort for the Artist @MeredithTaylor

SCREENING AT ROME FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | 16-27 OCTOBER 2024

The Order (2024)

Dir: Justin Kurzel | Cast: Jude Law, Nicholas Hoult, Tye Sheridan, Jurnee Smollett, Marc Maron , Alison Oliver | Aust, Thriller 116′

Austrailan auteur Justin Kurzel’s (Snowtown) is back with true-crime action thriller that dabbles briefly in white nationalism before kicking back into a standard eighties-set shoot-out affair.

In Denver, a zeitgeisty opening sequence provides contrast to the rugged machismo of the fighting scenes and revolves Alan Berg (Marron), the local Jewish broadcaster who captured Oliver Stone’s imagination for his 1988 outing Talk Radio, and offers another string to the film’s main narrative.

Jude Law is spot on as Terry Husk, a raddled, pill-popping FBI agent weary from fighting the KKK, and now relegated north west, for health reasons, to small-town Idaho where a Neo-Nazi cult – The Order – is slowly gaining force, under the beady eye of Tye Sheridan’s local cop Jamie Bowen, who has an old friend in its midst. Nicholas Hoult is The Order’s big boss Mathews who is plotting to overthrow the US government. He’s a classic racist and petty criminal with a solid family background and a bit on the side (in the shape of Odessa Young) who is also pregnant with his child. His wife (Saltburn’s Alison Oliver) is unaware or in denial of his extramarital set-up, but not stupid as to where the money is coming from.

Inspired by Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt’s book ‘The Silent Brotherhood’ scriptwriter Zach Baylin doesn’t delve into the ideology of the group, the focus here is their violence and resurgence that feels timely in the light of current Neo-nazi activity in the US and further afield. Meanwhile Mathews is breaking away from the establishment’s extreme right group Aryan Nation headed by Richard Butler (Slezak).

Once again Justin Kurzel drives the narrative forward with a pounding score from his brother Jed, and some ferocious action and robbery sequences. Sadly, the female characters are kept quietly in the background in this macho, male-only terrain with its rugged Pacific landscapes that contrast with Adam Arkapaw’s pallid vision of 80s America. @MeredithTaylor

PREMIERED AT VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2024

Playing Kafka at the BFI London Film Festival 2024

Playing Kafka is a video game that explores one of the most famous novels of all time, Franz Kafka’s The Trial, as a narrative adventure that places the audience at the heart of the story.

Playing Kafka, by Czech studio Charles Games, is part of this year’s Games Lounge at the BFI London Film Festival, a free showcase of creative projects playfully looking at alternative storytelling methods and diverse approaches to audience interaction and game design.

Director: Charles Games | Main team: Lucie Formánková, Ondřej Javora, Lukáš Kolek, Ondřej Paška, Alex Petrova, Vít Šisler, Ondřej Trhoň, Lucie Tvarohová
Goethe-Institut Prague: Hannah Jung, Monika Loderová, Thomas Meyer, Luisa Rath

Czech Republic 2024
Language: English

12 OCT 2024 – 27 OCT 2024 | Bargehouse at OXO Tower Wharf, London UK

Made in Prague Festival (2024)

The Made in Prague Festival returns to London for its 28th edition which runs from 31 October – 30 November 2024.

Look forward to the latest in Czech cinema from the international festival circuit and beyond. This year’s highlight is an exclusive new documentary about the final few years of the playwright, dissident and later President Václav Havel.

Film venues: ICA, Regent Street Cinema, The Garden Cinema, The Gate, and the Czech Embassy cinema at the Czech Centre + online

The year marks the 35th anniversary since the Velvet Revolution that ousted the Communist regime and brought on democracy. So it offers a perfect opportunity to honour the leading figure of the revolution, the playwright and dissident turn President Václav Havel with the UK premiere of Petr Jančárek’s documentary Havel Speaking, Can You Hear Me?

On Havel’s invitation, the filmmaker was granted unlimited access and creative freedom to capture the last few years of his life. The result is an extraordinary time-lapse documentary reflecting on Havel’s political legacy and universal human issues with absolute openness through previously unseen footage.

Screens at ICA on Thursday 14 November, followed by Q&A with director Petr Jančárek.

Additional highlights include the gripping true-life Cold War drama Brothers, chosen as the Czech Republic’s entry for the 2023 Academy Awards;

The UK premiere of Our Lovely Pig Slaughter, a comedy debut by director Adam Martinec and winner of A Special Award at Karlovy Vary International Festival 2024;

UK premiere of Waltzing Matilda, a tragicomic family drama that takes its title from Tom Waits’ song celebrating resilience.

MADE IN PRAGUE FESTIVAL 2024

Emmanuelle (2024) San Sebastián Film Festival 2024

Dir: Audrey Diwan | Cast: Noemie Merlant, Will Sharpe, Naomi Watts, James Campbell Bower, Chacha Huang, Anthony Wong | Erotic thriller 94′

Emmanuelle is an evocative exploration of female desire set in plush surroundings with captivating performances from Noemie Merlant, Will Sharpe ad Emily Watts.

On an empty plane a woman imagines being in the ‘mile-high’ club with a dark stranger. French actor Noemie Merlant is Emmanuelle and this is the first of her erotic fantasias in the Orient.

In HongKong, ensconced in the sensuous elegance of a swish skyscraper (actually the St Regis Hotel) her mission as a shark – or quality control agent of a leading hotel group – is twofold: to rate the hotel’s facilities with coded colours, and to find a way of ousting the impressive Guest Relations manager Margot Parson who is deemed ‘too expensive’ in her job of analysing the establishment’s regular FITs (frequent international travellers) and responding to their individual needs. Emmanuelle’s first task will be easy, the second not so: Naomi Watts is superb in the role of Parson, a consummate professional who’s cannily aware of her potential demise. She’s just one of the authentic characters who inhabit this rather sinuous, erotic thriller; easy on the eye with its glamorous ambiance devised by award-winning designer Katia Wyszkop (The Beast), impressive camerawork from DoP Laurent Tangy, and a rhythmic soundtrack from Evgueni and Sacha Galperine.

The film’s writers Rebecca Zlotowski and Audrey Dirwan (who also directs) were inspired by Emmanuelle Arsan’s 1967 best seller which formed the basis of an uneven series of films starring Sylvia Kristel. Full of cliches and maxims the spare script perfectly fits the campy ambiance, so don’t expect deep social commentary: this is ’90’s style soft-core sortie into female imagination, an erotic take on Anita Brookner’s ‘Hotel du Lac’ – or even Fatal Attraction, but here the women are in control. Certainly knocks Fifty Shades of Grey into a cocked hat. If Emmanuelle were trans it would certainly ramp up the critical acclaim.

Noemi Merlant plays the eponymous siren as a curiously stiff, snide and disapproving businesswoman, but not without sex appeal, in her starchy colonial style outfits and silky negligee. After a languorous bath in her suite over-looking the bay, a stiff-one in the bar leads to un-involving sex with a couple she meets there. Another strand, involving an escort called Zelda (Huang) posing as a literature student, doesn’t quite come off (although strangely these are the film’s most sexually explicit scenes (for men) with the women touching themselves up etc (just off camera).

Merlant soon mellows when a mysterious Asian stranger catches her eye. She noticed him on the plane and was intrigued by his indifference: And there’s nothing that irks a woman more than a dishy professional man who fails to submit to her enticing body language, albeit subtle, as in this case. Will Sharpe’s Kei Shinohara is just the man for the job, and Emmanuelle’s imagination smoulders.

According to security (Anthony Wong) the ‘ocean’ engineer always books suite 2701 but never sleeps there, coming and going at will, often disappearing. Mysterious. Effortless. Emmanuelle is drawn under his spell (even drinking his bathwater, and sleeping in his bed alone). This is a layered look at how a woman can become sexually obsessed by the thought of a remote, seemingly unobtainable man, who also claims to have lost his desire. This acts as a red rag to Emmanuelle’s ecstasy. She’s actually enjoying herself in the process and nothing has happened between them. But a slow, tantalising seduction has begun, in her mind, at least. But what about him? Is this reverse psychology? Shinohara’s enigmatic charms and casual insouciance are key to his exotic allure, along with the subtle come-on he offers her, a gold lighter with an inscription, leading her on a febrile escapade through the steamy gambling dens and mahjong salons of HongKong to pin him down, and getting tremendous pleasure in doing so. He is the trigger but her pleasure is self-actualised.

The final scene is a steamy tour de force. You’ll either smile or throw up your hands in disbelief but this latest incarnation may even become a cult classic along with the 1974 original. @MeredithTaylor

PREMIERE AT SAN SEBASTIAN FILM FESTIVAL | NOW IN CINEMAS IN FRANCE/BELGIUM before a NETFLIX release

Quand Vient l’Automne (2024) San Sebastian Film Festival 2024

Dir: Francois Ozon | Cast: Hélène Vincent, Josiane Balasco, Ludivine Sagnier, Pierre Lottin, Garlan Erlos, Malik Zidi, Sophie Guillemin, Paul Beaurepaire, Sidki Bakaba | France, Drama 102’

Burgundy is a perfect location for this wise and wistful family saga that centres on a muted murder mystery and stars veteran actors Josiane Balasco and Helene Vincent. This time around the popular French director adds a dash of the supernatural to his signature blend of irony and dark humour in a fable of ordinary folk.

Despite its awkward (US translated) title “When Fall is Coming” this is a warm and comfortable film about real people who’ve not succumbed to plastic surgery and love nothing more than family, good local food and wine. And being October it’s time for mushrooms: everyone has their own little secret spot for picking them. And Michelle (Vincent) and her close friend Marie-Claude (Balasco) meet to share this seasonal pleasure in the woods near their home in Cosne sur Loire. The poisonous ones are to be avoided at all costs, but Michelle has a guide book at hand, and prepares a delicious family dinner.

Despite her care, one of mushrooms has a bad effect on her daughter Valerie whose fractious arrival and swift departure back to Paris, with her nine-year-old Lucas (Erlos), breaks the gentle rhythm of this mellow autumn rendezvous. After the mycological mishap, Valerie refuses Michelle access to her treasured grandson Lucas, leaving the poor woman tearful and depressed. And her mood is not helped by the dying days of this damn squib of a season.

Undeterred Michelle makes a surprise visit to Valerie in Paris to plead with her, but is given short shrift at the front door. Michelle and her daughter clearly don’t see eye to eye, despite Michelle’s generosity in giving Valerie the flat in the first place, but that’s all part of the problem and largely due to this mother’s risqué Parisian past that financed her family, but also caused them shame. As usual, Ozon drips feeds us clues leaving us to fill in the plotholes.

When Marie Claude’s son Vincent (Lottin) is released from prison Michelle offers him a lifeline. And Vincent is so thankful to the older woman, and protective of Michelle and his mother’s past, he decides to give Valerie a taste of her own medicine, and therein lie the dramatic tension as the story unfolds towards its climax, Evgueni and Sacha Galperine once again supplying the ansty score. MeredithTaylor

SILVER SEASHELL JURY PRIZE WINNER | SAN SEBASTIAN 2024

The Jolson Story (1946)

Dir: Alfred E Green | Cast: Larry Parks, Evelyn Keyes, William Demarest, Bill Goodwin | US Biopic

This technicolour musical biography purports to tell the life story of American singer Al Jolson with Larry Parks in the main role

‘The Onion’ once carried a report that Al Jolson was lynched in error by the Ku Klux Klan. I don’t recall the last time they showed this film on television but it probably suffers the same odium as ‘Song of the South’ which makes it seem shockingly unWoke rather than the mild family entertainment as which it was originally received, with Evelyn Keyes benefitting handsomely from a makeover.

Anybody pondering upon the capacity of one era to impose its standards upon an earlier one should consider that Jolson was originally Jewish and both the star and the screenwriter were both subsequently blacklisted. @RichardChatten

NOW ON YOUTUBE

Viennale Film Festival 2024

The Viennale is Austria’s most important international film event, as well as one of the oldest and best-known festivals in the German-speaking world. Every October, the Viennale takes place in beautiful cinemas in Vienna’s historic centre, providing the festival with an international orientation and a distinctive urban flair.

The Viennale will open on October 17 with Leos Carax’ latest film, a documentary entitled C’EST PAS MOI (IT’S NOT ME) that premiered at this Cannes Film Festival.

Festival creative director Eva Sangiorgi describes it as ‘an unconventional, essayistic and very personal film by Leos Carax that combines autobiography, film history and contemporary history in just 42 minutes. The director reflects on his medium, his role models such as Vertov, Chaplin and Godard, and creates a lively mix of cinematic influences. A multi-layered reflection on love, beauty and cinema”.

The Festival will conclude with Mati Diop’s Berlinale Golden Bear winner Dahomey, a poetic documentary about the return of plundered royal treasures and their return to Benin from a Paris museum.

VIENNALE FILM FESTIVAL 17-29 OCTOBER 2024

Afternoons of Solitude (2024) Golden Shell Award | San Sebastián Film Festival 2024

Dir/Wri: Albert Serra | Spain/Portugal Doc, 125′

Albert Serra is best known for his intricate dramas: The Catalan auteur has won awards for, Story of My Death (2013), Last Days of Louis XIV (2016) Pacification. Now he turns his camera on reality with this romantically entitled observational documentary.

In fact there’s nothing remotely romantic about the vainglorious sport of bullfighting. But despite its demure title Afternoons of Solitude is a difficult to watch with its prolonged focus on extreme animal cruelty. The powerful, confused bull has no intent but to defend itself from the vicious jibes of a highly-trained and courageous chancer.

Peruvian bullfighter Andres Roca Rey, 28, is now at the top his game. A tall, rangy, alpha male he is surrounded by acolytes to aid and abet his performance in the ring. One of them describes the traits of the next bull on his killing list: “enough!” is his peremptory reply. He is the master, the macho male, all primped and suave in his impeccable outfit.

Not for nothing that the bullfighter’s costume is called the “traje de luces” (suit of lights): In an homoerotic episode in Madrid’s Ritz Hotel we see him lifted into his skin tight suit by his male valet. Stepping into highly polished pumps, delicately braided pompoms clasping his slender shins are secured with a silver ‘dagger’. Coiffed black hair is slicked back to reveal chiselled cheekbones, an ivory rosary dangling around his neck. The immaculate elegance of it all in contrast to the sweaty bestiality of the bull. And always a kiss and a prayer for the Virgin Mary.

Once in the ring, DoP Artur Tort Pujol captures the intimacy of the choreography between bull and matador, each glance a telling insight into the killer’s macho psyche. A peacock intent on subjecting a bull to a reign of psychological pain and torture – for no other reason than his own personal gratification and preternatural pride posing as ‘duty’. There are no commentaries or interviews. Back in the safely of his black limousine Andres basks in the glory of his victory, the adoration, boosted by compliments from his male entourage, he nurses his wounds with insouciance. The camera focuses on fleeting facial expressions providing ample insight into his dominance and his respect for the ancient tradition.

Yet bullfighting doesn’t come without its dangers for the matador. He must place himself in constant peril to gratify the crowd, goading the beast nearer and nearer, often with the red cape behind him, dicing with death. And one of them must die. The blood flows. The camera’s focus is the bull’s oozing gashes. No mercy. The bull pants in exhaustion, his body shudders, wracked with pain, woozy with thirst. The matador’s expression is pure concentration mingled with angry justification at his cruel task. The bull is disorientated, confused, desperate – destined for death. The fatal dagger goes in and the beast collapses. His is the solitude in that that lonely afternoon in the ring. @MeredithTaylor

Afternoons Of Solitude won the Golden Shell for best film at the closing ceremony of the 72^nd edition of the Spanish festival

Screening during NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL 2024

Moulin Rouge (1952)

Dir: John Huston | Cast: Jose Ferrer, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Colette Marchand | UK Drama 119’

They say success has many proud parents yet failure is an orphan. When the technicians at Technicolor laboratories first set eyes of cameraman Oswald Morris’s extraordinary work capturing the vibrant colour of Nineteenth century Paris they insisted on adding a disclaimer because they didn’t want to be associated with the result.

History has had the last laugh and it went to be only the first of several bold exercises with which John Huston became associated.

in this fictional biopic of French artist Henri de Toulouse Lautrec the casting of Jose Ferrer satisfied the need for a reputable stage actor for the lead but he didn’t begin to emerge himself in the role like Kirk Douglas as Van Gogh in ‘Lust for Life’. The film won the Silver Lion at the 14th Venice Film Festival @RichardChatten

NOW ON PRIME VIDEO

Megalopolis (2024)

Dir: Francis Ford Coppola | US Drama 120′

This ambitious undertaking, forty years in the making, should have been called ‘Magaflopolis’. Ok it’s easy to criticise, but a veteran director such as Ford Coppola has a duty to his audience: not to confuse them, or bore them rigid for over two hours – but that’s exactly what he does in this over-inflated piece of filmmaking that masquerades as an inspired satire.

Megalopolis is pretentious and posturing and ultimately vacuous. Discombobulating images continuously flash before our eyes along with a talented cast of Hollywood’s best. But there wasn’t a scene or a performance I enjoyed as the actors all seem caught up in the grandiosity of it all in displaying the worst traits of each sex. The women were grasping and bitchy. The men arrogant and ego-driven, in fact, Jon Voight was the only one with a shred of vulnerability and a cheeky grin of playfulness as canny banker Hamilton Crassus III with Aubrey Plaza hamming it up as his lover Wow Platinum. Meanwhile Shia LaBeouf is cast as Hamilton’s curious and corrupt trans-looking grandson Clodio Pulcher.

Coppola aims high, as he should do, but the film feels like an flashback to the 1980s; all gilded, burnished and blundering like a fancy-dress school play of Shakespeare with a sci-fi makeover that somehow looks old-fashioned in the scheme of contemporary special effects: the actors poncing around and quoting their literary lines in the hope this will give some integrity to what is really a confounding mess.

Adam Driver is the main character: he plays Cesar Catilina, a Nobel prize-winning ‘starchitect’ who is still recovering from the death of his wife, who he purportedly murdered: The jury is still out on this ambiguous plot line. Apparently he has invented a substance called Megalon which makes the building process more flexible. He intends to re-design and re-build parts of the city in a utopian scheme. Also tenuous is his mysterious control over time and space (?). Aubrey Plaza is fabulously vociferous as his long-term blond lover all done up in leopard skin with roots as dark as Kunta Kinte (she’s a busy woman romantically – it seems – as she also has a clinch with Clodio not to mention Crassus). But then Cesar falls for Julia the bland daughter of Cicero (Esposito) the city’s mayor (and his arch rival) who is all about noble things like decent pay, sanitation, new schools and hospitals. Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) is all about ‘creating a home’ and these various factions come into conflict with each other: the creative, forward-thinking and the social-minded face of urban existence.

There are some inspiring elements: Driver and Emmanuel riding a sort of watch face that floats over Manhattan. I seem to have forgotten the others. But the idea that America is still great gradually fades with hollow laughter. Brazen, brash and bloated this is a step too far; but that may just be the step you’re willing to take. @MeredithTaylor

NOW OUT IN THE UK and Ireland from 27 September 2024

Timestalker (2024)

Wri/Dir: Alice Lowe | Cast: Alice Lowe, Jacob Anderson, Nick Frost, Tanya Reynolds, Aneurin Barnard | UK Drama 90′

A love-affair pursued throughout the ages via a succession of incarnations would be a great basis for a sci-fi/fantasy romance. But an infatuated, somewhat annoying woman pursuing a baffled and apathetic man over the centuries offers a tragicomic scenario – which could, in theory, yield a decent mix of humour and pathos.
However, Timestalker ultimately looks better on paper than it comes off in execution.

Early sequences give us Agnes (played by Alice Lowe, who also wrote and directed the film) as a seventeenth-century Scottish villager smitten by Aneurin Barnard’s masked cultist, an eighteenth century English aristocrat in love with a highwayman played by the same actor, and a nineteenth century schoolteacher who… well, maybe it’s best to draw a veil over what happens to her.

These sequences are built from scenes so short that they feel more like TV sketches than elements of a feature film, and while Lowe’s poker-faced comic style can be effective, she doesn’t have the actorly chops to pull off a range of period characterisations, even ones which are too truncated to be much more than gestures towards portrayals.

The film only hits its stride when Agnes finds herself in the 1980s. The pace slows, the characters get a bit more fleshed-out, and Lowe seems more at home with the vein of comic targets offered by the era: aerobics dance classes, New Romantic music, risible fashions and hairdos, female bedrooms decorated with Pierrots, etc.

In this time-period her fixation takes the form of Alex, a Bolan-esque, Adam Ant-ish pop star who speaks with a high-pitched estuary accent and whose music is an amusingly accurate parody of 80s synth-pop. When Agnes confronts him in his dressing-room she’s wearing a convincing ‘dandy highwayman’ outfit, made all the more hilarious by the fact that in the 80s, people actually did go out to gigs and nightclubs dressed like this.

As they talk, Alex off-handedly suggests that Agnes isn’t really a time-traveller, but a psychotic fan lost in a fantasy world. Which raises the question: were her previous ‘incarnations’ just make-believe, and have we somehow been unwittingly inhabiting her fantasies? It’s an interesting, slightly head-swirling moment, but it doesn’t get fully developed.

All the ‘Alex’ characters seem to lack any awareness of, or interest in Agnes, which makes her intense attraction to him feel ludicrous – but also difficult to warm to, with the result that the film never really catches fire. It’s a shame, because the idea has potential and Lowe is supported by a talented cast including Nick Frost as an appalling, bison-like husband and Tanya Reynolds as a willowy friend and ally.

There are things to enjoy in Timestalker, but it doesn’t fully deliver in terms of humour, it isn’t at all moving, and the time travel element isn’t thought through cleverly enough. Perhaps Lowe’s go-to mode of comic bathos doesn’t really suit the material, or maybe her talent has just been overstretched by the effort to write, direct and perform the starring role. If so, she’d be better served by delegating at least one of these functions in future productions. @IanLong

Ian Long is a writer, screenwriting teacher and story consultant at www.ianlong.org

IN UK and IRISH CINEMAS from 11 October 2024

Seven Films to watch at BFI London Film Festival 2024

The 68th BFI London Film Festival runs from between October 9 and October 20 in London and other major UK cities.

Over 12 days from October 9 to October 20 London’s iconic cinemas, including the BFI’s own South Bank cinemas, the Prince Charles Cinema, the ICA, Curzon Soho and Mayfair and Vue West End expect to see award contenders along with a selection of this year’s premieres from the international festival circuit.

This year’s festival will open with BLITZ an Second World War drama starring Saoirse Ronan and Stephen Graham – along with newcomer Elliot Heffernan as a 12-year-old boy who goes missing amid the Nazi bombing campaign on London.

Also screening:

ENDURANCE (2024) UK/US

The actual voices of British Polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton and his crew come alive in thanks to AI techniques in this new documentary charting their remarkable journey to Antarctica in 1914

MEMOIR OF A SNAIL (2024) Australia

Oscar-winning director Adam Elliot’s tale of separated twins in 1970s Australia is a funny and poignant stop-motion story seen from a woman’s perspective and suffused with all the anguish of modern life. This tender tale of loss and alienation it soon branches out into a relatable stop meditation with appeal for all ages.

MY EVERYTHING (2024) France, Anne-Sophie Bailly

Laure Calamy is the star of this amusing family drama that centres on a mother and her disabled son. Their uplifting relationship and two terrific central performances makes this a positive pleasure despite the tricky issues involved.

MALDORDOR (2024) Belgium

In his second film of the season thriller supremo Fabrice du Welz (Adoration, Alleluia, Calvaire) gets together with regulars: Laurent Lucas and Beatrice Dalle in a gritty thriller that explores an episode of institutional dysfunction and police corruption so parlous some claimed they were ‘ashamed to be Belgian’.

ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT India

Unfolding in two parts and shifting deftly from realism to reverie this Cannes-awarded first feature from Payal Kapadia is about two women caught in impossible love stories in modern day Mumbai.

THE BRUTALIST (2024) US (main photo)

Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones shine in Brady Corbet’s wartime epic that tells the story of the American Dream through the lives of visionary architect Laszlo Toth and his wife Erzsebet.

MANJI (1964) Japan

Directed by the Japanese auteur Yasuzo Masumura and based on the novel ‘Quicksand’ by Juinichiro Taniziki this stylishly sensual ‘folie a deux’ sees a married woman (Kyoko Kishida from Woman of the Dunes and a ruthless young girl (Ayako Wake) engaged in a doomed love affair. Remade many times but never living up to the original).

BFI LONDON FLIM FESTIVAL 2024

Midas Man (2024)

Dir: Joe Stephenson | Cast: Jacob Fortune-Lloyd, Ed Speleers, Eddie Izzard, Jay Leno, Eddie Marsan, Emily Watson | UK Drama 112′

When Beatles manager Brian Epstein died in August 1967, at the height of the Summer of Love, the band went into meltdown. “We collapsed,” John Lennon recalled. “I knew that we were in trouble then. I didn’t really have any misconceptions about our ability to do anything other than play music, and I was scared.”

Epstein’s unwavering belief drove the Beatles to fame. He moulded their early image and helped them negotiate the initial phases of their monumental success. Then he was gone, leaving the stricken band to limp on, demoralised and disintegrating, for three more years.

Was his early death an avoidable accident? Were his demons poised to drag him to hell, no matter how grand his achievements? Or was he collateral damage of the Beatles’ meteoric rise? It isn’t entirely clear whether Midas Man has an answer to this, although it seems to err towards the second option.

But this leaves out the psychic maelstrom of the Sixties. No one could have foreseen how the decade would unfold, and nothing could have prepared a man, whose business experience lay in running the music department of his family’s department store, to deal with these pressures. Who’d have thought a Liverpool rock ‘n’ roll group would have the power to rewire global culture – seemingly almost overnight? Certainly not Epstein, not even when he was sitting in the offices of HMV, Pye and Philips, trying to impress the special qualities of his boys on sceptical record company executives.

The Sixties are far away now, and its events seem fixed and immutable. So it’s easy to forget the wild flux of the time, and how rapidly things were moving. Not everyone could keep up: certainly not Billy J. Kramer, Gerry and the Pacemakers, and some of Epstein’s other charges. But the Fab Four rode the wave with astonishing élan, graduating from cheerful teen anthems like ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ to the avant-garde mash-up of ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ in three short years.

Epstein had instituted the matching suits, the unison bowing, and the haircuts which, though long by the standards of the day, always looked combed and clean. All this gave the Beatles’ early presentation a showbiz neatness, but more importantly it fed a public sense of ‘the group’ as shared identity, a unified collective aligned towards some common goal. Within a couple of years, though, these early trappings looked fussy and old-fashioned. History had rolled on.

Jacob Fortune-Lloyd’s Epstein is tall, rangy, chiselled, and tormented. Organised and decisive in his business dealings, he’s shown as passive and masochistic in an emotional life mostly comprised of joyless fumblings with strangers in dark, sordid places. While pursuing the al fresco gay sex which leaves him vulnerable to assault and robbery, Epstein yearns for the settled joys of home and family: an irreconcilable combination which can surely end only in tears.

And there’s worse in store. In New York, Epstein meets struggling actor John ‘Tex’ Ellington, who seems to offer some prospect of meaningful connection. Tex arrives in London, moves into Epstein’s grandiose hotel suite – and disappears with a briefcase containing £20,000. The chaos of Epstein’s personal life has finally erupted into the disciplined world of his career; the cycle of shame and humiliation is complete. Unsurprisingly, he has a breakdown. It’s inferred that his energies are henceforward increasingly sublimated into his work, although the film doesn’t delve into the rumoured sexual dimensions of Epstein’s dealings with the band.

But the question remains – how to get the terminal velocity of the Sixties on screen? Midas Man covers a time of great experiment in film – the Pop Art deconstruction of Jean-Luc Godard, the kinetic energy of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ – but it stays mostly within the cinematic conventions of the standard biopic. When it moves into more inventive territory, we see what might have been.

In the sequences recounting the band’s U.S. and international tours, the screen is divided into three sections. The middle segment has Epstein walking towards the camera but never getting any closer, all the while accepting pills and drinks from unseen hands. Collaged photos limn a whirl of impressions. The effect is bold, graphic, dreamlike, and a clever encapsulation of the risky hamster wheel Epstein is walking. The film comes alive in these moments.

Like Back to Black a few months ago, Midas Man sets out to celebrate its protagonist’s life, and like the earlier film it spares us Epstein’s sad, possibly self-inflicted end. Instead, it concludes with the studio recording of ‘All You Need is Love’, broadcast to 25 countries and over 400 million people two months before Epstein’s death. This is presented as a personal apotheosis, although it was a technical achievement (the first-ever live global TV link) rather than an emotional milestone.

After this, the circumstances of Epstein’s death are conveyed in a brief onscreen text. But I think it was a mistake to cut the narrative at this point. If we’d been given a sense of the grief and confusion following Epstein’s death we might have truly felt his loss, and perhaps grasped how genuinely precious the Midas Man had become. @IanLong

IN UK AND IRISH CINEMAS FROM 14 OCTOBER

PRIME VIDEO from 30 OCTOBER 2024

Endurance (2024)

Dirs: Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, Jimmy Chin, Natalie Hewit | UK-USA 2024. Doc, 100min

The actual voices of British Polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton and his crew come alive in thanks to AI techniques in this new documentary charting their remarkable journey to Antarctica in 1914.

The Endurance, his boat, would sink without trace but the crew diaries and original expedition footage and photos kept by team member Frank Hurley survive to tell the tragic tale for the first time ever, restored by the BFI National Archive,

Interweaving past and present in a tense step by step expose, a team of current day explorers reveal how the ship was located over a century later in the Spring of 2022, some 3000m beneath the icy depths of the treacherous Weddell Sea. It was intact.

Crucially Shackleton’s indomitable spirit, perseverance and courage was key to the survival of his 27-strong crew after the Endurance went down after being locked in solid pack-ice. Shackleton had continuously boosted the morale of his men and their trusty pack of dogs for an entire year.

The Endurance22 expedition team, onboard the South African icebreaker S.A. Agulhas II, made use of state of the art search technology to find the Endurance led by their Dr John Shears, expedition subsea manager Nico Vincent, director of exploration Mensun Bound and historian and broadcaster Dan Snow (son of ‘swingometer’ supremo John Snow).

Keeping alive the memory of Sir Ernest Shackleton the documentary serves as both a gripping slice of history and a tribute to all those who risk their lives in courageous endeavour. @MeredithTaylor

SCREENING DURING THE BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2024

My Favourite Cake (2024)

Dirs: Maryam Moghaddam, Behtash Sanaeeha | Iran, Drama 97’

The current success of a new Iranian film My Favourite Cake in the UK press is remarkable. This achievement comes at the same time that we are viewing news bulletins containing images of increasingly repressive morality laws curtailing the rights of women, videos of Iranian women wearing veils and singing so as to be heard but not seen, as well as news of the house arrest of the filmmakers of this remarkable film that follows their award-winning Ballad of a White Cow.

The film was first screened at the 2024 Berlin Film Festival where it garnered worldwide distribution after winning the FIPRESCI and the Ecumenical Jury prize. The fate of the filmmakers is not yet known with charges against them involving scenes of women without veils and the drinking of wine, which is forbidden. The message behind the universal themes of the film however feels even more potent now.

My Favourite Cake is essentially a two hander between Mahin, played by Lily Farhadpour, and Faramarz, played by Esmail Mehrab, which explores feelings of love and affection that grow between two people who meet and engineer a clandestine night together. This may in other hands seem a straightforward and simple form of romcom but there is a subtle and very real difference as the drama happens within a framework of laws governing the lives of Iranian women.

The film opens on a quiet new day and ends with the dawn of another new day when nothing will be the same for Lily. She is a war widow who lost her husband years ago, has a grown-up family who live abroad and whom we hear on the phone but never see. The film includes a meal for a group of her enlightened women friends who all meet from time to time to discuss life, remember days of youth and poke gentle fun at the conventions of contemporary Iranian life. The film views Lily as a woman possibly constrained by the concerns of a wider family, and the daily pressure of life that includes nosy intolerant women in the apartment block where she lives. Framarz has spent a life time diligently working hard as a taxi driver. He was once married, never had children and is divorced. The two meet on an evening together with the knowledge that Iranian law forbids women to meet men without the presence of male members of family and as well as intimate relationships between men and women outside of marriage.

Directors Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha are a married couple who have created a sensitive and beautiful film that echoes the mood and tempo that Rainer Werner Fassbinder bought to Fear Eats the Soul in 1972. Links with the earlier German film about a relationship between an older woman and a younger Arab man are remarkable with both films exploring how personal freedoms and sexual desire are challenged and thwarted by the pressure of social and political convention. They also contain gentle naturalistic performances and use initial cross cuts between two people merging into a single frame as both rediscover feelings and a sense of belonging through the power of love. The use of a car as an enclosed private space in which people grow and change is effective, as are references to mirrors and the use of lighting along with scenes involving a television screen which is how Lily escapes into the romantic world of golden age cinema. Fassbinder included a coterie of women around his central character commenting on life and in My Favourite Cake a group of taxi drivers are observed talking about the meaningless nature of war and how better life was before the revolution of 1979. An image of a Viagra package is one of many tiny telling instances of detail that build up the fabric of the film.

Final scenes contain an element of framing involving melodrama which has always been part of the power of cinema to engage an audience and the poignant heart-breaking conclusion of My Favourite Cake reflects this, as well as evoking the film that inspired Fear Eats the Soul. This is All that Heaven Allows, a 1955 American film by Douglas Sirk, about the relationship between a widow and a young man which is all but ruined by problems of class, convention and repression which are ideas present in this latest film. Sirk commented that he intended the title of his film to be a metaphor for what little heaven allows and how stingy this can be. My Favourite Cake takes this provocative concept a stage further by offering two people a mere slice of a beautiful blossom orange cake that may never actually be tasted or eaten.

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Boom! (1968)

Dir: Joseph Losey | Cast: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Noel Coward | Drama 118’

Well, the money is certainly up there on the screen.

There are few sights to be savoured more than several rich and honoured creative people making a bunch of complete fools of themselves, while that loud noise you can hear is of several hard-earned reputations imploding.

Marking yet another step in his seemingly determined efforts to totally dismantle the reputation that Joseph Losey had painfully established, he took his cast all the way to the isle of Capri with a crew including top cameraman Douglas Slocombe only to throw any credibility he had left straight out of the window as his expensive talent just talked and talked and talked. @RichardChatten

NOW ON YOUTUBE

Cobra Woman (1944)

Dir: Robert Siodmak | Cast: Maria Montez, Jon Hall, Edgar Barrier, Sabu | Fantasy thriller 71’

Bette Davis once denied posterity the chance to savour the young Bette in Technicolor since for her it was the script that counted and if a script was any good it didn’t need the ‘gimmick’ of Technicolor so colour was her salad days usually synonymous with lousy writing.

‘Cobra Woman’ certainly provides yet a further demonstration of how awash Hollywood was with talent during the forties in Universal’s ability to squander a classy German director and the miracle that was Technicolor – photographed and designed by the same team that only the year before had collected an Academy Award for photography and art direction – on such a load of ripe hokum with a leading lady the limits of whose ability was photographing well in Technicolor.

But when you see Miss Montez perform her dance of death you’ll find that’s quite enough, thank you. @RichardChatten

Five Star Final (1931)

Dir: Mervyn LeRoy | Cast: Edward D Robinson, Marian Marsh, H B Warner | US Drama. 97’

Joseph, an editor of a tabloid, goes against his journalistic morals when he tries to stimulate public interest in a 20-year-old murder case in order to raise the circulation of the newspaper.

Mervyn LeRoy is one of those bizarre anomalies sadly common in film history that his career continued well past its peak with the result that his reputation suffered accordingly. Had he died or retired in 1935, or simply stuck to producing (‘The Wizard of Oz’ was one of his) posterity today would accord him much more respect.

Consider ‘Five-Star Final’ (the title refers to the final edition of a newspaper), sandwiched between authentic classics ‘Little Caesar’ and ‘I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang’, a morality tale which still resonates today on the question of journalistic responsibility, with its adroit use of split-screen and a supporting performance by a then unknown actor called Boris Karloff as a character so vile preview audiences actually protested that he was allowed to reach the end still alive. @RichardChatten

The Rules of the Game (1939)

Dir: Jean Renoir | Cast: Nora Gregor, Gaston Modot, Paulette Dubost, Mila Parély, Marcel Dalio, Julien Carette, Roland Toutain | France, Drama 110’

Some of the recent choices in critics polls for the greatest films of all time have been getting pretty idiosyncratic of late but my own nomination for the top spot remains ‘La Regle du Jeu‘, which plainly served as the template for Robert Altman’s ‘Gosford Park’ which in turn became ‘Downtown Abbey’. (Although the resemblance to ‘Upstairs Downstairs’ may be just a coincidence).

Set like many films in a huge country house but unusually depicting it as a fully functioning entity it remains a film of overwhelming humanity staged with a vibrancy that should make it compulsory viewing for all aspiring filmmakers. @RichardChatten

Bigger than Life (1956)

Dir: Nicolas Ray | Barbara Rush, Walter Matthau, James Mason | US Drama 97’

One of several bold choices made by James Mason that undeservingly died at the box office, resulting in his relegation to supporting roles. It’s always the the measure of an actor that he’s prepared to be unlikable and Mason manages to be absolutely terrifying in the throes of (SPOILER COMING:) drug addiction (his line, delivered deadpan to Walter Matthau that “God was wrong” has to the definitive expression of megalomania).

It comes as a surprise to see this intimate drama made in colour and ‘scope, but the huge close-up of Mason smugly drawing on a cigarette after scandalising a PTA meeting by declaring that “childhood is a disease and our job is to cure it”provides conclusive proof that close ups WERE possible in widescreen, while director Nicholas Ray makes several vivid use of colour as when in an early scene the screen is filled with yellow cabs, and at the climax when Mason brandishes a bible with red edges that makes it resemble a hot coal. @RichardChatten

ON BFI PLAYER

The Sleeping Tiger (1954)

Dir: Joseph Losey | Cast: Dirk Bogarde, Alexis Smith, Alexander Knox | Drama 89’

Even today Victor Hanbury is still regularly described just as a mere pseudonym for the blacklisted American director Joseph Losey with the themes in ‘The Sleeping Tiger’ usually attributed to Losey.

Hanbury though had been very much a real person whose career went back to the thirties and dealt with similar subjects in films he had recently produced like ‘Death Comes to School’ and ‘Glad Tidings’.

Alexander Knox in the first of several roles for Losey plays a typically obtuse Hanbury male completely oblivious to the passion welling within his wife – played by Alexei Smith who Losey when she first arrived took her to Speakers Corner where she was staggered to hear people openly saying things that would get them lynched or arrested back home – for bad boy Dirk Bogarde. @RichardChatten

NOW ON TALKING PICTURES

April (2024) Venice Film Festival 2024

Dir/Wri: Dea Kulumbegashvili | Ia Sukhitashvili, Kakha Kintsurashvili, Merab Ninidze | DoP: Arseni Khachaturan | Georgia, Drama 134′

Birth, life and death in the Caucasian Mountains is the focus of this extraordinary existential film. April is a Tarkovskian slow-burn thriller, part love story, part murder mystery, competing for the Golden Lion at Venice 2024 and certainly deserving of its award of Special Jury Prize. This penetrating portrait of guilt, alienation and quiet trauma is a second film for Georgia’s Dea Kulumbegashvili who swept the board with her 2020 debut Beginning, and now has Luca Guadagnino as a producer. It explores the state of existing as a woman without fulfilling traditional expectations.

High in a mountain village a mummified, atavistic figure plods along in pitch black while voices of children sing outing the void. Rain falls on a muddy puddle: April showers. A woman gives birth in a traumatic scene. The baby dies. There’s a great deal of darkness in April. All this contrasts with bursts of blinding light: the zinging colours of Spring, a rebirth: neon cherry blossoms, acid green meadows where scarlet poppies dance in the sunshine, a skylark soars into the heavens.

In a darkened room an investigation gets under way between the respected obstetrician Nina, (Sukhitashvili), her male colleague (Kinturashvili), and the hospital director (celebrated actor Merab Ninidze). This was apparently an unregistered pregnancy. The woman wanted to give birth naturally, but the medical profession demanded a caesarian. Nina respected the woman’s wishes. Her life is dedicated to serving the female community, above her own private life and, at times, the law.

On an open road travelling into the night Nina harks back to an incident where he sister nearly died in a lake. She felt powerless to help her. Feelings of guilt flood back, overwhelming her once again. The zombie-like figure reappears, an enigmatic motif for Nina’s emotional torture and self-loathing. Motherhood has slipped away from her in this devoutly Orthodox Christian village where bearing children is a woman’s main duty. Her jeep grinds away in heavy mud transporting her high into the mountains to deliver (or kill) the offspring of dutiful women, some of them still in their early teens. And there is one woman, a blind mute, who never had a choice.

Scenes unfold where Nina is clearly present but out of the frame, suggesting her to be enigmatic with complex motives, viewed with suspicion and a questioning supplication by her doctor colleague, a man she once loved, and rejected. He looks into the camera in one of the most emotionally intimate sequences even committed to celluloid: appealing desperately to, Nina, his former lover: “If you don’t want a man in your life, at least have a child”.

Nina is seen visiting a nighttime cattle market where disorientated livestock stare out from their sordid trailers, the farmers circling their prey. Nina defies convention to plow her own lonely furrow. This is her mission in life. She has no choice. April is not an easy film but one you will always remember. @MeredithTaylor

SPECIAL JURY PRIZE | VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2024

The Apprentice (2024)

Dir: Ali Abassi | Script: Gabriel Sherman | Cast: Sebastian Stan, Jeremy Strong, Maria Bakalova, Martin Donovan, Catherine McNally, Charlie Carrick, Ben Sullivan, Mark Rendall, Joe Pingue, Jim Monaco, Bruce | Biopic Drama, 120′

As Donald Trump storms back to the Presidency for a second term of office the words: “You’re either a killer or a loser” still ring true. This is the advice a young Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan) gets from his acerbic mentor Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) in this polarising political biopic written by journalist Gabriel Sherman and directed by Iranian-Danish filmmaker Ali Abassi (Border) and Holy Spider (who is now perhaps best known for his involvement in The Last Of Us).

Cohn, the lawyer responsible for putting the Rosenbergs on the electric chair and a key figure in the McCarthy witch hunts, offers up three key bits of business advice during The Apprentice – an entertaining romp that zips briskly through its two hours running time sketching out Trump’s early career as an eager apprentice trained under the high-flying lawyer, and eventually trumping him in a tale of machiavellian morals, ethics and business acumen.

There are elements of poetic licence at play here: in other words Sherman plays slightly fast and loose with the facts in fleshing out Trump’s backstory. The result is a fairly even-handed feature that on the one hand sees the US former president as cold-eyed and devious, but on the other opines that these are the very tools of the trade for those wanting to get on in big business – or politics, for that matter. Crucially it also highlights the recent concept of the truth being a construct open to individual perception.

The focus narrows in on Trump from a broad brush opening outlining the corruption of the Nixon years and the inherent dishonesty that is now rife in all circles of power, not least in America. It contrasts the ‘losers’ (those on welfare) with the killers, the ‘unscrupulous’ hard-working income generators during the Reagan presidency that led to the phenomenon of ‘corporate greed’.

The Apprentice sees Trump starting out during the 1970s working for his property magnate father, Fred Trump (Martin Donovan). Dressed in a suit Donald is tasked with doing the rounds to collect rents. One disgruntled tenant throws a pan of boiling water in his face, another swears at him. The family business comes then under fire from a civil rights action alleging discrimination against Black tenants. Cohn wins the case, as his lawyer, with Trump senior claiming: “How can I be racist when I have a Black driver?”

But Donald is determined to make it alone and sets his sights on transforming the downtrodden area around Grand Central Station where he vows to make a success in a project of urban regeneration involving the dilapidated Commodore Hotel, bringing jobs, European tourists and a facelift for Manhattan.

Family wise we also meet Donald’s kindly mother Mary Anne (Catherine McNally), and his brother Freddy (Charlie Carrick) a failed pilot with emotional problems: Fred admits to having been tough on his boys. But Donald is hellbent on success and soon bonds with Cohn after a chance meeting at a fancy Manhattan nightclub frequented by the top flight business community. Working together they soon go from strength to strength in a business alliance with Trump styling himself in the same vein as Cohn with his fast-talking intransigence. His transformation into fully fledged killer who lives by his own standards happens almost overnight and feels a little too fast even given the film’s ample running time. But Stan grasps Trump’s essence charting his character’s transformation from reasonable business man to self-seeking hardliner.

Trump soon becomes a man who takes his own advice often rubbing Cohn up the wrong way, while at the same time chosing to turn a blind eye to his ‘strange way of life’ and hedonistic habits. Trump’s puritan background sees him gradually distancing himself from the lawyer who berates him for his lack of financial probity. Their relationship eventually sours during the AIDS crisis, although Trump offers an olive branch in the finale.

The marriage to Ivana Zelnickova, against Cohn’s advice, is handled deftly and with some humour. Trump follows Ivana to Aspen to clinch their romance then falls flat on the ice after claiming to be a good skier. The Czech model is a little two sweet and sympathetic despite her purported savvy business sense, but Trump soon tires of her, claiming to find their home life ‘more like coming home to a business partner than a wife’. A shocking episode sees him beating Ivana, but whether this has a factual basis, despite his widely reported misogyny, is uncertain. Stan’s Trump may be polarise public opining in coming across as too likeable but this is surely the essence of a maverick who can charm as well as chastise and here he gives a compelling performance.

With a killer score of hits that just reeks of the ’70s and ’80 and a scuzzy retro texture this is a compulsive portrait of an indomitable man whose rise to power is all-encompassing and more relevant now than it was back in the day. @MeredithTaylor

IN CINEMAS ACROSS UK & IRELAND from 18 October 2024

Why War (2024)

Dir: Amos Gitai | Israel, Drama 87’

Trying not to tread on anyone’s toes Amos Gitai’s latest is timely, in the context of Hamas’ attack on Israel, but offers no answer.

Why War is a question without a question mark, a rhetorical question. And well it might be. Like those who frame every statement as a question, this opens a debate that is timeless and inconclusive, so what’s the point.

As an Israeli Jew, and there are plenty of Israeli Muslims, Gitai is fully aware of the tiny country, the size of Wales, is surrounded on all sides with few friends in its vicinity. So it feels understandably vulnerable and permanently ready for attack in these continuously turbulent times

The title gets its name from regular correspondence between Jewish luminaries Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud in 1932. But even these great minds where unable to unearth a cogent answer to this age old conundrum, albeit providing much food for thought.

In Tel Aviv, during an outdoor yoga class we witness the many posters bearing the faces of Israeli hostages seized by Hamas on that fateful day in October 2023. This serves as a permanent reminder to those going about their daily lives that some innocent citizens are still in captivity somewhere.

To live in Israel is to be in a constant state of flux with war a constant possibility, and with soldiers, both male and female, ever-present in cafes, bars and malls. Each Israeli does military service from the age of 18 and Gitai was no different, so naturally his work and films such as Kippur (2000) is suffused and informed by this experience and this mulls over the same territory but brings nothing really new to the party that plods on philosophically hoping for the best but always preparing for the worst. @MeredithTaylor

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | OUT OF COMPETITION

Movern Callar (2002)

Dir/Wri: Lynne Ramsay | UK Drama | Cast: Samantha Morton

This adaptation of Alan Warner’s novel suffers from various central improbabilities and a queasily amoral tone starting with the eponymous heroine waking on Christmas morning and discovering her boyfriend has committed suicide leaving a fully completed novel on his computer.

Miss Caller then does a truly shocking thing (SPOILER COMING:) when showing absolutely no emotion she simply substitutes her name as author for her boyfriend’s and sends it to a publisher.

In reality any publisher presented with a manuscript from a first-time author might have eventually got round to replying expressing interest but stipulating “you’ve first got to change this, This, THIS, THIS, THIS, THIS, THIS (contd. P.94.) before we continue any further”.

But no, before you can say “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know” the book is a runaway best seller and Miss Caller spends the rest of the film as one of the ideal rich. The End. @RichardChatten

Familiar Touch (2024) VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2024

Dir/Wri: Sarah Friedland. US. 91′

Ruth Goldman (Kathleen Chalfant) enjoys living in her comfortable mid-century styled house in California, but with dementia life has to change. US filmmaker Sarah Friedland draws from her own experience as a care-worker and choreographer in this accomplished debut feature.

Why are people patronised when they grow old, and often referred to in the third person: ‘She’s had a fall”; “does she take sugar” and similar expressions, are often levelled at family members rather than to the individual.

Ruth is a widowed wife, mother and published author. Yet despite physical elegance and accomplishments her increasing state of health means a move to what is euphemistically referred to in the US as an ‘assisted living facility’ where staff regard her with mild and knowing amusement.

Chalfont seems fully aware of her altered state and maintains her sense of purpose. But her efforts to exude authority in her new environment – which she initially regards as an hotel – are often lightly brushed aside in this empathetic look at ageing as experienced through the eyes of a respectable woman who is no longer as capable as she once was. Friedland’s feature deals sensitively with its subject reflecting Ruth’s innate dignity in maintaining a sense of self despite the life-altering condition.

Familiar Touch is probably not the first film you opt for as entertainment but it’s certainly informative and enlightening – and if you’re familiar with the territory- it certainly rings true. Friedland, who won Best First Film at the Orrizonti strand at the 81st VENICE FILM FESTIVAL collaborated with the staff and clients at ‘Villa Gardens’ in California which is one of those specialist retirement homes for female educators.

Chalfont’s graceful performance as a woman keen to maintain her distance with her assigned nurse Vanessa (Carolyn Michelle), has a tragic ring to it. And we all nod in acknowledgement that one day, in the hopefully very distant future, this could possibly be us. @MeredithTaylor

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | HORIZONS BEST FIRST FEATURE AWARD

Basileia (2024) Venice Film Festival 2024

Dir/Wri: Isabella Torre | Cast: Elliott Crosset Hove, Angela Fontana, and Koudous Seihon | Italy, Sweden, Denmark, 90′

Hovering between fantasy and horror Isabella Torre fleshes out her debut feature Nymphs which premiered at Venice in 2018.

In deepest Calabria, a murky mystery unfolds in the remote and rugged Aspromonte mountains overlooking the Straits of Messina where an archaeologist (Crosset Hove/Godland) is searching for an ancient treasure. The dig unfortunately unleashes mythological creatures intent on wreaking havoc and retribution on the local inhabitants.

Similar to many outings in the genre, the film rides on its atmospheric visuals, sinister score (by Andrea de Sica) and troubling horror tropes – rather than suspenseful storytelling. Torre and her DoP Melanie Akoka concoct a creepy and uncomfortable sense of foreboding with this imaginative idea based on local legend, with the menacing message: ‘mess with nature and nature will bring you death and destruction’.

Many believe that when tampered with the earth and its supernatural forces will deliver a nasty sting in the tail to prospectors who disturb and plunder its resources disturbing the status quo. And we’ve certainly had a dose of it with the recent pandemic which, according to some sources, had its origins in an undiscovered bat cave.

In real life Calabria is mafia or ‘Ndrangeta’ country and well known for nefarious goings on such as kidnappings, disappearances and the like. Torre inventively sublimates fact into fiction with an imaginative tale about forces of evil that manifest as glassy-eyed nymphs roaming around and spooking the male archaeologist and his team with their unearthly presence, their nakedness suggestive of succubi-like beings that work their ‘magic’ at night in the subconscious, making a refreshing change from the ubiquitous vampires (and possibly inspired by Gustav Klimt’s 1899 painting ‘Water Nymphs’. An intriguing, well-crafted film that will certainly appeal to horror fans with its visual flair and evocative sense of place. Once again Elliott Crosset Hove lends a touch of religious fervour to this deeply ungodly feature. @MeredithTaylor

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL | CLOSING FILM AT VENICE DAYS 2024

Millions Like Us (1943)

Dir: Sidney Gillian, Frank Launder | UK War Drama

A good-humoured exhortation to women of Britain that working in a headscarf and factory overalls was just as important to winning the war as serving in uniform, whose expressive use of Beethoven on the soundtrack once more demonstrated the British capacity for magnanimity even in time of war.

Gilliatt & Launder’s first venture into direction proved the only occasion on which they actually stood side by side on the set to give instructions; a practice that proved unwieldy so they subsequently took it in turns in all their later films (Launder, for example directed the St Trinian’s films).

Several of those involved were already well established with Launder & Gilliat at Gainsborough – including the cameraman, producer & editor of ‘Oh! Mr Porter’ – with the supporting cast including Gainsborough veterans Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne as Charters & Caldecott in uniform and Moore Marriott as Patricia Roc’s father who joins the Home Guard. @RichardChatten

TALKING PICTURES UK

Paul and Paulette take a Bath (2024) Venice Film Festival

Dir/Wri: Jethro Massey | Cast: Marie Benati, Jérémie Galiana | UK

In a summery Paris boy meets girl. She is a french lesbian who occasionally dates men. He is a straightforward American photographer, and their names, Paul and Paulette, give this stylishly offbeat-foodie themed romcom from debut filmmaker Jethro Murray its generic title, playing in this year’s Venice Film Festival Critics’ Week.

History tells us that in 1941/2 the United States intended to make France a ‘vassal’ state and almost succeeded with ‘Amgot’, De Gaulle objected. Despite all that the nation has taken up American spellings and US voiceovers in many transport systems. Deciding to re-enact the guillotining of Marie Antoinette Paul severs Paulette’s hair. Phone numbers are exchanged.

Inviting him to the soigné apartment borrowed from a friend she tries to seduce Paul by spinning a yarn about France’s first celebrity murderer in the Malle Sanglante affair. And so begins their relationship. Roaming around the French capital they do fun things together like imagining foodie treats and what a variety of iconic characters might taste like – from Ghenghis Khan to Hitler and even Kim Jong Un. They even ‘discover the pubic hair’ of Elvis Presley, Paulette’s teenage idol. They mull over the complexities of love and living together: “If things go sideways you shouldn’t go back”.

But Paulette’s flirty loucheness fails to impress the uncomplicated American Paul: “You’re always putting on a show it must be exhausting”. In other words she’s a pretentious drag.

Smitten despite all this Paul hires a VW Beetle and persuades Paulette to join him on an ad-hoc adventure. She agrees, reluctantly, but must visit her parents Charlotte and Gilles, an ex rugby player who murdered a child. When the young couple arrive we discover a dysfunctional household. And the young couple start to question their own motives in this vague ‘nouvelle vague’ romcom that winds its scenic way through Paris, Alsace and Munich.

There is a whiff of the Sixties in the snoozy score and the mid-century furniture in the apartment the couple stay in on their romantic interlude. This is a confident debut that has its moments but doesn’t really stand out in the genre despite game performances from Galiana and Benati. @MeredithTaylor

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | CRITICS’ WEEK 2024

Aïcha (2024) Venice Film Festival 2024

Dr/Wri: Mehdi Barsaoui | Fatma Sfar, Nidhal Saadi, Yasmine Dimassi, Hela Ayed | Thriller, 123’

Aïcha, the sole survivor of a bus crash, secures a new identity in this exciting and enlightening change of life thriller from Tunisian filmmaker Mehdi Barsaoui.

Working as a chambermaid in a luxury hotel, Aïcha has been in an impossible situation. Her parents are in debt, and forcing her into a loveless marriage. She’s also caught up in an affair with a married man who promises more than he can offer. So the crash, although traumatic, offers a reprieve and the chance to disappear and totally reinvent herself in another part of Tunisia. There were no witnesses to testify to her survival.

Mehdi M. Barsaoui avoids melodrama to offer a fascinating look at the North African nation through the eyes of a clever young woman who has gains agency due to chance and sheer chutzpah on her part.

We get to know Aïcha through a nuanced characterisation that shows how she is shaped by the past and tradition while being very much a modern woman. In the capital, now calling herself Amira, she gets a room in a house owned by a forward-thinking girl Lobna. They venture out on the town – not a head covering in sight – and enjoy themselves with two friends Rafik and Khaled. These scenes are set to a tranquil score in contrast to a street fight which Aïcha tries to break up, introducing us to another of Lobna’s friends. But they’re a fiery crowd and violence and danger is never far from the equation.

Being at the wrong place at the wrong time Aïcha later finds herself in police custody, wearing a brief red dress and without her identity papers, bringing us starkly back to reality of this paternalistic society. Once again Aïcha’s sheer grit comes into play as this haunting social drama rapidly morphs into a noirish police thriller, Barsoui handling the subtle tonal shift with dexterity in this brilliant follow-up to his award-winning debut feature A Son. Aïcha is screening at this year’s Venice Film Festival in the Horizons sidebar. @MeredithTaylor

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | HORIZONS 2024

That Lady in Ermine (1948)

Dir: Ernst Lubitsch | Betty Grable, Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Cesar Romero | Drama

One of the advantages of living alone is you can watch any old rubbish you like on TV without having to justify your choice of viewing to your family; a lesson I learned the hard way one afternoon in the bad old days when households only had only the one telly when I settled down to watch this film and barely ten minutes into it my sister indignantly exclaimed “What a TERRIBLE film!!” Whereupon I stormed up to my room and had to wait over twenty more years before finally getting a proper opportunity to see it.

Although historically most notable as Lubitsch’s final film – much of it actually being the work of Otto Preminger, a director not exactly noted for his light touch – on its own terms it can be enjoyed as a nostalgic return to Lubitsch’s old stamping ground of mittel-European romantic comedy with the additional embellishments of a sumptuous Technicolor production – which at $2.4 million had the largest budget Lubitsch ever commanded – immaculately photographed by Leon Shamroy. @RichardChatten

The Courageous (2024) Toronto Film Festival 2024

Dir: Jasmin Gordon | Drama, Switzerland, 80′

A Swiss mother of three finds herself on mean streets in this filmic but rather flat family drama premiering at this year’s Toronto Film festival.

Jule (Ophélia Kolb) is a difficult character to engage with. In the film’s early scenes, set in the gloriously scenic Valais region of Switzerland, the attractive 40 year old blonde abandons her well-behaved kids during a family outing only to reappear much later without much explanation. 10-year-old Claire, her eldest, seems mature for her age and has a non-plussed but philosophical attitude towards her complicated mother. Along with eight-year-old Loïc, and six-year-old Sami — these kids have learned to take care of one another, and while their rather self-entitled parent, a working bookkeeper, clearly feels disgruntled at not being able to offer them the life they all dream of, her attitude does not help their cause.

Because this is Switzerland, a wealthy country, the film explores whether all its citizens should share this wealth, and Jasmin Gordon’s focus here is the ‘working poor’. July has set her heart on a charming home amid pleasant surroundings but it is just beyond her reach financially and she lacks agency in pursuing her ideal future. Without much social grace, Jule tackles the various housing representatives by going off on a series of misguided tantrums, flouncing out of one office, and berating the estate agent in change of her desired home, and this does not help her cause, despite her difficult situation.

In her feature debut, The Courageous Gordon invites the viewer ‘to set aside judgements and step into someone else’s shoes’, according to the film’s notes, but a more vulnerable, appealing central character would certainly help the audience to do so and feel Jule’s pain. In contrast Laure Calamy’s depiction of social desperation in the recent Venice title My Everything garners much more sympathy helping the viewer to root for her all the way despite her understandable rants. @MeredithTaylor.

TORONTO FILM FESTIVAL 2024

Daughter’s Daughter (2024) Toronto Film Festival 2024

Dir: Huang Xi | Taiwan Drama 122′

The fate of an embryo is at the heart of this complex female-centric second feature from Huang Xi (Missing Johnny) a confident new voice in Taiwanese cinema. Starring well actor Sylvia Chang, Daughter’s Daughter is a bold and nuanced character study that shows how older women have as much agency as the younger generation in deciding the future of their family to be.

Jin Aixia, Mrs Fan, (Chang), a wealthy divorcee, enjoys a relaxed existence living in a beautiful apartment where she dabbles on the Stockmarket, socialises in her sports club, looks after her glamorous but rather confused mother, and has two daughters of her own who never met until they were grown up. Emma (Karena Lam), lived in New York, and Fan Zuer (Eugenie Liu), in Taipei. An attempt at IVF with her partner Jiayi, finally brings them to the US. But after a successful outcome the couple are sadly killed in an accident—leaving Aixia as the legal guardian of their potential offspring.

Now in New York, and in deep shock, Jin Aixia must decide the fate of this embryo. Overwhelmed with grief, she is faced with a choice: should she donate, terminate, or find a surrogate for the viable embryo. Having been a natural mother herself Jin Aixia has absolutely no idea how to proceed in the world of IVF or how to cope with the changes to her family; it’s a process totally foreign to her, along with how to deal with street beggars in the US capital. Confused and disorientated her mind seesaws backwards and forwards as she grapples with the present and a new experience, in a foreign city.

Financed by Taiwanese New Wave master Hou Hsiao-hsien this is a sleek and elegant contemporary feature that explores the difficult issues involved without stinting on visual appeal and with a sensitive and thoughtful central performance from Sylvia Chang. @MeredithTaylor

TORONTO FILM FESTIVAL 2024

Vermiglio (2024) Venice Film Festival 2024

Dir: Maura Delpero | Cast: Tommaso Ragno, Roberta Rovelli, Martina Scrinzi, Giuseppe De Domenico | Italy Drama 119′

In a snowy mountain village high in the Italian Alps, largely untouched by the hostilities, a family gathers for breakfast. It’s 1944 and the Second World War is coming to an end, but for this family the trauma is only just beginning. By a stroke of fate a refugee soldier will bring tragedy of a different kind just as Europe finds peace.

Premiering in the main competition at the 81st Venice Film festival Vermiglio is an endearing classically styled drama unfolding in four chapters. A Sicilian soldier, Pietro (De Domenico), is hailed as a hero and the girls are excited, particularly Lucia (Scrinzi) who is drawn to this chance of romance in this isolated mountain setting.

Soon the two are in love but their relationship will change the village forever as deep-seated misogyny resurfaces both here in the far North of the country, and in Pietro’s Sicilian village where a secret slowly emerges. A beautiful film full of nostalgia and solid performances, Vermiglio has commercial appeal but nevertheless feels rather formulaic in picturing women trapped in traditional roles and forced to accept the strictures and errors of their menfolk. @MeredithTaylor

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | GRAND JURY PRIZE

The Witness (2024) Venice Film Festival 2024

Dir: Nader Saeivar | Cast: Maryam Boubani, Abbas Imani, Ghazal Shoji | Iran, Drama 100′

Iranian dramas usually turn on some grave moral dilemma as this latest one, a clever social commentary, co-written by Jafar Panahi and Nader Saeivar, on how Iranians are forced to bow to government pressure, or suffer the consequences.

Veteran actor Maryam Boubani is Tarlan, a retired teacher, living comfortably in Tehran. But her peace of mind is shattered when her friend Rana is murdered by her own husband, a well-known politician. Tarlan faces a stark choice: yield to political pressure or risk losing her reputation and livelihood.

By Iranian standards this is a sleek and cinematic social drama, well acted and with a pithy story at its core, offering solid entertainment for the arthouse crowd @MeredithTaylor

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | HORIZONS EXTRA

Shepherds (2024) Toronto Film Festival 2024

Dir: Sophie Deraspe | Cast: Félix-Antoine Duval, Solène Rigot | France, Canada Drama 114′

A Canadian fetches up in Arles needing to rethink his life in this rustic game-changer from Sophie Deraspe one of the leading figures in new Canadian cinema.

From the get-go the locals advise Mathyas (Duval) against being a shepherd in rural Arles – it’s a gruelling way of life, and Deraspe doesn’t try to glamourise it in a ‘back to nature way’. But being a shepherd is an occupation much needed in this friendly part of Provence, and an obvious choice for a young man who loves nature and is looking for a new start (Mathyas actually wrote the book on which the film is based).

Strangely enough a work permit is the sticking point for Mathyas, a Quebecois from Montreal. Everyone who’s tried knows how amazingly difficult it is for an outsider to get a visa in France – you have to apply in your country of origin – contacts or no contacts. But let’s suspend our disbelief for the sake of this cinematic and confident drama.

Farming is a rude and rustic awakening for the naive former ad exec: And the sheep are the least of his problems. After a run-in with his boss, and several other locals, female company arrives for Mathayas in the shape of Elise who, in exchange for a roof over her head, offers to cook, a task she finds challenging the main diet being sheep lungs.

After a lucky break the two start afresh and manage to make ago of things. Good to know that no animals were harmed in the film’s production. @MeredithTayor

TORONTO FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | SEPTEMBER 2024

The Fall of Berlin (1950)

Mikheil Chiaurelli | War drama 167’

At the conclusion of ‘The Fall of Berlin’ (SLIGHT SPOILER COMING:) the Soviet leader’s plane lands in Berlin (an extremely unlikely occurrence since Stalin – portrayed by Mikhail Gelovani as a genial, pipe-smoking old cove in a gleaming white uniform – was afraid of flying) and a woman promptly rushes up to him, puts her arms around him and gives him a hug; when in reality she wouldn’t have got five feet before being clubbed to the ground. Which gives you a pretty good idea that this film should to be taken with a considerable pinch of salt.

Not long before Goebbels, after screening his recently completed Napoleonic epic ‘Kolberg’ to his bemused staff famously declared that a hundred years from now another fine colour film would be made commemorating the terrible times Germany was then going through. The Doctor’s prediction was answered far more swiftly than he could possibly have imagined since only four years later he featured as a limping caricature in the Soviet Union’s seventieth birthday present to their Dear Leader, resplendent in captured Agfacolor and with a score by Shostakovich (who later said that the assignment saved his bacon since at a critical moment he was engaged upon valuable work for the state) and by the look it probably consumed most of the Soviet Union’s GDP for 1949. @RichardChatten

NOW ON AMAZON

Vittoria (2024) Venice Film Festival 2024

Dirs: Alessandro Cassigoli, Casey Kauffman | Cast: Marilena Amato, Gennaro Scarica, Vincenzo Scarica, Anna Amato, Nina Lorenza Ciano Italy | 89′

To working class Naples, and the typically southern port town of Torre Annunciata in the distant shadow of Mount Vesuvius, where Alessandro Cassigoli and Casey Kauffman’s drama centres on real events and a follow-up up to their 2021 drama Californie. This time they’re backed by Nanni Moretti as producer.

Vittoria assembles a cast of newcomers aka ‘non-actors’ giving this slice of dreamy realism an off-the-cuff feel in depicting the story of a gutsy woman desperate to extend her family with a much-wanted girl.

Hairdresser Jasmine (Marilena Amato), a fiercely independent woman not to be messed with, has a classic ‘heart of gold’, and consults a fortune-teller. The rest is history, as they say.

Married to Rino, (Gennaro Scarica) a strong silent type who works tirelessly as a jobbing carpenter, the two have a son Vincenzo (Vincenzo Scarica) who is helping his mother in her salon, and two younger boys in a household where mum clearly holds sway. But the desire for a daughter in the family haunts her dreams (along with her dead father). It’s what motivates and bugs Jasmine so much she’s prompted to act on it.

The cast’s strong Neapolitan dialect and a heady score add authenticity and emotional weight to what is a moving piece of filmmaking with a touch of lyricism and possibly the duo’s most appealing to date. @MeredithTaylor

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | HORIZONS EXTRA

Apollo 13: Survival (2024)

Dir: Peter Middleton | Doc 96′

You may think you know the story of Apollo 13 but this filmic documentary offers further insight into the crisis that unfolded on April 13th 1970, when a catastrophic explosion rocked the Apollo 13 spacecraft, stranding three astronauts halfway to the moon.

Within a few hours, the primary oxygen and power supply failed, setting the stage for one of the great survival stories in human history. The following days involved a tense rescue mission as the world watched with bated breath.

Apollo 13: Survival plunders the archives and adds never-before-seen film materials and archival interviews with the crew, their families and the team at Ground Control in addition to covering much the same ground as Ron Howard’s 1995 feature starring Tom Hanks.

Here Middleton adds the voice of the astronaut Jim Lovell recorded right after an electrical fault shorted the power on their craft on its way to the moon. Nasa scientists were forced to devise a plan to circuit the moon while making best use of the dwindling oxygen supplies in bringing those famous men back to earth. Catnip for space travel fans. @MeredithTaylor

APOLLO 13: SURVIVAL launches on Netflix on 5th September

The Third Man (1949) 75th Anniversary

Dir: Carol Reed | Orson Welles, Joseph Cotton, Alida Valli, Trevor Howard, Ernst Deutsch | UK, Thriller 104′

The Third Man starring Joseph Cotton, Trevor Howard and Orson Welles is now considered pure cinema gold. This iconic cult classic, shot partly on location in postwar Vienna and partly in Shepperton Studios, captures a very short moment in time yet has stayed with us and is now celebrating its 75th Anniversary immaculately restored by Studiocanal.

Harry Lime’s speech about the cuckoo clock always seemed to me just sophistry and his remark about people being just dots to him reveals that he’s a sociopath for all of his charm; which necessitated him (SPOILER COMING:) killing the film’s most likeable character to justify his comeuppance (a moment that always comes as a shock to me no matter how many times I see it).

Although it seems starkly realistic, The Third Man is a triumph of artifice, since Welles is only in the film for about ten minutes (he wasn’t actually in Vienna for much longer, which is why you so seldom see his breath in closeups). The sewers in Vienna don’t actually provide the unbroken passage throughout the city the film so vividly suggests and the famous final shot in the cemetery wasn’t shot by Oscar-winning cameraman Robert Krasker, but an uncredited Hans Schneeburger (who did get a credit a few years later for his second unit work on Carol Reed’s The Man Between).

The opening narration by the way (only heard in the British version) is by director Reed himself (who’s fingers are seen coming through the grill at the climax). And two of my favourite moments belong to Bernard Lee: his admiration for the craftsmanship that went into Valli’s forged documents and his reassurance when reading through her love letters, “That’s all right miss, we’re used to it. Like doctors”. @RichardChatten

At a talk on in celebration of the restored film second unit script supervisor Angela Allen, now in her 90s, recalls that Orson remained elusive throughout the shoot, rushing around Europe in a bid to raise money for his other projects, and although he had a certain charisma he kept himself to himself, unlike Joseph Cotton, Alida Valli and Trevor Howard who were popular and professional. She also recalls how, when presented with Wiener schnitzel in one Viennese restaurant, some of the crew claimed: “we’re not gonna eat fish done up as meat”. @MeredithTaylor

NOW CELEBRATING its 75th Anniversary THE THIRD MAN is back in cinemas on 6 September and on 4K this Autumn

Phantosmia (2024) Venice Film Festival 2024

Dir. Lav Diaz | Cast: Ronnie Lazaro, Janine Gutierrez, Hazel Orencio, Paul Jake Paule | Drama 250′

There is possibly no other contemporary filmmaker like Lav Diaz in the fact that his life’s work is the history of the Philippines, and how that history has created what could be looked on as the cursed earth of post imperialism taken over by warring religious factions, social values and their deterioration, and issues about distorted history and its psychological effects on the nation and its people. The Chilean documentarian Patricio Guzmán is another, of course, but his work is documentary form and not drama.

With his latest, Phantosmia premiering Out Of Competition at this year’s Venice Film Festival (which has become his preferred location to unfurl new work), he sees the completion of a loose trilogy that follows When the Waves are Gone and Essential Truths of the Lake which examines the cyclical trauma and endless violence of Filipino history.

The film centres on Hilarion Zabala (played by Diaz regular Ronnie Lazaro), whose mysterious olfactory problem has recurred. A psychiatrist suspects it to be a lingering case of phantosmia, a phantom smell, and possibly caused by trauma, a deep psychological fracture. One recommended radical process to cure the ailment was that Hilarion must go back and deal with the darkest currents of his past life in the military service. Re-assigned to the very remote Pulo Penal Colony, he must also confront the horrific realities of his present situation.

As has been his wont in the majority of his films Diaz opts to film in a beautiful monochrome which he describes as assuming the role gunita (memory) for him and transports him back to the primal seasons of his youth.

Diaz is mistakenly referred to by that pejorative term “Slow Cinema”, which is the simplistic reasoning to do with the length of his films rather than a narrative description. He is most definitely a cinematic formalist but he takes and plays with genres and their construction to alight on something of his own making. A singular vision that is if anything a “Rhythmical local cinema”. The rhythm of the countryside, but definitely not ‘slow cinema’.

An audience coming afresh to a Diaz film will perhaps think his scenes seem banal taken on their own, but the power of his National cinema is the culmination of them, their juxtaposition that couldn’t be anything less than what they are.

There are quite a few tropes from classic American cinema in Phantosmia, from the late Westerns of the 70s that show the dying of a particular warrior culture with a man both out of place and time who endeavours to do what he feels is the morally correct decision while also searching for a redemption that he won’t be given. With the decision to rescue a young woman forced into prostitution we of think of Taxi Driver, which is of course a loose remake of The Searchers. There the inevitable violence is mundane and banal, and certainly not cathartic. Hilarion, if anything, resembles Paul Scrader’s God’s angry man, dictating his thoughts and confessions into a journal.

In totality we have a society rotting from the inside. Filled with corruption and rewards for the strong and wrongheaded exploitation against the bad men and the price they paid to secretly define their time and their fight overcome their regret and come to self acception. ©D W Mault. @D_W_MAULT

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | OUT OF COMPETITION 2024

Battlefield (2024) Venice Film Festival 2024

Dir: Gianni Amelio | Cast: Alessandro Borghi, Gabriel Montesi, Federica Rosellini, Giovanni Scotti, Vince Vivenzio, Alberto Cracco, Luca Lazzareschi, Maria Grazia Plos, Rita Bosello | Italy 104’

1918 and Italy’s wounded are winding their weary way back from the First World War across a wintry November landscape in this lavishly styled and sombre tragedy from seasoned director Gianni Amelio (Thé Patient’s Room) competing for the Golden Lion.

Strange things are happening both on and off the battlefield. In the local hospital an order goes out to treat all patients including those who have deserted. Giulio (Borghi), the compassionate but rather academic ward doctor, takes special care of a badly injured: an 18-year-old farm worker, a mustard gas victim and one cheerful soldier desperate to get back to the Front. Others are not so lucky: one man is now deaf, another will lose a leg.

Amid this well of suffering Giulio re-kindles a relationship with a friend from student days, a nurse (Rossellini) who believes some soldiers are avoiding a return to battle with self-mutilation, a crime punishable by firing squad. Giulio becomes obsessed with these self-harmers. Meanwhile, on the front, a mysterious infection is felling the troops and is gradually spreading to civilians.

Battlefield is also the story of two medics caught in the cross fire: one from a privileged background, the other, a less fortunate woman struggling for credibility despite her intelligence and talent. A solid premise then and a film that explores an un-chartered episode in the Great War with a solid script and committed performances, but one that will struggle to win a prize given this year’s spectacular main competition entries. @MeredithTaylor

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | GOLDEN LION COMPETITION.

The Mohican (2024)

Dir: Frederic Farrucci | Cast: Alexis Alexis, Mara Taquin | Thriller 87′

Alexis Manenti is the brooding star of this simmering arthouse western from writer director Frederic Farrucci best known for his TV fare.

On the coast of Corsica he plays a goatherd who is offered a decent price for his land. An offer he rejects. Joseph, one of the last shepherds on the Corsican coast, soon realises the mafia is behind the offer. But during their discussions the mafia man who came to intimidate him is accidentally killed and his death will naturally have devastating implications for everyone involved, not least his valuable flock.

The Corsican coast of Cape Santa Manza and forest becomes becomes a feral hunting ground in Farrucci’s arthouse thriller where a merciless hunt plays out in the sweltering heat of the summer. As the days go by, the film unfolds as an ethnographical portrait of a a dying community combined with a tense road movie that builds momentum with its focus on ‘Le Mohican’ Joseph – who embodies a resistance movement no one on the island deemed impossible. HIs feisty female companion Vannina adds a female dimension to this impressive sophomore feature screening in the Horizons Extra strand at the 81st Venice Film Festival. @MeredithTaylor

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | HORIZONS EXTRA

Mistress Dispeller (2024) Venice Film Festival 2024

Dir: Elizabeth Lo | Doc 95′

A lyrical aria from Puccini ‘Mio Babbino Caro’ seems a fitting opening accompaniment to this film about marital strife and infidelity. A Chinese couple are having dinner. They are clearly at odds. The wife suspects her husband of cheating. And in Beijing this entitles her to engage the services of a professional ‘snoop’ who will be invited to join the couple for a meal to sound out the husband’s issues. ‘But not for long’ advises the ‘dispeller’. ‘Men don’t like to talk that much’.

In China, a new industry has emerged devoted to helping couples stay married in the face of infidelity. Wang Zhenxi is part of this growing profession, a “mistress dispeller” who is hired to maintain the bonds of marriage — and break up affairs — by any means necessary.

Mistress Dispeller follows a real, unfolding case of infidelity as Wang attempts to bring a couple back from the edge of crisis. Their story revels the confusion and mixed emotions that can blow a marriage off course. And we gain a real understanding of the dynamic between the trio: mistress, wife and husband.

Hong Kong native Elizabeth Lo’s second film couldn’t be more different from her feature 2020 debut Stray that followed an ownerless dog around Istanbul. But both films share the same sense of poignant defeat and abandonment.

Mistress Dispeller is also very much about that sense of belonging, or ownership. That of a husband by his wife. The doc gives us intimate access to a real love triangle. The detective serves as a dispute resolver, councillor and a shoulder to cry on: Shame and failure being something that the Orientals find difficult to admit to. Divorce – the only alternative – and its aftermath ‘the dating scene’ – involves a sad litany of singletons searching for a soulmate through the small ads. So there’s a vested interest on all sides to heal the rift so the divorce court can be avoided at all costs. Wang skilfully manipulates the husband into giving up his ‘flirt’ so the mistress feels revalued and loses interest. But can feelings be so easily rationalised? Is it that simplistic?

During a meal with the married couple the wife engineers an excuse to go out leaving Wang to tease out the husband’s feelings. He admits to have developed a close friendship with a work contact. “With my wife it’s real life, with Fei Fei it’s like being in the sun”.

Surprisingly the wife takes a pragmatic approach aware that there is so much at stake. The husband’s pretty young friend is seen encouraging him to come with her to a local peony festival while the dispeller works on lowering the mistress’s expectations by providing her with the husband’s negative feedback gleaned during a follow up tete a tete with him. Once feelings are aired in a calm and frank exchange of views everyone gains clarity and the husband acknowledges that his wife and child are the most important people in his life and he needs to focus on improving that relationship. It’s a ‘win win’ situation for all sides, avoiding unnecessary heartache in the long run.

With imaginative camerawork and an operatic score this is another sensitive and intelligent film from Lo, and her co-writer Charlotte Munch Bengtsen. @MeredithTaylor

MISTRESS DISPELLER has its world premiere at Venice on 2 September 2024

After Party (2024) Venice Film Festival 2024

Dir: Vojtech Strakaty | Drama Czech 90’

A coming of age meets female empowerment drama sees a young girl forced to grow up pronto when her debt ridden father has a major financial crisis affecting the whole family. .

Carefree JINDŘIŠKA (23) is like any other teenager, throwing up the morning after an alcohol fuelled party the night before.

But she sobers up pretty quickly when the bailiffs arrive to empty the squeaky clean family home of all possessions – including an IKEA lamp – and blocking the credit cards.

In an instant Jindřiška’s world falls apart, forcing her to choose between helping her father or saving herself before it’s too late. The rest of the family are unhelpful. It appears they are owed money too. In the street Jindriska and her friend are then intimated by another debtor

Set in the serene Czech countryside this crisp and straightforwardly mature film is Vojtech Strakaty’s feature debut – a relatable drama that deals with an issue that other filmmakers have failed to tackle since Ramon Bahrani in his 2014 finicial thriller 99 Homes but one that resonates with a wide audience in today’s debt ridden world.

Doing the rounds with her father to rustle up money it emerges that Jindriska could raise a loan to help the family although she only has a part time job so it would be a drop in the ocean.

Eliska Basusová is convincing as a disdainful daughter gradually realising her rather profligate is no longer the man she thought he was, and is shifting his responsibility onto her young shoulders – and what’s worse – his arrogant cavalier attitude makes her feel justifiably uncomfortable and leaves her on the horns of a dilemma. But the narrative loses power in the final stretch which sees the girl cutting lose and focusing on her friends and freedom. Despite a rather enigmatic ending this is a nice-looking watchable film from the Czech newcomer, making its world premiere in the Orrizonti Extra strand at the 81st Venice Film Festival. @MeredithTaylor

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | HORIZONS EXTRA 2024

Alpha (2024) Venice Film Festival 2024

Dir: Jan-Willem van Ewijk | Cast: Gijs Scholten van Aschat, Reinout Scholten van Aschat, Laija Ledergerber | Dutch, Thriller, 100′

Stunning mountain scenery is the setting for this chilly psychological ‘anti-buddy’ thriller, an artful first feature for Dutch filmmaker Jan-Willem van Ewijk.

In a snowbound resort high in the Alps a confrontation between two skiers sets an edgy tone for an unsettling chain of events involving one of them, Rein, a musician, who is still recovering the death of his mother.

When his father Gijs arrives it becomes clear their shared grief is sparking conflict between the two and the film’s title gives us insight into a possible cause without offering any backstory.

The uncomfortable vibe worsens when the widower admits to have started dating – not only a younger woman but also known to them both. Glijs’ innocent attempt to flirt with Rein’s love interest Rega is also a bone of contention between the men especially as Rega is playing hard to get with Rein, and this only adds to his insecurity and general feeling of jealousy and alienation.

Gijs vulnerability when he inadvertently sheds a tear of grief triggers Reva’s protective instinct and she reaches out to the widow offering support and further irritating Rega.

The subtle interplay between the three adults is feels real and convincing possibly helped by the fact that actors Gijs and Reinout Scholten van Aschat are also father and son in real life.

Once on the slopes an intriguing power play begins, Rein, a snowboard teacher, is a fitter and more daring skier than his father who panics when the young man opts for a vertiginous descent and this sparks an avalanche with tragic and unexpected consequences

Never resorting to melodrama Alpha is a spare and visually stylish film Douwe Hennink’s camera keeping a well-judged distance from the protagonists creating a sense of remoteness and disconnection as the men feel isolated and alone in their grief further adding to the frigid sense of unease. An impressive debut. @MeredithTaylor

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL | VENICE DAYS 2024

The Things We Said Today (2024) Venice Film Festival 2024

Dir: Andrei Ujică: with the voices of Shea Grant, Therese Azzara, Tommy McCabe, Sarah McCluskey | Docudrama 86’ | France, Romania

Suffused with the gentle nostalgia of the Swinging Sixties this peach of a movie kicks off in the mid-Atlantic where the pioneering independent station Radio Caroline was born out of a desire to broadcast pop music and did so in an offshore battleship in those pre-internet days.

So begins this glorious look back – not in anger, but in sheer joy – at an era of innocence captures in grainy black & white by Romanian writer/director Andrei Ujică: best known for his documentaries Out of the Present and The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaucescu (2010)

Amongst other treasures it records the moment in 1965 when The Beatles descended from their plane and onto the tarmac, their iconic BOAC bags tucked under their arms, to give a sold-out concert at New York’s Shea Stadium (at 5.50’USD a ticket), all chewing gum, they disappear into a black limo, Paul not realising the windows are automatic when he tries to respond to a photographer’s question.

Paul McCartney and John Lennon leads the press conference, with a cheeky unpolitically correct comment when asked why the two unmarried bands members are sitting together.: “It’s because we’re queer – but don’t telling anyone”. All totally candid and unmanaged. One journalist described the event as “being in the eye of the storm”.

The Sixties, that wonderful moment in the sun, is like nothing you’ve probably seen before, or since. It was innocent; freewheeling, chilled out and much treasured in my memory. Ujică adds a black sketched figure, superimposed rather like an invisible voyeur, who narrates the story, as he remembers it. We move from Manhattan to Jones Beach. State Park in Wantagh New York where bathers enjoy the balmy weather far away from the horrors of Vietnam.

Switching to Los Angeles police riots involving the ‘Negro’ community are captured on film. They talk about being victims of abuse and police brutality. But then they dance ‘The Twist’ like no one else can. And in upstate New York a teenage girl dresses for the concert while a woozy trumpet plays ‘I Can’t Get Started with You’ as the early hours of that August day dawn. And the girl makes her ways through Holland Tunnel – the world’s first mechanically ventilated underwater vehicular passage. And we arrive in ‘the city’.

A cast of thousands is summoned—each separate sphere, face, and place given equal weight, each instant is meaningful, the excitement mounting as the girls – now painted, superimposed figures – make their make their way through the New York World’s Fair. There’s a haunting, dreamlike, ghostly quality to this reverie that makes us ache for those simple summers back then, with florescent butterflies floating into the air. (delicately rendered by Yann Kebbi). So many friends and family members have vanished but their memories and these images live on and we shed a soulful tear. @MeredithTaylor

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | until 7th September 2024

The Antique (2024) Venice Film Festival 2024

Dir: Rusudan Glurjidze | Cast: Salome Demuria, Sergey Dresden, Vladimir Daushvili, Vladimir Vdovichenko | Georgian, Drama 132′

In late Autumn 2006, Russian authorities detained thousands of Georgians and expelled them to Georgia, including those residing legally in Russia.

Set in modern day St Petersburg this impressive second film from Georgia’s Rusudan Glurjidze is a classically styled and darkly humorous ‘odd couple’ movie about an unlikely duo thrown together by circumstances beyond their control arising from turbulent times.

Set against the hopes and aspirations of migrants in an uncertain world where people are constantly on the move – through choice or necessity due to war and oppression – The Antique bears testament to the brutal and indiscriminate ways in which politics derail human lives.

Medea (Demuria) has sold her house in Georgia and is working in an antique shops where she meets fellow Georgian Lado (Daushvili) who is an antiques smuggler. Ready to move on with her life Medea bags herself a bargain flat in St. Peterburg’s historic centre only to find out that a curmudgeonly old man in the shape of Vadim Vadimich is already in residence. An inter-generational and personality clash ensues as the two are forced to make the best of their shared accommodation as the disorientated young woman tries to forge friendships while dealing with the past in the wintery city.

Giurjidze’s confident direction and Gorka Gomez Andreu’s widescreen camerawork capture this spectacular snowbound location and the majestic rambling interiors where the odd couple rub along. One relatable bone of contention is when Vadim strongly objects to Medea throwing his personal, if seemingly old, possessions away, including a strand of his brother’s hair. Another sees the old man arrested after he mistakenly goes into the wrong flat and raises merry hell with the current resident. The Antique offers another snapshot of Georgia’s rich culture infused with an endearing sense of the ridiculous. @MeredithTaylor

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | VENICE DAYS 2024 COMPETITION

Rusudan Glurjidze is a Georgian film director, screenwriter, and producer. From 1989 to 1991, she studied French language and literature at the Tbilisi State University, then switched to film studies. From 1990 to 1996, she studied film directing and scriptwriting at the Georgian State Film and Theatre Institute, taking Georgiy Shengelaia’s classes. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union destroyed the Georgian film industry, Glurjidze worked in advertising. She has been a producer and creative director of the Cinetech Film Production Company since 2007. Her feature directorial debut, House of Others, premiered in the East of the West competition at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, taking home the Grand Prix. The film was selected for numerous international film festivals, winning an array of awards, and became Georgia’s candidate for Best Foreign Language Film at the 89th Academy Awards.

We were Strangers (1949)

Dir: John Huston | Cast: Jennifer Jones John Garfield, Pedro Armendariz, Gilbert Roland | US political thriller

It’s well known that John Huston played an acting role as ‘White Suit’ in ‘The Treasure of the Sierra Madre’, but most people are unaware that shortly afterwards he also briefly appeared in an unbilled bit as a bank clerk in ‘We Were Strangers’ since so few have seen it.

One of the subjects frequently favoured by Huston was the activities of a North American abroad finding himself a fish out of water (a role in which he memorably cast Humphrey Bogart) combined in ‘We Were Strangers’ with the usual depiction of Latin America as riven with revolutions.

Later dismissed by Huston as “pretty frail material”, while attacked by the ‘Hollywood Reporter’ as “a shameful handbook of Marxian dialectic…and the heaviest dish of Red theory ever served to audiences outside the Soviet Union”. Despite Russell Metty’s usual exemplary photography the fundamental artificiality of the piece shows in the regular use of process work and casting John Garfield and Jennifer Jones – good as they both are – as a Cuban and a Mexican; although mitigated by the presence in supporting roles of authentic Latinos like Pedro Armendariz, Ramon Novarro and Gilbert Roland.
@RichardChatten

TALKING PICTURES TV | 2024

Wishing on a Star (2024) Venice Film Festival 2024

Dir: Peter Kerekes | Cast: Erica Barbiani, Lucia Candelpergher, Peter Kerekes, Vic Schmarc, Ralph Wieser, Vanja Jambrovic, Stefano Centini, Peter Kerekes | Drama 98′

Wishing on a Star received its world premiere in the Horizons strand of the 81st Venice Film Festival and is a quiet, gentle film that feels like a small unassuming drama doc, unafraid to tackle big themes of life.

While there is, strictly speaking, no clear narrative, the film offers a visual tapestry intercutting between stories of a gallery of players. Often cut together over a period of time and in some cases without finding out what happens next, several stories are left for the viewer to imagine resolutions. With references to astrology, the film provides viewers with questions as to whether we are the architects of our lives or simply life’s travelling players.

The film was co-written by the filmmaker with Erica Barbiani and focuses on stories about the search for love, relationships and re-birth with a number of sequences that hit home with more power than others. One character is a Neapolitan astrology therapist who invites people to imagine they are in foreign countries without actually travelling. Another character is a funeral director who inherited the family business, never found time to find a partner and still lives with his Italian mother who nags him to settle down. He decides to interview a group of women and chooses one to run the business while he is on holiday with Kerekes filming a meal for three seated around a table with deeply felt unspoken tension.

One of the most moving sequences involves a gentle older woman who has devoted her life to her mother. Now finally free, she embarks on a journey that will find her, by chance, swimming in a forbidden lake. Arrested by authorities, her action feels like a liberating sense of civil disobedience of a type never before experienced. Disappointment with life is not far away for some of the players and Kerekes is fascinated by twins, introducing at one point a surreal visual chessboard of multiple sets of twins.

The pace of Wishing on a Star may be too slow or languid for some and feels aimed at mature viewers willing to adapt to a pace and flow far away from the rapid style of current digital filmmaking. The spiritual mentor of the film could be Federico Fellini in his early documentary- flavoured period reinforced by the sounds of a Nino Rota inspired soundtrack complimenting a mosaic of ordinary characters made unique by the power of chance and imagination.

Wishing on a Star is Kerekes’ first feature length film that draws upon a background as a documentary filmmaker of short films which enables the Slovakian director to capture a sense of – often comic – dramatic fiction out of the beautifully observed natural movements and rhythms of ordinary people. There are also several expertly sustained long takes often filmed from mid-range viewpoints. The film is an accomplished production involving Italy, Lebanon, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Croatia with a flyaway sequence to Taiwan that looks and feels like a kind of European funded co-production without involving the UK in this post Brexit era.

PETER HERBERT / CURATOR MANAGER THE ARTS PROJECT

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To Kill a Mongolian Horse (2024) Venice Days 2024

Dir/Wri: Xiaoxuan Jiang | Malaysia, US, Hong Kong, Korea, Japan, 2024, 98′,

Struggling with power cuts, drought and hostile weather out on the snowy steppe, Saina, a divorced Mongolian horseman, makes a meagre living between country and city in a gruelling schedule. During the day he tends a flock of sheep and horses on his ranch. Nighttime sees him back in the city performing horseback routines to finance his father’s gambling debts and raise his son. Unlike the proud cavalryman he portrays in the show, Saina realises his traditional way of life is no longer tenable, forcing him to sell his flock of sheep, but keep the horses. The future for animals is also bleak.

Saina’s daily struggle very much connects to a global narrative of survival for small communities all over the world keen to carry on the ancient way of life of those that went before them while keeping pace with the modern world. The disintegration of the family unit is part of the problem he faces: his ex-wife has left for a better job in the city and is more demanding, his father is also giving him grief. The life he grew up in has dramatically changed.

In her first feature, a sensitive snapshot of masculinity in crisis, Xiaoxuan Jiang contrasts Saina’s ‘glamourised’ life under the bright lights on the big arena, all decked out in vibrant traditional costume, with the gruelling days managing animals on the windswept plains.

What shines through here is a fabulous human interest story. And the film’s stunning cinematography, captured on the widescreen and in intimate close-up, helps us experience it all like a native. It often feels like we’re actually part of the action. All this is in stark contrast to modern life in the big city with all the usual ‘mod cons’. An impressive and intelligent study of masculinity caught between the future and the past. @MeredithTaylor

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL | VENICE DAYS 2024

Edge of Night | Gecenin Kıyısı (2024) Venice Film Festival 2024

Dir/Wri: Türker Süer | Cast: Ahmet Rıfat Şungar, Berk Hakman | Turkey 87′

Duty and honour are pitted against family loyalties in this sober and stylish arthouse thriller that swings on moral and ethical concerns for two brothers, gradually exposing Turkey as a nation more polarised that ever and caught between East and West.

Sinan and Kenyan have always been close but their brotherhood is put to the test reflecting the narrative’s societal fractures when Sinan, a lieutenant in the Turkish army, is asked to hand over his brother Kenan to a military court, charged with disobedience and desertion.

Still troubled by their father’s tragic death and the questions surrounding their own cultural identity (their mother was not of Turkish birth), the brothers embark – Midnight Run style without the humour – on a journey through a country marked by political unrest. During a military coup it soon emerges that evidence that caused their father to commit suicide was fabricated and Sinan used as a pawn by his superiors. In a country where the State demands absolute loyalty, the brothers must decide if they are ready to face the sacrifices required by their duty and their conscience despite their own fragile status.

Turkish directors love the widescreen camera and that’s exactly what you get here with Matteo Cocco’s cinematography serving the film well. A resonant score brings to mind that unforgettable 1970s title Midnight Express. Spare of dialogue and seething with atmosphere this noirish existential thriller never outstays in welcome. Simple but deadly. @MeredithTaylor

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL | HORIZONS EXTRA 2024

oots, acceptance always seemed fragile, like a residence permit that could be revoked at any time. One mistake, and everything you achieved could lose its value, much like the two brothers on constant probation. Though set in Türkiye, the story’s themes are universal: navigating an increasingly authoritarian system and struggling to maintain one’s identity amid prejudice and mistrust. Gecenin Kıyısı / Edge of Night tells the story of a man leading his brother to doom, reflecting a society on the brink of losing its humanity.

Fail-Safe (1964)

Dir: Sidney Lumet | Cast: Henry Fonda, Walter Matthau | US Political thriller

In the Simpsons episode ‘Sideshow Bob’s Last Gleaming’, in addition to the predictabe references to Dr Strangelove, the producers as usual showed that they’d cast their net wide by quoting both Fail-Safe and the notorious ‘Countdown’ election broadcast of 1964.

Made almost simultaneously with Dr Strangelove but held back so the two films didn’t clash, director Sidney Lumet was always of the view that the films were released in the wrong order since Strangelove had achieved such an impact ‘Fail-Sale’ could only suffer by comparison; which is a shame as the characters in Strangelove were a bunch of buffoons who plainly deserved everything they got, while ‘Fail-Safe’ depicted sane men trapped in an insane situation. @RichardChatten

My Everything (2024) Venice Film Festival 2024

Dir: Anne-Sophie Bailly | Cast: Laure Calamy, Charles Peccia Galletto, Julie Froger | Drama, France, 95′

Laure Calamy is a put-upon mother juggling a dependent son and an elderly mother in this captivating first feature from Anne-Sophie Bailly.

Mona lives with her adult son, Joël, in a cramped apartment in the Paris suburbs. Now in his early thirties, Joël has suffered from dyspraxia since childhood and works in a specialised facility where he is in love with his disabled coworker Océane who soon soon becomes pregnant leaving Mona to deal with a potential minefield in this morally complex character drama.

But what could have been a gloomy, demoralising film ends up being a real joy to watch due to Bailly’s clever script, Mona and Joel’s uplifting relationship and two terrific central performances making this a positive pleasure despite the tricky issues involved. @MeredithTaylor.

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | HORIZONS 2024

Maldoror (2024) Venice Film Festival 2024

Dir: Fabrice du Welz | Cast: Anthony Bajon, Alba Gaia Bellugi, Alexis Manenti, Sergi Lopez, Laurent Lucas, David Murgia, Beatrice Dalle, Lubna Azabal, Melanie Doutey | France/Belgium 155′

In his second film of the season thriller supremo Fabrice du Welz (Adoration, Alleluia, Calvaire) gets together with his regulars: Laurent Lucas and Beatrice Dalle in a film that explores an episode of institutional dysfunction and police corruption so parlous some claimed they were ‘ashamed to be Belgian’ after this grim episode of the country’s crime history.

Maldoror is a gritty thriller and once again du Welz doesn’t hold back on the realism or his ‘stock in trade’ of crafting tricky characters and psychopaths of the highest – or lowest – order making this difficult to watch in its gruesome depiction of true events involving pedophilia and murder when two little girls go missing. The story is structured around the personal and private life of an impulsive young police recruit, Paul Chartier, who finds himself assigned to a secret unit investigating a circle of sex offenders entitled ‘Maldoror’.

It soon emerges the police are implicated so naturally Chartier’s efforts are thwarted by his chief (Lucas). Chartier (Bajon) has the tenacity, resilience and verve to take matters into his own hands pitting himself against the law and his Calabrian family-in-law, who are not the most conciliatory characters to deal with, at the best of times. In short, a real head-banger of a movie to add to his archive. @MeredithTaylor.

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL | OUT OF COMPETITION 2024

Mandoob | Night Courier (2023)

Dir: Ali Kalthami | KSL | Comedy thriller |

Ali Kalthami’s debut feature Is a taut and caustically comedic thriller set in Riyadh where a decent but down on his luck local guy comes a cropper.

Mohammed Aldokhi is robust and darkly humorous as the saturnine central character Fahad who is burning the candle at both ends in difficult circumstances. Bored – and frankly bad – at his day job in a call centre, nighttime sees Fahad grafting as a mandoob (courier) to earn money for his ageing father’s medical treatment.

Everyone knows that Saudi is an alcohol free zone but when Fahad is inevitably fired he makes the mistake of stealing booze from an illegal dealer with the hope of trading it on for cash. And so begins his descent into a world of crime in a country of zero tolerance on all levels – unless you’re Arab Royalty or in the Diplomatic service.

For the favoured set Saudi is a glitzy place framed by skyscrapers, swish cafes, snazzy hotels, magnificent shopping malls and vibrant nightlife. All this is showcased in DoP Ahmed Tahoun’s dazzling cinematography in an impressive debut to his promising career in film,

ON RELEASE 30 AUGUST 2024 IN UK AND IRELAND

Black Orchid (1953)

Dir: Charles Saunders | Cast: Ronald Howard, Olga Edwardes | Jack Bentley | UK Drama 58’

This is the sort of film that should be obligatory viewing for students of the narrative construction in the cinema for the sheer fascination of the single-mindedness with which the narrative is pared to the bone with not a solitary digression allowed to interfere with its determined pursuit of its goal of achieving its remit to deliver a dramatic conclusion.

In particular, it manages to include a gay character since the only possible motivation of the killer could come from the vengeful desire to satisfy the thwarted longings of one in the pangs of the love that then dared not speak its name. @RichardChatten

Widow Clicquot (2024)

Dir: Thomas Napper | Cast: Haley Bennett, Tom Sturridge, Sam Riley and Ben Miles.

Raise a glass to this English language biopic about a resolutely French wine and its female vintner in the male-dominated wine industry of the 19th century.

Family politics and female empowerment are at the heart of Thomas Napper’s lavishly styled biopic that sheds light on the storied champagne dynasty of Veuve Clicquot. For father-in-law Philippe (Ben Miles) it’s strictly business but for his emotionally unstable son sensitivity and craftsmanship are key: Francois (Tom Sturridge) sings to the grapes while in the distance Napoleon Bonaparte is suffering a crushing defeat. The film brings to mind Gilles Legrand’s 2011 outing You Will Be My Son where Niels Arestrup heads up a prestigious vineyard in St Emilion with his son. But this time the key figure is a woman.

Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin Clicquot could never be described as bubbly but she certainly takes control of the budding wine business the couple had steered forward, after Francois’ sudden death. Amid turbulent political change and financial crisis Barbe-Nicole fights off competition from competitors Moet revolutionising the world of champagne with an ingenious trade link with broker Louis Bohne (Sam Riley), taking the iconic brand and its special vintage ‘comet’ to fizzing heights as one of the world’s first successful businesswomen.

Haley Bennett is a modest but serious presence in the lead role of Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin Clicquot. Navigating the stormy waters of her husband’s laudanum addiction Bennett resolutely powers forward but never really sets the night on fire as the determined female figurehead. So although Widow Clicquot is a rather sombre in its direction and storytelling Barbe-Nicole’s love affair with Francois is certainly convincing exuding a simmering chemistry as they romp in candlelit flashbacks between the sheets in a lightly sparkling affair. @MeredithTaylor

In UK cinemas from 23 August | Released in cinemas on Friday 30th August

La Passion selon Beatrice (2024) Locarno International Film Festival 2024

Dir: Fabrice du Welz | Doc, 83

Dans ce road movie en noir et blanc, Béatrice Dalle, marche sur les traces de la vie de Pier Paolo Pasolini. Béatrice Dalle place très haut dans son estime Pier Paolo Pasolini. Selon elle, Pasolini et Jean-Luc Godard sont les meilleurs réalisateurs.

Dans ce film documentaire, l’actresse française, bien connue pour Betty Blue parcours l’Italie à la rencontre de ceux qui ont connus Pasolini. D’Ostie, lieu de l’assassinat de Pasolini, à Matera, lieu du tournage de l’Évangile selon Saint Matthieu, Béatrice Dalle et son traducteur, Clément Roussier, explorent les lieux importants de Pasolini.

Nous découvrons Pasolini à travers l’amour singulier de Béatrice. Nous découvrons aussi Béatrice Dalle avec le regard complice de Clément Roussier. C’est une écorchée vive de la vie. Elle est attachante lorsqu’elle parle de ses passions et aussi de ses conneries. @Gerard Marcade

LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2024

Mond (2024) Grand Jury Prize | Locarno International Film Festival 2024

Dir: Kurdwin Ayub | Austria/2024 93′ German and Arabic

Personal fitness gets a Middle Eastern work-over in this Ulrich Seidl produced sophomore feature from Kurdwin Ayub that sees an Austrian martial artist travel to Jordan to work with three princesses.

Tough on the outside but troubled and directionless Sarah gets a fresh lease of life on landing a well paid gig in Jordan after a brief online interview. The young Austrian flies from Vienna to a lavish Moroccan palace in Amman and is soon reminiscing with an Arab prince about his travels to Vienna where he enjoyed Sachertorte on his family visit.

Agreeing to sign a non-disclosure agreement that confines her to the training room and her lavish hotel this includes a strict embargo on social media. But the entente cordiale soon turns sour when the fitness guru taps into a misogynistic vibe between the prince and his teenage siblings which soon leads to a sinister discovery.

The next days sees Sarah (Florentina Holzinger) putting the girls – Fatima, Nour and Shaima – through their paces in a gruelling exercise regime that doesn’t agree with their couch potato lifestyle. The following day a visit to the mall takes precedence over exercise – these girls are not committed to anything but doing their makeup and chilling in their gilded internet free cage where bickering seems to be the order of the day, along with the odd prayer session in hijab and abaya.

Despite the draconian presence of body guards the girls still manage a sneak look at Sarah’s instagram. It soon emerges that self defence classes is what they want, and for good reason. When Sarah later hears frightened knocking sounds from upstairs and realises Fatima is calling for help her blood turns cold.

Asking to borrow Sarah’s phone one if the girls tries to publish footage of abuse afflicted on the fourth – hidden – sister Aya. Next day Sarah is summoned to Abdul’s office. The brother reminds the trainer of the strict code of not getting close to the girls. He claims Fatima is a troublemaker and to ignore her attention-seeking behaviour. On the other hand Sarah is pushing the boundaries and is clearly not emotionally mature enough to handle her mission and maintain a professional distance from the client.

Later that evening an attempt to flirt with the barman falls flat showing Sarah is clearly out of her depth, overwhelmed by events unfolding around her. She wants to bond with the girls but clearly this contravenes her rules of engagement and we start to fear the worst for her safety especially when she exchanges confidential information with the waitress. During these inadvisable exchanges it emerges the wealthy family is known for its mafiosi style with an omertà style code of silence. In trying to help the girls Sarah, in her naivety, makes a fatal error and events take a tragic turn.

Rather than simply exposing negative attitudes to women in the Middle East, the Iraqi-born writer director takes an even-handed approach in her startlingly unsettling documentary-thriller that occasionally veers into melodrama in exposing stark contrasts – and similarities – between Western and Middle Eastern youth culture for the of today. Both have drifted too far away from a healthy balance. MeredithTaylor

LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2024

Agora (2024) Pardo Verde Award | Locarno International Film Festival 2024

Dir: Alaeddine Slim | Tunisia, France, Saudi Arabia, Qatar · 2024 · DCP 2K · Color · 102′ · o.v. Arabic

A woman emerges from the sea. A shepherd disappears from the hillside in a remote Tunisian coastal town. Local cop Fathi investigates the bizarre events in this arthouse thriller from Alaeddine Slim who melds murder mystery and surreal sci-fi in Agora, a mesmerising follow-up to his award-winning feature debut Tlamess

In the abattoir three macabre corpses await the mortician. Blood seeps from their bodies. Piecing together local gossip Fathi finds out they are victims of a brawl in a massive tanker moored in the port. But the search for shepherd Mabrouk in the bosky backwater reveals no clues.

In his pre-apocalyptic portrait the Tunisian filmmaker makes evocative use of the hostile surroundings: decrepit buildings, contaminated seawater, a dead crow. Rotten veg and putrid fish in the market all bear testament to a failed harvest. The sea is throwing out its dead. Stray dogs are sickening and dying in the creeping malaise.

Then Detective Omar Walli, from Tunis section 19, arrives in town to oversee the investigation and contain the damage. But nobody feels comfortable with his sinister presence. “You can’t trust people from the capital”. says a man in the bar. Indeed. In the privacy of his hotel bedroom Omar defers to a bald, cancer-stricken woman who uses a voice box to issue her instructions.

The slow-burn police procedural is laced with fantasy sci-fi elements serves as a metaphor for global unease. Man has destroyed the environment and the earth is screaming in pain. Police and politicians are corrupt and under the cosh of an enigmatic big brother. Intertitles threaten dire warnings. “No one will be spared!” Meanwhile the mosques spew out a stentorious message that God is great.

A seething soundscape combines ambient sounds of thunder and an inventive electronic score. Neon-infused colours evoke a toxic environment where decay and degradation is endemic. One terrific scene sees birds flying frantically in all directions to escape the farmer’s poisonous fumigation.

The deaths remain unsolved but behind closed doors Omar and his female sidekick pander to an enigmatic cabal with gleaming neon blue eyes and white socks. Sounds weird but it works in this strikingly unusual fantasy thriller from the talented Tunisian auteur, screening in competition at this year’s 77th Locarno Film Festival. @Meredith Taylor

PARDO VERDE AWARD | LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2024

Toxic (2024) Golden Leopard winner Locarno International Film Festival 2024

Dir/Wri: Saule Bliuvate | Lithuania · 2024 · DCP 4K · Color · 99′ · o.v. Lithuanian

Teenage girls in the changing rooms. A scuffle breaks out. Against a back drop of Soviet Brutalist buildings a girl plays basket ball with the men of the village. Marija is a tomboy. And new to the village. Staying with her grandma, a flower seller, she has to make friends. But how when they disdain you and steal your jeans?

Lithuania’s Saule Bliuvate draws on her own experience in this feature debut, an artful snapshot of a Lithuanian backwater where the mundane melts into the surreal. Marija makes a friend. Two girls at a loose end dream of escaping from the dour reality of their dingy domesticity to the glamour of a new world where anything is possible – if your face and body fits. They will do anything to get taller, slimmer, rangier, even if it involves taking tapeworm tablets to get ‘the look’.

Every three years a model agent visits the village looking for fresh young faces to work in the model industry. Talk of New York, Paris, and Tokyo where life is an endless party and everything is free. So much to discover. Tall and slim with an androgynous look Marija is a big hit in the casting call.

Bliuvate abandons a straightforward narrative to paint and impressionist picture that lingers in short cinematic scenes capturing this post soviet dystopia set amongst a disoriented youth where young girls are reduced to passive victims who offer themselves up to all kinds of abuse to find a life they think might be better. Meanwhile back home the older generation are discovering new things too.

Acid green landscapes zinging with Spring vegetation contrast with the grunge of dilapidated huts, mangled cars, a sordid environment. Young bodies entwine with each other as they explore and discover their sexuality. Naivity meets experience in this poignant and picaresque picture of emerging youth. @Meredith Taylor

The Pardo d’Oro winner Akiplėša (Toxic) LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2024

100,000,000,000,000 (2024) Locarno International Film Festival 2024

Dir: Virgil Vernier | France 2024 77′

100,000,000,000,000 the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Director and writer Virgil Vernier is one of the singular new voices in French cinema whose work blends fiction, documentary and myth.

His look at grifters on the Cote d’Azur carries an unsettling message from China but ultimately overstays its welcome at just over an hour with some superficial scenes and a confusing opening.

Essentially a three-hander this narrative documentary drifts along aimlessly offering snapshots of the scuzzy characters inhabiting its glitzy location of Monaco: a male mixed heritage sex worker, a Serbian ‘stone healer’ and the 12 year old daughter of Chinese immigrants purportedly building their island to escape the threat of a forthcoming apocalypse.

Anyone can carve a niche for themselves in a place where there is money to burn and people who want to burn it. Vernier’s third feature aims to give a voice to his drifters but only skims the surface of their empty lives. There is nothing appealing or vulnerable about this trio to help us feel sympathy or engage with them particularly the male prostitute who has a high opinion of himself for no apparent reason and regards his clients with scorn. At least the Serbian woman Vesna is trying to find herself and make a better life. Vacuous like the characters and location they inhabit. A lost opportunity to make us engage with their plight and understand their motivations @Meredith Taylor

LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2024

Cent Mille Milliards (2024) Locarno International Film Festival 2024

Dir: Virgil Vernier | Doc France

Afine, la trentaine, vit à Monaco. Un matin, un homme qui court six jours par semaine, lui propose de devenir son coach sportif de façon à lui sculpter un corps de rêve. On se demande si Afine a eu une relation avec cet homme. La scène suivante montre Afine en présence d’une femme beaucoup plus âgée. Il est un gigolo. Il se botox les lèvres et mène une vie oisive sur la Côte-d’Azur.

Un peu plus tard, Afine et trois amies discutent de leurs relations sexuelles avec les clients. Le sujet est surtout de gagner un maximum d’argent pour pouvoir vivre plus aisément. Les trois amies s’en vont à Singapour en espérant y trouver une vie meilleure.

Noël 2022, il partage le réveillon avec une amie serbe qui a la garde d’une adolescente. Lors de cette veillée de Noël, on a l’impression que les trois personnes forment une jolie famille recomposée. Il n’en est rien. Son amie serbe est, elle aussi, une prostituée qui se cherche une reconversion. L’adolescente est une chinoise dont les parents font du business dans le bâtiment. Ils construisent un complexe immobilier à Monaco et aussi une île quelque part.

Les scènes très lentes et surtout les plans fixes, semblent montrer l’ennui de cet hiver 2023 ou peut-être seulement l’ennui du protagoniste principal. C’est au tour de son amie serbe de partir. Nous sommes en janvier 2023. C’est la fin des vacances scolaires. L’adolescente chinoise doit reprendre l’école. Afine regarde son amie serbe et la jeune chinoise partir en hélicoptère. La vie d’Afine est vide. On ne lui voit pas de centre d’intérêt. Gérard Marcadé

LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL | MAIN COMPETITION

Dear Beautiful Beloved (2024) Locarno International Film Festival 2024

Dir: Juri Rechinsky | Austria Doc 93′

48,359 Russians have so far lost their lives since Russia invaded the Ukraine in February 2022. Meanwhile on the other side of the conflict a lonely old woman gathers her things. She’s chosen to stay in her building. Her son leaves her with a final kiss.

English air workers Elizabeth and Jonny, from British Expeditionary Aid and Rescue, are on a mission to care for Ukraine’s ageing and infirm – some are blind, some crippled – and to keep them relatively safe from danger, and identity the dead. They present the new face of the burgeoning aid effort.

Austrian auteur Juri Rechinsky turns his artful camera on the survivors – mostly women with babies and young children. These are the forgotten people. Philosophical and positive the old look on the bright side. Cheering each other up. “I nearly died nine times down the mines. It wasn’t my destiny. Who knows what my fate will be”.

Then there are the volunteers. Bringing up the bodies. A jaw, a skull. The back of a head. A gold ring and a bracelet stuffed into a bag and stuck with a note on the white plastic covering. People with children wait in the station, wondering where to go. This is the messy side of war, if ever there was one clean one. Far away from the front lines. Where is the glory here?.

How can you make an arthouse film about death, mud and broken bodies?. This one manages to see the beauty in the beastly. A burning sunset. An ambulance chasing along to the mortuary in the frosty light of dawn. The camera records the intimate details. It captures the physical effort of carrying dead bodies, forcing them into body bags and slipping those into coffins. Form filling. Endless cataloguing. Finding order in chaos. Old ladies having their hair styled by a coiffeur eager to offer his services. No one needs hairdressers now.

The voyeuristic camera takes us into the mortuary to watch as relatives grief in their jagged sorrow. People kneeling along the roadside to honour the dead. Rechinsky keeps his distance from this grim subject but there is dark humour too, especially for the old ones who take a measured view of war and suffering. Impossible not to shed a tear. @MeredithTaylor

LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | CRITICS’ WEEK

Holy Electricity (2024) Pardo d’Or – Cineasti del Present | Locarno International Film Festival 2024

Dir: Tato kotatishvilli | Georgia, Netherlands · 2024 · DCP 2K · Color · 95′ · o.v. Georgian

After a family funeral young Gonga and his cousin Bart, a sort of Georgian Laurel and Hardy combo, find a suitcase full of rusty crosses in a scrapyard, Bart gets the idea to turn them into neon crucifixes and sell them door-to-door to the gullible inhabitants of Tbilisi.

After spraying the crossed they spend the night in their van only to be woken the next morning by a Roma coffee seller and enjoy a breakfast of fruit and bread. Passers by then offer them marketing tips to sell their wares

Following a chronicle three act progression the two finally manage to make abit of money and toast their friends to a long life with “plenty of eating drinking and fucking” until Bart makes a fatal mistake that provides the piece with a minor dramatic twist.

In their eventful crusade through the suburbs of the city the director captures the essence of his hometown Tbilisi through a series of moving tableaux. Holy Electricity is as much a travelogue as a demonstration of how Georgians forge love and friendship through this story of Gonga and Bart. Listening to Tbilisi’s music, absorbing its colours and textures, feeling its mood and capturing the zeitgeist.

We meet the famous stray dogs their ears tagged to demonstrate their vaccinated status and fed by passers-by, and a community of cats, a beggar singing got his supper reveals the poignancy of a nation where the poor are really pool (not just professionals out to make a buck).

Hospitals work well here too even for the animals – both Gonga and a pet dog find themselves bandaged up after minor broken bones. We hear the famous male singers joining together over a meal of Georgian cuisine including the famous khachapuri we experience the vastness of the capital nestling in a bowl in the surrounding countryside. But the overall impression is if calm and tolerance. Tato says his chilled narrative with documentary elements manages ‘To embrace my fellow citizens and accept them as they are: crazy, lovely, eccentric to outsiders eyes. ©️MeredithTaylor

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL | Golden Leopard | CINEASTI DEL PRESENTE 2024

The Invisible Man Returns (1940)

Dir: Joe May | Horror

Although second billed to Cedric Hardwicke, Vincent Price’s first effective horror lead came nearly fifteen years before ‘House of Wax’ succeeding Claude Rains in the title role of ‘The Invisible Man Returns’. Again the character is heard not seen, requiring an actor with an impressive voice (although as with the original the appearance of the actor playing the invisible man is more familiar to the viewer today than when the film was originally released).

Lacking the ruthlessness of James Whales’ version, visually the production is up to Universal’s usual high standards, with novelties such as an invisible guinea pig, the invisible man silhouetted by a puff of smoke from Cecil Kellaway’s cigar and helping himself to a scarecrow’s clothes. Richard Chatten

Boganloch (2024) Locarno International Film Festival 2024

Dir: Ben Rivers | Uk Doc

Enigmatic award-winning cinematic maverick Ben Rivers, who crossed between the chasm that separates cinema and video art, returns with another look at Jake Williams; who he has featured in his early shorts and the feature film Two Years At Sea. The film will premiere as part of the International Competition at this year’s Locarno film festival.

Made over a period of around a year, Rivers went up to Scotland five times during that period, staying for 10 days on each visit, and as usual he shot on his own old Bolex and a super 16mm Aaton. Like the previous film this gives the film an unworldly look akin to the silent cinema of both Dreyer and Murnau.

The subject of Bogancloch is Jake Williams, a spiritual cousin to the American transcendentalists. A modern day frontiersman who lives in the highlands of Scotland. His life is very much a physical one. He’s a musician and he also used to work as a supply science teacher at a local school. One sequence shows him in the classroom with a group of kids who listen in rapt attention as he explains the inner workings of the sun. This is very much a different way of living, one even that can be envied.

There is a sense of stillness, always it seems in the work of Rivers, alongside sound and found musical experiences, which feature among others: everything from jazz to campfire singalongs to Persian and Indian music and even a bit of the poetry of Seamus Heaney.

There is no explanation or simplistic contextualisation, there just is. There are colourful inserts of degrading photographs the younger Jake had taken on his travels as a merchant seaman mainly in the Middle East and India. Everything you need to know should breathe in through the lines of Williams’ face. A face that makes one think of other lived in faces of experience: Auden and Beckett.

This a film of purity, of both vision and existence. At times there is a dancing sense of kinesis at the edge of the frame that makes it seem like remembrance of things past while being situated in the real. A flickering in sparks and electricity that indicates the flickering flame of Brechtian doubt which proves the real.

As we watch in wonder one thinks: are we observing reality or in reality? Rivers seems to discover a place where he is forgotten and his subjects just are. He has discovered the anti uncertainty principle it seems.

Illustrating time is difficult (as it is a construct), it is different when anxious or happy. That is subjective time, then there is objective time which is mechanical and cannot be argued with. The Greeks know and understand this and separated time into either Chronos time or Kairos time which is the qualitative time of life. Kairos dictates what is said and done, and must be done at the right time. This is pure cinematic Kairos.

As the film progresses and near to the point we will leave it, the image seems to want to fold in on itself to slowly disintegrate, like all analog film will eventually do. At the end we are left with a man in a hot bath outside alongside the elements of winter as we slowly pull away and for moments we could be in an early Georges Méliès film until we become lost in metaphysics and space. ©️D W Mault

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | INTERNATIONAL COMPÉTITION

Mond (2024) Locarno International Film Festival 2024

Wri/Dir: Kurdwin Ayub | Docu-thriller 2024

Sarah est autrichienne. Elle est passionnée de MMA (Mixed Martial Arts). On lui propose d’être coach de fitness en Jordanie. Cela lui semble être un super boulot, lorsqu’elle découvre son nouveau lieu de travail, une magnifique villa de la banlieue d’Amman. Son boulot se transforme vite en tout à fait autre chose que ce qu’elle avait imaginée. La première séance de fitness a à peine commencé que l’une de ses clientes, trois sœurs, se retire en prétextant être blessée. A la fin du premier jour de travail, on pense que les trois sœurs, sont plus intéressées par les séries TV, le maquillage et le shopping que par le goût de l’effort de faire du sport. On pense qu’elles sont capricieuses.

Petit à petit, Sarah découvre une autre réalité. Elle comprend que les trois sœurs sont enfermées dans une prison dorée. La villa familiale est luxueuse. Mais les trois sœurs sont totalement privées de liberté. Les parents sont absents. Leur frère veille sur elles, mais est aussi le geôlier. Les trois sœurs ne sortent pas sans garde du corps. Elles n’ont pas d’accès libre à Internet.

De son côté, Sarah semble être perdue. Y a-t-il du sens à sa vie? Elle se saoule au bar de son hôtel. Complètement ivre, elle s’en va en discothèque seule dans ce pays qu’elle ne connaît pas. Elle est complètement inconsciente des risques qu’elle prend. On a peur pour elle.

Sarah se lie avec les trois sœurs. A nouveau, elle prend des risques inconsidérés lorsqu’elle accepte d’apporter son aide aux trois sœurs qui veulent s’enfuir. Lors de la scène interminable où Sarah conduit une voiture dans le parking d’un grand centre commercial, avec les trois sœurs à bord, nous comprenons très vite que la fuite est vouée à l’échec.

De retour en Autriche, Sarah retrouve sa sœur et sa nièce. Le contraste, entre sa vie en Autriche et son aventure en Jordanie, est saisissant. La réalisatrice nous laisse imaginer ce qui a pu arriver aux trois sœurs jordaniennes.

Gérard Marcadé (qui accepte de jouer le jeu et s’improvise critique de cinéma)

The Walking Hills (1949)

Dir: John Sturges | US Western 78′

John Sturges of The Great Escape fame started life as an editor before Harry Cohn, president of Columbia, offered him a job after the war when the studio made cheap pictures appealing to distributors. Sturges’ final film there was this high quality western made in Death Valley where the mercury was touching 49 degrees.

An intrepid search for gold – purportedly buried in a waggon – kicks off on the Mexican border where the shifting sands sparkle in Charles Lawton Jr’s chiaroscuro cinematography. The bounty hunters are Randolph Scott, William Bishop, Jerome Courtland and Ella Raines and their turbulent travails are accompanied by the dulcet strains of crooner Josh White’s guitar. Such was the heat that the sweat evaporated from the actors’ bodies so Sturges was obliged to adorn them in grease and glycerine to mimic it. @MeredithTaylor

LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL | RETROSPECTIVE 2024

Luce (2024) Locarno International Film Festival

Dir: Luca Bellini, Silvia Luzi | Italy Drama 92’

Episodes from the life of Luce an aimless young woman living in Rome is the latest feature from director duo Luca Bellini and Silvio Luzzi.

Partly told in Roman dialect the drama unfolds in bleak winter in a cold and rainy Southern Italy: One day on the beach, Luce has a sudden inspiration, and from that moment on her life also becomes someone else’s. A voice on her cellphone provides a tenuous line between her desires, her imagination, and the world around her.

Luce is disillusioned by love and life in general. By day she works in a noisy leather factory – and this is film that is incredibly noisy with its jarring score – by night she hangs out with an unreliable photographer in a relationship that’s heading nowhere. The women in her life are mostly unsupportive and tell her not to take life so seriously. So much for the sisterhood.

But one day on the beach she gets an idea in her head and becomes obsessed by it. Then come the anonymous phone calls from a man claiming to be her father. This disembodied stranger offers comfort and stability and the intimacy she has been missing. But is this just another man to let her down, or is it her real father?. Fact and fantasy meld and mesmerise us in this fuzzy reverie.

Essentially a one-hander with close up and personal camerawork from Jacopo Caramella and driven forward by its antsy atmosphere we really gets inside Luce’s world and experience what it’s like to be a downcast twenty something: confused, depressed and lonely. Marianna Fontana gives a soulful and sensitive interpretation of Luce in this intimate and refreshingly novel portrait of modern womanhood untethered by kids, companionship and close caring family. @MeredithTaylor

LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2024

Sleep #2 Locarno International Film Festival 2024

Wri/Dir: Radu Jude | Romania, Doc 71’

Radu Jude’s fascination with death is taken up again here in his enigmatically entitled Sleep#2 which makes a suitable companion piece to his 2017 outing The Dead Nation commemorating the Romanian Holocaust with a stunning collection of photos of long-dead uncelebrated Romanians from 1930s and 40s.

The Romanian auteur thought it would be interesting to focus this latest macabre documentary – one of two films he has screening in this year’s 77th Locarno International Film Festival – on the phenomenon of post mortem surveillance with an offbeat look at the final resting place of the American artist and trend-setter Andy Warhol (1928-87) in Pennsylvania. During his lifetime Warhol, a Rutherian Catholic, celebrated celebrity culture coining the phrase “15 minutes of fame”, and this film shows how his own celebrity status still draws visitors to his grave in St John the Baptist Byzantine Catholic Cemetery, Bethel Park nearly forty years after his death. This time there are no faces to gawp at only a stone commemoration.

A static camera pictures the Warhol grave site 24/7 throughout the seasons, by night and day. Those seeking a more dynamic action film can look away, this is very much in the style of documentarian Sergei Loznitsa’s 2016 outing Austerlitz. and says as much about the spectators as the subject matter itself. Jude films the livecam footage from a collaborative project between the Warhol family and EarthCam called simply ‘Figment’

We see the burial place in early summer with its stunning blue cornflowers right through to Christmas time as rain and snow fall heavily eventually engulfing the tombstone with its ever present decoration of Warhol’s iconic Campbell’s soup tins (from the 1962 painting) serving as a constant tribute to the artist’s pop art endeavour. The ambient score of traffic thunders on in the background and visitors and caretakers come and go each making their passive and active contributions. Inter-titles aim to offer placatory and euphemistic musings on death etc. What is the message here? Well let’s say it’s open to interpretation. Make of what you will. @MeredithTaylor.

SCREENING AT LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2024

Bell Book and Candle (1958)

Dir: Richard Quine | Cast: James Stewart, Kim Novak, Jack Lemmon, Ernie Kovaks, Hermione Gingold | Fantasy Drama 106′ 1958

If you thought your in-laws are weird check out Kim Novak’s brood in this film.

Cary Grant actively sought the lead in this glossy comedy in colour; which Hitchcock ironically used as the excuse not to cast Jimmy Stewart in ‘North by Northwest’, and is now vaguely remembered as the ‘other’ film he made with Kim Novak (whose beauty always seemed almost supernatural).

Frequently credited as the inspiration for the TV series ‘Bewitched’ (although that distinction more properly probably belongs to I Married a Witch) you certainly won’t find a collection as eccentric as Jack Lemmon, Ernie Kovacs, Elsa Lancaster and Hermione Gingold. ©RichardChatten

NOW ON TALKING PICTURES TV

FOUL EVIL DEEDS (2024) Locarno International Film Festival

Dir: Richard Hunter | United Kingdom · 2024 · DCP 2K · 108′ · o.v. English / Mandarin

Richard hunter has made a bit of a name for himself in the disgusting horror genre so his feature debut more or less speaks for itself and lives up to expectations with its vile and often ludicrous compendium of short stories vignetting the unkind, unpleasant or squeamishly ghastly unfolding as a collection of filmed sequences all based on reality.

Along similar lines to TVs Candid Canera – if you remember it – albeit with a macabre twist, this has to be seen to be believed. The characters are nasty, weird and some are just downright sad – like the guy who orders a pair of six inches long shorts. Or the porn addicted vicar stuck in a sexless marriage and plagued by maggot-infested cupboards conjuring up the worst fears of sleeping in your own bedroom.

Hunter intertwines them together to provide a running gag that ramps up a low level tension. It keeps us gripped to the screen throughout the feature’s one and three quarter hour’s running time. Ultimately watchable and entertaining this is easy and enjoyable viewing although the final reveals are more bathetic than satisfying. @MeredithTaylor

FOUL EVIL DEEDS (CONCORSO CINEASTI DEL PRESENTE) Saturday 8th at 6pm

The Count of Monte Cristo (2024)

Dirs/Wri: Matthieu Delaporte, Alexandre De La Patellière | Cast: Pierre Niney, Anaïs Demoustier, Bastien Bouillon, Laurent Lafitte, Patrick Mille, Anamaria Vartolomei, Vassili Schneider, Julien De Saint-Jean, Pierfrancesco Favino | France. 2024. 178mins

The Napoleonic era is seen in a different light from Ridley Scott’s recent epic in this swashbuckling sortie into French history from 19th literary darling Alexandre Dumas based on his storied hero The Count of Monte Cristo.

In 1812 Napoleon’s fleet is embattled in churning seas when a dashing young sailor gets his kit off to save a young woman from drowning. It’s an act that will bring him promotion to captain of the fleet and to ask the hand of his sweetheart. He is Edmund Dantes (Pierre Niney), she is Mercedes (Demoustier). And what a lovely couple they make. Edmund shyly sexy and Mercedes quivering with nubile bliss. But there’s a niggle in the woodpile in the shape of a jealous rival – in fact several – determined to thwart him at every turn. And no sooner than the lovers’ lips are dry from their post nuptial kiss than Edmund is seized on a charge of treason and imprisoned on the forbidding Chateau d’If in an island off the Marseille coast.

This epic adventure written by Delaporte and De La Patelliere is a tale rife with revenge and intrigue in a complex plot bursting with romance, sword play and fabulous settings. And it’s Niney’s most ambitious role to date. There are several baddies to contend with, Fernand de Morcef (Bouillon) who fancies Mercedes, scheming prosecutor Gerard de Villefort (Lafitte) who imprisons him without trial, and the curiously named Danglars (Mille) whom Edmonde replaced as captain. But of course Dantes is the focus as we soon find out why in his intriguing character evolvement from earnest young salt to hard-bitten hero.

After fourteen years of incarceration in his dank dungeon Edmund miraculously tools through a gap in the stone walls and comes face to face with a distant relative of the Monte Cristo in the shape of fellow prisoner (Abbe) Pier Francesco Favino. A close bond of trust forms in these challenging circumstances and Abbe divulges the location of his family treasure before tragedy strikes on the eve of a tension-fuelled escapade to uncover the secret of the hidden booty. But on returning home Edmund discovers that his love is now married to his ‘best friend’ and that his father has died of a broken heart.

Zipping through its three hour running time this tale of derring-do then transports us to a lavish palace where our hero has slipped into a more mysterious guise as the soi disant Comte de Monte Cristo, a raffish, tee totaller seeking justice but killing only in his defence, and supported by sidekicks, Andréa (Julien De Saint-Jean) and the enigmatic Haydée (Anamaria Vartolomei), who both have axes to grind with Edmund’s enemies. Residing in an opulent palace showcasing his newly acquired fortune Edmund sets out to exact retribution, and we root for him until the end, in this classically styled adventure drama with solid gold production values and sweepingly romantic score. @MeredithTaylor

NOW ON RELEASE IN UK from 30 August 2024

Sew Torn (2024) Locarno International Film Festival 2024

Dir: Freddy McDonald | Thriller 95’ 2024

A girl inherits her mother’s failing sewing business but soon finds herself spinning the perfect crime with the tools of her trade in this ingenious, if repetitive, feature debut from Freddy McDonald screening at the Locarno International Film Festival’s 77th edition

Barbara’s mother’s has only one customer left – and boy is she difficult and rude. Grace Vessier (Caroline Goodall) is getting married for the third time — her house is in an Alpine valley; providing the film with its stunning scenery. Quite why it’s set in Switzerland is never explained as all the characters speak English.

During the fraught fitting Barbara (Eve Connolly) drops a vital pearl button from Grace’s dress, so she must rush back to base on a life-changing journey. And it’s here that matters turn criminal. On the road back Barbara comes across an accident – or is it? Two bleeding bikers (Calum Worth, John Lynch), a briefcase, two guns and several bags of a white powder are strewn across the tarmac.

Sew Torn is a tricksy bit of Neo noir Macdonald making use of repetative motifs in a multi-stranded narrative that mulls over Barbara’s possible options in what soon emerges is a botched drug deal.

Should she commit the “Perfect crime… Call the police… Drive away.” Her mind whirls with questions. At first she thinks of driving off with the briefcase, presumably full of loot. Barbara mulls over the three options, each is explored with their various outcomes, and this is where the repetitive element kicks in. None are ideal but probably the final one that involves a dance routine in a bar is watchable. Barbara may have an ailing business on her hands but she sure is imaginative. MeredithTaylor

LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL | AUGUST 2024

La Vita Accanto (2024) Locarno International Film 2024

Christmas time in 1980s Vicenza. And a child is born to Maria (Valentina Bellé), the spoilt and troubled wife of a wealthy doctor Osvaldo (Paolo Pierobon) . But this little girl Rebecca (Sara Ciocca) faces a lifetime of rejection simply because the birthmark flies in the face of her mother’s pride and selfishness exposing deep fault lines in this illustrious family.

La Vita Accanto is the sensitive and classically styled latest film

from award-winning director Marco Tullio Giordano who directs from a script by Marco Bellocchio (who also produces) based on the book by Mariapia Veladiano

Sadly Maria was never fulfilled despite wealth and a loving husband and when her daughter born with a facial blemish she had the perfect excuse to channel her anguish into Rebecca’s blemish making her young life fraught and miserable

Fortunately Rebecca’s aunt, a famous pianist, instills in her the love of music and restores her faith in her appearance. And her faithful friend Lucilla and her mother Beba also rebuild her confidence. Her father is also endlessly patient and kind.

With its rousing classical score and immaculate direction this is a highly intelligent and elegantly crafted drama that shows how a mother’s mental illness not only causes family dysfunction, but seriously disrupts a daughter’s wellbeing affecting her development. Crucially the body can also heal itself because medicine is not an exact science. MeredithTaylor

LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2024 |

Salve Maria (2024) Special Mention | Locarno International Film Festival 2024

Dir: Mar Coll | Spain, drama 110’

Ever thought of killing someone dear to you? Mar Coll is a Goya awarded Catalan filmmaker competing in this year’s Golden Leopard competition and her latest feature Salve Maria certainly presents a convincing portrait of a woman on the edge with murder in mind .

Based on a novel by Basque writer Katixa Agirre it follows Maria a new mother struggling with her baby: the breastfeeding, the gruelling tiredness; the constant grizzling are all getting her down. And you really feel for her. So when she hears about the case of a French mother, accused of murdering her infant twins, Maria is shocked but not altogether surprised.

Maria becomes increasingly obsessed by this terrible crime and begins to fantasise about her own stressful situation until the idea of killing seems less outlandish than she originally thought. A grave orchestral score strikes the sombre mood lifting this domestic thriller elevating into much darker territory despite a rather underwhelming denouement. @MeredithTaylor

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL | INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION

Invention (2024) Pardo for Best Performance | Locarno International Film Festival 2024

Dir: Courtney Stephens, Callie Hernandez | Writers: Callie Hernandez, Courtney Stephens | Cast: Callie Hernandez, Sahm McGlynn, Lucy Kaminsky, Tony Torn, James N. Kienitz Wilkins | US Drama

“Of all the ways to lose a person death is the kindest“

On a tight budget Carrie picks out a black plastic box for the body of her conspiracy-minded father in the aftermath to his death. The only thing he leaves her – the patent for an experimental healing device, and a pile of debts. A fascinating premise turns into a sensitive psychological drama from US filmmakers Stephens and Hernandez, who also plays the main role.

Carrie then embarks on a series of meetings with her father’s collaborators in an attempt to discover more about her legacy and her dad’s life. Through these offbeat encounters she gradually builds up a picture of the man she hardly knew, and she also discovers some bizarre conspiracy theories.

Featuring archives from Callie Hernandez’s late father, this oddball and darkly comic film explores the process of mourning for a madcap parent. Oddly, the filmmaking itself becomes a part of the process with its electronic organ score and some visual flourishes adding to the bizarre ambiance.

There are some inventive ideas here and the filmmakers adopt an episodic approach to the narrative that plays out with a series of wacky character sketches and imaginative concepts. Occasionally the camera cuts to a bleached out sequence that feels like a flashback but is ultimately confusing in the scheme of things. There are also clips of filmed footage featuring other outlandish gadgets and inventions and these give this watchable and memorable film its tongue in cheek humour. The directors also point out the following which I found relevant and insightful: “Invention also serves as a portrait of America in its late period, a country in which widespread disappointment infuses the culture with hopeful fictions and toxic nostalgia”. @MeredithTaylor

LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL | Pardo for Best Performance | Callie Hernandez | CINEASTI DEL PRESENTE

Francesco (1989)

Dir: Liliana Cavani | Cast: Mickey Rourke, Helena Bonham Carter | Italy, Docudrama, 157’

A film by the director of ‘The Night Porter’ starring Mickey Rourke – depicted as less of a tree-hugger but complete with obligatory skinny-dipping scene – as Francis of Assisi might sound like a grotesque joke, and ‘Francesco’ certainly generated more headlines than ticket sales over the controversy worked up by the papers when they collectively threw up their hands in outrage at reports that Rourke had donated his proceeds from this film to the IRA.

It can’t be denied that ‘Mental Mickey’ – as the tabloids were quick to label him – was idiosyncratic casting as Francis, and Cavani wasn’t exactly known for her quiet taste and restraint, but Helena Bonham Carter brings grace to a supporting role and it isn’t quite the embarrassment you might have anticipated. Although it certainly does try. ©️Richard Chatten

Frewaka (2024) Locarno International Film Festival 2024

Wri/Dir: Aislinn Clarke | Cast: Clare Monnelly, Bríd Ní Neachtain, Aleksandra Bystrzhitskaya| Ireland, Horror, Gaelic Irish 103’

The past comes back to haunt a young Irish care worker in this macabre fantasy horror from director and first time feature scripter Aislinn Clarke.

In rural Ireland Catholic guilt and fear remains an oppressive theme even today in the 21st century. And it certainly troubles a young bride who takes her own life on the night of her marriage, in the film’s opening scenes.

In this Irish Gaelic feature, billed as the country’s first horror outing in the language, Clarke, best known for her director debut The Devil’s Doorway, makes inspired use of all the evocative horror tropes connected to Irish folklore: horseshoes, Billy goats and dispossessed voices – not to mention a glowing scarlet cross. Clarke confident direction relies on atmosphere to string together a series of terrifying events in the domestic environment where women are struggling in difficult circumstances.

The main character Shoo, recovering from a personal tragedy, has a gruelling and unforgiving time as a trainee care worker tasked with looking after an agoraphobic patient in a remote country setting. You can’t help feeling sorrow for Shoo’s poor charge Peig (Brid Ni Meachtain) a tortured widow desperately missing her dead husband Daithi (Og Lane) and coping with early onset dementia and plagued by the Na Sídhe – sinister entities whom she believes abducted her decades before. Peig clearly just wants to be left alone in her own home and is plagued by But somehow the women’s past traumas intermingle with alarming results, despite Peig’s initial antipathy towards her young helper.

There are certainly shades of The Whicker Man and St Maud (2019) here but the accent is on female camaraderie and this Irish horror outing doesn’t quiet exert the same chill or twisted humour as Rose Glass did in her care-worker thriller with its unnerving sensory specificity, despite some impressive ideas and committed performances from TV and theatre actor Clare Monelly in the lead role. @MeredithTaylor

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | 7 -17 AUGUST 2024

The Sparrow in the Chimney | Der Spatz im Kamin (2024) Locarno International Film Festival 2024

Dir: Ramon & Silvan Zürcher | Drama

After winning the Best Director prize at the 2021 Berlinale Ramon & Silvan Zürcher return with what they describe as the third film in their animal trilogy which premiered in the International Competition at this year’s Locarno Film Festival.

We are introduced to a pastoral scene that envelops a sense of dread as a bourgeois household begins to welcome a family get together to celebrate a birthday. Karen lives with her husband Markus and their children in her idyllically located childhood home. For Markus’ birthday, Karen’s sister Jule, her husband Jurek and their two children come to visit. All of them looming among the lush green of summer and with the regal blaze to come alongside the brute centre part of an iridescent moth.

The normal representations of a very similar scenario are all here: Families and their oppressive nature, tension between sisters, mothers and daughters and the constant competition and finally the way a family home holds memories and negativity. The problems with these tropes are the need to distinguish yourself from the great works that have come before you. For a time Der Spatz im Kamin manages to do this and intrigues the audience with what will come.

As we slowly begin to engage with the characters, the tropes slowly merge into cliche: the duality of the sisters, Karen is stern and rigid, constantly internalising her sense of self hatred and Jule, easy going, rhythmical and superficially happy. Jules’ daughter Johanna and the back and forth between them of boundaries being pushed which seems to hide more than the usual teenage rebellion. An unspoken visual clue is how alike both emotionally and physically Johanna and Jule are. Of course alongside that is Johanna’s burgeoning sexuality and her discovery of that power.

Like their previous films this is constantly surrounded by animals, insects and nature both in the house and outside of it. In fact the house is completely open, with windows and doors allowing the coexistence of both human and nature. In fact the house in itself and it’s unspoken history is alive to the constant discourse (both internal and external) between characters that always seems to take place in rooms and doorways.

Brushing against their family at certain moments is Liv who recently moved into the small house on the edge of the woods and who harbours numerous secrets most predictably that she is sleeping with Karen’s husband Markus.

In the second half it really loses its way and descends into the obvious with metaphor after metaphor: cracked plates, smashed glass. For a film that is trying to go beyond verbal language it really begins to sell itself short becoming a constant metaphor intermingled with tonal non sequiturs. A low rent Angela Schanelec is what springs to mind and to come we have children murdering animals and of course a burning house and the idea of character rebirth and wife/mistress swapping roles and personalities. Like I have pointed out earlier trope after trope that doesn’t won them and do anything different than we have seen in far better films.

The filmmakers previous films had a unique sense of the other/uncanny which was disconcerting and discombobulating. This maybe is a film too far and it might be a time for a creative reset. ©️ D W Mault

SCREENING IN COMPETITION AT LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2024

Locarno 77 | Nine Films To Look Out For (2024)

Locarno International Film Festival 2024 starts on August the 7th on the mountainside shores of Lake Maggiore in Switzerland’s Ticino canton. Here are some films to look out for:

PIAZZA GRANDE strand

La Deluge

The last days of Marie Antoinette and Louis XIV play out in the lavish costume drama from Gianluca Godice and starring Guillaume Canet and Melanie Laurent.

Lady from Shanghai (1947)

Directed by Orson Wells this cult classic is screening as part of this year’s Retrospective ‘Lady with a Torch – The Centenary of Columbia Pictures’. The film has been restored from a 4k scan of the original negative with a restored audio from the 35mm nitrate original soundtrack negative

Gaucho Gaucho (2024)

Dwek and Kershaw’s pristine black and white images are the stars of this fascinating sortie into the world of the Argentinian horseman, both male and female

Timestalker (2024)

The definition of madness: Doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome. English writer/director Alice Lowe’s entertaining imagination looks at one woman’s amorous experiences.

CINEASTI DEL PRESENTE strand

Foul Evil Deeds (2024)

Evil knows no bounds according to this horror feature from UK director Richard Hunter who dives into the minds of the bad and bizarre with his candid camera.

La Passion Selon Béatrice (2024)

Belgian maverick director Fabrice Du Welz returns this time in black white and casting Beatrice Dalle in a physiological thriller

FUORI CONCORSO strand

Romanian auteur Radu Jude wowed audiences with his proactive comp title Do Not Expect much From the End of the World that took the jury prize at last year’s Locarno. This time he has two films at this 77th edition – the enigmatically entitled Sleep #2 (that has no dialogue) and Eight Postcards from Utopia that captures his post-socialist homeland through the medium of advertising.

Raiz (2024)

Past and present collide in this enchanting award-winning drama from Franco Garcia Becerra that had already garnered prizes at Berlinale and Seattle this year, and follows an eight-year-old alpaca farmer Feliciano. He is ecstatic when Peru has the opportunity to qualify for the World Cup.

CRITICS WEEK strand

Beyond Guilt (2024)

The true crime genre is perhaps one of the most popular with the audience today. TV series, podcasts, and documentaries all over the world investigate murders, disappearances, and other crime events with an emotional emphasis on victims and perpetrators. In contrast Beyond Guilt looks at the “collateral” victims of a shocking serial murder case, documenting the daily life of the parents of Niels Högel, a German serial killer nurse convicted of killing about 90 patients.

LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2024

Ozi: Voice of the Forest (2024)

Dir: Tim Harper | With the voices of: Amandla Stenberg, Dean-Charles Chapman, Donald Sutherland, Laura Dern | Animation 97’

Ozi is an adorable orphan orangutan who is separated from her family during a manmade fire and uses her special influencer skills to save her forest and home from deforestation.

It’s a measure of the increasingly high profile that animated features are enjoying that the late Donald Sutherland lent to this film his vocal talents to the role of a crocodile called ‘Smiley’ (rather aptly since Sutherland’s menacing smile had long been a characteristic of his)

Ozi himself is a cute little tyke, with a mop of bright red hair, big brown eyes, secure in her cuteness for her father to plead vainly “Don’t do the eyes!”, blessed with a worldly wit and able to operate an ipad.

Human rapaciousness inevitably gets short shrift; humanity’s Humanity’s saving grave coming in the form of two friendly forest rangers. @RichardChatten

IN UK AND IRISH CINEMAS FROM 16 August 2024

you can watch the trailer HERE.

Cartas Telepaticas (2024) Locarno International Film Festival 2024

Dir: Edgar Pera | Experimental/Fantasy Doc | Portugal 2024

Hats are the watchwords in this beguiling cinematic creation from Portuguese maverick filmmaker Edgar Pera.

Zooming in over the skyscrapers of New York this monochrome musing explores and draws comparisons between the enigmatic lives of two contemporary writers from the modernist literary movement: Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), who adopted a series of different noms de plume each with their own separate intellectual Identity, and the horror poet and novelist Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937).

Worlds apart yet united by their unique brand of science fiction horror the two engaged in correspondence, although they never came face to face. Pessoa was best known for his idiosyncratic heteronyms (a word that has a different pronunciation and meaning from another word but the same spelling eg ‘tear’) to reflect on how individuals can also have multiple personas and different facets of their own lives. The multi-coloured frames contain a series of black and white photos of be-hatted men who each utter maxims from the annuls of literature.

The maverick Portuguese moviemaker Edgar Pera makes us of split screens, Ai generated images and a syncopated electronic score with his signature echoing voices (think O Barao) creating possibly the most meaty and accomplished experimental horror of his career to date. @MeredithTaylor

LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | CONCORSO INTERNATIONAL 2024

Mexico 1986 (2024) Locarno International Film Festival 2024

Dir: Cesar Diaz | Cast: Berenice Bejo, Fermin Martinez, Leonardo Ortisgris, Julieta Egurrola, Matheo Labbe | Drama 89’

Another fascinating slice of history from Latin America in the Seventies that unfolds in Guatemala, 1976. A terrified woman runs along the street with a baby boy. She is Maria, a Guatemalan rebel activist fighting against the corrupt military dictatorship. Now desperate to save her life amid death threats she must flee to Mexico, leaving her son behind.

Ten years later, when he comes to live with her, she is forced to choose between her duties as a mother and continuing her revolutionary activism. Berenice Bejo gives her all in this passionate portrait of divided loyalties from La fremis-trained director Cesar Diaz of Amores Perros and Our Mothers fame. @MeredithTaylor

LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | CONCORSO INTERNATIONALE 2024

Death will Come (2024) Locarno International Film Festival 2024

Dir: Christoph Hochhäusler

There’s a retro 1980s feel to this noirish neon crime thriller set in Luxembourg’s louche underworld.

La Mort viendra (Death Will Come) is writer director Christoph Hochhäusler’s follow-up to his Berlinale Silver Bear winner Till the End of the Night. Screening in the main International Competition lineup in of this year’s Locarno film festival this is a tense and twisty thriller that certainly punches above its weight elevated by an evocative score and gritty monochrome street scenes reminiscent of Seventies crime fare Day of the Jackal and the French Connection although on a much more modest scale.

The film follows a stylish crime boss (Louis-Do de Lencquesain) who hires a sassy hit woman called Tez (Sophie Verbeeck) to track down one of his most valued couriers. But Tez – a sort of grown up Nikita – soon gets out of her depth and becomes entangled in a conspiracy in the criminal underworld that rather runs out of steam in the final stretch but it’s decent and watchable – and guess what? – there’s a lesbian twist. MeredithTaylor

LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2024

Bride of the Monster (1955)

Dir: Edward D Wood Jnr | Cast: Bêla Lugosi, Tor Johnson, Tony McKoy, Loretta King US Horror | 69’ 1955

During the sixties Orson Welles had at one point planned to end his version of Don Quixote with a nuclear explosion, a goal in which he was preempted by Ed Wood by ten years.

Talking Pictures preceded this afternoon’s screening with the disclaimer that viewers might find this film disturbing. But anybody perplexed at the brevity of Bela Lugosi’s final screen appearance in ‘Plan 9 from Outer Space’ will not be disappointed with this earlier film he made for Edward D. Wood Jr.

Wood on this occasion doesn’t show his tendency to sermonise, even demonstrating a little imagination with some mumbo-jumbo about the origins of the Loch Ness Monster. Lugosi is given a much more substantial role, top-billed as whip-wielding mad scientist Dr Erich Vornoff hiding out in a cottage in the middle of a swamp whose most extravagant feature is an enormous laboratory in the basement where he keeps a pet octopus to which the good doctor and his mouth-breathing assistant Lobo by feeding it guests. @RichardChatten

NOW ON TALKING PICTURES TV

Someone at the Door (1950)

Dir: Francis Searle | Cast:· Michael Medwin. Ronnie Martin · Garry Marsh. Kapel · Yvonne Owen. Sally Martin · Hugh Latimer | UK Comedy drama 1950

A young Michael Medwin overacts like crazy in a rare leading role in this second adaptation of a play first filmed as a thirties quota quickie; an impression reinforced by the presence of Garry Marsh and Danny Green as the heavies.

The whimsical nature of this early production by Hammer veteran Anthony Hinds is established from the outset as the cast cheerfully breach the fourth wall turning and smiling at the camera (although the scene where Marsh menacingly bears down on the bound heroine wielding a lighted cigar would have seemed like strong meat even in Hammer’s later horror thrillers).

The acoustics of the country house already a familiar feature of Exclusive productions and the actors’ breath in the exteriors adds substance along with Walter Harvey’s atmospheric high contrast photography. @RichardChatten

NOW ON TALKING PICTURES

The Crowd (1928) Locarno International Film Festival 2024

Wri/Dir: King Vidor | US Drama, Silent 1928

A story of everyman lost in the crowd yet relevant to each one of us. King Vidor’s 1928 silent epic sees a young couple, John an advertising copywriter, and his wife Mary very much in love as they struggle through their ordinary life with all its pettiness and glory. John’s dream is to write an award-winning slogan but their world is turned upside by a family tragedy. Full of hope and sadness and Vidor’s magnificent mise en scène Thé Crowd shows man as a cog in life’s machinery on widescreen shots of New York, the Niagara Falls, the parks and the beach. Vidor captures the universality of experience with two expressive performances from Eleanor Boardman and James Murray and a rousing score by Carl Davis.

LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL | August 7 – 17 2024 | opening film

Defence of the Realm (1985)

Dir: David Drury | Cast: Gabriel Byrne, Denholm Elliott, Greta Scacchi, Ian Bannen | UK political thriller 96’

Opening with a night scene taking place in East Anglia but rather strangely described by an onscreen caption identifying the location as ‘East England’; back in the capital what follows is a prime example of the didactic political dramas that did so much to tame the iron heel of Thatcherism in eighties Britain.

Although affecting the style of a thriller and enlivened by the presence of the likes of Ian Bannen, Denholm Elliott , Fulton Mackay – and Robbie Coltrane – the film, based on a novel by Martin Stellman, contains my favourite example of a character doing something that one would only ever do in a movie when Gabriel Byrne (SLIGHT SPOILER COMING:) empties a newly opened carton of orange juice (we actually see him take it from the fridge and tear it open so there’s absolutely no doubt that it’s full) straight down the sink rather than into a jug simply to use the empty carton to place documents inside it. @RichardChatten

The Trouble with Jessica (2023)

Dir: Matt Winn | UK, Comedy satire, 90′

The Trouble with Jessica is of those spiky satires that hangs on a series of conundrums, the characters tossing the ball from one to the other as they scope how each thorny dilemma with ultimately affect them.

It all takes place in the leafy literati village of Hampstead, North London, where Sarah (Shirley Henderson) and Tom (Alan Tidy) have invited a coterie of close friends for a pre-sale last supper in their flashy double-fronted mansion. The dish of the day, a cherry clafoutis (a type of French pudding), features as the star turn, and may be the reason the film won the Audience Award and Special Jury Prize at last year’s Dinard British Film Festival.

Shirley Henderson is terrific as the hard-as-nails hostess Sarah, her husband Tom is an architect. The plot turns on their desperate need to the family house or face financial ruin. Rufus Sewell is a hot shot barrister. Much to Sarah’s annoyance, his wife Beth (Olivia Williams) has brought along her friend Jessica (Indira Varma) who seems to have dated all the men and still carries for them, flirting outrageously. Suddenly, after a seemingly trivial spat, Jessica goes into the garden and hangs herself. What happens next will have you on tenterhooks although the outcome is authentic and satisfying.

Written by Matt Winn and James Handel The Trouble is witty and fun and full of insider gags that may prove less amusing for those unfamiliar with the territory. Let’s say it’s an adult affair for heterosexual highflyers. @MeredithTaylor

NOW ON RELEASE IN FRANCE

Svaneti International Film Festival | Awards 2024

Redeem Me by Rechel Hananashvili took the Chalet Mestia Award for Best Project at Georgia’s Svaneti International Film Festival nestling amid vertiginous mountains in one of highest villages in Europe. The film takes place in an Israeli-Georgian household where a 12-year old girl is adjusting to domestic turmoil.

Tea Vatsadze’s Gravity won the Best Project by a Female Director Award. Gravity sees donkey farmers taking over in a post-Soviet society. A Special Mention went to Abustumani by Mariam Karkashadze

Founded and headed by local filmmaker Mariam Khachvani (Dede) in 2021, this year’s event paid tribute to two-time Palme d’Or winner Ruben Ostlund and showcased a comprehensive retrospective of his film archive. During the closing ceremony he also received the festival’s Honorary Goddess Dali Award and gave a masterclass on his filmmaking techniques in the UNESCO awarded village of Ushvilli that stands at 3000 metres in stunning scenery

In the Short Film Competition two additional awards went to Timur Chopliani for Best Film with Its Not Far From Here and Kim Toress from Costa Rica who won Best Director for The Moon Will Contain Us

An international jury of programmers and producers presided over the two competitions, selecting the various winners.

A programme of four digitally restored Georgian classics from the silent period was also shown during open-air late-night screenings.

Here is the full list of the winners:

Pitching Forum Competition Awards

Chalet Mestia Award for Best Project

Redeem Me – Rechel Hananashvili (Georgia)

Best Project by a Female Director

Gravity – Tea Vatsadze (Georgia)

Special Mention

Abastumani – Mariam Karkashadze (Georgia)

Short Film Competition Awards

Best Film

It’s Not Far From Here – Timur Chopliani (Georgia)

Best Director

Kim Toress – The Moon Will Contain Us (Costa Rica/USA)

Honorary Goddess Dali Award

Ruben Östlund

SVANETI INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2024

Uprising in Guria | Djanki Guriashi (1928/9) Svaneti International Film Festive 2024

Dir: Alexandre Tsutsunava | Georgia, Silent, Historical drama 190′

On the final night of the festival, on 21st July, we took to the deckchairs in Mestia’s main square to watch this dazzling snapshot of Georgian history.

According to sources, the 1920s was one of the most significant decades for Georgian cinema in terms of aesthetics and channelling the ideology of the era. Director Alexandre Tsutsunava (Qristine,1916, Who Is at Fault?/1925, Khanuma 1926, Two Hunters,1927) was one the first Georgian feature directors and studied at Moscow Art Theatre School before honing his filmmaking craft under Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko.

In A Rebellion in Guria Tsutsunava makes use of national motifs and artfully draws on his experience as a theatre and opera director to conjure up the seething sentiments of the Georgian ‘peasants’ who mounted a wide scale revolt against Russian colonialism in 1847.

Based on Egnate Ninoshvilli’s novel this three hour historical epic features spectacular battle set pieces and impassioned performances from A Mesniaev, K. Eristavi and I Korsunskaya chronicling the rebellion that took place in western Georgia during. @MeredithTaylor

Deadpool & Wolverine (2024)

Dir: Shawn Levy, Writers: Ryan Reynolds, Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, Zeb Wells, Shawn Levy | Cast: Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman, Emma Corrin, Morena Baccarin, Rob Delaney, Leslie Uggams, Karan Soni, Matthew Macfadyen | US Actioner 127′

The screen’s nerdiest superhero returns in tandem with Wolverine in a tale that probably owes as much to Shawn Levy’s earlier comedies as to Marvel comics.

The humour’s perversely juvenile considering – although it includes references both visual and verbal to other movies and the film business in general to tickle the tummy of the cinema-savvy – since the bad language, sex talk and eye-watering violence means it carries a 15 certificate.

As usual the characters devote more energy to fighting amongst themselves than evil-doers, and when they eventually do it’s almost as an afterthought.

Predictably it’s overlong and garrulous with several false endings; as our hero ruefully admits in one of the last of his frequent breaches of the fourth wall. @RichardChatten

NOW IN UK CINEMAS

All at Sea (1957)

Dir: Charles Frend | UK Comedy

The last and least of his Ealing comedies – dismissed by Alec Guinness as “the wretched, boring ‘Barnacle Bill’ – which I never wanted to do but only did out of friendship to Charley Friend” – ‘Barnacle Bill’ features playing yet another authority figure whose boundless self-confidence is completely unspoiled by failure and whose hubris involves sleeping in a hammock.

Recalling the depiction of the D’Ascoigne family in ‘Kind Hearts and Coronets’ with Guinness’s ancestors played by Guinness; while lacking the subtlety of the classic Ealing comedies of yesteryear with a galumphing score by John Addison it ended the studio’s history with a whimper rather than a bang but affords the agreeable sight of Guinness shaking a leg with a young Jackie Collins in slacks and a ponytail. @RichardChatten

NOW ON TALKING PICTURES TV

Dial M for Murder (1954)

Dir: Alfred Hitchcock | Cast: Ray Milland Grace Kelly | Thriller 90’

Alfred Hitchcock doesn’t get sufficient credit for his technical enterprise which here comes into full play in his exploitation of colour and 3-D in what in less ambitious hands would have been a simple piece of canned theatre, whereas Hitchcock makes almost no attempt to open the action out; instead employing the third dimension to draw you into the action as the ten-minute take had done in ‘Rope’.

Despite his mercenary nature Ray Milland is a classic charming villain in the Hitchcock tradition who commands far greater sympathy than Grace Kelly who after all is cheating on him with Robert Cummings, whose desire to get her off the hook whose motivation is purely selfish, and John Williams – who plays an Anglo-Saxon Columbo – increasingly finds a nuisance.

Kudos too to Dimitri Tiomkin’s score, the last he wrote for a Hitchcock film. @RichardChatten

A King in New York (1957)

Wri/Dir: Charles Chaplin | US Drama

Once Chaplin finally began to talk onscreen it swiftly became apparent how fond he was of the sound of his own voice, and from that point on he never stopped – even reciting a soliloquy from Hamlet’ at one point – in ‘A King in New York’; while in support his boy Michael proves a regular chip off the old block, to whom he passes the mantle “the little fellow”.

Historically important as Chaplin’s final lead, ‘A King in New York’ proved like most of Chaplin’s later work a film whose lack of availability for several years maintained the notion that it was something special, although later reappraisal sadly proved otherwise; while Chaplin’s critique of American crassness and vulgar materialism proved heavy-handed, with it’s depiction of the HUAC as naive and simplistic as his portrayal of Hitler in ‘The Great Dictator’.

Dawn Addams’ dark gamine looks make her a classic Chaplin ingenue, Oliver Johnston, who plays his ambassador, obviously met with Chaplin’s approval since he was later invited back for ‘A Countess from Hong Kong’; while the fact that the film was made in Britain is indicated by the large number of expatriate Americans, along with Sid James in the days when he was an honorary one. @RichardChatten

All the King’s Men (1949)

Dir: Robert Rossen | Cast: Mercedes McCambridge, Joanne Dru, John Ireland, Broderick Crawford | US Noir

John Carpenter’s Escape from New York has always seemed deeply flawed by the central implausibility that a man who looked like Donald Pleasance could have been elected President in the first place.

A fundamental shortcoming that has long afflicted Presidential politics in the United States is the stress perennially placed upon ‘charisma’ which perversely encourages style over substance, encouraging demagogues and going a long way towards explaining why two of the most grotesque chancers to have occupied the presidency since the turn of the current century had little more to offer than that overrated virtue.

Actual newsreel footage of the original Huey Long attests to his great vibrance and charisma, while the current pretender to the White House more strongly resembles the venal bully Willie Stark than Long himself.

Another major similarity between the final scene of All the King’s Men (SLIGHT SPOILER COMING:) based on what originally happened in Baton Rouge in 1935 and Saturday’s events in Pennsylvania was the sheer lack of finesse that characterised the response of the security details on both occasions. @RichardChatten

Citizen Saint (2023) Svaneti Film Festival 2024

Dir: Tinatin Kajrishvili | Georgia, Drama 2023

Is hope always a good a thing, or is it just a concept there to serve our own selfish needs? This is the question Tinatin Kajrishvili explores in her latest feature.

In a remote Georgian mining town, a saint’s stone statue mounted on a crucifix presides over the surrounding countryside and serves as a fatherly figure to those who come in tribute and also ask for help and protection

Citizen Saint – screening at this year’s Svaneti International Film Festival – reflects on the way Christian symbols of all kinds provide a comforting focus to believers all over the world.

According to local folklore the saint was crucified before turning to stone three days later. But when the man on the cross mysteriously disappears during restoration work a silent stranger (George Babluani) sporting stigmata and seemingly possessing mystic powers appears in the village causing the locals to assume this is the reincarnation of the statue. Some even reflect on the many secrets they have shared with him.

Miracles soon start to happen: the stranger finds a path through the caved-in tunnel where one of the villagers, a modest man called Berdo, once lost his son in a mining accident. Up to now he has only communed with his son’s ghost but now he can connect with him. The mine becomes a place of pilgrimage with believers coming from near and far in search of hope and healing including Mari, a woman whose husband was injured in the same incident. But the focus is always on the pilgrims’ own needs and expectations rather than the saintly man himself.

The Carpathian mountains surrounding the Svaneti International Film Festival provide an evocative backcloth for viewing this intriguing parable, a third feature for Kajrishvili who crafts an imaginative story about our ability to use representational icons to our own ends. Agile camerawork by Bulgarian DoP Krum Rodriquez is one of the triumphs of this resonant feature capturing the widescreen splendour of the craggy peaks, valleys and caves in pristine monochrome with fabulous use of light and shadow. Tako Zhordania‘s score adds to this surreal ambiance, combining ancient instruments, including the two-stringed erhu, and an Orthodox choir. @MeredithTaylor

NOW SCREENING AT SVANETI INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

Black Dog (2024)

Dir: Huan Gan | China 103’

This noirish black comedy is the lusciously lensed latest offering from Hu Guan and his longtime collaborator Rui Ge and stars awarded filmmaker Zia Zhangke alongside celebrated actor Eddie Peng who is strangely compelling in the main role.

It all starts with an accident in the remote steppe of north west China where a Clint Eastwood style drifter called Lang (Peng) comes home only to uncover the ghosts of his past. But this is no ordinary odyssey.

After escaping unscathed from an accident in the bus the skinny ex-prisoner fetches up in his hometown to discover the place is under threat from a rabid black dog. After joining the local dog patrol tasked with eliminating strays the two bond eventually and this is their unusual story.

Immaculately shot on the widescreen and brimming with thematic richness: civic and family duty; animal welfare, urban degeneration and so on this is a real treat with its sly humour, Pink Floyd score, visual acuity and an off beat script that takes its time and goes to unexpected places in telling an imaginative and moving story about a man and his best friend @MeredithTaylor

BLACK DOG will have its UK premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival (August 15-21, 2024), where it has been selected to screen Out of Competition.

Sleep (2024)

Dir/Wri: Jason Yu | Fantasy Thriller, South Korea 95’

Sleep is the debut feature title of South Korean writer director Jason Yu and specifically references classic 1970s paranoia films such as The Exorcist and The Driller Killer. But the deeper resonance may be the ground breaking Ira Levin/Roman Polanski novel/film Rosemary’s Baby (1968).

Sleep is divided into three chapters and explores the relationship of a married couple for whom pregnancy and impending birth starts to engulf the wife with doubt about the intentions of her husband. This will test how much he deeply cares for her and the unborn child. While the husband starts to behave ominously during the night, scratching his skin raw while asleep as well as sleep walking, the wife has to think outside of the box with more and more desperate ways to protect both her husband and unborn child.

During the second of three chapters the wife begins to adapt the apartment they live in with padlocks, lights at night, hand gloves, bedding straps and rails over windows. A medium will visit and offers exorcism, the wife’s mother provides unhelpful advice, food becomes an issue and a charming pet dog will become an unwelcome target for the couple. As strange behaviour increases during the hours of sleep, the film speculates on the nature of marriage and is aided here by accomplished sympathetic performances from Jung Yu-Mi and Lee Sun-Kyum as the couple.

Director Yu carefully uses architectural spaces to reveal inner states of mind which will also include a bath and a car doubling up as spaces to sleep in. As the wife fights to save the marriage, with the mantra “together we can overcome anything” visible on a wall, she talks to her husband about sharing life together providing a warm, loving, romantic touch to the film’s darkening paranoia.

Unlike Rosemary’s Baby, not everything in Sleep is clear about what is causing the states of paranoia. If not related to specific references to satanic malevolence, what are the other forces and factors at play here? In the final chapter, the film shifts focus towards the wife. Her loyalty and love within boundaries of familial relationships will also be tested.

The film has been described by Bong Joon Ho (the director of Parasite as an accomplished debut which it certainly is. As Yu learnt his craft working on films including Okja, an apt title for the film could have been Parasomnia which resonates with the theme of disturbed patterns of sleep. Peter Herbert

PETER HERBERT is CURATOR MANAGER at THE ARTS PROJECT

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Amoki (1927) Svaneti Film Festival 2024

Konstantine “Kote” Marjanishvili, also known by his Russian name of Konstantin Aleksandrovich (1872 – 1933), was best known as the founder of Georgian modern theatre and is widely celebrated for his part in the development of pre and post-revolutionary stage productions which were known for their lavish style and prodigious output

Born into a well-to-do literary family in Kvareli, then part of Russian empire, he started life as an actor/director during the early years of the 20th century before joining a troupe in Moscow where he later made a name for himself as an accomplished follower of Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863-1938) and went on to direct six films of various genres during the 1920s including this silent drama Amoki in 1927.

Inspired by Stefan Zweig’s Indonesian-set short story Amok the director heads off on an avantgarde flight of fantasy in his silent feature debut, a murky morality tale translocated to India. It sees a drug-addled alcoholic doctor (played by Aleksandre Imedashvili) descend into a hallucinogenic opium trip after suffering a breakdown and fetching up in an Indian village where he exploits the locals and attempts to take advantage of a married woman who requests his services in performing an abortion which will end in tragedy for both of them.

Serving both as an ethnographic snapshot of rural life in India at the time and an imaginative social drama the stealthy pacing and a sinister soundtrack only adds to the tension of this opium infused sortie into the imagination of a corrupt medic taking advantage of the characters he meets along the way (Nato Vachnadvili is particularly expressive and suitably dressed in the fashionable style of the era). The scene involving a bicycle theft is accompanied by the rhythmic whir of the wheels while also providing a palpable metaphor for colonial oppression. DoP Sergei Zabozlayev experiments with a dazzling array of inventive cinematic techniques including double exposures, aerial shots and soviet montage. A brave experimental film even by today’s standards. @MeredithTaylor

SVANETI international film festival 15-21July 2024

https://youtu.be/-9svbnswPJA?feature=shared

Kneecap (2024)

Wri/Dir: Rich Peppiatt | 105’

Kneecap begins with a montage of newsreel explosions, as a laconic and contradictory voiceover tells us that all films about Belfast start in the same way, but this one won’t. It’s clear from the off that this is one movie which will to use all means, fair or foul, to have its effect on the audience.

The film tells the story of the real-life rap group of the title, a trio from working-class West Belfast who play themselves in a drama which probably takes some liberties with the actuality but brims over with mischief, energy and inventiveness while making telling points about the Troubles and their repercussions down the generations.

In the 1990s, IRA man Arlo illicitly christens his son Móglaí Bap at a sacred Catholic rock in a wood outside Belfast. When British Army helicopters scope out the spot, Arlo becomes a marked man. He fakes his own death and goes into hiding, leaving his son in the care of a mother who promptly zonesout and retires to her sofa.

Bap and his friend Mo Chara grow up as self-confessed ‘low-life scum’. In theory the directionless duo are drug dealers,but their consumption levels are such that little is left for their customers. One of their few redeeming features is an enthusiasm for the Irish language, Gaeilge – or its slangy and idiosyncratic West Belfast variant.

A turning-point in their story comes when Mo is pulled in by police on suspicion of dealing. When he refuses to communicate in English, music teacher and Gaeilge evangelist J.J. Ó Dochartaigh is brought to the station to translate. Quickly falling into complicity with the suspicious youth, J.J. palms an as-yet-unnoticed blotter of acid and uses his position as intermediary to report the impenetrable curses Mo hurls at the peelers as a sober and watertight case. J.J. strikes up a friendship with the boys and encourages them to continue rapping in Gaeilge – in his view, “the light that guides us towards our freedom”.

Donning a woollen tricolour balaclava to hide his identity, J.J.steps in as producer, organiser and third member under the pseudonym “DJ Próvaí”. He also reverts to his youth as an enthusiastic drug-taker, which doesn’t sit so well with his girlfriend Caitlin.

Ó Dochartaigh does a good job in a role which requires a little more complexity than those of Mo and Bap, although they acquit themselves perfectly well. Conversely, Michael Fassbender’s brief incursions into the film as the mostly-absent Arlo bring a quasi-supernatural gravitas somewhat at odds with the generally harum-scarum tone.

Kneecap feels a bit like a hallucinatory take on the methods of French New Wave as the fourth wall is broken, the image paused and fast-forwarded, and striking visual effects and plasticine models mimic the drug states experienced by the band. Despite the cartoonishness and undercurrent of humour, though, the film gives us a sense of what it’s like to grown up in a violent and psychologically damaging place. Even if Mo and Bap see PTSD only as a useful pretext to claim prescription drugs, they probably are suffering from it. The music in the film demonstrates that Belfast Irish is a good fit for the rhythms of hip-hop, and we hear material steadily developing into its fiery and impressive current form as we watch the boys graduate from performing to a handful of elderly and indifferent drinkers in a small green box of a pub to striding large stages with grandstanding aplomb.

It’s always clear which side of the political fence the film is on, but Kneecap doesn’t try to hide the thuggery, gangsterism and chauvinism that infects the Irish Republican cause (as it does almost every other nationalist movement).These things are apparent in the name of the band and film’s joint title, of whose darker meaning we are left in no doubt by the story’s otherwise upbeat end. @IanLong

IN UK CINEMAS FROM 23 August 2024

Eno (2024)

Dir: Gary Hustwit | UK/US Music Biopic, 90’

Not many people could have been Eno. Quite possibly, he was the only one qualified for the job.

Consider his early life in 1950s rural Suffolk, whose rivers, flatlands and vistas attuned him to landscape, and perhaps gave the best of his music its curiously wistful, pastoral quality (many of his most affecting songs sound like sea shanties). Nothing too surprising there, maybe.

But there was a futuristic side to this bucolic backwater. The area was temporary home to a rolling contingent of U.S. airmen, many of them Black, so local juke-boxes throbbed with the futuristic sounds of cutting-edge R&B, rock ‘n’ roll, country and doo-wop, much of it too outré for radio play.

Eno (and it’s good to see the exotic mononym back in place after fifty years of eclipse by the more prosaic Brian) was enthralled by the enigmatic ‘mystery music’ that permeated his environment. Much of his subsequent career has been a series of strategies (a favourite Eno word) to recreate the exciting, baffling, galvanising effects it had on him.

Eno drew all the time. He sang in choirs and loved hymns. His grandfather had a barnful of player pianos, hurdy gurdies and other exotic instruments which in retrospect seem like early versions of the synthesizers whose sounds would define his grandson’s career (the joint arrival of Eno and synths was serendipitous; unable to play an instrument, he found himself performing on one which was so novel that no one knewwhether or not it was being played ‘correctly’).

Eno went to art school. His dandy tendencies blossomed, but he was a serious student, accumulating ideas that he would develop for decades to come (his output may be varied, but at root Eno is nothing if not consistent). One of the most important of these was the ‘systems’ approach to art.

Here, the artist’s main creative task is not to make artworks in the time-honoured, hands-on way. It’s to devise rules, or apparatuses, which will generate them. A somewhat detached and cerebral attitude which he’d bring – with hugely successful results – to the visceral, expressionistic arena of rock music.

Yes, Eno was positioned to benefit from a unique set of cultural confluences. But we care about him because he had the imagination and intelligence to integrate them and put them to use. He loves passion and strangeness, but he achieves them in an idiosyncratically rigorous way.

All this brings us to ‘Eno’ the film, and its Unique Selling Point. From time to time as we watch, skeins of computer code skitter down the screen. This isn’t some facile Matrix-lite trope, but a peep behind the wizard’s curtain: the tumbling digits are the actual workings of a specially-devised ‘generative engine’ which is selecting, in real time, the next piece of footage we’re going to watch.

Mirroring its protagonist’s preoccupations, director Gary Hustwit has made a ‘systems-based’ film about Eno’s artistic life. While its first and last scenes are always the same, the rest is different every time it’s screened.

Having said that, all ENO’s major career beats – early fame in Roxy Music, work with David Bowie, Talking Heads and U2, discovery of African music, return to the visual arts with videos and light-based pieces, etc – were covered in the iteration I saw.

So it seems that the material isn’t totally randomised (perhaps a pointless exercise) but batched into subject areas, from each of which the engine chooses a representative sample for each screening. There probably won’t be versions of ‘Eno’ which refuse to admit that its subject ever went to art school, joined Roxy Music or dallied with David Bowie, just as there won’t be renderings which harp endlessly on one or two of these things.

It’s a worthy experiment, and Eno is the perfect topic for a generative documentary. But will it work for other subjects? Despite the collage-like construction method, the film flowed well (the editing process was understandably laborious, sincethe ending of every piece of footage needed to be juxtaposablewith the beginning of all the others). The visible computer coding gives the film a modernist feel, like a Pompidou Centre-style building where exposed water pipes and heating ducts become design features. But I can imagine that future generative films will want to do without the cascading incursions.

Although ‘my version’ of the film gave a general overview of Eno’s career, the generative engine could presumably be primed to select material from batches of interest to specific audiences – say, environmentalists, cyberneticists, or music producers. This could be a useful way for filmmakers to dealwith the increasing volumes of material which mass around any given topic. Rather than making a series of films, they cannow just morph one movie to target its viewers.

Eno is a very good talker, often seeming to discover new thoughts as he articulates them. Some ideas that emerged in my version were: the need to create a persona to perform a song, why we should show less respect to Marcel Duchamp’s urinal, fears and remedies about the human impact on the environment, and why repetitive music shows you how your brain works.

But the film has a mildly impersonal feel. Despite Eno’s engaging qualities – he’s funny, affable, self-deprecating – it tells us little of him beyond his work. Recent footage shows him mostly alone as he potters about his home, studio and garden, and doesn’t divulge who else is in his life (a partner, children, family, friends – although I did see a cat). And there’s no sense how the Eno enterprise, presumably now quite sizeable, is organised.

At one point, Eno discusses the principles he uses to choose whether to go with a potential new project. These include “money,” “glory,” “physical exercise,” and “how long it would take.” “Sex” isn’t mentioned, but there was a time when no interview with Eno was complete without extended,often florid and perverse reflections on the subject. If the generative engine is persuaded to linger over these batches, some versions of ‘Eno’ could be particularly intriguing. @IanLong

UK RELEASE: 12 JULY 2024
PICTUREHOUSE CINEMAS | Soundtrack released on streaming, CD/vinyl on July 12 on Universal Music Recordings.
https://brianeno.lnk.to/EnoOST12

Kensuke’s Kingdom (2024)

Dir: Neil Boyle, Kirk Hendry | With the voices of Cillian Murphy, Raffy Kassidy, Sally Hawkins, Ken Watanabe | Anime 85’

Adapted from Michael Morpurgo’s classic book Kensuke’s Kingdom suggests a Japanese manga but the young hero is plainly European, the title referring to an old Japanese hermit (who we learn in a flashback was a former sailor shipwrecked soon after Nagasaki) who takes Michael under his wing after he learns the hard way the danger of disobedience when he gets shipwrecked.

The island is no tropical paradise since we see a Komodo Dragon gobble up a mud hopper in one gulp, while Michael gets bitten by ants and stung by enormous jelly fish.

Michael soon bonds with the local Orang Utangs, an idyll cut short by dive bombing sea gulls (in keeping with their current bad press) and three hunters in big boots, carrying guns and a big cage. Tougher kids will love this. @RichardChatten

KENSUKE’S KINGDOM | IN UK AND IRISH CINEMAS FROM 2 AUGUST 2024

Pierce (2024) Karlovy Vary Film festival 2024

Dir: NELICIA LOW | Cast: LIU HSIU-FU, TSAO YU-NING, DING NING, LIN TSU-HENG

Nelicia Low melds competitive sport with a sinister sibling centred thriller in her feature debut Pierce screening in World Premiere at this year’s Karlovy Vary Film Festival.

In Taipei the film follows Zijie a young fencer longing to re-build bridges with his beloved older brother when Zihan mysteriously returns after seven years in juvenile prison for killing an opponent during a fencing match. Their mother Ai Ling has suffered social embarrassment from Han’s conviction and is also recovering from the loss of her husband to cancer. A professional singer in a nightclub she has found love with a widower Zhuang (Lin Tsu-Heng).

Meanwhile behind back her sons grow closer, training together as the elder help the younger to up his game with Zijie improving by leaps and bounds getting selected to compete at the upcoming National Championships. Although their mother is furious with Zihan for hood winking her, Zijie tries to see the best in his brother until Zihan’s hostile past is triggered after an argument, leaving Zijie to fnally question whether his beloved sibling might be a violent sociopath after all.

Pierce brings to mind the recent Berlinale title Brief History of a Family and the cut and thrust of the elegantly performed fencing interludes provides a dynamic contrast to the seething psychological thrill of the family interactions when Han pulls rank physically and emotionally over his younger brother with the added dimension of enigma provided by the covert expressions behind the masks primped by the often discordant score.

Low exerts a confident control over her cast and narrative to deliver a really gripping first feature in this impressive start to her big screen career. @MeredithTaylor

KARLOVY VARY FILM FESTIVAL | BEST DIRECTOR AWARD – NELICIA LOW

Mr Majestyk (1974)

Dir: Richard Fleischer | Cast: Charles Bronson, Linda Crystal | US Drama 103’

Behind this exotic title and given its provenance in a story by Elmore Leonard it comes as an agreeably pleasant surprise, being a surprisingly funny comedy; not a quality one naturally associates with either its star or its director, while the part of a poor but honest melon farmer isn’t exactly typecasting either.

Unlike your common or garden thriller this one’s played for laughs and that goes for the late Al Letierri whose regulation mean-faced thug gets a little carried away in his pursuit of Mr Bronson to the extent (SLIGHT SPOILER COMING:) of unleashing a real mean bunch of heavies to turn their artillery on a great big pile of Bronson’s melons. @RichardChatten

Wilson (1944)

Dir: Henry King | Cast: Alexander Knox, Geraldine Fitzgerald | US Biopic 154’

James Agee paid a backhanded tribute to the ambition of Darryl Zanuck when he began his review that “‘Wilson’ is by no means the first film in which one might watching Hollywood hopping about on one foot trying to put on long pants”.

It was certainly brave of Zanuck to lavish a £4 million budget on an ambitious Technicolor biography on the founder of The League of Nations in wartime and bold to entrust to actor rather than a star, he rather hedges his bets by convincing he’s just a regular guy by devoting far too much footage to Wilson cheering on baseball matches and sing songs round the old piano; although for the connoisseur seeing the likes of Marcel Dalio as Clemenceau has its pleasures. @RichardChatten

Heart of the Oak (2023)

Dirs: Laurent Charbonnier and Michel Seydoux | France, Docudrama 81′

I once read that an oak tree provides a home for over 500 creatures. So living opposite a mature one for over twenty years I was fascinated to discover my neighbours. And this exquisite French doc follows life through the seasons in an oak tree that first sprouted in the Loire Valley in 1821.

Heart of the Oak plays out like a thriller with differently timed sequences so it isn’t strictly a documentary. There are moments of high tension in a film that isn’t preachy but peaceably silent apart from occasional bursts from Dean Martin’s tune-book. Gradually Laurent Charbonnier and Michel Seydoux set the scene in the vast branches of this ancient habitat showing how the tree’s root systems communicate to provide for an entire community of animals that each play their part in creating a seamless ecological environment: there are predators but nature’s helpers too, and as the titles roll at the end, there are some Latin names to conjure with, and their French and English common names. Immaculate aerial and close-up photography, using the latest audiovisual technologies (including 360-degree virtual cameras, machinery and special effects), and cutting edge innovations allowed the team to approach the microscopic worlds and glide through this miraculous bosky expose to offer an intimate understanding of the daily interactions between wood mice, jays, acorn weevils, goshawks woodpeckers, barn owns and red squirrels and many more. Truly a miraculous insight into the workings of our natural world. @MeredithTayor

Heart Of An Oak will be in UK Cinemas from 12th July and on Digital Download from 12th August

Memoir of a Snail (2024)

Dir/Wri| Adam Elliot | With the voices of Sarah Snook, Eric Bana, Jackie Weaver | Australia 90’

This delightful Australian anime is an endearing sob story seen from a woman’s perspective and suffused with all the anguish of modern life. A tender tale of loss and alienation it soon branches out into a relatable stop motion meditation with appeal for all ages, cleverly debunking modern trends and sharing human truths with a particularly uplifting message on mental health.

Written and directed by Academy award winning animator Adam Elliot Memoir of a Snail is crafted with a grungy aesthetic that sets the scene for the birth of Grace Prudence Pudel, a sickly twin whose mother dies in childbirth leaving her a snail collection and giving the film its enigmatic title.

Grace (Snook), a bit of an oddball to say the least, grows up with her pyromaniac brother Gilbert (Smit McPhee), paraplegic French film maker father Percy (Pinon) surrounded by the snails, her beloved guinea pigs and a collection of weirdos such as James, a magistrate defrocked for masturbating in court (who makes a crucial contribution later on in the film). Grace pours out her heart to a female snail called Sylvia (Williams).

Percy’s charisma inspires little Grace to become an animator but his sudden death from alcoholism forces the twins into foster homes: Grace with a childless couple in Canberra far away from her brother Gilbert who gets a family of God-fearing fruit farmers in Perth. But her real foster mother and confidente soon becomes Pinkie (Weaver) who delivers that well-known chestnut: ‘Life has to be lived forwards but can only be understood backwards’.

In his richly crafted narrative Elliot doesn’t look for easy solutions or short cuts. Ultimately Grace must realise her true vocation and embrace inner peace. There are no magic bullets. A wry dark humour sets Memoir apart front the average anime. With chuckles aplenty and believable characters (rather than the usual cyphers) this absorbing crowd-pleaser also benefits from a strong cast and its modest running time. @MeredithTaylor

World Premiere in Competition at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival on June 10th BEST FILM London film festival 2024.

Suspended Time (2024)

Dir/Wri: Olivier Assayas | Cast: Vincent Macaigne, Micha Lescot, Nine D’Urso, Nora Hamzawi, Maud Wyler, Dominique Reymond, Magdalena Lafont | France, drama 105′

In this uneventful little drama Olivier Assayas takes us back to a time most remember with a sigh and a sinking heart: the first pandemic lockdown.

Suspended Time certainly captures the sentiment, but let’s hope it’s the last of this rash of Covid-set films with nothing to say: a time some found reassuring, others restrictive. Endless days in the sunny Spring of 2020 when details loomed large, such as cleaning everything to within an inch of its life, as the world was thrown into forced navel-gazing and anxiety.

Assayas has assembled a watchable cast led by Vincent Macaigne as Paul, a laid back journalist enjoying the slightly angst-ridden months in his family’s bijou mansion deep in the Chevreuse Valley, not far from Paris, a backcloth Paul amply fleshes out in reflective monologues that take us back to a happy childhood.

Ensconced with his broadcaster brother Etienne (Lescot), Paul realises the two have nothing now in common. Joining is his slightly neurotic girlfriend Morgane (d’Urso), and Etienne’s other half Carole (Hamzawi) who are both sketchily drawn in a mildly amusing comedy of manners.

Suspended Time certainly looks very pretty thanks to the reappearance of Eric Gautier as the director’s longtime DoP, the two last worked together on Personal Shopper and that’s perhaps Assayas’ most interesting film of late, if you don’t count the TV series Irma Vep. Sadly Assayas fails to strike any emotional chords between his key players in a drama that’s pleasant enough but instantly forgettable. @MeredithTaylor

NOW ON RELEASE IN FRANCE | BERLINALE 2024 PREMIERE

Kill (2024)

Wri/Dir: Nikhil Nagesh Bhat | Cast: Lakshya, Tanya Maniktala and Raghav Juyal | India Thriller

Considering the extreme length of current commercial cinema, it comes a pleasant surprise to find a Bollywood movie that clocks in at a slim 105 minutes; probably due to the absence of songs, although it would be fun to see the makers try to stage an Indian dance routine aboard a speeding train.

Kill starts off fairly quietly but the introduction of a bunch of inbred malcontents, who spend plenty of time kicking dogs before learning the hard way that you don’t mess with an off-duty commando.

There follows 57 varieties of stabbings, gouging, shootings and stranglings amid copious quantities of bloodshed. The audience responded to all this with laughter, groans and applause with equal measure. Great fun if you like that sort of thing. @RichardChatten

Kill is in cinemas July 5 from Lionsgate UK

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)

Dir: Alfred Hitchcock | Cast: Leslie Banks, Edna Best, Peter Lorre, Nova Pilbeam, US Thriller 75’

The jury is still out on which was the better version of the only one of his films Alfred Hitchcock ever remade, but having just seen them in close proximity I can confirm that there’s very little in it.

The extra hour in the later version was due to a much greater length of time devoted to the foreign preliminaries, the bulk of the original taking place in a rather Germanic-looking London.

Anybody who saw the remake will be startled to find that the very same cantata is also used in the earlier version, and whereas the scene that follow is in the embassy in the remake comes as something of an anticlimax the original ends with a rip-roaring finale – originally based on the Siege of Sydney Street and probably also drawn from a recent viewing of The Testament of Dr. Mabuse quite unlike anything Hitchcock would ever attempt again.

The film also contains what later became Hitchcock’s trademark point-of-view shots, Nova Pilbeam makes a much more appealing hostage than the annoying Christopher Olsen in the remake; while it boasts a memorably ghoulish collection of conspirators, including Peter Lorre in his only film for Hitchcock and the late Cicely Oates as Nurse Agnes. @RichardChatten

Saboteur (1942)

Dir: Alfred Hitchcock | Priscilla Lane, Robert Cummings | US Thriller

Although largely forgotten today, ‘Saboteur’ was praised by Julian Maclaren-Ross in his seminal 1946 piece on Alfred Hitchcock, and represents probably the most substantial link in the chain that connects his thirties chase thrillers like the 1935 version of ‘The 39 Steps’ with ‘North by Northwest’.

Hitchcock’s well-known flair for making unorthodox use of famous locations takes us through Edmund Gwenn’ s plunge from Westminster Abbey in Foreign Correspondent’ through Norman Lloyd’s fall from the Statue of Liberty at the conclusion of ‘Saboteur’ to the famous climax of ‘North by Northwest’ on the face of Mount Rushmore; while the scene in which Robert Cummings bluffs his way out of a high class party where every exit is guarded by goons was later memorably done for laughs when Cary Grant disrupted an auction by mischievous bidding in ‘North by Northwest’ @RichardChatten

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Clive Owen Tribute | Karlovy Vary Festival 2024

ACTOR CLIVE OWEN TO RECEIVE KVIFF PRESIDENT’S AWARD

British actor Clive Owen, recipient of a Golden Globe, a BAFTA award, and a nomination for an Oscar, will be a special guest of this year’s festival. At the closing ceremony of the 58th KVIFF, Owen will be presented the KVIFF President’s Award.

On the occasion of Clive Owen receiving the KVIFF President’s Award, the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival will show the award-winning Closer, which was released twenty years ago following on from his role in Mike Hodges Croupier.

KARLOVY VARY INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 28 JUNE – 6 JULY 2024

The Wild Robot (2024) Annecy Animation Festival 2024

THE WILD ROBOT and its DreamWorks team were greeted by a hyper enthusiastic crowd at this year’s Annecy Animation Festival as first clips of Universal’s long-awaited release, due to arrive in cinemas this Autumn, finally hit the big screen.

Inspired by Titus Wong and Studio Ghibli and based on Peter Brown’s 2016 bestseller The Wild Robot is directed by Oscar-nominated Chris Sanders and brought to life by DreamWorks’ 54 animators and 10 artists as a powerful story about the discovery of self, a thrilling examination of the bridge between technology and nature and a moving exploration of what it means to be alive and connected to all living things.

The main focus is kindness and empathy as a tool for survival in a Bambi-style parable. Refreshingly, there are no real villains or cultural associations just a bunch of feral forest animals with tender and relatable emotional beats that will appeal to all audiences.

The DreamWorks creative team with Margie Cohn (President) and The Wild Robot’s director Chris Sanders (both far right)

Joined by a lively cast of Bill Nighy and Pedro Pascal, Lupita Nyong’o voices ‘Rozzum 7134’, a robot that’s clueless and vulnerable when she blows off course and lands on a remote island totally unprepared for what comes next.

The film also features the voice talents of Emmy winning pop-culture icon Mark Hamill (Star Wars franchise, Matt Berry (The SpongeBob Movie franchise) and Golden Globe winner and Emmy nominee Ving Rhames (Pulp Fiction).

The Wild Robot combines a timeless quality with a message of hope when ‘Roz’ is forced into a motherly role of guiding a fledging gosling in its first days of life.

Blending 2D and 3D images the DreamWorks design-team have created a unique aesthetic with painterly handcrafted images and with an original score by Chris Bowers. @MeredithTaylor

THE WILD ROBOT in UK cinemas from 18 October 2024

Croupier (1998)

Dir: Mike Hodges | Cast: Clive Owen, Alex Kingston | UK Thriller 94′

Mike Hodges died last year at the age of ninety, and this and ‘Get Carter’ are the two to remember him by (No, I haven’t forgotten ‘Flash Gordon’). Over a quarter of a century after the former, the latter marked a triumphant return from the doldrums and anybody familiar with the original James Bond novels will agree our hero Clive Owen (described by Ann Billson as “possessor of one the most interesting, funereal faces in films”) resembles 007 to a ‘t’.

Presumably Owen just wasn’t interested, but his role in ‘Croupier’ alongside Alex Kingston, will always provide a tantalising reminder of what could have been. He plays Jack Manfred an aspiring writer who is hired as a croupier where he realises that his as life in the casino would make a great novel.

Paul Mayersberg does such a lovely job on the screenplay I can almost forgive him for making such a pig’s ear of ‘Captive’ (obviously he was more suited to writing than directing his own material). @RichardChatten

AVAILABLE ON AMAZON

Svaneti International Film Festival 2024

The fourth annual Svaneti International Film Festival runs for a week from 15 July 2024 in the UNESCO World Heritage site of Svaneti, a region nestling in Georgia’s Caucasus mountains.

SIFF is the brainchild of general director Teimuraz Chkhvimiani, and artistic director Mariam Khatchvani who rose to the international stage with her awarding-winning feature debut Dede.

The Festival showcases the latest world cinema short films across the genres providing an opportunity for talented directors, producers and writers from all over the world to share their work in an exciting international environment.

Described as ‘breathakingly wild and mysterious”, Svaneti is now accessed by Queen Tamar Airport in the nearby capital Mestia. Tamar reigned as Queen of Georgia (1184-1213) during its Golden Age when the country became the most powerful in the region. Svaneti’s emblem is the koshki (defensive stone tower), created to house villagers at times of invasion and local strife (until recently Svaneti was renowned for its murderous blood feuds). Around 175 koshkebi, most originally built between the 9th and 13th centuries, survive here today and provide a stunning contrast to Mestia’s ultra modern airport designed by the German firm J Mayer H Architects.

SVANETI INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | SVANETI, GEORGIA 15-21 July 2024

Image copyright J. Mayer H. Architects

Eternal You | AI Meets the Afterlife (2024)

Dir: Hans Block, Moritz Riesewieck | US Doc 87′

Artificial Intelligence via ChatGPT is making it possible to talk to the dead, according to a disturbing new US documentary that delves into the pros and cons of this alarming new technology.

When a loved ones dies being able to contact them is a comforting thought for the bereaved especially in this day and age when death is taboo and people feel increasingly isolated or lonely. Joshua, one of the film’s contributors, has been doing just that with his late fiancée. He filled in a questionnaire with a few facts and next thing he was having an exchange with Jessica via ‘Project December’. It felt spookily real.

The ‘Afterlife Contact’ industry is clearly worth millions but it also raises moral and ethical concerns. Instead of the natural process of grieving, which we all have to go through, surely Joshua is just ‘holding on’ rather than ‘moving on’.

The market in the US is already awash with AI startups that aim to sell computer packages promising immortality. But government bodies and even some AI engineers are increasingly concerned about this industry of turning the dead into a business. There are real fears that it is out of control and messing with people’s lives. AI systems have developed ‘thanobots’ that work by taking a person’s digital footprint, analysing it and then replicating the personality, or even – more freakily – creating avatars that enable the living to interact with the dead using genuine exchanges that have previously occurred. “I wanted to have the last conversation I never had with him,” explains a grieving contributor. And this is understandable in cases where loved ones have not had a chance to say goodbye. One of the most sinister incidences is the case of a South Korean woman called Ji-Sung, who agreed to appear in a televised experiment to meet her dead daughter in virtual reality, right down to gloves that let her “touch” her. But where does this bogus interaction lead to?. Chatting to an avatar masquerading as a loved one is surely a hiding to nowhere.

For the younger generation, who are emotionally more detached from dead members of their family (such as grandparents) AI could provide a way of finding out about and even learning from their elders. But some people have managed to come to terms with death. One contributor preferred to remember her dead husband just as he was rather than knowing ‘whether he’s in Heaven or even in Hell’.

Eternal You certainly offers food for thought in a measured documentary that offers some visually striking images. The most moving encounters are those between the living. Perhaps we should learn to remember our loved ones as they really were, rather than messing with nature. @MeredithTaylor

IN UK and IRISH CINEMAS FROM 28 JUNE 2024

Sunset Boulevard (1950)

Dir: Billy Wilder | Cast: William Holden, Gloria Swanson, Erich von Stroheim, Nancy Olson | US Drama 110′

Hollywood in its heyday is now so far removed it’s practitioners have long since passed on; but when Billy Wilder wrote Sunset Boulevard it was still very much a thriving concern in which luminaries of yesteryear like Cecil B. DeMille, Max von Stroheim and Buster Keaton (who later admitted he never saw the film) were still active.

Writers at the time came very low in Hollywood’s pecking order but their facility with words frequently gave them literally the last word. Wilder had arrived in town as one those proverbial “schmucks with Remingtons”, but by the time he made Sunset Boulevard the tables had well and truly turned and he was in a position to unload the baggage that had long built up and pillory the money men that had so blighted his life in his salad days. @RichardChatten

NOW ON PRIME VIDEO

Flow (2024) Jury Award – Annecy Film Festival 2024

Dir: Gints Zilbalodis | Latvian Animation, 84′

Flow a relatable drama from Latvian animator Gints Zilbalodis (Away), centres on a cat that survives a destructive deluge on a boat and is forced, against its solitary nature, to collaborate with a collection of other animals in order to survive in a new world. The film, premiering at this year’s Cannes Festival, won the jury award and audience prize at Annecy Animation Festival, voted for by Annecy attendees. @MeredithTaylor

ANNECY ANIMATION FESTIVAL 2024 | BEST ORIGINAL MUSIC, JURY AWARD, AUDIENCE AWARD 2024

Wilding (2023)

Dir: David Allen | UK Doc 75′

Pigs can swim!

The English countryside is one of the most depleted in the world in terms of wildlife; a quarter of our beloved mammals now face extinction in a dying landscape. But there is good news, according to this uplifting new eco documentary from David Allen. His stunning film shows that given the right conditions nature can heal itself. And Isabella Tree and her husband Charlie Burrell have proved this with their regenerative rewilding project in Southern England. Allen bases his film on Isabella’s 2018 book ‘Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm’

Wilding documents a transformation that started fifteen years ago in Knepp, a crenellated country estate 19th castle in Horsham, deepest Sussex. When the young farming couple took over Knepp the surrounding farmland was drenched in chemicals and the oaks were dying. A fizzing underground chemical circuit board had destroyed the vital microrrhizal network that allows plants – and particularly native oak trees – to thrive and enrich the ground with organic life to grow nutritious crops and re-create a landscape that been missing since the advent of intensive agriculture after the Second World War. Despite their best farming efforts, Charlie and Isabella knew a new approach was needed.

In 2002 ‘Countryside Stewardship’ funding allowed the couple to roll out a an avant garden conservation project where nature ‘takes over’. They took the advice of Dutch ecologist and pioneer Dr Frans Vera and it was revealing: a natural landscape is not devoid of animals, but actually driven by herds of ancient wild stock that hold back the trees and assist in rebalancing the environment. So gradually the ancient animals were introduced to Knepp; but would they survive and breed?.

The task ahead was going to be fraught with difficult because the Knepp’s radical approach was weighted by so much public negativity. Intensive farming methods are hard-wired into the national psyche. To their dismay, the couple’s presentation was greeted with horror and anger by local farmers: “how are we going to feed the population without intensive farming?”. Many others felt the ‘privileged’ couple threatened to destroy the nature of the British landscape – as we know it – even allowed ragwort to prosper. ‘Creeping thistle’ is the enemy of farmers and is strictly controlled with pesticides – but more on that later.

With government support, the project eventually got under-way, and ancient breeds of wild native animals were allowed to run free and roam: Tamworth pigs, Exmoor ponies, red deer and longhorn cattle. Farm animals get fed but this new stock was going to have to fend for themselves. Surprisingly the beasts not only survived, but thrived. Freed from the restrictive practices of intensive farming, the animals reverted to their original natures, pigs even swam and dived for food. In fact, the Tamworth pigs seem to be the smartest, we watch as the sow nourishes herself with nettles for iron after giving birth to her first litter in the Spring.

Gradually wildlife returned to the land and it became a haven for near extinct and dwindling species: Turtle doves, nightingales and field mice numbers were boosting. Today, Knepp has the highest density of songbirds in Britain. And it’s the large grazing animals that provide the space needed to foster a habitat for thousands of native species. Beavers have since arrived to control the wetlands – since being granted a government licence – so no more floods that can cause havoc each year.

Eleven million butterflies headed to Britain in 2009 and those landing on the Knepp estate fed off the creeping thistle and devoured it. The following year no creeping thistle came back to the land. Charlie analysed the soil and cowpats and made the discovery that bugs that had been wiped out when the land was turned over to intensive farming had since returned. Now 19 different species of earthworms enrich the soil and provide the rich nutrients that eventually ends up in our food. Sixteen years into the project, Isabella introduced a pair of storks into Knepp – and the birds bred and provided stork chicks, for the first time in 600 hundred years.

But the question still stands. How can this small project restore Britain’s natural ecosystem and provide nutritious food for the growing population? Well that’s the subject for another film but the findings are positive. We can save the world if we really want to, thanks to Isabella and Charlie’s brave experiment. @MeredithTaylor

NOW OUT IN CINEMAS

Serious Charge (1959)

Dir: Terence Young. Cast: Anthony Quayle, Andrew Ray, Sarah Churchill | UK Drama 91’

If you’re too young to remember Doris Day before she was a virgin you’re probably not old enough to remember Cliff Richard when he was a sneering Teddy Boy in a leather jacket in this further contradiction of the received wisdom that an ‘introducing’ credit means the kiss of death to any aspiring actor, since in ‘Serious Charge’ that dubious distinction belongs to our Cliff when he was modelling himself on Elvis Presley before he saw the light and brought Jesus into his life.

Made in the days when erring vicars where popular tabloid fodder, the scenes with the grown-ups are what gives the films its weight, particularly those involving Sarah Churchill, who movingly demonstrates the destructive passions a middle-aged woman is capable of.@RichardChatten

NOW ON TALKING PICTURES

Mayerling (1969)

Dir: Terence Young | Drama

Terence Young was riding high on his reputation as the original director of James Bond when he was entrusted to make an opulent new version of the tragic love story of Prince Rudolf and Marie Vetsera that ended in tears at Mayerling in 1889.

Despite a distinguished supporting class headed by James Mason as Franz Joseph and Ava Gardener as the Emperor Elizabeth, an expensive production and Khachaturian on the soundtrack to give it a veneer of class, as a whole it’s all rather tinny and lifeless. Omar Shariff isn’t really mad enough to be convincing as Rudolf and even with the addiction of spectacles Catherine Deneuve is too robust to be so easily persuaded to cooperate in Rudolf’s (SLIGHT SPOILER COMING:) mad scheme. @RichardChatten

NOW ON PRIME

Army of Shadows (1969)

Dir: Jean-Paul Melville | Cast: Lino Ventura, Paul Meurisse, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Simone Signoret | France, Action drama 145’

With the D-Landings currently commemorating their 80th anniversary here’s a film that reflects on the behind the scenes heroism of the French Resistance with a sombre sense of grandeur.

L’Armée des Ombres (Army of Shadows), adapted by Jean-Pierre Melville, a veteran of both the Resistance and the Free French Army, from Joseph Kessel’s 1943 novel, was released in 1969, ushering in a spate of Occupation-centred films that adopted a more critical approach: The Sorrow and the Pity and Lacombe Lucien come to mind.

Melville celebrates these underground heroes with a sense of gangster-like pride familiar in Un Flic, Le Samourai and Le Cercle Rouge. The men lived by a code of honour tempered with ruthlessness, yet watching this week’s BBC coverage compiled from the accounts recorded during real live interviews with the survivors in the immediate aftermath to the Siege of Normandy (that started on the 6th June 1944 and ended on 30 August) the allied soldiers talk of real vicious savagery from both sides on the battlefield. Soldiers were lynched and decapitated, their body parts removed and even stuffed in their mouths such was the fervour to bring the six-year conflict to a final close in ‘Operation Overlord’. This is the ugly side of war at the coalface but Melville’s focus is on escape, capture and subterfuge and this is particularly well illustrated by the scenes featuring Lino Ventura and Paul Meurisse when they embark on a secret 1943 expedition to England by submarine. The two have time to see Gone with the Wind in London, and Meurisse, whose character is based on Jean Moulin, even gets a medal from de Gaulle. @MeredithTaylor

NOW ON DVD and DIGITAL in a 4k restoration on Vintage World Cinema courtesy of STUDIOCANAL

Roma, ore 11 (1952)

Dir: Giuseppe De Santis | Cast Lucia Bosé, Carla del Poggio, Elena Varzi, Lea Padovani, Delia Scala, Raf Vallone, Massimo Girotti, Paolo Stoppa | Italy Drama 107’

Unusually among neo-realist dramas ‘Roma, Ora 11’ – like the directors’s earlier ‘Riso Amaro’ – in that it largely deals with the plight of women. The film has echoes of ‘The Bridge of San Luis Rey’ and foreshadows the work of Costa-Gavras in its combination of angry social comment and the thrills of an action drama, heightened by the imaginative use of the tap of typewriter keys at certain key moments.

Although the cast contains several faces prominent in the Italian cinema the drama works as an ensemble piece dividing into two parts so that when you reach the midpoint the narrative reaches another level as the action moves from the scene of the accident to a packed casualty ward were the staff have to clean up the mess and everyone squabbles over who was responsible. @RichardChatten

Under the Grey Sky (2024) Tribeca Film Festival 2024

Dir/Wri: Mara Tamkovich | Drama 81’

Belarusian authorities continue their “purge” of independent voices punishing all who fall out of line. And with this in mind filmmaker Mara Tamkovich follows a freelance journalist in the lead up to and aftermath of her brutal arrest after reporting on a peaceful demo taking place in the Square of Changes in Belarus capital Minsk.

Based on real events that occurred on November 15th 2020, this sober and dispassionate feature debut from the Belarusian Polish filmmaker shows how Belsat journalist Lena Antonova (Aliaksandra Vaitsekhovich) and her partner Ilya (Valentin Novopolskij) live an ordinary life in Minsk until she covertly films the event from the window of an apartment overlooking the square.

A police drone floating nearby picks up the activity and takes draconian action. From then on Lena, her partner and colleagues are plunged into a world of uncertainty and anguish as the powers that be sentence The journalist to seven days of administrative detention followed by more serious criminal charges, imposed in a secret trial. Under The Grey Sky tracks the process in a classically styled and immersive socio-political drama that shows how the aftermath impacts the couple with long term consequences for all concerned.

Under the Grey Sky is a calm but affecting portrait of modern day persecution fleshed out from the writer/director’s short film LIVE (2022). Tamkovich never loses control of her well-paced narrative that avoids melodrama to tell a tension-fuelled tale, still all too common in countries which turn a blind eye to modern day human rights issues. Seasoned stage actor Vaitsekhovich gives a remarkable central performance as Lena, and we feel for her character’s plight.

According to Amnesty International, hundreds remain behind bars on politically motivated charges and face ill-treatment in detention. No rights organization is able to operate legally in Belarus.

Belarusian authorities have prosecuted critics of Russia’s war in Ukraine and brutally dispersed anti-war protests, while allowing Russian forces to use Belarus territory to support their invasion of Ukraine since February 24, 2022.

Belarus remains the only country in Europe and Central Asia to use the death penalty and expanded the crimes to which it can be imposed in 2022. @MeredithTaylor

SCREENING DURING NEW YORK’s TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL 2024 |

Only Two Can Play (1962)

Dir: Sydney Gilliatt | Cast: Peter Sellers, Mai Zetterling, David Attenborough, John Le Mesurier | UK drama

Kingsley Amis only agreed to allow Launder & Gilliatt to film his novel on condition that if Bryan Forbes’ adaptation took too many liberties he had the right to have his name taken off the credits; evidently he was satisfied with the results since his name is prominently displayed for all to see.

Peter Sellers strongly disliked making this film and was convinced it would be a flop, which probably accounts for his subdued performance which the film is all the better for.

The basic situation is eternal, but a couple of topical references (newspapers & posters precisely locate the action in April-May 1961) include the inevitable reference to Lady Chatterley and Sellers’ young daughter’s imaginary friend’s concern about The Bomb. The supporting cast inevitably includes Kenneth Griffith and Meredith Edwards, while there’s a ingenious cameo from John Le Mesurier and a memorable turn from Richard Attenborough as a bearded literary pseud who declares that he’s been “toying with the idea of translating Kafka into Welsh”. @RichardChatten

NOW ON LONDON LIVE

Arcadian (2024)

Dir: Benjamin Brewer | Cast: Nicolas Cage, Jaeden Martell, Maxwell Jenkins, Sadie Soverall | US Horror 92’

Uninvolving post-apocalyptic thriller that sees Nicolas Cage as Paul, a harried dad living with teenage sons in a remote wilderness where they come under attack from unknown forces.

Paul claims responsibility for this odd lifestyle although no explanation is given as to why. One night their cabin sustains a furious onslaught and in the morning a battered door bears testament to the attack with massive claw marks that seem to point towards a mysterious Alien-style monster in much need of a manicure.

The twin boys are continuously at loggerheads so scripter Mike Nilon decides to soften the feature with a romantic twist for Thomas (Jenkins) who soon starts a tentative relationship with Sadie Soverall’s local girl. But this never really catches fire in a convoluted horror thriller that is not gripping enough to keep us engaged for even 90 minutes.

For fans of Cage’s comedic brand of disaster-struck hero caught in a melodramatic meltdown this will go down a treat, and he certainly carries the film with a slightly more believable role than in The Surfer. That all said the off-the-rails plot and over preponderance of scares in the semi-darkness and macho grunting makes Arcadian eventually feel rather tedious. @MeredithTaylor

IN UK CINEMAS FROM 14 JUNE

Mr Verdoux (1947)

Dir: Charles Chaplin

Described by David Thomson as a “gloating portrait of cruelty”, with characteristic modesty Charlie Chaplin claimed it “the cleverest and most brilliant film I have yet made”.

Although a consummate actor (displaying a fastidiousness that had been part of his screen persona since his days playing a gentleman of the road) if the final results had managed to combine the cinematic imagination of Orson Welles – who gave Chaplin the original idea for which he receives a credit and who on his own films often demonstrated a deft sense of period, a quality ‘Verdoux’ completely lacks – with Chaplin’s performance it would have been quite a film.

With those two Napoleons on board the clashes of personalities would have been insurmountable. But at least we can be grateful that Chaplin’s performance survives; while the scene with Martha Raye in the rowboat wickedly parodies ‘An American Tragedy’. @RichardChatten

Nothing Sacred (1937)

Dir: William A Wellman | Cast: Carole Lombard, Frederic Marc | US Comedy 77’

With the benefit of hindsight there’s a bitter irony in Carole Lombard playing a girl defined by her own mortality as she seems so vibrantly alive for the duration of ‘Nothing Sacred’ – her own doctor declaring “You ain’t goin’ to die, unless you get run over or somethin’!” – yet within five years of the film’s release Lombard had indeed joined the ages.

The comedies of the 1930s were famed for their iconoclasm, qualities to be found in abundance in ‘Nothing Sacred’, the plentiful verbal wit provided by screenwriter Ben Hecht well complimented by some adroit sight gags devised by director William Wellman, with Wellman regular George Chandler playing an early paparazzi; while even composer Oscar Levent provides an early example of his cynical wit with a brief snatch of ‘Hearts and Flowers’ on the soundtrack at one point.

One strange feature is that whenever a photograph is seen a glamour shot of film star Carole Lombard is used rather than an accurate representation of Hazel Flagg herself. Modern woke sensibilities might be offended by the portrayal of black Americans as casually dishonest but the people of small town America are portrayed equally unflatteringly as sullen and monosyllabic. @RichardChatten

Grand Tour (2024) Best Director – Miguel Gomes | Cannes 2024

Dir: Miguel Gomes | Cast: Crista Alfaiate, Gonçalo Waddington, Cláudio da Silva, Lang Khê Tran | Fantasy drama 129′

Sashaying between past and future, documentary and drama this tender tension-tinged travelogue captures the glory days of Colonial times and the delicate exotic mystique of the Orient, at a time when it was still full of grace.

Grand Tour is unique, a plot-free tale of doomed love and betrayal blends seamlessly with a beguiling black and white kaleidoscope of swirling images reminiscing on the past. Portuguese auteur Miguel Gomes, in his first time Palme d’Or entry, gives life to his own brand of cinema: dreamlike, quirky and romantically absurd, in similar vein to his 2012 feature Tabu .

Surrender yourself to this timeless reverie set in Southeast Asia around 1918, where Goncalo Waddington’s English civil servant Edward has caddishly fled Rangoon on his wedding day. His dogged fiancée of seven years Molly (Crista Alfaiate) pursues him peripatetically despite his feet of clay.

Laughing childishly whenever his name comes up in conversation Molly is clearly in de-Nile on the Yangtze river as they glide effortlessly through ‘Burma’, Singapore, Tibet, Bangkok, Vietnam, Shanghai and Chengdu in a parallel continental odyssey all crafted in grainy black and white.

Niche in the extreme this is a diaphanous patchwork of a film may not appeal to everyone as it floats in filigree on the silver screen. It tells of an era of heady romance and adventure for Colonial types when the world was still an enticing oyster to discover. Now and then, the recent past surfaces through a crevice in the old world with modern music – a crooner sings in a crowded bar in Manila as modern motorbikes circle incessantly in the centre of ‘Saigon’.

At one point Molly is courted by a wealthy landowner (Cláudio da Silva) who offers her sanctuary when she falls ill. Here in this idyll, deep in the tropical jungle, she bonds with his servant Ngoc (Lang Khê Tran) and they decide to embark on an ill-advised journey North. Discover Grand Tour and immerse yourself in the mind-bending potential of the Orient. A fabulous film quite unlike any other. Quintessential Gomes. @MeredithTaylor

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | Winner BEST DIRECTOR

Nasty (2024)

Doc, Romania 103’

Anyone who remembers Ilie Nastase, the talented Romanian tennis player who entertained us in the 1970s with his Wimbledon antics, will enjoy this new documentary directed by his fellow countrymen Tudor Giurgiu, Cristian Pascariu and Tudor D. Popescu. premiering at this year’s Special Screenings section of Cannes the feature should have widespread interest for sports lovers everywhere so garnering a younger audience.

Nastase was a polarising figure, to say the least, and we see him winning his first US Open, qualifying for both Wimbledon and the Davis Cup finals, and generally blazing an eventful trail to the top of his game and so gaining a place in the annals of tennis history.

Ranked world number one player in 1973 ‘Nasty’ cut a colourful figure in every match he played but his provocative pathway was fraught with trials and tribulations. So he certainly broke the mould with his fractious behaviour and mercurial temperament laced with a dash of cheekiness. The Romanian player’s endearing charisma and dusky good looks went on to capture the public’s hearts and minds.

This is an enjoyable film chockfull of memorable footage from the archives and incisive commentary from tennis stars: John McEnroe, Jimmy Connors, Billie Jean King, Björn Borg, Stan Smith, and more recent players such as Boris Becker and Rafael Nadal. @MeredithTaylor

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2024

Annecy Animation Festival 2024

Annecy International Animation Film Festival is a global event dedicated to animation. This year, from 9-15 June, the biggest names in the sector gather together on the French lakeside town of Annecy (Haute Savoie) to celebrate the creative and diverse animation styles and techniques.

Main Competition Line-up

INTO THE WONDERWOODS | France/Luxembourg

10-year-old Angelo dreams of being an adventurer and explorer. Until one day, in the car with his family on their way to visit his beloved Granny, who is very ill, he is suddenly forced to show the extent of his bravery: he is left behind by mistake at the motorway services. Angelo decides to take a shortcut through the forest to reach his Granny’s house. He finds himself in a mysterious land inhabited by strange beings threatened by an enemy even worse than the local ogre.

FLOW | France/Latvia

A cat wakes up in a world covered in water, where the entire human race seems to have disappeared. He seeks refuge on a boat with a group of other animals. But getting along with them proves to be an even greater challenge than overcoming his fear of water! Everyone will need to learn to overcome their differences and adapt to this new world they find themselves in.

GHOST CAT ANZU | Japan/France

11-year-old Karin is abandoned by her father at her grandfather’s house, the monk of a small town in the Japanese countryside. Her grandfather asks Anzu, his jovial, helpful, although rather capricious, ghost-cat to look after her. The clash of their strong characters causes sparks, at least at the beginning.

THE COLOURS WITHIN | Japan

Synesthete Totsuko can see others as colors. Honour student Kimi has dropped out of school but still pretends to attend for her grandmother’s sake. They reunite and decide to form a band with Rui, who dreams of composing on analog synthesizers but whose mother expects him to become a doctor. Together, they find freedom, joy, and love.

THE MOST PRECIOUS OF CARGOES | France/Belgium

TOTTO CHAN: The Little Girl at the Window | Japan

At little Totto-Chan’s Tomoe School during the Second World War, she learns what racism and intolerance are, and discovers the grim reality of war.

MEMOIR OF A SNAIL | Australia

In 1970s Australia, Grace’s life is troubled by misfortune and loss. After their mother dies during pregnancy, she and her twin brother, Gilbert, are raised by their paraplegic-alcoholic former juggler father, Percy. Despite a life filled with love, tragedy strikes anew when Percy passes away in his sleep. The siblings are forcibly separated and thrust into separate homes.

ROCK BOTTOM | Spain/Poland

Through Robert Wyatt’s music, this animated musical plunges you into Bob and Alif’s passionate love story. They are two young artists immersed in the creative whirlwind of early 70s hippie culture.

SAUVAGES | Switzerland, France, Belgium

In Borneo, near the tropical forest, Kéria rescues a baby orangutang in the palm oil plantation where her father works. Kéria’s cousin Selaï comes to live with them seeking refuge from the conflict between his indigenous tribe and the logging companies. Kéria, Selaï and the little orangutang, now named Oshi, will have to fight against their forest’s destruction.

THE BOAT IN THE GARDEN | Luxembourg/France

In the early 1950s, on the banks of the River Marne, François, a young 11-year-old boy, is intrigued to discover that his parents are building a boat in their little garden, a replica of the famous sailor Joshua Slocum’s sailboat. As the years go by, in post-war France, François drifts from adolescence to adulthood. While the boat is being built, and with a tender and poetic look at his mother and father, the young boy embarks on his own adventure, one that will take him down his own passionate route of the sea and drawing.

THE IMAGINARY | Japan

Rudger is a boy no one can see, imagined by Amanda to share her thrilling make-believe adventures. But when Rudger, suddenly alone, arrives at The Town of Imaginaries, where forgotten Imaginaries live and find work, he faces a mysterious threat.

THE STORM | China

Torrential rain leads you into a colorful world of traditional Chinese ink art. A century-old sunken ship emerges, mysterious theater troupes come to life again. With countless masks worn by people and a world filled with intricate changes, what kind of bizarre story is unfolding?

ANNECY FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | MAIN COMPETITION | FEATURES

Four Little Adults (2024)

Dir: Selma Vilhunen | Drama, Finland

Four Little Adults looks at different ways of loving for a polyamorous couple (including a vicar!), from Oscar winning Finnish director Selma Vilhunen.

Polyamory has certainly been around for centuries but only recently has it become ‘mainstream’ as a socially accepted way of exploring the different ways people choose to live out the way they feel and desire.

Selma Vilhunen vaunts the concept cinematically in her upbeat and positive comedy drama that presents her characters as down to earth everyday people we can all relate to. And this is the crucial element in this amusing social satire that certainly offers provocative food for thought and some entertaining performances all round. @MeredithTaylor

NOW IN UK AND IRISH CINEMAS | ROTTERDAM PREMIERE 2024

C’est pas Moi- Leos Carax (2024) Cannes Film Festival

Dir: Leos Carax | With: Denis Lavant, Nastya Golubeva Carax, Anna-Isabel Siefken, Bianca Maddaluno, Kateryna Yuspina, Loreta Juodkaite, Peter Anevskii | Short 41′

Fans expecting a nice traditional potted portrait of the maverick Paris-born filmmaker’s life C’est Pas Moi will be disappointed.

Predictably Leos Carax steers clear of a straightforward narrative to offer an artful, multi-faceted collage of his four decade career. That all said, this self-portrait is both mesmerising and tantalising in the true style of the director himself, blending a pot pourri of the experimental, psychedelic and personal that echoes – even pays tribute to – his fellow countryman Jean-Luc Godard in films like The Image Book.

The project was intended to be shown as an exhibition at the Pompidou Centre a few years ago where the organisers has asked him to respond to the simple question: “Who are you?”. So Carax (aka Alex Christophe Dupont, 1960-) answers enigmatically but cinematically with a montage of exuberant images that channel his life and art.

Accordingly It’s Not Me, is a mixture of everything that appeals to him – from the Hollywood firmament to his own films like Holy Motors, Annette and Les Amants de Pont Neuf; snippets from family photos (but not of his estranged mother), snaps of his one time lover Juliette Binoche, his pets, actors he has worked with, like Denis Lavant and fellow directors Jean Vigo and even David Bowie. It’s Not Me is a real visual panoply but Carax is nowhere to be seen: He remains Mr Enigma. @MeredithTaylor

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2024

Foreign Intrigue (1956)

Dir: Sheldon Reynolds | US Drama

The credits proudly declare this film ‘Sheldon Reynolds’ Foreign Intrigue’, this being the film version of his TV series which he brought to the big screen – complete with Charles Norman’s ‘Foreign Intrigue Concerto’, which keeps popping up on the soundtrack with annoying regularity – with the added attraction of Bob Mitchum talking French and Swedish in a big suit against the backdrop of attractive colour location work of Vienna and Stockholm.

This 1956 feature is full of shots of people trudging down darkened streets away from the camera, along with two classy European female leads in the form of Genevieve Page and Ingrid Thulin (spelt ‘Tulean’ in the credits); although the most interesting character by far is a fellow named ‘Spring’, played by Frederick O’Brady who’d performed a similar function in Orson Welles’ ‘Confidential Report’, with which this film has been compared.

Happily while a large part of the preliminaries are garrulous and uninvolving it gets much better in the final half hour. @RichardChatten

The Most Precious of Cargoes (2024)

Director: Michel Hazanavicius Cast: Dominique Blanc, Gregory Gadebois, Denis Podalydes, Jean-Louis Trintignant | Animation, 71′ hour 21 minutes

To be considered ‘de nos jours’ every film festival must now include a film about trans people, sex workers, immigration, racism and the Holocaust – so The Most Precious of Cargoes was this year’s Palme d’Or hopeful on that theme

French filmmaker Michel Hazanavicius, of Lithuanian heritage, rose to the international stage with his Oscar-winning film The Artist (2011) and thence to Redoubtable (2017) and this year’s Cannes Film Festival with this painterly wartime animation. Adapted from the book by Jean-Claude Grumberg The Most Precious of Cargoes tells the story of a Jewish baby who survives against the odds.

Narrated by the late French actor Jean-Louis Trintignant and voiced by a sterling French cast this appealing fable turns on a miracle with universal appeal: a father throws his baby daughter from the window of their slow-moving Auschwitz-bound train in the hope of a better future, the deep snow cushioning her landing.

In so many ways a holocaust of sorts is still unfolding on all over the world today. And the film once again touches on the ongoing debate about the extent we are all prepared to go to protect and further our own lives and interests for the benefit (as in this case) or at the expense of others.

Fortune shines on this little girl who becomes the pride and joy of a poor childless woodcutter and her burly husband deep in a snowbound forrest somewhere in East Europe during the 1940s. The film works on two levels: a simple story that ripples out into deeper territory, much in common with the Ghibli tradition which this year’s 77th Cannes Film Festival tributes. A cartoon format and childlike appeal has nevertheless fast-reaching implications, not least making kids aware of the horrors of displacement and the dangers that lie on their path ahead. This child is given a chance in life, and the woodcutter also gets an opportunity to fulfil her own motherly wishes and at the same time protect her living bundle from the authorities out to exterminate Jews. Meanwhile the girl’s family fades away into the background, supposedly dying in the gas chambers, with only the father reappearing, in the final act, as a ghost of his former self. The ending is enigmatic but actually offers hope for the future in a rather lovely finale.

Aesthetically the film is beautifully realised in softly glowing water-colours, each frame flowing into an often harrowing Holocaust adventure. But The Most Precious of Cargoes also tends on the didactic often sentimental side with a narrative that starts off with promise but doesn’t follow through with the same fluidity of its visual style. Despite these narrative flaws this is certainly a film for kids as well as adults, and a welcome a valuable addition to the Holocaust sub-genre. @MeredithTaylor

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2024

Kinds of Kindness (2024) Cannes Film Festival 2024 | Best Actor Jesse Plemons

Dir: Yorgos Lanthimos | Cast: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Joe Alwyn, Mamoudou Athie, Hunter Schafer | Thriller, 162′

Yorgos Lanthimos selects a quality cast and has them star as different characters in three quirky interlocking stories. The first, a bizarre film that sets of this bemusing trio on the theme of control freakery, is the most watchable.

Here Willem Dafoe gets the upper hand as Raymond, a bossman who bankrolls and therefore holds sway over Jesse Plemons’ modest guy called Robert Fletcher. He gets to live in a modernist villa with his obliging wife (Hong Chau) courtesy of Raymond’s money, and is therefore totally in thrall to this control freak. He will do anything to make Raymond happy, and that gives the first segment its scary twist in the tale.

For those who prefer the Greek ‘weird wave’ director’s early fare such as Dogtooth and The Lobster, Kinds of Kindness will appeal, and reunites him with his co-writer on those projects, Efthimis Filippou. But the triptych of weird stories becomes increasingly so, often giving the impression that Lanthimos is just trying a little bit too hard to be perverse, just for the sake of it.

The first part certainly has you glued to the screen – not least for its visual incongruousness. Plemons sports a polyester Windolene-coloured roll-neck that contrasts with his greasy carrot-coloured hair. It’s an enigmatic tale whose pieces gradually fall into place, and this was the segment I found most engrossing.

From then on proceedings grow more dark, violent and unsavoury, but watching Willem Dafoe, Jesse Plemons, Margaret Qualley and Emma Stone do their stuff in varying roles is always intriguing – even though countenancing this ghastliness for nearly three hours is stretching it a little bit, and you may feel yourself coming over all queer (in the old-fashioned sense of the word).

The titles of each story are built around the initials R.M.F. (played by Yorgos Stefanakos) who doesn’t really have much a role to speak of – in fact he doesn’t get to say anything – but is merely there to serve the narrative as the car crash victim Fletcher is supposed to kill in order to please Raymond, in a final act of submission.

Margot Qualley entertains us on the electric organ with “How Deep is Your Love” the twin theme to the trilogy. She is variously Raymond’s wife Vivian (Qualley) and then a vet with life-giving powers in the final story. Meanwhile Emma Stone is Rita, a glam optician who falls for Robert in the second part of the control-themed scenario. But the standout in Kinds of Kindness is Jesse Plemons who really comes into his own in the new Hollywood firmament pulling off an impressive range of performances; his final turn as Daniel, a flesh-eating policeman is the least appealing, but in a good way. @MeredithTaylor

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | Best Actor Award

The Substance (2024)

Dir: Coralie Fargeat | Cast: Demi Moore, Margot Qualley, Denis Quaid | Sci-fi Thriller

The Substance is a loud, lewd, violent sci-fi shocker about the horrors of ageing for women. French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat’s flashy follow-up to her vicious vengeance thriller (Vengeance) follows Demi Moore’s fading fitness fanatic, Elizabeth Sparkle, a one-time LA TV aerobics star, fall by the wayside when her younger version Sue (Margot Qualley) takes over. Their reptilian boss-man Harvey (Denis Quaid) announces his intention to give Liz the push, and she overhears the damning conversation in a garish red public loo just like the one in The Shining.

Sue has firmer buttocks, peachier skin, and sparklier eyes. But when Elizabeth discovers ‘The Substance’, an injectable youth-giving elixir, warning bells ring. And very loudly at that. Expect plenty of squelching body horror, gore, 80’s style spandex and Alien style images. A sad, but inevitable, indictment on modern Hollywood. @MeredithTaylor.

Now on MUBI from 20 September 2024 | Coralie Fargeat won best screenplay at #Cannes2024 for ‘The Substance’CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2024

The Apprentice (2024) Cannes Film Festival

“You’re either a killer or a loser” is the advice a young Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan) gets from his acerbic mentor Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) in this polarising political biopic written by journalist Gabriel Sherman and directed by Iranian-Danish filmmaker Ali Abassi (Border) and Holy Spider (who is now perhaps best known for his involvement in The Last Of Us).

With a killer score of hits that just reeks of the ’70s and ’80 and a scuzzy retro texture this is an compulsive portrait of toxic narcissism even more relevant now than it was back in the day. @MeredithTaylor

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | THIS REVIEW FIRST APPEARED IN FINITOWORLD.com

Platinum Blonde (1931)

Dir: Frank Capra | Cast: Jean Harlow, Loretta Young, Robert Williams, Don Dillaway | US drama 89’

Don’t be fooled by the title, Jean Harlow may have the title role, and Loretta Young is technically the star, but the film belongs to the late Robert Williams.

One of the many satisfactions afforded by the study of old movies is their ability to preserve as in amber fleeting moments for the delectation of posterity, while in a very real sense bringing the dead back to life.

If you only knew Frank Capra from the films he made after the draconian Production Code rigidly enforced after June 1934 this film will come as a revelation for the briskness that Capra was then capable of bringing to the proceedings before he began taking himself very seriously.

But true value of ‘Platinum Blonde’ lies is the record that it provides of the charismatic Williams who aged only 37 succumbed to peritonitis following an appendectomy within weeks of the film’s completion and himself never saw it. @RichardChatten

NOW ON

Being Maria (2024) Cannes Film Festival

Dir: Jessica Palud | Cast: Anamaria Vartolomei, Matt Dillon, Giuseppe Maggio, Céleste Brunnquell, Yvan Attal, Marie Gillian

Last Tango in Paris was certainly a ground-breaking film shocking audiences to the core back in 1972. A woman directs this new biopic about the abused French actress Maria Schneider, who at age of 19, landed a role alongside Marlon Brando in the Bertolucci film that would make her a star but also destroy her life.

Berlolucci wanted to make a film about two people, Jeanne and Paul, indulging in a sexual relationship without any trappings. They would meet regularly in room and just go from there. But, crucially, without asking or her consenting, the Italian director and his 48-year-old male star sprung an unscripted rape scene on the young woman asking for real ‘rage’ and ‘humiliation’. And that’s what happened. Even though sodomy never took place the fear and loss of control is devastating. And we feel for Maria even though Brando assures her: ‘it’s only a film’. She has seen him as a mentor only to be deceived. And even now, in the light of the #MeToo era, this sequence is particularly resonant.

Maria is from an educated if broken home: her father (Attal) is the seasoned actor Daniel Gerlin who has gone on to form another family after leaving home. Her volatile mother Marie-Christine (Gillain) throws her out of the house – quite literally – for reconnecting him after the two meet and reconnect on a film set in the opening sequence. The twice rejected Maria then moves in with her uncle, but is clearly damaged by her life experience thus far.

Being Maria is directed by Jessica Palud (who has a handful of directing titles behind her: Revenir, Les Yeux Fermes), and co-written with Laurette Polmanss, freely adapting the novel ‘Tu t’appelais Maria Schneider’ by Vanessa Schneider, Maria’s cousin, It paints a convincing portrait of this young woman desperate to forge a career in acting.

Encouraged by her father in this endeavour, she contacts an agent and then finds herself in a café where she meets Bertolucci (Giuseppe Maggio who authentically, like the director, doesn’t role his ‘r’s). He has picked her out for the fateful role. (‘roles chose actors, not the other way round’ says her father). But after the furore of that pivotal scene, which happens early on. The film has nothing more to say thereafter and unravels as does Maria’s life. @MeredithTaylor

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | CANNES PREMIERE

Animale (2024) CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | Critics’ Week 2024

Dir: Emma Benestan | France, Fantasy thriller 101′

Experience the dizzying bull run at Saints-Maries-de-la-Mer in the Camargue and you’ll understand the sheer terror pulsating through the crowd when the bulls are released from the arena to run wild through the streets, commandeered only by a group of bareback riders.

After training at La Femis in Paris, Algerian filmmaker Emma Benestan honed her craft as assistant editor on the 2013 Palme d’Or winner Blue Is the Warmest Colour. And her feature debut, a neon-tinged neo western, captures the rush of adrenaline and fizzing energy of the bull run fusing it into a surreal bovine thriller that joins the sub-genre of women triumphing in a male dominated ‘world’. Conceived as a supernatural fable Animale blends classic body horror with a potent revenge piece imbued with the spirit of Palme d’Or winner Titane ,The Eagle Huntress and Zahori all rolled into one dynamic piece of filmmaking.

In a cast of newcomers and established actors, breakout talent Oulaya Amamra plays Nejma, a 22-year-old woman keen to make her mark in the macho bullfighting corrida, and to this endeavour trains fearlessly in the bullring and afterwards endures a night of heavy drinking with the boys. Waking the following morning Nejma suffers more than just a post-binge hangover. Her whole body feels strangely transformed. Then comes that news that some of the experienced guys have been found dead, and a rogue bull is on the loose.

The struggle with the bulls come to represent Nejma’s battle to be accepted as a woman, albeit a tough one. The bulls can be fierce and frightening when riled but they are also creatures capable of a certain sensitivity, and strangely seem to empathise with their female trainer. Nejma’s own feminine quality is seen in the bulls’ latent soulfulness that DoP Ruben Impens captures again and again in their frightened gaze. Animale is a novel and atmospheric feature that marks Benestan out as a talented auteur. @MeredithTaylor

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | CRITICS WEEK 2024

The Surfer (2024) CANNES FILM FESTIVAL

Dir: Lorcan Finnegan | Cast: Nicolas Cage, Julian McMahon, Nic Cassim, Miranda Tapsell, Alexander Bertrand, Justin Rosniak, Rahel Romahn, Finn Little, Charlotte Maggi | Australia/Ireland, Fantasy thriller 99’

Nicolas Cage seems to be enjoying his current screen persona: a decent family man who becomes increasingly disturbed and emasculated. In Lorcan Finnegan’s latest film, a psychological buddy thriller premiering at Cannes Film Festival, Cage is a harried, ego-driven dad hellbent on revenge: Australian set-psychodramas Long Weekend (1978) and Wake in Fright (1971) will both spring to mind in tone and intensity.

Set in beachside Australia, possibly Perth, this is a film about masculine pride and ego. But what starts as a plausible concept thriller soon drifts into much darker (more disgusting) territory and eventually grows tedious with its rather sad commentary on the male of the species.

Cage kicks off in a Lexus – hardly emblematic of success, – but that’s what it’s billed as here. His son in tow, he’s aiming to buy the house on the coast where he grew up as a killer surfer. But the locals, a pack of butch beach bums, don’t want him here. Father and son make their way down to the beach where they are confronted with the local gang of thuggish surfers, led on by Scally (Julian McMahon) who tells them to sling a hook, or a surfboard for that matter, and get the hell out of there.

Thus begins Cage’s descent into Hell. Beset by oncoming failure: his loss of face with his son, a failure to secure his dream property, and even the theft of his brogues, Cage turns his anger on the world at large – and the focus is the Bay Boys. What a pathetic sight he becomes, and in some ways we feel for him in a series of things that go impossibly awry: All these feelings of angst are reflected by the local flora and fauna: a cawing Kookaburra, a vicious scorpion, a rabid dog, the merciless sun that bakes down on the now delusional, dehydrated dad.

And his loss of self-esteem stares back at him in the negative attitudes of those around. Rather like Polanski’s character in The Tenant, he starts to doubt himself in a self-persecuting masculine meltdown. Sadly Finnegan’s finale doesn’t quite reach a satisfactory outcome, lost in mixed messages and bravado, but The Surfer is worth watching for Cage alone. @MeredithTaylor

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2024

Marcello Mio (2024) Cannes Film Festival

Dir: Christophe Honoré Cast: Chiara Mastroianni, Catherine Deneuve, Fabrice Luchini, Nicole Garcia, Benjamin Biolay, Melvil Poupaud, Hugh Skinner, Stefania Sandrelli | France, Drama 120′

A girl wakes up one day feeling a bit sorry for herself and decides to dress up like her late father in this starry, soft-hearted nepo-baby flick from French director Christophe Honore.

Of course Chiara is no ordinary girl, she is the likeable daughter of Catherine Deneuve and Marcello Mastroianni and her penthouse apartment overlooks Paris’ Tour Montparnasse. After turning up for a casting in a new film, the director (Nicole Garcia) asks her to play her role “more like Mastroianni than Deneuve.” And this sets Chiara contemplating the past in a film imbued with the spirit of Paris, and of French and Italian cinema.

Clearly more like her father than her mother Chiara decides to take on Marcello’s famous guise from Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, chopping off her hair and donning a black tailored suit to take a trip down memory lane – speaking Italian – for her role in a film that poses everlasting questions but never really lives up to its high-concept premise instead playing out in a series of jokey vignettes, musical interludes and reveries.

Catherine Deneuve looks proudly on as Chiara is mentored by Fabrice Luchini, schmoozes ex lover Melvil Poupaud, parties with musician Benjamin Biolay and hooks up with a ginger-haired Spaniel padding through the nighttime streets of Paris where she also bumps into Hugh Skinner’s lovelorn British soldier taking time out from his NATO barracks (that’s the film’s fascinating revelation – and qualifies its entry in the Queer Palme competition). Fizzing with fun and nostalgia this is a lovely little film but Palme d’Or material?. @MeredithTaylor

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2024

Rumours (2024) CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2024

Dir: Guy Maddin, Evan & Galen Johnson | Canada 118′

Cult Canadian director Guy Maddin is an auteur in his own right with an eclectic stash of avant-garde films under his belt and loyal fanbase. Recently he joined forces with Evan and Galen Johnson and here joins them for a curious pulp horror outing worth seeing only for its stellar cast.

It all starts off rather straighforwardly in a lakeside gazebo in the grounds of a German castle at a G7 conference hosted by Kate Blanchett’s spritely president Helga Ortmann. She is joined by Denis Menochet (for France); Charles Dance (bizarrely for the US) a pigtailed and horny Roy Dupuis (Canada); Nikki Amuka-Bird (the UK) Italys’ Rolando Ravello and Takehiro Kira (Japan) who gather to work on a crisis paper until proceedings take a deep dive into Dr Strangelove territory.

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | MIDNIGHT SCREENINGS 2024

Saraband (1948)

UK 1948. Dir Basil Dearden. With Joan Greenwood, Stewart Granger, Peter Bull,Flora Robson. 96min. U

The attention paid to Ealing’s comedies has long been at the expense of their dramas, an oversight that has perennially overshadowed the work of Basil Dearden; although his importance to the studio was amply attested to when entrusted by Michael Balcon with the responsibility of making Ealing’s first production in Technicolor.

In this rare excursion for Ealing into historical drama, Bull and Greenwood are perfectly cast as the dissolute Prince George-Louis and his reluctant bride Sophie-Dorothea. Shooting in colour for the first time allowed the studio to give full rein to the period costumes and sets (the latter were nominated for an Oscar). The design provides an evocative backdrop to the princess’s tragic story. As her lover, Granger shows why he was soon poached by Hollywood, his stature and looks making him the perfect screen hero.

Although Ealing’s comedies seemed contemporary at the time, they are now as much period pieces as Saraband (for Dead Lovers), set in the early eighteenth century. Conceived as a Gainsborough romance for grown-ups – for which Ealing enlisted Gainsborough leading man Stewart Granger (who recalled it fondly in his memoirs) – it was a pet project of Balcon’s, but proved something of a poisoned chalice to Dearden, being the second of two ambitious box office failures based on novels by Helen Simpson (the second being Hitchcock’s Under Capricorn).

Nevertheless with production design by Dearden’s regular collaborator Michael Relph and photography by Douglas Slocombe it’s ravishing to look at, with a haunting score by Alan Rawsthorne. Among the supporting cast Peter Bull makes the future George I a memorable ogre, Flora Robson and Françoise Rosay a formidable pair of grande dames; while if it it only had a young Joan Greenwood in Technicolor playing the waif-like Sophie Dorothea that alone would make it well worth viewing. @RichardChatten

The Shrouds (2024) Cannes Film Festival

Dir/Wri: David Cronenberg | Cast: Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, Guy Pearce, Sandrine Holt | Canada 119′

In David Cronenberg’s latest sci-fi love story a grief-stricken man mourns the loss of his wife. But was he more obsessed with her body than her mind? Sexual desire is just one of the themes in this macabre but melancholy thriller. On his return to Cannes after Crimes of the Future, the Canadian director mulls over psychosomatics, freewill, life after death and the power of Al in a filmic hotchpotch of complex and avantgarde ideas. Exciting to watch but needlessly convoluted in its plotline.

Here Vincent Cassel is France’s answer to Vincent Price: the chiselled cheek bones, haughty gaze, powerful physicality, penetrating blue eyes and shock of white hair make for a creepy cemetery entrepreneur who goes by the name of Karsh Relikh, an atheist who believes in the afterlife, but is also surprisingly vulnerable. The death of his wife Bekka has been a body blow, so much so that his teeth are actually rotting in response to the anguish (according to his dentist): he hasn’t had sex since her death four years previously, although this celibate status will be short-lived. Bekka leaves an almost identical sister Terry in the shape of Diane Kruger who deftly takes on both roles.

Weirdly it takes Karsh nearly the entire film to discover that Bekka’s body is what he misses most and he admits to experiencing a visceral desire to have been interred with her. And so he takes ‘great comfort’ in watching her corpse slowly decompose after burial in a “shroud” lined with multiple X-ray cameras. Bekka also visits him in her dreams complete with mastectomy scars. And when he finds out that their relationship was not as exclusive as he imagined, the jealousy is destructive. Meanwhile his limp brother in law Maury (Guy Pearce), is also emotionally unhinged by his divorce from Terry, and is trying to get his own back on Karsh for enigmatic reasons. Cronenberg envelopes his various themes into this simple story of sorrow and sadness.

Ultimately The Shrouds seems to serve as a cinematic valedictory to Cronenberg’s own wife who died of cancer several years ago. It has the same cold beauty as his recent works but none of the dark humour of his early films. @MeredithTaylor

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2024

Bird (2024) Cannes Film Festival 2024

Dir/Wri: Andrea Arnold. UK/France. Drama, 119 mins

A spadeful of social grit soaked in the English countryside and served up with a dash of magical realism is the best way to describe this latest feature from Andrea Arnold.

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2024

The Garden of Allah (1936)

Richard Boleslavski died just short of his 48th birthday – his death probably hastened by the rigours of having recently directed two temperamental stars in the Arizona desert – and is largely overlooked by modern students of the cinema, but left behind him an interesting body of work, including this historic production in Technicolor.

Greta Garbo’s favourite photographer William Daniels once lamented that his greatest regret was that he never got the chance to record her lovely blue eyes for posterity. Fortunately Marlene Dietrich appeared to good advantage in several intermittent Technicolor productions of which ‘The Garden of Allah’ was the first.

Considering the unwieldy nature of Technicolor technology at the time the camerawork is fluid and mobile – and deservedly won an Academy Award – while it’s new-found ability to register the colour blue is seen to good effect in the succession of diaphanous blue gowns worn by Dietrich. @RichardChatten

NOW ON YOUTUBE

Three Kilometres to the End of the World (2024) Cannes Film Festival

Dir: Emanuel Parvu. Romania. Drama. 104 mins.

The past and the present collide in this straightforward Romanian melodrama, a third feature for filmmaker/actor Emanuel Parvu, and his first time in the main competition at the 77th Edition of Cannes Film Festival.

17-year-old Adi (Ciprian Chiujdea) is back from Bucharest to spend the summer with his God-fearing parents in their idyllic painted wooden house on the edge of the Danube. The young man has everything going for him: looks, intelligence and a good start in life. Until he suffers a savage attack on the way to the village disco, the future looked bright.

The action unfolds in a simple chronological way with strong performances all round: you may recognise Adi’s father Bogdan Dumitrache from his brilliant performance in Spiral and A Decent Man. This is Chiujdea’s feature debut and he feels convincing as a young man determined to get on in life despite his overbearing mother (Laura Vasiliu).

Shocked at the severity of Adi’s wounds his parents decide to file a complaint with the local police. But this is a small, tightly-knit community and the culprit is soon identified as the son of another local man to whom the father owes money. What also emerges is that this is a gay-bashing. And it doesn’t there with bitter repercussions as the parents remain in denial of their son’s sexuality, blaming his life in the big city, and hoping that a spell in a monastery will ‘sort him out’.

The story has its twists and turns which often feel rather uneventful but gain resonance in Parvu and his co-writer Miruna Berescu’s clever script. Three Kilometres is also made all the more watchable by the enchanting settings and some superb limpid visuals that create a real wonderland of this rural paradise in the Danube Delta, a throwback in time. @MeredithTaylor.

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2024

Megalopolis (2024) CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2024

Dir: Francis Ford Coppola | US Drama 120′

Megalopolis is pretentious and posturing and ultimately vacuous. Discombobulating images continuously flash before our eyes along with a talented cast of Hollywood’s best. But there wasn’t a scene or a performance I enjoyed as the actors all seem caught up in the grandiosity of it all in displaying the worst traits of each sex. The women were grasping and bitchy. The men arrogant and ego-driven, in fact, Jon Voight was the only one with a shred of vulnerability and a cheeky grin of playfulness as canny banker Hamilton Crassus III with Aubrey Plaza hamming it up as his lover Wow Platinum. Meanwhile Shia LaBeouf is cast as his curious and corrupt trans-looking grandson Clodio Pulcher (Shia LaBeouf).

Coppola aims high, as he should do, but the film feels like an flashback to the 1980s, all gilded, burnished and blundering like a fancy-dress school play of Shakespeare with a sci-fi makeover that somehow looks old-fashioned in the scheme of contemporary special effects: the actors poncing around and quoting their literary lines in the hope this will give some integrity to what is really a confounding mess.

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2024

Holy Cow (2024) Cannes Film Festival | UCR

Dir: Louise Courvoisier | France, Drama 90’

A joyful, earthy coming of age film about one of the most important things in life: Good food.

Holy Cow is also a first feature for Courvoisier who makes her debut along with lead actor Clément Favreau in this year’s Un Certain Regard sidebar.

In the Limousin dairy farmer’s son Totone (Clement Favreau) lives a carefree existence until his father’s sudden death forces him to grow up quickly and take charge of a younger sister (Luna Garret).

Landing a job in a neighbouring farm making cheese has its complications. First of all the farmer’s son is his love rival and Totone gets beaten up on day one. Then the cheese-making machinery gets the better of him. Worse of all, work starts at 4am and his sister must be taken to school.

But Totone is determined. And we get a crash course in the fine art of Comte cheese-making into the bargain. And when Totone meets fellow farmer Marie Lise (Barthélémy) they make a natural team with some dramatic heft provided by a heifer. But predictably the course of true love doesn’t run smoothly.

With a lively upbeat score and some lush rural cinematography Holy Cow is a breakout bucolic hit with a range of naturalistic performances from Clement Favreau and his fellow cast in an impressive feature debut. @MeredithTaylor

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | UN CERTAIN REGARD 2024

All We Imagine as Light (2024) Cannes Film Festival 2024

Dir/Wri: Payal Kapadia | Cast: Kani Kusruti, Divya Prabha, Chhaya Kadam, Hridhu Haroon | India Drama 110′

Writer-director Payal Kapadia‘s Mumbai set feature All We Imagine As Light is the first Indian film to compete for the Palme d’Or in nearly three decades; an impressive achievement for a first time filmmaker, especially an Indian woman. The last time an Indian film made it into the main competition was Shaji N Karun’s Swaham in 1994. Sadly it went home empty-handed losing out to Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. Kapadia, however, is not new to Cannes. Her poetic yet powerful documentary, A Night of Knowing Nothing, was the winner of Golden Eye for best documentary during the 2021 edition of Cannes Film Festival.

Unfolding in two parts and shifting deftly from realism to reverie All We Imagine As Light is about two women caught in impossible love stories in modern day Mumbai. Prabha, a nurse, shares a flat with Anu, yet they hardly know each other and are further constrained from forming a friendship due to shameful secrets that trap them from sharing their personal lives. Both women are disappointed by love, for differing reasons, and this emotional claustrophobia pervades the first part of the drama.

Anu, a Hindu, is in love with a Muslim man and forced to conceal her relationship due to societal constraints. All the two of them want is to make love but this is frowned upon even nowadays. Prabha is caught in an arranged marriage with a man who has since disappeared back to his village. One day, out of the blue, a rice cooker arrives in the post, supposedly from her estranged husband. This innocent gift sends Prabha into a deep depression, opening up fresh wounds of romantic disillusionment and upsetting her emotional equilibrium once again. She is a married woman constrained by all the ties that it implies, but leaving her lonely and emotionally frustrated.

The second part of film brings an uplifting almost dreamlike tonal shift that sees the women freed from their inertia when they set off on a road trip to a beach town where a mystical forest creates a space for the womens’ dreams to be unleashed. Kapadia’s film touches on traditional themes of abandonment, religious intolerance, female friendship and sexual liberation that are still all too relevant in today’s India with its impressive technical and financial advances. Yet despite all this, many women are still sadly stuck in the dark ages, while in the West men are enjoying the freedoms of gay marriage, gay fatherhood, and sexual transitioning. A thoughtful, richly thematic and beautifully captured film with two sensitive performances from leads Kani Kusruti and Divya Prabha. @MeredithTaylor

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2024

The Girl with the Needle (2024) CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2024

Dir: Magnus Von Horn | Cast: Vic Carmen Sonne, Trine Dyrholm, Besir Zeciri, Ava Knox Martin | Sweden, Drama

After training at the world famous film school in Lodz (Poland), Swedish director Magnus von Horn soon won international recognition in 2020 with his confident first feature Sweat a slick and scathing satire on social media celebrity.

The Girl with the Needle couldn’t be more different in tone or style but the theme is the same – sort of. A relentlessly grim atmosphere pervades this Palme d’Or hopeful, another tale of female empowerment turn of the century-style. This time set in 1919 Copenhagen where the macabre shadow and privations of the First World War still hang over Europe, affecting Denmark even though they were neutral.

Here a young girl called Karoline (Carmen Sonne) becomes reliant on all the help she can get after her husband Peter (Zeciri) disappears, suspected of being caught up in the hostilities. Karoline tries to apply for a widow’s pension but because Peter has not been technically declared dead she falls foul of the rules, according to Jorgen (Joachim Fjelstrup), the owner of the garment factory where she fetches up and whose needle give the film its gruesome title. She is soon pregnant by Jorgen who has no intention of marrying her.

Enter Dagmar (Dyrholm) a benevolent shopkeeper who purportedly helps poor mothers to find foster homes for their unwanted babies. The two bond and Karoline agrees, somewhat reluctantly, to become a wet-nurse, until it soon emerges that there is a terrible secret behind this work.

Unfolding in pristine black and white – and DoP Michal Dymek does a great job visually along with set designer Jagna Dobesz – this is a full blown horror story with all the hallmarks of Robert Lynn’s Dr Crippen (1963) and Fritz Lang’s M (1931) not to mention Dickens or The Brothers Grimm (but this is no fairy tale). The echoing, plangent soundscape and special effects – a series of leering faces that morph from a smirk to a gurning glower – are really sinister while feeling totally in keeping with an era fraught with human death and destruction in the trenches. Carmen Sonne and Dyrholm, really plummet the depths of Hell to dredge up these two ghastly women: one forced, through force of circumstance, to be dreadful; the other evil incarnate.

Needles become a metaphor for the pain and suffering that they deliver throughout the film: whether it be morphine, ether or an abortion attempt. Peter soon reappears maimed and disfigured and wearing a mask and unable to eat without making disgusting noises. Another ghastly character is Dagmar’s seven-year-old ‘daughter’ Erena (Knox Martin) another evil concoction – a blond female answer to Damien from Omen II. Not for the feint of heart and certainly not for those frightened of needles. @MeredithTaylor

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2024

Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed (2024)

Dir: Hernan Roselli | Argentina, Crime Drama 100′

Best known for his Rotterdam FIPRESCI-winning drama Mauro Argentina’s Hernan Roselli comes to Cannes’ 77th Edition with an intriguing crime drama.

Difficult to imagine that this seemingly decent family could actually be involved in something as dodgy as the criminal underworld. But Roselli’s third feature, which he writes and directs, blends found footage with fiction delving into the underbelly of organised, if low-level, crime in the outskirts of Buenos Aires the Felpetos have been running a clandestine lottery business for several decades.

Alejandra runs the administrative side of things, while her daughter Maribel heads up the team who log the bets from the privacy of their own living room. But the authorities have recently started to crack down on the activities of local bookies bringing a unsettling tonal shift to proceedings particularly when it emerges that the Felpetos have been concealing a burning secret.

The film, screening at the this year’s Directors’ Fortnight competition strand combines the same seething atmosphere as previous Argentine fare such as Azor, A Common Crime and Shady River in reflecting the unsettling history of the country with intriguing modern day realism that brings a striking note of reality to this assured piece of filmmaking marking Roselli out as a director at the top of his game. @MeredithTaylor

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | DIRECTORS’ FORTNIGHT 2024

The Southern Brides | Las Novias del Sur (2024) CANNES FILM FESTIVAL

Dir: Elena Lopez Riera | Spain, 40′

Las Novias del Sur premieres in the Queer Palm competition at this year’s 77th CANNES FILM FESTIVAL. It’s another unique snapshot of life in Southern Spain from Elena Lopez Riera who has carved out a niche for herself with similar ethnographical fare such as El Agua (2022), Those Who Lust and The Entrails.

Screening during Cannes Critics’ Week Southern Brides features the stories of various mature women who discuss their intimate experiences of love and marriage from the middle of the last century. Whether positive or negative this emotional heritage provides a shared history for themselves and their future generations.

Lopez Riera, who is unmarried and childless by choice, comes to the realisation that this vital thread connecting her to the future is missing, setting her adrift in the Universe.

Whereas the recent Costa Rica documentary Memories of a Burning Body (2024) focused on the sense of freedom and self-realisation middle age entailed for a group of now single women, here the director combines interviews with archive footage to craft a documentary where the accent is more on the personal voyage of discovery gleaned from sharing these sometimes poignant and riveting revelations. @MeredithTaylor

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | CRITICS’ WEEK 2024 .

The Second Act (2024) CANNES FILM FESTIVAL

Dir: Quentin Dupieux | Cast: Lea Seydoux, Vincent Lindon, Louis Garrel, Raphael Quenard | France Comedy | 80′

Best known for his ‘zany’ comedies (The Deerskin, Incredible But True) writer director Quentin Dupieux gets the opening slot at this year’s 77th Edition of the CANNES FILM FESTIVAL with his latest The Second Act that follows a group of bored actors on the edge of a nervous breakdown. The task here is trying to make their boredom funny, and Dupieux doesn’t quite pull it off.

The film stars Lea Seydoux, Vincent Lindon and Louis Garrel (who has recently turned his talents to comedy) and the action revolves in the confines of The Second Act, a diner in the middle of nowhere, where Garrel is David, the love interest of Seydoux’s character Florence who is keen to introduce him to her father (Lindon) as ‘the man of her life’. Problem is, David doesn’t really fancy her and tries to get his friend Willy (Quenard) involved. But Willy isn’t convinced.

When they all eventually sit down together the bickering continues between their characters in the film being made and the actors they play in the actual film. There’s an inspired scene where the waiter (Manuel Guillot), clearly a lonely depressive, tries to serve them an expensive Cote du Rhone, but, due to stage fright, manages to spill it everywhere but in the glasses.

The Second Act is occasionally funny and Dupieux’s script full of good ideas and topical themes such as sexuality and racism and also touching on more contemporary subjects like the emergence of AI for budget filmmaking, and the late arrival to the French film industry of cancel culture and the #MeToo movement. But Dupieux just doesn’t know how to bring this all together into a story with a dramatic arc that leads to a satisfactory denouement. Ultimately the film outstays its welcome in a series of amusing skits brilliantly performed by a talented cast who eventually run out of steam with their laborious, receptive dialogues. A missed opportunity with some fun moments. @MeredithTaylor

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | OPENING FILM 2024

The Other Way Round (2024) Best Film Directors’ Fortnight 2024

Dir/Wri: Jonás Trueba | Spain Romantic Comedy 114′

Following his recent success with triple-award winning documentary Who’s Stopping Us (2022) Jonas Trueba’s latest, a comedy crowd-pleaser, follows a longterm couple in the throws of an amicable break-up.

After fifteen years together Ale (Itsaso Arana), a filmmaker, and Alex (Vito Sanz) have decided to call it a day. So to celebrate this rite of passage the two plan to invite their nearest and dearest for a knees-up in their Madrid flat.

Competing in the Directors’ Fortnight section at this year’s Cannes Film Festival this upbeat relatable romcom from the multi-award-winning is co-written by Trueba and his lead duo in a mumblecore style with its focus on sassy dialogue and slightly cooky performances from Arana and Sanz who are so plausible as an ordinary couple with the usual doubts and complexes that none of their close coterie can actually believe this relationship will – or indeed – should come to an end.

A party to mark the end of their life together is certainly a novel idea and the story goes to provocative places in exploring what happens when expectations fall short and long-term love just doesn’t set the night on fire anymore, although a strong and workable friendship is still alive and kicking, and many couples eventually decide to stick together their shared history and close ties with others binding them in a lifelong affair. The Other Way Round is a light-hearted look at deconstructed coupledom that ultimately asks the question: is everyone lucky enough to remain ‘loved-up’ forever or is this state of grace just a pipe dream, or even a mindset, for the lucky few? @MeredithTaylor

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | DIRECTORS’ FORTNIGHT 2024

Universal Language (2024) Directors’ Fortnight 2024

Dir: Matthew Rankin | Canada, Comedy Drama 89′

Fans of quirky humour will warm to this interconnected selection of parables from the Matthew Rankin whose breakout comedy hit The 20th Century swept the festival board back in 2019.

Rankin is a one-man potted Canadian version of Monty Python, and here along with his co-writers Ila Firouzabadi and Pirouz Nemati, dreams up a series of witty off-the-wall tales set, of all places, in Winnipeg and featuring a (predominantly) Farsi-speaking cast.

Universal Language is certainly an acquired taste: the humour is eye-pokingly prurient, politically incorrect and bizarre. The sets are provocative and the stories surreal, but will certainly have you pinned to your seat staring at the screen aghast – in anger, bewilderment or amazement at the weirdness of it all. In contrast to the content, visually it looks all quite bland and washed out colour-wise but that just adds to almost whimsical nature of the perfectly framed set pieces: the turkey shop is a case in point, as is the school scene that opens in a snowy urban landscape; clearly Winnipeg has some great architects, and you get a tour of the city by a character called Massoud who certainly adds value to his travelogue of the town. The man and his mother tale is another well-worn chestnut but the Quebec setting is novel.

Whatever you make of it Universal Language is a bracingly inspired piece of filmmaking from a director who thinks out of the box and deserves a place in this year’s Directors’ Fortnight selection at Cannes Film Festival 2024.@MeredithTaylor

DIRECTORS’ FORTNIGHT 2024 | CANNES FILM FESTIVAL

Tasio (1984) Cannes Film Festival 2024

Dir: Montxo Armendariz | Spain, Drama 93′

A young man grows up in the rural surroundings of Spain’s Navarra region in Armendar’s poignant ethnographical portrait of working lives that echoes Victor Erice’s El Sur, created two years previously.

Armendáriz adopts a meditative approach to his minimalist depiction of Tasio’s powerfully visceral world that comes to life in Jose Luis Alcaine’s incandescent camerawork. Spare of dialogue yet speaking volumes, the film shows how Tasio ekes out a modest existence making charcoal. It’s a slow-burning (quite literally!) and arduous process: wood is piled into enormous mounds and then set alight as it gradually smoulders into a sooty mound of dense black remains. Tasio, the `carbonero’, pokes and prods the mass making sure it gets just enough just air to continue its process in a centuries old cottage industry that still exists in parts of Spain.

The film was shot on the borders of the Basque Country (Euskadi), in the extreme west of Navarra (Navarre) around the villages of Aranarache, Eulate, Urra, Baquedano and Zudaire, villages forming the area known as Améscoa not far from the bosky slopes of the Sierra de Urbasa. A simple but noble look at times gone by. @MeredithTaylor

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | CANNES CLASSICS 2024

Simon of the Mountain (2024) Cannes Film Festival | Critics’ Week

Dir: Luis Federico | Cast: Lorenzo Ferro, Kiara Supini, Pehuen Pedre | Argentina, Chile, Uruguay | Drama 97′

Argentinian filmmaker Luis Federico makes a brave and inspired attempt to work with the physically and mentally impaired in his feature debut that explores alternative lifestyles and parallel universes centring on an unlikely trio as they navigate the world from an original perspective.

Communities all over the world thrive in the margins of what is known as “society”. This is often what happens when the gene pool is restricted or concentrated to a small circle of people who find themselves compromised in all sorts of ways, allowing them to experience our world through different eyes.

The film centres on Simon (Ferro) a strong-jawed, capable man who, looking for a change of direction, hooks up with two disabled teenagers (played by Kiara Supine and Pehuen Pedre). Simon is well-versed in bed-making but not cooking or cleaning. For some reason he becomes into contact with two disabled kids and this leads to an often unnerving journey of friendship and discovery.

It was the American comedian W.C. Fields who once said: “never work with children or animals”. He was of the opinion that they can be unpredictable with their ability to steal scenes. But this quality only adds to this film’s allure, and Federico manages some extraordinary results from his fist time young actors. One scene in particular, involving an exchange between Supine and Pedre, is electric in its intensity and this just goes to show the enhanced sensibility between those experiencing challenges in other areas and makes Simon of the Mountain a touching, surprising often darkly humorous experience lead by two outstanding debut performances. @MeredithTaylor

BEST FEATURE WINNER CRITICS’ WEEK | CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2024

Supernova (2024)

Dirs: Yossi Bloch, Duki Dror | With: Shoval Roberman, Tomer Weiner, Racheli Nahmias, Michal Ohana, Noam Cohen, Gali Amar, Amit Amar, Ilan Regev, Hananya Benjamin | Israel doc 2024, 52′

A new documentary from Israeli filmmakers Yossi Block and Duke Dror brings to life that fateful Autumn day when Hamas reportedly attacked more than 20 Israeli towns and kibbutzim killing 1200 people in one day.

On the morning of Saturday, October 7th, 2023, thousands of young Israelis were dancing in the desert at a major international trance-music festival. Euphoria then devastation. Suddenly dozens of terrorists on motorcycles drove into the crowd while militants on hang gliders cut the sky. The terrorists surrounded them, blocking the roads, ambushing escaping cars, grabbing hostages, and leading them violently and triumphantly into Gaza.

This film provides a retrospective of 24 hours at the Nova festival in Re’im through the lens of young individuals who endured the horror. The initial filming began 48 hours after the catastrophic incident, during which the filmmakers documented eight partygoers. The narrative unfolds chronologically, weaving together their first-hand accounts to construct a record of the events.

Interviewed to camera, the kids describe their initial excitement of breaking free from their daily lives to enjoy the outdoor music festival. A cautious comment comes from one of the girls who questions why the location, at the Re’im Junction, is so near to the border with Gaza.

But the festival is now in full swing and fireworks seem to fall from the sky. Or wait a moment. They’re missiles, dozens of them. Calm turns to mild panic when the guards tell the festival-goers to leave the area due to a missile attack.

Director Duki Dror deftly combines the survivors’ own phone footage and face to face interviews with Hamas recorded footage to show how the ground-based units fire missiles that rain down on Israeli territory. A shout goes out ‘God is Great’ and Hamas soldiers make their way into the crowd.

By now day has dawned. But 4000 people trying to leave the festival site at once is no joke. And those who finally get on the road are ambushed by Hamas soldiers who open fire on them indiscriminately (according to Hamas filmed footage). In scenes like something out of the D-Day landings Israeli teenagers are seen running like hell across the open fields while they are fired upon by Hamas soldiers. Some run towards a prefab hut where they take cover and tend to the wounded. Others hide wherever they can. But someone tells them to run if they want to save their lives.

Some of the teenagers found their way to a shelter but Hamas soldiers pelted the metal shack with grenades killing and maiming many of those inside. One young man tells how he slid under a dead body to avoid death. Another grabbed a severed leg and put it over him describing an overwhelming smell of blood, faeces and gunpowder.

At one point a shout goes out from a Hamas soldier: “she’s a war slave, throw her in the back” (of a truck). He grabs a young man by his hair. All around are bodies and burnt out cars.

One dad, Ilan Regev, follows his kids’ phone footage and decides to grab his gun and head south in his truck. He watches as his kids Maya 21, and 18 year old Itay, are captured. Luckily they were eventually released after over seven weeks in captivity. Others who escaped the mayhem speak of their feelings of guilt and are haunted by images of blood and limb-less bodies. They are the lucky ones. This devastating massacre shocked the world with its extremely graphically violent images. @MeredithTaylor

SUPERNOVA IS AVAILABLE ON VOD

An Unfinished Film (2024) Cannes Film Festival 2024

Dir: Lou Ye | Cast: Ming Liang, Qin Hao, Mao Xiaorui, Xuan Huang, Xi Qi, Zhang Songwen | 105′

Do we need another film about the pandemic? Well, this new documentary/drama from Chinese director and his co-writer Yingli Ma certainly offers additional insight and will have its world premiere on 16 May 2024 at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, in the Special Screenings section.

Set in January 2020 it sees a film crew reunite near Wuhan to resume the shooting of a film halted ten years earlier, only to share the unexpected challenges as cities are placed under lockdown. The original film was never finished and remained frozen in time. But here what starts as an ordinary working day for a film crew soon develops into mayhem as Lou Ye and his co-writer blend a real sense of unease punctuated by poignancy and even humour as events unfold during Christmas 2019 and culminate in April 2020.

Naturally the pandemic offered dramatic potential to a vast array of dramas and documentaries, but unlike previous tragedies such the Second World War and the Holocaust all of us have lived through this latest world crisis and experienced it at the coal face, maybe even losing loved ones in the process. And those terrible memories of anxiety, desperation and even boredom all come flooding back when watching An Unfinished Film. Fascinating to see how the Chinese cope with the unfolding events and how the authorities perform, often with violence and draconian measures: and the Chinese public’s reaction is not as meek and obedient as the global image would have us believe.

What emerges here, as the film’s ultimate takeaway, is a story about ordinary people trying to get on with their lives in horrible circumstances: working, loving, dreaming, praying, suffering – and celebrating just like we all did during those fateful few years. @MeredithTaylor.

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | SPECIAL SCREENINGS 2024

In his Own Image (2024) Cannes Film Festival | Directors’ Fortnight 2024

Dir: Thierry de Peretti | Cast: Victoire Du Bois, Alexis Manenti, Louis Starace, Marc-Antonu Mozziconacci, Thierry de Peretti, Antonia Buresi, Cedric Appietto | France 110′

Screening in this year’s Directors’ Fortnight In his Own Image is Thierry de Peretti’s fourth feature that follows on from The Apaches (2013) A Violent Life (2017) and Undercover (2023) winning awards at San Sebastián and the Cesars.

Based loosely on a book by Jerome Ferrari this docudrama follows Antonia, a driven young photographer on a local newspaper in Corsica where her personal life mirrors the island’s turbulent political landscape from 1980s until the dawn of the 21st century.

With all the romanticism of a true love story In His Own Image unfolds before our eyes in de Peretti’s poignant potted political and social story of his island homeland. The director has clearly poured his heart and soul into this cinematic chronicle and infused it with a palpable sense of national pride and identity – and it draws us in from the first scene.

Peretti himself stars as Joseph, a priest in the small southern town of Bastelica where he is also godfather to a young woman called Antonia. Her extraordinary life plays out from the late 1970s onwards and serves as a classic tale of female empowerment, showing how she finds her chosen métier; parties with her friends and falls for her lover Pascal (Starace) who is 21 in the summer of 1979. It also shows how this woman is seen through the prism of a man. A selfish man who puts his country rather than his partner at the centre of his life, and both of them rather suffer the consequences.

The action is evocatively captured on the widescreen and in intimate close-up, accompanied by an evocative score and enriched by archive footage that sets off with a devastating opening sequence and then flashes back in time to witness the local political unrest that sees Antonia’s new lover drawn into the conflict between the French authorities and local activists. They are fighting for Corsica’s liberation in a violent civil war, and Pascal is one of the them and becomes a ferocious freedom fighter.

In January 1980 Ajaccio is held under siege and archive sequences provide the film with a seething sense of unease and dramatic tension. During the events, Antonia corresponds avidly with Pascal, helping to raise awareness of his plight with her outstanding personal photo archive that speaks volumes: a photo tells a thousand words.

Antonia remains obsessed by her lover as she follows his cause. Her commitment and passion will eventually land her a job at the local newspaper Corse Matin. Despite her age and lack of experience this gives her a sense of independence and agency way beyond her years.

Now living in flat in Ajaccio Antonia is able to conduct a relationship with Pascal on his release from prison. When Guy Orsini, a freedom fighter, is murdered Antonia captures even more photo coverage. But she also comes to the realisation that being a photographer isn’t always an honourable profession – if you want juicy photos – and that working for Corse Matin is limiting her career progression and talents: obits, sport, village dances and trivial fare is not where it’s at for an inspired career photographer, and so Antonia must try to forge her own way, and also break away romantically with new lover Simon (Mozziconacci).

De Perretti elegantly balances all these elements: family, love, career and craft in a compelling drama that avoids sensationalism or melodrama to create a vibrant sense of a nation and a real woman of the late 20th century. Ordinary but also extraordinary In His Own Image is a real triumph. @MeredithTaylor

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | DIRECTORS’ FORTNIGHT

Gertrud (1964)

Dir: Carl Theodor Dreyer | Denmark, Drama 116’

A film that continues to cause controversy – Philip French once opined that if you could turn ‘Gertrud’ into a sleeping pill it would make the perfect tranquilliser – with a tiresome, self-centred heroine who spends an inordinate amount of time staring into space while seemingly oblivious to the blandishments of a succession of alpha males.

It’s too bad that veteran Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer failed to realise his original aim to make ‘Gertrud’ in colour, as what to prove his swan song (although he continued to furnish ambitions to make a life of Christ) limpidly photographed by Henning Bendtsen it would have looked even better than it already does. @RichardChatten

Dog on Trial (2024) Cannes Film Festival 2024 | Un Certain Regard

Dir: Laetitia Dosch | Cast: Laetitia Dosch, Anabela Moreira, Anne Dorval, Francois Damiens, Pierre Deladonchamps | France, Comedy 83′

Laetitia Dosch first came to Cannes in Leonor Serraille’s Golden Camera winning Jeune Femme (2017). Here she stars in her own confident first feature as an animal rights lawyer determined to fight for her client, a recidivist dog.

Based on a true story, the comedy satire takes place in a small Swiss town where Maitre Avril Lucciani (Dosch) is a sucker for lost causes; much to the annoyance of her barrister colleague (Deladonchamps). We first meet the two of them in a cafe where he is complaining about Avril’s lousy track record. He meanwhile makes no excuse for misogynistic comments in extolling the virtues of a recent trip to Italy (“the women are amazing, their breasts are like fruit waiting to be picked – and they give wonderful blowjobs”!). The pace here is brisk and the humour eye-wateringly outré in the style of French comedian Blanche Gardin.

The next day Avril predictably takes on another lost cause: that of Cosmos, a dog who has bitten several people and is now being sued by a Portuguese cleaner (Moreira), and her barrister played by Anne Dorval. Cosmos’ owner (Damiens) clearly has a screw loose but Avril is convinced by her argument that dogs should have just as many rights as humans. She pleads that Cosmos is not ‘a thing’ but ‘an individual’ who also has needs (and here she illustrates with the dog’s need to pee). Meanwhile the prosecution claims the animal should be put down. Noisy courtroom scenes jostle with filmed footage of street demonstrations and contemplative domestic settings where Avril reflects on her ability to fight for her cause.

Dosch’s arguments are well thought out and she doesn’t look for easy answers in a pithy dark comedy co-written with Anne-Sophie Bailly. What starts as a satire lampooning animal welfare and the French legal system soon ripples out into the thornier territory of street violence, casual misogyny, racism and even trivial consumer concerns. Going from strength to strength, Dosch clearly now has a talent for comedy in her tightly scripted debut that never outstays its welcome @MeredithTaylor

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | CAMERA D’OR | UN CERTAIN REGARD 2024 |

PALM DOG WINNER 2024 IN CANNES

SENIOR STRAY KODI SCOOPS TOP PRIZE FOR

SWISS-FRENCH COMEDY DOG ON TRIAL

GRAND JURY PRIZE GOES TO LITTLE XIN IN CHINESE DRAMA BLACK DOG

Wild River (1960)

Dir: Elia Kazan | Cas: Montgomery Clift, Lee Remick, Jo Van Fleet | US Drama 110′

Probably Elia Kazan’s greatest film, though seldom acknowledged as such. The film’s failure both critical and commercial broke Kazan’s heart, to whom it had been a deeply felt project since he’d wanted to make a film honouring the work of the Tennessee Valley Authority since his days as an idealistic young leftwing firebrand.

By the time Kazan was finally able to command the resources to release this goal he’d grown older and his sympathies had shifted from the official representing the New Deal to Ella Garth who in Kazan’s mind had by then come to personify the individual against the state. As photographed by Ellsworth Fredricks in mellow autumnal hues it remains one for the ages with its dynamic cast of Montgomery Clift and Lee Remick. @RichardChatten

NOW ON PRIME VIDEO

Cinema de la Plage | Cannes Festival 2024

Every day at 9:30PM, the Festival de Cannes reinvents itself as night falls, transforming the Croisette’s Plage Macé, opposite the Majestic hotel, into an open-air cinema.
In addition to the screenings, meetings and Official Selection events held at the Palais des Festivals, this is another way for everyone to get involved to the great cinema party.
On the programme for the 77th Festival: teams on stage, world premieres, suspense, action, Jackie Chan, Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese, Rachid Bouchareb, Tony Gatlif, Danny Boyle, the continuation of the tribute to Studio Ghibli, and much more…
This now traditional rendezvous is open to festival-goers and all audiences, with a choice “warm-up” act every evening: the duo TwinSelecter. Rock, pop, soul, funk, punk, mambo, electro, film soundtracks, jazz, disco, psychedelic, hiphop, garage, to get you going before the screening!

THE PROGRAMME!

Tuesday May 14
TRAINSPOTTING (4K Restoration)
Danny Boyle
1995 – 1h34 – UK

Wednesday May 15
MOI AUSSI
Judith Godrèche
2024 – 17mins – France
Screening in the presence of the film team

Followed by SILEX AND THE CITY
Jean-Paul Guigue & Julien Berjeaut
2024 – 1h20 – France, Belgium
Screening in the presence of the film team

Thursday May 16
MY WAY
Thierry Teston in collaboration with Lisa Azuelos
2024 – 1h18 – France
Screening in the presence of the film team

Friday May 17
AFTER HOURS
Martin Scorsese
1985 – 1h37 – USA

Saturday May 18
TRANSMITZVAH
Daniel Burman
2024 – 1h40 – Argentina
Screening in the presence of the film team

Sunday May 19
INDIGÈNES (Days of Glory)
Rachid Bouchareb
2006 – 2h10 – France
Screening in the presence of Rachid Bouchareb

Monday May 20 – A short night with Ghibli
TALES FROM EARTHSEA
Gorō Miyazaki
2006 – 1h55 – Japan
Screening in the presence of Gorō Miyazaki

Followed by PORCO ROSSO
Hayao Miyazaki
1992 – 1h33 – Japan

Thursday May 21
EXILS
Tony Gatlif
2004 – 1h43 – France
Screening in the presence of Tony Gatlif

Wednesday May 22
SLOCUM ET MOI
Jean-François Laguionie
2024 – 1h15 – Luxemburg, France
Screening in the presence of the film team

Thursday May 23
ARMOUR OF GOD II: OPERATION CONDOR
Jackie Chan
1991 – 1h57 – China

Friday May 24
NINE QUEENS (Nueve Reinas)
Fabian Bielinsky
2000 – 1h54 – Argentina

Saturday May 25
PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE
Brian De Palma
1974 – 1h31- USA

Locust (2024) CANNES FILM FESTIVAL

Dir: Keff | Taiwan

Keff is an American-Taiwanese screenwriter, director, musician and artist who grew up in Hong Kong and now comes to Cannes Critics’ Week with his feature debut, a follow-up to his second short film, Taipei Suicide Story.

Locust fuses a visually alluring neon-infused cinematic style with some violent gang scenes in 2019 Taiwan where Zhong-Han, an orally-challenged young man in his twenties, leads a double life slaving in a family-run restaurant during the working hours while nighttime sees him running a racket on behalf of Triad-style local gangsters.

When a shady businessman takes over the restaurant from his decent, hard-working former boss, Zhong-Han soon realises that his family and friends are in danger, forcing him into a swift ‘volt face’ in order to confront his own gang, that also serves at a metaphor for all that’s wrong in modern Taiwan, especially the corruption in the country’s corridors of power.

Locust is an assured, if a tad overlong, debut for the filmmaker who showcases his impressive writing talents and ability to transmit his ideas to the screen in a powerful and filmic first feature. @MeredithTaylor

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | CRITICS’ WEEK 2024

Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971) CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | CLASSICS 2024

Dir: Robert Bresson | France/Italy, Drama 83’

Adapted from Dostoevsky’s story about a young man and woman’s chance encounter as they gradually fall in love over four successive nights in Paris. The tentative nature of their gradual obsession for one another is echoed in Pierre Lhomme’s luminous cinematography that creates a delicate dreamy landscape of the French capital where anything could happen as their erotic passion grows into love. The Bresson version transcends mawkishness and sentimentality. However, unsure their actions are these two believe in the mystical power of love to transform their ordinary lives. In 1957 Visconti filmed another version using the original title White Nights.

RESTORED PRINT | SCREENING during CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2024 in the presence of Nathanael Karmitz, Chairman of the board of mk2

When the Light Breaks (2024) Un Certain Regard 2024

Dr/Wri: Rúnar Rúnarsson | Cast:

Rúnar Rúnarsson’s latest film, When the Light Breaks opens the Un Certain Regard in the festival’s official selection

This simple but never simplistic study of profound and repressed grief takes place in springtime Reykjavik where a young pan-sexual woman’s joy is turned to sorrow after a tragic event sends her on a rollercoaster ride to emotional hell.

When the Light Breaks is the Icelandic director’s fourth feature and follows his 2019 portmanteau feature Echo that won the Youth Jury Award at Locarno Film Festival.

Once again the tone is sombre but this time the narrative lacks the bite of his previous fare in particular Sparrows (2015) and plays out as a predictable story of loss that is nevertheless moving in its depiction of collective grief. It centres on Una (breakout teenage star Elín Hall) who is in the early stages of a relationship with Baldar Einarsson’s Diddi when they are separated by tragedy. The remainder of the film explores the aftermath to the event and the affects it has on Diddi’s circle of friends and particularly on Una who is unable to reveal their nascent affair for reasons that will soon become clear as the film unspools.

DoP Sophia Olsson makes atmospheric use of Iceland’s rugged landscapes that contrast with the sleek architectural framing of modernist interiors and the particularly resonant scenes that take place in Reykjavik’s expressionist neo-gothic Hallgrímskirkja Church of Iceland that soars 244 feet into the blue yonder. Something to behold and very much in keeping with the film’s spiritual undertones. @MeredithTaylor

UN CERTAIN REGARD | CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2024

Block Pass (2024) Semaine de la Critique 2024

Dir: Antoine Chevrollier | Cast: Sayyid El Alami, Amaury Foucher, Damien Bonnard, Florence Janas, Artus Solaro, Dahan Lamort, Axelle Fresneau, Mathieu Demy

Motorcross racing makes for a high octane subject in this stylish teenage buddy movie from French filmmaker Antoine Chevroillier.

The Loire-born director is competing for the Golden Camera in the Cannes’ Semaine de la Critique competition and shares script duties with Bérénice Bocquillon and Faïza Guène in his big screen debut which stars Damien Bonnard and Mathieu Demy alongside Sayyid El Alami the young lead of his hit TV series Ouseekine.

Teenagers Jojo (El Alami) and Willy (Solaro) have been inseparable since childhood and spend their all free time training at the Pampa race track honing their biking skills much to the annoyance of their parents (Mathieu Demy, Damien Bonnard) who want them to focus on school work. And what starts as a heady, fun-filled romp soon turns into something more serious as Willy’s long held secret threatens to destroy not only their friendship but also the unsteady relationship there have with parents.

This dazzlingly photographed portrait of teenage ennui kicks over the usual intergenerational conflicts: truancy, drugs, etc and also adds sex to the list. The summery rural landscapes of France provide a pastoral contrast to a story of lost childhood and tainted dreams in A well-paced action drama punctuated by tension fuelled conflicts between the boys and their parents and two terrific central performances by El Alami and Solaro. @MeredithTaylor

SEMAINE DE LA CRITIQUE | CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2024

The Mystery of the Leaping Fish (1916)

Dir: John Emerson | Cast: Douglas Fairbanks, Bessie Love, Allan Sears | US short film 25’

Douglas Fairbanks stars in this slapstick comedy whose curious title refers to the inflatable fish employed by early California surfers.

James Monaco once stated that the shock of discovering PreCode Hollywood cinema was a basic part of the education of every serious student of the film; The Mystery of the Leaping Fish preceding that fault line by a full fourteen years.

When ‘Easy Street’ was televised back in the sixties the heroine briefly found herself menaced in a cellar by a wild-eyed weirdo brandishing a hypodermic whose identity the narrator explained was that of a mad scientist eager to try out his new formula. Seen today it’s pretty obvious what was really happening.

Every generation thinks it discovered sin, The Mystery of the Leaping Fish shows that more than a century ago the state of California already possessed that quality in abundance, to the extent that when Aleister Crowley passed through Hollywood in 1916 with uncharacteristic primness he dismissed the natives as “the cinema crowd of cocaine-crazed sexual lunatics”.

Described by Kevin Brownlow as “one of most the bizarre films ever produced”, an unrecognisable young Douglas Fairbanks plays a detective with the incredible name ‘Coke Ennyday’ upon whose desk sits an enormous box with ‘Cocaine’ in big letters on the side and like Sherlock Holmes in the opening scene of ‘The Sign of Four’ is shown shooting up.

Venturing out disguised in a Kaiser Bill moustache (later revealed to be fake), walking with a Groucho Marx lope in a variety of loud checks in pursuit of a gang of criminals, he comes across a box of opium, his face lighting when he samples the contents into which he then enthusiastically tucks in, it promptly putting a spring in his step. @RichardChatten

NOW ON YOUTUBE

Made in England: the Films of Powell & Pressburger

Dir: David Hinton | UK Doc 122′

A leisurely look at the filmography of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, forever to be known as The Archers. Made In England which premiered at this year’s Berlinale and is directed by David Hinton (longtime director of numerous episodes of The South Bank Show). The documentary has a trump card that raises it above ‘run of the mill’ linear telling of their dual careers in that it is guided and contextualised by long time supporter Martin Scorsese.

To say that Scorsese narrates the film is to do it and him a disservice; he starts with a tale he has told many times before and that is his own cinematic origin story, from discovering the adventure fantasy that Michael Powell co-directed in 1940: The Thief Of Bagdad. Scorsese, although he watched it on a tiny B&W television, remembered the name of the director and his formal experimental mise en scene that he wanted to see more of. Made in England is very much in the vein of Scorsese’s two documentaries that focus and US and Italian cinema.

People think having the internet and access to unlimited information makes them more informed and engaged with the world, but the opposite of that is true, and we sometimes forget how it was in the pre-internet era. I discovered Powell and Pressburger through the prism of Emeric Pressburger which is unusual. I read an essay he wrote for the Faber annual film journal Projections entitled: The Early Life of a Screenwriter, which sent me on a mission to discover the films this man had written.

After relating his discovery of Powell & Pressburger Scorsese – in immense detail – takes the audience on a journey through the ups and downs (mainly ups) of their career, which encompasses WWII, the creation of their partnership as The Archers and adventures through the UK and US studio system, and the eventual split of the partnership, with Michael Powell’s career being destroyed after the release of Peeping Tom.

Scorsese numerous times talks about their representation of love which they told through a visual language that can only be described as ‘pure cinema’; the juxtaposition of Colour; light; music and movement. One thinks of what Jean Luc Godard said about Nicholas Ray, but which can also stand in for Powell & Pressburger: “There was theater (Griffith), poetry (Murnau), painting (Rossellini), dance (Eisenstein), music (Renoir). Henceforth, there is cinema. And the cinema is (Nicholas Ray.) Powell and Pressburger”.

Their cinema gives a Kierkegaardian dizziness of freedom, it shows the impulses but also the limitations of love. It is a cinema that stops the written in its tracks and deals a death blow to its descendent: the imaginary. This is its virtue: to switch off, to put a stop to make believe. Their universe is a hermetically sealed one that is disgusted by the rigour of humanity, and they continue to remind us that what interests them is the rigour of angels and romanticism, rather than the logic of chess masters

What we are left with, of course, is that the films are now thankfully readily available, and many of the iconic ones have recently had a cinematic release. One of the images that will endure is the feeling of safety and excitement when one comes across the legendary logo of The Archers, that beautiful technicolour comfortable indent. ©DavidMault @D_W_Mault

IN UK & IRISH CINEMAS FROM 10 MAY 2024

The Hyperboreans (2024) Cannes Film Festival | Directors’ Fortnight

Dir: Cristobal Leon, Joaquin Cocina | Drama, Chile 64′
World premiere

Following their first feature-length animated film The Wolf House (2018), visual artists and filmmakers, Chilean Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña have focused on stop-motion animation and creating worlds that are as disturbing as they are absorbing.

The Wolf House was inspired by the story of Colonia Dignidad, the film could also have been straight out of Walt Disney had he had an equally bizarre imagination as these two.

Los hyperbóreos is certainly out there even for an experimental affair. It is a film within a film in which Antonia Giesen, actress and part-time psychologist, decides to make a thriller about what goes on in her patient’s mind – but that’s easier said that done.

The film takes shape inside a vast studio where we are led by a woman who is by turns a storyteller, actress and illusionist – who interacts with Méliès-style cardboard sets and effigies, following in the footsteps of a very real man: the Chilean neo-Nazi Miguel Serrano (1917-2009), a writer who was very much avantgarde in his wacky ideas and theories. This brave piece of filmmaking is an acquired taste and not for the feint-hearted but with its quirky mise-en-scene will certainly appeal to diehard cineastes. @MeredithTaylor

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | DIRECTORS’ FORTNIGHT 2024

Auction (2023)

Dir/Wri: Pascal Bonitzer | France Drama 91’

Olivier Gourmet, Lea Drucker and Alex Lutz are the stars of this rather good arthouse thriller – written and directed by ex Cahiers du Cinema critic Pascal Bonitzer – in fact his tenth film – about the heady world of art auctioneering.

A deliciously caustic opening scene sets the tone for an intriguing affair set amid the beau monde of Mulhouse, New York and Paris where Andre (Alex Lutz) is an upscale auctioneer at ‘Scottie’s’ and has just landed a commission for a painting he believes to be a fake. Andre is at loggerheads with his trainee Aurore (Chevillotte) who ends up providing the missing link to the narrative, with an intriguing backstory.

Andre and his colleague and ex-wife Albertina (Drucker) decide to visit the long-lost painting that’s now hanging in the ordinary home of a shift worker Martin Keller in Mulhouse. It turns out to be the real work by Austrian expressionist painter Egon Schiele that was seized by the Nazis in 1939 and discarded as part of the Nazi purge of degenerate art. An Austrian Jew called Wahlburg had bought it in 1918 but had to escape Austria leaving it behind. Andre sees the unexpected find as an opportunity for promotion, and moves in quickly when Keller expresses no interest in it at all.

Andre and Albertina join forces with a provincial lawyer (Hamzawi) to track down the Wahlberg family in the shape of Bob Wahlberg who is one of nine heirs to the painting and a particularly generous man. He wants Martin to benefit from the canvas worth millions and be considered the tenth heir. Wahlberg is happy to sell it for 8 million. But Andre smells a rat and doesn’t want it to go for a song, as he considers the market for Schiele particularly strong. And that’s where Aurore comes in.

Auction is another juicy tongue in cheek satire with a hint of tension, and it looks really good too in Pierre Million’s camera with natural performances especially from Lutz and Drucker who dazzle with their stylish chemistry. The only bum note – a cheeky lesbian twist which feels contrived and serves no real purpose. @MeredithTaylor

NOW IN FRENCH CINEMAS

The Small Back Room (1949)

Dir: Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger | Cast: Jack Hawkins, Kathleen Byron, UK Drama

The director Michael Powell once opined that The Small Back Room was probably his best film, while Emeric Pressburger’s personal favourite was The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp; therefore anyone in any doubt as to the contrasting personalities behind The Archers should go no further than this austere black & white adaptation of Nigel Balchin’s novel which further develops the pair’s preoccupation with the emotional fallout from the national trauma of World War II.

Focusing on the emotional truth of a tortured love story the British noir takes place during 1943 with the Germans dropping explosive booby-traps over Britain. Meanwhile the troubled expert tasked with disarming them fights his own private battle with alcohol. The expressive use of sound was already a Powell characteristic and in the expressionistic sequence depicting delirium tremens combining the ticking of a clock and an enormous whiskey bottle.

The incisive depiction of office politics probably also originated with Balchin (likewise the treatment of physical disability) although one wonders which studio executive was being parodied by Powell in the sequence with the Whitehall ignoramus played by Robert Morley. @RichardChatten

AT THE BFI from 28 May | DIGITAL AND BLURAY/DVD RESTORATION RELEASE ON 3 JUNE 2024 | STUDIOCANAL VINTAGE CLASSICS |

Savanna and the Mountain (2024) Directors’ Fortnight

Dir: Paulo Carneiro | Portugal Doc 74’

Eco Documentarian Paulo Carneiro is well known on the festival circuit for his similarly themed short Water to Tabato in 2014 and his first feature-length documentary in 2018, Bostofrio où le ciel rejoint la Terre. The Portuguese director Portuguese filmmaker is back in the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight sidebar with a hybrid doc re-enactment filmed on a shoestring budget – and none the worse for it – that sees local villagers getting together to stop a government incentive aimed at extracting lithium via their contractor Savannah Mines.

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | DIRECTORS FORTNIGHT 2024

Empire (1964)

Dir: Andy Warhol | US Doc

The frequently reproduced shot illustrating Warhol’s Empire misrepresents what the film is actually like to experience since the archetypal view of the Empire State Building at dusk is soon over, and for the remainder of the film’s duration all you see is just the illuminated windows surrounded by darkness.

I must be one of the very few people pedantic enough to have actually sat down and watched the whole thing through (although I have to confess that even I didn’t watch the film in it’s entirety, since Tarzan and Jane Regained, Sort Of… was showing on the screen next door and I snuck out to catch it and when I returned the only thing that had changed was that one of the office lights had been switched off), and I have certainly have had far, far worse experience – Lonesome Cowboys’ for example- than when I settled down to see it at London’s South Bank in 2007.

Since so few people have been rash enough to have submitted to the entire experience they’ve missed out on the irony that the film’s dramatic highlights are in fact the reel changes; since each time Warhol himself is seen reflected in the window, as predictably he couldn’t be bothered to turn off the lights when he set the camera running again. @RichardChatten

Freres – Brothers (2024)

Dir: Olivier Casas | Cast: Yvan Attal, Matthieu Kassovitz | France, Drama

Oliver Casas makes a well-intentioned tribute to all the child survivors who lost parents in the aftermath to the Second World War with his sophomore feature Freres – a noble idea but sadly that’s all it is.

Based on a true story Freres is a worthy piece of filmmaking whose only plus point is a central casting of Matthieu Kassovitz and Yvan Attal as adult brothers (their young selves – aged 5-8 – are played by a dusky duo of Enzo Bonnet and Victor Escoude-Oury).

We’re supposed to be moved by the men’s plight as children in a torpid narrative arc (cobbled together by three writers) that sets off in their childhood. But not even this veteran French couple can jazz up a buddy movie that relies heavily on the sweeping landscapes of France and a dramatic score droning away in the background during endless elliptical stretches where neither men speak (and you can’t help thinking of Terrence Mallick) but look into the distance with pained or poignant expressions for the best part of two hours.

In early scenes we see their kid counterparts living in a cabin in the woods after being mysteriously abandoned by their mother in 1948. They represent the many “lost children” left behind by the war. Pat feels somehow responsible for Michel and this devastating experience creates an everlasting bond between the two as they survive for nearly seven years in a hostile environment where testing events shape their future in the name of brotherly love. Kassovitz’s character Patrick, a doctor, tells Yvan Attal’s younger counterpart Michel, an architect “If you want to live, I have to go away. And so he does – at the age of 43. Why exactly, and do we even care?

Freres flips backwards and forward in time until one day, after marrying and raising two adult kids, Michel gets a call from Quebec to say Pat has gone awol from his family home. So he drops everything to investigate. Once again, reunited with Michel, he goes back to the cabin in the woods this time to play chess and reveal a little bit more of the past, but nothing really tangible quantifies Pat’s need to depart this world. And the suspense in waiting for a plausible reason is almost unbearable (pause for laughs) in this glossily filmed epic filmed on the wide screen and in vignettish close-ups by Magali Silvestre de Sacy. If you want to see some really worthwhile films on this subject I would recommend the following: Germany Year Zero (1948) Au Revoir les enfants (1987) or Rene Clement’s magical wartime fable Forbidden Games (1952) @MeredithTaylor

The Trouble with Harry (1955)

Dir: Alfred Hitchcock | John Forsythe, Shirley MacLaine, Edmund Gwenn, Mildred Natwick | UK Drama 99′

One of the qualities that makes the cinema so satisfying is its ability to preserve precise moments for posterity; qualities displayed in abundance in ‘The Trouble with Harry’, made when Hitchcock was at the peak of his powers, headed a team both talented and loyal (including his initial collaboration with Bernard Hermann) and marked the debut of a fresh young talent in Shirley MacLaine (who turned ninety last Wednesday).

The comic element in Hitchcock’s films is often grievously overlooked but finds probably its fullest expression in The Trouble with Harry. Hitchcock himself was fond of declaring that one of his most fervently held desires had always been to show blood dripping onto daisies (which evidently inspired the truly revolting shot of blood dripping onto a bread roll during a picnic in Chabrol’s Le Boucher, and which Hitchcock had himself already anticipated in the shots of Florence Bates and Jesse Royce Landis subbing out cigarettes in a tub of cold cream and a fried egg in Rebecca and To Catch a Thief respectively); and by locating a tale of grisly murder in idyllic sylvan surroundings ‘The Trouble with Harry’ showed exactly where the wily old fox was coming from. RichardChatten

NOW ON PRIME VIDEO

Cannes 2024 | Programme additions

Thierry Fremaux, festival director, has unveiled the long-awaited line-up for this year’s 77th edition of The Cannes Film Festival (May 14-25)

The competition includes a glittering selection of world premieres from David Cronenberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Jacques Audiard, Andrea Arnold, Yórgos Lánthimos, Paul Schrader and Paolo Sorrentino including the long-awaited latest outings from auteurs Leos Carax, Ali Abbasi, Alain Guiraudie, Jia Zhang-Ke and Miguel Gomes.

The Festival opens on the 14th May with Quentin Dupieux’s The Second Act (out of competition) with festival president Greta Gerwig leading the festival jury who will decide the winner of this Year’s Palme d’Or.

COMPETITION

Megalopolis – Francis Ford Coppola

An architect wants to rebuild New York City as a utopia following a devastating disaster in this Sci-fi epic starring Adam Driver, Aubrey Plaza, Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight (image above)

The Apprentice – Ali Abbasi (above) copyright Apprentice Productions Ontario Inc.

A dive into the underbelly of the American empire that charts a young Donald Trump’s ascent to power during the 1970s through a Faustian deal with the influential right-wing lawyer and political fixer Roy Cohn.

Motel Destino – Karim Ainouz

The Brazilian Algerian director is back in Cannes a year after The Firebrand with a love story between a man and a woman struggling against their demons.

Bird – Andrea Arnold (above)

Following her Cannes 2021 triumph Cow, Arnold returns to her native Kent for this male-centric family story starring Franz Rogowski in the title role alongside Barry Keoghan.

Emilia Perez, Jacques Audiard (below)

Mexican drug carte thriller with – you guessed it – a trans twist.

Anora – Sean Baker (above)

Mikey Madison stars in this comedy about a sex worker in New York and Las Vegas

The Shrouds – David Cronenberg (above)

The Canadian ‘Baron of Blood’s eagerly awaited return stars Vincent Cassel and Diane Kruger in a sci-fi adventure that follows a grieving widower’s attempts to contact the dead.

The Substance – Coralie Fargeat (Qualley – above)

The Revenge director’s latest is simply billed as ‘a horror story’ and stars Margaret Qualley, Dennis Quaid and Demi Moore.

Grand Tour – Miguel Gomes (above)

A man desperate to leave his fiancée on their wedding day in Rangoon, 1917, flees across Asia with his bemused ‘ex’ in tow

Marcello Mio – Christophe Honoré

Chiaro Mastroianni takes on the guise of her father Roberto – right down to the last detail – in this curious but inspired drama that also stars her mother Catherine Deneuve, Fabrice Luchini, Melvil Poupaud and English funnyman Hugh Skinner. (image below)

Caught By The Tides – Jia Zhang-Ke (below)

All We Imagine As Light Payal Kapadia

Kapadia returns to Cannes after winning the The Golden Eye for his feature-length debut A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021).

Kinds Of Kindness – Yórgos Lánthimos (below)

Three characters cross paths in the Greek auteur’s follow-up to Oscar- winning Poor Things that once again stars Emma Stone and Willem Dafoe, along with Jesse Plemmons and Margaret Qualley.

L’amour Ouf – Gilles Lellouche (below)

Beating Hearts follows star-crossed lovers Francois Civil and Adele Exarchopoulos from different sides of the track: Audrey Diwan co-writes with three others (ouf!) based on a novel by Neville Thompson.

Wild Diamond – Agathe Riedinger (below)

This feature debut from the French director centres on tempestuous teen Liane, 19, who lives with her family in Frejus, Côte d’Azur and is hellbent on stardom when she lands an audition for TV show Miracle Island.

Oh Canada Paul Schrader (below)

Great to see this much underrated director, and writer of cult classics Taxi Driver, American Gigolo and Raging Bull in the competition line-up with a drama about one of sixty thousand Canadians who refused to fight in Vietnam. Richard Gere stars alongside Uma Thurman.

Limonov – The Ballad, Kirill Serebrennikov (below)

Ben Wishaw stars in this drama, co-written by Oscar winning Pawel Pawlikovski, about the maverick Soviet poet Eduard Limonov.

Parthenope – Paolo Sorrentino (below)

Another gorgeously lensed drama from the Italian auteur that centres on a woman: is she a siren or a myth? Gary Oldman, Stefania Sandrelli and Luisa Ranieri star.

The Girl With The Needle – Magnus Von Horn (below)

Sweat, his feature debut, was an assured piece of filmmaking. Here the Swedish director dives back in to the past for a female centric “fairytale about a horrible truth” starring Trine Dyrholm.

THE SEED OF THE SACRED FIG (below) Mohammad Rasoulof – According to a press agent, Rasoulof has apparently escaped Iran without permission in order to be in Cannes for the screening of his competition hopeful, and asks the international community for ‘effective support”.

LA PLUS PRÉCIEUSE DES MARCHANDISES – Michel Hazanavicius

Another Second World War tale told in animation. Voiced by the late Jean-Louis Trintignant, along with Gregory Gadebois and Denis Podalydes, follows the story of French Jewish family deported to Auschwitz. During the journey the father throws one of his kids out the train where he’s discovered in the snow and taken in by a childless Polish couple. (below).

TREI KILOMETRI PANA LA CAPATUL LUMII – Emanuel Parvu

The Romanian director and actor won the Heart of Sarajevo (2017) for his feature debut Meda.

OUT OF COMPETITION

The Second Act – Quentin Dupieux
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga – George Miller
Horizon – An American Saga, Kevin Costner
She’s Got No Name – Peter Chan
Rumours, Evan Johnson – Galen Johnson, Guy Maddin

MIDNIGHT SCREENINGS

Twilight Of The Warrior Walled In – Soi Cheang
I, The Executioner Seung Wan Ryoo
The Surfer Lorcan Finnegan
The Balconettes – Noémie Merlant

CANNES PREMIERE

Miséricorde – Alain Guiraudie
C’est Pas Moi Leos Carax
Everybody Loves Touda Nabil Ayouch
The Matching Bang Emmanuel Courcol
Rendez-Vous Avec Pol Pot – Rithy Panh
Le Roman de Jim, Arnaud Larrieu – Jean-Marie Larrieu

SPECIAL SCREENINGS

La Belle De Gaza – Yolande Zauberman (documentary)
Apprendre – Claire Simon
The Invasion – Sergei Loznitsa
Ernest Cole, Lost And Found – Raoul Peck
Le Fil – Daniel Auteuil

UN CERTAIN REGARD

Norah – Tawfik Alzaidi
The Shameless – Konstantin Bojanov
Le Royaume – Julien Colonna
Vingt Dieux! – Louise Courvoisier
Who Let The Dog Bite?– Lætitia Dosch
Black Dog – Guan Hu
The Village Next To Paradise – Mo Harawe
September Says – Ariane Labed (below)

L’histoire De Souleymane – Boris Lojkine
The Damned – Roberto Minervini
On Becoming A Guinea Fowl – Rungano Nyoni
My Sunshine – Hiroshi Okuyama
Santosh – Sandhya Suri
Viet And Nam – Truong Minh Quý
Armand – Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | 14-25 MAY 2024

Cannes Classics 2024

100 years of Columbia Pictures
GILDA
Charles Vidor
1946, 1h50, United States

A Sony Pictures Entertainment presentation. Restoration from the original 35mm nitrate negative and a 35mm nitrate internegative. 4K digitization and digital image restoration by Cineric, Inc. Audio restoration by John Polito at Audio Mechanics from the sound track of the original 35mm nitrate negative. Color correction, conformation, additional image restoration and DCP creation by Motion Picture Imaging colorist Sheri Eisenberg. Restoration supervised by Grover Crisp.
Screening in the presence of Tom Rothman, President of Sony Pictures Entertainment.

The 40th anniversary of Paris, Texasby Wim Wenders, Palme d’or 1984
PARIS, TEXAS
Wim Wenders
1984, 2h28, West Germany/France

A Wim Wenders Stiftung presentation. A 4K restoration commissioned by the Wim Wenders Stiftung under the supervision of Wim Wenders and with the kind collaboration of Argos Films.
Distribution France Tamasa, release July 3, 2024.
Screening in the presence of Wim Wenders.

Le siècle de Costa-Gavras
LA VÉRITÉ EST RÉVOLUTIONNAIRE – L’AVEU
Directed by Yannick Kergoat, written by Edwy Plenel
2024, 52mins, France

Michèle Ray-Gavras presents a KG Productions production with the support of INA, Gaumont Pathé Archives, ERT.
Presentation of one of the ten episodes of the documentary series « Le Siècle de Costa-Gavras », dedicated to the history of the film L’Aveu.
Screening in the presence of Costa-Gavras, Edwy Plenel and Yannick Kergoat.

The ultimate film of Jean-Luc Godard
SCÉNARIOS
Jean-Luc Godard
2024, 18mins and 34mins, France/Japan

An Écran noir productions production in association with ARTE France and Nekojarashi Llp (Roadstead).
Scénarios is the title Jean-Luc Godard chose for his final 18-minute film, made, literally, the day before his voluntary death. In addition, Jean-Luc Godard recorded a 34-minute film in which, mixing still and moving images, halfway between reading and seeing, he outlined his project for Scénarios.
Screening in the presence of Fabrice Aragno, Jean-Luc Godard’s assistant, and Mitra Farahani, producer.

The 70th birthday of the Seven Samourai
THE SEVEN SAMOURAI
(Les Sept Samouraïs)
Akira Kurosawa
1954, 3h27, Japan

A presentation of Toho Global Ltd. Digital restoration by Toho Co.,Ltd. For the 4K restoration, the 35mm print was supplied by Toho and produced by TOHO Archive Co, Ltd. Images and sound respectively digitized by ARRISCAN and SONDOR RESONANCES. Restoration carried out to celebrate the film’s 70th anniversary since its first Japanese cinema release. French distributor : The Jokers Films.
Screening in the presence of Shion Komatsu (Toho).

The complete works of Frederick Wiseman
LAW AND ORDER
Frederick Wiseman
1969, 1h21, United States

A presentation and restoration by Zipporah Films in association with Steven Spielberg, with the participation of the Library of Congress.
New version restored in 4K from the 16mm image negative and original sound. Digitization and color grading carried out at DuArt and Goldcrest laboratories in New York. Calibration and restoration by Jane Tolmachyov, under the supervision of Frederick Wiseman and the production direction of Karen Konicek. Digitization of the complete works of Frederick Wiseman, which will be the subject of retrospectives around the world from autumn 2024.
Screening in the presence of Frederick Wiseman.

Raymond Depardon Photographer
LES ANNÉES DÉCLIC
(The Declic Years)
Raymond Depardon
1984, 1h07, France

A Presentation of the Films du losange. Restauration in 4K under the supervision of Claudine Nougaret and Raymond Depardon at TransPerfect Media laboratory from 35mm image, magnetic and sound negatives.
Screening in the presence of Claudine Nougaret and Raymond Depardon.

Lucy Barreto, a producer in Brasil
BYE BYE BRASIL
(Bye bye Brésil)
Carlos Diegues
1970, 1h42, Brazil

A presentation and restoration by Lucy and Luiz Carlos Barreto for Produções Cinematográficas LC Barreto, in association with Quanta, Alexandre Rocha and Marcelo Pedrazzi, financed by Rede D’Or.
Screening in the presence of Lucy and Luiz Carlos Barreto, Paula Barreto.

The 60th anniversary of Jacques Demy’s Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Palme d’or 1964
THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG
Jacques Demy
1964, 1h32, France

A presentation by Ciné-Tamaris. 4K restoration under the supervision of Mathieu Demy and Rosalie Varda-Demy from the original negative, scanned in immersion to reduce the effects of time on the film by the Eclair Classics and L.E. Diapason laboratories in Paris. Sound restoration based on a three-track stereophonic mix of music and vocals.
Screening in the presence of Rosalie Varda-Demy and Mathieu Demy.

JACQUES DEMY, LE ROSE ET LE NOIR
Florence Platarets
2024, 1h28, France

An Ex Nihilo, Ciné-Tamaris, ARTE France and INA production, with the participation of Ciné +, Cineventure 9, and the CNC. International distribution by mk2 Films.
Screening in the presence of Florence Platarets and Frédéric Bonnaud (screenwriter).

DOCUMENTARIES

FAYE
Laurent Bouzereau
2024, 1h31, United States

A Needland Media, Amblin and HBO production.
The first feature-length documentary about Faye Dunaway who speaks about her career, with landmark roles in Bonnie and Clyde, Chinatown and Network. Joining Faye are her son Liam, colleagues and friends such as Sharon Stone, Mickey Rourke, James Gray and many others.
Screening in the presence of Faye Dunaway and Laurent Bouzereau.

JIM HENSON IDEA MAN
Ron Howard
2024, 1h51, United States

An Imagine Documentaries and Disney Branded Television production.
Welcome to the mind of Jim Henson, a singular creative visionary, from his early years as a puppeteer on local television to the worldwide success of Sesame Street, The Muppet Show and more. With unprecedented access to Jim’s personal archives, Oscar-winning director Ron Howard offers a fascinating and insightful look at a complex man whose vivid imagination inspired the world.
Screening in the presence of Ron Howard.

WALKING IN THE MOVIES
Lyang Kim
2024, 1h28, South Korea

A ZONE Film, Kookje Daily News co-production with the participation of Busan’s Committee for Local Press.
A portrait of one of the key figures in the rise of Korean cinema: Kim Dong-ho, founder of the Busan International Film Festival. The film describes his own dedication and creativity in the service of cinema and asks: “How could a high official fall in love with cinema?”
Screening in the presence Dong-ho Kim and Lyang Kim.

JACQUES ROZIER, D’UNE VAGUE À L’AUTRE
Emmanuel Barnault
2024, 1h, France

An INA and mk2 Films production, with the participation of Ciné+ and the CNC.
Jacques Rozier or the fierce, independent itinerary of a filmmaker in perpetual disarray, admired by his peers and pampered by the critics.
Screening in the presence of Emmanuel Barnault.

ELIZABETH TAYLOR: THE LOST TAPES
Nanette Burstein
2024, 1h41, United States

A Zipper Bros Films, Gerber Pictures, Sutter Road Picture Company and Bad Robot production.
Thanks to access to Elizabeth Taylor’s personal archives and seventy hours of newly-discovered intimate recordings, the film by Nanette Burstein, who won acclaim at Cannes a few years ago for The Kid Stays in the Picture, which she co-directed with Brett Morgen, lifts the veil on the star, revealing a woman far removed from her public image.
Screening in the presence of Nanette Burstein.

FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT, LE SCÉNARIO DE MA VIE
David Teboul
2024, 1h38, France

A co-production of 10.7 production and INA, with the participation of France Télévisions, CNC, Procirep-Angoa and Fondation La Poste. International sales mk2 Films.
At the end of his life, gravely ill, François Truffaut took refuge with his ex-wife Madeleine Morgenstern. She tried to keep him occupied during his long agony. The filmmaker confided in his friend Claude de Givray, with the intention of writing his autobiography. Too weakened, he abandoned the project. The film reveals part of this final story.
Screening in the presence of David Teboul and Serge Toubiana (screenwriter).

ONCE UPON A TIME MICHEL LEGRAND
David Hertzog Dessites
2024, 2h, France

A MACT Productions and Le Sous-Marin Productions production with the participation of OCS, in association with Dulac Distribution, Mediawan Rights and Indéfilms 10.
Michel Legrand, jazz musician and composer extraordinaire, has left his mark on the history of cinema, including the films of Jacques Demy, especially The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, the 60th anniversary of which is being celebrated in Cannes. Using never-before-seen archives and personal accounts, the film looks back on a lifetime dedicated to music, and the career of a man who served it masterfully to the very end.
Screening in the presence of David Hertzog Dessites.

RESTORED PRINTS

SLAP THE MONSTER ON PAGE ONE
Marco Bellocchio
1972, 1h28, Italy/France

A Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna presentation. Restored in 4K by the Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna in collaboration with Surf Film and Kavac Film, under the supervision of Marco Bellocchio at the L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory.
Screening in the presence of Marco Bellocchio and Gian Luca Farinelli, Director of the Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna.

THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS
Steven Spielberg
1974, 1h50, United States

A presentation and restoration by Universal Pictures. Special thanks to Steven Spielberg for his oversight of the 4K restoration of this film.
Screening in the presence of Cassandra Moore, Vice President, Mastering & Archive at NBCUniversal.

CAMP DE THIAROYE
Ousmane Sembene and Thierno Faty Sow
1988, 2h33, Senegal/Algeria/Tunisia

A presentation of The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project. Restored by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and the Cineteca di Bologna at the L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in association with the Tunisian Ministry of Culture and the Senegalese Ministry of Culture and Historical Heritage. Thanks to Mohammed Challouf. Restoration funded by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.
Screening in the presence of Margaret Bodde, Executive Director of The Film Foundation.

ARMY OF SHADOWS
Jean-Pierre Melville
1969, 2h23, France

A Studiocanal presentation. 4K restoration created from the original 35mm negative and sound negative carried out by L’Image Retrouvée.
Screening in the presence of Juliette Hochart, EVP of Library, and Thierry Lacaze, Head of French theatrical, video and VOD distribution, Studiocanal.

JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN
Dalton Trumbo
1971, 1h52, United States

A Gaumont presentation. New 4K digital print, produced by GP Archives. Malavida will be released in France on October 2, 2024 in this new 4K print.
Screening in the presence of Nicolas Seydoux, Chairman of Gaumont.

ROSORA AT 10 O’CLOCK
Mario Soffici
1958, 1h42, Argentina

An Argentina Sono Film presentation. Restored in 4K by Cubic Restauration in collaboration with the Society for Audiovisual Heritage, coordinated by Fernando Madedo and supervised by Luis Alberto Scalella. Restored in the original AlexScope 2.35 format from the original 35mm negatives in the archives of Argentina Sono Film, the owner of the film.
Screening in the presence of Luis Alberto Scalella, president of Argentina Sono Film.

TASIO
Montxo Armendáriz
1984, 1h36, Spain

A presentation of the Cinémathèque Basque, Spain. 4K restoration financed by the Basque Government and carried out by the L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory from the original negative, supervised by director Montxo Armendáriz and with the agreement of production company Enrique Cerezo, PC. French distribution by Tamasa and release in French theaters in 2025.
Screening in the presence of Montxo Armendáriz.

THE ROSE OF THE SEA
Jacques de Baroncelli
1947, 1h26, France

A Pathé presentation. 4K restoration, based on the original nitrate negatives, an image negative and an optical sound negative, as well as a 1st generation standard brown. Work carried out by the L’Image Retrouvée laboratory (Paris-Bologna).
Screening in the presence of Sophie Seydoux, President of the Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé Foundation.

BONA
Lino Brocka
1980, 1h26, Philippines

A Kani Releasing and Carlotta Films presentation. New version restored in 4K by Carlotta Films and Kani Releasing at the Cité de Mémoire laboratory (Paris) from the original 35mm image and sound negatives preserved by LTC Patrimoine. Special thanks to Pierre Rissient and José B. Capino. French theatrical release: September 25, 2024.
Screening in the presence of Vincent Paul-Boncour, director and co-founder of Carlotta Films.

MANTHAN
(The Churning)
Shyam Benegal
1976, 2h14, India

A presentation of Film Heritage Foundation. Restored by Film Heritage Foundation at Prasad Corporation Pvt. Ltd.’s Post – Studios, Chennai and L’Immagine Ritrovata Laboratory, in association with Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation Ltd., the cinematographer Govind Nihalani and the director Shyam Benegal. Manthan was restored using the best surviving elements: the 35 mm original camera negative preserved at the NFDC-National Film Archive of India and the sound was digitised from the 35 mm release print preserved at Film Heritage Foundation. Funding supported by Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation Ltd.
Screening in the presence of actor Naseeruddin Shah, the family of actress Smita Patil, producers of the film and Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, Director, Film Heritage Foundation.

SHANGHAI BLUES
Tsui Hark
1984, 1h42, Hong Kong

A Film Workshop presentation to mark the company’s 40th anniversary. 4K restoration of the original negative supervised by Tsui Hark and Nansun Shi, in collaboration with L’Immagine Ritrovata, soundtrack remixed by One Cool Sound.
Screening in the presence of actress Sylvia Chang.

FOUR NIGHTS OF A DREAMER
Robert Bresson
1971, 1h23, France/Italy

A mk2 presentation. Restored in 4K by mk2 Films with the support of the CNC from the image negative and magnetic sound at ECLAIR CLASSICS, Paris/Bologna.
Restoration and color grading supervised by Mylène Bresson. Color grading by Christophe Bousquet. Sound restoration by L.E. DIAPASON. French theatrical release by mk2.Alt and Carlotta first quarter of 2025. International distribution: mk2 films.
Screening in the presence of Nathanaël Karmitz, Chairman of the board of mk2.

REMINDER!

Napoléon par Abel Gance (1927) to open Cannes Classics
NAPOLÉON PAR ABEL GANCE (1927)
Abel Gance
1927, 3h40, France

After 16 years in the making, here is the first part (3h40) of Abel Gance’s Napoleonic epic (from Bonaparte’s youth to the Siege of Toulon).
Screening in the presence of Costa-Gavras, President, and Frédéric Bonnaud, General Director, of the Cinémathèque française.

The screening will take place in Salle Debussy on Tuesday May 14 at 2PM.

77th CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | 14 – 26 MAY 2024 |

Red Herring (2023)

Dir: Kit Vincent | UK Doc 94′

Childhood seemed like an endless journey of discovery for filmmaker Kit Vincent until he was diagnosed with cancer and given four to eight years to live at the tender age of 24.

Terrible news, so much so that his father collapsed with a heart attack – quite literally. And in his debut feature Red Herring it rapidly becomes clear that Kit’s devastating condition affects his close family just as much as himself. And so the film takes over, their daily lives together becoming the main focus – rather than the concer.

But not everyone is as keen as Kit in being part of the film and not least his girlfriend Isobel, the two will embark on fertility treatment and she naturally wants these conversations to remain private, unlike kit whose way of coping is to share everything including his seizures and key parts of his treatment. Kit’s father Lawrence, a professor and former college principal, is certainly a strong character and draws on his recent conversion to the Jewish faith for guidance, and this leads to some fascinating philosophical chats with his son. Kit’s mother, a healthcare worker, finds a way of dealing with the personal rather than professional trauma by immersing herself in raising a brood of chickens.

Conversations with his family often bring up difficult episodes in Kit’s childhood and provide a beneficial therapy for dealing with the past. In this way they all thrash out their feelings and these scenes give Red Herring a positive often moving spin in contrast to the darker moments. Well-paced at 94 minutes, the director never loses sight of the film’s cinematic quality.

Kit is adamant about not wanting to make a depressing film about impending death and he certainly succeeds. Red Herring is first and foremost about a family fronting up to an uncertain future and the transformative dynamics that come into play as each member reacts to changing circumstances in their own personal way. And for that it’s a watchable and uplifting triumph. @MeredithTaylor

RED HERRING IS IN SELECT UK CINEMAS AND ON DEMAND FROM 3 MAY 2024

That they may face the rising sun (2023)

Dir: Pat Collins | Cast: Barry Ward, Anna Bederke, Ruth McCabe, Lalor Roddy, Sean McGinley | Ireland, Drama 111’

Pat Collins’ leisurely lyrical tale of rural Ireland forty years ago is beautifully captured on the wide screen and in rather stagey domestic interior scenes were the local characters shoot the breeze and sometimes touch on more philosophical themes in the style of the Ambridge residents of the popular BBC series The Archers.

Based on internationally acclaimed Irish author John McGahern’s award-winning novel of the same name, the story centres on middle aged creative couple Joe, a writer, and his East European painter wife Kate respectively played by Barry Ward and Anna Bederke with a dash of bohemian charisma. Others include Lalor Roddy’s Patrick who pops in to supply the village gossip – but nothing too controversial to rock the tranquil tenor of this bucolic backwater.

This is a gentle pastoral affair that could have been directed by the late Terence Davies, and whose main attraction is the day to day lives of Irish country folk as they go about their business and the glorious vistas of the Emerald Isle in the changing seasons luminously photographed by Richard Kendrick all accompanied by a plangent occasional score. @MeredithTaylor

IN UK AND IRISH CINEMAS FROM 26 April 2024

The Black Pirates (1954) and Massacre (1956)

Dir: Allen H Miner | Cast: Anthony Dexter, Martha Roth, Lon Chaney Jr, Robert Clarke | US Action Drama 74’

As others have observed the budget for this 18th Century yarn about buried treasure didn’t even run to a ship so the pirates of the title arrive by rowboat; what visual grandeur it possessed instead supplied by the El Salvador locations elegantly and vividly shot in Ansco Color by cinematographer Gilbert Warrenton (a process that highlighted the worldly charms of a young lady by the name of Marta Roth as a worldly serving wench whose red lipstick matches her dress and proves pretty sharp with a broken bottle).

The pirates themselves certainly are a mean and ugly bunch (aided by the presence of a leering Alfonso Bedoya), while in a film shot closer to home the scenes of bloodshed and flogging would surely have encountered greater problems with the Breen Office.

Massacre (1956)

Dir: Louis King | Cast: Martha King, Dane Clark, James Craig, Miguel Torruco | US Western 76’

Having visited El Salvador to make ‘The Black Pirates’ producer Robert Lippert’s later depiction of criminal activity moved inland (once again employing Gilbert Warrenton’s fluid Ansco Color location photography to compensate for lack of more substantial production values) to Mexico where he once again availed himself of the talents of Mexican actress Martha Roth, who unlike the glossy serving wench she played in ‘The Black Pirates’ this time superficially appears at first glance a more robust young lady, and gets to show herself quite a horsewoman; while for the cognoscenti the presence of Luis Bunuel’s Man Friday Jaime Fernandez is worth noting.

The film also marks a considerable departure from the wholesome Technicolor family entertainment usually associated with director Louis King; the cynical tone of his final film firmly established from the outset by the opening sequence depicting a funeral cortège which turns out to be carrying illicit rifles. @RichardChatten

AVAILABLE ON PRIME VIDÉO

Topaz (1969)

Dir: Alfred Hitchcock | Cast: Frederick Stafford, Dany Robin, John Vernon, Karin Dor, Michel Piccoli, Philippe Noiret | UK Thriller 143’

A film by Hitchcock set against the backdrop of the Cuban Missile Crisis sounds promising, but this adaptation of Leon Uris’s novel just doesn’t work and despite being one of Hitchcock’s most expensive and elaborate films is also one of his dullest, dying at the box office and today languishing in well-deserved obscurity.

Seriously compromised by undercast leads, denied the talents of key personnel from his halcyon days of the fifties and largely devoid of his characteristic black humour, the British veteran’s frequent indecision during filming – including a hastily contrived alternative ending – shows in the end result.

Bad Hitchcock of course is better than no Hitchcock and ‘Topaz’ contains at least two scenes worthy of The Master involving Philippe Noiret and Karin Dor. @RichardChatten

NOW ON PRIME VIDEO

The Ghost Train (1941)

Dir: Walter Forde | Writers: Arnold Ridley, J.O.C. Orton Val Guest | Cast: Arthur Askey, Richard Murdoch, Kathleen Harrison | UK Comedy

Gainsborough Studios long seemed to have held a predilection for trains since they were responsible for the original silent version of Arnold Ridley’s classic play, along with Oh! Mr Porter and The Lady Vanishes (which also featured Linden Travers); while director Walter Forde’s background in comic shorts and his classic 1932 drama Rome Express made him just the man to undertake this third version as a vehicle for the egregious Arthur Askey.

Oh! Mr Porter also concerned a local legend concerning a stretch of haunted rail line (and shares a baleful Herbert Lomas with ‘Ask a Policeman’), but the plot has been brought up to date by making the baddies Nazi fifth columnists rather than IRA gun runners, with such topical references as jokes about food coupons and ration books and when Askey challenges a parrot to say ‘Heil Hitler!’ @RichardChatten

NOW ON YOUTUBE

The Man with a Thousand Faces (2024)

Dir: Sonia Kronlund | France Doc, 90′

So who is the man of a thousand faces? He introduces himself as Daniel, Alexandre or Ricardo and apparently comes from Brazil or Argentina. Sometimes he’s a surgeon, others an engineer. The women he meets and moves in with are disarmed by his looks, charisma and accomplishments. They fall in love, one even falls pregnant. Meanwhile the fantasist flits around the world juggling these various relationships, always an excuse in hand for his absence.

Documentarian and screenwriter Sonia Kronlund (The Prince of Nothingwood) is fascinated by the story and decides to investigate with the help of a private detective. We meet the women involved. They are intelligent, grounded and articulate. No histrionic outbursts just calm refections of incredulity as they gradually dissect and come to terms with their nemesis. Can they ever be the same again?. When your lover says his father has been killed in a car crash, is it churlish to reply: Really? This is the vestigial damage they are left to work through in their future relationships. Falling in love demands a certain innocence, a vulnerability. Can that ever be regained?

Kronlund knows the territory. What emerges is another tale of self-reinvention, rather like in The Prince of Nothingwood. The French filmmaker herself admits to having been duped by unsatisfactory past relationships so there’s an empathy of kindred spirits and a deep satisfaction at work here as she constructs her extraordinarily subtle expose of a pathological liar. A man unable to be straight with others – let alone himself.

Adopting a classic three act structure Kronlund gradually works her way towards the finale as she peels back the layers of this arch psychological scandal, checking her facts with a lawyer who is able to demonstrate that the man’s entire existence is based on the dissemination of images of lives which are not his – a face can be slotted into an online uniform or guise that bears no resemblance to reality. Finally we see the real ‘Ricardo’ ‘hoisted by his own petard’ in this clever piece of investigative filmmaking. @MeredithTaylor

NOW ON RELEASE IN UK CINEMAS

Beyond the Raging Sea (2024)

Dir: Marco Orsini | Doc With Omar Nour and Omar Samra, Made in conjunction with the UN Refugee Agency | 80′

Billed as a heroic tale of rescue Marco Orsini‘s documentary Beyond the Raging Sea attempts to jump on board the current wave of sympathy for the refugee boats in chronicling how two inexperienced mariners embarked on a cross Atlantic voyage in a rowing boat – admittedly a top of range piece of kit – but what was the point of this foolhardy act of ‘derring do’?

Told in a flood of talking heads – mainly by the guys themselves – Egyptians Omar Nour and Omar Samra – we hear how in 2017 they decided to take part in the Talisker Whisky Atlantic Challenge – a sort of seabound equivalent of the Paris-Dakar race – but in rowing boats, across the Atlantic from La Gomera in the Canaries to Antigua; a 3,000-nautical-mile, 40-day undertaking.

The going was rough and the guys soon found themselves in difficulty when their vessel capsized in ferocious seas – and there’s a great deal of jaw-dropping thrashing about in the wet that gives the film a certain dramatic heft, although the fact they lived to tell the tale slightly takes away the tension. It seems the feckless duo did it out of solidarity with the refugees whose testimonies then feature in a 10-minute tacked-on coda. @MeredithTaylor

IN CINEMAS FROM 19 APRIL 2024

Honorary Palme d’Or for Studio Ghibli

This year’s 77th edition of Cannes Festival will award an Honorary Palme d’or for the first time to a group rather than an individual: Studio Ghibli.

Alongside the Hollywood greats, the Japanese studio embodied by two superb storytellers, Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, and a host of cult characters, has unleashed a fresh wind on animated film over the past four decades the Japanese animations have brought a breath of fresh air to the genre appealing to both kids and adults with vibrant universes and sensitive, engaging stories that brings together traditional and contemporary.

The Wind Rises (2013) @StudioGhibli

The Festival de Cannes was an early explorer of the animated film adventure. In the early years, Walt Disney productions presented short films (1946) and the feature Dumbo (1947). In 1953, Walt Disney himself took Peter Pan to the Croisette, where René Laloux won a special Jury Prize in 1973 for his first feature, Fantastic Planet. After a long absence, animation returned to Cannes in force with Shrek (2001) and Shrek 2 (2004), Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004), Persepolis (2007), Waltz with Bashir (2008), which all received awards in the Competition, or even Up, which opened the Festival in 2009. Many other films, such as Inside Out, Kirikou and the Wild Beasts, and more recently, Elemental, and Robot Dreams have also left their mark. Moreover, Un Certain Regard welcomed The Red Turtle (2016), Studios Ghibli’s first collaboration with a European production company.

It all began 40 years ago. The success of Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind in 1984 enabled him to establish Studio Ghibli with Isao Takahata in 1985. Today, the films are watched by people all over the world, and draw many visitors to the Ghibli Museum, Mitaka and Ghibli Park to experience the world of our films for themselves. And although Miyazaki and Takahata are now veterans of their craft Studio Ghibli will continue to take on new challenges, led by a new generation who will carry on the spirit of the company.

Back in the day the two achieved what seemed to be an impossible feat: independently producing pure masterpieces and conquering the mass market. Producer Toshio Suzuki, a key studio member from the start and soon assuming a full time role, he managed the studio with formidable efficiency, establishing perfect complementarity between the projects of Miyazaki and Takahata, by turns producers and directors.

The tale of the Princess Kagua (2013)

In 1988, with the simultaneous release of Grave of the Fireflies and My Neighbour Totoro these outstanding creative artists achieved a double success. In 1992, Studio Ghibli was able to begin financing its own feature films with Porco Rosso. In the early years, only the two founders directed their films, but gradually young auteurs such as Goro Miyazaki and Hiromasa Yonebayashi distinguished themselves and joined the Studio.

In four decades and over twenty feature films, Studio Ghibli won over its audiences with works imbued with poetry and with humanistic and environmental commitments. With Porco Rosso, Pom Poko, Princess Mononoke, My Neighbors the Yamadas, The Wind Rises and The Tale of The Princess Kaguya, Studio Ghibli has delivered stories that are as personal as they are universal. They have won prestigious awards, including both the Golden Bear and the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature for Spirited Away, and more recently another Oscar for The Boy and the Heron.

In Europe as in the United States, these films are among the animators’ most acclaimed work, between art for art and the commercial challenges of the industry. They are true models, as much for the quality of their writing, directing and animation as for their commitment to extensive aesthetic aspirations. In 2001, the Ghibli Museum, Mitaka opened on the outskirts of Tokyo to showcase the animators’ work and rich heritage, as well as to show short films created for the museum, thus asserting the Studio’s cultural importance. In 2022, the Ghibli Park, a hybrid park facility expressing the world of Studio Ghibli, opened in Aichi Prefecture. Goro Miyazaki, the first Director of the Ghibli Museum, was appointed the Creative Development Director to oversee the park construction.

Image © Hayao Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | 14 – 25 May 2024

Sidonie au Japon (2023)

Dir/Wri: Elise Girard | Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Tsuyoshi Ihara, August Diehl | France, Drama 97′

“Writing’s all that’s left when you have nothing”

Isabelle Huppert and Tsuyoshi Ihara make an absolute dream casting in this tender tale of love, a third feature for French director and co-writer Elise Girard.

Sidonie au Japon is a wistful contemplative look at loneliness, loss and longing amidst tranquil Oriental landscapes brimming with blossoms where Huppert’s writer Sidonie has come to promote her reprinted first novel ‘L’ombre Portée’ (The Shadow Cast) inspired by her own life.

On arrival at Osaka airport the distinct foreignness of Japan and its social contrasts disarms the widowed French woman sending her dazed and confused into a state of reverie and reflection. The subtle absurdity of this culture shock also lends a delicious dash of dark humour to what is ostensibly a sober tale of mourning and transformation for Sidonie and her enigmatic Japanese publisher Kenzo Mizoguchi (Ihara), who is still married, but unhappily so. The couple embark on a series of interviews and book signings, Kenzo escorting Sidonie on an illuminating architectural tour of Kyoto with the same transcendent energy as Kogonada’s 2017 travelogue Columbus.

Japan is very much a character here: a land of haunting stillness where everything seems hushed and deferential in contrast to Europe and the West. This ambience has an increasingly profound effect on the jaded writer enveloping her slowly in the past where she reconnects with the spirit of her dead husband (Diehl) who is revealed in luminous sequences where the two reminisce and comfort one another. These are not ghostly scenes but ones where his entity offers uplifting enlightenment bringing about a gentle but cathartic shift in her state of being as she becomes romantically drawn to Kenzo who she had initially found overbearing, particularly his habit of insisting on carrying her handbag. Their courtship is tentative and driven forward by subtle body language rather than words: “in Japan we don’t talk about those things we just do them”, says Kenzo to the disconcerted Sidonie.

Elise Girard has clearly been inspired by the lighter-hearted ghosts from David Lean’s Blithe Spirit (1945) or Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947) rather than the more doom-laden presence in David Lowery’s A Ghost Story (2017) with her characterisation of August Diehl’s Antoine and he gives a charismatic performance as the sun-kissed ghost in his hand-tailored suit and brogues. But the focus here is on the living and the interplay between Sidonie and Kenzo: a couple who somehow find each against the odds. Beautifully shot by Celine Bozon the closing scene is particularly amusing in referencing the apposite maxim ‘speech is silver, but silence is golden’. @MeredithTaylor

NOW IN CINEMAS IN FRANCE, BELGIUM

The Death of Adolf Hitler (1973) Sunday Night Theatre ITV

The very simplicity of this television production works in its favour as it graphically portrays the claustrophobic environment in which Hitler spent his final days; although the depiction of him sleeping in his uniform smacks of dramatic license.

Frank Finlay’s portrayal of the Fuhrer – while as usual inadequately portraying the prematurely aged, grey-haired, shambling husk of a man he had descended to by this stage in the war – doesn’t fall into the usual trap of showing him as sympathetically as most other portrayals usually are; although there’s a lapse when Goebbels is described as “one of Hitler’s oldest friends”, since Hitler hadn’t had any close friends since he purged Ernst Rohm.

This production provides a colder-eyed look at Hitler than usual and it’s portrayal of a self-centred bully prone to temper tantrums is far nearer the mark; although David Irving would certainly take exception to Hitler personally telling a secretary that “in 1941, I personally ordered the extermination of all inferior races’.

In supporting roles Caroline Mortimer emerges both as more substantial and culpable Eva Braun than the real thing ever was, depicted yelling “Kill the Jews!”, Ed Devereaux is memorably cast as an oleaginous Martin Bormann while Myvanwy Jenn makes a brief but vivid impression as a shrill Hanna Reitsch. @RichardChatten

NOW ON TALKING PICTURES TV

John Singer Sargent: Fashion and Swagger – Exhibition on Screen (2023)

Dir: David Bickerstaff | Doc

American painter John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) is best known for his ‘swagger portraits’ of wealthy Americans of the Edwardian era. The canvasses command our attention and mesmerise in the same way as Rembrandt’s although Sargent adopts a more broad brush style than the Dutch 17th century master who was known as the greatest portrait artist of his era, arguably of all time.

In his latest art biopic director and cinematographer David Bickerstaff frames his documentary through interviews with curators, contemporary fashionistas and style influencers, their input and his fluid camera showing how Sargent influenced modern art and fashion with a unique approach in capturing personalities, gender politics and social capital on the canvas. John Singer Sargent: Fashion and Swagger brings this all together for everyone to enjoy on the big screen, the expert commentaries adding value and insight.

Sargent’s approach is testament to how clothes and outward apparel can make a powerful social statement and one that still reverberates today, albeit in different ways. Sargent’s portraits certainly capture the imagination and Bickerstaff conveys this with skill despite an over-reliance on ‘talking heads’: he should consider limiting them to a select few and re-introducing them with inter-titles whenever they appear. @MeredithTaylor

John Singer Sargent: Fashion and Swagger IN CINEMAS 16 APRIL 2024

Mother Vera (2024) Bfi London Film Festival 2024

Dirs: Cécile Embleton & Alys Tomlinson | UK, 2024, 91′

An ascetic life of prayer and devotion is not for everyone. But Mother Vera (birth name Olga) has chosen the path and shares her turbulent past and uncertain future in this sepia-tinted monochrome meditation that follows the ex-druggie nun through her first year in a monastery that starts in a snowbound Belarusian forest and culminates in sun-baked flatlands of the French Camargue.

After contracting HIV from her partner Oleg, Olga’s life of parties and secular pleasures came to an end and was replaced by daily prayer, devotion and animal husbandry in the remote monastery. We first meet Mother Vera prone on the stone floor of the religious establishment where she will live a life of asceticism, shoeing horses, bell ringing.

Wearing a black headdress and floor length robes,

The monastery is also home to ex convicts – in the eyes of the Lord Christians both saints and sinners are all equal – and the nuns seem to exert a certain power over the men, who regard them with respect, the fact that ‘good and evil’ coexist in the world and in each of us – is transformative, one tempering the other, and providing the film with its spiritual message that good can conquer bad and this is acutely felt during the Easter celebrations when incense is burnt to purify the air and welcome the rebirth of spring.

Vera then goes back to her family in the wooded countryside – two brothers and a mother along with a bevy of farm animals. Two donkeys and a sheep and later some horses and she has a particular affinity with horses – one amazing scene sees her riding through a snowy landscape on a white horse. They provide the healing that Vera needs along with close love of her mother as they go through the anxiety of her drug addition. And she repents our her sins in leading others into threat world. Love perseveres

Revealed through spellbinding visual language echoing the rigid discipline of monastic life, we enter the enclosed, shadowy spaces of a convent outside Minsk. Sound and silence submerge us in the rhythm of the community. After twenty years of monastic service and faced with a life-changing decision, Vera must confront her troubled past to find the freedom she desires.

NOW AT BFI LONDON FESTIVAL | VISIONS DU REEL | NYON SWITZERLAND

Back to Black (2024)

Dir: Sam Taylor-Johnson | Cast: Marisa Abela, Eddie Marsan, Jack O’Connell, Lesley Manville, Bronson Webb, Harley Bird, Juliet Cowan | UK Musical Biopic 122′

Star biopics stand or fall on the quality of their central performance. We generally resent the idea that anyone could step into the shoes of a beloved artiste, particularly one who is no longer here. “No one can be David Bowie,” we scoff, writing off films like “Stardust” before we’ve even seen them. It takes a lot to convince us otherwise.

So it should be said straight off that Marisa Abela’s performance as Amy Winehouse in Back to Black is astonishingly, blindingly good. She’s got the look, she’s got the strut, the attitude, the toughness, the vulnerability. But what about the voice? No one sings like Amy, right? Does Abela mime, or does she try to sing and, inevitably, blow it spectacularly?

Well, actually neither. Abela does her own singing, and she has the Amy voice down. The electric current that plugs you directly into the singer’s nervous system, the riveting delivery that won’t let your attention stray one iota from the woman at the microphone.

It doesn’t feel so much like impersonation as wholesale possession (although it’s clearly the result of great craft and technique), and I frequently forgot that I wasn’t watching the real Winehouse. But what does it say about Amy’s raw authenticity that it can be recreated so completely by another gifted performer? Maybe this irony is one reason for the aggrieved noises from some uber-fans. Maybe it’s possible to pay tribute all too well.

We probably shouldn’t go to Back to Black for a deep understanding of the motives and inner life of its protagonist. After all, we watched the unravelling in real time, on TV, splashed across tabloids, in concert, so we should have a few working theories. Amy had a stellar talent, and a rage for music’s capacity to express extreme emotions. Maybe she began to create drama in her life which she could mine for songs. Maybe she developed a taste for ever-darker material. And maybe the feedback loop span out of control and she was consumed by drama that couldn’t be controlled or reconciled.

The film shows us Amy’s family (surely too loving to be blamed for her demons?), her agents and managers (but no sighting of Mark Ronson), and Blake Fielder-Civil, the great love of her life, played with lithe physicality by Jack O’Connell. Blake starts the film as a strutting jack-the-lad, diminishes into a venal, battered toy-boy husband, and ends it struggling out of drug dependency, mumbling his prison psychiatrist’s script about toxic co-dependent relationships as he makes his final break with Amy. “You should be stronger than me,” goes the refrain of one of the early songs. But Blake obviously wasn’t.

“I’m an anachronism”, she tells him at one point, and despite the film’s stated aim to rescue and celebrate Amy – just as she wanted to restore jazz to its rightful place in pop culture – it seems to agree with the sentiment. The mercurial singer is framed in a rapidly receding world of cobbled streets, Victorian railway arches, pubs where you can still smoke, and pop performers who refuse to be moulded by their handlers.

Back to Black will stand as a monument to Amy’s London. Golders Green Crematorium, Primrose Hill, Camden Town pubs The Dublin Castle and The Good Mixer, the London Zoo and Soho Square and other landmarks make appearances, all captured in fine, muted colours. The score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis is similarly subdued, mostly ominous drones and strings playing figures in low registers, wisely avoiding any clash with the Winehouse style.

An image of a caged canary is lingered on a few times too often – yes, we get it – but Amy teetering on crazily high pink shoes at her Glastonbury performance (itself a memorable set-piece) sums up her reckless abandon as well as anything here: flirting shamelessly with the audience, over-sharing about her private life, staying upright through sheer stubborn will and a little help from the roadies, and singing as if her life depended on it – which it probably did.

The world didn’t know it needed a torch singer with punk attitude until Amy Winehouse came along, but she thought differently. And it certainly missed her after she’d gone. @IanLong

IN UK and IRISH CINEMAS from 12 April 2024

Ripley (2024) Netflix

Dir/Wri: Steven Zaillian | Cast: Andrew Scott, Dakota Fanning, Johnny Flynn, Eliot Sumner, Maurizio Lombardi | US Drama series on Netflix

Tom Ripley, the raffish cad who steals through Patricia Highsmith’s psycho-thriller page-turners, gets a striking monochrome makeover in this stylish Netflix series – based on her first novel in the series The Talented Mr Ripley – and directed by Steven Zaillian who blazes a new trail for the 1960s grifter starring Andrew Scott – who is both vulnerable and venal.

Andrew Scott‘s Tom Ripley is not the suave, likeable rogue from the Texan writer’s creation ‘Deep Water’ or ‘The Cry of the Owl’. Here in this new series for Netflix he’s seen as a seedy swindler, uncomfortable with his life in a sordid bedsit in New York’s Bowery district, and certainly less self-assured than John Malkovich’s American trickster, who famously garrotted his travelling companion in Liliana Cavani’s suberb 2002 thriller Ripley’s Game. Incidentally Malkovich gets a role here as Reeves Minot.

Scott is nevertheless immaculate in his re-imagination of the antihero. A glassy-eyed, high-performing psychopath desperate to rise to the occasion when Kenneth Lonergan’s brilliant Herbert Greenleaf, a shipping magnate, proffers an all-expenses-paid opportunity of a lifetime: a trip to Naples in its ‘dolce vita’ heyday to track down his son, Dickie (Flynn) a trust fund dilettante who has fled to southern Italy and re-styled himself as a playwright and painter (‘along the lines of Picasso’) with his laconic girlfriend Marge (Dakota Fanning makes a spectacular return).

But don’t expect a sun-drenched Italy basking in insouciance and graced with Alan Delon’s louche lounge lizard in Rene Clement’s Purple Noon (1960) – the light here is hard-edged as it stares down on jagged black & white echoing stairwells, stormy coves and chiaroscuro courtyards. Behind Ripley’s dark sunglasses lurks a calculating conman so out of his depth in Dickie’s milieu and so insecure of himself he could hit out, like Caravaggio, at any minute (the artist’s ‘Seven Acts of Mercy’ hangs in the local church). And Ripley even misjudges the soigne mood with Dickie – when he finally finds him at the top of a thousand steps in palatial splendour – by foolishly inviting a sinister stranger to drinks, bearing an ‘offer he can’t refuse’. Dickie couldn’t care less about money – these two are social worlds apart. But Dickie rubs Ripley up the wrong way too and they both part company under sullen skies.

Cinematic and compelling this is a watchable series both narrative wise and in artistic terms, Zaillian wrote and directed all eight episodes and it certainly makes for a worthwhile adaptation with its flinty humour and suggestive performances from Johnny Flynn and Dakota Fanning – Eliot Sumner striking the only slightly bum note as Freddie Miles. Miss Highsmith would be proud to know her creation is having another outing courtesy of this impressive series. @MeredithTaylor

NOW ON NETFLIX

Black Flies (2023)

Dir: Jean-Stephane Sauvaire | Cast: Tye Sheridan, Sean Penn, Mark Tyson | US Thriller 120′

Black Flies feels very much like a film you might have seen before: baby-faced paramedic rookie (Sheridan) comes up against the coalface of reality joining Sean Penn and his New York trauma team in Jean-Stephane Sauvaire”s blood-drenched docudrama of life on the streets. Meanwhile Mike Tyson is the bossman making sure they sticks to the rules.

Tye Sheridan makes it all watchable working alongside his antithesis – a less convincing Sean Penn – as a hardened medic whose integrity gradually bleeds out in the cliched finale (set to Wagner’s ‘Rheingold’), Sheridan becoming the knight in shining armour. We follow the two through their ‘casualty caseload’ of drug dealers, addicts and sex workers and we don’t care about any of them. But that’s the point. A decent thriller with a predictable outcome A pale rider alongside Martin Scorsese’s Bringing out the Dead. @MeredithTaylor

IN UK CINEMAS FROM 19 APRIL 2024

Chocolat (1988)

Dir/Wri: Claire Denis | Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Isaac De Bankole, Giulia Boschi, Francois Cluzet, Jean-Claude Adelin | France, Drama 105′

In her intimately observed feature debut Claire Denis draws on her own experience of growing up in the twilight years of French authority in 1950s Africa exploring the social dynamics between the past and the present for men and women, black and white in pre and post colonial Africa

Isabelle Huppert is a young woman who returns to a remote outpost in West Africa where her formative years were spent in the company of Protee her family’s black ‘houseboy’ a powerful presence of dignity and intelligence played by Isaac De Bankole. The overall effect is one of resonating tranquility as we become enraptured by the daily exchanges between France and Protee as the story flows from to present that culminates in a luminous finale – that was then and this is now and we should not try to compare the two or apologise for history. @MeredithTaylor

ON 4K RESTORATION BFI BLU-RAY & DIGITAL from 29 APRIL 2024

The Great Mr Handel (1942)

Dir: George Walker | Cast: Wilfrid Lawson, Elizabeth Allan, Malcolm Keen | UK Drama 89’

Goebbels was almost certainly aware of the strange anomaly that the first two Technicolor features made in wartime Britain while the war was at its lowest ebb both centred upon a German hero; although Handel promptly demonstrates his patriotic principles by declaring to a detractor that “While you are not English by any act of your own, I am English by choice”.

Resembling ‘Amadeus’ in its depiction of an unorthodox talent forced to abase himself before assorted pseuds and dilettantes; while the film betrays its origins as a radio play with its emphasis on talk – and the lack of obvious marquee value helped it to fail at the box office – Lord Rank at least had the good sense to cast an actor of the calibre of Wilfred Lawson rather than just a conventional leading man in the title role. So while two-thirds into the film Handel gets down on his knees to pray it at first seems ominous, despite Roger Manvell’s curt dismissal of “the sort of thing that disgraced ‘The Great Mr Handel'” and George Perry’s description of it as “so dull it has never been revived” Lawson’s performance combined with the imaginative use of colour (veteran colour cameraman Claude Friese-Greene was presumably enlisted for his experience with Dufaycolor, while his younger collaborator was a nascent Jack Cardiff) means it works.

The film is also to be cherished for the unique opportunity it provides to see the lovely young Elizabeth Allan in Technicolor; while Hay Petrie has one his best roles as Handel’s faithful servant Phineas, who in the final half-hour makes the film a virtual two-hander. @RichardChatten

Mamba (1930)

Dir: Albert S Rogell | US drama 78’

So few films in two-colour Technicolor survive in anything like decent prints that the continued existence of ‘Mamba’ after over ninety years gives us even greater cause to be thankful, especially given it’s unlikely provenance as a production of Poverty Row outfit Tiffany and the fact that it’s a preCode melodrama in the vein of Somerset Maugham rather than just another musical.

Beginning as did so many early talkies with a sweeping and elaborate tracking shot, the film is so remarkable one can only express surprise at the obscurity in which director Albert Rogell now languishes; his subsequent career career largely confined to ‘B’s before he finally disappeared into television.

The condescending attitude to Africans will probably offend modern sensibilities, but the real villain of the piece is unambiguously shown to be Jean Hersholt – described by one member of the cast as “two-legged pig – whose wealth has justifiably failed to bring him the respect he feels that he deserves from the other colonials, his brusque lack of concern for the wellbeing of the native population prompting one to opine that “This dog Bolte consistently breaks down the very thing we try to teach our natives: respect for the white man”.

Also very preCode is the way that the evident horror of Hersholt’s mail-order bride Eleanor Boardman at the prospect of him putting his clammy paws all over her is so vividly conveyed. @RichardChatten

NOW ON YOUTUBE

The Good Teacher | Pas de vagues (2023)

Dir: Teddy Lussi-Modeste | Cast: Francois Civil, Toscane Duquesne, Shain Boumedine | France, Drama 97′

Films about the challenges of being a teacher in the 21st century should have their own sub-genre; in 2012 The Hunt set the trend and got an Oscar nomination for and in the same year Francois Ozen comedy mystery In the House, won the Golden Seashell at San Sebastián. School of Babel addressed the issue of immigrant integration in 2013. The stresses strains of working of coping with complaints are dealt with variously in A Proper Job (2023) The Teachers’ Lounge (2023) and About Dry Grasses (2023). And finallyThe Holdovers (2023) adds a welcome twist of comedy to a fraught scenario . This latest tale is from French director Teddy Lussi-Modeste based on his own experience.

Francois Civil, best known for his swashbuckling antics as D’Artagnan in The Three Musketeers series, is once again impressive as Julien Keller, a teacher who is put through the mill when a teenage girl in his class accuses him of sexual abuse, totally out of the blue. Soon the allegations spread until the entire school is thrown into turmoil, with Julien fighting to clear his name, and safeguard his own sanity.

Calm and reasonable, Julien appears to be the ideal teacher. Early scenes see him taking trouble to help struggling pupils in his class and generally keeping discipline without appearing draconian – not easy in a chaotic multi-racial co-ed in a Paris banlieu where Julien soon faces mounting pressures from Leslie’s disordered brother, and fellow students who pitch in with individual views on a situation that exposes wider issues both at school and at home.

Lussi-Modeste and Audrey Diwan (Happening) avoid cliche in a layered approach to a narrative that could easily have opted for simplistic solutions. The Good Teacher shows how an isolated event can quickly escalate and get out of control in today’s ‘culture of blame’. @MeredithTaylor

THE GOOD TEACHER is on release in France and Belgium.

The Passion of the Christ (2004)

Dir: Mel Gibson | Cast: Jim Caviezel, Maia Morgenstern, Monica Bellucci. | Drama 127’

Lives of the founder of Christianity had been a cinematic mainstay since the Passion Play of Oberammergau was first filmed in 1897; while during the century that followed many eminent filmmakers had expressed the desire to tackle the subject. But nobody could have dreamt that a version would be directed by Mel Gibson – whose metamorphosis from the personable young actor in films by Peter Weir to a standard bearer for the Right had been deeply dispiriting to contemplate – and displays a morbid fascination with the violence of his death rather any interest in his ideas (the sheer length of time it takes the Messiah to survive in the face of sustained torture and flagellation doubtless stemming from Gibson’s desire simply to prolong the bloodshed rather than to the indomitably of his spirt).

The version depicts Jesus of Nazareth’s final hours on the days of his crucifixion in Jerusalem based on a screenplay by the American writer Benedict Fitzgerald who is also credited as ‘translator’ on the Coen brother’s comedy O Brother, Where Art Thou?.

The status of Pasolini’s ‘Gospel According to St Matthew’ as the definitive cinematic life of Christ continues to remain unassailable; but it was certainly a canny move by Gibson to employ subtitled dialogue in Aramaic, since lines like “It’ll never catch on” when Christ demonstrates his new invention called “a table” (he’s a carpenter, geddit?) would otherwise have had audiences in fits. @RichardChatten

Late Night with the Devil (2023)

Dir: Cameron Cairnes/Colin Cairnes | Cast: David Dastmalchian, Laura Gordon, Ian Bliss | US Comedy Horror

Johnny Carson rival Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian) hosts a syndicated talk show ‘Night Owls’ that has long been a trusted companion to insomniacs around the country. However, ratings for the show have plummeted since the tragic death of Jack’s beloved wife. Desperate to turn his fortunes around, on October 31st, 1977, Jack plans a Halloween special like no other. Unaware he is about to unleash evil into living rooms across America.

The Cairnes write and direct this entertaining and witty possession horror comedy with Dastmalchian holding it all together in a dynamite tour-de-force as Johnny Carson.

NOW in UK Cinemas

Priest of Love (1981)

Dir: Christopher Miles | Casr: Ian McKellen. Janet Suzman. Mabel: Ava Gardner. Tony: Jorge Rivero. Dorothy: Penelope Keith. Christopher Miles directed.

Ten years after filming D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Virgin and the Gypsy’ director Christopher Miles rolled up his sleeves and got stuck into the final years of the author himself in this pretty if garrulous combination of travelogue and period drama.

As the great man himself a relatively young Ian MacKellan resembles and occasionally sounds like a ginger Wilfrid Lawson. The supporting cast includes the inevitable John Gielgud as inquisitor-in-chief Herbert G. Muskett, while the women in his life comprise the unlikely triumvirate of Ava Gardner, Janet Suzman and Penelope Keith. @RichardChatten

NOW ON NETFLIX

There’s Still Tomorrow (2023)

Dir: Paola Cortellesi | Cast: Paola Cortellesi, Valerio Mastandrea, Romana Maggiora Vergano, Emanuela Fanelli | Italy 118mins

A downtrodden Roman housewife turns her life around in this 1940s tale of female empowerment from first time director Paola Cortellesi who also stars in her multi-award-winning first feature.

In Neo-realist black and white Cortellesi plays a modern day Anna Magnani in a stylish domestic melodrama with a relevant political message that sees Delia (Cortellesi) living in Rome just as Italy is getting back on its feet after the Second World War. American GIs are still patrolling the streets but the winds of change are blowing through the open air markets where the long-suffering wife and mother does her daily shopping often queuing for ages to feed and care for her boorish father-in-law, three children and controlling macho husband Ivano (Valerio Mastrandrea) – who greets her with a slap in the face when she wishes him ‘good morning’ in the opening scene.

Delia tiptoes around her family always being the martyr by putting them first and ignoring her own needs while life is passing her by due to the patriarchal society of the day where women appear to carry the weight of domestic responsibilities and have no agency. Cortellesi puts this all down to the Fascist regime. And the future looks more or less the same for the next generation in the shape of Marcella, her teenage daughter ((Romana Maggiora Vergano), who is not destined for a career but a good marriage: her middle-class boyfriend Giulio (Francesco Centorame) could fit the bill. Meanwhile Delia is thankful for small mercies such as sharing a bar of American chocolate with her old flame Nino (Vinicio Marchioni) – the two of them smile to reveal stained teeth, reflecting the film’s dark slick of humour and addressing the poor state of the Italian postwar health service. Delia knows that change can only come if she puts her mind to it.

This is a stylish if slightly uneven crowd-pleaser which will go down well particularly with female audiences, and the cleverly contrived finale shows Cortellesi to be a filmmaker with panache and a rare talent for storytelling. @MeredithTaylor

NOW ON RELEASE IN FRANCE/BELGIUM | IN UK/IRELAND 26 APRIL 2024

Un condamné à mort s’est échappé (1956)

Dir: Robert Bresson | Cast: François Leterrier, Charles le Clainche, François Jost | France 100’

Made when Bresson was still showing us actors’ faces and their hands rather than their backs and their feet, ‘Un condamne a Mort s’est echappe’ is proof positive than an austere drama in black & white can be as absorbing as the most action packed thriller.

French Resistance activist André Devigny is imprisoned by the Nazis and starts planning his escape from his solitary cell. On the day of his execution he is given a new cellmate who may be a Gestapo informer. Should reveal his elaborate escape scheme?

To those unfamiliar with the director’s work – notorious for his total lack of overt action and the almost parodic lack of expression of his casts of non-professionals – this will come as a pleasant surprise as you watch with your totally undivided attention the deceptively mundane details of prison life, it’s impact actually heightened by the sparing use of music (although whenever Bresson actually does allow Mozart his head he certainly makes up for lost time). @RichardChatten

The Green Deal | La Promesse Verte (2024)

Dir/Wri: Edouard Bergeon | Cast: Alexandra Lamy, Felix Moati, Sofian Khammes, Julie Chen, Antoine Bertrand, Adam Fitzgerald | France, Eco- thriller 120′

A French student travels to Indonesia to complete his thesis on the palm oil industry but finds himself on death row accused of drug trafficking in this scenic but schematic geopolitical thriller from Edouard Bergeon.

Best known for his TV fare and award-winning 2019 drama In the Name of the Land Bergeon may have had the seventies cult classic Midnight Express in mind when he set out to conflate themes of ecology, drug trafficking and parental perseverance in his latest look at our threatened environment. The Green Deal is certainly a worthy attempt to address another threat to the planet in the shape of deforestation. But the result is too conventional and not exciting enough to grab our interest for two whole hours. And while the vast jungles of Indonesia certainly look impressive in Eric Dumont’s sweeping cinematography what we get narrative-wise is a worthy painting-by-numbers procedural that fails to generate emotion or surprise.

An impressive opening sequence sees eco warrior Landreau voyaging along the vast river to the heart of Java. Here, he meets up with locals, an inspiring NGO Nila Jawad (Chen) and doctor Paul Lepage (Bertrand). But after filming compromising footage of palm oil farmers Landreau falls foul of the system and ends up being thrown into prison falsely accused of that ‘old chestnut’ drug trafficking which is always wheeled out as an excuse when corruption needs to be covered up by the authorities.

Meanwhile back in France Landreau’s mother Carole galvanises government and big business into action in a bid to save her son, and the planet. From then on the focus turns to the thorny legal and political machinations involved in the palm oil industry exposing the French government’s complicity in this damaging threat to the environment and our health. Despite some interesting plot twists and turns the outcome is predicable.

Bergeon’s message is certainly heartfelt and worthwhile in addressing the issues concerned and raising the profile of this damaging industry that is ripping up and destroying vast tracts of Indonesia’s threatened ecosystems. But the story itself is lacklustre and we feel strangely uninspired by the plight of Landreau (Félix Moati) and his desperate mother Carole (Alexandra Lamy) despite her commendable efforts to drill down on the culprits – big business in cahoots with the Indonesian and (surprisingly) French government whose ministers merely shrug their shoulders in dismay.

The Green Deal works best as an expose of palm oil which is linked to the petrochemical industry and is now found in almost every manmade foodstuff linked to an increased risk of heart disease and other chronic health conditions. Beyond the danger the commodity poses to mankind, deforestation has destroyed a critical habitat for many endanger species – including rhinos, elephants and tigers. @MeredithTaylor

NOW ON RELEASE IN FRANCE & BELGIUM

Once More with Ealing!

1949 saw the release of a trio of classic British comedies that really cemented Ealing’s place in history as this country’s finest film studios: Passport to Pimlico, Kind Hearts and Coronets and Whiskey Galore!

75 years later, these films offer a window into the hilarious nature of British eccentricity and ingenuity, and one that shows a healthy disdain for authority coupled with a not inconsiderable dose of anarchy. Today in the world of woke these features seem as fresh, innovative and, above all, as amusing as ever.

To celebrate its 75th Anniversary Ealing’s most endearing crime caper The Lavender Hill Mob (out 29 March) gets an up-to-date restoration and a nationwide re-release. Cinemas will be offering a selection of Ealing classics, both comedy and drama, under the banner ONCE MORE WITH EALING!

Other classics to revisit include Ealing stalwart Alec Guinness and his gang of thieves undone by Katie Johnson and her parrots in gloriously restored 4k Technicolor The Ladykillers along with ground-breaking and provocative dramas such as Pool Of London and It Always Rains on Sunday the archetypal portmanteau horror championed by everyone from John Landis to Kenneth Branagh, Dead of Night, and that man Guinness again, facing off against big business as they try to quash his miracle invention in The Man in the White Suit.

Also joining these bigger Ealing names are some lesser-known gems: Jean Simmons is blackmailed by her no-good husband back from the dead in Cage of Gold, Tommy Trinder impresses in a rare dramatic role in Ealing’s wartime ode to the Auxiliary Fire Service and their vital work during the Blitz in The Bells Go Down, and Lease of Life, written by Eric Ambler and starring Robert Donat as a Vicar who delivers an impromptu sermon that sets tongues wagging in Ealing’s only treatise on religion.

EALING DARK and LIGHT | STUDIOCANAL VINTAGE CLASSICS COLLECTION APRIL 2024

Unicorns (2023)

Dir: Sally El Hosaini and James Krishna Floyd | Cast: Ben Hardy, Hannah Onslow, Madelyn Smedley, Nisha Nayar | UK Drama 119’

A unicorn is not only a mythical creature but also acts as a metaphor for strength and resilience. These are qualities at the heart of a new British film made by the director team of Sally El Hosaini and James Krishna Floyd. Their latest collaboration neatly fits into a genre of feel-good social comment comic dramas, often successes of the more modest budgeted British film industry.

Unicorns centres around an unlikely queer romance between a young white English Essex working class mechanic and an Asian Muslim drag queen. The film has a ring of truth linked to true-life source material of Asifa Lahore who was Britain’s first Muslim drag queen. Where it transcends this material is an awareness of how opposites with split divided lives in real life often attract each other as a way of breaking out of traditional thoughts and manners of behaviour. As Unicorns reveals, the journey to fulfilment is not always an easy one but there is warmth and humour along the way with moments of heartbreak which the film sensitively blends together.

The film begins with a young man’s casual and lusty sexual encounter with a woman on scrubland followed by a purely accidental, serendipitous foray into London’s legendary Club Kali for queer Asians and friends. It is here that the young man Luke (Ben Hardy) locks eyes with a beautiful drag queen dancer Ashiq/ Aysha (Jason Patel).

After this uneasy but engaging chance meeting the film charts a ‘will they or won’t they get it together’ relationship linked to pressures of Luke being a single dad of a 5-year-old son with an absent partner and the recent death of his mother, while also discovering that he may not be as entirely heterosexual as he imagines. Ashiq also has a secret life as a drag queen dancer in queer clubs and private parties which is totally hidden from the day-to-day reality of his life as a dutiful son of an Asian Muslim family. For a queer Asian man there is sometimes a choice in life of an arranged marriage or – as described at one point – jumping off a bridge.

Key scenes take place in a car at night which the film uses as a form of road journey with an enclosed private space in which both characters grow and change during the course of the film. For Luke there is the way he discovers love and sexually connecting with another man. For Aysha there are rivalries with other drag queens and pimps as well as pressure from a brother to conform and stop the double life. All the performances linked to a wide range of friends and family for both characters are astutely well observed, performed and directed by filmmakers who previously made My Brother the Devil (Best British Newcomer 2013) and The Swimmers 2022.

Unicorns reveals how Britain has embraced enlightened and progressive attitudes towards diverse mixes of ethnic and gender cultures and fits well within a tradition of social realist comic dramas such as the queer English romances of My Beautiful Launderette 1985 and Beautiful Thing 1996. Unicorns may appear slight at times and wear its heart on its sleeve in places although audiences are likely to enjoy the film’s resilience, as much as two lovers do while learning lessons in the power of love. @PeterHerbert

UNICORNS on release in UK and Irish cinemas from 5 July 2024

Une Famille (2024)

Dir/Wri: Christine Angot | Doc, France 2024 82’

An alarming expose of family disfunction is at the heart of this unsettling ‘cri de coeur’ from award-winning French writer Christine Angot who bases her documentary debut, set in Strasbourg, on her 1999 novel L’Inceste.

Angot, 59, strikes a gamine figure in her stylish black jeans and white boots but her delicate features hide a lifetime of trauma. We meet her in leafy suburb of Strasbourg where her father, who died a few years ago, first started abusing her when she was only 13. His wife and children still live there. Angot knocks on the door and barges her way into their stylish family home confronting her father’s wife and insisting her cameraman joins for moral support in what turns out to be a challenging confrontation that will expose the raw feelings Christine still harbours as she demands to know what this middle class woman thinks about her deceased husband’s covert history of long term sexual abuse. Now a mother of teenager herself, Christine is clearly emotionally damaged and still haunted by what her father did back then and its legacy that marks her own family. A brave and fascinating reportage.

The French novelist, playwright and journalist was born Chateauroux. Her first novel “Vu du Ciel” was published in 1990. She rose to prominence in 1999 with “L’Inceste”. This was followed by titles including “Les Désaxés” and “Une part du Cœur”, both of which were awarded the Prix France Culture. Her most recently published work “Le Voyage dans l’Est” won the 2021 Medici Prize. She was made an Officer of Arts and Letters in 2013 and has been a member of the Goncourt Academy since 2023.

NOW ON RELEASE IN FRANCE | BERLINALE PREMIERE and winner of Tagesspiegel Readers’ Jury Award 2024.

Civil War (2024)

Dir/Wri: Alex Garland | Cast: Nick Offerman, Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Jesse Plemons, Jefferson White, Cailee Spaeny | US Drama 109′

Civil War provides UK filmmaker Alex Garland with an expanded American canvas on which to explore themes and ideas of his four earlier, more intimate, British films. This new UK/USA co-production follows the journey of a quartet of media journalists racing against time in a 4-wheel vehicle as they travel from New York through Pennsylvania onto Washington DC to record a make-or-break address to the nation by a beleaguered President of the USA. The journey itself is no joy ride as the American landscape has been ripped apart by warring communities that has paralysed the White House at the heart of American politics.

In one chilling sequence, the journalists remind a menacing ginger henchman with red glasses (played by Jesse Plemons) that ‘We’re Americans, ok?’ to which they get the reply ‘What kind of American are you?’. In another scene, Kirsten Dunst, as a world-weary war photographer journalist (named after Lee Miller the WW2 war photographer), has become the reluctant mentor for a young woman (Cailee Spaeny) who is hungry for experience without comprehending how bloody and awful is the reality of war. The older war photographer mentions she has covered the horrors of war thinking that this would be a warning to others not do so again, although she knows now that this is not the case.

In another of the most tender and telling scenes in the film, the photographer agonises over the decision to delete or retain what may be a beautiful image but also one which may exploit the death of a man she has befriended. It is in scenes like this that Garland raises moral dilemmas between what the human eye can see and the camera lens records that is at the heart of photography and the subject of Haskell Wexler’s 1968 film Medium Cool. The film also suggests the spectre of Susan Sontag’s devastating essay Regarding the Pain of Others (2003). It is within the skill of Garland’s writing that themes questioning politics, media and society can be found beneath the surface of a film fundamentally built on images linked to a physically fast flowing narrative.

Garland is added by a production team from earlier films and Rob Hardy’s use of a new small light camera (DJI Ronin 4d) is able to keep the action stable when viewed on both IMAX and smaller screens. Fast-moving action sequences benefit from off-screen input of an experienced ex-Navy Seal adding authenticity to the film’s vivid sense of physical movement with Glenn Fremantle’s soundtrack combining lush chords of stereophonic music with soundscapes. The performances are skilful and reveal the director’s sensitive understanding of women in largely maledefined environments. Kirsten Dunst brings depth to the role of the mature photographer/journalist just as much Garland centred earlier films around female characters with the sensitive performances of Alicia Vikander in Ex Machina, Natalie Portman in Annihilation, Sonoya Mizuno in Deus and Jessie Buckley in possibly his most personal and misunderstood film Men.

Civil War also fits very well alongside outsider filmmakers who have observed America at a not so cool distance and is comparable with American films made by Europeans such as Jacques Demy and Agnes Varda. The film that Civil War most echoes may well be the Italian director Antonioni and his daring and ground breaking critique of America in Zabriskie Point from 1969. Civil War contains similar cinema-verité images of protest between civilians /students and military police/guards suggesting that nothing much has changed since the revolution of 1968. The UK-based filmmaker also captures images of the decay of former glories of communities crystallised by beautiful images of a damaged circus clown model, neglected rural landscapes and characters who are framed or towered over by the glass and concrete of American architecture.

Just as Antonioni questioned the breakdown of society and consumerism in 1968 there is also rich and potent post COVID/ Capitol Hill riot material here for Garland in 2024 with both films involving a journey heading towards apocalyptic finales. Civil War tackles the meltdown and threat to order by the divisive behaviour of people that is accelerated by politicians and speculates on the current fear that America is drifting towards a kind of anocracy, existing somewhere between democracy and autocracy. If Garland’s earlier films derived from intimate, dystopian and out-of-body time zone experiences his latest could be viewed as the nightmare of what becomes of paradise as envisaged by the youthful ‘trippy hippy’ but now older protagonists of Garland’s breakthrough 1996 novel The Beach.

Civil War may have rough edges linked in places to the ambitious script, although it remains a remarkable contemporary outing revealing a sensitive director with the ability to harness vivid images of death and violence from acts of warfare. @PeterHerbert

https://www.peterherbert.online

https://theartsproject1.wixsite.com/theartsproject

CIVIL WAR on release from 12 April 2024 | PREMIER IMAX London on 19/3/24 with an introduction from Alex Garland

Rings on her Fingers (1942) Gene Tierney Season 2024

Dir: Rouben Mamoulian | Cast: Henry Fonda, Gene Tierney, Laird Cregar, Shepperd Strudwick A | US Comedy drama 86’

Dismissed by Rouben Mamoulian as “the least important of my films”, Rings on Her Fingers was only made to work out his contract with Fox, but is nevertheless a diverting trifle in its own right.

Made in imitation of Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve it permits Gene Tierney to extend her range by casting her against type as a gum-chewing salesgirl selling girdles “born on the wrong side of the counter” taken under the wing of a pair of confidence tricksters (one of whom describe her as “ten cent baby in a million dollar business”) reunited with a personable young Henry Fonda playing a $65-a-week accountant – self-described as “wage slave #65” – who the pair naturally mistake for a millionaire; although Spring Byington warns her partner in crime “Don’t try to short change him, this one can count!”

As one of the pair it provides an always welcome opportunity to see Laird Cregar – an actor who possessed a talent as massive as his girth and died far too young – who ironically was Mamoulian’s original choice as Waldo Lydecker before being manoeuvred out of directing Laura. @RichardChatten

OUT OF THE SHADOWS: THE FILMS OF GENE TIERNEY season kicks off at the BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE from 26 MARCH 2024

The Door in the Wall (1956)

Glenn H. Alvey Jr | | Sci-fi Drama

The cinema has employed the split screen almost since the dawn of the medium, and like devices such as irises became regarded as moribund with the introduction of sound, becoming trendy again with the nouvelle vague.

Based on a story by H. G. Wells, visual antecedents to ‘The Door in the War’ are contained in the portmanteau film ‘Dead of Night’ – which also used Wells as a source – and the Technicolor scenes depicting the garden in the otherwise monochrome ‘The Secret Garden’; while Ingmar Bergman was soon to recreate the effect in ‘Wild Strawberries’ to illustrate the longing to renter the past, and a similar mood later infused the 1960 ‘Twilight Zone’ episode ‘A Stop at Willoughby’.

As for the Independent Frame itself, it grows on you as it progresses, with the use of colour on the whole quite retrained – as in the subtle verdigris hue employed to highlight the titular door – but it heightens the impact of the exotic birds, the diaphanous green of the lady in the garden and by default the black & white photographs in a family album; and as in 3D the overall distraction is amply compensated for by the visual impact of the moments when it really comes off.

The film also recalls Hitchcock’s ‘Rope’ in the laconic way the changes in the framing is achieved. @RichardChatten

NOW ON YOUTUBE

Way of a Gaucho (1952)

Dir: Jacques Tourneur | Rory Calhoun, Gene Tierney | Western Drama 97’

Jacques Tourneur arrived in Argentina to make this late addition to Hollywood’s good neighbour policy a bit too early to avail himself of CinemaScope – which would have been well suited to the vast horizontal expanse of the Argentine pampas, seen to good effect thanks to Tourneur’s elegant use of lateral tracks – while the bright red of the soldiers’ caps displays the dramatic potential of Technicolor.

Rory Calhoun – in gaucho pants that would nowadays contravene numerous health & safety regulations – and Gene Tierney in a veil aren’t obvious casting as Latinos, but Richard Boone as usual gives good value as a cavalry officer whose robust view of discipline finds expression in staking people to the ground; while its not every film in which you get to see Everett Sloane as a singing gaucho. Based on a novel by Herbert Childs, Alfred Newman as usual contributes a noisy but appropriate score. @RichardChatten

I Could Never Go Vegan (2024)

Dir: Thomas Pickering | With: Thomas Pickering, George Monbiot, Sophia Ellis, Melanie Joy, Gemma Newman, Alan Desmond, Minik Patel, Paul Youd | UK Doc 97’

There are so many reasons to go vegan according to a plausible new documentary that takes us jauntily through the long list of why eating animal protein is no longer viable according to first time feature filmmaker Thomas Pickering – who has never eaten meat.

Born in the 1980’s and raised vegetarian, before switching to a vegan diet, Tom is convinced that his way of eating it the right way for animals, his own health, and the planet. In his vehement attempts at proselytism he comes up against some reasonable claims: “vegan food is expensive”, “how d’you get your protein” and “climate change doesn’t exist” are just a few.

So Tom sets out on a quest to investigate whether veganism is justified by talking to athletes, doctors, scientists, psychologists, farmers and even chefs. He talks to a game 84-year-old taking part in his sixth ultra-marathon, and visits a factory farm where the practices are appalling to say the least in footage that is painful to watch and these scenes are to be applauded in raising animal welfare issues. Worth mentioning here is also diseases contracted from animal sources such as campobylactor and E Coli.

Whether you are convinced or not – and there’s something extremely irritating about Pickering’s bumptious way of putting across his point of view – most of us agree that there are highly plausible reasons to choose a varied diet and that occasionally eating animal protein with its rich range of vitamins is healthy despite objecting on humane grounds to animal welfare and slaughter methods, particularly with regards to halal practices – a topic Pickering sadly fails to explore – or even mention.

Directed, edited and written by Thomas and his brother James, with support from Heather Mills (ahhh!) Peter Egan and Alicia Silverstone, I Could Never Go Vegan is decently made and researched. But when somebody bangs on about their opinion for over an hour, without any counter-argument I want to run for the hills in the opposite direction, fast. But many will find this revealing and persuasive, I’m sure. @MeredithTaylor

IN UK and IRISH CINEMAS from 19 April 2024

Phantom Parrot (2024)

Dir: Kate Stonehill | UK Doc

Digital surveillance is all part of being in the internet age and we go along with it while not being entirely at ease at being spied upon against our will. It’s just one of the downsides of modern life. We share the info, others use it to their own advantage.

Kate Stonehill’s documentary explores a far more sinister form of surveillance. It focuses on our mobile ‘phone use via a new state programme nicknamed “Phantom Parrot” that allows the government to plot our whereabouts at any given moment through our active handheld devices. With the nation’s increased exposure to nefarious elements at UK ports (sea, air or rail) the police have been given enhanced search powers under the 2000 Terrorism Act, and this allows them to crack down on suspects, at will, demanding PIN codes and passwords across all their devices and the further power to confine them to three months in prison, if deemed appropriate.

In 2016, Muhammad Rabbani, a director of Cage, an organisation that campaigns on behalf of Muslims held under war-on-terror laws, came under police suspicion under Schedule 7 of the 2000 Terrorism Act when he travelled back to the UK from Qatar. And he was not the only one stopped. Much the same as your luggage being randomly rifflled through when airport security staff get bored, it’s a similar situation. And nobody likes it but that’s the deal. For some unknown reason Rabbani was subject to a random check at border control and when he refused to comply with police protocol he found himself in court and threatened with prison.

Stonehill became fascinated with his case and decided to make this film with a view to ‘making the invisible world visible’. Luckily for Rabbani, Gareth Pearce, a human-rights lawyer came to his rescue. I, for one, am glad the police are patrolling our borders. That’s what they’re paid and trained to do and we rely on them to keep us safe. @MeredithTaylor

Phantom Parrot is in UK cinemas from 15 March

E.1027 – Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea (2024)

Eileen Gray was a creative genius and the first woman to conquer the territory of architecture at a time when men controlled it all. This new film reflects on Gray’s impressive career and her avant garde house on the Cote d’Azur and will appeal to cineastes and lovers of art and design alike.

Unfolding as a stylish hybrid documentary E.1027 is a filmic journey into the emotional world of Eileen Gray, who was born into a large family in County Wexford, Ireland before before moving to London where her career languished in the shadow of her male colleagues in the world of architecture at a time when the profession was dominated by men.

In the 1920s women architects found themselves confined to designing interiors but Gray broke the mould by moving to France where she courted the art scene before moving south where she found a plot of land on the water’s edge in Roquebrune – Cap Martin and fulfilled her dream of having a modernist house on the Riviera. A self-confessed bi-sexual she lived with her younger lover, the editor-in-chief of the journal ‘Architecture Vivante’ Jean Badovici. The two crossed paths with fellow architect Le Corbusier and his wife Yvonne but Corbusier comes off the worse for wear in Swiss filmmaker Beatrice Minger’s take of events. He is seen an arrogant rather self-regarding character who muscles into Gray’s world by decorating her house with his own murals.

Eileen Grey – the house at Roquebrune – Cap St Martin

Minger’s film takes us into Gray’s inner circle, a tightly knit coterie of designers that included Fernand Lager, Corbusier and his wife Yvonne. Early on Gray counteracts Corbusier’s theory that a house is ‘a machine for living’ considering it more spiritual than that: ‘A place you surrender to, that swallows you. A place you belong to”.

Gray and Jean Badovici discovered the Roquebrune-Cap-Martin location that sits on the Côte d’Azur between Monaco and Menton. Due to its rocky, cliff-hanging location, wheelbarrows has to be used to transport materials on site. Gray named the house: E for Eileen 10 for John Badovici but left the place two years later: “I like doing things but I don’t like possessing them”. Eileen had already bought another plot of land inland and even more remote location and she left her house to ‘Bado’.

The film then broadens its focus onto Badovici and Corbusier’s relationship, with the French architect claiming Gray’s scheme for the house was copied from his own pen design. He built his own wooden Cabanon alongside a little bistro near to E.1027. But the Second World War put an end to the rivalry when Nazis occupied the Roquebrune house riddling the walls with bullets.

In the title role Natalie Radmall-Quirke smokes her way throughout this intimate portrait of the artist who appears both victim of her emotions and driving force behind her lover Bado – in one scene a graceful dance is testament to their feelings for each other. After leaving the house Gray was forced to contend with Corbusier’s arrogance, although he valiantly tried to find a buyer for the Roquebrune house which eventually to a Swiss art Marie Louise Shelbert who misguidedly thought he had designed it. No one came to Bado’s funeral.

Family money and her strong work ethic clearly allowed Gray to remain financially independent all through her life although there is never any mention of commissions outside her own designs although – many of her schemes never left the drawing board until later recognition saw her furniture sell for astronomical prices although her famous house had a less illustrious ending. In a final interview Gray emerges as an appealingly decent woman without a shred of ego.

E.1027 also brings to life conflicting undercurrents in the Parisian art scene of the 1930s. A fascinating finale allows us to meet Eileen Gray in a brief interview. She comes across as modest and appealingly lacking in any ego. @MeredithTaylor .

E1027 – Murals by Corbusier

EILEEN GRAY AND THE HOUSE BY THE SEA which will celebrate its world premiere at CPH:DOX 2024 (March 13-24, 2024) in Copenhagen as part of the INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION programme.

The Sorcerers (1967)

Dir: Michael Reeves | Cast: Boris Karloff, Elizabeth Ercy, Catherine Lacey, Ian Ogilvy, Susan George | UK Horror

Among films over which the Grim Reaper casts a long shadow pride of place must surely go to Michael Reeves’ The Sorcerers whose elderly star and young director died within two years of its opening and within nine days of each other (while Victor Henry suffered a fate worse than death after being paralysed in a street accident.

Reeves’ nihilistic vision paints a very bleak view of human nature (tempered with odd touches of black humour as when Ian Ogilvy takes a swig of Coca-Cola whereupon Karloff grimaces and splutters “Urggh, horrible stuff!!”); while in a reversal of older peoples’ fear of the capacity of violence on the part of youngsters here it’s the kids that are exploited by a pair of delinquent pensioners, particularly an elderly speed freak who discovers the vicarious thrill of “Intoxication with no hangover, ecstasy with no consequence!”@RichardChatten

NOW ON GOOGLEPLAY

Immaculate (2024)

Dir: Michael Mohan | Cast: Sydney Sweeney, Alvaro Morte, Simona Tabasco, Benedetta Porcaroli | US Horro 89’

Cecilia, a young American woman, travels to an Italian convent to pledge her life to Jesus (“what a waste!” an official sighs ruefully as he processes her through customs), joining a cadre of young nuns dedicated to helping their sick and demented elder sisters through the last phases of their journey to ‘the Lord’. Cecilia completes her vows and is welcomed into the community as its latest bride of Christ. All seems well.

Well, almost all. Sexuality is surprisingly prominent in daily life: elegantly-cut robes flatter lithe figures; one nun suggests that another’s sour demeanour is the result of “her vibrator’s batteries running down”; and, oddest of all, the building has its own well-equipped gynaecological clinic, complete with a dedicated doctor. As more warning signs accumulate, our misgivings about the convent are more than confirmed (a violent prelude has already clued us up on the extreme risks of trying to leave it).

Immaculate is the passion project of its star, Sydney Sweeney, emphasised by the prominence of her name above the film’s title. Noted for her eye-catching appearance in the video for the Rolling Stones single ‘Angry’, the actress first found fame with TV series ‘The White Lotus’ and ‘Euphoria’.

Sweeney isn’t the first actress to use the clout that comes with success to back a dark and challenging project. For instance, Olivia de Havilland was the motive force behind The Heiress (1949): selecting and securing the property, talking William Wyler into directing it, and playing a lead part at odds with her usual serene glamour.

Similarly, the narrative of Immaculate calls for Sweeney to portray a gamut of strong emotions. Cecilia begins the film cowed by the convent’s gravitas and opulence, albeit armed with a quiet, steely faith which will eventually put the institution to the test. She ends it in shrieking, blood-drenched agony, facing a poignantly fateful decision.

Immaculate is a stylish, well-made and intelligently written horror with high production values. Its vision of a malign and conspiratorial Catholicism is not new, but it manages to cast a spell (undermined at times by frequent jump-scares, heavy-handedly underlined by non-diegetic soundtrack explosions) as it builds towards a visceral climax.

The latter part of the film feels a little rushed and truncated, and some elements are under-developed: neither Cecilia’s formative near-death experience nor the existence of a sub-order of sinister, red-masked nuns are fully explored, and I’d have liked more character development for the two nuns (one supportive of Cecilia, the other stonily opposed) who gravitate to her.

But this is Sweeney’s show. The third act sees Cecilia facing her fate almost alone in the once-teeming building as she hurtles towards a starkly memorable denouement. Unlike the cold revenge enjoyed by de Havilland in The Heiress, retribution in Immaculate is served piping hot, and Sweeney throws herself into the finale with such crazed gusto that most will feel sated by her maniacal power. @IanLong @_i_a_n_l_o_n_g_

Ian Long is a writer and story consultant who teaches various aspects of screenwriting in his Deep Narrative Design workshops. ‘Stargazer’, a psychological drama feature co-written with director Christian Neuman will be released later this year, and Ian is currently developing ‘Malediction’, a supernatural feature set in southern Italy.

IMMACULATE is in UK cinemas from Friday 22 March 2024

The Persian Version (2023)

Dir/Wri: Maryam Keshavarz, Producers: Anne Carey, Ben Howe, Luca Borghese, Peter Block, Corey Nelson) | US Drama

Vibrant energy and a dash of humour powers Maryam Keshavaraz’ crowdpleaser forward. The Persian Version sees a large Iranian-American family gathering for the patriarch’s heart transplant. The dramatic twist is a family secret that catapults the estranged mother and daughter into an exploration of the past that flips backwards and forwards between the United States and Iran as the two discover more kinship than they first imagined.

Enlivened by exuberant dance routines to a vintage American and Iranian pop score, the highlight of the show is vivacious newcomer Layla Mohammadi whose over-the-top personality is tempered by her ‘mean mummy’ parent Shireen (Niousha Noor). Occasionally erring on the tediously overtalky this is a spirited and earnest attempt to address cross-cultural identity and bring together past and present in a ‘healing’ way. @MeredithTaylor

ON RELEASE FROM 22 MARCH 2024

Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987)

Dir/Wri: John Hughes | US Comedy 90’

Mainstream Hollywood cinema of the nineties offers many profound disappointments, of which two of the most poignant were the early death of John Candy, thirty years ago this month after suffering a heart attack in his sleep, and Steve Martin’s increasing dissatisfaction with simply being funny.

With a plot that owes an evident debt to ‘The Out-of-Towners’ it’s disarmingly good-natured and nice to see the erstwhile ‘Wild & Crazy Guy’ play the straight man for a change with Candy as Falstaff to his Prince Hal.

Over thirty years later ‘Planes, Trains and Automobiles’ is as melancholy to watch as it is funny since it demonstrates the ability of the cinema to preserve such moments for posterity. @RichardChatten

NOW ON PRIME VIDEO

The Golden Thread (2022) Bergamo Film Meeting

Dir: Nishtha Jain | Doc 90′

The Jute industry has been the mainstay of millions of Bengalis for hundreds of years but is now in a state of decline putting their livelihoods in jeopardy.

In artfully composed shots Nishtha Jain’s documentary exposé examines the relationship between factory and labour in an industry which has come under pressure due to the switchover to plastics. The Golden Thread transports us from the peaceful riversides of West Bengal, where the green canes of jute grow in abundance, to the two largest jute factories in the Indian region around Kolkata where the plant is woven into material.

The Golden Thread could easily be set in the 18th century but this is modern day West Bengal. The camera follows hot on the heels of workers arriving by bike at the vast Naihati Jute Mills where the dried jute is being stored in bundles before it reaches the massive weaving looms. The frenzied din of spinning soon takes over and then cuts back to the peace and tranquility of a muddy riverside where a man in a large straw hat is cutting down green canes in preparation for drying.

Although the heyday is over for the jute industry, Naihati is proud to announce “we manufacture environment friendly jute… which includes food grade jute products (hydrocarbon free) and geo-textiles”. State aid has kept this sustainable alternative to plastic going but the future looks bleak despite the eco potential of jute.

The challenge to survive continues for many Bengali labourers who still rely on the factory to support themselves and their families despite poor working conditions. Accidents and jammed machines are a frequent occurrence. Grievances, hopes and fears are aired and compete with the din of the whirring spinning machines. The workers’ plight is taken up by the unions who are fighting to raise pay to a minimum wage requirement of £200 a month and improve conditions in general. It’s a familiar story of quality over production that connects to a global narrative of struggling traditional industries and communities all over the world. @MeredithTaylor

SCREENING DURING BERGAMO FILM MEETING | 9 – 16 March 2024

Aus einem Deutschen Leben | Death is my Trade (1977)

Dir: Theodor Kotulla | Cast: Gotz George, Elisabeth Schwarz, Kai Taschner, Hans Korte | Biographical Thriller, Germany 145′

Erroneously described on YouTube as a “WW2 War Film’, this adaptation of Robert Merle’s 1952 novel ‘Death is my Trade’ actually devotes more time to the experiences of Rudolf Hoss – thinly disguised as ‘Franz Lang’ – in the First World War as an earnest young teenager serving as a sergeant on the western front before joining the NSDAP in 1922 and finally – with just over an hour more to go of a film running 145 minutes – installed as the Commandant of Auschwitz in 1941 and the period covered by The Zone of Interest; which places far greater emphasis on Hoss’s wife.

Filmed in Auschwitz-BirkenauThis disturbing study of ‘dehumanisation’ (an expression coined by The Zone of Interest’s director Jonathan Glazer) is staged in the Brechtian manner in numbered episodes in which in 1916 the Kaiser’s picture still hangs on the wall, to be replaced by Hitler in 1922, and finally by three considerably more imposing portraits of the Fuhrer when WWII finally arrives.

The scene where Himmler states to Hoss that the Fuhrer personally ordered the destruction of the Jews will doubtless enrage Holocaust deniers (just as David Irving in his book on Nuremberg showed far more indignation at the roughing up Hoss got at the hands of his captors than the content of his testimony). Hoss is depicted as a weakling rather than as a monster who lacked the courage to say ‘No’ – but was plainly not happy at his work – half-heartedly requesting a posting on the front before reluctantly knuckling down at his desk studying diagrams of the correct way to herd prisoners and diagrams of crematoria. Starring Gotz George as Lang, Elisabeth Schwarz as Elsa Lang and Hans Korte as Heinrich Himmler the feature went on to win the Outstanding Feature Film award at the German Film Awards 1978. @RichardChatten

NOW ON YOUTUBE

Pendulum (1969)

Dir: George Schaefer | cast: George Peppard, Jean Seberg, Richard Kiley | US Noir Thriller 106′

A glossy, extremely well-acted film that marks the point of contact between two contrasting career arcs: George Peppard had already reached its apex in pictures, and he was soon to find his niche as unorthodox TV lawmen for which this served as something of a dry run with his pursuing a baby-faced killer who anticipates Scorpio in Dirty Harry.

For Jean Seberg it marked a brief return to Hollywood after several years in European exile – still sporting her distinctive gamine haircut – as Peppard’s wife (an actor she actively disliked which made their chilly scenes depicting a marriage gone sour all the more plausible).

Directed by TV veteran George Schafer much it resembles a movie made for TV, but both the themes tackled – with the then shocking sight of people dying with their eyes open – and the use of Washington as a backdrop lend it a certain distinction. @RichardChatten

NOW ON YOUTUBE

Close your Eyes (2023)

Dir/Wri: Victor Erice | Spain, Drama 169′

Close you Eyes screened to rapt audiences at Cannes last year. It marked the Basque director’s triumphant return to the screen after an absence of thirty odd years when his Dream of Light (1992) had followed on from El Sur (1983) and his acclaimed debut The Spirit of the beehive (1973). His fourth features unites him with Ana Torrent who was only 6 when she made her screen debut in The Spirit.

Close your Eyes is a slow-burning drama that reflects discursively on memory and disillusionment through a story set in the 1990s. An actor called Julio Arenas (José Coronado) has disappeared from the set after filming the opening and closing scenes that bookend a film called The Farewell Gaze. The director Miguel Garay (Manolo Solo) has subsequently abandoned the project and repaired to beachside Andalusia where he has kept himself amused with his writing until an opportunity to be interviewed for a programme about Julio’s mysterious disappearance sends his mind flooding back to the past as his friendship and working relationship with the actor resurface.

Erice uses Miguel’s experience as a way to delve into the theme of loss, identity and the mystical power of cinema and its interplay with the past and present offering both fantasy and illusion. Although Miguel has tried to obliterate certain painful memories of his past, the man he thought he was is recalled through the prism of the present. So the search for his lost friend offers an opportunity to shine light into the darker recesses of his subconscious that fills in some gaps and culminates in a startling finale. Erice explores the men’s work as artists in a subtle and layered piece of filmmaking that serves as a valedictory and highly intelligent reflection on the world of cinema. @MeredithTaylor

IN CINEMAS FROM 12 APRIL 2024

The Proud Ones (1956)

Dir: Robert D Webb | Cast: Robert Ryan, Virginia Mayo, Jeffrey Hunter | US Western Drama

The great Akira Kurosawa was often said to be the most western of Japanese directors and personally declared ‘The Proud Ones’ to be one of his favourite films.

By the end of the 1950s Fox were finally giving Robert Ryan roles that were worthy of his talents – sadly not for long – to portray nobility and get the girl (in the comely form of Virginia Mayo) in this sombre, character-driven western in which Ryan plays a heroic role akin to Gary Cooper in ‘High Noon’ that takes a surprisingly benign view of its characters, with Arthur O’Connell being his usual likeable self and even Robert Middleton not playing the usual ogre. @RichardChatten

Elaha (2023)

Dir/Wri: Milena Aboyan Co-Wri: Constantin Hatz | Cast: Bayan Layla
Derya Durmaz, Nazmi Kirik, Armin Wahedi, Derya Dilber, Cansu Dogan, Beritan Balci, Slavko Popadić, Hadnet Tesfai, Homa Faghiri, Rebér Ibrahims | Drama 110′

Being a woman in a Kurdish community is all about secrecy and subterfuge according to this impressive feature debut from Armenian born writer/director Milena Aboyan who shows the ongoing societal pressure for Kurdish women and girls in modern-day Germany. Men – and particularly mothers – hold sway in this ‘multicultural’ environment where ironically the women seem to be the ones enforcing age-old traditions.

Elaha, 22, is dreading her forthcoming marriage to her overbearing Kurdish boyfriend because she will have to prove she is a virgin – and she is not. Although the film explores Elaha’s options to re-instate her ‘innocence’ what it really deals with is the tremendous pressure of conforming to traditional ideals in a tight-knit, often hypocritical, set-up.

Naturally we empathise with Elaha who is thoughtfully played by newcomer Bayan Layla. But she is by no means a straightforward character who is playing her fiancé off against her ex-boyfriend to whom she feels considerable attraction, for obvious reasons. She desperately wants to conform to her family’s wishes and doesn’t want to bring shame on her mother and father but on the other hand she feels the freedom her ex boyfriend accords her is far more appealing. The overriding impression we get in the scenes with her fiancé – who is stuck in a ‘Madonna Whore’ complex – is one of fear and oppression: not the basis for a happy relationship, let alone marriage. By the same token, Elaha does not want to be ostracised from Kurdish society or lose the love and support of those she holds dear.

Aboyan and her co-writer Constantin Hatz deal sensitively with the issues involved introducing contrasting characters, in the shape of Elaha’s teacher and counsellor, who call into question these old-fashioned values. Elaha finds their opinions persuasive, although they fly in the face of her family’s traditional stance. Her teacher points out the seemingly ludicrous situation Elaha finds herself in but Aboyan never paints her mother and father as unlikeable; they are simply victims of an outmoded way of life in the context of modern day Germany. This is a visually appealing and engaging film that raises some important questions about family and society as a whole and women’s role within it. @MeredithTaylor

Elaha will also preview on International Women’s Day (8th March) at the BFI Southbank, as part of their Woman with a Movie Camera strand | In cinemas UK & Ireland on Friday 26th April 2024

Frida (2023)

Dir: Carla Gutiérrez | Doc 87′

This latest foray into the life of the artist Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderon (1907-54) follows Ali Ray‘s chronicle of the painter’s life seen through the prism of Mexican history.

Frida, based on her own previously unseen diaries and letters, is a much more intimate and visceral view told in her own words (voiced by Fernanda Echevarría del Rivero).

In troubled life full of pain and tragedy, Kahlo managed to triumph through sheer adversity and her own brand of bloody-mindedness.“Was the virgin Mary really a virgin?” she asked a priest during mass. Clearly she was en route to be a success as a paintet when she started channelling her florid fears and morbid moods onto canvas after a life-changing contretemps with a tram left her bedridden at only 18.

In keeping with its subject matter this is an artful documentary that unfolds in colour and black and white. In an inspired touch director Carla Gutiérrez has decided to animate some of Kahlo’s work so the ‘Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair’ comes alive. This seems in keeping with Kahlo’s avant-garde and subversive take on things, along with her unusual marital arrangements with her long term much older husband and lover Diego Rivera which ended in divorce and then re-marriage based on a bizarre set of conditions including Kahlo’s refusal to ever sleep with him again (they had both been unfaithful, she with Leon Trotsky – no less).

So Gutiérrez offers up a refreshingly lyrical new take on the artist that lives to her reputation as complex, vulnerable but fearless to the last. @MeredithTaylor

Frida is in UK cinemas on 8 March and on Prime Video on 14 March.

Andre Simonoviescz | In Loving Memory | 2013-2023

Andre (far right) with Derek Malcolm and Meredith Taylor | photo credit: Charles Rubinstein | Venice 2018

BERGAMO Film Meeting | 9-17 March 2024

Bergamo Film Meeting unveils its 42nd edition from March 9 – 17, 2024. One of the most important events in the Italian festival calendar the meeting draws thousands to its annual celebration of auteur and arthouse cinema in the mountainside venue just north of Milan in the Italian Dolomites.

Home to the Duomo di Bergamo, the city is also proud of its Romanesque Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore and the grand Cappella Colleoni, a chapel with 18th-century frescoes by Tiepolo.

Bergamasco is one of Italy’s most intriguing dialects and food-wise the town boasts a wealth of gourmet restaurants and bars where you can savour saffron-flavoured risottos and a legendary pancetta-laced pasta dish called casonelli alla bergamasca served in a rich butter sauce accompanied by the local wines – including the famous red Moscato di Scanzo. BERGAMO is also well known for its wealth of ice-cream parlours based on regional ingredients – including liguorice and zabaglione – with stracciatella a speciality.

Film-wise there’s a really exciting line-up that includes a retrospective on the work of French director and leading proponent of the Nouvelle Vague Eric Rohmer, including his seasons series: Conte de printemps, d’automne, d’hiver and d’ete, Le Rayon Vert; and Ma Nuit chez Maud to name but a few.

St Petersburg-born French actor, director and screenwriter Sacha Guitry (1885-1957) will receive a Tribute as one of the most fascinating and versatile film personalities of the 20th Century. The honour will include screenings of his 1935 director debut Bonne Chance!, Donne-moi tes yeux (1943) and La Poison (1953) amongst others.

A Tribute to Walter Matthau will highlight an American Comedy Classics strand featuring director Elaine May’s A New Leaf, Billy Wilder’s The Front Page. and Gene Saks’ 1966 outing The Odd Couple starring Matthau and Jack Lemmon.

There will also be a chance to see the latest arthouse films fresh from the festival circuit including a selection of world premieres in the Festival’s Main Competition. @MeredithTaylor

https://www.bergamofilmmeeting.it/en/

The Shooting (1966)

Dir: Monte Hellman | Cast: Jack Nicolson, Warren Oates, Millie Perkins, Will Hitchens | US Drama 82’

A historically important film since it marked the beginning of the collaboration between Monte Hellman and Warren Oates that eventually came to full fruition with ‘Two-Lane Blacktop’.

For Jack Nicholson, who co.produced with Hellman and plays yet another in a long line of leering malcontents it represented yet another frustration before he finally arrived with ‘Easy Rider’.

Assisted by the minimal score by Richard Markowitz the predominantly horizontal visuals created by cinematographer Gregor Sandor dispenses with the usual visual attraction associated with the genre concentrating instead upon character interaction; while as the shady lady – like Nicholson wearing a striking wide-brimmed hat – the freckles on Milly Perkins’ face shows she had spent far more time exposed to the sun than poor Anne Frank had. @RichardChatten

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All Shall be Well (2024) Berlinale 2024

Dir/Wri: Ray Yeung | Drama 93′

All Shall Be Well opens as if all is very well during a sequence in which a diverse range of family generations are observed sitting around a table laughing, chatting and eating from copious bowls of food. There is nothing here out of the ordinary in a sequence that evokes familiar Asian family gatherings seen in many films linking traditions of Asian filmmaking, including the great family-focused films of Yasujiro Ozu.

The film swiftly shifts tone after we have been introduced to the two older women, Angie and Pat, who are clearly longtime partners, creating a successful business partnership and lovingly referred to by the family as Aunties. Angie (played by Para Au) is seen talking in a carefree way to Pat (played by Lin-Lin Li) who is in another room when Angie becomes aware of an ominous silence. Director and screenwriter Ray Yeung delivers the first of a series of audacious edits with a cut-away to a funeral sequence. We then observe, in a series of sequences, how shattered and distraught Angie feels about the loss of her soul mate.

Hong Kong based filmmaker Ray Yeung has made previous films on subjects including male relationships linked to the fashion industry in Front Cover (2015) and Twilight Kiss (2019) which looks at the problems of an older couple of gay men. All Shall Be Well takes Leung a stage further with his delicate, more unsettling than it looks, new film. It is a masterly study of complex family relationships and less than forgiving and harsh laws in countries like Hong Kong with links to China that are not progressive with LGBT rights. The film explores how family connections can be unsettling when order and inheritance involving wealth and property surface with the rights of couples in LGBT relationships literally less than clear or white-washed out of legal frameworks.

Apart from remarkable ensemble performances in particular from Patra Au at the centre of the film there is impressive camerawork by Ming kai Leung which gently moves the camera along with the movement of characters or frames sequences with close-ups as the drama unfolds. Yeung centres a key element around the spiritual healing powers of water that anchor a clash between Pat and her brother-in-law.

The film’s denouement is one of the finest in recent cinema. A revelation provides the otherwise unanswered mystery which has bothered and troubled Angie as she calmly but resolutely refuses to accept the fate handed to her by family rights and laws that enshrine injustice. When Angie discovers the real truth about her partner the film ends on a triumphant note of calm acceptance as to how love can transcend whatever blows that life brings. A powerful thought-provoking ending brings resolve and resolution to Yeung’s film and it is not surprising that All Shall Be Well walked off with the coveted LGBT Teddy Award against considerable competition at this year’s 74th Berlin Film Festival.

A film to watch out for when it is released which is likely to find a true worldwide following along the lines of recent enlightening LGBT themed films including The Blue Caftan.

TEDDY WINNER | BEST FEATURE FILM | BERLINALE 2024

PETER HERBERT
CURATOR MANAGER
THE ARTS PROJECT
https://www.peterherbert.online

https://theartsproject1.wixsite.com/theartsproject

Baltimore (2023)

Dir: Joe Lawlor, Christine Malloy | UK drama 98’

Imogen Poots is the only reason to see this faded foray into the past that seems topical merely because of the current outburst of anti-capitalist rage being expressed throughout the Western World.

In Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor’s character drama she plays Rose Dugdale, an aimless girl with nothing else to do but rail against a system that saw her growing up in a rural mansion in Baltimore — a village in County Cork, Ireland — where her torpid existence soon sees her drawn to the limelight – in this case the contrasting excitement of stealing her own family’s clutch of paintings, in league with the IRA.

Flashbacks show her kicking against the system from an early age in sympathising with a fox during a hunt and a Black woman in a family artwork. The heist soon gives Rose a focus and some lead in her pencil transforming her from a ‘nothing’ to a ‘something’ in her own eyes – a rebel with a cause.

Rose’s mild-mannered parents (Carrie Crowley and Simon Coury) are mystified at this transformation from ordinary teenager to political activist and dismayed when she and her boyfriend (Patrick Martins) steal from them at a fundraiser for the IRA and so its goes on as Poots steals the show with a nuanced portrait of futility and misguidedness.

With its drab visual aesthetic and lifeless characters Baltimore is a dreary trudge through Dugdale’s life and times – which eventually amounted to nothing but caused suffering to many – but for Poots’ performance it is tolerable. @MeredithTaylor

IN UK CINEMAS FROM 1 MARCH 2024

The Bride Wore Red (1937)

Dir: Dorothy Arzner | Cast: Joan Crawford, Franchot Tone, Robert Young, Billie Burke | US Drama

With a title like that The Bride Wore Red is guaranteed to stand out in even the most casual perusal of Dorothy Arzner’s oeuvre; along with the fact that one of the writers and the editor were also women.

Although Ms Arzner disliked making this film and left it in high dudgeon after having a happy ending imposed by Metro, it remains a most diverting Tyrolean lark (a fact appropriately reflected in Franz Waxman’s score).

In a role originally intended for Luis Rainer the film’s biggest liability is as usual Joan Crawford (her most impressive moment being as a cake decoration behind the credits) but she certainly brings an authentically feral quality to the scene where she hunches up her shoulders and gets stuck in when offered lunch.

While of the two leading men Robert Young has the most screen time Franchot Tone has the more interesting part, while standouts in support include George Zucco before he was typecast as mad doctors, and Mary Philips is as usual a robust presence.@RichardChatten

Pepe (2024) Berlinale 2024

Dir: Nelson Carlos De Los Santos Arias | 122′

Nelson Carlos De Los Santos Arias’ Pepe which unspools in the Berlinale Competition and has been described by artistic director Carlo Chatrian as its least “classifiable” entry, which is high praise indeed when you look at the distinctive films that surround it in this year’s competition. Following on from this luminous film Cocote, which won the Signs Of Life Award at the 2017 Locarno film festival.

Very much a hybrid text that encompasses humanism, epic, essay and mythic folk tale; all told through the prism of a hippopotamus the humans call ‘Pepe’ and is adrift from the clutches of his owner: Pablo Escobar. We have been here before, of course, with numerous documentaries that have looked at the Columbian drug lord and his menagerie of wild animals that lived on his armed compound. This is a very different beast from those spurious basic works.

A voice that claims to belong to a hippopotamus. The Latin word hippopotamus is derived from the Ancient Greek hippopótamos, from híppos ‘horse’ and potamós‘river’, together meaning ‘horse of the river’. Sometimes what is represented is not supposed to be taken as what it appears; the horse of the river is here to do some heavy lifting. In what some would call zoomorphism, what we are looking at is the climate crisis, the migrant crisis, imperialism, post colonialism and of the destruction of late capitalism and its toll on the global South.

The voice is droll and of the kind that has seen too much, but is comes post death following it’s escape and journey down the Magdalena River where he will come to a brutal end that is the narrative that fits many that are othered by a populace terrified of what they cannot understand. Pepe remains in death the quintessential romantic, condemned to the corporeal.

The film enjoys itself and takes its time, it glides through many philosophical concepts within a hermetically sealed universe. The journey through the Magdelena seems like an exercise through South American literature particularly ‘The Apprentice Tourist’ by the queer mixed-race “pope” of Brazilian modernism: Mário de Andrade, even though he focused on the Amazon, but the reference makes poetic sense if not empirical sense.

At various points the film wanders off from the kinesis of the river and partakes in various human life, from beauty pageants and the emotional violence of destructive relationships that very obliquely connect to our eponymous hero. But far from a dying and deadened milieu, the Magdalena and its environs is in fact brimming with life. This is emphasised with a dominant binary and linear ontology around life and death. The living and the dead are not fixed in a binary but bound together in an intimate, dynamic, circling dance. Decay and regeneration are two sides of the same coin.

The long, widening rivers of South America are very much horizontal and rhizomatic. As per Caribbean writer Edouard Glissant rhizomatic identity is unlike a root which grows vertically from one place, it grows horizontally, stretching out to meet other roots.

As the oral testament continues one thinks of the acclaimed Canadian author LM Montgomery who said, “Nothing is ever really lost to us as long as we remember it”. To speak is to make sense of our reality but it also shows the impulses and the limitations of existence.

It is so invigorating to see a young filmmaker who has ambition to spare: Where a lot of his contemporaries settle for shooting rabbits, he is only interested in hunting big game and the Socratic questions that come with that territory. One can only be excited for the journey where he’ll journey to next. @d_w_mault

SILVER BEAR – BEST DIRECTOR | BERLINALE 2024

Sons (2024)

Dir: Gustav Moller | Cast: Sidse Babett Knudsen, Dar Salim, Sebastian Bull | Denmark/Sweden/France. 2024. 99mins

One of the best films at Berlinale 2024 was this glacially unnerving psychological thriller from Swedsh director Gustav Moller (The Guilty). It stars Borgen’s Sidse Babett Knudsen as a dedicated prison guard who takes pride in her ethos of pastoral and rehabilitative care but finds herself out of her depth when taking on a new role in the high security wing where she becomes obsessed with one of the inmates, a vicious psychopath, serving time for murder. It soon emerges that Mikkel (Bull) has a connection to Eva and one that sees her taking risks and behaving in an increasingly unadvisable way towards him. In these unpredictable and oppressive surroundings the power base gradually shifts putting Eva and her colleagues in grave danger.

Moller and his co-writer Emil Nygaard Albertsen once craft a sinuous study of human evil that sees the prison environment is a challenging unpredictable one: an atmosphere of calm control can abruptly erupt into hostile and dangerous violence. Eva is made aware of this by her colleague (Dar Salim) who warns her about becoming too familiar with the inmates: “Some people are just beyond rehabilitation”. But Eva has another axe to grind and ignores his advice to her detriment in this robust and frightening character drama. @MeredithTaylor

BERLINALE | GOLDEN BEAR COMPETITION 2024

Henry Fonda for President (2024) Berlinale 2024

Dir: Alexander Horwath | Documentary 186′

What Henry Fonda For President is most definitely not is a documentary on the level of a Blu Ray extra which is what most documentaries that look at iconic figures resemble these days and are devoid of ambition or intellect; two things that this film has in spades – written and directed by Alexander Horwath – who is a writer, curator and film historian.

Horwath has had a long career in the trenches as what Werner Herzog would describe as a ‘true soldier’ of cinema. In his career he has been the director of the Viennale (1992-97) and the Austrian Film Museum (2002-17). He also curated the documenta 12 film program (2007) and many other projects in the film and art world. His essays and books have, among other topics, addressed subjects such as Josef von Sternberg, Ruth Beckermann, Guy Debord and Austrian avant-garde cinema.

With this, his debut film which premiered in the Forum Section of the Berinale, he has stepped out from the dusty confines of academia and bravely put his head above the parapet and opened up to eventual brickbats by the deluded and most deserved acclaim for a near unique piece of cinema.

The film may be titled Henry Fonda For President, but it is as much about Fonda as it is about the American century. America is the force field of the film and is always waiting to be rediscovered. That means – of course – the cinema, the place where we can experience what Nathaniel Hawthorne once noted, American is something of “a country in the shape of a church”. That is one of the notions of the US State that Howarth returns to again and again: religion and its place in a country that has very high opinions of itself and thinks it is the exception to every rule.

A monument resembling a cathedral to the American century through the prism of a decent man, perhaps the man who when seen and experienced most would want to be. The film starts with his polar opposite and the single figure the film juxtaposes him against: Ronald Reagan. Not Reagan the actor but Reagan the politician and company man for US corporations and hyper capitalism.

The film then jumps to the 17th century and by virtue of Fonda’s particular family history: the early migration of the Fondas from Holland to America, later from the East to the Midwest, and from there to New York City and California. As well as the director’s voice-over he relies on the last interview Fonda gave to Lawrence Grobel in 1981, before he died a year later. In these interviews we come across a man being brutally honest, not so much about cinema but of the men taking America down a path that has led to Trump and the near death of American democracy: Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon.

The film’s formalism has a twin in Steve McQueen’s Occupied City, in the sense that they both look at contemporary space in a manner of a psychogeographer. We are taken time and again from places that appear in Fonda’s films then and now, whether Drums Along The Mohawk, Grapes of Wrath and My Darling Clementine. Other than his own films, though, the filmmaker – as you would expect – is more interested in philosophers, whether Paine, Thoreau, Tocqueville, Emerson and Fuller.

Bertold Brecht once said,”Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes”, that is what stayed with me after over three hours sitting with this epic piece of work. Both then and more importantly the present. @d_w_mault

BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL | FORUM 2024

Who do I Belong to? (2024) Berlinale 2024

Dir: Meryam Joobeur | Cast Salha Nasraoui, Mohamed Hassine Grayaa, Malek Mechergui, Adam Bessa, Dea Liane
Tunisia / France / Canada 2024 | Arabic, Subtitles: English, German | 117′

Maryam Joobeur makes a visually stunning debut with this Berlinale competition title that mixes professional actors with newcomers to tell another tale about events in the ‘Monde Arabe’ this time with elements of magic realism. On the sandy shores of northern Tunisia Aïcha (Salha Nasraoui) and her goat-farmer husband Brahim (Mohamed Hassine Grayaa) live a peaceful existence in amongst the dunes where they seem content with their sons Adam (Rayen Mechergui) and Amine (Chaker Mechergui).

Theirs is a modern household although Brahim definitely wears the trousers although Aïcha soon emerges as a matriarch to be reckoned with. “Women speak in this community” announces Brahim when their long lost son Mehdi (Malek Mechergui) returns to the fold with a mysteriously mute, burka-wearing wife called Reem (Dea Liane) who has blue eyes and an advancing pregnancy. Mehdi has been fighting for ISIS in Syria and appears to have rescued Reem from a terrible fate at the hands of ISIS. The dumbstruck Reem is clearly still traumatised by events which play out in a gruesome sequence.

DP Vincent Gonneville’s close-up camera focuses intensely on the actors’ faces. This is resolutely arthouse fare and the dialogue in as sparse as the windblown vegetation in the desert location where life often drifts into surrealism amongst the whispering dunes. There is some violence here to contrast with the dreamlike status quo in this haunting and original piece of filmmaking. @MeredithTaylor

BERLINALE GOLDEN BEAR | BERLINALE 2024

The Strangers’ Case (2024) Berlinale 2024

According to the Berlinale festival blurb it was our very own bard William Shakespeare coined the phrase ‘The Strangers’ Case’ in reference to the plight of migrants all over the world. This apparently inspired first time feature director Brandt Anderson to make a film about a tragedy of refugees.

The Strangers’ Case is a gripping if schematic film that centres on a Syrian family in Aleppo whose predicament will change the lives of five different families. In the midst of it all is Amira, an Aleppo-based paediatric surgeon and her daughter who find themselves swept into a dangerous but familiar tale when they are buried by a bomb from the civil war raging in their country.

Managing to escape the ruins of their home they secure a place on one of those un-seafareing dinghies run by a criminal trafficker/criminal (the muscular Cy ). On the same boat trip is another Syrian family who have opted to leave their place in a migrant camp in order to get to Europe. The criminal who organises their boat transfer, for a hefty fee, is also responsible for a son who he leaves behind.

The Texas born director certainly masters his material in a slick and confident debut that certainly provides compulsive viewing although the narrative tends to be simplistic with characterisations falling predictably into baddie and goodie territory and a docudrama with a predictable ending. @MeredithTaylor

BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL 2024

The Devil’s Bath (2024) Berlinale 2024

Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala delve into their country’s macabre past for this painfully drawn out if atmosphere horror story that often looks like a painting by Hieronymus Bosch.

The Devil’s Bath follows Goodnight Mommy as a profound and disturbing psychological true thriller, based on an unexplored historical episode in European social history that hails from Upper Austria in the 1790s, according to court records. The ‘Bath’ in question was a state of depression brought on by the rigours of everyday life, and many escaped this by committing murder and subsequently seeking a pardon from the Church which allowed them to commit suicide and receive a decent burial, rather than being cast out for eternity.

In a remote rural village, Agnes (Anja Plaschg), a poor peasant girl, finds herself imprisoned within the strictures of local expectations when she marries her husband Wolf, a man with nothing to offer but a stone hovel and a life of duty, religious dogma, a mother in law from Hell. And to make matters even worse, it turns out that Wolf is impotent in an era where child-bearing is the primary goal of marriage and womanhood. Barren women were treated with suspicion and often accused of witchery, so Agnes’s nuptial joy soon turns to misery.

Not surprisingly, she goes mad, unable to speak openly about her plight, and for two long hours we feel her mental and physical pain in a film that chills to the bone with its overcast skies, dank settings and disgusting rotting fish motifs.

The horrific death of a baby at the hands of its mother, in the film’s ominous opening scene, serves as a warning sign that The Devil’s Bath is not going to be a barrel of laughs, but neither does it descend into the realms of sensationalism as a seething sense of dread builds, albeit at a snail’s pace. Festering wounds and putrefying flesh along with every kind of human deformity are often elevated to an art form in Martin Geschlacht’s camerawork (which won him a Silver Bear); but they are disgusting nevertheless and a stark reminder of what life was really like back then. There is beauty too in the misty mornings and Autumn countryside.

Agnes takes the baby’s death to heart and gradually becomes obsessed by having her own child. One particularly evocative scene sees her praying obsessively over a wax effigy of the Baby Jesus, that she steals from the local church, with a particularly ghoulish outcome. Morose and malingering, Agnes is a tragic figure, and the final scenes of this ghastly period piece are truly shocking. @MeredithTaylor

SILVER BEAR – BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY | BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL | GOLDEN BEAR 2024

Black Tea (2024) Berlinale 2024

Dir: Abderrahmane Sissako | Drama 96′

Black Tea, Abderrahmane Sissako’s first narrative feature in a decade, feels like one of those amateurish student films assembled from a series of ideas (jotted down by Sissako and his co-writer Kessen Fatoumata Tall) that doesn’t quite come together. Formally known as The Perfumed Hill it plays out like an episode from a TV soap in scenes shot and then cobbled together without any regard for tonal integrity or even dramatic content.

Is it a female empowerment story: clearly no, judging by the storyline and absurd final reveal. The whole thing relies on the flimsy chemistry between the two unlikely central characters, who nevertheless make for a stunning duo, in the shape of Chang Han as a Chinese tea trader called Cai and Nina Melo, his latest apprentice Aya, who hails from The Ivory Coast.

In a bizarre opening scene Aya says a resounding ‘no’ to her ‘husband to be’ in one of those mass registry office weddings back in her homeland. Suddenly, and inexplicably, she finds herself in Guangzhou, China speaking fluent Mandarin and brushing up on the delicate art of tea-tasting at a shop owned by Cai who is unhappily married to Ying (Wu Ke-Xi). The two have a teenage son, Li-Ben (Michael Chang) and Cai also has a girl called Eva from a previous relationship.

When the scene shifts to the Guangzhou, Aya is already ensconced in the business, judging by her glorified position as assistant to Cai. When not working she spends the day prancing around in the local shopkeeping community. There are other African immigrants (who all speak fluent Mandarin) and who indulge in trite exchanges, touch up her hairdo and smile reverentially as her as if she’s a member of royalty. It soon emerges she has jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire relationship-wise as Cai is clearly not really available. He even asks her to sit alone in his bedroom while he entertains his entire family to dinner, including a rather traditional old grandfather who makes racist comments. There’s a suggestion of a lesbian frisson with Ying and Aya, but it stays in Ying’s fantasy world. And that’s just about it.

The film clearly takes its name from Nina Simone’s eponymous song, and is beautiful to look at with DP Aymerick Pilarski’s vibrant visuals capturing colourful hillside villages and tea plantations. There are some original elements here, but the lack of a meaningful narrative arc and no real drama to speak of makes this a vacuous follow-up to the director’s stunning third feature Timbuktu (2014). @MeredithTaylor

IN COMPEITITON | BERLINALE 2024

Spaceman (2024) Berlinale 2024

Dir: Johan Renck | Cast: Adam Sandler, Carey Mulligan, Kunal Nayyar, Lena Olin, Isabella Rossellini | USA 2024 | English, Czech, Korean, Subtitles: English, German | 106′

Are long-distance relationships sustainable? It’s a valid question, and one that US director Johan Renck ponders in this Berlinale Special Gala outing.

Spaceman is a strange, discombobulating film that tries to meld sci-fi with romantic drama and fails, despite the poignant efforts of stars Carey Mulligan, Adam Sandler and a hairy little creature called Hanuš, who has six eyes but a heart in the right place.

Based on the absurdist novel “Spaceman of Bohemia” by the Czech writer Jaroslav Kalfar, Spaceman explores how leaving a lover alone for too long can lead to negative navel-gazing and how – with a little help from our friends – we can put things into perspective. Or at least that’s the idea here.

Swirling around the edge of the solar system astronaut Jakub (a glum Adam Sandler) is on a distant six-month space mission away from his wife Lenka (Mulligan), expecting their first child. The two talk every day – on a special live link – but Lenka feels lonely and isolated and is on brink of ending it all despite her love for Jakub – shown in frequent flashbacks as she dances Terrence Malick style through flowery fields – and some persuasiveness on the part of her mother (Olin). Jakub senses the emotional distance between them when the phone line goes dead because his messages have been put on hold by Mission Control, headed by Isabella Rossellini (in cameo).

Then a gentle alien being enters his spaceship and the two settle into a chummy co-existence (after Jakub tries to kill the beast). There is much to enjoy here if you like purple nimbus cloud formations and Carey Mulligan – although she is sadly underused in this forgettable space oddity @Meredith Taylor

BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL 2024

Skanderberg (1953)

Dir: Sergei Yutkevich | War drama 120’

Seventy years after its release this film stands testament to the brief honeymoon between Albania and the Soviet Union between the death of Stalin and Enver Hoxha’s inevitable falling out shortly afterwards out with his successors in the Kremlin.

The Soviet cinema had already been the beneficiaries of the unintended largesse of the Germans when they took possession of Agfacolor at the end of the war – which explains why colour was such a surprisingly common feature of Eastern European films of the 1950s – and when the time came to play father bountiful to little Albania the choice of subject was a no-brainer: it had to be a film depicting Albania’s greatest national hero.

To that end the Russians dispatched veteran director Sergei Yutkevich to Albania with a large consignment of colour film and evidently one of Mosfilm’s dollies, since both the frequent battles scenes as well as the interiors abound in dynamic lateral tracks and sweeping camera movements. @RichardChatten

Langue Étrangère (2024) Berlinale 2024

Dir: Claire Berger | with Lilith Grasmug, Josefa Heinsius, Nina Hoss, Chiara Mastroianni, Jalal Altawil France / Germany / Belgium 2024 French, German, English, Subtitles: English, German. 105′

Clarie Berger’s latest: a ‘coming of age lesbian drama with a difference’ adds marital strife and political activism to the mix to concoct a heady brew that spills out in the summery corners of contemporary Europe:

Student exchanges often develop in unexpected ways, and although Claire Berger’s drama treads on familiar ground in its themes, invigorating performances from a talented cast, along with confident close-up and personal camerawork, make for an intoxicating watch (especially if you’re seated right up close to Berlinale’s main mammoth screen at the Palast).

Strasbourg and Leipzig get a welcome airing as the consecutive locations where relative newcomers Josefa Heinsius and Lilith Grasmug play the exchange students, joining their respective onscreen mothers, arthouse regulars Nina Hoss and Chiara Mastroianni, for some head-on clashes and tender heart-to-hearts, although the drama’s final show-down doesn’t quite satisfy what has come before.

French teenager Fanny (Grasmug) gets short shift from her German pen-friend Lena (Heinsius) when she first arrives at Leipzig station: Lena and her mother (Hoss) are not getting on well after the breakdown of her parent’s marriage but these differences will soon bond the girls together in more ways than one when they partake of magic mushrooms during a party with Lena’s dorky boyfriend.

When Lena returns to Fanny’s home in Strasbourg to discover her parents – mother Antonia (Mastroianni) and father Anthar (Jalal Altawil) – are not exactly hitting it off either, the two troubled girls find more common ground and start to act out in rebellious ways claiming to be ‘anti everything’, with Fanny breaking the glass in an advertising hoarding and other acts of defiance.

Fanny, who has been bullied at school, at first seems the more vulnerable of the two but soon shows a malevolent streak with her vivid imagination causing Lena to question their friendship. But all this soon boils down to the regular ‘teenage’ stuff. Langue Etrangere is compelling nevertheless. Hoss gets an interesting part that creates an entirely new persona as she breaks away from her Christian Petzold era. Mastrianni too gets to flex her muscles in a role that contrasts with her usual romantic dramas. @MeredithTaylor

BERLINALE COMPETITION | BERLINALE 2024

Scorched Earth | Verbrannte Erde (2024) Berlinale 2024

Dir: Thomas Arslan | Cast: Mišel Matičević, Marie Leuenberger, Alexander Fehling, Tim Seyfi, Bilge Bingül | Germany 2024 | German, Subtitles: English | 101′

This simple but striking thriller takes us back to the film noir fare of the 1940s to show that crime doesn’t pay at the end of the day. But will our antihero still get the girl – or indeed – the booty?

Following In the Shadows, Scorched Earth is the second part of Thomas Arslan’s Trojan trilogy. It sees his career criminal – a morose Mišel Matičević – back in Berlin, and looking to finance his future with another gig. But Berlin has changed in the interim (a bit like the Berlinale itself) and his old contacts are faded and thin on the ground. And the digital world has rather taken over in place of brawn and suitcases full of cash.

Slick locations and some impressive chiaroscuro camerawork still make this gripping in an ‘old school’ way and the plot – revolving around the theft of a pricey painting – is compelling yet easy to follow and doesn’t take the easy way out. A solid little classically-styled thriller with a modern twist. @MeredithTaylor

PANORAMA AUDIENCE AWARD COMPETITION | BERLINALE 2024

Kinoteka (2024) London Polish Film Festival 2024

The Kinoteka Polish Film Festival is back for a 22th edition running from 6 March until 28 March and celebrating the latest in Polish arthouse film and cult classics.

World-famous filmmakers: Agnieszka Holland, Małgorzata Szumowska & Michał Englert, and DK & Hugh Welchman, will join the festivities as well as renowned directors such Walerian Borowczyk and Krzysztof Kieślowski.

OPENING GALA

Kinoteka 2024 begins on 6 March at BFI Southbank with an Opening Gala screening of the critically acclaimed Green Border (Zielona granica, 2023) from director Agnieszka Holland (In Darkness, The Secret Garden) raising the profile on immigration in the form of a moving journey across Europe. After moving to the north east of Poland, psychologist Julia (Maja Ostaszewska) becomes an active part of a tragedy that takes place on the Polish-Belarusian border. This story interweaves similar events involving those trying to make their way to Europe to escape an uncertain future in their own countries.

CLOSING GALA

Heading to the BFI IMAX on 28 March, the festival’s Closing Gala for 2024 will be an exciting celebration of film and music, where the audience will be treated to Polish box office smash-hit The Peasants (Chłopi, 2023) that makes stunning use of an oil painting animation technique, The Peasants is a visually thrilling rendering of Władysław Reymont’s Nobel Prize-winning tale.

NEW POLISH CINEMA

Expect to discover the very latest in Polish films hot off the international festival circuit. Małgorzata Szumowska (Never Gonna Snow Again, Mug, Body) and Michał Englert (Never Gonna Snow Again, Infinite Storm). Woman Of (Kobieta z, 2023) is set against the landscape of the Polish transformation from communism to capitalism, spanning 45 years of the life of Aniela Wesoły (Małgorzata Hajewska) and her journey to find personal liberty as a trans woman.

Communist Poland also provides the backdrop for Saint (Święty, 2023), which is set during the final, turbulent days of the Polish People’s Republic and shows a nation grappling with its identity, torn between allegiance to Church and State. Mateusz Kościukiewicz (Mug, Bracia) stars as a rookie policeman investigating the theft of a priceless silver sculpture from Gniezno Cathedral in this thrilling mystery.

The multi-award winning Doppelganger (Doppelgänger. Sobowtór, 2023) from Jan Holoubek (Netflix’s The Mire, 25 Years of Innocence) is a stylish psychological thriller rooted in actual events of Cold War Poland starring Jakub Gierszał (Najlepszy), as a tale of espionage unfolds simultaneously on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

Elsewhere in the programme, Klaudiusz Chrostowski’s Ultima Thule (2023) features another compelling lead performance from Jakub Gierszał as Bartek, a man struggling to make sense of his life, who leaves his family to travel to a remote Scottish island. This striking, minimalist feature debut won the Best Micro Budget Film Award at Gdynia Festival 2023.

Adapted from a novel by Jakub Małecki, Feast of Fire (Święto ognia, 2023) is a heartwarming film about happiness, ambition and secrets as two devoted sisters struggle with very different constraints imposed by their bodies.

Adrian Apanel’s Horror Story (2023) is a smart take on the often absurd rites of passage between adolescence and adulthood that expertly combines black comedy and horror tropes. Jakub Zając (Dawid i Elfy) plays a man who arrives in Warsaw ready to start his adult life in the world of finance but soon finds himself reeling from the brink of one disaster to another.

The Secret of Little Rose (Rózyczka 2, 2023) is the much anticipated sequel to Jan Kidawa-Blonski’s multi-award winning Rose (2010). Once again starring Polish acting greats Magdalena Boczarska (Ostatnia rodzina) and Robert Więckiewicz (In Darkness, Wałęsa: Man of Hope), the film tells the story of a career politician whose life is turned upside down following a terrorist attack which kills her husband.

Lastly, Paweł Maślona’s Scarborn (Kos, 2023) is an action-packed historical tale that won multiple prizes at Gdynia Film Festival 2023 including the Golden Lion, Press Award and Youth Jury Award. Based on real events, it follows the story of General Tadeusz “Kos” Kościuszko (Jacek Braciak) who returns to Poland in 1794 and plans to start an uprising against the Russian occupying forces but on his tail is a Russian cavalry captain (Robert Więckiewicz) who is determined to foil his plans.

DOCUMENTARY

The festival’s documentary strand this year consists of two eye-opening films that take viewers to war zones across the world and, through very different lenses, show how the conflicts affect those caught in the cross-fire. In the Rearview (Skąd dokąd, 2023) tells the stories of the ordinary Ukrainian people that director Maciek Hamela helped evacuate from the country following the Russian invasion.

Developed over seven years, Danger Zone (2023) is an unsettling documentary examining a dark side of tourism, where people choose to visit war zones on organised tours at great expense. Taking an observational approach, the film juxtaposes the experiences of these so-called ‘war zone tourists’ and a tour operator with the everyday lives of those who live and fight in countries such as Somalia, Afghanistan and Syria.

CINEMA CLASSICS

Three Polish auteurs are represented in the Cinema Classics strand, in a programme that spans 1940s and 1970s Polish film. Krzysztof Kieślowski’s breakthrough masterpiece Camera Buff (Amator, 1979), was written for then rising actor Jerzy Stuhr who plays a factory worker whose passion to capture the world on 8mm film, gradually takes over his life, with implications on his freedom.

The Story of Sin (Dzieje grzechu, 1975) is an intense, taboo-breaking work from cult director Walerian Borowczyk, that is based on a famous novel by Stefan Żeromski, who co-wrote the screenplay. Presented as a sumptuous melodrama, the film follows the fate of a young woman Ewa (Grażyna Długołęcka) who, after falling for the young impoverished lodger in her family home, ends up in a spiral of seduction and obsession.

And lastly from prolific filmmaker Michał Waszyński, Kinoteka is proud to screen The Great Way (Wielka droga, 1946), the first post-WW2 Polish feature film. Produced by the 2nd Polish Army Corps and shot largely at Cinecittà, it tells the story of a young soldier who is taken to a military hospital where a nurse pretends to be his fiancée, to support his recovery. Secretly reading his journal to understand his story, she learns of his experiences on the battlefield. While a fictionalised narrative, The Great Way uses documentary footage to show the real story of the Polish army led by General Anders, known for their mascot Wojtek the bear.

KINOTEKA POLISH FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | LONDON 6-28 March 2024

Venues: BFI Southbank, BFI IMAX, Southbank Centre, Cine Lumiere, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Phoenix Cinema, Prince Charles Cinema, Rich Mix, Watermans

Memories of a Burning Body (2024)

Growing up in a repressive era in the Central American island of Costa Rica, when sexuality was a taboo subject, 68-year-old Ana, 69-year-old Patricia and 71-year-old Mayela developed their understanding of what it means to be a woman based on unspoken rules and implicit expectations.

In her first feature length documentary, Costa Rican filmmaker Antonella Sudasassi Furniss records the memories, secrets and longings of these three women who tell their stories off-screen. another woman of their generation (Sol Caballo) acts out these experiences on screen. Memories is a rather trite is well-meaning docudrama that nevertheless succeeds in blowing away the myth that sex is all over by the menopause.

The most important point Memories makes is that these women are now discovering the freedom to enjoy satisfying sexual encounters for the first time in their 60s and 70s after a repressed start to their love life that really didn’t set the night on fire despite offering marriage and children: A goal that fulfilled societal expectations but left them disillusioned.

Sol Caballo, 65, found herself alone for over a decade, and missing sex and companionship. Harking back to the time when her first love sent her a ‘pre-sucked lollypop’, she tells how it served as a symbol of sexual lust because kissing was then forbidden for teenagers. Feelings of desire soon overwhelmed her as she was growing up, and she felt a terrible guilt for these repressed feelings which had no outlet. Sol then reflects on the shame of puberty often going into graphic details. It was a time when the nuns at her school instilled fear rather than understanding of the opposite sex. At the same time young men also felt shy and diffident around girls, leading to embarrassment and misunderstandings – so rather than a happy time this was one full of apprehension and worry.

All this plays out in beautifully crafted dramatised sequences picturing her character as a little girl growing into an adult and then getting married to a fumbling husband who went on to beat and rape her after their child was born. Fortunately there is a happy ending for Sol’s character in the modern day.

Sudasassi Furniss offers alarming insight into the realities of a Latin American society that was clearly still very repressed in the late 1960s, 1970s and even – hardly a long time ago. While in Europe 60 is now the new 40 for women, those in Costa Rica are now experiencing a sexual re-birth according to this revealing chronicle.

Memories of a Burning Body is a startling expose which also provides a wake-up call to all those in unfulfilling relationships who think that sexual pleasure is over at 60 plus; this film is here to tell you to that the joy can go on, and even begin later in life. @MeredithTaylor.

Burning Body is Costa Rica’s nomination for the Academy Awards Foreign Language feature | BERLINALE 2024 | Panorama Audience Award winner 2024

Sleeping with a Tiger (2024) Berlinale 2024

Dir/Wri: Anja Salomonowitz | Austria, 2024 106′

A new docudrama raises the profile of Austrian avant-garde painter Maria Lassnig (1919-2014) considered one of the most important artists of the 20th/early 21st century.

Radical in its approach, Lassnig’s “body awareness paintings” focused on her own life as a woman. It celebrates the female body not from the traditional male gaze of beauty, but from the female experience of being a sexual and biological force, exploring gender conflicts, pain, and even the fear of cancer. Lassnig had a special way of dealing with colour she termed “colour vision”. Unlike the often tortured images of her fellow Austrian expressionist Egon Shiele, Lassnig’s impressionistic art is on the whole rather easy on the eye with a gorgeous pastel allure despite the trauma it often depicts, highlighted with the use of red.

Modern artists are invariably depicted as tormented: van Gogh, Frida Kahlo and Edvard Munch. Lassnig was no different according to Austrian filmmaker Anja Salomonowitz who comes to Berlinale’s Forum sidebar with her fourth film, a decade after her debut Spanien (2012). This is an impressionistic take rather than a straightforward biopic. So, although it unfolds in chronological form, interweaving acted scenes and documentary, Birgit Minichmayr (The White Rabbit) plays the central role throughout the artist’s life from a young woman until the age of 94. Lassnig emerges as a prickly, intractable but intuitive character who often feels at odds with the art world but stands by her art to the very end. Throughout Salomonowitz attempts to probe Lassnig’s core being and is keen to stress her mental state and her struggle in the male-dominated art world, which culminates in critical acclaim, the artist often seemingly rejecting her success.

From childhood, Lassnig is seen in conflict with her mother, and this troubled maternal relationship bleeds into Lassnig’s future in Vienna when she is drawn, via the capital’s Art Academy, into the local post-war art scene. Morose and strong-willed, her own body and biological state becomes a focus for her work making it highly original. Intuitively, she judges the value of her painting long before the art world makes its verdict.

Later, as an accomplished artist with her own exhibition, she is seen complaining about the hanging of her paintings (‘they are too low’)- an art in itself – and demands a rehanging, threatening to withdraw her work. The gallery assistant, claims this is the best way of to sell the paintings. But Lassnig remains faithful to her vision.

Anja Salomonowitz’s homage to the artist certainly ‘fleshes out’ the “body awareness” of Lassnig’s art but I can’t help wondering whether the film would have worked better as a straightforward documentary. Visiting Vienna for last year’s Viennale Film Festival I was captivated by Lassnig’s paintings but I left this film feeling unsettled (although not surprised) by Salomonowitz’s take on the woman herself, and her cinematic interpretation of a brave and pioneering artist whose real life was sadly tortured. Sometimes art is better left to speak for itself @MeredithTaylor

BERLINALE FORUM 2024 | 15 -25 February 2024

Black Tuesday (1954)

Dir: Hugo Fregonese | Cast: Edward G Robinson, Jean Parker, Peter Graves, Milburn Stone | US Crime Noir 80′

More than two decades after Little Caesar Eddie Robinson was still capable of showing absolutely no sign of mellowing – while as his moll Jean Parker is a classic floozie in the Claire Trevor tradition – in this astringent United Artists quickie which briefly begins as a home invasion drama, then becomes a prison film before concluding with a humdinger of a shoot-out.

Recalling the days when hoodlums still wore their hats indoors, the visual highlight is probably the section in the prison gothically lit by Stanley Cortez; although there plenty of other nice touches along the way such the scene early on were a bunch of journalists saunter in to watch a pair of executions in the electric chair as if attending a first night, and the shot during the final siege of a floor covered with spent cartridge cases. @RichardChatten

NOW ON YOUTUBE

Comme Le Feu (2024) Berlinale 2024

Dir: Philippe Lesage | Canada/France 2024 | 161′

The Generation sidebar of the Berlinale seems perfect for filmmaker Philippe Lesage, it is a section that facilitates exchanges between audiences and filmmakers especially focusing on dialogue with younger audience members. Lesage is most well known for the two loosely linked films The Demons (2015) and Genesis (2018) which both launched the international career of Théodore Pellerin. The director has focused on the travails of Quebecois teenagers and their distant parents and with Comme Le Feu he is back on familiar ground that unfortunately is returning an ever more diminishing recrudescence.

Teenage Jeff is invited by his friend Max to travel deep into the woods and stay at the isolated estate of acclaimed director Blake Cadieux. He has high expectations for the trip: Cadieux is an artist he greatly admires – plus Aliocha, Max’s older sister, with whom he is secretly in love, is also coming.

The film opens with a muscle memory of visual references: long following shots with a gliding camera as a car travels through the bucolic countryside accompanied by a deep drone-inflected score that indicates a pensive trip is to come. By the time the journey ends we will be at a lake where we meet a man standing by a sea plane. This is acclaimed director Blake Cadieux (Arieh Worthalter), who is meeting an old colleague: Albert (Paul Ahmarani), his son, daughter and Jeff. By the interactions from the ‘adults’ we become aware of some of the oncoming battles for Alphaness between two men who have left a lot unsaid, that will slowly unravel during a very long 161m.

The scenario is of course familiar to the classic French Country House genre, but not the farce of Feydeau or the state of the nation treatise à la Jean Renoir’s La Règle du jeu but something else entirely, something very Quebecois. Lesage makes claims that border on cliché, that of the hostile forest and the interior of the cabin becoming the liminal space where there is a youthful search for ideals and freedom while confronting the wounded egos of the jaded adults. There are the motifs of the country house updated, hunting (with both rifles and bow & arrows), dinner, alcohol and unspoken grievances bubble up and destroy the supposed relaxed atmosphere.

This is centred on the two best scenes in the film that are formally the same, a fixed camera at the head of the table as the two adult male protagonist poke and prod each other until they start orally fighting for control and supremacy, while this is on-going the teens sit in stony silence. These two scenes are beautiful in their emotional violence with Paul Ahmarani a clear stand out, what with his pathetic neediness and long-held grudge with his former collaborator Blake.

Other than these two scenes everything else is signposted by a broad schematic screenplay that tries to cover far too many bases. From spurned teenage love, to emerging female sexuality, to creativity in crisis and the inability to settle. By the last act the film has completely come undone with characters acting to the edicts of the screenplay rather than in an emotionally honest manner. This comes with death, dream sequences and a hurt dog.

After the potential promise we started with, we are left with a squalid melodrama that seems snatched from an even more mediocre genre film. @d_w_mault

GENERATION 14 PLUS | BERLINALE 2024

A Taste for Women (1964)

Dir: Jean Leon | Cast: Sophie Daumier, Guy Bedos, Grégoire Aslan | Drama 100’

The title suggests a saucy Parisian sex comedy but the knowledge that Roman Polanski collaborated on the screenplay immediately puts us on notice to expect something far darker; and since Sacha Vierny had recently made ‘Last Year at Marienbad’ look so sumptuous his ugly black & white photography for this film was presumably by design.

Guy Bedos looks understandably bewildered as he’s assailed from all sides by assorted ghouls, gangsters and members of a weird cannabalistic sect employing machine guns, blow pipes and samurai swords. Edwige Feuillere brings her usual dignity and grace to the proceedings (although even she reveals a more perverse side savouring a sadomasochistic cabaret); while Ward Swingle’s score is sometimes stridently awful but is just as likely to work beautifully. @RichardChatten

NOW ON YOUTUBE

Arcadia (2024) Berlinale 2024

Dir: Yorgos Zois | Cast: Vangelis Mourikis, Angeliki Papoulia, Eleną Topalidou | Greece/Bulgaria/USA, 99′

One of the first changes to the Berlnale that artistic director Carlo Chatrian made when he unveiled his first edition of the festival in 2019 was a new section entitled Encounters which was very much in the vein of the programming choices at his previous job: the head of Locarno. It is in Encounters that Arcadia premieres during the 2024 edition of the Berlinale.

Arcadia is the sophomore title from Greek filmmaker Yorgos Zois whose debut Interruption premiered at Venice in 2015. Following on from that film he is continuing to look at existence through the prism of the heritage of Greek myth and Odyssian Circular journey of love, loss, sex and death.

Formally more experimental and with a tone harbouring discombobulation that feels akin to slowly sinking through quicksand, it brings to mind Churchill’s maxim of the Soviet Union: “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.”

We open on an educated middle class couple driving through the Greek countryside in the evening and discover they are married doctors, and that the husband Yannis (Vangelis Mourikis) is en route to identify a woman’s body in the aftermath to a car crash. His wife Katerina (Angeliki Papoulia), is along for the ride – it seems.

After doing their duty at the hospital they head to a holiday home to sleep. At this point when Yannis falls asleep the film starts to slowly uncover its true self. Katerina can’t sleep and discovers a youth in one of the bedrooms in a sequence that cryptically tries to explain the couple’s reality and why they can’t take their shoes off (which becomes a motif with a delightful payoff at the close). From here we are surrounded by the essence of sex in all its disguises. Sex, in fact, will become both an aid to memory, remembering and the subject of which most people tell lies.

The youth, acting like Beatrice guiding Dante through the forest in canto 2 of ‘The Inferno’, takes Katerina to the Arcadia: a bar come garage full of naked Rubenesque bodies fucking à la Carlos Reygadas. It becomes clear we are in some sort of limbo for the dead, or what in Greek myth was the in-between state called the ‘Fields of Asphodel’ before the journey to either Elysium/Heaven or Tartarus/Hell. The denizens of Arcadia have nothing to do but strive to remember, fuck, sing and drink.

When in a place of unreality, whether that be dream space or somewhere metaphysical, there is the danger of becoming nothing more than a series of non-sequiturs. But to seek explanation in a film like this defeats the object of what it is and how it exists and creates its world. There is of course a temporal vacuum that shows how a film is joined to reality: it reaches all the way out to it, but delimits the thinkable and thereby the unthinkable.

Through Katerina’s journey we encounter guilt, dead children, relationships destroyed by selfishness and carnal greed/erotic vagrancy. She is the one that needs to be released by the living: Yannis. As Emily Dickinson put it: Parting is all we know of heaven/And all we need of hell. We are then left with the perpetual contemplation of an elusive being that teaches us the art of loving the intangible. @d_w_mault

ENCOUNTERS 2024 | BERLINALE 2024 | 15 – 25 FEBRUARY 2024

Diaries from Lebanon (2024) Cairo International Film Festival 2024

Lebanon’s ongoing conflict is complex. Over the years many filmmakers have documented various aspects of the nation’s continuing strife that seems to stem from internal struggles as well as external forces; not least the current issues with Israel. All very confusing for the rest of the world: War and Lebanon have almost become synonymous in our collective consciousness.

Three people share their input in this new documentary from Myriam El Hajj, founder member of Rawiyat – Sisters in Film, a collective of women filmmakers from the Arab world. Diaries from Lebanon is her second documentary and takes us back to 2018 and brings together three voices. The first is a feminist writer, poet and activist named Joumana who stands for election to the Lebanese parliament, defying a political system that has been suffocating her country for 40 years. The film shows how Joumana is voted in, only to be fraudulently ousted the very next day, leaving her supporters furious and leading to more unrest and violent demonstrations in the streets of Beirut.

Another feisty woman, Perla Joe, soon becomes a symbol of this uprising, capturing the imagination of young people who feel increasingly marginalised in a place where war has become the only unifying force in their collective experience.

Meanwhile the past rears its head in the shape of Georges, a vociferous veteran of the Lebanese Civil War which lasted from 1975 to 1990. One of the original fighters, he lost a leg in the conflict but still believes in ‘the glory’ of war, rather than ‘the pity’ as Great War poet and soldier Wilfred Owen famously cited in 1917/18. Glory seems to be thin on the ground in this Middle Eastern nation, but the dream of peace and a worthwhile future is now the ultimate battle. @MeredithTaylor

CAIRO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2024

The Great Yawn (2024) Berlinale 2024

Dir: Aliyar Rasti | Cast: Mohammad Aghebati, Amirhossein Hosseini, Saber Abar, Mahin Sadri, Mehrdad Ziaie Iran 2024 Farsi, Subtitles: English 93′ Colour World premiere | Debut film | Debut film

The motto “It’s always better to journey than to arrive” is possibly the best way to describe this engaging debut feature from Iranian filmmaker Aliyar Rasti who has made it into the Berlinale Encounters sidebar after critical acclaim with his award-winning short In Between.

Dark and deadpan humour is one of the main attractions of his offbeat road movie that sees two unlikely blokes thrown together on a difficult mission in the style of Martin Brest’s Midnight Run (1988). Although the outcome may leave some viewers perplexed, the darkly deadpan humour and gripping storyline with its valid human insight carries a low-key political message of the kind the Iranians do well. And this makes The Great Yawn compelling from the start. Visually too it’s a winner with an extraordinary, atmospheric sense of place captured creatively in Soroush Alizadeh’s inventive camerawork. Quite why this isn’t in the main competition line-up is as much of a mystery as the film itself. Perhaps the selection committee were as challenged as I was with the finale.

After dreaming of a cave full of gold coins, Beitollah, a religious man, (Aghebati) sets up a series interviews to recruit a paid companion – preferably a loner with no religious scruples – to collect the ‘forbidden’ treasure from the cave, and so claim his half of the booty. Shoja (Hosseini), an un-prepossessing bearded type who claims ‘not to believe in anything’, is selected for the job. Absolutely skint, an amusing sequence sees him begging for a toothbrush, no one obliges.

So the two set off the next day as planned, Shoja with absolutely nothing but the clothes he stands in. The odyssey – that mirrors life and all its challenges – will take them to the farthest corners and central deserts of Iran on a arduous journey where they will sometimes come to understand one another, sometimes not, in their search for the right cave (aka ‘the universal truth’). They are continually dogged by a poor young boy on a motorbike who calls himself ‘the bastard’ but doesn’t understand how he got the name.

Shoja puts his absolute faith in Beitollah, who aids and abets him all the way in their joint mission. To get a bit of money they stay with a farmer and work in her paddy field. She tries to persuade Shoja to stay (everyone has left to work in the city), but he declines, committed to the task at hand. After various encounters they come across a Caravanserai where they stay the night. The inn’s owner decides to follow them on their search for ‘the great yawn’ aka Jacob’s cave, purportedly the location of their ‘holy grail’. Will they find the meaning of life – that’s for you to decide. Rasta’s film is all about trust, truth and human faith. It’s also highly enjoyable. @MeredithTaylor

SPECIAL JURY AWARD EX AEQUO | ENCOUNTERS 2024 | BERLINALE 15-25 FEBRUARY 2024

Faruk (2024) Berlinale 2024

Dir: Asli Ozge | Doc Turkey, Germany, France 97’

Faruk, a man in his 90s, is fighting fit. Turkish filmmaker Asli Ozge artfully captured this snapshot of life for her elderly father in Istanbul, a modern capital in a Western nation, with all the benefits and ills that now entails. Faruk highlights the plight of the elderly – not only in Istanbul but everywhere.

Faruk, straddling two centuries, struggles to make sense of today’s world: A venal place where robbery is commonplace; not just in the street but in the privacy of your own home. Asli shows how a perfect storm of events slowly destabilises her father’s equilibrium as an ageing man with considerable agency, still managing his own life. The film also explores a complex father daughter/relationship that leaves us puzzled, and even dismayed.

In response to the effects of so-called climate change, the council is planning earthquake protection affecting the building where Faruk has continued to live, since the death of his wife, in a pleasant part of Istanbul.

Change comes when it emerges his home is up for demolition, despite a recent refurbishment; one that Faruk has already paid for. The other residents are keen to proceed, so after various meetings, Faruk agrees. But he is disappointed when reviewing the plans: The refurb switches everything round so the ‘French’ balconies are even smaller than before and the safety escape leads down from the master bedroom. More disruption in view for Faruk. Upheaval and life-altering events become more difficult to manage once we get older.

The film paints a dismal picture of modern life in the Turkish capital: like everywhere nowadays petty theft and social incivility seems to be on the increase. During a residents’ meeting his neighbour is called away to be told her husband has died on the metro. And to make matters worse, he was robbed of his wallet and spent the day riding round before anyone raised the alarm. Faruk may be old but he is still capable, although his daughter offers to help him with a ‘power of attorney’. He assures her by agreeing to a medical test. Making his way unassisted, by bus and on foot, he goes to the doctor. In scenes that see him directly facing the camera, he answers the questions correctly. We really feel for Faruk, who is later pictured celebrating the New Year all alone with only champagne for companionship. He does a traditional Turkish dance while a mock-up video shows him dreaming of following a nude dancing girl into his kitchen.

Faruk looks on the bright side even in the face of disillusionment. We see him acquiescing to change, and reflecting on it philosophically. The new flat is drab and pokey, and he argues with his daughter’s cleaner who tries to throw away papers and family treasures in preparation for the move. Then snow arrives and an earthquake near the Aegean. His mobile ‘phone, a vital link to his daughter, then disappears, possibly stolen by door-to-door hawkers asking for charity donations, which he gladly offers. He leaves a ‘phone message to the thieves: his simple plea is heart-breaking; a pitiful reflection on humanity. This is the final straw for Faruk who decides to take a short holiday while his daughter is abroad trying to finance the film.

We later see him back in Istanbul, visiting the new building with a positive mindset for change. His heart sinks when he discovers the reality of his new life. The filmmaker portrays her father as a decent, likeable old-school gentleman but the finale leaves us as confused as Faruk himself. Was Faruk mistaken or did he just have a selective memory of the past? A moving and captivating tribute to a life. @MeredithTaylor

PANORAMA | Berlinale 2024

Afterwar (2024) Berlinale 2024

Dir: Birgitte Stærmose | with Gëzim Kelmendi, Xhevahire Abdullahu, Shpresim Azemi, Besnik Hyseni, Luan Jaha Denmark / Kosovo / Sweden / Finland 2024 Albanian, Subtitles: English 85′ Colour World premiere | Documentary form

This feature debut from Birgitte Stærmose takes us back to Bosnia for a raw reverie of an Eastern European conflict that still reverberates in the memories of those affected back in 1999. Fifteen years in the making and created in a close artistic collaboration with the cast who stare directly at the camera their faces still childlike, even though adulthood has now hardened them. They share bitter experiences of selling ‘phone cards and cigarettes in a struggle that still goes on decades later.

Pristina, war-torn Kosovo, is a grim city emerging slowly out of the festering fog of its slushy snowbound setting. In the dingy dawn of another day, car headlights glow, a red-eyed testament to the poverty and squalor that still dogs the capital. The documentary alternates between social realism, staged performance and an existential meditation on the long-term repercussions of war. Snapshots of shattered lives show that war may be over but a different war has now begun: that of survival. @MeredithTaylor

PANORAMA | BERLINALE 2024 | 15 – 25 FEBRUARY 2024

My New Friends (2024) Berlinale 2024

Andre Techine was last in Berlnale with L’adieu à la nuit was screened out of competition in 2019. At that time gay sexual-awakening stories were still quite thin on the ground and his film, co-written Regis de Martin-Donos and Celine Sciamma, felt fresh and innovative.

His latest, screening in Berlinale’s Panorama sidebar, although decent rather unremarkable as it goes over old ground although the subject matter – political activism – is still big thing in France (think ‘Gilets Jaunes’ etc). This politically-charged drama is carried by Isabelle Huppert, as Lucie, a widowed forensics detective who finds herself on the horns of a moral and ethical dilemma when a new family moves in next door.

The dramatic backdrop of the Eastern Pyrenees is once again the setting for a lowkey, human story that shows how political leanings weigh more heavily than ever before on our day-to-day relationships, threatening to disrupt even the closest of friendships. And this personal strife lies at the heart of the film.

This time around the veteran director is with his regular co-writer de Martin-Donos in a story that unfolds in the small village of Saint-Genis-des-Fontaines, near Perpignan, where Lucie’s growing friendship with the woman next door (Hafsia Herzi) is put under pressure when it emerges her troubled husband Yann (Pérez Biscayart) has a hefty criminal record in police anti-activism with an ongoing involvement in violent ant-capitalist demonstrations in Toulouse and Montpellier. Naturally Lucie finds herself at odds with Yann exposing potential divided loyalties with his wife.

Huppert once again channels all the angst of a rather lonely soul who is forced to be even-handed towards her neighbours while at the same time standing by her private beliefs and professional credentials. Political activism is now becoming more widespread all over Europe and this makes the film thematically relevant despite its rather underwhelming presentation. @MeredithTaylor

PANORAMA AUDIENCE AWARD COMPETITION | BERLINALE 2024

Cu li Never Cries (2024) Berlinale 2024

Dir: Pham Ngoc Lan | Cast: Minh Châu, Hà Phương, Xuân An, Hoàng Hà, Cao Sang Vietnam / Singapore / France / Philippines / Norway 2024 Vietnamese, Subtitles: English

This lyrical black & white drama from Vietnam explores the nation’s past and present from the intergenerational perspective of a young woman and her widowed aunt who has just returned home after living in Germany. In her luggage Auntie Cu li carries a Pygmy Slow Loris, an indigenous primate from the Vietnamese rainforest, inherited from her dead husband. One strangely touching scene sees Cu Li dancing in a bar with a waiter and the Pygmy loris, the tiny animal seems to embody the essence of this proud nation, fiercely defending itself while remaining graceful to the end.

Cu Li’s young niece, who lives with her, is preparing for her wedding. The two argue bitterly about the usual intergenerational conflicts. Meanwhile her kids and the monkey look on, a picture of guileless vulnerability. Another contrast between the strength and vulnerability of an oriental nation that has born the brunt of many conflicts.

“The present keeps bringing us back to the past” opines Cu li. She quotes the 1960s communist president Ho Chi Min (1945-69) known as ‘uncle’ who said of the Black River (that runs from China to North Western Vietnam): “We must transform the water from foe into ally – our final purpose is to tame the river”. At this point Cu li is pictured scattering her husband’s ashes into the raging waters.

While the young couple anxiously ponders their uncertain future together (Cu Li’s niece is already pregnant with another child), Cu li invites the waiter to be her partner at the wedding, offering him money. The waiter is concerned about being seen as her toy boy, and the Pygmy Loris once again appears to echo all this anxiety – a tiny but potent little animal capable of killing with the toxin that spurts from its elbows when in danger, while outwardly exuding grace and innocence.

A brief running time plays to the film’s advantage along with a simple soundscape of exotic birdsong and imaginative outdoor locations captured in DoP magical monochrome camerawork. In his enchanting feature debut Pham Ngoc Lan expresses the hopes, fears and regrets of his homeland in an often surreal, understated and tender gem. @MeredithTaylor

PANORAMA COMPETITION | BERLINALE 2024

Gloria! (2024) Berlinale 2024

The inmates of a Venetian girls’ musical orpanage in the Napoleonic era find their lives disrupted by the arrival of a splendid pianoforte – a newly-minted instrument which opens up a range of creative and lifestyle possibilities.

This well-made and visually appealing film begins in a seemingly sober and realistic vein but quickly escalates into the fantastical as it heads towards a giddy climax.

The musical rivalry between the convent’s star pupil and a ‘mute’, untutored outsider provides much of the story’s narrative thrust when the ingénue begins to compose music which sounds, at turns, suspiciously like jazz, minimalism and contemporary pop-rock –at one point even taking on a sheen of techno.

Her originality thrills the other girls, but throws the upcoming concert they are about to give for the Pope into jeopardy. Meanwhile, the convent’s elderly, untalented musical director tries to deal with his lust for a foppish, money-hungry young aristocrat.

It’s all very anachronistic and ultimately quite silly, but some will enjoy the girl-power uprising of the convent’s students against their patriarchal tutor, and there are moments of laugh-out-loud humour courtesy of a ravaged-looking Paolo Rossi, whose flights of shrieking fury are up there with those of Klaus Kinski. @IanLong

BERLINALE 2024 | GOLDEN BEAR 2024

Every You Every Me (2024) Berlinale 2024

An industrial coal mining zone of Cologne provides a heavy-duty backcloth to this thematically ambitious, atmospheric slice of social realism from German filmmaker Michael Fetter Nathansky who follows the gradual implosion of a relationship through the eyes of a woman called Nadine (Schwarz).

Relationship breakdown is a heart-sinking subject but it also makes for quizzical viewing in Alle die Du Bist that sees Nadine’s partner in different guises. The opening scenes, set in some sort of institution, are confusing at first as Nadine’s partner is revealed as a bull, a small child (played by Schrein); and an adolescent (Aabbaz)?. It subsequently emerges that Paul embodies all these identities by turns, – at least in Nadine’s gaze – and we gradually learn to accommodate this unique idea. The single mother has left her home in Brandenburg at the age of 24 and met the mercurial Paul while working in an open-cast mining installation. A proud father, he is also undoubtedly a man of many faces whose male charisma has clearly set her heart on fire.

But life moves on and Nadine falls on harder times largely due to structural changes in the industry. Nathansky’s idea of casting several actors to embody one character is a brave and fanciful one, and certainly pays tribute to one woman’s efforts to make do and mend and reinvigorate her long-term emotional relationship. At the same time Nathansky’s follow up to his director debut You Tell Me (2019) requires a large leap of faith on the part of the audience. Committed performances all round. @MeredithTaylor

BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | PANORAMA AUDIENCE COMPETITION | 15 – 25 FEBRUARY 2024

Eureka (2023)

Dir: Lisandro Alonso | Cast: Chiara Mastroianni, Viggo Mortensen, Rafi Pitts, Viilbjork Malling Agger | Fantasy drama, Argentina147′

Viggo Mortensen and Chiara Mastroianni star in this striking that sees a man in search of his daughter journeying into the unknown.

Everyone loves a good story but storytelling is not like it used to be in the Golden Era of Hollywood and or European arthouse traditions. That said, Argentinian auteur Lisandro Alonso always manages to intoxicate us with his mesmerising fantasy drama such as Jauja that seem to hark back to a strange and exotic past celebrating the weird and wonderful. Eureka opens as a striking classically styled western.

More an art-installation than a straightforward narrative film Eureka is an off-beat, slow-burning addition to his oeuvre that starts off in gleaming back and white. Mortensen fetches up in a silent backwater in the Old West – no hint of Sergio Leone – but his gunslinging skills are a match for Clint Eastwood when told by a local innkeeper to ‘f*** off’.

Shifting to the present, in full colour, the focus is then a Native American police officer who is working through a gruelling casebook of local petty criminal offences. This sequence morphs in turn to a surreal scenario as the officer drinks a potion that transforms into a bird that flies back to the Brazilian jungle where another bizarre occurrence unfolds. Alonso quails aware from form or narrative in a seductive sensory concoction that beguiles and mesmerises, possibly getting its name from the place where gold was first discovered. A transformative experience on the big screen. Give it a go. @MeredithTaylor

IN UK CINEMAS FROM 16 FEBRUARY 2024

Sex (2024) Berlinale 2024

Dir/Wri: Dag Johan Haugerud | Comedy Drama, Norway 125′

“Once a thing is known, it can never be unknown. It can only be forgotten”. Anita Brookner, Look at Me

Compelling, absurd and offbeat this chilled-out Norwegian dark comedy reveals the complex dynamics of human desire in a simple parable that centres on the lives of two happily married chimney-sweeps, who just happen to be dyslexic.

Best known for his award-winning 2019 drama Barn – Dag Johan Haugerud’s latest – the first film in a trilogy to be followed by Dreams and Love – unfolds in a summery suburb of Oslo where the two heterosexual men are casually chatting over their canteen lunch. Their conversation is banal enough at first but what is soon revealed in this casual tete a tete between Feier (Jan Gunnar Roise) and Avdelingsleder (Thorbjorn Harr) will have far-reaching implications on their family relationships.

Feier admits to having had casual sex with a male stranger but Avdelingsleder’s response is revealing in its insight into modern attitudes in Norway: “Admitting you’ve had sex with a man is easier than admitting you’re Christian”.

Avdelingsleder – who reads Hannah Arendt in bed – then describes a dream where he is a woman who has sex with David Bowie. This leaves him confused and questioning how much his personality is shaped by how he appears to others. His wife (Brigitte Larsen) later points out: “homosexuality is not just an identity it’s an activity“.

Predictably, Feir’s wife (Siri Forberg) is not impressed when her partner shares his one-off sexual encounter, and his revelation will reverberate the fallout intruding into their daily lives. She wants a full and frank discussion about what exactly happened and this opens up a thorny debate between the two about physical and emotional experiences and how we all define marriage, relationships and coupledom in general. These conversations are surprisingly affecting and go to show just how fuzzy the borders are in desire and sexual attraction in a film that probes and challenges pre-conceived views on sexuality and gender roles, both for the characters and us, the audience.

Writer/Director Dag Johan Haugerud offers up an upbeat and enjoyable look at how as humans we pride ourselves on our unique ability to love and communicate verbally, although our enhanced brains also make our structured lives more complex: at the end of the day we are basically all animals, albeit human ones, but once we start to analyse our feelings that’s where our lives become complicated forcing open that universal ‘can of worms’ about infidelity and the purported differences between the male and female brains in a debate that ripples out into religious and moral norms in modern Norway.

Although the pace slackens as the film unfolds Sex is an upbeat and often moving affair that comes to a satisfying conclusion despite the couples’ differences and recriminations. At the end of day this is a candid film full of hope that offers a relaxed and positive view of coupledom: “Think of love as a choice. I’ve chosen you and you’ve chosen me”. @MeredithTaylor

BERLINALE | ENCOUNTERS – BEST FIRST FEATURE AWARD 2024

Matt and Mara (2024)

Dir: Kazik Radwanski | Cast: Deragh Campbell, Matt Johnson, Mounir Al Shami, Emma Healey, Avery Layman | Canada, Drama 80′

Deragh Campbell and Matt Johnson star as college friends reconnecting in this captivating Canadian comedy drama from Kazik Radwanski exploring the enduring power of attraction.

Mara, a creative writing professor, has a baby girl with her guitarist husband but their marriage is in trouble when she unexpectedly bumps into Matt on her university campus. The two immediately spark off each other with their literary talents that ignite past memories: Matt, now a published author, is charismatic and likeable and the two soon become close again but their undeniable chemistry is challenged by the pre-existing status quo and the ties that already bind Mara to her current partner and child. The film show how easy it is for desire to build in a vacuum until the pressures of real life intervene.

Matt and Mara unites Radwanski with his Campbell who also starred in his 2019 feature Anne at 13,000 ft in this amusingly light and refreshing snapshot of modern relationships showing how the past can come back to bite us in unexpected ways.

NOW IN CINEMAS | BERLINALE ENCOUNTERS COMPETITION 2024

Nothing But the Best (1964)

Dir: Clive Donner | Writer: Frederic Raphael | Cast: Alan Bates, Denholm Elliott, Harry Andrew’s, Millicent Martin | UK Drama 99’

A full six decades ago it was already becoming evident that filmmakers with serious aspirations had tired of black & white kitchen sink dramas; demonstrated here by the approving depiction of the amoral ascent from austerity to affluence of estate agent Jimmy Brewster (played by Alan Bates in what the Allans’ described as “perhaps the finest British comedy performances of the decade”) compared with just five years earlier when that of Joe Lampton in ‘Room at the Top’ had been viewed with prim Calvinist distaste.

Although now grievously neglected Clive Donner’s film remains of lasting importance as the British cinema’s major contribution to the satire boom of the early sixties (with a debt to the French New Wave apparent from the liberal use of iris outs and horizontal wipes, while the presence of Millicent Martin, Bernard Levin and William Rushton remind you that this was the era of ‘That Was the Week That Was’).

In larger supporting roles Denholm Elliot sends up the louche entitlement of the sort of fellow he played straight ten years earlier something rotten; while Pauline Delaney plays the landlady every man wishes he’d had as a youngster. @RichardChatten

Paramount on Parade (1930)

Dir: Dorothy Arzner, Otto Brower, Edmund Goulding || Cast: Jean Arthur, Clara Bow, Gary Cooper, Fredric March, Maurice Chevalier | US Musical 102’

Paramount on Parade displays little of the imagination of Universal’s The King of Jazz and certainly lacks the star quality of Metro’s The Show of Shows and is amateurishly staged as if on a proscenium and played to the camera throughout; but the masters of ceremonies Jack Oakie and Skeets Gallagher sauntering through the proceedings cheerfully breeching the fourth wall seem to be having as much fun as the audience.

The sets are pretty basic with the idiosyncratic exception of the tinted spoof murder mystery and the various Technicolor sequences which ironically lack a soundtrack (although perhaps that’s a blessing in the case of Harry Green as a Jewish matador). Jean Arthur and Gary Cooper are rather wasted – particularly as the points when they get to sing are both now silent – and you have to look hard to spot Frederic March.

With the fleeting exception of Kay Francis in Technicolor as Carmen Maurice Chevalier is easily seen to the best effect (in sequences evidently the work of Ernst Lubitsch), especially performing an Apache Dance with Evelyn Brent; but Mitzi Green, Nancy Carroll and Clara Bow also get to make their mark.

Apart from the scenes with Chevalier it’s hard to know who actually directed what, but the presence of Ludwig Berger – addressed as ‘Dr. Berger’ – in the Technicolor episode The Gallows Song identifies him as the man responsible for the colour composition that so impressed Alexander Korda that he later invited him to work for him at Denham on The Thief of Baghdad. @RichardChatten

Rei (2024) IFFR 2024

Dir/scr: Toshihiko Tanaka. Japan, drama 189′

Rei is a kanji character that can represent a variety of meanings. The genderless name is therefore a really good title for this complex but rather overlong (at over three hours) feature debut from Toshihiko Tanaka which won the Tiger prize at this year’s 53rd Rotterdam Film Festival.

Rei is about Matsushita Hikari, a self-contained thirty-something woman whose comparatively uncomplicated life in the corporate world contrasts with the trials and tribulations of her friends in a series of interconnecting dramas that highlight – albeit reductively – Japanese attitudes towards disability and, in particular, those with special needs and heightened sensibility. On a deeper level Tanaka also explores human connectedness along the lines of that well-worn phrase: “No man is an island”: It’s only through knowing each other that we really come to understand ourselves.

We first meet Hikari (Takara Suzuki) and her deaf landscape photographer friend Masato (played by Tanaka himself) in the wintery countryside surrounding Tokyo. Hikari’s life lacks a certain excitement and she seeks this out in creative scenarios. Hikari is also drawn to an actor called Mitsuru (Keita Katsumata) who she meets through her love of theatre and through a flyer where she has discovered Masato’s work. Finding his artistry compelling she asks him to take her portrait in the snowy setting. Another friend of hers Asami (Maeko Oyama) has a three-year-old daughter with special needs. Asami is dealing with the additional pressures of a husband who is having an affair with a nurse (who also cared for Masato’s mother).

Hikari is fascinated by Masato and the two share exchanges on SMS and email to get over the communication barrier. Asami is so impressed by Masato’s portraits of Hikari she commissions him to photograph her own family and these extraordinary pictures capture something that words can never do about the state of her relationship with her husband. But despite his unique and arcane talents Masato is sadly seen as a flawed character due to his hearing issues in this dense narrative in a drama that marks Toshihiko Tanaka out as a rising star in the film firmament. @MeredithTaylor

ROTTERDAM FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | TIGER PRIZE 2024

Le Bonheur est pour Demain (2024)

Dir: Brigitte Sy | Cast: Damien Bonnard, Laetitia Casta, Beatrice Dalle | France, Drama 97′

Another example of how good actors don’t make a decent film is this limp effort to infuse a dreary sink estate drama with romance – French style.

A warmed-up version of Henri Fabiano’s 1961 classic it stars Damien Bonnard and Laëtitia Casta who certainly create a moody head of steam as the doomed lovers Claude and Sophie at the film’s core. Both losers, he soon ends up in prison leaving her, an abused single mum, with another bun in the oven. Quelle surprise!

There are artful touches in Daniel Bevan’s production design and Frederic Serve has fun with his lenses but the narrative – which may have been shocking back in the day – is now as tired as a Sixties council block, and not even veteran actress Beatrice Dalle, as Claude’s gutsy mother, can tart it up to be anything memorable.@MeredithTaylor

NOW ON RELEASE IN FRANCE AND BELGIUM

All of Us Strangers (2023)

Dir: Andrew Haigh | Cast: Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal, Claire Foy, Jamie Bell | UK Drama 105′

Andrew Haigh’s new film All of Us Strangers may well be this British director’s most personal and accomplished film so far. Based on a Japanese novel The Discarnates by Taichi Yamada (1934-2023) which has been filmed in 1988 by Nobuhiko Obayashi (1938 -2020) the adaptations reveal how a remarkable literary source material can provide two fertile parallel viewpoints.

The Haigh adaptation is focused on Adam, a script writer, played by Andrew Scott, suffering from not only writers’ block but the crushing weight of a lonely unhappy life as a gay man. What has caused this is gradually revealed through subconscious thoughts about the loss of his parents. These are sublimely visualised by Haigh as Adam tentatively embarks on what is his first adult real-life relationship with Harry, another lonely gay man.

Haigh reveals care and sensitivity with actors, bringing out the best in Paul Mescal (as Harry) and Jaime Bell and Claire Foy (as parents) while the core of the film rests on a remarkable central performance by Andrew Scott. He plays a loner and is in tune with Haigh’s theatrical sense of interior mise en scene that sensitively uses framing of space to capture Adam’s viewpoint. Credit here is due to the tight flawless framing of Jaimie Ramsay’s beautifully lit and textured camerawork along with the original linked-in music and sound of Emilie Levenaise-Farrouch.

Scott and Mescal are completely at ease with each other and this is deeply felt in a sequence where the two men stroke each other’s naked thigh and knees which is erotic without being any more explicit. Likewise, the way Haigh surrounds and closely follows Scott during an eventful night in a night club, as his head swims to the sound of The Power of Love by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, reveals a filmmaker drawing from personal experience. The handling of a mother’s suppressed homophobia and the hint of gay cruising when first encountering his father are remarkable scenes capturing nuanced undercurrents. There is only one bedtime sequence involving the parents and son that feels uneasy.

Profound connections involving the providence of love and the need for redemption are at the heart of the film, separating time zones with the idea that there is a time to love, but also a time to die. The Obayashi drama has sensitive family relationship sequences involving a man and his deceased parents and a moody relationship with a female neighbour, although the film changes course by introducing a supernatural element involving zombie horrors feeding off a life force. This is finely tuned into Japanese culture and might explain why Obayashi’s version of The Discarnates is less well known in the west. The Haigh adaptation is more romantic and there is an uncanny feeling of spirituality also found in the work of Frank Borzage, another great romantic. Haigh appears to reflect that for his two damaged men it is only through love and adversity that souls are made great

All of Us Strangers builds on Haigh’s previous films Greek Pete, Lean on Pete, Looking, 45 Years and The North Water with a similar feeling for the interior spaces of homes, rooms, a ranch and the confined space of a boat stranded in ice. London at night in All of Us Strangers feels both alienating and melancholy, with the magical lights of cranes and high-rise buildings on the horizon becoming confined and darkened spaces for Haigh’s s lost souls. The daytime scenes when Adam wanders through the suburbia of his youth in search of his deceased parents have different film grain and light aiding the director’s ability to use space to explore complex emotional relationships.

The film’s final sequence brings to a full circle how ownership of our past can be grasped, although this ethereal finale has drawn criticism and may well be divisive. The audaciousness of both the finale and the fluid anti-realist thread flowing through the film suggests a gentle reminder of the daring of Powell and Pressburger as there are Matters Of Life and Death to be discovered at the heart of All of Us Strangers.

This is a triumphantly beautiful film that after more than one viewing suggests British film culture may have the heir apparent to the late great lamented Terence Davies. Haigh has the earlier filmmaker’s interest and ability with providing literary adaptations and resonance drawn from personal experience. We may well be witnessing a new chapter in the growth of gay related British cinema to be rightly proud of. Peter Herbert

PETER HERBERT is curator manager at THE ARTS PROJECT

NOW ON RELEASE IN UK CINEMAS

Get Your Man (1927)

Dir: Dorothy Arzner | US Drama 63’

Interesting to compare this rather demure affair with the one pictured nearly a hundred years later in HOW TO HAVE SEX (2023).

Far from being a manual advising young ladies how to succeed with the opposite sex as the title suggests, this early directorial outing for Dorothy Arzner – the only woman director during Hollywood’s Golden Age – whose assignment to the project led Clara Bow to take umbrage as her presence on the set meant one less man around – subscribed to the then prevalent twenties convention of a racy title but a plot of ultimately high propriety, ending (SLIGHT SPOILER COMING:) as it does with the two young leads retiring to separate rooms rather than spending the night together.

Typically for a film by Ms Arzner the men are all gormless and pliable, while the observation that “My uncle’s eighty, and he’s still a public menace to private secretaries” shows that she had their measure a full ninety years before the Harvey Weinstein scandal lifted the lid on workplace sexual harassment. @RichardChatten

Now on YouTube

The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire (2024)

Wri/Dir: Madeleine Hunt Ehrlich | US Doc 74′

The French West Indies’ island of Martinique really comes alive in this evocative portrait of Suzanne Césaire (1915-66) with its sultry soundtrack from Sabine McCalla.

Writer, teacher, devotee of Afro-Surrealism and leading proponent of the Négritude movement, Césaire was also a mother of six who considered writing to be of utmost importance in her life. Typically she never promoted herself as such, and consequently seems to have slipped through the cracks of history.

American filmmaker Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich has alighted on her subject in this immersive new documentary that includes a treasure trove of interviews with Césaire’s living children and family.

The Ballad is a bid to explore the writer’s career and legacy as it drifts elegantly through the past and present in an episodic and often enigmatic reverie based on the truth, and brought to life by the award-winning actor Zita Hanrot, herself a new mother, as she prepares to flesh out the character of Césaire .

Sadly – as is often the case – more is known of Suzanne’s husband Aimé, a political figure. But nonetheless Hunt-Ehlich succeeds in raising the profile of this astonishing anti-colonial activist who blazed a trail for feminism during the early part of the twentieth century. An enlightening and worthwhile documentary feature debut in this year’s Tiger Competition at Rotterdam International Film Festival. @MeredithTaylor

BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL | ROTTERDAM FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | TIGER COMPETITION 2024

How to Have Sex (2023)

Dir/Wri: Molly Manning Walker | Cast: Mia McKenna-Bruce, Lara Peake, Enva Lewis, Samuel Bottomley, Shaun Thomas, Finlay Vane Last, Guy Lewis | UK Drama 91′

What sounds like a cinematic instruction manual soon turns out to be predictable revelation about how little has changed since we were all teenagers. Giggling, dancing, getting drunk (and even throwing up) is still par for the course for the kids in Molly Manning Walker’s dynamic feature debut set on a Butlin’s-style holiday camp in the sun-drenched Greek island of Crete.

The London-born writer-director, who cut her own teeth as a cinematographer of Charlotte Regan’s film Scrapper, shows there is still the same vulnerability and uncertainty in this story about girls grasping the nettle of supreme social confidence while everything around them is still weird and unpredictable.

Tara, Skye and Em You are the teen trio at the heart of How to Have Sex. Don’t expect to see anything naughty as Nicolas Canniccioni’s rolling camera drifts more over faces and tender expressions than actual nude bodies, although these girls are certainly attractive with their bronzed limbs and complexions in the bloom of youth. Tara (a brilliant McKenna-Bruce) does form a bond with a guy called Badger (Shaun Thomas) and then she gets close to Paddy (Bottomley), but theirs is a muddled encounter that leads to disillusion rather than jubilation leaving her off kilter and bemused by that thing called love. And the same goes for her relationship with Skye (Lara Peake), Manning Walker makes the sage observation that while girls can be best buddies they can also be bitter rivals.

Tara’s needling desire to put her first sexual experience to bed drives the drama forward as she negotiates the subtle art of flirting and seducing on the day-glo dance floor, to a thrumming soundscape. Script-wise, Manning Walker opts for an intuitive aperçu of adolescent life rather than anything gripping but this acutely observed and poignant generational expose really nails the innocence, cockiness and sheer abandon of youth. @MeredithTaylor

MUBI BLU-RAY and DVD release on 12 February 2024

Argylle (2024)

Dir: Matthew Vaughn | UK Thriller 139′

Pirandello meets Philip K. Dick in this disarming piece of escapism that starts out seeming to be an ultra-glossy piece of escapist hokum but swiftly changes tack when it transfers its attention to charmingly buxom Bryce Dallas Howard as an author caught up a plot so outlandish you keep wondering if the Vaughn and his scripter Jason Fuchs are going to make it all a dream to bring it to a resolution.

The film is full of surprises (such the identity of the actor briefly seen playing her boss which early on drew from the audience the first of many doubtless intentional laughs). Vaughn displays the style and aptitude for pacing already amply evident in Layer Cake, Kingman: The Secret Service, Rocketman and Kick-Ass and creates vivid colour effects all the more effective for being sparingly employed.

Sam Rockwell makes a personable hero, but the most memorable cast member is probably Vaughan’s own cat; a strange-looking moggy seemingly unfazed by the bizarre events going on around him. @RichardChatten

IN CINEMAS IN FRANCE and the UK

Pet Shop Boys Dreamworld (2023)

David Barnard | Musical Concert film 120′

Who’d have thought a couple of English lads from Tyneside would make it to multi-millionaire status. Not only coining it, but also giving pleasure to their international fanbase for the past four decades.

David Barnard’s concert film sets the summery scene in Copenhagen’s Royal arena last July where a jubilant Danish crowd cheer the opening number In Suburbia kicking off the Pet Shop Boys’ latest musical extravaganza.

Enveloped in white trenches and black polos ‘The Boys’ – aka Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe – soon emerge from behind their silver sci-fi masks beaming on the audience against a background of monochrome moving images – Tennant – now 69 – on vocals and Lowe on keyboards rol seamlessly through a series of singable classics – each one memorable and unique: The Streets have No Name, I love you, you pay the Rent Why Don’t We Try. A backing band joins them for I Could Leave You. Rocking a white fez and tuxedo Tennent turns up the tempo for a bilingual single That’s the Way Life is.

Things get more jovial when Tennant shares a personal memory about a trip to the Caribbean with his long term partner Lowe. This segues into Domino Dancing, Monkey Business, New York City Boy and the tortuously poignant Jealousy.

Another change of tone and a saturnine makeover ushers in the ironically titled Love Comes Quickly, Neil moving stealthily across a moody mood-board of scarlet, indigo and vermilion.

The tone morphs again with Lowe, mysterious in a baseball cap and shades, finally takes to the vocals with his flattened-out North Eastern vowels for Maybe I didn’t Treat You. Tennant, suave in silver, steps forward for a solo sparkler Dreamland with female backing transforming the syncopated vibes into Heartbeat. How Am I gonna Get through This, Go West and It’s A Sin making the most of the rhythm.

Barnard – best known for his concert films featuring Gorillaz, Nick Cave and Eric Clapton, adds an artful touch with some impressive aerial photography, ushering in the ultimate showpiece with my personal fave West End Girls suitably sung by Tennent in a dark grey suit amid street lamps.

A finale of We Were Never Being Boring brings this heady trip down memory lane to a jubilant showdown as Tennant and Lowe continue to give delight to millions. Guaranteed to light up your January Pet Shop Boys Dreamworld is a real shot in the arm for those Winter blues. @MeredithTaylor

PET SHOP BOYS DREAMWORLD: THE GREATEST HITS LIVE AT THE ROYAL ARENA COPENHAGEN is showing in cinemas worldwide on Wednesday, January 31 & Sunday, February 4, 2024 only
SYNOPSIS:

Eternal | For evigt (2024) IFFR 2024

Dir: Ulaa Salim | Sci-Fi 99′

Director Ulaa Salim returns to The Rotterdam Film Festival after his first feature Sons Of Denmark premiered there in 2019 to wide acclaim. His latest is a safe piece of narrative with a very high opinion of itself but ultimately wallowing in schematic plotting to create a soufflé of a film.

Going back to his 2012 short Ung For Evigt, a rather juvenile look at one’s first great love, For Evigt/Eternal takes that premise and shoe- horns the contemporary fear of ‘imminent climate emergency’ into the mix, with diminishing returns.

Elias (Viktor Hjelmso) bonds with Anita (Anna Sogaard Frandsen) on the dancefloor. Bland repetitive beats lead to nervous introductions, copious alcohol consumption, consummation and pledges of undying love told (of course) with a slow montage to pass the time that could/should be used to broaden the lead characters.

Soon enough our loved up couple hit a blip: He wants to study (with a focus on the climate crisis) while she wants to have a good time. And before we know it she is pregnant and he has been offered a place at MIT.

Tough choices are made that destroy the relationship, and we eventually jump forward 15 years later to discover the planet is in danger with the Icelandic coastline collapsing into the sea: There appears to be a breach in the Earth’s core that could speed up climate change.

Now the film reveals what the filmmaker obviously thinks is his trump card – alternate realities that reveal Elias and Anna in different versions of where they are as the environment crisis worsens.

Elias (now played by Simon Sears) and Anita (by Nanna Øland Fabricius, or as she is known, the musician ‘Oh Land’), bump into each other in three ‘what if’ possibilities. Here Salim is looking at other filmmakers who played with the concept, most successfully Krzysztof Kieslowski in Blind Chance. Sadly Eternal is closest to Peter Howitt’s tediously banal Sliding Doors and has ideas above its station.

For Evigt/Eternal is a very middle of the road film and not really worth getting worked up over, despite the filmmaker’s sly and sometimes obvious references to Godard, Tarkovsky, Kubrick and Malick. In fact, one almost envies his chutzpah in stealing one of Kubrick’s pièces de résistance: the finale from 2001, intercut with re-hashes of late Malickian reveries. In hindsight though I couldn’t ultimately decide if it was arrogance or stupidity that led to these bizarre choices.

The film reminds me of British efforts that seem to exist as a clarion call to the US studios, rather than a work that exists for its own sake as an example of the seventh art. Depressing as that is, there is a kind of honesty here that reveals more about what we have just watched, and what it means in the grand scheme of things vis-à-vis film festivals and their ultimate raison d’être. @d_w_mault

ROTTERDAM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2024

The Green Cockatoo (1937)

Dir: William Cameron Menzies | Cast: John Mills, Rene Ray, Robert Newton, Charles Oliver | UK Crime Drama 70′

Although John Mills is technically the star, The Green Cockatoo is principally told through the big blue eyes of Miss Rene Ray as a country mouse who gets a crash course in what “a vile and wicked city London is”; while, as directed by visionary production designer William Cameron Menzies, it anticipates the feel of a forties film noir (complete with a score by Miklos Rozsa).

Old movies often provide incidental details of interest to later social historians: in this case that the phrase “a bit of a goer” was in use back in the 1930s. The film further charmingly shows its age by depicting John Mills as a song & dance man – first seen singing in a night club before briefly launching into an incredible swivel-hipped tap dance. We’re expected to believe he and Robert Newton are brothers (presumably only their mother could tell them apart) further showing just how long it was made when Mills describes him as “a good kid”. @RichardChatten

NOW ON PRIME VIDEO

https://youtu.be/PtdPzBBnDMo?si=DfB3vx8kaSix46kN

Bolero (2024) IFFR 2024

Dir: Anne Fontaine | France, Biopic drama, 122′

Anne Fontaine’s ravishing musical biopic of Joseph Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) opens with various modern musical versions of the legendary French composer’s 1928 masterpiece – the Bolero – from China, India, Africa and Mexico that have kept his spirit alive for modern audiences and whose composition is at the heart of the drama.

Ralph Personnaz plays the leading role of Ravel, an accomplished pianist in his own right, who is pictured being turned down for a place at the Paris conservatory after a dizzying display of his keyboard talents at audition.

Feted as one of France’s most loved composers, Fontaine chronicles Ravel’s life and loves in the interwar years of the 1920s and 1930s with this sumptuous romantic drama that gathers together a talented cast: Jeanne Balibar, Vincent Perez, and Emmanuelle Devos, and benefits from the lavish musical interludes as Ravel takes to the piano during his touring concerts: Like Rachmaninov, amongst others, he earned his living from playing as well as composing.

The first of these transports us to Boston and New York where he convenes with the turn of the century ‘beau monde’ and indulges his penchant for gloves (asking a local prostitute simply to put them on gracefully, rather than indulge his sexual fantasies in a more palpable way). The past fuses with his present in a dreamy reverie of flashbacks that flesh out his talents and skills and cement his reputation as one of the greatest French composers of the 20th century along with his contemporary Debussy, all set against a highly creative period in French history that aligned him with the Impressionists and famous writers and poets such as Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Cocteau amongst others.

Here in the US he also cements his friendship with the unhappily married Misia Sert (Doria Tillier) one of three female influences in the film: the other being the Russian dancer Ida Rubinstein (Jeanne Balibar), who inspired the Bolero, and his fellow pianist and friend Marguerite Long (Emmanuelle Devos). An elegant and informative biopic from Fontaine who delighted us with Coco before Chanel in 2009. @MeredithTaylor

ROTTERDAM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | 25 JANUARY – 3 FEBRUARY 2024

In the Land of Brothers (2024) Sundance 2024

Dir: Raha Amirfazli & Alireza Ghasemi | Cast: Hamideh Jafari, Bashir Nikzad, Mohammad Hosseini | IDrama, Iran, France, Netherlands 95′

In this nuanced portrait of identity and belonging in a world full of barriers, three members of an extended family of Afghans try to find a sense of home in an increasingly unstable environment of Iran, under threat of US invasion in 2001.

The delicately interwoven stories are thoughtfully told and set against a background of menace that connects with the universal narrative of displacement that continues to resonate all round the world. Their plight is a familiar one involving police brutality, administrative mix-ups and delays – along with the everyday stresses of modern life that exist in any ordinary family. Hamideh Jafari, Bashir Nikzad, Mohammad Hosseini make for a convincing trio.

An impressive first feature for Raha Amirfazli and Alireza Ghasemi In the Land of Brothers is a quietly reflective look at a situation that has international repercussions and is deeply felt by anyone of us trying to fit in with a society that strives to make our existence untenable whether it be in Iran, Europe of the United States. DoP Farshad Mohammadi’s subtle camerawork compliments the understated tone of this watchable and well-acted drama that consolidates the directing duo’s growing reputation on the international film stage. @MeredithTaylor

Sundance Film Festival – The Directing Award: World Cinema Dramatic goes to Raha Amirfazli & Alireza Ghasemi for IN THE LAND OF BROTHERS. #Sundance 22 January 2024

Un coup de dès | Breaking Point (2023)

Dir: Yvan Attal | Cast: Guillaume Cannet, Yvan Attal, Victor Belmondo, Maiwenn, Alma Jodorowsky, Marie-France Crozes | France, Thriller 85′

This thrilling little romantic melodrama set in Brazil, Paris and the Cote d’Azur sees two Frenchmen committed to lifelong friendship after one saves the other’s life.

Guillaume Cannet is Vincent an intrepid businessman who steps into the brink when his chum Mathieu, falls victim to a break-in at the home he shares with Juliette (Crozes) in a chic part of Paris.

Happily married to Delphine (Maiwenn) Vincent loves playing the field and Mathieu (who real life partner is Charlotte Gainsburg) is only too ready to cover for him given his past loyalty until he too falls prey to the charms of Elsa (Jodorowsky), one of Vincent’s lovers. Dark clouds soon gather over their gilded lifestyle when Elsa is found dead in a perfect storm of coincidences.

Yvan Attal, who writes, directs and stars as Mathieu, certainly knows how to create atmosphere and tension with all the classic noirish elements at his disposal including a clever plot, a solid French cast and a sweeping romantic score that spells danger. Attal has a rare gift of exuding sexiness, decency and stability, so we’re on his side all the way through.

Soigne and elegantly styled, Un coup de dès is the perfect B film to curl up with, and even better on the big screen with its lavish imagery and gorgeous settings. Wish there were more of these sophisticated yet effective modern thrillers aimed at middle-aged people who still fall in love and probably shop at Waitrose (French equivalent E.Leclerc). @MeredithTaylor

NOW ON RELEASE IN FRANCE

Padre Pio (2023)

Dir/Wri: Abel Ferrara | Cast: Shia LeBeouf | Asia Argento, Marco Leonardi | Drama, 104′

Abel Ferrara’s latest is a morose and brooding affair that sees the veteran director absorbed in contemplation on religion and socialism and channelling his angst through the figure of Padre Pio of Pietrelcina (1887-1968) a Capuchin friar and mystic who was venerated in 2002, and is played here by Shia LaBoeuf.

Pio was clearly not a happy man and the bearded and be-chausabled LaBeouf conveys this spiritual turbulence in various sequences that play out alongside the main narrative set in a small coastal town in Apulia in 1918 where soldiers are limping home from the First World War (Italy had joined Allied forces in 1915 after initially declaring neutrality).

There is much moaning and gnashing of teeth as the villagers commiserate over the death of their loved ones. Ferrara and his co-writer Maurizio Braucci reflect on the exploitation of farm workers by a glib local landowner, running for office in the elections, as the men return to their gruelling agricultural work on his land.

But change is afoot in Italy, and the socialists prevail amid threats and violence from local right-wingers. Meanwhile the stigmatised Pio is seen in vignette swearing at a young female confessor. Asia Argento gets a cameo role as ‘a man’ seeking a strange request. It’s an odd view of the Church – rather than the usual consoling, supportive religious presence, Pio is seen as an abusive figure, basking in guilt and shame, largely because he had apparently previously forged links with the fascists. So another strange and intractable film then from the accomplished director of Bad Lieutenant and Driller Killer whose Berlinale title Siberia was panned by the critics. Ferrara clearly has an axe to grind and he continues to wield it in his own artful way. @MeredithTaylor

ON DIGITAL courtesy of Dazzler Media in UK and Ireland FROM 26 JANUARY 2024 | VENICE FILM FESTIVAL PREMIERE 2023

Brief History of a Family (2024) Berlinale 2024

Dir/Wri: Jianjie Lin | Cast: Feng Zu, Ke-Yu Guo, Xilun Sun, Muran Lin | China, Thriller 99’

Beijing in post-one child policy China is the setting for this stylish but unnerving Michael Haneke-style psychological drama. Brief History of a Family, the feature debut of Jianjie Lin, shows the striking modern face of the city, far away from Wuxia and social realist Chinese fare we’ve become used, although the traditional Chinese themes of loyalty, discipline, betrayal, rivalry and even misogyny are present and subtly interwoven into this intriguing thriller.

Unfolding in series of glowingly-captured serene scenes, accompanied by an occasional score of gentle classical piano music that alternates with disconcerting electronic vibes, the story follows a middle class couple, Mrs Tu and her husband, a biologist, who have only recently been married and share a tragic secret that promts Mrs Tu to strike up a relationship with their son Tu Wei’s enigmatic new friend when he comes for tea after an alarming incident at school which is brushed under the carpet.

Yan Shuo is thoughtful and reserved, and still traumatised into a state of near catatonia by the sudden death of his mother. The troubled teen talks of being abused by his father, who we never meet, but whose sudden death casts a sinister veil over his past, intensifying the boyish rivalry between the two teenagers that develops a violent edge when Tu Wei’s parents start to talk openly of adopting the morose orphan who is more artistic and academic than their sporty son, who nevertheless excels in fencing, competing for a place in the local team.

The director shows how important study and discipline is in his homeland, and how the focus of modern professional parents is their offsprings’ education abroad. One disturbing scene sees Dr Tu queuing to get his son a place at college where a mantra is piped continuously over the tanoy: ‘Conquer English and realise your children’s dream to study abroad.’ Only 30 percent will be admitted to college in China, putting pressure on the kids to knuckle down to their studies. And they are seen doing so in an almost clinical classroom.

As the couple take Yan Shuo under their wing they are increasingly drawn towards his commitment and academic prowess, to the detriment of the boys’ personal relationship. Family secrets and buried feelings soon give rise to increased tensions that test the bonds and expectations that bind the four of them together until the shattering resolution finally dawns in a quietly devastating finale.

One of the many triumphs here is Jianjie Lin’s accomplished direction and the restrained yet potent performances from the ensemble cast. With its striking Danish sound and classical score of Bach, Mozart and Schubert, this is a tense and tightly-scripted arthouse thriller that never outstays its welcome at 99 minutes. An impressive first film from a director heading for international success. @MeredithTaylor

WORLD PREMIERE | Grand Jury Prize, World Cinema, Dramatic SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | BERLINALE GWFF Nominee Best First Feature Award, and Panorama Audience Award.

Head South (2024) IFFR 2024

Dir: Jonathan Ogilvie | Cast: Ed Oxenbould, Marton Csokas Roxie Mohebbi | New Zealand, Drama 98′ 2024

The Rotterdam Film Festival is traditionally a place where discoveries are made from unexpected places and this year’s opening film Head South is no exception. It manages to bypass what some have called a fool’s errand, that is ‘the opening film curse’. It does this with a meandering ode to post punk in a provincial town filled with beautiful losers with excess energy who search for belonging inside the cocoon of a lived experience.

New Zealand writer/director Jonathan Ogilvie certainly knows of what he speaks, before cinema he directed numerous music videos for legendary New Zealand record label Flying Nun, combined with that he has mined his teenage years for a cathartic and very strange gem.

Angus (Ed Oxenbould)is a teenager who it can be said is having ‘a moment’, his mother has left the family home for two weeks to ‘discover’ herself and he and his laconic father are left to have lonely dinners and some time together. His two friends are annoyed after he sells them oregano in place of marijuana, and to break his enforced solitude he receives a package from his brother who is studying in London.

Alongside a pithy postcard is a copy of Public Image’s single Public Image. Alas the vinyl is warped so heads to local record store: Middle Earth Records (No, really) where the droll proprietor Fraser reigns supreme and is the font of all musical knowledge. This is the point in a classic bildungsroman where the journey can be said to truly begin. In a matter of time he has been dared to start a band, only he is adrift, emotionally, spiritually and most importantly empirically.

At this point Ogilvie does a classic bait and switch. When we were expecting a classical quirky teenage wasters on the ‘l am in search of sex, drugs and rock n roll’ theme we start to see that the director is working on a completely different register that cleverly leaves small visual clues (a cinematic clip of Lawrence Oates often quoted line: ‘I am just going outside and may be some time.’) to what will become tragic and life changing.

What tends to happen a lot of time in films of this ilk is the filmmakers relying on tired and trusted tropes that verge on cliche, here though Ogilvie subverts these ideas, whether it is the longed for older woman against the obvious potential partner that the protagonist can’t see, or the first gig triumph and the deconstruction of the myth of the aspired to be cool kids. In fact it goes further in its attempt to destroy the idea of coolness being something to grasp, it instead points out it is in fact a false economy.

The film succeeds in many ways, it has a beautiful desperation that hangs around the characters and its recreation of the late 70s is perfect. It looks like the 70s, whether in the set decoration, the film stock or the sense of boredom in a small town with nothing to do (especially on a Sunday). It feels like the 70s and it probably smells like the 70s too! @d_w_mault

ROTTERDAM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | 25 January – 3 February 2024 |

Stella. A Life. (2024)

Dir: Killian Riedhof | Cast: Paula Beer, Bekim Latifi, Damian Hardung, Joel Basman | Germany Drama 121′

This horrifying wartime tragedy kicks off in good spirits. In a Berlin nightclub to dazzling strains of Benny Goodman’s ‘Sing Sing Sing’ the harried main character Stella is an aspiring jazz singer only just facing up to the unspeakable terrors of her hometown under Nazi rule.

The daytime sees her slaving away in a garment factory where the Jewish workers are one day rounded up and shot. But Stella, based on the real life of Stella Goldschlag, is determined not to end her life in Auschwitz. In fact, so determined, that she would go on to betray her fellow Jews, some of them close friends, to the Gestapo, just to salvage her own dreams.

Looking wan and washed out for her gruelling role, Paula Beer turns in another dynamite performance as a highly suggestible woman on the brink whose life is turned upside down when she refuses to submit to the constraints of being a Jew in Nazi Germany just when her musical career is starting to take off.

Hounded, questioned and subjected to continuous scrutiny, Stella and her parents are forced into hiding where she realises the only way to survive is to play a double game. But that will have consequences for the brittle blue-eyed anti-heroine – who is both victim and perpetrator – as she tries desperately to juggle her life with various powerful protagonists in a bid to avoid deportation to Auschwitz. Sadly her story turns into a nightmarish maelstrom of torture, duplicity – and ultimately guilt.

With its febrile tone and intense pacing Stella. A Life conjures up the palpable fear and very real trauma Nazi Germany instils in its Jewish population in 1944 and shows how ordinary people are capable of evil, in certain circumstances. Some of the set pieces are truly harrowing. particularly a scene where Stella is picked up by her hair, and brutally kicked in the head during an interrogation. Riedhof certainly knows how to create atmosphere but his script suffers from an under-developed storyline, and Stella’s descent into evil is never convincingly realised in a thriller that gradually gives way to sensationalism with a series of traumatic interludes, rather than a cohesive narrative.

Stella. A Life is an effective exploration of the horrors of war and the devastating emotional and physical effects on the victims in their desperate will to survive – until guilt rears its ugly head. @MeredithTaylor

NOW ON RELEASE IN FRANCE | ZURICH FILM FESTIVAL WORLD PREMIERE 2023

Shoshana (2023)

Dir/Wri: MIchael Winterbottom | Cast: Irina Starshenbaum, Harry Melling, Douglas Booth, Gal Mizrav, Ian Hart, Aury Alby, Ofer Seker, Liudmyla Vasylieva | Wris: Michael Winterbottom, Laurence Coriat, Paul Viragh | 119 mins

Prolific English filmmaker Michael Winterbottom goes into thriller mode for his latest outing, 15 years years in the making, and set amidst the political movers and shakers in the run-up to Israel’s founding as a state. Palestine is still under the colonial rule of the British and this provided a favourable climate for Jews escaping from the Nazi clutches of Hitler.

Inspired by real invents, the focus is journalist Shoshana Borochov (a feisty Irina Starshenbaum) the daughter of a Russian Socialist Zionist who held sway back in the day. Shoshana is a member of a paramilitary Zionist force and has inherited her father’s spirit as she deftly navigates the social milieu of the great and the good while working for a Hebrew-language paper, She also gives us a historical context in voiceover.

Naturally this influx of Jews gives rise to tensions amongst the existing Arab community. There are two Zionist organisations in particular – the Haganah, the paramilitary Zionist force to which Shoshana belongs, and the Irgun, a hard-core Zionist organisation focused on flushing out Arabs from the territory.

Soshana soon falls for English police officer Tom Wilkin (Douglas Booth), who is working alongside his colleague Geoffrey Morton (Melling) to capture the leader of the Irgun, Avraham Stern (Aury Alby), in order to shut it down. Morton also shares a frisson with Shoshana. Tel Aviv is a modern city complete with its new (at the time) Bauhaus buildings (although filming took place in southern Italy). Anyone who knows Tel Aviv will also appreciate what a closely-knit society it is with its social and business connections. And so Stern and Shoshana soon finds themselves connected through their many contacts.

This is an elegantly kitted-out political thriller with plenty of action between the sheets. There’s nothing like a man in a uniform – or a woman – in a uniform and silk negligee. Shoshana is also testament to the fact that nothing has really changed in the Middle East or in Europe for that matter (apart from the ‘elephant in the room’ that is Brexit). An enjoyable classically style romp that explores the way extremism and violence can force a wedge between people, forcing them to choose sides. @MeredithTaylor

IN UK CINEMAS FROM FRIDAY

Night of the Generals (1967)

Dir: Anatole Litvak | Cast: Peter O’Toole, Albert Finney, Tom Courtney | US Action Drama

When Sam Spiegel engaged Peter O’Toole for the title role in Lawrence of Arabia it came with strings attached in the form of a long-term contract (which is the reason first choice Albert Finney had declined the part).

Thus is the presence herein of O’Toole explained (not that his choice of films ever displayed much discernment and in The Night of the Generals he gives a performance that’s eccentric even for him), while from Spiegel’s point of view the appeal of a film reuniting both stars of Lawrence of Arabia was only too apparent.

The money was always up there on the screen on a Spiegel production, it has a score by Maurice Jarre that lingers pleasantly in the memory and a particularly good performance in a supporting role by Tom Courtney (who has a memorable scene discussing the merits of modern art with O’Toole).

While for students of the period it contains possibly the only screen representation of the incident when Rommel’s car was strafed by a Spitfire (which provides the opportunity for Spiegel to include Christopher Plummer in a guest role). @RichardChatten

NOW ON PRIME VIDEO

Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer (2022)

Wri/Dir: Thomas von Steinaecker | With: Werner Herzog, Chloe Zhao, Joshua Oppenheimer, Patti Smith, Robert Pattinson, Carl Weathers, Wim Wenders, Christian Bale, Nicole Kidman | Volker Schlondorff | Klaus Kinski, Lotte Eisner | Doc Germany 102′:

Sometimes a question has to be asked that brings to mind what Bernard MacLaverty called the ‘elephant in the room.’ That is – who is a documentary like this for?

If you know Werner Herzog as a writer/director you will most likely find this film a slight trifle that only skims the surface of one of the most mythologised filmmakers, who is still with us. If, on the other hand, you know Herzog from his appearances on animated series and roles in such examples of America’s Movie Industrial Complex like The Mandalorian or Jack Reacher (as fun as they are) then this documentary will be an introduction to what Socrates meant when he claimed ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’ in the sense that, in the last fifteen years, Herzog has turned from an unique filmmaker who gave us visions of the imagined to a Pop Culture behemoth that at times touches on self parody; most definitely examined and lived in.

Radical Dreamer follows the 81-year-young filmmaker in LA and on a pilgrimage to the family home where he grew up. With a short running time the origin story is merely glimpsed as we focus on the stories that it seems everyone knows: the walk across Europe to save the life of Lotte Eisner (which Herzog detailed in his book Of Walking In Ice) and the lunacy of Klaus Kinski (which is better detailed in Herzog’s own 1999 documentary My Best Fiend).

One of the usual choices the director Thomas von Steinaecker makes is the selection of talking heads, half with German speakers and half with Anglo-Saxons. It is perhaps no surprise that the English speakers don’t really impart anything of interest and some of the choices are damn right bizarre, Carl Weathers, for example, who shared a scene with Herzog in The Mandalorian and the filmmaker Chloé Zhao. The German speakers have far more insight, and for that we could have stayed with them longer. They include Wim Wenders; two of Herzog’s brothers; his first wife and Volker Schlöndorff.

I think we need to look at this film as a primer, a ‘greatest hits’ package; if you will. It is certainly part of a media blitz that includes the release of his autobiography, a retrospective at the BFI Southbank and the re-issue at the cinema of some of his great films from the 70s. I do feel though that the films Herzog made in the 70s had a sense of mystery, and that he too seems an enigma: half holy fool and half the foremost example of his acclaimed ecstatic truth concept.

Back in the 70s, making those ethnographic hybrids (are they fiction, documentary or myth?) was a much younger man’s game and eventually, like all great artists, Herzog pivoted away from them and reimagined himself as a documentarian. His fiction films go to places that are undiscovered until he returns in documentary form to explore his claim that nature is uncaring and a devil’s fortress. @D_W_Mault

WERNER HERZOG: RADICAL DREAMER is in cinemas in the UK and Ireland on 19 January and on BFI Player and Blu-ray on 19 February. BFI Southbank’s retrospective season, JOURNEYS INTO THE UNKNOWN – FILMS BY WERNER HERZOG, runs throughout January.

Praia Formosa (2024) IFFR 2024

Dir: Julia De Simone | Cast: Lucília Raimundo, Samira Carvalho, Maria D”Aires, Mãe Celina de Xangô Brazil, Drama 94’

This beguiling third feature from Brazilian filmmaker Julia De Simone is set in the cultural melting pot of Formosa an industrial port, just east of the capital Brasília.

Ten years in the making the film premieres at this year’s ROTTERDAM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL and centres on De Simone’s intriguing research project that shifts gently away from documentary form in the opening scenes to explore a fictional story of decolonisation and female empowerment.

Muanza is a woman born in the Kingdom of Congo in the early nineteenth century and trafficked to Brazil. One day she wakes up to find herself in the modern day port region of Rio, known as ‘Pequena Africa’, or Little Africa.

Praia is the second part of a trilogy that started with the 2014 short film O Porto and culminates with Rapacity, Praia Formosa.

This is a sinuous slow burn study with a sepia and pastel-tinted aesthetic that perfectly compliments its ethnic subject matter reflecting on a colonial past and intertwining it with the present with thoughtful and graceful performances from the leads.

ROTTERDAM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL | 25 January – 3 February 2024

The New Look (2024) Apple TV+

Dir: Todd A Kessler | Cast Juliette Binoche, Ben Mendelssohn, John Malkovich | Drama series 2024

A slick new series on Apple sashays back to fashionable post war Paris emerging from German occupation and in need of a fashion boost

In an all star International cast Juliette Binoche is the biggest surprise. She is English speaking Coco Chanel alongside Ben Mendelssohn as Christian Dior. John Malkovich is Lelong Balmain

Bristling with intrigue the series cleverly combines wartime thriller elements with a more lightweight look at the birth of haute couture in a shocking story of how fashion icon Christian Dior and his contemporaries including Coco Chanel, Pierre Balmain, and Cristobal Balenciaga navigated the horrors of World War II and launched modern fashion.

The New Look is filmed exclusively in Paris by Todd A Kessler and will make its global debut on Apple TV+ with the first three episodes onWednesday 14th February 2024, followed by new episodes weekly

On Apple TV+, followed by one episode every Wednesday through April 2024

Steppenwolf (2024) IFFR 2024

Dir: Adilkhan Yerzhanov | | Kazakhstan/Russia,102′

A hyper violent civil war rages across an apocalyptic landscape where gender conventions prevail in classic Western style: the men are the killers. One traumatised woman seeks to preserve life, that of her child, predictably kidnapped by organ traffickers (a ‘nice’ modern twist).

After his exquisite 2018 feature The Gentle Indifference of Life and 2022 thriller Assault, Yerzhanov returns to a vast wilderness for another Steppe legend love story: that of a mother for her child. The intrepid Tamara is determined to sacrifice her own life and safety to safeguard that of her son. In this endeavour hires an investigator, a reformed ex-convict who goes by the name of Steppenwolf and bears a canny resemblance to the mythological character, literally the ‘wolf of the Steppes’. Complete with shaggy hair, clear blue eyes and a swaggering gait he’s not a man to be underestmated as his victims soon discover to their chagrin.

Threatening and pacifying his female companion by turns, Steppenwolf is certainly menacing but also faintly ridiculous. Committed to these endless brutal murders, tersely executed with an axe or rotary cutting device, Steppenwolf goes about his business while Tamara remains meek and submissive, reduced to a mumbling, monosyllabic communication. At one point she seems to have died, lips turning purplish, but no, this woman is the heroine of the piece, an indomitable martyr empowered to withstand endless pain and emotional suffering to achieve her aims. Stylish and formally striking, the hostile landscape mirrors the film’s bloody violence – but a little more dark humour would have been welcome. Hard-going for the faint of heart. @MeredithTaylor

PREMIERING AT ROTTERDAM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL | 31 JANUARY 2024

The Worst Man in London (2024) IFFR 2024

Dir: Rodrigo Areias | Cast: Albano Jeronimo, Edward Ashley, Victoria Guerra, Edgar Morais, Carmen Chaplin | Portugal, Drama 122′

Charles Augustus Howell, the main character in this suggestive slow-burn drama from Portuguese director from Rodrigo Areias, was certainly a mercurial character: for some he distilled the vibrant qualities of the pre-Raphaelite era, others found him a rather a machiavellian rogue, suspecting him of blackmail and even forgery.

This is not a film about art as such, but an intriguing look at 19th century high society through a group of Victorian creatives whose aim was to see the world in a more realistic and natural light, inspired by the Italian painters of the 14th and 15th century. And while they look very Victorian through our modern day gaze, behind their often inscrutable personas, Arieas and his writer paint them as arcane, subversive and mired in intrigue in their tightly-knit, incestuous coteries, preferring to focus their attention on the allure of renaissance Italy with vibrant colours that romanticised the era, rather than on the harsh realities of industrial revolution, that was gearing up in London at the time.

Pacing-wise and with its leisurely, episodic structure The Worst Man in London recalls Eugene Green’s The Portuguese Nun. We meet the characters as if introduced to them at a cocktail party, in a series of charming vignettes and graceful set pieces, the drama glows like a jewel-box in Jorge Quintela’s imaginative camerawork.

The international cast includes Carmen Chaplin who is particularly good as Lady Posselthwaite. Edward Ashley plays Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Victoria Guerra, Lizzie Siddal and Christian Vadim (son of Catherine Deneuve) La Rothiere.

Howell, born in Portugal, was not just Ruskin and Rosetti’s agent, he also served as a model for Dante Gabriel Rossetti although he seems to have been air-brushed out of history largely due to his purported skulduggery and is brought back to life as the focus of this sumptuous period piece that unfolds as a lush and finely detailed society chronicle of the day, with Howell working his way through the ranks acquiring works and establishing relationships with the great and good. One of his celebrated coups is to persuade Rossetti to dig up and sell the works of poetry buried with his wife Lizzie Siddal. Albano Jeronimo is certainly convincing in the main role of Howell, with his elegant stature and saturnine looks. @MeredithTaylor

IFFR | WORLD PREMIERE Monday 29 January 2024

https://youtu.be/n9Ce8SucC7s?feature=shared

My French Film Festival 2024

Now in its 14th year, MyFrenchFilmFestival shines a spotlight on a new generation of French-language filmmakers and gives audiences around the world the chance to share their love of French cinema

JANE B. FOR AGNÈS V. (1987) directed by Agnès Varda

In this kaleidoscopic film made of various fragments of fictions, over various seasons, Jane Birkin plays various roles, including her own, with humour.

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JUNKYARD DOG (2023) directed by Jean-Baptiste Durand

Childhood friends Dog and Mirales’ relationship is upended when Elsa arrives in their small village in the South of France, but as romance blossoms for Dog, jealousy eats away at Mirales.

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POLARIS (2022) directed by Ainara Vera

Two sisters, one an expert sailor navigating the Arctic, are compelled to overcome fate and join forces; their journey guided by the polar star.

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MY SOLE DESIRE (2022) directed by Lucie Borleteau

Have you ever been to a strip club? But you’ve already wanted to – at least once – you didn’t dare, that’s all. This film tells the story of someone who dared.

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NO DOGS OR ITALIANS ALLOWED (2022) directed by Alain Ughetto

Alain Ughetto’s stop-motion animation tells the autobiographical story of his family’s exile from Northern Italy at the start of the 20th century.

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SPARE KEYS (2022) directed by Jeanne Aslan and Paul Saintillan

Sophie, 15, jumps at the chance to get the spare keys to her wealthy friend Jade’s house. A poetic, funny, and memorable first feature.

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STAMPEDE (2022) directed by Joelle Desjardins Paquette

When 9-year-old Lily is taken by her father on a surprise road trip to a truck-racing rodeo in far west of Canada, she soon realises she’s on a bigger adventure than she first thought.

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SUPER DRUNK (2023) directed by Bastien Milheau

While rummaging through her father’s wine cellar for bottles, Janus and Sam discover a strange machine.

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THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE (2023) directed by Patric Chiha

From 1979 to 2004 – from disco to techno – a man and woman frequent a huge nightclub in anticipation of a mysterious event.

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THE GREEN PERFUME (2022) directed by Nicolas Pariser

An actor finds himself embroiled in a shadowy conspiracy in Nicolas Pariser’s stunning combination of espionage, theatre, and the graphic novel.

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MY FRENCH FILM FESTIVAL | ON BFI PLAYER | January 19th – February 19th 2024

Reinas (2024) Sundance Film Festival 2024

Wri/Dir: Klaudia Reynicke-Candeloro | Chile, Drama 104’

It’s summertime 1992 in crisis-ridden Chile and actor turned cab driver Carlos Molina is really fed up. His clients don’t share his love of film and even his daughters fail to recognise him when he turns up at his ex-wife’s house to deliver a birthday present to his eldest daughter Lucia

America beckons and Elena and teenagers Lucia and Aurora are off to pastures new. But a dispondent farewell with their estranged dad only adds to the girls’ feelings of regret and instability at their upcoming departure especially as Aurora (Luana Vega) not as keen on leaving Lima as her rather morose mother for reasons that soon become apparent.

This is a well-paced and endearing coming of age domestic drama from Chile’s Klaudia Reynicke-Candeloro and one which refreshingly puts the focus on a father-daughter relationship with Gonzalo Molina particularly likeable as a down-on-his-luck dad trying to put a brave face on his challenging life and catch up on some quality time with his kids who are not as naive as he thinks. The titular ‘reinas’ have cottoned on to his efforts have them believe he is a ‘secret agent’. His youngest Lucia is asking him probing questions about his work, and Aurora already has a boyfriend Rony and is hiding a burning secret.

But Carlos’ relationship with ex Elena and her mother (veteran Chilean actor Susi Sanchez) is strained and he feels reticent to sign the girls’ release form – both parents must give their consent for their children to leave Chile and this quandary provides the film with its dramatic twist. Impressive visuals and retro production design add to the film’s allure. @MeredithTaylor

Grand Jury Prize | World Cinema Dramatic SUNDANCE 2024

World premiere 22 January 2024

The Disappearance of Shere Hite (2023)

Dir: Nicole Newnham | With: Dakota Johnson, Shere Hite | US Doc 118′

What is in a name? Or more to the point, what is in the named title of a work of documentation. The acclaimed documentary about the academic Shere Hite comes after acclaim at numerous film festivals including Sundance where it premiered over a year ago. The Disappearance of Shere Hite is a misnomer; another example of American Exceptionalism that declares one doesn’t exist if one escapes from the hermetic puritanism that holds sway in the laughable declared “Land Of The Free”.

Documentaries of this sort exist in a state of pedagogy for the unaware, at times this can be limiting but here documentarian Nicole Newnham (director of the transgressive documentary Crip Camp) uses several devices to create a narrative that impresses and creates the possibility of a series of ‘what ifs’ and ‘could bes’, these include Dakota Johnson reading from Hite’s dairies and writings and, more movingly, a collection of oral histories comprised of the letters she received from women who had filled out her questionnaire: this became her groundbreaking and incendiary ‘The Hite Report’, which was published in 1976.

The film glides through the chronology of her life in a nonlinear fashion which adds to the sense of mystery if you approach the film without much prior knowledge of Shere Hite. She was at Grad School where she discovered the first feminist women’s groups that were starting to spring to life in New York. Paying her way through school as a model, the variety of modelling that many in the industry look down their noses at: adverts for white goods and Robert McGinnis’ famous James Bond illustrations including on the shoulder of Sean Connery for Diamonds Are Forever.

It was Socrates who claimed that “Beauty is a short lived tyranny”. Right from the start of her modelling career Hite discovered the self-evident truth in that aphorism, and started to look for an ‘out’ before the industry would crush her like so many women before her. The final straw appears to be when she was cast in an advert for Olivetti, with the tagline: “The typewriter is so smart she doesn’t have to be.” From there she started writing questionnaires to hand out to women in the hope they would fill them in and post them back to her. She felt this was more likely to get a honest response than phone or in person interviews.

When the book was released it was an instant publishing phenomenon and she was invited to do lots of media appearances. This is a time we can now look back at and see the beginning of the Culture Wars that have continued in furiosity, and where we find now ourselves adrift from an empirical reality. As so many intelligent women have discovered, holding truth to power – especially 1970s patriarchy – means you will be attacked and demeaned in numerous ways. Her detractors cast doubt on her Scientific methods and flagged-up photographs she had posed for in ‘Playboy’ while a student.

The attacks only intensified when Shere started working on a male version of ‘The Hite Report’. This provided another opportunity for male critics and academics to refuse to believe the men questioned in the report, particularly in regards to their personal feelings and claims that toxic masculinity had affected relationships with their fathers, at home, and in workplace. It has taken decades for certain men to break through these negative attitudes. Robert Gottlieb (who died recently and was featured in the documentary made by his daughter, Turn Every Page) was one of the book’s only male supporters at the time. He claimed to have been devastated by the opinions shared that those men who took part.

In the end Shere Hite did what so many US Iconoclasts are forced to do, go into exile to avoid facing public humiliation or defamation. Her escape led to a second life in England and Germany. She died after a long illness in 2020. At that point the original Hite Report was the 30th best-selling book of all time. Ironically, most contemporary American feminists are unaware who she was and how important she was, standing alongside the legendary Sexologists: Alfred Kinsey and Masters & Johnson. @D_W_Mault

IN CINEMAS FROM 12 JANUARY 2024

Haunted (1995)

Dir: Lewis Gilbert | Cast: Aiden Quinn, Kate Beckinsale, John Gielgud, Anna Massey | UK Fantasy horror 95’

Based on a novel by James Holborn, like ‘Don’t Look Now’ this film starts with a prologue depicting a young girl drowning (a debt further acknowledged by a brief glimpse of Hilary Mason at her memorial service), but this time she’s in a long white dress rather than a red duffle coat.

In the more conventional hands of Lewis Gilbert the action then picks up in a twenties mansion in the style of Brideshead – complete with Anthony Andrews – and the plot proceeds to make it’s way with elements lifted from ‘The Halfway House’, ‘The Haunting’ and ‘The Shining’.

Aiden Quinn and a youthful Kate Beckinsale (who shows that she’s a modern girl by smoking, wearing jodhpurs & riding boots, driving like a maniac, swimming starkers, playing the piano in a kimono and enthusiastically making love) make an attractive pair of young leads, ably supported by Anna Massey as a disturbed old nanny, John Gielgud as the family doctor whose entrance is literally preceded by a cloud of smoke, and Liz Smith as a disconcertingly accurate fortune teller. @RichardChatten

Bonnard: Pierre et Marthe (2023)

Dir: Martin Provost | Cast: Cécile de France, Vincent Macaigne, Stacy Martin, Anouk Grinberg, André Marcon France. 2023. 122 mins.

Seduction follows a chance meeting in the street between impressionist painter Pierre Bonnard and Marthe Boursin (aka de Meligny) who becomes his model, muse and lover in 1893 Paris.

The coup de coeur and subsequent romantic relationship is sumptuously depicted in this lyrical latest outing from Breton writer/director Martin Provost and stars Vincent Macaigne and Cecile de France as the central couple whose turbulent mutual devotion endured until their deaths in the 1940s as Bonnard’s career flourished and Marthe became a noted artist of the day.

Captivated by her beauty Bonnard immediately puts brush to canvas painting the stunned Marthe in the nude. These avant-garde canvasses would go on to cause much chuntering in the salons. But Bonnard flatly refused to make Marthe a mother thinking it too bourgeois for his artistic lifestyle. Instead he encouraged her to paint.

The couple set up home in a rambling country villa on the banks of the Seine where Marthe swims everyday until her doctor prescribes hot baths for her asthma. Close friends Monet (Andre Marcon) and Vuillard (Gregoire Leprince-Ringuet) visit frequently. There’s a great deal of nude frolicking, the agile camera chasing after the passionate characters who live a life of artistic abandon in the sumptuous rural setting where summer never seems to cease in Guillaume Schiffman’s gorgeous camerawork. An incessant violin score is occasionally overbearing.

Despite her poor health, not helped by Bonnard’s infidelity with various women (played gamely by Stacy Martin as the unstable Renee Monchaty) and Anouk Grinberg as Misia Sert, his hard-edged and condescending patron), Marthe emerges the stronger more fleshed-out chactacter of the two, her fébrile intensity contrasting with Bonnard’s phlegmatic reticence to be drawn into any kind of debate that takes him away from his easel. By his own admission he apparently lacked the courage of his convictions: a creative with feet of clay.

As you might expect from the subject matter the film often ramps up the melodrama but Provost manages the tonal shifts with style in one of the most enjoyable films of his career so far. A dab hand at portraying maverick women, his 2008 film about an edgy artist Seraphine was lauded at the Césars, and Violette (2013) takes on the complex character of Simone de Beauvoir (Sandrine Kiberlain) seen through the eyes of her close friend and mentee Violette Leduc (Emmanuelle Devon).

Provost somehow avoids the trap of making this biopic preachy: de France and Macaigne play a credible couple whose deep love for each other feels real despite his philandering during which he maintains a low profile while everyone affected is in complete disarray. Captivating and compulsive this is a two-hour biopic worth watching. @MeredithTaylor

NOW ON RELEASE IN FRANCE | CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2023

Hana-Bi | Fireworks (1997)

Dir: Takeshi Kitano | Cast: Takeshi Kitano, Kayoko Kishimoto, Ren Osugi, Susumu Terajima, Tetsu Watanabe | Japan 98′

There’s a serene stillness that takes all the horror away from the unexpected outbursts of brutal violence that are almost funny – quite apart from the deadpan humour that Takeshi Kitano fully intended in his thoughtful thriller. This makes Fireworks extremely enjoyable as we watch him play an ex-cop whose marriage slowly gets back on its feet after his wife (Kayoko Kishimoto) comes out of hospital. Hana-Bi means fireworks but the words individually mean ‘flowers’ and ‘fire’

Fireworks is an extremely likeable film. Kitano directs and also stars without a shred of sentimentality, just business as usual as he tends to his wife and dispatches the odd criminal who gets in his way in an artfully composed arthouse thriller. His character’s minimal dialogue and terse exchanges also make this a joy to watch for those who hate scrolling through dialogue in an unfamiliar language. Clocking in a just over a hour and a half it also leaves you wanting more rather than less – often the case with lengthy Japanese and South Korean fare.

Inspector Nishi (Kitano) may be a dab hand with a flick knife – which he makes liberal use of – but his sense of honour is second to none. And he feels deeply responsible when his colleague Horibe (Ren Osugi) stands in for him getting life-changing injuries after attempting to arrest a criminal. Nishi encourages him to paint to fill the lonely hours when his wife subsequently leaves him. There’s an amusing vignette with Tetsu Watanabe as a scrap metal dealer.

The paintings are infact Kitano’s own work but provide a delicate leitmotif to the crime caper that went on to win the Golden Lion at Venice in 1997. The finale will leave you with much food for thought. @MeredithTaylor

AVAILABLE ON MUBI and PRIME VIDEO channels

Panic in Year Zero (1962)

Dir: Ray Milland Cast: Ray Milland, Jean Hagen, Mary Mitchel, Frank Avalon US thriller

A remarkably unflattering depiction of the ruthlessness that Americans prided themselves on being capable of during the Cold War (described by Denis Gifford as “Ray Milland’s illustrated handbook on What to Do When the Bomb Falls”) which makes ‘The Turner Diaries’ look like a Fabian Society publication.

In this tale of survival against the odds, a family leaves Los Angeles for a camping trip in the nick of time before a bomb destroys the city. Ray Milland, inspired by a short story from Ward Moore and directing a script from John Morton and Jay Simms, vouchsafes the inconvenient truth that, in the event of an attack by The Enemy, the first people patriotic Americans would turn the guns they’ve been hoarding so lovingly on would be other Americans – and ammunition would be of greater value than money.

The film one again proves the ‘holocaust theory’ in saluting an average working stiff who when his back’s to the wall gets his way by showing a total disregard for no one but himself and his wife and kids, which earns the final admiring tribute of a pair of state troopers as “five more good ones”. @RichardChatten.

NOW ON AMAZON

Rotterdam International Film Festival 2024

The International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) takes place this year from 25 January until 3rd February and the Tiger and Big Screen competitions for the 53rd edition are already raring to go.

Head South by Jonathan Oglivie opens the festival on Thursday 25 January. The celebration will close with La Luna. a comedy debut from Raihan Halim, about a conservative Malaysian village shaken by the arrival of a lingerie premiere of

This year’s Talks line-up features: Marco Bellocchio, Anne Fontaine, Alexander Kluge and Rachel Maclean.

IFFR’s Tiger Competition is the main festival platform for emerging film talent and features a selection of 14 titles in 2024. The Tiger Competition Jury for 2024 is Marco Müller, Ena Sendijarević, Nadia Turincev, Herman Yau and Billy Woodberry.

The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire, Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, 2024, United States, world premiere

Flathead, Jaydon Martin, 2024, Australia, world premiere

Grey Bees, Dmytro Moiseiev, 2024, Ukraine, world premiere

Kiss Wagon, Midhun Murali, 2024, India, world premiere

Me, Maryam, the Children and 26 Others, Farshad Hashemi, 2024, Iran, Germany, Czech Republic, world premiere

Moses, Jenni Luhta, Lauri Luhta, 2024, Finland, world premiere

La Parra, Alberto Gracia, 2024, Spain, world premiere

Praia Formosa, Julia De Simone, 2024, Brazil, Portugal, world premiere

Rei, Tanaka Toshihiko, 2024, Japan, world premiere

Reise der Schatten, Yves Netzhammer, 2024, Switzerland, world premiere

She Fell to Earth, Susie Au, 2024, Hong Kong, world premiere
sr, Lea Hartlaub, 2024, Germany, world premiere

Swimming Home, Justin Anderson, 2024, United Kingdom, world premiere

Under a Blue Sun, Daniel Mann, 2024, France, Israel, world premiere

Clockwise, stills from the films: La Parra, Praia Formosa, She Fell to Earth, Swimming Home

Big Screen Competition

The Big Screen Competition offers a wide-ranging selection, bridging the gap between popular, classic and arthouse cinema features. 12 titles have been selected for IFFR 2024. IFFR invites an audience jury to grant the VPRO Big Screen Award.

Aire: Just Breathe, Leticia Tonos Paniagua, 2024, Dominican Republic, Spain world premiere

Children of War and Peace, Ville Suhonen, 2024, Finland, world premiere

Confidenza, Daniele Luchetti, 2024, Italy, world premiere

Eternal, Ulaa Salim, 2024, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, world premiere

Milk Teeth, Sophia Bösch, 2024, Germany, Switzerland, world premiere

The Old Bachelor, Oktay Baraheni, 2024, Iran, world premiere

Portrait of a Certain Orient, Marcelo Gomes, 2024, Brazil, Italy, Lebanon, world premiere

Seven Seas Seven Hills, Ram, 2024, India, world premiere

Steppenwolf, Adilkhan Yerzhanov, 2024, Kazakhstan, world premiere

Tenement, Inrasothythep Neth, Sokyou Chea, 2024, Cambodia, world premiere

The Worst Man in London, Rodrigo Areias, 2024, Portugal, world premiere

Yohanna, Robby Ertanto, 2024, Indonesia, United Kingdom, Italy, world premiere

Clockwise, stills from the films: Eternal, Milk Teeth, Steppenwolf, Seven Seas Seven Hills

Talks

Each edition, IFFR presents a Talks programme that aims to inspire – providing fresh perspectives and profound insights into the world of filmmaking.

This year’s lineup features luminaries such as Marco Bellocchio (Rapito, Limelight); Rachel Maclean, one of this edition’s artists in Focus; Alexander Kluge (Cosmic Miniatures, Harbour); and Anne Fontaine (Boléro, Limelight), who each will discuss their remarkable careers.

The full Talks lineup will be announced in the second week of January.

ROTTERDAM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL | 25 January – 3 February 2024

Society of the Snow (2023)

Dir: J A Bayona | With: Enzo Vogrincic, Agustin Pardella, Matias Recalt, Esteban Bigliardi | Spain, Thriller 144′

The crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 in the Andes mountains in the South American springtime of October 13 has been told many times before and certainly makes for compulsive viewing in J A Bayona’s horrifying version of the tragedy. Society of the Snow is Spain’s Oscar hopeful but perhaps Piers Paul Read’s 1974 book ‘Alive’ is still the most emotionally impactful retelling, leaving the visual impact of the events to our imagination. Bayona bases his version on a more personal account from Uruguayan written Pablo Vierci who grew up with some of the victims.

From the warm comfort of our own viewing experience, how can we possibly imagine what it really felt like when the Uruguayan Old Christians Club rugby union team were forced to cope in sub zero temperatures after the plane carrying them to a match in Chile was sliced in half by the mountains. Sixteen passengers survived the initial crash and the event hit international headlines. Wearing scanty clothing and with no equipment whatsoever the victims made it through the initial days. But after the search was called off they were forced into an unconscionably grim 72-day fight for survival forcing them into cannibalism. Of the forty five original passengers, only sixteen would make it back home.

This is not an involving, character driven film but one that launches from a brief introduction to the team into collective trauma, reflecting their common goal to survive. Bayona opts for sensationalism staying true to his roots in horror, working with mostly newcomers. There are no leads just an amorphous central casting. The film ostensibly deals with isolation, suffering and survival, but on a much deeper level the victims were forced to acknowledge the true impact of their plight. Their Catholic faith was test to the limit, not by praying in a Church, but on a bare mountainside through unselfish acts of human sacrifice. Desperately hungry, most ate their dead companions consoling themselves in the belief that this was the true meaning of Holy Communion. In this enforced team-building situation, the men are put to the test and forced to face the ultimate truth: who are, and how do we relate to one another when everything is stripped away in a snowbound wilderness

Narrated by Numa Turcatti (Enzo Vogrincic), who joined the trip at the last minute, the film is a lasting testament to all those who died, naming them individually in inter-titles as they die. Proving once again that truth is often more incredible than fiction, the nightmarish events the survivors are forced to endure really beggar belief: endless blizzards, an avalanche that traps them with their friends’ dead bodies for several days. Technically Society is faultless in Pedro Luque’s spectacular cinematography but there are longueurs and issues with pacing in a screenplay that involves four writer.s Society of the Snow feels overlong at over two and a half hours. So in conclusion more of a last tribute to those that died than a moving engaging experience. My advice is stick to the book. @MeredithTaylor

NOW ON NETFLIX

The Lady Vanishes (1938)

Dir: Alfred Hitchcock | Cast: Michael Redgrave, Margaret Lockwood, Basil Redford, Naunton Wayne, Catherine Lacey, Googie Withers | UK Thriller 90’

The Lady Vanishes probably represented the apex of Hitchcock’s Gainsborough period as well as marking possibly his earliest foray into the world of international politics that eventually culminated in ‘Topaz’ about the Cuban missiles crisis.

His background working in German films is evident from the production design, classic Hitchcock tropes include staging the action on a train, the use of cute little models and oversized props with a memorable MacGuffin.

Basil Redford and Naunton Wayne exhibit the traditional British sang froid by exhibiting more concern about the Test Match scores back home; while the sight of Catherine Lacey as a nun in high heels must have given Ken Russell ideas. @RichardChatten

Nuovo Olimpo (2023) Netflix

Dir: Ferzan Ozpetek | Cast: Luisa Ranieri, Greta Scarano, Damiano Gavino, Aurora Giovinazzo, Andrea Di Luigi, Alvise Rigo | Italy, drama, 113’

Nuovo Olimpo is the 9th feature film during three decades for the Italian/Turkish director Ferzan Ozpetek. The film has been quietly slipped into the Netflix schedules and the surprise is that it brings the director full circle to his striking debut Haman. Largely set in a Turkish steam house which becomes a place for two men to secretly meet, this 1999 film is remembered for its gentle and profound feeling for humanity and the coded mysterious ways we navigate questions relating to family, relationships and gender.

There is a strong hint the true story that inspired Nuovo Olimpo provides Ozpetek with what may be his most personal film since Haman. Many of the preceding films including Fati Ignoranti! (2022), Cuore Sacro (2005) and Mine Viganti (2010) are generally romantic generic family dramas possibly aimed more at the local rather than world film market. Nuovo Olimpo may seem slight and unassuming. Looked at more closely, it reveals a confident director with an understanding of how astute and careful narrative, sensitive performances and skilful layered editing can result in a nuanced film more effortlessly complex than first appears.

The story itself is of an eternal nature in which two young bisexual men meet but are unable to build the attraction into a complete gay relationship. Enea (Damiano Gavino) is a film crew set worker and Pietro (Andrea di Luigi) a trainee medical student who first lock eyes on each other in an opening sequence that is a homage to Gena Rowlands and John Cassavetes’ Gloria. This is one of Ozpetek’s many love letters to the cinema with Nuovo Olimpo both the title of the film and the name of the cinema in the film that will be a space which becomes as safe to meet for the men much as the steam room does in Hamam.

The film has four acts, set in 1988,1998 and 2015 and begins in 1978 with a chance follow-up encounter between two men in a classic arthouse repertory cinema that will be familiar to those who remember The Biograph Cinema in London’s Victoria. Ozpetek captures details of cruising in a cinema to make this comparable to sequences in Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy, Clements This Angry Age and Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye Dragon Inn. The cinema is presided over by a matronly box office fag hag woman with an astute knowledge of her male customers and Ozpetek includes clips on the cinema screen from Renato Castellani’s Nella Citta l’Inferno (1959) aka And We The Wild Women, with Magnani and Masina exuding fiery Italian passions while men in the audience cruise in auditoriums and toilets.

Ozpetek adds into the romantic tragic narrative hints of the cinema’s own ‘amour fou’ with subtle references to McCarey’s An Affair to Remember, Almodóvar’s Talk to Her and Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession. The film may also contain a fleeting reference to Ophul’s Letter from an Unknown Women with a street map containing the words: “so time and space won’t get in the way” which becomes a form of letter that returns to the men over the decades. One of the film’s most moving sequences involves the wife of one of the men who provides her husband with the key to follow his heart, much as Ang Lee centres on the women in Brokeback Mountain as the real creators of the destiny of men unable to realise a love unspoken in.

Ozpetek is aided by the delicate movement of beautiful wide screen camerawork by Gian Filippo Corticelli, both lush and restrained music, uniformly good acting including relaxed and very natural explicit nudity and sex scenes, while the cast undergo ageing over three decades.

Ultimately it is with his choice of theme that Ozpetek makes Nuovo Olimpo most satisfying. He explores how love can both envelope as well as separate, create doubt and distance between what is real as well as imagined. As if impossible loves live on longer, the film contains an exquisite sequence in which the two men are separated in space but united in time as they watch Nella Citta l’Inferno on Television screens as a reminder of time lost, but not forgotten.

The final sequence is masterly and may well be one of the most beautiful in recent cinema. As the two men face each other in an empty street and make a decision that changes both lives, Ozpetek contemplates that if stinginess is all that heaven allows, there is also the choice to live on in the dream of an impossible love. The sequence concludes with an unbroken camera movement combining reality and a moment in time that was never to be. The film anticipates that there may be much more to come from this remarkable filmmaker. @PeterHerbert

Peter Herbert is Curator Manager at The Arts Project, 215 Weedington Road! London NW5 4PQ

https://youtu.be/NatMTfOZsl8?si=pGqSptdDGCL2nsJ9

The Coughing Horror (1924)

Dir: Fred Paul | Cast: H Agar Lyons, Fred Paul, Humberston Wright, Fred Morgan | Silent Horror 31′

I first became aware of this intriguing title as a teenager when I came across it in the chapter on British silent horror films in Denis Gifford’s ‘A Pictorial History of Horror Movies’.

Now nearly a hundred years old, it seems a good time to review The Coughing Horror, which made its first appearance in August 1924 as an episode in the series ‘Further Mysteries of Dr. Fu Manchu’.

It sees Nayland Smith coming up against the “Coughing Horror”, Dr Fu-Manchu’s servant, when commissioned by the British Government to investigate a series of murders,

The ordinary settings and lack of style – with nighttime exteriors obviously shot in daylight – give the film an almost documentary feel in our contemporary gaze. Nayland Smith takes it all rather in his stride and, in the long tradition of white actors playing Chinamen, little attempt has been made to make the doctor appear authentically oriental apart from his satanic eyebrows and affecting a kimono, while presiding over a rum collection of roughnecks including a hunchbacked dwarf.

Horror-wise, I can safely say that in half a century of watching weird films, I have never seen such a bizarre sight as what Gifford described as a “hirsute henchman” and the film itself terms “A monstrous Cynocephalyte, Half Man……Half Ape”.

At the film’s conclusion (SLIGHT SPOILER COMING:) the good doctor simply makes off in a cab. Doubtless the world shall hear from him again. @RichardChatten

NOW AVAILABLE TO WATCH FREE IN THE UK ON BFiPLAYER.

Scala!!! (2024)

Dirs: Ali Catterall, Jane Giles | UK Doc with Barry Adamson, John Akomfrah, Rick Baker, Ralph Brown, Paul Burston, Adam Buxton, Caroline Catz | 96′

Cinemas are edenic places, some would describe them as palaces which to be fair they were at some point in the 20th century. But between that time of art deco grandeur and the mostly soulless multiplexes and faux art houses that blight our horizons something else existed. Something magical.

Of all the places, the Scala is the most storied in the UK and we now have a myth-making introduction for all those that missed out. There should be a warning for those cinephiles currently hiding out in cinemas across the UK, this is what was taken from you.

The danger with a documentary like Scala!!! is that it must skirt the chasm of describing experiences that have passed and will never be repeated and the cynical idea of nostalgia as false consciousness… Happily I can report that it never falls into that trap.

When we look and listen to the numerous talking heads, from filmmakers: John Waters, Mary Harron, Caroline Catz and John Akomfrah; musicians: Jah Wobble, Barry Adamson, Douglas Hart and Thurston Moore; critics: Kim Newman and Alan Jones, we can perhaps understand what François Truffaut meant when he claimed that ‘film lovers are sick, sick people’.

The sense of the outsider reigns supreme here, as an existential answer to an unanswered question that searches for finding a like-minded peer group. When this happens hubs are important, and the Scala was one of these. Located for the longest time in Kings Cross a good decade before it became the homogeneous gentrified experience that it now is. Difficult to explain what urban areas in the UK were like in the 80s. King Cross could be described as the relative to New York’s Time Square of legendary grindhouses before that was Disneyfied by Rudy Giuliani.

Alongside everything else that the 80s gave us we had to deal with rampant homophobia, the Scala was a safe space before the term started to have various connotations. It was very definitely a ‘Queer” space, queer in the sense that celebrates transgression in the form of visible difference from normie culture.

It has been a long process for Scala!!! to come to light, a crowd funded budget, a book and a yearly national film festival, but through it all the directors Jane Giles (former programmer at the Scala and author of the book) and Ali Catterall (film critic and author) have kept the faith and battled to bring into existence a wonderful documentary that has been acclaimed at various film festivals and will now be going on a nationwide tour to cinemas across perfidious Albion.

What we are left to ponder, after luxuriating in the text, is where we are now that everything has become homogeneous and nondescript. It is true that grubby cinemas of faded glamour very rarely exist anymore, but what have we sacrificed for the boutique cinemas and multiplexes? Comfort, security, safety and a lack of cinema cats. I certainly know where I would rather experience the 7th art. It is yet another example of the mainstream swallowing everything like an out-of-control whale. Outside of London the notion of the Rep cinema simply doesn’t exist, which is a form of cultural vandalism. One thinks of one of the defining lines in John le Carré’s ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’, when Bill Hayden says, ‘it has all become so ugly.’ @DWMault

In UK and Irish cinemas from 5 January 2024. Scala!!! will be available digitally on BFI Player and released on BFI Blu-ray on 22 January 2024 | A season of the Scala’s greatest hits, Scala: Sex, drugs and rock and roll cinema, runs at BFI Southbank throughout January with selected films on BFI Player.

https://youtu.be/Oc85T_TGuxE?si=4xAO9hcFhPtyQhA1

Night Swim (2023)

Dir: Bryce McGuire | Cast: Kerry Condon, Wyatt Russell, Amelie Hoeferle, Gavin Warren, Jodi Long | US Horror 98′

An awarding-wing short film is sometimes worthy of the feature treatment, especially when the producers Jason Blum and James Wan were responsible for the Halloween series, M3GAN and Malignant.

Not the case in this horror outing directed by Bryce McGuire who puts endless jumps scares ahead of an emotionally affecting storyline when an average American family move into a spacious home in Minnesota that boasts, in estate agents’ parlance, a luxury swimming pool.

Unfortunately the wily agent (Nancy Lenehan) has omitted to mention a series of tragedies at the property – one involving the disappearance of a young girl called Rebecca – hence the attractive price.

An opening sequence warns us that something nasty other than dead leaves is lurking in the murky depths, and that things are not going to go swimmingly for Kerry Condon and her husband Wyatt Russell. He is Ray Waller, a baseball pro diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. She is Eve, a stay-at-home mother of teenagers Izzy (Amelie Hoeferle) and Elliot (Gavin Warren).

And sure enough, the kids are soon frightened by a series of poolside scares largely involving a ghoul who surfaces as the waters mysteriously muddy. Strangely, Ray’s illness seems to improve, but there’s no explanation as to why. And all these events are too repetitive and drawn out, there not being enough material to really make a substantial impact to engage us for the 98 minute running time. Don’t bother to come in, the water’s not lovely. @MeredithTaylor

NOW ON RELEASE IN UK CINEMAS

The Big Country (1958)

Dir: William Wyler | Cast: Charles Bickford, Charlton Heston, Jean Simmons, Burl Ives | US Western

Having earned his spurs as a director of ‘B’ westerns during the silent era, William Wyler strode back into town thirty years later to supercharge the genre with the help of Technicolor and Technicolor to embellish the petty squabbling that passed for a plot in ‘The Big Country’.

A New England sea captain in the 1880s arrives at his fiancée’s sprawling Texas ranch, where he becomes embroiled in a feud between two families over a valuable patch of land.

Wyler’s co.producer Gregory Peck created something of an anomaly being about as vertical an actor as you could possibly find, which probably necessitated the frequent use of longshots in the staging.

Charles Bickford and Charlton Heston bring considerable authority to relatively small supporting roles; while after the scenery the most impressive feature is probably Chuck Connors’ teeth, his provenance as Burl Ives’ proving rather hard to swallow, but his interest in the radiant Jean Simmons being only too plausible. @RichardChatten

Mr Sardonicus (1961)

Dir: William Castle | Cast: Oscar Homolka, Ronald Lewis, Audrey Dalton | US Horror 90’

William Castle usually located his films in a very contemporary America but this time he transferred his activities to a mythical nineteenth century European country called Gorslava.

The template this time was the Hammer horrors and Roger Corman’s adaptations of Poe, with a nod towards ‘The Phantom of the Opera’, “The Man Who Laughs’ and ‘Eyes Without a Face’.

It’s full of the usual staircases, torture chambers, dungeons and graveyards but despite a much larger budget Castle was still far too stingy for colour. For fans of old movies there’s the presence of Vladimir Sokoloff as Sardonicus’s father and Oscar Homolka as a wall-eyed retainer with a penchant for leeches.

Without divulging the famous trick ending, Castle probably also pinched that too, since it bears a suspicious resemblance to the finale of ‘Casanova’s Big Night’. @MeredithTaylor

Dream Scenario (2023)

Wri/Dir: Kristoffer Borgli | Cast: Nicolas Cage, Julianne Nicholson, Lily Bird, Jessica Clement, Dylan Baker, Michael Cera | US Psychological Horror 101′

A million miles away from his crazed roles of the recent past such as Renfield and Mandy Nicolas Cage is terrific here as an introverted professor caught up in a celebrity scandal set in Ottawa, of all places.

Written and directed by Norwegian Kristopher Brogli Dream Scenario is more of a nightmare really and not for the feint-hearted. Some may leave the cinema with a feeling of overwhelming sadness and even despair at the situation Cage finds himself in as Paul Mathews, a mild-mannered – even boring – family man.

From his humdrum existence in a leafy suburbs of some provincial university, Paul, a bearded and bedraggled biology professor married with two girls, becomes an over-night sensation – in the worst possible way – when the otherwise unremarkable man – who probably wears crocs on his days off – enters the dream lives of random individuals as their ‘bete noire’.

Desperate to gain recognition with his academic work on animal camouflage, Paul sadly only finds notoriety when his students report strange dreams where he appears, first as an innocent bystander, then as an ardent lover, and finally as belligerent presence intent on wreaking havoc in their collective subconscious. Soon, his colleagues and even ex girlfriends start to surface claiming to have been affected by these bizarre nocturnal occurrences.

With his ordinary man Borgli’s horrific surrealist fantasy leads us through a ghastly real experience of modern day America embroiled in fame, celebrity, cancel culture and even AI. This is undoubtedly Cage’s best performance in years and we really feel for Paul as he desperately tries to justify his position as a decent, hard-working human being just trying to make his way through life when he is catapulted into being both the hero and then antihero of the piece. Brilliant idea that’s a little overwrought in the final stretch. @MeredithTaylor

NOW ON RELEASE

The Edge of the Blade (2023)

Dir: Vincent Perez | Cast: Vincent Perez, Doria Tillier, Damien Bonnard, Guillaume Galiléenne, Roschdy Zem | France, Historical drama 101′.

Vincent Perez has chosen a bold theme for his capable fourth feature, a historical drama set in 1887 about the honour of duelling. The Edge of the Blade is interesting more than gripping with its horseback sabre fighting, use of epees, firearms and other 19th century weapons.

Duelling was banned in France although armed duels still took place as a way of solving disputes and to preserve the honour of those seeking prompt justice in the higher echelons of society. The practise continued in France until the Second World War.

Best known for roles in Cyrano de Bergerac and Le Bossu, Perez also stars here as the agile but utterly charmless one dimensional antihero of the piece, Louis Berchere, who seems hellbent on dying in the name of honour – and to be honest perhaps that’s better than ending up in a care home. A ferocious combatant in the battle to preserve his honour we see him demanding a duel to the death in the film’s early part.

Despite the masculine nature of the subject the Swiss actor turned director manages to weave in a timely side-plot about a real life suffragette style feminist called Marie-Rose Astie de Valsayre (Doris Tillier) whose left hook causes some serious damage not least to the honour of the solid French cast of Damien Bonnard, Guillaume Galiléenne – and Roschdy Zem, a swashbuckling instructor at a fencing school, who she later seduces although there’s no bodice-ripping to speak of here.

Perez and his co-writer (and wife) Karine Silla have certainly done their research; the rolling titles at the end of the film explain that Marie-Rose was a significant figure during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 and is remembered for her campaign to get women the vote, and attempting to overturn legislation prohibiting women from wearing trousers.

The men all brush up against Marie-Rose’s brazen assertiveness – it was unknown at that time for women to be other than feminine and pliant. In a surprising twist, she challenges Bonnard to a duel but he manages to delay proceedings claiming her rig-out is unsuitable, whereupon the police are seen arriving on the brow of a nearby hill.

Mostly unfolding in interior scenes there are several impressive outdoor duel sequences – one in the woods and another in an open barn in remote fields. And while there’s no real dramatic arc or complexity in the characters, Perez and his DoP Lucie Badinaud manage the fighting set pieces with verve, and the finale is spectacular both for the duellists and the horses involved. @MeredithTaylor

NOW ON RELEASE IN FRANCE and BELGIUM | AUDIENCE AWARD KARLOVY VARY 2023

The Story of Mankind (1957)

Wri/Dir: Irwin Allen | Cast: Ronald Colman, Hedy Lamarr, Groucho Marx, Harpo Marx, Agnes Moorehead, Virginia Mayo, Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, Cedric Hardwicke, Dennis Hopper, Jon Carradine | US drama 100’

One of the many jokers to be found in that pack of twaddle ‘The Fifty Worst Movie of All Time’, this isn’t really as much fun as that makes it sound, but it has its moments; the touching scene with Cathy O’Donnell as a Christian girl hiding from the Romans, in particular, belonging in a much better film.

The Devil and the Spirit of Man debate the everlasting question: is humanity ultimately good or evil?.

Some of it sounds pretty ludicrous – it’s true, but for the most part The Story of Mankind is played pretty straight, and the scene with Dennis Hopper and Marie Windsor as Napoleon & Josephine is watchable; while Ronald Colman, Vincent Price and Cedric Hardwicke bring a rare class to the heavenly tribunal.

That Irving Allen was a better producer than a director is evident from the fact that he managed to include all three Marx Brothers in the thing, but not as a team; while Groucho as Paul Minuet buying Manhattan from the indians shows how unfunny he can be if hasn’t got a decent script. @RichardChatten

Sundance Film Festival 2024

Kicking off the year in snowy Utah from January 18th – January 28th, Sundance Film Festival is always hotly anticipated amongst the film community. Here’s a selection of what’s on offer in January:

U.S. DRAMATIC COMPETITION

Between the Temples / U.S.A. (Director and Screenwriter: Nathan Silver, Screenwriter: C. Mason Wells, Producers: Tim Headington, Theresa Steele Page, Nate Kamiya, Adam Kersh, Taylor Hess) — A cantor in a crisis of faith finds his world turned upside down when his grade school music teacher reenters his life as his new adult bat mitzvah student. Cast: Jason Schwartzman, Carol Kane, Dolly de Leon, Caroline Aaron, Robert Smigel, Madeline Weinstein. World Premiere. Available online for Public.

Dìdi (弟弟) / U.S.A. (Director, Screenwriter, and Producer: Sean Wang, Producers: Carlos López Estrada, Josh Peters, Valerie Bush) — In 2008, during the last month of summer before high school begins, an impressionable 13-year-old Taiwanese American boy learns what his family can’t teach him: how to skate, how to flirt, and how to love your mom. Cast: Izaac Wang, Joan Chen, Shirley Chen, Chang Li Hua. World Premiere. Available online for Public.

Exhibiting Forgiveness / U.S.A. (Director, Screenwriter, and Producer: Titus Kaphar, Producers: Stephanie Allain, Derek Cianfrance, Jamie Patricof, Sean Cotton) — Utilizing his paintings to find freedom from his past, a Black artist on the path to success is derailed by an unexpected visit from his estranged father, a recovering addict desperate to reconcile. Together, they learn that forgetting might be a greater challenge than forgiving. Cast: André Holland, John Earl Jelks, Andra Day, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor. World Premiere. Available online for Public.

Good One / U.S.A. (Director, Screenwriter, and Producer: India Donaldson, Producers: Diana Irvine, Graham Mason, Wilson Cameron) — On a weekend backpacking trip in the Catskills, 17-year-old Sam contends with the competing egos of her father and his oldest friend. Cast: Lily Collias, James Le Gros, Danny McCarthy. World Premiere. Available online for Public.

In The Summers / U.S.A. (Director and Screenwriter: Alessandra Lacorazza, Producers: Alexander Dinelaris, Rob Quadrino, Fernando Rodriguez-Vila, Lynette Coll, Sergio Lira, Cristóbal Güell) — On a journey that spans the formative years of their lives, two sisters navigate their loving but volatile father during their yearly summer visits to his home in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Cast: René Pérez Joglar, Sasha Calle, Lío Mehiel, Leslie Grace, Emma Ramos, Sharlene Cruz. World Premiere. Available online for Public.

Love Me / U.S.A. (Directors and Screenwriters: Sam Zuchero, Andy Zuchero, Producers: Kevin Rowe, Luca Borghese, Ben Howe, Shivani Rawat, Julie Goldstein) — Long after humanity’s extinction, a buoy and a satellite meet online and fall in love. Cast: Kristen Stewart, Steven Yeun. World Premiere. Available online for Public.

Ponyboi / U.S.A. (Director: Esteban Arango, Screenwriter: River Gallo, Producers: Mark Ankner, River Gallo, Adel “Future” Nur, Trevor Wall) —Unfolding over the course of Valentine’s Day in New Jersey, a young intersex sex worker must run from the mob after a drug deal goes sideways, forcing him to confront his past. Cast: River Gallo, Dylan O’Brien, Victoria Pedretti, Murray Bartlett, Indya Moore. World Premiere. Available online for Public.

A Real Pain / U.S.A., Poland (Director, Screenwriter, and Producer: Jesse Eisenberg, Producers: Dave McCary, Ali Herting, Emma Stone, Jennifer Semler, Ewa Puszczyńska) — Mismatched cousins David and Benji reunite for a tour through Poland to honor their beloved grandmother. The adventure takes a turn when the pair’s old tensions resurface against the backdrop of their family history. Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Kieran Culkin, Will Sharpe, Jennifer Grey, Kurt Egyiawan. World Premiere. Available online for Public.

Stress Positions / U.S.A. (Director and Screenwriter: Theda Hammel, Producers: Brad Becker-Parton, John Early, Stephanie Roush, Allie Jane Compton, Greg Nobile) — Terry Goon is keeping strict quarantine in his ex-husband’s Brooklyn brownstone while caring for his nephew — a 19-year-old model from Morocco named Bahlul — bedridden in a full leg cast after an electric scooter accident. Unfortunately for Terry, everyone in his life wants to meet the model. Cast: John Early, Qaher Harhash, Theda Hammel, Amy Zimmer, Faheem Ali, John Roberts. World Premiere. Available online for Public.

Suncoast / U.S.A. (Director and Screenwriter: Laura Chinn, Producers: Jeremy Plager, Francesca Silvestri, Kevin Chinoy, Oly Obst) — A teenager who, while caring for her brother along with her audacious mother, strikes up an unlikely friendship with an eccentric activist who is protesting one of the most landmark medical cases of all time. Inspired by a semi-autobiographical story. Cast: Laura Linney, Woody Harrelson, Nico Parker. World Premiere. Available online for Public.

U.S. DOCUMENTARY COMPETITION

As We Speak / U.S.A. (Director and Producer: J.M. Harper, Producers: Sam Widdoes, Peter Cambor, Sam Bisbee) — Bronx rap artist Kemba explores the growing weaponization of rap lyrics in the United States criminal justice system and abroad — revealing how law enforcement has quietly used artistic creation as evidence in criminal cases for decades. World Premiere. Available online for Public.

Daughters / U.S.A. (Directors: Angela Patton, Natalie Rae, Producers: Lisa Mazzotta, Justin Benoliel, Mindy Goldberg, Sam Bisbee, Kathryn Everett, Laura Choi Raycroft) — Four young girls prepare for a special Daddy Daughter Dance with their incarcerated fathers, as part of a unique fatherhood program in a Washington, D.C., jail. World Premiere. Available online for Public.

EVERY LITTLE THING / Australia (Director: Sally Aitken, Producers: Bettina Dalton, Oli Harbottle, Anna Godas) — Amid the glamour of Hollywood, Los Angeles, a woman finds herself on a transformative journey as she nurtures wounded hummingbirds, unraveling a visually captivating and magical tale of love, fragility, healing, and the delicate beauty in tiny acts of greatness. World Premiere. Available online for Public.

FRIDA / U.S.A., Mexico (Director: Carla Gutiérrez, Producers: Katia Maguire, Sara Bernstein, Justin Wilkes, Loren Hammonds, Alexandra Johnes) — An intimately raw and magical journey through the life, mind, and heart of iconic artist Frida Kahlo. Told through her own words for the very first time — drawn from her diary, revealing letters, essays, and print interviews — and brought vividly to life by lyrical animation inspired by her unforgettable artwork. World Premiere. Available online for Public.

Gaucho Gaucho / U.S.A., Argentina (Directors and Producers: Michael Dweck, Gregory Kershaw, Producers: Cameron O’Reilly, Christos V. Konstantakopoulos, Matthew Perniciaro) — A celebration of a community of Argentine cowboys and cowgirls, known as Gauchos, living beyond the boundaries of the modern world. World Premiere. Available online for Public.

Love Machina / U.S.A. (Director and Producer: Peter Sillen, Producer: Brendan Doyle) — Futurists Martine and Bina Rothblatt commission an advanced humanoid AI named Bina48 to transfer Bina’s consciousness from a human to a robot in an attempt to continue their once-in-a-galaxy love affair for the rest of time. World Premiere. Available online for Public.

Porcelain War / U.S.A., Ukraine (Director and Screenwriter: Brendan Bellomo, Director: Slava Leontyev, Producers and Screenwriters: Aniela Sidorska, Paula DuPre’ Pesmen, Producers: Camilla Mazzaferro, Olivia Ahnemann) — Under roaring fighter jets and missile strikes, Ukrainian artists Slava, Anya, and Andrey choose to stay behind and fight, contending with the soldiers they have become. Defiantly finding beauty amid destruction, they show that although it’s easy to make people afraid, it’s hard to destroy their passion for living. World Premiere. Available online for Public.

Skywalkers: A Love Story / U.S.A. (Director, Screenwriter, and Producer: Jeff Zimbalist, Producers: Maria Bukhonina, Tamir Ardon, Chris Smith, Nick Spicer) — To save their career and relationship, a daredevil couple journey across the globe to climb the world’s last super skyscraper and perform a bold acrobatic stunt on the spire. World Premiere. Available online for Public.

Sugarcane / U.S.A., Canada (Director: Julian Brave NoiseCat, Director and Producer: Emily Kassie, Producer: Kellen Quinn) — An investigation into abuse and missing children at an Indian residential school ignites a reckoning on the nearby Sugarcane Reserve. World Premiere. Available online for Public.

Union / U.S.A. (Directors: Stephen Maing, Brett Story, Producers: Samantha Curley, Mars Verrone) — The Amazon Labor Union (ALU) — a group of current and former Amazon workers in New York City’s Staten Island — takes on one of the world’s largest and most powerful companies in the fight to unionize. World Premiere. Available online for Public.

WORLD CINEMA DRAMATIC COMPETITION

Brief History of a Family / China, France, Denmark, Qatar (Director and Screenwriter: Jianjie Lin, Producers: Ying Lou, Yue Zheng, Yiwen Wang) — A middle-class family’s fate becomes intertwined with their only son’s enigmatic new friend in post one-child policy China, putting unspoken secrets, unmet expectations, and untended emotions under the microscope. Cast: Feng Zu, Keyu Guo, Xilun Sun, Muran Lin. World Premiere. Available online for Public.

Girls Will Be Girls / India, France, Norway (Director, Screenwriter, and Producer: Shuchi Talati, Producers: Richa Chadha, Claire Chassagne) — In a strict boarding school nestled in the Himalayas, 16-year-old Mira discovers desire and romance. But her sexual, rebellious awakening is disrupted by her mother who never got to come of age herself. Cast: Preeti Panigrahi, Kani Kusruti, Kesav Binoy Kiron. World Premiere. Available online for Public.

Handling the Undead / Norway (Director and Screenwriter: Thea Hvistendahl, Screenwriter: John Ajvide Lindqvist, Producers: Kristin Emblem, Guri Neby) — On a hot summer day in Oslo, the newly dead awaken. Three families faced with loss try to figure out what this resurrection means and if their loved ones really are back. Based on the book by John Ajvide Lindqvist. Cast: Renate Reinsve, Bjørn Sundquist, Bente Børsum, Anders Danielsen Lie, Bahar Pars. World Premiere. Available online for Public.

In The Land of Brothers / Iran, France, Netherlands (Directors, Screenwriters, and Producers: Raha Amirfazli, Alireza Ghasemi, Producers: Adrien Barrouillet, Frank Hoeve, Charles Meresse, Emma Binet, Arya Ghamavian) — Three members of an extended Afghan family start their lives over in Iran as refugees, unaware they face a decades-long struggle ahead to be “at home.” Cast: Hamideh Jafari, Bashir Nikzad, Mohammad Hosseini. World Premiere. Available online for Public.

Layla / U.K. (Director and Screenwriter: Amrou Al-Kadhi, Producer: Savannah James-Bayly) — When Layla, a struggling Arab drag queen, falls in love for the first time, they lose and find themself in a transformative relationship that tests who they really are. Cast: Bilal Hasna, Louis Greatorex, Safiyya Ingar, Darkwah, Terique Jarrett, Sarah Agha. World Premiere. Available online for Public.

Malu / Brazil (Director and Screenwriter: Pedro Freire, Producers: Tatiana Leite, Sabrina Garcia, Leo Ribeiro, Roberto Berliner) — Malu — a mercurial, unemployed actress living with her conservative mother in a precarious house in a Rio de Janeiro slum — tries to deal with her strained relationship with her own adult daughter while surviving on memories of her glorious artistic past. Cast: Yara de Novaes, Carol Duarte, Juliana Carneiro da Cunha, Átila Bee. World Premiere. Available online for Public.

Reinas / Switzerland, Peru, Spain (Director and Screenwriter: Klaudia Reynicke, Screenwriter and Producer: Diego Vega, Producers: Britta Rindelaub, Thomas Reichlin, Daniel Vega, Valérie Delpierre) — Surrounded by social and political chaos in Lima during the summer of 1992, Lucia, Aurora, and their mother, Elena, plan to leave and seek opportunities in the United States. Their farewell involves reconnecting with their estranged father, Carlos, adding turbulence to the regrets, hopes, and fears of their emotional departure. Cast: Abril Gjurinovic, Luana Vega, Jimena Lindo, Gonzalo Molina, Susi Sánchez. World Premiere. Available online for Public.

Sebastian / U.K., Finland, Belgium (Director and Screenwriter: Mikko Mäkelä, Producer: James Watson) — Max, a 25-year-old aspiring writer living in London, begins a double life as a sex worker in order to research his debut novel. Cast: Ruaridh Mollica, Hiftu Quasem, Ingvar Sigurdsson, Jonathan Hyde, Leanne Best, Lara Rossi. World Premiere. Available online for Public.

Sujo / Mexico, U.S.A., France (Directors, Screenwriters, and Producers: Astrid Rondero, Fernanda Valadez, Producers: Diana Arcega, Jewerl Keats Ross, Virginie Devesa, Jean-Baptiste Bailly-Maitre) — When a cartel gunman is killed, he leaves behind Sujo, his beloved 4-year-old son. The shadow of violence surrounds Sujo during each stage of his life in the isolated Mexican countryside. As he grows into a man, Sujo finds that fulfilling his father’s destiny may be inescapable. Cast: Juan Jesús Varela, Yadira Pérez, Alexis Varela, Sandra Lorenzano, Jairo Hernández, Kevin Aguilar. World Premiere. Available online for Public.

Veni Vidi Vici / Austria (Director and Screenwriter: Daniel Hoesl, Producer: Ulrich Seidl) — The Maynards and their children lead an almost perfect billionaire family life. Amon is a passionate hunter, but doesn’t shoot animals, as the family’s wealth allows them to live totally free from consequences. Cast: Laurence Rupp, Ursina Lardi, Olivia Goschler. World Premiere. Available online for Public.

WORLD CINEMA DOCUMENTARY COMPETITION

Agent of Happiness / Bhutan, Hungary (Director and Producer: Arun Bhattarai, Director: Dorottya Zurbó, Producers: Noémi Veronika Szakonyi, Máté Artur Vincze) — Amber is one of the many agents working for the Bhutanese government to measure people’s happiness levels among the remote Himalayan mountains. But will he find his own along the way? World Premiere. Available online for Public.

The Battle for Laikipia / Kenya, U.S.A. (Director and Producer: Daphne Matziaraki, Director: Peter Murimi, Producer: Toni Kamau) — Unresolved historical injustices and climate change raise the stakes in a generations-old conflict between Indigenous pastoralists and white landowners in Laikipia, Kenya, a wildlife conservation haven. World Premiere. Available online for Public.

Black Box Diaries / Japan, U.S.A., U.K. (Director and Producer: Shiori Ito, Producers: Eric Nyari, Hanna Aqvilin) — Journalist Shiori Ito embarks on a courageous investigation of her own sexual assault in an improbable attempt to prosecute her high-profile offender. Her quest becomes a landmark case in Japan, exposing the country’s outdated judicial and societal systems. World Premiere. Available online for Public.

Eternal You / Germany, U.S.A. (Directors: Hans Block, Moritz Riesewieck, Producers: Christian Beetz, Georg Tschurtschenthaler) — Startups are using AI to create avatars that allow relatives to talk with their loved ones after they have died. An exploration of a profound human desire and the consequences of turning the dream of immortality into a product. World Premiere. Available online for Public.

Ibelin / Norway (Director: Benjamin Ree, Producer: Ingvil Giske) — Mats Steen, a Norwegian gamer, died of a degenerative muscular disease at the age of 25. His parents mourned what they thought had been a lonely and isolated life, when they started receiving messages from online friends around the world. World Premiere. Available online for Public.

IGUALADA / Colombia, U.S.A., Mexico (Director: Juan Mejía Botero, Producers: Juan E. Yepes, Daniela Alatorre, Sonia Serna) — In one of Latin America’s most unequal countries, Francia Márquez, a Black Colombian rural activist, challenges the status quo with a presidential campaign that reappropriates the derogatory term “Igualada” — someone who acts as if they deserve rights that supposedly don’t correspond to them — and inspires a nation to dream. World Premiere. Available online for Public.

Never Look Away / New Zealand (Director, Screenwriter, and Producer: Lucy Lawless, Screenwriters and Producers: Matthew Metcalfe, Tom Blackwell) — New Zealand–born groundbreaking CNN camerawoman Margaret Moth risks it all to show the reality of war from inside the conflict, staring down danger and confronting those who perpetuate it. World Premiere. Available online for Public.

A still from A New Kind of Wilderness by Silje Evensmo Jacobsen, an official selection of the World Documentary Competition at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute. Photo by Maria Gros Vatne.

A New Kind of Wilderness / Norway (Director: Silje Evensmo Jacobsen, Producer: Mari Bakke Riise) — In a forest in Norway, a family lives an isolated lifestyle in an attempt to be wild and free, but a tragic event changes everything, and they are forced to adjust to modern society. World Premiere. Available online for Public.

Nocturnes / India, U.S.A. (Director and Producer: Anirban Dutta, Director: Anupama Srinivasan) — In the dense forests of the Eastern Himalayas, moths are whispering something to us. In the dark of night, two curious observers shine a light on this secret universe. World Premiere. Available online for Public.

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat / Belgium, France, Netherlands (Director and Screenwriter: Johan Grimonprez, Producers: Daan Milius, Rémi Grellety) — In 1960, United Nations: the Global South ignites a political earthquake, musicians Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach crash the Security Council, Nikita Khrushchev bangs his shoe denouncing America’s color bar, while the U.S. dispatches jazz ambassador Louis Armstrong to the Congo to deflect attention from its first African post-colonial coup. World Premiere. Available online for Public.

NEXT

Desire Lines / U.S.A. (Director, Screenwriter, and Producer: Jules Rosskam, Screenwriter: Nate Gualtieri, Producers: André Pérez, Amy E. Powell, Brittani Ward) — Past and present collide when an Iranian American trans man time-travels through an LGBTQ+ archive on a dizzying and erotic quest to unravel his own sexual desires. Cast: Theo Germaine, Aden Hakimi. World Premiere. Documentary. Available online for Public.

Kneecap / Ireland, U.K. (Director and Screenwriter: Rich Peppiatt, Producers: Jack Tarling, Trevor Birney) — There are 80,000 native Irish speakers in Ireland. 6,000 live in the North of Ireland. Three of them became a rap group called Kneecap. This anarchic Belfast trio becomes the unlikely figurehead of a civil rights movement to save the mother tongue. Cast: Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, Naoise Ó Cairealláin, JJ Ó Dochartaigh, Michael Fassbender, Josie Walker, Simone Kirby). World Premiere. Fiction. Available online for Public.

Little Death / U.S.A. (Director and Screenwriter: Jack Begert, Screenwriter: Dani Goffstein, Producers: Darren Aronofsky, Andy S. Cohen, Dylan Golden, Brendan Naylor, Sam Canter, Noor Alfallah) — A middle-aged filmmaker on the verge of a breakthrough. Two kids in search of a lost backpack. A small dog a long way from home. Cast: David Schwimmer, Gaby Hoffmann, Dominic Fike, Talia Ryder, Jena Malone, Sante Bentivoglio. World Premiere. Fiction. Available online for Public.

REALM OF SATAN / U.S.A. (Director and Screenwriter: Scott Cummings, Producers: Caitlin Mae Burke, Pacho Velez, Molly Gandour) — An experiential portrait depicting Satanists in both the everyday and in the extraordinary as they fight to preserve their lifestyle: magic, mystery, and misanthropy. Cast: Peter Gilmore, Peggy Nadramia, Blanche Barton. World Premiere. Documentary. Available online for Public.

Seeking Mavis Beacon / U.S.A. (Director and Writer: Jazmin Renée Jones, Producer: Guetty Felin)— Launched in the late ’80s, educational software Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing taught millions globally, but the program’s Haitian-born cover model vanished decades ago. Two DIY investigators search for the unsung cultural icon, while questioning notions of digital security, AI, and Black representation in the digital realm. World Premiere. Documentary. Available online for Public.

Tendaberry / U.S.A. (Director, Screenwriter, and Producer: Haley Elizabeth Anderson, Producers: Carlos Zozaya, Matthew Petock, Zachary Shedd, Hannah Dweck, Theodore Schaefer, Daniel Patrick Carbone) — When her boyfriend goes back to Ukraine to be with his ailing father, 23-year-old Dakota anxiously navigates her precarious new reality, surviving on her own in New York City. Cast: Kota Johan, Yuri Pleskun. World Premiere. Fiction. Available online for Public.

PREMIERES

The American Society of Magical Negroes / U.S.A. (Director, Screenwriter, and Producer: Kobi Libii, Producers: Julia Lebedev, Eddie Vaisman, Angel Lopez) — A young man, Aren, is recruited into a secret society of magical Black people who dedicate their lives to a cause of utmost importance: making white people’s lives easier. Cast: Justice Smith, David Alan Grier, An-Li Bogan, Drew Tarver, Rupert Friend, Nicole Byer. World Premiere. Fiction.

And So It Begins / U.S.A., Philippines (Director, Screenwriter, and Producer: Ramona S. Diaz) — Amidst the traditional pomp and circumstance of Filipino elections, a quirky people’s movement rises to defend the nation against deepening threats to truth and democracy. In a collective act of joy as a form of resistance, hope flickers against the backdrop of increasing autocracy. World Premiere. Documentary. Available online for Public.

DEVO / U.K., U.S.A. (Director: Chris Smith, Producers: Chris Holmes, Anita Greenspan, Danny Gabai) — Born in response to the Kent State massacre, new wave band Devo took their concept of “de-evolution” from cult following to near–rock star status with groundbreaking 1980 hit “Whip It” while preaching an urgent social commentary. World Premiere. Documentary.

A Different Man / U.S.A. (Director and Writer: Aaron Schimberg, Producers: Christine Vachon, Vanessa McDonnell, Gabriel Mayers) — Aspiring actor Edward undergoes a radical medical procedure to drastically transform his appearance. But his new dream face quickly turns into a nightmare, as he loses out on the role he was born to play and becomes obsessed with reclaiming what was lost. Cast: Sebastian Stan, Renate Reinsve, Adam Pearson. World Premiere. Fiction.

Freaky Tales / U.S.A. (Directors, Screenwriters, and Producers: Ryan Fleck, Anna Boden, Producers: Poppy Hanks, Jelani Johnson) — In 1987 Oakland, a mysterious force guides The Town’s underdogs in four interconnected tales: Teen punks defend their turf against Nazi skinheads, a rap duo battles for hip-hop immortality, a weary henchman gets a shot at redemption, and an NBA All-Star settles the score. Basically another day in the Bay. Cast: Pedro Pascal, Jay Ellis, Normani Kordei Hamilton, Dominique Thorne, Ben Mendelsohn, Ji-Young Yoo. World Premiere. Fiction.

Ghostlight / U.S.A. (Director and Screenwriter: Kelly O’Sullivan, Director and Producer: Alex Thompson, Producers: Pierce Cravens, Chelsea Krant, Ian Keiser, Eddie Linker, Alex Wilson) — When a construction worker unexpectedly joins a local theater’s production of Romeo and Juliet, the drama onstage starts to mirror his own life. Cast: Keith Kupferer, Dolly de Leon, Katherine Mallen Kupferer, Tara Mallen. World Premiere. Fiction.

SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL | 18 – 28 JANUARY 2024

Winter Break | The Holdovers (2023)

Dir: Alexander Payne | Cast: Paul Giamatti, Dominic Sessa, Da’Vine Joy Randolph | US Comedy 133′

Paul Giamatti is the reason to watch this bittersweet comedy satire from Alexander Payne – his best since Nebraska in 2013. This time written by David Hemingson the film is already set to be a critics’ favourite for its witty acerbic observations of school life, along the lines of the Dead Poets Society back in 1989.

Giamatti is Paul, a disenchanted history professor in a private boarding school in 1970s snowbound New England where he is one of three characters forced to stay over for the holidays with nowhere else to go.

The boys are a privileged and self-entitled lot but Paul digs his heals in academically and discipline-wise in a darkly humorous drama that morphs into the ultimate buddy movie about a man who makes a sacrifice for the good of another. Hemingson’s pithy script is strewn with Latin and Greek truisms and mottos and Paul is constantly quoting them with a twinkle in his eye (“it’s the left one you have to look at”): the most appropriate here is from Cicero “Non obis solum” which apparently means: “not for ourselves alone are we born”.

Paul Giamatti | Best Male Actor in a Musical/Comedy 81st Golden Globes | Credit: Virisa Yong

Giamatti is at his best when playing these kind of philosophical roles: a disappointed disciplinarian determined to make the best of things while maintaining his strict code of conduct. And we feel for him in his attempts to remain in control and at a distance while fully aware of the potential glumness of the situation for Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), a bright but awkward teenager whose mother has last-minute romantic plans for the Christmas break that don’t involve her son. Making up the motley threesome in the echoing boarding school corridors is bereaved cafeteria manager Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) who son has recently been killed in Vietnam.

Paul – who suffers various ailments – wants nothing more than to be left alone to enjoy his break buried mystery novels and nice things to eat. Instead he is forced to contend with a complex emotional triangle which will play out in fraught but surprising ways: Not unlike the average Christmas for most families then.

Payne imbues this all with a bittersweet understanding of the issues involved. Mary is sensitively played by Da’Vine Joy Randolph, as she bitterly reflects on her son’s death, but always with warmth and never overdoing the sentimentality. All three interact convincingly without a shred of self-pity or rancour given the situation they find themselves in, and the warmth that Giamatti gradually brings to bear on his ‘odd couple’ dynamic with his pupil Angus – who has his own tragic secret – is well-judged and subtle. Sessa manages to be cynical and vulnerable in his thoughtful feature debut. The best thing about Winter Break is that Payne never opts for trite solutions or one-dimensional characters with Paul, Angus or Mary.

With its far-reaching themes Winter Break (aka The Holdovers) is possibly the most apposite Christmas film of this season with its simple Christian message. It’s a film that works for any season, for that matter, with its wry humour and melancholy nostalgia – and not too much tinsel to make it watchable well into the New Year. @MeredithTaylor

BEST PERFORMANCE BY A FEMALE ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE IN ANY MOTION PICTURE | DA’VINE JOY RANDOLPH | BEST PERFORMANCE BY A MALE ACTOR IN A MOTION PICTURE – MUSICAL/COMEDY PAUL GIAMATTI | 81st GOLDEN GLOBES 2024

BEST MALE ACTOR IN A MUSICAL/COMEDY 81st GOLDEN GLOBES – PAUL GIAMATTI

Don’t Bother to Knock (1952)

Dir: Roy Ward Baker | Cast: Marilyn Monroe, Anne Bancroft, Richard Widmark, Donna Corcoran | UK Drama

Based on a novel by Charlotte Armstrong called ‘Mischief’. If you were ever curious to see Marilyn Monroe as Blanche DuBois this stark Fox quickie cheaply entirely shot in the studio – which few people have even heard of, let alone seen – gives some idea of what her interpretation would have been like.

Ironically she’d only recently supported Bette Davis in All About Eve, who herself later starred in what director Roy Baker called “the one about the baby-sitter who just happens to be a psychopath”. Richard Widmark however jumped at the then rare opportunity to play a character who wasn’t a giggling psychopath, while it’s also notable as Anne Bancroft’s film debut. Already constantly late and unable to hit her cues; being Elisha Cook Jr.’s neice was probably already an inauspicious start in life. And like her last completed film, The Misfits, Don’t Bother to Knock is highly uncomfortable to watch since Monroe’s precarious mental state playing a girl just out of an institution is only too evident from the end result.@RichardChatten

NOW ON AMAZON

The Incident (1967)

Dir: Larry Pearce | Cast: Tony Musante, Martin Sheen, Beau Bridges, Brick Peters, Ruby Dee | US Thriller.

Still largely unknown but it’s generated a lot of lively discussion on the IMDb, I’ve seen a lot of films in my time and this I unhesitatingly nominate as the scariest I’ve ever seen since it’s based on a situation you could find yourself on the way home without the trouble of going out of town to the Bates Motel.

Taking place in the days when night trains’ lack of corridors made them death traps and historically of interest as both Martin Sheen’s film debut and Thelma Ritter’s swansong; others have commented upon the grimly amusing fact that the police automatically assume the black guy is the culprit.

Banned outright by the British censor, it would probably still have problems today in this regard, but went on to win Best Screenplay for Nicolas E Baehr at Mar Del Plata, South America’s foremost film festival, with a script proving that the simplest ideas are always the most successful and a shoestring budget can produce something far more interesting than a shedload of money (Texas Chainsaw Massacre being another case in point). The result is a tense and nerve-shredding Michael Haneke style exploitation thriller set in the 1960s when New York was in the grip of moral decline. @RichardChatten

Artie Shaw: Time is All You’ve Got (1985)

Dir/Wri: Brigitte Berman | Canada | 1985 | 115m | English

An Oscar-winning music documentary about the mercurial clarinetist Artie Shaw returns to the screen after many years in a pristine new restoration.

Shaw (1920-2004) was no ordinary musician: his restless intellectual curiosity and uncompromising nature took him from postwar poverty to stardom in Hollywood where he would tirelessly reinvent himself as a pioneering saxophonist and bandleader, flouting the colour barrier of the time by hiring African Americans like Billie Holiday, Hot Lips Page and Roy Eldridge to play alongside him. Shunning celebrity in the 1940s Shaw would go on to write four bestsellers. His charisma and matinee idol good looks saw him marrying eight times, his wives included Lana Turner, Ava Garner and Evelyn Keyes. He even dated Rita Hayworth.

In Brigitte Berman’s Artie Shaw: Time is All You’ve Got (1985) we join Artie in the privacy of his own home as he talks us through his five-decade career, enlivened by interviews and a treasure trove of photos and archival film footage. Berman refuses to try anything tricksy or complicated with her storyline, adopting a straightforward chronological structure – and this is one of the plus points of this engrossing Oscar-winning documentary.

She sets the scene with a brief prologue. Artie Shaw (1910-2004) was born Arthur Arshawsky on the Lower East Side, to immigrant parents. An only child, he was teased for being Jewish when his family later moved to Connecticut. Retreating into books and music he taught himself the clarinet, practising eight hours a day, to escape his loneliness: “I just wanted to get up there on the stage in the bright lights with those pretty girls…and get out of where I was living”.

After ‘expelling himself’ from school to focus on music he soon found work as a jobbing clarinetist and saxophonist and headed to New York which was the capital of jazz in 1929. There the best work was to be found on the radio stations and Shaw was well paid. By the end the of the 1930s he would be earning USD 60k a week. From time to time during his career he became disenchanted by the music scene, taking time out to reflect on his second love, writing. In one of these ‘sabatacle’ breaks he bought a farm in Bucks County and hoping to spend the rest of his life there coming to the conclusion eventually that his recalcitrant personality and inability to compromise was better suited to writing than show business which required constant collaboration.

All that said, Shaw would go on to become one of the most popular stars of the 1930s and 40s Swing era – and a friendly rival to “King of Swing” Benny Goodman with his own compositions like “Nightmare”. His big break came in 1938 with a recording of Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine”. After that he never looked back as a leading light on the big-band circuit.

But it wasn’t always plain sailing – heading for the West Coast in 1939 to support soldiers during the war effort he fell ill with leukaemia, but was soon back on his feet after a ground-breaking treatment. Here his fame often got in the way of his solidarity with the others in his desire to entertain troops, and be assisted in his efforts to do so. When asked on one occasion: “Who do think you are?” He answered: I know who I am: but who do YOU think I am?”

Tiring of fame during the ‘jitterbug’ era when he literally walked offstage after being hit by a dancer’s heel during a stint as the house bandleader at New York’s Pennsylvania Hotel. The public was offended when Shaw angrily branded the jitterbugger as ‘morons’, for not taking music more seriously. Undeterred, he refused to come back, but of course he would return.

Although he never professed to be an actor, Shaw appeared alongside Fred Astaire and Paulette Goddard in H C Potter’s 1940 outing Second Chorus that sees Artie taking on two competitive college students (Burgess Meredith and Fred Astaire) after hiring their band manager Ellen Miller (Godard). The pair then compete to win Ellen’s heart.

Berman is an award-winning Canadian film director best known for her 1981 documentary debut BIX: Ain’t none of them play like him yet, which focused on another jazz legend Bix Beiderbecke. Berman shows how Shaw’s restlessness and intellectual curiosity drove him forward to explore his creativity and collaborate with a number of well known stars of the time including vocalist Mel Tormé, drummer Buddy Rich – who give interviews – and actress/ex-wife Evelyn Keyes (Gone With The Wind), whose other ex-husbands included director John Huston. @MeredithTaylor

A tribute to my father Gordon Taylor who was inspired to learn the clarinet by Artie Shaw | Screening at Film Forum from Friday, January 5 to Thursday, January 11 – the New York premiere of a new 4K restoration, supervised by the director.

Häxan (1922)

Dir/Wri: Benjamin Christensen | Doc, Silent, Denmark 97′

An amusing horror curio made in Denmark in 1922 that aims, in an episodic style, to tell the story of witchcraft through the ages. In conclusion director Benjamin Christensen attributes the black arts to female hysteria, as diagnosed by Freud. Some may find the lewd nude sequences a sinister representation of the occult others merely view them as the slightly crude behaviour of a bygone era. But the evocative score in some versions certainly adds to the film’s creepy allure along with the sonorous narration provided by Willian S Burroughs delivered in an offbeat style that somehow dumbs down the film’s more outlandish pretensions. @MeredithTaylor

NOW ON JANUS FILMS AND YouTube or Amazon.

Sleeping Car to Trieste (1948)

Dir: John Paddy Corsairs | Cast: Jean Kent, Albert Lieven, Derrick De Marney, Paul Dupuis | UK Crime drama 95′

A reminder of the days when travelling by rail actually seemed incredibly glamorous especially on the Orient Express that provides the exotic setting for this 1948 thriller that sees spies pursuing a stolen diary.

Director John Paddy Carstairs is no Walter Forde but this serviceable remake of Forde’s 1932 film based on Clifford Grey’s story looks good through the lens of cameraman Jack Hildyard.

Albert Lieven is likewise no Conrad Veidt but looks good in black tie. On the distaff side Rona Anderson receives an introducing credit while Jean Kent shows poise as his partner in crime. The only member of the original cast is Finlay Currie who originally played an American but is now an irascible Englishman; while Bonar Colleano and Michael Balfour supply the real thing. @RichardChatten

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE

The Three Musketeers: Milady (2023)

Dir: Martin Bourboulon | France, Adventure drama 115′

The second part of this spectacular sortie with our four French Musketeers opens in 1627 and this time puts Milady at the centre of the swashbuckling, bodice-ripping epic originally penned by Alexandre Dumas.

Once again Martin Bourboulon directs a script by Matthieu Delaporte and Alexandre de la Patellière. There is a brief catch-up with Part I in the opening scenes and the emphasis here is on mood and manoeuvres rather than an involving and memorable storyline – not helped by the break between films. Refer to the novel if you want a more involving experience, although the our hot heroes certainly make for this enjoyable to watch.

Eva Green is mistressful as Milady de Winter, a fictional character who features in the later part of Alexandre Dumas’ original novel. But there’s nothing timid about this tumultuous temptress who is the hired assassin of Cardinal Richelieu. In the first part we saw her throw herself from a clifftop but she survived to tell the tale and is not going to give up without a fight in seducing the sultry and tousled hair D’Artagnan – and who could blame her – but he is desperate to defend a pouty paramour of his own in the shape of Constance Bonacieux (Lyna Khoudri).

Once again England is the enemy and Milady is plotting to engage France in a complex war aimed at ridding the country of King Louis XIII (Louis Garrel really looks the part with his wig and moustache). This is cloak and dagger stuff and involves plenty of sword fights with D’Artagnan (François Civil), Athos (Vincent Cassel), Porthos (Pio Marmaï) and Aramis (Romain Duris complete with eyeliner) all pulling out all the stops. There is a surprise in store for Athos who has his own romantic issues to tackle but he’s keeping his powder dry in this eventful capitulation to Part I.

Eva Green makes for a mysterious Milady. Smirking and smouldering seductively she joins a long list of actresses who have played the character on screen. Most notable are Barbara La Marr alongside Douglas Fairbanks in Fred Niblo’s 1921 production. Lana Turner vyed with Gene Kelly in George Sidney’s 1948 drama; Faye Dunaway had two goes at the role in the early seventies with a starry cast of Oliver Reed, Raquel Welch and Christopher Lee. French actress Emmanuelle Beart featured in a TV mini series in 2005, and Mila Jovovitch played her in Paul W S Anderson’s 2011 epic which was not deemed as success. @MeredithTaylor

From 15 December in French K and Irish cinemas.

The Portrait (2023)

Dir: Simon Ross | Cast: Natalia Córdova-Buckley, Ryan Kwanten, Virginia Madsen, Mark-Paul Gosselaar | US Thriller

There’s an unnerving power behind Simon Ross’s feature debut – a Dorian Gray style psychodrama involving a damaged man and his wife who seems to be suffering from a syndrome called pathological grief. The Portrait is shrouded in secrets and unreliable memories but the characters feel cliched and bogus and never really make us care enough to uncover the truth. And that’s possibly the point: It appears that reality is a moveable feast in this saturnine mood piece, written and produced by David Griffiths (of Collateral Damage fame).

After Alex (Ryan Kwanten) suffers life-changing injuries in a devastating accident his capable wife Sofia (Natalia Córdova-Buckley) becomes full time carer to her vicious catatonic husband. In the attic of their palatial Californian villa she uncovers a disarming painting, purportedly a self-portrait, of Alex’s great-grandfather Calvin – a dead ringer for her objectionable hubby. The sinister painting certainly spooks Sofia out and comes alive in nifty jumps scares. Maybe Sofia is just imagining all this – or is buried guilt surfacing from her subconscious?.

Two morose blond women then enter the fray attempting to flesh out the family backstory. They are Basic Instinct style lovers Esther and Mags (Virginia Madsen), a distant cousin of Alex. Virginia Madsen is a good actress but Mags is not her finest hour. And this is where The Portrait starts to feel less plausible and more flimsy as is edges into the realms of kitsch fantasy.

With her impenetrable screen magnetism (and back muscles Mike Tyson would be proud of) Sofia holds it all together against the odds. But our credibility of her doting acceptance of the violent catatonic beast she has to put up with is stretched to breaking point, and that’s probably why she reaches out to the troubled gardener Brookes (Mark-Paul Gosselaar), a strong silent type who is also harbouring a weird secret under his overalls. The two have a brief liaison after Sofia invites him into the house for emotional support: “I’ve got vodka”.

As a sinister soundtrack weighs down on us we gradually realise that Sofia is also hiding a secret that explains Alex’s attitude, and why his love and gentleness for his wife has somehow morphed into brutality. This enigma gives the film a driving force and an undeniable allure, powering it forward to a fierce finale. The Portrait is an interesting study in the timely ‘war of narratives’. @MeredithTaylor

The Portrait is available on digital platforms from 11 December.

Along Came Love (2022)

Director: Katell Quillévéré | Cast: Anaïs Demoustier, Vincent Lacoste, Hélios Karyo, Morgan Bailey, Josse Capet, Paul Beaurepaire, Margot Ringard Oldra | France, Drama 125′

Katell Quillévére, best known for her heart-rending 2013 drama Heal the Living, really knows how to bring beauty and intense emotion to the screen without shying away from difficult themes. The opening titles of her latest film Along Came Love (Le Temps d’aimer) show archive footage of the public humiliation of French women or ‘collabos’ who engaged with German soldiers during the Second World War. Rather like the ‘tarring and feathering’ carried out by the IRA on women suspected of involvement with British forces during the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland these reflect the unspeakable face of misogyny. What follows, by contrast, is a poignant and ravishingly depicted love story starring Anaïs Demoustier and Vincent Lacoste and set in Brittany in 1947. Despite its unevenness in chronicling four decades of their life, Along Came Love will win your heart.

Demoustier is Madeleine, a collabo whose young son Daniel (Hélios Karyo) is the result of a brief affair with a German soldier. Disgraced and desperate to escape the past she is working as a waitress in a seaside restaurant where she meets François (Vincent Lacoste) a wealthy intellectual, bashful in his beret and dapper navy suit. Madeleine is decked out in Breton national costume with a starched white headdress that certainly adds to her allure. Love is in the air and Francois orders two glasses of champagne, one he offers to her.

The director and her co-writer Gilles Taurand don’t quite manage to keep us convinced of their fraught story during the film’s two hour running time. There are certainly bursts of intensity to the fractious wartime marriage but also times where melodrama takes over and leaves us confused: intellectually and sexually, the two appear to misfire – Francois is an old school academic, Madeleine a somewhat lightweight character given to a flirtatiousness that seems inconsistent with the couple’s supposed romantic bliss which sends them down the aisle and then to his spacious apartment in Paris.

Life in the capital is often turbulent and this conflict plays out during the time the couple have fled Paris and are living in Châteauroux during the 1950s, where they run a bar frequented by American GI’s from a nearby military base. Here they meet and become involved in a ‘menage a trois’ with a Black soldier named Jimmy (Morgan Bailey) who fires up their sexual fantasies with his lusty corpulence. But the affair between them feels gauche and unconvincing. In contrast Madeleine’s relationship with her son (played as a young man by Paul Beaurepaire) seems much more authentic. All in all, Demoustier and Lacoste manage to carry the film through these awkward moments and into the 1960s and 1970s where her stylish rigouts accurately reflect the times as the story builds to its devastating conclusion.

During his studies François had apparently had an illicit affair with a male student who comes back to haunt him in a dramatic turns of events involving arson and the authorities. Nobody wants to be in trouble with the French police but soon the inevitable occurs and Francois is taken away.

All this feels less authentic than Madeleine’s more reasonable backstory, based, apparently, on the life of Quillévéré’s own grandmother. With its echoes of Douglas Sirk’s 1958 outing A Time to Love and a Time to Die this arthouse melodrama from the Ivorian director is certainly a welcome addition but not one of her best. @MeredithTaylor

Perfect Days (2023)

Dir: Wim Wenders | Cast: Koji Yakusho, Tokio Emoto, Arisa Nakano, Yumi Aso | Drama 123′

Wim Wenders’ latest cinematic sortie celebrates the simple pleasures in life seen through the day to day existence of a lavatory attendant in Tokyo, where these facilities are a genuine art form kept immaculately clean by this elegant janitor.

Perfect Days has the same gentle rhythms and sympathetic quirkiness as Paris Texas but this time the main character is at peace with his modest lifestyle. Late middle age finds Hirayama satisfied with the status quo and able to embrace change when it makes a welcome appearance, and not disappointed when it goes away again. Recognise this person in yourself? Then Perfect Days is your film.

Koji Yakusho is a joy to behold and his captivating presence (as Hirayama) radiates throughout the film drawing us into a delightful fable where life just bobs along contentedly in a state of grace often called ‘flow’. Hirayama finds his happiness in music, books, food and photography.

Wim Wenders has long been fascinated by cities: and Tokyo has frequently come under his radar: his stylish1980s documentary Notebook On Cities And Clothes also ponders creative potential. And here the focus of his protagonist’s days is the lavatory: form and function. And Tokyo’s water closets are the most inventively designed, and arguably the most pristine known to mankind, largely thanks to Hirayama and the locals whose sense of awareness and civilisation is second to none, public ablutions-wise.

More a philosophical meditation than a drama Perfect Days is nonetheless mesmerising. It brings the veteran German director’s technique and lightness of touch together with a vital ingredient that makes him one of film’s geniuses. Effortless and minimalism, this is a magical concoction, a meaning-of-life feature that gets to the very heart of human existence with its sheer simplicity. It could also bore the pants off mainstream audiences with its ‘nothing-really-happens’ banality.

A typical day for Hirayama sees him waking at dawn in his spartan apartment where he shaves and sips tea before slipping into his ‘Tokyo Toilets’ overalls for the drive to work. Despite a menial job he cuts a dapper figure in his blue cotton jumpsuit and seems cheerful in his endeavour: to keep the capital’s lavatories spotless. A goofy young colleague Takashi (Tokio Emoto) frets and moans about his love life and lack of money, but that ship has long sailed for Hirayama, these issues no longer concern him.

Music is his companion and we enjoy a score of iconic ’60s tunes, most significantly Lou Reed’s ‘Perfect Days’, which gives the film its title, along with Van Morrison and The Rolling Stones. Lunch and dinner are enjoyed with his regular bartenders, and here Wenders conjures up a culinary essence of contemporary Tokyo. Hirayama also enjoys photography; trees are of particular interest, and he takes cuttings from root stock potting the perfect little shoots, complete with soil, with the help of a paper container kept conveniently in his wallet. After a wash in the communal baths he beds down on his futon where he reads to the light of Tokyo’s neon illuminations. His dream-life is delicately etched in black and white montages evoking the Japanese concept of ‘komorebi’ and created by the director’s wife Donata Wenders.

Alone but not lonely and totally at ease with himself, Hirayama barely utters a word throughout but engages volubly when the need arises, as with Mama (Sayuri Ishikawa), a middle-aged woman who runs a noodle bar he often visits. His niece Niko (Arisa Nakano) makes a brief appearance, providing a welcome female presence in Hirayama’s life and fleshing out a backstory that speaks volumes. He looks on with a philosophical, knowing shrug of the shoulders when her mother arrives.

Tokyo is very much a character here beautifully captured by Franz Lustig’s perfect camerawork. The final sequence of Hirayama’s facial expressions as he drives through the night provides a charismatic valediction to a memorable but slender snapshot of a satisfying life. @MeredithTaylor

NOW ON RELEASE IN FRANCE

East of Elephant Rock (1978)

Dir/Wri: Don Boyd John Hurt, Christopher Cazenove, Judy Bowker, Jeremy Kemp, Anton Rogers | UK Drama

Don Boyd produced some of the most ambitious but foolhardy British films of the seventies and eighties. Leonard Maltin gave this typically eccentric attempt by him at direction shot in Sri Lanka (in which he displays a bizarre penchant for slow zooms and fisheye lenses) a ‘BOMB’ rating; but it can be enjoyed in a similar spirit to a ‘Ripping Yarns’ parody of ‘The Letter’ (naturally set in a rubber plantation) full of sybaritic Brits like gruff zenophobe Jeremy Kemp, clipped Christopher Casenove as a fellow called Proudfoot and an ethereal Judi Bowker who inflames the passion of a youthful John Hurt.

The biggest surprise is the music credit for Peter Skellern, although surprise turns to horror when he actually contributes a couple of songs. @RichardChatten

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE

The Mother of All Lies (2023) | Étoile d’Or Marrakech Film Festival 2023

Dir.: Asmae El Moudir | Documentary with Asmae El Moudir; Morocco, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Egypt 2023, 96 min.

La Femis graduate and director Asmae El Moudir, follows her first film The Postcard with this feature debut set against the troubled past of her homeland, Morocco.

Aesthetically the film follows a daring concept: On the one hand El Moudir questions her forebears’ history, using puppets and a handmade replica of the Casablanca neighbourhood where she grew up, at the same bringing herself into the feature, openly questioning her parents’ version of events.

The story centres on a single photo. El Moudir wants to know why she only has one photograph from her childhood, and why the girl in the picture isn’t even her. Her dictatorial grandmother burnt the rest of the memorabilia. The snap is shot in a Kindergarten setting and it soon turns out the girl in the photo is her sister Fatima, one of the victims of the massacre ordered by King Hassan II in Casablanca in June 1981 when the poor rose up to protest against the cost of living: bread and sugar prices had increased by a staggering 77%.

On that fateful day in June 1981, the grandmother had closed the house but she was the only person who could have seen the assailant who killed her granddaughter. Confronted by the surviving sister, the grandmother used bullying tactics to keep her, and the rest of the household, quiet. Not by accident, the photo of Hassan II is the only other image which survived to tell the tale.

The death toll was officially put at sixty six people but observers believed over six hundred were killed by police and military. After many years of the Sahara War, the Kingdom had run out of money and the price rises were supposed to cover for the seemingly endless military campaign. El Moudir questions her mother, father and grandmother’s account about their home and their country. Slowly, she unravels the layers of deception that have shaped her life.

As it turns out, Fatima was not the only victim in the house. The filmmaker’s father was a promising goalkeeper with the local team. One morning, the army and police used the pitch to bury the victims of the massacre, ending the father’s dream career. He joined his brothers who were jailed for decades, in mourning a lost past. One of the brothers recalls his time in prison: many where forced into claustrophobic cells where they were suffocated.

El Moudir painstakingly puts together the repressed history, with the grandmother defiant to the last. The use of puppets and miniatures actually makes the grand deception even more real, and quite alarming. There are echoes of the Chamber of Horrors in Madame Tussaud’s wax work museum. DoP Hatem Nachi merges the two artistic levels seamlessly. The film is particularly convincing in showing how the tyrannical grandmother uses her status as the matriarch to repress any form of resistance from her docile and traumatised family. The Mother of all Lies is innovative and startling. An impressive start to a promising filmmaking career. AS

ÉTOILE d’Or AWARD FOR Best Film | MARRAKECH FILM FESTIVAL 2023| CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2023 | UN CERTAIN REGARD Best Director

Wonka (2023)

Dir: Paul King | Cast: Timothee Chalamet, Olivia Colman, Hugh Grant, Paterson Joseph, Sally Hawkins, Rowan Atkinson, Matt Lucas, Jim Carter | Musical 112’

Wonka is a charming sugar-coated candy-coloured confection fizzing with fun that reminds us that Christmastide should be a time of goodwill and joie de vivre rather than stress and family contretemps. Charming and hummable it may be but Wonka is an instantly forgettable Christmas crowdpleaser that will blow away with the tinsel once the Christmas decs are back in their boxes.

Timothee Chalamet at the 81st Golden Globes | photo credit Benny Askinas

Graced by a delightful cast: Timothee Chalemet is the standout with his androgynous charm and delicatesse in a surreal turn as the legendary Willy Wonka of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory who, according to its creator Roald Dahl, purportedly invented the best chocolate. Of course we all know that’s Cadbury’s – but no one likes to admit it.

Johnny Depp was a big hit in Tim Burton’s adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in 2005, after Mel Stuart delivered the first cinematic sensation with Gene Wilder in the main role in 1971. But rather than opting for another version of Dahl’s 1964 classic book, Warner Bros offers up a prequel original story taking us back to Wonka’s genesis with themes of class warfare and the glass ceiling.

Wonka‘s focus is that dreams can come true and offers inspiration for today’s young entrepreneurs. It goes behind the original story to picture a youngster from modest means whose dreams, ideas and determination will make him an international superstar – aided by his best friend Noodle (Calah Lane). Every bit a story of modern times, it sees Wonka come up against the establishment of chocolatiers whose delicious fare is reserved for the rich.

Nathan Crowley’s set design is magical and Joby Talbot, the composer behind the catchy title music for the BBC’s League of Gentleman, has created a memorable original score. Listen with your eyes shut and there’s nothing captivating about Simon Farnaby and Paul King’s script, despite expectations. So just enjoy the fabulous camerawork and the entertaining cast who bring it all to life despite the messy storyline: Olivia Colman (as Mrs Scrubbit), Hugh Grant (as Oompa Loompa), Rowan Atkinson (as Father Julius) and Peterson Joseph (as Arthur Slugworth) . Wonka is certainly eye-catching but if you’re looking for a more amusing Christmas movie this yuletide, I’d go for Your Christmas or Mine 2. @MeredithTaylor

FROM 8 DECEMBER 2023

Torino Film Festival 2023

The capital of Piedmont, Turin sits majestically on the banks of the Po River set against the snowy peaks of the Alps. The home of Fiat cars is famous for its regal architecture, grandiose piazzas and Juventus stadium. Turin is also a foodie capital: white truffles, risotto and ‘bicerin’ – molten hot chocolate that has to be eaten with a spoon – taking its name from the oldest cafe founded there in 1763.

Celebrating its 41st edition Torino Film Festival announced the following awards:

Best film (18.000 €) to:
LA PALISIADA by Philip Sotnychenko (Ukraine)
With the following motivation:

Complex film of great directorial freedom in the construction of concatenated scenes that find their own independent meaning. In his debut work, the director demonstrates absolute mastery of means.

Special Jury Award (7.000 €) to:

LE RAVISSEMENT by Iris Kaltenbäck (France)
With the following motivation:

Harmoniously successful film, where everything contributes to the excellent final result. Iris Kaltenbäck, with the complicity of performers Hafsia Herzi, Alexi Manenti and the entire cast, makes a mature and engaging first feature
.
Best actress to:
HAFSIA HERZI for the film LE RAVISSEMENT / THE RAPTURE by Iris Kaltenbäck (France)

Special mention to:

BARBARA RONCHI for the film NON RIATTACCARE by Manfredi Lucibello (Italy)

Best actor to:
MARTÍN SHANLY for the film ARTURO A LOS 30 by Martín Shanly (Argentina)

Best screenplay to:

SÉBASTIEN LAUDENBACH, CHIARA MALTA for the film LINDA VEUT DU POULET! by Sébastien Laudenbach e Chiara Malta (France/Italy)

INTERNATIONAL DOCUMENTARIES COMPETITION

The jury of the International Documentaries Competition composed by Tizza Covi (Italy), Carlo Hintermann (Switzerland/Italy), Jessica Woodworth (Belgium/United States) awards the prizes:

Best Film IWONDERFULL (6.000 €) to:

NOTRE CORPS / OUR BODY by Claire Simon (France)

Special Jury Award to:

CLORINDO TESTA by Mariano Llinás (Argentina)

Mention to:

SILENCE OF REASON by Kumjana Novakova (Bosnia)

ITALIAN DOCUMENTARIES COMPETITION

The jury of the Italian Documentaries Competition, composed by Valentina Bertani (Italy), Fabio Bibbio (Italy) and Costanza Quatriglio (Italy), awards the prizes:

Best Film (6.000 €) to:

GIGANTI ROSSE by Riccardo Giacconi (Italy) With the following motivation:

On the blurred boundary between reality and fiction, in a tale that reasons on the mechanisms of representation and the staging of reality, the director takes us on a sentimental journey through family conflicts and the difficult memory of a brutal group violence against a defenseless man. Thus the camera becomes an opportunity to unveil unspoken secrets and emotions.

Special Jury Award to:

TEMPO D’ATTESA by Claudia Brignone (Italy) With the following motivation:
The months leading up to childbirth constitute a time of sharing in the film. A balm for the fears that women too often keep to themselves and that here they face together by building a community. In women’s mutual listening and the filmmaker’s understanding, the time of waiting is the precious time of caring.

CRAZIES | COMPETITION
The jury of the Crazies Competition, composed by Alessandro Boschi (Italy), Anaïs Emery (Switzerland) and Maurizio Tedesco (Italy), awards the prize:

Best Film to:

AUGURE / OMEN by Baloji (Belgium/Congo/Netherlands/Germany/South Africa)

Special mention to:

VISITORS – COMPLETE EDITION by Kenichi Ugana (Japan) and
THE COMPLEX FORMS by Fabio D’Orta (Italy)

FIPRESCI PRIZE

The jury composed by film critics Roberto Baldassarre (Italy) Joanna Orzechowska-Bonis (France), Harri Römpötti (Finland) awards the Fipresci Prize (Premio della Federazione Internazionale della Stampa Cinematografica) to:

BIRTH by Jiyoung Yoo (South Korea)
With the following motivation:

Birth is an accurate feminist dissection of the role of women balancing motherhood, work and creativity in our competitive world by a Korean director inspired by Yasujirō Ozu’s cinema.

TORINO FILM FESTIVAL 2023 | 24 NOVEMBER – 2 DECEMBER 2023

Sexy Beast (2000)

Dir: Jonathan Glazer | Cast: Ray Winstone, Ben Kingsley, Amanda Redman, James Fox, Ian MacShane | UK Thriller 89’

The story of professional crook called back for one last job is one of the perennial themes of the gangster film. A long way from the terseness and glamour of the classics of the thirties, the opening scene with the boulder rolling into the swimming pool establishes from the get-go that the events depicted in ‘Sexy Beast’ are as much a dream as a nightmare.

Unlike the fast-talking sharply-dressed Hollywood prototype, Ray Winstone’s gangster is an uncouth oaf who discovers the hard way he has more to fear from his associates – represented by bullet-headed troll Ben Kingsley – than the long arm of the law.

A startlingly brunette Amanda Redman makes an all-too-rare appearance on the big screen; while ‘Performance’ and ‘Villain’ are evoked by the presence of James Fox and a very saturnine Ian MacShane.

Along with Get Carter and Long Good Friday, Jonathan Glazer’s feature debut, written by Louis Mellis and David Scinto, represents the best in British crime thrillers. But unlike Mike Hodges and John MacKenzie, who have sadly now left us, Glazer’s star is still in the ascendent. @RichardChatten

ON PRIME VIDEO

The Red Shoes (1948)

Dir: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger | Cast: Anton Walbrook, Marius Goring, Moira Shearer, Robert Helpmann | Musical Drama 135′

A huge event both at the box office and in the development of Technicolour (all the better to showcase Moira Shearer’s ravishing red hair), but – like the impresario himself – played by Anton Walbrook elegant but sorely lacking the soul of Powell & Pressburger’s earlier productions.

There’s long been a school of thought that Pressburger was the brain behind the two, but he should also take the blame for the pretension that increasingly overwhelmed their films, while Powell’s skill at organising the various elements and his smooth use of trick photography, like Busby Berkeley, creates a sumptuous experience which supposedly takes place in the world of theatre but is truly a work of cinema @RichardChatten

ON RE-RELEASE AT THE BFI LONDON SOUTHBANK | GARDEN CINEMA WI | LUMIERE CINEMAS SW7

Anselm (2023)

Dir.: Wim Wenders; Documentary with Anslem Kiefer, Daniel Kiefer, Anton Wenders; Germany 2023, 93 min.

To call Wim Wenders’ portrait of German artist Anselm Kiefer a documentary would be selling the work of both artists short. Anselm is a potted history of post war Germany, rooted in the society where both men were born, in 1945. Neither of them escaped unhurt even though Kiefer, a more confrontational character than Wenders, took the brunt of criticism.

But “Das Rauschen der Zeit” is first and foremost a chronicle of a country still not ready to face its racist past. Their output is shrouded in enigma and ambivalence. There is always confusion and reverie: Wenders’ American set films and Kiefer’s French based creations are flights of imagination. But the shadow of the Third Reich looms large, and cannot be negotiated with art or gestures.

Anselm Kiefer, represented as a young man by Daniel Kiefer and as a school boy by Anton Wenders, gained prominence in 1971 as Joseph Beuys’ master student in Dusseldorf. This was followed by a scandal in Venice, at the Biennale in 1980, when Kiefer was accused of being a neo-Nazi, with him insisting he just wanted to refer to the victims of the Holocaust, wearing his father’s Wehrmacht’s Uniform and greeting the public with the Nazi salute. In 2022 Kiefer would make a triumphant return to the city.

But by now his work output was colossal – both in yield and form: He created topographic landscapes in an old brick factory in Germany, and landscapes in the South of France. And he continues to this day with mega installations in his new studio in Croissy near Paris. There are architectural constructions, numerous pavilions, underground crypts and a gigantic, roofed amphitheatre. Everything is larger than life, and Kiefer is still at it, in a big way, always moving forward to the next project. Flame throwers are his favourite “weapons” of art, giant lift constructions lead him to the top of the world. Literally.

Then we return to the beginning with Paul Celan (1920 – 1970), holocaust survivor, poet and translator, who drowned himself in the Seine. The author Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1976) a member of the circle of artists striving for a new beginning, not another cover-up. She died in an “accidental” fire in her own bed. But they were outnumbered by the ex-Nazi supporters who went into “inner exile” while still supporting the regime, like the philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), who never apologised or even tried to explain. There is a moving snapshot of Celan trying to meet Heidegger – but like Richard Strauss, leader of the NSDAP “ReichsmusikKammer” (Musicians had to be Aryans to take part), Heidegger could not even be bothered to say sorry, keeping his international reputation intact.

There is brilliance on both sides of the camera, thanks to DoP Franz Lustig, and it is a credit to both artists to return to the failed new beginning, because the huge majority of Germans preferred to feel sorry for themselves and were busy with collective denial. Wenders and Kiefer are still attempting to evade the past. But try as they may, it still outruns them. @AndreSimonoveisz

IN CINEMAS FROM 8 DECEMBER 2023

The Viking (1928)

Roy William Neill | Donald Crisp, Pauline Starke, LaRoy Mason | Silent 90’

Just as silent films were never actually ‘silent’ – since they were always had a musical accompaniment – they weren’t simply in black & white either, since from virtually the word ‘Go’ tinting had been an integral part of the filmmaking process.

In Elmer Rice’s 1929 play ‘Street Scene’ Swedish janitor Carl Olsen (played on both stage & screen by perennial Hollywood Swede John Qualen) indignantly corrects his Italian neighbour’s brag that Christopher Columbus discovered America by asserting “it vos Leif Ericsson!!” I don’t know if Olsen had recently seen ‘The Viking’ – which opened in New York exactly 95 years ago this month – at the pictures, but his attitude explains why this film exists.

Herbert Kalmus – founder of Technicolor – had just enjoyed considerable artistic success with the Douglas Fairbanks vehicle ‘The Black Pirate’ although the process had proved far too unwieldy to be commercially viable. But he soon developed Technicolor Process #3 (known to film historians as two-colour Technicolor), a simplified and more practical form of the process which sufficiently impressed young Irving Thalberg at Metro to authorise that his studio distribute the resulting film @RichardChatten

Freud’s Last Session (2023)

Dir/Wri: Matthew Brown | Cast: Anthony Hopkins, Matthew Goode | US Drama

Sigmund Freud and C S Lewis debate the existence of God in this provocative imagined drama starring Anthony Hopkins and Matthew Goode, and based on a play by Mark St Germain that became a hit off Broadway.

When Hopkins played the English theologian and writer in Shadowlands he reduced audiences to tears with his earnest attempt to court Debra Winger’s dying writer Joy Gresham. In Matt Brown’s two-hander Matthew Goode is the star turn as a more . dapper and indulgent C S Lewis with Hopkins, his sparring partner, spiky and reticent in his final years as the legendary shrink.

Matthew Brown and Mark St Germain decide to spice things up by incorporating flash back episodes of Lewis’ life in the trenches but this detail often derails the already engaging exchange of informed views, detracting from the film’s natural dramatic thrust.

Sometimes linear narratives work best, and that is arguably the case here. On the other hand, the writers’ decision to probe Freud’s backstory with his daughter Anna adds an informative touch to an intelligent foray into the young woman’s Electra complex: Interestingly the theory belonged to his Swiss colleague Carl Jung and not her dad. @MeredithTaylor

In UK CINEMAS from June 14, 2024

Lost in the Night (2023)

Dir: Amat Escalante | Cast: Juan Daniel Garcia, Ester Expósito, Barbara Mori, Fernando Bonilla, Hero Medina, Vicky Araico | Thriller 120′

The rich and the poor have a Mexican standoff in this Neo western – and no prizes for guessing who wins the day. Amat Escalante first arrived on the scene with his shocking feature debut Heli. Lost in the Night is a muddled murder mystery that looks spectacular but leaves us in the dark for most its running time. A pervasive sense of uneasiness gradually gains momentum in the final stages but some questions are left unanswered in a quietly savage tale of revenge that simmers in Adrian Durazo’s widescreen landscapes of the craggy Guanajuato setting.

Juan Daniel Garcia is Emiliano, the hero of the piece. This morose Mexican macho is motivated by a keen sense of justice. He is a serious man with a mission: to shed light on the fate of his pioneering mother (Araico) who disappeared after campaigning against the sale of the local mine to foreign investors and the contingent job losses. And he soon tracks down his suspect, an effete conceptual artist called Rigoberto (Bonilla), who hangs out in this stark backwater, postering around a curious concrete lakeside villa with his steely wife Carmen (Barbara Mori) and her influencer daughter Mónica (Ester Expósito), whose speciality is fake suicide videos. The local police, headed by Jero Medina, are not fit for purpose so Emiliano makes his own investigations by offering to work undercover as the family caretaker.

Emiliano represents solid values, Rigoberto all that is spurious in this world: his most famous work conceptualises dead Mexican bodies. But Escalante’s narrative often gets bogged down in these modernising themes derailing the story from its central focus and stretching the film rather too thinly over its two hour running time. Emiliano’s female equivalent Jasmin (Mafer Osio) is a traditional Mexican ‘madonna’ who offers him tenderness but never really gets a look in. Monica throws herself at him, turned on by his strong silent earnestness. At one point he dives in and rescues her from the lake after one of her more petulant displays of narcissism. So an interesting addition to the Escalante archive but not one of his most memorable. MT

NOW IN UK Cinemas

https://youtu.be/S38sRUvJjYs

Sweet Sue (2023)

Dir/Wri: Leo Leigh | Cast: Maggie O’Neill, Tony Pitts, Harry Trevaldwyn, Anthony Adjekum, Anna Calder-Marshall, James Dryden | UK Comedy Drama 99′

After a shaky start with Loony in the Woods and his short documentary Fact of Fiction: The Life and Times of a Ping Pong Hustler, Leo Leigh, Alison Steadman and Mike Leigh, finally finds his feet with this confident comedy drama.

Sweet Sue makes for an amusing feature debut capturing the sardonic resentment of a bereaved English family with the same signature brand of snarky deadpan humour of his parents.

Of course Sue, a sparky Maggie O’Neill, is anything but sweet: and we soon realise why, but that’s all part of the irony. The film opens with another dating disappointment for Sue, a fifty-something singleton, whose has just been stood up in the local pub. Meanwhile, in the now familiar setting of a care home her younger brother, Pete, is in the final stages of an undignified death, comforted by his wife, (Hannah Walters) who clearly resents Sue’s continued lack of input in the matter. The two of them bicker bedside while Pete gobs uncontrollably into a tissue. The next scene sees his funeral cortege pulling out of a driveway with a ghastly floral tribute of pastel chrysanthemums bearing the name ‘Pete’ adorning the hearse. The petty bickering flares up later in the pub – this ‘close family’ is clearly far from close, Sue’s mum chunters away under her breath, and Pete’s widow once again bemoans Sue’s lack of support. Breaking away from the morose duo Sue strikes up a conversion at the bar with a tight-lipped, leather-clad biker who introduces himself as Ron. The two promptly leave, Sue preparing to ride pillion with her potential paramour, Pete’s widow objecting loudly as the two make off

The story proceeds along similar lines as we get to know them all better, Sue is assertively bubbly while Ron remains locked in his monosyllabic old-school masculinity. Anthony, his rather narcissistic son, is a thoroughly modern character, and Trevaldwyn certainly plays up his personality traits to perfection. Ron, by his very nature, remains the most enigmatic character here, and we are left wondering whether Sue will make a go of things this time: there’s clearly a sexual frisson despite their chalk and cheese differences. Sweet Sue maybe not be groundbreaking narrative wise but it certainly has a ring of truth for those familiar with the dysfunctional family territory. @MeredithTaylor

IN UK AND IRISH CINEMAS from 22 December 2023

Keep your Seats, Please! (1936)

Dir: Monty Banks | George Formby, Florence Desmond, Alistair Sim, Gus McNaughton | Uk Comedy 82’

George Formby’s status at Ealing had reached the stage where the company was prepared to invest in something more substantial to provide him with a showcase, even it rather squanders the satire of Ilf & Petrov’s Russian original novel.

As the hero Formby shows such a limited grasp of maths you want to wring his neck as he stupidly shrinks his prospective inheritance like a meter on a taxi; and his adventures are inclined to be more harrowing than funny – as in a truly apocalyptic scene which begins with him being attacked by a duck.

Monty Banks’ direction is usually very perfunctory, but this has be the only film in you get to see Formby punch Alistair Sim in the face on two separate occasions, while the film elsewhere displays a bracing cynicism in it’s depiction of the effect on people of the prospect of easy money. @RichardChatten

Memory (2023) Venice Film Festival 2023

Dir/Wri: Michel Franco | Cast: Jessica Chastain, Peter Sarsgaard, Brooke Timber, Merritt Wever, Elsie Fisher, Jessica Harper, Josh Charles | US Drama 92′

If past trauma and repressed memory is your thing then this quietly intense drama from Mexican auteur Michel Franco will certainly appeal. It won Peter Sarsgaard Best Actor at this year’s VENICE FILM FESTIVAL. He plays Saul, a Brooklyn-based social worker suffering from dementia whose altruistic intentions are caught in the headlights of his damaged co-worker’s recollections. Memory is a welcome addition to his previous features Chronic and Sundown.

Jessica Chastain is Sylvia, a gentle soul who looks after people with mental health issues. Peel back the layers of her buttoned-up persona and we uncover a former alcoholic, three years in recovery, and fiercely protective of her daughter Anna (promising newcomer Brooke Timber) who has grown up fast in dealing with her mother’s troubled past.

Sylvia and Saul are instantly drawn to one another at a school reunion when they are reintroduced by her younger married sister Olivia (Wever). But her attraction to Saul is laced with a sense of misgiving and she pulls away. It soon emerges that Saul’s attraction to Sylvia stems from an incident in the past that he fails fully to bring to mind, so hazy is his memory of past events. Sylvia, on the other hand, has a laser sharp recollection of that incident that left her traumatised, and she leaves the party. Saul follows her home but ends up spending the night outside her building unable to gain access. The following morning Sylvia finds him unconscious in the freezing weather and calls the emergency services and his brother Isaac (Charles), to come to collect him.

Sylvia is determined to confront Saul who is in the early stages of dementia. Her accusations flood out angrily and Saul is upset and unable to comprehend her hostility in the light of his own very different recall. It turns out that Sylvia’s memories are not exactly accurate either but clearly both are coming from a position of loneliness and low level depression and Chastain and Sarsgaard handle this with thoughtful consideration. Jessica Harper makes a robust return to the screen as Sylvia’s estranged mother Samantha, who offers further insight into her daughter’s troubled past reminding us that we can never fully erase the stain of our family backstory.

“A Whiter Shade of Pale,” makes for a sober soundtrack incorporating nostalgia into the mix. Franco directs with confidence maintaining the unsettling tone throughout and as suppressed memories surface this sinister undertone keeps mawkishness at bay. Recriminations are never allowed to derail the sensitivity of the unfolding drama. Not an easy film to watch but certainly one that is well-judged and superbly performed. @MeredithTaylor

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2023

Napoleon (2023)

Dir: Ridley Scott | Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Vanessa Kirby, Tahar Rahim, Rupert Everett, Paul Rees, Ben Miles, Ludivine Sagnier, Edouard Philipponnat | UK Drama 158′

Napoleon is a rather gloomy epic that mourns its French hero in misty landscapes, robust parliamentary debates, bloody battle scenes and sorrowful domestic settings where a doomed love story plays out amid gilded trophies and treasures.

Ridley Scott creates a sprawling two and a half hour feature that is more impressive than involving although Phoenix is compelling throughout as a flawed hero and likeable rogue, despite his American delivery: a soulful and mercurial figure whose private life never quite attains the glorious success of his strategic prowess as French military leader and emperor in various campaigns. Most notable is the Siege of Toulon, where he captures the port city from the English in the film’s opening stages, to his most significant triumph at the battle of Austerlitz with its atmospheric widescreen images of soldiers and horses plunging silently into the depths of a frozen lake where their blood mingles evocatively with the icy water. Scott lists Napoleon’s less admirable achievement in the film’s final title sequence that makes for grim reading with its tragic loss of life running into thousands; and this is probably one of the reasons why French critics have condemned the film.

Josephine, an imperious Vanessa Kirby, has managed to reinvent herself as Napoleon’s witty new wife. But despite her considerable talents as a patron of the arts and their torrid sex life and genuine love for each other, Napoleon choses to divorce her in favour of his country because, Josephine, six years older than him and in her second marriage, is unable to provide him with an heir. She is banished to the murky palace of Malmaison, Rueil, where she dies of diphtheria, Napoleon arriving too late to say a final farewell. The emperor, in turn, is deemed a threat to the security of Europe, and ends his days in the remote outpost of Saint Helena after a crushing defeat at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, having previously returned from Elba.

Ambitious and informative, David Scarpa’s well-paced script straddles three decades, from the final stages of the French Revolution in 1793 until Napoleon’s death in May 1821. The guillotining of Marie Antoinette makes for a captivating opening sequence. We watch her being clamped onto the base of the guillotine before the blade is unleashed from its moorings slicing cleanly through her neck, the executioner dangling her bleeding head by the hair as the baying crowd roars.

Next comes Robespierre’s fate in parliament bringing an end to the Reign of Terror. This political instability offers Napoleon the ideal opportunity to surge up as a masterful strategist and architect of the Republic, crowning himself Emperor in 1804. At continuous loggerheads with England he tries to forge a pact with Prussia and Austria, which proves unsuccessful, and leads to heavy losses in Russia. Abdicating, he then heads for the Island of Elba, returning to France where he suffers a debilitating defeat against the Duke of Wellington’s army in alliance with Prussian Forces at Waterloo. And here Rupert Everett shines as a drole, rather foppish caricature of English aristocracy.

Stanley Kubrick would be proud of the film’s immaculate battle set pieces particularly at Waterloo, and there are some enjoyable support performances from Paul Rhys at Talleyrand, Edouard Philipponnat as Tsar Alexander, who is seen to enjoy a brief dalliance with Josephine, John Hollingworth as Marshal Ney and Richard McCabe as Lord Whitworth. But Napoleon belongs to its star Joaquin Phoenix who exudes strength and humanity despite his human flaws. @MeredithTaylor

NOW IN CINEMAS

The Peasants (2023)

Dirs/scr: DK Welchman, Hugh Welchman. Poland/Serbia/Lithuania | 114′

Poland’s Academy Award 2024 hopeful is another animated portrait from directing duo DK Welchman and Hugh Welchman who won an Oscar nomination for their painterly drama about Vincent Van Gogh Loving Vincent.

Based on novel from Nobel prize winner Wladyslaw Reymont this is a tale of love and revenge set in a 19th century Polish village of peasant farmers. The narrative reworks themes of male dominance in that are still relevant today, a century later: women, especially good-looking ones, are expected to submit to the subconscious will of men, and are punished, psychologically or materially, if they refuse to toe the line.

The focus here is beautiful young Jagna (Kamila Urzedowska) who refuses to conform to traditional village life and finds herself increasingly at odds with women who are envious of her power and beauty, and men who are desperate to bed her. Jagna tolerates a loveless marriage to a controlling much older husband Boryna (Miroslaw Baka) by having an affair with his estranged married son Antek (Robert Gulaczyk) and escaping into a creative world of her own, representated by bird motifs.

Capturing the seasons of the year in a pre-revolutionary Poland, the directors combine pencil sketches, expressionist brush work and photographic realism, blending oil paintings from Polish 19th artists: Michal Gorstkin-Wywiorski, Ferdynand Ruszczyc and Jozef Chelmonski over live-action footage of actors to create another fluid animated drama that feels contemporary while rooted firmly in the past. @MeredithTaylor

IN UK CINEMAS from 8 December from Vertigo Releasing | The Peasants is Poland’s Academy submission 2024

Castaway (1986)

Dir: Nicolas Roeg | Cast: Oliver Reed, Amanda Donohoe, Georgina Hale, Frances Barber | UK drama 117’

The most striking scenes in ‘Castaway’ are the first twenty minutes depicting a drab eighties London. What follows is a pale shadow of ‘Michael Powell’s Age of Consent, which was set in Australia; although Powell’s earlier film doesn’t boast a pair of nuns in the comely form of Georgina Hale and Frances Barber (looking far tastier fully-clothed than Amanda Donohoe in the all-together).

Miss Donohoe is supposed to be a lover of old movies (she’s seen watching Peter Finch on the telly), which makes it rather surprising that she doesn’t turn tail and flee the moment she sees that her prospective companion is Olly Reed (who progressively looks more and more like a ginger Jabba the Hutt as the film develops), whose idea of a smooth come-on is “A screw and a cold beer is at the moment the summit of my ambition!”; so its hardly surprising they make such an argumentative pair (especially as she gets more turned on when he talks about food rather than sex).

Naturally as shot by Nicolas Roeg it all looks very impressive but their constant squabbling rapidly gets very monotonous. @RichardChatten

Eileen (2023)

Dir: William Oldroyd | Cast: Thomasin McKenzie, Anne Hathaway | US Thriller | 97′

Flawed but captivating nonetheless, this latest psychological thriller from William Oldroyd (Lady Macbeth) comes alive with dazzling lead performances from Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway as emotionally abused young career women in 1960s New England. Oldroyd stunned us with his first feature Lady Macbeth, seven years later his follow up lacks the same conviction

Adapted from Ottessa Moshfegh’s Booker prize-shortlisted novel, Eileen is certainly intriguing and stylish with its retro aesthetic and echoes of Todd Haynes’ Carol, albeit set a decade later. The female centric story, revolving around two troubled characters, initially catches fire but then drifts between several strands never quite coming together as a lesbian-themed folie-a-deux that ends in tragedy.

Hathaway and McKenzie certainly inject powerful onscreen chemistry in the same vein as Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara did as the blond bombshell and sultry sales girl in Carol. Here the workplace in not a glossy department store but a grim remand centre for young men where the earnest young Eileen (McKenzie), 24, is enduring a meaningless existence as a put-upon administrator living at home with a mean, alcoholic father (Wigham). When we first meet her, Eileen is nursing romantic rejection and a broken down car in a snowbound Boston of 1964.

When Hathaway’s Rebecca joins the facility, a psychologist tasked with a difficult case involving a an inmates and his mother, Eileen is immediately caught in the headlights of Rebecca’s glamour and starts to fantasise about her, professionally and sexually.

In Luke Goebel’s script Eileen is the more fully fleshed-out character with the bleached blond, brown-eyed Rebecca remaining enigmatic and underwritten. Clearly the the psychologist harbours a few skeletons in the cupboard, and is not the strong, self-realised women she appears to be, but spiky and unsettling with a penchant for downing martinis in a local bar where the two women flirt, Eileen gradually falling under Rebecca’s spell as their relationship unravels with events taking a sinister turn.

The film reaches its heady climax with this unpredictable state of affairs, but soon fizzles out in the unconvincing final stages, all thematic complexity lost in the rather hasty, melodramatic ‘crime thriller’ conclusion.

William Oldroyd’s Eileen is a fascinating watch despite its an ending that fails to make sense. The two sizzling performances: the delicate soulfulness of McKenzie and Hathaway’s brittle, hard-edged and unstable antiheroine make for a heady mix in a pulpy portrait of femmes fatales in a pickle. @MeredithTaylor

IN UK CINEMAS FROM 1 DECEMBER 2023

Sweet Dreams (2023) Locarno Film Festival 2023

Dir: Ena Sendijarevic | Cast: Renée Soutendijk, Hayati Azis, Lisa Zweerman, Florian Myjer, Muhammad Khan, Hans Dagalet, Rio Den Haas | Dutch, Drama 102’

This stylish and sumptuous Colonial satire is the sophomore feature of Bosnian Dutch director Ana Sendijarevic who was lauded with multiple awards on the festival circuit with her debut Take Me Somewhere Nice.

Sweet Dreams harks back to Holland’s prosperous colonial roots in the Dutch East Indies where subversive things are happening in the tropical heat of a verdant sugar plantation in 1900. Much to the cynical consternation of his elegant wife Agatha (Renée Soutendijk), the ageing owner Jan (Hans Dagelet) has fathered a child, Karel (Rio Kai Den Haas) with his Indonesian housekeeper Siti (Hayati Azis) but subsequently meets his maker after a bed-hopping episode one steamy night.

Naturally nothing will be the same again as the family, son Cornelius (Florian Myjer) and his pregnant wife Josefien (Lisa Zweerman) crack the whip but are then exposed to the coalface of colonialism when they discover that Karel is the sole heir to family fortune but also that housemaid and her partner Reza (Muhammad Khan) refuse to continuing kowtowing to his command and are plunged into a state of gently controlled emotional chaos in the sweltering heat of the jungle.

Sendijarevic’s sympathies are clear; the colonials are painted as vile caricatures, but she creates just the right enigmatic atmosphere of subterfuge that occasionally echoes Wes Anderson and Lucrecia Martel (Zama). With a deft lightness of touch Sweet Dreams captures this exploitative state of affairs with humour and immaculate set pieces in an amusingly surreal drama driven forward by an evocative almost overpowering occasional score by Martial Foe.

Ana Sendijarevic and her DoP Emo Weemhoff shoot in the 1.33:1 Academy ratio in a story divided into chapters. This keeps us at a respectable distance from a rather melancholic narrative that marks the end of an era for Western dominance as the Dutch lose their control on a previously ordered colonial existence which ended when Indonesia declared independence in August 1945. @MeredithTaylor

NETHERLANDS OSCAR ENTRY | LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2023

https://youtu.be/p8TLjO7WMI0?si=xT5PWKmhxUC1o6G6

The Mission (2023)

Dir: Amanda McBaine, Jesse Moss | US Doc 103′

This new documentary tells the story of a courageous but naive young man who was fired up by his spiritual conviction to embark on a fateful mission to a forbidden part of the world. The Mission also offers a fascinating and comprehensive exploration of the ‘Messiah’ complex in this deep dive into unethical travel and even modern day martyrdom.

Inspired by Robinson Crusoe and ‘boys own’ adventures of derring-do, John Chau blatantly ignored official government advice. In 2018, he set off on a misguided journey to North Sentinel Island to visit one of the last communities of people who have chosen to remain “uncontacted” by contemporary society. The Sentinalese tribe enjoys the protection of the Indian government and discourages outsiders from visiting their palm-fringed enclave in the Bay of Bengal.

In the erroneous belief that God would protect him, Chau would meet his fate shortly after arrival. But the story that follows his early demise is really worth watching. Some may find John’s hubris inspiring, others may find his disingenuous arrogance condescending in this act of wilful denial. It’s just another example of how ‘American individualism’ can lead to the misguided belief that the system can somehow be beaten in a bid for glory by using God’s message as a badge of honour to break international laws in the name of Christianity.

The Mission is nonetheless a thrilling documentary. Inspired by Chau’s extensive diaries and a letter from his bereaved father, directors Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss make use of comprehensive commentary from his friends for a story that combines archive footage of John’s past, interviews with his friends, and imaginative cartoon images to flesh out a unique example of how a modern missionary was motivated by his fervent evangelical faith to conquer a remote tribe and explore uncharted territory.

Although the documentary takes an somewhat unwarranted swipe at certain aspects of Christianity seen through the prism of its more fervent followers, The Mission does shed light on the enigmatic inhabitants of North Sentinel Island who have made an informed decision to avoid the outside world based on their own experience of history rather than from a standpoint of ignorance. In the end what Chau’s story boils down to is this modern day need for ‘self importance’ rather than true religious belief which has nothing to do with the ‘self’. MT

IN UK CINEMAS FROM 17 NOVEMBER 2024

Rich and Strange (1931) | Celebrating Hitchcock’s 125th Anniversary

Dir: Alfred Hitchcock | Cast: Henry Kendall, Percy Marmont, Joan Barry | Comedy Drama 93’

Although not well known Rich and Strange is to be cherished as one of the very few out and out comedies Hitchcock ever made: witness the literally sick humour of Henry Kendall curled up in bed with ‘mal de mer’, his eyes widening as the indigestible items leap off the menu and the horrified reactions of the young couple when they discover what they’ve just had for dinner.

Hitchcock’s earlier experience as an art director is apparent in the skill with which the various foreign locations that serve as the story’s backdrop are so convincingly evoked; while anyone familiar with his films of the fifties will recognise vivid set-pieces like the hero’s struggle with traffic on the Underground (which anticipates the depiction of bustling New York life that opens ‘North by Northwest’ with Henry Kendall as the bewildered innocent abroad like James Stewart in The Man Who Knew Too Much while Joan Barry is suitably sleek as one of the first Hitchcock blondes. @RichardChatten

RICH AND STRANGE is one of a box set of eleven Special Edition BLU-RAYs to celebrate Hitchcock’s 125th Anniversary | Out 16 December 2024

The Taste of Things (2023)

Dir Anh Hung Tran | cast: Juliette Binoche, Benoit Magimel, Pierre Gagnaire | Drama | France, 135′

One time lovers Juliette Binoche and Benoit Magimel re-unite for a sumptuous feast of the senses that sees gastronomy as a conduit for a long lasting celebration. The French Vietnamese filmmaker first came to Cannes twenty years ago with his ravishing feature debut Scent of Green Papaya that won the Camera d’Or.

The Taste of Things, his seventh feature, adapted from Marcel Rouff’s 1924 novel The Life And Passion of Dodin-Bouffant is set in France in the late 19th century, the film follows the life of Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel) as a renownd chef living with his personal cook and lover Eugénie (Juliette Binoche). Eugénie and Dodin share a long history of gastronomy and love. While emotions remain restrained, their culinary discoveries are lavish and exquisite. The only sadness for Dodin is that Eugénie refuses to marry him. So, the food lover decides to do something he has never done before: cook for her.

This delicious romantic drama also serves as a discursive entrée into French culinary history as post prandial conversion drifts into the domaine of gastronomic greats Marie-Antoine Carême and Georges Auguste Escoffier both respected as ‘king of chefs and chef of kings’ of French haute cuisine. And their dishes are sensuously prepared by Binoche and her assistants: a mouth-watering vol au vent – you can almost taste the cream oozing out of it – followed by tenderly poached quails and an omelette Norvégienne otherwise known more prosaically as Baked Alaska and, of course wines accompany these dishes.

We first meet Eugenie (Binoche) in her kitchen garden on a blissful summer’s morning chosing a fresh lettuce for a mouth-watering meal of lavish proportions. Dodin (Magimel) and his guests will savour at their leisure later on at lunch. Every dish is a work of art created from a basis of fresh local ingredients in season. But the film also symbolises a wider appreciation of the simple pleasures in life we often take for granted such as the intense anticipation of a tempting dinner or the satisfying sensuality of long-lasting desire.

Eugenie luxuriates in the quiet pleasure of cooking and enjoying time spent with Dodin over the twenty years of their life together. Their epicurean partnership has gradually led to the bedroom where occasionally the two indulge in the realm of the senses that extends beyond the purely culinary.

But Dodin wants to formalise the arrangement with marriage. And is also concerned for Eugenie’s well-being and her failing health. Slowly he takes over in the kitchen preparing the food as an act of affection and appreciation he feels for her in their relationship of mutual respect and dedication. And the act of successful courtship, like the preparation of a luscious dish, requires patience and meticulous timing, a heavy-handed approach may ruin the chemistry, but he must keep the pot simmering in this delicate dance of love that is typically French. @MeredithTaylor

NOW ON RELEASE IN FRANCE | CANNES FILM FESTIVAL Winner Best Director | France’s Academy Award Entry 2024 | IN COMPETITION 2023

Bandido (1956)

Dir: Richard Fleischer | Cast: Robert Mitchum, Ursula Thiess, Gilbert Roland, Zachary Scott | US Action Drama 92’

In his memoirs director Richard Fleischer gave a harrowing account of the horrors of filming in Mexico beset with insect stings and upset stomachs. The film itself takes its lead from leading actor Robert Mitchum by being much more light-hearted than Fleischer’s account would have lead you to expect.

In its rollicking picture of Mexico as a place in which lead is constantly flying (none of it naturally hitting our Bob) it rather recalls the Harold Lloyd comedy ‘Why Worry?’; a piece of advice that Mitchum obviously took to heart.

Apart from Mitchum himself the most interesting member of the cast is probably veteran Mexican heavy Miguel Inclain, who was deeply touching in ‘Salon Mexico’ and briefly appears late in the film as a priest. @RichardChatten

Past Lives (2023)

Dir: Celine Song | S Korean Drama 105′

An ambitious – you could say precocious – pre-teen playwright moves from Seoul to Canada to further her writing ambitions in this moving first feature from Celine Song.

Nora (Seung-ah) leaves behind a teenage sweetheart Hae Sung. Twelve years later we meet her again as Nora (Lee) and fate sees her rekindling the earlier crush with Hae Sung (Teo Too) who still lives in Seoul. But their thing fizzles out and she marries New Yorker Arthur (John Magaro). Another twelve years goes by and Hae Sung still carries a candle for Nora, and hopes it will come alight again when he visits New York.

There’s something quite detached about Nora as a character that fuels this subtle drama about a young woman who often blows hot and cold in her romantic encounters. Clearly Nora (Lee) has a palpable chemistry with Hae Sung (You) but Arthur (Magaro) also features heavily as her neglected other half. Past Lives is a thoughtful and appealing debut for a South Korean director who is clearly going places. @MeredithTaylor

APPLE TV, AMAZON PRIME VIDEO | BERLINALE premiere 2023

May December (2023)

Dir: Todd Haynes | Cast: Julianne Moore, Natalie Portman, Chris Tenzis, Charles Melton | US Drama 117′

May December could well be one of the masterworks about the way paedophilia impacts on relationships and family life. It is the confident latest film from Todd Haynes who began as a key figure of the 1990’s New Queer Canadian Cinema with films such as Poison, The Karen Carpenter Story, Safe and Velvet Goldmine. Working with a talented cast and crew, actor Julianne Moore and producer Christine Vachon showcase the power of a mature director in full command of his filmmaking craft.

The film is not an easy watch for those who find difficult subjects uncomfortable in an entertainment context although there is a duty for fearless artists to interrogate challenging subject matter. May December certainly does this and provides a deeply moving and affecting study of the secrets, lies and deceptions that exist even within close relationships.

The title is a play on the seasons of the year reflecting the romantic relationship between two people of different ages, and linking spring – that comes with youth – through to the eventual winter of old age. This connection with the seasons echoes Alexander Singer’s criminally undervalued 1961 film A Cold Wind in August about the relationship between an ageing stripper and a much younger man; as well as Catherine Breillet’s latest feature Last Summer (2023) that sees a married woman toy with her young stepson without serious emotional intentions.

There is a difference here. Once Haynes lifts the lid off the various themes nothing will be the same again for his wide range of players and characters. The plot is straightforward and based in reality, echoing the true 1990s story of 36-year-old Mary Kay Letourneau who left her husband and family after being convicted and jailed due to her relationship with a 13-year-old boy. On release from prison, she married the young man and formed a new family and a cosy, respectable and conventional middle-class life.

At this point in the narrative Haynes introduces melodrama. The mother (Moore) commissions an indie film that will tell her story and, hopefully, reveal honest truths about what had happened years previously. The film begins with a visit from Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) the actor chosen to play Julianne Moore’s dysfunctional character Gracie, in an attempt to understand everyone involved in this extended family life. The coming together of the first family and the children from the second marriage, during a graduation ceremony weekend, is beautifully handled with sly humour while revealing a feature of complex resonances.

The film offers a powerhouse challenge for Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman as the women involved, and recalls the work of George Cukor, another gay filmmaker at ease working with female actors and handling themes involving women. Julianne Moore has the more grounded role as the mother/wife, enabling her to invest her character with more backstory involving childhood abuse trauma that in later life could have manifested in an arrested state of childhood as the source of her original transgressive relationship with the 13-year-old boy. Haynes heightens this with her, now adult, younger husband who is beginning to realise he has missed out on a full experience of life, and revealing that May/December relationships can bring problems later on involving missed and lost opportunities.

Natalie Portman may have the more difficult but also revealing role as Elizabeth. She has a less defined past suggestive of being mildly lonely and only moderately successful. This is all left open but heightens the contrast between both characters: Elizabeth appears to be shadowing Gracie with a form of imitation that reveals how a mix of identity issues and role-playing can be very dangerous. One sequence is particularly revealing and offers a masterclass in skilful technique and razor-edge emotional precision: The two women face each other, seemingly stripped bare of their respective personas.

Another aspect of the film’s power involves Haynes’ well-documented understanding of the 1950s Hollywood cinema of Douglas Sirk. The visual style is mostly melancholy with muted greys and browns and none of Sirk’s expressionistic colour lighting, although there is a similar sense of framing and space involving settings and characters. Also relevant here are Sirk’s themes involving theatrical illusion, patriarchal values and forbidden love – which threaten familiar and social conventions – in a ‘let’s pretend we are all nice’ middle-class setting bringing to mind All that Heaven Allows (1955).

There are many other intriguing and poignant scenes that are best left for viewers to experience. If you are wondering why the beautiful score by Marcelo Zarvos includes sonorous chords of music in a French style, this is because the music incorporates Michel Legrand’s score for Joseph Losey’s film The Go Between. The reference may be intentional as May December is another insight into the myriad ways a child’s life can provide complex links into adult lives. @PeterHerbert

NOVEMBER 17 in cinemas and on SKY CINEMA DEC 8

PETER HERBERT is Curator Manager at THE ARTS PROJECT

Twice upon a Time (1953) Powell + Pressburger Season

Dir: Emeric Pressburger | Cast: Hugh Williams, Elizabeth Allan, Jack Hawkins, Yolande Larthe | Drama 85′

After filming wrapped in 1953 Emeric Pressburger never wanted to think about Twice Upon A Time again, so onerous was the task of making it. The same fate had befallen such cinematic Cinderellas as Hitchcock’s Waltzes from Vienna and Bergman’s It Can’t Happen Here.

Based on the novel by Erich Kastner – originally filmed in 1950 and remade by Disney eight years later as The Parent Trap – it’s a far more succinct drama that avoids the initial enmity that wasted so much time in the later film.

Michael Powell never bothered to watch Twice Upon a Time, Pressburger never mentioned it again, and it was not included in the National Film Theatre’s Powell & Pressburger retrospective of 1978. Kevin Macdonald (in his 1994 biography) declared that “Today no print of Twice Upon a Time is available” and there isn’t a single review on the IMDb. This means that the screening at BFI Southbank on 6th November 2023 was the first in seventy years.

As for the film itself it comes as a charming surprise: Beautifully shot on location by Christopher Challis with characteristically whimsical narration by Jack Hawkins who also stars as Dr Mathews. @RichardChattten

BFI’S POWELL + PRESSBURGER SEASON | NOVEMBER 2023

Seaside Special (2022)

Dir: Jens Meurer | Germany Doc

A warm and well-balanced view of Brexit Britain is expressed by the people of Cromer, Norfolk in this delightful documentary made by a German, no less!

Famous for its seafood, especially crabs – and wonderful sandy beaches Cromer is also home to a summer end-of-the-pier show that runs for three months – to packed audiences – twice a day! And this gives Jens Meurer – whose in-laws are English – the perfect setting for a sunny expose of the most divisive political and social event in our recent island history. Meurer offers a very human story seen by the people, and for the people. Politicians or local councillors are thankfully nowhere to be seen.

Shot on 16mm and intended for big screen viewing in a collective atmosphere Seaside Special turns out to be nostalgic and surprisingly entertaining in showing English life at its best through a variety of idiosyncratic Brits who are putting their best foot forward to make both the show (and Brexit) a success in spite of their conflicting views: ‘Hoping for the best but planning for the worst’, as Boris Johnson famously once said.

It may be modest in its provincial setting but the summer variety show is no amateur dramatic affair; it certainly punches above its weight and the quality acts look and feel really professional. And what also makes this and the show so endearing is the human angle. Real people with honest, unpredictable and often refreshing views imaginatively captured in Meurer’s lens. @MeredithTaylor

Seaside Special is in UK and Irish cinemas on 10 November 2023

Fingernails (2023)

Dir; Christos Nikou | Cast: Jessie Buckley, Riz Ahmed, James Allen White | Drama

Jessie Buckley and Riz Ahmed are the stars of this ponderous futuristic drama from Greek director Christos Nikou who tries to nail down that ephemeral thing called love.

Chemistry-wise Anna (Buckley) and Amir (Ahmed) hit the jackpot with 100% when taking a test to prove their viability as a love match. There’s only one problem – Buckley already has a positive score with her long term partner Ryan (James Allen White), although their relationship has now lost its spark.

Fingernails is certainly intriguing premise-wise but suffers the same airless inertia that dogged Nikou’s first feature Apples – although that film swept the board on the international film festival circuit with its inventive and whimsical look at amnesia.

Nikou, who co-wrote the screenplay, at least succeeds in demonstrating that AI and computer testing are not infallible and that human chemistry and its wonders still rest in the ether. And that’s the positive takeaway, along with two more enjoyable performances from Buckley and Ahmed. @MeredithTaylor

In select cinemas, and streaming globally on Apple TV+, from November 3rd

Macbeth (1948)

Dir: Orson Welles | Cast: Orson Welles, Jeanette Nolan, Dan O’Herlihy, Roddy McDowall | US Drama 107′

Unlike Orson Welles’s later unorthodox adaptations of Shakespeare shot in far flung locations abroad ‘Macbeth’ was dashed off in Hollywood in 23 days on a budget of less than $900,000 the unapologetically commercial outfit Republic (whose logo it comes as quite a shock to see at the conclusion).

The end result was murky even by Welles’s standards, full of incongruously varied accents (as you would expect from a cast that includes both Dan O’Herlihy and Roddy McDowall), not least Welles’s own. (Poor Jeanette Nolan’s Lady Macbeth has taken a lot of flack over the years, but personally I think she’s pretty effective.)

Jacques Ibert’s score is quite impressive, and appropriately manages to include bagpipes. Welles plainly knew his Eisenstein and while the sets looks if they were left over from an episode of ‘Star Trek’ John Russell lights them for maximum effect’; and in Welles himself – still quite light on his feet in those days – it of course possesses a truly formidable protagonist.@RichardChatten

Fanny: the other Mendelssohn (2023)

Wri/Dir: Sheila Hayman | Doc 97′

Raising the profile of yet another uncelebrated musical genius, a new documentary unveils the little known story of Fanny Mendelssohn (1805-1847). This could have been just another worthy study of female endeavour but BAFTA-winning filmmaker Sheila Hayman brings her great-great-great-grandmother Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel to life in an absorbing biopic that delves into the archives and crafts a juicy tale of celebrity, sibling rivalry, and hitherto undiscovered treasure.

Fanny Mendlessohn was born in Hamburg, Germany where she always took a backseat to her more famous younger brother Felix. Despite the male-dominated classical music scene of the era she still managed to compose 450 works in a life that was cut short at 42. Fanny’s masterpiece ‘The Easter Sonata’, is performed by Decca-winning pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason who enlightens us with her own challenges in the field of classical music: and it seems little has changed since the 19th century.

This lively documentary is set on location in Berlin, New York, London, Oxford and Buckingham Palace, Fanny: The Other Mendelssohn follows in the tracks of other creative female pioneers of the 19th Century: The Bronte sisters, George Sand and Berthe Morisot. All very modern women – who just happened to live several hundred years ago.@MeredithTaylor

NOW ON RELEASE IN UK CINEMAS

Son of Frankenstein (1939)

Dir: Rowland V Lee | Cast: Boris Karloff, Basil Rathbone, Béla Lugosi, Lionel Atwill, Josephine Hutchinson | US Horror 99′

In Gods and Monsters Ian McKellen (playing the director James Whale) derisively barks “I only directed the first two, the rest were made by hacks”. This is a bit hard on Roland V. Lee who delivers an extremely atmospheric addition to the canon, and derives full value, aided by cameraman George Robinson, from Otterson & Riedel’s ‘psychological sets’, complete with a portrait of Colin Clive.

Billed as ‘A Roland V. Lee Production’, to add to its credibility, this was the last Frankenstein movie of the thirties, and marks the final appearance of Karloff’s monster – who had apparently lost the ability to speak since we last saw him – flanked by a memorable performances from Basil Rathbone in the title role. Lionel Atwill also star as the police inspector deliciously spoofed by Kenneth Mars in Young Frankenstein, and Bela Lugosi as the vengeful Ygor (possibly the last role he ever played that counted for something). @RichardChatten

The Royal Hotel (2023)

Dir: Kitty Green | Cast: Julia Garner, Jessica Henwick, Herbert Nordrum, Dylan River | Australia, Drama 91

Set in the rugged wilderness of the Australian outback The Royal Hotel provides a twisty new turn on a genre of cinema involving forms of exorcism. This handsome-looking thriller moves on from earlier male-dominated features in the OZ exploitation genre that are generally laced with misogyny, xenophobia and homophobia, such as Ted Kotcheff’s masterly 1971 outing Wake In Fright.

There are similar themes to be found here as two young Canadian women on an Overseas Experience in Australia start to run low on funds and secure work in a remote drinking hole hotel, having travelled to the outback to replace a couple of English girls. Both find themselves having to confront a hostile environment.

Unlike the earlier films in the genre the two women and a range of other female characters, including an indigenous aborigine, are seen to find ways of elbowing out the worst traits of male behaviour. One of the men is played by Hugo Weaving in a standout performance well beyond his Priscilla Queen of the Desert days.

The film opens in a booming underground disco with a tracking shot following a young woman who has unsuccessfully chatted up a male bartender. As she leaves this pulsating darkened room the camera follows her into the bright quiet daylight of Sydney harbour. It all feels like a curious premonition that she will also become a bartender and experience both welcome and unwelcome male attention.

Melbourne-based film director Kitty Green follows up her previous film The Assistant with many beautiful visual touches. These include the contrast of an empty swimming pool with deck chairs and a sequence of jumping into outdoor water streams that serve to refresh the claustrophobia that dry arid landscapes induce in her characters. There are striking edits involving doors that open up possibilities but also shut out the unexpected. The natural beauty of a snake contrasts with what will happen to the contents of a bottled-up glass jar.

Apparently the film is based on a documentary about the real life experiences of two Canadian backpackers travelling in the Australian outback. Although the director’s observation of the women is possibly too understated or underplayed by Julia Garner and Jessica Henwick, The Royal Hotel is more likely to be viewed as a film of measured gradual chills.

The last sequence is clearly indebted to Tony Williams’ 1982 film Next Of Kin which was co-scripted by Michael Heath and voted by Tarantino as his choice for the best OZ exploitation chiller. The film earlier involved a woman battling interior demons in a gothic house and may have had more off-the-kilter chills and zany humour, but Green draws from her film a similar sense of brooding menace.

As its female protagonists look to find a way to escape from an inferno of impending hell, The Royal Hotel also employs a striking use of fire during the finale. This is a very clear homage to the earlier film while providing within the narrative a more contemporary female focused angle.@PeterHerbert

NOW ON RELEASE IN UK CINEMAS

A Taste of Anatolia | Turkish Film Festival 2023

Turkish cinema comes to England this November courtesy of TASTE OF ANATOLIA – the only film festival in the UK dedicated to cinema of Turkey.

Celebrating its 5th edition, the full programme is available online on the film platform Balik Arts Tv and at live ‘in person’ screenings at the Rio Cinema, London, Old Divinity School, St John’s College, Cambridge University, North London Community House in London, Refugee Workers Cultural Association in London, University of East Anglia in Norwich and Aylesbury Youth Action in Buckinghamshire, the festival stretching to four towns for the first time.

Expect to see the latest releases from the festival circuit including Black Night (2022) and Snow and the Bear (2022) that premiered at the prestigious Golden Orange Festival in Antalya on Turkey’s Mediterranean riviera.

A TASTE OF ANATOLIA

Klimt & The Kiss (2023)

Dir: Ali Ray | UK Doc

“To every age its art, to every art its freedom” Vienna Secession.

The Kiss by Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) is one of the most recognised paintings in the world and its reproduction posters adorn student bedroom walls from Vancouver to Vladivostok.

Yet this new documentary urges us to look beyond Klimt’s often decorative style at the extraordinary motivations of the celebrated Austro-Hungarian genius whose sensual Art Nouveau creations blend ancient myths with modern eclecticism, and are more valuable today than ever before fetching top prices at international auctions. Klimt’s final painting Lady with a Fan (1918) was sold in June 2023 for £85.3 million, the highest price artwork ever sold at auction in Europe, (according to BBC News).

Klimt was one of the pioneers the ‘Jugendstil’ movement known in Vienna as the ‘secessionists’ who joined a pan-European trend of breaking away and rejecting the old school along with the British Arts and Crafts and Impressionism movements in France.

Gustav Klimt’s 19th century Vienna was a time of conflicted sexuality: in society women were corseted and buttoned up but Klimt’s louche feminine depictions are bursting with a feral sensuality that conveys women’s true nature focusing on love, desire and the cycle of life from birth to death. In his private life, Klimt clearly loved and appreciated women and often slept with his models who hung around his studio, often naked, waiting for a chance to be depicted in his iconic images, reflecting an era that was deeply misogynist.

Meanwhile his elegant portraits of wealthy society hostesses such as Adele Bloch-Bauer and Sonia Knips provided the bread and butter for his lush artistic endeavours that include prints, murals and objets d’art, often elaborated with gold leaf, silver, gilt stucco and mother of pearl. There were also symbolist paintings: Judith and the Head of Holofernes, Pallas Athene, nymphs, water serpents and mermaids. His work also included landscapes and murals such as the famous Beethoven Frieze that adorns Vienna’s Secession Building.

Women also featured heavily in his private life. The artist lived with his mother and sisters and although he never married, his long term partner, the Austrian fashion couturier and businesswoman Emilie Louise Floge, whom he also painted in 1902, shared his artistic vision and dressed in her own loosely-designed feminine creations.

Klimt developed an ornate often dreamlike style and made use of different mediums to express human truths rooted in nature, flowers and the surreal, but his sketching technique was also superb and rivals that of Picasso in its simple yet sensual marks. The impact of grief, madness, love and death on the female body provided a rich source material and formed the basis of his avantgarde work.

Filmmaker Ali Ray makes liberal use of interviews with specialists and art curators to flesh out her latest biopic for Exhibition on Film that follows on from her previous documentaries on Frida Kahlo and Mary Cassatt, the American impressionist painter (2023).

ON RELEASE IN UK CINEMAS from 30 OCTOBER 2023

Saltburn (2023)

Dir/Wri: Emerald Fennell | Cast: Barry Keoghan, Rosamund Pike, Jacob Elordi, Richard E. Grant, Archie Madekwe | UK Thriller 122′

Emerald Fennell follows her Oscar-winner Promising Young Woman with a wicked tale that spins on two English maxims: ‘Never Complain, Never Explain’ and ‘To Thine Own Self be True’.

Struggling to find his place at Oxford University, student Oliver Quick (Keoghan) finds himself drawn into the world of Felix Catton (Elordi), who invites him to Saltburn, his family’s Oxfordshire estate, for a summer never to be forgotten.

Once again Fennell clearly knows the territory and Saltburn is an amusingly accurate account of life for an Oxford university ‘fresher’ (first termer) seen though the eyes of Oliver who is on a (state-funded) ‘full grant’. Gifted, gauche and perceptive he may be, but the star turn here is the privileged Felix who brings a refreshingly charismatic angle to the party. Felix is not only dashingly handsome, he is also empathetic and kind, extending the hand of friendship to Felix in the light of his father’s sudden death. Not so the rest of the Catton family who are the epitome of what English upper class eccentrics are supposed to be: arrogant, supercilious and hilarious. Urbaine and feigning ennui they lounge around in their magnificent pile in the country where Sir James (Grant) and self-confessed bisexual Lady Elspeth (Pike) hold sway (“I was a lesbian for a while but it was all too wet. Men are so lovely and dry”).

Richard E Grant and Rosamund Pike take to the milieu like ducks to water, along with Paul Rhys’ tight-lipped butler Duncan. The token black bohemian guest Farleigh (Madekwe) provides eclectic grist to the mix but Carey Mulligan, the star of Promising Young Woman, only makes a guest appearance as Pamela. Anthony Willis gives this all a funky twist with his original score and there’s a subversive scene where Oliver secretly watches Felix tossing himself off in the bath, ushering in his gay credentials which are never fully explored. Is he yet to come out or just a voyeur?.

So Keoghan has a difficult, unlikable role that doesn’t convince as the middle class misfit who comes to stay fostering malign intent and latent bisexual undertones. He certainly manages a briefly sinister moment as a belligerent bisexual with feet of clay but when it turns out that Oliver is not what he seems, the proverbial shit hits the fan.

Fennell is certainly ‘a talent to amuse’, in the words of the great Noel Coward, but her plot resolution goes haywire in the final stages with a misjudged finale that feels unconvincingly shoed-in. Dreamily captured by Linus Sandgren’s inventive camerawork this cleverly observed satire is certainly worth seeing for its superb performances. MT

AMAZON MGM from 17 November 2023

The Idea (1932)

Wri/Dir: Berthold Bartosch, Frans Masereel Music: Arthur Honegger. Silent, 25’

I’ve long been aware and intrigued by this film and have finally just availed myself of the opportunity to see it on YouTube.

An adaptation of the 1920 graphic novel by Franz Masereel, it remains one of the tiny handful of attempts at a serious animated film which although technically a fantasy paints a vivid picture of the social unrest of the period and strongly evokes an urban environment; the hazy visuals possibly intended to suggest smog and capturing the same haunting atmosphere as – no, don’t laugh – Noggin the Nog (who’s avant garde score it resembles).

As for the Idea herself she resembles a corporeal version of Botticelli’s Venus whose fluctuations in size throughout are presumably intentional. @RichardChatten

AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE

The Killer (2023)

Dir: David Fincher | Cast: Michael Fassbender, Tilda Swinton, Arliss Howard | US Thriller 118′

David Fincher is back with another noir crime thriller that sees a philosophising hitman reflect on the meticulous precision and emotional detachment required for his day to day existence. But life is what happens when we’re making plans – as the saying goes – and this ‘gun for hire’ is quietly going round the bend.

Fresh from its world premiere at Venice Film Festival, The Killer, adapted from the French graphic novel by Alexis ‘Matz’ Nolent, stars Michael Fassbender as the hired assassin whose diurnal activities are voiced over by drole observations (“weakness is vulnerability”, “avoid empathy”) making this all the more intelligent and captivating, even when it descends into brutal violence. Even these scenes are sleekly choreographed in Fincher’s crisp direction and Andrew Kevin Walker’s lean script.

In the rooftops of Paris the unnamed killer is staking his target out, Day of the Jackal style. But too much time spent in preparation can often impact on performance. And this is one of the twists in a tale that sees the hitman running to keep still, as we soon discover: The Killer is an intellectual performance rather than a plot-driven one.

Sadly, a woman – his girlfriend (Monique Ganderton) – gets in the way of his day job after a home invasion goes wrong, and this blows our hero off course leading him on a peripatetic journey to the Caribbean, New York, Chicago, Florida and New Orleans Caribbean to unpick the mess. A gripping and highly enjoyable foray that keeps us on our toes with plenty of eye candy, thanks to DoP of the moment Erik Messerschmidt. MT

OUT TODAY IN CINEMAS | 10 November on NETFLIX

Julius Caesar (1953)

Marlon Brando, James Mason, John Gielgud. Louis Calhern, Edmond O’Brian, Greer Garson, Deborah Kerr | US drama 121’

Joe Mankiewicz had contributed enough black ink to the ledgers of Hollywood to be entrusted with this ambitious version of one of Shakespeare’s most celebrated plays.

Metro were prepared to make it in Technicolor but Mankiewicz predictably declined, especially as it would probably have created problems with the censor depicting (SPOILER COMING:) Caesar’s bloodied corpse.

Miklos Rozsa’s score owes much more his earlier film noirs than his subsequent work on historical epics. While winning Academy Awards for the art direction the forum at Rome has simply been recycled from ‘Quo Vadis’ and Philippi dashed off in a day at Bronson Canyons, the very plainness of the settings enabling Mankiewicz to subordinate the spectacle to the dialogue; although the presence of John Gielgud (then young enough to be described as ‘young Cassius’), James Mason, Greer Garson and Deborah Kerr amply attest to the fact that it’s a prestige production.

Among the smaller parts the appearance early on of George Macready bodes well, while John Hoyt – who was in the original Mercury production – certainly looks the part as Decius Brutus and rejoined Mankiewicz ten years later on the set of ‘Cleopatra’ on which Mankiewicz attempted to avoid the discrepancy of accents that jars so much in this version; although the gamble in casting Marlon Brando as Mark Anthony paid off handsomely. Edmond O’Brien may seem rather rather out of place as Casca but as ever is always worth watching. @RichardChatten

The Old Oak (2023)

Dir: Ken Loach | Wri: Paul Laverty | Cast: Dave Turner, Ebla Mari, Claire Rodgerson, Trevor Fox, Chris McGlade, Jordan Louis, Chrissie Robinson | UK Drama 117′

A far cry from his early hits Kes and Poor Cow, The Old Oak is another disingenuous sob story from Ken Loach and his pal Paul Laverty who joins him, on script duties, in eschewing a traditional narrative and rolling out the cliched pros and cons when a group of Syrian refugees are plonked into a village in County Durham.

Naturally the locals aren’t best pleased when the busload arrives in the former mining town. Ressources are already stretched as it is and things can only get worse (which is presumably why most of the disgruntled locals voted Brexit).

That all said, Brits and Syrians gradually settle down into a modus vivendi as they get to know one another and realise everyone’s the same at the end of the day and just wants a simple life.

But what plays out is far from simplistic, and Laverty makes pleasing use of the vernacular with some seasoned old chestnuts peppered with expletives aplenty in telling the tale. And to be fair on old Ken, his latest is far and away a better film than his 2016 agitprop I, Daniel Blake. much loved and lorded by our friends abroad. This at least feels real and genuine with well-formed characters, and there’s a lovely scene set in Durham Cathedral.

Robbie Ryan’s careful camerawork, a few laugh-out-loud gags and some naturalistic performances from a cast of newcomers – especially the two leads: Dave Turner and Ebla Mari, make The Old Oak unexpectedly moving and amusing despite the mawkish, over- protracted ending. Not a patch on Kes or Poor Cow though. MT

NOW ON RELEASE IN UK and FRANCE

Atirkül in the Land of Real Men (2023) IDFA 2023

Dir: Janyl Jusupjan | With: Atirkül Arzyldabekova, Arzyldabekova Abish, Arzyldabekova Samat, Bayaman Salimbek uulu | France / Czech Republic / Kyrgyzstan, 2023, 65 min.

In the spectacular landscapes of Kyrgyzstan where – apparently- “real” men hold sway, a fervent woman challenges their male prowess with her own particular brand of female empowerment.

Atirkül, a horse lover, is keen to preserve Kyrgyzstani heritage with the local sport of ‘buzkashi’. And to this end she has gathered together a group of men who excel in the ‘all-male’ daredevil horse-back pastime with time-honoured tradition.

Atirkül in the Land of Real Men joins a fascinating series of ethnographic docs and docudramas from the region that include the recent Song of the Tree and The Eagle Huntress. In this neck of the woods enterprising women continue to challenge gender roles and overcome unconscious bias, and are every bit as powerful in their endeavours, perhaps even more so, than their male counterparts.

The game itself is certainly dangerous for both horses and riders. To the outsider, buzkashi looks a bit like a rough and tumble version of polo with a dead goat (!) serving as the ball. Players try to wrestle the inanimate corpse from the rival team of riders while staying on horseback – and this, like polo, requires strong core muscles and powerful legs. Members of the team are seen struggling through the icy snowscapes to join the others, and practising swooping down to pick up the dead goat. A great deal of cut of thrust is involved in getting hold of the goat in a rugby-style scrum as horses and men pitch in fearlessly. Atirkül is campaigning to get bigger more powerful horses for her team but her plans are put on hold due to financing issues: the riders have to earn their living too, and take time out in Russia where they find gainful employment in the menial sector.

Clearly Atirkül’s strength lies in her mouth: her negotiating ability and spirited sense of humour certainly makes up for what she lacks in the physical department. Her enjoyment comes from the buzz of horse-trading, honed during her previous career as an importer and seller of Chinese goods, as she gradually builds an indomitable team.

And there’s seemingly no end to this gutsy woman’s day. After hours in her home village of Jaylgan (Tajikistan) we see her badgering one of her sons to get married. Never taking herself too seriously – another incident sees her grappling with a garden swing that collapses when she tries to sit down for a moment of well-earned rest. Life is tough in Kyrgyzstan, and even more so for women. Twas every thus!. MT

INTERNATIONAL DOC FEST AMSTERDAM 2023 | PREMIERE

Animal Farm (1954)

Dir: Joy Bachelor, John Halas | Animation 72’’

Animal Farm suffered a fate similar to Gulliver’s Travels‘ fifteen years earlier in reaching the screen as a Technicolor treat for kiddies in a fashion that would surely have shocked their creators.

Poor George Orwell went his grave being patted on the back by Tories congratulating him for his demolition of socialism in ‘Animal Farm’ and ‘1984’ despite it being obvious to anyone with half a brain that the subject of his ire was Stalinism rather than socialism.

Viewed purely as a film it succeeds extremely well with its attractive and fluid photography and, until the final couple of minutes, is remarkably faithful to the original with capitalism getting pretty short shrift in the portrayal of the hateful Mr Jones and his cronies. @RichardChatten

Raindance Film Festival 2033

The 31st Raindance Film Festival, the UK’s leading indie film festival returns to the heart of London’s West End frrom 25 October– 4 November 2023.

OPENING GALA: DAY OF THE FIGHT (dir: Jack Huston, Canada)

UK Premiere. Debut feature. Award-winning British actor Jack Huston (Boardwalk Empire, American Hustle, House of Gucci) makes his directorial debut with this story of a once-renowned boxer who takes a redemptive journey through his past and present, on the day of his first fight since he left prison. This formidable drama stars Michael Pitt alongside a cast including Ron Perlman, Joe Pesci, and a cameo from Steve Buscemi. Director Jack Huston will take part in a post-screening Q&A, followed by a gala opening party at the Waldorf Hilton.

CLOSING GALA: UN AMOR (dir Isabel Coixet, Spain/Catalonia)

Coixet’s cinema is an acquired taste and her latest Un Amor is based on Sara Mesa’s bestselling novel. Award-winning actress Laia Costa plays a young woman who escapes her stressful life in the city and relocates to rural Spain. When she accepts a disturbing sexual proposal, it gives rise to an all-consuming and obsessive passion. Nominated for the Golden Seashell at San Sebastián Film Festival, it’s a striking account of existential doubt and the transformative power of carnal desire.

SPECIAL GUEST FOCUS: CATALONIA

Raindance is honoured to welcome Catalonia as the special guest this year. Closing gala Un Amor is presented as part of this special focus in partnership with Catalan Films and Institut Ramon Llull, along with the UK Premieres of Upon Entry, Tender Metalheads and La Singla (more details below). A dedicated Shorts Programme Catalan Collection will further showcase the vision, ambition, and vibrancy of Catalan filmmakers. Special sessions during Raindance’s Industry Programme will also champion Catalonia’s film industry.

IN COMPETITION: FILM STRANDS

PARACHUTE (dir: Brittany Snow, USA). UK Premiere. Debut feature. The directorial debut by actress Brittany Snow (Hairspray, Pitch Perfect) won her the “Thunderbird Rising” award at SXSW. Lead actress Courtney Eaton (Yellowjackets) also picked up a prize at SXSW for her powerful performance as a young woman with an eating disorder and addiction issues.

ALL THE COLOURS OF THE WORLD ARE BETWEEN BLACK AND WHITE (dir: Babatunde Apalowo, Nigeria). UK Premiere. Debut feature. Winner of the “Best Feature” Teddy at Berlin, it portrays two men who develop a deep affection for each other when they first meet in Lagos – but in a society which considers homosexuality taboo, they feel the pressure of social norms.

UPON ENTRY (dir: Alejandro Rojas, Sebastián Vasquez, Spain/Catalonia). UK Premiere. Debut feature. Acclaimed at festivals including Málaga and Tallinn, it follows a young couple as they move from Spain to the United States, only to face an unpleasant inspection and gruelling interrogation when they enter New York airport’s immigration area.

ONLY THE GOOD SURVIVE (dir: Dutch Southern, USA). International Premiere. Debut feature. Multi-award-winning actress Sidney Flanigan (Never Rarely Sometimes Always) plays a young woman who, after a heist gone wrong results in the deaths of three of her friends, finds herself in the custody of the smalltown sheriff in this impressive genre-bending horror/thriller.

MOUNTAIN ONION (dir: Eldar Shibanov, Kazakhstan). UK Premiere. Debut feature. This Venice Film Festival prize-winner follows an 11-year-old boy who finds his mother in the arms of a truck driver, and so he travels from Kazakhstan to China to find what he believes is the only thing that can help his father save the situation and become a strong man: Gold Viagra.

LOST SOULZ (dir: Katherine Propper, USA). International Premiere. Debut feature. A young rapper leaves everything behind and embarks on an odyssey of self-discovery, music, and friendship in this slow-burning Texas-bound roadtrip movie.

STORM (dir: Erika Calmeyer, Norway). UK Premiere. Debut feature. After her son drowns in an accident, a mother tries to restart her and her daughter’s life in this tough and powerful drama – only for rumours to surface that the daughter pushed her brother into the water.

THE LAND WITHIN (dir: Fisnik Maxville, Kosovo/Switzerland). UK Premiere. Debut feature. The “Best First Feature” winner at Tallinn, it follows an adopted boy living in Switzerland who returns to his native Kosovo at the request of his cousin, to help identify the exhumed bodies from a mass grave in their childhood village. Lead actress Luàna Bajrami won the Raindance 2021 “Best Director” award for her directorial debut The Hill Where Lionesses Roar.

ALL THE SILENCE (dir: Diego del Rio, Mexico). UK Premiere. Debut feature. An actress and sign language teacher learns that she is soon to become deaf. Despite having deaf parents, deaf friends, and a deaf girlfriend, she refuses to accept a world without sound.

BLOOD FOR DUST (dir: Rod Balckurst, USA). UK Premiere. With a cast including Kit Harington, Josh Lucas and Stephen Dorff, it tells of a struggling travelling salesman who finds himself on a dangerous path after a chance encounter with a former colleague.

CLASHING DIFFERENCES (dir: Merle Grimme, Germany). UK Premiere. Debut feature. Winner of the “Young German Cinema” award at Munich Film Festival, the all-female cast tell the story of a white feminist organisation who, in a clumsy attempt at diversity, invite a group of queer and BIPOC women to participate in their conference.

HEAVIS TENDRES/TENDER METALHEADS (dir: Joan Tomas, Spain/Catalonia). UK Premiere. Debut feature. An animated tale of two teenage boys in 1990s Barcelona who take refuge in their friendship and heavy music, escaping the grey world in which they live.

PALIMPSEST (dir: Hanna Västinsalo, Finland). UK Premiere. Debut feature. From the Venice Film Fest Biennale Cinema College, this Benjamin Button-esque sci-fi drama follows two elderly roommates who are selected for a medical trial that makes them younger, giving them a second chance at life while retaining the memories of their past life.

PETT KATA SHAW (dir: Nuhash Humayun, Bangladesh). UK Premiere. Debut feature. Having directed the multi-Oscar® qualifying horror short Moshari, this self-taught filmmaker brings more ancient South Asian folklores to life in this supernatural anthology film – perfect viewing for Halloween.

SWEET SIXTEEN (dir: Alexa-Jeanne Dubé, Canada). World Premiere. Debut feature. Adapted from the late Suzie Bastien’s 2018 play, eight 16-year-old girls unveil themselves through eight bittersweet monologues.

WHITE PLASTIC SKY (dir: Tibor Bánóczki, Sarolta Szabó, Hungary). UK Premiere. Sarolta’s debut feature/Tibor’s 2nd feature. This bold and visually striking animated film follows a young couple living in a barren, post-apocalyptic Budapest in the year 2123, struggling for food and life as they survive along with the rest of humanity beneath a huge white dome.

DOCUMENTARIES

SATAN WANTS YOU (dir: Steven J. Adams, Sean Horlor, USA). UK Premiere. 2nd feature. The provocative story of how the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s was ignited by Michelle Remembers, a bestselling memoir co-written by a psychiatrist and his patient, which made lurid claims about Satanic ritual abuse.

DUSTY & STONES (dir: Jesse Rudoy, USA). UK Premiere. Debut feature. This remarkable debut intimately chronicles the ride of Gazi “Dusty” Simelane and Linda “Stones” Msibi, two struggling country music singers from Swaziland who journey to Texas hoping for their big break.

SEX WITH SUE (dir: Lisa Rideout, Canada). UK Premiere. Debut feature. Winner of “Best Documentary” at the Canadian Screen Awards 2023, it chronicles the life of nurse-turned-sex-educator Sue Johanson, whose popular radio and TV programmes offered sex education from a pleasure-driven, feminist perspective.

LA SINGLA (dir: Paloma Zapata, Spain/Catalonia). UK Premiere. 3rd feature. Romani flamenco dancer Antoñita Singla lost her hearing just days after her birth, so learned to dance by watching her mother clapping. In the 1960s she was considered “the best flamenco dancer in the world” – but ironically, she was more famous internationally than in Spain. This is her fascinating life story.

WE ARE GUARDIANS (dir: Chelsea Green, Rob Grobman, Edivan Guajajara, Brazil/USA). UK Premiere. Debut feature. Produced by Leonardo DiCaprio’s Appian Way Productions, this is a poignant portrayal of a group of native people who endeavour to save what is left of the Brazilian Amazon.

ANOTHER BODY (dir: Sophie Compton, Reuben Hamlyn, USA). UK Premiere. Debut feature. Winner of the “Special Jury Award” at SXSW, it documents a college student’s search for justice after she discovers deepfake pornography of herself circulating online.

AURORA’S SUNRISE (dir: Inna Sahakyan, Armenia). London Premiere. 3rd feature. Combining archive footage with animation to tell the true story of a teenage refugee turned Hollywood star: 14-year-old Aurora lost everything during the Armenian Genocide, but after fleeing to New York her story became a media sensation, leading to a starring role as herself in the 1919 film Auction of Souls.

OMAR AND CEDRIC: IF THIS EVER GETS WEIRD (dir: Nicolas Jack Davies, Germany/UK). World Premiere. 2nd feature. Having worked with the likes of Coldplay, Elbow, PJ Harvey and Mumford & Sons, this Grammy-nominated director charts the intimate, artistic and personal relationship between Omar Rodriguez-López and Cedric Bixler-Zavala of American progressive rock band The Mars Volta.

THE BOOKS HE DIDN’T BURN (dir: Claus Bredenbrock & Jascha Hannover, Germany). World Premiere. Debut feature. Narrated by Academy Award® winner Jeremy Irons, this documentary takes an eye-opening look at history by examining the remains of Adolf Hitler’s private library.

LONG DISTANCE SWIMMER: SARA MARDINI (dir: Charly Wai Feldman, UK). UK Premiere. Debut feature. When former pro swimmers Sara Mardini and her sister Yusra arrived in Germany from war-torn Syria, they were Europe’s most celebrated refugees. Now Sara is facing a 20-year prison sentence for volunteering with a Greek NGO, helping other refugees. Screening in association with Migration Matters Festival.

SISTERS INTERRUPTED (dir: Caroline Sharp, UK). UK Premiere. Debut feature. Highlighting the medical injustices that people face, this documentary follows two sisters as they both battle forms of epilepsy and together fight for access to a treatment that could save both their lives.

RED HERRING (dir: Kit Vincent, UK). London Premiere. Debut feature. Tackling themes of mental health, love and society, a filmmaker enlists his family on an intimate and darkly humorous journey to help them come to terms with his terminal illness.

EMBERS (dir: Christian Cooke, UK). World Premiere. Debut feature. The first feature by British actor Christian Cooke, he also stars alongside a cast including Ruth Bradley (Humans, Ted Lasso) in this story of a sexual surrogate who is employed to help a high-security psychiatric patient overcome his intimacy issues so he can make parole.

SILENT ROAR (dir: Johnny Barrington, UK). London Premiere. Debut feature. Chosen to open this year’s Edinburgh Film Festival, this charming coming-of-age drama follows a young surfer on the Isle of Lewis as he deals with unresolved grief following his father’s death.

THE PORTRAIT (dir: Simon Ross, UK). European Premiere. Debut feature. After her husband is devastated by a tragic accident, a devoted wife becomes obsessed with a mysterious portrait that resembles how he once was. This eerie thriller stars Natalia Cordova-Buckley (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.), Ryan Kwanten (True Blood) and Oscar nominee Virginia Madsen (Sideways).

CATCHING DUST (dir: Stuart Gatt, UK). UK Premiere. Debut feature. Erin Moriaty (The Boys) and Jai Courtney (Suicide Squad, Terminal List) play a repressed wife and her criminal husband hiding out in the Texas desert, when a couple from New York suddenly arrives with dangerous consequences for them all.

WARHOL (dir: Adam Ethan Crow, UK). World Premiere. Debut feature. The lives of a controversial America shock jock, a desperate deaf girl, a homeless ex-soldier, and a scared young gang member intertwine in this tale of choice, consequence, and redemption.

RESTORE POINT (dir: Robert Hloz, Czech Republic/Slovakia). UK Premiere. Debut feature. Raindance asked top critics to select and champion a film, and this special “Critics Pick” is selected by Variety’s Guy Lodge. Set in 2038, a female detective investigates the case of a murdered couple when a restoration team is able to bring one of them back to life.

TYPIST ARTIST PIRATE KING (dir: Carol Morley, UK). Special pre-release London Premiere. Kelly Macdonald (No Country For Old Men, Operation Mincemeat) and Monica Dolan (Appropriate Adult) play two women whose friendship grows as they hit the road in an electric car looking for endings and reconciliation. Co-starring Gina McKee (Our Friends In The North, My Policeman).

RAINDANCE FILM FESTIVAL 24 OCTOBER-4 NOVEMBER 2023

La Sagrada Familia (2005) Viennale 2023

Wri/Dir: Sebastian Lelio | Cast: Nestor Cantillana, Marco Hernandez, Patricia Lopez, Coca Guazzini, Macarena Teka | Chile, Drama 99’ 2005

Sebastian Lelio’s first film La Sagrada Familia has nothing to do with the cathedral in Barcelona, – a provocative social experiment – it unfolds thousands of miles away in his native Chile, and plays on the passion of Eastertide and its inherent conflicts.

A group of actors were given a script and a beach house to live in for a week on location. The plot focuses on a couple of architects, their grown up son and his girlfriend. What follows is an ingeniously plotted family tragedy complete with resolution, but the process is left open for the actors to improvise bringing their own ideas and interpretation to the table.

An awkward subplot doesn’t quite ring true but serves to counterbalance the central story seen through intimate close-up and widescreen handheld camerawork and picturing Chile’s wild Pacific coastline near the capital Santiago.

Marco (Nestor Cantillana) has always had a competitive relationship with his father (Sergio Hernandez). When his mother goes away for a few days over the Easter holidays leaving the father with Marco with his bohemian girlfriend Sofia (Patricia Lopez), an erotic scenario develops between the three of them in this tension-fuelled constructed reality. MT

SCREENING at VIENNALE 2023

Abschied (1930) Powell + Pressburger Season at the Bfi

Dir: Robert Siodmak | Cast: Brigitte Horney, Aribert Mog, Emilie Unda | Drama

Made in Neubabelsberg Studios in Berlin in just ten days on a budget of DM80,000, Abschied (Farewell) gained Emeric Pressburger his first screen credit during his brief sojourn in Weimar Germany before settling in Britain in 1936.

The action never leaves the shabby boarding house presided over by Emilia Unda, who some viewers might recall as the headmistress in Madchen in Uniform. Unlike Robert Siodmak’s previous outing of outdoor Neue Sachlicheit (Menschen am Sontag (1929) this anticipates the later garrulous romantic realism of Pressburger’s own Miracle in Soho minus the baroque touches one came to associate with those of his longtime collaborator Michael Powell. @RichardChatten

POWELL + PRESSBURGER SEASON AT THE BFI AUTUMN 2023

Three Sad Tigers (1968) Raul Ruiz Retrospective Viennale 2023

Raúl Ruiz | Drama, Chile 100′

Ruiz’s lively debut is perhaps the purest form of cinema verite and social realism, giving a fascinating snapshot of ordinary people in Chile in the late 1960s. If there was an example of the Chilean New Wave – this is it; and the film went on to win the Golden Leopard at Locarno the year after it was shot.

Inspired by a play from Alejandro Sieveking. Ruiz’ essentially plotless narrative centres on three men trying to make a decent living for themselves in pre-Allende Santiago, the rolling camera capturing the most intimate moments of their everyday activities in brief and tantalising vignettes often scored by atmospheric music or outbursts of song. Raw and charismatic Three Sad Tigers leaves a haunting impression. Ruiz incomparable technique is astounding.

The most obvious touchstone is John Cassavetes’ 1970 outing Husbands but this is a much more impressionistic look at what men get up to when left to fend for themselves during times of crisis. It also offers a sober impression of life back then. What starts as a reasonably playful affair soon turns sinister eventually descending into violence as one of the characters feels short-changed by another other. Three Sad Tigers was the first of a trio of films Ruiz made in Chile before the 1973 military coup set in motion his move to France. MT

RAUL RUIZ RETROSPECTIVE | VIENNALE 2023

Richard III (1955)

Dir: Laurence Olivier | Cast: Laurence Olivier, Claire Bloom, Cedric Hardwicke, John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson | UK Drama 151’

Olivier’s third cinematic version of Shakespeare – the fourth if you count Paul Czinner’s film of ‘As You Like It’ – was probably his most parsimonious (the budget ran to VistaVision and Technicolor but Bosworth Field was shot in Spain to keep costs down and the difference in the lighting is in stark contrast to the rest of the film; along with the incongruous presence of the young Stanley Baker as the Earl of Richmond).

It was rapturously received by critics and is to this day considered one of the finest adaptations of the bard, which makes Olivier’s inability to raise the finance to make a version of ‘Macbeth’ even more to be regretted.

Olivier himself is plainly having the time of his life eying the camera as he shares his cunning plans; while the film’s cleverest conceit has to be the inclusion of an almost entirely wordless Pamela Brown drifting through the periphery of the action as Edward IV’s mistress Jane Shore. @RichardChatten

NOW ON BBC IPLAYER

Bfi London Film Festival 2023

Arts curator Peter Herbert reports from year’s Bfi London Film Festival on London’s South Bank:

THE ZONE OF INTEREST (2023) has a kind of ponderous beauty drawing parallels between the consumerism of living and that of death as perceived during the horrors of war. It feels like it’s source novel by Martin Amis but is unmistakably the work of one of our most important UK directors and adds to Jonathan Glazer’s small but striking body of films.

I wasn’t a massive fan of BOOK OF CLARENCE (2023) and thought the director was more vivacious than his film which is radical at its best with a very amusing use of Benedict Cumberbatch.

RED ISLAND (2023) has lots of good elements but seemed drawn out by the end and as directed by Robin Campillo became a bit unfocused beyond the central child’s eye view. It’s perfect Curzon fare.

James Benning’s ALLENSWORTH (2022) (above) may be one of his best. 12 chapters representing 12 months of the year.. It could be screened as an ongoing cycle like THE CLOCK and contains some of his key ideas and images in the context of a memory of a town scarred by a historical memory of racial horror. The use of Nina Simone’s song Blackbird is very haunting and moving in one sequence.

THE STRANGER AND THE FOG (above) had a very passionate introduction from a key person involved with its restoration. He described a film that on its release in 1974 was met with baffled indifference by audiences and critics at festivals, and was effectively buried by Iranian authorities. Looking at it now. it still feels largely impenetrable without knowledge of intense religious cultural motifs. Filmed by writer and director Bahram Beyzaie on locations used by Pasolini as sets for his final ARABIAN NIGHTS film, it lacks for me the homoerotic potential of Pasolini that it fleetingly contains and doesn’t develop the beautiful visual surrealism of the comparable Paradjanov . It’s a long 145 minutes with plenty of rain,fog,mud and symbolism but is a unique one off for sure. Let’s see how its reputation develops once this restoration is released.

THE ANIMAL KINGDOM (2023) (above) may not be perfect but the rich fertile imagination of director Thomas Cailley gets under the skin with its idea of people mutating into animals with authorities struggling to often violently suppress what’s happening. There are curious parallels with Ray Bradbury and the sequence in the forest revealing a community of mutants living a positive new life reminded me of the end of FAHRENHEIT 451 with the forest of people keeping forbidden books alive. After the film I could see people around me with a range of facial features suggesting the animal world, much as years ago the work of Cindy Sherman altered visual perceptions for days after experiencing an exhibition of her face shifting photography. This is a good sign of successful art altering the way you can look at life around you One for a film distributor to consider acquiring. The film with the strong combination of Romain Duris, Paul Kircher and the possibly underused but ascending actress Adele Exarchopoulos could be commercially successful?

THE BLACK PIRATE from 1926 looked splendid in its 2 strip technicolor glory highlighting the wooden timbre set design. It felt a bit stolid as directed by Albert Parker until the exuberance of the last 30 mins which has more of the emotional power and beauty associated with Dwan or Walsh. There is a surprising lack of closeups of the charismatic Fairbanks as its largely filmed long /medium camera range. Neil Brand was as exuberant as we expect from the best of the current silent film pianists.

ALL OF US STRANGERS (2023) (main pic) may be the standout so far and the more I think about comparisons between the growing body of work by Andrew Haigh and the parallel of Terence Davies in terms of literary adaptations and gay identity may be well worth exploring further.

POOR THINGS (2023) – last but not least – its visual originality, set design and ideas seem to overflow the confines of the screen. I was reminded at times of Cacoyannis’ similarly imaginative and internationally funded but failed Sci-fi hellzapoppin THE DAY THE FISH CAME OUT from 1967, though this shows how far creative Greek cinema has evolved on every level. The cast led by Emma Stone don’t hold back on anything realising the intricate female- dominated and designed energy of Tony McNamara’s script. It is possibly Lanthimos’ most fully developed work so far. A riveting finale to this years LFF.

PETER HERBERT is CURATOR MANAGER

THE ARTS PROJECT in North London’s Kentish Town

Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)

Dir: Martin Scorsese | Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Lily Gladstone, Jesse Plemmons, John Lithgow | US Drama 200’

Martin Scorsese’s 26th film is a love story, a crime thriller and an epic of cultural significance. Because it’s essentially about immigrants – the white man taking over the natives in their own country evoked by film’s lyrical title – Killers of the Flower Moon is also bound to be universal and newsworthy in its appeal. But Scorsese also makes his first Western smoulderingly beautiful with each frame a glowing masterpiece capturing the ravishing splendour of the Oklahoma countryside during the prohibition years of the 1920s when most of the western world was caught up in the first world war.

Best female actor in a motion picture – drama – 81st Golden Globes @Benny Askinas

Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro are masterful as the two villains of the piece with Jesse Plemmons offering integrity as the calm and straightforward man of the Law. DiCaprio acts his socks off but newcomer Lily Gladstone steals the show as the Native American woman he falls for and marries, mostly for love but also because his uncle (De Niro) is keen to ensure her fortune passes into the family, a common practice that spread through the region like wildfire, attracting all kinds of negative elements to this peaceful community and giving the film its spiritual element so loved by Scorsese: the serpent in the Garden of Eden

Three and a half hours steal by engrossingly as Scorsese and his co-writer Roth craft a treacherous tale of subplots and intrigue fleshing out each character to build a rich cinematic tapestry of the times but, in contrast to his New York fare, the violence here is nuanced and restrained but the film really needs to be seen on the big screen. If this true epic doesn’t win an Oscar I’ll eat my Stetson. MT

BEST PERFORMANCE BY A FEMALE ACTOR IN A MOTION PICTURE – LILY GLADSTONE | 81st GOLDEN GLOBES 2024

Jules (2023)

Dir: Marc Turtletaub | Cast: Ben Kingsley, Harriet Sansom Harris, Jade Quon and Jane Curtin | US 87′

Best described as a soft sci-fi dramady Jules follows a modest man living out his days in small town Pennsylvania. Marc Turtletaub combines topical and traditional themes in his darkly amusing tongue in cheek third feature starring Ben Kingsley.

Plagued by a daughter convinced he has dementia and a couple of deeply irritating neighbours (Harris and Curtin), Milton (Kingsley) keeps himself sane by attending local council meetings where his memory loss soon becomes cause for mildly amusing alarm.

But when a spaceship lands in the back garden, crushing his prized azaleas, a whole new world opens up and Milton finds out he is no longer living alone but with a gentle soul whom he names Jules.

Jules is a breath of fresh air, extra-terrestrial-wise. Mute and kindly, he provides comfort and a listening ear in this appealing and inventive caper that sees the three neighbours find meaning and connection later in life – thanks to an unlikely stranger. MT

JULES won the Audience Award at Sonoma International Film Festival | In cinemas 23 December 2023

Made in Prague Festival 2023

The Made in Prague Festival, one of the oldest national festivals in Britain, showcases the rich tapestry of arts, cinema, music, and culture – in the broadest sense – bringing cult classics and the latest Czech releases to the UK.

The festival this year celebrates its 27th edition with a gala opening and private view of Ultra Super-Natural by Barbora Šlapetová and Lukáš Rittstein, an unique testimony to the fusion of various cultures and civilizations that span the globe.

The backbone of the festival will be Czech film screenings featuring many British premieres. Highlights include Il Boemo, a biopic about the little known composer Josef Mysliveček, starring Vojtěch Dyk, who will join for a Q&A

A second Gala Special will present fresh from this year’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Restore Point, a sci-fi neo-noir thriller about the future of humanity. The screening at IMAX of this Hollywood-style production will be joined by female lead Andrea Mohylová along with the director and producer.

The Festival will conclude with the Gala pre-release screening of One Life, a biographical drama about British humanitarian Sir Nicholas Winton, starring among others Anthony Hopkins, capturing his efforts to save Jewish children from Nazi occupied Czechoslovakia.

Other films to look out for:

NIGHTSIREN

+ Q&A WITH DIRECTOR TEREZA NVOTOVÁ
Saturday 11 November, 5.30 pm / The Gate

A harrowing, yet beautiful take on patriarchy and internalised misogyny awarded by Golden Leopard at the 2022 Locarno Film Festival.

THE CRUCIFIED | Ukrizovana Dir: Boris Orlicky (1921)

Sunday 19 November, 3.30 pm / JW3

Filmed in 1921, this classic silent Czech film offers a fascinating, if troubling, representation of Jews and antisemitism in 19th Century Europe.

VICTIM | Obet | Dir: Michal Blasko (2022)

Monday 27 November 2023 / Genesis

A universal tale about two-class societies, repressed xenophobia and racism, as well as broken hopes and dreams. The Slovak Republic’s national submission for 2023 Academy Awards. More info

ARVÉD | Dir: Vojtech Masek (2022)

Tuesday 28 November, 6.45 pm / Czech Centre at the Czech Embassy Cinema

A fascinating insight into the life and mind of Jiří Arvéd Smíchovský, a charismatic hermeticist and occultist, who in his quest for knowledge became first a Nazi collaborator, than informer and witness in communist showtrials.

MADE IN PRAGUE FESTIVAL 2023 | 14-24 NOVEMBER 2023

Cinema Unbound: The Creative Worlds of Powell + Pressburger

Cinema Unbound: The Creative Worlds of Powell + Pressburger is a major UK-wide celebration of one of the greatest and most enduring filmmaking partnerships: Michael Powell (1905-1990) and Emeric Pressburger (1902-1988).

Bold, subversive and iconoclastic, their passionate collaborative artistic vision – spanning 24 films, including A Matter of Life and Death, The Red Shoes, Miracle in Soho and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp – is a vital part of the fabric of British cinema history, which continues to inspire audiences and artists alike.

Contraband (1940) Courtesy of BFI

The Spy in Black (1939) Courtesy of BFI

Black Narcissus (1947) Courtesy of BFI

From 16 October to 31 December at venues across the UK, on BFI Player and with the free, major exhibition The Red Shoes: Behind the Mirror (from 10 November, BFI Southbank).

20,000 Species of Bees (2023)

Dir: Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren | Spain, Drama 128′

Can a child as young as eight have strong sexual feelings, and trans ones into the bargain? That’s what Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren explores in her impressive first feature.

Assertive and entirely sure of herself Aitor, who calls herself Lucia in defiance of the male name assigned to her at birtH, is certainly a force of nature, brilliantly played by Sofía Otero in her debut. But her mother Ane (Patricia Lopez Arnaiz), a sculptor who is going through a crisis of her own, prefers to call her Coco because she finds it difficult to see her son as a girl.

20,000 Species of Bees is a delicate slow-burn coming of age drama that traces this morally complex mother child relationship as it gradually develops one summer in the Basque Country. Ane’s own mother Lita (Itziar Lazkano) plays the disapproving traditional role of reason. So it falls upon the girl’s aunt Lourdes (Ane Gabarian), whose skill as a beekeeper gives this limpid tale of female empowerment its title, to allow her niece to be herself without judgement or admonishment. MT

IN UK CINEMAS FROM 27 OCTOBER 2023

Blind Date (1959)

Dir: Joseph Losey | Cast: Hardy Krüger, Stanley Baker, Micheline Presle and directed by Joseph Losey.

Joseph Losey and fellow blacklistee Ben Barzman joined Stanley Baker for the first time in this stylish if talky crime film.

The scenes between Hardy Kruger and Micheline Presle as Jaqueline Cousteau who plays Losey’s habitual glacial continental actress – greeting Kruger with the come-on line “I always wondered what Holland exported apart from tulips, now I know!” – have an erotic tension Losey never achieved again; while Baker’s friction with his superiors continues his perennial obsession with Britain’s class system which came to full fruition in ‘The Servant’.

Availing himself of Britain’s best technicians Losey as usual avails himself of a classy British cameraman in the form of Christopher Challis and a snazzy jazz score. @RichardChatten

Beyond Utopia (2023)

Dir/Wri: Madeleine Gavin | US Doc 115′

This electrifying new documentary about North Korea focuses on those trying to escape the brutal regime, and won this year’s Audience Award at Sundance Film Festival.

Filmmaker Madeleine Gavin shows how South Korean pastor Kim Seungeun has dedicated much of his life to assisting the perilous flight of many from North Korea and onwards to safety through China, often with the help of fixers. And we witness frenzied footage of one family’s courageous escape through the voyeuristic camerawork of Taylor Krauss and Lisa Rinzler.

North Korea is certainly a weird and wicked totalitarian regime that represses its citizens with torture, a spartan lifestyle and the bizarre practice of forcing them to commit their personal solid waste to government centres to be used as fertiliser.

Beyond Utopia is not an easy film to watch but it’s certainly worthwhile. Crucially, these are real situations involving real people who risk the indignities of capture, torture and even execution if they are caught defecting. And that mere fact alone certainly concentrates the tension.

Fortunately there is a positive outcome for one family but Beyond Utopia often feels terrifyingly intense as it flips between fraught interviews with those concerned, and actual footage of their flight and the aftermath. The lucky escapees soon reflect on how wrong they were to believe that North Korea could ever be a paradise. MT

BEYOND UTOPIA is out in UK cinemas 24 October 2023

Pulp (1972)

Dir: Mike Hodges | Cast: Michael Caine · Mickey King ; Mickey Rooney · Preston Gilbert • Lionel Stander · Ben Dinuccio ; Lizabeth Scott | UK Drama

Having used the north of England as an incongruous setting for a tale of gangland violence in ‘Get Carter’, Mike Hodges and Michael Caine – who has announced his retirement at the age of 90 – journeyed to Malta for this disarmingly inconsequential shaggy dog story with echoes of the Montessi scandal.

The film abounds in cute visual conceits like the ubiquitous election posters of Frank Cippolata, a police lineup of hitmen dressed as priests; while Caine is at his most laconic passing judgements like “two crossed coffins on the Michelin guide” on a small town.

Along the way he encounters various eccentrics, including Dennis Price in a wide-brimmed hat that earns him the nickname “the Mad Hatter”, Lionel Stander (who actually tells his driver to “take him for a ride”), Mickey Rooney as an abrasive gangster star who boats of being “killed in eighty movies” (I wonder what happened to that portrait of him in his heyday on the wall of his mansion) and most surprising of all – one for the teenagers – Miss Lizabeth Scott. @RichardChatten

Snow Leopard (2023)

Dir/scr. Pema Tseden. China. 2023. 109mins

The snow leopard is a protected animal in its native Tibet but it represents different things to the local people in this wild region.

Pema Tseden, the pioneering founder of Tibetan cinema who died in May at the age of 53, rose to the international stage with his 2019 feature Balloon. With a unique cinematic vision Tseden shows how some Tibetans see this legendary leopard as a vicious threat, others a mythical being.

The sharp contrasts between tradition and the present day come to life in a striking story that centres on a family disagreement in the frosty wastelands where the rare beast roams as an increasingly endangered species.

Sheepherder Jinpa and his father are caught in a bitter conflict. Jinpa wants to kill a leopard that has run riot through his sheep enclosure killing nine of his frightened herd, but his father (Losang Choepel) feels this sacred animal should to be set free.

All this is recorded by a film crew who arrives from Qinghai province in northwest China keen on collecting newsworthy local stories. Lead reporter Dradul (Genden Phuntsok) has been tipped off by the herder’s brother, Nyima (Tseten Tashi), a monk, and the TV journalist is delighted when the situation takes on a ludicrous angle as the conflict deepens and this gives the film a touch of dry humour.

The enraged Jinpa will only back down if he gets compensation from the government. But this entails the endorsement of a government inspector who will have to travel all the way from the administrative capital days away.

So crew and family hunker down in the cosy yurt for a raucous night of high altitude hospitality. When the inspector finally arrives the conflict takes on a kafkaesque quality that often crackles with caustic comedy. Spectacular landscapes and mesmerising naturalistic performances, particularly from the leopard itself, make this particularly worth watching. MT.

NOW IN UK CINEMAS on 22 NOVENBER

Doctor Jekyll (2023)

Dir: Joe Stephenson | Cast: Eddie Izzard, Scott Chambers, Lindsay Duncan, Robyn Cara | UK Horror 90′

Following on from last week’s The Exorcist: Believer comes yet another version of a classic that bears no relation to any of its predecessors; although at least Doctor Jekyll retains its original author’s name in the credits.

This modern interpretation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella ‘The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’, Doctor Jekyll centres on one Dr. Nina Jekyll, a recluse who finds friendship with her newly hired help, Rob, played by emerging actor Scott Chambers. They must work together to prevent Hyde from destroying her life.

As the titular Nina Jekyll Eddie Izzard never looks like other than Eddie Izzard in drag (and serves to remind one of what a fine female impersonator Dick Emery was). What little narrative the horror outing has falls on the charmingly slender shoulders of Scott Chambers. But as a whole there’s far too much talk – punctuated by the frequent use of sledgehammer music cues – and it actually gets wordier as it gets gorier.

According to the publicity blurb, the release of Doctor Jekyll heralds a new era for Hammer, founded in 1934 and now owned by British theatre producer John Gore. As well as significant investment, Gore’s new vision for the company, fuelled by a lifelong love of all things Hammer, will lead to a string of new films bearing the iconic Hammer name, and Doctor Jekyll is, apparently, only the beginning. @RichardChatten

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyPUuM4COMU

The Standstill (2023) Viennale 2023

Dir: Nikolaus Geyrhalter | Austria, Doc

The pandemic lockdown still haunts our collective memory and forms the subject matter of this calm and salient reflection from Austrian documentarian Nikolaus Geyrhalter.

The Standstill (Stillstand), premiering at this year’s Dok-Leipzig, offers a chilling insight into those gruelling times of privation and restriction in the filmmaker’s homeland of Austria, with a focus on Vienna.

Since the early 1990s the director, writer and cinematographer has carved out a niche for a particular brand of cinema; his stark, elegant style casting a dispassionate often ironic eye the life on our planet, with multi-award-winning films such as, Our Daily Bread (2005); Robolove (2011); Homo sapiens (2016); Earth (2019) and Matter Out of Place (2022) – rather like his compatriot Michael Glawogger did from the 1980s until his early death in 2014.

There have a been a slew of lockdown film and this is a worthwhile addition to the archive with its restrained, distant approach to a pandemic which threatened to destroy humanity and is now hopefully under control. With an insightful series of interviews with those affected The Standstill will certainly strike a cord with every single one of us, but the intervening years make this more bearable to watch than some of the early Covid-19 offerings.

The Standstill focuses on the human tragedy starting at the very beginning of the European lockdown in March 2020 until December 2021, and Geyrhalter muses on how the Austrian capital was nearly brought to it knees despite its highly advanced medical system and efficient infrastructure.

Nowhere escapes his camera’s gaze as it pans in on shops, restaurants, schools and theatres showing the extraordinary length to which life, as we know it, was brought to a complete halt, the only places that buzzed with a frenzied activity were the hospitals and medical centres.

With his observational approach Geyrhalter once again brings a dash of dark humour to the sombre party as images of a black lorry laden with coffins is juxtaposed with footage of an anti-vax campaigner spreading his views. Geyrhalter leaves us feeling rather despondent. The hope that this period of inspection would somehow bring enlightenment and a desire for more solidarity and understanding across the globe have clearly not materialised given the continuing outbreaks of wars and conflict from East to West. When will we ever learn? @MT

VIENNALE until 31 OCTOBER 2023

Lost in the Stars (1974)

Dir: Daniel Mann | Cast: Brock Peters · Melba Moore · Raymond St. Jacques · Clifton Davis · Paul Rogers.

The best known version of Alan Paton’s acclaimed novel is Alexander Korda’s sombre 1952 version starring Canada Lee. Under the aegis of the American Film Theatre Ely Landau however took it upon himself to preserve for posterity the ill-fated 1972 revival of Maxwell Anderson and Kurt Weill’s 1949 Broadway musical adaptation which actually preceded the earlier film version.

Unusually for an American Film Theatre production it’s set on the Dark Continent (with Jamaica standing in for South Africa) rather than in America, it’s concession to American sensibilities coming in the casting of Brock Williams in a role that would been perfect for Paul Robeson had it been made in the 1930s, but who here gets to display the warm baritone he’d briefly employed in ‘The L-Shaped Room’. @RichardChatten

Prison in the Andes (2023) BFI London Film Festival 2023

Dir/Wri: Felipe Carmona | Chile, Brazil | 2023 | Spanish | 95′

On 11 September 1973 the Chilean Air Force bombed the Presidential Palace of La Moneda in Santiago de Chile overthrowing the Allende government and ushering in Augusto Pinochet’s brutal regime of torture and mass murder.

With innovative angles on the tragedy a slew of new films – 1976 and El Conde. commemorate the 50th anniversary of Pinochet’s reign of terror that continues to capture the imagination of filmmakers all over the world – from Costa Gavras’ Missing (1982), Marcela Said’s 2001 documentary I Love Pinochet to Pablo Larain’s The Club.

Felipe Carmona reflects on the surviving perpetrators of the regime in his first feature Penal Cordillera (Prison in the Andres). Premiering at this year’s BFI London Film Festival, the film explores the aftermath of evil, based on real events: what happens when instigators are on the receiving end of the cosh they themselves once wielded?

Not surprisingly, the perps are a remorseless bunch of baddies who utterly refuse to accept responsibility for their crimes on humanity in the post-Pinochet era. Prison in the Andes, a slow-burn often gruelling thriller despite its lush locations, centres on five military officers serving out their sentence in a luxury prison in the Andes mountains. Taking his inspiration from Pablo Larrain’s recent vampire reverie El Conde, that won Best Script at Venice Film Festival, Carmona plays fast and loose with his timeline, imagining this period of incarceration will go on for many of years, rather than months’, or even decades. And we certainly feel the weight of time.

The luxurious mountainside setting (in Chile and Brazil) enables Carmona to offer up a rather smouldering scenario, with his DoP Mauro Veloso certainly giving us a cinematic eye-full despite the glowering subject matter: the right-hand henchmen have their own pool and gardens and seem to hold sway over their captors in this false paradise. But a surprise change in circumstances, resulting from a prison interrogation, demonstrates their total lack of remorse. And the ensuing mayhem provides for some florid scenes of violence.

Once again themes of Nazism and the inherent nature of evil creep into Carmona’s rather flawed script although his film certainly makes for a muscular debate: are oppressors intrinsically immoral; or are they just otherwise decent people corrupted by blindly obeying orders? The Chilean filmmaker weighs in with a promising debut that reworks solid, evergreen themes, but his script lets him down in this potent study of evil. MT

BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2023 | FIRST FEATURE COMPETITION 2023

Cairo International Film Festival 2023 | Cancelled

Cairo International Film Festival – the oldest and most prestigious feature film festival in the Middle East – will be celebrating its 45th edition this year from 15 until 24 November with Bosnian director Danis Tanović as head of the Official competition jury, appointed by Amir Ramsis, Director of the Festival.

The well-known international writer and director has been selected in a bid to draw prominent figures from the global film industry to take part in the festival, with the aim of showcasing and sharing experiences among emerging Egyptian, Arab, and international filmmakers participating in the event.

Born in 1969, Bosnian director and screenwriter Tanović is one of the most prominent directors and screenwriters in Eastern Europe and worldwide.
His most important works include Death in Sarajevo which won the FIPRESCI award at Berlinale in 2016, No Man’s Land which garnered an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and Best Screenplay at Cannes in 2001, and An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker which won the Silver Bear – Grand Jury Prize, and a Silver Bear for Best Actor at the Berlinale in 2013. Tanović is the only director from Bosnia and Herzegovina to win an Academy Award.

Cairo International Film Festival is pleased to announce the MENA premiere of Back to Alexandria (main image) by Tamer Ruggli among its 45th edition official competition section. The Swiss-born director is a true international figure who has lived in Zaire, Saudi Arabia and Austria. This, his first feature, a story of female empowerment, stars the legendary French actress Fanny Ardant and the multitalented actress, director Nadine Labaki who plays a woman who must return to her native Egypt to visit her estranged mother (Ardant), an eccentric aristocrat. The eventful journey, leading her from Cairo back to Alexandria, is suffused with memories, nostalgia, and mixed feelings about her past which will inform and shape her exciting future.

CAIRO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL | 15 – 24 NOVEMBER 2023 was CANCELLED due to the Middle East Crisis

Victoria the Great (1937)

Dir: Herbert Wilcox | Cast: Anna Neagle, Anton Walbrook, H B Warner, Walter Rilla | Uk Drama 1937

Dufaycolor sold a lot of film in 1937 with the attraction of filming the Coronation in colour. In ‘Victoria the Great’ Herbert Wilcox was able to lavish Technicolor on recreating Victoria’s diamond jubilee forty years earlier.

Anthony Collins’ score is often inclined to be rather twee, but Wilcox directs with a lighter touch than usual although historical figures are throughout unsubtly addressed by name – such as ‘Lord Melbourne’, ‘Sir Robert’ and ‘Lord Palmerston – as a very obvious means of identifying them.

The film makes no secret of the German roots of the Royal Family (to the extent that Wilcox got a letter from the Kaiser himself congratulating him on the portrayal of her grandmother).

Anna Neagle invests the young Victoria with spunk, but it’s greatest distinction is probably bringing Anton Walbrook to British films, although as David Shipman later dryly observed Walbrook’s performance as Albert “suggested that Albert married beneath him”.) @RichardChatten

The UK Jewish Film Festival 2023

The UK Jewish Film Festival is making its yearly visit to London and the UK for a 27th celebration this year from 9-30 November with a selection of films available online from 20-27 November.

Anthony Hopkins is the star of the festival’s opening night gala on 9 November. James Hawes’ One Life (UK, 2023) tells the true story of Nicholas Winton, a British stockbroker, and son of German-Jewish parents, who, after being horrified by tales of refugees fleeing Nazi-occupied Sudetenland, sets off for Prague where he set about saving a many refugee children as possible. A sterling British cast includes Helena Bonham Carter in this inspiring tale of hope and determination.

Elliott Gould joins Miriam Margolyes and David Baddiel for this year’s Animation Gala My Father’s Secrets (France/Belgium, 2022), which is based on a graphic novel by Michel Kichka, one of Israel’s most beloved cartoonists. My Father’s Secrets is a heartrending yet deeply uplifting tale of remembrance, love and forgiveness.

The Cannes premiere film Kidnapped is this year’s Centrepiece Gala. Directed by Marco Bellocchio it tells another true story, that of a six-year-old Jewish-Italian boy, secretly baptised by his nurse, and kidnapped from his family in Bologna on the orders of the Pope in June 1858. Brought up and indoctrinated into Christianity at the Pope’s side, his distraught Jewish family embark on an international campaign to have their son returned and find themselves at the epicentre of a wider historical battle between the forces of Catholic authoritarianism, and equality and the unification of Italy.

The Closing Night Gala is My Daughter. My Love (Israel, 2023) a stylish and unsettling tale of marital crisis exploring the powerful bonds of this intergenerational story. .

ALAN HOWARD INTERNATIONAL DOCUMENTARY STRAND

Five premieres will screen in this documentary section.

Our Dad the Nazi Killer (International Premiere, Australia, 2023) unpacks an investigation, led by three Australian Jewish brothers, into the involvement of their father and uncle in the deaths of Nazi criminals in post-war Australia – an age of Cold War anxiety and persistent antisemitism.

The Devil’s Confession: The Lost Eichmann Tapes (UK Premiere, Israel, 2022) is another Nazi-themed outing presenting a series of taped conversations made during the 1950s in which Eichmann spoke freely and fervently of his deep regret about not sending millions more Jews to their deaths. The transcripts of the recordings played a crucial part in Eichmann’s trial but the whereabouts of the tapes remained unknown for years.

Egypt, A Love Song (UK Premiere, Israel, 2022) is a warm and sensitive look at the complicated relationship between Jewish and Arab identities and those caught in-between. With powerful archival footage, filmmaker Iris Zaki embarks on a remarkable journey with her father Moshe across countries and cultures, to trace the turbulent path her grandmother – legendary singer and actress Soad Saki, a huge star across the Arab world in the 1940s – took to raise her son as a proud Israeli citizen.

Vishniac (UK Premiere, USA, 2023) is a deeply moving film, in which Vishniac’s daughter speaks candidly about her bigger-than-life father, a remarkably talented and complicated man.

The Consultant: The Story of Arthur J. Finkelstein (UK Premiere, Israel, 2022) tells the story of the late Republican Party consultant, whose kingmaking powers have played a major role in the rise of right-wing populism around the world over the last two decades. Although Finkelstein had an ability to manipulate public opinion, he could not stop leaks about his own long-term same-sex relationship. Attempting to square Finkelstein’s identity with the views of the politicians he worked with, this fascinating film sheds light on a life full of mind-boggling moral contradictions.

EUROPEAN FILM PROGRAMME

The Goldman Case (France, 2023), a tense, edge-of-the-seat courtroom drama powerfully recreating the trial of Pierre Goldman in France in 1976 – widely acknowledged as the most divisive case since the Dreyfus Affair of 1894.

The Shadow of the Day (Italy, 2022) is a dramatic love story set in 1938 about a Jewish WWI veteran attempting to live life according to his own rules despite the encroaching darkness of Mussolini’s fascism.

Erica Jong: Breaking the Wall (UK Premiere, Switzerland, 2022), the writer of 1973’s Fear of Flying – a groundbreaking novel exploring the hitherto taboo subject of women’s sex lives and erotic fantasies – looks back on her remarkably rich and varied career as an author, whose trailblazing work has helped popularise the principles of feminist thought, and challenge sexual and social norms.

Stay With Us (France, 2022) tells the story of acclaimed Jewish comedian Gad Elmaleh, who moves back to Paris from New York. His parents are ecstatic about his return until they find out the identity of the new woman in his life: the Virgin Mary. Based on the filmmaker’s own Catholic conversion, this semi-autobiographical comedy is a celebration of interfaith harmony.

The Crucified (UK Premiere, Czechoslovakia, 1921) offers a fascinating, if troubling, representation of Jews and antisemitism in 19th century Europe. Tormented by a childhood memory of his Jewish mother being crucified during a pogrom, her illegitimate son is determined to find out her fate. This powerful new restoration is accompanied by a newly-commissioned electronic music score that subtly enhances the film’s unsettling themes.

ISRAELI FILM PROGRAMME

The festival’s largest strand, the Israeli Film Programme is a showcase for the most interesting and provocative new Israeli cinema across a variety of film forms and genres.

Barren (Israel, 2022) sees a young orthodox wife fall under the spell of a Rabbi who claims mysterious powers while her husband is away on annual pilgrimage.

The Camera of Doctor Morris (2022) everyone in Eilat knows Dr Reginald Morris and his crocodile Clarence who grew up in his garden, a British bubble in the middle of the desert where his family moved from Britain in the 1950s. Itamar Alcalay and Meital Zvieli has created an affectionate portrait from the good doctor’s 8mm footage.

Children of Nobody (Israel, 1992) centres on a caring foster-mother Margalit who runs a shelter for at-risk youth in a rapidly gentrifying area which leads to conflict with ruthless real estate developers.

Matchmaking (Israel, 2022), is a sharp and hilarious critique of the business of love and marriage in the Haredi community as young couple Moti (Amit Rahav, Unorthodox), who is Ashkenazi, and Nehami, a Sephardi, must find a way to be together in the ultra-Orthodox city in which they live.

Elik & Jimmy (Israel, 2022), a romcom, charts the decade it takes for Elik and the Jimmy to overcome their body image issues and give their relationship a chance.

The Future (UK Premiere, Israel, 2023) a semi-satirical psychological thriller in which an Israeli senior scientist Nurit fails to prevent the murder of an official, and goes head to head with the young Arab university student who confessed to the murder.

A Room of His Own (UK Premiere, Israel/Italy, 2023) is a moving and remarkably nuanced portrait of a vulnerable adolescence as seventeen-year-old Uri struggles to cope with his father’s departure, his mother’s emotional dependency on him, a lack of connection with his fellow students and the looming shadow of army service.

Valeria is Getting Married (UK Premiere, Israel, 2022), an unflinching and often hilarious exploration of gender inequality in its fiercest, most devastating form. The film sees Christina, a Ukrainian woman, organising the same arranged marriage set-up for her younger sister Valeria which she herself experienced, only to find that Valeria has other ideas.

Savoy (UK Premiere, Israel, 2022) is a powerful docudrama which recreates the night of 4th March 1975, when eight Palestinian terrorists commandeered the Savoy Hotel in Tel Aviv, taking guests and staff hostage. This hybrid film features both archival footage and reenactments with Ivgy playing Kohava Levi, a courageous guest who aided in negotiations but was ridiculed in the press at the time.

Or (My Treasure) (Israel, 2004) offers a mesmerising early performance from Ivgy as she plays a teenager desperately trying to earn enough money to support her mother and stop her from returning to prostitution. The film won multiple awards at the Cannes Film Festival.

H2: The Occupation Lab (Israel, 2022) (+ Panel Discussion) looks at the tense situation in the West Bank city of Hebron region where both Jewish and Palestinian residents live very different lives.

BRITISH FILM PROGRAMME

Red Herring (UK 2023) follows Kit, 24, who is coping with the diagnosis of an inoperable brain tumour. The life-shattering diagnosis impacts Kit and his family’s lives in many different ways, with the film also telling the story of Kit’s father’s conversion to Judaism, in order to get the support needed for the trauma the family is experiencing.

Shoshana (UK/Italy, 2023) (+Q&A with director Michael Winterbottom) is set in 1930s-1940s Tel Aviv and concerns the rising tensions between the Jewish population and the occupying British authorities. The renowned British director Michael Winterbottom again triumphs with this action-led historical feature follows two British police officers in their pursuit of the poet, Irgun leader and Lehi founder, Avraham Stern (Aury Alby), to try and stop murderous attacks against the British.

AMERICAS AND AUSTRALIA FILM PROGRAMME

I Like Movies (English premiere, 2022) is Chandler Levack’s cinematic love-letter and debut feature, a coming-of-age gem which invites us to see life through the eyes of a socially awkward seventeen-year-old cinephile who takes a job at at his local video store and learns about the darker side of the movie industry.

Less Than Kosher (UK Premiere, Canada, 2023) sees self-proclaimed ‘Bad Jew’ Viv forced to take a job at the synagogue when her career fails to take off.

Queen of the Deuce (UK Premiere, Canada, Greece, 2022) charts the unlikely story of Chelly Wilson, who fled her native Greece in 1939 to start a new life in New York City. With five dollars in her pocket, and personality and chutzpah in abundance, this trailblazer would start her own empire as the owner of several successful porn theatres and producer of hardcore porn movies within the ‘Deuce’ – NYC’s notorious 42nd Street.

The Narrow Bridge (UK Premiere, Australia, 2022) is an incredibly moving documentary about the members of the grassroots movement of Israeli and Palestinian Bereaved Families who struggle through their personal pain and hostility to promote peace and an end to the ceaseless cycle of violence, transforming their grief into a bridge for peace.

UK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL 2023 | 9-30 NOVEMBER 2023

Bernadette (2023)

Dir/Wri: Lea Domenach | Cast: Catherine Deneuve, Denis Podalydes, Sara Girardeau | France Comedy drama 90′

Behind every great man there’s an even greater woman. And Catherine Deneuve gives a laconic comedy turn in this political biopic based on Bernadette Chirac (1933-) and the final years of popular French president Jacques Chirac, who held two terms of office from the mid nineties until 2007.

Bernadette (1933-) is clearly not a woman to be trifled with and Deneuve fits the role perfectly as the deceptively savvy second fiddle to her successful spouse (played by Michel Vuillermoz).

Feeling sidelined at the Elysee Palace when her daughter (Sara Girardeau) lands a plumb job, this indomitable sixty something showstopper steps out of the sidelines and reinvents herself as a media personality playing the press – and her husband with sparky savoir faire to become a political icon in her own right.

In the semi-fictionalised drama director Lea Domenach shares script duties with Clemence Dargent. A star-studded cast is bolstered by a drole and deadpan Denis Podalydes as the First Lady’s right hand man. Lovers of Deneuve will lap up this snappy satire with its retro costumes and settings in Reims, Epernay and the Palais of Versailles itself. MT

NOW ON RELEASE IN FRANCE and BELGIUM

The Exorcist: Believer (2023)

Dir: David Gordon Green | Cast: Leslie Odom, Jr., Ann Dowd, Jennifer Nettles, Norbert Leo Butz, Lidya Jewett, Olivia O’Neill and Ellen Burstyn | US Horror 111′

Exactly 50 years ago this autumn, the most terrifying horror film in history landed on screens, shocking audiences around the world. Sadly The Exorcist: Believer is not a patch on the original just an attempt to attract a ‘younger audience’ by garnering traction from William Friedkin’s far superior outing.

In this often ludicrous ‘sequel’ Angela (Lidya Jewett) plays the girl, and the single parent is Victor (Leslie Odom Jr), a photographer who refuses to allow his daughter to play with her friend Katherine (O’Neill) during downtime. And he’s not stupid, because after school the two girls secretly sneak off to the nearby woods to stage a seance in the hope of contacting Angela’s late mother. Days later they reappear having no memory of their ill-judged escapade.

David Gordon Green certainly succeeds visually, character and mood wise: his horror film is subtly sinister and supernatural in its autumn settings and all goes well until midday through when the project nosedives: it’s as if Gordon Green has taken leave of his own senses possessed by the producers to churn out yet another franchise.

Victor decides to track down the only person he knows with any experience of the previous affair, and – back for another turn – it’s Ellen Burstyn, as splendid as she was in the 1973 original. Thence the film loses its way and its new plot lines in a melodramatic maelstrom of jump scares, speeches and sentimentality. The master Friedkin will be turning in his grave.

OUT IN UK CINEMAS FROM 6 OCTOBER 2023

The Goldman Case (2023)

Dir: Cédric Kahn | Cast: Arieh Worthalter, Arthur Harari, Stéphan Guérin-Tillié, Nicolas Briançon, Aurélien Chaussade | France, Drama 118’

Courtroom dramas have always been popular on the big screen and the latest crop has provided solid entertainment and done well award-wise on the festival circuit. Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall, won the Palme D’or at Cannes’, and Alice Diop’s Saint Omer, garnered the main prize at Venice last summer, with Santiago Mitre’s Argentina 1985 scooping the FIPRESCI prize.

Based on real events, Cédric Kahn’s The Goldman Case is a caustic affair redolent of the politically charged 1970s (the time of the Red Brigades and Badder-Meinhof group) and bristling with the anger and self-righteousness of its central character, the militant leftwing radical Pierre Goldman accused of murder and robbery.

As we are constantly reminded in these legal battles, the truth is irrelevant, the outcome always depends on the clever application of the law and the jury’s verdict. But as the trial gets underway, it soon emerges that this man has been falsely accused, and vehemently denies both the murder of two pharmacists and four counts of robbery. The plot turns on whether the all important jury with find him guilty as charged, or innocent.

Kahn, who wrote the script with Nathalie Hertzberg, sets the scene well, opening with a meeting in the offices of the defendant’s lawyer, Maître Kiejman (Arthur Harari). From then on we are closeted in the claustrophobic confines of the courtroom for the pithy procedural, all and sundry sweating it out in their closely tailored woollen suits as the fiery rhetoric flies backwards and forwards. And no one is more belligerent than the defendant himself – Worthalter is screen dynamite, remaining a figure of outright indignation to the very last as the falsely accused Goldman. The resentment he exudes is palpable, but whether you can stand the heat for two hours in this smouldering battle of wits inspired by his prison penned autobiography, ‘Obscure Memories of a Polish Jew Born in France’, is arguable.

Patrick Ghiringhelli does his best to make it all cinematic but this is rather a dry drama that serves to showcase the antisemitism and racism of the era, not least on the part of the police, and will certainly go down well with left wing intellectuals. It does seem extraordinary than a man could be accused and stand trial in such a high profile way without substantial proof of guilt, or indeed, any tangible witnesses. An off-duty policeman (Jeanson) – who purportedly saw the defendant at the scene of the crime – is wheeled into the witness box, and a friend of Goldman’s (Tshibangu) claims he was coerced by the police into giving evidence. Polish actor Jerzy Radziwilowicz (from Man of Marble) plays Goldman’s father, a war veteran who bolsters his son’s case from the outset, inculcating him with a strong sense of self belief from childhood that eventually led to a stint as a guerrilla in Venezuela. A strong cast also includes Nicolas Briancon as the judge Maitre Garaud. MT

The Goldman Case is released in UK & Irish cinemas 23^rd August 2024

D.O.A. (1949)

Dir: Rudolph Mate. | Cast: Edmond O’Brian, Pamela Britton, Luther Adler, Beverly Garland | US Drama 83’

With a title like that I think I’m safe in discussing this film’s plot without issuing a spoiler alert since most viewers are already well appraised of the plot in advance. A man, Frank Bigelow, has told he’s been poisoned and has only a few days to live, so he tries to find out who killed him and why.

At the outset of Kind Hearts and Coronets Denis Price laconically observes “when a man is to be hanged in the morning it concentrates his mind wonderfully”. Edmond O’Brien undergoes a similar transformation since the knowledge he only has hours to live has completely removed the fear of death which enables him to ride roughshod through a collection of ghouls; a situation bookended by the opening when he strides into a police station to report a murder and when the sergeant asks who, replies “I was!” and in a later flashback a scientist informs him “You’ve been murdered!” (only in a noir would you you hear a line like that!).

What makes the cinema such a rich experience is that it exists in a permanent present, so even though O’Brien dies at the end he remains marvellously alive each time the film is repeated. @RichardChatten

STREAMING ON PLEX TV

Club Zero (2023)

Wri/Dir: Jessica Hausner | Cast: Mia Wasikowska, Sidse Babett Knudsen, Sam Hoare, Camilla Rutherford, Elsa Zylberstein | UK

Jessica Hausner is back with another cold-eyed psychological drama that unfolds in an elite school where a teacher forms a sinister bond with a group of students.

A dereliction of parental duty is behind the faddish behaviour of so many kids today. Or so Jessica Hausner would have us believe in her primary-coloured feature that also highlights eating disorders through the online ‘pro-ana movement’, climate change and self control.

Mia Wasikowska heads the eclectic cast of singularly unlikeable characters as Miss Novak a nutritionist specialising in ‘zero eating’ in a modernist school billed as one of the best in Austria. The parents are rich and mostly neglectful of their kids who channel this latent disappointment and lack of real guidance by voicing a series of contemporary convictions which sound entirely laudable in the opening scenes: their love of sport, their need to impact less on to the environment. No one actually mentions a desire to be slim. Gradually Miss Novak indoctrinates her students into a cult of disfunctional eating, promoting the miraculous health and environmental benefits.

Hausner and her regular screenwriting partner Geraldine Bajard certainly make some really valid points but the stark, non-naturalistic interiors and characters are so intractable, performed by a cast of inexperienced newcomers, we do not care a jot for any of them as they fade into pasty-faced insignificance, and this, along with an irritating percussive soundscape and the relentlessly unforgiving depiction of Gen Z, makes for an arduous watch.

The exception here is school principal Sidse Babett Knudsen who lights up every scene with her amusing charisma, as Ms Dorset. Fellow auteur Ulrich Seidl is behind the production team but the film has none of his dry wit or deadpan appeal. Instead we are forced to endure a scene involving a teenage girl (Ksenia Devriendt) who eats her own vomit, echoing the ‘yuk’ factor of Ruben Ostlund’s Palme d’Or winner Triangle of Sadness. Bodily functions are a natural part of life but sound effects would have been far more effective. Sometimes what we don’t see is far more powerfu than what we do. MT

NOW IN UK CINEMAS from 6 DECEMBER 2024

8 of the Best Musical Biopics

Amy (2015) Rent/Buy

Best known for Senna, his acclaimed 2010 on about late Formula One driver, Asif Kapadia garnered an Oscar for this bittersweet biopic introducing the Southgate-born jazz singer as a “North London Jewish girl with a lot of attitude”, who loved to write poetry and lyrics. Unearthing a treasure trove of photos, home movie footage and demos shared from over 100 interviews from those closest to her, he shows Winehouse as a witty, down to earth and “gobby” girl with a rich and velvety voice, who never wanted to be famous but whose inadvertent stardom let to her tragic death, aged 27.

Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road (2021) – Apple TV/Prime Video

Do we need another Brian Wilson documentary? I Just Wasn’t made for These Times and Love & Mercy have already told his story, but the billion or so the super-fans will always ask for more. And The Beach Boys were America’s answer to The Beatles, back in the day, they epitomised an era and their harmonies are almost as divine – so yes, we do!.

Director Brent Wilson (no relation), veteran of music docs like Streetlight Harmonies, has tried the linear angle, confronting the images of the ‘Beach Boy’ founder with today’s survivor of schizoid-affective and bi-polar disorders, who enjoys being on tour again, even though the hallucinatory voices still haunt him – and have done for the last 60 years – when he is performing, in spite of all the medication available.

‘Rolling Stone’ editor Jason Fine, a close friend of Wilson, drives the megastar composer/singer round his favourite haunts, sadly only getting monosyllabic answers to his leading questions. Brian is very much in the shell he has created to survive. And there is more that enough pain for anybody to deal with, let alone a highly-strung artist.

Music-wise there is extensive time devoted to the iconic “Pet Sounds” and SMiLE, that came into being in the mid-1960s and finished thirty years later. There are few revelations, the bitter chapter of Brian’s relationship with fellow Beach Boy Mike Love is nearly brushed out of the picture. Only once the mask of self-defence slips, when Brian tells Jason “I have not talked to a real friend in three years.”

Miles Davis : Birth of the Cool (2019) Netflix/Apple TV

Documentarian Stanley Nelson tells it all in the usual talking heads style – Frances Taylor, Greg Tate, Carlos Santana, Herbie Hancock and his final manager Mark Rothbaum all appear and a straightforward narrative structure enlivened by many photos and clips from the archives. The film luxuriates in its musical interludes which are enjoyable and plentiful making this possibly the definitive biopic of one of the most inventive jazz musicians of the 20th century. Stanley Nelson’s expansive documentary takes an entertaining breeze through the musical career of Miles Davis eclipsing Don Cheadle’s movie 2015 drama Miles Ahead

“All I ever wanted to do was communicate through music”. The iconic jazz trumpeter and composer developed smooth romantic vibes and invented a cool, sophisticated masculinity that came to be known as the ‘Miles Davis Mystique’. For over five decades Miles developed various jazz styles from bebop, cool jazz and jazz fusion working with Prestige, Columbia, and Warner Brothers despite a rocky personal life that was full of love but fraught by ill health and emotional instability.

Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami (2017)

As fabulous now as when she was in 1979 when I first experienced her at a concert in Italy’s famous Covo di Nord Est – Grace Jones still rocks. Now at 75 her voice has mellowed, wavering occasionally, but her glamour and star power are just as potent and her aura and outrageous antics as just spectacular, if not more.

After an overture of Slave to the Rhythm where Grace performs in purple regalia and a golden sunburst mask, Fiennes cuts to an autograph session with fans fawning: “I’ve been waiting to see you for 25 years” – Grace responds “so has my mother”. Suddenly we are following her through Jamaica airport for an exuberant reunion with her mother (who looks like Aretha Franklin), son Paolo and niece Chantel, and as night falls, the camera pictures a sultry moonlight gig in the torridly tropical island, drenched in lush emerald forests.

Fiennes’ punctuates the gutsy real time footage shot in her kitchen, car and dressing room – with Grace’s mesmerising Dublin stage show, but both are beguiling and cinematic. Fiennes’ shirks the traditional documentary format – there are no photos or archive footage, making Bloodlight And Bami fresh, feisty and intriguing for longtime fans who have never really experienced the woman ‘behind the scenes’. It’s also longer than most docs at nearly 2 hours. In concert footage, Grace mesmerises with performances of Pull Up To The Bumper and more personal tracks including Williams’ Blood, This Is and Hurricane. She is s force of nature, and certainly a force to be reckoned with. MT

Stop Making Sense (David Byrne and Talking Heads (1985 re-released in 2023) AppleTV/Prime Video

Maybe not the latest look at but certainly the most iconic, this is a musical biopic in the best sense of the word. In Hollywood December 1983, French director Jonathan Demme films three concerts from Scottish maverick music maker David Byrne, rolling them out without explanation or talking heads – although Talking Heads are very much part of the scene. The bands speaks for itself and we get the best seats – on stage, up close and personal and from the back of the auditorium, even loitering in the wings. Demme’s film is an energising experience made at the climax of what would be the band’s final major tour. The show starts with the beat-driven Pyscho Killer and works its way through a classic repertoire with hits such as, Take Me to the Water to This Must be the Place that scored Paolo Sorrentino’s film of the same name in 2011 and of course, Once in a Lifetime. Byrne gradually relaxes from taut jutting-faced uncertainty to a more smiling and febrile intensity, a style icon in white plimsolls and oversized concrete-coloured suits. Hypnotic to look at, his moves are as funky, smooth and syncopated as Bing Crosby or even Elvis without the sexual magnetism: Byrne is a performer more artfully ambivalent in his erotic appeal, but none the less legendary. And he feels very much at home on his own or surrounded by his family of Talking Heads. A nostalgic, diverting, happy film. MT

Rachmaninov:The Harvest of Sorrow (1998) Rent/Buy

Tony Palmer’s extensive documentary about one of the world’s most loved composers (1873-1943) is a vibrant memoire, enlivened by musical interludes and ample archive footage of his life and times in Russia, Sweden and the United States where he finally died in 1943, unable to return to his beloved homeland: “a ghost wandering forever in the world”.

Playing out as a long autobiographical letter to his daughters Tatiana and Irina, voiced by Gielgud in slightly sardonic but wistful tone, the film covers the composer’s life until his final months in New York. But it starts at a low point, with the Rachmaninoff family leaving Russia in 1917, escaping from the Bolshevik devastation of Petrograd (soon to be Leningrad) set for musical adventures in Stockholm, and thence to America. Desperate about leaving his homeland, the composer also felt at a low ebb creatively: “Nowadays I am never satisfied with myself, I am burdened with a harvest of sorrow: I almost never feel that what I do is successful”.

Little Richard: I Am Everything (2023) Netflix

Rock legend Little Richard comes alive in this new biopic from Lisa Cortes. It sees the musical icon trying to come to terms with his complex personality and explores the lack of public recognition during his lifetime. John Waters, Mick Jagger and Tom Jones – among others – help to shed light on a life so full of promise, but blighted by social reality. Sometimes verging on the hagiographic, Cortes manages a wealth of information with aplomb, a more non-linear approach might have been an alternative.

Richard Wayne Penniman (1932-2020) was born in Macon (GA) in the deep South of he USA. Black, queer and disabled he was most certainly abused in childhood. But his deep religious faith eventually led to him renouncing his gayness: “God wanted Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve”.

The man who would create “Tutti Frutti”, ”Long Tall Sally”. “Good Golly, Miss Molly” and “Rip it Up” single-handedly invented Rock’N’ Roll – but the glory and the awards went to Elvis and Pat Boone: No wonder, he felt cheated. He was the architect of an art form and a social identity that became progressively clearer only later in his life.

ENNIO (2021) Prime Video

Ennio Morricone was one of cinema’s best loved and most prolific composers. Giuseppe Tornatore captures his complex romantic spirit in this warmly nostalgic tribute that also celebrates their own working relationship that started with Cinema Paradiso (1988) and continued for many years. In his lifetime Morricone scored over 500 movies, one year alone completing 18 films.

The biopic straddles film and musicology enriched by a treasure trove of excerpts and the stars that brought them to life praising Morricone’s charisma and single mindedness and describing their own experiences with a man whose modesty contrasted with his prodigious talent to amuse. The final half hour does feel repetitive with its endless clips of concert performances which add nothing to the party, and almost fly in the face of the composer’s lowkey sense of style. MT

Georgia on my mind…the London Georgian Film Festival 2023

The Black Sea, with its rich history and contemporary geopolitical significance, is at the heart of the seventh edition of the London Georgian Film Festival: Reflections on the Black Sea held at the Ciné Lumière in South Kensington from 28 September – 3 October. The festival takes place against the backdrop of Russia’s war in Ukraine, the fallout of which has made the Black Sea the focus of global attention.

The London Georgian Film Festival provides a rare opportunity to see 2020s Contemporary World Cinema from Georgia, Romania, Turkey and Ukraine, alongside previously banned 1920s silent films with live piano accompaniment. Through the selection of films from these countries, the festival takes audiences beyond the news headlines of the conflict to look into the lives and historical context of the people in the region. The programme features films from emerging filmmakers and writers, highlighting the experience of women and the LGBTQ+ community, and almost half of the films in the festival are directed by women. Summer Rutterford-Morley takes us through some of this year’s festival highlights.

International festival hit A Room Of My Own directed by award-winning filmmaker Ioseb ‘Soso’ Bliadze and co-written by actor Taki Mumladze. Tina (Taki Mumladze) has left an abusive marriage and moves in with hard-partying Megi (Mariam Khundadze). As Tina struggles to find her independence, she and Megi form an intimate bond which neither woman anticipated. The release of the film was a risk; similar films with LGBTQ+ themes have been met with protests in Georgia.

Snow And The Bear is the directorial debut of Turkish filmmaker Selcen Ergun. The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and follows a young forward-thinking nurse called Asli, who arrives at a remote Turkish town cut off from the world by an endlessly harsh winter amidst rumours of bears awakening early from their winter sleep. The film mirrors the constant pressure of feeling unsafe as a young woman in Turkey, where just 6% of films are directed by women.

The gripping Romanian drama Miracle, directed by Bogdan George Apetri, follows the tragic journey of Cristina Tofan, a 19-year-old novice nun, caught between the man’s world she has grown up in and the repressive old-fashioned isolated convent where she seeks sanctuary. The film unfolds as an unpredictable and captivating story while commentating on Romanian society and attitudes towards women.

Let Us Flow is Sophio Medoidze’s first feature documentary, offering a nuanced perspective on the annual August festival of the Tush people, as the filmmaker records young men visiting sacred ancestral shrines not accessible to women in the community. This poetic film considers the importance of ritual, the maintenance of community ties, and how modernisation and migration are transforming rural landscapes.

Anna Japaridze’s short film Glasses Crack, Tablecloths Splinter: Salvaging Georgia’s Undigitized Home Video Cassettes begins with home video footage following her birth in Tbilisi, soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Raised between Tbilisi and London, the film revisits Japaridze’s memories through footage and draws on the collective memories of many Georgians, through the time capsules of newly digitised home videos.

The Crazy Stranger by award-winning director Tony Gatlif is a fascinating classic film about World music and will be introduced by World music expert, film and music producer Joe Boyd. The film won Best Film at the Locarno Film Festival in 1997 and follows a young, passionate Frenchman on a mission to find a folk singer in a Romanian village, where he gets entangled with the life of the local Romani community and musicians.

The festival will also screen in the UK for the first time two recently restored classic silent films with live piano accompaniment by John Sweeney, highlighting historical parallels and recurring themes across generations. Banned by the Soviet authorities, The Self-Seeker is a brilliant, satirical film that follows an easy-going Kyiv opportunist as he tries to avoid the 1917-1921 civil war with the aid of a miraculous camel. The film will be preceded by a reading of a Ukrainian poem and will support Siobhan’s Trust, which is delivering assistance to Ukrainian communities on the frontline.

Against the breathtaking backdrop of the Georgian mountains, Vladimir Barskiy’s 1927 film Bela offers a deep dive into history, highlighting love and cunning in the Caucasus. Vladimir Barskiy also played Commander Golikov in Eisenstein’s masterpiece Battleship Potemkin. @Summer Rutterford-Morley

The London Georgian Film Festival: Reflections on the Black Sea will be held at the Ciné Lumière from 28 Sept – 3 Oct 2023

The Killers (1964) BFI

Dir: Don Siegel | Cast: Angie Dickerson, Lee Marvin, John Cassavetes, Clu Galager | US Thriller 93’

The credits of the second version of Ernest Hemingway’s 1929 short story – in which the target is only fleetingly seen – actually reads ‘Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers’.

Don Siegel’s version actually achieves the extraordinary achievement of improving on Robert Siodmak’s 1946 classic and focuses on the two hit men rather than their mark.

Originally made for TV but deemed too violent, the film finally made a star of Lee Marvin after a decade playing ugly heavies (Siegel begins the film with Marvin beating up a blind woman to save time establishing from the outset just what he was capable of).

The film contains the screen swan song of Ronald Reagan, a move Reagan bitterly regretted since it was the only time he played a villain; but he’s really rather good (witness his final close up at the film’s conclusion).” @RichardChatten

NOW AT BFI SOUTHBANK LONDON

The World of Raul Ruiz | Viennale Retrospective 2023

This year’s VIENNALE retrospective is dedicated to the Chilean director, writer and poet Raúl Ernesto Ruiz Pino.

Ruiz – who was born in Chile in 1941 – was exiled after Pinochet’s coup d’etat in 1973 to France where he emerged as one of the most exciting and innovative filmmakers of the 1960s. During a prodigious career that would continue well into the 21st century – his final films were completed by his wife and collaborator Valeria Sarmiento – he explored a range of different styles, places and cultures and directed over a hundred films, embracing the big screen and television as well as experimental fare.

Raúl Ruiz was certainly a maverick and soon abandoned his university studies in theology and law and switched to film school in Argentina in 1964 where he would stand out from the crowd of politically-engaged Chilean filmmakers such as Patricio Guzman with work that was more surreal and avant-garde in nature. Success came early and his first feature Three Sad Tigers (1968) shared the Golden Leopard at the 1969 Locarno Film Festival.

During the 1970s and 1980s Ruiz developed an ironic and often amusingly eccentric style of low-budget filmmaking supported by his producer Paulo Branco. A long collaboration with Chilean composer Jorge Arriagada kicked off with Colloque de chiens (1977). This was followed by The Suspended Vocation (1978); The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (1978); On Top of the Whale (1982); Three Crowns of the Sailor (1983); City of Pirates (1983); Manoel’s Destinies (1985); Treasure Island (1985) and Life is a Dream (1986).

Ruiz’ idiosyncratic style gained traction and consequently higher budgets during the 1990s attracting well-known international stars to the party and top talent such as John Hurt (Dark at Noon,1992) who bought into Ruiz’ eclectic style of filmmaking. With the band-waggon rolling his films were soon in demand on the international festival circuit.

A coup came in 1997 when Catherine Deneuve and Melville Poupaud starrer Genealogies of a Crime won the Silver Bear at Berlinale for Outstanding Artistic Achievement. And Deneuve was joined by her daughter Chiara Mastroianni, Emmanuelle Beart and John Malkovich for the glossy Palme d’Or nominated Time Regained again in 1999. Succeed breeds success and Ruiz went on to cast Isabelle Huppert in his 2000 drama Comedy of Innocence. Nominated for the Golden Lion at Venice the film went home empty-handed (the top prize instead being awarded to Jafar Panahi”s The Circle). Another, unsuccessful, attempt at winning the Palme d’Or came for Ruiz in 2003 with That Day.

Ruiz also made mainstream films in the English language with Shattered Image (1998) and A Closed Book (2010), but his final international flourish was Mysteries of Lisbon, a ravishing four and a half hour epic based on the novel by Camilo Castelo Branco.

Very much an intellectual filmmaker Ruiz plundered the literary world for ideas and expounded his theories in two books Poetics of Cinema 1: Miscellanies (1995) and Poetics of Cinema 2 (2007). He engaged with film and video projects in universities all over the world until his death in 2011, from cancer complications. His final resting place was his homeland of Chile where a National Day of Mourning was declared in his honour.

Determined that all films would reach international audiences, Valeria Sarmiento, also a director, presented his 2012 feature Night Across the Street which made a fitting conclusion to Ruiz’ long and impressive career at the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes Film Festival.

Lines of Wellington (2012), the Napoleonic epic that Ruiz was working on when he died, premiered on the international circuit throughout the rest of the year, at Venice, San San Sebastián, Toronto and New York Film Festival. And Locarno Film Festival 2017, his half-finished feature The Wandering Soap Opera, made for an amusing entry, its telenovelsa-esque style very much in keeping with the mainstream TV fare of his homeland of Chile, where he had began the project in 1990. Perhaps the highlight of this retro is his film El Realismo Socialista Come Una De Las Bellas Artes (1973/2023), which for a long time was only available in fragmentary form and has now finally been completed. MT

VIENNALE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2023 | 19 – 31 OCTOBER 2023

LaRoy (2023)

Dir/Wri: Shane Atkinson | Cast: John Magaro, Steve Zahn, Dylan Baker, Galadriel Stineman, Matthew Del Negro, Brad Leland, Bob Clendenin, Megan Stevenson, Darcy Shean | US Comedy thriller, 110′

LaRoy is a quietly triumphant Coen-esque comedy thriller centring on a case of mistaken identity in small-town Texas.

John Magaro plays Ray, a biddable good-looking guy living out a humdrum existence in the Texas town of LaRoy where he would do anything to make his beauty queen wife Stacy-Lynn happy. But his thoughts turn to suicide on discovering she is cheating on him with his brother Junior (Matthew Del Negro), who helps him run the family hardware business.

A chance meeting with Skip (Steve Zahn) makes Ray reconsider his options. Skip, a dangerous fantasist, takes himself far too seriously and has a random recall of reality. Posing as a private eye he acts and dresses ‘more like Howdy Doody’. But the well-meaning Ray falls in with Skip’s plan to investigate a series of small time crooks in the hope that he can raise money for Stacy-Lyn’s dream of owning a beauty salon.

Together the two men vaguely foster unrealised dreams of validating their empty lives and even making themselves local heroes. And this leads to a doomed partnership in crime with their awkward social interactions giving the film its most drole moments, after Ray is mistaken for a hit-man.

A series of showcase support characters are well-formed and believable: Dylan Baker is the sinister standout, the real hit-man Harry (and he’s not ‘here to help’); Galadriel Stineman is Angie, Skip’s feisty ex; Adam Leland (from Friday Night Lights) is a misogynist used-car salesman called LeDoux but his wife Midge (Darcy Sheen) gets the best line: in fact women certainly have the upper hand in this Texas town.

So an understated gem of a debut from Shane Atkinson, the deadpan humour is subtle and incidental but vital to the film’s success, with memorable lines and characters that feel real and resonate long after the tragic ending. You may want to see it again for this reason, I certainly did, and will. There are certainly echoes of the Coen brothers, but Atkinson has forged his own path and seems like a filmmaker who has set out on a worthwhile journey. Let’s hope we see more of him. MT

LaRoy, Texas will be available on Digital Download from 12th April | https://www.vertigoreleasing.com

King and Country (1964)

In 1963 Joseph Losey’s huge success with The Servant gave him carte blanche with his next project.

Since the following year marked the fiftieth anniversary of the start of the First World War – an occasion celebrated by a landmark TV series of interviews with survivors – Losey took the opportunity to interrogate his perennial fascination with the British class system which resulted in one of the most raw and powerful anti-war films since ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’.

To that end he enlisted Dirk Bogarde to represent the officers and Tom Courtney the common man who plays a sacrificial lamb akin to those in Kubrick’s Paths of Glory.

During World War I, Courtenay is Hamp, a young soldier who deserts his post, attempting to escape the relentless guns and mud and walk home. Captain Hargreaves (Bogarde), an aristocratic British Army lawyer, must defend Hamp before the army tribunal, for whom the crime of desertion carries the threat of execution. Initially, Hargreaves approaches Hamp’s case with disdain; however, upon learning that Hamp volunteered for duty on a dare, that he is the sole survivor of his unit and that his wife has been unfaithful in his absence, his efforts on Hamp’s behalf become more impassioned and earnest. In the face of cold army bureaucracy, Hargreaves’s arguments fall on deaf ears as Hamp becomes a victim of morale-boosting on the eve of the troop’s deployment into an impending bloody battle.

Even by Losey’s standards King and Country is a relentless and harrowing experience. It proved to be his final black & white film and lost its entire tiny production costs. Losey career never completely recovered and in retrospect it can now be seen as the beginning of his decline. @RichardChatten

KING AND COUNTRY on Blu-Ray or DVD now.

La Petite (2023)

Dir: Guillaume Nicloux | Cast: Fabrice Luchini, Ann Corsini, Maria Taquine | France/Belgium drama 97’|

The medieval city of Ghent and the Belgian coastline make a handsome setting for this otherwise fraught family drama from Guillaume Nicloux (The Nun).

Based on Fanny Chesnel’s novel The Crib it stars Fabrice Lucchini as a lonely and fractious furniture restorer called Joseph whose estranged son and partner are killed in a car accident, making the old boy even more morose.

Joseph then discovers that the couple were expecting a child from a surrogate mother, so a moral responsibility rests on his shoulders, as the grandfather, to track down and befriend the surrogate, a fearsome Flemish virago called Rita Vandewaele. (Maria Taquine)

Being anti-social and uncomfortable out of his comfort zone, this is a difficult task for Joseph and the awkwardness of the situation gives rise to some mawkish humour that falls rather flat as Luchini tries his best to build a rapport with another unlikeable character. Ann Corsini is underused as the only ray of sunshine – apart from the baby – in this rather bland affair that leaves us as cold as its subject-matter. MT

NOW ON RELEASE IN FRANCE AND BELGIUM

Tomorrow I’ll Get Up and Scald Myself with Tea (1977)

Dir: Jindrich Polák | Cast: Petr Koska, Jiri Sovak, Vladimir Mensik, Vlastimil Brodsky | Czechoslovakia 1977, 93′

Jindrich Polak (1925-2003) was a director little known in the west but he made two memorable contributions to the science fiction genre. (The first being a 1963 production called Ikarie XB1.)

From a long study of the matter I have come to the conclusion that the Czech cinema possesses a singular quirkiness that is manifest in this strangely titled confection finally returning to the South Bank nearly half a century after it was included in a November 1978 season of recent Czech productions.

I had the good fortune to catch it’s sole BBC screening in January 1982 and for decades after used to enthuse to my friends about this terrific film that only I seemed to have seen (not quite the only one since Peter Nicholls in his 1984 book ‘Fantastic Cinema: An Illustrated Survey’ urged his readers to “See this if you ever have the chance”). @RichardChatten.

NOW ON YOUTUBE

Visions (2023)

Dir: Yann Gozlan, Diane Kruger, Mathieu Kassovitz, Marta Nieto | France, Erotic Thriller 120′

Mediterranean seascapes, modernist villas and a mysterious ménage à trois with a mile-high club pilot. A Perfect Man director Yann Gozlan delivers it all in this glossy erotic thriller that echoes Basic Instinct without its juicy plotline. Visions is fun until it gets stuck on the runway, with Philippe Rombi’s classy score a dead ringer for Jerry Goldsmith’s iconic BI original.

Diane Kruger is perfectly cast as glacial airline pilot Estelle. Living the dream with her medic lover Guillaume (Kassovitz) in their Bandol beachside villa; she drives a Porsche, he a black BMW motorcycle. The opening scene pictures her powering her way through the waves on a morning swim in Côte d’Azur waters: but there’s a sting in the tail to this idyll: a smack of deadly jellyfish hovers nearby setting a sinister tone for this unsettling study in sexual obsession and paranoia.

Estelle’s meticulous routine soon goes awry thanks to the reappearance of former flame Ana (Marta Nieto). The two set eyes on each other in an airport lounge and the rest is history. But their lesbian lust is threatened by someone peering through the keyhole, and it looks suspiciously like Guillaume in his snazzy helmet, or maybe it’s the stray dog that roams around the beach.

When Ana goes missing Estelle’s imagination works overtime imagining her with another lover, as baleful glances and salacious stares are shared with the putative paramour, a gallery-owner called Johana (Amira Casar). Estelle is reduced to a nervous wreck: She must kick her benzo habit and return to those microbiome-friendly smoothies and stick to the original plan – a baby with the long-suffering Guillaume (a criminally underused Kassovitz).

Coasting on its captivating camerawork and atmosphere this is a moody, erotic thriller to be enjoyed on the big screen. But no amount of visual wizardry can make up for a vehicle that cannot seem to land. Gozlan, collaborating with various other writers, has certainly hammed up on his knowledge of piloting, and that give us something to chew on in a portrait of obsession that goes badly wrong. MT

NOW ON RELEASE IN FRANCE AND BELGIUM.

Time Without Pity (1957)

Dir: Joseph Losey | Cast: Michael Redgrave, Ann Todd, Peter Cushing, Leo McKern, Paul Daneman | Drama

Joseph Losey had recently arrived in Britain with first hand experience of persecution from his experience of being the sharp end of the the activities of the HUAC and with scores to settle he sank his teeth into that fine old American tradition of capital punishment in this tense drama.

Michael Redgrave plays a desperate father engaged in a desperate race against time to save his sons life but finds that no one will help him (There’s a searing attack on public complacency when George Devine declares Redgrave as guilty as the rest of the general public of total indifference).

The general stridency of technique is reflected in Leo McKern’s wild overacting. @RichardChatten

Sultana’s Dream (2023) San Sebastián Film Festival 2023

Wri/Dir: Isabel Herguera | With the voices of Mary Beard, Miren Arrieta, Paul B Preciado, Roberto Bessi, Nausheen Javeed | Anime 80′

Fears of being a woman alone surface in this opening scenes of this ravishing animation that packs a potent punch in fluidly depicting life in a society ruled by men.

Isabel Herguera’s tale of female empowerment is a first feature for the San Sebastián-born filmmaker. Inspired by the exotic colours and sultry moods of the Indian subcontinent she bases her narrative on an avant-garde 1905 fable by a pioneering Bengali feminist writer Rokeya Hussein who imagines a utopian kingdom of Ladyland. Here, women call the shots in creating a harmonious society where they are educated and gain considerable agency while the men are locked away in purdah.

Set her timeline in the modern day Herguera’s glowing anime centres on Ines (Miren Arrieta), a young filmmaker who returns from India to Spain to seek career advice from her wheelchair-bound oceanographer mother who is a font of wisdom.

With its topical themes of politics, religious freedom, feminism and the environment Herguera’s well-paced and witty satire pokes subtle fun at the male-dominated society that still exists in India as Ines embarks on a peripatetic odyssey to realise her hopes and dreams in this visually captivating gem. MT

GOLDEN SEASHELL COMPETITION | SAN SEBASTIAN 2023

A Journey in Spring (2023) San Sebastián Film Festival 2023

Dirs: Ping-Wen Wang, Tzu-Hui Peng | Taiwan, Drama, 90′

Lovers of slow-burning Asian Arthouse cinema in the masters Jia Zhangke, Tsai Ming-liang or Kim Ki-Duk will warm to this drole and dystopian look at a marriage in decline and its aftermath.

A languorous opening sequence by a waterfall gives way to a bustling street scene that shows, without the need for words, that Khim-Hok and his wife Tua are no longer happy together. And who can I blame a bickering middle-aged couple forced into close proximity enduring the dregs of winter in a rain-soaked rural backwater, dreary despite its magnificent temples and lively food market.

Small domestic altercations in the couple’s cramped living conditions collide with serene moments in the lush Taiwanese countryside when Khim-Hok remembers their promising past and his estranged son’s happy wedding, seen in flashback, as he waits endlessly for a bus. Back at home matters come to a head after an incident with a jar of plums, and the following day when Tua quietly passes away he decides to relegate her body to the chest freezer.

But their son and his partner suddenly appear on the scene, unannounced, after years of absence. Khim-hok clearly has some explaining to do and this clarity focuses his mind and brings the past flooding back into the present leading him on a cathartic and often poignant journey of reflection and self-discovery.

Seasoned filmmakers Ping-Wen Wang and Tzu-Hui Peng direct this assured and resplendent Taiwanese tale that unfolds in evocative tableaux giving minor moments of everyday life a resonance without resorting to fanfare or fussy dialogue. Journey into Spring is a watchable joy – particularly for an international audience outside Taiwan – with its minimal dialogue. The sleek script speaks volumes leaving nothing spare in a muted and memorable 21st century parable. MT

SAN SEBASTIAN FILM FESTIVAL 2023 | GOLDEN SHELL 2023

Hit Man (2023)

Dir. Richard Linklater. US.Comedy 2023. 113mins

Gary Johnson seems like just another dorky divorcee with his cats and Honda civic. But life is turned upside down when he takes on a “fake assassin’ job for the New Orleans Police Department, in Richard Linklater’s latest, a noir comedy, premiering at Venice.

Hit Man, a crowd-pleasing comedy to kick off the summer, is a real feel-good affair co-written by Linklater and Glen Powell who stars as the unlikely undercover cop who also lectures in philosophy at the city’s university. And despite geeky outside appearances Gary pulls off both roles convincingly in a confident comedy turn that sees him in different disguises and personas – from Russian gangster to Redneck – a far cry from the open-toed sandals and baggy jeans of his geeky prof role.

Gary poses as a jobbing gun for hire, snagging his victims with false assurances, these putative perps are then pounced on by a posse of police and dealt with by the strong arm of the law. That is until Gary falls for one unhappy wife called Madison (Adria Arjona) – and it seems the feeling is mutual – the two sharing a simmering chemistry, Gary rising to occasion in ways he never thought possible.

Madison wants rid of her husband, so Gary invents an alter ego in the shape of Ron so the two can get down and dirty without being “unprofessional”. Soon they’re scheming like Stanwyck and MacMurray, and Gary is soon out of his depth. Let’s remember Madison is contemplating murder while Gary is just a decent guy stroking his pussies! Luckily his colleagues are there to support him but will they come to the rescue before Gary finds himself in deep water?

The clever script and whip-smart dialogue ensures Hit Man never descends into farce or camp territor, Sandra Adair editing with deft aplomb. A welcome and enjoyable edition to the Linklater archive. MT

NOW IN UK & IRISH CINEMAS- VENICE FILM FESTIVAL PREMIERE 2023

San Sebastián Film Festival | Competition selection 2023

The San Sebastian Film Festival is Spain’s only A-list event running from 22 September until 30th in the North West Spanish town on the shores of the Atlantic, and often known by its Basque name of Donostia. This year celebrating its 71st edition, a selection of Spanish titles and international fare competes for the Golden Shell Award in venues such as the Kursaal and the Victoria Eugenia theatre. This year’s edition, honouring Victor Erice, and headed by Claire Denis as president of the Golden Shell jury, kicks off withThe Boy and The Heron and closes with James Marsh’s Dance First starring Gabriel Byrne.

THE BOY AND THE HERON – Hayao Miyazaki

A young boy named Mahito yearning for his mother ventures into a world shared by the living and the dead. There, death comes to an end, and life finds a new beginning. A semi-autobiographical fantasy about life, death and creation, in tribute to friendship, from the mind of Hayao Miyazaki. Out of competition

DANCE FIRST – James Marsh

Literary genius Samuel Beckett lived a life of many parts: Parisian bon vivant, WWII Resistance fighter, Nobel Prize-winning playwright, philandering husband, recluse. But despite all the adulation that came his, way he was a man acutely aware of his own failings. Titled after Beckett’s famous ethos “Dance first, think later,” the film is a sweeping account of the life of this 20th-century icon. Out of Competition

Competition films

ALL DIRT ROADS TASTE OF SALT – Raven Jackson

A lyrical decades spanning exploration across a woman’s life in Mississippi, this feature debut from award-winning poet, photographer and filmmaker Raven Jackson is a haunting and richly layered ode to the generations of people that hail from the region.

A JOURNEY IN SPRING – Tzu-Hui Peng, Ping-Wen Wang

An old man with a limp, Khim-Hok, has depended on his wife over the years. They live in an old house on the urban fringe of Taipei. After his wife suddenly passes away, the man puts her into an old freezer and carries on as normal. But his long lost son and partner suddenly appears leaving Kim-Hok to face his demons.

SULTANA’S DREAM – Isabel Herguera

Taking her inspiration from a feminist sci-fi short story written in Bengal in 1905, Ines sets out on a voyage of discovery around India in search of Ladyland, the Utopian land of women.

EX-HUSBANDS – Noah Pritzker

Peter’s parents divorced after 65 years, his wife left him after 35, and his sons, Nick and Mickey, are off leading their own lives. When Peter flies to Tulum, crashing Nick’s bachelor party hosted by Mickey, he realizes he’s not the only one in crisis.

FINGERNAILS – Christos Nikos

Anna and Ryan have found true love. It’s been proven by a controversial new technology. There’s just one problem: Anna still isn’t sure. Then she takes a position at a love testing institute, and meets Amir.

GREAT ABSENCE – Key Chika-Ura

KALAK – Isabella Eklof

Jan is on the run from himself after being sexually abused by his father. Living in Greenland with his little family, he yearns to be a part of the open, collectivist culture and become a Kalak, a “dirty Greenlander”.

RED ISLAND – Robin Campillo

L’île rouge / Red Island is set in Madagascar in the early 1970s, on one of the last air bases of the French army, where military families live the last throes of colonialism. Influenced by his reading of the intrepid comic book heroine Fantômette, ten-year-old Thomas sweeps with a curious glance what surrounds him, while the world gradually opens up to a different reality.

THE PRACTICE – Martin Rejtman

Gustavo and Vanessa separate and have to redraft their projects together. Both are yoga teachers. Gustavo is Argentinian, Vanessa is Chilean. The trip to India is cancelled. Vanessa keeps the apartment and leaves the studio they shared, making Gustavo homeless. As a result of the accumulated stress, Gustavo injures his knee and replaces yoga: first with quadriceps exercises and then with the gym. But gradually he gets his life back on track and starts practising again.

THE GREAT TEMPTATION – Xavier Legrand

Ellias Barnès, 30, is the newly-announced artistic director of a famous Parisian fashion house. But as expectations are high, he starts experiencing chest pain. Out of the blue he is called back to Montreal to organise his estranged father’s funeral and discovers that he may have inherited much worse than his father’s weak heart.

THE SUCCESSOR – Xavier LeGrand

MMXX – Christi Pui

Oana Pfifer, a young therapist, gradually slips into the net of the questionnaire she submits to her patient. Mihai, Oana’s brother, worrying about his birthday, is stuck in a story far bigger than he can handle. Septimiu, Oana’s husband, concerned about his health, vaguely listens to a strange story his colleague was caught up in a while ago. Narcis Patranescu, an organized crime detective, deals with an unsettling dark story while interrogating a young woman at a funeral.

THE RYE HORN – Jaione Camborda

Illa de Arousa, 1971. Maria is a woman who earns a living harvesting shellfish. She is also known on the island for helping other women in childbirth with special dedication and care. After an unexpected event, she is forced to flee and sets out on a dangerous journey that will make her fight for her survival. Seeking her freedom, Maria decides to cross the border by one of the smugglers’ routes between Galicia and Portugal.

PUAN – Benjamin Naishtat, Maria Alche

THE ROYAL HOTEL – Kitty Green

UN AMOR – Isabel Coixet

Having escaped from her stressful life in the city, 30-year-old Nat holes up in the small village of La Escapa, in deepest rural Spain. In a rundown country house, with a crochety stray dog, the young girl will try to put her life back on track. Having dealt with her landlord’s hostility and the mistrust of the village locals, Nat finds herself accepting a disturbing sexual proposal made by her neighbour Andreas. This strange and confusing encounter will give rise to an all-consuming and obsessive passion that will completely engulf Nat and make her question the kind of woman she thinks she is.

A SILENCE – JOACHIM LAFOSSE

Astrid is the wife of an acclaimed lawyer. Silenced for 25 years, her family balance suddenly collapses when her children initiate their search for justice.

Special Screenings

THEY SHOT THE PIANO PLAYER – Fernando Trueba, Javier Mariscal

A music journalist from New York sets out on a frantic investigation into the mysterious disappearance of Brazilian pianist Tenorio Jr, regular accompanist of Vinicius de Moraes, among others. This animated thriller moving to the beat of jazz and bossa nova portrays the days immediately before the Latin American continent was enshrouded by totalitarian regimes.

A PROPER JOB – Thomas Lilti

It’s a new school year. Benjamin is a PhD student without a grant. Given his lack of future prospects, he accepts a position as a contract teacher in a Parisian middle school. Without training or experience, he soon realises just how tough the teaching profession can be in an education system crippled by a chronic lack of resources. With the support and commitment of the other teachers, and a bit of luck, he will reconsider his vocation.

SAN SEBASTIAN FILM FESTIVAL | 2023

Golden Orange Film Festival 2023 | National Competition 2023 | Cancelled

The Golden Orange Film Festival was due to open on the 7th October 2023 celebrating its 60th anniversary on the Southern Turkish Riviera has been cancelled due to censoring issues centring on one of the films: a documentary entitled The Decree. A glittering selection of world premieres and award-winning titles will take part in the International Feature and documentary Film Competition, with the National Feature and Documentary Competition showcasing the latest in Turkish cinema.

NATIONAL FEATURE COMPETITION | GOLDEN ORANGE FILM FESTIVAL | Antalya 2023

A HERO OF OUR TIME (2023)

Dir/Wri: Miraç Atabey | CastEmrah Gülşen,Mustafa Kandemir, Elvan Çanakoğlu, Evrim Çervatoğlu,A Hero Of Our Time

Inspired by Lermontov’s infamous anti-hero Pechorin, A Hero of Our Time depicts a negative generational portrait that embodies many of the vices and flaws of our time through the story of an immature man who deals with his father’s funeral preparations in the hills of northeastern Turkey where tradition clashes with the modern world.

THE REEDS (2023)

Dir: Cemil Ağacıkoğlu | Wri Cemil Ağacıkoğlu, Arzu Ağacıkoğlu | Cast: Hilmi Ahıska, Sevgi Temel, Gökhan Yıkılkan,

In an Anatolian village, Ali, an impoverished cane-harvester, is still deeply in love with his wife, Aysel, and dreams of winning back her affection. The region is ruled by gangs and outlaws and Ali kills one of them in a tragic accident. And when he loses his entire crop Ali must struggle to survive against the odds in this fable about resistance and the enduring power of love.

SACRIFICE (2023)

Dir/Wr;: İsmail Güneş | Cast: Mürşit Ağa Bağ, Fuat Onan, Nermin Yılmaz

Born in Samsun in 1961 Ismail Güneş made his directorial debut with the film Before the Sun Rises in 1986. His latest feature premiering at this year’s GOLDEN ORANGE FILM FESTIVAL is a complex moral tale that sees an elderly man fighting with his conscience when his son is conscripted into the army.

LIFE (2023) – main image

Dir/Wri: Zeki Demirkubuz | Cast: Miray Daner, Burak Dakak, Cem Davran, Umut Kurt, Melis Birkan, Osman Alkaş

Zeki Demirkubuz embarked on his cinema career in 1986 as an assistant to Zeki Ökten. Since 1994, his films have been premiering on the international festival circuit. His latest feature, LIFE, screens at Antalya’s GOLDEN ORANGE FILM FESTIVAL. Once again the past and present collide when Hicran runs away from home after her father forces her into an unwanted engagement with Rıza who, desperate to track his potential bride down, begins an eventful search for her in Istanbul.

NOT WHAT YOU THINK (2023)

Dir/Wri: Vuslat Saraçoğlu | Cast: Serdar Orçin, Alican Yücesoy, Hazal Türesan, Ozan Çelik, Ünal Yeter, Elif Neva Özhan

Vuslat Saraçoğlu’s first feature film, Debt was screened at international festivals and received various awards, including the Golden Tulip for the Best Film at the 37th Istanbul Film Festival.

Not What You Think follows three siblings who are all different in character, mentality and lifestyle: Tahsin (44), Yasin (38) and Remziye (34) are drawn together in their hometown after the mysterious death of their father. During their time in Tokat, their relationship oscillates between closeness of warm moments and serious tension where their personal realities are challenged in this film that explores the tangled dimensions of sibling-hood and false and unreliable memories.

BELONGING (2023)

Dir: Mete Gümürhan | Wri: Chris Westendorp | Cast: Alihan Şahin, Sinan Eroğlu, Hayat van Eck, Mina Demirtaş, Lorin Merhart

A feature exploring the poignant sense of dislocation and disenfranchisement felt by a teenager born in Rotterdam of Turkish parents. Belonging also carries with it a positive message of hope for all those with preconceived notions about the past.

Directing from a script by Chris Westendorp, Belonging marks Gümürhan’s first venture into fiction feature filmmaking, after gaining a Special Mention from the Generation Kplus International Jury at the 66th Berlin Film Festival for his 2016 title Young Wrestlers where it premiered.

SUDDENLY (2023)

Dir: Melisa Önel | Wri: Feride Çiçekoğlu | Cast: Defne Kayalar, Öner Erkan, Şerif Erol, Ayşenil Şamlıoğlu

Another immigrant tale sees Reyhan returning to İstanbul from her longterm base in Hamburg where she opts for a radical reinvention of her former life in an daring experiment with freedom.

Directors Melisa Önel, born in İzmir in 1980, has a photography and video installation background. She has been writing and directing shorts, fiction films, and documentaries since 2007, including ‘Me and Nuri Bala’ (Best First Documentary at Antalya Film Festival 2009), Seaburners (Berlinale Forum 2014), and Coastliners (Istanbul Film Festival 2016).

8X8 (2023)

Dir/Wri: Kıvanç Sezer | Cast: Alican Yücesoy, Ece Yüksel, Halil Babür

Three people are caught in an endless struggle to survive in this complex character-driven drama.

Born in Ankara, director and writer Kıvanç Sezer has received multiple awards on the international festival circuit for his debut and sophomore features, My Father’s Wings (2015) and La Belle Indifference (2019)

DOCUMENTARY COMPETITION | 2023

MY LIFE IS A MOVIE (2023)

Dir: Serdal Doğan | Turkey,

A group of elderly people in their twilight years have agreed to participate in this experimental film where they script and act out their own trials and tribulations in the context of a supportive cinema education framework.

MY NAME IS HAPPY (2023)

Dir: Nick Read & Ayşe Toprak

Aspiring popstar Mutlu Kaya (Mutlu means ‘happy’ in Turkish) narrowly escapes an attempted femicide with her life. Despite life-changing injuries, Mutlu goes in search of justice and to reclaim her voice as a singer in this film about female empowerment.

ECLIPSE (2023)

Dirs: İpek Kent, Efe Öztezdoğan

One of the greatest tragedies of the modern era happened in 2020. As a result of the global measures taken against the Covid-19 pandemic, the Olympic Games, which was to be held in Tokyo, was delayed for the first time in its history. In one hundred years, only three gymnasts had been able to represent Turkey in gymnastics, however, this is about to change; Eclipse explores their motivations, victories, losses and injuries in a bid to get one step closer to the highest success attainable by an athlete.

THE AEGEAN SUN (2023)

Dir/Wri: Ömer Gümüşer

Writer and director Ömer Gümüşer studied Film Design at Yaşar University brings his unique visual perspective to this new documentary about the popular İzmir Kültür Park that was shut down in 2019, only to be given a lucky reprieve in the wake of the pandemic.

PHILOSOPHY (2023)

Dir/Wri: Münir Alper Doğan

Conversations with five philosophy scholars from Turkey about philosophy, art, literature, life and death. Prof. Dr. Örsan K. Öymen, Prof. Dr. Halil Turan, Prof. Dr. Türker Armaner, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Barış Parkaner and retired philosophy scholar Assoc. Prof. Dr. Cemil Güzey expand on the ideas of famous philosophers who left their mark our recent history, such as Descartes, Hume, Nietzsche, Spinoza, Marx, Wittgenstein, Heraclitus, Sokrates, Plato, Aristoteles and many others in this worthwhile and enlightening journey through the history of philosophy.

THE DECREE (2023)

Dir/Wri: Nejla Demirci

The Decree looks at Turkey’s mechanism known as ‘Decree Law’. Yasemin and Engin have been driven out of society and pushed into isolation but want to return to their duties and fight back through a forest of red tape. How long can they persevere?

Director and writer Demirci was born in Ağrı and studied Sociology in Anadolu University. While fighting for the Ergene River, which is abandoned to industrial pollution, she decided to make a documentary film about the situation. The journey of the Sunflower (2012) which received Special Award of the Jury at Ankara Film Festival. Her documentary Confrontation (2017) received the Best Documentary Award in International TRT Documentary Days.

BLUE ID (2023)

Dir: Burcu Melekoğlu, Vuslat Karan | Wris: Burcu Melekoğlu, Vuslat Karan, Efe Durmaz

An intimate report of the struggles and self-realisation of Rüzgâr Erkoçlar, Blue ID tells the story of the many obstacles the actor has had to overcome in order to live ‘an authentic life’.

Burcu Melekoğlu is a director and editor based in Istanbul. Believing in the power of independent documentary film to change hearts and minds, she founded MOXIE, an independent production company that produces documentaries and released the feature length documentary film Blue ID that won the IDFA NPO Audience Award in 2022.

WHO ARE YOU? (2023)

Dir/Wri: Cenk Kaptan

Music was one of the sectors hit by the pandemc. OLTA Solidarity, founded by independent musicians, made a name for itself with the support it gave to musicians during the crisis. OLTA Solidarity managed to release 130 songs with a total of 10 albums. All the income was transferred to musicians, music and stage workers who lost their livelihoods. In a playful style “Who Are You?” underlines just how indispensable music and musicians are for societies today.

THE GOLDEN ORANGE FILM FESTIVAL | ANTALYA, TURKEY | due to run from 7 October until 14 October 2023 has been cancelled.

The Killer is Loose (1956)

Dir: Bud Boetticher | Cast: Joseph Cotton, Rhonda Fleming, Wendell Corey | US noir thriller

After a decade spent making programmers Bud Boetticher was on the verge of finding his vocation as a director of westerns.

The series of oaters Boetticher made with Randolph Scott on which his reputation rests were bookended by two very twentieth century crime dramas shot in black & white by veteran Lucien Ballard.

It’s ironic that Wendell Corey’s grievance at his wife’s death makes him the villain, since that’s often what motivates Scott. The title’s a bit of a misnomer as Corey is far from your usual psychopath and remains inscrutable to the end.

The subject would have been right up Andrew Stone’s street but displays far more ruthlessness and has a higher casualty rate (there’s a particular nasty moment with a hoe).

I was rather disappointed that far more screen time was devoted to Joseph Cotten than Corey but the conclusion proved satisfyingly tense, @RichardChatten

Carlos (2023)

Dir: Rudy Valdez | US biopic with Carlos Santana | 87′

This is a comprehensive and personal chronicle recounted by the Mexican born guitarist Carlos Santana, now 76, who rose to fame in the late 1960s where he pioneered a fusion of rock&roll and American jazz with his eponymous band.

Directed by Rudy Valdez and featuring Carlos himself – interweaved with archive footage, family photos and films of the band performing – we hear how he grew up in 1950s Tijuana Mexico, where his parents were his main influence – and not always in a positive light – along with Tito Puentes, Little Richard and B B King. His father Jose was a violin player in a classic Mariachi band, a national instrumental style that involved the players dressed in matching outfits, led by a conductor. Close to his mother, Carlos states, in a rather cheesy note, how buying her a home with a refrigerator meant much more to him than personal fame.

Carlos’ first recorded performance was in 1966 when the family had moved to San Francisco where he would cross paths with producer Bill Graham who began booking the band as a support act to the likes of The Who.

For diehard fans of Santana’s iconic style, the film misses a trick in its focus on family details as recorded in his 2014 memoir, “The Universal Tone,” more than his fabulous career as lead of the world famous band. The thrust here is on his early struggles which involved sexual abuse, addition and racism, and his fight for success and recognition through spirituality.

The band toured internationally, and I was lucky enough to see them at a gig at university on their rise to fame with the 1999 ‘Supernatural’ Album, and they made for a spectacular live act and are equally powerful in the recording studio.

But Carlos ultimately attributed his success to Columbia’s Clive Davis, who is now a senior at Sony Music Entertainment, the production company behind this documentary. There is a distinct lack of commentary from friends and collaborators making this seem rather a one-sided and even self-congratulatory affair despite some enjoyable musical interludes that stand testament to the band’s iconic status and worthy of its international fan base. MT

CARLOS: THE SANTANA JOURNEY GLOBAL PREMIERE | IN SELECT UK Cinemas ON SEPTEMBER 23 & 27.

Typist Artist Pirate King (2023)

Dir.: Carol Morley; Cast: Monica Dolan, Kelly McDonald, Gina McKee; UK 2023. 108 min.

Carol Morley is best known for her debut Dream of a Life, a docudrama about a woman who suffered a lonely death in North London. The British filmmaker is now on rescue mission for UK artist Audrey Amiss (1933-2013) whose posthumous output was made over to the Welcome Trust.

Morley unearths of prodigious output that included 47 books. A passport states that the bearer is the titular ‘Typist, Artist, Pirate King’. Indeed, Amiss was born in Sunderland in the early 1933s before drifting down south where she was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia that put paid to her studies at London’s Royal Academy. What followed was a life of “revolving doors”, in and out of institutions.

Morley has decided to stage this as a garrulous road movie Amiss (Dolan) literally trapping her psychiatric nurse Sandra (Macdonald) in a trip from South London to Sunderland- claiming the north east as her spiritual home. The reason for the trip is an exhibition of her paintings in Sunderland – which feels much stuck in a time-warp. But Audrey enjoys the ride via car and bus much more than her long-suffering companion (“Sandra Panza”). Aubrey is shrill and aggressive, harping on about the past and those, now long gone, who have either done her harm or abetted her against countless enemies. She finally admits her fall in a ravine was due to poor eyesight, rather than the fault of her sister Dorothy (McKee), as she had claimed all along.

Monica Dolan gives a feisty, over-the-top performance as Amiss, but it somehow works against the film’s cause: the rehabilitation of an artist who called out the advent of the UK’s consumer society, and media domination. Morley frames her protagonist as a martyr, but also an unpalatable one, largely due to the farcical comedy treatment which not only mocks Amiss but also, sadly, her affliction. Thus she emerges very much more as a pirate than a creative worthy of her cause.

Imaginatively shot by French DoP Agnes Godard, Typist triumphs despite Morley’s direction and script. Somewhere along the road, this talented filmmaker loses the reins, leaving Amiss as her worst enemy rather than a figure to be celebrated. A forthcoming biography should shed more light on the life of this worthwhile British artist. AS

IN CINEMAS FROM 27 OCTOBER 2023

The Bedford Incident (1965)

Dir: James B Harris | Cast: Richard Widmark, Sydney Poitier, Martin Balsam, James MacArthur | US Action drama 106’

Producer James B. Harris made his own singular contribution to the war film after he and Stanley Kubrick went their separate ways and with the help of Kubrick’s cameraman Gilbert Taylor came up with this astringent naval drama which manages to feature both Eric Portman and Donald Sutherland in the same film (but not at the same scene alas).

A product of the period when black & white was the cinemas’ default setting and filmmakers treated their audiences like grownups, the characters were sufficiently nuanced to encompass Cold War Ahab Richard Widmark’s indulgence towards Wally Cox (who himself seems completely oblivious) and the dog that didn’t bark, since after fifteen years this was the first ever film in which Sydney Poitier’s colour was never relevant or remarked upon.@RichardChatten

ON MUBI

A Proper Job | Un métier Sérieux (2023) | San Sebastian Film Festival 2023

Dir/Wri: Thomas Lilti | Cast: Vincent Lacoste, Francois Cluzet, Louise Bourgoin, Adele Exarchopoulos, Mustapha Abourachid | France Comedy Drama 101′

Real life pals Adèle Exarchopoulos and Vincent Lacoste star in this amusing schoolroom drama – they were last seen giggling together on the Red Carpet at Cannes for the premiere of Elemental.

A Proper Job is the latest from French writer/director Thomas Lilti whose sobering sophomore feature Hippocrates saw Lacoste as a junior doctor thrown into the deep end at the Hospital Rothschild in Paris. This time he’s Benjamin Barrois, a junior tutor with no experience – and it shows – trying to finance his PhD at a Normandy secondary school with few resources. And his first day teaching rowdy adolescents certainly gets off to a bad start when a more senior colleague mistakes him for an intern, in front of the class. This doesn’t help his cause.

True to say that many otherwise decent kids can be monsters in the classroom and that’s certainly the case here. Benjamin lurches from crisis to crisis as Lilti demonstrates in semi-documentary style the many pitfalls of being a schoolteacher nowadays. And we’ve already seen these situations in films like The Hunt (2012), Mr Backmann and His Class (2021) and most recently in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s About Dry Grasses (2023).

So when one of his pupils, an unruly kid with a troubled home-life, refuses to respect the simple code of class conduct Benjamin has a problem on his hands, then the boy files a complaint with the school head (Abourachid) that leads to a disciplinary process.

Lacoste is such a versatile actor you can’t help liking his portrayal of Benjamin: he can be serious but there’s always a cheeky glint in his eye. And when he joins a surfing break in Biarritz with other members of the staff there are moments of high tension and the camaraderie between the colleagues is really put to the test. They support each other unfailingly when the chips are down.

Lilti fleshes out the backstories of the other teachers: Pierre (Cluzet) is having marital difficulties, and single parent Meriem (Exarchopoulos) is struggling to teach her own kid while juggling her career. Another teacher Sandrine (Bourgoin) is pushed to the limit in a livid classroom confrontation.

Lilti never looks for simple solutions in his well-paced script, and the finale is spectacular. A really good cast and a sympathetic treatment of the issues involved make this another convincing feature from a much deserving director who has so far received 14 nominations but never won a prize. Let’s hope he will soon. MT

IN CINEMAS IN FRANCE | SAN SEBASTIAN FILM FESTIVAL 2023

Calvaire (2004)

Dir: Fabrice du Welz | Belgium, Thriller 88′

Calvaire kicks off Fabrice du Welz’s ‘Ardennes’ Trilogy, a series of tortured psychological thrillers with a religious ring to them (Alleluia, Adoration) set in the remote forested region of Belgium known as Wallonia. There are clear echoes of Philippe Haim’s Barracuda 1997 and Roman Polanski’s Cul de Sac (1966) to this potent possession piece that sees a stranger veering off the beaten track to find himself in trouble.

Although Belgian, Calvaire forms part of the New French Extremity Movement, a series of intensely sensorial and violently exploitative psychodramas that featured rape, mental torture and graphic sex. Notable protagonists of the sub-genre are Philippe Grandrieux, Catherine Breillat, Gaspar Noe, Lars von Trier, and Bruno Dumont. Here Du Welz and his co-writer from Alleluia craft another warped cult classic for the archives.

A travelling troubadour (Laurent Lucas) finds himself at the mercy of some bizarrre Bruegelesque characters when his van breaks down on a rainy night on the way home from a gig. After enduring an eerie encounter with a whimpering wayfarer called Boris (Jean-Luc Couchard) who appears to have lost his dog Bella, a cosy fireside welcome from inkeeper M. Bartel (Jackie Berroyer) seems like a reprieve, but soon turns into a nightmare when his perverse host, who warns him not to go near the village, has other ideas about making his guest feel at home, although this does rather outstay its welcome despite a modest running time. MT

CALVAIRE on digital platforms from 19 September 2023

A Haunting in Venice (2023)

Dir: Kenneth Branagh | UK Fantasy thriller 100′

Venice, All Hallows Eve 1947, and the privations of the war are still haunting the lugubrious rain-soaked city in this morose horror-tinged thriller from Kenneth Branagh. Adapted from the Agatha Christie treasure trove: ‘Hallowe’en Party’, from 1969, this latest outing follows on from Death in the Nile. In a bid to attract a younger generation, rather than the usual ‘Archers’ demographic, the ghosts are all children.

The po-faced Belgian sleuth (Branagh himself) has been dragged out of self-imposed retirement by an American crime writer friend Ariadne Oliver, a sparky Tina Fey who considerably lightens the mood). She wants him to come with her to a halloween seance at a penumbral palazzo haunted by dead children. The idea is to rumble a ‘fake’ physic (Michelle Yeoh) hired by the chatelaine Rowena Drake (Kelly Reilly) to shed light on the mysterious drowning of her daughter Alicia (Rowan Robinson). True to form, Poirot has no truck with things spiritual until his scepticism is piqued when things turn nasty. Could evil forces really be at work in this sinister setting with its Tourneuresque shadow-play? Or is this merely a bid to disguise skulduggery.

The underused cast of suspects make their excuses: Rowena’s ex fiancé Maxime (Kyle Allen), the housekeeper Olga Seminoff (Camille Cottin); Dr Leslie Ferrier (Jamie Dornan) and his little son Leopold (a superb Jude Hill); a Hungarian couple (Ali Khan, Desdemona Holland). Even Piorot’s bodyguard (Richard Scammarcio) is questioned.

A Haunting is certainly a bit of fun to start with, and there are some witty one-liners largely from Tina Fey. DoP Haris Zambarloukos makes it all look spectacular, but no amount of jump scares, echoing voices, screeching parrots – or even a projectile vomiting skeleton – can save the narrative torpor that eventually sets in as this latest outing sinks slowly into the lagoon. MT

NOW IN CINEMAS

Alphaville (1965) Prime video

Dir: Jean-Luc Godard | Cast: Eddie Constantine, Anna Karina | France drama 99’

In 1924 a quantum leap occurred in speculation about the future when Fritz Lang saw the Manhattan skyline at night and realised it had already arrived. Jean-Luc Godard took that idea still further by using contemporary Paris as the setting for ‘Alphaville’, the result probably being the only film by Godard to be quoted by both Monty Python and Benny Hill.

Although set in the future ‘Alphaville’ is now a film to be watched with a powerful sense of nostalgia and is a profoundly melancholy experience since we now know that Godard was on the cusp of a precipitous decline into mediocrity.

Near the conclusion of ‘Vivre sa Vie’ Anna Karina was shown writing a letter anticipating a job in a film starring Eddie Constantine. Did Godard suspect that such a film would see fruition in less that three years in the form of ‘Alphaville’? @RichardChatten

NOW ON ORIME VIDEO

Fremont (2023)

Dir: Babak Jalali | Cast: Anaita Wali Zara, Jeremy Allen White, Gregg Tarkington, Siddique Ahmed | US Drama 91′

An Afghan translator from war-torn Kabul reinvents herself as a fortune cookie writer in this succinct but memorable immigration story directed and written by award-winning filmmaker Babak Jalali and his co-writer Carolina Cavalli (Amanda) and starring Anaita Wali Zara in a stunning screen debut.

Unfolding in glowing monochrome tableaux like a neorealist drama of the 1940s this ravishing arthouse feature, lensed by Laura Valladao, takes place in present day Fremont, a suburb of San Francisco.

Simply told yet complex, captivating and thematically rich Jalali draws us into the everyday life of world-weary Donya, a young woman who finds the petty trivialities of western society completely out of sync with her fraught past in Afghanistan.

Jalali uses a clever narrative device – an impromptu consultation with psychiatrist, Dr Anthony (Turkington) – to flesh out Donya’s backstory. She went to him requesting sleeping tablets but ends up revealing how, working as a translator for the army, she financed her passage to America, and how she would have happily gone anywhere to escape her past. And so these amusing sessions get underway providing the connective tissue for Donya’s days at the handmade fortune cookie company where she endures a humdrum existence until Daniel (Robert Mitchum/ Dustin Hoffmann lookalike Jeremy Allen White) pops into the equation, and sparks fly.

Jalali exposes San Francisco’s lively immigrant population in amusing vignettes: A Chinese co-worker takes advantage of Donya selling her expensive coffee when the office machine breaks down, a Chinese lute player entertains us briefly with his soulful vibes, and various diners read aloud their fortune cookie massages giving the film context and textural richness. Fremont benefits from its sleek running time; there is nothing spare or redundant in this quirky gem. MT

IN CINEMAS FROM 15 SEPTEMBER 2023

Bill Douglas – My Best Friend (2023)

Dir: Jack Archer | UK Doc 78′

Bill Douglas (1934-91) was one of Scotland’s greatest filmmakers. And no one knew him better than his companion and collaborator Peter Jewell who captures the essence of an auteur in the mould of Chris Marker or even Terence Davies in this affectionate portrait.

Directed and written by Jack Archer, Bill Dougles – My Best Friend is a documentary about a distinctive creative talent and a lifelong platonic relationship. Jewell serves as the narrator and the affable on-screen presence reminiscing over Douglas’ long career, and their life together. It was a friendship that could almost be described as love, although Jewell never actually declares it as such. And although girlfriends intervened over the years they never prized the two men apart.

Douglas was born in 1934 in the run-down mining village of Newcraighall, Scotland, where he lived with his grandmother having been abandoned by his father. Peter Jewell came on the scene in the early 1950s and the two struck up a lively friendship – Douglas always immaculately turned out in contrast to the scruffy middle class Peter, but they bonded over their love of film, a medium that allowed Douglas to escape his traumatic childhood. Soon Bill had moved in with the Jewell family in their large house in Barnstable, on the Jurassic Coast, at a time where there were still German prisoners of war stationed there, waiting to be repatriated.

The two men then gradually drifted to London, ample black and white footage showing the war-torn city of the era. Renting a small place in Soho they remained oblivious to the fleshpots so engrossed were they in making home movies which they claimed ‘were all rubbish’. It was a friendly creative neighbourhood and this is how their filmmaking started. Fever was a first film, a drama with its allusion to mental illness at a time of much social unrest, and a prescient fear of a nuclear Holocaust. Globe and Striptease were other short films the two cut their teeth on. Come Dancing followed in 1971. Rather like Terence Davies, Bill also made a trilogy about his tragic life entitled, My Childhood (1972). It was a film that showcased the poverty of his growing up, and went on to win the Best Debut film at Venice Film Festival.

The number three would continue to feature prominently in the Douglas oeuvre, and locks were also a ‘thing’: Bill was obsessed by locks and entrances. Determined to control every aspect of the filmmaking process, Douglas gradually emerges a Chekovian figure who knew each of his scripts word by word, line by line. A favourite drama of the era was Michel Audy’s film La Maree, that invoked a knife as a symbol of sexual fear, and the two of them watched it over and over again. For Douglas filmmaking was a constant attempt to understand his life, and montage became more and more important enabling him to visualise his feelings and ideas because he found verbal expression difficult.

Bill Douglas was certainly a “filmmakers’ filmmaker”, and an inspiration for many who follow in his wake including Lenny Abrahamson and Lynne Ramsay who share their thoughts to the camera. But Douglas was criminally overlooked commercially.

Director Jack Archer deliberately chose to put Peter at the centre of his film due to his influence on Douglas. Today Bill remains a huge part of his life even thirty years after his death. As Peter himself says, “Art is the only immortality”. MT

PREMIERED AT VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2023

Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed (2023)

Dir.: Stephen Kijak; Documentary; With Joe Carberry, Tim Turner, Les Garlington; UK 2023, 104 min.

US director Stephen Kijak (We are X) delves into the complex life and times of Rock Hudson (1925-1985), one of Hollywood’s most enigmatic legends, in a documentary largely seen through the eyes of his friends and collaborators.

There are too many contradictions to really call this factual but it stands as a valiant attempt to distill the essence of a charismatic screen idol into 104 minutes. A mini series could have been another way of telling his fascinating story.

Kijak first tackles Hudson’s relationship with his agent Henry Eilson, the man who made (and perhaps helped to destroy) the leading man’s career. His intervention, making Hudson marry Wilson’s secretary Phyllis Gates, misfired as a publicity coup and harmed both Gates and Hudson in the long term.

But binding the Hollywood star of the 1950s to the modern version proves a less successful task for Kijak and Hudson. Even after the Stonewell riots in 1969, Hudson remains in the closet while leading a successful life as a heterosexual star in his three features with Doris Day (Pillow Talk 1959, Lover Come Back 1961 and Send Me No Flowers (1964).

Hudson made the perfect male role model during the 1950s. His casting in Giant (56) was clearly a rebuke for the”lack of male ego” and featured his enemy James Dean. The titular Douglas Sirk title All That Heaven Allows (1955) falls into the same category – but the 1960s saw Hudson miscast in all the macho features such as Tobruk and Ice station Zebra. But Hudson soon tired on the big screen as his star rose on the TV. One of his last contributions was a guest role in the popular series Dynasty.

Kijak ends on a rather solemn note, “Hudson saved nobody, because they all died”. This morose comment reflects the epoch of the Reagan administration that ordered cut-backs in Aids support, research and individual help. In his final interview, Hudson is stoical and prepared to meet his maker: “I am not afraid of anything”.

Rock Hudson, who was forced to be a heterosexual male seducer of the 1950s, despite his true nature, never felt at home during this era. But his life long friendships with co-stars Doris Day and Elizabeth Taylor bear testament to his enduring connection with the female sex. Kijak may have failed structurally in this engaging expose, but the rich archive of first-hand accounts fleshing out the actor’s life in the shadows more than makes up for it, and leaves us awestruck: Hudson was a great loss on a personal and professional level. AS

ROCK HUDSON: ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWED will be available on Digital platforms on 23 October 2023.

A Silence (2023) San Sebastian Film Festival 2023

Dir: Joachim Lafosse | Daniel Auteuil, Emmanuelle Devos, Salome Dewaels, Matthieu Galoux | Drama 100’

Daniel Auteuil and Emmanuelle Devos star in this sober look at a family in crisis when a father is suspected of child pornography and his wife is left to pick up the pieces.

The sins of the father come back to bite prominent lawyer Maitre Schaar (Auteuil) in the French town of Metz where he has dabbled in child pornography forcing his wife Astrid (Schaar) into an untenable code of silence. But their teenage children Caroline (Salome Dewaels) and Raphael (Matthieu Galoux) are not of an age when they want answers and when other allegations start to emerge the truth can no longer stay hidden drawing proceedings to a devastating finale.

Joachim Lafosse – best known for award-winning films Our Children (2012) and After Love (2016) – is a master of atmosphere rather than plot-driven narratives, and his skill at creating a seething sense of disquiet comes into its own in the leafy suburbs of the Moselle city where the Schaar family endure a soul-searching daily existence in their plush mansion. And although Astrid (a dignified Devos) has done a good job of shielding her kids from the accusations, the family is clearly in disarray and Raphael, in particular, harbours a savage mistrust of his father and wants him to face formal justice after years of psychological trauma that started when the boy discovered incriminating videos on his father’s computer. A morose but thoughtful study in family dynamics in the face of dysfunction MT

SAN SEBASTIAN FILM FESTIVAL 2023 | GOLDEN SHELL COMPETITION

Oh…Rosalinda (1955)

Drs: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger | UK Drama 101’

Anton Walbrook and Dennis Price had both done distinguished work for Powell & Pressburger, but they sure took a bath on this one; although connoisseurs of the bizarre will relish seeing a musical with John Schlesinger and Arthur Mullard as Russian chorus boys (not to mention a delectable young Jill Ireland and the sinuous Ludmilla Tcherina in the title role).

The Archers’ first film in CinemaScope was this operatic version of ‘The Third Man’ which probably reflected the input of Pressburger more than it did Powell, although fanciful details like Walbrook’s opening breach of the third wall in the fashion of the Master of the Ceremonies in ‘Le Ronde’, the black & white newsreel and the scene where Price returns from a bender seeing double show the Powell touch.

A troubled production flawed by serious undercasting that resulted in Mel Ferrer, Anthony Quayle and Michael Redgrave playing roles originally intended for Bing Crosby, Orson Welles and Maurice Chevalier it promptly crashed and burned both critically and commercially and failed to even get a release in the States; but when over thirty years later Powell was finally persuaded by Martin Scorsese to watch it agin he actually rather enjoyed it. @RicharfChatten

The Black Pirate (1926) BFI London Film Festival 2023

Dir: Albert Parker | Douglas Fairbanks, Billie Dove, Tempe Pigott, Donald Crisp | US Action drama 88′

The Technicolor Corporation’s most ambitious undertaking to date was the only production made in what was officially known as ‘Technicolor Process #2”.

Fairbanks Sr had considered making a pirate film as early as 1923, a project he envisaged all along as the perfect subject to be tackled in colour; he’d been favourably impressed with the results Technicolor had so far achieved so he thought he would give the process a shot.

It certainly raised Technicolor’s profile, and the results (as the archive screening coming up at the London Film Festival attests) on it’s own terms survives as a most satisfying entertainment with memorable stunts (the most famous being a slide by Fairbanks down the sails of a ship and vivid uses of colour; but the victory proved Pyrrhic since making the film proved a big enough challenge, and the real headache began when they tried to repeat the effect in mass-produced prints.

So it was back to the drawing board for Technicolor while Fairbanks never tried the process again. @RichardChatten

LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2023 | 4 -15 OCTOBER 2023

Maestro (2023)

Dir: Bradley Cooper | Cast: Carey Mulligan, Bradley Cooper | US Biopic Drama 130′

Leonard Bernstein was a world class conductor. He was also a conflicted personality. And this conflict lies at the heart of this astonishing biopic love story from Bradley Cooper who started his career as an actor in Hangover and Guardians of the Galaxy, and is now an Oscar class director. Maestro deserves to win an award for its exuberance, intelligence, and standout turns from Carey Mulligan and the director himself who plays the leading role.

How does an extrovert performer – such as a conductor – also satisfy his inner life as a creative composer: these are the two qualities that Bernstein struggled to satisfy and Cooper managed to bring them out into the open in his best film so far.

Bernstein was gay but he was also deliriously happy with his wife Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan), a Chilean actress who takes him on, despite his complex sexuality. Cooper’s ambitious biopic showcases Bernstein’s entire adult life from 1943 when he bursts onto the music scene as a 25 year old stand-in at Carnegie Hall, after the regular conductor drops out. He proves to be a dab hand with a baton and then falls for Montealegre at a friend’s cocktail do.

The couple’s coup de foudre is an urbane, witty affair and their onscreen chemistry sizzles, seizing the front pages in glistening black and white footage. It’s often hard to keep up with their frothy peripatetic lifestyle as careers blossom and their family grows to make them the talk of the town in all the right circles.

Occasionally veering into pastiche Cooper’s dazzling direction and script (co-written with Josh Singer) keeps us on board with Bernstein’s highs, lows and achievements in the thrilling whirlwind that gradually switches to colour in the more realistic 1970s.

And this is where dark cloud threaten the couple’s gilded lifestyle, Bernstein stealing an ill-judged behind the scenes kiss with a pretty boy (Matt Boomer) who then lurks in the background for the rest of the film, and Montealegre struggle with cancer. And Mulligan is the star turn here in one of the best performances of her career: as the gifted, tortured, adaptable Felicia. Her subtlety and sophistication is mind-blowing in some deft dialogue scenes where she spars with Cooper with exquisite precision. The subject may be Bernstein but this is Mulligan’s film. MT

NOW ON NETFLIX | VENICE FILM FESTIVAL | GOLDEN LION 2023

Priscilla (2023) Coppa Volpi | Venice Film Festival 2023

Dir/Wri: Sofia Coppola | US Drama 110′

Picturing the early days of Elvis Presley’s career from the perspective of Priscilla, his first love, wife and mother of Lisa-Marie, Sofia Coppola plumps for a tender teenage imagining doused in pervasive melancholy. And Priscilla may not go down well with Elvis fans.

Priscilla Presley, née Beaulieu, is 14 when she falls for the 24-year-old nascent hip-swivler, who emerges a manipulative, narcissist given to angry outbursts. Coppola also portrays him as a bed-dodger, prone to spiritual fads and introspective navel-gazing, and clearly only in love with himself.

Jacob Elordi really captures this morose side of Elvis, and certainly looks the part with his rangy physicality and matinee idol sultriness. He also conveys an emotional hollowness in the singer that eventually renders him a gothic vampire-like character. With his controlling ways and sinister subterfuge, he appears to groom her, but not as a sexual Svengali, contrary to appearances. What he wants is a trophy wife to stay in the background while he enjoys the romantic attentions of his film co-stars Ann-Margret and Nancy Sinatra.

The young Elvis clings to the cutesy, doll-like, reassuring figure of Priscilla as a mother substitute. They are both Texans far from home (he is stationed in Germany doing military service, she the daughter of an army commander), and Elvis desperately misses his ‘mom’. But this is a first love affair that never matures into adulthood, and Priscilla remains physically and emotionally unfulfilled. Despite Elvis’s simmering sexuality he fails to meet her seemingly modest needs in the bedroom. And this is the film’s enlightening secret. The film is endorsed by Presley herself and adapted from her book ‘Elvis and Me’ which she co-wrote with Sandra Harmon.

The emphasis here is also Priscilla’s strict upbringing, as a schoolgirl still studying for her ‘A’ levels. Elvis invites her to Memphis where she disappears into his mansion to live out a lonely existence despite an initial welcome from his grandma ‘Dodger’. His father Vernon is a mean old man, and Elvis spends most of his time with the boys, a set of male acolytes known as the “Memphis Mafia”.

Spaeny is perfectly cast in the role of Priscilla exuding a soft sensuous charm, she is vulnerable yet canny until her joy is eventually smothered. Priscilla is a romantic drama founded on its hazy romantic atmosphere, but the adult Priscilla is never really fleshed out, the second half sadly fragments as Priscilla gradually drifts away, dissatisfied and disillusioned, which is a pity because this is a gorgeously crafted love story sumptuously detailing a young girl’s heartthrob in early sixties America. And, growing up in that era, to me it all feels so real. MT

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL | COPPA VOLPI – BEST ACTRESS | GOLDEN LION COMPETITION 2023

Coup de Chance (2023) Venice Film Festival 2023

Dir|Wri: Woody Allen | Cast: Melvil Poupaud, Lou de Laâge, Niels Schnieder, Valerie Lemercier | US Comedy Drama, 90’

Woody Allen is back. Coup de Chance, his latest comedy drama, is also his first in a foreign language. Not bad for an 87 year old director. But wait a minute? How will he do the funnies in French? Well you’ll be pleased to know he pulls it off in a dazzling coup de grace (this could be his last film, we are are told) thanks to the comedy talents of Melvil Poupaud with a twinkle in his eye, Woody blends romance with drole humour in a noirish jaunt centring, comme d’habitude, on a menage a trois.

Paris glows in Vittorio Storaro’s autumn tints. Financier Poupaud (Jean ) and Lou de Laâge (Fanny) are a glamorous young couple enjoying a beau monde existence: a slick 7ieme apartment and a country house for weekend shoots. She is bohemian and feckless, he is more ‘bon chic bon genre’ with his dapper suits, state of the art train set and a penchant for getting his own way. But he buys her trinkets from Cartier and they seem to be in love. So what could go wrong?. Well Fanny bumps into an old school friend Alain (Schneider), a poet (and the only decent character) and falls for his lyrical charm. Woody’s classic themes once again rear their heads: fate, infidelity, murder and a wicked mother-in-law, whose meddling will bring the house down.

Coup de Chance moves along briskly each scene an enjoyable gem, Woody seems to edit as he goes along and there is nothing spare in this delicious drama with its needling tension and upbeat jazz score from Herbie Hancock. If this is Woody’s curtain call to say goodbye he deserves a long round of applause. MT

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2023 | NETFLIX

Evil Does not Exist (2023)

Dir/Wri: Ryusuke Hamaguchi | Cast: Hitoshi Omika, Ryo Nishikawa, Ryuji Kosaka, and Ayaka Shibutani | Japan Drama 115′

Japanese auteur Ryusuke Hamaguchi came to Venice Film Festival last year with another weirdly serene thriller spiked by a steely sense of humour.

Evil Does not Exist – his first feature since winning the best international film Oscar with Drive My Car last year – follows Takumi and his little daughter Hana, who live in the remote village of Mizubiki, fairly close to Tokyo but miles from the hubbub of the big city, where they enjoy a modest existence according to the seasons, like generations before them.

An extended opening sequence luxuriates in the peacefulness of this bosky location where Takumi is seen rhythmically chopping firewood and scooping crystal clear stream water into bottles. Mizubiki is a natural habitat for Siberian Ginseng and Wasabi leaves that Takumi and his brother pick to use in their cooking. And on her way back from school through the woods – often unaccompanied – Hana loves watching the deer grazing in the bracken. She has learnt all the names of the native trees and how to identify them.

But this rural idyll comes under threat when the villagers are invited to hear about a local glamping site being planned by a start-up financier from Tokyo. This ‘holiday village’ offers city residents a comfortable “escape” to nature. But when two representatives of the glamping company arrive in the village to hold a meeting, it soon becomes clear that the project will have a negative impact on the local water supply, endangering the delicate ecological balance of the area and the villagers’ way of life. These moral, ethical and ecological concerns are teased out in Hamaguchi’s richly insightful narrative that could easily provide material for several other features.

The Q&A session takes place calmly and without conflict between the reps and the villagers, and there’s a great deal of dark humour at play in the arguments and counterclaims that helps to mollify what could have been a hostile confrontation. The ill-prepared reps – provided by a talent agency – soon have to admit their total ignorance of the nearly countryside, and also their lack of knowledge of basic ecology, and the locals quietly put them to shame. But the meeting has an even more profound affect on Takumi and little Hana, the ripples of which gently play out in the film’s tense and quietly devastating finale. @MeredithTaylor

IN UK & IRISH CINEMAS FROM 5 APRIL 2024 | VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2023 | GRAND JURY PRIZE | GOLDEN LION COMPETITION 2023

The Killer (2023) Venice Film Festival 2023

Dir: David Fincher | Cast: Michael Fassbender, Tilda Swinton, Arliss Howard | US Thriller 118′

Premiering in competition at Venice Film Festival, The Killer, adapted from the French graphic novel by Alexis ‘Matz’ Nolent, stars Michael Fassbender as the hired assassin whose diurnal activities are voiced over by drole observations (“weakness is vulnerability”, “avoid empathy”) making this all the more intelligent and captivating, even when it descends into brutal violence. Even these scenes are sleekly choreographed in Fincher’s crisp direction and Andrew Kevin Walker’s lean script.

Sadly a woman, his girlfriend (Monique Ganderton), gets in the way of his day job after a home invasion goes wrong, And this blows him off a course leading him on a peripatetic journey to the Caribbean, New York, Chicago, Florida and New Orleans Caribbean and to unpick the mess. A gripping and highly enjoyable foray that keeps us on our toes with plenty of eye candy thanks to DoP of the moment Erik Messerschmidt. MT

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2023 | IN COMPETITION 2023

Poor Things (2023) Academy Award for Best Actress

Dir: Yorgos Lanthimos | Cast: Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Mark Ruffalo, Margaret Qualley, Christopher Abbott, Ramy Youssef, Jerrod Carmichael, Kathryn Hunter | Fantasy Drama 141′

Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest offering won’t be to everyone’s taste. In fact, despite its artful, fish-eye lensed wizardry, strange camera angles, kaleidoscopic images and gobbledegook dialogue, it may irritate the hell out you after the initial fascination.

Unfolding in black and white – until the heroine finally comes into her own in the second hour – Poor Things feels rather pleased with itself, as if the maverick Greek director is being perverse for the sake of perversity. Doused in profanities, the film makes ample use of the c-word – always a negative in my view – that detracts from some of the clever writing. This eighth feature is based on a literary award-winning work by the Scottish writer Alasdair Gray (1934-2019) and is adapted here for the screen by Tony McNamara who also scripted Lanthimos’ big success The Favourite. But Poor Things is far and away a less enjoyable film although it eventually comes into its own as a surreal female empowerment story with Sci-fi undertones.

Emma Stone is screen dynamite as the main character Bella Baxter, a young woman who undergoes a life-changing evolution after she brought is back to life, after attempting suicide, by the radical scientist Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe with a Scots accent) who inhabits an Alice Wonderland style household with echoes of Dali and Magritte.

In Baxter’s weird Victorian home, Bella starts off mentally-challenged after the doc gives her the brain of own unborn child who has died in the accident, when Bella jumped from Tower Bridge. From then on she questions the Victorian world around her, and herein lies the humour: Bella is an adult child without inhibitions, constantly verbally and sexually challenging grown-up society and all its idiosyncrasies.

Emma Stone | Best Female Actor in a Musical/Comedy 81st Golden Globes

Bella’s state of grace makes her refreshingly honest and naive to the point of ridicule. And this candour is the key to her complete emancipation that comes about through total disregard for her gender and the social restraints of the era. Bella escapes from Dr Baxter’s household with the caddish Duncan Wedderburn (a superb Mark Ruffalo), and their peripatetic odyssey involves much debauchery, Bella having scant regard for her sexual probity as she experiments wildly with all sorts of men in a Parisian whorehouse. The two lovers enjoy unbridled graphic sex scenes with Bella burbling on in her strange speech patterns, like a female version of Robert Peston, only more so.

The whirlwind romance transports them all over Europe from Lisbon to Paris and finally London in sequences that reminded me of Michel Gondry’s Mood Indigo. Freed from the prejudices of her era, Bella gains considerable agency and finally becomes a liberated woman of today. A brilliant premise and a visual knockout, but far, far too long for its own good at over 2 hours. MT

The Caine Mutiny Court Martial (2023) Venice Film Festival 2023

Dir/Wri: William Friedkin | US Drama 96′

William Friedkin’s final film, The Exorcist directer sadly died last month, turns out to be as compelling a court room drama as ever there was, based on the Pulitzer Prize winning book by Herman Wouk.

Delivered with gusto by a cast of commanding actors, amongst them Jason Clarke (who recently flexed his verbal acuity as the prosecution council in Oppenheimer), this follows the court martial of U.S. Naval captain, Lieutenant Commander Philip Queeq who had showed signs of mental instability during a recent foray in the Middle Eastern waters, purportedly jeopardising the safety of his ship, and was relieved of his command by a First officer called Stephen Maryk (Jake Lacy).

Clarke is Greenwald, called in to defend Maryk despite a degree of reluctance and scepticism on his part. And his fears gradually gain ground as the trial proceeds, Greenwald questioning if the Caine were a true mutiny or simply the courageous acts of a group of sailors that could not trust their unstable leader.

This briskly paced affair moves along like ‘a bat out of hell’ as Friedkin intended, as we play judge and jury in the ethical and moral dilemma with some of the finest minds of the US Navy, played by Monica Raymund, Lance Reddick Elizabeth Anweis and Francois Battiste. The Caine Mutiny may not look particularly exciting confined to its pristine interior setting and cast of dapper sailers but this richly thematic, chewy drama provides dynamite entertainment. And what a film to go out on.

Friedkin commented in the press blurb: ‘I intentionally chose to keep the issue of right and wrong as ambiguous as possible. I was consistently impressed with the level of expertise that our actors brought to their roles and I believe that these are some of the best performances I have ever seen’. And he should know. MT

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL | OUT OF COMPETITION 2023

Sidonie in Japan (2023) Venice Film Festival 2023

Dir.: Elise Girard; Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Tsuyoshi Ihara, August Diehl; France, Japan, Switzerland, Germany; 95 min. 2023

Sidonie in Japan is rather a wan ghost story about loss and the healing powers of love. It all looks rather gorgeous and Isabelle Huppert keeps us intrigued with her star quality right through to the end.

She plays Sidonie Percival a French writer has been suffering from writer’s block since her husband Antoine (Diehl), a major influence, dies in a car accident. During a book tour in Osaka she embarks on an affair with her publisher Kenzo Mizoguchi (Ihara) who has ended his loveless marriage. But the past seems to haunt them both, particularly Sidonie, until Antoine’s shadowy ghost finally ‘wanders off to the other side”. It’s unclear whether Antoine has re-appeared to tell Sidonie to write again,but he soon vanishes for good leaving Sidonie and Kenzo free to get to know each other on their way to Nara, Kyoto and the wondrous island of Naoshina.

Much is made of Sidonie’s frist book “L’Ombre Portee”, The carried Shadow”, which is sort of auto-realism in the vain of Marguerite Duras.
The film is driven forward by wonderful widescreen visuals, the minimalist script taking a back seat. Huppert takes the lead, just as she’s always done since first appearing on the festival circuit in in Alain Tanner’s 1968 The middle of the World. Since then, Huppert has carried a whole host of minor features saving them from oblivion, and Sidonie, outstaying its welcome even at 95 minutes, is no exception with its likeable if underwhelming characters all on ‘adagio non troppo’.

There are no barbs here so Huppert has to inject tempo herself, and she succeeds against the ponderous script and its meanderings. In the end Sidonie leaves the audience in a bind: clearly Girard has talent, writing here with Maud Amelia and Sophie Fillieres, but script lacks polish and needs finessing. AS

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL | GIORNATE DEGLI AUTORI 2023

The Palace (2023) Venice Film Festival 2023

Dir: Roman Polanski | Cast: John Cleese, Fanny Ardant, Mickey Rourke, Oliver Masucci | Comedy Drama, 90’

Roman Polanski has a field day in latest film which turns out to be turkey – in the best possible way. And this is no news to ardent fans of the controversial director who has always been true his heart with an eclectic body of films that have won him an Oscar, a Palme d’Or, a Bafta, Golden and Silver Bears, and a brace of other garlands.

Polanski prides himself in being an actor’s director with a string of international hits: Tess, The Pianist, Chinatown, The Ghost, Cul-de-Sac, Repulsion, Frantic and hauntingly memorable thrillers like Rosemary’s Baby, The Ninth Gate and The Tenant. His version of Macbeth stands out from the crowd, along with historical drama Oliver Twist. Knife in the Water will certainly go down in history as one of the most taught psychological dramas. And then there’s Fearless Vampire Killers that vaunts his absurdist comedy talents.

The Palace, premiering at this year’s 80th edition of the Venice Film Festival, probably falls somewhere between box office flop What? (1972) and Fearless Vampire Killers. Set in a snowy Swiss 5 star hotel called this jaunty little comedy once again assembles a motley crew of oddballs there to welcome in the 21st Century. But what’s missing here is Polanski’s iconic craft and dogged attention to detail, and although there are some laughs, for the most part the film is about showcasing the grotesque to the point of parody.

The Palace feels like Polanski is just having a big party with his close friends – co-writer Jerzy Skolimowski and producer Ewa Piaskowska, Fanny Ardant and John Cleese (in a departure from Basil Fawlty). Veteran DoP Pawel Edelman is behind the camera and Alexandre Desplat provides the score. And there’s even a part for his daughter Morgane.

In The Palace, nearly all the guests have had some form of cosmetic work particularly Mickey Rourke who sports an orange perma-tan and a blond wig hiding his baleful frown. They all demonstrate the rude sense of entitlement of the super rich. But this is just all part of the fun. In a timely tongue-in-cheek touch a group of Russians injects a vein of Cold War sculduggery. A retiring President Yeltsin makes a TV announcement introducing his replacement, an unassuming man called Vladimir Putin. There is plenty of intrigue but none of the narrative strands leads anywhere. Maybe in his ripe old 80s Polanski is just poking fun at plot resolution. Who knows? But a touch of upbeat humour is much welcome in these angst-ridden times. To cap it all, the star turn, providing the romantic finale, is a live penguin. MT

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2023 | OUT OF COMPETITION

Ferrari (2023)

Dir: Michael Mann | Cast: Adam Driver, Shailene Woodley, Penelope Cruz, Jack O’Connell, Sarah Gadon | US Action drama 127′

Motor-racing is a dangerous business. And this slick production from Michael Mann highlights the dangers, not just for the drivers but also the general public, paying tribute to the citizens of Guidizzolo where ten spectators were mown down in a crash that also killed Spanish Ferrari driver Alfonso de Portago, and brought to a close the Mille Milia competition. The film opens with the loss of his favourite driver in a time trial, when playboy de Portago (Gabriel Leone) stepped into the breach. But his star is a doomed one.

Ferrari is not the first feature about motor-racing but it’s certainly one of the most glossy and expensive-looking. The thrill of the track was brought to life in Le Mans 66 (2019) with the focus on the famous partnership between Ford and Ferrari and their respective drivers; Mosley: It’s Complicated looked at the lawyer’s efforts to improve safety in the sport, and Darryl Goodrich’s 2017 documentary Ferrari: Race to Immortality honours the daredevil 1950s Ferrari team-mates Peter Collins and Mike Hawthorn. And Collins also makes an appearance here played by Jack O’Connell.

But the spotlight here is firmly on the life of Enzo Ferrari and his entrepreneurial spirit during the perilous early days of Formula One in the Summer of 1957. Adam Driver certainly looks the part in his elegant hand-made suits and dark glasses, and is very much the driving force of this enjoyable action drama. Penelope Cruz gives a shouty, one-note performance as his embittered wife and business partner Laura. The death of their only son has destroyed the marriage and Ferrari has taken up with Linda (Woodley) the mother of his heir. Whether the boy will inherit the Ferrari name and keep the brand alive is one of the film’s main preoccupations. And the frumpy Laura is determined to put a spanner in the works with her permanent frown and maudlin disposition.

The cars often take a back seat to the family drama but there’s plenty of fun and fireworks on the track to keep fans entertained: Enzo is keen to keep speed and quality in pole position where his cars are concerned. Sadly, a great deal of backstory, including de Portago’s love story with Linda Christian (Gadon) – who famously gave him the “kiss of death’ before his final race – is glossed over to cut the running time down to just over two hours, and this in some way affects the film’s emotional ballast. We don’t really feel for any of these people, least of all Laura in her justifiable grief.

Mann incorporates plenty of original footage, early clips cleverly manipulated to show Driver at the wheel. And although some of his dialogue is decidedly creaky not so Erik Messerschmidt’s magnificent set pieces which capture the races on impressive wide screen sequences. This is solid entertainment adapted for the screen by Troy Kennedy Martin and based on the book ‘Enzo Ferrari: The Man, The Cars, The Races, The Machine’. MT

IN UK CINEMAS from 26 DECEMBER | VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2023 |

The Promised Land (2023)

Dir: Nicolaj Arcel | Cast: Mads Mikkelsen, Amanda Collin, Simon Bennebjerg, Melina Hagberg, Kristine Kujath Thorp, Gustav Lindh, Søren Malling, Morten Hee Andersen, Magnus Krepper, Thomas W. Gabrielsson, Laura Bilgrau Eskild-Jensen

Bastarden or The Promised Land is a handsome if doom-laden frontier drama that transports us back to 18th century Jutland, Denmark. Mads Mikkelsen is Ludvig Kahlen, a dogged but decorated military man who has risen through the ranks and now wishes to dignify his existence by transforming the ragged heathland into a lucrative farming concern, garnering the respect of the King, who owns it, and hopefully a title into the bargain.

A gruelling endeavour this farming caper may be, and many have failed before him, including the King, but if anyone can succeed it’s Mikkelsen’s Kahlen, a hard-headed, indomitable stoic with a soulful glint in his eye.

Directed by Arcel Nicolaj Arcel and co-written by Oscar-winning Anders Thomas-Jensen we are also in safe hands story-wise with a script based on Ide Jessen’s 2020 historical work The Captain and Ann Barbara.

Barstarden bristles with rock solid themes of class, race, exploitation and misogyny, and there’s even a menage-a-trois, or even ‘a-quattre’ to lighten things up. All in the best possible taste: This is hardly bodice-ripping territory given the grim nature of the Northern climes.

And Mikkelsen is a mesmerising presence with his graceful economy of movement and tight-lipped charisma. Here, he is Denmark’s answer to Clint Eastward. And he also cuts an admirable figure at court in Copenhagen, asking to be granted a spit of land so he can transform the terrain, financed with his soldier’s pension, into a worthwhile concern. And he gets the go-ahead.

But 18th century Jutland is a barren hostile territory fraught with bandits and gypsies. And Kahlen only has a meagre set-up at his disposal: a tent, a pistol, a horse and a pick – to start work with. His chosen crop is potatoes. A hardy choice but not immune to frost damage. And there’s another drawback: A violent and villainous enemy in the shape of judge and wealthy landowner Frederik De Schinkel (Simon Bennebjerg), who claims ownership of this area of the King’s land, and has sought to enoble himself by insisting on adding the “De”, even when others don’t, and this provides the film with a flinty vein of humour.

An invitation to dinner chez “De” Schinkel unfortunately ends in tears when the two disagree over the ownership of the land. But the soldier’s unflinching stance against the caddish would-be aristocrat wins the heart of De Schinkel’s intended, who is also his cousin, the pulchritudinous but penniless Edel (Kristine Kujath Thorp), whose father is forcing her into a loveless marriage of convenience.

And so the battle of wills begins with De Schinkel disrupting Kahlen’s efforts to cultivate the land. A local parson then offers Kahlen the support of two runaway servants who have escaped De Schinkel’s household due to his violent temperament. Johannes (Morten Hee Andersen) and Ann Barbara (Amanda Collin) agree to work for free, along with some local outlaws and an orphaned Roma girl called Anmai Mus (Melina Hagberg), a ‘darkling’ whom the Danes consider bad luck.

Bastarden soon develops into a rich character drama as the battle of wills plays. And Kahlen fights on doggedly despite the many challenges and amid much physical duress, violence and torture all round. DoP Rasmus Videbaek showcases the magnificent countryside of Northern Denmark and the splendour of its architectural heritage (actually the shooting takes place in Germany and Czechia!). Bastarden is a gripping Nordic Western that once again proves that true love is often stronger than the ultimate desire to succeed. MT

IN UK CINEMAS from 2 FEBRUARY 2024 | VENICE FILM FESTIVAL premiere

El Conde (2023) Best Screenplay | Venice Film Festival 2023

Dir: Pablo Larraín | Cast: Alfredo Castro, Jaime Vadell, Antonia Zegers, Paula Luchsinger, Amparo Noguera, Gloria Munchmeyer | Chile, 115′

A vampire, all suited, booted and cloaked, flies over the rooftops of Santiago in Pablo Larrrain’s thrilling latest drama that has us believe that the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet is Margaret Thatcher’s firstborn (weird as he was born before herr). It’s an outlandish idea, one many of many, in this surreal doom-laden satire that reflects, with a baleful glare, on international fascism (wokeism et al) in the 20th century.

But although Larrain his co-writer Guillermo Calderon get rather bogged down in their phantasmagorical version of Chile’s modern political history El Conde is a witty and highly inventive feast for the eyes and certainly worthy of its slot in the competition line-up at Venice Film Festival‘s 80th celebration.

Macabre, gothic and hilarious by turns – you certainly won’t go home disappointed – but the visual side far out-trumps (!) the political version of events, its lugubrious black and white set pieces are some of the most alluring and inspired committed to celluloid in recent years. An El Conde is certainly unlike anything the director has done before.

Pinochet is forced to endure a miserable existence, past his retirement in 1990 and subsequent demise in 2006, as the undead dictator grimming it out in a chilly cattle-shearing outpost in the freezing South of the country (reminiscent of Theo Court’s White on White). Here he will face his own family demons, the main concern being the financing of his brood of layabout adult offspring, dealing with his ghastly wife (Gloria Münchmeyer) who is having an affair with his butler (the brilliant Alfredo Castro), a White Russian who will oversee the investigation into where Pinchochet has hidden his millions. For this purpose he has (bizarrely) hired a nun (Paula Luchsinger) who wears white robes, when not doing accounts in her bedroom, and in these scenes she’s a dead ringer for Maria Falconetti in Dreyer’s 1928 drama La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc.

But before all this Larrain briskly takes us through the dictator’s previous existence as blood-thirsty rebel ‘Pinoche’ during the French Revolution. Valiantly in allegiance to Marie Antoinette, he takes her head with him as a trophy after her execution (guillotines feature heavily throughout). He then glides Dracula-like southwards towards Chile where he signs up to the ranks in the 1973 coup. After faking his own death, the 250 year-old continues to drift around over the Chilean capital – and these airborne sequences are the most exciting in the film. Too old to hunt for blood, his daily diet then consists of human heart ‘smoothies’ which he whisks up in the trusty blender.

El Conde is a fascinating foray then, and mostly narrated in English by the aforementioned Iron Maiden ‘Madame Pinochet’ who certainly gets it in the neck, above all the other vampiric political leaders, supposedly just for being a woman ‘Twas ever thus!. MT

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL | BEST SCREENPLAY | GOLDEN LION 2023 | COMING TO NETFLIX ON 15 SEPTEMBER

Dogman (2023) Venice Film Festival 2023

Dir/Wri: Luc Besson | Cast: Caleb Landry Jones, Jojo T Gibbs | France, thriller 117′

A dog really is man’s best friend in Luc Besson’s latest, a canine thriller, based on real events. “Dogs have only one fault” according to Douglas, the main character, “they trust man”.

Wrapped round another astonishing performance from Caleb Landry Jones – in fact, he is the film – Dogman shows how a complex, wounded soul rebuilds his life thanks to the love and companionship of a pack of dogs of all breeds from tiny terriers to Corgis and Alsatians. The story is book-ended by his psychological assessment with struggling psychiatrist and single mother Evelyn (T.Gibbs) who feels compassion for Douglas’s suffering after he lands up in jail. The two are united by their respective pain.

French ‘cinema du look’ filmmaker, best known for his string of iconic hits, The Big Blue, Nikita and Leon adds another crowd pleaser to the list. Dogman is a likeable character we can all relate to; an honest broker with a heart and soul despite his flaws. And we feel for him.

A tough childhood sees Douglas thrown into a cage of dogs by his cruel father whose abuse forces the boy (played by Lincoln Powell) into a wheelchair. The dogs rally round and become a supportive family in his eventive journey through life And here Besson stretches our credibility to the limit in what Douglas actually get up to but somehow it works.

Besson endows Douglas with many qualities: compassion; kindness; persistence; self-deprecation and a certain nobleness of character. He is a perfect role model for everyman, let alone the hard-done-by. And he has bankable talents too: a melodious singing voice that sees him impersonate Edith Piaf, Marlene Dietrich and Marilyn Monroe. Landry-Jones plays him with an endearing serenity despite his ill-changing injuries. But woe betide anyone who pushes him too far. And the plot turns on a revenge saga that sees Douglas and his dogs rally round a vulnerable woman in some ludicrous scenes that really beggar belief. Dogman has that same idiosyncratic visual allure of all Besson’s features. Despite its flaws this is another winner entertainment-wise. MT

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL | GOLDEN LION 2023

Melk (2023) Venice Film Festival 2023

Dir/Wri: Stefanie Kolk | Netherlands 93’

After her baby is stillborn Robin makes an altruistic decision in this sombre and affecting feature debut from Dutch filmmaker Stefanie Kolk.

Nine months of pregnancy, and then a traumatic birth with nothing to show for it is a tragedy for any mother. And when Robin (Frieda Barnhard) learns her baby has died, everyone in the family is affected not least her partner (Wimie Wilhelm). The two go through plenty of soul-searching finally coming to the conclusion that the nourishing milk that Robin is already producing should not be wasted but go to a good cause.

But their doctor has disappointing news. She advises the couple against their decision to donate breast milk, not wishing to put a further burden on Robin’s grief-stricken body: Lactating into a bottle is a big commitment. But Robin feels it will actually empower her to deal with the mourning process by injecting a note of joy and positivity into an otherwise pretty grim scenario. And the milk donation project gives her something upbeat to talk about with her friends. It’s not all doom and gloom thanks to Robin’s pragmatic nature and she must avoid being defined by her loss and find a way to put a positive spin on her life. She is a survivor and a strong one at that supporting her partner through his grief. But then comes another layer to the storyline that adds an enigmatic twist of lowkey dramatic tension to an already fraught situation.

Melk is sensitive but never sentimental and made all the more enjoyable by Emo Weemhoff’s stylishly framed images and some convincing performances all round, particularly from leads Barnhard and Wilhelm. Alexander Reumers’ minimalist score leaves us with space and tranquility to reflect on the gravity of a scenario that gently lifts the lid on an inevitable fact of life that also offers a message of hope. MT

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL | GIORNATE DEGLI AUTORI 2033

Making of (2023) Venice Film Festival 2023

Dir.: Cedric Kahn; Cast: Denis Podalydes. Emmanuelle Bercot, Jonathan Cohen, Stefab Crepon, Souheila Jacoub; France 2023, 118′.

Cedric Kahn’s nostalgic look old-style filmmaking is a cinematic sister to Truffaut’s Day for Night. But while Truffaut celebrated a past full of wistful sentimentality, Kahn takes step back into the 1960s, when factory workers were the heroes (at least for a time), before Godard killed the sub-genre off with Tout Va bien.

Making Of takes us behind the camera to experience the emotional turmoil generated by crew, cast and extras and the addictive nature of filmmaking.

In a drab provincial town in France, director/script writer Simon (Podalydes) is feeling suffocated by his film about workers taking over their factory. And he is right: two young investors withdraw their money after Simon rejects their “Happy Ending” – he wants reality at all costs. Line producer Vivianne (Bercot) wants to cut the budget and is running out of money. The actors, crew and the extras, who live in nearby high rise blocks are faced with a unpalatable choice: forgo wages for the remainder of the shoot, and hope the film coins it at the box office (so the royalties off at least some return) – or walk off the set and let the film die.

And worst of all the male star Alain (Cohen) is a self-centred jerk who dominates the stage during discussions. His partner Oudia, played by Nadia (Yacoub), lives locally with a jealous boyfriend. Joseph (Crepon), a budding screenwriter desperate to make it in films, agrees to shoot a behind-the-scenes on video camera.

Father of two Simon is filmed arguing with his wife in Paris. Their marriage is going down the plughole so he makes a lightening dash to Paris to save it but later collapses in a motorway pharmacy. With so many personal interests involved, can the majority agree to write off their wages for the vague promise of box office success?

Kahn reflects on a time when actors and extras offered their services for free particularly in political films for free – but the star(s) made sure the production went ahead. In this case, there is a clear division between the extras, the “ordinary” actors and the crew and Alain, the box office star. These demarcations run deep: and Kahn reveals the worst of them

“Cinema is a hard drug”, opines Simon, who wants to retire. DoP Patrick Ghirenghelli uses the handheld camera to conjure up the mayhem and thrusts headlong into a world where setbacks are the order of the day. So filmmaking is still a labour of love even though it can often be a dangerous one. Well-observed and highly entertaining. AS

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL |

Brighton Rock (1948)

Dir: John Boulting | Cast: Richard Attenborough, Hermione Baddeley, William Hartnell, Harcourt Williams

You know you’re in Greeneland when Harcourt Williams appears as a down-at-heel lawyer who quotes ‘Macbeth’.

Directing duo The Boultings were fast ascending in critical status when they turned their attention to Greene’s novel and their facility with locations is demonstrated from the outset by the first twenty minutes following Alan Whitely as the il-fated Kolley Kibber through the streets of Brighton.

Despite the disclaimer blaming the activities of Pinky and his gang on the thirties it perfectly captures the shabby feel of the postwar austerity era, complete with Nigel Stock in a zoot suit and a spivvy moustache.

The ending caused controversary at the time but it seemed me a pretty neat trick because although it concentrates on Carol Marsh’s rapturous smile somebody would have promptly (SLIGHT SPOILER COMING:) given that record player a good swift kick.

One final thought: was it just by coincidence that Pinky’s previous victim was called Fred Kite? @RichardChatten

NOW ON PRIME VIDEO

Tatami (2023) | Venice Film Festival | Horizons 2023

Dir: Guy Nattiv, Zar Amir Ebrahimi | Docudrama, 105′

Making history as the first feature to be directed by an Iranian, who also stars, and an Israeli Tatami is an edgy addition to the female sports sub-genre bringing us ringside into the competitive world of the Women’s Judo Championships in a stylish black and white thriller.

Sporting competitions – both on the screen and in real life – seem to be fraught with difficulties for women, who are more likely to find themselves at the centre of sexual controversy, either in the form of unwelcome advances, as in the recent Spanish football debacle, or, as in action dramas Slalom and Power Alley where the main characters experience unexpected biological or erotic challenges that threaten to destabilise their performance or sporting prowess.

The focus here is political: Iranian judoka Leila (Arienne Mandi) and her coach Maryam (Cannes Best actress winner Ebrahimi) will find themselves put to the test when they arrive for the competition all shrouded in hijabs, which they will also wear for the entire contest. The action spikes as the competition is in full swing. Leila is suddenly ordered to fake an injury or face being branded a traitor of the Islamic Republic, along with her coach.

With her own and her family’s freedom at stake, Leila must make an impossible decision: comply with the Iranian regime as her coach Maryam implores her to do, or fight on and go for the country’s first gold medal.

This is an intelligent and striking action thriller that once again highlights a repressive religious regime that particularly punishes women. Co-written by Nattiv and Elham Erfani, who also takes up the role of assistant coach to the women’s team, Tatami is a strong contender competing for the Horizons award at this year’s 80th edition of the Venice Film Festival. MT

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL | HORIZONS 2023

Passages (2023)

Dir.: Ira Sachs; Cast: Franz Rogowski, Ben Whishaw, Adele Exarchopoulos, Erwan Kepoa Fale; France/Germany 2023, 91 min.

A menage-a-trois goes wrong in a big way in this cruel love story from award-winning filmmaker Ira Sachs (Love is Strange).

In Paris two Germans and a Brit finds themselves in a Douglas Sirk style melodrama with feint echoes of Eric Rohmer. Sachs puts his personal slant on the many faces of sexuality in an absorbing and often upsetting gender war.

Lovers Tomas (Rogowski) and Martin (Whishaw) have a longstanding relationship although the aggressive and manipulative Tomas, a film director, has the upper hand with Martin reluctantly putting up with the endless humiliation just to keep it all running smoothly.

We first meet Tomas on set, as unpleasant and immature upstart. But after the film’s wrap party, Tomas takes a shine to Agathe (Exarchopoulos), a primary school teacher who drops her own boyfriend like a stone, as does Tomas, moving in with Adele shortly afterwards. This is not the first time Tomas has played the field with a woman, and pretty soon the cracks appear – and when Agathe falls pregnant her parents’ arrival only makes matters worse.

The switcheroo continues with Martin now in a relationship with writer Ahmad (Fale). But this is by now means the end because Tomas wants to show his omnipotence, and is still powerfully drawn to the dependable Martin, and soon the tables change again.

Tomas is a savage, and not a noble one. His hunger for emotional support, a real neediness born out of insecurity, collides with his brash manner and outlandish lies. He is not lovable at all, but his animalistic sex drive makes both Adele and Martin believe they are his chosen one. Sachs is very open in showing the couples’ intercourse, to the point of being graphic to the extreme. But all this has a place in a bitter struggle for love, with both Adele and Martin mistaking lust for the latter. For Tomas everything has to be an exciting thrill ride, no questions asked. He is a vicious child, a sociopath in the making, a time bomb ready to implode, and Rogowski is the actor to play him with his passionate intensity.

DoP Josee Deshaies has fun with her camerawork, keeping the wild sex and bitter tantrums under control: her images are never voyeuristic, she always finds a way back to show the humanity in facial expressions. Her portrait of Paris, the city of love, is sober: an ideal backcloth for a modern love story, even though it never feels like one. Sachs, the observer, delivers this minimalist feature with as much love as possible, taking sides only at the very end. AS

ON RELEASE IN CINEMAS FROM 1 SEPTEMBER 2023

For Night Will Come (2023) Venice Film Festival 2023

Dir: Céline Rouzet | Cast: Mathias Legout Hammond, Elodie Bouchez, Jean-Charles Clichet, Celeste Brunnquell | France, Thriller 104′

A mother gives birth but when she suckles her baby the results are startling in this beguilingly deceptive thriller with its dark vein of humour from first time feature filmmaker Céline Rouzet.

The intimate opening gives way to a gorgeous splash of bosky pastures and hills. This is the Ardennes in full summer where Georges et Laurence Feral have decided to settle with their two kids. Baby Philemon is now a teenager (Legout Hammond) and little Lucie (Laly Mercer) is ready to start school leaving Laurence to return to work. And they seem like any other family in this pleasant part of France.

The strange thing is their evenings seem to be spent hooked up to blood bags that Laurence has apparently filched from the blood donation department of the hospital where she now works.
Philemon has found a girlfriend Camilla (Celeste Brunnquell) but an unorthodox habit remains with him as he desperately tries to protect her from the truth. And one day he mysteriously saves the life of a local woman – but no one understands how. And this plot line is never really resolved. Philemon is clearly a troubled teen who gradually feels more and more of an outsider in this close knit community.

Often viewed on the widescreen with an aerial camera this is a sinister drama that gets darker by the minute, and the night scenes are particularly alluring as Philemon descends into the nightmare of his terrible affliction.

Best known for her award-winning debut documentary feature A Distant Thud in the Jungle (2020) Rouzet director with confidence from a script co-written by William Martin. Mathias Legout Hammond is the standout in a soulful performance sensitively supported by Élodie Bouchez and Jean Charles Clichet as his parents. MT

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2023 | HORIZONS COMPETITION.

Tomorrow (1972)

Dir: Stephen Anthony : Cast Robert Duvall, Olga Bellin, Sudie Bond | US Thriller

Halfway between making his screen debut as Boo Radley in ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ and winning an Oscar for ‘Tender Mercies’ Robert Duvall finally proved himself capable of carrying a film on his own in this backwards ‘Silas Marner’ based on an original by William Faulkner. (All three adaptations as it happens were the work of Horton Foote), which also marked the final film of stage director Joseph Anthony.

Jackson Fentry, a lonely farmer in Mississippi, takes in a pregnant woman and begins to look after her. However, things take a tragic turn after she gives birth to her child.

Austerely shot in black & white, ‘Tomorrow’ was described by Leonard Maltin as “the best-ever presentation of the author’s work”; while Olga Bellin is as touching here as Jane Wyman in the equivalent role in ‘Johnny Belinda’. @RichardChatten

Housekeeping for Beginners (2023) Venice Film Festival 2023

Dir: Goran Stolevski | Cast: Anamaria Marinca, Alina Serban, Samson Selim, Vladimir Tintor, Dzada Selim, Mia Mustafa, Sara Klimoska, Rozafa Celaj, Ajshe Useini

Modern families come in all shapes and sizes and none more so than the one in Housekeeping for Beginners that started with two mothers at its helm.

Macedonian born Goran Stolevski, best known for his award-winning debut You Won’t Be Alone, plunges us into a maelstrom of mixed emotions, tears and recrimations in this free-flowing melodrama that sees Dita (Anamaria Marinca), a reluctant and harried ‘mum in law’, suddenly forced to bring up her girlfriend’s two unmanageable daughters: cheeky upstart Mia and troubled Vanesa, a teenager going on 40!).

So life is what happens when you’re making plans, as the phrase goes. And to make matters worse Dita, a cultured and intelligent individual, is pushed to the limit, and we really a palpable sense of panic for her in this hair-raising set-up, where she also tolerates a marriage of convenience with (Vladimir Tintor) who is gay but needs papers to stay in the country.

A battle of wills ensues as the three continue at loggerheads captured by Naum Doksevski’s pin-sharp frenzied camerawork that takes us up close and personal to this unlikely family fighting to stay together through force of circumstance rather than compatibility and desire. MT

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL | HORIZONS 2023

The Featherweight (2023) Venice Film Festival 2023 | Horizons 2023

Dir.: Robert Kolodny; Cast: James Madio, Lawrence Gilliard jr., Stephen Lang, Keir Gilchrist, Ruby Wolf, Shari Albert, Imma Allielo, Gordon Silva, Ron Livingstone, Ron Livingstone; USA 2023, 99 min.

US filmmaker Robert Kolodny also creates some impressive visuals of decay in this docu-drama, written by Steve Loff.

The Featherweight, his first feature, looks at the failed comeback of ex-world champion featherweight Willie “Pep” (Madio), considered one of the best fighters of the 20th century and famed for his speed, finesse and elusiveness in the ring. But his return to the ring ruined his marriage and career prospects in the midst of a poisonous family atmosphere in his home town of Hartford /CT, a mere two hours train ride away from New York, but in another universe from the throbbing metropolis.

Where Martin Scorsese and others still see some romantic yearning in the fighters portrayed, Kolodny shows just disillusionment and fractured family relationships. Born Gugliemo Papaleo in 1922, the sportsman had a terrible time at the hands of his violent father Salvatore (Silva) and his tyrannical Mama (Allielo) and their drug dependent son Billy (Gilchrist). Sister Fran (Albert) seems a voice of reason, even though she can take on all others when it comes to prejudice and conspiracy theories.

The family home is a den of psychological violence where Linda (Wolf), Willie’s much younger wife, tries to escape for a acting career in New York. The jealous boxer does his best to sabotage her efforts. Having won 229 out of 241 fights he has managed to hold on to world championship in his weight class for years.

Gambling eats away at Pep’s finances and he is broke by the age of 42, six years after retirement. Against the advice of his manager Bob Kaplan (Livingstone) Pep plans a comeback, aided and abetted by his trainer Stephen Lang (Gore). All the people in his circle during Pep’s career have little influence on the boxer or his actions – but Sandy Saddler (Gilliard jr), who took the world title from Pep, before losing in the return fight, has an emotional relationship with Pep.

Salvatore emerges a violent, manipulative brute who took the children away from his wife for a time. When young Pep lost his shoe-shining spot to an older boy, Salvatore told Pep to fight his corner – or he would have a much bigger battle on his hands. Somehow this story colours the whole film, Pep feeling guilty about his father’s death – rather than liberation from his tormentor. But his treatment of Linda sadly shows he has inherited his controlling and jealous misogyny.

Kolodny reveals the broken heartlands of the USA: Hartford has been left to rot, like many towns which have fallen by the wayside. Pep is a symbol of this decline: he will end up begging for jobs at Hilton hotels in remote locations. No wonder he wants to return to the ring, the only place he shone, and counted at his home. Hartford is an industrial wasteland, and Pep goes out of the frying pan and into the fire, exchanging his training for a comeback in a dump of a ring in Miami.

The Featherweight leaves nothing to the imagination: Pep is just a step away from his ancestors from Sicily: violence, physical and psychological, are the only ways he knows how to solve a conflict. One roots for Linda in the hope she will make her escape to New York. Pep, on the other hand, will always be on the losing side: in his family battles and his comeback. A dark, disheartening tale of relegation and loss. AS

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL | HORIZONS 2023

The Naked Road (1959)

Dir: William Martin | Cast: Jeanne Renner, Ronald Long, Art Koulias, Eileen Letchworth | UK drama 74’

Talking Pictures unearthes another offering for students of the archeology of the cinema with an exploitation quickie so obscure it didn’t even it make into ‘The Psychotronic Encyclopaedia of Film’.

Presumably meant for drive-ins, it would probably have got down a treat in church halls and – for it’s picture of capitalism at its most predatory – would probably also gone down a treat in the Soviet Union (although the line about the redemptive power of religion would have had to go).

Made back in the days when nice girls didn’t neck, but for the fifties music you’d think it was made in the early thirties. Every man the heroine encounters is a total jerk; while the district judge who preys on speeders in cahoots with the local highway patrolman is portrayed as so casually venal that when his victim asks how he’s expected to pay simply shrugs and declares “I don’t care who pays the fine”.

As it that weren’t all he promptly hands them over to a pair of white slavers who pump her full of dope in pursuit of their nefarious scheme. The judge we never see again but rest assured (SLIGHT SPOILER COMING:) his partners in crime are finally rounded up and sent up the river for the next five years. @RichardChatten

TALKING PICTURES TV

Enea (2023) Venice Film Festival 2023

Dir.: Pietro Castellittto; Cast: Pietro Castellitto, Adamo Dionisi, Chiara Noshere, Benedetta Porcadi, Sergio Castellitto; Italy 2023, 117 min.

The Mafia theme is hard-wired into Italian life. And although on the surface of it Enea might seem just another Italian gangster flic, Pietro Castellitto’s Rome-set sophomore feature is sublimated into a sumptuously lyrical often melodramatic character study of stunted emotional development. Like the Greek hero Aeneas, son of Aphrodite, Enea struggles to do his good looks justice, and his nonchalant nature will be tested to the limit.

Enea (P. Castellitto) is drop dead gorgeous and he knows it, relying on his charisma and winning manners to sail through life. Now in his thirties, he is still joined at the hip to his close friend and fellow pilot Valentino (Dionisi) and the feeling is mutual. (“I always followed you because you are so attractive”).

But their friendship will be tested to the limit after Enea, who owns a Sushi-bar, gets involved with the mob in a drug heist worth a cool 20 million. Just how Enea got roped into the gig – or why he decides to keep the loot all to himself – is a mystery. This guy is a sly operator who slips into his gangster role with consummate ease.

Enea’s father (Stephen, the director’s actual father) is a child psychologist with a destructive personality needing to let off steam after hours. But he enjoys the emotional kudos of having a “happy family’, however fake it is. His wife (Noschere) is a TV presenter, but seem to resent her life of privilege. In a very telling scene her husband watches her nearly being hit by a falling palm tree in the atrium of the their villa. These are the kind of people who blow a gasket when the housekeeper leaves. They even employ a Filippino butler with a dodgy background, just for show.

So life is certainly not sweet in the Enea household. His much younger half-brother is a troublesome truant and the city’s General prosecutor has thick files on both Enea and Valentino. He makes the mistake of threatening the two friends in his office at the top of a skyscraper – an unwise decision as it later turns out.

Then Enea falls for Eva (Porcoroli) and this sounds the death knoll for his closeness with Valentino, setting in motion a stunningly surprising finale. DoP Radek Ladczuk captures this orgy of pyrotechnics, car chases and killings with his superior style. But the script never leaves the family setting: Enea might be the black sheep, but his relationship with Valentino (as long as it lasts) is the most honest thing here, despite its ambiguities. Do we need another Italian gangster movie?, possibly not. But this one will seduce you with its structural brilliance and visual allure. An unforgettable addition to the Mafia subgenre.AS

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL | GOLDEN LION COMPETITION 2023

Foremost by Night (2023) Venice Film Festival 2023

Dir: Victor Iriarte | Cast: Lola Duenas, Manuel Egozkue, Ana Torrent | Spain/Portugal/France Drama 95′

Set in San Sebastián, Madrid, Porto and Paris Victor Iriate’s first feature offers an inspirational way for two women to come to terms with past trauma. Billed as a violent murder story with a political background, the crime here is ‘much greater than anyone could ever imagine’ (according to the lead character Vera and harks back to a terrible child trafficking episode in Spain’s not so distant past.

The film’s enticing early scenes give way to a less satisfying denouement. The idea of framing the story as neo-noir thriller is a clever one but the execution, though poetic, is rather overwrought. We already know what’s going to happen, it’s just a question of how and when.

In the opening scene a menacing score accompanies a woman’s hand tracing over the pages of an atlas of Spain and Argentina. This hand belongs to Vera (Lola Duenas, unforgettable for her performance in Alleluia) and we don’t trust her for a minute. And for good reason: forced to give up her child Egoz for adoption, she is a bitter woman. And the pain and rancour is with her everyday. A collage of pictures and archive clips follows in silence, shedding light on Spain’s social and political past and that unfortunate trafficking episode and the perpetrators. Vera imagines killing them all. Desperate for revenge the lonely woman spends all her spare time searching in vain for the documentation relating to her child’s whereabouts. But nothing comes to light.

Vera, a court stenographer, lives in the Basque capital but has always spent her summers on the Douro where her aunt lived. On the way to Porto she will eventually meet Cora (Ana Torrent) who has brought up Egoz (Manuel Egozkue, who has an uncanny resemblance to his adoptive screen mother). The two women have one thing in common, they are both highly dexterous: Vera types all day, Cora is a talented pianist, and their abilities are showcased as one of the film’s recurring motifs. The three of them play a dangerous together, and seem to get on like a house on fire. But this is all part of the quite obvious deception. Iriarte and his two co-writers capture the spirit of William Congreve: “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned”. MT

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL | GIORNATE DEGLI AUTORI 2023

Coup! (2023) Venice Film Festival | Venice Days 2023

Dir: Austin Stark, Joseph Schuman | Cast: Peter Sarsgaard, Billy Magnussen, Sarah Gadon | US Action Drama 98′

This darkly comic upstairs-downstairs satire harks back to another pandemic this time the tragic Spanish ‘Flu outbreak in 1918.

Coup! also features an invasive force of another kind in the style of Teorema or The Servant when a gun-slinging grifter from the Deep South arrives at the Hamptons island retreat of a wealthy family to cook for them during their glorious isolation.

The opening sees Floyd Monk (Peter Sarsgaard stealing the show) looking down on the body of man with a gunshot wound to his head. Meanwhile out in the streets bodies are mounting up due to the arrival of a fatal flu from Spain.

First time filmmakers Austin Stark and Joseph Schuman set the scene with with black and white news footage of the tragedy that swept through North America causing more casualties than the World War itself.

But the outbreak has so far avoided the island where Jay Horton and his wife Jules are secretly holed up in their palatial mansion. And this where Floyd fetches up as the new cook. The laidback, card player has a seditious streak immediately starts a low-key rebellion downstairs inciting the other members of staff, a chauffeur (Faran Tahir) and a housemaid (Skye P Marshall) to join in. But the wary longterm housekeeper Mrs McMurray Kristine Nielsen), will have none of it, and immediately orders him to make an eggplant casserole supper for his new boss.

Insurrection is now in the air, as well as the virus, as Floyd stages a coup. Meanwhile Horton, a progressive vegetarian journalist – who also purports to be a humanitarian boss – encourages his staff to be aspirational while he himself fosters political ambitions, although some hail him to be a ‘muck-raker’. Pretending to still be on the thick of it back in the big City, he also emerges as rather deceitful, writes a ill-judged piece for a local rag accusing the president of mishandling the pandemic.

Back in the ‘Big Smoke’ mass protests are being staged against the president and his mishandling of the pandemic, and McCarthy is injured in a mêlée at the market, while buying food. Floyd the opportunity of her absence to encourage the staff uprising requesting horton to double their wages, and staff quarters (for their protection) which he agrees to do. But a strict lockdown soon sees all cut off from the mainland and encouraged to kill the local fauna to stay alive, a practice that Jay Horton opposes on humanitarian grounds, but is soon forced to change his mind when his wife and family demand to be fed. And Although Floyd is clearly a better shot and a far superior survivor than his cowardly boss: (“At times like these nature has a way of bringing out the beast in some, and the beauty in others”) the hobo, in a clever move, makes sure he passes the glory onto Jay. And when they all tuck into venison the mood is decidedly upbeat.

Determined not to be outdone, Jay thinks he can rumble Floyd but the hobo is cleverer than he gives him credit for. And it appears there’s been a case of mistaken identity in this louche little thriller carried by Sarsgaard with a glint in his eye and Sarah Gadon who turns how to be rather a dark horse. The denouement is both satisfying and unexpected. MT

CLOSING NIGHT GALA | GIORNATE DEGLI AUTORI 2023

God is a Woman (2023) Venice Film Festival 2023 | Critics’ Week

Dir.: Andres Peyrot; Cast: Aristeides Turpana, Diaz de Pestan, Olonnigdi Chiari, Cebaldo Inawinapi; Panama/France/Switzerland 2023, 87′.

French/Panamese filmmaker Andres Peyrothas has unearthed a real gem for his first film. It takes us back to 1975 when French documentarist Pierre-Dominique Gaisseau (1923-1997) went with his crew and family to the San Blas islands of Panama. Herre the Kuna community consider their women to be sacred.

Gaisseau’s claim to fame was winning the first ever Documentary Oscar, in 1962, for Sky Above and Mud Beneath. But despite this lofty achievement financing God is a Woman soon ran into difficulties and the bank took the film as collateral.

Then along came Aristeides Turpana who happened to be present at the original shoot and is now a university lecturer. He has taken it upon himself to discover the original, and luck is on his side when he meets one of his former students who is now the deputy minister for culture in the Republic of Panama. He digs out a copy of the 1975 version of God is a Woman – but dust has eaten the film material rendering it unfeasible, even for restoration purposes.

So Turpana makes his way to Paris where he had promised to meet Gaisseau in a particular cafe. But the filmmaker is long gone, and so is his wife, and daughter Akiko. Turpana soon cheers up when he finds out that Akiko has hidden a copy of the film in her cellar.

The Cinematheque Francaise was able to restore the copy and finally, fifty years after shooting, the refurbished film arrives in San Blas. Excitement spreads like wildfire, people taking on loans from family members to travel to the screening. They are looking forward to seeing their, who have since died, preserved on celluloid. Turpana oversees the construction of an outdoor cinema with a huge screen – on the night of the projection, boats from all over the islands are moored near the screen – over a hundred thousand people have ventured out to see their heritage.

The original 1975 copy is rather a wild undertaking, Gaisseau was known for his excesses. But somehow his approach fits the exuberant staging of a young girl’s coming-of-age. She has chosen a partner of own generation and he has two nights to escape – but he doesn’t disappoint her and joins in the celebration dancing with his male peers.

In the discussion that follows it transpires that Gaisseau did not translate the shaman correctly, but went for a more exotic approach – something which had been done regularly in the past. But the young filmmakers of today are anything but overwhelmed by Gaisseau’s efforts, although they admire his camerawork – in the style of John Ford. But most people really enjoy the mass celebration, “just in time to commemorate the rebellion of the San Blas people against the colonial forces hundred years ago”.

DoPs Patrick Tresch and Nicolas Desaintquentin uses hand-held cameras to capture the festivities. Gaisseau’s poetic pastoral pictures serve as an everlasting memory of that joyous occasion and will live forever etched into the collective memories of the Kuna people. AS

CRITICS’ WEEK | VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2023

Yurt (2023) Venice Film Festival 2023

Wri/Dir: Nehir Tuna | Doğa Karakaş, Can Bartu Arslan, Ozan Çelik, Tansu Biçer, Didem Ellialtı, Orhan Güner, Işıltı Su Alyanak | Turkey, Drama 116′

In the 1990s the social divide between religious and secular Turks is creating tensions in this artful feature debut from Nehir Tuna .

It centres on fourteen-year-old Ahmet a truculent teenager from a privileged background who finds himself holed up in a repressive Islamic institution at the behest of his recently-converted father keen to instil traditional Turkish values in his rather spoilt son.

But the atmosphere in the hostel is decidedly hostile. Ahmet’s smart clothes and urbane manners set him apart from the less fortunate pupils he is forced to mix with in the dormitory and one of them reacts by spitting at the young scholar who is far from happy with his new home.

Meeting Hakan, a street-smart kid who knows how to work the Yurt system, is the turning point for Ahmet and together the two get a sense of empowerment and confidence and they start to stand up to the draconian masculine environment of the dormitory amid scenes of quite brutal violence. Tuna gives a real sense of the spiritual but also oppressive religious strictures that shape the boys’ education. But once the two have found their sense of freedom colour floods into the picture in some appealing pastoral settings beside a lake. Together the two of them start to imagine the kind of world they want to live in.

Yurt could be any coming of age buddy movie, but what sets it apart is Florent Hery’s stylish camerawork in glowing black and white and a well-chosen occasional score of classical and folkloric songs. Tuna’s confident direction elevates this to a more resonant and memorable arthouse drama that champions a free-spirited modern Turkey, a world away from the past. MT

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2023 | HORIZONS & QUEER LION COMP

Hesitation Wound (2023) Venice Film Festival | Horizons 2023

Dir: Selman Nacar | Tulin Ozen, Ogulcan Arman Uslu, Gülçin Kultur Sahin, Vedat Erincin,Erdem Senocak | Turkey, Drama 84′

There’s nothing like a courtroom drama to keep you on the edge of your seat and there have been some really gripping legal-themed dramas of late: St Omer, Red Rooms, and Anatomy of a Fall this. This one, from Turkish director Salman Nacar, is more moody than tense in depicting the everyday life of a young female defence barrister in Istanbul.

The director Selman Nacar won multiple awards for his feature debut Between Two Dawns, and his latest runs along similar lines: a morality tale that centres on a professional woman forced to make an impossible choice: Canan (Tulin Ozen) finds herself in a no-win situation, personally and professionally, caught between looking after her dying mother and forging ahead with her career. No wonder she’s a chain-smoker with ulcer trouble.

In the snowbound capital the camera pans in on the dour hospital confines where Canan is at odds with her sister Hopi on whether to offer her mother’s organs up for donation. Both women are pushed to the limit from all sides. Their mother, although still alive, is lying in a vegetative state on a ventilator. And it only needs one person to sign the consent form, but Canan’s sister, herself a mother, can’t put pen to paper.

Back in her offices, Canan watches out of the window as her client Musa arrives in a police van, ready to stand trial for killing his boss. She berates him for not shaving off his heavy beard, but also puts his jittery mind at rest. Musa is in the dock charged with voluntary premeditated murder. It’s a thorny case built around his threats to kill the owner of the garment factory. But Canan mounts a spirited defence, with a few tricks up her sleeve. And the murder was never witnessed.

Cemal – a vital witness in the trial – must be there to provide an alibi for Musa’s defence. But he’s disappeared. And when Canan tracks him down he refuses to comply for complex reasons.

So two peoples lives hang in the balance. And Canan stands between them. Then other evidence starts to emerge. Apparently the victim was having an affair with Muse’s mother and started to make threats.

Although the ending feels rather underwhelming after such a strong build up this snapshot of modern Turkey makes for compulsive and intelligent viewing with its plausible characters, convincing performances and memorable widescreen camerawork. MT

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL | HORIZONS 2023

Thank You Very Much (2023) Best Documentary | Venice Film Festival | Classics

Dir: Alex Braverman | US Doc, 99′

The Safdie Brothers are behind this new documentary that looks back at the life and career of Andy Kaufman, considered one of the most innovative, eccentric and enigmatic performers of his era. A master of manipulation, Kaufman could generate merriment, tears or violent reactions from his audience, even discombobulating his closest friends into a nonplussed silence.

Messing with reality is everything that Andy was about. His art form is his act but – like every artist – he had to come up with something new and this was the magic formula: To have fun. Whether the audience got it, or not, it was up to them.

Documentarian Alex Braverman jumps around a bit in telling Andy’s outlandish story. It unspools like an outburst of mixed emotions; anecdotes and excerpts from amusing chat show interviews. The comedian can’t understand why people laugh at his deadpan silences – but not at his gags. But when he finally lands a Carnegie Hall gig success has arrived.

The best thing about Braverman’s film is that he goes back to Andy’s upbringing to understand why this middle class Jewish entertainer had such a desperate need to live in the past, recreating an eternal childhood. Apparently It all stems from a ‘narcissistic wound’: As a child Andy’s best friend was his grandfather Pappo. The two were inseparable, and sold on each other until grandpa’s death. Andy’s parents didn’t have the heart to tell their son his friend had gone forever, saying Pappo had just gone travelling. But Andy never got over his parents’ deception. Unable to cope with the rejection he created an alternative way of staying forever with Pappo, retreating into an interior life in his bedroom where he invented his own TV station ‘Channel 5’, eventually turning himself into a children’s entertainer and then a fully fledged adult comedian.

Humour was largely situational. Taking a one off job as a waiter Andy would often put on funny voices when serving customers, leaving the diners flummoxed but unsure how to respond. By creating a series of different characters, Andy could dissimulate, accessing the innermost depths of his personality with these diverse guises. The ‘foreign man’ Latka act was one of his most long-running gags. An Elvis impression allowed him to be sexy. The Tony Clifton character allowed him to be an ‘asshole’.

Danny DeVito – one of the main talking heads – talks of his involvement with Andy during the ‘Taxi’ years, But the fact that Clifton actually existed as real person led to a complicated set-too with his ‘alter ego’. Another act featured an old woman who died of a heart attack on stage. But nobody understood whether it was real or not, leading to complaints as Andy’s acts drifted dangerously near the bone.

Personally too his life became fused with fantasy. Often he responded “not necessarily” when confronted with unequivocal facts. Drug addiction took over and, for a while, Andy lived in a local park as a ‘drop-out’. After this troubling episode he managed to bond with his father, who is still alive and provides ballast as a commentator. Andy discovered transcendental meditation and claimed it saved him. He eventually became a teacher of the method.

At one point Laurie Anderson joined him on his stage and became his stooge, often in some very violent violent acts that showcased the brutal face of America in contrast to the saccharine one so often vaunted by the entertainment industry. At this point he had also started a bizarre new act challenging women to wrestle him in the ring where he would perform as the bad guy wrestler, at a time when women’s lib was on the rise. Andy could be great fun in a crowd but he was incapable of emotional intimacy.

Thank You Very Much is entertaining and well put together chronicling the life of a unique performer who was also, like many entertainers, a troubled soul. Braverman certainly gets under Andy’s skin, as much as anyone could, to celebrate a man who was socially unconventional whose skill was performing for an audience who didn’t know it was actually watching a show. MT

VENICE CLASSICS AWARD FOR BEST DOCUMENTARY 2023

Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person (2023)

Dir.: Ariane Louis-Seize; Cast: Sara Montpetit, Felix Antoine Benard, Steve Laplante, Sophie Cadieux, Noemie O’Farrell; Canada 2023, 88 min.

Ariane Louis-Seize opts for an extravagant title in her deadpan feature debut. Co-written with Christine Doyon, this quirky Canadian comedy is a roller-coaster of conflicting emotions centred around Sasha, a bloodthirsty vampire who would rather die than do any harm.

In Montreal, we meet family favourite Sasha celebrating her birthday. The gift of a piano goes down well and proves her to be a natural on the ivories but a clown emerges as her first victim. The family can’t wait for her get their fangs into this helpless ‘amuse-guele’ but Sasha gives it a wide berth.

Sasha has been groomed with a diet of German vampire movies of the silent era for her life of bloodlust. But this gorefest has the opposite effect on her: Sasha feels empathy for potential human victims and enters adulthood (she is 68, but looks decades younger) without draining a single drop of the crimson nectar she craves.

Maybe she’s a late developer? Her father, (LaPlante) an academic, is philosophical and bides his time but her mother (Monpetit) is impatient for Sasha to get her fangs into someone: “I am not going to hunt for you for the next 200 years” is a warning cry, so Sasha spends a spell with her aunt to cut her teeth and get cracking.

Enter Paul (Benard), a suicidal young man tormented by group of punks led by Henry. Cousin Denise encourages Sasha to complete the first kill – and age gracefully like auntie Victoria (375). But Paul falls for Sasha (whence the film gets its title) and is desperate for revenge on Henry. Sasha is well aware of her need to “transfer” Paul (AVATAR like) to his vampire status. Somehow she must pounce.

This amusing tragicomedy unfolds in a similar – albeit more upbeat – vein to Let the Right One In with DoP Shawn Pavlin taking a Grimm’s fairy tale approach, incorporating realistic elements to reflect the present, equally dark and foreboding, as the outwardly pleasant and moderate vampire world.

Sasha has to fight on both fronts and develops a certain taste for violence when cornered. But she (and Paul) must be true to the mission: to remain humanist at all times. A great premise but a bit of a ”one-act-pony”, even at 88 minutes. The final reel feels rather drained of the energy spent in the early part of the story. Still, Human Vampire is one-off and highly entertaining, Ariane Louis-Seize is certainly a talent to reckoned with. AS

NOW ON MUBI | WINNER of the 2023 GdA Director’s Award. GIORNATE DEGLI AUTORI VENICE and TORONTO 2023

The Stranger (1945)

Dir: Orson Welles | Cast: Orson Welles, Edward G Robinson, Loretta Young | US Noir

Long before he met David Lean, Sam Spiegel in his S. P. Eagle days was already signing the cheques for Orson Welles.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that after a promising start Welles quickly sank into a dispiriting morass of inferior films; however, films like ‘The Stranger’ and ‘The Lady from Shanghai’ would on their own have been the cornerstone of any lesser director’s reputation.

Reunited with the production designer of ‘Citizen Kane’ and teamed for the first with Russell Metty (long before ‘Touch of Evil’ and the films of Douglas Sirk whose wintry small town in ‘All That Heaven Allows’ this resembles), this probably represents one of Hollywood’s great anti-fascist films.@RichardChatten

Manga D’Terra (2023) Locarno Film Festival 2023

Wri/Dir: Basil da Cunha | Cast: Lucinda Brito, Nunha Gomes, Evandro Pereira | Swiss/Portuguese | Musical drama 96′

Portuguese Swiss director Basil da Cunha is back in the streets of his beloved Reboleira this time celebrating the women of this home close-knit Creole community in a lyrical musical courtesy of Eliana Rosa, Henrique Silva and Luis Firmino) who flesh out this spirited portrait of a place often down on its luck but oozing with heart and soul.

A follow-up to his award-winning second feature The End of the World, O Fim do Mundo that screened at the 2019 edition of Locarno, Manga d’Terra centres on Rosa (Eliana Rosa), 20, who has returned to the Portuguese capital from her native Cape Verde leaving her kids with her mother.

But after Cape Verde, life in the Lisbon suburb is no picnic in the park. Street violence and male aggression now make her life a daily struggle. And when she loses her job in a small restaurant (run by Nunha Gomes) reality bites for the single mother who only has her female friends for support and her strong singing voice as a way of grafting to survive. MT

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2023 | GOLDEN LEOPARD COMPETITION

Touched (2023) Locarno Film Festival 2023

Dir/Wri: Claudia Rorarius | Cast: Stavros Zafeiris, Isold Halldórudóttir | German, Drama 135′

Imagine a life without love or physical closeness. That lot falls to a paraplegic man in this thoughtful drama from German filmmaker Claudia Rorarius. Essentially a two-hander Touched explores the importance of power and control in human relationships. And while Alex may be physically powerless, his strong personality more than makes up for it when lonely caregiver Maria arrives. The physically challenged patient soon realises he is playing with fire.

Dark and good-looking, Alex (Stavros Zafeiris) has previously enjoyed a varied love life, like any man of his age. But paralysis makes him understandably frustrated and desperate. And we really feel for him. Maria (Icelandic plus-size model Isold Halldórudóttir) is blond and blue-eyed but grossly obese. But after Alex tries to commit suicide in the rehabilitation centre’s exercise pool, she embarks on an illicit attachment to her patient which is deemed below the belt by medical standards, despite Alex’s positive response.

At first Alex appears to be the victim of circumstance, claiming he would never date Maria in real life. But he soon appears to wield the power in this ‘folie a deux’ (that involves graphic sex scenes). Maria is then threatened with the sack when she is discovered in Alex’s bed one morning, the two having spent the night together.

With extraordinary intuitive performances from Halldórudóttir and Zafeiris (which won them a Pardo Award in this year’s Concorso Cineasti del presente), and minimal dialogue, Touched gently unpacks this unconventional relationship in a spare, slow-burning and sensually rich character drama. One of the most provocative films in the year’s Cineasti del Presente line-up at Locarno Film Festival 2023.

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2023

Critical Zone (2023) Golden Leopard Winner 2023

Wri/Dir: Ali Ahmadzadeh | Iran, Drama, 99′

In this dour social realist drama Amir, a drug runner, chases around the backstreets of Tehran trading his wares and dealing with his clients. But he is just one of the disenchanted characters inhabiting this look at the margins of Iranian society, including his dog who provides Amir with continued emotional support during evenings in their dingy basement apartment. In fact, most of the film unfolds in cover of darkness reflecting the grim reality of modern life in the capital, and Ahmadzadeh’s need to shoot in secret without the authorities’ permission.

Ali Ahmadzadeh continued to face pressure from the Iranian authorities to withdraw his film from the Locarno Film Festival main competition – but screen it did – and went on the win the coveted main prize, The Golden Leopard in this year’s 76th edition of the lakeside festival. No doubt Iran’s security ministry will continue to investigate the writer/director.

Critical Zone is aesthetically inventive and convincingly performed in its depiction of the gruelling lives of Iran’s most oppressed youth and in fact anyone who opposes the draconian regime than bans all kinds of alternative ways of living.

Ahmadzadeh rose to the international stage with his debut Kami’s Party at Berlinale 2013. The following year he made an appearance there with Atomic Heart. Critical Zone is his fourth feature. MT

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2023 | GOLDEN LEOPARD WINNER

First Affair (2023) Premiere Affaire | Locarno Film Festival 2023

Dir/Wri: Victoria Musiedlak | Cast: Noée Abita, Anders Danielsen Lie, Alexis Neises, François Morel, Saadia Bentaïeb | France, Drama

A girl discovers the real world in this erotic legal love story from French director Victoria Musiedlak. Premiere Affaire is one of the juiciest films to hit the Piazza Grande at this year’s Locarno’s 76th edition.

Sex is variably at centre of any drama where the French are involved and Premiere Affaire has a clever title that cuts both ways: as a first love affair and debut criminal case in the life of budding lawyer Nora, a mesmerising Noée Abita, who soon discovers that life is not as simple as it first appears. And Musiedlak doesn’t give her main character a smooth ride in this classically styled ‘school of hard knocks’ outing.

Fresh out of law school, naive Nora, 26, is working in the Paris cabinet of a suave but sharp as nails commercial advocate when she opts to take on a criminal case, that of a gauche young man Jordan Blesy (Alexis Neises) accused of murdering his sister’s friend. Here she will learn her first lesson: don’t get romantically involved with your colleagues. Enter the police officer assigned to the case, Alexis (Danielsen Lie). The two eye each other up warily and Nora, while gamine and vulnerable, is not one to be trifled with, giving the film its raunchy style. And credit to Musiedlak who opts for a feminine touch making their love scenes intensely titillating rather than uncomfortable to watch.

Clearly this is a story fraught with ethical and moral issues – not to mention racial tensions: Nora is of Maghrebi heritage and her mother is sceptical of her daughter’s career and provides the negative undertones so frequently present in intergenerational narratives of this kind. Meanwhile, Nora is burning the candle at both ends in taking on a case that runs contrary to her official remit in the commercial cabinet, so there’s never a dull moment, and certainly no easy answers in this stunning first feature from the French writer/director. MT

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL | PIAZZA GRANDE 2023

The Devil Rides Out (1968)

Dir: Terence Fisher | Cast: Christopher Lee, Charles Gray, Patrick Mower, Gwendoline Ffrangcon Davies, Nike Arrighi | UK Horror

Intended by Hammer Films as the first of a series of adaptations of the novels of Dennis Wheatley, adapted for the screen on this occasion by Richard Matheson, sadly its lacklustre performance at the box office resulted in only one further attempt and the less said about To the Devil a Daughter – which effectively spelled finis for Hammer’s status as a major player in British films – the better.

The Devil Rides Out represents a radical new departure for veteran Hammer workhorse Terence Fisher, while Hammer’s chief bogeyman (currently serving as the regular screen personification of Fu Manchu) Christopher Lee gets a chance to play Nayland Smith for once; role he attacks with obvious satisfaction.

New to Hammer, Charles Gray as the evil Mocata probably gave Cubby Broccoli the idea of casting him as Blofeld. @RichardChatten

Stepne (2023) Best Direction | Locarno Film Festival 2023

Dir: Marina Vroda | Ukraine/Gerrmany/Poland/Slovakia | Drama

Ukraine has suffered a grim recent history and this first feature from award-winning filmmaker Marina Vroda certainly captures past and present in this weary plod through one family’s existence, informed by the director’s own experience.

In the running for the Locarno Film Festival’s Golden Leopard, Stepne is set in a bleak village where Anatoly (Oleksandr Maksiakov) has come home Soumy to care for his moribund mother (a spry Nina Antonova). Food shortages, numbing cold and miserable neighbours make this a thankless task but the tenderness between the two, who are joined by his brother (Oleg Primogenov) adds a glimmer of warmth to this otherwise gruelling family portrait.

Sharing stories that express the pain of the past and the future the elderly inhabitants flesh out what is otherwise a unerringly dismal exhausted portrait of Ukrainian identity and their flecks of flinty humour show a spirit and a resilience which has to be admired. They are made of sterner stuff than the younger generation who are gradually learning what it means to survive in a place beset by conflict due to the ongoing war. A difficult watch but a worthwhile one. MT

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL | GOLDEN LEOPARD 2023

Espaldas Mojadas (1955) Locarno Film Festival 2023

Dir: Alejandro Galindo | Cast: David Silva, Victor Parra, Martha Valdez, Oscar Pulido | Mexico Adventure 111’

One of the most topical features in this year’s Locarno Mexico retrospective is one of the most lyrical contemplations on the nature of belonging ever to hit the silver screen. Golden Era director Alejandro Galindo subtly explores the pros and cons of economic migration in a black and white adventure drama that often romanticises the eternal search for a better existence while glorifying the mother country of his native Mexico.

Starring David Silva (as Rafael) and Martha Valdes (as Maria) this soulful black and white beauty unfolds on the Mexican border on the banks of the Rio Grande. On one side there is the burgeoning wealth of late 1950s America where ‘everyone has a car’. On the other, Spanish is spoken and traditional life holds sway amid the proud poverty of Mexico where, due to an accident of birth, people strive to survive and eke out an existence while always hoping to make it over to the ‘other side’, with or without papers, to a place where the streets are paved with gold.

In the dead of night amid twinkling stars and the ambient sound of nature a group of Mexican men are seen furtively making their way down to the river’s edge where they embark on the short journey to the other side of the river. Suddenly, sirens blare and shots ring out over the rippling waters captured in Rosalio Solano’s pristine velvety visuals. One of the men sinks below the surface, his only plea is to be taken back to die on the Mexican side where he is serenaded by a sultry solo guitar.

There are joyful moments too in this melancholy melodrama. Carnival time sees the camera soar about the crowds in an amazing overhead shot, the camera then dips down into the crowd where Rafael is enjoying a street-side hamburger (‘without the mustard’!). But life without papers is no picnic. In the railway sidings bound for Colorado Rafael strikes up a friendship with the joker of the piece, one Luis Villarreal (Pulido), who takes a laidback approach to living as a drifter away from home. He provides the film with a much needed dose of dark humour offering Capra-esque social commentary (“I thought about converting to communism, but then they told me ‘everyone still has to work”.) Eventually securing casual labour with an American called Mr Sterling Rafael becomes a slave to the arduous grind of railroad construction, and discovers that Catch 22 still persists despite making it to the ‘promised land’ and this strand gives the film its dramatic twist.

Filled with nostalgic songs from back home this soulful film portrays Mexicans as a deeply sentimental people striving for a better life while celebrating their family traditions and rich culture of the homeland. Wet Shoulders also highlights the plight of second generation Mexicans born in the US and now finding themselves lost in a halfway house where they no longer belong back home, or in America. A thematically rich drama about the basic dignity of belonging, earning a living and being able to hold your head high wherever you are in the world. MT

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL | MEXICAN RETROSPECTIVE 2023

Do Not Expect Too Much From The End Of The World (2023)

Dir/scr: Radu Jude. Romania, Luxembourg, France, Croatia. 2023. 163mins

Radu Jude is emerging as one of the most challenging directors on the European scene at the moment and his latest outing, described as ’part comedy, part road movie, part montage’, looks at the eternal theme of exploitation in the workplace and otherwise.

Not one for a minimalist title (apart from his debut Afterim): his recent outings have been as garrulous as their content: I Do Not Care if We Go Down in History as Barbarians, The Happiest Girl in the World and Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn – and have discombobulated the best of us. Jude continues the trend with Do Not Expect Too Much From The End Of The World a multilayered comedy concoction, named after a maxim by the Polish poet Stanislaw Jerzy Lec.

Jude once again takes history by the scruff of the neck to come to some thought-provoking realisations on how the goal posts have moved, and are constantly being manipulated in modern life through fake news. The past is invariably viewed as rosier than the more aggressive present and reflected here in grainy monochrome, in contrast to colour.

The action centres on the fraught everyday life of spirited production assistant Angela Raducanu (Ilinca Manolache), not unlike Kalia in Animal (another Locarno Golden Leopard contender), she is besieged on all fronts: over-worked, underpaid, and sometimes not even paid at all.

But Angela is certainly no fool. Careening through the streets of Bucharest in a mini van with the radio blaring out a sparky selection of tunes, she is en route to interview people for a safety video commissioned by an Austrian company (headed by Nina Hoss as Doris Goethe). This marketing tool expounds the virtues of taking protective measures. Jude interweaves Angela’s chaotic journey with his customary literary quotations, and excerpts from a film by Lucian Bratu in which the heroine (Dorina Lazar) searches for love in the sexist Ceausescu-era Bucharest of the early eighties (this segment goes by the title of ANGELA: a conversation with an 1981 film).

To gee herself up Angela posts videos pretending to be Andrew Tate taking off Putin. There are clearly analogies between present day Angela and her character from the past. And today’s Angela has great fun lampooning contemporary Romania in a jittery, broad brush, freewheeling approach not dissimilar to that of Bad Luck Banging, which has become Jude’s style in recent years. Nothing has really changed since Lazar’s era but social media has just amplified all the negativity and misogynist attitudes through its portals of Twitter and TikTok.

A character called Ovidiu, a wheelchair user, is the focus of part B. His testimony will feature in the safety video but his claims are then ‘groomed’, in one take, to provide sufficient evidence for him to claim compensation from the Austrian company. But will they believe him or even take him seriously? This moment is the most revealing of Jude’s entire film. Exhausting but certainly fizzing with energy. MT

Now On BFI PLAYER 2024

On the Go (2023) Locarno Film Festival 2023

Dir: Maria Gisèle Royo, Julia de Castro | Spain, Drama 72′

Two friends set off for one last hurrah in this erotic roadie reverie, shot entirely on 16mm, from Spanish co-directors Maria Gisèle Royo and Julia de Castro who have explored their own maternal instincts and come to the conclusion that their first feature is the ultimate form of giving birth.

The sexually adventurous Milagros (Julia de Castro), 37, is keen to make the most of her final fertile years in a frantic search for a male of the species. Jonathan (Omar Ayuso), still in his early twenties, is seeking solace in Grindr, scrolling through potential penises in a bid to find the perfect mate to overcome his vulnerability issues. The two are joined by a mysterious Asian Babe who calls herself La Reina de Triana (Chacha Huang) and whose only desire is to become a traditional housewife and look after her husband and kids.

So off they go along the sandy coastlines of Andalusia – from Malaga to Cadiz – in a stylish white decapotable. This unbridled and often ill-considered odyssey comes to represent their atavistic need to procreate: The mates they yearn in this scattergun search may be entirely unsuitable but the chemical drive to replicate ourselves has nothing to do with reason. The notion that we are any freer in the 21st century than we were in the Dark Ages is just a myth. Our three protagonists are all the victims of their biology and physicals drives, and they are acting on these forces in weird and wonderful ways. On The Go is a spirited and often misfiring attempt to portray this heady time on the big screen. MT

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL | CINEASTI DEL PRESENTE 2023

The Vanishing Soldier (2023) Locarno Film Festival 2023

Dir: Dani Rosenberg | Cast; Ido Tako, Tikva Dayan, Shmulik Cohen, Efrat Ben Tzur | Israel 97′

When an Israeli soldier disappears during a terrorist raid on his barracks all hell breaks loose in this tragic comic love story from Dani Rosenberg who looks at what freedom really means in a country permanently on its guard.

Anyone who has spent any time in Israel knows that most people live an ordinary existence despite the constant violence reported on the News. But young soldiers are ever-present in the streets and pavement cafes of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem serving as a constant reminder of how this tiny nation the size of Wales protects itself from from the vast surrounding block of countries that seek to undermine its existence.

What starts as a tense survival thriller with a young IDF soldier Schlomi fleeing from Gaza after an attack from Hamas militants soon develops into a freewheeling exploration of this soldier’s life as an ordinary young man forced to defend his country in an ongoing ‘battle,’ when all he really wants is to be at home with his girlfriend and family.

Since Israel’s foundation in 1948 military conscription has been mandatory for both sexes. From the age of 17 they are required to serve for at least two years in this major rite of passage.

In his third feature director Dani Rosenberg, also known for his TV fare, takes an almost documentary approach to show the stresses and strains of army service and how that pressure impacts on parents, friends and family members. Not just a question of routine administrative duties, army life involves the ever present possibility of severe injury and even loss of life.

After 18 year old Schlomi (Ido Take) escapes his army base in the film’s fraught opening scenes, agile camerawork and a needling score highlight the teenager’s tense state of mind as he chases round trying to reconnect with his girlfriend Shiri (Efrat Ben Sur) and eventually spending a few hours with his grandmother. Desperate to find his parents Schlomi finally tracks them down at the main hospital in Tel Aviv where his father Shmulik is recovering from a heart attack brought on by a bomb blast. He reflects laconically on what the police are calling’a terrorist incident’.

But Schlomi’s bullshit story about being home ‘for a few days leave’ doesn’t wash with his mother (Tikva Dayan) who sees a newsflash on the television telling a different story: The IDF have launched a search for Schlomi’s whereabouts believing him dead or even kidnapped. The young soldier has clearly committed a serious breach of army service leaving his angry mother to face the music with the commander while she hatches a plan for her son to save face and get back to his platoon. Despite a rather underwhelming finale, The Vanishing Soldier is a brave and intelligent drama picturing real life in Israel today. MT

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL | GOLDEN LEOPARD 2023

https://youtu.be/RDYVXJQBDU4

The Most Dangerous Game (1932)

Directors Irving Pichel, Ernest B Schoedsack US Horror | Cast: Fay Wray, Joel McCrea, Leslie Banks

Based on: “The Most Dangerous Game”; 1924 story in Collier’s; by Richard Connell

Talking Pictures’ screening was prefaced with the usual disclaimer about outdated dialogue and offensive racial stereotypes, but the British should take umbrage at seeing yet again an English accent and a vocabulary equated with evil (although Count Zaroff actually describes his kinfolk as “we Cossacks”, and he has a henchman called Ivan who provides the film’s scariest moment when he smiles in greeting).

The visceral contents of Zaroff’s trophy room were cut from postCode reissues while he lascivious designs on comely brunette Fay Wray (“Kill then love. When you have known that you have known ecstasy” he gloats) is another sure sign that the film hails from the preCode era. @RichardChatten

Animal (2023) Locarno Film Festival 2023

Dir: Sofia Exarchou | Greece, Drama 116′

Greek director Sofia Exarchou’s second film takes place in a family hotel in an unknown Greek Island where dancer Kalia ((Dimitra Vlagopoulou)) is doing her best to inject some fun in the rather joyless atmosphere in her capacity as an “animateur” choreographing stage shows to enthuse holiday-makers.

Looking after a young family and satisfying her partner is an exhausting business but Kalia always switches on the charm and an electric smile for the tourists and encourages her new recruits to do the same to cover versions of ‘Yes Sir I can Bougie’ and other soulless hits. But when Eva (Flomaria Papadaki) arrives Kalia sees a reflection of her younger self in the young girl’s enthusiasm and willingness to shine in a gruelling diurnal activity that feels like hard work, the muscular stresses and strains reflected in Monika Lenczewska’s close-up camerawork.

Exarchou takes a documentary approach to reflect the sheer physical grind of Kalia’s daily existence but there is dark humour too in a similar vein to Ulrich Seidl’s seaside satire Rimini .Although the Austrian filmmaker goes further down the route of lampooning his hero.

The need to be upbeat and bubbly is no mean feat when dealing with a public that is often sluggish: they’ve come on holiday for a relaxing break but also want some fun while getting fit and healthy before they return to their home environment. But Kalia too needs to get away from the forced bonhomie of her paid employment and needs to have a break of her own. And that’s when the going gets challenging in this perceptive look behind the scenes of the holiday entertainment industry. MT

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL | GOLDEN LEOPARD COMPETITION.

5 Hectares (2023) Locarno Film Festival 2023

Dir: Emilie Deleuze | Cast: Lambert Wilson, Marina Hands | France, Comedy 94′

Lambert Wilson has been taking time out from Paris to explore the pleasures of French rural life. In A Great Friend (2023) he embraces solitude in a rustic mountain retreat, Golden Hands (2023) sees him falling in love in Calvados.

In 5 Hectares, premiering at this year’s Locarno Film Festival, Franck moves lock stock and barrel to an idyllic farmhouse in the depths of the Limousin determined to make a go of country life with his wife Lionelle (Marina Hands). But the neighbours immediately take against the sauve Parisian entrepreneur and his delightful wife, despite their best efforts to fit in. Franck soon learns that country people prefer a strictly personal approach far removed from the formality of Paris. So a change of tack is needed when Franck decides to buy a tractor. And that’s not all – Le Limousin is well known for its beef cattle.

French filmmaker Emilie Deleuze is no stranger to Locarno where she competed for the Golden Leopard two decades ago with Mathieu Demy starrer Mister V, a powerful drama set on a farm. 5 Hectares is much lighter in style playing on the ongoing theme of town versus country in a delightfully bucolic comedy with some Fawlty Towers style humour. MT

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2023 |

Dammi (2023) Locarno Film Festival 2023

Dir: Yann Demange | Cast: Riz Ahmed, Souheila Yacoub, Yousfi Henine | Isabelle Adjani, Sandor Funtek | France, 16′

A woozy reflection on the nature of belonging starring Riz Ahmed as a disenfranchised man of Algerian heritage searching for his roots but never quite finding them in a nocturnal Paris. Returning here, he glides through memories of his past and surreal fragments of the present, searching for connection with his estranged Algerian born father.

Director Yann Mounir Démange, also of Algerian/French parenthood, came to fame through his breakout TV series Top Boy. With an Algerian father and French mother he understands the territory and what it means to feel like a boat swirling in the high seas looking for a safe birth – and the man will find one but it will be with a person rather than a country in this cinematic reverie… Behind Paris is Algiers. MT

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL | 2-12 AUGUST | PIAZZA GRANDE OPENING FILM

Explanation for Everything (2023) Viennale Film Festival 2023

Dir: Gabor Reisz | Cast: Gáspár Adonyi-Walsh, István Znamenák, András Rusznák, Rebeka Hatházi, Eliza Sodró, Lilla Kizlinger & Krisztina Urbanovits | Hungary, Drama

The tensions of Hungary’s polarised society come unexpectedly to the surface when a student’s exam results become the focus of a national scandal, in this slow burn sophomore feature from Hungarian filmmaker Gabor Reisz (For Some Inexplicable Reason).

In a summery Budapest cramming for his final exams is the last thing on Abel’s mind having fallen for his studious school friend Janka who only has eyes for their happily married history teacher Jacob.

Playing in this year’s Horizons sidebar at Venice Film Festival’s 80th edition Explanation for Everything certainly takes its time in establishing the heady milieu of end of term nerves and fraught family life in the build up to the annual summer holidays. But the thrust here is the flight between tradition and the modern world in a film that contrasts the staunch, nationalistic devotion to duty, expressed by Abel’s conservative father, and Jacob’s liberal-minded take on the future with its woke overtones. Gabor Reisz creates another thematically rich and worthwhile modern classic. MT

VIENNALE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL | 19-30 OCTOBER 2023 | HORIZONS | BEST FILM – HORIZONS 2023 VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2023

The Man on the Eiffel Tower (1949)

Dir: Burgess Meredith | Cast: Charles Laughton, Franchot Tone, Burgess Meredith, Robert Hutton, Jean Wallace, Patricia Roc, Belita | Drama

Georges Simenon used to boast that he never bothered to watch the films based on his books and a clause in his contract for this particular adaptation stipulated the withdrawal of all prints from circulation after fifteen years, with the result that for over thirty years it only existed in bootleg prints and Burgess Meredith in a 1979 interview lamented the disappearance of this film and said he’d love to see a decent colour print of it.

The original director Irving Allen ran foul of Laughton (not an uncommon occurrence) after only three days and the task of making it fell to the three leading actors who took responsibility for all the scenes in which they themselves didn’t appear; the main credit therefore going to Meredith since he had by far the smallest part.

In addition to the record in colour it provides of postwar Paris, the film is significant for providing Laughton with his first taste of direction and provided in cameraman Stanley Cortez the collaborator who realised his ill-fated masterpiece ‘The Night of the Hunter’, with the perverse result that he gives a surprisingly uninvolved performance as Maigret while it’s Franchot Tone who wildly overacts. @RichardChatten

ON MUBI

Paris Memories (2023)

Dir: Alice Winocour | Cast: Virginie Efira, Benoit Magimel, Gregoire Colin, Maya Sansa | France, Drama 105′

Belgian actor Virginia Efira is the star of this survival drama that thoughtfully explores the aftermath of a terrorist attack on a Paris bistro.

Belgian filmmaker Alice Winocour has already touched on the affects of trauma on the human condition, particularly for women, in her previous features Augustine, Disorder and Mustang. Paris Memories is possibly the most relatable so far in its exploration of life-changing events. The threat of terrorism surrounds us all every day.

Russian translator and journalist Mia (Efira) sees her life ripped apart while enjoying a glass of wine in a busy cafe when a terrorist strikes. Haunted by the tragedy, Mia bonds with the other survivors and soon forms a romantic attachment to Thomas (Magimel) who was badly injured in the attack, although ultimately their relationship doesn’t quite ring true. Mia also makes it her business to track down a man who helped her to safety and here the storyline widens into the scuzzy demimonde of disenfranchised workers and illegal migration.

Winocour calmly unpacks the emotional toll of the attack of Mia’s private life as she retreats from her partner Vincent (Colin) leading him to suspect an affair. But this is by no means just about Mia and touches on the broader effects of the incident and the fallout it has on everyone affected, and not always in a negative way. Paris Memories is a tribute to those lost in Bataclan in November 2015, the Louvre Museum attack in 2017, and the Charlie Head incident in 2020. A deeply affecting drama that looks for a positive message of hope.

ON RELEASE FROM 4 AUGUST 2023

Kokomo City (2023)

Dir: D Smith | US Doc 73′

If your idea of entertainment is watching a series of Black trans sex workers loudly lamenting their life, then Kokomo City is for you. More impressive than anything though is the hyper-stylised way D Smith captures his subject. The glossy black and white images splash onto the screen at refreshingly odd angles: It all feels rather like flicking through a slick fashion magazine – maybe a trans version of Men’s Vogue or even that French erotic title NewLook (now out of publication).

Here we are in Atlanta and these women are seriously disgruntled behind their Barbie-style rigouts and fluttering black false eye lashes. Gesticulating at the camera with super sharp white painted talons and jutting chins, they offer advice about how to avoid that 5’clock shadow. But most of all they harp on about the trials and tribulations of satisfying the males that come to them for satisfaction – and how they do it better than cisgender females. There’s a raw, competitive edge to their narratives. And sometimes we feel for them. But after thirty minutes or so enough is enough. And while they rightly point out that no man wants to listen to women’s problems at the end of the day – that’s what is mostly dished up in this unique, cinematic and occasionally insightful kaleidoscope of American trans views. MT

KOKOMO CITY – IN UK & IRISH CINEMAS 4 AUGUST 2023

Venice Film Festival 2023 | 80th Edition

The hottest ticket at Venice Film Festival this year must be for Roman Polanski directing John Cleese in his latest film The Palace playing out of competition in the 80th edition that runs on the Lido from 30 August to 9 September 2023.

The last time the controversial Polish born filmmaker came to Venice Film Festival he won the Silver Lion Grand Jury prize – amongst others – with his enlightening drama about another polemical figure Alfred Dreyfus, wrongly accused of treason and ostracised by society. Polanski’s outsider portraits are his stock in trade, arguably the most memorable being The Tenant so The Palace, described as a ‘dark comedy’, is set to be one of the jewels in the crown of this year’s glittering line-up and is co-written by the his close friend Polish Great Jerzy Skolimowski, and takes place in the magnificent Gstaad Palace in Switzerland.

Talking of comedies, Woody Allen, the king of them all, is back, also out of competition, with Coup de chance, a romantic look at love and infidelity set in Paris, and Woody’s first film in French, with an star cast of Lou de Laage, Valerie Lemercier and – of course – the tousled Melvil Poupard, with Gregory Gabedois, no doubt doing the funnies.

Texan luminary Wes Anderson has not one, but two films on the major festival circuit this summer: his latest The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, albeit a short at 37 minutes, follows hot on the heels of Asteroid City and is adapted from a Roald Dahl story. It stars Ralph Fiennes, Ben Kingsley and Benedict Cumberbatch and will go directly to Netflix. Anderson’s previous outing The Fantastic Mr Fox was also a Dahl adaptation.

A biopic of Leonard Bernstein’s, or – more accurately – his wife, is another hotly anticipated competition feature from actor now director Bradley Cooper who got no less than eight nominations for his debut A Star is Born. Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and Todd Phillips are putting their money behind Cooper’s competition title Maestro so that’s a good enough endorsement in most people’s minds, especially when Carey Mulligan has the leading role.

Michael Fassbender has been keeping his powder dry on the festival circuit for a while now but he’s back with The Killer playing an assassin in crisis in this latest thriller from David Fincher. Taking inspiration from the French graphic novel series of the same name it follows on from Fincher’s murderous repertoire of Seven, Zodiac and Mindhunter.

Adam Driver made such a success of his tousled Italian hero Maurizio Gucci in House of Gucci he has now landed the leading role of Enzo Ferrari in Michael Mann’s biopic about the motor racing entrepreneur. This time Penelope Cruz plays his wife and Shailene Woodley his mistress, Lina Lardi.

Poor Things is another hotly anticipated title at this year’s Mostra. Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos will be on the Lido with his latest – a Frankenstein fantasy remake starring Emma Stone – although the film will not get a release until Christmas time due to the Hollywood strikes. Maybe an Oscar is in the pipeline for him this time around.

Elvis Presley was the focus of attention at last year’s Cannes but this year the spotlight is on his wife Priscilla in a feature directed by Sofia Coppola (Marie Antoinette) who explores her story as a teenager and young adult. Austin Butler is back as ‘the King’.

Meanwhile cinema du look director Luc Besson graces the competition lineup with Dogman a film not all that dissimilar from Matteo Garrone’s 2018 outing of the same title – with a focus on man’s best friend. This one stars the incendiary Caleb Landry Jones (Nitram) alongside the serene Marisa Berenson (Barry Lyndon).

Not to be outdone on the assassin theme Richard Linklater joins the party with Hitman a Houston based police thriller about an undercover Charles Bronson style law enforcer who turns the table on his clients.

The Promised Land must be the most popular title for a film but despite this acclaimed Danish scriptwriter and now director Nikolaj Arcel (Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) has chosen it for his Venice competition title that stars Mads Mikkelsen, in Denmark film is called Bastarden giving a hint to its drift

Two year’s ago at Venice Mexican filmmaker Michel Franco made a fabulous little thriller called Sundown with regular Tim Roth and Charlotte Gainsbourg. It was sadly underrated on release but this year he’s back with Memory about a couple dealing with the hot potato of the moment dementia.

William Friedkin is a faithful Venice supporter with his generous appearances on the red carpet; he’s easy to talk to and doesn’t stand on ceremony, even at 87. This year he comes with his first fiction feature since Killer Joe in the shape of a morally complex piece entitled The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial starring Jason Clarke and Kiefer Sutherland and based on Herman Wouk’s original stage play.

The Night Porter director Liliana Cavani, now 90, has a new drama entitled L’Ordine del tempo. Based on the recent bestseller by Carlo Rovelli it follows a group of friends meeting for what may be the last time on their annual get together.

Chilean auteur Pablo Larraín is another Venice hard hitter with his previous titles No, The Club and Spencer. This year he makes an appearance with El Conde a bizarre imagined horror outing that sees the onetime dictator Augusto Pinochet reimagined as a vampire who has decided to hang up his fangs – whatever next…

Meanwhile in the VENICE DAYS sidebar Isabelle Huppert makes an appearance in literary romantic drama Sidonie in Japan that sees her embark on an affair with a Japanese publisher whilst on a book tour.

Catalan actor Lola Duenas has made a real splash with her portrayals of strong women – in Fabrice du Welz’s horrifying thriller Alleluia (2014) and in Lucrecia Martel’s coruscating historical piece Zama. Here she is again in Victor Iriarte’s competition entry Foremost by Night.

Fans of Peter Sarsgaard can see him in two films. In the Out of Competition title, he stars in Coup! Set during the time of the infamous Spanish flu outbreak in 1918 it centres on a rebellious servant who leads a revolt against his wealthy employee. There’s more to come so stay tuned MT

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2023 | 30 AUGUST – 9 SEPTEMBER 2023

https://www.youtube.com/live/XG9pMYOjAKs?feature=share

Lars Von Trier Season

The films of one of world cinema’s most renowned and daring provocateurs, Lars von Trier, will be making a comeback to the big screen this summer with a new retrospective entitled Enduring Provocations

The retrospective looks back on von Trier’s controversial career, having courted ardent fans and enemies in equal measure during his nearly four decades as a director.

Known for his restless technical innovation and rebellious approach to the genre, von Trier has confronted the taboo subjects of the day and the eternal existential problems of the human condition with the same thorny, troubled intelligence and puckish humour.

Enduring Provocations revisits some of the director’s most incendiary works on the big screen headlined by remastered versions of Breaking the Waves, Idiots and Melancholia. The season asks whether his cinema of narcissism and self-abasement still has the power to get under our skin. Is it the on-screen violence that is hard to stomach, or those troubling questions his films ask about human suffering, morality and the disorders of society?

The retrospective will launch on the 4th of August with the newly remastered Breaking the Waves. The power of faith, love and friendship lies at the heart of this devastating drama from Danish wild-child Breaking the Waves won the 1996 Grand Jury Price in Cannes and created two stars: Stellan Skarsgard and Emily Watson in her raw screen debut that saw her nominated for an Oscar. Watson would never again reach these heady heights in a performance, and this was arguably Von Trier’s heartrending masterpiece, although he would go on to become the agent provocateur per excellence with a string of outrageous hits has never since reduced audiences to such a collective blithering emotional wreck.

In seven chapters and an epilogue, von Trier sets out to prove faith is stronger than any dogma. Set in the early 1970s Emily Watson is Beth McNeill (Watson) is a naïve and emotionally vulnerable young woman living in a devout Calvinist village where the residents cower in fear of being excommunicated by a coral of draconian religious ministers. Beth soon falls foul of them, marrying an ‘outsider’ in the shape of Jan Nyman (Skarsgard), an oil platform worker. Intoxicated by sexual passion she swears undying love for Jan and vows to keep him alive whatever the consequences when an accident on the rig renders him paralysed and bedridden.

Beth believes that God (whom she prays to out loud in the church) has punished her for asking Jan to return early from a contract on the rigs. Disturbed by a brain injury, Jan demands that Beth stimulate his libido by having sex with other men and recounting the details to give him hope of recovery. Beth blindly follows Jan’s wishes, sinking to the depths of sexual depravity by prostituting herself with locals and strangers, jeopardising her own well-being by visiting the occupants of a trawler (headed by a sadistic Udo Kier) declined custom by even the local prostitutes . Her blind faith in the power of divine healing is in conflict with conventional medical advice, and Beth soon turns against her stalwart friend Dorothy (the wonderful Katrin Cartlidge who won Best Supporting Actress) and Doctor Richardson (a memorable Adrian Rawlings).

Breaking is very much Jeanne D’ Arc in reverse: Virtue is replaced by sex as a way to redemption. And like for Jeanne, there is only one way for Beth: all or nothing. It is perhaps von Trier’s greatest achievement to not lose the audience at this point.

Back in 1996, there were long and heated discussions after the Cannes Palme d’Or ceremony (as in the decision to award this year’s Palme d’Or to Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall instead of the radical Zone of Interest from Jonathan Glazer). Breaking the Waves is a more daring feature than Mike Leigh’s Secrets and Lies (1996), with Leigh’s hyper-realistic stage approach running into difficulties. Apart from the fantastic performances and gut punch of von Trier’s mise en scene, Robbie Mueller’s handheld camera alone makes the film a winner in this tragic celebration of life and the wonderment of human love, carnal and otherwise.

ENDURING PROVOCATIONS | CURZON | AUGUST 4TH 2023

Brighton Rock (1948)

Dir: John Boulting | Cast: Richard Attenborough, Hermione Baddeley, William Hartnell, Harcourt Williams

You know you’re in Greeneland when Harcourt Williams appears as a down-at-heel lawyer who quotes ‘Macbeth’.

One final thought: was it just by coincidence that Pinky’s previous victim was called Fred Kite? @RichardChatten

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Barbie (2023) Cinematic and Box Office Achievement | 81st Golden Globes 2024

Dir: Greta Gerwig | US Fantasy drama | 116′

Before an explosion of psychedelic plastic heralds the long-awaited advent of Barbie we are transported back to a prehistoric playground where Helen Mirren describes a ludic past when little girls played ‘mummy’ with their pliable baby dolls. Then Mattel entrepreneur Ruth Handler came along and decided to up the game. She gave her own daughter something more adult-like to play with – the result was Barbie.

Margot Robbie, all toned limbs and blonde, hair plays this glamour toy like the real thing. In her candy-coloured kingdom “Artificial Barbie” enjoys a sexless teenage dream of girlie get-togethers where wimpish, whingeing himbos only exist to serve to serve their female counterparts. We start to wonder how long we can put up with this prissy pastel charade. Then along comes the storyline.

Artificial Barbie encounters ‘an issue’ and has to visit the ‘real world’ where women are still being diminished by the male of the species. And, unsurprisingly, she immediately suffers an existential crisis.

In her fourth feature, Greta Gerwig shares script honours with consort Noah Baumbach. crossing into the 145 M$ super league. Co-produced by the Barbie franchise m-holders Mattel, the feature suffers a toxic overload with its multiple subplots: the gender war between Barbie (Robbie) and Ken (Gosling) is just an excuse for a tiff in the trenches of old and new feminism. The boy brigade, led by Ken (a perfectly cast Gosling), is rather less imaginative in the tussle to regain control not only of old-fashioned Barbie-land but also of reality (in this case the Hollywood suburb of Santa Monica). Gerwig/Baumbach create endless quotes to exploit their subject matter, starting with Kubrick’s 2001 styled set where sullen little girls throw their toys out of the pram, rejecting dreams and motherhood at the same time.

Barbie Team | 81st Golden Globes | photo credit Benny Askinas

Barbie is a resentful feature even when indulging in self-critique: Artificial Barbie complains about “Sexualised Capitalism” and her lack of beauty, the Helen Mirren cuts in with “Margret Robbie is the wrong actress to cast”. Well, Robbie might not be a miniature doll, but she is certainly not a push-over when it comes to Ken and his low level aggressiveness which often looks over-mannered.

But as long as Barbie channels its Busby Berkeley spectacle of song and dance routines all is well. Somewhere after the 90 minute mark Gerwig remembers she is supposed to be staging an epic masterpiece, and things go down downhill. “Irresponsible thoughts of death” and “Proustian flashbacks” have nothing to do with ‘gen Barbie Doll’, past or present.

Virtue-signalling demands the hiring of America Ferrera and Issa Rae, a Latino mother/daughter duo, who help Barbie to save and conquer the real world. Will Ferrell is brilliant as the dancing/singing/running CEO of Mattel, reprising his sublime nasty role in Elf.

But whatever Gerwig/Baumbach had in mind the profit will go to franchise holders Mattel and Ruth Handler ((cuttingly described as “a five foot Jewish woman with a double mastectomy and tax issues”) who have once again reinvented their brand. Barbie will go on living in the minds of those who – like me – just thought of her as a ‘fun doll to dress up in different outfits’: and even gave her an androgynous crop (her hair never grew back!.) The film is original, high-performing but soulless. MT

CINEMATIC and BOX OFFICE ACHIEVEMENT | 81st GOLDEN GLOBES 2024

Paris When it Sizzles (1964)

Dir: Richard Quine | Cast: William Holden, Audrey Hepburn, Grégoire Aslan | Drama 110’

When he decided to remake Julien Duvivier’s La Fete a Henriette (1952), was it screenwriter George Axelrod’s intention all along that the lead in this repost to the auteur theory be played by William Holden?

Holden had already served as Billy Wilder’s narrator and spokesman for disaffected scriptwriters everywhere in Sunset Boulevard; in which he complained that audiences don’t realise anybody writes a movie, they just think the actors make it up as they go along. (Which if this weren’t a remake of an earlier film one might have thought Axelrod had himself just done.)

Audiences contemplating this extravagant shambles, however, know exactly where the blame lies since Alexrod constantly draws attention to his culpability in writing this script; while denigrating all the ‘little people’ involved in making the film itself. His arguments would have carried more weight had he marshalled them more coherently himself and he’d cast a lead actor who could play comedy.

An overwritten and overacted soufflé that fails to rise (which desperately overuses zooms, pans and wipes as if it were a Bollywood movie), with an appropriately overemphatic score by Nelson Riddle. It’s its production values and star power (notably a rather sweet extended cameo by Tony Curtis) that make it watchable. But it goes on for far too long.

Mind you, Resnais made just as much of a pig’s ear of similar subject matter with Providence. @RichardChatten

Oppenheimer (2023) Academy Award Best Picture | Best Motion Picture: 81st Golden Globes

Dir/Wri: Christopher Nolan | Cast: Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh, Josh Hartnett, Casey Affleck, Rami Malek, Kenneth Branagh, Benny Safdie, Jason Clarke | 180′

A haunting vision of the future hangs over this fraught epic about the man who invented the iconic bomb that ended World War II.

English director Christopher Nolan frames his feature through a stimulating Washington based court investigation as Oppenheimer’s florid life and times flash back urgently forward to a needling score – from Cambridge to Leiden and then California and finally Los Alamos in New Mexico – providing thrilling social and political insight into the final stages of the Second World War.

Christopher Nolan wins #GoldenGlobe Best Director 2023 photo credit: Virisa Young

Cillian Murphy is screen dynamite as Robert Oppenheimer, a Jewish scientist from New York, who was seen as a hero to many but later vilified as a threat to his country for questioning America’s arms race bravado with his learned opinions in those turbulent times. Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of Robert Oppenheimer, Murphy leads a cast who each pull their weight in this mighty masterpiece that mesmerises for over three hours, the final segment is the most riveting and allows the stern but softly spoken Murphy to expose the soulful side of this conflicted but brilliant man.

Hoyte van Hotel’s coruscating cinematography is impeccable in vivid colour and pristine black and white, the 15/70mm print showcasing Nolan’s most impressive film to date.

Oppenheimer serves both as a densely-plotted character study and a simmering slice of history that also delves into the brutal tactics of the McCarthy era, but never at the expense of some dry humour and a wise perceptive overview from Tom Conti’s ageing Albert Einstein as the father of scientific breakthroughs. Meanwhile in the Los Alamos labs a selection of top flight theoreticians cut through the science by simply dropping marbles into jars to illustrate the difference between uranium and plutonium as fusion bomb components.

Performance-wise Downey is outstanding as Strauss, a major player in the Atomic Energy Commission and a monstrous ego; Matt Damon is masterful as Major Leslie Groves, in charge of security at the Manhattan Project; Emily Blunt (a steely Kitty) and Florence Pugh (a sensuous Tetlock) play the feisty women in Oppenheimer’s life and Jason Clarke’s Roger Robb (Special council to the AEC) could put any cross-examiner in the shade. Gary Oldman gets a surprisingly powerful cameo as President Truman “people will remember who dropped the bomb, not who built it”.

Academy Award Best Picture | Best Actor Cillian Murphy, Best Supporting Actor Robert J Downey, Best Director Christopher Nolan Best Original Score, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing | Best Motion Picture – Drama | Best Director – Christopher Nolan | Best Original Score – Motion Picture | Best Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role in any Motion Picture – Robert Downey Jr. | 81st Golden Globes 2024

Essential Truths of the Lake (2023) Locarno Film Festival 2023

Dir.: Lav Diaz; Cast: John Lloyd Cruz, Shaima Magdayao, Hazel Orencio, Agot Isidra, Bart Guingona, Susan Africa, Reyhan Abcede; Philippines, Portugal, France, Singapore, Italy, Switzerland, UK 2023, 215 min.

Police inspector Hermes Papauran (Cruz), one of the country’s foremost investigators, is again the focus of this latest epos from Philippine auteur Lav Diaz. Essential Truths of the Lake serves as a prequel to his 2022 outing When the Waves are Gone that saw him haunted by a dark past and ready to meet his maker in a quest for the truth.

Investigating a murder case from 2005, in the last days of the bloody regime of President Duarte in 2020, Hermes is a troubled and rather destructive character who suffers occasional bouts of psoriasis and contingent physical afflictions brought on by his negative take on life.

On the banks of the titular Taal Lake, an atmospheric setting, Hermes is having a meeting with his female superior The Colonel about re-open the cold case of Esmeralda Stuart (Magdayao), a mythical beauty queen/cabaret star, who disappeared without trace in 2005. The Colonel agrees to re-open the investigation but warns Hermes about his family obligations in the face of the potentially perilous mission: “They want you back” states The Colonel, making clear that she is in control of proceedings.

Hermes interrogates the drug lord Jack Barquero (Guingona), one of the main suspects in the Stewart case, who then has him followed by his son Nick and three of his henchmen but a nearby volcano erupts, the ash destroying more clues in the case. We then return aesthetically and contents-wise to the Diaz matrix of old, and The Colonel sacks Hermes from the case, making him the prey rather than the pursuer. Meanwhile the beleaguered detective befriends Melchora (Africa) and loses a potential collaborator in his search for the truth; an old man dies of a sudden and suspicious heart attack. A cake seller – who might, or might not be connected to the original murder – is then killed by Melchora’s dog after trying to steal some of her papers, and the self-destructive Hermes is once again in the wilderness. Then Diaz comes up with a brilliant solution.

In contrast to his previous outings Diaz opts for a nuanced contemporary arthouse style, particularly in the cabaret scenes. Gone (at least for the time being) are the wild landscapes and isolated fighters that categorised his earlier works. Here we are merely spectators rather than protagonists drawn under the Diaz spell. At just 215 minutes The Lake is two films in one, the conventional opening giving way to a compelling detective thriller.

But Hermes no ordinary policeman, he soon emerges as the lonely fugitive in a self-inflicted exile, the Stuart case serving merely as a red herring in this existentialist landscape. The lake becomes a labyrinth and the detective is gradually swallowed up in a timeless vacuum created by Co-Dop Larry Manda. Diaz again captures the loneliness of his hero, circling the lake and finding nothing but volcano ashes. Hermes is clearly in need of help, and here we are invited to experience the savage jungle of his anguish – detective story or not – in this shortish feature (by Diaz standards!).

Lengthwise, there’s good news for diehard Diaz fans desperate to disappear into his lengthy epics: a twelve hour feature is now in the pipeline. AS

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2023

Bitten (2023) La Morsure | Locarno Film Festival 2023

Dir/Wr: Roman de Saint-Blanquat | Cast: Leonie Dahan-Lamort, Lilith Grasmug, Fred Blin, Cyril Metzger | France Horror

French filmmaker Romain de Saint-Blanquat has created an entire universe with his enticing feature debut echoing the style of Jean Rollin’s Le Frisson des Vampires (1971), Suspiria or even Blanche (1971) by Walerian Borowczyk, and complete with a sixties-style soundtrack. Even the actors have evocative names.

This retro vampire fable unfolds in a Catholic convent in 1967 where Françoise (suggestively played by Leonie Dahan-Lamort) is a febrile seventeen-year-old boarder obsessed with morbid thoughts that focus on her own imminent death on the eve of Lent when the spirits will run wild and evil spirits roam free to tempt the unsuspecting.

Convinced she has only one more night on Earth, she escapes the confines of her all-girl dormitory to free herself of this final evening along with her friend Delphine (Lilith Grasmug) and some other friends. The idea is to indulge in gaudy style fancy dress party in an abandoned house deep in the woods where they can ‘live life to the lees’, as Keats put it.

Here Francoise drifts into a bizarre Gothic reverie buoyed by her emotions that play on the subconscious in a realm of the senses teetering on the edge of sanity all the time dicing with danger in her need for cathartic release. There’s a sexual edge to this sortie into the sensual abyss and it comes in the shape of Cyril Metzger’s character who supplies a much needed male element for her to act on as seductress and potentially even succubus – if her fears are realised – in the afterlife. And with this reversal of traditional vampire tropes the film feels refreshingly ‘de nos jours’.

La Morsure may not be totally original in concept but it is certainly an adventurous and enticing giallo-style fantasy and a beguiling addition to the vampire genre. MT

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2023 | CINEASTI DEL PRESENTE

Family Portrait (2023) Locarno Film Festival 2023

Dir/Wri: Lucy Kerr | US Drama

In these unusual times of fake news and false memories, can a photo still be trusted to reflect the truth in capturing a moment in time? This is the question writer director Lucy Kerr ponders in her slim but intriguing feature debut premiering in the Filmmakers of the Present strand at this year’s Locarno International Film Festival.

A relaxed day in the countryside unfolds as an extended family finds themselves gathered together at the start of Covid. The idea to capture the moment in a family portrait gets relaid to the back burner when a mother goes missing and her daughter decides to investigate.

Driven forward by a busy ambient soundscape the bosky opening scene soon gives way to the spacious wooden clad interiors of the Shaker dwelling where a salad lunch is being prepared. The conversation returns to the proposed photo but then a sudden death in the family gives rise to more endless speculation and the portrait is once again forgotten.

Is this family really as contented as they would have us believe. A needling score seems to indicate otherwise as the film moves into more unsettling territory as time and space become one big enigma turning the family portrait into a solemn rite of passage. MT

LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2023

Jour de Fête (1949)

Dir: Jacques Tati | France Comedy

Although the films of Jacques Tati continue to enjoy great esteem and obviously inspired Benny Hill and The Two Ronnies, I must confess to something of a blind spot, admiring the meticulous care that goes into staging his sight gags but not actually finding them terribly funny. (His use of sound is also good, witness the scenes with the wasp.)

Two things in particular set Tati apart from other great screen comics: firstly his great height, since a lot of the humour comes from the contrast of his huge frame straddling his tiny bike.

The other is conceiving his films in colour years ahead of it’s time. In a spirit of national fervour Tati daringly tried to make ‘Jour de Fete’ in a native process; sadly the process promptly went bust and the film had to be released in monochrome (a format which continues be attributed to it in reference books and is how was shown on Talking Pictures) although even then he added details in colour throughout the film on a later reissue. Only after Tati was long death was the colour version restored and the film can finally be seen as it’s creator envisaged it thanks to the miracle of the DVD.

The Oscar (1966) Tribute to Tony Bennett

Dir: Russell Rouse | Cast Stephen Boyd, Tony Bennett, Elke Sommer, Eleanor Parker, Ernest Borgnine | US Drama

On paper this film sounds like the camp classic plenty of reviewers have already described it as; but it outstays it’s welcome, feels like a TV production (although it might have worked better in black & white) and even it’s dialogue worthy of Edward D. Wood Jr. is desperately short on the genuine wit that might have forestalled some of the flack it’s taken over the years.

The surprises start with the mouth-watering title sequence: beginning with the incredible array of guest stars listed, and proceeds through the revelation that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences actually gave special permission for Oscar statuettes to be used in this freak, to the screenplay credit for Harlan Ellison. (It’s based on a novel by Richard Sale, who I’d love to know exactly who he was settling scores with, while plenty of the gems from the dialogue could have been published separately as a book in their own right.) But we never once see Frank Fane on a film set; and it could just as easily be about a politician or a businessmen, and the dialogue does rather labour what a skunk he is.

Many of the supporting performances are as good as you would expect from the excellent cast of character actors, some of them rather strangely cast in often very minor roles, some of which make more sense when you realise how many of them are former Oscar winners themselves (Ed Begley, Ernest Borgnine, Walter Brennan – who won three! -, Broderick Crawford and James Dunn), while Edith Head was actually nominated for her work on this. Milton Berle gives an excellent straight performance, and among the femmes Jill St.John, Eleanor Parker, Edie Adams and the girl in the green dress shaking her chassis in the opening shot of the Tijuana party sequence all make the most of the little screen time they get.

Aside from James Dunn (an Academy Award winner for ‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn’ whose drinking wrecked his career), the most poignant piece of casting is Peter Lawford, who in 1962 had been brutally cast out of the Rat Pat by Frank Sinatra after Old Blue Eyes suffered a snub by Lawford’s brother-in-law JFK. Sinatra never spoke to him again; which makes this film’s final scene even more sardonically ironic than it already seems. (One of the film’s ‘fictitious’ nominees, Richard Burton, nominated for a Paramount Production called ‘Grapes in Winter’, later suffered a similar disappointment in reality at the 1978 Academy Awards when the Oscar for Best Actor went to “Richard… Dreyfus”.

TONY BENNETT (1926-2023)

Beat the Devil (1953)

Dir: John Huston | Humphrey Bogart, Jennifer Jones, Gina Lollobrigida, Robert Morley, Peter Lorre | US Adventure Drama 89′

This light-hearted rehash of The Maltese Falcon crossed with the Road films was one of two outings (along with The Night of the Iguana) John Huston later thought he should have made in colour.

It affords the not inconsiderable pleasure of seeing a high-powered star and an important director having a little lark (it’s a good ten years in advance of the sort of thing made by the nouvelle vague).

Robert Morley plays the Fat Man, Peter Lorre returns from the earlier film looking very eccentric with his hair bleached white, Jennifer Jones is an absolute revelation as an habitual liar (Bogart just shrugs and says “let’s just say she relies upon her imagination rather that her memory”) while veteran jobbing actor Ivor Barnard has the role of his career as a vicious killer Bogart derisively nicknames ‘The Galloping Major’.

STREAMING ON PLEX and BFI online was

Five Films to look out for at Locarno Film Festival 2023

Delve inside this year’s Locarno International Film Festival line-up and you’ll discover some intriguing feature premieres playing in the Cineasti del Presente, Fuori Concorso and even Piazza Grande sections:

Mimi – The Prince of Darkness (2023): Brando De Sica (Italy)

Curiosity is drawn to Brando De Sica’s macabre-sounding thriller that centres on Mimi, a reclusive teenager who works in a small pizzeria in Naples. A strange rumour has it he was abandoned in childhood due to his deformed feet, now hidden by orthopaedic boots. There’s something of the Diane Arbus to this horror outing from the Rome-born director, writer and sound designer, and we want to know more especially in the light of the caveat: “could upset sensitive viewers” .

FUORI CONCORSO 2023

Cuvari Formule (2023) Dragan Bjelogrlic): (Serbia)

In 1958 during the Cold War, two scientists at the Vinca Institute in Belgrade pit their wits in a race for survival in an edgy sci-fi outing written and directed by Serbia’s best known film director Dragan Bjelogrlic and based on the novel by Goran Milasinovic.

PIAZZA GRANDE 2023

Camping du Lac: Eleonore Saintagnan (2023) (Belgium)

When Eleonore’s car breaks down in the middle of rural Brittany she rents a bungalow and becomes enveloped in a strange lakeside fantasy world as the past and present fuse in this magical drama from this first time Belgian filmmaker.

CONCORSO CINEASTI DEL PRESENTE 2023

Continent Magnétique (2023): Luc Jacquet (France)

The few thousand kilometres that separate Patagonia to the South Pole provide a fascinating and hypnotic journey for explorers. Some even speak of an addiction to “the Antarctic bite” but don’t translate this into to French. The March of the Penguins director Luc Jacquet has been experiencing the phenomenon for 30 years. This time, he returns for a visually-striking adventure that somehow feels like a final journey to a vanishing continent and its inhabitants. MT

PIAZZA GRANDE 2023

What Remains (2022): Ran Huang (UK)

British-educated Chinese filmmaker Ran Huang’s makes his feature debut with this 1990s set psychological thriller that unfolds in a Finnish psychiatric hospital where a therapist (Andrea Riseborough) and a policeman (Stellen Skarsgard) slowly fall under the spell of one of their patients who confesses to a series of grisly murders.

FUORI CONCORSO 2023

LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2-12 AUGUST 2023

Passing of the Third Floor Back (1935)

Dir: Berthold Viertel | UK Drama 90’

Based a story by Jerome K. Jerome, The Passing of the Third Back is a highly theatrical piece that probably marked the apex of the British phase of Conrad Veidt’s career in British films.

Largely seen through the large hungry eyes of Renee Ray, Veidt obviously plays a Christ figure transforming the lives of the rest of the cast which interestingly contains a high proportion of women, notably Mary Clare as the ghastly landlady Beatrix Lehmann, a feline, chain-smoking Miss Kite, and the lovely Anna Lee; while Frank Cellier wheels out his usual venal, clammy-pawed capitalist who serves as Lucifer to Veidt’s Christ. @RichardChatten

Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis (2023)

Dir.: Anton Corbijn; Documentary with Aubrey Powell, Noel Gallagher, Roger Waters, Nick Mason; UK 2022, 101 min.

Cambridge in the early 1960s: four young men set out to make history: Syd Barnett and Roger Waters would found “Pink Floyd”, meanwhile Storm Thorgeson and Aubrey Powell were re-inventing the art of record cover design with Hipgnosis’; an English design duo who created memorable cult classic album sleeves. The images would sear into our collective unconscious as a visual record of the times. Hipgnosis would go on to devise iconic covers for the likes of T. Rex, Black Sabbath, Wishbone Ash, the Alan Parsons Project, Peter Gabriel, Genesis, Yes, AC/D and many more.

First time full-length documentary filmmaker Anton Corbijn has adapted Trish D Chetty’s script chronicling the often wild and chaotic relationship between Storm Thorgeson (nomen est omen) and Aubrey Powell (*1946), the latter contributing much of the film’s material, since “Stormzy” died in 2013. Noel Gallagher, David Gilmour, Jimmy Page, Roger Waters and Nick Mason give their testimony of a ground-breaking relationship.

Back in the day the HQ of “Hipgnosis” in Denmark Street (WC2) had no loo facilities – everyone used the sink, and nobody thought much of it. Then a water pipe burst in the Greek Bookshop on the ground floor below and valuable antiques were severely damaged – luckily Storm and Aubrey had insurance cover. These were just some examples of a time when art got away with blue murder.

Hipgnosis’ first cover work was for “Pink Floyd’s” 1968 album “A Saucerful of Secrets”. From then on the band would headline the Hipgnosis catalogue – together with “Led Zeppelin” . Floyd’s “Atom Heart Mother” soon followed in 1970, that famous cover with “the Cow”, that resisted any attempt to be replaced by its given title. Pink Floyd’s 1973 outing “Dark Side of the Moon”, with the famous triangle glowing in a dark SF world, was so far the most ambitious attempt to elevate cover design into an artform in its own right – but it often succeeded in doing much more. Pink Floyd’s “Wish you were Here” (1975) took things a step further, avant-garde, even for those days: Few knew the stuntman risked his life in being set on fire – most people thought it was just a collage.

Hipgnosis’ 1973 cover for Led Zeppelin’s “Houses of the Holy” – featuring naked children climbing on Ulster’s Giant Causeway – would never have got past the censors today. On a more playful note “Look Here (‘10cc’ 1980), pictured a lightly tranquiliised sheep on a psychiatrist’s couch – (under strict medical conditions!).

And talking of our furry friends, Pink Floyd’s “Animals” album cover (1977) featured a pink plastic pig floating over Battersea Power Station. Roger Waters considers pigs to be at the top of the social pecking order, and -in fitting tribute – the porker later broke free and ended up drifting over countryside meadows.

Perhaps much more frightening was Peter Gabriel’s cover for “Scratch” (1978), which showed the artist itching himself out of his cover cage, foreshadowing horror films to come.

When asked about Storm, all interviewed were unanimous “but he was a genius”, although Thorgeson was invariably a procrastinator – always in a bad mood and uncompromising. In 1983 things came to an end even though Peter Christopherson, also from Cambridge, had joined the duo. “Stormzy” never cared much about money, and soon the group turned their talents to producing music videos, Storm thought he was “a Hollywood director with all the money in the world to spend”. But the bank had other ideas after Powell had left. The two didn’t speak to each other for twelve years, much in the same vein as Syd Barnett and his Pink Floyd band members.

DoPs Martyn Breekhulzen and Stuart Luck give life to this tour-de-force of images. And for once, the music takes a back seat. Opening a new Vinyl and reading the lyrics printed inside the cover was a ritual for us back then. Corbijn’s overdose of nostalgia will go down a storm with fans of that magical era. Enlightening, passionate and rather sad. AS

IN CINEMAS FROM 14 JULY 2023

Une Nuit | Strangers by Night (2023)

Dir: Alex Lutz | Cast: Alex Lutz, Karine Viard | France, Drama 90′

Alex Lutz may have had Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise in mind with this chatty drama capturing a brief romantic interlude between two complete strangers who literally bump into each other on a crowded Paris metro.

Conceived by Lutz and his co-star Karine Viard and their co-writer Hadrien Bichet Une Nuit premiered at this year’s Un Certain Regard sidebar and certainly provides food for thought and a few laughs too despite the rather slim storyline that stretches the imagination, to say the least.

The film kicks off with a fierce argument in the underground after one of them complains about the other’s perceived bad manners. Next minute they’re getting on like a house on fire with a steamy session in one of those photo booths that still (thankfully) exists in France.

Karine Viard once again dusts down her comedy talents as the flirty Nathalie, a woman of the world comfortable in her skin and happy to experiment. Lutz plays a slightly younger but still frisky Aymeric. Both have teenage kids and are happily married so this this is clearly just going to be a flash in the pan. The romantic banter is probably best appreciated by a French-speaking audience but the two actors share an easy onscreen chemistry making this an amusing, often touching, little interlude. Paris gets a bit of a look in too as the setting for this cheeky, very French affair. MT

NOW ON RELEASE IN FRANCE and BELGIUM

Dawn of a New Day (1964) Youssef Chahine Season

Dir: Youssef Chahine | Drama, Egypt

Dawn of a New Day has been described as Sirkian. In reality this glossy sixties colour moral tale bears a stronger resemblance to Antonioni; while the cast of overdressed, big-haired women foreshadow Almodovar, the backdrop here is Cairo rather than Buenos Aires.

Stage star Sanaa Gamil is a formidable protagonist, unhappily married to an indolent mercenary husband – played by director Chahine himself – who, it is suggested, forced the 40 year-old into an abortion that plainly leaves a huge hole in her heart, filled by an affair with a 22 year-old lad.

This moral tale makes no bones about her selfishness and venality, Chahine’s much-vaunted social conscience is implied by the offhand way she treats her servants in a parable that leaves us with a hopeful message: each day brings a new dawn, so never lose faith in the future. @Richard Chatten

Drama & Desire: The Films of Youssef Chahine – BFI Southbank season

And Then Come the Nightjars (2023)

Dir: Paul Robinson | Cast: David Fielder, Nigel Hastings | UK Drama 80′

Farm animals are having a tough time at the moment and especially dairy cows, blamed for raising the levels of methane and killing random walkers straying onto their territory when all they want to do is moo and chew in peace. But this is nothing compared to twenty years ago when the bovine population was decimated by foot and mouth disease and millions of livestock were systematically and often brutally slaughtered to control the outbreak.

This film version of Bea Roberts’ award-winning play takes place on a south Devon farm during that fateful epizootic of 2001. And although the narrative is rather slim, the summery English countryside sees the story soar above its stage origins in a colourful and genuinely moving look at male friendship with the original cast of Nigel Hastings and David Fielder terrific as the unlikely couple thrown together in crisis.

The last episode of foot and mouth disease occurred over twenty years ago but those TV images of livestock being incinerated in vast fires all over the countryside are still haunting with the farming community bearing the brunt of the crisis, psychologically and in their pockets.

Seasoned farmer Michael (Fielder) really brings all this home to us as a recent widower who had become fiercely attached to his small herd of dairy cows, naming them after members of the royal family. And we really feel for him and his animals with the demise of dairy farming threatening to be a frightening possibility: “there have cows on this farm for over 200 years and now there’s nothing” he complains bitterly.

Vet and close friend Jeffrey (Hastings) offers to help with the government enforced slaughter, ensuring humane methods, but Micheal is inconsolable and furious at this intrusion into his personal property, threatening to blow the men from the ministry away with a two-barrelled shot gun in scenes that are both pitiful and tragic (we see the flames, but not the cows in John Craine’s clever cinematography). Jeffrey’s life is not without its marital complications bringing these two lonely men closer in the absence of women. And Then Comes the Nightjars serves both as a touching tribute to that terrible time and to male friendship.

25 & 26 August | Chichester Film Festival | IN CINEMAS FROM 1 SEPTEMBER 2023

https://youtu.be/AO1gRxZqx9Y

Fantastic Machine (2023)

Dir.: Axel Donielson, Maximilien von Aertryck; Documentary Sweden/Denmark 2023, 88 min.

‘An image tells a thousand words’

A potted history of the camera – from the early nineteenth century to the present day – provides compulsive viewing in this new documentary from Axel Donielson and Maximilien von Aertryck.

Apparently King Edward VII, when watching his own coronation re-staged by film pioneer Georges Melies in a Paris studio, exclaimed “What a fantastic machine” in his wonderment of a gadget which would transform public and private life forever.

The first time feature directors have plundered the archives and uncovered a wealth of material from the clips and sources – as a bonus, they are also preparing a book version which will serve as a companion piece to the documentary – promising additional, previously unseen material into the bargain.

The opening shows people in a shopping centre looking in astonishment at the ‘Camera Obscura’ images, forgetting they have far more sophisticated equipment in their own pockets. The stream of images, from Muybridge to Logan Paul; Melies sensational early shorts to “Breaking Bad” Fantastic Machine is a film about film and our obsession with recording what we see. It also tells the story of how technology changed the planet.

Back in the day, Melies’ footage of trains shocked audiences so much they fled the cinema in horror. There are oddities on show too, and breathtaking examples throughout that beggar belief: A very cheerful Leni Riefenstahl, looking back with nostalgia at a flatbed editing machine, ignores her past and her work and pretends there is no representation in any of her films.

Fantastic Machine shows us the first intercontinental broadcast and the response it got from an audience in Wisconsin. There are examples of how photography eventually came alive with the moving image, and the first examples of the ‘peep show’ that would lead, in time, to ‘blue movies’. Yes, now that’s all on the internet for free.

The advent of TV was a major step forward, and with it the commercials that now seem to rule the world. But early TV was also a means of gaining insight and education in the “Open University” at least for the middle-classes, who were upwardly mobile during the 1960s. TV Commercials or ‘adverts’ soon found their way from the big box in the living room to the mobiles in our pockets, leading us persuasively by the nose to the goods we think we need with algorithms to find a target audience.

You Tube has now created a new audience, and a set of new age entrepreneurs: The phenomenon has spawned a legion of teen millionaires all under the age of eighteen. On a darker note, we have to thank the cameramen who risk their lives in war zones, and those who took images of liberated concentration camp victims, “so that nobody can say that it did not happen”. The directors strike a note of caution when it comes to fake news, urging us to think before we act. Seeing is not always believing, and can be deceptive.

Fantastic Machine is certainly worth a second viewing. Apart from being a treasure trove of information, it never takes itself too seriously with a welcome dash of humour, and a non-judgemental approach at all times. AS

IN UK CINEMAS FROM 19 APRIL 2024

Locarno Film Festival 2023

The Locarno International Film Festival director artistic director Giona Nazzaro today unveiled his eclectic mix of films for the 76th Locarno Film Festival which runs from 2 until 12 August 2023 in its luxurious lakeside location. Locarno is known for its edgy profile and this year will be no different: Films by established auteurs: Lav Diaz, Quentin Dupieux and Ken Loach will screen alongside an inventive array of undiscovered newcomers in a selection that embraces traditional stories and more experimental and avant-garde fare.

Locarno’s main Piazza Grande section offers a chance to catch up on this year’s festival hits including Cannes Palme d’Or winner Anatomy of a Fall from French director Justine Triet starring Sandra Hüller; Ken Loach’s latest Cannes feature, The Old Oak; Noora Niasari’s Sundance audience award winner Shayda; and a new eco-documentary from March of the Penguins‘ filmmaker Luc Jacquet set in Antarctica.

Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude is back in the Concorso internazionale with his latest drama Do Not Expect Too Much of the End of the World and Quentin Dupieux brings his wacky brand of humour with Yannik a follow up to Smoking Causes Coughing, starring Blanche Garden and Pio Marmai. One of the most prolific auteurs of today Lav Diaz has yet another a new film for the competition Essential Truths of the Lake.

Two times Oscar winner Cate Blanchett will also be on the Piazza Grande, Europe’s largest outdoor screening space, along with Oscar-nominated British actor Riz Ahmed (Sound of Metal) who will be presented with this year’s with Locarno’s Excellence Award Davide Campari. And Harmony Korine (Spring Breakers) will receive the 2023 Pardo d’Honore

The 2023 Locarno International Film Festival runs from August 2 to 12 with the following line-up

Piazza Grande Programme

Anatomy of a Fall, director: Justine Triet
Magnetic Continent, director: Luc Jacquet
Guardians of the Formula, director: Dragan Bjelogrlić
Dammi, director: Yann Mounir Demange
Falling Stars, directors: Richard Karpala, Gabriel Bienczycki
The Falling Star, directors: Fiona Gordon, Dominique Abel
La Bella Estate, director: Laura Luchetti
City of Women (1980), director: Federico Fellini
La Paloma (1974) director: Daniel Schmid
La Voie Royale, director: Frédéric Mermoud
Smugglers, director: RYOO Seung-wan
The Tragedy of Othello by W. Shakespeare, director: Edoardo Leo
Première Affaire, director: Victoria Musiedlak
Shayda, director: Noora Niasari
The Old Oak, director: Ken Loach
Theater Camp, directors: Molly Gordon, Nick Lieberman

Concorso Internazionale Program

Animal, director: Sofia Exarchou
Home, director: Leonor Teles
El Auge del Humano 3, director: Eduardo Williams
Essential Truths of the Lake, director: Lav Diaz
The Permanent Picture, director: Laura Ferrés
Lousy Carter, director: Bob Byington
Manga D’Terra, director: Basil Da Cunha
Critical Zone, director: Ali Ahmadzadeh
The Invisible Fight, director: Rainer Sarnet
Do Not Expect Too Much of the End of the World, director: Radu Jude
Nuit Obscure – Au Revoir Ici, N’importe Où, director: Sylvain George
Patagonia, director: Simone Bozzelli
Rossosperanza, director: Annarita Zambrano
Stepne, director: Maryna Vroda
Sweet Dreams, director: Ena Sendijarević
The Vanishing Soldier, director: Dani Rosenberg
Yannick, director: Quentin Dupieux

Concorso Cineasti Del Presente Program

Camping du Lac, director: Eléonore Saintagnan
Ein Schöner Ort, director: Katharina Huber
Excursion, director: Una Gunjak
Family Portrait, director: Lucy Kerr
Dreaming & Dying, director: Nelson Yeo
La Morsure, director: Romain de Saint-Blanquat
Negu Hurbilak, director: Colectivo Negu
On the Go, directors: María Gisèle Royo, Julia de Castro
Rapture, director: Dominic Sangma
Rivière, director: Hugues Hariche
Todos los Incendios, director: Mauricio Calderón Rico
Touched, director: Claudia Rorarius
Und dass man ohne Täuschung zu leben vermag, director: Katharina Lüdin
Whispers of Fire & Water, director: Lubdhak Chatterjee
West Border, director: Yan Luo

LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2-12 AUGUST 2023

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023)

Dir: Christopher McQuarrie | Cast: Rebecca Ferguson, Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Pom Klementieff, Vanessa Kirby, Simon Pegg, Esai Morales, Indira Varma, Mark Gatiss | US Actioner 163′

If you dreaded the phrase ‘to be continued’ at the end of an episode of the ‘X Files’, the words ‘Part One’ on the seventh and newest instalment of the Mission Impossible franchise may have an ominous ring but this only adds to the anticipation in this latest outing. And you certainly get your money’s worth on this peripatetic romp through Europe in search of a jewelled key to open who knows what: Tom Cruise (at 61 – occasionally raddled but reassuringly on form) pits his wits against a venal antihero Gabriel (Esai Morales), and scenery to die for – not to mention the spectacular stunts (Rebecca Ferguson performed her own after months of training).

The latest adventure sees Ethan Hunt (Cruise) and his IMF team embarking on their most dangerous mission yet: To track down a terrifying new entity that could signal the end of the world should it fall into the wrong hands. At the same time dark forces from Ethan’s past threaten to close in unleashing this deadly race around the globe. In the face of this mysterious, omnipotent enemy Ethan is forced to accept that nothing is more important than his mission, not even the lives of those he cares for most (yes there’s romance too!).

And this latest Mission certainly delivers the goods, there are plenty of laughs (most of them I hope intentional, courtesy of Simon Pegg), the enormous budget is well-used with spectacular set pieces and an ingenious script from McQuarrie and his co-writer Erik Jendresen (based on the Bruce Geller TV series). There two terrific scenes employing Venice as a back drop, there’s an incredible climax involving a locomotive plunging off a bridge, and amidst all that testosterone boasts a fearsome foursome of femmes fatales. @Richard Chatten

Just the Two of Us (2023)

Dir: Valerie Donzelli | Cast: Virginie Efira, Melville Poupaud | France, drama 110′

When a woman reconnects with a guy she once knew sparks fly and a romance catches fire in this intense thriller from French director Valerie Donzelli

Starring Virginie Efira and Melville Poupaud this Cannes 2023 premiere is based on Eric Reinhardt’s award-winning novel Amour et les Forets and written for the screen by Donzelli and Audrey Diwan. The love affair between teacher Blanche (Efira) and urbane banker Gregoire (Poupaud) moves swiftly from sexual attraction to pregnancy and marriage. But we sense from the outset that something is wrong and alarm bells soon ring loudly when Gregoire introduces his new girlfriend as his ‘wife’ to complete strangers. Soon the couple are celebrating a move from Blanche’s family home in Normandy to a spacious 1960s style house in the eastern city of Metz. Later Blanche will discover that Gregoire engineered the move to separate his new wife from her twin sister (also played by Efira, wearing a wig) and her mother in an attempt to isolate her so he can dominate the relationship.

And once the champagne glasses are put away Gregoire’s controlling personality comes to the fore reducing Blanche, a confident and outgoing woman, to a near nervous wreck. So not a new idea but a tense and at times uncomfortable film made all the more so by stunning performances from two actors at the top of their game.

A clever narrative device has Blanche relating the unfolding events to her lawyer, played by Dominique Reymond in a commanding turn, and this gives the film an authentic grounding making it feel all the more chilling as a day to day reality for many women today subjected to domestic violence from their psychologically disturbed partners whose pattern of behaviour is always charming and persuasive at the outset known as ‘love-bombing’ in popular parlance. Blanche also makes the tragic mistake of seeking a release in an online dating site rather than confronting Gregoire and forcing him to seek professional help. MT

NOW ON RELEASE IN FRANCE | CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2023

Afire (2023)

Dir.: Christian Petzold; Cast: Thomas Schubert, Paula Beer, Langston Uibel, Enno Trebs, Paula Beer. Matthias Brandt; Germany 2023, 103 min.

German writer/director Christian Petzold (*1960) won the Grand Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival 2023 in for Afire, his tenth feature film. This award is well earned: Petzold can be called the chronicler of recent German history, illuminating past and not so present transgressions. Hot on the heels of Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog he is the only German director regularly featuring at international festivals. His minimalist style always cuts to the chase with a lean but substantial body of film.

Petzold’s first feature Innere Sicherheite/The State I’m In (2000) set the standard for what would follow: Petzold tells the story of a teenager whose desperate need for freedom jeopardises the security of her terrorist parents who have so far successfully avoided capture. In the 2001 he began what was to be an enduring collaboration with Nina Hoss and continued with FIPRESCI prize winner Wolfsburg (2003) and this continued with Yella (2007) and Jerichow (2008). In Barbara (2012) Petzold investigates Germany’s immediate 1945 past, and Transit (2018), an adaption of the Anna Seeghers’ novel of the same name, featuring the life of German immigrants during the first years of the Nazi regime, saw him replacing Hoss with Paul Baer who won the Best Actor prize in Berlin for Undine (2020).

Afire is the second part of a trilogy about the artist in society in Germany. Set in an imagined time span after the fall of the wall in the advent of the computer age, this is a feature nonetheless dominated by human emotions with a dose of dark humour .

On the way to a summer getaway on the Baltic Coast friends Leon (Schubert) and Felix (Uibel) are waylaid when their car breaks down. Then Felix’s mother, the owner, has also promised Nadja (Beer), a post graduate student, one of the rooms. Nadja has a boyfriend, coastguard Devid (Trebs), and Felix and Leon have to listen to the couple’s lovemaking. This is quickly reversed, with Nadja and Leon having to listen to Devid and Felix getting it on.

Leon, meanwhile has just finished writing a second-rate novel and is behaving like a stroppy teenager, secretly in love with Nadja. Leon’s editor Helmut (Brandt) turns up and tempers flare, with catastrophic results.

All this fits into Petzold’s general overview of German men who still seem better at living than dying. Helmut discusses the director’s pet theme with Heinrich Heine’s poem “The Asra”.

DoP Hans Fromm puts a documentary spin on his images, catching the protagonists like fish in a deadly net. Schubert simmers quietly but effectively as the spoilt child would be author, and Beer does her best with a tricky role. But true to Heine himself, Petzold stays the course, and no one’s prepared for what’s in store.

Afire might not be Petzold’s greatest achievement, but he once again proves to be head and shoulders above his German peers. This is another sad tract on Germany’s guilt complex – played out by a new generation of males. AS

IN CINEMAS and ON CURZON HOME CINEMA from 25 AUGUST 2023

The Damned Don’t Cry (2023)

Dir.: Fyzal Boulifa; Cast: Aicha Tebbae, Abdullah El Hajjouji, Antoine Reinartz; France/Belgium/Morocco 2022, 110 min.

A mother and son embark on an eventful odyssey across Morocco in this daring and strikingly beautiful sophomore feature from award-winning British-Moroccan writer/director Fyzal Boulifa (Lynn + Lucy).

Fatima-Zahra (Tebbae) is a 43-year-old widow and extremely alluring, although rather naive: dressing provocatively she tries to seduce a much younger man in a secluded spot near Tangier beach and is robbed off her jewellery. Her relationship with her 16-year-old son Selim (Hajjouji) swings between over-protectiveness and harsh criticism: the two are interdependent and neither of them has really grown up.

From a squalid studio accommodation in town the odd couple hitchhike a lift to relatives in the country. But they are not welcome in the midst of preparations for a wedding. We also learn that Fatima has a few skeletons in the cupboard: ostracised by local society after being raped in her twenties – Selim was the offspring – she was forced into sex work to support her son.

Selim is eager to get back to Tangier and break free from his mother’s influence. Abdoul, a shady character, offers him a job on a building site, but really lines him up for sex with Sebastien (Reinartz), a wealthy Frenchman. The two hit it off to Salim’s surprise, and he quite takes to Sebastien who later apologises to him. The Frenchman then employs Selim on a regular basis, and Fatima tells her son she is working for a well-known brand in the fashion industry – in reality she is working for a minimum wage in a sweatshop.

Fatima meets a bus driver who wants to take her on as his second wife, his existing spouse suffering from mental problems. But Selim sabotages the planned marriage, telling the husband-to be the truth about his mother. When Sebastien’s partner from Paris arrives, Selim reacts with extreme jealousy and channelling his anger into criminal behaviour that will inadvertently separate him from his mother for the first time.

DoP Caroline Champetier follows the mother and son across the Moroccan landscape and the imposing urban backdrop of Tangier: her handheld shots scope out narrow alleys, and sordid domestic interiors that contrast with Fatima’s imaginative embellishment of reality. Tebbae and Hajjouji are brilliant as the destructive couple, driving each other further and further into the quicksand of social deprivation. A tight script helps, and Boulifa uses all his running time to push the narrative forward. An award-winning first film is always a difficult act to follow but this talented filmmaker triumphs with an even more impressive second feature. AS

IN CINEMAS AND ON CURZON HOME CINEMA | 7 JULY 2023

The Lost Children (2023) Karlovy Vary 2023

Dir/Wri: Michele Jacob | Cast: Iris Mirzabekiantz, Liocha Mirzabekiantz, Lois Litt Magis, Lohen Van Houtte, Belgium, Fantasy Drama 82′

An unexpected disappearance is at the heart of this edgy psychological drama from Belgian director and screenwriter Michele Jacob.

Lost Children sees ten-year-old Audrey (Iris Mirzabekiantz) and her three siblings suddenly abandoned by their father – with no explanation – and forced to fend for themselves in their summer holiday hideaway deep in the woods.

In this first full length feature Jacob delves into the world of fantasy, betrayal and self-doubt as the four kids are initially thrilled at the prospect of exploring this bosky backwater free from parental control, but soon grow anxious as a hierarchy develops along the lines the ‘Animal Farm’, with Audrey naturally taking the lead as she assumes responsibilities far beyond her years.

Lost Children is not just a rites of passage story but a mature and inventive attempt to explore how kids process trauma by escaping into their imagination in order to deal with a crisis – and this can often be the making of them. Left to their own devices the children risk falling prey to their worst fears as a sinister ambiance permeates their surroundings enhanced by Andreas Moulin’s unsettling soundscape.

Here the trauma takes the form of a monster that haunts their subconscious but feels entirely palpable and visible as reality and fantasy merge in Nastasja Saerens’ bold visuals. And when night falls the forest seems to close in on them with a strange monster looming out of the darkness and weird noises echoing through the forest as events turn surreal. Shot on shoestring but none this worse for it, this slim but affective horror film marks Jacob out as an impressive talent in the making. MT

KARLOVY VARY | JUNE 30 – JULY 8 2023 | PROXIMA STRAND

Red Rooms (2023)

Dir: Pascal Plante | Cast: Juliette Gariépy, Laurie Babin, Elisabeth Lucas, Maxwell McCabe Lokos | Thriller Canada

Canadian writer director Pascal Plante offers a cold-eyed look at the dangers of hybristophilia in this striking arthouse thriller that shares the same airless chill as the work of fellow Canadian David Cronenberg, but somehow lacks the maestro’s resonance.

Sexual obsession with criminal offenders is a growing phenomenon particularly amongst women. From Ted Bundy to Charles Manson, serial killers have always had their female acolytes and here Plante focusses on the psychological rather than the physical in a hard-egded character study cum courtroom drama.

In a wintery Montreal aloof photographic model Kelly-Anne (Gariépy) surfs the internet’s illicit ‘red rooms’ and has become strangely fascinated by brutal child murderer Ludovic Chevalier (Lokos) whose grisly crimes are detailed in an informative opening scene by the prosecution barrister (a brilliant Natalie Tannous). The quiet almost unassuming murderer exudes a strange air of vulnerability, locked in his courtroom cage. In contrast Kelly-Anne is distant and detached in all her dealings and remains an impenetrable character throughout, apparently unmoved by the desperate pleas for help from one of the mother’s affected when the gruesome photos of the murders are revealed.

Kelly is gradually drawn under Chevalier’s spell attending every single court hearing in the hope of attracting his attention, even sleeping overnight outside the courtrooms despite the freezing weather. Here she meets a homeless drifter (Babin) and offers her board and lodging. The two form an unlikely bond as the enigmatic storyline drifts between reality and fantasy in a bracing psychodrama that explores female friendship, media manipulation, and probes the hitherto undiscovered recesses of the human mind and its capacity for both evil and benevolence. MT

NOW IN UK CINEMAS FROM 6 SEPTEMER 2024 | KARLOVY VARY 2023 | CRYSTAL GLOBE COMPETITION.

Dancing on the Edge of a Volcano (2023) Karlovy Vary 2023 Special – Jury Mention

Dir: Cyril Aris | Doc. 87′

Graceful and elegant, a woman walks through the streets of Beirut. Despite her refined manners she feels driven to kill those responsible for the destruction of her city. The Paris of the Middle East is scarred and ruined. Yet again.

This film within a film serves both as an intensely personal record of the ongoing tragedy and a love letter to a cherished homeland in the wake of recent events that have left the country in total chaos unable to recover due to repetitive trauma.

Lebanese director and writer Cyril Aris sets his film against the backdrop of an ongoing film production initiated by some of his close friends who we see debating how to approach their story in the light of the catastrophic explosion that rocked the Port of Beirut on August 4, 2020 along with the pandemic. These events have not only delayed filming but changed everyone’s lives. Once again. But to abandon the project would be to admit defeat.

Friends and colleagues gather round an alfresco table to workshop their proposed film with the working title of Costa Brava. It follows the Badri family – parents and two girls and their grandmother – who have decided to leave Beirut to escape pollution and corruption. The kicker is a government decision to locate a landfill site right next to their property. The idea is to start afresh and build a sustainable life in harmony with nature.

Meanwhile widespread protests break out in the streets. People of all classes are raging against a state system that has trapped everyone with a corrupt government taking them all hostage in their own homes. It is claimed the explosion was caused by illegally stored material imported by Syrians who intended to use it to assist their own insurrection.

But should these Lebanese remain in their beloved capital city, even at the expense of human dignity that drives them into an impractical backwater where their lives and even their finances are frozen by the government, making escape a near impossibility. Or should they follow the words of the Lebanese poet Nadia Tueni: “I choose the sea in spite of shipwrecks”? MT

KARLOVY VARY FILM FESTIVAL 2023 | CRYSTAL GLOBE SPECIAL JURY MENTION

Arsenie: An Amazing Afterlife (2023) Karlovy Vary 2023

Dir: Alexandru Solomon | Doc Romania/Lux 96′

Arsenie Boca, a revered priest, theologian and mystic is the subject of this deep dive into faith and religious persecution from Romanian filmmaker Alexandru Solomon.

Since the advent of Jesus Christ, humanity has always been fascinated by visionary miracle makers holding them out to represent the holy grail in our everlasting search for the meaning of life.

Zian Boca, born in 1910 in Hunedoara, Romania, followed an orthodox religious path travelling to the legendary Mount Athos for spiritual training, before being ordained a deacon in 1935 and subsequently the abbot of Brancoveanu Monastery five years later, despite persecution by the communist regime, the holy man has been hailed as a saint by his many followers although he has yet to be canonized.

The film, the latest outing from seasoned cinematographer and director, Solomon, who started making documentaries in 1993, is composed of a series of re-enactments of Boca’s life and provides not only a vibrant insight into his work as a visionary and spiritual leader but also serves to reflect the state of contemporary society as believers desperately search for answers and cling onto the concept of miracles to sublimate them into a more edifying and meaningful existence in this increasingly troubled and perilous world. A film full of hope and insight that never takes itself too seriously in capturing the essence of this inspirational philosopher, scholar and cleric. MT

KARLOVY VARY FILM FESTIVAL | PROXIMA STRAND 2023

The Bohemian (2022)

Dir: Petr Vaclav. Czechia/Italy/Slovakia. 2022. 140 mins | Cast: Vojtěch Dyk, Barbara Ronchi, Elena Radonicich, Lana Vlady

Baroque music is at the core of this sweepingly romantic classically styled costume drama that reimagines the life and loves of a little known Czech composer who even tutored Mozart in 18th century Italy.

Il Boemo, the Czech entry for the Academy Awards, makes fabulous use of the magical allure of its sumptuous Italian settings to tell a tale of doomed love affairs and the determination to overcome disappointment and succeed in the highly competitive arena of classical music. But behind this gilded cage lurks a squalid world of decadence and debauchery and Czech writer director Petr Vaclav reveals both sides of the palcoscenico in a drama smouldering with illicit sexual intrigue but bolstered by a bold story and prodigious musical interludes.

The film opens in 1781 as Josef Myslivecek (b,1737) is on his death bed, poverty stricken and ravaged by syphilis, his deformity hidden by a Venetian mask. Years earlier, in 1765, he has arrived in Venice from a native Prague to seek his fortune as a musician and composer. But romance soon intervenes as Josef makes his way amongst the ‘beau monde’ and the urbane musician finds himself drawn into a love triangle with his young pupil, a well-born cellist who loses her virginity to him with disastrous consequences, and an aristocratic woman (Radonicich) whose libidinous charms capture Josef’s imagination as his reputation blossoms in all directions, and not just musically.

An exciting opportunity then takes Josef to Naples where his operas, written but hitherto unperformed, get a welcome airing. Here, as opera maestro, he enjoys a brief affair with real life diva Caterina Gabrielli (Barbara Ronchi) who agrees to sing in his debut opera but then loses her cool in a tense first night showdown in front of the fish-obsessed King of Naples (Ciccariello) who has a few unexpected habits up his sleeve. Invitations to lead illustrious orchestras soon flow including one sojourn that sees him fall for a married pianist in an affair that will prove his undoing.

Moving peripatetically around Europe, Josef finds himself back in Prague in 1768 meeting the child prodigy Mozart and instructing the precocious pianist in the rudiments of music with some new compositions which the boy picks up and embellishes like a pro in the film’s most amusing scene.

Tall, elegant and extremely graceful, Czech actor Vojtěch Dyko makes for a convincing maestro and he gives a sympathetic performance in the title role, although his pop star credentials often feel larger than life in the context of the film’s theme of struggling artist desperate for success. The divas are refreshingly idiosyncratic, and it works to the film’s advantage that Vaclav has cast delicately beguiling actors voiced by real opera singers including the famous Simona Saturova (La Gabrielli).

Sadly, Josef falls victim to his carnal desires that often take precedence to his musical career, and this lack of perseverance and single-minded commitment is ultimately the key to his lack of endurance. Il Boemo is visually sumptuous glowing in candlelit interiors and lush landscapes, Vaclav does not stint on the music side of things with some rousing operatic episodes courtesy of contemporary Czech conductor and harpsichordist Vaclav Luks who has revived interest in his fellow countryman. This makes Il Boemo all the more enjoyable adding ballast and authenticity to the tragic story of a talented composer who somehow fell by the wayside in the chronicles of musical history. MT

AVAILABLE NATIONWIDE ON DIGITAL
Tuesday, July 30

Asteroid City (2023)

Dir: Wes Anderson. Starring: Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Liev Schreiber, Hope Davis, Stephen Park, Rupert Friend, Maya Hawke, Steve Carell, Matt Dillon, Hong Chau, Willem Dafoe, Margot Robbie, Tony Revolori, Jake Ryan, Jeff Goldblum | US Comedy drama

Wes Anderson has a dedicated following but even diehard fans were put off by his 2021 film The French Dispatch, with its over-talky, complicated structure. In contrast Asteroid City is so exuberant, nostalgic and lovely to look at the sheer dynamism is sure to endear it to even Anderson sceptics although some complained, at the Cannes press screening, it lacked an ‘involving storyline’. This is a movie that is constantly on the move with Anderson’s regular A-list cast and candy-coloured eye-popping visuals that just make you gawp in amazement for two hours in a film about a play within a TV show .

Once again the narrative unfolds through multiple framing devices with Bryan Cranston introducing the show in a black and white opening scene where we meet Conrad Earp. (Norton) He is the playwright of the 1950s story we are about to watch which then bursts on the screen in a dazzling blast of technicolour transporting us to the mythical desert location of Asteroid City famous for its massive meteor crater and observatory for stargazers eager to see the Milky Way. It’s also a military testing ground for atomic weapons, pioneered by the serene scientist Tilda Swinton. There is a textbook style alien (Jeff Goldblum) whose appearance causes Jeffrey Wright’s army commander to launch an investigation. But Adrien Brody and Willem Dafoe get left on the sidelines in nondescript cameos.

But the film’s focus is Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman), a melancholy, pipe-smoking photographer and recent widower who arrives with his children, and his wife’s ashes, in a retro shooting-break that promptly blows a gasket. Butch mechanic Matt Dillon scratches his head unable to mend the vehicle so Augie asks his father in law Stanley (Tom Hanks) for help, meanwhile falling for Scarlett Johansson’s luminescent but lonely Hollywood star Midge, in scenes that plays out like a psychedelic version of Psycho. The nostalgia comes from the music – Rupert Friend is the crooning cowboy – the all round aesthetic and the upbeat gaiety that recalls a time when America was great and led the way in all things cutting edge, including scientific breakthroughs and space travel, but still had decency and family values at its heart. MT

NOW ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE

Forever and a Day (1943)

Dirs: Victor Saville, Herbert Wilcox, Cedric Hardwick, Edmund Goulding | UK Drama

A chronicle by RKO of Britain at war from the days of Napoleon to the nights of the Blitz, this super-patriotic compendium production was made at the behest of Sir Cedric Hardwicke to raise funds for his compatriots in the depths of the war who described it as a “patriotic piece to which a multiple of people gave their talents”, Forever and a Day corralled an extraordinary array of expatriate Brits, some long established in Hollywood, ranging from Sir C. Aubrey Smith to Victor McLaglen as a doorkeeper named Archibald and others like Anna Neagle and Jesse Matthews who were just passing through.

Not exactly an entertainment but of definite curiosity value; with a tone that darkens considerably in the scenes with Claude Rains. @RichardChatten

ON TALKING PICTURES TV

Smiling Georgia (2023) Karlovy Vary 2023

Dir.: Luka Beradze; Documentary with Nana Papidze, Lamara Samkharadze, Nodar Labadze, Bezhan Labadze; Georgia/Germany 2020, 61 min.

In his pithy political expose Luka Beradse looks at how leaders lie and mislead voters just to stay in power.

The promise of subsidised dental care was the clincher for many, particularly seniors, in President Saakasvilli’s 2012 campaign spearheaded by a promise to make “Georgia smile”. But the electorate laughed back in his face and the UNM (United National Movement) lost to the coalition of Georgian Dream (GD).

Smiling Georgia offers just one of many examples of political foul play that seems endemic nowadays all over the world. The ruling party’s policies appeared positive, well-intentioned and far-reaching with a focus on agriculture, employment and healthcare. Across the country, dentists had been having a field day removing rotten teeth – and even healthy ones – guaranteeing that state of the art dentures would be fitted shortly after the election. But in the end the older generation bore the brunt of the false promises and were left disgruntled and toothless to boot.

Set between two elections, 2012 and 2020, Beradze’s sardonic social commentary shows how self-styled politicians have lost respect for the electorate and got carried away with their own importance. In the village of “No Name” the first round in 2012 ended with defeat for the ruling UNM President who subsequently fled the country and was arrested for corruption on his return from exile in 2021.

Ironically, the UNM had promised to provide a new set of gnashers for everyone in No Name and the surrounding villages. Alas, UNM lost and the hapless victims spent the next eight years regretting having trusted the powers-that-be, one man even carrying his wife’s used dentures around in a bag in a macabre act of defiance.

2020 saw a re-run of the dental promise strategy, this time with the GD promising to make the UNM’s empty promises a reality. But one of their candidates faired badly in front of the cameras she had hired to showcase her party’s virtues. It emerges that the GD candidate was a bully who had picked the only woman in the village fortunate enough to have her teeth. But the TV stint was a mismanaged fiasco and she ended up storming out of the interview in a huff. We don’t get to find out if she was successful in the 2020 November elections (law suits pending) but the party of the uninformed won the nationwide poll, with the UNM making barely ten percent of the votes.

An epilogue shows elderly farmers chuntering on about their feelings of disappointment in the elected party, while a pig scratches itself on a tree in the background. DoP Lomero Akhvlediani’s handheld camera is a busy witness to this tale of democratic disillusionment. Smiling Georgia maybe brief, at just over an hour, but Beradze puts so much verve and bitter-sweet humour into the free flowing narrative that the result far outweighs many other full-length features bolstered by repetitive footage and forced situational comedy just to make the 90 minute mark. AS

KARLOVY VARY FILM FESTIVAL 2023 | 30 JUNE – 8 JULY 2023

Empty Nets (2023) Karlovy Vary 2023 | Special Jury Prize

Wri/Dir: Behrooz Karamizade | Cast:Hamid Reza Abbasi, Sadaf Asgari, Keyvan Mohamadi, Pantea Panahiha | Germany/Iran Drama

Behrooz Karamizade’s stark feature debut hides a simple truth: being with the one you love shouldn’t be contingent on class, entitlement or money. Such is the case in many traditional societies where marriage is reliant on a dowry, and particularly in Iran that provides the sombre setting for this well-paced and compulsive contemporary thriller.

France’s answer to Pierre Niney, Hamid Reza Abbasi gives a soulful turn as Amir, an unfortunate young man from a poor family background who is madly in love with his upper class sweetheart Narges (Sadaf Asgari) but lacks the financial means to marry her after being fired from his menial job on ethical grounds; and later falls foul of his girlfriend due to her strict moral principles.

As is often the case with Iranian cinema strong writing trumps aesthetic appeal, but Karamizade’s skill in crafting a convincing narrative with authentic characters shines out showing him to be a talent in the making this a well-deserved winner of this year’s Crystal Globe Special Jury Prize.

CRYSTAL GLOBE COMPETITION | SPECIAL JURY PRIZE | Karlovy Vary 2023

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)

Dir: James Mangold | Cast: Harrison Ford, Phoebe Waller Bridge, Karen Allen, Mads Mikkelsen, Antonio Banderas, Toby Jones | US Action drama 154’

Admirers of Indiana Jones won’t be disappointed while those who don’t care won’t be surprised at the film franchise’s latest and probably final instalment. Jez Butterworth’s script sees the veteran archaeologist racing against time to retrieve said ‘dial of destiny’ that can purportedly change the course of history.

Harrison Ford turned 79 during production but wears it very well and much better than Karen Allen and Jonathan Rhys-Davies (whose appearance drew loud applause at tonight’s screening at Leicester Square) and the fact that he’s a wrinkled old codger (visibly rattled when his lecture on archeology is upstaged by the moonshot) makes the stunts all the more impressive; while Phoebe Waller-Bridge looks feisty in jodhpurs astride a motor-byke. She’s a modern heroine with retro appeal.

The conclusion when it finally comes would been quite satisfying if hadn’t taken such a long to get there. @RichardChatten

NOW IN CINEMAS NATIONWIDE

Carmen (2023)

Dir: Benjamin Millepied | Cast: Paul Mescal, Rossy de Palma, Melissa Barrera | Musical Drama 116′

Spectacular to watch with its neon-enfused aesthetic, Benjamin Milllepied’s reimagining of Prosper Merimee’s Andalusian-set romance gets a Mexican makeover, but suffers an emotional bypass in the process.

The enigmatic and strangely un-involving storyline poses more questions than it answers – to those uninitiated with the original – and the gutsy musical interludes scored by breakout composer Nicholas Britell (Succession) feel disconnected from the plot but provide much needed entertainment to carry us through the two hour running time.

Paul Mescal is the star turn and, as ever, a magnetic presence as Aidan, tearing up a treat with his macho vulnerability but seemingly in a different film from the one starring his titular lover (Melissa Barrera) and Rossi de Palma’s Masilda. The opening sequence is one of the strongest and sees Carmen’s fiesty flamenco dancer mother gunned down by a drug gangster while strutting her stuff on a wooden platform in the dazzling deserts of Chihuahua (actually it’s New South Wales). The film returns to this tragedy in repeated flashbacks. Barrera is stunning as Carmen but can’t sing to save her life.

After the shooting Carmen sets fire to her family home and escapes across the border to Texas where she meets ex-marine Mescal who finds himself working with the baddies to pick up illegal migrants. After a brush-up with one of the other patrolman Aidan goes on the run taking the reluctant Carmen with him. And apart from the intoxicating settings he’s the only reason to watch this. MT

NOW NATIONWIDE IN THE UK AND FRANCE

Cinnamon (2023) Tribeca 2023

Dir: Bryian Keith Montgomery | Cast: Hailey Kilgore, David Iacono | US Thriller

Cinnamon, written directed and produced by Bryian Keith Montgomery Jr., is a crime thriller that purports to refresh the blaxploitation subgenre of the early 1970s best represented by cult outings such as Shaft, Super Fly, Sheba Baby etc but feels underpowered alongside these great classics.

The genre has been very much alive and kicking in the interim years with Quentin Tarantino’s fare most notable Django Unchained, Jackie Brown, Larry Cohen’s Original Gangstas (1996) and most recently the Netflix outing The Harder they Fall starring Idris Elba. The artfully titled Cinnamon is a pale rider in comparison to those spunky affairs, and even lacks the idiosyncratic soundtracks that really set them on fire, although Kilgore has a great voice and an appealing screen presence. She plays a budding young singer aiming for the stars while working nine to five in a petrol station. Along comes a suave but dodgy criminal (David Iacono) and the two hatch a plan to make it big in the music business. But best laid plans are constantly derailed. Pam Grier adds class to the mix but despite some strong performance this doesn’t quite cut the mustard. MT

TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL 2023

Twilight Women (1952)

Dir: Gordon Parry | Cast: Freda Jackson, Rene Ray, Lois Maxwell, Laurence Harvey | UK Crime Drama 89’

Unmarried nightclub singer, Vivanne Bruce, is suddenly along when her lover, Jerry Nolan, is arrested for murder. Searching for a place to live she eventually finds a room in a boarding-house run by the ruthless “Nellie” Alistair, who has an ulterior motive for offering unmarried mothers bed and board.

Britain’s first ‘X’ feature was this unrelenting slice of life with photography and production design that makes it resemble a silent German kammerspiele in which the unwed mothers of the title are first introduced in a series of close ups that resemble a series of mugshots.

The men are hardly seen (where was Maxwell Reed on the day they shot it?) with the egregious exception of Laurence Harvey, first seen as a crooner (obviously dubbed) in a nightclub.

Freda Jackson reprises her baby-farmer from No Room at the Inn, again answering to the appellation ‘Mrs’ although we never actually see her husband. @RichardChatten

NOW ON PRIME VIDEO

Smoking Tigers (2023) TriBeCa Film Festival 2023

Dir/Wri: So Young Shelly Yo | Cast: Abin Andrews, Erin Choi, Erin Yoo, Ji-young Yoo, Jun-ho Jeong, Luke Kim, Paul Syre, Phinehas Yoon, Sook Hyung Yang, Teddy Lee

A Korean-American girl’s fall from grace is artfully captured in this mature and memorable high concept drama that won Best Script at Tribeca 2023 for first time feature director So Young Shelly Yo.

Ji-young Yoo won Best Actress for her nuanced portrayal of Hayoung, a teenager struggling to come to terms with her parent’s divorce and its affect on their upmarket lifestyle. A new term at high school among Seoul’s wealthy elite and keeping at eye on her younger sister only adds to the stress. And we feel for her.

Refreshingly Smoking Tigers is not just about poverty, but tells a much more complex and involving often darkly amusing story exploring all the unsettling impacts of divorce, puberty and loss of social status through Hayoung’s tricky journey into adulthood. And the director really knows how to deliver a stunning finale. MT

Best Screenplay in a U.S. Narrative Feature: So Young Shelly Yo for Smoking Tigers, (United States) – World Premiere | TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL 2023

My Name is Alfred Hitchcock (2023)

Dir.: Mark Cousins; mockumentary narrated by Alistair McGowan; UK 2022, 120 min.

My Name is Alfred Hitchcock, by writer/director Mark Cousins (March on Rome), is anything but voiced and directed by the legendary British born director – as claimed at the start of this engaging compendium of Hitchcock facts – but a homage by Cousins, who comes clean at the end but not before two hours of pseudo-introspection by AH have passed. Entertaining as these hours are, in the end Cousins fails to amalgamate the contented pater familias (of wife Alma, daughter and pet dog) with the filmmaker who was perhaps most responsible for creating the “male gaze”, culminating in brutal rape scenes such as those seen in Frenzy (1972).

Captioned into six chapters (Escape, Desire, Loneliness, Time, Fulfilment and Height) ‘Hitchcock’ (an avuncular McGowan with Hitch’s signature East London accent) ponders his career from of a very subjective corner: the director as prime creator in a society that served merely as a backcloth in a world where women are victimised by men, to such a degree that two of his main stars (Annie Ondras’ Alice in Blackmail and Sylvia Sims’ Mrs. Verloc in Sabotage (1936) are forced to kill their torturers, both getting off scot free. Hitchcock’s later films are not only more graphic, they are also voyeuristic, to say the least, culminating in Frenzy.

Yet Cousins fails to explain the filmmaker’s position whilst directing Hollywood’s most glamorous actors of this golden era. “The evil genius” portraits have gone a long way to explain Hitchcock’s ‘dark side’ but Cousins circumvents any reflection on the psychological gap between filmmaker and family man. Only once, near the end – Cousins keeping us guessing in an ambivalent way – does this surface in the Paradine Case (1947): Peck’s lawyer Keane is so devastated by the brutality of his Lordship, the lecherous Judge (Laughton), that he leaves the courtroom after having displayed his passion for his client (Alida Valli). Hitchcock raises the camera to an overhead shot until Peck is diminished into a little boy leaving the classroom after a severe ticking off. Perhaps this is the way Hitchcock felt at end of a day’s shooting

My Name is flawed for obvious reasons, even a late 1960s critique would not have let AH get way with rape and murder, picturing the gruesome deeds with such heightened aesthetics, and leaving the camera to indulge itself in such a gratuitous way. That all said, the film will certainly prove box office catnip as fans and newcomers arrive to lap it all up. AS

ON RELEASE IN CINEMAS FROM 21 JULY 2023

Five (1951)

Dir: Arch Oboler | Cast: William Phipps, Susan Douglas Rubes, James Anderson, Charles Lampkin | US Sci-fi 91’

Arch Oboler’s ‘Five’ marked the original template for the many dramas to depict the aftermath of a nuclear war and you’ve got to hand it to him for not pulling his punches; realistically depicting radiation sickness and with a bleak and uncompromising conclusion.

Based on radio play ‘The Word’ there’s an awful lot of talk, but it consequently also benefits from a skilful use of sound. The film strongly resembles Oboler’s earlier independent production ‘Strange Holiday’ and like that creates a claustrophobic intimate drama despite being set against the backdrop of the wide open spaces.

Oboler was also responsible for the production design, and shows ingenuity in staging the action around the Frank Lloyd Wright guesthouse at his own Malibu ranch. @RichardChatten

NOW ON AMAZON

Karlovy Vary Film Festival 2023

Scottish actor, director and producer Ewan McGregor and Swedish actress Alicia Vikander will be the guests of the first weekend of the 57th Karlovy Vary Festival. Both actors will receive the Karlovy Vary IFF President’s Award and present their latest films.

This year’s edition of the festival will open with Firebrand, with Alicia Vikander leading as Katherine Parr, the only wife who survived Henry VIII and the first woman to publish in the English language.

Ewan McGregor will be there with his latest film You Sing Loud, I Sing Louder he stars alongside his daughter, actress and producer Clara McGregor.

KARLOVY VARY FILM FESTIVAL | 30 JUNE – 8 JULY 2023

Rather (2023) Tribeca Film Festival 2023

Dir: Frank Marshall | US Doc 96′

A new documentary offers a straightforward snapshot of Texan journalist, news anchor and commentator Dan Rather (1931-) who became a revered household name with his spirited and engaging presence on American TV networks during the turbulent years of the 1960s and beyond.

Daniel Irvin Rather has covered virtually every major event in the world for the past 60 years but is also known for ushering in the era of fake news that led to his downfall at the respected CBS network. Rather is also credited at being the first journalist to announce the news of John F Kennedy’s death in 1963 by running with the rumour, ‘based on his instincts’ before it was fully confirmed.

Amongst many other achievements Rather stood out with his impactful style of reporting that bridged the gap between what was really happening on the ground during the Vietnam war, and the sentiment presented back home. The film outlines his fall from grace for airing documents, during a CBS broadcast in the run up to the 2004 presidential election, suggesting that George W Bush had a sketchy military record during the 1970s. The issue is still mired in controversy to this day.

Coming across as a serious man of integrity as he faces the camera as an engaging raconteur, at 91, without guile or glibness, the film pictures him from all perspectives: dutiful son, dogged marine recruit, devoted husband, deeply religious Texan. And this rounded impression is echoed by his daughter Robin who offers her admiration for a loving father who also was deeply committed to his cause. Talking heads-wise we also hear from Susan Zirinsky, his longtime colleague at CBS News, who sees him from a career angle, and not always in glowing terms.

Brimming with spectacular archive footage, news bulletins and interviews, the film darts around chronologically charting a career that began on Texas radio and graduated to TV News slots, where Rather made a name for himself covering Hurricane Carla, the Civil Rights Movement, the J F Kennedy Assassination, Watergate and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The wars in Vietnam, the Gulf and Afghanistan saw him on the battlefield dodging the bullets, and sending serial postcards back home to his family with the simple, repetitive message: “War is Hell”. At CBS and on 60 Minutes he was a revered anchor and is now prolific on Twitter appealing to a younger generation with his recalcitrant outbursts and on his own website News and Guts.

“Can you still make a difference as a journalist” Rather said at the Texas-based Moody College of Communication in 2009. “Yes, if you don’t quit”. This is a clear-eyed, informative film that refuses to dig the dirt on Dan. That’s for another documentary. MT

TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL | NEW YORK 7-18 JUNE 2023

House of Wax (1953) Bfi Film on Film 2023

Dir: Andre de Toth | Cast: Vincent Price, Frank Lovejoy, Phyllis Kirk, Carolyn Jones, Roy Roberts, Paul Picerni | US Horror 88′

Historically important for its role in both the history of the 3D film and the career of Vincent Price; who after 15 years as a general purpose actor finally found his vocation as Hollywood’s premier ghoul, House of Wax sees his fiendish character Jarrod managing a museum full of wax-covered murder victims.

A remake of Michael Curtiz’ early colour production called Mystery of the Wax Museum, close attention to the limited palette of the original is readily apparent from the blues and pinks at the film’s conclusion.

Like Mad Vince himself (who talks to his eerily lifelike exhibits with the fond intimacy of Prince Charles alone with his plants), the film frequently displays a childish sense of fun, as when a barker breeches the fourth wall and projects a ping-pong ball straight at your nose.

The film also provides early peripheral roles by Carolyn Jones during her days as a tittering blonde and Charles Bronson as a deaf mute called Igor (no, really) who’s the subject of a splendid sight gag. @RichardChatten

BFI Film on Film Festival (8-11 June) is the UK’s first film festival dedicated to screening works solely on celluloid with films showing on rare Nitrate, 16mm, 35mm, 70mm, dual-strip 3D and Super 8.

Hondo (1953) Bfi Film on Film 2023

Dir: John Farrow | Cast: John Wayne, Geraldine Page, Ward Bond, Michael Pate, James Arness | US 83′

Despite the obligatory shots of arrows heading straight for the camera climaxing in a rousing encirclement by injuns, Hondo, based on Louis L’Amour’s best-seller, is more a character study than a straight western and stands up perfectly well played flat.

John Wayne plays army dispatch rider Hondo Lane who finds his true place in the world when he comes across a woman and her son living in a remote homestead amongst warring Apaches.

Katherine Hepburn was reputedly intended for the role eventually played by Geraldine Page (who gets an introducing credit) reputedly selected for her homely looks, so as not to outshine Duke Wayne.

Wayne doesn’t actually get to tell her she’s beautiful when she’s mad but she frequently curls her lip in the face of his swaggering machismo. @RichardChatten

The King of Algiers (2023)

Dir: Elias Belkeddar | Cast: Reda Kateb, Benoit Magimel, Meriem Amiar, R’Mimez, Chahine Beriah, Mourad Khan

Benoit Magimel and Reda Kateb star in this artful crime caper as a couple of French gangsters on the run in Algiers.

Omar la Fraise (Kateb) has just received a 20 year prison sentence, and his only way of escape is retreating to Algeria where he hopes to lie low with his partner in crime Roger (Magimel in his louche comedy guise honed in Pacifiction and his third appearance at this year’s Cannes Film Festival).

The close friends take up residence in a palatial villa on the coast, and Omar – in the pretence of turning over a new leaf, takes a job in a pastry factory where he meets and falls for the feisty Samia (Amiar), providing the film with its most confident plot point: the classic case of a good woman falling for a felon and redeeming him through the power of her love. Omar and Roger’s crime story is less convincing – although the two make an amusing double act as hardened crims, although the extreme violence involved in their activities feels out of context in the otherwise light-hearted nature of this airy crowd-pleaser.

Often waxing lyrical Elias Belkeddar’s feature directorial debut plays out like an affectionate tribute to the town of Algiers, and we get a really soulful sense of the country through magnificent aerial views of the capital city and its surroundings (provided by Darius Khondji’s nephew Andre Chemetof), the camaraderie of the people and their strong attachment to music with a lively score by composer Sofiane Saidi. MT

PREMIERED AT CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2023 | NOW ON RELEASE IN FRANCE.

Barbie Nation: An Unauthorised Tour (1998)

Dir: Susan Stern | US Doc, 1998

Tall, lithe and perfectly formed with a swish of long blonde hair: the Barbie doll was the pinnacle of perfection for young girls in the 1960s. Hours were spent dressing her up in a variety of outfits with shoes that never stayed on, tiny handbags and even gloves. Barbie was a fully formed adult of 19, and later even had a boyfriend called Ken.

Susan Stern’s brief but informative documentary Barbie Nation: An Unauthorized Tour dives deep into the story of this iconic plaything that was sexy and yet resolutely asexual in an era where women were still content to be mothers and wives. Back in the early 1960s there was never a mention of Barbie working or having career aspirations beyond being a secretary or a nurse.

Ruth Handler was an ordinary Denver wife and mother when she spotted a gap in the market that would make her one of the richest enterpreneurs of the 20th century. Her little daughter played with dolls made out of paper and Ruth, ran a small furniture business called Mattel with her husband Elliot, and his partner Matt Matson (Matt+El).

In a brilliant marketing stroke, the entrepreneurial Jewish housewife then had the idea to extend their range of furniture and picture frames to include dollhouses, and then came across the German’ Bild Lill Doll’, created by Reinhard Beuthein years earlier. The doll was based on a gold-digging comic strip sex symbol but Handler refashioned the mannequin transforming it into Barbie in 1959.

Barbie was the first adult doll on the market in the 1950s. In archive footage, Handler explains her reasons for creating an adult doll that could help girls deal with the physical changes as they went through puberty. The adult doll had breasts (but no nipples!) and was not popular with parents, but the went down a storm with their kids after Mattel devised a clever TV marketing campaign. Girls had great fun dressing the Barbie dolls, and buying different outfits each week with their pocket money. Back in the day, I remember the sheer excitement of discovering, while staying with my cousin, that Brierley’s in Peterborough were selling Barbie outfits at discount prices. We bought the whole range. Even nowadays two Barbies are sold every second somewhere in the world.

The film then explores Barbie’s evolvement as the doll was produced in a variety of different guises: there was a black Barbie, named Christie that could say: “Hello I’m Christie, let’s go shopping with Barbie” – simple words perpetuating the safe but stock idea that Sixties women were pliant emptied-headed females happy to stay in the background. Nowadays things have become more avantgarde: there is even a blood-soaked ‘Carrie Barbie’ and a ‘Frida Kahlo’ wheel-chair user. The Barbie ‘Fashionistas line’ is now available in seven skin tones, 22 eye colours and 24 hairstyles.

Naturally Barbie couldn’t stay ‘innocent’ forever. A more sinister undertone comes from two women who gave their dolls a dominatrix spin with appropriate leather accoutrements. Stern interweaves her doc with footage from original Barbie ads; a Philadelphia TV news story with the startling headline, “Is deep frying a Barbie part of a Satanic ritual?”. And this negative aspect is echoed in Handler’s own life: She was later convicted of false accounting that saw her and Elliot forced out of running the business they had started. Breast cancer followed but her indomitable entrepreneurial sprit survived when she came up with a new business called Nearly Me, the first to produce customised breast prostheses on the general market. There’s no keeping a good woman down!. MT

25th ANNIVERSARY DIRECTOR’S CUT | Available on demand from 27 June 2023

Des Mains en Or | Healing Hands (2023)

Dir: Isabelle Mergault | Cast: Lambert Wilson, Josiane Balasko, Sylvie Testud | France Comedy 91′

Lambert Wilson is the star of this light-hearted comedy drama that sees his austere arrogance melt in the face of straightforward kindness as a distinguished writer with a bad back. Wilson plays almost the same character as in his recent film Simple Things. This time he is Pierre, a debonnair professional living in a Belle Epoque mansion in the enchanting coastal region of Calvados where he is surrounded by the trappings of success, but somehow isn’t feeling it. Clearly something is missing in his life.

An invitation to join the Academy Francaise is flattering, but chronic back pain leaves him unable to cope with the stress of this high profile existence, and the fear of not being able to meet his commitments only makes matters worse. And then along comes earth mother Martha (Balasko) with her healing hands. Whether you buy into their formulaic romance is the key to the film’s success. If not the luscious Normandy landscapes provide the eye candy in this mildly amusing crowd-pleaser. MT

NOW OUT IN FRANCE AND BELGIUM

The Red Island | L’île Rouge (2023)

Dir/Wri: Robin Campillo | Cast: Nadia Tereszkiewicz, Quim Gutierrez, Charlie Vauselle | France, Drama 115′

Robin Campillo follows his frenetic activist film 120bpm with this mystical, evocative childhood recollection of growing up on the Island of Madagascar during in one of the last French military bases of the French empire. The story is seen through the eyes of his character Thomas (Vauselle) whose caped comic book hero Fantomette adds an air of surreality to this dreamy island reverie with his nighttime sorties transforming the place into a secret world of exotic and illicit liaisons.

Life in the former French protectorate of Madagascar seems like any other colonial existence for the French people living there and awaiting repatriation in 1971. For Thomas this East African outpost, where he lives with his mother, father and two brothers in a simple bungalow, is an adventure playground full of wild and exciting possibilities courtesy of his caped adventurer Fantomette.

With its sense of adventure underpinned by reality this often feels like a Tintin adventure, but the cartoon character Fantomette – created in 1961 by the French graphic artist Georges Chaulet – is the whimsical Batman-like shadow. With a black mask and red-lined cape he provides the film with a layer of fun and intrigue in ingenious animation sequences that perfectly express Thomas’ boyhood imagination and lend a mischievous air of danger, a counterpoint to the everyday life on the military base where the spirit of native insurrection is still reverberating outside the walls of the encampment.

These daily demonstrations exulting in liberation inject an air of harsh reality into the ordered but rather hedonistic vibe of expat life. In the daily round of barbecues, swimming in the sea and boozy lunches Thomas’ parents Colette (Nadia Tereszkiewicz) and Roberto (Quim Gutierrez) are fully-rounded characters enjoying a vibrant sexual chemistry their sensuality always threatening to incandesce into an explosive episode that only adds to their allure.

Campillo records all this in the three strand narrative, but always retains his sense of boyhood wonder and playfulness through the amusing vignettes featuring the masked adventurer. Colette, a warm and tender mother, runs him up a cape and mask on her sewing machine, and once lights are out, the night becomes a thrilling time to explore. The island and its wildlife, vegetation and ordinary buildings, like the church, are transformed into a strange paradise in the light of the moon. After dark, Thomas’ imagination is set free as he discovers the mysterious goings on in a world beyond everything he has known before, transported by his guise as a boyish Fantomette. MT

NOW ON RELEASE IN UK cinemas | CURZON

Daliland (2022)

Dir: Mary Harron | Wri: John C Walsh | Cast: Sir Ben Kingsley, Christopher Briney, Barbara Sukowa, Suki Waterhouse, Rupert Graves, Andreja Pejic, and Ezra Miller | Canada Drama 97′

Ben Kingsley is sensational as Salvador Dalí, pictured in his later years in this enjoyable classically-styled biopic from Canadian filmmaker Mary Harron and her writer John C Walsh.

Set in New York and Spain in 1974, the thrust is not so much the artist’s work but his fascinating obsession with his wife and muse Gala (Sukowa) whom he describes as: “the secret within my secret”. Seen through the inexperienced eyes of the bland and pasty-faced James (Briney), the focus then shifts to this young assistant keen to make his name in the art world, who is helping the eccentric and mercurial Dalí prepare for a big gallery show, although his credentials for the post are never explained. Ultimately, the naive James feels disillusioned by the experience – but we wouldn’t expect anything else; such is the ephemeral nature of artistic genius.

The legendary surrealist often takes a backseat in favour of this far less intriguing cypher who somehow finds himself on the receiving end of all the female attention – even from Gala – who is styled as a sexually voracious virago whose profligate nature puts her marriage under strain, although the quixotic Dali remains in denial of her faults til the end.

Kingsley is perfect for the role with his dark, exotic features (he would also make a great Louis XIV). Not unexpectedly, his Dali comes across as mercurial, quaintly timid and vulnerable, but always dignified, a rather curious classical stringed score accompanying his painting interludes rather than something more avant-garde and zany. But Marcel Zyskind certainly captures the strange and whimsical quality of the artist’s nature with his deft camerawork and some magical lighting effects in a nighttime sequence on the beach in Cadaques, Catalonia.

Dali’s other acolytes in this engaging shag-fest include Ginesta, a sinuous Suki Waterhouse, Amanda Lear (Pejic) and Rupert Graves’ Captain Moore, a financier and the voice of reason who frets over the Dalis’ extravagant lifestyle. MT

Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)

Dir: PeterWeir | Cast: Rachel Roberts, Anne-Louise Lambert, Helen Morse, Vivean Gray, Kirsty Child, Tony Llewellyn Jones | Fantasy Drama, Australia 115’

The last time I saw this adaptation of Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel – a film that triumphantly realises Hitchcock’s oft-expressed desire (a desire that also informed Claude Chabrol’s ‘Le Boucher’) to locate a spine-chilling mystery against a rural backdrop in brilliant sunlight – I found the experience so unnerving that when it was over it took a major effort simply to venture out into the dark to put the bins out.

Cliff Green bases his script on a novel by Joan Lindsay that sees a group of Australian schoolgirls vanish mysteriously during an idyllic summer picnic, haunting and frustrating the people left behind. That the sole girl to return is unable to explain exactly what happened during the time of her absence is characteristic of the film’s ambiguity which strongly implies that somehow the supernatural were involved without spelling it out.

When the film came out a reporter noticed that in 1900 Valentine’s Day fell on a Wednesday not a Saturday and the tragedy wasn’t in any of the papers at the time. So he asked Joan Lindsay if it actually happened and only then did she reveal that the novel was entirely fictitious. @RichardChatten

NOW ON BLURAY COURTESY OF SECOND SIGHT FILMS

Daughter of Darkness (1948)

Dir: Lance Comfort | UK Horror

Ironically – considering her best remembered film role was as the Virgin Mary in ‘King of Kings’ – Siobhan McKenna made her film debut in Victor Hanbury’s answer to ‘Nightmare Alley’, as a wide-eyed Colleen reviled by the women of the village as the Devil incarnate and lusted after by the men; which seems a little harsh as she wears a crucifix and on several occasions seeks sanctuary in a church.

Her first victim is Maxwell Reed as Battlin’ Dan, a gypsy pugilist with eyebrows like Vampira whose looks Miss McKenna soon improves by scarring his cheek.

This heady brew is done proud by Lance Comfort enhanced some lovely use of night-for-night by Stanley Pavey, taking in along the way a conflagration in a barn and a fearsome finale in a churchyard. @RichardChatten

AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE

Five Angles on a Murder (1950)

Dir: Anthony Asquith | Cast: Dirk Bogarde, Jean Kent, John McCallum, Susan Shaw, Hermione Baddeley, Charles Victor | UK Drama

Despite his rather inflated reputation some of Anthony Asquith’s films are barely even competent. A decisive piece of evidence for the case for the defence is ‘The Woman in Question; the structural resemblance of which to Akita Kurosawa’s ‘Rashomon’ the same year is often remarked upon (rather less point out the use of a framing story like that in J. B. Priestley’s ‘An Inspector Calls’ ).

Jean Kent’s tendency to artificiality is well-used in her career-defining performance in the title role, while the presence of Dirk Bogarde sporting an American accent in full-on bow-tied spiv mode brings home just how long ago this all was. @RichardChatten

Kidnapped (2023)

Dir: Marco Bellocchio | Cast: Enea Sala, Leonardo Maltese, Paolo Pierobon, Fausto Russo Alesi, Barbara Ronchi | Italy, Drama 125′

Now in his eighties, Italian filmmaker Marco Bellocchio is still knocking them out and shows no intention of slowing down: he has just completed a script for the upcoming film The Life Apart. His latest outing, a classically styled melodrama, tells the little known story of the kidnapping of a Jewish boy seized from his family home in Bologna and taken to live in the Vatican in 1858. This story exposes another ugly episode of the history of the Catholic Church, this time concerning coercive conversion.

Kidnapped is a hardcore arthouse affair full of impassioned speeches, religious symbolism and magnificent set pieces with vehement style of 16th or 17th century European art in the style of Caravaggio or Valasquez, ramped up by a thundering score from Esterno Notte composer Fabio Massimo. Cast-wise it boasts a tour de force from Italian actor Paolo Pierobon as a malevolent Pope Pius IX who orders a series of forced religious conversions as his power diminishes in the wake of the newly-founded Kingdom of Italy in a climate of vicious antisemitism.

Apart from the Pope, a series of rather cardboard characters are there to serve the narrative in a film whose primary focus is the outright humiliation of a Jewish family whose little boy, 6-year-old Edgardo Mortara (played by Enea Sala, then Leonardo Maltese), is seen living happily with his wealthy parents Solomone “Momola” Mortara (Fausto Russo Alesi) and Marianna (Barbara Ronchi).

One night Edgardo is taken away from his family’s palatial home on the premise of his having been secretly baptised by the family maid. The only way for the couple to get their child back is to convert to Catholicism, which is naturally a non-starter to their own religious beliefs.

Inspired by a Daniele Scalise’s book ‘Il Caso Mortara’, Bellocchio and his co-writer Susanna Nicchiarelli chronicle Edgardo’s turbulent time in the Vatican where he undergoes intense religious instruction along with other Jewish boys. Meanwhile, back in Bologna, Momola works with the international press to raise the profile of his son’s plight through a vigorous campaign demonising the pontiff. Despite best efforts on their part, the boy reaches adulthood as an indentured servant to the church and somehow develops a year erotic zeal for Pius. In one scene his adulation causes him to knock the pontiff down and leads to him being forced to draw three signs of the cross with his tongue on the floor, as a punishment. Another sees Edgardo freeing a statue of Christ, who then comes down from the cross and walks calmly away.

Fire and brimstone and much ringing of hands follows with Ronchi channelling a typical Jewish mother – and you feel for her and her cute offspring. Rapito certainly reflects a blood-soaked era which culminated in the Papal States – and Pius himself – been eventually vanquished by the Italian army in 1870. Needless to say the Catholic Church fails to redeem itself in the film’s ending, and still has a lot to answer for even to this day, in this brutal portrait of tyranny and religious bigotry. MT

IN UK CINEMAS and on CURZON HOME CINEMA FROM 26 APRIL 2024

Marguerite’s Theorem (2023) Cannes Film Festival 2023

Dir.: Anna Novion; Cast: Ella Rumph, Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Julien Frison, Sonia Bonny, Clothilde Coureau; France/Switzerland 2023, 112 min.

Marguerite’s Theorem is a welcome addition to the asocial mathematician subgenre (A Beautiful Mind, X + Y, The Man Who Knew Infinity etc). Ella Rumph plays twenty-five-year-old PhD student Marguerite Hoffmann who has reached that momentous time in her academic career when she will present her thesis to the PhD supervisor Professor Werner (Darroussin).

Sporting slippers in the cafeteria and the lecture hall, Marguerite cuts an odd but genial figure, hassled by the male students, but – worse of all – contradicted in her thesis about a Hungarian mathematician, by another of Werner’s students, a boy called Lucas (Frison).

Humiliated in public, Marguerite leaves Mathematics behind, at least for a while, turning her talents to Mah-Jong which offers her a decent living. Clothilde Coureau is her meddling mother getting in touch with Werner in a bid to find out why her daughter has thrown in the towel. Maths wins out in the end. Marguerite joins forces with Lucas united in their quest to fathom out the Goldbach theorem, even turning the tables on Werner.

Relationships prove more difficult than science for Marguerite in this competitive environment and Novion leaves us in the dark as to who is rinsing whom (scientifically speaking). The mathematicians, including Marguerite herself, are much more interested in proving their colleagues wrong than discovering new dimensions – even if they all disagree. Lucas seems to be the arch-schemer, Marguerite bringing up the rear. Werner emerges a Mephistopheles-like character, forced to rely on his experience rather than his fading brain-power to get what he wants.

PD Anne-Sophie Delseries’ intriguing set design sees the flat Marguerite shares with Noa (Bonny) transformed into a black-board jungle covered in Algebra cyphers sometime resembling poetry. Maths is shown as a work of art, Werner still insisting that emotions and Maths are diametrically opposed. There are feint echoes of A Beautiful Mind, with moments of semi mental illness taking hold of all characters. Although occasionally veering on the predictable Marguerite’s Theorem makes up for it with new plot twists.

In the end it seems that Maths may not be as satisfying as love, but something close to it: to find a modus operandi we must to learn to trust ourselves and our partner – forgetting the Ego and letting go of past prejudices. But will Marguerite be able to overcome her past as the ugly duckling, and fly away, like a swan, with the prize of love.

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | SPECIAL SCREENING 2023

Rosalie (2023)

Dir: Stephanie Di Giusto | Cast: Nadia Tereszkiewicz, Benoit Magiel, Benjamin Bioloay | France, Drama 115′

Hair – or the lack or lack of it – is an emotive subject for both sexes. And particularly for women. Classically styled but highly original this unusual arthouse drama draws inspiration from a true story that scandalised Brittany in the 1870s.

French director Stephanie Di Giusto’s sophomore feature explores the life of a woman who is forced to reinvent herself when she arrives in a small village in Brittany, to be married. Nadia Tereszkiewicz is a force to be reckoned with in the title role of Rosalie. Her desperate desire to be loved, and initial lack of confidence is due to a terrible secret. On their wedding night her new husband Abel (Benoit Magimel) throws Rosalie out of the house. He feels cheated and appalled and unable to accept the rampant body hair that Rosalie has had since birth.

But Rosalie refuses to be defined by a natural phenomenon. Challenged by her isolation in this small community she soon realises that a change of attitude is needed in order to secure the success of her marriage to Abel, a bar owner struggling in debt. This change of perspective sees her gently blossoming with a growing acceptance of herself and a proud defiance that ripples out into all her relationships with surprising and often conflicting consequences.

Sumptuously captured in its ravishing rural locations this is an unsettling and thought-provoking film that questions traditional views of eroticism, sexuality and gender roles, touching on prejudice and also the male and female gaze. Rosalie is an understated look at the positive affects of perseverance, determination and self-belief and a triumph. MT

NOW IN FRENCH CINEMAS | CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2023 | UN CERTAIN REGARD

Lost in the Night (2023) Cannes Film Festival 2023

Dir: Amat Escalante | Cast: Juan Daniel Garcia, Ester Expósito, Barbara Mori, Fernando Bonilla, Hero Medina, Vicky Araico | Thriller 120′

The rich and the poor have a Mexican standoff in this Neo western – and no prizes for guessing who triumphs. Amat Escalante first came to Cannes with his shocking feature debut Heli. Lost in the Night is a muddled murder mystery that looks spectacular but leaves us in the dark for most its running time. A pervasive sense of uneasiness gradually gains momentum in the final stages but some questions are left unanswered in a quietly savage tale of revenge that simmers in Adrian Durazo’s widescreen landscapes of the craggy Guanajuato setting.

Juan Daniel Garcia is Emiliano, the hero of the piece. This morose Mexican macho is motivated by a keen sense of justice. He is a serious man with a mission – to shed light on the fate of his pioneering mother (Araico) who disappeared after campaigning against the sale of the local mine to foreign investors and the contingent job losses. And he soon tracks down his suspect, an effete conceptual artist called Rigoberto (Bonilla), who hangs out in this stark backwater, postering around a curious concrete lakeside villa with his steely wife Carmen (Barbara Mori), and her influencer daughter Mónica (Ester Expósito), whose speciality is fake suicide videos. The local police, headed by Jero Medina, are not fit for purpose so Emiliano makes his own investigations by offering to work as the family caretaker.

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | PREMIER 2023

https://youtu.be/S38sRUvJjYs

The Woman from Constantinople (1969) Cannes Classics

The late 1960s was certainly a time for female filmmakers in Hungary, amongst them Líva Gyarmathy and Martá Mészaros. Judit Elek (1937-) made a name for herself with short films and then went on to direct her first of sixteen features, an atmospheric curio entitled, Sziget a szárazföldön, The Lady from Constantinople.

Elemér Ragályi was behind the camera providing the drama with its distinctive visual allure that adds considerable value to Iván Mándy’s slim but texturally rich plot centring on the titular lady (Manyi Kiss) who arrives at Budapest station in the opening scenes, and then proceeds to heckle her way through a lecture about Istanbul. Back in her apartment she stares vacantly at the wall outside and eventually decides to move out. And this provides the story with its central focus as wanders around collecting her possessions together to a piano score by Tihamér Vujicsics’

A low point in Elek’s career involved her ordering the gratuitous burning alive of 16 sheep during the making of her 1989/90 feature Tutajosok. This act of brutality saw her condemned by a group of scientists from Poland “No director knowing her own worth would debase herself for using so primitive and cruel methods”. (Source: Wikipedia). Nevertheless the film went on to win the Grand Prix at Creteil International Women’s Film Festival and the Montreal World Film Festival: Prize of the Ecumenical Jury in 1989.

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | CANNES CLASSICS 2023

The Other Laurens (2023) Cannes Film Festival 2023

Dir: Claude Schmitz | Cast: Marc Barbe, Louise Leroy, Kate Moran, Olivier Rabourdin, Tibo Vandenborre, Edwin Gaffney | France/Belgium 117′

This stylish neon-drenched detective thriller premiering in Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight sidebar channels France’s ‘cinema du look’ phase of the 1980s, and stars Olivier Rabourdin as Gabriel Laurens a scuzzy Belgium-based private detective who finds himself caught up in a surreal drug-trafficking investigation when his niece, Jade (Leroy), asks him to investigate her father’s death in the South of France.

Just when Laurens thought the coast was clear to enjoy his semi-retirement he finds himself embroiled in the complex financial problems of his estranged drug-dealing twin brother Francois (also played by Rabourdin), and a dodgy series of lowlife characters ducking and diving between Perpignan and the border with Spain.

There’s a touch of Luc Besson’s Leon to his relationship with his niece and this gives the film some of its more nuanced and soulful sequences particularly their coastal limousine drive and nighttime cocktails where Laurens explains the tragic fall-out with his brother.

Naturally the Americans have to get involved, finding it impossible to stay their side of the Atlantic, and this introduces Laurens to his twin brother’s ex Shelby (Moran) and her hunky French henchman (Barbe and Vandenborre), and Scott (Gaffney) who feels entirely out of place in the narrative with his chipper nonsense and tales of derring-do in Afghanistan.

Amongst other sub-plots Scott also rubs up against Marc Barbe’s gang-leader who swears revenge for their cultural contretemps providing a racial touchstone. Full of anecdotes and dry humour (question: what’s the Spanish for ‘paparazzi’, answer: ‘paparazzo?). With an evocative score and clever twist to the tale The Other Laurens is a smart and good-looking thriller that refreshes the genre. MT

DIRECTORS’ FORTNIGHT | CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2023

Vincent Must Die (2023) Cannes Film Festival 2023

Dir: Stéphan Castang | Cast: Karim Leklou, Vimala Pons, Francois Chattot, Karoline Rose Sun | France/Belgium, Fantasy Thriller 115′

A darkly hilarious and good-looking take on ‘The Office’, showcases Karim Leklou’s brilliant comedy talents as an ordinary man who somehow becomes the butt of random violence.

Brilliantly written by Mathieu Naert the film imagines Vincent (Leklou) in a variety of ghastly scenarios that accurately reflect life today. At work Vincent he is bludgeoned by an office intern who hits him in the eye with a computer. On a date he is then menaced by a tramp, and finally, riding home on his pushbike, he becomes the target of road rage. Even his neighbour’s kid attacks him on the stairwell. Clearly something must be done. Vincent is going downhill mentally and physically, until he buys himself an American bulldog called Vulcan. But he that lives by the sword can die by it too. When love comes along in the shape of Margaux (Vimala Pons) things get even more complicated.

Satirising our increasingly brutal and dangerous world this noirish tongue-in-cheek thriller imagines – with humour – a world where the psychological affects of generalised anger and violence have an everyday impact of society as whole making us fearful, defensive and even aggressive until we gradually become closed off to society as a whole. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2023 | CRITICS WEEK 2023

Agra (2023) Cannes Film Festival 2023

Dir.: Kanu Behl; Cast: Mohit Agarwall, Vipha Chibber, Rahal Roy, Ruhansi Sharma, Anschal Coswami, Pryanka Bose. India/France 2023, 118 min.

Kanu Behl certainly walks on the wild side in Cannes, very much like his countryman Anurag Kashyap with Kennedy. Set in the titular Indian city, Agra is a take on “Crime and Punishment”, where male hero Guru is full of toxic masculinity in an overcrowded, decrepit India, caught between tradition and modern technology, giving few positive identity models for the male youth of today. Agra proves that meaningful sex is the panacea of the modern world. And unlike drugs it comes free.

Guru (Agarwall), 25, but still lives at home – he even sleeps in his mother’s bedroom. The cramped conditions force his father (Roy) to live on the upper floor with his mistress. Not surprisingly, Guru is confused, imagining a torrid sexual relationship with the nubile Mala (Sharma). He wants to marry her and move into the house, using the spare terrace as his new home. Unfortunately, Mal only exists in his dreams, and his family is unable to convince him of the truth.

In this state of sexual frustration and high anxiety Guru goes out of control. After killing his pet squirrel he is sent away from home and becomes obsessed with ‘phone sex, trying in vain to set up dates with women on the internet, his desire for a relationship taking over his life until dream and reality merge and threaten to swallow him up in surreal images captured on a dizzying handheld camera through the labyrinthine streets of the city. .

Then along comes internet cafe owner Priti (Bose), a forty year-old woman with a limp, who proves to be an ideal sexual playmate. Both are plagued by their family in a complex narrative that sees Behl eventually running out of steam, even though Guru finally becomes his own person, saying good-bye to Mala. Guru has no moral compass for his life’s trajectory, although he eventually finds an emotional touchstone in Priti. In modern India, it seems as if many are more or less homeless or on the verge of being evicted – jobs are few and far between, and civil servants still have the upper-hand like under British rule. Agra has little pity with society – and if it would not have been for the schmaltzy ending, this could have been a real great feature.

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2023

Power Alley | Levante (2023)

Dir: Lillah Halla | Brazil, Portugal, Spain | Sports Drama 92′

There’s plenty of energy and a queer vision behind this female-centric volleyball drama. Even the shower scenes fizz with a fast-moving tomboyish vibe and a thumping score from Brazilian band ‘Badsista’.

Playing in the Cannes Critics’ Week line-up, Brazilian director Lillah Halla’s colourful debut feature follows a teenage volleyball player who discovers she is pregnant in the run-up to an important championship match in a country where abortion is illegal.

The tone then turns more downbeat as 17 year old Sofia (Ayomi Domenica Dias) reflects on her options, not knowing who to turn to given the country’s termination ban. Blocked in her attempts to seek an illegal termination Sofia realises her career is now in question and she fears the worst when Gloria and Dr Elias confirm the pregnancy is well on the way.

There is a positive way forward for Sofia but it will involve telling her widowed father Joao (Rômulo Braga) who is equally invested in her future and proud of her achievements. He flies into a rage when he finds out the news, and is naturally opposed to Sofia’s wish to terminate. As the pregnancy develops the colour-scape becomes more vivid, shot through with a surreal neon aesthetic reflecting Sofia’s wildest fears.

Halla’s narrative never opts for the predictable instead there’s a complex set of circumstances in the mix as her central character’s dramatic arc develops with Sofia experiencing a sudden and unexpected transformation.

The story gradually unfolds to reflect that well-worn maxim: “life is what happens when you are making other plans”. Punchy and well-put-together Power Alley gets its message across in a drama that is both educational, tense and watchable. Lillah Hilla is certainly a talent in the making. MT

POWER ALLEY WON THE TOP PRIZE at BERGAMO FILM MEETING 2024

Inshallah a Boy (2023) Cannes Film Festival 2023

Dir.: Amjad Al Rasheed, Cast: Mouna Hawa, Haitam Omari, Yumma Marwan, Salwa Nakkara, Mohammed A Jizawi, Eslam Al-Awadi, Seelena Saltanian; Jordan/France/Saudi Arabia/ Qatar 2023, 112 min.

This debut drama from Amjad Al Rasheed is also the first ever Jordanian feature film to be presented at Cannes, via Marrakech Film Festival‘s Atlas Workshop 2022.

Inshallah a Boy certainly deserves this honour in showcasing the outrageously misogynist laws that hold sway in many Arab countries: if a widow has no male heir, her deceased husband’s family is by law entitled to half her possessions. Al Rasheed’s tightly-written script makes what could have been a dry and worthy story absolutely gripping throughout its running time. Al Rasheed co-wrote the screenplay with Delphine Agut and Rula Nasser, based on his own original story.

Nawal (Hawa) wakes up one morning to discover her husband has died in his sleep. With her young daughter Nora (Sultanian) Nawal is soon facing the greed of her brother-in-law Rifqi (Omari), who demands 1000 Jordanian Dinar for a pick-up truck he sold to Nawal’s husband, plus a fifty percent share of the family flat, originally bought with her parents’ money.

But there could be a way out of this injustice. And it will come via Lauren (Marwan) the daughter of her Nawal’s boss Mrs Souad (Sakkara), who employs her as part of a team of carers looking after her mother Colette (who is dying of Alzheimer’s). Nawal was the family’s sole breadwinner, her husband having lost his job – without telling her – four months prior to his death. If Nawal can prove she is ‘pregnant’, Rifqi cannot lay his hands on her property, or her daughter, for whom he claims custody, telling the court that Nawal is unable look after the girl. If Lauren can provide Nawal with a forged positive pregnancy test in return for helping her track down an abortionist to get rid of the child (conceived with the husband she no longer loves or lives with) then Nawal can keep her worldly goods.

A complex narrative then, but Al Rasheed handles it with aplomb. There’s another twist to the tale that could complicate matters: Nawal’s colleague Hassan (Al-Awadi) has developed a crush on the widow, but this could work in her favour. Then disaster strikes when Lauren’s husband finds about his wife’s pregnancy and puts his foot down to an abortion. The two women’s inventiveness is then put to the test as they both fight the law and Jordan’s male-dominated patriarchy finally to find peace and contentment.

There is never a dull moment in this frenetic drama, DoP Kaname Onoyama using a lively hand-held camera to follow Nawal who seems to be perpetually on the move in the busy streets of Amman, even trying to learn to drive her dead husband’s truck. The ensemble acting is convincing, with Omari the standout as the scheming villain supported by Nawal’s double-dealing brother, the two no better than rats from the capital’s sewer.

JORDAN’s ACADEMY AWARD NOMINATION

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | Critics’ Week 2023

A Night in Casablanca (1946)

Dir: Archie Mayo | with Groucho, Harpo, Chico Marx, Charles Drake, Lois Collier | uS Comedy 85’

Although nothing else in A Night in Casablanca begins to measure up to the opening gag with Harpo holding up the building, it remains the last truly vintage film the Marx Brothers ever made; and became something of a cause celebre when Jack Warner protested at the use of ‘Casablanca’ in the title. (It even has Dan Seymour from the original.)

It follows the familiar pattern, right down to the usual bland male lead (this time it’s the turn of Charles Drake). The boys must have got a lot of satisfaction to get laughs at the expense of Nazis, especially Sig Ruman who declares that “it will sooth me to see someone in pain”, while the level of the humour can guessed from the amount of time the film devotes to him losing his toupee.@RichardChatten

NOW ON MUBI

Creatura (2023) Directors’ Fortnight 2023

Dir: Elena Martin | Main Cast: Mila Borras, Alex Brendemuhl, Marc Cartanya, Cristina Colom | Drama, 118′

A woman’s adolescent sexual awakening and its impact on the rest of her life is the focus of this artful and innovative psychological study from Catalan director Elena Martin. It could be anyone’s story but still somehow feels intimate yet relatable with its universal appeal.

Mila’s story unfolds at five, fifteen and thirty five where the film opens with Mila Borras having found contentment- or so it seems – with Gerard, sensitively played by Marc Cartanya. The two of them are moving to her parents’ house in the country but this fresh start fails to ignite their failing sex life, and Mila’s mental state is suffering as a result.

Reflecting back on the past Mila can find no real cause for the blockage or her failure to respond sexually to Gerard anymore. Often a rash appears which sends Mila down-spiralling into a state of near hysteria although Gerard remains positive and supportive and they work through the situation.

In their nuanced narrative Elena Martin and her co-writer Clara Roquet explore false memory, buried trauma, societal misogyny and even over-thinking in this brave and beautifully captured drama that makes evocative use of its Summery settings in an around Girona, Barcelona and Sitges.

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2023 | DIRECTORS’ FORTNIGHT

Légua (2023) Directors’ Fortnight Cannes 2023

Dir: Filipa Reis, Joao Miller Guerra | Cast: Carla Maciel (Ana), Fátima Soares (Emília), Vitória Nogueira da Silva (Mónica), Sara Machado (Sofia), Paulo Calatré (Victor), Manuel Mozos (Guilherme) | Drama, Portugal

An award for most enchanting opening scenes in this year’s Quinzaine selection much surely go to DoP Vasco Viana. Legua unfolds in deepest Portugal where a country estate – seemingly abandoned by its owners – is now home to three generations of God-fearing women who live an almost feudal existence in this quiet backwater miles from Lisbon and Porto.

Emilia is the ‘old-school’ elderly retainer who still takes her job seriously, despite her declining health, taking care of the modest property belonging to her boss Senhora Manuela who lives in Lisbon (and who we never meet). The fastidious old lady is also a taskmaster for middle-aged Ana, whose labourer husband has gone to work in France, but who also abides by Emilia’s exacting standards. She respects the old lady and never forgets the dept of gratitude she owes her for helping raise her own daughter Monica, who is now studying engineering. The young girl is very much of the ‘me-generation’, mocking the old-fashioned ways and traditions, preferring to listen to trance music with her Sofia, and focus on her future.

With its languorous pacing and graceful attention to detail Légua both celebrates and mourns the passing of an old order, now almost left behind to its antecessors. But is the future as promising as Monica believes?. Emilia and Ana are the guardians of this heritage and still relish their daily duties and the sense of order which is fast disappearing, and which lends comfort and stability to both ‘servant’ and ‘master’.

Emilia’s values are rooted in the last century and she believes traditions should be upheld and respected to the finest detail. Ana shares her views and carries forward the diurnal duties involved in running a home. There’s a gentle sensuous rhythm to this husbandry, and Reis and Guerra capture this pride in a job well done with sumptuous gracefulness, in a film that is almost silent apart from the soft sounds of birds and, at one point, a Christian Passion hymn harmonised by Bach.

Ana is an also a decent cook and a capable gardener. She believes her duty lies with her boss and with her Emilia (whose health is now rapidly going downhill) rather than with her husband, who she loves passionately, but who has been forced to seek work in France. Their daughter Monica is very much a city girl, who has no truck with the past. Monica fizzes with teenage energy as she talks about planning a rave in the nearby countryside: “although no one would come!”. It’s lively performance from Vitória Nogueira da Silva, but Monica has as hard-edged selfishness to her personality. Typical of youth, she has no time for the past, only the future.

The strength and appeal of the narrative is this convincing portrayal of all three generations: their respective notions are cleverly melded and given equal respect within a film that is never judgemental of youth, or age – for that matter – but gently observes the feelings and authentic rituals of each of the women, while also reflecting and luxuriating on the surrounding landscape, both flora and fauna, which is also gradually disappearing with the passage of time. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | DIRECTORS’ FORTNIGHT 2023

Blackbird Blackbird BlackBerry (2023)

Dir: Elene Naveriani | Drama: Georgia, Germany, Switzerland 110’

Elene Naveriani is an unique filmmaker with a distinctive visual style. Her third feature, the enigmatically titled Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry, is a simple but thematically rich love story that continues in the same vein as her impressive second feature Wet Sand (2021) and luxuriates in the same artful framing and vibrant allure captured by DoP Agnesh Pakozdi.

Once again the plot centres on a close-knit community in rural Tbilisi, where the striking central character Etero, 48, nearly loses her life slipping off the side of a ravine while picking blackberries in the opening scene. Etero, who runs the village store, stands her ground when it comes to dealing with the bitchy village sisterhood, unlike the others she is happily unhitched and content with her sole status, a feminist without being aware of the fact. Appreciated but always mocked by the other women, she a warm and likeable person with considerable agency. Content to spent her life alone until she experiences the transformative affects of an impromptu sexual encounter which will change the course of her life forever in the film’s uplifting reveal.

Based on Tamta Melashvili’s feminist novel of the same name. Naveriani relentlessly portrays the more delicate nuances of rural life, and challenges Georgia’s heteronormative patriarchal structure in a narrative that stridently puts her position forward through Etero’s austere but appealing personality. She is prepared to welcome life’s vagaries, while also believing in her ability to forge a life alone even when she meets the somewhat sheepish Murman (Temiko Chinchinadze), who is seemingly unavailable. Eka Chavleisihvili gives a memorable tour de force as the modest, quietly philosophical force of nature; an inspiring woman who somehow attracts positivity through her staunch acceptance of life, preparing for the worst but always open to serendipity. MT

In UK cinemas on 3rd May 2024 | CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | DIRECTORS’ FORTNIGHT 2023

Only the River Flows (2023)

Dir: Wei Shujun | Yilong Zhu, Chloe Maayan, Tianlai Hou, Tong Lin Kai | China Drama 102′

Beijing born filmmaker Wei Shujun returns to Cannes three years after his award-winning Striding into the Wind (2020).

You could be forgiven for thinking Only The River Flows was actually made during the 1990s such is the vintage look of the celluloid and its grainy quality, shot by Chengma Zhiyuan (Fires on the Plain). The feature premiered at Cannes Un Certain Regard sidebar but is set thirty years ago in rural China where a chief of police Ma The (Yilong Zhu) is investigating a series of murders that lead to an early arrest. The victims are a kindly widow, a poet and a rather sweet little boy. But the detective starts to question this decision due the increasingly unusual behaviour of the locals in this riverside backwater.

Written and directed by Shujun Wei, the feature certainly pays homage to the noir detective stories of the 1950s but what makes it more interesting is its portrayal of China before the economic boom at a time where most ordinary people were still quietly getting on with their humdrum lives in relative obscurity. And Ma The is a case in point. Under the cosh of his superiors, he is forced to suffer in silence and endure grim headquarters in a disused cinema. Home life is not much better, infact he lives in a rather squallid hovel with his wife Bai Jie (Chloe Maayan) who has recently become pregnant with a child who may have a borderline genetic disorder.

Based on a book by Hua Yu, it pictures the police as rather cartoonish characters who would rather be doing anything (such a playing pingpong) than tracking down criminals, and there’s dark humour at play here in the script co-written with Chuniei Kang.

The chief suspect is laughingly known as ‘the madman’ but the investigation also throws up some rather squallid little goings on which add texture and context to the thrust of the narrative – the hunt for the serial killer – in this rather scuzzy little corner of China. MT

ONLY THE RIVER FLOWS will be released in UK and Irish cinemas 16th August 2024.

The Other (1972)

Dir: Robert Mulligan | US Fantasy drama

Fifteen years after Tom Tryon had played the title monster in I Married a Monster from Outer Space, although the ordeal it depicted must have paled by comparison with the subsequent experience of working for Otto Preminger. He returned to films in style as executive producer on his own adaptation of his best-selling novel.

Having just created a splash with ‘Summer of ’42’ director Robert Mulligan returns to the summer of 1935 – a date driven home by an appearance of the National Review Association logo and when John Ritter is seen reading a newspaper headlining the trial of the kidnapper of the Lindbergh baby – for this Hitchcockian exercise in psychological horror shot in brilliant colour by veteran cameraman Robert Surtees (there’s an eye-watering scene depicting a kid falling on to a pitchfork) which imbues Connecticut with the same inscrutable beauty as Grant Wood and Andrew Wyeth.

Just as Mulligan’s earlier study of childhood during the thirties in ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ had enlisted the services as narrator of Kim Stanley (a stage actress rarely seen in films), so ‘The Other’ provides an extremely rare screen record of legendary Broadway star and acting coach Uta Hagen. @RichardChatten

Reality (2023)

Dir: Tina Satter | Cast Sydney Sweeney, Josh Hamilton, Marchant Davies | US Drama 83′

A whistleblowing psychological drama that traps us for most of its running time within the confines of a small room and other drab locations to tell the true story of Reality Winner, an American NSA contractor who in 2017 divulged confidential top secret intelligence that revealed her country’s knowledge of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential elections.

Satter’s impressive feature debut is based on her own stage play ‘Is This a Room’ and revolves around an interrogation between two male FBI agents and Reality, an ambitious and highly intelligent linguist multi-linguist, sensitively played Sydney Sweeney. The dialogue is actually taken from the FBI’s transcripts of what was actually said, and demonstrates just how persuasive the men become in gradually breaking down a suspect until they achieve their aims.

It all starts in 2017 when Reality (Sweeney) is doorstepped at her home by FBI agents Garrick (Josh Hamilton) and Taylor (Marchant Davis), who present a search warrant and then start a menacing interrogation. Reality readily engages with their line of questioning as her house is searched and her telephone confiscated until it gradually emerges that she is a suspect in the disclosure of highly sensitive information. At times stranger than fiction, Reality is an absorbing film that blends political thriller with fantasy drama with striking lighting effects and sound design. Sydney Sweeney is certainly a force to be reckoned with in the title role. MT

NOW IN CINEMAS NATIONWIDE from 2 June 2023 | BERLINALE PANORAMA 2023

The Buriti Flower (2023) Ensemble Prize 2023

Dir.: Joao Salviza, Renee Nader Messora; Cast: Francisco Hyjno Kraho, Luzia Cruvakwyj Kraho, Debora Sodre.

The Kraho are an indigenous tribe of hunters gatherers who have continuously fought and died to retain their lands along the Balsas River in northeastern Brazil, since 1940. Renee Nader Messora and Joao Salaviza introduced us to these people back in 2018 with their Un Certain Regard jury prize winner The Dead and the Others/

Five years later they are back in the Un Certain Regard sidebar to elaborate on their experience living amongst the tribe, this time spending 15 months living with them and shooting on 16mm. The Buriti Flower much connects to a global narrative of survival for small communities all over the world struggling to maintain their ancestral rights and preserve their freedom in the face of the developed world that continues to expand into their ancestral territory.

The government of former President Bolsonaro called the area “unproductive” and helped European settlers to “reclaim” it by force. The history of the Kraho people is a history of massacres, with the government of the day more or less complicit. The “National Indian Foundation” (FUNAI) was founded in 1969, after its predecessor had to be abandoned because it supported the aggressive settlers in taken the land from the Kraho and other Indian minorities.

Jotat Kraho a young girl (who like most of the actors play themselves) has hallucinations about an upcoming disaster. Her sleep is disturbed and she flies through the air in her dreams. Her uncle asks the titular Buriti palm for advice. He and other Kraho people are on the way to Brasilia for a congress of Indian minorities wanting to bring their grievances to the central administration.

But before they set off, we are told in detail the massacres of the 1950s, when the two most wealthiest ranchers of the area hired cow-boys and their guns, to liquidate the Kraho population so that their land would fall to the massacre’s perpetrators. One young Kraho woman woke up early on that fateful day, so she could warn others, before hiding. The village eldest Balbino – who we see in a black-and-white film shot before the massacre, tried to argue with the aggressors, only to be shot in the back when walking to his house. Up to this day, the “Gatehouse” to the village is always covered twenty- four fours because the threat of another invasion is always virulent.

Buriti ends on a hopeful note with the birth of the baby: “One more, but we need Two for the Leopard”. This is a melancholic and languid feature rather like the waters that dominate the landscape. There is a ghostly atmosphere that lends a surreal air to the proceedings, pregnant with possibility. DOP Nader-Messora lets her imagination roam freely, and the result is a kaleidoscope of water fairies and dream like creatures of all kinds This is set against the barbaric background of history. Unique and emotionally gripping.

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | UN CERTAIN REGARD 2023

Kennedy (2023) Cannes Film Festival 2023

Dir.: Anurag Kashyap; Cast: Rahul Bhat, Sunny Leone, KK Gautlam, Megha Burman, Benedict Garrett; India 2023, 142 min.

Best known for his epic Gangs of Wasseypur, Anurag Kashyap is back with his latest, a neo-giallo thriller that unites him with Rahul Bhat who starred in his kidnapping drama Ugly in 2013,

Kennedy is more or less a killing spree that follows an insomniac ex-cop still operating in a corrupt underworld. The film has been mostly shot during the night on Mumbai streets, over a period of 30 days and sees the titular character morphing into another person while still doing the dirty work for the corrupt Police commissioner in Mumbai.

Kennedy (Bhat) moves around without a fixed address, making it difficult for his old superiors to control him. One of his favourite places is a luxury hotel in the city, where he meets the equally enigmatic Charlie (Leone), whose alliances are not very clear – like with most characters. One exception, a senior clerk in the government, pays for his anti-corruption with his life – and so does his whole family.

There is a McGuffin, with Kashyap trying to confuse the issues even further; intertitles announce a countdown to the big night where all will be revealed. But the killing goes on, often to classical Viennese music (courtesy of the Prague Philharmonic choir) and this gives the scenes – with bodies flung all over the place – a distinct surreal feeling, elevating it from mainstream thrillers.

Kennedy seems to soften as the film wears on, making contact with his daughter on the net. But whether this spells redemption for his nefarious ways is never quite made clear – or if we are in for a Kennedy ‘Mark Two’. The bloody mayhem is commented on by a London News reporter (Garrett), who keeps the audience on board with the action – a very much needed intermediary.

Kashyap is a fan of neo-noir author Patrick Manchette and the late French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville, both influences leading to a ambivalent hero status for Kennedy, who seems to be happy to kill, only regretting his actions moments later. Obviously this is down to a split personality, allowing him to be effective as a killer, and very withdrawn when left to his own devices. There is a false bravado about him, particularly when dealing with women like Charlie.

DoP Sylvester Fonseca must take credit for the success of this revenge thriller, set in artificial, claustrophobic interiors – often hotel rooms – trapping the victims like animals. Fonseca and Kashyap also remain on target for most kills in one sequence, their relentless pace leaving us breathless. These repeated nightmares merge into each other, leaving very little room for reflection. But Kennedy still manages to tell a story – however warped and ambiguous.
The eye-candy, if you can call it that – is just right for a Midnight screening at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where Kashyap’s feature is the only Indian film in the programme.

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | MIDNIGHT SCREENING 2023

Rien a Perdre (2023) Cannes Film Festival

Virginie Efira, Arieh Worthalter, Félix Lefèbvre, Alexis Tonetti, Mathieu Demy, India Hair | Drama Belgium France 110’

A mother’s spirited struggle with the French legal system lies at the heart of Rien a Perdre, a fast-moving feature debut for Delphine Deloget best known for her TV fare and award-winning documentary No London Today that bagged a prize at the major Swiss festival Visions du Reel fifteen year ago.

Virginie Efira once again gives a feisty performance as the intractable Sylvie, a single mother with an explosive personality, trying to hold together her family of two tearaway boys – and a chicken – after the father of her youngest has cleared off. Teenage Jean-Jacques (Lefebvre) is a gifted trumpet player, but when his younger brother Sofiane (Tonetti), the more troubled and least fleshed out of the two, gets badly burned on the chip fryer, it becomes clear that Sylvie cannot cope.

Sylvie puts on a brave front but faces some difficult choices and her mental state has clearly suffered as a result. Her bother Alain (Demy) tries to help by offering Sofiane a home but is deemed too close to the problem. And her lover (Worthalter), is .

Sooner or later the authorities catch up with the family but Sylvie comes to blows with a pleasant social worker who proposes a move to a foster home for the boys. This turbulent intervention and the family’s slowly emerging backstory provides the driving force for the remainder of this naturalistic and often moving feature which offers Efira another chance to display her talent for playing strong-willed women. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | UN CERTAIN REGARD 25 May 2023

The (Ex)perience of Love (2023) Cannes Film Festival 2023

Dir.: Ann Sirot, Raphael Balboni; Cast: Lucie Debay, Lazare Gousseau, Florence Loiret Caille, Nora Hamzawi, Florence Janas, Tarek Halaby, Ninon Borsei; France/Belgium 2023, 89 min.

Playful and often hilariously funny The (Ex)perience of Love is an emotional rollercoaster in the same vein as Jan Bucquoy’s 1994 drama The Sex Life of the Belgians.

Presented at this year’s Semaine de la Critique at Cannes it the sophomore feature of Belgian writer/director Ann Sirot and her French filmmaker partner Raphael Balboni, who recently bagged the top prize at Belgium’s “Marguerites” Awards for their debut Madly in Life.

Sandra (Debay) a fitness instructor, and her partner Remy (Gousseau), editor of a high-brow art magazine in Brussels, are trying to have a baby. Nothing seems to work until their Danish gynaecologist comes up with a diagnosis and a possible cure: Apparently, Sandra and Remy are suffering from a “past loves syndrome”, and need to circle back and sleep with all their ex parters to clear the ‘blockage’.

Both have complex emotional backstories in tune with modern times: Sandra has had more lovers than Remi whose ex Julie (Hamzawi), who would later become his sister by marriage. Quite understandably, Julie’s husband Manu is very much against “lending” his wife to Remy, who is also something of a snob. Remi’s first love Nora has given up on relationships and now lives, sexually active, with two female friends in a shared flat.

So the completion between Remi and Sandra begins, both enjoying their “backlog’ of ex-lovers. Remy meets Marion (Caillle), who is open to all forms of sexual experimentation. Justine (Borsei), Sandra’s sister and a mother of two, tries to help her sibling, who now feels emotionally side-lined by Remy, who is rather enjoying his status as a ‘single man’. On his way to ‘sexual liberation’, he uses Sandra as a sort of guide, trying to sleep with a woman during an orgy in a swimming pool where everyone is wearing an animal head. But no experiment is without its surprises as both Remi and Sandra soon discover.

The (Ex)perience of Love is a study in male sexuality, with Remy regressing to teenage-hood, all too ready to sleep with new women, ‘forgetting’ Sandra and the child they so much wanted. Although the ending is a little too cosy and constructed, the directors confirm that sex without emotional commitment is empty. And that men like Remy are emotionally much less mature than Sandra had hoped for. Hilarious at times, The (EX)perience paints a rather sober picture of gender politics. MT

SEMAINE DE LA CRITIQUE | CANNES FILM FESTIVAL

The Swimmer (1968)

Dir: Frank Perry | Cast: Burt Lancaster, Janet Langard, Janice Rule, Tony Bickley, Marge Champion | US Drama 95′

A man spends a summer’s day swimming as many pools as he can in a quiet suburban town in this cult classic that Burt Lancaster called the favourite of his career

A nightmare drenched in beautiful Connecticut locations in glorious sunlight, this review is for those reeling from the devastating ending and wondering what THAT was all about!

My mother’s typically astute interpretation which seems to hit the nail on the head was that Lancaster suffered some catastrophe that cost him his job and his marriage, had a nervous breakdown and one day wandered out of the sanatorium where he’d spent the last couple of years unaware that time had passed; hence the ambivalent response of everyone he meets to see him. @RicharfChatten

NOW AT BFI SOUTHBANK

The Leather Boys (1964)

Dir: Sidney Furie | Cast: Rita Tushingham, Colin Campbell | Drama

‘The Leather Boys’ can still raise eyebrows for it’s pioneering depiction of a nice young lad who finds that he prefers the company of Dudley Sutton to his shrewish little wife played by Rita Tushingham..

Well before he hit the big time with ‘The Ipcress File’ Sydney J. Furie, the new boy from Canada, had already demonstrated himself a director of bewildering versatility with his work ranging from ‘X’-rated shockers like this to Cliff Richard musicals.

In the former category ‘The Leather Boys’ attracted particular notoriety when as a casualty of the industry crisis of 1963-64 it took over a year to obtain a circuit release, which earned it a place on Terence Kelly’s list of ‘martyred’ films on page 35 of his book ‘A Competitive Cinema’. All in all a perfect candidate for Talking Pictures. @RichardChatten

ALSO ON BFI PLAYER

Landshaft (2023)

Dir.: Daniel Koetter; Documentary with Sama Karapoghosyan, Nune Hovhannisyan, Evya Hovhannisyan, Armen Papyan; Germany/Armenia 2022, 97 min.

The rumbling unrest between Armenia and Azerbaijan simmers below the surface on these neighbouring countries, often erupting into full blown conflict. Such was the case in 2020 when war once again broke out between the two nations. Countless lives have been lost and over the past few decades on both sides of the border.

German essayist and documentarian Daniel Koetter (Hashti Tehran) was invited to visit the eastern region of Armenia, bordering on Azerbaijan. Koetter had in mind to shot a documentary about both sides of the conflict, but somehow never got permission to film on the Azerbaijani side. Yet Landshaft is anything but biased. It starts with praise for the Azerbaijani enemy, whose hospitality is praised by one of Koetter‘s Armenian sources, who aided and abetted the filming process.

Doubling up as cameraman, Koetter finds himself in the region around Lake Sevan and the Sotk goldmine. The eastern Armenian border is overlooked by high peaks and is constantly caught in the crossfire, the invisible enemy ready to pounce at any moment. The goldmine runs along the border, each country controlling their respective side of the booty. But the Azerbaijanis have the protection of a Russian company – and Russian drones monitor the Armenian population.

Koetter started shooting just after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The landlocked region of Nagorno-Karabakh is the centre of this proxy war between Russia and its allies and old enemies like Armenia on the other side; a country devastated by the Turkish genocide in WW1. Here in Sotk, the Russian army guarantees a certain buffer between the two countries. There was no military activity during Koetter’s shoot, but in September 2022 places were he had lived and worked were bombed. The drones, produced by Russia, keep the Azerbaijanis on the winning side. “Whoever can, leaves the place” says a dejected Armenian – the same person who had only good things to say about the enemy of today. Like in former Yugoslavia, nobody can explain when and why the neighbours felt out with each other.

Koetter started to accept the invisibility of Azerbaijani soldiers: leaving his house he was surrounded on three sides by mountain peaks where the enemy was stationed. Staying true to this perspective, he shows empathy with the ones without power, but refrains from taking sides. As a symbol, the connecting road to Nagorno-Karabakh, once the main thoroughfare, has become a dead end. The simmering conflict continues, always ready to explode. The mine is the central point of life for both countries.

The dialogue with Armenians is only part of the developing picture: an eerie calm belies a landscape charged with latent violence. Landshaft may be opaque, but it shows the many forms of displacement. The psychological impact and the loss of identity is much more grave in its long term effect than the military skirmishes. Both sides are losers in a war of attrition. AS

VISIONS DU REEL 2023

Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power (2022)

Dir.: Nina Menkes; Documentary with Laura Mulvay, Julie Dash, Joey Soloway, Catherine Hardwicke, Rosanna Arquette; USA 2022, 107 min.

It is no an accident that British film critic Laura Mulvay leads an all-female cast of academics and filmmakers in this new documentary. Brainwashed takes a long cold look at the different ways women and men are treated, both on the screen and by the film industry. Naturally, their male counterparts were invited to contribute but declined. It proves inconclusively that patriarchy has no gender, and that Mulvay’s theory of the ‘Male Gaze’ is very much alive even in the most high-brow fare.

Accordingly, we are forced to take our most admired films and throw them under the bus of sexism: from Last Year at Marienbad to Vertigo, Raging Bull and Le Mepris. Even cult classics such as Blade Runner and Metropolis get the red card.

In the full frontal assault few get away unscathed. Hollywood’s early women directors Ida Lupino and Dorothy Azner are just as guilty as their contemporary counterparts, despite representing just eight percent of the filmmaking community, they have all somehow committed the ‘male gaze’ faux pas’. Even “Palme d’Or” winner Julia Ducournau, only the second female to win the award, takes the rap – for Titane, in which a young woman has sex with a car.

But what exactly is the “male gaze” and what does it consist of? It starts with the definition of the Subject/Object relationship, followed by the specific framing of female and male characters, executed in the camera movement and the lighting: Easy to see how this happens if female filmmakers and camera operators are in the minority. Women often appear naked in films whereas their male counterparts rarely so. The effect is subliminal. Yes, of course, we are all inured and conditioned to it, it’s par for the course – but how often do we actually object?

In the golden era of the studio film women’s faces were captured in 2D sheen, making them look dewy and perfect, whilst men were shot in craggy 3D, implying they had other qualities. Women were reduced to the one-dimensional stereotype of beautiful inertness. As an interesting observation: have you ever watched Raging Bull and noticed that Cathy Moriarty’s image at the swimming pool is detached from the male speakers?

Finally, let’s move on to Mandingo, a trash product directed by Richard Fleischer in 1975. The female plantation owner (Susan George) forces the black slave to have sex with her (otherwise she would accuse him of rape and he would die). His pectoral muscles are very visible, and in all other ways the table is turned too: the male body is, for once, waiting to be conquered by the powerful female.

Brainwashed is rigorous and bracing in its approach, stringent in its execution; and an eyeopener for all who thought they knew the full extent of the phenomenon known as ‘the Male Gaze’. AS

BFI Blu-ray, BFI Player Subscription, iTunes and Amazon Prime release on 17 July 2023

Book Club: the next Chapter (2023)

Dir.: Bill Holderman; Cast: Jane Fonda, Mary Steenburgen, Diane Keaton, Candice Bergen, Don Johnson, Andy Garcia, Greg T. Nelson; USA 2023, 107 min.

Bill Holderman thought he was on to a good thing when Book Club, his feature debut, hit the big screen back in 2018. This follow-up is not as funny or well-written but takes up where he left off, and with the same team of Jane Fonda, Mary Steenburgen, Diane Keaton, Candice Bergen and their love interests Don Johnson, Andy Garcia and Greg T. Nelson. Their star power carries Book Club: the next Chapter from cover to cover.

First time around “50 Shades of Grey” was the book up for discussion. This time around “The Alchemist” provides the reading matter. But rather than reading the focus is on a trip to Italy for a last ‘hurrah’ before Vivian (Fonda) settles down with Arthur (Johnson). What could be more romantic than an Italian wedding? Well, what starts as a joyride in Rome soon turns into a catalogue of disasters.

On the plus side, Book Club: the next Chapter looks ravishing, DoP Andrew Dunn pulling all the stops out with his camerawork and plenty of frothy dialogue. But something is lacking: a spark to set it all on fire. Fonda is regal; Steenburgen mischievous; Candice Bergen sarcastic and self-deprecating and Diane Keaton hoping for a better version of Woody Allen to spar with. But the script lets these ladies down badly. Which is a shame, because so much talent deserves something brave and daring. Certainly not this orderly retreat behind bland in-jokes and telegraphed plot changes. So not much of a page-turner, just a reliable comedy blighted by the fate of all sequels. . AS

ON RELEASE FROM 12 MAY 2023

Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell (2023) Camera d’Or winner 2023

Dir: Thien An Pham | Le Phong Vu, Nguyen Thi Truc Quynh, Nguyễn Thinh, Vu Ngọc Manh | Drama 177′

Thien An Pham makes his feature debut with this languid mystical odyssey reflecting the history of Vietnam. It sees a Saigon songster embark on a spiritual journey into his past in search of a brother who vanished long ago.

Thien (Vu) is living a carefree existence in the capital when tragedy changes his life forever. The reason for this dramatic change is the death of his sister in a freak motor cycle accident. Thien must take his sister’s body back to the rural village where they grew up in, and find his brother, a committed Christian who his since left town.

Back in the rural village, Thien meets the craftsman Truing Quynh) a proud ex-soldier, who admirably refuses to take money for the shroud he has created for Thien’s sister. He fought on the side of the South Vietnamese army and lost many friends since they were heavily outnumbered. But he is stoical and full of forgiveness, even though the side they were fighting for was responsible for their defeat.

Thien also comes across Sister Thao (Quynh), a young woman who almost became his bride back in the day. Thien is aggressive towards her at first, his male ego playing up, but soon realises the mistake he made in letting her go. For the first time, he understands her decision to choose a life of chastity, poverty and obedience and wishes he could believe in God, something which still eludes him. Later he meets a friend of his brother, and he follows her to his work place deep in the jungle. Here, his faith will be tested once again.

DoP Dinh Duy Hung creates a mesmerising sense of place with breath-taking images in the jungle and the waterways that play with light and shadows and changes to reflect Thien’s emotional transformation. Thien’s struggle to be able to believe in God after all the years of a superficial life is an arduous one, but he tries to be honest, even when seemingly losing the battle.

An old motorcycle, which belonged to his father, is his trademark, transporting him through the countryside, often getting stuck in the mud and mirroring the peaks and troughs of his own mental journey. His endurance grows with time, but his brother, who seems to be at the heart of the enigma, remains elusive.

This is certainly an epic, a subtle, sinuous piece of filmmaking and Thien An Pham is certainly in love with his long travelling shots. Leaving some of these “darling Images” on the editing floor would certainly have made for a more concise, less languorous look at his country’s past. But there is no mistake, this is a filmmaker with talent. AS

André Bazin Prize by Cahiers du cinéma goes to Pham Thiên Ân for Inside The Yellow Cocoon ShellCANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2023 | DIRECTORS’ FORTNIGHT 2023

The Survival of Kindness (2023)

Dir.: Rolf de Heer; Cast: Mwajemi Hussein, DarsanSharma, Deepthi Sharma; Australia 2023, 96 min.

Dutch-Australian writer/director Rolf de Heer (Ten Canoes) has created another dystopian lament, set in a remote part of Tasmania and South Australia and shot during the lockdown of the pandemic, which was particularly harsh in Australia.

De Heer is well underway to claiming ownership to the sub-genre oethnographic docu–drama. His characters hardly ever get names: just, black woman, brown girl, brown boy, Everything is minimalist, Maxx Corindale’s camera roams about finding no peace in the outback. Essentially a series of episodes his narrative remains enigmatic and rather lacking in flow.

The film opens in the aftermath to a massacre, bodies strewn around, until the camera focuses on a family. A black woman (Hussein) is captured in an iron cage, trying to escape. She ingeniously, finds enough tools to create a sort of key, which opens the door, and delivers her into the dark desert. Not prepared for the challenging terrain, she has no footwear but luckily meets helpful Asian siblings (Darsan and Deepthi Sharma), who live in a vintage train. Even though the three of them share no common language, the communication is sufficient.

Later, the Black Woman will find her boots, but loses them again later on. The threesome arrive at a city where they are captured and put to work in an industrial complex, where the Woman has to slave away in a salvage yard, trying to find metal. But her resourcefulness is once again at the forefront, and she manages to get free of her shackles. In the end she will be left with a brutal choice if she is to survive at all.

Anna Liebzeit’s score is unsettling, even though there is birdsong and lapping water. Mwajemi Hussein carries the feature with dignity, even without words, she communicates the essentials of a world lost.

The endless repetitiveness makes this feature feel bloated: once again brevity is of the essence whilst it is obvious that dramatic arcs are not part of how the story is told, the 96 minutes certainly feel much longer. As a medium-length feature THE SURVIVAL would have certainly had more power. AS

WINNER FIPRESCI PRIZE BERLINALE 2023

The Nature of Love (2023)

Dir: Monia Chokri | Cast: Magalie Lepine, Pierre-Yves Cardinal, Francis William Rheaume, Monia Chokri | Comedy Drama Canada 111′

Girl meets boy from the other side of this tracks in this Quebec-set drama that explores how love can break down even the toughest barriers of class and intellect, until the cracks start to show.

Canadian actor and filmmaker Monia Chokri returns to Un Certain Regard with her third feature having won the Jury prize of the Cannes sidebar in 2019. The Nature of Love very much brings to mind Brigitte Rouan’s 1997 feature After Sex: A forty year old woman, in a loveless and sexless relationship, embarks on a risky affair in a social environment unknown to her. It’s a well-worn formula but told with style and appeal.

Sophia (Lepine-Blondeau) and Xavier (Reaume) are middle-class intellectuals living together in Quebec. Held together by a shared history and a tight circle of friends they have drifted into that ‘friendship’ zone that so often sounds the death knoll on passion. But when Sophia meets Sylvain (Cardinal), a builder working on her new summer house, the chemistry is electrifying.

Sylvain is all brute strength and masculine charm, and Xavier seems content to let things slide. But soon Sylvain’s blue-collar background is at odds with Sophia’s soigne milieu. And rather than accepting his gaucheness amongst her own set, Sophia persists in correcting her new lover’s limited vocabulary (“he has to learn to be precise to give his opinion greater value”). And that flies in the face of Sylvain’s male ego. After the usual recriminations the lovers split, and Chokri then explores the aftermath digging deeper into their cultural differences in a scene of utter confusion.

Chokri plays Sophia’s close friend Francoise, her role is to support this new beginning, while Sophia’s mother is the voice of reason, knowing her daughter all too well. Xavier’s father is the Alzheimer’s sufferer, reminding us to live life to the full: the Grim Reaper is always waiting in the wings.

Not as intricate and poetic as Mia Hansen-Love’s One Beautiful Morning, The Nature of Love is still a passionate portrait of a woman on fire. Shot with simmering compassion by DoP Andre Turpin, Chokri keeps up a relentless pace in this no-holds-barred dark comedy. @MeredithTaylor

THE NATURE OF LOVE will be released in UK and Irish cinemas 5th July 2024

Firebrand (2023)

Dir: Karim Ainouz | Cast: Alicia Vikander, Jude Law, Eddie Marsan, Sam Riley, Ruby Bentall, Erin Doherty | Drama

Jude Law is grotesque as Henry VIII on last his last legs – quite literally – in this imagined drama chronicling his marriage to Catherine Parr, the only wife who survived him, played with elegant conviction by Alicia Vikander.

Brazilian/Algerian filmmaker Karim Aïnouz last came to Cannes with a ravishingly beautiful 1950s outing The Invisible Life of Eurydice Gusmao. His latest, adapted for the screen by ‘Killing Eve’ writers Jessica and Henrietta Ashworth from a novel by Elizabeth Freemantle, is another story about the plight of women living constricted lives, this time in turbulent Tudor times.

Catherine Parr was the first woman to publish in the English language but the focus here is not so much her literary skill as her feminine guile seen through her struggle to survive this putrid, coercive and quixotic tyrant who forces himself on her at every opportunity in the desperate need to provide a male child. His gruesome grunts and larded buttocks bear testament to Catherine’s gruelling ordeal. She is far the most interesting character here but is rather left on the sidelines with the flatulent bully Henry taking centre stage.

Firebrand is a dark disturbing drama that unfolds within the claustrophobic confines of the royal quarters only occasionally making it into the fresh air of its glorious Spring settings. Intrigue, conspiracy and sculduggery are par (!) for the course: and familiar touchstones to those terrible times of misogyny and paranoia, the threat of beheading hanging over every woman, and man in the court.

Catherine Parr was the most fortunate of Henry’s alliances, and was even appointed regent while the king was in France. But she was also suspected of harbouring radical religious views in her objection to the church’s use of Latin: and this plot line sees her befriending the outspoken Protestant heretic Anne Askew (Erin Doherty) causing a rift with Simon Russell Beale’s Stephen Gardiner, a Catholic bishop and Catherine’s implacable opponent. So nothing really new to write home about here but certainly a film worth considering. MEREDITH TAYLOR

GOLDEN GLOBE NOMINATED | NOW IN UK AND IRISH CINEMAS

It’s Raining in the House (2023) Cannes Film Festival

Dir: Paloma Sermon-Dai | Purdey Lambert, Makenzy Lombet, Louise Manteau, Donovan Nizet | Belgium, France Drama 82′

An artful and entrancing coming of age story that unfolds one sultry summer in lakeside Belgium where teenagers Makenzy and her younger brother Purdey are discovering love and life in their working class neighbourhood after their mother leaves home.

Paloma Sermon-Dai’s tender debut drama is another personal project for the Belgian filmmaker whose award-winning documentary Petit Samedi chronicled her brother’s struggle with substance abuse.

There is a distinct cinema verite feel to It’s Raining, the director drawing from her documentary experience, and once again casting her own relatives, real-life sister Makenzy, almost 18, and fifteen year-old half-brother Purdey, in a naturalistic feature inspired by her 2017 short film Makenzy.

Needs must when the devil drives, and the siblings have to fend for themselves in a story that is slim on plot but triumphs with impressive camerawork from Frederic Noirhomme (Playground) who instills the piece with a sense of soft-peddling, bucolic charm. The kids’ naturalistic often amusing banter avoids a melodramatic approach to their trials and tribulations, capturing instead the banality and frustration of their humdrum everyday existence, often with flinty humour.

But while Purdey is more mature and realistic in outlook, trying to get a job and talking to the social services after she splits with her controlling Moroccan boyfriend, her brother loafs around with his friends and steals from the local store to make ends meet. Purdey’s petty crimes gradually turn more hard-edged when he meets some kids from Brussels, providing the film with a sombre change of tone in contrast to the carefree vibe of the opening scenes. Time for Purdey to make some serious decisions about her future. Sometimes the strongest bonds emerge out of hardship. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2023 | SEMAINE DE LA CRITIQUE |

Silent Dust (1949)

Dir: Lance Comfort | UK Drama

Based on the play by both himself and his father Roland, Michael Pertwee already displays the caustic take on human nature that would characterise his later work for Mario Zampi.

During the titles, as the unmistakable strains of Georges Auric swells up, top billing goes to Sally Gray, but the film really belongs to Stephen Murray who gives a towering performance as the patriarch dismayed to discover that his son (a perfectly cast Nigel Patrick) far from being the dead hero he was mourning was actually a very much alive bouncer.

Another little gem from the still unsung Lance Comfort. Two clever scenes are one depicting a lying flashback and a subjective sequence (SLIGHT SPOILER COMING:) in which he visualises a scar-faced intruder with the scar – which being blind – is on the man’s wrong cheek. @RichardChatten

The Anatomy of a Fall (2023) Golden Globes 2024 | Best Motion Picture – Non-English Language

Dir: Justine Triet, Wri; Justine Tried, Arthur Harari | Cast: Sandra Hüller, Swann Arlaud, Milo Machado Graner, Samuel Theis | Drama 151’

French director Justine Triet enters the premier league of French film directors with this absorbing and fiercely intelligent psychological drama that sees a writer implicated in the death of her husband.

Certainly deserving its top prize at this year’s Cannes competition Anatomy of a Fall stars Sandra Huller, her second role of the festival, in a gripping courtroom drama that begins with a mysterious death and the gradually dissection of a marriage that in the early scenes appears to have everything going for it, and with an appealing little boy (Machado Garner) to show for it. But who knows what goes on behind the scenes?. And in this case the setting is a remote and picturesque chalet in the French Alps where, as the film opens, successful German novelist Sandra (Huller) is being interviewed by a young PhD student from nearly Grenoble. The relaxed atmosphere sees the two women enjoying wine and gossipy banter, but loud music from the upper floor soon brings this genial meeting to close. Sandra’s husband is composing and playing back his syncopated vibes on a loop. And when Samuel is found dead, having fallen – or jumped – from a window, it gradually dawns that all is not well in this snowy paradise.

Over two hours then slip by in an engrossing battle of wits where the action swings from the magnificent Alpine hideaway to the sober confines of the court where Sandra, defended by her barrister and close friend Vincent (Swann Arlaud), will have to prove her innocence against the vicious cross examination of the prosecution (Antoine Reinartz). And here fact, reality, and fiction come under the spotlight, including Sandra’s dirty laundry which she is forced to reveal in public: her temper, her bisexuality, but also her keen intellect: and once again we realise that the Law is not about discovering the truth but winning the battle of perception.: As Vincent puts it succinctly to Sandra who insists: “I didn’t kill him”. “That’s not the point” – “You need to deal with how you come across to others”. As courtrooms dramas go this is one of the best. MT

Winner Best Motion Picture – Non-English Language | Best Screenplay – Motion Picture – 81st Golden Globes 2024 | CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2023 | WINNER PALME D’OR

The Mother of All Lies (2023) Directing Prize Winner UCR 2023

Dir.: Asmae El Moudir; Drama-Documentary with Asmae El Moudir; Morocco, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Egypt 2023, 96 min.

La Femis graduate and director Asmae El Moudir, follows her first film The Postcard with this feature debut set against the troubled past of her homeland, Morocco.

The story centres on a single photo. El Moudir wants to know why she only has one photograph from her childhood, and why the girl in the picture isn’t even her. Her dictatorial grandmother burnt the rest of the memorabilia. The snap is shot in a Kindergarten setting and it soon turns out the girl in the photo is her sister Fatima, one of the victims of the massacre ordered by King Hassan II in Casablanca in June 1981, when the poor rose up against the cost of living crisis: bread and sugar prices increased by a staggering 77%.

On that fateful day in June 1981, the grandmother had closed the house but she was the only person who could have seen the assailant, who killed her granddaughter. Confronted by the surviving sister, the grandmother used bullying tactics to keep her, and the rest of the household, quiet. Not by accident, the photo of Hassan II is the only other image which survived to tell the tale.

The death toll was officially put at sixty six people but observers believed over six hundred were killed by police and military. After many years of the Sahara War, the Kingdom had run out of money and the price rises were supposed to cover for the seemingly endless military adventure. El Moudir questions her mother, father and grandmother’s account about their home and their country. Slowly, she unravels the layers of deception that have shaped her life.

El Moudir painstakingly puts together the repressed history, with the grandmother defiant to the last. The use of puppets and miniatures actually makes the grand deception even more real, and quite alarming. There are echoes of the Chamber of Horrors in Madame Tussaud’s wax work museum. DoP Hatem Nachi cleverly merges the two artistic levels seamlessly. The film is particularly convincing in showing how the tyrannical grandmother uses her status as the matriarch to repress any form of resistance from her docile and traumatised family. The Mother of all Lies is innovative and startling. An impressive start to a promising filmmaking career. AS

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2023 | UN CERTAIN REGARD

The Homecoming (2023) Cannes Film Festival 2023

Dir: Catherine Corsini Cast: Suzy Bemba, Esther Gohourou, Aïssatou Diallo Sagna, Lomane de Deitrich, Cédric Appietto, Denis Podalyds, Virginie Ledoyen | France, Drama

Catherine Corsini is arguably most successful in her intimate character dramas. Summertime particularly comes to mind. Her eleventh feature premiering at Cannes Film Festival captures the intensity of a summer holiday, with two terrific central performances from newcomers and onscreen sisters Suzy Bemba (Jessica) and Esther Gohourou (Farah). The French island of Corsica provides a stunning playground for them to get together after a long time apart, and experience first love before going on to real life.

The French are big on holidays: barely a month goes by without some kind of long weekend or school break, and Corsica is becoming increasingly popular with its secluded beaches and craggy coves. To bring us up to speed with family set-up Corsini starts her film with a preamble showing a mother Khédidja (Aïssatou Diallo Sagna) fleeing Corsica with her two little girls, their father having died in enigmatic circumstances. Flip forward fifteen years and the three of them are heading back there where Khédidja will be serving as nanny to a wealthy family from Paris. Here Corsini and her co-writer Naïla Guiguet skilfully manage the various narrative strands involving the trauma of their characters’ collective past, occasionally veering into melodrama but always with feeling.

Jessica is the smarter of the girls and soon develops a close bond with Gaia (Lomane de Deitrich), the daughter of the Parisian couple (Denis Podalydès and Virginie Ledoyen). Meanwhile the tomboyish Farah starts to dabble with drugs and meets Corsican bandit (Harold Orsoni) providing the film with some spikier moments. Bemba and Gohourou make for alluring couple exuding both charm and humour, somehow making their mark in an environment that is distinctly unfriendly to outsiders, and there’s a racial element at play here. Clearly they don’t fit in, and Farah is not the most likeable of teenagers.

But mostly this is an extended family story about sins of the past and redemption. All the characters experience a transformation as the dynamic gradually shifts with satisfying outcomes. Corsica is very much a character, its breathtaking scenery stealing the show as it did in I Comete: A Corsican Summer and Let the Corpses Tan.

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2023

Monster (2023) Cannes Film Festival 2023

Dir: Kore-eda Hirokazu | Cast: Sakura Andô, Eita Nagayama, Soya Kurasawa, Hinata Hiiragi, Mitsuki Takahata | Japan Drama 126′

This study of classroom bullying, and childhood trauma is not one of Kore-eda’s best films, and never reaches the emotional heights of Our Little Sister or Like Father, Life Son. But after a choppy first hour Monster eventually comes together as a stirring drama about the benefits of friendship and imagination. The film also deals with the controversy of parent versus teacher in an educational environment where increasingly staff are having to take responsibly for often false accusations in order to keep the peace and avoid PTA reprisals.

Minato (Kuokawa) lives with his widowed mother Saori (Ando) in the Japanese coastal city of Suwa. The climate here is extreme and frequent downpours and typhoons provides the story with its often stormy atmosphere that mirrors the emotional state of this troubled but tightly-knit couple who we first meet watching a blazing fire from the balcony of their family flat.

Minato has a new teacher called Mr. Hori (Eita Nagayama), and their controversial relationship gives the story a sinister undertow when the boy starts behaving strangely. Clearly something it going on but Kore-eda keeps us guessing in a series of rather other sequences. It soon emerges than the boy has been injured by Mr Hori after an incident at school. Saori wants answers but they are not forthcoming, the staff and Mrs Fushimi (Tanaka), the reserved head mistress, merely bow and express their deep regret in Japanese style.

The focus then turns to Minato’s relationship with another student, Yori (Hinata Hiragi) whose father, a single parent, appears to be off the rails. From then on, sharing their past traumas the boys form an indelible bond as the story gradually turns into a affectionate buddy movie where the two of them scamper around in the summery fields and explore an abandoned train which becomes their hideout and a place to escape to and enjoy a sense of adventure and fantasy.

Complimented by a soothig score from late Ryuichi Sakamoto Monster often feels like a film in two halves, the second being the most satisfying and enjoyable and exuding Kore-eda signature tenderness and his skill for working with children. The seasoned director elicits some really stunning naturalistic performances from the entire cast. Yoko Tanaka is probably the most impressive as the stylishly elegant Mrs Fushimi, the epitome of discretion but always with a twinkle in her eye.

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2023

The Taste of Things | La Passion de Dodin Bouffant (2023) Cannes Film Festival 2023

Dir Anh Hung Tran | cast: Juliette Binoche, Benoit Magimel, Pierre Gagnaire | Drama | France, 135′

The Taste of Things, his seventh feature, adapted from Marcel Rouff’s 1924 novel The Life And Passion of Dodin-Bouffant is set in France in the late 19th century, the film follows the life of Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel) as a renownd chef living with his personal cook and lover Eugénie (Oscar®-winner Juliette Binoche). Eugénie and Dodin share a long history of gastronomy and love. While emotions remain contained, the culinary discoveries are, on the other hand, breathtakingly exquisite. The only sadness for Dodin is that Eugénie refuses to marry him. So, the food lover decides to do something he has never done before: cook for her.

We first meet Eugenie (Binoche) in her kitchen garden on a blissful summer’s morning chosing a fresh lettuce for a mouth-watering meal of gastronomic proportions. Dodin (Magimel) and his guests will savour at their leisure later on at luncheon. Every dish is a work of art created from a basis of fresh local ingredients in season. But the film also symbolises a wider appreciation of the simple pleasures in life we often take for granted such as the intense anticipation of a delicious dinner or the satisfying sensuality of long-lasting desire.

Eugenie luxuriates in the quiet pleasure of cooking and enjoying time spent with Dodin over the twenty years of their time together. Their epicurean partnership has gradually led to the bedroom where occasionally the two indulge in the realm of the senses that extends beyond the purely culinary. But Dodin wants to formalise the arrangement with marriage. And is also concerned for Eugenie’s well-being and her failing health. Slowly he takes over in the kitchen preparing the food as an act of affection and appreciation he feels for her in their relationship of mutual respect and dedication. And the act of successful courtship like the preparation of a delicious dish requires patience and meticulous timing, a heavy-handed approach may ruin the chemistry, but he must keep the pot simmering in this delicate dance of love that is typically French. @MeredithTaylor

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | IN COMPETITION 2023

Banel & Adama (2023)

Wir/Dir: Ramata-Toulaye Sy | Cast: Mamadou Diallo, Moussa Sow, Binta Racine Sy | Drama 87′

Senegal’s dry sunny climate and spare sandy landscapes make a spectacular setting for this simple but never simplistic love story from first time feature director Ramata-Toulaye Sy. It sees a young couple conflicted by the modern world and the spirituality of African folklore.

Vibrant images and spectacular framing picture the newlyweds Banel and Adama at peace in their small village. But dark clouds soon gather over their idyll when Adama becomes increasingly absent from the picture dealing with his commitments as a farmer in a worrying drought. Banel spends her days aimlessly walking around repeatedly talking about her plans to leave the village and emerging as a rather spiteful and vacuous character, killing small birds and reptiles with a sling through boredom and bitterness.

A little boy named Malik is always on her trail, monitoring her movements. Adama calls him a “scribe angel,” who is trying to read her mind. But Banel becomes abusive towards him and she realises the futility of her life without a clear purpose. Is the director trying to make a point about a women’s role in tribal society. While the men tend their cattle the women have their own part to play. They must run the home and bear children. If so Banel is neither a trailblazer nor a role model, but a frustrated character and her life is without foundation in these shifting sands.

Ramata-Toulaye Sy has an outstanding gift for visual storytelling and a real eye for framing. Banel and Adama is a cinematic and atmospherically powerful film full of striking imagery, brooding discontent and baleful glances, including the extraordinary sand storm sequence that brings this enigmatic feature to a close. There are some intriguing ideas and concepts at play, but whether the story – about tradition and the modern world – can captivate an audience for the film’s entire running time, without character development and a satisfying plot resolution, is questionable. So script development is certainly where this talented filmmaker needs to focus her attention. MT

NOW IN CINEMAS

Last Summer (2023) Cannes Film Festival

Wri/Dir: Catherine Breillat | Cast: Lea Drucker, Olivier Rabourdin, Clotilde Courau, Samuel Kircher | France Drama 104′

This French remake of May el-Touky’s far edgier awarding-winning original Queen of Hearts is so laboured, long-winded and last-century.

Léa Drucker gives a steely performance as Anne a smug but successful juvenile rights lawyer who likes to live on the wild side and risks it all to have a casual affair with her mixed-up, ugly duckling stepson Theo (Kircher) because she can. In this sleek makeover where the focus is the upmarket Parisian suburban settings, Anne plays token mother to her adopted Japanese daughters, but most of the time she is flaunting her voluptuous figure in couture dresses, and stilettos, and is rarely without a glass of wine to get through her days of being a legal champion and massaging the ego of her rich and raddled industrialist husband Pierre (Rabourdin) who she can also alienate in a second with her razor-sharp rhetoric.

But this sweet tale sour when Theo throws his toys out of the pram, confessing the liaison to Pierre on a ‘man-to-man’ break. Anne strikes back with a vituperative counterclaim bringing her husband back onside and threatening Theo with her legal prowess. Breillat shocked audiences twenty years ago with her avantgarde approach to sex from the women’s point of view, most notably in Romance – but this material is so passe and lacks the bite of her early work, playing out like an bland erotic comedy with some skilful camerawork thrown in. It is also overlong.

El-Touky co-wrote the script but her original film Queen of Hearts – an apt title embodying the control freakery behind Anne’s character – also dived deeper into the psychological aspects of the story of an abusive narcissist with a heart of stone. Breillat’s film focusses on the intimate sexual relationship which provides awkward and ultimately tedious viewing, and is particularly unconvincing in its motivations as Theo is no adonis and lacks charisma. And who really wants to sit through endless close-up sweaty sequences of people having sex? MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2023

About Dry Grasses (2023) Cannes Film Festival 2023

Dir: Nuri Bilge Ceylan | Cast: Merve Dizdar, Deniz Celiloğlu, Musab Ekici | Turkey, Drama 197′

The past and the present once again collide in this discursive latest drama from Nuri Bilge Ceylan. It sees an art teacher languishing in a remote Anatolian backwater yearning for a transfer to the bright lights of Istanbul.

Samet (Deniz Celiloglu) has always been proud of his easy manner and genial way with his students although recently this bonhomie has failed to materialise due to his stalling career. He shares a comfortable house with a younger colleague Kenan (Musab Ekici) who joins him by the fireside after trudging across the snowbound wasteland in the film’s opening sequence. The two seem unaware of the latent competitiveness in their relationship,

But summer soon arrives bringing with it a vast expanse of dry grasses. Ceylan’s elegant framing once again provides a contemplative setting for this reflective story about school staff having to shoulder responsibility for accusations from pupils. And Samet soon comes under scrutiny when a pupil accuses him of abuse.

Samet has a soft spot for his prize pupil 14 year old Sevim (Ece Bagci) and the two often engage in inappropriate banter. But when Sevim betrays their clandestine friendship by filing a complaint about his behaviour to the authorities Samet backs off immediately, wondering whether his more attractive colleague Kenan is fact partly to blame for the complain. Kenan then becoming the focus in the inquiry. All this has a negative impact on Samet’s ego accentuating his competitive streak with Kenan. By way of getting his own back he decides to sabotage Kenan’s budding romance with his female colleague Nuray (Merle Dizdar) who works in a bigger school in a nearby town.

Although the Turkish auteur reworks his customary themes in one of his most resonant works so far, his films are always intriguing, memorable, and wonderful to look at. This time around a cheeky fourth wall adds an element of surprise to the Ceylan’s signature style. And although Dry Grasses never reaches a resounding conclusion, we leave the cinema feeling satisfied and enriched by the experience. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2023 | Best Actress Award Merve Dizdar

Anselm (2023) Cannes Film Festival 2023

Dir.: Wim Wenders; Documentary with Anslem Kiefer, Daniel Kiefer, Anton Wenders; Germany 2023, 93 min.

To call Wim Wenders’ portrait of German artist Anselm Kiefer a documentary would be selling the work of both artists short. ANSELM is a potted history of post war Germany, rooted in the society where both men were born, in 1945. Neither of them escaped unhurt, even though Kiefer, a more confrontational character than Wenders, took the brunt of criticism. But “Das Rauschen der Zeit” is first and foremost a chronicle of a country still not ready to face its racist past. Their output is shrouded in enigma and ambivalence. There is always confusion and reverie: Wenders’ American set films and Kiefer’s French based creations are flights of imagination. But the shadow of the Third Reich looms large, and cannot be negotiated with art or gestures.

Anselm Kiefer, represented as a young man by Daniel Kiefer, and as a school boy by Anton Wenders, gained prominence in 1971 as Joseph Beuys’ master student in Dusseldorf. This was followed by a scandal in Venice, at the Biennale in 1980, when Kiefer was accused of being a neo-Nazi, with him insisting he just wanted to refer to the victims of the Holocaust, wearing his father’s Wehrmacht’s Uniform and greeting the public with the Nazi salute. In 2022 Kiefer would make a triumphant return to the city.

But by now his work output was colossal – both in yield and form: He created topographic landscapes in an old brick factory in Germany, and landscapes in the South of France. And continues to this day with mega installations in his new studio in Croissy near Paris. There are architectural constructions, numerous pavilions, underground crypts and a gigantic, roofed amphitheatre. Everything is larger than life, and Kiefer is still at it, in a big way, always moving forward to the next project. Flame throwers are his favourite “weapons” of art, giant lift constructions lead him to the top of the world. Literally.

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2023 | SPECIAL SCREENING

The New Boy (2023)

Dir: Warwick Thornton | Cast: Kate Blanchett, Mezi Atwood, Deborah Mailman, Wayne Blair | Drama, Australia

Kate Blanchett delivers another tour de force – this time as a nun in a remote outpost for orphaned boys in Australia’s outback.

This drama about a boy disrupting the delicate status quo in a remote Benedictine monastery run by a renegade nun has a definite ring of Matthew Lewis’ Gothic novel The Monk about it.

But this is Australia in the 1940s rather than 18th century Spain. And the themes of innocence and spiritual corruption are replaced by those of Colonisation and the survival of indigenous communities, namely the Aboriginals. There’s no sex, as in Dominik Moll’s The Monk but there is some magic realism: by rubbing his fingers together the boy conjures up the healing force of a sparkling light.

Warwick Thornton’s narrative follows a well-worn formula: the mercurial stranger comes to town and works his magic – good and bad – on a sceptical community. The ‘new boy’ in question is 9 year-old Aswan Reid, an Aboriginal who, early on, saves another orphan from a fatal snake bite. He sleeps under the bed, gobbles down his porridge, and gets extra rations from Blanchett’s indulgent ‘Mother Superior’ Sister Eileen, who is mourning the recent loss of her partner Dom Peter. And while the nun slowly hits the bottle, questioning her own faith, the boy gradually navigates this new world without losing the vital ropes to his past.

The other boys remain bemused by their new housemate who tries to steal the jam belonging to the kindly caretaker George (Wayne Blair) from under the nose of buxom cook Sister Mum (Barbara Mailman). But the boy is thankfully diverted from these rather cheesy interludes by the arrival of a life-size crucifix from Europe, sent to Aussie to avoid it being damaged by the WWII hostilities. And this provides a source of endless fascination for the boy as he experiments by piercing his own hands to see if they bleed, as the crucifix does, miraculously. Eventually, Sister Eileen wonders if baptism could be the answer to the boy’s antics.

Naturally Blanchett is the star turn here but Reid certainly pushes above his weight in an impressive performance for an untrained newcomer in this welcome addition to the aboriginal sub-genre from indigenous director Warwick Thornton. MT

IN UK CINEMAS FROM 08 MARCH 2024

Tiger Stripes (2022)

Dir.: Amanda Nell Eu; Cast: Zafreen Zairiza, Deena Ezrai, Piqa, Shaheisy Sam, Jun Lojong | Drama, 95 min.

Amanda Nell Eu goes far beyond the bounds of horror with her astonishing debut feature. She wa the first woman filmmaker from Malaysia to make it into Cannes Film Festival main completion for the 75th Edition. Shooting was originally planned for 2018 but had to be postponed due to the pandemic.

Set a strictly religious Muslim School for Girls in rural Malaysia, this is a story of liberation via magic. Tiger Stripes unfolds in the playful, slightly ironic style of Jacques Rivette’s early films such as La Bande a Quatre. Her aim here is not scare the audience but make them fully appreciate her heroine’s struggle for liberation.

Zaffan (Zairizal) is twelve years old and puberty is a taboo subject in her strict Muslim household. Any discussion about bodily changes is strictly out of bounds: “you are dirty now” is all she tells her daughter. Zaffan’s friends are even more aggressive, led by the goody-two-shoes Farah (Ezrai), who isolates Zaffan from her girl friends and “shops” her to the school authorities. After the class teacher has a nervous breakdown dealing with Zaffan, who is now considered an evil spirit, an exorcist tries to liberate the girl from the demon (whilst plying his fare on a mobile) but he is also left defeated. Will Zaffan really be liberated after escaping to the jungle with her new identity?

Told tongue-in-cheek style, Tiger Stripes contrasts our modern technology-driven world with the traditional Muslim dogma that deprives girls of their freedom and identity: they may have their mobile ‘phones, but their status as second class citizen will prevail. Instead of being proud of their bodies, they are told be ashamed of being ‘Deuxieme Sex’. There is only one way out: magic realism.

DoP Jimmy Gimferrer creates an atmosphere of permanent threat: particularly at night during a school outing in the woods when strange noises keep the girls awake. The creatures of the night, which might help to liberate Zaffan in the end, are not so much present, but are everywhere. Two worlds collide. And Zaffan’s parents and the school authorities are very much afraid of the magic world: they have never left the world of their childhood, and religion is just a way of convenience.

A roller-coaster of a film, Tiger Stripes makes his point: Girls just want to dance and have fun. With a firework of ideas, EU burns down the real walls of imprisonment with a magical firework display. Brilliant. AS

NOW IN SELECTED UK CINEMAS

Jeanne du Barry (2023)

Dir/Wri: Maiwenn | Cast: Maiwenn, Johnny Depp, Melvil Poupaud, Pierre Richard, Pascal Gregory, Benjamin Lavernhe, Marianne Basler | France, Drama 117′

French actor and filmmaker Maiwenn clearly had Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece Barry Lyndon (1975) in mind when she came up with idea of making a film about the six-year love affair between the widower King Louis XV (1710-74) and his mistress Jeanne du Barry, who would dance him to his grave. Seven years in the making, the film is based on a script by the director and her co-writers Teddy Lussi-Modeste and Nicolas Livecchi who create an overlong potboiler that aspires to be more momentous than it actually is, and with little dramatic heft to carry us through the narrative torpor.

In real life Jeanne Becu, Comtesse du Barry, was a cultured patron and aesthete who counted Voltaire amongst her coterie. But Maiwenn skips over historical fact imagining her heroine, who she also plays, as a woman who started life as an orphan and used her looks and low cunning to scamper up the social ladder to the Royal throne, entrancing the King who had only recently lost his Polish Queen Marie Leszczynska and his previous mistress Madame de Pompadour.

John Alcott won the Best Cinematography Oscar for Barry Lyndon and this version in elegantly shot in the same flickering candlelight style by Laurent Dailland who also captures the magnificent landscapes surrounding Versailles, the film marks Maiwenn’s 35 mm debut and aims for the same delicate atmosphere as Barry Lyndon but achieves none of the depth or finesse of Kubrick’s epic, some set ideas seemingly copied directly from the original.

Slim of plot but busting with bodice-heaving interludes Jeanne du Barry is a raunchy romp that harks back to an era where it was unthinkable for a commoner to become chatelaine of the magnificent palace of Versailles where she would slip into the King’s bed, via a marriage with Melvil Poupaud’s Comte du Barry, and craftily negotiate malign influences in the corridors of power.

Sadly we see no real evidence of du Barry’s clever strategies, or her artistic prowess, Maiwenn instead playing her as a simpering coquettish ‘cat that got the cream’ in a series of face-offs with the King’s cartoonish offspring and his valet, a suave Benjamin Lavernhe.

Maiwenn makes for a rather salacious, hard-edged heroine, unpopular with her female counterparts but capable of turning on the charm with her male entourage. Depp is masterful in his limited screen appearance gracing the set with his usual charismatic allure but even Johnny can’t save this travesty.

NOW ON RELEASE IN UK CINEMAS FROM 19 APRIL 2024

La Chimera (2023)

Dir: Alice Rohrwacher | Cast: Alba Rohrwacher, Josh O’Connor, Isabella Rossellini Italy, Drama 130′

Alice Rohrwacher’s latest drama is set during the 1980s in world of the ‘tombaroli’ or tomb robbers and tells the story of an English archaeologist (Josh O’Connor) caught up in this illegal trafficking of ancient artefacts.

A magical poetic tenderness is the ephemeral quality in Rohrwacher’s unique style of filmmaking and her dreamlike fourth feature has the same lyrical lightness of touch that haunted Corpo Celeste, The Wonders and Happy as Lazarus in some ways completing the final trio. Unfolding in her home of Tuscany the tale once again connects the past with the present through a delicate thread linking Italy’s ancient history that is still so much part of everyday life where relics are as common as bus stops at every street corner. La Chimera is a film that you gradually surface into as if waking out of the depths of a dream.

Italy’s Etruscan heritage was still being discovered at the end of the last century and a motley band of wayfarers chance upon this priceless buried treasure hoping it will finance the rest of their lives. Arthur (O’Connor) leads the quest – but is also haunted by another, more spiritual search, an illusory longing for Benjamina, a girl he loved and lost long ago. Her mother – a delightful Isabella Rossellini who brings so much resonance to the story with her own personal history – is still living in the past in a decadent grandeur of the old station of Riparbella, with her family and housekeeper Italia (Duarte).

Sporting a crumpled cream linen suit – the masculine sartorial emblem of 1980s Italy – Arthur spends most of the film in a state of gruff melancholy after being hailed by the others as the quintessential Italian-speaking Englishman who innate style and sense of conviction capture their imagination. They tag along with Arthur in the hope that he will lead them to the holy grail with his knack of locating sites with a flimsy forked branch. But like life itself, their odyssey is filled with dreams and illusions: Always better to travel in hope than to arrive. MT

NOW IN CINEMAS | CURZON

Asteroid City (2023) Cannes Film Festival 2023

But the film’s focus is Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman), a melancholy, pipe-smoking photographer and recent widower who arrives with his children, and his wife’s ashes, in a retro shooting-break that promptly blows a gasket. Butch mechanic Matt Dillon scratches his head unable to mend the vehicle so Augie asks his father in law Stanley (Tom Hanks) for help, meanwhile falling in love Scarlett Johansson’s luminescent but lonely Hollywood star Midge, in scenes that plays out like a psychedelic version of Psycho. The nostalgia comes from the music – Rupert Friend is the crooning cowboy – the colours and the upbeat gaiety that recalls a time when America was great and led the way in all things cutting edge, including scientific breakthroughs and space travel, but still had decency and family values at its heart. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2023

The Zone of Interest (2023) Academy Award for Best International Feature Film 2024 | Grand Prix – Cannes Film Festival 2023

Wri/Dir: Jonathan Glazer | Cast: Sandra Huller, Christian Friedel, Ralph Herforth, Max Beck | UK 107′

Another daring and distinctive outing from the English auteur/commercials director, and his first non-English film, centres on a Nazi family living in an immaculate villa boasting an idyllic flower-filled garden.

On the other side of the wall smoke rises from the ovens of Auschwitz concentration camp. As birdsong fills the air the camera focuses on the crimson petals of a delicate dahlia while screams of torture ring out in Mica Levi’s chilling score. Beauty and horror shared in one chilling frame.

Music leads us into Glazer’s brave and bracingly original fourth feature, a valuable addition to the Holocaust sub-genre. Inspired by the 2014 novel from Martin Amis it takes an another, unique, look at the genocide this time focusing on a dissociative family in total denial of their neighbours. While they briskly build a life with a growing family, thousands are losing theirs in the most inhumane way possible beyond the wall.

In many ways a holocaust of sorts is still going on all over the world today. The film explores an ongoing debate about the extent we are all prepared to go to to protect and further our own lives and interests at the expense of others. The Zone of Interest asks: Who is beyond our wall, and who would we sacrifice to preserve our way of life?

Filmed in Poland and immaculately lensed by Lukasz Zal (Cold War), geometric framing and pin-sharp images offer a clinical, realist take on daily life for butch camp commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his priggish wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) who spends her days complacently primping her garden: the perfect hausfrau with a heart of stone. Meanwhile Rudolf struts into his tidy living room to discuss with his sturmbannfuhrers the best way to incinerate 700,000 Hungarians.

A decade in the making and based on comprehensive research The Zone of Interest delves into the lives of Rudolf Hess (1901-47) and his wife who were just ordinary people who loved and took care of their family, but that’s where their empathy finished. Hess was no anomaly; somewhere along the line he and his fellow Nazis all became serial killers. The Zone of Interest is not just about the banality of evil, it takes the concept further to question our own individual capacity for violent words and deeds and points towards the possibility of each one of us being these people. And in this way the film connects subconsciously to us, the audience.

An early scene captures an intimate testament of loss and callous gain: Hedwig twirls around in a beautifully fashioned sable coat, just one of the personal items stolen from an Auschwitz victim. In the pocket a rose red lipstick is dabbed on tentatively and then relegated to her dressing table. As Hedwig and her staff gather round the breakfast table silk lingerie possibly still warm from the bodies of its victims is then divided casually amongst the women as their gossip about food and shopping.

Gradually more sinister elements surface in this Eden which play on our imagination in the same vein at The White Ribbon. A this is very much and interactive experience with its unsettling score that leads us into doom evoked by the blood-curdling overture. They are a family going through the motions in their lush riverside setting but clearly all is not well in Paradise.

Cinema is full of stylish films about the Holocaust: most recently Son of Saul and The Conference. This one, focussing on the ’Interessengebiet’ (or area around the Auschwitz camp), is far from ‘gemutlich’ but provides chilling food for thought and a tribute to Martin Amis, whose novel sparked Glazer’s interest, and whose death was announced on 19th May 2023, just after the film’s Cannes Film Festival premiere. MT

NOW ON RELEASE | OSCAR FOR BEST INTERNATIONAL FEATURE FILM, BEST SOUND Johnnie Burn, Tarn Willers 2024 | CANNES FILM FESTIVAL GRAND PRIX | 2023 |

Club Zero (2023) Cannes Film Festival 2023

Wri/Dir: Jessica Hausner | Cast: Mia Wasikowska, Sidse Babett Knudsen, Sam Hoare, Camilla Rutherford, Elsa Zylberstein | UK

Jessica Hausner is back in Cannes with a psychological drama that unfolds in an elite school where a teacher forms a sinister bond with a group of students.

Hausner and her regular screenwriting partner Geraldine Bajard certainly make some really valid points but the cold-edged, non-naturalisitc interiors and characters are so universally unlikeable, performed by a cast of inexperienced newcomers, we do not care a jot for any of them as they fade into pasty-faced insignificance, and this, along with an irritating percussive soundscape and the relentlessly unforgiving depiction of Gen Z, makes for an arduous watch.

The exception here is school principal Sidse Babett Knudsen who lights up every scene with her amusing charisma, as Ms Dorset. Fellow auteur Ulrich Seidl is behind the production team but the film has none of his dry wit or deadpan appeal. Instead we are forced to endure one scene involving one teenage girl (Ksenia Devriendt) who eats her own vomit, echoing the ‘yuk’ factor of last year’s Palme d’Or winner Triangle of Sadness. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2023

Fallen Leaves (2023) Cannes Film Festival 2023 | Jury Prize

Dir/Wri: Aki Kaurismaki | Cast: Alma Pöysti, Jussi Vatanen, Janne Hyytiäinen, Nuppu Koivu | Finland Drama 81

A spare but satisfying love story emboldened by Kaurismaki’s usual deadpan humour and blatant disregard for visual appeal. Fallen Leaves sees two lonely blue-collar workers form a tentative bond when they first set eyes on each other in a run down industrial backwater to the north of Helsinki.

Morose panel beater Holappa (Jussi Vatanen), a heavy drinker, lives in a squalid trailer with his fellow factory workers. When Friday night comes around he joins a colleague for karaoke where he meets Ansa (Alma Pöysti) but neither seems particularly impressed with each other. Or so it would seem. After taking her number, he promptly loses it and so begins an obstacle-ridden path to romance.

Aki Kaurismaki won the Gold Bear for his Syrian refugee story The Other Side of Hope in 2017. Six years later he tracks back on similar themes in this ironically entitled ‘fourth’ episode of the Proletariat Trilogy, that started over two decades ago with The Match Factory Girl. Unlike Ken Loach’s recent agitprops Fallen Leaves avoids collective whingeing instead opting for playful humour to tell a tightly-scripted tale of gentlefolk, inured to their humble existence, and content with their situation in life – but love is always the balm they seek to get them through the day.

Full of irony and innuendo, Fallen Leaves works through familiar territory: immigration, zero hours contracts, social isolation and the healing powers of love in a light-hearted drama where music plays an important part, weaving in tunes from the Finnish songbook and offering a welcome antidote to the hardcore fare in this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Cheers and standing ovations prove this to be one of the most popular features of this years 76th edition. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2023

https://youtu.be/qmtYPFON7Us

Little Richard: I Am Everything (2023)

Dir.: Lisa Cortes; Documentary with Little Richard, Mick Jagger, John Waters, Billy Porter, Tom Jones, ; USA 2023, 98 min.

Michael Jackson, Prince and later David Bowie (who idolised Little Richard) profited from Richard’s fight for an identity that overcome segregation, at least for part of a younger generation, after the events of 1968. But the music industry “ignored and cheated him”. ‘It was unfair’ says historian John Branca.

Academics may try to come to terms with it, citing the ‘then’ and ‘today’ comparisons, but Little Richard needs no defenders in our contemporary world, he lived through a time which was soul-crushing, and no film can gloss over this. Little Richard was overly optimistic when he claimed “My music broke down the walls of segregation”. And later he is quoted as saying “I want to change my image. I want to come out loud and gaudy as ‘the Living Fame”.

The feature makes no connection to “Flame”; it is a nod to the Pentecostal origins of the gay disco singer Sylvester. Little Richard was really re-inventing himself, even though it was not a always a linear process. But the singer’s religious ambivalence was the kicker in later years.

There are TV interviews and concert footage galore, and alone for this selection Cortes deserves credit. She may have strayed into an intellectual wilderness of a hindsight interpretation, but she keeps his music alive. The true King of Rock’N’Roll will always have the last word when he sings, breaking down our defences like no one else. AS

NOW IN CINEMAS COURTESY OF DOGWOOF

A Brighter Tomorrow (2023) Cannes Film Festival 2023

Dir: Nanni Moretti | Drama Italy/France, 95′

Since winning the Palme d’Or over two decades ago with The Son’s Room Nanni Moretti, now nearly seventy, has been turning out self-reflective dramas about life for the Italian left-wing middle classes, and this circuitous comedy is another predictable sortie into that Roman territory and not without his signature moments of dry humour.

Like many directors of his era, Moretti keeps making the same film over and over again and this is the least involving to date. But then life tends to repeat itself so this is not such a bad thing, although you start to wonder why he is still in the main competition with so many talented filmmakers languishing in the sidebars. His last visit to Cannes with Three Stories, in 2021, was another middling drama in his repertoire where the women are usually peacemakers, the men the troublemakers, apart from Moretti himself who always good as the self-questioning man of integrity. Naturally – he’s the director.

A Brighter Future is essentially another of his films within a film, Moretti is Giovanni a neurotic novelist struggling to finish his own feature. As usual the politics are left-wing and the pace plods along placidly about the Italian Communist party objecting to the Soviets during the Hungarian invasion of 1956.

Margherita Buy – always a luminous prescence – plays his wife Paola, the film’s producer. But the is marriage going downhill and she has decided to leave him. Meanwhile Matthieu Amalric makes another febrile appearance as the film’s producer desperately trying to rustle up finance. To beef up the production Giovanni he has cast a group of Koreans who provide the funniest scene during a script meeting where their interpreter gets a ticking off for translating an intimate aside he has with Paola.

There are references to his ‘friends’: architect Renzo Piano and Martin Scorsese in a debate about violence in film. Scorsese has surely more experience and greater validity in commenting where this is concerned. The story gradually grinds to a rather pessimistic conclusion in chewing over and digesting the decadence of politics. So this is not one of his best outings but maybe a brighter future will bring a better Moretti film with it. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | COMPETITION 2023

Human Desire (1954)

Dir: Fritz Lang | Cast: Gloria Grahame, Glenn Ford, Broderick Crawford | US Noir 91’

Jerry Wald had so been intoxicated by those shots of trains going into tunnels he’d long wanted to do a remake of ‘La Bete Humaine’. By far the lesser of two films by Jean Renoir by Fritz Lang ‘Human Desire’ relocates a very gallic tale by Emile Zola of amour fou to the American heartland (evocatively shot in the bleakness of winter by Oscar-winning cameraman Burnett Guffey) with decidedly mixed results.

Instead of archetypical Frenchman Jean Gabin and provocative young Simone Simon we get all-American boy Glenn Ford (not exactly convincing as a sexual psychopath), while Gloria Grahame alone earns the film another as Broderick Crawford’s lawful wedded nightmare. @RichardChatten

The Conference (2022)

Dir: Matti Geschonneck | Germany, Drama, 90′

This chilling chamber piece chronicles the 1942 conference that saw a group of Nazi officials quietly enjoying brandy and cigars while signing the death warrants of eleven million European Jews. The meeting was over in ninety minutes.

The Conference is a compelling piece of filmmaking in spite of its cloistered one-room setting in a dour villa on the banks of a icebound lake in Berlin where fifteen stony-faced German attendees led by the chief of the Reich Security SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich (a smirking Philip Hochmair) dispassionately perpetrated mass genocide.

Hitler and his fellow Nazis has reached the opinion that Germany’s Jewish population had become ‘too big for its boots’. The Wansee Conference took place on 24th January 1942 to discuss the ‘Final Solution to the Jewish Question,” or, in more mundane words, to discuss the total annihilation of Jews in countries under the control of the German Reich, in the quickest and most efficient way possible.

Best known for his 2017 outing In Times of Fading Light German filmmaker Matti Geschonneck directs with flair and precision a script based on the actual minutes recorded by the deadly SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann (of which only one copy remains). The meeting is unobtrusively recorded by the only female member there, Ingeburg Werlemann (Lilli Fichtner who made her debut in The White Ribbon).

All present are totally committed to the macabre plan of action. There is never a scintilla of thought given to pain and suffering involved, only the inconvenience and potential side effects on the German soldiers responsible for putting the genocide into action. Once again bringing to mind those famous words: the ‘banality of evil’, Geschonneck has made a powerful and important film that examines one of world’s darkest eras and showing how easy it is for a few misguided men to change the course of history. MT

ON RELEASE IN FRANCE

Harriet Craig (1950)

Dir: Vincent Sherman | US Drama

The title suggests just another Joan Crawford weepie in which she suffers in mink, but that’s only half the story.

It’s ironic that Crawford found popularity in roles in she which was noble and self-sacrificing (in reality in ‘Mildred Pierce’ she would almost certainly have had Ann Blyth for breakfast).

As one who holds the heretical view that Crawford wrecks nearly every film in which she appears, I nominate ‘Harriet Craig’ as the one glorious exception to that rule; she’s certainly a hundred times more frightening than Rosalind Russell in the 1936 version.

It’s only too believable that Mrs Craig’s staff live in terror of her; and she ain’t kidding when she comes home to find the place a mess, and her companion opines that the servants left that way, lowers her voice and snarls “they wouldn’t dare!” @RichardChatten

Lakelands (2023)

Dir.: Robert Higgins, Patrick McGivney; Cast: Eanna Hardwicke, Danielle Galligan, Lorcan Cranitch, Dafhyd Flynn, Gary Lydon; ROI 2022 100 min.

Irish films have been recently in the (Oscar) news, with The Banshees of Inisherin and The Quiet Girl featuring prominently. Robert Higgins and Patrick McGivney also hail from the Emerald Isle. Their first film clearly has Lindsay Anderson’s 1983 classic This Sporting Life in mind but fails to overcome the emotional limits of its two main characters it ends up in a cul de sac of Neo realism.

Farmer Cian (Hardwicke) is the captain of the local Gaelic Football team in Granard Longford a rather drab town in the Irish countryside. In order to find the ‘bright lights’, Cian and his mates have to take a long bus ride to Cavan, where nightclubs promise girls and drugs. In a senseless brawl outside a pub Cian suffers a life-changing concussion. Unable to cope with the long-term after effects due to CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy) he and his coach Bernie (Lydon) are forced to re-think his promising future.

The macho culture surrounding Irish football is partly to blame for the lack of understanding surrounding Cian’s condition, and the club’s supporters are not sympathetic: the captain of the local Minor League is not supposed to submit to such an outlandish illness. The reactions mirror Cian’s own assessment: it will go away, he has to be patient. But Cian has to face up to that fact that his career and his social standing in the community are ruined, and Cian becomes increasingly morose and downcast, not helped by his father Diarmud (Cranitch). Then hope comes along in the shape of Grace (Galligan), a nurse who will soon return to the UK. This relationship is left open, one of the flaws in the script, along with the failure to properly address the toxic male culture, difficulties to find an ending, Higgins and McGivney flounder even more with a half-hearted compromise.

Whilst the rural background is anything but romantic as the title suggests, DoP Simon Crowe overloads the images with utter dreariness to the point of boredom. To show the landscape of having an input in the behaivior of Cian and his mates is one thing, but dragging the audience for 100 minutes of senseless repetitive images is asking simply too much. Cian and Gabrielle’s relationship, the centre of the feature, is so opaque, that it asks more question than answers.

It is very clear what LAKELANDS was aiming for, but the execution is simply too lame and uninspiring. A missing dramatic arc leaves the audience dangling in an emotionally undercooked art-house fair. AS

IN CINEMAS FROM 5 MAY 2023

How to Blow up a Pipeline (2023)

Dir.: Daniel Goldhaber; Cast: Ariela Barer, Kristine Forseth, Lukas Gage, Forest Goldluck, Sasha Lane, Jayme Lawson, Marcus Scribner, Luje Weary, Irene Bedard; US 2022, 104 min.

With its eye-catching title How to Blow up a Pipeline is a provocative film specially given Putin’s punitive action in Russia. But this is nothing to do with the recent invasion of Ukraine, In fact Daniel Goldhaber’s film, a fascinating political thriller, takes place in Texas where a group of eco-warriors severely damage a pipeline, in two places.

Basing their film on the 2020 non-fiction book by the Swedish author Andreas Malm, who argues against climate in-activism, the American director and his co-writers Ariela Barer and Jordan Sjol locate their narrative in the US. And like all good Heist movies the characters are introduced one by one, with their stories shown in flashbacks, cleverly arranged by editor Daniel Garber.

The native American bomb expert Michael (Goodluck) is fed up with the oil corporations’ misuse of the land that belongs to him and his people. The military veteran Dwayne has lost the land which was in the hands of his family for a century: the government took the land forcibly, citing corporate need. Rowan (Forseth) and Logan (Gage) are a hippy couple, much more interested in sex and drugs than ecology.

Then there are lesbians Alisha (Lawson and Theo (Lane), whose death with leukaemia was cited as the result of living near an oil refinery. Alisha, a seasoned community worker is very skeptical about the whole enterprise, but at least she can be near Theo. Shawn (Scribner) is an idealistic college student who might “have read too many books, and decided to change the world”. And there is Xochite (co-author Barer) who opens the feature which a message to the owner of the SUV she is vandalising, calling for attacks on ‘things which kill us’.

The film avoids preaching or sermonising, and the warrior are never glamorised, Goldhaber leaving the audience to make up their own minds. It goes without saying that all participants face long prison sentences or even the death penalty for their actions. And like in all good heist movies, the audience is often misdirected: with one scene showing a development that upends long-held assumptions.

DoP Tehillah de Castro shoots on 16 mm film to achieve a grainy quality to compliment the storyline which sees a crew of misfits avoiding romanticism at all costs always aiming for pragmatism however desperate their plight.

One of the most symbolic scenes pictures a warrior shooting down a drone with a single sling shot: David meeting Goliath head-on, the outcome dictated by the power structure. Courage may not prevail in this uneven battle, but the time for story-telling is over, as one documentary filmmaker has to admit in his interview with Dwayne. How to Blow up a Pipeline is unique: for once this is a documentary that really lives up to its vital message. AS

IN CINEMAS FROM 21 APRIL 2023

Semaine de la Critique (2023)

La Semaine de la Critique will present seven feature films in the competition for its 62nd edition which runs from 17 to 26 May 2023

TIGER STRIPES

Malay director Amanda Nell Eu’s first feature film, offers a new, witty, and extravagant take on teenage metamorphosis and rebellion. A surprising and delightful fantasy film that celebrates young women’s desire to let loose in a society that aims to firmly discipline them.

SOFIA

Sofia is an athlete who dreams of reaching the top, but her dream turns into a nightmare when she finds out she is pregnant. An unwanted pregnancy that she cannot legally terminate since abortion is still illegal in Brazil. The countdown has started, and Sofia’s mind is made up. With Levante, her first feature, Brazilian director Lillah Halla stands up to conservatism that is eating away at her country with a unifying, queer outlook. One for all, and all for Sofia.

SLEEP

There’s no dozing off when watching Sleep, Korean director Jason Yu’s first feature film. Bong Joon-Ho’s former assistant director signs a sensational film as he tells the story of a struggling young couple before and after their first child is born. A closed setting: three chapters, two protagonists, one crying baby, a barking dog, and a roaming ghost: the perfect ingredients for a horrific, devilishly effective comedy.

LE RAVISSEMENT

In her film Le ravissement, French director Iris Kaltenbäck skillfully tackles the issues of a very close, intimate friendship between two women, and delivers a riveting psychological thriller. A breathtaking first film with very fine, delicately crafted writing, and a stunning cast: Hafsia Herzi, Nina Meurisse, Alexis Manenti and Younes Boucif.

LOST COUNTRY

Serbian director Vladimir Perišić’s second feature film, is an intimate and political saga set in 1996 Belgrade during the students’ demonstrations against Milosevic’s regime. A teenager is torn between his own convictions and his love for his mother, a corrupt politician. A powerful film that overhauls the canons of classical drama.

INSHALLAH, A BOY

The very first film from Jordan to be presented at La Semaine de la Critique. Amjad Al Rasheed’s first film is the deeply moving portrait of Nawal – a care worker, a widow and mother of a young girl – who is fighting like hell for her independence, played by Palestinian actress Mouna Hawa. She imbues this radiant, determined warrior with the gravitas of the greatest female heroes in the history of cinema.

IL PLEUT DANS LA MAISON

A bittersweet summer tale, Il pleut dans la maison is Belgian director Paloma Sermon-Daï’s first fiction feature. Staying clear of pathos, she tells us the unadorned story of the relationship between siblings who try to stay together with their dignity intact as their home is flooded and their bank account emptied. Two wonderful characters, beautifully written and interpreted by the young Purdey and Makenzy Lombet.

NO LOVE LOST – Closing Film

To finish with a bang, La Semaine de la Critique will present No Love Lost Erwan Le Duc’s delectable second feature. A French tragicomedy with a quirky, poetic take on relationships between parents and children. Father and daughter – Nahuel Perez Biscayart and Céleste Brunnquell – are inseparable. An irresistible duo that will make you laugh at the drop of a hat.

La Semaine de la Critique will take place in Cannes between the 17th and 25th of May.

Visions de Reel (2023)

Visions du Réel has unveiled the official selection for its 54th edition (21 to 30 April 2023). It is a powerful and dazzling programme that showcases the strength of contemporary non-fiction filmmaking.

In all, 82 world premieres amongst other films will offer a panorama that often challenges the boundaries between fiction and reality. 46 countries are represented in the selection, while 37 Swiss (co)productions are featured in all sections of the Festival, highlighting the fertile momentum of Swiss documentary production. The programme is complemented by three main guests: Argentinian filmmaker Lucrecia Martel (Guest of Honour) alongside Italian Director Alice Rohrwacher (Special Guest) and Swiss Director Jean-Stéphane Bron (Atelier). The programme features an equal number of films from female and male directors. The 54th edition will open its doors on Friday 21 April with the world premiere of Nightwatchers by Juliette de Marcillac.

VISIONS DU REEL, Nyon, Switzerland | 21 – 30 APRIL 2023

Directors’ Fortnight | Cannes Film Festival (2023)

Discover the 55th selection of Directors’ Fortnight

Find the complete programme here

Following the Cannes Film Festival, you can watch the 2023 Selection between June 7 and 18 in about 30 arthouse cinemas in France.

Here is this year’s selection:

VALE ABRAÃO (Val Abraham / Abraham’s Valley)

de Manoel de Oliveira

Séance spéciale

LE PROCÈS GOLDMAN (The Goldman Case)

Cédric Kahn

Closing Film

AGRA

Kanu Behl

L’AUTRE LAURENS (The Other Laurens)

Claude Schmitz

BÊN TRONG VỎ KÉN VÀNG (Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell)

Thien An Pham

First Film

BLACKBIRD BLACKBIRD BLACKBERRY (Merle merle mûre)

Elene Naveriani

BLAZH (Grace / La Grâce)

Ilya Povolotsky

First film

CONANN

Bertrand Mandico

CREATURA

Elena Martín Gimeno

DÉSERTS

Faouzi Bensaïdi

IN FLAMES

de Zarrar Kahn

Premier long métrage

LÉGUA

Filipa Reis & João Miller Guerra

LE LIVRE DES SOLUTIONS (The Book of Solutions)

Michel Gondry

MAMBAR PIERRETTE

de Rosine Mbakam

RIDDLE OF FIRE (Conte de feu)

de Weston Razooli

First Film

THE FEELING THAT THE TIME FOR DOING SOMETHING HAS PASSED

de Joanna Arnow

First Film

THE SWEET EAST

de Sean Price Williams

UN PRINCE (A Prince)

de Pierre Creton

XIAO BAI CHUAN (A Song Sung Blue)

de Zihan Geng

Premier long métrage

WOO-RI-UI-HA-RU (In Our Day)

de Hong Sang-soo

Closing Film

QUINZAINE DES REALISATEURS | 17-27 May 2023

A Day at the Beach (1970)

Dir: Simon Hesera | Cast: Peter Sellers, Mark Burns, Beatie Edney, Fiona Lewis, Maurice Reeves | Comedy Drama 93′

This far less glamorous version of La Feu Follet remains the joker in the pack of the careers of both producer Roman Polanski (who wrote the script and cast two veterans of Dance of the Vampires, and Peter Sellers.

Shelved for over twenty years before it finally emerged, the film is set in an incredibly bleak out of season seaside resort and filmed in Denmark. It remains to this day the most mysterious title in Peter Sellers’ filmography.

Sellers’ role (listed in the end credits as played by someone called ‘A. Queen’) is confined to a malevolent cameo alongside regular foil Graham Stark as one of a sinister pair who preside over a gift shop. The lead is actually played by a young actor called Mark Burns as a crapulent boor who spends the entire film rubbing people up the wrong way, notably Bergman veteran Eva Dahlbeck as a cafe proprietress. A young Beatie Edney steals the film in her debut billed as ‘Beatrice’. @RichardChatten

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE

Beau is Afraid (2023)

Dir: Ari Aster | Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Nathan Lane, Amy Ryan, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Hayley Squires, Denis Menochet, Kylie Rogers, Parker Posey, Patti LuPone | US Thriller

America has always led the world into the future, and that future has now become a present day dystopia. Or so Ari Aster would have us believe in his third feature that plays out like a cinematic version of The Scream on replay.

Joaquin Phoenix is utterly compelling as the connective tissue holding the wreckage together. Beau is Afraid is at times tragic, unwatchable and hilarious in its depiction of a wounded soul caught in the car crash of modern life.

Petty criminals, noisy neighbours, druggies, weirdos and psychopaths inhabit this thriller that scratches at the edges of horror in showing how truly ghastly the modern world has become, and those within it. At least through the eyes of Beau Wassermann (Phoenix) a long-suffering and likeable middle-aged man traumatised and suffocated from birth by his domineering mother, and living out a hellish and lonely existence in a squalid urban dive. This often feels like Aster’s most personal film to date, and despite glints of dark humour he takes his main character’s trauma seriously: a man whose earnest attempts to please his mother are simply misinterpreted by her unassuageable need for a different kind of filial love.

Beau, on medication and totally reliant on his therapist (Stephen McKinley Henderson), has planned to visit his mother Mona (LuPone) but misses his flight, incurring further maternal disapproval. When he finally gets his act together she has died in a tragic accident the enigmatic circumstances of which push Beau into emotional meltdown, unleashing an epic chain of bizarre misadventures that are both beautiful and brutal by turns. And the brief moments of relief inexorably lead to more heartache or pain.

Being Jewish, Mona’s funeral has to take place promptly, and Beau has to be there as her treasured only son. But getting there proves a herculean task fraught with setbacks and ambivalent people, amongst them Grace and Roger (Amy Ryan and Nathan Lane), who save Beau from a terrible accident only to cause him further turmoil, along with their nasty teenage daughter, and Denis Menochet in a sadly underwritten part as a psychotic war veteran. An episode involving Hayley Squires as a wood nymph feels utterly redundant. Throughout, the world-weary Beau is back-footed and endlessly apologetic, even when the fault lies elsewhere.

Although overlong – at three hours – Aster handles the tonal shifts of Beau’s tortuous mental journey with precision assisted by his production designer Fiona Crombie and DoP Pawel Pogozelski who captures the shifting emotional landscape from Beau’s shabby urban apartment to the rosy pink glow of his recovery bedroom chez Grace and Roger; the Frank Lloyd Wright style bosky backwater Beau finally calls home and the momentous finale. Beau is the epic hero of today: his hopes constantly dashed after a potentially positive breakthrough in Phoenix’s intense yet subtle study of bewildered vulnerability. MT

NOW IN CINEMAS

Vermeer: The Greatest Exhibition (2023)

Dir: David Bickerstaff | UK Doc, 90′

David Bickerstaff has captured the market by successfully bringing the world’s most anticipated art exhibitions to the screen, and this latest doesn’t disappoint. Vermeer is a fabulous look at the largest Johannes Vermeer Exhibition in history that opened at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum in Spring 2023. This effectively means that anyone anywhere can enjoy these treasures, or relive the occasion afterwards at home.

Vermeer brings 28 of the artist’s 35 known works together in all their clarity and mastery, both from the Rijksmuseum and the Mauritshuis in the Hague, and showcasing the Dutchman’s artistry, his artistic choices and motivations for his compositions, as well as the creative process behind his paintings, and his talent for storytelling through his nuanced brushwork, his technique of using blurring and light to create subtle depth, capturing the artist’s voyeuristic gaze that often gives his subject matter an enigmatic feel. Curators enrich the film and offer enlightening commentary on his most storied paintings: Girl with a Pearl Earring, The Milkmaid The Little Street, Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid and Woman Holding a Balance, and many others from the Dutch Golden Age. A cinematic outing to enjoy on the big screen and view again and again. MT

IN CINEMAS IN THE UK and France from 18 April 2023

My Everest (2023)

Dir.: Carl Woods; Documentary with Max Stainton-Parfitt, Candy Stainton-Parfitt, Martha Stainton, Oscar Stainton, Andrea Shipley; UK 2922, 86 min

There’s nothing extraordinary these days about trekking to Mount Everest’s base camp, everyone seems to be doing it. But Max Stainton-Parfitt is extraordinary. He undertook the endeavour – 5364 above sea level, by foot and on horseback, the first person ever to reach base camp suffering from cerebral palsy.

His valiant trek is the focus of this debut feature documentary from British director/DoP Carl Woods who combines interviews with Max’s mother Martha and his brother Oscar who reveal how little help the family got in supporting Max’s efforts.

Max is captured on his family’s home movies, a little boy who wanted to be a fireman when he grew up. In 1993 he was diagnosed and went for treatment in Hungary and Miami. After studying at Queen Marys in London, he became an investment banker in the City and is now a father, marrying his PA Candy in 2019.

Most of the feature is dedicated to the week long trek up the mountain in 2018, with Max (and Candy) twice at the point of giving up. Sherpas were very helpful although Rocky, his horse, did throw him off on one occasion, battling snow and ice and rickety bridges on the journey towards base camp where Max and Candy were whisked off by helicopter.

Max’s arrival is a real triumph given the tortuous climb in adverse weather conditions. Nothing could have prepared him for the ordeal given his physical limitations. In an interview afterwards Candy explains how the macho adventure was really a way for Max to prove himself to his City colleagues: “as a man who could be relied on in an emergency”.

My Everest doesn’t quite match up to expectations or Max’s indomitable prowess. Flashbacks are often clumsily inserted and too much time is spent on needless repetitions during the climb. Still, this a unique and worthwhile document of a struggle against the odds. AS

IN CINEMAS 27 APRIL 2023

The Bat (1959)

Dir: Crane Wilbur | Cast: Vincent Price , Agnes Moorhead | UK Thriller 72’

William Castle being otherwise engaged Crane Wilbur (who had previously worked on the script of ‘House of Wax’) took over the director’s chair to helm this updated remake of the long-running Broadway hit by Alice Roberts Reinhardt and Avery Hopwood.

This time around The Bat trades in his big silly ears for a stylish trilby. The set depicting the spooky old house doesn’t begin to compare to that in the 1926 version, but the presence of Vincent Price amply compensates.

Our Vince meets his match in Agnes Moorehead as Cornelia Van Gorder, the bestselling author of ‘The Private Morgue of Dr. X’ who shows her disrespect for bats by incredulously asking “that thing’s got a brain?”, boasts that “there are guns in everything I’ve ever written”, presides over a houseful of women with a live-in spinster maid sleeping on a sofa in the same room as her mistress and breeches the fourth wall with the film’s closing line; while the only rooster in that particular henhouse is John Sutton as her answer to Jeeves. @RichardChatten

THE BAT IS NOW ON YOUTUBE

Cannes Film Festival 2023 – Programme complete

The 76th Cannes Film Festival is set for a legendary year with Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon starring Robert De Niro and Leo DiCaprio, and an out-of-competition world premiere of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.

Bernardo Bertolucci makes his final bow winning an honorary Palme d’Or in 2011

Some of the best names in cinema will be crowding the Croisette this year – in fact, it’s hard to think which stars won’t be on the famous Red Carpet for this year’s epic celebration announced by Thierry Fremaux.

The 2023 competition lineup includes new films from Jonathan Glazer, Wes Anderson, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Todd Haynes, Nanni Moretti and Aki Kaurismäki. The programme also includes the latest from cinema greats Wim Wenders, Takeshi Kitano, Victor Erice and Catherine Breillat. Five female directors and one first time film will compete for the coveted main prize the Palme d’Or.

Palme d’Or hopefuls include Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda, who won in 2018 with Shoplifters and is now back in Cannes competition with Monster, and Nanni Moretti with Il Sol Dell’Avvenire after winning the main prize with The Son’s Room in 2001. Nuri Bilge Ceylan, won the Palme in 2014 Winter Sleep, and comes back with About Dry Grasses, another story set between Istanbul and small town Anatolia.

Wes Anderson’s latest Asteroid City promises to be as quirky as ever and stars Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Steve Carell, Tilda Swindon, Jason Schwartzman. Todd Haynes’ May December features Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore in another emotional rollercoaster. But humour will undoubtedly come from Aki Kaurismäki and Dead Leaves, his first film in six years. Veteran Wim Wenders returns to Cannes with his Japan-set feature Perfect Days together with his documentary Anselm, a portrait of German painter Anselm Kiefer, one of two films about artists, the second being Martin Provost’s drama Bonnard, Pierre et Marthe that explores the love story between the renowned French painters Pierre Bonnard and his wife Marthe.

Jessica Hausner is one of six female directors in competition this year, with Club Zero. She joins Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher, who directs her sister Alba, Josh O’Connor and Isabella Rossellini in Chimera. French filmmaker Justine Triet will present her thriller Anatomy of a Fall. Catherine Breillat, another seasoned French director will be there with with L’été dernier starring Léa Drucker; Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania (The Man Who Sold His Skin) is coming with Four Daughters; and a feature debut for Senegalese-French director Ramata-Toulaye Sy with Banel & Adama will premiere in competition this year.

One of this year’s most anticipated films in the Palme d’Or lineup is from English auteur Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast, Under the Skin): Zone of Interest is a Nazi-themed thriller based on the novel by Martin Amis. One time lovers Benoit Magimel and Juliette Binoche team up for La Passion de Dodin Bouffant from Vietnam-born French director Tran Anh Hung.

It takes a Brazilian/Algerian director to make a film about Henry the VIII, but forget Hilary Mantel, Firebrand is billed as a ‘history horror story’ and stars Alicia Vikander, Eddie Marsan, Jude Law and Simon Russell Beale. Oscar winner Steven McQueen will be there with Occupied City, a documentary that explores Amsterdam under Nazi-occupation. Also from England comes Molly Manning Walker with her debut feature (in UCR) which goes by the buzzworthy title of How to Have Sex. Let’s just hope that this and all the other live up to expectations. MT

JEANNE DU BARRY by MAÏWENN – Opening Film Out of Competition

CLUB ZERO by Jessica HAUSNER

THE ZONE OF INTEREST by Jonathan GLAZER

FALLEN LEAVES by Aki KAURISMAKI

LES FILLES D’OLFA by Kaouther BEN HANIA
(FOUR DAUGHTERS)

ASTEROID CITY by Wes ANDERSON

ANATOMIE D’UNE CHUTE by Justine TRIET

MONSTER by KORE-EDA Hirokazu

IL SOL DELL’ AVVENIRE by Nanni MORETTI

L’ÉTÉ DERNIER by Catherine BREILLAT

KURU OTLAR USTUNE by Nuri Bilge CEYLAN
(ABOUT DRY GRASSES)

LA CHIMERA by Alice ROHRWACHER

LA PASSION DE DODIN BOUFFANT by TRAN ANH Hùng

RAPITO by Marco BELLOCCHIO

MAY DECEMBER by Todd HAYNES

JEUNESSE by WANG Bing

THE OLD OAK by Ken LOACH

BANEL E ADAMA by Ramata-Toulaye SY | 1^st film

PERFECT DAYS by Wim WENDERS

FIREBRAND by Karim AÏNOUZ

LE RETOUR. Catherine Corsini

BLACK FLIES Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire

UN CERTAIN REGARD

LE RÈGNE ANIMAL by Thomas CAILLEY – Opening Film

LOS DELINCUENTES by Rodrigo MORENO
(THE DELINQUENTS)

HOW TO HAVE SEX by Molly MANNING WALKER | 1^st film

GOODBYE JULIA by Mohamed KORDOFANI | 1^st film

KADIB ABYAD by Asmae EL MOUDIR
(THE MOTHER OF ALL LIES)

SIMPLE COMME SYLVAIN by Monia CHOKRI

CROWRÃ by João SALAVIZA, Renée NADER MESSORA
(THE BURITI FLOWER)

LOS COLONOS by Felipe GÁLVEZ | 1^st film
(THE SETTLERS)

OMEN by BALOJI | 1^st film

THE BREAKING ICE by Anthony CHEN

ROSALIE by Stéphanie DI GIUSTO

THE NEW BOY by Warwick THORNTON

IF ONLY I COULD HIBERNATE by Zoljargal PUREVDASH | 1^st film

HOPELESS by KIM Chang-hoon | 1^st film

TERRESTRIAL VERSES by Ali ASGARI, Alireza KHATAMI

RIEN À PERDRE by Delphine DELOGET | 1^st film

LES MEUTES by Kamal LAZRAQ | 1^st film

ONLY THE RIVER FLOWS
Wei Shujun

UNE NUIT
Alex Lutz

The film will be screened Out of Competition – Closing Un Certain Regard

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2023 | 16-27 May 2023

A Love Story (2023)

Dir/Wri: Alexis Michelik | Cast: Juliette Delacroix, Marie-Camille Soyer, Pauline Bresson, Leontine d’Onceiu | France, Drama 88′

Alex Michelik takes no time in cracking on with this formulaic lesbian love story that gradually spools out as a less convincing version of Ghost, Summertime and The Spectacular Now. So you get three films for the price of one – albeit with more plotholes than London’s Finchley Road.

The same sex affair at its core is a nice idea and, as suggested, this coup de coeur catches fire in the early scenes of A Love Story leading us to believe that Michelik, – who also stars – has something else up his sleeve for the reminding sixty odd minutes of his sophomore feature that makes the female orgasm its recurring motif.

Within twenty minutes of meeting lesbian journalist Katia Markowitz (Delacroix) and Justine (Soyer) are enjoying carnal pleasures, even though the latter has been heterosexual so far in her life. The two arrange to see each other again and are soon bosom buddies discussing Justine’s burning desire to have child. Their whirlwind romance sees them ‘getting married’ in a outdoor social gathering that allows her brother William (Michelik), a successful author, to promote his recent book before the assembled crowd.

A Spanish fertility clinic offers the women two bites of the cherry from a sperm donor but it’s Justine who falls pregnant and soon comes all broody and temperamental. And that’s when the problems start and the orgasms – thankfully- stop. Justine packs her bags without explanation, cue – a flashback to all the happy times they’ve shared together – as Katia goes into emotional meltdown. Amid footage of street riots (totally unexplained) Katia is pictured giving birth to a girl called Jeanne (d’Oncieu) feeling justifiably disgruntled that it was Justine who wanted a child in the first place.

Fast forward a decade or so and mother Katia finds out the cancer she suffered earlier (?) has come back with a vengeance leaving her with only weeks to live, and desperate for someone to look after the pre-teen Jeanne. Well the obvious choice is her brother William who has now become an alcoholic not capable of looking after himself let alone a child: In the intervening years, a car accident has left him a widower with a severe brain injury.

Cut a long story short (although this is a fairly short film as features go nowadays) Jeanne moves in with William – who has an advance to write another book – and becomes his mother figure. This coupling feels way more entertaining and real than the lesbian twosome, Jeanne now posing all the relevant questions we’ve been wondering about from the film’s beginning. Meanwhile, the ghost of William’s wife (?) is following them about everywhere, dancing to the strains of Ella Fitzgerald’s ‘Every Time I Say Goodbye’. The most poignant scene sees William admitting to Jeanne she’s a far better writer than he is, having read her private diary, much to her consternation. She is then left to make a decision about whether she is taken into care or stays with her ‘adopted’ father who could die any moment from a subdural hematoma.

At this point, the lesbians surface again on a motorway service station, Justine having agreed to take a week’s holiday to their beloved Mont St Michel. This time the relationship also feels far more authentic than the fake fairytale they were living before their break up (with the obligatory shot of her on the loo, just to make it all seem real), Justine confessing she was never a lesbian anyway, but to round off it all off, we have to endure another or her orgasms with Katia very much alive and kicking. MT

A LOVE STORY IS NOW ON RELEASE IN FRANCE.

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (2023)

Dir.: Hettie Macdonald; Cast: Jim Broadbent, Penelope Wilton, UK Drama, 108′.

Jim Broadbent and Penelope Wilton star in this sentimental tearjerker from first time film director Hettie MacDonald,

Broadbent is Harold Fry, in his early sixties, living in a seaside backwater in Devon with his chipper wife Maureen (Wilton). The marriage has been blighted by the death of their only son David (Cave) whose drug addiction led to suicide, and they are no longer on speaking terms. Then out of the blue comes a letter from Queenie, a former colleague and friend. She is signing off from a hospice in Berwick-on Tweed, suffering from terminal cancer.

A chance encounter with a woman at a petrol station – called simply ‘Garage Girl’ (Singh) sends Harold off on a walking trek to the Scottish border – inspired by her bid to keep her friend Queenie spiritually alive. Needless to say the story is made up, but Harold is already on his way, gathering with him a crowd of followers, when his story captures the imagination of the press, and a stray dog. Harold befriends one time drug addict Mick (Thiara) who is soon phased out due to his relapse. When Harold arrives at the hospice he gets cold feet, and it’s Maureen’s turn to support him.

Hettie MacDonald’s first stab at a feature film is influenced by her TV work (Dr Who), this lending an episodic nature to proceedings. Some of the scenes feel contrived, particularly those with the younger Harold and Maureen (Cullinale/Jackson Smith) playing perfect family, but mature Maureen’s encounters with neighbour Rex (Mydell), who has given up on live after the death of his wife, seem much more genuine in a dramatic arc often marred by false endings, and an overgenerous running time. DoP Kate McCullogh strives for meaningful images beyond the usual road-movie fare, but it all feels visually rather bland.

The Pilgrimage wants to be about redemption and loss, and Penelope Wilton certainly captures these emotional nuances as a woman left alone in her grief – Harold even stays outside the crematorium chapel at his son’s funeral – Maureen taking her revenge by not giving him a message from Queenie. She had taken the sack for Harold after he partly destroyed their brewery workplace. Wilton is the perfect foil for Broadbent’s “hang dog” character, he believes that a single deed could make up for his lifelong denial of emotion. Overall, the powerful acting helps to compensate for the sometimes unfocused direction. AS

NOW ON RELEASE from 28 April in UK Cinemas

A Thousand and One (2023)

Dir: AV Rockwell | Cast: Teyana Taylor, Aaron Kingsley Adetola, Aven Courtney, Josiah Cross, William Catlett | US Drama 117′

AV Rockwell has a strong premise for her feature debut that chronicles ten years in the life of a struggling black family set against the burgeoning gentrification of Brooklyn during the 1990s. And it looks fabulous with its inspired aesthetic sense and an evocative soundtrack. Sadly A Thousand and One is slight, overlong and underwhelming despite a confident central performance from Teyana Taylor who plays Inez, a bitter and difficult underdog whose only desire is to forge a stable family.

We first meet 22-year-old hairdresser Inez at Riker’s Island detention centre before she struts out into the big wide world in search of Terry, a six-year old child she left behind. Unfolding in a series of brief episodes the film soon establishes her difficult circumstances: grinding poverty and homelessness, Inez not exactly ingratiating herself with the foster family who have looked after Terry in the intervening years. The two are soon out on the streets of Harlem, Inez keen to start out again alone, before settling down with Lucky (Catlett), who appears to be a lover from the past. And the tale continues in this enigmatic vein, leaving us to fill in the gaps in a tonally uneven moody melodrama that aspires to be more momentous than it actually is, despite its justifiable pretensions.

Inez remains the same character over the decade while young Terry develops, played by three different actors (Atedola at 6, Courtney at 14 and Cross at 17). He is the most nuanced character growing from a hurt little boy – the film’s most meaningful scene sees him left all alone to amuse himself for the day – into a thoughtful and intelligent adolescent, and eventually a disillusioned teenager.

Catlett’s Lucky eventually finds some soul after a prickly start in his new family, although he never really bonds with Inez (apart from in sex scenes) and the three of them somehow remain disconnected despite their fraught journey together. Taylor holds the film together with her vehemence and indomitable emotional power although her performance sometimes feels contrived: a little less attitude and a touch more vulnerability would have been welcome to make her character more relatable.

Oddly enough, One Thousand and One is at its most resonant in picturing the changing backcloth of New York’s gradual urban generation seen through a series of shifting aerial views of the city, brilliantly captured by DoP Eric Yue, along with carefully chosen archive clips from various speeches given by mayors Rudy Giuliani to Michael Bloomberg amongst others. This gives the film the ballast and integrity lacking in the story of Inez and her family. A worthwhile story then, in need of more depth script wise. MT

IN CINEMAS IN APRIL 2023.

Strange Way of Life (2023) Cannes Film Festival

Pedro Almodóvar’s short, a gay Western, STRANGE WAY OF LIFE starring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal, will receive its World Premiere out of competition at the festival, followed by a theatrical release in the UK later this year.

STRANGE WAY OF LIFE is Almodóvar’s second work in the English language, his first being THE HUMAN VOICE starring Tilda Swinton which premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2020. The film is produced by El Deseo and presented by Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello, with all characters costumed by the company.

A man rides a horse across the desert that separates him from Bitter Creek. He comes to visit Sheriff Jake. Twenty-five years earlier, both the sheriff and Silva, the rancher who rides out to meet him, worked together as hired gunmen. Silva visits him with the excuse of reuniting with his friend from his youth, and they do indeed celebrate their meeting, but the next morning Sheriff Jake tells him that the reason for his trip is not to go down the memory lane of their old friendship….
The strange way of life referred in the title alludes to the famous fado by Amalia Rodrigues, whose lyrics suggest that there is no stranger existence than the one that is lived by turning your back on your own desires.

Although he has never won the coveted Palme d’Or Writer/Director Pedro Almodóvar is one of Spain’s most celebrated filmmakers with numerous accolades to his name including an Academy Award®, four BAFTAs, numerous Goyas and over 100 further wins and nominations. His credits include WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN, ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER, VOLVER, PAIN AND GLORY and PARALLEL MOTHERS.

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2023 | 17-27 May 2023

Free Money (2023)

Dir.: Lauren DeFilippo, Sam Soko; Documentary with Michael Faye, John Omondi, Isaac Nyamori, Mary Anyango Songa, Jael Rael Axhieng Songa, Larry Madowo; Kenya/USA 2022, 78 min.

Kenyan director Sam Soko (Softie) and her US counterpart Lauren DeFilippo (Red Heaven) have researched the impact of fast growing Non-Profit agency GiVE DIRECTLY (GD), founded by Michael Faye and three of his fellow students from Harvard and MIT.

GD has come up with a revolutionary idea to fight poverty in eleven countries, giving participants in the scheme $22 a month for twelve years. The pilot scheme will run until 2031.

Caroline Teti, who works for GD, is aware she does not represent the emissary from the First World, promising much and delivering nothing. Near the Kenyan village of Koogutu, where GD’s recipients of UBI (Universal Basic Income) live, there are houses without roofs, financed by Kenyans who were told they could sell them for a profit after purchase, when the real estate company had installed the roofs – something that never happened.

The men of the village are particularly sceptical, they fear that their women will grow horns and leave them – part of a satanic cult which promises money but instead takes the souls of the recipients.

Larry Madowa, a journalist with the BBC, who grew up in the area, keeps an eye on the GD activities. He is sceptical – and so is the audience, when we find out that Google is one of the the main investors in GD. Anyone in the village who is over 18 will receive the money monthly via a smart-phone transfer, itself a novelty. The directors chose to follow two participants in the scheme, John Omondi (18) and Jael Rael Achieng Songa (16). Whilst John receives the 2280 Kenyan Sterling monthly payments, Jael is the victim of a bureaucratic bungle, and is left penniless. Meanwhile her girlfriends go to school and gain an education, which will set them free. John later encounters difficulties in Nairobi, where he wants to study, but the capital is an expensive place. The villagers runs a lottery, and one day Jael is the winner, and together with help of her family she can now also start school.

At a visit at the local call centre we can see the progress the young people have made thanks to technology, after the initial shock of having to use a mobile.

There is no easy answer here. No one knows what will happen when the scheme runs out in 2031. Yes, maybe the recipients of UBI serve as guinea pigs, but GD is trying to break the charity mould, and it’s well worth a try, in spite of early pitfalls. After all, in the First World the workforce was paid to stay home during the pandemic.

Four different DoPs follow the participants in this trial and error exercise. It seems that the improvements to their homes have alone made it all worthwhile. And on the local market, UBI recipients get preferential treatment because the traders know they will not ask for credit. AS

FREE MONEY, in cinemas and on demand, on 21st April.

Heavens Above (1963)

Dir: The Boulting Brothers | Comedy Drama | with Peter Selllars, Ian Carmichael, Irene Handl, Cecil Parker, Isabel Jeans | Comedy Drama 118’

Having already socked it to the army and the trade unions the Boulting brothers now turned their attention to that other Great British institution, the Church of England.

The boys were getting very cynical in their old age and the sunny optimism of Peter Sellers’ brummie prison chaplain comes a very poor third to the corruption and venality of his flock in the fictional parish of Orbiston Parma.

A newspaper headline referring to Salan serves as a reminder of unpleasant realities abroad. There are plenty of nasty digs at travellers and welfare claimants and the coarsening of their humour is demonstrated by the use of a laxative (“Builds you up, cleans you out!”) as a major plot point and it really jumps the shark when Sellers goes up in a rocket at the conclusion.

The brothers’ perennial disrespect for institutionalised religion is tempered here as it was in their company’s 1940 production ‘Pastor Hall’ by their sympathetic depiction of an individual clergyman. @RichardChatten

Suzume (2023)

Dir.: Makoto Shinkai, Anime with the voices of Nanoka Hara, Eri Fukastu, Hokuto Matsumura, Ann Yamane; Japan 2022, 122 min.

The turbulent history of Japan comes alive in this delicately drawn and magical adventure that will resonate with a generation of young people still traumatised by the Tohoko earthquake and Tsunami and the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant disaster.

Suzume (voiced by Nanoka Hara) is a clever 17-year-old orphan who lives with her aunt in Kyushu, on Japan’s southern Island, after losing her mother. On the way to school one day she meets Souta (Hokuto Matsumura) a mysterious young man with a special ability for ‘closing out’, by way of a door, an ancient demon called the Worm who can bring havoc on Earth. Together, they set out in search of the door, tramping through ruins in the countryside, and Suzume is the first to find it, accidentally unleashing the Worm that then morphs into a kitten called Daijin, and leads them on to surreal adventure across Japan during which Souta miraculously transforms into a shape-shifting stool – of the wooden variety (!) – causing hilarious scenes – with Suzume and Souta having to wait a long time, before Daijin decides to turn Souta back into his human form.

The animation is spectacular, a mixture of 2 and 3D hand drawn animation and the use of CGI, which in the case of the red super worm is rather overdone: the worm looks tame in comparison with the rest of the Anime. Loss and decay are the main subjects of Anime director Makoto Shinkai (Your Name). The past is a dangerous place to return to, particularly for Suzume, who is able to close doors to keep the beastly worm underground, while also being afraid of what she will find behind the door leading to the house she grew up in during the first few of her life. Two scenes in particular stand out, one takes place in an ancient bath house, desolated and abandoned, and another in an old-fashioned fairground which comes eerily to life.

Suzume is a potent mixture of melancholy and hilarious fun, as the girl gradually grows up during her adventures. Suzume has an impressive confrontational scene with her aunt, accusing the woman of only adopting her to avoid an adult relationship. At a later stage, Suzume takes back her accusations, but this is as a result of her falling for Souta, as her Tom-Boy identity gradually recedes. Overall, this is a mature Anime, with Shinkai using lots of kawaii cuteness, but also referentially quoting Studio Ghibli’s Kiki’s Delivery Service with the talking cat in the shape of Daijin. A magic round-about-movie. AS

SUZUME IN UK and IRISH CINEMAS on 14 April 2023

Jeanne du Barry to open Cannes Film Festival 2023

Jeanne du Barry, directed by Maïwenn, and starring Johnny Depp, will open the 76th Festival de Cannes and will be screened in world premiere at the Grand Théâtre Lumière, on Tuesday 16th May.

French director Maïwenn directs and stars in her sixth feature Jeanne du Barry, playing the eponymous main character alongside Johnny Depp, Benjamin Lavernhe, Melvil Poupaud, Pierre Richard, Pascal Greggory and India Hair. Recounting the life, rise and fall of the king Louis XV‘s favourite, the film will be released in French cinemas at the same time as the official world premiere.

The historical drama follows Jeanne Vaubernier, a young working-class woman hungry for culture and pleasure, who uses her nouse and allure to slither into the corridors of power where she becomes a firm favourite with King Louis XV restoring his joie de vivre. Desperately smitten, and unaware of her status as a courtesan, the King moves her into his palace of Versailles, where her arrival scandalises the court.

Director, screenwriter, actress and producer, Maïwenn directed her first feature film, Pardonnez-moi in 2006. In 2011, she won the Jury Prize at the Festival de Cannes for her first selection in Competition for Polisse. Four years later, she was back with Mon Roi, Emmanuelle Bercot winning the Best actress award.

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | 16 – 27 MAY 2023

The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan (2023)

Dir: Martin Bourboulon | Wris: Matthieu Delaporte, Alexandre de La Patelliére | Cast: Francois Civil, Vincent Cassel, Louis Garrel, Vicki Krieps, Romain Duris, Pio Marmai, Eva Green, Lyna Khoudri | France, 121′

When it comes to swashbuckling the three musketeers are certainly the men for the job. And with a smile as broad and beaming as a silver cutlass, Francois Civil leads the glittering international cast in this spritely and splendidly mounted seventeenth century French epic based on the mid nineteenth century novels of Alexandre Dumas, whose own father served as a valued general under Napoleon.

On a rain-soaked night in 1627 a lone rider arrives at a fortress in Paris. He is Charles D’Artagnan of Gascony and he hopes to join the court of King Louis XIII as a faithful musketeer alongside the trusty Athos (Vincent Cassel), Portos (Pio Marmai) and Aramis (Roman Duris). Martin Bourboulon is a director well used to delivering on the big screen as we saw in Eiffel, and he doesn’t disappoint here in Part I of this historical action drama with its sparkling script and elegant costumes (Part II – Milady, follows later this year).

During this era of religious turbulence France has been enjoying a stable time under Louis XIII. But the storm clouds are gathering and the Protestants are a force to be reckoned with and ever close to the King of England with their stronghold of La Rochelle. More than ever, the King needs the protection of his household guard – a triumvirate force of three main musketeers with their fire power and chivalrous swordsmanship.

There’s plenty of intrigue and some magnificent fighting scenes to keep the most exacting cineastes entertained. Louis Garrel makes for a convincing King whose brother is soon to be married. But Cardinal Richelieu (Ruf) is sceptical about celebrating when the throne should be focusing on more serious internecine matters. Not to mention court intrigue involving the French Queen, Anne of Austria (Krieps) and her romantic liaison with the Duke of Buckingham (Fortune-Lloyd). The final act turns on a secret love token she offers the Duke, and her life will depend on getting it back. This race against time provides the film with its thrilling denouement and puts D’Artagnan on his mettle in the cliffhanger finale that sets us up for part two where Eva Green’s venomous Milady will sashay into action.

So nothing extraordinary about this latest Dumas drama – just another reliably enjoyable bodice-buster that never takes itself too seriously unfolding in soft candlelight and stirring sword-fighting scenes in the lush French countryside. MT

NOW ON RELEASE IN FRANCE

The Conquest of Everest (1953)

Dir: George Lowe | UK Doc

Marking the 70th anniversary of the historic expedition, this dazzling new restoration of the classic British documentary tells the awe-inspiring story of the first successful attempt on the peak of Mount Everest. Narrated by Meredith Edwards (A Run For Your Money) and featuring the mountaineers Sir Edmund Hillary, Wilfred Noyce and Tenzing Norgay, the documentary details the history, preparation and description of the route as well as fascinating footage of previous attempts and the social context of the achievement.

It’s a good thing the expedition was a success or all the beautiful colour footage shot before the final assault on the summit would have gone to waste! Simply bringing all that unexposed stock along with them as they climbed up Everest (and then getting it back down again afterwards) must have been quite a logistical feat in its own right, although not on a scale of that achieved by the Captain J.B.L. Noel in the 1920’s; some of whose footage is included here.

The main title carries the credit ‘Print by Technicolor’, which means the makers thankfully didn’t actually lug a three-strip Technicolor camera up Mount Everest. Fortunately they wouldn’t have been short of light surrounded by snow at that altitude (although they were lucky Technicolor didn’t insist on them going back to redo the shot where a hair was visible in the gate).

Dramatic licence is occasionally apparent in cases such as an insert of an ice-pick going into snow, but the cameramen would have had to cut most of the footage in the camera since discarding footage in the editing room would seldom have been an option; the first take usually being the one they used. @RichardChatten

AVAILABLE ON BLURAY COURTESY OF STUDIOCANAL on 20 May 2023

Indiana Jones & the Dial of Destiny | Cannes 2023

Indiana Jones returns to the Festival de Cannes for the world premiere of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, directed by James Mangold, starring Harrison Ford as the legendary hero. 15 years after the presentation in 2008 of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull directed by Steven Spielberg, the final installment of the Lucasfilm saga will be screened on Thursday, May 18 in Cannes and will be released in theaters on June 28 in France and June 30 in the United States. On this occasion, the Festival will also pay a special tribute to Harrison Ford for his career.

It is to the memorable music of John Williams, that James Mangold and Harrison Ford will climb the steps of the Palais des Festivals on May 18 alongside Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Antonio Banderas, John Rhys-Davies, Toby Jones, Boyd Holbrook, Ethann Isidore and Mads Mikkelsen. An event that will mark the highly anticipated comeback of the famous adventurer in the Official Selection.

“In 1995, I was honored to come to Cannes with my first film Heavy, as part of Director’s Fortnite. Twenty-eight years later, I am proud to return with a slightly larger spectacle. My legendary collaborators and I are very excited to share a brand new and final Indiana Jones adventure with you!”, declared director James Mangold.

Straight out of the imagination of George Lucas, well before the great epic Star Wars, it was in 1981 that Raiders of the Lost Ark, the first part of the saga, was revealed to the world. Directed by Steven Spielberg, the adventures of Indiana Jones conquered the hearts of millions of fans who followed him for four decades.

The embodiment of a heroic America, Harrison Ford has played some of the most iconic roles of the last 50 years including Han Solo for George Lucas in Star Wars IV, V, and VI, and Rick Deckard in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) and Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 (2017).

In 2023, James Mangold directs him to play again the adventurer with the hat and the whip. The American director and screenwriter is back in Cannes, 28 years after the presentation of his first film Heavy. He then directed, among others, Copland in 1997, the biopic on Johnny Cash, Walk the Line in 2005 with Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon, which earned the Oscar for Best Actress, but also 3:10 to Yuma in 2007 and Ford v Ferrari in 2019.

The Festival de Cannes would like to thank The Walt Disney Company and LucasFilm for their trust and is looking forward to hosting the screening of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny which promises another great cinematic adventure around the world.

The film is produced by Kathleen Kennedy, Frank Marshall and Simon Emanuel, with Steven Spielberg and George Lucas serving as executive producers.
John Williams, who has scored each Indy adventure since the original Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981, has once again composed the score.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is set to be released in cinemas on June 28, 2023 in France and on June 30, 2023 in the US.

The One that Got Away (1957)

Dir: Roy Ward Baker | UK Action thriller, 111’

The British have always prided themselves on being good losers and magnanimous in victory; with the previous war long past the opportunity came to show we were also good winners. By the mid-fifties Kurt Jurgens had already carved himself a niche in Good Germans, this time it was Hardy Kruger’s turn.

Although depicted as an abrasive character described as “a mixture of bombast and sheer nerve” – the fact he’s occasionally heard talking German gives him a sinister edge – the film is careful to assure us Kruger was never a party member, while the relationship between him and his captors is rather intimate. @RichardChatten

NOW ON YOUTUBE

Leonor will Never Die (2023)

Dir.: Martika Ramirez Escobar; Cast: Sheila Francisco, Bong Cabreara, Rocky Satumbides,c Anthony Falcon, Rea Molina, Dido De La Paz; Philippines 2022, 101 min.

This tongue in cheek love letter to the TV films of the 1980s comes from first time Philippine writer/director Martika Ramirez Escobar. It follows one time filmmaker Leonor (Francisco) who hasn’t worked in the industry since her heyday in late twentieth century.

A well known figure in her neighbourhood Leonor lives with her son Rudy (Cabrera) who one day finds out from the ‘ghost’ of her other son Ronwaldo (Falcon) that a competition for new screenplays is due to be launched on national TV. Keen to get back in the saddle, Leonor dusts down an old script entitled “The Return of the Kwago”. But the re-write is curtailed when a freak accident puts Leonor in a coma. Even then, the catatonic Leonor refuses to give up. Aided and abetted by various corrupt politicians like the local mayor (De La Paz), and the helpless Isabella (Molina), and yet another son – who lost his life in one of her previous endeavours, giving the piece a macabre twist – Leonor trail-blazes her return to glory.

Escobar runs riot with her curio, switching ratios in the style of the 1980s in a series of wacky episodes set in different time frames, DoP Carlos Mauricio working miracles with the complexity of it all. Leonor will Never Die may be not be for everyone, but will go down a treat for fans of bad taste. AS

IN CINEMAS FROM 7 APRIL 2023

To Catch a Killer (2023)

Dir: Damián Szifron | Cast: Shailene Woodley, Ben Mendelsohn, Jovan Adepo | Thriller 119′

Shailene Woodley plays a modern-day Clarice Starling in this slick Baltimore-set police procedural from Argentine director Damian Szifron (Wild Tales) It has to be said though that Ben Mendelsohn pulls rank performance-wise as her confident boss, the FBI’s chief investigator Geoffrey Lamark tasked with helping her track down a dangerous killer with the use of profiling. Usually cast as a villain Menselsohn makes for a masterful and persuasive chief who never takes himself too seriously, in the style of Carey Grant.

Profiling has long been the go-to device used in criminal investigation, alongside forensics. And Lamark (a Mendelsohn) instantly marks out the troubled Eleanor as the best detective to help solve the case. She stands up to him impressively in a gutsy street scene. And Woodley is certainly convincing in the role of Eleanor, a young police recruit whose feminine intuition and troubled past give her the tools and personal experience needed to understand the perp’s warped mind.

As the police and FBI launch a nationwide manhunt, they are thwarted at every turn by the individual’s unprecedented behaviour. Together Mendelsohn and Woodley make a poweful coupling yet Eleanor may be the only person who can understand the mind of their assailant and bring him to justice. MT

ON RELEASE ON in the US from 21 April 2023

The Passionate Stranger (1957) Cinema Rediscovered

Dir: Muriel Box | Cast: Margaret Leighton, Ralph Richardson, Carlo Justino | UK Drama

The Passionate Stranger (1957) centres around happily married house-wife Judith Wynter (Margaret Leighton) who keeps the fact she is a best-selling author of steamy romance novels a closely guarded secret. As her husband Roger (Ralph Richardson), recovers from a serious illness, the couple’s new driver Carlo (Carlo Justini) discovers the manuscript of Judith’s latest novel and jumps to a rather unfortunate conclusion, making life in the Wynter household very complicated indeed!

Similar in conception – and, alas, execution – to Preston Sturges’ ‘Unfaithfully Yours’. I guess it was an early attempt by future ‘Carry On’ producer Peter Rogers at a saucy comedy, but what – or who? – exactly are we supposed to be laughing at?

The middle section in pretty fifties Eastmancolor – in which Margaret Leighton, inauspiciously reunited with ‘Holly and the Ivy’ patriarch Ralph Richardson, plays Chopin in Norman Hartnell – goes on for far too long and is too broadly played, and none of it is remotely as witty as it evidently thinks it is. While Humphrey Searle’s score sledgehammers home situations that cry out for a more tongue-in-cheek treatment.

The most remarkable transformation is Patricia Dainton’s from mouse to hussy (with painted red lips to complement her emerald green dress), and is probably the single most enjoyably daft component in the film. @RichardChatten

On CINEMA REDISCOVERED BRISTOL until 30 July 2023 | BLURAY & DIGITAL for the first time in August 2023 along with RATTLE OF A SIMPLE MAN (1964) and THE TRUTH ABOUT WOMEN (1957) directed by Muriel Box

Tokyo Joe (1949)

Dir: Stuart Heisler | US Drama

It is a truth rarely acknowledged that for every timeless classic Humphrey Bogart made during the forties there was a mediocre clunker now languishing in richly deserved obscurity.

The late David Shipman went so far as to describe ‘Tokyo Joe’ as “one of his worst films” (which seems a bit harsh if you’ve ever seen ‘The Two Mrs Carrolls’); the felony compounded by the fact that Bogart actually it for his own company, Santana.

The film is probably more interesting to contemplate that to actually watch, but it has a certain morbid fascination. But it’s not every day you hear Bogie speak Japanese, Alexander Knox brings his usual quiet dignity to the thankless part of Bogart’s rival in love; while it provides a rare chance see Florence Marley – who now enjoys cult status for the title role of Curtis Harrington’s ‘Queen of Blood’ – bringing her glacial blue eyes to the role of Bogie’s ex-wife during her very short-lived Hollywood career. @RichardChatten

The Cairo Conspiracy (2022)

Dir.: Tarik Saleh; Cast: Tawfeek Barhom, Fares Fares, Mohammad Bakri, MakramKhoury, Mehdi Dehbi, Ramzi Choukair, Sherwan Haji; Sweden/Finland/France 2022, 126 min.

The Cairo Conspiracy is an ambitious thriller with strong affinities to John Le Carre’s novels, telling story of an innocent “Angel”, who falls prey to unholy machinations in the Al Azhar University in Cairo, the heart of Sunni Islam, in this increasingly damning but overlong portrait of corruption in the Egyptian capital.

Adam (Barhom) is a naïve fisherman whose life changes when he is selected to join the prestigious Al Azhar University in Cairo. Here he crosses paths with Zico (Dehbi), who delivers an enimatic message: “Your soul is pure, but every second in this place will corrupt it”. Zico should know, he is working for State Security agent Ibrahim (the reliable Fares Fares) and dies mysteriously before he can tell Adam more.

Adam then finds himself promoted as Zico’s successor in the grand conspiracy scheme, with the secret service trying to find an appropriate replacement when the Grand Iman dies. The most popular choice is “Blind” Sheikh Negm (Khoury), who is supports the Brotherhood, in the eyes of Ibrahim and his superior General Al Sakran (Bakri) a “terrorist”. Adam is then told to infiltrate the Jihadist cell, led by Solomon (Haji). But his bid to navigate the system could be tricky and precarious if he makes the wrong move.

The placid setting of the mosque contrasts with the mayhem of the conspiracy. Fares is an ambivalent person: he seems to genuine, almost caring towards Adam. His superior General Al Sakran is made of sterner stuff: violence for him is simply a way of life. Adam is caught in the spider web of deceit as the plot closes in on him, well aware that running away will bring shame on his family.

Visually this is a rewarding experience, even the violent scenes are shot with a degree of poetic sensitivity. Apart from the length, the only point of criticism is Saleh’s failure to take sides: and this objectivity collides with the byzantine brutality engulfing the two sides of this power struggle.

The Swedish TV director has had a run of decent big screen features of late and this follow-up to the The Nile Hilton Incident and The Contractor won him Best Screenplay at Cannes Film Festival 2022. AS

IN PICTUREHOUSES FROM 14 APRIL 2023

Kindling (2023)

Dir.: Connor O’Hara; Cast: George Somner, Conrad Khan, Wilson Radjou Pujalte, Mia McKenna-Bruce, Rory J. Saper, Geoff Bell, Tara Fitzgerald; UK 2022, 94 min.

The first feature film of English writer/director Connor O’Hara is based on his short film Infinate, dealing with premature death. O’Hara tries to strike a balance between grief and optimism, but it is up to the audience to decide if he manages to avoid a rather sentimental tearjerker.

Sid (Somner) is about to die from testicular cancer, having been given two years to live, he has managed three, but this summer will be his last, and he invites his best friends to a special celebration of his leaving the planet: Diggs (Pujalte), Dribble (Khan), Plod (Saper) and Wolfie (Zajaz) to celebrate his leaving this planet.

Sid’s parents (Bell/Fitzgerald) are long-suffering, trying not to transfer their trauma on to their son. Sid then meets Lily (McKenna-Bruce), a girl of his own age who has had her own share of trauma and is unsure what to study at university – Sid makes her promise to chose English literature. The two have an ambivalent relationship, with Sid guided by his keen interest in Astrology which inspires him to ask each of his four friends to find tokens relating to Love, Home, Family, Friends and Location. They must all come up with a symbol for these objects, which will be burned at a bonfire at the end of the summer, with Sid hoping to be granted immortality.

It seems churlish to criticise such a worthwhile undertaking as this but Kindling really lacks the sufficient narrative ballast to keep us engaged for over 90 minutes in what largely amounts to a series of episodes with the main message buried in bickering and tantrums. All Sid’s friends want to make his passing a special occasion, but they are not always mature enough to find a way to express their emotions. It is no surprise that Geoff Bell and Tara Fitzgerald are outstanding as the parents, having had the opportunity to work through their loss and survivors’ guilt. In the end, Sid’s wish to be immortal may not be fulfilled, but he has made a lasting impression on his social circle.

DoP David Wright makes evocative use of the surrounding countryside to lighten the clouds of dread hanging over proceedings. Kindling is a labour of love, a way for the writer/director to work through his own experiences, and is admirable as such. AS

KINDLING IS IN UK CINEMAS AND DIGITAL PLATFORMS from 21 APRIL 2023

Grand Expectations (2023)

Dir: Sylvain Desclous | Cast: Rebecca Marder, Benjamin Levernhe, Emmanuelle Bercot, Marc Barbe | France, Drama 105′

Benjamin Lavernhe and Rebecca Murder star as hypocritical left-wing lawyers in this ambitious but flawed film that starts in a glorious modern villa in Corsica and winds up in a prison in Lyon.

Madeleine (Marder) is on holiday with her lover Antoine at his father’s swanky beach villa near Porto Vecchio. One morning, driving along a small deserted road, their career prospects are dashed forever when they make a fatal decision with irreversible consequences.

High hopes of this turning into a sultry seaside thriller sink without trace in Sylvain Desclous’ follow-up to his 2016 feature debut Vendeur. What starts as a pithy psychological drama with an intelligent premise and a brief tension-fuelled police procedural, soon gets bogged down in a far less promising slice of social realism weighed down by tedious political pretensions in the style of Ken Loach.

Ultimately Grand Expectations doesn’t know whether it wants to be a thriller or a drama centring on workers’ rights. And it ends up failing on both counts. The characters of Antoine and Madeleine are badly thought out and totally un-likeable. And they’re implausible into the bargain, showing no real warmth or compassion in relation to their aims in life: No humanist individual would behave the way Madeleine or Benjamin do, so we really don’t care what happens to either of them. Bercot is cast in another hard-faced unsympathetic role – this time as a lawyer and union representative. Isabelle Huppert made a much more sympathetic job of it in her recent film Le Syndicaliste. Madeleine’s father (Barbe) is convincing as her estranged parent who walked out on the family and gets a chance to redeem himself, providing the vital link in the film’s denouement.

The accident and its aftermath – the most fascinating part of the feature – takes a backseat for most of the film, Madeleine hardly giving it a second thought while focusing of her career prospects, and only thinking of her own glory while pretending to champion workers’ rights. The original plot-line is then shoed in again in the final act with an unfeasible outcome for all concerned. MT

ON RELEASE IN FRANCE

The Last Seagull (2023) CPH:DOX

Dir: Tonislav Hristov | Finland, Doc with Ivan | 79′

Writer director Tonislav Hristov offers more insight into his native Bulgaria with this melancholic look at last chances and dwindling communities seen through the eyes of an ageing ‘Seagull’, a man who makes a living from escorting female tourists.

Ever since 1979 Ivan has been charming the birds on Sunny Beach on Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast. Now, at 58, his days as a low level lothario are numbered and he is looking in the last chance saloon for a way out.

Sunny Beach is not exactly the Côte d’Azur but it’s cheerful and family-orientated with a fabulous stretch of silky white sand. For a long time the resort has offered rich pickings for Ivan in the shape of wealthy female tourists from nearby Russia or Ukraine. But the tousled-haired simian-featured chain smoker is now growing tired of the sun and endlessly parading up and down plying his trade.

Love is simply a business deal for Ivan, a way to finance the rest of his life. And since his divorce he claims ‘to feel nothing for women’, despite his need to please them. Back in the good old days, hanging out with a ‘wealthy’ Russian or Ukrainian earned him €50 a day including board and lodging. His last relationship, with a Ukrainian, lasted three years. Now Ivan is forced to make his way working in a car wash and doing odd jobs around the local farms. The future certainly looks grim as he cuddles a kitten and a puppy back in his ramshackle house in the small rural backwater of Dervent – a place he now claims to hate.

But this social malaise is not just about Ivan. Everyone in the community is suffering the effects of transmigration. And with the young moving to the cities, the local population has dwindled in recent years. The pandemic also signalled a sea change in fortunes for the elderly ‘Don Juan’, now a grandfather, he yearns to reconnect with family and his estranged son who lives with his wife and toddler in Ukraine.

Hard times have also made wealthy women selective: more than just ‘looks and a lay’, they want a responsible man who can hold down a ‘proper’ job. One trump card up Ivan’s sleeve is his EU status as a Bulgarian: despite being poor, he can offer Ukrainian or Russian women a passport to Europe. And a small flat of 50 square metres can be bought in the region for a mere 20,000 euros. Marriage to Ivan will give her Carte Blanche to move around Europe and ‘to much nicer countries such as Germany’. And that’s worth its weight in gold with the recent war in Ukraine, and the increasingly fraught situation in Russia.

Filmed during the pandemic and making the best of its coastal and rural settings captured in all their glory by Hristov’s regular DoP Orlin Ruevski, who filmed The Good Postman and January, this is a good-looking documentary and all the better for its tight edit and concise running time. The Last Seagull also connects with the narratives of Ulrich Seidl’s 2012 outing: Paradise: Love and Laurent Cantet’s Vers Le Sud (2005) that reflect on marriages of convenience, increasingly popular in this day and age.

SCREENED DURING CPH:DOX 2023

One Fine Morning (2022) Un Beau Matin

Dir.: Mia Hansen-Love; Cast: Lea Seydoux, Melvil Poupaud, Pascal Greggory, Camille Leban Martins, Nicola Garcia, Fejria Deliba, Sarah Lepricard, Pierre Meunier, Sarah La Picard; France 2022, 112 min.

French writer/director Mia Hansen-Love always tries to show the extraordinary in simple terms: and One Fine Morning is another story about love and loss that unfolds without sentimentality. There is poetry, but always of the melancholy kind and small details turn out to be the harbinger of change. Nothing comes easily to her main characters who feel real and relatable, and full of human flaws. To put it all into context, Hanson Love interweaves pithy insights into her narrative as the large picture gradually emerges in the final act in this uplifting, profound and deeply affecting story of love in all its forms.

Sandra Kingsler (Seydoux) is a widow living with her young daughter Linn (Martins) in Paris where she is coming to terms with the slow demise of her father Georg, a former professor, who is suffering from a neuro-degenerative disease. Life is literally slipping away from him: “I wait for the thing to come and it doesn’t”. A care home is the only option, and Sandra and her sister, mother of two Elodie (Picard), and their divorced mother Francoise (Garcia) are searching for a suitable place.

In the middle of this family crisis, Sandra falls for a friend of her ex-husband. Clement (Poupaud) is a cosmo-chemist caught up in his own marriage and father of one. Finally, Sandra has enough of “being his mistress” and leaves Clement to make a decision. And as other characters join the story it grows ever more complex like a richly woven tapestry, each thread dependent on the other.

Going through her father’s diaries Sandra finds out that he wanted to write his autobiography, giving the film its title. There are certainly autobiographical passages from the director’s life, but they are part of a storyline explored the ongoing collision between Sandra’s attempts for happiness, and the reality. Her father’s illness sends her also back into her ambivalent childhood: even though she now idolises her father. In some ways, One Fine Morning is the reverse telling of the Hansen-Love’s earlier feature Good-Bye First Love in which the female central figure says goodbye to her past, having stepped into an identity more suitable for the rest of her life.

Sandra reflects on her past, her husband and a father who will soon will be memories. After all these years of emotional turbulence and physical abstinence she wants a passionate relationship, and she collides with Clement who does not want to spend all day in bed making love. As a translator/interpreter, she is well aware of the importance of words, and she wants to live life to the full, not content to take a back seat like her sister or mother. But Sandra is also as dependent on Clement’s return as her father is of outside help. One Fine Morning is all about hope after all – a story about the moments that make up a life. AS

IN CINEMAS IN UK & IRELAND FROM 14 APRIL | EXCLUSIVELY ON MUBI from 16 June 2023

Air (2023)

Dir.: Ben Affleck; Cast Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Jason Bateman, Chris Messina, Viola Davis, Julius Tennon, Matthew Maher, Damien Young; USA 2023, 112 min.

Director Ben Affleck teams up again with Matt Damon – this time to sell shoes. But this is no ordinary footwear, but the titular basket ball trainers that would kick Michael Jordan and ‘Nike’ to the top of their respective games.

It pays off that Affleck never reveals the actor who plays MJ – just a shot of the back of his head. AIR works hard to make us root for ‘Nike’, the sports shoe company that ranks third after ‘Adidas’ and ‘Converse’ in the sneaker hall of fame, the former being the favourite to sign MJ to the most lucrative deal ever – despite his rookie status.

Damon plays Sonny Vaccaro whose brief is to save Nike’s basketball division when the founder and his boss, Phil Knight (Affleck) tries to pull the plug on the whole division. Vaccaro is no sportsman and hates physical exercise, but when it comes to negotiation he is in the premier league and, in the pre-internet days of 1984 personality mattered much more than today and scriptwriter Alex Convery reflects this in some showcase scenarios for Sonny, not least with David Falk (Messina), Jordan’s agent, the villain of the piece.

One of the highlights is Sonny’s encounter with MJs mother Deloris (Davis), the only woman in this male-only talk show. There are fine performance from Jason Bateman as Rob Strasser, one of the company’s leading execs, and Matthew Maher as Peter Moore, the designer behind the famous shoes. DoP Robert Richardson does a marvellous job in the confined environment of the sports arenas, and the film gets out and about to the Jordan’s home for some fresh air. William Goldenberg’s editing is brisk, reminiscent of Argo. But there is a drawback: it’s one thing seeing American hostages escaping from post-revolutionary Iran in Argo – but watching a major company trying to outwit their competitors is hard work. And anyone familiar with the story knows how it all pans out. The good old boys of ‘Nike’ made profit-sharing for athletes possible, so it became obligatory for colleges all over the country to share the gains they made on selling sweaters with their students. But ultimately, watching shoes being sold by people with six or seven digit salaries is hard work, particularly when visual power is in short supply. AS

IN CINEMAS ACROSS THE UK FROM 5 APRIL 2023

Come and See (1985)

Dir: Elem Klimov | Cast: Alexei Kravchenko, Olga Mironova | USSR War epic, 149′

Once described by J G Ballard as the greatest war movie ever made, this 1943-set World War II epic, from Soviet director Elem Klimov, is certainly the most devastating serving as a metaphor for the ongoing and needless destruction wreaked by one human being on another. In this case Nazi Germany is the aggressor invading Belarus, then part of the Soviet Union.

Both poetic and realist, Klimov’s chronicle sees a fresh-faced young peasant boy reduced to an emotional wreck after he unearths a rifle on the beach and prepares, gleefully, to join the Soviet resistance movement against the occupying troops. Flyora, played by Alexei Kravchenko, is just another example of a soldier who starts out with glorious intentions and ends up broken and disillusioned in what poet Wilfred Owen described as ‘the pity of war’.

Early scenes capture a rural idyll where Flyora is pictured mucking about with his friend and then returning home to his mother and sisters before being conscripted into the resistance effort. A luminous Tarkovskian interlude in a pine forest introduces him to love in the shape Glasha (Olga Miranova) but their brief paradise turns to inferno after a rocket bombardment from a Nazi war plane bombards the couple and the crane that befriends them, deafening Flyora in the process. The two return home to find their village has been routed and the family killed, but Flyora is unable to engage with the reality of the images before him, captured on the wide-screen and in static close-ups of the boy’s increasingly incredulous expression by Sally Potter’s regular DoP Aleksey Rodionov (who would go on the photograph Orlando, The Party and Yes).

The remainder of the film follows Flyora as he struggles to survive against the odds, and depicts some of the most horrifying – and saddening – scenes ever recorded where the German soldiers inflict terrible pain on innocent farming communities and their animals. By now the boy has lost his mind in the mayhem, and is then thrust into a surreal sequence intercut with original Hitler-related footage contextualising the episode into stark reality and picturing Flyora re-united with his rifle and shooting maniacally at the German troops’ photographic trophy of the Nazi leader seen abandoned in the mud. MT

628 Belorussian villages were burnt down during the Nazi invasion 1941-44.

ON BLU-RAY | AMAZON PRIME VIDEO

Raised up West Side (2023)

Dir.: Brett A. Schwartz; Documentary with Darius Jones,Liz Abunaw, Jahmal Cole USA 2022, 86 min.

Chicago is best known for its cultural heritage of Frank Lloyd Wright and striking skyline punctuated by modern architecture and the famous Lurie Garden at Millennium Park on Lake Michigan’s shoreline.

The predominantly Black western part of the Illinois capital is the focus of this new documentary from Emmy-nominated filmmaker Brett A Schwartz who follows a group of men – some of them interviewed – whose childhood friends have long left and whose lives now fail to match up to the city’s glittering image of prosperity.

Daily shootings and killings are the norm, sometimes babies and small children are killed in the crossfire. Offenders end up in jail and upon release have no chance on the job market. Food plays a mayor role in this social malaise: an unhealthy lifestyle and cheap junk fare contribute to mass obesity in this place of deep-seated segregation. The demise started in the late 1960s with the murder of Martin Luther King in 1968. Mass riots were commonplace, not only in Chicago. Businesses moved out, estate agents kept upwardly mobile Black families out of the districts now reserved for Whites. Raised Up West Side is a chronicle that explores positive efforts to improve this sad state of affairs.

In an effort to address both food crisis and unemployment, the Farm of Ogden, a farmers’ market in the North Lawndale neighbourhood of the Westside now co-exists with “The Chicago Botanic Garden’s Windy City Harvest Program”. This runs a thirteen week transitional jobs programme giving ex-offenders the chance to learn a trade and secure long-time employment. The figures might not be impressive but of 212 enrolled, 152 men finished the course, and 119 found full-time jobs.

A modern aquaponics-based indoor farm, which yields fresh produce, shares the facility. Local entrepreneur Liz Abunaw, one of the leaders of the co-op, feared the Covid lockdown would lead to crisis, but instead the turnover improved because fast-food outlets shut down so people had to start cooking for themselves. Students from the ‘My Block My Hood My City’ project offer tourists a tour through the ghetto. Founder Jahmal Cole (who plans to run for Congress) is proud of the recent developments: West Side has found a new way of fighting back.

Jahmal is writing a novel about the history of the district, and has now found a full time job in a gym in Washington DC. But perhaps the story of Darius Jones is most typical for the Westside: his mother was unable to keep him away from the East Garfield Park neighbourhood, where he joined his first gang at 13, owned the first gun at 15 and was convicted age 18 for aggravated car jacking. In the Maximum Security Facility of Cook County Jail, he joined a programme to learn farming skills and this allowed him to spend some time outside jail. After his public lawyer found discrepancies in the police reports leading to Darius’ conviction he was released after only two years. Darius joined the Windy City Harvest Corps group, with life giving him a second chance.

Despite some enlightening archive clips and the worthwhile nature of the story it tells, Raised Up West Side is often let down by a scattergun approach to editing, Schwartz sometimes loses the thread of his narrative, and we do too. AS

AVAILABLE ON DIGITAL PLATFORMS FROM 28 MARCH 2023

He Walked by Night (1948)

Dir: Alfred L Werker | Cast: Richard Basehart, Scott Brady, Roy Roberts, Whit Bissell | US Film Noir 79′

A obvious precursor to Dragnet – complete with an appearance by future star Jack Webb – and a fine example of the routine excellence of the Hollywood thriller of the forties. He Walked by Noir unfolds in a semi-documentary style and follows police on the hunt for a resourceful criminal who shot and killed a cop.

Alfred Werker has long been difficult to fathom since amid the detritus of a journeyman career there’s been a handful of remarkably accomplished examples of filmmaking.

Applying the declamatory style then fashionable in urban thrillers, a nerdy young Richard Basehart plays a killer with absolutely no redeeming features cornered in the Los Angeles storm drains as Harry Lime was the sewers of Vienna in The Third Man.

While it’s widely known that Anthony Mann contributed several sequences; the overall success of the film probably owes as much to the unifying contribution of the magnificent black & white photography of John Alton. @RichardChatten

The Brothers (1947)

Dir: David MacDonald | Uk Drama

Where do you start with this one? It certainly doesn’t look as if it was meant to promote tourism north of the border.

Patricia Roc (looking even less convincing as a sweet young thing in pigtails than Joan Fontaine in ‘Letter from an Unknown Woman’) arrives on the Isle of Skye where the ratio of men to women seems five to one and the attracts the attention of all the young bruiser. Foolishly she soon goes skinny dipping with predicable effects on the local lads who promptly start fighting over her.

You start wondering if you’re seeing double when John Laurie appears in two roles, and are we seriously expected to believe Finlay Currie produced two sons who look like Duncan Macrae and Maxwell Reed; maybe they were adopted? @RichardChatten

The Last Sentinel (2023)

Dir.: Tanel Toom; Cast: Kate Bosworth, Lucien Laviscount, Martin McCann, Thomas Kretschmann; UK 2023, 117 min.

On a beleaguered Earth in the year 2063 this rambling Sci-fi thriller sees four soldiers waiting for their long-overdue relief crew on Sentinel – a remote nuclear-armed military base in the vast sea that separates two remaining continents. As weeks turn into months their patience is tested to the limit, rather like ours in having to endure the overlong running time.

Estonian director Tanel Toom had a great idea to adapt Malachi Smyth’s script about a dystopian future set on the dwindling remnants of dry land. But the story would have worked better as a theatre play given the confined nature of the location.

A storm wreaks havoc in the opening scenes of The Sentinel testing the men’s patience and setting them at loggerheads, willing to die rather than fail in their mission. Thomas Kretschmann plays their stern leader Hendricks. Kate Bosworth steals the show as Cassidy, the lone female trying to forget her past and her, now dead, family. But even she has a job saving a thriller which often feels like an over-talkie, second-hand Sci-fi yarn. Needless to say, she embarks on an affair with one of the men, Sullivan (Laviscount), who is rather an unstable character and wants to leave the ship and get home on the “Aurora”, a boat which shows up on the radar and is nearly sunk by the trigger happy Hendricks, who has a rebellion on his hands when it turns out the vessel is not an viable option. Naturally, it all ends in tears when we discover the truth about the level-headed Cassidy. Mat Ratassepp captures some striking images but the darkness, limited location and restraint of the battleship makes his job hard. An ‘A’ for effort, but rather limp in its execution. AS

Released on digital 24 April 2023

The Master Gardener (2023)

Dir.: Paul Schrader; Cast: Sigourney Weaver, Joel Edgerton, Quintessa Swindell; USA 2022, 107 min.

Paul Schrader follows First Reformed with another lean film noir about redemption. Starring Sigourney Weaver and Joel Edgerton The Master Gardener is as perfect a B-Movie as you can get, this one in the Southern Gothic tradition spiced up with a contemporary twist. Full of surprises and much soul-searching it centres on a rather eclectic menage-a-trois. Schrader is still the last men standing in a Hollywood renaissance that never really happened.

Rich, arrogant and spoilt, dowager Norma Haverhill (Weaver at her most acerbic) is on the wrong side of middle age, and rules her garden empire like a plantation owner before the Civil War. She is the Law, or better still, she makes and breaks it. Her “Boy Friday”, or more of a man servant, is Marvel Roth (Edgerton) the titular horticulturalist.

Schrader gives a running VoiceOver that tools through all the fine gardens in history. Norma is not very keen on under-achievers, she even refers to her dog as “just a veranda dog”; not fit for blood sport. And we can well imagine Norma in her younger days, riding mercilessly to hounds. Roth panders to her obediently during the preparations for the forthcoming garden show (which may be the last, as Norma is not what she was), but when Norma invites him to bed, a ritual that clearly dates back along way, we are quietly taken aback to witness his florid tattoos particularly the swastikas.

Into this idyll of tranquility and natural beauty Norma then places a time-bomb, very well aware of its explosive powers: Maya, her nineteen-year old grand-niece will help Roth and his staff to create the perfect garden. Norma did not care much for Maya’s mother – or any other relatives, for that matter – but prides herself in doing a good deed just this once. Roth, who is no spring chicken himself, immediately falls for Maya who is also has a drug problem. Her boyfriend/pimp/dealer regularly beats her up, and faces the wrath of Roth. But there a consequences, and Roth must retaliate, revealing a tawdry past – all redeemed courtesy of Miss Norma. But now he must make a choice.

DoP Alexander Dynan, who worked with Schrader on First Reformed, conjures up a rather staid and sterile picture of the gardens, historic and contemporary, and may be this is intentional. The only time they really enchant is in a surreal sequence towards the end, But his images of a broken America caught between white supremists and the immigrant underbelly feel authentic. The dying gang lords are being replaced by small time drug dealers and their scene. Schrader again quails away from judgement or sentimentality: his style is laconic and the assault is always full frontal. Master Gardener is like one of the best pulp-novels: the great Jim Thompson would have been proud. AS

ON RELEASE FROM May 2023

On the Wandering Paths | Sur les Chemins Noirs (2023)

Dir/Wri: Denis Imbert | Jean Dujardin, Josephine Japy, Amy Duperey, Jonathan Zacai | France, Drama 95′

A famous writer embarks on an arduous trek through France after an accident puts his life into perspective, in this reflective fourth feature from Denis Imbert.

“To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive” very much comes to mind in Sur les Chemins Noirs. The journey is far and away the most significant and enjoyable element of this otherwise rather underwhelming affair that sees Jean Dujardin at his most sober and pensive as Pierre: a reformed and hedonistic alcoholic who nearly lost his life after falling from a balcony while under the influence. Based on a novel by Sylvain Tesson, the subject matter was obviously crying out to be filmed on the big screen and works best as a contemplative travelogue capturing the glorious rural scenery of France from the magnificent Mercantour National Park in the Alps Maritimes to Normandy’s Cherbourg Peninsula. Although various urban locations do feature.

The tricky terrain – not to mention the fanatic cyclists and other hill walkers – make the going tough and laborious for Pierre, who has only just recovered from a leg injuries and a concussion that has left him with a brain injury and epilepsy. But he soldiers on north through France, Imbert helpfully marking out the significant places with inter-titles, just like in the old movies, but now sadly abandoned: There is Plomb de Cantal in the Avergne; Bourganeuf in Aquitaine, and the Loire river and its chateaux stretching out before us, and the white sandy Normandy beaches crowned by Mont Saint-Michel. Along the way, local farmers provide Pierre with cheese, wine and provisions, or a bed for the night, advising him on the pitfalls of the region: such us wolves, or fast flowing rivers. And these meetings and a series of flashbacks allow Imbert and his co-writer Diasteme to flesh out Pierre’s backstory: his previous life as a celebrated author in Paris, his book-signing that leads to a brief affair with a much younger Anna (Japy) – an episode that fails to carry any emotional weight. Pierre admits that his “new mistress is solitude”. Along the way Pierre also visits various friends and family members that are once again forgettable.

The great outdoors very much eclipses the human element here, characters paling into insignificance compared with France’s glorious landscapes, rivers and mountain peaks. Crucially this is all about the healing powers of nature, our inherent solitude in the scheme of things, and one man’s triumph over adversity and pain. Pierre has now chosen a life of independence and quietly revels in the privation and of being alone after so much excess in his previous existence. DoP Magali Silvestre de Sacy really triumphs with her impressive camerawork, the light changing from the warmth of the south to the gentle washed out colours of the Loire in this pleasant and meditative watch. MT

NOW ON RELEASE IN FRANCE AND BELGIUM

Motherland (2023) CPH:DOX Winner Dox Award

Dir.: Hanna Badziaka, Alexander Mihalkovich; Documentary with Swetlana Korzhych; Swe/Nor/Ukraine 2023, 94 min

Belarus has been taking the rap in the media recently for the harsh regime of its dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko, judging by this documentary from Hanna Badziaka and Alexander Mihalkovich, this is not fake news.

The directors followed relatives and victims of “Dedovschina”, a brutal, often deadly initiation ritual imposed by the forces, a regime that was first practised in the army of the old Soviet Union, and is still prevalent in former republics of the former Russian empire.

Two young Belarussian men, Aleksandr (“Sasha”) and Nikita had reservations about joining up. Nikita, who spends his time with his Rave circle mates, had second thoughts about serving, and even mulled over the idea of emigration or opting out on medical grounds, by pretending to be a ‘nutcase’. But his father talks him into serving, believing it will make a man out of his son. Sasha, on the other hand, blindly joins up. To his detriment, we later find out, when his mother Svetlana puts flowers on his grave. Svetlana now spends her time up and down the country trying to find justice for Sasha, and connect with other people whose sons have suffered the same fate. She never accepted the official version of “suicide”, after workers in the morgue, where her son is resting, told her about his physical wounds: bruises on his back and neck.

Sasha was the victim of said “Dedovschina” – which is literally translated as ‘Grandfathers”: old men who pull rank in the army, holding sway over new recruits. But their status will change when today’s victims become tomorrow’s perpetrators, getting their own back for all pain they have suffered in their first year in the barracks.

A voice-over reads imagined letters from a soldier (actually written by co-director Mihalkovich, edited by Hanna Badziaka), talking about his torture at the hands of the older men, whom he had to pay on a regular basis, into the bargain. The anonymous voice describes a life of hell.

Meanwhile Nikita has been released from service and is heavily traumatised. A shadow of his former self he regrets not having fled the country. It is August 2020, and election time in Belarus, and Lukashenko is standing again, having seized power in 1994. Had he stayed in the army, Nikita would have been forced to open fire at his friends who have joined the popular resistance movement, in a bid to keep the dictator from being re-elected. But the police and the military (as well as Vladimir Putin) have a vested interest in making sure Lukashenko stays in power, and many demonstrators are killed in the protests. In one of the letters, the author states “that after being transferred to new barracks, out of the reach of the “Grandfathers”, I enjoy the pleasure of my new powers. It has gone under my skin”.

Nikita’s friends emigrated to the Ukraine after the election, but they went ‘out of the frying pan and into the fire’ when Russia invaded the nation. Svetlana continues to rage against the authorities but fights a losing battle. DoP Sirhiej Kanaplianik stays close to the action with a hand held camera, capturing brutal confrontations, particularly the bloody scenes when police and plain-clothes agents join the mass slaughter. AS

NOW AT CPH:DOX 2023 | DOX AWARD WINNER | ONE WORLD INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS competition.

Main image: A riot policeman is standing next to the House of Government in Minsk amid mass protests in 2020. Credit: Siarhiej Kanaplianik

Life After Death (2022) Vilnius Film Festival 2023

Dir.: Nerijus Milerius; Cast: Juozas Budraitis, Adomas Gavenonis, Dainius Gavenonis, Rasa Samuolite; Lithuania 2022, 71 min.

Lithuanian writer/director Nerijus Milerius reflects on how death – real and fictional – affects three generations of a family of actors in this free-flowing second documentary. The important and trivial coalesce in a meandering potpourri of musings and rather impressive images of Vilnius under siege from Covid.

Adomas, a budding film director, records his elderly grandfather Juozas Budraitis coming to terms with the end of his life. Adomas wants to have a lasting memory of the old man who lives alone with his cat. His parents, actors Rasa and Dainius, talk at length about their own experiences of death on stage and in films. Rasa is not keen on playing characters whose relatives are dying, for fear this might tempt fate. But Dainius is more pragmatic: “Life converts into death”. Juozas is swift to point out the stark reality of his own demise: “only one person will leave: relatives and/or doctors are left behind”.

Adomas talks at length about the time he played the part of young director who got killed, an older filmmaker also suffered a brutal demise in the same film, and these deaths are played out in series of harrowing clips. Benas Alexandravicius, lead singer of the rebel rock band McLOUD, then makes an appearance during a rooftop performance overlooking Vilnius. Benas is proud of his revolutionary profile, but where he fits into the film is anyone’s guess.

An often rambling attempt at authenticity, most significant for its impressive images of the Lithuanian capital undergoing urban regeneration. Bulldozers make way for luxury apartment blocks in the city centre. An oddity which needed much more work to be a success. AS

VILNIUS INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2023

Houria (2022)

Dir: Mounia Meddour | Cast: Lyna Khoudri, Rachida Brakni, Nadia Kaci, Amira Hilda Douaouda | Drama, 104′

A talented dancer is forced to re-think her life in this vibrant second feature from Mounia Meddour who continues to explore the Algerian sisterhood and their creative struggle against male oppression.

Houria (Lyna Khoudri) always dreamed of being a ballet dancer. Her friends are all in the same predicament, striving to make a success of their lives. As a trained PE teacher, Houria throws herself into often painful practice sessions, coached by her mother Sabrina (Brakni), in the hope of being accepted into a professional troupe. But she is just one of several women in this passionate and sensuously crafted drama who are desperate for personal and professional fulfilment yet thwarted by Algeria’s male-dominated set-up and blighted by tragedy.

Her best friend Sonia (Amira Hilda Douaouda), also a gym teacher, has organised an illegal boat passage to Spain. Having saved the money to buy a car by betting on ram baiting fights – in scenes that are grossly overplayed and distressing but aim to convey a testosterone fuelled male environment – Houria is then attacked by a convicted criminal who remains at large, due to sloppy policing, and left with a broken ankle and post-traumatic mutism, her hopes of a dancing career dashed. Once again the sisterhood comes to the rescue, and these scenes are evocatively played by the film’s talented cast, and beautifully captured in Leo Lefevre’s spectacular close-up camerawork that focuses on faces and body language. During her rehabilitation Houria volunteers on a rehabilitation project with aurally and vocally challenged women and together they find common ground and a way forward.

Houria – a name meaning ‘freedom in Arabic – often feels like a series of spirited episodes in the lives of these unfortunate women who have triumphed against adversity and made their way forward creatively despite considerable sadness, pain and regret. There’s a great deal of passion here but not much of a dramatic arc until the final stages when all the plotlines eventually come together. Despite formal flaws this is heartfelt filmmaking. MT

NOW ON RELEASE IN FRANCE | PREMIERED AT CAIRO FILM FESTIVAL 2022

Outsiders and Exiles: Jerzy Skolimowski | Bfi

OUTSIDERS AND EXILES: THE FILMS OF JERZY SKOLIMOWSKI

In collaboration with the BFI and this year’s London-based Polish film festival Kinoteka will also present Outsiders and Exiles: The Films of Jerzy Skolimowski, a month-long retrospective screening at BFI Southbank. This is a rare opportunity to see the work of one of the world’s most remarkable filmmakers. Skolimowski’s latest sensation EO (2022), inspired by Bresson’s 1966 drama Au Hasard Balthazar, has garnered critical acclaim across the world since its premiere at Cannes, culminating with the film’s recent Academy Award nomination.

The season will include early Polish features like Identification Marks: None (1964) and Hands Up! (1967/1981), both of which will also be released on BFI Blu-ray on 24 April, British-made classics such as Deep End (1970) and The Shout (1978), and later career highlights including Essential Killing (2011) and 11 Minutes (2015). A number of the films in the season will also be available to watch online on BFI Player. MT

NOW AT BFI SOUTHBANK | LONDON 2023

Knock on Any Door (1949)

Dir: Nicholas Ray | Cast: John Derek, Humphrey Bogart, Allene Roberts. | US, 1949, 100’

The first of two features Ray made for Santana, Humphrey Bogart’s short-lived independent production company, Knock on Any Door unfolds against the poverty and crime of 1930s Chicago, a setting that drew upon Ray’s Midwestern youth and Depression-era political activism.

John Derek, here in his debut, later became so notorious as a middle-aged man whose leading ladies got conspicuously younger with each succeeding film, it comes as quite a shock to see him here, in his debut, as a genuinely young kid (complete with an “Introducing” credit) from the slums Pretty Boy Romano who lives by Al Capone’s creed: “Live fast, die young, and have a good looking corpse!”.

Photographed by Burnett Guffey who later won an Oscar for ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ and anticipating the same director’s Rebel Without a Cause by six years. Humphrey Bogart is at his most personable playing the lawyer who cares, with an absorbing slug-fest in a boiling hot courtroom between him and district attorney George Macready. @RichardChatten

Remember to Blink (2023) Vilnius Film Festival 2023

Dir.: Austeja Urbaite; Cast: Doville Kundrotaite, Anne Azoulay, Arthur Igual, Inesa Sionova, AgusAntarnacius; Lithuania 2023, 109 min.

Women have the upper hand in this provocative and harrowing study of jealousy, obsession and cultural division, a feature debut for Lithuanian writer/director Austeja Urbaite, screening at this year’s Vilnius International Film Festival.

The glorious countryside of Northern France provides a bosky backdrop to turbulent family politics when French couple – Jacqueline (Azoulay) and Leon (Igual) – decide to adopt Lithuanian siblings Karolin (Sionova) and Rytis (Antarnacius). They have hired a Lithuanian nanny to help the children settle in after leaving the orphanage back home where they have clearly been traumatised, and Karolin given sleeping pills.

Medical student Gabrielle is easy-going and plays imaginative games with the children but Jacqueline is dominating and controlling, pushing for discipline. In an insensitive move she also changes the kids’ names to Caroline and Romain, in honour of the writer Romain Gary, who was of Lithuanian heritage. When they all get wet during playtime, their mother-to-be complains to Gabi “You are not a child any more!”. Leon, a painter and designer, takes the line of least resistance but secretly agrees with Gabi. His wife has a dark secret: she gave birth to a son, Sebastian, at the age of sixteen and the boy later left home never to be seen again.

Gabi re-plays the “Gorgon” sage with the children – obviously Jacqueline features as the titular villain. But the nanny is increasingly concerned for the kids’ welfare and gets in contact with their birthmother in Lithuania. One night Leon storms off after a big row with his wife and Gabi decides to escape back home with her charges, having poisoned the family dog.

Language and its use and misuse plays a central role in this psychological thriller: Gabi tries to keep the children’s motherland alive, but Jacqueline wants them to integrate into the French way of life. Leon stays neutral but is a weak character compared with both women. What’s fascinating here is the director’s decision to portray her own gender as manipulative and machiavellian through the characters of Gabi, Jacqueline and Karolin in this mature and inspired debut. AS

VILNIUS INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL | 16-26 MARCH 2023

Never Forget Tibet: the untold story of the Dalai Lama (2023)

Dir.: Jean-Paul Mertinez; Documentary with Tenzin Gyatso the 14th Dalai Lama, Har Mander Singh, Rani Singh, Nithin Coca, Leslie Dirusso, Dr Lobsang Sangay, Rinchen Khandro Choegyal narrated by Hugh Bonneville; UK 2022, 94 min.

This fulsome portrait of the 14th Dalai Lama, narrated by Hugh Bonneville, is anything but untold and brings nothing new to the table. And what’s more the editing is sloppy, jumping from one interviewee to the next in a scattergun approach that will nonetheless provide cinematic catnip for the luminary’s devoted followers.

The film opens with an introduction of sorts to the Dalai Lama (*1935), Leslie Dirusso. This includes a “Limited Edition of the Heinrich Harrar Collecton” of photos of the young Dalai Lama in Lhasa, shot in the late 1930, and developed decades later. The spiritual leader’s brother and sister-in-law talk about their admiration for the spiritual leader, and journalist Nithin Coca reiterates the regional threat from the current Chinese government inherent in their water dam policy of which has led to droughts in India, Thailand and Bangladesh. Dr. Lobsang Sangay, president of the Central Administration of Tibet, talk at length about China’s current discrimination towards the nation. To prevent Tibetans from emigrating to India, the Chinese government tries to control the population in a digital way, using drones and tracking devices.

Rinchen Khandro Choegyal, founding director of the Tibetan Nuns project, explains how those subjected to rape and torture in Chinese prisons have been offered a brighter future. Today women have the same access to education as men, and equal opportunities in the professions. Before women were restricted to cooking and cleaning.

The highlight is the meeting between His Holiness and Har Mander Singh, an Indian officer who helped to save the Dalai Lama’s life, guiding him in his 1959 escape from the Chinese soldiers who were guarding him. Singh led a small team, over snowy mountains and glaciers to South India. He died in 2020.

Singh’s daughter Rani, a journalist, is given the privilege of an one-to-one interview with the Dalai Lama who surprisingly admits to mulling over the idea of joining the Chinese Communist Party when he befriended chairman Mao. He was talked out of it by a friend, who told him to wait. In 1950, China invaded Tibet.

The Dalai Lama is today a near-mythical personality, an ‘influencer’ who focuses his attention on the younger generation encouraging them to fight for a more equal world, and save the planet from extinction. Compassion is his watch word. AS

ON RELEASE FROM 30 MARCH 2023

Fantastic Machine (2023) CPH:DOX

Dir.: Axel Donielson, Maximilien von Aertryck; Documentary Sweden/Denmark 2023, 88 min.

‘An image tells a thousand words’

A potted history of the camera – from the early nineteenth century to the present day – provides compulsive viewing in this new documentary from Axel Donielson and Maximilien von Aertryck.

SCREENING AT CPH:DOX 2023

The Wayward Bus (1957)

Dir: Victor Vicas | US Drama 87’

Neo-realism comes to Hollywood in this remarkable onscreen teaming of fifties icons Joan Collins (as a tippling, money-hungry little drab with a husband inevitably named ‘Johnny’) and Jayne Mansfield as a blonde movie star travelling incognito proving that not every film they made was glossy Technicolor nonsense (the full title actually being ‘John Steinbeck’s The Wayward Bus’); the old guard being represented by Dan Dailey, Larry Keating and Will Wright.

Produced by Billy Wilder’s former partner Brackett and directed by continental import Victor Vicas, it vividly evokes in widescreen an era when cops rode in helicopters but roadside cafes were still equipped with candlestick phones and aspiring actors looked up to Robert Wagner and MarlonBrando.@RichardChatten

NOW ON YOUTUBE

Sage Homme (2023)

Dir: Jennifer Devoldere | Cast: Karin Viard, Melvin Boomer, Steve Tientcheu, Tracy Gotoas | France Drama 104′

French filmmaker Jennifer Devoldere makes a comeback after more than a decade with this didactic rather uneven comedy drama that explores the world of childbirth through the eyes of young male midwife, played by Melvin Boomer in his feature debut.

After failing the entrance exam to become a doctor, Léopold (Boomer) is relegated to midwifery, rather a come-down from his perspective, and it shows. Clearly, delivering babies is a challenging profession for a young man who comes from a hyper male background of three younger brothers and a macho father, and gets a baptism of fire in a world dominated by women, and particularly his boss Nathalie, played by Karin Viard who carries the film from start to finish. From their first meeting, when Leo makes a fuss about wearing the obligatory pink overalls, Nathalie will knock him into shape by the sheer force of her experience and personality, and challenge his misconceptions about childbirth and what it takes to bring the next generation into the world – in graphic detail – these scenes providing the film with considerable emotional freight.

Boomer gives a decent first performance but his backstory, set in the council blocks of Nancy, feels completely eclipsed by that of Viard and her patients. And the other characters: his father (Tientcheu), brothers, and girlfriend (Gotoas) seem totally irrelevant to the far more gripping and meaningful hospital scenes, dominated by Nathalie doing her vital work, while Leopold looks on as the truculent trainee – although he does in the end redeem himself.

Devoldere covers all the birth bases: the complicated cases, the tragic ones and, ultimately, the legal ones, which gives the film its final sting. We learn a lot about being midwife and why working in the professional can be so controversial, yet so totally reliant on people who care and are prepared to give it their all. People like Nathalie, with Viard managing to ooze sensuality while being up to her elbows in blood and gore. MT

NOW ON RELEASE IN FRANCE

Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale celebrates 70 years

2023 marks the seventieth anniversary of the publication by Jonathan Cape of the first of what became a long-running series of novels by Ian Fleming detailing the adventures of a latter-day Bulldog Drummond called James Bond. Fleming redefined spy fiction forever with his creation that would go on to spawn numerous film adaptions spanning six decades, from Terence Young’s Dr No (1962) to No Time to Die (2021) with another outing in the pipeline for 2025/26.

I actually this book over forty years ago. I remember silently groaning when it became apparent that the climax involved following a card game. It’s testament to Fleming’s that I actually found utterly engrossing.

This earlier adaptation explains the failure of Saltzman & Broccoli to make there own version. The rights instead fell into the hands of Charles Feldman who threw in everything but the kitchen sink to distract viewers from the fact of the absence of Sea Connery. The result (which had several directors, including John Huston, who also played ‘M”) who inevitably a shambles.

Quentin Tarantino frequently expressed a desire to get back to basics with a version set in period, but when it finally reached the screen in 2006 it marked the dawn of a new era with the emergence of Daniel Craig.

Infinity Pool (2023)

Dir.: Brandon Cronenberg; Cast: Alexander Skarsgard, Mia Goth, Cleopatra Coleman, Jalil Lesbert; Canada/Croatia/Hungary 2023, 117 min.

The new sub-genre “Eat the Rich” gets another addition with Brandon Cronenberg’s latest – an overblown potboiler that sees the filthy avoid a chance for redemption. Overlong, with a nearly two-hour running time, Infinity Pool oozes bodily fluids, and a proper sex-orgy – but alas, fails miserably when it comes to the plotting.

Suffering from longterm writers’ block, author James Foster (Skarsgard) takes his wife Em (Coleman), who happens to be the daughter of Foster’s publisher, on a luxury holiday to the impoverished fictional island of Latoka, where the wealthy live it up in a gated paradise. Em and James meet Gabi (Goth) and her husband Alban (Lesbert), the latter couching his vacuous personality in a shroud of enigma. In contrast Gabi is a blood-thirsty seductress who decides to torture the miserable James. On an expedition outside their gilded cage Gabi’s dangerous driving kills a local farmer. Unfortunately, the draconian ‘zero tolerance’ laws of Latoka make provision for the man’s relative to enforce – and enact – the death penalty.

But an inventive loophole allows for the Chief of the Police to line his pockets by offering to clone the perpetrators, allowing them to escape scot-free before the relatives get to exact their bloody revenge on their stand-ins. As such, James sees his “body double’ being slaughtered before his very eyes by the farmer’s son. From then on everything happens in overdrive, with Gabi and the rest of the cloned un-dead tormenting James. Voyeurism and the male gaze triumphs in the tame and disappointing plot resolution. James and Gabi are convincing, but the rest of the characters are predictable in a sensationalist and empty narrative which telegraphs every development taking away the suspense.

Half-way through, “Daddy Issues” are mentioned, possibly in reference to Brandon Cronenberg (43) being one of the “Nepo-Babies”, forced to fight for recognition in the shadow of an over-baring parent: in his case his father David.

DoP Karim Hussain, who worked on Possessor, tries hard to find an original angle on the aesthetics – not easy because Infinity Pool feels rather old hat despite a promising premise. AS

IN CINEMAS NATIONWIDE FROM 24 MARCH 2023

The Tutor (2023)

Dir: Jordan Ross | Cast: Garrett Hedlund, Noah Schnapp, Victoria Justice, Johnny Weston | US Thriller 91′

Garrett Hedlund gives a charismatic performance as a successful private tutor for the rich in this slick sophomore feature from Jordan Ross. The opening scenes picture Ethan (Hedlund) mentoring a series of odious and precocious young adults in the palatial Southern mansions of the East Coast monied elite. We are immediately on his side and appreciate the tricky nature of the work despite the considerable financial advantages. “The Magic City” of Birmingham Alabama, home of the Civil Rights Movement, provides a refreshing setting with its neo-classical buildings and leafy avenues captured with cinematic panache by Brian Rigney Hubbard.

By night Ethan is calming his pregnant girlfriend (Justice) with his sardonic sense of humour and raspberry leaf tea and life looks rosy until the past comes back to haunt him when an opportunity to improve the family finances comes in the shape of an unusual new client whose fancy abode and wealth beyond the dreams of avarice tops anything Ethan has ever experienced before. On arrival, the butler shows him to his personal suite complete with pool table and an extensive library, and Ethan – who will turn out to be an unreliable figure of authority – can hardly believe his luck.

His new charge – the troubled young Jackson (Noah Schnapp) – proves to be challenging and is most certainly on the spectrum in the way he forms an unhealthy attachment to Ethan, throwing tantrums and generally acting out in unpredictable ways. And Jackson’s bizarre cousins – spending the summer with him – stretch our imagination with their wild antics as this imaginative psychological thriller scripted by Ryan King (Law & Order Criminal Intent) morphs – not altogether convincingly – from light-hearted to seriously sinister threatening to derail Ethan’s own existence and unlock secrets from his past. MT

ON RELEASE FROM 23 MARCH

Q Planes (1939)

Dir: Tim Whelan | Cast: Laurence Olivier, Valerie Hobson, Ralph Richardson, George Curzon | UK Drama

Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson make a dashing pair back in the days when Olivier was still cast as a handsome hunk.

Although the use of biplanes locates the action in the frivolous thirties (as exemplified by Olivier calling Valerie Hobson as “Miss Fleet Street of 1938”), the storyline about disappearing high-speed bombers looks ahead to the coming war in Europe.

Olivier is officially the star but Richardson has the showier part as a deceptively vague, bowler-hatred, brolly-wielding moustached secret agent – who insouciantly breaches the fourth wall at the film’s conclusion – cheerfully acknowledged by Patrick MacNee as the inspiration for John Steed. @RichardChatten

Vilnius International Film Festival 2023

In celebration of its 700th year Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital, welcomes a fresh array of homegrown talent at the VILNIUS INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL from March 16-26th.

Vilnius put itself on the map, globally speaking, two years ago when the 2020 edition turned the country’s airport into a drive-in theatre. A year later, the programming moved into top hotels where locals could check into a room for the full immersive festival experience. Last year, the festival was one of the first to champion Ukrainian films, raising the profile of the beleaguered nation’s plight.

Lithuania may be a small country with only three million inhabitants but it punches above its weight culturally with a vibrant sense of innovation in cinema, the arts, food and tech. VIFF, known as the Kino Pavasaris (“Film Spring” in Lithuanian), reflects this high level of creativity in the upcoming 28th edition which features five Lithuanian features and five shorts. In some ways the lockdown was positive because filmmakers spent more time developing their scripts, rehearsing with their actors and preparing their films in general. And it shows.

Tragedy struck last year when Lithuanian filmmaker Mantas Kvedaravičius was killed during the making of his feature documentary Mariupolis II. This year’s festival once again focuses on Ukraine with a screening of his documentary, and also includes LUXEMBOURG, LUXEMBOURG by Antonio Lukich and Philip Sotnychenko’s LA PALISIADA. The festival closes with a mystery screening; an observational documentary collectively shot by the Lithuanian film community on a voluntary basis–an unprecedented project never seen before in the country.

The Vilnius Film Festival is supported by the Lithuanian Film Centre, co-funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture, Creative Europe MEDIA Programme of the European Union, Vilnius City Municipality and Go Vilnius. Vilnius IFF Kino Pavasaris is an independent private initiative.

Vilnius International Film Festival: kinopavasaris.lt

The 39 Steps (1959)

Dir: Ralph Thomas | Kenneth More, Taina Elg, Brenda de Banzie, Barry Jones, Joan Hickson | UK Drama

You remake Hitchcock at your peril, but although generally considered inferior to the 1935 classic this version is perfectly enjoyable in it’s own right.

A straightforward remake of Hitchcock’s 1935 classic rather than a literal adaptation of John Buchan’s novel (Mr Memory isn’t in the book, but the explanation of the title accurately adheres to the original).

While Hitchcock’s version rarely left the studio, this version is attractively shot on location in Eastmancolor, often feels like a rather agreeable day out and has a delightful score by Clifton Parker.

It also benefits from an enormous cast of familiar faces – Brenda De Banzie is particularly good – with Barry Jones just as sinister as the man without the tip of his finger as Godfrey Tearle was in the original. @RichardChatten

The Other Profile (2023) CHP:DOX 2023

Dir.: Armel Hostiou, Cremix Onana Genda Cristo; Documentary with Areml Hostiou, Cremix Onanna Cristo, Peter Olela, Sarah Ndele, David Kapay; France 2022, 82 min.

Ever wondered about those fake profiles on social media?. A revealing new documentary travels from France to the Republic of Congo to track one down.

French filmmaker Armel Hostiou one day made a startling discovery. A Facebook Profile with his name existed in Kinshasa. The Other Profile is a road movie about his search for his double. It is also an essay on the meaning of authenticity.

When Hostiou arrived in Kinshasa, the capital of the Republic of Congo, locals Sarah and Peter offered to ferry him round in the search for his enigmatic double. Many of their friends supported the endeavour, many of them Hackers. One of the leads, David Kapay, a set designer, claimed to know many young women who went for auditions as the filmmaker’s double, and were charged ten Dollars for the privilege of an appearance .

Needless to say, the ‘film projects’ never saw the light of day. To liven things up, everybody seems to have a pet dog in the circle Peter and Sarah frequented, one was called ‘Donald Trump’. After a meeting with a lawyer proved unsuccessful, Hostiou’s visit to a local ‘Maribou’ was also a failure, since Peter explained to him later, that the Shaman had a helper in the next room.

Finally, the three of them staged an audition of their own, trying to get the “casting director” David Kapay, to lure the elusive ‘doppelganger’ out of hiding. It soon turned out that many of the young women were desperate, and only too ready to stump up money they couldn’t afford – and even resort to the casting couch – to landing a part in a film which was supposed to be shot by a French director.

Finally, on the day of a heavy rainstorm, Hostiou made a breakthrough, but the results were surprising, and not at all what he expected. Hostiou had only been picked because of his youth “You are the star of tomorrow”. It seemed a right little racket leading Hostiou to the realisation this was just a small drop in an ocean of lies and deception.

The Other Profile is certainly not like any other feature documentary: filmmaking, or better, faithfulness in producing films, is the overriding theme. In this day and age of fake news and profiles, people are never what they seem to be. In the end Hostiou gives up his identity to co-direct the documentary with his other half. DoPs Armel Hostiou and Elie Mbansing stay close to the characters in this adventure about identity and belonging. AS

PREMIERING AT CPH:DOX 2023

Lynx Man (2023) CPH:DOX special mention Nordic:Dox award 2023

Dir: Juha Suonpaa | Doc, Finland 80′

Until fairly recently the wild lynx was in danger of extinction. This astonishing cinematic documentary follows Hannu (Hannibal) Rantala whose interest in the elusive animal came about as an accident, quite literally. A time of convalescence forced him to stay indoors and now on his farm in the West of Finland he discovers the healing properties of nature in an environment home to all kinds of wildlife – including the Eurasian lynx.

Finding a dead lynx by the side of the road, Hannu bonded with the graceful creature and came to the realisation that the lynx, who lived in the area during his childhood, had made a comeback.

Hanno cuts an eccentric figure, to say the least with his long beard and shoulder-length hair. In some ways he’s just an ordinary Finn: taking saunas, playing his accordion and looking at FaceBook. But when we see him walking around naked and crouching in the snow with just a hat on, we start to wonder if he is half-man half-beast. Roaming around with a lynx mask Hannu is actually lying in wait to capture the enigmatic lynx in an undercover operation to record footage on a specially concealed camera covered in feathers. Soon twenty three such devices are in place for the project: “it’s not about resembling the bird, but about movement and such” says Hannu, who also makes use of a mirror to assist the process – with some startling results. Pheasants and a moose are spooked out by their reflections as their peer unwittingly into to mirror. Eventually Hannu identifies two females, calling them ‘Spot’ and ‘Grumpy Girl’ and a male ‘Joseph’.

Grumpy Girl eventually turns up, supple and lithe, the large feline has pointy ears, long powerful legs and hindquarters, a short tail dipped in black, spotted caramel-coloured fur with a white underbelly and eyes as big as headlights. Two cubs follow her, purring like cats. There are five cubs in total, protected from predators (foxes and wolves) by the father Joseph’s scent which he sprays liberally round their territory. But a skin disease, robbing the lynx of their fur, can also be life-threatening, sadly Joseph catches it, leaving him bare against the cold. Man is a predator too as we will discover in the final act of this enlightening eco-documentary that premiers at this year’s CPH:DOX, following on from Suonpaa’s 2013 outing Wolf Man.

Mixing black and white footage with colour Juha Suonpaa captures the enchanting early Spring landscapes of this remote part of the world, showing foxes, deer, moose and wild geese, among others, and finally the lynx whose enormous eyes are specially adapted to hunt at night.

In 2021 Hannibal and his friends launched a complaint with the Supreme Administrative Court of Finland. The precedent states that lynx population management in Finland does not meet the directive requirements and is therefore illegal.

SPECIAL MENTION – NORDIC:DOX AWARD AT CPH:DOX | COPENHAGEN 2023

The Intruder (1962)

Dir: Roger Corman

A labour of love for Roger Corman (who turns 97 next month) who ruefully admitted that it was one of only two films he’d made that had ever lost money; but after years of coining it in he could afford just for once to make a film that he really cared about.

Even today liberal use of a certain word can still shock; while bringing it in took plenty of courage, since the crew constantly had to move on when the locals turned ugly when they discovered the man they were cheering wasn’t the hero but the villain (if you look closely you’ll see the conclusion takes place on three different locations).

Modern viewers will be surprised to see William Shatner as the satanic snake oil salesman Adam Cramer, to which his declamatory style is well suited. Leo Gordon is cast spectacularly against type in a sympathetic role, while to further keep costs down writer Charles Beaumont (author of the original novel) makes his sole film appearance as an actor.@RichardChatten

Human Rights Watch Film Festival 2023

The Human Rights Watch Film Festival Presents 10 Award-Winning Films
in the London Edition, 16-26 March 2023

The Human Rights Watch Film Festival, now in its 27th year in London, presents a line-up of 10 award-winning, international documentary films in partnership with Barbican Cinema, and generously supported by players of People’s Postcode Lottery.

The festival programme, presented in person at the Barbican from 16-24 March, includes in-depth Q&As and panel discussions with filmmakers, film participants, activists and Human Rights Watch researchers following all screenings. The films will also be available to catch up digitally across the UK and Ireland on the festival website from 20-26 March. This year’s edition opens with the London premiere of Delikado:

DELIKADO directed by Karl Malakunus

Documentary focussing on three environmental defenders who are risking their lives to stop corporations and governments seeking to steal the increasingly valuable natural resources of their home, Palawan, an island in the Philippines. With its rich biodiversity and natural beauty, Palawan is one of Asia’s most visited tourist destinations, but for a small network of environmental crusaders, it is more akin to a battlefield. The battles fought by these climate activists are shared by allies worldwide – but the abusive regime of former President Rodrigo Duterte adds urgency to this deepening human rights crisis. The filmmaker and journalist Karl Malakunas, who has been based in Asia for two decades, will attend the festival.

THEATRE OF VIOLENCE (UK Premiere)

Lukasz Konopa and Emily Langballe will attend the festival to present their closing film Theatre of Violence that raises complex questions about new forms of colonialism and definitions of justice in the landmark International Criminal Court trial of Daniel Ongwen. The former Ugandan child soldier, Ongwen was abducted as a child – as were an estimated more than 20,000 other children – by Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army. Intimidated and indoctrinated, he quickly learned to kill or be killed. In the unfolding debate his defence lawyer, Krispus Ayena, grapples with questions of accountability when someone is both victim and perpetrator, and the underlying issue of what justice looks like when being conducted in an international court, far away from key cultural and historical context.

NO U-TURN (London Premiere)

In his debut documentary the celebrated filmmaker Ike Nnaebue takes viewers on a journey with fellow Nigerian citizens leaving their country, travelling north through Africa and beyond, in search of work and the opportunity to build a future in Europe, despite the known and unknown challenges lying ahead. As he retraces his own stalled journey, made over 20 years ago, this self-reflective travelogue is overlaid with a powerful poetic commentary and insight into the impact of a colonial past, to unpack the deep longing of an entire generation in search of opportunities.

CATEGORY: WOMAN (European Premiere)

Written and directed by a former Olympian, Phyllis Ellis, Woman focuses on four female athletes from the Global South who are targeted and forced out of competition by regulations imposed by World Athletes, stirring relentless debates on their “legitimacy” as athletes and as women. Using women’s naturally varying androgen levels to evaluate their performance advantages, the sporting institution creates new rules, declaring that certain female athletes must medically alter their healthy bodies to compete in their sport. The film exposes an industry that puts women’s lives at risk, and raises issues of racism, sexism, and the right to determine another persons’ biological sex.

I DIDN’T SEE YOU THERE (London Premiere),

As a person with a disability navigating the world from a wheelchair, the filmmaker Reid Davenport is often either the subject of unwanted gaze — gawked at by strangers — or paradoxically left invisible, ignored, or dismissed by society. In I Didn’t See You There (London Premiere), Davenport sets out to make a film about how he sees the world without having to be seen himself, capturing indelible images informed by his disability. This is a personal, political, and unflinching account – offering a perspective and stylistic approach rarely seen in film. I Didn’t See You There will have two relaxed screenings at the festival, which are open to all audience members.

KOROMOUSSO, BIG SISTER (European Premiere)

With candour, humour and courage, a group of African-Canadian women challenge cultural taboos, and build a road to individual and collective healing in Koromousso, Big Sister (European Premiere). Working with co-director Jim Donovan, Habibata Ouarme combines her own experience of female genital mutilation (FGM) with personal accounts from some of her friends, to begin a journey of personal discovery, with discussions on the importance of female pleasure and the complexity of the female anatomy, while working to shed long-held feelings of shame and loneliness. While finding strength and joy in their own frank and intimate conversations together, Habibata and her friends continue to advocate for wider access to restorative surgery and facilitate community conversations in Canada and worldwide.

SEVEN WINTERS IN TEHRAN (UK Premiere)

Seven Winters in Tehran (UK Premiere), directed by Steffi Niederzoll, explores the case of Reyhaneh Jabbari, a young Iranian woman who became a symbol of resistance and women’s rights worldwide. In 2007, Reyhaneh, 19, is sentenced to death in Iran for the murder of a man who tried to rape her. Using secretly recorded videos provided by her family, their testimony, and the beautiful, lyrical letters she wrote from prison, voiced by Holy Spider actress Zar Amir Ebrahimi, Seven Winters in Tehran opens a window into the many ways women are oppressed and silenced in Iran, and the immense risks taken by those who defend and support them.

IF THE STREETS WERE ON FIRE (London Premiere)

If The Streets Were On Fire (London Premiere) introduces BikeStormz, a movement of young cyclists that attempts to offer a safe and welcoming space for youth in London. Starting as a protest against violent crime with the slogan “knives down, bikes up,” BikeStormz, founded by a social activist, Mac Ferrari-Guy, has grown into a movement and safe space for young people around London to freely express themselves. The filmmaker Alice Russell beautifully captures groups of young people as they glide through the city, doing wheelies, tricks, and acrobatics and cheering each other on as they travel through the postcode-neutral space of central London. Yet as they come together and find liberation through cycling, they are threatened with arrest and accused of anti-social behaviour.

SILENT LOVE (UK Premiere)

Marek Kozakiewicz’s Silent Love (UK Premiere) is a coming-of-age and a coming-out story about embracing new roles and redefining old ones. Aga, 35, is legally adopting her teenage brother, Milosz, after their mother’s death – a process that probes into her life choices. However, there’s something she can’t share in their conservative Polish village: her long-term relationship with her girlfriend, Maja. Aga has always hidden her relationship from friends and family, and must continue to hide it from the social workers for fear of losing her case for Milosz. Silent Love delicately captures this trio’s discreet struggle as they begin to live as a family, against the prejudices of an ultra-conservative and viscerally homophobic society.

WHEN SPRING CAME TO BUCHA (UK Premiere)

The impact of war on the day-to-day lives of citizens of a small town in Ukraine is profiled in When Spring Came to Bucha (UK Premiere), which poignantly captures how a small community continues with life amid trauma and loss, while war rages on close by. After a month of intense fighting, the Russian army withdrew, leaving the town destroyed in its wake. Yet in the midst of suffering, a young couple gets married, and life must go on. This heart-rending yet empowering documentary tells stories of loss, hope, and resistance, as the spring flowers of Bucha begin to bloom.

Details about the screenings and discussions can be found HERE

Cyborg: a documentary (2023)

Dir.: Carey Born; Documentary with Neil Harbisson, Moon Ribas, Adam Montandon, Ophelia Dero, Manuel Munoz; UK/US/Spain/Germany 2023, 87 min.

Colour-blind artist Neil Harbisson is the subject of a new documentary premiering at this year’s CPH:DOX, that raises the lid on the relatively new phenomenon of cyborgs: people whose physical capabilities are extended beyond the norm by mechanical elements built into the body. And Harbisson – whose life has changed since he merged into a cyborg existence – now claims to be at the cutting edge of making mankind ready for space travel.

Harbisson, now in his late thirties, was born with achromatism, a rare form of colour blindness. So his parents sent him to Dartington Arts School in Devon where he studied piano and met his partner and collaborator Moon Ribas. They promised to ‘exchange their eyes’ and went on to save trees in Malmo. She witnessed Neil starting to use ear phones designed by product designer Adam Montandon, which helped him to “read” colours.

This first feature documentary for Carey Born then shows how Neil is now able to experience all his senses thanks to an antenna drilled into his brain, although the legality of this process is still shrouded in darkness. At the CEN SES (Centre for the study of Senses) in London. Professor Ophelia Deroy explains the process of antenna implementation that enables Neil to build up a ‘memory’ bank. There are colour identifications, with blue being the most tranquil one, and violet the most violent. According to Neil “These perceptions became my feelings”. The visual and auditory cortex interact and Neil sees a sinfonia of colours.

Neil and Moon make an unorthodox couple. They are now doing up a basement in Barcelona where Moon sleeps on the grand piano. The reason for this is a threat by an unnamed person, who wants to kill the self-proclaimed “First Cyberborg”. But this has not stopped the duo from talkings this further. They have developed a “Solar Crown”, a device enabling them to guide the sense of time, controlling and stretching the perception of time and age, leading to time travel. Their promised ‘eye exchange’ has yet to happen but the two have meanwhile developed a communication system called “Bluetooth”: each of them have a “Bluetooth” in their mouth, communicating via morse code.

Harbisson is well known for his global exhibitions raising the profile of his colour- scored paintings, transpositions of sound, music, voices and colours. But sometimes there are limitations: during a televised discussion he was proud to share how new device could help him to read the time. Whereas his opponent just pointed to his wristwatch.

Clips from ancient SF films bring some comic relief, and DoP Matthew Akers stays close to the – very happy – couple, who strong emotional bond very much supports their work. Born evokes the spirit of Harbisson’s motto “Design yourself” but she still leaves enough space for the audience to question Harbisson’s mission on earth in a film that oscillates between wonderment and ridicule: what if he is right after all? AS

NOW IN UK CINEMAS | PREMIERED AT CPH:DOX 2023

The Pilgrim (2022)

Dir.: Joshua Benson; Cast: Jeff Worden, Rachel Colwell, Julie Oliver-Touchstone, Rebeka Stein, Lou Llobell, Emerald Clarke; USA 2012, 96 min.

First time filmmaker Joshua Benson has adapted George Killock’s short story about a visit to the West of America which turns into a homecoming – of sorts. Will (Worden) has it made. Now a successful architect in London he loves his work and the glittering city buildings, but puts his subordinates down, and neglects his girlfriend Claire (Llobell).

Then comes a phone call from the American West – South Dakota border with Wyoming, to be precise – his sister Jeannie( Billy for short) informing him about the death of his estranged mother. Will jets immediately over the pond, only to be told by Billy that the funeral has already taken place. She has a task for him: to sprinkle their mother’s ashes on the mountains near the family home where their sister Kay (Oliver-Touchstone) still lives.

This is not a close family – for an unnamed reasons – so Will is reluctant to fill the requested task but does so in order to put the past behind him. What follows involves a series of minor disasters with people he meets on the way: A blonde All-American-Beauty and a hitch-hiker Alva (Colwell) who is building oil rigs with her brother, Will’s mood deteriorating rapidly until he finally leaves his car behind and continues his odyssey, travelling light with a back bag.

As an idea, the feature works beautifully, all Wenders and “Weltschmerz”. But in reality there are too many questions left unanswered: Will’s family has fallen out in a big way, but we never find out why. The Wild West which Will re-visits is just a fata-morgana, as is the London world of sky-scrapers, introduced with a heavy Beethoven score. Everything Will falls for is a product of his longing for the past. The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. What gradually emerges is Will’s inability to be a team player: he has to have the leading role – no matter which country. His so-called feelings are just projections of something he will never really possess: he is a runner by nature. Worden leads an impressive cast and DoP’s Alex Grigora’s panoramic images of the West are equally beguiling. But Benson’s script is like a first draft, ideas held together by excellent production values. AS

THE PILGRIM is available to rent or own on North American digital HD internet and satellite platforms on March 14, 2023 through Freestyle Digital Media

www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPwrXj8BBvI

The Blaze | En Plein Fer (2023)

Dir: Quentin Reynaud | Cast: Andre Dussollier, Alex Lutz | France Thriller, 85′

There have been a number of good films about the ecological disaster of wildfires in the past few years, perhaps the most memorable being Fire Will Come. Sadly, Quentin Reynaud’s feature debut feels rather underwhelming considering the dramatic potential of its subject and exciting plot elements: a forest fire that rages out of control through the Landes region in South Western France killing animals and terrifying the human population. And a father and son hoping for reconciliation.

On the plus side Quentin Reynaud uses the topical tragedy to reflect the troubled backstory of a grieving man (Alex Lutz) who is keen to reconnect with his father (the reliable Andre Dussollier). But unlike the fierce forest fire that gets The Blaze off to a tense and exhilarating start, powered forward by convincing CGI effects and a nerve-needling score, the film soon fizzles out in the glowing embers of enigma without a satisfying conclusion leaving us high and dry on the sandy beaches of the Atlantic coast. Reynaud had a great cast and some really strong plot elements to work with, he just needed to develop his script more. MT.

NOW ON RELEASE IN FRANCE + BELGIUM

The Monster Club (1981)

Dir: Roy Ward Baker | Cast: Vincent Price, John Carradine, Anthony Steele | Uk Horror

Milton Subotsky’s swan-song as a producer of horror films was also the last of a series of collections of episodes that began fifteen years earlier with ‘Dr Terror’s House of Horrors’.

Being the eighties the music’s pretty dire (the shot of B. A. Robertson performing being as ghoulish as anything else in the film). It’s not really very good but has a certain charm (how could it fail to with Vincent Price presiding?). Subotsky himself is parodied as the famous film producer ‘Lintom Busotsky’ who introduces probably the best episode in which Britt Ekland plays his mother, Richard Johnson a vampire as a good father, menaced by Donald Pleasence and three henchman in bowler hats and carrying violin cases. @RichardChatten

Dream’s Gate (2023) Berlinale 2023

Dir.: Negin Ahmadi; Documentary with Negin Ahmadi, Nasrin Abdulahh; Iran/France/Norway 2023, 65 min.

The “Women’s Protection Union (YPJ)” is an all-female section of the “Armed Forces of Rojava” that forms part of the Syrian Democratic Forces. Since 2011 the unit has been involved in Kurdish/Syrian resistance, fighting the “Islamic State of Iran”, “ISIS” and the forces of the Turkish army, who have occupied parts of the autonomous Kurdish region.

In her first feature documentary Iranian filmmaker Negin Ahmadi has spent the last six years in the company of these women to see what makes them tick and, in the process, she found her own voice. On returning from the conflicted region to Tehran she admits to “missing the war”. Being part of the group of courageous female fighters gave her a sense of purpose, and a real identity in the bigger picture, having felt lost in her own large male-dominated family.

Dream’s Gate shows how Syria is still very much a man’s world. Negin realises she reacted against this growing up in family where men made all the decisions. The women fighters showed Negin another reality: women were capable of being naughty and rebellious one minute, then suddenly transformed into “martyrs” prepared to give up their lives for a worthy cause.

Sometimes the motives are personal: one of the female fighters actually killed her father for supporting “Isis”. But even though Negin identifies more and more with the female warriors, she never loses her perspective. Seeing the constant stream of violence and death on her mobile during the fighting in Deir-Ez-Zor, she states: “The ones I saw today won’t live long”. Negin also films interviews. One of the fighters admits to finding an ISIS spy amid their ranks. Finally Negin gets access to Nasrin Abdulahh, a founder member of the (YPJ), who explains why the organisation is under pressure. Once women marry they have to leave the service, “for biological and emotional reasons”. But Negin is more than sceptical. For Nasrin everything is political, but for Negin women’s right are paramount. After her return to Tehran we see her hanging the washing out on the roof terrace, wondering “ What is happening to me? Nothing seems to be the same as it was before, even shopping is suddenly an alien pastime”.

Dream’s Gate feels all the more powerful for its compact running time of just over an hour. There is no need to aim for ‘objectivity’ or expand on the narrative. The pictures tell a thousand words. AS

PREMIERED DURING BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL 2023

The Fox | Der Fuchs (2023)

Dir: Adrian Goiginger | Cast: Simon Morzé, Karl Markovics, Hana Geißendörfer, Marko Kerezovic, Joseph Stoisits, Pit Bukowski, Stanislaus Steinbichler, Adriane Gradzie | Austia, Drama 117′

A boy brings meaning to his life after a tragic childhood rejection in this enchanting Austrian wartime Heimatfilm that harks back to the cinema of Leni Riefenstahl, with its academy ratio and suberb visual allure.

The Fox is a sophomore feature for the Austrian director Adrian Goiginger who was inspired by the true story of his great-grandfather Franz Steitberger, who grew up in a farm on the Pinzgau mountains in Austria.

In the early 1930s rural life was still unmechanised and little Franz is forced to work hard in the farm until he is forcibly removed from his father, Karl Markovics in a cameo role, and taken away. The story then jumps forwards several years to 1937 when Franz (Morze) is conscripted into the army during the Second World War, when Austria became part of Nazi Germany during the Anschluss.

The harsh reality of war leaves the introverted young soldier traumatised but wandering in the woods one day he finds solace in the discovery of a baby fox separated from his family after the death of its mother. The two become inseparable, the fox travelling with Franz in his sidecar as a dispatch driver from Poland to France and towards the Eastern Front.

Despite its rather unsatisfactory plot resolution, this is a slim but beautifully told and deeply affecting wartime drama that once again emphasises how animals can often replace the human element offering comfort and emotional security in times of crisis. MT

Adrian Goiginger and lead actor Simon Morze will attend the screening and take part in a Q&A as part of watchAUT Austrian Film Festival that opens in London on 23 March 2023

Le Syndicaliste | Sitting Duck (2022)

Dir: Jean-Paul Salome | Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Gregory Gadebois, Yvan Attal, Marina Fois, Pierre Delardonchamps | France, Drama 121′

French director Jean-Paul Salome has made a complete pig’s ear of this true story about a dedicated union campaigner for a French nuclear industrial. Based on the book by investigative journalist Caroline Michel-Aguirre: ‘The Union Official’, The Syndicaliste – starring Isabelle Huppert – feels like two structurally flawed films rolled into one. The end result undermines both, and feels like a pyrrhic victory for a victim of crime dedicated to lifting the lid on malfeasance in the French nuclear sector during the time of Francois Hollande (2012-17).

The film opens in 2012 as Irish-born union official Maureen Kearney (Huppert) is found gagged and tied up in the basement of her Paris home. Flashback to several months earlier, and Salome establishes how this plucky woman is not afraid of making enemies or speaking her mind on behalf of her union members or standing up to her new boss Luc Oursel (Attal) who she suspects, quite rightly, of dodgy dealings in the nuclear business, having just replaced the more honourable Anne Lauvergeon (Marina Fois) in a political coup.

Kearney then finds out from a mole in the EDF nuclear agency that the Chinese are getting into bed with the French in a deal that will undermine workers and their employment rights. So we have a strong and appealing storyline that should make a successful film. But Salome and his co-writer manage to complicate things with a fractured narrative that flashes backwards and forwards making Kearney look increasingly ridiculous in fighting her corner, despite Huppert’s convincing performance as the sassy, well-presented woman executive, married to a faithful and supportive husband (Gregory Gadebois).

After an hour of dealing with the political whistleblowing side of the story, Salome then turns his focus on the detective procedural that hones in, with almost forensic detail, on Kearney’s purported attack. The film’s second half involves Kearney’s struggle to prove her innocence with endless gynaecological procedures and an intrusive ongoing interrogation by an unsympathetic police detective (Delardonchamps) who calls into question her side of events, unable to believe that her professional composure is consistent with that of a woman who has been raped. Eventually there is a legal inquiry and court case with Huppert having to defend herself, in similar vein to her role in Paul Verhoeven’s Elle. By the end we are incredulous at seeing her being exonerated – and not in a good way. MT

NOW ON RELEASE IN FRANCE

The Damned (1961)

Dir: Joseph Losey | Cast: Macdonald Carey, Shirley Anne Field, Oliver Reed, James Villiers | Thriller, 82′

The film that concluded the journeyman phase of Joseph Losey’s career. Based on H. L. Lawrence’s novel ‘The Children of Light’, and called ‘The Damned’ because ‘Village of the Damned’ had recently scored a big hit. I would have loved to have been present when this film was first screened for the top brass at Hammer Films, who must have seen the film out in stunned silence.

Unable to know what to do with it, they pushed it out as a second feature, when it rescued by an admiring review from Philip French just months before Losey made his critical breakthrough with ‘The Servant’. Writer Evan Jones said they could have made half a dozen different films from what they’d shot and that one cast member so exceeded expectations they built his part up; he didn’t name names but I suspect he meant Kenneth Colpe.

Despite Losey’s admission that he’d never read the novel, it’s actually a very faithful adaptation of the original. The opening chapters depicting the hero fleeing the accidental killing of his wife have been discarded, the children in the book are hot to the touch rather than cold, the villain in both is called Bernard and and one point he instructs his minions to send a helicopter (so much for Losey’s claim that that was an original idea!) While Oliver Reed and his marauding gang obviously inspired the Droogs in ‘A Clockwork Orange’. @RichardChatten

The Fabelmans (2022)

Dir: Steven Spielberg | Cast: Michelle Williams, Gabriel LaBelle, Paul Dano | US Biopic Drama 151′

Steven Spielberg’s own family story unfolds in this delightfully tender look back at his childhood seen through the eyes of his fictional alter ego Sammy (played as an adolescent by Gabriel LaBelle).

The Fabelmans is also tribute to the wonder of cinema and the American Dream, the nostalgia for the days of our own childhood, and a rose-tinted reverie about a fractured family that feels convincing and (justifiably) sentimental rather than bitter. This is a story than envelopes you in its warmth and heartfelt conviction – you get a palpable sense of this pragmatic young storyteller who would eventually, through conviction and perseverance, become one of the world’s greatest living filmmakers.

There’s also a whimsical quality that makes The Fabelmans such a joy to watch through Janusz Kaminski’s softly-lensed visuals. And that’s largely because Spielberg has such emotional intelligence and pours it all into a brilliant script with his co-writer Tony Kushner. Casting-wise the film is also a triumph: Paul Dano and Gabriel LaBelle are undeniably watchable as a father and son who are worlds apart – Burt a scientist, Sammy an artist – but eventually come to understand one another, without violence or rancour. Michelle Williams is sublime as Mitzi, the blond, pixie-haired Jewish princess of a mother of four, who could have been a concert pianist but settled down as a traditional postwar matriach and feels frustrated and unfulfilled, but is still worshiped by her decent, loving husband (who won’t admit there is anything wrong) and accommodated by her giving son (who discretely unveils his mother’s treachery on the medium of cine-film). And this generosity of spirit and tolerance makes for a satisfying family story with a happy-ish ending.

The tale begins in one of those snowy Hollywood-style Christmases in 1952 where the Fabelmans are celebrating Chanukah in their expansive home in New Jersey – with candles rather than fairy lights and Santas. Burt, an outstanding computer engineer, and Mitzi, a homemaker, take Sammy to his first movie: Cecil B DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth, which is shocking and transformative for the wide-eyed little Sammy (played by Mateo Zoryon). Burt’s brilliant career then takes them all to Arizona where there is plenty of scope for family fire-side barbecues and singing with Mitzi, the dynamo at the centre of it all, and where her subversive relationship with demon seed ‘Uncle’ Bennie (Rogen) strikes a subtle note of caution, although Burt’s mother Hadassah (Jeannie Berlin) has been hinting at this all along. And this episode is fleshed out when the family finally move to California.

For Sammy filming is his saving grace and a way of escape from all these traumas. It also, amusingly, comes it handy as a ‘babe magnet’ when Sammy falls foul of antisemitism in his California high school where he comes up trumps despite a variety of hateful stock characters. There is also an entertaining visit from Mitzi’s wayward Uncle Boris (Judd Hirsch) who offers Sammy valuable career advice:, “Art will tear your heart out.” MT

NOW ON RELEASE IN THE UK and France.

Damn the Defiant (1962)

Dir: Lewis Gilbert | cast: Dirk Bogarde, Alex Guinness, Anthony Quayle, Murray Melvin , Victor Madden | UK Drama

Following hard on the heels of his brave performance in ‘Victim’ Dirk Bogarde’s determination to trash his pretty boy image continued apace taking second billing to Alec Guinness in what the late David Shipman described as “another subtle study in nastiness” as a head card-carrying swine who personally takes part in press gangs, carries a rope and smirks with quiet satisfaction when watching floggings.

Scripted by Nigel Kneale and Edmund North, filmed in CinemaScope and Eastmancolor in Spain by Christopher Challis and commencing at Spithead in 1797 in the days when two dozen lashes denoted a soft captain and edited by Peter Hunt (soon to make his name on the James Bond franchise) with a cast that spans the generations from Walter Fitzgerald to James Bolam. @RichardChatten

Creed III (2023)

Dir.: Michael B. Jordan; Cast: Michael B. Jordan, Tessa Thompson, Jonathan Majors, Phylicia Rashad, Mila Davis-Kent; USA 2023, 116 min.

With Creed III nearly 50 years of Hollywood’s boxing history has been relegated to the back burner. What started in 1976 with Sylvester Stalone’s rollocking Rocky Bilbao is now in the hands of titular star and debut director Michael B. Jordan and veteran producer Irwin Winkler (Goodfellas, The Irishman). And it shows.

Avenging his father to become World Heavy Weight champion, Adonis Creed (Jordan) has settled down as a family man and boxing promoter residing in a super posh penthouse above the Hollywood Hills. His wife, the singer Bianca (Thompson), has given birth to baby daughter Amara (Davis Kent), super cute, but prone to violence in the Kindergarten. The past then rears its ugly head in the shape of Damian (Majors) who rocks up after 18 years behind bars to face his old school mate Adonis in the ring. The face off between the two egos is going to be interesting.

Creed III is pure melodrama with family relationships taking centre stage rather than the fighting, which is now reduced to an art form unfolding in a series of dazzling set pieces, rather than brutal set-tos. Creed III has been neutered, with Damian as the pantomime villain rather than a menacing hero. There is too much talk, and not really enough trousers, not to mention some really bad parenting, with Bianca letting Amara watch Dad fight in the ring.

The production values are on top form with DoP Kramar Morgenthau conjuring up some impressive fight scenes, panorama shots and stunning luxury apartments: but what ever happened to the raw Rocky of the ring?. Creed III is too slick for its own good, a triumph of consumer dreams. AS

NOW ON RELEASE IN UK CINEMAS FROM 3 March 2023

Mary Cassatt: Painting the Modern Woman (2023)

Dir: Ali Ray, Writer: Phil Grabsky | Biopic, 74′

Mary Cassatt is often described as the most misunderstood of all the Impressionist artists but her work, and particularly her print-making was groundbreaking in showing 19th women actively engaged in their lives rather than merely as passive or decorative figures. Her radical images showed them to be intellectual, feminine and real, which was a major shift in the way women generally appeared in art during the 19th century. Part of the Exhibition of Screen series this new documentary biopic is directed by Ali Ray (Frida Kahlo) and written by Phil Grabsky (Hopper).

In 1844, Cassatt was born into a privileged and well-connected family in Allegheny near Pittsburgh which was then one of the largest cities in America. Beginning her career in the early 1860s, she, like other women artists, were not allowed to work from nude models so she honed her figurative painting by copying from plaster-castes. After the American civil war ended, she went to Paris where she found a stimulating art scene and studied under Jean-Leon Jerome, visiting the Louvre each day to gain inspiration and socialise with other artists of the day.

In 1867 she headed to Northern France to join an art colony in the town of Ecouen. Here she painted The Mandolin Player 1868, her first work to be accepted in a Paris salon, later returning back home, during the Franco Prussian War. But success eluded her on the home front, and she came to the realisation that her future lay in Europe where she was later welcomed into an artistic community in Parma, and then to Spain in 1872 where she settled in Seville and came under the influence of Hispanic painters and local styles.

Back in Paris, the rebuilding after the war provided a boost of creative energy and Cassatt met Edgar Degas who had seen her work at the Academy des Beaux Arts and invited her to exhibit with the more radical Impressionists, after some false starts with the Salon des Refusés.

By 1878 she was collaborating with Degas. And the arrival of her parents and her sister Lydia provided her with support for socialising freely and making new connections. It was during this time she began working as a printmaker – a process involving etchings transferred onto a coated copper plate. With this distinctive style, she made a name for herself in works like The Lamp, so by age of 42 she was ready to show independently.

Cassatt’s career eventually encompassed not only painting and print-making but using the sale of her work to support the Women’s Suffrage Campaign. And by her sixties she had also become invaluable as an art advisor encouraging her fellow Americans on how to purchase French Impressionist paintings and build collections. Her successful career came to a close in 1914.

The world’s most eminent Cassatt curators enlighten this story of social and cultural change; a time when women were fighting for their rights, with the language of art being completely re-written. Mary Cassatt and her modern women were at the heart of it all. Sadly there is no mention here the outstanding female Impressionist, her French colleague Berthe Morisot.

In UK cinemas to coincide with International Women’s Day on March 8th 2023.

Kinoteka 2023

Kinoteka Polish Film Festival 2023 is back for its 21st edition running from 9 March – 27 April across venues in London

Celebrating his upcoming Oscar nomination and a career spanning 60 years, Jerzy Skolimowski will be in attendance for a season dedicated to his filmography at BFI Southbank. Skolimowski’s latest sensation EO (2022) has been nominated for Best International Feature at the 2023 Academy Awards, and this season encompasses the career of a ‘Polish Great‘ who is still at the top of his game behind the camera.

OPENING GALA

Kinoteka 2023 begins on 9 March at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts: ICA with an Opening Gala screening of the brilliant debut from Damian Kocur, Bread and Salt (Chleb i sól, 2022, UK Premiere). Packing a deep emotional punch, the film takes us on the journey of two brothers (played by real-life siblings Tymoteusz Bies and Jacek Bies), in a small Polish town during one hot summer. Bread and Salt has won multiple festival awards including the Horizons Special Jury Prize at Venice Film Festival and The Golden Tulip at Turkey’s Antalya Film Festival, as well as the journalists and youth juries award at the Gdynia Film Festival. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with director Damian Kocur.

CLOSING GALA

The Closing Gala will take place on 27 April, and is a screening of Feliks Falk’s classic Top Dog (Wodzirej, 1977) at Cine Lumiere alongside an immersive dinner themed to the film. Causing much debate in Poland on its original release, Top Dog follows the story of small-town entertainer Danielak, who will stop at nothing to achieve his aim of hosting the town’s 500th anniversary celebrations.

NEW POLISH CINEMA

Comprising some of the finest and most thought-provoking cinema of the past year, the New Polish Cinema strand highlights the voices of both established filmmakers and debut directors, presenting a powerful snapshot of the country’s contemporary film scene. Making their way to the UK for the first time, many of the titles have already received recognition and awards at international film festivals. This year’s titles reflect on the value of relationships, both personal and those found in in the wider community, starting with director and co-writer Anna Maliszewska’s Dad (Tata, 2022, UK Premiere), a free-spirited road movie which follows a father, Michal (Eryk Lubos) who heads out on the road with his daughter after the sudden death of the Ukrainian neighbour who looked after the girl during his frequent long works trips. Fucking Bornholm (2022, UK Premiere) is a biting drama which exposes the frayed edges of family dynamics through a neglected wife and mother as she experiences the psychological torment of a family vacation on an idyllic island. Starring Maciej Stuhr (Aftermath, 2012) and Agnieszka Grochowska (Strange Heaven, 2015), Fucking Bornholm was nominated for Best Film at Trieste, Krakow and Karlovy Vary International Film Festivals, and won the Europa Cinema Label Award for Best European Film at Karlovy Vary 2022.

Centered on a powerhouse performance from Agata Buzek (High Life, 2018) and set amid the eerie beaches and city-scapes of Poland’s Baltic coast, Illusion (Iluzja, 2022) charts the agonising tension placed on a couple as they attempt to track down their missing daughter, with the pressure mounting as the ineffectual police prepare to close the file on the case in searing psychological drama. The screening of Illusion will be followed by a Q&A with Marta Minorowicz.

Shreds (Strzępy, 2022) sees established documentary filmmaker Beata Dzianowska turn her keen observational eye to the story of a family patriarch struggling with the onset of Alzheimer’s and the family faced with the impossible decisions which result. Woman on the Roof (Kobieta na dachu, 2022, UK Premiere) from writer-director Anna Jadowska, also focuses its attention on an elderly protagonist, as Dorota Pomykała’s portrayal of a desperate and detached woman who attempts to rob a bank. A critique on a society which sidelines older women, Woman on the Roof offers an absorbing character study and is based on a true story. Pomykała won a Best Performance award at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival for her role.

DOCUMENTARY

This year’s Documentary stand comprises two very different films that seek to find humanity, both within individual, everyday struggles and in times of extreme hardship. An international festival favourite which premiered at CPH:DOX, Pawnshop (Lombard, dir. Lukasz Kowalski, 2021, UK Premiere) is a bleak but hilarious documentary about an eccentric couple who run Poland’s largest pawnshop, a business which is struggling. Life, theatre and cinema combine in the portrait documentary The Hamlet Syndrome (Syndrom Hamleta, dir. Elwira Niewiera and Piotr Rosolowski, 2022), which highlights the work of Award-winning theatre director Roza Sarkisianm. Sarkisianm brought together five young Ukrainian actors affected by war in Donbas, to develop a performance based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

OUTSIDERS AND EXILES: THE FILMS OF JERZY SKOLIMOWSKI

In collaboration with the BFI, Kinoteka will also present Outsiders and Exiles: The Films of Jerzy Skolimowski, a month-long retrospective at BFI Southbank and a rare opportunity to see the work of one of the world’s most remarkable filmmakers. Skolimowski’s latest sensation EO (2022), has garnered critical acclaim across the world since its premiere at Cannes, culminating with the film’s recent Academy Award nomination. The season will include early Polish features like Identification Marks: None (1964) and Hands Up! (1967/1981), both of which will also be released on BFI Blu-ray on 24 April, British-made classics such as Deep End (1970) and The Shout (1978), and later career highlights including Essential Killing (2011) and 11 Minutes (2015). A number of the films in the season will also be available to watch online on BFI Player.

FAMILY SCREENING

The work of Agnieszka Holland is also present at this year’s Family Screening of The Secret Garden (Tajemniczy ogród, 1993), the director’s adaptation of the classic children’s novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett. When Mary Lennox is sent from India to live in England with relatives, she discovers an overgrown mysterious garden with her cousin Colin and friend Dickon. Gradually the children begin to uncover the secrets of nature concealed behind the garden walls and the family stories entwined within. Holland’s sumptuous re-telling boasts music by composer Zbigniew Preisner and a memorable performance from Maggie Smith as their severe housekeeper, Mrs Medlock.

CINEMA CLASSICS

As part of its Cinema Classics strand, Kinoteka is proud to screen Polish auteur Andrzej Wajda’s early masterpiece Ashes and Diamonds (Popiół i diament, 1958). On the final day of WWII, a young Polish Resistance fighter is ordered to assassinate a Communist official. With his target being a former comrade-in-arms, this triggers a moral dilemma, calling into question all that was fought for. Defined by an electrifying, iconic performance by Zbigniew Cybulski, this depiction of Poland, poised between the horrors of the recent past and an uncertain future, is arguably Wajda’s greatest achievement, and a landmark of international cinema. Moving to France, Jean Luc-Godard’s Passion (1982) is the second of the festival’s classic cinema screenings. Starring Polish actor Jerzy Radziwiłowicz, who also starred in Night Train, and worked with Andrzej Wajda, Passion tells the story of film director, Jerzy, (played by Radziwiłowicz), who is in France to shoot a project but becomes interested in the unfolding struggle of a young factory worker, Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert). Award-winning director Agnieszka Holland’s take on the novel Drive your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk Spoor (Pokot, 2017) is a feminist ecological thriller and modern fable with a clear message against injustice which highlights the value of friendship and of those seeking to make positive change on the margins. The screening will feature a recorded intro by director Agnieszka Holland discussing her Berlin Festival Silver Bear winning work.

MUSIC IN FILM

Delving further into Poland’s cinematic past, Kinoteka presents a special Music in Film screening of Andrzej Żuławski’s controversial masterpiece The Devil (Diabeł, 1972), which was banned by the Communist government between 1972 and 1988. Set in 1793, during the Prussian army’s invasion of Poland, we follow Jakub, a young Polish nobleman, who is rescued from imprisonment by a stranger. This screening will be accompanied by a musical tribute from DJ and producer Andy Votel. Ranging from electronic through orchestral to psych rock and experimental, Votel will explore the music composed by Andrzej Korzyński for Żuławski’s most iconic films as well as other Polish musicians of the 1970s.

Kinoteka Polish Film Festival 2023 takes place 9 March – 27 April across venues in London: BFI Southbank, Barbican Centre, ICA, Prince Charles Cinema, Riverside Studios, Phoenix Cinema, Cine Lumiere, Whitechapel Gallery, Ognisko Polskie – The Polish Hearth Club

Between Revolutions (2023) Berlinale 2023

Dir.: Vlad Petri; Documentary with the voices of Ilianka Hanrnut, Victoria Stoiciu; Romania/Qatar/ Iran/Croatia 2023, 67 min.

Two women separated by political revolutions in Iran and Romania share their respective experiences of trauma through a semi-fictional series of letters in this fascinating documentary from Romanian director Vlad Petri.

Petri has plundered the Secret Police archives and pieced together images from TV and film documents to create a semi-fictional correspondence between the two women who studied Medicine together at Bucharest University during the 1970s,

Zarah came originally from Tehran to Bucharest to study medicine and formed a close friendship with fellow student Maria, who grew up in Bucharest. Around the same time, revolution is breaking out in Iran, and Zarah, in her last year of studies, joins her father in the effort to bring down the Shah’s regime, but in her first letters after the return of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, express fear rather than joy. It appears that social progress has been perverted by a the clerics who seek instead to repress women, and make the hijab obligatory.

Zarah’s father’s organisation is shut down, and he vanishes without a trace, and she is told to stop looking for him. Over in Romania, Maria is told by her father, to stop writing to Zarah, and start a family. By now, the two women’s correspondence becoming more poetic, Maria urging Zarah “We used to be one, let us be together again”. In Iran, the war with Iraq results in many deaths on both sides, Zarah complaining in her letters to Maria “ I have no voice in the matter of my 15-year old nephew going to war, because I am not a mother. If he is killed, we will be the ‘family of a martyr’”.

After Khomeini’s death in 1989, a new wave of repression breaks out, and Zarah’s flat is ransacked, her books and photo albums strewn all over the place. Maria, her graduation completed, has been transferred to a small village hospital where she feels trapped. A return to Bucharest seems impossible, and Zahar’s letters seem to dwindle. Maria has been finally granted a return to Bucharest, and she has acquiesced to her parent’s wishes and married Marius, a colleague from the hospital.

The Secret police are on her tail, in their long coats they look identical to those in Iran. Maria is active in the uprising against Ceausescu, but her husband stays at home. She continues her correspondence with Zarah, telling her all about the fall of the dictato which will have dire consequences, including widespread poverty from the devaluation of the currency: “We are supposed to be free now. But I know from you, that victories can be confiscated”. A year later, Marius has left the hospital and is selling contraband cigarettes and other goods from Turkey. Maria is desperate: “I wish we could start all over again. We are fading together”.

Vlad Petri has crafted a melancholic essay film about dashed hopes and stolen futures, that underlines the perils of fighting for change. In the end, Zarah’s fate is left open, with Maria fighting to keep their past and their friendship alive. Short, but utterly devastating in its harsh conclusions, Between Revolutions is a testament to lost lives and shattered dreams – with political and personal defeat going hand in hand. AS

BERLINALE 2023

Delegation (2023) Berlinale 2023

Dir.: Asaf Saban; Cast: Leib Lev Levin, Neomi Harari, Yoav Bavly, Alma Dishy, Ezra Sagan, Karolina Bruchnicka; Israel/Germany/Poland 2023, 102 min.

Israeli writer/director Asaf Saban takes on a complex, and perhaps even untenable, undertaking that follows a group of Israeli high school students whose final studies retrace the Holocaust in Poland.

Adolescence is never easier at the best of times, and their confrontation with the past makes it less so. Nitzan (Harari) is the central character: she is in love with Ido (Levin) but realises he is narcissistic and does not like to commit himself. On the other Frisch (Bavly) is naïve and rather secretive. His grandfather Yosef (Dagan), a holocaust survivor, accompanies the students on the trip, giving context with his own experiences.

Nitzan is not sure how to deal with so much past trauma, and she steals a shoe from one of the Camp museums in an attempt to bring past and present together. In the barracks of Auschwitz, she bonds with Ido – partly because Frisch has been left behind at a gas station, and is hitchhiking his way to Auschwitz. The truck driver, who gives him a lift, also leads him to the burnt out ruins of an old synagogue where the mayor asks Frisch to say a few words of Hebrew. After Frisch has re-joined the delegation he gets together with Nitzan and Ido and they head off to a party where Frisch ends up sleeping with the birthday girl Anna (Bruchnicka), whilst a relieved Ido is sent packing by Nitzan into the arms of Einat (Dishy) – who has waited patiently on the sidelines.

Delegation works well in portraying the shifting relationship between the teenagers, but is less convincing in Frisch’s encounter with the Polish citizens. Poland’s continued denial of their corroboration with the Nazis during Holocaust is still leading to the violence against the few thousand Jews still left in Poland. During an outing to the city the group leaders warn the Israelis not to display any religious or secular evidence of their nationality, and to stay in groups of six, never venturing off alone. Frisch’s friendly encounter in the synagogue is therefore a clear contradiction of the earlier scene.

Yosef’s role in the feature feels rather sketchy, more substance would have been helpful; but his meetings with Frisch shows the chasm between the survivor’s generation and that of their grandchildren, who use the holocaust to motivate themselves to join the combat units of the IDF.

Cinematographer Bogumie Goodfrejow is very sensitive with his images of the camps – just showing enough to re-invoke the horror. In contrast, the scenes with the teenagers are full throttle – perhaps even more when set against the traumatic background. But Saban seems to have bitten off more than he can chew – somehow the group’s discussions about “what have we seen today” are a tad over-didactic. AS

BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL | GENERATION 2023

The Rise and Fall of Comrade Zylo (2023)

Dir.: Fatmir Koci; Cast: Alex Seitaj, Donald Shebu, Enisa Hysa, Jorida Meta, Amos MujiZaharia, Xhona Karaj, Petrit Malaj, Samuel Vargu; Albania 2022, 119 min.

Fatmir Koci’s amusing drama takes place in Albania, at the height of the Cold War when Stalinist functionaries, banal but powerful, tried to stay in their jobs against a tide of permanent change. The film is based on Dritero Agollis’ 1973 satirical novel of the same name, adapted for the screen by co-writer Mike Downey.

The Soviet bureaucrats’ incompetence is highlighted by the plight of aspiring author Demka (Shehu), who has given up his own writing to churn out speeches for his superiors in the Cultural Department. The main benefactor of Demka’s output is the Zylo (Seitaj), whose ‘follies de grandeur’ are bolstered by his other half Adila (Hysa), while his oldest son Diogenio (Vargu) is a “Wunderkind” composer, in reality, just a fraud like his father. Zylo and his wife are friends with the playwright Adam Adashi (Zaharia)) and his wife Cleopatra (Meta). Another character called Zenepja (Karaj) cannot deal with his bitterness about his own literary career manque – or his neglect of her – and orders him to quit his job.

Adashi’s play “The Storm is defeated” leads to a fall-out between Zylo and other members of his department: some are keen, others condemn the work, and Zylo is left trying to guess which side his boss Comrade Q (Malaj) will come down on. Meanwhile he complains that Demka is too slow in his speech writing – largely because the poor man is bogged down with Zylo’s endless re-writes. Adila is in love with her husband’s literary output, unaware that another man is actually penning them, namely Demka, who she flirts with at a reception for an old-fashioned Albanian folklore band.

Some scenes are particularly farcical: Zylo’s obsession with the idea of bringing Socialism to West Africa. He, Demka and Cleopatra visit the dark continent, but their meetings with government officials are non-events due to it being ‘harvest time’. During their trip Demka senses there is something going on between his boss and Cleopatra, and he is not far wrong. On another occasion, Zylo takes Demka on a visit to the countryside where he wants to impress the local leaders with his cultural plans, but he ends up getting drunk and frightening his guests with a revolver. But dark clouds are gathering over Zylo, who also happens to be a sleepwalker.

DoP Marek Wesolowski showcases the protagonists in Ozu-style medium shots, and turns to black-and-white when describing Demka’s dreams of a better life. But despite Koci’s enthusiasm for the subject, there are just too many one-dimensional characters involved in a self-indulgent drama highlighted by its absurdist humour. AS

A Hard Day’s Night (1964)

Dir: Richard Lester | UK Musical Biopic

I was big a fan of The Beatles almost as soon as I could walk, so in the summer of 1964 my father treated me to a visit to see ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ at the Colosseum in Gorleston (now the local branch of Boots).

Even at the tender age of five I was struck by the clarity with which the big screen showed up the irises of the cast. When six years later I saw it on TV it already looked like a period piece, and after nearly sixty years Lennon & Harrison are long gone, Ringo and Paul are in their eighties and Dick Lester is 91.

Seeing the young Lennon is a chastening sight since he become such a sour old cuss. Ringo makes up for being Ringo since his scenes easily rank among the film’s best and it was him who came with the title in the first place.

PEDANTS PLEASE NOTE: that the presence of Victor Spinetti was a favour to George Harrison’s mum. @RichardChatten

The Teachers’ Lounge (2023)

Dir: Ìlker Çatak | Cast: Leonie Benesch, Leonard Stettnisch | Germany, Drama 98′

Weird things are happening in schools all over Europe and in this shrewd and serrated psychological thriller from German director Ìlker Çatak, the focus is a series of thefts that take place in a German secondary school.

There’s a brittle quality to the central character Carla Nowak – a highly sensitive Leonie Benesch (The Crown) – who soon gains our sympathies as a committed and professional Maths teacher who hails originally from Polish stock and speaks fluent English to boot. Naturally she shares her fellow teachers’ disquiet about a series of thefts and the heavy-handed way they are being dealt with by the powers that be in this bright and well designed educational establishment in Westphalia. And the tension that surrounds Carla’s attempt to address the matter, after a boy with Turkish parents has his rucksack searched, drives the mystery forward with a needling and urgent score.

The school makes an apology for the embarrassment caused to the boy, and young Carla does her best to deal diplomatically with his parents. But then Carla is faced with fresh controversy when money is stolen from her own purse by what looks like another member of staff with a boy at the school. It appears that Carla has recorded the event on her laptop – in footage that shows the woman’s distinctive flower- patterned blouse. Carla confronts her colleague, an unrepentant Mrs Kuhn (Eva Lobau), who refuses to fess up despite the laptop evidence and this leads to the woman being suspended.

But far from gaining her fellow colleagues support they all start to question Carla’s actions – Frau Kuhn’s little boy self-righteously ups the ante claiming the Maths teacher should apologise to his mother for falsely accusing her of a unproven crime. This sends Carla scuppering into the bathroom to assuage her nerves with the help of a plastic bin liner. She spends the rest of the film in a state of high anxiety, back-footed by the boy’s stance and generally incredulous at the collective unsupportive reactions of everyone involved.

Cast your mind back to The Hunt where Mads Mikkelsen found himself as a teacher in similar territory, accused of inappropriate behaviour with a child pupil, and this is how this situation gradually spins out of control for Carla in The Teachers’ Lounge with its chewy ethical concerns provided for in a meaty script from Catak and his co-writer Johannes Dunker. They leave us somewhat in the lurch in the final stretch which loses power despite a febrile performance from Benesch who remains memorable as a decent woman scorned MT

NOW ON RELEASE IN FRANCE and BELGIUM | BERLINALE 2023 WINNER: BERLIN EUROPA CINEMAS LABEL

WatchAUT Festival 2023 | A celebration of Austrian cinema

March brings a chance to binge on Austrian cinema – not only the classics but the latest crop of films from edgy new directors.

This year WatchAUT celebrates its second edition running from 23-26 March at London’s Cine Lumiere courtesy of The Austrian Cultural Forum London in cooperation with the Austrian Film Institute and Austrian Films.

The festival offers a special archive screening of Fritz Lang’s silent masterpiece FRAU IM MOND. Often considered as the first ‘serious’ science fiction film, the female led fantasy is a fascinating historical counterpoint to today’s spectacular sci-fi epics – including Leni Lauritsch’s space station thriller RUBIKON, one of the new Austrian films set to screen at this year’s festival alongside others including opening gala THE FOX, award-winning LGBTQ+ drama EISMAYER, and Nikoas Geyrhalter’s environmental documentary MATTER OUT OF PLACE.

THE FOX (dir: Adrian Goiginger, Germany/Austria, 2022). UK Premiere.

The true story of Franz Streitberger, the director’s great-grandfather, a motorcycle courier for the Austrian Army. At the beginning of the Second World War, this introverted young soldier comes across a wounded fox cub that he looks after and takes to occupied France with him – and through this unique friendship, his own past as an outcast farmers son slowly catches up with him.

Q&A with director Adrian Goiginger and lead actor Simon Morzé. 23 March.

FRAU IM MOND (dir: Fritz Lang, Germany, 1929).

An early film by visionary Austrian director Fritz Lang, Woman in the Moon follows a band of space pioneers as they attempt mankind’s first lunar voyage. This silent sci-fi epic is often considered as the first ‘serious’ science fiction film due to its realistic depiction of space travel. When the film premiered 94 years ago, it introduced cinema audiences to many elements that we now readily associate with space travel, including the idea of a countdown before the launch of a rocket. Presented in its rarely seen full-length version with live piano accompaniment, transporting the audience back to the era of silent film.

26 March

EISMAYER (dir: David Wagner, Austria, 2022). London Premiere.

Vice Lieutenant Eismayer is the most feared trainer and model macho in the Austrian Army, despite being a gay man in secret. When he falls in love with a young openly gay soldier, his world gets turned upside down. Based on real events, this LGBTQ+ feature championed at numerous film festivals, including Venice where it won the Grand Prize at Venice International Critics Week and was nominated for the Queer Lion.

Including Q&A with director David Wagner. 24 March.

I AM THE TIGRESS (dir: Philipp Fussenegger, Dino Osmanoviç, Austria/United States/Germany, 2021).

A favourite at BFI Flare, this intimate documentary portrays Tischa Thomas aka The Tigress – a 47-year-old mother and competitive bodybuilder whose physical strength and prowess contrasts with her beneath-the-surface vulnerability.

Including Q&A with directors and Tischa Thomas. 25 March.

MATTER OUT OF PLACE (dir: Nikolaus Geyrhalter, Austria, 2022). Winner of the WWF Green Leopard at Locarno International Film Festival, this environmental documentary captures the dispersion of garbage – observing the sisyphos-like work of garbage collectors and waste managers around the world. 25 March.

RUBIKON (dir: Leni Lauritsch, Austria, 2022). British actor George Blagden (Versailles, Vikings) stars alongside Austrian actress Julia Franz Richter and Ukrainian-born actor Mark Ivanir (The Good Shepherd) in this sci-fi drama. When Earth suddenly disappears in a toxic brown fog and all contacts are broken, the crew of a space station must decide whether to stay safe in space or risk their lives to get home and search for survivors. 26 March.

VERA (dir: Tizza Covi, Rainer Frimmel, Austria, 2022). Winner of the Venice Horizons Award for Best Director, as well as Best Actress for Vera Gemma, this Italian language drama co-stars Asia Argento and tells the story of Vera: a woman who lives in the shadow of her famous father and is tired of her superficial life amidst Rome’s high society, until tragedy offers perspective.

23-26 March 2023, Ciné Lumière, London SW7 2DW https://www.acflondon.org/events/watchaut-2023/

Pearl (2023)

Dir.: Ti West; Cast: Mia Goth, David Corenswet, Tandi Wright, Matthew Sunderland, Emma Jenkins-Purro, Alistair Sewell; USA/New Zeland/Canada 2022, 103 min.

Going into the cinema and expecting the worst excesses from slasher movies makes Pearl a satisfying surprise. This neo-classical noir is a sister feature for John M. Stahl’s Leave her to Heaven (1945) where the brilliant Gene Tierney played a twisted socialite with a fetish for killing. Director and co-writer Ti West (X) takes a leaf from Stahl with this refreshing new creation.

Pearl – whose aesthetic of garish candy colours also channels Stahl’s feature – sees the titular young woman (Goth, also the co-writer), living on a homestead in the American countryside with her parents. The First World War is on its way out and Pearl is expecting the return of her husband Howard (Sewell) in the big city. But her repressive German Mother (Wright) hates the idea of her daughter having any fun and envious because Pearl’s father (Sunderland) is an invalid: mute and wheelchair bound.

It soon emerges that Pearl has a penchant for killing their farm animals and feeding them to her pet alligator in the lake. The beast appears like a faithful dog on Pearl’s command while her real pet canine has already fallen victim to a compensatory killing spree. Out of frustration, Pearl has taken to humping a scarecrow and also fancies herself as a dancer, and when Mitsy (Jenkins-Purro), Howard’s sister, gets wind of a local dance competition, with the best selected to entertain the soldiers, Pearl is only to keen to join up, supremely confident she will prevail.

But first there is the uncomfortable matter of Pearl’s affair with the local projectionist (Corenswet), who promises to take her to Europe. When the visit is not forthcoming, she uses a pitchfork to drive her message of disappointment home in a fit of pique that knows no bounds involving a variety of vicious weapons and victims. After accidentally setting Mum on fire and smothering Daddy, the last person standing is Mitsy, who bears the brunt of Pearl’s anger after losing out on the dance competition. An axe comes in handy and finally Pearl can sit down to dinner. But hold your horses: Howard is on his way home.

The humour is deliciously deadpan There is even a moving scene near the end when Pearl is cuddling up to Mum, listening in her mind to an old German lullaby from back in the day. Pearl combines originality and past values of the horror/noir genre with an antiheroine who gradually finds a place in our hearts with her relatable revenge campaign – after all, most of us are occasionally tempted to follow her example. The difference here is that Pearl has lost her inhibitor reflexes which prevent ordinary people from running amok. DoP Eliot Rockett ensures the grisly deeds are as understated as possible in this highly entertaining shocker. AS

ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE from 17th March 2023

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927)

Dir: F. W. Murnau | Cast: George O’Brian, Janet Gaynor, Margaret Livingston | US Silent, 87′

Lured to Hollywood by producer William Fox, German Expressionist F.W. Murnau created one of the silent cinema’s last and most luminous masterpieces. Having already made a name for himself on the continent, Sunrise – a tale of two country mice overwhelmed by the temptations of the city after the husband is seduced by a sophisticated urbanite – represented an auspicious Hollywood debut that promised much, but tragically produced little. The recipient at the very first Academy Awards, in 1928, of a special award as the “most unique and artistic production” of the year, Murnau failed to build on its great success and after two more ill-fated Hollywood silents the German director went to Tahiti to recharge his batteries on Tabu.

Posterity alas will never see what impact Murnau would have on the classic era of the thirties because he tragically died in a car accident at the shockingly early age of 42. Richard Chatten

SUNRISE: A SONG OF TWO HUMANS (1927) directed by F.W. Murnau. now screening courtesy of the BFI player subscription from 6 March 2023

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Simple Things | Les Choses Simples (2023)

Dir/Wri: Eric Besnard | Cast: Gregory Gadebois, Lambert Wilson, Marie Gillain | France, Drama 97′

Gregory Gadebois, Lambert Wilson and a frisky french bulldog are in fine comic form in this odd couple buddy movie. Simple Things is far from simple totally subverting expectations in a comedy drama that is actually quite subtle and complex.

Set in the heady landscapes of the Auvergne Alps an evocative opening sequence reminds us how stressful modern life has become in the big city. And this is where the uber chic eco entrepreneur Vincent (Wilson) is heading when his sports breaks down on a lush mountain highway. Plump country bumpkin Pierre (Gadebois) just happens to riding by and offers him a offers him a lift on his motorcycle.

This being the rural life Pierre – not a man to be trifled with, or hurried – insists on cooking an delicious omelette and taking a siesta before the two finally set off for the big smoke, Vincent offering Pierre dinner for his kindness. But spying an angry yuppie complaining of Vincent’s late arrival Gadebois speeds off into the distance.

In the thick of the boardroom it dawns on Vincent how fed up he is of the fast lane. But before he has time to reflect on his frayed mental state the meeting is in full swing, but he is clearly coming apart at the seams. Back at the ranch Pierre is feeding the chickens when Vincent reappears on the pretence of losing his Mont Blanc pen, but really to ask Pierre if he can stay awhile and the disdainful loner offers him a meagre straw mattress in his nearby rustic cabin. Next morning Wilson makes an offer Gad immediately – and angrily refuses – that of offering to finance his friends existence as part of an eco project. Deeply insulted that anyone should try and patronise his modest way of life as if it were somehow quaint rather than real on every way, Pierre sends the smug ‘cool guy’ packing.

The subtle interplay between Wilson’s trendy entrepreneur and Pierre’s disdainful mountain hermit provides the film with its rich vein of humour but the romance between Pierre and his cousin’s widow Camille (Gillian) sounds a bum note in this otherwise engaging comedy drama. Bernard and his co-writer Anne Wermeligere cook up a clever script which ticks all the zeitgeisty boxes and there’s a terrific car chase and an evocative score too not to mention some eye-catching mountain scenery. MT

ON RELEASE IN FRANCE

Under the Sky of Damascus (2023) Berlinale 2023

Dir.: Heba Khaled, Talal Derki, Ali Wajeeh; Documentary with Eliana Saad, Inana Rashed, Souhir Saleh, Sabah Al Salem; Denmark/USA/Germany 2023, 88 min.

Men are outnumbered by women in the Syrian capital of Damascus but, increasingly, they still manage to dominate the female population. A collective of female actors do their best to stage the growing repression in this well-intentioned documentary from Heba Khaled, Talal Derki and Ali Wajee.

Unfortunately the artistic undertaking hits the road blocks when it soon emerges that a member of the crew tried to exploit the women sexually. “Women are more enslaved than ever in these times” declares middle-aged actor Sabah Al Salem, who has recently been released from prison after her active protests against male dominance. “The biggest exploitations we face are of a sexual nature”.

In a clip from one of Salem’s feature films, we see the male actor striking her with full force on the cheek, with the director not even batting an eyelid. The interviews are harrowing, one young woman complaining how her father regularly beat them all, often so violently that they had to go to hospital. Another woman tells the story of how her husband went on to marry two more wives and sent her, his first wife, and their daughters to live with his family where they are now treated like servants.

At a centre for Deaf and Mute women, a member of staff reveals how many have been sexually abused. One women was raped by three men, and the court found them guilty – but the first rapist had to marry the victim, to satisfy the honour of the family.

The stage undertaking makes good progress until one of the actors, Eliana Saad, abruptly stopped coming to the rehearsals claiming her boyfriend was against her participation. It later turns out this was not true. Adel, the line producer, had been harassing Eliana, asking for sex and threatening her with punishment if she refused to comply with his wishes. The sexual harassment episode forms the production’s centrepiece, but rehearsals were later suspended, and so was the film. The directors Heba Khaled and Talal Derki then returned to their homes in Berlin; but later changed their minds when film critic Ali Wajeeh took over the production and direction in Damascus, finishing film and play with the help of DoP Raed Sandeed.

This is a brave piece of guerrilla filmmaking and the crew is entitled to some leeway. But there are too many questions left unanswered, and the exact circumstances of Adel’s attack on Eliana and the other actresses, Inana Rashed and Souhir Saleh remain unsubstantiated. Under the Sky of Damascus is a potent piece of agit-prop, a story that needs to find an audience not only in Syria, but throughout the Arab world where thousands of women are abused and even killed by husbands, fathers, brothers and cousins – with the so-called honour killings still going unpunished. The feature, a debut for many of the crew, is dedicated to these victims. AS

BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL | 2023 | NOMINATED FOR BEST DOCUMENTARY AWARD

Bank Holiday (1938) mubi

Dir: Carol Reed | Cast: Margaret Lockwood, John Lodge, Rene Ray, Kathleen Harrison, Merle Tottenham | Drama

The film that conclusively showed Carol Reed was a director to watch starts with a wry shot of adjacent newsstands grimly warning of the storm clouds over Europe, and the rain clouds over Britain.

Kathleen Harrison was such a hit she later got her own series (here she’s married not to Jack Warner, but Wally Patch who even wears his bowler on holiday); also supplying comedy is Rene Ray and Merle Tottenham knocking back Martinis by the tumbler).

That taken care of, gravitas is supplied by John Lodge pining after his wife who died in childbirth (all too common in those days) and Hugh Williams and Margaret Lockwood slipping away for what we’d now call a ‘dirty weekend’. When Miss Lockwood (SLIGHT SPOILER COMING:) flees in panic she falls straight from the pot into the fire by accepting a lift from absconding manager Garry Marsh. @RichardChatten

Deep Sea (2023) Berlinale 2023

Dir: TIAN Xiaopeng | China I 2023 I 112 min I Animation I

An absolutely ravishing Chinese anime that needs to be seen on the big screen is this enchanting story of Shenxiu, a little girl abandoned by her mother, and still suffering from bad dreams about a monster called Nightmare. On a cruise with the rest of her family she actually sees him on the deck humming her mother’s favourite tune and beckoning her on a mysterious and healing undersea odyssey where Shenxiu will encounter some weird and wonderful characters amongst them a mystical shape-shifting creature that resembles a squid called a Hyjinkx.

Shenxiu joins forces with a strange character called Nanhe as they plummet the depths of the ocean in search of her long lost mother, a quest that will bring both wonder and heartache and a shocking twist in the final resolve. Like all good animations, Deep Sea works on two levels: to offer a spectacular visual treat for younger viewers and a deeper more meaningful experience for mature audiences. Some of the content may be disturbing for more suggestible children under 14.

Playing in the Generation strand at this year’s Berlinale the film explores children’s intense and often dreamlike emotional life showing how they find solace by escaping into their imagination in order to process trauma. MT

BERLINALE 2023 | GENERATION STRAND

#Manhole (2023) Berlinale 2023

Dir: Kumakiri Kazuyoshi | Cast: Nakajima Yuto, Nao, Nagayama Kento, Okada Michitaka | Japan: 99′

Another nail-biting psychological drama along the lines of 127 Hours this time sees a man trapped down a manhole, Japanese style, and determined to prevail despite the odds.

The crisis sends the central character down-spiralling into a dark night of soul-searching with director Kumakiri Kazuyoshi adopting a gritty and hard-edged slant to his narrative in place of the more sleek treatment that Danny Boyle’s gave his 2010 outing with James Franco as the victim.

Professional office worker Shunsuke (Nakajima Yuto) is on the verge of getting married and has been celebrating his forthcoming nuptials at a surprise celebration thrown by his colleagues. In an alcoholic haze he trips directly into an open manhole and later comes to, relatively unscathed but unable to avail himself of a rather dodgy ladder placed by the workmen, due to sustaining a leg wound.

As luck would have it Shunsuke still has a fully-charged mobile at his disposal and uses this to launch an SOS attempt via his ex Mai (Nao) and then has a brainwave of presenting himself as female, potentially hoping for better traction as a ‘damsel in distress’. And this is where it gets technical because his GPS locator is not picking up on his actual whereabouts making it impossible for the emergency services, or friends, to locate him. Kazuyoshi then evokes a seething sense of desperation mixed with the absurdity of the situation as Shunksuke is forced to spend hours tapping furiously on his ‘phone in the dank and grimy confines of his underground prison as his soul is laid bare by overthinking his life and his past ‘crimes and misdemeanours’ in a quirky but effective situational thriller. MT

BERLINALE 2023

Matria (2023) Berlinale 2023

Dir: Alvaro Gago | Spain, drama. 99′

The Spanish coastal region of Galicia is viewed as a rain-swept, hostile place and very much a character in this feature debut from Alvaro Gago whose heroine, a single mother in her forties, is beset by difficulties not of her own making but determined to prevail against the odds in the fishing town of Vilanova de Arousa, near Pontevedra.

Gago bases his story on his 2018 award-winning short film that sees the plucky, mercurial yet vulnerable Ramona (Vazquez) holding down two jobs, one as a cleaner, the other aboard a mussel dredger, while her partner Andres (Santi Prego) is a typical loser who spends the days drinking and complaining. Her daughter Estrella (Luaces), from a previous relationship, has already left her home and her studies to pursue a relationship which seems equally destructive.

A disagreement over pay in her cleaning job sends Ramona packing but she soon settles down into a ‘modus vivendi’ as carer for a grumpy old widow Xose (E.R. Cunha “Tatán”) who is stuck in his ways but offers her a semblance of normality. Ramona’s vulnerability and her self-destructive tendency to blow a fuse and then get back on track is the crucial plot point in this engaging Galician-language character study with its inevitable nods to contemporary consumer bleats and the ills of capitalism. MT

BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL | 2023

Creature (2023)

Dir.: Asif Kapadia; Ballet choegraphed by Aksam Khan with Jeffrey Cirio, Stina Quagebeur, Fabian Reimair, Erina Takahashi, Ken Saruhashi; UK 2022, 87 min.

Asif Kapadia has drastically shortened Aksam Khan’s titular ballet from 120 to 87 minutes. One should not forget, that the original Ballet reviews were not too positive, and one point often mentioned was the running time, seen as overly self-indulgent. Kapadia’s version is not only streamlined, but concentrates on the main themes of the production: existential loneliness and revenge.

Georg Büchner’s unfinished play “Woyzek” and Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” are the cornerstones of the ballet. With Khan having changed the repressive small town atmosphere of “Woyzek” to the arctic laboratory, Kapadia can stage the ballet more or less in one place: the scientists/soldiers’ wooden hut which later on partially collapses.

The Creature (Cirio) is very much in love with his wife Marie (Takahashi), but she is drawn to the loudmouth Drum Major (Reimair). Whilst the Creature tries to gain entrance into society, he exists merely to serve as a test object for the group of scientists/soldiers who are keen to find out how long their specimen can withstand the deadly hypothermia. At the same time scientists and soldiers are seen as a compatible unit and that the female camp doctor (Quagebeur) is a comic copy of Dr. Mengele, whose horrific medical tests were responsible for many deaths at Auschwitz/Birkenau. On the middle level of the ruling hierarchy, the captain (Saruhashu), uses the Creature to provide for his daily comfort.

Repeated tape recordings of the conversation president Nixon had with the astronauts of the moon landing on 20.7.1969 play out through the film, Nixon calling them – rather derogatively by their first names – Neill and Buzz. Andy Serkis lends his voice to some computer-voiced commentary, but neither of these elements particularly enhance the ballet feature.

DoP Daniel Landin keeps the light arctic dark, with the protagonists looking like shadows of themselves. Symbolically, and in line with his prototype status, the Creature is stripped of any form of warm clothing and treated like a wild animal, rather than a human. The minimalist wooden set is constructed like a fortress in the white arctic landscape, with the Creature enduring endless tests to measure his resistance to ice and snow. But his personal battle with the Major for the soul of Marie is even more inhumane, since he is not even granted the status of a combattant. The Major and The Doctor head up the oppressive regime, science and military might working hand in hand. This central theme connects the ballet with Shelley’s Frankenstein: the creature being led loose into a world bent on destroying him while his once proud creator stands by helpless.

Creature is a brutal and unforgiving ballet of sorrow and alienation, both physical and psychological. A true horror feature, set like a spartan Western film, with the main protagonist literally stripped of everything. AS

ON RELEASE FROM FRIDAY

Femme (2023)

Dir/scr: Sam H. Freeman, Ng Choon Ping. UK. 2023. 99mins

This erotic Neo-noirish revenge thriller builds up quite a head of steam after getting down to business with a classic confrontation in an East London convenience shop between chameleon-like club performer Jules (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) and ex-con Preston (George MacKay) whose plethora of tattoos would certainly give David Beckham a run for his money. The violent homophobic assault that ensues will see Preston getting his comeuppance in a gay sauna where drag queen Jules assumes another identity.

Extended from the short film of the same title Femme is the intense and fervent feature debut of directing duo Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping. Because of its LGBTQ subject matter the film will no doubt find its way onto the festival circuit and also into arthouse cinemas. Femme is all about the men’s ability to dissemble and assume a variety of identities to suit the milieu of the modern metropolis where sexual identity is not longer simply a question of ‘male’ and ‘female’ but has become a multifarious melting pot of myriad styles capturing the mercurial zeitgeist of gaydom. Performance wise George McKay continues to be a talent to amuse. MT

NOW IN UK CINEMAS from 1st DECEMBER 2023 | BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL 2023

The Klezmer Project (2023) Berlinale 2023

Dir.: Leandro Koch. Paloma Schachmann; Documentary with Perin Snee, Rebecca Janofer, Cesar Lerner, Bob Cohen, Argentina/Austria 2023, 117 min.

Klezmer music dominated the Yiddish speaking world of (mainly eastern) Europe before the Holocaust. The Klezmer Project sees Leandro Koch and Paloma Schachmann scouring Europe for the dying embers of this iconic Ashkenazi instrumental tradition in their engaging hybrid documentary debut.

And they have to act quickly. Most of the musicians are now well into their eighties and there is dearth of audio material. The pandemic saw the death of many who would have gladly taken part, but the 2016 research reccy ended as a trial run. Judaism is struggling to survive in countries like Romania, Moldovia and Ukraine, and the connections with the Yiddish language has also been severed. To find as many active musicians of Klezmer as possible, what what drove the directors forward.

Schachmann, who plays the clarinet, regularly performed at Jewish weddings, and her audience talked about their childhood. She got to know Klezmer musicians from around the diaspora before she and Koch flew off to Eastern Europe in their initial 2016 mission. They had a camera and a recorder, but the agenda was dictated by the availability of the surviving musicians. One goal was to show the powerful combination of Klezmer music and the Yiddish language. Most of the fictional parts were written before the journeys, and they enabled the filmmakers to depict ethno-archaeological research into the origins of Klezmer music. Crucially, their aim was focus on the essence of Yiddish culture and Klezmer music, knowing full well the difficult task on their hands. What they had not bargained for was the reticence of those involved to come forward given that main surviving Jews in the diaspora have turned their back on their own culture. If anything this made the filmmakers even keener, and led to them uncovering some unexpected material.

Bob Cohen is the central figure in the research project. He told Koch and Schachmann the names of all the musicians who still knew the Klezmer tunes. Reading Susana Skura’s papers was was always helpful – she gave the directors some background on the vanishing culture and Bob showed them where to find the last remains.

On the second trip, the filmmakers started in Poland where the Jewish Cultural Festival was taking place. There they met Schulam Ment, an amazing fiddler, who was going on tour to Romania with Benjy Fox Rosen. Jake and Benji played Jewish songs and Klezmer music in old synagogues around Transylvania. In Ukraine the filmmakers caught up with Sasha Somish, a Jewish singer and Choirmaster from Lyviv. In Moldavia Marin Buena and Adam Slinga were recorded, who were, like Susan Ghergus, Fima Chorney and Slava Farber, outstanding performers of Lautantraditional music.

The editing process (Leandro Koch/Javier Favot) took nearly 18 months. 120 hours of footage had to be dealt with, there were “always new layers of different narratives to incorporate and this demanded new scenes.” Because of the pandemic the filmmakers were unable to return to Eastern Europe, they had to find answers sifting through footage already in their possession. In the end, the pruning led to almost two separate films: the one shot in Argentina and the other from Eastern Europe. They are connected by a Yiddish story and Koch’s notes about Jewish Culture. This labour of love and dedication to a dwindling musical culture is significantly enhanced by DoPs Leandro Koch and Javier Favot, whose intimate images of the musicians resonate the most in this unique and moving first feature. AS

BERLINALE 2023 |

A Happy Man | Un Homme heureux (2023)

Dir: Tristan Seguela | France, Comedy 97′

A mayor finds out his wife wants to be a man but is more concerned about re-election than his marriage in this perky outing from French director Tristan Seguela.

Sexual transitioning is a tricky subject to tackle and one that could easily be maudlin, misconstrued or even cringeworthy. But Seguela and his writers successfully pull it off, opting for a wafer-light, tongue-in-cheek treatment for this amusing contemporary comedy that treads gently through classic Chabrol country: a conventional Northern French town with its shuttered windows, family-run shops and bars where the locals tend to be conservative, and are not going to take kindly to an LGBTQ+ council. It’s hardly Paris.

Fabrice Lucchini is perfect for the role of Jean Leroy: first incredulous and then gently scandalised in an ‘oh la la’ way when his wife declares, over the pig’s trotters, that she feels like a man, and always has done throughout their 40-year marriage and three children, although, is still in love with him and, in deference, agrees to transition after his election campaign.

Catherine Frot clearly relishes the role of Edith, now Eddy. Soon the hormones are kicking in, and she’s sporting an incipient beard and moustache, not to mention a tweed jacket and sensible shoes. She even tells the daily to stop calling her ‘Madame’, and enlists in support groups where she meets other transexuals..

Philippe Katerine provides an ironic foil for Lucchini’s mayor, a little bit suggestive, never judging him, and always ready to provide a sympathetic listening ear even when the going gets tough and Leroy goes into meltdown behind the scenes. And especially when he is caught on a traffic camera, his wife embracing him in full drag in a video that naturally goes viral threatening to destabilise his “Forward as Before” campaign trail on social media. Tristan Séguéla offers up a mature, entertaining and insightful comedy drama where the watchwords are understanding, kindness and tolerance, ensuring a happy – almost moving – ending. MT

ON RELEASE IN FRANCE

Berserk (1967)

Dir: Jim O’Connolly | Cast: Joan Crawford, Diana Dors, Ty Hardin, Robert Hardy, Michael Gough | US Drama 97’

If you didn’t think that Joan Crawford could sink any lower than William Castle see what happened when he fell into the clammy embrace of Herman Cohen.

Crawford obviously wasn’t bothered about the quality of the script as long as she got the star treatment (the fabulous outfits she wears were probably the biggest part of the budget; I wonder if she was allowed to keep them?).

Crawford is a woman after Cohen’s own heart playing a queen bee who thinks the deaths are good for business lusts after Ty Hardin and still looks fabulous in tights, as do Diana Dors and Judy Geeson (we even get to see Dors wrestle Marianne Stone).

The ludicrous ending comes as no surprise to anyone who seen Crawford’s earlier film ‘Strait-Jacket. @RichardChatten

Massimo Troisi: Someone down there loves me (2023) Berlinale

Dir.: Mario Martone; Documentary with Anna Pavignano, Paolo Sorrentino, Michael Radford, Roberto Perpignani; Italy 2023, 128 min.

A very personal portrait of successful director, writer and actor Massimo Troisi by his fellow Neapolitan director Mario Martone (Nostalgia) and scripter Anna Pavignano, who co-wrote all of Troisi’s features, even after their relationship came to an end.

Massimo Troisi was born in February 1953 in San Giorgio a Cremano near Naples. Early in childhood his heart was weakened by rheumatic fever which contributed to his early death in 1994 at only 41. Troisi started his film career as an actor in the early 1960s, and by the 1970s he had formed the theatre group La Smorfia at the Centro Teatro Spazio with Enzo De Caro and Lello Arena. The three of them were popular on radio and TV, and they never lost contact.

In 1981 Troisi directed and played the lead in his first feature Ricomincio Da Tre, a low budget indie shot in six weeks that was a big hit at the box office, running for over 600 days and grossing more than The Empire Strikes Back. The film and its helmer swept the board at the Donatello awards, Italy’s equivalent to the Oscars.

A year later he starred in a TV Special “Morto Troisi, Viva Troisi” together with Roberto Benigni, and in 1983 Troisi and Lello Arena were responsible for No Thanks, Coffee makes me Nervous. 1987 saw him direct The Ways of the Lord are finished, the highest grossing Italian feature of the year. He went on to win the Coppa Volpe at the Venice Film Festival for his role in Splendour, sharing it with Marcello Mastroianni. Troisi’s final feature as a director was I thought it was Love…but it was a Gig from 1991.

Poor health was to dog Troisi throughout his life. He underwent a triple by-pass operation, but his heart “was as big as a football” and he was desperately in need of a transplant. The surgery was due to be performed at Harefield Hospital near London, but he was determined to finish Il Postino, the story of a timid waiter and the Chilean Nobel Prize Winner Pablo Neruda, directed by Michael Radford. Radford and editor Roberto Perpignani give deeply affecting details about Troisi’s death at his sister’s house in Ostia where he died very shortly after the arduous shoot had concluded. Legend has it that he said “I don’t want a new heart because my acting is closely connected with the defective organ”.

Troisi was famous for his quotes, and his self depreciation: “I never like myself, I am so self-critical that I don’t commit suicide so as not to leave a note that would seem ridiculous to me.”

DoP Pado Carnero contributes to the intimate setting with Martone and Pavignano going over the details of a short but significant career, assisted by Troisi’s comprehensive diaries which bear testaments to a man of drole humour: “Suffering in love is a disposable void: no one gains from it, except the songwriters who make tunes for us” AS

BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL 2023

The Wrong Box (1966)

Dir: Bryan Forbes | Cast: Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Ralph Richardson, Michael Caine, Peter Sellers, John Mills, Tony Hancock, Nanette Newman | UK Comedy

Having made his mark with four consecutive realist black & white dramas, Bryan Forbes made this none-too-successful attempt to lighten up and turned to Robert Louis Stevenson for his first film in colour with a cast that includes both the old and the new, ranging from John Mills, through Peter Sellers to Peter Cook & Dudley Moore (the former sporting a very dashing moustache) and Tony Hancock.

No matter how many times I see it, I always wonder if Wilfrid Lawson will make it to the end this time, Ralph Richardson is hilarious as a garrulous old bore who drives the Bournemouth Strangler to distraction with his endless talk, while Mrs Forbes demonstrates an unexpected facility with comedy in a role of wide-eyed innocence.@RichardChatten

Marlowe (2022)

Dir: Neil Jordan | Cast: Liam Neeson, Diane Kruger, Jessica Lange, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Colm Meaney, Daniela Melchior, Alan Cumming, Danny Huston, Seana Kerslake, Francois Arnaud, Ian Hart | Noir thriller, 95′

Liam Neeson stars as Marlowe in this often vicious noir thriller that transports us back to late 1930s Bay City, California with vague echoes of Polanski’s Chinatown, but there the similarity ends.

Raymond Chandler’s classic character Marlowe was most successfully evoked by the craggy-faced icon Robert Mitchum in Farewell, My Lovely (1974) but Neeson adds a certain warm soulfulness to the role as the private detective based on the book by John Banville.

In the capable hands of Neil Jordan’s direction Marlowe certainly looks decent and boasts a strong international cast and some witty dialogue but too many characters and subplots overload a story that loses its way in the complexity of it all. Essentially Marlowe boils down to a series of starry vignettes held together by a circuitous storyline, written for the screen by William Monahan.

Philip Marlowe is looking into a missing persons ‘cold’ – or rather – tepid case involving a certain Hollywood film exec Nico Peterson (Arnaud) who has slipped away from his married lover’s embrace, a hard-edged blonde called Clare Cavendish (Kruger tries – and fails – to channel Dunaway) who is keen on Marlowe keeping her amused while she employs him to track down the much younger man who is normally between her sheets.

Neeson gets some good lines in the witty and often virtue-signalling dialogues: “Is your husband a homo”.? he asks Clare: “No he’s not remotely that interesting”. But there’s no gay twist here just an old-fashioned story of jealous women and men chasing the dollar. Fedora in place, Marlowe makes his rounds in the area and this brings in some car chase scenes and leads to an upmarket private establishment called the Corbeta club where louche lounge lizards and moneyed widows wile away the warm evenings in what is actually Barcelona rather than the US West Coast.

Here he comes across Clare’s mother, a charismatic blonde called Dorothy Quincannon (Lange oozes style unlike her spiteful daughter) who claims to have seen Peterson despite reports of him fetching up dead, the victim of a ‘hit and run’. But Hollywood studio head Floyd Hanson, played by Danny Huston (whose stock in trade nowadays is playing debonair gentlemen of questionable intent) is keen to quash the rumour, and will go to violent lengths to keep Peterson’s disappearance a mystery. Huston is really effective as the suave but saturnine film exec, his father John was even more memorable in Chinatown.

Other characters woven into the convoluted narrative add padding but feel entirely irrelevant. There is Alan Cummings’ mean and seedy nightclub owner who has dealings in Mexico, and police detectives Colm Meaney and Ian Hart. Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje adds ballast as a uniformed chauffeur who gives Marlowe back-up when he needs it. Marlowe looks authentic with its swaying palm trees, sleek automobiles and elegant costumes but somehow never grips or moves us despite being enjoyable while it lasts. MT

NOW ON RELEASE IN FRANCE | US and other territories.

High Noon (1952)

Dir: Fred Zimmerman | US Western

Although it received widespread acclaim and four Academy Awards John Wayne was so affronted by the attack on American values this film constituted he made ‘Rio Bravo’ with Howard Hawks to rebut it.

The film has been cited by those on both the left and the right to support their own specific political agendas (the film itself has it’s own internal contradictions embodied in the fact that the writer was blacklisted and that it stars Gary Cooper – a very friendly witness).

A once in a lifetime supporting cast ranges from Lon Chaney Jr. To Thomas Mitchell; while the presence of Lee Van Cleef bridges the gap between the classic Hollywood western and Sergio Leone. @RichardChatten

The Echo (2023)

Dir.: Tatiana Huezo; Documentary with Montse Hernandez, Sarahi Hernandez, Uriel Hernandez, Ramiro Hernandez. Members of the Tapia and Gonzales families;; Mexico/Germany 2023, 102 min.

El Salvadorian born, Mexican writer/director Tatiana Huezo follows her outstanding drama debut Prayers for the Stolen, with a female-centric documentary feature that follows three families during a year in a remote Mexican mountain village where – once again – a little girl is the focus.

Montse (Montserrat Hernandez) is a studious, soulful child who loves animals and a cares for her elderly relative. She dreams of becoming a teacher and is already practising being ‘very strict but knowledgeable’ in preparation for her future. But Montse realises she must leave the village to pursue her dream career. Her mother Sarahi Rojas Hernandez, who had married young without finishing High School, is not a role model for Montse, who feels -rightly – that she will be held back simply because of her gender. Father, Uriel Hernandez, like many men in the village, works in a factory during the week and expects his wife to look after the children, take care of the animals, and cook for the family, whilst he relaxes at the weekend.

After a meal, he tells his son Ramiro to leave the plates on the table. “The washing up is for the women, you do not have to do it”. Montse can see her mother obeying her husband, even though she sometimes contradicts him. But Montse eventually leaves home with just a back-pack. Another local, visiting the her in the city, communicates Montse’s mother’s desire to keep in touch.

Huezo paints a picture of a society still stuck in the Dark Ages where women are second class citizens and men put their feet up, leaving all the chores to their wives and daughters. Montse is a critical observer of this state of affairs, but her fellow females more or less coalesce to the status quo, and follow the rules without questioning.

DoP Ernesto Pardo stays close to his subjects, capturing the austerity of the terrain, and the womens’ emotions that often betray a contradiction to their spoken words. The Echo is a timely essay about home and exile, obedience and rebellion, all caught with a minimum of drama. Tatiana Huezo proves once again that minimalism is a powerful way to show how the ordinary can become extraordinary. AS

THE ECHO IS IN UK CINEMAS FROM 26 JULY 2024

BERLINALE | COMPETITION 2023 Jury Prize | Encounters – Berlinale 2023

Last Night of Amore (2023) Berlinale | Special Gala 2023

Dir: Andrea Di Stefano | Cast: Pierfrancesco Favino, Francesco Di Leva, Katia Mironova, Linda Caridi | Italy, Crime Thriller 124′

Italian ‘man of the moment’ Pierfrancesco Favino stars alongside his Nostalgia sidekick Francesco Di Leva in this ‘al dente’ heist thriller with a Chinese twist from talented writer/director Andrea di Stefano (The Informant).

A magnificent nighttime opening sequence transports us over the rooftops of Milan from the Duomo and beyond finally zooming down on a soirée in full swing through the windows of an apartment. A little boy looks down on a man in the street below. Yes, it’s Favino as super clean detective Franco Amore on his way home from a jog to meet another colleague Cosimo (Gerardi) at a surprise party in celebration retirement the following day. The evening has been organised by his suave and savvy stiletto-heeled wife, Viviana (Caridi) who has hair as glossy as a freshly cracked chestnut and a décolletage to match in a crime thriller that is gripping and emotionally intelligent.

Di Stefano goes to great lengths to establish Franco’s probity as a policeman but also shows how important Viviana is in bolstering his career, underlining the strength of their relationship and their complicity. Crucially, Viviana feels responsible for limiting Franco’s career progression due to her links with the mob via her distant relative Cosimo (Gerardi).

After making a brief appearance at the gathering to enforce his soulful and squeaky clean image, Last Night then gets down to business when Franco is called away by his boss Sarno to discover his best friend and longtime colleague Dino (Di Leva) has been shot dead on the highway while moonlighting ‘off duty’ on a diamond heist. The action then flashes back ten days to show how Franco had saved the life of a Chinese Mafia boss Mr Zhang whose son-in-law is working behind the scenes to undermine him in a diamond deal.

Things have certainly moved on from the days of Italian Mafia and male dominance in Italian detective thrillers, and thoughts of Franco’s imminent retirement are soon on the back burner when Zhang’s son-in-law presents the honest cop with a final gig before retiring, and a financial boost to his pension he could have only dreamed on, if he agrees to drive an accomplice Fei Fei and the precious booty of African diamonds to a given destination in the capital.

Franco gets Dino (Di Leva) on board and they set off with Fei Fei and her boyfriend along Milan’s Carugate freeway but the vehicle gets a puncture. Fei Fei refuses to let Franco stop, but an officious policewoman pulls them over and in the shootout that follows Dino, the Chinese couple and the policewoman take the bullets. Suffering an existential crisis, Franco then stages a crime scene to cover his tracks, throwing the jewels in the river. He then calls Viviana to the crime scene for backup, refusing to fess up on his moonlighting activities. At this point, it certainly looks like his retirement plans – and his marriage – are over. But all is not lost. Viviana is not a just pretty face, she’s a woman with an eye to the end game, and considerable perseverance, who is willing to get her hands dirty – quite literally – and will come up trumps in this inventive Robin Hood style thriller’s tense finale. Shot with brilliant bravura by DoP Guido Michelotti Last Night of Amore is a classic thriller of lost souls that feels entirely contemporary in its scripting, breathtaking yet relevant and emotionally engaging. MT

BERLINALE SPECIAL GALA | BERLINALE 2023

When will it be like it never was before (2023) Berlinale | Generation 2023

Dir.: Sonja Heiss; Cast: Camille Loup Moltzen, Arsseni Bultmann, Merlin Rose, Kolja Koddenbrock, Leevi Tjelle Hohlein, Pola Geiger, Laura Tonke, Devid Striesow; Germany 2023, 116min.

In her expansive drama focusing on the development of post-war German child psychiatry from 1974 onwards, Sonja Heiss bites off far more than she can chew and runs out of time in the final act.

Based on the 2013 autobiographical novel of Joachim Meyerhoff, the film’s opening scene, and far the most intriguing part, sees seven-year old Josse (Moltzen) being teased mercilessly by teenage brothers Philipp (Koddenbrock) and Patrick (Hohlein).

Josse’s father Richard (Striesow) is the director of a huge psychiatric clinic in the north of Germany and lives with his wife Iris (Tonke) and family on the grounds of the institution. The teenage Josse (Bultmann) Josse is close to both his parents, and spends time with his father’s patients, often feeling more at ease in the clinic than at home his brothers due to their aggressive behaviour. A childhood friend Marlene (Geiger) comes back into his life when she is “parked’ by her parents with Richard and Iris, and later commits suicide.

Josse tries in vain to work through the reasons for her suicide with his father but Richard simply states that she wanted to die, and he was unable to help. This episode alienates Josse even more from his father, who by now is cheating on his wife with his secretary, Iris retreating into the world of her youthful adventures in Italy. Later, Josse’s brother and father will experience tragedy but this episode is curiously shown as part of his ‘lessons in life’.

There seem to be no borders between Richard’s role as a director of the institution and his private life: he and Josse “talk shop” about the patients’ case histories, with Josse humouring the sick he encounters on the grounds, playing the part of his father as a benevolent bystander.

DoP Manuel Dacosse brings an epic quality to the proceedings with his impressive images of life in the hospital and the trials and tribulations of family life, including the very unholy Christmas celebrations which culminate with Iris using the electric carving knife as a weapon of destruction, not just to serve the turkey.

As is often the case in German cinema, Heiss and her co-writer adopt a rather didactic approach to the material which rather spoils the overall fluidity in this worthwhile study that charts the much-needed changes in German psychiatry in the latter part of the 20th century. AS

OPENING FILM OF THE GENERATION STRAND | BERLINALE 2023

Family Time (2023) Berlinale | Encounters 2023

Dir: Tia Kouvo | Cast: Ria Kataja, Elina Knihtila, Leena Uotila, Tom Wentzel, Jarkko Pajunen, Sakari Topi, Elli Paajanen, Toomas Talikka; Finland/Sweden 2023, 114 min.

Three generations come together during the Christmas holidays in this insightful study of familial ties developed from a short by its first time Finnish director Tia Kouvo.

Amid the usual round meals, domestic chores and saunas, intimacies will surface in a drama that relies on body language and facial expressions as well as discursive interludes. What is not said often becomes more revealing – and intriguing – than the usual outspoken discussions, although Kuovo includes some grim confrontations demonstrating just how unbearable family get-togethers can be when false bonhomie is the order of the day. Set in two parts, Family Time shows eight people trying not to comes to blows in exploring their everyday experiences of alienation and sickness.

The celebration take place in the family home near Lathi with parents and grand-parents Ella (Uotila) and Lasse (Wentzel; Susanna ((Kataja) and husband Risto (Pajunen) and their two children Hilla (Pajaanen) and Kassu (Talikka); and Susanna’s sister Helena (Knihtila), and partner Simo (Topi).

Although women are known to often have the upper hand in Nordic society, Kuovo’s characters are not appreciated by their husbands. Susanna has to propose her own toast for a recent promotion as design boss for a local supermarket. Her family seemingly could not care less, voicing disappointment that she is not in charge of the entire operation throughout Finland. Hilla tries to liven things up by pretending to direct a TV film, casting her family as the protagonists. Grandfather Lasse is an alcoholic, banished to his own room for spoiling the atmosphere, and soiling the floor. Naturally the women are left to clean up the mess. In a farcical scene Ella plays Santa Claus, complete with the outfit, handing round the presents after lunch. The men recede into the background of these domestic charades, the women put on a brave face, wishing it could be over sooner than later, but voicing the opposite.

The second part is a scenario of “what typically happens in the New Year.” Susanna and Risto finally come to blows after the stress of having to look after Hilla and Kassu on top of their busy careers. But although Susanna craves intimacy, Risto is happy to read a SciFi novel from the 1950s, coldly ignoring her attempts to engage with him. Next day, they lock themselves into the car in the garage and have another confrontation, away from their kids. Nothing is resolved and Susanna falls asleep from sheer emotional exhaustion. Meanwhile, Helena and Simo make pleasantries in a banal attempt to communicate. Ella and Lasse catch up with his old friend from seafaring days, she regaling him with stories of people he has never heard of.

Kouvo and DoP Jesse Jalonen observe these curious human interactions, and while the protagonists talk – not so much to each other but just to be heard – the camera focuses on desultory objects. Family Time is a mature and memorable debut, Kouvo channelling Bergman, in his obsession to sweat the small stuff. Certainly a name to remember for the future. AS

BERLINALE | ENCOUNTERS 2023

Il Castillo (2023) Berlinale 2023

Dir.: Martin Benchimol; Cast: Justine Olivo, Alexia Caminos Olivo; Argentina/France 2022, 77 min.

The first solo feature film from Argentine director Marin Benchimol, whose short films have garnered prizes on the festival circuit, is a tight little dark comedy, set deep in the Argentine Pampa, where time has stood still, and class divisions are as blatant as in the era of Juan and Eva Peron.

Sadly, no one is now king of this colossal castle. Once again the inheritance is just a poisoned challis: a once splendid building left by the owner to her former house-keeper Justina (J. Olivo) – with the obligation never to sell the property – the poor woman cannot afford to pay for the upkeep, let alone the much-needed new roof and plumbing system.

The former owner has paid a cruel trick on her devoted employee who she still treats like a servant and smiles benignly on the many photos in a house which is now a burden to Justina and her daughter Alexia (A.C. Olivo). Her family now live in the city, and only comes to El Castillo to celebrate family anniversaries and large gatherings. Meanwhile Justina and her daughter Alexia (A C Olivo) are saddled with a white elephant.

The two new owners might have shared a symbiotic relationship back in the day, but now Alexia is grown up and wants to leave home to work as a car mechanic in the city, with a view to a career a as a Formula Four racing driver. With this in mind, she has installed a play station console and huge screen in her room, and practises on this dummy race track, while stuck in the Pampa with her demanding Mum. It seems the umbilical cord is still attached: when she finally escapes the mansion in her battered car, unforeseen circumstances see her phoning home to her mother for help.

Meanwhile Justine is forced to sell off the livestock, one by one, with the wealthy family making improbable proposals to solve the crisis: there is no doubt they are just waiting for Justine to give up and leave. Justine’s love life is like a running gag, her husband/boyfriend always promising to come and visit, but bailing out at the last moment. Alexia, whose name her mother shouts whenever she gets stuck with a problem – ie. very often, finally makes it to the city, leaving poor Justina wondering whether she will remain an old retainer forever.

Benchimol keeps everything spare in a narrative that never overplays its hand. The interaction between mother and daughter is a portrait of bitter rivalry, with the loser facing a life-shattering defeat. Justina, living in a past, where she was treated like a human being by her mistress, is now at a loss in a fast-moving technological world. The wealthy family look on in quiet satisfaction, during their sporadic visits, having adjusted successfully to their new way of life.

Nico Miranda and Fernando Lorenzale evoke a Henry James like setting of decay and destructive emotions, The colours are saturated perfectly capturing the languid downhill road ahead. Alexia’s failed attempt to escape is symbolic of the emotional cue de sac the two women are caught in. A sad variation on the “Odd-Couple” theme. Intriguing and highly entertaining modern fairytale, if not always successfully structured. AS

BERLINALE 2023 | PANORAMA

Disco Boy (2023)

Dir.: Giacomo Abbruzzese; Cast: Franz Rogowski, Morr Ndiaye, Laetitia Ky, Mikhail Balicki; France/ Poland/Belgium/Italy 2023, 91 min.

Best known for his award-winning short documentary films Giacomo Abbruzzese’s ambitious feature debut centres on the destiny of two men from opposite ends of the world. But despite a clever idea and the extraordinary power of Helene’s Louvart’s magical visuals – which won her a reward for Best Artistic contribution at this year’s Berlinale – Disco Boy’s characters do not share the same ideals and so can never fulfil the film’s plot resolution: one is a soulful humanist hero, the other is merely out for himself.

On a bus crammed with raucously chanting football fans Aleksei (Rogowski) and his friend Mikhail (Balicki) leave the beleaguered republic of Belarus bound for the West, via Poland, on their three-day visa.

In a river near the German/Polish border the men are confronted by German Police on boats. Shots are fired, and Aleksei continues his journey alone. In Paris he undergoes the gruelling procedure of enlisting in the Foreign Legion. The arduous training will eventually achieve his aim of gaining French citizenship.

Thousands of miles away in the Niger Delta Jomo (Ndiaye) and his friend Udoka (Ky) are rebel fighters struggling for the survival of their families, their home, their lives – against the Western-backed government in hock to mighty oil giants. Jomo (Ndiaye) will come head to head with Aleksei, who is leading his men to liberate French hostages kidnapped by the rebel forces.

Jomo and Udoka in the ensuing battle, their souls travel with Aleksei to Paris, where he drinks a glass of Bordeaux in memory of Mikhail – saying goodbye to his past for good -before embarking on a career as disco dancer – the same dream Jomo had. The two merge, and Udoka joins them: Aleksei, a stranger forever in Paris, has finally found fellow travellers, who live like him, in-between worlds.

Disco Boy scores highly on the cinematic front: a light show in its own right full of explosive set pieces – not only in the battle zones – boats glide along the Seine as well as the Niger their lights illuminating the glittering night skies where coloured comets are in free-fall as the whole universe comes alive with sight and sound.

In this magnificent milieu Abbruzzese hopes for a union of souls where the men will merge into one humanitarian mission. Even Franz Rugowski cannot redeem Aleksei who is dislocated in more than one way so there can never be a meeting of the minds with Jomo and Udoka who are selfless humanitarians fighting to keep their home, their village – their lives. Disco Boy is too clever by half to be disingenuous: a feature so rich in talent shoots itself in the foot by letting us feel we are being manipulated because we can see the strings. AS

In CINEMAS FROM 27 March 2024 | BERLINALE 2023 | BEST ARTISTIC CONTRIBUTION COMPETITION

God’s Creatures (2023)

Dir.: Saela Davis, Anna Rose Holmer; Cast: Emily Watson, Paul Mescal, Aisling Franciosi, Declan Conlon, Toni O’Rourke, Lalor Roddy, O’Dwyer); USA/UK/ROI, 100 min.

An ambitious murder story unfolds in the style of a fishy Greek tragedy in this Ireland-set thriller from Brooklyn-based filmmakers Saela Davis and Anna Rose Holmer.

In a dour and windswept fishing village a mother called Mary (O’Dwyer) is crying over the body of her drowned son, while another, Aileen O’Hara (Watson) is celebrating the return from Australia of her own offspring, Bryan (the ubiquitous Paul Mescal). Aileen’s husband Con (Conlon) and daughter Erin (O’Rourke) are less keen to see Bryan who was a tear-away in his youth. Grandfather Pat (Roddy), who spends his days napping, gets on best with Bryan, the two singing old seafarer songs.

Bryan has come back in the hope of reviving his father’s defunct oyster farm, but that’s not his only mission in life. With an eye for the girls he sees every female in the village as a potential paramour but soon comes a cropper with a less pescatarian catch in the shape of Sarah (Franciosi), whose delicate features belie a stern personality when challenged. But Bryan’s ‘way with woman’ fails to make the oysters thrive and soon the plant has to stop working full time due to fungal contamination. Meanwhile Emily Watson, as mesmerising as ever as Aisleen, has more fish to fry that normal grafting in a fish processing plan and dealing with her son’s slimy reputation. She will soon be forced her to make a decision that will destroy everything she has worked for. As that’s not all, the local fishermen soon start complaining about missing catches.

The scope of the production is very much like a TV play, with action scenes covering up for the sparse emotional content: there is no slow dramatic build up, just sudden outbursts of violence, and the motivations are only too obvious. Most members of the O’Hara clan seem rather one-dimensional making this a rather predictable story held together by solid performances, Mescal playing against his usual cuddly casting in Normal People and Aftersun. DoP Chayse Irvin does a great job with his panorama shots of this coastal backwater, and his images in the food procession plant show the terrible working conditions in this seething study of mother love gone wrong. AS

NOW IN CINEMAS FROM 31 MARCH 2023

Java Head (1934)

Dir: J Walter Ruben | Cast Anna Mae Wong, Elizabeth Allen, John Loder, Ralph Richardson |

In the 1880s the port city of Bristol is home Java Head a sailing ship line company. The owner has two sons . One, a handsome seaman is in love with a local girl but unable to marry her due to their feuding fathers. Eventually he returns home with an exotic and upmarket Chinese wife.

Anna Mae Wong gets one of the final roles worthy of her in this adaptation of Joseph Hergesheimer’s novel which manages to sail the high seas without ever leaving Ealing and constitutes the fifth and final of five films she made in Britain.

Although Miss Mae Wong as “a heathen Chinese” married to an Englishman introduced to a horrified Nineteenth century Britain doesn’t even appear until nearly halfway through the film she gets top billing, making an unlikely team with English rose Elizabeth Allan, their names appear before Edmond Gwenn and John Loder who come in at third and fourth with Ralph Richardson coming up at the rear at fifth in the cast list.

Totem (2023)

Dir: Lila Aviles | Naima Senties, Montserrat Maranon, Marisol Gase, Saori Gurza, Mateo Garcia | Mexico, Drama 95′

Totem is another observational piece of filmmaking from Mexican filmmaker Lila Alviles whose debut The Chambermaid garnered awards all over the world. Seen through the eyes of a little girl called Solecita who is a mine of information about the animal kingdom, a place she escapes to avoid the trauma of her father Tona’s terminal illness.

From the exuberant opening scenes in a public restroom the handheld camera thrusts into the intimate hurly burly of domestic life in a whir of comings and goings of the extended family, in a hive of activity where nothing is left to the imagination -except the nature of Tona’s illness -as preparations for his forthcoming birthday are well underway. His wife, an alcoholic with a glass of whisky on the go at all times, is baking a cake, and her sister dyeing her hair. Her uncle Napo soon turns up with a goldfish, and Sol and her brother and little sister name it Nugget.

Close up and personal drama centric movie about an entire family who live together. mother and daughter singing in a public lavatory in close up and personal family relationship.

Meanwhile in the hushed confines of his bedroom Tona -a local celebrity in the local community – is suffering the agonies of some kind of debilitating illness possibly cancer, his carer Cruz tending him patiently all the time aware of the impact his possibly terminal affliction is having on little Sol – an astonishing in her screen debut.- a sensitive little girl who takes everything seriously – not least the end of the world and other matters existential

The family have been putting their heads together to find a way forward for Tona’s treatment – he has been taking morphine but drugs are expensive in Mexico, and chemo is also up for debate. A mystical faith healer has been called into clear the house of evil spirits and balance the positive energy: Ludica has located good energy in a part of the room where the grandmother used to sit and she then sweeps the room with a flaming loaf of bread, charging 3000 pesos for her services. The grumpy grandfather – who speaks through a special gadget – has been tending a bonsai for the past 8 years, a gift especially for his son special day.

Giving up on traditional medicine the family put their faith in their spiritual beliefs in a union of souls which gives the film some of its most exuberant scenes captured by DoP Diego Tenorio. In the light of Tona,’s worsening condition these jubilant celebrations are tinged with a certain poignance making them all the more significant. And although weak and in pain he is determined to make an appearance, and when he does so friends and family are over-joyed to see him and send brightly coloured balloons into the night sky as a gift for the gods. The birthday is a wonderful occasion in rich colours lots of dancing and a special performance from Sol. Ending with an extraordinary booming sound as if the whole universe is resounding in support of Tona. The final scene is simply breathtaking. MT

NOW IN UK CINEMAS 1 DECEMBER 2023 | Totem is Mexico’s Academy Award submission 2024

Cinema Made in Italy | Spring 2023

Cinema Made in Italy showcases the best of Italian cinema with eleven new releases coming to London’s Cine Lumiere from 9 until 13 March 2023

Fantozzi

An insignificant cog in the wheels of a large company, Fantozzi starts his days battling against time (he must clock in) and overcrowded buses; he continues half hidden behind piles of work dumped on him by his crafty colleagues. Things are no better at home. Or in his free time. The film follows the hilarious and sometimes desperate trials and tribulations of our anti-hero, as he tries to get on in life.

Il Colibrì (The Hummingbird) (2022) Dir: Francesca Archibugi

Nanni Moretti, and Berenice Bejo star alongside Pierfrancesco Favino who plays Marco Carrera, aka il Colibrì or “the hummingbird”: a life of fateful coincidences, loss, and stories of absolute love. Il Colibrì is the story of the ancestral force of life, of the arduous struggle we all make to withstand what at times appears intolerable – also by wielding the powerful weapons of illusion, happiness, and good cheer.

Il Signore Delle Formiche (Lord of The Ants) (2022) Dir: Gianni Amelio

At the end of the sixties, a trial was held in Rome that caused a sensation. Playwright and poet Aldo Braibanti (Luigi Lo Cascio) was sentenced to nine years in prison, found guilty of plagio. That is, of having submitted another person, physically and psychologically, to his own will. In this case, a student and friend who was barely of age. The youth’s family had him committed to a psychiatric hospital and subjected to a string of devastating electroshock treatments to “cure” him of that “diabolical” influence. Drawing inspiration from true events, the film tells a story through a chorus of voices.

In Viaggio Dir: Gianfranco Rosi (2022)

This documentary by award-winning filmmaker Gianfranco Rosi centres of the first nine years of Pope Francis’s pontificate during which he made 37 trips visiting 53 countries, focusing on his most important issues: poverty, migration, the environment, solidarity and war. Intrigued by the fact that two of Francis’s trips – the first to the refugees landing in Lampedusa; the second in 2021 to the Middle East – so closely mirrored the itineraries of his films Fuocoammare and Notturno, Rosi follows the Pope’s Stations of the Cross. He sees what he sees, hears what he says and creates a dialogue between archival footage of Francis’ travels, images taken by Rosi himself, recent history and the state of the world today.

Interdit Aux Chiens et Aux Italiens (No Dogs or Italians Allowed) (2022)

In Alain Ughetto’s stop motion animation Luigi and his brothers set out from their native village in the Piedmont, to discover “La Merica”, the fabulous land where dollars grow on trees. Finally, instead of crossing the Atlantic, Luigi puts his backpack down in southern France, with hands that could no longer work.

Le Otto Montagne (The Eight Mountains) (2022)

The Eight Mountains is a story about friendship, fatherhood, and the choices we make in life. In the background, the mountains we climb every day, both physically and mentally. Told through the story of two close friends, this Cannes award-winning feature reflects on the complex nature of human relationships in the modern world.

L’immensità (2022) Dir: Emanuele Crialese

Spanish actor Penelope Cruz gives a tour de force performance at the centre of this 1970s set drama that unfolds in Rome at time of great social and cultural change, full of grit and glamour. The young Borghetti family has just moved into one of the many freshly-built apartment blocks in the city. The move is bittersweet. Despite the beautiful, sweeping views of Rome from their top floor apartment, the family is not as close as they once were.

Clara (Cruz) and Felice (Vincenzo Amato) are no longer in love, but are unable to leave each other. Clara finds refuge from her loneliness in the shelter of her special relationships with her three children. The oldest, Adriana (11), an unknown child in this new neighbourhood, deliberately presents as a boy to the local children, pushing the family’s bond towards a breaking point.

Margini (Margins) (2022) Dir: Niccolo Falsetti

Summer 2008. Three friends have the chance of a lifetime: opening for their favourite punk hardcore band. At the very last moment, the concert falls through but Edo, Iac and Miche don’t give up. To them punk is more than music, it’s a lifestyle. In a blink, they decide to bring the gig to Grosseto, the silent and conservative city where they live. All the difficulties and problems they face on their way risk to blow up their lives and their friendship.

The March on Rome (2022) Dir: Mark Cousins

Through little-seen archive and his characteristically cinematic analysis, Mark Cousins narrates the ascent of fascism in Italy and its fall-out across 1930s Europe. Both essay film and historical document, Cousins contextualises history through the now, holding a mirror to a political landscape of a creeping far right and manipulated media.

Notte Fantasma (Ghost Night) (2022) Dir: Fulvio Risuleo

This award-winning two-handed psychological thriller sees a plain-clothes policeman apprehend a seventeen year old boy, after watching him buying dope. The detective will drive aimlessly around all night with the teenager in the back of his car.

Siccità (Drought) (2022) Dir: Paolo Virzi

Drought has plagued the Italian capital of Rome for three years now, and the lack of water has changed everybody’s life. While strict rules add to people’s misery, odd characters roam the streets of the capital. Outcasts, achievers, victims, and wrongdoers are all part of the same tragic picture, and they are all after the same thing: redemption.

Spaccaossa (The Bone Breakers) (2022) Dir: Vincenzo Pirrotta

Inside a warehouse in Palermo, a group of people smashes a man’s arm to pieces with a wheelie bag packed with weights. This is the method used by an amateur criminal organization that fractures the limbs of its willing victims before staging fake accidents and raking in the insurance payouts. Vincenzo recruits the individuals from among the down-and-outs that haunt the city streets, where Luisa is a habitué, since she gets her crack there. Vincenzo’s problems suddenly get worse, though, after a series of mistakes shut him out of the gang, and Luisa is now his only chance: he convinces her to have her bones broken.

CINEMA MADE IN ITALY : MARCH 9 – 13 2023 | CINE LUMIERE LONDON

Cidade Rabat (2023)

Dir: Susana Nobre | Raquel Castro, Paula Barcia, Laura Afonso | Drama 101

Portuguese director Susana Nobre won the prestigious La Femis Scholars’ Award with her short film Provas, Exorcismos. She is back in the Berlinale with Cidade Ribat a follow-up to her unusual feature No Táxi do Jack, a part-road movie part-ethnological portrait of small-town rural Portugal.

Grief and the unsuspecting consequence of mourning are the focus of this laconic drama that centres on 40 year old Helena (Castro), a typical 21st century ‘everywoman’ who seems to take life in her stride, juggling a lover, an ex-husband, a daughter, and her elderly mother – who we meet briefly in an early vignette – and whose death is viewed as just another daily task to be dealt with: we watch her choosing a casket with her sister. Yet, despite her obvious sadness the death provides an unexpected relief for Helena who has been so weighed down with her responsibilities and can now finally let her hair down, and she does.

With its limpid colours and artful compositions Cidade Ribat is quotidian yet thematically rich as a study of just how much 21st century women have to deal with and accomplish in their seemingly mundane everyday lives. Cidade Ribat is testament to how the world has moved on for women since the days of Jeanne Dealmann, yet this liberation and freedom has brought with it infinite complications. MT

IN ARTHOUSE CINEMAS | BERLINALE 2023 | FORUM

Here (2023) Berlinale 2023 | Encounters

Dir: Bas Devos | Cast: Liyo Gong, Stefan Goat | Drama, 82

A serendipitous relationship between a Romanian construction worker and a Belgian-Chinese woman slowly ignites in this subtle yet luminous feature from Belgian auteur Bas Devos.

Landscape, countryside and the built environment are integral characters in this lowkey love story that relies on Grimm Vendekerckhove’s exquisite camerawork and Devos’ spare dialogue to tell its charmingly cinematic story.

Stefan is on the verge of going back to his own country and while doing the valedictory rounds with a parting gift for friends and family he chances upon his future lover who is preparing her doctorate on mosses.

With Here Devos adds another spare but memorable fourth feature to his archive that started with Violet, Hellhole and Ghost Tropic. His features submerge us into their respective worlds so the storytelling becomes an organic experience, enveloping us the slowly developing love story between two characters very much at ease with their own respective lives in a glowing arthouse film that unfolds in a series of radiantly-crafted tableaux in 4:3 format. MT

BERLINALE 2023 | ENCOUNTERS | FIPRESCI PRIZE WINNER 2023

The Burdened (2023) Berlinale 2023 | Panorama

Dir.: Amr Gamal; Cast: Khaled Hamdan, Abeer Mohammed, Samah Alamrani, Awsam Abdulrahman; South Yemen/Sudan 2023, 91 min.

Polish-born Yemenite director Amr Gamal follows his 2018 feature debut Ten Days before the Wedding – the first to come out of the Yemen in 30 years – with a solemn and understated family drama.

Adopting a docudrama style Gamal paints a grim view of his country with this subdued ‘case study’. It’s October 2019 and the Yemenite capital of Aden is in social and economic turmoil with Isra’a (Mohammed) and Ahmed (Hamdan) amongst the victims of the economic crisis, with their fourth child on the way. Ahmed is still waiting to be paid by his employer, the state TV station, and his political persuasions prevent him from working for one of the private TV channels, although his wife is determined to have their kids educated in the private system. The couple seem caught between their political and their financial possibilities, and Ahmed has started to beat his wife.

But the most urgent problem is getting rid of the unplanned baby. Isra’a’s relative Muna is a doctor at the local hospital, but has refused them an abortion in the past on account of her own strict Islamist views. Trying to persuade her otherwise, Isra’a sends a video of a Koran scholar explaining that abortion is ‘Halal’ until the foetus develops a soul after 120 days. Grudgingly Muna agrees, but then Ahmed has to bribe the ER doctor for his signature to let the surgery go ahead. Meanwhile Isra’a realises the abortion will be the end to her friendship with Muna.

In the streets of the capital conflicting militias are fighting pitch battles for supremacy, make simple driving a hazard, Ahmed’s taxi – a loss making business – is damaged by one of their convoys, with little hope of repair. DoP Mrinal Desai captures the mayhem with a handheld camera following hot on the heels of Ahmed and his beleaguered family, their own private civil war providing a metaphor for the state of the nation. AS

BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL | PANORAMA 2023 | AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL FILM AWARD WINNER 2023

After the Fox (1966) Tribute to Burt Bacharach

Dir: Vittorio De Sica | Cast: Peter Sellers, Victor Mature, Britt Ekland, Martin Balsam | Comedy Drama

It’s not every day you see a film scripted by Neil Simon and directed by Vittorio De Sica, and this certainly will never be regarded as a highlight in any of the participants’ careers (with the possible exception of Victor Mature).

De Sica himself contributes an amusing cameo as himself (and probably had fun pillaring the critic who has to be bodily carried out of court) while Peter Sellers adopted the accent and mannerisms of the late Mario Zampi for the part of the bogus director claiming to be making a film called ‘The Gold of Cairo’.

Akim Tamiroff in a fez as usual makes Sellers look like a follower of The Method, while poor Martin Balsam looks as if he wandered off a different set. Once heard Burt Bacharach’s title song is never forgotten. @RichardChatten

La Montagne (2022)

Dir: Thomas Salvador | Cast: Thomas Salvador, Louise Bourgoin, Martine Chevallier, Laurent Poitrenaux | France, 113′

Not since Julian Polsler’s visionary Austrian drama Der Wand (2012) has there been such an imaginative eco-thriller, set this time in the French Alps. La Montagne successfully blends mountaineering and sci-fi into a lowkey love story that explores the mysterious kinetic qualities of the Alps.

Expect to see some really spectacular special effects along with superior widescreen panoramas of the mountains in the early Spring thaw. But also a sense of danger that slowly builds when the introspective main character Pierre – played by the director himself – is seen walking across a glacier in crampons and later enduring ferocious winds in his small bivouac pitched on the ascent to the summit of the Aiguille du Midi near Chamonix Mont Blanc.

Salvador, who won the SACD award at last year’s Cannes Film Festival for this enigmatic sophomore feature, adopts a docudrama style with some impressive Alpine set pieces, and adds authenticity to this intimate story with some serious technical detail during Pierre’s meeting with his climbing pal Marc (Poitrenaux) that sees them take on a complex bit of rock climbing and offers impressive views of the peaks as well as emotionally charged moments when Pierre slips on the ice.

In a mountainside restaurant Pierre then strikes up a conversation with Lea (Bourgoin) on the pretence of asking her to pop a card in the post. This leads to a meeting with his family at the base of Chamonix where he argues with his brother who is not happy about Pierre’s laissez-faire attitude to keeping in contact with the rest of them.

Pierre crosses paths with Lea again and a romantic frisson develops when she offers a handy tip on how to tie non-slip laces on his boots. Smoke from a distant landslide then grabs Pierre’s attention as the tone changes gear with a more sinister undertow as Pierre goes to investigate and discovers a mysterious light glowing out of the rock-face, the luminosity intensifying as night gradually falls on the hostile terrain.

On closer examination Pierre discovers what appears to be a sparkling globular mass that travels around the rock-face like the glowing embers of volcano magma. But before Pierre can investigate further his attempts are thwarted by an unexpected turn of events in this intriguing mountain adventure that splices the surreal with a serendipitous story of modern love. MT

NOW ON RELEASE IN FRANCE

Mal Viver (2023) Silver Bear Jury Prize | Berlinale 2023

Dir: João Canijo | Cast: Anabela Moreira, Rita Blanco, Madalena Almeida, Cleia Almeida, Vera Barreto Portugal / France 2023 Competition | World premiere Drama, Portugal

An inheritance proves to be a poisoned challis and one that will flush out memories and deep-seated resentments brewing between five members of a close family in this immersive drama from Portuguese auteur João Canijo.

The property has seen better days. Once a lavishly appointed architect-designed Sixties hotel boasting extensive grounds a generous kidney-shaped swimming pool – that still provides the women with a regenerative backwater and a break from each other – the place is now in need of extensive refurbishment and the staff have resorted to using bleach and fly spray just to keep the place clean.

Conijo’s female-centric narrative provides fertile ground for a richly discursive and contemplative slow-burn drama whose languid pacing often bristles with insight and delicate observations in mulling over the women’s collective past together, and seemingly futile future touching on domestic themes of cooking, child-rearing and the inevitability of ageing, as well as wider issues that allude to the social malaise in modern day Portugal.

Other scenes focus on trivial squabbles that often flare up from nowhere between mother and daughter as they try on shoes, or compare haircuts. Often there is intrigue or enigma surrounding what is said – as much as unsaid – as we piece together the past and present of these relatable interlocking characters.

Many of the conversations take place offscreen and focus on the central character Piedade (Moreira) whose desperate cries for help fall on the deaf ears of her mother (Blanco), daughter (Almeida) and extended family who are too consumed with their own trivial lives to focus on her subtle call for help.

Pietade is often seen eavesdropping on her mother Sara while trying to keep her snappy emotional support dog from squeaking or barking, other desultory conversations unfold in the peace and quiet of this tranquil rural location.

DoP Leonor Teles choses a a vibrant aesthetic and a variety of camera angles to keep us involved: often viewing the characters from above or at waist level, or on the widescreen and in intimate closeup while a quietly triumphant score of Elgar’s Nimrod at one point plays in the background.

The ending comes as no surprise to those tuned in to Piedade’s particularly middle-aged female sense of futility – yet it provides a perfect conclusion to this mature and artfully framed family drama playing this year in the Berlinale main competition

BERLINALE 2023| 15 -26 February 2023

Magic Mike’s Last Dance (2023)

Dir.: Steven Soderbergh; Cast: Channing Tatum, Salma Hayek Pinault, Ayub Khan Din, JemiliaGeorge, Juliette Motamed; USA 2023, 112 min.

When Steven Soderbergh burst onto the film scene with Sex, Lies and Videotape the world was aghast at this shiny new talent. Decades later his final part of a trilogy that started in 2012 is tame and overloaded with characters and sub-plots. And by the end nobody really cares what happens.

Last Dance centres on a wealthy soon-to-be-divorced couple – Maxandra Mendoza (Hayek Pinault) and ex-male stripper Mike Lane (Tatum). After their furniture business goes bust Mike meets his friendly creditors via Zoom. The couple then spend an evening of wild passion (no sex – mind) and Mike re-arranges Maxandra’s flat in Miami. She offers him an opportunity in the theatre business – having inherited London’s “The Rattigan” in the divorce settlement. There, a tedious costume drama is soon abandoned for a night out with male strippers who run riot under Mike’s direction (minus their g-strings).

The whole saga is narrated by Maxandra’s teenage daughter Zadie (George) who is a mixture of “Alexa” and Wikipedia, and even finds time to write a novel in the ensuing chaos. Meanwhile Max’s chauffeur/confidante Victor (Din) tries in vain to keep his mistress from making any more mischief. A motley selection of half-baked characters join in the farce including Max’s soon-to-be-divorced husband and the local council chief-administrator who wants to close the theatre but is persuaded otherwise by a visit of the stripper ensemble in the bus (!). The focus here is really on Mike and Max: will they, or won’t they do it?

Brilliant production values nearly save the day but cannot make up for an underwhelming and unfocused production that overstays its welcome at nearly two hours. AS

ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE FROM 10 FEBRUARY 2023

Knock at the Cabin (2023)

Dir: M Night Shyamalan | Cast: Dave Bautista, Jonathan Groff, Rupert Grint, Nikki Amuka-Bird | US Thriller

A magical cabin in the woods becomes a scene of horror in this latest ‘apocalypse’ from M Night Shyamalan. Little Wen (Cui) and her parents Eric (Groff) and Andrew (Aldridge) are enjoying a family holiday when their rustic idyll is interrupted by four complete strangers with seemingly evil intent – judging by their weapons – although they profess otherwise, in this unusual home invasion thriller.

On of the interlopers, the meat-headed Dave Bautista, has already befriended Win in the film’s opening scene but we know he is not to be trusted. And pretty soon Dave make the bizarre request that the family sacrifice one of their members in order to save to rest of humanity.

Adapted from a novel by Paul Tremblay, the film’s initially intriguing premise soon gives way to some doom laden scenes of destruction, violence and existential menace. Saved – only just – by a solid and persuasive cast Knock in the Cabin is just another example of doom-laden fare we really could do without in the negative world we live in. MT

NOW ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE

Amanda (2023)

Dir: Carolina Cavalli; Cast: Benedetta Percaroli, Galatea Bellugi, Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Margherita Maccapani Missoni, Monica Nappo, Michele Bravi; Italy/France 2022, 93 min.

Amanda is the anti-social but wickedly amusing daughter of one of Italy’s rich industrialist families in this impressive first feature from Carolina Cavalli who celebrates female friendship.

The sardonic 24-year-old (Benedetta Percaroli) is back in her home town of Turin after spending some time in Paris. In a bid to put distance between her and her family, who have no time for her whims and capricious behaviour, she opts to stay in a hotel but makes a regular appearance at the family dinner table and seems to have hit it off with her niece, much to the consternation of Amanda’s older sister Marina (Missoni).

Amanda’s first object of desire is a regular visitor to the Cinematheque – a place of magic for Amanda – but neither of them makes any contact. The “Dude” (Bravi) is next in line, but after it transpires he only wants to distribute free condoms – instead of drugs – he bites the dust as potential bestie number two.

Then a blast from the past arrives in the shape of Rebecca (Bellugi), her best friend from primary school. After a long stand-off – Rebecca suffers from claustrophobia – the two manage to connect, but a horse will be the vital link in cementing the women’s friendship.

Although Amanda is not very lovable Cavalli’s clever writing skills make her an irresistible force of nature: she can be witty, but her comments often cut to the quick. All this scathing comedy and a string of amusing plot lines make the film whizz by leaving us wanting more. Cavalli – unlike her feminine creation – adopts a restrained approach to the storyline that – at just over 90 minutes – is well worth watching. AS

NOW ON CURZON From 2 June 2023

Battle of the Sexes (1960)

Dir: Charles Crichton | Cast: Peter Sellers, Robert Morley, Constance Cummings, Jameson Clark, Donald Pleasence | UK Comedy 90′

Despite the vaguely saucy title and brash opening narration by Sam Wanamaker this is actually a very gentle comedy made by veterans of Ealing Studios such as director Charles Crichton.

Made in the days when Peter Sellars was still a character actor rather than a personality he thoroughly immerses himself in the surprisingly self-effacing role of a mild mannered wage slave who rather recalls his drunken projectionist in The Smallest Show on Earth.

Shot in Edinburgh – the remotest location Constance Cummings’ superiors could think of to send her – the sombre mood is well served by Freddie Francis’ low-key photography allied to skilful use of sound plausibly evoking a clothing company so traditional that use of the word ‘synthetic’ makes grown men faint and even a pen with a squeaky nib seems intrusive. @RichardChatten

Berlinale Film Festival | Competition Line-up 2023

20.000 especies de abejas (20,000 Species of Bees) by Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren | with Sofía Otero, Patricia López Arnaiz, Ane Gabarain, Itziar Lazkano, Sara Cózar Spain 2023 Competition | World premiere

Art College 1994 by Liu Jian People’s Republic of China 2023 Competition | World premiere | Animation

Bai Ta Zhi Guang (The Shadowless Tower by Zhang Lu | with Xin Baiqing, Huang Yao, Tian Zhuangzhuang, Nan Ji, Wang Hongwei People’s Republic of China 2022 Competition | World premiere

Bis ans Ende der Nacht (Till the End of the Night) by Christoph Hochhäusler | with Timocin Ziegler, Thea Ehre, Michael Sideris Germany 2023 Competition | World premiere

BlackBerry by Matt Johnson | with Jay Baruchel, Glenn Howerton, Matt Johnson, Cary Elwes, Saul Rubinek Canada 2023 Competition | World premiere

Disco Boy by Giacomo Abbruzzese | with Franz Rogowski, Morr Ndiaye, Laëtitia Ky, Leon Lučev France / Italy / Belgium / Poland 2023 Competition | World premiere | Debut film

Le grand chariot (The Plough) by Philippe Garrel | with Louis Garrel, Damien Mongin, Esther Garrel, Lena Garrel, Francine Bergé France / Switzerland 2022 Competition | World premiere

Ingeborg Bachmann – Reise in die Wüste (Ingeborg Bachmann – Journey into the Desert) by Margarethe von Trotta | with Vicky Krieps, Ronald Zehrfeld, Tobias Resch, Basil Eidenbenz, Luna Wedler Switzerland / Austria / Germany / Luxembourg 2023 Competition | World premiere

Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything by Emily Atef | with Marlene Burow, Felix Kramer, Cedric Eich Germany 2023 Competition | World premiere

Limbo by Ivan Sen | with Simon Baker, Rob Collins, Natasha Wanganeen, Nicholas Hope, Mark Coe Australia 2023 Competition | World premiere

Mal Viver (Bad Living) by João Canijo | with Anabela Moreira, Rita Blanco, Madalena Almeida, Cleia Almeida, Vera Barreto Portugal / France 2023 Competition | World premiere

Manodrome by John Trengove | with Jesse Eisenberg, Adrien Brody, Odessa Young, Sallieu Sesay, Philip Ettinger United Kingdom / USA 2023 Competition | World premiere

Music by Angela Schanelec | with Aliocha Schneider, Agathe Bonitzer, Marisha Triantafyllidou, Argyris Xafis Germany / France / Serbia 2023 Competition | World premiere

Past Lives by Celine Song | with Greta Lee, Teo Yoo, John Magaro USA 2022 Competition | International premiere | Debut film

Roter Himmel (Afire) by Christian Petzold | with Thomas Schubert, Paula Beer, Langston Uibel, Enno Trebs, Matthias Brandt Germany 2023 Competition | World premiere

Sur l’Adamant (On the Adamant) by Nicolas Philibert France / Japan 2022 Competition | World premiere | Documentary Form

The Survival of Kindness (Das Überleben der Freundlichkeit) by Rolf de Heer | with Mwajemi Hussein, Deepthi Sharma, Darsan Sharma Australia 2022 Competition | International premiere

Suzume by Makoto Shinkai Japan 2022 Competition | International premiere | Animation

Tótem by Lila Avilés | with Naíma Sentíes, Monserrat Marañon, Marisol Gasé, Saori Gurza, Teresita Sánchez Mexico / Denmark / France 2023 Competition | World premiere

BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL 2023 | 15 – 26 FEBRUARY 2023

Dalva (2022) Rotterdam Film Festival 2023

Dir: Emmanuelle Nicot; Cast: Zelda Samson, Alexis Manenti, Fanta Guirassi, Sandrine Blancke, Jean-Louis Coulloc’h; Belgium/France 2022, 85 min.

Emmanuelle Nicot wrote and directed this audacious first feature about a sensitive twelve-year old girl, the titular Dalva (Sansom), who has been sexually groomed by her incestuous father, the two sharing an intimate and outwardly loving relationship, more like lovers rather than father and daughter.

Nicot’s skills as a casting agent are key to her successful drama: Samson is totally convincing in the role of the outwardly shy and vulnerable young girl who has the assured gracefulness of a Geisha girl, knowing how to play every man she meets. Dressed titillatingly in lacy black dresses, drop earrings and stockings, she has clearly been a target for paedophile clients and the film’s violent opening scenes witness her being forcefully separated from her father (Coulloc’h) who has literally kept her to himself, moving rapidly from place to place, to escape the authorities, and her mother (Blancke).

She arrives, kicking and screaming, at the foyer for vulnerable females demanding to be re-united with her father. When she is told by her new carer Jayden (Manenti) that he abused her sexually, she claims: “But I never said no”. Isolated from the other girls, she tries several times to escape, and these scenes picture her negotiating walls in slinky evening dress. Brought back to the home, she befriends Samia (first timer Guirassi) who has been raised by a negligent sex-worker mother, the two offering each other complementary tips on how to survive the rough and tumble of the institution.

But Dalva has not given up the idea of seeing her father again, and she tries to manipulate Jayden with inappropriate sexual overtures, trying to seduce him into being a second father figure. Finally, the authorities give in, and Dalva is allowed to visit her father in jail, accompanied by Jayden. In a moving vignette, her father admits to being a paedophile abuser, destroying Dalva’s world for good.

Nicot directs with assurance, guiding Samson through the often upsetting confrontations. DoP Caroline Guimbal captures the ‘female gaze’ with her delicate images of Dalva’s interpretation of mature womanhood, keeping to the role her father has groomed her for, to perfection. It’s a performance within a performance. The close-ups of Dalva are particularly evocative, Samson has that rare ability of conveying strong emotion without over-acting, quite an achievement for one so young.

DALVA wins the AUDIENCE AWARD | ROTTERDAM FILM FESTIVAL 2023

The Whale (2022)

Dir.: Darren Aronofsky, Cast: Brendan Fraser, Hong Chan, Ty Simkins, Samantha Morton, Sadie Sink; USA 2022, 117 min.

The Whale never breaks free from its claustrophobic stage origins, adapted for the screen by Samual D Hunter and based on his 2012 play. In contrast to his usual fare Darren Aronofsky’s direction is restrained, by his own admission, in a feature that deals with the ‘elephant in the room’ in the 21st century: Obesity. Brendan Fraser beefs up for a gargantuan performance as the fated fatty Charlie, traumatised by his partner’s suicide and wallowing towards an early grave in a dour Idaho backwater where he teaches creative writing via Zoom.

Charlie has no desire to be hospitalised and his ample finances provide for nurse Liz (Chau) to look after him, his estranged wife Mary (Morton) and daughter Ellie (Sink) – putting in appearances for obvious reasons – but they are angry and shouty in contrast to the benign and philosophical Charlie who feel for increasingly as he tries to put past to rights. Christian cult member Elder Thomas (Simkins) brings an innocuous twist to the plot, completing the quintet of depressive truth-seekers.

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE IN UK + FRANCE

The Apartment (1960)

Dir/Wri: Billy Wilder | Cast: Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray, Ray Walston | US Drama 125’

As he handed Billy Wilder the Academy Award for Best Picture (the last to go to a black & white movie until ‘Schindler’s List’) Moss Hart wryly remarked to him “Better quit now, Billy. It’s not going to get any better than this!”.

Appropriately paired on BBC2 this afternoon (although in the wrong order) with Brief Encounter which contained the scene with Valentine Dyall that inspired it; when I first saw The Apartment half a century ago at the age of 13 even then I found it as melancholy as it was funny.

It was a sign of the times that Best Picture went to such a gown-up film; and ironically Hope Holiday (now 91), who played Margie MacDougall, has just revealed that soon after making this was sexually harassed by Jerry Lewis. The line “that’s the way it crumbles, cookie-wise” has become one of the most memorable lines in comedy cinema history. @RichardChatten

NOW ON PRIME VIDEO MGM

Women Talking (2022)

Dir.: Sarah Polley; Cast: Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, Frances McDormand, Judith Ivey, Ben Whishaw, August Winter; USA 2022, 104 min.

With all the dystopian dramas around at the moment Sarah Polley offers a rewarding human story full of hope that unfolds within a religious cult in a remote corner of contemporary Bolivia.

In the aftermath to ongoing abuse from their menfolk, a group of women – carried by a stellar cast of Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley and Frances McDormand – try to come to terms with their experience and focus on finding a positive solution to determine their future and that of their children.

For years, men have used cattle anaesthetics to subdue the women, raping everyone of them between four and sixty. On top of it, they have accused the women of making it all up, claiming that demons were at work. But the seven men are now in custody in the nearby town, the rest are collecting money to free the perpetrators from jail. The women have two days to come up with a practical answer: there are three alternatives: Submit to the men by forgiving them -to keep the status quo; stay and fight – or leave. Scarface Janz (McDormand, (the film’s producer) choses the first option, but she is in the minority and soon leaves the meeting. Ona (Mara) changes her mind and votes to leave, Salome (Foy) wants to stay and fight, even if that means transgressing the religious laws of the colony. Mariche (Buckley) even speaks out the unspeakable: committing murder as an act of revenge.

The only man present is schoolteacher August Epp (Whishaw), who is taking the minutes of the meeting. None of the women can read or write, having been deprived of the basic education. Epp is in love with Ona who is pregnant after having been raped. Another question is how to deal with the children: if they vote for ‘leave’, what will happen to the children. Maternal instincts will clash with the overall decision.

Women Talking is a calm and edifying experience. Salome comments “freedom is an endless meeting”, something straight out of 1960s. And: “Looking back, we saw that violence was happening everywhere”; the women try to explore their own guilt examine whether they have somehow colluded with their menfolk by letting them get away with abuse, just to keep the peace – and the religious order “set up by men”.

DoP Luc Montpellier reflects the vapid existence of these women with a bleached out colour palette of pale hues. In the end, with The Monkees “DaydreamBeliever” blasting over the end titles, nothing will be the same any more.

IN CINEMAS FROM 17 FEBRUARY 2023

Cassandra Cat (1963) Blu-ray

Dir: Vojtěch Jasný | Cast: Jan Werich, Emília Vášáryová, Vlastimil Brodský and Jiří Sovák | Czechoslovakia, 101 mins

A Special Jury Prize winner at Cannes in 1963 Cassandra Cat is an allegorical fable in which life in a small town is turned upside down with the arrival of a magician and his cat. Everyone’s true character is revealed through the cat’s gaze and recognized for who they truly are in visually stunning musical scenes. A provocative and beautifully executed fantasy with great camerawork, this film was seen as an unacceptable take on the shortcomings of communist society after the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and banned.

Making its world premiere on blu-ray courtesy of Second Run in a 4K restoration

White Plastic Sky (2023) Berlinale 2023

Dir.: Tibor Banoczki, Sarolta Szabo; Animation feature with the voices of Tamas Keresztes, Zsofia Szamosi, Judith schell, Zsolt Nagy; Hungary/Slovakia 2022, 110 min.

Hungarian animator directors/writers Tibor Banoczki and Sarolta Szabo have had great success with their short films like Leftovers, which were shown all over the festival circuit. White Plastic Sky is their first feature length animation film, an imaginative sci-fi animation showcasing their talent.

White Plastic Sky is a haunting dystopian parable, in the same vein as cult classic Solyent Green and Elysium, it unfolds in mixture of 2D and 3D, and an effective roto-scaping technique that allows the animators to trace and create animation frames via life-action footage.

In Budapest in 2123 people are paying a high price for their survival: the sky is a dome covering the city, and certain death follows within three days of leaving the zone due to a shortage of food and oxygen. If they make it to the age of fifty an enforced implant recycles them into oxygen and food for the remaining population. The gruesome process is euphemistically called “serving the city”.

28 year old Stefan (Keresztes) a psychiatrist, and his musician wife Nora (Szamosi), are mourning the death of their son Tomi and their marriage is in trouble. On impulse, Nora decides to gift herself to “the city”. Stefan is shocked, and tries to talk her out of it, but she is adamant. Some of his friends in the administration department, give him access to the plant where he pretends to interview the technical crew.

An enigmatic doctor (Schell), who is only a few weeks away from her fiftieth birthday, helps him to get hold of Nora who is not yet affected by the implanted branch. The three of them set out to visit an elderly professor, now in his eighties, in a part of the country where the security services have no access. On the journey they are attacked by soldiers and Nora and Stefan are left alone to find the man who is able to remove the branch from Nora’s body. But can the couple trust a man who has condemned his own daughter and her husband to serve humankind?

Technological progress has certainly been made with driverless cars and other new-fangled vehicles speeding through the city, creating a bogus impression of progress, but outside is a barren landscape of desolate countryside and uninhabited cities, and the human element seemed to have regressed to the Dark Ages. White Plastic Sky is original and stunning in its form and content, painting a menacing view of a future where man is no longer a sentient form of life, despite so-called progress. AS

BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL | ENCOUNTERS 2023

The Beast in the Jungle (2023) Berlinale 2023

Dir.: Patric Chiha; Cast: Anais Demoustier, Tom Mercier, Beatrice Dalle, Martin Vischer, Sophie Demeyer; France/Austria/Belgium 2023, 103 min.

A doomed love story is given a twentieth century spin into the future in this dizzying drama, set against the chronicles of club music – from disco to techno – between 1979 and 2004.

The Beast in the Jungle was published exactly 120 years ago and is generally considered Henry James’ finest novella. Transporting the action from an English country mansion to a nightclub in Belgium, Patric Chiha’s fifth feature imagines a couple who meet on the dance floor at a beach rave in 1971.

John (Tom Mercier from Golden Bear 2019 Winner Synonymes) confesses to May (Demoustier) that he is destined to do something extraordinary with his life. When they meet again in a Paris club five years later, May reminds him of his bold claim, and John invites her to join him for the big event. May is already involved with Alice (Demeyer), a graphic designer, but is increasingly drawn to Pierre (Vischer) who loves her unconditionally.

In the background, but somehow taking centre stage, is the “physionomiste” (Dalle) who controls admissions to the club. There is a running commentary on topical news items such as the election of Francois Mitterand, first socialist president of the V. Republic in 1981 – but May and John are oblivious as they wander around absorbed in each other. A man in a car shouts “this is a night for fucking, not walking” – hitting on a raw nerve in the couple’s relationship: they have not yet – nor ever will – make love, and they only touch each other just before the end when they attempt to dance for the first time.

The “Berlin Wall” falls in 1989 and by now May is married to Pierre, but she still meets John regularly, both waiting for the event that will change everything, to happen. The Aids epidemic impacts on the club’s attendance records but, unlike Alice, May and John seem unaffected by the tragedy – apart from the time when the club has to close.

Finally all is revealed and, this being a Henry James novella, we know the ending will be a cruel one for those disaffected by love. Demoustier and Mercer are an ideal couple both being in love with the notion of their uniqueness. Mercier’s John is indifference personified, he hardly talks but gazes sullenly into the far away distance where he believes his promised land will materialise. Demoustier gives May enough enigmatic power to convince us that she believes in John’s prophecy. She rebuffs Pierre and Alice, who really care for her, and follows John on his path of vanity and self-glorification.

DoP Celine Bozon takes us on full throttle joyride through 25 years of music and dance, leaving the audience breathless. Beatrice Dalle is a perfect club impresario . dominating proceedings with her glowering presence, Chiha always ensuring that the focus is on the leading couple and not on the excitement of the all-consuming rave. Melancholic, like Mia Hansen-Love’s take on the same period of counter-culture music in Eden, The Beast in the Jungle is full of bizarre events, held together by James’ spirit of sadistic emotional obsession. AS

BERLINALE FiLM FESTIVAL 2023 | 15 – 26 FEBRUARY 2023

Empire (2023) Gothenburg Film Festival 2023

Dir.: Frederikke Aspock; Cast: Anna Neye, Sara Fanta Traore, Claus Riis Ostergaard, Jesper Groth, Tyler Erroll Murray, James Sampson, Cherie Celeste Malone; Denmark 2022, 92 min.

This lively costume drama from Danish director Frederikke Aspock satirises racism with an outwardly light ironic tone, but behind the brightly coloured sets and costumes there lurk some hard facts about colonialism during the mid nineteenth century.

Back in 1848 the Danish West Indies comprised the island of Saint Thomas, Saint John and Saint Croix (sold to the US in 1917). The story follows Anna Heegaard (Neye), a ‘free coloured’ woman who owns her own slaves and is living in the State House Mansion with the Danish Governor General Peter von Schotten (Ostergaard) who has a wife and family back home in Denmark.

Anna runs the place with a rod of iron, subjecting her black staff members to her draconian power games while pretending to be their friends. Her Maid of Honour, Petrine (Traore), who lives ‘in house’ with her young son Frederik (Murray), gets the brunt of Anna’s methods, but behind the scenes the slaves are starting to contemplate revolt.

The plot turns on Anna’s dominating attitude which extends beyond mere household matters and into the governor’s affairs of state. Gradually she becomes embroiled on both sides of the fence after a visit from Admiral Irminger (Groth) requesting that von Schottten plead the King for military support against the Obeah rebels. Anna overrides the Governor’s agenda, writing her own letter to the King, forging von Schotten’s handwriting, and asking for military support to be prepared in the event of a rebel uprising – something von Schotten has no intention of doing – with tragic consequences.

Beyond the light-hearted voice-over this is a cruel feature with episodes of brutal violence that point to moral decay on all sides, led by the Danish authorities, who will later be instrumental in selling the colony to the Americans, without asking the inhabitants. DoP Linda Wassberg captures the resplendent colours of the island setting, but is equally apt in showing the fatalities in a tour-de-force of human evil. AS

GOTHENBURG FILM FESTIVAL 2023

We are Next of Kin (2022) Rotterdam Film Festival 2023

Dir: Hans Christian Schmid | Cast: Cast: Claude Heinrich, Adina Vetter, Justus von Dohnanyi, Hans Low, Yorck Dippe, Enno Trebs, Fabian Hinrichs, Philipp Hauss | Drama 118’

The aftermath of an abduction is seen through the eyes of a 13-year-old boy unimpressed by the bungled attempts of those entrusted to bring his father back in this sober domestic-centred drama from seasoned German director Hans Christian Schmid.

Jan Philipp Reemtsma was kidnapped in 1996, and the film is based on his son Johann Scheerer’s autobiographical novel that views the world through his burgeoning adolescent experience of adults in authority struggling to cope with their own infallibilities.

Johann (Claude Heinrich) is clearly in awe but also resentful of his father (Philipp Hauss), an accomplished academic who is clearly disappointed in his unruly teenage son. The opening scenes of We Are Next of Kin picture a typical scenario with a father trying to drum some sense into a boy who is more keen on playing in a band that focusing on his schoolwork.

Jan’s subsequent kidnapping is a subdued off-screen affair and Johann then witnesses his mother Kathrin (a steely Adina Vetter) and the family solicitor Schwenn (Justus von Dohnanyi) putting their heads together to work out what do in the face of the large ransom demanded by the abductors. Their efforts are supported when two special branch detectives Vera (Yorck Dippe) and Nickel (Enno Trebs) come on board with their ‘specialist’ negotiating skills.

From then on the drama turns on the fraught psychological and strategic aspects of the kidnapping with the focus on human error rather than the event itself, Jan’s whereabouts and circumstances remaining rather shady in a abduction that took place before the advent of the internet and today’s technological advances.

There’s a traditional feel to proceedings with old-fashioned ransom notes and letters being the kidnap ‘currency’ rather than mobile ‘phone messages and texts. Although there are some tense scenes, the film’s measured pacing reflects the often stark reality of the kidnap situation for the family and their advisors left to suffer the quietly devastating emotional toll of being controlled and menaced by an unknown outside force and to endure interminable delays while progress is made, or not.

Gradually Johann sees his father transform from a doughty figure of authority to a vulnerable human being desperate for help in this unusual kidnapping and rights of passage drama. MT

ROTTERDAM FILM FESTIVAL | 2023 | LIMELIGHT STRAND

A Canterbury Tale (1944)

Dir: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger | Cast: Eric Portman, Sheila Sim, Denis Price, John Sweet | UK Drama 124’

Described by Basil Wright as “the kinkiest film of the war” and recalled with distaste by the reviewers of Peeping Tom, Michael Powell’s taste for the fanciful (the dialogue actually mentions marijuana) was already manifesting itself in the antics of the glueman and the use of Edmond Knight in three quite distinct roles.

The extraordinary resemblance of the early cut from the kestrel to the spitfire to the much-vaunted equivalent in ‘2001’ is almost certainly attributable purely to coincidence since until the late seventies the film had long languished in obscurity and it’s highly unlikely Kubrick had seen when he embarked on his own film in 1964.

Powell was born in Canterbury himself so the choice of the locale was evidently a deeply personal one. His eye for talent is well demonstrated by his casting the hitherto unknown Denis Price and the engaging American non-professional John Sweet. @RichardChatten

Treasure of the Golden Condor (1953)

Dir: Delmer Davies | Cast: Cornel Wilde, Constance Smith, Anne Bancroft, Finlay Currie, Walter Hampden | US Drama 93’

Delmer Daves couldn’t make a dull film if his life depended on it but he had a jolly good try with this glossy Technicolor remake of Son of Fury with Cornel Wilde in Tyrone Power’s role of an illiterate stable lad who goes out into the big wide world to make his fortune in Guatemala with the aid of a treasure map.

George Macready memorably plays his usual sanctimonious villain, and this is the only film I recall where he personally engages in fisticuffs himself. Finlay Currie in a tam-o-shanter does his usual Scotts thing, while the women include Fay Wray and Anne Bancroft (the latter in the role played in the original by Frances Farmer).

Officially Alfred Newman wrote the music, but the resemblance of a couple of musical cues to ‘North by Northwest’ serves as a reminder that Bernard Herrmann was then under contract to Fox. @RichardChatten

Copenhagen Does Not Exist (2023) Rotterdam Film Festival 2023

Dir: Martin Skovbjerg | Cast: Angela Bundalovic, Jonas Holst Schmidt, Zlatko Buric, Vimer Trier Brogger | Denmark, Thriller, 98′

In the light of a young woman’s disappearance her lover is confined to an interrogation by her father and brother to find out what really happened after the two of them withdrew into a world of their own. The story Sander offers them is a relatable yet deeply personal lyrical reverie that explores the deepest recesses of romantic love.

Martin Skovbjerg’s sophomore fiction feature brings Copenhagen Cowboy‘s stars Angela Bundalovic and Zlatko Buric together again as daughter and father in an enigmatic thriller that explores an incendiary love affair from different perspectives, and questions the nature of this ‘folie a deux’. Gradually Sander, the lover, sensitively played by Jonas Holst Schmidt, begins to question whether he was really adored as much as he was enamoured with the object of his affections, Ida, whose absence remains a mystery until the final reveal.

The strength of Nordic cinema is its ability to express intense emotions sizzling below the surface with calm composure and control. And Copenhagen Does Not Exist is another brilliant example. Once again award-winning writer Askil Vogt (The Worst Person in the World) crafts a subtle and nuanced love story that feels real and authentic while never allowing the powerful feelings of its central character to dominate the overall narrative that looks at love it all its forms. The film’s rich and vibrant aesthetic is a departure from Nordic Noir’s chilly tones in a sleek and sophisticated psychological thriller that captivates with its romantic love story enveloped in a steely and suspenseful family inquiry. MT

ROTTERDAM FILM FESTIVAL 2023 | BIG SCREEN AWARD 2023| GOTHENBURG FILM FESTIVAL | DRAGON AWARD nominee 2023

Indivision – Birdland (2023) Rotterdam Film Festival 2023

Dir: Leila Kilani | Cast: Ifham Methet, Ikram Layachi, Bahia Boutia El Oumani, Mustafa Shimdat | Morocco, 127′

Leïla Kilani conjures up a world both magical and violent in her long-awaited follow-up to Sur La PLanche (2011). Birdland is set amid the lavish forest that surrounds the faded splendour of the Bechtani’s family’s estate in El Mansouria, near Tangier. It is also home to the ominous Moroccan Black Stork which becomes a central character in this intense eco thriller.

Lina, the youngest member of the Bechtani family, believes herself to be bewitched by the winged creature that once landed on her mother’s grave in tribute to her life. She spends her days and nights recording the flocks on her mobile, along with her father Anis, an ornithologist. But humans too come under her scrutiny. And we meet them through her own unique perspective as the plot unfolds: The general, her grandmother, is the doyenne of the household, who, according to Lina, only cares about her gilded kaftans, and getting rid of the vast estate which has fallen into disrepair in recent years, having been on the market for several decades.

Another reason for selling is the increasing presence of squatters who have been occupying the land for forty years and are now threatening to take over. In the light of this social revolution The General has ordered more guards to protect the property from the marauding masses of Bab Al Sama, and immigration from Libya, and has plans to send Lina to a private school away from her life here fully integrated into nature.

Another key character in the story is the family maid Chinwiya, a divisive figure who The General calls her ‘daughter’ but who turns out to be a touchstone for the brewing troubles in the village, and in love with one of the unrest’s main ringleaders, an arsonist, who has been causing havoc in the area and loss of wildlife with a series of ferocious forest fires in the hope of clearing the area for the construction of housing.

A forthcoming family wedding will trigger a parting of the waves in an inheritance which has become somewhat of a poisoned chalice. Anis considers it vital to retain the land not only for future generations but also, more importantly, to comply with Habous Law, as a charitable foundation for the flora and fauna in this magnificent eco-forest bordering the Atlantic coast by the Straights of Gibraltar.

The wedding is a raucous affair with singing and dancing, Lina recording it all on social media her mobile phone. But these mobile conversations taking place in French, Spanish and Arabic, interweaved into the action, are soon confusing: there is enough power and dramatic heft in Kilani’s direction making the texting feel intrusive, overloading the film’s already indulgent running time, and disrupting the magical atmosphere of a thriller which stands its ground without recourse to this trendy plot device, potentially there to appeal to a younger audience who have lost their verbal dexterity but not their typing ability. But crucially the texting here is vital as Lina simply doesn’t have ‘a voice’ and is forced to watch negotiations and disseminate ideas and feedback to wider audience, capturing the zeitgeist from the internet and social media and even writing keywords and questions all over her body, emerging as a teenage eco warrior and eventually influencing the film’s outcome in her own special way.

Captured on the widescreen and in intimate close-up Indivision is glorious to look at drawing you under its spell with an evocative ambient soundscape of wind rushing through the palm trees and lush undergrowth, exotic birdsong and a pipe score that needles the tense action scenes of this inventive piece of filmmaking. MT

ROTTERDAM FILM FESTIVAL 2023 | TIGER COMPETITION 2023

Little Dixie (2023) Rotterdam Film Festival 2023

Dir/Wri: John Swab | Cast: Frank Grillo, Eric Dane, Annabeth Gish, Mercedes Mason, Peter Greene, Maurice Compte, Beau Knapp | US Thriller 100′

If you like taught genre thrillers with an arthouse edge this latest from John Swab is a hardboiled, neon-drenched, neo-noir affair, full of sassy set pieces, vicious performances and a script honed to the bone.

Little Dixie opens with a man strapped to the execution table awaiting death by lethal injection. Mexican drug baron Miguel Prado has committed triple homicide but he shows no remorse. The drugs trickle down their vials and into his body as he screams out in pain.

There to watch are State Governor Richard Jeffs (Dane), and erstwhile Special Forces agent Doc Alexander (a mesmerising Frank Grillo) who has been asked to broker a covert truce with Prado’s Mexican drug cartel, led by Miguel’s brother Lalo (Compte). But the death of Miguel puts an end to all that, and after Richard refuses to back down on his war on the cartel during a TV broadcast, the Mexicans want revenge.

Raphael Cuco, Lalo’s half-American henchman, has other plans, and they involve Doc’s adored daughter, Little Dixie – aka Nell – who he kidnaps, in revenge for Miguel’s death, demanding a ransom in the shape of Richard’s head, quite literally. And who is Doc to say no to Cuco, if it means saving the life of his darling daughter Dixie (Riggs).

Style-wise there are echoes of Nicolas Winding Refn’s recent Mexican outing Too Old to Die Young, but Little Dixie is a far tighter, punchier beast with the spareness of Craig Zahler’s Brawl in Cell Block 99 in mind.

The bodies soon mount up. Doc’s crooked colleague Billy (Gish) and her girlfriend (Alexander) are the first to go, shot through the head in their double bed. Richard’s sidekick Clerke (Dekke) is another of Cuco’s casualties: handcuffed to the seat and torched in his car, lighting up the night sky like a blazing jewel. Another stylish scene takes place in a nightclub where Cuco hits on an Alice cooper-style Drag Queen, taking him back to a motel where he meets a violent end after discovering Dixie in the tub. Dixie, who is no shrinking violet, then gives Cuco a moral lecture as he reveals his backstory of being related to the Prados through his white mother and a gangland father.

The entertainment here is in these slick vignettes with their superb performances masterfully handled by Swab and his DoP Will Stone and production designer Jose Cavazos. Nothing is spare or left to chance. Even after a massive murder spree involving some elegant blood-drenched manoeuvring, Grillo’s Doc seems philosophical and unfazed. And despite some dry retching, his hair remains immaculate as he takes to the wheel of his black chevy to drive to Zaragoza on the Mexican boarder for yet another confrontation: “It’s gonna be long night” he says. The final waterside scene is a classic: a tangerine-tinged sunset with the jetty stretching into oblivion. Anything could happen, and it does. But you’ll have to see the film to find out. MT

LITTLE DIXIE | ROTTERDAM FILM FESTIVAL 2023 | HARBOUR

The Flying Scotsman (1929)

Dir: Castleton Knight | Cast: Ray Milland, Gordon Harker, Moore Marriott, Pauline Johnson | Uk Drama 50’

Castleton Knight anticipated his work in documentaries with the climax on location in this rollicking thriller which marks the unique interaction of Moore Marriott and Ray Milland.

Marriott was only 44 but already looks much older, while Milland (here already exhibiting the superciliousness that later became his trademark) already looks like he did in his Hollywood heyday. Even then Marriott looks more like the heroine’s grandfather than her father.

This marked the lovely Pauline Johnson’s penultimate film. She actually survived the scene where she (SPOILER COMING:) clings to the outside of the train in high heels – which rather resembles the climax of ‘Oh! Mr Porter’ – giving up films to marry and move to Australia. @RichardChatten

Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (1968)

Dir: Clive Donner | Cast: Barry Evans, Judy Geeson, Angela Scoular, Adrienne Poster, Vanessa Howard | UK Drama

On the way to school back in the seventies I used every morning to go through Sheffield Botanical Gardens and pass a genuine Mulberry Bush planted in 1968 by Judy Geeson to promote this film (it now resembles a small tree rather than a bush).

Four years earlier Clive Donner had depicted in ‘Nothing But the Best’ the upwardly mobile career of a Jack the Lad played by Alan Bates. This time it’s the turn of Barry Evans (later best known on TV for ‘Doctor in the House’ and ‘Mind Your Language’), who like the delightful Angela Scoular met an untimely and tragic end.

Both films have in common the wonderful Denholm Elliot representing the establishment, while it’s a measure of the film’s dubious sexual politics that the great height of Sally Avery as Cathy is bizarrely assumed to denote plainness, even down to perceptibly dubbing her voice to make her seem even coarser. @RichardChatten

New Strains (2023) Rotterdam Film Festival 2023

Dirs: Artemis Shaw, Prashanth Kamalakanthan | US Drama 78′

“He flashed me as a child; it was the first non-close family dick I saw”. says Kallia of her uncle in the opening scene of this offbeat handmade movie, with its ad-libbing script peppered with “like” before every other word. Shot on an Hi8 camcorder, its grainy VHS ‘warts and all’ footage certainly captures the zeitgeist, a fractious couple – Kallia and her partner Ram (both directing, post lockdown) – holed up in a New York flat lent to them by said uncle during the pandemic of 2020.

As the two them wise up to the life-threatening situation engulfing them, obsessive cleaning of every single object and surface area is the order of the day in the era came to be known as the “new normal”.

Some may find New Strains ‘de trop’ in its gruesomely graphic detail. Expect to see lavatory functions, sexual functions – and malfunctions – becoming central to the narrative, for lack of anything more interesting, as the two are reduced to kids watching YouTube and fiddling endlessly with gadgetry in their state of infantilism induced by the pandemic.

Not entirely confined to the spacious apartment, Kallia does make it outdoors where everyone she encounters is masked up to the hilt, including a neighbour, her ex, who tries to hit on her again hoping for some action on his roof terrace. Everywhere is temporarily closed or cordoned off in reflection of that ghastly time in early 2020, and beyond.

At one point Kallia confesses – bizarrely – to having spent the morning at a Fra Angelico exhibition, while TV reports talk of a generalised state of cognitive decline brought on by the wide-scale epidemic. Later Kallia ‘meets’ girlfriends to exercise with a ‘group cardio burn’ session online, with Ram convinced he’s finally got the lurgy.

Being in lockdown offered ample opportunity for self improvement, and for falling out with each other. But for some reason, Kallia and her beau only embrace the latter. The Covid crisis sees them reduced to the lowest common denominator in an unintentional comic performance that echoes a looser and more lewd version of Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon in The Odd Couple: she the moody anxious type, he the more avuncular, obliging artist.

New Strains amounts to a series of random episodes rather than a story with a recognised narrative arc. Their banter is amusing for a while but then grows tiresome – even with the film’s short running time – as we are forced to endure the inanities, and reflect back on a time that, for many, was a living nightmare from hell. The only redemption was the glorious spring weather, and the sound of silence – apart from birdsong. MT

ROTTERDAM FILM FESTIVAL 2023 | TIGER COMPETITION

Kavur (2023) Rotterdam Film Festival 2023

Dir.: Firat Ozeler; Documentary with the voices of Cem Yilmaz, Funda Eryigit; Turkey 2023, 89 min.

A new documentary from Turkey’s Firat Ozeler pays homage to filmmaker Omer Kavur (1944-2005) who directed fourteen feature between 1974 and 2003 before his tragic death from lymphoma. His films were shown in Cannes and Venice, but, rarely – if ever – made it to the UK. The only English speaking retrospective was held at the Harvard Film Archive in 2001, where five features were shown. The film is both a biopic and a travelogue, narrated by Funda Eryigit, it visits the many places Kavur touched during his struggle to build a career. Cam Yilmaz voices Kavur’s own perspective of his life.

Born in Istanbul in 1944 to wealthy parents who moved in all the right circles but whose marriage eventually broke down, Kavur was sent to a Swiss finishing school to be groomed for success. Clearly he had plenty of love but no home. Paris was the next step where the budding filmmaker studied in the daytime, and worked in a hotel at night. His 1987 feature Motherland Hotel (Anayurt Oteli) is a testament to his three year stint as a night porter – anything to reduce his debt.

An unidentified lover tells about the sadness which engulfed Kavur even in those days: “He was not a happy person”. His return to Istanbul saw the city transformed by bulldozers and the developers. The old buildings were gone replaced by apartment blocks. Turkish cinema had moved on too and Kavur was dismayed to discover an industry which thrived on porn features. The Sex Life of a Belly Dancer, was a case in point.

Kavur’s own first films were not successful at the box office, and he became withdrawn and reclusive eventually leaving the city of his birth, blaming himself: “I should have adapted, and did what was expected from me”. He was critical of the socialist films of the era, calling them ‘trendy’. His travels next took him to a small Baltic town where the theme of rememberance became an important focus of his maturing style of filmmaking.

Ozeler makes use of ample archive footage, clips of Kavur’s final feature, Karsilasma shot in 2003, and a video showing him as a deeply troubled man obsessed by death and decay. Plagued by dreams that transported him back to his childhood, Kavur seemed to be continually trying to escape the trauma. The film’s final act sees him reciting a poem with the unnamed woman. When death finally caught up with Kavur, he had come to terms with his life and discovered a certain tranquility, despite being exhausted from illness and therapy. It was like coming home again.

In his debut feature premiering at Rotterdam’s International Film Festival, Ozeler has caught the overriding melancholy of Kavur’s life as an artist who never felt at ease with himself after being sent away from his homeland at an early age. A motif running through his work shows him knocking at doors that will be forever closed, like in Kafka’s “The Castle”. Kavur certainly had his time in the sun as a director on the festival circuit, but he never quite moved with the times. Ozeler portrays his subject with skill and empathy, the travel rumination making an evocative backcloth to the tortured mind of this celebrated Turkish filmmaker. AS

SCREENING AT ROTTERDAM FILM FESTIVAL | CINEMA REGAINED |

Plane (2023)

Dir.: Jean-Francois Richet; Cast: Gerald Butler, Mike Colter, Yoson An, Daniela Pinada, Tony Goldwyn;, Evan Dane Taylor, UK/US 2023, 107 min.

With a title like Plane we are not expecting anything special – and while this airborne thriller doesn’t break any new ground, it will satisfy its “Boys-Only” brigade audience who like things ‘retro’. Plane is an 80s throw-back to films like Under Siege and the Cannon Group vehicles who even made it onto the ‘Red Carpet’ in Cannes back in the day. So let’s not pretend we never saw the like of it before.

Like all Action Man features, Plane relies on a leading man at the helm, and Gerard Butler, 53, still fits the bill. Now the older statesman of the “Save the World” Brigade his hang-dog pilot Brodie Torrence (widowed, with a daughter waiting for Daddy to return for New Year’s Eve) pilots his jet with just 14 (!) passengers from New York to Tokyo. One of them, Louis Garpare (Colter), is a murderer being accompanied by an FBI agent to his new prison home. Alas, an electric storm puts an end to all communication equipment on board, and Torrence has to land the plane on a small island in the Philippines. Needless to say, his troubles have only just started.

The corporate leadership, whose penny-pinching dictates are responsible for the catastrophe in the first place, want to let Torrence and his acolytes fight it out. But ex-military commander Scarsdale (Goldwyn), who has taken a liking to Torrence (having watched a video of him putting a passenger into a headlock), alerts his ex-buddies from the Special Forces to help ‘unlikely lads’ Torrence and Colter contain the local guerrillas under the leadership of a certain wild-eyed Jummar ((Taylor), so Torrence can get his plane into the air again, in time for New Year and his daughter.

Popular spy-thriller writer Charles Cumming wrote the script with J.P. Davies, and they are as politically incorrect as possible in an outing that sees simpering women watching the men folk get on with the business of killing – by hand, sledgehammer and rocket launchers. DoP Brendan Galvin does his level best to indulge us with close-ups and impressive panorama shots. Butler suffers multiple bullet wounds but still remains dignified, ably supported by his Korean co-pilot Dale (An). Maybe not Batman and Robin, but another successful buddy relationship. Who says men can’t bond? AS

PLANE IS IN UK CINEMAS from 27 JANUARY 2023

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Munch (2023)

Dir/Wri: Henrik Martin Dahlsbakken | Cast: Alfred Ekker Strande, Mattis Herman Nyquist, Ola G. Furuseth, Anne Krigsvoll, Arthur Berning, Lisa Carlehed, Thea Lambrechts Vaulen | Drama, 104′

Munch is a brave and ambitious biopic evocatively reflecting the many faces of Norway’s most internationally famous expressionist artist whose tortured painting ‘The Scream’ has come to represent humanity’s collective cry of pain and isolation.

Seasoned Norwegian auteur Henrik Martin Dahlsbakken clearly understands his confused countryman whom we first meet in his final months, at 80 (played by Anne Krigvoll, in an inspired casting), a reclusive and cantankerous creative worn down by years of being misinterpreted, and emotionally abused by his friends and associates.

Seen from the artist’s own perspective this sumptuously impressionistic drama then plays out in concurrent strands that picture his troubled life – at 21 (played by Ekker Strande), 30 (Herman Nyquist) and 45 (Faruseth) – to explore the confusion and loneliness that inspired the tortured sketches and canvasses that came to represent an outpouring of grief.

‘The Scream’ could be attributed to the time his entire Berlin exhibition was deemed ‘unfinished’ or ‘too moody’ for the German style at the time, and was abruptly cancelled on the night of the vernissage. We see Munch crying out in pain at the sheer perplexity of it all, although he would later become a figure of great notoriety for breaking his avant-garde style. During this time he meets August Strindberg (another female casting – Lisa Carlehed).

Henrik Martin Dahlsbakken is not the first to attempt a film about the artist (1863-1944) – 1974 TV outing Edvard Munch was a grim affair – but he is certainly the most successful in showing Munch as a highly sensitive soul who gradually became disillusioned by a life overshadowed by illness and bereavement (of both his mother and sister, and his own near death), his father’s overbearing nature, and a series of unsatisfactory encounters, most notably in an romantic episode in Vesthold, eastern Norway where, at 21, his father takes him to spend the summer in the lush countryside to encourage his talent. Plagued by mosquitoes, he falls for married society girl Milly Thaulow (Lambrechts Vaulen) who then rejects him cruelly, adding to his emotional confusion. Later in his forties he is admitted to a private Copenhagen clinic for a psychiatric disturbance. And so begins his retreat into a world of isolation.

This is not a film flooded in abject negativity and Dahlsbakken does his best not to dwell on the dour nature of Munch’s life, and this is what makes the drama enjoyable. Despite the tragedies in Munch’s personal life, the overwhelming impression Dahlsbakken creates is one of melancholy beauty and poignance for man misunderstood.

Munch experimented wildly and eventually chose to reject the outside world, but his backstory is imaginatively fleshed out here, Dahlsbakken cleverly reflecting the descent with four different actors – all convincingly played. Acting as his own production designer in variety of styles, the well chosen episodes are captured in pristine black & white and a painterly colour palette by DoPs Pal Ulvik Rokseth and Oskar Dalhsbakken. An accomplished and impressive arthouse drama despite its often confusing narrative structure. MT

NOW IN CINEMAS IN FRANCE and UK | MUNCH OPENED THE ROTTERDAM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2023

Phaedra (1962)

Dir: Jules Dessin | Cast: Melina Mercouri, Anthony Perkins, Elizabeth Ercy, Raf Vallone | US Drama 115’

After Anthony Perkins checked out of the Bates Motel he spent the next five years on the continent where he fell into the predatory embrace of lynx-eyed cougar Melina Mercouri.

‘Phaedra‘ is probably the nearest thing Jules Dassin ever made to a Hollywood soap opera, as he follows Mrs Dassin in the title role cheating on her husband (a shipping magnate who owns his own helicopter) while she swans about on boats, gets off planes in dark glasses in a succession of killer outfits, and generally behaves like a glamorous cougar.

Instead of pianos on the soundtrack we get guitars by Mikos Theodorakis. It’s all hilariously pretentious, but great fun. @RichardChatten

https://youtu.be/JQVbuCbpZ_c

Mon Crime – The Crime is Mine (2023)

Dir: Francois Ozon | Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Fabrice Luchini, Nadia Tereszkiewicz, Rebecca Marder, Dany Boon, Andre Dussollier, Jean-Christophe Bouvet, Edouard Sulpice | France, Drama 102′

Isabelle Huppert and Fabrice Lucchini star in this cheeky little chamber piece. Fast moving and frothing with fun and his signature mischievous humour Francois Ozon’s latest is a 1930s-set feminist whodunnit that pushes all the buttons on today’s #metoo polemic while recalling the absurdist boulevard style of its original stage play, adapted by his regular co-writer Philippe Piazzo and driven forward by a jaunty, noirish score.

In 1930s Paris, two young women have a field day getting their own back on men in the style of the famous ‘Papin sisters’. After her boyfriend leaves her for an heiress, pretty but talentless young actress Madeleine Verdier (Tereszkiewicz) finds herself implicated in the murder of a famous producer after a tussle on the casting couch, but is acquitted with the help of her lawyer friend Pauline (Marder), on the grounds of self-defence. A new life of fame and success begins, until the truth finally comes out.

Ozon litters his production with throwbacks to the era: Danielle Darrieux is playing in Billy Wilder’s Bad Seed at the local picture house. And there’s an inspired guillotine scene just for good measure. Huppert makes her grand entrance an hour into the production – as the veteran star of the silent screen (and erstwhile casting couch victim) Odette Chaumette – but gracefully without stealing the show from her fellow divas who make a picaresque comedy duo. Andre Dussollier and Dany Boon are also there to entertain. MT

The Crime is Mine is released in UK & Irish cinemas 30^th August 2024

The Nothingness Club (2023) Rotterdam Film Festival 2023

Dir: Edgar Pêra | Cast: Victoria Guerra, Miguel Nunes, Albano Jeronimo, Miguel Borges | Portugal Fantasy Drama, 92′

Edgar Pera fans will recognise the Portuguese auteur’s baleful character sketches (O Barao from the IFFR 2019 retrospective) in this stylish psychological thriller that dives into the deranged world of one of the 20th century’s most significant figures, the Portuguese poet and writer Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), here played by Miguel Borges.

The Nothingness Club is possibly Pera’s most substantial and relatable film to date, a noirish mannered thriller that plunders the emotional vulnerabilities and vicissitudes of the creative psyche in exploring the many faces of Pessoa’s heteronyms, the three main being Ricardo Reis (Correia), Alvaro Campos (Jeronimo) and Alberto Caeiro (Nunes). At the poet’s literary salon the eponymous ‘Nothingness Club’, they argue, debate and spar with each other and with the poet himself, and Campos even engages with his only attested lover Ophelia (Guerra) who joins in, in her guise as a femme fatale. Highly entertaining for his devotees and enlightening for arthouse enthusiasts. MT

ROTTERDAM FILM FESTIVAL 2023 | BIG SCREEN AWARD

100 Seasons (2023) Rotterdam Film Festival 2023

Dir.: Giovanni Bucchieri; Cast: Louise Peterhoff Giovanni Bucchieri, Michel Riddez, Karin Bertling, Vera Olme Peterhoff; Sweden 2023, 101 miin.

Giovanni Bucchieri reflects on his 1990s relationship with co-writer Louise Peterhoff in this impressive but disturbingly morbid hybrid feature.

Giovanni lives in a small room entirely dedicated to his past. In his late forties, he has fallen on hard times professionally as a singer and actor, and is undergoing treatment for bi-polar with a psychologist (Riddez) who also prescribes him medication which Giovanni flushes down the loo. Intensely obsessed with his own death, even to the extent of making it into an art form involving his own coffin, Giovanni also performs in the street, one time ending up naked. Louise was the love of his life, and he spends his days watching videos of his life with Louise, a ballet dancer and now a choreographer who is bringing a modern dance version of “Romeo and Juliet” to the stage.

The home videos tell a sad story of how Louise – who is divorced, and living with teenage daughter Sasha (V.O. Peterhoff), became unable to cope with Giovanni’s tendency to over-dramatise every situation in their relationship. The films show them in 18th aristocratic dress which is somehow redolent of the rollercoaster relationship. Both have been deeply affected by their time together and Giovanni is now coming to the end of his life. Meanwhile, Louise is in a relationship with Noah whom she tries in vain to keep away from her daughter.

Louise’s ballet project is often interrupted by the cast who are not happy with her style of direction that pictures the romantic story as anything but. In her defence Louise claims that “Romeo and Julia” is Shakespeare’s weakest play, but that she chose to choreograph it as “a challenge”.

100 Seasons is a macabre piece of filmmaking. Rarely have we seen a director filming their own fictional death for a feature. Bucchieri is certainly in love with decay and morbidity, and the film becomes a vehicle for this weird obsession which verges on outright narcissism. DoP Axel Pettersson goes all out for effects, showcasing Bucchieri’s the over-the-top performance to extraordinary effect. 100 Seasons is not always well served by its rather chaotic structure, which leaves too many questions unanswered in an otherwise entertaining and engrossing debut. AS

ROTTERDAM FILM FESTIVAL 2023 | TIGER COMPETITION 2023

Five Fingers (1952)

Dir: Joseph L Mankiewicz | Cast: James Mason, Danielle Darrieux, Michael Rennie, Walter Hampden | US Thriller

James Mason actually quotes the famous observation that “no man is a hero to his valet”. At the time Mason was treading water in Hollywood and probably looked down with the same urbane contempt as Cicero himself obviously felt for the men her was currently working (witness the ease with which he opens his original contact’s safe when he’s briefly out of the room and the smug way he explains how he did it).

Based on a true story, and a novel ‘Operation Cicero’, Five Fingers is a wartime spy thriller that sees the valet to the British Ambassador in Ankara trying to make a fortune by selling secrets to the Germans while trying to romance a refugee Polish countess.

Mason was patrician enough to pass for “an Oxford-bred aristocrat if ever I saw one” (he actually admits to being Albanian) and was just the man to do justice to Joseph Mankiewicz’s witty dialogue, and the film boasts a score by Bernard Herrmann.

Daniele Darrieux brings a little Continental sophistication to the part of a Polish countess, John Wengraf is a reasonable facsimile of Von Papen (although Alfred Zeisler doesn’t look a bit as his co-defendant at Nuremberg Ernst Kaltenbrunner). @RichardChatten

Endless Borders (2023) IFFR 2023

Dir.: Abbas Amini; Cast: Pouria Rahimi Sam, Mino Sharifi, Behafarid Ghaffarian, Naser Sajjadi Hosseini, Ghalem Sakhi Nazari | Iran/Czech Republic/Germany 2023, 111 min.

Iranian writer/director Abbas Amini (The Slaughterhouse) explores personal and political struggles in this complex drama set in a remote village in Balochistan near the Iranian-Afghanistan border. Shifting alliances dominate, with the main protagonist having to face a truth he had denied for a long time.

Ahmad Vaezi (Sam) has been exiled from his native Iran for political reasons. Now living in a small Afghan community that comes under regular scrutiny from the border forces he serves as both teacher and doctor. But Ahmad has got off lightly. His partner Nilofar (Sharifi) has just been released on probation after a two-year imprisonment, accused of similar offences. Clearly the separation has put their relationship under strain and they struggle to contact one another.

A fresh wave of controversy confronts Ahmad one day when sixteen-year old Hasebah (Ghaffarian) desperately asks him for help to escape the village with Balaj (Hosseini), a local young man who has fallen in love with her. She also reveals that, on account of her father’s bankruptcy, she was forced to marry the village elder – who Ahmad had always assumed to be her father. To complicate matters further, family honour dictates that the elder’s son will kill Hasebah if she is caught trying to leave.

Despite the danger, Ahmad and the two lovers flee to Tehran where the teacher’s life becomes even more complicated when he is accused by Nilofar’s father of putting her life at risk due to his actions. The father has, meanwhile, given his house as security for Nilofar’s bail. This puts further pressure on Ahmad and his partner, and they decide, along with Balaj and Hasebah to continue their onward journey to freedom in Turkey, via a perilous trafficking arrangement, Ahmad insists to the reluctant Nilofar that he only joined the political resistance group out of love for her. At a dangerous river-crossing they are ambushed by the border patrol, and Ahmad is forced to make a life defining decision.

Religious affiliations seem to loom large in this fraught environment where once again it causes most of the conflict, not only socially but personally. The villagers are against the Taliban, not so much for their treatment of women, but because they follow another religious law. At the height of the couples’ dramatic escape into Turkey, Balaj refuses to even wear clothes that are associated with another Islamic group, even when his life is in danger.

DoP Saman Lotfian follows the action with his handheld camera, focusing on middle distance shots or close-ups. Ahmad is a complex main character who belies his ‘holier that thou’ persona in a mature and analytical feature full of contradictions and unexpected twists. AS

ROTTERDAM FILM FESTIVAL | BIG SCREEN COMPETITION 2023 | VPRO Big Screen Award 2023.

La Guerre des Lulus (2023)

Dir: Yann Samuell | Cast: Isabelle Carre, Didier Bourdon, Francois Damiens, Alex Lutz, Ahmed Sylla, Paloma Labeaut, Leonard Fauquet, Mathys Gros, Tom Castaing, Loup Pinard, Luc Shiltz | France/Luxembourg, Drama 109′

Four kids embark on a boys’ own adventure in this upbeat coming-of-age drama that sees them evacuated to a religious school in Picardie at outbreak of the First World War.

During the time away from their parents the boys, of varying ages, will meet with a series of brief but challenging encounters that will make real men of them, when the time comes. French president Emmanuel Macron is now considering re-introducing compulsory military service, and this film seems to reflect its benefits, especially for young men.

In Yann Samuell’s well-paced drama, Ludwig (Fauquet) is a timid intellectual and an avid reader of Jules Verne’s novels – especially the one his mother left him with as a parting gift. He soon gets the support of Francois Damiens, in a serious role as the Abbot, and a schoolmaster (Lutz) who is then forced to leave for the front. Lucas (Castaing) is hardly out of nappies when he finds himself far away from home. Luigi (Gros) is the strongest boy, and pre-teen Lucien (Loup Picard) will soon discover the tender pleasures of first love when Luce (Labeaut) appears on the scene, as the only girl.

Isabelle Carre plays a feisty farmer’s wife who gradually takes on the role of the boy’s matron before she too faces tragedy. The scenes in her cosy farmhouse glow like a painting by Arthur Rackham, deep in the lush countryside where the war is never far away. The enemy forces are gaining ground, and one day the school building is bombed, nearly get killing them all. The advancing German troops are soon seen off by the farmer’s wife.

Escaping the village, the boys run into a German soldier called Hans who has defected from the army and hopes to join his wife back home. Hans befriends the boys and teaches them German. But dark clouds soon loom when Hans (Schiltz) tries to take them all across the border to safety in Switzerland. Thrilling scenes see them in the thick of trench warfare during the First Battle of Picardie in September 1914. A chance meeting with a French officer called Moussa (Sylla) comes just at the right time, but not before more they are surrounded by another enemy onslaught.

Shot in studio Babelsberg with some stunning visuals, and driven forward by Mathieu Lamboley’s terrific original score. There are some extraordinary performances from a cast so young, particularly Didier Fauquet as Ludwig. La Guerre des Lulus, is a wonderfully rousing film that navigates some dramatic highs and lows. Samuell shows how kids, unlike adults, can often often trust and connect across barriers, untainted by prejudice or dogma. And that some adults: here a teacher, a soldier, a mother, and a maverick, can really inspire young people to greatness by mentoring and supportive companionship. MT

NOW ON RELEASE IN FRANCE.

The Juniper Tree (1990)

Dir: Nietzchka Keene | Cast: Bjork, Bryndis Petra Bragadottir, Valdimar Orn Flygenring, Guorun Gisladottir | Fantasy Drama, 78′

Iceland is a magical setting for this enchanting medieval black and white adaptation of a 1812 Grimm’s fairytale that sees two sisters forced to flee the homeland after their mother is stoned to death for practising witchcraft.

Filmed and entirely funded by American writer and director Nietzchka Keene (1952-2004) and her co-producer Alison Powell, the film eventually premiered at Sundance 1991 nominated for the Grand Jury Prize, Dramatic. Keene’s career was cut short but her final film, another female centric story, Barefoot to Jerusalem, was completed after her death, in 2008.

Icelandic singer Björk, in her feature debut, makes for a perfect heroine as Margit with her feral looks and delicate diction so evocative of this Grimm’s inspired fantasy with its horrific undertones. The German brothers themselves had been captivated by the painter Philipp Otto Runge’s original adaptation of The Juniper Tree. Hailed as Germany’s answer to our own visionary poet and printmaker William Blake, his mysticism and symbolism seem to fit well with the English artist’s. And although the Grimms dialled up the darkness with their themes of cannibalism and child abuse, Keene reflects this in her own lyrical version with its violent misogyny and witch-burning while at the same time questioning its moral code in an ascetic spiritual ambiance straight out of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet or even Bergman’s The Seventh Seal.

Margit and her sister Katla (a softly spoken Bryndis Petra Bragadottir) are wandering around stunned and looking for shelter after their mother has met her terrible death. Their recourse to witchcraft will be the only practical way of surviving in this bleak terrain where anonymity serves to their advantage, until they meet a widower called Johann (Flygenring) who has lost his wife, and been left with his only son Jonas (Pormar). Katla casts a spell on him and the foursome continue as rather unsatisfactory bedfellows, Johan deeply resenting Margit’s attempts to replace his mother by giving her weird and whimsical incantations short shrift with the sobering words: “she was better than you”.

Some may find the film too enigmatic even at only 78 minutes, but Bjork’s innovative presence gives a freshness that keeps The Juniper Tree otherworldly and radical rather than rooted in the distant past, and is this unique curio is definitely worth visiting. MT

BFI BLU-RAY RELEASE

The Stone Flower (1946)

Dir: Aleksandr Ptushko | Cast: Vladimir Druzhnikov, Yekaterina Derevshchikova, Tamara Makarova | USSR Drama, 89’

It will come as an extraordinary surprise to anybody unfamiliar with the Soviet cinema of the Cold War era just how common a component of it was colour, personally decreed by Uncle Joe himself.

The Stone Flower centres on a young stonecutter called Danilo who visits the mystical Copper Mountain to discover its infamous secret, a stone flower so mesmerising that anyone seeing it finds it impossible to leave.

Soviet colour films of the period ironically looked far better in the late forties than ten years later since the Russians still had use of captured Agfacolor stock freshly manufactured by the Germans after they constructed an Agfacolor plant in Prague.

One of the first postwar films shot in Prague and winner of the Stalin Prize and Best Colour Award at Cannes in the year its filming, Aleksandr Ptushko’s fable was one of the first fruits of Czechoslovakia’s former occupiers inadvertent largesse. The result anticipated all those ‘Tales from Europe’ fondly remembered by children on BBC1 in the sixties and seventies. @RichardChatten

Girl (2023) Sundance Film Festival 2023

Dir.: Adura Onashile; Cast: Deborah Lukumuena. Le Shantey Bonsu, Liana Turner, Danny Sapani; UK 2023, 87 min.

Two Congolese asylum seekers find out their Glasgow council estate is not quite the bed roses they imagined after escaping their war-torn country in this debut feature from Adura Onashile.

Girl, premiering at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, is another coming-of-age drama, almost a carbon copy of Caterina Mona’s 2022, Zurich-set feature Semret that premiered at last year’s Locarno Film Festival. It follows the lives of Grace, 24, and her teenage daughter who could even be her sister at 13 years old. Their new life in Scotland is easy up to a point, but the changes they both need to adjust to are going to be difficult in the long run.

Grace, played by French actor Deborah Lukumuena in her first English-speaking role, carries the baggage of a traumatic past in the Congolese Civil War. Like many parents these days she is over-protective of her daughter Ama (Bonsu), for good reason, but filling her head with horror stories about the war back home and barricading the windows with cardboard is not good way to bring up your daughter. And Ama has grown into a bit of a rebel, sneaking out onto the balcony to watch the real world go by. Social Services have be involved and the school headmistress has complained about Ama’s attendance. Grace resists any attempt to socialise her daughter who soon befriends Fiona (Turner) who serves as her conduit the outside world, introducing her to all the modern teenage trends. Grace has found a job but is struggling to cope with Counting OCD, a condition impelling the sufferer to count to high numbers in a bid to ward off negativity. Grace also hyperventilates. Fellow employee Danny (Sapani) is the first man to break through Grace’ defences.

Although this is no sink estate drama DoP Tasha Back captures the reality of life there, and the comfortable home Grace has created in contrast to the harsh world outside. French actor Deborah Lukumuena, who won a “Cesar” for Divines, gives an imposing performance in a film that avoids sentimentality and polemics, with a focus on the women’s eventual liberation from their tragic past. AS

PREMIERING AT SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL | 19 -27 JANUARY 2023 | also playing at the opening film at this year’s GLASGOW FILM FESTIVAL 2023

Holy Spider (2022)

Dir: Ali Abassi | Cast: Zar Amir-Ebrahimi, Zar Amir Ebrahimi, Hedi Bejastani, Arash Ashtiani | Thriller 114′

Border was a surreal gender bender fantasy set in Sweden. This time around Ali Abassi returns to his native Iran blending true crime and salient social comment with a scuzzy serial killer thriller that unfolds in the Islamic pilgrimage town of Mashhad, where millions come to worship at the shrine of Imam Reza .

This is where middle-aged Saeed Hanaei (Bajestani), a dedicated family man and construction worker, murdered sex workers at the turn of this century, before being trapped by a tenacious female journalist who nearly lost her own life in the process as she wades through the mire of a chauvinistic society fighting off advances from an incredulous policeman to convince an unscrupulous judge.

Holy Spider sets off in the sordid backstreets of the city (filmed in Amman) where it follows ex Iran-Iraq war veteran Saeed as he picks off his victims on a motorcycle, riding them back to a squalid basement where he strangles the women with their own hijabs, earning him the name of ‘Spider Killer’.

Tehran-based journalist Rahimi (Zar Amir Ebrahimi), arrives in town determined to track Saeed down, and will stop at nothing, not least the misogyny of the police and local authorities, who undervalue women – and particularly ‘loose’ women – to bring him to justice. And her ongoing investigation exposes the wider implications of these murders in a society that holds men and marriage in high regard. And Saeed truly believes he is doing a service to Islam in ridding his community of these ‘low life’ women who are seen as no more than vermin on the streets of the city.

Border was mesmerising in its zinging Nordic setting but Holy Spider plays out as an exotic neon nightmare, Nadim Carlsen’s intimate close-ups gripping us by the throat in experiencing the strangulations for ourselves: the twisted purple lips, the bloodshot eyes, and bruised bodies, the sordid salaciousness of it all. A droning electronic soundscape from Lajos Wienkamp-Marques escalates the tension, feeding every fear engendered by the wickedness of this anti-female annihilation.

As Rahimi pursues the murderer she is beset on every side by negative forces aiming to discredit her in a narrative that persuades us that this task is a not just about exposing the truth but managing the lies and the wide-held belief, amongst Saeed’s family and supporters, that he is righteous in his crusade to wipe out junkies and prostitutes. And the suspense needles on until the final horrifying moments. MT

BEST ACTRESS WINNER (Zar Amir Ebrahimi) | CANNES 2022 | IN UK and IRISH cinemas from 20 JANUARY 2023

The Case of the Red Monkey (1955)

Dir: Ken Hughes | Cast: Richard Conte, Rona Anderson, Russell Napier, Donald Gordon | UK Thriller 71’

This Merton Park espionage drama came as an early indication that Ken Hughes was a director to look out for. The subject belongs to a conventional thriller but a vein of eccentric humour runs throughout and the jaunty little hammond organ score which gives the film its unusual title adds a tone of whimsy and evokes a silent film.

The inevitable American star Richard Conte is always good to watch, Rona Anderson is feisty as the romantic interest who just happens to be the police superintendent’s niece, while among the bad guys Sylva Langova makes an elegantly coiffed dragon lady cigarette in hand, and Colin Gordon is cast refreshingly against type as heroic Martin of the ‘Echo’ who declares “The people want facts with their cornflakes!” @RichardChatten

Iron Butterflies (2023) Sundance Film Festival 2023

Dir: Roman Liubyi | Doc with Bridget Fiske, Sofiya Gakh, Anton Ovhcinnikov, Joseph Lau | 84′

In his documentary debut, Director Roman Liubyi plunders the archives for clips and real life interviews that present a convincing expose of an act of genocide that changed the course of recent history for all of us. The film bears testament to the recent corrosive trend for questioning incontrovertible truths.

A case in point is the focus of Iron Butterflies. On July 17, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was shot down by Russian forces over eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board. The reality of this attack, and its possible ramifications for the then-ongoing war in Donbas and the West’s relationship with Russia, was immediately questioned by the Russian government and media which chose to spin the evidence and change the goal posts, presenting a different ‘truth’ – also known as ‘lies’ – to the one the rest of the world had accepted.

Gradually, the film pieces together ample evidence of what really happened – the title referring to butterfly-shaped items of shrapnel that were found in the bodies of the pilots. As the evidence gradually piles up Liubyi shows that denying what really happened eventually becomes more outlandish and incredible.

In a world where violence can only be defended by lies, and lies only maintained by violence, Iron Butterflies presents the truth of what happened to MH17, but also what was at stake by not confronting it.

SCREENING DURING SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL 19-29 JANUARY 2023 | WORLD CINEMA DOCUMENTARY COMPETITION.

When it Melts (2023) Sundance Film Festival 2023

Dir.: Veerle Baetens; Cast: Charlotte De Bruyne, Rosa Marchant, Amber Metdeppeningen, Femkevan der Steen, Naomi Velissariou, Sebastian Dewaele, Matthijs Meertens, Chrlotte van der Eecken, Simon van Buyten,Anthony Vyt; Belgium/ Netherlands 2023, 111 min.

Family conflict is at the heart of this provocative drama about a troubled teenager from first time Belgian director Veerle Baetens.

Now an adult, Eva (De Bruyne) has clearly not recovered from the past. Out of quiet desperation, we see her (in flashback) deliberately breaking a gift rejected by another girl called Elisa (Van Der Eecken) who she tried to befriend when she was younger (played by Marchant). And desperation is a good way to describe her current existence in a Belgium city where she now lives, people around her clearly picking up on her angst. The truth will gradually emerge in a series of flashbacks fleshing out her childhood showing a happier time in the countryside where she grew up.

When It Melts sees Eva returning to the village many years after a sweltering summer where everything seemed to go wrong, leaving her scarred and emotionally fragile. This time, Eva has taken a block of ice in the back of her car, but not in preparation for the summer heat, as we soon discover as the tragedy unfolds. Her old friend Laurens (Van Buyten) is happy to see her. His mother – the local butcher – always seemed warm and protective, unlike her own parents who were dismissive and distant. Tim is still suffering from the death of hs brother Jan, who fell into a cesspit. His parents clearly would have preferred him to die instead.

In the past Elisa (Van der Eecken), was always more mature and sophisticated than the others. Her Dad gave her a horse as compensation for his frequent absence. Elisa, out of boredom, hung out with Eva, giving her make-up lessons and lending some of her clothes. Eva saw this as true friendship, introducing Elisa to Laurens and Tim. But their relationship ends when Eva accidentally kills Elisa’s horse by feeding it poisonous flowers. Sex inevitably becomes another complication between the girls and the boys, in a game of truth or dare that goes seriously wrong. Graphic violence and cruelty takes place off scene, the sheer brutality of these encounters is clearly harrowing – but very much in line with the characters committing them.

When it Melts avoids sensationalism, but is once again testament to how far ordinary teenagers will go to fulfil their darkest desires. Strong performances across the board make this heart-rending and convincing, Baetens’ debut will stay with the audience for a long time after they leave the cinema. AS

SPECIAL JURY AWARD, WORLD CINEMA DRAMATIC : BEST PERFORMANCE ROSA MARCHANT | SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL 2023

High Wind in Jamaica (1965)

Dir: Alexander MacKendrick | UK Drama

The last film of true substance in the ill-fated directorial career of Alexander MacKendrick rather tones down the bleakness and ferocity of Richard Hughes’ 1929 novel, but is still faithful to MacKendrick’s perennial them of the dire results when amoral youthful innocence crosses the path of adult venality.

The Thorntons are a British family living in Jamaica in 1870. When they decide to send their children back to England for a proper education, the long journey home quickly turns into pandemonium when a pirate ship, led by Capt. Chavez (Anthony Quinn), attacks their vesselThe kids in this film follow in the tracks of Sydney Stratton in ‘The Man in the White Suit’, Mandy, Sammy in ‘Sammy Going South’ and even Mrs Wilberforce in ‘The Ladykillers’.

The film offers the novelty of a miniature version of Martin Amis as one of the children and a surprisingly traditional score by Larry Adler with not a harmonica in sight. @RichardChatten

Babylon (2023)

Dir.: Damien Chazelle; Cast: Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Diego Calvas, Jean Smart, Olivia Wilde. Spike Jonze, Li Jun Li, Jovan Adepo. Max Minghella; USA 2022, 190 min.

Damien Chazelle (La La Land) is not the first filmmaker to depict the extravagance and outsized egos of the Hollywood years between talkies and sound. Before Chazelle came along there was Sunset Boulevard and Robert Altman’s 1992 The Player (among many others) but none resort to the dreary hyperbole of Babylon or its needless financial outlay that Chazelle burns through with boyish glee, greedily biting off far more than he can chew in this mouthful of mediocrity.

The extraordinary running time is also a nod to the director’s inflated ego: like it or lump it, we are stuck with this overblown ‘Director’s Cut’ that sees him unable to control himself in a homage to Hollywood’s Golden Era in a cartoonish version of what really went on. Glossy moving images glide meaninglessly over a depthless void, giving lip service to reality without ever engaging with it, and leaving out references to the “Hays Code” of 1934, and the influencing contribution of European directors like Chaplin, Lang, Curtis, Litvak and Siodmak. Chazelle turns a blind eye to cinematographic history.

Three main protagonists lead us through the Hollywood jungle in 1926 with the advent of the talkies. Matinee idol Jack Conrad (Pitt) works his way through the women and is only too aware of losing out to the talkies. On the phone to a mighty producer he complains: “this script for his new feature stinks, and the studio will blame him for the result”. But he soldiers on until self-disgust and disappointment drives him to tragedy.

Margot Robbie’s Nellie LaRoy, the “wild girl” with the New Jersey squawk and a penchant for drugs and gambling, is a born star before she even sets foot in a studio. Based on Clara Bow (the original ‘It’ girl`) Nellie gets her chance to act when the female lead is killed in the opening orgy scene. The body is smuggled out of the building while an elephant makes a grand entrance, grabbing the camera’s attention. Nellie is also a showstopper, but her scenes are raucous and obscene, and later she has difficulties with the sound system that sounds her death knell. Alas, Nellie’s type is superfluous to requirements, and she is written out of the narrative.

Mexican American “Manny” (Diego Calva), her counterpart, is dazzled by stardom, starting at the bottom and rising to the top, only to crash down to reality, and a 1952 epilogue where he is still in love with her despite her ruinous gambling addiction. She leaves him at the bottom where they first met.

Animals are treated with unbridled neglect and even cruelty. Manny, amongst other feats, is forced to manoeuvre said elephant up a steep hill where the poor beast becomes frightening and incontinent spraying everyone in sight. Another spectacular episode in the desert sees Conrad take on a rattle snake desperate to escape his clutches. It is finally slayed by the sinuous Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li) after Nelly’s attempts to kill by swirling it round in mid air.

There are (too) many cameos: Jean Smart’s gossip columnist is the only voice of reason, telling Conrad he shouldn’t grumble, at the end. “because fifty years from now some kid will stumble over your image.” Max Minghella is suitably tyrannical as an elegant Irving Thalberg, and Jazz musician Sidney Palmer (Adepo) is given a box of charred cork to blacken his face, so he can fit in with the rest of the band.

Chazelle’s regular DoP Linus Sandren holds it all together image-wise lending a visual unity that is lacking in the script. On a positive note, Chazelle occasionally shows sparks of real panache and humour, and succeeds in bringing cinema back as one of many attractions in the fairground. AS

IN UK CINEMAS FROM 20 JANUARY 2023

Two Tickets to Greece | Les Cyclades (2022)

Dir: Marc Fitoussi | Cast: Laure Calamy, Kristin Scott Thomas, Olivia Cote, Alexandre Desrousseaux, Panis Koronie | France, Comedy 109′

Laure Calamy turns her talents to comedy and Kristin Scott Thomas lets her hair down in Marc Fitoussi’s uplifting French drama that navigates the highs and lows of female cameraderie and lifelong friendship. With humour, insight and maturity Fitoussi shows you never really know someone ’til you go on holiday with them.

Blandine and Magalie were inseparable as naughty teenagers growing up in Paris and then went their separate ways. Meeting up again decades later their lives have changed completely: Blandine (Cote) is a downbeat divorcee and mother to Benjamin Desrousseaux), bubbly ’80s disco fan Magalie (Calamy) is freelancing in the music business, with free being the operative word for broke.

On a whim they decide to embark on a trip to the Greek Islands, but their conflicting personalities soon see them coming to blows, Magalie is feisty and flirts with the reality – and every man she meets, always seeing the glass half full; Blandine works with cancer patients but has lost her bedside manner where love is concerned.

The trip gets off to a bad start when the two get thrown off the ferry, Magalie having brought the wrong tickets, they are forced to bed down in cramped conditions on a barren island with a group of SAGA holidaymakers. The next day gets off to a promising start – for Magalie, at least – when they meet some hunky surfers, but any hope of romance soon hits the rocks, despite Magalie regaling all with her song and dance routine, and nightfall sees them back in the same bedroom together.

When they finally get to Mykonos, Magalie’s old friend Bijou (Kristen Scott Thomas rocking flowing grey tresses) it ready to welcome them into her Greek idyll with her artist boyfriend (Koronis). This is where Blandine shines, bonding with breast-cancer sufferer Bijou who is anxiously awaiting the results of a recent biopsy.

Les Cyclades brims with tears, recriminations and laughter – and Calamy is genuinely hilarious, Cote complimenting her spunky confidence with a sober sensitivity. As a comedy duo they chanel the same comedy dynamic as Alison Steadman and Harriet Reynolds in the TV outing ‘Abigail’s Party’. Meanwhile Kristin Scott Thomas’ Bijou – straight out of the swinging sixties – provides a fun and stabilising influence as a successful woman grounded by the feel-good influence of love. MT

NOW IN FRENCH CINEMAS

https://youtu.be/xbIsRbyrhJQ

Goodbye Happiness | Au revoir le bonheur (2023)

Dir: Ken Scott | Cast: Francois Arnaud, Antoine Bertrand, Louis Morisette, Patrice Robitaille, Julie LeBreton, Charlotte Aubin | France/Canada Comedy Drama 107′

Serious themes are given the simplistic treatment in this lightweight comedy that bobs along pointlessly in Canada’s Ken Scott one-note direction.

When their father dies, four adult brothers return to their childhood home in Canada’s picturesque Magdalen Islands, only to discover the housekeeper has turned it into a fully occupied b&b. But much worse is to follow at the reading of the Will, forcing the men – and their families – to completely reassess the future.

Unfortunately, there’s nothing authentic in about any of these main characters who are merely cyphers representing their individual personality flaws: Nicolas (Arnaud) is unfaithfulness personified: we see him mindlessly bonking Camille (Aubin) in the opening scenes, and then inviting her to join the trip. “With your family?” she splutters, incredulous, and soon fades into the background. Charles-Alexandre (Morisette) is greed personified, a bland financier who spends the film working out how to extract his inheritance. Then there is William, a writer unable to string two words together for a new novel. But perhaps the saddest of the foursome is Thomas (Bertrand), an overweight loser who cannot move on from the past and spends the whole time whingeing. The performances here are as flaccid as the various subplots that fail to resolve convincingly in a mawkish scenario held together by saccharine interludes picturing this happy extended family romping around the countryside never disagreeing despite justifiable reasons to do so considering the tragic issues that confront them. This is just abnormal, even comedy needs tonal nuance.

By the end we are supposed to feel happy and relieved for them but we really couldn’t care less. The only saving grace in this comedy without any laughs is Norayr Kasper’s stunning photography that puts this gorgeous part of Canada on the screen for all to enjoy. MT

NOW ON RELEASE IN FRANCE

Beat Girl (1960)

Dir: Edmond T. Greville | Cast: Gillian Hills, Christopher Lee, David Farrar, Adam Faith, Shirley Anne Field, Oliver Reed, Peter McEnery, Nigel Green | UK Drama 89′

Gillian Hills is the teenage star of this 1960s classic from Nice-born director Edmond T. Greville, who trained under Ewald Andre Dupont, and who also made the horror cult classic The Hands of Orlac the same year.

Anybody in any doubt as to who really created the distinctive sound of 007 need look no further than the opening sequence featuring the John Barry Seven that starts this extraordinary meeting of talent from different places and different eras; ranging from the veteran French director himself to Christopher Lee, Adam Faith, Shirley Anne Field and a debuting Oliver Reed absurdly gyrating about in a loud plaid shirt anticipating the wally he’d ultimately end up as.

Based on Greville’s own story adapted for the screen by English scriptwriter Dail Ambler, the characterisation is far more nuanced than in the hippy era, as exemplified by the pouting Gillian Hills in the title role, far removed from the vapid bimbo with whom David Hemmings romped with purple paper in Blowup. She would later go on to secure the part of Sonietta in Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange (1971). @RichardChatten

Slow (2023) Sundance Film Festival 2023

Dir.: Marija Kavtaradze; Cast: Greta Grineviciute; Kestutis Cicenas, Pijus Ganusauskas, RimanteValiukaite; :Lithuania/Sweden/Spain 2023, 104 min.

Lithuanian writer/director Marija Kavtaradze’s sophomore feature explores different sexual needs within a heterosexual relationship.

Elena (Grineviciute) is an easy going dance instructor and choreographer in the world of modern ballet. Sex is important to her and she also enjoys male company unlike her close friend who has just entered a convent. Elena is wary of women, having suffered the negative impact her mother (Valiukaite) who wanted a tall slim classical dancer as a daughter, and still lets her known it.

Elena then meets sign language interpreter Dovydas (Cicenas) who will translate for a group of young hearing and speech-impaired dancers. Drawn to his attractive physique she is looking forward to jumping into bed with him only to discover he is cupiosexual, although he still wants a relationship with a woman. Elena is baffled, she has so far only dealt with men who are highly sexed. Dovydas is really in love with Elena, but is unable to consummate their relationship. After a rejection, Elena compensates with a fling with an old flame, but tells Dovydas all about it: “It was just for fun”. The two try to come to terms with Dovydas’ condition: he is not emasculated by Elena’s stronger sexual drive, and does not withdraw from her, as he might if suffering from sexual disfunction. That said, somehow they both suffer in different ways from the absence of sex. In a drunken state, they contemplate an open relationship, but both decide against it. Elena turns to her ex Vilius (Ganusauskas), in the hope of a ‘friends with benefits’ solution but he rejects the idea. But the final act gets rather bogged down in the couple’s attempts to find a modus vivendi, descending into remonstrations and protracted arguments.

Slow is actually two films in one, the rehearsals and performances of Elena’s dance troupe become engrossing in their own right. They show that Elena’s sexuality is very bound up in her physicality, and the form and function of her chosen career is only one step away from the sexual act itself. In contrast Dovydas is not at one with his body and its functions, and Elena finds it difficult to put herself in his shoes and cope with a man who is good-looking but sexually low-powered, just as she cannot get her mind around her friend opting for celibacy. DoP Laurinas Bareisa conjures up the grace and movement of the ballet scenes. Intellectually impressive, Slow’s lack of drive and continuity is the only flaw in this illuminating drama. AS

BEST DIRECTOR WINNER | WORLD CINEMA DRAMATIC | SUNDANCE 2023

The Old Way (2023)

Dir: Brett Donowho | Cast: Nicolas Cage, Clint Howard, Abraham Benrubi, Ryan Kiera Armstrong | US, 95′

Nicolas Cage is back to his old way of starring in second rate material, like this pale rider of a western that rather puts the genre to shame despite is stunning settings in Wyoming. Modern day westerns really need to have another string to their bow beyond just a passable script and solid production values to compete with the multitude of titles flooding our film screens from Netflix to Amazon Prime and beyond.

During the past decade or so filmmakers have revitalised the western genre updating the original concept with refreshing stories that still remain tethered in the past: arthouse chiller The Power of the Dog (2020), the sheer dynamism of The Revenant (2015) and Oscar-winning Django Unchained (2012) have earned their place in the pantheon offering innovative twists to style that was originally defined by the AFI as ‘set in the American West embodying the spirit, the struggle and the demise of the new frontier’.

The Old Way may tick the boxes but its torpid direction and formulaic revenge theme fails to set the campfires burning entertainment-wise, and Cage, who turns in a reasonable performance as a craggy gunslinger facing up to past misdemeanours, is certainly is no Clint Eastwood. Another also ran. MT

Erotikon (1920)

Dir: Mauritz Stiller | Silent Drama 106′

Posterity is proving much kinder to the films of Victor Sjostrom than those of Mauritz Stiller and despite its title the late David Shipman described this particular example “as erotic as an ashtray full of dead stubs”.

For most of it’s length Stiller just directs people constantly talking in long shot as if the closeup hadn’t yet been invented; the raciest moment actually comes when the characters all decamp to a theatre where a lady called Carina Ali performs a startling Apache dance practically nude.

Tora Teje plays a high-maintance floozie who sashays about with her hand on her hip and a cigarette between her fingers, cuckolds her husband (a lecturer on the polygamous tendency of beetles) and makes eyes at a “modern day Icarus”. Her parting shot “It’s a crying shame I had mutton casserole today” isn’t exactly “tomorrow is another day”, but it’s certainly one for the book. @RichardChatten

ON AMAZON and BLURAY

Copenhagen Cowboy (2023)

Dir: Nicolas Winding Refn | Cast: Angela Bundalovic, Andreas Lykke Jorgensen, Li li Zhang, Jason Hendil-Fors, Zlatko Buric, Fleur Frilund, Valentina Dejanovic, Maria Erwolter | Denmark, TV Series

A visionary woman from another planet is at the heart of this spellbinding 6-parter (Netflix), the latest from the maverick Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn, scripted by a clutch of imaginative female writers and limned by glowering compositions and neon-soaked visual effects from award-winning Magnus Nordenhof Jonck (Bridgend, A War).

Back in his native Denmark for the first time since 2005, the arthouse auteur not only stars here but embellishes the film with previous themes from Neon Demon, Only God Forgives and Pusher in a lurid miniseries that is so edgy and aesthetically breathtaking you can forgive its minor narrative flaws.

Copenhagen Cowboy swoops down on the dystopian underbelly of the modern capital where vicious gangs hold sway fed by an evil influx of Eastern immigrants vying for power in the drug trade. Miu (Bundalovic) is the connective tissue between them, an outwardly vulnerable faith healer with a mysterious provenance. This mistress of the martial arts is naturally misunderstood by the misogynist menfolk in her midst who are deeply fearful of her ability to rapidly switch allegiances, cast a spell – or kill with a stroke of her hand. The limpid-eyed Miu is also a miracle worker, a lithe ‘living lucky charm’ decked out in a Prussian blue ‘William Jacket’ tracksuit, for ease of movement.

The film’s casting is superb: Pernille Lembecke and Astrid Faarup have rounded up a compelling cache of actors who not only look surreal but also embody pure evil. As Miu, Angela Bundalovic exudes a laconic remoteness not unlike Scarlett Johansson’s ‘Female’ in Under the Skin. Andreas Lykke Jorgensen is supremely scary as a snarling Danish prince of darkness, and his mother, a vampish blond with chiselled cheekbones, is straight out of a Helmut Newton photo. Then there is Zlatko Buric’s slobbering Slavonic lawyer, a criminal fixer who inhabits one of the city’s stylish skyscrapers, and later emerges as Miu’s negligent relative. A deluded Serbian housewife (Dejanovic) and her vicious axe-wielding pimp of a brother make for nefarious siblings early on in proceedings. Winding Refn also gets a wordless look-in, Hitchcock-style, in a subplot involving the design of a supercharged prosthetic penis. There are also killer pigs whose maniacle squealing provides the soundtrack for one particularly gruesome episode involving the tattooed Aryan prince of darkness in an imagined Danepack-style factory.

These vibrant characters will captivate diehard fans during the many haunting longueurs, and keep us glued to the screen for fear of missing some vital clue or visual flourish. The novelty here is the use of a 360-degree camera that revolves round the set like a southern cassowary scanning for prey.

Refn plays fast and lose with the plot-lines, but who cares with so much visual mastery at play; performances that zing with originality, not to mention Winding Refn’s penchant for avantgarde synth-pop soundscapes – one by Cliff Martinez, another by Julian Winding, complete the spell. Refn’s time with Netflix has ensured the worldwide exposure of his unique brand of talent but word has it that he is returning to the big screen with another bizarre offering. Bring it on soon. MT

NOW on NETFLIX

Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel (2023)

Dir.: Amelie van Elmbt, Maya Duverdier; Documentary with Merle Lister, Rose Cory, Steve Willis, Bettina Grossmann, Nicholas Pappas, Larry Rivers, Stanley Baird; USA 2022, 76 min.

Dreaming Walls tells the story of one of the most iconic hotels of America and its transformation into a bland ‘luxury’ hotel eradicating a glorious and decadent history of one of the final haunts of New York’s vibrant bohemian society.

Belgian filmmakers Amelie van Elmbt and debutant Maya Duverdier visit the current Chelsea Hotel, where the last of New York’s libertine literati still hold sway trapped between unaffordable rent rises, renovation chaos and nostalgia.

The story artist Steve Willis laments the downsizing of his former one-bedroom flat to a studio, gone is the bathroom where Janis Joplin’s toothbrush holder once reigned as a witness to her short romance with Leonard Cohen, inspiring his “Chelsea Hotel No. Two”.

Photos of Mark Twain, Dylan Thomas Marylin Monroe, Patti Smith, Arthur Miller, Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, William S. Burroughs – to name only a few – light up the walls, in homage to another former resident, the avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas who was the first to brake away from screen projection.

And Andy Warhol, whose Chelsea Girls (1966) immortalised the residents during the hotel’s heyday. Languishing like ghosts from a bygone era these tantalising images are a poignant reminder of the rip-roaring yesteryear gradually being eradicated by the gruelling renovation – now in its tenth year.

Yet there’s a comfort in the building works; clinging on in grim solidarity and herded together onto the first floor by the management, some sitting tenants secretly hope the renovations will go on forever, fearing the inevitable rent rises will drive them out when the makeover morphs into just another piece of property porn riding on its former glory, to accommodate a flush but vacuous nouveau riche. but only attracting those who can pay the exorbitant price.

Decay and violent has always featured heavily at the Chelsea Hotel – according to former manager Stanley Baird the Sid Vicious/Nancy Spungen affair in 1978 was a case in point, quoting artist and performer Rose Cory: “the Chelsea was a place for love, divorce, drugs and creativity. It’s a powerful location”.

Merle Lister, once a famous choreographer, tries to befriend the construction workers, but they give her short shrift – like the old ghosts of the past. Some of them actually die during filming: Bettina Grossmann (1927-2021), a conceptual artist, was the hotel’s longest resident. Wild flowers and fauna have now taken over the balconies, and a poster proclaiming “Help me, I am being killed”.

Joachim Philippe and Virginie Surdej have stuck to the concept make Dreaming Walls a night ride into the past with their evocative camerawork, as the past collides uncomfortably with present reality. Dylan Thomas provides the symbolic epitaph: “Do not go gently into the night”, along with a fitting tribute : “TO ALL WHO ONCE STAYED IN THE CHELSEA, AND THEIR DREAMS”. Dreaming Walls is an ode to a New York that was artistic, experimental and untamed. AS

IN UK CINEMAS FROM 20 JANUARY 2023

ON RELEASE IN UK CINEMAS FROM 20 JANUARY 2023

The Cat and the Canary (1978)

Dir: Radley Metzger | Cast: Wilfrid Hyde-White, Honor Blackman, Olivia Hussey, Edward Fox | US Drama

While John Willard’s original play was produced in 1922, this version updates the action to 1934 (which still predates the Bob Hope classic by five years).

Whereas the mansion in the earller films had been dark and covered in cobwebs, here it is vast but tinny, hopelessly overlit and decked out in what Honor Blackman sardonically describes as “my favourite period, early Devil’s Island!”

But as seventies remakes go however it could be a lot worse, and making Lawyer Crosbie a woman is a bright idea (especially as she’s played by Wendy Hiller). Beatrix Lehman makes a memorably spooky housekeeper as the ironically named Mrs Pleasant, while the depiction of mean old millionaire Wilfred Hyde White at the film’s conclusion makes a novel use of colour. @RichardChatten

Luka (2023) International Film Festival Rotterdam

Dir/Wri: Jessica Woodworth | Cast: Jonas Smulders, Geraldine Chaplin, Jan Bijvoet, Sam Louwyck | Drama, 94′

Luka is a dystopian desert phantasy, re-creating a Spartan military state ruled by fear and paranoia, sometime in the distant past. This striking first single outing for Belgium/American director-writer Jessica Woodworth (King of the Belgians) is based on the novel ‘Il deserti dei Tartari’ by Dino Buzzati. The focus is a talented young sniper desperate to see active service in the defence of his country in an impending invasion, the threat of which drives our anticipation forward.

Gripping in the early stages, not least for its visual allure, the film is unable to sustain this momentum for the entire running time. But the highlight is DoP Virginie Surdej’s symmetrical, architectural compositions and her sepia-tinted black & white images which make Luka a memorable and captivating interpretation of the classic novel.

Jonas Smulders is an appealingly boyish hero as Luka the young marksman who, after wishing his mother a fond valedictory in the film’s opening scenes, strides across Steppe-like open terrain to serve as sniper in the Kairos Fort, in the desert of the “North”. There’s something of David McCallum’s ‘Illya Kuryakin’ in Smulders’ feral enfin-like features, making him rather an androgynous romantic hero. But his impatience for battle gives him a steely resolve that tempers this puppyish charm: clearly he is keen to get cracking on the battlefield.

In this testosterone-charged atmosphere the sniper soon becomes close to Konstantin (Tadevossian), who is a listener, trying to detect – with his rather basic electronic equipment – any attack by ‘the North’. But Luka increasingly warms to Geronimo (Schrevens), the son of one of the military leaders. And when Konstantin detects a possible attack from ‘the North’, Luka’s superior sniping skills see him being chosen by the General and Raf (Bljvoet), the most fanatical of the leaders, to go out into the desert and destroy the enemy.

Luka has the right to select a companion, and he goes for Geronimo. The men walk into the desert where they catch sight of a horse. On their return to the fort, where Raf questions their findings. Konstantin is accused of deliberately misinterpreting his data, and Geronimo for imagining the horse. Geronimo and his father escape into the desert, while Luka is sentenced to ghosting, a sadistic punishment involving death by water deprivation and solitary confinement. Luckily, a new alarm saves his life and soon he is out in the desert again chasing phantoms, at least for a time.

Buzzati’s writing is close to Stanislaw Lem, and there are echoes of Tarkowsky’s Stalker, but the difference here is that Buzzati paints the picture of a semi-fascist military state, with the protagonists’ distinct idiosyncrasies. In this way, a narrative can develop, making the circumstances secondary – very much the opposite of Tarkovsky’s approach of a sprawling narrative with the destructive action becoming the primary point of the feature.

Geraldine Chaplin gives an enticing performance as the General, and Smulders offers intrigue as the naïve pawn in a deadly game. The film could benefit from a tighter middle-section to make it more punchy in its appeal as a dramatic narrative and an essay on power structure relying on a mirage-like enemy. AS

BIG SCREEN AWARDS | ROTTERDAM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2023

Tár (2022)

Dir: Todd Field | Cast: Cate Blanchett, Nina Hoss | US Biopic Drama 158′

Cate Blanchett is sheer dynamite – allegedly mastering fluent German – as a world famous musician foisted by her own petard in this hefty near three hour biopic from US director Todd Field.

Field, in his first film since Little Children (2006), firmly establishes the gravitas of Lydia Tár’s prestigious position as head conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic in the prodigious opening scenes of a feature which luxuriates in its endlessly fascinating main character; her peripatetic high-net-worth lifestyle amongst the Berlin’s musical luminaries, her pioneering grit and perseverance in accomplishing her multiple worthy achievements: now at the zenith of her career she is a pianist, composer, conductor and successful family woman who has adopted a Syrian refugee with lover Sharon Goodnow (the ever luminous Nina Hoss) and is seemingly in-eclipsible, or so it would seem. But then allegations of impropriety surface – as they always seems to these days – leading to a down-spiralling in professional and homelife. Is she a narcissist? or simply a perfectionist unwilling to accept second best from her fellows, or herself – Field leaves you to make the final decision.

Slow-burning towards a coruscating crescendo after a languorous, immersive overture, Tár’s denouement is decidedly gut-punching. Certainly a film for cineastes or fans of classical music, this is heavyweight yet compelling entertainment, that keeps us engaged throughout its running time. A magnum opus for Field and a tour de force par excellence for Blanchett. Let’s hope she wins the Oscar – she certainly deserves to. MT

IN CINEMAS FROM 13 JANUARY 2023 | Copa Volpi Award for Best Actress Cate Blanchett | VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2022

Empire of Light (2022)

Dir.: Sam Mendes; Cast: Olivia Colman, Michael Ward, Colin Firth, Hannah Onslow, Toby Jones, Tom Brooke; UK 2022, 119 min.

This noble tribute to the golden days of the picture palace and the power of human connection is underwhelming despite the deep humanity of its intentions. A brilliant British cast of Olivia Colman, Colin Firth, Tom Brooke and Toby Jones are the motley crew of characters trying to keep their cinema afloat in the seaside town of Margate, where the chance to show a regional premiere of Chariots of Fire gives hope to a movie theatre that is well past its glory days. Director and first time script writer Sam Mendes certainly offers a flawless visual portrait of provincial England at the beginning of the 1980s but his script lets him down, lurching between lethargic melancholy and over intense melodrama unfolding in a series of episodes rather than a cohesive and flowing feature.

The Empire is a cinema on Margate beachfront where troubled employee Hilary (Colman) has suffered a breakdown and is barely coping with the unwelcome sexual advances of unhappily married cinema manager Donald (Firth), and a much younger addition to the team, Stephen (Ward), who falls for her as the two begin a torrid affair. But after getting close to Hilary, Stephen, who is black, rekindles his relationship with his first girlfriend Ruby, destabilising Hilary’s fragile stage of mind. Hilary is somehow in thrall to Donald and their conflict comes to head on the cinema’s first night screening of Chariots of Fire, when she then trounces him by reading an Auden poem, before spilling the beans.

During a National Front rally, the mob then storms the cinema, seriously injuring Stephen and landing him in hospital. The other three main members of the cinema staff: the sensitive ticket manager Neil (Brooke), cranky projectionist Norman (Jones) and usherette Janine (Onslow) in her “Rocky Horror Show” outfit, barely get a look in as characters, despite the rich tapestry of the storyline and its exciting potential.

Instead, Mendes concentrates far two much on nostalgic detail and the negative aspects of Hilary’s condition which robs the film of momentum and the chance for the other characters to play a real part. Strangely Roger Deakins’ rapturous camerawork becomes the focus of Mendes’ mournful semi-autobiographical recollection, upstaging even Colman’s soulful performance and the support of the underused and talented cast who struggle with their underwritten parts. What could have been a landmark film about the healing nature of cinema, music and community ends up as another decent, but rather unbalanced production where politics instead of people takes centre stage. AS

EMPIRE OF LIGHT in UK and IRISH CINEMAS from 9 January 2023

Piggy (2022)

Dir.: Carlota Pereda; Cast: Laura Galan, Richard Holmes, Carmen Machi, Julian Valcarcel, Irene Ferreiro, Camilla Aguilar, Jose Pastor, Claudia Salas; Spain/France 2021, 99 min.

Always original – surreal even – Piggy is a vibrant coming-of-age psychological revenge thriller from Spanish director Carlota Pereda, developed from her 2019 short film of the same name, that shows how in some European countries obesity is still socially unacceptable.

The opening shot sees the main character Sara (Galan) standing in her parents’ butcher shop in small-town Extramadura, her homework soaked in pig’s blood. Outside, three girlfriends Claudia (Ferreiro), Roci (Aguilar) and Maca (Salas) are about to go swimming with the local boys. Sara is not only over-weight she is downright obese. And her parents have made things worse by favouring a younger brother. What follows is a disturbing but all too common look at teenage bullying that can lead to emotional trauma.

When Sara eventually gets to the pool her girlfriends try to drown her with a lacrosse stick in an extreme act of bullying, stealing her clothes in the process. Waddling home in her bikini, the tables are soon when she is accosted by car carrying her screaming friends, driven by The Stranger (Holmes). In a supreme act of revenge Sara ignores their desperate pleas for help, and heads back to the village where more horror unfolds when a video featuring her being bullied by her pals has been circulated by Claudia’s boyfriend Pedro, who has deleted it “out of pity”.

Scenes of graphic horror unfold in the revenge spree, not only in her parent’s house but also in a slaughterhouse in the nearby countryside, where Sara gets her own back on the entire village. And this being Spain, a bull – in this case an escaped prize fighter – also colludes with The Stranger in the ensuing bloodbath. In her clever script Pereda clearly implies that he might also have been a victim of bullying like Sara. Far from being just a slasher, Piggy is a startling and intelligent look at teenage angst, complete with a complex blood-soaked narrative. AS

IN CINEMAS FROM FRIDAY

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)

Dir: Robert Wise | US Sci-fi 92′

A key work of fifties science fiction recently awarded the accolade of yet another unnecessary remake, The Day the Earth Stood Still remains one the sadly few contributions to the genre made with grown-ups in mind.

Robert Wise’s classic hits the ground running with a terrific title sequence and a tingling theramin score by Bernard Herrmann (one of the few genuinely original scores ever written for a sci-fi movie) dovetailing into a still unsurpassed depiction of a flying saucer sweeping across the Washington skyline before gracefully settling in the centre of the Washington Mall.

Michael Rennie had the role of his career as the tall, personable, well-spoken Klaatu (writer Edmond North later admitted to Klaatu’s use of ‘Carpenter’ as an alias and his resurrection as conscious references to Christ). His nine-foot robot Gort was played by Lock Martin, the doorman at Grauman’s Chinese Restaurant, the tallest man in Hollywood.

Klaatu in the words of Peter Biskind is “not one of those diffident aliens who land on a farm somewhere in Iowa and takes years to make their way to Washington or Los Angeles. Klaatu means business and goes right to the top.” At the height of the Cold War Rennie’s testy remark “I’m not concerned with your petty squabbles!” is an extraordinary thing to hear in a mainstream Hollywood movie; while Albert Einstein – obviously the model for the wise Professor Barnhardt – was also at that time a controversial figure. @RichardChatten

NOW ON TALKING PICTURES

Una Vita Difficile (1961)

Dir: Dino Risi | Alberto Sordi, Lea Massari, Franco Fabrizi, Lina Volonghi | Italy, Drama 118′

Lake Como, Northern Italy, 1944. Partisan Sordi on the run from the Germans, is sheltered, nursed and romanced in an abandoned mill by local innkeeper’s daughter Massari, whisking her to Rome after the war to share his shabby flat.

The story of an on-again, off-again, then on-again relationship, told against 17 years of Italian history, from the last year of World War II to the economic boom of the early 1960s – the liberation of Rome, the country’s switch from monarchy to republic, the first post-Fascist general election, etc. – as Sordi’s commitment to the Cause gets in the way of his earning a decent living for Massari and their newborn son.

In Italy, Una Vita Difficile is cherished as one of the great works of commedia all’italiana – a Golden Age of cinema from the 50s and 60s that includes Monicelli’s Big Deal on Madonna Street, Germi’s Divorce Italian Style, Lattuada’s Mafioso, De Sica’s Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, and Risi’s own Il Sorpasso. While these and others were major arthouse hits, Una Vita Difficile was never released in the US.

One of Italy’s most beloved stars, Alberto Sordi began his film career as the Italian dubbing voice of Hollywood actors, including Cary Grant, and became famous as the Italian voice of Oliver Hardy. After appearing as the Valentinoesque title character of Federico Fellini’s The White Sheik, Sordi had his breakthrough role in Fellini’s I Vitelloni, as one of the aimless young men of the title

Though never an international star like contemporaries Marcello Mastroianni and Vittorio Gassman, Sordi was one of Italy’s biggest box office attractions, starring in over 150 movies (19 directed by himself). Along with Anna Magnani, Sordi was the quintessential Roman, affectionately known by his public as “Albertone.” At his funeral in 2013, an estimated crowd of close to a million gathered outside the church to pay their last respects.

Una Vita Difficile’s many comic highlights include a Banquet from Hell at the table of an ancient principessa and a riotous sequence at Cinecittà, with guest appearances by superstars Vittorio Gassman (who’d star in Risi’s Il Sorpasso a year later) and Silvana Mangano (best known as star of the neo-realist classic Bitter Rice and wife of producer Dino De Laurentiis), along with director Alessandro Blasetti, known as “the father of Italian cinema.”

Often called “Italy’s Billy Wilder,” Dino Risi’s film career began as an assistant to Mario Soldati and Alberto Lattuada. His films are populated by a rogue’s gallery of shamelessly lovable commedia all’Italiana types in the inimitable guises of some of the era’s greatest actors: Alberto Sordi, Vittorio Gassman, Nino Manfredi, Ugo Tognazzi, and Sophia Loren.” Risi was awarded an Honorary Golden Lion at the 2002 Venice Film Festival for his life’s work.

Una Vita Difficile was scanned in 4K from the original negative by Istituto Luce, Rome. The restoration was carried out at VDM by Studiocanal and headline.@Andrea Torres

AT FILMFORUM New York from FEBRUARY 3

The Minute you Wake Up Dead (2022)

Dir: Michael Mailer | Cast: Morgan Freeman, Cole Hauser, Jaimie Alexander | US Crime Thriller

Why Morgan Freeman went for this clunky cliched ‘neo-noir’ whodunnit is anyone’s guess. The only other mystery is how such a poor script got a budget to be made in the first place. Set in deepest Mississippi it sees a group of honest but deeply uninteresting people emerge as suspects in a story so far-fetched and implausible even Freeman fails to gain credibility as the local sheriff investigating the case. It all starts with Russ (Hauser), a financially successful broker, enjoying drink in his local after trousering a fortune on the city’s stock markets. Tongues start to wag when he is confronted by an angry punter lamenting the loss of his life savings. It appears Russ has duped the locals in an ill-thought out insurance scam, and they are not best pleased at losing their money. Russ then gets a series of anonymous phone-calls announcing: “Where will you be the minute you wake up dead?” Do we really care? Russ’s next door neighbour Delaine (Alexander) does, and she temps him round to her place to enjoy ‘the best beef stew in the neighbourhood”, according to her daddy (Dahlgren) who survives the stew but then gets shot dead. This is the first in a series of murders, Morgan Freeman losing the will to live as gradually bodies and plot-holes pile up. MT

ON DIGITAL PLATFORMS from 9 JANUARY 2023.

A Man Called Otto (2022)

Dir.: Marc Forster; Cast: Tom Hanks, Mariana Trevino, Mario Garcia-Rullo, Truman Hanks, Rachel Keller, Cameron Britton, Peter Lawson, Anita Jennings; USA 2022, 126 min.

This lightweight user-friendly remake of Hannes Holm’s dour original A Man Called Ove (2015) is styled for the American market, based on a bestseller by Fredrik Backman. It stars Tom Hanks as Otto, a lonely pensioner suffering from the recent death of his beloved wheelchair bound wife Sonja (Keller).

On a condominium outside Pittsburgh, Otto is Pennsylvania’s answer to Victor Meldrew, a miserable old buffer hellbent on bringing rule-breakers to task, particularly parking offenders and neighbours who put their rubbish in the wrong container – there are so many to choose from. In flashback we see a much happier Otto (Hank’s son Truman), courting the bookworm Sonja in his petrolhead days when speed was his main thing.

Tragedy strikes on the way back from a day out at Niagara Falls when the two are involved in a road accident killing Sonja’s unborn child and condemning her to life in a wheelchair. An office tantrum soon sees Otto edged out of his long-term job, and a place on the condominium Administration Board. Otto then comes to blows with his best friend and neighbour Rueben (Lawson) who buys a Japanese car, an act of treachery in Otto’s opinion.

But all is not lost – the very start of the film has already predicted a return to grace for grumpy old Otto who is seen buying a rope that leads to a botched suicide attempt. Otto now has new neighbours, the do-gooding twosome Marisol (Trevino) and Tommy (Garcia-Rullo). Marisol is pregnant again, and Otto offers her driving lessons and becomes a reliable babysitter. He also offers sanctuary to teenager Malcolm – now transgender rather than gay – after the boy’s father throws him out.

Hanks’ easy charm and bountiful bonhomie is the key to his casting, he can never be seen in a negative light – for long at least – so the rest of the film is bland and predictable. Gone is the quirky indie feel of the Swedish original and we are left with a feel-good story of schmaltz and saccharine, just saved by the production values and an humanising Tom Hanks. AS

NOW IN CINEMAS FROM FRIDAY 6 JANUARY 2023

The Wicked Lady (1946)

Dir: Leslie Arliss | Cast: Margaret Lockwood, James Mason, Patricia Roc | UK Drama

Described by the late David Shipman as a “junk classic”, and Margaret Lockwood as a “calculating husband-stealing murderous bitch” (surrounded by decor and wearing costumes that must have consuming half the budget) who relieves her boredom by moonlighting as a footpad and enjoying a sado-masochistic relationship with a very saturnine young James Mason (who calls her a “green-eyed devil”).

Critics absolutely hated this film, but it went to become the top-earning British film of 1946. Like all the best melodramas the women call the shots (and if anything Lockwood particularly enjoys rubbing her own sex up the wrong way concentrating on their jewellery and devoting much of the film tussling with them like a prizefighter).

The ladies in the audience obviously derived considerable pleasure from the sight of Lockwood plunging ever deeper into sin while rooting for Patricia Roc – who gets to slap Lockwood’s face – and gone home well satisfied when she dies (SPOILER COMING:) with a bang followed by a whimper. It’s even rumoured that Queen Mary used to regularly watch it at Marlborough House. @RichardChatten

Rimini (2022)

Dir: Ullrich Seidl Wris: Ullrich Seidl, Veronika Franz | Cast: Michael Thomas, Tessa Gottlicher, Hans Michael Rehberg, Ibrahim Isiktas | Austria, Drama 116′

Rimini is a comedy of the most tragic kind. Accurately reflecting the tawdry reality of life in a washed-out seaside town in winter where lost souls come together disillusioned by lives that turned out to be shadows of their hopes and dreams it pictures the sleety coalface of the 21st century as it really is for many, warts and all.

Fans of Austrian auteur Ullrich Seidl will welcome another addition to the archive. Rimini is less horrific than his gruesome Safari. More long the lines of Paradise: Faith, and Paradise: Love this latest is less poetic, infinitely more grotesque and quietly brilliant in its acute observations. A muted colour palette and exquisite compositions offer some visual redemption but for the most part Rimini is a heart-sinking film to watch.

The first and only laugh comes near the beginning when the main character, ageing nightclub singer Richie Bravo (Thomas), swaggers back home to Austria from his squallid apartment in Rimini to attend his mother’s funeral, during which his dementia-ridden father (beautifully played by Hans-Michael Rehberg) shouts out “who’s dead?” It’s an all too familiar situation for many and Rehberg (who died in 2017 shortly after filming) will also provide the film with its devastating finale that conveys the pity and poetry of this ghastly yet deeply affecting drama.

But when Richie later beds down in his single-bedded teenage room after the funeral, the sad truth emerges: his life has never really moved on from leaving home, to a failed relationship that inadvertently bore him a neglected daughter Tessa (Tessa Göttlicher). But more of that later.

Off-season Rimini is a tacky retirement backwater where the raddled paunchy figure of Richie Bravo returns. After the sobering events of the funeral, his sweaty leather trousers and bleach-blond looks still seem to cut the mustard with the budget crown of Austrian/German holidaymakers who are prepared to pay for a few awkward ‘senior’ moments between the sheets, despite the usual sexual accoutrements, although passion has long left the bedroom for both parties.

The louche lounge lizard zips himself up and heads back for another grotesque stage appearance eking out strident cover versions from the past. And then home to confront Tessa who has suddenly fetched up in Rimini to reveal her pregnancy with a Muslim refugee (Isiktas) and is demanding bed and board along with his entourage of religiously observant pals. Tessa’s indomitable appearance provides the touchstone to reality that will bring Richie full circle to the present and a future of deeply-felt pain and financial hardship that will lead to his descent into venality. MT

ON RELEASE in the UK early in 2023

Caravaggio’s Shadow (2022)

Dir: Michele Placido | Cast: Riccardo Scamarcio, Isabelle Huppert, Louis Garrel, Lolita Chammah, Micaela Ramazzotti | Drama 120′

Riccardo Scamarcio hogs the limelight as the painter Caravaggio, aka Michelangelo Merisi (1571-1610), in this visceral epic that glows like one of the painter’s original masterpieces in this imagined drama from Michele Placido.

Accused of murder in 1609 the maverick painter flees the depraved bacchanalian world of 17th century Rome but is unable to escape the clutches of Louis Garrel’s inquisitorial Catholic investigator Ombra (a fictitious character) or the lustful advances of Isabelle’s Huppert’s Marchesa Costanza Sforza Colonna whose family offers him sanctuary in Naples while urging the Pope to offer clemency until Caravaggio’s suspicious death in Porto Ercole the following year.

Scamarcio gives an incendiary performance as the legendary ‘bad boy’ who purportedly loved young boys as much as beautiful women, and whose talent for taking outcasts and sinners and transforming them on the canvas into saints and madonnas is almost eclipsed by his salacious lifestyle.

Caravaggio has long captured the imagination of art lovers and world specialists – such as Andrew Graham Dixon – and Placido’s ambitious art thriller certainly evokes the savage mystery of the era with stunning set pieces, an emotive original score and Michele D’Attanasio’s painterly camerawork although it often feels like the script, co-written with Sandro Petraglia and Fidel Signorile, overelaborates the sensationalism at the expense of historical facts.

Caravaggio’s talent as the era’s most spectacular painter elevates him into the realms of superstardom while he himself remains a grounded character despite his undeniable genius. Scamarcio really brings out the humanity in the painter and his vulnerability as an artist and convinces us of his efforts and his subsequent failure to rise above the negative impact of the nefarious characters surrounding him. This thrilling expose of the life and times of a legendary and revolutionary artist is lusciously mounted entertainment on a grand scale. MT

ON RELEASE IN FRANCE and in the UK later in 2023 | ROME FILM FESTIVAL PREMIERE

Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things (1972)

Dir: Bob Clark | US Horror

A bunch of hippies learn the hard way to sow some respect for the dead in this cross between an episode of ‘Scooby Doo’ and The Blair Witch Project played for laughs with the production values of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

This no-budget lark shot in Florida directed by ‘Benjamin’ (as he was then billed) Clark sure delivers the goods. The atonal score by Carl Zittrer frequently sounds more like sound effects than music and art director David Trimble (not that one, I hope) adds to the levity by putting his surname on a tombstone.

The usual bunch of hippies are an engaging bunch, particularly feisty Valerie Mamches and wide-eyed Anya Ormsby. The climax when it finally comes doesn’t disappoint you when it erupts (SPOILER COMING:) into a wondrous pastiche of Night of the Living Dead.

NOW ON YOUTUBE AND PLEX

Rashomon (1950) BFI Retrospective 2023

Dir.: Akira Kurosawa; Cast: Toshiro Mifune, Machiko Kyö, Masayuki Mori, Takashi Shimra, Minoru Chiaki, Kichijioru Ueda; Japan 1950; 88 min.

From Agatha Christie to Patricia Highsmith modern literature is fraught with unreliable narration. One of the first writers to employ the device was Robert Browning back in his 1869 novel The Ring and the Book.

Akiro Kurosawa filmed his brilliantly constructed script into a cinematic masterpiece that unfolds under the crumbling arches of a temple in medieval Kyoto during a meeting between a priest, a woodcutter and a sceptical traveller, the first two having been witness to the trial of a villainous bandit who allegedly robbed a samurai and raped his wife.

The bandit Tajomaru is actually very proud of his wrongdoing – but we really question his guilt. His narrative is full of self-grandeur, but it does not make him into the vainglorious beast he really longs to be. The wife Massako is an arch feminist, equally fed up with her snobbish and cold-hearted husband as she is with the brutal Tajomaru, played by a mesmerising Toshiro Mifune, who would go on to star in many of Kurosawa’s films.

The traveller’s questions form the basis of a series of flashbacks to the trial, and the conflicting evidence of five people, one of them speaking through a medium. But there is something missing in Massako’s chronicle of events: she faints at an opportune moment, and wakes up displaced and confused. Samurai Kanazawa is actually the most evil one: arrogant and puffed up with his class superiority, he is also as greedy as the bandit. The woodcutter is the Everyman, who wants to be right, but is too confused by the ordeal to get to the heart of the truth. He, like the priest, is waiting for a moment of redemption that materialises later on in form of an abandoned baby.

Kurosawa tells the story not as a realistic undertaking, but as a fairy story set deep in the woods where danger lurks in dark corners for all the main protagonists. The black-and-white images of DoP Kozuo Miyagawa echo the symbolism of Fritz Lang’s early German features, with the flickering shadows tricking the audience, as well as the characters, into believing their version of the truth which remains subjective and intangible until the end.

The ‘Rashomon structure’ appears again and again during film history: notably in The Usual Suspects (1995), and Gus Van Sant’s Elefant (2003), a chronicle of the shooting at the Columbine High School.

Rashomon won the Golden Lion at Venice in 1951 and its commercial release in Britain eased the gradual transition of Japanese and Asian cinema into the mainstream after the dehumanising events of the Second World World.

ON RE-RELEASE FROM 6 January 2023 courtesy of BFI as part of a major KUROSAWA RETROSPECTIVE,

Retreat, Hell! (1952)

Dir: Joseph H. Lewis | US War drama

In his first film after exploring the dark side of America in Gun Crazy, Joseph H. Lewis turned his talents to this ultra-patriotic movie beginning and ending with To the Shores of Tripoli over the credits culminating with a finale set in the snowy wastes of Inchon which was one of the very few Korean War films actually made during the war.

Retreat, Hell! sees Frank Lovejoy, the commanding officer with a heart of gold beneath his gruff exterior; veteran captain Richard Carlson, the thoughtful family man and war veteran recalled to action; and teenage private Russ Tamblyn all fighting their way out of a frozen mountain pass while under overwhelming attack by some Chinese soldiers. Also appearing in the film is Tamblyn’s older brother, also a Marine, and Nedrick Young (credited as Ned Young). A sure sign of official endorsement is the abundant use of actuality footage.

The most interesting feature however is the eighteen year-old ‘Rusty’ (as he was then billed) Tamblyn who provides an early demonstration both of his ability to act along with the physical dexterity to convincingly take part in a session of jujitsu. There’s not a lot of humour but the admonition of Tamblyn’s drill sergeant Nedrick Young (ironically himself soon to be blacklisted) to go easy on the target he is bayoneting since it belongs to the US government is fairly amusing. @RichardChatten.

Paris Blues (1961)

Dir: Martin Ritt | Joanne Woodward, Sydney Poitier, Paul Newman | US Drama 98’

The cinematic legacy of the Beat Generation has always been far more interesting than that of the hippies. Graced by the black & photography of Christian Matras this film creates a Paris far removed from the early work of Godard then being made.

A testament to the days when cool dudes wore suits and ties, of whom none were cooler than Paul Newman and Sydney Poitier in their pristine youth (the former playing a bad boy in a role originally meant for Brando is seen perusing a copy of the New York Herald Tribune carrying a picture of Kennedy’s inauguration on the front page).

Like most films about jazz it’s far too in awe of itself and everyone talks too much (it’s at it’s most self-satisfied in the musical duel between Newman and Satchmo); and Duke Ellington’s noisy score makes no attempt to complement the action.

The performance that gives the film real soul is that of Joanne Woodward, who when she herself gets to tickle the ivory ironically plays a few bars of the ‘Blue Danube’. @RichardChatten

Sabotage (1936)

Dir: Alfred Hitchcock | Cast: Sylvia Sidney, Oskar Homolka, Desmond Tester, John Loder, Joyce Barbour | Drama 76′

Joseph Conrad’s original novel was published in 1907 at the height of anarchist activity. Hitchcock’s version updates it to the 1930s, complete with a Disney cartoon on the programme of the cinema in which it’s set.

The baddie’s provenance isn’t specified here, but after Hitchcock arrived in Hollywood the exhortation in Foreign Correspondent not to let the lights go out over Europe the message could be far more overt.

It contains four classic Hitchcock set-pieces involving knives, and a scene with a bomb second only to the death of Gromek in Torn Curtain for sheer ruthlessness.

As usual with Hitchcock obvious models compete with actual locations. His anarchist cell sure are a sinister looking lot, particularly William Dewhurst as their unctuous little quartermaster. @RicharChatten

NOW ON PRIME VIDEO

Speed (1994) Prime video

Dir: Jan De Boni | Cast: Keanu Reeves, Dennis Hopper, Sandra Bullock, Joe Morton | US Action thriller 116′

An exemplary piece of high concept filmmaking that provides plenty of bang for your buck. Director Jan De Bont does a lovely job martially the components with results that really look as dangerous as they’re supposed to with none of that obvious CGI and wobbly steadicam that makes watching modern action films such a trial; and there’s none of that glee in indiscriminate death on a vast scale that disfigures the Die Hard films.

Keanu Reeves is a charmingly dedicated hero, and Sandra Bullock gives the performance that made her a star (her distress when she thinks she’s hit a child’s perambulator is genuinely touching).

Dennis Hopper is obviously having the time of his life playing “an encyclopaedia of bombs” whose line “Poor people are crazy. I’m eccentric” is worthy of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. @RichardChatten

NOW ON PRIME VIDEO

Sundance Film Festival 2023

The Sundance Film Festival is back for the first time since 2020 at its Park City venue celebrating independent film with a line-up of 101 feature-length films, from 23 different countries. This year’s festival is an in-person and online event allowing audiences all over the world to enjoy access to the latest films from 19-29 January, the online programme starting on 24th, and including all titles

The festival is divided into four main sections: US DRAMATIC, US DOCUMENTARY, WORLD CINEMA DRAMATIC and WORLD CINEMA DOCUMENTARY. There is also the MIDNIGHT, PREMIER and NEW FRONTIER strands representing /horror edgy, first and ground-breaking new titles. See the full line-up for the 2023 Sundance Film Festival below.

U.S. DRAMATIC COMPETITION

THE ACCIDENTAL GETAWAY DRIVER : U.S.A. Dir/Wri: Sing J. Lee, Screenwriter: Christopher Chen – During a routine pickup, an elderly Vietnamese cab driver is taken hostage at gunpoint by three recently escaped Orange County convicts. Based on a true story. Cast: Hiệp Trần Nghĩa, Dustin Nguyen, Dali Benssalah, Phi Vũ, Gabrielle Chan. World Premiere. Available online.

ALL DIRT ROADS TASTE OF SALT: U.S.A. (Dir/Wri: Raven Jackson – A decades-spanning exploration of a woman’s life in Mississippi and an ode to the generations of people, places, and ineffable moments that shape us. Cast: Charleen McClure, Moses Ingram, Kaylee Nicole Johnson, Reginald Helms Jr., Sheila Atim, Chris Chalk. World Premiere. Available online.

FAIR PLAY: U.S.A. Dir/Wri: Chloe Domont – An unexpected promotion at a cutthroat hedge fund pushes a young couple’s relationship to the brink, threatening to unravel far more than their recent engagement. Cast: Phoebe Dynevor, Alden Ehrenreich, Eddie Marsan. World Premiere. Available online.

FANCY DANCE: / U.S.A. Dir/Wri: Erica Tremblay, Wri: Miciana Alise – Following her sister’s disappearance, a Native American hustler kidnaps her niece from the child’s white grandparents and sets out for the state powwow in hopes of keeping what is left of their family intact. Cast: Lily Gladstone, Isabel Deroy-Olson, Ryan Begay, Shea Whigham, Audrey Wasilewski. World Premiere. Available online.

MAGAZINE DREAMS: / U.S.A. Dir/Wri: Elijah Bynum – An amateur bodybuilder struggles to find human connection as his relentless drive for recognition pushes him to the brink. Cast: Jonathan Majors, Haley Bennett, Taylour Paige, Mike O’Hearn, Harrison Page, Harriet Sansom Harris. World Premiere. Available online.

MUTT / U.S.A. (Dir/Wri: Vuk Lungulov-Klotz — Over the course of a single hectic day in New York City, three people from Feña’s past are thrust back into his life. Having lost touch since transitioning from female to male, he navigates the new dynamics of old relationships while tackling the day-to-day challenges of living life in between. Cast: Lío Mehiel, Cole Doman, MiMi Ryder, Alejandro Goic. World Premiere. Available online.

THE PERSIAN VERSION / U.S.A. Dir/Wri: Maryam Keshavarz, Producers: Anne Carey, Ben Howe, Luca Borghese, Peter Block, Corey Nelson) — When a large Iranian-American family gathers for the patriarch’s heart transplant, a family secret is uncovered that catapults the estranged mother and daughter into an exploration of the past. Toggling between the United States and Iran over decades, mother and daughter discover they are more alike than they know. Cast: Layla Mohammadi, Niousha Noor, Kamand Shafieisabet, Bella Warda, Bijan Daneshmand, Shervin Alenabi. World Premiere. Available online.

SHORTCOMINGS / U.S.A. Dir: Randall Park, Wri: Adrian Tomine — Following Ben, Miko, and Alice as they navigate a range of interpersonal relationships and traverse the country in search of the ideal connection. Cast: Justin H. Min, Sherry Cola, Ally Maki, Debby Ryan, Tavi Gevinson, Sonoya Mizuno. World Premiere. Available online.

SOMETIMES I THINK ABOUT DYING: /U.S.A. Dir: Rachel Lambert, Wri: Kevin Armento, Stefanie Abel Horowitz, Katy Wright-Mead — Fran likes to think about dying. It brings sensation to her quiet life. When she makes the new guy at work laugh, it leads to more: a date, a slice of pie, a conversation, a spark. The only thing standing in their way is Fran herself. Cast: Daisy Ridley, Dave Merheje, Parvesh Cheena, Marcia DeBonis, Meg Stalter, Brittany O’Grady. World Premiere. Available online. DAY ONE

THE STARLING GIRL / U.S.A. Dir/Wri: Laurel Akira Parmet — Seventeen-year-old Jem Starling struggles with her place within her Christian fundamentalist community, but everything changes when her magnetic youth pastor Owen returns to their church. Cast: Eliza Scanlen, Lewis Pullman, Jimmi Simpson, Wrenn Schmidt, Austin Abrams, Jessamine Burgum. World Premiere. Available online.

THEATRE CAMP / U.S.A. Dir/Wri Molly Gordon, Nick Lieberman, Screenwriters: Noah Galvin, Ben Platt — When the beloved founder of a run-down theatre camp in upstate New York falls into a coma, the eccentric staff must band together with the founder’s crypto-bro son to keep the camp afloat. Cast: Molly Gordon, Ben Platt, Noah Galvin, Jimmy Tatro, Patti Harrison, Ayo Edebiri. World Premiere. Available online.

A THOUSAND AND ONE / U.S.A. Dir/Wri: A.V. Rockwell — Convinced it’s one last, necessary crime on the path to redemption, unapologetic and free-spirited Inez kidnaps 6-year-old Terry from the foster care system. Holding on to their secret and each other, mother and son set out to reclaim their sense of home, identity, and stability in New York City. Cast: Teyana Taylor, Will Catlett, Josiah Cross, Aven Courtney, Aaron Kingsley Adetola. World Premiere. Available online.

U.S. DOCUMENTARY COMPETITION

AUM: The Cult at the End of the World /U.S.A. (Dirs: Ben Braun, Chiaki Yanagimoto — On the morning of March 20, 1995, a deadly nerve gas attack in the Tokyo subway sent the nation and its people into chaos. This exploration of Aum Shinrikyo, the cult responsible for the attack, involves the participation of those who lived through the horror as it unfolded. World Premiere. Available online.

BAD PRESS / U.S.A (Dirs: Rebecca Landsberry-Baker, Joe Peeler — When the Muscogee Nation suddenly begins censoring its free press, a rogue reporter fights to expose her government’s corruption in a historic battle that will have ramifications for all of Indian country. World Premiere. Available online.

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF SHERE HITE / U.S.A. (Dir: Nicole Newnham — Shere Hite’s 1976 bestselling book, The Hite Report, liberated the female orgasm by revealing the most private experiences of thousands of anonymous survey respondents. Her findings rocked the American establishment and presaged current conversations about gender, sexuality, and bodily autonomy. So how did Shere Hite disappear? World Premiere. Available online.

GOING TO MARS: The Nikki Giovanni Project / U.S.A. (Dir: Joe Brewster, Michèle Stephenson — Intimate vérité, archival footage, and visually innovative treatments of poetry take us on a journey through the dreamscape of legendary poet Nikki Giovanni as she reflects on her life and legacy. World Premiere. Available online.

GOING VARSITY IN MARIACHI / U.S.A. (DirS: Alejandra Vasquez, Sam Osborn — In the competitive world of high school mariachi, the musicians from the South Texas borderlands reign supreme. Under the guidance of coach Abel Acuña, the teenage captains of Edinburg North High School’s acclaimed team must turn a shoestring budget and diverse crew of inexperienced musicians into state champions. World Premiere. Available online.

JOONAM / U.S.A. (Dir: Sierra Urich — Spurred by a provocative family memory and a lifetime of separation from the country her mother left behind, a young filmmaker delves into her mother and grandmother’s complicated pasts and her own fractured Iranian identity. World Premiere. Available online.

LITTLE RICHARD: I AM EVERYTHING/ U.S.A. Dir: Lisa Cortés — This celebration of Little Richard reveals the Black queer origins of rock ’n’ roll, finally exploding the whitewashed canon of American pop music. Through archival and performance footage, the revolutionary icon’s life unspools with all of its switchbacks and contradictions. World Premiere. Available online. DAY ONE

NAM JUNE PAIK: Moon is the Oldest TV / U.S.A. (Dir: Amanda Kim — The quixotic journey of Nam June Paik, one of the most famous Asian artists of the 20th century, who revolutionised the use of technology as an artistic canvas and prophesied both the fascist tendencies and intercultural understanding that would arise from the interconnected nature of today’s world. World Premiere. Available online.

A STILL SMALL VOICE/ U.S.A. Dir: Luke Lorentzen — An aspiring hospital chaplain begins a yearlong residency in spiritual care, only to discover that to successfully tend to her patients, she must look deep within herself. World Premiere. Available online.

THE STROLL/ U.S.A. (Dir: Kristen Lovell — The history of New York’s Meatpacking District, told from the perspective of transgender sex workers who lived and worked there. Filmmaker Kristen Lovell, who walked “The Stroll” for a decade, reunites her community to recount the violence, policing, homelessness, and gentrification they overcame to build a movement for transgender rights. World Premiere. Available online.

VICTIM/SUSPECT/ U.S.A. (Dir: Nancy Schwartzman — Investigative journalist Rae de Leon travels nationwide to uncover and examine a shocking pattern: Young women tell the police they’ve been sexually assaulted, but instead of finding justice, they’re charged with the crime of making a false report, arrested, and even imprisoned by the system they believed would protect them. World Premiere. Available online.

WORLD CINEMA DRAMATIC COMPETITION

BAD BEHAVIOUR: New Zealand Dir/wri: Alice Englert — Lucy, a former child actor, seeks enlightenment at a retreat led by spiritual leader Elon while she navigates her close yet turbulent relationship with her stunt-performer daughter, Dylan. Cast: Jennifer Connelly, Ben Whishaw, Alice Englert, Ana Scotney, Dasha Nekrasova, Marlon Williams. World Premiere. Available online.

ANIMALIA / France, Morocco, Qatar Dir/Wri: Sofia Alaoui — A young, pregnant woman finds emancipation as aliens land in Morocco. Cast: Oumaïma Barid, Mehdi Dehbi, Fouad Oughaou. World Premiere. Available online.

GIRL U.K. Dir/Wri: Adura Onashile — Eleven-year-old Ama and her mother, Grace, take solace in the gentle but isolated world they obsessively create. Ama’s growing up threatens the boundaries of their tenderness and forces Grace to reckon with a past she struggles to forget. Cast: Déborah Lukumuena, Danny Sapani, Le’Shantey Bonsu, Liana Turner. World Premiere. Available online.

HEROIC – Mexico, Sweden (Dir/Wri: David Zonana — Luis, an 18-year-old boy with Indigenous roots, enters the Heroic Military College in hopes of ensuring a better future. There, he encounters a rigid and institutionally violent system designed to turn him into a perfect soldier. Cast: Santiago Sandoval Carbajal, Fernando Cuautle, Mónica del Carmen, Esteban Caicedo, Carlos Gerardo García, Isabel Yudice. World Premiere. Available online.

MAMACRUZ – Spain Dir/Wri: Patricia Ortega, Wri: José Ortuño — With the help of her newly emigrated daughter, a religious grandmother learns how to use the internet. However, an accidental encounter with pornography poses a dilemma for her. Cast: Kiti Mánver. World Premiere. Available online.

MAMI VATA – Nigeria Dir/Wri: C.J. “Fiery” Obasi — When the harmony in a village is threatened by outside elements, two sisters must fight to save their people and restore the glory of a mermaid goddess to the land. Cast: Evelyne Ily, Uzoamaka Aniunoh, Kelechi Udegbe, Emeka Amakeze, Rita Edochie, Tough Bone. World Premiere. Available online.

LA PECERA – Puerto Rico, Spain Dir/Wri: Glorimar Marrero Sánchez — As her cancer spreads, Noelia’s ultimate decision is to return to her native Vieques, Puerto Rico, and claim her freedom to decide her own fate. She reunites with her friends and family, who are still dealing with the contamination of the U.S. Navy after sixty years of military practices. Cast: Isel Rodríguez, Modesto Lacén, Magali Carrasquillo, Maximiliano Rivas, Anamín Santiago, Idenisse Salamán. World Premiere. Available online.

SCRAPPER: U.K. Dir/Wri: Charlotte Regan — Georgie is a dreamy 12-year-old girl who lives happily alone in her London flat, filling it with magic. Out of nowhere, her estranged father turns up and forces her to confront reality. Cast: Harris Dickinson, Lola Campbell, Alin Uzun, Ambreen Razia, Olivia Brady, Aylin Tezel. World Premiere. Available online.

SHAYDA – Australia (Dir/Wri: Noora Niasari — Shayda, a brave Iranian mother, finds refuge in an Australian women’s shelter with her 6-year-old daughter. Over Persian New Year, they take solace in Nowruz rituals and new beginnings, but when her estranged husband re-enters their lives, Shayda’s path to freedom is jeopardized. Cast: Zar Amir Ebrahimi, Osamah Sami, Leah Purcell, Jillian Nguyen, Mojean Aria, Selina Zahednia. World Premiere. Available online. DAY ONE

SLOW – Lithuania, Spain, Sweden (Dir/Wri: Marija Kavtaradze — Dancer Elena and sign language interpreter Dovydas meet and form a beautiful bond. As they dive into a new relationship, they must navigate how to build their own kind of intimacy. Cast: Greta Grinevičiūtė, Kęstutis Cicėnas. World Premiere. Available online.

SORCERY – Chile, Mexico, Germany Dir/Wri: Christopher Murray, Wri: Pablo Paredes — On the remote island of Chiloé in the late 19th century, an Indigenous girl named Rosa lives and works with her father on a farm. When the foreman brutally turns on Rosa’s father, she sets out for justice, seeking help from the king of a powerful organisation of sorcerers. Cast: Valentina Véliz, Daniel Antivilo, Sebastian Hulk, Daniel Muñoz. World Premiere. Available online.

WHEN IT MELTS – Belgium Dir/Wri: Veerle Baetens, Wri: Maarten Loix — Many years after a sweltering summer that spun out of control, Eva returns to the village she grew up in with an ice block in the back of her car. In the dead of winter, she confronts her past and faces up to her tormentors. Cast: Charlotte De Bruyne, Rosa Marchant. World Premiere. Available online.

WORLD CINEMA DOCUMENTARY COMPETITION

5 SEASONS OF REVOLUTION – Germany, Syria, Netherlands, Norway Dir: Lina — An aspiring video journalist in her 20s finds herself already facing self-reckoning. Born in Damascus, Syria, Lina starts to report on the events around her until she is compelled to become a war reporter and, later, the unexpected narrator of her own destiny. World Premiere. Available online.

20 DAYS IN MARIUPOL – Ukraine Dir/Wri: Mstyslav Chernov — As the Russian invasion begins, a team of Ukrainian journalists trapped in the besieged city of Mariupol struggle to continue their work documenting the war’s atrocities. World Premiere. Available online.

AGAINST THE TIDE – India Dir/Wri: Sarvnik Kaur — Two friends, both Indigenous fishermen, are driven to desperation by a dying sea. Their friendship begins to fracture as they take very different paths to provide for their struggling families. World Premiere. Available online.

THE ETERNAL BUTTERFLY – Chile Dir/Wri: Maite Alberdi — Augusto and Paulina have been together for 25 years. Eight years ago, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Both fear the day he no longer recognises her. World Premiere. Available online.

FANTASTIC MACHINE – Sweden, Denmark Dirs: Axel Danielson, Maximilien Van Aertryck) — From the first camera to 45 billion cameras worldwide today, the visual sociologist filmmakers widen their lens to expose both humanity’s unique obsession with the camera’s image and the social consequences that lay ahead. World Premiere. Available online.

IRON BUTTERFLIES – Ukraine, Germany Dir: Roman Liubyi — In summer 2014, sunflower fields and coal mines in eastern Ukraine turned into a 12 square kilometre crime scene. A multi-layered investigation into the downing of flight MH17, in which a butterfly-shaped shrapnel was found in the pilot’s body, implicated the state responsible for a war crime that remains unpunished. World Premiere. Available online.

IS THERE ANYBODY OUT THERE? / U.K. DIR: Ella Glendining — While navigating daily discrimination, a filmmaker who inhabits and loves her unusual body searches the world for another person like her, and explores what it takes to love oneself fiercely despite the pervasiveness of ableism. World Premiere. Available online.

THE LONGEST GOODBYE – Israel, Canada Dir: Ido Mizrahy — Social isolation affects millions of people, even Mars-bound astronauts. A savvy NASA psychologist is tasked with protecting these daring explorers. World Premiere. Available online. DAY ONE

MILISUTHANDO – South Africa Dir/Wri: Milisuthando Bongela — Set in past, present, and future South Africa — an invitation into a poetic, memory-driven exploration of love, intimacy, race, and belonging by the filmmaker, who grew up during apartheid but didn’t know it was happening until it was over. World Premiere. Available online.

PIANOFORTE – Poland Dir: Jakub Piątek — Young pianists take part in the legendary International Chopin Piano Competition. A unique chance of a lifetime, portrayed from backstage and set to Chopin’s music. World Premiere. Available online.

SMOKE SAUNA SISTERHOOD – Estonia, France, Iceland Dir: Anna Hints — In the darkness of a smoke sauna, women share their innermost secrets and intimate experiences, washing off the shame trapped in their bodies and regaining their strength through a sense of communion. World Premiere. Available online.

TWICE COLONISED – Greenland, Denmark, Canada (Dir: Lin Alluna — Renowned Inuit lawyer Aaju Peter has long fought for the rights of her people. When her son suddenly dies, Aaju embarks on a journey to reclaim her language and culture after a lifetime of whitewashing and forced assimilation. But can she both change the world and mend her own wounds? World Premiere. Available online.

BRAVE, BURKINA! – U.S.A. Dir/Wri: Walé Oyéjidé — A Burkinabé boy flees his village and migrates to Italy. When disillusioned by heartbreak and haunted by memories of home, he travels through time in hope of regaining all he has lost. Cast: Alain Tiendrebeogo, Mousty Mbaye, Noel Minougou, Aissata Deme, Afissatou Coulibaly. World Premiere. Fiction. Available online.

DIVINITY – U.S.A. Dir/Wri: Eddie Alcazar —Two mysterious brothers abduct a mogul during his quest for immortality. Meanwhile, a seductive woman helps them launch a journey of self-discovery. Cast: Stephen Dorff, Moises Arias, Jason Genao, Karrueche Tran, Bella Thorne, Scott Bakula. World Premiere. Fiction. Available online.

FREMONT – U.S.A. Dir/Wri: Babak Jalali, Screenwriter: Carolina Cavalli — Donya works for a Chinese fortune cookie factory in San Francisco. Formerly a translator for the U.S. military in Afghanistan, she struggles to put her life back in order. In a moment of sudden revelation, she decides to send out a special message in a cookie. Cast: Anaita Wali Zada, Jeremy Allen White, Gregg Turkington. World Premiere. Fiction. Available online.

KIM’S VIDEO – U.S.A. Dir/Wri: David Redmon, Ashley Sabin — Playing with the forms and tropes of various cinema genres, the filmmaker sets off on a quest to find a legendary lost video collection of 55,000 movies in Sicily. World Premiere. Documentary. Available online. DAY ONE

KING COLE – U.S.A. Dir/Wri: Elaine McMillion Sheldon — The cultural roots of coal continue to permeate the rituals of daily life in Appalachia even as its economic power wanes. The journey of a coal miner’s daughter exploring the region’s dreams and myths, untangling the pain and beauty, as her community sits on the brink of massive change. World Premiere. Documentary. Available online.

KOKOMO CITY – U.S.A. Dir: D. Smith — Four Black transgender sex workers explore the dichotomy between the Black community and themselves, while confronting issues long avoided. World Premiere. Documentary. Available online.

TO LIVE AND DIE AND LIVE – U.S.A. Dir/Wri: Qasim Basir — Muhammad returns home to Detroit to bury his stepfather and is thrust into settling his accounts, but Muhammad’s struggles with depression and addiction may finish him before he finishes the task. Cast: Amin Joseph, Skye P. Marshall, Omari Hardwick, Cory Hardrict, Dana Gourrier, Maryam Basir. World Premiere. Fiction. Available online.

THE TUBE THIEVES – U.S.A. Dir/Wri: Alison O’Daniel — From 2011 to 2013, tubas were stolen from Los Angeles high schools. This is not a story about thieves or missing tubas. Instead, it asks what it means to listen. World Premiere. Documentary. Available online.

YOUNG. WILD. FREE – U.S.A Dir: Thembi L. Banks, Iris: Juel Taylor, Tony Rettenmaier — High school senior Brandon is drowning in responsibilities when his world is turned upside down after being robbed at gunpoint by the girl of his dreams. Cast: Algee Smith, Sanaa Lathan, Sierra Capri, Mike Epps. World Premiere. Fiction. Available online.

Rotterdam International Film Festival 2023

Festival director Vanja Kaludercic has revealed the programme for the 52nd International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) taking place from 25 January – 5 February 2023. Opening with Henrik Martin Dahlsbakken’s MUNCH, an unorthodox biopic about the famed Norwegian artist, Varun Grover’s ALL INDIA RANK will bring this year’s celebration to a close.

The two main strands – The Tiger and Big Screen competitions once again promise an avant-garde selection of world premieres and will be highlighted by Steve McQueen’s artwork in collaboration with Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen.

French cinematographer Hélène Louvart will be honoured with this year’s Robby Müller Award.

Tiger Competition 2023 selection

100 SEASONS, Giovanni Bucchieri, 2022, Sweden, world premiere

This feature debut is a hybrid tale of love, success and failure, taking place over 25 years, featuring dancers Giovanni and Louise’s teenage relationship in the 90s, with a fictional present where the director deftly mixes real life footage of himself and co-star Louise Peterhoff into the fiction.

GAGALAND, Teng Yuhan, 2023, China, world premiere

This feature debut is a psychedelic boy-meets-girl story set against the Tik-tok and social media generation in China

GEOLOGY OF SEPARATION, Yosr Gasmi, Mauro Mazzocchi, 2023, Tunisia, Italy, France, world premiere

INDIVISION, Leïla Kilani, 2023, Morocco, France, world premiere

A fraught but poetic familial story set in Tangier that sees the past collide with the future for one clan still adjusting to the far-reaching effects of the Arab Spring.

LETZTER ABEND, Lukas Nathrath, 2023, Germany, world premiere

The German city of Hanover provides an elegant setting to this lowkey character-rich indie drama that follows a group of people preparing to move back to the fast-paced capital of Berlin.

MANNVIRKI,

Gústav Geir Bollason, 2023, Iceland, France, world premiere

an experimental curio best described as a study in architectural filmmaking that follows a group of people trying to make sense of their deteriorating surroundings.

MUNNEL Visakesa Chandrasekaram, 2023, Sri Lanka, world premiere

An ex-Tamil Tiger veteran returns to his village to look for his lost love while his mother weaves spells.

NEW STRAINS Artemis Shaw, Prashanth Kamalakanthan, 2023, United States, world premiere

A New-York set romcom sees a couple adjusting to the weird experience of being thrown together in a foreign city far away from friends and family.

NOTAS SOBRE UN VERANO, Diego Llorente, 2023, Spain, world premiere

The filmmaker’s home of Asturias, Northern Spain, provides the sensual background to this simmering story of love and confusion.

NUMB, Amir Toodehroosta, 2023, Iran, world premiere

Amir Toodehroosta’s sophomore feature is a social satire that takes place in a kindergarten where a six-year-old plays silent witness to the events unfolding around him.

NUMMER ACTTIEN, Guido van der Werve, 2022, Netherlands, world premiere

In what is essentially a series of vignettes, Dutch filmmaker Guido van der Werve uses a fractured narrative to reflect on the past and explore the present in his feature debut.

LA PALISIADA, Philip Sotnychenko, 2023, Ukraine, world premiere

Based around two gunshots, a quarter of a century apart, a neo noir detective story bearing witness to Soviet State-sanctioned brutality, police and legal corruption in 1990s Ukraine.

PLAYLAND Georden West, 2023, United States, world premiere

A debut drama that uses music, dance and performance art to depict Boston’s oldest gay bar The Playland Cafe, established in 1937 and forced to shut down in the city’s urban renewal programme of 1998.

LE SPECTRE DE BOKO HARAM, Cyrielle Raingou, 2023, Cameroon, France, world premiere

Due to the sinister spectre of the terrorist organisation of Boko Haram violence has become part of the scenery in the far north of Cameroon. In her startling feature debut Cyrielle Raingou follows a group of children learning to cope with its constant threat.

THIIIRD Karim Kassem, 2023, Lebanon, world premiere

In Kassem’s third feature, Lebanon’s social and economic turmoil is expressed, shared and agonised over by customers in the peaceful haven of a car mechanic’s garage on the outskirts Beirut.

THREE SPARKS, Naomi Uman, 2023, Albania, Mexico, world premiere

American-Mexican filmmaker Naomi Uman pictures life in a rural Albanian village from her own unique perspective as a woman residing in a traditional and deeply patriarchal society.

ROTTERDAM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2023

You Resemble Me (2022)

Dir.: Dina Amer; Cast: Lorenza Grimando, Illona Grimando, Mouna Soualem, Sabrina Cuazani, Dina Amer, Alexandre Gonin, Gregoire Colim, Agnes de Tissandier, Zinadine Soualem; US/France/Egypt 2021, 90 min.

Who was Hasna Ali Boulahcen?. Mistakenly known as “the first European woman suicide bomber” by the media, after a series of coordinated Islamist terrorist attacks that rocked Paris on Friday 13 November 2015, it later turned out that her only ‘crime’ was to flee the building where the terrorists were hiding. A male accomplice detonated Hasna’s suicide vest, bringing to an end her tragic life, and inspiring American-Egyptian journalist Dina Amer to make this passionate feature debut that plays out like a slowly detonating bomb.

The film follows Hasna (9) and Mariam (7), who are played by real life sisters Lorenza and Illona Grimando, growing up in a rough part of Paris where they often steal to survive with their Maghrebi parents: an abusive mother, and a father who is hardly ever there forcing Hasna to take responsibility for her little sister. The social services place them with different foster families and their religious dietary requirements are totally ignored: foster parents (Colim/Tissandier) have no idea that Hasna cannot eat pork. As an adult, Hasna is played by three actors with the help of Deepfake technology: the “party girl” (drugs and sex) is Mouna Soualem, the “assimilated pretty-girl” identity by Sabrina Ouazani. Amer lends her face to the now radicalised freedom fighter.

Mariam is astonished when she sees her cousin Abdel Hamid (Gonin) on TV, talking about joining the fight against the “infidels”. Hasna always dreamt of joining the French Army – but, like many radicalised people – becomes bitter after being rejected by a recruitment officer (Soualem), who is more French than the French themselves. After the “Charlie Hebdo” and “Bataclan” shootings, Hasna calls the French protesters ‘a mindless mass’, setting up the gruesome finale to her life.

Amer finally turns the camera away from Hasna and onto her family with the usual interviews that express deep sadness. But somehow Hasna as a person still eludes the audience, although she emerges a deeply damaged person. There are simply too many contradictions in the life of a young woman caught up the culture war currently fracturing French society. Hansa emerges an innocent by-stander, driven into hands of male chauvinists who killed her before she could get away.

DoP/co-writer Omar Mullick uses his handheld camera to great effect, tracking the tears of Hasna’s terrible life. You Resemble Me is anything but perfect, but at least it’s authentic, a tragedy that truly reflects life finally becoming more positive as the story unfolds. AS

IN CINEMAS 3 February 2023

The Grand Bolero (2021)

Dir.: Gabriele Fabbro; Cast: Lidia Vitale, Ludovica Mancini, Marcello Mariani, Filippo Prandi; Italy 2021, 90 min.

Gabriele Fabbro draws on an award-winning background in music promos and commercials with this surprise mixture of horror and musical drama with a lesbian twist. Borrowing for the best of Dario Argento and Luis Bunuel The Grand Bolero will particularly appeal to classical music lovers.

In a dilapidated 17th century church in the Italian countryside during the recent pandemic, a banner proclaims “Everything will be fine” – but everyone knows this is wishful thinking. Father Paolo (Mariani) spends his days ringing the bells to mark another steep rise in the number of victims struck down during the first lockdown . The church houses two organs: one from the 15th century, the other from the 19th – that really came into its own during the era of silent films.

Middle-aged control freak Roxanne (Vitale) is in charge of the organ’s restoration programme, and is furious when Paolo presents her with a mute assistant called Lucia (Mancini) who has been taking artefacts from the church and passing them on to a man called Luca (Prandi) – who could be her brother or even a lover.

Roxanne becomes so obsessed with Lucia she does everything in her power to humiliate the young woman, but has to pipe down when it turns out Lucia is also a gifted organ player. For Lucia’s character Fabbro and his co-writer Ydalie Turk clearly had Jeanne Moreau in mind from Bunuel’s The Diary of a Chambermaid – the original tempestuous subordinate turned mistress. The enigma of Lucia remains mysteriously, and suitably, unresolved. The peaceful wood near the church becomes a hunting ground of violent emotions transforming the fairy story into a Grand Guignol finale.

The Grand Bolero culminates in an orgy of music, featuring everything from the Ravel to Holst and other European organ masters. The narrative is driven forward by Roxanne’s lust for Lucia that seems to devour everything as it builds towards the climactic reveal. Gabriele Fabbro leaves us breathless but satisfied: having pulled out every stop, in more ways that one, for this imaginative debut underpinned by considerable filmmaking experience. AS

NOW ON AMAZON PRIME

The Big Freeze

With temperatures this Christmas dipping to -18 in parts of Scotland, Richard Chatten reflects back on Britain’s Big Freeze of 1963 and the films that were on in the cinema back in the day.

Sixty years ago in December this country was hit by months of sub-zero temperatures and actually made it into the Guinness Book of Records for one of the coldest UK winters ever.

Britain was covered in a thick blanket of snow long enough for it also to leave an indelible mark on the British cinema, through which its progress can actually be charted.

Perhaps the earliest film of The Big Freeze was Stanley Goulder’s The Silent Playground, a drama shot set in South London during which the snow obviously first fell, playing havoc with the film’s continuity, since it comes and goes scene from scene.

The snow was firmly established by the time of the two classic Pinter adaptations The Caretaker and The Servant, the cold being so bitter that Joseph Losey was hospitalised with pneumonia, and Dirk Bogarde had to take over the latter as director for several days.

Val Guest’s 80,000 Suspects, starring Richard Johnson and Claire Bloom, depicted the attempts to control an outbreak of smallpox in a Bath covered in snow, and became a metaphor for generalised crisis, although people were hardier back then having been through one, and some of them even two, World Wars. Several Edgar Wallace mysteries (notably John Moxey’s Ricochet) are also shrouded in snow along with Calculated Risk, a heist thriller with music by George Martin.

Nightmare

By the time of Wolf Rilla’s The World Ten Times Over the snow had visibly turned into slush. Probably the last film that appeared during the frosty weather was Hammer Film’s Nightmare, a psychological thriller marking the film debut of Jennie Linden. It hit cinemas in the chilly April of 1964.

The only feature depicting The Great Freeze in colour appears to have been Snow, a British Transport Films short shot by the veteran cameraman Wolfgang Suschitsky which portrays British Rail making light weather (if you’ll pardon the pun) of the snow. The Great Train Robbers sensibly waited till the following summer. @RichardChatten.

THE BIG FREEZE | DECEMBER 2022

The Stranger (2022) Netflix

Dir: Thomas M Wright | Australia, Thriller

Two strangers meet on a bus ride in the outback in this tense Australian thriller written and directed with visual flair and ingenuity by Thomas M Wright.

At first The Stranger feels like one of those heist movies, one last trick before retiring for a bearded and biddable loner Henry (Sean Harris) hired by Paul (Mouzakis), an amiable undercover cop. Henry is down on his luck and looking for a gig ‘but nothing violent’. Paul then introduces his new pal to his criminal circle and an uncertain Henry goes along for the ride soon bonding with Mark (Joel Edgerton), who will show him the ropes.

Paul and Mark soon turn out to be police detectives working on a cold case, an unsolved crime involving the disappearance of a boy eight years earlier in 2002. The police have been working tirelessly to find a body and a murderer, but so far have been unable to pin down Henry, the only suspect, who was seen in the area at the time the boy vanished. But when they discover Henry has another identity things start to fall into place.

Based on Kate Kyriacou’s book The Sting: The Undercover Operation that Caught Daniel Morcombe’s Killer, The Stranger is a gripping and sinuous piece of filmmaking with a twisty, tantalising narrative and convincing performances from Harris and Edgerton, who also produces.

Mark works hard to win Henry’s trust and their close relationship runs parallel to the nationwide police investigation that will gradually get to bottom of Henry’s murky past. Until the police get firm tangible evidence to place murderer and victim at the scene of the crime their killer could still slip away, after eight years on the run. MT

NOW ON NETFLIX

Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom (2022)

Dir.: Pawo Choyning Dorji; Cast: Sherab Dorji, Ugyen Norbu, Keiden Lhamo, Kunzeng Wangdi, Tshering Dorji, Sonam Tashi, Pem Zam, Tsheri Zom; Bhutan 2019, 109 min.

A delightful story from Bhutan that sees a vain and self-centred young man deciding to leave his close knit community to forge a career as a singer in Australia.

Ugyen Dorji (S. Dorji) feels misunderstood by his friends and family for wanting to emigrate to Australia, particularly as his job as a teacher is much valued in his hometown of Thimphu, the capital of Bhutan. During his fifth and final year of the mandatory government service, Dorji’s boss sends him to the remote mountain village of Lunana, eight days by foot and horse from Thimphu, to teach a class of nine primary children.

During the journey Dorji remains detached and hostile towards Michen ((Lhendup), a guide who leads him all the way up the mountains: he never takes his headphones off (until the signal gives out), and is generally unapproachable, refusing to give a ritual offering to the Gods. In the village, he is incensed to discover the outside loos and primitive conditions, and immediately asks to be taken back, but changes his mind, when 12-year old Pem Zam (her real name) the “School Captain” reminds him of his commitments.

Pem Zam’s father is an alcoholic, and her niece Saidon (Gurung) a singer of traditional songs, given as offering to the Gods. Dorji soon becomes a favourite with the children and Asha (Jinpa (Wangdi), the village elder, starts singing again for the first time after the death of his wife. Dorji is enchanted by Saidon who teaches him a melancholic song “Yak Lebi Lhadar”, about a yak herder who mourns the loss of his favourite animal. Saidon also gives Dorji the titular yak named Norbu who takes up residence in the class room. Even though Dorji has given up on the internet, he is adamant to leave the village before winter sets in, telling the villagers that he will not return, but fulfil his dream of a singing career in Sidney, where we watch him performing to a totally disenchanted audience.

In his director debut Pawo Choyning Dorji borrows a reverse storyline from Andrei Konchalovsky’s second feature The first Teacher (1965) that follows a teacher sent from Moscow to a Muslim village where, contrary to Dorji’s experience, the villagers greet him with hostility.

We expect Dorji’s heart to melt – but no such luck. He is fixated on a goal which he has “imported’ from the internet: his dislocation in Australia is just the outcome of a collision between the TV images Dorji has internalised and the reality. Like many others, he is chasing a dream which does not exist.

DoP Jigmet T. Tenzing takes full advantage of the breath-taking beauty of the mountain world, threatened by extinction due to Global Warming – a term the villagers have not heard yet, but are fully aware of the dramatic consequences of climate change. Tenzing, like the director, avoids any sentimentality: although Dorji is a prime example of a person who has buttoned themselves down emotionally to avoid dealing with long term trauma from the past, and possibly the future

When Dorji asks his students the classic question “what do you want to be when you grow up?” one boy tells him his chosen profession is to be a teacher because “he reaches towards the future”. AS

Lunana was shortlisted for the Foreign Feature Films Category of the “Oscars” and had its world premiere at the LFF 2019 in London. Director Pawo Choyning Dorji has since finished his second feature Four Day to the Full Moon in 2022.

Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom – In cinemas and digital 10th March

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Brussels (1975)

Dir.: Chantal Akerman; Cast: Delphine Seyrig, Jan Decorte, Henri Storck, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, Yves Bicat; Belgium/France 1975, 202 min.

Ironic that Chantal Akerman’s epic of female loneliness has replaced Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo as the “Greatest Film of all Time” according to the “Sight and Sound Magazine’s 2022 Critics’ poll”. Hitchcock, the leading perpetrator of the male gaze, has finally been ousted by Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman: a rigorous chronical of visual storytelling.

On the other hand it is no co-incidence that the iconic British director has found countless imitators over the years: ‘Hitchcockian’ is now a commonplace adjective in film parlance. Meanwhile Akerman’s disciples – Kelly Reinhardt and Gus van Sant – are still grafting away at the coalface of arthouse film; celebrated by cineastes, but certainly not the mainstream.

Chantal Anne Akerman was born Brussels in 1950 to the holocaust survivor Natalia (Nelly) Akerman, whose family perished in a concentration camp. Chantal had a sister, Sylvaine, but Nelly would be her guiding light, encouraging Chantal to forge her own career rather than marrying young, as her mother had done. But Chantal still saw life from her mother’s perspective, despite a radical relationship with Sonja Wieder-Atherton, and a job as a university lecturer in New York. Akerman’s final feature No Home Movie (2015) captures Nelly’s final months. Akerman would take her own life the same year, in Paris.

Jean Dielman was shot in five weeks with a modest grant from the Belgium government of around 20,000 euros (in today’s money). Anchored by a luminous performance from Delphine Seyrig, one of the day’s foremost film stars in France and Belgium, Seyrig was also one of the first feminist filmmakers whose Be Pretty and Shut Up (Sois belle et tais toi) 1981 ruffled quite a few feathers in the male-dominated French-speaking cinema world at the time. Seyrig carries the feature, haunting every frame with her elegant obduracy. She is fragile – yet always capable and in charge – until blind-sided by an event she had never anticipated.

Jeanne Dielman lives a modest existence with her teenage son Sylvain (Decorte) in a tiny flat in Brussels. A widow trying to keep up appearances on reduced circumstances, she leaves nothing to chance. Daily-life plays out in a repetitive timetable over the course of three days. The relationship with her son could best be described as detached, the closest they ever get to closeness is when competing for the most accurate pronunciation of a word from his Flemish-speaking school. Even a letter from her sister in Canada is viewed with formality rather than sibling affection, and this style sets the tone for the rest of the film.

Incessant washing, cleaning and cooking form the basis for the meticulous monotony of Jeanne’s daily life. And there’s a comfort in the quotidian, punctuated by brief errands, or to replenish the larder. Whenever Jeanne leaves a room, she switches off the light. Relief comes as a poisoned chalice when her neighbour’s baby arrives in a portable cot, driving her to distraction with its endless mewling, all beyond her control. The afternoon sees Jeanne receiving clients (Storck, Doniol-Valcroze, Bical), who pay for her bedroom services, and keep the wolf from the door.

The first signs of mental disorder erupt in highly controlled emotional meltdown over an incident involving potatoes. Jeanne then forgets to put the lid on the tureen, a hiding place for her hard-earned cash, and is afterwards seen frantically going round the shops in search of a button missing from a coat. The following day will see Jeanne pushed to the limits, the formal minimalism morphing into a melodrama that is implied but never shown. Under a mantle of discrete ecstasy Jeanne’s world spins out of control when a client dares to threaten her stability, challenging her control and exposing feelings that can be never be realised or properly acknowledged in her life of emotional asceticism.

DoP Babette Mangolte shoots in colour but her images owe much more to black and white. Jeanne is always in charge, and always busily involved in a world of repetitive housekeeping. Her casual outings take us into a world of stasis – the roads and pavements bereft of movement, make Jeanne happy, because they submit to her orderly sense of self. At the end she is almost catatonic, and somehow purged of her inner angst, for a while at least. Akerman’s triumphant study of displacement activity is almost a horror story, a psychological thriller that sees Jeanne forced to keep herself engaged in a mindless, male-enforced rigorous ritual to avoid a loss of control and its contingent breakdown that would expose the gaping emotional void in her life.

BFI will screen JEANNE DIELMAN as part of the full 100 Greatest Films of All Times in JANUARY, FEBRUARY and MARCH 2023.

Broker (2022)

Dir.: Hirokazu Kore-eda; Cast: Song Kang-ho, Gang Dong-won, Bae Doona, Joo-young, Lee Ji-eun, Park Ji-young, Im seung-soo; South Korea 2022, 129′.

Surrogacy is given an upbeat comedy treatment in this touching crowd pleaser from Japanese humanist Hirokazu Kore-eda, his first to take place in Korea.

Broker is very much in the same vein as his Cannes winner Shoplifters, proving once again his talent for turning melodrama into social realism, even though the film is rather too fluffy in its near formalistic conclusion. It all starts in film noir mode: the rain is pelting down on the South Korean city of Busan where distraught mother Moon So-young (Ji-eun) has just given birth to a child she cannot afford to keep. There is a baby hatch in a nearby religious charity building, and she puts baby Woo-sung (Ji-yong) in front of the hatch and disappears into the night. Following hot on her heels are two baby trafficking detectives – Soo-Jin (Dona) and Lee (Joo-young).

The day after, So-young has a change of heart – even though she had put a note into the baby-basket promising that she would return she confronts a pair of kidnappers Ha Sang hyon (Kang-ho) and Dong soo (Dong Gang-dong-won) who are actually stealing her baby for a money-making scam. When So-young threatens the two men with the police, they admit their crime, but offer So-young a part in the “sale” of her baby: it’s always better to have the biological mother present. The detectives are puzzled when So-young gets into the spirit of things, refusing to lower her asking price, even though the adopting couple lower their offer claiming “the baby isn’t as cute as in the photos”.

Broker occasionally risks turning into a farce, but Kore-eda cleverly avoids it. The same going for the role playing changes with the two detectives seemingly are the only ones, who want the baby to be sold, just to solve their case. DoP Hong Kyung-pyo shows off his love of small details, and Song Kang-Ho, who won “Best Actor” in Cannes, perfectly pitches his melancholic take on proceedings. Broker is certainly not Kore-eda’s best, but it may be his warmest, most humanistic and passionate statement, moving the audience without spilling into sentimentality. AS

ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE FROM FRIDAY 2023

In his first Korean-set film unfurls itself into another touching, wryly funny tale of surrogate families. It’s not quite on a par with his Palme d’Or winner Shoplifters – what is? – but it’s a crowd-pleaser and a gentle joy, with a standout performance from Parasite’s Song Kang-ho.

Broker opens with a young woman, So-young (K-pop star Ji-eun Lee), leaving her new-born son at one of Busan’s so-called baby boxes. They’re a real-life mechanism to enable struggling parents to ensure unwanted children find their way into care. But they come with social judgment – ‘You threw your baby away’, So-young will be told on more than one occasion – and in Broker’s world, at least, they’re ripe for exploitation. Sure enough, two adoption brokers, Sang-hyun (Parasite’s Song Kang-ho) and Dong-soo (Gang Dong-won), steal the baby and begin touting him around on their network of wealthy wannabe parents, using their laundrette as a front for their criminal enterprise.

It’s an unlikely scenario – even before So-young, wanted for murder and being trailed by two cops, forms an unlikely alliance with the two baby traffickers – but Koreeda’s warmth and wit make it easy to let it slide. He wants to take you on a journey with a burgeoning family of misfits that’s soon swelled by another young orphan. The quartet, and the young moppet, travel around in a battered van full of dry cleaning from one lot of potential parents to another. It reminded me of Little Miss Sunshine in its easy charm, and there are similar dynamics are at play here: touching bonds slowly forming, life lessons being learnt and some big laughs.

The thieves-with-a-heart-of-gold trope is reinvigorated by Song Kang-ho’s Basset Hound charms
The hackneyed thieves-with-a-heart-of-gold trope is reinvigorated by the sharpness of the writing and Song’s Basset Hound charms. While Broker occasionally gets close to cloying, especially in its neat ending and jaunty score, Koreeda keeps it the right side of cutesy. It’s best enjoyed as a modern-day fairy tale – only, one where the abandoned baby sparks nothing but enchantment.

Anonymous Club (2021)

Dir.: Danny Cohen; Documentary with Courtney Barnett; Australia 2021, 83 min.

Australian filmmaker Danny Cohen takes full control in this musical biopic about the singer/songwriter and ‘anti-influencer’ Courtney Barnett, who sprung to fame with her witty deadpan lyrics in an album called “I’ve got a friend called Emily Ferris”.

The whole point about Barnett is that she became a sensation not through a glossy image of self-promotion but because of a reclusive style that makes a virtue of her tortured inner conflict and deems her to be a powerful feminist voice for audiences all over the world, and a ‘mega-star in the making’. That may make her sound like a female version of Morrissey, but time will only tell if her talent matches up to the iconic 1980s superstar of the Smiths who is still going strong in his sixties.

Cohen gained access to Barnett through their many music-video collaborations, and paints an intimate picture of the 35-year-old Sydney born singer who is not afraid to admit to deep-seated low-self-image issues and occasional bouts of depression. But somehow Cohen is too overcome by the artist’s persona, and allows the feature to turn into a sort of self-help therapy session.

The film’s title is taken from Barnett’s 2013 song, which we never hear, even though her world tour (without backing band) offers ample opportunity. Starting in 2018, when Cohen told Barnett to use her dictaphone for an ongoing commentary – later used in the feature – the singer had just split up with girlfriend and musician Jen Cloher, who had taken an active part in the creative works. “Tell me, how you really feel” is a proper break-up album, words not being minced: “Tell me when you are getting bored//And I leave//I’m not the one who put the chain around four feet//I am sorry for all my insecurities// But it’s just part of me//”.

The tour takes Barnett on the road to places like Bloomington (Indiana), Oslo and Berlin, but the focus is firmly on the singer herself, and Cohen never lets her escape: “I am not your mother//I am not your bitch” she rages, shouting so loudly during performances, that she loses her voice. Barrnett is often passive-aggressive: “Sometimes I sit and think//and sometimes I just sit”. And: “You know it’s ok to have a bad day”.

When somebody new enters her life, Barnett calms down a bit, but the film’s overriding impression does not compute with the ‘girl next door image’ concocted by the networks and her PR. This would have been fine had the director left his safe spot of chronicler and admirer and posed a few direct questions. Yes, it is absolutely normal to be insecure in the music industry where dog eats dog and the other way round – but nowadays we are all living on the edge of a precipice in a climate we have helped to create.

Barnett still has a voice – literally and figuratively speaking – but most ordinary people do not. Nobody wants to take the cuddle blanket away from her, millions are clearly waiting to buy her records. But please, save us from long shots with purring cats listening to her guitar songs: this is not a therapy session open to all. In her mid-thirties, Barnett still has the right to feel insecure, but Cohen is obliged to shoot some straight, even awkward, questions. By negligence, he is derailing his project by finishing with another version of “Courtney is just like you and me”. She is not, and the star and her chronicler know that only too well. Therapy might be free, at least in this case – but not much else. AS

NOW ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE

Mr Bachmann and His Class (2021)

Dir: Maria Speth | Doc, Germany 217′

A weighty documentary Fred Wiseman would be proud of takes an in-depth look at the life of dedicated German teacher, Dieter Bachmann, and his teenage class in Stadtallendorf near Marburg.

Germany has learnt a long lesson in the aftermath to the Second World War, and the atrocities of Nazism are still drilled into pupils, particularly here in a city infamous for its history as a munitions centre that made use of forced labour in the local factory, now buried by its roof covering of trees.

Of course nowadays the class is also made up of immigrant communities from Turkey, Bulgaria and Russia who see the world from a different perspective: ‘the war’ has another meaning for them, but they have all suffered crisis back home and find themselves adjusting to another country, and a diverse set of rules.

Laid-back and placid, Bachmann strikes a jovial figure in his youthful garb of jeans and tee-shirt, despite nearing retirement. His speciality is music and art, along with the classic curriculum of German and Maths, and his comforting phrase “Wir schaffen das” (“We’ll handle it”) makes him a popular teacher and mentor all round. The length of the film allows us to get to know the man himself and appreciate his methods and the enormity and subtlety of the task at hand – not only instructing the next generation, but making them into culturally sensitive, compassionate individuals.

Away from the didactic sounding title, the film unfolds as an enlightening and immersive study of classroom multiculturalism along the lines of Laurent Cantet’s 2008 docudrama Entre les Murs (The Class) and Nicolas Philibert’s classic Etre et Avoir (2002) with Bachmann being the German equivalent of the film’s Georges Lopez. A Hollywood equivalent Dangerous Minds, where Michelle Pfeiffer takes on a monumental task as a retired marine turned teacher in a deprived and racially divided community in California, shows just how challenging teaching can be. MT

ON RELEASE FROM 9 DECEMBER 2022

January (2022)

Dir.: Andrey Paounov; Cast: Samuel Finzi, Iossif Surchadzhiev, Zahary Baharov, Svetoslav Stoyanov, Leonid Yovchev, Malin Krastev; Bulgaria,/Luxembourg/ Portugal 2021, 108 min.

A first feature for Bulgarian director Andrey Paounov, who honed his craft as a documentarian, January sees two men and a bird trapped facing an existential crisis in a snowstorm in the middle of nowhere.

January is the coldest month in Bulgaria, and no-one in their right mind would venture outside, particularly into the woods, where wolves and vampires lurk in a ghostly white wilderness.

Borrowing from Beckett and Lynch and based on a play by Yordan Radichkov, Paounov and his English co-writer Alex Barrett (best known for City Symphony) drench their evocative icebound thriller in post-socialist gloom, aesthetically it is close to the “Dybuk” features set in Eastern Europe in the late 1930s.

In a small hut next to an old industrial building, the guard (Finzi) and an old man (Surchadzhiew) are bored, trying to master the crossword. They are waiting for a certain Peter Matorow, who went out early in the morning with his sled and gun to drive to the nearby city. Matorow seems to be in charge, and able to find a solution for the current impasse. Soon twins (Baharov/Stoyanov) arrive, wanting to know about the whereabouts of said Matorov. They are threatening, and the guard tries to pacify them. Finally, Moratow’sled arrives, but the horse carries just his gun and a wolf frozen to death.

The arrival of a priest (Yovchev),makes everything even more enigmatic, and the ritual of the horse returning only with a gun and a frozen wolf is repeated four times – without any hope for the return of Matorov. After dark, a group of vampire hunters arrives, accusing the old man of being dead for a long time. But they leave in the sled with the now customary outcome. In a brilliant scene towards the end – shot in glittering colour in contrast to the sombre black-and-white of the rest of the feature – the guard, by now contemplating suicide, visits a 1950 night club, where the bartender (Krastev) treats him like an old friend.

DoP Vasco Viana composes images of a prison like existence, where the two men live in the shadow of the plant next door, whilst they are reduced to opening walnuts with a self-built apparatus. It is clear, that the huge building next door represents communisms, old photos of their leaders are laying around, decaying like the building itself. On the other hand, the modern oligarchs, who are ruling the country now, are not much better, the twins just want to participate in the exploitation of their home country. The Guard is trying to keep the vampires at bay, and save something of the past for himself and the old man, before becoming more and more suicidal. Symbolically, the crow kept in an cage and suspected to drink the local brew of rakia, is uncertain to leave its cage after given the chance to fly away.

JANUARY is compelling first feature , but the running time doesn’t legitimsed by the rather thin narrative..

AS
***1/2

Rodeo (2022)

Dir.: Lola Quivoron; Cast: Julie Ledrou, Antonia Buresi, Yannis Lafki, Ahmed Hamdi, Dave Nsaman Okebwan, Loius Sutton; France 2022, 104 min.

Lola Quivoron made her Cannes debut with a provocative tour-de-force of daring motorcycle stunts and a heroine, who behind her tough facade, is a feminist fighter in a world of macho men.

Rodeo has much the same striking visual allure as Julia Docournau’s Palme d’Or winner Titane, particularly in the cold blue and green aesthetic; both directors graduated from La Fémis. Titane daringly explored obsession between a woman and her car, Rodeo has a more humane angle but Quivoron’s heroine often falls too easily onto her feet given the difficult path she has chosen .

A shouty opening sequence sets the tone for the rest of the feature: We briefly meet Julia (Ledru) before she disappears, obviously homeless. On an illegal racecourse in the countryside, she embarks on a vain attempt to kick start motorbike stunt racing with a gang of macho ‘dirt riders’. But disaster strikes early when one of the guys Abra (Okebwan) has an accident and later dies in the hospital -“they pulled the plug on him” comments one of his friends.

Julia is able to connect with the big boss Domino, who operates a ‘swiping’ ring involving expensive motor cycles from the seclusion of his prison cell. She persuades him to let her sleep in the garage, where the gang’s top of the range machines are housed. For this, Julia has to swipe on order a motor cycle the boss has his eye on. Julia will fill her bag with small stones, telling the owner of the motor cycle she will just have a quick go on one of the bikes, leaving him her bag “with my keys, identity and credit cards”. Julia will repeat this modus-operandi successfully throughout the film. The guys in the garage, among them Kais (Lafki), Mous (Hamdi), and Ben (Sutton), are not sure how to take Julia. there’s definite frisson with Kais, but the chemistry fizzles with her and Domino’s long-suffering wife Ophélie (Buresi) and Domino soon cottons on to the situation. Rodeo culminates with a high octane robbery – re allong that famous scene in Derek Cianfrance’s The Place Beyond the Pines – with a massive trailer of glossy motorcycles, unfolding like a ballet sequence, using quad bikes. But Quivoron has a dramatic yet poetic ending in store for her heroine Julia.

Rodeo is a rollercoaster ride, but Julia’s temper tantrums often show her vulnerability. She cannot allow herself any feelings for the opposite sex, hiding behind her men-eating persona. But her desired liaison with Ophélie is doomed. Somehow we see a perverse Cinderella motive: Julia wants to be invited to the ball of motorbikes and mayhem – but because of her gender she is reduced to the villain of the piece. The daring stunts provide the cut and thrust of Quivoron’s lesbian themed arthouse drama but, the heart and soul is Julia’s search for an identity not determined by gender.AS

NOW IN UK CINEMAS | JURY AWARD + BEST ACTRESS AWARD – JULIE LEDROU | TURIN INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2022

Sight and Sound Poll 2022 | The Critics’ top 20 Greatest Films of All Time

The Critics’ top 20 Greatest Films of All Time are:

1       Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975)
2       Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
3       Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)
4       Tokyo Story (Ozu Yasujiro, 1953)
5       In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, 2001)
6       2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
7       Beau travail (Claire Denis, 1998)
8       Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch, 2001)
9       Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov,1929)
10     Singin’ in the Rain (Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly, 1951)
11     Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (F.W. Murnau, 1927)
12     The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)
13     La Règle du jeu (Jean Renoir, 1939)
14     Cléo from 5 to 7 (Agnès Varda, 1962)
15     The Searchers (John Ford, 1956)
16     Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren & Alexander Hammid, 1943)
17     Close-Up (Abbas Kiarostami, 1989)
18     Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966)
19     Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)
20     Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954)

Jeanne Dielman 1 @BFI National Archive

Since it was first conducted in 1952, Sight and Sound’s Critics’ poll has become a hotly anticipated event within the global film community as it represents a litmus test for where film culture stands. This year’s poll reached a wider and more diverse group than ever before and incorporates the top 10 lists of over 1,600 participants from all corners of the globe who voted for more than 4,000 films overall. This compares to the 846 who were asked 10 years ago and reflects a variety of factors, including the more diverse group of contributors voting in the poll and the impact and increased influence of film commentators internationally via the internet. It may also be explained in part by the explosion of access to a wider selection of films, thanks to the proliferation of movies available to view on numerous streamers, boutique Blu-ray and DVD collections, the increase of TV channels dedicated to movies and curated film seasons, all of which have helped to create a more cine-literate contributor. A largely unimaginative and list then which has not really changed much since it first came into being. The voters were asked to interpret ‘Greatest’ as they chose: to reflect the film’s importance in cinematic history, its aesthetic achievement, or perhaps its personal impact in their own life and their view of cinema.

Cleo 5-7 – Number 7 – @Bfi National Archive

The wider and more diverse electorate appears to have had an impact on the diversity of the top 100 films. Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles and Claire Denis’s Beau travail were the only female filmmakers’ films in the 2012 top 100. This year’s poll now features 11 films by female filmmakers in the top 100, and four in the top 20, with new entries by Chantal Akerman – her second entry is News from Home at number 52 – Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7 at number 14 and The Gleaners and I in number 67, Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (co-directed with Alexander Hammid) in 16^th place, Vera Chytilová’s Daisies at number 28, Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire in 30^th place, Barbara Loden’s Wanda at number 48, Jane Campion’s The Piano at number 50 and Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust in 60^th place.

In 2012 there was one film by a Black filmmaker listed in the top 100 – Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Touki Bouki, at number 93. In 2022 there are seven titles in the top 100 by prominent Black filmmakers. Touki Bouki has climbed to 67^th place, with new entries for Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing in 24^th place, Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep at number 43, Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust and Barry Jenkins’s Academy Award®-winning Moonlight in joint 60^th place, and Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl jointly at number 95.

Barry Lyndon – No 45 @Bfi National Archive

In 2012, two films from the last two decades made the top 100 – Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love and David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. The top 100 in 2022 features nine films from the last two decades, with new entries including Bong Joon Ho’s Academy Award®-winning Parasite at number 90, Hayao Miyazaki’s Oscar®-winning Spirited Away in 75^th place and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady at number 95, as well as The Gleaners and I, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Moonlight and Get Out. The top UK film is Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon at number 45, followed by Carol Reed’s The Third Man at number 63 (up from 73rd). Two films by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger feature in the top 100: The Red Shoes in 67^th place and A Matter of Life and Death at number 78 (up from 90^th).

Metropolis @Bfi National Archive

Two silent films have made the top 20: F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans and Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, which is also the only documentary to make the top 20. There are nine films from the silent era in the top 100, including Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights and Modern Times, Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. and The General, Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

Films that have been knocked out of the top 100 include Erich von Stroheim’s Greed, D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance, Luis Buñuel’s Un chien andalou, Jean Renoir’s Partie de campagne and La Grande Illusion, Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons and Touch of Evil, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du paradis, David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’eclisse, Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, Wrath of God, Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part II, Robert Altman’s Nashville and Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull.

These are my own personal choices, and my reason for making them. Of course these are only ten of my favourites, but I’ve tried to choose films not just for their technical strength but also for their powerful effect on me. I want to come away feeling moved, enlightened, inspired or changed in some way. They need to stand up to the test of time. All these films have good performances, a solid script and strong visual allure, but there has to be an X factor too. And that lies at the heart of my choices.

MY 20th CENTURY (1989)
Director(s): Ildiko Enyedi (Hungary)
Comment: An elegant inventive whisper-light reverie about civilisation at the turn of the 20th Century seen from a woman’s point of view.
BARRY LYNDON (1976)
Dir: Stanley Kubrick (US)
Comment: This epic saga has something new to discover each time I watch it. An extraordinary treasure trove of images, performances and historical details captured by John Alcott and bound up in an iconic score. If I could choose one film to take to my desert island it would be this one.
SUPER FLY (1972)
Dir: Gordon Parks Jr (US)
Comment: I discovered this gem at a Black cinema retrospective at Locarno Film Festival some years ago. A heady breath of New York in the early 1970s it captures the daily life of a cocaine dealer (Ron O’Neal) and his lover (Sheila Frazier) who live life on a knife edge with such style and gutsiness – Curtis Mayfield’s score it just the icing on the cake. And of course costume design from Nate Adams sets the tone.
THE TENANT (1976)
Dir: Roman Polanski (France)
Comment: Paris is the sombre star of this twisted psychodrama, a portrait of paranoia punctured by lewd moments of humour in a scabrid script. Polanski is the timid outsider gradually cowered into submission, and as the horror unravels to Philippe Sarde’s plangent score, all sorts of skeletons emerge from the past and the present. Bang up to date with its immigration theme, yet constantly resonating with the Holocaust, and echoing the pity, shame and humiliation of its central character, this is an endlessly haunting thriller that left Polanski empty-handed at Cannes (1976) after surely one of the most extraordinary performances of the 20th century.
KOBIETA SAMOTNA(1987)
Dir: Agnieszka Holland (Poland)
Comment: Shot on a hand held camera, this simple tragedy speaks volumes about the abject emotional misery and privation suffered by its central character Irena who lives alone on the outskirts of Communist era Wroclaw with only her 8 year old son for company. A brief period of happiness leads once again to desperation and gloom. Unforgettable in its stark depiction of life in eighties Poland. Won the Special Jury prize at Polish Film Festival 1988
THE CRANES ARE FLYING (1957)
Dir: Mikhail Kalatozov (Soviet Union)
Comment: Kalatozov led Soviet cinema back to the lyricism of Pudovkin and Eisenstein away from the realism of the Stalin era in a poignant drama portraying dark times with such elegance, its everlasting themes of love, war and courageous sacrifice enveloped in the velvety visuals of DoP Sergey Urusevsky. Tatyana Samoylova is mesmerising as Veronika and won Best Actress at Cannes where the film won the Palme d’Or in 1958.
DON’T LOOK NOW (1987)
Dir: Nicolas Roeg (UK)
Comment: A beautiful horror masterpiece: chilling, soulful, romantic in its depiction of extreme grief, regret and yearning for love lost, in all its forms. Totally relatable and yet mysterious, treacherous and unreachable. So many emotions well up when watching this film. It resonates with a grief that is palpable. The tragedy of its story remains in the mind forever.
THE GREAT ADVENTURE (1953)
Director(s): Arne Sucksdorff (Sweden)
Comment: A lyrical black & white Swedish cinema verite docudrama that pictures a year on a farm in remote Sweden where a man lives with his family in the heart of the forest, the director doubling us as the pipe-smoking father and DoP. The film won prizes at Cannes and Berlin for the poetic way Sucksdorff combines wildlife photography with a gripping storyline that plays out like a thriller with touches of humour, the local fauna unwittingly providing the characters: owls, otters, pine-martens, rabbits, squirrels and a lynx all take part in their natural habitat in a deeply forested 1950s Sweden. Enchanting.
NOSFERATU THE VAMPYRE (1979)
Director(s): Werner Herzog (Germany)
Comment: The vampire legend is brought to life in this hauntingly beautiful fantasy fable that takes us into the realms of darkness and beyond with an atavistic quality that strikes at the core of our deepest fears. The power and complexity of the performances, the magnificence of the sets and Wagner’s score make this an all time classic masterpiece that feels fresh and deeply thought-provoking each time you watch it.
IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE (2000)
Dir: Wong Ka Wai (Hong Kong)
A smoulderingly sensual love story unfolds between two Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung, in 1962 Hong Kong. Enchanting and suggestive, the film floats along like a gorgeous cloud of perfume buoyed by delicately suppressed emotions and vibrant visual allure.

SIGHT AND SOUND POLL 2022

White Noise (2022) Netflix

Dir.; Noah Baumbach, Cast: Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, Raffey Cassidy; USA 2022, 136 min.

The curse of the festival opener was alive and kicking at Venice when this feature has its world premiere: Noah Baumbach’s White Noise, an adaption of Don de Lillo’s 1985 novel, is simply an embarrassment. In New York, Jack Glasdney (Driver) and Babette (Gerwig) have a brood of kids to look after from their own fraught marriage and earlier relationships. And they fail miserably: the toddler and younger children are a drain on their energy and, the older ones – including teenager Denise (Cassidy) seem more mature than their parents. Then an ecological disaster comes to town, and Jack is caught in the fallout. Mysticism and graphic violence ensues, but no plot resolution of any kind. DoP Lol Crawley does his best to keep the frantic tempo going, but it’s all empty noise.AS

ON RELEASE on NETFLIX FROM 9 DECEMBER 2022

Tori and Lokita (2022)

Dir.: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne; Cast: Pablo Schils, Joely Mbundu, Alban Ukaj, TijmenGovaerts, Charlotte Bruyne, Nadege Quedrago,Marc Zinga; Belgium/France 2022, 88 min.

With Tori and Lokita Belgium writers, directors and producers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have found their way back to the brilliance of Rosetta and L’Enfant – both Palme d’Or winners – with their angriest feature yet. Winning the 75th Anniversary award in Cannes 2022 was also recognition of their continued commitment to shining a light on those at the outer margins of society in films that were neither sentimental soap operas nor Ken Loach-style agitprops: Tori and Lokita is a tragedy, a drama and a poetic love story of a different kind.

Back in the Dardennes’ old stamping ground of Liège and the industrial suburb of Seraing we first meet eleven year old Tori (Schils) and his sixteen-year old sister Lokita (Mbundu) during a committee hearing to establish her status as bona-fide emigrant. It later emerges the two are not related but met on the boat to Italy, Tori having been forced to leave Cameroon purportedly as the child of a sorcerer. So the two of them cooked up a story to increase their chances of getting refugee status for Lokita. But the authorities only grant Tori leave to remain, and Lokita is threatened with deportation.

The two are meanwhile under extreme pressure not only to provide financial assistance for the education of Lokita’s brothers back home in Cameroon, but also to take into account the restaurant Chef Betim (Ukaj) and the people smugglers Firmin (Zinga) and Justine (Quedrago) who got them into Belgium – at a steep price. Betim uses them in his drug trading activities, and when it becomes clear that Lorita will not get a resident visa, Betim promises to get her papers if she tends a hash plant for three months. Lokita agrees, even though Betim is sexually abusing her. Tori hatches a plan which will seem like a victory for the two of them, but turns into a tragedy of epic proportions.

DoP Benoit Dervaux’ handheld camera catches the full range of emotions etched across the faces of these two desperate people struggling to be accepted. Much the same as every visa system, the Belgium one is arbitrary, and laced with an undercurrent of xenophobia. Lokita is fiercely protective of Tori: she is his mother, sister, and companion: always encouraging him to go to school so that he can realise his ambitions. Lokita herself wants to become a home help, if granted refuge status. Somehow, the Italian song Tori picked up in Italy becomes ‘their song’, a theme tune Tori sings to cheer Lokita forward, through thick and thin. Their loving interdependency is the beating heart of this tender tragedy.

Tori and Lokita is a stark reminder for parents all over the world who may be ignorant of the dangers of people trafficking. The Dardenne brothers keep their distance, never judging the youngsters, always trying to see things from their perspective in a humane and passionate story of our times. AS

Released exclusively in cinemas on 2 December 2022 | Picturehouse Entertainment

More than Ever (2022)

Dir: Emily Atef | Cast: Vicky Krieps, Gaspard Ulliel, Bjørn Floberg | France, Drama 123′

Taking control is a powerful part of dealing with terminal illness. And choice is at the heart of this romantic drama from French filmmaker Emily Atef. The film follows Helene (Krieps) a bright young woman madly in love with her husband, Mathieu (Ulliel), and overwhelmed by feelings of loss and isolation at the thought of dying, just as her friends are looking forward to the future.

Anxious not to be defined by her incurable condition Helene is naturally depressed, not least at contemplating the end while those around her are beginning their married lives and looking forward to having children – one is already pregnant, the usual pictures of the growing baby are passed round the dinner table, where Helene becomes a figure of pity, people not knowing quite what to say as she struggles on alone.

Naturally Mathieu is keen to find a cure for her illness, but Helene feels shut out by his own desperate need to keep her alive, against the odds. And forcing her to be positive when a new treatment offers hope. Even her mother imposes her own feelings of self-pity, breaking down in tears rather than giving Helene strength and the time to talk and express herself.

Atef clearly understands the situation. There is nothing more normal than wanting to get away from the wave of pity and silence that descends on us when we face challenging situations, such as life-limiting illness, or the curse of infertility. And Helene also realises that her lover will go on to have a full life and a family with somebody else.

Feeling lost and isolated she seeks solace on the internet and gets to know a terminally ill man (Bjørn Floberg) living in the pristine paradise of the Norway’s fjords, and feels comfort and solidarity from reading his daily blog. Off she goes to meet him, without Mathieu, who wants her to stay in France in case a suitable lung donor becomes available. The peace and solitude, and the spartan surroundings of a boathouse adjoining the man’s property provides distance and a chance to rediscover herself and take control of her illness. Atef does not look for easy exits or a sentimental treatment for her dying heroine. And Helene is not always a sympathetic character, but she is vulnerable, and we feel for her – it’s a monumental performance from Krieps, and from Ulliel, who ironically would die suddenly in an accident, months after filming wrapped.

The stunning cinematic setting of the Norwegian countryside in early Spring offers a bracing backcloth to a tragedy that could happen to any of us facing certain death or contemplating the final days of a loved one. And More than Ever offers an upbeat message of hope, not just unmitigated doom. MT

NOW ON RELEASE IN FRANCE and in the UK from early 2023.

It was a Sunday evening in November (2022) Turin International Film Festival 2022

Dir: Lina Wertmüller | Doc, TV 120′

It went almost unnoticed outside Italy that earthquake that struck the southern Irpinia region on a Sunday evening in November 1981.

But filmmaker Lina Wertmüller, who blazed a trail through Italian cinema during the Seventies with hits like Swept Away, was there with her camera recording human tragedy in a nation continually rocked by seismic disaster. And this was just another incident that would go down in history. More lives lost. A government repeating that lessons would be learnt. But they never were.

Just a year after her death Italian Television pays tribute to the pioneering director with a restoration of the made for TV documentary: È una domenica sera di novembre which aired a year later on RAI TV2 and during Turin International Film Festival 2022

The Roman-born filmmaker said at the time: “This poor South captivates me, stimulates me, land of wolves and kings, where I feel planted perhaps because of an Irpinian grandmother. This deep South, the part with the least, left behind. Alone, that always feels at disadvantage from the others. This unknown South that everybody think they know, and therefore feel entitled to define, judge, maybe condemn and when a catastrophe like the earthquake brings it up again, you realise that you know nothing at all about that South, that it is a continent as distant as the Third World, but with the space and nature of other third worlds”.

As the cameras roll over the scene of total devastation during that tragic Sunday night, a woman’s voice echoes from deep in a crater, another pitiful old lady talks of five such earthquakes in her lifetime alone. Mangled bodies are pulled from the wreckage and wrapped in white shrouds amid tangled debris, broken glass and exposed masonry. A helicopter glides over the region giving us a bird’s eye view of the area involved: churches and buildings lie in ruins most look almost beyond repair.

The South has always been forgotten and marginalised in the scheme of things. The regions of Campania, Apulia, Abruzzo, Basilicata, Molise, Calabria and Sicilia seem like a different country from the industrial powerhouse of the wealthier northern regions. There are clearly parallels here with the recent floods in the southern states of America – the voyeuristic TV cameras are there to offer an armchair view of human misery, but the government seems largely to have turned its back, although prime minister of the time Amintore Fanfani makes a sheepish appearance in dark glasses, and is then driven away in his limousine. Public support from the richer industrial north of the country was certainly offered, but coordination was clearly lacking and politicians’ empty words fell on deaf ears.

What starts as a reportage of the unfolding catastrophe and the subsequent proposals for reparations soon broadens out into an in-depth ethnographical portrait of local traditions, folklore, religious devotion and time-honoured customs. All this is interwoven with Wertmüller and Piera degli Esposti’s readings of the comments on the South made by literary luminaries Alberto Moravia, Carlo Levi, Furio Colombo, Alberto Ronchey, Giampaolo Pansa and enriched with passages taken from the works of Leonardo da Vinci, Pliny the Younger, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Giacomo Leopardi. The documentary ends with a final interview with Martin Scorsese who is still very active in promoting the wider cinema world beyond his own focus on Italian American features.

With this glowing digital restoration, Lina Wertmüller’s documentary does what it set out to do: bear witness to an ongoing Italian tragedy: “It is my dream that everyone should be made aware of what’s happening in Italy. No just today, when the events are unfolding, but for posterity. In short, let us remember that the future is ancient”.

TURIN INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2022 | 25 November – 3 December 2022

Lina Wertmuller courtesy of Torino International Film Festival

The Queen of Spades (1949) Restoration

Dir: Thorold Dickinson | Cast: Anton Walbrook, Edith Evans, Yvonne Mitchell, Ronald Howard, Michael Medwin, Valentine Dyall | UK Drama, 95′

Yet another jewel in an output by Dickinson, short on quantity but long on quality, which showed his time at The Film Society in the 1920s had been well spent.

It takes place in Imperial Russia 1806 where St Petersburg is in the grip of gambling fever. No card strikes more fear in to the hearts of the soldiers than the evil Queen of Spades. Captain Herman Suvorin (Anton Walbrook) is a lowly German engineer: an outsider obsessed with making his fortune whose peculiar manner isolates him from the revelries of the other bawdy soldiers. He is intrigued, though, by soldiers’ gossip that tells of the legend of an ancient Countess (Dame Edith Evans), who supposedly sold her soul to the devil years before in exchange for the secret of success at the card game de jour: Faro. When he stumbles across a strange and rare book that seems to confirm the story, Suvorin sets about a dastardly plan in order to extract the old lady’s secret for himself. Worming his way into the household by paying false court to the Countess’ lonely ward Lizaveta (Yvonne Mitchell), Suvorin discovers a secret door to the palace that leads directly into the Countess’ chambers. On the night of a ball that the Countess and Lizaveta attend, he enters the palace and waits in the shadows for the Countess, determined to learn her secret before another bitter winter’s day breaks.

Immaculately assembled and incisively acted by a large cast of familiar faces it both looks good, thanks to the gothic photography by Otto Heller, and sounds good, thanks to Georges Auric’s rich score and eerie use of sound (notably the rustle of the Countess’s cape). Yet as coldly elegant as Anton Walbrook was in the lead, The Queen of Spades was a troubled production. Thorold Dickinson – at just three days notice – took over direction from screenwriter Rodney Ackland whose footage remains in the film (notably the flashback sequence with Pauline Tennant as the young countess) and plagued with money problems; not that you’d know from the film that emerged. RichardChatten

THE QUEEN OF SPADES | RESTORATION COURTESY OF STUDIOCANAL | IN CINEMAS from 23 DECEMBER | ON BLU-RAY, DVD & DIGITAL FROM JANUARY 23

The Home entertainment release comes complete with bonus features including an Introduction by Martin Scorsese, a new interview with film critic Anna Bogutskaya as well as a rare filmed interview with Thorold Dickinson discussing the film in detail. THE QUEEN OF SPADES is the newest addition to the ever-expanding Vintage Classics collection.

Man and Dog (2022) Turin International Film Festival 2022

Dir: Stefan Constantinescu | Drama, 100′

The Covid epidemic changed the world forever and wreaked havoc on lives. People found themselves trapped at home or forced to stay abroad, away from their loved ones. Jealousy and paranoia disrupted relationships. Romania’s Stefan Constantinescu’s subtle yet compelling arthouse drama shows how one man’s obsession nearly destroyed his family in his desperate search for the truth. He also acknowledges the important role pets played in supporting our emotional wellbeing during the pandemic.

After a mysterious text message from an unknown number, Doru (Bogdan Dumitrache) leaves a job in Göteborg for his hometown in Romania. The message suggests his wife Nico (Ofelia Popii) is having an affair and – despite evidence to the contrary – Doru’s imagination goes into overdrive as the tension slowly builds.

In the countryside near the port of Constantia Constantinescu establishes the milieu: a relaxed and summery setting where a close knit community of friends and family – and his eager pet mastiff Amza – welcome Doru back but also wonder how he has breached covid restrictions with the city shortly to go back into lockdown. Romania is shown as a male-dominated society where women rely on their feminine whiles despite being financially self-sufficient. Doru spends the days mentally sifting through a list of likely suspects with the help of his close female friend Georgi. She dismisses a wealthy Turkish widow Dan as a contender:- “he likes young babes” and “can get whoever he wants”. But Doru stops at nothing in his desperation to find a culprit and tracking down the origin of the suspicious text.

Doru and Nico, a therapist who works from home, make a really natural couple. But although their marriage appears to be solid, the film shows how easily doubt can undermine even the closest human bonds. She has made a positive go of her life in his absence and is certainly not the little wife waiting at home. But Doru’s suspicion clouds even his sense of self in the family hierarchy – clearly Nico and their daughter can manage well without him and this further diminishes his male ego, as it slowly implodes. His faithful dog Amza is on the receiving end of his anxiety – and he even tries to abandon the dog in the nearby woods in a scene which strikes an odd note. Man and Dog is not a whodunnit but a taut, well-crafted study of delicate family dynamics in the time of crisis. MT

IN COMPETITION | TURIN INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2022 | 25 NOV – 3 DEC 2022

Nobody’s Hero (2022) Turin International Film Festival 2022

Dir: Alain Guiraudie | France, Drama 105’

Alain Guiraudie burst onto the international scene with his intriguing thriller Stranger by the Lake. His latest effort Nobody’s Hero (Viens je t’emmène), takes us back to his earlier comedies King of Escape and Staying Vertical. Absurdist, satirical and occasionally sexually explicit it centres on a sympathetic loner caught between his desires and the reality of life in a modern-day France mired in terrorism, social and economic crisis. Some may find it offensive but its dead pan humour and political incorrectness is a bracing punch in the teeth in our woke times, and never takes itself too seriously.

Médéric (Jean-Charles Clichet), a kindly computer coder, has fallen hopelessly on love with much older married prostitute Isadora (Noémie Lvovsky) but their latest tryst, in a tacky hotel, is interrupted by news of a terrorist attack in their hometown of Clermont-Ferrand (shot in sink estate realist style by Hélène Louvart)

Everyone is caught up in the mayhem, not least Mederic’s neighbours, a motley crew of old-timers who jump to their guns – quite literally in one case – preparing for another one of the devastating incidents that has rocked France in recent years.

Sélim (Illiès Kadri), a young Arab, enters the fray looking for shelter and Médéric is naturally sceptical – but his sense of human decency prevails. Selim comes in out of the rain and eventually into Mederic’s apartment where he makes himself at home, refusing to leave. Médéric’s neighbours all react differently. One elderly resident, who has taken to wearing a hijab, actively takes pity on the boy, another tries to chase him away with a stick. The police are ever present but powerless. Meanwhile, Médéric is still chasing after the cartoonish nymphomaniac Isadora, their love affair providing the ludicrous link between reality and slapstick surreality with her abusive businessman husband Gérard (Renaud Rutten) constantly dragging her away from the clutches of the mild mannered Mederic even when their noisy love-making retreats to the confessional of the local church.

Nobody’s Hero can be hilarious at times if you suspend disbelief and get carried away with the rest of the audience. But it slightly overstays its welcome in the confusion of the finale that explodes amid gunfire and gratuitous orgasms.

TURIN INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2022

Unrest (2022) Turin International Film Festival 2022

Wri/Dir: Cyril Schäublin | Swiss Drama 90’

The minimalist elegance and precision of Swiss watchmaking embues this dour and distinctive drama from Cyril Schäublin who was inspired by the ideas of the revolutionary Russian political thinker and essayist Pyotr Kropotkin to look at how workers in a small leafy village in the Swiss Jura in 1877 are assembled and crushed by the larger industrial system that controls them, just like tiny components in the timepieces they painstakingly put together.

Coming from a family of watchmakers Schäublin understands the craft and the endless care that goes into each tiny mechanism. A watch is like a human body. Compact, precisely constructed and carefully calibrated to continue functioning for the rest of its life. There may be chaos all around, as the first rumblings of revolution make their way into this discreet and charming summer setting, but the watch must keep working. Time is of the essence. And time is set according to four different schemes: the watch factory timetable is eight minutes ahead of the municipal one, which is set by the local post office.

Pyotr Kropotkin, a cartographer from Russia, arrives in the village to make sure the maps of the region carry their appropriate names. He is caught up in the undercurrent of subversion and this tension slowly builds but hardly breaks the serene summer ambience as the workers continue their methodic process, delicately and discretely voicing their concerns but aware that any change could seriously disrupt timekeeping, or the mechanisms themselves. And there are orders to deliver. They must clock in and clock out with gruelling regularity. The overloads and the police puts their cases and conditions forward sternly and formally but they are never aggressive or authoritarian. Social change is in the air but it is an egalitarian gentlemanly affair.

Schäublin directs with care and confidence capturing the time-honoured craft at the core of his narrative. 150 years after the Russian revolution the workers plight has not changed although now it has reached a mounting, pervasive, all-encompassing collective hysteria. MT

TURIN INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2022 | BEST DIRECTOR AWARD | Berlinale Encounters 2022

The Werewolf (1956)

Dir: Sam Latzman, Fred Sears | US Horror

This quickie by Sam Katzman & Fred Sears brings the legend up to date by setting it in a very contemporary world of bars and juke boxes. As usual the werewolf is treated sympathetically as a tortured soul doctors are desperate to help (his first human victim being a mugger whose throat he rips out – and the local police don’t display the usual bloodlust in pursuit of their quarry (the sheriff with admirable understatement asks “How do you explain a thing like this to his wife and his kid?”)

Steve Ritch portrays the title character as a pitiful soul and you really feel for the poor fellow when he shrieks in pain when he steps into a beartrap. He’s actually far more effective as a human being than a wolf (because Columbia owned the copyright they were able to reuse the makeup that Andreas wore in ‘The Return of the Vampire’ along with a couple of uses of that film’s theme).

The subplot concerning the activities to two renegade scientists makes the film feel unneccessarily cluttered, but the climax on a bridge in the Bear Lake Valley is at least worth waiting for (SPOILER COMING:) when they finish him off not with silver bullets but good old fashioned rifles.@RichardChatten

Casque d’Or (1952)

Dir.: Jacques Becker; Cast: Simone Signoret, Serge Reggiani, Claude Dauphin, Raymond Brussieres, William Sabatier; France 1952, 94 min.

French director/co-writer Jacques Becker (1906-1960) is relatively unknown outside France, his early death at 53 sadly cutting short a promising career that started as assistant to Jean Renoir before he captured in WWII by the Germans, spending a year as a POW. He directed thirteen features

CASQUE D’OR belongs – together with Touchez pas au grisbi and Le Trou – in the Pantheon of French post war features; Becker being a favourite of the critics-turned-filmmakers of “Cahiers Du Cinema”, with Jacques Rivette often collaborating with Becker. CASQUE is anything but a period film, even though its set in 1901, when the real life drama happened.

In Paris at the turn of the 19th Century, CASQUE D’OR follows the love affair between Simone Signoret’s Marie, a gangster’s moll with a heart of gold, and reformed criminal Georges Manda.

Marie (Signoret) has always been on the lookout for a man to save her from the ‘milieu’. And she finds one in the shape of Manda, after leaving abusive boyfriend Roland Dupuis (Sabatier).

When ex-con turned carpenter Georges Manda (Reggiani) arrives on the scene, it is love at first sight. But she has other admirers: Felix Leca (Dauphin), the evil boss of the gang, lusts after Marie and hopes to get rid of Manda, finally killing Roland with the help of a knife (was it a Sabatier like the actor’s name – we shall never know). But Leca’s vendetta is not over and leads to a bitter end after Marie and Manda’s brief romantic countryside idyll

DoP Robert Levebvre’s stunning black-and white camera borrows from Fritz Lang in his scenes with the gang, and Becker quotes from the German director’s film M. His prison escape scene on the lonely road was later ‘copied’ by Jean-Pierre Melville in Le Deuxieme Souffle.

CASQUE is never a melodrama, the protagonists are tied of the gangster code, their actions doomed because of their inflexibility: they are all captives of the set-up they have chosen.

Becker passed his flair and talent on to his sons Jean and Etienne who became directors in their own right, after assisting their father, who had an obsession for details: his film props became linked to the protagonists, and sometimes they were even more significant than the characters themselves.

The 70th anniversary copy has been lovingly restored, and CASQUE D’OR is witness to Becker’s mastery of the many genres he chose for his films AS

Theatrical Release Date: 25 Nov 2022 Home Ent. Release Date: 28 Nov 2022

Driving Mum (2022)

Wri|Dir: Hilmar Oddsson

Hilmar Oddsson offers up another tale of Icelandic family strife and dysfunction, a black comedy very much along the lines of his fellow countryman Grímur Hákonarson’s dour and determined tale of sibling rivalry set in a farming community, Rams.

Although here the drift is towards melancholic fantasy, it’s a brave and bracingly impressive feature proving Icelandic cinema to be one of the most offbeat and ingenious in the magnetic north.

Þröstur Leó Gunnarsson cuts a dismal figure as A son whose existence is diminished by the maternal force that gave him life – and we feel for him. His indomitable mother (Kristbjörg Kjeld) is the classic monster matriarch – feared and yet revered in equal measure and he finds himself trapped by her influence.

This son, his dog and his deceased mother – the ultimate back seat driver – take to the road in a final surreal cross-country journey. Sardonic is the watchword as long-discussed funeral plans are finally put in motion in a grim valedictory voyage. Although dead, mother still dominates from beyond the grave as a gaunt and ghoulish physical presence to ensure her wishes are followed to a tee.

Óttar Guðnason creates a saturnine sense of place with his stark black and white cinematography providing a bleak and baleful backcloth to Jon’s rumination on an unfulfilled existence and his lonely life. Revenants from his past include a solitary female figure, a group of karaoke revellers and a recurring carnival motif.

Reality occasionally rears its head in the understandable queries he receives from people he meets along the way, and this contrast between the mundane and the ephemeral provides the piece with its vein of tragi-comedy.

Although his dead mother remains tight lipped and stoical, her wishes become real-time in-car conversations that really need no voice; they are seared into Jon’s unconscious like some macabre maternal spell that bizarrely echoes from the other side. MT

IN CINEMAS FROM FRIDAY 1 MARCH | GRAND PRIX winner at Tallinn International Film Festival 2022

The Menu (2022)

Dir: Mark Mylod | Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Anya Taylor Joy, Nicholas Hoult, Janet McTeer, John Leguizamo, Judith Light, Hong Chau | Drama, 107’

A puzzle lies at the heart of this deceptively simple satirical drama from Succession director Mark Mylod. And no prizes for guessing who eventually finds their way successfully through the trial that takes the form of a puffed-up haute cuisine soiree, a sort of ‘masterclass’ lead by Ralph Fiennes’s condescending chef and his prim assistant Elsa (Hong Chau).

The Menu is the latest in the recent spate of films that lampoon the rich and privileged. But also those who slavishly follow the crowd – here it’s a brace of bankers, a washed up wealthy couple; an actor beyond his sell by date. And at the end of the meal their lives will end in tragedy – no less – as the mood shifts into horror.

Then there’s Margot (Anya Taylor Joy) a last minute stand-in date for fearful foodie Tyler (Nicolas Hoult) who is in awe of the whole set-up. The Menu is clever, amusing and very proud of its smug credentials. But Margot will call it all out and foist Fiennes’s eminence grise masterchef by his starched, shroud-like overalls. As a footnote when it comes to over-inflated food descriptions, I first heard the phrase ‘freshly harvested baby carrots tossed in creamy butter’ back in the early 1980s, on a flight to San Francisco. Who would of have known that this ridiculous food gentrification fetish would get so out of hand. MT

THE MENU IS NOW ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE

She Said (2022)

Dir: Maria Shrader | Cast: Carey Mulligan, Zoe Kazan, Patricia Clarkson, Andre Braugher, Jennifer Ehle, Angela Yeoh, Zach Grenier, Ashley Judd, Samantha Morton, Gwyneth Paltrow, Angela Yeoh | US Drama 129′

Maria Shrader’s worthy trudge through the Weinstein saga sees women tearing up at the slightest provocation – even those who never met him – but there’s one consolation: Carey Mulligan.

She plays Megan Twohey, one of a pair of New York Times journalists, along with Joe Kazan’s Jodi Kantor, who wrote a harrowing Pulitzer Prize-winning expose of the prolific sexual crimes committed by Hollywood mega-mogul Harvey Weinstein back in 2017, when the scandal finally broke.

The City of London was my domain for nearly fourteen years, and so no stranger to sexual shenanigans on the trading floor. I was once asked to keep a Norwegian shipping magnate ‘happy’ after a night out with fellow brokers. Naturally I froze in anger and disbelief back in the day as a twenty something graduate used to more respectful behaviour from the opposite sex. But hey – you faced up to them, or moved on, or got over it. It was very much the territory for working women in a man’s world, particularly attractive ones.

Nowadays we have the #MeToo brigade who – quite rightly – objected to their big bosses’ beastly behaviour. Not just a slap and a tickle but hard core sex. One of them, Rowena Chiu (Yeoh), complains Weinstein asked for ‘just one thrust’. The whole idea is faintly ridiculous.

She Said is sober, well-acted but terribly dull because we know what’s going to happen as the torpid narrative, adapted by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, trundles along solemnly with the two tracking down rumours and substantiating the umpteen financial settlements that allowed Weinstein to avoid legal proceedings in preying on actresses and assistants for decades. Nearly 90 people would eventually agree to share their stories about Weinstein – who we never see – although we do hear his stentorious voice during a telephone call. The women affected included Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie, and Ashley Judd (who plays herself).

The reporters work would also spawn a book: She Said. And that literary tome provides the basis for this earnest but bland account of the take-down of the most powerful man in the movies who is now serving a 23-year sentence for rape and sexual assault.

Mulligan saves the day as a pre-possessed and powerful reporter, softened by motherhood, but still ‘having none of it’; Kazan’s Jodi feels she’d be more at home running a knitting class, but her sympathetic face seems to do the trick in getting the information out of run-down mothers and film execs who were clearly devastated by their casting couch experiences. The rest of the cast is supportive: Samantha Morton’s Zelda Perkins stands out as the most grounded, philosophical and convincing victim, Patricia Clarkson is solid and reliable as the NYT editor who guided some of the era’s most seismic investigations. Shame then that the real villain of the piece is nowhere to be seen. Who would play him? MT

NOW IN CINEMAS

Enys Men (2022)

Dir.: Mark Jenkin; Cast: Mary Woodvine, Edward Rowe, Flo Crowe, John Woodvine; UK 2022, 91 min.

Enys Men is a surreal leap forward for Cornish auteur Mark Jenkin after his striking 2018 debut Bait. Once again we’re back on the Cornish coast with another unorthodox feature and Jenkin taking full control of the artistic process: from directing and writing to creating the soundscape. The setting, a small island off the Cornish coast, plays the lead role in the mystery and we, the audience, join the human cast in groping the way through a maze where a beast is waiting in prey.

Mary Woodvine is the red mackintosh wearing ‘Volunteer’ – a sort of caretaker and biologist. And that red Mac strikes fear into our hearts – a pavlovian response from Nic Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. Mary’s lonely days are spent documenting the genesis of lichen on six experimental flowers with distinctive red stamens. Nightfall sees her tucked up in bed with Edward Goldsmith’s 1972 bestseller “A Blueprint for Survival”.

From her flower diary we know the year is 1973, and the month is April, and the film is drenched in this seventies atmosphere. The colours produced by the 16mm camera reflect the bleached out and grainy look of the era. A radio – Mary’s only contact with the world beyond crackles away, a live wire of conflicting channels zinging with static, just like wirelesses did back then. But this wireless is the only way of communicating with the outside world, apart from sporadic visits from a boatsman (Rowe) who offers provisions and carnal delights for the lady of the house. The forth protagonist, an ecclisastic (J. Woodvine), is straight out of Wicker Man, and, together with the pagan statue on the island, creates a menacing ambiance of mounting dread and expectancy for the plantswoman. Her younger ‘Alter Ego’ (Crowe) occasionally rears her head to remind us of a history suggestive of violence, and the scar on the woman’s stomach is testament to some kind of past brutality .

All this minimalism brings to mind Bresson, but a certain opaqueness very much echoes Resnais. Repressed love and terror mingle with images of angelic children all dressed in white suggesting some kind of pagan ritual. Enys Men scratches at the edges of horror and the tropes are all there along with the evocative soundscape that signals a change in the emotional atmosphere. The past has taken its victims, and the future is unpredictable. The missing minotaur is always just hiding beyond the next rock, ready to pounce.

ENYS MEN is pure cinema, constantly catching the audience by surprise. As we search for visual clues it soon becomes clear there is nothing to understand in this enigma open to individual interpretation. Although the lack of a concrete conclusion may frustrate many audiences, Enys Men sees Jenkin developing his visual style and language as an unique auteur. AS

IN CINEMAS FROM 23 JANUARY 2023

My Neighbour Adolf (2022)

Dir: Leon Prudovsky. Israel/Poland/Colombia. 2022. 96 mins.

Udo Kier adds a certain twinkly allure to this rather saccharine tragicomedy about a concentration camp survivor who suspects his neighbour of being a war criminal – Adolf Hitler, no less.

Israeli director/co-writer Leon Prudovsky clearly thought it was a good idea to make an upbeat film about the Holocaust after so many understandable tragedies. A shame then that My Neighbour Adolf comes across as a tonal misfire that could have worked better as a sinister thriller or a wacky comedy – some may indeed find the glib 1960s set feature rather tasteless. On the plus side it’s got Udo Kier as the offending ‘man next door’.

Somewhere in South America – possibly Colombia – the grumpy old Polsky (Hayman) is the sole survivor of a family that purportedly perished during the Holocaust leaving him to live out a placid existence tending his black roses transported from the homeland.

When not playing chess or chatting to the postman Polsky is puzzled by his new German neighbour Mr Herzog – a dead ringer for the infamous Nazi leader. But his efforts to probe the man’s background come across as clunky and insubstantial, and are drawn out right until the finale, Kier stealing the show as a cantankerous old bugger whose vulnerability occasionally adds a certain charm. But David Hayman gets most of the screen time with his curious accent – leaning towards Scots rather than Eastern European – forced to compete with the insistent, irritating score. MT

IN UK CINEMAS from 4 NOVEMBER and DIGITAL PLATFORMS from 14 NOVEMBER 2022

Bones and All (2022)

Dir: Luca Guadagnino | Cast: Taylor Russell, Timothee Chalamet, Michael Stuhlbarg, André Holland, Chloë Sevigny, David Gordon Green, Jessica Harper, Jake Horowitz, Mark Rylance | Romantic Drama, 130’

Ten years ago Let the Right One In told a coming of age story about teen vampires. Bones and All turns the spotlight on cannibalism in a tale that is both tasty and tender thanks to the troubled twosome at its heart, Taylor Russell and Timothee Chalamet. Luca Guadagnino brings his talents to the table for the third time with writer David Kajganich.

Lee and Maren are two cupid-struck cannibals who drift across America in a blood-spattered blue Chevrolet from Virgina to Nebraska. Slowly falling for each other in a western-style romantic drama Bones occasionally veers into gore and visceral thrills but not nearly as much as in Raw. This is a sympathetic celebration of young love, freedom and self-realisation laced with a strumming score of country tunes. Arseni Khachaturian’s lushly lensed locations are loosely inspired by Edward Hopper’s cold-edged canvasses and a Camille DeAngelis 1980s novel.

But unlike the source material Maren is looking for the mother she never knew. She developed a taste for human flesh after nibbling a friend’s finger, and then cut her teeth with a menacing man-eater in the shape of Sully (a menacing Mark Rylance) who prefers his flesh cold. Then she falls for Lee, a grifter of sorts with a penchant for gay-mey meat despite being straight. And although they gorge themselves endlessly on love and lean meat there’s a hollowness here that is very 21st century. Can they reconcile their individual weirdness and make a go of it? Deep down they’re just like everyone else. MT

NOW in CINEMAS | Best Director Award | Venice Film Festival 2022

Westerns are Back in Town | Turin International Film Festival 2022

Turin Film Festival has long been synonymous with westerns. A favourite genre of artistic director Steve Della Casa, the tradition goes back to the turn of the 21st century when the festival paid tribute to those venerable veterans of the Wild West: Howard Hawks, Budd Boetticher, Anthony Mann and John Ford.

Terror in a Texas Town

Steve Della Casa has spent the past two decades focusing on a fistful of lesser known films from the era. Delving into the archives of the more niche directors like Ray Enright, Lesley Selander, Randolph Scott and Sterling Hayden, he has presented a clutch of cult classics championed by critics and western lovers like Bertrand Tavernier or Phil Hardy, films that celebrate an eclectic variety of characters, tones and styles – and some curios such as Sam Newfield’s 1938 outing THE TERROR OF TINY TOWN, starring dwarf actor Billy Curtis, and his 1937 hit HARLEM IN THE PRAIRIE with its African-American cast. Wacky, eccentric characters are the name of the game in FOUR GUNS TO THE BORDER (1954), actor Richard Carlson’s first film as director, adapted from Louis L’Amour’s novel, showcasing the simmering sensuality of its leading star Colleen Miller.

The Terror of Tiny Town

TERROR IN A TEXAS TOWN (1958) was one of four acclaimed B-movies that brought Joseph H. Lewis’ cinematographic career to a close, a dynamic duel between the black-clad gunslinger and striking sailor Sterling Hayden, armed with just a whaler’s harpoon – is one of the most memorable scenes in western history. The American Civil War made its mark on the lives of western heroes, staging scenarios that were as divisive and irreconcilable as the war itself – and reverberate even today.

Four Faces West

In Roy Rowland’s 1947 outing THE ROMANCE OF ROSY RIDGE (1947) these conflicts take on a poetic and lyrical tone. FOUR FACES WEST (1948) is, by contrast, peaceable by western standards with hardly a shot fired – ironically it was a box office flop – and SHOTGUN (1955), the jewel in the crown of Lesley Selander’s prodigious 100-feature output – is a taut revenge western, filmed in blazing Technicolor. Worth a mention is also CORONER CREEK (1948) which was shot in the more economical Cinecolor by Ray Enright, a film that would lead Randolph Scott – one of western’s most popular stars – to his long and fruitful collaboration with Budd Boetticher.

The Romance of Rosy Ridge

And where would be without a psychological western, a sub-genre very much in vogue from the late 1940s onwards: the choice fell on Harry Keller’s SEVEN WAYS FROM SUNDOWN from 1960 (it is the most recent of the eight films in the review), featuring another western pioneer, and hero of the World War II: Audie Murphy. Sometimes these Hollywood classics give a nod to more successful models, occasionally they anticipate them. See them all on the big screen at this year’s Turin Film Festival. MT

TURIN INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL | 25 NOVEMBER – 2 DECEMBER 2022

The Punishment (2022) Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival 2022

Dir: Matias Bize | Wri: Coral Cruz | Cast: Antonia Zegers, Nestor Cantillana | Drama 85′

A small child turns the tables on his parents in this taut and discursive two-handed drama from the accomplished Chilean director Matias Bize and his screenwriter Coral Cruz.

Ana and Mateo have stopped their car in the woods on their way to visit Ana’s parents for dinner. But a heated argument soon absorbs their attention and seven-year-old Lucas is left to fend for himself. When they are ready to leave, the boy is nowhere to be seen.

Both blaming each other for his disappearance, uncomfortable truths start to surface as the couple question their failure as parents. Ana sternly calls out to Lucas, threatening him with all sorts of privations for his bad behaviour, before eventually ‘phoning the police. It’s a fraught scenario that rings alarm bells for every parent, anything could happen in this bosky backwater, and the camera roves through trees and undergrowth during one tense take.

Zegers’ Ana is ‘mean-mummy’ with her hard-faced disciplinarian approach to dealing with Lucas, and our sympathies lie with her son and his more tolerant father (Cantillana) who, at least, tries to come up with solutions. But then it emerges that Lucas is a bit of a rebel, and not easy to manage, his teachers suspect he is suffering from ADHD.

Gradually Zegers’ wins us over with her plausible confession that eventually brings the drama to its satisfying conclusion, persuading us that motherhood is no picnic; much of the time it is frustrating, gruelling and thankless.

The Punishment is a well-crafted but dour drama that could have worked better as a radio play given the monotonous confines of its setting. Zegers and Cantillana do their best to make Ana and Mateo feel authentic and relatable in a drama that proves, once again, that we are always toughest on the ones we love. MT

TALLINN BLACK NIGHTS FILM FESTIVAL | IN COMPETITION 2022

A Letter from Helga (2022) Tallinn Film Festival 2022

Dir/Co-Wri: Așa Hjorleifsdottir | Romantic Drama | Iceland, Netherlands, Estonia | 118′

The wild and windswept fjords and mountains of Iceland are the setting for this visually resplendent romantic drama that sees a poet fall hopelessly in love with his neighbour. A Letter from Helga is based on a novella by Bergsveinn Birgisson who co-scripts.

Așa Hjorleifsdottir follows her first feature The Swan with another lyrical and more accomplished look at how nature and Iceland’s rural and folkloric heritage shapes the emotions of the inhabitants of this extraordinary scenic island in the Northern hemisphere.

For Helga (Hera Hilmar) and Bjarni (Thor Kristjansson) loves comes like a lightening bolt although they are both – unhappily – married, Helga has two young kids with Hallgrimur (Bjorn Thors), Barni and Unnur (Anita Briem) are locked in childless misery. Forbidden fruit is always more tantalising, and the lovers secret trysts grow more passionate as they reflect on their stale marriages, in heart-rending flashbacks. And yet changing their lives seems impossible in the disproving social set-up.

The story is simple with its themes of infidelity, jealousy and bitter regret, but embellished with such poetic poignancy and passion and leads Hera Hilmar and Thor Kristjansson really feel real in their romantic adventure. Hjorleifsdottir scores the intimate scenes and teasing tete-a-tetes with a sweeping score from Kristin Anna Valtysdottir that often tingles with its icy top notes and strident strings, riffing on local ballads and dances. Dreams of starting a new life in Reykjavik hint of a promising future that can never be but seems so possible in the brave new world after the War. MT

WORLD PREMIERE | TALLINN INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL | BALTIC COMPETITION 2022

The Golden City (1942)

Dir: Veit Harlan | Germany, Drama

Hans Steinhoff was a much better director but Veit Harlan (1899-1964) – on the strength of ‘Jud Suss’ and ‘Kolberg’ (which very few people have probably actually seen) – tends be the name most often cited when people discuss the Nazi cinema. In all fairness their appalling reputation tends to be attributable to the context in which they were made rather than the films themselves. ‘Die Golden Stadt’ like all Harlan’s films was banned outright when Germany lost the war; although it also merited it for its unflattering depiction of the Czechs. (Presumably it’s set in the present day but there’s never any suggestion that Czechoslovakia was currently under German occupation.)

As Goebbels’ blue-eyed boy Harlan was able to lavish upon it opulent decor and beautiful Prague locations ravishingly shot by by colour specialist Bruno Mondi, and Goebbels liked the result so much he predicted that “It will have to become one of the great masterpieces of German cinematic art and film direction”.

As usual it starred Harlan’s wife Kristina Soderbaum, a strapping, bun-faced, blue-eyed blonde in puffed sleeves at one point shown energetically riding a horse. I won’t reveal her eventual fate, but anybody familiar with Harlan’s films will probably already be familiar with her nickname ‘Reichswasserleiche’ @RichardChatten

Nostalgia (2022)

Dir: Mario Martone | Cast: Pierfrancesco Favino, Francesco Di Leva, Tommaso Ragno, Aurora Quattrocchi | Italy, Drama 117′

Mario Martone’s moody reflective thriller Nostalgia, adapted from the novel by Ermanno Rea, sees a man returning to his past in Naples having made his mark in the Middle East. But this attempt to turn back time and is not greeted with the warmth he had hoped for in all quarters.

Martone floods the screen with the faded glory of the southern Italian seaport in a lush and classically styled rumination that contrasts the positive outlook of his central character Felice Lasco (Favino) with the bitter resentments he finds back home. His moribund mother Teresa (Quattrocchi) is overjoyed to see him but his attempts to reconnect with an old sparring partner, the infamous gangland ‘Badman’ Oreste Spasiano (Ragno), are less successful to say the least. Their nefarious past is pictured in flashbacks – and he is warned to keep away from the crumbling neglected backwater of Rione Sanita where Oreste now hangs out under the protection of his acolytes.

But although Felice is determined to gloss over the ups and downs of his complex relationship with Oreste, who tears up at their reunion, an unresolved incident from the past is still a sticking point between the two men: one who has found personal and professional success, the other failure and a life of crime. Naples is very much a character here and the simple but satisfying plot works to the film’s advantage allowing Martone to embellish his local characters, the most memorable is the local priest Don Luigi Rega (Francesco Di Leva) who still provides a spiritual touchstone to the community from his base in the vast cathedral. Buzzing around on a motorbike in full ecclesiastical regalia he is a comforting but commanding figure, his steadfast moral compass providing the guiding light. But Felice is ultimately a tragic figure, trapped by his determination to heal the past and his inability to face the truth. MT

NOW IN CURZON HOME CINEMA

Emily the Criminal (2022) Prime Video

Dir/Wri: John Patterson Ford | Cast: Aubrey Plaza, Theo Rossi, Jonathan Avigdori, Gina Gershon, Kim Yarborough | US Thriller 93′

Best known for her dead pan comedy dramas Aubrey Plaza puts out her claws as Emily the star turn in this slick urban thriller from John Patterson Ford.

Emily is a woman at the end of her tether: broke, jobless and desperate to clear a mountain of student debt. An opportunity to make easy cash turns out to be illegal – but needs must when the Devil drives. Unsure, at first, of her criminal credentials she soon gets the hang of it, and as the scams get more serious, Emily finds an inner strength. This diffident damsel in distress turns feisty feminist felon, beating the men at their own game.

But things get more complicated when she joins forces with her charismatic conman boss (Theo Rossi) forcing her into deeper water than she ever thought possible. Emily turns the table on the criminal underworld coming up trumps into the bargain.

Good production values, moody lighting and a pounding score from Nathan Halpern sets the scene for Patterson Ford’s watchable first feature showcasing Plaza’s cool and compelling screen presence as a modern-day Nikita. MT

NOW ON AMAZON PRIME

The Sleeping Tiger (1954) Blu-ray

Dir: Victory Handbury | Cast: Dirk Bogarde, Alexis Lewis, Alexander Knox, Hugh Griffiths, Maxine Audrey | UK, Noir thriller, 89′

Stylish and unmistakably Losey with its sinister vibe, striking camerawork by Harry Waxman and schmoozy avantgarde score by Northampton-born Malcolm Arnold. Of course Losey was directing under a pseudonym of Victor Hanbury having fallen foul of the US authorities.

In his first collaboration with the director, Dirk Bogarde and Alexis Smith make for a subversive couple in the jagged 1950s London-set psychological noir thriller. She is the bored housewife married to Alexander Knox’s kindly cardiganed psychiatrist, when Bogarde comes along – a suave thug in faintly ridiculous jodhpurs — and is caught red-handed during a smash and grab. Knox offers Dirk therapy rather than exacting damages, and becomes a father figure to the troubled tousled-haired drifter. A dazzling dance floor number with Alexis and Bogarde really sizzles but she ends up scorned and forced to admit “I wish I was a man”. And it all predictably ends in tears but not without a fight. Losey at his best. MT

NEWLY RESTORED and NOW ON BLURAY, DVD and DIGITAL from 7 November 2022

And Yet We Were All Blind (2022) Tallinn Film Festival 2022

Dir.: Beatrice Pollet; Cast: Maud Wyler, Geraldine Nakache, Gregoire Colin, Fanny Cottencon, Pascale Vignal, Pascal Demolon, Ophelia Kolb; France 2022, 95min.

Based on real events, French writer/director Beatrice Pollet recreates a courtroom drama centred on Claire Morel, a lawyer and mother of two daughters, whose denial of her pregnancy nearly led to the death of her newborn son and landed her in front of a court, accused of infanticide.

Claire (Wyler) is a happy mother of two and lives a contended middle-class life with husband Thomas (Colin), a tree surgeon. One night, when Thomas returns late home from work, he finds his wife bleeding heavily, her life hanging in the balance when the police arrive. But rather than help, they accuse her of infanticide after a neighbour found a new born baby in a dumpster opposite her house.

Claire’s best friend, a lawyer called Sophie (Nakache) takes over her case. But it’s not going to easy. Claire was in denial of her pregnancy, she the court and jury take a dim view of her, pressing a harsh sentence. The Judge (Demolon) takes a sympathetic view, the prosecutor (Kolb) asks for the maximal custodial sentence of seven years. Sophie researches Claire’s medical history. It seems she was only aware of being pregnant with her daughter Babou three months into the term. But nobody really believes Claire has “repressed” the birth of her baby son – and she cannot remember dumping him on the container. Even Thomas has his doubts. Yet Sophie remains convinced of her friend’s story. In the end, it falls to the medical experts. The public – and particularly women – aggressively calling Claire “a Sorceress” and asking “for the protection of the womb”.

There are echoes of Alice Diop’s recent Venice winner Saint Omer another example of filicide with no rational motive. Claire is in a much stronger position being a lawyer, and aware of how the system works. But she is reluctant to exercise her professional knowledge incase she loses her status as a lawyer. But more than anything, she fears her new baby, Simon, will never bond with her.

Pollet tries very hard to avoid any sentimentality, and she succeeds most of the time, although we don’t feel get a strong impression of the characters, they seem to fade into George Lechaptois washed out aesthetic. A worthwhile drama but one that could have certainly benefited from more more emotional cut and thrust and a less academic approach. AS

World premiere at the Tallinn Festival | The 23rd of November at 6.30pm

Silent House (2022) IDFA 2022

Dir.: Farnaz Jurabchian, Mohammadreza Jurabchian; Documentary with Nassrin Mirsadeghi, Houssein Mirsadeghi, Mohammad Mirsadeghi; Iran/France/Canada/Philippines/ Qatar 2022, 100 min.

A striking Art Deco villa in Tehran becomes ‘silent witness’ to four decades of Iranian history in a revealing new documentary from the sibling filmmakers who grew up there during the Islamic revolution and beyond.

Farnaz and Mohammadreza Jurabchian spent nearly their whole lives in a palace once owned by Esmat Dowlatshahi, the fourth and final wife of Reza Shah Pahlavi (although the marriage was never officially recognised). The property came into the family when their grandfather, a local trader, decided he had to possess it. His own passion for photography was soon shared by his daughter Nassrin, and later by his grandchildren who would eventually become independent filmmakers, honing their craft in and around their impressive family home.

Silent House unfolds entirely within the confines of the villa, its proximity to the Shah’s official residence, the Sa’dabad Palace, restricted the cameras from roaming further afield. But the family story speaks volumes painting a colourful picture about their life and times. Enriched with personal reflections and archive material from TV and film, the doc provides a potted political and social history of post 1979 revolutionary Iran across three generations.

Their grandmother made her home comfortably on one floor of the building surrounded by gardens and a brood of cats. Growing up the daughter of a wealthy and religious family, she was married off at only thirteen to a much older, middle class, man who put an end to her studies and ballet lessons: “He was mean and treated me like dirt. He beat up any man who looked at me – and he was unfaithful”. But the couple lived there together for fifty years and had six children.

Her daughter Nassrin is an enterprising, over-achiever. But her own husband’s sudden death in the north of Iran forced her to become a single parent. Undeterred, she was soon finding ways to keep the family coffers replenished by turning the tennis courts into a country club. But despite her industriousness, her own mother wanted her younger brother Hossein to take over the running of the house until Nassrin found herself back in control after he was conscripted into the Iran-Iraq war. Hossein came back shell-shocked and suffering from severe PTS and soon cloistered himself in a cottage in the garden, where he later died.

Nassrin had meanwhile joined the 1979 revolution, even taking baby Farnaz with her to meetings where she wore army fatigues and taught her to sing revolutionary songs. Many houses were confiscated by the regime, and Farnaz’ grandfather had to buy back his house for the second time, forcing him into bankruptcy. He died shortly afterwards, of grief.

Nassrin had by now turned herself into a filmmaker and bequeathed a camera to her children. Her father’s funeral, a stately affair attended by all the local traders, is her personal cinematographical tribute to the family’s history. The house then underwent extensive renovations and Nassrin turned it into a film studio – with the fixtures and fittings providing the props. It made a perfect set for many feature films, with the family appearing in bit parts – “everyone in the house became part of the film set”. In 2005 it provided the location for Masud Kimiai’s feature The Command and later Ziaeddin Dorri’s The Pahlavi Hat series. The siblings then started to make their own short films.

Ever ambitious, Nassrin moved on to education, becoming director of the PBO Kindergarten in charge of 144 children and over 2000 employees. During the Iran-Iraq war, Nassrin had banned TV for her children, preferring them to watch light-hearted dramas such as The Sound of Music. Soon they were real cineastes. And while their mother was developing an interest in running for President during the 2009 elections, civil was breaking out, and Farnaz was encouraged to leave Iran.

In Montreal, Farnaz decided to enrol in film school rather than study engineering. “But whenever I wanted to shoot something, I had visions of home”. Meanwhile Mohammadreza had stayed in Tehran and was studying photography. The siblings (and their cameras) were re-united in the villa when their mother’s eldest brother Mohammad arrived. He had left Iran forty years previously to live in the UK.

A family wedding is the last hurrah for the palace, their grandmother died shortly afterwards in her late eighties. The siblings film her non-stop during the last days of her life; “that was all we could do for her”. During her funeral, the cats roamed freely throughout the property, finally making a home for themselves in the house. Nassrin gives in to the demand of the rest of the family to sell. And prospective buyers are filmed, looking round a house where in 1943 Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin once carved up the world.

DoP Mohammadreza Jurabchian’s camerawork certainly improves during the long Gestalt period. Personal and political events interweave seamlessly, the mood is melancholic in this unique combination of social history and personal tragedy, as well as happy times.

The authorities in Tehran felt so threatened by the feature they refused to allow the directors and producers to attend the screening at the IDFA in Amsterdam on its world premiere. Another case of Iranian censorship taking the country backwards rather than forwards into the 21st century. AS

IDFA | INTERNATIONAL DOCUMENTARY FESTIVAL AMSTERDAM 2022

Armageddon Time (2022)

Dir: James Gray | Cast: Anne Hathaway, Anthony Hopkins, Jeremy Strong, Domenick Lombardozzi | US Thriller, 115′

Anthony Hopkins and Anne Hathaway star in this coming of age story about growing up in Queens in the 1980s. Armageddon is a solid but rather bland, sentimental drama that feels overlong and underwhelming, from the director who made his first New York-based drama Little Odessa – about a family of Soviet Jews – at the tender age of 25.

Armageddon Time returns to the same territory with another working class Jewish family trying to fit in. And there are some spirited outbursts both at home and in the classroom, although for the most part it’s a toned down rather docile affair. The plot lines are predictable, and references to the Holocaust are a hollow echo of much more moving dramas on the subject of antisemitism. The oblique references to the local influential Trump family feel like cheap point-scoring with intentionally unlikeable cameo roles from John Diehl as Donald Trump’s father Fred, and Jessica Chastain as the hard-faced US judge Maryanne Trump, along with the fact that the Graff family hail originally from Ukraine.

The youngest boy Paul (Banks Repeta) is possibly an autobiographical portrait of the young James Grey – unruly, artistic and at odds with the rest of the striving family, particularly his hot-headed father (Jeremy Strong). He only really connects with his grandfather Aaron (Hopkins) who will finance his private education after the subversive troublemaker gets a bad name for himself at his local ‘comprehensive’, with his black friend Johnny ending up taking the rap. Celebrated cinematographer Darius Khondji tries to lift Armageddon out of the torpid settings but, all and all, this brings nothing new to the party in contrast with Gray’s later more avantgarde sci-fi outing feature, the space-hopping Ad Astra (2019). MT

ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE FROM FRIDAY 18/11 | CANNES FILM FESTIVAL

The Poet (2022) Tallinn Film Festival 2022

Dir.: Giedrius Tamosevicius, Vitautas V. Landsbergis; Cast: Donatus Zelvys, Dainius Gavenonis, Indre Patkauskaite, Martynas Nedzinskas; Lithuania 2022, 111 min.

The Poet is not just another epic drama about the grim days of Russian- occupied Lithuania in the late 1940s. First time director Giedrius Tamosevicius and veteran Vitautas V. Landsbergis avoid cliches, derring-do and bloody battlefields, instead opting for a cerebral look into the mind of a talented yet emotionally unstable creative spirit, the poet Kostas. This is a drama that turns on a moral dilemma and explores heroism from another angle. And to make things really authentic the directors have gone for a Soviet realist aesthetic – popular in many Eastern bloc countries after the fall of communism.

Kostas (Zelvys) has been sent down from university for his Anti-Soviet poetry that undermined the ‘great leader’ Stalin. He gets a second chance by agreeing to be a double agent for the KGB, into the bargain saving his family from deportation to the infamous GULAG. His first assignment involves infiltrating a group of partisans fighting the Soviet occupation forces from their hideouts in the woods. Under the guise of a teacher, he falls for librarian Jule (Patkauskaite), unaware she is in league with the partisans and is put off by Kostas’ opportunism. But life gets complicated when Kostas is asked by Taurus (Gavenonis), the leader of the partisans, to become a double agent in their own ranks. He agrees, hoping to win Jule back.

At a Teacher’s Congress in Vilnius Kostas meets up with an old friend Eduardos (Nedzinskas), who has found a way of working the system and making a living from his anti-Soviet poems. He wants Kostas to do the same and move back to Vilnius. But Kostas gets embroiled with his KGB case officer, and finds himself being blown off course work-wise and emotionally. His double life starts to implode after the partisans come under attack from Russian forces during a night’s celebration in the woods. Kostas and Taurus dive for shelter in an underground bunker where they explore the enormity of their decisions during a dark night of the soul. AS

WINNER – BALTIC COMPETITION – TALLINN BLACK NIGHTS FILM FESTIVAL | 17 NOVEMBER 2022

Million Dollar Pigeons (2022)

Dir: Gavin Fitzgerald | US Doc 98′

Whoever thought there was money to be made from a pervasive variety of bird that many regard as a pest? Well – as its title suggests – there’s millions to be made from the common or garden pigeon. Award-winning Irish filmmaker Gavin Fitzgerald takes a sympathetic look into the lucrative sport in his latest documentary Million Dollar Pigeons.

Pigeon fanciers from all over the world – from Thailand to America – enter their feathered friends in a high stakes competition – a sort of avian Tour de France – where the winners – from all walks of life and cultural backgrounds -stand to make millions of dollars from the humble and mostly unwanted winged athlete.

Fitzgerald’s skill as a director and cinematographer make this visual appealing as well as fascinating as another study of human exploitation of the animal kingdom. The birds become a unifying force for good in creating meaning in people’s lives; a blank canvas for their hopes and dreams – rather like we saw in Dark Horse and the recent Middle Eastern doc Kash Kash: Without Feathers We Can’t Live. But the modest birds can also have a negative impact on lives, when they become a divisive tool in race to make money. Fitzgerald explores the sport in general and probes the lives of a handful of fanciers competing in the sport. MT

ON RELEASE FROM 26 NOVEMBER

Shadow of a Doubt (1943)

Dir: Alfred Hitchcock | US Noir Thriller 90’

Charlotte is ecstatic to have her dear Uncle Charlie over at her place. But upon his arrival, she learns that he is a serial killer and must now stop him from killing more people.

Directors’ attitudes to their films is sometimes based not on the quality of the end result but the memories of it’s making. Hitchcock himself denied that this was as reputed his favourite of his films but simply that he’d enjoyed working with Thornton Wilder on the script so much it had a special place in his memories.

Although relatively little-known today it surely ranks with his best, awash with similarities to his more celebrated productions. Joseph Cotten is once one of Hitchcock’s most charming psychopaths, like Bruno Anthony in ‘Strangers on a Trains’ hiding his pathological hatred of women behind an apparent flippancy.

Like ‘Psycho’ it begins with the camera stealing through a window into a hotel room; when the action transfers to the sleepy little town of Santa Rosa the horror lurking behind the deceptively bland surface is classic Hitchcock. But the presence of an innocent brunette instead of a guilty blonde is refreshingly unusual for Hitchcock.@RichardChatten

Polish Prayers (2022) IDFA 2022

Dir.: Hanka Nobis; Documentary; Switzerland/Poland, 2022, 84 min.

Like many countries nowadays Poland is deeply divided largely due to the erosion of what are often seen as ‘traditional’ values. For her first feature documentary, premiering in this year’s IDFA, Hanka Nobis spent five years following a group of young men who have formed “Brotherhood”, an association that champions Catholicism, nationalism, Pro-Life and celibacy before marriage. Her findings are illuminating as well as shocking.

In ‘survival camps’ in the countryside, the men club together to provide a united front against the LGTB community and the pro abortion lobby. After a year with the group Nobis decides to focus on Antek, who is now twenty-five years old.

Antek comes from a background where strict conservative ideology is at heart of family life. And yet his family is divided, his parents are divorced and Antek and his little sister celebrate Christmas in two households. It almost feels like Antek has sought refuge in the “Brotherhood” and retreated into its misogynist standpoint. Another group member rails against “his castration”, and “misses the time when men could look after women”. Finally, he posits, “even women are not happy today, because nobody looks after them”. Weirdly his mother, a physician, seems to endorse his membership of the Brotherhood.

Some weekends are spent in the rural setting where the members prepare for a ‘war’ they believe is inevitable. Antek has a gun, which, he is proud to admit, only cost him 500 Zlotys. But he’s not much of a shot. His other group activities involve heckling during LGBT and Pro-Choice marches. The Brotherhood’s banners proclaim: “Homosexuals are often Paedophiles”, but they avoid physical violence for fear of reprisals.

Then love arrives for Antek when he meets Weronika, and his picture of the world – and his place in it – starts to change. He tells a Brotherhood friend, that “he has doubts about believing in God”. Weronica makes him happy without the need for his Catholic faith”. And even though the couple eventually split up, Antek changes his mind about becoming a priest. Finally, his new fiancée is able to convince him to march under the ‘Rainbow flag of Love’. But when his mother pays him a visit, he takes the flag down. Later, his mother expresses her disappointment about him leaving the Brotherhood: “You were always so responsible as a teenager, that’s the reason why we let you leave home”. The final credits roll on a split screen, one half showing Antek playing the guitar, at peace with himself.

DoP Milosz Kasiura uses his hand-held camera to capture the instability of Antek’s life. And in some way the director’s inexperience works to her advantage in painting a portrait of uncertainty: Antek is also at the beginning of his metamorphosis and an accomplished filmmaker might have glossed over the raw and fractious undercurrents of change. Polish Prayers may lack polish, but it’s certainly a compelling debut. AS

POLISH PRAYERS | IDFA 2022 | World Premiere | 14 November 2022

Turin International Film Festival headlines with The Beatles

Celebrating its 40th year anniversary, The Torino Film Festival – Italy’s second largest after Venice – looks sets to be a really glitzy affair with a musical and visual extravaganza showcasing two of the world’s best known bands – the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

Themed on their links with film legends Martin Scorsese, Wim Wenders, Jean-Luc Godard and scouser Malcolm MacDowell – who remembers the Liverpool band when they were still the Silver Beatles back in their ‘Cavern’ days – this year’s festival comprises an international Competion and two retrospectives amongst other events – and takes place from 25 November until 3 December 2022.

‘Help’ courtesy of Torino Film Festival

On the opening night of 25th November, Turin’s historic Teatro Regio will play host to a musical and cinematic evening that captures the imagination of the Swinging Sixties, divised by the festival’s artistic director and critic Steve Della Casa, and broadcast nationwide. Most people know Turin as the headquarters of the famous FIAT motor company; this year’s 40th Anniversary celebrates the city’s baroque credentials with the initiative Casa Festival a film ‘citadel’ set in Turin’s World Heritage Site the ‘Cavallerizza Reale’ (Royal Horsewoman) a baroque 1740 building designed by the First Royal architect Benedetto Alfieri to carry out equestrian activities.

Malcolm McDowell courtesy of Torino Film Festival

The 40th Anniversary line-up presents films from well-established directors and exciting new talent. Expect to see 81 world premieres along with award-winning releases from this year’s festival circuit, cult classics and sophomore features. Charlotte Le Bon’s coming-of-age drama Falcon Lake, Nicaraguan filmmaker Laura Baumeister’s magic realist tale Daughter of Rage Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk’s fantasy thriller Pamfir and Lola Quivoron’s provocative revenge thriller Rodeo about a feminist motorcyclist in a world of macho man.

Also in the programme are Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO, Aleksandr Sokurov’s Fairytale Hlynur Pálmason’s Godland and Lav Diaz’s latest epic look back at his nation’s chequered history A Tale of Filipino Violence.

There will be also be a chance to meet the talent in platform masterclasses with world famous Italian stars and directors Mario Martone, Paolo Sorrentino, and Toni Servillo.

TURIN INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL | 25 NOVEMBER-3 DECEMBER 2022

Kanaval: A People’s History of Haiti in Six Chapters (2022)

Dir.: Leah Gordon, Eddie Hutton Mills; Narrated by Adescar Sanil, Madame Raymonde Bellevue, Georges Marshall, Ronald Bellevue, Lauture Joseph Joissant, Frantzo Jean; UK/Haiti 2022, 78 min.

British documentary filmmakers Leah Gordon and Eddie Hutton Mills have taken an upbeat approach in their film about Haiti, a country with a truly grim history. Told in six chapters by six narrators – Kanaval conveys the joyful exuberance of the colourful and popular carnival without diminishing the turbulent past of this island state.

The carnival in the southern city of Jacmel gets top marks from all the narrators. The wax lyrical about the origins of the costumes and demonstrations as historical replays. Port-au-Prince might be the capital, but their carnival celebrations are eclipsed by those in Jacmel.

The first chapter deals with colonisation of the island by French and Spaniards in the late 1790s, the former soon getting the upper hand. But a strong rebel movement, under the leadership of Toussaint L’Overture, fought for independence, which was achieved by the former slaves in 1804. Unfortunately, the leader had died in French captivity, and it fell to his successor, Jean-Jacques Dessaline to build an independent republic.

Creole, the language used by the former slaves, became the official lingua franca of the liberated country. But the defeated French insisted on reparations for the loss of slavery (!) insisting on USD 150,00, over USD 20 Billion in today’s money. The Haitian’s only stopped paying for their freedom in 1947. Adescar Sanil shows the re-creation of the black loin cloths worn by slaves when they met at night. And he reflects on the progress Haiti could have made, had it not been saddled with this heavy debt.

In 1915 the US invaded Haiti – for no apparent reason – and the slave-status of the indigenous population was more or less restored. When the US troops left the island in 1934, a system of corruption and servitude remained. Haitians responded with Voodoo, and that become their soul. Far from anything portrayed in Hollywood films – where white, vulnerable women were chased by black sorcerers – the image nonetheless stuck. The re-creation of voodoo is particularly impressive, and showcases the imagination of the contemporary carnival activists.

In 1957 Haiti elected Francois Duvalier (1907-1971) as president. Called “Papa Doc” because he was a physician and helped cure an epidemic before he became president, he soon claimed to be dictator for life. On his death, he declared that his 19 year old son Jean-Claude (1951-2014) should succeed him despite his lack of experience. Jean Claude (Baby Doc) was not as keen on murder and torture as his father, he abandoned parts of the feared “Tonton Macoute”, the hated secret police. But he enjoyed life as a playboy and ironically, his lavish, televised wedding would lead to his downfall in 1986. He fled the country, claiming “the people would have toppled him in the carnival season”.

Today’s carnival activists use paint to transform them into superheroes of Hollywood films. But the street artists are also impressively athletic and their dances are spontaneous and exhilarating to watch. The joy and exuberance is infectious, and you certainly believe Frantz Jean, the last of the narrators, when he says: “without the carnival people would go mad”. AS

KANAVAL | NOW ON RELEASE IN UK CINEMAS AND WILL BE SHOWN ON BBC ARENA on 27 NOVEMBER 2022.

https://youtu.be/btL_RfkmHvc

Paradise (2022) IDFA 2022

Dir/Wri: Alexander Abaturov | DoP Paul Guilhaume | France, Doc, 91′

When it comes to wildfires the spectacle of a roaring blaze in the middle of a snowy landscape does not normally spring to mind. But climate change has recently played havoc in the northern hemisphere, as filmmaker Alexander Abaturov discovers in his cinematic ethnological portrait of Siberia where sweltering heatwaves and drought are a new phenomenon.

Paradise opens with a smoozy rather seductive opening sequence as the camera glides softly over frosty rooftops and sweeps down onto a reflective scene picturing a little girl saying her prayers with the words: “Tell me, Sacred Mountain, do you see the whole Earth from here?”.

In 2021 alone, fires burned 19 million hectares in Russia, and for first time ever ashes blew to the North Pole. Back down to earth in the heart of the ‘taiga’ lies the village of Shologon where and the natives are adopting a zen approach to dealing with the exceptional circumstances. By nature a peaceful people their calm collaboration contrasts with the – hardly surprising – inflammatory reaction we have come to expect from the recent outbreaks, but the Siberian stance is certainly novel, and makes for a reflective and contemplative look at how these chilly lands are fighting fire – not with fire – but with collaborative calm.

In the distance billowing smoke heralds the incendiary arrival of trouble. A group of firefighters make their way on open trucks to the root of the problem through sparse woodland. There is no blaze to speak of, just a smouldering scarlet-tinged landscape and the locals name it ‘the dragon’ as they quickly retreat back to base to report their findings and regroup.

Without a formal fire service or governmental aid they are forced to rely on mutual and community support. Helicopters supply water to assist in quelling the outbreak and the final scenes, filmed in slow-burn close-up, take us right to the centre of the blaze creeping like a seething living carpet of flames through the undergrowth.

What impresses here is the way the firefighters work serenely and methodically to put out the blaze. Making use of an evocative soundscape scored by Les Percussions de Strasbourg, Abaturov’s sophomore documentary morphs into a surreal and dreamlike meditation as humans battle the elements, almost beyond them, and ‘The Dragon’ is tackled and finally laid to rest. MT

IN COMPETITION | INTERNATIONAL DOCUMENTARY FESTIVAL AMSTERDAM 2022 | 9 – 20 November 2022

Gyeong-Ah’s Daughter (2021) London Korean Film Festival 2022

Dir.: Jung-eun Kim; Cast: Kim Jung-Young, Ha Yoon-Kyung, Kim Woo Kyum, Kim Woo Kyum, Lee Chae Kyung; Republic of Korea 2022, 117 min.

Family relationships are complex and the transition between childhood and adulthood can be particularly fraught in the digital age when traditional parents discover their kids are not only having sex, but sharing explicit content on the internet. A dramatic discovery sets up the frantic first half of this feature debut by Kim Jung-eun, who then unpacks the slow fragmentation of the mother/child relationship at its heart.

Gyeong-Ah (Jung-Young) is a typical example of a clingy parent whose focus, due to her difficult marriage, has always been her daughter. Yeon-Soo (Yoon-Kyung) has left home and is teaching philosophy in a secondary school where she is extremely popular relishing her newfound freedom after the leaving the gloomy parental home behind. She hardly ever sees her widowed mother Gyeong-Ah (Jung-Young) who works as a carer in a small Korean town where both women seem to have been on the receiving end of abusive relationships with men.

Out of the blue – the young teacher gets a sex tape containing explicit photos of her in the nude, filmed by her ex-boyfriend Sang-Hyum (Kyum). Their affair had ended acrimoniously and clearly Sang-Hyum is out for revenge. But when the tape goes viral her mother holds her adult daughter responsible rather than supporting her, even though she is the victim of a revenge crime.

The plot then turns on the different reactions and desired outcomes of the crime. Rather than siding with her daughter Gyeong-Ah demands financial compensation; Yeon-Soo wants her lawyer to go for the jugular with a custodial sentence for her ex.

A hectic first half gives way to a tonal shift into the more slow-burn nuanced exploration of the relationship breakdown showing the inner struggle between mother and daughter as the generational conflict plays out between two very different generations of women in Korea. AS

LONDON KOREAN FILM FESTIVAL 2022

Hopper (2022)

Dir: Phil Grabsky | UK Doc, 90′

Edward Hopper (1882-1967) is probably the best known American painter in the world. Mysterious, ephemeral – and despite their bright colours – airless; his depictions of bleak backdrops and isolated people tell a story that allows us to connect on some deep level despite the enigma of the artist himself. Hopper’s work influenced the likes of Rothko, Banksy, Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch, and even The Simpsons for the unique way it captured 20th century America.

Edward Hopper (1903) Self-portrait

Of his urban landscapes the 1942 painting Nighthawks (main pic) has come to represent loneliness and big city isolation – but that’s not what Hopper had in mind, as we later discover. In this latest art documentary Phil Grabsky uncovers the detached and reclusive artist through his relationships and his life.

Hopper is possibly one of Grabsky’s most immersive biopics to date. The director and photographer combines fascinating archive footage, expert interviews and the artist’s personal diaries to reveal an informative visual reflection of American life in the first half of the 20th century. Refreshingly, Hopper is his own art movement, his work sits entirely on its alone although it is classified as realist, Neo-realist and even impressionist, amongst others. By nature a loner Hopper never tried to connect with any artistic movement, he simply followed his own style, studying art in New York at a time when the US was responding to European avant-garde:. ‘The big painter always has something to say.’

Early Sunday Morning (1930) Edward Hopper

Born into a well-to-do cultured family open to new ideas, the young Hopper was encouraged to be creative, and given the materials to do so, growing up in the riverside town of Nyack (NY). Described as bookish he underwent a growth spurt which made him the subject of bullying when he grew to 6 foot 4′ in his early teens.

Hopper dreamed of being a naval architect, and his interest in the built environment, light and shadow, would dominate his work. But out of economic necessity a career as an illustrator proved lucrative at the turn of the 20th century. And after a ten-year fruitless infatuation with a fellow painter he fell for Josephine Nivison (1883-1967) who gave up her own promising art career to be his manager. They would marry in 1924. Through her we gain so much insight into the private man behind the brush. Together they painted their way through a marriage that wasn’t always emotionally fulfilling for Josephine, but gave the buttoned-down Hopper the buffer he needed from the outside world. She often supported him when he only painted two or three canvasses a year, and a painting could take him months to complete even though the subject was quotidian; such was his intellectual process in telling ‘the story’.

Compartment C, Car 293 (1938) Edward Hopper

A jazzy music score heralds Hopper’s 1913 move to New York’s Washington Square in Greenwich Village where in 1920 he would paint one of his most controversial canvases: Soir Bleu criticised for its misogynist theme. But unlike George Bellows’ exuberant often chaotic NY scenes, Hopper’s paintings here were devoid of noise. Adam Weinberg, director of the Whitney Museum of Modern Art, claims Hopper followed his own unique vision in these depopulated landscapes. Deputy director of Washington’s National Gallery, Franklin Kelly, describes how Hopper depicted NY as an isolating city. Yet it was this sense of isolation that was a natural part of the human condition, according to the Whitney’s Kim Conaty, and Hopper wanted to articulate that.

His 1927 Automat painting features a woman on her own in a cafe. But far from lonely, it seems she was actually enjoying a break from the hubbub of the capital’s streets. Yet this stillness seems to be interpreted – often by the critics – as loneliness. Hopper – in an archival interview – clearly states he never thought of it that way. And even though he had no interest in capturing the zeitgeist, his work inadvertently took on a socio-political angle: it charted change. The Great Depression of the 1930s saw women joining the workforce and becoming financially independent. Yet his pictures of the simple low rise buildings and empty streets of New York in the 1930s – such as Early Sunday Morning – convey an enigmatic emptiness that contradicts the hustle and bustle of the time – but therein lies the contradiction in Hopper’s unique view of his world.

Mansard Roof (1923) Edward Hopper

A move to Gloucester Connecticut saw Hopper’s love of buildings and architecture coming to the fore. His most joyous canvas Mansard Roof (1923) was the first painting sold since 1913, when he had hoped the sale of Sailing (1911) would rapidly lead to more. But this ‘mansard’ phase took off with Hopper’s love of light and shadow being the focus of a series of energetic depictions of local buildings providing a pictorial digest of the small seaside town during that time. Lighthouse Hill (1927) would later capture Hitchcock’s imagination for the Neo-Gothic house in Psycho. This interest in film works both way, often inspiring Hopper, as his work influenced other creatives, as in Shirley, Visions of Reality : he also claimed to have felt a deep affinity with Delbert Mann’s noir character Marty (1955). There’s certainly a noirish quality to his Compartment C, Car 293 1938

In the early 1930s in seaside village of South Truro, Massechusetts. became the couple’s new home and ushered in a more prolific phase for Hopper. The couple built a house – that still stands today – on isolated sandy road. Together they started to travel backwards and forthwards across the States looking for painting locations where he could explore light and contrast, best seen in Morning Sun (1952) and the much later Sun in an Empty Room (1963). And although these seem to tell troubled stories – Hopper had no interest in revealing himself, or explaining his motives. One of his most devastating pictures is arguably the ironically titled Summer Interior (1909) which appears to show a woman in emotional crisis. But, like the artist himself, her story remains a closed book. MT

Released to coincide with the major Hopper exhibition (Edward Hopper’s New York) at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (Oct 22 – Mar 23).

Frames of Mind | Peter Greenaway Retrospective 2022

The BFI celebrates Peter Greenaway‘s 80th birthday with a retrospective and the premiere of his new feature Walking in Paris. And here Andre Simonoveisz reflects on his career to date

The Welsh born director, writer, artist and painter Peter Greenaway is certainly one of the most controversial contemporary filmmakers, and to this day his films are an acquired taste. The jury is still out on whether Greenaway wants to be an arthouse filmmaker, or merely a trained artist who uses the big screen as a canvas for his painterly creations, and the fact that his films lack any formal narrative structure seems to point to the latter: Greenaway’s features often have a stilted feel, unfolding in a series of formal set pieces rather than in flowing storytelling.

Composition, lighting and costumes are always the most significant elements in a Greenaway film. And yes, the aesthetics are wonderful to look at, but they are only as alive as Greenaway allows them to be. The artist/painter Greenaway is always in control of the filmmaking process: and rather like Robert Bresson before him, the actors are merely pawns in the process, with the camera as a paintbrush. The rest is amateur philosophy and a total reliance on art history, Renaissance, Baroque and Flemish predominating. On his way to visual perfection, second-hand or otherwise, Greenaway chanced upon film as his medium, and has used it as an intermediate step.

This is perhaps too critical of his work, but let’s go back to the beginning of his feature film career with The Falls (1980) an avantgarde sci-fi mockumentary that looks at the 92 victims of a phenomenon known as VUE (Violent unknown events) and whose names begin with the word ‘Fall’. Just over three hours long, this an etude, a whimsical compendium of surreal and bizarre circumstances explores just how far away from his creation the filmmaker was – or pretended to be. Can we ever be an objective observer of death? Or was the result proof, that the highbrow ‘intellectual’ Greenaway was above all the parochial issues of real life – and death.

The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) was a bracingly beautiful piece of work scored by Michael Nyman’s minimalist soundscape which carried the narrative forward and is more memorable than its contrived murder story. The dapper draughtsman, Mr. Neville (Higgins) is foisted by his own elegant petard and falsely accused of murder after a series of sexual dalliances with the aristocratic ladies Mrs. Herbert (Suzman) and her daughter Mrs. Talman (Lambert). But the ‘story’ pales into insignificance in comparison with its magnificent surroundings, and what we remember is the bucolic backdrop, the feudal mansion, the immaculate costumes and the way Mr. Neville plays the director whilst he re-arranges life to suit his drawings. Many Greenaway films are about sexual obsession and The Draughtsman is no exception, it is a remote object of desire rather than an involving comedy of manners; sex, after all, is just another construct for the filmmaker to exploit.

The Cook, the Thief his Wife and her Lover (1989) is considered Greenaway’s most mature feature. From here he could have taken another route: instead of being obsessed by numbers or esoteric subjects, he could have really embraced the meaning of life, but instead his feature once again mirrors art, quite literally, recreating the 1616 painting by Flemish baroque artist Frans Hals. Michael Gambon is the churlish and sadistic thief Albert Spica, who owns a French restaurant in London where he entertains his cronies, amongst them is a young Tim Roth. His wife Georgina (Mirren) is appalled, and soon finds herself a suitable lover, Michael (Howard), a bookseller. They have to be careful, and conduct their romance in all sorts of seedy settings. Albert wises up and tortures Michael by force-feeding him. Georgina exacts her revenge in an equally disgusting way before she shoots him. This sounds ghastlier than it actually is – but crucially the takeaway is once again the aesthetic rather than the storyline – which is entirely unreliable. Jean-Paul Gaulthier designed the 17th century costumes and camerawork by DoP Sacha Vierny reflects the airless grandeur. Dutch producer Kes Kasander would stay with Greenaway for more tilts at artistic perfection. Premiering at the Venice Film Festival in 1989, The Cook was shown “Out of Competition”. When asked why he decided not to enter Greenaway’s film “In Competition” festival director Guglielmo Biraghi explained that loved the work of Greenaway, but “it his films are not really like others.”

What followed were highs like Prospero, The Baby of Macon and total flops including the soulless series of The Tulse Luper Suitcases. Somehow, the world decided to move on. AS

THE BFI CELEBRATES PETER GREENAWAY IN HIS 80TH YEAR.

Life for Ruth (1962)

Dir: Basil Dearden | Wri: Janet Green, John McCormick | Cast: Michael Craig, Patrick McGoohan, Janet Munro | UK Drama, 93′

I once saw an American preacher on CNN wave aside every question about child mortality with the three simple words “Straight to Heaven”, thus displaying the same fatalism that enabled Jean Harlow’s mother – a devout Christian Scientist – to keep any doctors at arm’s length from her mortally ill 26 year-old daughter..

The third of a trilogy of films by the team of Dearden & Relph and McCormack & Green on controversial social issues of the day, Life for Ruth aka Walk in the Shadow vanished from cinemas almost as soon as it appeared, but remains an absorbing drama, based on a play by Janet Green (who also wrote Dearden’s cult classic Dirk Bogarde starrer Victim) that explores an issue that still arouses passions today (see above).

Atmospherically filmed on location in County Durham, it would have been interesting to have seen it in an alternative version in which Michael Craig & Patrick McGoohan switched roles, since the latter was quite a calvinist himself in real life. @RichardChatten

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022)

Dir.: Laura Poitras; Cast: Nan Goldin, David Armstrong, Marina Berio; USA 2022, 117 min.

US photographer and activist Nan Goldin (1953-) captures her own life from behind the camera of this documentary directed by Laura Poitras, best known for her 2016 biopic Risk that centred on Julian Assange. The film is in part tribute to Nan’s battle with opiod addiction that came about after a wrist injury. And she holds the wealthy Sackler responsible for bringing about ‘an unfathomable death toll’ with their opiod drugs.

Certainly less idolatrous than Poitras’ look at the Australian Wikileaks editor this novel but flawed ‘interview’ style structure works – up to a point – and went on to win her the Golden Lion at Venice 2022 on account of its timely subject matter, rather than the film itself.

Goldin comes across as straightforward and pragmatic in an outing that often feels like two films rolled into one, told in seven chronological chapters starting with the Washington born Goldin’s early years in a well-to-do but dysfunctional Boston-based family whose ethos reflected the sexual repression of the Eisenhower era.

It emerges Nan’s older sister Barbara was influenced by the suppressive regime and spent her life in and out of psychiatric hospitals before committing suicide at the age of eighteen and leaving her younger sister traumatised for the rest of her life. The film takes its title from a quote in Barbara’s’ diary. Nan was placed in foster care by the Social Services but ended up being evicted.

New beginnings came with Art-School, and then Nan joined the underground community in New York where films by Bette Gordon and Vivienne Dick bore testament to a wild but creative scene. Velvet Underground, James Brown, Nina Simone and Charles Aznavour were regulars, and Nan was influenced by the work of Cookie Mueller and and David Wojnarowicz, both victims of the Aids Epidemic. A breakthrough came with “The Ballade of Sexual Dependency”, which started life as day-in-the-life slide-show for its subjects. A year later, in 1986, the work appeared as a celebrated photo book showcasing the love life of New York’s Bowery neighbourhood, starting in 1979.

All the Beauty then flips to March 10th 2018 in the then “Sackler Rooms” of the New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art where Nan and her con-activists demanding an end to the “Temple of Money’ financed by the Sackler family by staging a ‘die-in’ on the flat. Later the same group “PAIN (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) launches more protests in Museums all over the world, including the Louvre in Paris, which became the first gallery to remove the “Sackler” label from its exhibitions. The “National Portrait Gallery” in London soon followed, rejecting a gift of £100,0000.00 from the Sackler family, after Goldin threatened to take her exhibits out of the show. Today, many large Museums worldwide have taken her cause on board.

Goldin’s lead of the campaign is very personal, like everything about her work. After being trolled by Sackler employees, the family settled with PAIN for a hefty figure of six billion dollars, which later escalated to ten million, in compensation for the victims. Three members of the disgraced family are interrogated by Goldin and her co-activists as part of the settlement. The Zoom meeting shows them rather sheepishly grinning into the camera, words fail them.

Nan Goldin is not only hard on the ‘greedy’ corporates, she also admits to working as a sex worker, and shows videos of the wounds received from a boyfriend. Nan Goldin is still fighting the battle, her sister Barbara lost. AS

ON RELEASE EARLY IN 2023 | VENICE GOLDEN LION AWARD | VENICE 2022

Incubus (1966)

Dir; Leslie Stevens | Cast: William Shatner, Allyson Amers Kia, Eloise Hardt | US Fantasy thriller 78’

Leslie Stevens blew the considerable capital he’d made from ‘The Outer Limits’ on this almost wilfully uncommercial folly. Aided by a tingling score by Dominic Frontiere, fellow ‘Outer Limits’ veteran cameraman Conrad Hall (who does a lovely job) later recalled it as ‘ten days shooting, great fun’, ruefully admitting “I don’t what it means but I love it”.

The decision to shoot it in Esperanto – deliberately intended to make the film hard to follow – Leonard Maltin laconically observed “sort of limits its appeal”, which is one of the reasons so few people have heard of it, let alone seen it.

If the thing wasn’t already weird enough there’s even the sight of William Shatner speaking his dialogue with English subtitles.@RichardChatten

Living (2022)

Dir: Oliver Hermanus | Cast: Bill Nighy, Tom Burke, Alex Sharp, Aimee Lou Wood | UK. 102 mins

The English middle class world of the 1950s is gracefully captured here in a sombre but sonorous drama about a dying civil servant. What makes it particularly interesting is that the director is South African Oliver Hermanus and the screenwriter is the Japanese born novelist and Nobel prize winner Kazoo Ishiguro (Never Let Me Go) whose story of discrete mid 20th sensibilities was inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 masterpiece Ikiru (To Live).

Quintessential English maxims like ‘keep calm and carry on’ and ‘never explain, never complain’ immediately spring to mind with reference to Living‘s noble main character Mr Williams who is the embodiment of a dissipated but dignified gentleman of a certain age – and played wistfully by Bill Nighy – whose world is rocked by the revelation that he is suffering from terminal cancer. But life goes on in the corridored confines of his Civil Service offices where he heads a department dedicated to planning applications, staffed by his young assistant Mr Wakeling (a thoughtful Alex Sharp), who guides us through the film, and secretary Margaret (Aimee Lou Wood of Netflix’ Sex Education) who could best described as gently ‘petillant’, rather than ‘bubbly’ – a quality normally ascribed to female typists in the small ads, back in the day.

Moving but never sentimental, one of the more touching scenes pictures Mr Williams at home and desperately rehearsing the words to explain his diagnosis to his son and daughter-in-law who are unaware of his presence in their unlit sitting room, and at the same time, talking amongst themselves about asking him to move on, And this tragic event sets in motion Mr Williams’ determination to start living before he dies.

In Brighton, regarded as a louche seaside setting back in the 1950s, Mr Williams comes across Mr Sutherland (Tom Burke) a writer of questionable origins, and engages on a night of excess that unleashes in Mr Williams an impressionistic reverie of nostalgic thoughts and ideas as he reflects back on his life. These scenes take on a dreamlike quality expressed by vibrant juxtaposed images, in contrast to the crisply formal daily procedural he has grown accustomed to in the offices the Civil Service in County Hall.

Returning to London he encounters Margaret and decides to invite her to join him in his final ‘hurrah’. At this point he also takes to singing a plangent Scottish folk song as he swings in the children’s playground at dusk. The final act briefly explores Mr Williams’ last planning project and labour of love – a children’s playground built on a former bomb site in the East End. And this provides the film with a whiff of internecine controversy amongst his staff who claim the iniative as their own. The final scenes are slightly underwhelming but nevertheless provide a satisfying finale to this elegant and rather lovely look back in time. MT

NOW ON RELEASE IN CINEMAS NATIONWIDE.

Return to Seoul (2022)

Wri/Dir: Davy Chou | Drama, 115′

French Cambodian director Davy Chou has made a name for himself with his unique cinematic gaze on Cambodia and its people. His graceful prize-winning feature debut Golden Slumbers reminisced on Cambodian cinema from the 1960s to the mid 1970s.

But his latest, a drama with the apt title Return to Seoul (aka All the People I’ll never be) is a sideways glance at cultural identity seen through the eyes of its main character, a twenty five year old French woman who returns to her native South Korea to track down her birth mother.

From the start you are not going to like Freddie (Ji-Min Park). Flouncing into a bar in downtown Seoul she flirts outrageously with a Korean guy who then makes romantic overtures, only to be told, point blank, that she already has boyfriend ‘back home’ in Paris. Arrogant and extremely pleased with herself, on the face of it, she then tells another lover who has selflessly accompanied her back to Seoul for one of her business meetings, later in the film, that “she could erase him from her life at any minute”.

Of course all this hides a deep emotional wound at her core: inflicted by a biological mother who first abandons her as a baby in a Seoul orphanage, and then declines to meet her when she painstakingly tracks her down via the Seoul orphanage where she was given up.

Told in a series of off-kilter episodes tracking her life from that first meeting in the bar, until her early thirties, the film is full of awkward characters that are neither appealing nor relatable, the exception being a French businessman (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) who turns from lover to employer, All the People is a brave but not always successful attempt to explore the complexities of forging ahead with meaningful personal and romantic relationships when your heart has been shattered at birth. MT

NOW IN CINEMAS

Hansan: Rising Dragon (2021 | London Korean Film Festival 2022

Dir:Kim Han-min | Cast:Park Hae-il, Byun Yo-han, Ahn Sung-ki | 129 mins | 2021 | South Korea

Hot on the heels of The Admiral: Roaring Currents, a naval warfare blockbuster that remains the most successful Korean film of all time with over 17 million admissions, South Korean director Kim Han-min returns to the legendary exploits of Joseon Era admiral Yi Sun-sin’s with a prequel story that is just as rambunctious but even more focussed than the hit that spawned it.

Set in 1592, six years before the events of The Admiral: Roaring Currents, the film depicts the lead up and Admiral Yi’s explosive exploits during the Battle of Hansan Island, when he led a small fleet against a vast Japanese armada. Park Hae-il, seems to be this year’s Korean ‘man of the moment’ – he also stars in Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave – and here takes over the mantle of the admiral from Choi Min-sik. Portraying Admiral Yi during an earlier naval campaign in his career, which also saw him heavily outnumbered by a Japanese armada, Park imbues the historical figure with a staunch and stolid solemnity and some of the most stunning naval set-pieces ever committed to film. Hansan: Rising Dragon closes this year’s edition of LONDON KOREAN FILM FESTIVAL.

LONDON KOREAN FILM FESTIVAL 2022 | Thu 17 Nov, 7:00pm , Regent St Cinema

Come Come Come Upward (1989) London Korean Film Festival 2022

Dir:Im Kwon-taek | Cast: Kang Soo-yeo, Jin Yeong-mi, Yu In-chon, Han Ji-il, Chon Moo-song | 120 mins | 1989 | South Korea

South Korean director Im Kwon-taek, now nearly ninety, is possibly best known outside Korea for his ground-breaking documentary Mandala, (1981) arguably the finest film ever made about Buddhism as part of human society. In Come Come Come Upward a young woman makes her way to a mountain convent where she undergoes a demanding initiation programme in an environment best described as challenging – both physically and spiritually – not helped by aloofness erring on hostility from the other young nuns, and the almost draconian convent elder – yet none of this seems able to put her off. Flashbacks allow a glimpse of her motivations for leaving the world behind. However, the world, in the strange form of one broken yet determined man, pursues Soon-nyeo/sister Chung-hwa right to her refuge.

LONDON KOREAN FILM FESTIVAL | Sun 06 Nov, 2:30pm, ICA LONDON

A Lonely Island in the Distant Sea (2021) London Korean Film Festival 2022

Dir: Kim Mi-young | Cast: Park Jong-hwan, Lee Yeon, Kang Kyung-hun, Park Hyun-suk
110 mins | 2021 | South Korea

Life is what happens when you’re making plans is very much the order of the day in this inspired drama from Kim Mi-young. The story follows Yuncheol (Park Jong-hwan) who, now in his forties, has failed in his marriage, and his early promise as a talented sculptor has gone off the boil. But the winds of change bring a refreshing new boost to life when his artistically gifted daughter Gina (Lee Yeon) decides to drop out of college and enter a Buddhist temple.

Yuncheol, who himself once imagined becoming a monk, is not sure what to think of his daughter’s decision, but her confidence inspires him to explore pastures green and this leads to a romantic attachment with an independent-minded history lecturer (Kang Kyung-hun). A Lonely Island just goes to prove that even when we think are stuck in the doldrums the winds of change can suddenly blow in alter this mindset triggering a different perspective on life.

A sensitive and profound drama about the dynamics of social interaction and the meaning of life that resonates more profoundly at the narrative develops. Yuncheol’s life may seem static but his close relationships help him to develop and deepen in unexpected ways.

LONDON KOREAN FILM FESTIVAL 2022 | Wed 09 Nov, 8:45pm, ICA London

Hot in Day, Cold at Night (2021) London Korean Film festival 2022

Dir: Park Song-yeol | Cast: Park Song-yeol, Won Hyang-ra | 90 mins | South Korea

Hot in Day, Cold at Night might look from its plot summary to be a depressing tale of economic hardship, but filmmaking-screenwriting duo Park Song-yeol and Won Hyang-ra – who also star as the main couple – manage to make this uplifting and enjoyable. Although not quite a comedy, the film’s finely-calibrated blend of sardonic humour and soft-heartfed vulnerability have made this one of the year’s most talked-about Korean independent films.

Made on a shoestring – and none the worse for it – Hot in Day, Cold at Night shows how it is possible to create remarkable art out of the most basic materials providing the script is strong and based on a believable concept. However bad things get, married couple Young-tae (Park Song-yeol) and Jeong-hee (Won Hyuang-ra) promise themselves that they will never borrow from loan sharks. But with both of them out of work, scraping by on the occasional odd job, their circumstances only continue to worsen. Eventually, without telling her husband, Jeong-hee begins to contemplate the unthinkable.

Tue 08 Nov, 8:45pm, Genesis Cinema

London Korean Film Festival 2022

The London Korean Film Festival is back to celebrate its 17th year from 3 November – 17 November 2022, featuring 35+ cinema screenings in leading venues around London.

The London Korean Film Festival has grown from modest beginnings to become one of the longest running and most respected festivals dedicated to Korean cinema in the world, featuring cult classic and the latest dramas, blockbusters and documentaries from the nation’s established filmmakers, auteurs and new talent. .

The 17th London Korean Film Festival is organised by the Korean Cultural Center UK with the support of the Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports & Tourism, Korean Film Council.

The Draughtman’s Contract (1982)

Dir: Peter Greenaway | Cast: Anthony Higgins, Janet Suzman, Anne-Louise Lambert. Hugh Fraser | UK Drama 108’

The Draughtsman’s Contract, a film that is now over forty years old, was made in the 1980s about events in 1694. Elaborate, stylised, enjoyable, spiteful and mysterious, a film in black, white and green. With sheep. Eminently enigmatic. Always associated with frames, so much so indeed that a framing device of the late 1600s is on hand to remind you that what is outside the frame is strictly irrelevant. The French newspapers described Peter Greenway as a cinematic dandy and the English, once they had passed their enthusiasm for being outside their comfort zone, slowly warmed to it. Shot on 16mm blown up to 35mm for cinema release, it surprised the art-cinema circuit and irritated some English cinematic luminaries to declare that filming in England was no longer tenable if such films were going to be made there henceforth.

Greenaway used a somewhat unorthodox filming procedure – being shot on super-16mm and enlarged to 35mm for cinema release. He was concerned that it should be seen as an English landscape film situated around a somewhat arcane proposition of “draw what you see and not what you know”. Your eyes must be solely your guide. He never expected it to be as successful on the art-cinema circuit. It’s a story about a “frame-up” both in metaphor and for real, and the film frame is unremittingly ubiquitous with the appearance of that late 17th-century framing device to remind you of the tyranny of the film frame. The French especially enjoyed it though a French newspaper said he was a cinematic dandy and the English newspapers, at first, until they settled on a more relaxed approach were appalled at its literary, theatrical, and visual pretensions.

The costumes by Sue Blane surprised and delighted audiences, so many layers, cuffs, tails and frills tailored to exhibit the body. When everyone wore white the Draughtsman was out of step and wore black. When everyone wore black the Draughtsman wore white, an arrangement to persistently demonstrate the artist being out of step manoeuvred by the wealthy establishment whose controls were out of reach however hard he tried to learn and catch up. The music by Michael Nyman surprised and excited and delighted everyone. Energetic often to a point of frenzy and exhibiting much irony.

When filming finally finished in the Groombridge Kent fields Greenaway claimed he wanted to start again, and wrote a sequel called The Hedgecutters about trimming boundaries. Since the draughtsman was too blinded, damaged and too dead to be resuscitated, the follow-up hero was to become his overdressed effete servant primed to die with cut extremities. But it didn’t work.
For a start the title was too mundane and too artisanal. It was winter and the vegetation was becoming leafless.

The next film titled a Zed and Two Noughts was calling. But Draughtman’s was truly an idyllic experience filmed in unusually persistent English summer weather that only collapsed when it finally broke and the characters appropriately began to complain in 1694 about the arrival of storms.

NOWON MUBI, BFI PLAYER

River of Desire (2022) Tallinn Film Festival 2022

Dir.: Sergio Machado; Cast: Sophie Charlotte, Rômulo Braga, Daniel De Oliveira, Gabe Leone, Coco Chiarella; Brazil 2022, Romantic thriller 107 min.

Brazilian writer director Sergio Machado started his film career as assistant to Walter Salles and went on to win the Youth Award at Cannes in 2005 for his feature Lower City. After success with credits in TV, documentary and commercial video his latest drama River of Desire is a passion-fuelled waterside ménage-à-quatre based on Milton Hatoum’s “Farewell Captain”. Machado’s well-structured script is sadly let down by the overtly male gaze of the graphic sex scenes and a melodramatic tele-novella ending.

The story centres on three brothers Dalberto (de Oliveira), Dalmo (Braga) and Armando (Leone) who get along amicably in the house they have inherited from their father after his wife left with a Gringo. But when the Dalberto is joined by his beguiling new wife Anaíra (Charlotte) the dynamic shifts as masculine desires are unleashed and – inevitably – family tragedy ensues as the three find themselves in love with the same woman. One day Dalberto’s work takes him up the Amazon river from Brazil to Peru Anaira becomes lonely and despondent and looks to the other two for her entertainment.

Machado’s intriguing character drama is suffused in the vibrant colours and sensuality of this sweltering tropical paradise that plays on the hormonal rush of the remaining siblings once their brother has gone upstream. Anaira is playful and naive, and has no idea what reality has in store for her in this watchable thriller which makes fabulous use of its Amazon locations. AS

WINNER – BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY – TALLINN BLACK NIGHTS FILM FESTIVAL 2022

All Quiet on the Western Front (2022)

Dir/Co-Wri: Edward Berger | Germany, War thriller. 147′

A century after the ‘Great War’ (1914-18) took its toll on 17 million lives, Erich Maria Remarque’s classic German language novel ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ finally comes to the big screen in this elegant arthouse adaption from Edward Berger (Jack). Previous Hollywood versions pale into insignificance alongside this passionate and quietly devastating epic, seen from the unique perspective of a German soldier.

Like many teenagers throughout Europe Paul (Felix Kammerer) is thrilled at the chance for adventure and joins the ‘glorious’ war effort along with his school-friends after a rousing call to arms. Little did they know the fate that awaited them.

The war was well under way when the chums Müller (Moritz Klaus), Kropp (Aaron Hilmer), Tjaden (Edin Hasanović) and the slightly older professional soldier Katczinsky or “Kat” – (Albrecht Schuch) finally arrive at the front expecting an exciting run of it before finally marching to victory as German heroes. Just like the Allied forces of Tommies and ‘Poilus’ were hoping for on the other side.

Berger and his co-writer stay reasonably close to the original telling their harrowing story in a thrilling and lyrical anti-war action drama that captures the spirit of English war poet Wilfred Owen’s famous ‘Strange Meeting’ without ever stinting on the brutal reality of tday-to-day violence and terrible bloodshed. Some mean feat. And yet the film remains compulsive for well over two hours.

Paul and his fresh-faced comrades at arms spend their days lurching from the screaming horrors of trench warfare to the hysterical joy of ‘downtime’ when they steal a goose and roast it, or catch sight of some nubile French girls in a distant meadow. Experiences that see them desperately longing to be back home, away from the nightmare that is their daily reality, and one that foreshadows a doomed future made all the more poignant because only we know the truth.

Rather than confusing us with complex military strategics, Berger fills his film with the mundane yet fascinating detail of the wartime experience: blood-soaked uniforms of the dead are routinely collected from the battlefield and washed in steaming vats before being recycled on to the next eager soldier, name tags of the dead still attached; a body hangs naked and legless from a tree, its uniform blown off by the sheer force of a shell; intimate letters are read aloud revealing an unspeakable tragedy from back home.

Meanwhile German officers enjoy opera music while they dine in splendour, or munch on crisp croissants in a railway carriage at Compiègne begging the French for an armistice through their learned politician Matthias Erztberger (Daniel Bruhl). But Thibault de Montalembert’s Marshal Foch says, decidedly: “Non”.

After the truce is eventually signed – without compromise – a German general informs his emotionally broken troops – only Paul is still fighting – that they have one last chance to save the nation’s honour before the war officially ends at the 11 hour of the 11th day (November 1918). For once, a literary adaption worthy of the original.

Netflix’s German-language adaptation broke BAFTA history with a record-breaking 14 nominations and seven wins, including Best Film, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay. MT

NOW ON NETFLIX | All Quiet on the Western Front won numerous awards including 4 Oscars, one for BEST INTERNATIONAL FEATURE FILM and several BAFTA awards.

Medieval (2022)

Dir: Peter Jakl | Cast: Michael Caine, Ben Foster, Sophie Lowe, Til Schweiger | US Action drama, 126′

A bloodthirsty bohemian epic from the days when men took their anger out on the battlefield rather than the football pitch and warlords said deep and meaningless things like “Death brings Life”. Medieval, touted as the most expensive Czech film ever made, tells the story of the Czech warlord Jan Žižka (1360–1424ish) who is considered a major figure in Czech history and led the military wing of the followers of the religious thinker and reformer of the Catholic Church Jan Hus, the so-called Hussites.

Žižka is played by American actor Ben Foster who’s more interested in grimly defeating armies of the Teutonic Order of Holy Roman Empire than exuding charisma. Once again, Michael Caine stars – and is no guarantee for the quality of a film – but he brings a certain sense of naturalness to the party as the wise old Lord Boresh. See it on the big screen where Jesper Toffner’s swashbuckling set-pieces really come into their own. MT

NOW IN CINEMAS NATIONWIDE

Nunca abre esa puerta (1952) Never Open that Door | Viennale 2022

Dir: Carlos Hugo Christiansen | Argentina, Noir 85′

Argentine director/co-writer Carlos Hugo Christiansen (1914-1999) was one of the leading lights of Argentine cinema during its “Golden Age” after WWII, and directed 54 feature films that pushed the boundaries of what was considered permissible back in the day. Together with Alejandro Casona, Christiansen – who was of Danish parentage – adapted three short stories written by the “King of Gloom” Cornell Woolrich (Rear Window), another leading proponent of of Film Noir. In 1937 Christiansen decided to let If I Die before I wake stand alone with a running time of 73 minutes, leaving Alguin al telefono and El Pajaro as a well matched duo of darkness under the common title Nunca Abre Esa Puerta.

Both features are set in a domestic environment which somehow heightens the seething atmosphere of terror that gradually seeps into both films, especially as a women are the target of suppressed and confused male emotions of jealousy and revenge. Alguin stars Angel Magaña as Raul Valdez whose sister Luisa (Dumas) is in thrall to a shady old man (Fiorito) who wants her body and the gambling debts she owes him.

Raul’s interest in his sister is more insidious than he cares to admit to himself, but he is also bound by a brotherly desire to defend her honour and avenge her death. Naturally Christiansen had to handle this in a discrete narrative so as not to upset the influential Catholic Church. We see Raul moving around his sister’s neo-modernist apartment like a naughty schoolboy up to no good on the pretence of offering her ‘brotherly protection’. But Raul’s jealousy eventually explodes and he hits Luisa, suspecting her debtor of competing for her affections. Poor Luisa is also being terrorised by mysterious phone-calls causing her to commit suicide. Raul puts two and two together and – quiet wrongly – suspects the culprit is also the old man. But he is in for a surprise. Soon we see him being threatened by the same calls that caused Luisa to take her own life.

El Pajaro features one of Woolrich’s most famous – and recurring villains – the whistler. Each time recidivist criminal Daniel (Roberto Escalada) offends, he can’t help whistling. Once again the focus is the family, and sexual jealousy rears its head with the males in denial of their feelings: this time the trio involves Daniel, his accomplice Raul (Luis Otero) and Maria (Norma Jimenez) who is Daniel’s childhood love and now lives with her blind mother Rosa (Ilde Pirovano). Raul represses his not-so-brotherly love for his sister Maria, and Daniel is arrogant and self-centred, preferring to kill instead of love. Daniel is the proto-type psychopath of the Woolrich oeuvre, a man incapable of love. Chiaroscuro camerawork is a vital element allowing Rosa to tell the difference between night and day (“it’s a different kind of shadow”).

Alguin al telefono and El Pajaro are worlds apart in their social milieux, but they both focus on family dysfunction. Christiansen pictures this languid descent into darkness for both his anti-heroes as their characters implode – a central element of noir cinema – at a time when the sanctity of the family and Church were paramount in Argentina. AS

ARGENTINA NOIR CINEMA | VIENNALE 2022

The Big Job (1965)

Dir: Gerald Thomas | Cast: Sid James, Dick Emery, Joan Sims, Lance Percival, Derek Guyler | UK comedy

Although neglected by film historians it’s remarkable just how many people turn out to have seen this. Based on ‘A Fire Has Been Arranged’ made thirty years earlier with Flanagan & Allen, the script had been kicking around for several years, but when it finally hit screens producer Peter Rogers was highly satisfied with the results.

The humour’s much less coarse than in the ‘Carry On’ series proper and it lives up to the loving period recreation of the prologue evoking ‘The Blue Lamp’ with the police in hot pursuit in Bentleys; while the wonderfully surreal moment when a dumbfounded copper finds a pair of harpoons sticking out of the tree in his yard is worthy of Bunuel.

When the action proper starts fifteen years later, it still paints a nostalgic picture of an era when black & white was the cinema’s default setting, new towns were springing up, people drove Ford Cortinas and there were red telephone boxes on every corner.

Sid James takes a break from being the usual lecherous old goat, refreshingly it’s the women who are both more amorous and show far more initiative than the men and the ending will make feminists want to cheer. @RichardChatten

The Black Vampire | El Vampiro Negro (1953) Viennale 2022

Dir: Roman Vinoly Barreto | Cast: Olga Zubarry, Roberto Escalada, Nathan Pinzon, Nelly Parizza, Mariano Vidal Molino | Argentina, Noir thriller, 90′

A spiral staircase repeatedly signals a descent into doom in this Buenos Aires-set psychological thriller from Roman Vinoly Barreto who restyles Fritz Lang’s M into a shocking noirish melodrama, heightening the detective elements. There are no vampires to speak of – or much blood for that matter – but a child murderer on the loose is enough to strike a pervasive fear into a small community where children are disappearing like ninepins, and mothers are going hysterical.

Barreto and his co-writer and photographer Alberto Etchebehere make startling use of shadow-play, magical realism and surrealist dream sequences to channel all the angst of the turbulent political landscape in Argentina into a story about a marginalised man who becomes a child serial killer after being rejected by school-friends and belittled by women. Nathan Pinzon really brings out the humanity in the pathetic antihero and we feel for him despite his despicable crimes. A pounding score by Juan Ehlert, another emigre from German, ramps up the tension in the film’s incredible finale.

Interestingly, Robert Siodmak, who shared the same birthday as Barreto, and fleed persecution in Nazi-occupied France for Hollywood where his striking noir thriller The Spiral Staircase (1946) also focused on a serial murderer, this time targeting physically flawed women. MT

SCREENING DURING VIENNALE 2022

Native Son (1951) | Viennale 2022

Dir.: Pierre Chenal; Cast: Richard Wright, Gloria Madison, Jean Wallace, Charles Cane, Willa Pearl, Nicholas Joy, Ruth Robert, Gene Michael, George D. Green, Argentina 1951, 104 Min.

After fleeing the Zon-occupied Zone of France in 1942 due to his Jewish origins, Belgian-born French filmmaker Pierre Chenal (1904-1990) settled in Argentina, like many Jews – and even more Nazis after 1945. Argentina was governed by a military junta under Juan Peron who would offer sanctuary to the likes of Dr. Josef Mengele, Auschwitz'”Angel of Death.

Chenal was the first director to adapt James M. Cain’s novel “The Postman always rings Twice” for the screen as Le Derniere Tournant in 1939. Noir cinema flourished in Buenos Aires’ eclectic melting pot of disenfranchised filmmakers whose creative instincts were heightened by their unstable surroundings. Chenal must have found the atmosphere productive, although he would later return to France for good.

Native Son is based on the 1940 novel by Richard Wright who also took on the leading role after the actor originally cast dropped out. Wright and Chenal shared writing credits, with the helmer aiming for a much more realistic version of Carné’s 1939 outing Le Jour Se Leve. There it was class that alienated Jean Gabin’s hero from society, and which led to his death by the police forces. In the case of Native Son, race and class punished the main protagonist Bigger Thomas. But whilst Gabin was a likeable character, Thomas is anything but. The nightmare he finds himself in is very much of his own making, even though society plays a large part in his downfall. His status as a black man was certainly a pre-condition for his eventual fate.

In Chicago, 1940, Bigger Thomas has a dubious past. Living with his mum (Pearl) and sister Nera (Alves) in a one-bedroom flat he is on the lookout for a legal job, but still fraternises with his venal friends. A job as a chauffeur to the wealthy and benevolent Dalton family provides a way out. Henry Dalton (Joy) and his blind wife Helen (Robert) have a daughter, Mary (Wallace) whose boy friend Jan Erione (Michael) is an organiser for race equality, and is keen to rehabilitate black offenders. Thomas is surprised that they treat him as an equal on a night-out on the town where they meet Thomas’ girl friend Bessie (Madison) in her debut as a nightclub singer.

Thomas is jealous of her ‘manager’, who is way too friendly with Bessie. On the way back, the three of them get drunk and Thomas has to carry Mary to her bedroom. When her mother appears, feeling her way through the room, Thomas is well aware of the consequences should he be discovered in her daughter’s room. So he takes a pillow to stop Mary from talking, accidentally suffocating her in the process and then burning the body and coming up with a harebrained kidnapping scheme in the process, trying to extort a ransom from the Daltons for Mary’s return. Bessie becomes involved and soon the police are on the murderer’s tail, along with the local press who, as usual, enjoy finding the most sensational angle of bringing Thomas to justice.

Chicago glowers in DoP A.U. Merayo’s black and white camerawork, casting long shadows in roof-top chase scenes in a world that feels frighteningly real and yet somehow surreal, as the nightmare merges. Chenal shows how prejudice still burns bright between blacks and the authorities which cannot co-exist, and this bitter internecine hatred only goes to intensify the deadly clashes in a film that reflects a society at undeclared war. When it was shown in the USA, the film was butchered by a cut of 30 minutes. Only in 2021 was the American public deemed ‘evolved’ enough to watch the original version. AS

ARGENTINE NOIR | VIENNALE FESTIVAL 2022 | 20 OCTOBER – 1 NOVEMBER 2022

Rebecca (1940)

Dir: Alfred Hitchcock | Cast: Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine, George Sanders, Judith Anderson, Gladys Cooper | UK drama 130’

Alfred Hitchcock incredibly never won an Oscar as best director. The nearest he came was the Best Picture statuette awarded this timeless classic which he arrived in Hollywood to make passing Olivier just as the latter was about to bid farewell to his career as a Hollywood hunk and return to the West End stage.

As befits a novel by Daphne du Maurier the men are largely sidelined, the real conflict being between the women, particularly the war of nerves waged by the terrifying Mrs Danvers on Joan Fontaine (who was as genuinely as overwhelmed by her surroundings as the mousy little wife she played).

Rarely mentioned is the fact that the final close up of the monogrammed pillow consumed by flames obviously inspired the shot at the end of ‘Citizen Kane‘ just as the opening shot of Manderlay in ruins was probably copied in the shots of Xanadu that bookended the later film. Kane was edited by Robert Wise, so is it merely coincidence that the prologue of Rebecca bears a striking resemblance to the conclusion of Wise’s The Haunting? @RichardChatten

The Bitter Stems | Los Tallos Amargos (1956) Viennale 2022

Dir: Fernando Ayala | Cast: Fernando Cores, Julia Sandoval, Vassili Lambrinos, Gilda Lousek, Pablo Moret | Noir thriller, 90′

Murder, mistrust and suspicion are the classic Noir elements that burn through this stylish psychological thriller from Fernando Ayala one of Argentina’s most revered filmmakers.

The Bitter Stems/Los Tallos Amargos (1956) sees Buenos Aires-based journalist Alfredo (Cores) join forces with an unlikely ally – the thrusting Hungarian refugee Liudas (Lambrinos) – in a get-rich scheme that predictably goes wrong. But it’s Alfredo’s flawed character – his lack of self-belief and florid imagination – that ultimately leads to his self-inflicted downfall in a tense and tightly scripted narrative that still resonates in today’s climate of uncertainty and xenophobia. But there’s a caveat: always beware of someone who has nothing to lose.

Still living with his mother (Romay) and sister (Lousek) in a pleasant Buenos Aires suburb Alfredo has never quite made the grade career-wise despite the encouragement of his loving girlfriend Susana (Sandoval). A chance meeting with a barman Liudas has a distinct touch of Strangers in a Train about it: offering the men an opportunity they have been looking for. Both have something to gain from the arrangement: an illicit but lucrative journalism course capitalising on Alfredo’s journalistic credentials, Liudas having the chutzpah to get the project off the ground and the chance to finance his family’s passage to America with the promise of legal citizenship; and Alfredo can fulfil his financial ambitions, although he stands to lose professional credibility if the scheme backfires. But soon the cheque are piling up and success is within their grasp.

But the plot turns on Alfredo’s lack of trust in his partner, an affable stranger who seems too good to be true but is also a bit of a swindler when the scheme gets underway. And crucially, Alfredo is an upstanding citizen and doubts starts to play on his mind. And soon suspicion and neurosis rears its ugly head and Alfredo’s doubt start to cramp his style and eat away at his confidence. He starts to look for a way out.

Once again Ayala makes use of surrealist dream sequences and magic realism supported by Ricardo Younis’ striking camerawork. An evocative score by Astor Piazolla creates an atmosphere full of anxiety and suspicion building towards a denouement that is both tragic and unexpected in this stylish and satisfying noir thriller based on a best-selling novel by Adolfo Jasca. MT

SCREENING DURING VIENNALE FILM FESTIVAL 2022

Argentine Noir at Viennale 2022

Film noir, a term coined by French critic Nino Frank in 1946, is usually associated with the stylish Hollywood crime dramas of the 1940s and 1950s, Double Indemnity being a classical example. But its roots lie much earlier in the jagged German expressionist cinematography of the early 1920s. Whether a genre or simply a style of filmmaking is a subject for debate, but the elements generally considered attributable to noir cinema are stark lighting effects, intricately-plotted fractured narratives, flawed characters and an underlying sense of doom.

So what better way to describe the films that came out of Argentina during the Peronist years from 1946-55, a time of civil upheaval and political oppression that led to a generalised sense of superstition and existential gloom, although for some it was a time of nationalist pride. Peronist-style politics continued in Argentina until the 1970s with films depicting the ‘Dirty Years’ now taking on the same sense of foreboding and similar underlying elements but with washed-out aesthetics replacing noirish black and white as seen in Rojo, The Clan and Azor.

Argentine Noir is explored in this year’s Viennale International Film Festival in a series created by Fernando Martín Peña, a film historian known for his research in Latin American archives, and his colleague Roger Koza, who have drawn on the resources of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the Library of Congress in Washington for their work in preserving and restoring an archive of films that exemplify the tradition of film noir, yet rarely seen outside South America. Sinister protagonists, venal detectives and violence were rife on the streets Buenos Aires during the Peronist years and provided gritty material for the likes of film directors such as Fernando Ayala, Hugo Fregonese, Carlos Hugo Christensen, Román Viñoly Barreto and Pierre Chenal. MT

ARGENTINE NOIR CINEMA

HARDLY A CRIMINAL | Hugo Fregonese, 1949, 80′

A bank employee commits the perfect crime in this hard-boiled action drama directed by Fregonese before he embarked on a career in Hollywood and Europe that started in 1950 with another noir outing One Way Street starring Dan Duryea and James Mason.

NATIVE SON | Pierre Chenal, 1951, 106′

In 1940s Chicago a young black man takes a job as a chauffeur that ends in tragedy. Pierre Chenal directs from a script based on the novel by Richard Wright who also stars as the fateful driver, alongside Jean Wallace and Gloria Madsen.

THE BEAST MUST DIE, Roman Vinoly Barreto, 1952, 92′

A novel by poet laureate Cecil Day Lewis (aka Nicholas Blake) spawned this haunting noir fantasy with its shimmering cinematography by Alberto Etchebehere (who would go on to co-script The Black Vampire with Vinoly Barreto). A complex thriller with a rather spiritual ending sees a father turn detective to avenge the mysterious death of his son. Claude Chabrol directed his own version in 1969 with This Man Must Die.

DON’T EVER OPEN THAT DOOR, Carlos Hugo Christensen, 1952, 85′

Another family revenge thriller connected by the titular door between good and evil: the first involving a brother and sister (played by Argentine star Renee Dumas, above); the second centres on a whistling criminal. The script was adapted from two Cornell Woolrich stories. Noirish cinematography by Pablo Tabernero.

IF I SHOULD DIE BEFORE I WAKE, Carlos Hugo Christensen, 1952, 73′

A child holds the key to a murder mystery being investigated by his detective father. Lucio Santana is a lovable little boy but can – or should he – keep a secret? A sinister thriller that turns on a moral dilemma from one of Argentina’s most audacious directors, Carlos Hugo Christensen.

THE BLACK VAMPIRE, Roman Vinoly Barreto, 1953, 90′

Fritz Lang provides the source material for this taut and oppressive ‘feminist’ reworking of his classic M. Don’t expect any blood or fangs – the focus here is on the mothers of children stalked by a deranged paedophile known as the ‘Black Vampire’. A passionate Argentine cast is led by award-winning actor Olga Zubarry and Nelly Panizza.

THE BITTER STEMS, Fernando Ayala, 1956, 90′

Never trust a stranger comes to mind in Fernando Ayala’s award-winning classic that draws on ‘the perfect crime’ theme – that naturally goes wrong – when two men conspire together on a ‘get rich’ scheme with disastrous results. Based on the best seller by Adolfo Jasca. Bitter Stems’ finale rivals anything made in Hollywood at the time all primped by Astor Piazzolla’s sinuous score. MT

ARGENTINE NOIR AT VIENNALE 2022 | 20 OCTOBER – 1 NOVEMBER 2022

The Blood of Jesus (1941) Black History

Dir: Spencer Williams | Cast: Cathryn Caviness, Spencer Williams, Juanita Riley, Reather Hardeman, Rogenia Goldthwaite | US Drama 57’

A remarkable film located between Green Pastures and Cabin in the Sky, made all the more remarkable because it centred on the experience of a woman.

At the end the possibility lingers that the whole thing was a hallucination and the marked disparity in style between individual scenes was swiftly confirmed by a quick search of Wikipedia which reveals that the scenes of heaven were actually lifted from an Italian film made twenty years earlier.

The silent influence can also be discerned by imagery like the angel wearing a huge pair of wings which suddenly appears in a fashion reminiscent of Melies; which also has the advantage of making the contrast with the documentary-style footage of urban black nightlife over eighty years ago doubly striking. @RichardChatten

NOW ON YOUTUBE

Never Let Go (1960)

Dir: John Guillermin | Cast: Richard Todd, Peter Sellers, Elizabeth Sellars, Adam Faith, Carol White, Mervyn Johns | UK Drama 90’

This meaner, uglier British version of Bicycle Thieves was a key film both in Peter Sellers’ development as an actor and as a human being, it being his first attempt at a heavy and also because he took the role home with him each night, which placed a terrible strain on his marriage for reasons only too obvious if you watch it.

Modern audiences probably don’t even know what a Ford Anglia was, but the moment when Sellars’ boot comes crashing down on a terrapin it still elicits gasps from people who’ve unflinchingly sat through Peckinpah.

Henchman David Lodge seems suspiciously loyal to Sellers’ character (always addressing him as ‘Lionel’). Kubrick at the time was a huge fan of Sellars so he almost certainly saw this film; is it merely coincidence that both this and ‘Dr Strangelove’ employ ‘When Johnny Comes Marching Home’ on the soundtrack? @RichardChatten

NOW ON PRIME VIDEO

Cette Maison (2021) Viennale 2022

Dir.: Miryam Charles; Cast: Florence Blain Mbaye, Schelby Jean-Baptiste; Canada 2022, 75 min.

Time, space and identity are disconnected in this enigmatic debut feature that looks at the mysterious death of a fourteen year old Haitian girl. First suicide was suspected, but it soon turns out that Tessa was murdered.

Best known for her award-winning short films This House is a highly personal project for Quebecois Miryam Charles because Tessa was her niece. The two-handed narrative of displacement plays out on three time lines: the past, the present and the future. The first segment sees Tessa (Mbaye) trying to comfort her mother Valeska (Jean-Baptiste) who is still grieving ten years after her daughter’s death. Valeska’s voice-over shifts between her guilt at having taken her daughter to Connecticut – instead of their home in Haiti – and a conversation with Tessa that brings some consolation to both of them.

Valeska glides through the rooms of the titular house where the brutal crime was committed. Intercut are some scenes of the women’s Haitian family who are shown celebrating a victory in the 1995 referendum that would have given independence to Quebec, but was narrowly defeated. Tessa is seen complaining and asking the adults to change channel. Another scene sees Tessa and Valeska sitting at a table groaning with Haitian fare, the mother warning her daughter about the spicy delicacies. Equally down to earth are Tessa’s ruminations about a future she was robbed of, in the lush landscapes of Haiti.

But there are some disturbing scenes: Tessa in her coffin, giving a running commentary while her bereaved family looks down on her body shrouded in white. Deeply affecting is also a scene where social workers ask Valeska how she is coping with her bereavement, and mistaking her apparent composure for complacency. Valeska and Tessa clearly had issues to deal with; the mother’s guilt and the daughter’s ghostly appearance are often at odds with their communication – and even though the teenager tries to console her mother, her anxiety about the future is palpable.

DoP Isabelle Stachtchnko underlines the Proustian atmosphere with hazy visual allure, the light filtering through the Venetian blinds giving the couple an eerie almost ghostly appearance. Some may find the enigmatic treatment annoying, but somehow Charles overcomes this in an otherworldly gem that never outstays its welcome. AS

SCREENING AT VIENNALE 20 OCTOBER – 1 NOVEMBER 2022 | ON GENERAL RELEASE NATIONWIDE FROM 4 NOVEMBER 2022

The Innocent (2021)

Wri/Dir: Louis Garrel | Cast: Louis Garrel, Noemie Merland, Roschdy Zem, Anouk Grinberg | France, Romcom, 100′

At a loose end emotionally after his wife dies a young man becomes obsessed with his mother’s new lover who has just come out of prison.

The Innocent is Garrel’s most enjoyable outing since turning director. It takes a frivolous idea and spins it into a witty and soulful story that also works as a love letter to Lyon and its gourmet reputation and an homage to the French comedy capers of the sixties with noirish undertones primped by a lively original score from prolific composer Gregoire Hetzel (Incendies). With a starry cast of Noemie Merlant, Roschdy Zem and Garrel himself, this is an entertaining romp.

Abel (Garrel) certainly has mixed emotions about Michel (Roschdy Zem), convinced that his mum Sylvie (Anouk Grinberg) will end up a victim – again – when her new lover returns to his life of crime, although the couple’s marriage certainly seems like a bed of roses. And when they start a new floristry business in Lyon’s trendy Corbas district Abel, who works in the local aquarium, is appalled to hear them having raunchy sex in the stockroom. Sylvie’s romance reminds him how much he misses his own lost love and he is driven to tears laying flowers on her grave in the shadow of Lyon’s famous Notre Dame de Fourviere, a scene that gives the film its tender touch of melancholy.

But Abel certainly has mixed emotions about Michel – and some of them are downright hostile. So with his spunky new girlfriend Clemence (Merlant) Abel hatches a mischievous plan to spy on Michel at work, and this neurotic quest to dig the dirt on his father in law provides the film with its rich vein of humour. But Michel is no fool and calls their bluff with embarrassing results as we start to wonder whether he really is a reformed character.

But, true to form, Michel is soon back to his old tricks while fronting as a delivery guy for the furniture shop ‘Conforama’. Abel soon finds himself inveigled into the robbery involving caviar as the movie moves into heist mode, with Clemence saving the day. Garrel skilfully navigates the tonal shifts between comedy crime caper and soulful romcom in a film that ends with mixed emotions of a different kind as the romantic tables are turned. MT

IN CINEMAS FROM 25 AUGUST 2023

Marcel! (2022)

Dir.: Jasmine Trinca; Cast: Alba Rohrwacher, Maavane Conti, Giovanna Ralli, Umberto Orsini, Valentina Cervi, Valeria Golino; Italy 202, 93 min.

Cruelty to animals and their tragic deaths features in many indie and arthouse films underlining our important bond with these vulnerable creatures. This year dogs and donkeys bare the brunt of man’s callous behaviour and MARCEL! is not exception.

Actress turned director Jasmine Trinca;s debut feature is an absurd, surrealistic comedy in the style of Fellini, but with, literally, much more bite. The titular Marcel is a canine, obsessively loved by street performer Alba Rorwacher, much to the chagrin of her daughter Maavante Conti, who just wants to be loved by her mum, and not always parked with grandparents Giovanna Ralli and Umberto Orsini.

Told in ten chapters, the story of this dysfunctional family is grim as well as fascinating. As far as mothers go, Rohrwacher is a nightmare: not only does she neglect her daughter, but she lets her pet dog Marcel sit at the dinner table, feeding him carrots. She is also a fan of divination, throwing coins around with great gusto – and to add to her talents she acts as a medium. An elderly admirer brings her flowers, and attends all her performances in the town square. Her daughter is forced to watch, but not allowed to play her saxophone, which would certainly enhance her mother’s amateurish performance.

Marcel soon goes missing, And no prizes for guessing the outcome or culprit involved in his disappearance. Later, mother and daughter drive to a county fair, were the child has to act Marcel’s part, before discovering the the macabre reality. Not having had much success with their act, the two then travel to visit family; a cousin (Cervi) is well aware of Rohrwacher’s shortcoming as a performer. Proceedings are livened with one family member fancying themselves as a hunter with the whole living room full of stuffed animals, a wild boar being next prey on the agenda.

Rohrwacher is a wonderful eccentric, Trinca calling her a “Buster Keaton disguised as a panther”. But the main reason why this often unstructured script comes together is Maavane Conti, who can be wonderfully expressionless and unfazed by the most turbulent of circumstances. Her limpid blue eyes seem to be cast out of marble, and she manages to remain obdurate in deflecting the guilt her mother accusingly projects on her with grandfather claiming:”it was your father’s dog”. Said father is absent, presumed dead, having left some dark drawings which make the flat even more gloomy.

DoP Daria d’Antonia creates the right ambience for this madcap trip, the colours being as crass as the action. Director Trinca is already planning ahead, hoping that Conti will be her “Antoine Doinel”. At least she rely on the actors baling her out, because MARCEL! has even at just 93 minutes offers too little substance. Quirky it certainly is, but if only the episodically nature could be replaced by more cohesion. Still, a stunning ending shows that Trinca is not short of of ideas. AS

RAINDANCE FILM FESTIVAL 2022

Lynch/Oz (2022)

Dir.: Alexandre O. Philippe; Documentary with Amy Nicholson, Rodney Asher, John Waters, Karyn Kusama, David Lowery, Justin Benson, Aaron Morehead; USA, 108′

Swiss born director Alexandre O. Philippe has created a niche for himself with a clutch of informative film essays exploring late twentieth century American Horror cinema in Memory: The origins of Alien, Hitchcock’s shower scene in 78/52 and Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on The Exorcist. With LYNCH/OZ he takes a look at David Lynch, arguably the world’s most enigmatic living director, with the help of seven filmmakers and one film critic.

Told In six chapters the film goes back through the annuls with extensive clips from The Wizard of Oz and comes to a definitive conclusion: That David Lynch is completely obsessed by this “Dada picture” of Hollywood, directed by Fleming in 1939, the same year he finished Gone with the Wind.

David Lynch is well-known for not wanting to discuss any of his films. But when asked if Wizard influenced him – he replies: “Not a day that goes by that I don’t think about Wizard of Oz“.

Billowing curtains feature heavily in the Lynch archive, so it seems appropriate that each segment of Philippe’s documentary opens and closes with plush green drapes. Critic Amy Nicholson kicks off proceedings which her chapter entitled “Wind”, highlighting the many connections between Wizard and the Lynch oeuvre. There are the ruby slippers (Blue Velvet and the Twin Peak series); the man behind the curtains who (re)appears in Mulholland Drive; Dorothy (sic) Vallens in Blue Velvet and the wind – which captions this chapter – in Eraserhead.

But the focus is on two worlds where the Lynchian protagonists alongside Dorothy and her re-incarnations exist side in a parallel universe: reality and fantasy. Like Lolita, who was forced to live in two disconnected hemispheres: that of the schoolgirl and the mature man’s lover, Mullholland Drive is perhaps he best example of this dichotomy. We watch an ingénue grow into a mature woman and actor, but at the same time, the traumata brought on by the chaos that surrounds her, prevents Lolita from really growing, forcing her to adjust to an alien world of grown-ups in the film business. Meanwhile her friends’ delusions are a state of induced schizophrenia.

David Lowery, in chapter V (“Judy”), wants to save Dorothy and Judy Garland, one of the many doppelgängers that inhabit the Lynchian universe. Garland’s personal tragedy being pre-played in Wizard. In chapter IV (“Maltitudes”), director Karyn Kusama discusses reality and transformation, seen when The Yellow Brick Road morphs into Lynch’s Lost Highway. John Waters is his usual sardonic self, talking about his friendship with Lynch and their parallel careers in chapter III (“Kindred”). And Rodney Asher (“Membranes”, Chapter II), is still fixating on his feature Room 237 and its relationship to Kubrick’s The Shining, trying to expound his thesis of original and remake in general discussion.

The Peter Pan syndrome is mentioned, both in connection with Lynch himself and the Dorothy character. And the evil witch in Wizard is compared to Kurtz in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, him being both wizard and witch, his own destructive doppelgänger.

Some try to make Wizard into a film noir, but it is all genres rolled into one: Musical, thriller, comedy, horror and Sci-fi. Corruption couched in suburban perfection is the overriding theme in the Lynch cycle, and best showcased in the Twin Peaks series. Lynch tries to liberate Dorothy in Twin Peaks:The Return. But Garland was an unhappy Wendy in the adult world of her Peter Pan universe, crushed by the Neverland pirates of the film industry. A happy home-coming only happens in the movies.

DoP Robert Muratore and editor David Lawrence manage the treasure trove of clips and material seamlessly. LYNCH/OZ is a labour of love, and a gratifying compendium of film history. AS

IN CINEMAS NATIONWIDE FROM 2 DECEMBER 2022

She is Love (2022)

31Wri/Dir: Jamie Adams | US Drama 83′

Ever wondered what happened to Sam Riley after his breakout role as frontman Ian Curtis in the much-acclaimed biopic Joy Division? He plays Idris in this perky romcom that sees a long divorced couple revisiting their past in a bid to salvage the good times. Idris is now in a new relationship with Louise (Marisa Abela) and running a hotel in Cornwall where Patricia (Haley Bennett) checks in for a few day’s holiday. Clearly still very fond of each other their awkwardness at suddenly meeting up again soon gives way to a fun-filled vibe touched with soulfulness as they reminisce, write songs and share the odd tear. Although She is Love treads familiar ground and brings nothing new to the party it provides light-hearted entertainment for just over an hour. MT

IN UK CINEMAS FROM 3 FEBRUARY 2023

https://youtu.be/GMZCckgI-wY

Utama (2022)

Dir: Alejandro Loayza Grisi | Bolivia, Doc 87′

All over the world small rural communities are struggling to survive amid the inexorable march of progress particularly in the light of climate change and economic crisis. In his first feature Bolivian filmmaker Alejandro Loayza Grisi transforms this gruelling struggle into a quietly stunning drama with avant-garde vision, working with a cast of local non-pros.

In the arid Bolivian highlands, UTAMA follows an elderly Quechua couple determined to stay in their remote smallholding surrounded by the magnificent highlands of Bolivia hundreds of miles south of La Paz. And who would blame them? Virginio and Sisi have been living the same daily routine for years tending their flock of llamas whose pink-ribboned ears marks them out in one of the film’s inspired and endearing touches.

But this year’s drought has cast a long shadow over their traditional way of life forcing them to reconsider the future and potentially move with family members in the city, particularly in the light of Virginio’s worsening health. The arrival of their teenage grandson accentuates the widening gulf between the hardworking old couple and leisure-driven younger generation. Sisa must decide whether to stay and maintain their traditional way of life or admit defeat. Harnessing the brilliant light of this ethereal part of the world, 3500 meters above sea level, award-winning cinematographer Barbara Alvarez makes each frame a visual masterpiece. MT

ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE 25 NOVEMBER 2022 | UK PREMIERE BFI LFF 2022

A Date in Minsk (2022) Winner Best Film Doclisboa 2022

Dir.: Nikita Lavretksi; Cast: Volha Kavaliova, Nikita Lavretski; Belarus 2021, Drama, 88 min.

Belarus director/producer Nikita Lavretksi is best known as the pioneer of Belarus’ mumblecore, an independent style of filmmaking pioneering by Mark and Jay Duplass, A Date in Minsk is an existential and personal portrait of a couple of filmmakers who try to figure why their relationship failed by pretending to meet each other for the first time.

Lavretski and Volha Kavakiova indulged in “a toxic, interdependent relationship” for eight years continually coming to blows in their personal and professional lives. Shot by DoP Yalia Shatun in one take – no mean feat – the couple first meet first in a rundown billiard hall where it becomes obvious Volha has no idea of how to master the game. With Nikita forced into instructor mode the relationship re-boot gets off to a poor start as they both re-hash the other’s past misdemeanours which are manifold.

Nikita sometimes adopts a self-critical attitude, admitting to his “new friend” that he laughed when his ex fell over on a skiing holiday, landing arse about face in the snow. During this “first date”, it also emerges that Volha is a games developer, and Nikita used to teach maths, and is now an independent filmmaker pioneering a radical new style.

As the date wears on Nikita becomes more and more contrite: “I am bearing the weight of being a terrible person”. They more they distance themselves from their failed relationship the happier they become; discussing their favourite comics, which, in Volha’s case is James Acaster. She is also fond of the UK TV series “Peep Show”. Although the dump of a pool hall is anything but stimulating it was better than meeting in a cinema, they both agree as they circle each other like two Western duellists in a Mexican standoff. Shatun’s camera is as shaky as the couple’s faltering morale. Little inserts of the couple’s former life echo Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player, and after the two leave the pool hall, the film’s title appears.

On their way to the tube station, Nikita and Volha wax philosophical: do they really belong in Belarus now many of their friends have emigrated. It seems that Nikita is trying to prolong the meet-up for a long as possible, making the most of every minute. His insecurity is palpable but Volha has already moved on with her life and left the relationship behind.

This is filmmaking as therapy, and we can clearly imagine JL Godard and Anna Karina in the place of Volha and Nikita. Radical but passionate, this is an emotional tour-de-force with improvised dialogue. It leaves Nikita like Orpheus back at the closing doors of the tube station. A Date in Minsk won ‘Best FILM’ at the ‘DocLisboa International Competition’ 2022. An inspired and refreshing choice. AS

City of Lisbon Award for Best International Competition Film. | DOCLISBOA 2022 | OCTOBER 6-16

Iguana Like the Sun (2022) Antalya Film Festival 2022

Dir.: Julián Robles; Cast: Dolores Heredia, Krystian Ferrer, Luisa Huertas, Myra Batalia, Sabina Petriz, Fernando Alvarez, David Hevia; Mexico 2022, 100 min.

The debut feature of Mexican director/co-writer Julián Robles is, in the widest sense, a re-working of John Huston’s 1964 classic Night of the Iguana, based on the Tennessee Williams play of the same title. But where as Huston’s failed hero is a defrocked priest, lusting after a blonde nymphet, Robles’ equivalent is Gerardo (Ferrer), a gay man living in a household of women.

The film starts with a death – we learn later it was Gerardo’s father who was killed in his pick-up truck after a train him at an open crossing. The matriarch, grandmother Dona Dolores (Huertas) believes he was killed by the Narcos who wanted his land along the beach of the ocean where the family runs a struggling holiday camp. Gerardo is sure his father would have accepted the money from the drug lords – a scenario that seems contradictory to Dolores’ extreme suffering.

But Gerado’s main concern is his mother Mercedes (Heredia), who constantly puts him down for his sexual orientation. We are – after all – in Mexico, a bastion of machismo and the Catholic church. But then, young Elia (Batalia), has already left the Church and joined a sect, making her even less worthy than Gerardo in Dona Dominga’s estimation. Elia’s current boyfriend Mario (Alvarez) lives in an artist colony with German ex-pat Ludwig (Hevia), and wants to leave with Gerardo, now divorced from his wife. The tension mounts, and the solar eclipse, highlight of the tourist season, brings out the best and worst in all concerned.

The family is full of odd-balls: there is Indira, named after the ex-premier of India, who, does the accounts in the middle of the night, but is up to her secret dealings away from the house. Dona Dominga tries to rule un-impeded, but there are too many secrets in her closet, and when she finally decides to sell, it is too late. But there is humour too: the train which killed Gerardo’s father, used to stop near the beach, “but now it doesn’t even stop when somebody is killed.”

Iguana is a visual treat and DoP Claudio Chea should get a mention for his subtle nighttime images and powerful impressionistic beach photography. And the ending is, for once, a real surprise. Iguana Like the Sun is full of smouldering passion, denial and longing. Like the Houston film, it is a chronicle of loss. AS

ANTALYA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL | 1-09 OCTOBER 2022

Marrakech Film Festival | Programme Highlights 2022

Marrakech Film Festival is back after two years under a new artistic director Remi Bonhomie. With its fabulous climate, medieval walled Medina dating back to the Berber empire, exotic palaces and lush gardens – Yves Saint Laurent’s famous Majorelle is the standout – Marrakech is the ideal location for a winter festival celebrating international cinema with an emphasis on Moroccan and MENA film in general. The 19th edition includes an international competition, gala screenings, the Moroccan Panorama, and the 11th continent celebrating innovative film that challenge cinematic boundaries and

Here is the festival line-up:

INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION

ALMA VIVA
by Cristèle Alves Meira / Portugal
Principal Cast: Lua Michel, Ana Padrão, Jacqueline Corado, Duarte Pina, Catherine Salée

ASHKAL
by Youssef Chebbi / Tunisia
Principal Cast: Fatma Oussaifi, Mohamed Houcine Grayaa, Rami Harrabi, Hichem Riahi, Nabil Trabelsi, Bahri Rahali

ASTRAKAN
by David Depesseville / France
Principal Cast: Mirko Giannini Samuel, Jehnny Beth, Bastien Bouillon

AUTOBIOGRAPHY
by Makbul Mubarak / Indonesia
Principal Cast: Kevin Ardilova, Arswendy Bening Swara, Haru Sandra, Rukman Rosadi, Yusuf Mahardika

THE BLUE CAFTAN (Le Bleu du Caftan/Azraq al-qaftan)
by Maryam Touzani / Morocco
Principal Cast: Lubna Azabal, Saleh Bakri, Ayoub Missioui

FARAWAY SONG (Cañçao ao Longe)
by Clarissa Campolina / Brazil
Principal Cast: Mônica Maria, Carlos Francisco, Jhon Narvaez, Margô Assis, Matilde Biagi, Ricardo Campos

PETROL
by Alena Lodkina / Australia
Principal Cast: Nathalie Morris, Hannah Lynch

RED SHOES (Zapatos rojos)
by Carlos Eichelmann Kaiser / Mexico Principal Cast: Eustacio Ascacio, Natalia Solian, Phanie Molina, Irine Herrera

RICEBOY SLEEPS
by Anthony Shim / Canada
Principal Cast: Choi Seung-yoon, Ethan Hwang, Dohyun Noel Hwang, Anthony Shim, Hunter Dillon

SAVAGE (Amina)
by Ahmed Abdullahi / Sweden
Principal Cast: Nimco Ahmed Ali, Jamilah Mohamed Kirih, Ariane Castellanos

SNOW AND THE BEAR (Kar ve Ayı)
by Selcen Ergun / Turkey
Principal Cast: Merve Dizdar, Saygın Soysal, Asiye Dinçsoy, Erkan Bektaş, Derya Pınar Ak

A TALE OF SHEMROON (Chevalier noir)
by Emad Aleebrahim Dehkordi / Iran
Principal Cast: Iman Sayad Borhani, Payar Allahyari, Masoumeh Beygi, Behzad Dorani

THE TASTE OF APPLES IS RED (Ta’am al-tufah, ahmar)
by Ehab Tarabieh / Syria
Principal Cast: Mariam J. Khoury, Tarik Kopty, Rula Blal, Hussien Rumiah, Maisa Abd Elhadi, Suheil Haddad

THUNDER (Foudre)
by Carmen Jaquier / Switzerland
Principal Cast: Lilith Grasmug, Mermoz Melchior, Benjamin Python, Noah Watzlawick, Sabine Timoteo

GALA SCREENINGS

Opening Film
GUILLERMO DEL TORO’S PINOCCHIO
by Guillermo del Toro / Mexico et Mark Gustafson / USA
Principal Cast: Ewan McGregor, David Bradley, Gregory Mann, Finn Wolfhard, Cate Blanchett, John Turturro, Ron Perlman, Tim Blake Nelson, Burn Gorman, Christoph Waltz, Tilda Swinton

ARMAGEDDON TIME
by James Gray / USA
Principal Cast: Anne Hathaway, Jeremy Strong, Banks Repeta, Anthony Hopkins

BOY FROM HEAVEN (Walad min al-janna)
by Tarik Saleh / Sweden
Principal Cast: Tawfeek Barhom, Fares Fares, Mohammad Bakri, Makram J. Khoury, Mehdi Dehbi

MARLOWE
by Neil Jordan / Ireland
Principal Cast: Liam Neeson, Diane Kruger, Jessica Lange, Alan Cumming, Danny Huston

MASTER GARDENER
by Paul Schrader / USA
Principal Cast: Joel Edgerton, Sigourney Weaver, Quintessa Swindell

MEDITERRANEAN FEVER
by Maha Haj / Palestine
Principal Cast: Amer Hlehel, Ashraf Farah, Anat Hadid, Samir Elias, Cynthia Saleem, Shaden Kanboura

THE SITTING DUCK (La Syndicaliste)
by Jean-Paul Salomé / France

Principal Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Grégory Gadebois, François-Xavier Demaison, Pierre Deladonchamps, Alexandra Maria Lara, Gilles Cohen with the participation of de Marina Foïs, Yvan Attal

THE SWIMMERS
by Sally El Hosaini / Egypt/United Kingdom
Principal Cast: Mana Issa, Nathalie Issa, Matthias Schweighöfer, Ahmed Malek, James Krishna Floyd, Ali Suleiman

SPECIAL SCREENINGS

BURNING DAYS (Kurak Günler)
by Emin Alper / Turkey
Principal Cast: Selahattin Paşali, Ekin Koç, Erol Babaoğlu, Erdem Şenocak, Selin Yeninci

CORSAGE
by Marie Kreutzer / Austria
Principal Cast: Vicky Krieps, Florian Teichtmeister, Aaron Friesz, Katharina Lorenz, Jeanne Werner, Alma Hasun

THE DAMNED DON’T CRY
by Fyzal Boulifa / Morocco
Principal Cast: Abdellah El Hajjouji, Aïcha Tebbae, Antoine Reinartz

DECLARATION (Ariyippu)
by Mahesh Narayanan / India
Principal Cast: Kunchacko Boban, Divya Prabha, Lovleen Misra, Danish Husain, Kannan Arunasalam

THE ETERNAL DAUGHTER
by Joanna Hogg / United Kingdom
Principal Cast: Tilda Swinton, August Joshi,
Carly-Sophie Davies, Joseph Mydell, Crispin Buxton

GODLAND
(Vanskabte Land | Volga∂a Land)
by Hlynur Pálmason / Iceland
Principal Cast: Elliott Crosset Hove, Ingvar Sigur∂sson, Vic Carmen Sonne, Jacob Hauberg Lohmann, Ída Mekkín Hlynsdóttir

LES HARKIS
by Philippe Faucon / France
Principal Cast: Théo Cholbi, Mohamed Mouffok, Pierre Lottin, Yannick Choirat, Omar Boulakirba

MONICA
by Andrea Pallaoro / Italy
Principal Cast: Trace Lysette, Patricia Clarkson, Emily Browning, Joshua Close, Adriana Barraza

NAYOLA
by José Miguel Ribeiro / Portugal
Voices: Elisângela Rita, Vitória Soares, Feliciana Délcia Guia, Marinela Furtado, José Adelino Barcelo Carvalho

NO BEARS (Khers nist)
by Jafar Panahi / Iran
Principal Cast: Jafar Panahi, Naser Hashemi, Vahid Mobaseri, Bakhtiar Panjei, Mina Kavani

QUEENS (Reines)
by Yasmine Benkiran / Morocco
Principal Cast: Nisrin Erradi, Nisrine Benchara, Rayhan Guaran, Jalila Talemsi, Mohamed Nider Hamid

RETURN TO SEOUL (Retour à Seoul)
by Davy Chou / Cambodia
Principal Cast: Park Ji-min, Oh Kwang-rok, Guka Han, Kim Sun-young, Yoann Zimmer, Louis-Do Lencquesaing

RHINEGOLD (Rheingold)
by Fatih Akin / Germany
Principal Cast: Emilio Sakraya, Kardo Razzazi, Mona Pirzad, Arman Kashani, Hüseyin Top, Sogol Faghani

SAINT OMER (Saint-Omer)
by Alice Diop / France
Principal Cast: Kayije Kagame, Guslagie Malanda, Valérie Dréville, Aurélia Petit, Robert Cantarella

UNDER THE FIG TREES (Sous les figues)
by Erige Sehiri / Tunisia
Principal Cast: Fide Fdhili, Feten Fdhili, Ameni Fdhili, Samar Sifi, Leila Ouhebi

THE 11TH CONTINENT

BEIRUT AL-LIKA (Beirut, the Encounter)
by Borhane Alaouié / Lebanon
Principal Cast: Haitham El Amine, Nadine Acoury, Renée Deek, Refaat Haidar, Hussam Sabbah, Najwa Haidar, Rafic Najem (1981)

DRY GROUND BURNING (Mato seco em chamas)
by Joana Pimenta / Portugal
and Adirley Queiros / Brazil
Principal Cast: Joana Darc Furtado, Léa Alves Da Silva, Andreia Vieira, Débora Alencar, Gleide Firmino, Mara Alves

EAMI
by Paz Encina / Paraguay
Principal Cast: Anel Picanerai, Curia Chiquejno Etacoro, Ducubaide Chiquenoi, Basui Picanerai Etacore, Lucas Etacori

FATHER’S DAY
by Kivu Ruhorahoza / Rwanda
Principal Cast: Mediatrice Kayitesi, Aline Amike, Yves Kijyana, Cedric Gisubizo

FRAGMENTS FROM HEAVEN
by Adnane Baraka / Morocco
Documentary
With: Mohamed Oubakha, Abderrahman Ibhi, Lahcen Oubakha, Youssef Oubakha

IN FIELDS OF WORDS: CONVERSATIONS WITH SAMAR YAZBEK (As-sahel al-mumtani)
by Rania Stephan / Lebanon
Documentary
With: Samar Yazbek

MARINER OF THE MOUNTAINS (Marinheiro das Montanhas)
by Karim Aïnouz / Brazil

MUNA MOTO (The Child of Another)
by Jean-Pierre Dikongué-Pipa / Cameroon Principal Cast: David Endéné, Arlette Din Bell, Philippe Abia, Gisèle Dikongué-Pipa, Jeanne Mvondo (1975)

PACIFICTION
by Albert Serra / Spain
Principal Cast: Benoît Magimel, Pahoa Mahagafanau, Marc Susini, Matahi Pambrun, Alexandre Melo

POLARIS
by Ainara Vera / France
Documentary

REEL NO. 21 AKA RESTORING SOLIDARITY
by Mohanad Yaqubi / Palestine, Morocco
Documentary

REWIND & PLAY
by Alain Gomis / Senegal
Documentary

MARRAKECH FILM FESTIVAL | 11 -20 NOVEMBER 2022

All is Vanity (2022) London Film Festival 2022

Wir/Dir: Marcos Mereles | UK Drama 72′

Made on a shoestring and none the worse for it Marcos Mereles’ watchable little indie drama imagines what really happens from the perspective of the crew and cast when a fashion shoot in a London warehouse goes off the rails. Naturally the egos and idiosyncrasies of the entire crew soon surface and have to be taken into consideration when the production – and the film itself – goes into meltdown, never to return.

Sid Phoenix brings a touch of Alan Partridge to proceedings as ‘the photographer’ taking control of the team. His drole and offbeat tongue-in-cheek performance is the best thing about this slim feature debut that often feels like a graduation film. The rest of the team lack originality character-wise despite some decent performances: his volunteer assistant (Yaseen Aroussi) is keen but clueless, the make-up artist (Rosie Steel) disappears during the shoot, and the model (Isabelle Bontrer) is bored to tears. Mereles clearly has good ideas and needs to focus on bringing structure and a more engaging dramatic arc to his next production. MT

ALL IS VANITY ON CINEMA AND DIGITAL RELEASE in UK and IRELAND FROM 14 OCTOBER

Made in Prague Festival 2022

The popular, multi-genre festival Made in Prague returns to London for its 26th year. Representing one of the oldest national celebrations of European culture in the UK,
the festival presents an exciting programme covering film, music, science, visual art and literature across London and beyond between 1 November and 4 December 2022.

This year’s highlights feature:

Olmo Omerzu’s wry black comedy Bird Atlas, often quoted ‘Czech Republic’s answer to the smash hit series Succession‘.

Kunstkamera, Czech surrealist and filmmaker Jan Švankmajer’s lastest film introducing the artist’s unique private collection of artefacts to the world.

Powerful documentary 107 Mothers, an exquisite docudrama telling the stories of mothers and pregnant woment in a Ukrainian prison.

Gustav Machatý’s 1929 silent gem Erotikon + live accompaniment by UK pianist Stephen Horne at the BFI Southbank.

Hommage to the great Czech film composer Zdeněk Liška available on BFI Player.

a number of critically acclaimed contemporary Czech films, many of which will be introduced by their directors.

MADE IN PRAGUE FESTIVAL 2022

Occupation | Okupace (2021) Made in Prague Festival 2022

Dir.: Michal Nohejl; Cast: Antonie Formanova, Aleksey Gorbunov, Martin Pechlat, Otokar Brousek, Tomas Jelabek, Cyril Dobry Vlastimil Venclik; Czech Republic 2021, 98 min.

This bizarre absurdist chamber from Czech director/co-writer Michal Nohejl (Fobie) sees the crew and cast of a Prague theatre imagine the emotional aftermath to the invasion of their country by Russian and Warsaw Pact troops in 1968.

Okupace never really escapes its stagey stetting – the bar of the theatre – Nohejl borrowing freely from Milos Forman’s Fireman’s Ball – but adding a critical nuance in terms of the historical traumata of the old Czechoslovakia.

For many Czechs the Munich tragedy of 1938 comes back to haunt them in 1968. In both cases, there were no heroes to save the day and the drunken arguments of the cast and the play’s director (Brousek) are very much a reaction to this lack of muscular leadership. Pavel Neskudia (Pechlat) plays the artistic boss of the theatre. The play – about the Czech communist martyr Julius Fucik – is hailed as ‘mediocre’ by all present. Neskudia is interviewed by the enigmatic beauty Milada (Formanova), who heaps praise on him for having returned from Western exile after the invasion. Unfortunately Neskudia, like everyone one else in the room, is slightly paranoid, and accuses the woman of being part of the secret service STB, sent out to spy on him.

One of the actors has remained in his SS costume and this freaks out a drunken Russian officer (Ukranian actor Aleksey Gorbunov), who arrives desperate to get even more drunk. He accosts Milada and a scuffle breaks out. Somebody decides it would be good idea to pretend that the Russian has fallen into the hands of the Nazis, represented by the “SS man”. Violence escalates, and the artists leave the Russian for dead. A Russian patrol then turns up inquiring where their officer is, and the Czechs’ total denial of his whereabouts leaves the group in a precarious position: they know very well what will happen to them if the truth comes out. Fuelled by more alcohol, the troupe decide to aspire to the heroes the country never had.

Inspired lighting effects from DoP Jan Baset Stritezsky make the bar look like something out of Visconti’s The Damned. He then conjures up pure evil with his shadow-play as the violence escalates. Performances are decent with the protagonists falling out with each other over the violence they have brought upon themselves. Despite all this the production fails to soar above the confines of its one-location setting. Occupation remains very much a filmed theatre play which does require a basic knowledge of Czechoslovakia’s history. The war in Ukraine also plays a role, underlining how just much Czech people feel let down by their own country. Occupation is a brave and avant-garde endeavour which doesn’t quite live up to its intentions. AS

SCREENING DURING MADE IN PRAGUE FESTIVAL | LONDON 2022

Charlotte (2022)

Dir.: Èric Warin, Tahir Rana; Animated feature with the voices of Keira Knightley, Brenda Blethyn, Jim Broadbent, Sam Clafin, Eddie Marsan, Sophie Okonedo, Mark Strong; Canada/Belgium/France 2021; 92 min.

The soapy main image may lead you to believe that Charlotte is just another children’s animation. Quite the contrary. Èric Warin and Tahir Rana’s film is a film of substantial gravitas in the style of Studio Ghibli, a lyrical storybook based on the life of German Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon (1917-1943) whose autobiographical work entitled “Life? or Theatre?, depicting her own life, may very well constitute the first graphic novel.

Charlotte, voiced by Keira Knightley, would be blighted by tragedy. Growing up in Berlin where she studied art prior to the outbreak of the Second World War, her mother Franziska committed suicide when she was only eight, although Charlotte was under the impression that the death was due to influenza. Charlotte grew up fearing she would meet the same fate, as suicide was common in a family who suffered from poor mental health. Her father, a surgeon, had then married her mother’s sister, the opera singer Paula Salomon Lindberg.

A love affair with the much older, married, Alfred Wolfson (Strong) coloured Charlotte’s years at art school. But after the “Kristall Nacht” tragedy of 1938, she moved to the South of France where her depressive grandmother (Blethyn) was under the care of her grandfather Ludwig Grünwald (Broadbent), and would take her own life, like Charlotte’s mother had done years earlier. In the early 1940s, Charlotte found refuge with American Ottile Moore (Okonedo), who helped many Jewish refugees. Charlotte would entrust her prolific creative output of over seven hundred works to local doctor George Morrides who was able to present Charlotte’s father with the paintings in 1947. He had survived with Paula in hiding in Amsterdam.

Charlotte’s 35-page confession was published in 2015. It emerged that she had poisoned her grandfather after he insisted on her sharing his bed, and threatened to call the police, as Charlotte was only given leave to remain in France as his carer. She sent the confession to Wolfson, but he never received it. Brief happiness came with her marriage to Alexander Nagler (Clafin) in 1943. The couple were expecting a child when she was deported to the camp in Drancy, and Nagler to a forced labour camp where he died the following year. Charlotte Salomon arrived in Auschwitz on 10. October 1943, and was killed the same day, aged 26, and five months pregnant.

Quite why the filmmakers chose to set this tragic tour-de-force in soft-focused pastels remains unclear. Perhaps they had in mind the Studio Ghibli style of a narrative open to two-way interpretation: light and dark. But there is nothing light-hearted about Charlotte’s story and Keira Knightley’s “little-girl” voice puts a trivial spin on epic art work that unfolded in the midst of genocide.

Salomon’s oeuvre is now exhibited at the Jewish Museum in Amsterdam. Charlotte is a dubious undertaking but if it helps to raise awareness of Salomon’s prolific output and attracts new admirers it has fulfilled its purpose. AS

CHARLOTTE IS DUE FOR GENERAL RELEASE IN EARLY DECEMBER 2022 AND DURING THE UK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL 2022

Aftersun (2022)

Dir/Wri: Charlotte Wells | Cast: Paul Mescal, Frankie Corio | UK Drama, 91′

This pretentious two-hander that tries to capture the mood of a holiday in Turkey between a father and his little daughter in a series of loosely flung together impressionistic images, is not such a good film as it thinks it is. Daring editing and inventive camera angles cannot make up for a script that needs more work.

Callum (Paul Mescal of the breakout TV hit Normal People) and pre-teen Sophie (Frankie Corio) indulge in the lazy vibe of the seaside resort where everything is geared towards British tourists and a family crowd. In aiming for a relaxed feeling Charlotte Wells abandons a formal narrative structure in a drama whose one-note vibe lacks the emotional intensity to keep the audience engaged even for the film’s modest running time. The cliched idea that adults are always embarrassing to their kids is laboured to the point of being irritating. Many critics in our audience found it difficult to decipher Sophie’s couched mumbling (particularly when she is offscreen), and trying to interpret the meaning of entire sentences became tedious after a while. Also, having Sophie deliver a pitch perfect karaoke effort rather than one which was painfully off-key to listen to, would have been so much more moving. That said, Mescal is a mesmerising presence, and one vignette towards the end is particularly disarming – although confusing – as the film builds towards a hazy reveal that is clearly meant to be momentous rather than bewildering, Wells opting for flashbacks that invite an open-ended interpretation of what has gone before and how it relates to the present and future for Sophie and her father. MT

NOW SCREENING AT LONDON FILM FESTIVAL until 16 OCTOBER 2022.

Little Axel (2021) Raindance Film Festival 2022

Dir.: Fabien Greenberg, Bard Kjøge Rønning; Documentary with Axel Joachim Jensen, Marianne Ihlen, Leonard Cohen, Nick Broomfield, Axel B. Jensen; Norway 2021, 57′

A new and heart-breaking documentary about Axel Joachim Jensen (*1960), who has spent more than forty years in Oslo’s Gaustadt Psychiatric Hospital, being treated with anti-psychotic drugs. Best known for being the son of Norwegian writer Axel Buchardt Jensen (1932-2003), aka the Norwegian Jack Keouac, and Marianne Ihlen, muse of Leonard Cohen, who both died a few months apart in 2016, his life has been tragic, to say the least.

In the 1960s, the Greek island of Hydra was a paradise for sex, alcohol and drugs and haven where artists and would-be artists had the time of their lives. When Marianne Ihlen and her new-born son Axel Joachim Jensen arrived on the island, Marianne presumed that Axel sr would be there to raise his son. But the author had already left with another female admirer leaving Marianne and Axel in the lurch. Enter Canadian writer and poet Leonard Cohen, who would for over twenty years be Axel’s more or less caring father. Cohen paid Alex’s eduction at the anti-authoritarian Summerhill in Suffolk, and later in a much stricter Swiss boarding school.

But Axel, like many children in the artist colony, roamed free from an early age. Kids were present at the parties, and the partner changes, and Axel started smoking when he was seven. Later he turned to hashish and, when he met his biological father Axel sr for the first and last time as a young teenager, Axel sr then introduced him to LSD, profoundly affecting his emotional development.

When Axel jr was nine, he and a friend of his – just three years older – travelled 260 km around Greece without any supervision. India was his next traumatic playground, at the tender age of fifteen. By his late teens he was institutionalised in Gaustadt after spending time with Cohen in New York where the international star spent the nights at the famous Chelsea Hotel. His relationship with Ihlen had ended after eight years, but the two remained friends ’til the end of their lives.

Filmmaker Nick Broomfield, who directed Marianne and Leonard: Words of Love, is one of many witnesses interpreting the environment where Axel jr and other children grew up. But the main reason why Axel went off the rails was his father, author Axel. B Jensen, whose comments on marriage and child-rearing are bizarre to say the least. He was a patient of the anti-establishment psychiatrist David Cooper, who rated his mental state as borderline.

As for Axel Jensen’s legal guardian, who encouraged his ‘participation’ in the documentary, one can only guess for motives: Axel comes across as a shell of a person, after being prescribed forty years (and counting) of mind-altering drugs. His mother was the only person who regularly visited him in Graustadt, but she too had a new family to look after.

Little Axel’s childhood may have had an enviable childhood but his personality was simply too sensitive to withstand the abrupt changes his life took. This is one of most depressing documentaries for a long time exploring unintentional childhood neglect leading to lifelong psychiatric care. Poor Axel was well-nourished and provided for materially but deprived of the stable and unconditional love he deserved. AS

RAINDANCE FILM FESTIVAL 2022

Robe of Gems (2022)

Dir/scr: Natalia López Gallardo. Mexico/Argentina/US. 2022. 118 mins

A visually striking, thought-provoking and disquieting feature debut from Natalia López Gallardo who joins a talented array of female filmmakers such as Tatiana Huezo (Prayers for the Stolen)and Fernanda Valadez (Identifying Features) in bringing more intriguing stories from Latin America.

Isabel (Nailea Norvind) and her family live with her mother (Monica Poggio) in a rambling estancia where the threat of gang violence seems a million miles away from their languorous existence, although for their housekeeper, Maria (Antonia Olivares), it is very real and possibly the reason for the recent disappearance of her sister. Isabel is going through some kind of emotional trauma of her own after a potential marital disagreement. At a loose end and in empathy with Maria, she decides to make some discrete but ultimately ill-advised inquiries of her own.

In a bid to be enigmatic Robe of Gems loses its impact drifting around nebulously between a police thriller and a stylistic arthouse drama until finally gaining some shape in the second hour. The connections between the characters are never fully explained, their lives gradually fading into view in the woozy heat of a Mexican summer, the focus on mid-shots and close-ups only adding to the air of mystery in a drama where a great deal happens off-camera, in a series of episodes. Beyond the artistic flourishes though, few clues are given to enable understanding or feeling for the rather buttoned-up characters. That all said, López Gallardo must be applauded for telling a sinister story with such a lightness of touch and without resorting to violence; the final scene is quietly devastating. MT

BFI London Film Festival 2022 | SILVER BEAR JURY PRIZE WINNER | BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL 2022

Two films by Wendy Toye | British Directors

Born in London on 1 May 1917, Wendy Toye made her stage debut at the age of three when she appeared at the Royal Albert Hall as a member of a juvenile dance troupe. Her solo turn as part of the act brought her considerable publicity, and Toye began to perform in music halls and charity shows with many of the day’s top stage stars. By the age of nine, she appeared at the Palladium in a ballet she had choreographed herself, entitled The Japanese Legend of the Rainbow. Toye was soon in much demand as a choreographer and was invited to perform with Serge Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe, where she met the film-maker/artist Jean Cocteau.

In 1931, she made her first film appearance, appearing in Anthony Asquith’s Dance Pretty Lady, but was more interested in the technical process of filmmaking than in acting. By 1942 she was arranging the dances for The Young Mr Pitt (where she was befriended by director Carol Reed, editor David Lean, cameraman Ronald Neame and actors Robert Morley and Richard Attenborough) and in 1946, she served as choreographer on Herbert Wilcox and Anna Neagle’s Piccadilly Incident. During this period, Wendy’s talents as a stage director meant she was in increasingly high demand.

On meeting the British producer George K. Arthur, Toye expressed interest in directing a short, The Stranger Left No Card (1953), for him. Made on a budget of £3,000, the film was a delightfully sinister parable which won the best short film award at The Cannes Film Festival and impressed Alexander Korda sufficiently for him to offer Toye a contract.

Toye directed the ‘In the Picture’ episode of Three Cases of Murder (co-d. David Eady, George More O’Ferrall, 1953), The Teckman Mystery (1954) and the domestic comedy, Raising A Riot (1955) for Korda until his sudden death in 1956 saw her contract shifted to Rank. There, she made All for Mary (1955) and the nautical comedy True as a Turtle (1957). Both films did well at the box office, but Toye had to wait until 1962 for her next film assignment, We Joined The Navy; another seagoing comedy. Toye’s last theatrical film was a short entitled The King’s Breakfast (1963), after which she turned to directing television drama, as well as continuing to be celebrated for her extensive work in the theatre.

Although Wendy Toye complained that Rank refused to support her desire to direct projects more ambitious than her comedies, she took pride in the fact that she never went over budget, and that her responsible example paved the way for other women to enter the field. She continued directing stage comedies until the mid 1990s, when she retired, with a lifetime of work in the theatre and film to her considerable credit.

THE TECKMAN MYSTERY

Toye directs a thriller by Francis Durbridge that sees a writer fall in love with the sister of a pilot missing during during a test flight. Despite being superficially set against a backdrop of Cold War intrigue, nobody seems to be taking an ambling anecdote about a missing pilot terribly seriously. It might well have worked better as a B movie, still with the same supporting cast, of whom the most entertaining by far is Duncan Lamont as a sardonic detective involved in the case.@RichardChatten

WE JOINED THE NAVY

It’s not every day you see a film starring Kenneth More, Lloyd Nolan and Mischa Auer (the latter playing a double role)! Directed by a woman, scripted under a pseudonym by a blacklistee from a 1959 novel by John Winton that vouchsafed a few home truths about Naval Intelligence, set against the backdrop of a revolution abroad and released the month after the Cuban missile crisis.

It it all sounds fascinating on paper, but evidently wasn’t considered any threat by the authorities since the makers were permitted the use of the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth and had the money to lavish upon widescreen & colour location work in Villefranche-sur-Mer. @RichardChatten

ON BLU-RAY & DIGITAL FOR THE FIRST TIME FROM NOVEMBER 21

Nocebo (2022)

Dir: Lorcan Finnegan | Wri: Garret Shanley | Cast: Eva Green, Mark Strong, Chai Fonacier, Billie Gadsdon | Ireland, thriller 90′

A blood-sucking insect is a metaphor for the exploitative fashion industry in this ingenious horror outing starring Mark Strong and Eva Green. She plays a fashion designer suffering from a mysterious illness that frustrates her husband (Strong), the pragmatic voice of reason, and leaves their little daughter Bobs -a stunning Billie Gadsdon – totally distraught. Help arrives in the form of a Diana, a Filipino carer (Fonacier) who uses traditional healing to reveal a terrible truth in this latest riff on the nanny sub-genre.

Best known for his distinctive sophomore feature Vivarium Irish director Lorcan Finnegan plunders Filipino folklore and may have had his fellow countryman Sheridan Le Fanu’s The Evil Guest in mind for this incendiary thriller set in the contemporary and contentious world of children’s fashion. Once again, as in Vivarium, the focus is a married couple in crisis, this time a well-off professional couple: Chrissi (Green) and Felix (Strong) who live in a vast Victorian mansion in smart part of Dublin, but Bobs comes second to their high-flying careers.

The marriage is not without its flaws and the opening scene that sees the couple arguing about who should pick Bobs up from school – as they climb into their top of the range cars in their gravelled driveway – will strike a familiar cord for parents who both work. Eva Green’s delicate – almost feral – beauty is just right for the role of Chrissi a highly-strung children’s designer whose health takes a turn for the worse after a difficult phone-call provokes a series of ghastly hallucinations featuring a dog festooned in tics.

Feeling generally under the weather Chrissi completely forgets hiring Diana (Fonacier), a spooky Filipino helper who arrives on the doorstep making herself immediately at home. Felix resents her intrusive way about the house calling her “a backward snake oil merchant”. Diana is indeed a mixed blessing – she cooks sumptuous meals and provides Chrissi with symptom relief – but always with the sinister caveat “for the time being”. A sinuous use of slow-mo and an exotic score ramps up our fears for the family, and flashbacks reveal Diana’s troubled past toiling in a Filipino sweatshop. Garret Shanley’s well-thought out script touches on all the right notes with convincing characters, a backstory that feels real and a satisfying plot resolution, and although the finale is a touch overwrought Nocebo is a slick and gripping watch. MT

ON RELEASE in early DECEMBER 2022

Marrakech Film Festival 2022 | Jury Announced

The Marrakech International Film Festival announces the members of the jury of its 19th edition, scheduled to take place from 11 to 19 November 2022. The international jury will award the Étoile d’Or to one of the 14 first and second feature films in the competition, which is dedicated to the discovery of filmmakers from around the world.

Jury president Paolo Sorrentino is joined by Danish director Susanne Bier, Guatemalan-born US actor and producer Oscar Isaac, British actress Vanessa Kirby, German actress Diane Kruger, Australian director Justin Kurzel, Lebanese director and actress Nadine Labaki, Moroccan director Laïla Marrakchi and French actor Tahar Rahim.

Representing 10 different countries from four continents, the jury of the Festival’s 19th edition reflects the Marrakech International Film Festival, an event that celebrates world cinema.

The jury will render its verdict during the closing night of the Festival on November 19, 2022

MARRAKECH FILM FESTIVAL 2022 | 11-19 NOVEMBER 2022

Pamfir (2022)

Wri/Dir.: Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk; Cast: Oleksandre Yatsentyuk, Stanislaw Potiak, Solomiia Kyrylova, Yelena Khoknahlatkina, Miroslav Makoviychuk, Ivan Sharan, Oleksandr Yarema; Ukraine/France/Poland/Chile/ Germany/Luxembourg 2022, 102 min.

Pamfir may look like the typical gangster movie, but it turns out to be quite different from any other genre outing: a noirish fairytale Western where the Indians have been replaced by wild beasts from the past. It all unfolds during the folkloric Malanka festival in the wild and inhospitable western part of Ukraine’s Romanian borderlands around where the director grew up, .

Leonid (Yatsentyuk), also known as Pamfir – which means stone returns home to his village after a stint in Poland. His wife Olena (Kyrylova) and teenage son Nazar (Potiak) have really missed him and their re-union is emotional. But not so with his father Pamfir’s (Makoviychuk), who lost an eye after a fight with his son. Victor’s grandmother (Khoknahlatkina) tries, with the help of her younger son Victor (Sharan), to bring the feuding men together, but the feud continues.

It soon turns out the whole family have been involved in smuggling contraband to Romania, with Pamfir as the ringleader, earning the nickname of “Godfather”. He now wants to go straight but his attempt to reintegrate into mainstream society are scuppered when his son Nazar burns down the local church, destroying not only Pamfir’s documents bit making his father liable to pay compensation. Working with his sidekick , “The Rat”, he continues his illegal trading with Romania unnaware of being watched by another gangster who goes by the name of Oletsa (Yarema) and his men. Oletsa not only runs the smuggling operations, but also the church. Oletsa’s men attack Pamfir, asking the crimelord to do “one last run” to pay back his debts. But, as usual, there is a snag: the tunnel, leading to Romania is narrow, and only Nazar will be able to get through.

The focus then turns to Olena whose back-breaking job at her father in law’s factory, keeping the family afloat, also contributed to the loss of her first child. She now becomes more and more instrumental in ending Pamfir’s smuggling career once and for all.

DoP Nikita Kuzmenko’s heightens the atmosphere of terror that propels Pamfir in primal almost poetic journey. The camera is constantly on the prowl in long tracking shots through foggy woods encompassing vast widescreen landscapes and ancient forests that belong in a fairytale. And this is exactly what the director is aiming for: the villagers’ straw costumes during the carnival celebrations; their wooden masks, garishly painted, bring to mind the ghastly ritual of pagan festivals and the fear generated by The Wicker Man. The ghastly brutality of this atavistic festival resurges through Pamfir’s effort to liberate himself from the violence of the modern day. Gorgeous to watch, full of twisty revelations, PAMFIR is a stunning feature debut. AS

In Cinemas 5 May 2023 |

Winners (2022)

Dir/Wri: Hassan Nazer. UK. 2022. 85 mins.

Cinema Paradiso comes to mind and is actually mentioned in this sunny tribute to cinema and the Iranian directors past and present from award-winning filmmaker Hassan Nazer. It follows the adventures of a young film fan who comes across a shiny Oscar like statuette in the dusty wasteland surrounding his village in the remote desert of Kavir, and decides to trace its owner. The film also stars Mohammad Naji from Majid Majidi’s 2007 Song of Sparrows another delightful drama that also charmed the birds off the trees.

Iranians love their cinema so much so that there are no less than three newspapers dedicated entirely to the subject. And this delicate lyrical fable echoes with the spirit of Iranian cinema and filmmakers such as Abbas Kiarostami, Asghar Farhadi , Majid Majidi, and many who languish in prison. Hassan Nazer made the film in Scotland where he arrived as a refugee two decades ago.

It opens when keen cineaste and Afghan refugee Yahya (Parsa Maghami) watching Jafar Panahi’s 2015 Golden Bear-winning Taxi while his widowed mother is imploring him to go to bed. During the day he works for Nasser Khan (Naji hiding from the authorities) on one of Tehran’s scrapyards for a minimum wage. In the dusty rubble he then discovers the statuette which has already had a colourful history of its own, that started in the back of a taxi and finished in the middle of the road via the local post office. Nazer packs a great deal into his charismatic feature and the joie de vivre it generates makes it a success. MT

IN CINEMAS NATIONWIDE from 16 March 2023 | RAINDANCE FILM FESTIVAL | 26 OCTOBER – 5 NOVEMBER 2022

1976 (2022)

Dir.: Manuela Martelli; Cast: Aline Kuppenheim, Nicolas Sepulveda, Hugo Medina, Alejandro Goic, Carmen Gloria Martinez, Gabriel Urzua; Vilma Verdejo, Yasna Ríos; Chile 2022, 97 min.

Another classically styled arthouse drama taking us back to the turbulent 1970s in Latin America seen through the eyes of a well to do Santiago woman, under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet Ugarte.

1976 is a first feature for Chilean director/co-writer Manuela Martelli who works with a predominantly female crew and seasoned actress Aline Kuppenheim (A Fantastic Woman) who gives a sensitive performance in this lowkey but thematically vibrant domestic drama as 49 year old Carmen.

Carmen is redecorating the family’s holiday home near the beach in time for the season. As she chooses paint for the walls the sound of gunshot is clearly audible in the nearby street. Back at the house, she meets the local priest Father Sanchez (Medina) who has been involving her in various charity efforts, and his latest suggestion is that she takes in a young homeless man called Elias (Sepulveda).

Elias has been classified as a fugitive from Pinochet’s ‘Secret Police’, and is currently sheltering in one of the out-houses. He seems mild-mannered enough although in need of medical attention for a bullet in his thigh. Carmen always wanted to be a doctor but her father would not allow her to follow in his path, but somehow Elias brings out her caring side, and her recent Red Cross stint certainly comes in handy to took after the young man.

Father Sanchez later reveals that Elias was put in charge of two children after the Pinochet putsch, but that he panicked and became traumatised when they were later murdered. Carmen’s three grandchildren arrive with their mother and the rest of the family, the kids complaining that their favourite TV programme has been interrupted by a broadcast from Pinochet, adds further context. During all this, Carmen looks after Elias, tending to his bullet wound, soon finding herself assisting Elias is some of his underground work. She meets Silvia (Ríos), a fellow conspirator who gives her the code name “Cleopatra”, and sets up a meeting with another link in the resistance chain, who want to spirit Elias away.

Carmen’s husband Miguel, a doctor in Santiago, arrives at the house, much more interested in his college Osvaldo, who has chosen Miguel (Goic) to “re-organise” the hospital where one of the doctors has already fled the country. But when a young girl is found dead near the beach, and the writing is on the wall. Carmen’s next rendezvous with a parish priest does not go according to plan, and she is followed in her car which is later ransacked. Carmen knows she is living on borrowed time, and her maid Julita (Verdejo) soon confirms Carmen worst fears in a rather spooky scene at dusk. Will Carmen’s status and marriage save her?

The main thrust of the story is the developing relationship between Elias and Carmen. Keeping her distance at first and seeing Elias as just another charge to take care of for father Sanchez, the memory of her thwarted career and the negligence and nagging by her husband (who sees her as a ‘trophy’ to show her off to family and friends) changes the dynamic between them.

The tipping point for Carmen is another dig by Miguel, due to her wearing a dress showing off her figure: Carmen cuts the dress into pieces, but also ends all emotional ties to her status. She asks Elias, jokingly, if she will be remembered after the downfall of the Pinochet regime, and he claims a hospital will be named after her. But Elias is also aware of the danger for Carmen: “Tell them you never saw me, that you did not know my name. They will believe you”.

DoP Yarará Rodgriguez lets the camera glide over the beautiful coastal landscape, but his close-ups of Carmen are equally impressive, highlighting her personal transformation. She is anything but a dutiful member of the underground: thanks to Father Sanchez, she has stumbled into something much more dangerous than she can imagine, but she also has a point to prove: her rebellion is personal, disobeying her husband and all he believes in has become her tool for resistance. Aline Kuppenheim is brilliant as Carmen, supporting by an impressive cast. 1976 is a small gem, made on a shoestring it brings together the personal and the political in a subversive way. Maria Portugal’s mournful score very much underlines the lyrical narrative. AS

NOW ON BFI PLAYER RENTALS | BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL | CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | CANNES PREMIERES 2022

Confetti (2021)

Dir.: Ann Hu; Cast: Harmonie He, Zhu Zhu, Amy Irving, Helen Slater, Li Ya Nan; USA/China 2021, 97 min.

Dyslexia is a common condition that bears no relation to intelligence. In CONFETTI Chinese-American writer/director Ann Hu presents an engaging, humanistic drama about the struggle for adequate education for dyslexic students in two vastly different cultures and countries namely China and the USA.

In China where dyslexia is barely recognised, Mei Mei (He), daughter of Lan (Zhu Zhu) and Lao Chen (Ya Nan) is teased and bullied at her small-town primary school. Lan, who is illiterate, fears her daughter will ostracised by society, having to do a menial job as a cleaner, like her illiterate mother. When Thomas, an American teacher, meets Mei Mei, he immediately suspects she is dyslexic: his sister displayed the same symptoms, but still went on to enjoy an academic career. Lan discusses the educational offering for dyslexic students in the USA and proposes she and Mei Mei emigrate there to benefit from these schools.

In New York Lan and Mei Mei stay with Thomas’ friend Helen McCellan (Irving), a wheelchair-bound writer who has lost her close family in a car crash, and is just in the process of finishing her book. The search for a suitable school gets underway in a much more positive way than in China where the authorities were blatantly ill-informed and unhelpful. But in the US money is the key to accessing schools and social services. Eventually, Lan and Helen come across ‘Horizon’, an institution catering for students with all kinds of special needs who are prepared to consider taking Mei Mei providing the child gets a neuro-psychological evaluation from a registered psychiatrist. And this does not come cheaply. But this means that Helen can connect personally with Dr. Wurmer (Slater), head of the ‘Horizon’; but Lan’s patience has run out, and she want to fly home to China.

As always in Hu’s feature, details play a big role; and culture clash is not just linguistic but brought about by very different expectations between the two countries, Hu letting sentimentality creep into a narrative whose structure does not leave much room for ambiguity. Still, Confetti – named after the colourful paper rain symbolising Mei Mei’s attempt to deal with language – is a worthwhile feature, but not one of her most intriguing as a director. AS

IN UK CINEMAS FROM 21 OCTOBER 2022 | IN SUPPORT OF THE BRITISH DYSLEXIA ASSOCIATION

Beyond the White (2021)

Dir: Evgeny Kalachikhin | Wri: Anastasia Gorokhova | USSR, Doc, 90′

If your idea of heaven is vast open seascapes and silence then Beyond the White is a documentary that may appeal

Cut off from civilisation the Northern Russian villages of the Kola Peninsula are scattered along the shores of the White Sea a southern inlet of the Berents Sea. Here on the Tersky coast wild white horses roam freely, rather like in the Camargue, and bring to mind Andrey Konchalovskiy’s award-winning film The Postman’s White Nights (2014).

In this remote location the twenty or thirty inhabitants live in traditional blue painted wooden houses surrounded by water, forests, and sand. Most have now moved to the larger cities and the major port of Arkhangelskaya. The weather-beaten inhabitants that remain live in blue-painted wooden houses and survive from dwindling fish stocks -mostly herring – home-baked bread and pies that are cooked in kiln-like ovens built into the chimney.

The focus is a fire that has been burning across the flat steppe like-terrain providing cause for concern reflected in Alessandra Medianikova’s incendiary images. But Anastasia Gorokhova avoids a traditional narrative relying instead on the stunning landscapes themselves and an often epic soundscape to paint a vivid panoramic picture of the locals and their animals – including mosquitoes- living in communion with nature in the wild beauty of the primitive elements at the end of the world. MT

ZURICH FILM FESTIVAL 2022 | NOW AVAILABLE AT TRUESTORY.FILM

No Bears (2022)

Dir: Jafar Panahi | Cast: Jafar Panahi, Naser Hashemi, Vahid Mobaseri, Bakhtiar Panjei, Mina Kavani, Narjes Delaram, Reza Heydari | Iran, 104’

Two love stories intercept in this latest from Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi. No Bears sees him play arbiter and remote filmmaker – from a laptop in exile in his own country – in a deceptively simple political docudrama set on the Turkish border with Iran: Borders being the major thematic concern.

The gulf between tradition and modernity, city and countryside, fact and superstition is expounded and questioned with dark humour and a lightness of touch as the director tries to get on with shooting his film amid dodgy wifi connections. It follows Zara (Mina Kavani) and Bakhtiar (Bakhtiar Penjei) who are hoping to find freedom in Europe. In the process of securing fake passports, Zara makes it clear that they must leave together – or the deal is off. So much for love!.

From a remote village just over the border in Iran, Panahi is monitoring proceedings from his laptop with the help of Ghanbar (Vahid Mobaseri), his earnest assistant director who suddenly leaves to attend a wedding ceremony. Panahi asks him to film the ceremony involving a couple who have been betrothed since the cutting of the newborn bride to be’s umbilical cord. But another man has become involved with the bride and she has jumped at the opportunity to go him to Tehran causing much concern for the traditional local community who have resorted to smuggling, as farming no longer makes any money since the drought.

While desperately trying to keep a low profile from the authorities Panahi finds himself drawn into village politics with the local sheriff (Hashemi) claiming the director has taken a photo of the two putative elopers – witnessed by a little boy. Although Panahi is adamant to the contrary, giving his photo-card as proof, he gradually finds himself ‘persona non grata’ amongst the locals. And as the tone grows progressively more urgent for the troubled lovers Panahi ponders not only freedom of movement but also creative and intellectual liberty in his beleaguered nation, and further afield. No Bears is no great shakes from a visual point of view but carries a potent sociopolitical message. MT

No Bears BFI London Film Festival 2022 | October 5-16 in cinemas and on BFI Player On general release nationwide from Friday, November 11.

Live Now Pay Later (1962)

Dir: Jay Lewis | UK Drama 104’

One of the most grievous tragedies of British film preservation was the wiping by the BBC of the original TV version of David Mercer’s ‘A Suitable Case for Treatment’, but a good idea of what Ian Hendry’s performance was like can be gained from this long-forgotten gem described by Raymond Durgnat as “a key film, a worthy harbinger of Joan Littlewood’s ‘Sparrows Can’t Sing’.

Hendry was nominated for a BAFTA for most promising newcomer in a leading role, but soon after swiftly declined into alcoholism before the sixties seriously got under way. Knowing this adds further poignancy to this reminder of the era when Harold MacMillan was telling the public that “most of you have never had it so good” and £14.09d was a sun large enough to be worth sending bailiffs in to recover.

The script by Jack Trevor Story contains cynical lines like Hendry’s admission that he preys upon people “I con into buying things they don’t need and can’t afford”; notably Liz Fraser as one of his victims whose misfortunes culminate in a truly harrowing scene when men come to repossess her furniture while her husband is in the middle of impressing the chairman of the local golf club. @RichardChatten

NOW ON TPTV

Black Night (2022) Antalya Film Festival 2022

Dir.: Ozcan Alper; Cast: Berkey Ates, Cem Yigit Üzumoglu, Taner Birsel, Sibil Kekill, Pinar Deniz, Firat Kaymak; Turkey/ Germany/Netherlands/USA 2022, 113 min.

Turkish director/co-writer Ozcan Alper (Memories of the Wind) offers up a dispassionate and violent portrait of the Turkish countryside where prejudice combined with a toxic male superiority complex lead to an unpunished murder.

Told in parallel strands, the flashbacks of the original assassination and the attempt at atonement, seven years later, are brilliantly edited by Osman Bayraktaroglu and Umut Sakallioglu. During an opening shot, Ozcan Alper shows the group hysteria generated by the men’s hunting expedition. Their bloodlust, coupled with the promise of free meat, is a symbolic motif repeated in different variations through the feature.

Ishak (Ates) has been forced to go back to his village for the first time in seven years when his mother falls ill, having studiously avoided being there for his father’s funeral, a domestic tyrant who had beaten his whole family for decades. We soon learn another reason for Ishak’s reluctance to return:, the disappearance of his close friend Ali (Üzumoglu), a forest engineer. The exact circumstances are unclear as Ishak had fainted when he saw Ali’s bloodied-stained body.

So once the funeral is over, Ishak confronts his ‘friends’ demanding to know the truth. But they stonewall him and kill his faithful dog Clown. Ishak then visits the vagabond Ferhat (Birsel), who lives in the mountains where Ali disappeared, and Ferhat’s daughter Sirma (Kekill), a university lecturer in Germany. In flashback we watch Ali giving Maths lessons to Sultan (Deniz), a young woman from the village who had been sent out to find out ‘if her teacher was gay’, something everyone – apart from Ishak – had agreed on. It was clear that Ali and Sultan clearly fancied each other so Ishak asks her why she ended up marrying the abusive Nurettin (Imer), who she could not stand before Ali’s disappearance. Searching in the nearby caves for Ali’s body, Ishak finds a note giving him an exact location in a cave. It then emerges that a possible reason for Ali’s disappearance was that he was murdered by the villagers for destroying the traps they had laid out to catch wildlife : this way of poaching was forbidden by law. So they conjured up a rumour that he was either gay or taking advantage of a local woman.

Towering panoramic shots, a signature of Turkish cinema, showcase the majestic beauty of surrounding landscape. But for some, namely the villagers, the countryside is just a killing field where they hunt their forbidden prey, driving it to a cruel death. DoP Imer’s cave images are particularly special, reminiscent of El Buco. Powerful and uncompromising, Oczan Alper shows how personal gain turns into violent political mechanics.

BLACK NIGHT is Turkish cinema at its best, visually impressive and relevant, a much deserved winner at the National feature film Competition of the Golden Orange Festival in Antalya, where his feature garnered Best Screenplay and Best Film. AS

Bread and Salt (2022) Antalya Film Festival (2022)

Dir/Wri: Damian Kotzur | Tymoteusz Bies, Jacek Bies, Bartosz Olewinski, Malgorzata Puzio, Nikola Raczko, Nadim Shelabi, Nadim Suleiman, Wojciech Walkiewicz | Poland, Drama, 99′

A classical pianist reconnects with his past in this contemplative portrait of Polish youth that unfolds in a series of impressionistic episodes, Tomasz Wozniczka’s liquid velvet lensing and the brilliant musical interludes elevating it from being just another story of tribal conflict.

In his outstanding first feature Damian Kotzur turns a racial tragedy into a lyrical poem. Bread and Salt – a traditional Polish greeting to newcomers – is a film full of rhythmic contrasts that gracefully balances classical and contemporary, formality and playfulness, introspection and gravity, joy and anguish, based on real events that occurred in a provincial Polish town where nothing much has changed since the fall of communism.

Tymek (Bies), a piano scholar at Warsaw’s famous Academy of Music, is back home for the summer and spends lazy days with his younger (real life) brother Jacek who has been slack in practising for his piano exams preferring to hang out with his mates and girlfriend Anita. Tymek joins in the fun but always at a discerning distance.

Their placid summer vibe is punctured by a racial incident on the bus where tension bristles when the gang tease Arab-speaking kebab shop worker Nadim, taking his rucksack and shouting racial taunts. To his credit, Nadim takes it all with a pinch of salt, philosophically claiming the incident was “God’s Will”. Tymek, already a regular at the kebab shop, quietly refuses to be drawn into proceedings but he cannot prevent his friends from having their ‘fun’. He and Nadim have a quiet respect for one another, Tymek shyly inquiring if Nadim has been offered the “bread and salt” since his arrival in the small town. Their chemistry is palpable but their tentative friendship is of a different kind and cannot calm the troubled waters or cannot bridge the gap between the sparring sides

Kotzur and his co-writer Marta Konarzewska have clearly perfected their script and Alan Zejer’s clever editing is the icing on the cake. A cast of non-professionals keeps the action fresh and real. There are scenes of sheer jubilation at a fairground attraction and these combine with the subtle beauty of a cloud of murmurating starlings; the exhilaration of the brothers’ classical piano duet (mainly playing Chopin’s nocturnes and Szymanowski’s compositions), Tymek’s subtle avoidance of Nikola’s advances as he glances casually at his bedroom clock, and his smouldering verbal attack on his tiny pupil who is driven to silent tears, the deep shock as a pool of blood seeps symbolically into the sign of a cross. And the final moments – without giving too much away – are deeply moving, elliptical and artistically sublime. A stunning debut. MT

BEST DIRECTOR | INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION | ANTALYA FILM FESTIVAL 2022

Snow and the Bear (2022) Antalya Film Festival

Dir/Wri: Selcen Ergun | Turkey, Drama 104’

A woman battles the elements and an intractable winter in this well-crafted debut feature from writer-director Selcen Ergun that plays out as a metaphor for female survival in modern day Turkey.

In a snowbound village in the remote eastern part of the country, young nurse Aslı (Merve Dizdar) arrives from the capital – in a similar vein to Burning Days – although lacking the brooding intensity of Alper’s incendiary thriller.

After making her way through a mountain blizzard, it soon becomes clear that her new post is going to be challenging, physically and from a personal point of view.

The hostile weather has brought bears to the village hungry for food after their long winter sleep, but also an unwelcome guest in the shape of Hasan (Erkan Bektaş) – a rowdy, unpopular drunkard – who soon vanishes fuelling rumours that he might have fallen foul of his sworn enemy, the sinister Samet (Saygın Soysal) – or even that bears might be responsible for his disappearance.

Dizdar is calm and resolute as the long-suffering female newcomer Asli, facing a deeply engrained patriarchal set-up where myth and folklore conspire against her modern outlook and professional training, in this enjoyable thriller enhanced by Florent Herry’s sensitive visual allure and an evocative score by Erdem Helvacıoğlu. MT

BEST FIRST FILM – BEST ACTRESS MERVE DIZDAR | NATIONAL COMPETITION | ANTALYA FILM FESTIVAL 2022

Copenhagen Architecture Film Festival 2022

Copenhagen Architecture Festival x 2022 presents its most comprehensive edition to date: more than 100 events throughout the Danish capital will offer the opportunity to contemplate and explore what ‘Sense of Place’ means for architecture and the built environment today in films, exhibitions and debates with a host of international guests.

Film highlights include Claire Denis VENDREDI SOIR (2002) that sees Vincent Lindon and Valerie Lamercier star as strangers drawn to each other in an erotically-charged encounter on one of the hottest nights of the summer in Paris. The streets are jammed with traffic but a balmy limbo descends on the couple who are like ships that gently collide in the starry night. Claire Denis uses her unique recording and detailed cinematic language to tell a very sensual story.

The film is presented by Mathias Ruthner, film editor at Øjets Bibliotek. (Introduction in Danish)

Vendredi Soir / Claire Denis, 2002 / France / French with English subtitles / 90 min. + introduction

Vendredi Soir (2002)

THE STREET FILM STRAND

Allowing hostile and friendly encounters, the street is the bedrock of modern society; a motif so deeply engrained in the narratives and images of culture and a centuries-old engine of Western architectural and modernist theory.

6/10 The Dangerous Street I: MEAN STREETS by Martin Scorsese

7/10 The erotic street: FRIDAY NIGHT by Claire Denis

10/10 The Dangerous Street II: MANILA IN THE CLAWS OF LIGHT by Lino Brocka

15/10 The Social Street: DO THE RIGHT THING by Spike Lee

16/10 The anti-social street: NEIGHBOURING SOUNDS by Kleber Mendonca Filho

16/10 The Dilapidated Street: BEHIND THE MASK OF JOY by Georg Pabst

COPENHAGEN ARCHITECTURE FILM FESTIVAL 2022

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Emily (2022)

Dir.: Frances O’Connor; Cast: Emma Mackey, Alexandra Dowling, Amelia Gething, Fionn Whitehead, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Adrian Dunbar; UK/US 2022, 130 min.

This big screen imagining of Emily Bronte’s life is a wild affair that will offend scholars but delight cinema audiences. Emma Mackey is dynamite as the 18th century poet and novelist who dares to have sex with a curate and revolts against patriarchy and her two sisters, who are only too happy to conform.

Emily is a rebel with a cause: the early death of her mother has seen two of her Brontë sisters Charlotte (Alexandra Dowling), Anne (Gething) cow-towing to their stern, rather blustery father Patrick (Dunbar), who regularly hammers home the word of God from the pulpit. His Byronesque son Branwell (Whitehead) will become a role model for Emily: she copies his tattoos proclaiming ‘freedom of mind’ and turns a blind eye to his opium habit which will be his undoing.

The new curate William Weightman (Jackson-Cohen) is handsome beyond belief but deeply wedded to God. All her sisters swoon over William, but only Emily takes action: their affair is passionate and sweepingly romantic, firing up her senses and sublimating real life into her poems and famous, and only, novel ‘Wuthering Heights’.

Alas, William gets cold feet, the fear of God and Patrick, his stand-in on Earth, plays on his conscience, driving him to terminate their affair. But on the eve of Emily’s departure with Charlotte to Brussels, the curate rues his decision, and gives a letter to Branwell, begging Emily to stay and be his love. The remainder of the drama plays out in this mood of utter devastation of mind and body, before the final triumph of ‘Wuthering Heights’.

The plot turns on the letter episode: O’Connor does not go with the submissive suffering of the three women – she hurtles headlong into Thomas Hardy territory and ‘Jude the Obscure’. But although Branwell is a less evil creature than Hardy’s Arabella, he still plays God to the detriment of the lovers.

DoP Nanu Segal makes nature as foreboding as the lovers’ souls with the English countryside blossoming in tune with the lovers’ springtime emotions and brooding in the murkiest of winter hues, as the camera exploring the ghostly atmosphere of the moors in gloomy tracking shots. Haworth, the village, where Emily is seen as an outsider, is shown as a bastion of local traders and shopkeepers.

Abel Korzenioski’s Gothic score ramps up the romance but the self-defeating story perseveres with its passionate tale of woe. The only slight drawback in this gut-wrenching tale about a woman colliding with a world run by men is the self-indulgent running time that takes away the sting of the bitter male/female confrontations. Although O’Connor plays fast and lose with a few literary facts this is no place for anaemic scholarly retrospection – Emily is a drama seen through the prism of female emancipation; a vivid re-imagining of what could have been. AS

ON RELEASE FROM OCTOBER 14 2022

The Lost King (2022)

Director: Stephen Frears| Cast: Sally Hawkins, Steve Coogan, Harry Lloyd, James Fleet, Jessica Hardwick, Robert Jack, John-Paul Hurley, Sinead MacInnes | UK Drama, 108′

Sally Hawkins plays the researcher who discovered the remains of Richard III in this low-key drama from director Stephen Frears. The result is entirely watchable but ultimately a little uneven, as if it can’t quite decide which story it wants to tell.

Hawkins plays Philippa Langley, a divorced mother of two young teenage boys, who’s passed over at work possibly due to suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome. When she takes one of her sons to see a production of Richard III, she feels an instant kinship with the King (played by Harry Lloyd) and is compelled to learn more about his life.

After becoming a member of the Richard III Society and doing some diligent detective work, Philippa becomes convinced Richard’s remains are buried beneath a car park in Leicester. However, she meets continual resistance from various Leicester authorities, who are then only too pleased to take all the credit once Philippa’s hunch turns out to be correct.

Understandably, given the similar based-on-a-true-story premise, Frears has reunited a significant number of the creative team behind his 2013 hit Philomena, including co-writers Steve Coogan (who has a token support role as Philippa’s supportive ex-husband) and Jeff Pope. Also on board is Philomena’s composer, Alexandre Desplat, who opens the film with a bizarre pastiche of Bernard Herrmann’s theme for Psycho, setting entirely the wrong tone.

That tonal inconsistency continues throughout the film, as the script cycles between several different story aspects seemingly unable to settle on whether it wants to be a fantasy-tinged tale of self-discovery, a symbolic battle against the establishment (men) and injustice, or a heart-warming, lightly comedic family drama. In the end, in trying to be all three elements at once, it fails to fully satisfy in any of them.

Hawkins is on her usual excellent form as Philippa, but it frequently feels like she’s only been given one note to play. On top of that, the conceit of having her essentially haunted by Richard III (Lloyd appears by her side repeatedly, with very little dialogue) largely backfires because she starts to look crazy, especially when passers-by observe her talking to herself in the street.

The script’s most compelling element is the way it addresses how history is written – Philippa isn’t just exhuming Richard’s remains, she’s also restoring his maligned reputation, compounded through the ages by Shakespeare’s play. The film attempts a parallel in the way it suggests the establishment tried to write Philippa out of her own story, but it ultimately comes off as clumsy, something that isn’t helped by a misjudged ending that’s almost laughably sanctimonious and fails to ring true. Matthew Turner

NOW IN CINEMAS NATIONWIDE from FRIDAY

The Oil Machine (2022)

Dir.: Emma Davie; Documentary with Holly Gillibrand, Kevin Anderson, Emeka Emembolu, James Marriott, Mikhaela Loach, Steve Waygood, Sir David King; UK 2022, 82 min.

Taking on the oil industry is no mean feat but Emma Davie tackles it bravely in her first single outing as a director in a father naive feature documentary that explores the implications “the death of oil” would have in the UK. Whilst this is an activist’s s film first and foremost, Davie does not shrink away from questions that challenge our perception of the issues involved. There are no easy options when it comes to the desperate need to reduce our reliance on this energy source which is reeking havoc on the environment with the increase in world water levels – destroying – among others – large parts of Bangladesh and Vietnam and the loss of life and displacement of around 15 million people, but also on the the destruction of parts of Vietnam along the Mekong Delta , the largest rice producing region in the world that feeds millions.

Closer to home, the UK is financially reliant on its North Sea for a long time to come and the cost of dismantling the oil industry cannot be put into figures. economic structures such as the stock market are linked to the Pension Funds radically affected by a downturn in industries such as ship building that provide a vital source of employment. Never mind the everyday products that we rely on such as plastic.

So it comes as no surprise to hear that the new licensing of the Cambo oil field off the coast of Shetland is in direct contradiction to the Paris Climate Agreement to which the UK is a signatory member. The reason is not only the North Sea Oil lobby, which has the ear of the government, but that technological breakthroughs like Carbon Capture are unlikely to guarantee the Net Zero ambitions (and promises) of the industry for a long time. So, like it or not, “our future rests on a future no one wants”, says Steve Waygood from Aviva Investors.

Holly Gillibrand, also known as “Scotland’s Greta”, can be as adamant as she likes in asking for an end to fossil fuel culture because the results would be catastrophic and cause irreversible damage to the planet over the next 30 years. And the question “how quick can we do it” is actually hindered by all those participants, not least the investors and entire regions who rely on North Sea Oil.

It is right for former Chief Scientific Officer Sir David King to claim, “there were thousands of years of history without the use of gas and oil – until the 1970s, when drilling began in the North Sea.” But the world is now a far more complex place and the cost of dismantling a whole industry still seems too daunting to be realised more or less ad hoc.

Davie soon finds herself on a slippery slope putting forward questions she does not really want to ask. The result is what is called a balanced view: in this case, the gulf between what is needed and what is possible is simply too wide; King Oil will go on reigning to the detriment of the planet and everything that breathes. AS

THE OIL MACHINE IN CINEMAS NATIONWIDE FROM 11 OCTOBER 2022

Burning Days (2022) Antalya Film Festival 2022

Wri/Dir: Emin Alper | Turkey, Thriller 129′

Emin Alper made his debut with Beyond the Hill, a searing psychological thriller centred on a family holiday. Burning Days, screening in competition at this year’s ANTALYA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL, seethes with the same savage sense of dread as his previous genre thriller Frenzy (2015), taking us deep into a remote corner of southern Turkey where it tackles poverty, corruption and homophobia in a close-knit village of Yaniklar, dominated by its authoritarian mayor.

Emre (Selahattin Paşali), a clean-cut young prosecutor, represents the progressive city-dwelling face of modern Turkey, arriving from Ankara to bring order, respect and social justice to the chaos of the traditional, populist movement that thrives on corruption and nepotism in the rural backwater.

The sound of gunfire greets him as a slaughtered wild boar is dragging its bloody entrails through the streets. A drought had caused vast sink holes to open up in the desert wasteland beyond the town, not to mention a plague of rats. But Emre faces a far more serious issue in this seedy community – that of homophobia – when he forms a bond with Murat (Ekin Koc) the owner of the local newspaper.

Once again Alper generates a creeping feeling of dread and genuine fear for his earnest, upstanding central character who soon finds out the mayor’s influence overrides law and order, using the microcosm of Yaniklar to explore Turkey’s modern malaise in an absorbing and visually striking arthouse parable that sees the past in conflict with progress. MT

BEST DIRECTOR – EMIN ALPER and 7 other awards | NATIONAL FEATURE COMPETITION | ANTALYA FILM FESTIVAL 2022 | CANNES FILM FESTIVAL PREMIERE

The Beasts | As Bestas (2022)

Dir: Rodrigo Sorogoyen | Cast: Denis Menochet, Marine Fois, Diego Anido, Luis Zahara, Marie Colomb | Spain, Thriller 137′

A stunning slo-mo sequence involving wild horses opens this smouldering psychological thriller from Rodrigo Sorogoyen, providing the key to the tragedy that will follow.

Antoine (Denis Menochet) and Olga (Marina Fois) have come from France to live in a remote rural part of Galicia where they grow and sell vegetables in the local market and restore derelict houses respectful of the environmental and ecological issues involved. Although most of the locals in the tightly knit community of rough-hewn feral farming folk are friendly, Xan (Luis Zahara) and his devious younger brother Lorenzo (Diego Anido) resent the comparative newcomers, and we soon discover why.

Denis Menochet is one of those actors capable of extreme sensitivity and frightening physical power and he brings the full force of his talents to Antoine counterbalancing the subtle persuasive power of Marina Fois’ Olga in a tale that unfolds with slow-burn intensity in the lush rolling hills and verdant pastures of Spain’s rainy north-eastern corner.

Luis Zahera’s Xan is very much a match for him although clearly cut from coarser cloth that the more sophisticated Frenchman and his wife who are seen as hobbyists who are dwelling amongst them as a lifestyle choice in contrast to the dour existence endured by the local ‘hill-folk’ whose only chance to escape their gruelling poverty is through a proposal from developers.

Tensions mount after a dispute in these planning regulations and an undercurrent of edgy mistrust fuels the human interactions that mostly take place in the local bar where provocative sparring matches between Antoine and the brothers are in stark contrast to the muted beauty of the rural idyll.

The focus then turns to the female characters of Olga and her daughter Marie (Columb) whose differences are gradually resolved in a more meaningful way providing the film with its resolute and emotionally-charged final scenes that show how calm strength of character and perseverance are what really counts in dispute resolution when seeking justice and a successful conclusion. Sorogoyen and Isabel Pena’s brilliant script and clever use of contrast in both setting and characterisation make this riveting from start to finish. MT

BEST ACTRESS: MARINA FOIS | ANTALYA FILM FESTIVAL 2022 | SAN SEBASTIAN FILM FESTIVAL AUDIENCE AWARD.

UK Jewish Film Festival 2022

UK Jewish Film Festival is back in cinemas in London and nationwide, running from 10-20 November 2022, and online from 21-27 November 2022. This year’s line-up crosses the diaspora from American to Europe and Israel with an in-depth documentary strand and a section dedicated to the LGBTQ+community. Most screenings will feature talks and debates with the films’ stars and directors.

The festival opens on 10 November with Moshe Rosenthal’s bittersweet comedy Karaoke (Israel, 2022) and closes with the UK Premiere of French romantic drama Where Life Begins starring Ricardo Scamarcio and Lou de Laage and directed by . Stéphane Freiss.

The Centrepiece Gala is Ady Walter’s Yiddish language one-take black and white drama Shttl set on the eve of the German invasion of Soviet Ukraine. The British Animation Gala Charlotte explores the life of war-time artist Charlotte Salomon who painted her own life story before dying in Auschwitz, aged-26. Another story from the war is the tragic Three Minutes: A Lengthening (UK, 2022) Bianca Stigter’s debut documentary is narrated by Helena Bonham Carter and tells a whole story from a tiny fragment of film depicting three joyous minutes in the life of a Polish village, on the cusp of a war that would annihilate most of its inhabitants (image below).

ALAN HOWARD DOCUMENTARY STRAND

Showcasing important new documentaries: Reckonings (UK 2022) marks the 70th anniversary of the ground-breaking Luxembourg Agreements of 1952, which paid reparations to Jews and the Israeli state for the crimes perpetrated by Nazi Germany. A Tree of Life (USA, 2021) is a harrowing but immensely important documentary that shines a light on the deadliest attack on Jews in American history at the Tree of Life synagogue in 2018. A panel discussion with Lord Mann, a member of the House of Lords and advisor to the Government on Antisemitism will follow the screening. On a lighter note Who’s Afraid of Jewish Humour looks at the origins of the use of satire and irony in Jewish culture, and is accompanied by a Q&A with director Jascha Hannover.

EUROPEAN FILM PROGRAMME

Director Yvan Ittal will attend with his wife Charlotte Gainsbourg and son Ben Attal for the tense, timely and thought-provoking #MeToo drama, The Accusation (France, 2021). Carol of the Bells explores the fluctuating friendship of three families – Ukrainian, Polish and Jewish – Stanislav, Poland, in 1939. The Conference (Ger, 2022) sees a group of high-ranking Nazi officials gather by Berlin’s Lake Wannsee in 1942 to discuss the Final Solution – the annihilation of Europe’s Jews. In The Forger (Ger/Lux, 2022) 21-year-old Samson Cioma Schönhaus’ zest for life knows no bounds as a Jew hiding out in the German capital where he forges a career as a graphic artist and forger to help fellow Jews. Farewell Mister Haffmann (France, 2021). Evolution (2021) directed by from Hungary’s Kornél Mundruczó and Kata Weber (Pieces of a Woman) examines the intergenerational effects of the Holocaust and the legacy of trauma through the eyes of a small European Jewish family.

In the gripping psychological thriller The Man in the Basement (France, 2021) a modern Parisian couple unsuspectingly rent their basement to a Holocaust denier who spreads his malicious views on the internet. Simone Veil: A Woman of the Century (France, 2022) a biopic of the feminist icon who survived the Holocaust to become one of the most influential figures of the 20th century. Haute Couture (France, 2021) The world of high fashion and interracial relations mingle in this glossy drama starring Nathalie Baye. In The Will to See (France, 2021) French Jewish author, philosopher and filmmaker Bernard Henri Lévy offers a no holds barred look at urgent humanitarian crises around the globe, and challenges people to take action.

ISRAELI FILM PROGRAMME

An all-encompassing look at the nation past and present through an array of character-based dramas and documentaries showcasing Israeli society. Israel’s leading documentarian Ran Tal 1341 Frames of Love and War (Israel, 2022) looks at the life and work of the celebrated photojournalist Micha Bar-Am. Marco Carmel’s Paris Boutique (Israel, 2022) is romantic comedy about love, friendship and peace in the Middle East. Perfect Strangers (Israel, 2021),(Q&A with director Lior Ashkenazi) Lior Ashkenazi’s feature debut invites us to question how well we really know those close to us. Blue Box (Israel/Belgium, 2021) is a deep dive into the life and legacy of Joseph Weits, a respected Zionist figure through his great-granddaughter, filmmaker Michal Weits.

AMERICAS FILM PROGRAMME

Panama’s 2022 Oscar entry Plaza Catedral (Panama, 2021) examines street violence in Latin America through the unlikely bond between an architect and a young boy she finds on the street with gunshot wounds. The Restless Hungarian (USA, 2021) explores collective trauma through the intense experiences of four generations of filmmaker Tom Weidlinger’s family history. Narrated by Jeff Goldblum, Fiddler’s Journey to the Big Screen (USA, 2022) chronicles the astonishing journey of this 1971 cult classic from stage to big screen. The Wild One (France, 2022), Not to be missed is this doc that reveals the incredible story of Czech-born film director Jack Garfein, who survived Auschwitz to become one of Hollywood’s greats.

BRITISH FILM PROGRAMME

The British Film Programme for 2022 includes We Left the Camp Singing (UK, 2022) a documentary highlighting the artistic output of Jewish inmates at Theresienstadt concentration camp.

LGBTQ+ cinema is well represented with three films from Israel that tackle a diversity of issues. Concerned Citizen (Israel, 2022) tries hard to debunk a few urban myths in a un-involving drama that ends up as a farce. The Swimmer (Israel, 2021) is a timely expose of male competitiveness in the Israeli national swimming team. The highly controversial practice of gay conversion therapy comes under the spotlight in The Therapy (Israel, 2021) a thought-provoking feature documentary debut from Zvi Landsman. MT

UK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL | 10-20 NOVEMBER 2022 | 20-27 ONLINE

Smile (2022)

Dir.: Parker Finn, Cast: Sosie Bacon, Jessie T. Usher, Kyle Gallner, Caitlin Stasey, Robin Weigert, Gillian Zinser, Kal Penn; USA 2022, 115 min.

Horror flick Smile brings nothing new to the sub-genre, although Christobal Tapia de Veer’s inventive soundscape will echo eerily in your head long after the film’s forgettable mundane plot has faded; the second half is particularly absurd and surreal. Parker Finn developed the feature debut from his eleven minute short Laura hasn’t slept and borrows heavily from J-horror especially The Ring and It Follows.

Over-worked and on call 80 plus hours a day Dr Rose Cotter is barely holding down a job in the trauma department of a psychiatric ward in a large hospital where she is also receiving treatment from therapist Dr Madeline Northcott (Weigert) for the damage caused by her mother’s suicide. Backstory-wise Rose also has issues with her sister Holly (Zinser) for leaving Rose to deal with her mother. When Holly’s son celebrates his seventh birthday, he unpacks Rose’ present, only to find the dead body of Rose’ missing cat Moustache. Then comes the more recent shock of Rose seeing her patient Laura (Stasey) die before her very eyes by slicing her throat with a piece of porcelain, having confessed to being unable to cope with the strangely smiling faces of strangers hunting her down.

Soon, Rose is experiencing the same symptoms as her dead patient, and researching Laura’s past she discovers that her university lecturer also committed suicide in front of her. Rose’s fiancé Trevor (Usher), is unwilling to discuss the issue, so Rose turns to ex-boyfriend Joel (Gallner) who happens to be a cop. She has to escape the deadly curse and has only four or five days to do so.

Visually DoP Charlie Sarroff shocks with the some decent horror tropes, jump-cuts and gory set pieces. Sosie Bacon (daughter of Kevin) feels real as a mental health professional coming up against something no textbook has prepared her for. In the end, Smile looks convincing, but no prizes here for the unimaginative storyline. AS

NOW IN CINEMAS NATIONWIDE

The Sixth Child (2022) Antalya Film Festival 2022

Dir: Leopold Legrand | Sara Giraudeau, Benjamin Lavernhe, Damien Bonnard, Judith Chemla | France, Drama 92′

The desire for a child is an emotive hot potato that has recently seen a comedy treatment in Ninja Baby (2021) and a more romantic one in this summer’s Venice Film Festival crowd-pleaser The Children of Others (2022).

In The Sixth Child two couples from opposite sides of the social divide come together in an unusual arrangement. Franck (Damien Bonnard in fine form) is a skint scrap metal dealer living on a caravan site with his wife Meriem (Judith Chemla) and his five kids. A sixth child is on the way. Julien (Benjamin Lavernhe) and his wife Anna (Sara Giraudeau), both lawyers, cannot have children. A court case brings Franck into contact with Julien who saves him from prison, and in return the naive but likeable Franck suggests an arrangement that might suit both couples. Franck declares himself broke and offers the lawyer the baby, suggesting a simple adoption where Franck and Anna will bring up the child, rather than a full fledged legal one – a long, convoluted process and terribly stressful for everyone.

But once Anna befriends Merriem and sets eyes on the ultrasound of the baby she rather loses her critical and legal mind and becomes irrational, offering the God-fearing Franck and Merriem thousands of euros in cash – with a promise of more – nudging the arrangement into the bounds of human trafficking, and flying in the face of the law and her own professional status, as Julien later points out to her as emotions run high. They could both lose their jobs and end up in prison.

A film touching on such basic human drives is always going to be moving, especially for those affected by the issues, and this directorial debut from Leopold Legrand certainly is, although the strong premise, based on Alain Jaspard’s novel, is poorly served by an uneven and underdeveloped script that not only fails to grapple with the complexity of the issues at the film’s core but instead opts for sensationalism with the human trafficking angle shoehorned into the film’s confusing final act.

Sara Giraudeau’s Anna is the weakest character; purportedly a lawyer, she does nothing but mope around all day, and her attempts at closeness with the much more authentic Judith Chemla (Merriem) are unconvincing. Benjamin Lavernhe brings depth and sensitivity to his difficult role as the childless father. The Sixth Child is engaging and watchable as a tragedy where no one wins despite a seemingly ideal scenario. MT

THE SIXTH CHILD | ANTALYA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2022

BFI London Film Festival 2022

The BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL is back with another opportunity to discover the best new films – and 22 world premieres – live in London from 5 – 16 October, and from 14 -23 October on BFI Player.

Here is a selection of world premieres on offer:

Pinocchio (dirs. Guillermo del Toro, Mark Gustafson, USA) Guillermo del Toro takes Carlo Collodi’s original children’s story into darker territory with stop-motion animation

Creature (dir. Asif Kapadia, UK) – The Award-winning documentarian turns his talents to capture modern dance sensation Akram Khan and his latest venture that unfolds in a former Arctic research station.

The Estate (dir/scr. Dean Craig, USA) – A starry cast of Anna Faris, David Duchovny and Toni Collette play relatives vying for aunt Kathleen Turner’s vast family fortune.

Inland (dir/scr. Fridjof Ryder, UK) – Mark Rylance is the star of this evocative character drama/thriller about a young man returning to his hometown after his mother’s disappearance.

Klokkenluider (dir/scr. Neil Maskell) – A witty script and eccentric characterisation coalesce in this acerbic feature debut from Neil Maskell that follows a government whistleblower and his partner into hiding in a remote cottage in Belgium.

Name Me Lawand (dir. Edward Lovelace) – A deaf Kurdish asylum seeker tries to integrate into a Derbyshire town in this upbeat rites of passage drama.

Pretty Red Dress (dir/scr. Dionne Edwards, UK) – A lively drama borrowing from Peter Strickland’s original idea In Fabric about the transformative powers of a red dress.

She Is Love (dir/scr. Jamie Adams, UK) – The Black Mountain Poets‘ director returns with this moving drama about love the second time around. Stars Sam Riley and Haley Bennett.

The Girl from Tomorrow (dir/scr. Marta Savina, Italy-France) – A passionate feature debut from Italy’s Martina Savina sees a young woman rebelling against an arranged marriage in 1960s Sicily.

The Blaze (dir. Quentin Raynaud, France) – With wildfires raging across Europe again last summer this incendiary French eco-thriller makes a timely entry in this year’s festival and stars veteran Andre Dussollier as a father attempting to re-kindle his relationship with his son.

Kanaval: A People’s History of Haiti in Six Chapters (dirs. Leah Gordon, Eddie Hutton Mills, Haiti-UK) – Haiti prepares for carnival time in this jubilant look at the island’s turbulent history and colourful cultural life.

My Father’s Dragon (dir. Nora Twomey, Ireland) – The Secret of Kells director returns with another endearing animation.

Xalé (dir. Moussa Sene Absa, Senegal-Ivory Coast) – Strong storytelling and a twisty plot make this female-centric thriller an absolute must see, from musician, filmmaker and Absa.

Shttl (dir/scr. Ady Walter, Ukraine-France) – A Jewish filmmaker returns home from Kyiv to join his fiancee in the wake of Germany’s 1941 invasion of Ukraine in this impressive single-take black and white drama from first time filmmaker Ady Walter.

BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2022 | 5 – 16 OCTOBER 2022

Le Lyceen (2022) San Sebastián Film Festival 2022

Dir/wri: Christophe Honore | Cast: Juliette Binoche, Christophe Honore, Xavier Giannoli, Vincent Lacoste, Paul Kircher | France, Drama 122′

Juliette Binoche stars alongside Christophe Honore, who writes, directs and appears briefly in this tender stream of consciousness confessional that explores their teenage son’s tentative sexual awakening in a wintery Chambery on the foothills of Mont Blanc.

Told from the perspective of Lucas (Kircher) a breezy, upbeat opening scene sees father (Honore) and son motoring along a country road only to find themselves careening into the middle of a field, narrowly involved in a collision with another vehicle. And this near accident sets the febrile tone for the tragedy that will follow as the whole family implodes into anguish in facing a very different future to the one they all had in mind.

Always wearing its heart on its stylish sleeve in a beautifully nuanced way Honore’s emotionally honest film is at times difficult to watch as the heartbroken Lucas suffers an extreme reaction to his loss. But this also seems to crystallise his decision to start a sexual relationship with his friend Oscar, and a night of passionate lovemaking follows before Lucas leaves for a week in Paris with his artist brother Quentin (Lacoste), who shares a swanky flat with Lilio.

Paris is a new and radical world for the provincial teenager and Lucas is caught up in the excitement of discovery, but is also very much in awe of his brother who is busy preparing for his first exhibition. Using the city as a playground to flex his muscles in newfound sexual freedom, Lucas is also surprised to discover his puppyish unbridled appeal is much in demand with older and more sophisticated men. And this naivety does not always go down well with Lilio and certainly not with Quentin who sends him packing back to his mother after he oversteps the mark, complaining Lucas’ unbridled behaviour is disrespectful at a time of family grief. Everything comes together in a graceful denouement that sees Isabelle and her family finally seeing a light at the end of their tunnel of grief. MT

SILVER SHELL | SAN SEBASTIAN 2022

The Shadow of Goya (2022)

Dir: Jose Luis Lopez-Linares | Writers: Jean-Claude Carriere, Cristina Otero Roth | With Julian Schnabel | Doc, 90′

Jean-Claude Carriere’s final visit to Spain informs this new documentary on the nation’s most outstanding 18th century artist whose output reflected all aspects of life from the beautiful to the bestial, and beyond.

The French writer – who died months after his trip – wanted to look at how Goya – often called ‘the father of modern art” – influenced other painters such as Picasso, Salvador Dali, Cezanne, Van Gogh, and even the filmmaker Luis Bunuel (with whom Carriere also collaborated). Artist Julian Schnabel (who appears in a white overall, slit to the waist) claims Goya’s broad brush strokes have a distinctly modern look that would have a great impact on impressionism and even surrealism. In the light of this, The Shadows of Goya soon widens out into a compendium culture trip suffused with cinema, art and creativity, also taking in a visit to the major retrospective on Goya currently happening Basel, Switzerland.

By way of background, Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes, born in Zaragoza in 1746, had already felt the first rumblings of revolution that would go on to loosen the Spanish nation from its colonies throughout the 19th century, and this turbulence echoes through the dark clouds of his early landscapes and engravings with his large canvasses depicting full blown conflict: ‘The Disasters of War’ and ‘The Third of May 1808’. ‘Los Caprichos’, his eighty or so engravings, mercilessly satirised the failings of Spanish society of the day; from religious fanaticism to professional incompetence and even The Spanish Inquisition. Goya even lampooned doctors after they failed to help him when he grew deaf from a debilitating illness, depicting them as donkeys famously in ‘Tu Que no Puedes”. But he always made his titles ambiguous so as not to offend his bread and butter clients from high society and the aristocracy whom he charged extra for painting hands, but not feet.

Carriere waxes lyrical on his subject, showing us round Goya’s various haunts and explains how the artist was intrigued by his fellow men and gave them equal exposure in his work as he did his wealthy clients and most famously in ‘The Burial of the Sardine’, a tribute to an exuberant crowd celebrating on the first day of Lent. We also hear about his famous ‘Black Paintings’, often portrayed on the walls of his home ‘La Quinta del Sordo’ (literally “Deaf Man’s Manor”). These fourteen works depict the base aspects of humanity: madness and deformity features largely in these works, and in the ‘Dos Mujeres’ that sees two ugly old women almost mocking the artist for painting them. The ‘Black Works’ also incorporated Goya’s famous use of symbolism echoing his desire to get beyond the visual and into a spiritual domain, brilliantly portrayed in ‘Saturn Devouring his Son’. He even painted a dog – ‘El Perro’ – who seems to be drowning or in distress. All these pictures are open to interpretation.

Bunuel and Goya both came from Aragon and we get to see various clips from the surrealist filmmaker’s That Obscure Object of Desire, as well as Schnabel’s biopic At Eternity’s Gate to show how Van Gogh’s intense style echoed the Goya’s detailed ‘Caprichos’ engravings.

The film also gets out and about to show Goya’s frescoes in Cadiz and Zaragoza cathedral, and the captures the flowing landscapes of Aragon and ancient villages, some untouched since the Civil War. For some reason Carriere decides to break into Spanish at regular intervals and seems particularly obsessed by a reclining female nude and her clothed counterpart in Madrid’s Prado Museum (‘La Maja Nesnuda/Vestida’) the film is given valuable context from historians, specialists and curators: Antonio Gonzales Marin, Antonio Gascon, and Charlotte Castel-Rousseau from the Prado in Madrid.

So a lively and informative look at this eclectic Spanish artist who eventually died in Bordeaux after becoming completely deaf, reflected in surrealist sequences by the award-winning director and documentarian Lopez-Linares (Bosch: The Garden of Dreams) and his DoP Andres Recio Illan. And an enlightening valedictory offering from Carriere. MT

SCREENING AT VANCOUVER INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2022

Fragments of Paradise (2022)

Dir.: K D Davison; Documentary with Amy Taubinis, Allen Ginsberg, Hollis Melton, Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich, Kent and Flo Jacobs, John Waters, Jim Jarmusch, Peter Sempel, Oona Mekas, Sebastian Mekas, Marina Abramovic; USA 2022, 98 min.

US director/producer KD Davison has chosen the avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas (1922-2019) as the subject for her first feature documentary scooping the Best Documentary prize at Venice Film Festival in the process.

Jonas Mekas – the “Godfather of Avant-garde Film” – was a prolific filmmaker as the architect of the movement. Told in four chapters this is a chronicle of a life-long odyssey, and Davidson clearly worships at his alter, an approach that is the film’s only flaw.

Born in Lithuania, Jonas and his brother Adolfas eventually arrived in the USA settling in Williamsburg, Brooklyn after leaving Lithuania for Vienna in 1944 via the German Labour Camp of Elmshorn near Hamburg. Jonas had become a published poet in his homeland and became obsessed with cinema after visiting Amos Vogel’s ground breaking “Cinema 16”.

In 1954 Mekas founded the alternative “Film Culture Journal”, four years later he became the first film critic of “The Village Voice”. He was co-founder of the “Filmmakers Cooperative” (1962) and – perhaps his greatest contribution to film history – he started the “Anthology Film Archives” in 1964. That same year, with Lionel Rogosin, Mekas began to organise filmmakers in the “New American Cinema Movement.” 1964 was a proactive year for Mekas but the downside was his arrest for screening Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures and Jean Genet’s Un chant d’Amour.

Kenneth Anger and Allen Ginsburg were often guests in Mekas’ chaotic house, as was Jim Jarmusch, who filmed his short Coffee and Cigarettes in the dilapidated “Anthology” building, before it became the functioning centre for the production and distribution of about 600 avant-garde features. A miracle then that Jonas still found time to shoot his own films, Guns of Trees (1961) and Walden (1969) were the most successful of the early period.

Ironically Mekas’ The Brig (1964) had found admirers in the Soviet Union who lauded him for his critique of the USA. Mekas was invited to show his feature in Moscow in exchange for a visit to his family in Lithuania. There are moving images in Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1972) showing a reunion with his mother who had waited 25 years to see her son again.

In 1974 Mekas married Hollis Melton and his two children Oona and Sebastian serve as executive producers of this documentary. Oona’s birth was filmed on camera and she is moved to tears when shown images of her childhood, very much aware that her father never stopped being a poet, his obsession with spending at least ten minutes a day with his camera was his way of creating a daily poem. Later we see him filming his granddaughter.

The filmmaker Pete Sempel shot a trio of Mekas features: Jonas in the Desert, Jonas at the Ocean and Jonas in the Jungle. There are extremely sad songs, and Mekas is seen still traumatised by his youth. Scorsese called him “the prophet, he showed us the way”. Mekkas also became firm friends with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, but he never stopped filming his family: Out-takes from the Life of a happy Man, As I was moving ahead occasionally and Paradise not yet Lost (aka Oona’s third Year). Cats also grab the limelight occasionally challenging humans with their beauty and grace.

In 1999 Hollis Melton was adamant about having her own independence and started to move out – a process which took until 2004. The scenes of her gradually taking her belongings are heart-breaking, throwing Jonas into a life he did not want: “What is my life all about, 30 years – now this empty space. Do I still have time to do something with my life. Nobody but the camera, she is my only friend?”.

On film, a ladybird crawls around the rim of a glass and Mekas comments: “this is the human condition”. But his camera rolls on, for at least ten minutes a day. And suddenly there is worldwide recognition, exhibitions all over the place. He had turned the trauma into energy. In old age, he had found a new form of relationship with his son, they had become best friends. Oona is seen rummaging around Jonas’ flat, looking for Christmas decorations. “We always find little fragments. Intimate things from his heart and soul. Poetry is his films, he managed to catch some of the beauty.”

DoP Bill Kirstein creates rather conventional images that reflect the structure of the narrative. But it would have been too much to ask for a ‘Mekas’ style’ film. In this way the documentary is accessible for newcomers to Mekas’ work. A filmmaker who was also clearly in love with his family and his cats. AS

JONAS MEKAS | SCREENING DURING BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2022 | BEST DOCUMENTARY PRIZE | VENICE FILM FESTIVAL | 2022

Antalya International Film Festival 2022 | 1-9 October 2022

Antalya Film Festival opens on the 1st October 2022 celebrating its 59th edition on the Southern Turkish Riviera with a slew of award-winning titles taking part in the International Feature Film Competition, and a National Feature and Documentary Competion showcasing the latest in Turkish cinema.

INTERNATIONAL FEATURE FILM COMPETITION

The Sixth Child | Dir: Léopold Legrand | France, Drama 103′

Judith Chemla, Sarah Giraudeau and Damien Bonnard star in Léopold Legrand’s first feature that takes another look at the morally complex world of adoption and the most fundamental yet complex human condition – that of motherhood.

The Beasts | Dir: Rodrigo Sorogoyen | Spain, Thriller 127′

Xenophobia again rears its head in this thriller about a French couple who move to a poor rural border village in Galicia, Spain where they fall foul of the locals.

Bread and Salt | Dir: Damian Kocur | Poland, Drama, 100′

Hot on the heels of its Horizons Award at Venice Film Festival comes this courageous Polish drama exploring the far-reaching affects of interracial conflict that started in a small Polish village and is now rippling out into the wider world.

My Love Affair with Marriage | Dir: Signe Baumane, Animation 107‘

Signe Baumane’s bittersweet look at love and wedlock through the eyes of a subversive young woman garners a light-hearted twist from its delicately drawn animations winning the Jury Distinction prize at this year’s Annecy Festival.

Men of Deeds | Dir: Paul Negoescu, Romania, Drama, 105′

A plodding policeman is forced to toughen up and face the music in this amusing slow-burning sociopolitical drama from Romanian director Paul Negoescu.

Dustland | Dir: Kazem Daneshi | Iran Drama 100′

A town erupts in violence after a seemingly peaceful event in this morally muscular award-winning thriller from Iranian director Kazen Daneshi

Queens | Dir: Yasmine Benkiran | France, Morocco, action Drama 93′

This impressive first feature from Moroccan director Yasmine Benkiran sees three Moroccan women embark on a fearless journey of discovery across the Atlas Mountains to the Atlantic coast, with the police on their tail.

The Quiet Girl | Dir: Colm Bairéad | Ireland, Drama, 90′

One of the best dramas of 2022 is this quietly devastating story of loss and belonging set in rural Ireland in 1981, with a stunning debut performance from Catherine Clinch.

Valeria Is Getting Married | Dir: Michal Vinik | Israel,

An arranged marriage has an unexpected twist in this entertaining Israeli chamber piece that looks at the love lives of two Ukrainian sisters in Tel Aviv.

The Visitor | Dir: Martín Boulocq

Bolivia’s Martin Boulocq offers up a morally complex drama that turns on the interplay between an ex-convict retuning to his hometown and hoping for redemption and his deeply religious father-in-law who has other ideas. A strong South American cast is led by Cesar Troncoso and Mirella Pascual (Whisky).

JURY OF INTERNATIONAL FEATURE FILM COMPETITION

Actors: Anamaria Marinca, Jean-Marc Barr, Film Curator and critic Nikolaj Nikitin, Arte France director Olivier Père, and director and screenwriter Valdimar Jóhannsson (Lamb).

NATIONAL FEATURE FILM COMPETITION

Mirror, Mirror (Ayna Ayna) / Belmin Söylemez
A Hope (Bir Umut) / Ümit Köreken
Hollow (Bomboş) / Onur Ünlü
A Woman Escapes (Gidiş O Gidiş) / Burak Çevik, Sofia Bohdanowicz, Blake Williams
Hara / Atalay Taşdiken
Iguana Tokyo / Kaan Müjdeci
Snow and the Bear (Kar ve Ayı) / Selcen Ergun
Black Night (Karanlık Gece) / Özcan Alper
Burning Days (Kurak Günler) / Emin Alper
RSVP (Please Respond) (LCV [Lütfen Cevap Veriniz]) / İsmail Kurtuluş, Kaan Arıcı

JURY OF NATIONAL FEATURE FILM COMPETITION

President : screenwriter-director-producer Yeşim Ustaoğlu Her fellow jurors include the actor-director, Ahmet Mümtaz Taylan, the screenwriter-director, Azra Deniz Okyay, musician Harun Tekin, poet Haydar Ergülen, actress Nurgül Yeşilçay and cinematographer Uğur İçbak.

NATIONAL DOCUMENTARY FILM COMPETITION

23 Cents Soldier / Mümin Barış
Drifting / Somnur Vardar
Duet / Ekin İlkbağ & idil Akkuş
What’s the Name of the Film? / Pınar Fontini
Hatice / Murat Erün
The Miss / Mert Erez
KAF KAF / Metin Dağ
Who Is Mihri / Berna Gençalp
White Collar Peasants / Hazar Uyar
A Strange Sight to Behold: The Van Lake Monster / Behçet Güleryüz

JURY OF NATIONAL DOCUMENTARY FILM COMPETITION

Director-screenwriter Ceylan Özgün Özçelik, documentary director Elif Ergezen and documentary filmmaker Hilmi Etikan

ANTALYA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2022 | 1-9 OCTOBER 2022

Blue Jean (2022)

Dir/Wri: Georgia Oakley | UK Drama

A watchable if rather dated-looking sapphic love affair plays out in Georgia Oakley’s first feature as a director. Set in the 1980s, that’s hardly surprising. It was time when attitudes were still traditional on the gay front and further complicated by government policy. And this certainly colours Jean’s experience as a lesbian trying to balance her professional life as a successful PE teacher in a secondary school and her days with militant lover Viv (Kerrie Hayes) whose more strident style echoes the punk era. The two are certainly happy together and enjoy mocking Cilla Black’s popular Blind Date programme during their evenings by the telly. They share Jean’s flat in a grim sink estate in north-east England where we first meet Jean bleaching her cropped hair blonde. Jean has a straight marriage under her belt and a strained relationship with her married sister. But her sexuality often sits uncomfortably with her role as a teacher, and her need to hide her gayness from her employers when one of her pupils (Siobhan/Lydia Page) discovers her secret. And this plot line supplies the twist in the story when Jean finds herself drawn to a new girl called Lois (Lucy Halliday) who then shows up at the gay club Jean often goes to with Viv. Blue Jean is certainly well made and watchable, if slightly short-changed on plot resolution. MT

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL PREMIERE | SEPTEMBER 2022 | SCREENING BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2022 OCTOBER 2022

Hidden Letters (2022)

Dir.: Violet Du Feng; co-dir.: Zhao Quing; Documentary with Hu Xin, Wu Simu, He Yanxin; China 2022, 89 min.

A fascinating new documentary sheds light on a secret language used by Chinese women to communicate with each other imprisoned in their homes before Chairman Mao’s “Big Leap Forward”

First time director, producer and co-writer Violet Du Feng has, with co-director Zhao Quing (Please remember Me) offers up a passionate expose showing how even nowadays Chinese women are still hemmed in by traditional roles despite a more commercialised society. The sisterhood’s covert means of contact away from the prying eyes of the male population was made possibly by a clandestine language – Nushu was their only way out.

Hu Xin, a woman in her mid 30s, takes lessons in Nushu from He Yan Xin, the last living Nushu mistress of the art. Xin works in the Nushu Museum in Jianyong Township, formed by seven villages where she met her ex-husband after joining the National Youth Council. Her parents were complicit in China’s male-dominated society, wanted her to marry and have children rather than a career. But her spouse was brutal and even made her abort a six-month old daughter, because he wanted a son.

Even Xin herself seems to fall in with this traditional view, seeing herself as having failed as a woman and mother. Yan Xin remembers boycotting sex with her husband for several years, talks about a time when it was impolite to look at a man while doing the housework. “We were merely slaves”, she recalls. Her husband beat her up but never touched her face, and forbade her to cry within earshot of his cousins who lived next door. Yan Xin sang Nushu lullabies to her children, and kept up a lengthy correspondence with other repressed women.

Wu Simu, a music teacher who also teaches Nushu songs and dances, thought her Shanghai-based fiancé Simu was quite progressive but it soon turned out that all he wanted was a workhorse who would hold down a job and look after the children single-handed. After all his own mother worked the land all day and did the household chores in the evening. He orders Simu to give up Nushu – seeing it as worthless hobby that detracts her from earning more in a proper job. Simu, to the great disappointment of her parents, gives him the push.

Talking about commercial values. both Simu and Hu Xin are involved in an exhibition featuring Nushu products in Macao where local politicians take the position that Nushi products would have no future without the adherence to market trends. They also considerate the language to be subversive, undermining the ideology of the state by diminishing the fundamental the female tenets of Obedience, Acceptance and Resilience.

A $300 mobile ‘phone capable of translating from Mandarin to Nishu is not exactly selling like hot cakes either. Simu confesses she is frustrated that men are still “the Heaven”. Hu Xin and Wu Simu wanted the exhibition to be called “Women for Modern Times”, but the politicians insisted on “Modern Women” ie ‘Modern’ had to precede ‘Women’. So the future of this secret language Hu Xin and Wu Simu think about the future of Nushu at schools, the State bureaucrats prefer “Cross branding”‘ which is very popular. In their studio, Hu Xin and Wu Simu plan for participation of Nushu artists in an exhibition about Women artists – not video games.

Du Feng weaves together a rather pessimistic image of Women’s rights – past and present – in China. DoPs Feng Tiebing and Wei Gao show a technocratic state of the art, but in the country side the rules of the last century are still intact. And for all the progress in technologies: the cut-throat business of competition has no place for subtle subjects like Nushu. AS

BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2022 | 5 – 16 OCTOBER 2022

Inland (2022)

Dir.: Fridtjof Ryder; Cast: Rory Alexander, Mark Rylance, Katherine Hunter, Eleanor Holiday, Shaun Dingwall, Neil Williams; UK 2022, 82 min.

Fridtjof Ryder makes a striking but saturnine first feature, borrowing heavily from Nicolas Roeg and David Lynch, as implied by the film’s title. Ryder wrote the script before he was twenty, but filming was delayed for several years due to the pandemic.

Essentially a two hander, the film follows a young man (Alexander) whose disturbed mental state lies at the heart of the narrative and will dictate the course of his life even after longterm psychiatric treatment. One relationship in particular looms large; with garage owner Dunleavy (a saturnine Mark Rylance) who offers him board and employment in the West Country city of Gloucester (the director’s hometown). The two will circle each other like fish in an aquarium: the implications are not promising, but their interaction is never really explored. This young man has obvious lived through abandonment issues and has difficulty integrating, a flyer shows the photo of his mother, who has gone missing.

Donleavy remains the only fully fleshed out character here but his relationship with his employee is never developed beyond the surface. Alexander’s young man remains enigmatic, ephemeral even, never emerging as someone substantial. There are nods to his mother’s Romani background – but Inland asks more questions than it answers.

DoP Ravi Doubleday lets the camera roam in the dark woods and poorly-lit streets of Gloucester in a pervasive atmosphere of gloom. Dunleavy’s little house looks lost in the dark forest. Rylance tries hard to fill out his character, but struggles with the avoidance of anything factual. Alexander walks in a landscape he is supposed to know, but childhood and present always mingle, giving him no foothold in reality. AS

IN CINEMAS FROM 16 JUNE 2023

Driving Madeleine (2022)

Dir/Wri; Christian Carion | Cast | Dany Boon, Line Renaud, Julie Delarme | French, Drama

Lacking the emotional punch of the Bruce Beresford’s 1989 hit Driving Miss Daisy this romanticised French version sees an elderly woman reflect on her checkered life to a down-on-his-luck taxi driver.

On the face of it, life has dealt Madeleine (Renaud) and Charles (Boon) a pretty bad hand. But the difference is their perception of things, according to the spry but cantankerous 92-year old. Time and the wisdom of age has softened Madeleine’s outlook lending a philosophical spin on her twilight years in a care home. Dany Boon’s Charles, on the other hand, is still in his prime but with money worries putting a strain on his marriage to Carine (Julie Delarme).

After an upbeat sortie in down-town Paris the film goes for darker territory without really creating a relatable backstory for Madeleine’s turbulent relationship with ex-husband Ray (Laheurte). Christin Carion and his writer Cyril Rely plunge us headlong into vivid flashbacks of her troubled postwar love life opting for sensationalism in graphic scenes of sexual and emotional abuse that fail to generate our sympathy. We feel nothing for these two or their little boy Mathieu (Hardriel Roure) despite the grim picture of a marriage that goes from bad to worse, with Ray ending up in prison and ruining Madeleine’s life. And now sixty years later all she has to look forward to is a grim nursing home.

A rousing almost epic score accompanies the melodramatic revelations as Carion attempts to imbue the film with a dramatic weight that should really have come from the writing rather than the musical prompts, and this leaves the audience disaffected despite Renaud and Boon’s best efforts to move us.

Hearing Madeleine pour out her woes has a therapeutic affect on the gruff but soft-hearted Charles who realises he hasn’t done so badly so far compared to his long-suffering ‘fare’. Suitably chastened by listening to Madeleine’s problems he makes a furtive phone call to his wife to try and patch up their differences. Ray then offers Madeleine lunch which leads to a taxi trip round Paris and this joyride is the only highlight in a rather glib affair with its predictable crowd-pleasing ending. MT .

NOW ON RELEASE IN UK CINEMAS | TORONTO FILM FESTIVAL 2022

Riceboy Sleeps (2022)

Dir.: Anthony Shim; Cast: Choi Seung-yoon, Ethan Hwang, Anthony Shim, Dohyun Noel Hwang, Hunter Dillon, Kang in-Sung, Han Wok Shik; Canada 2022, 117 min.

Riceboy Sleeps is an intimate and deeply affecting look at loss and the nature of identity from Canadian writer/director/editor Anthony Shim who also stars in his sophomore feature. Set in the 1990s in Canada and Korea, the melancholy film reflects Shim’s own experiences as a small boy emigrating from South Korea to Canada.

Young Korean widow So Young (an impressive Choi Seung-yoon) has left her home in Korea for a modest factory job after her husband committed suicide in a psychiatric ward. But her six-year-old son Dong-Hyun (Dohyun Noel Hwang) cannot settle down in his new home and the Canadian primary school where he is teased and bullied by the other children who steal his Korean packed lunch. And although their Canadian food is far less healthy-looking, Dong-Huyn wants it just to be like the others. So Young encourages her son to be strong and fight back when attacked, but the result is a week-long detention for Dong-Hyun even although his assailants go unpunished. Dong-Hyun opts to change his name to Michael Jordan, but has to settle for David.

Nine years later, and 16-year old Dong-Hyun (now played by Ethan Hwang) has become a stroppy teenager hanging out with his friend Harry (Dillon) and experimenting – not very successfully – with drugs. Meanwhile his mother has become romantically involved with fellow Korean Simon (Shim) who proposes to her on the same day she is diagnosed with cancer. Simon wants her to try complimentary medicine, but So Young decides to take her son back to Korea to meet her family.

Avoiding sentimentality at all times Shim opts for a poetic approach to dealing with death. The clash between the two cultures is made obvious in often ironic terms, but this is not just another story of a suffering immigrant: Far from being a victim So Young is a pragmatic and proactive woman. In a sad reflection of today’s culture, Dong-Hyun’s integration comes about via drugs and violence resulting from the use of narcotics.

Riceboy Sleeps offers some spectacular widescreen landscapes of Gangwon-do, South Korea shot by DoP Christopher Lew whose agile camerawork also captures the domestic conflict in Canada with moving close-ups of mother and son. This is an emotional rollercoaster, a passionate epic on the vagaries of life with So Young as a modern day heroine, refusing to accept defeat. AS

WINNER OF THE PLATFORM PRIZE | TORONTO FILM FESTIVAL 2022

Desert Legion (1953)

Dir: Joseph Pevney | Cast: Alan Ladd, Richard Conte, Arlene Dahl, Akim Tamiroff | US Action drama | 86;

Hollywood must have absolutely throbbed with fascinating stories in its heyday, and a glance at the credits of even a Universal-International potboiler like this (actually directed with some flair by Joseph Pevney, who later worked on Star Trek) reveals it certainly lived up to both the ‘Universal’ and the ‘International’ parts of its banner in those days.

At a superficial glance this appears just another yarn about the foreign legion, based on a 1927 novel by Georges Arthur Surdez and adapted for the screen by Irving Wallace and Lewis Meltzer; but on closer inspection it turns out to have elements of Lost Horizon thrown into the mix, with ravishing redhead Arlene Dahl photographed in Technicolor in a succession of glitzy, diaphanous outfits by Bill Thomas by veteran cameraman John Seitz (whose CV included The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and Sunset Boulevard).

At fourth and fifth place in the cast list we find Akim Tamiroff without his rug but sporting enormous side-whiskers, who a dozen years later would turn up in Alphaville; and as Dahl’s father 77 year-old Oscar Beregi, twenty years after playing the role of asylum director Dr Baum in The Testament of Dr Mabuse! @RichardChatten

Viennale Film Festival 2022

One of the world’s longest-running film festivals VIENNALE celebrates its 60th anniversary this year from 20 October until 1 November 2022.

This year’s edition brings together a glittering array of world premieres along with the latest award-winning films and specially curated retrospectives amongst them a special tribute to long time Viennale director and Werner Herzog on his 80th birthday on 28 October 2022.

ARGENTINE FILM NOIR

With its turbulent 20th century history of violence and insurrection Argentina lends itself particularly well to the film noir genre. A series of recently restored films shot in Buenos Aires by Fernando Ayala, Hugo Fregonese, Carlos Hugo Christensen, Román Viñoly Barreto and Pierre Chenal will highlight the Peron era (1949-1956)

ELAINE MAY RETROSPECTIVE

Paving the way for women in a largely male-dominated industry, the pioneering comedy writer, actor and filmmaker Elaine May (1932-) has certainly made a name for herself in a continuing career now ripe for celebration. This year’s Viennale will be screening her four major works as director A New Leaf (1971), Ishtar (1987), Mikey and Nicky (1976), and The Heartbreak Kid (1972). In 2022 she received an Oscar for her lifetime achievement.

MED HONDO

Mauritanian born producer, actor and director of African cinema Med Hondo (1936-2019) rose to the international stage with an incendiary study of French Colonial conflict in Africa. SARRAOUNIA(1986) was particularly noteworthy for its clever female central character, the titular queen of the Aznas played by Ai Keita. Hondo’s films continued to explore the continent’s cultural and colonial power struggles through documentaries, musicals and crime thrillers up until his death in 2019. The festival will screen nine recently restored works, amongst them Hondo’s directorial debut, SOLEIL Ô; LES BICOTS-NÈGRES VOS VOISINS (1974); WEST INDIES (1979) and crime thriller LUMIÈRE NOIRE (1994).

YOSHIDA KIJŪ – RETROSPECTIVE

Viennale dedicates this year’s retrospective to the Japanese director with twelve rarely shown works on 35mm, organised together with the Austrian Film Museum. Probably best known for A Promise which won the Golden Seashell at San Sebastián in 1986, Kiju was born in Fukui, Japan, in 1933, and moved with his family to Tokyo where he studied for a literary degree before gaining a place at the Shōchiku studio in 1955, founding a film magazine with Ōshima Nagisa, and working as assistant director for Kinoshita Keisuke.

In 1960, Yoshida made his directorial debut with ROKUDENASHI (GOOD FOR NOTHING), a riotous film about disoriented youth. In the powerful melodrama AKITSU ONSEN (AKITSU SPRINGS, 1962), he collaborated for the first time with Mariko Okada, who would become his wife and the protagonist of his films that critically examine Japanese gender relations. With Okada, he also founded the independent production company Gendai Eigasha in 1966. Three years later, he presented EROSU PURASU GYAKUSATSU (EROS + MASSACRE) – which together with RENGOKU EROICA (HEROIC PURGATORY) and KAIGENREI (COUP D’ETAT) forms the trilogy of Japanese radicalism – one of the central works of Japanese New Wave. Although Yoshida himself never particularly liked this term, he is regarded as its most important representative, along with Ōshima and Masahiro Shinoda.

Stylistically daring and always touching on taboos in terms of content, Yoshida’s films explore upheavals in Japanese society, especially in the 1960s. From the mid-1970s onwards, Yoshida directed only a few films. In 1998, he published the book Ozu Yasujirō no han eiga (Ozu’s Anti-Cinema), a widely acclaimed analysis of the work of the great Japanese director. In 2002, Yoshida made KAGAMI NO ONNA-TACHI (WOMEN IN THE MIRROR), his last film to date. © Viennale.

VIENNALE TRAILER

This special anniversary presents six short films by award-winning directors from different traditions and regions of the world, reflecting the diversity and richness of contemporary cinema: Claire Denis, Nina Menkes, Sergei Loznitsa, Ryusuke Hamaguchi and Narcisa Hirsch.

VIENNALE FILM FESTIVAL 2022 | 20 OCTOBER – 1 NOVEMBER

See How They Run (2022)

Dir: Tom George | Cast: Sam Rockwell, Saoirse Ronan, Adrien Brody, Ruth Wilson, Reece Shearsmith, Harris Dickinson, David Oyelowo, Charlie Cooper, Pippa Bennett-Warner, Pearl Chanda, Sian Clifford, Jacob Fortune-Lloyd | UK Drama 98′

Agatha Christie’s long-running play The Mousetrap finally gets a film version of sorts in this character-laden farce carried by a brilliant comedy performance from Saoirse Ronan.

On a snowy night in London’s Soho, 1953, she is police constable Stalker, called in to investigate the murder of the director hired ‘to make the film version less boring than the play’, after its 100th staging.

The dead man turns out to be accident-prone Leo Köpernick (Adrien Brody in Wes Andersen mode) a friendless American who sees an opportunity to reinvent the play for Hollywood, with his philandering producer John Woolf (Reece Shearsmith). Obviously that’s not going to happen, but what comes next is a cosy re-imagining of the good old days of post war whodunnits positively bristling with roaring fires, red herrings and a starry cast, although none shines as brightly as Ronan whose perfect timing lights up every scene.

Not so her boss Sam Rockwell (Inspector Stoppard) whose shifty behaviour and muffled attempt at a cockney accent strike a bum note in this amusing, if confusing, comedy caper (too much editing, Ed). And this is a glaring plothole because writer Mark Chapell has him as one of the main characters in his dawdling script, but from Stoppard’s shifty demeanour it starts to feel like he may actually be a suspect. Or is that just another red herring?.

Harris Dickinson plays The Mousetrap’s dapper lead Richard Attenborough and Pearl Chanda his wife, Sheila Sim. Ruth Wilson shines as the glossy but tight-fisted impresario Petula Spencer. Shirley Henderson is magnificent as a crusty old Agatha Christie in what turns out to be a rather entertaining cameo role – shame there wasn’t more of her – and David Oyelowo is the pompous writer Mervyn Cocker-Norris, let’s forget about his preposterous Latin lover Gio (Fortune-Lloyd).

See How They Run is all a bit hit and miss but the silliness is half the fun, and it really does look rather super, especially the scene where they all arrive, after receiving a mysterious invite, at Christie’s stately mansion in deepest Berkshire.

The Mousetrap is one of theatre land’s most iconic plays and started life as Agatha Christie’s 1947 radio play called Three Blind Mice. Later adapted into a TV film, and then a short story before taking to the stage in October 1952, it’s still going strong at St Martin’s Theatre seven decades later. Sadly See How They Run will probably soon be a distant memory. MT

NOW ON RELEASE IN THE UK AND NATIONWIDE.

Don’t Worry Darling (2022)

Dir.: Olivia Wilde; Cast: Florence Pugh, Olivia Wilde, Chris Pine, Harry Stiles, Gemma Chan, Kiki Layne, Douglas Smith; US 2022, 122 min.

Not even three three publicity stunts could elevate Olivia Wilde’s follow-up to her debut feature Booksmart at the Venice Festival this year where the film written by Katie Silberman, Shane and Carey Van Dyke was screened Out of Competition.

Was Shia LaBeouf really fired and replaced by Harry Stiles? And did Styles really spit at Chris Pine? And what about Florence Pugh. Did she cut down on press work because she was miffed by Wilde?

Don’t Worry Darling turns out to be a pale imitation of Stepford Wives, The Truman Show and Pleasantville rolled into one. In the southern Californian desert a model community called ‘Victory’ has been set up very much along the lines of Pleasant Living, with the wives cleaning and cooking while their menfolk put their minds to the top secret ‘Victory’ project, all kitted out in dapper 1950s suits and driving souped-up retro cars.

In this empty-headed utopian Eldorado Alice (Pugh) are Jack (Styles) are always hard at it – even on the kitchen table – cutlery and plates flying all over the place. Frank (Pine) and his wife Shelley (Chan) are meanwhile the leaders of the clean living brigade. Frank is not only the boss at work, he is the spiritual guru who keeps everything together like a scout master. Bunny (Wilde) and Bill (Smith) are trying hard to fit in with the set-up; the only one having doubts is Margaret (Layne).

One day a toy airplane lands in her lap and soon afterwards Alice sees a full size version falling from the sky and detonating in the desert. After Margaret commits suicide on the roof of her house, Alice takes matters into her own hands. But instead of offering insight into why these female characters are being gas-lit, Wilde opts for a car chase.

PD Katie Byron and Aronofsky’s regular DoP Matthew Libatique keep the production values up, mustard and pistachio dominating in the desert sand and the cloudless sky. Vacuous and totally humourless, Don’t Worry Darling is a void, held together by Pugh who struggles desperately to bring something fresh to the production. A first class actor in a lousy imitation game, she has all the right to be angry at Wilde – never mind the rumour mill. AS

VENICE REVIEW | ON RELEASE IN THE UK FROM 23 SEPTEMBER

Juniper (2022)

Dir/Wri: Matthew Saville | Cast: Charlotte Rampling, George Ferrier, Marton Csokas, Edith Poor | Drama, 95′

Charlotte Rampling steals every scene in this poignant if predictable drama from debut director Matthew Savile. Light-hearted and upbeat Juniper also showcases the verdant landscapes of Auckland captured on the widescreen by Marty Williams.

Ruth (Rampling) is a prickly English wartime correspondent convalescing in her son Robert’s (Csokas) country house in New Zealand where she has wised up to his ulterior motives – a need for financial support and to act as a rudder for his unruly teenage son Sam (Ferrier). Sam has no wish to look after a cantankerous old woman and is furious about her sleeping in his late mother’s bedroom.

A keen battle of wits develops as Ruth and Sam find common ground as intergenerational tearaways with the same rebellious take on life, although Ruth has the edge in this amusing character drama that shares certain similarities with Justin Kurzel’s recent hit Nitram, without the incendiary power and implications of that thriller.

Rampling brings out the humanity in Ruth whose eloquent resolve is unaffected by her regularly hitting the gin bottle and calling a spade a spade without ever losing her cool determination not to be outwitted by a petulant grandson who has recently lost his mother and been expelled from school, and eventually uses him to achieve her own benevolent ends.

Avoiding sentimentality and astute in his observation that age and infirmity have no bearing on a person’s innate character drives, Juniper is a witty and well-written debut taking its clever title from the Juniper berry that goes into making gin. Ruth is a courageous woman whose desires are undimmed by her increasing years bringing to mind Dylan Thomas well worn poem: “Do not go gentle into that good night…Rage, rage against the dying of the light”. MT

ON RELEASE FROM 23 SEPTEMBER 2022

Something You Said Last Night (2022) San Sebastián Film Festival

Dir/Wri.: Luis de Filippis; Cast: Carmen Madonia, Ramona Milano, Paige Evans, Joe Parro; Canada/Switzerland 2022, 96 min.

This first feature for writer/director Luis de Filippis is an exercise in style. A short family holiday is (mis)used by parents and two sisters to behave badly – not in an outrageous way, but just enough to be really irritating throughout its running time.

Renata (Madonia), a writer in her early twenties is on holiday with a teenage sister Siena (Evans) and overbearing parents Mona (Milano) and Guido (Parro). Left at home is brother Anthony, who, like his sisters, is a victim of a passive-aggressive mother who tries to control everything from table manners to mobile phones. Mostly without success.

Ren, a trans woman, also has a secret to hide and one that will make her increasingly dependent on the family. Siena (Evans) wants to leave the nest and spends the nights cruising. Ren has an affectionate relationship with her father, who suffers mostly in silence – even during a farcical birthday party which brings out the worst in him. But most annoying of all is Mona’s forced happiness: the girl is always breaking into song and dance, hoping the rest of the family will join her. There is one rather moving scene where some kids on the beach take Ren’s doll, teasing her about her looks, and then destroying the toy – only for Guido to repair it for his grateful daughter.

The late Jean-Luc Godard postulated that style is everything and certainly de Filippis stringently adheres to a unity of aesthetics in a script entirely consisting of smalltalk and petty arguments. Everybody seems emotionally and intellectually regressed – the real arguments are buried too deep to be solved.

DoP Norm Li underlines the one note narrative with pastels colours and languid close-ups. We wait for something cruel to happen (like in early Bruno Dumont features), but de Filippis simply wants to emphasise that Ren is just one of the crowd, and certainly succeeds in gaining some admiration for creating another “Neighbours’ on sea. Not for everyone, but one has to admire de Filippis’ absolute adherence to the principle of unbroken exasperation. AS

SOMETHING YOU SAID LAST NIGHT won the Changemaker Award at TIFF 2022 | SCREENING DURING SAN SEBASTIAN FILM FESTIVAL 2022

All that Breathes (2022) Grierson Award BFI London Film Festival

Dir: Shaunak Sen | India, Doc, 91′

In New Delhi nature is adapting far more intuitively to pollution than humans according to this visionary documentary that embodies the stealth of the animal kingdom.

All That Breathes works on three levels: as a melancholic, dreamlike meditation on the vital synergy that exists between all living creatures; as an eco-doc exploring the worsening effects of pollution and climate change in India; or simply, as a human story about two brothers working together to make the world kinder and more humane.

Living in an increasingly violent and overpopulated capital city, Mohammed, Nadeem and their friend/co-worker Salik dedicate their spare time to a home-based mostly self-funded organisation called Wildlife Rescue. For the past two decades they have rehabilitated kites and other birds of prey in the cramped conditions of a makeshift clinic. Key to the relevance of kites is that Muslims believe feeding them will bring some kind of religious reward or sawab. Since the brothers started the clinic in 2003 the situation has got worse and their patient list is constantly growing, consuming more of the brothers’ time and impacting on their own family wellbeing.

Director Sen creates an evocative portrait from the opening scenes that see ants, mice and rats scurrying around under the neon-lit night skies of Delhi oblivious to the looming violence and public unrest that rages, on a daily level, in the background. Meanwhile, landfill sites are invading the landscape, rivers are drying up and monsoons are worsening causing flooding that brings sewerage out into the open. “Delhi is an open wound, and we are tiny a band-aid” says Nadeem.

The air is becoming so heavy with chemical pollution and smog that birds are tumbling from the skies and often literally crash into one another as they hover over landfill sites, scavenging for food. Crucially, many chemicals are not fully tested for their environmental impact and these birds act as a monitor for toxicity – rather like the famous ‘canary in the coal mine’ back in the Industrial Age. But the brothers have no time for chemical testing and analysis as they face a growing list of avian patients. Cinematographer Ben Bernhard creates a woozy poetic bird’s eye view of a city intoxicated by its own chemical brew. His camera also allows us intimate close-ups of the kites, vulnerable but beady-eyed on the operating table.

Swooping between the real and the surreal Shaunak Sen invites us to gaze at the beauty of the animal kingdom and the ugliness caused by humans, in this decadent apocalyptic world, and draw our own conclusions. MT

Marrakech Film Festival | 11-19 November 2022

The Academy Award-winning director and screenwriter Paolo Sorrentino will head the jury of this year’s Marrakech International Film Festival, taking place from 11 to 19 November 2022.

The jury awards the Étoile d’Or to one of the 14 first or second feature- length films in the festival’s international competition, which is dedicated to the discovery of filmmakers from around the globe. is one of the best-known and exciting representatives of Italian filmmaking today. With an array of award-winning films and series already under his belt. Sorrentino puts a edgy twist on contemporary themes and offers a unique reflection on power, politics and religion, among other subjects. An author with an abundant imagination driven by a constantly renewed aesthetic ambition, Sorrentino has won awards at the most prestigious film festivals and events around the world.

The Young Pope

Paolo Sorrentino was born in Naples in 1970. One Man Up (L’uomo in più), his first feature- length film, had its premiere at the Venice Film Festival in 2001, and marked the start of his collaboration with the actor Toni Servillo, with whom Sorrentino went on to make several films. All of his subsequent six features were selected for the Official Competition at the Festival de Cannes: The Consequences of Love (Le conseguenze dell’amore, 2004); The Family Friend (L’amico di famiglia, 2006); Il divo (2008), which won the Jury Prize; This Must Be the Place (2011), shot in the United States and featuring Sean Penn and Frances McDormand; The Great Beauty (La grande bellezza, 2013), which won both the Academy Award and the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film; and Youth (La giovinezza, 2015), which brought together celebrated actors Michael Caine, Paul Dano, Jane Fonda, Harvey Keitel, and Rachel Weisz. The film received three European Film Awards and was nominated for an Oscar and two Golden Globes.

In 2016, The Young Pope, Sorrentino’s first television series, was nominated for a Golden Globe and two Emmy Awards. Loro (2018), his eighth feature-length film, was selected for the Toronto International Film Festival.
In 2019, Sorrentino directed the television series The New Pope, starring Jude Law and John Malkovich.

In 2021, The Hand of God (È stata la mano di Dio) was presented at the Venice Film Festival, where it won the Grand Jury Prize. The film also received Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations.

MARRAKECH FILM FESTIVAL 2022

Daughter of Rage (2022) San Sebastián Film Festival 2022

Dir/Wri.: Laura Baumeister: Cast: Ara Alejandra Medal, Virginia Sevilla, Carlos Gutierrez, Noe Hernandez, Diana Sedano; Nicaragua 2022, 90 min.

An eleven year-old girl is forced to make a living on Nicaragua’s biggest landfill in this passionate poetic realist feature debut from writer/director Laura Baumeister.

Everything from human clinical waste to the kitchen sink gets dumped into a massive crater at La Chureca the main rubbish dump near the capital Managua where a civil war is rumbling. Little Maria (Medal) scratches an existence collecting spare parts which can be cleaned and sold on for a decent profit. In reality Maria is a child from hell, she is lazy and aggressive but brave when the need arises. Her struggle for survival is an act of endurance and enterprise.

At home, her mother Lilibeth (Sevilla) has manage to salvage some puppies which have already been sold on to a gangster, who runs the site taking a cut by offering accommodation in makeshift huts. Recovering from a near rape attempt one night Lilibeth finds out that her daughter has fed the puppies contaminated food, which has inadvertently killed them. So Lilibeth will have to endure sex with the gangster – in front of her daughter – to make up for the delay in delivering the puppies. Knowing perfectly well she will never be able to keep her side of the bargain she must disappear deep into the rain forest where Maria will be left – against her will – in the care of Raul (Hernandez), who runs a small processing site, cleaning and selling spare parts.

Although Maria desperately wants to leave with her mother she knows the consequences will mean a loss of income and no food. And this brings out the worst in her as she comes up against everyone in the plantation, fighting with a boy called Tadeo (Gutierrez) and smashing up a TV until the police arrive to raid the site.

Baumeister shows a country in chaos with smalltime gangsters controlling and exploiting the poor: every there are roadblocks and crime if rife. There is only one way out: mythical stories which will eradicate the depressing reality. Lilibeth tells her daughter the story of cat woman who prowls the forest. Maria just wants to escape, but where to and how?.

Daughter of Rage often feels like two films rolled into one, but DoP Teresa manages a seamless transition between realism and myth with intensely powerful images that overcome any shortcomings in the narrative leaving the audience in awe of a startling feature debut. AS

SAN SEBASTIAN FILM FESTIVAL | 16-24 September 2022

Everybody Loves Jeanne (2022)

Dir/Wri: Celine Devaux | Cast: Blanche Gardin, Laurent Lafitte, Maxence Tual, Nuno Lopez, Marthe Keller | France, Drama 95′

Jeanne founded an ecological startup to save the world from plastic. Now on the verge of bankruptcy she has some tough decisions to make about her future in this cross between a screwball comedy and a reflective romantic drama.

First time director and illustrator Celine Devaux opts for a jokey narrative device featuring animated inserts of a female version of ‘Mr Blobby’ voicing Jeanne’s worst fears, hopes and melancholy musings. These illustrations actually interrupt the narrative flow making you wish the director would just get on with a story powerful enough to carry a drama that gets more and more enjoyable as it finds its groove, although the message it finally delivers is a bit of a cop out feminist-wise. Not sure whether this was what Devaux originally intended.

Fortunately Jeanne happens to have inherited her mother’s place in Lisbon where she grew up with her brother Simon (Tual). So off she heads to the sun to clear her debts with the sale. On the way she meets old school friend Jean (Lafitte on top form as a pain in the arse) and spends the flight wondering whether she fancies, or finds him deeply irritating. This dilemma is soon resolved when Jean is met by his wife and little daughter, and also turns out to be loaded – in a withering twist on Jeanne’s own financial failure. She, by contrast, is met by her ex Victor (Lopez) who is also now a father, and married into the bargain, although she re-kindles secret desires to bed him. And it’s these amusing insights that make the film entertaining and Jeanne so appealing as a character who everyone can relate to: a woman who is not afraid to be disliked but also wants to be perceived as doing something worthwhile, while suffering the secret need to be loved – a tough call but one that Blanche Gardin pulls off successfully in this impressive feature debut.

In Lisbon she sees her mother everywhere in the flat – a hoarder who nagged about her never calling. So clearing out the flat is the last thing on her mind. Gradually slumping into a low level depression she escapes into the sandy beaches and mellow sunsets of the Portuguese capital until the unexpected arrives in a soft-pedalling finale. MT

NOW ON RELEASE IN FRANCE | CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | CAMERA D’OR 2022

Trenque Lauguen (2022) Part I

Dir: Laura Citarella | Cast: Laura Paredes, Ezequiel Pierri, Rafael Spregelburd, Elisa Carricajo, Veronica Llinas, Juliana Muras, Argentina, Drama | 2 x 120′

Taking its name from a sparsely populated town in a region to the West of Buenos Aires Laura Citarella’s compelling feature debut often feels like an Argentine version of Twin Peaks, unfolding in two parts, each two hours long.

The mystery is there and the smalltime isolation – in this remote landlocked province larger than Austria – is palpable, and time-wise it feels like a throw-back to the 1950s although the story unfolds in the present day. Trenque Lauquen is all about the road less travelled, and, like the layers of an onion or a Russian doll, that sense of enigma edges the narrative forward; although some may find the pace slower than watching paint dry. Subtle but powerhouse performances save the day, Laura, Ezekiel and Raphael feel like real people we might even have met; we certainly get to know them inside out in this small-town backwater. A particular standout is Cecilia Rainero as Normita, but Laura Paredes is also notable in the lead.

The film opens as two men are discussing a woman. Ezequiel (Pierri) is her colleague, Raphael (Spregelburd) her boyfriend. Laura (Paredes, who also co-wrote the script) is a radio presenter and botanist. She has vanished, apparently without trace, after discovering a cache of hidden love letters.

The men want to find Laura for their own different reasons, and this provides them with their own search for the truth. Although Raphael calls himself her boyfriend, as the story unfolds Ezequiel will get far closer to Laura when she reappears. She is on an entirely different journey her male friends. And as they all embark of this existential odyssey, a sense of betrayal of his friend Raphael haunts Ezeguiel’s every expression. Meanwhile the meandering story takes us deeper and deeper into the mystery that haunts and obsesses Laura: the covert love story between a gaucho and an educated woman in an exploration probing the complexity of the female condition.

Divided into a series of chapters this soulful South American drama provides an immersive often surreal tale if we surrender to its lyrical languor in the sultry landscapes of the Argentine Pampas. @MeredithTaylor

PARTS I and 2 UK CINEMAS and on CURZON HOME from 8 DECEMBER 2023

Victim | Obet (2022) Toronto Film Festival 2022

Dir. Michal Blasko; Cast: Elizaveta Maximova, Vita Smachelyuk, Gleb Kuchuk, Igor Chmela, Victor Zavadil, Inna Zhulina, Alena Mihulova, Veronica Weinhold; Slovakia/Czech Republic/Germany 2022, 92 min.

This feature debut for Slovakian director Michal Blasko is a tightly-wound political thriller asking the question: How far would you go for a better life? Written by Jakub Medvecky, it takes place in a Czech border town where Roma are used as scapegoats for Neo-Nazis.

Ukranian hairstylist Irina (Smachelyuk) dreams of a better life in the Czech Republic where she wants to open a hairdressing salon. On re-applying for citizenship – having failed on a technicality – she finds out her teenage son Igor (Kuchuk), a talented gymnast, has been ‘purportedly’ set upon by three “non-white” assailants in their building, and has been hospitalised after losing a kidney in the attack.

Inspector Novotny (Chmela) orders the arrest of the eldest son of a Roma family living in the same building as Irina and Igor. The media gets hold of the story, and agitator Michal Selsky (Zavadil) organises “A March for Igor”, and the mayor tries to score political points with the incident. Meanwhile, Igor admits to his mother that he fell over while trying to impress girl friend Lenka, and no assault actually took place.

The focus is firmly on Irina who becomes an overnight celebrity, winning a reward of around £2000 sterling, and taking out a lease on a Hairdressing salon. Life is sweet. And the Czech Republic is now her oyster. But the lie plays on Irina’s conscience and she sinks deeper and deeper into a moral morass when Igor insists on sticking to the racist lie.

DoP Adam Mach uses handheld cameras tracking the action as Irina desperately looks for a way out of her dilemma. But being to be a good citizen and a supportive mother has its conflicts. Selsky is a mini-monster who, even when wrong-footed by Irina, still keeps the racism pot on the boil. Although schematic at times, Victim is a thorny morality play with no easy answers. AS

TORONTO FILM FESTIVAL 2022

The Tiger and the President (2022)

Dir: Jean-Marc Peyrefitte | Cast: Andre Dusollier, Jacques Gamblin, Anna Mouglalis, Astrid Whettnall, Laura Benson | France, Drama 108′

Jacques Gamblin is the star of this jaunty political drama inspired by on real events surrounding an almost forgotten French president Paul Deschanel (1855-1922).

Paris in the roaring 1920s and a transformational time for French politics in the wake of the Third Republic. President Georges Clemenceau (Dussollier) aka ‘The Tiger’ for his contribution to the Allied Victory, has just been ousted from office by a forward-thinking and sharp-witted successor Paul Deschanel (Gamblin) a radical reformer and inspired orator. Deschanel realises his task is to transform the post world war lives of the French people whose battle cry is: “you won the war, now let us win the peace”. Meanwhile the Treaty of Versailles is being signed, with Germany the last to put ink to paper. On his victory the new president launches into a raft of sweeping reforms including the vote for women – poopoo-ed by Clemenceau – ridding France of the nightshift in factories, along with the death penalty – were amongst his most positive social changes.

In his first feature French director and writer Jean-Marc Peyrefitte freely admits to embellishing the storyline co-written by Marc Syrigas, ramping up the sparring between Clemenceau and Deschanel to give the film its comedy elements and adding a picaresque even whimsical quality to an often poignant drama about a man whose fervent desire was to better his country recovering from the First World War. But this humanist side of his character also gave rise to deep anxiety, and to remedy this his doctor prescribed a controversial barbiturate called Veronal – later withdrawn from use – that led to a famous episode of him sleepwalking off the back of train, during a presidential visit which culminates in a painterly stay in the French countryside with a family of yokels. Anna Mouglalis offers a shoulder to cry on and much valued pillow talk to both men who apparently shared the same ‘Salon’.

Peyreftte cleverly dovetails both presidents into news highlights from the 1920s archives. And these along with stylish Art Deco settings and a score of appropriate musical hits from the era add to the allure of this intelligent and jaunty interwar drama about a man slowly losing his mind. MT

NOW ON RELEASE IN FRANCE

Kompromat (2022)

Dir: Jerome Salle | Cast: Gilles Lellouche, Joanna Kulig, Louis-Do de Lenquesaing, Michael Gor | France, Action thriller 122′

Gilles Lellouche brings some much needed Gallic charm to this chilly political espionage outing co-written and directed by Jerome Salle and based on real events.

Kompromat is a story that couldn’t get much grimmer if it tried in shadowing the current state of affairs in Russia. Lellouche plays affable French diplomat Mathieu Roussel who is thrown into jail in subzero Siberia on a flimsy charge of child pornography. In reality he is being framed by the FSB in a ‘no-win’ situation known as a ‘Kompromat’. But Matthieu is mystified as to why, in a plot that only goes to underline just how impossible his situation is when up against the Ruskies.

You can’t help feeling sorry for Mathieu when it later emerges his marriage to French wife Alice (Lasowski) is is also doomed. They are briefly seen in a lukewarm exchange before the authorities arrive to arrest him in a violent incursion. Later Alice returns to France with Rose, but not before filing a complaint about him to the authorities.

So begins a Kafkaesque nightmare of epic proportions as Mathieu takes on the authorities from a weakened position. Friendless and down on his luck, he turns to a mirthless Russian lawyer called Borodin (Godunov) who manages to get him released on an electronic tag. Then there is Louis-Do de Lenquesaing’s sharp-suited French ambassador, who briefly swings into action but to no avail. A Russian woman called Svetlana (Kulig) – whose marriage is also in trouble – supplies a frost-bitten romantic frisson. The two had briefly danced together at a work do, and she enables his bid to escape by supplying a mobile phone. But can he really trust her as he makes his way across the frozen wastelands in this dour but watchable thriller. MT

NOW ON RELEASE IN FRENCH CINEMAS | 12 SEPTEMBER 2022

Blonde (2022) Venice Film Festival 2022

Dir.: Andrew Dominik; Cast: Ana de Amas, Adrien Brody, Bobby Cannavale, Julianne Nicholson, Lilly Fisher; USA 2022, 166 min.

Australian director Andrew Dominik adapts Joyce Carol Oates Monroe’s novel – all 738 pages – by the look of it, for this Golden Lion hopeful. Worth mentioning this because the feature is, like the book, a work of fiction; an imagined drama. Dominik is dealing with a myth, and the way he does it certainly raises questions of exploitation and voyeurism.

In the opening scenes a seven-year-old Norma Jean Mortenson (Fisher) is told by her single mother Gladys (Nicholson) that her father is a movie-star. A black-and-white photo is all the ‘proof’ she is given – and from that moment onwards Norma Jean, who will become the legendary Marilyn Monroe, will look for her Daddy in most men she meets. The real Marilyn believed Clark Gable was her father – ironically both starred in Monroe’s last feature Misfits (1961). During shooting Marilyn’s husband, the playwright Arthur Miller (Brody), fell in love with set photographer Inge Morath, and married her soon afterwards. Nothing of this found its way into Blonde, nor is there any mention that Monroe supported Miller in his legal battle with the HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) – a move that could have ruined both their careers. Instead we get a choppily edited, slapstick parody of a three-some with Charlie Chaplin Jr. and Edward G. Robinson Jr. This symbolises the director’s salacious choices: the more scandalous, the better.

Suffice to show Monroe being raped by studio boss Daryl Zanuck at the start of her movie career, but Dominik decides to spice up his narrative with a full frontal display of her tumultuous time at the hands of JFK. Her comments: “that she felt like meat being delivered” only adds grist to this shameless ‘expose’.

Billy Wilder gets off far too lightly, into the bargain. Dominik still thinks the infamous scene in Seven Year Itch, when Monroe’s skirt is blown up around her ears by the passing subway, is ‘funny’, and not a provocation for Monroe’s newly wed husband Joe Di Maggio (Cannavale). The marriage, unsurprisingly, did not last long. Wilder also wrote a horrible monologue for Monroe in Some like it Hot, showing her off as the typical scatter-brained blonde and to underline the point Ana de Armas (as Marilyn) runs around semi-naked for no apparent reason other than titillation.

DoP Chayse Irvin uses all tricks in the book to get the bandwagon rolling: hopping from old-fashioned colour to pristine black-and-white, and using slow-motion sequences to accentuate what appears to be history. It is not.

Netflx, as the producers, as well as Dominik, can be sure that the kaleidoscopic mayhem will find a willing audience. It will no doubt sell like hot cakes in cinemas, where, after a brief run, it moves on to the beleaguered streaming platform.

But the real culprit is Alberto Barbera, director of the Mostra. Nobody held a gun to his head to make him chose Blonde. He just went for the glory, never mind a possible scandal. The result is at best a feature filmed for the voyeuristic male gaze, at worst pornography masquerading as an art form. @Andre Simonoveisz.

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL | 2022 | IN COMPETITION.

It Is In Us All (2022)

Dir/Wri: Antonia Campbell-Hughes | Cast: Cosmo Jarvis, Rhys Mannion, Claes Bang | Drama

This enigmatically titled thriller is the confident feature debut of seasoned actor Antonia Campbell Hughes who certainly knows how to create atmosphere even if her writing needs some fine-tuning.

Cosmo Jarvis leads in a pent-up performance as Hamish Considine a nihilistic young man whose past comes back to bite him with tragic consequences after a motorway accident unleashes a lifetime of suppressed emotional baggage.

Campbell Hughes creates a terrific sense of place in the rain-lashed countryside of Ireland, And it’s here where Hamish returns to visit the grave of his Irish-born aunt and deal her estate – a desolate house – on behalf of his pragmatic father, an expat businessman (a bearded Claes Bang who we only see on zoom). Outwardly blasé and self-assured Hamish soon turns out to be anything but after his car collides with another vehicle setting in course a cataclysmic chain of events as he pieces together his childhood to makes sense of the present.

The crash has destabilised Hamish physically and mentally but he shrugs it off stoically discharging himself from hospital too early with a severe concussion. When the only survivor of the other vehicle – a 17 year old livewire called Evan (a brilliant Mannion) – drops round to the house the two develop an almost surreal bond as Hamish is sucked into his mother’s homeland, feeling a palpable connection with the locals who share their own experiences of growing up with her and her sister.

A humble cow in Evan’s family farm becomes the symbol of this cherished motherhood and the fear of her being slaughtered in the abattoir nearby has Hamish reliving the devastation of losing his own mother when he was only a boy. Evan’s volatile personality comes to represent a seething life-force for Hamish drawing him inexorably to the past until he realises there is no going back and no way forward. It Is In Us All is not much of a thriller, in the traditional sense, but certainly a spellbinding look at how places create emotional memories that bind us eternally to the past. MT

UK AND IRISH CINEMA AND DIGITAL RELEASE DATE 23 SEPTEMBER 2022

Beyond the Wall (2022) Venice Film Festival 2022

Dir.: Vahid Jalivand, Cast: Navid Mohammadzadeh, Diana Habibi, Amir Aghaei, Iran 2022, 123 min.

This nightmarish siege drama with a tentative love story at its heart is one of the most accomplished features competing for this year’s Golden Lion at Venice Film Festival. Iranian films can be weak on the cinematic front despite their gripping storylines but Beyond the Wall is full of spectacular action scenes and tender close-ups. For once content and aesthetics come together in truly unique form.

Told in a series of flashbacks the sinuous thriller takes place in an apartment block where Leila (Habibi) is looking for her 4 year old son after evading the police during a workers’ protest. Meanwhile, one of the occupants, a blind man called Ali ((Mohammadzadeh) is attempting suicide but only succeeds in dislodging some hot water pipes when he is interrupted by the concierge of the building with the news that a hostage is somewhere in the building. Ali soon realises that Leila is actually hiding in his flat and becomes obsessed with trying to help her, escaping his own personal trauma and disappearing into a fantasy world with the unknown woman. Why is Ali so adamant to help Leila? The flashbacks gradually reveal the disturbing answer, and the brutal finale will have you cowering in your seats. AS

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2022 | GOLDEN LION

Il Signore delle Formiche (2022) Venice Film Festival

Dir.: Gianni Amelio; Cast: Luigi Lo Cascio, Elio Germano, Leonardoc Maltese, Sarah Serraiocco; Italy 2022, 134 min.

Italian director/co-writer Gianni Amelio returns to Venice with a worthy but rather tired looking epic about the trial and imprisonment of 1960s poet and intellectual Aldo Braibante accused of ‘Plagiarism’, an old fascist law masking homophobic intent. The case went to trial in Rome when Ettore’s family brought a law suit against the academic, who enjoyed a consensual relationship with the student.

Ennio (Germano), a Unita journalist, is sympathetic to Braibante but the communist newspaper refuses to support his case since they believe homosexuals should be punished in concurrence with the Italian state. Graziella (Serraiocco) joins Ennio in setting up an LGBT styled campaign. And while Graziella pursues her activism, Ennio then leaves the newspaper, potentially a victim of Aids. DoP Luan Amelio underlines the director’s stereotypical message with rather bland images in this quality potboiler. AS

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL | GOLDEN LION 2022

The Son (2022)

Dir.: Florian Zeller, Cats: Hugh Jackman, Laura Dern, Zen McGrath, Vanessa Kirby, Anthony Hopkins, USA/UK/France 2022, 123 min.

The Son is a glib and one-note second feature for director Florian Zeller after his Oscar-winning debut The Father took the film world by storm with its emotional clout and authenticity. The Son is too verbose, and too monotone to be engaging despite its slick production values, never escaping its stagey origins in a screenplay adapted by Christopher Hampton from Zeller’s play.

Anthony Hopkins again stars as a father, this time to successful lawyer Peter (Jackman) who is on the verge of a potential White House association and has left his wife Kate (Dern) for a much younger trophy wife Beth (Kirby). The couple have just had a baby son but Kate contacts him about taking on board their own teenager Nicholas (an underwhelming McGrath ) who has obvious mental problems, self-harming and playing truant from school. Peter’s relationship with his stern father Anthony (Hopkins) has not helped him bond with Nicholas and after a suicide attempt, Nicholas is sectioned in a psychiatric ward turning his parents’ world upside down. Performance wise the standout is once again Hopkins who is commanding as a tough pragmatist, against Jackman’s dignified but hamstrung lawyer, with the female characters more or less brushed aside. The Son feels too redactive in contrast to its successful predecessor, with Zeller stranded in the middle between a film and a theatrical production. The upshot is a depressing psychodrama. AS

ON RELEASE FROM 17 FEBRUARY 2023 | VENICE FILM FESTIVAL PREMIERE | GOLDEN LION 2022

Saint Omer (2022)

Dir.: Alice Diop; Cast: Kayije Kagame, Guslagie Malanda, Valerie Dreville, Aurelia Petit; France 2022, 123 min.

This gripping feature debut from award-winning documentarian Alice Diop is a courtroom drama of a special kind. Saint Omer is a quest for a seemingly unobtainable truth in contemporary France.

Isolation and loneliness are felt particularly keenly by the main character Rama (Kagame), a Paris-based university lecturer who arrives in Saint Omer to cover the case of Laurence (Malanga), a mother on trial for killing her own daughter after a suffering the shame of being ostracised by her much older white husband.

The French-Senegalese director and co-writer is already a successful documentarian and won the Silver Lion (Grand Prix) and the “Luigi De Laurentiis Lion of the Future Award” for best first feature at Venice Film Festival.

Diop could have hardly chosen a more incendiary subject based on the case of Fabienne Kabou, who killed her 15-month old daughter by drowning her in the sea off Northern France then going back to Paris as if nothing had happened. Diop used the trial documents as a basis for her heart-wrenching tale of the re-telling of the ‘Medea’ myth.

Rama – Diop’s Alter Ego in the film – is also pregnant but does not want to tell her family, since she has a dysfunctional relationship with her own, abusive, mother Odile (Kamate) shown in flashback. She’s also keen to collect collect information for her forthcoming book on Medea. During the trial, Rama finds more and more personal parallels to the life of the accused, Laurence Coly (Malanga), who was studying for a PHD in philosophy even though – like everything else in her CV – this is not really a given. Coly had hidden the birth of her daughter from nearly everyone, including her mother whom Rama meets during the breaks in the court proceedings. The two women wander through the streets of the small city, with Odile being really proud of her daughter’s academic style of conversation.

These encounters raise more questions than answers for Rama who has doubts about her ability to be a good mother. Her partner Adrian (De Pourquery) comes down from Paris and tries to puts her mind at rest. Rama’s partner is the exact antithesis of Luc Dumontet (Maly), the father of little Elise, who is 30 years older than Laurence. He too helped to hide Elise’ existence from the world by not registering her birth.

The Judge (Dreville) tries hard to find out what drove Coly to her desperate deed, and Coly seems equally confused about her motives throughout the trial. She mentions witchcraft, but has no proof. She is adamant about not wanting to hide the truth, and has a high IQ and proud of the fact. Laurence grew up in Dakar in a wealthy Catholic family and always achieved high academic results. But her personality remains an enigma throughout the trial and she is stubbornly closed to the help offered.

Saint Omer opens with an archive extract from the liberation of France in 1944: women collaborators are punished by having their hair cut off publicly. Are they victims, are they heroes? Diop insists throughout her film that she is not interested in easy solutions, wanting to question the objective as well as the subjective. Which brings us to Marguerite Duras. Rama is also a novelist and lectures on Duras (again shown in flashback) and this certainly raises the question of how much she wanted to gain inspiration from the case. But the Laurence case unsettles her in a way she had not bargained for.

DoP Claire Mathon frames Laurence in the style of a Velasquez portrait, putting her firmly in the limelight. The close-ups clearly borrow from Ozu, the camera travelling slowly upwards – or downwards when it comes to Rama, who is hemmed into the rows of spectators. The light is sometimes diffuse, reflecting Laurence’ state of mind.

At the end, there are mostly women left: the protagonists of the legal proceedings, the crowd on the spectator benches. The same goes for the film crew.

Austere and fragmented, Saint Omer is not looking for solution but leaves us to make up our own minds, almost like an offscreen jury. Nowadays it seems as if the truth is becoming a moveable, mutating feast. AS

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL WINNER | SILVER LION | SAINT OMER IS FRANCE’S ACADEMY AWARD ENTRY 2023

The Eternal Daughter (2022)

Dir.: Joanna Hogg; Cast: Tilda Swinton, Joseph Mydell, Carlly-Sophia Davis; UK 2022, 96 min.

Joanna Hogg envelopes personal memories in her latest film -a ghostly tale that echoes Henry James and Sigmund Freud. The Eternal Daughter is all about the unprocessed grief and guilt between a mother and her daughter, or is it her adopted daughter?.

Rosalind and her middle-aged filmmaker Julie (Swinton in doppelgänger mode) retreat to the Welsh countryside to stay in a stately haunted hotel which once belonged to Rosalind’s family. Arriving in swathes of mist on a dank December night, they appear to be the only guests in residence. A celebration of Rosalind’s birthday is supposed to be the highlight of the trip that Julie is hoping will also provide a few ideas for a film about her mother.

The eerie sequestered location provides an ominous setting for the days ahead which get off to a bad start when the two women find themselves at the mercy of an offhand hotel receptionist (Davies) who puts them in a dingy room where Julie hardly gets any sleep, disturbed by sinister noises during the night. Gradually a dreary routine sees reality and fantasy fuse in a malign atmosphere where Julie’s creative juices fail to flow, her dog becoming an acute barometer for the enigmatic goings on while also echoing Julie’s suppressed feelings of anxiety in her desire to please her mother who is submerged by her own unreliable memories of the past

Shot on 35mm film in Panavision with an evocative score, this is an imaginative reflection on how well we think we actually know our parents as people before we came along, and how their experiences colour our own lives. Rosalind was the child of Victorians in a distinctly un-permissive world shaped by the maxim “never explain, never complain”. She lived through wartime but her recollections seem suppressed by a desire to put a positive spin on the past and bury her true feelings. And although the past is still a foreign country for Julie, she and her mother are actually more similar than they imagine, locked together in a timeless bond through their intimate background. Hogg’s unique idiosyncratic style with its witty English sensibilities once again triumphs and is instantly relatable for her niche audience of committed cineastes. The Eternal Daughter is a delicate but thematically redolent memoire that adds to her distinctive archive. A piquantly tender often sadistic tour de force. MT

IN UK CINEMAS 24 NOVEMBER | VENICE FILM FESTIVAL PREMIERE

Other People’s Children (2022) Venice Film Festival 2022

Dir.: Rebecca Zlotowski, Virginie Efira, Callie Ferreira-Goncales, Roschdy Zem, Louana Yamee, Fred Wiseman, Chiara Mastroiani, France 2022, 104 min.

Rebecca Zlotowski (Planetarium) explores a woman’s desire to have children when she bonds with her boyfriend’s daughter. Hitting forty and changing her mind about becoming a parent, Rachel (Efira) decides to go for it with the help of her gynaecologist (Fred Wiseman!) and hunky Ali (Zem), who she falls for just in time. But there is a hitch: Ali is already a father but his cute daughter Leila (Ferreira-Goncales) wins Rachel’s heart. Leila’s mother Alice (Mastroiani) seems happy with Rachel getting involved and a holiday in the Camargue is the highpoint leading to a joyful epilogue. But somehow Rachel seems empty. Virginie Efira storms through the streets of Paris like a tornado in another pragmatic performance in a sunny snapshot that somehow lacks bite.

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL | GOLDEN LION 2022

The Whale (2022) Venice Film Festival 2022

Dir.: Darren Aronofsky, Cast: Brendan Fraser, Hong Chan, Ty Simkins, Samantha Morton, Sadie Sink; USA 2022, 117 min.

The Whale never breaks free from its claustrophobic stage origins, adapted for the screen by Samual D Hunter and based on his 2012 play. In contrast to his usual fare Darren Aronofsky’s direction is restrained, by his own admission, in a feature that deals with the ‘elephant in the room’ of the 21st century: Obesity. Brendan Fraser beefs up for a gargantuan performance as the fated fatty Charlie, traumatised by his partner’s suicide and wallowing towards an early grave in a dour Idaho backwater where he teaches creative writing via Zoom.

Charlie has no desire to be hospitalised and his ample finances provide for nurse Liz (Chau) to look after him, his estranged wife Mary (Morton) and daughter Ellie (Sink) putting in appearances for obvious reasons. Christian cult member Elder Thomas (Simkins) brings a twist to the plot, completing the quarter of depressive truth-seekers.

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL | GOLDEN LION COMPETITION 2022

Argentina 1985 (2022) Venice Film Festival 2022

Dir.: Santiago Mitre, Cast: Ricardo Darin, Juan Pedro Lanzini; Argentina/USA 2022, 140 min.

Multi-awarded director Santiago Mitre (The Summit) chronicles a dark episode in the history of his nation: the 1985 trial of the Junta’s generals. And although these military monsters had terrorised the country and murdered half a million Argentinians for nearly a decade during the ‘Dirty Wars’, this was the only trial that ever took place. The hero of the hour is General Prosecutor Julio Strassero (a masterful Riccardo Darin) who, undeterred by the military’s still considerable and corrupt influence within their fragile new democracy, assembles a team of hungry young lawyers for the monumental court battle. What follows – on the widescreen and in intimate close-up – is an incendiary race against time to bring justice, involving death threats as dirty as the wars themselves. DoP Javier Julia’s panoramic shots of the courtroom and specular street set pieces make this a real epic that speeds along with Mitre’s tightly written script making over two hours seem like minutes. AS

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2022 | FIPRESCI PRIZE WINNER 2022

Monica (2022)

Dir.: Andrea Pallaoro; Cast: Tracey Lysette, Patricia Clarkson, Joshua Close; USA/Italy 2022, 110 min.

Writer/director Andrea Pallaoro is back with a Lynchian riddle in the same enigmatic style and eerie atmosphere as his modest but memorable Hannah starring Charlotte Rampling as a refined woman down on her luck. Once again family rejection is the crux of the storyline. Monica wallows in a seething atmosphere of doom as another downcast heroine who has lost her place in the social pecking order, rejected by her mother on spurious grounds, although she is on reasonable terms with her brother Paul (Close) who talks about the good times they had as children. Buttoned down by its 4:3 format and old fashioned colour system (rather like the 1950s Eastmancolour) this is another melancholy tale you will not forget. AS

NOW in UK CINEMAS 15 DECEMBER 2023 | VENICE FILM FESTIVAL PREMIERE 2022

White Noise (2022) Venice Film Festival

Dir.; Noah Baumbach, Cast: Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, Raffey Cassidy; USA 2022, 136 min.

The curse of the festival opener is alive and kicking at Venice: Noah Baumbach’s White Noise, an adaption of Don de Lillo’s 1985 novel, is simply an embarrassment. In New York, Jack Glasdney (Driver) and Babette (Gerwig) have a brood of kids to look after from their own fraught marriage and earlier relationships. And they fail miserably: the toddler and younger children are a drain on their energy and, the older ones – including teenager Denise (Cassidy) seem more mature than their parents. Then en ecological disaster comes to town, and Jack is caught in the fallout. Mysticism and graphic violence ensues, but no plot resolution of any kind. DoP Lol Crawley does his best to keep the frantic tempo going, but it’s all empty noise.AS

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2022

World War III (2022) Venice Film Festival | Horizons 2022

Dir: Houman Sayeddi | Drama, Iran

A sardonic streak of deadpan humour lights up Houman Sayyedi’s pitch black parable that sees a humble labourer’s life transformed when he lands the star role in a film.

Deep in the Iranian countryside on a rain-lashed building site Shakib (Tanabandeh) is homeless and alone in the world after losing his wife and son in an earthquake. Things looks up when the modest drifter is offered lodging and a bit part in a feature film about Hitler’s atrocities, shooting nearby – the only condition: no friends or family can stay. So Shakib’s death mute girlfriend Ladan must make herself scarce.

The days on set are hectic with Shakib rushing around in crowd scenes dressed up as a concentration camp detainee – striped pyjamas and all. In another stroke of luck, he then lands the role of Hitler – a man whom he has never heard of – and a swanky new pad in the prefab that houses the main crew. But Ladan puts her foot down, a plan to smuggle her into his comfortable billet will have unimaginable consequences, potentially ruining his big break. Then her violent guardian appears on the scene demanding cash to the tune of 20k from the new “film star”. This is the least of Shakib’s problems in a morose and meandering morality tale like only the Iranians can tell.

Sayyedi had Hannah Arendt in mind when crafting World War III, and her words certainly ring true : “Societies ruled by totalitarian regimes are the most effective creators of anarchists”. With a whip-smart script the director and his writers strike just the right balance between dark humour, tragedy and melodrama, although melodrama slightly wins out in the cataclysmic finale where poor Shakib – a decent man driven to distraction and brilliantly played by Mohsen Tanabandeh – will fight tooth and nail for what really matters most. MT

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2022 | HORIZONS AWARD WINNER 2022

Tár (2022) Venice Film Festival 2022

Dir: Todd Field | Cast: Cate Blanchett, Nina Hoss | US Biopic Drama 158′

Cate Blanchett is sheer dynamite – allegedly mastering fluent German – as a world famous musician foisted by her own petard in this hefty near three hour biopic from US director Todd Field.

Field, in his first film since Little Children (2006), firmly establishes the gravitas of Lydia Tar’s prestigious position as head conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic in the prodigious opening scenes of a feature which luxuriates in its endlessly fascinating main character; her peripatetic high net-worth lifestyle amongst the great and the good, her pioneering grit and perseverance in accomplishing her multiple worthy achievements: now at the zenith of her career she is a pianist, composer, conductor and successful family woman who has adopted a Syrian refugee with lover Sharon Goodnow (the ever luminous Nina Hoss) and is seemingly un-eclipsible, or so it would seem.

Slow-burning towards a coruscating crescendo after a languorous, immersive overture, the denouement is decidedly gut-punching. Certainly a film for committed cineastes or fans of classical music, this is heavyweight stuff but a magnum opus for Field and a tour de force par excellence for Blanchett. MY

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2022

The Wandering Princess (1960)

Dir: Kinuyo Tanaka | Japan, Drama 102′

Kinuyo Tanaka moved up several gears after a five-year hiatus as a director with this ambitious blockbuster for Daiei based on Saga Hiro’s 1959 best-selling memoir made in colour & ‘scope with Oscar-winning Machiko Kyo and superlative production values.

The Wandering Princess is based on the autobiography of Aishinkakura Hiro, who lived a turbulent life as the consort of Fuketsu, the younger brother of Emperor Puyi of Manchukuo.

Full of spectacle and drama it chronicles the war years from 1941 to 1945, the sight of all those uniforms marking an extraordinary departure for a director associated with woman-based intimate drama. It was huge hit ranked 27th in the ‘Cinema junpo’ poll for best films of 1960, despite – or perhaps because – it perpetuates the myth that remains popular in Japan that the Land of the Rising Sun’s participation was solely as a victim.@RichardChatten

AT BFI LONDON

18th Spanish Film Festival | London 2022

The London Spanish Film Festival kicks off at the Ciné Lumière and Riverside Studios for its 18th edition from September 22-29 . An opportunity to catch the latest Spanish films that may not get a general release in UK cinemas.

In 1933 the young filmmaker Luis Buñuel traveled to Las Hurdes, an isolated and extremely poor region in central Spain, to film his surrealistic documentary Land without Bread. 85 years later hispanist and biographer Ian Gibson does the same trip as part of his work of recovering the most recent historical memory of Spain through the biographies of the country’s famous artists Buñuel, Dalí and Lorca. Gibson’s trip will end in Granada, where the search of Lorca’s remainings seems to be coming to an end.

Followed by an on-stage conversation with filmmaker Pablo Romero Fresco and documentary-maker Mike Dibb.

Sat 24 Sep | 4.15pm | £15, conc. £13 | Ciné Lumière

Alegría lives in the Southern city of Melilla has been trying to distancing herself for her Jewish background when the arrival of her niece brings the past flooding back. Will this be the time to reconcile with her own daughter, who she hasn’t seen for years and is now living in Israel – and a mother herself? Inspired by the director’s own experience, Alegría is a film by and about women, their friendship and understanding beyond religion and culture as well as the conflicts and contradictions within.

Tue 27 Sep | 8.50pm | £15, conc. £13 | Ciné Lumière

When Julio, the leader of an UFOlogists association in Elche dies unexpectedly, it falls to José Manuel take over his work. Meanwhile, everyone in Elche is looking for a girl who has gone missing. Exquisitely framed, García Ibarra’s debut feature film is uncomfortably amusing and defies expectations in a terrific way.

Preceded by the short SUELTA | Loose
by Javier Pereira, with Olivia Baglivi, Javier Ballesteros, Maria Jáimez | Spain | 2022 | col | 19 min | In Spanish with English subtitles

With a solid and long acting career, Javier Pereira moves to the other side of the camera and surprises us with Suelta, his first short, a dark story about trust and preconceptions that won’t leave you indiferent.

Wed 28 Sep | 8.30pm | £13, conc. £11, under 25 – £6.50 | Riverside Studios

Emilio and Rosa have created a dream family living with their five daughters in an isolated valley in the Canary Islands. But the past comes back to haunt them in this tense debut feature based on Paul Penn’s novel Desert Flowers

Followed by a Q&A with lead actor Daniel Grao
Wed 28 Sep | 8.30pm | £15, conc. £13 | Ciné Lumière

Laura is a psychologist working with victims of gender violence, and harassed by the husband of one of her patients in this subtle and stylish psychological thriller.

Thu 29 Sep | 6.20pm | £15, conc. £13 | Ciné Lumière

Pereda’s formidable debut rifs on adolescence insecurities and delivers a grisly and ferocious psychological horror film which premiered at Sundance Film Festival this year. It sees Sara, an overweight teenager, become the victim of constant bullying by the other girls until the arrival of a mysterious stranger in the village.

Thu 29 Sep | 8.40pm | £15, conc. £13 | Ciné Lumière

14TH CATALAN WINDOW

Neus Ballús third feature film is an original and deadpan docudrama that follows the working days of three handymen from different cultural backgrounds in the Catalan capital. Entertaining and times hilarious in its depiction of ordinary life.

This moving reflection on loyalty and the ties that bind is set in small-town Mallorca where two estranged sisters, Anna and Marina will uncover all sorts of skeletons in the cupboard when they are forced to sell a local bakery. Anna has barely left the island and is unhappy in her marriage, Marina works as a doctor for an NGO in Africa.

Fri 23 Sep | 6.15pm | £15, conc. £13 | Ciné Lumière

Autumn 2015. Two Catalan lifeguards, Oscar and Gerard, travel to the Greek island of Lesbos after seeing the heart-wrenching photograph of a little boy drowned in the Mediterranean. When they arrive the shocking reality is much worse: thousands of people are risking their lives everyday trying to cross the sea in the most precarious of vessels, fleeing from armed conflicts and other miseries in their home countries. And nobody is doing any rescue work. Based on real facts and real people, Barrena’s multi-awarded film invites us to think about what can be done when a crisis hits from political, social and human standpoints.

Sat 24 Sep | 6.30pm | £15, conc. £13 | Ciné Lumière

13TH BASQUE WINDOW

In 2000, Maixabel Lasa’s husband, Juan María Jáuregui, was killed by the terrorist organisation ETA. Eleven years later she receives a message from one of the men who killed Juan: he wants to meet with her in the Nanclares de la Oca prison in Álava, where he is serving his sentence after breaking ties with the terrorist group. Based on the inspiring true story of a brave woman whom, after losing her husband at ETA’s hands, decided to take a step towards a peaceful coexistence by agreeing to meet the imprisoned terrorist responsible for her husband’s death.

Followed by a Q&A with filmmaker Icíar Bollaín
Wed 28 Sep | 6.00pm | £13, conc. £11, under 25 – £6.50 | Riverside Studios

Euskadi 1985, and 12-year-old Marcos and his friends, José Antonio, Paquito and Toni are forced to face turbulent times of political violence and terrorism even though the summer holidays are in full swing.

San Sebastian, 2000. The Basque conflict is active. Sara, a fifteen-year-old girl, writes a letter to her absent brother as she trains for the most difficult clib of her life.

Sun 25 Sep | 6.40pm | £15, conc. £13 | Ciné Lumière

1st ANDALUSIAN WINDOW

LA HIJA – The Daughter
dir. Manuel Martín Cuenca, with Javier Gutiérrez, Patricia López Arnaiz, Irene Virgüez | Spain | 2021 | 122 min | col | cert. 18 | In Spanish with English subtitles

Manuel Martín Cuenca explores the dark and sinister side of human nature in this atmospheric drama that centres around a pregnant teenager who has run away from a juvenile detention centre near Jaen.

Followed by a Q&A with producer and co-writer Alejandro Hernández Thu 22 Sep | 8.35pm | £15, conc. £13 | Ciné Lumière

Carla Simón’s spectacular debut feature is a beautifully crafted, sensitive drama about a six-year-old girl who goes to live with her Catalan family after her mother’s death.

LA MANIOBRA DE LA TORTUGA -Unfinished Affairs
dir. Juan Miguel del Castillo, with Natalia de Molina, Fred Tatien, Mona Martínez, Ignacio Mateos | Spain/Argentina | 2022 | 101 min | col | cert. 18 | In Spanish with English subtitles

When the body of a young girl is found inspector Manuel Bianquetti sets, despite the opposition of his superiors and coleagues, on a solitary crusade to find those responsible for the crime, which reminds him of his own troubled past. The only person who seems to be on his side is his neighbour, a fragile and distrustful nurse. Adapted from the bestselling novel by Benito Olmo and set in the city of Cádiz, Unfinished Affairs is a true noir full of misleading clues, revenge, corruption and bold decisions as well as a portrait of the harsh reality of gender-based aggression.

Followed by a Q&A (tbc)
Mon 26 Sep | 6.20pm | £15, conc. £13 | Ciné Lumière

TRANCE
dir. Emilio Belmonte, with Jorge Pardo, Chick Corea, Mark Guiliana, Niño Josele | France | 2021 | 98 min | doc | UK premiere | In English and Spanish with English subtitles

Trance follows Jorge Pardo, renowned flutist and saxophonist of Paco de Lucía’s sextet, on a journey to the heart of flamenco music. Pardo’s flamenco-jazz work is essential to understand the evolution of contemporary flamenco. Belmonte’s road movie contains some exceptional musical moments and captures Pardo’s conception of art as a way of life and life as art.

Tue 27 Sep | 6.20pm | £15, conc. £13 | Ciné Lumière

A TREASURE FROM THE ARCHIVES HOMAGE TO BERLANGA

After the death of Franco, the Marquis of Leguineche returns to Madrid from thirty years of voluntary exile in the countryside. From his palace he intends to approach the King to resume court life. Berlanga, with his usual sharp wit, explores how Spanish high society tries to invent itself after Franco’s era has ended.

18th Spanish Film Festival | London 2022 | 23 September

Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022)

Wri/Dir: George Miller | Cast: Tilda Swinton, Idris Elba | Australia, Fantasy Drama, 118′

Best known for his groundbreaking saga Mad Max, Australian director writer George Miller turns his talents to another fantasy world with a fairy tale starring Tilda Swinton, in her second film at VENICE FILM FESTIVAL‘s 79th celebration.

Based on a short story by A S Byatt, she plays Dr Alithea Binnie who gets more that she bargained for after buying a trinket in a market stall on a visit to Istanbul. Polishing up the bauble back in her hotel bedroom out pops a djinn in the shape of Idris Elba, offering the good doctor three wishes in exchange for his freedom. The voluble djinn then rather outstays his welcome with endless exotic tales of his escapades in the style of the Arabian Nights. Certainly entertaining – up to a point – this is another enjoyable flight of fantasy with Tilda, and some spectacular special effects, stealing the show. MT

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL | 2022 | UK Cinemas from Friday, 2 September.

Casa Susanna (2022) Venice Film Festival 2022

Dir/Wri: Sebastian Lifshitz | France, Doc 97′

In the open scenes of this well made gay interest film an American broadcaster talks to four dolled up women who turn out to be men. Shock horror probe. But that was back in the Sixties, Nowadays cross-dressing is par for the course thanks to ‘Full Personality Expression’ that allows people to wear whatever they want, wherever they go.

Back in the 1950s and ‘60s this underground network of transgender women and cross-dressing men were forced to find refuge at a modest house in the Catskills region of New York. Known as Casa Susanna, the house provided a safe place to live for a few days as they had always dreamed—dressed as women – without fear of being incarcerated or institutionalised for doing so. Told through the memories of those whose visits to the house would change their lives, the film looks back at a secret world where the persecuted and frightened found freedom, acceptance and, often, the courage to live their lives out of the shadows.

Award-winning documentarian Sebastian Lipshitz enlivens his expose with wonderful photos of New York in the 1960s along with archive footage of Danish cross-dresser Christine Jorgensen, who became an overnight celebrity, and others who joined in. Another woman remembers her father paying visits to the Casa where he enjoyed wearing women’s clothing and only felt comfortable wearing a female nightie in bed. And although the doc slightly overstays its welcome in driving home the point repetitively, it certainly provides a unique and valuable insight for those interested or affected by the issues concerned. MT

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL | 31 AUGUST – 1 SEPTEMBER 2022

Blackbird (2022)

Dir/Wri: Michael Flatley | Drama, 97′

Michael Flatley’s self-financed spy thriller has a checkered history, premiering briefly four years ago, and now back in cinemas in the UK and Ireland.

The Riverdance supremo directs and also stars as a James Bond style spy turned luxury hotel owner, retired to Barbados for some peace and quiet after his fiancée is killed in a mission. But the past comes back to haunt him when another old flame (Nicole Evans) reappears on the arm of an arch villain (Eric Roberts) whose game plan is not unlike Hitler’s idea of exterminating the Jews.

Flatley has certainly splashed out budget-wise in a story that flips between lush Irish countryside, rainy London and beachside Barbados, but although his moves may be slick on the dance floor Flatley’s directing skills are less so. Blackbird is certainly a watchable if rather predictable little thriller with its heart in the right place. MT

IN CINEMAS FROM FRIDAY 2 SEPTEMBER

Winter Boy – Le Lyceen (2022) Toronto Film Festival 2022

Dir/wri: Christophe Honore | Cast: Juliette Binoche, Christophe Honore, Xavier Giannoli, Vincent Lacoste, Paul Kircher | France, Drama 122′

TORONTO FILM FESTIVAL 2022 | 8 -18 SEPTEMBER 2022

Wolf and Dog (2022) Venice Film Festival 2022

Dir.: Claudia Varejo; Cast: Ana Cabral, Ruben Pimento, Christiana Branquinho; Portugal 2022, 111min.

This impressionistic first feature film from Portuguese director/co-writer Claudia Varejo, (Amor Fati), is set on Sao Miguel, an island in the Azores. A straightforward gay awakening story, Varejo puts tempo, heart and soul into a spirited debut that is structurally flawed.

Ana Cabral gives a sparkling performance as Ana, the neglected middle child of a traditional family where her brothers Tejo and little Simao get all the attention. Ana is best friends with Luis (Pimento), who is openly gay and dresses provocatively often attracting negative attention on an island still ruled by the old-fashioned values of the older generation. The church and patriarchy is on its last legs, ready to be swept away by the young who, more often than not, leave the island as soon as they can.

One day the mother finds her son unconscious in a drug den and he admits to being part of a narcotics smuggling ring. But once Cristiana (Branquinho) arrives from Canada, this heavy mix of personal and cultural rebellion will boil over. Meanwhile Ana finds all the answers to her questions in when she falls for Cristiana – but what will she do when Luis and her lover depart the island for good at the end of the summer?

Varejo goes hell-for-leather in her pursuit of youth revolution. Sometimes simplistic in the dialogue (“Binarism is a prison’), overly sentimental in the love scenes between the young women on the beach – but always galloping forward at an insane tempo, Wolf and Dog storms through classrooms, churches, family homes and places of traditional male refuge. In the disco, a girl band hold sway while the old women pray their offspring will not be seduced by ‘Satan’.

DoP Rui Xavier does his best to support this all-out assault: his handheld camera tracking Ana in her pursuit of love and freedom. But the lingering lakeside scenes don’t come off so well. Overall, Wolf and Dog is well-acted and beautiful to look at but the relentless emotional explosions make for over-kill, particularly with a generous running time, giving the director too much space for self-indulgence. Varejo was obviously afraid to leave anything on the editing-room floor – but self-discipline would have helped here. AS

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL | WINNER DIRECTOR’s AWARD | VENICE DAYS SELECTION 2022

Godard seul le Cinema (2022) Tribute

Dir.: Cyril Leuthy; Narrator Guillaume Goux; with Anna Karina, Marina Vlady, Anne Wiazemski, Hanna Schigulla, Judy Delphi, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Mirelle Darc, Daniel Cohn Bendit and JL Godard; France 2022, 100 min.

Jean-Luc Godard (1930-2022) was still out to revolutionise cinema, just before his death at 91, according to this latest documentary about the famous filmmaker and co-founder of the Nouvelle Vague who claims, in his defence “I don’t have my heart in my mouth anymore”.

“Godard is a legend, but we have forgotten the man”. In trying to uncover the real Jean-Luc director Cyril Leuthy sat down with Godard’s many collaborators, friends and critics who have a lot to say about an eternal rebel who was still exhausting himself in the hunt for a perfect cinema, even with 140 films under his belt.

We watch him on the set of Le Mepris in 1963, and in scenes from Breathless, for which Godard won the Prix Jean Vigo. At the ceremony he claimed: “awards matter, because they draw attention to the cinema”. The film changed society and the world (!), everything was possible from then on, even close-ups with a wide-angle shot.

Godard was born in a fashionable Paris district in 1930 and moved between Paris and Switzerland as a young man. His father Paul was a physician. His mother Odile worked for a bank, and died in an accident in 1954. The family did not want JLG to attend her funeral, since he had disgraced himself by stealing from his friends and family: he financed Rivette’s first film with the money he stole from his uncles. After the success of his first feature, Godard was happy that Le Petit Soldat (1960) was banned. “I am happy that my second film is hated, it brings me closer to the cinema”. Marina Vlady, star of Godard’s “Two or three things I know about her” believes he actually played the improvising genius. In reality, Vlady and the cast were dependent on their earphones: Godard directing them “like robots”.

Anna Karina, JLG’s first wife and muse is adamant: “he was irritated by happiness. He is pure spirit”. Macha Meril, who starred in JLGs Une femme mariee (1964) goes a step further: “I was like a substitute for Anna Karina. He treated me like an ornithological object”. Anne Wiazemsky, wife number two, was proud to be with the filmmaker, but also found JLG soft, funny and loving. Her recollections of her marriage are read out by a child. But after she starred in La Chinoise, the first cracks appeared. Daniel Cohn-Bendit claims the Chinese employees of the Paris embassy called JLG a moron, and would have forbidden the film title, had they had the power. Cohn-Bendit maintains Godard supported the Cultural Revolution, which the former calls “Ritual slaughters” JLG meanwhile was fighting the De Gaulle regime, calling democracy ‘a slow way of death’.

From then on JLG put his anger onto the big screen: Weekend (1967) saw mass slaughter on the auto routes of France, a metaphor for France’s capitalist take-down. After helping to support the re-instatement of Henri Langlois as leader of the Cinematheque, Godard and Truffaut helped to bring the 1968 Cannes Festival to an abrupt standstill. But the intended revolution did not materialise. JLG fled into the Dziga Vertov collective, co-lead by Jean-Pierre Gori. And Anne Wiazemsky, moved out: “Gorin moved in with JLG, there was no room for me. I loved him as a filmmaker, not a commissar.”.

The features that followed in the aftermath: Vent d’ Est and Vladimir and Rosa, had limited releases – and remained in the dark for decades. Their financing had only been raised because JLG was behind the camera, even though he was part of the collective. Godard then retreated into the political cinema of the 1970s. In 1977 he went to live in Rolle, Switzerland, where he had spent his childhood.

A near fatal accident saw him teaming up with a friend from the past Anne-Marie Miéville. After the two moved to Grenoble, Godard founded his first studio ‘Sonimege’. But he still dreamed of starting again: “When I take a shot, I ask myself, what would Lang, Renoir or Hitchcock do? And I would do exactly the opposite”. Still, Sauve qui Peut (1980) was a new beginning, JLG used the word ‘I’ for the first time in a decade. Cannes was helpful for his comeback, and he lectured “the incredible is what we don’t see”. Passion (1982) with Hanna Schygulla was another step towards rehabilitation. Her remark “the only relationship he has is when he is filming” is the nearest anyone has got to the truth.

In 1983 JLG won the Golden Lion in Venice – it also got him a pie in the face when a member of the audience was unhappy with the sexual content of the feature. In 1995, the first snap of JLG as a child was discovered. In the photo, he was actually mourning himself. ” I mourned first, but death did not come. Since then I follow myself as a human being, but I am not one”. His major epic Histoires du Cinema, cost him ten years of his life and was finally released in 1988, with a running time of 423 minutes. Based on 495 films and 148 books, plus photographs and paintings, it sums up his philosophy: “History has to be told in ruins, cinema is only real as a history of ruins”.

And finally: “Cinema is nothing. but it wants everything”. And we can be sure that JLG has given himself, or whatever is left of him, to the beast called cinema. DoP Gertrude Baillot sets a frenetic tempo in motion – and it never slackens. Leuthy has succeeded in bringing the personal and the cinematographical together in a portrait of a man who sacrificed his own life and ability to love on the alter of re-invention – without ever finding himself in the process. AS

JEAN LUC GODARD 1930-2022 | VENICE FILM FESTIVAL | VENICE CLASSICS 2022

Burial (2022)

Wri/Dir: Ben Parker | Cast: Harriet Walter, Tom Felton, Charlotte Vega, Barry Ward, Bill Milner, Dan Renton Skinner, Niall Murphy | UK Drama 95′

Christmas Day 1992 and the Red Flag has fallen with Gorbachev’s resignation bringing an end to seventy years of Communist rule in Russia. Anna Marshall (Harriet Walter) is watching the BBC News from the comfort of her country home in a domestic vignette that bookends this ambitious historical drama from English director Ben Parker.

But when her dog Gulliver is let out for a nighttime sniff he gets a nasty surprise in the shape of a masked intruder demanding retribution for the past. Anna is a feisty and highly intelligent Jewish bird, and a one time officer in the Russian army, who refuses to be taken for a ride by the foul-mouthed Nazi sympathiser Lukasz (Felton). And after chaining him to the fireplace she launches into her version of what really happened when she was Brana Vasileva, one of an elite group of Soviet soldiers tasked with taking Hitler’s remains back to Stalin’s Moscow, as proof of his death. Many theories have circulated about what became of the Nazi leader’s body after he committed suicide. Ben Walker’s narrative offers one plausible suggestion.

The story then transports us back to rural post war Germany (actually Estonia) where Charlotte Vega takes up the role of Vasileva (aka Anna Marshall as her younger self). Shortly after setting off on their mission the group heads into deep forests and comes under attack from what appears to be a pack of werewolves carrying a load that suggests there are some supernatural powers at work in this remote bosky backwater. It soon emerges they are actually German ‘Wehrwolf’ partisans, using guerrilla tactics and hallucinogenic gas to disorientate their enemies. In a bid to keep their leader’s secret buried forever, the Germans go hell for leather in a bloody and brutal fight against the Russian contingent doing anything in their power to thwart the Soviet mission of returning the Nazi’s leader’s remains to Russia.

Burial is written and directed by Ben Parker whose feature debut The Chamber garnered critical acclaim back in 2016. This latest, an ambitious and lavishly styled historical drama, really comes alive in the brilliant camerawork of Estonian DoP Rein Kotov who often works from an aerial perspective suggestive of prey being tracked by an unknown force of some kind. All credit to Parker for his ingenious idea and for casting an indomitable Harriet Walter to play the feisty Soviet veteran, her counterpart Vega having a difficult act to follow as the younger heroine, leading a cast that also fails to distinguish itself on this occasion. So despite some tense and brutal action set pieces the rest of the feature doesn’t quite live up to the promise of the opening, but Burial is nevertheless a watchable take on a mystery that has haunted many in the intervening years since the fall of Nazism and its arch villain Hitler. As a footnote, whoever did the subtitles should be taken out and shot at dawn: Bolsheviks is translated as ‘Bastards’ and Berlin, ‘Violin’. Fortunately these are autogenerated by Vimeo, but certainly do a disservice to the aurally challenged.

BURIAL PREMIERES AT FRIGHTFEST 2022 | On digital from 26th from 101 Films. On Sky, iTunes and Amazon from 12th September 2022

Bentu | Wind (2022) Venice Film Festival | Venice Days 2022

Dir/Wri: Salvatore Mereu | Cast: Peppeddu Cuccu, Giovanni Porcu | DoP Francesco Piras | Italy 2022, 70′ Sardinian dialect.

In a sun-backed hillside in the arid plains of Sardinia Raffaele is sleeping out in the open waiting for the wind (il bentu). So as not to be late when it finally comes he has massed up his little pile of grain, which will last him for the coming year. The most important thing in his life at the moment is this wind, it’s also the title of this tough but enchanting moral fable that reflects on self-discipline for young and old alike.

For the next few days Raffaele has left his wife back in the village and must wait patiently for the wind to help him separate the grains from the chaff, so he can make bread and earn his livelihood. And his grandson Angelino, who visits him during this lonely time in the open fields, must also wait – to be old enough to ride Rafael’s treasured mare Turtledove.

Darkness falls and Raffaele eats an omelette by candlelight before spending the night in wild anticipation of the weather to change and imploring it with ancient songs and supplications. Come morning he tidies up the field in readiness for the whiff of air to blow up from the sea, and tells his little grandson off for arriving unwashed and unkempt to help him. He talks about the need to look sharp in today’s world where the boy may find himself one day driving machinery rather that sweeping the straw around like his grandfather. Although the old man takes a dim view of modern intrusions like the thresher.

In his primitive shack Raffaele hollows out a hunk of bread and fills it with creamy curd cheese from a blue bowl. And all the time Angelino asks when the horse will be ready. “When you’re grown up”, Raffaele tells him. And during their time together he initiates Anglelino into the ways of the world reprimanding the boy for leaving the freshly churned milk in the sun. Meanwhile the gruff old man goes about his daily duties: pumping water from the well, washing and clearing up while his grandson tries every trick in the book to let him ride the mare until it’s too late.

Sun-based Sardinia is very much a character here and Francesco Piras creates an evocative sense of place with his limpid hyper realist images in a feature that relies on its ambient soundscape, folkloric music and simple dialogue.

Sardinian filmmaker Salvatore Mereu was inspired by a story from poet and novelist Antonio Cossu (1927-2002 to make his feature, simple in execution and storyline yet wide-reaching in its themes, Bentu is all about the impatience of youth; the intrinsic value of staying in rhythm with the natural world and respecting time-honoured traditions in a place where time seems to stand still as the future marches on. MT

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2022 | VENICE DAYS

The Origin of Evil (2022)

Dir/Wri: Sebastian Marnier | Cast: Suzanne Clement, Laure Calamy, Doria Tillier, Dominique Blanc, Jacques Weber | Drama. 125′

Sebastian Marnier’s stolen identity thriller is a bizarrre and curiously compelling film set on the southern French Isles de Hyeres, with a starry French and Canadian cast.

What starts as a mundane domestic drama that sees a modest woman called Stephane (Laure Calamy) working in a fish factory, soon develops into something much more mysterious, surreal and even violent when her ambitions find her in the company of a strange and dysfunctional family in a ravishing villa in seaside Porquerolles.

How she gets there is the crux of a narrative that hands on dramatic conceit, and to reveal her intentions too early on would destroy the entire plot. But after a telephone call one night to a man called Serge, purportedly her estranged father, and one-time mayor of Hyeres, Stephane is transported, by boat, to the sun-stroked shores of an island whose magical ambiance casts its spell over the remainder of the story.

Stephane has never met Serge’s second family: his ostentatious wife Stella (Blanc) whose profligate shopping sprees line the corridors of the expansive Belle Époque villa, her morose daughter George (Tillier), who runs his ‘business empire’ consisting of various restaurants; her plucky teenage daughter, and Agnes, a strange housekeeper channelling Mrs Danvers without her style and sang-froid. And we never really question Stephane’s background, so larger that life are the rest of the family. Their antics are so much more entertaining that Stephane’s rather mundane backstory as she makes frequent trips back to check on the fish factory (which it turns out she also owns) and visit her lesbian lover (Clement) serving time in a prison on the mainland.

The Origin of Evil sees Marnier in full control of script and direction concocting a sinuous story about jealousy and bitterness with a series of duplicitous characters all out for the main chance but not all motivated by the same goals. Due to a narcissistic wound – her ‘father’ abandoned the family and gave her a man’s name as he really wanted a son – Stephane has never recovered from the humiliation. Stella (Dominique Blanc) and George (Doria Tillier) just want money and are determined to inherit the entire estate from Serge, by declaring him ‘senile’ in the court procedure that brings dramatic heft to the narrative.

Meanwhile meek little Stephane schemes away in the background massaging Serge’s ego and his painful legs, only to emerge the real villain of the piece. And although Marnier rather over-eggs the omelette in the overblown denouement, this is a deliciously wicked – and at times hilarious – that made its world premiere at the 79th Venice Film Festival.

IN CINEMAS FROM 27 MARCH 2024 | VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2022 | New Horizons Extra

A Compassionate Spy (2022) Venice Film Festival 2022

Dir/Wri: Steve James | US Doc, 101′

The United States is the only nation to have used the atomic bomb in warfare

The UN has declared the use of the bomb illegal but none of the atomic 9 nations has signed the treaty

The Compassionate Spy chronicles the life and career of American physicist and spy Theodore Hall (1925-99) best known for his involvement in creating the atomic bomb during World War Two, and passing the secrets of the ground-breaking invention to the Soviet Union.

Based on live interviews with his surviving spouse Joan, and archive footage of Theodore in the final months of his life, along with interviews with Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel (Bombshell The Secret Story of America’s Unknown Atomic Spy Conspiracy), awarding-winning documentarian Steve James pieces together a sinister and compelling account of the atomic years and the couple’s life together from their first meeting at the University of Chicago, when Joan was only 17, until Ted’s death in November 1999. And although James maintains his distance, Joan presents a resolutely affectionate view of her husband and his work. And while Ted expresses a certain degree of regret for his actions, Joan is clearly besotted by her ‘child prodigy’ husband and his achievements and maintains a hagiographic stance to this day.

So the focus here is Joan’s glowing account of her early years with Ted and their close friend Savile (Savi) Sax, the three remained inseparable until Joan, a budding poet, decided to give up her idea of playing the field until her late twenties. She would eventually marry Ted in 1947 in what seemed like a natural progression, both Socialists from Russian Jewish backgrounds but Ted grew up in New York and Joan was from Chicago, and so in love she admits – on discovering his incendiary activities – she would have married Ted even if he had been a murderer.

In 1944, Ted was recruited as an 18 year old Harvard senior to be the youngest physicist on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos where, in order to get ahead of the Germans, he handled experiments for the implosion device (“Fat Man”) and helped determine the critical mass of uranium for “Little Boy”.

But when the war was over, Ted failed to shared his new wife and colleagues’ elation felt after the successful detonation of the world’s first atomic bomb, when Japan and Germany were already defeated. And here James interweaves shocking images of the widespread destruction of Hiroshima where 340,000 citizens died to avoid the necessity of an US invasion.

Ted was concerned that the consequences of an American monopoly of atomic weapons could lead to a wide scale nuclear catastrophe, and was especially worried about the possibility of the emergence of a fascist government in the United States. At the time the Russians were viewed through rose-coloured spectacles in America, having been allies against the Germans. And this favourable sentiment was reflected in films like Mission to Moscow (1943) that was nominated for an Oscar but went home empty-handed.

For his part, Ted admits (in the interview) to finding the Russians approachable – “they even had a sense of humour!” – so he decided to pass key information to the Soviet Union. And while on a vacation in New York City in October 1944, he visited the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) offices, instead of the Soviet Consulate (where he feared FBI surveillance), in order to locate a suitable contact to pass information about the Manhattan Project along to the Soviet Union.

After a few recommendations, he met Sergey Kurnakov, a military writer for Soviet Russia Today and Russky Golos, and handed him a report on the implosion bomb, and the scientists who worked at Los Alamos. Saville Sax delivered the same report to the Soviet Consulate a few days later under the guise of inquiring about relatives still in the Soviet Union.

Hall later talks of his regret at passing on the secrets, but Joan points out that his failure to do so would have resulted in misfortune for the whole world. The couple would go on to have three children, one getting killed in a bicycle accident, they shares their views, along with Savi Sax’s son and daughter who reflect on their father’s reaction to his involvement but admit that his activity had possibly less of an impact on the family. James also shares ample footage of the Rosenberg couple who went to the electric chair in 1953 for their spying activities, Ted considering them guilty of a minor offence.

Densely researched and revealing A Compassionate Spy is packed to the gunnels with photos and archive footage, and enlivened by occasional musical hits of the 1940s, this is fascinating film but the one to one interviews with Joan Hall are sometimes too heavy going. MT

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL | OUT OF COMPETITION.

Author Archive

This year’s Viennale Film Festival pays tribute to Vienna’s homegrown star, the actress Helene Thimig, born in Austria when it was still Austria-Hungary.

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