Film Reviews by PD

This one, the debut feature from Costa Rican/Swedish director Nathalie Álvarez Mesén, is a 'Carrie'-accented portrait of feminine power that finds its holy fool of a heroine striving for her own kind of religious freedom. In some ways, Clara (Wendy Chinchilla Araya) is the most liberated woman in the remote, and deceptively matriarchal Costa Rican village where she 'works for God'. A semi-feral 40-year-old who they say was once visited by the Virgin Mary, Clara has been moulded into a faith healer by her pious mother, who’s successfully rebranded her daughter’s curved spine and childlike intellect as symptoms of divinity. Aside from miracles on demand, little is expected of her - Clara is free to spend her days wandering through the forest, caring for her beloved white horse Yuca, and making homes for the beetles she finds in the wild. That is, as long as it doesn’t displease her mother. For Fresia keeps her only surviving daughter on a tight leash, especially now that Clara’s sister — the jewel of her family — has 'gone to heaven', leaving behind Maria, a bright-eyed daughter of her own. Clara is treated like a young child throughout, and, even more worryingly, Fresia denies Clara the free surgery that would straighten her spine: “God gave her to me like this,” she explains.

The tension at the heart of the film is rooted in Araya’s gripping performance (a professional dancer's first screen role), which more than delivers on the potential of casting someone with such exquisite control of her body in the part of a disabled woman who has such precious little control over her life. From the opening frames of Clara reaching towards Yuca — Araya’s hands grasping at the air as if trying to pull the horse closer at the same time as they hope to escape from her wrists — 'Clara Sola' is fleshed with the feeling that love and repression are braided together. A richly symbolic and increasingly tense fable, Mesén’s film may be steeped in Catholic religiosity, but it ultimately places what’s left of its faith in the act of letting go - no small feat given the patriarchal systems that they've inherited (there’s a distinct sense of self-denial to how Fresia, Clara, and Mariá have embraced their respective roles before the story begins and a man turns everything upside down) - they suffocate each other, if without malice. For her part, Mariá is an unwitting participant in the patriarchy; she spends the film preparing for her 'quinceañera' and carousing around with her much older boyfriend, (the remarkably tender Santiago - and the only one who recognizes that Clara has more to offer beyond the role she was born to play), activities that are rendered with remarkable even-handedness. The festivities inevitably becomes a venue for quasi-supernatural violence in a way that cements the film’s connection to 'Carrie,' but the party is painted more as an opportunity for empowerment than it is for horror.

The handheld cinematography and a trembling violin score combine to suggest that Carla is being seduced back to the earth — that she’s gradually rejecting the mortal world that had always rejected her in return. It isn’t easy for Clara to let go of the context that has caged her in, nor is it easy for Mesén to illustrate what that looks like; if the ending feels a little clumsy, that’s only so because the rest of the film is carried by a defiant refusal to play by the rules. Powerful stuff.

The national anthem has never been the loveliest tune ever sung, and its somewhat aggressive tenor is heard early on in “The Choral.” Upon delivery of some 'good news' from the front in the midst of the First World War, an English village choir’s hearty, spontaneous rendition of it disrupts their rather shabbier rehearsal of Elgar’s haunting oratorio “The Dream of Gerontius,” prompting refined choirmaster, Ralph Fiennes' William Guthrie, to roll his eyes to the back of his head. “If only you sang Elgar with the confidence you sing the national anthem,” he mutters. Art counts for a lot more than patriotism to Guthrie, and Nicholas Hytner‘s film — despite its twee English trappings —(largely) takes his side.

The first original screenplay in over 40 years by Alan Bennett, a 91-year-old national treasure whose place in British cultural life has never been tidily defined: a gay, agnostic, working-class Northerner, he’s also staunch royalist who declined a knighthood. Many of those conflicts are present here — some for better, some for worse - even if the whole is drenched in a little too much sentiment for my tastes. At first glance, the film seems a fusion of two brands of British feelgood crowdpleaser: the keep-calm-and-carry-on portrait of wartime resilience, and the let’s-put-on-a-show underdog story. The year is 1916, the setting the picturesque Yorkshire mill town of Ramsden — the rolling hills and cobbled streets of which seem safely sheltered from the war raging over on the Continent, but for its depleting effect on the town’s young menfolk. There’s an opportunity for the boys in the village chorus, sorely deprived by the draft of male voices — and soon its young choirmaster too. Enter stage right Guthrie, an urbane, prodigious conductor formerly of some renown, though much disapproved of by the locals on several counts, not least among them the fact that he spent several years living and studying in Germany. His unapologetic atheism doesn’t help; nor do further “peculiarities” that nobody precisely wants to name. “Let’s just say I’d prefer a family man,” says a priggish board member and leaves it at that.

Guthrie’s gayness remains more or less covert throughout Bennett’s script, though Fiennes plays him with a typically understated air of melancholy, his mourning turned inward for loves and lovers he can never name. There are also unanswered overtures from the choir’s pianist Horner, a soft, vulnerable young man whose conscientious-objector status renders him a fellow outsider, although the film is ultimately more preoccupied with the romantic lives of its younger characters, as the teen soldiers-to-be desperately seek to lose their virginities before potentially losing their lives. Bennett’s script flits inconsistently between generations, foregrounding certain perspectives before they suddenly recede, with Guthrie’s ambitious plan to stage Elgar’s elevated work (with an off-key choir and a three-person orchestra) lending proceedings the narrative thrust. This doesn’t culminate in the against-the-odds artistic triumph you might expect: there’s a more nuanced, honest moral in favour of artistic aspiration, integrity and compromise all at once, via a hilariously deflating cameo from Simon Russell Beale as Elgar himself.

The film is at its best when it chafes quietly against our expectations of gentle British comfort viewing, whether sharing in Guthrie’s dry exasperation at demonstrations of national pride, or eschewing dewy romanticism for its sole, unlikely sex scene: a passionless, reluctant handjob on the moors, discreetly depicted but subtly illustrative of bodies and souls broken by war and English reserve. There are ugly open wounds in “The Choral,” even if they’ve been carefully and handsomely dressed. Not a classic by a long chalk, but well worth a look.

There are two gods in “Souad,” Allah and smart phones, but in a battle between the two it’s clear who’ll be the winner. Ayten Amin’s bold second feature is very much alive to the contradictions of teenage life in conservative Egypt, where the pressures of social media clash with traditional religious strictures, leading to schizophrenic lives of acute unease. The film is remarkable not just for its sharp, non-judgmental insight, which captures lives and environment with a neorealist sensibility, but also for the nuanced performances making each character rounded yet ultimately unknowable.

From the start, Amin grabs our attention, signalling how she’ll be taking normal situations and giving them a twist. Souad pleasantly chats with the conservatively dressed older fellow bus passenger beside her, conveying the image of a good god-fearing young woman excited about medical school and her fiancé, but in the next shot and still in a hijab, she projects a very different personality as she chews gum and talks with a contemporary beside her in a far harsher manner and with a completely different story. Back-to-back, the two bus scenes give us an unexpected, conflicting image of the protagonist, trying on different personalities to adapt herself to how she wants others to perceive her. Souad is clearly uneasily trapped between conflicting modes of comportment, and the immediate world around her is very limiting.

Souad lives in Zagazig, a nondescript city north of Cairo full of unauthorised constructions which she sees from the balcony of her lower-middle-class family’s apartment. She’s in school yet her life is circumscribed by the expectations of her social class, which means she’s required to spend much of her time sharing household chores with her mother Nagwa. She and younger sister Rabab (Basmala Elghaiesh - fabulous throughout) have a strong yet typically volatile sibling bond, while their father Abdallah barely interacts with the family. Contact with boys is possible only through her mobile, which is the most important item connected to her body (far more than her hijab). The mobile phone is her confidante, window and mirror: she sees herself solely through it, to an even greater degree than her friends (it's also one of those rare films which really engages with online existence and social media, yet without needing to flash up tweets and texts as onscreen graphics in the way most do).

Souad wears a T-shirt with the slogan “Girls Do Not Dress for Boys,” but while she’d give lip service to that, the truth is she longs for the male gaze and yearns to dress in a way that attracts it. She sends streams of suggestive photos and messages to the guy she considers her boyfriend, Ahmed, a content creator for social media living in Alexandria who’s older and clearly far less invested in the relationship. Then 40 minutes in, an unforeseen event upends the storyline (and cleverly alters traditional narrative expectations) and brings Rabab to the fore, as she takes a day trip to Alexandria to meet Ahmed.

Amin captures the salient differences between Zagazig and cosmopolitan Alexandria, where the latter appears to grant a more relaxed atmosphere yet where the dictates of controlling conservatism are still present. One of the many strengths of “Souad” is the way it manages to subtly encapsulate each milieu, building a complex picture of Egypt today that’s both loving and critical. Most of all, the film offers insight into the impossible space so many young Egyptian women inhabit, where what’s forbidden by religion is so commonly available virtually, and the hypocrisy of it all creates an untenable tension that crushes the spirit. Amin’s choice of intensely workshopping scenes with unknown actors pays off in spades, ensuring flowing dialogue that feels unscripted and true. Beyond words though, the actors convey knotty inner lives, caught by a roaming camera that makes the viewer very much a part of this world. Impressive stuff.

This highly original second film from German director Mascha Schilinski’s ('In Die Sonne Schauen' in German), is a haunting, transfixing chronicle in which the lives of four girls are fused into one long cinematic tone poem, hopping between different epochs without warning, painting a portrait of budding womanhood and rural strife through the ages. The closest thing that comes to mind is perhaps Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, although this is Malick by way of Jane Campion and Michael Haneke, shifting between fleeting coming-of-age moments and scenes of resolute darkness and human cruelty. At two and a half hours, and without an easily discernible narrative, it will be of appeal only to the very patient, but they are rewarded by a work that reminds us how the cinema can still reinvent itself, as long as there are directors like Schilinski audacious enough to try.

Co-written with Louise Peter, the film’s collage-like structure tells four simultaneous stories though a series of fragments or snaphots (cameras of all types are depicted and used on screen), spanning a timeframe from the early 20th century all the way to the present. Set in the same massive farmhouse that passes down from one family to another, the film never strays too far from its main location, venturing out only to wander the nearby fields or dip into a river separating East and West Germany.

Characters come and go over the years, as cinematographer Fabian Gamper creeps around the house like a ghost discreetly recording events as they happen, catching both the many moments of torment but also flashes of occasional humour. Scenes become memories in other scenes, passed on from the living to the dead and back again, cut together so that they resonate more as time goes by and whilst the effect is a tad disorienting at first, you soon get used to it, and this is a piece whose power slowly accumulates as it progresses. The quartet of girls we follow — Alma (10 year-old Hanna Heckt - particularly impressive) after the turn of the last century, Erika after WWII, Angelika in the GDR of the 1980s and Lenka in the present — are not all related, though they share a common history that hangs over the house as both a blessing and a curse. There is trauma in their lives — sometimes deep unforgettable trauma that never seems to leave, but there is also beauty and self-discovery. Schilinski has essentially made four bildungsroman movies at once, each of them about young women awakening to the possibilities, as well as to the limits, that life has to offer them.

The film offers up an altogether unique kind of storytelling, one made up of momentary sensations, images, emotions and sounds that gradually form a bigger picture, depicting a world where young women face untold obstacles from one epoch to another, including rape, the death of loved ones, forced sterilisation, incest, and a form of rural slavery and prostitution, yet one in which they eventually emerge as arbiters of their own fates. Schilinski doesn’t spare us all their pain and suffering, nor does she hide the joy and wonder they sometimes experience; her brave girls carry their forebearers within them from one generation to the next, surging toward the future both wounded and victorious. Very impressive stuff indeed.

Christopher Nolan’s love affair with the Premium Large Format moviegoing experience peaks with The Odyssey, a gigantic undertaking that marks the first feature shot entirely with IMAX Film Cameras. The result is a self-consciously 'epic' action film which attempts to be both immense and intimate, albeit one whose flow is impeded by the inherently episodic nature of the nonlinear source material.

The protagonist is of course played here with introspective intensity by a commanding Matt Damon — whose internal transformation, from a hubristic warrior to a man humbled by trauma and loss, is as near to a continuous plotline as the film gets. It’s very difficult to effectively dramatise someone piecing together memory fragments on a gradual path to moral and existential awakening, and Nolan just about brings this off, although the ending is perhaps a bit too rushed for this is to be completely effective. It's harder still when much of that process happens in a dream-like haze on an island beach, where the nymph Calypso is keeping Odysseus as her lover; these interludes aren't nearly tense enough for me, and therefore merely halt the narrative flow as a result. Another problem is that the writer-director never finds much balance between the parallel journeys of Odysseus and his son Telemachus, making the film feel structurally clumsy at times (it doesn’t help that Tom Holland seems wrong for the role, sapping the gravitas from Telemachus’ path to maturity). Classicists might also grumble about key incidents from Odysseus’ voyage home being skipped altogether or given such hasty treatment that they carry no weight - blink and you might miss Scylla, the six-headed sea monster that Odysseus and his men dodge while steering their long boat around a whirlpool, and only those with excellent recall of their English studies are likely to have much idea what’s going on when the man-eating giants called Laestrygonians make a rampaging appearance.

On the other hand, several key episodes work very well. The dramatic escape of Odysseus and his men from the cave dwelling of the sheep-herding one-eyed giant Polyphemus is well-handled, and has consequences for the voyage given that the enraged Cyclops is the son of vengeful sea god Poseidon. There’s eerie poetry in the crew’s fear as they pass the island inhabited by Sirens whose songs lure sailors to their death on the rocks, with Odysseus in agony as he’s tied to the mast to resist their call. Perhaps the standout interlude is the soldiers’ visit to the island domain of Circe, a treacherous witch played with deceptive calm by a truly chilling Samantha Morton. The climax that ties together the almost 3-hour film comes when Odysseus at last makes it back to Ithaca, disguised as a beggar to throw off those who want him dead. Van Hoytema’s cameras seem to be everywhere at once when Odysseus launches into a visceral clash; it's exactly the kind of large-scale set piece at which Nolan excels, a high-stakes melee in a confined space, triggered by a test set by wife Penelope, played with just the right balance of steely self-possession and vulnerability by Anne Hathaway. It’s here too that the film's themes finally acquire potency — about the sobering disillusionment that follows war; the fragility of heroism; defiance of the gods; the uncertainties of homecoming after a long absence. Perhaps the most resonant theme is conscience, as Odysseus weighs his achievements against his sacrifices, from the drowning of his men to the slaughtered Trojans, tricked by a gift to the gods in violation of all that is considered sacred.

Unsurprisingly, it's a visual feast, with stunning sets and costumes, whilst the preference for in-camera spectacle over digital fakery wherever possible pays off. All in all, not the masterpiece that some have claimed, and no match for the intellectual complexity of 'Oppenheimer', but an enjoyable watch all the same.

The opening credits to director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s film set the scene as Brazil, 1977, and then add, “a period of great mischief.” This is an appropriate description of the film itself, an intense and distinctly unsettling romp that includes secret identities, corrupt cops, intricate schemes, Carnaval frivolity, a severed leg inside a shark’s stomach, some very brutal action, a deliberately garish ’70s cinema style and a bit of thoughtfulness and emotion spread out over almost two and a half hours. The result is a film that's all over the place – coherence not high on its list of attributes. But its messiness is part of the point; a film that took itself more seriously than this one wouldn’t let a climactic gun battle turn into an almost cartoonish splatter-fest.

The director draws his inspiration from his memories of Recife in the late ’70s, from his mother’s work as an oral historian and from the style of some cinema of the era, with oversaturated, vivid colours. At the film's centre is Marcelo (Wagner Moura), a tech researcher who arrives in Recife during the riotous Carnaval week. Marcelo is fleeing something, but we’re not sure what, as he takes lodging in a nondescript building populated by colourful characters (including a cat with two faces) and overseen by an old woman who seems to be harbouring plenty of secrets of her own. But, especially in the early section, Marcelo’s story is just one of several narrative strands that remain stubbornly independent of each other: the corrupt policemen, their even more corrupt bosses, a human leg that’s found inside a shark’s stomach, two guys who seem to be very good at disposing of other bodies. It all begins to merge when those disposal experts are hired to hunt down and kill Marcelo by a powerful businessman that Marcelo had opposed when the guy tried to shut down a research institute years earlier, but no sooner has the film settled into this ’70s thriller vibe than a couple of young women show up sporting iPhones and Apple computers to help them listen to recordings made by Marcelo and others back in the day. It’s a jarring change, but then the women disappear for another long stretch; if they feel like odd, superfluous additions to the narrative, they’ll eventually prove not to be completely extraneous. The ending aims to be a more reflective and emotional coda, and it gets close to succeeding in that, but coming just half an hour after a crazed bloodbath and a sex-park romp by a severed leg, it’s hard to find your way there. Nevertheless, a film which is unmistakeably the work of an artist who’s deeply fascinated with the ways in which cinema, politics, and personal history co-mingle, and the themes of love, loyalty, and the cost of integrity under tyranny. Intriguing stuff.

In Lucile Hadžihalilovic's film, loosely inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen, a mirror (whether real or metaphorical) is a dangerous thing, and thus the film is in many ways a meditation on perception - how we perceive ourselves, how others perceive us, and how those directions are often interchangeable: 'Glace', its title in French, can of course mean either ice or mirror.

For Jeanne (Clara Pacini -superb throughout, with just the right mix of innocence and experience), a 15-year-old orphan, an attuned self-perception may come at a cost - an early encounter admiring an ice-skater called Bianca pirouette with graceful ease is immediately followed by the skater politely refusing to help Jeanne find a bed for the night, but this only (somewhat implausibly - magic realism dominates throughout) only leads to an encounter with The Snow Queen herself (Marion Cotillard - very convincing), the elegant, mysterious figure from the book Jeanne loves to read. Through the eyes of her youthful protagonist, the world is a startling place of mystery, and as in so many fantasies, Jeanne steps into something of a rabbit hole, assumes a new identity, and is introduced to a realm that seems far beyond the dimensions of her own. Frequently painted in striking images, the film pulsates with the vibrant imagination of a teenager at the brink of adulthood.

But this is no children's film. When Jeanne awakes, she realises she is not being visited by any fairy queen but by an actress, Cristina, on a sound stage, in a film adaptation of Andersen's tale. And, shortly after, Jeanne is able to take on the skater's glamorous name; suddenly, Jeanne is Bianca, an extra in a film with a diva at its centre, being welcomed in by its mega-star as something between a protégé and a puppet. Unlike Ingmar Bergman's Persona, which feels like an obvious precursor as much as other metatheatrical films like Federico Fellini's 8 1/2, the psychology of Jeanne/Bianca and Cristina is rather simple. Jeanne is an orphan because of her mother's death by suicide; Cristina quickly becomes a surrogate. Cristina's childhood was lost, too, and it is clear she views Jeanne as her younger self. But they are both treating each other with kid gloves, and while Jeanne is fascinated and enamoured with Cristina's stardom, she overlooks her obvious cruelty. Cristina, meanwhile, willingly overlooks Jeanne's lies — about her age, her name, her experience.

Many will doubtless find the pace rather too glacial (sorry), but for me this suits its dreamy/nightmarish atmosphere perfectly, and allows comment on the film apparatus itself: Hadžihalilovic and cinematographer Jonathan Ricquebourg frame many frames within frames: Jeanne peering at Cristina through peepholes and cracks of doors and closets, watching playback of scenes they've just shot, the windowpanes encompassing the lightly falling snow. But that pace undoubtedly comes at a cost. Olivier Messiaen's score is haunting and provocative, but it, and Hadžihalilovic's direction, suggest a build towards a payoff that never really arrives - it's perhaps the type of film that asks for a deeper engagement than it is willing to offer. But Hadžihalilovic may just be pulling us into her conception of image-making as a process of self-actualization and if that is the case, the film does well to break from Andersen's tragic tale for something a bit more existential. As Jeanne grows rapidly before our eyes, we are left to wonder if it is ever truly possible to maintain your personhood in a job that requires shedding of the skin to inhabit that of another. In The Ice Tower, that question is a matter of life and death. Intriguing stuff.

You have been fired. You have taken a menial job and are barely scraping together the family necessities. But wait! Now you are interviewing for a position for which you are superbly qualified! And you’ve been forewarned about the boss’s trickiest question! Unfortunately, however, you are in a Park Chan-wook film and he is in scathingly playful form, and so a bothersome shaft of sunlight means that however much you fidget in your seat you cannot angle its glare out of your eyes. You smile too wide at the interviewers’ unimpressed silhouettes, showing too many teeth. You are Mansu (Lee Byung-hun - absurdly brilliant throughout), and the film you don’t know you’re in is a delectable dark comedy.

We are immediately charmed onto Mansu's side, and we never really leave it, despite all the obviously terrible, ridiculous, often grisly things he’s about to do. This is because he has worked for decades managing a paper factory that abruptly lays him off, as a result of which everything must go, including the family house and the family dogs, thus setting up the film's anti-capitalist messaging, rageful sense of humour as Mansu embarks on a horrible and elaborate scheme to identify the potential candidates ahead of him in line and do them in. He finds just two: Gu Bummo, who’s been drinking himself into a daily stupor since getting laid off, much to the annoyance of his flouncily theatrical wife Ara (a very funny Yeom Hye Ran); and gentle family man Go Sijo, a meek shoe-store salesman who is, at heart, passionately a paper man (there is quite a lot of detailed paper-production talk en route). Needless to say, none of Mansu’s projected killings goes according to plan given this inept murderer, not to mention that the victims all have their own angular, absurdist personality traits and refuse to be simply the inert buffers that will send events spiralling out of anyone's control.

The film perhaps loses a bit of its impetus in the latter stages, and whilst its focus on the capitalist mindset and the brutalising hypnosis of the rat race is very well done, the film rarely reckons with the system itself, much less those it actually leaves behind. But wonderfully watchable mayhem on the whole.

Rather discouraged by some of the reviews ('sentimental', 'overwrought', 'lacking the soul of the book' etc), I was a bit wary of this one, but so pleased I didn't let it stop me watching, for this is an impressive piece by a fine director.

There is of course very little we know about William Shakespeare, but one of the few things we do know is that he had a son named Hamnet, who died aged 11, in 1596 (most likely of plague, which swept the country at that time), and that three years later, Shakespeare wrote his most famous play, Hamlet. It’s this curious nugget of personal history which gave rise to Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel Hamnet, a rich and deeply felt meditation on loss and death, a study of how artists channel their grief into art, and which gives the spotlight to his wife, Agnes. It doesn’t feel an obvious choice of material for Chinese filmmaker Chloé Zhao, but she successfully transfers it to the screen with many personal touches - whereas for example the book front-loads its catastrophe with elliptical storytelling, the script here (co-written by Zhao and O’Farrell) opts for a linear approach, and this for me works very well. There is the occasional portentous omen — a rising flood, a swarm of bees — but it begins romantically and sweetly, with a bucolic meeting between the future Mr & Mrs Shakespeare. The chance encounter between William (Paul Mescal) and Agnes (the quite wonderful Jessie Buckley, who gives a soul-shattering performance) is beautifully played: she, a woman of the forest with a gift of seeing, he, a man of words, initially tongue-tied, but then wooing her with a (prophetic?) retelling of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Both Zhao and Shakespeare share a love of the natural world, and her searching, inquisitive camera roams the valleys of both faces and landscapes.

Gently and convincingly, a portrait of life in Elizabethan Stratford is revealed, a place of craft and tradition, of clearly defined gender and class roles. Agnes’ birth scenes are especially harrowing; Emily Watson, as Shakespeare’s mother Mary, nicely represents the awkwardness of in-laws who don’t always see eye-to-eye — but also the quiet acknowledgement of pain and mortality. Just as the book was, this is a film about the strength, solidarity and sacrifice of women in a patriarchal society, and the silent moments shared by Buckley and Watson are very moving indeed. When the tragedy comes, as it must, it is devastating. The actors utterly sell the wrenching, suffocating, physical manifestations of grief, and only very occasionally do the performances feel somewhat overcooked, perhaps more theatrical than the screen requires, and for me the child actors don't quite have the necessary emotional depths required: Zhao’s efforts to elicit unselfconscious child acting, clearly encouraging a naturalistic, improvisational approach on set, also leads to some incongruous ahistorical wobbles, and the film also takes certain liberties with the history of Shakespeare’s plays, for example, suggesting he started coming up with Romeo & Juliet years before he actually wrote it.

Such quibbles however are totally banished for the heart-rending finale, when Agnes travels to London to witness a performance of Hamlet, the play, for herself; this sequence is the culmination of everything to this point, and Zhao doesn’t waste it. We watch the most famous moments of the play unfold on stage, with Noah Jupe excellent as the boy prince. Allowing Shakespeare’s beautiful iambic pentameter to do the talking, we essentially witness a collective processing of trauma unfurl in real time, and you'd have to have a heart of stone not to let the tears flow - of catharsis, of cinematic healing.

Camus’ L’Etranger is not an easy book to adapt. Luchino Visconti tried in 1967, but failed to capture the novel’s sense of solitude and abandon. François Ozon’s new adaptation is far better. Firstly, he successfully transforms Camus’ words into pictures - in this case, high-contrast black-and-white images that convey the author’s eye for immersive detail, plunging us into a Mediterranean world of sea, sex and sun that’s enchanting until it becomes unbearable. Secondly, Ozon diverges from the text in a few key places to offer a postcolonial reading of a novel that was published two decades before Algeria liberated itself from French rule. In Camus’ book, the viewpoint of the Arab characters is altogether absent, whereas here Ozon has chosen to give Algerians more of a voice, albeit in a subtle fashion, commenting on the indifference of Frenchmen toward a situation that would soon give way to violent revolution. Purists may take issue with this, but the director deserves credit for finding an intelligent way to update the book for a generation that has come to reject colonialism both past and present.

Ozon’s film is a pleasure to watch both aesthetically and dramatically, a feast of sights, sounds and existential turmoil. After an opening newsreel proves how disparagingly the French looked upon Algerians at the time, we find Meursault (Benjamin Voisin – superb throughout, effectively carrying the entire drama as a lost soul whose physical attractiveness does not conceal the emptiness inside him) alone in his apartment when he learns about the death of his mother. Withdrawn and taciturn (he hardly speaks, and when he does it’s often to say, “Je ne sais pas”) he heads to the countryside to hold vigil over his mother’s body. Ozon conveys the loneliness of Meursault, not to mention the desolation of the people he encounters, through striking shots that frame them against barren landscapes or interiors. When Meursault returns to Algiers after the funeral, the film shifts tones to showcase the sun-baked beauty of a colonial capital at the height of its splendour, while occasionally cutting away to reveal an Arab population treated like second-class citizens. During a visit to the seaside, Meursault bumps into an old friend, Marie (the excellent Rebecca Marder). Although he’s supposed to be mourning his mother’s demise, he quickly embarks on an affair that, at least from his point of view, is much more about carnal satisfaction than love. Meursault also starts hanging out with his shady French neighbour, Raymond, whose abusive relationship with an Algerian woman eventually leads to the murder.

Camus’ book is split evenly before and after the killing, whereas the film spends more time chronicling Meursault’s life up to the point he’s arrested. Some of the best scenes highlight the deep despair of that life, emphasising how Meursault is indeed a stranger (or more accurately outsider, as the title of the book was first translated to in English) in a land under occupation. Ozon implies that Meursault’s alienation also stems from the oppression he’s perpetuating, whether consciously or not, in a country soon to be embroiled in a bloody war of independence. The last act focuses on his imprisonment, trial and the weeks leading up to his execution, including a tense conversation with a priest hoping to read the inmate his last rites. Just as in the book, we understand that Meursault is condemned to death not only because of his act, but because of his failure to display ‘normal’ human emotions, whether about the crime he committed or his recently dead mother. 

Perhaps the film’s greatest invention is to also give a name to the nameless “Arab” whom Meursault kills. Camus’ formidable antihero may be lost to his own demons, as well as to the demons of colonialism, but Ozon boldly suggests that the memory of his victim may live on as a harbinger of what is to come. Powerful stuff.

Jafar Panahi’s latest is another reflection of his currently fractious relationship with his country; as with all of his work, it's astutely aware of the physical and psychological scars that result from living in a state of tyranny.

The film begins ominously with a family driving down a dark road, the headlights of their car providing the only illumination. Suddenly, the vehicle hits and kills a stray dog, which immediately distresses the young girl in the backseat. Her expectant mother, attempting to calm the child down, explains that this unfortunate occurrence must all be part of God’s plan. “God had nothing to do with it,” the girl responds, pointedly countering her mother’s naïve optimism, while her father remains stoic behind the wheel. Indeed, this accident will have devastating ripple effects, and to the point that the question of God’s involvement will be the least of anybody’s concerns.

The film reveals itself as a seriocomic morality play, with the characters’ contrasting points of view vividly illuminated by how their varying temperaments ricochet off of each other. In a notable scene, Panahi keeps his characters in a state of queasy tension after they catch the attention of security guards at a parking garage. The guards ask for a bribe to look the other way, and when they say they don’t have any cash, the guards quickly produce portable card readers. The film aims a satiric arrow at the corruption that’s rampant in Iran by making the characters’ overarching fear of being caught with a kidnapped person an ultimately baseless one in a world where nothing matters except for personal gain. Ultimately, Panahi is interested in exploring how life under tyranny turns everyone into the worst versions of themselves. This isn’t to say that Panahi’s anti-authoritarian spirit doesn’t flow through the film, as evidenced by his deliberate decision to not have his female characters wear hijabs, in defiance of Iran’s strict religious rules. And the film's final moments bring Panahi’s critique of contemporary Iran into especially grim focus, as an ostensibly happy conclusion morphs into existential dread with the realisation that no matter what the oppressed do to move past the trauma of what they’ve experienced, it will always be one triggering thought, or sound, away. By now, the Iranian regime’s victims far outnumber its oppressors, whose draconian measures are inadvertently creating the very resistance they’re trying to suppress. When things eventually reach a tipping point, Panahi wonders whether the citizens’ revenge should be correspondingly cruel, or if they should show mercy? It’s telling that Panahi is no longer obliquely challenging specific policies but openly threatening his overlords with payback. Impressive stuff as always from a great director.

This latest from accomplished director Paul Thomas Anderson packs an awful lot in its long running-time (nearly three hours), with the result that there's much more breadth than depth. Perhaps if it was more focused, or just shorter, Anderson’s message could have been more hard-hitting, but as it is I'm coming away thinking it's ultimately rather superficial despite its best intentions.

It stars of course Leonardo DiCaprio (many names, but usually 'Bob') who's the explosives expert for a revolutionary group called The French 75. After we jump forward 16 years, DiCaprio then spends the rest of the film staggering through the chaos wearing a bathrobe and not making much sense, as though Jeff Lebowski accidentally wandered into “The Battle of Algiers.” It’s not that Anderson lets the film’s politics fade into the background - the film is filled with right wing corruption and farcical portrayals of a secret racist illuminati. But he’s more interested in taking rather-too obvious potshots at the film’s real-world analogues than actually exploring them, and when he does add complexity, that complexity has nothing more than a 'both sides are bad' quality (and sadly he can't portray the film’s one queer character without making them the one person willing to violate the sanctity of 'zip it when questioned by police'). Anderson does commit to portraying White Nationalists as insipid hypocrites who abuse their power, but he also insists tacking on scenes at the end that both strain credulity and add little to the film’s finale. In all, it’s all rather muddled, although to be fair it's perhaps suggesting that America’s political struggles stem from a lack of consistent identity or ideals, or that weekend political warriors are an annoying distraction from real heroes doing real work, like Benicio Del Toro’s karate instructor-slash-underground leader (this sequence is really good, with some very effective dark humour). But the fact that Del Toro’s character genuinely views Bob as the most important person in the room, when clearly he’s not, is a bit awkward.

As with all things Anderson, the film is an ambitious production, both Anderson and cinematographer Michael Bauman do an astounding job of finding epic shots hidden within comedic landscapes, and vice-versa, and the cast is uniformly equipped to tackle this material, although the villain of the piece, Sean Penn's Col. Lockjaw, is more Dick Dastardly than Heinrich Himmler. All in all, watchable enough with some effective sequences but for me ultimately far from Anderson's best work.

This highly original, darkly satirical piece from Radu Jude uses the traffic-jammed streets of Bucharest as a nightmare vision of modern life. Our guide through this hellscape is Angela (Ilinca Manolache - fabulous), an overworked and distinctly under-slept production assistant. Angela is conducting at-home auditions with several working-class employees of an Austrian furniture company who were injured on the job, one of whom will then be selected to appear in a safety advisory video and share their story as a cautionary tale-meets-ass-covering gambit. The film’s plot, inasmuch as it has one, ultimately hinges on a man left partially paralysed in a car-related accident, and it’s clear that Jude has cars on his mind - his camera observes them as economic necessities, environmental hazards, physical dangers, and unsightly detritus cluttering modern cities, embodiments of our dependence on the very things that are killing us.

Jude interposes Angela’s urban travelogue with scenes from Lucian Bratu’s 1981 film 'Angela Moves On', which, being made during the last decade of Ceau?escu’s rule, presents a sanitised version of a taxi driver’s life. Here, Dorina Lazar, who played Angela in 'Angela Moves On', shows up to reprise her role, whilst in the present day she’s a relative of the wheelchair-bound worker, Ovidius, who’s ultimately selected for the safety video. Also, using a video filter that makes her look like Andrew Tate’s face painted on a balloon head, Angelica records short TikTok videos in character as Bobita, a foul-mouthed misogynist and Putin fanboy who rails against the 'sluts and whores' of Bucharest, a practice she describes as a 'critique through exaggeration', comparing herself to the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Treated as a peon at work, she finds perverse pleasure in lashing out through her outrageous social media avatar, and even manages to score a cameo from notorious director and boxer Uwe Boll. This theme, of the pliability and manipulative power of images, comes to its climax in the final shot: a 40-minute continuous take comprising the raw footage of the company’s safety video, during which, as marketing reps step into the shot to coach him into tweaking his account, we see the construction of a false narrative.

If the film sounds like it’s all over the place, it’s because, in marked contrast to Jude’s earlier works, which typically focused on the minutiae of specific historical events or fictional incidents, this one feels like it’s about just about everything. He still taps into a wide variety of literary sources, from Don DeLillo to Slavoj Žižek (all cited in the end credits), but more than that, this is a film that listens avidly to what a cross section of ordinary citizens, played by both actors and non-actors, have to say about such things as the war in Ukraine, Putin, Viktor Orbán, Jewish and Romani people, poverty, exploitation, and many more. In Manolache’s extraordinary performance, she’s a highly relatable avatar for a generation swindled out of the very idea of leisure time or job satisfaction by the con that is the gig economy, but, despite everything, she's also wholly herself, an independent spirit with a brilliant magpie mind.

Many will inevitably moan about the film's sheer length (just short of three hours), but this not only reflects the sheer amount of time spent on the road but also allows for many effective tangents, the most remarkable of which occurs when Angela picks up the Austrian head of marketing from the airport and describes a stretch of particularly dangerous road with hundreds of crosses honouring traffic casualties, at which point the film cuts away to a several-minute silent montage of the roadside crosses. No, we shouldn’t expect too much from the end of the world: it comes not with a bang nor even a whimper, but with the realisation that it’s been ending all along. Very impressive work indeed.

Early on in Urška Djukic’s distinctly original coming-of-age film, a brief montage strings together images of shrines to the Virgin Mary scattered through the mountains, forests, and villages of Slovenia. For a film set in the Catholic milieu of a girls’ choir, a preponderance of Marys isn’t in itself surprising, but with the lack of corresponding images of Jesus (with one arguable exception), it takes on a distinct tinge, perhaps gesturing at the absorption by Catholicism of pagan fertility cults. For the teenage protagonist, Lucija (Jara Sofija Ostan - superb throughout), Mary becomes not only an object not of veneration, but of desire.

Much of the (admirably restrained) film is centred on Lucija's friendship with Ana-Marija, a girl her age but much less sheltered. An ambiguous attraction simmers between them, as the knowing Ana-Marija coaxes Lucija into the mysteries of desire and transgression. When, in a game of truth or dare, Lucija chooses dare to avoid outing her inexperience, Ana-Marija tasks her with kissing 'the most beautiful girl in the school', as a result of which, in an innocently sacrilegious manner, Lucija kisses a statue of the Virgin Mary—a prelude to more flouting of Catholic taboos on the part of both girls. But their relationship comes under threat when Lucija mistakenly confides in the choir conductor, whose reaction, in a psychologically brutal scene, is truly disturbing.

The film’s dreamy cinematography often places the viewer in the perspective of Lucija, prone to trance-like reveries at the sight of beauty, but its the sound design which is particularly effective and wonderfully intimate, simulating the sound of blood ringing in her ears, for instance, when she comes face to face with a naked male labourer who bears a striking resemblance to certain depictions of Jesus. Throughout, Ostan performs her character’s 'virginity' as an ignorance of prejudice, a pre-indoctrinated state of grace if you like, for she is moved by beauty in all its forms, without quite knowing which are considered appropriate for 'good' Catholics. Lucija doesn’t yet recognize a distinction between religious and physical ecstasy, or between friendship and romantic love. She knows no shame or grief, only curiosity. Her desire is unformed, not yet tamed, and this makes her coming of age a bitter one, if not entirely tragic.

A hallucinatory final scene leaves perhaps too many dangling plot threads, but Djukic’s film fascinatingly shows how Catholic moral strictures and an underlying paganism where desire is holy are two sides of the same coin. Disconcertingly, Djukic seems to hint that it’s precisely the intensity of such prohibitions that inspires and gives meaning to the transgression of them. Intriguing stuff.

Sean Baker’s latest continues the process of staking out his niche as a chronicler of the messy lives of an often invisible American underclass. It’s one of those worth watching solely for a stunning, skull-splitting performance from Mikey Madison as Anora, or ‘Ani’, who works in a Manhattan lap-dancing bar called HQ, an environment of throbbing sexuality and glittering sleaze that Baker treats like any regular workplace. There’s both camaraderie and friction among the young women who dance there, and while over-inebriated customers might sometimes need to be cut off at the bar, the bouncer and boss ensure that it’s a relatively safe space. Approaching each potential client with a winsome smile, Ani knows how to maximise her take-home. The film lurches into full photon torpedo mode after the arrival of the son of a Russian oligarch, Ivan Zakharov ('Vanya'), who, unlike many of her customers, is close in age to Ani and who she likes well enough to give him her number, initially simply looking to make some cash on the side. At 23, Ivan is an immature playboy, a giggly stoner who likes to play videogames and have sex like a Duracell bunny, and on reflection it’s difficult to see how street-wise Ani would take seriously someone as clearly shallow as Ivan, but we’re taken along for the ride also, and thus is set in train a series of increasingly zany events until the ‘real world’ inevitably comes crashing in. As things veer into seemingly dangerous territory, Baker spices up the scenes with a relentless amount of (mostly) very effective Woody Allenesque dark humour that keeps the film buoyant, even as Ani gets a rude awakening about the reality of spineless Ivan’s feelings for her. But, as is customary in Baker’s work, women treated as sexual playthings in the narrative are treated with dignity by the film.

While Anora could stand to lose 15-20 minutes, it’s a very satisfying watch on the whole, defying mainstream genres while deftly commenting on questions of class, privilege and the wealth divide. As Ani is forever yanked this way and that, degraded and disregarded, she is indeed vocally indignant but otherwise rolls with it, baited with money and cowed by the tacit authority of those with it; there’s a sophisticated intertwining of personal tragedy and social comment, especially in the film’s final, disquieting scene. Overall, perhaps not a masterpiece, but very impressive, intelligent work none the less.