Film Reviews by PD

This one veers from noir to revenge thriller to horror to pitch-black comedy via moments of magic realism, with the result that the overall effect is something of a mess, but there’s never a dull moment, and the film pulses with an irresistible energy. Set in a small desert town in rural grunge New Mexico in 1989, the film centres around the extreme, often violent, intensity of the relationship between gym manager Lou (Kristen Stewart) and Jackie (Katy O'Brian). There's serious chemistry between the two, with Stewart investing the role with an avid hunger, stripping away her normally cool façade to give the film a charged centre of vulnerability. The film starts off lean and mean, then grows slowly and steadily more delirious, particularly as the other major character, Lou’s estranged father, Lou Sr., played by Ed Harris, becomes increasingly important. Unfortunately, as this happens our investment in the central couple – both rather underwritten – vanishes by the minute, overtaken as the film then is with rather too much noise and nastiness for my liking, although the brief bursts of Anna Baryshnikov, stealing scenes as an excitable gossip, are very well done. Glass forces some big, but rather silly swings in the last act (the biggest of which is quite literally too big), but by this time the plot has run out of gas, and only some amusing light touches involving cats and carpets rescue the heaviness of the action. All in all both watchable but ultimately forgettable.

This powerful eco-fable from ‘Drive my Car’ director Ryusuke Hamaguchi, was for me all-but ruined by a truly unexpected ending.

It centres on the taciturn Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), the woodcutter, water-gatherer and all-round handyman of Mizubiki village, a community of just 6,000 people who live in symbiosis with their rural surroundings whose rustic lifestyle Takumi exemplifies. With intent, forensic interest, Yoshio Kitagawa’s unobtrusive camera observes him from a short distance, as he goes through what seem to be near-daily rituals: chopping firewood, collecting spring water for the local udon restaurant, and forgetting to pick up his little daughter Hana from school. But, situated close enough to Tokyo to be an easy drive yet far enough for its landscapes to feel light years from the capital’s skyscrapers and offices, Mizubiki makes an attractive potential tourist destination, and sure enough, a company called Playmode has acquired a package of land they’re keen to develop for “glamorous camping” aka glamping — a concept so self-evidently inane that surely only late-late-capitalism could have dreamt it up. A wonderful scene involving a meeting of the village with two Playmode reps is a superb snapshot of community solidarity meeting corporate stonewalling – it’s highly impressive that Hamaguchi manages to make the discussion of the location, capacity and efficiency of a septic tank into such absorbing drama.

This is a story made far more of details and textures than of grand actions. Firstly, it turns out that neither of the reps are the heartless automatons they might at first seem, and secondly, the image of rural life is not overly prettified, nor unduly invested in the idea that a traditional way of life is somehow inherently more virtuous than life in a city. Indeed, as Takumi points out, the villagers are hardly that much more “traditional” than the newcomers — the region was only designated for settling after the war. The composite image we build up from all these sedate, hypnotic fragments, is one of fundamentally decent people, moving in the right direction, flowing with the stream, caring to find common ground with each other and with the common ground itself.

The film successfully intertwines these various elements until a utterly confounding, hard-to-absorb ending. It’s rare that a film’s final scenes should so materially change the inflection of its meaning, as Hamaguchi suddenly swings away from its prior axis of cautious, melancholy optimism toward something far colder, wintrier and more fraught. It may well be bleakly fascinating to witness a filmmaker paint so subtle and soothing a portrait of humanity, only to finally remind us that there is no soothing nature – human or otherwise, but for me if the film had ended more ambiguously, or indeed just a few minutes earlier, it would ultimately have been far more powerful.

Lou Reed’s rock standard “Perfect Day” does make an appearance - on the protagonist’s stereo as suitably ideal sunlight pours into his small, neat Tokyo apartment, before heading out into the city on a calm weekend afternoon. If that sounds a little basic, said protagonist Hirayama — a mellow, soft-spoken toilet cleaner beautifully played by Koji Yakusho — would probably agree, for he’s into simple pleasures. His solitary life is built around the things that make him happy and the work that keeps him solvent; he’s not inclined to wonder what other people make of it. Wenders’ film, in turn, is sincere and unassuming, and whilst a little too sentimental for my taste, nevertheless ultimately wins you over.

The film finds its maker in unusually uncomplicated form: it hasn’t the spiritual philosophy of “Wings of Desire” or the penetrating poetry of human desolation that marked “Paris, Texas.” But its humane, hopeful embrace of everyday blessings is enough to make it Wenders’ most approachable film for some time. There’s something of a documentarian’s eye to the film’s patient examination of process and routine, as it follows Hirayama on his daily rounds with minimal fuss or incident. Hirayama has a fixed cleaning rota, shared with younger slacker colleague Takashi, that covers the public loos in the city parks of Tokyo's smart Shibuya ward (the distinctly non-cliched presentation of Tokyo is one of the film's features). They are largely taken for granted by their often caught-short customers, as is Hirayama himself, used to being silently brushed past as if he, too, were a mere facility. But he clearly takes pleasure in the job's methodical regularity, just as he enjoys his daily lunch breaks in the same outdoor spot or his daily post-work drink at the same busy commuter bar. Weekends, with bicycle trips to the laundromat, the bookshop, and a small restaurant run by cheerfully nurturing Mama, are different but just as contentedly regimented. But when Niko, the teenage daughter of his estranged sister Keiko, turns up unannounced on his doorstep and decides to stay a few days, the ensuing disruptions to his routine also expose what a deliberate construction that routine is in the first place: a defence against a past life he doesn’t want back, whilst a charged encounter with a stranger at the end of the film culminates in a literal shadow-dance of unbidden, childlike playfulness. A distinctly low-key, but enjoyable watch.

This one's ideal if you're on a long-haul flight or need to kill a rainy Sunday, for you could probably read David Grann’s excellent book about an audacious 1920s conspiracy to steal resources from the Osage people by murder in less time, and you’d also learn a whole lot more about how J. Edgar Hoover and the newly formed FBI used this case to establish their place in American law enforcement.

Granted, this is Martin Scorsese, who has obviously earned the right to tell stories as he wants. The trouble is, at 206 minutes (and it felt like it), the film isn’t an 'epic' so much as a miniseries - if if had been closer to two hours, I have the feeling it would have been a much better film. However, as it is, “Killers” is still a compelling true story, one that Scorsese has thankfully avoided being a standard detective yarn in favour of a more morally thorny look at how the white culprits plotted and carried out murder. It’s engrossing from the start, the palpable tension methodically echoed by Robbie Robertson’s steady-heartbeat score. But it keeps going and going until everyone we care about is dead, dying or behind bars, with nearly an hour still in store.

Scorsese opens on prosperous times for the Osage people, who’d become super-wealthy thanks to the countless oil derricks that cover their bland land, but which made them obvious targets to be exploited. Early on, the director draws a direct line between the Osage Murders and the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, referenced via old-timey newsreels — both cases in which white supremacists couldn’t stand to see others prosper, counting on a biased legal system to cover their crimes. But this isn’t the story of one murder. Taking a page from “Goodfellas,” Scorsese runs through half a dozen suspicious deaths right upfront, dismissed without investigation. That’s the climate into which DiCaprio’s character, an opportunistic World War I veteran named Ernest Burkhart, moves to Fairfax, Okla., where he soon finds himself participating in the killings. Ernest’s first stop off the train is the place of his uncle William “King” Hale (played by De Niro), who welcomes him to town, glad to have the perfect patsy. Ernest doesn’t realize it, but the scheme is already underway. For it to work, King needs his nephew to marry Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), an Osage woman who’s too sharp not to recognize a gold digger, but too trusting to imagine just how sinister her suitor’s intentions may be. It’s classic Scorsese to present this case from the criminals’ perspective, together with a fascination for corruption, violence and underground dealings, and Grann’s book offers all that, plus an intriguing challenge for DiCaprio, who plasters a gargoyle-worthy frown across his mug for most of the film. Meanwhile, Gladstone is so sympathetic as Mollie, we cringe at every turn as her life is destroyed.

The country’s ambivalence toward Natives makes their job easy, and without bothering much with context, “Killers” illustrates some of the ways the system was designed to defraud them. De Niro lays on the charm, serving as a kind of godfather figure to everyone in Fairfax, but Scorsese's focus in the drawn-out climax is around Ernest: will he protect King to the bitter end, or will he testify against his uncle and maybe save Mollie in the process? The decision comes down to the fate of his children (who somehow got short shrift in the preceding three hours).

For me, the last sections of the film are by far the weakest, which feel rushed by comparison with what went before. And instead of following the courtroom drama to its natural conclusion, we cuts to a Technicolor epilogue, as a Hoover-endorsed radio show summarises what happened. It’s an odd way to wrap a film that’s taken its time thus far, and a reminder that no one is telling Scorsese 'no' — because if this device were an option, it could have kicked in an hour earlier. All in all, however, worth a watch if you've the time and patience!

Hannah Arrendt’s famous phrase “The Banality of Evil,” gets beaten to death by anyone trying to describe ordinary folk who commit extraordinary crimes, be they fictional villains or historical figures who shock us both with their psychopathy and their everyday, “quiet next door neighbour” dullness. But it’s best applied as she intended, to the monsters who perpetrated the Holocaust. That routine heartlessness, cruelty and widespread complicity is at the heart of Jonathan Glazer’s quietly horrific film.

Very loosely based on the Martin Amis novel, which fictionalised the family life and sexual shenanigans of the commandant of Auschwitz, the film is a cryptic, underexplained tale that buries us in banality. Most of revolves around a company man — SS camp commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) - depicted here as a casual careerist, hobnobbing with industrialists looking to improve their profits in the “manufacturing” side of the vast German concentration camp, looking for efficiencies from contractors who have designed a quicker, faster, mass-extermination-ready crematorium, pocketing stolen loot and enjoying the comforts of slave labour, not just for the camp, but for keeping his comfortable home just outside the gates. But his performance is overshadowed by that of Sandra Hüller, who plays an all-too convincing Hedwig, the matriarch of the household, mother of five Höss children, who jokes to her visiting mother that the officers’ wives and perhaps even the inmates, refer to her as “The Queen of Auschwitz.” She may well be the most monstrous figure here, representative perhaps of every German who “doesn’t want to know,” but we know does. She parcels out confiscated clothing, tries on a stolen fur coat, and when a young servant is clumsy, inattentive or otherwise provocative, Hedwig lets drop that she could have 'your ashes scattered over the fields'. She knows exactly what’s happening, and what her entire lifestyle is built on. One of many chilling moments has their Hitler youth tween son sorting “teeth” with gold fillings at bedtime, something he admits to when his much younger brother wants to know what he’s doing under the covers.

The film opens with a blank screen and the sounds of the camp captured in the distance — manual labour, shouts and occasional muffled screams, distant gunshots. This echoes throughout the film, with every walk through the garden, every open window in the house underscored with what goes on under the smoke we see billow from chimneys from the heart of the death factory. The sounds, when we notice them, are disturbing enough, but when we stop noticing them, as the Höss family do, that’s even more disturbing. Glazer’s most artistic touches are showing a young woman sneaking around the edges of the camp after dark, picking apples off fruit-filled trees, hiding them on outside-the-gates work sites so that the starving people inside can find them as they dig or load coal, sequences filmed in stark black and white night negative footage. The violence is always out of sight and muffled, even when we hear it, but there’s no denying that it’s there, and Hedwig’s mother plays a crucial part in the action, since only she is sensitive enough to flee from the scene.

It's perhaps arguable that ultimately the film is rather shallow, of use only to those naïve enough to believe that nobody without horns and a pitchfork can be the devil, and there is very little to grasp here in terms of character, only concepts. However, it's still a compelling, original piece.

This one's the tale of a stone-cold female author Sandra who steals her husband’s book idea, then mercilessly murders him, or alternatively, the tale of widow who must defend herself in court after her depressed husband commits suicide by jumping from the attic window of their remote home in the French Alps. The facts of the case: Sandra Voyter is a writer whose books often borrow from her life—the death of her mother, the emotional rift from her father, and the accident that left her 11-year-old son Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner) partially blind. Her husband Samuel, also a writer, was unable to pick Daniel up from school on time, leading to the accident, and thus blamed himself. One morning, Daniel goes on a walk with his dog Snoop and returns to find his father dead in the snow. Sandra, the only other person present in the house at the time, is the prime suspect, although she claims she was asleep.

Thus set up, the film centres on Sandra's predicament, and therein lies the first problem, for whilst Sandra might be an icy protagonist, Triet’s view of her is weighted in her favour, not least because it's told almost entirely from her point of view. A potentially hostile media for example is ever-present but its perspective strangely utterly tame: the most damning thing a talk show host does in the film is read a quote from one of Sandra’s books (in a film more daring in its critique of the media, you might see a Joan Rivers-like media figure cracking inappropriate jokes about Sandra’s frigid demeanour), whilst in court our sympathies are similarly entirely weighted in favour of Sandra's lawyer/friend. In contrast, the best moment is one of tense passion, showing Sandra and Samuel battling it out in flashback via an audio recording he made without her knowledge, the day before his death. They may be famous writers, but they have a lively argument over the same things many other couples argue over: money, infidelity and, most of all, the division of labour in the household. Who does more for the family, who makes more time for their son? This explosive moment puts the main question that is quietly present in our lives squarely into focus: If your romantic life were put under the scrutiny of the law, without time for preparation, would you come out as the victim or the perpetrator? Marriage is of course often a messy business when it comes to who is blame for what, but the courts must have a black-and-white version of things in order to uphold the law. Since Sandra must prove herself innocent of murder, her main initiative becomes convincing the court that her husband committed suicide, even though she has no physical evidence of this and doesn’t even believe it herself. However, despite Triet's clear sympathy for Sandra, it's also easy to see her as a very selfish woman focused only on herself and her writing career, to the point that she blinds herself completely to her husband’s depression, even after his death.

For me, the film is most compelling, not as a 'whodunnit', nor as the interrogation of a marriage, but as a picture of a grieving child working his way through his father’s death; in this regard Machado-Graner’s tear-jerking performance as a heartbroken child searching for impossible answers after discovering his father’s lifeless corpse is a much more engaging story, and watching Daniel move through the stages of his grief, from bedridden depression to finding some semblance of peace, is ultimately what makes the film worth it. Sandra’s fate rests with Daniel’s court testimony; so too does the arc of the film. Machado-Graner’s tears push past “generic sad kid” and plumb the depths of distress to discover a newfound, authentic optimism in Daniel’s dark circumstances. Shading the role further, a science experiment Daniel performs involving Snoop and some aspirin leads to stellar dog acting that goes far beyond simply playing dead (and earned a well-deserved Palm Dog win). All in all, a rather uneven piece.

Molly Manning Walker’s ambitious feature attempts a look at the pressures and permissiveness of teenage friendships combined with a rather didactic story about the vagaries of consent, with the result that it's much better at the former than the latter. Best friends Tara, Em, and Skye scream “Best! Holiday! Ever!” at each other during a taxi ride from the airport, oblivious to the dangers of deciding that in advance; they’ve also pre-determined that Tara — the trio’s last remaining virgin — will “get laid” by the time they go home, which proves to be another fraught case of putting the cart before the horse. Tara seems on board with the plan, and it’s not as if it’ll be hard to find a willing partner given her good looks and a ultra-hedonistic Malia beach club; alas, however, there’s no guarantee that any of Tara’s potential suitors know how to have sex any better than she does. And of course the odds are they won’t even care — not when so many of these people have been socialised to think of sex as a consecration of their own self-worth; that this is a culture which collectively diminishes notions of consent in the rush to 'experience' is an obvious target.

The film is at its best during its first half, when the thrust of Walker’s attention is focused on the nuances of Tara’s friendship with Skye and Em. As played by the excellent Mia McKenna Bruce, Tara is a multi-dimensional lead: street smart, she is brash and bull-headed in a way that disguises her relative innocence — as well as her private fear that the GCSE results will put her on a very different path than her besties. The pressure Tara feels to join the club and have sex is even more intense now that she feels like even the smallest fissure between she and her friends might fracture them apart forever, and it doesn’t help that Tara — like so many of the people she meets in Malia — seems privately convinced that everyone else is having more fun than she is. Maybe if she has another bathtub-sized drink everything will fall into place. Maybe if she finally gets laid she’ll be able to postpone her actual loss of innocence: the crushing realisation that her life may not live up to the dreams she once had for it.

The other two members of the fraternity are either too cynical or not cynical enough. Em is a rather underwritten sweetheart who’s too busy snogging her lesbian crush to notice what Tara is going through, while Skye is an insecure bully whose appetite for deep-fried cigarettes is only matched by her need to undercut Tara at every opportunity. She’s the kind of girl who only seems interested in fucking the guys her friends like, so when Tara hits it off with the bleach-blond ('Badger') who’s staying in the next room over, it’s only a matter of time before Skye casually tells him that Tara has never had sex before. Badger's good-hearted nature in this context is refreshing; by contrast, all the booze in the world can’t hide the fact that his best mate Paddy is, as Badger says much later, an absolute “nightmare of a guy.” Unfortunately, all these characters are incongruously one-dimensional for a film so attuned to the grey areas of sexual assault.

At its best, the film captures the kinds of unspoken rituals that occur within groups of excitable youth, the way certain people hover around each other and the way others can just swoop in, the paroxysms of longing and jealousy and spite and shame that are the lingua franca of being a teenager. It also captures the ways that such interactions can quickly become poisoned and dangerous. Even during an overwrought third act, it never loses sight of what these characters are willing to overlook, or why. It all ends on a soberingly painful note as Tara, at long last, sees herself with a clarity that she’ll be able to keep forever — a valuable souvenir rescued from a holiday she'll never forget.

In one of many striking scenes, a group of shabbily dressed men, each carrying a shovel, wait outside a hospital in Djibouti City, Somalia, in the faint hope that someone will die. They are professional gravediggers, and their living depends upon being at hand when a corpse becomes available. Their friendly banter is an odd contrast to both their grim profession and their poverty. This is the gritty reality that provides the context to director Khadar Ayderus Ahmed’s first feature.

The central character is Guled (Omar Abdi). Despite the family’s extreme poverty, Guled has been content with his life, until his beloved wife, Nasra, became ill with a kidney disease. Nasra is resigned, but Guled still hopes to find a way to save her, and his efforts make up the central thread of the story. Nasra is played by fashion model Yasmin Warsame in her first acting role, and she perfectly captures Nasra’s charm, her calm acceptance of her fate, and her love for her family, as well as her chemistry with Guled. Their close relationship comes across beautifully, especially during their few light-hearted moments, as when they playfully try to crash a wedding, discuss their son, or simply chat and reminisce as they cook dinner together at home. These scenes are essential; the couple’s attachment seems to raise them above their obvious poverty, and it is the force behind Guled’s actions in the remainder of the film.

The story follows Guled as he searches for a way to raise the money for his wife’s surgery, becoming increasingly desperate and finally settling on a difficult solution involving a punishing journey on foot through the desert, presented almost in the form of a quest or pilgrimage. As he travels, the film follows what is happening at home with his wife and son Mahad, who sets aside his boyish unruliness and devotes himself to caring for his mother in simple but heartwarming family scenes. In contrast, Guled’s efforts become more rigorous and increasingly hopeless, and he may have to face the prospect of returning home empty handed. Guled’s absence allows for a moving turn in the story, in which details of Guled and Nasra’s courtship and marriage are described through alternating scenes: of the bedridden Nasra telling the story to her son, and of Guled pausing in his journey to relate his version to fellow travellers. The circumstances of their marriage, as it turns out, partly explains their poverty, and adds depth to the realities of their home life.

Ahmed has commented on his wish to present these characters “with dignity, compassion and tenderness", and in this he certainly succeeds. Powerful work.

Most of us can easily relate to the experience of a sleep-shattering jab of an early-morning alarm and the various sensations a promising job interview subjects us to in a context of a demeaning job. Eric Gavel’s film is a breathless nail-biter whose stoical protagonist Julie (Laure Calamy - utterly convincing throughout) is a single mother of two who commutes to Paris from the suburbs in her capacity as head chambermaid at a four-star hotel, while at the same time looking for a job better suited to her university education. The film’s title is quite literal, alluding to the “second shift” that still falls disproportionately on the shoulders of women, often expected to perform endless hours of unpaid domestic labour after clocking off from work.

Julie’s day-to-day life would be gruelling enough were it not for a transit strike that serves as a backdrop to her struggle. It makes her late for work and late to pick up her children from their childminder, Madame Lusigny, forcing her to hitchhike or pay for taxis that she can’t afford while she waits for her (all too absent) ex-husband to pay alimony and take some responsibility. Still, she views the strikes almost as a rogue weather phenomenon, never blaming them for her troubles but never showing any solidarity either, (let alone succumbing to the thought of why she can’t go on strike herself). This is all-too obviously a dog-eat-world where a workforce is both exploited and taken for granted; cornered though she is, the individualism that drives Julie’s actions leads to the firing of another single mother.

The frenetic editing of scenes that see Julie sprinting from terminal to terminal through seething crowds and traffic jams, barely keeping her cool as further delays and cancellations of service are announced, never relents, and her work routine is shot at the same level of intensity. The pulsing Minimal soundtrack by Irène Drésel matches the rhythm of rapid-fire close-ups showing Julie changing into her uniform, making beds, fluffing pillows, scrubbing toilets, and so on, all of which provides a palpable contrast to the rare scenes in which she gets an all-too brief breather. Any moments of hope are quickly snuffed out, notably a meeting with a fellow parent (and the only character with any direct relation to the strikes) who gently rejects her advances, which he rightly interprets as an act of desperation rather than passion; here and elsewhere, Calamy’s performance deftly captures the moment-by-moment collapse of Julie’s composure. There’s a bitterly ironic edge to the fact that her job transposes the domestic labour she performs at home to a hotel—domestic space in its most alienated form; that both Julie’s boss at the hotel and her job interviewer at the marketing firm are women suggests that it’s capitalism, rather than sexism, that’s at the root of everyone’s troubles. The ending for me is by far the weakest bit of the film, unfortunately - if it had concluded about thirty seconds before it does, ie, before we hear what the substance of a phone call is, then it would have been even better. Nevertheless, very impressive work.

That a country like Pakistan could produce a film like Joyland is, in itself, pretty remarkable. The centre of the film’s story — of an unorthodox, extra-marital relationship between a married man and trans woman — unpredictably caused a huge stir in its country of origin, where conservative religious values hold sway and LGBTQ rights remain woefully backwards: the film ended up being banned by the government there, only to be unbanned (with some scenes censored) after voices as loud as Amnesty International and Malala Yousafzai spoke up.

From an 'objective' point of view, the film is a thoughtful, nuanced and sensitive story, and a deeply considered exploration of how modern ideas of gender and sexuality sit awkwardly in a rigidly traditional society that still expects marriages to be arranged and men to be breadwinners, women to be homemakers. It is, above anything else, a well - pitched character study, told with a formidable ensemble of actors, and a script that treats each role with respect and consideration. Most impressive by far is Alina Khan as Biba, depicted as a transgender woman with real agency and power, in a culture that can treat her like a second-class citizen. She is tough and sharp-tongued — we get brief glimpses of Lahore’s khwaja sira (“third gender”) community that supports and sustains her — but vulnerable and flawed, too. Khan is an amazing find: making her feature debut here (like many on the cast list), her screen presence is very powerful indeed, and means that we can easily see how Haider (Ali Junejo) soon falls under Biba’s spell. Under pressure from his father to meet certain societal expectations (get a job, provide a son), Haider accepts a gig at an erotic dance show, initially, it seems, just to prove he’s not a washout. He is a gentle soul and, it’s implied, somewhere on the gay spectrum — but his extra-marital affair with Biba is played out without sensationalism. He is tenderly protective of Biba, while also grappling with a sexual and romantic desire he doesn’t fully comprehend. In another, more 'soapy' film, Haider’s wife Mumtaz (Rasti Farooq, also very good, and another feature first-timer) might have been little more than a ‘wronged-woman’ caricature, but she gets layers to her, too: trapped by the patriarchal system that suffocates her own desires.

However, Mumtaz becomes the unexpected focus of the film’s final act, and therein lies the film's major problem, for it takes an unexpectedly tragic turn with the result that, after all the subtlety of what came before, the film’s conclusion is unduly melodramatic and thus of course significantly undermines its power. Nevertheless, a brave and impressive work.

This one's an expansive documentary essay on the gendered nature of film language by Nina Menkes. Using over 175 snippets of footage from scores of films, as well as interviews with filmmakers such as Joey Soloway, Julie Dash, and Catherine Hardwicke, among others, it represents a slickly assembled collage that seeks to illustrate Menkes’ “understandings about shot design and the established cinematic canon,” to quote her directly. Clearly made with the best of intentions, unfortunately however the film is founded on a rather simplistic and weakly argued thesis that doesn't do justice to the many waves of feminist film theory in academic circles. In essence, Menkes proposes here a watered-down version of Laura Mulvey’s ideas about the “male gaze,” a term Mulvey coined in her foundational 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (although to her credit Menkes dispenses with much of the juicy psychoanalytic language about phallocentrism and scopophilia Mulvey retconned from Freud).

'Brainwashed' has many qualities, not least many interesting interviewees, but the presence of a solid theoretical framework is not one of its virtues. Menkes takes that central, so-basic-it’s-banal notion about who does the looking in film, and who is looked at, in order to mount a critique of the quintessentially patriarchal nature of film language. Which is fine as far as it goes, but the thesis here is ultimately so reductive and lacking in nuance that presents a number of problems, not least of which is that the model can’t cope with films made by female directors who don’t fit Menkes’ strictures. Cheryl Dunye’s extreme close-ups of two women making love in The Watermelon Woman gets a pass of course, but Sofia Coppola’s long held shot of Scarlett Johansson’s derriere in the opening minutes of Lost in Translation is for her too much like the male gaze, whilst Kathryn Bigelow earns recognition for being the first woman to win an Oscar for Best Director for The Hurt Locker, but gets dinged for hiring all men to supervise the key craft contributions. The film is more persuasive when it engages with the realpolitik of the film industry, addressing the innate and persistent sexism in Hollywood specifically that’s challenged and humiliated filmmakers from Rosanna Arquette to Penelope Spheeris. Fellow director and activist Maria Giese talks informatively about efforts to use the 1964 Civil Rights Act to find a legal path to reducing discrimination against women in the industry, a topic that deserves a documentary all its own, and Ita Obrien also helps to move the discussion into the 21st century given how filmmakers now can make films that express a female or even non-binary gaze, the latter a particular concern of Soloway’s.

It’s frustrating therefore that these lines of inquiry aren’t pursued fully; instead, the bulk of the film consists of offering up yet more clips from canonical male voyeuristic fare. There are undoubtedly many to choose from, but equally a fair few scenes selected here are analysed in isolation from the rest of the films in which they are from. For example, she demonstrates the 'man as subject, woman as object' shot through a scene from “Phantom Thread,” insisting that it implies that Daniel Day-Lewis’ Reynolds Woodcock has power over Vicky Krieps' Alma, but had she bothered to study this in relation to the context of the entire film, we would see how director Paul Thomas Anderson then flips this visual language, along with the power structure of Woodcock and Alma’s relationship, by the end of the film (I'm sure Menkes knows this, so I'm afraid she's guilty of simply choosing to ignore something that doesn't fit the thesis, which is unworthy of her). Needless to say, the film also has no time to explore the complexity of desire the way, for instance, Mulvey herself did in one of her other seminal essays which explored female spectatorship. All in all, a bit of a disappointment.

This very absorbing piece by first-time writer-director Georgia Oakley takes (an admittedly non-too-subtle) aim at Section 28, introduced by Thatcher’s government in the 80s, which effectively enshrined homophobia into law, preventing teachers from the “promotion of homosexuality” in schools, and fostering a climate of mistrust and fear that arguably continued well into the current generation. The message is conveyed via a knotty, complex character study of PE teacher Jean (newcomer Rosy McEwen - superb throughout), and is generally successful of providing an empathetic portrait of a life lived in secret, and all the strains that brings on the journey to self-acceptance. On screen in pretty much every scene, McEwan balances the vulnerability of her stresses with a worldly poise and calm, and Oakley takes care, too, to show a gay life that feels rich and lived-in — from the simple exhilaration of a boozy, smoky gay pub, bound by the safety and welcoming of that community, to the everyday curtain-twitching of the wider community, automatically suspicious of difference. Unfortunately for me, the film attempts a bridge too far when trying to deal with the effects of a teacher-pupil attachment, the ramifications of which are treated rather superficially; Jean's actions amount to stalking at one point (which in 'real life' could easily have got her arrested) and generally the effects of Jean's actions on 15-year old Lois are both barely touched on and all-too neatly resolved, which left something of a bitter taste for my liking. Nevertheless, a serious, thoughtful piece.

This debut feature from Laura Samani is a hard watch at times, but compelling viewing nevertheless. Agata (beautifully played by Celeste Cescutti) is a young woman who gives birth to a stillborn child on the coast of Veneto in North East Italy in a deeply religious community where the priest emphatically states that the unbaptised baby is now in limbo where she will stay for eternity. The year is nominally 1900 but with their tradition the fishing village could just as easily be in the Middle Ages; Agata only given hope when she is told of a sanctuary in the mountains where unbaptised babies are briefly and miraculously brought back to life for one breath – time enough, given this mentality, for the baby to be baptised and thus saved.

The film has the rooted magic of a folktale as Agata straps the small coffin to her back and sets off on her epic journey to the mountains in the north, where she is joined by Lynx (Ondina Quadri), who becomes an unlikely companion and whose story also gets woven into the action (if less successfully). Samani and her co-writers use Friulian dialect throughout, a language that can change from one village to the next; these are lives for the most part lived in one place and deeply connected to the land or in Agata’s case the sea, something Lynx has never seen, whilst Agata is in a world she barely understands. Cinematographer Mitja Licen’s camera follows close at Agata’s heels for the beginning of the journey but as it goes on the movement widens to include the landscape and the film takes on a genuine sense of grandeur when the mountains finally loom into the frame. A sequence where their journey takes us under a mountain sees Luca Bertolin’s sound design come to the fore as underground winds blow through the tunnels, whilst composer Fredrika Stahl, using folk songs to great effect, provides a score that becomes increasingly beautiful as the film goes on and is a reminder of a time when the only culture available was music you made yourself. It is ultimately a film about a personal grief which gradually, step by step, takes on a mythic resonance, and the last twenty minutes are truly astonishing. Very powerful stuff indeed.

Joanna Hogg's latest is very much a minor piece compared to her usual fayre, but is still engaging, mainly because of Tilda Swinton's 'double' performance both as filmmaker Julie and her aging mother Rosalind. The setting is a remote Welsh hotel which used to belong to Rosalind’s aunt Jocelyn, and where Rosalind stayed at various points during her past, and as with “The Souvenir,” Hogg’s outstanding two-part meta-textual memoir, the film is as much about an artist’s fickle relationship with her own creativity — and her struggle with the ethics of co-opting stories that do not necessarily belong to her — as it is about any interpersonal bond. However, here the film's power is perhaps diminished rather than enhanced by the (rather cliched) 'haunted house' motifs, with the result that after a while it starts to feel like an unnecessarily drawn-out wait for a 'big reveal' that you can see coming from a mile off. Nevertheless, there's still much to enjoy - as well as Swinton, there's a wonderfully surly, border-line hostile hotel receptionist (a pitch-perfect Carly-Sophia Davis), who couldn’t more obviously care less about Julie’s quite reasonable requests, and the sense of entrapment in pragmatic English reserve, where mother and daughter exchange halting pleasantries and little acts of care by day, while Julie roams the maze-like corridors and the misty grounds of the hotel by night, is nicely done. In its best moments, including an excruciating passive-aggressive/affectionate-aggravated birthday dinner, and a couple of exchanges with the hotel’s genial concierge Bill, there is some good insights into the vast and yawning gulf between the conversations we would like to have with our mothers and daughters, and the ones we actually end up having. Sometimes, no matter how resolved you are to reach down into the inexpressibly profound depths of your mutual love, guilt and remorse, all you can ever actually dredge up is some comment about the niceness of the marmalade or prettiness of the wrapping paper. Dog-lovers' hearts will also melt over the film’s most important supporting actor: Louis, Rosalind’s faithful spaniel, who steals whole scenes. Much more to come from Hogg, I hope.

Prolific documentarian Mark Cousins latest is a love letter to one of cinema’s towering greats. The opening credits announce that the film was “written and voiced by Alfred Hitchcock”, but the first sound of that voice on the soundtrack, however familiar its adenoidal depths and Cockney slants, immediately sparks doubt, and in fact the master of suspense is voiced by English impressionist Alistair McGowan. Once we’ve got past this ventriloquist conceit — that Hitchcock, addressing Cousins and us, is revisiting his body of work from the perspective of the smartphone-tethered 21st century — the film succeeds in engaging us with Cousins’ typically sharp connections as he delves into the visual language of Hitchcock’s creations, the many narrative motifs and inventive strategies as well some of their key themes.

As “Hitchcock” notes, his films have been analysed every which way and back, and Cousins’ fresh approach divides the work into six sections, an elegant capsule melding existential questions with the practical challenges and opportunities of big-screen storytelling. The first chapter, Escape, is the longest, and from there the film moves through Desire, Loneliness, Time and Fulfilment, culminating with Height (as in an elevated sense of perspective), and this proves a very good way of exploring Hitchcock's work. Biographical elements mainly serve as a complement to the stories they tell; he doesn’t second-guess or dismantle the films as much as zero in on what makes them tick. We are reminded that Hitchcock, unfairly generally dismissed as a mere entertainer, was wielding radical methods, the film particularly good as showing how he escaped the conventions of drama, replacing them with hyperrealities, not unlike his beloved Cezanne in his own field.

For the Hitchcock-curious, Cousins’ film easily could serve as an introduction to his work, but for fans it also casts a new light on scenes you may have seen many times - laying bare for example the ache in Norman Bates’ philosophical musings, or the charged space around Hitchcock's many lonely characters. It finds rhymes between the phone booth in The Birds and the shower in Psycho, and links the blinding orange afterglow of flashbulbs in Rear Window, on a soundstage facsimile of Greenwich Village, to A-bomb tests in the desert on the other side of the continent. No Hitchcock fan needs reminding that the best of his movies are endlessly, insistently watchable. And yet, viewed through the prism of this discerning film, it’s remarkable how affecting the images still are. Wielding the camera as voyeur, detective and tense-shuffling “time phantom,” Hitchcock unfailingly draws us in. Most enjoyable.