Film Reviews by PD

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.

Paolo Sorrentino’s latest is a captivating portrait of an esteemed political leader in the waning days of his term. For the most part it’s a sober film, but it’s not without the customary creative arias, the playful humour and visual delights that have distinguished Sorrentino’s best work, and features a quite wonderful turn by Toni Servillo as Mariano De Santis, a fictional president of the Italian Republic. He describes himself as “a grey, boring man, a man of the law,” but instead is revealed to possess a wellspring of deep feeling, humanity and — to his own surprise — doubt.

With La Grazia, Sorrentino makes the radical and (these days) original choice of imagining a senior politician being an honest man of integrity; he's intelligent and principled but needled by ethical uncertainties over choices he faces during his final days in office, together with a complex personal history. The absence of corruption, scandal, self-dealing and cronyism makes this a somewhat unreal break from present-day concerns, but the reflections on power, influence and the weight of the past are unquestionably relevant.

De Santis’ face is generally as unyielding as the Palazzo del Quirinale, the official residence of Italian presidents. Eccentrically, his only pleasure is listening to rap music on his earphones (Sorrentino, as often before, supplies plenty of distinctive electro-pop on the soundtrack), but Servillo’s characterisation allows for subtle hints of the man’s vanity; he also seems unsure whether to be amused or offended when he discovers his nickname is “Reinforced Concrete.” With just six months left in his term, the former judge’s duties have decelerated to the point where one of the proposed items on his agenda is an interview with the editor of ‘Vogue’ about his sartorial choices, but three matters occupy thick folders on his desk. One is a law to legalise euthanasia, which has wide support, including from his daughter Dorotea. “If I don’t sign, I’m a torturer. If I sign, I’m a murderer,” says De Santis. The others are requests for pardons: one for a popular history teacher who killed his wife when she reached the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s, the other for a young woman convicted of murdering her husband in his sleep. Sorrentino’s script neatly intertwines these concerns, cleverly pondering the difference between the truth absorbed up close and the law, which is viewed from a distance.

The film is punctuated by poignant moments of reflection in which Mariano sneaks cigarettes on the Quirinale roof while sharing confidences with Colonel Labaro, his cuirassier, the elite cavalry regiment that serves as the president’s guards. Other introspective angles are explored during Mariano’s audiences with his friend the Pope, a serene Black man with a head crowned by a bundle of silver dreads, to whom Mariano confesses his loneliness since his adored wife Aurora’s passing (the film increasingly becomes a story about love as Mariano ruminates on his past relationship with Aurora). The Pope doesn’t offer empty words of pious comfort, instead telling the politician that his life has become weighted down when what he wants is “leggerezza,” or lightness. There are also beautifully observed moments such as the illness of Mariano’s favourite horse, whilst two set pieces are fabulous: one involving Mariano as guest of honour at a veterans’ dinner for Italy’s mountain infantry, the Alpini, and another where he hosts an official reception for the Portuguese president and simply looks on motionless as the visitor attempts to process toward him across a courtyard in the driving rain: a dream image of the vulnerability and absurdity of official pomp.

La Grazia is visually arresting, but it’s the film’s warmth, its spirit of forgiveness, understanding and hard-won wisdom that grips us; or to borrow from the title, its 'grace', an Italian word also for official pardons. A tender and powerful piece.

Walter Salles' latest film concerns the period between 1964 and the mid-70s when hundreds of Brazilian individuals were “disappeared” by the military dictatorship as part of a counter-revolutionary campaign. Among the missing were students and former politicians, rich and poor alike, swept up in the tides of brutality that beset the country with ramifications that continue to resonate to this very day. Along with those who never came home were the many family members that were also picked up and interrogated, undergoing hardships that would for years mark them with suspicion by the state and leave lasting psychological effects.

The film allows international audiences into this world of quiet resilience and powerful response to the whims of a dictatorial regime. Following the true-life story of Eunice Paiva (Fernanda Torres) and her family, this is a powerful indictment of those that caused such harm, and a blistering celebration of one woman’s tenacious drive to seek justice and to preserve the truth for generations to come.

The early portion of the film is presented with an impeccable sense of place, and everything from the clothing to the set design and dressing is handled with extreme dexterity. Even at the most heightened moments of suffering or anxiety the storyline never becomes overwrought, Salles’ skillful navigation of this years-long story doled out in a precise yet never ponderous pace. The raw emotions that Eunice and others experience is also expressed in beautifully attenuated fashion, and it’s the quiet power of the character as exceptionally embodied by Torres, free from histrionics, that makes it that much more effective. From the child actors right through to the taciturn menace of the abductors and interrogators, there’s a sense of documentary-like truthfulness throughout that transcends any usual cinematic excesses. Salles’ camera wanders from beach to home with a freedom that’s often stunning, and everything from gritty street scenes to more subtle glimpses of Rio-area landmarks are dropped in with a keen and careful eye.

The film’s first two thirds we’re situated within the time period of the coup, and this feels by far the most urgent and impactful parts of the narrative. But to end with a generic title card to say what occurred over the next quarter century would do injustice to Eunice’s story, and the film wisely grants more than enough space to see her myriad actions that helped reshape her country be appropriately commemorated. Although tonally this concluding act perhaps feels a tad more heavy handed, it’s still a fitting coda to what builds up from the initial scenes. While an entirely refreshed cast is called upon to take up the mantle with events some quarter century later, the sense of familial connection remains strong. Seen through these various lenses, Eunice’s story is given a more fulsome presentation. Very impressive work.

When this film was announced and selected for the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, the director was sentenced by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Court to eight years in jail, flogging and a fine. Rasoulof skipped the country after sentencing and fled to a safe house in Germany. And all some filmmakers have to worry about is getting the final cut.

All the travails are worth it, though. Excellently played across the board, with powerful performances all the better for being understated, the film is a microcosm of contemporary Iranian life as filtered through a middle-class Tehran family, with a sprinkling of earned genre elements to boot. Rasoulof centres on Iman (Misagh Zare - thoroughly convincing), a civil servant who is promoted to an investigating judge tasked with interrogating those who protest against the regime. He is married to ultra-devoted wife Najmeh (Soheila Golestani, also superb, who has been arrested in Iran over her activism) with two teenage daughters, Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami - really good) and Sana — neither of whom has yet been aware of what their dad does. This new position means changes: a better standard of living on the one hand, but restrictions on the daughters’ lifestyle on the other, together with a gun kept in a drawer for 'protection' which will significantly affect the plot.

For the first 80 minutes or so, it’s a slow-moving (at 2hrs and 45 minutes it might be overlong for some, but for me it didn't feel that way) but compelling domestic drama as Iman grapples with the new job — the speed with which he has to process the demonstrators denies due diligence, whilst the arrival of Rezvan’s free-spirited, militant friend Sadaf opens up fissures in the family which soon escalate. From this point, the film gets more melodramatic and thus loses its impact somewhat (even culminating in a rather implausible Hollywood-style shoot-out) but, for the most part, Rasoulof keeps it realistic, parlaying the political in human terms and never forgetting the true-life consequences: throughout the film, the fiction is punctuated with TikTok footage of horrifying police brutality (often meted out to women) and literal blood on the streets. There's little subtlety, and perhaps Rasoulof can be accused of being more interested in his own ideas than in what real young adult women might do in this situation, but the overall result is a bold and timely state-of-the-nation address.

Set to the rhythm of the changing seasons in the high Italian Alps, Maura Delpero’s film is a graceful and tender, slowly unfolding piece involving us in the lives of many different characters, with wider observations on the aspects of social change affecting women at the end of the Second World War.

The time is 1944 (although it could easily be 1914), when young men were away in uniform fighting and only womenfolk, children and a few elderly men were left to carry on the farmwork and homesteads. The house of the Grazidei family is in many ways a safe haven for its incumbents, but also one under the tutelage of a commanding father (Tommaso Ragno). This anomaly is immediately striking: even taking into account the period’s high infant mortality rate, the family seems over-populated and the expression “one more mouth to feed” an understatement. It is clear that this sensitive, cultivated man who loves teaching is also a traditional patriarch who makes all the decisions in the house, including some bad ones regarding his children’s future. Another oddity is the presence of Pietro, a young Sicilian deserter who is in hiding from the army with the complicity of the villagers. In spite of – or because of – the language and culture gap, he and the teacher’s eldest daughter Lucia are drawn to each other. What leads to the fatal denouement here – a shocker by any standard – is a moral failing that village tradition cannot forgive. It leaves the family turned upside down, and even their strong family bonds seem to unable to heal the psychological wounds.

Vermiglio is a film that proceeds carefully with few narrative missteps, until the ending sends Lucia on a highly improbable journey across Italy that upsets the tale’s strong sense of geographical unity, leaving us wishing perhaps for a more convincing ending. Still, the portrait of a nearly vanished rural way of life remains compelling, the film’s initial lightness and peace gradually giving way to a bleakness, a sense of entrapment, giving us a clear-eyed look at the social structures traditional Catholicism serves to camouflage.

Social-realist films about migrant alienation, especially those set on the cold automated factory floor, can be grimly authentic to the point where the audience itself is also cut adrift. But Laura Carreira's debut feature, with its touches of sci-fi dystopia, is an enveloping portrait of dehumanisation and infantilisation which doesn’t ask for pity or outrage. Aurora (Joana Santos, excellent throughout), a young ‘picker’ in a giant fulfilment warehouse in Scotland, comes from Portugal, but she could be any lonely soul who has tried to break past the prison of small talk into a deeper human connection. Her hesitant, faltering attempts are heightened by the lack of money or prospects that leads to a life on the precipice. Everything about the management structure is designed to put distance between Aurora and humanity; the managers seem just as disconnected from fleshy hierarchies as is she. Rules and work practices just materialise from distant, unnamed planets.

Carreira, an Edinburgh resident and Portuguese native whose accomplished shorts including 'The Shift' give a clear sign as to the warming flame of her social conscience. Although it’s formally of some interest (tight close-ups in a boxy frame, ambient sound only, some street casting) the film is more daring in its juggling of emotions over a restrained run-time, always clinging to a quiet determination to put the viewer inside one lonely life, with all the risks and hopes that brings. Providing a credible social realist context while still producing cinematic highs and lows is a tough challenge - Carrera initially answers it inside the giant fulfilment centre, where goods are packed randomly to keep pickers alert. We begin with Aurora and her little automatic reader machine which impatiently beeps if she takes too long to find an item, yet could be the most responsive thing in her life. She carpools with another Portuguese colleague, and shares a building with strangers who come and go in a kitchen and life devoid of natural light. Any small talk Aurora encounters is both excruciating and impossible to break through: she is starving for a connection, which might come when a friendly Polish ‘man with a van’ moves into the house, although Aurora has almost lost the ability to speak through her loneliness. A colleague at the centre who makes a friendly overture disappears and is said to have committed suicide, all but immobilising her in terror. Any time she dares to make a tentative move outside the radius of her mobile phone the moment is brushed away – Carreira makes you understand how huge those fleeting opportunities are for a woman in her position, whereas a slight stumble such as a broken phone could crush her completely. The chance of an interview to become a care worker, deemed low-paid and low-status in the UK, is everything to her, and it’s here where Carreira ratchets up the stakes.

Thanks to the tight team-work between Carreira and her intuitive lead actor, the film becomes an intense but engaging experience, and the last scene is truly inspired. Impressive stuff.

Joshua Oppenheimer’s distinctly original musical drama is set in a fossil-fuel oligarch’s luxury survival bunker in a desolate salt mine. “The houses are all gone under the sea,” begins the T.S. Eliot quote that opens the film. “The dancers are all gone under the hill.”

Mother (Tilda Swinton – inevitably superb throughout) was once a ballerina, whom Father (Michael Shannon) and Son (George MacKay – also very impressive) routinely praise for having performed at the Bolshoi many years ago. It seems to have been 25 years since they retreated underground; in fact, 20-year-old Son has only ever known the painstakingly-decorated bunker, filled with artistic masterpieces.

Mackay’s character is one of naive brilliance, someone who commemorates major historical moments through their inclusion in a remarkable diorama which includes Chinese workers with smiling faces, and who assists his father with his self-serving autobiography that no one will read – a work in which of course he absolves himself of any blame for the climate crisis. Mackay is in many ways the most interesting person on show with many of the best lines, whilst Swinton’s character speaks volumes mainly by expressions and countless evasions. The rest of the household consists of Doctor, whose main medical task seems to be prescribing sleeping aids for everyone’s incessant nightmares; agreeable Butler, who tends to Father’s demands, and Friend, who’s specified to be Mother’s closest companion and the only loved one who was allowed in the bunker when the end times first unfolded. Interestingly, the only names ever uttered are those of relatives who were abandoned. Son gently speaks the name of his mother’s sister—which he only discovered by snooping through an old tablet—and Friend continues to profess love for her child who supposedly died before the apocalypse.

There’s very little ‘action’ as such, and the 148-minute runtime feels distinctly overlong by at least half an hour. The only major plot development occurs when a ‘stranger’ (Moses Ingram) somehow manages to make her way in the mine with the inevitable conflicting consequences - the rest of the tribe debating fiercely over whether she should be allowed to stay. While the outsider’s presence begins to poke holes in the group’s collective fallacy, it’s also clear that ugly grudges and harsh truths were always at risk of breaking through, much like the cracks that consistently appear on the bunker’s walls, and much of the film is spent giving us glimpses into the various individuals' respective pasts and thus different forms of guilt.

However, for all the intriguing premise and impressive performances, ultimately the film fails for me. Apart from the length, the film rather shies away from direct confrontation of the actions and individuals responsible for our climate crisis: the terrible but all-too plausible scenario of elite survivors of apocalypse prioritising the preservation of mostly Western “masterpieces” and their own reputations never blooms into fuller consequences. But the film’s major downfall, is that its musical numbers are dull, discordant and downright intrusive. Despite its stage-influenced production design and a single fleeting tap-dance sequence, the lyrics penned by Oppenheimer and music by Joshua Schmidt simply don’t capture the songwriting finesse of the Golden Age they are presumably so desperate to emulate. You can see what Oppenheimer is trying to do - individual traumas exorcised in order to maintain a utopian illusion—but their harmonised phrases only serve to convey far more about the fantasy they’re forced to project. As another reviewer said, there's a good film in here somewhere, but all in all, rather disappointing.

Yeah, I'm in. This is an austere, novelistic, self-consciously important film that unfurls in a measured sprawl over 3 hours, but nonetheless exerts an iron grip throughout. It mulls on some weighty themes of Jewish identity, the immigrant experience, privilege, culture-versus-commerce, the thin lines between inspiration and insanity, ambition and crushing egotism, creativity and compromise, architectural integrity, the arrogant insularity of privilege and the long reach of the past. The result is a very impressive, serious piece about a man of genius who gets to taste the American Dream but also feel the stinging humiliation of a conditional welcome that turns ice-cold.

It begins in 1947, as Hungarian-born Jewish architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody, fabulous throughout, brimming with pain and passion in equal measure) spills from the bowels of a teeming ship to eye Ellis Island’s famous statue. From Tóth’s angle, Lady Liberty appears upside down, and America, land of dreams, will prove a frequently topsy-turvy, nauseating experience for Tóth over the next 30 years. Like Corbet’s provocative first two films, (The Childhood Of A Leader and Vox Lux) 'The Brutalist' charts the rise of an enigmatic figure., about which we first we know little other that he awaits the arrival of his wife, Erzsébet (an excellent Felicity Jones when she appears - her role seems almost marginal at first, but her character steadily grows in stature), and his niece, Zsófia, who remain in Europe after the war. But slowly, brick by brick, the pieces are dropped into place, and we learn that Tóth is a celebrated architect of the Bauhaus school. At once ugly and beautiful, the jutting, concrete blocks of his 'Brutalist' structures seek to shape an aesthetic future.

In silence Tóth speaks volumes; a halting, traumatised figure in the first half, whilst by contrast, post-intermission, Tóth’s words escalate and his emotions amplify, uncorked by the arrival of Erzsébet and Zsófia. There’s also the construction of a prodigious building that will serve as auditorium, chapel, library and gymnasium, and the clashes with domineering patron Harrison Van Buren that come with it. Unnerving even when he’s being charming, Van Buren creates a strange push-pull to his relationship with Tóth, currents of admiration and envy, power and disgust swirling beneath the surface. Corbet, perhaps, sees echoes of his own experience — the visionary artist beholden to the whims of myopic moneymen — and then pours cultural prejudice into the mix. For the Van Burens are revealed to be the quintessence of moral corruption bred by wealth and power; (only Harry’s twin sister Maggie seems to value genuine kindness) the film becoming a scathing critique of the ways in which America’s moneyed and privileged class gains cachet through the labour and creativity of immigrants while never considering them equals; despite Harrison’s big pronouncements on the responsibility of the rich to nurture the great artists of their time, he’s a cultural gatekeeper in an exclusionary club. Despising weakness, he ultimately cuts László down to size with a pitilessness that in hindsight seems preordained from their first encounter.

Editor David Jancso threads the sprawling story with a flow that pulls us along nicely, incorporating archival material for historical context. And Lol Crawley’s cinematography is magnificent, never more so than when prowling the mausoleum-like halls of the unfinished project or the tunnels of Carrera. Together with production designer Judy Becker and costumer Kate Forbes, the DP shows a remarkably attentive eye for detail, conjuring the look of mid-century America with a period verisimilitude that feels truly alive - seldom have we been transported to the past so effectively.

A truly awesome film in every respect.

Pablo Larraín’s drama about the legendary American-born Greek soprano Maria Callas, begins on the day of her death in 1977 and then flashes back to one week before; most of it taking place during that week and dotted with key episodes from Callas’s life. The story it tells is that of a neurotic death spiral.

Callas' apartment, with its chandeliers hanging from high ceilings, its wooden walls and large old canvases, as well as one of the most luxurious beds I’ve ever seen in a film, is splendid enough to suggest the court of an 18th-century French royal. This is Larraín’s third inside portrait of an iconic female figure of the 20th century after “Jackie” and “Spencer”. In all three, the residences loom with significance, like elaborate stage sets that act as gilded cages, though here Callas' apartment, more than the houses in the other films, feels like a prison of her own making, and maybe that’s because her whole life has become a prison. Maria gets through the days by taking her 'medicine,' a cocktail of uppers and downers, notably Mandrax, a hypnotic sedative that she obtains illegally; meanwhile, she treats the two people who’ve taken care of her for years — housekeeper, Bruna and her butler / chauffeur, Feruccio — like vassals whose purpose in life it to cater to her various whims. She avoids meeting her doctor as if he were the devil, whilst she fantasises, night after night, that she’s being visited by the ghost of her former lover, Aristotle Onassis.

And then there’s the matter of her voice. Maria is 53, and she hasn’t sung in public for four-and-a-half years. Yet the way the film presents her, she’s a total artist, a woman fuelled and consumed by her gift, which is to sing opera with a voice so sublime, so pure in its piercing majesty, that it reaches to the heavens. The film is filled with opera, notably by the great 19th-century Italian composers, who Callas elevated in the repertoire, and every time an aria comes on the soundtrack we’re indeed swept up by the power of her gift, Jolie doing an extraordinary job of lip-syncing to the nuances of Callas’s vocal splendour.

Jolie gives in many ways a very fine performance - from the moment she appears, she seizes our attention, playing Maria as woman of wiles who is imperious and mysterious. However, the essential vulnerability in the end-of-her-tether Maria is somewhat lacking, whilst the black-and-white flashbacks tend to serve us with as many questions as answers, leaving us with the distinct sense that we haven't delved very far into what in real life was certainly a terribly complex individual. Nevertheless, Larraín’s film is unusually nuanced in its double-edged depiction of the relationship between icons and their public, and Callas — even while losing her grip on reality — is all too clear-eyed about what people want from her. As she says of her dogs: their dedication is 99 percent motivated by food, and one percent by love; this dynamic puts her at a distance from the rest of the world: the same distance that separates a theatre audience from the stage. Well worth a look/listen.

Adapting Sigrid Nunez’s 2020 novel 'What Are You Going Through', in which a terminally ill woman asks an old friend for her companionship as she prepares to end her life, Pedro Almodovar takes time to shake off a certain stilted, page-bound quality in the film's first section, but a change of scene and the luminous screen presences of Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore breathe life into a film which ultimately is a very tender drama about life, death and the responsibilities of friendship.

What does work right from the start is the director’s customary attention to visual detail, to the ways that spatial lines, symmetry and especially colour can give shape to his characters’ inner lives, but it’s when the story leaves Manhattan and heads to a modernist rental near Woodstock that it starts acquiring emotional vitality. Tucked away in a woodsy setting, the house is an architectural delight, a cluster of what look like cubic boxes in wood and glass almost inviting us to arrange and unpack them, while freeing up the film to do the same with its characters - a shot in which the two women lounge side by side on upholstered deckchairs, mirroring a copy of Edward Hopper’s 'People in the Sun' hanging inside, is especially effective.

Given Martha’s decisiveness, there’s no will-she-or-won’t-she commit suicide tension, nor is there, apart from a brief exchange with a hostile police officer, any morality debate around the right-to-die issue — although it's clear that the director is in favour of legal euthanasia access. But there’s a cumulative satisfaction in watching two infinitely compelling actresses play women negotiating questions large and small, and there’s a sad beauty in the finality of Martha’s decision. Swinton and Moore imbue the film with heart that at first seems elusive, along with the dignity, humanity and empathy that are as much Almodóvar’s subjects here as mortality. What ultimately makes the film affecting is its appreciation for the consolation of companionship during the most isolating time of life, whilst among the secondary roles John Turturro does gentle, contemplative work as a former boyfriend Ingrid inherited from Martha, who now gives talks on climate change and other global crises of a world in its death throes; his irreversible loss of hope plays as a counterpoint to Martha’s.

The film feels sometimes subdued to a fault and could have perhaps used a few more notes of gallows humour to vary the tone, and at times a distracting score doesn't help, but the camerawork has a contrasting calming effect, suggesting peace for Martha and sorrowful acceptance for Ingrid. One of the most satisfying touches, injecting resonant feeling into the final moments, is a passage lifted from James Joyce’s novel and John Huston’s film of 'The Dead', providing a poetic coda. Impressive and moving stuff.

The Pope is dead, and after a three-week time jump, the world’s most powerful cardinals gather in Vatican City, their mission to elect a new leader from among their ranks.

As one might expect, cardinals immediately splinter off into factions and begin scheming, hoping to put forth candidates that represent their viewpoints while maintaining just enough broad appeal to garner votes from the larger populous of peers (if this sounds familiar, that’s because Conclave operates as a thinly veiled allegory of American politics). The previous Pope’s reign opened the door for more progressive policies within the historically conservative Catholic church, and a small subset - including Cardinals Lawrence and Bellini - are terrified that other cardinals see this conclave as an opportunity to correct course. To Bellini, Lawrence, and allies, the worst-case scenario would be an ascension of openly racist and homophobic Italian candidate Tedesco. Our perspective is placed squarely within Lawrence and this small team pushing for Bellini, a group close to the former Pope and as such carrying an entitlement that can make them difficult to root for, even if we understand and agree with their agenda.

Conclave’s best scenes are the voting sessions in the Sistine Chapel, and the narrative wisely takes its time getting to that dramatic first vote. Like all things in the Catholic Church, the process is archaic: handwritten paper votes are placed in an urn and the results are read aloud. Each vote-count offers an endless array of possibilities, whether a frontrunner extending a lead or losing momentum, or a surprise new candidate joining the mix. Despite their frequency, these scenes never lose their power. There is a classic murder-mystery feeling to how front-runners are dispatched (in this case through scandal rather than outright murder) one by one - when Bellini accuses Cardinal Lawrence of harbouring secret ambitions of becoming Pope himself–despite his insistence otherwise–it’s hard not to believe that Lawrence might be carefully biding his time, content to be the last man standing. Meanwhile, newcomer Cardinal Benítez represents the classic mysterious stranger about whom we know very little other than a secret stint at a hospital in Switzerland.

The film deftly tracks changing power dynamics so that we’re always aware of who’s in the lead and who might be ready to make a push, with the focus squarely on a left-wing-v-right wing setup, theological ideas being, for better or worse, largely excluded, although Cardinal Lawrence gives a powerful sermon about the importance of doubt and dangers of conviction–an important reminder that faith cannot exist without uncertainty. In another standout scene, Benítez is admonished by Lawrence for continuing to vote for him, for God doesn’t only use followers who are ready and able to serve: it’s a nice reminder to stick to one’s convictions even when opting for a “lesser evil” might be the prudent decision.

Sadly, however, the end-tying last act is all rather difficult to take seriously, and a rapid succession of late developments only serve to undercut all of what went before, leaving us with the impression that this is a film more of an airport paperback than moral treatise. All in all, watchable enough but for me ultimately all a bit superficial.

Mike Leigh’s latest invites us to spend an hour and a half with the most insufferable woman in the world, and that all the ensuing unpleasantness turns out to be time well spent is a credit to Leigh’s curiosity about those intent to spread misery and the joy-sucking traps they set for themselves and others. In a welcome return to his classic sombre social realist trademark, Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), a London housewife, goes to sleep frowning and wakes up screaming — her anger at life, the universe and anything seemingly solar-powered; in a rare lowkey moment, when her mellower sister Chantelle asks why she can’t enjoy life, Pansy instinctively blurts, “I don’t know!”

Jean-Baptiste delivers a truly astonishing performance that burns through the screen like a flamethrower. One of her first rants kicks off with a corker of a line — “Cheerful, grinning people, can’t stand ’em!” — and goes on to scorch everything on the block, from dogs in sweaters to baby clothes with pockets. Her tongue-lashing is often hilarious (at least to us), although it leaves Pansy’s husband, Curtley and their 22-year-old browbeaten, layabout son, Moses, reduced to silence, petrified they’ll draw her ire. Pansy is such an unpleasant force that you begin to wonder if she’ll be visited by three spirits in the night - clearly, she and not the world around her is the problem, but our own narrative need to understand her and offer solutions makes us comb through her tirades looking for clues, determined to decide where she should fall on a scale from flat-out mean to mentally ill.

As we start to collect a list of Pansy’s triggers (lifts, germs, animals, bouquets of flowers), her world does feel like a prison, an idea that the cinematographer underlines with a shot of her fearfully huffing up a set of stairs, her exhausted face peeking through the bars on the handrails as though she’s locked inside a cell, although a rather too obvious dirgy score is for me too heavy-handed at reinforcing her sterile life - far better surely just to let the action speak for itself. One of Leigh's favourite motifs is the sound of cooing pigeons — pests to some, but also survivors who’ve adapted to survive on crumbs of kindness, a theme picked up on sporadically as morsels of patience and generosity become life-giving sustenance, even if we perhaps cathartically prefer the scenes where strangers fire back at Pansy with both barrels.

Every scene is a comment on the art of complaining, although it's not an anti-complaining film as such - expressing our grievances properly can be a way of bonding, which Chantelle, a hairdresser, knows from the customers who come to share their grievances, whilst Chantelle's two relentlessly upbeat adult children, whose deliveries will unnerve anyone who has played the role of the family mediator, are at one point revealed to be both putting up a false front, their soft and smiling phoniness in sharp contrast to the film’s title: we might prefer their positivity, but we can’t pretend it’s healthy. Pansy's chronic issue by contrast is that she complains gratuitously, stacking her gripes into a wall so that even the people who want to help simply give up.

As often in Mike Leigh, he steers uncomfortably close at times to inviting us to laugh at the characters on offer rather than empathise with them, and there's also the inevitable semi-epiphanal moment involving lots of tears, but here the film is better for having a closing scene doesn't allow us anything by way of closure.

Set in Madagascar in the early 1970s, the film depicts a strange transitional period for the island nation; a decade after it formally became a Republic but still with several ties to its former colonisers, right up to the continued presence of the French army. Director Robin Campillo himself grew up in an army base, and here we follow the experiences of his screen surrogate Thomas (Charlie Vauselle - excellent), a comics-obsessed youngster fascinated by the lives of the adults around him––always hiding in plain sight to catch glimpses of conversations that are often decidedly not for young ears.

The film consists of a loose patchwork of lived-in memories that are most engaging when filtered through the young protagonist’s perspective; adults discuss their affairs unaware they’ve got an impressionable child hanging onto their every word from under the table, or behind a closed door. Frustratingly, however, the film frequently deviates from the framing we’re supposed to be viewing these scenes through, so it's often a personal film that can’t completely commit to the child’s-eye POV that makes it feel so singular. What the film does best in is anchoring a child’s viewpoint through a range of heightened comic book interludes, as Thomas and his Vietnamese friend Suzanne bond over reading the adventures of the young caped crusader Fantômette. Immediately we’re introduced to a teenage girl in a Zorro-adjacent costume, the only human onscreen fighting against various over-the-top villains in a child-friendly noir playground. The extended interrogation scene that opens the film lasts long enough that you can imagine some cinema-goers leaving to go and ask if they walked into the wrong screening, but the comic book sequences, with each interlude arriving completely unprompted, have the authentically disorienting effect of a child trying to piece together everything they did today into a single anecdote.

Unfortunately, perhaps a problematic issue with 'Red Island' might be that these superhero interludes are more attention-grabbing than the personal coming-of-age drama itself, although these do eventually weave into the main narrative in the final act as Thomas spies on his elders while in a Fantômette costume. If the story were told entirely from Thomas’s perspective, keeping us at arm’s length from getting to know his family beyond his limited understanding of their personal lives, then the fact they aren’t as richly sketched out as characters wouldn't be as much of an issue. But instead we frequently see them away from him, not just catching cryptic glances at their private lives from behind closed doors, which only serves to illustrate how thinly drawn they are; this has the result that, ultimately, the film is too divided in its interests to entirely function as either a political statement or as a precise portrait of childhood in a strange place.

However, for all this, the film's greatest sequences are beautiful evocations of the director’s childhood, both real and imagined. Most effective of all is a telling scene where military families and locals alike watch a 16mm print of Abel Gance’s Napoléon on the beach, projected onto a sheet in front of the waves. As Napoléon fights a storm while Robespierre’s radicals take control of the National Assembly, it acts as a synecdoche for another era of French rule, whilst the final 15 minutes send the film out on a note of optimism for a people asserting their independence.

This film is something of a tone-poem depicting the protagonist’s brutal struggle with enough distinctive elements — in every sense of the word — to make it more than just another draining addiction story. Together with a powerful supporting performance from Stephen Dillane as bipolar father, Andrew, Saoirse Ronan as Rona puts herself through the physical and emotional wringer as a young woman repeatedly redefining her rock bottom before finally summoning the resolve to control her alcohol addiction.

The film is adapted from the memoir by Amy Liptrot, a native of the Orkney Islands, grounding her account in contemplations of the natural world around her, from its science to its mythology. Those side notes — covering everything from folkloric tales, beachcomber found-object art, maritime history, bird migration paths and old legends — give the story a distinctive aspect, whilst various interludes embrace documentary, philosophy and poetry, using archival footage, photographs and animation. Having so many narrative detours is a bold stroke, the extensive voiceover emphasising the material’s literary origins. But these deviations feed into a highly atmospheric sense of place, as well as laying the foundations for the communion with nature that will ultimately provide Rona with a way forward. Underwater images of seals are especially beautiful.

I sometimes wonder who addiction dramas are for, besides actors looking to shrug off vanity in favour of a gritty challenge. It’s been a long time since films about the downward spiral of alcoholism, like Wilder’s 'The Lost Weekend'. That said, a distinctive setting and imaginative narrative embellishment can make the desolation of unhealthy dependency compelling. ‘The Outrun’ definitely accomplishes this well. As Rona tends to the farming demands of lambing season, reminders of her raucous drunken days in London rupture her thoughts, with the thumping techno music that accompanies many of those memories pounding away in her headphones. Recollections of her time in rehab and the shame and self-doubt she shares with fellow alcoholics also surface in a timeline shuffled between London, the present-day Orkey Islands and her childhood there. "I cannot be happy sober,” she says to another AA attendee in a despondent moment. These thoughts collide also with memories of her father’s manic highs when she was a girl, smashing windows and welcoming the gale-force winds like a conductor in front of an orchestra, eventually forcing Annie to leave him. Dillane captures the wild swings of bipolar disorder with heartbreaking effectiveness.

The tentative turning point comes when Rona takes a job working with the RSPB, surveying for corncrakes, a once-prolific species now endangered. The job is monotonous at first, leaving her too much time to think. But when she finds herself in a tiny no-frills bird warden house on one of the most remote islands, she begins to see what the possibility of liberation might feel like. There’s no magical epiphany, just an accumulation of experiences, from Rona’s interactions with the friendly local community to her increasing immersion in nature, including a wonderful sequence involving an icy dip in the sea to join the seals.

The strength of Fingscheidt’s storytelling is how she harnesses the elements, a theme carried through in arresting images of the dramatic landscape, although, as in just about every film I watch these days, the score is often at best rather intrusive, and at worst an annoying distraction. At just over two hours, some might complain about its length, but the time went by very quickly for me, and that it did so while avoiding the many cliches of the cinematic memoir adaptation (usually by contorting life’s sprawl into a clear arc of definitive scenes) is its own achievement, a testament to both the source material and Ronan’s tremendous performance. Impressive stuff.

Yorgos Lanthimos’s extraordinary psychodrama revels in the sheer bizarre splendour of all the chaos on screen, whilst being wonderfully subversive and having a distinctly humanist heart. It’s adapted by Tony McNamara from Alasdair Gray’s novel of the same name, itself inspired by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with its interrogation of Victorian repression and hunger for the power of God.

The creature at this film’s centre, Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), is a young woman who’s brought back to life (sort of) after a suicide attempt by Dr. Goodwin Baxter (a perfectly Karloffian Willem Dafoe), whom she calls ‘God’. Bella is defined by her weird baby talk, voracious libido, and boundless curiosity about the world. She mixes the baby talk with complex terminology (one character points out that Bella doesn’t know what a banana is but also uses the word ‘empirically’), is afraid of nothing, and uses her tongue and her stoicism as weapons. She’s increasingly more self-possessed, particularly as a woman, than most people in ‘polite society’ would ever dare to be, with predictable consequences.

Lanthimos is a master of juxtasposing realism and surrealism, and as with his breakthrough ‘Dogtooth’, ‘Poor Things’ is about someone who must contend with the real world’s contradictions - in both, consciousness and free will must bend to social edicts, and language is duplicitous and weaponised. But while Dogtooth’s essential viewpoint is humanity’s capacity for cruelty, ‘Poor Things’ ultimately gives us a warmer vision, albeit after a long wait.

A feature of the film is its incongruous expletive-shouting and slapstick-sequences that just as much recall Monty Python as much as Lanthimos’s earlier work. But the film's greatest asset is Stone’s ability to situate Bella first as jester, then as the emotional foundation upon which the whole of the film is built. As the ‘real world’ tries to dim Bella’s enthusiasm for her growing understanding of everything around her, her consciousness and capacity for feeling becomes more complex and intricate. In this respect, perhaps a flaw of the film is that the parts that are supposed to most complicate Bella’s point of view often lack the gravity and immediacy of the shock of learning that people can be bad and that bad things happen all the time without reason. Instead, much of the savagery that’s supposed to contextualise life in totality for Bella is usually framed as ‘jokey’, and thus the action seldom broaches ‘the uncomfortable’ close enough to find the delicate balance between the darkly funny and the truly horrifying. There are few scenes of real seriousness, where the stakes for Bella feel like they truly matter, and much of this is due to a curiously light performance from Mark Ruffalo as Duncan Wedderburn, who pales into significance beside Stone to the extent that the overall impact film is somewhat undermined as a result.

However, all is redeemed by Stone, whose ability in portraying a woman coming to grips with the overwhelming experience of becoming self-aware and what to do next is compelling (if perhaps ultimately exhausting). We read on her face Bella’s ability to negotiate more and more complex and intricate emotions, ideas, and feelings - Stone's smirks, eye-rolls, ecstatic cries and sullen frowns speak volumes. Bella’s tendency to blurt out any and all thoughts, her blunt honesty is a key feature of the filmmaker; the adult woman clearly calling the bluff on a man’s (childlike?) world. “I have adventured it,” she says in her own form of English, ‘and found nothing but sugar and violence.’ Moreover, when we get a late-act glimpse into what drove Bella to despair in the first place, it’s made clear that ‘Poor Things’ reveals it’s not just a resuscitation but also a revenger’s tale, and this is when we see that its creators have indeed (thankfully) picked a side. The ending, meanwhile, just adds a perfect quirky coda to everything that's gone before. Amazing work.