Film Reviews by PD

From the second scene of Mortensen’s second feature, audiences know the fate of Vivienne LeCoudy (Vicky Krieps). A resilient French Canadian pioneer woman left alone for years, Vivienne dies at home in bed, a single tear making tracks on her cheek. Mortensen opts to tell her story out of order, flashing back to Vivienne’s childhood and then carrying on past her death to reveal whether her absentee partner (played by Mortensen) manages to avenge what happened to her. For me, the nonlinear narrative choice doesn't serve to add much, and I'm coming away feeling that the film falls between two stools, being neither a conventional western nor something to keep 'art house' fans watching long. Set during the Civil War but perhaps made with a mindset more in line with the #MeToo era, Mortensen’s take on a traditionally violent genre opens with Vivienne’s dying vision of a knight in shining armour coming to rescue her. That fantasy occurs twice more in the film, which stays behind with Vivienne as fellow immigrant and all-but-husband Holger Olsen enlists to defend the Union. The next time we see the knight, he lifts the visor to reveal Holger’s eyes beneath the helmet. Later, Vivienne pictures herself inside the armour, a self-reliant, modern-day Joan of Arc. In a feminist twist on the John Wayne paradigm, the film allows Vivienne to be her own saviour (sort of). But before she makes that breakthrough, Vivienne must endure all manner of indignity and disrespect from one of the local men.

Krieps is ideal casting for this uniquely tender-strong character, and she gives a fine performance. Faced with the choice between a comfortable life in a golden cage and whatever Holger may have to offer, Vivienne decides to travel west with him, only to find that the home’s a dump and the town’s corrupt. Films rarely frame that experience from the woman’s perspective, which makes Mortensen’s enlightened approach refreshing, even if Vivienne’s independence manifests itself in a way that anyone can sense is bad news. But after so many subtleties, it’s unfortunate that Mortensen relies on rape as a plot device, though Vivienne’s reaction reinforces the strength she finds in Holger’s absence, during which Vivienne transforms their scrappy patch of nothing into a proper home, with a thriving garden and plants blooming all around the porch. (She probably should have opened a flower stand in town, rather than find work at the saloon, but then I guess Mortensen couldn’t have made his statement about what dastardly predators men can be). When Holger returns, it’s to the scene that opened the film, just in time to watch Vivienne die. But being the film’s spine, without her, the film rather tails off somewhat.

At its best, it gives us a sampling of what life on the untamed frontier could be like. But, Vivienne excepted, the characters are made out of cardboard, notably the villain, who is simply a sadistic, monstrous cartoon, conveniently clothed in black, as if we’d have any trouble figuring out he’s the baddy. Ultimately, though, it' film’s didacticism lets it down, for the ruin that comes to Holger's life and Vivienne’s is presented as a reward for his loyalty and commitment to doing what he sees as the right thing, and for me this comes across as glibly schematic, a truly ugly lesson. All in all, a well-meant piece but for me all a bit forgettable.

Mark Jenkin’s singular, uncompromising style remains unchanged: hand-cranked, grainy 16mm film brought to imperfect life with scratches, fibres and lens flare, and a post-synched soundtrack that lends his films an uncanny vibe. This one feels thematically familiar too, sharing Bait’s grief over lost fishing communities and Enys Men's haunting qualities. But Jenkin weaves a whole new tale of the unexpected here: one that will leave you scratching your head and smelling of fish.

The time-travel premise sounds high-concept, but Jenkin is more interested in a nightmarish, dreamlike ambience, evoked by rhythmic sound and images and fractured editing, than a propulsive, clearly determined narrative. Ambiguity is everything here, which will either invite you to consider myriad allegorical readings — climate change, Brexit, industrial decline and the cost-of-living crisis are all hinted at — or just put you off altogether. The script suggests that what the characters are experiencing has to do with the ways in which the past is imagined; perhaps notions of a better past have more to do with our own anxieties about our present than the bygone realities and how older generations may have conducted their lives. 'Rose of Nevada' leaves us with a paradox: the past that abruptly appears seems desirable and inviting, offering the fishermen prosperity and a sense of purpose. Multiple readings are possible.

What’s undeniable, though, is that Jenkin’s filmmaking is the star of the show. Mesmerising shots of rusted metal, weathered woodwork and flourishing lichen signify a world in decay while, perversely, primary colours — the blue Cornish sky, Callum Turner’s pink baseball cap — pop off the screen and slap us in the face. Compelling stuff.

In Paolo Cognetti's film the narrator ruminates, "If the point at which you immerse yourself in the river is the present...then the past is the water that has flowed past you." 'The Eight Mountains', an adaptation of Cognetti's novel written by the author alongside directors Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch, follows Pietro (Luca Marinelli) from adolescence to adulthood and, like the book, it's is a contemplative film, one that uses its lengthy runtime to settle in and take you through the four or so decades in which it tracks Pietro's relationship with Bruno (Alessandro Borghi), a friendship that is achingly pure even as outside forces alter the course of it.

Pietro and Bruno meet one summer in the Italian Alps (the Aosta Valley region, shot over a period of seven months to capture the full scope of its weather, is an arresting backdrop. It’s the kind of vista which would normally demand widescreen photography, but the choice here is to capture it in a tighter, boxy aspect ratio. It works well, accentuating the steep angles, the breathless climbs, emphasising the drama of the landscape. The mountains are a forceful presence throughout, in a film which argues that they fundamentally change the personalities of the people who spend time with them). The pair come from two vastly different backgrounds: Pietro's family is renting a cabin for the summer before they return to the city, while Bruno lives with his aunt and uncle while his father works construction jobs. As they grow older, the camera feels as if it is subtly zooming out, framing Pietro and Bruno against the vast landscapes, mimicking the feeling of slow isolation that creeps up on them through the years. Pulled apart by circumstances beyond their control, it's nearly two decades before the pair reunite, and it's fitting that what brings them back together is the very thing that drove them apart. There's no room for melodramatics, here, though — the film is careful in its depiction of friendship, tender in the way it follows Pietro and Bruno as they learn about each other (and themselves) all over again (a process that isn't easy).

It's an exacting film — it does not shy away from the monotony of trekking up a mountain or building a stone house layer by layer, and looks at relationships similarly. Pietro and Bruno's friendship, with powerful performances from the two leads, is filled with quiet moments that, if not recognised by the film, would not seem all that meaningful. Some will find it far too slow and its runtime certainly contributes to that, but the film wouldn't be able to reveal the layers to friendship and other intimate relationships if it didn't have the time to. There's a fair few weaknesses: the early childhood scenes are perhaps a little cliched and mannered, and there are a few too many musical montages set to accordion-heavy compositions, with lyrics which are a little 'on the nose' (themes are snow, climbing mountains, friendship). And because everything is told from Pietro’s perspective, much is left unsaid and unseen - the women, mothers and love interests, are barely there; Bruno’s home life is only alluded to. Overall, moreover, it's a rather conventional, risk-averse piece of filmmaking. But it remains a beautiful and provocative story about a profoundly rooted friendship, one that’s centres on the consequences of living freely and asking us to consider that which we leave behind in the pursuit of personal enlightenment.

The material realities of being a woman in the central African nation of Chad are expressed with profound sympathy in Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s short and low-key but hard-hitting film. Eschewing the pat melodrama of victimhood and righteous triumph through suffering, the film depicts oppression as a constant struggle between pernicious forms of power and capable, resourceful women.

Amina is a single mother living in a Muslim community in N’Djamena. To get by, Amina takes the steel wires from old car tyres and weaves them into baskets. Haroun foregrounds the patient work that defines her day-to-day life, imbuing it with dignity by focusing on the precise, attentive detail that goes into everything from sharpening homemade knives to the plier-assisted winding of the wire around metal framework. Through her ingenious reworking of industrial products, Amina earns enough to support herself and her 15-year-old daughter, Maria, but even within this space that they’ve carved out for themselves they still face the barriers of social, economic, and religious power, Amina’s self-sufficiency quickly shown to clash with the expectations of religion, state, and community that she be little more than an extension of man (or God). The opening scene’s depiction of her crafting process is followed by a series of scenes in which men attempt to impose their control on her, notably local market bigwig Brahim, who has been trying to get Amina to marry him for some time, claiming, unlike other men in the village, to accept her as a single mother. Later, a local imam stops her, wanting to know why she’s isn’t attending prayers (there’s more than a little irony in the earlier shot of Amina rolling out a rug and praying outside the mosque, as women aren’t allowed inside.) Thus Haroun economically but effectively establishes the various constraints on Amina and Maria. When it’s revealed that Maria is pregnant and wants to have an abortion, Amina is initially furious, but when she reflects and considers that she doesn’t want Maria to face derision or hostility for being a single mother like herself, her position changes, a position that leads to her taking on the state, the local imam, and Brahim himself. The middle stretch of Lingui takes us, in a series of sobering steps, through the agonising, sometimes death-defying process of seeking an abortion in a place where it is at once the gravest sin and one of the oldest folk practices.

While he attunes the viewer to the everyday rhythms and practices of life for lower-class women, Haroun doesn’t entirely work in the register of realism - episodes like Amina and Maria inexplicably getting lost in a labyrinth of paths they walk every day make for memorable symbols of the difficult journey that the pair have been forced on to, although while Haroun’s imagery adeptly moves us from grounded reality to evocative metaphor, the storytelling doesn’t always seamlessly blend realism and contrivance - a development involving a conveniently wealthy blood relation in particular rather undermines the rooting of the story in the everyday world that Haroun establishes early on. Nevertheless, when the film's (both chilling and delicately hopeful) conclusion culminates effectively in a revelation whose seeds Haroun has been deftly planting throughout, the overall power of his plotting becomes evident. What we're left with is a film that pits the official, patriarchal community—hypocritical and inherently fractured—against the “sacred bonds” between women, and while the power between these sides remains plainly imbalanced, Lingui suggests that nobody’s been finally defeated. Impressive work.

Early on in Ozon's tender-hearted but unsentimental film, ailing 85-year-old André asks, or more accurately intsructs, his daughter Emmanuèle to help him end his life. After a brief period of understandable panic, she takes the assignment more or less in stride, give or take the odd cry behind closed bathroom doors. “Why would your father ask this of his daughter?” her bewildered husband asks her in bed one night. “That’s why, because I’m his daughter,” she replies, seemingly amazed he has to ask. Thus the film effectively divides the world into people who understand this and people who don’t, while remaining sympathetic to all parties.

Adapted from Emmanuèle Bernheim’s memoir of her father’s death, this elegantly written, persuasively performed drama finds the ever-unpredictable Ozon in his plainest, most pragmatic gear as a filmmaker. The results are cinematically distinctly low-key, but a tony cast of familiar faces, led by a terrific Sophie Marceau and André Dussollier as father and daughter. But the film is not especially interested in stoking the debate and controversy that tend to trail films on this thorny topic; the ethics of assisted suicide are not being relitigated here, even as André’s friends and family express more personal reservations over this stubbornly determined strategy. If André isn’t fighting for his life, following a severe stroke that has left him hospitalised for months, Emmanuèle isn’t fighting over it. What ensues is more a tricky period of negotiation, heavy on the practicalities of ending a life in a country where such things remain illegal, and revealing in the process a fair bit of gallows humour amid the heavier emotional labour. Complicated family baggage also emerges in the process, though Ozon doesn’t treat any of it — particularly conflicts related to the dying man’s sexuality — as a mystery to be solved. Instead, he simply trusts his audience to intuit what the characters have long wearied of talking about.

Indeed, as a film about death, the film is as grown-up and (largely) as detached as André would like the whole ordeal to be, beginning with the brisk irony of the title. But life inevitably throws up messier emotional barriers to the best (or worst) laid plans: No man is an island, and no man, it turns out, can die on one either. “In the end, they usually choose life,” a doctor calmly shrugs in response to Emmanuèle; she and her younger sister Pascale aren’t quite as willing to airily hope that their father’s death wish is a passing phase; how much they’d miss him if he went through with it is another of the film’s pleasing points of ambiguity. André, a proponent of tough love in their childhood, has in turn remained hard to love throughout their lives. In a handful of tart, terse flashbacks to Emmanuèle’s teen years, he’s brusque and occasionally verbally abusive toward her. According to Pascale — tellingly never present in any of these brief, jarring jumps back in time — that still counts as more attention than she ever received. “He’s not interested in girls,” Pascale’s own teen daughter remarks flatly when asked why she won’t visit him in hospital: Time and grandfatherhood, it seems, haven’t softened him. That André chose only one daughter to burden with his request is a running source of flinty tension between two otherwise lovingly supportive sisters: Perhaps, Pascale somewhat acidly suggests, Emmanuèle should see it as a gift. But we are given a reminder, too, of the relative comfort in which this plushly bourgeois, culturally discerning family gets to sort out this crisis, for The Swiss clinic where André wishes to end it all will charge €10,000 for the privilege, and the money, at least, is not among this brood’s various issues. “I wonder how poor people do it,” André muses. “They wait to die,” his daughter lightly snaps. It’s an exchange typical of Ozon’s smart, measured but still deeply human take on a delicate subject.

This brave film ('Night of Fire' in Spanish - for once the English title seems better) is a truly heart-rending piece but compelling viewing. Seen through director Tatiana Huezo's eyes, the hollow in the earth that Rita and her 8-year-old daughter Ana are digging in the ground near their scruffy house’s front door is a grave and a womb, a trap and a refuge. It is designed to fit Ana’s little frame, and the girl has already been drilled in the procedure for its use should Rita sound the alarm. Ana knows to fear the convoys of black SUVs that roar along the road below, and to fear even more the day one of them might turn up the track toward her home, but she doesn’t yet know why to fear them. Rita and the other women of this small, beleaguered rural community — who in the absence of menfolk working in far-off towns congregate in a beauty salon when not earning a pittance scraping the opiate goop out of poppy plants — seem to have a tacit agreement to protect their children’s innocence as long as they can. Thus Ana leads an almost normal childhood playing secret, giggly games with friends despite living in the shadow of the cartel, whose men occasionally descend on the village to kidnap young girls from their families A key feature is the strong, if sometimes strained relationship between daughter and a unsmiling, hardened, resourceful mother, together with an unbreakably close bond with her two besties, Paula and Maria.

While, again, she might not understand exactly why, when Rita insists that Ana get her lovely long hair cut into a boyish crop, and Paula must do the same, the girls submit, crying, to the chop. Maria, who has a harelip, is spared. The unspoken assumption is that Maria’s disfigurement is a blessing: the cartel men won’t want her, just as they will pass by the homes of young boys. That it’s best not to be too feminine, too pretty, too obviously unprotected by men is not the only facet of the film’s fascinating commentary on gender: Rita occasionally takes on “mannish” qualities, as though in this world of single women and girls styled to look like boys, a mother must also be a father, even if that means assuming a mean-drunk-dad persona at certain times. But dulling down the bright, dangerously noticeable edge of Ana’s incipient sexuality obviously gets more difficult as she gets older, a process Huezo covers in her most daring formal leap, which is replacing the three excellent child actors playing Ana, Paula and Maria with three equally excellent young teenagers. Now they are in a local one-room school, crushing on their teacher and visiting the rodeo where Maria's brother Margarito performs when he is not working, in a low-level capacity, for the cartel.

Most of the time the Mexican drug trade is an impersonal threat that hovers like the helicopters that with minimal warning will spray toxic chemicals onto the poppy crop and onto any unsuspecting passerby who has not taken shelter. Like childhood itself, Huezo’s film unfolds in episodes and pauses and interludes; the catastrophe, which inevitably comes, being all the more devastating for our complete immersion in the world it will threaten to destroy. Huezo and cinematographer Dariela Ludlow give us an immensely strong sense of place, with some particularly eye-catching scenes, both poignant and slightly comical, of a crowd of villagers splayed across a mountain slope at dusk for the location’s Wi-Fi reception, their mobiles glowing as they talk to absent husbands and sons. Huezo shows how alone the townspeople are in their plight, how vulnerable in their geographic isolation. but at the same time, Huezo is alert to the villagers’ ingenuity and endurance, as individuals and communally: Ana and her friends' simple experiments in telepathy are more than games; they’re binding themselves to one another, with creativity and love, and perhaps reaching for a true language, against a world of silences and lies. Powerful stuff.

Alice Diop's highly original film adapts the court transcripts from the 2016 infanticide trial of Fabienne Kabou, a French woman of Senegalese descent, in which a fictional stand-in for Diop appears in the form of young novelist Rama. To write her next book on the subject of the Medea figure (a woman in Greek myths known for murdering her offspring to as revenge against her lover), Rama travels to the town of Saint Omer to observe the trial of Laurence Coly, a Senegalese immigrant and student convicted of leaving her 15-month-old child, Baby Elise, to drown at sea. A pregnant professor of Senegalese descent, Rama notices the parallels in hers and Coly's background, which begin to stir up some unwanted fears about motherhood as well as her memories with her mother.

The cinematography harvests the humanity from the sustained takes, fixating on the judge, the accused, the witnesses, and Rama as one of the courtroom observers. The shots hone in upon their expressions, as the defendant and witnesses absorb cross-examinations spoken off-camera, as if each person has a universe existing inside of them. And in providing an individualised approach, we become keenly aware of the societal imbalances that exist in the mosaic of dialogue. The camera does not harden Coly, the defendant, into a Medea monster, nor does it soften her into a paragon of "victimhood", and Guslagie Malanga portrays a woman with her own complexities searching to assert her existence. When Coly claims no memory of the incident, the judge clocks in that Coly remembers the tides rising on her limbs, to which Coly retorts that there are some things that can't be explained. These literal discrepancies may seem self-deluding, but we also gather this is the range of her truth as she understands it. When Coly's white and much older lover (and father of the child) is called to the stand, his testimony is revealing. Xavier Maly plays him as a grieving father, but the camera also has us confront how he ducked behind privilege to confront the palpable problems in his relationship with a younger Black woman, whose world only started shrinking when she had a child that remained unregistered. By illustrating these social undercurrents, the film exposes the fissures in the French court. Burrowed under Coly's and her lover's testimonies are systemic injustices that French society would rather shove under the carpet, the film peeling back the curtain on how society formulates judgments according to a person's race and cultural background while absolving itself of the systemic flaws. The lifeblood of this racism is clear in the French news coverage fixating on Coly's elegant French and a testifier accusing Coly of hiding behind a Wittgenstein philosophy because she did not choose a philosopher "of her culture."

"Saint Omer" says much about the psychological and societal impact of invisibility, starting with the invisibility of the Senegalese immigrant community (i.e. forcing them to erase their culture to assimilate) in French society. This invisibility extends to both Rama and Coly, who have a shared history of fraught relationships with their immigrant mothers. So Rama's meeting with Coly's mother has a very strong impact, such as when she pegs Rama as pregnant and boasts how she raised Coly to be decent and respectful in French society. We feel Rama swallowing her discomfort, as if she senses this mother forbade flaws in her daughter, even if her maternal teachings came from a place of love and immigrant self-preservation. Interspersed delicately with the proceedings are Rama's childhood reflections, not told through traditional-feeling "flashbacks" but a history lyrically knitted into the present.

It says a lot for the filmmaker that there is no straightforward 'good vs evil' or simplistic statements about race or gender on display here, nor is it concerned specifically with the verdict. In so doing the themes on display are very powerful indeed. Gripping stuff.

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.