Film Reviews by PD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unfortunately, the usual version of events has made the ‘Lost Weekend’ of 1973-4 into a sort of blip in Lennon’s life, equivalent to some sort of one-night ‘fling’ with the secretary before resuming reality. This of course is a travesty of the truth.

The film is told entirely from May Pang's point of view and is a diary-like account of how her relationship with John played out week by week, emotion by emotion. On that score it does very well indeed, offering us a fascinating and often moving account of Lennon unmoored, trying to find himself in a world whose adulation he both courted and couldn't deal with. The film is also successful at revealing May's sincere love for John, and how they became convivial companions, their relationship rooted in a genuine mutual affection and in Lennon's discovery that he didn't have to live in a way that was always chained to his legend. There’s amazing archival material throughout, which gives us brief glimpses sense of what Lennon was like away from the limelight - including the dark side, which is very much in evidence. We hear for example Pang’s stories about how Lennon, in a drunken fit, smashed up their place in L.A., and how he would hit her sometimes (Lennon’s violent tendencies in general and against women in particular have generally been airbrushed out of his story after his murder). But according to Pang, the tales of Lennon’s misbehaviour were more the exception than the rule, and she accentuates all the positives - it’s no coincidence for example that during the period he was able to build a relationship with his son Julian, and also able to reconcile with Beatle Paul – it’s really moving to see the two former Beatles bury the acrimony and rediscover their friendship, even to the extent of being on the brink of working together again.

According to Pang, it was Yoko herself who deliberately set the whole thing up - having observed John’s infidelity, Yoko figured that she would let him stray with a woman she could control (even by her standards, a decision of seriously weird manipulation). However, Pang insists also that it wasn’t Yoko’s idea that the two of them move to L.A.; that, she claims, was an impulsive move on John’s part, who clearly had ‘serious’ feelings for her. And so began a distinctly odd three-way relationship, with Yoko attempting to manage it from a distance with persistent phone calls and May gradually being convinced that John wanted to be with her. The documentary chronicles how after about a year there (we often forget of course that this was no ‘weekend’), they returned to New York, moving into a small apartment, where they lived until the first months of 1975 and how they were talking of buying a house together in Montauk. But of course Yoko had never entirely been removed from the picture. There are many moments in the film when Yoko does not come off well — notably in Pang’s description of how Yoko attempted to cut off Lennon’s relationship with Julian, who is interviewed throughout the film; that Pang helped to bring John and Julian back together is obvious. But what doesn’t seem convincing is the final twist. After John goes back to Yoko, and Pang confronts him about it, he says, quite simply: ‘She’s letting me come back’. Letting him? That doesn’t square with what the film has implied — that Lennon had drifted away from Yoko; his comment suggests that their separation was always contingent on an understanding between them. But that’s something we’d have to guess at, and although May says that she and John kept seeing each other during what proved to be the last years of his life, we rather too suddenly skip to the fateful events of 1980, thus leaving many questions unanswered.

You’d have to have a heart of stone not to feel for May and what might have been, both for her and for the world. The film is no more than a slice of a bigger piece of history, but is a very engaging story of a truly remarkable, very likeable woman.

This one probably isn't for you if a) you don't like long films in which nothing much happens or b) have a particular affection for horses, but Icelandic writer-director Hlynur Pálmason's latest is an ambitious and accomplished piece as he attempts to see his homeland through outside eyes, namely, the Danes who claimed it from the late 19th century. At once visually mesmerising and emotionally austere, the film takes the country’s colonialist past as its subject, pitting a late-19th-century man of faith against a force far stronger than him: a kind of Arctic 'There Will Be Blood.'

In the opening scene, Lutheran priest Lucas (brilliantly played by Elliott Crosset Hove) is sent by the Church of Denmark to establish a parish in Iceland, but it's immediately clear that he's not at all prepared for what lies ahead. Sincere and devout he may be, but the journey (which takes up the first hour of the film) breaks him the same way that Africa did Kurtz in 'Heart of Darkness,' (an obvious reference). Lucas is proactively curious, he carries a camera and pauses often to document his surroundings (we’re told at the outset that the film was inspired by seven historic photographs taken by a Danish priest, the first to document the country’s southeastern coast), but remains incongruously ridiculous among the strong, sturdy, practical men around him. When Lucas finally reaches his destination, a fellow Dane named Carl (Jacob Hauberg Lohmann, a great performance neatly balancing hospitality and menace) asks him, “Why the long journey, when you could have just sailed here?” Quite. Lucas intended the arduous detour as a way of appreciating Iceland, but instead, the trek merely turns him against it - a clear indictment of colonial enterprises.

After the vast, unforgiving landscapes of the first hour, the rest of the film is by contrast much more claustrophobic as it focuses on Lucas' interaction with the locals and his growing resentment of them and especially his former guide Ragnar, who he treats the way conquistadors did the Natives, as somehow subhuman. The language barrier between them serves as one of the film’s key themes, and often doesn't translate well via subtitles: Pálmason gives the film two names — “Vanskabte Land” in Danish, “Volaða land” in Icelandic — and neither means “Godland.” These titles overtly refer to a poem by Matthías Jochumsson called “Wretched Land,” which tore into a place he couldn’t abide. Lucas wrestles with similar feelings toward Iceland, and his behaviour becomes increasingly unpredictable as the film goes on - another of the film's unifying themes is the egocentrism of masculinity. At Carl’s table, Lucas is drawn to Carl’s eldest daughter, Anna, but appears dazed and seems to have forgotten how to pray, whilst Anna’s slightly wild younger sister Ida (excellently played by the director’s daughter, Ída Mekkín Hlynsdóttir) merely perplexes him. Here, in this small, hardy community, Lucas is the proverbial fish out of water, having forgotten the bishop’s advice at the outset: for the mission to be a success, he must adapt to the locals and their customs. He is absolutely incapable of it.

All of this is enormously rich material to work with, rendered all the more engaging by the surroundings, and although Pálmason doesn’t make anything easy, he has a most unique sense of pacing, devoting months if not years to capturing images of a single location under changing conditions. As in 'A White, White Day,' there’s a time-lapse element here, as, for example, when the director features an overhead shot of a decomposing horse. Amongst all this there's some wonderful touches - a story about some mating eels and mass infidelity is haunting, whilst Lucas' opening turn in his role as a priest in his newly-built church is bleakly hilarious. Much to admire for those with time and patience!

Todd Field's highly original emotional epic, part psychological thriller, part character study, concerns the downfall of a world-famous conductor, superbly played by Cate Blanchett. The film is at its best in channelling a distinct sense of Kubrick-style unease as it charts the slow, tortuous unmaking of Tar, her seeming invincibility being of course precisely what leads to her downfall. It's basically a film about the corruption of power and the dichotomy of genius, although Field also attempts (rather less successfully) to include such topical themes as cancel culture and the #metoo movement. The film is mercifully not a manifesto, and cleverly eschews conventional narrative, and although it sometimes resorts to lazy shorthand in conveying the details of the protagonist's dilemmas, Blanchett's performance is compelling throughout, and particularly effective for me are the surreal elements that appear unexpectedly during the tale, which often effectively reveal a burdened conscience. Despite its length (over two and a half hours) no minute feels wasted, and indeed it is the last section that is particularly engaging, with an unexpected ending which is both quirky and tragic. Gripping stuff.

Shifting from the delicate childhood memories that shaped her impressive 2017 feature debut, 'Summer 1993', Carla Simón expands her scope to take in a more extended fictional family portrait with no loss of personal investment in a stirring ensemble piece. The film is named for the village in Spain where the Catalan director’s people have cultivated peaches for generations; it’s cast with non-professional actors whose deep roots in that agrarian culture inform their flawless natural performances. The result is a heartfelt drama about the wrenching clash between traditional agriculture and industry. The prevailing mood is one of melancholy for a way of life under threat and stability abruptly upended, but this is tempered throughout by gratitude for the beauty and bounty of land whose people are no less nurtured by the soil and the sun than the orchard they tend.

Simón lulls us into a false sense of happy harmony by opening with three excitable children (their carefree, 'sod health-and-safety' existence is a delight to watch) playing a raucous spaceship game in a broken-down car, but when a crane appears to tow the wreck, we learn that the Solé clan, who have farmed the property since the Spanish Civil War, are on borrowed time, for the landowner, Pinyol, has made an agreement with an alternative energy company to replace the trees with solar panels. The ingenuous Solé patriarch, Rogelio, is still convinced that a spoken agreement with Pinyol’s ancestors seals their rights, whilst his son-in-law Cisco and his wife Nati are more pragmatic, already cozying up to Pinyol for employment and causing a rift in the family. It’s not immediately easy to figure out who’s who and clarify all the connections, but the overlapping hubbub of the dialogue and the swiftly established network of fondness and frictions make the cast entirely convincing as a tight-knit family.

The anchoring centre of the ensemble is Rogelio’s son Quimet (Jordi Pujol Dolcet), who accepts his family’s fate with proud indignation, throwing all his energy into drawing maximum yield from the final harvest. That means leaning more on his teenage children Roger and Mariona for labour, whilst Quimet’s wife Dolors attempts with no-nonsense efficiency to keep the loving but quarrelsome family together, as does his sister Glòria. The signs of a shift away from the family’s roots are already evident in rebellious Roger, secretly cultivating cannabis plants, and the often-petulant Mariona, rehearsing a dance routine to perform at the village fiesta. But neither of the adolescents is untouched by the sobering threat of change, and the film delicately explores, without any melodrama, how the various tensions rippling through her family are not lost even on the youngest children.

The inevitability of the Solés' fate is sorrowfully indicated by the constant arrival of delivery trucks and the initial stages of solar panel installation on the land bordering the orchard; the devaluing of history is also subtlety symbolized by Pinyol’s indifference to the fact that his wealthy family was hidden and protected during the war by the Solés. Rendered powerless to stop the cruel hand of progress, the family acknowledges their suddenly uncertain future while drawing whatever fortification they can from the land that’s nourished them. This is most evident in bearish Quimet, played by Dolcet with the infectious warmth and coiled strength of an everyman type - watching him arrange snails on a grill and cover them with dried grass to be smoked and eaten at a big, jovial family lunch where everyone ends up in the pool is just one example of his appreciation for the life that has sustained them. His tears when when his impatience costs them a part of the harvest carry a real sting, whilst his exultant win in a wine-guzzling contest at the town festival gives him a moment of cathartic release, a victory in face of defeat. A beautiful, engaging, quietly-tragic piece.