Film Reviews by PD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alice Rohrwacher's extraordinary, quirky work ventures into Italy’s labyrinthine past through pocket communities, vanishing breeds that seem suspended in time. In The Wonders, it was a family of beekeepers; in Happy as Lazzaro, it was isolated sharecroppers; and in La Chimera, it’s a ragtag band of 'tombaroli', grave-robbers who dig up Etruscan relics and make their money selling those antiquities on to fences who in turn sell them to museums and collectors for (of course) vastly larger sums.

The three films make up an informal trilogy about the delicate thread between life and death, present and past. The latter remains very much alive almost everywhere you look in Italy, an ancient spectre with a long reach extending into contemporary life. That temporal duality, as in the earlier films, informs the enveloping sense of place. Rohrwacher makes films we sink into rather than watch dispassionately, taking time to establish the milieu as her characters and stories reveal themselves in layers. It's a film laced with nods not just to ghosts rooted in the story but to Italian cinema’s illustrious past — most notably with Pasolini, but also early Fellini, Ermanno Olmi and the Taviani Brothers, among others.

The title refers to unattainable dreams and illusory promises, which for these looters of history is the prospect of striking it rich with one major find that will set them all up for life. The chimera of the Englishman Arthur (Josh O’Connor) is Beniamina, the woman he loved and lost, who haunts his dreams. The tombaroli regard Arthur as a kind of mystic, able to locate fruitful spots to dig with a forked tree branch that serves as a divining rod, the force of each find seemingly sapping his strength. It's a wonderful part for the very gifted O’Connor: dressed for much of the film in a cream linen suit that’s grubby and rumpled, like a gentleman archaeologist or a continental traveller gone to seed, Arthur lives among the plants and trees in a makeshift shanty on the town’s ancient walls. He’s at home among the carousing bunch of grave-robbers, but also stuck in his own head, fixated less on the wealth to be found underground than the mythological entryway to the afterlife, where he might reconnect with Beniamina.

Rohrwacher injects silent comedy notes by using jumpy fast-motion in scenes with the grave-robbers being chased by carabinieri and inverts frames to alter our perspective. She gets creative mixing up music choices, from Monteverdi and Mozart to Kraftwerk electro-pop and Italian rock, and there’s also a woozy dream-beauty to intermittent stretches of the film that suggests a passage between two worlds. That suspended state resonates with most poignancy in O’Connor’s affecting performance, floating between open-heartedness and fatalism, between the comforting escape of dreams and the sadness of reality. Whether Arthur will let go of the past or find a path into it is the film’s big mystery.

One of the key themes La Chimera considers is who owns the past. Unlike the fearful Italia, the tombaroli believe everything left behind is fair game, regarding the Etruscans as naïve in thinking that treasures so easily unearthed would stay put. But ownership even in the present is revealed to be a tenuous thing as we see evidence that the grave-robbers are just lowly links in a chain, cheap labour in a greed-driven market. Of course, future generations all carry the past in one form or another, passing it on like an heirloom or hand-me-down garment. But when what’s carried is a shared cultural history with no intended forebear, does it automatically become everyone’s, or no one’s? The film could perhaps be accused of being ultimately a little too whimsical to provide serious answers, but nevertheless this is sophisticated and absorbing stuff.

An adaptation of Claire Keegan’s novella by the same name, Tim Mielants’s film is a sombre, understated account of Ireland’s Magdalene laundries, institutions which housed so-called “fallen women” from the 18th to the late 20th centuries. Operating under the guise of consolation, these laundries were essentially workhouses for sex workers, promiscuous girls, and young women who became pregnant out of wedlock, who were forced to engage in gruelling labour as punishment.

The film is set in the modest town of New Ross in 1985 and follows Bill Furlong (Cilliam Murphy - compelling throughout), a somewhat dejected coal merchant who lives with his wife Eileen and their five daughters. He spends his days toting coal in a canary-coloured truck, often to the local convent, where he is increasingly alarmed by his observations. After entering the convent to follow up on an invoice, an adolescent girl scrubbing the floors wails for Bill to help her escape to a nearby river. When he later shares his apprehensions with Eileen, she encourages him to drop the subject. “If you want to get on in this life, there are things we have to ignore,” she says - the film is excellent at revealing how personal and social pressure counsels him against speaking out, lest the powerful church turn against his business, his family and himself. This is, of course, how Ireland’s national scandal of the Magdalene laundries was allowed to survive, abusing tens of thousands of women who became pregnant outside marriage and their children, but both Keegan’s book and Walsh’s script are also interested in exploring the silence around the scandal, the forces that kept people from speaking out, or even seeing that anything was wrong. Even in the film’s biggest confrontation, with Emily Watson’s Mother Superior – as thuggishly self-assured as any Mafia don and just as ruthless – Bill holds himself still and somehow curled in on himself, and yet you can’t look away.

Meanwhile, flashbacks to a posh home at Christmastime gradually reveal how Bill was personally implicated in the existence of Magdalene laundries as a child and how his past trauma bleeds into the present. While his character is certainly admirable, there is something to be noted of a history of gendered violence accessed through the conscience of a benevolent man – that the laundries exist as peripheral action to Bill contending with his unremitting memory. There is a sense of foreboding and secrecy to the entire project, with the dialogue mostly communicated in whispers and the characters exchanging stern glances at any mention of the convent. In lieu of sensationalising the persecution of these young women, the film compellingly casts its gaze onto the complicity of the community and the social architectures which uphold abuse. Often slow-moving or repetitious – there is a recurring gesture of Bill strenuously washing his dirty hands – the film adopts the bleak sensibility of this history, ultimately advancing the belief that we ought to welcome the subjugated and vulnerable into our homes – a message we'd do well to receive, the final credits reminding us that the tradition carried on in Ireland until 1996. Powerful stuff.

“Heretic” opens with an unusual table setter: two young missionaries from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are discussing condoms and why some are labelled as large even though they’re all pretty much a standard size. “What else do we believe because of marketing?” one asks the other. That line will echo through the film, a stimulating discussion of religion that emerges from a horror movie wrapper. Despite a second-half slide and feeling decidedly unbalanced as a result, this is the rare film that combines lots of squirting blood and elevated discussion of the ancient Egyptian god Horus.

Our two church members are wandering around trying to covert souls when they knock on the door of a sweet-looking cottage. Its owner, Mr. Reed, offers a hearty “Good afternoon!”, welcomes them in, brings them drinks and promises a blueberry pie. He’s also interested in learning more about the church. So far, so good. Mr. Reed is, of course, if you’ve seen the poster, the 'baddie' played by Hugh Grant, who gradually reveals that he actually knows quite a bit about the Mormon religion — and all religions. “It’s good to be religious,” he says jauntily and promises his wife will join them soon, a requirement for the church. Writer-directors Scott Beck and Bryan Wood thus set us up for an unexpected and thoroughly engrossing theological debate, with Mr. Reed not unlike an earnest professor of comparative religion set against two naive missionaries armed with talking points who are hiding their own doubts. Mr. Reed knows exactly where the weak points are and thrusts in the philosophical knife. “How do you feel about awkward questions?” he asks before tackling the church’s stance of polygamy. “Yeah, it’s sketch, for sure,” East’s Sister Paxton finally admits. Soon the discussion turns on which religions are marketed better. Mr. Reed is, after all, facing a pair of walking and talking advertisements for Mormonism.

So beautifully constructed and acted in the first half that we don’t really notice at first when it slides into more of a horror film (you might be a step ahead of the missionaries, but not by much). But Beck and Wood take this fascinating premise as far as it can go before it becomes a rather airless stage play. By the halfway point, the audience who came for the horror rather than the lectures on religious marketing get what they came for, but unfortunately as a result the plot by the end is a murky, muddled and disturbing mess.

Grant, with his comfy cardigan and candles, is the film's draw, but there’s great work by Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East as the missionaries, who convey very well indeed the position of trying to not act scared even when they’re terrified. And one of the film's strengths is that they’re no mere ingenue targets — they often bite back with worthy criticism of Mr. Reed’s beliefs through shaking teeth. All in all a bit of a mixed bag but well worth a look.

'What follows is an act of female imagination,' declares a title card at the beginning of 'Women Talking'. It’s an accurate description of writer-director Sarah Polley’s adaptation of a novel by Miriam Toews, centred on the female members of a Mennonite colony. But those opening words are also a challenge: the women are responding to years of calculated sexual abuse, years in which the male leaders of their sect silenced their complaints by insisting that the horrors they experienced belonged to the realm of demons or the 'wild female imagination.'

At the core of Polley’s intelligent, compassionate film is the belief that in films and in life, words can be action, particularly for those hitherto denied a voice. The philosophical and often faith-steeped bent of the women’s discussion might put off some, but this thoughtful and beautifully shot film is a rewarding exploration that addresses both the characters’ predicament and the existential questions that face any contemporary woman navigating oppressive patriarchies. Toews’ 2019 novel was inspired by events in a Mennonite community in Bolivia, where for years women were drugged and raped while they slept by a group of men in their colony, the book revolving around the women’s deliberations after they learned the truth about their assaults. Their discussion was filtered through the voice of the one man they still trusted, schoolteacher August, enlisted to take the minutes of their meetings because none of them had been taught to read or write. In Polley’s interpretation, August, played by Ben Whishaw, is a key character, but the women’s voices drive the story without intermediary.

Given a couple of days to forgive the men who have been arrested for the rapes — or be excommunicated from the colony and therefore denied a place in heaven — the women vote on three possible responses: do nothing, stay and fight, or leave. These are arguably the options for how to address any life crisis, but for people who have lived such sheltered lives, the vote is an extraordinary undertaking, and soon beliefs and temperaments clash among the women, representing three generations. The youngest of these, Autje, delivers a judiciously used voiceover narration, indicating a future beyond this flash point, whilst the thoughtful, beatific Ona (beautifully played by Rooney Mara), who’s pregnant as the result of her assault, beams with equanimity and idealism. Meanwhile, Autje’s mother, Mariche (Jessie Buckley - outstanding), lashes out at nearly everyone with a fierce belligerence that’s laced with unspoken vulnerability. By contrast, Salome (Claire Foy), expresses a less conflicted rage than Mariche’s, giving the character’s maternal instincts and awareness of injustice a formidable power, and the two oldest women in the group, Agata and Greta, are figures of unfussy wisdom played to perfection by Judith Ivey and Sheila McCarthy. Via these voices and others, Polley also asks us to consider how innocent children grow up to be the kind of men who hold women back and sometimes brutalise them: Frances McDormand (a producer of the film), onscreen briefly as someone who can’t imagine leaving the community, suggests an untold story in the apparent knife-blade scars on her cheek - the way women’s acceptance of abuse is passed from one generation to the next is delicately addressed throughout.

There's a fair few weaknesses: it does feel rather artificially 'stagey' at times, and an intrusive score including terrible syrupy strings doesn't help at all - so much better (of course) just to let the writing and visuals do the work (although an incongruous blast of 'Daydream Believer' does work well). But on the whole this is an ambitious, thoughtful and moving piece.

This is a small-scale, muted mood piece, full of delicate understatement. It centres on the seldom-explored Afghan immigrant milieu: the droll decision of director Babak Jalali to plonk his young protagonist down in a family-run (and remarkably kindly) Chinese fortune cookie factory setting up an intriguing premise which is (broadly) well-sustained throughout the film. Anaita Wali Zada — a former national tv presenter forced to flee the Taliban after the fall of Kabul — is wonderful as Donya, a former translator at U.S. Army bases - a “traitorous” background earning her the subdued hostility of a neighbour living in the same housing complex populated by Afghan refugees in the San Francisco Bay Area city that gives the film its title. Shooting in black and white, Jalali keeps the focus tight on Donya as she works on the short assembly line at 'Hand-Made Fortune Cookies', but her essential loneliness is (perhaps a tad conveniently) dissipated by a remarkably astute (if rather unbelievable) psychologist, and, crucially, a friend-in-need co-worker which sets up a plot shift which we follow with some interest, and though it ends up all a bit too sentimental for my liking, we are nevertheless persuaded by the film's insistence on the healing possibilities of the human heart, which ultimately gives the film a lot of weight. Well worth a look.

This excellent piece deals with a variety of themes including trust, manipulation, conformity and abuse of authority, all of the action taking place within the confines of a school filled with hormone-addled children and their beleaguered teachers supposedly observing inscrutable codes of conduct; the film making full use of the dramatic possibilities inherent in its setting.

The story begins with an environment already unsettled by accusations of theft, with young teacher Carla (Leonie Benesch) pulled into a tense conference with other staff and two student representatives. Throughout, the well-intentioned Carla acts like a public defence lawyer, reminding the squirming children that they don’t need to answer which of their classmates may be the thief, whilst her counterproductively vehement colleagues press ahead like they’re detectives trying to break down a reluctant witness (the total inability of the senior staff to deal with serious accusations will be a feature). This issue then morphs into multiple overlapping crises, each of which concerns Carla directly or indirectly, and turn Carla’s once-orderly classroom and then the entire school into a free-fire zone of rumour, innuendo, and recrimination. Throughout, the director keeps us on medium-to-high boil through the film's quick-moving runtime, treating the dramatic developments with full emotional earnestness but without overplaying things - there are even moments when the film pokes fun at some characters’ self-seriousness, such as a great scene involving the staff of the student newspaper treating a 'gotcha' interview with Carla as the equivalent of Watergate. Carla remains admirably idealistic through all the chaos but finds herself more and more isolated; the irony of the film is that in attempting to push back against the group mentality of students or staff, Carla ends up drawing even more attention to her outsider status.

Benesch delivers a performance with an intensity that stops just short of self-martyrdom. But despite presenting Carla as more well-intentioned than almost any of the other adults on show, who largely appear as, if not even more, venal and petty and panicky as the students, this surprisingly suspenseful film doesn’t treat her as a hero, and although the rather truncated conclusion provides few clear answers, it makes clear that regardless of Carla’s genuinely caring nature, being rewarded for it rather than punished isn’t a given. Well worth a look.

With its wintry, rural setting, this latest from Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan features his trademark compositional allure, opening here with a wide shot of a man being dropped off by a van at the edge of an icy field, his dark figure contrasting starkly against the pale ground and sky. This is Samet (Deniz Celiloglu), a middle-school teacher who is bitterly serving out the last year of his assignment at a remote village school. Similar to Ceylan’s Winter Sleep, this is a character portrait of a distinctly unlikeable man—though here, Samet (given a veiled dangerousness by Celiloglu) remains stuck in a state of self-delusion until the end. Samet is so preoccupied with puffing himself up, and with controlling the given situation around him, that he woefully miscalculates of a number of personal encounters, most notably with Sevim (beautifully played by Ece Bagci), one of his students; the scenes involving the two of them are quite masterful, leaving us with the distinct feeling that there’s so much more to Sevim than meets Samet’s eye, if only the self-obsessed fool would be curious enough to look.

Meanwhile, Ceylan's visual compositions are stunning once again — a shot for example of Samet and a colleague retrieving water from a mountaintop well, which seems to float in the clouds is particularly memorable—and unexpected touches arrive when the film cuts to widescreen renditions of the portraits Samet takes of villagers with his camera, as well as a bizarre moment in which Samet breaks the fourth wall by opening a door and walking across the soundstage where the film is being shot. As ever with Ceylan, much of the film consists of lengthy dialogues about life, the universe and everything, with occasional references to the country’s political tensions, although here class dynamics also feature. Probably the most arresting scene is that which occurs between Samet and Nuray, a teacher from another town, and a recent amputee. As Nuray, Merve Dizdar gives one of those electric supporting performances that threatens to grab the film from its lead, particularly since Nuray has a voracious intelligence that sees through Samet immediately, as well as a sorrowful weariness in the wake of her injury.

Many will doubtless be put off by its style ('nothing happens') and its running time (well over 3 hours) but for fans like me it could have gone on for days. Wonderful stuff.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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