Film Reviews by PD

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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