Film Reviews by PD

Since the 1950s, many children have been adopted internationally from South Korea. A programme initially started to find parents for orphans of the Korean War, it became a huge operation, with thousands of orphans or children of unwanted pregnancies sent overseas for a better life. Partly based on the testimony of a real-life friend of director Davey Chou, the film dramatises the story of one such adoptee: Freddie, now 25, superbly played by Ji-Min Park.

Park Ji-min is very impressive as the film’s charismatic, mercurial protagonist, embodying Freddie's multiple contradictions with some skill, and while Chou’s screenplay gently challenges many preconceived assumptions about the effects of adoption on adoptees, it also perceptively realises that whether biology affects identity or not, the mere possibility that such a link exists can exert a powerful attraction on a searching spirit not quite sure what it is searching for. Set across eight dramatically transformative years in Freddie’s life, the film is divided in three, and rounded off with a short, gently ironic coda. The first section, detailing a first visit to Seoul, is the longest and most straightforward. Glimmers of the self-possessed Freddie’s erratic extroversion do appear, as when she suddenly exhorts a whole restaurant full of strangers to gather and carouse around a single table, or when she casually picks up and sleeps with an acquaintance only to coldly rebuff his more sincere subsequent attentions, but mostly, the film’s opening hour loosely follows the expected arc of the adoption drama, as French-speaking Freddie, with useful new friend Tena in tow as translator, hesitantly goes about tracking down her birth parents. Her mother remains elusive, whilst Freddie’s biological father is quite the contrary - his overeager attempts to reconnect after two-and-a-half decades of absence is perhaps the one reaction most certain to make his prodigal daughter recoil. Freddie is more affected by her origin story than she’ll admit, but she’s also prickly about it, as though resenting the idea that the complex, oddly magnetic person she has become could be reduced to a simple set of adoption-related psychological cause-and-effect.

The film seems to settle into a placid, melancholy rhythm, as Freddie’s brief stay nears its end: there’s a nice line in culture clash as Tena not only translates Freddie’s blunt demurrals, but softens and sweetens them so as not to hurt her father’s feelings. Then, abruptly, the setting changes. We’re still in Seoul but it’s two years later, and Freddie is slinking vampishly through the nighttime city having jettisoned her old friends and become part of the city’s glamorously seedy underground. Then the last act leaps forward again, this time by five years, with Freddie putting her edge of amorality to work as an arms dealer, employed by one of her former hookups and apparently happily coupled up with supportive French boyfriend Maxime. This time, her return to Seoul on business is reluctant, and by this stage, the film itself has transformed, from adoption drama to character portrait and ultimately into an intriguing and intricate investigation of place and belonging. One that will obviously mean much to adoptees and emigrants, but also for those of us blessed and cursed with that rootless, wanderlusting gene, where home isn't the place of your birth, or the house you were raised in, or the place where you keep all your stuff, but where you are always subconsciously coming back to in your heart. Powerful stuff.

It’s no secret that Morocco is one of the most homophobic places on Earth, punishing certain acts with prison sentences. Maryam Touzani’s tender and compassionate piece involves Halim (perfectly played by Salem Bakri), and his wife, Mina (Lubna Azabal - also superb) who own an old-fashioned garment shop in the town’s medina. Halim works as a maalem, or master tailor, struggling to keep the trade alive. These days, machines accomplish the work that artisans like Halim once did by hand, and apprentices are hard to find, and quite a bit of the film is dedicated to this disappearing craft: as with Paul Anderson's 'Phantom Thread', Touzani details with some skill the care with which Halim sews the embroidery to the hem of a caftan, featuring shots of characters preparing the thread, testing the fabrics and so on. These sensual details evoke the sensation of touch, taking the place of the more explicit scenes found in so many LGBT-themed art-house films; the film is thus admirably restrained and understated, even if it perhaps overstays its welcome a little at over 2 hours.

We are clearly meant to identify with Halim, who has been forced to repress his true identity for many years, but the most empathetic character is arguably his seriously ill wife, whom Azabal imbues with more layers than the screenplay suggests. We think of her feelings even in scenes when Mina remains off-screen — as when Halim slinks away to the local hammam, where he’s found a way to have anonymous sex with other men. There’s little satisfaction in these trysts, which take place behind closed doors, but Halim silently hopes for more when a fair-featured young man named Youssef (Ayoub Missioui) expresses an interest in learning the trade. Mina picks up on the threat almost immediately, catching her husband staring discreetly — but not nearly discreetly enough — at Youssef’s bare torso as the apprentice changes clothes across the workshop. How much does she understand about Halim’s true nature? That question floats beneath the surface of the film, unanswered till nearly the end. There is also the matter of the eponymous caftan, which a client has commissioned for a special occasion. An ankle-length tunic made of petroleum blue silk, embellished with ornate gold trim, it appears to be the most beautiful garment Halim has ever made. But this time, he isn’t working alone. Touzani showcases practically every step of the creation, using the process as a kind of slow-motion seduction between Halim and Youssef. The woman who ordered the caftan stops by every few days to check on its progress, but Mina doesn’t like her attitude; the job takes weeks and would earn them a fine sum, but Touzani has introduced the caftan as a symbol, and it’s touching to see how the film uses it in the end.

There's a kind of wishful thinking to the film's politics, for as Morocco modernises, Halim’s field seems increasingly outdated, but by the same token so long as the country remains conservative about aspects of homosexuality, he cannot love whom he wants. “The Blue Caftan” dares to imagine a world where there’s room for both appreciation of the old ways and room to evolve. Serious work.

Adapted from the bestselling novel by Rachel Joyce, this one's deliberately aimed at a senior audience and involves solid performances from Jim Broadbent and Penelope Wilton, who just about save the day from what is ultimately a pretty predictable and terribly sentimental piece. Broadbent's Harold sets off — to his wife’s consternation — in his hopelessly inadequate deck shoes on a secular-but-spiritual mission from Devon to Berwick-Upon-Tweed in order to keep Queenie Hennessey, a former colleague dying in a hospice, alive. Inevitably, the people he encounters along the way irrevocably change him, from a (rather too good be be true) Slovakian cleaner who bandages his bleeding feet, to an idealistic teenage boy who reminds him of his estranged son, whilst wife Maureen, played by Wilton, is angry and bereft, eclipsed by his sudden devotion to Queenie. It involves a curiously weak, unsubtle script which simply isn't up to displaying the depths of any character, favouring as it does far too much in-your-face exposure which borders on the banal at times, and whilst cinematographer Kate McCullough does her best to keep things grounded, pursuing Harold along motorways as well as rolling hills, and injecting his traumatic memories of his son with a nightmarish quality thanks to stark spotlights illuminating these flashbacks, the few snatches of genuine pathos are few and far between (as often, a truly cloying score doesn't help matters). Lots of heart, but its attempt at dealing with weighty issues such as grief and guilt falls rather flat, I'm afraid.

This one's a watchable backstage drama, but for me despite an imposing performance by Renée Zellweger, the film doesn't succeed in exposing the dark heart of Garland’s last years, failing as it does to get under its protagonist’s skin. As with the (much better) Stan & Ollie of the same year, Tom Edge’s screenplay examines Garland through the prism of a late-in-life UK engagement peppered with flashbacks to key moments in her early years as a child star (including a distinctly creepy scene with Louis B Mayer). The 'present day' theatre scenes are by far the strongest, but by the same token the correlation between Judy’s treatment as a child and her later-in-life troubles feels terribly simplistic, with an overload of pop psychology that undercuts any attempts at complexity. Equally banal is a truly irritating plot thread back in London involving Garland and two gay fans that feels entirely engineered to pay homage to Garland’s status as a gay icon rather than offer any sense of convincing organic drama. And whilst Zellweger goes some way to etching Judy’s loss — there’s a touching late-on moment when Judy phones home to her daughter — and goes for broke on stage, barnstorming her way through classics such as ‘The Trolley Song’ or smouldering on ‘Come Rain Or Come Shine', the film really stumbles in its big climax, pulling a rather cheap trick in parlaying one of Hollywood’s saddest, most tragic stories into a strangely sentimental moment. I'm going away thinking Garland — and Zellweger — deserved so much more.

This one's a fairly predictable, bittersweet relationship drama - with perhaps a little too much 'soap opera' at times - but as with many facets of Mia Hansen-Løve's filmmaking, there’s an intelligence, a sadness, a more literary undertow to its seeming simplicity. “Un beau matin” in French, the title is lifted from a haunting poem by poetic realist Jacques Prévert, which describes the conflict of facing absence in your life, all while pretending there’s literally nothing there. At no cost to its calm, loping pace, the film is about many things at once: separate personal crises alternately surge and recede over the course of a year, given equal prominence in the script’s loose one-day-at-a-time structure. It’s a welcome change of pace for the ubiquitous Léa Seydoux, recently seen on screen as almost everything but an ordinary woman, and projecting here a warm sense of human wear and tear that we too rarely get to see from her. De-glammed inasmuch as it’s possible to deglam her — with minimal makeup, a short, practical hairdo and an oft-recycled wardrobe of slouchy floral dresses, she’s casually chic in the manner of someone you might plausibly know — Seydoux plays Sandra, a bright, independent, long-single mother with a freelance translating career that just about pays the rent of the teeny apartment she shares in Paris with her eight-year-old daughter Linn. We meet her en route to another cosy Parisian shoebox, this one belonging to her father Georg, a former philosophy professor who has almost totally lost his sight — one consequence of the neurodegenerative disorder Benson’s syndrome, which is gradually claiming his mind and memory too. No longer able to live independently, he and his family are thus thrust into the administrative nightmare of the national care home system, barely able to secure him a room of his own amid a logistical tangle of waiting lists and exorbitant fees. With Sandra stretched even thinner than usual, anxiously fretting over all aspects of her father’s situation, it’s an awkward time for a complicated new relationship to present itself, but life being what it is, that’s exactly what happens. Enter charming 'cosmo-chemist' Clement, and thus to Sandra's reawakened need for intimacy. In dramatising these two chaotic factors in Sandra’s life, Hansen-Løve is at pains to avoid tidy, swelling arcs and grand narrative collisions. Instead, the film accrues subtle power through repetition, as characters put themselves through the same banal ordeals again and again hoping for different outcomes: as the increasingly disoriented Georg is shuffled from one unsuitable facility to another, losing his bearings a little more each time, Sandra and Clement repeatedly attempt to forge new romance without disrupting the status quo. In both cases, the concept of home — not just a place to live, but the companions and care that anchor life itself — is held as precious and elusive. The director hardly stretches herself here, but enjoyable viewing nevertheless.

Well, first off you'll have to have a heart of stone not to enjoy much of this one. But as an adaptation of Judy Blume’s landmark 1970 young adult novel it's rather too undemanding. That's not to say it isn't broadly faithful to the book, in which of course an 11-year-old girl talks freely to the reader, and God, about the anxieties, fantasies and contradictions tripping her up on the path to maturity, and preteen Margaret’s concerns are timeless — peer pressure, crushes, menstruation, faith, and so on. But Blume treated them seriously, neither passing judgment on her protagonist’s immature mistakes, nor over-dramatising, whilst this adaptation, written and directed by Kelly Fremon Craig, rather shies away from putting the funny, flawed and all-too-realistic Margaret on screen exactly as she is. Today, inevitably, it’s not enough to be representative: Margaret must be a role model, too, and the result is rather too much sentimental artificiality at the expense of the messy realities, although it's fair to say also that young audiences may not miss some of the original novel’s more honest truths, especially as they’ve been trained to expect tidy stories where protagonists fix their faults and here even (gasp!) assure the adults in the film that they’re raising them just fine.

Abby Ryder Fortson gives us a convincing performance as Margaret, who spends the entire film in flux, notably when it comes to religious faith, a vacuum she attempts to resolve by visiting various Jewish temples and Christian churches and chatting with her loose concept of a deity. “I’ve heard great things about you,” she says in her first prayer. On top of all this is the sudden adjustment to suburban lawns and sprinkler parties, and her new friends’ fixation with the signposts of womanhood. The bossy ringleader Nancy (Elle Graham) adds a welcome burst of energy to proceedings, insisting that Margaret and pals Gretchen and Janie must wear bras — even as Nancy meanly gossips about the one developed girl in sixth grade, a wallflower named Laura, who towers over the class like a poppy among dandelions (the erratic roll-out of puberty is well-depicted). The standout scenes are the ones involving the friendships, and there's a great and all too-brief scene involving a class film on “menstroo-ation,” as over-enunciated by its host. But here, annoyingly, the film snips out novel Margaret’s outrage to discover that the lecture was “like one big commercial” for a line of feminine products, vowing to never buy the brand when her period starts. Can't today's children absorb a little of Margaret’s anti-corporate cynicism? However, Craig does a good job cutting to each of the girls’ faces as they gaze at the presentation in horror, hope, and suspicion. Still, it only intermittently feels like we’re observing this world through a child’s eyes. Instead, the running time is padded with a wholly unnecessary subplot about Margaret's mother's struggle to adjust to becoming a stay-at-home housewife, especially since her daughter barely seems to register it at all. All in all, as charming as the film is in its best moments, it’s hard not to be frustrated as it backpedals from the book’s awareness that not all wrongs are righted. Sometimes, our heroines might stay friends with bullies. Sometimes they might run from conflict and never explain themselves. Sometimes, they might even hurt people without making amends. Welcome to life's realities.

Charlotte Regan’s film inevitably invites comparison with fellow Briton Charlotte Wells’ 'Aftersun', since both revolve around the relationship between a working-class adolescent girl and her single-parent father during the summer holidays. But whilst 'Aftersun' is a seriously moving work of some depth and beauty, 'Scrapper' is ultimately a sweet bit of fluff that’s trying too hard to be funny and offbeat and ends up being too often simply annoying. But that's not so say that there isn't much to enjoy here. At the heart there’s a brace of superb performances from Harris Dickinson, who brings a certain soulfulness to the hitherto-absentee dad Jason, and newcomer Lola Campbell, who brings a truly remarkable natural comic timing to her turn as 12-year-old protagonist Georgie. Regan clearly has a knack with younger performers and elicits a relaxed, laconic air of confidence from Campbell (although sadly the supporting ensemble, which includes Alin Uzun as Georgie’s best friend Ali, Freya Bell as her nemesis Layla, and a chorus of bit players are much weaker). Meanwhile, the highly saturated colours of Elena Muntoni’s production design, Oliver Cronk’s costumes and Molly Manning Walker’s cinematography create a stylised, semi-magical world out of a shabby housing estate on the outskirts of East London. That quirky quality, much loved by British filmmakers these days, is undoubtedly fun, but only gets you so far. For what lets the film down is Regan’s underdeveloped script, which can’t manage the tonal shifts between grief, the various ethical conundrums, and comedy hijinks. And it takes a huge suspension of disbelief to accept the basic conceit that, after the sudden death of Georgie's mother, somehow no one from the adult world has worked out that this means Georgie is living entirely on her own, especially since she has somehow managed to bamboozle inquisitive social workers into thinking that she’s being minded by a fictitious uncle (the brief scenes involving the social workers are terribly mean). To survive, she's taken to stealing bicycles and selling them for cash, and we are invited to view this is charming and endearing, which would be very awkward were it not for the fact that Dickinson and Campbell make such a great double act. But what’s harder to swallow is that Georgie, Ali and, by extension, we the viewers should just shrug off the fact that her father has been an inarguably rotten, and utterly absent father up until now (and if you think about it, Georgie’s mother is more than a little culpable too given she made no arrangements to secure support for her child even though she knew she was going to die very soon). But emotional logic is clearly not being prioritised here in a film that’s more invested in visually interesting and touching moments where, for instance, father and daughter dance together in an abandoned building while backlighting pours through the empty windows. All in all, a film with many weaknesses but whose quirky quality and central performances carry us through.

This one's a romantic comedy with a dash of philosophy, its “Groundhog Day”-esque premise casting Andy Samberg as Nyles, a guy repeating the same day over and over, although the show is rather stolen by Cristin Miloti as Sarah, who provides much of the maturity and philosophy on offer. It's an enjoyable enough watch with some good moments, but even with the clever tweaks introduced by its sci-fi-flavoured premise – referencing “infinite time-loop situations,” – the film turns out to be a fun but ultimately rather thin construct. Granted, there’s nothing completely original, and there have been plenty of variations on this formula, but even making those allowances, this feels derivative almost to the point of distraction. The scenario unfolds against the backdrop of a destination wedding in the titular California locale, just the place someone might stumble upon a mysterious cave that leaves the hero in this strange predicament. Nyles isn’t completely alone in that, though as with all time-bending concepts, the less one knows going in – or dwells on the logistics – probably the better. As the sister of the bride, Sarah exhibits a sense of sadness, which will gradually be explained, whilst this being a romantic comedy, the question of two unlikely people being given the time to bond inevitably figures into the plot. Ultimately the film finally falls a little too much under the heading of 'been there, seen that', but the central theme of the possibility of personal growth for certain types of young men in a kind of emotional stasis is a worthy one nevertheless.

For those who grew up in the era of 'prog rock', this is an enjoyable trip down memory lane. Introduced to us are the two main creatives of album-cover designers 'Hipgnosis' - the late Storm Thorgerson, the eternally prickly visionary of the two, and, still around, and the key interviewee of the film, Aubrey “Po” Powell, Strom's long-suffering partner, who accomplished or oversaw the actual execution of Thorgerson’s often insane ideas, invariably on location. We get brief glimpses into the Cambridge art scene alongside the young members of Pink Floyd and their first design for the band’s second album, “Saucerful of Secrets,” an uncharacteristically psychedelic cover that soon gave way to much more interesting pieces. If you’re a Floyd fan, you may have spent much more time contemplating the “Atom Heart” cover and its meaning than the band ever did, or Powell himself, who, he claims, just hopped over a fence after he spotted a cow by the side of the road. There may not have been much more to it than that (although I recall a story about a farmer saying that they'd just been milked and were therefore in a good mood - suggesting more planning than Powell lets on here) but, whatever the truth of it, a template of marrying blue skies with natural objects or beings that took on near-mystical value was born. The three surviving members of Floyd all give fresh interviews (which is probably about as close as Waters and Gilmour will ever be to one another again, sadly). Throughout, there is more personal affection for Thorgerson’s brilliant imagination than for his apparent lifelong rudeness and brusqueness, so it’s somewhat ironic that Thorgerson’s character and personality is praised highly by Waters despite their friendship ending after Thorgerson doing the one thing Waters couldn’t forgive, which was to take credit for the concept of the flying pig. Plus ca change ...

The film is nothing if not a testament to absurdly high record company budgets in the ’70s, and the amazing lengths Hypgnosis would go to get the 'perfect' album cover (one would have liked to see some of the 'rejects', but hey-ho). There's the familiar-to-many stories of the creation of the prism on 'Dark Side', the burning man on 'Wish You Were here' and, of course, the inflatable pig on 'Animals', plus a very interesting tale of Led Zepplin's 'Presence' cover, and other nice contributions from the likes of Peter Gabriel and Beatle Paul (there's a nice brief moment when, after Storm's gone off in a sulk after some disagreement over Wings' 'Venus & Mars' cover, Paul simply says - 'that's ok man, Po can do it himself - he's the photographer anyway, right?'). Then there’s the great, if painful, tale about the shoot for a 10cc cover that involved finding a sheep and a psychiatrist’s couch and putting one atop the other in the shallows of a lake in Hawaii (because of course). Powell remains aghast that he went to all that work and then the image was perversely reduced by Thorgerson nearly to postage stamp size on the finished mockup.

The tale of how the era of Hipgnosis is portrayed as coming to an end, how the primary murder suspect is MTV and its frothy synth-pop acts of the early ’80s — illustrated on screen by Depeche Mode - is over and done with very quickly and, though obviously deliberate, probably deserved more serious treatment and is clearly a story in itself. And one is left truly baffled by the tragic ending of financial ruin and Powell having to go to David Gilmour with a begging bowl. The director doesn’t tarry or wonder aloud about what transpired after the point at when this film abruptly ends, amid changing tastes, and there’s also no discussion of how music mogul Merck Mercuriadis, (who appears in and exec-produced the film) ended up with Hipgnosis as the name of his massive song publishing rights company. However, as an appreciation of the golden age of 'album art', this is a hugely enjoyable piece.

Farhadi's latest perhaps lacks the emotional punch of his best work, but there's still plenty to admire here as he constructs an ethical clusterfuck whilst keeping us rooted in place even as our sympathies fly in every conceivable direction.

The film centres around Rahim (an extraordinary Amir Jadidi) whose every strategy fails at every turn despite his best efforts (although its fair to say there's probably one or two plot twists too many which means the film feels much more contrived than his earlier work). Soon there are other reputations on the line, and possibly other lives as well. Farhadi's flair for stacking rights on top of wrongs until they all topple over into a single mixed-up pile on the floor is again on display here — and what the film lacks in brute force sentiment it makes up for in the childlike simplicity of its central question: What’s the difference between doing a good deed and not doing a bad one? And whilst Farhadi's work doesn't usually tackle the emotional ramifications of social media, here, in his low-key way, he manages to spin Rahim’s diffidence into a shrewd portrait of how random faces in the crowd can sow doubt into someone’s own self-understanding. It's subtle, but always there in the shadows — the flipside of a story about the pitfalls of treating decency as a public spectacle. Iran is a complex and bureaucratic country, but it is also the role of social media and so-called ‘fake news’ that lend the piece a contemporary relevance, even as it feels like an ancient morality tale.

So much of this film’s slow-churning power comes from the growing tension between what people decide about Rahim’s actions second-hand, and how he feels about them himself. The brilliance of Jadidi’s performance isn’t in his soft likeability, but rather in the character’s performance of it; how Rahim both leans into it and pushes against it, and how he then tries to pull himself out from a tailspin of bad decisions even as he keeps making them worse - indeed, it almost feels cruel to see how Rahim is forced into complicity with his own ruin as his possible plans of action become ever narrower. Meanwhile, each new character who’s introduced to the story comes equipped with their own preconceptions, the judgements of which escalate at the same rate as the lies that Rahim — and his roster of collaborators — have to tell in order to undo the damage of the lies they’ve already told. Powerful stuff.

This mile-a-minute mind-bender from absurdist duo Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert takes as its premise that every conceivable variation of our lives exists in some alternate universe or other, then proceeds to give its harried heroine Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) a whirlwind tour of all those possibilities, which endeavours to capture the staggering burden of trying to exist in a world of boundless choice. At its heart is the intense parent-child bond in one Asian family — especially the impossible demands that the immigrant mother puts on her daughter — and argues that letting go while loving unconditionally is the answer. A fair enough sentiment, but unfortunately, this is drowned in a bombastic, sensory-overload experience, which throttles us for a truly exhausting two hours and more. There's far too much overcomplicated sci-fi logic, based around the heroine's being some sort of big-brain physicist in another dimension, whereas she learns “you’re living your worst you” in this one — meaning that every other possible Evelyn made more successful life choices. One became a huge Hong Kong action star, others an opera singer, a maid or a teppanyaki-style chef. The Daniels present as many of these realities as possible in short, zany micro-sketches, and there’s even a universe in which everyone has hot dogs for fingers, a scenario which the directors bring back again and again as an extended joke which wasn't that funny first time round, and we get much the same thing with a running gag about a world where people are mind-controlled by raccoons; meanwhile, a giant CG everything bagel comes bursting through a parallel dimension to swallow up everything Evelyn holds dear. Inevitably, the real threat to life, the universe and everything is Joy, Evelyn’s daughter, on whom Mum has piled life’s many disappointments, to the point that Joy finally snapped and reinvented herself as an entity known as Jobu Tupaki, who jumps from universe to universe murdering Evelyns and leaving a trail of chaos in her wake. All of this, especially given the film's rapid editing and Son Lux’s broken-pipes score, just succeeded in giving me a headache and just left me pleased when it was finally all over, I'm afraid.

Set in 1990s Quebec, this tender, delicate film concerns Jaime (Anwen O’Driscoll), a teenager who has recently lost her father and who, to help her grieving mother, has been packed off to a remote community where her Aunt, a Jehovah’s Witness, lives and where Jamie is expected to attend religious 'meetings'. Jaime is rebellious enough to smoke joints with her new school chum, Nathan (it's a pity we don't see more of him than we do as he is useful at letting us hear some of what is going through Jamie's head), but she is also remarkably respectful enough not to be critical of her aunt’s beliefs. Before long she's attracting the attention of Marike (June Laporte), the minister’s daughter, and the pair become firm friends – and, soon, something more than friends. The slow-burning romance is beautifully done, and captured well by the cinematographer Gayle Ye: their stolen kisses and side glances feel both intense and poignantly innocent, although the score is something of an irritating distraction. Recent cinematic representations of Jehovah’s Witnesses, notably in Dea Kulumbegashvili’s 'Beginning', Richard Eyre’s 'The Children Act' and Daniel Kokotajlo’s 'Apostasy', have, inevitably, not been kind, and this compassionate story, co-written and co-directed by the former Witness Sarah Watts shows a lot more understanding towards the community, (indeed, it's perhaps too generous). As Jaime and Marike go door to door with brochures, it becomes clear – long before the elders intervene with a surprising lack of force – that each has very different ideas of how their relationship will work. Mercifully, the film eschews some of the more extreme tropes of religious dramas, and understands that the real drama, the tragedy of a young person denying herself love in the name of God, needs no embellishment. But you'd love to be a fly on the wall when Marike, as promised to her soulmate, is explaining it all behind scenes - the scriptwriters aren't up to this, sadly, for Marike’s commitment to 'the truth' waivers just an unexplored fraction, her story seemingly ending as Jaime’s is beginning.

Though the beats of the narrative are fairly predictable and the dialogue is rather cliched at times, there's seriously good chemistry between the two lovers, and you definitely feel for them, especially Jaime, who shows an understanding of life well beyond her years and is admirably restrained (I'd probably have shouted and screamed at these soulless brainwashed androids and then burned down the chapel, but that's just me). Well worth a look.

This coming-of-age story centres on Sammy Fabelman (Gabriel LaBelle), who becomes entranced by the spectacle of a train crash onscreen when his parents – Mitzi (Michelle Williams) and Burt (Paul Dano) – take him to watch Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth, thus introducing him to cinema’s profoundly magical illusion of immortality. Sammy is inevitably a boyhood avatar for Spielberg’s own love affair with film, and in many ways the first half-hour is the most effective as we watch Sammy reaching towards his dreams. Unfortunately much of the rest of the action is characterised by a determination to smash the audience over the head with every dramatic note, the dialogue much too obvious and the plot points too emphatic, thus violating the golden rule of “show, don’t tell”.

As you'd expect, much of the film's finer moments involve the power of film, but the dramatic range of the narrative – family issues, racial discrimination, creative ambitions, romantic frustrations, adolescent friendships as well as the joys and pains of growing up – only serves to weaken the central theme rather than enhance it. And in its all-too obvious attempt to produce a heartwarming crowd-pleaser these themes themselves fall rather flat. There's an annoying sentimentality throughout, and it's curious that the director doesn’t seem to have the heart to extend his parents beyond archetypes: Burt is smart and safe, Mitzi frustrated and impetuous; despite the director's intent not to romanticise his family, the film still ends up being frustratingly more self-celebration than self-interrogation. All in all, watchable enough but rather too light and fluffy for my taste.

To title your film after a year is a bold statement, but for Chileans, “1976” will conjure up a host of reactions tied to what was one of the most brutal years of Pinochet’s dictatorship. This piece is a subdued but totally engaging film, grounded not in the resistance movement against Pinochet, nor on the political manoeuvring that led to thousands having been disappeared, but cleverly focusing instead on a housewife’s day-to-day routine, as she slowly finds her insular world rocked by events that soon spiral out of her control.

The opening scene sets the tone as a shopping trip is disturbed by the screams of a woman, presumably being hauled away, right outside the shop and under Carmen's eyes. Carmen may not bat an eyelid when such screams mildly disrupt her errands, but when a priest requests that she help care for a wounded man, she soon realises her discomfort with looking the other way. The film then becomes the story of how radicalisation can take root even in the unlikeliest of places, and as Carmen finds herself further helping the priest and the young man, she discovers a larger network eager to push back against Pinochet’s craven politics. An eerie air of paranoia takes over the second half, arising from Carmen’s increasing inability to experience her normal life without fear and suspicion; pointed asides by house guests become warnings hard to unhear, while strangers on the street become threats impossible to ignore. Martelli hews so closely to this woman’s conservative, carefully curated world of lavish children’s birthday parties and vanity-driven renovations that the repercussions of Pinochet’s hardened policies — whispers of disappeared men and women, hushed calls for antidemocratic power — can only ever be felt on the edges of upper-middle-class life. Yet once you see it, as Carmen does, nothing is the same.

The film thus represents a different proposition from most period pieces about this dark era of Chilean history. That Carmen only becomes begrudgingly radicalised is conveyed in Kuppenheim’s captivating performance, which carries a wealth of budding realisations best limited to impassive gestures lest they reveal her own misgivings and increasingly dangerous alliances. But the shift is presented in a way that feels almost inevitable, if only because it’s driven by a deeply personal sense of empathy and compassion. At every turn, Carmen makes decisions based on purely personal and site-specific circumstances, yet toward the end, she can’t even enjoy daily errands without feeling the weight of what’s happening around her, for this bourgeois housewife cannot shake off the sense that to live the life she used to live is a form of complicity with the regime. Impressive stuff.

This beautifully evocative film centres on the intimate friendship shared by 13-year-old Belgian boys Leo (Eden Dambrine) and Remi (Gustav De Waele), and especially the responsibility that comes with it. Unfortunately it's really two films - impressively subtle and sensitive in the first half, offering us as pure a portrait of innocent, innocuous same-sex affection as we’ve ever encountered on film, before, after a tragic twist, becoming something altogether different and rather less engaging.

It’s worth celebrating the first 45 minutes of the film, which will resonate deeply with anyone, gay or straight, who’s ever found themselves adapting their behaviour according to the homophobia of others. The pain and vulnerability of coming of age is tenderly and convincingly depicted, the young performers both heartbreaking and revelatory in their sadness – it’s hard to broadcast such deep emotion without losing an ounce of credibility. Dambrine plays Leo with wondrous innocence, while De Waele’s performance as his best friend Rémi is full of pain and tenderness. Seldom apart, Leo and Remi seem to be joined at the hip; even their nights are spent sleeping over at one another’s houses, limbs entwined, whilst their parents treat both children as their own (Léa Drucker and Emilie Dequenne play Leo and Remi’s respective mothers, and both are terrific). Director Lukas Dhont and co-writer Angelo Tijssens present observational scenes of everyday life, revealing character through behaviour rather than expository dialogue; so much of their technique is subtext, which relies on us to play detective. And yet, deprived of certain clues, audiences will construct whatever idea of these two boys they want in their heads, filling in the blanks with some combination of lived experience and personal prejudice. Are Leo and Remi gay? Might one of them be, but not the other? (These are not irrelevant questions, even if the film stubbornly refuses to address them).

On the first day of a new school term, surrounded by an unfamiliar group of students, the boys cling to one another especially tight in class and during breaktime. In the cafeteria, a surprisingly forward girl puts the question to them, “Are you together?” and Leo tenses up, explaining that they’re just “close,” like brothers. It’s a life-changing moment for Leo and Remi, and though neither one fully realises it at the time, they have just experienced a key jolt of heteronormative socialisation. They’ve been told that their friendship is not normal, and no one wants to be different. Leo in particular is figuring out what it means to be a man in the modern world, and one of the codes by which he’s expected to live is to be mindful of his emotional and physical proximity to other guys.

And then the second half. Because the film goes out of its way to present the boys as pre-sexual, the sudden tragedy seems all the more unfair, and though Dhont handles the attendant mysteries as delicately as one could hope, it’s not a little exasperating to think this is where he wanted the story to go, because from this point, “Close” has become a completely different (and not nearly as powerful) film, and unfortunately young actor Dambrine is nowhere near practiced enough to project Leo’s thoughts. Sincere as it may be, this tragedy feels like a narrative device, designed to prove some kind of ideological point, when the film could have taken the (admittedly far harder) dramatic road of watching how these two boys navigate the newly discovered peer pressures. As it is, for me the plot twist weakens the film enormously. Nevertheless, well worth seeing and hopefully more to come from a hugely talented director.