A hastily cobbled together list: partly because I’m later than usual (I usually get it out of the way on New Year’s day), but also because it’s a snapshot of changing opinions and if I wait more than a few days I’ll need to update it. Better to just get it down and move on.
Due to these strange times, most of these films were watched on a TV or laptop screen. Not ideal by any means, but needs must.
The films are listed alphabetically within each category.
1. New in 2021 (new releases, festival films, etc)
A Little Bit of Paradise (Troche raju) *short film* [Andrzej Cichocki, 2020, Poland]
I was very impressed by a previous short by Cichocki called The Shadow Forest. This latest one is a superb documentary, a sensitive and empathetic study of a family living in a remote, rural part of Poland. It has won awards at several festivals, including the Krakow Film Festival.
Beautiful details of the everyday life of a Silesian family in a remote corner of Poland. Living on the outskirts of the city, their world is inextricably linked with the nature around them.
Synopsis on Mubi
A Night At The Opera *short film* [Sergey Loznitsa, 2020, France]
Using archive footage, Sergei Loznitsa revisits the Opéra de Paris’ gala evenings during the 1950s and ’60s. Between prestige and protocol, these events gathered the crème de la crème of the French and international elite, while crowds of ordinary people assembled to watch the spectacle from afar.
A remarkable feat of archival excavation from Sergei Loznitsa, this sublimely edited short features a host of cinematic—and actual—royalty attending a gala at the Opéra de Paris. Culminating with a performance by Maria Callas, A Night at the Opera is a bejewelled monument to high society rituals.
Mubi
Ali & Ava [Clio Barnard, 2021, UK]
This was the opening film to the 40th edition of the Cambridge Film Festival, and wonderful to watch on the big screen. Stand-out performances from Claire Rushbrook and Adeel Akhtar.
There’s a tremendous human warmth to this love story from writer-director Clio Barnard, a social-realist tale… It’s a drama of autumnal love conquering the divisions of race, the disillusionments of middle age, the discomfort of parenthood and grandparenthood, and the tensions of class…
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
Barnard’s film is an essay in acceptance and love.
The Alpinist [Peter Mortimer, Nick Rosen, 2021, US]
The Alpinist, about free spirit and solo climber Marc-André Leclerc, is distinctive because its subject is an outlier even within the maverick climbing community. What drives him is not glory or sporting achievement. A goofy Canadian given to describing a blighted hellface of sheer rock as “super fun”, Leclerc was diagnosed with ADHD as a child. Climbing, he says, is the only time when he “doesn’t feel my squirrel brain twitching”. It’s an intriguing insight into a particular kind of obsessive drive, and a portrait of a man who, as one of his contemporaries remarked, feels almost too comfortable on the side of a mountain.
Wendy Ide, The Observer
Available: DVD/Blu-ray due January-March 2022
Ammonite [Francis Lee, 2020, UK / Australia / US]
Not as strong as Lee’s debut masterpiece, God’s Own Country, but impressive nonetheless. And set in one of my favourite places in the UK – Lyme Regis.
You will struggle to find a British debut film as bracingly tender and hopeful as Francis Lee’s God’s Own Country… Lee’s follow-up film continues to spotlight the cautious love that ignites between two untethered souls when they knock together. His protagonist is Mary (Kate Winslet, playing a real, renowned 19th-century palaeontologist) who shares a paltry home with her mother (a bristling Gemma Jones). Their life is funded by her keen eye for precious fossils on the ravaged local coast. Keeping exposition purposefully light, Lee establishes Mary’s solitary, stoic life through the rhythm of her vigorous daily grafting. Only through a few sparse interactions do we learn that her palaeontological potential has calcified into resignation after too many men have bottled her talents and presented them as their own.
With its stark and challenging vistas, pointed framing of class and gender and nurtured, emboldened performances, Ammonite feels like an extension of Lee’s already impressively well-honed skills rather than a stride into new terrain. When a filmmaker captures intimacy as intuitively as Lee, however, it feels like there can never be too much of a good thing.
Beth Webb, Empire
Beanpole (Dylda) [Kantemir Balagov, 2019, Russia]
Individuals in shock, a nation in shock, a movie in shock – and, by the end, in fact, its audience in shock. These are the states of mind to be experienced in this brutal and brilliant film by 27-year-old Russian director and co-writer Kantemir Balagov. He finds a spiritual world of PTSD with his movie set in Leningrad just after the end of the second world war, inspired by The Unwomanly Face of War, the 1985 oral history of Soviet women’s wartime experiences by Svetlana Alexievich. His movie has absorbed the influence of Alexander Sokurov (with whom Balagov in fact studied) and Aleksei German; but Balagov is a fiercely individual and quite staggeringly accomplished talent…
This is a story of people for whom the horror of war has not ended, for whom peace is the horror of war by other means. When the patients gamely try to entertain little Pashka by imitating a dog, and Pashka does not recognise it, one patient shruggingly asks how the boy would have seen a dog when they have all been eaten. The hospital itself is a time-honoured symbol for the madhouse – or infirmary, or mortuary – that is the nation’s soul. One patient, when presented to a grand lady visitor (who is to play a chilling role later in the movie) behaves strangely, offensively and then blood begins to seep through his white pyjama jacket. What has happened is that his stitches have ripped, a commonplace occurrence which nonetheless has an uncanny effect here: as if the pain and violence he has experienced – along with everyone else – is supernaturally rising to the surface: the return of the repressed. Beanpole is moving, disturbing, overwhelming.
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
Beginning [Dea Kulumbegashvili, 2021, Georgia / France]
A striking new cinematic voice, with a debut feature which implicates the viewer as voyeur at every uncomfortable turn. A film full of things not said, things withheld. And then there is that final shot!!!
In the opening scene of Dea Kulumbegashvili’s outstanding debut feature, a minister talks to his congregation about the story of Abraham and Isaac. Before he can answer his own question, about the moral a Christian should draw from this Biblical test of faith, the sermon is interrupted by a firebomb thrown through the door. It’s a heart-in-mouth moment, which sets in motion the film’s often oblique narrative, which pivots around the minister’s disillusioned wife.
Yana, the wife (played by Ia Sukhitashvili), is there in the hall during the attack, and moments later we see her outside alone. The image is an enigma. The fire crackles on the soundtrack as the audience is left to guess whether the rest of the congregation survived the attack.
This pattern of withholding information continues through the film. Kulumbegashvili (who co-wrote as well as directed the film) repeatedly keeps answers at bay, whether it’s a plot point, the owner of a point-of-view shot, or even the moral of a Bible story. In one powerful shot near the start of the film the focus pulls away from the burning hall in the distance, rendering it an unrecognisable blur. There’s a lengthy delay before two characters enter the foreground, shot extremely close and perfectly sharp. With Beginning, Kulumbegashvili and her close collaborator DoP Arseni Khachaturan have mastered the art of cinematographic suspense…
Sukhitashvili’s performance as Yana is all the more impressive for conveying the complexity of her crisis with limited movement or dialogue. Her deep ambivalence is masked by the reserve that is expected of her in her role with the church community. When she does speak her mind to her husband, he hardly listens, as he will later refuse to believe her on a crucial point. Her enforced decorum is reflected in the film’s rigorous aesthetic, its sparse dialogue and recurring stillness. In contemplating the horror of a subservient life, Kulumbegashvili has created a quite extraordinarily compelling film.
Pamela Hutchinson, Sight & Sound
Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets [Bill Ross IV / Turner Ross, 2020, US]
A great example of documentary fiction, where the lines are blurred, but the effect is all the more powerful.
Last call for drinks in this liquor-lashed celebration of American bar culture from Bill and Turner Ross.
Siblings Bill and Turner Ross have made a film which, on its surface, offers a valedictory salute to a musty institution that is in tragic decline: the American dive bar…
The film comes across as a vérité riff on the classic TV sitcom Cheers, in which patrons and drinkers all know each other’s name, and it’s seemingly rare that a random stranger would wander in off the street for a quick tipple. Ostensibly, it’s made to feel as if the filmmakers just hit the right place at the right time and that the steady consumption of booze served to suppress any anxieties that patrons may have had about “performing” in front of the camera.
Taken at face value, it’s a very entertaining and immersive look at working class bar culture and alcohol as a catalyst for performance and truthful expression. If you dig a little deeper, you’ll discover that there’s an illusory aspect to the film, and that its apparent relationship to the documentary form is – despite appearances – by no means a given.
It would be fascinating to delve into questions of whether the environment we’re seeing has been manipulated in any way, but they should be questions that come after experiencing the film knowing as little about it as possible – taking this rollercoaster outpouring of pure emotion at face value. What we will say is, the more you know about it, the more miraculous the film becomes, operating as both an important cultural document about American leisure time, and a treatise on the authenticity of any recorded image.
David Jenkins, Little White Lies
Diseased and Disorderly *Short film* [Andrew Kotting, 2021, UK]
I first came across Kotting’s work via his exuberant, eccentric, and joyous film Gallivant, where he followed his daughter Eden and her grandmother on a trip around the UK. In this latest short, Eden is a grown woman and artist, and the film gives expression to her art and her shimmering inner world.
There’s a nice item about Eden and Andrew in this edition of the BBC radio Film Programme.
First Cow [Kelly Reichardt, 2019, US]
The fifth of Kelly Reichardt’s films set in America’s Pacific Northwest mines and marries many of the US auteur’s preoccupations. Working with co-writer Jon Raymond to adapt his own novel The Half-Life, Reichardt revisits the social inequality of Wendy and Lucy, the cruel history of Meek’s Cutoff, and the sensitive male friendship at the heart of Old Joy. On the Oregon frontier of the early 19th century, the tender-hearted Cookie Figowitz (John Magaro) is working for unpleasant beaver trappers, when he comes to the assistance of King-Lu (Orion Lee), a Chinese immigrant on the run from Russian hunters…
As ever, Reichardt works in delicate movements as a storyteller. Magaro and Lee’s wonderful chemistry keeps perfectly in step with the filmmaker.
From the opening sequence, in which a contemporary mushroom forager (played by Alia Shawkat) discovers human bones, First Cow is a tactile experience in which footfall on the forest floor and dirt take centre stage. Regular cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt, working in muted, earthy colours, and a crunching sound design add to the sensorial experience.
Tara Brady, The Irish Times
The French Dispatch [Wes Anderson, 2021, US / Germany]
Utter joy!
There’s something wonderful about watching an artist seem to lean into their criticisms – to gather up the tics and affectations they are (often unfairly) reduced to, and take them to their logical endpoint. Here, we look at the case of Wes Anderson, often accused of making not films but overly stylized art objects, fussy items that value design over emotion. And in response, he has made… a film in the form of a magazine…
…Charmingly, this film that loves writers is also one of Anderson’s most lavishly directed – which is, I know, saying something. His giddily ornate style is fully in place, but with new flourishes; least surprisingly, considering the time and place, the aesthetic earmarks of the French New Wave are very much accounted for. But Anderson isn’t just imitating. He’s extending that era’s spirit of formal and narrative playfulness, complimenting the aforementioned dual structures with counterpoint split-screens, surprise subtitle placement, and willy-nilly saturation. The stories are mostly in black and white, except the moments when he seems to have simply decided they shouldn’t be (like when we see Benicio del Toro’s paintings, or Saoirse Ronan’s eyes). And near the end of the third story, he renders the big chase scene in animation, because why not.
Anderson’s films have also become a welcome opportunity for serious actors to let their hair down – Tilda Swinton is clearly having a blast, and Frances McDormand hasn’t had this worthy a vehicle for her magnificent comic timing since Burn After Reading – and in terms of sheer laughs-per-minute, this may be Anderson’s funniest film (at the very least, it rivals Rushmore). But it’s not lightweight, and it’s not silly, and there’s a moment of genuine pathos at the end of the third story that’s quite unlike anything Anderson has ever done. I’d watched the film, to that point, with a big dumb grin across my big dumb face, and then I realized I was misty-eyed as well. What a delightful movie this is.
Jason Bailey, Crooked Marquee
Guide Me Home *Short film* [Stefan Georgiou, 2021, UK]
A new film by this gifted and versatile director is always an eagerly anticipated event. His latest is a beautifully conceived short about one of the many poor souls who fall through the gaping cracks of our modern society.
Written, produced and directed by Stefan Georgiou, David arrives in London with dreams of becoming a somebody, but when things don’t go to plan he starts to slip between the cracks of the city he loves so much. Starring: Mat Laroche, Hannah Emanuel, Sarah Niles, Will Kenning, Hannah Banerjee and Comfort Fabian…Guide Me Home is graceful, thoughtful and visually superb, it takes an important topic and handles it with sensitivity and respect. It impressively deals with a dark subject without falling into a hole of despair, it embraces the larger picture and the complexity by holding onto a sense of hope. Mat Laroche does a terrific job of bringing through all the different sides to David and giving him a very authentic feel. The direction, editing and cinematography all work together brilliantly to portray the film’s intricacies and subtleties, topping it off with a very emotional score that rounds out the experience elegantly. There’s no rush to the finish line, it takes its time and slowly builds to create a meaningful exploration of mental health.
Film Carnage
Gunda [Viktor Kosakovskiy, 2020, Norway / US / UK]
Stunning black and white photography and patient observation help make this an incredibly immersive and transformative experience.
Russian film-maker Viktor Kossakovsky has made acclaimed documentaries about the connections between people (The Belovs, Wednesday 07.19.61) and about the state of the planet (the recent, environmentally themed Aquarela). He now turns his attention to the animal kingdom – or rather, a small, seemingly unpromising sector of it – in Gunda, a portrait of various farm animals, and in particular a mother pig and her litter. Some viewers may be sceptical of the way that Kossakovsky uses elegant, even lyrical camerawork to elevate seemingly base material: cinematically, this may seem like making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. But you don’t have to be an animal lover to appreciate the craft and the genuine poetic vision of a film which, though strictly unsentimental, is intensely moving, transfixing and quite genuinely unique…
Human presence is entirely absent, implicit only in buildings and objects, notably in the machine which figures at the end of the film – an initially puzzling episode, with sound figuring heavily, its full meaning at last emerging to quite devastating effect. Anyone who never thought they could imagine the feelings of an animal will have their mind changed here, in a sequence that you might see as indirectly making Gunda a figure of the human condition on four legs, every bit as resonantly as Bresson’s Balthazar or Bela Tarr’s Turin Horse.
Jonathan Romney, Screen Daily
It Must Be Heaven [Elia Suleiman, 2019, France / Qatar / Germany / Canada / Turkey / Palestinian Territories]
After a decade, Suleiman is back with his deadpan, laconic character, casting his eye on the absurdities and injustices of the world.
As in his three previous films, Suleiman takes the lead, playing a version of himself as channeled through the comic personas of Buster Keaton, Jacques Tati and, sure, Mr. Bean. Save for one line of dialogue, Suleiman anchors the film as a quiet observer who takes in the absurdities of the world around him and responds with a cockeyed look or quick double-take that speaks 10 times louder than words.
As a director, Suleiman knows how to compose the frame to get the most out of each gag, and as a performer, he recognizes that his arched eyebrows are powerful tools of comedy and employs them as such….
But don’t mistake Suleiman’s droll approach as evidence of dispassion. Quite to the contrary, in fact, because he uses that flattening style to make his larger point. “It Must Be Heaven” finds the filmmaker/character leaving his home in Palestine to live in Paris and New York, only to find those big city meccas wrought with the same absurdities that mark his native Nazareth.
Ben Croll, The Wrap
Just In Case *Short* [Kirsty Robinson-Ward, 2021, UK]
The performances and strength of writing make this a deeply affecting film. It’s a beautiful depiction of both the extreme loneliness and fear of mental health and the importance of maintaining loving relationships. An important and moving film.
How do you battle an invisible demon? How do you survive the war inside your own head? How do you tell your Dad you’re fighting for 30? ‘Just in Case’ explores the harsh reality of what it’s really like to live with bipolar disorder.
In collaboration with Bipolar UK and the Film and TV Charity. This film has also been awarded the Raising Films Ribbon supporting parents and carers within the industry.
April Kelley penned ‘Just in Case’ which based on her own experience living with bipolar disorder and conversations she’s had with her own Dad. She also starred in it alongside British icon Philip Glenister (Life on Mars, Ashes to Ashes, Belgravia).
Directed by Kirsty Robinson-Ward whose commitment to the actor relationship shines through her work. Her ability to listen to the script and facilitate the actors’ needs allows the development of beautiful character performances shown time and time again in her work.
Film’s website
Lemons *Short* [Rvbberduck, 2021, UK]
Nicely told in 5 mins, good performances, good script, witty.
Two lemons walk into a petrol station. This dark comedy short film is currently on the festival circuit, for release in 2022.
Film’s website
Limbo [Ben Sharrock, 2020, UK]
The gentle pacing, the dead-pan humour, the eye for the perfect shot – Ben Sharrock’s film is a devastatingly humane look at treatment of refugees. Brilliant.
Omar (Amir El-Masry), has journeyed to Scotland from Syria with his instrument – his grandfather’s oud, always carried at his side as a material reminder of his connection to home – and the inescapable baggage of trauma, exile and homesickness. An acclaimed musician back in Damascus, he fears that he will not be able to play again. Here, in this nowhere land, it just doesn’t feel right…
Visually clever, and by turns witty and moving (director Ben Sharrock never sacrifices feeling for aesthetic), Limbo ends as it begins – with uncertainty. There are no answers to the men’s questions, no sureties in their quests for survival.
Rebecca Harrison, Sight and Sound
Malakout *Short* [Farnoosh Abedi, 2020, Iran]
Superb animation: the visual style and atmosphere is exhilarating.
This glorious piece of animation is such a stunning rendering of Poe-esque images and sounds that I still can’t believe what I have seen. Every frame is a true masterpiece.
Miguel, as quoted on Horrible Imaginings Film Festival website
Maria Chapdelaine [Sébastien Pilote, 2021, Canada]
Epic in its wilderness period setting, and intimate in its nuanced observation of characters who are rarely given to speech.
A visually stunning, deeply satisfying piece of cinema, a gorgeous period piece. Canadian history has rarely, if ever, looked so sumptuous on the screen, or felt so rich…
At two-and-a-half hours, this is a long movie, but it is enchanting, evocative, and rewarding and best seen on a big screen where the beauty really shines.
Karen Gordon, Original Cin
Mayor [David Osit, 2020, US, UK]
This gradually tightens its grip on you. Just wait for the finale.
Local governance, according to Musa Hadid, mayor of the Palestinian city of Ramallah, is the most beautiful branch of politics. It’s certainly, as this compelling fly-on-the-wall documentary attests, the area in which he is able to have the most direct connection with the city and its people…
Wendy Ide, The Observer
Deft editing and unexpectedly affecting music choices make for an engaging portrait of the kind of impassioned and dedicated politician who seems in short supply right now.
Meanwhile on Earth [Carl Olsson, 2020, Denmark / Sweden / Estonia]
Reminds me to some extend of the carefully composed, largely fixed camera, observational documentaries of Nikolaus Geyrhalter. Can I describe the humour as “deadpan”?
Carl Olsson offers a factual and artfully framed overview of Sweden’s contemporary funerary industry in his calm and cinematic documentary that makes every step enjoyable and informative. Straightforward, fixed camera positions and placcid, symmetrical compositions satisfy our curiosity as a process that is rarely discussed and is still taboo in most European countries. Essentially a series of vignettes set to a cheerful upbeat occasional score, the film pictures every ritual and the routine procedures that accompany the transition…
Meredith Taylor, Filmuforia
A thoughtful and informative portrait of our final exit from this world.
Nico [Eline Gehring, 2021, Germany]
A stunning lead performance from Sara Fazilat in this powerful drama. This won the Youth Lab Jury award at this year’s Cambridge Film Festival.
Sara Fazilat gives a thunderbolt of a performance as Nico, a confident German-Persian lesbian working in Berlin as a caregiver. Her effusive personality radically changes after a racially motivated attack lands her in the hospital and leaves her with deep psychological wounds. Director Eline Gehring and co-screenwriter Fazilat convey the brutality of the act without being overly explicit, interested more on depicting the emotional damage than the physical scars. Fazilat impresses in every scene as we see how the incident changes her. But her journey is not without hope, fortunately, and a few surprises.
Randy Myers, The Mercury News
Nomadland [Chloé Zhao, 2020, US]
The film tells the story of a woman made homeless and forced to become one of the millions of nomads living in America from their motorhomes and RVs. This happens when the Gypsum Corporation plant in her hometown of Empire, Nevada, is closed down, casting around 800 residents out and leading to the termination of the town’s zip code. These events are real, based on accounts contained in a book of the same name by the journalist Jessica Bruder…
The “one man and the wilderness” trope that is central to the American dream and its promise of self-fulfilment is present, but it rubs up against the harsh reality faced by most Americans in the 21st century – of lives reduced to a succession of dire inevitabilities dictated by the profit motive. How do you reconcile the notion of freedom that is so important to American identity with the fact that so few Americans ever get the chance to experience autonomy or, indeed, control?
Nathalie Olah, The New Satesman
One More Night (En Natt Till) *Short* [Erik Warolin, 2021, Sweden]
An intriguing, slightly disturbing short, which leaves you wondering what next. Excellent.
Moa and Tage have a chance at a home buying deal of their lifetime. But only if they spend a couple of nights with Dorotea, the current owner of the house. The couple agrees to the odd request. When the owner suggests more and increasingly pushy requests, the patience of Moa and Tage is tested.
Synopsis on Mubi
Passing [Rebecca Hall, 2021, US / UK / Canada]
[A] shiveringly delicate but subtly provocative directorial debut from actor Rebecca Hall…
Hall, for her part, shoots the film in exquisitely modulated black and white: not merely an artsy affectation, but a vital visual leveller in a film that explores the ways in which skin tone is the basis for so many people’s assumptions and prejudices. She has an ear as well as an eye. Devonté Hynes’ score is full of brittle, jazzy piano riffs that trickle, like the characters on screen, into nervous limbo; Jacob Ridikoff’s sound design, amplifying the swishes of fabric and conversational echoes from other corridors, is attentive to every detail that a woman this vulnerable in the world must hear. Hall has said in interviews that a film of Passing has been in her mind’s eye since she read the book in her early 20s. That depth and dedication of thinking is evident — but she’s also a born filmmaker, fit to take on any other story she pleases.
Guy Lodge, Film of the Week
Petite Maman [Céline Sciamma, 2021, France]
An exquisite, perfectly formed film from the wonderful director Céline Sciamma. Possibly the best film of 2021.
After the gorgeous, windswept Portrait Of A Lady On Fire, Céline Sciamma returns with a story that is just as elegant and compelling, and even more microscopic in its focus. Made under lockdown conditions with a tiny cast and barely 75 minutes long, this packs in more human emotion than films three times its length.
Nelly (Joséphine Sanz) is a quiet eight-year-old who travels with her parents to empty her grandmother’s house following the older woman’s death. Nelly is processing her loss, as is her visibly struggling mother (Nina Meurisse), when Nelly meets Marion (Gabrielle Sanz), in the woods behind the house. She quickly realises, and seems instantly to accept, that this is her mother at her own age. The pair become friends, and Nelly grasps that she has a chance to learn more about her reserved mother and explore some of the missing pieces of her own life…
Sciamma seems to understand childhood better than any filmmaker out there save perhaps Miyazaki (to whose work this has rightly drawn comparisons), and like him she turns her camera to little girls, largely overlooked in American cinema, and their relationship with their mothers, a hugely underexplored issue next to the ubiquitous father complex.
Helen O’Hara, Empire
The Power of the Dog [Jane Campion, 2021, UK / Canada / Australia / New Zealand]
Between its pitched psychological warfare, its disorientingly vast Western landscapes (with the stunning Otago region of New Zealand standing in for Montana), and an unsettling dissonant score by Jonny Greenwood, The Power of the Dog sometimes feels like Campion’s female-centric reply to Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 epic There Will Be Blood. Both are intimate chamber dramas about how money and power corrupt human relationships, set against a backdrop of early 20th-century capitalism. (The Power of the Dog takes place in 1925, but in a place so remote and frontier-like it’s surprising when a piece of modern technology like the automobile makes an appearance.) And both feature a central character—Daniel Day-Lewis’ Daniel Plainview, Cumberbatch’s Phil Burbank—whose arrogantly self-assured demeanor hides a core of bottomless insecurity and, when pushed to the limit, bottomless malevolence…
The Power of the Dog is one of those films that, on first viewing, seems to have a story too thin to support the epic sweep of its setting. But watch it a second time through, and the tightly coiled thriller plot comes into focus, with no detail wasted as the movie hurtles toward a violent, psychically shattering, but narratively satisfying ending.
Dana Stevens, Slate
Quo vadis, Aida? [Jasmila Zbanic, 2020, Bosnia & Herzegovina / Austria / Romania / Netherlands / Germany / Poland / France / Turkey / Norway]
The matriarch of a family fights for the lives of her loved ones in this gripping and impactful look at the 1995 Srebrenica massacre. Beautifully directed by Bosnian filmmaker Jasmila Žbanić (2006 Berlinale winner Grbavica), it features an absolutely storming performance from Jasna Ɖjuričić in the title role and excruciatingly illuminates a desperate plight…
For much of its economical duration, Žbanić maintains extraordinary tension and a race-against-the-clock pace but her film slows down during key moments to reflect on the terror and loss. By combining smartly incorporated storytelling devices with powerful, real-life events, its director has created something astonishing here. Aided immeasurably by her formidable leading lady and excellent DP Christine A Maier, Žbanić shows herself as a shrewd, compassionate and genuinely outstanding filmmaker, who really knows the value of the human face.
Emma Simmonds, The List
Roaring 20’s (Années 20) [Elisabeth Vogler, 2021, France]
More than just a hugely impressive single-take technical feat…
In a single, unbroken shot which Ms. Vogler filmed herself, we are given a slice of hipster Parisian life on midsummer’s night 2020. The exact evening matters because traditionally the city celebrates the longest day of the year with street music on every corner; and the lively street life the actors must navigate was clearly shot in real time. The action begins outside the Pyramid of the Louvre and ends in Buttes-Charmont, a hillside park on Paris’s western side with spectacular views of the city…
The idea, spoken late in the film, that a century takes 20 years to get started, meaning 2020 is the first real year of the new century, was undoubtedly the impetus for painting this portrait of this place and time. Other one-shot movies are about a place, like “Russian Ark” and the Hermitage throughout history, or a time, like “Victoria” and her very bad night in Berlin. “Roaring 20’s” succeeds in being about both. As a document of a city full of people attempting to carry on as normal, which understands our worries and coping mechanisms and the affect they have on our relationships, it will be admired for years to come. This is a movie that can never be replicated; and that authenticity is a very special achievement.
Sarah Manvel, The Critic’s Notebook
Servants (Sluzobníci) [Ivan Ostrochovský, 2020, Slovakia / Romania / Czechia / Ireland]
Servants is set in 1980, in the thick of communist Czechoslovakia during the Cold War era; however Ivan Ostrochovsky’s (Goat) insidiously flinty, supremely assured and chillingly stylish second feature spins a story which is of utmost relevance today. Following two young seminarians caught between faith and politics as the state’s oppressive regime exerts its influence over the Catholic church, this is an unsettling rebuke of government control and ideological manipulation — as well as a sharp cry against compliance with the prevailing status quo…
Sarah Ward, Screen Daily
Shiva Baby [Emma Seligman, 2020, US / Canada]
This slick, sly comedy of New York Jewish manners rests on a simple, claustrophobic premise: what if your whole precarious life, your carefully constructed, fatally fragile persona, fell publicly to pieces amid the ritual and solemnity of a stranger’s funeral?…
As writer, Seligman studs her intricately constructed screenplay with hilarious absurdity and scalpel-sharp one-liners; as director, she frames the mayhem expertly, with one eye always on the bigger picture. The result is an exhilarating and compassionate film about love, death, loneliness – and the life-affirming importance of dessert.
Lisa Mullen, Sight and Sound
Sound of Metal [Darius Marder, 2019, US]
Sound of Metal is a film of great beauty and great purpose. A project that first evolved out of Darius Marder’s work as a documentarian, it’s a triumphant rebuttal to films that represent disability stories as the stuff of quaint tragedy and saintly patience. Ruben Stone (Riz Ahmed, Oscar-nominated for his role) is the drummer of a noise band who’s built his entire life around two things: his music and his girlfriend Lou (Olivia Cooke). The couple travel from gig to gig inside an old Airstream camper van. Life is simple – but brittle, too.
One morning, Ruben wakes up to realise that he’s lost the majority of his hearing, as sound designer Nicholas Becker allows the aural world to crumble away and become nothing but a series of inscrutable thuds. Becker’s attempt to replicate the experience of deafness is not only technically impressive, but intelligently deployed. He drifts in and out of Ruben’s perspective, so that the audience never forgets how profound and sudden his hearing loss is…
Clarisse Loughrey, The Independent
Ahmed’s performance is a force to be reckoned with. This is an actor who’s deeply connected to his surroundings – those large, inquisitive eyes always darting around in order to take in every detail – so he’s particularly well-cast here. He’s a jittery, desperate, lovesick ball of tension, a wind-up toy about to explode, unable to process what’s happened to him.
Sounds of Nature *Short* [Eliza Petkova, 2021, Germany]
I really like this one. In 15 minutes it tells a story in which you never quite know where it’s going to lead. The last line of dialogue and the credit at the end explain everything. And you immediately reassess what you’ve seen.
Visuals and editing are perfect in telling the story. The sound is wonderful.
Impressive.
During a walk, a dental nurse realises the distance between her and her ailing mother.
Synopsis in Cambridge Film Festival programme
Spotted yellow *Short* [Baran Sarmad, 2020, Iran]
One of those little gems, like a precious gift. The beautiful visuals – compositions so simple yet detailed, framed to perfection – are one of the immediate pleasures of this film. It’s an exquisitely crafted short, where a simple fable becomes a rich experience, as wonderful as meeting a giraffe in the city.
Roya is a young girl with a yellow spot on her face. One day she feels the signs of a real giraffe in her life. And her normal life is slowly changing.
Synopsis on Mubi
Titane [Julia Ducournau, 2021, France / Belgium]
With stories of walkouts and people fainting, I was braced for the extreme violence. What I found was, yes, a violent film, but not the sickeningly grotesque display suggested by the hype. It is in fact an excellent horror with a surprisingly tender story at its heart.
But, as is often the case, to sensationalise Titane is to undermine the full scope of Ducournau’s work. Her impulse for excess leaves little room for impure or insincere emotions from her characters. Everyone is trapped in their most vulnerable state. Alexia, while on the run, disguises herself as the missing son of firefighter Vincent (Vincent Lindon). There’s not all that much familial resemblance, but when Vincent is asked whether he’d like to order a DNA test, he still snaps back: “What for? Think I can’t recognise my own son?” He feels like a piece of his soul has finally been restored. It doesn’t matter in what form it’s delivered…
One more thing – there’s a part of this film that I’ve been very careful to tiptoe around. Though it elaborates wonderfully on all of Titane’s themes, the surprise is just too good to ruin. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since.
Clarisse Loughrey, The Independent
Then Came Dark *Short* [Marie-Rose Osta, 2021, Lebanon]
Brilliant. From the very first image, I was hooked. Cinematography, sound design, the wordless story, told to perfection.
A mist emerges, a howling wind kicks in and the forest turns dark. Two men pull out a tree and drag it like a dead body. In a forest in the mountains of Lebanon, where the unspoken pact of balance between the villagers and the forces of nature breaks, legend has it that revenge is bound to happen.
Film’s Vimeo site
2. Older films discovered for the first time
Aquarela [Viktor Kosakovskiy, 2018, UK / Germany / Denmark / US]
Having been so impressed by Kosakovskiy’s Gunda (see above), I was excited when a friend recommended this earlier film being shown on BBC TV. I was not disappointed.
In Victor Kossakovsky’s masterful essay film Aquarela, water in all its forms provides the scale against which human life is to be measured. We watch it metamorphose from ice to liquid, snow to rain to mist…
In moments like the bursting of the ice, the film, in all its grandeur and careful unfolding, becomes apocalyptic in its own right. In asking us to contemplate water’s power and its densely metaphoric nature, we realize our extreme dependence on it in more senses than one.
Fatima Naqvi, Film Comment
The Ascent (Voskhozhdenie) [Larisa Shepitko, 1977, Soviet Union]
Why has it taken me so long to discover this fantastic film?
It’s a remarkable work, and The Ascent became Shepitko’s most powerful film. But before all that, she had to hide the religious parable from Soviet censors, painting Sotnikov as a solid Soviet peasant. Then when the movie came out, a fate of good fortune — rhapsodic praise from Pytor Masherov, a high-ranking government official — kept the film in the graces of the Communist regime. And when The Ascent took home the Golden Bear at the 1977 Berlin Film Festival, the USSR submitted it for Oscar consideration. The Academy chose not to nominate the film. Neither the first nor the last time the Academy failed to reward excellence.
Tastes change, nations rise and fall, yet movies remain. And with its stunning black and white cinematography, harsh realism and humanist portrayal, The Ascent has found new life in the 21st century as a bona fide masterpiece, one you can now own on Blu-ray or DVD from The Criterion Collection.
Michael J. Casey, Boulder Weekly
The Circle *Short* [Lanre Malaolu, 2019, UK]
There’s a view that society has of young black men from working-class backgrounds who live on council estates. The media, for example, often focuses on the negative connotations and crimes committed by some of these young men. That isn’t denying that crime can sometimes be an issue in some of these areas and should, of course, be combated. However, there are many young men in these environments who aren’t involved in any crime or negativity whatsoever. Yet they are still judged, not only by their surroundings, but by their economic status, what they wear and the colour of their skin.
I wanted to challenge the hell out of this stigma and show the flipside of the coin which is rarely talked about: the abundance of brotherhood, love and vulnerability these young men possess.
I made this film to show the reality of what it’s like for underprivileged, young black men growing up on a London council estate, not as being grim, but as an environment that’s full of youthful energy, strong family ties and camaraderie.
I also made this film because I am one of these men. I was born and bred in a council estate in Hackney (pre the cafes, hipsters and vegan fried chicken shops) and have seen and felt all the above, first hand.
Lanre Malaolu interviewed in The Guardian
Les Misérables [Ladj Ly, 2019, France]
Powerful, truthful, authentic, and insightful.
There’s little sense of artifice, as young stars such as Issa Perica lend gripping veracity to scenes that might otherwise have seemed contrived or overwrought. I struggle to recall a more arresting image than that of Issa, bruised and bloodied, bursting into tears in the midst of a harrowing ordeal, only to rise again like a silent wraith in the third act, which plays like an inverted social-realist revisiting of Gareth Evans’s 2011 Indonesian action movie The Raid.
A pulsing electro score by French music project Pink Noise adds sparse yet atmospheric accompaniment, with simple looping riffs building tension in key scenes, while more elegiac cues emphasise the strange melancholic beauty of the drama. It’s that sense of beauty – of the possibility of redemption – that prevents Les Misérables from being crushed by the grim weight of the world it depicts. It’s a world in which Ly grew up, and his love of these neighbourhoods, in all their hardscrabble glory, is tangible.
Mark Kermode, The Guardian
Saint Maud [Rose Glass, 2019, UK]
A powerful debut. Morfydd Clark and Jennifer Ehle are superb. The ending is truly shocking.
When it comes to horror, there is nothing more frightening than the human mind… The conjuration of wild daylight visions and spiritual torments in Saint Maud skilfully blurs the line between a possible medical condition and outright madness, while also slyly suggesting that the film’s heroine may in fact be possessed. In this respect, Glass borrows a page from psychoanalysis by portraying zealous spirituality as psychosomatic, but gives neither the religious dogma nor medicine a final say…
As the images mutate from drab and prosaic to more vividly disturbing, Glass slowly chips away at our certainty about how to interpret the story. By the time she rolls out the spectacular finale, we have plunged so deep into ecstasy that we’re ready to empathise with Maud, perhaps even to dread her wrath.
Ela Bittencourt, Sight and Sound
The Rider [Chloé Zhao, 2017, US]
I was prompted to see this after watching Nomadland. I think this might actually be an even better film.
Sweeping vistas and earnest, ultra-realistic performances are at the heart of Chloe Zhao’s moving drama “The Rider,” which follows the struggles of a modern cowboy after his promising rodeo career is cut short by a grave injury. The drama was filmed almost entirely on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota and features Pine Ridge residents — members of the Lakota tribe — playing thinly fictionalized versions of themselves…
the movie’s gorgeous cinematography will make you yearn to gallop across the Badlands with Brady and his friends. That, combined with Zhao’s sensitive direction and spare script and the actors’ down-to-earth performances, make The Rider a compelling drama about what it means to be a man in a world that doesn’t offer men all that many options.
Nikki Baughan, Alliance of Women Film Journalists
Time [Garrett Bradley, 2020, US]
The idea that the mass incarceration of African Americans is in effect a modern form of slavery has been explored in several powerful documentaries… But while others have tended to concentrate on statistics, history and politics, director Garrett Bradley goes the other way in her film Time, conjuring an almost expressionist account of the experiences of a family torn apart by prison, examining the toll that jail time takes on those outside the prison walls…
Eschewing explanatory title cards or on-screen text, Bradley creates a tone poem that ebbs and flows in hypnotically lyrical style, dexterously shuffling images from disparate periods to create something unified and immersive.
Mark Kermode, The Guardian
The Trial (Le procès) [Orson Welles, 1962, France / Italy / West Germany]
Anthony Perkins is perfect casting, and perhaps Welles the perfect, or near perfect, Director for this big screen adaptation.
For all our anticipation of high Wellesian style, The Trial constantly upends our expectations. It’s a film of unsettling opposites. Its fevered bursts of style are offset by eerily long, subdued dialogue scenes. For all the grim portent of that opening, the film also works as a dark comedy. And even though it places us firmly within the mind of its protagonist—that Kafkaesque cypher K, at once Everyman and no man — the film also undercuts that conceit by suggesting that K might not always be the innocent he pretends to be. Indeed, Welles uses his dream narrative to bring us face to face with a very stark reality: That, in the modern age, we are often responsible for our fate, and for our own downfall. Kafka’s symbolic novel of bureaucracy, law, and guilt captured something universal about the human condition. Welles literally explodes that to create a parable of the twentieth century, one that both embraces and destroys the Cult of the Individual…
At once surreal, comic, terrifying, mythic, and modern, The Trial is a beautifully made film, but it is more than that. It is Orson Welles’s greatest, most acute testament on the times in which he lived.
Bilge Ebiri, Movie Mezzanine
X&Y [Anna Odell, 2018, Sweden / Denmark]
Strange, unsettling, curious, confusing, brash, nuanced: all these and more.
With X&Y (2019), [Odell] has constructed a more elaborate meta narrative to further explore reality through re-enactment. Informed by the structure of Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York (2008), with the staging of Lars von Trier’s Dogville (2003) and dark humour of his The Boss of it All (2006), X&Y is, at heart, an earnest pursuit of truth, through smoke and mirrors.
Odell stars opposite Mikael Persbrandt, in Sweden a beloved bad boy, celebrated in the media as both heartthrob and esteemed actor despite multiple drug arrests. They play versions of themselves – their public personas. Sitting opposite each other in a studio-replica interrogation room, they hash out the ‘boundaries’ of their ‘performances’ in their film project and stoke a delicious, simmering sexual tension that Odell will later use as if it were Chekhov’s gun…
X&Y’s findings are less about chromosomes and more about the unease and uncertainty of artistic responsibility and accountability. Well aware of the history of cinema she’s taking on, from Ingmar Bergman to the more recent #MeToo movement in Hollywood, Odell is always in control, even when, for the viewer, her boundary-pushing is pit-of-the-stomach uncomfortable.
What makes the nuance of her critique so enjoyable is that these ethics are explored by the crème de la crème of Nordic actors: Sofie Gråbøl, Vera Vitali and Jens Albinus each play an aspect of Odell while Trine Dyrholm, Shanti Roney and Thure Lindhardt reflect Persbrandt.
Tara Judah, Sight and Sound
when curiosity threatens 