There are two sections:
- New in 2022 (new releases, festival films, etc)
- Older films discovered for the first time
Films are listed alphabetically within each section.
1. New in 2022 (new releases, festival films, etc)
Aftersun [Charlotte Wells, 2022, UK, US]
Incredibly impressive: subtle, atmospheric, immersive. One of the stand-out films of the year.
A coming-of-age story and an achingly beautiful depiction of a fragile father-daughter relationship, Charlotte Wells’ first feature is a marvel of nuance, full of evident but often unspoken affection. Paul Mescal (Normal People) is touching as Calum, separated from his daughter’s mother, trying to connect with 11-year-old Sophie (Frankie Corio, in an amazingly natural performance). During their holiday week at a slightly run-down resort in Turkey, they swim, sit on the beach and eat ice cream. Sophie is just old enough to see that in some way her father is deeply unhappy, but not adult enough to know more. An ordinary film would lead toward an explosive ending, but despite the mounting tension there is nothing plot-driven about this subtle, piercing, small wonder of a film, recently named Best British Film at the British Independent Film Awards.
Caryn James, BBC Culture
Alcarràs [Carla Simón, 2022, Spain, Italy]
A beautiful, rich, and powerful film. Another one of the year’s best films.
You can practically smell the midsummer fatigue that wafts through “Alcarràs” on the faintest and most occasional of breezes: a mixture of sweat, baked earth and ripe, plump peaches, inviting in the moment but suggestive of future spoiling. All simple seasonal pleasures are on borrowed time in Carla Simón’s lovely, bittersweet agricultural drama, and not just because winter is inevitably coming. For the large, garrulous Solé clan, who have spent every summer of their lives picking fruit from their familial orchard, this looks to be the last in that tradition, as they face imminent eviction from their patch of land in Catalonia. Yet as they squabble over their uncertain future — and plenty else besides — the sun shines and peaches droop voluptuously from endangered branches. There’s nothing for it but to complete the final harvest.
In her second feature, Catalan writer-director Carla Simón returns to the rural region that served as the backdrop to her remarkable, autobiographical debut “Summer 1993,” and the film once more benefits from her warm affinity for this alternately parched and verdant landscape…
Her follow-up shares and builds on many of that film’s virtues, from her subtly textured, fully inhabited evocation of place to her sure hand with non-professional actors, who this time make up the entire ensemble. A more drifting sense of narrative drive than the already mellow “Summer 1993” might make “Alcarràs” a slightly harder arthouse sell, but it confirms the strength and consistency of Simón’s directorial voice.
Guy Lodge, Variety
Beautiful Beings (Berdreymi) [Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson, 2022, Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, Netherlands, Czechia]
This stunning coming-of-age story from Iceland has a freshness and immediacy that delivers an unforgettable cinematic experience.
Beautiful Beings takes us away from the familiar rural settings of many Icelandic films into the city and the experiences of a group of four teenage boys. Coming from often dysfunctional homes, they forge friendships marked by banter and bravado.
The film doesn’t flinch from the raw brutality they face and instigate, but it also has surprising moments of tenderness. Brilliant, nuanced performances from the young leads and beautiful photography, which provide a poetic sensibility, make this a powerful, unmissable film.
If in terms of narrative there’s not much new here, there is a freshness and an inhabited vibrancy that makes this painful coming of age story feel exactly its own. And DP Sturla Brandth Grøvlen (“Victoria,” “Rams,” “The Innocents”) deserves a great deal of the credit for that, shooting the boys’ lives with an immediacy and a fluidity that is captivating, even when their behaviors are brutal. It’s a story told poetically, impressionistically, through sun-flare and cigarette smoke and the somehow heartbreaking details of Balli’s bad haircut and Konni’s acne and Addi’s eyelashes, only for a drive-by motorbike assault, perpetrated by Konni and Addi, to occur with the rattling suddenness of an action movie.
Jessica Kiang, Variety
Belfast [Kenneth Branagh, 2021, UK]
Kenneth Branagh’s latest movie is a semi-autobiographical drama about growing up during the Troubles. Though it contains sentimental and self-serving moments, (and presses the ‘killer Van Morrison track’ button way too often), I loved it. The majority of the scenes may be shot in black and white, but the logic that underpins the story is anything but.
Charlotte O’Sullivan, The Evening Standard
Boiling Point [Philip Barantini, 2021, UK]
Anyone employed by the service industry might find their fight-or-flight response triggered by Boiling Point’s restaurant-set dramatics…
Captured in a single, 90-minute take (with none of Birdman’s hidden edits), Boiling Point crosses back and forth over the invisible line that always bisects these kinds of spaces, dividing the public sphere from the private, the smiling face of hospitality from the quiet panic attack in the backroom. The film is always on the move, and yet somehow oppressively claustrophobic, as the tension gradually builds to the point of no return suggested by its title.
Clarisse Loughrey, The Independent
Close [Lukas Dhont, 2022, Belgium, Netherlands, France]
The performances in this moving film are astonishing.
The script is so economical, and the acting so beautifully natural (especially by Dambrine, a remarkable discovery), that Close feels less like a drama than a tapestry of fragments from a candid documentary.
The films that premiered in the main competition strand at Cannes have been unusually divisive this year. Every one of them has been loved by some critics and loathed (or at least dismissed) by others. But there were rumours all along that audiences might agree on Close, and when it was shown, towards the end of the Festival, the sniffles and sobs bore out those rumours. Some people may have reservations about some of Dhont’s choices, as I do, but it’s hard to imagine anyone seeing Close without being rocked by his tremendous empathy and vision. At the age of 31, he is already an exceptional filmmaker, and this is an exceptional film.
Nicholas Barber, BBC Culture
Come Find Me *short film* [Nela Wagman, 2021, US
Nicely told from the child’s point of view, where – like the protagonist – you are piecing together a story which is unsettling and confusing. Lovely lead performance from the young actress.
After a single car accident claims life of her baby sister, Sophia yearns for a mother now broken by grief and trauma. Her father, too, absorbed in his wife’s pain and his own, cannot give Sophia the support she craves. As Sophia’s mother begins to recover, it seems all she wants is to start everything anew. Sophia sees herself as left behind, and soothes her loneliness in a world of fantasy.
IMDB
Cow [Andrea Arnold, 2021, UK]
Brilliant and powerful documentary. The camera desperately tries to see what Luma is thinking, but we are faced with the impossibility of anything but a crude and highly ambiguous communication between the species. Yet, the film also makes clear the importance of our need to understand and in order for us to reduce suffering.
Andrea Arnold’s “Cow” is all the more powerful because of the humane conditions of the farm she has chosen to document. We may never know what Luma is thinking, but this sympathetic portrait makes her unforgettable.
Laura Clifford, Reeling Reviews
Drive My Car [Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, 2022, Japan]
Novelistic in its richness of character and depth of observation.
Despite the conscious theatricality of some of its scenes, Director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, who exploded onto the scene in 2015 with Happy Hour and went on to impress still more with Asako I & II and Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, resists the temptation to steer too close to the text he’s referencing and instead delivers a character-focused piece. Where it veers closest to Chekov is in its depiction of characters whose refusal to see one another clearly, and to recognise their similarities, limits their understanding of themselves and has an isolating effect. The bond that forms between Yûsuke and Misaki feels like a furious assault upon this, externally quiet though it may be. Rooted in forgiveness, it’s a renewed struggle for life.
Jennie Kermode, Eye For Film
Flee (Flugt) [Jonas Poher Rasmussen, 2021, Denmark, France, Norway, Sweden, Netherlands, UK, US, Finland, Italy, Spain, Estonia, Slovenia]
This animated documentary from Danish film-maker Jonas Poher Rasmussen is an irresistibly moving and engrossing story, whose emotional implications we can see being absorbed into the minds of the director and his subject, almost in real time. Rasmussen’s elegant digital animation, interspersed with live-action archive TV footage, makes for a seamless link between the present and the remembered past and provides an ingenious way of obscuring the subject’s identity, which still has to be kept under wraps.
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
Forever Young *short film* [Michel and Nico Arribehaute, 2022, France]
A lockdown film bursting with creativity and fun. Guaranteed to put a smile on your face.
Go Through the Dark [Yunhong Pu, 2021, US, China]
Guanglin is a blind boy from a poor single-parent family in China. His prospects would typically be severely limited, but he is also very gifted at the game of GO and gains fame as a prodigy.
This captivating documentary follows him as he navigates his way through the pressure of developing his talents, dealing with his troubled past, and the relationship with a father who is pushing him hard to succeed.
Cambridge Film Festival
Hit The Road (Jaddeh Khaki) [Panah Panahi, 2021, Iran]
Technically and artistically astounding.
The son of Jafar Panahi, Panah Panahi served as an editor and assistant director on his father’s most recent films, but this remarkably assured picture leaves no question that he’s a considerable talent in his own right…
There’s not a single moment in the storytelling which feels rote, not a directorial decision which resorts to cliché. The film’s opening is a case in point. An insistent child’s hand stabs at a crudely drawn piano keyboard in time with the music which accompanies the scene. It becomes evident that the keys have been Biro’d onto the plaster cast on the leg of the father (Hassan Madjooni), who half-heartedly swats his son away like a persistent mosquito. A single shot takes in the mother (Pantea Panahiha), and then, outside the car, some distance away and staring back at his family with shadows in his eyes, the older son (Amin Simiar). It introduces not only the key characters of the but also hints at the dynamics between them all…
Panahi demonstrates a complete mastery of tricky tonal shifts: a very funny moment involving a cyclist is followed by a veiled heart to heart between the parents which gives some indication of the gravity of the journey; a breathtaking wide shot, in which the single most important and emotionally wrenching event of the film plays out, is followed by a wondrous moment of fantasy which combines an homage to 2001 with a comic riff about Batman’s bashed-up batmobile. Thrillingly inventive, satisfyingly textured and infused with warmth and humanity, this is a triumph.
Wendy Ide, Screen Daily
How Dare You Have Such a Rubbish Wish [Mania Akbari, 2022, Iran, Canada, UK]
From the striking opening shot this film had me hooked. The film is a stark reminder of how pernicious the ubiquitous male gaze has been, and of the countless female stories we never heard. Society and cinema have always been the poorer for the scarcity of women’s voices. Thankfully, women’s stories are being heard more frequently, but there is still much more to do, and much more for us to understand.
Persistent and brave, the exiled Iranian artist Mania Akbari sensationally restores 90 years of moving images of hidden Iranian cinematic history in a fictitiously invented story of a male gaze which suddenly turns desire into oppression, obedience and ownership. She reconstructs the deleted wonders of Iranian cinema, compares their radical modifications and finds footage of the first protest with 20,000 women on the streets. She boldly seeks to restore and reclaim her own body after a long nasty battle against breast cancer.
Edvinas Pukšta, Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival
Il Buco (The Hole) [Michelangelo Frammartino, 2021, Italy, France, Germany]
It’s a magnificent piece of work, completely beguiling from end to end and one which wears its immense philosophical profundity with admirable lightness. In the spirit of its subject, the director offers us images of the like seldom seen in cinema, with each slow reveal of a crepuscular underground antechamber or a stalactite-filled wall gifting us a feast for the senses and soft-spoken hymn to human endeavour and the transcendent, mysterious beauty of the natural world.
Davey Jenkins, Little White Lies
In the Court of the Crimson King: King Crimson at 50 [Toby Amies, 2022, UK]
I love Leslie Felperin’s description of this as being like a “workplace comedy”!
In one way, for instance, this is a workplace comedy, like The Office but with huge drum kits, grizzled roadies and rapturous fans who are almost all late-middle aged white guys (except for the 20% or so who aren’t, such as the young Norwegian nun who finds parallels with religious music in King Crimson’s sound). The fan commitment is not all that surprising given the passion of the band themselves, especially the group’s leader and one constant over the years, guitarist Robert Fripp. A bespectacled, often severely suited figure with a West Country accent, Fripp explains here how he still practices for over 45 hours a week, and that doesn’t count performing. Severe and exacting, he’s clearly something of a musical martinet. Yet that perfectionism is also inspiring too: it explains perhaps why the many musicians we meet here have stayed with him, or quarrelled with him and stopped talking to him altogether, but still speak of him with awe.
Leslie Felperin, The Guardian
Inventory (Inventura) [Darko Sinko, 2021, Slovenia]
This slick Slovenian psychological drama is an amusing slow burn, with unsuspecting twists and turns and a host of curious characters.
Cambridge Film Festival
Mass [Fran Kanz, 2021, US]
There’s a strong sense of renewal to Mass. Clearly, the push of this wrenching film is towards cleansing and forgiveness, but that a debut film-maker could write and direct such an accomplished work, with performances by four actors in such finely-tuned harmony, says much about the renewal — and purpose — of cinema itself as the industry moves forward. With rigour and clarity of purpose, actor/director Fran Kranz holds the audience in his hands, probing at the unthinkable and daring to keep the faith…
Kranz and DoP Ryan Jackson-Healy shoot in extreme close-up, an unsparing, tight view of every line and delivery. It’s a small room, but Mass bravely immerses the viewer in a real world where awful events make no sense and arguments bounce against familiar walls. It emerges with the sense of human truth which, as the closing sequence emphasises, goes very deep. In a difficult, fractured time for the United States, Mass reinforces the power of open debate and how hard that can be, as well as rewarding.
Fionnuala Halligan, Screen Daily
Moonage Daydream [Brett Morgen, 2022, Germany, US]
A must for every Bowie fan. Less of a documentary than a sensory experience.
American director Brett Morgen’s kaleidoscopic collage of David Bowie’s life is a dazzling mashup of elegy, celebration and intimate portrait…
Is it definitive? Of course not. No two-and-a-quarter hour film could ever hope to contain Bowie’s labyrinthine legacy, and despite the exhaustive mining of rich archival material (some familiar, some revelatory), there are still plenty of roads for future film-makers to follow. What Moonage Daydream does manage to do is to share some of the adventurous spirit of its subject – a chameleon who wasn’t afraid of falling flat on his face while reaching for the stars. If Bowie’s career teaches us anything, it’s that no one can laugh at you if you’ve already laughed at yourself. Certainly his capacity for balancing seriousness with self-deprecation (“No shit, Sherlock!”) remained one of Bowie’s most endearing traits.
Earlier this year, film director Duncan Jones (Moon, Source Code, Mute) tweeted that, although he had not yet seen this new film about his father’s life, “it absolutely has the blessing of our family” because “I know it was made with love”. It sounds cheesy to say so, but it is precisely that profound sense of love that shines through Moonage Daydream.
Mark Kermode, The Guardian
Navalny [Daniel Roher, 2022, US]
Daniel Roher’s Navalny puts its cards on the table right away about the kind of movie we’re about to watch. In a sit-down interview, Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader with the golden-boy looks, waves off the interviewer’s initial line of questioning as sounding too much like fodder for a memorial. Instead, he says, Roher should make this a thriller. Roher’s expertly paced documentary (edited by Maya Hawke and Langdon Page) proceeds to do just that, conveying the mortal danger and daring subterfuge in Navalny’s campaign to expose the corruption and murderous abuses of Russia’s leaders. The telegenic Navalny makes a readymade hero for the screen, a youthful and often sunny contrast to grim-faced predecessors in Russian resistance.
Nicolas Rapold, Sight and Sound
No Bears [Jafar Panahi, 2022, Iran]
We can only hope that 2023 brings the release of Panahi from prison in Iran.
Fact and fiction, truth and lies swirl about each other in Jafar Panahi’s latest. The film – in which Panahi plays a version of himself – also deals with the age-old conundrum of whether to stay or go.
Panahi himself doesn’t currently have the latter option, having been detained by the Iranian authorities back in July and ordered to serve six years in prison. Given that, since the filmmaker was banned from making movies in 2010 by the regime he has made 10 features and shorts, it’s unlikely this latest act of repression will succeed in silencing him either.
Amber Wilkinson, Eye For Film
Oop [*short film*, Hongliang Verner Huang, 2022, China, Canada]
This was shown at the 41st Cambridge Film Festival. The futility, sadness, and inhumanity of war encapsulated in under 4 minutes. Masterful.
Pushing Boundaries [Lesia Kordonets, 2021, Switzerland]
Great film which won the Cambridge Film Festival Youth Lab Jury award.
Giving us a glimpse from the inside, filmmaker Lesia Kordonets follows the Paralympians as they prepare for the next Olympic Games while dealing with the division of family and friends and the worsening economic situation, yet still strive to keep morale high.
Cambridge Film Festival
Return To Dust (Yin ru chen yan) [Ruijun Li, 2022, China]
It’s a gorgeous, quietly affecting film that finds an unassuming beauty in this simple life in rural China, but which doesn’t shy away from the extreme hardships faced by the very poorest. A sleeper hit domestically, it reaches UK and Irish audiences having recently been unceremoniously pulled from Chinese streaming services, a victim, it is suggested, of a tightening official control over unflattering depictions of Chinese life.
Wendy Ide, The Observer
Riverside Mukolitta [Naoko Ogigami, 2021, Japan]
“Riverside Mukolitta” is a film about death affecting life, about little joys overcoming fear and about second opportunities in life, told with wit and personality.
Adriana Rosati, Asian Movie Pulse
She Said [Maria Schrader, 2022, US]
Both Mulligan and Kazan are excellent, but equally impressive are a series of supporting turns from Samantha Morton, Jennifer Ehle and – playing herself in a wrenching scene – Ashley Judd. Schrader’s sensitive, unshowy approach to the directing choices is a smart decision; this is a film that is respectful of and in service to the stories of the women.
Wendy Ide, The Guardian
Sick of Myself [Kristoffer Borgli, 2022, Norway, Sweden]
The sly pleasure of Sick of Myself is that Signe’s narcissism differs from the rest of ours more in degree than kind. Her impulses are as uproarious as they are repulsive not because they’re so hard to understand, but because on some level, we can understand them all too well.
Angie Han, The Hollywood Reporter
The Banshees of Inisherin [Martin McDonagh, 2022, Ireland, UK, US
Though Gleeson’s crumpled resignation finds ample room for both nobility and cruelty, it’s Farrell who really anchors the film. It’s tricky to play a character who every other character refers to only as a dullard, and then to make him so worthy of our sympathy and pain. But when the actor’s eyebrows twist up like a pair of divining rods, he’s able to push that “kicked puppy” look into something profoundly tragic. The Banshees of the Inisherin is really a beautiful work to behold.
Clarisse Loughrey, The Independent
The Electricity in Me *short film* [Mat Sheldon, 2022, UK]
The film’s visceral stream of consciousness comes directly from the diaries and letters of Writer/Director Sheldon’s birth mother, Joan Stockdale, whose thoughts and feelings he has crafted into an emotionally captivating film about a woman he never knew directly but whose creativity, refusal to conform and loyalty are clearly apparent.
Sarah Smith, Directors Notes
The Innocents (De uskyldige) [Eskil Vogt, 2021, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, France, UK]
Have watched this a few times; it get better with every viewing.
As for The Innocents, it might yet become a scary-movie classic: it greased my palms with anxiety and incidentally has some of the best child acting I have ever seen…
The Innocents is a nightmare unfolding in cold, clear daylight.
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
The Quiet Girl [Colm Bairéad, 2022, Ireland]
It seems a modest little story at first, a cinematic wallflower content to cling to the corners of its tight, boxed-in aspect ratio, rather than thrust itself on to the audience. But while The Quiet Girl, Colm Bairéad’s multi-award-winning Irish-language drama, might be small in scale, it’s one of the most exquisitely realised films of the year. There’s a kinship with Céline Sciamma’s Petite Maman in the crystalline delicacy of the storytelling – an adaptation of Claire Keegan’s acclaimed short story Foster – and the way it plays on the heartstrings like a harp. It also calls to mind the earliest work of Lynne Ramsay – her first feature, Ratcatcher, and short film Gasman – in the way Kate McCullough’s curious camera latches on to the small details that are magnified in the eyes of a child.
Wendy Ide, The Guardian
The Souvenir: Part II [Joanna Hogg, 2021, UK, Irelend, US]
Searching, leftfield, strange and imaginative – you could call The Souvenir Part II all those things. It’s also sensitive and funny. There’s warmth in various friendships, and Richard Ayoade brings laughter as the pompous, proud filmmaker Patrick, seen making a big movie musical that has grand folly written all over it. Yet he also has some frank, tender interactions with Julie which help propel her in the direction she needs to go to flourish and move on with her life.
The layering of Part II – the film within a film about someone’s real life or a version of it – is very skillfully done, never obvious or pompous (unlike Ayoade’s Patrick). This is a story about the importance of making mistakes, of learning, of pulling yourself up and trying again – whether in love, sex, art or friendship. It’s a delirious ‘making of’ film: the making of an artist and the making of a life in all its messy glory.
Dave Calhoun, Time Out
The Story of Film: A New Generation [Mark Cousins, 2021, UK]
Cousins’ scholarship draws from high and low, commercial and arthouse, Hollywood, Bollywood and Wakaliwood, and he tips his hat to the films that both homage and overturn the first 100 years of cinema. If there is a thesis binding together what is designed to feel like a stream-of-consciousness dreamscape, it is the awareness that to be truly original, cinema in the 21st century must subvert what came before. This extends to who is behind the camera directing our gaze. Cousins loosely structures his observations into chapters on comedy, musicals, bodies, horror, slow cinema, the surreal and VR, before jumping off into extracts of films that serve to synthesise all that he finds thrilling about the next generation.
Sophie Monks Kaufman, Empire
Train Again *short film* [Peter Tscherkassky, 2021, Austria]
It all began with a wonderful piece of found footage—as is so often the case with my films. Train Again was inspired by a 5-minute roll of 35mm film that a friend had discovered at a flea market and thoughtfully passed my way. It consisted of commercial rushes for our state-owned railway, presenting ten to twelve takes of a train emerging from a tunnel in the distance, gradually approaching and finally reaching the camera which in turn pans with the train as it speeds past and disappears into the distance—at the opposite end of the frame.
Aside from the pan, the takes bear an unmistakable similarity to the Lumière brothers’ L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat: What begins as a long shot of a faraway train progresses through all phases of shot-proximity before culminating in a close-up—whereby in our modern-day takes, the camera’s closeness to the tracks inscribes a tremendous dynamism into the footage at the moment of the train’s passing.Peter Tscherkassky, Mubi
The train rushes were filmed quite clumsily, some takes are a bit shaky while others break off midway—in a word, too funky not to want to do something with the material!
The Worst Person In The World (Verdens verste menneske) [Joachim Trier, 2021, Norway, France, Sweden, Denmark]
Instead, the film channels the unpredictable, sometimes magical, often cruel reality of living in the here and now. A thoroughly modern movie, there are explorations of hot button topics including #MeToo, political correctness and environmentalism, woven together with such ease that it avoids becoming a screed.
To watch this in tandem with Reprise and Oslo, August 31st is to see not only the growth of a city, but the evolution of us. The growth of how humans see and understand one another. This philosophy about modern life and romance is packaged gorgeously, with Kasper Tuxen’s sunny cinematography, but it’s a character study for the ages, with Reinsve, Danielsen Lie and Nordrum delivering three magnetic turns.
Trier understands both the euphoria of living and the banality of loneliness, and that no matter how much we think we know, the universe always finds a way to wrongfoot us. Catharsis comes in accepting our own smallness in the cosmos, and life’s only constant is its ability to surprise us.
Hannah Strong, Little White Lies
Wild Men (Vildmænd) [Thomas Daneskov, 2021, Denmark
There’s something very winning about the deadpan humour and underlying warmth of this very Scandinavian comic drama, which never becomes merely absurd thanks to our sympathy for Martin, a lost suburbanite ill-equipped for the challenge he’s set himself.
Paul Whittington, Irish Independent
Without you (Senza te) *short film* [Sergio Falchi, 2022, Italy]
I loved this. A simple story whose emotional depth is conveyed through an attention to atmosphere and simple observation. The lead actor’s face is wonderful – a lifetime’s experience etched into every crease – the camera loves him.
A very old man who lives alone and can’t forget the love of his life is attended by a busy and not supportive granddaughter, until one day…
Film website
2. Older films discovered for the first time
A Skin So Soft (Ta peau si lisse) [Denis Côté, 2017, Canada, Switzerland]
On paper, A Skin So Soft will probably look like another one of Canadian auteur Denis Côté’s off-center, exploratory documentaries. The filmmaker’s tenth feature follows the daily routine of six Quebecois bodybuilders, and their almost maniacal dedication to the art of building the perfect body. But we know, both from his skewed fictions (like Carcasses, Vic & Flo Saw a Bear or Boris without Beatrice) and from his tilted documentaries (Bestiaire, Joy of Man’s Desiring), that there’s always more to his films than meets the eye. As it turns out, this free-form documentary, shot with a minimal crew for a ridiculously small amount of money, is out to find the people that are hidden inside the body armor—the workout as revelation of an identity, a personality, the muscles as a mere facade for the person inside. It’s a film that Côté himself describes as one of his personal favorites…
Jorge Mourinha, Mubi
Dear Future Children [Franz Böhm, 2021, Austria, Germany, UK]
This film, as it chronicles the struggle for justice and equality across Hong Kong, Chile and Uganda, is an intimate and empathetic portrait of young people who are simply fighting for a brighter future.
What arises from these vignettes of radical activism and protest is a sense of deep attachment to one’s home, the kind of unconditional love that galvanises spirits into physical and ideological battles.
Phuong Le, The Guardian
Keith Jarrett: The Art of Improvisation [Michael Dibb, 2004, UK]
Keith Jarrett is more than ‘just a jazz musician’. This exploration of his life and work, including close encounters with the man himself, offers an exceptional opportunity to examine the contrasting worlds of jazz and classical music. At the same time, the programme presents a fascinating and analytical portrait of a complex but remarkable musician whose interests and influences range from jazz, ethnic and folk music to Bach, Mozart, Stravinsky and Samuel Barber.
The first documentary made with Jarrett’s full co-operation, the film also includes interviews with Keith, the musicians he has played with over the years, and members of his family, tour managers and other close musical and recording associates.
BBC iPLayer
Lamb [Valdimar Jóhannsson, 2021, Iceland, Poland, Sweden]
And although it’s set now, Lamb is a throwback to a time before cinema. Starring Noomi Rapace, an excellent Swedish actor who doesn’t always get the roles she deserves, it’s both a character study and a fable, about a couple who work as sheep farmers in a remote and misty part of the land. One day, they discover a lamb/human hybrid, birthed by one of their flock. They adopt the unusual child and begin to raise her as their own. Because this is a fairytale, this decision is a simple one, and the events — some of which are dark and violent — that unfold as a result are also simple, but have a profound and magical sense of inevitability to them, as in all the best fairy stories. Lamb takes its time to cast its spell, but before you know it, you’ll be hypnotised.
Catherine Bray, Film of the Week
MLK/FBI [Sam Pollard, 2020, US]
Through a skilful assembly of documents, propaganda, candid clips and photos, Pollard — a veteran editor of multiple Spike Lee films — paints a picture of how J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI mounted an obsessive white supremacist campaign to tarnish the reputation of the civil rights leader. This is aided by voiceovers from an impressive array of interviewees such as Clarence Jones, Anthony Young and former FBI director James Comey. That they are not revealed on camera until the final moments only makes the composition of footage more compelling.
Amon Warmann, Empire
So Long, My Son [Xiaoshuai Wang, 2019, China]
So measured is the pacing, so sinuous the timeline, so understated the subtle ache of the performances that you don’t immediately realise that Wang Xiaoshuai’s exquisite three-hour drama has been performing the emotional equivalent of open-heart surgery on the audience since pretty much the first scene.
Wendy Ide, The Observer
The Humans [Stephen Karam, 2021, US]
Stephen Karam has adapted his Pulitzer-shortlisted 2015 play The Humans for the big screen to unnerving effect. Slowly, the purely Aristotelian conceit – a bickering family converges on a ramshackle duplex for Thanksgiving – gives way to a sense of festering entrapment. By the darkened final act, one half expects to learn that the entire haunting psychodrama has taken place inside of the head of the family patriarch. Or that perhaps everyone we have encountered is dead.
Tara Brady, The Irish Times
The Lost Daughter [Maggie Gyllenhaal, 2021, Greece, Israel, UK, US]
Colman can make Leda simply driving a car seem dramatic, as the expression on her face quietly captures the emotional turmoil she tries so hard to contain. And Gyllenhaal can turn an image of rotting fruit into a jump-scare. Nuanced though it is, the story is always engaging and full of unexpected turns.
Caryn James, BBC Culture
The Sparks Brothers [Edgar Wright, 2021, UK, US]
I have to admit that I really knew little or nothing about Sparks before this, and for a long time I actually thought they were British, basically because Ron’s purse-lipped eye-rolling and grimacing at the camera reminded me of Kenneth Williams or Blakey from On the Buses. But Wright’s film has converted me. Sparks are the Gilbert and George of pop music. Or maybe it’s truer to say Ron and Russell are the continuing reincarnation of Pete’n’Dud; they are funny, perhaps uniquely so in genuinely fusing pop music and humour, in their extraordinary, surreal lyrics and brilliant album designs.
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
when curiosity threatens 