Parky At the Pictures (27/12/2024)

(An overview of 2024, with a Top 20 films list)

So many critics have declared 2024 to have been a dreadful year for cinema. What have they been watching?

The Hollywood blockbuster may not have had much to shout about over the last 12 months, but that's never a bad thing in an age when mainstream movies are made by committees to pander to the tastes of a demographic determined by crunching market research data. Indeed, the sooner that the American film industry can emerge from its superhero fixation the better it will be for everyone who prefers films to be made by directors with something to say rather than programmers creating digitised environments and effects.

For a reviewer with negligible mobility and a restricted budget for streaming sites, some titles will slip through the net. Even the odd award winner gets missed (particularly when links are not even made available for Critics Circle Award nominees. Sigh! It's a hard life for us pampered few). But Parky At the Pictures manages to see its share of new releases and much gratitude has to be extended to the distributors and publicists who are so helpful in providing viewing links.

There are only so many hours in a day, however, and a number of admired films went unreviewed, including Wim Wenders's Perfect Days, Pablo Berger's Robot Dreams, Trần Anh Hùng's The Taste of Things, Edward Berger's Conclave, Payman Maadi's Opponent, Mati Diop's Dahomey, Yorgos Lanthimos's Poor Things, Rungano Nyoni's On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, and Payal Kapadia's All We Imagine As Light. Similarly, even with twenty spaces to fill in the end-of-year round-up, there is still no room for the likes of such recommended items as Phạm Thiên Ân's Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, Agnieszka Holland's Green Border, Moin Hussain's Sky Peals, Marie Amachoukeli's Àma Gloria, Alice Rohrwacher's La chimera, Laura Citarella's Trenque Lauquen, Rich Peppiat's Kneecap. Marco Bellocchio's Kidnapped, and Cédric Kahn's The Goldman Case.

A clutch of documentaries are also worthy of mention, despite their failure to make the final section. Among them are David Tedeschi's Beatles `64, Alex Gibney's In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon,

David Hinton's Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger, Stephen Soucy's Merchant Ivory, and Arun Bhattarai and Dorottya Zurbó's Agent of Happiness.

But we have managed to whittle everything down to a Top 20 of 2024. And here it is:-

20) THERE'S ALWAYS TOMORROW.

Starting out as a singer, Paola Cortellesi has been performing since she was 13. As an actress, she won the David di Donatello Award for Massimiliano Bruno's Escort in Love (2011) and accrued further nominations for husband Riccardo Milani's Piano, solo (2007), Do You See Me? (2014), and Like a Cat on a Highway (2017), Bruno's The Last Will Be Last (2015), and Giuseppe Bonito's Figli (2020).

Now, with her directorial debut, There's Still Tomorrow, she has added six more Donatello nods and beaten Greta Gerwig's Barbie at the Italian box-office. Moreover, with this monochrome homage to the neo-realist dramas of the postwar period, Cortellesi has also sparked a debate about domestic abuse in a still stubbornly patriarchal society.

Rome, 1946, and Delia Santucci (Paolo Cortellesi) wakes to a slap across the face from her feckless husband, Ivano (Valerio Mastandrea). She dresses and (to the joyous sound of Fiorella Bini's `Aprite le finestre') prepares breakfasts and packed lunches for her spouse, teenage daughter Marcella (Romana Maggiora Vergano), and foul-mouthed squabbling sons, Sergio (Mattia Baldo) and Franchino (Gianmarco Filippini). As they leave for the day, Delia tends to her bedridden father-in-law, Ottorino (Giorgio Colangeli), who gripes because Ivano has left without saying goodbye. As the old man prattles on about the things he has done for the ingrate, Delia reminds him that teaching him to rob graves and drive his mother to suicidal distraction wasn't much of an example.

Emerging from her basement apartment, Delia greets neighbour Alvaro (Lele Vannoli) and trades him a sandwich for keeping an eye on the old man while she attends to her many jobs around her Trastevere neighbourhood. She gives an injection to the grandfather of a well-to-do family (where the wife is excluded from a father-son conversation about politics); delivers the bras and garters she has stitched for a lingerie shop; teaches a novice (who's on better money) how to repair umbrellas; and hangs washing on the roof of a building in which she is not allowed to use the elevator.

Stashing some cash so Ivano doesn't fritter it all, Delia returns a lost snapshot to an African American GI, who introduces himself as William (Yonv Joseph) and gives her some chocolate for finding his family photo. He misunderstands her eagerness to leave for her name (`Gottago'), but she recognises that he is as much a second-class citizen with his fellow troops, as women are in Italy. She tells market trader Marisa (Emanuela Fanelli) about him and promises to help her make some apricot jam.

Passing a garage, she bumps into Nino (Vinicio Marchioni), who has never forgiven himself for letting Ivano steal Delia away. They chat awkwardly and she gives him one of the chocolate bars and they share brown-toothed smiles, as the camera circles around before a customer calls Nino away. She bustles off and returns home to see Marcella sitting with Giulio Moretti (Francesco Centorame), the scion of a lower middle-class family. Gossiping neighbour Ada (Barbara Chiesa) claims the match will save Marcella from the drudgery Delia endures and she agrees to host a Sunday lunch so that Ivano can meet Giulio's parents.

Marcella is mortified that the Morettis will see how she lives, but Delia promises that she will keep everyone in line. She is feeling so positive because she has just received a letter about her entitlement to vote in the forthcoming election and she hides it in her jewellery box. The mood dips when Ivano comes home from work and immediately starts criticising and belittling his wife. However, he is overjoyed about the prospect of his daughter marrying into money and even gives Delia a proud squeeze. But, when she brings out the chocolate to celebrate, he accuses her of whoring with the Yanks and beats her (in a choreographed ritual that is danced out to `Nessuno').

Saddened by Marcella lecturing her for staying with a brute who cheats on her all the time, Delia screws up her voting paper and tosses it in the bin. Next day, after lying motionless during sex and waving away Ivano's apology (he's on edge because he's been through two world wars), she gets cross with William when he tries to stop her to chat and sees the bruises on her shoulder. She tells Marisa about the engagement and they share a smoke before she returns to a courtyard slanging match with Ada, who claims that Giulio's bar-owning parents are country bumpkins.

Despite laying on a good spread, with her best crockery, Delia is dismayed that Mario (Federico Tocci) and Orietta Moretti (Alessia Barela) realise that she has served them inferior meat and pasta. She manages to keep the boys quiet, but grandpa wanders into the feast in his pyjamas and accuses the guests of being wartime collaborators. Giulio tries to ignore the incidents, but younger sister Luisa (Chiara Bono) rolls her eyes and regards Ivano as a relict when he questions why she is still in school when she could be bringing home money.

Delia wells up when Giulio proposes to her daughter. But her hopes of celebrating come crashing down with Ivano's mother's best plate, when she trips on the step with the dessert and the house clears so Ivano can punish her. As they go for ices, the Morettis roll their eyes about the ghastly in-laws they seem set to inherit. However, after being told by Ottorino to spare the rod to prevent Delia from becoming accustomed to beatings, Ivano dances with her to Achille Togliani's `Perdoniamoci', as they flashback in their minds to their first meeting, courtship, and wedding before the abuse started and the kids came along.

A montage shows Delia going about her chores and being embarrassed when William stops her and tells her that she can always come to him if there's anything she needs. Passing the garage, she discovers that Nino is closing up and moving north to work with a cousin. He asks her to run away with him, but she knows she can't leave. However, she's hurt when Marcella disowns her for taking the blame when she burns the potatoes and protecting her from a beating. The savagery of the attack prompts her to buy material for a new dress so she can flee with Nino. But she overhears Giulio dictating terms to her daughter over make-up and working after they're married and she realises that, for all his outward charm, he's going to be just as tyrannical as Ivano.

Having overheard Ivano bragging to Ottorino about how they'll all be made because of the Moretti's café money, Delia asks William to blow up the premises. Marcella is heartbroken when Giulio asks for the ring back and leaves Rome for the family village because they've been ruined. Delia keeps her counsel, as Ivano tells his bawling daughter that she's escaped poverty in a country hovel, while the gossiping neighbours decide the explosion was an act of Zionist revenge.

With everyone out on Saturday night, Delia packs to leave with Nino. She has made an excuse to visit Marisa's building to tend to some patients and plans to slip away after mass. As she leaves, she realises that Ottorino has died in the night, but says nothing. However, Alvaro pops in to check on the old man and rushes to the church to break the bad news. Mourners come to pay their respects and drink free coffee, while Ivano puts on a show of grieving. An old lady nobody knows prays at Ottorino's bedside, as Marisa arrives to confide that the loss could be a blessing in disguise, as Delia would never have survived being away from her children.

After a two-day vigil, Delia leaves the money she has saved beside Marcella's pillow so that she can complete her studies. She takes her voting paper and tries to sneak out before Ivano is awake. When he catches her, she claims to be doing extra inoculations to pay for the funeral. But she drops the document and doesn't realise until she's in the queue at the polling station (after having stridden through the empty streets to Outkast's `B.O.B. Bombs Over Bagdad').

Ivano finds the form and comes storming after her. But Marcella picks it up from the floor and presents it to her mother, who is wearing her new top and lipstick to mark the special occasion. Not recognising her, Ivano walks right past and Delia gets to have her say in whether Italy should remain a monarchy or become a republic (although she has to remove her lipstick to lick the envelope). Spotting Marcella from the staircase, Delia mouths the `mmm-mmm' refrain from Daniele Silvestri's `A bocca chiusa' and everyone purses their lips in a silent gesture of defiance when Ivano tries to confront her. Marcella beams with pride at her mother and the 13 million other women who got to cast their vote for the first time in both the constitutional plebiscite and the Constituent Assembly election of 2-3 June 1946.

Despite edging towards `neorealismo rosa' and feeling more like a vehicle for Sophia Loren than Anna Magnani, this is nevertheless a splendid pastiche of the austere audiovisual style devised by screenwriter Cesare Zavattini to reflect the realities of Italian life after the Fascist fantasies peddled by Benito Mussolini. Cortellesi and co-scenarists Furio Andreotti and Giulia Calenda even borrow a Black GI from Roberto Rossellini's Paisà (1946) to reinforce the period connection, which is sufficiently strong to accommodate the odd anachronistic song choice.

These are often inspired, however, with by `Calvin' by The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion propelling Delia along pavements bustling with people going about their business in the wonderful tracking shot that accompanies the opening credits. But it's the preceding slap in the marital bed that sets the tone for what follows, as Delia's daily ordeal in an occupied country still suffering from food shortages is compounded by the violence of her demanding, idle, and irredeemably chauvinist husband.

The narrative has its melodramatic moments, particularly where Giulio and Nino are concerned. But Cortellesi deftly deflates Delia's first swooning tryst with the latter by coating their teeth in chocolate, while the luncheon party is a set-piece of excruciating precision. She also slips humour into the wake, as Alvaro embellishes his tale with each telling until he claims that Ottorino's last words were to claim him as a lost son.

The ensemble is exemplary, as is Valerio Mastandrea, whose white vest and short fuse brings to mind Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire (which would premiere on Broadway in 1947). Romana Maggiora Vergano also impresses as the naively judgemental daughter who comes to see the light. But Cortellesi wisely keeps the focus on Delia, whose quiet strength is rooted as much in the iniquities of the imbalanced society in which she was raised as in her own forbearance and love.

Her direction is as commendable as her performance, with her choices in depicting how Delia is battered being particularly intriguing. She is admirably abetted by production designer Paola Comencini and costumier Alberto Moretti, as well as cinematographer Davide Leone and editor Valentina Mariani, whose sense of rhythm is complemented by Lele Marchitelli's delightful score. Zavattini would carp at the occasional contrivance and resort to sentimentality. But even he would have to concede that it should not have taken eight decades for an Italian woman to direct a meaningful neo-realist film.

19) INSIDE THE YELLOW COCOON SHELL.

Having impressed on the festival circuit with The Mute (2016) and Stay Awake, Be Ready (2019), Vietnamese director Pham Thien An makes an astonishingly assured feature debut with Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell. Linked to the latter short, this distinctive road movie makes audacious use of long takes that locate the characters in their milieux. Showing at The ICA in London, this is an intimate, inventive, and involving three-hour treatise on loss and faith, place and purpose, and regret and redemption that is destined for the Slow Cinema pantheon.

Thien (Le Phong Vu) is dining with two friends in a Saigon bar beside a floodlit five-a-side pitch. A wolf mascot wanders into the bar and several others approach the table, as Thien admits that he struggles to connect with the concept of God: `The embrace of faith is ambiguous…I want to believe but I can't. I've tried searching for it many times, but my mind always holds me back.'

As some patrons cheer a goal in a 2018 World Cup match on the television, a female rep (Ngo Thuy Tien) tries to interest the trio in trying a new beer. However, she's interrupted by a metallic thud and the camera slowly pans to the street, where two motorbikes have collided head on. A crowd gathers, but Thien remains seated.

While with a masseuse (Chau Thien Kim) at a spa, Thien is asked to take a call and he discovers that his sister-in-law, Hanh, was killed in the accident that was survived by his young nephew, Dao (Nguyen Thinh). He visits the boy in hospital and does card tricks to distract him when he asks to see his mother. Indeed, Thien keeps putting off breaking the news, even though he has made arrangements to hire a van to take Hanh's body home to Du Linh for burial.

En route, Thien entrusts Dao with an injured baby bird that he found on the ground in the market. But, shortly after the Christian ceremony for his mother, the boy has to bury the bird in the garden of his relative, Trung (Vu Ngoc Manh). As Thien's brother left Hanh on her own, he insists on paying half the costs and Trung asks him to make a donation to Mr Luu (Nguyen Van Lu'u), who had prepared Hanh's shroud. Thien and Dao ride along a rutted rural road to see Mr Luu, who refuses the gift, as he feels it's his duty to help his neighbours. As the camera slowly approaches the window in which Thien and Mr Luu are sitting, the old man reminisces about his time in the military. He shows his visitor documents relating to his service and the camera performs a 360° to show the simplicity of his abode and the various images of the Virgin Mary and his late lamented lover.

The power gives out during a rosary service for Hanh, but no one misses a beat in their prayers. By candlelight, Thien does some magic tricks for Dao and explains that dinosaurs are extinct. The glowing fingers of a luminous alarm clock peer through the darkness, as Thien compares faith to the certainty that a good friend will return borrowed toys. Dao asks if they can visit his mother in Heaven and Thien promises they will go there one day.

After mass, Thien bumps into an old flame who is now Sister Thao (Nguyen Thi Truc Quynh). He comes to the convent after offending her by asking why she became a nun and she is embarrassed when he congratulates her and says she looks good in her outfit. Unable to sleep, he helps Trung capture a fat rooster who has attacked his own tethered bird at first light. They go fishing in the lake and Thien wonders why God acts the way He does, as he confides that brother Tam had entered a seminary only to be told to find a wife rather than a vocation. Marriage had clearly not suited him and he has bolted and now Hanh is dead.

After a top shot into the shallow bowl containing three large fish, Thien enrols Dao at Sister Thao's school on a misty morning. He is going to try and find his father, but his mind drifts back to a rendezvous with Thao in a grand abandoned house above the village before he had left for Saigon. They had kissed passionately, but she wouldn't let him go further and had explained that she had heard God's call. Thien had got drunk in a karaoke bar and sung sentimental songs out of tune before falling asleep in his gaudily decorated kiosk.

The sound fades as Thien rides through mist-shrouded villages. He runs out of petrol and a passing scooter rider siphons a bottle from his own tank so that Thien can reach Don Sien, where he's been told Tam has a job. Stopping to get his scooter fixed, he shows Tam's wedding photo, but no one recognises him. Over a drink, an old woman (Phi Dieu) asks Thien whether he's searching for his brother or his soul. She claims that her soul once left her body and she learned the truth about human misery and the brevity of existence. Looking into his eyes, she reminds him that there is no point in accumulating riches in this world if one loses one's soul.

Waking from a dream about his path being blocked by a herd of buffalo, Thien wanders out into the darkness. A cacophony of birds and insects accompanies him, as he wanders along the road in the rain until he comes to a small tree covered in butterflies. The next day, he finds Tam's home and meets his partner and baby. She prepares his lunch and they ride out to where he works. Thien holds the baby in its yellow shawl and watches the water cascade down a slight incline.

On waking on his bike, however, Thien finds himself alone. He is chided for being in the way by an old farmer who has no idea who Tam is. Wheeling his bike to the edge of the pond, Thien strips down to his underwear and lies in the cooling water to take stock.

While the choreography of Dinh Duy Hung's camera is often exquisite, it's the landscape and the plays of light, shade, and mist captured by its lens that most beguile in this languorous odyssey. Regardless of the location, Thien feels out of place. But this is hardly surprising, as he feels detached wherever he happens to fetch up, while also being uncomfortable in his own mind. Even his five year-old nephew reinforce his sense of ennui, as he simply can't answer the innocent, but probing questions that also keep troubling him.

Yet, while we spend considerable time with Thien, we actually learn very little about him. He seems to have a good job as a video editor, as he can pay for the funeral, but his life in Saigon is swiftly set aside, as he travels back to the scene of the romance from which he has seemingly never recovered and the starting point of the quest for the estranged brother who is possibly more enigmatic than he is.

Le Phong Vu plays the part splendidly, although the direction does occasionally feel Bressonian, even though the more obvious influence would appear to be Lav Diaz and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, with a little dash of Tsai Ming-liang drizzled in for light relief. With the exception of the endearing Nguyen Thinh, the remainder of the cast are required to flesh out ciphers, although Nguyen Thi Truc Quynh gets to exhibit passion as well as piety.

Blending in passages of solo cello and acoustic guitar, sound editors Vuong Gia Bao and Kin Ying Chong excel in complementing Pham Thien An's endless formal invention in exploring the riddle of the cocoon shell that traps people in the pursuit of material gain at the expense of their psychological and spiritual well-being. Viewers will have to decide whether Thien finds what he is looking for and what lies in wait for him and Dao. But they will also find themselves reflecting on their own preoccupations and priorities.

18) CLOSE YOUR EYES.

Spanish director Victor Erice is often dubbed the most feted director with the smallest filmography. While it's true he has only completed three features in 52 years - The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), El Sur (1983), and The Quince Tree Sun (1992) - he has also made 14 shorts since 1961, including the anthology contributions of `Segment 3' to Los Desafios (1969), `Lifeline' to Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet (2002), `Ana Three Minutes' to 3.11 Sense of Home, and `Vidros Partidos' to Centro Histórico (both 2012).

Moreover, he has also produced occasional gallery installations and documentaries like the frustratingly elusive Víctor Erice: Abbas Kiarostami. Correspondencias (2007). However, after 31 years, the 82 year-old Erice returned last spring with a fourth feature. Twelve months on, it finally reaches UK cinemas, and it's safe to say that Close Your Eyes has been well worth the wait.

In 1947, a Sephardic Jew named Lévy summons a private detective called Franch to his chateau, Triste le Roy. He is dying and wants the Spanish Civil War exile to travel to Shanghai to find his teenage daughter. As Franch embarks on his mission, the screen freezes and we discover we have been watching a film entitled, The Farewell Gaze, which had been abandoned after the actor playing Franch disappeared and was presumed dead.

He was Julio Arenas (José Coronado) and, in 2012 (two decades after he vanished), director Miguel Garay (Manolo Soro) is invited to participate in a TV programme attempting to solve the mystery. Miguel finds some rehearsal tapes in storage and listens to them before appearing on Unresolved Cases. Interviewer Marta Soriano (Helena Miquel) discovers that he and Julio were navy buddies who had wound up in a Francoist prison together for public order offences before working in films. As Miguel had written the part for his friend, he didn't have the heart to continue the project and became a novelist. But the loss still pains him and he resists prompting to speculate about Julio's fate.

As a favour to Marta, Miguel agrees to contact Julio's daughter, Ana Arenas (Ana Torrent), to see if he can persuade her to appear in the show. First, he calls on his old editor, Max Roca (Mario Pardo), who has two cans of film from the aborted shoot. He despairs about the future of a medium that has abandoned celluloid for pixels and suggests that becoming obsolete was also Julio's problem, as he couldn't cope with getting old and no longer being the heartthrob he had once been.

As Ana works as a tour guide at the Prado, Miguel meets her in the canteen. She gives him a photo of the friends in their 1960s sailor suits and laments that her father never got to meet her son. Whenever she watches his old pictures, she is moved more by his voice than his face, as she spent so much of her childhood talking to him on the phone, while he was away filming. Miguel admits that he agreed to do the programme because translating film books doesn't bring in much money. But he concedes that he enjoys living in a coastal village, where he can fish and tend his small orchard.

A chance find at a secondhand bookshop reminds Miguel about an Argentinian singer named Lola San Román, but the number he has no longer exists. Marta shows him her interview with journalist Tico Mayoral (Antonio Dechent), who believes that Julio was caught in an affair with the wife of an important person who arranged for him to be disappeared.

While visiting Max, Miguel sees a caricature drawn by his cartoonist son, who had been killed in a traffic accident. Max thinks the fragments of The Farewell Gaze should be screened in a cinema, but Miguel is more interested in locating Lola (Soledad Villamil). She happens to be on a visit to her old family home in Segovia and Miguel returns the book he had inscribed for her years before. They had been lovers before Julio had stolen her and she reveals that he had called her a week before his disappearance.

Miguel explains that Julio had been drinking and behaving erratically, which was a sure sign he had fallen in love. A cutaway shows Julio on a clifftop in a downpour, as Miguel posits that he could easily have decided to exit the life that had become too much for him and begin again under a new name. He asks Lola to play a song she had used to sing for him, but the lyrics prove too poignant and she stops.

Having picked up some postcards he had sent to his son, Miguel heads home to Almeria. On the bus, he plays with a flick book of a Lumière train coming into a station. Over a drink, he sings `My Rifle, My Pony and Me' from Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo (1959) with neighbours Patón (Alejandro Caballero Ramis), Toni (Dani Téllez), and his pregnant partner, Teresa (Rocío Molina). Their landlord is keen to move them off the land and they fear they will be forced to go.

Busying himself with fishing and translating a biography of Samuel Goldwyn, Miguel can't bring himself to watch the show. He's surprised when Marta calls with news that a man resembling Julio has been reported in a retirement home run by nuns. Belén Granados (María León) shows him the photo from the film of the missing Chinese daughter and he sees Julio (now nicknamed after Argentinian singer Carlos Gardel) doing odd jobs. Having sat opposite him at lunch and sung an shared song while chatting on a nocturnal bench, Miguel is convinced he has found his friend and calls Ana.

Sister Consuelo (Petra Martínez) allows Miguel to stay and he meets with Dr Benavides (Juan Margallo) to discuss when Julio lost his memory and why. They whitewash a wall together and Miguel shows Julio some of the knots they had learned in the navy. He ties one when Ana comes to sit with him, but he shows no sign of recognition and she is saddened by his suffering and makes plans to leave.

However, Miguel spots a white king in a box of Julio's nicknacks that Sister Consuela had been keeping and he asks Max to bring the film down for a screening in the hope the final scene will jolt Julio's memory. Marta sits with Belén and Sister Consuela with Sister Lucía (Ana María), as Ana joins her father in the darkness of the village cinema that has been re-opened for the night. Max is sceptical, as he believes screen miracles ended with Carl Theodor Dreyer. But the scene showing Lévy being reunited with Qiao Shu (Venecia Franco) brings tears to Gardel's eyes in a series of Falconettiesque close-ups.

Shots of a Janus head statue showing youth and old age from the grounds of Triste le Roy accompany the pre-crawl credits. It's an apt reference, as Janus was the Roman god of time, as well as beginnings, doors, gateways, passages, frames, transitions, duality, and endings. Moreover, the music composed by Federico Jusid seems to start with the same notes as the Ralph Vaughan Williams arrangement of `Picardy' used for the hymn, `Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence'. A coincidence, perhaps, but a rather Dreyerian one.

Deftly switching from the 16mm used for the unfinished 1990 feature and digital imagery for the 2012 segment, Erice foregoes the opulence that has been his trademark. But Valentín Álvarez's imagery is still evocative, as the action moves from an imposing French chateau to a TV station, a coastal haven, a rustic retreat, and a care home. There are also poignant stop-offs at a storage room (whose lightbulb packs in) and an editor's archive, where Erice and co-scenarist Michel Gaztambide reminisce about the glory days of projection and fret about a future in which films will be lost to digital decay and future generations will be denied the pleasure of singing along to Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson.

Erice specks proceedings with such self-reflexive grace notes, but this isn't a forbidding film exclusively for cineastes. It's a very human story, with Miguel being driven by friendship and his own need for either closure or a renewed connection. He's played with the hesitant sadness of someone who dreads making an unwanted discovery by Manolo Soro and his reunion scenes with José Coronado (whose contentedly amnesiafied Gardel is a far cry from the sullenly reticent Franch) are stoically touching.

Reuniting with Erice for another tale (after The Spirit of the Beehive) in which moving images change lives, Ana Torrent has a tougher role, as Ana has to deal with the prospect of meeting a man who has been absent in one way or another for her entire life and who she knows better from his films than from her memories. But she conveys again (as she had done as a child) cinema's power to haunt and transcend, as Erice seeks to reassure us that the lights haven't quite gone out on the Seventh Art just yet.

17) EVIL DOES NOT EXIST.

Having been forced to abandon the Paris shoot for Our Apprenticeship because of Covid-19, Ryusuke Hamaguchi agreed to a request from Drive My Car (2021) composer Eiko Ishibashi to provide some bucolic images for a live orchestral performance. During the course of the shoot for Gift, however, Hamaguchi realised that there was a feature in the silent scenario and the result is Evil Does Not Exist.

As the camera tracks slowly gazing upwards into branches fingering into the sky, we see eight year-old Hana Yasumura (Ryo Nishikawa) making her way home from school through a snowy forest. Father Takumi (Hitoshi Omika) cuts firewood for his neighbours in the small community of Mizubiki, which lies in the mountains some two hours away from Tokyo. The buildings are functional and far from picturesque. But the scenery is stunning and Takumi points out some wild wasabi as he and Kazuo (Hiroyuki Miura) are carrying spring water for the village's udon restaurant.

Realising he has forgotten to collect Hana from school, Takumi drives off. He finds her in the woods and she identifies trees as he carries her on his shoulders. Earlier, he had heard a hunter's gun firing and he follows tracks in the snow to find the carcass of a faun that had been shot in the stomach. On their way home, they also pick up a feather that they give to the village chief, Suruga (Taijiro Tamura), who makes quills for his son to pluck his harpsichord.

A meeting is held in the village hall with Mayuzumi (Ayaka Shibutani) and Takahashi (Ryuji Kosaka), reps from the Playmode talent agency that has plans to open a glamping site near the village using funds made available for enterprise during the pandemic. They present a video before taking questions. Several people voice concern about the positioning and the capacity of a septic tank, with Takumi being concerned that it will pollute nearby wells, while Kazuo's partner in the noodle shop (Hazuki Kikuchi) mentions the importance of pure water for her dishes.

Takahashi admits he isn't qualified to address these issues in detail and promises to inform his superiors, while trying to reassure his audience. But an elderly woman picks holes in his glib pronouncements about on-site caretakers to show how easily wildfires could start from unsupervised barbecues. A hot-headed local sneers that they are rushing their plans to meet the cut-off date for subsidies and has to be held back by Takumi when he demands that their boss and the glamping expert advising him attend the next meeting.

Takumi rises again to explain that the region was only given over to farming after the war and that his grandparents were outsiders. He suggests, therefore, that they will do what they can to co-operate if the plan is a sound one and will benefit the village economy. Suruga reminds them that water flows downhill and that they have a responsibility to those downstream. He suggests Mayuzumi and Takahashi take Takumi's number, as he knows everything about the eco system of the area and could help them refine their plans.

Back at the office, Takahashi and Mayuzumi have a Zoom chat with boss Honguchi (Yoshinori Miyata). He's in his car and is in no mood to listen to their misgivings. His assistant explains that redrafting the plans will cause them to miss the subsidy, which they now need having purchased the land. Honguchi sends the pair back to Mizubiki to offer Takumi the caretaker job, so they will feel like one of their own is involved. Mayuzumi doesn't think he can be swayed, but the bosses urge her to get him drunk and use her charms on him.

In the car, Mayuzumi and Takahashi wonder how they got themselves into such a pickle. He suggests she should quit, as she doesn't seem cut out for show business. But she was bored as a care worker and needs to have an interesting job as she has no intention of getting married. Takahashi started acting 17 years ago and became an agent after his show boss became embroiled in a scandal. She giggles when a dating app message pops up on his phone and he admits he wants to get married as he's lonely. As they drive on, he wonders if he shouldn't take the caretaker's job himself and retire to the country with his bride and a dog.

Finding Takumi chopping logs, Takahashi asks if he can have a go. He fails a couple of times, but feels a thrill when Takumi gives him a stance tip and he cuts through. They lunch at the noodle shop, where Takumi turns down the caretaker role and seems sceptical when Takahashi says he fancies doing it if he acts as his mentor. They accompany Takumi to fetch water and are surprised when they hear gunshots. He informs them that they are after the deer who roam on their glamping ground and they seem dismayed.

They call at the school, but Hana has already left. Ignoring warnings about going out alone, she went to a farm to feed some cows and seemed to have left hurriedly. But there's no sign of her at her usual haunts and the out-of-towners help Takumi look for her. Mayuzumi gashes her hand on a ginseng thorn and she feels uneasy because of what Takumi had told her about the balance of nature and gut-shot deer attacking humans. While she stays at home nursing her bandaged palm, Takahashi joins Takumi in searching for Hana. A tannoy announcement rings out, as the locals scour the woods.

In a field, the two men pause, as they see Hana approaching an antlered deer. It's been shot and, as Hana removes her bobble hat, Takumi suddenly leaps on Takahashi and applied a stranglehold. He's powerless and loses consciousness, as Takumi walks across to Hana. Picking up her lifeless body, he strides across the field into the murky distance. He stumbles and falls again in trying to stagger on. The moon appears through the branches of a tree, as we hear the sound of a man gulping for breath.

While making this remarkable film, Hamaguchi took time out to attend a lecture at his alma mater by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, the former tutor with whom he had co-scripted Wife of a Spy (2020). Kurosawa closed by telling the students to go out and `shoot something that will surprise even yourself'. Clearly, Hamaguchi took this advice for the ending that is bound to spark debate wherever the film is shown.

Interestingly, Hamaguchi told A Rabbit's Foot: `I can't clearly verbalise the ending either. At the same time, it's not that I feel a certain discomfort about what happens. I feel like the end feels necessary, although I can't quite put into words as to why.' He continued, `Myself and Hitoshi didn't talk about the motives behind his actions, but when I asked him to act it out, something about his acting felt very truthful. What is interesting to me is that towards the end of the film we have more information about the characters who are coming in from the city, and by the end they're wondering why this happened to them. The film, nor Takumi, the main character, gives an answer to this question. But that's partly the aim of this film, to continue to probe ourselves. Why is this happening to us?'

That's all that really needs to be said about the denouement, which is actually the least interesting aspect of the film, as was the case with the 15-minute eye-closing sequence in Lois Patiño's wildly overrated, Samsara. Much more intriguing is the way in which Hamaguchi sets the scene and deploys Hitoshi Omika, who had been his assistant director on Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (2021). Equally fascinating is the way in which he humanises the interlopers, through the meeting with their graspingly arrogant bosses and during the car journey back to the village. Ayaka Shibutani remains rather reticent throughout, although she opens up when teasing her colleague about his chat-up techniques. But Ryuji Kosaka drops the suave pretence to reveal a vulnerability and a need to be useful that bring about his downfall.

Contributing a clarity that reinforces the purity and simplicity of the locale, Yoshio Kitagawa's measured camerawork is deftly edited by Hamaguchi and Azusa Yamazaki to unobtrusively complement the shifts between lyricism and intensity in Eiko Ishibashi's beguiling score, which slips between orchestral and guitar-led passages and frequently cuts out abruptly to alert the audience that all is not always what it seems in a world in which talent agencies turn to glamping to make a few extra yen.

In focussing on a wild deer who attacks when wounded in a place where the water supply is endangered, Hamaguchi seems to invoke the spirit of Henrik Ibsen. There are also hints of Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring (1960) and those grim fairytales about woodcutters living with their motherless daughters in the depths of the forest. But this is very much a parable about the ongoing battles between tradition and modernity and the pastoral and the corporate that lie at the heart of Japan's current crisis of identity. It also has thought-provoking things to say about migration and settlement, vocations, and the creeping post-millennial sense of entitlement that has changed human expectations and behaviour patterns. In dodging the issue about the existence of evil, the ending echoes Joe E. Brown's line in Some Like It Hot (1959) about nobody being perfect and it will be interesting to see if Gift is ever made available outside the concert hall, as it might contain the odd elusive clue.

16) GRAND THEFT HAMLET.

For someone who, many moons ago, had redrafted William Shakespeare's Hamlet as a vampire chiller, the realisation that Pinny Grylls and Sam Crane had made Grand Theft Hamlet felt like a gut punch. But this animated documentary is so guilelessly splendid that any grudges soon melted away to be replaced by idiotically indulgent grins.

During Britain's third Covid lockdown in January 2021, actors Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen are playing Grand Theft Auto when they stumble across the Vinewood Bowl amphitheatre while escaping from the Los Santos police after a mindless casino shooting. As they explore, they decide to stage a production of Hamlet within the game world and announce a performance date. Within a few lines of the first scene, however, audience members start shooting at the pair and they get the giggles as the text about a quiet watch on the battlements of Elsinore clash with a gun battle with some helicopter cops that culminates in Sam's avatar being wasted.

Convinced they're on to a winner, Sam persuades film-making partner, Pinny, to help them document their experiences of being virtual producers. Connecting with her inner Tilda Swinton, Pinny creates an avatar and is interviewing Sam and Mark at Vinewood, when they are approached by Co3lho, who shoots them. He sends a friend request and comes to Sam's apartment to learn more about the project. However, he vanishes the second Mark completes the `Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow' soliloquy and they wonder whether they're wasting their time.

Having posted a beach video inviting players to an audition, Mark and Sam are frustrated when no one shows up. When Sam goes for a wee, Mark reveals that he has been to Holland for his paternal aunt's funeral and Pinny is saddened to hear he is now the last of his bloodline. He is discussing coping with the pandemic as a single fortysomething when DJPhil joins them. Despite looking like a shirtless man in a top hat, he is controlled by a mother and literary agent (Nemonie Craven Roderick) using her nephew's GTA because she loves Hamlet and is intrigued by the idea of staging it virtually in a world every bit as violent as that of Shakespeare's. She reads a speech and celebrates by gunning down Sam and joking that she should get Claudius while her aim is true.

Sadly, she goes home and they lose touch with her. But the audition brings Nora (Danielle James), Shamir Sanni, Tilly Steele, Sam Forster, Jeremiah O'Connor (a historical cook, and Jen Cohn to the venue, along with Gareth Turkingson, who claims to have a face for radio and a voice for mime. Lizzie Wofford is a voice artist and does a speech from Julius Caesar complete with throat-cutting motions. Rocking an alien avatar, ParTebMosMir turns out to be a half-Finnish man from Tunisia and he recites a passage from the Qu'ran. Finally, Mark's football friend, Dipo Ola, does a speech from Othello and they producers are surprised by the calibre of respondee they have attracted.

Sam sets up a company called Elsinore and the cast assembles for a read through at his offices. They have chosen Dipo to play Hamlet, but he gets gunned down by Fred Dog while performing on the roof and Mark curses that it's going to be very boring if gun-toting idiots are going to keep intruding. Worse still, when they meet him at a subway station to recce locations, Dipo announces that he's got a real job because lockdown is ending and he's not going to have the time to play the lead. Sam wonders if they should jack things in, but Mark wants to keep going, as the project has kept him sane during his long hours alone.

Sam thinks Mark should play the Dane, but he's the one who goes scouting locations to deliver `To be or not to be'. He perches on a rock in an oncoming tide and struts in boxer shorts in a clothes shop. But nowhere feels right and a driver they chat to (who has just broken his leg) doesn't feel in the right place to consider life's big questions. Mark admits it's weighty stuff and suggest the speech is more of a guy thing, as men tend to bottle things up and let them fester.

Eventually, Sam finds a dive bar in a rough part of town and swerves a brawl to ponder a giant python in a glass tank. Suddenly inspired after being killed by a cop, he reads the lines as lower-rung individuals mill round him on the street outside and he feels ready to play the role. Gareth has also found a way into Claudius, while Nora confides at a rehearsal that she has just come out as trans to her family and can relate to Hamlet's search for his own truth.

ParTeb offers to provide security for the show and patrols in a fighter plane. Meanwhile, the masked and top-hatted DontaeIsBetter comes along to watch and Sam and Mark are so pleased with an Act III rehearsal that they thank him for being such a good spectator. BTRaiderZ also becomes a key part of the group, with Sam considering him a kind of superhero stage manager, as he comes coming to their rescue whenever they need him. Unfortunately, he can't prevent Sam from plummeting to the ground when he misses his step on to a giant blimp for an airborne scene.

Jerry also falls off while preparing to play Old Hamlet's ghost and we see him driving a flying car, as he muses on the fact that the GTA setting makes it feel as though Elon Musk has thrown billions at the production. He can't believe that no one has thought of this setting before and he is as excited as the rest of the cast when Sam and Pinny discuss the fact that some big name actors might look in to see how they do. However, the real-life partners have their moments of tension when he forgets her birthday and she makes it clear that he is neglecting her and the kids because he is spending so much time in the game.

Having bought a giant plane without knowing what he is going to do with it, Sam feels troubled by the words of Hamlet's speech, `What a piece of work is a man!', as he can see parallels between the real and the GTA worlds, with their beauty and grotesque violence bringing out the best and worst in people.

On 4 July 2022, without once performing the play all the way through, the company assembles to do their best and make the most of some wonderfully imaginative settings. Sam admits those guests waiting to come into the GTA realm, while Mark announces that the YouTube and Instagram links are live. He can't resist a chuckle when everyone on the blimp dies at the end of the opening battlements scene, but the rest of the show goes without a hitch and Pinny is the first to applaud before everyone decamps to dance at Dontae's nightclub. Mark and Sam promise to keep in touch, as the former logs out. But we get to see them for real, as Grand Theft Hamlet wins at the Stage Awards at the Drury Lane Theatre in 2023.

It's a fitting end to a bold and innovative enterprise, which confirms that Bill the Bard had it right when he said all the world's a stage. Nowadays, however, the entire virtual world is available for strolling players to strut their stuff - because, as this playfully challenging actuality confirms, we are all playing parts and making entrances and exits until our final curtain falls.

Despite a couple of linking scenes between Sam and Mark and the birthday argument with Pinny feeling a bit stage-managed (she's co-directing, filming, and editing the feature for goodness sake, so it's not like they're not in it together), there is a sweep-along spontaneity to the picture that is made all the more enjoyable by the oddball nature of some of the walk-by intruders roaming the online, multi-player universe and by the growing willingness of the cast members to open up about themselves and why they sought out such an unusual project.

While the visuals are down to GTA, they are deftly edited by Pinny Grylls, while the music and sound design by James Perera deepens the textural ambience so that viewers feel submerged in the sights and sounds being experienced by the players and their avatars. They also help Crane and Oosterveen make a 422 year-old play feel wholly relevant to the pandemic generation, which had to confront mortality on a global scale that had not been witnessed for over a century.

Likely to amuse video-sceptics and techno-novices than hardcore gamers, this has a can-do spirit that and a readiness to accept people for who they are - in real and virtual scenarios - that infuses the film with an optimism to match its intelligence, empathy, and occasional laugh-out-loud ridiculousness. Ultimately, the rest is silence. But one does hope that Crane selling t-shirts emblazoned with his line, `If I could just request that you refrain from killing each other.' They could change the world.

15) MONSTER.

Now in his sixties, Hirokazu Kore-eda is the latest in a long line of humanist Japanese film-makers. Returning home after making The Truth (2019) in France and Broker (2022) in South Korea, he sets himself the challenge of working from a screenplay by another hand for the first time since his outstanding 1995 debut, Maborosi. With its Rashomon-like structure, Monster, may not be one of Kore-eda's major works. But its manipulation of perspectives and assumptions coaxes viewers into reassessing their role in the storytelling process.

Saito Mugino (Sakura Andô) lives in Suwa in Nagano Province with her tweenage son, Minato (Soya Kurokawa). When a nearby building catches fire, he asks her whether it's possible to transplant a pig's brain into a human and mentions that the idea came from his fifth-grade teacher, Hori (Eita Nagayama). At the dry cleaners where she works, Saito hears a rumour that Hori was at a hostess bar in the torched building and she wonders if he's odd or just lonely.

Having caught Minato cutting his own hair, losing a shoe, and putting soil in his school water bottle, Saito tries to use his late father's birthday to find out what's going on in his life. But he refuses to talk at the shrine in their apartment with her in earshot. When he fails to come home, Saito finds him singing `Who is the monster?' in a darkened railway tunnel. She asks about his bruised ear on the drive home and is horrified when Minato opens the car door and rolls out into the road.

When Minato accuses Hori of calling him a pig-brained monster and pulling his ear until it bled, Saito goes to the school to complain. Principal Fushimi (Yûko Tanaka) is preoccupied because her grandson has just died and Saito is dissatisfied with the half-hearted apology that Hori makes at a formal meeting, in which the senior staff bow deeply and urge Hori into showing more sincerity.

Convinced that Hori has continued to bully her son, Saito returns to the school and demands that Fushimi (who she has seen tripping an unruly child in the supermarket) takes her claim seriously and deals with her like a human being rather than making displays of old-fashioned civility. Seeing Hori, she chases after him and demands his dismissal after having accused him of starting the recent fire. However, he counters by stating that Minato is a bully and a disruptive influence.

After finding a lighter in Minato's room, Saito goes to see Yori (Hinata Hiiragi), the classmate her son has supposedly picked on. He seems cheerful until she corrects his spelling in a letter wishing Minato a speedy recovery from a cold. She spots a burn on his forearm and insists on taking him to the school, where he avers that he is not being bullied by her son. When the principal tries to leave the room, Saito follows and asks her to show some compassion, just as she can sympathise with her because her husband had accidentally reversed over their grandson.

Shortly after Hori makes a public apology for taunting and striking, he is dismissed. But he's back at the school on the day Minato throws himself off a staircase and Saito is at the end of her tether when she comes to collect him. At bedtime, he tells her that he has seen his father and he passed on a message. He also asks his mother not to feel sorry for him. But, as a typhoon blows up outside, Saito finds Minato missing from his room, with the floor covered in drawings of a monster.

At this juncture, we return to the night of the fire and start to see the same events from Hori's point of view. He is on a date with girlfriend Hirona (Mitsuki Takahata) and is spotted near the hostess bar. She teases him about taking his job too seriously and says no one remembers their elementary school teacher. When he enters his classroom to find Mitano throwing stuff around, he tries to calm him down and accidentally bumps his nose, which starts to bleed and the kids look on in shocked silence.

When Saito's complaint comes in, Fushimi and the senior male teachers rehearse his apology and he is struck by the fact that the principal ensures a photo of her deceased grandson can be seen from her disk. As she was on compassionate leave when he started, he doesn't know her and he's surprised when a colleague informs him that her husband took the blame for the accident when she was actually at the wheel.

Concerned about Yori, Hori goes to his home and is taken aback when his father, Shoda (Akihiro Kakuta) says he's got a pig's brain and needs sorting out. He's further perplexed when he overhears Yori singing the monster song in the washroom after seeing Mitano beating a hasty retreat. When one of the girls shows him a dead cat in the playground and claims Mitano had been playing with it, Hori asks her to share her accusation that the boy had killed the cat with the principal. However, the conversation is misconstrued by another teacher and Hori is pinned against a wall for inappropriate behaviour.

When Saito hires a lawyer to sue the school, Fushimi hangs him out to dry and forces him to apologise in front of the fifth-grade parents. As he leaves, he accuses her of using him as a scapegoat (like her husband) to protect her reputation, but she doesn't rise to the bait. Articles appear about him in the press and Hirona keeps her distance, as kids leave pig brains on his doorstep.

Desperate to clear things up after Fushimi dismisses him with the words `what actually happened does not matter', Hori returns to the school and tries to reason with Mitano. But he falls downstairs and Hori is accused of having pushed him. When the typhoon strikes, Hori is transferring his goldfish in a bowl when he slips and water splashes a pile of unmarked homework. Recognising Yori's writing, he notices that his spelling errors make up the characters of Mitano's name and he rushes round to the house to tell him that he understands what has been going on. But the boy is already missing and Hori joins Saito in searching for him by the railway tunnel. Ignoring warnings about mudslides, the pair find an old carriage and force open a window and call out to Mitano and Yori.

After we see Fushimi visiting her husband in jail, we return to the night of the fire, when she sees Yori drop a lighter as he runs past her on a bridge. He uses his phone to film Hori at the scene and sends a link to Minato in bed. At school, Minato orders Yori to stay away from him because he's a bit eccentric and he doesn't want to get bullied by association. But he feels an affection for him and sneaks time alone, even though he cuts off the locks of hair that Yori had stroked during a moment in the music storeroom.

When their classmates try to force Yori to kiss one of the girls, Minato starts chucking things around to protect him and Yori smiles quietly in recognition of his action. As a reward, he shows him the railway carriage where he hides and they have fun pretending to be the crew. Wandering through the woods, they find a dead cat and Yori insists on cremating it. Minato asks if he set light to the hostess bar because his father was there, but Yori only declares alcohol to be bad.

On the day bullies lock Yori in a toilet stall, Mitano slips away without freeing him and Hori thinks he must have been the culprit. When they discuss the incident, Mitano claims that they can trust Hori as he's kind, although Yori takes exception to his frequent joke about the need for boys to act like men. He tells Yori to stop believing he's got a pig's brain and to resist his father's efforts to `cure' him so that his mother comes up. When Yori asks about Mitano's father, he implies that he died while on an illicit tryst with another woman.

Decorating the carriage, they spend hours drawing and playing in the woods, where Minato teases Yori for knowing the names of all the flowers. They devise ways of putting each other's names into their homework. But Minato is dismayed when Yori announces that he's being sent to live with his grandmother and changing schools. They hug, but Minato suddenly feels awkward and pushes Yori away and speeds off on his bike. Moreover, when he gets teased for being lovey-dovey with Yori because he refuses to gang up on him in an art lesson, Minato loses his temper and pins Yori to the floor. Hori stops the fight and agrees not to report them if they make up like men.

Heading to the carriage, Minato waits for Yori to come. But he never does and this is the night that Saito finds him in tunnel and he jumps out of the car on the way home (after he had tried to apologise for not being as much of a man as his rugby-playing father). As we fast forward through events as Minato copes at school with Yori's absence, we pause to see him rush round to the house when he texts to say he's back from his grandmother's . His father proudly tells Minato that Yuri has been cured and met a nice girl while he was away. But Yori confides that he's just the same and Minato listens through the door as his friend is punished.

With Hori having been sacked and ejected after trying to confront Minato on the stairs, he is overheard apologising on the balcony outside his classroom by Fushimi. He admits to having fibbed about Hori and she confesses that she has also told lies. Joining the principal in the music room, he volunteers that he likes someone but it worried they can never be happy and she reassures him that everyone is entitled to feel good. She hands him a trombone and picks up a French horn and tells him to blow hard to let out any negative feelings. The sound they make echoes around the school.

On the day of the typhoon, Minato finds Yori asleep in a filled bath and he drags him out of the water. They go to the carriage, which seems to capsize during the storm. As we see Fushimi peering down into a rushing stream and Saito and Hori make a dash through a safety cordon to get to the railway coach, the boys clamber out of a window into the sunshine. Yori wonders whether they've been reborn, but Minato reassures him that they are the same as they have ever been, as they run through the long grass whopping at the joy of being alive.

TV veteran Yuji Sakamoto won the Best Screenplay prize at Cannes for this nonlinear rite of passage. Yet it never really hangs together because the convolutions are so archly self-conscious. There's a deliberation about the way in which the information is doled out that leaves viewers with no option other than to draw erroneous conclusions before being put right in a final reel that blithely adopts an omniscient perspective. No one likes a whodunit in which the telltale clue appears out of thin air and this approach to constructing a narrative is predicated too much towards teaching the audience a lesson rather than allowing them to participate in the process.

Sharing a school setting with Hong Kong director Nick Cheuk's Time Still Turns the Pages and certain themes with Lukas Dhont's Close (both 2023), this remains an intriguing story because Minato and Yori are so well played by Soya Kurokawa and Hinata Hiiragi and so well directed by Kore-eda. There's nothing cutesome about their relationship or trite about the anguished soul-searching that the former endures in order to come to terms with who he is. But Hori is much less convincingly drawn, as he is the pivot around which the dramatic conceit turns. Consequently, Kore-ada almost requires Eita Nagayama to give two separate performances that he stitches into a whole in the editing suite. More might have been made of the scenes with Mitsuki Takahata's seemingly reluctant girlfriend, as they are the only ones in which Hori is not having to react to events not of his own making. Similarly, despite the excellence of Yûko Tanaka's enigmatic performance, the subplot involving Fushimi's dead grandson and blame-taking husband hardly feels like a commensurate situation to Hori being scapegoated for the good of the school.

Even Sakura Andô's bullish display rings hollow, particularly in the scenes in which she browbeats the principal and her kowtowing staff. Of course, children hide secrets from parents and Saito has plenty to contend with in holding down a job and seemingly ensuring that Minato continues to love his father, even though he appears to know that he seemingly died during an adulterous assignation. But the tenaciousness of her bid to ruin Hori and browbeat his superiors into showing some human emotion feels forced because we know next to nothing about her personality and little more about how well she actually knows her child. That said, Yori's relationship with his father is like something out of a soap opera, as is the business of the girl and the dead cat.

Ryûto Kondô's cinematography is admirable, whether in the confines of the school rooms and the shabby the railway carriage or in the open spaces where the boys can be themselves. The late Ryuichi Sakamoto's piano score also makes a poignant contribution, with the haunting blasts of the brass instruments reinforcing the overall sense of discordancy. But, in spite of the odd expected passage of emotional delicacy, the gimmicky strategies employed on this dissertation on the socialisation of children and the elusive nature of happiness means it falls far short of such exceptional Kore-eda outings as After Life (1998), Nobody Knows (2004), Still Walking (2008), Like Father, Like Son (2013), and the Palme d'or-winning Shoplifters (2018).

14) SLEEP.

Having served as assistant director to Bong Joon-ho on Okja (2017), Jason Yu makes his directorial debut with Sleep, a mischievous chiller that sets out to test a South Korean couple's motto, `Together We Can Overcome Anything'.

Residing in a comfortable apartment, award-winning actor, Hyun-su (Lee Sun-kyun), and officer worker wife, Soo-jin (Jung Yu-mi), are expecting their first child. One night, however, Hyun-su mumbles, `Someone is inside,' in his sleep, prompting Soo-jin to take a look around in the darkness. A loud knocking turns out to be a door banging in the wind and Soo-jin blames their cute dog, Pepper. But new downstairs neighbour, Min-jung (Kim Guk-Hee), complains that noises have been disturbing her for several days.

Remembering nothing of the incident, Hyun-su is glad that the grumpy old man who had previously lived beneath them has gone. But the hormonal Soo-jin is feeling vulnerable and becomes concerned when her husband keeps scratching his face while he sleeps. He refuses to see a doctor, even though she finds splotches of blood on the wooden floor and Pepper cowering under the bed.

Returning from work to find Hyun-su sat in the dark, Soo-jin is surprised by his suggestion that he should quit acting to become an estate agent. She reassures him that he is a fine actor, but is spooked enough to put over gloves on his hands when he goes to bed. She works late, only to be appalled when Hyun-su sleepwalks into the kitchen and starts scarfing down raw meat and fish. As Pepper barks furiously, Soo-jin follows her husband into the bedroom and has to pull him back from the open window when he threatens to throw himself out.

Wrestling him to the floor, Soo-jin is amazed when Hyun-sucomes round and has no idea what has been going on. He agrees to see a doctor (Yoon Kyung-ho), who claims he has a REM sleep disorder that can be cured by making the apartment as safe as possible, quitting alcohol, and getting early nights. Soo-jin's mother (Lee Kyung-Jin), however, thinks he's possessed and urges her daughter to consult a shaman and paste a protective symbol to the underside of the bed.

Despite giving Hyun-su a thumbs-up before he drops off, she wakes in the night to find food packaging on the kitchen floor and she screams on opening the fridge while searching for Pepper. But a new chapter starts, as Soo-jin gives birth to a daughter, Ha-yun, and she refuses to allow Hyun-su to move into a nearby inn to stop him from causing any more nocturnal harm. Indeed, she reinforces the security arrangements that now include confining Hyun-su to a constricting sleeping bag.

With her mother still insisting that divine intervention rather than medication is required, Soo-jin becomes suspicious when she sees Min-jung and her son, Jin-hyuk (Kim Jun), walking a dog named Andrew, who is the image of Pepper. She also takes umbrage when the neighbour suggests that she should leave Hyun-suif the marriage isn't working out. This makes Soo-jin even more determined to find a solution, even if it means sleeping in the bath with the baby and her spouse weeing up the wall in the night.

Furious at the doctor when he can't promise a quick cure and refuses to try stronger pills, Soo-jin throws something at his head. Embarrassed, Hyun-su goes to sleep in the car, but his wife is adamant that they will see this through together, come what may. New locks are put in to keep Hyun-su from wandering. But it's Soo-jin's mother who makes the decisive move, when she hires shaman Haegoong (Kim Keum-Soon) and she immediately determines that Hyun-su is being haunted by the ghost of an old man who letches after Soo-jin. However, she reveals she can only exorcise him if she knows his name and shoots Hyun-su a daggers stare, as he placidly cradles his daughter.

Having checked that all of her old boyfriends are still alive, Soo-jin wonders if the man from downstairs might be getting his revenge for the noise they used to make during love making. She discovers from Min-jung that Park Choon-Ki (Lee Dong-Chan) was her father and Soo-jin becomes so convinced that is stalking them that she asks her sleeping spouse if he is going to harm Ha-yun and a voice replies, `I don't know.'

Hearing crying coming from outside, Soo-jin finds her baby in a dumpster. But she has been dreaming after Hyun-su had woken in the night and put her to bed because she is exhausted after standing vigil. She is cross with him for removing the symbol from under the mattress, but dozes off. Rousing with a start, Soo-jin panics when she can't find Ha-yun and burns her hands in overturning a bubbling pot of soup in case the infant is being boiled alive. In fact, she had been having her nappy changed and Hyun-su is aghast at seeing his wife kneeling on a puddle of stock. Before he can react, however, she knocks him cold with the pan and he wakes to find his hand and feet bound, as Soo-jin straddles him with a knife, as she demands to know what Mr Park wants of her. Hyun-su calms her down by disclosing that the doctor had changed his prescription, so he hopes that things can start getting back to normal.

After a long rest cure, tests show his REM patterns have stabilised, while Soo-jin has spent a month in a psychiatric unit, while her mother babysit. When Hyun-su goes to collect her, however, he finds she discharged herself and he finds her at home. The main room is lit by candles and Soo-jin explains in front of a large screen that they have to get Mr Park's ghost out today or they are stuck with it. When he goes to leave, she hurls the `Together We Can Overcome Anything' sign into the hall mirror. Returning to the lounge, Hyun-su watches as she explains how Mr Park's death coincided with his REM episodes and shows him photographs of a failed exorcism. Then, she produces a bound-and-gagged Min-jung from the bathroom and threatens to bore a power drill into her skull unless the ghost leaves.

As midnight approaches, Mr Park bids farewell to his daughter and urges her to leave the building, as it's inhabited by lunatics. Hyun-su slumps forward and Soo-jin rushes to check he's no longer possessed. She rests her head on his chest and he looks away with a look of relief that's just sufficiently ambiguous to leave the lingering suspicion that all is still not well.

While it requires a certain suspension of disbelief, there's nothing particularly complicated about this Babadookian saga. It's not that frightening, either, despite the creeping, claustrophobicising camerawork. A bit more time might have been taken to show how well Hyun-su and Soo-jin rub along together, while Chapter Three is frustratingly rushed, as Soo-jin resorts to desperate measures to get her perfect life back. However, Lee Sun-kyun and Jung Yu-mi play off each other splendidly, as husband and wife take turns to exhibit eccentric behaviour.

Production designer Shin Yu-jin and cinematographer Kim Tae-soo artfully conspire to use lighting shifts to transform a cosy dwelling into a hell hole, in which everyday items like refrigerators and stew pots become implements of terror. Editor Han Meey-eon does a good job of timing the jolts, although Yu prefers to keep moments like Pepper's discovery and Hyun-su's exorcism off screen, as he lays the emphasis less on the horror aspect of the story than its human factor.

The first two chapters are leavened with disarming flashes of wit and their absence from the denouement expose the clumsy way in which Yu strives to strap a few shocks on to the action with the plot's loose ends. He doesn't quite succeed and also fumbles the bid to conclude on a cryptic note. Nevertheless, this is a mostly engaging and often amusing first outing, which intriguingly examines matrimonial dynamics and atones for missteps in scripting and direction with the off-kiltering atmosphere and some excellent acting.

13) IN CAMERA.

Having written a play while studying English at the University of Salford, Naqqash Khalid made his first short, Parts (2016), in New York in just 12 hours with a crew recruited from Craigslist. Two years after making Stock (2018) for Sky's Art 50 project (during which the lead actor's visa expired), he was named a Star of Tomorrow by Screen Daily. Now, after a lengthy gestation period that saw him ditch his PhD thesis and a teaching gig, 30 year-old Khalid has released his debut feature, In Camera, which he has labelled `a fairytale about ambition, performance and identity' that has been made for a generation `which can only focus for a minute at a time'.

Cross with his agent because he's trapped in a cookie-cutter cop show when he wants to do a film with Naqqash Khalid, an actor (Aston McAuley) barely acknowledges Aden (Nabhaan Rizwan), who has been playing the corpse in a scene, when he says his goodbyes. The production assistant is embarrassed that wardrobe allowed him to get fake blood over his own shirt, but Aden shrugs. It's all in a day's work for a British Asian actor.

Having been left slightly baffled by an acting class in which the teacher (Clare Burt) insists that rebound repetition can reveal character, Aden discovers from flatmate Bo (Rory Fleck Byrne) that the new tenant is moving in later that day. An overworked junior doctor, Bo asks Aden if he ever forgets facts and envies him being in a job where other people tell him where to stand, what to wear, and what to say. Nonplussed, Aden agrees to dinner with the newcomer and sidles off an audition.

He ignores a flirtatious insinuation from the receptionist before finding himself in a cramped room full of white guys in white t-shirts. The casting director (Sarah-Jane Potts) commends him on being so ordinary looking before dismissing a question about his character in a toothpaste commercial and ordering him to make his smile `whiter'.

While Bo calls home and places his stethoscope on the vending machine that gobbles his money during an epic shift, Aden has to ask for an overdraft fee to be waived because he has funds to amend his overdraft. He attends another line-up, but is overlooked by the casting director's inexperienced female assistant.

Arriving home, Aden meets Conrad (Amir El-Masry), who invites him to share his takeaway. Confident and snazzily dressed, he explains that he has started a company advising men on what to wear. He tells Aden that this is `our time', as the fashion and film industries are waking up to their needs and edging towards the diversity that will make them the go-to people. Tongue-tied, Aden seems unconvinced, but Conrad is just as garrulous when an exhausted Bo comes home and can barely string together a coherent sentence.

As his next audition, where he is again called by a time slot rather than a name, Aden asks about the part he is reading for in a pilot and is given a blizzard of information that might have been useful beforehand by the woman who will run the lines with him (Bryony Davies). As he stands in front of the camera, the image cuts to the teen sci-fi setting and Kyle (Aden in a blonde wig) tells his high school classmate (Davies) about needing to discover who he is after realising he's an alien. Adopting a generic American accent, he commits to the role and is still visualising himself as Kyle when the assistant informs him that his tape will be assessed and he'll be notified about any callback.

As Bo wakes on a corridor floor in his green hospital scrubs, Conrad calls Aden and asks if he can stand in for a model at a shoot the following day. Reluctantly he agrees before joining a therapist (Naomi Radcliffe) who has asked him to play the role of the deceased son of Joanna (Josie Walker), a mother from Northern Ireland who needs closure. Despite Aden getting a nosebleed, the session goes well enough for Joanna to ask if he would take her number with a view to joining her and her husband for dinner or a walk.

Standing with fellow hopefuls in a small room in a dark t-shirt, Aden is surprised to see a latecomer (Antonio Aakeel) offered a chair before being whisked off. One of the others curses that they all might as well go home, as he gets every job. When Aden asks why, they agree it's because he's so `unproblematic'.

Driving home, Bo sees a vending machine in the middle of a country road. Getting out, he buys a chocolate bar and gets back into his car to munch on it. Aden, meanwhile, is at Conrad's shoot. He is taken aback when the photographer (Gana Bayarsaikhan) reveals that she quit acting for the very reasons he finds it suits him. She suggests that he would be better for the campaign than the model, as he gives off a real person vibe that few can manage. Conrad senses something is wrong, but Aden insists he's fine, despite leaving hurriedly for another audition.

After much thought, Aden calls Joanna and they arrange a supper. He makes it clear that his rare is £450 and goes to the house, where he puts on one of her son's shirts. She asks for a hug and he keeps his arms by his side as she tentatively leans into him. They are chatting at the table when her husband (Jamie Ballard) gets home. But he can't cope with the charade and orders Aden to leave. Although he tries to remain in character, Joanna snaps at him when her husband begins to howl in distress. However, he waits by the front door for his payment and gives Joanna a heartfelt hug before rushing outside and vomiting.

At his next audition, Aden is seen as a bearded jihadist with a gun over his shoulder. The woman reading with him (in her character costume) suggests trying an accent. When Aden asks her to be more specific, she tells him to attempt something Middle Eastern and he turns away when she urges him to have a play with it. Riding home in a taxi, the driver asks what he does. Aden manages a smile when he says he'll soon be in Hollywood. But he's less amused when the driver asks where he is originally from and confides that he came to Britain in the 1970s, but has bought a plot of land to build a retirement home so he can be buried in his homeland.

Back at the flat, Bo is having his hair cut by Conrad. He describes a recurring dream in which he is drenched with blood cascading down a sleek glass building, while four onlookers urge him to do something because he's a doctor. Conrad shares that he dreams in monochrome, but Aden swears he never dreams and declines the offer of a trim. Nevertheless, he shaves off his beard after covering his face in shaving foam and telling himself to smile and say the words on the page, as he stares into the mirror.

Next morning, having previously caught flies in a glass and let them out of the window, he crushes one crawling over a script. He borrows a white t-shirt from Conrad and mouths some of his buzz phrases in front of the mirror while wearing a leather jacket that his roommate had swiped from the fashion shoot. Putting on a new front, Aden goes to an audition and learns that the man who books everything has had his face scarred in an attack. The other aspirants consider it the luck of the game, as they all now have a better chance of getting work.

Having scarfed his way through the contents of the fridge, Aden is looking at his online profile when Bo gets home. Mistaking him for Conrad, he is surprised to see him because he was supposed to be going away. Slipping into the role, Aden adopts Conrad's mannerisms to explain away the food shortage and apologise by cutting his hair. Bo reminds him that he had done that a couple of days ago and laughs when Aden tells him that he's going to kill his shift (as that wouldn't be appropriate for a doctor). They fist pump and Bo says it's good talking with him before a cut shows Aden sitting in the same position, bewildered by the exchange that's just taken place.

Adopting his Conrad pose, Aden plays the game with the next casting director, who warms to his chilled approach. He gets to play a scene on a rehearsal set in which a son fights back after his father tries to interfere in his life. This serves him well when Conrad returns having been made creative director by a trendy company and offers him a chance to come to America and work for him as a sideline to his acting. But Aden walks away, declaring that he's nobody's shadow.

Describing dreams in which he's alternately running and laughing, Aden (wearing a white tracksuit with a red and blue stripe across the chest) has flashes back to his daily routine while frenziedly stabbing Conrad with a kitchen knife. As Bo gets home to a full fridge before climbing inside the washing machine, Aden strides purposefully through the streets. He's now a star and feigns not to recognise the production assistant (Hussina Raja) who had treated him like a nobody on the cop show. Sending her for a water, he takes the racist praise of the ignorant director (`You're like the Brown version of…what was his name again…?') before barely acknowledging (`Yeah, sure') the British Asian extra who has just played a scene with him in the front seat of a studiobound car. And so the wheel turns...

Having decided that the `three-act film is no longer fit for purpose', Khalid decided to structure the action around `loops, cycles, tessellations, geometric shapes, and things looping back over and over again'. The result is dynamic, dizzying, and disorientating, as this darkly comic, but deeply serious picture frog-marches the viewer through their casual preconceptions, unconscious prejudices, and entitled indifferences. It's impossible not be shaken, rattled, and rolled by a work of genuine ambition, acuity, and audacity. Khalid has said that if he never makes another film, he will be satisfied because he got to produce his debut on his own terms. One can only hope on this evidence, however, that In Camera is the start of a long career.

It's not without its jagged edges. The subplots involving Bo and Conrad don't quite work, even if - as has been suggested - they are both figments of Aden's imagination. Some have even claimed that Bo could be Joanna's son (although the accents don't quite align for that). Whatever their status in the scenario and regardless of the accomplished performances of Rory Fleck Byrne and Amir El-Masry, this is All About Aden (to paraphrase the title of Joseph L. Mankiewicz's 1950 Oscar-winning treatise on the psychological quirks of acting folk). More to the point, this is all about Nabhaan Rizwan, as he limns someone who only gets close to being comfortable when he's not forced to be himself. Shifting sublimely between being enigmatic and empathetic, coy and cocky, and vulnerable and venal, he never once lets the mask of inscrutability slip to allow us a glimpse of the real man reflected in the mirror, as he decides to act in everyday life because he's better at role playing than living.

The personal elements leave a deeper impression than the barbed self-reflexive satire aimed at the cynicism and tokenism of the thesping milieu. In particular - even though it's inspired by Yorgos Lanthimos's Alps (2011) - Aden's relationship with Joanna is fascinating, as we learn nothing about his background and are left to wonder whether he is working out issues from his own youth in seeking to help a grieving mother (albeit for a handsome fee). Or is this more evidence of the Method madness that starts to take over after Conrad's pep talk, as Aden strives to represent in order to avoid becoming irrelevant?

Ably abetted by production designer Guy Thompson and cinematographer Tasha Back, Khalid (or `the Asian dude' as he's dubbed en passant) achieves some neat Stricklandesque pastiches of tele-aesthetics, while Ricardo Saraiva's sharp editing and Paul Davies's attuned sound design jolt us between events occurring in a disconcerting variety of Mancunian settings that reinforce the creeping dehumanising soullessness of modern existence - at least from a male perspective, as despite Josie Walker's touching turn as a distraught mother and Misha Adesanya, Lindsay Bennett-Thompson, and Bryony Davies displaying commendable versatility in multiple minor roles, this is very much a boys' own story.

12) HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS.

If Guy Maddin and Dom Joly conspired to create a live-action Elmer Fudd cartoon, it might look a bit like Mike Cheslik's Hundreds of Beavers. Following Lake Michigan Monster (2018), this silent, monochrome comedy has been made over six years on a micro $150,000 budget in conjunction with actor-writer Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, who also worked on the 2016 short, L.I.P.S. Containing over 1500 effects shots, this canny blend of knockabout, pastiche, animation, and video game is destined to become a cult classic.

The plot matters less than the gags, which come thick and fast, as 19th-century applejack entrepreneur, Jean Kayak (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews), sees his distillery and surrounding orchard destroyed by fire after beavers chew through the wooden beams supporting a giant keg. Regaining consciousness in heavy snow, the heavily bearded Jean attempts to catch food to silence his rumbling stomach. But the rabbits who inhabit the woods easily see through his gauche attempts to catch them and, when he does finally succeed in snaring one, it's eaten by some raccoons who have been enjoying his hapless efforts from an overhanging tree branch.

Forever falling into snow holes made by the rabbits as part of a network of escape tunnels, Jean decides to try angling. However, the fish ignore his lures until he accidentally cuts his finger and reels in a bumper catch. Stumbling across a store in the wilderness, Jean trades some of the fish with The Merchant (Doug Mancheski), who sells him a tiny penknife from the selection of hunting equipment he keeps. Catching sight of The Merchant's Furrier Daughter (Olivia Graves), Jean decides to become a trapper, although his initial efforts leave much to be desired after he cuts up his clothing to make snares.

A Native American Fur Trapper (Luis Rico) agrees to swap the knife for a pair of snow shoes and Jean succeeds in capturing a raccoon and gazes on with goo-goo eyes, as the Merchant's Furrier Daughter disembowels the creature with practised skill and makes him an outfit, complete with a hat made from the animal's head.

Recovering from a broken leg after falling into a pit dug by The Master Fur Trapper (Wes Tank), Jean tags along to pick up tips. However, the Master Fur Trapper's sled dogs start disappearing during the night and Jean is left with a diagram showing the location of his traps when his companion is devoured by wolves. Still a novice, Jean relies on his own cockamamie hunting methods. But they prove successful and the Merchant's Furrier Daughter gives Jean a pole dance while her father is distracted. Suitably enlusted, Jean vows to capture enough pelts to purchase an engagement ring. However, The Merchant informs him that he would need to capture hundreds of beavers in order to make the payment.

Discovering that the wolves have hidden The Master Fur Trapper's haul in their cave, Jean attempts to steal them. His repeated failures are viewed by beavers bearing a resemblance to Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson, who report back to the vast dam that the beavers are constructing on the nearby lake. A bid to stop Jean's activities backfires when he coaxes a recce party into the wolf cave and he uses icicles to create a gate to prevent the beavers from escaping. When he brings the furs to the store, however, he discovers it's merely a wooden flat erected by the beavers to recover the pelts and give them a decent burial.

Breaking into the dam to reclaim his booty, Jean navigates the intricate machinery to track down his prey. However, he is caught in the act and put on trial before a beaver court. He is found guilty and laid out on a buzz saw table so that a coat can be made of his skin. But he manages to escape and not only beats up lots of beavers, but also sabotages a rocket that has been built out of his surviving applejack keg and creates Green Bay by destroying the dam.

Rolling the pelts into a large snowball, Jean strikes out for the store. The beavers form a colossal human figure that strides after their foe, only for the Native American Fur Trapper to help his friend by roping the rocket and forcing it to plough into the beaver behemoth, which adds to the haul that Jean presents to The Merchant, who consents to the betrothal, as the body count rises into the 380s.

Opening with a rousing production number worthy of Trey Parker's Cannibal! The Musical (1993) and alternating inspired gags with cornball buffoonery, this bravura delight is guaranteed to generate belly laughs and wry smiles aplenty, as well as fitful groans at the odd clunker that falls resoundingly flat. Such is the scattershot nature of the comedy, as the gags relentlessly tumble in on each other, that Cheslik and Tews even get away with a running joke about the baccy-chewing Merchant repeatedly missing a spittoon.

The pair have shared their influences in a 92-strong list of comic classics on Letterboxed. But Georges Méliès, Buster Keaton, Charlie Chapin, and Karel Zeman are the names that leap most readily to mind, as this wilderness romp morphs into a live-action exercise in product placement for the Acme corporation from the Looney Tune cartoons. One suspects much of the credit for such shtick is owed to Mike Wesolowski, whose `gag man' credit will warm the cockles of anyone with a love for silent slapstick.

But sound plays a crucial role in the humour, whether it's the human and animal chatter that designer Bobb Barito mixes into a soundtrack that is replete with moments of foley magic and the library selections supplementing Chris Ryan's score, such as `Left Bank Two' by The Noveltones, which those of a certain age will recognise as the gallery music for wonderful BBC children's art show, Vision On (1964-76). Equally important are the puppets devised and operated by Brandon Kirkham, the splendid outsize animal costumes designed by Casey Harris and worn with such aplomb by an unseen cast of comic performers. The impeccable miniatures and ludicrous props are also a joy, as are the visual effects concocted on a home computer in post-production by Cheslik after he and cinematographer Quinn Hester had shot the action in front of tarpaulins suspended in the Wisconsin woods in the middle of winter.

Such primitive conditions make the performances all the more laudable. But Tews stands out for both the cartoonishness of the faces he pulls in close-up and the agility of his physical clowning. Mack Sennett and Hal Roach would have nodded in approval, as would the makers of Super Mario Bros and Donkey Kong. But for all its crackpot plotting and gonzo energy, this is clearly a work of considerable intelligence and ingenuity, whose meticulous planning is artfully masked by the DIY aesthetic and madcap antics.

11) CROSSING.

Raised in Sweden by Georgian parents of Turkish descent, Levan Akin is in the ideal position to assess how cultures clash and coalesce in his fourth feature, Crossing. Considering themes broached in his breakout sophomore outing, And Then We Danced (2019), this is an even bolder statement on the status of LGBTQIA+ communities in the transcontinental regions of South-East Europe.

Retired history teacher, Ms Lia (Mzia Arabuli), lives in the Georgian coastal city of Batumi. When her sister dies, she promises to find Tekla, the trans daughter who ran away from home because no one in the village accepted her. Hearing that she had been living in a beach cottage with some prostitutes, Lia asks a neighbour, who turns out to be her old student, Zaza (Levan Bochorishvili). He makes a big fuss of her and tells nursing wife, Ruso (Nino Karchava), to get out the best bottle. Half-brother Achi (Lucas Kankava) is desperate to get out of the city and tells Lia that Tekla gave him a forwarding address in Istanbul. Despite her misgivings, she agrees to let him escort her as a translator and he is so delighted that he steals Zaza's car to give Lia a lift home.

As she plans an early start, she invites him to stay the night and tells him to pick some tomatoes and cucumbers from next door's garden. She gulps down a glass of chacha brandy while informing Achi that he won't be allowed to drink or do drugs on the trip. He concurs and is amused when the neighbour kids give them a parting gift of some dip to go with the vegetables they had filched. On the coach, Achi throws up after scarfing free snacks, but he has recovered by the time they reach the border.

Surprised that Turkey is no different to Georgia, Achi warns Lia that she is being ripped off by the money-changer who buys her grandmother's gold bracelet. Needing cash for the trip, she takes what she gets and reminds Achi that she has no intention of mothering him, as she is on a mission. Chastised, he wakes her on the coach as they approach Istanbul, which she had visited as a girl with her father, and she buys him breakfast after he discovers that they need to take a ferry across the Bosphorus to get to the address.

A meandering travelling shot explores the boat, as Lia and Achi stand on the deck. Street kids Izzet (Bünyamin Değer) and Gülpembe (Sema Sultan Elekci) huddle together, as he strums a saz. On the deck above, Evrim (Deniz Dumanli) smokes a cigarette. She is a trans lawyer who volunteers for the Pink Life organisation. Having tried to mediate for a gay man being evicted by his landlord, she goes to the hospital to meet with Dr Erol (Mehmet Isyar) to collect the documents that legally register her change of gender. A ginger-and-white kitten clambers on to her lap for a stroke, as she sits in the waiting-room. The medic evidently disapproves of Evrim, as does one of the department heads who charges her for his required signature. But she perseveres, as she knows the importance of ticking all the boxes in a country with such a dim view of all LGBTQIA+ matters.

Spotting Lia and Achi asking for directions, Izzet and Gülpembe offer to guide them through the bustling district for five lira. Everyone knows them, as Izzet fends for himself during his mother's frequent absences and Gülpembe has become his unofficial sister. However, there is no sign of Tekla at the house run by Gülsen (Okşan Büyük) and Lia despairs of the seedy neighbourhood in which her niece had been staying.

Booking into a cheap hotel, Lia chugs down a chacha and makes Achi stand guard outside the bathroom while she showers. As they chat, she admits to not having seen Tekla for a long time and is ashamed for having bowed to village pressure to disown her. Achi asks about her plans and she explains she has nothing particular to live for: `I'm just here until I'm not.'

Unable to sleep because of the sex noises coming through the paper-thin walls, Achi goes for a wander. As he wants to stay in the city, he asks about jobs at the various street cafés and narrowly misses Evrim, who has been stood up for a date. Walking home, she is offered a lift by Ömer (Ziya Sudançıkmaz, an unofficial taxi driver who tell her that they need to make up a story about being college friends going to a party in case they get stopped by the cops. They park for sex and she heads off to a party, to which Achi has been invited by Özge (Derya Günaydın), who had met him at the hotel. He guzzles down as much food and drink as he can get his hands on, but saves some pastries when Özge takes him to a chic patisserie for breakfast.

Angry with Achi for running out on her, Lia wanders back to Gülsen's house to make enquiries about Tekla. She is invited in for tea and one of the younger prostitutes wishes that her family showed such concern about her whereabouts. As some with a Georgian grandfather sings a sentimental song, Lia is struck by the camaraderie between the women and takes comfort that her niece would have had a support network to cope with her tough life.

Returning to the room to find Achi crashed on the bed, Lia orders him to leave. He protests that he had been trying to find a job and wasn't planning to desert her, but she is adamant. She's touched that he brought her a bun, however, and, when she sees him stroking a stray cat on the pavement outside her café, she invites him to rice and potatoes. As they are eating, they are overheard by Ramaz (Levan Gabrichidze), an ex-pat Georgian who is dining with his friend, Mustafa (Soner Yalçin). When he hurries off to keep a date, Ramaz introduces Lia to raki and she gets tipsy.

However, she's flirting for a reason, as she hopes that Ramaz will help her find Tekla. She whispers in his ear after dancing seductively around him and she is furious with Achi after she returns from applying red lipstick to discover that Ramaz has fled. No sooner has she slapped Achi, however, than she throws up and he offers an arm to steady her, as they wander back to the hotel with Lia recalling how the men used to flock round her when she was a girl. They pass Izzet and Gülpembe, who are dumpster diving. He is delighted to find a hair trimmer and makes his `sister' laugh by shaving his fringe. When they busk at a nearby bar, however, they are moved along without making a penny.

Nearby, Ömer spots Evrim while she's out with friends and comes over. He can't stay, as he has a geography exam the next morning at the university and Evrim is touched that he wants to be a teacher. She takes his card so she can call whenever she needs a cab. But she gets home to find Mustafa waiting on the stairs. He apologises for having stood her up and promises to buy her breakfast. However, he scarpers at first light and Evrim has to dress quickly because she has to bail out Izzet from the police station after he has been arrested for picking a tourist's pocket.

A couple of cops taunt Evrim about not being a qualified lawyer because she can't get the degree transferred to her new name until she has her documents signed. However, despite their eagerness to send Izzet to an orphanage, they hand him over to her and she takes him for a haircut to repair the trimmer damage to his fringe. Gülpembe shows Evrim a glamorous hairstyle she has seen in a magazine and she takes the children for lunch to warn them about staying clear of trouble while Izzet's mother is away.

Waking with a hangover, Lia declares that Istanbul is a place where people come to disappear. She refuses to give up, however, and hopes that Evrim can help find Tekla after they bump into Izzet and he explains what's going on. Evrim agrees to do what she can, although she is concerned that Tekla might not want to be found. They take a ferry to another red light district and visit a house Evrim knows well. The den mother suggests that Tekla had drug issues before she disappeared. But she hands over a bundle of her belongings and Lia cries over them, as she begins to wonder if she will ever find her.

Feeling sorry for Lia, Evrim takes them to dinner at a restaurant hosting a wedding. She coaxes Achi into dancing and he drags Lia on to the floor, where they are able to forget their cares and enjoy themselves. Ömer drives them home and Evrim is delighted when he invites her to breakfast. Up in the room, Achi announces that he plans to stay in Istanbul, even though his mother had disappeared here years before (unless she had died and no one could bring themselves to tell him) and Lia gives him a hug. She has forgiven him for lying over the address and recognises that he has much in common with the niece who had to leave a home that was crushing her spirit.

As she wanders towards the ferry terminus, Lia runs into Tekla (Tako Kurdovanidze). They hug and go back to the flat she shares above her boyfriend's hair salon. Lia smiles at the potted plants grown in her memory and cradles Tekla's head in her lap. But it's all wishful thinking, as she thinks back on what she told Achi about begging for Tekla's forgiveness for having put the opinion of her neighbours above the happiness of her niece. Deciding to stay on the ferry, as it turns around, Lia heads back to keep searching - on the off chance.

Demonstrating that life in the margins isn't all prejudice and degradation, Levan Akin's fine film captures the acceptance, resilience, and supportiveness of those who band together in unconventional communities after being

discarded by wider society. Although the emphasis is on trans sex workers, Akin also highlights the plight of the kids left to roam the streets of Istanbul, as they seem less visible than the thousands of stray cats whose perilous existence has been examined in documentaries like Ceyda Torun's Kedi (2016).

Ironically, Georgian and Turkish are gender-neutral languages, as each retains a highly patriarchal social outlook, which explains why trans youngsters can be murdered by fathers who can get away with claims that the gun went off accidentally while it was being cleaned. Evrim's experience with the toxic coppers and hospital staff is contrasted with her treatment by a lover who uses her for furtive sex while maintaining an esteemed position in the neighbourhood. Things may be different with her sweet cabbie, but Lia still has to find out Tekla's fate, while Achi will have to start from the bottom in order to survive in a city where his kind are ten a penny.

Lucas Kankava gives Achi a Liam Gallagher kind of swagger, but he's still a vulnerable innocent with much to learn, even though he's content to live on his wits. His rapport with Mzia Arabuli's Lia is splendidly delineated, as she sheds her preconceptions and comes to realise the difficulties facing the younger generation is has ceased to teach the lessons of the past. Lia also discovers things about herself during her sojourn, especially when Ramaz flees from her charm offensive. Deniz Dumanl's Evrim is still learning how to use her femininity, but her moxey gives her a head start when it comes to turning her humanist impulses into effective advocacy for her Pink Life clients and the waifs she comes across in a day's work.

Working with a deft selection of Georgian and Turkish songs, Akin and cinematographer Lisabi Fridell capture this environment with inquisitive, but never intrusive camerawork and through an unfussy, respectful, and non-sentimental approach to the denizens of an enclave whose character transforms after dark in order to give those who came there seeking sanctuary a chance to express themselves and live on their own terms.

10) OCCUPIED CITY.

Eleven years after the hideous truth of the Nazi death camps had been revealed, Alain Resnais revisited the abandoned sites at Auschwitz and Majdanek to ponder how such unremarkable plots could have been the site of such despicable carnage. Running 32 minutes and scripted by Mathausen-Gusen survivor, Jean Cayrol, Night and Fog (1956) remains the most potent meditation on the Holocaust and Steve McQueen clearly had it in mind while making Occupied City.

Inspired by Atlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945 - a 2019 survey of 2000 buildings that was written by McQueen's Dutch historian wife Bianca Stigter, who also directed the excellent 69-minute Three Minutes: A Lengthening (2022) - this epic documentary was largely filmed during the pandemic lockdown. In running for 262 minutes, it seeks to stand alongside such extended masterpieces as Marcel Ophüls's The Sorrow and the Pity (1969) and Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985), which respectively ran for 251 and 566 minutes. But, in returning to McQueen's installation phase in order to juxtapose modern-day images of 130 locations with the Stigter text delivered impassively by Melanie Hyams, this treatise on absence as a presence, which doesn't include a single frame of archival footage or second of talking-head testimony, runs the risk of comparison with Peter Greenaway's exploration of a `Violent Unknown Event' in the cod-documentary, The Falls (1980), which itself ran for 195 minutes.

There's little point in attempting to list each of the entries in a litany that reinforces the validity of Hannah Arendt's concept of `the banality of evil'. By all accounts, a 36-hour version exists that would be even more challenging to watch and assess. But certain sequences stand out, including the first, in which a woman descends into a cellar in which Jews once hid in order to fetch some supplies. The sight of children playing and dogs romping on the Museumplein where Heinrich Himmler once inspected troops also leaves its mark, as do the revelations of the Rijksmuseum's role in exhibiting confiscated Jewish artworks and acquiescing in the cult of Rembrandt that was bolstered by a 1942 Hans Steinhoff biopic.

Wartime events at the Concergebouw are related between footage of anti-lockdown protests and the use of mounted police to disperse the crowd. It's not entirely clear what statement McQueen is intending to make here, but the blurred then/now demarcation is disconcerting. Much more impactful is the contrast of footage of a couple's wedding with details of the execution of a nurse who had helped Jewish children escape while working in the hospital that had once stood on the site.

A brief mention of Anne Frank comes over shots of the denture workshop that now occupies what had been her favourite ice cream parlour, Oase on Geleenstraat. We're shown people socialising in a café at the former prison, Huis van Bewaring, and hear the 10 commandments for people in hiding. One third of the 12,000 Amsterdam Jews who went into hiding were caught.

After views of the Amsterdamse Bos and stories about the camps situated there, details of safe houses are relayed over Brueghelesque images of skaters on a frozen canal and sledgers on a slope. The sense of relief at being outside and mingling during the health crisis is palpable and few would have been mindful of the atrocities being outlined in the narration. They would also probably not have known about Eduard Veterman, the playwright who became a wartime forger and was possibly assassinated by collaborators in 1946. The irony that his final play was entitled Things Won't Turn Out the Way You Expect digs deep.

As does the story of how the Jewish Gratitude Memorial became the National Holocaust Names Memorial, which was opened by King Willem-Alexander in 2021. The passage following is less effective, however, as arch drone shots are used to capture the city under Covid curfew over a description of wartime restrictions. Once again, the juxtaposition is disquieting, primarily because its intentions are unclear. The role played by the Vredeskerk peace church is less perplexing, unlike the decision to use David Bowie's `Golden Years' over a montage of old people receiving their anti-Coronavirus jabs.

Following footage of a sparsely attended rally against fascism, we hear about the Hunger Winter and the rail service to the Westerbork transit camp. A description of the arson attack on the civil registry in a bid to nullify the effectiveness of mandatory identity cards contains a mention of Anne Frank's pleasure at the sabotage. But such moments of relief were few and far between, as a series of disclosures about betrayals, confiscations, and wilful destruction affirms. This includes the history of the De Mirandabad swimming pool in Amstel Park.

A visit to a desecrated Jewish cemetery precedes a section on the Jewish Council and whether it protected all Jewish citizens, favoured the elite, or collaborated with the occupiers. This is followed by scenes from a Remembrance Day ceremony and a recollection of the gun battle that broke out on 5 May 1945, when German troops had fired on a crowd celebrating the arrival of a British unit and the end of the war. A 15-minute interval ends the first half of the film.

The second opens on a misty shot of lorries passing over a bridge near where the Nederlands verzet attempted to assassinate notorious collaborationist detective Hendrik Blonk, who survived to be jailed after the war. Shots of rehearsing dancers and exercising pensioners accompany an account of the 1943 mass round-up of over 3000 Jews. A snippet about art forger Han Van Meegeren precedes revelations about the sterilisation of non-Jewish women in mixed marriages by hospital staff who were returned from Westerbrok for the procedures.

We next see a school that has been built on the site of the deportation centre that was used before the operation relocated to the Hollandsche Schouwburg. A glimpse of the former ground of the 1944 Dutch title winners, De Volewijckers, leads into a passage about the 128 Jews who chose suicide in 1940 to living under Nazism.

The home of gay painter Willem Arondeus is our next port of call. He participated in the registry raid and was executed in the dunes with 11 others. Among the many involved in the arts who resided at the Wolkenkrabber building nicknamed `The Skyscraper' was contralto Julia Culp, while neighbour Gerben Sonderman (a pilot who had shot down three Luftwaffe planes during the invasion) hid a radio in an empty apartment to transmit messages to London. Staying in the air, we learn about the USAF and RAF raids on the Fokker factory, while watching bright young things bop at a gallery that had once housed the office for the city's air-raid defences.

More people enjoy themselves in the sunshine on the site of the Weteringschans (Detention Centre 1) on Kleine-Gartmanplantsoen. Jewish prisoners had been made to walk around the courtyard here chanting, `I am a Jew, beat me to death, it's my own fault.' Anne Frank was briefly held here and, as we watch chess games on floor boards, we discover that women who had slept with the Germans had their heads shaved in front of the gates after liberation.

Moving to the Jonas Daniel Meijerplein, we hear about the strike that followed the first razzia round-up in 1941. At Oosterpark, a memorial is being held to honour the African victims of slavery, while a trip to the Stock Exchange reveals a mixed wartime record of handling stolen Jewish treasure to downing tools in the final months of the occupation. There's no hint of guilt here and one wonders how many students at Gerrit van der Veen College know it was the most feared address in Amsterdam during its time as the headquarters of the Sicherheitspolizei. This was bombed by the RAF at the request of the Dutch resistance and the street renamed after partisan artist, Gerrit van der Veen.

Having recorded a pro-Palestinian event in Dam Square, the camera moves on to the demolished site of the City Tree Nursery on the Frankendael Estate, which had been used by the Nationale Jeugdstorm. It lingers near a bridge to watch excited children greet Sinterklaas's boat, as we hear about the fate of the civil registry plotters and the fatalities caused by the blackouts ordered to avoid assisting the RAF. Moving to the Church of Our Lady on Keisersgracht, we learn about the heroic work of banker Walraven van Hall in funding the resistance.

As people exercise in a snowy Sarphatipark, we hear how the Nazis renamed it after a supremacist philosopher and used it as a collection point during the round-up of 5000 Jews. The betrayal of resistance leader Johannes Post by prison guard Jan Boogaard is outlined next before we're informed about the menus at the food kitchens that opened during the Hunger Winter and how tulip bulbs became part of the menu in 1945. `Tea' and `coffee' substitutes were the code names used for the Jewish babies smuggled out of the crèche on Plantage Middenlaan by Henriëtte Pimentel and her staff before it was closed in December 1943.

Opposite was the Hollandsche Schouwburg, which became the city's main deportation centre. Some escaped, but Jew catchers like Wim Heinnecke made a fortune from recapturing around 8000 for a 7.5 guilders reward. Following a poignant slow glide past the memorial wall at the theatre, we head to Vondelpark and learn about an exhibition of toys made by Nazi soldiers and the midwinter festivals held by the NSB to demonstrate their Aryan connections. In all, 125,000 Dutchmen volunteered to fight for the Nazis, while boys and girls flocked to the youth organisations.

At the harbour, we are told about the daring theft of a Fokker seaplane and an attempt to blow up a railway bridge. But we also discover that a Dutch volunteer unit refused men from Suriname in case it upset those from South Africa. As we see people queuing at the Carré Theatre in Amstel to pay respects to murdered crime reporter Peter R. de Vries, details emerge of the demand for live entertainment during the war and the staff's insistence on hiding fugitives. The doctors at the largest Jewish hospital in Amsterdam also faked illnesses and injuries to protect patients from deportation.

In Rivierenbuurt, we see stolpersteine being laid and learn the area was nicknamed `the Milky Way' during the war because of all the yellow stars. We also drop in on a house on Reguliersgracht, where the 12 Jews hidden by Ivo Schöffer survived the war, and are reminded of the lengthy sentences given to the so-called Breda Four war criminals. The role of Central Station is also discussed, as news reports tell of Ukrainian refugees coming to the city. Only 5000 of the 107,000 Jews deported returned to the Netherlands (the biggest percentage of deaths in Western Europe), with Amsterdam losing three-quarters of its 80,000 Jewish inhabitants.

Details follow of the bandstand in front of the Royal Palace and the restrictions placed upon Jews in Dam Square's De Bijenkorf department store. As we see a large climate change protest, the narration mentions a German social club at the Hotel Krasnapolsky, speeches by Reichskommissar Arthur Seyss-Inquart, and food shortage protests by women goaded into demanding action from the mayor by the Communist Party.

Following a slow tram ride through the city (accompanied by a plaintive cello) to the Electrische Museumtramlijn, we close on a bar mitzvah and some boys bursting joyously through a golden double door. It's a fitting way to conclude, as it confirms the abject failure of the Wannsee plan without diminishing from the acts of cruelty, treachery, and courage that have been so compellingly recalled.

At times, this monumental enterprise frustrates because it's not always easy to decipher names and places because Hyams has evidently undergone a crash course in Dutch pronunciation. The tone of her commentary couldn't be improved, however, and she plays a vital role in keeping the audience focussed on the gruelling realities when some of the impeccably composed visuals threaten to prove a distraction. Moreover, there's something chilling about the absence of finality whenever she informs us that a building has been demolished because it's only been physically replaced rather than erased from the record.

Whether shooting interiors or landmarks, Lennert Hillege's 35mm photography is exceptional, as it provides an intimate time capsule of Amsterdam edging its way through lockdown. The editing of McQueen and Xander Nijsten is equally measured, as it conveys the shifting rhythms of a city emerging from restriction. Oliver Coates's innovatively diverse score underlines these atmospheric shifts, while also complementing the often sombre nature of Stigter's scholarly, but accessible text. The occasional juxtaposition will raise eyebrows, but it's difficult to understand some of the criticism of the film's content, structure, or sincerity. This is anything but a dry wander through a citywide museum exhibition. It's a troubling reminder that we never quite emerge from the shadow of the past and that we would do well to heed the lessons that history has to teach about human nature and geopolitical cycles.

9) THE DEAD DON'T HURT.

Having made a decent start to his directing career with Falling (2020), Viggo Mortensen reveals with The Dead Don't Hurt that he was taking notes while working with Argentinian auteur Lisandro Alonso on Jauja (2013) and Eureka (2023). While the tone and visuals work well, however, the narrative is inexplicably and fussily anti-linear.

As a girl, French-Canadian Vivienne Le Coudy (Eliana Michaud) doted on her fur-trapper father, who was killed by British soldiers after he went away to war. Raised by her mother (Véronique Chaumont) on stories of Joan of Arc and knights in shining armour, Vivienne (Vicky Krieps) finds herself in 1860s San Francisco, where she refuses to be shackled by an Irish art dealer (Colin Morgan). Instead, she falls in with Holger Olsen (Mortensen), a Danish carpenter riding a horse named `Knight', who charms her at her flower stall and persuades her to start a new life with him in a shack in the wilderness outside the north Nevadan town of Elk Flats.

Banker Rudolph Schiller (Danny Huston) is mayor of the town, which he runs in cahoots with landowner Alfred Jeffries (Garret Dillahunt), who has just been awarded a controlling share in the saloon managed by Alan Kendall (W. Earl Brown). As she likes to earn her own money, Vivienne takes a job behind the bar and quickly comes to realise that Weston Jeffries (Solly McLeod) is an alcoholic loose cannon, who exploits his father's status.

When Unionist soldiers come to the saloon to recruit for the fight against the Confederacy, Olsen feels duty-bound to sign up for the $100 bounty. Vivienne is furious with him for sacrificing their idyll and refuses his marriage proposal. Having returned from the First Schleswig War to find his wife gone, Olsen is concerned, as he rides away. But Vivienne is determined to make her new life work and she continues to tend the flowers she has planted in the shadow of the unfinished barn.

At the bar one night, Weston loses his temper when Mexican pianist, Claudio Garcia (Rafel Plana) plays a Unionist song and beats him to a pulp. Jeffries tries to defuse the situation, but Vivienne is appalled and answers the door with a pistol when Weston calls on her in the middle of the night. Barging through the door, he rapes her and she gives birth to his son, who she names Vincent after her father.

When Olsen returns from the war, he is surprised to meet the boy (Atlas Green), who speaks French more readily than English and is wary around the stranger. Vivienne informs Olsen about what happened, but stops him from seeking revenge because Weston (who had dodged the war) has gone into exile after killing some Mexican workers. Instead, Olsen gets Vincent to help him finish the barn and slowly rebuilds his relationship with Vivienne. He also applies for the vacant post of sheriff and appoints Billy Crossley (Shane Graham) as his deputy.

All seems calm until Weston returns to town because he has heard that Jeffries and Schiller are about to strike it rich with a gold find on some land they have acquired. He wants his cut, but Jeffries urges him to lay low because he is a wanted man. Meanwhile, Vivienne has fallen ill and the doctor tells Olsen that she is dying from syphilis.

While Olsen is burying his wife, Schiller comes to the cabin to inform him that there has been some unpleasantness in town. Crossley and several others have been killed, but the guilty man is in custody awaiting trial. Olsen attends the courthouse, where Ed Wilkins (Alex Breaux) is up before Judge Blagden (Roy McKinnon) on a murder charge. He can barely speak to defend himself and Blagden warns his wife, Sarah (Angela Lentz) that he will not tolerate her accusations that her husband has been framed.

Having witnessed the inexpertly handled hanging, Olsen returns the keys to the shack to Schiller, along with his final rent payment. He rides off with Vincent, only to encounter Weston in the sagebrush. Leaving the boy in a safe place, Olsen rides after Weston and shots are exchanged. However, he escapes and manages to take Olsen unawares. As he orders the Dane to throw down his guns, Olsen hurls a knife into his throat and leaves him to bleed to death, as he takes Vincent to the Pacific Ocean, where they watch the sunset over the end of the world.

With an ending that recalls the father/son journey undertaken by Mortensen in John Hillcoat's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic bestseller, The Road (2009),the film actually opens at Vivienne's deathbed, with scenes from her childhood and her experiences in San Francisco being slotted into a core section that centres on the Civil War years. This places the dramatic onus on Vicky Krieps, who copes with typical aplomb, as the ever-poised Luxembourgish-German actress is currently one of the most accomplished performers in world cinema. Indeed, her capricious, courageous, vulnerable, and valiant Vivienne is so compelling that Viggo Mortensen is barely missed, although this also has much to do with some hissable entitled villainy from British actor Solly McLeod, whose best moment comes when he watches with incredulity as the pianist's daughter (who takes care of Vincent while his mother's working) invites Vivienne to supper at the Mexican family's home.

The seething racism that underpins this scene is used to contrast frontier bigotry with Trumpist railings against migrants, while the corrupt governance of the town, the unfinished barn, and the predatory mistreatment of Vivienne all relate to the state of the nation in the Alt-Right, #MeToo era. While there is no direct correlation with the Black Live Matter campaign, such themes are laudable, as is the reflection on the differing effects that conflict has on men and women. But they are hardly discussed in the subtlest manner, while the dialogue also often sounds pastiched.

Yet Mortensen (who also composed the serviceable score) manages some intriguing touches, notably in having the knight in shining armour who regularly appears in Vivienne's dreams being played by her father and Olsen before she becomes her own Joan of Arc. Although the camerawork is somewhat perfunctory, Marcel Zyskind's views of the flower-specked homestead plonked down in the middle of the wilderness reinforce the pivotal notion of cosiness corrupted, but the handsome widescreen images leave viewers in no doubt that the frontier life that shaped the American Dream was nasty, brutish, and short.

8) ABOUT DRY GRASSES.

For decades, schoolteachers were paragons of cinematic virtue. They inspired, nurtured, and protected their students, whether from the traditions of their public school or the vicissitudes of a cruel world. Then, around the time that Jim McAllister (Matthew Broderick) allowed Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon) to get under his skin in Alexander Payne's Election and Eve Tingle (Helen Mirren) set out to discredit Leigh Ann Watson (Katie Holmes) in Kevin Williamson's Teaching Mrs Tingle (both 1999), things started to change.

The behaviour of some of the staff at Hogwarts should surely have attracted the attention of the inspectorate. But bad teachers became increasingly common in the more `real world' situations depicted in Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko (2001), Richard Eyre's Notes on a Scandal (2006), Craig Gillespie's Mr Woodcock (2007), Jake Kasdan's Bad Teacher (2011), Thomas Vinterberg's The Hunt (2012) and Another Round (2020), and İlker Çatak The Teachers' Lounge (2023). Another is added to their number in Nuri Bilge Ceylan's About Dry Grasses.

Dropped off at a bus stop in the middle of an Anatolian nowhere, Samet (Deniz Celiloğlu) trudges through the Incesu snow to start a new term at the school where he has been teaching art on a government posting for four years. He lives on campus and catches up with roommate Kenan (Musab Ekici) and a ranger sergeant (S. Emrah Özdemir) at the nearby base, who sets him up on a blind date with Nuray (Merve Dizdar), an English teacher at a bigger school in the neighbouring town who lost a leg in a terrorist explosion. While they get on well enough, Samet tries to get Kenan interested, as he has no intention of settling down.

Samet is desperate to get a transfer back to Istanbul and snaps when a kid accuses him of always favouring Sevim (Ece Bağcı) and her best friend, Aylin (Birsen Sürme) when it comes to answering questions. He clearly engages with the chirpy 14 year-old and gives her the occasional gift (which he tells her not to show to her classmates) and even lets her link his arm on the corridor. When she's caught by Kevser (Nalan Kuruçim) with a love letter in a notebook during a class search, Samet criticises his female colleague for being a spoilsport. However, he's unsettled when Sevim asks for its return and starts crying when he tells her that he's torn it up. He tries to reassure her that there's nothing wrong with being in love and recalls having a crush on a teacher that he considers the purest feelings of his life.

But Sevim doesn't believe he destroyed the letter and he believes she is responsible when he is summoned by the Director of Education (Yıldırım Gücük) to answer a complaint that he and Kenan have behaved in an inappropriate manner. As guidance counsellor Alakan (Ferhat Akgün) points out, they can't say who pressed the charge or to what it relates. But the director makes it clear that they would have been toast if it had related to something outside the classroom. As it is, he has been able to bury the report and he has reassured Principal Bekir (Onur Berk Arslanoglu) that there will be no scandal.

Kenan protests vociferously, while Semet remains silent. But he is furious when he gets back to school and invites senior colleague, Tolga (Erdem Şenocak) to sit in on a meeting with Bekir, as he wants to know why he didn't alert him to the situation before he was hauled before the big boss. Bitter at being overlooked for the principalship, Kenan blames Bekir for following the rulebook instead of using common sense. But he informs them that someone has accused them of putting their arms around them and pinching their cheek. Kenan denies everything, but Samet knows that he had tried to put a hand on Sevim's shoulder when she had been upset about the letter.

Nevertheless, he's outraged when Tolga confirms that Sevim had named Samet and Ayin had accused Kenan. On hearing that Sevim is angry about the letter, Samet protests that he had taken it off Kevser to spare her blushes. But Tolga says things are viewed differently in village communities and, when Kenan ticks his friend off for giving Sevim presents, Samet barks back that Kenan is a local defending the customs and psyche of his insular and uncivilised community.

During his first lesson with Sevim's class, Samet loses his temper and insults the kids by saying they'll spend their lives planting potatoes and beets so that the rich can be more comfortably indifferent to their plight. Bekir warns him to go easy after there are complaints, but he sends Sevim into the corridor at the start of the next session and milks the approval of the boys who had been irritated by his past favouritism. However, his relationship with Kenan starts to decline, especially after Nuray asks to take a photo of him so she can do his portrait and nudges Samet's arm out of the shot. He is also annoyed by their chattiness whenever they meet up for tea and resents Kenan being invited to meet her parents after she had sidestepped his invitation to dinner.

When he meets up with village friends, Vahit (Yüksel Aksu) and Feyyaz (Münir Can Cindoruk), Samet finds himself refereeing their argument over the latter picking a fight with a local. On his way back to his digs, he drops in on Tolga, who tells him that Ayin's complaint had been about Kanan and that he had been caught in the middle. He suggests that Kanan was jealous of Samet's relationship with the girls and had been clumsy in trying to be pally himself. Having seen him ingratiate himself with Nuray, Samet turns against him and calls him a rat.

His regard takes a further downturn when he sees Kanan and Nuray together in town and his friend claims to have spent the day with his sick father at the hospital. Venturing back out, Samet makes a point of bumping into Nuray to see if she mentions anything. She invites the pair to supper at her lodgings, but Samet doesn't tell Kanan and lies about him being busy when he shows up alone. While she prepares the food, he mooches around the room and notices some of Nuray's excellent drawings, which he recognises as superior to his own efforts as an amateur photographer (which we see in a couple of montages).

After dinner, Nuray goads Samet about his insistence that his life will improve once he leaves the school, as she feels his problems stem from his attitudes and not his location. The discussion becomes heated when they get on to politics and Samet struggles to keep his temper as he tries to justify his beliefs. When he lets slip that he had hoped she would be more receptive to him, Nuray moves to the sofa.

She asks him more personal questions about how he views himself, his opinion on children, and whether he believes in monogamy. He's taken aback when she asks why he lied about not telling Kanan and he tries to kiss her. Nuray goes into the bedroom and he follows her, cupping her face and planting kisses. Demurely, she asks him to dim the lights and he wanders into the next room and out into the soundstage housing the set. Striding past co-workers at the studio, Samet/Celi̇loğlu goes to the bathroom and stares into the mirror and pops a pill (Viagra, perhaps?) before returning to the film world, having survived a moment of self-loathing narcissism to discover how to play the next scene without his mask slipping.

They have sex and Nuray shows him how her prosthetic leg works. He admires the sophisticated equipment and promises to say nothing to Kenan about what has happened. But the first thing he does is blurt it out with insouciant smugness and delights in the pain it causes his housemate, who ignores incoming texts on his phone. After several days of this, Nuray comes to the house in her new car (Kenan had been giving her lessons) and she fights tears as she asks him why he had been snubbing her. The look on Samet's face clues her that he had broken his promise and she explains that she had slept with him to see how her body would respond because she is constantly having to renegotiate how she copes with life and her place in it. She bemoans the fact she feels so weary, but recoginses that she's not alone in her ennui.

Leaving in distress, she has to ask Kenan to drive her home, as it's snowing heavily. A POV shot through the windscreen shows falling flakes and they blur into a match shot of the green grass over which Samet strolls, as he laments in voiceover how slowly time passes in a backwater that is unrecognisable without its white blanket. He arrives at the school to inform Torga that he is glad to be leaving.

As Samet tidies his office, Sevim breezes in with a slice of cake. She's wearing a pink dress and lipstick and chats as though nothing untoward has happened. Sitting her down, Samet asks if she has anything to say about recent events, but she simply smiles as he tells her that his greatest disappointment at the school is wasting the time he invested in her. She waits until he's finished and enquires whether he'll be coming to the end-of-term celebration.

While exploring an ancient ruin of Karakuş Tumulus with Nuray and Kenan, Samet climbs a hill on his own. He's not that interested in the columns (one of which has since collapsed), the civilisation that erected them, or the socio-religious purpose they once served. It's a hot day and he notices the dry grasses under his feet that would otherwise have felt so insignificant, but now seems so poignant because they have parched almost as soon as they have sprouted. He thinks about how things with Sevim could never have been different because of the chasm between them and because she has the energy and ambition he lacks. As he recalls a snowball fight with her, he reflects on how sad it will be that he had created a mirage to help him get through his ordeal, as she will stay in her tiny corner of Turkey and waste the talent he had detected in her. He would feel sorry for her, as he had seen something of his young self in her. But, as he concludes, `Seasons come and go, hopes are born to die, and still, life goes on.'

Although the spirit of Anton Chekhov is again evident in a Nuri Bilge Ceylan drama, it's Jean Renoir's insistence that `everyone has their reasons' that makes his ninth feature so compelling and compassionate. Played without vanity by Deniz Celiloğlu, the amoral, manipulative Samet is not an easy character to like. With notable exceptions, he has no interest in his students and is more concerned that they put the lids back on their pens than that they appreciate perspective or learn how to sketch a horse. He has friends around the village he considers a hellhole, but has exhausted the patience of the majority of his colleagues. Local boy made good, Kenan looks up to the city slicker, even though he's considerably brighter and more affable and attractive, as Nuray soon discovers.

Their café tryst is one of several set-pieces that Ceylan and cinematographers Kürşat Üresin and Cevahir Şahin capture in long takes filled with deft camera moves that consistently coerce the viewer into reappraising what they are watching. Ceylan and Oğuz Atabaş's editing is also acute, notably during Samet and Nuray's dinner-table exchange and the tense aftermath in her bedroom that includes an audacious self-reflexive detour that wrenches the audience out of the action before plunging them back in with no explanation.

Nuray also features in another standout sequence, as she tries to coax Kenan into coming clean about the reason for not returning her calls. Desperately sad and impeccably played by Merve Dizdar (who won the Best Actress prize at Cannes), this tearful confrontation is matched by Sevim's embarrassed bid to reclaim the love letter that she knows Samet has read and not destroyed. The way in which Ece Bağcı switches between giggling innocent to wounded avenger is superb and confirms Ceylan's genius for handling actors and ensuring that screeds of erudite dialogue (crafted by Ceylan, wife Ebru Ceylan, and co-writer, Akın Aksu) sound natural rather than rehearsed.

The supporting cast is solid, but the most fascinating character is the landscape, which is shrouded for much of the time (like Samet's joie de vivre) to drive home the point of how culturally detached Istanbul and Ankara are from the more easterly regions. However, Ceylan resists the temptation to delve too deeply into Turkey's complicated political situation, although it's implied that the suicide bomber who injured Nuray was Kurdish and he rightly avers that Samet's problems don't amount to a hill of beans compared to theirs. Religion is also reduced to a fudged answer, as Nuray interrogates an ambivalent Samet while debating whether to go to bed with him.

Not for the first time in a Ceylan film, women are cast in a more positive light than men, with Nuray wearing casually the heroism that Samet refuses to contemplate in wanting to be left alone to live as misanthropically as he sees fit. Yet, while they may be opposites on so many issues, the pair share a view that the education system in this `land of unending setbacks' does staff or students few favours. Given such entrenched resistance to change, one can only wonder where Samet will end up teaching next and, if he does stay in the profession, will he have learned his lesson?

7) SOUNDTRACK TO A COUP D'ETAT.

Belgian multi-media artist, Johan Grimonprez, has acquired a reputation as an uncompromising film-maker with Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997), Double Take (2009), and Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade (2016), But he has created his finest work to date with Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat, which draws on a range of audiovisual and print sources to chronicle the impact that Congo's independence from Belgium had on the geopolitical scene at the height of the Cold War.

On 16 February 1961, a session of the United Nations Security Council was gatecrashed by 60 people protesting about the murder of Congo's first independent prime minister, Patrice Lumumba. Among them were singer Abbey Lincoln and drummer Max Roach, who are seen performing at a time when the United States was sending Black jazz musicians on ambassadorial trips to countries it was keen to prevent from entering the Soviet orbit. However, several were angry at the government for preaching democracy abroad while segregating and repressing its own African American population.

Clips from television programmes are used to put the situation in context. Congo had been under cruel colonial rule by Belgium since the 1908. However, it was announced by King Baudouin in 1959 that Brussels would withdraw once it was certain that a stable regime could be established in Léopoldville. No sooner had independence been granted on 30 June 1960, however, than opponents of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba started lobbying against him. Despite the reluctance of President Joseph Kasa-Vubu, he requested assistance from the Soviet Union, which had been outspoken on the subject of decolonisation.

Premier Nikita Khruschev had famously spoken on the subject at the United Nations in New York, where the block of 17 newly liberated African states were providing a headache for the administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower. They were being courted by non-aligned countries like India, Indonesia, and Egypt, which had started to play a larger part in world affairs after Gamal Abdel Nasser had humiliated Britain and France during the 1956 Suez Crisis. This was a watershed moment for a changing world, as was the emergence of Fidel Castro in Cuba, who had allied himself with the Kremlin.

Despite accusations, Lumumba was regarded as a Communist by Belgian PM, Gaston Eyskens. Concerned that the Union Minière mining company (which was supplying the US with materials for its atomic weapons programme) would fall into the wrong hands, he backed the bid for secession from Congo by the province of Katanga, which declared itself to be a sovereign state under Moïse Tshombe. Eager to prevent the situation from inflaming relations between the superpowers, UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld (the Swede who came in for a lot of stick from all sides) dispatched a peacekeeping force to the region.

As Baudouin sought to raise the country's spirits by marrying Fabiola de Mora y Aragón, his ministers were appealing to Washington for assistance. In order to placate Khruschev after his shoe-banging speech at the UN, Eisenhower insisted that he would not be interfering in the affairs of Africa. However, the CIA under Allen W. Dulles was keeping busy, while musicians like Louis Armstrong, Nina Simone, Duke Ellington, and Dizzy Gillespie are being sent on cultural goodwill missions by the State Department that allow agents to travel as part of their retinues. Fully aware of how they are discriminated against in their homeland, these artists are despised by Khruschev (who hates the jazz promoted by broadcasters like Willis Connover on the Voice of America radio station) and mistrusted by activists like Malcolm X, who is becoming increasingly feared by the white establishment.

With chaos reigning in Congo, Lumumba's former military adviser, Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, exploits the situation to expel the Soviet emissaries and establish a new government. The coup leaves Lumumba in custody, but his cause is taken up around the world, with soundbites capturing musicians like Miles Davis, Thelonius Monk, and John Coltrane expressing their views. Ultimately, any hopes of a United Nations of Africa were dashed, as Mobutu regained control of Katanga and reinforced his grip on power after Lumumba was killed at the age of just 35 on 17 January 1961.

Three days later, John F. Kennedy was sworn in as Eisenhower's successor. Many had little doubt that Ike had been complicit in Lumumba's execution. But, despite Maya Angelou joining Lincoln and Roach in their bid to shame the UN into acting, the world's attention was soon shifted away from Africa, as the threat of conflagration intensified. Moreover, the tide of Civil Rights advocacy also turned with the rise to prominence of Martin Luther King, Jr, while jazz was replaced by rock'n'roll as the sound of youthful rebellion. No wonder Dizzy Gillespie failed to make it to the White House in 1964. These developments are left largely unsaid at the end of the film, but they emphasise how differently things might have turned out in certain spheres had the Year of Africa not been so swiftly and calculatingly derailed.

Marie Daulne (aka Zap Mama) reads extracts from Central African Republic activist Andrée Blouin's My Country, Africa, while we also hear extracts from Belgian-Congolese writer In Koli Jean Bofane's Congo Inc. and Irish diplomat Conor Cruise O'Brien's To Katanga and Back, as well as passages from the recorded memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev. But it's the blend of archive footage and music that makes this so compelling in inviting comparison with Swedish documentarist Göran Olsson's The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 (2011).

Often drawing out print media headlines for emphasis, Grimonprez, editor Rik Chaubet, and sound designer Ranko Paukoviæ make a magnificent job of using the music of performers like Melba Liston, Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, and Miriam Makeba to complement the rhythm and pace of the content, while also revealing that America's secret weapon was `a blue note in a minor key'. This enables those not wholly au fait with the decolonisation and non-aligned movements to realise that there was a lot more going on in the world in 1960 than the stand-off between the US and the USSR. The trio also deftly compare the way Belgian and American politicians conducted themselves on camera and at the podium, with the expressions on the faces of King Bauduoin and his ministers as Lumumba tells it like it is in his Independence Day speech encapsulating centuries of white attitudes to Africa.

Grimonprez also leaves his audience in little doubt that nothing has changed, either in the Democratic Republic of Congo or in the United Nations or in the corridors of power in Washington, Moscow, and Brussels. Rap may also have replaced rock as the most influential musical form, but the status of people of colour has scarcely advanced since the 1960s and seems unlikely to change much with Donald Trump about to return to office.

Louis Armstrong once famously sang about a wonderful world. There's little evidence of it in this technically accomplished and intellectually astute 150-minute picture, which should give us all plenty to ponder this festive season - perhaps in a double bill with Xinyan Yu and Max Duncan's Made in Ethiopia.

6) DO NOT EXPECT TOO MUCH FROM THE END OF THE WORLD.

Radu Jude is the maverick radical of the Romanian New Wave. His 2006 outing, The Tube With a Hat, is the country's most decorated short, while he was widely acclaimed for his wry debut, The Happiest Girl in the World (2009). Following the featurette, A Film For Friends (2011), he scored more festival kudos with Everybody in Our Family (2012) and Uppercase Print (2020), while Aferim! (2015) and Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021) respectively took the Silver and Golden Bears at the Berlin Film Festival.

He now returns with Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, a lacerating treatise on the pre-occupations of the modern world that makes knowing use of extracts from Lucian Bratu's 1981 drama, Angela Moves On, which starred Dorina Lazar as a Bucharest taxi driver. Riffing on the absurdity of making art under strict bureaucratic conditions, this continues a theme explored in The Potemkimists (2022), a short inspired by Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925). Jude has been in this meta-territory before with I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History As Barbarians (2018), a trenchant satire about the Romanian Holocaust that serves as a companion piece to The Dead Nation (2017), which centres on photographs of small-town life in the 1930s and 40s, and The Exit of the Trains (2020), an account of the Iași pogrom that was co-directed by Adrian Cioflâncã.

Woken at 5:50am by the alarm on a phone lying on top of a well-thumbed Marcel Proust paperback, Angela Raducanu (Ilinca Manolache) heads out to interview candidates for a workplace accident video that's being produced by an Austrian company. She toils long hours for Forbidden Planet and complains to her boss on the phone as she gets stuck in endless Bucharest traffic jams. The first person she visits has gone fishing and she has to conduct a Zoom interview about how he lost his fingers in a factory machine. She asks him to put up a fake background so it doesn't look as if he is having a nice time and completes her questions surrounded by his anxious family members, who could do with the money because they can't afford to heat their apartment.

Picking up her mother (Rodica Negrea), Angela visits her grandmother's grave before heading across the city to interview a woman who has been confined to a wheelchair after falling following a colleague's lunchtime drinks party. Angela says she hopes she's chosen before returning to her van and has to tactfully turn down a picture of a cat that the woman insists she takes after she had admired it.

Whenever inspiration hits her, Angela stops to record pieces for her social media site. In the clips, she adopts a bald cap and some bushy eyebrows to transform herself into Bobita, an Andrew Tate-worshipping slob whose misogynist remarks have earned him a cult following. Intercut with these monochrome sequences are colour clips from Angela Drives On, which are occasionally slowed down and even paused to offer a contrast to Romanian society then and now.

Kept waiting at a swish office block, Angela eventually meets with the owner of the property company whose build is encroaching upon the cemetery because of a clerical error. He jokes that he likes to spook visitors by keeping a copy of Karl Goldsmith's Capital on his boardroom table so that they think it's by Karl Marx. Refusing to budge and claiming that his lawyers will win any court case, he couches his threats in smiles and Angela has to settle for the pyrrhic victory of asking for an icon to be taken down.

She pauses for lunch and berates the security guard who chases away a woman who had been begging on the pavement. Similarly, she curses any motorists who annoy her on the road, even when she is in the wrong - such as when she momentarily dozes off at some traffic lights because she works such long hours. What was the film about again?

Arriving at her next destination, Angela is welcomed by an elderly woman who is pleased they share the same name, although wonders whether Raducanu is a Gypsy name. As she is played by Dorina Lazar, we see clips from the 1981 film as she explains how she met her second husband, who had fallen asleep in the back of her cab. She explains how he had been a drunkard, but had reformed out of love for her. As he was an ethnic Hungarian, however, they had quarrelled after the 1989 revolution.

Angela presumes they separated and he died. But Gyuri (László Miske, who was also in the Bratu film) is in the next room and introduces himself with some snatches of poetry. When their wheelchair-bound son, Ovidiu (Ovidiu Pirsan), gets home, Angela records his testimony and chats to Gyuri about whether Viktor Orbán is a dictator before taking her leave.

Having booked a restaurant for the Austrian delegation, Angela records a Bobita clip in the washroom, in which she claims to have discussed cultivating lawns with King Charles and Queen Elizabeth's funeral. Putting off an afternoon tryst with her beau, she interviews a man who can't speak and doubts whether he'll be chosen for the project. Blowing bubbles with her gum, she drives across the city past a power station that had also been in the 1981 film. Arriving at a film studio, she picks up some lenses and persuades her friend to introduce her to Uwe Boll, who is shooting a green-screen creature feature. He chats to her about Bobita and agrees to swear in a video for Instagram. Angela's friend also asks to be in a clip and the cloaking device gives her a bald head, too.

Summoned back to the office after pulling over to have a nap in a sun-dappled woodland halt, Angela joins a Zoom meeting with Doris Goethe (Nina Hoss), who is co-ordinating the film. As the hired director has died overnight (prompting a discussion about how David Hemmings died on the set in Romania and why Jean-Luc Godard chose to kill himself), she is introduced to his replacement (Serban Pavlu) and he discusses the style he proposes to adopt using Cooke lenses. Having spat on some snacks she is serving to the team, Angela is asked to talk Doris through the people she has interviewed and they agree only to use the first name of a man whose surname in Romanian means `buttock'. They also agree to avoid references to Gypsies and Russia.

Despite the image freezing, the meeting goes well and they concur with the big boss, who wants the film to convey emotion. Back on the road, Angela buys some books from a street vendor in the traffic and does a Bobita piece about having sex with Miss Jean Brodie. She picks up Ovidiu and delivers him to the studio before dashing off for a rendezvous with her boyfriend (Daniel Popa). During a quickie in the back of the van, he ejaculates on her spangly dress and Angela is flustered when she collects Doris at the airport.

As they drive, Angela asks if Doris is related to the great German author and she admits to not having read many of his books because he's family. When Doris notices how aggressively everyone drives, Angela tells her about a 250km stretch of single carriageway leading to the southern city of Buzau that had over 600 crosses marking accidents because no one stays in their lane. A protracted colour cutaway shows many of these crosses before returning to the journey to the hotel.

Doris isn't sure when Angela asks if her company is cutting down Romanian trees to make furniture, but is sure they wouldn't do it without government permission. Angela scoffs about corrupt officials and responds to question about Romanian poverty by averring that Albanians are poorer and are less civilised. When Doris asks to hear some manele music, Angela plays her favourite track before explaining how Nicolae Ceauescu tore down the Uranus-Izvor neighbourhood (see in Bratu's film) to build the Palace of the Parliament. Dropping her off, Angela staggers back to the van exhausted after learning that Goethe's last words weren't `More light', but `More nothing.'

As the film shifts to Ovidiu recording his testimony with his mother and daughters, the imagery is in colour and confined to a single camera shot of the group positioned before the car park barrier that had put Ovidiu in an 18-month coma and left him paralysed from the waist down. Angela is behind the camera with the director, who calls a halt to proceedings while a van advertising Russian vodka is moved from the middle distance.

Asked about his next project, he declares that corporate film has dominated cinema history, ever since the Lumière brothers photographed workers leaving their factory in Lyon. As they hadn't liked the first take, the second was a re-staging of reality rather than a documentary record. He also notes that Georges Méliès made a film advertising Bornibus mustard. But only a still remains, which proves that photography is more enduring than the moving image.

Wandering into shot, the director asks Ovidiu to avoid mentioning anything that is detrimental to the company, such as poor lighting in the car park or the fact he had been tired after working overtime. When asked to admit that he wasn't wearing a safety helmet, he argues that he was off company property when the car crashed into the barrier and the bar hit him. Besides, he doesn't want to say anything that contradicts the testimony he has already given to his compensation tribunal.

As they mull over this development, Angela tells a story about a firing squad officer who was tried for stealing bullets from the corpses of his victims. Ovidiu's family don't understand the point of her anecdote and start complaining about the rain. Meanwhile, Doris has called the set for a progress report and ask them to remove the rusty barrier, as it makes the company look bad. The director reminds Ovidiu not to mention it in his testimony and he begins to wonder what he can actually say.

When the big boss says he hates the clip, he orders them to film Ovidiu's speech as a pastiche of Bob Dylan's `Subterranean Homesick Blues' (even though he hates the singer because he's Jewish). While someone goes off to get a green cards from the van so they can digitise the words later, Angela records a Bobita video in which she hopes that Russia crushes Ukraine. When a colleague asks why the content is always so contentious, she explains that she is satirising both those who post such crap and those who take it as gospel truth.

While they wait, the director criticises Doris and her boss and claims that the Austrians were enthusiastic Nazis and even elected a former officer, Kurt Waldheim, as president. When the cards arrive, Ovidiu is asked to pass them to the daughter on his right. The director applauds, but suggests doing it again, only more slowly. It's raining quite hard by now and Ovidiu keeps wiping his face. Fearful that the fee for the shoot he so desperately needs will come at the expense of his lawsuit, he is also anxious that the company will write whatever it wants on the cards rather than using his words. The director ensures him that he won't allow this to happen and offers to take them to lunch. But Angela is ready to run them home and can't afford to linger, as she's got tons to do before home time.

There are echoes of Ben Hecking's Haar in Radu Jude's brilliant absurdist take on the gig economy and the world going to hell in a handcart. Kate Kennedy also works for a production company and finds herself dealing with bad news about her father and an unwelcome proposal from a lover while clearing away the Budapest soundstage where shooting has wrapped on a crass sci-fi flick entitled, Time Travelling Vampire Pirates. As wonderful as Kennedy was, she's a speck n the rearview mirror of Ilinca Manolache, who is utterly riveting as the exploited gopher who displays her suppressed intelligence in biting back in the guise of a misanthropic bigot who confrontationally mocks the Instagram and TikTok followers who respond positively to his hate speech with the taunt, `I'm like Charlie Hebdo, suckers!'

It's only in the latter segment that we get to realise that Angela has been wearing a rainbow-coloured sequin dress to canvass potential subjects for a corporate video about workplace accidents. She still shimmers in the sunlight in Marius Pandaru's grainy, high-contrast black-and-white images, but she doesn't stand out to the same extent as she does in the colour coda.

What makes this hilariously straitlaced sequence more compelling than it already is is the fact that it offers an unofficial ending to the story told in Angela Moves On, because Jude cajoles us into accepting that marvellous octogenarian Dorina Lazar is reprising the role she had played four decades earlier. But Angela hasn't moved on very far at all and the implication is that the same will be true in 40 further years time of Ms Raducanu.

Editor Catalin Cristutiu does a fine job of cutting between Jude and Lucian Bratu's footage, as Pandaru's camera captures the changing face of Bucharest in the 33 years since the fall of Communism. However, the lens spends much of its time fixed on Manolache's right profile, as she traverses the city to the point of exhaustion without once recognising the irony that she is helping make a film about safety at work. Yet, for all the woes that befall her and those worse off than herself, there's no Lavertyesque sentiment or Loachian reproachfulness here. Instead, Jude commends the indefatigability of the human spirit with a wry observational detachment that is complemented by an ideological clarity that eschews easy targets and pointing fingers.

As the sign beneath the clock with no hands reads, it is, indeed, later than you think. But, while we probably shouldn't expect too much of the end of the world, this fierce and funny, crass and canny, chaotic and controlled 163-minute masterpiece won't let you down. It's already one of the films of the year and firmly among the best in the first quarter of the 21st century.

5) HERE.

Belgian Bas Devos is another emerging director who has only just been picked up by British distributors. Following the shorts Taurus, Pillar (both 2006), and The Close (2008), he premiered Violet (2014) and Hellhole at Berlin, while Ghost Tropic (both 2019) impressed at Cannes. Now in his forties, Devos finally gets to show UK audiences what he can do with Here, which won both the Encounters Award and the FIPRESCI Prize at Berlin.

Stefan (Stefan Gota) works on a building site in Brussels. It's about to close for the summer and he has four weeks to kill. Having had a call to visit a school friend who is in prison back in Romania, he decides to make a big pan of soup from the vegetables he has left in the fridge of his spartan apartment.

He gives the first portion to his friend, Cédric (Cédric Luvuezo) when he helps him lay the tables at the restaurant where he works. Cédric shows Stefan a photograph of the daughter he is sure will change the world. As they sit together, Stefan reveals that he isn't sure about going home, as he's not certain he'll want to come back. Cédric listens, as he muses on the childhood memories that have been flooding back during sleepless night, before going to heat up the soup.

Across the city, ShuXiu (Liyo Gong) works as a bryologist at the university. When not teaching classes or staring into a microscope, she is writing a thesis about the mosses and lichen that grow in the woods surrounding the city. Although she's Belgian-Chinese, she lives alone, with an aunt being her only relative in Brussels.

Walking to his next delivery, Stefan sees the gate open at a community. He asks a woman (Saadia Bentaïeb) who has just picked some vegetables from her allotment how the system works and wonders if she can identify some seeds he has found in his pocket. She suggests he might like to get a plot of his own, but he's unsure that he'll be staying in Brussels. Nevertheless, they chat as he heads towards the garage where his friend (Teodor Corban) works.

Stefan is hoping that he can fix up a car so he can drive home and they sit outside with the other two mechanics to enjoy the soup. The Romanian friend describes a dream he had in which he saw several people from his past and he makes Stefan promise to go out for an evening when he returns to Brussels.

Wandering on, Stefan takes shelter in a Chinese restaurant named La Longue Marche and is surprised when ShuXiu comes in from the rain and dries her hair behind the counter before handing over a takeaway. She sometimes helps her aunt (ShuHuang Wang) and listens half-heartedly, as Stefan describes walking in the park at night near his home. After sitting on his own for a while, he goes in search of his older sister, Anca (Alina Constantin), who heats up some of his soup in the microwave. Surprised to hear that her school crush is in prison, she sympathises with Stefan, as he tells her about going for nocturnal strolls because of his insomnia. However, as she's on a nursing shift, she has to get back to work and, after he wakes up from a doze dream about rain in the trees and light through a spider's web, he leaves.

The next morning, Stefan unplugs his fridge and pours the last tub of soup down the sink. Pausing on the walkway outside his flat, as he takes the rubbish out, he watches some children playing and waves to a neighbour. He seems to be accepted here and feels at home. But something is calling him away.

Walking along a path through the greenery to collect his car, Stefan bumps into ShuXiu. She is studying some moss and he kneels beside her and inspects her specimens, as she tells him that mosses will outlast humans. He explains that he has to go, but he winds up walking along with her, although his thwacking the undergrowth with a stick irritates her. Helping her up an incline, he shares some trivia that Cédric had told him about the first train journey on the European mainland.

ShuXiu strides out, while Stefan lags back to pick some berries (the sound shifting from her stomping boots to singing birds, as he catches up with her). Clambering through branches, she chides him for getting too close when she crouches to examine a tree root. He stands up and admires the glade in the sunshine and listens to the distant sound of a babbling brook above the birdsong.

In a dark corner of the wood, ShuXiu uses a torch to write something in her notebook and he's taken by how meticulous she is. She offers him a biscuit and he pauses to look at her, while they munch. Stopping to remove a stone from her shoe, ShuXiu tells Stefan to listen to the sound of the rain starting to fall and they have to take shelter under some streetlights.

At home that night, Stefan makes up a special pot of soup. When ShuXiu arrives at her aunt's restaurant, she's surprised to learn that he has left her a tub in a bag. The aunt asks the man's name and she realises she doesn't know.

There is so much to applaud in this exquisite piece of Slow Cinema, but the laurels have to go to sound designer Boris Debackere, who sets out his stall in the opening shot, as the breeze rustle tree leaves in the foreground, while machinery pounds from the construction site that is framed by the drooping branches. Ameel Brecht's minimalist score is also exceptional, as is Grimm Vandekerckhove's 4:3 ratio 16mm photography, as it switches between shadowy living-rooms, verdant footpaths, sun-kissed train carriages, and mossy clumps. The static close-ups of the flora are delightful, but they're brought to even more vivid life by the sounds that fill the air around them. As the master of the `pillow shot', Yasujiro Ozu would be suitably impressed.

Editor Dieter Diependaele maintains the gentle pace, as the lanky, bearded Stefan Gota lollops along in his deeply unfashionable thirtysomething shorts. His soup-donating chats have an insouciant charm that makes them feel as though they could have been staged by Jean Renoir in A Day in the Country (1936). Little is said, but each encounter is suffused with the spirit of friendship. Yet, something is preventing Stefan from sleeping properly and prompting him to leave the life he has made for himself far away from home.

Liyo Gong also feels like a seed blown on the wind. She is younger, brighter, and more focussed than Stefan, although we first hear her describing in Chinese a night-time panic attack that only ended when she `surrendered to the oneness of all things'. During their ramble in the woods, ShuXiu bosses Stefan around and shoots him dagger looks when he irritates her. But she has a quiet smile on her face while taking the bus to her aunt's eatery and the realisation she hadn't asked the kindly stranger's name leaves her feeling wistful and amused.

As in Ghost Tropic, the camera spends a lot of time trailing pedestrians. However, the Brussels depicted here is less sinister, even though it remains somewhat alien, as Stefan and ShuXiu attempt to reconcile feelings of betweenness and belonging and acclimatise to their surroundings like woodland moss.

4) LIVERPOOL STORY.

Having impressed with the socialist actualities, Dennis Skinner: The Nature of the Beast (2017) and The Big Meeting (2019), Norris Green director Daniel Draper returned home to join photographer Don McCullin in Toxteth for Almost Liverpool 8 (2021). He remained in the city for Manifesto (2022), which was centred on the parliamentary wards of Walton and West Derby. But Draper visits every postcode in Liverpool Story, as the 36 year-old sets out to correct the false impressions given by previous cine-excursions to the banks of the Mersey.

Opening with a caption quoting Henry David Thoreau's famous line from Walden (1854) - `Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is.' - a camera descends to the bed of the River Mersey. Muffled sounds can be heard, but the images are clear and the dockland water seems surprisingly clean.

Back on dry land, snow covers tree roots, as we pop into a deli en route to Chinatown for the 2023 New Year celebrations. This is Liverpool the port as the confluence of cultures. But it's also a bustling city forever on the go and we're whisked off to the Philharmonic Hall to watch cinema organist David Nicholas running through a few tunes.

At a wintry Speke, plane-spotters watch a take-off at John Lennon Airport, while men mess about in boats on the flight path. Over a shot of The Matchworks in Garston, a woman muses on the soundtrack about what makes a Scouser and whether those born outside the city are entitled to feel they belong because they share so many values. Hopefully not, however, the kind displayed by the Evertonians chanting `39 Italians Can't Be Wrong', as they make their way through the streets to or from a night game.

A graffito reads `RIP LFC' on the boarded-up window of a bookmaker's, as we eavesdrop on an Italian class and see a cat peer round a door at a fellow feline hunched on the pavement outside a typical Liverpool terraced house. This sense of acceptance is echoed in the voices we hear over shots of the tide rolling on to a pebbly beach of residents who have come from far and wide and found a home in Liverpool. Demonstrators deplore `racist scum' at a Stop the Boats protest, where the debate with a man denying he's a fascist is heated and forthright.

At an inclusivity rally, a Black woman reminds listeners about Liverpool's shameful connection to the Slave Trade. But she also points out that a Scouse accent is a blend of Welsh, Irish, and Norwegian in celebrating the diversity of the city and its people.

Among the many linking shots of church spires, doorways, shopfronts, and architectural flourishes, we drop into a tattoo parlour and an antique shop before gazing up at the imposing façade of the Exchange Station on Tithebarn Street. Then, we're off for a brief dip into the Bluecoat Chambers and the nearby violin repair shop. A fiddle is among the instruments being played by the various buskers in the City Centre, in a montage that reinforces the sense of diversity that suffuses daily life.

A man explains on the soundtrack that he regards the city as a living being and hopes that others will see it in a similar light and feel better disposed to taking care of it. A derelict house is juxtaposed with a clearance site, as the camera latches on to buildings old and new between stops at a barber's shop and a café. We join the crowds watching the St Patrick's Day Parade, as tricolours flutter to remind Liverpudlians of the long connection with the old country. Another band strikes up and Morris men jingle into sight and there's more musical variety on offer at Outpost on Renshaw Street, as live bands get people bopping.

Over shots of rolling brown water, voices reflect on the memories the city holds for them and the connections it retains with passed loved ones. A woman mentions the DNA of the seafaring tradition giving her a wanderlust that is never stronger than the sense of pleasure at returning home. As we see the Liver Buildings on the waterfront and ride the ferry, a man describes peace he felt at scattering his brother's ashes from the Dazzle vessel designed by Sir Peter Blake (who is linked to the city via the Sgt Pepper cover).

Spring is in the air and an underwater shot peers up at a duck swimming past. After a whistlestop tour of grocery shops and takeaways, we hug the touchline with the manager of Granby Toxteth Athletic, as the players seek to put his pre-match and half-time lessons into practice. Once again, there's no time to linger, as trips to a boxing gym, the Liverpool Bridge Club, and the Princes Road Synagogue bring us to the Nelson Mandela mural on the side of the neighbouring Kuumba Imani Millennium Centre. On the corner is the Greek Orthodox church of St Nicholas, but the next stop is Aintree for the Grand National.

A male voice declares that Liverpool sometimes feels like an old lush sitting in the pub and spouting on about how beautiful she was 30 years ago. He doesn't want to wallow and urges the city to keep moving forward, perhaps on the motorbikes being lined up on the pavement outside a dealership. We pop into a launderette and a cobbler's before we gatecrash a sparsely attended Coronation Party and an open mic poetry session.

After exploring a workshop making Christian statues, we pass through the studios of Liverpool Community Radio to glimpse the interiors of the Shri Radha Krishna Temple and the Ganesh Temple. We're then plunged into the mayhem of the Eurovision Song Contest, as Lviverpool stood in for the Ukrainian capital for a week and demonstrated to the continent and beyond what a uniquely welcoming and inclusive place it can be.

Hither and thither again, a meeting is held to cater a Shrovetide gathering, while we slip into a bookshop and a dress shop before finding ourselves on a sun-dappled path, as a passing cyclist hopes that the camera has caught his good side. The good humour continues, as Everton fans celebrate surviving another brush with relegation and a band sings `Can't Buy Me Love' at the Sommerfest. On a larger scale, Sefton Park hosts the Africa Oyé Festival and there's the expected mix of ages and ethnicities in the crowd.

Next, we're off to see a drag stripper at a queer scratch night at SPEW! But a male voice wonders whether Liverpool isn't at its best when it takes off the make-up put on for the benefit of tourists and becomes itself again as darkness falls. Night clouds give way to bright sunlight, as a new day begins at a bakery. People wander round a modern art expedition and the screen goes yellow, as a man declares himself to be a custodian of the city, as he feels a duty to ensure it's okay. Others concur, as we see a range of wonderful buildings, that you get to know Liverpool and its people by walking, looking, and listening, as there's always something new and, sometimes, the occasional thing disappears forever.

A model poses for an art class before Sefton Park Women's Cricket XI takes to the field. We join a service at a Sikh Gurdwara and sit in on an alcohol support group, as a man grumbles on the voicetrack that Liverpool has lost some of its identity because so many shops in the centre are chains with no connection to the community and he worries that globalisation is going to erase what makes the city stand out.

People attend a book signing, but there's a much bigger crowd at a cat show. There's also a healthy turnout at the Chinese Ribbon Dancing class at Pagoda Arts, although temptation lies just around the corner at a chippy. It's strictly eyes front when it comes to the annual Orange Lodge Parade and focus is also needed at the snooker hall we visit after watching some fishmongers and butchers in action.

As some pause to watch an oud group playing in Sefton Park, others wander around the Palm House. The camera picks up some of the expensive properties around Cressington Esplanade, as a woman admits in voiceover that while she's aware that there's lots wrong with Liverpool, she'll defend it to the hilt if an outside dares to criticise it.

After peering over the shoulder of the North End Sketch Club, we watch bespoke tailor John E. Monk with hushed reverence and squeeze into the delightfully cramped Henry Bohn Books. Pride ingratiates itself to one half of the city with a choral rendition of `You'll Never Walk Alone' before we trundle off to a skateboard park and reach a knitting club via a pet shop. Following on from the anthemic theme, Naomi heads to Anfield for match day with her guide dog, Dotty, while others make for the river bank for a day's fishing.

From quiz night at the Hobo Kiosk in the Baltic Triangle, we fetch up at The Cavern, where a variety of tribute acts warble their way through `Some Other Guy', `Honey Pie', `A Hard Day's Night', `I Am the Walrus', and `Please Please Me'. Outside, people sleep rough, as a window cleaner sops shop fronts, while new builds rise up around him, suggesting he is going to need a longer telescopic pole if he wants the contracts.

Over a travelling shot along a dock road, we hear a woman recalling the loss of her brother when she was 12 years old. She ponders the fact that the current occupants of her family home won't have a clue about the sadness she experienced there and which still binds her to the area, as she has never moved away. But people are on the move on the escalators up and down to the Merseyrail platforms that service everywhere from Chester to Southport. It would be easier to get the bus to Calderstones Park to see the Allerton Oak, which is reputed to be the oldest tree in the North West at around 1000 years old.

A neat cut takes us to the workshop of some woodturners before we do a little line dancing. The owner of a shoe shop proudly discusses his stock, as we drop into some more of those local businesses that are the heartbeat of any community street. A Hallowe'en party is thrown for young kids by Kinship Carers, while an older audience gathers to hear the live Scottish music at the famous Caledonia pub.

Over misty views, a man opines that you can hear the waterways flowing under the city if you press your ear to the ground. A rather awkward cut shows us men kneeling in prayer at the Al Rahma Mosque before we earwig on an Irish language lesson and tap our toes to stepdancing class. Our next stop is a gun shop before Ringo Starr beams out from the cover of his Rewind Forward EP in The Musical Box record shop. A cuter link would have shown us The Casbah (which was once owned by Pete Best's mother, Mona). But a bingo session at the Merseyside Society For Deaf People separates the two Beatle drummers and, no, that isn't the tower of St Peter's in Woolton that ends this segment.

As lights reflect in glistening pavements, voices wonder about the future and hope that the young will seize the right to run the city without looking over their shoulders or seeking permission. Fireworks erupt in the nocturnal sky and eyes young and old gaze upwards. They look straight ahead at the paintings in the Walker Art Gallery, but they will have to peer past the scaffolding covering the frontage to see the statue of the Spirit of Liverpool looking out over the city from her lofty vantage point. Dinosaurs lurk next door on William Brown Street, while peace reigns in the adjoining Picton Library. Even the Willis pipe organ in St George's Hall falls silent.

Seagulls hover for scraps and a man claims that they have become more aggressive as people have become more wasteful. Neglect is also a modern disease and the camera alights on tents in the City Centre, as a woman with a degree and a gift for photography laments the toll that alcohol has taken on her life and the lack of help she's had to rebuild a once promising life. She cries thinking of the artists and musicians she has known on the streets who have never been given a fair chance to use their talents.

A pro-Palestinian march weaves its way to the Queen Victoria monument on Castle Street, but life goes on elsewhere in bakeries, garages, shops, and at the Rice Lane Farm, where pigs munch and geese and chickens gaggle and chuck. We see the chapel at the nearby Walton Park cemetery before dashing off to the Yoko Ono Lennon Centre to hear music in the Tung Auditorium. The crowd is more raucous watching the wrestlers at the Fist Club, but we return to the land of the dead to see a headstone being carved.

Moving on from a bait shop, we call at a cycle shop (whose owner has a stark message about polluted water) and a store specialising in dolls houses. Christmas is coming and kids of all ages gather in front of the Town Hall for the annual Santa Dash. Others visit the Christmas Market with its big wheel decked out in fairylights. New Year revellers share their hopes for 2024 and a cloud passes over a bright moon, as `Auld Lang Syne' fades away on a plaintiff piano.

And thus ends an audiovisual love letter that will make every Scouse exile feel tearfully homesick and defiantly proud. This isn't the first `city symphony' to be filmed here, as Anson Dyer made A Day in Liverpool in 1929. It featured such subsequently lost landmarks as the Overhead Railway, which was fondly known as `the Dockers' Umbrella'. Sadly, iconic spots like Richard Wilson's `Turning the Place Over' installation at Moorfields had gone before Draper embarked upon his odyssey. But viewers will note the absence of postcard snaps of such familiar sites as the Three Graces, St Johns Beacon, the Fab Four statue at the Pier Head, Superlambanana, the Mann Island development, the gents in the Philharmonic Dining Rooms, and Antony Gormley's `Another Place' at Blundellsands. The cathedral are also denied a close-up, although the Anglican is mentioned in an anecdote, while a shadow on a wall is suspiciously Paddy's Wigwamesque.

This is because Draper and editor Christie Allanson have eschewed the structures that have featured in Hollywood blockbusters and become something of a cliché in the process. Instead, they have honed in on the quotidian and the quirky in seeking to convey the mindset and mood of a city that has often been written off, but refuses to go away. Rather imposing their own opinions and insights, they have given the floor over to others and Amina Atiq, Sam Batley, Dan Chan, Mick Colligan, Naomi Ditchfield, John Gahan, Jane MacNeil, Dave Nicholas, Ilaria Premici, Rita Smith, Elke Weissmann, Yusuf Yassin, and Ali Zeinali prove eloquent, considered, and sincere vox poppers.

For many, this will serve as a corrective to Terence Davies's highly resistible Of Time and the City (2008). But even admirers of that overrated personal history will have to concede that Draper's visuals are absolutely superb and one can only hope that this astute insiders snapshot will be released on disc so that future generations of Scousers can know how their city looked and sounded during all four seasons of 2023.

3) MY FAVOURITE CAKE.

Anyone fortunate enough to see My Favourite Cake will immediately wonder why no UK distributor had the insight to pick up Risk of Acid Rain (2015) or Ballad of a White Cow (2020), the previous pictures by the Iranian directing team of Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha, who have also made the documentary, The Invincible Diplomacy of Mr Naderi (2018). So committed are the longtime partners to telling it like it is that they are currently under house arrest in Tehran while facing Revolutionary Court charges of peddling propaganda against the regime for depicting a woman drinking alcohol and dancing with a man to whom she is not married, while not wearing a hijab.

Retired nurse Mahin (Lily Farhadpour) has been a widow for almost half her life. She is now 70 and rises at noon because she has trouble sleeping and gets cross when her daughter calls to check she's okay. Afternoons are devoted to watering her plants, some of which she stole from a local park when she was younger. Nights are spent knitting in front of sentimental melodramas, but she enjoys hosting `the old gals' for dinner parties, at which they gossip, diss men, and tease resident hypochondriac, Puran (Mansoureh Ilkhani), when she suggests they watch a video of her colonoscopy.

Feeling low after the table talk had turned to isolation, Mahin calls her daughter. But she's too preoccupied with her youngest to chat and Mahin paints her nails while watching a romance on television, after having applied make-up in the bathroom mirror to determine whether she's still attractive. Her daughter lives abroad and sends clothes, which she urges her mother to wear indoors. But she never does and finds herself reminiscing to a taxi driver (Mohammad Heidari) about the youthful nights when she used to get dolled up and wear high heels and plunging necklines to see famous singers at the Hyatt Regency Hotel.

Singularly failing to flirt with a man in the bakery, Mahin goes to the hotel's new coffee bar. It's empty and she decides to have tea because she doesn't know how to scan the QR code on the menu. Sitting on a bench in the park, she asks an old man when the elderly come for exercise and pretends she is asking so her husband can come. However, she gets distracted when the Morality Police try to arrest a girl (Melika Pazouki) for not covering her hair and Mahin gets into a row with the male officer, who threatens to bundle her into his van. She fights her corner, however, and is rewarded with a kiss from the girl, who envies the fact that old ladies got to enjoy life before the Revolution and now don't have to bother about how they look. Letting the remark go, Mahin watches as the girl rushes off to join her boyfriend, even though she risks being detained again.

At the pensioners' restaurant, Mahin listens to four friends kvetching and overhears that they all have wives, unlike Faramarz (Esmail Mehrabi). He's a cabby with a grey moustache and Mahin is so taken by him that she spends the rest of the day waiting for him to return to the rank so he can drive her home. Politely, he agrees and says nothing when she sits in the front seat. She admits having fibbed to his colleagues that she knew him and introduces herself. As they talk, he reveals that he is unmarried and has no children, as his body is filled with shrapnel after being sent to fight against Iraq while in the army. He has driven a cab for 20 years, but once spent a month in prison after being arrested for playing the tat in a wedding band.

Convinced he's a decent man who is as lonely as she is, Mahin asks Faramarz if he would like to spend the evening at her place and he agrees. Stopping to collect a prescription from the chemist, he hurries back through downpour and calls the rank to say he's off for the night. Mahin smiles at the prospect of having company and asks Faramarz to drop her off and park a couple of streets away to stop the neighbours from gossiping.

Tentatively poking his head around the door, Faramarz compliments Mahin on her home and she ushers him into the kitchen for food and wine. She has changed outfit and put on lipstick and he is surprised that they're the same age. Sitting at the breakfast bar, he admits he's become invisible with age, but isn't afraid of dying. They agree that it would be hard on anyone who finds them alone in their homes, but she insists they have many years ahead of them, as they toast to health and the future.

He explains how he was matchmade by his mother with a very religious woman, who divorced him when he couldn't give her children. But he admits that praying and fasting isn't his thing and Mahin nods understandingly. Indeed, when a nosy neighbour (Effat Rasoulinezhad) inquires about hearing a man's voice, she's given short shrift and the emboldened Mahin decides to eat in her walled yard, when Faramarz offers to fix her broken lights. She bakes a cake while he works and picks him some fresh herbs. He promises to bring some flowers to plant in her rich soil and they agree to make their own wine, in a fermentation bowl they will hide in a hollow in the yard. Relishing the idea of having someone with whom to make plans, the pair chatter away and concur that everything is better when done with love.

As they eat, Faramarz ventures that most men don't get to experience a woman's love and Mahin tells him that he should be feeling it right now. She offers to dance for him and is pleased when he reveals he's too tipsy from the wine to drive home. Back indoors, Mahin changes again and poses them for a selfie, which she makes him promise to keep to himself. Spotting some photos on her wall, he claims she looks better now than she did in her honeymoon picture. She puts on some music and asks if Faramarz has had other lovers since his wife. He admits to a brief romance with a woman who left for Australia with a richer man, as he wishes that Mahin had found him sooner.

Taking a pill on a trip to the bathroom, Faramarz dances around the room with Mahin, who thinks he looks cute when he lets himself go. Feeling woozy, as the wine and tiredness hit, he collapses on the settee. She reaches for his hand, as she reassures him that she wants him to spend the night. Asking if he can shower, he suggests she joins him, but she is too bashful. Instead, they sit fully clothed under the water and joke that characters showering together in foreign films don't know how to scrub each other's backs.

Mahin ices the orange blossom cake, as Faramarz puts on some of her husband's clothes. Sneaking into her room, she puts on some perfume and ventures into the guest room, where she finds Faramarz dead on the bed. Being a nurse, she tries to massage his heart, but it's too late and she asks God why he has allowed this to happen to her, as she holds back the tears.

Waking up next morning, Mahin snuggles under Faramarz's arm. But she is thinking rationally and knows she will be punished for having a man in her home. So, she calls a gardener (Mozafer Esmaeli) to dig a pit for flowers in her yard before washing the body and sewing it into an old bedspread. Tutting on finding a blister pack of Viagra in his pocket, she puts a small piece of cake into Faramarz's mouth before covering his face. When darkness falls, she drags the shroud through the house and into the yard. Pulling back the blue cloth to kiss his forehead, she hauls the body into the hole and starts filling it in. As the morning breeze rustles the foliage, Mahin sits with her back to the camera so we can't see her sadness and dread.

What a double bill this would make with Elene Naveriani's Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry (2023), although a goodly supply of tissues would be necessary. Not everyone will condone the abrupt turn to the dark side, but it's difficult to imagine how this poignant drama could end any other way. The dialogue from the soppy sagas that Mahin watches on TV leave Moghaddam and Sanaeeha with little option. Moreover, could you imagine the trouble they would be in if the next set of red lines had been crossed?

This is a hugely courageous picture that dares to explore the simple human feelings that so many lonely people endure without hope of any sort of physical or spiritual consolation. The odds of a Mahin and a Faramarz meeting by chance and forging such an immediate and intimate bond are admittedly small. But the fact that they just might makes this exquisitely judged chamber piece so winning and wonderful.

Lily Farhadpour is exceptional, as the widow deciding to risk all for one last taste of happiness after deciding long-distance phone calls and gal pal dinners can only fulfil so many needs. She surprises herself by how easy it turns out to be to find the soulmate she knew must be out there somewhere and Esmail Mehrabi fits the bill perfectly. Twinkling courteously, he goes with the flow with a mix of disbelieving enthusiasm and charming trust in the stranger seeking to reconnect with the free spirit she once was.

The sequence in the nocturnal yard, as the lights come on after many years of darkness deftly sets the tone, as Mahin and Faramarz make simple, practical plans to share small pleasures. But the concern that this is all too good to be true - and they won't be able to have their cake and eat it, too - nags away before it morphs into a lingering fear that Mahin won't get away with her `crime', as several people will have seen her at the restaurant and the taxi rank, while Faramarz's car is parked around the corner.

Shooting a number of scenes in secret during the street protests that followed the death in custody of Mahsa Amini (who had been detained for not wearing a hijab), the co-directors collude with cinematographer Mohamad Hadadi in following the besotted strangers around the homey interiors designed by Amir Hivand (who also worked with Moghaddam on the costumes) in order to convey the hesitancy that keeps intimacy just out of reach until a sombre 360° pan reveals just how great the distance has actually been. Yet, while Moghaddam and Sanaeeha are to be commended for the choreography of their film, as well as its anti-authoritarianism and body positivity, its most subversive element is the sheer love of life that the septuagenarians rediscover after 35 years of theocratic repression.

Moghaddam has worked in the past with Jafar Panahi, who is the master of completing films under the noses of the Iranian authorities. But let's hope that she doesn't need to apply any acquired skills when she and Sanaeeha come to make their next picture. In the meantime, there are those two earlier outings, which should at least be made available on disc or a streaming platform.

2) BLACKBIRD BLACKBIRD BLACKBERRY.

Having studied painting at the State Academy of Art in Tbilisi, Elene Naveriani received a Masters in Critical Curatorial Cybermedia before taking a degree in film at the Geneva University of Art and Design. Still based in Switzerland, they made their directorial bow with After I Am Truly a Drop of Sun on Earth (2017), which was followed by Wet Sand (2021). Naveriani reunites with the star of the latter, Ekaterine Chavleishvili, on Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry, which premiered in the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes.

Having clambered back after almost falling into a ravine when she is distracted by a blackbird while picking blackberries, Etero Gelbakhiana (Eka Chavleishvili) has a vision of her neighbours viewing her washed-up body with disdain. Returning to the shop selling beauty and cleaning products that she runs in a remote Georgian village, she feels an urgent attraction towards delivery man Murman (Temiko Chichinadze). He's the married father of twins, but has long admired Etero and puts up no resistance when she seduces him into sex on the storeroom floor.

She runs her hand through some spilt soapflakes, as they enjoy the post-coital stillness. But a crack of thunder returns Etero to her senses and she sends Murman packing with a reminder to say nothing of their tryst. Locking the shop door, she reaches down with her fingers and shrugs at the loss of her virginity at the age of 48.

Feeling peculiar, she asks friend Nino (Piqria Niqabadze) to take her blood pressure and she identifies arrhythmia. She urges Etero to keep away from the ravine, as she's no longer young and looks at her quizzically when she describes how swept away she had been by the beauty of the blackbird.

Murman calls that night, while Etero is watching a programme about origami. He asks if they can talk on his next visit and she promises to be home. However, she's distracted by a shout and scuttles off to feed her long-dead father (Gocha Nemsitsveridze) and brother (Rezi Karosanidze) and is taken aback when the latter sees the bruise on her arm and accuses her of becoming a whore.

After two days away from the shop, Etero finds Londa (Tamar Mdinaradze) waiting for her. She wants a tonic for her thinning hair and asks why Etero has left the fan running on the counter. Jumping to the conclusions that she's having menopausal hot flushes, Londa gossips about Etero when Nino invites some friends over that night. They discuss her brutal brother and how he almost treated Etero like a servant. Back home, she calls Murman during a rainstorm and reminisces about the time her father had taken her to visit her mother's snow-covered grave. She had enjoyed feeling close to him for once, but still knew that he blamed her for her mother's untimely death.

Woken by Natala (Lia Abuladze), who tries prying into her business, Etero takes the bus to town to run errands. She stops for a millefeuille and coffee and brushes off the unwanted attentions of an old man who claims she should be married. Chatting to shopkeeping couple, Marina (Sopo Grigolashvili) and Ia (Iako Tchilaia), she confides that she would like to retire to a house overlooking the river and devote her time to learning English and photographing the beauty all around her.

The blue-haired Elene (Ani Mogeladze) helps Etero translate word she doesn't understand on the packaging of her products. She listens to her loud rock music and learns it's a song about freedom. Etero has made her own small step in this direction by removing the pictures of her father and brother from the wall. But it's Murman who makes her feel free and she masturbates when he sends a text about missing her smell of sunshine.

Her growing understanding of herself prompts Etero to snap back when Londa, Natela, and Tsisana (Anka Khurtsidze) taunt her about her weight when they meet at Nino's for cake. She insists she's glad she has never been suckered into so-called love by a man looking for a skivvy and would much rather have her body fill out than to it bear the ravages of child-rearing. Stalking out with her head held high, she strides home past a gaggle of men drinking in the street. Natela drops by to check on her next day, but doesn't apologise. Instead, she criticises the sweet jelly that Etero serves her and laments that her mother had ignored the warning signs of the cancer that had killed her so young.

Etero listens with disinterest, even when Natela tells her that they are planning to build a shopping mall next to her shop. She is still in a good mood because Murman had called. He had feigned leaving his glasses in the shop in order to give assistant Tengo (Shota Sharvashidze) the slip and had suggested a Saturday night rendezvous - before forgetting his specs for real.

She brings cake in a box to the woodland road where Murman is waiting. As they drive, they listen to Charles Aznavour's `Emmenez-moi' and Etero almost manages a smile. After passionate love-making in the van, they lie on the grass to admire the view. He had grown up in the area and this had been his special spot to be alone. Etero explains that blackberries had been her only childhood friends and he asks if he can be her blackberry. On the bus home, she is touched by a text claiming to miss her already, although the warm feeling is spoilt by the disapproving stare of an elderly female passenger.

Nettled when Nino comes to buy goods without exchanging a word, Etero crashes one of her card games. She tells the group about being pestered by an old classmate after her father had died and she had been forced to drive him away with her brother's rifle. The women chuckle, as Etero impersonates her admirer, but the joke turns on her when Natela reveals that he had been in her pharmacy to purchase Viagra and they mock her when she has to ask what it's for and whether all men over 50 have to use it.

Feeling good about herself, Etero starts listening to the radio again. She accompanies Murman to a hotel and she discovers that he writes poetry about her in his notebook. Able to explore each other at leisure for the first time, she feels able to trust him with the revelation that she had been in love with the prettiest girl in her class. Resting her head on his chest, she asks how he has survived as the only gentle dog amongst wolves. But, when he makes his next delivery, Murman breaks the news that he has got a job driving lorries in Turkey and has to leave because the money is so much better. Etero insists she understands and squeezes his hand when he promises he will come back to hold her.

But she's crushed by her loss and feels worse when she suspects she's suffering from ovarian cancer. She invites her friends over and tells them to take what they want from her brother and father's belongings. Moreover, when Murman calls to ask her to come to Turkey with him, she informs him that they had better part because she doesn't want to leave and would rather be alone and free to make her own decisions.

Travelling to Tibilisi, she sees a doctor recommended by Marina and Ia. Nino sees her off at the bus stop (she's fibbed she's visiting a bereaved friend) and vows to be there for her. Etero pictures herself in a coffin, as she checks into a swanky hotel. But her life isn't in danger. Indeed, she's pregnant and the doctor claims it's a miracle for someone her age. Unable to eat her millefeuille in a café, Etero looks at the scan photos and starts to cry.

Echoing the theme of late-life love explored in Aki Kaurismäki's Fallen Leaves (2023), this is a poignant, but affirmational picture that is made all the more affecting by the meticulous care with which Naveriani and Chavleishvili present Etero's bittersweet existence. The deadpan tone is reinforced by the stillness of Agnesh Pakozdi's subtly lit imagery and the blocks of autumnal colour that production designer Teo Baramidze uses on the walls of homes, shops, and hotel rooms alike. Aurora Vögeli's editing is also measured, as Naveriani allows scenes to play out in their own time.

Chavleishvili's Joan Crawford-like eyebrows also convey a sense of immovability, as Etero tries to make sense of the exhilarating and frightening changes that start coming over her after she is given a second chance at life, with the ravine and the river rushing in its depths almost serving as a rebirth canal. Yet her eyes capture the wonderment that Etero feels at spotting a blackbird, realising the depth of Murman's feelings after reading his verses, or coming to appreciate the beauty of her post-coital body in the bedside mirror. Her sudden submission to her own passion is presented with equal delicacy, although Temiko Chichinadze deserves credit for ensuring that Murman is seen primarily as an emancipator rather than an adulterer.

Etero's shift in perception don't necessarily emanate from his desire, however. In adapting a novel by a Tamta Melashvili, Naveriani and co-scenarist Nikoloz Mdivani ensure she is content with her lot before he came along and already has the self-possession that her sometimes cruel village friends rarely recognise. Etero does things on her own terms, after having survived the tyranny of her menfolk. After all, she's the one who makes the first move, even though Murman has long been silently smitten.

Such an approach enables Naveriani to pass adroit comment on Georgian society and the gender conventions it underpins. Attitudes towards outsiders are explored through the treatment of a couple selling watermelons opposite Etero's shop, while the limited nature of her stock and her old-fashioned reflects on the state of the economy after three decades of independence. Etero's first love was a female classmate and seems more envious of the lesbians who have complete, mutual control over their relationship than she is of the local friends who root their self-worth in marriage and motherhood.

It's ironic that both Georgia and a blackbird feature in Paul McCartney songs on The White Album. Working in Turkey by the end of the film, Murman clearly has Georgia on his mind, while Etero has long been waiting for her moment to arise and be free. But the birdsong that follows the final fade to black leaves the suggestion that (for all the ambiguity of Etero's tears) their story may well be only just beginning.

1) THAT THEY MAY FACE THE RISING SUN.

Having captured the sights, sounds, and pace of Irish life in such invaluable titles as John McGahern: A Private World (2005), Silence (2012), and Song of Granite (2017), Pat Collins works much the same magic in That They May Face the Rising Sun, a lyrical adaptation of John McGahern's last novel from 2002. Set in County Leitrim in the 1980s and flecked with autobiographical elements, this relishably leisurely, but deceptively eventful saga was nominated for 11 awards and won Best Film at the Irish Film & Television Awards.

Five years after returning from London, novelist Joe Rutledge (Barry Ward) feels he has succeeded in reintegrating into the rural community in which he had grown up. German wife Kate (Anna Bederke) might have retained her interest in an art gallery in London, but she has taken up crafts like carding wool and basket-weaving and is usually happy to see the neighbours when the pop in for a chat over a mug or a glass.

While farmer Jamesie Murphy (Phillip Dolan) wheels his bike along the road to have a gossip over a dram, the grumpy Bill Evans (Brendan Conroy) crunches biscuits and cadges fags before waddling off with the buckets he fills in the nearby pond. Garage owner, The Shah (John Olohan), comes for lunch by car. He wanders with Joe to admire the glorious view to the hill and confides that he's thinking of retiring, as he muses: `The rain comes down, the sun shines, grass grows, children grow old and die. That's the holy all of it. We all know it full well and can't even whisper it.'

Sheep are taken to market and bee hives are inspected, as Joe writes and Kate sketches. Patrick Ryan (Lalor Roddy) drops in to quiz Kate about why she has no children and inform Joe that his brother, Edmund, has gone into hospital and is not expected to recover. He suggests they do some work on the greenhouse that they have been building for two years. While they are treating the timbers, Jamesie's brother, Johnny (Seán McGinley), cycles up in his best suit. He has been working in London and asks Patrick how the outsiders have been getting on before speculating about how Joe copes with Kate wearing the britches.

Over sandwiches, Patrick and Johnny relive a scene they once performed in J.M. Synge's Playboy of the Western World. But Joe takes exception to Patrick mocking Johnny for taking on a cleaner's job at Ford's Dagenham plant and Patrick stalks out after being reminded that a little tact and kindness can go a long way. Embarrassed, Johnny follows his old friend, who keeps chuntering as they amble down the path and vows not to return any time soon.

Bob (Declan Conlon), Kate's partner in the gallery, comes to visit with the news he is moving on to the National. This means that Kate will either have to agree to a sale or move back to London and Joe is surprised when she lets it slip that she takes her trips to escape the quiet and the unplanned routine that he finds so enchanting. Joe defends Bill when he comes to the door and Bob compares him to a character in a Russian novel. He explains that he's illegitimate and virtually works for Jamesie for free because that's how country life goes. As the local priest has invited him to help take the old folks to Carrick, Joe walks with him to the bus stop to reassure him that everything will go well.

Joe helps Jamesie bale hay in the shadow of the hills, while Kate chats to his wife, Mary (Ruth McCabe), who is doting on her granddaughter. Saddened to hear that Patrick had not wanted him to know about Edmund's death, Joe is cheered by the revelation that The Shah (who is his uncle) is going to marry Susan Maguire (Catherine Byrne) from the hotel and is honoured to be asked to be his best man. But he feels the burden when Kate suggests that he composes a letter on Jamesie's behalf to tell Johnny that there's no room for him in the house after losing his job. Noting that everyone will soon have telephones, Joe realises that no one will need to write to each other any more.

Christmas comes and Joe takes Patrick a bottle. He's in bed and changes to visit his cousins while discussing Johnny's situation and the need to finish the greenhouse. Joe denies writing the letter for Jamesie and helps break out a bale for the sheep. They're warily civil, as though neither can quite trust himself to betray any emotion, because that's the way it is. Bill and The Shah come for lunch and Joe writes about the day having had that gentle ease that can only be taken for happiness.

Following a spring wedding that's enjoyed by everyone, Johnny comes home for a visit. He's landed a DIY job with lodging and claims to be keeping busy. Fibbing that Jamesie had begged him to come home, he tells Joe, as they drive to the village, that `you never know a place more than the one you grew up in'. Over a pint, he reveals he had gone to London after an actress from the play, but had been left high and dry when things didn't work out. Denying any regrets, Johnny suddenly feels afraid he'll get left behind when Joe remembers he needs to call at the shop. Realising that Johnny's spirit has been broken, he orders more drinks and Nora the barmaid (Derbhle Crotty) makes a fuss of him.

Although he claims that everything is `alphabetical' when Joe drops him off, Johnny dies shortly afterwards. As there's no sign of Patrick, Joe agrees to lay him out with cousin Frank (Patrick Ryan). But he and Kate simply look on as everyone prays the rosary downstairs. Patrick is furious that he wasn't called in time, but Joe realises he is simply hurting at losing his best friend and puts an arm around his shoulder as the rasped rebukes turn to muffled sobs.

On the walk home, Kate announces her intention to stay and they hug. The next day, Joe helps Bill and Patrick dig the grave, while Jamesie looks on. They find bones in the earth and Patrick curses that they've widened the wrong end. He insists that Johnny will face the rising sun and prays for the resurrection of the dead.

Perhaps the most audiovisually sublime feature ever to be made in Ireland, this eulogy to the everyday wholly adheres to Graham Greene's maxim about films depicting `life as it's lived and life as it ought to be lived'. Much is owed, of course, to John McGahern's text, which has been deftly adapted by Collins and Éamon Little. Indeed, they even drolly include a self-reflexive exchange between Patrick and Joe, as the former spruce himself up for Christmas Day. `Does anything happen,' Patrick inquires about the book Joe is working on, `or is it the usual heavy going?' After a pause, the author replies, `Not much drama. More day-to-day stuff.' Never was a truer word spoken.

Thanks to Barry Ward, Joe could well be one of the nicest people in screen history. Considerate and considered, he is a former seminarian and medical student who always takes account of other people and has the knack of reacting to their pleasures and pain with an apt phrase. He even refrains from putting pressure on Kate, when he leaves her to decide their future. But it might have been interesting to see how he would have reacted if she had come to a different conclusion.

Judging by Padraig O'Neill's production design and Richard Kendrick's views of the surrounding countryside, it would be hard to justify leaving this idyllic spot. Collins actually filmed on Loch Nafooey in County Galway and the Ozu-esque pillow shots he employs to allow the audience to ponder the previous scene and to convey the passing of the seasons are superbly complemented by the combination of the exquisite sound design and the piano score composed by Irene and Linda Buckley. What a pity no one has ever perfected aroma-vision, as this would be even more irresistible.

Ward isn't alone in giving an excellent performance, however. Anna Bederke is delicately watchful, as she respects her antic guests with only the odd quizzical smile at her husband. Lalor Roddy's gnarled Patrick is a scene-stealing masterclass, but Seán McGinley's display of stifled regret and crushed pride is also outstanding. Philip Dolan and John Olohan are also impeccable, while Brendan Conroy is heart-rending as the ill-used outsider forever hoping to belong.

Much has changed since the time depicted here. But it's hard not to be beguiled by the elliptical scenario and its tranquility. Simple things are still key to the meaning of life and the world would certainly be a better place if everyone heeded Joe's reminder that speaking the plainly may not always be the best way and that we should treat each other instead - whether in person or in online anonymity - with `kindness, understanding, sympathy, tact, humour, maybe'. Now that's the holy all of it.