Juror #2 [2024]

 Juror #2, 94-year-old Clint Eastwood’s 40^th directorial feature, is a legal thriller that intrigues with its ethical conundrums and pulpy plot contrivances, while also leaving one unsatiated on account of its rather staid script and convenient resolution. In other words, it’s akin to a taut and eventful, if absurdly implausible, airport novel that one probably won’t leave mid-air. In this cheeky spin to Lumet’s classic 12 Angry Men, the protagonist who’s resolutely trying to sway the opinions of his fellow jurors while debating their verdict on what seems to be an open and shut case, is motivated less by moral considerations and more by guilt. Justin (Nicholas Hould), a troubled former alcoholic with a heavily pregnant wife, is called for jury duty on a trial against a man suspected of murdering his girlfriend. They had a volatile relationship, they had a nasty public argument just prior to her death and he was seen chasing her in his car in a foul mood. Circumstantial evidences, therefore, make it a seemingly easy verdict for the jury, as does the suspect’s problematic past; the public prosecutor (Toni Collette), who harbours a political career on the issue of going tough against crime, is also blindly convinced of his culpability. However, unbeknownst to all, Justin believes that the guy is innocent of this particular crime and that he himself might’ve been responsible for the death instead; and while he wants to avoid getting caught, his gnawing guilt makes him try and save the guy too. Though it holds attention, there’s no missing the shaky, coincidence-driven plot. What’s actually interesting, however, is seeing a heavily conservative person like Eastwood making a film that’s anything but.

Director: Clint Eastwood

Genre: Drama/Legal Thriller

Language: English

Country: US

Santosh [2024]

 British-Indian filmmaker Sandhya Suri’s gripping, smouldering and impressive debut feature Santosh operated in the grim intersectionality of class, caste, religion and gender, and the foul cesspit of disenfranchisement, bigotry, caste violence, Islamophobia, misogyny and police brutality. That may seem like a lot is going on for one movie. It’s therefore to Suri’s credit – aided perhaps by her background as a documentarian – that these themes were organically interlaced into the script, thereby ensuring that they’re integral to this police procedural involving the investigations into the rape and murder of a young Dalit girl in the ironically named north Indian state of “Chirag Pradesh”. The clincher was that these subterranean realities were evoked through the gaze of a woman protagonist – privileged by her caste and religion, but not so much by her class and gender – in an inversion to this otherwise “masculine” genre and the heavily male-dominated police force. Shahana Goswami was terrific – in a turn marked by seething fury and restraint – as the eponymous Santosh, a recently widowed woman who decides to inherit her husband’s job of a police constable, and therefore his salary and accommodation, in order to secure her social and financial independence. There, she immediately encounters an environment reeking of patriarchy, prejudices, sexism and apathy, and soon after finds herself amidst an increasingly vile morass on account of the afore-mentioned crime. The scenario was suffused with additional nuance upon the arrival of a seasoned senior inspector (Sunita Rajwar) to lead this politically volatile case, as on hand she treats Santosh with courtesy and even protectiveness – albeit, coloured with sensual undertones on occasions – while, on the other, she has a murky past of custodial torture and cynical expediency.

Director: Sandhya Suri

Genre: Crime Thriller/Police Procedural

Language: Hindi

Country: India/UK

No Other Land [2024]

 State-sponsored brutalities and oppression can manifest in diverse forms, as can defiance and resistance against them. Acts of micro-activism and citizen journalism are eloquent illustrations of the latter, oftentimes taking particularly haunting qualities and power through their rugged authenticity, unfiltered vérité and defiant resolve. This was unforgettably evidenced by the crushing documentary essay 5 Broken Cameras 14 years back, as is by No Other Land that’s directed by a Palestinian-Israeli collective spearheaded by Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham. Adra, a Palestinian residing in occupied West Bank and life-long activist, has been fearlessly recording the plight of his impoverished fellow villagers – residents of a tiny hamlet called Masafer Yatta – who’ve been facing forced displacement and cruelties, since as long as he can remember, at the hands of the Israeli military who want to ostensibly setup training grounds for the soldiers, and scheming Israeli settlers who then plan to seize the vacated lands for territorial expansion. His tireless documentation of these brazen acts of state-sponsored crimes, including the bulldozing of homes and schools, and violence against protesters, counterpointed the villagers’ refusal to surrender despite the dispossessions, hardships and abject helplessness. His footage – shot over many years leading to the inception of the ongoing genocide in Gaza – speaks truth to power and bears witness with simmering fury and striking urgency. These were, in parallel, coupled with the stirring solidarity that’s established with Abraham, an Israeli journalist who highlights the harrowing injustices in national and international media. The dramatic difference in the situations of these two comrades – in terms of relative rights, freedom and privileges – are vaporized by their shared battles against repression with a remarkable sense of lucidity, equanimity and even humour.

Directors: Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Hamdan Ballal, Rachel Szor

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film

Language: Arabic/Hebrew

Country: Palestine

The Shrouds [2024]

 The complex, tangled and murky ways in which body, mind and technology feed into each another has been a recurring thematic preoccupation for the nonconformist Canadian prophet David Cronenberg. That informed The Shrouds too, the unsettling and morbidly fascinating latest by the veteran provocateur. It’s also an intensely personal work, as he made it to process his grief upon losing his wife to cancer in 2017. The film, therefore, was steeped in pain and melancholy, albeit metastasized by twisted desires, problematic technological overreach, political paranoia and psychosomatic disintegration. Karsh (Vincent Cassel) – imagined as the director’s stand-in with his white back-brushed hair – is a technocrat who’s unable to recover from the loss of his ravishingly beautiful wife Becky (Diane Kruger) who died of cancer and who he continues to have lurid dreams about. He’s channelled his grief into an outré entrepreneurial venture called “GraveTech” wherein one can see – through voyeuristic 3D images – the decomposing corpses of one’s deceased loved ones. The mind-bending tale is provided additional fillip through three other troubled individuals – Becca’s twin sister Terry (Kruger) who’s turned on by conspiracies, her pathologically jealous ex-husband (Guy Pierce) who’s a techie and sees global machinations everywhere, and the sultry blind wife (Sandrine Holt) of a potential billionaire investor – and spiralling, nightmarish developments that’re underplayed by the film’s relaxed editing style and chamber settings, viz. the vandalizing of the company’s showpiece Toronto site, including Becky’s grave, by unknown assailants; Karsh’s virtual assistant (voiced by Kruger) displaying sinister undercurrents; and the blurring of the real with Karsh’s disturbed psyche. Kruger was particularly striking in her evocation of three separate personas in this radical late-career piece that alternated between dark, cautionary and tender.

Director: David Cronenberg

Genre: Body Horror/Sci-Fi Thriller/Marital Thriller

Language: English

Country: Canada

A Traveler’s Needs [2024]

 A Traveler’s Needs – Hong Sang-soo’s third collaboration with Isabelle Huppert – is a film of spontaneous comings and goings, loopy repetitions, eccentric digressions, and fleeting impressions. This is, furthermore, a droll and idiosyncratic tableau on improbable encounters and oddball language lessons. Huppert, whose fabled career is filled with incongruous, anomalous and unhinged characters, is a delectably strange cat here as Iris (Huppert), a whimsical and coquettish French woman of an unknown past and dubious disposition. Since her arrival in Korea, she’s been drifting in Seoul, earning money by teaching French to well-off locals using a self-devised method that’s hilariously weird, and sharing apartment with a naïve young guy for whom she’s somewhere between an attraction, wise mentor and unlikely mother figure. Over the amusing and playful narrative’s loosely-strung chapters, we see Iris teaching and interacting with a young woman who’s become fond of her quirky tutor; being interviewed by a woman (Lee Hye-young) who wants to employ her but is flabbergasted by her pedagogy, and then bonding with her and her genial husband (Kwon Hae-hyo) over makgeolli – Iris’ beverage of choice – and the poetry of Yun Dong-ju, who was arrested and killed at the age of 28 for his anti-Japanese resistance in occupied Korea during WW2; having meandering conversations with the infatuated Inguk (Ha Seong-guk) with whom she stays; and drinking more makgeolli and listening to bad English translations of Kwon’s poems. In a deadpan aside – the only stretch without Huppert in it – we see Inguk being berated by his passive-aggressive mother (Cho Yun-hee) who’s shocked at his choice of roommate. The minimalist script, consequently, unfolded as a charming and observational take on aimless travels, intercultural companionships and existential ennui.

Director: Hong Sang-soo

Genre: Comedy/Slice-of-Life

Language: English/Korean/French

Country: South Korea

The Substance [2024]

 What happens when you mix a cocktail that’s equal parts grotesque body horror, caustic showbiz satire, deliriously lurid and grisly B-movie, and fierce feminist critique on male gaze, shallow beauty standards and institutionalized ageism? You get a brash, deliciously nasty, wickedly funny and intensely polarizing film like Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, that’s unapologetically in-your-face and dripping with chutzpah. However, for the same reasons, it also felt overdone and unwieldy at times, with its lofty ideological ambitions lacking in complex undertones, even if – admittedly – Fargeat was probably never aiming for nuance or subtlety. This, incidentally, is also a rare body horror film directed by a woman, thereby pairing it with fellow French filmmaker Julia Ducournau’s Titane. The titular “substance” is an experimental black-market drug that spawns a younger and more beautiful self of oneself; the only catch being, the two alternate versions must co-exist symbiotically to avoid horrific repercussions to both. Elisabeth (Demi Morre), once a fabled Hollywood goddess but now leading aerobics shows for the TV, is summarily fired by the network’s boorish and lascivious boss Harvey (Dennis Quaid) – a deliberately noxious caricature given the name – as she’s just turned 50. Faced with anonymity and irrelevance, she falls into the trap and takes the sinister drug, and thus emerges – through a literally spine-crushing process – her young, saucy and sexy doppelgänger Sue (Margaret Qualley). Soon enough a mutually destructive battle develops between them, as they spitefully start treating one another as rivals. Moore and Qualley weren’t just excellent in their respective roles, they also complemented each other as psychedelic variants of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The garish colours and trippy visuals, meanwhile, were reminiscent of De Palma and Verhoeven.

Director: Coralie Fargeat

Genre: Sci-Fi/Body Horror/Showbiz Satire/Black Comedy

Language: English

Country: France

I'm Still Here [2024]

 Memorable films and books hinged around enforced disappearances of political dissidents, which was frequent under military dictatorships in Latin America, interweave the personal and the collective, with one informing the other. I’m Still Here, Walter Salles’ haunting and intimate tale of loss, defiance and solidarity, touched upon a brutal national wound through one family’s story. Adapted from Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s memoir, and imbued with the director’s own memories, it focussed on the well-off, progressive and politically engaged Paiva family on the despairing backdrop of Brazil’s repressive military dictatorship. Rubens (Selton Mello) – civil engineer, former Congressman and secret supporter of left-wing resistance activities – was arrested, tortured and killed by the authorities, though his status remained officially “unknown” until his wife Eunice (Fernanda Torres), who became a lawyer at the age of 47 and an activist championing victims of the dictatorship, secured his death certificate twenty-five years later. The film began on a buoyant note as we see this family – which also comprised of their four lively kids, living in a beach-side house in Rio Janeiro, and regularly visited by friends – with hints to the troubling political situation that turns into a backlash upon a Swiss diplomat’s kidnapping. The narrative, therefore, was broken into a “before” and an “after” as we see Eunice – who herself was illegally detained for 12 days – having to uproot her family and provide for it while doggedly pursuing Rubens’ disappearance. Accompanied by an engrossing soundtrack from the 60s and 70s, and powered by a towering central turn by Torres, this luminously shot and classically framed film reminded me of Cuarón’s Roma, which too was exquisitely foregrounded on a closely-knit family on the backdrop of political tyranny.

Director: Walter Salles

Genre: Drama/Historical Drama/Political Drama/Docudrama/Family Drama

Language: Portuguese

Country: Brazil

Grand Tour [2024]

 Diverse elements that constitute cinema – from its technical facets and grammar to its sociocultural roles and historicity – were evoked with joyous abandon in Grand Tour by the virtuoso Portuguese auteur Miguel Gomes. Forming a fascinating companion piece to his sublime masterpiece Tabu – in its tapping into colonial-era tapestry where nostalgia is sharply counterpointed by irony; chronicling of an infectious travelogue self-consciously stripped of exoticism; and channelling the palette of classical-era movies while deconstructing that and even celebrating its artifice – this wistful, eccentric, gorgeously composed, feverishly mounted and wildly experimental gem was ingeniously constructed in the form of a diptych. In the first act we follow Edward (Gonçalo Waddington), a British civil servant stationed in Rangoon in 1918 who flees in a fit of existential panic on the prospect of marriage to his fiancée Molly (Crista Alfaiate) arriving for that purpose; he travels to Singapore, Bangkok, Saigon, Manila, Osaka, Shanghai and further – initially to escape, but eventually through delirious inertia of motion – only to keep finding cheerful telegrams from Molly informing him that she’s happily in pursuit. In the second act we switchover to the optimistic Molly and follow her indefatigable journey, undeterred by Edward’s abandonment. Gomes, in a playful and idiosyncratic formal choice, alternated the story of the globetrotting lovers – shot in 16-mm on soundstage and accompanied by voiceovers whose languages changed based on the countries they’re in – with essayistic present-day footage of those places, some of which he’d shot before Covid stuck and directed the rest remotely. Further, though set in the past, one often sees them juxtaposed with anachronistic components, and this dazzling collapsing of the past and the present reminded me of Petzold’s engrossing film Transit.

Director: Miguel Gomes

Genre: Comedy/Romantic Comedy/Road Movie/Adventure

Language: Portuguese/Burmese/Thai/Chinese/Vietnamese/English

Country: Portugal

Hard Truths [2024]

Mike Leigh reunited with Marianne Jean-Baptiste in Hard Truths nearly 3 decades after they last worked together in the shattering masterpiece Secrets & Lies; further, he also returned to his preferred setting of contemporary, everyday England over a decade since his brilliant film Another Year. This latest from the great British filmmaker, which could’ve repurposed the title of Almodóvar’s hilarious gem Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, may well rank among his most downbeat works; while he’s made movies with bleaker backdrops and drearier settings, this one came largely devoid of any reconciliations, resolutions and catharses, thereby underscoring its bracing cynicism. At the core of this combustible miniature tale of personal and domestic collapse, in post-Covid UK, is Pansy (Jean-Baptiste), a perpetually edgy and cantankerous middle-aged British-Jamaican woman who’s afflicted with anxiety and depression, and is on the brink of an irreversible emotional meltdown. She keeps lashing out at her taciturn, mild-mannered husband (David Webber) and their withdrawn, soft-spoken son (Tuwaine Barrett), as well as whoever she’s compelled to meet, from her doctor to the cashier at the departmental store and even random strangers at the parking lot. She, as well as the desolate atmosphere at their otherwise fastidiously sanitized suburban house, made for dramatic contrast to her jovial and vivacious sister Chantelle (Michele Austin), and the happily chaotic environment of the women’s parlour that this single mum runs as well as the vibrant energy at her small apartment where she lives with her equally lively daughters (Ani Nelson and Sophie Brown). Jean-Baptiste and Austin were both memorable in this alternately tense, exasperating, darkly funny and compassionate kitchen-sink portraiture of working-class diaspora families barely holding it together.

Director: Mike Leigh

Genre: Drama/Family Drama

Language: English

Country: UK

Crossing [2024]

 Swedish-Georgian filmmaker Levan Akin’s fourth feature Crossing began with the seemingly curious information that both Georgian and Turkish languages have gender-neutral grammars; the implication of that became eminently clear over the course of the film as we realize that both countries – like so many others around the world – are steeped in intense gender prejudices, heteronormative attitudes and acute transphobia. This tender and understated film begins in Batumi, the Georgian port city located on the Black Sea, but then quickly moves over to the vibrant melting pot of Istanbul that, despite the right-wing nationalism, religious conservatism and populist rhetoric of the current Turkish government, continues to harbour a throbbing immigrant culture and underground LGBTQ+ scene. The loosely structured narrative revolves around three characters – Lia (Mzia Arabuli), a retired Georgian schoolteacher and middle-aged woman who decides to visit Istanbul in search of her lost trans niece Tekla, in keeping with a promise made to her dead sister and possibly to make amends to her past intolerance; Achi (Lucas Kankava), an opportunistic but essentially goofy, penurious and harmless teenaged guy who coaxes Lia into taking him along, as he wants to escape his brother’s dreary home; and Evrim (Deniz Dumanli), a vivacious trans woman and activist lawyer in emphatic solidarity with trans sex workers, who lives a proudly liberated life despite the daily harassments and bigotry that she encounters. The evolving relationship between the trio – debutante Dumanli’s performance being the standout of the lot – was portrayed with empathy for those living subaltern existences on the margins, restrained emotions which cut loose on occasions but stopped short of sentimentality, and enchanting depictions of the bustling local sights and sounds without ever going touristy.

p.s. Watched it at the 2025 Bangalore International Film Festival (BIFFES).

Director: Levan Akin

Genre: Drama/Road Movie

Language: Georgian/Turkish/English

Country: Georgia

The New Year That Never Came [2024]

 Delving into incidents linked to Ceaușescu’s totalitarian regime, and the proclivity for bleak, ironic and wordy canvases, continue to be recurring motifs and tonal choices for current Romanian filmmakers too, like their trailblazing Romanian New Wave forbears. Following Metronom and Libertate from 2022 and 2023, respectively, Bogdan Mureșanu’s glorious debut feature The New Year That Never Came – a riveting hyperlinked portmanteau film that’s filled with tense paranoia, gripping desperation, cutting humour and exquisitely controlled chaos; cinematographed with understated brilliance; and set to a pulsating soundtrack – took us right into the eve of the dictator’s fall on 22^nd December 1989. The narrative, which composed of multiple interconnected strands that coalesced into a mesmeric 20-minute climactic sequence – stunningly accompanied by Ravel’s Bolero that progressively reaches its apotheosis, and wherein the claustrophobic square format dramatically changed into liberating wide-screen – crisscrossed between 6 individuals and unfolded over 2 days. TV station Director Stefan (Mihai Calin) must rapidly replace the footage of an actress in a pean to Ceaușescu as she’s defected; theatre actress Florina (Nicoleta Hancu), chosen as the replacement, wants to lose this “opportunity” at any cost; Stafan’s son, ironically, is on a reckless defection plan himself; the latter is under surveillance of state security officer Ionut (Iulian Postelnicu), whose aged mother wants to cling to her old apartment slated for demolition; meanwhile Gelu (Adrian Vancica), a factory worker tasked with shifting furniture, has just realized that his son has naively posted a letter that could get him executed. Hancu was the standout among the excellent cast, while Gelu’s story – redone from an acclaimed short by Mureșanu – was the most hilarious in this dazzling tapestry that gradually built towards an explosive crescendo.

p.s. Watched it at the 2025 Bangalore International Film Festival (BIFFES).

Director: Bogdan Muresanu

Genre: Drama/Black Comedy/Political Satire

Language: Romanian

Country: Romania

Black Dog [2024]

 Guan Hu’s bleak and wryly funny redemptive drama Black Dog straddled multiple genres – edgy revisionist Western, reflective state-of-the-nation cinema, sardonic social satire, and heartwarming human-animal buddy film – while delivering this simultaneously epic and intimate tale. It exhibited diverse cinematic influences – Jia Zhangke’s muted and melancholic commentaries on the human cost of China’s rampaging economic progress (the Chinese giant, incidentally, played a notable cameo in it), Kelly Reichardt’s love for oddball small-town outsiders, and Buster Keaton’s droll persona of a flummoxed individual unable to comprehend the world around him – which made it even more absorbing. Set in a derelict ghost town adjacent to the Gobi Desert – filled with deserted houses, inhabited by dwindling individuals existing on the margins and infested by violent strays, and superbly shot in wan yet striking widescreens – on the backdrop of preparations for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, it begins on an eccentric note as a ramshackle bus loses control and flips over upon being ambushed by a pack of wild canines. Lang (Eddie Peng), a former stunt motorcyclist and rock guitarist who’s just been released on parole from prison after serving many years for manslaughter, returns to this desolate wasteland that’s changed beyond recognition. There, upon joining a corrupt taskforce formed to free the town of strays – as part of a broader programme to give the place a cosmetic makeover ahead of the Olympics – this laconic bike-riding loner inadvertently befriends the wiry and feral titular dog. Meanwhile, he finds his father – former zoo-owner – drinking himself to death, tentatively reconnects with a beautiful and lively circus performer (Tong Liya) with whom he possibly had a romantic past, and is continually chased by a snake-venom peddler seeking revenge.

p.s. Watched it at the 2025 Bangalore International Film Festival (BIFFES).

Director: Guan Hu

Genre: Drama

Language: Mandarin

Country: China

April [2024]

 Déa Kulumbegashvili’s second feature April, like her shattering debut film Beginning, was an austere, minimalist, brooding, intensely intimate and formally rigorous work. Operating in the intersection of sparse and desolate realism, scorching social commentaries and undercurrents, and elemental body horror, the film was foremost – like its predecessor – a radical exercise in feminism and a searing investigation into small-town bigotry. Women’s mind, body and agency were evoked as political and personal battlegrounds through its protagonist Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), an ob-gyn who complements her work in conventional hospitals delivering children with performing secret abortions and surreptitiously providing birth control procedures in intensely religious, conservative and patriarchal village communities. Her acutely isolated life – she fills up her spare time by either being lost in her ravaged interiority or dangerously picking up strange men while taking lonely long drives or engaging in emotionally vacant on-off physical encounters with a kindly ex-boyfriend (Kakha Kintsurashvili) who’s also a respected colleague at the hospital where she works – is punctuated when a baby dies upon a natural delivery performed by her. The grief-stricken father, associating the tragic occurrence with her rumoured work as an abortionist, accuses her of wilful murder, leading to growing scrutiny on the hospital and in turn on Nina’s professional ethics and morality. Sukhitashvili gave a spellbinding turn in portraying her solitary, troubled and defiant character’s emotional struggles and existential crises. The film comprised of a string of viscerally unsettling sequences – including a “live” birth like Márta Mészáros’ Nine Months and a clandestine abortion like Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3, Weeks and 2 Days – shot with gripping exactitude in bravura long takes, while its “slow cinema” aesthetics were accompanied by disquieting imagery and nightmarish atmosphere.

p.s. Watched it at the 2025 Bangalore International Film Festival (BIFFES).

Director: Dea Kulumbegashvili

Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Social Drama/Experimental Film

Language: Georgian

Country: Georgia

La Casa [2024]

 There isn’t a dearth of memorable films foregrounded on siblings and relatives who, upon an unplanned reunion, get flooded with unresolved memories, and tenuously accomplish a semblance of reconciliation. And yet La Casa, Álex Montoya’s bittersweet, seriocomic and deftly layered adaptation of Paco Roca’s graphic novel of the same name, had an enlivening authenticity and freshness about it. The filmmaker composed it through a nuanced mix of myriad emotions – humour, warmth, nostalgia, melancholy, grief, regrets, repressed bitterness – and delicately evoked vignettes that added underlying complexities into this exceptionally intimate slice-of-life tale. The death of their aged father – once a vigorous person who became an ailing, lonely man in old age, and who meant profoundly to each of them, albeit in vastly different ways – brings together three siblings to the now barren, dust-filled house filled with echoes of the past. Their primary intent is to sell off the place. That, unsurprisingly, turns out far more difficult than they’d anticipated. Moreover, while they’ve drifted apart and their lives have taken divergent courses, they still retain fierce bonds which unravel over the course of a few days. The film’s exceptional ensemble cast comprised of David Verdaguer and Olivia Molina as José, a writer, and his editor wife; Óscar de la Fuente, Marta Belenguer and María Romanillos, respectively, as older brother Vicente, his wife and their daughter; Lorena López as the sister; and Miguel Rellán as an ageing neighbour. Exquisitely photographed in warm, muted colours and interspersed with sepia-toned Super8 reels, it’s really a mini-marvel that such a seemingly “unoriginal” film, at the risk of being seeped in contrived sentimentality, instead succeeded in being such a richly textured work and an absorbing watch.

p.s. Watched it at the 2025 Bangalore International Film Festival (BIFFES).

Director: Alex Montoya

Genre: Drama/Family Drama/Ensemble Film

Language: Spanish

Country: Spain

Miséricorde (Misericordia) [2024]

 Alain Guiraudie channelled Claude Chabrol – the latter’s recurring love for delivering cutting and subversive social critiques through tales of passion and crime in provincial France – in his delectably teasing pastoral noir Miséricorde. The film also possessed a morbid sense of humour – that was at its most darkly funny in a sequence where the protagonist is served mushrooms for dinner that’ve grown at the site of a murdered man’s corpse, recalling Imamura’s penchant for macabre fun – and an increasingly absurdist streak, interlaced with charged homoerotic overtones. It began on a creepily banal note, as the protagonist – shot from his POV – drives through winding country roads in near silence; one can already sense that unseemly developments await at his destination. He’s Jérémie (Félix Kysyl), a soft-spoken baker presently out-of-work, who’s returned to his bucolic hometown of Saint-Martial to attend the funeral of his former boss who he admired. Things take uncomfortable turns from get-go as the middle-aged widow (Catherine Frot), who figured Jérémie was in love with her deceased husband, offers him an extended stay at her place and is poker-faced about the ensuing intimacy, while her volatile and aggressive son (Jean-Baptiste Durand) – possibly triggered by some repressed memories – is increasingly hostile to Jérémie as he thinks that the latter is planning to seduce his mom, which rapidly escalates into violence. Jérémie, meanwhile, has a soft-corner for an unemployed pot-bellied loner, while an impish local priest (Jacques Develay), who’s also an avid forager of mushrooms, is attracted to Jérémie. The tranquil environs of this sleepy village evidently mask a saucy core rippling with delicious amorality and sizzling carnality, and this duality found sly accompaniments in this droll, playful and earthy work.

p.s. Watched it at the 2025 Bangalore International Film Festival (BIFFES).

Director: Alain Guiraudie

Genre: Thriller/Crime Thriller/Black Comedy

Language: French

Country: France

The Girl with the Needle [2024]

 Magnus von Horn’s harrowing The Girl with the Needle, that transformed a real time and a true crime event into nightmarish gothic horror, walked a razor’s edge between bleak period film, intense exercise in exploitation cinema and extreme miserabilism. With a rigorous formal grammar – informed by Carl Theodor Dreyer’s spare desolation, German expressionism, Lynchian grotesquerie and von Trier’s provocative portrayals of suffering – it crafted a fervid, claustrophobic and unsparing vision of deprivation, sordidness and violence. But what made it, for me, most unsettling was its moral ambiguity and troubling representations bordering on exploitative. Set in 1919 as the devastating WW1 is culminating, and in a Copenhagen that’s a hellish mix of muck and destitution, the film’s protagonist is Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne) whose woes and misfortunes are portrayed with ambivalence and even apathy. Living in squalid conditions and working as a lowly seamstress at a grimy factory, she’s left pregnant – which she unsuccessfully tries aborting – when her affair with her boss comes to a cruel ended. Meanwhile her husband, who she’d assumed dead, returns with debilitating war trauma and a grisly facial disfigurement that gets him employed as a circus freak. Her life takes a seemingly positive turn when she befriends Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm), who claims to illicitly arrange adoptions of unwanted babies; Karoline, in turn, becomes a wet nurse to Dagmar’s 7-year-old daughter. Unbeknownst to her – and viewers who aren’t invested in Danish history – this genial middle-aged lady is the notorious Dagmar Overbye. The film, which began with overlapping images of faces grimacing into rictuses that reminds one of Goya and Munch’s paintings, bristled with visceral terror that – complemented by its disconcerting score – remained through till the end.

p.s. Watched it at the 2025 Bangalore International Film Festival (BIFFES).

Director: Magnus von Horn

Genre: Historical Drama/Crime Drama/Psychological Horror

Language: Danish

Country: Denmark

Carnival Is Over [2024]

 Fernando Coimbra, who’d shot to fame with his multi-award-winning debut film A Wolf at the Door, returned to his Brazilian milieu after a considerable gap with his deliciously twisted and riotously entertaining third feature Carnival Is Over. By infusing grand Shakesperean themes of ambition, lust and power – slyly channelling Macbeth from Lady Macbeth’s perspective – into the pulpy and lurid B-movie palettes of 80s neo-noirs and crime thrillers, Coimbra delivered a dark, violent, wickedly funny and gleefully nasty blend of highbrow and lowbrow that continuously subverted viewers' expectations right till the hilariously messy climax. Valério (Irandhir Santos) and Regina (Leandra Leal) are a married couple happily invested in their kinky role plays and living in a luxurious villa overlooking Rio de Janeiro. He’s never wanted to get into his father’s criminal underworld business even if his wealth was accorded on account of that; his father’s death, unfortunately, has complicated his exit plan, as he isn’t just riddled with debts, his scheming uncle – who’s taken ownership – is hatching plans of his own. Egged by the luscious, volatile, self-serving and splurging Regina, Valério sets in motion a counter ploy to get rid of his uncle and take charge of the operations so that he can then sell it. Ironically, once he tastes the allure of this netherworld, he takes to it like a duck to water, thereby triggering a fatal game of distrust, deceit and betrayal between the couple. The film’s sardonic humour and unpredictability were accentuated by Leal’s superb turn, Valério’s organic transformation and Regina’s mom who dishes out bad advices. The pulsating sound design, that ranged from silences and discordant notes to frenzied beats, made it all the more riveting.

p.s. Watched it at the 2025 Bangalore International Film Festival (BIFFES).

Director: Fernando Coimbra

Genre: Thriller/Crime Thriller/Black Comedy/Marital Comedy

Language: Portuguese

Country: Brazil

Caught by the Tides [2024]

 Few filmmakers have so masterfully blended profound socio-cultural upheavals with achingly intimate individual stories, and the inexorable flow of time with stasis, melancholy and transience, as Jia Zhangke. Caught by the Tides – with its episodic structure, zooming in on two outsiders drifting and reconciling over three segments across multiple years, inextricably counterpointed with China’s tectonic mutations – immediately recalled his two previous films Mountains May Depart and Ash Is Purest White. Jia, in a remarkable artistic choice, composed the first two segments by sifting through a thousand hours’ outtakes from three films – as well as deliberately shot additional footage with plans of converging them into a future work – viz. Unknown Pleasure from 2002, his sublime masterpiece Still Life from 2006, and Ash… from 2018; the final segment, shot during Covid-19 pandemic, was the only one filmed in present. Astonishing self-reflexivity aside, this radically conceived assemblage imbued it with fascinating additional textures and subtexts – be it the organic ageing of the two lead actors (Zhao Tao, Jia’s partner and muse, and Li Zhubin), or the changing visuals, viz. grungy and energetic low-fi videos in the first segment, bleak and meditative widescreen exteriors in the second, and recently shot digital images in the third. While it did have a skeletal narrative – a dancer (Tao) and her boyfriend (Zhubin) are separated when he leaves Daton to find work elsewhere; she travels to the site of the Three Gorges Dam to find him; and he eventually returns amidst Covid-19 restrictions – it also possessed long observational stretches and interludes like fly-on-the-wall documentaries and travelogue essays. Incidentally, while the mesmeric Tao hardly ever speaks, the film was a kaleidoscopic compilation of folk, pop and disco soundtrack.

p.s. Watched it at the 2025 Bangalore International Film Festival (BIFFES).

Director: Jia Zhangke

Genre: Drama/Romance/Road Movie

Language: Mandarin

Country: China

The Seed of the Sacred Fig [2024]

 The Seed of the Sacred Fig is a fearless demonstration of how even the most intimate spaces – the confines of one’s home, familial bonds and private thoughts – aren’t exempt from paranoia, conflict and violence when one resides in a totalitarian theocracy. Through a gripping tale filled with urgency, fury and dissent, Mohammad Rasoulof as much chronicled revolution in progress as he defiantly participated in it. Having courted bans and arrests on multiple occasions, it compelled him to flee Iran and take political asylum in Germany to avoid draconian punishments. The film both directly and metaphorically examined the “Women, Life, Freedom” protest movement through a seemingly regular middle-class Tehran family. Iman (Missagh Zareh), the middle-aged patriarch employed with the country’s judiciary, has just received a big promotion, bringing with it better salary and a bigger apartment, as well as troubling moral consequences because – like a puppet – he must sign on documents which will seal death sentences. Consequently, his family – comprising of his doting wife Najmeh (Soheila Golestani), and independent-minded daughters Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki) – must keep his profession a secret. Meanwhile, massive protests and the government’s brutal crackdowns against it bleed into their home through disturbing found footage shot on mobile phones – which, in today’s times, have come to provide powerful counterpoints to complicit mainstream media – that the sisters secretly follow. Their physical separation from the turbulence outside gets breached when a college friend is grievously wounded, and the fault-lines within the family irrevocably escalates to disturbing proportions when Iman’s official handgun – in literal mirroring of ‘Chekhov’s gun’ – goes missing. Rasoulof’s polemical resistance was accompanied by terrific performances and a riveting script that unfolded like Matryoshka dolls.

p.s. Watched it at the 2025 Bangalore International Film Festival (BIFFES).

Director: Mohammad Rasoulof

Genre: Drama/Family Drama/Political Thriller

Language: Persian

Country: Iran

The Room Next Door [2024]

 Pedro Almodóvar’s first feature-length film in English, The Room Next Door – based on Sigrid Nunez’s What Are You Going Through – bore all the distinctive signatures of the veteran Spanish maestro’s serious-toned films. With its two complementary middle-aged women characters, blend of melodrama and artifice, lush visual designs, predisposition with mortality, and wordy script, one wouldn’t make any errors in guessing its director, even if – perhaps on account of it having been made in a cultural milieu far away from his home turf and in a language that he’s not fully comfortable in (thereby necessitating translation of his screenplay from Spanish) – it also felt tad stilted and mannered at times, and lacking in the kind of playful vibrancy that one finds in his best works. It, nevertheless, was engaging enough thanks to the commanding performances of its two lead actresses – Tilda Swinton (who’d also featured in Almodóvar’s tantalizing short The Human Voice) and Julianne Moore –, in the way it tampered its funereal theme with effusive emotions that bordered on the campy, and cinematic references ranging from Fassbinder and Bergman to Keaton and Rosellini. Ingrid (Moore), a bestselling author, and Martha (Swinton), an erstwhile war journalist – old friends who’ve even shared the same boyfriend (John Turturro) – are reconnected after many years when the former suddenly finds out that the latter is afflicted with terminal cancer. As they revive their deep friendship through old memories, anecdotes and regrets, Martha confides into Ingrid that she’s decided to end her life and requests her to be in the room next door when she does that. Almodóvar, interestingly, permeated the atmosphere with an air of mystery, even if the premise was unambiguously clear throughout.

p.s. Watched it at the 2025 Bangalore International Film Festival (BIFFES).

Director: Pedro Almodovar

Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Buddy Film

Language: English

Country: Spain

Camera Buff [1979]

 Camera Buff, which established Krzysztof Kieślowski as an essential voice in world cinema, powerfully evoked his rich background as a former documentary filmmaker as well as his sublime prowess in crafting profound social, political, existential and moral inquires through narratives. It also stirringly exhibited self-reflexive elements – be it his own early days as amateur cinephile or his ethical grappling with the repercussions of documenting “truth” in complex political climates that ultimately influenced his decision to switch forms – through Filip (Jerzy Stuhr), a once easy-going man, doting husband and carefree worker, who discovers a magnetic love for cinema, becomes an amateur documentarian, experiences political and existential awakenings at the cost of marital and professional stability, starts understanding both the vitality and predicaments of his images, and eventually decides to train his lens on himself. Four key moments shaped his journey – his impulsive purchase of a 16mm camera to film his new-born daughter; being commissioned by his boss (Stefan Czyzewski) to shoot their factory’s jubilee celebration and then coaxed into submitting that at a festival; confiding into his troubled wife (Malgorzata Zabkowska) that he wants deeper experiences instead of simple contentedness, thereby cementing their marital collapse; and a work of activism inadvertently leading to the expulsion of a senior colleague (Jerzy Nowak) he’s fond of. Shaped by exceptional performances spearheaded by the outstanding Stuhr, delightful use of wry humour in the script, and engrossing visual compositions, the film’s two particularly unforgettable sequences involved the airing of an immensely moving docu that he’s made on a disabled colleague and his instinctive urge to view his wife’s departure through a frame, and featured a cameo by Kieślowski’s great namesake Krzysztof Zanussi as himself.

p.s. This is a revisit. My earlier review of this film can be found here.

p.p.s. Watched it at the 2025 Bangalore International Film Festival (BIFFES). 

Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski

Genre: Drama/Political Satire/Marriage Drama

Language: Polish

Country: Poland