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