La Grazia (Grace) [2025]

 Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grazia, on paper, shouldn’t work, as at its most elemental it’s about a white, ageing, well-off, conservative, heteronormative man in a position of power and beset with moral dilemmas, religious inhibitions and political indecisiveness. It, however, harboured a mischievous coexistence of austere tones and solemn themes with punkish undercurrents and a subversive streak, and this interplay between seemingly incongruous elements made this a surprisingly enthralling experience. Predominantly an exercise in narrative minimalism and weighty themes, it comprised of exquisitely restrained performances by a small cast led by an exceptional Toni Servillo as fictitious Italian president and renowned former jurist Mariano De Santis (incidentally, he played real-life Italian premiers twice in earlier Sorrentino films); judicial debates with his exasperated lawyer-daughter (Anna Ferzetti); mulling on a new bill legalizing euthanasia awaiting his ratification and proposed presidential pardons for two people in jail for having committed murders (Linda Messerkliger was especially riveting as a striking woman who’s brutally killed her abusive husband); being haunted by the memories of his dead wife who he loved immensely, while also consumed by her infidelity from four decades back; and ample moments of silent introspection, solitary smokes and inaction. Further, set mostly inside the Quirinal Palace, its grand visual compositions were dominated by vast, empty spaces. In parallel, it occasionally cut loose with idiosyncratic bursts – a Rastafarian, moped-riding Pope; an electrifying contemporary dance sequence that reminded me of Pablo Larraín’s dazzling film Ema; a disastrous walk through torrential rains by a superannuated Portuguese President, shot in stylized slo-mo; acerbic jabs by Mariano’s close friend and nonconformist art critic (Milvia Marigliano); sardonic undertones frequently cloaking the melancholic airs; and a terrific, sparingly-used techno score.

Director: Paolo Sorrentino

Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Political Satire

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

Once Upon a Time in Gaza [2025]

 Directed by Nasser Brothers – identical Palestinian twins Tarzan and Arab – Once Upon A Time in Gaza is what the seemingly hackneyed title suggests, viz. a wacky potpourri of politics and meta-references. It’s made in the veins of a revisionist Western – populated with crooked characters, crumbling moralities, wry ironies, stylized dynamics, grimy landscapes and random violence – and set in the titular city which has been under a draconian siege for decades. It’s particularly shaped by the brothers’ intent in capturing life – with its idiosyncrasies, inconsistencies and arbitrariness – beyond the blockade, apartheid and genocide that informed its backdrop, and strongly recalled the great Elia Suleiman’s films. Divided into two disparate halves, the first was led by Osama (Majd Eid), a gregarious and amoral hustler who runs a small falafel outlet and peddles in smuggled painkillers on the side; he employs the unassuming Yahya (Nader Abd Alhay), and faces a deadly face-off with Abou (Ramzi Maqdisi), a nasty cop wanting a pie of the drug trade. The focus shifts to Yahya in the second half where, traumatized by Osama’s murder by Abou (who’s now grown in power), he’s offered to star as a martyred revolutionary in an agitprop action film sponsored by Gaza’s Ministry of Culture. Though the two halves felt disjointed – sardonic slice-of-life followed by deliberately self-reflexive events – they together carried a free interpretation of the good, the bad and the ugly personas from Sergio Leone’s iconic spaghetti Western. Majid was captivating, as were the grubby locales, subaltern subtext and deadpan humour. Filmed in Jordan by the exiled brothers, it also featured snippets from the subversive, over-the-top movie-within-movie, and operatically-scored funeral processions that nodded at Kalatozov ‘s magnificent I Am Cuba.

Director: Tarzan & Arab Nasser

Genre: Black Comedy/Political Satire/Crime Thriller/Buddy Film/Neo-Western/Action

Language: Arabic

Country: Palestine

Dead Man's Wire [2025]

 Gus Van Sant’s Dead Man’s Wire was filled with absorbing zeitgeist, gritty 1970s vitality, sly humour and subversive “state of the nation” satire, and channelled two Sydney Lumet gems. Like Dog Day Afternoon, its protagonist is a regular Joe who commits a sensational crime in an act of desperation, triggers a media circus, and becomes an anti-establishmentarian folk hero; and, like Network, he’s incredibly angry at capitalist greed. Based on an actual event from February 1977 – and all the more phenomenal for it – it starts off with Tony Kiritsis (Bill Skarsgård), intending to kidnap Meridian Mortgage Company’s owner M.L. Hall (Al Pacino), whose mala fide and predatory business practices have cost him his commercial property which he’d dreamt of turning into a shopping centre. However, as Hall Sr. is enjoying a lavish impromptu vacation, Tony kidnaps his son Richard (Dacre Montgomery) instead, and walks/drives him to his own apartment – through cops, journalists and passers-by – by devising an audacious improvisation that lent the film its title. He then holds the man captive for the next 72 hours while engaging in negotiations with the company’s lawyers, the FBI and local cops via a local RJ (Colman Domingo), who’s loved for his velvety voice and his jazz music show. Tony’s demand is simple – compensation for his financial loss and a public apology. Skarsgård was spellbinding – bringing in a blend of fury, screwball planning, vulnerability and uncanny media savvy – and Pacino was captivating in his cameo as a platinum-grade douchebag. They were complemented by a great soundtrack, analogue visual compositions and controlled farce, as the film portrayed class war and rotten corporate opportunism – all too prescient even today – while also delivering crackerjack entertainment.

Director: Gus Van Sant

Genre: Thriller/Crime Thriller/Docudrama

Language: English

Country: US

Bugonia [2025]

 Yorgos Lanthimos’ absurdist and unhinged black comedies have toggled between relatively minimalist palettes and unreservedly maximalist ones. Bugonia was primarily constructed in the former vein – seething with anxiety, paranoia, gallows humour, and satire on class warfare, corporate malfeasance and exploitation – and soared for stretches with the unsettling ferocity and straight-faced schlock of his dystopian parable The Lobster. However, unlike that earlier film, it instead ended up literalizing the plot, delivering philosophical explanations and veering towards grandiose tendencies in the final third leading to the “extraterrestrial” climax. That jump into fantasy partially offset the tense and edgy buildup, even if it ultimately closed with a fine montage accompanied by Marlene Dietrich’s rendition of the great Pete Seeger folk song “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”. Remade from the Korean film Save the Green Planet!, it follows two marginalized and alienated guys – conspiracy theory-obsessed Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and his autistic cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) – who kidnap Michelle (Emma Stone), the CEO of a powerful pharmaceutical company, assuming her to be an alien (“Andromedan”) secretly here in human form to destroy earthlings and its ecology. At its heart lay the psychological duel between the cold, manipulative and sociopathic Michelle, with her doublespeak, consulting jargon, and frightening lack of empathy, and Teddy, whose grief, past trauma, and emotional estrangement – complemented by his intelligence and detestation for the neoliberal monstrosity that the pharma company represents – has transitioned into volatile and destructive monomania. Stone was riveting, and Plemons no less compelling, in embodying their characters, while Delbis was quietly affecting as the tragically lost and fragile Don, in this bleak and unsparing work that stopped short of brilliance due to Lanthimos’ inability to pull back.

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

Genre: Black Comedy/Thriller/Social Satire/Sci-Fi

Language: English

Country: UK

Dracula [2025]

 Romanian provocateur and lampooner Radu Jude’s Dracula – his second outing in 2025 after Kontinental '25, both shot using iPhones – was a profane dissection of Romania’s most famous export, ferocious depiction of how troubling historical events are appropriated by consumerist societies into kitschy money-spinners, and lurid commentary on the blood-sucking vampirism of AI in cinema (and arts in general). After the relatively more restrained (though no less cutting) last film, Jude returned to his maximalist ways – and further amped up his preferred episodic form – in this unhinged and outrageous work that was a brutal parody, farce, burlesque, satire and critique rolled into one. Comprising of multiple chapters of disparate lengths and tones over a three-hour length and connected by a linked narrative, the film felt uneven and overdone on occasions, while unabashedly delivering a riotous potpourri of politics, history, sex, violence, comedy, metatextual referentiality, societal takedowns, celebration of lowbrow aesthetics, and chaotic experimentation. A gleefully vulgar filmmaker (Adonis Tanța) wants to make a commercial movie on Bram Stoker’s eponymous creation (which had been inspired from the 15^th century ruler Vlad the Impaler, who’d meted out savage punishments to his opponents and is a hero for ultra-right-wing nationalists), but is creatively blocked. He therefore makes use of LLM prompts for a series of gratuitous reimaginations. They include a smutty, Dracula-themed cabaret that allows tourists to engage in carnal and violent roleplays; a sham health centre summoning the Count for psychosomatic treatments; a Dracula reincarnate outraged by his bastardization to hapless visitors; Vlad calling his ghouls to viciously break a defiant union strike; and a PhD student falling for an aristocrat’s daughter in a town haunted by a vampire, amidst religious frenzy.

Director: Radu Jude

Genre: Comedy/Black Comedy/Social Satire/Political Satire/Experimental Film/Anthology Film

Language: Romanian

Country: Romania

Peter Hujar's Day [2025]

 In 1974, writer Linda Rosenkrantz – who loved harnessing casual conversations and gossips – invited celebrated photographer and her friend Peter Hujar – who was still operating in the margins at that time, even if he was already a part of New York’s underground cultural circle, and died at the young age of 53 a decade later due to AIDS related complications – to her Upper East Side apartment to share how his previous day had been. The freeform “interview” that was recorded on tape as part of an intended larger project was unfortunately lost, but the manuscript resurfaced nearly half-a-century later in 2021, and which filmmaker Ira Sachs discovered at a Parisian LGBTQ+ bookstore. Peter Hujar’s Day is a delectable adaptation of that interaction – at once a meticulous, word-for-word transliteration of the text and a self-reflexive interpretation through such playful gestures as changing attires, the day transitioning into night in sync with Hujar’s recap, jump cuts, and the film’s crew bleeding into the frame on occasions. This warm, droll and captivating work provided a fascinating time capsule of 1970s NYC while also revealing, through gentle touches, the deep friendship that Rosenkrantz (tenderly portrayed by Rebecca Hall) had with Hujar (played with terrific panache by Ben Whishaw). Over the course of this intimate pas de deux, an exceptionally chatty Hujar recounts activities both consequential (Allen Ginsberg’s photoshoot, receiving tips for winning over William Burroughs, phone call from Susan Sontag, the challenges of getting paid, etc.) and banal (napping, eating Chow Mein, etc.), and their rambling exchanges – mostly indoors but at times on the balcony with the NYC skyline as backdrop – were captured in rich, grainy and exquisitely zeitgeisty 16-mm photography and art décor.

Director: Ira Sachs

Genre: Drama/Docudrama/Biopic

Language: English

Country: US