Two Prosecutors [2025]

 Sergei Loznitsa’s stark, gripping and viscerally crushing film Two Prosecutors – a rare narrative feature by the exiled filmmaker and politically outspoken activist-archivist who’s best-known for his formally rigorous found-footage documentaries – delivered a devastating parable on the horrors and banality of totalitarianism. The Kafkaesque work, with Gogolian and Orwellian undercurrents, is set in 1937 during Stalin’s Great Purge, and was adapted from a novella by Soviet nuclear physicist Georgy Demidov who was himself a political prisoner for eighteen years on charges of being a Trotskyist. However, its Stalinist period setting notwithstanding, it powerfully speaks to all totalitarian bureaucracies and nation-states across eras, geographies and political spectrums. While destroying evidences of protestations by political prisoners, the man ordered with the task carries out a small act of disobedience by sneaking out one of the letters. That triggers the arrival of doggedly idealistic prosecutor and young Bolshevik Kornyev (Aleksandr Kuznetsov) to the Bryansk prison, who obstinately believes in the ideas of truth and justice much to the detriment of his physical wellbeing. After overcoming psychological gamesmanships by the brutish prison authorities and labyrinthine prison corridors, he meets an old Bolshevik (Aleksandr Filippenko) who’s been dubiously imprisoned and tortured by NKVD. Kornyev decides to travel to Moscow to meet the country’s real-life Procurator General Andrey Vyshinsky (Anatoliy Beliy), hoping for his intervention… he does intervene, but not in the manner Kornyev had hoped for. Shot in desaturated colours, long takes and austere framing which amplified the oppressive, claustrophobic and ominous atmosphere, it comprised of two particularly nerve-racking waits and two darkly funny asides – viz. a rambling monologue by an amputee Leninist (Filippenko again) and a deliberately incongruous song by two ominously effusive men.

Director: Sergei Loznitsa

Genre: Drama/Political Thriller/Historical Drama

Language: Russian

Country: Germany/Ukraine

Nouvelle Vague [2025]

 Richard Linklater composed Nouvelle Vague as a love letter to the eponymous French movement and Jean-Luc Godard’s trailblazing genius through a quirky, breezy and enjoyable “behind-the-scenes” making of JLG’s seminal debut feature Breathless. The latter film, with the way it embodied radical creative freedom – in its conception, making, expression and all-round irreverence – became the movement’s most emblematic work, and Linklater’s ode was therefore also a gushing celebration of movies itself. Shaped like a picaresque caper, it began with The 400 Blows’ rapturous Cannes screening, the unforgettable debut of Godard’s friend and fellow Cahiers du Cinéma critic Truffaut. With most others belonging to Cahiers’ pioneering cohort having made feature debuts already, Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) decides it’s high time for him to jump from theory to action. He hustles a meagre budget from producer Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfürst), somehow lures Hollywood starlet Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch) – fresh out of her success with Preminger’s Bonjour Tristesse – into the cast, and pulls in his friend Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin), largely unknown at that time, as the Bogart-admiring anti-hero. Former war photographer Raoul Coutard (Matthieu Penchinat), who’d become a Nouvelle Vague legend himself, joins the crew, and thus begins a whirlwind and hilariously unpredictable 20-day shoot when Godard fought with Beauregard, annoyed Seberg, broke every cinematic grammar, charmed everyone and created history, while proving to be alternately mercurial, infuriating, enigmatic, wryly funny and inspired, uttering pithy philosophies and advised by his zen gurus Rosellini, Melville and Bresson. Despite its fleeting qualities, playfulness and verisimilitude – gorgeous B/W photography on 35mm film, digital recreation of 1960s Paris, and made fully in French – Linklater’s approach, ironically, stood at odds with Godard’s guerrilla, improvisational and political filmmaking.

Director: Richard Linklater

Genre: Comedy/Docudrama

Language: French

Country: France