If I Had Legs I'd Kick You [2025]

 Writer-director Mary Bronstein’s wackily titled film If I Had Legs I’d Kick You – her first feature direction in 17 years which she shot over just 27 days, including two additional ones by trading her director’s fee – began on a dry note with Linda (Rose Byrne) grudgingly agreeing with her daughter’s remark that “Mommy is stretchable”. However, as physics teaches us, nothing is indefinitely stretchable, and an over-stretched object inevitably snaps. The woman is already simmering with nerve-racking anxieties and teetering on the edges, having to care for an overdependent daughter with a mysterious feeding problem that necessitates difficult medical arrangements, and do so helplessly alone due to a perennially absent husband who keeps alluding to conventional gender roles, while also managing her own job, dealing with a damaged apartment, and indefinite relocation to a shabby motel. As a result, it doesn’t take much for her to unravel, and which Byrne portrayed with aplomb. The movie was claustrophobic, tense and distressing, but it was also oftentimes darkly funny and borderline unhinged. Linda, despite being a spiralling trainwreck, is ironically a psychiatrist herself, who – further ironically – takes psychiatric help from her colleague (Conan O’Brien) with whom she shares a passive-aggressive relationship. Additionally, she must continuously engage with people who keep getting on her frazzled nerves – a supremely irritating motel receptionist, a pedantic parking guard, and a couple of overbearing patients, including a teenaged guy who’s physically besotted with her. The script, unfortunately, felt overloaded at times, a serial embodiment of Murphy’s Law, and tad heavy on metaphors; a lighter-footed approach might’ve better complemented the emotional battleground. This, was, nevertheless, a gusty work that courageously navigated through motherhood at its most strained.

Director: Mary Bronstein

Genre: Psychological Drama/Black Comedy

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

The Voice of Hind Rajab [2025]

 On 29^th January 2024, Hind Rajab, a 5-year-old Palestinian girl, was killed in Gaza by the Israeli Defence Forces. Six of her family members – uncle, aunt and four cousins – were earlier killed, leaving the little girl stranded, while two paramedics were also killed upon trying to rescue her. This massacre, which became a harrowing reminder of the ensuing genocide, and the desperate but ultimately futile rescue attempts by the Palestine Red Crescent Society from their West Bank headquarters, formed the subject of the deeply discomfiting docudrama The Voice of Hind Rajab. Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania, in her previous work Four Daughters, had blended documentary and performative elements into a stunning hybrid film, and she went for a similarly bold formal gamble here. She set it entirely in the humanitarian organization’s office, featuring dramatization of the actual individuals involved in remotely leading the rescue efforts, and used the actual recordings of the little girl’s voice – helpless, confused, afraid and too young to fully comprehend this horrendous scenario – to lend authenticity to the proceedings. While the adults in the room – call centre worker Omar (Motaz Malhees); his supervisor Rana (Saja Kilani); Mahdi (Amer Hlehel), who’s responsible for coordinating with the authorities and paramedics; and Nisreen (Clara Khoury), who provides counselling to the traumatized employees – battle through the night, their emotionally fraught conversations shot in near-real-time – that portrayed the extreme psychological toll and bordered on histrionics – made for an unsettling contrast to the actual voice of the deceased kid. This counterbalancing between commentaries on the war crime and staged verisimilitude – and reducing the girl to just an anchoring voice – was an ethically fraught choice, even if it was a distressing watch.

Director: Kaouther Ben Hania

Genre: Drama/Docudrama/War

Language: Arabic

Country: Tunisia

Twin Peaks [1990-91, 2017]

 Twin Peaks – the surrealist, grisly, horror, mystery, campy and goofy soap opera that David Lynch co-created with Mark Frost – was a surprise hit when it premiered in 1990, and became a pop-culture phenomenon with a cult following despite its eccentric, outlandish and bizarre plot elements. The first season – arguably the highest-point in the series – opened with the murdered body of the beautiful but troubled high school student Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) in the tranquil town of Twin Peaks. It followed, on one hand, the murder investigation led by the incorrigibly optimistic and doggedly persuasive FBI Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) supported by the local Sheriff, and on the other, the private affairs, sly ploys and nefarious machinations of the town’s offbeat residents which included corrupt businessmen, impassive cops, mad psychiatrists, punks, drifters, and striking damsels (Lara Flynn Boyle, Sherilyn Fenn, and Joan Chen), along with teasing forays into alternate realms. The longer second season concluded the investigation, and then took the plot forward. With the broader narrative scope, it succeeded in being more playful, madcap and adventurous, while also stepping the gas too much on occasions on silly humour and psychedelic excesses. Though the second season ended on a cliffhanger note, and Lynch followed it immediately with the gripping prequel feature Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, it was a whopping 2 ½ decades before a much-awaited third season finally arrived. Largely bereft of the campy Americana and soap opera elements of the earlier seasons, this alternately arresting, ingenious and exasperating season – filled with multiple parallel plots, interludes and detours, alongside both returning and new cast members – took the narrative forward, backwards and sideways into a bonkers, mind-bending trip.

Director: David Lynch

Genre: Series/Crime/Mystery/Comedy/Horror/Thriller/Drama

Language: English

Country: US

Nada [1974]

 Nada, the ferocious, fatalist and brilliant political thriller by Jean-Patrick Manchette, was a book tailor-made for adaptation by Costa-Gavras; the case for that appears especially stronger when one realizes that the Greek-French director made the magnificent State of Siege – which too featured the abduction and assassination of an American official by a left-wing guerrilla outfit, albeit in Uruguay instead of France – a year prior to the book’s publication. Though Chabrol was also a political filmmaker with strong leftist affiliations and made multiple subversive thrillers over his fecund career, his political expressions were often aimed at the bourgeoisie rather than the state, while his thrillers were distinctive for their sultry inaction and comeuppances that may never arrive. He was, therefore, an uncharacteristic person to adapt a violent and explosive book like this. However, he possibly sensed the cool, the cynicism and the dark irony underlying the tale of a ragtag group of anarchists kidnapping the US ambassador in France, even while the reader/viewer knows from get-go that this is a spectacularly suicidal mission. It ends in an ugly massacre as the vicious and reactionary cop tasked with hunting them down, and the ham-fisted governmental machinery backing him, don’t want it to end in any other way. The ensuing work, consequently, possessed the filmmaker’s sardonic and seditious jabs – and an arresting showdown that mirrored the book’s deep nihilism – while also appearing rough and uneven on various occasions. The eponymous Nada groupuscule comprised of a Catalonian partisan (Fabio Testi), a weary middle-aged revolutionary-for-hire (Maurice Garrel) and a dipsomaniac (Lou Castel) among others, while the carnage against them is spearheaded by a ruthless cop (Michel Aumont) and a Machiavellian Interior Minister (André Falcon).

Director: Claude Chabrol

Genre: Thriller/Political Thriller

Language: French

Country: France

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

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

Conclave [2024]

 Who’d have thought that a movie packed with ageing, pompous, conservative and hyper-religious men in ostentatious dresses could make for a taut papal thriller. Adapted from Robert Harris’ bestselling novel of the same name, Conclave was at its most entertaining when it functioned as a pulpy potboiler. When the pope dies of a heart attack, what ensues is one of the oldest and most secretive rituals – viz. election of the next pope. Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), as dean of the College of Cardinals, becomes the most powerful man in the Catholic church at such a time as this, and congregates the titular papal conclave at the Vatican City. The frontrunners are a liberal British Cardinal (Stanley Tucci), an ultra-orthodox and gleefully nasty Italian (Sergio Castellitto), a Canadian moderate (John Lithgow) who had a suspicious meeting with the Pope just before his death, an African-American (Lucian Misamati), whose win could be historic moment for the church, though ironically, he’s exceptionally regressive in his views, and an enigmatic last-minute arrival (Carlos Diehz) who’s been based in various war zones. It was amusing, bordering on the fiendish, seeing seemingly “pious” and “dignified” men concocting petty machinations at the canteen and corridors, squabbling with each other like schoolkids, and even resorting to Machiavellian ploys to win the coveted position. Along the way murky events – both within the sequestered chamber and outside – make the proceeding more dramatic. However, where the film faltered – which slightly undermined its delicious fun – was when it tried portraying moral seriousness, existential dilemmas and political correctness. Consequently, while Fiennes was excellent in his performance, his character was arguably the least interesting of the lot vis-à-vis his smug, hyper-competitive and power-hungry colleagues.

Director: Edward Berger

Genre: Drama/Thriller/Religious Drama/Conspiracy Thriller

Language: English/Italian/Latin/Spanish

Country: UK

Amar Lenin (My Lenin) [1970]

 While Ritwik Ghatak’s staunch political beliefs and leanings remained largely beneath the complex dramatic surfaces of his films – imbuing the themes and proceedings with additional context without making them overtly political – they were far more articulated elsewhere, be it in his writings or in his iconoclastic documentary Amar Lenin. Once a holy grail for Ghatak aficionados as it’d been rendered obscure by censorship woes and formal unavailability – it was, in fact, banned by the country’s Censor Board, which was eventually overturned by then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi – and it continues to exist today in the fringes through low-quality bootleg copies, and denied public screenings on the rare occasions that anyone attempts to do that. What’s particularly ironic is that, this 20-minute work, made in order to commemorate the birth centenary of Vladimir Lenin, was anything but inflammatory or provocative; rather, made on a small budget, it was completely devoid of hyperbolics, belligerence and harangue, and its tone was gentle, restrained and quietly uplifting. “Jatra”, a traditional form of folk-theatre popular in rural Bengal that’re generally focussed on religious and mythological topics, was often used during the 1960s and 70s by Communist collectives and playwrights to raise social and political awareness; the docu begins with a footage of one such performance at a village, with Marx and Lenin in Western outfits but speaking in Bengali, and then ending with a joyous recital of L’Internationale in Bengali. A young farmer, upon seeing this, is inspired to read more about Lenin’s ideas and activism, and then takes a trip to Calcutta to witness the processions, events and speeches celebrating the centenary, and finally participates with other farmers in a land collectivisation drive.

Director: Ritwik Ghatak

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Short Film

Language: Bengali

Country: India

Kalyug [1981]

 Kalyug, Shyam Benegal’s modern-day retelling of Mahabharat, mirrored the giant epic’s violent tale of familial feud, hubris, compromised ethics and mutually assured destruction. Co-written with Satyadev Dubey and Girish Karnad, it transplanted the epic from medieval world of warring royalties to hostile corporate behemoths – two branches of the same family – in 1980s Bombay, who, in their unbridled power lust and desirous of a prized government contract, roll out increasingly ruinous machinations. One half of the battling families – the Pandavas – is represented by the soft-spoken eldest brother (Raj Babbar), the hedonistic middle-brother (Kulbhushan Kharbanda), the arrogant but capable youngest brother Bharatraj (Anant Nag), and the eldest’s bewitchingly beautiful wife Supriya (Rekha) who secretly covets the youngest. The other half – the Kauravas – is represented by the vindictive Dhanraj (Victor Banerjee), and his great friend and mastermind Karan (Shashi Kapoor), who’s a cultured loner, carries a secret torch for Supriya, and – unbeknownst to himself – is the former trio’s eldest brother. One pitfall of having a massive ensemble cast – which also comprised of Sushma Seth as family matriarch, Amrish Puri as her brother, A.K. Hangal as ageing loyalist, Om Puri as trade union leader, Supriya Pathak as Bharatraj’s young wife – is that they must shine in their limited screentime. The heavy plot painted a bleak picture of greed, cut-throat competition and murky realpolitik, while providing limited scope to delve deeper. The film, therefore, was a mix of some captivating highs – Karan’s reaction upon hearing his backstory and Supriya’s motherly consolation of a broken Bharatraj that veered towards erotic were haunting moments, Om Puri’s cameo was explosive, and the bloody tale was unapologetically maximalist – and unavoidable lows due to plot contrivances and overcooked moments.

Director: Shyam Benegal

Genre: Drama/Family Drama/Crime Drama

Language: Hindi

Country: India

The Prowler [1951]

 The aspect that one realizes immediately about The Prowler is that three key people associated with it were irreparably affected by McCarthy’s notorious Witch-Hunts. Its screenplay was written by Dalton Trumbo, who’d already been blacklisted, and consequently wrote it using the name of his friend Hugo Butler, who himself got blacklisted soon after; Losey too had to flee the country in the same year, and found himself blacklisted and thereby unemployable upon his return a year later, forcing him into exile thereafter. This bleak and cynical B-noir – with its politically loaded motifs that touched upon class envy, abuse of power by those in uniform, sexual misconduct, and running references to ghost towns and Indian burial grounds – were imbued with darker connotations by the above context. When Susan (Evelyn Keyes), a married woman who stays alone for long stretches as her husband is often away for his work as radio host, calls the police upon sensing being pried upon by a peeping tom, a nastier bad news inadvertently starts unfolding for her in the form of disgruntled beat cop Webb (Van Heflin). His role, ironically, is to provide protection, but soon tries to force himself upon her, and then hatches a dirty ploy to entrap her. While the plot’s progression was considerably dependent on contrivances, one senses bitter and nihilist undercurrents in it, that’re embodied by Heflin’s creepy and sinister turn. The desolate ghost town of Calico that it culminated in – a former mining town that witnessed an economic nosedive – emphasised the underlying themes of human corruption, greed and fatalism. The titular prowler, incidentally, was a classic red herring, with its purpose restricted to putting this sordid tale in motion.

Director: Joseph Losey

Genre: Thriller/Crime Thriller/Film Noir

Language: English

Country: US

Marathon Man [1976]

 Coming on the back of a string of highly reckoned films, The Marathon Man unsurprisingly gets somewhat lost in John Schlesinger’s filmography. A taut, tense and ominous exercise in political paranoia and conspiracy, and adapted by William Goldman from his own novel, the film combined a number of topics in its storyline – from the dark legacies of the Holocaust and McCarthyism to the CIA’s notorious love for sharing their bed with monsters as part of its murky Machiavellian realpolitik, and even the rise of climate activism – that made it a bristling political film, beyond its moody atmosphere and thriller elements. “Babe” Levy (Dustin Hoffman) is a shy and lonely PhD student and an aspiring long-distance runner – which is established at the outset as he’s seen training hard in Central Park – who’s haunted by the memories of his dad’s suicide during the witch hunts. Unbeknownst to him, his elder brother “Doc” (Roy Scheider) is an undercover agent, acting as a diamond courier for fugitive Nazi war criminal Christian Szell (Laurence Olivier). When Szell’s brother gets killed in a random road rage incident, energetically shot in the New York streets, a chain of ugly incidents get sparked involving violence and murders, and before long Babe gets unwittingly drawn into this nefarious setup despite being completely oblivious of what his brother is mired in. The film featured a deftly paced narrative that slowly builds the tempo leading to a nightmarish run through the city’s nocturnal streets, a chilling turn by Olivier, a nerve-racking dental torture sequence, and some fine on-location shoots in NYC and Paris that captured the 70s zeitgeist, leading to a rewarding watch despite some of its erratic plot developments.

Director: John Schlesinger

Genre: Thriller/Political Thriller

Language: English

Country: US

Career Girls [1997]

 Similar to how the scorching Naked was a radical volte face for Mike Leigh after the bittersweet Life Is Sweet, and the cathartic Secrets & Lies a stunning switch after that, Career Girls – with its parodic humour and quirky satire, and reflective moments thrown in – presented another considerable tonal shift. One, nevertheless, finds in it the pointed sociocultural observations, dry political jabs and affecting female friendships which’ve been recurring elements in the sardonic British humanist’s oeuvre, while the themes that it espoused – viz. the transformed demeanours and outlooks of two women from the 80s to the 90s mirroring the tectonic changes in London during these two points in time – infused wry undertones into the proceedings. It was, otherwise, a relatively slight and patchy work, and its humour was tad alienating at times, while still being engaging and perceptive. We see the two protagonists, viz. Annie (Lynda Steadman) and Hannah (Katrin Cartlidge), through interlocking narratives. Set in 1996, the former has come over to London to spend a weekend at the latter’s charming apartment. Meeting after 6 years, they renew their past bond, revisit their old localities many of which are now heavily gentrified, admire facets about each other, and of course reminisce. As may therefore be surmised, there’re multiple flashback episodes, starting in 1986 when a then neurotic Annie – afflicted with dermatitis and besieged with tics – joins the then bohemian, mercurial and caustic Hannah in the latter’s grubby and chaotic flat, and progressing through various seriocomic experiences over the next four years. Steadman and Cartlidge were both interesting to watch, as they displayed complementary behaviours in the past, and significant evolutions thereafter into more self-assured, conformed and mellowed individuals.

Director: Mike Leigh

Genre: Comedy/Social Satire/Buddy Film

Language: English

Country: UK

The Swindle [1997]

 The Swindle, despite being a seemingly lighter work in Chabrol’s filmography – relatively speaking, that is –, grabs one’s attention with its amoral protagonists, slippery motivations, sly asides, and a narrative laced with ambiguous identities and deception. However, what made it particularly enticing, were its two central performances. Isabelle Huppert – in a more playful collab with Chabrol, coming in between her more diabolical turns in La Cérémonie and Merci pour le Chocolat – was enchanting as Betty, a woman assured of her powers as a seductress, while Michel Serrault mellowed his character Viktor’s underlying cunning with endearing self-effacement. Together they’re professional con-artists, who expertly plan and coolly execute their jobs while avoiding suspicions, and pursue opportunities in a manner that caution and prudence always take precedence over reckless greed and immediate returns. We’re never sure of their individual and shared backstories, nor do we get a clarity on their relationship – father-daughter, platonic lovers or purely “business partners” – which added layers of ambivalence to the proceedings. The film began by jumping straight into action, as we see the pair smoothly pulling off their latest job at a business conference in a Swiss hotel, with Betty first seducing a hapless man into her sultry charms, and Viktor then robbing him just enough to avoid scrutiny. Their decision to remain under the radar, however, is undone when Viktor gets drawn by Betty – despite his reservations – into a high-stakes scheme involving a shady courier (François Cluzet) working for a dangerous money-launderer. Though the film lost some of its fun and sauciness towards the last third, the wry equation between the two leads and deadpan celebration of their unscrupulous chicanery made it amusing, mischievous and entertaining.

Director: Claude Chabrol

Genre: Thriller/Crime Comedy/Heist Film

Language: French

Country: France

Music [2023]

 It’s rare for a filmmaker to remain steadfastly committed to their politics or form or both over the entire stretch of their career, and to defiantly walk a rigorously crystalized path unconcerned with what’s considered de rigueur for the times. Angela Schanelec – co-founder of the “Berlin School” – belongs to the dwindling group of such outmoded giants as Ken Loach, Patricio Guzmán, Philippe Garrel, Hong Sang-soo et al. Music – the sexagenarian’s 10^th feature – is a spare, elliptical, elusive, experimental and characteristically Bressonian exercise exactly along the lines of her abstruse filmography. In other words, it definitely isn’t a film that one should approach either uninformed or expecting conventional storytelling. On paper, it’s an interpretative modern-day retelling of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex; however, it’s defined as much by its references to the Greek play as its departures from it. As a reviewer pithily remarked, it’s “a postmodern expression of a premodern text”. In its barest essence, it’s a tale of tragic union between Jon (Aliocha Schneider), an orphaned guy who serves a prison sentence upon inadvertently killing a man, and Iro (Agathe Bonitzer), a guard in that same prison where they get acquainted. Their seemingly contented marital life is short-lived as he starts losing his vision, though that’s partly compensated through his passionate vocation for singing. Their union, unfortunately, is based on a dark coincidence unbeknownst to either, which eventually and inevitably leads to suicide when that gets uncovered. Composed of sparse, austere and muted tableaux, and with long stretches of dialogue-free sequences interspersed with evocative classical diegetic music, this fleeting, exacting and stripped-to-bones work obliquely elucidates how a terrible price can be extracted by both knowing too much and too little.

Director: Angela Schanelec

Genre: Drama/Experimental Film

Language: German/Greek

Country: Germany

Poor Things [2023]

 Poor Things is possibly Lanthimos’ most unreservedly ambitious film to date – ribald, outré and gleefully grotesque – while also being situated in his distinctively weird aesthetic palettes and expressions. Adapted from Alasdair Gray’s novel of the same name, it conjured a wildly imaginative blend of period setting and punk-dystopia, and thereby a mix of black humour, body horror, sci-fi fantasy, existential inquiries and feminist fable. Yet, for all its absurdist splashes, it was also ultimately an exercise in humanism and morality, and therefore bereft of the wickedly savage and deadpan nihilism that he’d pursued so far. Consequently, for all its fantastical imagery, extravaganza and provocations, it demonstrated that he’s either mellowing with age or attempting an expanded audience (or both). Set in cartoonish Victorian England – flamboyantly evoked through zany cinematography, garish backdrops and discordant scores – it’s centred on Bella (Emma Stone), who has the mind of a child in the body of a woman. This freakish contradiction is the result of the handiwork of mad scientist Godwin (Willem Defoe) – who she unironically calls “God” – as he revived a woman who’s committed suicide by transplanting an unborn child’s brain into her. Unapologetically gauche, outrageously libidinous and infinitely curious, she embarks on a wild adventure of self-learning, first with the gloriously louche Duncan (Mark Ruffalo) – their romps represented the film’s most enjoyable sections – and then as a prostitute at a Parisian brothel where she’s drawn to socialist ideas. The drab final segment and some self-consciously serious set-pieces, unfortunately, were dampeners. Excellent performances aside – Stone was particularly fearless and nuanced – the film comprised of a charming cameo by Hanna Schygulla and droll inter-species hybrids reminiscent of Sukumar Ray’s unforgettable nonsense poem ‘Khichuri’ (“Hodgepodge”).

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

Genre: Sci-Fi/Black Comedy/Fantasy/Romantic Comedy/Existentialist Drama

Language: English

Country: UK

Last Summer [2023]

 Catherine Breillat proves with Last Summer that, even in her mid-70s, she hasn’t lost either her propensity or her appetite to defy norms and push the envelope in matters involving uncomfortable, unorthodox and amoral expressions of women’s private desires. Made a decade after her previous film Abuse of Weakness, this remake of the Danish film Queen of Hearts marked an intriguing overlap between prestige cinema aesthetics and dangerously salacious themes. Its central crux – viz. a forbidden affair between a middle-aged woman and her teenage stepson – might’ve been tailormade for an exercise in saucy softcore in most other filmmakers’ hands; but, not in Breillat’s, as her objective was a non-exploitative and non-judgemental dive into a queasy and murky quagmire that a problematic relationship such as this constitutes, alongside the associated elements of sexual politics and power, and made in the kind of measured, unsentimental and analytic style that’s – in absence of a suitable term – oh-so French. In the narrative’s sharpest irony, Anne (Léa Drucker) is a capable and committed attorney who represents victims of sexual abuse, which therefore underscored how transgressions can often defy easy pigeonholing. Furthermore, the way her husband Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin), with whom her marriage has long entered a stage of convenient stasis, decides to believe her over his moody and rebellious son Théo (Samuel Kircher) – when he decides to reveal the secret liaison on account of the angst he experiences upon Anne’s decision to break-off – disconcertingly presaged the devastating revelations concerning Alice Munro. The film was at its strongest in the first and last thirds, separated by a relatively staid middle section when the affair actually unfolds, and was led by a courageous turn by Drucker.

Director: Catherine Breillat

Genre: Drama/Romantic Drama/Marital Drama

Language: French

Country: France

The Pigeon Tunnel [2023]

 A meeting between renowned American documentarian Errol Morris – his examination of the slippery nature of truth, by sifting through deceptive non-truths, has been a running theme in his filmography, and most famously touched upon in his canonized work The Thin Blue Line – and celebrated British spy novelist David Cornwell – who, through his best-selling books pseudonymously written as John le Carré, had repeatedly delved into the subversion and obfuscation of truth – was, on paper, a match made in heaven. Furthermore, Cornwell sat for this rare interview just prior to his death on Morris’ behest, thus enabling this momentous rendezvous. However, for anyone who’s read le Carré’s enticing and engrossing memoir The Pigeon Tunnel, there was unfortunately nothing new in this partial transliteration of that marvellous volume. While the book, through droll irony, had audaciously cut across through myriad fascinating anecdotes from the writer’s eventful life, Morris probed predominantly into one specific aspect only, viz. Cornwell’s complex relationship with his father Ronnie – a compulsive career conman who was perennially on the run – which remained the great unresolved equation in his life. While that served as terrific material, made all the more arresting by his sardonic and surprisingly candid articulation of that difficult chapter from his life, Morris kept stopping short of provoking new memories and revelations beyond what Cornwell had already let loose in his memoir. While, in a captivating stylistic choice, the author’s responses were juxtaposed with footage from four highly reckoned adaptations (Martin Ritt’s haunting The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and the three acclaimed BBC miniseries Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Smiley’s People and A Perfect Spy), dramatizations and overemphasis of the title’s meaning, however, felt tepid.

Director: Errol Morris

Genre: Documentary/Biopic

Language: English

Country: UK

The Lying Life of Adults [2023]

 The chaotic messiness of life, the anxiety-laden process of reconciling with that, and the complexities that people must often navigate through vis-à-vis familial and class backgrounds, are running strands in Elena Ferrante’s novels, and the same vividly held true in her captivating book The Lying Life of Adults. Edoardo De Angelis placed these at the forefront in his commendable adaptation – co-written by Ferrante herself – into the miniseries form. Giovanna (Giordana Marengo) is an intelligent, perceptive and soft-spoken, but inwardly obstinate, restless and emotionally muddled adolescent girl. Unsure of her footing, she finds herself drifting while growing up in a well-off nuclear family, comprising of erudite and left-leaning parents, in 1990s Naples. Upon overhearing her father’s offhand remark about her growing resemblance to her estranged Aunt Vittoria (Valeria Golino) – who her father had violently fallen out with many years back, turning her into persona non grata in their family – she develops a gnawing curiosity to meet her. And when that eventually happens – which necessitates a journey from the cloistered bourgeoisie world that she inhabits to the gritter and seedier side of the city, thus crossing irreconcilable societal borders in the process – the impact of that spins her out of her axis. As her relationship starts deepening with this brash, volatile and overly religious woman – alternately magnetic and repulsive – she finds herself noticing the fault-lines in her family and questioning her own identity, which brings forth a rebellious streak in her that pushes her towards forging a radical new path for herself. Though certain sections felt tad superfluously etched, striking turns by Marengo and Golino, strong political undercurrents, impressive visual designs, and eclectic electronic soundtrack made for a rollicking viewing experience.

Director: Edoardo De Angelis

Genre: Drama/Urban Drama/Coming-of-Age/Miniseries

Language: Italian

Country: Italy