Mussolini: Son of the Century [2025]

 It often takes distance to relook at an infamous tyrant’s hideous rise, along with the toxic idea of fascism (or its codification, to be more appropriate), and that’s what one senses while watching the biopic miniseries on Benito Mussolini’s surge from a relative nobody to two decades’ reign as an ultra-right-wing dictator of Italy. Adapted from Antonio Scurati’s novel, this was directed by British filmmaker Joe Wright – best known for his fine 2007 film Atonement and having never made anything outside the English language, leave alone in Italian – and produced while conscious that populist right-wing nationalism has once again been raising its ugly head across continental Europe, including in Italy. The brutal, power-hungry and self-serving strongman’s ascent – from founding the ‘Fasci Italiani di Combattimento’ in 1919 and stoking pent-up frustrations from WW1, through establishing the savage ‘Blackshirts’ militia, exponential growth in political clout and snatching the Prime Ministerial chair, and up until the cynical assassination of socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti by his bloodthirsty thugs in 1924, culminating with a chilling speech in the Parliament on 3^rd January 1925 which effectively signalled the advent of totalitarianism – has been presented in the form of a punk, stylized and tar black satire that made it a volatile fusion of political history with gleeful formal experimentation, punched with the ethos and machinations of a gangster movie. The deliberately grotesque, hideous, hyper-violent and vulgar tone and palette – composed with compelling exactitude over 8 episodes of an hour each – were accompanied by a techno score, contemporary self-awareness, and a fiery – and frequently fourth-wall breaching – performance by Luca Marinelli as the smug, insecure, uncouth, self-serving and cunning despot who embodied the absolute corruptibility of absolute power.

Director: Joe Wright

Genre: Biopic/Black Comedy/Historical Drama/Political Satire/TV Miniseries

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

Sabar Bonda (Cactus Pears) [2025]

Marathi filmmaker Rohan Kanawade’s tender and assured feature debut Sabar Bonda – weaved with intimate semi-autobiographical elements, memories and reflections – was an intensely muted expression of barely contained emotions. A contrapuntal evocation of grief and desire, two supposedly antithetical emotions, it also captured with subtlety what could’ve easily made for acrid parody, viz. the very Indian habit of family elders and “well-wishers” freely encroaching into private spaces and imparting unsolicited advices on life choices and marital decisions. Informed and shaped by the director’s own experiences upon his father’s demise a decade back, which necessitated a rather uncomfortable trip back from Bombay to his village that he hadn’t visited in many years, the film too opened with a similarly reluctant “homecoming” of Anand (Bhushaan Manoj), a 30-something gay man employed in a middle-income job in Bombay, to his ancestral village for performing his father’s last rites. Though he’d “come out” to his parents long back, his extended family members aren’t explicitly aware of his sexuality – though not fully unaware either – and consequently, along with instructions on how he should mourn, also doggedly badger him on marriage. However, contrary to societal expectations, he rekindles his intimacy with Balya (Suraaj Suman), an old friend who’s similarly single and a farmer who’s craving to escape from his rural environs. Naturalistically shot in soft colours, lyrical exteriors and framed in rounded edges like old photographs, Kanawade’s understated depiction of the fraught situation – and toned-down evocation of the homophobic atmosphere – was laced with undercurrents of defiance and a wish for the mundane. Alongside the two male leads, competently played by theatre actors who’ve known each other for long, Jayshri Jagtap was also memorable as Anand’s mother.

Director: Rohan Kanawade

Genre: Drama/Romantic Drama/Slice-of-Life

Language: Marathi

Country: India

Romería [2025]

 Romería – Carla Simón’s delicate, melancholic and gorgeously sun-kissed third film was a nakedly autobiographical work from her. The Catalan director lost her parents to AIDS when she was six, grew up with her uncle and his family, and went on to study filmmaking. Her delicately realized alter-ego Marina (Llúcia Garcia) has a similar personal arc, and her haunting quest for her deceased parents – alongside reconciliations with her hazy memories of them – informed this deeply personal film. The striking 18-year-old protagonist, who intends to study film at university, needs to get recognized on her father’s death certificate to be eligible for scholarship, and hence travels to the coastal city of Vigo in the hopes of getting a notarized attestation from her paternal grandparents who she’s never met. There, over the course of five days, she meets uncles, aunts, nephews and nieces all of whom welcome her with a mix of warmth and curiosity; her seemingly genial grandfather attempts to “bribe” her with money that’ll allow her to pursue her studies without the need for scholarship and therefore the legal formalities; and her stern grandmother openly disapproves her presence. Armed with her mom’s diary that steers her “homecoming” and a digital camcorder frequently complementing her own eyes, she starts piecing together what really happened to her parents – who embodied Spain’s “lost generation” – through interactions with her newly found family, their oftentimes conflicting accounts, and an unsaid sense of shame surrounding their tragic backstories. Led by the wonderful Garcia and a lively cast, this visually sumptuous work reminded me of such recent films as Céline Sciamma’s Petite Maman, Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun, and in particular, Karim Aïnouz’s docu essay Mariner of the Mountains.

Director: Carla Simon

Genre: Drama/Film a Clef/Coming-of-Age/Autobiographical Cinema

Language: Spanish

Country: Spain

The Hero of Friedrichstrasse Station / Berlin Hero [2025]

 Like his much-loved 2003 film Good Bye, Lenin!, Wolfgang Becker crafted a playful tragicomedy – recalling East Germany, which disappeared from the map upon reunification with West Germany, using an absurdist and gently satirical lens – with The Hero of Friedrichstrasse Station. However, while the former was set as the wall was coming down, Becker’s final, posthumously released film – adapted from Maxim Leo’s novel – looks into that thirty years later through the porous devices of memory and history. The film’s middle-aged Berliner protagonist Micha (Charly Hübner), who runs a struggling video store, is “discovered” by an opportunist journalist (Leon Ullrich) – looking to write a career-defining article while commemorating the 30^th anniversary of the Wall’s fall – as the mastermind behind a “mass escape” from the erstwhile GDR in 1984. No matter that it was an honest mistake by the then callow railway worker in East Berlin that’d inadvertently rerouted an S-Bahn carrying 127 passengers to West Berlin, and that everyone barring 2 had returned, as who’d want truth to come in the way of a great story – especially one that goes well with how the former Communist country is remembered today in mass media and popular cultural memory. Though uncomfortable with the half-truths and lies that get spun, he starts enjoying being a media sensation. Things, however, are complicated when he finds himself falling for a woman (Christiane Paul) who happened to be one of the 2 people who’d stayed, and former dissident Herald (Thorsten Merten) starts digging into the story. The endearing and vibrantly composed film had moments of ironic humour, as when Herald subverts expectations by praising aspects of East German life that today’s consumerist Germany finds impossible to accept.

Director: Wolfgang Becker

Genre: Comedy/Political Satire/Romantic Comedy

Language: German

Country: Germany

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

What Does That Nature Say to You [2025]

 Lengthy alcohol-soaked interactions – as speeches slur, conversations digress, inhibitions get lowered, and anxieties, fissures and disappointments get subtly exposed – have defined Hong Sang-soo’s droll, observational slices of life. The pivotal sequence that his seriocomic 33^rd feature gradually builds towards is also an inebriated gathering where banal discussions, albeit with simmering undercurrents, transition into an edgy meltdown and disapproving opinions. Passing the “alcohol test” was therefore a crucial consideration in his amusing take on the “meet the parents” premise; however, that said, in his delectably mellow and understated world – where life plays in a minor key – confrontations and judgements are both transient and quickly forgotten. Ha (Ha Seong-guk), a thirty-something amateur poet who’s detached ties with his wealthy and influential father in order to pursue beauty shorn of societal chains, is invited by his girlfriend (Kang So-yi) of three years – who’s come to accept his quirky lifestyle choices – into her parents’ sprawling hilltop home. Her family, however, may not be as understanding, despite their outwardly genial natures. The father (the wonderful HSS regular Kwon Hae-hyo) disarmingly engages Ha in rambling banter – trying his antiquated car, showing him around, egging him to bond with the family, and finally sloshing him with makgeolli –; the discerning mother (Cho Yun-hee), a poet herself who gets Ha to open up about his poetry skills; and the sister (Park Mi-so), supposedly battling depression, steadily needling him about his privilege that’s at odds with his romanticized desire for the life of a starving artist. In a quirky formal choice, the typically unadorned visuals in the customary long takes became hazy on occasions, complementing Ha’s frequent avoidance of glasses in his preference for blurry vision of things.

Director: Hong Sang-soo

Genre: Drama/Comedy/Slice-of-Life

Language: Korean

Country: South Korea

The Piano Accident [2025]

 In a hyperconnected digital world overstuffed with vacuous “influencers” spewing inane garbage in the name of content, and their rabid “followers” ravenously consuming them, one can only be bemused by this weirdly symbiotic relationship. Quentin Dupieux’s The Piano Accident is a pungent and jaundiced satire that ferociously interrogates this greasy and desolate state of affair. It’s, in other words, a rather savage little film that goes for the jugular and takes no prisoners. It begins with a teasing shot of a piano suspended midair before seemingly crashing down. We then see Magalie (Adèle Exarchopoulos), a cantankerous young woman with a fractured arm – ostensibly injured by the said incident – being driven to a luxurious getaway by her servile factotum Patrick (Jérôme Commandeur). As we gradually learn, she’s an insanely popular and super-wealthy social media sensation who creates bizarre content – freely milking her congenital insensitivity to pain for masochistic reels – that her fans consume like a drug, and that she’s currently escaping from a shocking turn of events which can permanently ruin her. This is a curiously minimalist work in terms of its cast; aside from the incorrigible Magalie – whose utterly repulsive behaviour is a defence against her rotten and empty core, and delightfully hammed up by Exarchopoulos – we have the middle-aged Patrick, who satisfies all her churlish demands while secretly despising her as he’s unlikely get such a well-paying job elsewhere; Simone (Sandrine Kiberlain), a desperate journalist who blackmails her way into a candid interview with the notoriously media averse celeb; and a salivating idiot (Karim Leklou) representing toxic, dim-witted fandom. The film gleefully deals in unrestrained excesses with a sense of humour that’s equal parts grotesque, horrifying and unhinged.

Director: Quentin Dupieux

Genre: Comedy/Black Comedy/Social Satire

Language: French

Country: France

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

Father Mother Sister Brother [2025]

 Father Mother Sister Brother – Jim Jarmusch’s fourth anthology film, a form that he keeps returning to – was interwoven with his love for aimless drifters, low-key emotions, deadpan humour, and loosely-strung stories that don’t reveal any big truths. The overarching theme of this gently idiosyncratic and curiously compelling triptych was the unknowability of the inner workings of one’s parents and a Rorschach test on defining familial relationships through one’s subjective interpretations. In the wryly funny and ironic first episode, “Father”, carrying delectable traits of O’Henry and Maupassant, siblings Jeff (Adam Driver) and Emily (Mayim Bialik) visit their aged, reclusive, widowed and estranged dad (Tom Waits) who stays in remote New Jersey; while they wonder how their father survives with no social security, and his dishevelled cabin confirms their doubts, there’s something brewing underneath which delightfully comes to the fore eventually; the father’s nonconformist existence (which Waits channelled naturally) made for an amusing contrast to his children who’re squares. In the relatively weaker middle chapter “Mother”, the scenario is reversed as two neurotic sisters – the uptight Timothea (Cate Blanchett) and the oddball Lilith (Vicky Krieps) – visit their successful, self-assured mom (Charlotte Rampling) in Dublin, for a rather stiff-collared annual reunion. In the wistful and glorious final chapter “Sister Brother”, that saw Jarmusch operating in commanding form, American-Parisians and fraternal twins Skye (Indya Moore) and Billy (Luka Sabbat) reconnect over the melancholic memories of their bohemian parents – who’ve recently died – over coffee, old photos, their parents’ emptied apartment, and final belongings; it featured a cameo by the legendary Françoise Lebrun. The film featured Dusty Springfield’s seductive song ‘Spooky’, Anika’s haunting rendition of it, oddball connecting threads, and carefree skateboarders representing subaltern freedom.

Director: Jim Jarmusch

Genre: Comedy/Family Drama/Anthology Film

Language: English

Country: US

Portobello [2025]

 It’s quite astonishing that Marco Bellochhio, a (hopefully) soon-to-be nonagenarian who made his directorial debut six decades back, is still making films that’re bold, ambitious, caustic, rebellious, comprises of electrifying moments and filled with throbbing vitality. His second television miniseries – made four years after Exterior Night, a similarly vigorous and riveting recounting of a complex and sensational chapter from contemporary Italian history – Portobello flamboyantly glided through a real-life soap opera filled with kitsch, melodrama, scandal-mongering, lurid machinations, “theatre of the absurd” and a proto version of cancel culture. Enzo Tortora (Fabrizio Gifuni, in his third consecutive collaboration with Bellocchio and fourth overall) was at the peak of his popularity in the early-1980s when things took a spectacular nose-dive for him and he was plunged into a bizarre nightmare. He was the host of the enormously popular weekly TV show – a rather cheesy programme that was fervently devoured by 28 million viewers – when Giovanni Pandico (Lino Musella), a creepy and egotistic Comorra member who was obsessed with Tortora and turns into an informant for the Italian authorities, falsely alleges the latter of being a drug trafficker for the mafia out of sheer spite. Few of his fellow turncoats, too, join him in that, and as a result Tortora’s life comes crashing down, leading to a frustrating, traumatic and seemingly endless battle with an obsessed state prosecution. Bellocchio splendidly captured the zeitgeist through ambitiously mounted set-pieces and production designs, and the utterly farcical nature of the scenario through a mix of drama, bombast and sardonic humour, thereby making this a thrilling seriocomic ride. The firebrand Italian filmmaker’s pointed jabs at his country’s social, political, judicial, religious and criminal layers continue unabated.

Director: Marco Bellocchio

Genre: Drama/Legal Drama/Crime Drama/Biopic/TV Miniseries

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

Kontinental '25 [2025]

 Coming on the back of his two provocative and coruscating stunners Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn and Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, Kontinental ’25 felt decidedly contemplative in comparison, even if a relatively toned-down Radu Jude film too leaves one with a pungent aftertaste through cutting satire, caustic jabs and gallows humour. This was a sharp assault – carried out using a disarmingly gentle-looking scalpel – on the crushing and callous apathy of post-Communist, neoliberal Romania, marked by dismantling of social safety nets for the marginalized and vulnerable, escalating housing crises, rabid gentrification, toxic ethno-nationalism, and perhaps most ironically, the outsourcing of guilt. The film’s deliberately cheesy protagonist, Orsolya (Eszter Tompa), a bailiff of Hungarian ethnicity, evicts a homeless man (Gabriel Spahiu) – displaying disingenuous sympathy while arriving with intimidating bouncer-cops – from the unused boiler room of a building that’s set to be turned into a boutique hotel by a German company. That, tragically, incites the man into committing suicide, and as a result she’s plagued by a heavy outpouring of guilt, which she sobbingly unloads – over a series of deadpan conversations – onto her husband, boss, friend, mom, punkish former student, and priest, while also clarifying each tine that she wasn’t legally culpable. Jude’s scalding portrayal of inbred racism was nonpartisan; Orsolya’s cantankerous mom curses Romanians for stealing Transylvania from Hungary and for being lazy, while her Romanian husband chuckle while reading through the brazenly bigoted trolling in social media targeting her ethnicity. The film, incidentally, opened with a 20-minute near-wordless montage where we follow the soon-to-be-dead “non-person” through the city, while scoffing at the over-abundance of urban kitsch, from robot dogs to plastic dinosaurs.

Director: Radu Jude

Genre: Black Comedy/Social Satire

Language: Romanian/Hungarian

Country: Romania

Resurrection [2025]

Resurrection – Bi Gan’s return 7 years after his hypnotic last film Long Day’s Journey into Night – was as much a work of epic thematic preoccupations and stylistic ambitions, as a mind-bending, hallucinogenic and baffling exercise. Euphoric in its formal audacity, and melancholic in its tone, this elegy to cinema was a classic example of a work that dazzles with its visual splendour and scale – especially in how it glides across diverse filmmaking eras and genres, and serves as a successor to Méliès and Lynch – but also exasperates by its elaborate fantasies, flamboyant flourishes and metaphor-filled conceit. Its premise is an alternate world where humanity has sacrificed dreams to live forever. “Deliriants”, consequently, exist as an anachronism, as they secretly dream, thereby gradually withering away by refusing to conform. Sandwiched between a prologue made as an expressionist, sci-fi, silent film revealing a grotesque and dying “deliriant” that’s an embodiment of movies, and an epilogue mourning its death and culminating with “fin de cinéma”, were four compulsively staged dreams. The convoluted first dream was a 1940s noir and espionage thriller about a tormented musician on the run in sin city; the bleakly beautiful second dream, shot in wintry images, was focused on a lost monk in a derelict monastery haunted by his dead father’s ghost; in the picaresque third dream, a con artist takes an orphan girl under his wings to swindle an ageing mob boss; and in the pulsating final dream – spectacularly filmed in a single take and techno colours, thus recalling his previous feature – a self-destructive hoodlum falls for a mysterious girl employed by a violent gangster. Jackson Yee played the mythical “deliriant” as well as its four manifestations.

Director: Bi Gan

Genre: Drama/Sci-Fi/Thriller/Mystery/Experimental Film

Language: Mandarin

Country: China

The Mastermind [2025]

 Kelly Reichardt’s minimalist “anti-genre” exercises – subversion of genre trappings, prioritizing inaction over actions, and leaving cine-goers without conventional payoffs – have produced anti-road movies (Wendy and Lucy, Certain Women), anti-Westerns (Meek’s Cutoff, First Cow), anti-political/legal thrillers (Night Moves, Certain Women), and anti-relationship/domestic dramas (Certain Women, Showing Up). She’s now made an absorbing anti-heist film with the beguiling and captivating The Mastermind. On that note, it recalled two other marvellous recent films – Rodrigo Moreno’s The Delinquents (especially how they glided through mischievous non-sequiturs) and Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera (both starred Josh O’Connor as roguish art thieves, though the similarities in their characters ended there). The protagonist here may well be the world’s worst art thief, giving a deliberately ironic ring to the film’s hyperbolic title. Aimless, unemployed, emotionally stunted, financially dependent on his well-off parents and working wife, and once considered very promising, JB (O’Connor) is the quintessential drifter. The Massachusetts resident hatches a foolhardy plot to steal four paintings – tellingly, by the American abstract painter Arthur Dove, thereby demonstrating his intellectual superiority over his material stupidity – by borrowing money from his mom, employing fellow losers and with no follow-through or backup plans. Significant portions of the film delved into the aftermaths of the robbery, as things go south right-away and JB is forced to go on the lam. The terrific jazz score complemented the improvisational form, and O’Connor embodied his character’s aloof, self-serving, hangdog charm, untouched by the era he’s living in, viz. the 1970s, anti-Vietnam War protests and counter-culture movements. The zeitgeist, incidentally, existed in the edges, bleeding in through the brilliant diagetic soundscape (TV programmes, radio bulletins, people speaking in the backgrounds), until JB inadvertently walks into it.

Director: Kelly Reichardt

Genre: Crime Drama/Heist Film/Road Movie

Language: English

Country: US

Sirāt [2025]

 Óliver Laxe’s existential road movie Sirāt was both an unconventional film and a film made unconventionally. Combining the hellish journey of outsiders with nothing to lose (except their lives) in Clouzot’s Wages of Fear – or perhaps more appropriately, due to their tonal likeness, Friedkin’s remake Sorcerer – and the dystopian, post-apocalyptic landscapes of Mad Max, with the monomaniac quest of a father for his daughter who’s switched sides with the “philistines”, so to speak, in Ford’s The Searchers, it formed an elemental and sensorial experience. The latter aspect was heightened by its hyper-saturated realism, a visceral audiovisual palette counterpointing a stripped-down narrative, and its embracing of a techno-trance world where music is for dancing rather than listening to. Set in the harsh and visually stunning deserts of southern Morocco – captured through electrifying cinematography and accompanied by a pulsating electronic score – its primal setup followed Luis (Sergi López), a middle-aged man who, along with his adolescent son Esteban, joins a subaltern group of nomadic misfits residing outside societal boundaries – and whose raison d'être is to reach transcendence through hallucinogenic music and drugs – in search of his missing daughter. They meet at a throbbing rave held in the desert, and when that’s dismantled by the cops, they embark on a crazy ride that evolves from thrilling and immersive to tragic and shocking, to reach another illegal rave – Luis, hoping to locate his daughter, and the eccentric gang for music that never ends. This was, therefore, a story that begins in media res and ends just as abruptly, and the arbitrary violence, meaninglessness and breakdown of civilization that they encounter served as proxy to the third world war that blazes outside the frames.

Director: Oliver Laxe

Genre: Psychological Thriller/Neo-Western/Road Movie/Adventure/Epic

Language: Spanish/French/Arabic

Country: Spain

Miroirs No. 3 [2025]

 Miroirs No. 3, with its beguiling set-up, eerily tranquil tone with an underlying disquietude that gently builds, disarming and economical narrative that defies complex people and themes, and exploration of identity and memory, was immediately recognizable as a Christian Petzold film. The recurrence of automobile accidents in his filmography, and his sparing use of haunting, off-kilter music, were also present. It channelled two of his films in particular – the sunny, rustic setting and an understated human story that evolves through stray, low-key interactions reminded me heavily of his ravishing last film Afire; however, the one that it formed the closest companion piece to was his unnerving earlier film Yella, as both featured what can perhaps be called “hyperreal/quasi ghost stories”. Like the latter film, this too begun with a shocking road accident; while her partner, with whom her relationship was already faltering, instantly dies, Laura (Paula Beer), the emotionally drifting heroine and music student, emerges largely unscathed from it. She’s provided accommodation by Betty (Barbara Auer), a kindly older woman with whom Laura had fleeting eye contacts earlier and whose house is located adjacent to the accident site, and they promptly settle into a peaceful domestic routine – cooking, painting fences, grocery shopping, having coffee, etc. Betty, unbeknownst to Laura, harbours a past trauma, and that – along with what catalysed this bond – starts surfacing when Betty’s husband (Matthias Brandt) and son (Enno Trebs), both expert car mechanics and seemingly estranged from her, arrive in the scene. Classical and pop tracks delightfully featured in the diagetic score of this work marked by a lovely interplay between being restrained and emotionally charged. The performances, led by the two women, were particularly remarkable.

Director: Christian Petzold

Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama

Language: German

Country: Germany

I… for Icarus [1979]

 JFK’s assassination has formed a recurring thread within political conspiracy thrillers, while among French left-wing political cinema in particular, films starring Yves Montand represented a sub-genre in itself. Directed by Henri Verneuil, best known internationally for the stylistic crime movie The Sicilian Clan, I… for Icarus ticked both boxes. Beginning with the cheekily framed disclaimer, “this story is entirely true since I’ve imagined it from start to finish”, this captivating, fatalist and irony-laden interpretation of the intrigue behind the American President’s death provided a delectably cynical expression of how, in modern nation-states, “truth” is diffused under convenient falsehoods, and that curiosity can have fatal consequences. Set in an unnamed country, a fearless, non-conformist President keen on challenging the status quo is shot dead, and the commission investigating into it returns with the verdict that it was the act of a lone assassin. Senior prosecutor Henri Volney (Montand), however, dissents the commission’s finding, and as a result is given the responsibility for leading a fresh inquiry. As he starts digging along with his team, he finds a continuously repeating pattern of ignoring, suppressing, bending and tampering with evidences, the disturbing discovery that multiple witnesses have been liquidated, and the growing realization that shadowy forces and senior state operatives are behind the conspiracy. Montand brought in his customary blend of charisma, intelligence and weariness in this film laced with distinctive French sensibilities and accompanied by Ennio Morricone’s riveting, self-reflexively used score. In an unsettling aside, the “Milgram obedience experience” is recreated, underscoring how, as Volney summarizes, “even in a country that’s civilized, democratic and liberal, two-thirds of the population are capable of carrying out any order coming from a higher authority.”

Director: Henri Verneuil

Genre: Thriller/Political Thriller/Conspiracy Thriller

Language: French

Country: France

Distant Voices, Still Lives [1988]

 British filmmaker Terence Davies’ feature-length debut, Distant Voices, Still Lives, continuously switched between bitter, mournful memories and gregarious displays of life in the here and now, and between private and public spaces. These intersecting aspects, along with Davies’ decision to replace linear recounting with a heavily impressionistic approach, instilled this heavily autobiographical film with formal rigour and poetic realism that were curiously at odds with its mythologizing of war-time and post-war working-class Britain and splashes of melodrama. Incidentally, this was two shorts rolled into one considering that its two interconnected halves “Distant Voices” and “Still Lives” were filmed two years apart and made with different crews, albeit with the same set of actors. It’s foregrounded on a Liverpudlian family – a stoic mother (Freda Dowie), two daughters (Angela Walsh and Lorraine Ashbourne) and son (Dean Williams) – that lived under the scarring shadows of an abusive and violent patriarch (Pete Postlethwaite), and continues to bear that trauma even after his death, which formed a pivotal juncture for them and divided their lives into a before and an after. Their oppressive interiority within their dreary, cramped home was frequently alternated with moments spent with friends and family in taverns and public houses, drinking beer and breaking into popular songs of that time. The communal power of music, in fact, formed a key theme. The cinematography, with its washed-out and desaturated colours, exquisitely evoked a lost time and space that exists through the subjective prism of memories, while the long, gently panning shots captured the calm and the chaos. The mannered acting and lack of any redeeming qualities of the brutish father, fleeting displays of gentleness notwithstanding, marginally dampened this deeply personal work.

Director: Terence Davies

Genre: Drama/Family Drama/Musical/Coming-of-Age

Language: English

Country: UK

The Getaway [1972]

 Sam Peckinpah delivered a gripping genre exercise with The Getaway – arguably the most straight-up actioner in his incendiary career – and an archetypal, albeit lesser-known, early entry in the pantheon of gritty 1970s American crime cinema. It was a substantial hit too, despite stretching mainstream sensibilities with its nihilism, violence and cynical amorality, facing considerable behind-the-scenes turbulence, and receiving negative critical reviews (which has fortunately reversed with time). The credit for its appeal goes as much to Peckinpah’s high-throttle direction and leading man Steve McQueen’s “King of Cool” on-screen persona, as the enormously cinematic source novel by Jim Thompson – with its blend of heist gone awry, sociopathic outlaws, on-the-road thrills and brooding violence – and the crackerjack script by Walter Hill, who rewrote the original adaptation by Thompson, including completely doing away with the novel’s final third and its pungently surreal finale. The film’s rakish stylistic flourishes were evident at the outset during the ingenious opening montage – capturing overlapping moments in times while introducing incarcerated career criminal “Doc” McCoy (McQueen) who’s up for parole – which was accompanied by flamboyant freeze frames and terrific sound design by Quincy Jones. Upon securing his release, he’s arm-twisted into immediately planning a bank robbery, which starts unravelling from the get-go thanks to a sleazy, rotten partner (Al Lettieri) who intends to double cross Doc at the first opportunity, and an alarming escalation in unplanned body counts. He’s consequently forced to go on the lam along with his wife (Ali MacGraw) – who doubles as a driver with fine get-away skills, thereby potentially serving as a prototype for Hill’s protagonist in The Driver – and partake in spectacular shoot-outs that stretch plausibility, while planning an escape to Mexico.

Director: Sam Peckinpah

Genre: Action/Crime Thriller/Road Movie

Language: English

Country: US

Seconds [1966]

 Seconds – the nightmarish final chapter in John Frankenheimer’s ‘Paranoia Trilogy’ – wasn’t an overly political film, unlike the two that preceded it, viz. The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days in May. It was, instead, a bleak and discordant foray into mid-life crisis and existential disillusionment, along with an unsettling study on the malleability of identity – through the dystopian premise of “rebirth” via next-gen plastic surgery – that recalled Georges Franju’s Eyes Without A Face and Hiroshi Teshigahara’s The Face of Another; this latter facet, incidentally, would keep recuring in both future arthouse films (e.g. Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In) and mainstream movies (e.g. John Woo’s Face/Off). However, that said, it wasn’t without political undertones thanks to its sharp critique of the American Dream that’s supported by conventional suburban family, corporate job, material wealth, consumerist desires and heteronormative existence. This was clearly a work of two halves. In the brilliantly constructed first half, middle-aged, well-off and deeply dissatisfied New York banking exec Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph) is lured by a shady company – through hilariously sleazy salesmanship (by Jeff Corey), spurious smooth-talking (by Will Greer) and wicked entrapment – into agreeing to shed his current identity and transform into bohemian Malibu-residing artist Tony Wilson (Rock Hudson), in lieu of a steep price that they exact in return. In the rather formless second half, Tony struggles to adjust in his new persona and life – finding it equally empty and meaningless – and faces a horrific destiny in the memorably macabre closing sequence. The film’s visceral mood was amplified by the expressionistic B/W cinematography and jazzy score which, along with its free-flowing Kafkaesque segments, made it feel closer to a European than an American film.

Director: John Frankenheimer

Genre: Thriller/Psychological Thriller/Sci-Fi

Language: English

Country: US