Someone on Letterboxd complained that this film uses an overused trope of people not recognising someone they’ve known for years, even someone to whom they’ve been married. A. Penelope (Juliette Binoche) not recognising Odysseus (Ralph Fiennes) is directly from Homer’s Odyssey and B. If you can’t see that Binoche plays Penelope as recognising Odysseus straight away but being unable or unwilling to allow him back into the palace without proving himself despite the conflicted yearning she feels for him to return, then you need to watch the film again. THE RETURN is a creative and artistic exercise of adaptation, reconfiguring Odysseus’ triumphant return to Ithaca as a tragedy and recolouring every character with that emotional resonance.
Like EMILIA PÉREZ, THE END is a musical with, at first glance, no reason to be a musical as well as songs that aren’t particularly memorable. Unlike EMILIA PÉREZ, THE END winds up justifying its unusual genre choice. The stylisation and excess of the musical genre ends up contrasting with and emphasising the emotional repression at the core of the film.
HARVEST is a period drama with the trappings of a folk horror and does not succeed as either. There’s no horror and the drama does not represent any particular period. It obliquely refers to the Highland Clearances without actually being embedded in the Scottish context of those events. HARVEST is an hour too long at the front and is poorly paced throughout, the characters are tediously obtuse, and the script loves to tell rather than show.
An entertainingly tense dramatisation of a small-scale situation on a 1980s US game show. THE LUCKIEST MAN IN AMERICA has some fun nostalgia aesthetics emulating the look of old VHS recordings (it specifically brought to mind Patrick Cotnoir’s visual work on this live reading of THE STAR WARS HOLIDAY SPECIAL). Paul Walter Hauser carries the film with a wonderfully ambiguous charm where you never quite know if he’s a charming happy-go-lucky guy or a snake oil salesman. Patti Harrison is sadly wasted but it’s always a joy to see her.
There’s an interesting but undeveloped metaphor for neurodivergence in PEACOCK (PFAU - BIN ICH ECHT?), a film where Matthias (Albrecht Schuch) spends his entire life masking as part of his job playing various social roles for clients. He masks to such an extent that the person underneath begins to disappear, leading his girlfriend (Julia Franz Richter) to ask the titular question, “Are you real?” The film explores this alongside some other interesting questions around performance, honesty, and humanity but it all feels a little light by the end in a way that feels as if it hasn’t properly engaged with its weighty themes.
An astonishing physical performance from Ben Foster drives this thriller where the villain is not a serial killer but road infrastructure and careless rural driving practices. Ben Foster is a charming, creepy, unreadable quiet little man whose obsession drives away his hot wife (played by Cobie Smulders who manages to do enough with the very little character that the screenplay gives). Foster’s secret seems to be bringing a little Tim Robinson energy to the role in a way that makes the script pop while also tapping into the deep pathos of the character and further establishes I Think You Should Leave as the key text of our current sociocultural moment.
There’s something extra tense about a thriller that could be resolved instantly if the character just did something – anything – different: in this case if Nicolas Cage’s nameless protagonist just left the beach car park where he spends the entire film. Fortunately he doesn’t and director Lorcan Finnegan gives us a trippy take on the classic Cage performance, emphasising the deep psychological distress of this character and his one-man war of attrition against some mean Australians. A wildly entertaining film that portrays the stifling and oppressive atmosphere of a dry heat and the bizarre madness that it induces uncomfortably well.
The howling of the wind around walls and through trees dominates the soundscape of the film’s first half, subtly suggesting the Scottish landscape itself turning against Tornado (Kōki,). However the wind dies down in the second half as Tornado herself takes on the force of the wind and becomes the avenging samurai that the land needs. TORNADO has an incredible sense of place, embedded in the Scottish hills where the film was shot. The space is clearly articulated in the film such that we always have a sense of the geography of the lake around which the story takes place.
The premise of becoming lost in an infinite hotel filled with eccentric inhabitants with clear inspiration from Kafka, BARTON FINK, House of Leaves, and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland sounded like catnip to me. Disappointingly there’s not much more substance to MR. K beneath the web of allusions and references. There’s a terrifically blank performance from Crispin Glover playing the straight man and some terrific Jeunet and Andersson inspired production design and visual style but it doesn’t add up to much. A wonderfully strange and cosmic ending went some way to redeeming the whole however.
I was extremely concerned that this documentary on the rise of American neo-fascism would sympathise with the three Proud Boys that it follows but was pleased to see that director Michael Premo’s detached style of documentary filmmaking simply observes the men exposing themselves as mendacious, stupid, incoherent, and selfish without particularly expecting the audience to care about their racist and bigoted concerns. These are men obsessed with their warped ideas of freedom and capitalism who like to indulge in the casual cruelty of threatening to crucify an “Antifa” protester or dumping gallons of paint on Black Lives Matter protesters. Living in 2025, it unfortunately feels like half a story.