Film

You are camping with friends, drinking beer and swimming, celebrating your nineteenth birthday. A car pulls up in the forest. Your aunt emerges, and as she walks towards you she calls out, palms pressed as if in prayer. In Spanish filmmaker Icíar Bollaín’s gripping Maixabel (2021), it is enough for a relative to say your name to know that the worst has happened: your world has ended, your father has finally been slaughtered.

If you were to pluck a tenth-century Norse Viking from their firelit longhouse and drop them into the twenty-first century so that they could create a film accurate about their life and culture, you would probably end up with something not far off from Robert Eggers’ The Northman, and not just because of the film’s graphic violence, fanatical religious ceremonies, and historically faithful aesthetics. The Northman also successfully depicts the way in which Northerners may well have perceived and spiritually understood the world around them.

The Godfather, the first instalment of Francis Ford Coppola’s three-part mafioso epic, premièred fifty years ago last month. Released in March 1972, The Godfather became a huge commercial success. By year’s end it was the highest-ever grossing film. And despite its brutal and salacious content, and its pulpy source material – which may help explain its attraction to moviegoers – it was a critical success. Pauline Kael, writing in the New Yorker, described it as ‘a great example of how the best popular movies come out of a merger of commerce and art’.

In the middle of Bogotá’s Parque de la Independencia is a statue of Nicolaus Copernicus. Designed by the Polish sculptor Tadeusz Lodziana, it was gifted by the People’s Republic of Poland to the city of Bogotá in 1974, after the resumption of diplomatic relations between the two countries, which had been suspended from 1952 to 1964. This period overlapped with La Violencia in Colombia, a bloody civil war between conservative and left-wing forces, during which roughly 200,000 people were killed.

After a decade spent redefining Australian outback noir with Mystery Road (2013), Goldstone (2016), and their ABC TV offshoots, writer–director Ivan Sen turns his attention to a semi-futuristic Asian metropolis in Loveland, retaining his lean directorial focus while delving into even headier philosophical territory. His new film is a strange beast indeed – daring, beautiful, frequently confounding. Those expecting breakneck cyberpunk action will likely head home disappointed – the genre worlds Sen’s characters inhabit are usually more prison than playground – but those with the patience to indulge this alluring and moody experiment should find much to admire.

Director Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s latest feature, Drive My Car, ponders fidelity and sorrow, and the universal truth that people are mostly fucked up. It adapts Huraki Murakami’s short story of the same name from his collection Men Without Women (2014), about a widower recounting his deceased wife’s infidelities to his ‘homely’ female driver. Hamaguchi’s film gently teases out the many quirky strands of information glossed over in the master novelist’s short story, most notably the characters’ backstories. The result is a literary work, magnificent in scope, that unfurls over three entrancing hours.

A teenager’s arduous journey from a Taliban-occupied Afghanistan in 1989 to the safe haven of Denmark is given a uniquely painterly treatment in Flee. Far from diminishing the story’s impact, this animated documentary is all the more profound for the insidious way the visuals undermine our defences.

Danish filmmaker Jonas Poher Rasmussen became friends with Amin soon after the Afghan refugee arrived in Denmark as an unaccompanied minor. Despite a friendship that has lasted twenty-five years, Amin had never told Jonas the full story of the harrowing experiences that led to his eventual asylum. He hadn’t told anyone. Through the course of Poher Rasmussen’s film, we find out why. 

Catholicism gets a bad rap when it comes to sex these days. The Church fixates on condoms and abortion. It isn’t always big on homosexuality either. Paul Verhoeven’s ‘historically inspired’ film, on one level, explores the hypocrisies that arise from such callow credos: the religious renounce the flesh but flagrantly eroticise spiritual and interpersonal relationships. Carnal obsessions abound on screen. Nuns mortify themselves (quite literally) and male clergy are reassuringly lascivious. The whole film is as revealing of the female figure as you would expect from the director of Basic Instinct (1992) and Showgirls (1995). Indeed, those who buy their ticket for the soupçons of Sapphic frottage are unlikely to be disappointed.

On the sunny streets of Belfast in 1969, nine-year-old Buddy (Jude Hill) fights imaginary dragons with a wooden sword and a shield made from the lid of a garbage bin. When his Ma calls him home for tea, he races through the neighbourhood, bright-eyed and carefree. But the afternoon idyll is quickly shattered by a small army of Protestant rioters laying siege to the street, smashing windows and firebombing cars in a targeted attempt to weed out any remaining Catholic residents.

They have always been inseparable in the public imagination, the Coen brothers, a zygotic artistic collaboration with an almost primal indivisibility. While for years Joel was credited as director and Ethan as producer, this was due entirely to a quirk in the Directors Guild of America that disallowed duel directorial credits, unless members were an ‘established duo’. This became official in 2004: they are now the established duo of commercial film – one would have to go back to Powell and Pressburger to find a cinematic partnership of such richness and breadth. With the release of Joel’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, the first film directed solely by one brother, it seems a good time to drill down into the brothers’ quintessence: what is a Coen brothers’ film, and what could or should we expect from a Coen brothers film? Is the zygote finally subdividing?