Your Guide To The 2018 Sydney Film Festival

The 2018 Sydney Film Festival is imminent, and, in preparation, yr old pal Film Carew has been watching as many films as possible. Consider this a helpful guide through the grand SFF program.

24 FRAMES

Shots of wolves playing in the snow, horses trotting alongside a highway, or birds wheeling through the sky are beautiful. Shots of digital wolves frolicking in digital snow, digital horses trotting alongside a digital highway, or digital birds wheeling through a digital sky, however, are not beautiful. They’re just pixels. 24 Frames is being billed as the final film for legendary auteur Abbas Kiarostami, but it’s not; not, really. Instead, it finds 24 still photos that he took brought to ‘life’ —after his death— via digital animation. The effect is the opposite of Kiarostami’s Five: instead of quiet, meditative contemplation on the religious reverence of cinema, it feels more like watching some digital-animation student’s folio.

ÁGA

An aging couple live in a yurt upon Arctic ice, in the middle of a snowy nowhere. Their routines —trapping, fishing, weaving, stoking fires— make it feel as if this story could be taking place at any point in history; until the sound of a distant, arriving snowmobile alerts us to the contemporary setting. At first, we witness the mundanity of their lives, but soon director Milko Lazarov builds to an almost operatic finale; the grandeur of the landscape and the evocativeness of the framing adding to the sense of cinematic lyricism.

AMERICA TOWN

In the post-war Korea occupied by the American military, towns sprung up by army bases, where English was spoken, dollars were accepted, the booze ran free, and prostitutes were plentiful. Jeon Soo-il’s film wants to explore the horrors of these places; especially the way any sex worker who contracted venereal disease was institutionalised, to keep the streets ‘clean’ for the randy Americans. Which is a noble notion, except the film itself feels like cut-rate Kim Ki-duk: a mixture of careful compositions, hammy drama, and violent outbursts; as well as being yet another coming-of-age film about a young boy falling in love with a hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold.

ANCHOR & HOPE

Carlos Marques-Marcet’s debut 10.000km is one of the best ‘small’ films of the decade; a tale of a long-distance relationship told largely via Skype. His second feature reunites him with his same two leads —Natalia Tena and David Verdaguer— in another study of contemporary relationships, but introduces a third party into the equation. Tena and Oona Chaplin (a pair of Game Of Thrones actors in a radically-different setting), play lovers in a long-term relationship, living on a canal-boat in London. One spontaneous, drunken night, they decide to have a baby, and that their weird Spanish pal (Verdaguer) should be the sperm donor. Things get complicated, making for both playful comedy and dramatic poignancy. Marques-Marcet shows himself, again, to be an unusually empathetic, perspective studier of human behaviour, and a gifted director of actors.

BEAUTIFUL THINGS

If you only see one documentary-exploration-of-consumer-waste-turned-experimental-sound-art-musical this SFF, make it this one. Giorgio Ferrero’s film begins with familiar observational subjects: men working in oil-fields, on super-tankers, in a sound studio, and at a waste plant. Yet, it’s as obsessed with sound (and silence) as vision, turning buzzing toys, wrenches clanging metal, and spinning washing-machines into both noise terror and, finally, music. Beautiful Things is lyrical, ridiculous, and filled with dreams and ambition; a definite SFF standout.

BISBEE ’17

There’s not the same level of meta-fictional hijinks as with Actress and Kate Plays Christine —two films that posed as documentaries but were anything but— but, here, Robert Greene uses the mechanism of making a film to touch at troubling notions of American cultural identity and community values. He heads to the tiny mining outpost of Bisbee, Arizona —seven miles from the Mexican border— for the 100-year anniversary of a union-busting mass-deportation of workers. The film is about history lingering and cultural baggage, but it’s also about the re-telling of past trauma, the responsibilities of playing real people (a theme lingering from his last film). There’s interviews, rehearsals, musical interludes; but, mostly, there’s the grim sense of history repeating.

THE BREADWINNER

For women, life under the Taliban’s turn-of-the-century regime is so horrifying, it resembles the great, mythical evil of a fairytale. This the theme running through Nora Twomey’s adaptation of Deborah Ellis’s popular YA novel, in which a young girl poses as a young boy in order to support her family. Her goals —to provide food for her family, get her father out of prison, and escape Afghanistan— are like a mythical quest; and the telling of fables alongside the narrative gets at the way people turn to stories both to make sense of their life, and to escape from it.

[CENSORED]

Sari Braithwaite’s existential essay film starts from a simple premise: a movie made from scenes cut by Australian censors between 1958 and 1971. But, via her reluctant narration, Braithwaite discusses how her naïve idea of hoping to ‘liberate’ once-banned footage turned into a grim struggle with the history of filmmaking; being censored something suffered only by those privileged enough to get to tell their stories in the first place. Braithwaite’s narration is big on questions, short on answers; providing much food for thought for viewers both casual and film-historian.

CHOCOLATE OYSTER

There’ll surely be a great friends-and-family vibe at the premiere of Chocolate Oyster, a low-budget, mumblecore-ish film set and shot in Bondi. But the film itself —an ensemble movie supposed to be, roughly, about modern relationships— isn’t much, a collection of vignettes that land somewhere between charming and painful; the characters many, but never memorable, and rarely well-acted. The persistent music, that plays throughout, is so anodyne it often sounds like hold music; or, even worse, when it’s jaunty gypsy jazz, the spectre of Woody Allen is evoked.

THE CLEANERS

Images that contravene Facebook/Google guidelines aren’t expunged by some all-knowing algorithm. Instead, there’s an outsourced, offshore Filipino workface whose surreal McJobs involve going through 25,000 images a day, making snap decisions on what should or shouldn’t be banned. The repercussions of their decisions can be massive, and this sterling documentary —by German directors Moritz Riesewieck and Hans Block— duly explores them, showing how the corporate policies/standards of our internet overlords doesn’t just shape the way we see the world, but the world itself.

COLD BLOODED: THE CLUTTERY FAMILY MURDERS

After last decade’s duelling Capote biopics (2005’s Capote and 2006’s Infamous) it hardly seems like you’d need more of the Cutter Family murders on screen. After all, how can you make a four-episode true-crime series —shown, here, in a single 168-minute screening— when everyone knows what happened? Joe Berlinger addresses this by drilling down deeper. This isn’t just an exploration of the sensational crimes, or of Truman Capote’s famous ‘non-fiction novel’ retelling In Cold Blood, but of policing, community, and lingering effects. It also touches on meta-text territory, examining In Cold Blood as the birth of true-crime, the ongoing obsession with celebrity killers, and Cold Blooded’s own place in that landscape.

DISOBEDIENCE

There’s an entire subgenre —perennially represented at queer film festivals— of tales about scandalous same-sex attraction in devout religious communities. Disobedience is an A-grade variation on the theme: based on a book by Naomi Alderman, adapted by ace Chilean auteur Sebastián Lelio (seen at last year’s SFF with A Fantastic Woman), and starring Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams. They play old flames reunited, after years apart, in London’s Orthodox Jewish community. It’s hard to type this sentence with the appropriate resonance, and lack of prurience, but: a huge part of Disobedience’s success comes with its on-screen depiction of sex, capturing its complexity —animality, emotion, thrill, embarrassment, and release at once— in a memorable sequence free from sex-scene clichés or leering male gaze.

DRAGONFLY EYES

Filmmaker Xu Bing combed through 10,000 hours of CCTV footage to make Dragonfly Eyes, a film out to explore a romantic conceptual notion —“what’s the distance between the video fragments of real life and ‘reality’?”— by inserting a narrative amongst such captured reality. The moments of real-life catastrophe and craziness (car accidents, street brawls, even a plane crash) are amazing, but essentially the stuff of YouTube vids. The drama itself is far more generic, giving the whole film the effect of being an evolution of the ‘found footage’ movie: contemporary video technology, with its association with reality, a new tool used to draw viewers into a familiar story.

DRESSAGE

Iranian cinema is full of parables in which children undertake tasks that symbolise greater social struggles, or moral quandaries stand in for critiques of the state. Pooya Badkoobeh’s film picks up on these themes, and delivers a teen drama in which peer pressure, adolescent rebellion, and class privilege are explored in a study of social ethics. A teenage girl (Negar Moghaddam) and her upper-class friends rob a grocery store for kicks, and she ends up with the security footage. Thereafter, her friends, family, and parents demand the evidence be destroyed, but she holds firm; her refusal to give in to society’s widespread corruption a moral crusade staged out of equal parts crisis-of-conscience and spite.

EX LIBRIS: THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

The 47th feature for legendary ‘direct cinema’ don Frederick Wiseman —88 years old and showing no signs of slowing— is familiar for anyone who’s witnessed a Wiseman flick before. It’s a 200-minute portrait of the New York Public Library service, featuring long, observational sequences in which meetings are taken, policies are discussed; only, this time, there’s also a random Elvis Costello appearance. Wiseman remains obsessed with the inner workings of institutions, and his patient studies ultimately reward patient viewers.

FOXTROT

The Foxtrot is a dance in three steps, and Foxtrot is a film in three acts. Samuel Maoz’s long-awaited follow-up to his in-a-tank 2009 war-movie Lebanon, it opens with every Israeli parent’s nightmare: soldiers knocking on the door, telling them that their son has died. After a first-act study of searing grief, the film pivots away, the absurdist second-act showing said son alive-and-well at a dead-end IDF outpost, where the soldiers on military duty kill time. After an artful animated interlude —the most striking moment in a striking film— the third act is a study of loss, and hopeful healing. The evocation of the foxtrot, danced twice herein, is Maoz’s way of symbolising the “traumatic circle” of Israeli society; how the cycles of military service, wars, trauma, and repression trap the country in a loop.

GENESIS 2.0

“There’s a word for this in German,” says director Christian Frei, in NQH (Not Quite Herzog) voiceover; the word, evidently, translating as something like ‘the warm feeling of anticipation before you leave harbour’. Genesis 2.0 balances anticipation and dread in equal measure, as Frei and co-director Maxim Arbugaev, in something like an epistolary film, swap missives and footage from radically-different, but absurdly-related worlds: amongst Siberian hunters on the lookout for mammoth tusks frozen under Arctic ice, and amongst the genetic engineers working to bring things —be they mammoths or just the beloved dogs of the wealthy— back from the dead. The film’s wildest times come when Korean genetic scientists talk blithely about their wildly-ambitious plans for the future of genetic manipulation, sounding like the world’s friendliest Bond villains.

GOOD MANNERS

This strange Brazilian film —a ‘classy’ riff on schlock genre— starts out almost like a Bergman film: a pregnant, lonely upper-class woman and her hired help are holed up in the one São Paulo house, falling deeper into a psycho-sexual relationship crossing class divisions. But then it ends with a little kid turned into a terrible-CGI werewolf, out to sate his wanton bloodlust. In between there’s a pastel-sketched animated interlude and a pair of random musical numbers, which means that Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra’s movie never just delivers the expected tropes.

HALF THE PICTURE

There’s nothing cinematically artful about Half The Picture, which discusses the shocking statistical disparity between genders amongst American filmmakers, doing so via talking-heads and a tone of you-go-girl inspirationalism that crests with an awful, platitude-stacked power-ballad that rolls over the closing credits. But there’s undeniable weight behind the shocking numbers, stories of sexual harassment, and pissed-off testimonies amongst its cast of American female directors. The most amazing moment comes when Miranda July, normally such an unflappable figure, gets emotional talking about motherhood and its impact on her career. Which is all a wonderful reminder that her third feature, thus far untitled, is actually finally coming in 2019.

HEARTS BEAT LOUD

SFF’s closing-night film is a piece of effortless crowd-pleasery, and, more importantly, a film about music steeped in a genuine love of music. Nick Offerman plays the owner of a failing record-store in Brooklyn, all flannel and beard. His daughter, Kiersey Clemons, has been raised a budding music-snob, but she’s heading to med-school. In her last summer before college, they decide to form a band. And, yes, they actually play the music, not just mime it. The down-to-earth depiction of DIY music-making is a huge part of the charm of Hearts Beat Loud. But Brett Haley’s film’s greatest blessing is the way that it captures the feeling of time passing; seeking not to preserve his sitcom set-up in three acts, but letting the story flow on. It captures a liminal moment in the lives of its two main characters, but not necessarily a definitive one.

HOLIDAY

In Isabella Eklöf’s debut feature, everything is bright —lights, whites, colours; clubs, shopping malls, holiday villas— but the humanity is dark. Victoria Carmen Sonne plays a naïve, young trophy girlfriend who arrives on the Turkish Riviera (covertly carrying a bag of cash) for a ‘family holiday’ with the crime clan of her silver-haired sugar-daddy. With her precise, largely-symmetrical frames, Eklöf creates vivid tableaux in which nouveau-riche opulence is set against cruel behaviour. It’s an unflinching study of social status, hierarchy, patriarchy, and immorality; a grotesquerie in which money and power amplify the horrors of humanity.

INSTRUCTIONS ON PARTING

Instructions On Parting opens with a family slideshow, a parade of faded pictures from years ago. As with old photos, there’s meaning not just in the captured image, but the evocation of temporality, and mortality. Amy Jenkins’ ensuing film is this dark notion played out in a long, sombre, oddly-calm home-movie. It’s a study of death: the filmmaker’s family —mother, sister, brother— all succumbing to cancer in quick succession. There’s a profundity in its proximity to death; Jenkins capturing intimate, unguarded moments from people who can feel their life draining away.

THE INSULT

“Old Civil War wounds” are opened in this Lebanese courtroom drama, in which a trial between two men from opposite sides of the political divide —a conservative Lebanese Christian and a Palestinian refugee— symbolises a greater issue. As the stubborn, prideful men refuse to budge from their position (one demanding an apology, the other refusing to give it), this portrait of intractable masculinity is out to evoke the stubbornness and machismo of political posturing and discourse. There’s real weight to Ziad Doueiri’s barely-cloaked themes, but too often the film feels weighed down by them, even leaden.

IN THE AISLES

At its worst, Thomas Stuber’s film peddles the creepy male-entitlement of rom-coms eternal: after getting a job in a big-box warehouse, Franz Rogowski sees Sandra Hüller through the shelves, balletically piloting a forklift, and the pair begin a flirtation. She’s married, but he’s obsessed. By the time he breaks into her house and spies on her in the bath, you’re wondering why this low-key comedy wasn’t billed as a horror-movie. Gladly, the third act reveals that this isn’t some quirky romance, but a dramatic study of alienation and isolation; the cavernous warehouse a place vast and unfeeling, in which the gathered workers find a sense of community, but remain distant, divided.

LEAN ON PETE

In the wasteland of small-town America, Charlie Plummer lives with his barely-around single dad; spending his time running, obsessively, through a blighted landscape. When he falls, by dint of Steve Buscemi’s crotchety coot, into the world of small-time local horse-races, he bonds with the race-horse of the titular name. Eventually, he ends up on a cross-country roadtrip; though where that narrative device, especially in American cinema, is normally a place for cutesy whimsy, here it’s a voyage through a dark country. Director Andrew Haigh uses this narrative —and his main character— as a way of exploring the burden of shame that comes with a life of poverty.

LOOKING FOR OUM KULTHUM

The great visual artist Shirin Neshat occasionally makes feature films; her last was 2010’s suitably acidic Women Without Men. Here, she gets v. meta with a meta-movie about a visual artist making a movie about the legendary Egyptian singer Oum Kulthum. This allows Neshat to dodge or dismantle all the old biopic clichés, whilst also dramatically depicting everything she’s going through: working in exile from Iran, making a film about an Arabic icon as a Persian, battling against boy’s-clubs as a female director, challenging producers, and obsessively identifying with her subject.

LOTS OF KIDS, A MONKEY AND A CASTLE

In her youth, a Spanish woman dreamed of her life giving her… well, read the title. Astonishingly, these dreams came true: six children, a pet monkey, and a castle to live in all coming her way. Now an 80-something matriarch, she wants a “home movie” made about her life. So, director Gustavo Salmerón —one of her kids— both rifles through the family’s super-8 archives, and charts a contemporary narrative: the kids returning home to help their parents downsize. Only, two hoarders in a castle can stash a lot of shit, and, so, this charming, non-threatening documentary finds the family rifling through suits of armour, paintings, candelabras, gilded furniture, endless boxes of bric-a-brac; the ultimate treasure being two sections of vertebrae from long-dead grandma’s skeleton.

MEKTOUB, MY LOVE: CANTO UNO

Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue Is The Warmest Colour follow-up has a familiar feel for the director: lengthy takes, improvised dialogue, a real-long run-time, a cous cous restaurant, the male gaze, sex. Over summer weeks on a coastal town in the South of France, a host of attractive young people drink, dance, flirt, fight, fuck. It’s essentially a film about desire, in which even a kid-goat sucking on a baby bottle is rife with sexual tension; but in which there are few moments of great drama, or even conflict. The result feels something like a sprawling, messy, horny, ass-worshipping Rohmer movie.

A MOTHER BRINGS HER SON TO BE SHOT

When Sinéad O’Shea heard that a mother in Derry, Northern Ireland, had taken her son to a “shooting appointment”, where local vigilantes would deliver justice via non-lethal bullets to his legs, the director imagined coming to town for a single TV news story. Instead, she’d spend five years chronicling the mother, her family, and the local community; where a distrust of police —and the slur of ‘informer’— makes for closed, blighted ghettoes that enact their own laws and punishments. 20 years after the end of The Troubles, O’Shea sees their lingering effect everywhere in Derry; her (Joshua Oppenheimer-produced) film daring to ask the messy, unanswerable question: “How do wars truly end?”

MUG

It’s quite an opening: a department store offering a Christmas-time ‘underwear’ promotion, in which those making the mad dash for a cheap TV must strip down first. This (literally) naked capitalist lust is set against religious hypocrisy in the latest film for wry Polish provocateur Małgorzata Szumowska, who pokes at the values of mass-cultural Christianity (with lots of weird shallow/isolated focus). In a backwoods town in the Polish countryside, they’re building the world’s largest Jesus statue. But when a local metalhead undergoes a face transplant after a disfiguring accident, his gruesome new form (“your face is fucked-up”) shows their pettiness, prejudice, cruelty, and selfishness.

A MURDER IN MANSFIELD

A Murder In Mansfield is a study of trauma, reconciliation, and closure cloaked in true-crime threads. A highly-publicised, locally-televised trial in 1990 Ohio found a doctor guilty of murdering his wife, burying her under concrete in the family basement. Key testimony in the trial came from his 12-year-old son, Collier. 26 years later, Collier —now a cinematographer— returns to town, with iconic documentarian Barbara Kopple filming his homecoming, out to come face-to-face with the past, and his still-imprisoned farmer. It’s a raw story given an eerily-mannered cinematic treatment; as if its subject, someone who talks about art-as-therapy therein, can only really get a handle on his wild life when seen through a frame.

NICO, 1988

“I’ve been on the top, I’ve been on the bottom. Both places are empty,” says Trine Dyrholm, donning the black wig and booming monotone to play the titular musical heroine. Susanna Nicchiarelli rock-biopic follows Nico on her final tour, years removed from her salad days of being Warhol Superstar and the Velvet Underground’s femme fatale. Here, she’s decades deep into daily drug abuse and constant self-destructiveness; the tour a travelogue en route to oblivion, in which the magic of the music is no longer a life-preserver.

OVER THE LIMIT

Every stereotype of the gymnastics coach is given rise in Marta Prus’s observational portrait of a Russian gymnast preparing for the Olympics; with stage mothers, Russian plutocrats, and bitchy rivals also lingering in the margins. Filled with endless training footage, a sentimental reading could be that Over The Limit is about the painful pursuit of perfection, and the toll that it takes on those who aspire to Gold-standard greatness. But what that means is, often, watching two middle-aged women unload a steady stream of verbal abuse, humiliation, manipulation, and cruelty upon a teenage girl.

ROCKABUL

When Afghani outfit District Unknown, the first metal band in a country where music is forbidden, play their first-ever gig, they suck. “It was the worst performance ever,” they say, with not too much hyperbole in their self-critique. They get better, but never enough that the actual music is at the centre of Travis Beard’s documentary. Instead, the music is a symbol, of independence, dissidence, liberty. It’s what carries them through hard times, but it’s not enough to keep the members from fleeing the country.

SAMUI SONG

“That director makes movies no one understands,” cautions an agent to an actress in a particularly meta moment in Samui Song. Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s latest offers another film in which the familiarity of genre tropes gives way to a feeling of dislocation and disorientation; the line between film and ‘film’ forever blurry. Here, a wife recruits a wannabe gangster to do away with her impotent husband; who ends up beaten to death, with due symbolism, by a statue of an erect cock. Thereafter, her life sprawls into a nightmare; though what’s her life and what’s a soap-opera production is left deliberately unclear.

THE SEEN AND UNSEEN

A girl in rural Bali is stricken by grief for the fate of her twin brother, bedridden with a brain tumour. So, she soon starts communing with his spirit —or her imagination, or delusion— in nocturnal flights of fantasy, rich with folklore, dance, and childhood mischief. Director Kamila Andini uses cinema’s close relationship to the subconscious to her benefit, ascending into a place somewhere between art-movie, fable, and dream.

TERROR NULLIUS

It’s the Australiana mash-up we had to have. Video-art duo Soda_Jerk raid local film history, employing Australia’s cinematic totems in ironic, satirical, provocative fashion. Here, dated swinging-dick heroes like Mel Gibson Mad Max and Crocodile Dundee are laid to waste; this a gleeful, vindictive fantasy in which Skippy is a feminist intellectual out to speak truth to power, the Man From Snowy River is a queer crusader (with his eyes on Brokeback Ledger), and Pauline Hanson meets her timely demise via a boomerang to the head. It’s obnoxious and hilarious, carrying the anarchic quality of memedom. But there’s a strong sense of purpose to the mischief: Terror Nullius poking at old, persistent, toxic myths, demanding that Australian identity, on screen and off, needs to be re-examined, rewritten, rewired.

THREE IDENTICAL STRANGERS

It’s the strangest of stranger-than-fiction tales: at 19 years old, three New Yorkers, having grown up in separate adopted households, discover that they’re identical triplets, separated at birth. Cue: media hysteria, minor celebrity, the talkshow rounds, a restaurant opened to trade on their fame. But the feelgood qualities of this reunion soon give way to a shocking web of dark secrets and shadowy conspiracies; director Tim Wardle uncovering twists and turns, and ending the film with a great final line.

TOWER. A BRIGHT DAY.

“Based on future events.” So reads the opening title-card of Tower. A Bright Day., which instantly combines with the unnerving score to create a sense of unease that percolates through Jagoda Szelc’s poetically-titled picture. Here, a family reunion takes place in a rural Polish house, on the edge of the forest, but feeling as if it’s the end of the world. Like Trey Edward Shults’s Krisha, it’s a film in which a family gathering begets claustrophobic paranoia and collective terror; score, sound design, and auditory tricks creating a hallucinatory state. Szelc locates that cinematic sweet-spot where you’re unsure if you’re seeing someone’s delusions or if things are tipping into the apocalyptic.

TRANSIT

In Occupied France, an on-the-lam German attempts to escape the encroaching fascist forces by assuming the identity of a writer; only to feel guilty when he meets the writer’s wife. It sounds —and plays— like a film set in WW2; as if a companion piece to director Christian Petzold’s previous picture, Phoenix. Except, in a simple, fantastic sleight of cinematic hand, Petzold shoots this story in contemporary France, essentially setting it in a time neither past nor present. This speaks to Transit’s greater theme, of history —wartime migration, persecution of immigrants, unfeeling states— repeating.

UPGRADE

A nasty B-movie blessed with both a ridiculous action-flick premise and a sense of Verhoeven-esque satire/absurdity, Upgrade takes place in a shadowy, noirist, future-dystopian America that’s actually secretly Melbourne (shouts to the Bolte Bridge). O.C. graduate Logan Marshall-Green plays a man’s man driven by that generic first-act tragedy: a murdered wife. Left a quadriplegic by the robbery that killed her, he’s offered an experimental, top-secret bio-mechanical procedure that’ll get him back on his feet. Instead, the bio-tech turns him into an unstoppable-killing-machine, dispatching bad-guys with gruesome ultra-violence played —by director Leigh Whannell— for splatter-horror lulz.

THE WIFE

There’s been percolating Oscar buzz for Glenn Close’s titular turn, in The Wife, since it premiered at Toronto last year; Close playing the long-suffering wife of a Roth-ian literary lion (Jonathan Pryce) due to receive a late-in-life Nobel Prize. But for all the lacerating critique of the patriarchy of literary prestige that’s in Meg Wolitzer’s source-text, the to-screen translation plays as pat, cute. Director Björn Runge ticks metronomically between scandalous, soap-operatic revelation and scenes of people yelling at each other; layered complexities found not in the filmmaking, only in Close’s performance.

WRATH OF SILENCE

The ol’ man-on-a-mission narrative is given an artful, socio-realist riff in this dad-looking-for-his-missing-son tale set against the grim culture and landscape of rural Northern China. Director Xin Yukun is clearly taking influence from recent flicks like Jia Zhangke’s A Touch Of Sin and Diao Yinan’s Black Coal, Thin Ice, which used genre tropes to cast Chinese society in harsh light. But Xin lacks their sense of formalist rigour and comic absurdity, respectively; his film hewing too close to a straight depiction of shopworn narrative clichés.

YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE

Lynne Ramsay’s first film since 2011’s We Need To Talk About Kevin is, if reduced to plot synopsis, a gritty genre-movie: Joaquin Phoenix seemingly channelling Choi Min-sik, is a hammer-wielding vigilante on a revenge mission. But Ramsay deliberately keeps most of the action out of the frame, bad-guys dispatched between edits. Instead of being driven by the engine of narrative, it’s a work of deliberate disorientation and obfuscation, tapping into the mind of its hero; who’s haunted by past trauma, paranoia, fantasy, panic attacks, and is losing touch with reality. The result is an airy art-movie that turns its revenge plot into a sensorial swirl; it looks great and sounds incredible.

ZAMA

The horrors of colonialism are comically skewered, in Zama, by the great Argentine director Lucrecia Martel. In a Spanish settlement on the Paraguayan coast, Don Diego de Zama (Daniel Giménez Cacho) wanders about in powdered wig and air of entitlement, a member of the landed gentry who trade in ‘Indians’ and are doted on by enslaved servants. Waiting for a transfer out of town, he’s gradually driven crazy; as if the environment is slowly taken its revenge on this interloper.