Tag: top 10

The top 10 dirtiest movies of 2023

Posted on by victorfraga

Another year has gone by and DMovies is now nearly eight years old. Since we started in February 2016, we have published more than 2,900 exclusive articles and reviews. We have attended both big and small film festivals and industry events of Europe, always digging the dirty gems of cinema firsthand and exclusively for you.

We physically five a-list festivals across Europe: Berlin, Locarno, Cannes, San Sebastian and Tallinn. Other gigs included the Turin, REC Tarragona, Transylvania and the Red Sea Film Festival, in Saudi Arabia, plus the usual suspects across the UK (the BFI London Film Festival and our indie favourite Raindance). We have published in excess of 400 articles and reviews and renewed our biggest partnerships.

We decided to pull together a little list of the 10 dirtiest films of 2022. And what better way to do it than asking our most prolific writers and also our audience for their dirty pick of the year? This is a truly diverse and international list, containing very different films from every corner of the planet, some big, some small, some you can still catch in cinemas, some on VoD and some you will just have to keep an eye for, at least for now!

Don’t forget to click on the film title in order to accede to the our dirty review of the movie (not necessarily written by the same person who picked it as their dirty film of the year). The movies are listed alphabetically…

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1. All of Us Strangers (Andrew Haigh):

Chosen by Daniel Theophanous

Loosely based on the 1987 novel Strangers by Taichi Yamada, All of Us Strangers is the story of Adam, in his 40s, a scriptwriter living a lonely existence working and living at home with an inability to connect with others. His life is marked by the tragic death of his parents, killed in a car accident just before his 12th birthday. The day after his encounter with Harry, in an elaborate trip down memory lane he makes his way to his suburban childhood home in Croydon. Finding himself at his local park, a place which initially gives the impression of a cruising spot, enhanced by the presence of an attractive moustached man in a leather jacket signalling him into the bushes. Adam follows him into an unexpected opening and upon close inspection it is revealed the man is his dad, looking just like before he died. A subtle and playful use of a gay trope nods to Haigh’s signature understated directorial approach.

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2. Asteroid City (Wes Anderson):

Chosen by Anton Bittel

It may come with Anderson’s typical whimsy and familiar cartoonish stylisations, but this formally challenging, hermeneutically convoluted work is focused on a deep, deep grief that no amount of narrative embedding can truly, permanently bury. Anderson’s retro-futurist small-town ’50s setting, the picture-book production design and dead-on cinematography, all the overt artifice and metatheatrical play, and even a story involving a visiting alien (and an incursion of Brechtian alienation effects) cannot quite contain the sense of loss that his eccentric ensemble of characters struggles to suppress as they look away from the grave towards the heavens – and so Asteroid Cityproves a richly layered, constantly diverting study in melancholy. It is beautiful, funny, sad, wise and humane.

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3. Barbie (Greta Gerwig):

Chosen by readership (most read review of the year)

Never before in your life have you seen as much pink. Costumes, houses, cars, streets and even the sky. Your eyes might suffer inflammation or photophobia. You might become pink-blind. This is a luminescent movie that exudes not just colour, flair and vigour, but also some very bright and gleaming messages. At a duration of nearly two hours, Greta Gerwig’s third feature film (after 2018’s Lady Bird and 2020’s Little Women) is her most expensive and commercial one, but this does not mean that the 39-year-old director has waived her auteurial sensibilities, her audacity, and her ability to touch and move even the most cynical and hardened of hearts..

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4. The Eight Mountains (Felix Van Groeningen, Charlotte Vandermeersch):

Chosen by John McDonald

Belgian filmmaker Felix van Groeningen, known for the heart-breaking 2019 film Beautiful Boy , is joined by his actress wife Charlotte Vandermeersch for this latest project, an adaptation of the award-winning 2016 novel of the same name by Italian author Paolo Cognetti. It’s a film that has been described as a “straight Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005)” which kind of says a lot about it – but this is far from being just a one-dimensional retelling. It explores a simple friendship with complicated edges, a combination of two isolated souls in dire need of this concept, and how it can cultivate into something significant and extremely poignant over time.

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5. Full Time (Eric Gravel):

Chosen by Jeremy Clarke

A single mum with two young kids struggles to hold her working life together in a Paris where the transport network in and out of the city is paralysed by strikes. The brief moment of calm at the start of the movie gives little indication of the relentless nature of what is to follow. Julie Roy (Laure Calamy) sleeps deeply, a figure at rest, as we watch parts of her face in close-ups. Suddenly, this tranquillity is shattered by the aural violation of the quiet by an alarm clock. As she gets the kids up, the radio blares out something about an increase in working hours and something else about the welfare state. The impression is of the microcosm of her life and the macrocosm of the wider world (France) in a state of crisis. She bundles her kids off to the child-minder’s and boards a pre-dawn train to Paris. The train is terminated because of an unwell passenger, so she has to switch to a bus to get to St. Lazare, and as she is trying to get to The Churchill, the luxury hotel where she works as a head chambermaid, she must fend off a mobile phone call about her mortgage repayments.

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6. Faceless After Dark (Raymond Wood):

Chosen by Paul Risker

This is a damn fine genre picture. Responses to the toxicity of social media have revealed that it’s a trickery little devil – concealing its true meaning. One suspects society might be terrified if it knew what an honest exploration the film is of a common, but ignored and misunderstood rage bubbling beneath the surface all around us – in part, how we create our own monsters. All of this is presented with subtlety. Director Raymond Wood, writers Todd Jacobs and Jenna Kanell, who plays the lead character, Bowie, ensure that first and foremost it’s a rollicking good genre picture with plenty of carnage and blood. And, in a time when references and influences aren’t discreet, here, the unhinged artist delicately evokes the spirit of a famous ‘fallen’ female character of 1950s cinema.

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7. Falling into Place (Aylin Tezel):

Chosen by Eoghan Lyng

A German lady and a Scottish man live out their memories on the streets of London, in this highly accomplished German film. Falling into Place avoids the most everyday clichés to demonstrate a love story based on guilt and unfulfilled desire. The audience knows more about the characters than they do, which might explain why they spend so much of the film apart. When Kira returns to London, she catches up with her Irish ex-boyfriend, hoping to rekindle the memories they shared. She’s open and honest in all the ways Ian – a struggling musician desperate to catch a break – is not. His seclusion likely stems from his father’s ill health – not forgetting his sister, who is situated in a hospital to cure her manic depression. They find other loves, but none of their partners seem to reignite the spark they enjoyed on that cold night in Skye. The question remains: Is it better to confine love to memory, or should you break free from the shackles of convention, and “take a risk”?

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8. In the Rearview (Maciek Hamela):

Chosen by Louis Roberts

Premiering at Sheffield DocFest last week, where it went on to win the Grand Jury Award in the International Competition, In the Rearview is a co-production of Ukraine, France and Hamela’s native Poland. Set almost entirely in the filmmaker’s own minibus as he takes thousands of refugees to safety, the film’s intimate yet non-intrusive approach is the very definition of ‘less is more’. Despite the extraordinary circumstances in which its subjects find themselves, the film is incredibly effective as a slice-of-life documentary, a testament to the resilience and courage of the normal people this conflict has affected, as well as Hamela’s determination to tell their stories as truthfully as possible.

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9. Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese):

Chosen by Victoria Luxford

After nearly 60 years of filmmaking, Martin Scorsese is still capable of making films that keep you glued to your seat. Teaming up with regular collaborators Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert DeNiro, Killers of The Flower Moon is both a complex power struggle and a howl of rage from America’s ugly past. Lily Gladstone is the heart and soul of the piece, with DiCaprio as ever excelling as a man torn between light and dark. At 81, there are more films behind the Oscar-winner than ahead, but he shows no sign of slowing with one of the most gripping films of the year.

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10. The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer):

Chosen by DMovies’ editor Victor Fraga

Jonathan Glazer’s latest creation hits your head so hard that it keeps it spinning vertiginously. It throws your set of inner values and principles into disarray, and make you question the very nature of your humanity. It’s a necessary and urgent film, relevant to people of all nationalities and with a topic as current as it was 80 years ago, when the Third Reich was at its height.

The movie depicts the routine of Rudolf Hoess (Christian Friedel), the longest-serving commandant of Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp, his wife Hedwig Hensel (Sandra Hueller) and their five children (ranging from babyhood to 11 years of age) around 1943 in a large country house. The facilities are very comfortable, however not particularly extravagant. The dining room and lounge are elegant and spacious, the medium-size garden is populated with gingerly pruned plants, a table and a few chairs. This is where Rudolf welcomes other Nazi officers. A guest casually describes how the gas chambers work, with a factory plant to hand: “load, burn, cool, unload, then start all over again”. It sounds as if they are talking about a food manufacturing procedure. This is also where the children play. Where Rudolf and Hedwig enjoy their intimacy, sharing the friendly banter and occasional joke. A quiet lake nearby provides the family with rural entertainment, reflection and a connection with nature. This could be any German family. It is such casualness that is most jarring. These people lead a hair-raisingly mundane existence.

The Zone of Interest is pictured at the top of this article.

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And here goes one last-minute addition:

The Beast (Bertrand Bonello):

Chosen by Nick Kouhi

One of contemporary French Cinema’s most exciting provocateurs, Bertrand Bonello has cultivated a knack for confidently melding potentially incongruous genres into a recognizably pervasive strain of dread. His new film The Beast is possibly his boldest work yet, as intellectually rigorous as it is stylistically dazzling in its three historically discrete but thematically linked tales of l’amour fou between a couple spanning across a century and two continents.

The would-be lovers bear the same names in their separate lives: Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) and Louis (George MacKay), whose paths first cross in early 20th Century Europe. Their chance encounter in Paris sparks a kinship where she confides in him a latent fear of some unknown catastrophe that will befall her. The central premise, inspired by Henry James’ 1903 novella The Beast in the Jungle, extends to 2014 where Gabrielle is now a struggling actress in Los Angeles and Louis is the thinly veiled double of Elliot Rodger, whose misogynist social media vlogs culminated in six murders near the University of California.

The top 10 dirtiest movies of 2021

Posted on by victorfraga

Another year has gone by and DMovies is now nearly six years old. Since we started in February 2016, we have published 2,200 exclusive articles and reviews. We have attended both big and small film festivals and industry events of Europe, always digging the dirty gems of cinema firsthand and exclusively for you.

Despite the numerous challenges posed by the pandemic, we physically attended five A-list festivals across Europe: Berlin, Locarno, Venice, San Sebastian and Tallinn. Other gigs included the very first Red Sea Film Festival, in Saudi Arabia, plus the usual suspects across the UK (the BFI London Film Festival and indie favourite Raindance). We have published 400 articles and reviews and renewed our partnership with organisations such as the Black Nights Film Festival and VoD providers Festival Scope and ArteKino.

We decided to pull together a little list of the 10 dirtiest films of 2021. And what better way to do it than asking our most prolific writers and also our audience for their dirty pick of the year? This is a truly diverse and international list, containing very different films from every corner of the planet, some big, some small, some you can still catch in cinemas, some on VoD and some you will just have to keep an eye for, at least for now!

Don’t forget to click on the film title in order to accede to the our dirty review of the movie (not necessarily written by the same person who picked it as their dirty film of the year). The movies are listed alphabetically…

,,,

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1. Annette (Leos Carax):

Chosen by Justin Khoo

Starting with a bombastic ode to the artifice of cinema, and culminating in a heart-wrenching reckoning with misplaced ambition, artistic inadequacy, and parental regret, Leos Carax’s Annette makes the case that self-reflexive postmodern art can still pack an emotional punch. Between these bookend showpieces, the film slides playfully between fantasy and reality, yet remaining grounded in the demanding-yet-graceful performances of its three leads (Adam Driver, Marion Cotillard, and Simon Helberg) and a dreamlike set design that recalls 2020 and 1920 alike. For all these lovely qualities, any musical lives or dies by its music, and Annette is fortunate to feature an infinitely hummable score by Sparks, including many songs that you may find on repeat in your head long after the show has ended — a comforting reminder that some things, are, really, “out of this world”!

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2. Baby Done (Curtis Vowell):

Chosen by Eoghan Lyng

The first thing you should know about Baby Done is that yes, it is a film about babies, and yes, as a treatise on biology, it showcases the many unflattering elements that come with childbirth. There’s the belching, the farting, the aging and crying that comes part and parcel with the voyage every potential parent sets for themselves. And between these squabbles over baby clothes, baby showers and baby motions comes the birth of a new cinematic genre.

It’s not an explicitly feminist apotheosis, but it essays mothers at their most urgent, urbane and undressed. “I want a baby,” Zoe says; “I just don’t want to be a mum.” Determined to keep her head up, Zoe searches for “pregnancy fetishes” on the internet. But however reluctant she comes across, or how difficult she appears to her boyfriend, Zoe is never anything less than charming, and beneath the feisty veneer comes a human equally as ecstatic as she is terrified to bring another human to the world.

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3. Black Bear (Lawrence Michael Levine):

Chosen by Charles Williams Ex Aequo

It’s difficult to talk about this American dirty movie without giving the game away. Establishing dialogue suggests a traditional, staid indie mumbler but the film soon morphs into a more experimental space, cohering into a satisfying, chewy thinkpiece by the end; a millennial reimagining of Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001) by way of Adaptation (Spike Jonze, 2002), updated with more pertinent issues to filmmaking today.

The film is built around two lightning rod scenes, reflections of the same event told from wildly different contexts. It is a diptych of competing quantum narratives with the viewer left to decide whether either, both or neither contain any truth. The implied throughline of a writer exploring these hypotheticals does little to clarify whether the plot is drawn from experience or directly conjured, a torturous creativity writ large.

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4. Dune (Denis Villeneuve):

Chosen by Amhara Chamberlayne

Dune is the best kind of blockbuster – visually arresting, intellectual and emotionally engaging. It feels like a mash-up of Game Of Thrones and Star Wars – in a good way. Its fascinating world is realised through a seamless blend of practical and digital effects, but it isn’t just pretty for the sake of it – its visuals emphasise the depth of the story. It’s hero’s journey is familiar yet it feels fresh thanks to the psychedelic spin and unique setting. The performances are fantastic, and Chalamet does well to hold his own amongst a cast of veterans.

Bring on Part 2!

Dune is also pictured at the top pf this article.

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5. The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmao (Karim Ainouz):

Chosen by Paul Risker

Director Karim Aïnouz and screenwriter Murilo Hauser’s Un Certain Regard winner (Cannes Film Festival, 2019), is a deeply emotional film. Adapted from Martha Batalha’s novel, the emotional presence of the drama comes through the audience bearing witness to the lives of the two sisters, Eurídice (Carol Duarte) and Guida (Julia Stockler), unfolding through the years.

Aïnouz plays with the voyeuristic role of his audience and uses their active participation to contribute to the emotional crescendo. Sharing in the pain of the characters, the audiences fears of mortality and time lost are effectively exploited. The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão is a cry against patriarchy and gender inequality, that has inflicted irrevocable hurt on women, denying them the most precious of gifts, time.

Despite premiering in Cannes in 2019, The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmao only reached UK cinemas in 2021.

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6. Memoria (Apichatpong Weerasethakul):

Chosen by Redmond Bacon

With Memoria, Thai legend Apichatpong Weerasethakul is basically trying to do the impossible: use the cinematic form to depict the vibrating, mysterious connection between all human beings. A dreamy, strange, addictive and loopy dream-like journey through Medellin and the Colombian jungle, his first non-Thai film is the best film of the year.

Tilda Swinton, the patron saint of all things weird, stars, in an unusually downbeat turn. She plays a woman from Scotland travelling to Medellin to visit her sick sister. Her sister’s husband suggests her sickness has been caused by her research: investigating a tribe in the Amazon that purposefully choose to stay hidden. She could be cursed. Like with Weerasethakul’s previous films, one suspects ghosts or malevolent spirits might be involved.

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7. A Place Called Dignity (Matias Rojas Valencia, 2021):

Chosen by DMovies’ editor Victor Fraga

The year is 1989, just months before the end of the Pinochet’s sanguinary dictatorship, somewhere in the remote hinterlands of Southern Chile. The country dares to hope for freedom and democracy for the first time in two decades. Inside Colonia Dignidad, however, there is no visible sign of the end to the years of the institutionalised physical, psychological and sexual abuse to which staff and students are subjected.

This highly mysterious and secluded organisation is run by sadistic German preachers. They are under the purview of Pius (Hanns Zischler), who prefers being called Dauer Onkel, German for “permanent uncle”. There’s nothing pious and avuncular about the old foreigner. He invites his young male students to his bed late at night and forces them to undress. The actions of “permanent uncle” will leave a permanent scar on his young victims.

This shockingly powerful Chilean film is based on real events.

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8. Riders of Justice (Anders Thomas Jensen):

Chosen by Ian Schultz

The latest film from director Anders Thomas Jensen is a black comedy that subverts some aspects of action movies. It’s an incredibly funny but strangely moving film about Marcus (Mads Mikkelson), whose wife is killed in a tragic train accident. He is approached by two men statistical analyst Otto (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) and Lennart (Lars Brygmann) with their suspicions about the “accident”, and they team up to find out what actually happened. Its one of those films that pretty much anyone could enjoy: it’s an art film, an action film and a comedy, it has a lot of emotional depth, and it even becomes a Christmas film at one point. Riders of Justice is a solid piece of work with loads of great twists and turns, and juggles its tones perfectly. Mikkelson is fantastic as always, turning in an even better than in last year’s Another Round (Thomas Vinterberg, 2020).

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9. Some Kind of Heaven (Lance Oppenheim):

Chosen by Charles Williams Ex Aequo

An assured and sumptuous debut documentary feature. Lance Oppenheimer gets intimate access and honesty from his subjects, a motley crew of Floridian pensioners for whom life begins as the end nears. Love, sex, drugs and lawn tennis and are all viable pastimes at The Villages, a retirement-complex-cum-city-state with a population that exceeds the smaller countries. Everything is heightened by beautiful cinematography that brings to mind a slideshow projection of holidays long forgotten.

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10. Summer of Soul (Questlove):

Chosen by Dan Meier

Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz (1978) was knocked off its perch this year, not just by Van Morrison and Eric Clapton’s Covid denial but also Summer of Soul – Questlove’s ode to black culture and its white erasure. Buried for 50 years, phenomenal footage from 1969’s Harlem Cultural Festival vibrates with the rhythm of soul and the crackle of protest. Incendiary performances from Sly and the Family Stone, Nina Simone and Ray Barretto testify to the diversity and freedom of African and Latin American music, arguably creating the all-time greatest concert movie; a moving (in every sense) celebration of anti-racism, not anti-vaxxers.

Our top 10 dirty picks from the BFI London Film Festival 2020

Posted on by victorfraga

The year of 2020 has been like no other, and every single film event had to adapt. The BFI London Film Festival (LFF) is no exception, as the British capital (and the rest of the nation) grapples with the new lockdown rules and restrictions, which have either prevented or discouraged people from leaving their homes in order to go to the cinema. Of course every cloud has its silver lining, and the good news is that all films are now within reach of anyone in the UK, not just the country’s capital.

Throughout the course of 12 days, 14 feature films and a featurette (Almodovar’s The Human Voice) will available to watch in cinemas, namely the three cosy theatres of the BFI Southbank. Plus 59 feature movies are available on BFI Player at specific time slots (which range from a few days to a few hours). They include 50 virtual premieres. You can see the full list and book your tickets by clicking here. In addition, there is also a short film, XR, immersive art and an augmented reality installation – just click here for more information.

Below are our top 10 picks from the programme. They are dirty movies that we watched earlier this year at the Berlin, the Venice and the San Sebastian International Film Festival (the Spanish festival embraced the entire selection from the cancelled edition of Cannes). They are some of the most innovative, provocative and downright filthy that we have seen this year. Of course we haven’t covered every single film in the LFF programme, so stay tuned for more dirty gems throughout the British Festival!

The 10 dirty movies below are listed in alphabetical order. Just click on the film title in order to accede to each individual review:

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1. 200 Meters (Ameen Nayfeh):

Mustafa (Ali Suliman) and his wife Salwa (Lama Zreik) live 200 meters apart in villages separated by the West Bank Wall. When he receives a call from his wife saying his son has been rushed to hospital, he’s denied access at the Israeli checkpoint on a technicality. Leaving him with no choice, he pays a driver to smuggle him to the other side of the wall. Mustafa alongside a small group of strangers come to depend on one another, as they undertake the dangerous 200 kilometre odyssey.

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2. Another Round (Thomas Vinterberg):

A history professor, a school music director, a children sports coach and a psychology teacher walk into a bar. They’ve decided to test the theory that mankind should maintain a 0.05% blood alcohol concentration in order to maximise their potential and achieve greatness. Two glasses of wine for kick-off and then top it up throughout the day. You already know where this is going but it’s an intoxicating ride through Sazerac-sodden highs before the crashing hangover sets in. The four male protagonists won the Best Actor prize at San Sebastian. Another Round is also pictured at the top of this article.

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3. Days (Tsai Ming-liang):

The king of slow cinema is back, and he’s in great shape. In his latest movie, two men carry on with their lives as normal on the streets of Taipei. One of them (Anong Houngheuangsy) is young and poor, and prepares a meal in his humble dwelling. The other one (Lee Kang) is a little older and seemingly wealthy, judging by the hotel room that he hires. This is where they meet. The conversations are sparse and wilfully “unsubtitled”. The younger man gives the older man a sensual massage, which gradually develops into full-on sex. The action is delicate and sensual, with a palpable sense of intimacy. The two characters develop a bond, helped by the quietly effervescent chemistry between the two actors. There’s also a touch of tenderness. The older man gives a tiny music box to the young one, which appears again in the end of the movie. The two men are inextricably linked through their memories, embodied by the unusual trinket.

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4. The Human Voice (Pedro Almodovar):

Breaking up with your ex is never an easy task, particularly when he’s already found a new companion. He hasn’t returned home for three days, in a rather unambiguous sign that he has now left for good. You experience a lot of feelings: despondency, jealousy, hate and – first and foremost – rage. You want to stab his chest. You want to cut him up with an axe. You want to set fire to what once was your love nest.

Can you live out these things for real? Probably not a good idea. So the 70-year-old Spanish filmmaker found a cunning solution. He staged the entire action. He built a mock home inside a large warehouse and hired Tilda Swinton to play the jilted lover. She is supported by her doting pooch Dash, dazzling costumes and a jaunty music score by Alberto Iglesias. Almodovar’s latest movie places a 1928 play by Jean Cocteau in a modern context.

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5. Never Gonna Snow Again (Malgorzata Szumowska/ Michal Englert):

Zenia (played by British Ukrainian actor Alec Utgoff) heals the pains and afflictions of the bored and sick Polish bourgeoisie. He lives in a small flat in town, and spends most of his time – massage-bed under his arm – on an upper class district, visiting very different clients. A woman struggles with an unsatisfactory sex life and an unruly daughter. A man is dying of cancer. An old lady is very sad and lonely, in the company of her three bulldogs. And so on. The young and attractive foreigner is a masseur, a healer, a hypnotherapist, a dancer, a friend and a lover, sometimes all at once.

Never Gonna Snow Again is a highly elliptical film. It’s a collection of allegories, some perfectly intelligible, some deeply personal and moot to interpretation. There is a apparent reference to last sequence of Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), as a young Zenya uses telekinesis in order to move a glass across the table. Some sequences feel very creepy/ Lynchian, such as an exotic peep show dance (watched by Zenya) and a magic trick on stage (inexplicably performed by Zenya alongside one of his clients). All strangely delectable.

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6. New Order (Michel Franco):

What was intended to be an ostentatious celebration soon turns into a bloodbath, in the movie that won the Silver Lion of Venice. Twenty-five-year-old, pretty and Nordic-looking Marianne (Naian González Norvind) is getting married to the handsome, Italian-looking Alan (Dario Yasbek Bernal). Both families and their rich friends have united at her family’s spectacular dwelling, somewhere in Mexico City. Everyone is dressed to kill, and food and drink are abundant at the extravagant party. Until their conspiring employees open the house gates to trigger-happy, ruthless rioters.

This is no Marxist revolution. The rebels are profoundly consumerist, wide-eyed with greed, as they steal the expensive electronics, jewels and other valuables from their hapless victims. They take enormous pleasure in vandalising the property. They are not concerned about equality. Instead they work in cahoots with local authorities and other groups. Their allegiance is as fragile as the champagne glasses at the wedding party. Nihilism and factionalism prevail. There is no concern for social justice. They are prepared to betray and to kill their associates without hesitation. They just want money. As much money as possible.

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7. Nomadland (Chloe Zhao):

Fern (Frances McDonald) is a beautiful and intelligent middle-aged woman. She is very unusually charming, with her quiet and stern smile. She is also in perfect good health. Someone who could be working in Wall Street. Instead she lives in poverty in the back of her van (not a camper van, but a regular size one), travelling across her large nation in search of temporary employment in fast-food restaurants, factories and so on. She literally has to “handle her own shit”, in reference to the bucket that she uses as a toilet. The movie that won the Silver Lion at Venice is based on Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, a non-fiction work penned three years ago by Jessica Bruder.

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8. Shirley (Josephine Decker):

In the year of 1964, the highly reclusive horror writer Shirley Jackson (Elizabeth Moss) and her husband Stanley (Michael Stuhlbarg) “welcome” two graduate students into their Vermont mansion, Rose (Odessa Young) and her spouse Fred (Logan Lerman). Rose and Fred are vibrant, optimistic and full of life. Shirley are cruel and offensive misanthropes. Shirley will attempt to hurt and humiliate the naive couple at every opportunity. Her equally unpleasant husband will support her in the very questionable endeavour.

Shirley wasn’t just a reclusive, who rarely ever left her large estate. She was also a sociopath. In the few occasions when she ventured out of her property, she helped to ensure that everyone in her surroundings felt threatened and mortified. Her actions included the the sharpest and meanest remarks, pulling scary faces and spilling wine on the sofa. Her gaze overflowing with hate and envy. She has Bette Davies eyes, complete with the bitchiness of Margo Channing in All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950). The difference between between Davis’s character and Shirley is that the latter is genuinely cold-blooded and brutal.

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9. Supernova (Harry Macqueen):

Tusker (Stanley Tucci) has received a diagnosis of dementia, causes and stage unknown. Things are definitely worsening, however, this simply won’t do for author Tusker, renowned for his intellectualism and lively personality. Concert pianist partner Sam (Colin Firth) is stoically resigned to tackle the coming challenges and is considering easy access bungalows or outside help. His heart is completely dedicated towards this new goal to spend their remaining time together. “Every moment”. The two are not entirely on the same page, with the sentimentality of Sam’s approach rubbing against the more clinical outlook of Tusker, railing at the inevitability of becoming a passenger in his own body. The diametrically opposed personal introspection of the writer against the sensitivity of an outwardly performative musician has until now defined their relationship, now causing friction.

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10. Undine (Christian Petzold):

Undine (Paula Beer) is an eloquent historian. She teaches tourists about the architectural history of Berlin in a local museum. She shows them a giant model of the city as it currently is and another one of what it would look like now had the GDR not unexpectedly collapsed 30 years earlier. Her life is also seeing a very abrupt change: her lover Johannes (Jacob Matschenz) is about to dump her. The nonchalant yet assertive female has threatened to kill him in case he proceeds with his plans. She does not wish to see their romance confined to the past, just like urbanistic plans for the defunct communist state.

She then meets the handsome Christoph (Franz Rogowski), a diver familiar with the underwater secrets of the German capital. The grounded lady and submarine gentleman complement each other. They meet entirely by accident (literally), in one of these rare occasions when the underwater world comes crashing into the surface. Undine was unwittingly waiting to submerge into Christoph’s world for some time. Her name is a reference to a 200-year-old German novella about a water spirit.

Top 10 films about Brexit… and why it should have never happened

Posted on by victorfraga

At DMovies, we are proudly European. We believe in the values of internationalism, diversity and tolerance. We also believe that cinema should not be confined to the borders of one nation, and that we all benefit from the plurality of cultures, visions and perspectives. The characteristics commonly associated with Brexit – nationalism, intolerance, cultural and political arrogance – are an affront to the very essence of a dirty movie. A dirty movie is a movie that brings people together, that celebrates the universality of cinema in novel and thought-provoking ways.

None of our writers support Brexit. In fact, very few people in the film industry do, except perhaps for poor multimillionaire Michael Caine. Some of our recent interviewees have expressed their reservations about the Brexit, too. An elated Mike Newell told us a few months ago: “People like me are infuriated by Brexit. Brexit’s a very bad thing. Not just culturally, turning our backs on Beethoven, but where’s the money gonna come from?”. A more magnanimous Ken Loach stated, also in an exclusive interview a few months ago: “there’s a lot of fake patriotism, xenophobia, chauvinism. I think that cinema and the left in general should communicate that people are of equal value, whatever their origin, religion, the language they speak. Everyone is our neighbour. Our working class people have more in common with the working class of other European countries than with our ruling class.”

So we came up with a list of 10 dirty movies that investigate – at times directly and other times poetically and obliquely – the various phenomena that triggered Brexit, from overt and rabid racism to a general discontentment with the establishment and the feeling neglect in the more rural and impoverished parts of the country. We hope that these films will help viewers to reflect on the mistakes made, understand how unscrupulous politicians capitalised on these problems and sentiments, and restore our trust in a diverse, tolerant and inclusive Britain. We believe that the UK will eventually heal these wounds and rejoin the EU.

These films are listed in alphabetical order. Click on the film title in order to accede to each individual review.

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1. Bait (Mark Jenkin, 2019):

Like a modern-day A Day in the Country (Jean Renoir, 1936), Bait observes the tension between rural and city folk and sees the darkness that misunderstanding can lead to. Edward Rowe’s increasingly desperate fisherman takes us along with him, as he lives hand to mouth and dreams of buying a boat to improve his catch. The tourists he was forced to sell his family home to, who repeatedly refer to themselves as a part of the community, keep trying to make his life even harder, though of course its all within their legal rights.

Bait is also great Brexit movie. But that’s not to say that it’s a single issue movie. This film will still be relevant long after we’ve got our blue passports, because these are battles that have always taken place, probably always will. But the way Jenkin relates past and present, generational and class divide, allows the film to take on mythic qualities.

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2. Brexitannia (Timothy George Kelly, 2017):

The interviewees within this documentary are mostly in scrublands, council estates, broken down factories or a workingman’s club in areas such as the North-East of England, Northern Ireland, Clapton in Essex or the South West, describing their fears and what made them vote Brexit. The movie is was divided in two parts. We knew this was so because we were helpfully given the title “Part One: The People”, before the participants started talking. It was all vaguely interesting and amusing. The audience sometimes laughed out loud at some of the views held by this strange bunch, living somewhere outside the M25.

But there came a point when I was positively looking forward to what else we were going to get after ‘the people’, hoping that there would not be too much of it and that it was not going to go on for too long. Indeed, after “Part One: The People”, came “Part Two: The Experts. A group of half a dozen or so prominent individuals chosen to give their educated views on Brexit – one of them being Noam Chomsky.

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3. The Brink (Alison Clayman, 2019):

Stephen Bannon is largely credited with the election of Donald Trump, which he describes as “a divine intervention”. Bannon remained his chief strategist until August 2017, when the two men fell out. It’s not entirely clear how close the two are right now. Nevertheless, Bannon remains very loyal to Trump’s cause and ideology. He works closely to the Republican Party. He was devastated when the GOP lost control of the House of Representatives, after the 2018 midterm elections.

The controversial political figure has made very good friends in Europe, with whom she shares many affinities. We see him meet up with Nigel Farage. They a passionate conversation about nationalism. Bannon believes that Trump’s election was a direct consequence of the Brexit referendum. “Victory begets victory”, he sums it up. We also watch him meet up with smaller and less significant leaders from the European far-right, including countries such as Belgium and Sweden.

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4. Democracy (David Bernet, 2016):

This documentary does what the British media generally fails to do: it highlights the importance of personal privacy. In fact the UK seems to be moving precisely in the opposite direction. The highly controversial Investigatory Powers Act was passed last November with barely any objections from the political establishment, and very limited exposure in the media. The UK government now has unprecedented powers to snoop on our Internet history. While the film doesn’t highlight the UK context, if you are vaguely familiar with Tory privacy policy (or lack thereof) you might immediately realise the stark contrast.

It’s vital to note that, with Brexit, the UK may no longer be subjected to these laws, which could make the country extremely vulnerable to US corporate interests. Data privacy laws are very relaxed in the US, where an individual’s criminal and even health records are often publicly available or stored in databases with little to no protection.

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5. Eaten by Lions (Jason Wingard, 2018):

This is not a film that overtly deals with Brexit. The film delves into the topics of infidelity and paternal abandonment with the thickest tongue-in-cheek, darkly flippant and ironic tone. “She had those eyes, almost as if something was wrong with her” Irfan (Asim Chaudry) tells Omar (Antonio Aakeel) about meeting Omar’s mother. Aakeel and Chaudry are on fine form, but Jack Carroll, playing the disabled Pete, is the real scene-stealer. Simply watching him trying to act anything but impish in a seduction scene (across from the sultry Natalie Davies) shows a comedic talent that stands beside the decided discomfiture of Peter Sellers and Stan Laurel.

Kevin Eldon, Johnny Vegas and Hayley Tammaddon punch up the supporting cast with strong supporting performances, with the right hint of subtle xenophobia. Despite his background, Omar’s foster mother suggests that he belong with “his own” (pointing to his Indian father), a particularly potent and shocking moment and one that supports an exclusivist England that voted for Brexit and one that touches on an all too potent nerve.

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2. Hurricane (David Blair, 2018):

It’s too easy to take most British WW2 movies (e.g. Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan, 2017) and claim they bolster the idea of Brexit – Britain alone against the world, defeating the dastardly Germans and so on. Hurricane is different. Its Royal Air Force (RAF) pilots are refugees from the Polish Air Force, wiped out by the Luftwaffe in a mere three days and kept on ice by Britain’s xenophobic War Office following their arrival in England. When they’re finally allowed into the air, these Poles turn out to be much better fighter pilots than the majority of Brits who are being slaughtered by the enemy at an alarming rate. Indeed, it’s the Polish pilots that turn the Battle of Britain around.

Hurricane is named after the RAF’s most widely used fighter aircraft and those portrayed here, at least when flying, are computer generated. Much of the CG work has been carried out in India (nothing wrong with that) on the cheap. The aircraft looks like computer models partly because no-one’s bothered to dirty them up and partly because there’s no attempt at reflecting the weather on their metal surfaces as real flying aircraft surfaces would do. Consequently, the flying sequences have an air of unreality about them which a little more budgetary spending in the right places could easily have fixed.

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7. I Love my Mum (Alberto Sciamma, 2018):

This British comedy about haggling mother and son accidentally shipped to Morocco humanises refugees and also functions as a trope for Brexit.The essential misunderstanding between our heroes and their Spanish and French counterparts has overtones of Brexit negotiations, in which none of the countries can seemingly surmise what the other wants. While these later scenes meander at times, and rely on just a little too much flat sexual humour, they do get at the heart of why Britain and the rest of Europe seemingly can never properly get on.

Complemented by handsome photography of the Mediterranean Coastline and the Pyrenees, the rugged beauty of both Spain and France shows us what we are missing out!

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8. Memento Amare (Lavinia Simina, 2017):

Mihai (Cristanel Hogas) is an immigrant. And as such he is divided between two nations. His beautiful wife and his young daughter dwell in Romania. Mihai is in London, where he toils as a construction worker, presumably in order to save money and provide a better future for his family. His relationship with his family is vibrant and colourful, while his life in the UK is sombre and colourless.

Because the movie is not entirely chronological, there are hints of the disclosure in the very opening sequence. The outcome looks bleak yet inevitable. And it raises a number of questions: Could the psychological wounds of Brexit could stay open for decades? How will the “orphaned” generations react to having their king (and their kingdom) taken away from them? Is it possible that the young may seek justice with their hands? Is warring the only road towards redemption? One thing looks certain: solidarity has collapsed (perhaps to the point of no return), and the future is not bright.

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9. Postcards from the 48% (David Wilkinson, 2018):

It’s time to look back and evaluate what has been achieved since the referendum in 2016. Postcards from the 48%, as the title suggests, is a proud Remainer of a film. It lays out solid reasons as to why Brexit is insane, and the UK has been mis-sold a fantasy. It’s also a call to action: there’s still time to reverse a catastrophe. It’s mandatory viewing for those looking to consolidate their Remain views and opinions, and also for those in doubt.

A very pertinent analogy is made at the end of the movie. If you buy a house and find out it sits on a sinkhole, you should be able to to challenge your purchase. That’s why Britain should be given a second referendum and the opportunity to challenge the 2016 vote, which was heavily influenced by fallacies and lies.

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10. The Street (Zed Nelson, 2019):

The devastating effects of gentrification are meticulously observed in documentary The Street, a scathing indictment of Tory austerity over the past four years. An empathetic portrait of a community in flux, it doubles up as a wide-spanning lament for a country that has seemingly lost its way.

As the double infliction of Brexit and Grenfell Tower impose even greater mental and physical harm upon the local population, the tragedy of Hoxton Street over the past four years becomes the tragedy of London, and by extension, the UK itself. Do the government care about working class people at all? Judging from this film, all evidence points to the contrary. While pointedly didactic (it may as well have said “Vote Labour” at the end) it earns the right to be, caring deeply for its subjects and begging for an empathetic solution.

The top 10 dirtiest films of 2019

Posted on by victorfraga

Another year has gone by and DMovies is now nearly four years old. Since we started in February 2016, we have published 1,400 exclusive articles and reviews. We have attended both big and small film festivals and industry events of Europe, always digging the dirty gems of cinema firsthand and exclusively for you.

This year alone, we have published 400 articles and reviews and renewed our partnership with organisations such as Native Spirit, the Tallinn Film Festival, the Cambridge Film Festival, plus VoD providers such as Walk This Way and ArteKino. What’s more, our weekly newsletter has highlighted the best films out in cinemas, festivals, VoD and DVD every Friday to our 20,000 subscribers! We have up to 100,000 monthly visitors on average.

So we decided to pull together a little list of the 10 dirtiest films of 2019. And what better way to do it than asking our most prolific writers and also our audience for their dirty pick of the year? This is a truly diverse and international list, containing very different films from every corner of the planet, some big, some small, some you can still catch in cinemas, some on VoD and some you will just have to keep an eye for, at least for now!

Don’t forget to click on the film title in order to accede to the our dirty review of the movie (not necessarily written by the same person who picked it as their dirty film of the year). The movies are listed alphabetically. And scroll all the way to the bottom of the article for the turkey of the year (a film so squeaky clean that you shouldn’t be sad if you missed it)…

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1. Animals (Sophie Hyde):

Selected by Eoghan Lyng

The glorification of male companionship has been celebrated in tragicomedies such as Withnail & I (Bruce Ronbinson, 1987) and Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996). Animals, on the other hand, showcases the triumphant revelry between two young women, decadent in their communal taste for fermented depravity. Effortlessly translating Emma Jane Unsworth’s book from Manchester’s streets to the Irish capital, Animals zips with inspired zest, an energised exposition of elastic wit and inspirited storytelling.

Laura (the British born Holliday Grainger, complete with killer Dublin accent) fancies herself a writer, fancifully fantasising through voluminous bottles with the coquettish Tyler (Alia Shawkat). Their thirties fast approaching, the women see little reason to halt their precocious abilities to party, until love threatens to put these halcyon days to pasture. Minesweeping to Alphaville, Laura walks into the enigmatic Jim (Fra Fee), a precocious Ulster pianist whose scale painting conjures composites of satiated sexual desires. Between these silhouettes, a solitary fox walks, echoing the lonely poetry the film displays.

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2. Dragged Across Concrete (S. Craig Zahler):

Selected by Jack Hawkins

Dragged Across Concrete may not be the best film of the year, but it’s certainly the dirtiest. With it, S. Craig Zahler cements his status as a leading genre auteur, which is no mean feat. Few other filmmakers could get away with a 160-minute crime film of such deliberate pace and odious content.

For example, half-way into the narrative we are introduced to a young mother named Kelly, who is returning to work after three months’ maternity leave. Performed with heartfelt angst by Jennifer Carpenter, Kelly has clearly dreaded this day, tearfully lamenting how she ‘sells chunks of her life for a pay cheque so rich people I’ve never even met can put money places I’ve never even seen. With some degree of tough love, her partner persuades her to leave for the bus; what happens when she makes it to the bank will have you shaking your head in disgust. It becomes clear that the sole purpose of the character is to make you feel terrible, and it is this – along with the film’s pervasively bleak vision – that makes Dragged Across Concrete the dirtiest film of the year.

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3. Echo (Rúnar Rúnnarsson):

Selected by Redmond Bacon

This film is basically Love Actually (Richard Curtis, 2003) directed by Roy Andersson. Comprised of only 56 static takes, Rúnar Rúnarsson calmly takes Iceland’s pulse during the Christmas season; delivering a panorama that is equal parts funny, sad, ironic and loving. Displaying a supreme confidence in direction and writing, this is a major step up in form and content.

It spans through the Advent season to the New Year, that time of year when families are reunited, stress levels are high, and wallets are strained. Everyone is in the mood to either try and enjoy themselves, or simply get through the darkest days in the year. Spanning from rich to poor, old to young, alone or surrounded with family, it feels like all of Icelandic life is contained within this film.

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4. Joker (Todd Phillips):

Selected by Michael McClure

The Joker looks on its poster as yet another quirky, all-American urban mythology film, that appeals to that predictable audience base – it is anything but. With its extraordinarily talented performance by Joaquin Phoenix, it is up there with the greats of the Weimar cinema such as The Blue Angel (Josef von Sternberg, 1930) and Nosferatu (FW Murnau, 1922) as an exploration of the human psyche, that is both prophetic and insightful. It is about that phenomenon that Nietzsche called “ressentiment” in which the weak, talentless and envious take out their anger on the talented and intelligent and turn it into an internalised ritual of cruelty.

It the creed of the “people” versus the “elite”, the Nazi against the Jew, the herd against the thoughtful and intelligent. The Joker is a useless, bitter clown who in his resentments takes on the right to kill those who show him up for what he is. As such, in this age of social media, trolling and glib public opinion, this film is very modern and very prophetic. Joaquin Phoenix is up there with Emil Jannings in the complexity and depth of his performance.

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5. Never Look Away (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck):

Selected by Jeremy Clarke

What is art? Why do artists make art? These questions lie behind Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s latest film, like his earlier The Lives Of Others (2006) a German story exploring that country’s history and identity. It clocks in at over three hours, but don’t let that put you off because it needs that time to cover the considerable ground it does. Never Look Away spans the bombing of Dresden by the Allies in WW2, the liquidation of people considered by the Nazis inferior and therefore unfit to live and the very different worlds of post-war art schools in first East and later West Germany. This means it also spans two generations: those who were adults during the war, and those who were children at that time and became adults in post-war Germany.

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6. Parasite (Bong Joon-ho):

Selected by DMovies’ audience and Lucas Pistilli

Our audience’s pick is our most read review of 2019, and the film isn’t even out in UK cinemas yet!

The latest Palme d’Or winner at Cannes, and the first Korean film to win the prestigious prize, follows a small family of four They live in a shoddy basement flat in an impoverished district of Korea. They face unemployment, and the future does not looks bright. They steal wi-fi from their neighbours. They panic when the password is changed, leaving them disconnected from the rest of the world. But that isn’t their one “parasitic” action. All four are con artists. One by one, they take up highly qualified jobs with a super-rich family, which also consists of four memebers. They are very well-spoken and manipulative. Their bosses never suspect that there’s something wrong with their highly “diligent” workers. These impostors are also extremely charming. Your allegiance is guaranteed to lie with them.

Furthermore, Lucas wrote: “A home invasion-social critique hybrid that exposes the malaise of late-stage capitalism with a Hitchcockian flair, Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite is a film that rewards multiple viewings and is very deserving of every acclaim sent its way. The thriller establishes a sense of barely-contained mayhem early on and doesn’t let the audience go until the only way out is sheer chaos. A killer picture is every level”

Parasite is also pictured at the top of this article.

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7. So Long, My Son (Wang Xiaoshuai):

Selected by Patricia Cook

Across four decades of turbulent Chinese society, Wang studies a married couple, using the death of their son as a focal point around which to subtly explore the single-child policy and the impact of the Cultural Revolution.

The unconventional structure zips back and forth through different time frames, gradually moving along a central timeline. The story occurs in episodes which each have the feel of their own short story, but which fill in the details of the other things we have seen. Wang leans heavily on dramatic irony, raising the tension as we wait for truths to emerge. One wonders if he couldn’t have found a way to cut 15 minutes or so from the run time, so languid are the first two hours. It isn’t until the final 50 minutes that So Long My Son really pays off every beat he’s set up. Like a Koreeda film, revelation is piled upon revelation, disarming you with one bombshell and then slapping you with another. Wang even uses the flashbacks to abet this by undercutting the outcome of one scene with the reality of the past or present.

In addition, Patricia wrote: “A thoroughly engrossing film, beautiful to look at and outstanding in interweaving the personal and the political. It is an epic story covering the impact a tragic event has on a group of friends. Although long, it never fails to engage”.

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8. Sorry We Missed You (Ken Loach):

Selected by Victor Fraga, editor of DMovies

Ricky (Kris Hitchen) is a building worker with an impeccable CV, living with his family somewhere in suburban Newcastle. He persuades his wife Abbie (Debbie Honeywood) to sell off her car in order to raise £1,000 so that he can buy a van and move into the delivery industry. A franchise owner promises Ricky that he’ll be independent and “own his own business”, and earn up to £1,200 a week.

The reality couldn’t be more different. Ricky ends up working up to 14 hours a day six days a week. He literally has no time to pee, and instead urinates in a bottle inside him own vehicle. His draconian delivery targets and inflexible ETAs (estimated time of arrival) turn him into a delivery robot. A small handheld delivery device containing delivery instructions virtually controls his life. Ricky has been conned. His “independence” is but an illusion. He might own his car, his company and his insurance, yet he’s entirely at the mercy of his franchiser.

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9. Uncut Gems (Sadfie Brothers):

Selected by Daniel Luis Ennab

Everything about Uncut Gems excites. A mythological sprawl that feels timeless, and tragic in its overall emptiness by the time Howard Ratner supposedly wins. I’m reminded of Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant with an ugly, repulsive enforcer addicted to chaos. Ratner is a study of desperation. An addict with nothing beyond his own stakes. Nothing to offer, nothing to redeem, a man always running even when he never actually has to. Everything that happens in Uncut Gems could’ve simply been avoided, and yet — the vile beauty of such a fact is that it wasn’t. It’s the story of a dreamer, a chaser, one for fool’s gold.

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10. The Vast of Night (Andrew Pattinson):

Selected by Paul Risker

Effusing the nostalgia of 1950s small town America, director Andrew Pattinson’s debut feature is a near-perfect film, a quintessential addition to genre cinema. Set during one night in a small town in New Mexico, young radio DJ Everett (Jake Horowitz) and switchboard operator Fay (Sierra McCormick) set out to discover the origins of a mysterious frequency they hear over the radio. In those moments when strange incidents that may explain the mysterious frequency are recounted to Everett and Fay, Pattinson incorporates the oral storytelling and the literary traditions. He asks us to imagine for ourselves rather than to show us, and this makes The Vast of Night striking for its anti-cinematic shades. The stillness of these moments is effectively offset with the urgency of the pair to unravel the mystery before its too late, and an ending that effectively compromises on revealing versus preserving the mystery.

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and the turkey of the year is…

Vita and Virginia (Chanya Button):

Virginia Woolf has never been this dull and joyless before! And love has rarely seemed more anodyne than in this awful biopic, which has a miscast Gemma Arterton and Elizabeth Debicki playing the two lovers. Here one of the most important women to have ever put pen to paper is reduced to a wholly passive, sickly, and sad woman, devoid of any true emotion, inspiration or true internalisation. Her lesbian lover, Vita Sackville-West fares no better, Gemma Arterton more focused on her aristocratic mannerisms than her transgressive personality or desire to shake the system. Together they seem like they’re still reading through the script.

Our top 10 dirty picks from the Cambridge Film Festival

Posted on by victorfraga

The Cambridge Film Festival is now nearly four decades old, making it the third longest-running film festival in the country!

This year’s diverse programme includes over 150 titles from 30 countries from all continents. They range thrillers and dramas to comedies and documentaries created by the very best of both established (such as Ken Loach, Francois Ozon and Werner Herzog) and emerging filmmakers (such as Mati Diop and Aaron Schimberg).

Now in its 39th year, the Cambridge Film Festival celebrates cinema in all its forms while also tackling some of the critical issues facing our world today, including climate change, human rights, women’s rights, prison conditions and mental health.

Because it’s always to decide where to begin in such a large film event, we have decided to lend you a little helping hand. Below are our top 10 dirty picks from the Festival, chosen exclusively for you. Don’t forget to click on the film title in order to accede to exclusive dirty reviews (where available). These are listed in alphabetical order.

Click here for more information about the event and also in order to book you tickets right now.

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1. Atlantics (Mati Diop):

Ada (Mama Sané) and Souleiman (Ibrahima Traoré) are young and in love with each other. They walk along the beach and gaze into each other’s eyes. They hold hands and kiss. The next day Souleiman sets off on a primitive pirogue towards Spain, like many other refugees have done. Ada is left to contend with an arranged marriage to wealthy and arrogant Omar, whom she despises. After the ostentatious wedding ceremony, however, strange things begin to happen, such as the nuptial bed that suddenly catches on fire. The police suspect that Souleiman never left and is involved in the arson, and Ada is his accomplice.

This may sound like your traditional love story, but it isn’t. In reality, Atlantics is a an eerie ghost story imbued with religious, social and political commentary. Djinns (supernatural creatures in Islamic mythology) haunt the locals. The dead return in order to seek justice for their loves ones. Perhaps Soulemain died at sea and his ghost is playing tricks with the living?

Atlantics won the Grand Prix at the latest Cannes Film Festival.

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2. By the Grace of God (Francois Ozon):

Francois Ozon is best remembered for his psychological dramas, psychosexual thrillers and twisted comedies. He has now moved into an almost entirely new territory: Catholic faith and paedophilia. The outcome is nothing short of magnificent. The director paints a profoundly humanistic portrayal of the sexual abuse victims of real-life priest Father Bernard Preynat (Bernard Verley), thereby denouncing the silence and the complacence of the Catholic hierarchy.

By the Grace of God, which won the Silver Bear at the latest Berlinale, follows the steps of 40-year-old father-of-five and respectable professional Alexandre (Melvil Poupard). He decides to confront Father Preynat, who abused him 30 years earlier, upon finding out in 2014 that the priest still working closely with children. The problem is that the crime took place in 1991 and it has now prescribed (exceeding the 20-year threshold for legal action), and so Alexandre searches for more recent victims of Father Preynat, in a Goliath versus David battle against the extremely powerful and millenary Catholic Church.

Ozon’s latest film is also pictured at the top of this article.

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3. Chained for Life (Aaron Schimberg):

Aaron Schimberg’s film about a European auteur directing their first English language movie was never going to be an average movie. In this American film, the bucolic blond Mabel (Jess Weixler)is a beguiling beauty who struggles working with a co-star who is anything but the epitome of conventional beauty. Although she plays the blind lead who falls disgracefully in love with a facially disfigured man (Rosenthal, played by British actor Adam Pearson, who has an actual facial disfigurement), her real-life interactions showcase a Draconian demeanour out of character with the charitable character she inhabits onscreen. It’s one of the many canny references swimming in Chained For Life, a work steeped in residual reference.

This distinctive film strives for originality. Schimberg is unashamed at displaying his innate knowledge of cinema, commencing with the silhouetted opening titles. Opening with one of Pauline Kael’s sparkier quotes, the movie is overtly proud of its understanding of the world of cinema, peering behind, before and between the goings on of a film.

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4. Filmfarsi (Ehsan Khoshbakht):

Iranian cinema can be as well defined by what it doesn’t show as by what it does. Women’s hair is never seen, characters never drink and sex is never depicted. Filmmakers, like Jafar Panahi (still technically under house arrest), must find novel ways to skirt restrictions to say what they want about life and society. What’s truly incredible is that despite these restrictions, Iran can lay claim to one of the richest cinematic cultures in the world.

Style follows form, the government’s rigid censorship paradoxically leading to some remarkably powerful works. Could the metafictional stylings of Abbas Kiarostami or the tightly wound social dramas of Asghar Farhadi have come out of a more liberated society? Perhaps I have been thinking about it all wrong. As the documentary Filmfarsi shows — surveying popular Iranian cinema up until the Islamic revolution of 1979 — Iranian cinema has always been characterised by wild invention, improvising with what you have and melding genres together.

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5. Fire Will Come (Oliver Laxe):

This a sensory experience. One that you feel with your skin. Feel the heat, feel the fog, feel the humidity. Director Oliver Laxe and his crew received fire training in order to join the Galician forest brigade as they battle the very large fires that routinely castigate the Northeastern nation of Spain. A very audacious feat. You will be caught right in the middle of hell, surrounded by collapsing trees and gigantic flames. Laxe didn’t even know whether his film equipment would survive. Fortunately for us, it did. Despite this, plus the fact that the actors use their real names, Fire Will Come (which won the Jury Prize for the Un Certain Regard strand of Cannes) is not a documentary.

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6. The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmao (Karim Ainouz):

This is as close as you will ever get to a tropical Douglas Sirk. Karim Ainouz’s eighth feature film and the second one to premiere in Cannes (after Madame Sata in 2001) has all the ingredients of a melodrama. The 145-minute movie – based on the eponymous novel by Martha Batalha – is punctuated with tragic relationships, epic misfortunes, fortuitous separations and untimely deaths. All skilfully wrapped together by an entirely instrumental and magnificent music score.

The titular character (Carol Duarte) and her sister Guida Gusmao (Julia Stockler) live with their traditional parents. Their Portuguese father Antonio is rude and formidable, while their Brazilian mother Ana is quiet and passive. The action takes place in the charming and quaint Rio the Janeiro of the 1950s.

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7. Paper Boats (Yago Munoz):

A mother sends her children to her widowed father for fear of losing them to the New York foster system. A frosty man by nature, he agrees to care for them in the Mexican rustic desert, while his daughter fights for her right to live as an American citizen. It’s not the most original of stories, but it offers moments of raw, impactful soulfulness, proving that blood is indeed thicker than water.

This slow-burn drama is deftly punctuated by Pedro Damian’s steely lead, a no-nonsense grandpa none-too-impressed by his child’s request to unsettle his blissful boat rides by minding her three children. His gruff demeanour is a country away from the metropolitan lifestyle they have become accustomed to.

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8. Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Celine Sciamma):

The story takes place in 1770 in rural Brittany. An Italian aristocrat (Valeria Golino) has found a wedding partner for her beautiful young daughter Heloise (Adele Haenel), who just returned from a convent to live with her mother is her enormous estate house. Her husband-to-be lives in Milan, and Heloise has never met him. Her mother commissions Marianne (Noemie Merlant) to paint her daughter in secret because Heloise would never consent to it (presumably because the picture will be sent to her prospective husband). Marianne pretends to be Heloise’s mere companion, working alongside the housemaid Sophie (Luana Bajrami). Heloise’s sister has recently committed suicide, likely due to the prospect of a similar marital arrangement. This means that the burden on Marianne is enormous. Could Heloise too attempt to take her own life?

This is a film almost entirely made by women. The writer director is female, and so is the cinematographer (Claire Mathion). Virtually all the characters are female, too. Men are only seen in the end of this 119-minute movie,

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9. Secretaries – A Life for Cinema (Raffaele Rago, Daniela Masciale):

Though it advertises itself an attempt to document the long-range effects cinema brought to Italy, this film is much more interested and successfully in representing the social history it so readily represents. From the profuse luxuriance explored on the screen, it was the penpushers, the workers and the everyday women who made this possible. In its own way, it’s a tribute to Italy, Italian cinema and the indomitable nature of the Italian woman.

The film’s ambitious time-lapse method, converging from the present to the past, is presented in an assemblage of photo clips, showing the women both in their prime and in the fortunes of their Autumnal years. As is the nature of time, these subjects won’t likely be here to detail their story of a sensational decade when the next sensational decade begins.

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10. Sorry We Missed You (Ken Loach):

Last but not least on out least is Ken Loach’s latest heart-wrenching drama. Ricky (Kris Hitchen) is a building worker with an impeccable CV, living with his family somewhere in suburban Newcastle. He persuades his wife Abbie (Debbie Honeywood) to sell off her car in order to raise £1,000 so that he can buy a van and move into the delivery industry. A franchise owner promises Ricky that he’ll be independent and “own his own business”, and earn up to £1,200 a week.

The reality couldn’t be more different. Ricky ends up working up to 14 hours a day six days a week. He literally has no time to pee, and instead urinates in a bottle inside him own vehicle (I would hazard a guess that Amazon’s infamous practices inspired scriptwriter Paul Laverty). His draconian delivery targets and inflexible ETAs (estimated time of arrival) turn him into a delivery robot. A small handheld delivery device containing delivery instructions virtually controls his life. Ricky has been conned. His “independence” is but an illusion. He might own his car, his company and his insurance, yet he’s entirely at the mercy of his franchiser.

Our top 10 dirty picks from the 2019 BFI London Film Festival

Posted on by victorfraga

The 63rd BFI London Film Festival, the biggest and the oldest film festival in the UK, takes place between October 2nd and 13th in a number of prestigious venues in Central London. The event will showcase 225 films from both established and emerging talent from every corner of the planet. This year, the Festival will host 21 world premieres, nine international premieres and 29 European premieres. In total, there will be 46 documentaries, four animations, 18 archive restorations and seven artists’ moving image features.

So where to begin? Below is a list of 10 dirty movies that you shouldn’t miss. We have seen the majority of these films (as they premiered in Berlin, Cannes and Locarno earlier this year), so we can vouch for our list, which is teeming with thought-provoking, innovative and downright filthy gems. Don’t forget to click on the film title in order to accede to our exclusive dirty review (where available). The films are sorted alphabetically.

You can click here in order to purchase your ticket now!

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1. Adolescents (Sébastian Lifshitz):

Charting the lives of two girls from thirteen to eighteen, Adolescentes is an immersive documentary depicting the vicissitudes of youth. Five years in the making, filmed twenty-four days a year and composed from 500 hours of rushes, it has the flow of a fine naturalist drama, standing nicely alongside Young Solitude (Claire Simon, 2018) and Belinda (Marie Dumora, 2017) as yet another brilliant French documentary about the complexity of growing older.

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2. Bacurau (Kleber Mendonca Filho, Juliano Dornelles):

The little town of Bacurau has been erased from the map. Literally. Locals can no longer locate it on the various online applications. Someone (or something?) is killing the locals. There have been seven murders in one day. Small UFOs monitor the town from above. The locals are prepared to fight back for their survival. They also wish to protect their their identity and cultural heritage. They cherish the Bacurau Museum, a small building where town’s invaluable artifacts are stored. The local doctor Domingas (Sonia Braga) is some sort of matriarch. Men, women and children are ready to take arms. Bacurau is a resistance movie against the rise of fascism in Brazil.

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3. By the Grace of God (Francois Ozon):

Francois Ozon is best remembered for his psychological dramas, psychosexual thrillers and twisted comedies. He has now moved into an almost entirely new territory: Catholic faith and paedophilia. The outcome is nothing short of magnificent. The director paints a profoundly humanistic portrayal of the sexual abuse victims of real-life priest Father Bernard Preynat (Bernard Verley), thereby denouncing the silence and the complacence of the Catholic hierarchy.

By the Grace of God follows the steps of 40-year-old father-of-five and respectable professional Alexandre (Melvil Poupard). He decides to confront Father Preynat, who abused him 30 years earlier, upon finding out in 2014 that the priest still working closely with children. The problem is that the crime took place in 1991 and it has now prescribed (exceeding the 20-year threshold for legal action), and so Alexandre searches for more recent victims of Father Preynat, in a Goliath versus David battle against the extremely powerful and millenary Catholic Church.

By The Grace of God won the Silver Bear prize for Best Film in Berlin earlier this year. It shows in a thrill gala as part of the BFI London Film Festival.

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4. Ema (Pablo Larrain):

“Every new Pablo Larraín film is a miracle of imagination, invention and insight into human behaviour. And Ema may be his most lyrical and poetic yet – a character study of a beguiling woman who is ruled by heart and impulse. In a vivid collage of scenes shot by Sergio Armstrong, with an expressive score from Nicolas Jaar, Larraín paints a picture of talented contemporary street/reggaeton dancer and teacher Ema. We learn of a recent trauma and her fiery relationship with her slightly older husband (Gael García Bernal), who is both a choreographer and her creative collaborator. Their recent adoption of a troubled child has gone badly, for which they are harshly judged. They, in turn, blame one another. Writing with Guillermo Calderón and Alejandro Moreno, Larraín’s film intersperses explosive, intoxicating scenes of dance within dramatic moments that are fractured in time.” (Tricia Tuttle)

Ema shows in strand gala section of the BFI London Film Festival.

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5. The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmao (Karim Ainouz):

This is as close as you will ever get to a tropical Douglas Sirk. Karim Ainouz’s eighth feature film and the second one to premiere in Cannes (after Madame Satain 2001) has all the ingredients of a melodrama. The 145-minute movie – based on the eponymous novel by Martha Batalha – is punctuated with tragic relationships, epic misfortunes, fortuitous separations and untimely deaths. All skilfully wrapped together by an entirely instrumental and magnificent music score.

The film, which is also pictured at the top of this article, won the Un Certain Regard award for Best Film in Cannes earlier this year.

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6. The Irishman (Martin Scorsese):

In Martin Scorses’s latest movie and ninth collaboration with Robert de Niro, a labour leader and the infamous head of the Teamsters union, whose connections with organised crime were wide ranging, his career ended with a conviction for jury tampering, attempted bribery and fraud, but he was pardoned by President Nixon in 1971. Not long after, he disappeared. Declared legally dead in 1982, various theories have circulated as to what happened to him. Few are as convincing as that told by Frank ‘The Irishman’ Sheeran.

Written by Gangs of New York collaborator Steven Zaillian (Schindler’s List), Scorsese’s The Irishman weaves an engrossing and intricate web of connected events, audaciously cutting back and forth across decades. It is the closing film at the BFI London Film Festival.

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7. Maternal (Maura Delpero):

hat constitutes motherhood? Is it something that is hereditary or something that can be earned? This is the question wrestled with in Maternal, which slyly reimagines the story of the Virgin Mary for modern times. A deeply Christian tale, both in its sense of empathy and its themes, Maternal is a precise chamber Italian-Argentinean co-production that wrestles with the meaning of motherhood, finding no easy answers yet imploring the viewer to bring their own faith and meaning to each scene.

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8. Piranhas (Claudio Giavannesi):

Adapted from the eponymous novel by Neapolitan writer and Camorra expert Roberto Saviani (who also wrote the screenplay), Piranhas follows 10 adolescents in Naples who set up a gang in order to make money and enjoy an unbounded and hedonistic example.

Fifteen-year-old Nicola (Francesco di Napoli) is the gang leader. He convey a very disturbing type of masculinity at a very young age. He takes “protection” money from locals in order to buy drugs, attend expensive clubs, buy branded clothes and posh furniture. Thousands of euros flow like water. He smokes marijuana and snorts cocaine, and circulates locally with the confidence of an adult. He loves to show off his newly found power and wealth. He has a beautiful girlfriend called Letizia, and he also hire prostitutes. He terrorises the narrow alleyways on his scooter.

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7. Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Celine Sciamma):

The he story takes place in 1770 in rural Brittany. An Italian aristocrat (Valeria Golino) has found a wedding partner for her beautiful young daughter Heloise (Adele Haenel), who just returned from a convent to live with her mother is her enormous estate house. Her husband-to-be lives in Milan, and Heloise has never met him. Her mother commissions Marianne (Noemie Merlant) to paint her daughter in secret because Heloise would never consent to it (presumably because the picture will be sent to her prospective husband). Marianne pretends to be Heloise’s mere companion, working alongside the housemaid Sophie (Luana Bajrami). Heloise’s sister has recently committed suicide, likely due to the prospect of a similar marital arrangement. This means that the burden on Marianne is enormous. Could Heloise too attempt to take her own life?

This is a film almost entirely made by women. The writer director is female, and so is the cinematographer (Claire Mathion). Virtually all the characters are female, too. Men are only seen in the end of this 119-minute movie, in entirely secondary roles. Yet this is a film about men and the subtle ways that they oppress women. Heloise regrets having to marry a man whom she has never met, while Marianne is not allowed to become a fully-fledged painter because the artistic establishment prohibits her from studying male anatomy.

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10. So Long, My Son (Wang Xiaoshuai):

Across four decades of turbulent Chinese society, Wang studies a married couple, using the death of their son as a focal point around which to subtly explore the single-child policy and the impact of the Cultural Revolution.

The unconventional structure zips back and forth through different time frames, gradually moving along a central timeline. The story occurs in episodes which each have the feel of their own short story, but which fill in the details of the other things we have seen. Wang leans heavily on dramatic irony, raising the tension as we wait for truths to emerge. One wonders if he couldn’t have found a way to cut 15 minutes or so from the run time, so languid are the first two hours. It isn’t until the final 50 minutes that So Long My Son really pays off every beat he’s set up. Like a Koreeda film, revelation is piled upon revelation, disarming you with one bombshell and then slapping you with another. Wang even uses the flashbacks to abet this by undercutting the outcome of one scene with the reality of the past or present.

10 films about The Troubles

Posted on by victorfraga

As with every July 12th, the Orange Marchers cornered the Queen’s avenues of Belfast with the zest of 1690 ringing through the 2019 buildings. It’s a march that symbolises the divisions that exist still in Ireland’s most northerly province. These divisions led to a war, starting in the 1960s, only the shared power-sharing handshakes of The Good Friday Agreement ceased a 30-year conflict. Chaos and conflict have narrative properties, a quality which has been showcased in several films. Though the most galling depictions of The Troubles were saved until the millennium, many fine reflections of conflated conflicted truths found their to the cutting room floors, some telling reflections of Her Majesty’s Government serialised in serial film.

And yet neither the Loyalist nor the Republican Movements acted with great compassion, the torment of war encased in the artillery on both sides. This list neither wags nor holds a finger at the disputatious activities which involved three nations. Rather it seeks to understand the artistry which reflected a war divided over monarchic loyalties, hibernal loyalties and a statement of Northern Irish identity. The impact of a Brexit Vote (which Northern Ireland voted against) may cause a future return to the struggles. For some, reunification seems paramount, for others, an affront to their proud identity. As it stands the first opens in an Ireland preparing, the last in Scotland finishing a war, while the eight impress the haunting conflicts of a residual, never ending battle.

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1. Ryan’s Daughter (David Lean, 1970):

The gun toting, bog smoking antics of the Republican movement matches the backdrop of David Lean’s cinematic portraiture, the Kerry landscape wistfully romantic in spirited woodlands. Soldiers and bullets enter the mountainous backdrop as a local married pub lady enters into a liaison with a soldier whose comrades kill her townsmen. David Lean’s pastoral, political spectacle carries a covert change cutting the myriad of masked freedom fighting memories in the backdrop of a Britain awaiting the toll of The Troubles.

Steely in appearance, Robert Mitchum strides as the apprised Charles Shaughnessy, a local teacher whose father in law informs the soldiers from the provincial puissant of his tavern and whose wife sleeps with one of the soldiers Shaughnessy personally and politically opposes. Often unfairly compared to the majesty of Lean’s earlier efforts, Ryan’s Daughter is a seismic work, understated in the historical backdrop Ireland and Britain still share. Gun smuggled capers echo the bordered insanities Irish men experienced in the 1970s, writhing to the efforts of an Empire uninterested and unimpressed with the isles it inhabits. The agrarian agricultural beauty envelopes the romance the fervent fancies Rosy (Sarah Miles) shares with an exhibit of soldiers, waiting to offer their flame fancied pistols.

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2. The Outsider (Tony Luraschi, 1980):

An American ascending from the American dream to a hibernal one, Craig Wesser acts convincingly in the dual role of actor and Vietnam veteran, violently entering the indolent Belfast hovels. Notorious on release, The Outsider suffered the ignominy of being dropped from a London festival after filming in Northern Ireland had proven unsustainable. And yet there’s a power to the film foolishly ignored by the festival goers, crept as it is in crepuscular imagery and masculine fragility. Behind the array of metallic weaponry comes a tale of generational fortitude. Wesser plays the torn-down American, eager to follow his Grandfather’s career in ridding Ireland of a British burden. Then there’s Sterling Hayden, the aged grandparent, burdened with a secret of British platitude.

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3. Maeve (Pat Murphy and John Davies, 1981):

The Irish Times called it “Ireland’s first bona fide feminist film”. If an oversimplification (I’d make a strong case that Ryan’s Daughter pipped it), the story at least understands the struggles of the everyday woman returning from the liberal London lounge-ways for a Belfast betrothed to gender politics. Maeve (Mary Jackson), scarf worn and headstrong, stands in front of a machine gun poking heavy, imbuing the Godardian French Wave milieu in her dress. Director Pat Murphy was a founder of the feminist film and video distribution network Circles, tellingly calling both England and Ireland for their questionable exemplars in gender representation at the turn of the 1980s.

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4. Cal (Pat O’Connor, 1984):

Orange Orders open lacerated words, as Loyalists lacerate young Cal (John Lynch) for his allegiances to the provisional Irish Republican Army. Amidst the towering bombs which batter the broken pebbles they walk comes one of the most deeply romantic movies of the last thirty-five years. Mark Knopfler, a thoughtful Glaswegian entranced in his six strings, soundtracks Helen Mirren, a widowed, willowy ingenue cascaded in her heart strings. Entranced in Marcella’s arms, Cal crosses the threshold of Catholic guilt, slain in his love for her posture, demonstrated in his killings of her slain husband. The leisured love stems from screenwriter’s Bernard MacLaverty’s liturgical prose, learned in the perspective Belfast prisons Cal must enter and Marcella must wade through a doleful dalliance as bested battleground breaks them down.

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5. Elephant (Alan Clarke, 1989):

A dawn rises. A car passes. A man turns to his urinal. He’s bulleted into the toiletry fluids, pouring his own bodily blood over his bodily fluid. Alan Clarke’s uncompromising, punchy work works without dialogue, the camera acting out the variety of killings which haunt Northern Ireland on a daily basis. The naturalistic handheld manner of this short film won Clarke plaudits; his producer, Danny Boyle, would direct serial zombie thriller 28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2002) with a very similar setup. Shooting the shootings that come unresolved to the world, Clarke’s observational style called back to Yoko Ono’s late 1960s’ commentary Rape, shocking audiences with a style less glamorous than scurrilous. It’s largely silent, though take warning. Some of the killings are deafening in their protrusion.

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6. In The Name Of The Father (Jim Sheridan, 1993):

Daniel Day Lewis won three Oscars, one as a paraplegic writer, one as a Western Oil Baron, one as America’s liberator of slavery. Yet Day Lewis never gave as fiery a performance as he did incarcerating the incarcerated emotions he endeavoured through Gerry Conlon’s real life trajectory. Arrested as one of The Guilford Four, Conlon was jailed in 1975, wrongfully sentenced for fifteen years as a supposed Provisional IRA bomber. Sinewy in appearance, leathery in hair, Day Lewis walks with rock assurance during the film’s telling climax, the pathway to a journalist rimmed front door a small solace after fifteen years a wronged convict. Emma Thompson works remarkably in her appearance as Conlon’s trusted lawyer, while Pete Postlethwaite wades in his cell as the dejected Giuseppe Conlon. Where Day Lewis gives his best, so does Postlethwaite, two brilliant English actors with impeccable Northern Irish diction. Fittingly, Postlethwaite’s final performance came as Fergus Colm, the callous Irish crime lord in Ben Affleck’s excellent The Town.

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7. The Informant (Jim McBride, 1997):

Before Harvey Weinstein shocked the world with professed lechery, he shocked the film world when the lightweight Shakespeare In Love (John Madden) championed the astonishing Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg) for the 1998 Best Picture Award. In the midst came an unvarnished showtime movie, dedicated to showcasing the trichotomy of male perspective. The capricious Gingy (Anthony Brophy) must stand against his IRA compeers to work with, beside and for the will of an English Lieutenant (Cary Elwes) and a proud Protestant detective (the hoary Timothy Dalton) in a war none will ultimately win.

“The movie is important, because it exposes the complete abdication of morality that happens when two nations go to war” the two-time Bond recalled. “Most people believe, in a war, that one side’s bad and one side’s good. But the minute you go to war, the rules go out the window and both sides become bad.”

In a Dublin licked up to explore the battle beaten Belfast, Jim McBride’s exploration into the human spirit examines the why’s, how’s and who’s of the conflict, relegated to television at a time when no major distributor would have promoted the film. And yet there’s a telling humanity to the proceedings, not least when Maria Lennon’s Roísín berates Dalton’s DCI Rennie for recruiting Catholic women for sexual pleasure.

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8. Bloody Sunday (Paul Greengrass, 2002):

Audiences who knew James Nesbitt as the unflappable lead from the comic Cold Feet could scarcely imagine the depth, nuance, stealth and steel he’d bring as the real life Ivan Cooper. A proud Presbyterian unaware of the circumstances behind Bloody Sunday, Nesbitt took to reading the script while filming another project in Manchester. It moved him as effectively as he moved his audiences in what’s arguably the performance of his life. Detailing the real life tragedy of a peaceful protest, the paramilitary killings outraged many in Britain. Vanessa Redgrave marched for resolution, Paul McCartney issued a musical statement, U2 commemorated the song in one of their more potent pieces. Fittingly, Bono’s voice closes the film with gravitas.

“I’ve seen the film six times now,” the real life Cooper revealed “And my first thoughts were that it was an emotional experience. I’m able to say with confidence that it was made with great integrity.”

Helmed by director Paul Greengrass, the film’s naturalistic style of filming added a padding of telling realism, driving viewers into the middle of the senseless 1972 killings. Hollywood took notice of his skill: Greengrass earned his place as Jason Bourne (2016) director largely on the strength of Bloody Sunday.

Bloody Sunday is also pictured at the top of this article.

9. Hunger (Steve McQueen, 2008):

One take. A 17-minute, unending, uncompromising take. The priest talks of God, the prisoner talks of country. Steve McQueen’s first, finest and most harrowing work came from the true life horror stories from the HM Prison Maze, innocent by-standing men stripped by their dignities by a Government shadowed overseas. Just as it took an English director to paint the atrocities of Bloody Sunday, another brilliantly ambitious English man saw the truth in the sullied cells which starved the intellect of its prisoners as harshly as they starved their bodies. We could write an entire article on why this film should be remembered, but instead I’ll focus on sinewy dialogue, Michael Fassbender’s Bobby Sands and Liam Cunningham’s Father Dominic Moran exchanging sharp words, cutting in their veneer, tense in their timing. Involving, issue non resolving, the scene sits in solemn penance, one long take with few of the pyrotechnics employed throughout Birdman. Staggering.

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10. The Journey (Nick Hamm, 2016):

It started with the barbed shot, it ended with the barbed retort. The Journey chronicles the voyage Republicanism and Unionism joined, fittingly embodied in a taxi driven by an impartial driver. Colm Meaney and Timothy Spall star as Martin McGuinness and Ian Paisley, two political combatants who worked in close collaboration to steer their shared country through the devolution of power in the region. Brilliant and bathetically, the claustrophobic taxi’s engine mirrors the distressed sounds a battle ground surrounded these two men. The furnished Scottish woodlands echoes the planted fears these men share. As a reverend, McGuinness sees Paisley’s position as more polemic than parochial. As a former member of the Irish Republican Army, Paisley sees McGuinness’s political convictions with criminal conviction. Meaney paid tribute to McGuinness in a 2017 Guardian, a man whose demise followed the real life Paisley’s. And yet the film attributes and pays tribute to the figureheads, whose shared journey lead to a safer home neither of them experienced.

When violence gets dirty…

Posted on by victorfraga
Warning: this article contains minor spoilers

Plenty of films have violent content, that’s easy. Fewer possess a genuinely visceral quality that, for better or worse, leaves a lasting impression on you. But fewer still are actually about violence, about how it feels and what it means for victims, perpetrators and wider society. Here are 10 examples of where cinema has broached this darkly compelling subject, listed in chronological order.

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1. A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971):

Kubrick’s idiosyncratic masterpiece begins with Alex (Malcolm McDowell) and his droogs beating, raping and stealing their way through dystopian Britain in one of the most electrifying – and objectionable – opening sequences in cinema history. It is a stunning synthesis of Kubrick’s wired, aberrant vision and McDowell’s supremely confident performance, creating a spectacle of the most indulgent amorality that draws the viewer in, almost making them the fifth droog.

Alex’s run is short-lived, however, and he finds himself locked up, with his only ticket to freedom being the revolutionary ‘Ludovico technique’. This turns out to be every Libertarian’s worst nightmare – a neurological procedure resembling abject torture that brainwashes its patient (or victim?) to hate whatever they are being forced to watch or listen to. In Alex’s case, he is programmed to hate – be physically reviled by – sex, violence and, as an unfortunate by–product, his beloved Beethoven.

Now, this treatment certainly stops little Alex from tolchocking and doing the old ‘in-out in-out’, but whose idea of justice is this? Certainly not the prison chaplain’s (Godfrey Quigley), who remarks indignantly:

‘Choice! The boy has no real choice, has he? He ceases to be a wrongdoer… he ceases also to be a creature of moral choice.’

This is the dilemma at the centre of A Clockwork Orange. Could we afford the state this power, ostensibly for the greater good? Where would it start, where would it end? Would the treatment be extended to petty criminals? How many brains and lives would be ruined? Kubrick’s film posits many questions but provides no easy answers.

Click here for our dirty review of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.

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2. Straw Dogs (Sam Peckinpah, 1971):

Much like Deliverance, Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs mires an ordinary (and slightly effete) man in a situation of animal violence. Anyone who’s been in a playground will recognise the bullyboy behaviour – the leering glances, hostile posturing, mocking remarks. All are designed to push the boundaries until all pretences are fatally dropped. This toxic dynamic looms over the film, giving it a nasty, foreboding dread.

Most unsettling is Amy’s (Susan George) relationship with Charlie (Del Henney), her broad, masculine old flame. Her persistent attraction to him – despite being married to David (Dustin Hoffman), an academic – represents the idea of women being attracted to dominant and potentially violent male behaviour.

This notion becomes particularly direct and controversial in two moments – a rape that becomes consensual and the manner in which David asserts his dominance over Amy in the violent climax, slapping her face, pulling her hair and ordering her to ‘stay there and do as you’re told, or I’ll break your neck.’ Although the film tells us little about the future of their relationship, there can be no doubt that David’s aggression gets both her attention and her respect. It is part of the toxic message that runs through Straw Dogs – violence, even sexual violence, can be a viable option.

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3. Dirty Harry (Don Siegel, 1971):

Dirty Harry’s lowbrow appeal – and aestheticisation of violence – disguises a film that asks hard, dangerous questions about crime and punishment. It seems almost risible now, but long before Inspector Harry Callahan became the proverbial anti-hero stock character, critics took Dirty Harry really rather seriously, with some even labelling it “fascist”.

If you enter this film addled with political notions then perhaps you could see it as fascist. After all, Eastwood’s eponymous supercop plays fast and loose with the law – breaking and entering, torturing a suspect and ultimately becoming something of a free agent in the film’s denouement. But the question at the heart of Dirty Harry is an uncomfortable one. If you were the powerless victim of an unhinged and uncaught criminal, who would you want in your corner – the desk-bound bureaucrat or the ballsy, hard-nosed Inspector?

Ultimately, Callahan serves justice in his signature style, goading the snivelling, hateful Scorpio into retrieving his dropped P38 with the famed ‘Do I feel lucky?’ line. As he picks it up, Callahan delivers the last .44 round straight through his heart, blowing him off the jetty and into the quarry lake. Yet, as Callahan watches Scorpio’s twisted face submerge into the murky water, there is little catharsis. To the score of Lalo Schifrin’s haunting End Titles, Callahan detaches his seven-point star and throws it into the lake, utterly disillusioned with everything his profession stands for.

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4. Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972):

This timeless survival thriller places the viewer in the proverbial ‘what-if?’ situation. What would you do in the face of such rapidly escalating danger, where initiative and ruthlessness are the deciders of life and death? This is the situation faced by Lewis (Burt Reynolds), Ed (Jon Voight), Drew (Ronny Cox) and Bobby (Ned Beatty), four ‘city boys’ from Atlanta venturing into the wilderness of northern Georgia.

The infamous rape sequence – which has lost none of its ugliness – is cut short by Lewis’s broadhead arrow, which thuds through the chest of the mountain man in an agonisingly protracted death scene. What follows is a desperate argument over their plan of action – what are we going to do… do we get the authorities… have we done anything wrong… what’s our story… who’s still out there?

Alas, their situation goes from bad to worse as bones are broken, Drew goes missing and Ed is tasked with a cliff face and a mountain man who’s looking to finish what he started. It is a brutish, dog-eat-dog story that makes one appreciate every pedestrian comfort and societal institution they’ve ever taken for granted.

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5. A Short Film About Killing (Kristok Kieslowski, 1988):

This fatally bleak realist drama is about the use of violence. After an aimless young man wantonly murders a taxi driver, he is executed by the Polish state in an act that some would argue is equally senseless. The dilemma of this film, delivered with unremitting miserablism by Kryzstof Kieslowski, made such an impression that it shaped both public opinion and political persuasion in the twilight years of communist Poland.

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6. Elephant (Alan Clarke, 1989)

The most direct and unusual film on this list, Alan Clarke’s Elephant is quite simply 39 minutes of men walking up to other men and shooting them dead. Here Clarke uses his noted penchant for Steadicam shots to comment on the cyclical nature of the Northern Irish conflict and the wider issue of how violence begets violence. 

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7. Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood, 1992):

Clint Eastwood’s metafictional revisionist Western examines the jarring disparity between real and romanticised violence, between the myth of the Old West and the cruel, ugly reality. Much of the savagery of its central character, William Munny, is depicted not with explosive bloodletting but with sparse, disturbing dialogue that gives an authentic weight to his character. 

Of course, the metafictional element is deeply personal to Eastwood, who had spent the preceding 30 years shooting dozens of outlaws with preternatural accuracy, often with little to no blood. There’s a scene in Unforgiven, however, that depicts the real suffering inflicted by a bullet to the gut, as well as the wrenching shame of the perpetrators, especially Ned (Morgan Freeman), who passes the rifle to Munny, unable to finish the job.

Towards the film’s end, as Munny stands in a barren, windswept scene, he summarises the terrible loss of killing better than any other film in this list – “It’s a hell of thing killing a man. You take away all he’s got, and all he’s gonna have”.

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8. Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999):

Central to Fight Club’s nihilist cry against consumer culture is bone-crunching, face-smashing violence. For the Narrator (Edward Norton), nothing else matters after Fight Club; the rush of pummelling or being pummelled into the concrete negates every banal concern. His rudderless existence is given meaning and vitality by pain and sacrifice. However, his rejection of society’s material narrative in favour of this savage masculinity proves to be a doomed rabbit hole of toxic nihilism.

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9. No Country for Old Men (Coen Brothers, 2007):

Old men – and old women – have lamented the state of society since time immemorial. In the fourth century BC, Plato remarked: ‘What is happening to our young people? They ignore the law. They riot in the streets, inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decaying.’ 

No Country for Old Men opens with a similar sentiment, only it’s delivered in the world-weary drawl of Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones). His fear of society’s mores slipping into a violent abyss, which is reactionary yet resonant, is set against one of cinema’s greatest cat-and-mouse thrillers, which bursts with tension and pitiless violence. And once it’s over – just another episode of conflict and misery in Bell’s long career – he sits at the kitchen table, retired yet dejected, unsure of the world and his place in it.

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10. Nightcrawler (Dan Gilroy, 2014):

Nightcrawler is a Schraderesque character study of a man far more dangerous than Travis Bickle. Utterly opportunistic and completely without a moral compass, Lou Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal) is introduced as a drifter with a creepy flair for dogged self-promotion. He has scraped a nomadic existence of skulduggery and crime – some petty, some definitely not – but the film’s events begin as he finally stumbles upon his life’s calling – paparazzi photojournalism.

In this field, Lou provides what so many of us can’t look away from. Road accidents, home invasions, carjackings gone wrong – anything that involves blood, gore and misery is good for business. After all, who hasn’t looked when they’ve passed a traffic accident, a fight, or someone in the throes of cardiac arrest? We know it’s in poor taste but we just can’t help ourselves. For people like Lou, however, it’s positively thrilling.

Nightcrawler is a satire of this tasteless voyeurism – content that’s perhaps interesting for the public but decidedly not in the public interest, a distinction that is gleefully ignored in favour of lucrative morbidity and cynical scare mongering.

The top 10 dirtiest films of 2018

Posted on by victorfraga

Another year has gone by and DMovies is now nearly three years old. Since we started in February 2016, we have published 1,100 exclusive articles and reviews. We have attended both big and small small festivals and industry events on both sides of the Atlantic, always digging the dirty gems of cinema firsthand and exclusively for you.

This year alone, we have published 450 articles and reviews and renewed our partnership with VoD providers such as Walk This Way and ArteKino. Plus, our weekly newsletter has highlighted the best films out in cinemas, festivals, VoD and DVD every Friday to our 25,000 subscribers! We now have 100,000 monthly visitors on average.

So we decided to pull together a little list of the 10 dirtiest films of 2018. And what better way to do it than asking our most prolific writers and also our audience for their dirty pick of the year? This is a truly diverse and international list, containing very different films from every corner of the planet, some big, some small, some you can still catch in cinemas, some on VoD and some you will just have to keep an eye for, at least for now!

Don’t forget to click on the film title in order to accede to the our dirty review of the movie (not necessarily written by the same person who picked it as their dirty film of the year).

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1. Shoplifters (Hirozaku Koreeda):

Selected by Alasdair Bayman and Tiago Di Mauro:

Alasdair writes: “Fashioning himself into the hearts of festival viewers for years with features as After Life (1998) even through to neo-noir Third Murder (2017), Hirokazu Koreeda is a master of conveying the purest of human emotions on screen. Yet, his Palm d’Or winning Shoplifters (2018), on the surface, appears in to be purely in the ilk of similar films in his oeuvre. Nevertheless, what is quietly breathtaking about his latest film is that it comes to subvert any predictable pleasures that one may hold before entering the theatre. Central to these small twists is the pivotal final act which lands a sly uppercut to one’s emotional state. Further, the direction is objective towards the titular group of people – they simply exist in a state of love, without any prejudices.

Personally, witnessing the dexterous Kirin Kiki give one of her last on-screen performances, after sadly passing away in September, adds a deeper level of profundity to the narrative. Supported by the whole cast, particularly Lily Franky as the dishevelled father figure, the visuals merge with Haruomi Hosono’s tender score to create a definitive cinematic experience not only the greatest of 2018, but of modern cinema”

Tiago writes: “Reset the world! Hirozaku Koreeda’s magnificent accomplishment by Director Hirokazu illustrates the beauty of the relationships and their impact on our lives – even where they disregard social conventions, laws, assignments and dogmas. The topic fits in very well in a world facing a crisis of human values. It’s a delicate, profound and controversial study of an unconventional family. And of how the family concept evolves with time”.

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2. The Wild Pear Tree (Nuri Bilge Ceylan):

Selected by Redmond Bacon:

“Nuri Bilge Ceylan is never in a rush. His movies are meditative, talky, novelistic. The Wild Pear Tree is no exception, taking over three hours to explore the life of a graduate returning to his hometown to try and write a novel. Interweaving discussions about literature, Islam, love and success, its a film simply bursting with ideas. At first appearing to be plotless, once the central conflict between father and son slowly comes into view, Ceylan has slyly dug his claws in. Its an astonishing mastery of form, showing a director at the top of his game.”

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3. Slam (Partho Sen-Gupta):

Selected by Victor Fraga.

“This is not your average Australian film. In fact, it’s as international as it gets. The action takes place in New South Wales, but the crew and cast are very international indeed. The director Partho Sen-Gupta is originally from Mumbai, while the lead role is played by Palestinian actor Adam Bakri. The topics addressed are also universal: cultural assimilation, Islamophobia and religious/political extremism.

Ameena (Danielle Horvat) is a young rebel. She lives with her mother, a Palestinian refugee. She’s an activist and a feminist. She wears a hijab out of choice because she believes that women should be respected for their fists, and not for their curves. She routinely engages in slam poetry in the local community centre, a competition in which poets perform the spoken word. The letters “S-L-A-M” are written on her hand, very much à la The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955). Her performances are hypnotic and passionate. Her room is covered in Palestinian freedom, fight racism and antifa posters.”

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4. Blindspotting (Carlos Lopez Estrada):

Selected by Fiona Whitelaw.

“This is a film that has a lot to say, with detail, subtlety and poetic wit. It made me laugh out loud and also flinch with alarm. The central spine is the relationship between best friends since childhood Colin (Daveed Diggs) and Miles (Rafael Casal). This relationship sits within a story of the changing neighbourhood of Oakland, California and the lethal relationship the police have with black men in America.

The first thing that draws you into this story is the visual and vocal panache of a style that realises this tightly wound genius of a script (Daveed Diggs/Rafael Casal). The editor (Gabriel Fleming) deserves a special mention here. Scenes are beautifully cut through with tight cut away shots of doors slamming, feet on truck pedals, faces on wall murals and the juxtaposition of regular and ‘hipster gentrified’ housing.”

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5. Loveless (Andrey Zvyagintsev):

Selected by Richard Greenhill.

“In a year in which Russia has often dominated headlines, Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Loveless reminded us that the most incisive social and political critique often comes from Russia’s own artistic community. His savage thriller is gripping throughout and visually arresting, throwing the viewer into a stark spiritual emptiness that resonates further West too”

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6. Widows (Steve McQueen):

Selected by Eoghan Lyng.

“It’s the closest thing he’s directed to a mainstream movie, but Steve McQueen’s towering Widows (2018) is also his best work since Hunger (2008). His first three films cemented themselves under the performances of Michael Fassbender’s withering body, Cary Mulligan’s naked body and Chiwetel Ejiofor’s naked soul bearing, yet this bears an entire ensemble of credible performances. McQueen has not lost the eye for insurrectory, bringing the muscular Liam Neeson in bed with the beguiling Viola Davis, an addition to this painter turned filmmakers growing collection of incisive and thoughtful pieces.“

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7. Crowhurst (Simon Rumley):

Selected by Paul Risker.

“Aesthetically impassioned filmmaking, Rumley’s visual eye and how he marries it to the soundtrack seers the experience of Crowhurst to one’s memory. Beneath this aesthetic flare lies a touching story of aspiration, that in the time of Brexit offers a reflective insight into the fallacy of the identity of this once great isle”

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8. Burning (Lee Chang-dong):

Selected by Ben Flanagan. Also pictured at the top of the article.

“What do we burn for? Is the question at the heart of Lee Chang Dong’s latest, an extended masterpiece that meditates on the transience of identity, voyeurism, and a changing South Korea. But the Hitchcock of it all, might come as a surprise.

Yoo Ah-in plays Lee, an aspiring writer who begins a fling with a Shin (Jeon Jong-seo), a girl he once bullied in high school. He soon moves out of Seoul and back to his father’s farm, where propaganda alerts from Pyongyang echo from across the border. In a nation that, Dong suggests, increasingly revolves around city life, his family duty has him tethered to a liminal Korean zone.”

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9. Big Fish & Begonia (Liang Xuan, Zhang Chun):

Selected by Jeremy Clarke.

“Around the age of 16, people in the spirit world must visit the world of the humans, with whom they are warned not to interact, as a rite of passage. Thus it is that teenage spirit girl Chun must pass through the elemental maelstrom linking her world and ourswhereupon she is transformed into a red dolphin and made to spend seven days in the seas of the human world.

The whole is rendered in beautifully drawn animation as effective at portraying in the heroine’s internal life as it is in bringing incredible landscapes and fantastic creatures to the screen. The pace is mesmerisingly slow in places, breathtakingly action-packed in others. Where else can you see a girl sell half her life to save someone else’s, a man play mah-jong against three other versions of himself or the terrible portent of snow falling in the middle of Summer? For the finale, it throws in cataclysmic floods and waterspouts descending from the skies.”

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10. The Trial (Maria Augusta Ramos):

Selected by our audience (most read review of the year, with more than 50,000 views).

“The world is blithely unaware of the coup d’état that took place in largest country of Latin America in 2016. Most people outside Brazil assume that the impeachment of president Dilma Rousseff was a legitimate process in accordance with the country’s constitution. Many think that Dilma was involved in some sort of corruption scandal and that her removal was an entirely bona fide process. The 137-minute documentary The Trial reveals the details of a process so absurd that it’s akin to Kafka’s eponymous novel, which is mentioned the film. The book tells the story of a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote authority, with the nature of his crime remaining a mystery. Not too to different to what happened to Dilma.

The Trial premiered at the 68th Berlin International Film Festival in February, when this piece was originally written. The film received a standing ovation that lasted nearly 10 minutes, the largest one I have ever witnessed at the Festival (which I have attended eight times). This is a powerful venting outlet and denunciation tool for Brazilians who feel that they have been denied a voice in the mainstream media.”

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And a last minute addition (let’s play it dirty and make it 11 instead of 10)…

11. Mandy (Panos Cosmatos):

Selected by Steve Lee Naish.

“It exists as a headfuck, a hallucinatory trip, but it’s one worth taking and experiencing in all its lucid glory. The action takes place in 1983 in the Pacific Northwest of America that seems devoid of people, at least normal people. But we know this is no alternate reality, however much Mandy believes in the supernatural or the otherworldly. President Ronald Reagan appears on the radio rallying against drugs and pornography. If Mandy had been released at the time of Reagan, the moral majority would have flipped at its bent vision of religion and God. Still, the woods, mountains, and lakes are bathed in a fog of dreamy light and aura that offers a sense that weirdness is a norm in these parts.”

Our top 10 dirty picks from the Cambridge Film Festival

Posted on by victorfraga

The Cambridge Film Festival is now nearly four decades old, making it the third longest-running film festival in the country!

At this historical juncture in the UK’s relationship with Europe, the Festival strives to reflect the vast diversity and richness of European filmmaking. With 57 features (two thirds of the programme) from 19 different European countries, the selection affords fascinating insights into cultures which tend to be less familiar to us. Look out for Austrian Focus, Catalan sidebar and ‘Eye on Films’, a special showcase of emerging talent from countries such as Kosovo, Belgium and Macedonia.

Looking not only at Europe but also beyond, the Festival is to open up windows on the wider world, with features and documentaries addressing such urgent themes as the plight of migrants seeking a better future, the rise of artificial intelligence, the need to combat prejudice in all its forms, and the struggles of those trapped in repressive regimes. Even our ‘classics strand’, with its tales of US presidents in crisis, is full of contemporary resonance.

Because it’s always to decide where to begin in such a large film event, we have decided to lend you a little helping hand. Below are our top 10 dirty picks from the Festival, chosen exclusively for you. Don’t forget to click on the film title in order to accede to exclusive dirty reviews (where available). These are listed in no particular order.

Click here for more information about the event and also in order to book you tickets rightg now.

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1. Kedi (Ceyda Torun, 2017):

An inhabitant of Istanbul claims: “in a way, street animals are our cultural symbol”. Roaming the urban streets, Istanbul’s cats live a life away from the veiled domesticated environments associated to them in the West. Cared for by the inhabitants of the city, these animals are never far from adoration. However, the community’s attention towards such cats runs deeper than simply feeding them; it exposes Istanbul’s deep understanding of nature and its historicity. Directed by Ceyda Torun, who grew up in Istanbul in the 1980s, ths documentary flows poetically and reminds one of such ‘city symphonies’ as Mark Cousin’s I Am Belfast (2015) and Terence Davis’ Of Time and the City (2008).

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2. The Marriage (Blerta Zeqiri, 2018):

Set in present-day Prishtina (the capital of Kosovo), The Marriage (also pictured at the top of this article) is the story of an impossible love. It’s also the very first LGBT film from Kosovo ever. Anita (Adriana Matoshi) and Bekim (Alban Ukaj) are adding the final touches to their wedding. Their preparations are almost complete and they will tie the knot in just two weeks. Anita has been living with the trauma of her missing parents during the Kosovo War of 1999, while Bekim is very much an established man in the city. In the course of their wedding-planning, Bekim’s secret ex-lover from the past, Nol (Genc Salihu), returns from France. His return changes course of events and establishes a new connection between characters.

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3. The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (Terry Gilliam, 2018):

Terry Gilliam’s intended magnum opus is a very divisive film. DMovies’ editor Victor Fraga wasn’t particularly keen on it. He wrote: “It’s gooey inside, deflated and burnt. Its texture isn’t consistent. But it’s still digestible with some very tasty bits“.

Ian Schultz begs to differ. He travelled all the way to Paris in order to watch the movie. He wrote: “Like all of Gilliam’s films, despite being grand, it’s intensely personal. Toby and Quixote portray the director’s two sides: Toby personifies the deeply frustrated would-be artist whose passion and determination have been channelled into commerce, while Quixote is the dreamer whose life was enriched and yet damaged by the story”. Read his article by clicking here.

Now it’s your turn to make up your mind and decide whether you like it or not!

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4. Suspiria (Luca Guadagnino, 2018):

It’s big clit vs small dick energy in Luca Guadagnino’s remake of Suspiria, an aesthetic update of the original by turns confounding and magical – that neon soaked Argento look is replaced by the muted palette and instagram friendly architectural design/framing of Guadagnino. There’s enough glass brick on display to make you think twice about throwing stones, and enough conflicting, contradictory messages by this movie to have you frustrated, stupefied and eager to come back for more.

But there’s fairly little DNA shared with the Argento original. A fondness for split-focus dioptre shots aside, the closer comparative point is Possession, that masterpiece of writhing bodies in Berlin. That’s because Suspiria is far less interested in copying the emotions of the original than it is with taking a few of the themes and ideas (particularly that of displacement and cultism) through a modern lens.

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5. Lemonade (Ioana Uricari, 2018):

How far would you go for your green card? How much is the American dream worth? Romanian nurse Mara (Mălina Manovici) wants to settle in the US because she feels that the country could offer her and her 10-year-old child Dragos more opportunities than her homeland. She isn’t fleeing poverty or war. She came to the US in a work placement for six months, and then succeed to marry one of her patients. She’s well trained and educated. But she’s soon to discover that the “Land of the Free” isn’t quite ready to welcome her with open arms.

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6. Happy as Lazzaro (Alba Rohrwacher, 2018):

The story starts in the impoverished and aptly-named rural town of Inviolata (Italian for “inviolable”), where a group a group of peasants work as sharecroppers in conditions analogue to slavery for the pompous Marquise De La Luna and her son the eccentric Marquis De La Luna. The decrepit buildings and working conditions suggest that the town is in the South of Italy, although its exact location is never revealed. Lazzaro helps both the peasants and the bosses without drawing much attention to himself. He’s prepared to do anything for this people. He will offer his very blood is asked to do it.

Suddenly, De La Luna’s “great swindle” is uncovered. She’s arrested and the farm abandoned. The peasants move to the city in search of pastures green. Then the film moves forward several years. The actress Alba Rohrwacher, who happens to be the director’s elder sister, plays different characters at the different times. Everyone ages. Except for Lazzaro. He looks exactly the same; even his plain clothes remain unchanged.

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7. If (Lindsay Anderson, 1968):

Lindsay Anderson’s biting satire on public school life and the British establishment is generally reckoned as one of the best – and most subversive – British films ever made. The mesmerising Malcolm McDowell plays the leader of a group of disaffected sixth-formers who plot to bring armed revolution to their school Founders Day. A brilliant distillation of the spirit of 1968, a legend of popular culture, and a must for anyone who has ever felt stifled in school uniform.

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8. Malcolm is a Little Unwell (Malcolm Brabant/ Trine Villemann, 2018):

This film chronicles the descent into madness of award-winning BBC foreign correspondent Malcolm Brabant after he receives a routine yellow fever vaccine required for an assignment in Africa. He begins hallucinating and starts to believe he is the new Messiah, being directed by the ghosts of dead friends who, like him, covered the siege of Sarajevo. Brabant suffers several relapses, psychotic episodes and bouts of treatment in psychiatric hospital. He captures one episode on camera himself, while his wife Trine Villemann keeps video diaries in order to document his transformation…

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9. Roobha (Lenin M. Sivam, 2018):

A unique romantic tale that deals with the complexities of gender identity. Roobha, a trans-woman, struggles to find her place after being ostracized by her family. Her chance encounter with a family man, Anthony, leads to a beautiful romance. But their blissful relationship soon comes crashing down for reasons not their own. Roobha is a beautiful film that confronts the transgender stigma and biases that exist within the Tamil community. Although revered in ancient times as incarnates of the Mohini, transgender members of the community now often find themselves ridiculed and stigmatised.

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10. Miss Dali (Ventura Pons, 2018):

Salvador Dalí’s complex personality is thoroughly explored in Ventura Pons’s luminous biopic. Based on the memories of Dalí’s sister, who studied for some years in Cambridge, she recounts her life with the famous painter with her British friend. Ventura Pons met Dalí on many occasions as they both admired the Catalan village of Cadaqués, background to many of Dalí’s paintings and to Pons’s beautiful film.