Rewrite
From Walter Salles’ Oscar-buzzed epic I’m Still Here to the first film from Greek weird-wave star Ariane Labed, we present our picks of this month’s releases
From February 7
The traumatic legacy of Brazil’s military dictatorship is brought painfully to light in Walter Salles’ epic family drama, a box-office smash at home that’s brought a belated reckoning with the hundreds of people ‘forcibly disappeared’ by the regime.
The film opens in 1970, when leftist opponents of the ruling military junta try to spring their colleagues from jail by kidnapping a Swiss diplomat. The government’s heavy-handed response sends waves of fear through Rio, where former governor Rubens Paiva lives in an idyllic beachfront home with his wife, Eunice (Fernanda Torres), and five children. Many of the city’s moneyed middle classes have already fled, but the Paivas decide to sit tight, packing their idealistic eldest, Vera (Valentina Herszage) off to uni in London where her politics can’t land her in trouble.
It’s perhaps no surprise that these early scenes are the picture’s most vivid – a reflection, perhaps, of Salles’ own childhood in Rio, where the lingering suggestion of violence is no match for the era’s heady mix of tropicalía music and revolutionary politics. (Salles’ dad served in the João Goulart government deposed by the coup.) At times, the film recalls Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma in its deft portrait of family life soon to be torn apart, heightening our sense of incoming tragedy through the use of Super-8 home footage taken by Vera.
That tragedy arrives in the shape of three plain-clothed officials who come to the family home one day, taking Rubens off for questioning while the kids scurry in and out of the house. Of course, he never returns, and from here the focus turns to Eunice, as she is left to pick up the pieces while waging a years-long battle to determine her husband’s whereabouts. Unfortunately, the piecemeal nature of her battle means the film’s second half lacks the fluency of the first, though Salles is able to draw on a supremely self-possessed portrayal from Torres (Oscar-nominated for her work here), who never lets us forget her character’s fundamental decency and unfailing pursuit of what’s right. After far-right former president Jair Bolsonaro’s own failed coup of 2022, it’s a powerful testimony to the importance of remembering.
From February 7
“Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s ass,” runs a lesser-known subclause of the ten commandments, and there’s something vaguely Biblical about the family feud that animates Bring Them Down, a sheep-rustling revenge thriller that turns very nasty indeed. Mikey (Christopher Abbott) lives at home with dad Ray (Colm Ready), a farmer at war with neighbours Gary (Paul Ready) and his son, Jack (Barry Keoghan, as troubling as ever). Meanwhile Gary’s got problems of his own with his wife, Caroline (Nora-Jane Noone), an old flame of Mikey’s disfigured in a car crash that killed Mikey’s mum. Working from a script in English and Gaelic, first-time director Christopher Andrews handles the action with terse aplomb and a clever, POV-switching narrative. But the wilder this story gets the sillier it seems.
From February 14
Cousins Chatila (Mahmood Bakri) and Reda (Aram Sabbah) are Palestinian refugees turned petty criminals in Athens, trying to hustle up the funds to start new lives for themselves in Germany. When the sensitive Reda spends all their savings on heroin, Chatila cooks up a risky scam that will pay for their flights out of the country – and cost them their souls into the bargain. Directed with sweaty brio by Danish-Palestinian director Mahdi Fleifel from a script he wrote with Jason Colgan and Fyzal Boulifa (The Damned Don’t Cry), this is a gripping and empathetic study in moral corruption among Europe’s immigrant fringes.
From February 21
A star of the Greek weird wave, Ariane Labed’s first film as director taps the same vein of surrealist menace as her husband Yorgos Lanthimos’s Dogtooth, in which she also appeared. Greek siblings September (Pascale Kann) and July (Mia Tharia) live with their artist mum (Rakhee Thakrar) in Ireland, where they’re shunned at school for their looks and weird, insular energy. When the headstrong September pulls a knife on July’s tormentors, the family decamp to their grandma’s house by the sea in Ireland, where the sisters’ bond becomes ever-more troubling. Labed’s world is admitting of a little more natural light than her partner’s hermetically sealed concoctions, which makes for a provocative if tonally uneven debut.
From February 28
Imagine Charlie Kaufman with lashings of hot gay sex and you’ve got something like The Summer With Carmen, Zacharías Mavroeidis’s metafictional tale of two failed Greek actors’ attempts to write a screenplay. At their local cruising beach, aspiring filmmaker Nikitas (Andreas Lampropoulos) tells best friend Demosthenes (Yorgos Tsiantoulas) he’s been asked to pitch an idea for a no-budget film that is “Greek, sexy and fun”. Demosthenes suggests they work together on a script based on his adoption of a dog, Carmen, belonging to an ex he still secretly pines for, but the pair are undone by Nikitas’ insistence on giving his character a tidy ‘learning’ arc. The result is a highly sexed, admittedly quite niche musing on self, writing and identity that film studies undergrads and horny folk alike may find to their taste.
in HTML format, including tags, to make it appealing and easy to read for Japanese-speaking readers aged 20 to 40 interested in fashion. Organize the content with appropriate headings and subheadings (h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6), translating all text, including headings, into Japanese. Retain any existing
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From Walter Salles’ Oscar-buzzed epic I’m Still Here to the first film from Greek weird-wave star Ariane Labed, we present our picks of this month’s releases
From February 7
The traumatic legacy of Brazil’s military dictatorship is brought painfully to light in Walter Salles’ epic family drama, a box-office smash at home that’s brought a belated reckoning with the hundreds of people ‘forcibly disappeared’ by the regime.
The film opens in 1970, when leftist opponents of the ruling military junta try to spring their colleagues from jail by kidnapping a Swiss diplomat. The government’s heavy-handed response sends waves of fear through Rio, where former governor Rubens Paiva lives in an idyllic beachfront home with his wife, Eunice (Fernanda Torres), and five children. Many of the city’s moneyed middle classes have already fled, but the Paivas decide to sit tight, packing their idealistic eldest, Vera (Valentina Herszage) off to uni in London where her politics can’t land her in trouble.
It’s perhaps no surprise that these early scenes are the picture’s most vivid – a reflection, perhaps, of Salles’ own childhood in Rio, where the lingering suggestion of violence is no match for the era’s heady mix of tropicalía music and revolutionary politics. (Salles’ dad served in the João Goulart government deposed by the coup.) At times, the film recalls Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma in its deft portrait of family life soon to be torn apart, heightening our sense of incoming tragedy through the use of Super-8 home footage taken by Vera.
That tragedy arrives in the shape of three plain-clothed officials who come to the family home one day, taking Rubens off for questioning while the kids scurry in and out of the house. Of course, he never returns, and from here the focus turns to Eunice, as she is left to pick up the pieces while waging a years-long battle to determine her husband’s whereabouts. Unfortunately, the piecemeal nature of her battle means the film’s second half lacks the fluency of the first, though Salles is able to draw on a supremely self-possessed portrayal from Torres (Oscar-nominated for her work here), who never lets us forget her character’s fundamental decency and unfailing pursuit of what’s right. After far-right former president Jair Bolsonaro’s own failed coup of 2022, it’s a powerful testimony to the importance of remembering.
From February 7
“Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s ass,” runs a lesser-known subclause of the ten commandments, and there’s something vaguely Biblical about the family feud that animates Bring Them Down, a sheep-rustling revenge thriller that turns very nasty indeed. Mikey (Christopher Abbott) lives at home with dad Ray (Colm Ready), a farmer at war with neighbours Gary (Paul Ready) and his son, Jack (Barry Keoghan, as troubling as ever). Meanwhile Gary’s got problems of his own with his wife, Caroline (Nora-Jane Noone), an old flame of Mikey’s disfigured in a car crash that killed Mikey’s mum. Working from a script in English and Gaelic, first-time director Christopher Andrews handles the action with terse aplomb and a clever, POV-switching narrative. But the wilder this story gets the sillier it seems.
From February 14
Cousins Chatila (Mahmood Bakri) and Reda (Aram Sabbah) are Palestinian refugees turned petty criminals in Athens, trying to hustle up the funds to start new lives for themselves in Germany. When the sensitive Reda spends all their savings on heroin, Chatila cooks up a risky scam that will pay for their flights out of the country – and cost them their souls into the bargain. Directed with sweaty brio by Danish-Palestinian director Mahdi Fleifel from a script he wrote with Jason Colgan and Fyzal Boulifa (The Damned Don’t Cry), this is a gripping and empathetic study in moral corruption among Europe’s immigrant fringes.
From February 21
A star of the Greek weird wave, Ariane Labed’s first film as director taps the same vein of surrealist menace as her husband Yorgos Lanthimos’s Dogtooth, in which she also appeared. Greek siblings September (Pascale Kann) and July (Mia Tharia) live with their artist mum (Rakhee Thakrar) in Ireland, where they’re shunned at school for their looks and weird, insular energy. When the headstrong September pulls a knife on July’s tormentors, the family decamp to their grandma’s house by the sea in Ireland, where the sisters’ bond becomes ever-more troubling. Labed’s world is admitting of a little more natural light than her partner’s hermetically sealed concoctions, which makes for a provocative if tonally uneven debut.
From February 28
Imagine Charlie Kaufman with lashings of hot gay sex and you’ve got something like The Summer With Carmen, Zacharías Mavroeidis’s metafictional tale of two failed Greek actors’ attempts to write a screenplay. At their local cruising beach, aspiring filmmaker Nikitas (Andreas Lampropoulos) tells best friend Demosthenes (Yorgos Tsiantoulas) he’s been asked to pitch an idea for a no-budget film that is “Greek, sexy and fun”. Demosthenes suggests they work together on a script based on his adoption of a dog, Carmen, belonging to an ex he still secretly pines for, but the pair are undone by Nikitas’ insistence on giving his character a tidy ‘learning’ arc. The result is a highly sexed, admittedly quite niche musing on self, writing and identity that film studies undergrads and horny folk alike may find to their taste.
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