今月見るべき最高の映画

From July 4

It’s out with the new flesh and in with the old in David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, an eerie reckoning with tech’s ability to conjure up the dead that echoes the loss of his own wife from cancer in 2017. Karsh (Vincent Cassel, sporting the director’s signature icy-white quiff) is a widowed entrepreneur who has pioneered a new technology allowing people to see their loved ones as they decompose in the ground. When his graveyard is trashed one night, he exhumes evidence that points to a sinister conspiracy involving his late wife, Becca (Diane Kruger, who also plays twin-sister Terry and an AI version of Becca.) It’s a warped meditation on grief as only Cronenberg could muster, sombre and moving but crackling with moments of dark comedy and weird erotic frisson.

From July 25

An epic drama about a coldly self-involved conductor is a tagline that inevitably brings to mind Tár, but Matthias Glasner’s Berlin prize-winner Dying is completely its own animal. Tom (Lars Erdinger) is, well, a coldly self-involved conductor caught in a fractious co-parenting arrangement with his ex and the child’s father. He’s rehearsing for the premiere of a new work by his friend, the hot-headed and terminally depressed Bernard (Robert Gwisdek), so news of his parents’ fast-declining health comes as more of an inconvenience than anything. Also seemingly indifferent to her family’s fate is little-sister Ellen (Lilith Stangenberg), a dental nurse and hopeless lush who begins a messy entanglement with her boss. Glasner surveys the carnage with a ruthlessly funny but empathetic eye, leaving us to wonder how this man who conducts with such feeling and sensitivity can be so messed up when it comes to family – and that’s before he makes a decision that’s either the most monstrous thing he’s done, or an act of compassion that (sort of, maybe) redeems him.

in cinemas from July 23 via the ICA’s Off-Circuit platform

The films of Hong Sang-soo are so modest in scope and ambition they can almost creep by unnoticed. But they are often complete marvels in miniature, and What Does That Nature Say to You is no different: written, shot, edited and scored by the prolific director on consumer-grade cameras that sometimes wander out of focus, the film concerns an aspiring poet, Donghwa (Ha Seong-guk), who takes a trip with girlfriend Jun-Hee (Kang So-yi) to meet her family for the first time. Donghwa is the son of a famous lawyer, a source of fascination for all who meet him, but a topic of conversation he prefers to avoid. Is he any good as a poet? Probably not, as we begin to discover through a series of awkward comic vignettes (“Just don’t speak so conclusively about everything,” says Oryeong, scolding him for a slightly high-handed monologue about how “we know nothing” as humans. “That’s a kind of knowing, too.”) But doesn’t he deserve a shot at love regardless? Perhaps that’s the rub in Sang-soo’s pleasingly open-ended relationship drama.

From July 4

A film and theatre writer of some renown – she penned scripts for Steve McQueen’s acclaimed Small Axe series and Paweł Pawlikowski’s Ida – Rebecca Lenkiewicz makes a teasingly elliptical debut as director with Hot Milk, adapted from Deborah Levy’s novel of the same name. In Spain, directionless anthropology student Sofia (Emma Mackey) takes her mum (Fiona Shaw) to see a specialist about her paralysis, which may be psychosomatic in nature, before embarking on an affair with a free-spirited seamstress (Vicky Krieps). Part erotic reverie, part psychological study in feelings of guilt and co-dependency, Lenkiewicz’s film seems pregnant with meaning that never really becomes clear, as if we’re trapped in the same depressive funk as our lead. But it’s certainly a mood, built on committed turns from its central trio of performers.

On Netflix from July 14

The astonishing rise of evangelical Christianity in Brazil is the subject of Petra Collins’ Apocalypse in the Tropics, a story of surging far-right politics with chilling parallels to the US. Costa, who grew up in a secular household, was stunned like many in Brazil by the rise to power of Jair Bolsonaro, a formerly fringe political figure who won a whopping 70% of the evangelical vote in 2019, after promising to torch LGBTQ+ and indigenous protections along with the Amazon rainforest. To understand it, she gets extraordinary access to the power behind his throne, Silas Malafaia, a toxic televangelist who helped put Bolsonaro in office by turning his pulpit into a political stump. Costa’s camera doesn’t have far to look to reveal him as the blowhard he is, but she is tough on the failings of the left, too, musing on the fragile nature of democracy as she picks through the ruins of the failed coup of 2023, which Bolsonaro now stands accused of inciting.

From July 4

It’s out with the new flesh and in with the old in David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, an eerie reckoning with tech’s ability to conjure up the dead that echoes the loss of his own wife from cancer in 2017. Karsh (Vincent Cassel, sporting the director’s signature icy-white quiff) is a widowed entrepreneur who has pioneered a new technology allowing people to see their loved ones as they decompose in the ground. When his graveyard is trashed one night, he exhumes evidence that points to a sinister conspiracy involving his late wife, Becca (Diane Kruger, who also plays twin-sister Terry and an AI version of Becca.) It’s a warped meditation on grief as only Cronenberg could muster, sombre and moving but crackling with moments of dark comedy and weird erotic frisson.

From July 25

An epic drama about a coldly self-involved conductor is a tagline that inevitably brings to mind Tár, but Matthias Glasner’s Berlin prize-winner Dying is completely its own animal. Tom (Lars Erdinger) is, well, a coldly self-involved conductor caught in a fractious co-parenting arrangement with his ex and the child’s father. He’s rehearsing for the premiere of a new work by his friend, the hot-headed and terminally depressed Bernard (Robert Gwisdek), so news of his parents’ fast-declining health comes as more of an inconvenience than anything. Also seemingly indifferent to her family’s fate is little-sister Ellen (Lilith Stangenberg), a dental nurse and hopeless lush who begins a messy entanglement with her boss. Glasner surveys the carnage with a ruthlessly funny but empathetic eye, leaving us to wonder how this man who conducts with such feeling and sensitivity can be so messed up when it comes to family – and that’s before he makes a decision that’s either the most monstrous thing he’s done, or an act of compassion that (sort of, maybe) redeems him.

in cinemas from July 23 via the ICA’s Off-Circuit platform

The films of Hong Sang-soo are so modest in scope and ambition they can almost creep by unnoticed. But they are often complete marvels in miniature, and What Does That Nature Say to You is no different: written, shot, edited and scored by the prolific director on consumer-grade cameras that sometimes wander out of focus, the film concerns an aspiring poet, Donghwa (Ha Seong-guk), who takes a trip with girlfriend Jun-Hee (Kang So-yi) to meet her family for the first time. Donghwa is the son of a famous lawyer, a source of fascination for all who meet him, but a topic of conversation he prefers to avoid. Is he any good as a poet? Probably not, as we begin to discover through a series of awkward comic vignettes (“Just don’t speak so conclusively about everything,” says Oryeong, scolding him for a slightly high-handed monologue about how “we know nothing” as humans. “That’s a kind of knowing, too.”) But doesn’t he deserve a shot at love regardless? Perhaps that’s the rub in Sang-soo’s pleasingly open-ended relationship drama.

From July 4

A film and theatre writer of some renown – she penned scripts for Steve McQueen’s acclaimed Small Axe series and Paweł Pawlikowski’s Ida – Rebecca Lenkiewicz makes a teasingly elliptical debut as director with Hot Milk, adapted from Deborah Levy’s novel of the same name. In Spain, directionless anthropology student Sofia (Emma Mackey) takes her mum (Fiona Shaw) to see a specialist about her paralysis, which may be psychosomatic in nature, before embarking on an affair with a free-spirited seamstress (Vicky Krieps). Part erotic reverie, part psychological study in feelings of guilt and co-dependency, Lenkiewicz’s film seems pregnant with meaning that never really becomes clear, as if we’re trapped in the same depressive funk as our lead. But it’s certainly a mood, built on committed turns from its central trio of performers.

On Netflix from July 14

The astonishing rise of evangelical Christianity in Brazil is the subject of Petra Collins’ Apocalypse in the Tropics, a story of surging far-right politics with chilling parallels to the US. Costa, who grew up in a secular household, was stunned like many in Brazil by the rise to power of Jair Bolsonaro, a formerly fringe political figure who won a whopping 70% of the evangelical vote in 2019, after promising to torch LGBTQ+ and indigenous protections along with the Amazon rainforest. To understand it, she gets extraordinary access to the power behind his throne, Silas Malafaia, a toxic televangelist who helped put Bolsonaro in office by turning his pulpit into a political stump. Costa’s camera doesn’t have far to look to reveal him as the blowhard he is, but she is tough on the failings of the left, too, musing on the fragile nature of democracy as she picks through the ruins of the failed coup of 2023, which Bolsonaro now stands accused of inciting.