12月に見るべき映画

From December 26

“In Joachim Trier’s latest and most ambitious drama, Nora (Renate Reinsve) is an actress on the rise, but suffers a catastrophic anxiety attack seconds before stepping on stage at Oslo’s National Theatre. Her father, Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård), is a celebrated Swedish film director who has remained distant from Nora and her sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) since their parents divorced years prior. When their mother passes away, Gustav returns to Nora’s life and the looming, historic family home that Nora has a lifetime of shifting, unprocessed feelings about … There are emotional strands that feel laboured – it doesn’t help that the snippets we hear of Gustav’s script sound obvious and tired – but Sentimental Value is so frequently and convincingly moving in how it zeroes in on the gaps in affection and acceptance that neglect creates within a family. If art wants to be redemptive, it needs to make honest and sincere connections between its players. It’s a familiar maxim that Trier makes lively again: art is not just excavation, but rather renewal.”

– Taken from Rory Doherty’s Cannes review.

From December 5

The new film from Jafar Panahi is a superb thriller told with masterful economy, examining questions of what justice looks like in a country where state-sanctioned violence has become the norm. Filmed in secret by the Iranian new wave veteran, the film’s drama unfolds when an Islamic republic official is delivered into the hands of his former prisoners, after the squeak of his prosthetic leg gives him away to a local car mechanic called Vahid. The problem is Vahid never actually saw his torturer, who kept him blindfolded at all times, so he hastily abandons his plan to bury him alive and carts the man off in the back of his van to show his former prison-mates, who are drawn into the drama against their better judgment. Can they prove the man’s identity? And if it really is him, what then? Panahi has his cast debate the ethics of their situation at length in this fraught morality play, which has something of the bare-bones poetry of the best Western films.

– Alex Denney

From December 5

Seymour Hersh is the Pulitzer prize winning journalist whose tenacious reporting uncovered abuses of power in the US from army massacres in Vietnam to torture in Abu Ghraib. The 88-year-old writer is the subject of Laura Poitras’s new documentary, which makes a powerful case for the importance of investigative journalism at a time when US news outlets like the LA Times and the Washington Post are increasingly bending the knee to Trump and his lackeys in government. That said, this being Poitras it’s no mere hagiography, the film exposing the odd mix of ego and righteousness that makes for a great reporter and highlighting some of his missteps along the way. As it turns out, she’d been chasing the story for nearly 20 years before Hersh finally agreed to come on board – he never reveals why, but hearing him talk about how some of his scoops scared the shit out of editors he claims were too cosy with government feels beyond timely today.

– Alex Denney

Out now at the ICA and in selected cinemas nationwide

In this witty and ingeniously devised documentary, Croatian filmmaker Igor Bezinović plucks people from the streets of his hometown, Rijeka, to restage the city’s capture by proto-fascist forces in 1919. He begins with a question – “Do you know who Gabriele D’Annunzio is?” – to which most of the townsfolk merely shrug and say no, before enlisting several of them to play the Italian poet and aristocrat, an inspiration to the young Benito Mussolini, whose occupation of the city would last for over a year. Bezinović’s film is like a living history project – “a lovely game that should be approached with great seriousness”, as one participant puts it – and it wears its ironies lightly, preferring to let its ghostly images do the talking. Meanwhile in the present, a new statue of D’Annunzio is unveiled in Trieste, a monument to lessons unlearned as fascist ghosts walk among us once more.

– Alex Denney

From December 12

Fans of cerebral sci-fi will enjoy Animalia, a striking feature debut from French-Moroccan director and screenwriter Sofia Alaoui. Heavily pregnant Itto (luminous newcomer Oumaïma Barid) lives a life of luxury with hubby Amine (Mehdi Dehbi), a well-meaning but materialistic man whose family disapproves of her humble origins. But when Itto is called away on business and strange events lead to a national emergency being declared, she begins a dangerous journey that will shake her ideas about life to the core. There are shades of Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival to this hazily defined but resonant film, which combines end-times lyricism with some evocative special effects work that suggests another world hiding in plain sight.

– Alex Denney

From December 26

“In Joachim Trier’s latest and most ambitious drama, Nora (Renate Reinsve) is an actress on the rise, but suffers a catastrophic anxiety attack seconds before stepping on stage at Oslo’s National Theatre. Her father, Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård), is a celebrated Swedish film director who has remained distant from Nora and her sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) since their parents divorced years prior. When their mother passes away, Gustav returns to Nora’s life and the looming, historic family home that Nora has a lifetime of shifting, unprocessed feelings about … There are emotional strands that feel laboured – it doesn’t help that the snippets we hear of Gustav’s script sound obvious and tired – but Sentimental Value is so frequently and convincingly moving in how it zeroes in on the gaps in affection and acceptance that neglect creates within a family. If art wants to be redemptive, it needs to make honest and sincere connections between its players. It’s a familiar maxim that Trier makes lively again: art is not just excavation, but rather renewal.”

– Taken from Rory Doherty’s Cannes review.

From December 5

The new film from Jafar Panahi is a superb thriller told with masterful economy, examining questions of what justice looks like in a country where state-sanctioned violence has become the norm. Filmed in secret by the Iranian new wave veteran, the film’s drama unfolds when an Islamic republic official is delivered into the hands of his former prisoners, after the squeak of his prosthetic leg gives him away to a local car mechanic called Vahid. The problem is Vahid never actually saw his torturer, who kept him blindfolded at all times, so he hastily abandons his plan to bury him alive and carts the man off in the back of his van to show his former prison-mates, who are drawn into the drama against their better judgment. Can they prove the man’s identity? And if it really is him, what then? Panahi has his cast debate the ethics of their situation at length in this fraught morality play, which has something of the bare-bones poetry of the best Western films.

– Alex Denney

From December 5

Seymour Hersh is the Pulitzer prize winning journalist whose tenacious reporting uncovered abuses of power in the US from army massacres in Vietnam to torture in Abu Ghraib. The 88-year-old writer is the subject of Laura Poitras’s new documentary, which makes a powerful case for the importance of investigative journalism at a time when US news outlets like the LA Times and the Washington Post are increasingly bending the knee to Trump and his lackeys in government. That said, this being Poitras it’s no mere hagiography, the film exposing the odd mix of ego and righteousness that makes for a great reporter and highlighting some of his missteps along the way. As it turns out, she’d been chasing the story for nearly 20 years before Hersh finally agreed to come on board – he never reveals why, but hearing him talk about how some of his scoops scared the shit out of editors he claims were too cosy with government feels beyond timely today.

– Alex Denney

Out now at the ICA and in selected cinemas nationwide

In this witty and ingeniously devised documentary, Croatian filmmaker Igor Bezinović plucks people from the streets of his hometown, Rijeka, to restage the city’s capture by proto-fascist forces in 1919. He begins with a question – “Do you know who Gabriele D’Annunzio is?” – to which most of the townsfolk merely shrug and say no, before enlisting several of them to play the Italian poet and aristocrat, an inspiration to the young Benito Mussolini, whose occupation of the city would last for over a year. Bezinović’s film is like a living history project – “a lovely game that should be approached with great seriousness”, as one participant puts it – and it wears its ironies lightly, preferring to let its ghostly images do the talking. Meanwhile in the present, a new statue of D’Annunzio is unveiled in Trieste, a monument to lessons unlearned as fascist ghosts walk among us once more.

– Alex Denney

From December 12

Fans of cerebral sci-fi will enjoy Animalia, a striking feature debut from French-Moroccan director and screenwriter Sofia Alaoui. Heavily pregnant Itto (luminous newcomer Oumaïma Barid) lives a life of luxury with hubby Amine (Mehdi Dehbi), a well-meaning but materialistic man whose family disapproves of her humble origins. But when Itto is called away on business and strange events lead to a national emergency being declared, she begins a dangerous journey that will shake her ideas about life to the core. There are shades of Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival to this hazily defined but resonant film, which combines end-times lyricism with some evocative special effects work that suggests another world hiding in plain sight.

– Alex Denney