Category Archives: World cinema

Shorta review – Danish urban thriller gets the heart pumping

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Two cops are stranded in hostile territory when an act of police brutality triggers a riot in this slick action film

Denmark’s reputation as the land of tolerance, equality and cosy contentment takes a battering in this superslick urban thriller directed with adrenaline and savvy by first timers Frederik Louis Hviid and Anders Ølholm. “Shorta” is Arabic for “police”, and the movie opens with black teenager Talib Ben Hassi lying face down, a white police officer on his back. “I can’t breathe,” he pleads. We don’t see Talib again but his name is repeated over and over: on the streets in Svalegårdena, the fictional estate where he grew up; by TV journalists reporting on his condition in intensive care; at the police station where damage limitation is in overdrive.

Officers are warned to stay out of Svalegårdena – a powder keg waiting to explode. The shift commander puts solidly decent Jens (Simon Sears) in a car with repellent racist Mike (Jacob Hauberg Lohmann), a man who demands respect by bullying and intimidation. The script sets up these familiar cop stereotypes then messes with them – not massively convincingly to be honest. Jens in particular I found difficult to get a handle on; this is a film where characters act in ways to make the plot tick more than anything else. Things go wrong when Mike stops and searches cheeky Arab kid Amos (Tarek Zayat). He goes in hard, humiliates Amos, arrests him; at that moment news breaks that Talib is dead, triggering a riot.

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Underground review – mine explosion disaster film digs deeper than most

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French-Canadian director Sophie Dupuis puts human drama ahead of the action in this naturalistic, character-driven film

Here is an arthouse disaster movie from Quebec: a naturalistic, character-driven drama about what it might truly look like if a mineral mine exploded, trapping five workers underground. It’s the second feature from French-Canadian director Sophie Dupuis, who herself grew up in a mining family.

She opens her film in the heat of the rescue: red lights flashing, a response team descending into darkness. One of the rescuers, Max (Joakim Robillard), would be the hero of the Hollywood version, running around hot-headedly, disobeying orders: “Fuck you! I’m going to get the others!” Actually, much of the film is about how damaging it is for Max living with this tough-guy masculinity.

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The Cloud in Her Room review – exquisite slow-burn study of a quarter-life crisis

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Chinese film-maker Zheng Lu Xinyuan makes her debut with a dreamlike distillation of a young woman’s alienation from family and friends

“A few days ago, I met someone.” A woman makes the confession matter-of-factly to her on-off boyfriend as they try to find somewhere for dinner. At that moment the camera pans up to the sky, and when it fades back to the street, the couple have gone, vanished into thin air. It’s not the only time that Chinese film-maker Zheng Lu Xinyuan, making her feature debut, cuts away from characters at precisely the moment another director would go in for a close-up; it may drive you crackers.

This film is pure slow-burn arthouse, shot in black and white, the format dominated by flashbacks – perfect for a film that drifts along on scraps and dreamlike fragments. It follows aimless 22-year-old Muzi (Jin Jing) who is back in her hometown, Hangzhou, visiting her folks for Chinese new year. Nothing much happens. In an early scene a gay friend asks Muzi to have a baby for him; his parents are desperate for a grandchild. Her boyfriend, a sensitive, shaggy-haired photographer (Zhou Chen), shows up unexpectedly from Beijing. Muzi is also flirting with a local bar owner (Dong Kangning) who clearly rates himself. Her parents have been divorced for years. She smokes cigarettes with her dad (Ye Hongming), an artist and jazz musician. A couple of scenes hint at emotional tensions with her mum (Dan Liu), a woman with the glamour and poise of a 1950s movie star; after a drunken karaoke session, her mum is sick on the street. When Muzi leans down to help, mum roughly shoves her away.

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True Stories: Spaces review – impressive short docs from folk horror to a Lebanese marvel

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This short film collection from the True Story platform ranges across continents to look at how we interact with our environments

Deeply psychogeographical, this collection of documentary shorts from the streaming platform True Story roams among spaces old and new, and across continents. Personal and public memories are intertwined, creating portraits of how human beings interact with their environments, and vice versa.

Paul Heintz’s nocturnal Shānzhài Screens is a meditative study of liminal urban spaces, shot in a Chinese district that specialises in fine-art reproductions. Rectangular frames populate the screen, from flickering apartment windows, hurried video calls, to endless replicas of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. Authenticity is elusive, and loneliness reigns.

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Riders of Justice review – Mads Mikkelsen revenge thriller turns screwball

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Anders Thomas Jensen’s film is far-fetched, tonally wayward and shouldn’t work at all, but somehow it all comes together

The poster image of a grey-bearded, shaven-headed, tooled-up, mean-looking Mads Mikkelsen, combined with that title, might set alarm bells ringing … along the lines of, “Oh no, he’s doing a Taken.” Blessedly, rather than giving us a straightahead middle-aged revenge thriller, this unpredictable Danish film takes apart the whole trope. There are action thrills, to be sure, but they are folded into what becomes a sort of group therapy session on the psychology of grief, guilt, vengeance, chance and coincidence. Even more blessedly, it’s often hilarious.

Mikkelsen plays Markus, a military commander who is recalled from Afghanistan when his wife is killed in a train crash. He might have a particular set of skills, as Liam Neeson would put it, but emotional intelligence is not one of them. Markus refuses counselling and struggles to connect with his teenage daughter. Fortunately, along comes Otto (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), a maths geek who happened to be on the same train as Markus’s wife. He is accompanied by eccentric sidekicks Lennart (Lars Brygmann), and Emmenthaler (Nicolas Bro). They are convinced the crash was not an accident but a targeted killing connected to a violent biker gang.

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Luz: The Flower of Evil review – arty horror strangely mutes its women

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Colombian horror about a micro-cult is rather too fascinated by the barbarity of its leader, rather than the daughters he has hidden from the world

This bold and disturbing arthouse horror from first-time feature director Juan Diego Escobar Alzate feels like it could be set sometime in the 19th century. It’s about a tiny religious cult based in the wildly beautiful Colombian mountains: the group’s leader is El Señor (Conrado Osorio), a farmer who looks like a cowboy in the Clint Eastwood mould, with a macho growl; his trio of daughters wear frontier prairie dresses. But we must be closer to the present day: in an early scene the eldest, 23-year-old Laila (Andrea Esquivel), brings him a 1980s cassette player that she has found in the woods and she is spellbound by this unknown contraption. El Señor says the devil lurks inside.

It’s an intriguing set-up, and cinematographer Nicolás Caballero Arenas shoots the lush landscape through what looks like a trippy filter; blazing sunsets and garish rainbows give the film a quasi-fairytale, almost surreal feel. El Señor has raised his daughters in total ignorance of the world outside their community of a dozen or so. But the film is depressingly thin on the women; often it seems more interested in arranging them in arty tableaux than investigating the way that isolation has shaped their personalities and how they see the world. The wafty Terrence Malick-ish voiceover written for Laila doesn’t exactly fill in the psychological gaps.

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Drive My Car review – mysterious Murakami tale of erotic and creative secrets

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Ryûsuke Hamaguchi reaches a new grandeur with this engrossing adaptation about a theatre director grappling with Chekhov and his wife’s infidelity

Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s mysterious and beautiful new film is inspired by Haruki Murakami’s short story of the same name – and that title, like Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, is designed to tease us with the shiny wistfulness of a Beatles lyric. Hamaguchi’s previous pictures Asako I and II and Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy were about the enigma of identity, the theatrical role play involved in all social interaction and erotic rapture of intimacy. Drive My Car is about all this and more; where once Hamaguchi’s film-making language had seemed to me at the level of jeu d’esprit, now it ascends to something with passion and even a kind of grandeur. It is a film about the link between confession, creativity and sexuality and the unending mystery of other people’s lives and secrets.

Yûsuke (Hidetoshi Nishijima) is a successful actor and theatre director who specialises in experimental multilingual productions with surtitles – he is currently working in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and is preparing to play the lead in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. He has a complex relationship with his wife Oto (Reika Kirishima), a successful writer and TV dramatist who has a habit of murmuring aloud ideas for erotic short stories, trance-like, while she is astride Yûsuke having sex, including a potent vignette about a teenage girl who breaks into the house of the boy with whom she is obsessed.

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Mi Iubita Mon Amour review – touching debut from Noémie Merlant

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The Portrait of a Lady on Fire star has made a superbly low-key film about the ill-fated flirtations a teenager and older woman

Noémie Merlant is the French acting star who two years ago helped make Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire a colossal critical hit at Cannes. Now she provides one of the festival’s incidental pleasures with her engaging if flawed directorial feature debut, presented here as a special screening. She has written it with her co-star, the emerging Romany actor Gimi-Nicolae Novaci, whom she discovered and cast as a nonprofessional in Shakira, the short film she directed in 2019 about gypsy communities in Paris. There is a definite screen chemistry between them here, and at times Mi Iubita (Romany for “my love”) Mon Amour almost comes across like a straight Call Me By Your Name.

Related: The Souvenir Part II review – a flood of austere sunlight in Joanna Hogg’s superb sequel

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A Hero review – Asghar Farhadi’s realist tale is just too messy and unsatisfactory

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Plot holes trip up the Iranian director’s drama of a slippery man’s desperate efforts to trick his way out of debtors’ prison

Asghar Farhadi has made a tangled film about the tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive, in that calmly observant, realist yet information-withholding style with which this director made his name. In way, A Hero is a slice-of-life story, in which the “i”s and the “t”s are not necessarily dotted and crossed like a regular screenplay; it has the unsatisfactory, unclear messiness that real life has. There is plenty of interest here - and yet I have to admit to slight reservations about the melodramatic contrivances, which stretch credulity a little.

A Hero is a film that works because of a clever and subtle performance from Amir Jadidi as Rahim, a divorced father who has just been released from jail on a two-day parole, having been imprisoned for debt. He is a man with a bright yet strange, desperate smile, like one of the poor relations in Dickens. He is looking forward to being reunited with his girlfriend, his supportive sister and his beloved son – a gentle, sensitive boy with a speech impediment. Rahim is a man who believes that some sort of charming niceness might still get him get out of a jam. But he has a very specific plan for cancelling his prison sentence. His girlfriend has found a handbag in the street containing what appear to be gold coins: if they could sell them to a gold dealer, might that not raise enough for a deposit to persuade his creditor to forgive the debt?

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La Fracture review – gilets jaunes fable breaks under weight of its metaphors

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A lovelorn woman lies in a Paris hospital as violent protests rage on the streets. It’s all very symbolic … but is it any good?

The fracture of the title is, ostensibly, the nasty broken arm suffered by ditsy lead character Raf (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi), a comic-book artist in Paris who slips and falls over having had a traumatic and possibly metaphorical breakup with her partner Julie (Marina Foïs). But there is another metaphor level to come.

Related: Stillwater review – fictionalised Amanda Knox drama is so bad it’s bad

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Between Two Worlds review – Juliette Binoche goes undercover in the gig economy

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Emmanuel Carrère’s drama – based on Florence Aubenas’s bestseller Le Quai de Ouistreham – fails to probe fully the injustices faced by low-paid workers

Novelist and film-maker Emmanuel Carrère has contrived this earnestly intentioned but naive and supercilious drama about poverty and the gig economy, starring a tearful Juliette Binoche. It is adapted from the French non-fiction bestseller Le Quai de Ouistreham from 2010 by investigative journalist Florence Aubenas, published in the UK under the title The Night Cleaner.

In it, Aubenas describes her experiences “going undercover” and working in the brutal world of cleaning in Caen in northern France, where desperate applicants have to burnish their CVs with fatuous assurances about how passionate they are about cleaning, in return for dehumanising work with pitiful pay, grisly conditions and no job security. The grimmest part of the work is scrubbing lavatories and cleaning cabins on the ferry between Ouistreham and Portsmouth. The book is in the undercover tradition of George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed and Polly Toynbee’s Hard Work: Life in Low-Pay Britain.

Perhaps what might have been valuable would have been a documentary fronted by Aubenas herself, about what has and hasn’t been achieved for gig workers in France since her book came out – or, arguably, a Loachian fiction based on the real lives of these workers. What Carrère has done is create a drama in which it is the fictionalised Aubenas who is the centre of an imagined gallery of toughly courageous workers – her new best friends. The real dramatic crisis comes with Aubenas’s awful dilemma when she has to confess to them she has been fibbing all this time, and using their lives as raw material for her book, which she will write as soon as she returns to her wealthy and fashionable life in Paris. Some of her soon-to-be-jettisoned pals will forgive her when they see how important her book is. Some may not.

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Crazy Samurai: 400 vs 1 review – epic, single-take battle of bloody-minded intensity

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Only the most hardcore action junkies will have the stamina for what is essentially one marathon sword-fighting scene

The craziness is all in the idea of this singular Japanese action movie: essentially one marathon battle scene, filmed in a single take, in which a master swordsman takes down several hundred assailants. The execution, as it were, is a triumph of stuntwork, strategy and stamina, but in the watching it gets rather repetitive and wearying. Few but the most hardcore action junkies will really be up for it.

The set-up is quickly dealt with: a clan rallies in the forest around its newly anointed leader, a small boy, in anticipation of an attack. Attack there swiftly comes, in the form of Musashi Miyamoto: real-life master swordsman, 17th-century folk hero, and fixture of Japanese pop culture (Toshiro Mifune played him four times; Kinnosuke Nakamura played him seven times). Here, the role is filled with focused athleticism by local action hero Tak Sakaguchi, although acting abilities play a distant second to sword-swinging skills. The battle progresses through woodlands then into an abandoned village, with Miyamoto dispatching most of his inept assailants with a few efficient strokes: a slash to the neck, a chop to the top of the head, slashes across the belly as they practically hurl themselves into the path of his blade.

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Thomas Vinterberg: ‘There is a great need for the uncontrollable – but little room for it today’

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The Danish director’s new Oscar-winning film Another Round is about a group of teachers who dedicate themselves to getting drunk. He talks about losing control, patching up his friendship with Lars von Trier and the death of his daughter

Thomas Vinterberg looks back on the past six months with disbelief. “I made a film about four white, middle-aged, semi-fat men teaching their students to drink. I didn’t think it would survive.” Instead, Another Round swept the award ceremonies (best foreign language film at the Oscars and Baftas; best film at the European film awards and London film festival), and proved a spectacular box office success in his native Denmark when it opened between Covid restrictions. Vinterberg is a boyish 52-year-old, with an open smile and chestnut hair that has a touch of gel. A priest’s cassock hangs from the bookcase behind his chair. It is easy to overlook the cassock but, like Chekhov’s gun, it fires in the final act.

Vinterberg admits his film evolved in the making. “The initial idea was to be provocative. We wanted to celebrate alcohol and drinking. But that idea hit reality. It is a film about the generation divide. I hope it is a film about how we care for one another.” Another Round opens with a title card quoting the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard: “What is youth? A dream. What is love? The dream’s content.” This thought comes alive as golden youths are seen racing around a lake on an idyllic summer’s day, carrying crates of beer that they must finish as a team. It is a summer bacchanal, drawn from real life. “Both of my oldest daughters took part in the Lake Run,” Vinterberg says. “When I described it to American friends, they were shocked. They listened to the rules: the winners are the first to finish the crate. They wanted to know, was I OK with this? How could I tell them, actually, I was kind of proud?”

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One in a Thousand review – Argentinian teen’s hoop dreams, hanging out and hoping

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Clarisa Navas’s film is a confident, visually engaging romance conjuring a world of teenage waiting and wanting

This is an LGBT urban pastoral from film-maker Clarisa Navas, set in a tough barrio in Corrientes province, north-eastern Argentina. Sofia Cabrera plays Iris, a teenage girl who appears to have been excluded from school – although that doesn’t make her lifestyle any more obviously aimless than all the people she’s hanging out with. Iris is obsessed with basketball and spends most of her days loafing around, shooting hoops, talking with her brother and cousins, and chatting with the neighbourhood kids, gay and straight. Then she chances across a charismatic older woman called Renata (Ana Carolina García), who has an elegantly wasted image; Renata has mysteriously been abroad for a while and apparently dances at a local club called Traumatic, where she appears to be on the fringe of sex work. Some are saying that she has HIV – although this may simply be spite. Iris and Renata are drawn to each other and soon they are in love.

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‘Father of African cinema’ Ousmane Sembène at work – in pictures

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A look back at the career of Senegal-born film director Ousmane Sembène as his 1968 film Mandabi is released in the UK for the first time

•Mandabi is released on 11 June in cinemas, and on 28 June on DVD, Blu-Ray and digital platforms.

•Peter Bradshaw on Mandabi: classic about colonialism resonates today

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Oxygen review – air runs out for claustrophobic survival nightmare

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Mélanie Laurent is excellent as a woman who wakes up in a cryogenic pod with enough oxygen to last the length of the film

Here is a single-location mystery thriller from first-time feature screenwriter Christie LeBlanc which is more than a bit on the preposterous side. It requires some hefty levels of disbelief suspension and plausibility buy-in. But the excellent Mélanie Laurent (from Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds) sells it hard, and it’s a rather elegant contrivance, more restrained than usual from this director, the shlock-horror specialist Alexandre Aja.

Laurent plays a woman who wakes up enclosed in a cryogenic hi-tech pod, slightly bigger than a coffin, surrounded by screens and readouts, hooked up to various life-support wires. She can’t remember who she is or why she is there, although she is almost immediately plagued with traumatised flashbacks of being rushed into hospital. Or is she rushing someone else into hospital? She can’t move. She can’t get out. And, increasingly, she can’t breathe. She realises that her oxygen levels will last only around a 100 minutes, the length of the film, in fact, which plays out in real time. And her only friend, the only one who can help her in this claustrophobic nightmare, is the velvety Hal-type voice of the controlling computer, drolly provided by Mathieu Amalric, which in time-honoured style is inscrutable, but with a hint that it knows more and could do more than it is letting on.

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The Lady in the Portrait review – painterly pageantry in a Chinese royal court

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Fan Bingbing stars as an emperor’s wife having her portrait painted in this artful yet inert period drama

This French-Chinese co-production about an earlier French-Chinese collaboration offers handsome pageantry amid its lavish recreation of 18th-century imperial court life, but it isn’t quite enough to compensate for a puttering narrative motor. Longtime Apichatpong Weerasethakul producer Charles de Meaux has turned director with a far eastern equivalent of Girl With a Pearl Earring – another decorous, ever so slightly sleepy matinee sit.

The film’s subject is Jean-Denis Attiret (played by Melvil Poupaud), a real-life French Jesuit missionary who spent half of his 60-odd years employed as the Chinese court painter. His trickiest commission, recalled here, came from the emperor’s bored wife (Fan Bingbing), thirsting to preserve an image that might turn her indifferent husband’s head.

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Lucky review – spirited Ghanaian romcom captures the social media age

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An idling student enlists the help of a wideboy friend in pursuit of a hot date in a comedy that veers between likable and laddish

Here is a vibrant, idiosyncratic portrait of Ghanaian youth, bursting with wisecracks and a boyish restlessness. There is an amateurish shakiness to the visuals, but the film overcomes this with a lot of charm and an innate understanding of its young subjects.

Related: 20 best African films – ranked!

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Identifying Features review – horror and heartbreak in Mexico’s borderlands

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First-time director Fernanda Valadez conjures up a vision of real evil in her story of the terrors faced by migrants into the US

There is unbearable heartbreak in this migrant drama from first-time Mexican film-maker Fernanda Valadez – and also a vision of real evil. At times, it looks something like social-realist folk horror. Mercedes Hernández plays Magdalena, a middle-aged woman from Guanajuato in central Mexico whose teenage son Jesús left home three years before, with a friend, on a bus bound for the border, where he’d hoped to take his chances on disappearing into the US as an illegal. But the body of Jesús’s friend has been found on Mexican territory, in an unspeakably grim holding area where the corpses of teen runaways are routinely kept in container boxes awaiting identification – though there is still no proof that Jesús himself is dead.

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Sofia review – Moroccan society through the eyes of an unwed mother

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Meryem Benm’Barek’s smart debut lays bare the scandalous consequences for a Casablanca woman who finds herself single and pregnant

In Morocco, sex outside marriage is punishable by up to 12 months in prison. But when unmarried Sofia gives birth, in this debut feature from Meryem Benm’Barek, her family’s biggest fear is not her going to jail, it’s preserving their honour. The film is straightforward, a blunt social-realist drama. (Sofia goes into labour at a kitchen sink, while washing up.) Only at the end does it dawn on you how carefully the story is plotted: something happens that recasts everything that has gone before – and, if anything, makes the story even more grim.

Maha Alemi stars as 20-year-old Sofia, who doesn’t know that she is pregnant until her waters break during a family party in Casablanca. It’s never clear whether Sofia, who didn’t gain much weight, was completely unaware of the pregnancy; perhaps she suspected it but had blocked it out. Her face is mostly blank, and she walks through the film numbed and zombie-like. After the birth, her family is disgusted – and terrified that a scandal will blow her dad’s business deal with wealthy entrepreneur named Ahmed. (Ahmed is played by Mohamed Bousbaa. Like a bit character in a murder mystery, watch him – he’ll be important later.)

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