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History shows than invasions invariably lead to massive population flights – though it’s not usually the invading country’s population doing the fleeing. In 2022, Putin’s assault on Ukraine led to an exodus of conscription-age Russians, heading overseas to avoid dying in the Donbas, and exposing the kind of social fault line that dissident director Andrey Zvyagintsev loves to chip away at with his austere cross-examinations of modern Russia. This existential moment is more of a business quandary for the man at the heart of Minotaur, a marital drama that evolves into a metronomic and mesmerising thriller that flickers with moments of mordant satire (there are laughs, honestly). Logistics CEO Gleb (Dmitriy Mazurov), suddenly left with several roles to fill, is summoned to a meeting with the mayor where he discover that he and his fellow business leaders also have to offer some of their employees up for military service in Ukraine. It’s a Dostoyevskian predicament that Gleb deals with like the capitalist he is: he fabricates a clutch of new roles at the company and promptly puts the entire intake on the conscription list. The only employee he wants to save from military service is his head of security, who has been spying on his unfaithful wife Galina (Iris Lebedeva) for him – and he’s not in much of a hurry to do even that. It’s at this point, with the introduction of Galina’s lover, a handsome photographer closer to her age, that the film spirals off in a dark new...

No one is pining for the fjords by the end of this slow-boiling cauldron of a moral drama. Shot with a subdued palette and set in a small waterside community in rural Norway, Cristian Mungiu’s (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days) film has Renate Reinsve and unrecognisable Marvel star Sebastian Stan as a Norwegian mum and her Romanian engineer husband, who discover that the warm welcome of their new home town doesn’t extend past a slice or two of cake and a tour of the high school. Mungiu quickly sets up his inciting incident: Lisbet (Reinsve) and Mihai Gheorghiu’s (Stan) teenage daughter Elia (Vanessa Ceban), one of their five children, is spotted with unexplained bruises by her new teacher. Worried these were inflicted by her parents’ corporal punishment, the teacher reports this to the local child protection agency. It escalates when Elia admits that her dad has ‘slapped’ them. And he has. Mihai is a stern but loving dad guided by his family’s strict faith. The old ‘spare the rod, spoil the child’ ideology is intact in his culture, but in his new homeland, it’s a crime. The stakes are existential: prison and the loss of their kids. Even their next-door neighbours, the school’s pompous headmaster and his sympathetic lawyer wife, initially so welcoming, back away. Only their own tearaway teenager Noora (Henrikke Lund-Olsen) stands by the family, and especially Elia, on whom she harbours a crush. That, in turn, will come to inform the homophobic Mihai’s decisions.  ...

There’s a joy in watching a filmmaker returning to a place they know inside out. Every gesture, every local tradition, every character’s aspiration is shot through with local knowledge. Scorsese has it with Little Italy, Tarantino with LA, and James Gray definitely has it with Queens, the New York borough he grew up in and that he’s quietly immortalising on screen. Its low-rise streets, in the shadows of Manhattan’s bright lights, were the setting for his debut, Little Odessa (1994), and two subsequent crime dramas We Own the Night (2007) and The Yards (2012). And it’s the backdrop for an unshowy but enthralling late ’80s parable of aspiration gone wrong that reunites Marriage Story duo Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson to great effect.   Johansson is Hester Pearl, the warm-hearted matriarch of a middle-class Jewish family in one of the borough’s leafy streets. Her husband, Irwin (Miles Teller), is an engineer for whom geeky enthusiasm is a default setting. Cooing relatives would probably refer to their two children, 18-year-old Scott (Gavin Goudey), off to college in the spring, and his doting younger brother Ben (Roman Engel), as ‘polite young men’. Irwin, though, is fretting about the tuition fees, especially with Hester also angling for a new home among the swimming pools and lawns of Long Island. Into this happy but pressured dynamic steps Driver’s older brother Gary Pearl, an ex-cop with the gift of the gab and an unmissable business opportunity for Irwin. Turning...

Clio Barnard’s (The Arbor) bruising new drama is a picture of modern England seen through the eyes of five Brummie friends. It’s uplifting to see a piece of British cinema so attuned to the hopes and attitudes of young Brits, a grainy, 16mm snapshot of society firmly in the lineage of Shane Meadows, Andrea Arnold, Ken Loah, Tony Richardson et al, and played out by a clutch of gifted actors. Like Rocco and His Brothers with a Bromwich burr, it’s the story of a tight-knit friendship group swimming against the economic tide. Barnard and screenwriter Enda Walsh (Disco Pigs, Small Things like These) crystallise the challenges of modern life, with its struggling families, unmet aspirations and property ladders with no rungs. The Irish playwright has streamlined Birmingham poet Keiran Goddard’s multi-perspective novel into an ensemble drama with boundless love for its characters, if not always quite enough room. We enter this un-levelled up cityscape through the pub doors: childhood sweethearts Patrick (Anthony Boyle) and Shiv (Lola Petticrew), new dad and building site foreman Conor (Daryl McCormack), and wealthy charmer Rian (Joe Cole) are out celebrating their hard-partying mate Oli’s (Jay Lycurgo) 30th. Shots are necked, bumps of coke snorted and the room filled with decades’ worth of love and goodwill. The Streets’ 2002 anthem ‘Don’t Mug Yourself’ blasts out of the speakers, a throwback to a more hopeful kind of hedonism.  Here, though, booze and drugs represent something...

It’s happened to us all. You meet someone on a night out and you just click right away. They’re wearing the perfect leather jacket and tell you your hair is cute. You listen to all the same bands and watch the same films. It’s fate. Only, you never hear from them again. You’re haunted by the idea of the missed connection, by the ‘what ifs?’. Alicia MacDonald’s Finding Emily is a charming and heartfelt romcom that explores what happens when the ‘what if?’ goes too far.  Twenty-two-year-old Owen (Spike Fearn from Alien: Romulus) is a hopeless romantic who works as a sound engineer in the student union at Manchester City University. One night he meets the enigmatic Emily, dressed as a fairy, and sparks fly. But when goes to text her the next day, he’s got the wrong number. Owen then embarks on a maniacal, and often cringeworthy, quest to find his real-life manic pixie dream girl. On the way he gains the help of another Emily (The Nice Guys’ Angourie Rice), a determined psychology student writing her dissertation on romantic love. She’s looking for a case study to prove her thesis that love is an unnecessary ‘evolutionary hangover’ that can only lead to self-sabotage and madness. It’s a romcom match made in heaven. It has all the things a good romcom should have Fearn is painfully adorable as Owen. He’s got the face of Mick Jagger with a Liam Gallagher haircut (and monobrow), and has the energy of the sweet boy-next-door crossed with a swaggering front man. As well as being a...

There’s nothing worse than watching your favourite new movie start to fall apart before your eyes. Especially if the filmmaker responsible has bone fides as strong as The Wailing’s Na Hong-jin, and the cast offers the off-the-wall prospect of Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander popping up in a K-horror epic.  Because for a solid hour, the man behind that superlative 2016 supernatural horror, is playing another blinder. We’re back in remote South Korea somewhere near the DMZ, where signs warn people to ‘beware of spies’ and paranoia comes with the territory. Except, it’s not spies to beware of but whatever is ripping chunks out of the local cattle and reducing the place to rubble. Welcome to the small harbour town of Hope (pop: mostly dead).  In the spirit of all good creature features, Na keeps his monster under wraps for the entire opening reel. Instead, we follow tough-talking cop Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min) and no-nonsense local Sung-ki (Zo In-sung) as they head off in different directions to find out what’s been tearing the town apart. The set design is terrific. Bum-seok and his revolving cast of reluctant sidekicks tiptoe through the guts of shredded buildings and down dank alleys, while explosions billow in the near distance and cars are hurled over buildings. The introduction of a young deputy, Jung Ho-yeon (Jung Ho-yeon), complete with a cop car’s worth of heavy weaponry, is midnight-movie heaven. For a solid hour or so, Na Hong-jin plays a blinder As they’re...

Filmmaking dads and their actress daughters are having a moment, and this fabulous filmmaking odyssey from Spanish director Rodrigo Sorogoyen is an even richer affair than this year’s Oscar-winner Sentimental Value. As movies about movies go, The Beloved is darker than Truffaut’s Day for Night and as self-scouring as Godard’s Le Mépris, two masterpieces to which comparisons don’t feel entirely outlandish. It’s complex material handled with elegance by Sorogoyen (The Beasts) and supercharged by Bardem, whose meatiest Spanish-language role in years, playing a volatile filmmaker who uses his new project as a chance to reconnect with his estranged daughter, is a real sidewinder of a performance. All easy charm and coiled, Bond-villain menace, he’s a complex, self-regarding man whose moods change with the weather and whose motivations are fatally at loggerheads. Bardem is Spanish director Esteban Martínez, once an enfant terrible of indie cinema in the manner of a Quentin Tarantino or David O Russell, and famous for punching his own leading actor during his tearaway days. He’s supposedly mellowed enough to take on his most ambitious project yet: a period drama called ‘Desert’ about Spain’s Western Sahara colony set in 1932 and filmed in the baking heat of the Canary Islands. Even his wary producer isn’t so sure.  A 20-minute opening scene reunites him with daughter Emilia (Bitter Christmas’s Victoria Luengo) in a Madrid restaurant. One of two extraordinary set pieces that turn...

Japanese humanist Hirokazu Koreeda is known for packing a sentimental wallop into shrewdly-observed melodramas about families and children. So, it’s curious that he returns to the sci-fi genre 28 years on from After Life (1998) – one of his most wistful and probing films to date – with a concept this loaded, yet he focuses on everything but its core emotions. Likewise, anyone looking for his sweeping manifesto on generative AI best keep those expectations in their box. Instead, we are treated to a shallow chronicle of the continuing adventures of Otone (Haruka Ayase) and Kensuke Komoto (Japanese comedian Daigo) and their adopted humanoid child Kakeru (Rimu Kuwaki). This adorable seven-year-old comes with an off button and a charging chair. Kakeru is a robot doppelganger for their flesh-and-blood child who died two years previously in circumstances not broached until the midpoint.  Koreeda doesn’t waste time wrestling with a ‘should they/shouldn’t they adopt a humanoid’ line of questioning. We are in a near-future world that seems to have put ethical arguments around AI in the past and where big companies send adverts via insect holograms. One propaganda butterfly from tech company REBirth is all it takes for Otone to feel the rush of temptation. Kensuke is sceptical enough to keep his distance, but doesn’t feel strongly enough to fight with his wife over her impulse purchase of luxury goods. The story ambles on from here in a sunny, anecdotal fashion with lots of things...

Being a dad to grown-up children can be a challenging business. How do you express all that love, all that frustration, to someone who is a bit, well, past hearing about all that? How do you let go of the expectation, the sense of entitlement to some kind of gratitude for the sacrifices along the way. The truth, as DIY auteur Quentin Dupieux’s personal and typically gonzo parenthood parable reveals, is ‘with difficulty’.  The French surrealist is at his most Buñuelian in Full Phil, a chamber piece set mainly in an opulent Parisian hotel suite that cuts back and forth to a B-movie-within-a-movie, a stiff-limbed ’50s Creature from the Black Lagoon-style flick starring Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim (aka comedy duo Tim and Eric) as scientists who rashly reanimate a voracious swamp creature. Our offspring will destroy us, is the combined message – and we’ll probably deserve it.  Woody Harrelson and Kristen Stewart are chalk-and-cheese single-dad-and-daughter pair Phil and Madeleine Doom, a wealthy industrialist and his 32-year-old offspring on a trip to the City of Light to ‘reconnect’. And it’s not going well: personal boundaries are being trampled – she’s left something unflushable in his loo – and his aggressive vibes have drawn the attention of a hotel staff member (The White Lotus’s Charlotte Le Bon) who decides to stay in the suite for safeguarding reasons. Phil’s complaints to management fall on death ears. ‘She has excellent instincts,’ he learns. ‘She caught a...

Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s first foray into foreign-language filmmaking, a French-language drama, might appear daunting, what with the subtitles, the 196-minute running time, and much of the action taking place in an old people’s home. Not exactly date-night fodder. Yet you would be remiss to pass it by. The opening scene sets the tone: Paris care home manager Marie-Lou (Benedetta’s Virginie Efira) is napping in the bucolic grounds while one of her patients enjoys a smoke. The home is called the Garden of Freedom, an apt name for a place that aspires to be more than just a stopping-off point before death for its residents. Marie-Lou aims to provide the best care to her patients, but is up against budget restrictions, corporate managers and staff resistant to her innovative regime. The home was once a psychiatric hospital, which is of relevance later, when Marie-Lou encounters Tomoki (Kodai Kurosaki), a youth with learning difficulties who has escaped his wards and is running free through the streets of Paris. As luck would have it, Marie-Lou speaks fluent Japanese – what were the chances?! Tomoki’s uncle is an acclaimed actor Goro (Kyozo Nagatsuka), starring in a play directed by Mari (Tao Okamoto). They invite Marie-Lou to their show about Franco Basaglia, a psychiatrist instrumental in dismantling mental hospitals throughout Italy. Hamaguchi returns to Basaglia’s fundamental question: ‘Are healthy people truly alive?’ throughout the film. Where Evil Does Not Exist was a...