The walls of the narrow corridor that leads to the loo at the Curzon Soho are papered with posters that have become not only familiar over the years but, insofar as filmgoing and urinating are two strictly connected biological needs, somehow part of the experience of watching a film there. Among those, the one of Les yeux sans visage has always made me linger and engage in fleeting contemplations. I just couldn’t avoid being hypnotised by that woeful gaze buried behind the mysterious white mask. Having finally watched the film, I now understand why it has earned its place as a classic, and such a coveted spot in a public bathroom. Franju’s famed horror serves as a brilliant case study of narrative exposition, both in terms of explicit versus implicit storytelling and timing. The opening is deliberately ambiguous. Hints of an eerie plot are hardly flashed, leaving us blind in the thrilling obscurity. Yet, only shortly thereafter, the conundrum is surprisingly unravelled, shifting the focus from the what to the how, and somehow elevating the genre from mystery to drama. The film cleverly paces its unfolding by using a measured approach to the most unsettling material. In the first part, any graphic depictions are ingeniously spared, allowing our imagination to conjure the most frightening images. Yet, just when we think we’re not in for a certain cinematic type of gruesome spectacle, we are plunged into a painstakingly long sequence of surgical horror that exposes us to everything we had hoped not to see. The misery of the unwilling protagonist is transfigured into the flesh of the unaware victim, imbuing both fates with a physical weight that persists as a dire shadow throughout the film, only to be revived in the horrific climax and ultimately resolved into a different, more poetic form of freedom.

As I get out of the screen I keep the door for an elderly lady so hunched that she doesn’t reach my hips. A tall gentleman in his nineties whom I assume to be her son, or perhaps her grandson, holds her hand. As they pass in front of me, she looks up, gives me a tender smile, and with an accent I can’t quite place, says thank you. While I slowly follow them down the corridor towards the exit, I hear them conversing—she is Polish. My heart sinks to an even deeper level than the film has taken it, and it continues to fall as I write this note on my way home. And if the chilly wind outside has got my eyes wet with shy tears, is not quite for any of the obvious reasons, but for the beauty that art and life just made experience.
By the way, the only thing that doesn’t work in Jonathan Glazer’s long-awaited The Zone of Interest is the green glow of the emergency exit. Everything else is a marvel—exclamation mark.

Taking a considerable aesthetic departure from his previous works, Yorgos Lanthimos transforms the screen into the site of an art installation—and if this time he seems to rely more on the visuals than the contents, it is to a no less piercing ultimate result.
Although the relentless zooming in and out got me a little woozy, other bold stylistic choices such as fisheyes and the combination of colour and b/w, did feel convincing and perfectly synergistic to the narrative—all the more as shot on vibrant Kodak stock.
Echoing scattered if vivid traits of the architecture of Mackintosh, Gaudí, Horta, as well as reminding me the romantic surrealism of Tim Walker’s fashion stories, production designers Shona Heath and James Price put together a colourful theatre of contaminations that never feels dull or inconsistent—and provide the perfect sound box to Jerskin Fendrix’s fantastic score.
Whilst I particularly loved the dancing skills of Mark Ruffalo and everything Kathryn Hunter did, and does in general as an actor, it is indeed Emma Stone’s Bella the true driving force of the film—the baffling purity of her logics, her straightforward attitude to life, her roaming without intent, but a clumsy yet somehow extremely elegant and seductive gait, through a world that feels much stranger than the freakish past that created her.

As bestas establishes a particularly fleshly eeriness from the incipit. In a long, slow-motion sequence a couple of men tame a herd of wild horses. It’s almost a dance, masculine and muscular, that forebodes the sordid events to come. Here is how we deal with things around here, it seems to express—physically. Cut to a wonderful dialogue scene in the local bar, to which the Galician cadence confers the elegance of a recitative despite its uneasy tone. In just a few minutes, a gloomy mood is set, where at every beat something darker is perceived beneath the surface. Jokes become unsettling as friendly conversations seem more and more to disguise threats. Even the subtle whispers of nature make us wary of an unspoken yet palpable danger.
Funny coincidence that the Galician for the beasts should sound so close to asbestos, suggesting perhaps the best adjective to describe the atmosphere—toxic. Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s rural tragedy kept me on the edge in the same way Matteo Garrone’s Dogman did, and left me equally shaken. But whereas the latter had a mostly psychological focus, As bestas delves into themes as current as xenophobia and gentrification reminding us that the problems, up there among the forgotten, are not as straightforward as they might seem—thus unveiling a much deeper reflection on our time.

However stumbling into at least one of the cinematic features that normally put me off—namely, the uncountable montages, because they always feel like a facile narrative trick that only succeeds in pushing me away from what interests me the most, the characters, especially these, which are brilliant—there’s a certain charm to Priscilla’s candid sincerity that didn’t leave me untouched or, for that matter, not entertained.
Where another director would have probably fallen into the temptation of shooting scenes of sex, excesses, or various abuses, Sofia Coppola finds her story elsewhere, with taste and discretion, allowing her voice to be stronger than the canon as to both the subject, the themes, and the genre. Not only she refuses to embrace the myth. She deconstructs the perceived sense of exceptionality of both the protagonists and their story into common terms of normality, to then chase and eventually find a truer, more human, and profound essence.
Almost forgot, the gigantic and charismatic Jacob Elordi plays the best Elvis I remember having seen on screen. Ignoring size and physiognomy—haven’t checked, but I doubt that Elvis was so statuesque—he has just the controlled, understated demeanour and intriguing shyness, whether genuine or faked, the King used to exhibit off-stage and during interviews.

There’s something I can quite put my finger on to the introductory sequence of Anatomy of a Fall that immediately shattered the slight scepticism I had to overcome in order to go and see it. Justine Triet’s Palm d’Or is a stunningly written piece that digs with dramaturgical mastery in the remotest places of the human nature, cynically exposing both its fragility in the face of possible misinterpretations, and its perverted inclination to give in to them.
When Miloš Forman’s Mozart is summoned by the Emperor and questioned about his work on the politically feared figure of Figaro, the young and boisterous musician pitches a scene in which a duet turns into a trio, then a quartet, and so on. ‘Guess! Guess, Majesty. Imagine the longest time such a thing could last, then double it.’ Triet’s—and partner/co-writer Arthur Harari’s—joint bravura doesn’t live too far from that picture. Their naturalistic way of looking behind both institutional and domestic walls gives an exhilarating sense of truthfulness to passages you’d want to last forever.
One peculiar expedient Anatomy of a Fall resorts to, somehow managing to expand time to a quasi-transcending effect, is repetitions. The same facts are run through over and over again in different contexts while the central incident itself is either enacted or recalled multiple times and in all sorts of fashions. On location, within private conversations, deep inside the eyes of the characters—all phenomenal performers—and in our minds alike.
Cleverly picked to reflect and emphasise that trait, and a greatly defining element for the film in their own right, are the music tracks. The wonderful instrumental version of 50 Cents’s misogynistic classic P.I.M.P. (witty and bitter in-joke) by Bacao Rhythm & Steel Band almost conveys a state of trance while setting an interesting—and far less than obvious—dialogue with the cyclic flamenco structure of Albéniz’s Asturias.
I wonder, in retrospect, if the authors’ creative process has anything in common with those of their characters, if the film itself may have sparked from their own conversations about functioning as a couple while living through art and surviving success, the one thing in life that seems to be a problem regardless of its presence or absence. Apart from love, of course.

Alright, I’ll say it. There is one shot that really bothered me. Just one, I promise. When Julie returns to her room after unsuccessfully searching for her dog—which she thought was lost—the camera crash-zooms into the lovely Louis as he lies comfortably next to her mum in bed. I am not sure if it is a pathological condition similar to an allergy or an intolerance like the one I have for butter and coriander. As a matter of fact, I’m very rarely not distracted by zooms. They suddenly make me feel removed if temporarily from the story, unwillingly made aware of the craft.
Apart from that, The Eternal Daughter couldn’t have been worthier of the long wait, confirming Joanna Hogg as one of the finest auteurs of our time, and one of the few for whom I quite literally rush to the cinema as soon as anything new is released.
Constantly swinging between gentle hints of horror and comedy, introspective minimalism and family drama, The Eternal Daughter touches very different human territories, intriguingly exploring the hidden paths that connect them. Being a mother or not having been one, being a daughter, forever, and an artist.
Perhaps the real wonder of the film, Tilda Swinton is simply superb in two very distinct yet tightly related roles. The way the stolid grace of Rosalind’s formal composure counterpoints Julie’s fragility, their different sets of mannerisms, little rituals, miseries, and even language—especially in a film that I assume largely based on improvisation as per Joanna Hogg’s usual process—are perfectly convincing, measured, and beautifully nuanced.
The Eternal Daughter certainly leaves a lot to unravel, but without ever sounding inaccessible or excessively intellectual. Just enough is given out to provoke, keep on the edge, set up a dialogue. A delicate balance that Hogg achieves on the page as well as through her elegant aesthetic instincts.
The slightly washed-out look and the iconic aspect ratio of the Super 16 camera—for my own record, an Arriflex 416 she used for the entire trilogy, to include both chapters of The Souvenir—frame an almost dioramic world in which we are progressively led to suspect that any detail to the tiniest minutiae might have a deeper reason to be. They come in a white cab, Julie leaves alone in a black one. Or the green glow that lights the eerie interiors at night, the hardly discernible noises ominously chiming in and out at all times, the many books, their titles, those about dreamers and those about adventurers. What are artists, methinks, if not both at once. And what is our mind, if not a mazy place with walls and doors, filled with all sorts of sounds.

Summer 1998. A friend and I were driving past the Beverly Wilshire when he started. ‘Look, there’s Sean Penn!’ I turned to see. Slouched on bench behind red sunglasses, wearing white sweat socks and comfy slippers, he was casually fiddling with a baseball bat. But it definitely wasn’t Sean Penn—nor was the curly-haired guy sitting next, for that matter, whom I realised only later was director David Fincher. My friend was obviously more knowledgeable about NBA players than actors, and I was just the opposite, though on one thing he was right—the semi-pyjamaed demigod lounging there, probably waiting for his driver, was the actor from Seven Years in Tibet. At Ale’s command, I snapped a cheap paparazzi photo with our disposable Kodak camera and that was it—one more for the album of our crazy time at UCLA.
A few days after the surreal encounter we were wandering around Downtown as we stumbled upon a film set. Not an unusual sight in LA, except this was clearly bigger than the average we had seen around, so we got closer and approached a guy with enough communication devices on his body to seem a reliable source of information. Between a walkie-talkie buzz and another he was kind enough to reply, even caring to embellish the title with an article—The Fight Club. At that point, I had no idea that such a film was in the works, but when I eventually saw it about a year later, something struck me indelibly—the fragments of practical filmmaking I had hardly glimpsed on the streets against what the art of cinema had made of it.

I must have had an almond stuck in my rectum when I saw it first upon release, especially thinking that apart from some stylistic affectations that I still find unnecessary—the excessive glow against the digital feel of its crystal b/w or the fake cigarette burns, for instance—what had put me off then is just what enthralled me more at this round.
As much as gossip is always more interesting than facts, if Mank deserves any attention, it’s not for having lent an ear to it—perhaps rewriting history a touch too aggressively here and there—but for having dwelt on the adventurous lives that fed material and intentions of one of the most debated masterpieces in American cinema.
Hollywood at its glorious best, according to Fincher’s intriguing rendition, is an unfinished place populated by neurotic individuals who are not proud of what they do, hate their work, the friendships they maintain, and ultimately themselves. But it’s also a stage within another where true selves are vacant but for the echo of their unspoken torments in their virtuosic dialogues. A ruthless producer, an almighty entrepreneur, an arrogant genius, a disillusioned screenwriter and pantomime drunkard, and an only apparently airheaded blonde—Mank is a tragicomic carousel of magnificently cast and interpreted roles, dextrously spun by feverishly inspired pages that, to my partial defense, do require a few iterations to be appreciated in all their depth and clever writing. Never too late to reconsider a film.