In the dark night of a yellow forest, a masked gang makes its prey fall from a tree. The possessed members take a grim group photograph to celebrate the success of the hunt as if they captured a beast—but it’s a man. The prisoner, also masked, is then thrown into a well with a noose around his neck. The furious running of the rope describes with a mournful hiss the interminable descent until its end disappears into silence. But the man is alive.
Clinging to the rocky walls of the humid hole, he frees himself from the constraints, not from the mask, and with ancestral free solo dexterity begins the long, difficult ascent.
Aired on the BBC unannounced and without credits, The Fall are seven gloomy minutes that grow with each viewing evoking sinister forebodings about our world, about everything we have seen or heard in recent years, and about the kind of human being we have become—the notion of which might still escape us.
Anthony Minghella once said that a short film should be a perfect sentence. The Fall is Jonathan Glazer’s response to that note.

Bait is the gift cinema lovers covet, the surprise I myself was after when I went to see it even though all I knew was that on the poster towered a big beardy face like those I like. The kind of men who survive because of their rocky hands, wellies on their feet to keep steady on slippery surfaces.
Martin fishes for lobsters with a boat that no longer exists in a place where times are threatening the identity of a generation, the legacy of the previous. It’s on today’s raped Cornwall, snatched from its inhabitants and sold to holidaymakers, that Mark Jenkin—a Cornish himself, and very vocal on the matter of gentrification—solo writes, directs, photographs, develops, and virtuously edits. Behind the nostalgic tingling of the 16 mm grain of a Bolex camera, he captures with a tragicomic sense of irony some rather perfect performances, conveying personal and collective frustrations, and ultimately giving shape to a truly unique piece of work.

A bunch of flowers on the street is one of the most poignant symbols in the collective imagination. We see it, we know immediately what it means, and we suddenly find ourselves helplessly sinking in a deep, irrational sadness. But so much more do flowers mean if instead of leaning against a wall they are in a vase on a table, nicely displayed at an event, if the hands of a man are taking care of them or those of a woman bring them close to her cheeks as she loses herself in their scent, in a memory, somewhere far. With words spoken by the colours of flowers on the gloomy tints of a misty weather, Loreak explores incomprehensions, loneliness, affections, and the exhausting human rebelling against oblivion. There’s a very thin line between living in the present and in the past, a line stretched not only by the fear of being forgotten but also and above all, by that of forgetting.

In a decade—it won’t be more as nothing ever lasts longer—in which offences are read everywhere except where they really are, Girl could have not but ignited an interesting debate. To have raised a fuss like cinema rarely does in our century and aroused the susceptibility of the most conformist souls in different ways, is a film that doesn’t simply delve into the difficulty of accepting oneself, but into the literal impossibility of recognising oneself into a mirror. Girl is about different forms of obsession and the physical synergy their clashing can dangerously lead to.
Lukas Dhont’s surprising debut is a wonderful story of private courage that doesn’t mean to judge or teach. Whoever saw not more than an overly anatomical portrayal of a category, that’s exactly where they proved their incapability to see anything else than that, a category. But Girl takes us beyond all that, and it does with the red eyes of a father, the embrace of a demanding guide, and the breath of a child trying to wake us up. Nothing but the silent power of life.

Foxtrot is a series of dreams, three, each one with its own protagonist, distinctive mise en scène, and direction. In one, the sudden sense of void is portrayed with distressing cynicism, elegant geometrical compositions, and meticulously designed camerawork. In another, it switches to an ironic, almost fairytale-like, visual language—the camera hardly moving as the framing becomes flat, square, two-dimensional. In the final one, as if overwhelmed by an unbearable weight of existence, it seems to free from any stylistic filter and embrace a more natural, intimate, approach. As in its Samuel Maoz’s words, the film is meant to ‘shock and shake, hypnotise, and move.’ Mission accomplished.
A mistaken name, an empty can, a camel in the street—Foxtrot’s portrait of a fate tragically written by the most insignificant events is excruciating, but at the same time its manneristic aesthetic ultimately muffles its creative identity letting the intuitions be prevailed by an excessively perfect cerebral cage.

I watched it many years ago on the telly, I think as I wait for my drink at bar of the BFI. I can’t say I loved it, which makes me even more eager to experience it on a screen of its size. Less than a minute in I wonder, where the hell was I looking the first time. Simply put, The passenger is a wonder. My friend, the wise architect of this night out on the South Bank compares it to Camus’s L’Ètranger. Maybe he’s right. Maybe that’s way it immediately resonated with me.
Antonioni’s favourite work—as he said once in an interview—is an enigmatic cinematic piece which tension is slowly cooked under a torrid sun. All is dusty and sticky and sweaty. So is the human threat as it ominously closes in.

‘I've seen so many of them grow up. Other people look at the children and they all imagine a new world. But me, when I watch them, I just see the same old tragedy begin all over again. They can't get away from us. Is boring.’

While Fritz Lang as himself and Michel Piccoli as a promising screenwriter discuss Ulysses, Godard tells with the irony of genius and the severity of beauty of an impossible return, of a borderline crossed forever. C’est la vie, as the fragile muse with the voice and body of Brigitte Bardot often reminds us, convincing everyone but herself.
This is the film that marks my defeat. It is the film that makes me feel the weight of my arms hanging down to my sides even though they are resting on my lap, my legs crossed. Yet still, it’s not discouragement what I feel. And if tears are coming, they are of utter enchantment. As only those who have common sense deceive themselves by thinking that despair and hope are two different emotions. And while I think back to that quote of John Berger that haven’t known for a long time what to do with—‘What remains of our hopes is a long despair which will engender them again’—I turn off the light and madly in love I say to myself, so it will be!

I pause for a moment. I am looking for a way, even a tiny little door like that of Alice because Dogtooth, which in its own deviated fashion is no doubt a land of wonders, has left me as any Yorgos Lanthimos film—with a blurry sense of curiosity and fascination.
My fingers touch weightlessly the keyboard as if pleading for collaboration—sometimes it works. The word ‘experimental’ appears on the white page. I read it once or twice. Wrong suggestion, I conclude—never trust the machines. I glimpse my reflection in the mirror with the corner of my eye. Back to the screen, I type ‘surreal,’ which I seem to find a little more convincing—and yet so generic. Thus I delete it but slowly, going backward letter by letter, thinking that after all it is not that off. By now I’m a little annoyed because I’ll be soon run out of time and energy. It’s very late, but on the nth tragic yawn some clearer ideas finally start to take shape.
Pitching a brilliant, if eccentric, solution Dogtooth hints at Plato’s cave while delving into the delicate themes of education and parenthood. Raising a family ceased to be a natural task as our century began to put pressure on the individual, exposing him more and more to the manipulative compulsions of society. As any clever satire, Dogtooth lets us build the bridge from its allegoric aberrations to our own weaknesses, our own neuroses, our own fixations—which is scary, and profound, and now I am definitely tired. But there’s one last thing I can't help wondering—if Lanthimos has any clue of the expressions he puts on his viewers’ faces. As I am sure he wouldn’t mind, mine is currently that of a ‘little yellow flower’. That said, I switch off the light, but keep my eyes open.