I browse through some old posters in a rack while my friend is queuing for drinks. Then I stop and look around the foyer. On every single object I lie my eyes on I see reflected the joy of acknowledging my physical presence in a cinema, and it feels great.
A few minutes later we sink in a familiar obscurity, but it only takes the time to read the opening card to be transported from the beautiful screening room of the Phoenix into a far less inviting place, and darker. An unfriendly metallic clatter breaks the murky silence. Frances McDormand opens a garage door letting a desolate brightness in. Quite a metaphor after over a year of pandemic captivity. I breathe the snow in like I could smell the cold, maybe I can. So, I think, this is the film everybody’s been talking about for months.
Watching Nomadland I couldn’t help contemplating what a stoical cinematic achievement it is to have shot a film like that. At the same time, I won’t lie, it felt a bit like watching a great film I have already seen. Even Frances McDormand seemed to me like giving a masterly performance she has already given. Maybe that’s because of how all the elements perfectly fit, or maybe because of how familiar are the emotions Chloé Zhao so tactfully captures. After all Nomadland is not a film about loss and absence, but rather one about what’s left, about presence, and the present. Again, quite timely so.

Whoever went to the cinema more than twice in his life knows that some films end and other don’t. There are rolling credits during which people get up and make their way hunched over between knees, abandoned coffee cups, and piles of popcorns to the exit, and other during which all stay sit, watching motionless names of strangers, waiting for an idea to take shape in their mind, the tears to dry, or for someone else to make the first brave move. Favolacce, the second directed as well as written by the D’Innocenzo brothers, is of this latter witchy breed.
Grown-up children awkwardly parented by a series of appallingly childish, useless, neurotic adults, are the strange souls with feral urges that populate a Roman summer of deafening cicadas.
Magnificently shot and interpreted, paced by the evocative music of Egisto Macchi¹ and the ethereal voice of Rosemary Standley², Favolacce is a suburban pastoral as true as the pages of a secret diary that seems to stir a reflection on what this generation is doing for the next and what kind of teaching is leaving behind.
Or maybe not. No matter. For as long as that doubt is alive, the spell cast by this special film will be with it, and so the desire to watch it again.

1. Egisto Macchi, Città notte, 1972.
2. Rosemary Standley & Dom La Nena, Birds on a Wire, 2014.

Speaking nests and cuckoos with a lover of Chekhov—Irish atheist—on a wet afternoon at the Heat, I realised that I spent a consistent part of my infinite childhood in front of a telly on which Miloš Forman’s Amadeus was playing in a loop. Whatever my parents had in mind, I am not sure it worked. In fact, I’m sure it didn’t. However, watching it today after a long time and with relatively fresh eyes, I still find myself in the same exhilarating state of awe.
Rewriting for the screen, Peter Shaffer puts his hands on his own work with resolute butcher mastery, managing not only to preserve the integrity of the themes—the Apollonian and the Dionysian, agony and ecstasy, passion and discipline, and of course envy—but to make the story stronger, the dialogues even sharper, and fill some scenes with the most indomitable romanticism.
Under the mourning sky, three gravediggers raise their collars as they gloomily leave the shelter. Amidst the iron crosses and the tragic trees of a late autumn, the hearse has arrived. It is an ordinary morning of silent tears, shed for another dead Christ with no name like many.

Their long, heavy skirts slightly moved by a surreal breeze—those of three women watching something off-camera unaware of the observer’s mechanical eye, mesmerised by a vision that will always be theirs only. It is to this famous 1951 still photography by Lucien Hervé that Marcell Iványi gives his own fascinating interpretation. Szél is a single-shot film that shines with Hungarian stylistic economy and an extraordinarily ingenious cinematic narrative. A simple camera revolution on a tripod seems to follow the voice of the wind in search of an answer. Curiosity intensifies as we pan across the deserted countryside, then turns into anguish, horror, and a final pragmatic resignation. These are not the seven minutes that will change the history of cinema, but a time not wasted that attracts our gaze like a lesser moon, intensely bright.

Among the many short films recently made by well-known directors (Mati Diop, Pablo Larraín, Paolo Sorrentino, Sebastián Lelio, to name some of the directors behind those I have seen) there is one that succeeded where others struggled to penetrate the creative muffling of this static unprecedented time.
Referring in the title to a strange epidemic case of compulsive urge to dance in the streets, Strasbourg 1518 implies an analogy between the extravagant historical episode and the current claustrophobic condition. With the domestic means that this period demands, Jonathan Glazer and Mica Levi meet again giving birth to a work that gradually convinces by making of the collective hysteria a hypnotic spectacle. The delirium and addiction of life in a cage according to the rare genius of one who managed to resist the torpor and keep feeding the artistic unquietness.

As I return to watching films after one of my recurring hiatuses from the screen, I couldn’t have bumped into something more exciting. And it’s not just because it delves into times and themes that are close to my own experience—Joanna Hogg’s latest truly is a precious gem made of a rare milky matter.
Interesting how The Souvenir, which shines especially for its dialogues, was apparently shot without a traditional screenplay, relying on the improvisational genius of the cast and the sensitivity of the director. It makes me think of an interview with Jean-Luc Godard, when prompted by Dick Cavett took out of his jacket the scripts of his two next films—a bunch of notes on a tiny notebook. And it makes me reflect on the role of the writer, on how actors can de facto become co-authors, and cinema even more creatively collective without watering down the identity of the work.

Jojo Rabbit is as strange and suspicious as its playful title. It looks like a children’s movie, but it is not at all, and it’s hardly for adults too. Although it is, for both. The language of Taika Waititi is a bit of a mess in search of an author that, courting Chaplin, Wes Anderson and Roberto Benigni, alternates a slightly dated comedy—at times funny, other priestly—with unexpectedly romantic moments, some of which a little cheesy, some genuinely touching.

For all that it is not, and its garish sense of wrong, Jojo Rabbit is in its own undefinable way a rather witty and profound film. Not least among its merits, that of recovering the formidable German version of David Bowie’s Hero, and entrusting its candid soul to the verses of Rainer Maria Rilke.

‘Let everything happen to you, beauty and terror.
Just keep going, no feeling is final.’

He is standing on the shore contemplating an almost motionless sea, acknowledging his own limits as a bureaucrat, a man, a father, a whoremonger—and the absurdity of the pompous culture he represents for necessity. He is at a dead-end, retreating being his only option, although a seemingly impossible one.
Don Diego de Zama, the strenuous corregidor, the resolute and righteous judge. He who brought peace among the Indians and made justice without ever drawing the sword. But also Zama the desperate man, lost and distant, consumed by the atrocious loneliness of a God born old who cannot die.
Lucrecia Martel delves once more into the inmost feelings of an alienated creature, his broken dialogue with a world that was once his and is no more—and does so with exquisite taste, delivering one of the best of our time.

They live in the mud above the clouds.
They’ll go down to the river screaming.
They will hide in the forest like sprites.
And continue the fight, the fires, and the dance.

The first few minutes of Monos equals a violent heart sank. The rest of the film is as exhilarating as the music that shapes it, a miraculous soundtrack by Mica Levi. Alejandro Landes’ Fitzcarraldian endeavour is a story without a place about painted faces and deep gazes, black eyes filled with rage and courage, belief and innocence. About those few who can bear the stare of beelzebub, and it’s stench, not needing or bothering to chase the flies away.