However inspired by a rather eerie Latin American folktale, I find calling it a horror film not just misleading but quite reductive. As many traditional legends passed on over the centuries by word of mouth, La Llorona does tell of spirits and monsters, but they are more real and contemporary than we might like to think. Bluntly denouncing, if through fictional characters, blood-curdling historical events while unfolding an intense family drama, its absorbing narrative flow lets the unease crawl under our skin. Now magical, now raw and tense, it gives us the time to reflect, no matter where we are from, on our own culture and the common aberrations of our kind—the one we call human.
La Llorona’s aesthetics and internal imagery are as impactful as the message it delivers. Cold tints prevail while the warm fill the tight visual space metaphorically given to the natives. Water and its creatures are used as signs of an unforgiving past resurfacing. Curtains and veils shape the mystery, the untold, the unspeakable. Particularly masterful is a scene where a Mayan woman candidly recounts her shocking experience at a trial. The camera slowly tracks back, almost defied as the atrocious details are being revealed. Only at the end, she uncovers her face from a beautifully embroidered veil. The truth is out, it won’t hide back any longer. Artfully, this shot mirrors the opening, where a lady that we’ll shortly know be the wife of the retired general accused of genocide, asks God for protection reciting a long, excruciating prayer. Her stare is blank, or aghast. We will know in a couple of hours, when ours will likely be the same.

Panicking over the prospect of missing it, I faced a forbiddingly freezing North London night for a last-minute solo cinema escapade. Coming from an exhausting day and being, as a huge admirer of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, quite familiar with his work, I was resigned to drop dead—figuratively—less than two minutes in. I didn’t bring one of those toilet-shaped sausages people put around their neck on planes only because I find them silly, but I did wear something ostentatiously mistakable for pyjamas. What a pointless display of self-esteem, because Memoria is not just captivating, it is the closest cinema has recently taken me to transcendental meditation.
A good film (whatever it means, I am already regretting having used the expression for how nonsense it sounds to me, but anyway) would probably embrace me, make me live for a time through its characters, empathy, but it would still somehow drive the experience. Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s slow-paced enigmatic scenes of staggering beauty, whether set in his native Thailand or the luxuriant Colombian altitudes, seem to force reverse the process by shifting the narrative—for how extraneous many will find the very word, narrative, to Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s oeuvre—from the author to the audience, ultimately inviting the latter to drive instead. Like his previous works—but not for this being unoriginal or repetitive in the slightest—Memoria defies any established ideas of entertainment and sublimely defines that of cinematic experience. Really, I can’t imagine it being seen anywhere other than a big screen, in a dark room.

The silent sea, that never really is to those who listen. There is only one verbal exchange between the main antagonists in the entire film. In a story that tells of hatred and distance and deprivation, it’s a simple, almost casual, yet monumentally surprising line—entrée monsieur, not one of closure, but of welcome.
The theme of resistance is in every breath of Le Silence de la mer. The determination of an old man and his niece in ignoring their unwelcome guest’s hearty monologues, and that of the latter in seeking politely to communicate with his hosts—or maybe deceit his inner self. There is a form of resistance in the secret attraction between a man and a woman who will never dare beyond looking at each other. Even the snow seems to have a particularly stubborn attitude in the few exterior scenes, or the clock, inauspiciously ticking in the background of most of the film. Back from a most disappointing visit to Paris, von Ebrennac bumps into three peasants who show no intention of stepping aside to facilitate his passage on the narrow pavement as he resignedly squeezes tightrope-walker-like on the kerb to go through—resistance again, and how beautifully represented. But there’s also resistance in the obstinacy of a filmmaker shooting a profoundly unconventional film against all odds, with little money and encouragement, and facing the risk of having the entire footage destroyed in case reckoned unworthy of Bruller’s novel—a première œuvre, even, and just as striking as Howard Vernon’s first iconic close up at the country house threshold.

Behind a Pixar ante litteram semblance, lies a far more intelligent and not cheesy in the slightest gem that tells of childhood, dreams, spirituality, and the war. Set in the bombarded Ménilmontant neighbourhood of Paris, Le ballon rouge follows the improbable friendship between a boy—Albert Lamorisse’s son, incidentally—and a balloon found on the street tied to a lamppost. It is a charming story, almost disarming in its simplicity, and yet so rich and layered. Like most of Europe, France is scarred by deep open wounds. As the world is trying to put itself together wondering how and what next, a garish symbol of youth, hope, and future, comes brightening the gloomy urban grey, and not quite from nowhere, but in a way that suggests it might have been there, unnoticed, for a long time. It just took a child to spot it, and it won’t take a prick to kill it because more will join.
The final spectacular sequence that takes us up in the blue sky, over a city whose stunning beauty has clearly survived the devastation, has an almost dichotomous cathartic power. If on the one hand it fills us with an exhilarating sense of relief and optimism, on the other, it metaphorically hints at the many innocent souls recently lost. And the levity of the film is suddenly burdened with an even more touching unexpected meaning.
Enriched by ingenious visual effects—which I suspect have to be considered all the more remarkable given the times—Le ballon rouge’s vivid photography captures superbly the charm and misery of post bellum Paris. Albert Lamorisse’s documentary sensitivity is apparent. Everyday life minutiae make every shot an old chest full of precious things to discover, and the film a fascinating historical reference as well as a poetic piece of fiction.
Towards the end of the film, Pascal is chased by a gang of little bullies. Desperately trying to leave them behind, he dives into a dark alley gripping the string in his hand as hard as he can. Behind him, the balloon bounces frantically between the walls of the narrow passage. This is filmmaking at its best, an image that moved me profoundly, one that will ever hardly forget.

Melancholy, beauty, resilience, and the times that are a-changin’. L’Apollonide portrays life in a luxurious Parisian brothel au crépuscule du XIXéme siècle from the candid point of view of its girls. ‘Ça pue le sperme et le champagne ici.’
An electrical sense of imminent end flows all other a maze of rooms and corridors. A century is over, leaving some bits behind for good. Habits are evolving. Who’s young is ageing, who’s old is dying, children are blooming unaware of it all. The maisons closes are the last remaining hideout of those who are desperately fleeing the passage of time—the secret place where self deception is sold and bought more than actual desire, where the cildish obsessions of a decadent bourgeoisie are satisfied more than their erotic urges. Uncertainty looms over a sensuous intricacy of fears, anxieties, dreams—some nightmarish, some illusory, other crudely real. ‘Si nous ne brûlons pas, comment éclairer la nuit?’
L’Apollonide is not a flawless film, but its sincerity is captivating, its mise en scène superb, and the love given to both the practical and dramatic insights absolutely enchanting.

Les Quatre Cents Coups seems to presage the cultural revolution of 1968. In fact, its secondary school protagonists will be in their twenties a decade later so the time scale is about right. ‘Elle va être un peu belle, la France dans 10 ans!’ says prophetically the teacher.
The film revolves around the idea of centrifugal versus centripetal forces, sometimes in the most literal sense. Antoine’s rebellious attraction to the outside and the feeling of being chased, trapped, cornered—again, not just figuratively—is given shape by a series of near metaphorical images. The Tour Eiffel in the opening sequence, imposing totem of daring, fights to be seen behind obstructing curtains of buildings. At the fair, in the spinning cylinder thing—whatever that is, I’d love to try it— he is pushed away and yet almost squashed on the curved wall of the exotic contraption. The epic final scene—that long run on the shore toward the sea he’s never seen—is so full of an exhilarating sense of freedom, air, future. But then again, is the long dreamt open horizon the answer, or another boundary in itself?

I have seen the MGM lion roar uncountable times but there’s something particularly exciting when it performs for a Paul Thomas Anderson film. It feels like being pushed back to an age where monumental films were made, except there’s no need to go that far from where I am sitting right now because I know something worthy of that allure is about to start.
It has been called a coming-of-age affair but the whimsically titled Licorice Pizza is more than that, and it doesn’t take longer than the opening to get it. If I ever considered walk-and-talk scenes a bit stagy or mannered, PTA proves me wrong by choreographing actors and sprinklers in a masterfully written sequence that while casting golden shades on the incredible talent of the two leads, frames at once the characters, their wants, and the world they live in.
There begins a picaresque SoCal romantic journey that is also, and rather quintessentially, about the pivotal American Seventies, those of a country trying to come to terms with Watergate, Vietnam, Charlie Manson, and desperately hustle the lost optimism of the previous decade into a new form of energy—the same, incidentally, that will irreversibly affect the entire Western culture.
The only thing that didn’t quite convince me is the parade of celebrities cameos (Bradley Cooper, Sean Penn and Tom Waits in particular, but also Harriet Sansom Harris’ vague caricatured homage to her own role in Phantom Thread). However hilarious, they seem to unnecessarily downgrade the otherwise brilliant comedic side of the film to a slightly cliched level. Minor flaw, if one at all, because Licorice Pizza is nonetheless quite as dazing as cinema can be.

Four people and two generations in front of a telly, the remote not in my hands. I couldn’t cope with another film like Disney’s nauseating Encanto. None of us could really, so I blindly play a trump card.
Aaron Sorkin writes for the stage making it look like cinema—or he writes screenplays as if they were plays. I have always found his idiosyncratic virtuoso dialogues more fun to read than to watch. His characters’ wittier-than-life eloquence often feels a little too impeccable even for a representation of life like cinema is, no matter how realistic it might appear.

BOB: Yeah, that’s exactly what I was going to pitch.
MADELYN: But I pitched it faster.
BOB: By interrupting me.
MADELYN: How do you think I got to be a woman in a comedy room?

Then again, ‘what you gotta understand’ is that this is Aaron Sorkin—one of the few working writers to really have a distinctive style, and also one of the best at picking a moment out of somebody’s lifetime making that fraction of history into a beautifully structured, rewardingly intelligent story.
To all the above, for better or worse, Being the Ricardos is no exception—it is in fact his most convincing work among those he both wrote and directed.

Even though the spider-verse thing does bring some kind of a positive mix of spice, surprise and nostalgia to it, the only redeeming features of the experience were the wonderful end title sequence designed by Karin Fong, the excitement of my two little associates before the film started (or, say, before it admittedly faded about an hour in), and Jon Favreau. Generally speaking, the real limitation of superhero movies is live-action. However well written the script—which isn’t necessarily the case of the flamboyant No Way Home—anyone in a tight garish onesie would look like a loser or a cosplay at best, whatever the difference. Superheroes live, and are such, only in comics and animation. Convincing exceptions are very few and none of this Marvel generation is on track to be one.