"Past Lives" (Prince Charles Cinema) Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), two deeply connected childhood friends, are wrest apart after Nora's.family emigrates from South Korea. Two decades later, they're reunited in New York for one fateful week as they confront notions of destiny, love, and the choices that make a life, in this heartrending modern romance.   The film, at once strikingly intimate and bracing in its scope, is broken into three parts spanning countries and decades: first with Nora (Moon Seung-ah) as a young girl in Korea, developing an early bond with her best friend, Hae Sung (Leem Seung-min), before she immigrates with her family to Toronto; then, following Nora in her early 20s as she reconnects virtually with Hae Sung; and finally, more than a decade later, when Hae Sung visits Nora, now a playwright married to an author, Arthur (John Magaro), in New York. The film has the instincts and control of an artist with a precise vision of the story's every conflicted, emotional note. The triptych that tracks Nora over the years is, in the most basic sense, about the different parts of her past. But in the film's breadth, sketching out the long arc of her relationships with Hae Sung and Arthur, and the memorable moment when they all eventually come together, the film constructs a deeply resonant and warmly generous meditation on the trajectory of a life. It's about, on a very simple level, what it's like to exist as a person. Or what it's like to choose a life that you live. More specifically, what that choice means for Nora, and what happens when the other choice, her phantom life in a sense, is suddenly staring at her through a computer screen, or across a park in New York City. It's so unfair, the devastating thing about us as people, the fact that we only have one life.   The simple, poignant tragedy in the film is also its animating idea: that choosing one life means losing another. There's a piece of yourself that you leave behind in the place you left, who like Nora, emigrated from Korea at the age of 12 for Toronto, before moving again to New York in her 20s. The moment, and the meaning and history filled in that gaze, bears a striking resemblance to the moment in "Past Lives", when Nora and Hae Sung finally see each other, in person, for the first time in years. It's like seeing a reflection of yourself from a different time. Hae Sung a hologram of a totally different existence, what could have been. The connection that Nora develops, first as a child, then over online messages and Skype sessions in her 20er, and revisits in-person later in life is, structurally, a carbon copy of what happened in Hae Sung's life. For her, the experience, one that is at some level universal for anyone who has simply moved into, say, another city or another phase of life, is especially disorienting and wistful, imbued by a distinctly diasporic longing as an immigrant who left behind her country, culture, and language at a formative age. You're not just seeing this person as they're, but you're seeing them as you remember them, which is in childhood. Nora, in other words, is her own person, rather than an idea sketched out by the binary of which man she chooses.   She's so certain about what she wants. And yet, as Nora's worlds collide between these two men, the third act eventually returns us to the bar scene that opens the film, with renewed context, if also a new, uneasy tension. There aren't any villains. But there are people who are filled with pride and people who are jealous and envious and angry, but they've to fight through those emotions. It would be a mistake, though, to read this dynamic as an early scene of a melodramatic love triangle. If "Past Lives" is a film about adults trying their best to behave like adults, no dramatic professions of love, no teary-eyed fights, no villains, this isn't to say it isn't a film that deals in sweeping emotional sentiment. One person can hold this much love, for her husband, for her childhood first love, and for herself, that's sacred. As for Arthur and Hae Sung, it's about these two men who know her, When Nora talks in her sleep, Arthur tells her at one point, she speaks in Korean, stepping into a version of herself only in her dreams. If Arthur can never know that part of Nora, there's a different, more alienating sense of absence for Nora and Hae Sung. He's here to sort of lift the veil and see that that little girl is gone. Then, Nora goes back, left to right, in the direction from which she came. She will stand there for a moment, and then she's gonna go back home, and every step is going to be a walk towards the future from the past.   You find yourself sitting at a bar sandwiched between two men from vastly different parts of your life. One is your husband, the other you childhood sweetheart. These two men love you in different ways, in two different languages and two different cultures. And you're the only reason why these two men are even talking to each other. There's something almost sci-fi about it. You feel like somebody who can transcend culture and time and space and language. It would be a mistake, though, to read this dynamic as an early scene of a melodramatic love triangle. Instead, The film turns this seed of experience into a quietly gutting film, concerned with something far more emotionally complex, the parts of a self that we lose as we become the people we're, and the ways our lives are shaped by those we love. And yet, the film is just as deeply emotional about the cosmic forces that shape our lives: if there's a bone-deep mourning over past selves, there's also the beauty in human connection, in the fact that a woman can find herself sitting with two surreally disparate parts of her lives, as if bending the rules of time and space. If there are 50 people in the room, you've 50 different reasons each of them have cried, and 50 different ways they’ve seen themselves. In all those ways of watching the film, there's actually no wrong answer, except for the one where you don't feel connected at all.   Written by Gregory Mann

"Ferrari"     It's the summer of 1957. Behind the spectacle of Formula 1, ex-racer Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver) is in crisis. Bankruptcy threatens the factory he and his wife, Laura (Penelope Cruz), built from nothing ten years earlier. Their volatile marriage has been battered by the loss of their son, Dino, a year earlier. Ferrari struggles to acknowledge his son Piero (Giuseppe Festinese) with Lina Lardi (Shai lens Woodley). Meanwhile, his drivers’ passion to win pushes them to the edge as they launch into the treacherous 1,000-mile race across Italy, the Mille Miglia.   Passion, ambition, power, the characteristics of Enzo Ferrari racecars came from within the man himself. From the beginning, they began to dominate the competition and fire imaginations worldwide. Born in Modena, Italy, the former racecar driver and team manager formed his own company in 1947. Built with almost no funding, Ferrari’s first car in its sixth race won the Rome Grand Prix. By 1957 the world’s greatest racers were vying for seats in Ferrari’s. Enzo and his wife, Laura, re-invested heavily in the racing division. As a result, by 1957 insolvency was stalking the factory. Meanwhile the tragic death of their only son, Dino, to mluscular dystrophy in 1956 has further shaken their rocky marriage. Dino was their center and future; now gone. Both grieve differently over the devastating loss. Meanwhile, Piero Lardi, Enzo’s son born in 1945 from his liaison with Linda Lardi, now seeks the acknowledgment of his father. Together they constitute a second family of which Laura is unaware until it’s revealed. As crises and revelations converge, Ferrari wagers all on winning one race, the supremely dangerous 1,000-mile race across open roads called the Mille Miglia.   We all know it’s our deadly passion, our terrible joy. But if you get into one of Ferrari cars, and no one is forcing you to take that seat, you get in to win. Enzo Ferrari is one of the most famous, yet inscrutable and complex men of the 20th century. “Ferrari” moves behind the inscrutable image of the iconic Enzo Ferrari. Based on Brock Yates 1991 book 'Enzo Ferrari: The Man, The Car, The Races, The Machine', the film is a character study. There's no equilibrium in his life, and that’s the whole point of Enzo Ferrari, because that’s more like the way life actually is. Ferrari was precise and logical; rational in everything to do with his factory and race team. In the rest of his life he was impulsive, defensive, libidinous, chaotic. The story is not a typical biopic. It seizes on the four months of Enzo Ferrari’s life, in 1957, when all the conflicts and fortunes, the drama of his and Laura and Lina’s lives come into focus. All the hurdles he faced in the mid-1950s, when motorsports was becoming a glamorous, international phenomenon. There's further duality in Ferrari’s life; his wife, Laura, was a woman hardened by struggle, grief, petrified love, and from being a woman involved in a business dominated by men.   An early deal with Ferrari meant that Laura is a 50/50 partner in the Ferrari factory, which became even more complicated when the couple’s personal life became messy and cold, and Laura’s savvy business instincts emerged as one of the few avenues of control she had. The power Laura had over the Ferrari company would anger Enzo, and yet, when his engineering staff once threatened to quit if Laura continued to make production visits at the factory, Enzo fired all of them, the world’s greatest automotive engineers, on the spot, immediately, out of solidarity with Laura. Still, Laura is invested in Enzo’s success and the Ferrari team’s wins on the track. Meanwhile, Enzo met, Lina Lardi, whom he had met in a factory his native Modena, Italy, during World War II, anchored his life. When their son Piero was born in 1945, Lina raised him in Castelvetro. She was a post-war Italian single mother focused on what was right for her child despite his being born out of wedlock at a moment in history, and in a country, that didn’t accept divorce. It's about providing a safe space for her son to feel like he belonged in a world that, during that time, especially in Catholic Italy, told anyone under those circumstances that they didn’t belong.   If Enzo Ferrari’s life was bifurcated into chaos and control, his life with Lina Lardi was a cause for one while embodying a desire for the other. When their affair began during the Second World War, Lardi had been working at a coachbuilding factory in Modena, and as Prime Minister Benito Mussolini’s fascist policies and World War II ravaged Italy, Ferrari and Lardi’s relationship grew. In the disarray of post-war Italy and the hardships that followed, Lardi raised their son, Piero. Lina is a woman at the crossroads of two lives that existed outside of her own, and she was a bit helpless in that situation; all Lina could do was show support and love for her son and the man that she loved. In Lina’s most forthright moment in the film, she confronts Enzo on his hesitancy to acknowledge Piero with his last name (due to Laura’s legal maneuvers and Italian cultural considerations, Piero was not able to be acknowledged as a member of the Ferrari family until after Laura’s death in 1978). The complexities and emotions involved were tumultuous, but Lina’s view is that what matters most is what’s best for Piero, and that has loved by Enzo as his son.   The difficulty of having two families, and two homes, one filled with grief over the loss of a son who hadn’t lived past the age of 24, the other focused on making a 12-year-old boy’s life free from pain and want, crashes into Enzo Ferrari’s pursuit of engineering perfection. He sees all too clearly the risk of losing all he’s built, either to companies like Fiat and Ford who were looking to buy him out, or through personal issues that threatened to overtake his life’s work. In 1957, Ferrari was going broke; the company’s passenger car sales had dwindled as competitors began breaking his cars speed records, making it harder to secure funding. All of that fueled Ferrari’s competitive nature even more. Ferrari would take a huge gamble with the fortunes of his company by entering the 1957 Mille Miglia, the famous 1,000-mile, open-road endurance race through Italy that had begun in 1927. Thirty years after its inaugural race, it was about to collide with a form of blind ambition Ferrari isn’t ready to be accountable for. His aim, going into this dangerous race, is to put together a multigenerational, flashy driving team that would attract financing to keep the Ferrari factory in business, and which would allow Ferrari to maintain control. But the cost would be high.   Moving to the racetrack, chief among the team of drivers surrounding Enzo Ferrari would be Alfonso de Portago (Gabriel Leone), whose horrific crash in the final stretch of Italy’s Mille Miglia, which killed de Portago and nine spectators, would for decades overshadow the legacy of the race and be part of the reason it ended in 1957. Eugenio Castellotti (Marino Franchitti) dies while attempting to reclaim Ferrari’s speed record from Maserati. Sound is also crucial in the de Portago crash sequence. At the moment of impact, the sound almost disappears, leaving a dull, closed-ear vibe to the sounds that follow. The concept is to have the impact noises as the car is plowing into the pole and through the crowd diminish over time. Piero began working with his father in the late 1960s and collaborated with the company’s Formula One teams, as well as in the concept and production process, and other aspects of production. When Enzo Ferrari died in 1988, Piero inherited his father’s stake in the company. Piero served as president of the Ferrari company until 2015.   There's the world of Enzo’s more intimate, domestic life, at home with Laura or in the countryside with Lina, and then there's the world of racing. The former would be a more classically composed aesthetic, while the latter would be filled with visceral, dynamic energy often through handheld camerawork. Italian Renaissance painting is so informed by architecture and the natural light that Italian architecture of that period lends to a space. It’s all this single-source, directional lighting from the windows. As for the color palette, the yellows, oranges, pale greens and terracotta/ochre hues of Northern Italy set the template. The concept is to slash through that palette with the bright, primary red of the cars, signifying aggression and energy in the face of the more austere aesthetic elsewhere in the film. The cars are kinetic, they’re full of agitation. The film wants to show the experience of what it's to drive one of those cars and to be in a tense race, trying to master the forces. It's, by design, a counterpoint to the formality of the dramatic, dialogue-filled scenes. There are incredibly powerful human moments, then we’re roaring around Italy with drivers flirting with death. In so many places around the world, it’s still a very similar situation, working from the shadows and not being acknowledged for what they do, not being valued. It’s as if youve mild chronic pain, only it’s emotional, but it's important for us to see that represented in many ways, but especially physically. Life is asymmetrical. Life is messy. Life is filled with chaos.   Written by Gregory Mann

“Poor Things”     “Poor Things” in the fantastical evolution of Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), a young woman brought back to life from the brink of death by the brilliant and unorthodox daring scientist Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). Under Baxter’s protection, Bella is eager to learn. Hungry for the worldliness she's lacking, Bella runs off with Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), a slick and debauched lawyer, on a whirlwind adventure across the continents. Free from the prejudices of her times, Bella grows steadfast in her purpose to stand for equality and liberation.   At the beginning of the film, Bella is a prisoner in the house and wears very Victorian looking blouses, but never a complete outfit. Bella doesn’t have any shame or trauma, or even a backstory. She's not raised by a society that's putting these confines on women. Bella draws things from the men she meets, from the women she meets, from the environment she's in, from what she's eating. Her character has never been told that there’s anything wrong with enjoying sex or the freedom to do whatever she wants when she wants. She's like a sponge. From being trapped at home, she goes to Lisbon on a romantic voyage with her lover. On the ship, she's met with a constant desire to escape. Then Alexandria are her younger years, where she sees the world as a messed-up place. Paris is her exploration of sexuality, where she pushes herself as far as she can before she returns home. Bella’s representation of woman sexuality is more in line with today’s landscape rather than thirty years ago. She's able to explore sex without feelings of guilt, which makes her a modern heroine. It feels like an unlocking and acceptance of what it's to be a woman and to be brave and free. Socially, you're so wired to think, ‘do people like me? She's not thinking about that.   Alongside themes of sexuality and social constraints comes the exploration of the male character's need to control Bella. Dr. Godwin Baxter is a brilliant, traumatized scientist, and a lonely man who wants to push his science and his art as far as it can go without a care for society’s rules. Baxter has his own journey as well. He starts out trying to possess her in a way, to parent her in the only way he's learned through his father. But you see that he kind of matures through his interaction with her. And eventually he comes to understand that he needs to let go and let her experience the world, and he's really supportive. Baxter also comes from an experiment, and he’s quite literally scarred by what his father has done to him. When Baxter brings Bella back to life, she becomes more than just an experiment to him, their relationship is not easily defined. Baxter hasn’t loved before, but he accidentally loves Bella, cares for her deeply and sees something of himself in her. There's an intelligence, curiosity and aliveness in Bella that he maybe wishes he could explore in himself. They're father and daughter, scientist and experiment, and even soul mates in a way, though not in a romantic or exploitative way. It’s not a simple relationship to categorize. The dynamic is being worked out over the course of the film through Bella’s discoveries. At a certain point, Baxter realizes she has to go out into the world, but he’s selfish and needs to go to a higher love.   Their relationship reaches a crisis point when Bella decides to leave home with Duncan Wedderburn. Duncan embodies toxic masculinity. He’s controlling, insecure and has a deep alpha male mentality. When Bella decides to leave London with Duncan Wedderburn and travel to Lisbon, she leaves with the mind and outlook of a young girl. Lisbon is her first time out in the world, and she wants to consume and experience everything, revealing in all the possibilities it has to offer. The danger with Duncan is that he just come across as a cad. As a ladies man who has been with many women, when he unexpectedly falls in love with Bella, it ultimately destroys him. She’s the perfect woman for him if he would just let her be herself. She’s rebellious, she’s game, and she makes him feel something, but his need to control kills the relationship. Under every raging narcissist is a really broken, vulnerable person, and Bella just cracks him open.   A bittersweet catalyst in Baxter and Bella’s relation's hip is the introduction of his student, Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef). Max is a poor-disheveled student who's clearly in awe of his professor, who has offered him an opportunity he can’t refuse. He has a gentle and friendly energy, but we also see an edge of darkness that he wants to let go. Part of the draw for Max is that he has lived a very sheltered life, and Bella seems safe, and very pure for obvious reasons. He’s a character that grows and whose moral compass shifts as he encounters Baxter and Bella. There's a rawness about Bella which attracts Max, she really speaks to something that any person is probably trying to regain. She's a modern woman in this time, and she gets to retain that human curiosity that we all had at a young age. It really shows the multitude of what is thrown at women from a young age. Bella gets to experience that from a different vantage point and then pick it apart and demolish it.   Harry Astley (Jerrod Carmichael) is someone that Bella meets at a key point in her journey on the ship. So far, she thinks that people are good, which comes from a place of privilege. Harry broadens the scope of the world. He shows her poverty that she didn’t know existed in a way that's juxtaposed to the very wealthy as a spectator sport. Harry is a cynic, through his life and career, his viewpoint has narrowed, which is why the scenes with Bella work so well; the juxtaposition of her naivety to his prejudices. When he takes Bella to Alexandria, she's confronted for the first time by mankind’s inhumanity to poverty. When he takes her to Alexandria, her soul shatters and her entire life changes. It's her first trauma and leads to some very important decisions in her life. Bella’s eyes are opened to the monstrous part of society when Harry takes her to Alexandria, and she sees the impoverished slum dwellers. This is the only time we see Bella as a representative of her social class and as an upper-class woman. There are really souls in the world that are pure and nonjudgmental, and you oscillate between thinking that they’re naïve and also wishing that you could have that freedom.   Bella is fascinated by Martha Von Kurtzroc (Hanna Schygulla) when she meets her on the cruise ship. She’s an older woman who's dressed eccentrically for the time and is very independent, so Bella is inspired by her instantly. Martha is a Women’s Libber and emancipated. She’s wealthy and can afford to have certain thoughts and ideologies because she’s never been dependent on a man. In Paris, Bella reaches a pinnacle for her sexual and intellectual development. It all comes together there in a way, she truly decides on how to see the world and how she wants to live in it. Swiney (Kathryn Hunter) is outrageous and cruel. On the face of it, she’s the horrid Madame of the Brothel, but then she falls for Bella, and she wants to possess this extraordinary creature. With Swiney’s character, Bella ultimately understands that it’s not just men who try to control her. With the profession she works in and the assortment of characters that have come through her doors, Swiney assumes that she has seen every facet of womankind. When Bella shows up on her doorstep, it astonishes her. She’s amazed by this, kind of naïve genius.   After Bella returns home and starts to settle back and relax into this world — and the happiness of her existence, Alfred Blessington (Christopher Abbot) suddenly appears, and her whole backstory comes to surface. He’s a bit of a cunt, generally, but he still has a heart somewhere deep down, shrouded under a bunch of ice. He's very possessive in some ways, but he's been through war and has a lot of PTSD. While Alfie knows Bella from her former existence, he's, ultimately, seeing her for the first time. It's probably quite jarring for Alfred because he's catching her when she's become a fully formed adult again. To him, he probably actually believes this is her, and it's some farce, there's a lot of denial happening. His character admits that their relationship had not been an ordinary one. It feels like they probably had this sort of mischievous, very combative, but fiery relationship in the past.   “Poor Things” deals with the patriarchal tension through Bella’s eyes. Bella is not only the protagonist but also the foil for the male characters. It's her ability to remain true to her humanity and to use her experiences to discover a sense of purpose that makes her admirable. Her zest for life encapsulates the curiosity that humans possess and crave new life experiences. It's about the development and liberation of a woman who grows up in a very repressive male society. That’s a lot of the source of the comedy because her relationships with the male characters are very frank and quite exposing of the fear men have of women. The male characters are trying to control Bella in their own various ways, and she doesn’t even entertain it. She's just too autonomous. The film explores men’s views of women and the lens that they're put under, and how men believe women are there to serve them.   What would a woman be, if she were able to start from scratch? Alasdair Gray’s novel is immediately something very visually striking and complex, the themes, the humor, and the complexity of its characters and language. The book is packed with ideas about gender, identity, and even Scottish nationalism. You’re in this incredibly rich philosophical and political world, all while being hilarious. It's a story about a woman’s freedom in society. To imagine a world where your mind isn’t conditioned by growing up and being taught to be a certain way. But it's also a version of the Frankenstein story, inverting the classic story by making the monster’ a very perceptive, beautiful woman, and her love interests potential monsters. While the book is told from numerous points of view, the script gives Bella the central one. It’s Bella’s coming-of-age story, and it lives in a dystopian version of a Merchant Ivory film, with the idea of a grand tour. The script pulls on different mythologies and story tropes. The story is grotesque and visceral.   There's a different mentality around sex in Europe versus America. We can watch so much violence and pain inflicted on people in a mass way in America, but nudity and sexuality are shocking to us. With the liberation of social constraints, also comes the return to a child-like wonder of the world. It’s that draw to purity, to something that hasn’t been tarnished. A wish to possess something that maybe reminds us of whom we used to be and try and regain that innocence in ourselves. We're very cognizant of the sexual politics and how that relates to the present day. There are always those people in society that don’t have the look of the time. You could walk down the street now and see someone who looks like they’ve come straight from the 70s. We're exploring who those people might have been, and what if they thought differently? When reading about women in the Victorian times, she noticed it was often much more about what rules they should follow. Bella has no shackles on her, making her a wonderful character to watch and the perfect example of pushing back against what was expected in Victorian England.   “Poor Things” comes at a time that might offer some insight into the problems currently faced around the world. The times that we live in right now can feel particularly chaotic. Sometimes you want to look back in history and learn lessons from the past. This is a political film, and we've to recognize the feminist and socialist aspects. The endeavor of the novel and the film is to make the world a better place by not accepting the evils we've come to regard as normal.   Written by Gregory Mann

"All Of Us Strangers"     One night in his near-empty tower block in contemporary London, Adam (Andrew Scott) has a chance encounter with a mysterious neighbor Harry (Paul Mescal), which punctures the rhythm of his everyday life. As a relationship develops between them, Adam is preoccupied with memories of the past and finds himself drawn back to the suburban town where he grew up, and the childhood home where his parents appear to be living, just as they were on the day they died, 30 years before.   There’s a textured, indelible sense of pathos that runs through "All Of Us Strangers", and the vast majority of the film’s complexities sits firmly on the shoulders of the protagonist Adam. Adam is a forty-something gay screenwriter living in a new build apartment block in London. He’s an orphan. He’s single, lonely. He carries around the burden of grief from a traumatic episode in his youth that saw both parents killed in a car crash. A cliché, he claims. Adam is a very solitary figure. He’s described by his mother as a very gentle and compassionate person. But that’s a kind of privilege, in a way. Adam is yearning to see his parents again, aching to be known by them. Perhaps finding them again will bring comfort and closure after the terrible loss. But it’s no easy task, nostalgia can often hide a different truth, and his parents were a product of the time they lived. Adam must also confront his fragile sense of self, battered by growing up gay in the 80s and 90s. Two traumas perhaps, closely entwined, stopping him from finding peace. Harry lives in the same apartment block as Adam, and after propositioning his neighbor one drunken evening, the two eventually become romantically involved. Their intensely passionate and transformative love affair has a transcendent power for them both.   He feels like a little boy, like somebody who should be a lot happier than he is, and the world tells him that he should be, but he’s not. He hides behind being sex positive and sex forward, and being fun, and he has a somewhat casual but problematic relationship with drugs and alcohol, he’s trapped. We recognize him in little bits of outself and friends and young men in the world. Much of the film’s emotional punch comes from the tender, heart-wrenching, and healing bond between Adam and his parents, when he returns to his childhood home and spends time with them. His deceased parents, who are alive, and the same age they were when they died. It’s a unique and endearing sense of absurdity, yet one that almost instantly feels weird. Mum (Claire Foy) has a complicated role, she's less accepting of who Adam is, of who he’s become. You can imagine that the father (Jamie Bell) would be the one to be uncomfortable with the idea that his son is gay. It adds this layer of complexity to Mum’s character. Adam coming out to his parents, finally, is one of the key narrative forces within this tale, and is handled with an adept, delicate touch that makes for some of the film’s most moving sequences, down to the subtlety of the writing. The characters have to maintain a sort of element of mystery.   "All Of Us Strangers" is hauntingly poignant and hypnotic story of loss and love and everything in between, is inspired by the novel 'Strangers' by Japanese author Taichi Yamada. First penned in 1987 and translated into English in 2003. What if you met your parents again long after they were gone, only now they’re the same age as you? The romantic parallel journey of "All Of Us Strangers" takes place in a more familiar, contemporary London. Scenes there range from the towering, modern apartment block where both Adam and Harry live, to the nightclub, which hosts an impactful and beautifully rendered portion of the film, shot on location at the iconic queer London institution: the Vauxhall Tavern. The isolation of the former set where Adam lives adds not only to the themes of loneliness that are prevalent, but to an otherworldly feeling which plays up to the supernatural element of the story. It’s a key part of the story as it really symbolizes the character’s isolation, and feeling very disconnected from the world, so we all have a real vision in mind. It seems an emotional way to explore the nature of family. The film wants to explore the complexities of both familial and romantic love, but also the distinct experience of a specific generation of gay people growing up in the 80s.   Though "All Of Us Strangers" is set in a singular time frame and era, the sequences when Adam returns to his childhood home to see his parents take place in a 1980s version of our world, as though stepping into a dream, a hazy, nostalgia-induced memory. It’s kind of hallowed turf, in a way. Move away from the traditional ghost story of the novel and find something more psychological, almost metaphysical. It's very surreal, and it makes us think a lot about what our children are going to say about our homes in forty years. It almost feels apocalyptic. It mirrors the isolation of the world to a certain extent; you’ve got these corporate towers, and these cities that are rapidly eroding, and you feel like little ants in this massive tower.   If you’re not inclined to go out and mix with the world, you can very easily find a place that isolates you. That’s what the tower represents, it feels cold and soulless. And in the face of all that, these two characters still manage to find a connection which we think is really uplifting. The off-realism feeling, the ever-so-slightly otherworldly atmosphere, is something that's also informed by Francis Bacon exhibition in London and the paintings were really strong, timeless, and there’s something about floating in time and space, about a lot of those images which ties in really well with this script. It's also grounded by the way in which it tackles the human experience. Its many layers and textures carry a profound, emotional undercurrent.   The film feels quite like a dream, then like the moment just before you fall asleep or the moment you wake from a dream, not quite sure what’s real. A more liminal space. Rather than play up to the supernatural elements, the film wants to focus on the notion of memory and how it works. Memories define us; they define what we become, our character, both for good and bad. We dug deep into our memories of growing up. It's a painful but cathartic experiment. In many ways, the film is about how you integrate emotional pain into your life. That pain will never vanish, it will always find a hiding place, but that doesn’t mean you can’t move forward. We're just living in the moment. We are not considering that this has a finite time on it. We’re not considerate of the rules on what it means to be dead.   We don’t think we’re ever really discussing the logistics of what that means, necessarily, and that’s what we love about it. That’s something not just gay people experience, everybody wants to feel connected to their family. What would you want to tell your parents about your life if you could revisit them, or what would you tell them right now? We live in a world that feels impersonal, or cold. It’s harder and harder to find the connections that we see Adam and Harry have in the film. All of us have been children, and most will lose our parents. Many of us will be parents ourselves and have kids who will grow into adults in the blink of an eye. Many of us will find and lose and hopefully find love again, even if it doesn’t last an eternity.   Written by Gregory Mann

"Monica"     "Monica" is a portrait of a woman who returns home to the Midwest for the first time in 20 years to confront the wounds of her past. Reconnecting with her mother Eugenia (Patricia Clarkson) and the rest of her family for the first time since leaving as a teenager, Monica (Trace Lysette) embarks on a path of healing and acceptance. Monica is reunited with her family for the first time since her youth. Uncertain if her mother will recognize her, Monica moves into her childhood home, hoping to heal the wounds of the past and forge a new path of forgiveness and acceptance. Exploring the universal thematic dichotomies of aging and beauty, rejection and alienation, the film details Monica’s world and state of mind, the pain and fear, the needs and desires, of a woman whose journey ultimately illuminates the human condition. The film delves into Monica’s internal world and state of mind, her pain and fears, her needs and desires, to explore the universal themes of abandonment and forgiveness.   Monica is a film about family, abandonment, and acceptance. It’s also a film that centers a Trans-woman character. Monica has been on her own since her mother dropped her off at the bus station as a teenager with only 5 minutes to spare and the message, 'I can’t be your mother anymore'. We don’t follow Monica during those early teen years, and that time is only hinted at. We meet her as an adult, but one that still carries that wound of early abandonment that we get the first taste of very early in the film when she calls Jimmy (Joshua Close). Jimmy is a man we never see who we only know through her attempts to contact him, but we see and hear the need to try and keep him in her life, to not be left behind by him. Then Monica receives a call she never thought she’d receive, not from Jimmy, but from the sister-in-law she never met, asking her to come back home to help care for her mother, who's losing her memory along with her health. The film never denies how difficult it's for Monica to return to the scene of her trauma but also doesn’t deny her the joy of forging new relationships with her niece and nephews.   It also doesn’t give an easy resolution to her relationship with her mother, whom she now has to mother, who denied her mothering when she still needed it. Her mother doesn’t recognize her right away like she secretly hoped. Though that may have been the only way for them to find a healing place, because Eugenia is not the same woman anymore that abandoned her, and that might be a way that helps Monica heal a bit from the pain of abandonment and finally call out Jimmy. And in the end, Eugenia does accept Monica as family, whether she finally recognized Monica as her daughter is not fully answered, but we think she did, even if it’s not voiced. The film does a good job of balancing the moments of joy with moments of sadness. From the topic, you might not expect there would be laughs, but there are plenty during certain scenes in the film particularly at one move during a solo dance scene. There are also moments that just makes us smile while watching. The film ends with a scene of Monica’s nephew signing the US National anthem at school graduation. It's a moment of healing and catharsis.   When your mother becomes sick, this confront you with your past and the psychological effects of abandonment. Treading between the interior and exterior, the emotional and physical, Monica explores the complexities of self-worth, the deep-rooted consequences of rejection and the lengths we go to heal our wounds. Through a cinematic language that stems from the juxtaposition of the aesthetics of intimacy and alienation, the film delves into the emotional and psychological landscape of Monica to reflect the precarious nature of self-identity when challenged by the need to survive and ultimately transform.   Written by Gregory Mann Starts Tuesday, 12 December 2023, 18:15 Rio Cinema 107 Kupland High Street London E 82 PB

"The Stones And Brian Jones"     Featuring revealing interviews with all the main players and unseen archive released for the first time, "The Stones And Brian Jones" explores the creative musical genius of Jones, key to the success of the band, and uncovers how the founder of what became the greatest rock'n'roll band in the world was left behind in the shadows of history.   "The Stones And Brian Jones" uncovers the true story and legacy of Brian Jones, the founder and creative genius of The Rolling Stones. When Brian Jones left The Rolling Stones in 1969, he had been a burden for a few years. A loose, unpredictable cannon. Jones surely couldn't have imagined that seven years earlier. The guitarist was the founder of the band, in the beginning the indisputable leader and even the main showpiece, although he wasn't the lead singer. But he had charisma and sex appeal to spare. Alcohol and drugs undermined his reliability, however, and by the mid-1960s Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were the creative core of the band. As a schoolboy aged 14, filmmaker Nick Broomfield met Brian Jones, by chance, on a train. Brian was at the height of his success, with the world at his feet, yet just six years later he would be dead. The documentary looks at the relationships and rivalries within The Rolling Stones in those formative years. The Stones and Brian Jones, which is filled to the brim with archival footage, from the problems Jones had with his parents over the many children with various children to his turbulent relationship with Anita Pallenberg. It explores the iconoclastic freedom and exuberance of the 60s, a time of intergenerational conflict and sexual turmoil which reflects on where we're today.   Featuring revealing interviews with all the main players and unseen archive released for the first time, the film explores the creative musical genius of Jones, key to the success of the band, and uncovers how the founder of what became the greatest rock & roll band in the world was left behind in the shadows of history. The Rolling Stones were a major influence in music business. Brian and Mick were heroes of the day, their rebellion and breaking of the rules were a great inspiration to us. The documentary is an opportunity to look at that formative growing up time until the shock of Brian’s death in 1969, the darkest moment in the history of The Stones, when things changed. For decades among the foremost names in documentary (more recently for 'My Father And Me', 'Marianne And Leonard: Words of Love', 'Whitney: Can I Be Me, Tales of The Grim Sleeper'), director Nick Broomfield studied at the National Film School under Professor Colin Young who had a great influence on his work, encouraging participant observation, as well as introducing him to filmmaker Joan Churchill. Together Nick and Joan made several films "Juvenile Liaison", "Tattooed Tears", "Soldier Girls", "Lily Tomlin" as well as "Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer". The film is influenced by the observational style of Fred Wiseman, Robert Leacock and Pennebaker, before moving to the more idiosyncratic style.   Written by Gregory Mann

"Four Daughters"     The life of Olfa (Hend Sabri), a Tunisian woman and mother of 4 daughters, oscillates between light and shadow. One day, her two eldest daughters disappear. To fill their absence, the film intimates a journey full rebellion, violence, intergenerational transmission and sisterhood, which will question the very foundation of our societies.   It's the story of a mother and of her four teenage daughters. When the film begins, it's astonishing to see them so radiant and smiling, when we're expecting to find women who are grieving. They're like that in real life. The passing down of traumas from mother to daughter is a recurring theme throughout this film. It's the story of a curse, because in turn, this little girl will hold her mother to account. Olfa is a very powerful character. She's the embodiment of a mother with all of her contradictions, her ambiguities, her troubled areas. Olfa’s story is well known in Tunisia. But what role was she playing and what was the nature of this trap? Olfa had been conditioned by journalists. But we've to understand that at that time, this kind of story was commonplace. We notice that in life we often behave in a way that's influenced by clichés that we’ve seen on TV or in the media. Most of these reports do not allow for the different dimensions of an individual to be explored. Yet Olfa is so exuberant, so ambiguous, and so complex that it is impossible to show just one side of her. What struck us about Olfa and her daughter's lives is the absence of men. As soon as a man enters their world, they throw him out. The men around them can’t survive them. They've a very complex relationship with masculinity. Olfa embodies something that's both very feminine and very masculine.   In a way, as all of the men have been ejected from their group, it's as if all these men are just one man (Majd Mastoura). For him, we can not permit ourselves to elicit such confessions in front of a camera. He thinks that this intimate speech should not have left the psychologists office. When you're faced with such revelations about other people’s lives, you've to ask yourself a thousand ethical questions. When you're faced with such revelations about other people’s lives, you've to ask yourself a thousand ethical questions. The strength of their resilience is phenomenal. It's a retrograde form of patriarchy that women have to assimilate in order to survive. They don’t have a choice. Olfa might not respect men, but she still embodies one of the forms of this patriarchy. When you come from a humble background like her, the choice for a young girl is limited: to become a prostitute or holier-than-holy. There's no room for nuance. And as they're beautiful, that's their other curse, her daughters chose holiness and even going beyond holiness, they've wished for death! Through the four portraits that the film paints of these young women, it's also a film about adolescence, of this chasm between childhood and adulthood, where suddenly we seek to understand, and even to experiment with, the idea of death, as one of the girls demonstrates when she wants to sleep in a grave. But even as we play with death, it's the period of our lives when we're searching for an ideal of life while worrying about our social environment.   The emergence of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, transformed the world of jihadism. After capturing large swaths of Iraq and Syria in 2014, the Islamic State attracted tens of thousands of foreigners who sought to build a new Islamic society in a modern caliphate. They included engineers, accountants, teachers, grandparents, and teenage girls, as well as fighters. They reinvigorated existing jihadist movements and galvanized a new wave of support for jihadism generally. In 2014, ISIS seemed to eclipse al-Qaeda. But al-Qaeda, the vanguard of the global jihadist movement, is seeking to reclaim its primacy. It has built support among local jihadist groups in the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, and the Caucasus. Core leaders still provide overall directives, although they've also dispersed among affiliates. Advisors help groups define local goals and targets. Al-Qaeda has played the long game, and it may prove to be a more enduring model than the Islamic State. But the jihadist spectrum is also far more diverse today than it was on 9/11. Tunisian nationals make up the largest number of foreign fighters affiliated with ISIS in Syria, Iraq, and Libya. As ISIS gains a stronger grip in neighboring Libya, the issue of youth radicalization in Tunisia is more pressing than ever. ISIS is highly effective and organized in using social media platforms to recruit foreign and local fighters across national borders.   The paper examines ISIS’s use of sophisticated online propaganda strategies to recruit young Tunisians and proposes concrete ways to improve the gov- ernment’s thus far lackluster response. Fighting the online and offline recruitment efforts of terrorist groups should include not only monitoring online content that incites violence but also more constructive measures such as building platforms to connect government with the population, from using social media to encourage civic engagement to crowdsourcing in policy making. How did ISIS manage to successfully recruit a person as ordinary as Olfa’s daughter's and convince them to commit a terrorist attack on such a scale? There are a plethora of reasons why Tunisian men and women flock to join ISIS at home and abroad. Regardless of their diverse motivations, ISIS has shown itself to be highly effective at recruiting foreign and local fighters across borders, using sleek online propaganda and social media platforms. In Olfa’s case, there's no evidence that her daughters were recruited online by ISIS. Nevertheless the threat of online recruitment and radicalization by Islamist terrorist groups remains very high. ISIS is one of the biggest threats to Tunisia’s stability and democratic consolidation as it is getting a stronger hold over parts of neighboring   After the revolution in Tunisia, the new government tolerated jihadist-Salafist discourse as part of its commitment to freedom of expression and beliefs. Such discourse in fact further strengthened the message that jihad is a duty of Muslims in times of war, for example in the war in Syria. Hungry for change, young men and women fell victim to such narratives, only to be disappointed later. Friends and family of some of the Tunisian fighters have reported that they've often regretted going to Syria after discovering a different reality. In fact, the number of returnee fighters to Tunisia is also the highest globally. While this number could signal a threat that terrorism will be reimported home, the returnees are a very valuable source of information for learning more about the motivation behind radicalization and designing proactive measures accordingly. For this to materialize, however, de-radicalization programs have to be in place to rehabilitate returnees, win their trust, give amnesties in return for their readiness to peacefully engage with society and to cooperate to prevent further radicalization. Jihadism has evolved dramatically and traumatically since the 9/11 attacks. Movements, leaders, targets, tactics, and arenas of operation have all proliferated in ways unimagined in 2001.   How to revive memories without embellishing or changing them, without playing the good guy, without sugar-coating the truth? How to succeed in recapturing what took place and what is no longer there? How to face up to the truth of one’s own past years later? The girls are looking for something that's missing. They want to challenge the authority of Olfa who has always embodied both their father and mother figure and who wanted to repress their sexuality. Since they did not have the tools to be able to do so, they became, as one of them said, 'God’s chosen ones'. This gave them the illusion of transcendence to try and impose their desires on the world. This film documents the different relationships to death and to life that sometimes run through adolescents in a confused manner.   However, taking a deeper look at the contradictions, the sensations, the emotions, requires time that journalists do not have. It is the role of cinema to explore these areas, these ambiguities of the human spirit. It's the role of cinema to explore these areas, these ambiguities of the human spirit. However, taking a deeper look at the contradictions, the sensations, the emotions, requires time that journalists do not have.  The line needed to become blurred because we spend our time acting in life and even more so in front of the camera. Since the early days, movies enjoyed exploring the tenuous relationship between fiction and documentary. It's a common thread that runs through all films. This film is a therapeutic laboratory in which memories can be recaptured.   Written by Gregory Mann

"Anatomy Of A Fall"     For the past year, Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller), her husband Samuel Maleski (Samuel Theis), and their eleven-year-old son Daniel (Milo Machado Graner) have lived a secluded life in a remote town in the French Alps. When Samuel is found dead in the snow below their chalet, the police question whether he was murdered or committed suicide. Samuel's suspicious death is presumed murder, and Sandra becomes the main suspect. Little by little, the trial becomes not just an investigation into the circumstances of Samuel's death but an unsettling psychological journey into the depths of Sandra and Samuel's conflicted relationship.   "Anatomy Of A Fall" portrays the downfall of a couple's relationship. The concept is to depict the physical and emotional descent of a body in a technical manner, symbolizing the decline of their love story. This couple has a son who discovers their tumultuous relationship during a trial that scrutinizes every aspect of their past. As the trial unfolds, the boy transitions from a state of complete trust in his mother to one of doubt, marking a crucial turning point in his life. The film follows this transformation closely. The film wants to incorporate the child's perspective into the narrative and juxtapose it with Sandra's, the main character, for a more balanced portrayal of the events. The film takes on the form of an extended interrogation, with scenes shifting from the couple's home to the courtroom, where characters are incessantly questioned. But there's no sense of realism, it's more a documentary style both in the writing and the cinematography. The film begins with a disorienting shot of a ball rolling down a flight of stairs. This obsession with falling is a recurring motif throughout the film, initially in a literal sense. We're are fascinated with the sensation of body weight and what it feels like to fall, which was sparked by the opening credits of Mad Men, where a man keeps falling.   The film constantly ascend and descend stairs, observing the fall from various angles to unravel how it happened. The film introduces the ball as a symbol of the fall, caught by a dog who looks at Sandra, the central character, and sets the stage for the two and a half hour exploration of her story. It's the battle between a couple with a child, delving into the complexities of time-sharing in a relationship. It's a theme that isn't often explored in cinema and raises important questions about reciprocity, trust, and the dynamics of a partnership. The characters challenge the traditional couple schema by reversing their roles. Sandra's pursuit of her freedom and will creates an imbalance, leading to an exploration of equality in a relationship that is both powerful and questionable. The film invites us to question our preconceived notions of democracy in a relationship and how it can be derailed by dictatorial impulses and a dimension of rivalry. Despite their struggles, the couple's idealism and refusal to resign themselves to a less-than-perfect situation is admirable. Even in their arguments, which are actually negotiations, they continue to be honest with each other, revealing a deep love that persists despite their challenges.   The use of different languages, French, English, and German adds a layer of complexity to Sandra's character and creates a sense of opacity. It also maintains a distance between her and the audience as a foreigner on trial in France, who must navigate her way through the languages of her husband and son. Sandra is a complex character with many layers, which the trial will explore. They do not speak the same language. This makes their negotiation even more concrete, with the idea of a third language serving as neutral ground. It's clear that there's a real love of language and verbal sparring in the courtroom scenes, and Advocat général (Antoine Reinartz) has a lot to do with that. He adds an otherness to the film and brings the contemporary world into it, which breaks the dusty solemnity of the trial. Although he plays the villain, he portrays a very seductive, devious, and flamboyant character. He speaks on behalf of the deceased, whom we hardly ever see, and must make him endearing to both the jurors and the audience. Advocat brings an arena dimension to the court and portrays the civilized violence of the prosecution. On the contrary Maitre Vincent Renzi (Swann Arlaud) plays a rather fragile character, sensitive, on the defensive. He's good but not idealized. It's clear that Sandra and knew each other years ago, and that there's still something between them that's not entirely extinguished.   The film has no flashbacks, the focus is on the spoken word. In a trial, truth is elusive, and there's a void that needs to be filled by the spoken word. And in reality, these exceptions are not flashbacks: in the scene of the argument, it is a sound recording that suddenly materializes on screen, creating a sense of presence. There's also the scene where Daniel reenacts his dead father's words, but it belongs to a different category. This time we've the image, but it's an account of a memory, an invention, or at best, a testimony without proof, as pointed out by the public prosecutor. The courtroom is essentially where our history no longer belongs to us, where it's judged by others who have to piece it together from scattered and ambiguous elements.   Written by Gregory Mann

"The Royal Hotel"     Americans Hanna (Julia Garner), and Liv (Jessica Henwick), are best friends backpacking in Australia. After they run out of money, Liv, looking for an adventure, convinces Hanna to take a temporary live-in job behind the bar of a pub called ’The Royal Hotel’ in a remote Outback mining town. Bar owner Billy and a host of locals give the girls a riotous introduction to Down Under drinking culture but soon Hanna and Liv find themselves trapped in an unnerving situation that grows rapidly out of their control.   The film is inspired by the feature documentary 'Hotel Coolgardie'. It's the story of two young Scandinavian women trapped in an Australian mining town. This clash of cultures feels like a way into a broader discussion about drinking culture and gender dynamics. There’s a part of us that understands that pub world and a part of us that's terrified by it. "The Royal Hotel" feels like an opportunity to do that by putting the two lead characters into a remote community, exploring how these two women navigate an unfamiliar and antagonistic environment, far removed from the urban existence they're used to. "The Royal Hotel" explores Hanna and Liv's experiences within the intense and volatile setting they find themselves in, while also delving into the underlying factors that contribute to its hostility. Hanna doesn't want to be there in the first place and she's feeling vulnerable most of the time, while Liv is more inclined to say ‘lighten up, it's not that bad…it’s just the culture'. With these two characters the film shows the subtleties in the way that women respond in these kinds of circumstances. The film wants to tell this outback story, through a female gaze, to turn the tables on a genre that's traditionally been very male, and to use the masculinity of that world as the fuel for the story, and to be able to examine some of the complications around male culture, but it feels reductive.   The central dramatic question of this film is not will they get out? It’s ‘should they?’ It's a much more subtle question, because it goes to the heart of this very masculine culture and what's unacceptable within that culture. It's a film that builds slowly and inexorably to the question of should they leave. It's about the way people respond to trauma. There's one way where you can be very on high alert, very fearful, or the other way, where you just dive in and drink it all away. The ending is a provocation. It generates conversation around what's acceptable within our culture and when we should stand up for ourselves and take a stand. And it’s a situation that's all too common for young women going into environments where they've little power; where they can start doubting whether their version of reality is the real version and start being co-opted into a culture that is making them feel like they're the ones who are crazy.   "The Royal Hotel" is set in a mining town and not a farming community so we were quite specific about what the landscape should look like. Mining towns are set up to support industry and are mostly filled with fly-in fly-out workers from interstate. The film wants the set to feel normal and inviting in the way that pubs quite often do, but it feels cold or menacing. This place is a threat. While the film has nods to thriller and Western genres, it cannot be readily characterised as a genre piece. Certainly, it's like a nightmare and at times we're almost verging towards horror, but you can not describe this as a genre film. The trick of it and the balancing act within it's that you're observing real behaviours, but you're coming at it from a particular perspective and by ramping up certain key moments you're heightening tensions within it.   Written by Gregory Mann

“The Royal Hotel" (Saturday 21 October, 2023, ARTS 20:35)     Americans Hanna (Julia Garner), and Liv (Jessica Henwick), are best friends backpacking in Australia. After they run out of money, Liv, looking for an adventure, convinces Hanna to take a temporary live-in job behind the bar of a pub called ’The Royal Hotel’ in a remote Outback mining town. Bar owner Billy and a host of locals give the girls a riotous introduction to Down Under drinking culture but soon Hanna and Liv find themselves trapped in an unnerving situation that grows rapidly out of their control.   The film is inspired by the feature documentary 'Hotel Coolgardie'. It's the story of two young Scandinavian women trapped in an Australian mining town. This clash of cultures feels like a way into a broader discussion about drinking culture and gender dynamics. There’s a part of us that understands that pub world and a part of us that's terrified by it. "The Royal Hotel" feels like an opportunity to do that by putting the two lead characters into a remote community, exploring how these two women navigate an unfamiliar and antagonistic environment, far removed from the urban existence they're used to. "The Royal Hotel" explores Hanna and Liv's experiences within the intense and volatile setting they find themselves in, while also delving into the underlying factors that contribute to its hostility. Hanna doesn't want to be there in the first place and she's feeling vulnerable most of the time, while Liv is more inclined to say ‘lighten up, it's not that bad…it’s just the culture'. With these two characters the film shows the subtleties in the way that women respond in these kinds of circumstances. The film wants to tell this outback story, through a female gaze, to turn the tables on a genre that's traditionally been very male, and to use the masculinity of that world as the fuel for the story, and to be able to examine some of the complications around male culture, but it feels reductive.   The central dramatic question of this film is not will they get out? It’s ‘should they?’ It's a much more subtle question, because it goes to the heart of this very masculine culture and what's unacceptable within that culture. It's a film that builds slowly and inexorably to the question of should they leave. It's about the way people respond to trauma. There's one way where you can be very on high alert, very fearful, or the other way, where you just dive in and drink it all away. The ending is a provocation. It generates conversation around what's acceptable within our culture and when we should stand up for ourselves and take a stand. And it’s a situation that's all too common for young women going into environments where they've little power; where they can start doubting whether their version of reality is the real version and start being co-opted into a culture that is making them feel like they're the ones who are crazy.   "The Royal Hotel" is set in a mining town and not a farming community so we were quite specific about what the landscape should look like. Mining towns are set up to support industry and are mostly filled with fly-in fly-out workers from interstate. The film wants the set to feel normal and inviting in the way that pubs quite often do, but it feels cold or menacing. This place is a threat. While the film has nods to thriller and Western genres, it cannot be readily characterised as a genre piece. Certainly, it's like a nightmare and at times we're almost verging towards horror, but you can not describe this as a genre film. The trick of it and the balancing act within it's that you're observing real behaviours, but you're coming at it from a particular perspective and by ramping up certain key moments you're heightening tensions within it.   Written by Gregory Mann

"When Evil Lurks" /10/07/23/Prince Charles Cinema/13:45/     The residents of a small rural town discover that a demon is about to be born among them. They desperately try to escape before the evil is born, but it may be too late.   When brothers Pedro (Ezequiel Rodríguez) and Jimmy (Demián Salomón) discover that a demonic infection has been festering in a nearby farmhouse, its very proximity poisoning the local livestock, they attempt to evict the victim from their land. Failing to adhere to the proper rites of exorcism, their reckless actions inadvertently trigger an epidemic of possessions across their rural community. Now they must outrun an encroaching evil as it corrupts and mutilates everyone it is exposed to, and enlist the aid of a wizened cleaner, who holds the only tools that can stop this supernatural plague.   The film wants to create an own universe and something unique in the genre. It's a sequel to "Terrified" (Aterrados). To make the audience experience disturbing situations in the context of everyday life. It's about a new way into the demonic possession subgenre, without falling into the expected or generic places. Unlike "Terrified", where the protagonists were based in a couple of houses and going to look for 'evil' until they collided with it, here we propose the complete opposite, evil would be looking for the characters, who would have to cross a whole region to avoid that confrontation. The idea is always to create a horror road movie of characters with family ties that are in a state of decay, which makes everything that happens more brutal and disturbing. The film also wants to present striking scenes and images within the horror and fantasy genre set in Latin America. A wildly original take on the possession film, "When Evil Lurks" is a shocking supernatural thriller.   Written by Gregory Mann

"Strange Way Of Life" /10/06/23/Picturehouse Clapham/13:10)     Silva (Pedro Pascal) crosses the desert that separates his ranch from the town of Bitter Creek on horseback. He's going to visit Sheriff Jake (Ethan Hawke), a friend from his youth, when both worked as hired gunmen. The action takes place in 1910, and the two men are in their fifties. Silva is of Mexican origin, a solid guy, emotional, elusive, a cheat, if necessary, warm. It's been twenty-five years since he last saw Sheriff Jake, blond, strict, cold, inscrutable, almost the opposite to Silva. That night, at the Sheriff's house, they eat a meat stew Jake has cooked, they drink, and they make love, all of it in abundance. The next morning, Silva wants the party to continue, but he finds a stony Jake, who's nothing like the man from the night before. This is the sequences that follow that orgiastic night in which both characters confront their past and their present in totally different ways. This is the heart of the story, the argument while they get dressed the following morning. In this argument, the ulterior motives are revealed, as well as the passion that they lived when they were younger, and that's still beating within them, even though Jake doesn't want to admit it once they are sober.   Jake has to go after a murderer who, according to an eyewitness, is Silva's son. And Silva has to intercede for him, trying to convince Jake that his son is innocent and that he should stop searching for him. All this, the sheriff’s duty as opposed to a father’s grief, mixed with reproaches and declarations of love from two lovers who haven’t seen each other in twenty-five years and who live their lives at opposite ends of the desert. These are the ten central minutes of the film. We still didn’t know what the story would be, or if there would even be a story, but the film gives voice to these two middle-aged, queer men who traditionally have remained silent in a genre like the western. The film is attracted by the idea of breaking that silence. "Brokeback Mountain" by Ang Lee is the closest Hollywood has come to telling a story about two men who love each other and talk about it, but the lovers in Ang Lee’s film are shepherds, so we don’t include the film in the western genre. There are westerns with gay characters, like "Warlock" by Edward Dmytryk. The script abounds in data about the passionate relationship between its two protagonists, Anthony Quinn and Henry Fonda, but no one talks about it even though their relationship is one of the axes of the film. This turns Dmytryk’s film into a strange western or one with a badly written script. The film is only understood if both of them are lovers, but that word is never mentioned.   It's a western filmed in a town built in Almeria for Sergio Leone as a set for his legendary dollar trilogy, with Clint Eastwood. The passing of time, fifty years of it, has given authenticity to the place, today being dusty and old. The typical artifice of what had been a film set fifty years ago had now disappeared. The film respects the rules of the genre without falling into any anachronistic temptation, except for the song at the beginning, with the voice of Caetano Veloso and the angelical face of Manu Ríos, which gives the film its title. In Sheriff Jake’s house there are several paintings by Maynard Dixon, one of the first artists, if not the first, to paint landscapes from the American West, with native Indians and cowboys. It's a discovery, his work possesses a coloring untypical of the time that brings it close to pop and at times to impressionism. There's also a portrait of the artist Lily Langtry, very famous at the start of the century, who actually made a silent film and whom Ava Gardner plays in "The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean" along with Paul Newman. The other great artist who appears on the walls of the ranch is Georgia O’Keefe, the Mexican landscape that hangs over Silva’s bed.   The film takes inspiration not so much from the reality of the time but from cinema, how actors were dressed in westerns between 1900 and 1915. If anyone wonders about Pedro Pascal wearing a green jacket, we remember "Bend of the River" by Anthony Mann, where James Stewart wears an identical green jacket. The film is also inspired by Vera Cruz (Robert Aldrich), specifically for the outfit worn by Silva's murderous son Joe. It's inspired by Burt Lancaster, all black. And Sheriff Jake, he's in a suit, with a vest and bola tie, like almost all the sheriffs in the Westerns we've watched. Kirk Douglas is one of the models, whether playing a sheriff or a card player, "Gun Fight at the OK Corral" or in "Last Train from Gun Hill", both by John Sturges. The male wardrobe has changed very little, the sheriff is always the most elegant, usually with a suit, waistcoat, the fabric of the waistcoat is the only thing that allowed you some fantasy, with shiny damasks, shirt and around the neck a bola tie. The rest of the male characters always wear a scarf around their necks, in different colours and patterns, a checked shirt and a waistcoat. The dresses of the Mexican prostitutes are inspired by "El Dorado" (Howard Hawks). Despite the fact that in Spain we have a great tradition of spaghetti westerns, more than a hundred were filmed in the 60s and 70s.   Written by Gregory Mann

"The Old Oak" (Picturehouse Fulham Road)     The Old Oak is a special place. Not only is it the last pub standing, it is the only remaining public space where people can meet in a once thriving mining community that has now fallen on hard times after 30 years of decline. TJ Ballantyne (Dave Turner) the landlord hangs on to The Old Oak by his fingertips, and his hold is endangered even more when the pub becomes contested territory after the arrival of Syrian refugees who are placed in the village. An unlikely friendship develops when TJ encounters a young Syrian with a camera, Yara (Ebla Mari). Can they find a way for the two communities to understand each other? So unfolds a deeply moving drama about loss, fear and the difficulty of finding hope.   The ex-mining villages are unique. Sitting at the top of the village looking out over the rolling hills. A young mother had walked her child to primary school, come back home, and then hung herself.  This image and imagining her haunted us. Wandering around many of these villages it's striking to see the older members of the community who were miners, or family of miners. One remarkable older lady in her nineties was a nurse and tended the wounded (one was her neighbour’s father, who still to this day lived next to her) from the Easington mining disaster of 1951 in which 83 miners died.  Listening to vibrant people like her, and others who were involved in the miners’ strike in 1984, bore testimony to a powerful sense of community spirit, cohesion and political clarity which contrasted with the hopelessness of many in the present. It becomes apparent that the past ie a character in the film.   How did a once organised working class with militant unions end up in the world of TJ, the main character in the film. He’s a good man. Ex– miner, his father was killed in a mining accident and as a consequence of that his mother bought The Old Oak pub. She’s been dead 20 odd years and he wanted to help his mother, but his marriage has broken up, he’s living in the poverty zone and the pub is struggling, as are most of the village pubs around. It’s the only public space left in the village. Because of what’s happened to TJ, he’s lost. He had been an organiser in the village – previously he ran football teams; everyone knew TJ. But because of what’s happened to him he’s just been beaten down and he’s withdrawn into himself. Then one day, some Syrian families move into the village. And that’s where the story of TJ in this film starts.   TJ’s life did not happen by accident but by a series of political choices. It seems to us The Old Oak had roots stretching back, that might help us untangle many of the conflicts and contradictions of the present. It begs the bigger question of how hopelessness, unfairness, and lack of agency in our lives, play out in how we treat each other. This is how the character Yara comes in and helps us open up the story. She’s a refugee who came here with her family. She doesn’t know where her father is because he was taken to prison and that was the last she heard of him. And we know real people who still don’t know anything about their fathers, where they're. Yara wants to make life here easier and more friendly and to forge a friendship between the two communities. She's brave. She stands up for herself. She’s also sociable. She’s trying to see hope through the ugliness and unfairness of the world. The camera gives her hope. That’s very similar to what TJ’s role is, building bridges. You feel empathy towards Yara because she faces a lot of racism. Most of them were detainees in Syrian prisons and were tortured for doing nothing. But in the story of the film, they're not focusing on what happened in Syria.   Laura (Claire Rodgerson) is an old family friend of TJ’s. They used to be activists together, probably doing anti–austerity stuff. Then TJ has kind of lost his way but Laura has kept on fighting for the community while trying to build a family and hold down a job. When the Syrian families arrive she wants to be a positive force to bring the communities together. An irreverent force of nature, is how she was described in the script! She doesn’t take any shit but just believes that the community can be better. She’s a fighter. And she hasn’t given up like TJ. That’s we like in real life, you can’t just give up and accept the fate that’s been dealt to you by the powers that be.   The Northeast in particular is a really segregated place. There’s this idea from the Blair age of ‘problem communities'. It’s not problem communities, it’s problem systems, problem scapegoating and problem dumping. It’s a complex film, because normally in films you're dealing with one community. Here, we've two communities. We've to the local families and the local pub goers, and then within the pub group, we've people who are in favour of the refugees being here, and we've’vepeople who are against. It’s a complex tapestry of characters and people and families.   Photography is the thread that stitches the locations and the characters and all the narrative together. It’s the device that links Yara to her history, to her present, and to her exploration of a new place and a new people. It gives her the licence to look and see. And then photography is also the device of how we self–select. It reflects what we choose to see and what we choose to remember. Because what we don’t see, we then start to fill in with our imagination. So photography in the film is the prompt to what has happened, what is happening, but also what isn’t there. The film shows the pain that Syrian families must go through. It’s not easy to move your life from one country to another.   Written by Gregory Mann

"Expend4bles"     In "Expend4bles", a new generation joins the world’s top action stars for an adrenaline-fueled adventure. Lee Christmas (Jason Statham) and Barney Ross (Sylvester Stallone) are back, leading the irreverent and indestructible team of elite mercenaries who laugh in the face of death. They're again joined by Gunner (Dolph Lundgren) and Toll Road (Randy Couture). Armed with every weapon they can get their hands on and the skills to use them, The Expendables are the world’s last line of defense and the team that gets called when all other options are off the table. The core team is buttressed by some new blood with equally unique styles and tactics, but with the same Expendables-style attitude.   They're a tight-knit team who run missions for various and ultra-secretive agencies. The leader of the pack, Barney Ross, has been with The Expendables  since its inception. Barney, is iron-willed, a master tactician, and supreme badass. He’s also a loyal friend to his comrade-in-arms, Lee Christmas. Before embarking on the team’s next mission, Barney’s bond with Christmas comes to the fore at a biker bar, where Barney and Christmas are seeking the return of the former’s cherished ring, which Barney lost, in a thumb-wrestling contest. When the duo’s fast-talking, joke-infused banter fails to yield results, Barney and Christmas do what they do best: take on the entire bar in a wild melee. Barney and Christmas are closer than brothers. As Barney heads into battle, you’ll never find him without his lucky skeleton ring. Barney’s number two, until he passes the torch in this new installment, is Lee Christmas, a hot-headed, knife-wielding merc who’s always by Barney’s side. Christmas is rough around the edges, but The Expendables are always there to support him.   If you double-cross Christmas, you’ll probably end up with a knife between your eyes. Gunner Jensen, a hulking giant, is, like all The Expendables, dedicated to the team’s success. A former chemical engineer, Gunner combines brains, when he chooses to use them, and brawn. This time, he’s trying to stop drinking, and is hung up on a woman he’s met only on the internet. Gunner has more than his share of idiosyncrasies and issues, be it substance abuse or concentration. But he’s been sober for several months and is doing the AA program. He’s also dating on the internet and love may be affecting his skills. There’s always something comedic going on with him, so he’s a bit of a comic relief for the team. Gunner is the only Expendable that isn’t trying to be tough; he doesn’t really care about that. He’s truly an agent of chaos. The fourth founding member of The Expendables is Toll Road, a skilled demolitions expert who’s also proficient in grappling. Due to the latter, Toll Road sports a prominent cauliflower ear, which his teammates, including the new crop, enjoy making fun of.   Newly 'Expendable' are Marsh (Garcia), a suit-and-tie CIA bigwig who assigns the team to its most dangerous mission; Easy Day (50 Cent), a former Marine who had once worked closely with Barney; Gina (Megan Fox), a hired gun and Christmas’s hot-tempered ex; and the hot-blooded, fast-talking Galan (Jacob Scipio), who’s the son of a former Expendable stalwart. They're the shadows and the smoke. They are the ghosts that hide in the night. It’s all about the camaraderie and chemistry. These guys can’t navigate through life, in general; they are only successful when they are together, saving the world. Their individual dysfunction makes them relatable; instead of being indestructible warriors, they feel pain and loss. That’s where we find Lee Christmas as the story opens. He’s having a volatile break-up with his girlfriend, Gina. In addition to being a skilled warrior, Christmas is known for his way with the ladies. But he’s met his match with Gina, a fellow mercenary with whom he’s experiencing a tumultuous, and very loud, breakup. And the team mission that follows is marked by a monumental error in judgment, not long after Christmas takes the reins from Barney as team leader.   But as The Expendables come together for their new mission, Barney is still very much in charge, greeting his longtime team members, welcoming the newcomers, and setting the table for the daunting and life-changing challenges to come. It all seems like business as usual for Barney and the team, but as the mission unfolds, and Barney remains in the pilot’s seat of their plane while his men battle the enemy on the ground, everything is about to change. The Expendables new mission finds them once again aboard their iconic turboprop plane, the Antanov, headed to a secret base adjacent to Libya’s nuclear weapon program. They’re on the hunt for a pitiless arms dealer, Rahmat (Iko Uwais), and his private army, which has stolen detonators to a nuclear device that could start World War III. Rahmat is a former military officer who’s now spearheading a deadly arms deal that could trigger nuclear war. He has some very dangerous clients. When Christmas goes off mission to help a comrade, Rahmat makes a narrow escape, taking the detonators with him. It’s a rare but total mission failure for The Expendables. As the team regroups, they set off on their most fateful journey to stop Rahmat and uncover the high-level operative he’s serving.   The Expendables is synonymous with great fighters and martial artists, it's in the franchise’s DNA. To carry that flame forward and keep it alive, we continue to pay tribute to the great fighters in cinema. Expendables crosses over generations. You've these iconic 80’s, 90’s, 2000’s action movie stars who are still clanging and banging with the best of them to this day. But you also have a new generation passing through, so we're honoring the new, the old we should say, but inviting the new into it. While next-level, explosive action provides the thrills, the film maintains the ante of the action in different areas, including hand-to-hand combat in more of a Hong Kong style than we’ve seen in the previous Expendables films. The film wants to create a much more visceral feel, which is what the Expendables films are all about. "Expend4bles" is a film to enjoy for its characters, thrills, heart, and laughs. That is the film’s triple-threat.   Written by Gregory Mann

"Daliland" (UK Release: /10/13/23/)     Salvador Dalí (Ben Kingsley) is one of the most world-renowned artists of the 20th century. The film focuses on the later years of the strange and fascinating marriage between Dalí and his wife, Gala (Barbara Sukowa), as their seemingly unshakable bond begins to stress and fracture. Set in New York and Spain in 1974, the film is told through the eyes of James (Christopher Briney), a young assistant keen to make his name in the art world, who helps the eccentric and mercurial Dalí prepare for a big gallery show.   The character of James is the audience’s perspective. It's the story of Salvador Dali and his wife Gala and how both of them are trying to hold onto their youth and the things that get in the way of that. It’s about the sort of people they surround themselves with and this whole world that James gets taken into that, falls in love with it and gets spat back out of. James also falls in love with Ginesta (Suki Waterhouse). But, Ginesta and James are definitely on different pages. James sees that this girl is interested in him and he falls in love. It’s really sweet, but that’s so far from how she sees it and that causes a lot of pain for James. If only he’d looked ahead, he’d have realised he’d set himself up for that one! Dali and Gala lived in a New York hotel for much of the late 1960s and early 1970s, so the film is primarily set in New York. New York in the 1970s is a place of great discovery. An exciting period, pre-disco and the beginning of punk, which was portrayed in a very different way in the US compared to the UK. Dali is surrounding himself with the movers and shakers of that time so his entourage consisted of people who were there for a purpose, they all have something interesting about them, whether they're musicians, artists, beatniks, poets, aristocrats or art buyers.   The film is primarily about Dali’s fear of death. Even though he's a remarkable genius he's also very much like us. Dali’s life and career spanned six decades. The other element the film wants to explore is Dali as an older man in New York in the 1970s, hanging out at Studio 54: He's living this very modern 70s life, yet we all think of him as a surrealist from the 1930s. Dali was quite a crazy guy when Gala met him. At that time, she was in a relationship with Paul Éluard, the writer and she had lived in a menage a trois with Max Ernst and Éluard. When she met Dali, something really extreme happened in her life. She really is very fascinated by him and she fell in love with him and she knew that this is the man to whom she would dedicate her life. Dali is a voyeur and Gala stimulated him very much artistically. He likes her passion and she completely gave her life to him, although she has other relationships, especially later in her life. She was criticized and condemned for sexual relationships with men who were much younger than she was. Gala is in her 70s in the period in which the film takes place and she didn’t like to be photographed as much as Dali. The script throws them together in this very uneasy chemistry. She's a lady who has a very strict image, she loves couture and the big designers of the time and she loves jewelry. She did more than anyone else to foster Dali’s career and more than anyone else to damage it. That’s an interesting paradox. In Púbal, in Figueres where Gala’s castle is, there’s still a lot of her jewelry, including pieces designed by Dali.   The story of Dali’s house at Portlligat, is that it's a fisherman’s hut that Dali and Gala first bought together in 1930. It was their first house. It didn’t have any electricity or utilities. They then bought the one next door which was a bit higher up and they started knocking walls down, hence the different levels which made it very quirky and recognizable. Dali’s personality really comes through, so it’s almost like the house is another part of his character. He finished work on it in 1972 so it’s like another piece of his art. The film deals mainly with the time when they're older and they've this very successful artistic life and they've built this whole world around them. They surrounded themselves with much younger people in an attempt to recapture their youth. People like Alice Cooper (Mark McKenna) and Amanda Lear (Andreja Pejic) are in their lives because both Gala and Dali loved beauty so they wanted to have beautiful people around them. Maybe the realization he has at the end is not in a sad or depressing way, it’s just reflecting on this moment in his life where he lived in this dream of a world. It's a façade as were the people he met and the life that he lived for that time. James just ends up in a moment of reflection and sort of nostalgia and it’s a moment of appreciation for the time that he had in that world.   Amanda is this fabulous woman who has this great relationship with Dali and she's in the center of that art world in Paris and London. She dated David Bowie and she was the ’It’ girl of the 1970s and 1980s",  before she becomes this sort of disco queen of Europe, like Grace Jones or Donna Summer. Captain Peter Moore (Rupert Graves) is Salvador Dali’s secretary, he did pretty much everything for him, including being an agent for his lithographs. He works on a commission basis and basically, he's part of Dali’s entourage. It’s very difficult to find out the truth about Moore because Dali is fabricator of reality, in his paintings and his life, and a lot of his entourage are also kind of fantasists we suppose. Moore wasn’t quite who he said he's, the English army Captain with the stiff upper lip. He's playing a part and we think that kind of pleased Dali who's happier with that rather than somebody who's authentic. Moore presents himself very well and is very charming, but he did some dodgy dealings, but a lot of people in the art world did dodgy dealings.   Dali is to the art world, what Almos Famous was to the rock and roll world. The glittering excesses of Dali’s fantastic circus, as seen through the young eyes of James, and the way he’s swept up into this opulent world, chewed up and spat out, until he realizes that the world’s quite a bit different than he dreamt it to be. There are many volumes where Dali is unkindly or dismissively judged. A distance that’s thrilling and terrifying, rather like a trapeze artist swinging back and forth, then suddenly the trapeze artist lets go and spins in mid-air and catches the other trapeze. It’s difficult to regulate the art world, because you’re selling people’s squiggles. Nobody knows how much they’re worth until somebody decides to pay that much for it. There’s a crossover between good and bad business practice in the art world and it’s very difficult to know where the edges are and that area can and has been exploited, even more so since Dali. It’s one of those things where you know it’s going to be special and then it happens, one of those times you’ll remember for the rest of your life.   Written by Gregory Mann

"R.M.N."     A few days before Christmas, having quit his job in Germany, Matthias (Marin Grigore) returns to his multi-ethnic Transylvanian village. He wishes to involve himself more in the education of his son, Rudi (Mark Edward Blenyesi)), left for too long in the care of his mother, Ana (Macrina Barladeanu), and to rid the boy of the unresolved fears that have taken hold of him. He’s preoccupied with his old father, Otto (Andrei Finti), and also eager to see his ex-lover, Csilla Szabo (Judith State). When a few new workers are hired at the small factory that Csilla manages, the peace of the community is disturbed, underlying fears grip the adults, and frustrations, conflicts and passions erupt through the thin veneer of apparent understanding and calm.   We recall watching a Mel Brooks film in the eighties called "Young Frankenstein". It was already a comedy, but even more for us, since the main character was getting on board a train in New York and getting off that train in Bucharest, which in the film was Transylvania’s capital. Transylvania stands for that place which is at the end of the world and is also the country of vampires and monsters. The story of "R.M.N. takes place a little before the pandemic, during Christmas 2019 and the beginning of 2020, in a small multiethnic village in Transylvania, the most western Romanian province. We go deep into Transylvania’s history but for us, it represents the typical kind of territory that was disputed between two countries and passed from one to another. A bit like Alsace and Lorraine. In this case it’s between Romania and Hungary, or rather the Austro-Hungarian empire. Therefore, there are Romanians and Hungarians living in Transylvania. But they’re not the only inhabitants. Some 700 years ago Saxons were given land there, at the edge of Europe, next to the Carpathians. Therefore, there are also Germans in Transylvania. Most of them left in the 70s when Ceausescu sold them to Western Germany for 5,000 DM per capita. The rest left after the fall of communism. But their houses, fortified churches, cemeteries, and villages with tall fences are still there. And there are also many Roma people in Transylvania.   They first came as slaves or servants some 200 years ago, and many moved into the houses abandoned when the Germans left. With so many ethnicities, Transylvania became a favorite playground for populist or nationalist movements of all kinds. There were street fights with victims in the 90s. Later things calmed down, many people went to work abroad as poverty affected them regardless of ethnicity. Nationalism is refreshed again every now and then, especially before elections. The film is about the situation in Transylvania and about Romanians, Hungarians and Germans sharing the same territory. It's set there but it’s also about Russians and Ukrainians, whites and blacks, Sunni and Shia, rich and poor, even tall and short. Whenever there’s a second person in the room, they will be perceived as being from another tribe and therefore a potential enemy. Languages, religions, flags (and other minor differences for which people kill one another). In the film, Hungarians speak Hungarian, Romanians, Romanian, and Germans speak German, but nevertheless they understand each other. They all speak English since it’s also a story about globalization and its side effects. The most sophisticated characters even speak French. And, of course, the Frenchman speaks English, while the people who came from afar speak their own language which nobody else understands. As a spectator, if you understand all these languages, bravo.   If not, there are subtitles, sometimes they've different colors for different languages, sometimes it will be up to you to figure out who speaks what. The Romanians have a red-yellow-blue flag, the Hungarians in Hungary have a red-white-green flag, but the Hungarians in a couple of Transylvanian counties have a blue and yellow one, the flag of the so called Tinutul Secuiesc, which militates for autonomy. Strangely, for of historical reasons, this county is not on the border with Hungary but somehow in the middle of Romania. Romanians are mostly Orthodox; Hungarians are mostly Catholic while Germans are mostly Lutheran. But it’s not that simple: some Hungarians are Unitarians, some Romanians are Greek-Catholic, some Germans are Calvinist. Therefore, each village has several different churches, and even the bells toll differently. Today, with so many people having gone abroad to work, many of the churches have very few parishioners. The Protestant churches are closed. Still, there's usually somebody in the village who holds the key to the church for whoever wishes to visit. When somebody from the village dies abroad, sometimes thousands of kilometers away, a relative of his will call home, so that the bells in his native village toll for him. These differences might seem minor, and they're certainly complicated to follow. Still, throughout history wars were fought because of such particularities and people killed other people for even smaller differences.   Mioritza is an inspirations for the film. Mioritza is tricky to explain, it’s a national Romanian ballad about three shepherds and their herds. Now these shepherds come from different regions, one has more sheep and he’s richer, so the others simply decide to kill him and take over his herd. His beloved sheep, his faithful dog, and nature in general try to warn him but he believes in destiny: if this is his fate, so be it. There’s even a pattern associated with Mioritza, with Romanian geography and with this mentality about life: it’s called the uphill and downhill rhythm. Matthias faithful dog warns him when danger arises and his sheep care for him maybe more than anybody else. Besides Mioritza, of course, there's the real story: before the pandemic some factory owners in Tinutul Secuiesc considered hiring workers from afar, given that the locals had left to work in Western Europe. Still, the characters of R.M.N. and the relationships between them are fictional, as are the motivations and attitudes of each, and the events of the narrative itself. Another distant source of inspiration is the Rosia Montana story, essentially, it’s the dilemma between giving people jobs mining gold and destroying the environment with cyanide or saving the environment and wonderful landscapes for future generations while the locals live in a continued state of poverty. And then, there are the regular news stories about animals and the side effects of Romania apparently having the biggest population of bears and wolves in Europe.   Traditions mean that people do something because some other people did it before them. In the end, somebody did it originally for some purpose, which very often is to chase away bad omens. You must agree even this explanation has more sense than doing something because it’s the tradition. The film portrays several winter traditions: some people dress in sheep and goat skins and dance, others wear bear skins and are whipped, some dress as the ancestors, the Dacians, sympathized with for opposing the Roman conquest. In some other areas in Romania, men simply wear masks and a huge helmet for the New Year’s Eve..They meet on the first day of the year and they fight each other to death. They don’t even come from different villages: the uphill ones fight the downhill ones, and sometimes some get killed. Don’t judge them: at least it’s fair and square. Not very different from all the sports and competitions which substitute for the same instinct of engaging your tribe against another. One of the most recurrent narrative explaining Romania’s current position among European countries is that we didn’t manage to develop as much as western societies because we're busy fighting the invaders who wished to plunder Europe, and because we kept them busy here in the East, westerners had all the time in the world to develop, and erect their opulent cathedrals.   But there are a lot of other current narratives used to explain the state of the world today, globalization is the new Babel, a sign that the world is coming to an end; when diseases will also become global, the end will follow swiftly, global warming is yet another sign of the imminent ending and soon the over-exploited resources will be exhausted and people will be fighting for survival. For centuries, it's easier to identify the invaders. The locals live in small villages among the forests and as soon as anybody on horseback showed up from the other side of the hill, he was a potential enemy tourism came later. Today, with airplanes, things got more complex. One peculiar stereotype regards the Huns, the Hungarians’ ancestors, arriving on horseback and eating the raw meat they tenderized under their saddles. The stereotype is so common that nobody doubts it. Some 30 years ago, The European Council recommended the use of the term Roma instead of Gypsy, perceived as offensive. Romania tried to oppose the initiative for the confusion it generated between Roma and Romanians but with no success, so the confusion deepened. For Romanians, to be taken as Roma is the greatest offence while westerners perceive our desire to make the distinction as already an inappropriate discriminatory attitude.   "R.M.N." brings into question the dilemmas of today’s society, solidarity VS individualism, tolerance VS selfishness, political correctness VS sincerity. It also brings into question this atavistic need to belong, to identify with one’s ethnic group, with one’s tribe, and to naturally regard others, whether of another ethnic group, another religion, another gender, or another social class, with reservations and suspicion. It's a story about old times, perceived as trustworthy, and present times, perceived as chaotic, about the underhandedness and falsity of a European set of values that are claimed more than they're implemented. It’s a story about intolerance and discrimination, about prejudice, stereotypes, authority, and freedom. It's a story about cowardice and courage, about the individual and the masses, about personal versus collective destiny. It's also a story about survival, about poverty, about fear and a grim future. The film speaks about the effects brought by globalization in a small community rooted in secular traditions, values of bygone times have dissipated, but the access people got now to the internet did not bring updated values but rather burdened them with the difficulty of distinguishing the truth and their personal opinions in today’s informational and moral chaos.   "R.M.N." also tackles the side effects of political correctness: people learned that it is better not to speak up if their opinions differ from the norm of the day, but the political correctness is not a formative process, and it didn’t change opinions profoundly, it just makes people express less what they think. But eventually things cumulate and at some point, they spill out. The story itself associates politically incorrect opinions with particular ethnicity or group, since opinions and actions are always individual, they're not dependent on any group identity but on much more complex factors. Beyond social connotations, it speaks about how our beliefs can shape our choices, about our instincts, irrational urges, and fears, about the animals buried inside us, about the ambiguity of our feelings and actions and the impossibility of ever fully understanding them. There are several recurrent images and visual motifs in the film. If you ever have the patience to watch the film twice, you’ll have something more to discover. Shooting one take per scene no matter how long or complex the scene ismis a statement that profoundly shapes the filmmaking style. You need to stage the situation as believable and as truthful as you can and then record this moment. The rhythm is not coming from editing, but it’s internalized. Ellipses take place only between scenes, the situation unfold in real time, nothing is cut off.   Written by Gregory Mann

"It Lives Inside"     Indian-American teenager Samidha (Megan Suri) is feeling torn between two environments where all isn’t entirely well: home, where she’s pressured by her traditionalist mother Poorna (Neeru Bajwa), and school, where she doesn’t quite fit in and is subject to microaggressions even from her friends. Her heritage and her present collide when her childhood friend Tamira (Mohana Krishnan), who has lately been acting strange and distant, confronts her bearing a mason jar. Something lives inside that jar something hungry that has Tamira terrified. She tells Sam that the stories of demons they heard as kids are true, and Sam discovers just how right Tamira is when the thing escapes its glass captivity, invades Sam’s life, and threatens everyone she loves. Sam is desperate to fit in at school, rejecting her Indian culture and family to be like everyone else. When a mythological demonic spirit latches onto her former best friend, she must come to terms with her heritage in order to defeat it. As the dark side of the folklore Sam begins creeping into her life, inescapable both at school and at home.   "It Lives Inside" initially emerged as an image, a kid on a bike, riding through Rockwellian suburbs. It’s right out of an early Amblin film. But what if this kid is escaping a puja, her school outfit wrapped in an ornate dupatta? For us, that image speaks to the duality we feel growing up as a first-generation immigrant in America. Where do I belong? Which country is my home? Which world is ultimately mine? When you move to North America from India at the age of four, a lot of your social education comes from watching American horror films. We always wondered, what are immigrant.families doing while Bruce the shark tore through Amity’s waters, while Freddy Krueger slashed teenagers in the dreamscape, and while Jack Torrance chased his son through the maze-like halls of the Overlook!   As it developes, the film forms its own dual identity. On one hand, it is a love letter to the community and culture that raised us while on the other, it is a visceral experience that is designed to instill the same raw terror in its viewers that our favorite horror films instilled in us. It's about the expertise in elevating socially-charged dramas to thoughtful, incisive mass entertainment in films like "Get Out" and Blackklansman". As the story developed, the ideas and emotions at its core only crystallized further and are never diluted or dulled down. We believe in horror cinema. It’s the greatest genre our art form has to offer, affording artists opportunities to tell challenging, emotionally rich stories within a harrowing, affective experience.   The film asserts its importance as an Indian-American ode to the outsiders stuck trying to live two separate lives and succeeds as a crossroads between international flavors and domestic horror mindsets. Thanks to the massive success of "Get Out," the last several years have seen an influx of Black horror films, bringing some much-needed racial diversity to a predominantly white genre. Latino horror has also been going strong as ever of late. Mostly centered on white characters. The film is influenced by 'It Follows" and "The Ring". The film asserts its importance as an Indian-American ode to the outsiders stuck trying to live two separate lives and succeeds as a crossroads between international flavors and domestic horror mindsets. A good, old-fashioned creature feature in a way that feels entertaining. In offering "It Lives Inside" to the cannon, the film wants to give you a window into the lives of people we care deeply about and to make you wonder if someone or something  really is hiding in the dark, waiting to pop out of your dark, empty closet when the lights are out.   Written by Gregory Mann

"Fremont"     Afghan refugee Donya (Anaita Wali Zada) lives in Fremont but works at a fortune cookie factory in San Francisco. Seeking connection, she decides to send a message out to the world through a cookie in this offbeat vision of the universal longing for home.   Each morning Donya eaves her tight-knit community of Afghan immigrants in Fremont, California. She crosses the Bay to work at a family-run fortune cookie factory in San Francisco. Donya drifts through her routine, struggling to connect with the culture and people of her new, unfamiliar surroundings while processing complicated feelings about her past as a translator for the U.S. government in Afghanistan. Unable to sleep, she finagles her way into a regular slot with Dr. Anthony (Gregg Turkington), a therapist, who grasps for prospective role models. When an unexpected promotion at work thrusts Donya into the position to write her own story, she communicates her loneliness and longing through a concise medium, the fortunes inside each cookie. Donya’s koans travel, making a humble social impact and expanding her world far beyond Fremont and her turbulent past, including an encounter with Daniel (Jeremy Allen White), a quiet automechanic, who could stand to see his own world expanded. Tenderly sculpted and lyrically shot in black-and-white, "Fremont" is a wry, deadpan vision of the universal longing for home.   "Radio Dreams" was about Iranians and Afghans living in the Bay Area. And "Land" was something entirely different, it took place in a fictional Indian reservation. With "Fremont" there are no specifically Iranian elements, but it's primarily about an Afghan girl who finds herself living in the Bay Area. As an immigrant or refugee coming into a new culture there a lot of times you want to be a human being foremost in order to be able to not just exist, but to have a sense of normalcy. And that's what aimed for with the character of Donya. She's a young girl, she has a traumatic past she needs to deal with, but she also has aspirational dreams. And those dreams are not about, you know, 'winning' or getting a job that pays $10 million, and calling home saying, 'Hey, ma, you know, America did sort me out. Look at me now'. It's not like that. No. Her aspirations are on a very normal, basic level. A lot of it is done in static shots.   For example, in the scenes with Donya and Dr. Anthony the film keeps the visual style pretty uniform in switching back and forth between them. Also, in the factory, the film shows the workplace, people at work, with static shots. We switched to handheld in the karaoke scene, which is a bit more dreamy, with softer movements while Donya is walking. Living thousands of miles from family and home, suddenly in a new country, starting from nothing, trying to make friends, trying to navigate through the complex immigration process to become a fully recognized U.S. citizen, none of it's easy. One thing about Donya’s personality is that she is strong. She doesn't want to share her loneliness with others, like even with her psychiatrist, Dr. Anthony. Sometimes she wants the company of other people, and sometimes she wishes she could get away. All of us are trying to find ways to do something for ourselves, and then for our people.   "Fremont" takes its title from its central setting, Fremont, California, a vibrant and diverse community in the East Bay and the most populous city in Alameda County. Fremont is situated on the historic lands of the Ohlone tribe, who were gradually displaced by Spanish missionaries beginning in the late 18th century. The area, along with the rest of modern-day California, was annexed into the United States following the conclusion of the Mexican-American War in 1848. The city itself was not incorporated until 1956, when five towns (Irvington, Centerville, Mission San Jose, Niles, and Warm Springs) joined together to form Fremont. The new city was named after John C. Frémont, the colorful and controversial figure who served variously as US army commander, California's military governor, and one of the state's first US senators. Frémont ran unsuccessfully as the Republican Party's first presidential nominee in 1856, with an anti-slavery platform and the memorable campaign slogan, 'Free Soil, Free Men, Frémont'. The city of Fremont itself has long been at the crossroads of economic opportunity and demographic change. Its proximity to Silicon Valley has brought high-tech manufacturing to working-class Fremont, the first Mac computer was built at an Apple plant in Fremont in the 1980s, and Tesla operates a major manufacturing hub there today.   Yet Fremont has also been treated as a bedroom suburb for the greater Bay Area-a calmer, quieter, cheaper alternative to the hustle and bustle of San Francisco. Until 2017, Fremont was the southern terminus for BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit), the commuter train that brings Donya into San Francisco for her job at the fortune cookie factory. Fremont today is roughly half Asian, with many different communities represented, including sizable Indian, Chinese, Filipino, and Vietnamese populations. Notably, Fremont can also claim, by general consensus, the largest Afghan population in the United States, with a short stretch of Fremont Blvd. dubbed Little Kabul. The Afghan diaspora of Fremont did not settle all at once; successive waves of migration have reinforced each other, with Afghans refugees displaced by the Soviet invasion of 1979, the Taliban regime in the late 1990s, and, most recently, the withdrawal of US forces in 2021. While Fremont is a work of fiction, Donya's story reflects the social texture of a real immigrant community perched between the pressure to assimilate and the will to survive.   The film is about an immigrant in a new country but, of course, there's no uniform immigrant experience. Each individual has different reasons for leaving and each individual has their own dreams and desires for what the future will hold in their new home. Often, one’s past dictates their present and for someone starting from scratch somewhere far from home, the past is never really behind them. This film wants to look beyond the idea that there are wild differences between humans. In a world where so much is made of imagining differences and exaggerating otherness, it’s important to look at universal similarities. An immigrant and a non-immigrant share many of the same hopes, dreams and ambitions. The main character in this film, Donya, a feisty young woman and a former translator for the U.S. military, feels she's where she's due to her own life choices. But this does not mean she does not suffer or feel displaced. She is determined to change things. She wants to be busy. She wants to be at ease. She wants to fall in love. And she wants acceptance. Like most other people. Even though this film looks at the plight of an Afghan translator and her new life in America, the style of the film is not one that's rooted in social realism.   Observations of the absurdities of cultural adjustment and feelings of displacement can also be presented through the lens of humor. For although the subjects that are dealt with here can be dark at times, there's humor in darkness too. Showing humor in situations that are bleak doesn’t underplay the seriousness or depth of a story but rather, it can add layers to the sense of realism. As the saying goes,  ‘He who cries only has one pain'. But he who laughs has a thousand and one pains. There's a huge Afghan refugee population in Iran. At a certain point, Iran is home to the biggest refugee population in the world, and the majority of them are Afghans. It's always about, you know, the men and the struggles they go through, which is of course very real. But the story also mentioned the town of Fremont, which is currently home to the largest Afghan community in the United States. And some of the women openly said that for them the process of working as translators had been even more difficult because some people in Afghanistan consider them to be traitors, but also because as women they run against the more traditional elements of that society by working at all.   You know, we think trauma changes you and we think grief changes you; we think happiness, success, all these things change you in some way. But we don't think they alter your personality. We see little shifts of course, but little shifts eventually get you somewhere, wherever that may be. Don’t forget Afghanistan! People there are still suffering, they're cold, hungry and without hope. It’s an emergency. Of course, there are problems worldwide, but please keep your thoughts on Afghanistan, where women's rights have disappeared. Talk about Afghanistan with your friends. Follow the.news.(http://the.news) And support Afghans who have recently arrived in your town or city. The story is far from over.   Written by Gregory Mann

"The Blackening"     "The Blackening" centers around a group of Black friends who reunite for a Juneteenth weekend getaway only to find themselves trapped in a remote cabin with a twisted killer. Forced to play by his rules, the friends soon realize this is no game. The film skewers genre tropes and poses the sardonic question, if the entire cast of a horror movie is Black, who dies first?   In the film, the group of friends reunite for a cabin weekend getaway. The friend group includes, Nnamdi (Sinqua Walls), his lowkey lawyer lover and college ex-girlfriend Lisa (Antoinette Robertson) and her gay best friend Dewayne (Dewayne Perkins). The rest of the crew follows shortly after, with the reformed King (Melvin Gregg), the life of the party Shanika (X Mayo), outspoken Allison (Grace Byers) and then there’s Clifton (Jermaine Fowler), an awkward but sweet nerd. Once they all arrive at the cabin, they realize the two members of the crew who planned the event are notably missing, Shawn (Jay Pharoah) and girlfriend Morgan (Yvonne Orji). As soon as the crew arrives, they pop a bunch of Blackface (James Preston Rogers), drink King’s super sugary Kool-Aid and play a fierce game of Spades. All seems well until they start wandering through the house and they stumble into a ‘game room’ and find 'The Blackening' board game, complete with a creepy white-eyed, bright lip, Blackface 'Sambo' figurine. All the doors immediately slam shut as the group is locked in with simple instructions, Play the game or die. Terrified, the group works through the board game’s absurd questions against the clock that test their knowledge of Black culture. There are questions ranging from naming Black actors that guest starred on Friends to reciting all of the Black national anthem. Finally, it comes down to one final question, who's the Blackest in the group? Whoever is chosen, must die. The group begins trading barbs about who they deemed the Blackest. By the end of the game, the group comes to realize that 'Blackness is whatever you want it to be'. No horror movie is complete without the antagonist. In "The Blackening" there are multiple villains out to make this Juneteenth celebration a night from hell.   Phil Stevens (Omar Epps) in "Scream 2". Captain Rhodes (Ving Rhames) in "Day Of The Dead". Shelley Baum (Meagan Good) in "One Missed Call". They all have two things in common. They’re Black. They also died first in their horror movies. From the early days of cinema, Black characters were often depicted as stereotypes or caricatures, playing the role of the expendable sidekick. This is the common trope that Black characters are often the first to die. In recent years, cinema has paved the way for more complex and nuanced portrayals of Black characters in horror movies. While progress has been made, there's still work to be done in terms of representation of diverse ranges of Black characters in the horror genre and beyond. "The Blackening" does what few horror movies have been able to do. The film provides just the gags and blood synonymous with the genre. It provides also some unique comedic moments as well. It shows Black people laughing, making jokes about Black culture and celebrating it, all the while, they're screaming, crying and literally throwing up out of fear. They fight for their lives against all of the evils that threaten them for about an hour and a half. In spite of that, they also accomplish something much deeper. The film wants to show that Black people not only can handle a genre that has historically seen them as expendable, but are a most necessary and nuanced voice in the space.   We love horror movies that are a bit of a mashup, that break the genre. That subvert the audiences expectations. This movie is a spoof, it's Scary Movie. The references that the characters bring forth and the way that they see themselves in the world is really talked about. This movie is intended to be a mix of gut-wrenching comedy and gut-wrenching fear and scares. The film satirizes the Black character trope in horror films with an original take. And, while this story stems from Black experiences and characters, it's ultimately an ode to the larger horror and comedy genre. Comedy is an art. There really is truth when it comes to the technicality of it, the timing of it, how much you deliver, and the way you deliver it. The balance of horror and comedy is very difficult. Comedy just comes from honest moments. A lot of times when you're scared and afraid, you're the most honest. You don't have time to predict what something is, and these are opportunities to play comedy.   Basically what the film is saying throughout is that Black people, specifically, are not a monolith. There’s a lot of us in this and we’re all different and at the same time being the same. There may be laughs and scares in the film, but there's a clear culturally relevant message present. There are moments where we're laughing, but then you realize in life there are people of color that are dealing with extremely dangerous situations and sometimes we have to laugh at it so that you don't cry about it, essentially. This film wants to break away from the trauma and hardship often present in Black storytelling and uses comedy instead. But there’s too much focus on Black pain and struggle stories or Black biopics. We're going to put ourselves in this position to get killed. This is not what we do in normal circumstances. So the concept of it is hysterical, but obviously, there's still some dramatic elements.   "The Blackening" provides an entertaining retreat from the world’s chaos. But  the film also provides a space for the Black community in the horror space. There’s more to Black characters in horror than just being the first killed. We all speak differently. We're all from different walks of life. We have different types of humor.   Written by Gregory Mann (Opens Aug 15 at Leichester Square, 7:30 pm)

(FULL TIME Fri 26 May - Thu 1 Jun Cine Lumiere 11:00 · 20:35 17 Queensberry Pl, South Kensington, London SW7 2DW, United Kingdom) "Full Time" Julie (Laure Calamy) goes to great lengths to raise her two children in the countryside while keeping her job in a Parisian luxury hotel. When she finally gets a job interview for a position she had long been hoping for, a national strike breaks out, paralyzing the public transport system. The fragile balance that Julie has established is jeopardized. Julie then sets off on a frantic race against time, at the risk of faltering. "Full Time"  begins with a noise, the leading character Julie’s breathing, as she sleeps. The idea is to reveal the character gradually, from an intimate perspective, in a macroscopic, sensory manner, with this deep breathing that enwraps us, letting us know that we will be right by her side the entire film. Extremely close to her breathing, to the very grain of her skin. Also, it's a moment of calm before the storm. The film is like a long forward thrust and the first scene precedes the constant motion that ensues. We’re pretty much in the only point in time when Julie is at rest, in that single and transient moment when she can recharge her batteries. Afterwards, there will no longer be any respite for her. Through the lens of this woman, alone with her children, it's about the rhythm of our lives and our daily struggles. Just like Julie, we want to speak about the people we see on the train every day who gamble on living far from the capital to have a better quality of life. It’s a difficult balance to strike and not everyone manages to find the way to make it work. It's difficult to keep the character’s bright composure in spite of the spell she is going through. The fact is that we know very little about this woman’s life, except that she's in the moment, yet relentlessly thinking of how to make things work from one day to the next. This woman is going through a rather chaotic chapter in her life, that Americans would sum up in the expression the perfect storm, meaning when you run into every possible and conceivable problem at once and you've to find ways to solve everything. It's a sensory film. Through the creation of a musical backdrop echoing Julie’s stressful daily life. The electro soundtrack reflects the character’s inner throbbing, the tempo and the repetitiveness of her own life. It’s like her inner music, a succession of waves transporting us into her experience. This way, everything that surrounded her became off screen sensory matter. It's a simple means to add density to the city, and make Paris more anxiety-inducing. For this is how Julie feels about being in town, instantly receiving its full- blown violence every time she steps off the train. This also explains why she wishes for another life for her children. She wants to maintain, regardless of the cost for her, her safe harbor in a more peaceful territory where the prevalent rhythm is less dehumanized. She’s a warrior. For her every means is acceptable, which sometimes includes small arrangements with the truth. Julie is an everyday heroine. We see her with her children, her colleagues, her friends, in her job interview. Each time, she isn’t quite the same woman and it's the sum of these women which tells us who she's. She has her own shortcomings, can be her own worst enemy, and can be tenacious to the point of obstinacy. She's both strong and fallible. Julie is highly physical, and you can feel her experience in the way she occupies the space. Because of the messes she has to deal with, Julie must constantly be one step ahead, planning for the future; just like a chess player, she said always several moves ahead. Paris is filmed in a rather unusual way, sharp and metallic although it essentially a mineral city. The urban surroundings aren’t typically Paris, and could have been any other large city. The inspiration comes from the way New York was filmed in certain 1970s movies. Paris hues are in orangish-gray tones, while my decision was to make them colder and cruder, as this corresponds well with the state of mind Julie is in the minute she sets foot in this hostile territory. "Full Time" is interested in the idea of repetitiveness in everyday life, having to repeat the same gestures endlessly at work and at home, as though caught in perpetual motion. The job shows us the extent to which Julie is attached to performance and perfection. The position of head chambermaid in a luxury hotel is not simple. There are specific skills and knowledge involved, precise tasks and gestures, and codes one needs to abide by. The film takes place during a massive nation-wide strike that spreads through all sectors of activity. Everything starts breaking down everywhere, in the image of what's happening to the leading character. The film wants the individual and collective struggles to follow parallel courses for us to gradually understand that they're connected, that they tell the same story, that one is the consequence of the other. Julie is stuck in a societal blind spot. She belongs to a category of workers who are the most vulnerable, for whom going on strike or having any form of representation is pretty much impossible. We remembered how, during the strike in Paris in 1995, we'd been very impressed with the way people who lived in and out of Paris showed great solidarity and found ways to function differently in their urban environment, walking, hitchhiking, helping one another. "Full Time" also plays with the rhythm of the day and above all that of the night. Living far from your place of work means leaving early and coming home late. Establishing Julie’s departures and returns home when it’s dark outside allowed me to convey the very long days, to broach the child-care logistics issues as well as the downsides of life in the country. This relation to time also gives the film the possibility to have the sun rise and set in public transportation, thus easily structuring days that succeed one another at an increasingly fast pace, without losing track of the story. Written by Gregory Mann .