OLMO**** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Day 2

OLMO is a funny, heart-felt, glorious film about a good kid trying to get the girl of his dreams while real life gets in the way. The kid is a teenage boy called Olmo who lives with his Mexican immigrant parents and big sister in a shitty New Mexican town in the late 70s. The girl of his dreams, Nina, lives across the street and is having a party on Saturday night. Olmo is too young and uncool to really stand a chance, but maybe, just maybe, if he turns up with his dad's killer stereo and his Saturday Night Fever dance moves he can get the girl. The problem is that his dad has MS and needs constant care, his sister is going to the local roller disco, and his mum has to work a double shift. 

Writer-director Fernando Eimbcke (DUCK SEASON) captures moments of pure joy often set to wonderful music. Apart from the aforementioned disco scene, there's a lovely scene where Olmo and his best mate manage to fix the record player under Olmo's father's painfully detailed tutelage, and suddenly the whole family is dancing around the living room. Even getting a cranky old car to start can be a scene of spontaneous happiness.

But the film also has its quiet moments of desperate sadness. In an early scene the kids are having an argument about who is going to babysit the dad, while he sits mute in his wheelchair - a once proud man conscious of the burden he has become. And later, without giving away too many spoilers, there's a plot pivot that confronts Olmo with the responsibilities of being an adult.

And then there are just so many moments that will ring true to those of us who grew up in immigrant families. The parents still speak their native language - Spanish - in the house, but the kids, born in the USA, reply in English. Both sides understand each other perfectly but don't have the confidence to actually speak the others' native tongue. The parents who are always worn out and tired. The kids who so desperately want to fit in. It all rings true.

Kudos to Plan B who are financing these low budget films. I really hope this gets distribution. It's so valuable - not to mention entertaining - to see well told, beautifully made migrant stories in these divided and violent times.

OLMO has a running time of 84 minutes. It played Berlin and Toronto and will play the BFI London Film Festival. It does not yet have a commercial release date.

THE SON AND THE SEA**** - BFI LFF 2025 Preview

Writer-director Stroma Cairns' feature directorial debut, THE SON AND THE SEA is a beautifully rendered story of four young British men trying to find their place in the world. The film stars the director's brother, and debut actor, Jonah West as Jonah, a frustrated twentysomething man trapped in the nihilistic London party scene. He decides to take a train to a coastal northern Scottish town to visit his ailing great-aunt, now in a dementia-care nursing home. His best mate Lee (Stanley Brock) tags along but their relationship is one of alternative laughs and bickering as Lee tells Jonah he needs to stop making excuses and sort himself out. Once they get to Scotland, Jonah and Lee meet two more young men: Charlie and feckless twin brother Lee (Connor and Luke Tompkins). Both have hearing disabilities but it's great to see this treated in a very straightforward way rather than as a plot device. 

Stroma Cairns captures something really beautiful and perceptive about how young men are with each other and the drifting, aimless vulnerability of not having a plan for your life. It's a patient film that watches them derp around but also face moments of real crisis, lensed beautifully by DP Ruben Woodin Dechamps, with a banging soundtrack from Toydrum (Slow Horses).

THE SON AND THE SEA has a running time of 102 minutes. It played Toronto and will play the BFI London Film Festival 2025.

SINK aka GHARAQ*** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Preview

Debut feature writer-director Zain Duraie's SINK is a beautifully acted film about a perilously unboundaried relationship between a mother and her mentally ill son in contemporary, middle-class Jordan.  They have such a close bond - regularly swimming together, partying together - that she is reluctant to acknowledge the severity of his withdrawal, depression and increasingly antisocial behaviour.  Rather than confront him, or admit to its oddity, she joins him in it, in a very powerful central scene involving a chicken (not as absurd as it sounds written down). The final act of the film sees her finally snap out of this and call for the appropriate help but she acts almost shocked and in grief. There are so many layers behind the performance - does she feel guilt that she enabled his behaviour for so long? Sadness that she has lost the child that she feels closest to? Fear that she did, at some level, enjoy being part of his antics?  The way the film is structured and played, we never truly know.  The mother, Nadia, (Clara Khoury, also starring in THE VOICE OF HIND RAJAB) is held at a distance from us, and in the end, that limited my true enjoyment of, and immersion within, the film.  

SINK has a running time of 88 minutes.  It played Toronto and will play the BFI London Film Festival, where it is contention for the Sutherland Trophy. All three screenings still have tickets available.

ISH***** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Preview

Writer-director Imran Perretta's ISH is a beautifully made and emotionally searing coming-of-age drama, set in contemporary Luton - a shitty post-industrial town an hour north of London. I know it's shitty because I grew up near there, and it comes as no surprise to see that this multicultural town is still facing the same racially motivated policing and tug of war for the souls of its teenage boys as it did when I was growing up in the eighties. 

The movie stars newcomer Farhan Hasnat as Ishmael, or Ish for short, a young teenage boy living in a multi-generational family, dealing (or not) with the death of his mum. He is at that age where, depending on when puberty hits, you can look and sound completely different from your best mate, in this case a much older-looking boy called Maram (Yahya Kitana).  Where Ish is a bit naive and looks younger than his years, Maram is more cynical and world-wise. He wants to hang out with the cool older kids, and is swept up in low-level politics.  Like it or not, world events now infect our country. What happens in Israel has a profound impact on our Jewish and Muslim kids.  For Maram, the "opps" are the "IDF" and he feels his people are under attack.

The film is about two kids being pulled apart.  Partly because Maram is maturing faster, but mostly because he is unanchored by the strong and loving family that Ish is part of.  There's something really beautiful about the relationship between Ish and his grandmother, and this film gives us a depiction of a centring and positive Muslim faith that is all too rare in contemporary British media. By contrast, Maram is left to his own devices by his fierce father, and all too vulnerable to having his head turned.  The motivating device of the film that really seals their separate fates comes about a third of the way through the film, when both kids are picked up by the police in a stop-and-search operation.  The episode is quick and brutal and a real eye-opener for those who haven't seen one of these first hand. 

It's hard to believe that this is a first-time feature directorial effort from Imran Perretta. The film feels so tightly scripted (kudos also to co-writer Enda Walsh -HUNGER) and beautifully captures the liminal nature of being a second-gen immigrant - how language and even names are slippery - and identity gets channeled through shifting patois. I also loved the monochrome lensing from DP Jermaine Canute Edwards, capturing the Luton I knew from my youth. This is a really impressive film and one that people wanting to understand contemporary Britain should watch.  It would pair well with the superb BBC Three series Man Like Mobeen.

ISH has a running time of 89 minutes and played Venice. It will play the BFI London Film Festival where it is in competition for the Sutherland Trophy for debut feature directors. Both screenings are sold out.

DREAMS aka DROMMER*** - Berlin Film Festival 2025 Golden Bear Winner

The third part of Dag Johan Haugerud's trilogy, DREAMS (SEX, LOVE), is a slippery, nostalgic and occasionally hilarious movie about a teenager's sexual awakening. 

Johanne is a 17-year old schoolgirl who falls desperately in love or in lust with her new French teacher and inveigles herself into Johanna with an A's life.  They hang out together at the teacher's apartment and for much of the film we are unsure of what exactly happening. Is Johanne with an E just a naïve schoolkid over interpreting every act of kindness or is she being groomed by a teacher who loves basking in her student's attention. This latter theory is given more weight when we meet another of the teacher's ex-students, though an adult, who says "there are many of us".  At this point one wonders how the schoolgirl will react? Mope and sulk or erupt into violence. And I love how quietly ambiguous the film is and for how long it refuses to give any clear answers.  Even in a final scene with the schoolteacher it is unclear just how complicit she was in what happened and how we should interpret this teenager's passionate and perhaps imagined love affair.

All of our uneasiness and questioning is given voice by the two older women in Johanne's life - her mother and her grandmother. Indeed, it's worth noting that men are almost entirely absent from this story except as a rather banal looking boyfriend or a rather banal therapist.  These scenes of inter-generational tussling are often hilarious but also signal how we, as adults, seek to pigeon-hole and explain and exploit the complex and sometimes unexplainable feelings of teenagers. 

These discussions are narratively induced by the fact that Johanne wrote her experience of her love affair in a book that is apparently preciously brilliant, and then gave the manuscript to her published poet grandmother and then to her mother.  At first Johanne's mother thinks her child has been the victim of sexual abuse.  But she quickly moves to thinking that the brilliant manuscript should be published as a queer feminist coming-of-age story.  And in some ways the disagreement between mother and grandmother over whether to publish is far more about their own tussles when the mother was a child than about Johanne at all.  I point you to an hilarious argument over the movie FLASHDANCE!

Ella Overbye gives a startlingly assured turn as 17-year old schoolgirl Johanne but all the female performances in this film are strong. I also loved the production design and directorial choices that show us cosy interiors with a romantic gauzy haze and feature endless beautiful architectural shots of staircases.

But this film is not without its flaws. I know that it needs to allow us into Johanne's experience of her love affair but the voiceover of banal teenage thoughts became rather tedious. I found myself clinging on for the comedy scenes between mother and grandmother. I also didn't find her voiceovers to be preciously brilliant (as described by them and by an editor) but to be the usual self-involved meanderings of a teenager.  Was this the point? Was it satire?  It was nonetheless boring for that.

DREAMS aka DROMMER has a running time of 100 minutes. It won the Golden Bear at the 2025 Berlinale.

MY OLD ASS***

Writer-direct Megan Park returns with he R-rated dramedy MY OLD ASS in which 18-year old Elliott (Maisy Stella - Nashville) takes some shrooms with her friends and suddenly finds herself talking to her 39-year old self (Aubrey Plaza - White Lotus). The films starts off being utterly hilarious with lots of shocked teenage horror that a 39 year old isn't married and is still in school. And why Stella may not look much like a young Plaza, she gets her give no fucks wry humour and confidence. 

At first, older Elliott's advice seems really good and helpful but there's one glitch.  Old Elliott tells Young Elliott to avoid a guy called Chad, even though they seem to have an instant connection that belies E's assumption that she is gay. The movie then takes a somewhat jarring tonal turn into a far more serious and affecting drama. Which is all good. I just didn't see it coming. And it felt a bit rushed and underdeveloped - and well - trite - by the end.  That said, Maisy Stella has a real talent for comedy and I hope this film leads to her getting more parts.

MY OLD ASS is rated R, has a running time of 89 minutes, and was released in September.

HOW TO HAVE SEX*****

Writer-director Molly Manning Walker's debut feature is an astonishingly raw, brave and affecting drama about a teenage girl's summer holiday turned horror.  I am unsurprised to learn that Manning Walker won the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes for her work, and can't wait to see what she does next.

The film stars Mia McKenna-Bruce as Tara, a sixteen-year old girl hoping to have some post-exam summer fun in Crete.  She is travelling with her two best friends, but we soon learn that friendship only goes so far when you both fancy the same boy.  We root for Tara to hook up with Badger (Shaun Thomas), who at least seems to have something of a moral conscience, but she inevitably ends up with his friend Paddy (Samuel Bottomley) who it is implied is more typical of the kind of guy you are going to meet on a party island.  Molly Manning Walker unflinchingly shows us the misogyny and sexual violence embedded in toxic holiday destinations like Cancun and the Med resorts. The most brutal part of all of this is how it manifests in the girls - the internalised misogyny of shaming someone for being a virgin, and the internalised pressure to have sex. You watch in terror as you realise the inevitable outcome of lots of booze, lots of pressure, and high-risk situations. All of this is portrayed with complete credibility by McKenna-Bruce and culminates in a final heartbreaking scene in an airport where she confesses the reality of what happened to her, and the evasive, equivocal reaction of her best friend. If you weren't worried about how teenagers think about consent before watching, you will be when you leave.

HOW TO HAVE SEX is rated 15 and has a running time of 91 minutes. It played Cannes and the BFI London Film Festival in 2023 and was released in the UK on December 29th. It will play Sundance 2024 before a February 2nd release.

LIE WITH ME aka ARRETE AVEC TES MENSONGES***

Two seventeen year old boys fall in love in small-town France.  One leaves for America to pursue his dream of becoming a writer and living a life true to himself.  The other stays back, weighed down by obligations toward his family farm, and maybe because of a lack of courage to come out.  Thirty-five years later the writer returns to find his lover has died, but also that a handsome young man, his son, is insinuating himself into the writer's life under false pretences.

The more accurate translation of this film's title isn't Lie With Me but Stop With Your Lies, or Stop Making Up Stories. And everyone in this film is lying. Stephane, the author, is lying about what Thomas meant to him, and why he writes, and fearful of publishing something that truly deals with what happened.  Thomas lied his whole life about his sexuality, but also left enough clues for his son Lucas to figure it out. And Lucas lies about his obsession with finding out until he is exposed. 

The resulting film is gentle, elegant, beautiful and moving but also rather slow, plodding and obvious.  It never really captured my heart. It felt rather safe and anaemic and gentle.  The novel upon which it is based is apparently a best-seller so I may try that instead.

LIE WITH ME played BFI Flare 2023 and is currently on release in the UK. It has a running time of 93 minutes.

WINTER BOY aka LE LYCEEN****

 

Theatre and cinema writer-director Christophe Honore (MA MERE) returns to our screens with a deeply personal, heartfelt and affecting retelling of the loss of his father and the impact this had on him as a young gay man.

The film opens in contemporary rural France with high-school student Lucas speaking not quite to camera as an unreliable narrator of his own story. We later find this is part of a therapy session. He describes his final trip to boarding school with his father, played courageously by Honore himself, who we come to realise probably committed suicide by driving his car into oncoming traffic.  Very quickly, the father is dead, and we see the rest of the film unfold in grief and trauma.

At the start of the film, Lucas is an out gay schoolboy with an active sex life. But when his father dies he decides to close off all feelings and live for physicality and the moment. He goes to Paris with his elder brother Quentin and develops a crush on Quentin's room-mate Lilio. He also flirts with religion, indulges in a random hook-up for the first time (nicely inter-cut!) and flirts with sex work in a kind of twisted act of protection for Lilio.

Clearly he is acting out, and struggling to come to terms with grief and his own sexual power as a near-adult. It's a lot and when the waves finally break the ramifications are severe and sensitively handled. 

There's so much to love in this film. First and foremost, newcomer Paul Kircher's magnetic central performance as Lucas but also Erwan Kapoa Fale's heartbreakingly sensitive turn as Lilio. I love that Honore depicts gay sex beautifully and openly, and also that he depicts the love-hate of siblings so authentically. Vincent Lacoste is fantastic as big brother Quentin. I really felt like I knew this trio and felt invested in their lives. 

But there are things I didn't like in the movie too. I didn't like that the opening therapy scene carried on into voiceover over the immediate reaction to the death. I found it mannered and distracting rather than elucidating. I think Honore means it to be mannered: he's making a point about a disjointed, fragmentary and contradictory narrator. Fine. I just could've done without it.  I also didn't like what felt like a forced focus on the mother (Juliette Binoche) late in the film. It felt as though Honore had to give her one big scene to get her to do the film.

That said, this remains one of the most beautifully told and affecting movies I've seen in a while, and well worth seeking out. I can't wait to see what Paul Kircher does next. 

LE LYCEEN has a running time of 122 minutes. It played Toronto, San Sebastian and London 2022 and BFI Flare 2023.

PREMATURE - BFI London Film Festival 2019

Ayanna (Zora Howard) is a naive bookish teenager bound for liberal arts college in the Fall.  But before that, her summer is upended by a chance encounter with Isaiah (Joshua Boone) that turns into a full-blown summer love-affair that - interestingly - she instigates.  He's older than her, and she loves his passion for music and ideas. She feels confident enough to open sexually and intellectually, sharing that she writes poetry.  It's intense and overwhelming, and ripe for a reality check when Isaiah's white ex-girlfriend shows up, or every time he gets into an argument with her friends over politics. The way in which both parties deal with the rift speaks to Ayanna's relative and understandable immaturity.  There's a third act twist that's beautifully and responsibly handled, and navigated, as the entire film, with real authenticity and nuance. And as we leave the couple at the end of the summer, there's a lovely ambiguity as to what will happen next.

I really was interested in the relationship, thanks mostly to Zora Howard's beautiful acting and writing. It also helps knowing she was pivotal in crafting the film alongside debut director Rashaad Ernesto Green, so that the explicit sex scenes don't come off as exploitative. But the really beautiful thing in this film is the backdrop to the relationship - our window into contemporary Harlem, in sunkissed 16mm - the way in which young people debate politics, or simply just hang out in launderettes, and the beautiful support system that young black women and their mothers have to provide for each other. 

PREMATURE has a running time of 86 minutes. It played Sundance and London 2019 and does not yet have a commercial release date.

A PARIS EDUCATION aka MES PROVINCIALES - BFI London Film Festival 2018 - Preview

Sweet tap-dancing Christ, this film really is the most boring pile of pretentious wank. Sit around for over 2 hours and watch whiny French film students have apparently deep and meaningful conversations about Art while fucking indiscriminately and being arrogant and bitchy.  The central character in this film - Matias - is meant to be our hero - an uncompromising wannabe auteur of integrity who worships the greats. But in reality he's just a jumped-up arrogant prick.  And he is worshipped by the film's protagonist Etienne - the provincial rube of the title who goes to Paris to study cinema, even before Etienne has even met Matias. In fact, as many women as Etienne cheats on his girlfriend with, this is the real love story of the film. The problem is that while Matias is unlikeable, Etienne is a banal void - dull, reactive, artistically blocked so we never actually see him create anything.  What makes this talky, endless, actionless nonsense even worse is that it's shot in black and white and laced with a Beethoven-heavy soundtrack for no real reason other than its director Jean-Paul Civeyrac is as pretentious as Matias. And let's be clear, this is not that kind of crisp elegant black and white photography of films like MANHATTAN. Nope. DP Pierre-Hubert Martin's whites are never white, his blacks lack depth - the whole thing just feels muddy.  Quite like the mind of its characters.  Avoid at all costs. 

A PARIS EDUCATION has a running time of 136 minutes. It played Berlin 2018 and was released in France and USA this summer. There are still tickets available for all three screenings at this year's BFI London Film Festival.

BEACH RATS

BEACH RATS is a beautifully observed brave film about a teenage boy struggling to come to terms with his homosexuality.  It's written and directed by award-winning sophomore director Eliza Hittman and benefits from delicately beautiful, 16mm, nostalgia-tinted photography from celebrated French cinematographer Helene Louvert (PINA!) The film stars British actor Harris Dickinson as a 19 year old high school graduate called Frankie, without job, car or aim in life.  His father is dying, his mum (Kate Hodge) is an exhausted caregiver, merely observing his comings and goings, and the only real emotional reaction we get from all that is Frankie looking bemused and distant and filching his dad's meds.  What he does have is a bunch of jock friends with whom he hangs out at the beach in Brooklyn, getting high, and up to no good. Against this typically "bro" hetero backdrop, boasting about conquests, Frankie attempts a tentative relationship with Simone (Madeline Weinstein), but she soon realises that he's not into her, and maybe gets the reason why. It's testament to the nuanced and subtle performances from both actors that we never truly know how far she gets it.  Simultaneously, Frankie is exploring the world of gay chatrooms, and moves from online flirting to midnight hook ups at the beach. I love the way that the director handles these without awkwardness or squeamishness, and never objectifies Frankie.  It's rare to see such an honest depiction of casual sex in any film, let alone showing homosexuality. Kudos to all involved but especially Harris Dickinson who gives a truly astounding break-out performance.

BEACH RATS played Sundance 2017 where won Best Director. It also played the BFI London Film Festival. It was released earlier this year in the USA. It was released in the UK and Ireland last Friday in cinemas and on streaming services. It will be released in Germany on January 25th 2018. The film has a running time of 96 minutes and is rated 15 for strong sex, nudity, drug misuse and language. 

LADY BIRD - BFI London Film Festival 2017 - Day 11

LADY BIRD is a funny, moving, beautifully observed relationship drama centring around the teenage girl of the title.  It's an assured directorial debut from writer-actor Greta Gerwig (MISTRESS AMERICA) and features another impressive performance from Saoirse Ronan (ON CHESIL BEACH) in the lead role, fearlessly matched by Laurie Metcalf (ROSEANNE) as her mother.  This relationship is at the heart of the film, with its class-frustrations echoed in Lady Bird's relationship with her long-time best friend.  To be sure, we also see the 17 year old navigate relationships with boyfriends too, but these aren't at the heart of the film

Christine McPherson is a quirky, smart but frustrated teenager who adopts the Lady Bird persona to mark herself as different from the bland Sacramento society in which she lives.  She dreams of moving to New York and attending a liberal arts college where she'll find people with interests similar to her own. The central tragedy of this film is that she takes that frustration out on those who love her the most, principally her mother Marion.  Marion is another strong personality, and as much as she loves her daughter, she's frustrated that Christine doesn't appreciate what her parents have sacrificed to put her through private school.  Marion is also deeply hurt when she discovers that Christine has been mocking their house as being "on the wrong side of the tracks" because it doesn't live up to the flashier houses that some of her friends live in.  This relationship is at the very heart of the film and is so relatable and brilliantly observed that it's worth watching the film for that alone.

But there's so much more to admire in this film. Christine is oblivious to the fact that her father (a beautifully tender performance from Tracy Letts) has lost his job.  And although he's not the centre of the film there's such humanity in seeing this highly qualified man having to apply for the same graduate entry jobs that his also over-qualified son is applying for.  He seems to be a truly selfless and decent man, and reminded me a lot of Willem Dafoe's character in THE FLORIDA PROJECT.  I also loved the relationship between Christine and her childhood best friend - and the way Christine ditches her for a more glamorous set to attract a new boyfriend.  It's a betrayal and reconciliation we've seen a million times in teen comedies, but so much more authentic and real here.  Finally, I loved the way Gerwig handled Christine's love life, and a particularly touching scene between Ronan and her boyfriend played by Lucas Hedges (MANCHESTER BY THE SEA). My only minor criticism of the film is that I wanted to see more of that relationship after that scene - it felt strange to me that it didn't continue.

Overall, this is a truly impressive directorial debut from one of the most original and intelligent voices in cinema.  I really admire Gerwig's mission to give us something that feels more authentic than typical coming of age dramas, and her willingness to show life as it is - financial struggles, selfishness, arguments, even Christine's deliberate acne - the movie we LIVE rather than the movie that plays in our head, as she said in the post-film Q&A. 

LADY BIRD has a running time of 94 minutes and is rated 15 for very strong language  and brief strong nudity. LADY BIRD played Telluride, Toronto and London 2017. It will be released in the USA on November 3rd, in the UK on December 29th, and in Spain on May 4th 2018. The film has a running time of 93 minutes.

SICILIAN GHOST STORY - BFI LFF 2017 Preview

SICILIAN GHOST STORY is a slow-burn drama that tells the tale of a mafia abduction in Sicily from the perspective of the teenage girl who had a crush on its victim. Descriptions of the film often play up the movie's fantasy elements but I found this to be a canard.  This is fundamentally a beautifully observed and melancholy tale of thwarted love and societal injustice. The fantasy elements, such as they are, are lightly handled and can be read as mere imagination and intuition.

The story takes place in a Sicilian hilltown amid verdant fairytale woods rather than in the dusty, oppressive Sicily of the Godfather films.  In a sunlit, giddy opening, our heroine Luna (Julia Jedlikowska) follows the kind, beautiful Giuseppe (Gaetano Fernandez) into the woods, and like any knight in shining armour, he saves her from a rabid dog. She then plucks up the courage to give him her love letter, and revels in this success that night by sending signals by torchlight to her best friend Loredana (Corinne Musallari).  But the next day at school, Giuseppe is nowhere to be seen, and Luna simply can't accept her parents and teachers explanations that he's sick or gone away.  The societal silence around his kidnapping, punishing his father for becoming an informant, is claustrophobic and brings Luna to the edge of madness. She cannot fathom why no-one will help her find her beloved when he can only be being held in the surrounding villages. Memories of their brief time together draw her back to the woods, and to the makeshift house where he is being held.  Her mother approximates a kind of buttoned up Mrs Danvers with her cool hardness and the owls are not what they seem. And all the time, poor Giuseppe is still imprisoned, clinging onto Luna's love letter but ever weaker and more apathetic.

The film works beautifully as an allegory of the impossibility of innocence in a corrupt world. Even outside of the main story, we see Loredana beaten by her father so much that she doesn't even seem to be bothered by it any more. At any rate, it gives her a magnificent toughness that puts her in a class of Badass Movie Best Friends all of her own.  But the real victory of the film is to be unflinching in its depiction of violence but also to give us some room for hope without seeming forced or simplistic.  After 90 minutes of very slow action, and an ending that I thought was all its own, the  movie continued and I was rather glad it did. It's also beautifully shot by Luca Bigazzi (YOUTH) and depicts a Sicily quite unlike that we have on screen before.

SICILIAN GHOST STORY played Cannes 2017. It was released in Italy earlier this year. It goes on release in France on November 15th and in Argentina on December 7th. Tickets are still available to see it at the BFI London Film Festival 2017.

MISTRESS AMERICA

Greta Gerwig - the writer and star of MISTRESS AMERICA - has fashioned a career as a writer and actress playing variations on a certain theme.  In we start with Whit Stillman's fantastic DAMSELS IN DISTRESS, Gerwig played a character called Violet that should've been insufferable - an arrogant, supremely confidence college student intent on making everybody's life better with her brand of wisdom. And yet there was something so knowingly absurd about her confidence that she became endearing, and I adored the movie.  Then we got FRANCES HA,  directed by Noah Baumbach, where Gerwig played a similarly eccentric twenty-something girl, but this time so indulged and flaky that I found her irritating beyond endurance.  Now we get Gerwig as Brooke Cardinas, the heroine of MISTRESS AMERICA, also directed by Baumbach.  She combines the arrogance of Violet with the flakiness and self-delusion of Frances, but somehow the result is a perfectly nuanced and captivating character, and a movie of real substance as well as wit.

WHO KILLED NELSON NUTMEG? - BFI London Film Festival 2015 - Day Four

WHO KILLED NELSON NUTMEG is a delightful, witty children's movie in the best tradition of Scooby Doo and The Famous Five.  Five intrepid friends gather to investigate the mysterious disappearance of the original Nelson Nutmeg - mascot at their summer camp.  As is typically the case, that's only part of a wider mystery that the pesky kids uncover! Moreover, we have the suspicious baddie in the form of thuggish Mr Slug, and Bonnie Wright aka Mrs Harry Potter enjoying a turn as the apparently diabolical new camp manager Diane.  The kids themselves have the right balance of age and youth, cynicism and romanticism, as we'd expect in such an adventure. I like that the writers have given us an age range for pre-teen to teenager so that we can explore first crushes, and gatecrashing your first disco as well as still believing in the power of the imagination. The performances of the five lead children are universally good and while the dialogue can be a little wooden at times, it's all about remembering your own youth and how we all used to go on these insane madcap adventures over the slightest of things.  And it's a melancholy tale about growing up - not just for the kids but the adults too.  

INSIDE OUT

INSIDE OUT is the phenomenally successful new Pixar movie from the directors of two films I really adored - UP and RATATOUILLE.  It's smart, witty and beautifully imagined and rendered. But for some reason it just didn't connect with me on an emotional level. In fact, two days after seeing it, the thing I remember most about my movie watching experience was the Pixar short film, LAVA, that preceded the feature. I can still sing that song and feel moved by the plight of the little volcano hoping for love.  INSIDE OUT was clever, and pretty, but I'm just not sure it's going to stay with me in that way.

This is often the problem with high concept film. INSIDE OUT posits a world in which our emotions are neatly split into five key feelings, and whichever of these controls our mood generates our memories and our feelings.  So, at first glance, our protagonist is an eleven year old girl called Riley, struggling with moving across country with her family, feeling pressured to keep a happy face for her stressed out dad, but inwardly hating it all.  But the real star of the show is Riley's emotion, Joy, played by Amy Poehler (PARKS & RECREATION).  Joy has, up to this point, been largely in charge of Riley's emotions resulting in lots of happy memories.  And Joy ascribes part of her success to keeping Sadness (THE OFFICE's Phyllis Smith) firmly off the controls.  So the coming of age journey is not really for Riley but for Joy, as she learns that everyone needs a little sadness to make the happier times happy by contrast. And sometimes a good cry, admitting your suffering, allows others to reach out to you and for you to resolve, rather than smother, your issues.  So in that sense, this is a radical children's movie, for while it still gives us a happy ending, that happiness is conditional on admitting that it's okay to be sad.

BOYHOOD

You can listen to a podcast review of this film here, or by subscribing to Bina007 Movie Reviews in iTunes:

In 2002, Richard Linklater (BEFORE SUNRISE) cast a six year old boy called Ellar Coltrane to play a kid called Mason, who lives with his sister Sam (Lorelai Linklater) and his single-mom (Patricia Arquette). He filmed the kids hanging out with their charismatic but clearly immature father (Ethan Hawke), cycling round their neighbourhood and acting out when their mom wants to move back home and go back to college.  Six years later and Linklater took up the project again.  The kids are dealing with life with a new stepfather, stepbrother and stepsister. Their mum has gone to college and gotten her career back on track, but the marriage is bad and their father is still a distant presence.  The difficulty of dealing with authority and life's sudden changes plays itself out.  The kids have an attitude because they can't see the full picture.  Fast forward another six years, and Sam has gone to college, and young Mason is on the verge of leaving. He's grown up now, but still growing - dating, excited and scared at the new life he's about to embark upon, sensitive and wise but still vulnerable and changeable.   Meanwhile, his dad has remarried and grown up and his mum has realised she's an empty nester.

LIFE PARTNERS

LIFE PARTNERS is a stealth movie. It starts off so quiet and banal and forgettable and then suddenly you realise you are engrossed in the characters' lives and when they get into arguments they feel lifted from your reality. This is the kind of observational dramedy that is harder to pull off - to truly make authentic - than it seems.  Accordingly, it probably should've gotten more attention than it did.  

Leighton Meester (Gossip Girl) starts as a twenty-nine year old girl struggle to reconcile herself to the fact that she hates her life. A dull secretarial job was meant to compensate for writing music, but she never really did that, and now she's just stick with no money, no idea of what to do with her life, and to cap it all, a best friend who is no longer available to her.  Why? Because that best friend Paige (Gillian Jacobs) has started her first serious relationship.  Paige wants good things for Sasha but mistakes her relationship misfires for a genuine career crisis - something which her new boyfriend actually gets.  

It feels so slight to say that this is a movie about two best friends growing up and growing apart before realising that their different life choices are okay.  But this is some of the most real stuff I've seen depicting twenty-something female friendship. It's also refreshing to see a lesbian character as the lead, and that her sexuality isn't the focus of the film. Yes, she's flaky at relationships but it accepts Sasha for who she is.  More films should do that. So kudos to director and writer Susanna Fogel & Joni Lefkowitz.  Can't wait to see what they do next.

LIFE PARTNERS has a running time of 93 minutes and is rated R. The movie played Tribeca 2014 and is now available on streaming services.

WE ARE THE BEST - a touching coming-of-age comedy

WE ARE THE BEST is an absolute joy! A funny, moving, authentic look at life as a young teenage girl rebelling against everything, no-one taking you seriously, and getting your heart broken. Its bittersweet tone and effortless depiction of close female friendship reminded me of GHOST WORLD - also based on a graphic novel - although the tone is less nihilistic than that. In fact, it felt closer to the delightful SON OF RAMBOW, showing just how much can be achieved by young naive kids who just don't know any better.

The story begins with a fight to control noise.  Bobo and Els are two teen punks in early 80s Sweden, constantly trying to block out the sounds of their fighting or partying loving but ultimately lackadaisical parents.  They try to hide out at their local youth club but under sound-attack from a shitty amateur prog-rock band they decide to book out the rehearsal space and, hey!, why not start a punk band!  This is, of course, the perfect idea because the key point of punk is that you didn't have to play, or play well, to participate. It was an inherently amateur concept. That said, when they see geeky Hedwig play classical guitar at a school concert, they realise they need her musical stylings and bring her into their group.  What follows is your classic SCHOOL OF ROCK style young kids form a band, go up against the prejudices of the community, and put on an awesome show.

That all sounds pretty hackneyed but the focus of this film isn't really on practice montages and winning some concert competition, but just on spending time with these friends and seeing how they interact.  I absolutely adored the feisty Klara with her boundless enthusiasm, absolute conviction and hilarious appropriation of adult terms.  Thoughtful introspective Bobo is something of an enigma, but the heart of the film - she's the one who perceives that geeky Hedwig might not want her hair shaved into a Mahican.  

A lot of the hilarity comes from seeing these guys write rebellious songs about hating their PE teacher, or debating whether God is a Fascist in these ponderous earnest tones. But what elevates this movie into something better and more worthwhile is the delicate way in which Lukas Moodysson essays the kids' relationships with their parents and the shifting loyalties between each other.  It's so rare to see childhood friendship depicted on screen with anything like authenticity - instead we just get those awful generic high school movies - and that makes WE ARE THE BEST all the more welcome.

Just one final note, for those of you familiar with Swedish auteur, Lukas Moodysson's previous films - the harrowing, uncompromising  LILYA 4-EVER and the more tedious but earnest MAMMOTH - don't be surprised when you find that WE ARE THE BEST is utterly different in tone and concern, and that the only commonality is the immediacy of the dogma-lite shooting style.

WE ARE THE BEST has a running time of 102 minutes and is rated 15 in the UK for very strong language. 

WE ARE THE BEST played Venice, Toronto and London 2013. It was released last year in Sweden, Iceland, Spain, Norway and Finland and it was released earlier this month in the Netherlands and Estonia. It will be released on April 18th in the UK and Ireland.