Category: Female led film

Through a Glass Darkly (1961)

Faith, family and femininity are put to the test in Bergman’s bleak meditation on religion and love

Director: Ingmar Bergman

Cast: Harriet Andersson (Karin), Gunnar Björnstrand (David), Max von Sydow (Martin), Lars Passgård (Minus)

Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly marks a new era in the Master’s filmography. It was the first of three thematically connected films about faith and religion (although you could argue The Virgin Spring really makes this a quartet). It saw Bergman make a firm commitment to seemingly theatrical chamber pieces, with small, focused casts of trusted collaborators handling complex (joke-free) and searching themes. It was also first of his films set on Fårö, a place that would become so associated with him it would effectively be rechristened Bergman Island.

Through a Glass Darkly (Bergman’s second consecutive Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Picture) is a brooding, intense chamber piece set entirely in a house and beachside jetty on Fårö. It’s a family reunion. Author David (Gunnar Björnstrand) returns to Sweden from Switzerland to see his children. They are 17-year old son and aspiring writer Minus (Lars Passgård) and Karin (Harriet Andersson), now married to respected older doctor Martin (Max von Sydow). The real purpose of the gathering is to monitor the recovery of Karin, a schizophrenic whose condition has (without her knowledge) been declared inoperable. Karin is drawn to obey the commands of voices only she hears which she believes emanate from an abandoned bedroom, covered in cracked wallpaper. There she believes God calls for her to join him on the other side of the wall.

There is much to admire about Through a Glass Darkly, not least the striking, haunting, cinematography of Sven Nykvist. In a film that takes place on an almost silent island – there is no music, other than a few bars of Bach on the soundtrack, and barely any natural sound, so much so that a late arrival of a helicopter seems (deliberately) like an almost demonic visitor – light becomes the main force. It beats down from the sun, wraps across rooms, seems to transform spaces in front of an eye (there is a beautiful stationary shot of it flooding an abandoned boat where Minus and Karin sit in shocked horror). It picks out every feature of the scarred wallpaper in Karin’s room and casts searching shadows and stark, interrogative beams across the character’s faces.

It greatly expands both the intensity and claustrophobia of a challenging chamber piece, exquisitely directed by Bergman. The acting of the four leads – three trusted collaborators and a newcomer – is faultless. Andersson, in particular, tackles an almost impossibly difficult character who we first meet as a carefree young woman and leave as a huddled, shattered figure hiding from the light behind sunglasses. Andersson’s raw and searching performance avoids all overblown histrionics, becoming a detailed and compassionate study of a woman losing control over her actions. Bergman holds the camera on her for long takes, while Andersson lets a multitude of emotions play across her face.

Björnstrand is equally impressive as a (disparaging) Bergman stand-in, an artist neglecting his children in a quest for perfection, coldly distant to others, guilty at his selfishness (at one point he excuses himself to privately weep at his inadequacy as a father, then returns unchanged) but quite happy to take what he can from his family to use in novels. von Sydow takes a quietly restrained role as a sombre, somewhat dour man, hopelessly in love with his wife but clearly little more to her (and he accepts this) than a surrogate father. Passgård more than matches them as a depressed teenager, yearning for approval and frustrated at learning how difficult life is.

Bergman’s family follows this complex and challenging family, which becomes a filter for understanding if love is where God is in our world. The family is distant and uncommunicative with each other – the opening scene sees them laughingly return from a swim, but the second any of them split into pairs for conversations, resentments about the others come bubbling out. Is any love here real or performative? And if it’s performative, where is love and therefore where is God?

In this world, has Karin’s schizophrenia may have emerged as an attempt to insert an acceptable love that is otherwise missing from her life. Her father is a cold-fish, who immediately announces at their reunion dinner he will soon leave for Yugoslavia, then produces a series of gifts “from Switzerland” all too obviously purchased at an airport and unsuitable for the recipient (such as gloves that don’t fit Karin). Her husband overflows with desire for her, but she can hardly raise a flicker of interest in him sexually and behaves him with more like an affectionate daughter.

The most affection filled relationship she has is also the most inappropriate. She and Minus have a relationship of physical intimacy, and she kisses and strokes him with an affection that from the start feels uncomfortably close. They confide in each other emotionally in a way they never would do with others, and Minus is the first witness of one of her schizophrenic breaks, invited by her to view the room she believes is a passageway to God. This unhealthy intensity builds, through confidences and whispered confessions into a terrible encounter in a ruined boat, where Karin is commanded by her voices to seduce Minus into crossing a terrible line.

Perhaps this is a search for love and meaning “to see but through a glass darkly” as St Paul wrote. Karin is searching endlessly for love – and therefore God – but her search seems fruitless. Her family only slowly adjust, she shatters her closest relationship and eventually even her visions in her wallpapered room tip into nightmares. Bergman never lets us see the visions Karin witnesses or hear the voices she does (this places more pressure on Andersson whose controlled and measured performance is more than capable of delivering on) but we see all the traumatic impact on her as they prove as incapable of delivering confirmation of love in her world as anything else.

It’s surprising, for a film which starts as a family drama and becomes a quietly nihilistic drama, that Bergman ends on a moment of hope as David and Minus share a moment of closeness. Bergman later said he regretted this, and the moment does feel forced at the end of a downbeat drama. It may be a reflection of the fact that Through a Glass Darkly, intriguing as it is, is perhaps a little too serious and leans a little too heavily into artistic intensity. It lacks the touches of warmth, hope and humanity that makes Wild Strawberries a masterpiece and at times hits its notes of intense brooding a little too hard (its more or less from here that the Gloomy Swede label stuck).

It’s frequently an artistic triumph, but in some ways I find it less complete than other Bergmans. It’s exploration of its themes of faith and love don’t always coalesce quite as sharply as I would wish. It strains a little too much for profound importance at the cost of some of its humanity and the characters – brilliantly performed as they are – feel a little too much like puppets in the hands of God-like Bergman, going as and when according to his needs. But then, a Bergman film that doesn’t quite make it, would be the crowning achievement of other directors – and Through a Glass Darkly haunts the mind, turning over and over again in your thoughts, for days after you’ve seen it.

Funny Girl (1968)

A star-turn is the main interest in this grand-scale but so-so musical

Director: William Wyler

Cast: Barbra Streisand (Fanny Brice), Omar Sharif (Nicky Arnstein), Kay Medford (Rose Brice), Anne Francis (Georgia James), Walter Pidgeon (Florenz Ziegfeld), Lee Allen (Eddie Ryan), Mae Questel (Mrs Strakosh), Gerald Mohr (Branca), Frank Faylen (Keeney)

Fanny Brice was the major pre-war star of Broadway, the leading lights of the Ziegfeld Follies, the sort of all-singing, all-dancing spectaculars they just don’t make any more. A fictionalised version of her life became a Broadway smash, produced by her son-in-law Ray Stark. Hollywood came knocking, leading to this film version. Shepherded to the screen by William Wyler (his first ever musical, a genre he’s avoided due to being deaf in one ear) it would tell of Brice’s early success, her relationship with Ziegfeld (Walter Pidgeon) and her marriage to dodgy gambler Nicky Arnstein (Omar Sharif). And to play Brice? It could only be the woman who created the role, a young sensation called Barbra Streisand.

Funny Girl begins, ends and is exclusively about Barbra Streisand. Making her film debut, Streisand is, not to put too fine a point on it, absolutely sensational. This is charismatic, star-making stuff from an actress who knew exactly how to tailor the part (already basically written for her) to her strengths. Streisand is funny, kooky, witty but also vulnerable, shy, preoccupied with her low-opinion on her looks. She totally convinces as a charismatic figure who can dominate the room with cheek, won’t think twice at bluffing she can roller-skate to land a role or pigeon-hole Zeigfeld and argue against being asked to do something in performance. But she equally easily embodies a vulnerable woman, worried she is an unlovable ugly duckling, so certain she is destined to be alone she zeroes in on the first man who shows interest in her.

That’s not even mentioning the magnetism of Streisand. A truly confident, unique performer you couldn’t imagine anyone else so brilliantly mixing power-ballad notes with this sort of quirky character comedy. She can belt out Don’t Rain on My Parade or I’m the Greatest Stars with an awe-inspiring voice. She can add layers of pathos and tragedy to songs like People and Funny Girl. But few other performers could be both a diva and a pratfall artist on roller-stakes or mix arch-wit with low-comedy by stuffing a pillow up her dress in performance to turn her bride character pregnant in His Love Makes Me Beautiful, the Ziegfeld number she desperately doesn’t want to perform (because she can’t see herself as a beautiful bride).

Streisand is so central to Funny Girl’s success that I’m not sure that so much as three minutes go by without her appearing. It’s not a surprise as, subtract her from the mix, and Funny Girl is a fairly bland, unoriginal and at times slightly flat musical that struggles to do or say anything interesting. It’s had millions poured into its elaborate sets, it’s grandiose costumes and its vintage, sepia-tinged photography. But it’s an overlong, overblown, poorly paced film blessed with a star turn.

Wyler’s main strength as a director on mega-budget spectaculars like this was his professionalism and control, the gifts a producer likes. Visually though, Funny Girl frequently looks lost in widescreen, sets shot in a way that magnifies their emptiness and lacking the sort of affinity for timing and musicality that something like Minnelli, Donen and Kelly made look so natural (Most of the larger musical numbers were worked on by Herbert Ross). There is the odd strong shot – a showy helicopter shot pans down to Fanny on a tug steaming past the Statue of Liberty during Don’t Rain on my Parade or a sunset that pops up between the faces of Sharif and Streisand during a dockside embrace. But too many shots favour getting the money on the screen or struggle to frame two people interestingly in widescreen.

Mind you the story is a bit of a struggle. Fanny’s ascent to success is fast-paced and untroubled by conflict. Every gamble she takes pays-off, every cheeky trick goes unpunished. She can’t roller-skate when hired to do so? She sabotages the closing number of Ziegfeld’s show with her pregnancy flourish? Doesn’t matter – everyone loves it. She teeters for a few minutes on being fired, then jumps to promotion and glory. Ziegfeld – the sort of elite, New England aristocratic role perfect for Walter Pidgeon – just sighs and acknowledges talent gonna talent.

There are a few more clashes in her personal life. Her marriage to Nicky is the core emotional plotline of the film, but Nicky’s rough edges (in real life he was a conman and a swindler) are shaved off. Instead, he is played as a charming rogue, a professional gambler who bamboozles Fanny’s manager into giving her a stonking payrise and plays with honour and grace at the card table. When his business dealings go south, it’s never really his fault and he’s so noble he works to save Fanny’s honour by taking the rap for a collapsed business and arguing she should divorce him forthwith.

It doesn’t help that Nicky is played by Omar Sharif. Sharif, while a striking screen presence, had an acting range pretty much restricted to playing Sherif Ali. He’s unable to give the role any depth or interest, he can’t sing (thankfully he only tries once) and he’s overly reliant on his expressive eyes. He’s no match for Streisand, with whom he has less chemistry than rumour suggests was the case.

Streisand though was one-in-a-million here. Rumours abound she was a difficult and demanding presence, who fought tooth-and-nail with Wyler. She requested endless retakes to get her performance just right and “contributed” to script cuts (Anne Francis, playing a blousy Ziegfeld singer, was furious that her role effectively ended on the cutting room floor). Her perfectionism made her a controversial figure in Hollywood – but it’s also the brilliant fine-tuning of her own skill that won her the Oscar she shared with Katherine Hepburn. On a side note, Streisand had been controversially invited to join the Academy before she made a film, meaning the vote I assume she cast for herself was the one that guaranteed her the Oscar.

Funny Girl is large, overlong, largely visually and narratively uninteresting film that has a bright, shining, tour-de-force superstar in the lead who is in absolute, total control of her talent. Without Streisand it would be a tedious turkey – with her, it’s a strange landmark.

Judy (2019)

A star turn is the only thing of note in this empty, uninsightful biopic

Director: Rupert Goold

Cast: Renée Zellweger (Judy Garland), Jessie Buckley (Rosalyn Wilder), Finn Wittrock (Mickey Deans), Rufus Sewell (Sid Luft), Michael Gambon (Bernard Delfont), Richard Cordery (Louis B Mayer), Darci Shaw (Young Judy Garland), Bella Ramsey (Lorna Luft), Royce Pierreson (Burt Rhodes), Andy Nyman (Dan), Daniel Cerqueira (Stan), Gemma-Leah Devereux (Liza Minnelli)

By 1969 Judy Garland (Renée Zellweger) was homeless, broke and stuck in a pill-and-alcohol fuelled depression. Desperate to provide a home for her children, she flew to London for a five-week booking at the Talk of the Town nightclub. Judy sees her, pushed beyond her physical and emotional limits, as she struggles to complete the run – or even get on stage – marrying the feckless young Mickey Deans (Finn Wittrock) and flashbacks to her memories as a Hollywood child star (Darci Shaw), under the punishing “mentorship” of studio head Louis B Mayer (Richard Cordery).

All this gets mixed together in Goold’s uninspired, sentimental and rather empty biopic that never really gets to grips with Garland’s personality, so desperate is it to shoe-horn her into a bog-standard narrative of redemption mixed with personal tragedy. Garland, I’m sure, would have hated it: she always pushed back against the idea that her life had been tragic (which this film whole-heartedly embraces) and the portrayal of her as a constantly misunderstood victim, generously one-sided as it is, boils her down into someone with no agency or control at all in her life.

As such, the most effective parts of this film are the flashbacks to her childhood, filming Wizard of Oz, living off diet pills so she can’t put on weight and working 18-hour days. All under the direction of a monstrously calm Louis B Mayer – a terrific performance of amiable, grandfatherly menace from Richard Cordery – who pleasantly tells her she is a dumpy child who must work like a dog to get ahead and owes everything to him. If the film gets anywhere to understanding Garland’s psychology, it’s in these scenes – I’d rather they’d made it about this than her swan song in England.

In the 1969 sections, the film continues to try and communicate that a life of constant work and pressure left Garland an emotional, physical (and possibly mental) wreck. It puts us on her side, stressing her vulnerability and desperation which she covers with brittle, demanding behaviour. But it’s too squeamish to show too much of her popping pills and downing more than the odd glass of vodka – despite the fact she’s clearly intoxicated for large parts of the film. It only briefly looks at how crippling anxiety affected her unwillingness to rehearse and implies her time in London was a lengthy period of unending servitude rather than a five-week booking singing her greatest hits (the film is hugely vague about timelines to increase the feeling of Garland’s powerlessness).

The film isn’t even smart enough to give us moments where other characters get a glimpse of the fragility under Garland’s prima donnai-sh petulance. Despite her treating both of them as a mix of underlings and informers, Jessie Buckley’s minder and Royce Pierreson’s pianist inexplicably become friends to the star part-way through the film. There is no scene to transition this, no moment of fragile tenderness they witness that makes them understand there is more to this demanding person than they initially thought. Instead, it feels like the narrative requires them to like her just as the audience is supposed to, so whoosh they like her.

The one affecting sequence sees a lonely Garland bumping into two gay fans (Andy Nyman and Daniel Cerqueira) and rather sweetly asking if they would have dinner with her (they are of course thrilled). Back at their apartment, they cook a disgusting looking omelette, play the piano and she listens as they are tearfully talk about their life of persecution in homophobic Britain. It’s gentle, sweet and the only time we (or she) get a real sense of what Garland means to people – these fans idolise her as a symbol of hope. Even this scene is undermined by (a) it not having any lasting impact on Garland as soon as it finishes and (b) these characters being shoe-horned into a blatantly emotionally manipulative ending almost unwatchable in its cloying feel-good-ish-ness.

The one thing the film has going for it is a committed, pitch-perfect performance by Renée Zellweger who captures the vocal and physical mannerisms perfectly. She won every award going including the Oscar. It’s an impressive study and she plays the moments of pain as committedly and rawly as the gentle, tender moments. She does everything the film asks of her, and it’s not her fault that it asks so little of her. There is no dive into Garland’s personality, no questioning that any of her ills were self-inflicted, no criticism for her not turning up for gigs where customers have paid a fortune to see her, no attempt to explore other perspectives on the impact of her actions or how she has become the woman she is.

Instead, Judy meanders towards its semi-feelgood ending without ever really letting us feel we’ve understood much about either this woman or her difficult life, other than framing her as a victim from a life of exhausting show-biz exploitation. Told within a story that is low on drama, pathos or humour, you end up wondering what point it was trying to make in the first place.

Tár (2022)

Character flaws abound in this intriguing and challenging film, open to multiple interpretations

Director: Todd Field

Cast: Cate Blanchett (Lydia Tár), Nina Hoss (Sharon Goodnow), Noémie Merlant (Francesca Lentini), Sophie Kauer (Olga Metkina), Julian Glover (Andris Davis), Allan Corduner (Sebastian Brix), Mark Strong (Eliot Kaplan), Sylvia Flote (Krista Taylor), Mila Bogojevic (Petra)

Absolute power corrupts absolutely. It’s a maxim humanity manages to prove true, time and time again. It doesn’t matter what the field is, when someone holds sway over the dreams and ambitions of others, there’s a decent chance that power can be enjoyed so much it starts being abused. It’s an idea key to Todd Field’s gloriously complex and challenging Tár, a film that defies easy explanations and characterisations, both frighteningly in the “here and now” but also terrifyingly universal.

Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) is an internationally renowned conductor and composer. The first ever head of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, she lives a jet-setting life of international acclaim and fame, praised at every stop-off for her stunning reinventions of classical music. But dark shadows swirl around her. She plays favourites: and her favourites are always attractive young women, just starting their career, who see her as inspiration and mentor. And Tár? She sees advantages to this. It’s unspoken knowledge to all, from her partner first violin Sharon (Nina Hoss) to the other members of the Orchestra. But as the suffering of one of Tár’s spurned proteges threatens to leak out into the public domain, her empire topples just as she reaches the summit of her career.

Tár is a brilliantly insidious film, a quiet but compelling character study that borrows elements of Kubrickian unknowability. In particular, Field avoids making moral decisions for the audience, but trusts we are smart enough to come to our own conclusions. Effectively, we spend the film following a deeply flawed, Spacey-like figure, whose life falls apart without being invited to feel morally superior to her. It allows us to feel the pain of her meeting the consequences of her actions, but never lets us forget her own arrogance and cruelty caused them in the first place.

Tár is both an inspirational genius and a dyed-in-the-wool bully. She solves problems with the mindset of an aggressive alpha – her solution to her daughter being picked on by a classmate, is outbullying the bully (“I will get you” she tells her, assuring her no one will believe her because Tár “is a grown-up”). She treats her assistant (and possibly former lover) Francesca who tags behind her in the hope of a junior conductor role like a slave, brow-beats Orchestra members and fellow conductors with friendly pressure and views every relationship in terms of what she can get out of it.

As this deeply flawed human-being, Cate Blanchett is mesmeric. Tár is a firm reminder that she is, perhaps, the greatest actor in the world and all her range is on show here. Blanchett is imperious, assured and totally brilliant. She invests Tár with such – admittedly deeply flawed – humanity, we have to constantly pull ourselves up to remember she’s a dreadful person. Tár is arrogant, convinced of her own genius and sees no-one as her peer. She’s also inspirational, charismatic and oddly charming. Blanchett’s mixes tragedy, grief, denial, panic and bottomless bitterness as Tár’s carefully constructed life falls apart like a time-delay car crash that suddenly jumps back into normal time.

Carefully paced – it’s difficult not to reflect on Tár’s opening words at a career retrospective interview on the importance of timing to give each moment its precise impact – Tár never rushes, unless it needs to and slowly, but assuredly unfolds the final days of her empire. It’s like watching the Indian Summer of an Astro-Hungarian Emperor, barely aware that huge global forces are about to sweep everything away and rob her of her control of events. Field reflects this in the film’s assembly: earlier sequences are marked by their long takes – virtuso set-pieces for Blanchett – and tracking camera, that constantly centres Tár. Later sequences become shorter, choppier, narrative information becomes less clear – it’s like Tár has lost control of the film as much as she has her life.

Control is central, and Tár’s abuse of it her undoing. Her (unspoken but implied) predatory demands for sexual favours in return for career advancement are an open secret among colleagues. Field adds a threatening sense of Tár being watched – either recorded on a phone, or shots of the red-haired back of a mysterious woman at key moments. The woman is Krista, a former protégé, the exact nature of her fall-out with Tár unclear, but who Tár has black-balled in the classical music world. Even as the fallout from this threatens to consume her, Tár can’t help herself from attempting to groom a new cellist (Sophie Kauer), fixing a blind audition, favouring her in private workshops and bypassing the orchestra’s new cellist to land her a juicy lead.

It’s part of Field’s wonderful and searching analysis of the corruption of power – even as the house of cards totters, people can’t seem to see it. While being a universal parable, the film is also fiercely topical. Tár has clear parallels with figures like Spacey. Her ageing former mentor (a crisp Julian Glover) bemoans how the slightest mistaken word to someone can be misinterpreted as lecherous abuse. Attention has focused on the idea of this as a cancel culture movie. Tár, at a Juillard lecture, does strongly disagree with a young BIPOC composer, who can’t relate to cis-gender old white guys like Bach. Tár pushes the rather self-righteous young man to justify himself, which he attempts. But she also goes increasingly further and further, moving from persuasion to brow-beating (her natural resort as a bully) and thinly veiled mockery. She’s smart enough to deconstruct the contradictions in the young man’s views – but cruel enough to mock his bravery at standing up. But Field allows both sides legitimate points, something that you don’t nearly get enough of in our polarised world.

Field also tips Tár more and more into something unsettling and other worldly. Tár’s uniquely perceptive hearing means she is plagued with strange noises: a chiming echoing around her bolt-hole apartment (the reveal of what this is, is another reminder of her indifference to other people), a screaming heard while out running, a metronome that wakes her at night. Strange daydreams, with ghostly, vampiric presences fill her mind. Late, she enters a damp-soaked abandoned building which feels like the gateway to some Lynchian parallel universe, guarded by a Tarkovsky-like dog who might as well be the gatekeeper to her nightmares. Much of the final act of the film unspools like a wild, terrible dream, where key events may not even be real. Reality crumbles, just as Tár’s control over her personal and professional life disintegrates.

Through it all we are invited by Field to empathise, but not sympathise, with this demanding and domineering woman. To understand her, but not forgive her, to dislike her but not tar and feather her. A lesser film would have done the moral work for us. Nothing is explicit about Tár’s cruelty, but the tears of her assistant (a superbly fragile Noémie Merlant) and the tight-lipped frustration of Sharon (Nina Hoss is terrifically pained and long-suffering in a difficult role) speak volumes. But yet, it’s hard not to feel something for someone as their life falls apart, no matter how earned the fall might be. Blanchett uses all her skills to make Tár someone who is frequently awful but never a bogeyman, is categorically in the wrong, but still a figure of hubristic tragedy.

Blanchett is earth-shatteringly good in the lead role and Field’s direction is subtle, balanced and plays just enough with your perceptions. Perhaps some of what we see takes place in Tár’s nightmares, perhaps we only see certain characters from Tár’s biased perceptions. It could even be a fabulous ghost story with past misdeeds haunting the frame, a deconstruction of our willingness to pull down the flawed, a study of the abuse of power – or all three and more. The fact you will debate it for weeks to come, means it’s definitely a great film.

Nomadland (2020)

Poetic and surprisingly moving, this Best Picture winner is light on plot but deep on meaning

Director: Chloé Zhao

Cast: Frances McDormand (Fern), David Strathairn (Dave), Linda May, Charlene Swankie, Bob Wells, Peter Spears, Derek Endres

We all have ideas about what life should look like in the 21^st century. Settled job, dream home, the rooted life. It’s what we are expected to be working towards – but it’s not for everyone. Nomadland, Chloé Zhao’s Malick-influenced road movie explores the lives of those who decide to live off that beaten track. The modern nomad, who chooses flexibility to move their home from place to place and don’t want to be tied down by bricks-and-mortar. It makes for a meditative, soulfully poetic film with a quietly mesmeric power.

Fern (Frances McDormand) is recently widowed, childless and has lost her job after the gypsum plant in Empire, Nevada closes. But, far from down-hearted, Fern is determined to lead a new life without the fixed commitments of her old one. She sells most of her possessions, kits out a van as a travel home and begins to drive across the country, taking seasonal jobs as and where she stops. She finds herself part of a warm and supportive community of nomads, who help to learn how to flourish in this unconventional home life.

Nomadland winning Best Picture is as close as the Oscars have come to giving an award to Terence Malick. It’s hard not to feel his influence over the camera’s languid worship of the beauty of the Badlands, or its characters quiet searching for higher in life, via a communing with nature. Zhao’s film is a very effective and surprisingly moving character study, with only the smallest smidgen of a plot, but full of feeling. Radiantly shot by Joshua James Richards, it finds an orange-tinged beauty in a dawn and dusk and tiny moments of joy in rain falling in your face. All contrasted with the dull oppressiveness of buildings, those four walls shutting out nature.

Zhao’s film goes a long way in challenging neat assumptions we might have about this lifestyle. “I’m not homeless I’m houseless” Fern states and she politely – but firmly – turns down well-meaning offers of charity. The decision to move from place-to-place is not one enforced by poverty or failure. Instead, this is a rich, vibrant, supportive community that looks out for each other and share a legitimate (and refreshing) view of the world. Who says you need to spend your life chasing the dollar and building up a debt to have a fixed slice of real-estate you can sort of call your own?

This is particularly true in our post-recession world. Nomadland starts with the final collapse of an industrial community, now a ghost town. Many of the nomads find seasonal work that is often manual and low-skilled. Fern’s first job (of many) is working at an Amazon dispatch location, where jolly team leaders burst with enthusiasm met with smiling indifference by the (often older) staff. Fern’s travel is shaped around moving to key locations for seasonal work – Amazon, a campsite, a short-order chef job, beet processing… The economic situation is poor, but this is a way of playing the system to get a higher level of freedom, without debt or financial pressures.

It’s a key subject of a talk given to fellow nomads by Bob Wells, an influential advocate of the nomad life-style (one of any people playing versions of themselves). It’s part of a series of events at a nomad event – a sort of convention – where people gather to share experiences, advise and life-hacks. Ever needed to know how to change a tyre or what size bucket you should use for your built-in toilet? Wonder no more! On the road people come together in a way they never would in more regular life. With everything transient and nothing fixed, friendships and connections are more intense, constantly in that first glow of excitement.

That’s the pay-off of choosing this lifestyle. Everything is transient. Close friendships form, but you might not see the other person for months at a time. While phones help you to keep in touch, day-to-day you see completely different people from place-to-place. It will never be completely clear where you might be to your family. However, the short-lived intensity of connections can lead to a closeness and intimacy that might otherwise take months – a friend of Fern’s confides she has terminal cancer but regrets nothing, with a warmth and trust that would normally takes years to form not weeks.

It’s implied as well that the more short-lived intensity of friendships fits more with what the slightly taciturn and guarded Fern wants from life. Frances McDormand makes her friendly, ready with a smile, good company – but she is always slightly reserved and guarded. She will give sympathetic ears and invite confidences. But she is also a woman determined to live by her own rule. Having lived most of her life in one place in a happy marriage, a conversation with her sister (who bails her out with a loan to repair her van) reveals she was always prone to not look back when a decision was made. It’s the same with deciding to live on the road as moving to Empire – Fern knows her own heart and mind, and will fully commit to that.

This is despite temptations, the main one she faces being David Strathairn’s (the only other professional actor in the film) Dave, a fellow nomad who makes no secret of his romantic interest in her. Sweetly played by Strathairn, Dave pursues Fern and dangles the possibility of a more fixed and traditional life. They are close, but Fern has lived that life of marriage and rejected already the idea of a family. And, as McDormand makes clear in her soulful eyes, if that life was ever on the cards, it would have been with her husband not this new man, nice as he is.

Nomadland, like Fern, can see the dangers and problems. A van breaking down in the middle of nowhere is a major danger, a broken plate a potential disaster – Fern painstakingly reassembles it, not wishing to spend the money to replace it. Low temperatures and bad weather can make it uncomfortable – although she (smilingly) rejects an offer from a garage owner to sleep inside. But it also understands living this lifestyle is a legitimate choice, filled with rich possibilities. You only need to see Fern joyfully travel to the coast or get wrapped up in the embrace of the vibrant community she finds on the road to see that you could do immeasurably worse with your life.

Zhao’s film has a documentary realism to it, that comes from its deep immersion in real nomad communities. It makes copious use of real nomads playing versions of themselves, giving a rich feeling of authenticity to every moment. It also means we gain a real understanding of the idea that goodbyes are never final in this world, that there is always the prospect of seeing someone again “down the road”. The film’s poetic empathy, its warmth and the vibrant humanity of its characters makes it film that creeps up on you and has a surprising, but profound, power.

Mulholland Dr (2001)

Surrealist, dream-like images fill a film that’s wilfully complex, perplexing and probably Lynch’s masterpiece

Director: David Lynch

Cast: Naomi Watts (Betty Elms/Diane Selwyn), Laura Harring (Rita/Camilla Rhodes), Justin Theroux (Adam Kesher), Ann Miller (Coco), Mark Pellegrino (Joe), Patrick Fischler (Dan), Michael Cooke (Herb), Dan Hedaya (Vincenzo Castigliane), Angelo Badalamenti (Luigi Castigliane), Michael J Anderson (Mr Roque), Monty Montgomery (The Cowboy), Lee Grant (Louise Bonner), James Karen (Wally Brown), Chad Everett (Jimmy Katz), Melissa George (Camilla Rhodes), Billy Ray Cyrus (Gene), Lori Heuring (Lorainne Kesher)

Spoilers: I’ll be discussing in detail the plot (if you can call it that) including its final act reveals which are crucial for understanding the film. So watch it first!

Where do you begin? Mulholland Drive feels like the culmination of Lynch’s work, a perfect boiling down of Twin Peaks, Lost Highway, Wild at Heart and Blue Velvet into a surrealistic meditation on Hollywood, wish-fulfilment, dreams and reality. It’s both wilfully inaccessible and surprisingly clear, both coldly cruel and achingly tender, full of hope and devoid of happiness. It’s tough, cryptic, engrossing viewing and unpeels like an onion (and likely to have the same effect on you as that vegetable). Every scene may mean everything or nothing, but there is not a moment of it that isn’t darkly, thrillingly engrossing.

It starts with a car crash on Mulholland Drive – but not before a stream of seemingly disconnected images that only later reveal their importance, including a women on a bed and a dizzying array of disconnected jittybug dancers drifting across the screen like paper cut-outs before a purple background. The car crash involves a mysterious woman ‘Rita’ (Laura Harring) who narrowly escapes being murdered but is left with amnesia. She stumbles to the house of Betty (Naomi Watts), a newly arrived girl in Hollywood, eager to become an actress. With only a bag of money and a mysterious blue key to go on, Rita and Betty search to find out who Rita is. Meanwhile, director Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux) finds his film (which Betty wants to audition for) being taken over by gangsters. Did I also mention an incompetent-but-brutal hitman, a supernaturally omniscient albino cowboy and a monstrous goblin-like hobo who lives behind a diner and can kill on sight?

Mulholland Drive grew out of Lynch’s plans for a new Twin Peaks style TV series. He shot a pilot, the footage from which takes up much of the first two thirds. Like Twin Peaks it was full of mysterious alleyways to be explored: it’s amnesiac lead, mysterious money and blue key, shadowy gangsters (even led by Twin Peaks veteran Michael J Anderson, here in a Red Room style hide-away, his head attached to a prosthetic body), creepy supernatural nightmare elements. Alas, the executives hated it (it wasn’t exactly Desperate Housewives), but French investors stepped in to fund Lynch turning it into a surrealist movie, with an additional half an hour of footage to an ending (of a sort).

A sort of ending is what we get. Mulholland Drive is a famously confusing, impenetrable film. But to me it seems clear. Lynch’s solution was to turn all the pilot footage into a bizarre and terrible dream – and latch on an ending set in the ‘real world’ which re-presents characters, events and throwaway moments in surprising new lights, leading us to radically reinterpret everything. Effectively, the first two-thirds are the guilt-ridden nightmare of Diane (Watts again), a failed actress in Hollywood who paid for a hit on a star actress Camilla (Harring again) who she believes seduced and spurned her. In her dream, Diane reimagines both herself and Camilla exactly as she wishes they were: herself unspoilt by Hollywood with preternatural talent, Camilla as an amnesiac utterly reliant on her.

What we have here is dreams as wish fulfilment: and what city is more about that, than Hollywood? Mulholland Drive plays as the dark underbelly of Sunset Boulevard (pretty dark and bitter already!). Lynch’s Hollywood is a vicious, heartless, bloody place, where cruelty and death are commonplace. In ‘the dream’ the gangsters – terrifying cameos from Hedaya and composer Badalamenti, the latter dribbling inadequate coffee from his mouth during a meeting in a grotesque power play – call the shots. Reality might be worse. This heartless factory of dreams chews up and spits out innocents like Diane, turning her from naïve and optimistic into bitter, twisted shell, emotionally maladjusted, locked in her apartment tearily in thrall to her worst instincts.

It makes sense in a way that the film is dominated (probably) by a dream. Hollywood is the town of stories, and it’s perversely logical that the unreality should feel so detailed, engrossing and narratively compelling while what is (probably) reality is fragmented, mundane and laced with cruelty. To the people of films, stories are richer and more freeing than anything that happens in real life and infinitely more comforting.

Comfort is what our dreamer wants. Naomi Watt’s Betty seems like a cliché of a small-town girl, swept up in the big city. Full of aw-shucks charm, the eagle-eyed will spot little moments of strength that feel out of character. There are micro-flashes of anger and she’s determined to break into a mysterious, abandoned house to find a clue when Rita runs. She’s a gifted actress, turning a mundane script in an audition (a script she and Rita laugh at) into a simmering performance of sexual control that stuns the room. But this is a multi-layed performance, just one facet of a whole.

Because Betty’s talent is recognised in the way her ‘real-world’ counterpart Diane – stuck in small supporting roles, gifts from Camilla – never is. There are touches of this in that audition: the director is the least involved and speaks only in vague bullshit. Its not just that talent recognition: in the dream she can turn her lover Camilla, an independent and (perhaps) selfish figure, into someone so dependent on her that she literally doesn’t even know who she is. She even turns the man Camilla leaves her for, into a deluded, humiliated cuckold in thrall to gangsters.

Lynch’s crafting of this dream is flawless. He can mine tension from even the smallest moments. Innocuous events – two men sitting in a diner, a kind old couple in a cab, a business meeting, a singing audition – drip with menace and unknown horror. His camera frequently, almost imperceptibly weaves, as if held floating in space. Logic jumps and sudden transitions abound. Lights flicker and time never obeys rules. He is also a master of black humour: a hit-job gone wrong (with bodies and a vacuum cleaner joining the carnage) is hilarious, as is Kesher’s unexpected arrival home to find his wife in bed with a muscular pool cleaner.

Mulholland Drive is also a sensitive and highly emotional romance story between two lost souls. Betty, naïve and helpful and Rita, who clings with gratitude and adoration to the woman who helps her. Moments of sexual tenderness between these two are shot with erotic beauty: contrasted sharply with the more sordid, aggressive couplings between them in ‘reality’.

But these mix with moments of chilling, unspeakable horror. The hideous goblin living behind a diner, an embodiment of all that is cruel, evil and twisted, later clutching a box the releases the furies themselves seem to leap from. Is this a dark expression of the dreamer’s own guilt (which seems to be transferred to “Dan” a man we see literally dying of fright in a diner that becomes crucial later)? The Cowboy, who may or may not be of this world, glanced at two dreadful moments (just as he promises) seems to guides the dream. And the Silencio club, a theatre of the bizarre, disturbing auditory and visual twists and turns that serves as the gateway between dream and reality – something Betty subconsciously knows, vibrating in terror in her seat, knowing this fantasy she has crafted is under siege from dark elements of the truth demanding she acknowledge them.

Mulholland Drive deconstructs itself at every turn, aided by Lynch’s wonderful, hypnotic surrealistic touches. What’s beautiful about it, perhaps, is it leaves it very much up to you. For me, the desire for dreams to be fulfilled is crucial. It’s all captured in Watts and Harring’s multi-layered performances, their versions of the same women contrasting and complementing each other. Lynch allows their personalities to blur both in character and in visuals (Rita ends up in a matching wig in touches of Vertigo while the film’s blurring of two personalities echoes Bergman’s Persona, including a homage via a shot where both faces seem to merge into one).

An intense, fascinating dream-like exploration of several classic Lynchian themes, Mulholland Drive is his finest, most rewarding film. One which, whatever interpretation you place on its events, grips and challenges you at every moment, full of scenes which spark a mixture of imagination, horror and intrigue. Powered by two wonderful performances at its lead, both with just the right mix of reality and fantasy about them, it’s an extraordinary film.

The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)

Dreyer’s searing, close-up dominated, silent masterpiece is a truly unique piece of cinema – and still astounding

Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer

Cast: Renée Jeanne Falconetti (Joan of Arc), Eugène Silvain (Bishop Pierre Cauchon), André Berley (Jean d’Estivet, prosecutor), Maurice Schutz (Canon Nicholas Loyseleur), Antonin Artaud (Bishop Jean Massieu), Gilbert Dalleu (Jean Lamaitre, Vice-Inquisitor), Jean d’Yd (Nicholas de Houppeville), Louis Ravert (Jean Beaupère), Camile Bardou (Lord Warwick)

It falls to few films to have the grace to redefine what cinema could do. Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc is one of those films that simply demands to be seen – and once seen will haunt you forever. For a film in many ways so profoundly simple, it is also profoundly wise, deeply affecting, troubling, moving and finally almost unbearably painful. Shot in an iconic collection of interrogative close-ups, Dreyer’s masterpiece earns its place as one of the greatest films ever made.

Dreyer’s masterstroke here was not to create a conventional biopic. We see nothing at all of Joan’s finding of her faith, her campaign against the English or exploits on the battlefield. Instead, we witness only the final days of her life, pulled up as a heretic before a biased and arrogantly superior ecclesiastical court. We first see her not as a strong figure (or even defiant) but a frightened girl creeping into frame, dwarfed by spears and towered over by a priest. If the French producers were expecting a triumphant eulogy to their recently beautified national saint, they had a shock.

Mind you, they had plenty of shocks already. Dreyer’s film used one of the most expensive sets ever built. Seven million francs were shelled out on an intricate medieval castle and courtyard, full of interconnecting passage ways. Dreyer’s surviving model of the set is impressive. You have to assume the real thing looked impressive as well, because the film almost never shows it. The Passion of Joan of Arc takes place in tight, fixed, searching close-ups – most strikingly of Joan but also of her interrogators and the witnesses of her martyrdom. The epic is pulled down to the tightest and most intimate framing of all: the human face, with all its blemishes, imperfections and dizzying emotions.

Those emotions play most sharply across the face of Renée Jeanne Falconetti. Falconetti had performed briefly in one film eleven years previously, but this was effectively her only work on camera. And it is extraordinary, one of the most searing, memorable performances in the history of cinema. You will never forget the fixed glare of her eyes, the devotional joy in her face and the self-accusatory pain in those same eyes when she briefly recants. Dreyer and Falconetti worked closely together to chart every single moment of the complex array of emotions.

Hope, despair, defiance, fear, self-loathing, determination, shrewdness, timidity – all these expressions form both in micro and in carefully held shots that allow Falconetti to naturally move from one to another. This is one of the few films that really has the patience to record thinking. We see realisations dawn upon her, her face slowly changing to process them and then (frequently) her eyes filling with genuine, heart-rending emotion. It becomes an intense – painful – study in powerlessness and vulnerability, dappled with little moments of hope. Her joyful face when the shadow of a window forms a cross on the floor is almost unbearable.

Not least, because as she stares enraptured at this shadow, we cut back and forth to her interrogators forging a letter from the Dauphin to further break her spirit. Dreyer introduces the priestly interrogators with one of the few motion shots, a long tracking shot panning across the rows and rows of well-fed, comfortable men who are about to stand trial over this young woman. The close-ups reveal as much about the priests as it does Joan. A complacent, arrogant Bishop smirks while he picks his ear. Others snigger and stare in disgust at this abomination.

But Dreyer’s film is remarkable for how much scope he gives many of the priests. We see some of them begin to form serious doubts as Joan’s sincerity flies in the face of their expectations. Schutz’s Canon – writer of that fake letter – doubts grow, finally seen sadly turning away as she is prepared for burning. Even Silvain’s Pierre Cauchon isn’t a sadist, or really a bully – just someone who can’t imagine a world in which he is wrong. It’s what leads him to push and push, sometimes with a resigned unease, willing Joan to recant. Some burn her sadly: but burn her none-the-less.

Dreyer’s film though is a passion – and, like the medieval plays that inspire it, it wants to take us on a journey to understand the power of Joan’s faith and nobility of her martyrdom. The priests convey us and Joan to the torture chamber – one of the few wide shots Dreyer uses, to show us the extent of the ghastly devices. A giant breaking wheel is turned with increasing, horrifying speed, its many spikes blurring, as Cauchon demands Joan recant. It drives her into a fainting fit and she is bled. A real AD gave up his vein to produce shockingly, horrifyingly genuine spurts of blood.

Dreyer’s claustrophobic close-ups are not designed to throw us into Joan’s POV, but to make us feel as trapped as she does. It’s striking that many of the close-ups can’t be either Joan’s perspective or the priests. There isn’t always continuity between them – we’ll cut from a full-on view, to a side-on one, a camera angle above and then below, staring up or glaring down. The effect is less about putting us into the eyes of its characters, than to make us feel like a spirit in the room, powerless to intercede. There are no establishing shots for geography, only the onslaught of faces shouting at the camera or starring with confessional pain at the lens.

Which helps even more with the sense of devotional mystery play Dreyer is aiming to create, using the language of cinema in ways no theatre-maker ever could. As Joan is mocked, and garlanded with a false crown, by braying English soldiers, we feel as trapped as she does. When her hair is sliced away, the shears feel uncomfortably close, but just as traumatising is the agony of guilt on Falconetti’s face, at the realisation she has turned her back on her God.

It’s been said watching the film is like watching, as if by a miracle, actual documentary footage of the trial. This realism is one of Dreyer’s master-strokes. So many other directors would have allowed touches of medieval pageantry, of poetry among the stark images. The closest we get to this is a doubtful Joan starring at freshly dug up skull, from the eye socket of which wiggles a worm, while deciding whether to confess. Other than that, the lavishness (that perhaps the producers expected) is nowhere to be seen, helping make the film as punishing and (finally) moving to watch as it is.

The final burning offers no release. The camera maintains its focus on Joan, who quietly passes the rope to her executioner so he can bind her to the stake, then turns her eyes one final time to heaven before her face is obscured in smoke and flames. Dreyer’s camera doesn’t flinch, and its fair to say Joan’s death is as horrifying as anything caught on screen. An alarmingly life-like body blackens, burns and shrivels in uncomfortable mid-shot. In a stunning swinging camera shot, soldiers prepare weapons to disperse the crowd. Dreyer’s camera doesn’t shy away from this atrocity either: bodies are battered, a fallen woman stares sightlessly in the camera, screaming mothers run with children in their arms, a cannon pans across the camera and fires into the crowd. The smoke of the burning – to which we constantly cut back to – fills the screen. It’s bleak and hellish.

This is truly a passion, a sense of the ascension of the spirit through the dread of pain and suffering. And we feel every moment of it through the uncomfortable but profoundly moving immersiveness of Dreyer’s camera – and the breathtaking camerawork of Rudolph Maté – and the astonishing raw performance of Falconetti. The Passion of Joan of Arc sears itself onto your memory, a visceral, unique piece of film-making unparalleled in the history of the medium.

Waiting Women (1952)

Bergman experiments with form and genre in this fascinating collection of female-led short stories

Director: Ingmar Bergman

Cast: Anita Björk (Rakel), Eva Dahlbeck (Karin), Maj-Britt Nilsson (Marta), Birger Malmsten (Martin Lobelius), Gunnar Björnstrand (Fredrik Lobelius), Karl-Arne Holmsten (Eugen Lobelius), Jarl Kulle (Kaj), Aino Taube (Annette), Håkan Westergren (Paul Lobelius), Gerd Andersson (Maj), Björn Bjelfvenstam (Henrik Lobelius)

Waiting Women is another early step in Bergman becoming one of the great directors in cinema. It’s easy to feel it’s a film worth seeing largely for completeness sake – I certainly felt that, seeing this unknown nesting at the bottom of a BFI box set containing Wild Strawberries, Smiles of a Summer Night and The Seventh Seal. But Waiting Women is a playful and inventive film that sees Bergman experimenting with form and genre and show-piecing his inventive use of the camera (it’s a key reminder this famed wordsmith also worked with two of the most gifted cinematographers in movie history, Gunnar Fischer and (later) Sven Nykvist).

Three women sit waiting at a country-side retreat (echoes of the holiday home in Wild Strawberries) waiting for their husbands (three brothers) to arrive. While they wait, they share stories. Rakel (Anita Björk) talks about her husband Eugene’s (Karl-Arne Holmsten) suicidal response to discovering her affair with childhood friend Kaj (Jarl Kulle). Marta (Maj-Britt Nilsson) remembers keeping her pregnancy from her now-husband Martin (Birger Malmsten), who she met thinking he was a penniless artist rather than the son of an industrial power-house family. And Karin (Eva Dahlbeck) remembers a night after a function which she and driven husband Fredrik (Gunnar Bjornstrand) spent trapped in a lift and almost rekindled the spark in their marriage.

Bergman’s takes these three stories and presents each in strikingly different ways. The first he packages as a full-blown romantic melodrama, with heightened passions, elaborate threats of death and dramatic proclamations of affection and desperation. The second shifts gear into a moody expressionistic drama, almost a silent-movie, with minimal dialogue and the scene shifting from striking shadow-play on hospital walls to silent comedy in a Parisian nightclub. The third caps the film with a single-location farce with witty wordplay and a dollop of sadness and regret.

It makes for a film that constantly surprises you – and a director looking to experiment and stretch his artistic legs, finding new ways of expressing himself in film. (He even pops up for a Hitchcock-like cameo!) It’s also three entertaining (in different ways) short stories and another, superb, Bergman female-centric film. Because, make no mistake, our sympathies are all with the women, whose stories leave you with more than a little impression – for all they have joyfully prepared the house for their husbands – that each of them are not leading the lives they might have wished.

The first story is the most conventional – perhaps because Rakel’s hormonal love-affair with a long-lost school friend feels like a twist on Bergman’s Summer Interlude. But all is carefully dialled up to eleven in a romance that would not feel out-of-place in Emily Brontë. The flirtatious lust between Rakel and Kaj – centred around a joint trip to a bathing house which drips with illicit sexual energy – simmers. There is an early Chekovian introduction of a gun, before Kaj’s essential coldness is revealed and Eugen’s shock swiftly turns to anger and suicidal resentment. It’s a marvellous Bergman scripting touch that Eugen always feels like the sort of man who will shoot himself to make his wife feel bad about herself rather than because of his own pain.

Bergman shoots it with brisk tracking shots interspersed with close-ups and allows the action to become increasingly bombastic as it builds towards its melodramatic conclusion of Eugen shuttered away in a boat house, threatening to end it all. It makes for a striking gear change as our second story begins, and the visual mastery of Bergman and Fischer’s partnership comes to the fore in a middle-chapter that homages the Silent Masters. Marta’s memories of her pregnancy and her meeting with her husband, begins with the nightmareish image of a face behind frosted glass, distorted out of all recognition (Bergman, as always, the lost great-horror director) before she finds herself in a hospital ward, breathing in anaesthetic gas, and seeing the shadows of the branches from the tree outside, twist and dance like possessive hands on the walls around her.

Played with a sympathetic sweetness, tinged with just the right touch of edgy defiance, by Maj-Britt Nilsson, Marta’s memories of meeting her husband in Paris plays out in her memory like an expressionistic film. In a Parisian nightclub, the camera ducks and swerves around exotic dancers, beautiful compositions of body and movement in every frame. She drops her GI boyfriend for a Martin after a series of surreptitious glances across the room and passed notes. Their courtship and early relationship in his blissful studio play out like a romance – until his family arrive with a chilling explosion of words about expectations and duties that shatter the illusion. The chapter closes with something that could be either memory or dream – Martin and Marta, with the warmth of their early days returned, on a beach together. Reality or regret? Bergman gives reasons to believe both.

The final story is the most enjoyable, lightest and also (in its own way) saddest. Beautifully shot largely in a single confined location – and this is a workshop for Bergman to build his confidence with composition – it gains hugely from the witty and controlled performances of Dahlbeck and Björnstrand as the austere married couple. Home truths and flashes of attraction seep out – and Bergman makes us feel for a moment that a corner has been turned when they return (at last) to their family home. It’s all an illusion though – its still Bergman after all – as the mood is shattered by Fredrik’s almost immediate resumption of his professional duties after a chance phone-call.

If its one thing you can pick up from these three stories, its that finding love, contentment and satisfaction is difficult for women. As three very different women, Björk, Nilsson and Dahlbeck are all superb, and the little hints of sadness Bergman gives all of them turns what could be a collection of shaggy dog stories into something suddenly, surprisingly, profound. Yes they are waiting – but is it for their husbands, or for the lives they (privately) might wish they had? As Marta’s sister Maj (Gerd Andersson) considers elopement with Marta’s nephew Henrik (Björn Bjelfvenstam), the normal expectations of discouraging such an action are challenged. After all, why shouldn’t Marta try for happiness? What’s the worst that could happen: that they could gain wisdom (as the other women have done?) from a summer of forbidden and confused love? Perhaps Bergman wanted to find out: his next film was the romantic first-love fable that turns sour Summer with Monika.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022)

Grief and loss are the beating heart of this tender and heartfelt Marvel film, mixed with standard action tropes

Director: Ryan Coogler

Cast: Letitia Wright (Shuri), Lupita Nyong’o (Nakia), Danai Gurira (Okoye), Angela Bassett (Queen Ramonda), Tenich Huerta Mejía (Namor), Dominique Thorne (Riri Williams), Winston Duke (M’Baku), Martin Freeman (Everett K Ross), Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Valentina Allegra de Fontaine), Florence Kasumba (Ayo), Michaela Coel (Aneka)

There is one thing you can never imagine – and never want to – having to plan for in your franchise. The tragic loss of your lynchpin. For Black Panther that man was Chadwick Boseman, and his heart-breaking early passing hangs over the film like a shroud.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is two films in one. One is a standard Marvel adventure film, with gags, set pieces and careful groundwork laid for future entries. The other is a heartfelt eulogy, a processing of the raw shock the people making the film – and many watching it – felt at the loss of this fine actor. In universe, T’Challa (Boseman) has passed away. His sister Shuri (Letitia Wright) blames herself for failing to save his life and his mother Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett) has become protective and unrelenting in her judgements.

With its monopoly on vibranium, Wakanda is now the most powerful nation on Earth. Other powers want a piece of that apple – and the US are plumping the deaths of the oceans for vibranium. But their search intrudes on a secret underwater civilisation led by wing-footed, super-strength Namor (Huerta Mejía). Namor threatens to unleash destruction unless Wakanda deliver him the scientist who created the US’s vibranium detector – who turns out to be a college student genius with Tony Stark vibes, Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne). When Shuri refuses to hand her over, Namor states he is coming for the surface – and will destroy Wakanda, a country he cannot trust.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is bookended by two heart-breakingly genuine moments of emotion. The death of T’Challa (off screen) and his funeral – a grief stricken, beautifully filmed funeral procession – carries a great deal of genuine rawness. A final montage of shots of Boseman, presented as the memories of Shuri finally coming to terms with her brother’s death is moving. The strongest parts of the film are these human moments. Wright has been open at her shock and pain at Boseman’s death and this translates beautifully in her affecting performance.

These adjustments to the script are the strongest parts of the film. Letitia Wright and Angela Bassett provide subtle, delicate work as two people affected by grief in very different ways, but both now more reckless, protective and retributive than before. The responses, guilt and pain of several characters carry real force and leave the deepest mark on the audience. It also builds a subtle “passing the torch” narrative, as Wakanda fears they have seen the last of their “Black Panther” who protected their nation through history.

Away from this, the film settles into being a more traditional Marvel franchise extender. Rightly much time has been given to the real-life tragedy, but this means much of the remainder of the plot feels rushed. Our new antagonists are hurriedly introduced – so much so that leader Namor (well played by Tenich Huerta Mejía with a charisma that covers an under-written part) introduces his people’s entire culture in an awkward info dump an hour into the film. Not a single other character of his merman race gets so much as a name (as I can remember) let alone a personality.

Despite being a slightly silly concept of an Atlantan (but definitely not Atlantis because that’s already been claimed by another franchise) underwater city with water pressure having given its inhabitants super-human strength, it is another strong commitment to diversity. These people descend from the Mayan civilisation, meaning they share the same history of persecution by the West as the African nations Wakanda represents. It should make them natural allies, right?

Of course, it doesn’t as this is a film that pivots on the mistakes and miscalculations of political leaders and how these force them into war. The film makes its point about political rivalries early with Ramonda giving the French and US an almighty ticking off at (a surprisingly small) UN for their ruthless attempt to obtain vibranium for themselves. However, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever dodges really delving into the most interesting implications of this.

Because there is a kernel of a really interesting, challenging idea here. In many ways Wakanda behaves with exactly the same domineering arrogance as the Western powers they criticise. The Wakandans take unilateral decisions for the world because they know best, treat other nations like recalcitrant children and horde the world’s most powerful resource for themselves. They are this close to a benign, dictatorial state. But the film isn’t interested in exploring this.

Bringing Wakanda and Talokan into rivalry on the grounds of Talokan seeing them as potential oppressors – as the most powerful among the surface nations they have always feared would crush them – would have been more interesting than the confused, convoluted “with us or against us” war we end up with. But I understand that a film, which prides itself on celebrating African culture, is not going to want to be seen as undermining any of that with something sharper.

Besides, this is all a set-up for the inevitable large scale action sequences. The finest is a haunting attack on a ship, where the Talokans use their siren voices to inspire the crew of an American black ops ship to drown themselves. There’s a decent car chase, some well-choreographed fights a pitched battles that thrill. It’s also notable that the loss of Boseman has led to this franchise being dominated by women of colour, all of whom deal with the sort of dilemmas and consequences that are normally the preserve of male (and white) comic-book heroes.

But the film’s heart is in the personal moments – and more interesting when looking at Shuri’s protective affection for Dominique Thorne’s plucky (sometimes overly so) inventor. It’s also interesting that this is a film that flirts more than I was expecting with its leads choosing anger and vengeance, over forgiveness and conciliation. Shuri and Ramonda lash out, with dangerous consequences, and express minimal regret. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever deserves points for being willing to tackle the negative implications of grief.

That’s the strength of the film, just as a pain of Boseman’s death is the beating heart. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is overlong and skips more challenging ideas, but it is also shot through with genuine grief. It’s not perfect, but it’s real, well-meaning and (for all its silliness and bombast in places) has a heart firmly in the right place. When a Black Panther rises in the final act, you will feel the film has earned it.

She Said (2022)

Earnest, well-meaning but not entirely dramatic recounting of the New York Times investigation into Weinstein

Director: Maria Schrader

Cast: Carey Mulligan (Megan Twohey), Zoe Kazan (Jodi Kantor), Patricia Clarkson (Rebecca Corbett), Andre Braugher (Dean Baquet), Jennifer Ehle (Laura Madden), Samantha Morton (Zelda Perkins), Ashley Judd (Herself), Zach Grenier (Irwn Reiter), Peter Friedman (Lanny Davis), Angela Yeoh (Rowena Chiu)

In 2017, the New York Times published revelations about Miramax kingpin Harvey Weinstein that shocked the world. Weinstein had used his position to force his sexual attentions on anyone from aspiring actresses to employees, with a rap sheet of crimes ranging from gropes to rape. It shook Hollywood to its core. She Said is the dramatization of the investigation carried out by reporters Jodi Kantor (Zoe Kazan) and Megan Twohey (Carey Mulligan) who sought out the victims, won their trust and pushed the story through despite threats of legal action.

She Said is a worthy, well-meaning film. It has moments of genuine power and its recreation of the testimony of the victims is tragic and heart-rending. But yet… I didn’t find it dramatic. I was left wondering, why did this true story of journalistic tenacity not carry the same impact as Spotlight or All the President’s Men?

Perhaps it’s because the film doesn’t really cover this story as an investigation. There isn’t the sense of facts slowly emerging to form a horrifying picture, or one small incident ballooning into an earth-shattering scandal. Instead, Twohey and Kantor are certain they have the basic facts from the start, with the film being instead a reveal of how many cases there are, rather than an expose of a wrong. While this is still important, it isn’t necessarily always dramatic and, eventually, She Said starts to feel every minute of its two-hour-plus run time.

The real focus of the film probably should have been the journalists’ determined work to win the trust of the principal witnesses – in particular Jennifer Ehle’s Laura Madden, whose whole life has been partially in the shadow of Weinstein’s assault in the 90s. Kantor – played with an empathetic richness by Zoe Kazan – worked night and day to encourage these women to bring their stories to the public. Instead, the film gets distracted with trying to cover too much, both the famous and the unknown victims, and the peripheral presence of Rose McGowan, Gwyneth Paltrow and Ashley Judd (playing herself) unbalance the movie away from the difficult, challenging – but more dramatically rewarding – work exploring office workers called into meetings to “massage” their gross boss.

It’s a shame the focus gets pulled away from these unknown women, who were little more than teenagers when Weinstein abused them in the 90s, since the sequences where they tell their stories are the ones that carry the most impact. There are superb cameo appearances from a trio of great actors. Ehle is superb as a woman resigned to trying to put things behind her, Morton brilliant as another prickling with rage and resentment, and Yeoh very good as a woman who never really managed to process her trauma. The careful, respectful, but deeply sad recounting of these women’s experiences by this trio are the film’s highlights.

Too much of the rest of the film gets bogged down in editorial procedure and the flat collecting of facts. It’s a bad sign when the film has to continuously state the “danger” the characters are facing while investigating and how every wall has ears. While Weinstein was a horrible man, terrifyingly powerful within his industry, I find it a stretch when (unchallenged) a character fears Weinstein will have him killed. I can’t see Weinstein hiring a hitman or utilising the sort of espionage techniques that would make the FBI jealous.

The film also struggles to get to grips with the depressing limits to any struggle for justice in the field of sexual harassment and assault. It starts by depicting Twohey’s investigation into Trump’s “locker room” pussy-grabbing “banter”, which peters out into a total failure to have any real impact at all. While the film suggests this as a motivating factor for the journalists to “get it right” this time, it doesn’t seem to acknowledge the limits of #metoo. It’s clearly very different to get Hollywood to clean out its house, compared to taking on someone with real power. Equally, the film gives no space to attempting to understand why Lisa Bloom, who represented victims of Bill O’Reilly and Trump, went to town defending Weinstein. There are interesting topics to explore here, but She Said wants to simplify its narrative down to goodies and baddies.

Time is also given over to the journalist’s home lives, none of which adds much to the overall narrative. Kantor’s relationship with a 10-year-old daughter just beginning to understand words like “rape” never quite solidifies into a thematic motivator. Twohey’s struggles with post-natal depression are bravely raised, but effectively disappear from the film (which makes me feel even a feminist film is squeamish about saying anything except motherhood is the dream for all women).

The final arc gets equally slightly bogged down in the fact-checking procedure. At times, the film has a little too much of a documentary feel, as if drama might have got in the way of the message. Despite this, there are some very good performances, with Kazan and Mulligan concealing mounting outrage under professional, dispassionate cool (Mulligan gets an outburst at a harassing bar patron, which does feel like too much of a “for your consideration” moment), even if we get little sense of who they are as people.

She Said is a very worthy look at a seismic news story, which never quite translates its coverage of impactful events into a truly compelling narrative.