Pitch black in the woods. An amber glow sketches nervous lights and shadows on the leaves. Then trees bend and fall, light as ears of wheat. The trunks break without resistance producing painful crackles. A giant is walking through, a monster is devouring them. Not far from the images evoked, two enormous bulldozers are revealed as they aggressively make their way into the forest. Demented beasts of metal. An ambiguous opening scene of arresting beauty that turns for a moment this very world, and the film, into a fantastic place of scary creatures.
Suddenly switching to semi documentary telling, and more so as the story unfolds, Fire Will Come is somewhat stylistically and narratively incoherent. And yet there’s more to it than the unescapable nostalgic feeling aroused by the copious Galician rain and its gorgeous dark green mountains. It is a laconic rural tale of solitude and defeat, discreet like those who live silently, and silently take the fated blows of incomprehension, injustice, and nature.

We open on a dark alleyway. To the right, elevated from the street level, a cemetery. The crosses loom above us. Vitalina Varela is an immersive journey into the depths of loss, its silent misery. Despite having the same elliptical narrative of Cavalo Dinheiro, its clearer storyline makes the characters immediately relatable and the experience more poignant. But this is not in the slightest accidental, or a flaw of the former for that matter. Through a process of passionate human discovery rather than one of cinematic manipulation, Costa seems to shape his films to the inner truth of their characters. Whereas Cavalo Dinheiro is based on a fictionalised version of the real Ventura, who according to Costa is incapable of recounting his life, Vitalina Varela reflects the lucidity of her eponymous protagonist’s tragic recollections.
Pedro Costa tells the struggles of an incredible life through little moments of such intensity to be possibly regarded as expressionistic. Vitalina arrives to Portugal from her native Cabo Verde barefoot. Her silhouette dangerously stands on the edge of the open door while the stairs are yet to attach. Nobody is there to assist, no other passengers. Tears, or blood, run down her ankles. Hers is the confidence of who defeated by fate challenges it to dare further. ‘Nothing left for you here, Vitalina.’ Wherever you go, grief will follow. Vitalina.
Once in the flat that was supposed to become theirs, her late husband’s bright yellow hi-vis breaks the bronze dimness of a never-ending night like a ghost, and a recurring visual aggression to the warm tints of the film.
To a similar cringing effect and a subdued witty sense of irony, contrast is sought through the secondary characters. A man flushing the loo in the background while candles are fixed by an impromptu home altar, or a priest loudly blowing his nose after confessing the one soul still coming to the church. ‘Seven cans of tuna, five euros? (beat) Excuse me, my condolences,’ says a mourner to an appalled Vitalina. Stoic, firm as a statue of herself.
Costa’s gorgeous ode to another dispossessed divinity is a dark place in ruins where faith is lost but another is to be found. For the art of cinema, and cinema as a true form of art.

Temblores moves from the unbelievable to the unbearable, and digs further. It isn’t so much the denounce of an endemic cultural blindness, as the microanalysis of the individual reactions that make it so abrasively convincing. Hinting at broader problems such as that of identity and free will, Bustamante guides us through the absurd, the touching—excruciatingly so, when two children steal a perfume to feel their dad closer and fall asleep tenderly hugging each other—and the near-comedy, as a priest echoes with words of wisdom an already preposterous situation or a religious fanatic lady in a perfect sheath dress gives a Full-Metal-Jacket-like lesson in masculinity to a group of naked men in a shower.
From the very first ambiguous scene to the genius finale, our heart is shaken, our eyes wide open.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the dark night of a yellow forest, a masked gang makes its prey fall from a tree. The possessed members take a grim group photograph to celebrate the success of the hunt as if they captured a beast—but it’s a man. The prisoner, also masked, is then thrown into a well with a noose around his neck. The furious running of the rope describes with a mournful hiss the interminable descent until its end disappears into silence. But the man is alive.
Clinging to the rocky walls of the humid hole, he frees himself from the constraints, not from the mask, and with ancestral free solo dexterity begins the long, difficult ascent.
Aired on the BBC unannounced and without credits, The Fall are seven gloomy minutes that grow with each viewing evoking sinister forebodings about our world, about everything we have seen or heard in recent years, and about the kind of human being we have become—the notion of which might still escape us.
Anthony Minghella once said that a short film should be a perfect sentence. The Fall is Jonathan Glazer’s response to that note.

Bait is the gift cinema lovers covet, the surprise I myself was after when I went to see it even though all I knew was that on the poster towered a big beardy face like those I like. The kind of men who survive because of their rocky hands, wellies on their feet to keep steady on slippery surfaces.
Martin fishes for lobsters with a boat that no longer exists in a place where times are threatening the identity of a generation, the legacy of the previous. It’s on today’s raped Cornwall, snatched from its inhabitants and sold to holidaymakers, that Mark Jenkin—a Cornish himself, and very vocal on the matter of gentrification—solo writes, directs, photographs, develops, and virtuously edits. Behind the nostalgic tingling of the 16 mm grain of a Bolex camera, he captures with a tragicomic sense of irony some rather perfect performances, conveying personal and collective frustrations, and ultimately giving shape to a truly unique piece of work.