As bestas establishes a particularly fleshly eeriness from the incipit. In a long, slow-motion sequence a couple of men tame a herd of wild horses. It’s almost a dance, masculine and muscular, that forebodes the sordid events to come. Here is how we deal with things around here, it seems to express—physically. Cut to a wonderful dialogue scene in the local bar, to which the Galician cadence confers the elegance of a recitative despite its uneasy tone. In just a few minutes, a gloomy mood is set, where at every beat something darker is perceived beneath the surface. Jokes become unsettling as friendly conversations seem more and more to disguise threats. Even the subtle whispers of nature make us wary of an unspoken yet palpable danger.
Funny coincidence that the Galician for the beasts should sound so close to asbestos, suggesting perhaps the best adjective to describe the atmosphere—toxic. Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s rural tragedy kept me on the edge in the same way Matteo Garrone’s Dogman did, and left me equally shaken. But whereas the latter had a mostly psychological focus, As bestas delves into themes as current as xenophobia and gentrification reminding us that the problems, up there among the forgotten, are not as straightforward as they might seem—thus unveiling a much deeper reflection on our time.

Alright, I’ll say it. There is one shot that really bothered me. Just one, I promise. When Julie returns to her room after unsuccessfully searching for her dog—which she thought was lost—the camera crash-zooms into the lovely Louis as he lies comfortably next to her mum in bed. I am not sure if it is a pathological condition similar to an allergy or an intolerance like the one I have for butter and coriander. As a matter of fact, I’m very rarely not distracted by zooms. They suddenly make me feel removed if temporarily from the story, unwillingly made aware of the craft.
Apart from that, The Eternal Daughter couldn’t have been worthier of the long wait, confirming Joanna Hogg as one of the finest auteurs of our time, and one of the few for whom I quite literally rush to the cinema as soon as anything new is released.
Constantly swinging between gentle hints of horror and comedy, introspective minimalism and family drama, The Eternal Daughter touches very different human territories, intriguingly exploring the hidden paths that connect them. Being a mother or not having been one, being a daughter, forever, and an artist.
Perhaps the real wonder of the film, Tilda Swinton is simply superb in two very distinct yet tightly related roles. The way the stolid grace of Rosalind’s formal composure counterpoints Julie’s fragility, their different sets of mannerisms, little rituals, miseries, and even language—especially in a film that I assume largely based on improvisation as per Joanna Hogg’s usual process—are perfectly convincing, measured, and beautifully nuanced.
The Eternal Daughter certainly leaves a lot to unravel, but without ever sounding inaccessible or excessively intellectual. Just enough is given out to provoke, keep on the edge, set up a dialogue. A delicate balance that Hogg achieves on the page as well as through her elegant aesthetic instincts.
The slightly washed-out look and the iconic aspect ratio of the Super 16 camera—for my own record, an Arriflex 416 she used for the entire trilogy, to include both chapters of The Souvenir—frame an almost dioramic world in which we are progressively led to suspect that any detail to the tiniest minutiae might have a deeper reason to be. They come in a white cab, Julie leaves alone in a black one. Or the green glow that lights the eerie interiors at night, the hardly discernible noises ominously chiming in and out at all times, the many books, their titles, those about dreamers and those about adventurers. What are artists, methinks, if not both at once. And what is our mind, if not a mazy place with walls and doors, filled with all sorts of sounds.

I am not sure when was the last time I had become aware of an audience not only rejecting what they were seeing—which they normally receive quietly, for either lethargy or respect—but also making their dissent understood like in the old ballistic days of rotten eggs and tomatoes. If a few viewers giving up on Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All in a full house of three hundred seats and a film on a relatively disturbing subject hadn’t quite prompted that consideration, they did in the much smaller context of a random midweek show at the Crouch End Arthouse, populated by hardly a dozen desperate souls. Thinking of it in retrospect, L’immensità is not so unbearable to make people flee, but it does put to the test the most committed filmgoers’ stamina.
Whereas a storyteller rummaging into his past is traditionally a good premise—in cinema as in any of the arts—Emanuele Crialese struggles to find his way through the same maze of intimate recollections that other directors have been able to articulate or make somehow attractive. The exploratory spirit of the artist looking for his own self in fragments of dreams and memories is the main absence. The narrative is tangent to many intriguing characters, stories, themes, without ever daring into the depths of any. The scenes inspired by Raffaella Carrà and Adriano Celentano are per se as brilliant as the sparse intuitions L’immensità is paced by, but so poorly grounded to ultimately come through just as lyrical indulgences. Even the Seventies are depicted in a rather superficial way, mostly relying on ochre and amber tones, some beautiful garments, and a couple of cars of the time scattered around a derelict city of concrete. None of this is necessarily bad, it just feels tentative and slightly disjointed like everything else in the film. I always thought I didn’t mind a film that doesn’t seem to know which way to go. And yet, sometimes, it turns out I do.

Tight angles on an animal and a female body are paced with the solemn gravity of a requiem by a unison of cellos and double basses. Brasses chime in setting a cadenced crosstalk of scarlet reds and pitch blacks. Is it a brutal killing, we might find ourselves thinking, or an avant-guard show. The circus.
Only minutes earlier, it was the gloomy end of a day that winter seemed to have claimed back after a delusive stint of spring. I had switched off too late to catch a film I desperately wanted to see, but I still needed to cleanse. Having domestic arrangements already been made to allow one of my recursive cinephile escapades, I bought a ticket for another film that wasn’t really on my list. So there I was, with a cup of coffee in my hands whose impossible temperature wasn’t showing any sign of dropping by the fraction of a degree and my heart sank into the abyss of one of the most fascinating films I have seen this year.
A few months after his debut feature was released, a young and unknown Jerzy Skolimowski got a phone call from Paris. To his complete disbelief Cahiers du cinéma wanted to interview him, why me? Despite having hardly been screened outside of Poland, Walkover had made it into their year top ten. The second place. Skolimowski froze for a good ten seconds, perhaps more, then he said, ‘And who is in the first place?’ It was Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar. Not having been able to see it yet, he asked if they could wait a couple days so he could go and watch it. To this day the experience is vivid in his mind. At some point during the film, the somehow cynical stance of the fresh filmmaker eager to learn the craft dissolved and by the excruciating epilogue, the beautiful scene where Balthazar dies in a mountain pasture surrounded by a flock of sheep, he was in tears. The first and only time in his life he really cried for a film. When a few years ago he and his co-writer, producer, and other half Ewa Piaskowska made with 11 Minutes their first attempt at a different way to break the received cinematic narrative, they knew they hadn’t quite succeeded. So as they felt the urge to continue the exploration, the memory of the effect that Bresson’s provocative masterpiece had had resurfaced, seemingly offering the right place to start all over.
Although their research in the equidae literature reached as far as Ovid and Apuleius to find a voice that wasn’t just an echo of Bresson’s, the comparison with Balthazar not only feels natural, it leads to a deeper appreciation of the work done on its Polish heir. As a donkey, the former does donkey things. He might have a vague cognition of the human world, but he is essentially an innocent observer. Much of the empathic connection with the audience comes right from its inability to understand our nonsensical torments. A different creature altogether, Eo is a couple of Darwinian steps ahead to say the least. Ambiguously courting a vague sense of parody, very soon in the film we see him cry or watch melancholically a herd of horses running free in the prairie. Later on, he will perceive the meanness of man and even revolt, seek revenge, make friends. Whereas Bresson’s donkey is some sort of a furry Virgil who takes us through the deep circles of our nature embodying the same elliptical attitude of its auteur’s cinematographic language, Skolimowski uses Eo to make a series of clear statements on the aberrations of our times. But there’s a more profound difference. Bresson’s models are sheer fascinating mysteries in the way they behave and the decisions they make. Skolimowski instead, judgmentally visit themes that are as valid as obvious, and he does writing characters who ultimately struggle to reach any of the complexity they seem to strive for. Hooligans, priests, and torturers. Eo is populated by a parade of foil figures whose inherent explicitness adds hardly anything to the established debate on the respective matters.
And yet, despite its latently weak foundations Eo develops a surprisingly solid structure and a shape of its own that gets frame after frame more convincing, more personal, more exhilarating. Bresson’s near documentary visuals couldn’t be farther from the expressionist spectacle Skolimowski puts on, a visual symphony that is drenched with experimental ambitions without ever seeming pretentious or daring for the sake of it. Conversely, Eo shows the maturity of an artist and his confidence in letting the show be steered, admittedly for the first time to this extent in his career, by the creative genius of his collaborators. Polish composer Paweł Mykietyn writes a superb score that goes far beyond the traditional concept of soundtrack. The entire film is arguably conceived as an immersive musical experience. Cinematographer Michal Dymek talked about a synergistic clash between his more pragmatic approach and Skolimowski’s free jazz process. More than a few are the scenes that still make me wonder where and how did they come from. After Eo is savagely beaten by a group of demented football supporters, we cut to a strange tracking shot of a quadrupedal robot clumsily walking in the dark on a dried field, to eventually stop in front of a perfectly flat reflecting surface. Further into our donkey’s epic, we are drawn into another striking, near mystical night shot on a skier, the snow ahead hardly lit by a head-torch, and the image flipped in post.
Now, whoever criticised or didn’t quite respond to it has no doubt a point, though what remains aside from any subjective position is that Eo provides an extraordinary sensorial trip that is substantially different when seen on the big screen. Especially in a time where the audiences are barricading themselves into smaller spaces, a film like this claims back the importance o the physical place and defines the art. Lucky me to have bumped into it by chance, as is anyone who saw it in a cinema. Because theirs only is the privilege and the joy to have been reminded what cinema itself is about.

I am divided. Using the classical music contemporary enclave as a backdrop, Todd Field delves into subject matters that are timeless and timely at once, striving for depth, complexity, and debate. Although prominently reflecting on the deceptive boundary between oeuvre and conduct of an artist, more intimate themes are implicitly tackled—the need of asserting a social position in a world of wolves, the strenuous fighting against inner phantoms, obsessions, insecurities, and the tragic acknowledgment of having aged. But whereas on the page Tár secretly smuggles under our skin an electric sense of unease, ambiguity, danger, as if the words we read could be a code for something else like the geometrical figures that torment its eponymous protagonist, on the screen it hardly nears the same brilliance. The beginning is exciting on both. Three long dialogue scenes follow one another almost back-to-back, highlighting the bravura of the writer and the performers—Cate Blanchett especially, no wonder, as always a spectacle in every movement, gesture, utterance, and gaze. ‘She’s almost like mercury rolling on a table,’ once said about her Sarah Paulson, using a beautiful analogy that particularly fits this performance. ‘It’s entirely elusive, and yet right there in front of you. And constantly moving and shape-shifting and . . . and something one would covet.’¹ Her costumes are amazing too. Elegant, linear, practical, perfectly framing the image of a person who has the drive and discipline to face her own fragilities and fleet, if so must be, only to defend her right to carry on—do more, do better. And yet the film, the film as an experience that shakes and burns and in time grows, sadly struggles to keep the great intuitions at the core of the story together, resulting in the lukewarm combination of a cryptic ghost story and a duly hand-sanitised character exploration—the music, its unmistakable scent of wood, being almost left behind or rather, again, failing to have the cohesive presence it has in the written form.
On the screenplay, an introduction reads, ‘Based on this script’s page count, it would be reasonable to assume that the total running time for Tár will be well under two hours. However, this will not be a reasonable film.’ A good resolution, but a promise not entirely kept. Except maybe for the ending, by far the most intriguing moment, the one that will make me come back to it soon.
The lights dim in an auditorium populated by monsters. She gives the downbeat. A hyper-masculine voice drowns the music. ‘If any of you have lost your nerve, then step away now and let no one judge you.’

1. The Elusive Power of Cate Blanchett, Jordan Kisner (The New York Times, 11 October 2022).

The vague adjectives usually deployed to articulate what’s by nature out of verbal reach can hardly pin Enys Men down. So yeah, it sure is unsettling, cryptic, and evocative—but is far more, and it is in that space between the striving for words and the stunning images where its exhilarating essence lies. Amongst the films released in recent years, I have rarely come across one that feels so rough and refined at the same time, or a director that combines more literally the words artist and film-maker. A film that instills the inexplicable urge to be seen more than once simply defines what cinema should be—what art is, in fact. Enys Men has the intensity of a non-destructive form of addiction. At my second iteration it gave me the impression of having been let, or perhaps dragged, a little further into its depths. To use the imagery of the film, it almost felt like looking into a well, and as the eyes adapted to its darkness starting to discern something in it—but again, what. I am pretty sure to have not fallen asleep in those couple of moments when I realised to have briefly transcended to a strange state of clarity. Everything in the film made suddenly perfect sense—only to eventually come back to pristine bewilderment, thinking how can something be so physical and yet so fleeting. The ritualised life of ‘the volunteer’ does carry an element of mantra for both her, a character tormented by anguishing memories, and the viewers. Enys Men is that very mystery, the one we chase in the unconscious hope to never grasp it.
The sheer beauty of Mark Jenkin’s photography is per se mesmerising—the grainy 16 mm stock, the near Technicolor vibrancy of reds and yellows on the gloomy tints of the rugged coast, the way light is captured or how in its absence blacks pierce the screen. But where the power of the film really takes its form, and so Mark Jenkin’s unique language, is the edit suite. Like in Bait, I can only imagine how misleadingly dull the script might have seemed to someone who had no clue about how it was going to be made. Tight angles on day-to-day actions intersect lyrical wides, awkwardly extreme closeups, or inserts on gorgeous vintage props, botanical macros, ghostly creatures, and a slug. Jenkin goes to the core of what visual storytelling is with a daring sense of irony, finding characters and themes in the process of cutting, stitching, juxtaposing. Something I only acknowledged at the second round, is how cohesive and idiosyncratic the use of sound is too—how gritty noises and dreamy folk tunes speak to each other, contributing to shape the aesthetics and the sensorial experience.
In regards to the influences, Mark Jenkin complied a genetic map of the film for a program at the BFI. Besides a juicy list that ranges from Chantal Akerman to Peter Strickland, one more reference surfaced in a Q&A. In conversation with Mark Kermode, prompted by a particularly attentive cinephile in the audience, he jokingly admitted to have ripped off the idea for the opening shot from Robert Bresson’s L’Argent. With that in mind, later in the film, I noticed at least another shot perhaps taken straight from it—an insert on the water washing blood from off-screen hands into a sink. ‘Homages,’ corrected him Kermode and Mary Woodvine in unison with a laugh. But not quite so, if I may. They are actually thefts, which reminding the famous quote attributed to Picasso, ultimately is what good artists do—take things, make their own, make them special.

This story has been told before. Not much in Romi Schnider’s fairytale trilogy, nor in the many depictions of Empress Elisabeth of Austria lately released on screen or telly, but whenever cinema has dared into the intimacy of a woman jailed behind the bars of a prepackaged social position. Pablo Latraín’s Spencer comes to mind more than Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette—with which Corsage only shares an intriguing knack for anachronisms, if anything—but there something else in Marie Kreutzer’s take that makes it unique and worthy of revisiting the myth. It is an elusive quality that is largely nurtured by the candid beauty of Vicky Krieps and the ferocious intellectual unruliness of the character she and Kreutzer have created.
The cinematic identity Corsage is after, largely driven by the magnetic performance of Krieps, is reflected by its crude aesthetics and natural photography. Not the sumptuous warmness of the average costume drama, but cold spaces, peeling walls, austere environments, much more in the likes of—and even further—Yorgos Lanthimos’s audacious The Favourite.
From the score composed by Camille and her theme song She was, to a chamber version of As Tears Go By, which is actually not miles off the original interpretation of Marianne Faithful, and the dreamy Italy by Soap&Skin, on which a moustached Sissi dances in the end credits, the musical choices are phenomenal. The contrast they provide, the tone they set, the truth they gently reveal.
And yet, behind its many fascinating aspects, lies a film that is strangely—perhaps deliberately—unemphatic. What this really means, I am yet to figure out. As a matter of fact, its winking dryness proved quite addictive, but contrary to heroin, I am sure it will have some side effects. That’s all I want from art.

My riches can’t buy everything
I want to hear the children sing
All I hear is the sound
Of rain falling on the ground
I sit and watch
As tears go by

Nada. Pinocchio lives on the page and in the memory of countless children, but on the screen his incarnations has hardly ever been more than the clumsy impression of an idea, however rooted. Guillermo del Toro’s age-old passion project is in some ways no exception, I hate to say, but with more than a few saving graces.
While giving up the layered narrative of Collodi’s Pinocchio and with that any trace of its freemasonic significance, del Toro drastically readapts the material to his own idiosyncrasies and disparately influenced sense of mythology making it more personal, contemporary, cinematic. Like he said, his Pinocchio is not much about a child learning to be a real boy, as it is about a father learning to be a real one. After all, children don’t need to learn how to be children, but grownups might have to learn how to be parents—when not adults too.
Guillermo de Toro’s Pinocchio is also the celebration of disobedience for the sake of affirming one’s identity, and therefore of unruliness as an act of innate bravery as opposed to one of immaturity. ‘If he’s a puppet, where are his strings?’ candidly asks Candelwick in church. ‘That’s true. Who controls you, wooden boy?’ chimes in his father, the city black-shirted podestà. ‘Who controls you?’ counters Pinocchio, to Geppetto’s embarrassment and the congregation’s muttered dismay.
By giving it a more specific historical placement than to my knowledge Pinocchio ever had, del Toro not only adds an unexpected sense of crude realism to a story broadly perceived as a timeless fantastic metaphor—he creates an exciting resonance between the stubborn, candid, rebellious attitude of our skinny little one and values that are close to intellectual resistance. Very soon we realise that Pinocchio’s magical characters have to deal with war, death, discrimination, Fascists—and the fairytale’s dramatic side suddenly gains a different gravity.
As stop-frame couldn’t have been a better choice to tell about a talking burattino and a cricket fond of Schopenhauer, the animations are mostly excellent with just a few jarring notes. The scenes where Geppetto is drunk and desperate, or when he puts Carlo and Pinocchio to bed are superb, tasteful, moving. Others moments lack the same charm. Count Volpe’s animation in particular, however deliberately theatrical and sophisticatedly mannered, feels conceived around slightly amateurish acting clichés.
Very interestingly, the comparison between this Pinocchio and Disney’s is not just an easy bait film critics picked up. Guillermo del Toro himself often raised the comparison, praising the beloved animated classic and declaring himself a proper Disney freak. The two films somehow speak to each other for how they read Collodi’s faceted novel from different yet complementary angles. Disney doesn’t get enough credit for being dark, says del Toro. As his films don’t get enough for being bright and positive.
But the most precious gift I get from him, is even prior to the film itself. As a very Mexican inspiration to Pinocchio’s central idea, he quoted a stanza from a poem by Jaime Sabines that is going to stay with me forever.

Alguien me habló todos los días de mi vida
al oído, despacio, lentamente.
Me dijo:  ¡vive, vive, vive!
Era la Muerte.

It is a dream not all directors can afford to make their own 8½. Even though I wouldn’t say that Iñárritu fully succeeded—nor that his has really much to do with Fellini apart from the common introspective intentions—Bardo is a rather admirable attempt at exploring one own roots and frailties using cinema in its purest form. ‘I put everything that I have into Bardo,’ he revealed at the London Film Festival. ‘I have nothing more to give at this moment. I gave everything, in terms of heart, in terms of soul, in terms of attention. I didn’t want to make Bardo, I needed to make it.’ And it definitely shows. Walking on a squiggly line between reality and metaphor, present and memories, personal and national nightmares—but also brilliance and self-indulgence—Iñárritu finds in the anguished Silverio Gama the fulcrum of a fascinating, if perhaps too ambitious, embroidery of themes. An intimate journey into paternity, grief, and fame, is intersected by a tormented reflection on Mexican history, spirituality, and identity. Either way, chasing truths that are nothing but emotional. It is hard not to picture the bearded Silverio pointing a finger at Iñárritu himself, and Bardo, his first Mexican film since Amores perros, as a way to reconnect to his home country, give it voice and justice, maybe ask forgiveness for having long neglected it.
Many scenes made my jaw drop, others touched me deeply, some didn’t quite convince me. One in particular—a preposterous conversation with Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés on a pile of slaughtered bodies and a gloomy artificial sky—felt overly mannered, both in narrative and symbolic intentions. The same comment I am tempted to extend to the categorical use of wide lenses. I actually wonder if the film was shot like Birdman on a single lens, and whether this extreme choice is maybe too apparent to serve the narrative without stealing, so to speak, the show.
Altogether, I have a feeling that Iñárritu’s cinema is starting to be too visually refined, contrived, post-produced—perhaps expensive—and that this overly manipulative work on the image is only coating the creative intuitions with unnecessary cosmetics. Insofar as I’d rather watch a film that takes the risk to be called pretentious than one that doesn’t even try to take me elsewhere, I can’t say I didn’t enjoy or appreciate it. Bardo does have a great soul and each of its photograms screams to let it through, but really, I am still in love with the brutal aesthetics of Amores perros and the nerve of the early Iñárritu.
On a due wiki note, bardo, in Buddhism, is the liminal state of existence between death and rebirth. Makes more sense than it seems.