As I get out of the screen I keep the door for an elderly lady so hunched that she doesn’t reach my hips. A tall gentleman in his nineties whom I assume to be her son, or perhaps her grandson, holds her hand. As they pass in front of me, she looks up, gives me a tender smile, and with an accent I can’t quite place, says thank you. While I slowly follow them down the corridor towards the exit, I hear them conversing—she is Polish. My heart sinks to an even deeper level than the film has taken it, and it continues to fall as I write this note on my way home. And if the chilly wind outside has got my eyes wet with shy tears, is not quite for any of the obvious reasons, but for the beauty that art and life just made experience.
By the way, the only thing that doesn’t work in Jonathan Glazer’s long-awaited The Zone of Interest is the green glow of the emergency exit. Everything else is a marvel—exclamation mark.

Taking a considerable aesthetic departure from his previous works, Yorgos Lanthimos transforms the screen into the site of an art installation—and if this time he seems to rely more on the visuals than the contents, it is to a no less piercing ultimate result.
Although the relentless zooming in and out got me a little woozy, other bold stylistic choices such as fisheyes and the combination of colour and b/w, did feel convincing and perfectly synergistic to the narrative—all the more as shot on vibrant Kodak stock.
Echoing scattered if vivid traits of the architecture of Mackintosh, Gaudí, Horta, as well as reminding me the romantic surrealism of Tim Walker’s fashion stories, production designers Shona Heath and James Price put together a colourful theatre of contaminations that never feels dull or inconsistent—and provide the perfect sound box to Jerskin Fendrix’s fantastic score.
Whilst I particularly loved the dancing skills of Mark Ruffalo and everything Kathryn Hunter did, and does in general as an actor, it is indeed Emma Stone’s Bella the true driving force of the film—the baffling purity of her logics, her straightforward attitude to life, her roaming without intent, but a clumsy yet somehow extremely elegant and seductive gait, through a world that feels much stranger than the freakish past that created her.

However stumbling into at least one of the cinematic features that normally put me off—namely, the uncountable montages, because they always feel like a facile narrative trick that only succeeds in pushing me away from what interests me the most, the characters, especially these, which are brilliant—there’s a certain charm to Priscilla’s candid sincerity that didn’t leave me untouched or, for that matter, not entertained.
Where another director would have probably fallen into the temptation of shooting scenes of sex, excesses, or various abuses, Sofia Coppola finds her story elsewhere, with taste and discretion, allowing her voice to be stronger than the canon as to both the subject, the themes, and the genre. Not only she refuses to embrace the myth. She deconstructs the perceived sense of exceptionality of both the protagonists and their story into common terms of normality, to then chase and eventually find a truer, more human, and profound essence.
Almost forgot, the gigantic and charismatic Jacob Elordi plays the best Elvis I remember having seen on screen. Ignoring size and physiognomy—haven’t checked, but I doubt that Elvis was so statuesque—he has just the controlled, understated demeanour and intriguing shyness, whether genuine or faked, the King used to exhibit off-stage and during interviews.

There’s something I can quite put my finger on to the introductory sequence of Anatomy of a Fall that immediately shattered the slight scepticism I had to overcome in order to go and see it. Justine Triet’s Palm d’Or is a stunningly written piece that digs with dramaturgical mastery in the remotest places of the human nature, cynically exposing both its fragility in the face of possible misinterpretations, and its perverted inclination to give in to them.
When Miloš Forman’s Mozart is summoned by the Emperor and questioned about his work on the politically feared figure of Figaro, the young and boisterous musician pitches a scene in which a duet turns into a trio, then a quartet, and so on. ‘Guess! Guess, Majesty. Imagine the longest time such a thing could last, then double it.’ Triet’s—and partner/co-writer Arthur Harari’s—joint bravura doesn’t live too far from that picture. Their naturalistic way of looking behind both institutional and domestic walls gives an exhilarating sense of truthfulness to passages you’d want to last forever.
One peculiar expedient Anatomy of a Fall resorts to, somehow managing to expand time to a quasi-transcending effect, is repetitions. The same facts are run through over and over again in different contexts while the central incident itself is either enacted or recalled multiple times and in all sorts of fashions. On location, within private conversations, deep inside the eyes of the characters—all phenomenal performers—and in our minds alike.
Cleverly picked to reflect and emphasise that trait, and a greatly defining element for the film in their own right, are the music tracks. The wonderful instrumental version of 50 Cents’s misogynistic classic P.I.M.P. (witty and bitter in-joke) by Bacao Rhythm & Steel Band almost conveys a state of trance while setting an interesting—and far less than obvious—dialogue with the cyclic flamenco structure of Albéniz’s Asturias.
I wonder, in retrospect, if the authors’ creative process has anything in common with those of their characters, if the film itself may have sparked from their own conversations about functioning as a couple while living through art and surviving success, the one thing in life that seems to be a problem regardless of its presence or absence. Apart from love, of course.

More years ago than a human mind could remember or a decent man dare to admit, I bumped into a featurette of the then-upcoming The Lion King—it was on the VHS of Cinderella, videotape times. Despite its understandably commercial nature, it had some sort of a eureka effect on me—Ha! so this is how animated films are made. Among the artists interviewed, there was this handsome man with Fred Mercury moustache and German accent who beautifully described how he had tried to infuse suaveness and ferocity into the same character or something down the line. It wasn’t what he said that impressed me, but how he moved, how he gestured, how he modulated the tone of his voice while talking about the creation of the Machiavellian Scar. The secret bond between animator and character—that is what he was making me aware of for the first time, and that is still what mostly attracts me to animation.
Skip forward to the present day, I am lucky enough to have been extended an invitation to a screening of the long-gestated directorial debut of Andreas Deja. Mushka may not be flawless, but it’s an act of love that couldn’t be truer to its author. Watching it in the company of old friends, fellow animators, and then having the pleasure to meet and chat with Andreas, threw me back to a particularly exciting moment in my life, the memory of which had gone neglected for a very long time.

It was a joy to see Marco Bellocchio’s Rapito screening to a full house, even up against a night that looked again like summer after a couple of questionable weeks. I was just filled with melancholy when I acknowledged—as I stood up and watched the end credits from the side aisle, embracing what seemed to me a charmingly civilised if old-fashioned local costume—that I was by a decade or two the youngest in the room. Ironically enough—though I hope, without concealing my horror, that this is not the shape film-going is taking—it felt like going out of church after service. You know, that sort of dignified silence, the polite giving way, and those awkward, compassionate, even contrite hints of smiles that are exchanged when eyes accidentally meet.
Rapito begins as a rather anaemic melodrama about an unbelievably true historical fact. Neither the writing nor the directing seems at first to exceed the average television drama virtues, but as the story moves into court the film starts to breach into its inscrutable figures—their contradictions, those of the time, those of our own culture—getting to a more and more convincing place through a crescendo of flashes of visual lyricism and dramatic vigour. Remarkable is the scene in which the freshly ordained Mortara abruptly goes berserk during the funeral procession of Pio IX and joins an indignant crowd who is threatening to throw the pope’s coffin into the Tiber. Or the one where his dad lets out his desperation in an emptied court, screaming and crying and punching himself on the head, with overwhelming human truthfulness. And it’s almost sickening the tragic intimacy Mortara takes advantage of in a seeming sort of trance to attempt at giving to her dying mother a Catholic baptism.
To an unlikely parallelism I could only discern in retrospect, this is the second film I’ve seen in a row after Tony Kaye’s American History X that revolves around such timeless themes as faith, family, identity, and—ominously echoing the current times—the almighty power of obtuse thinking, its control over the mind of others. Those made mouldable by innocence or ignorance.