Their long, heavy skirts slightly moved by a surreal breeze—those of three women watching something off-camera unaware of the observer’s mechanical eye, mesmerised by a vision that will always be theirs only. It is to this famous 1951 still photography by Lucien Hervé that Marcell Iványi gives his own fascinating interpretation. Szél is a single-shot film that shines with Hungarian stylistic economy and an extraordinarily ingenious cinematic narrative. A simple camera revolution on a tripod seems to follow the voice of the wind in search of an answer. Curiosity intensifies as we pan across the deserted countryside, then turns into anguish, horror, and a final pragmatic resignation. These are not the seven minutes that will change the history of cinema, but a time not wasted that attracts our gaze like a lesser moon, intensely bright.

Among the many short films recently made by well-known directors (Mati Diop, Pablo Larraín, Paolo Sorrentino, Sebastián Lelio, to name some of the directors behind those I have seen) there is one that succeeded where others struggled to penetrate the creative muffling of this static unprecedented time.
Referring in the title to a strange epidemic case of compulsive urge to dance in the streets, Strasbourg 1518 implies an analogy between the extravagant historical episode and the current claustrophobic condition. With the domestic means that this period demands, Jonathan Glazer and Mica Levi meet again giving birth to a work that gradually convinces by making of the collective hysteria a hypnotic spectacle. The delirium and addiction of life in a cage according to the rare genius of one who managed to resist the torpor and keep feeding the artistic unquietness.

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.’

He is standing on the shore contemplating an almost motionless sea, acknowledging his own limits as a bureaucrat, a man, a father, a whoremonger—and the absurdity of the pompous culture he represents for necessity. He is at a dead-end, retreating being his only option, although a seemingly impossible one.
Don Diego de Zama, the strenuous corregidor, the resolute and righteous judge. He who brought peace among the Indians and made justice without ever drawing the sword. But also Zama the desperate man, lost and distant, consumed by the atrocious loneliness of a God born old who cannot die.
Lucrecia Martel delves once more into the inmost feelings of an alienated creature, his broken dialogue with a world that was once his and is no more—and does so with exquisite taste, delivering one of the best of our time.

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.

A bunch of flowers on the street is one of the most poignant symbols in the collective imagination. We see it, we know immediately what it means, and we suddenly find ourselves helplessly sinking in a deep, irrational sadness. But so much more do flowers mean if instead of leaning against a wall they are in a vase on a table, nicely displayed at an event, if the hands of a man are taking care of them or those of a woman bring them close to her cheeks as she loses herself in their scent, in a memory, somewhere far. With words spoken by the colours of flowers on the gloomy tints of a misty weather, Loreak explores incomprehensions, loneliness, affections, and the exhausting human rebelling against oblivion. There’s a very thin line between living in the present and in the past, a line stretched not only by the fear of being forgotten but also and above all, by that of forgetting.