Every time I watch it, I get to a point—normally within the first ten minutes—where I wonder how is it possible that I liked it so much the last I saw it. With the same punctuality, an indefinite stretch further into the film, I always find myself completely enthralled by it.
However paced by a few attractive lines and scraps of dialogue—such as ‘You cannot escape the field, Whitehead! / Then I shall become it! I shall consume all the ill fortune which you are set to unleash! I shall chew up all the selfish scheming and ill intentions that men like you force upon men like me and bury it in the stomach of this place!’—A Field in England doesn’t carry any particularly profound message and doesn’t indulge in pretentious ostentations of auteurism. One of the most intriguing collaborations between Amy Jump and Ben Wheatley to date, it is instead a candid act of cinema whose uneducated instincts happen to feed the most genuine sense of experimentation.
Whereas the prologue is occasionally spoiled by some awkward comedy attempts—like a soldier awakening from apparent death saying, ‘Did someone mention ale?’—the film puts soon itself together replacing the facetious with the witty and the ironic. Even preposterous moments like a character materialising from a post that has been pulled out of the ground through a sort of asymmetric tug of war, seems to find their place in the surreal context.
The entire psychedelic sequence is an intoxicating, if raw, work of visual bravura that relates in my mind to the most clever advice I have ever heard giving. Speaking about the fear of not doing the right thing—or at least not right in the eyes of someone who might have the power to judge it so—Paul Thomas Anderson once said, ‘Just don’t give a fuck, that’s kind of the best thing to do.’ Which is right the spirit A Field in England seems to be fuelled with. Bizarre, flawed, brazen, inspiring.

There is a rare creative lucidity to the defecatory madness of Hard to Be a God. I would be lying if I claimed to have fully grasped its essence, though cogency is hardly a feature the author seems to be after. What clearly reads in his Bruegelian delusion is rather what he once declared, to not be interested in anything but ‘the possibility of building a world, an entire civilisation from scratch.’
Converted from native colour stock to a stunning, silvery b/w that reminded me at times of Ben Wheatley’s digitally photographed A Field in England (coincidentally released the same year), German’s apocalyptic orgy of rot and rain demands a certain degree of cinephile stamina, but not in exchange for nothing. Its exhaustingly slow pace and murky narrative convey a palpable sense of stillness, anguish, and oppression, that are likely meant to evoke Stalinist Russia’s dereliction while stirring broader reflections on human nature.
The camerawork is enthralling. Crisp spherical lenses wander throughout the delirious carnival seamlessly shifting in and out of POVs, often framed by bizarre objects in the foreground to an alienating effect. Characters emerge from behind the camera à la Klaus Kinski in Herzog’s Aguirre, occasionally staring straight at us, delivering random lines or lovely guttural grunts.
However arcane and strenuous, Hard to Be a God is the monumental work of a master. It left me singularly fascinated, inspired, and eager to take a long, warm shower.

A series of stunning views of the misted mountains. A chill air of cobalt, deer antlers in the distance. From the electric quietness, a nicely choreographed drone shot tracks an off-road vehicle, then a second, climbing up a dirt slope to join a bigger group on a plain. Hunters, or rather poachers, and the breathtaking sight of a majestic dawn in the valley.
The opening scene of Spoor is nothing I hadn’t seen before, but its beauty is arresting nonetheless. The same can’t be said about the rest of film, a pot of genres ranging from dark comedy to environmental drama with some nostalgic nods at Murder, She Wrote and a cringing touch of Mission: Impossible, leading up to a slightly preposterous bucolic utopia for a merry epilogue. Likewise, its narrative looks like that of a television drama in search of an identity, that constantly chases facts rather than letting its characters be, and breathe, outside of the self-contained world it sets.
Some directorial choices certainly show talent and skills that go beyond the box, but still won’t save the film from being utterly ordinary, and its ambitious contents from coming across hardly more profound than a sign at the zoo. Don’t touch the animals.

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.

Tropical vegetation on a bluish thunderous sky. Red peppers dry impassively on a tin roof. What seems to be a gunshot wakes up the birds, but is it? A couple of glasses are topped up with wine, red too, of a particularly garish tint. A woman’s hand clumsily drops some ice in one and picks it up, making the cubes clink insistingly, almost uncomfortably. Garden chairs are wearily dragged on the paving around a disused swimming pool. The putrid water. An awkwardly choreographed dance of aged tan bodies and abusive screechy sounds. Much hustle to go nowhere, not far. And then, definitely, another distant gunshot.
The opening sequence of La ciénaga, however annoyingly intercut with black title cards sporting a questionable graphic effect, is beyond description. A stroke of bravura, both narrative and directorial, not only acting as a proper ouverture to the story that is about to unfold, but also quietly hinting at the current sociopolitical state of the country. Argentina at last millennium sunset, that is.
Lucrecia Martel’s striking feature debut is wet and green and sweaty. It smells of swamp, it has its colours, and the carnal weight of the murky depth of a pond. It is a film soaked in muddled conflicts that moves at the pace of the adults’ compliant ineptitude, while the young are desperately urged to grow, if into a cynical disillusion. Formally mirroring the intro, in the final scene Momi noisily drags a chair to sit next to her sister Veronica, who’s placidly lying by the pool in the unbearable heat. ‘Adónde fuiste?’ asks the latter, seemingly resurrecting from a nap. ‘Fui donde se apareció la Virgen.’ Long pause. ‘No vi nada.’

Discerning a parallel between the feral creature masterly incarnated by Michel Piccoli and the figure of the film director is almost inescapable. He goes round the house like a sleuth, equally attracted by a seductive woman and a rusty old contraption. He experiences the surroundings with juvenile interest, showing the same cynical detachment while skilfully cooking, recording normal sounds, reviving memories on the wall, licking honey on a pearly skin, or building a functioning pistol to then make it an improbable work of art—like a tormented storyteller in search of subjects, and his own self, as tedium triggers creativity in the most unexpected ways. Dillinger è morto is at once a daring existentialist satire and a witty reflection on the nature of cinema. So, is Dillinger really dead?
In Marco Ferreri’s inspired vision, identity crumbles as things are progressively dispossessed, becoming an addictive object of curiosity for the senses. Seamlessly assuming the form of an apartment, or a playroom, the world is designed by a bored man that clashes with the impossibility of designing himself as a human being, and so as such fails. Gestures and interactions lose their meaning fed by an aimless intellectual need for exploration that fails too, eventually reverting to the trivial. Touching, watching, tasting, hearing—like a child, he acknowledges his being an alien to the world he created around himself, and fleets from the nonsense to the unknown, to experience the illusion of a new excitement while nothing will stop the setting of a sun also made of plastic.

Herzog, Pasolini, Leone, Olmi, Alice Rohrwacher, even Nicolas Winding Refn—and of course the Taviani brothers, as any time a grumpy peasant, and a loner, is seen on screen. If so many critics have felt the tactless urge to compare it with with the works of such a prestigious host of filmmakers, it can’t be solely because they had nothing else to say—Re Granchio does encourage comparisons. And yet, being the fortunate fantasy of some passionate cinephiles prone to respectful homages, doesn’t mar in the slightest its value.
Like the folktales handed down by the elderly, often enriched by the extra glass of wine, Re Granchio is a crafty patchwork of different styles and narratives. Elaborating a fragmentary legend running among the regulars of an actual hunt house who meaningfully appear in the film as a sort of passing on the baton, Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis go to the roots of storytelling to create the enigmatic character to whom artist Gabriele Silli lends his towering figure and magnetic stare. A drunkard, a free spirit and a fine thinker, a charlatan, a traveller, or a criminal, Luciano is the ousted nobody, an improbable and scruffier Ulysses who takes us from Tuscia to the edge of the world, incarnating the very essence of the romantic hero—the adventurer of his own life, struggling through and against his ineludible idiosyncrasies in search of atonement.
No matter how messy or flawed, Re Granchio’s genuine candidness and evocative imaginary are too attractive to let wordy scrutinies or presumptuous intellectual ejaculations get in the way—this is just cinema in its truest and most poignant incarnation. Aren’t we, after all, following too un cangrejo, persuading ourselves, step after step, that it is showing us the way?

‘Svanì per sempre il sogno mio d’amore.
L’ora è fuggita, e muoio disperato.
E non ho amato mai tanto la vita.’

What never ceases to fascinate me of the films made in the fortunate decade that starts around the end of the Sixties and conventionally ends with the infamous production experience of Heaven’s Gate, is that on top of being daring both technically, visually, and narratively, they are weird to the bones in a way that we have almost forgotten. Or at least largely has contemporary cinema.
Using the disturbing imagery of an industrial poultry farming machinery as a loosely metaphorical background, Death Laid an Egg follows a typical love triangle degenerating from boring daily inertia to havoc. As the theme of genetic manipulation is randomly dropped to provide some sort of secondary narrative leverage, the final part of the film gets a little clunky and unfocused. But what still makes it successful, and so inherently unsettling, are not its preposterous avian features, but rather the inner contradictory monstrosity of all its characters. A tormented man helplessly cornered by a convenient marital stability that plans a horrific murder otherwise showing a sturdy ethical sensitivity. A loving if superficial wife turning out to be a ruthless entrepreneur. A sweet and caring, almost childish, young lady seduced by trivial material pulses. A cynical scientist, a fake publicist, and a bunch of hooligan workers. None of them is empathic. They are all in some way disappointing, nauseating, obnoxious.
Dealing with more domestic demons than Elio Petri’s soon to be conceived Trilogy of Neurosis, Giulio Questi’s satire delves into moral and intellectual human aberrations with the same anxiety and scepticism that are intrinsic to a certain disenchanted way to look at modernity, and therefore the future.
In Questi’s words, ‘Industrialization was a rising tide that overwhelmed everything, a hymn to the future, a frenetic packaging of products without distinction between inanimate and animate, that still alive screamed in terror and pain. The big farms were a symbol of this. Each chicken was a man, each hen a woman, each chick a child. Wealth was built on them. And the egg triumphed over everything, white, smooth, perfect, with the life closed inside. Sexual perversion remained the only possible way out.’

I am not old enough to have met a Viking in person so I don’t know how they really looked like, though out of the many fantasies our perverted imagination produced about them, one above all I like to think true—that they could actually grab a spear in flight, turn it with one hand, and throw it back. Robert Eggers’s muscular epic distils in two hours of cold and grunts and fire, centuries of literature, legends, iconography of one of the most attractive populations in history, and one that recursively inspired legions of artists of any sort. But where the aesthetics gloriously succeed, everything else limps and eventually stumbles, making The Northman land not far enough from an empty Lion King with vain Shakespearean ambitions, and confirming that Eggers’s narrative skills are not yet as developed as his visual instincts. ‘A good revenge movie always works. Even if you don’t personally believe in the idea of vengeance, you know it’ll be fun to watch.’¹ True that, yet to me the potential of both the material and the author deserved a lot more than the fun-to-watch element.
While the ethereal presence of Anya Taylor-Joy, the beardy animality of Ethan Hawke, and Alexander Skarsgård’s physical and dramatic intensity are to be regarded among the heights of the film, I found Nicole Kidman miscast, her performance off, and her character in itself poorly written. As a similarly missed opportunity, it is a brilliant intuition that Amleth should eventually discover to have sought revenge for the wrong man, and therefore be torn between seeing King Aurvandil as a caring father, a ruthless ruler, or a brutish husband—but of this intriguing emotional complexity, there’s only a superficial hint that lasts the time of a couple of shots and disappears immediately after. Too bad, and yet for some reason I am already looking forward to his next.

1. Robert Eggers: ‘This is me trying to do Conan the Barbarian by way of Andrei Rublev’, Charles Bramesco (Little White Lies, 12 April 2022).