Natalia Valentina Rarely does opinion not benefit from the weight of a little time to test its strength, to see whether it holds or bends. The first festival screening I ever went to (faking a headache to skip maths and book whatever I could in the frenzy that is the public tickets opening), a friend and I were so bowled over by the unexpected sight of Edgar Wright and Matt Smith introducing ‘Last Night in Soho’ that we skipped out of there in a cloud of awe and admiration for the best! film! ever! The next day, he turned to me–
‘Was that movie kind of…?’
‘Low-key…’
‘Not great.’
‘…Yep.’
Now that the rolled up carpets of the festival have spent long enough back in the BFI storerooms to gather their first, second, and third thin layers of dust and my eyes have lost the sheen of ‘how-did-i-blag-my-way-into-this-press-screening-every-film-i-see-is-a-wonder-and-a-marvel’, it is time to talk about the work. These are the pictures I saw and the (semi-)lasting impressions they made, presented for your consideration…
Olivia & the Clouds (Available on Mubi)
A girl feeds flowers to her past lover under the bed who in return makes it rain, literally. Tomás Picardo-Espaillat’s premise promises a tickling take on love’s haunting qualities, but the surreal narrative thread slightly loses its way in the saturated scape of side plots. Likewise, the litany of experimental animation styles toes the line between clever and confused. Having lost the thread half an hour in, the rest of the runtime felt somewhat like an extended headspace meditation.
The Apprentice (In cinemas now)
Money, money, sex, money, bribes, big buildings, corruption, money, money, being a shit, false patriotism, money—essentially the central tenets of Ali Abassi’s flashy blast to the past Trump villain origin story. The cinematography plays in pleasing homage to 90s era camera footage, all grain and sweeping. Potentially cheap plays at humour—Donald Trump falls, Donald Trump makes cringy face, Donald Trump is threatened by tenants—are nevertheless effective. Sebastian Stan and Maria Bakalova are superb, and Jeremy Strong will never find his way out of a suit while he keeps being so sickeningly good in them. An entertaining hate letter to the America that birthed a monster, humour counterbalanced by moments of genuine horror. Now, a certainly terrifying victory lap for the orange buffoon.
Joy (Available on Netflix)
From the first five minutes of the film, you could tell that the footage of the real people involved in the story was coming with the credit roll…but it is a cliché for a reason. An effective tug at the heartstrings, Ben Taylor’s by-the-books storytelling works when the story—the invention of IVF—is scientifically extraordinary. Bill Nighy continues to never miss a beat. But the film could have been half an hour shorter.
All We Imagine as Light (29th November 2024)
is beautiful in the way that moonlight flickering on moving water is beautiful, in the way that streetlamps shimmering on the rain-soaked sidewalk are beautiful. Beautiful in the way that love will always be tangled up in fear and the city will never quite feel like home, and people still live in the city, and people still fall. If love is attention, Payal Kapadia’s clear-eyed gaze at Mumbai is a sonnet to the city-dwellers.
Queer (13th December 2024)
A tequila-sodden trip through a shittily cgi-fied Central/South America featuring the ayahuasca-induced movement sequence of your Frantic Assembly fanatic GCSE drama teacher’s wet dream—Luca Guadagnino accomplishes queer in the sense that this is the strangest film I’ve ever seen. The limitations of language might be located in its absolute inability to convey how bonkers this S. Burrough’s adaptation becomes.
We Live in Time (1st January 2025)
This was supposed to be my shit. A happy-sad romcom in the vein of Richard Curtis (before ‘Yesterday’) starring Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield (my spiderman) and produced by A24. I was foaming at the mouth; I was chomping at the bit; I was…disappointed. Florence Pugh plays Helmut, a former Olympic level figure skater turned best chef in Europe, cancer fighter, natural birther, complex female girl boss etc. with strong opinions and many alive plants. Andrew Garfield plays a Weetabix employee wife guy named Tobias. The price of purchase for an emotional reaction to a romantic film is dimension and believability, but this dynamic was, dare I say, boring—somewhat the concoction of someone whose feminism is rooted in the 2010s. And when a moment of pure romantic sincerity is punctuated by a millennial cringe nod to the heteronormativity of the situation…please. In John Crowley’s defence, there are definitely moments of genuine hilarity; I giggled the whole way through a certain gas station sequence. And there are moments of sincere warmth; anybody who has cooked breakfast with the person they love, or who yearns to, will surely feel stirred watching two sleepy people scramble eggs, and it takes some salience to know and show this. But ultimately, this is a film for people who live in Herne Hill and buy Neal’s Yard soap. It made me wish I could afford property, but it did not make me want to cry. Garfield’s Sesame Street interview gets closer to grief.
Hard Truths (31st January 2025)
You know when you’re working your service industry job and someone for seemingly no reason is rude to you, and when they leave, you’re forced to comfort yourself with the fact that ‘they are the ones who have to live with themselves.’ Mike Leigh’s film makes you live with that asshole. And it is testament to Marianne Jean Baptiste’s tour de force turn as the asshole in question that as the credits role, we cannot help but sympathise. We leave her ‘as still, as solemn, as unpleasantly definitive as statuary…’ and feel with a pang the warmth of our own blood and our own lives. Leigh gives his audience the gift of glasses, forcing us to see with a certain kind of clarity something as cloudy as depression. The result is a sometimes funny, often upsetting & always important cautionary tale.
So… those are the films that I saw and some of the thoughts that I had. I hope this might help you to decide which of these films warrant the currency of your attention; I hope that this decision might include them all. Time is precious, but to watch a film, good or bad or aggressively mid, is never a waste of it. Form your own opinions, sit with them a little while, and then let’s talk!
