The Innocents (De uskyldige) first published by Sight and Sound, June 2022 Review: The Innocents begins with an act of casual, childish cruelty. Woken by the grunting of her older, profoundly autistic sister Anna (Alva Brynsmo Ramstad) in the back of the family car, Ida (Rakel Lenora Fløttum) pinches her sister’s leg hard – after checking that their parents…
We Had It Coming opens with two programmatic sequences. In the first, Katja (Sofie Holland) is woken by the sound of a hardcore porn clip landing on her phone – a video in which, by implication, she features. She then, after grimly donning the transparent platform shoes that are part of her work costume, hangs…
“Who is that man?”, asks May Ryer, played by Brea Grant, who is also the writer of Natasha Kermani’s Lucky. May is herself a writer, penning how-to and self-help manuals for women in business, and is constantly having to hustle not just to create her work, but to promote it, to get it reprinted, to…
Le Havre first published by Film4 Synopsis: Polyhyphenate Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki’s latest deadpan treat offers a haven for old-fashioned French values. Review: “I used to live a Bohemian life in Paris,” aging, down-at-heel Marcel Marx (André Wilms) tells young Gabonese refugee Idrissa (Blondin Miguel). The entire œuvre of Aki Kaurismäki, Finland’s poker-faced champion of downbeat humanism and…
Shadows in Paradise first published by EyeforFilm (here slightly altered) In Goran Dukic’s Wristcutters: A Love Story, limbo is imagined as a place where no one ever smiles, where furnishings and cars all seem second-hand, where the colours are all drab and faded. “Everything’s the same here,” as one character puts it, “but it’s just a little…