Senior writer for Letterboxd Journal (as I interview all the seniors).
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Evil Does Not Exist 2023
As exquisite as it is sinister, Evil Does Not Exist is an invigorating change of pace for Hamaguchi. Smaller, quieter and more ambiguous than Drive My Car, it takes place in an isolated rural community, focusing on a widowed settler named Takumi (Hitoshi Omika) and his young daughter Hana. Their serene existence is interrupted when urban developers announce plans to build a luxury camping site, creating risks of water pollution and forest fires. As each side attempts to understand the other,…
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Opponent 2023
A taut, edgy portrait of an Iranian refugee family coming apart at the seams, brilliantly made by Iranian-born writer-director Milad Alami. Payman Maadi is outstanding as a man caught in an existential deadlock, torn between family duty and the pull of his long-suppressed sexuality. Nasiri is also excellent as a woman exhausted by her family’s reduced circumstances and Iman’s neglect. Like Flee and Joyland, Opponent leans into the messy intersections of family, religion, sexuality and poverty, avoiding easy solutions to its characters’ dilemmas. A must see.
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The Zone of Interest 2023
Sexy Beast and Under the Skin director Jonathan filmmaker Jonathan Glazer scores a resounding success with his fourth feature The Zone of Interest, an elegantly chilly study in the banality of evil that stands creditably alongside Ida and Son of Saul, using formalist cinematic language to evoke the horror of the Holocaust. The narrative, culled from Martin Amis’ novel, is deceptively simple: much of the film follows the day-to-day workings of a middle-class German household, replete with flaxen-haired children, flower gardens,…
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All of Us Strangers 2023
Sitting in a darkened cinema sobbing with hundreds of other gay men is a curious way to spend a Monday afternoon off work, but here I am, Gentle Readers - weeping publicly so you don’t have to. After the 48-hour romance of Weekend and the forensic study of a middle-aged marriage in 45 Years, Andrew Haigh returns with his greatest film yet, All Of Us Strangers, a three-hankie gay weepie starring Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal as lovers so perfectly…
