★★★☆☆ Set 45,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens were making incursions into the lands of the Neanderthals, Andrew Cumming’s horror thriller The Origin depicts a small tribe coming up against a malefic entity in unknown and inhospitable environs.
Returning for its 26th edition and with 2021’s Covid restrictions largely a thing of the past, Tallinn’s Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF) this year crowned Hilmar Oddsson’s Icelandic dark comedy Driving Mum as the 2022 Grand Prix winner, with the Best Director award going to Ahmad Bahrami for thriller The Wastetown.
The head of this year’s Venice jury Julianne Moore awarded the festival’s top prize, the Golden Lion, to Laura Poitras’ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, her profile of artist Nan Goldin and her campaign against the Sackler family. It’s a brilliant, committed piece of activist cinema.
★★★☆☆ Celebrated British director Joanna Hogg is back on the Venice Lido with The Eternal Daughter, a film shot in secret in lockdown and starring The Souvenir’s Tilda Swinton in dual roles as a mother and daughter heading to a hotel in the countryside for a much-needed birthday vacation.
★★★☆☆ A man sits alone in a room with a notepad and begins to scribble down his own voiceover. He only writes on one page and seems to always be starting at the top. His thoughts will be meticulous and he will show a certain expertise. When he’s finished writing he will place the pen on the table, neatly aligned with the pad.
The Sarajevo Film Festival has a history of resilience, so it was hardly surprising to see it come back stronger than ever after two years of Covid restrictions. Founded in 1995, the festival is now the leading industry event in south-east Europe, showcasing the very best films from across the Balkan peninsula.
★★★☆☆ For his third feature documentary, filmmaker Kris Kaczor turns his focus to the life and legacy of SuAnne Big Crow, a high school state basketball champion from South Dakota. As a Lakota Native American, SuAnne became a source of great inspiration for her community.
★★★★☆ Nabil Ayouch’s Casablanca Beats takes as its template a dozen or so Hollywood dramas and comedies aimed at instilling the positive value of inspirational education. From Dead Poets Society to School of Rock, the pitch and the arc are fairly similar even as circumstances change.
★★★★☆ French director Audrey Diwan adapts Annie Erwaux’s 2001 autobiographical book about her traumatic experience of an abortion in 1963 France. Happening is a naturalistic, heart-breaking and relentless account of the multiple traumas and injustices that cascade when women are denied their basic bodily autonomy.
★★★★★ For most children, school is a frightening wilderness of social injustice and unchecked danger. With her first feature, Playground – part of last year’s Un Certain Regard lineup – Belgian filmmaker Laura Wandel captures this universal ordeal with a masterful sense of perspective and empathy.
★★★☆☆ Afro-Latin percussionist and multiple Grammy award nominee John Santos is the worthy subject of filmmaker Kathryn Golden’s first feature-length documentary, a lively and often compelling portrait of the man and his music.
★★★★☆ Based on the life of 17th century nun Benedetta Carlini (Virginie Efira) who enters into a relationship with fellow nun Bartolomea (Daphne Patakia), Benedetta has all the religious symbolism, violence and nudity that we have come to expect from Dutch master Paul Verhoeven.
★★★☆☆ Based on the Norse myth that inspired Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Robert Eggers’ third film is a rollocking, rampaging Viking romp. The Northman is Eggers’ most ambitious project to date, but for all its howling spectacle and ultra-violent elemental machismo it is also his least successful.
★★★☆☆ In the early 1940s, with the world at war and Europe hopelessly divided, everyone was writing a spy story. Or at least, that’s what Operation Mincemeat will have you believe: a true tale of ingenious falsehood, where the boundaries between espionage and paperback fiction begin to blur.
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★★★★★ In a remote rural Mexican village a war wages between a drug cartel and the authorities. The villagers are inevitably caught up in the middle, their lives eroded and destroyed in unimaginable ways. Tatiana Huezo’s narrative debut is a harrowing account of lives held hostage by exterior forces.