This is one of those slice-of-life documentaries, which thrusts you into the middle of an under-represented community and just leaves you to draw your own conclusions. We join the mountain shepherds of the Pyrenees. Life seems quite tough. It’s made tougher still by the re-introduction of the brown bear.
The goals of re-wilding and bring locally extinct species back are clearly good. But the shepherds are understandably a little bit pissed off. We follow their work, their lives, their troubles, as they deal with the ever-present threat of the bears. However much they’re told the bears are solitary creatures that rarely attack livestock, the trail of mangled sheep carcasses tell a different story.
As a documentary it was fine. Probably too long. I’d have preferred something like 3 different tails of re-wilding conflicts. Instead, we get nearly two hours on the mountains.
Ooh this one was a bit intense.
Jennifer Lawrence puts in a stunning performance as a new mother, with postnatal depression spiralling into dangerous madness. Her and Robert Pattinson’s sexy, carefree lives have taken an abrupt turn. The ranch of dead uncle Frank has become a prison. The baby is crying. The dog is howling.
Throughout this film Lawrence is absolutely captivating and terrifying. She spins, wild-eyed and cackling from one scene to the next, a frenzied nervous energy always on the brink of explosion.
I nearly didn’t see this - it sounded heavy, more than thrilling - but I’m so glad I did. Absolute edge-of-the-seat stuff, and surely the best thing Lawrence has done so far.
A blood born virus that turns the body slowly to marble. A hospital-ward of slowly petrifying patients. Growing up as an immigrant teenage girl with a junkie uncle. Julia Ducournau’s films always go in pretty hard and this is no exception.
There are obvious AIDs parallels. But the film never really gets too bogged down in the illness (despite the astonishing visuals of the increasingly stony afflicted). This is a film about trauma, worry and loss. It’s bound up in the mother-daughter relationship, as the emaciated spectre of uncle Amin leers and chuckles from the sidelines.
I loved it. I’m not totally sure I understand it. But it doesn’t matter. It was a wild roller-coaster of a film. I had no idea at all where it was taking me and enjoyed every moment of it. Ducournau remains firmly on my “watch anything she makes” list.
Bechdel pass, natch.
On paper, I’m a big fan of this one. The unexpected death of a psychiatrist’s patient kick-starts a murder mystery. It’s a thriller in which reality and relationships are called into question. A series of small crimes, the burglary of her clinic, tells Jodie Foster she’s on the right track as she digs deeper into the family life of her deceased patient. Are the clues hidden in the sessions they’d shared?
Sadly, I didn’t love it. Foster’s acting was amazing, but the script wasn’t convincing to me. Her character goes off the rails too quickly, too completely. I never quite believed that this grown-up, serious professional would be raving about visions of 1940s Paris. Nor that the characters around her would accept her madness with a casual Gallic shrug.
We were always going to see the new Jafar Panahi film. After Taxi Tehran and No Bears, you can sign me up for any new film from Panahi. And more broadly, all of the Iranian cinema we’ve seen at the film festival has been gold.
This, fresh from winning the top prize at Cannes, is no different. It’s a fairly simple premise: what do you do if given the chance to take revenge on your torturer? And the story doesn’t do anything massively unexpected. But Panahi’s films are about the characters and they’re all just so human.