2025 in Cinema

I don’t know whether this has been a bad year for cinema, but I do know that I haven’t had much enthusiasm for it. I've ended up with a pretty solid top ten, but I’ve been happy enough to let a lot of the big-hitters pass me by without much interest, and while some of what I have seen has burned bright in the moment, much of it has faded away soon after. A lot of perfectly good movies but very few that have stayed with me. A lot of sixes and very few nines. But then I’ve also not had the chance to see some of the things I’d usually have made time for. I haven’t seen the new Christian Petzold movie, or Bi Gan’s Resurrection, or either of Zhang Lu’s two new movies. And Marty Supreme isn’t out yet. So who knows, maybe this’ll turn out to be a barnstormer of a year, after all, when I do finally catch up with these things and others like them. But all in all, it just doesn’t feel as if very much has been happening.

I've not really done much to make things happen for myself, either, which I’m sure has contributed to this ambivalence. I still managed to get to a few festivals but I keep circling the same ones, and I think I need to be more uncomfortable next year. When I went to Rotterdam in January, for the first time in five years, I got off the train, walked out into the city and felt as if I remembered all of it. The shapes of the buildings, the angles of the roads, the location of my hotel. The same happened in Vienna. I stayed in the same hotel, walked down the same street into town and remembered everything. There’s a warmth in familiarity, but lazy comfort is not a particularly helpful headspace to be in. It’s not one that lends itself well to discovery and it’s not what I want from travel. Most of what I see in a given year is seen at festivals, so I didn’t approach very much of anything this year with the wide-eyed energy of someone lost in a new place, contending with a new lay of the land, and open to whatever possibilities may emerge. Instead, I’ve been drifting around on autopilot, waiting for something to grab me.

Maybe that’s why most of the revelatory viewings I’ve had this year have come at home, during rare bursts of energy. It’s much easier to cater for a sudden jolt of curiosity when you have access to anything you’re in the mood for, rather than awkwardly moulding yourself to the scheduling whims of a film festival. So while I’ve seen fewer films than ever this year, I’ve largely chosen well when I’ve had the choice. The wisest choice I made this year was to dive back in to Inland Empire (2006) in the wake of David Lynch's death in January. I’ve written about my early struggles with Lynch before, but seeing this film for the second (or third) time, on Blu-ray at home in the middle of a wintry Saturday night, was a revelation unlike any I’ve had in recent memory. A whole world, still confusing and frightening, but finally in focus.

So when I look back at 2025, I’m probably going to think of Inland Empire before anything else. Good cinema always finds its way under your skin in one way or another, and I don’t think much of what I've seen from this year has really done that. Perhaps I should be less harsh on myself, then. Maybe I wasn't able to find many films that grabbed me because I didn’t see the right things in the first place, and it’s not so much a matter of passivity than it is a matter of luck. In any case, the year is basically over now and new movies are right around the corner. I hope next year will be a little more exciting.

In alphabetical order:

Avatar: Fire and Ash | James Cameron

The Currents | Milagros Mumenthaler

Die My Love | Lynne Ramsay

Dry Leaf | Alexandre Koberidze

I Dreamed a Dream | Wei Shujun

Kontinental ‘25 | Radu Jude

Short Summer | Nastia Korkia

Silent Friend | Ildikó Enyedi

Sinners | Ryan Coogler

Two Seasons, Two Strangers | Sho Miyake

__________

In spite of the slow year, I’ve managed to write a lot more than usual. I set myself a challenge of writing something about everything I watch on Letterboxd, which I’ve largely done, and my monthly newsletter, Strange Days, is still going strong. I’ve also written a few things for the blog that I’m proud of, including:

- Three festival roundups, from Rotterdam, London, and Vienna

- A look back at Takeshi Kitano’s autobiographical period

- A look back at the films of Sho Miyake

- A look back at the shift from objectivity to subjectivity in The Vanishing

- And an account of my history with Kill Bill

I’m happy to have gotten back into the habit of regular writing over the past couple of years. Long may it continue.

__________

Ten discoveries from a quiet year. I like to go with my instincts when looking for things to watch, without any specific influences besides the intangible things that hang in the air. Looking at this list of movies, every single one of which has moved me greatly, it feels as if I’ve gravitated towards the idea of confronting an absence. A feeling of having something to lose and then losing it, or searching for something to fill a space, or of rebuilding around the spaces where something used to be. I will always find it strange how themes emerge from what feel like random choices. I don’t know what drew me to these films now, in this year of all years, but something did. And that’s an interesting thread to pull on. For now, these are the ten films I liked above all others this year. I wonder what I’ll see next year.

In chronological order:

Stella Dallas | King Vidor, 1937

Unman, Wittering and Zigo | John Mackenzie, 1971

The Pelican | Gérard Blain, 1974

Man on the Roof | Bo Widerberg, 1976

Shanghai Blues | Tsui Hark, 1984

Typhoon Club | Shinji Somai, 1985

Rosa la rose, fille publique | Paul Vecchiali, 1986

Gilsodom | Im Kwon-taek, 1986

The Eel | Shohei Imamura, 1997

The Sweet Hereafter | Atom Egoyan, 1997

__________

I’ve had an unusual year of music discovery, and for the first time in a long time I’ve put a lot more time into new releases than I did into old stuff. It may have been a fairly tired cinematic year, but musically things have been wide awake. 

In alphabetical order:

Addison | Addison Rae

Baby | Dijon

Big City Life | Smerz

Bleeds | Wednesday

Caroline 2 | Caroline

Downpour | Charmer

Essex Honey | Blood Orange

Getting Killed | Geese

Headlights | Alex G

Lifetime | Erika de Casier

In terms of discoveries, I haven't put the same time and energy into excavations as I have in recent years. I listened to a lot of Scott Walker at the start of the year, and a lot of Slowdive at the end of it. Plenty more avenues left to explore next year.

In chronological order:

Climate of Hunter | Scott Walker, 1984

Pod | The Breeders, 1990

Pygmalion | Slowdive, 1995

All Natural Lemon and Lime Flavors | All Natural Lemon and Lime Flavors, 1996

Look Now Look Again | Rainer Maria, 1999

It Was Hot, We Stayed in the Water | The Microphones, 2000

Blue Screen Life | Pinback, 2001

Tha Carter | Lil Wayne, 2004

Citrus | Asobi Seksu, 2006

And… Hearing Things | dinner, 2007

__________

A few struggles here and there, but on the whole another good year of reading. I felt the strongest about Paul Auster and Kurt Vonnegut, whose novels below are two of the best I’ve read. I suspect I’ll go harder in 2026.

In chronological order:

Snow Country | Yasunari Kawabata, 1948

Galápagos | Kurt Vonnegut, 1985

Sátántangó | László Krasznahorkai, 1985

An Artist of the Floating World | Kazuo Ishiguro, 1986

The Big Nowhere | James Ellroy, 1988

Leviathan | Paul Auster, 1992

No Country For Old Men | Cormac McCarthy, 2005

The Years | Annie Ernaux, 2008

Frog | Mo Yan, 2009

Earthlings | Sayaka Murata, 2018

__________

A lingering memory from the year. On a flight from London Heathrow to Phoenix Sky Harbour, sometime in the middle of an artificial night, somewhere above the United States of America, listening to Hayley Williams’s Parachute over and over again as I dozed. As we descended, around midday, lights back on, I watched the air temperature gauge tick up beyond anything I’ve ever experienced and listened to it again. Every time I hear it now I’m thrown back to that weird state between time zones, watching a plane glide across a 3D map on a seat-back screen through tired eyes, waiting for the heat to hit me. But at least it’s a dry heat.

__________

If you’ve made it this far, thank you for persevering. I don’t know how you ended up here but I’m glad that, for whatever reason, you were interested enough in what I have to say to do so. So, thank you. It’s been a rough end to the year but I think things are starting to turn around. I hope 2026 is good to all of us.

Kill Bill | Quentin Tarantino, 2003

Kill Bill | Quentin Tarantino, 2003

When Kill Bill first came out, I read about it in a copy of Total Film magazine I bought from Tesco sometime near the end of 2003. I would’ve been twelve then, and obviously far too young to be able to watch it in the cinema, but it was one of the first movies I remember being actively hyped for. I had no idea who Quentin Tarantino was, or what made this movie significant enough to grace the cover of a magazine. But the simple fact that it was on a magazine cover at the exact time I started to read them was more than enough to lure me in. I had to wait until the following August to see it, when my parents got me Volume 2 on DVD for my birthday, and soon after I tried to buy Volume 1 in Woolworths, boldly and incorrectly assuming I could trick the shop assistant into believing that I was actually eighteen, and not thirteen. I didn’t have to wait long to rectify the mistake, when my mum picked up the DVD for me from a different Woolworths a week later. But it did mean that I watched the second part before the first, forever complicating the already non-linear chronology for me. In any case, once I had them both I must’ve watched the entire thing at least twenty times, sometimes together, sometimes separately, sometimes in the wrong order. Despite not knowing anything about Tarantino, or martial arts cinema, or yakuza movies, I was, for a while, utterly obsessed with it.

But then I left it behind. I didn’t pull on the threads of Kill Bill when I went to university. I didn’t watch anything by Lau Kar-leung or Kinji Fukasaku, nor did I watch Lady Snowblood or Five Deadly Venoms or The Bride Wore Black. As much as it easily could’ve done, Tarantino’s taste never set the foundation of my cinephilia. I had Fellini and Tarkovsky and Murnau instead, and a fresh copy of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die to work through. Kill Bill just fell by the wayside, a film that I’d already seen in a world of films that I hadn’t, and that was that.

As I write this, I’m a few days removed from seeing Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair, my first encounter with the film in any form in more than fifteen years. Both volumes cut into a single, intermission-split, four-and-a-half hour movie, as originally intended, with very few differences aside from a slight shift in the order of information and a few extra minutes of the anime section. But, otherwise, largely the same as it ever was. Seeing it again after all this time, and for the first time in a cinema, was nothing short of extraordinary. So much of it remains seared in my memory. The brutality of the knife fight in the suburbs. The Crazy 88 and everything that happens in Tokyo. The sad inevitability of the wedding flashback. The three-inch punch. The opening of the money-and-snake-filled briefcase in the trailer. And the final showdown with Bill that disappointed me so much as a teenager but feels so vital to the film now. Having seen an astounding number of movies since I last watched this one, it’s so thrilling and so rare to watch a filmmaker as wildly talented, well-funded, and totally brazen as Tarantino just cutting loose and luxuriating in his own cinephilia, throwing everything he’s got at a relatively straightforward revenge story and making it feel enormous. I don’t think Tarantino has ever bettered Kill Bill, and I’d be surprised if he ever did again. 

A part of me wishes that I never left it behind, that I spent my university years unpicking its homages and influences and watching those movies instead of diving headfirst into the canon. But then I wouldn’t have had this experience of rediscovery now, of seeing such a formative film as this one with new eyes and reveling in its thrills once again. I think you need these kinds of revitalising experiences every once in a while, if only to remind yourself of the electrifying power that cinema can have when it means something to you.

The Vanishing | George Sluizer, 1988

The Vanishing | George Sluizer, 1988

Fact and fiction. A woman goes missing in broad daylight at a busy service station. An inexplicable disappearance that is teased for the rest of the film, with Sluizer only alluding to the horrors that seem certain to have occurred. The moment she vanishes is shown from the perspective of her boyfriend, who doesn’t actually see anything, only realising her absence and frantically looking for her. Then, a different man, briefly seen where she disappeared, is shown separately conducting a series of experiments. He encourages his family to scream as loudly as they can in their secluded countryside home and later asks his neighbours if they heard anything. He times with a stopwatch how long different doses of chloroform keep him unconscious. He rehearses conversations designed to encourage women to get into his car, and checks his heart rate after testing them with real people. And then he’s shown at the gas station again. The past catches up with the present. These images are the only objective information Sluizer offers. A woman has disappeared without a trace, and this man has been behaving strangely. 

Years pass, and any hopes of finding her are now remote. Her boyfriend keeps up the search, putting up posters and making public pleas for information on TV. At the same time, the mysterious man still torments him from afar, hiding in plain sight and preying on his desperation. His obsessive need to find out what happened makes him susceptible to anything, and he’s made himself an easy target. And so the two men finally meet, and everything is revealed. But the perspective is no longer objective. It’s a version of events. A version authored and narrated by a man who has thought of every possible angle already, who has considered every variable in great detail. He’s telling a story to a man who wants to believe him, and he could be telling him anything. This might be what actually happened, but then again it might not be, and that’s the horror of The Vanishing. There are no answers that can help this man. No closure, no satisfaction. Just more questions, and dead ends, and lost time. Nothing can alleviate the horrors of the unknown.

Die My Love | Lynne Ramsay, 2025

Die My Love | Lynne Ramsay, 2025

Cages and cages and cages. The opening shot shows dilapidated rooms, overrun by autumn leaves and dirt from outside and decorated with floral wallpaper. Ramsay fills the film with dead images of natural life: jumpers emblazoned with animals, flowers drooping in vases, overflowing fruit bowls. An oppressive environment that gestures towards what the natural should be, not what it actually is. Everything is designed to give an impression of life while maintaining a bubble of domestication. There's nothing natural about small talk to pass the time, or owning a dog, or microwaving powdered mac and cheese. She's told again and again how she should be feeling, but it isn't ever how she really feels, and so she throws herself at the boundaries of an environment that's pinning her in (whether physical, societal, familial, or sexual, and on and on). A film about how frustrating it is to be oppressed by rules that don't make any sense to you, and about how the "solution" is always to be put in another cage, and then another, and another. Anything for other people to maintain a charade of normalcy. But, then, what is normal anyway?

Viennale 2025

Viennale 2025

In the Café Engländer, a coffee house on the Postgasse, not far from the edge of the Stadtpark in Vienna, you can order a Hurch Kaffee for €7.80. A Hurch Kaffee, named after the late Hans Hurch, artistic director of the Viennale for more than two decades, is a triple espresso, and on the window of the Engländer is a black and white photo of Hurch, standing alongside a waiter, holding several empty mugs by their handles. As much as Vienna is a city proud of its coffee, it’s equally proud of its film festival. The Viennale has built a formidable reputation as one of the finest festivals around, with its focus on artistic value over anything else resulting in a rich, expansive, and rewarding programme of films. This photo of Hurch, and the pride with which it is displayed, says a lot about Vienna as a city, and how the festival is as much a part of its fabric as the Albertina or a Wiener Melange.

This was my third visit to Vienna, and the first in which I’ve given myself the time to relax and enjoy myself. I spent three tired days at the festival in 2022 at the end of a week-long solo trip around Austria, and in 2023, I stayed a little longer and tried to do too much, splitting my time between as many new films as I could see and as much of the Raúl Ruiz retrospective as possible. It’s very easy to burn out at festivals, and the obligation to see as much as possible is a poisonous temptation I have fallen prey to many times before. This time, I saw a relatively modest sixteen films in the five days I was in town. A selection that barely scratched the surface of the programme, but a healthy amount of cinema all the same.

Among them, were two films from Radu Jude, a perennial presence at the festival and director of its trailer last year. I largely enjoyed the exhausting provocations of Dracula, in which a (fictional) filmmaker bereft of ideas haphazardly uses an AI assistant to generate various interpretations of vampiric mythology, reducing it to a series of artless vignettes. For Jude, these ugly images and idiotic ideas are just part of another wave of cultural commodification. There’s no difference between the fact that Vlad the Impaler’s birthplace has been transformed into a tourist restaurant and a montage of AI-generated portraits of the now far-right icon saying “I am Vlad the Impaler, you can all suck my cock” over and over and over again. It’s all born of the same impulse to rewrite the same myths, to spin the same stories in different ways to suit a different purpose. Everything is parasitic.

Jude’s other film from this year, Kontinental ‘25 is comparatively restrained but equally lacerating. Modelled loosely on Roberto Rossellini’s Europa ‘51, the film follows Orsolya, a bailiff whose eviction of a homeless man from the basement of a derelict building recently sold to developers pushes him to suicide. She is repeatedly reassured by her superiors that she did everything by the book and that she is not legally culpable for his death, but that doesn’t clear her conscience. Jude fills the film with long, meandering and often very funny conversations in which Orsolya recounts what happened in detail to several people, including her tired husband, a jaded priest, her fiery mother, a former student, and an old friend from law school, none of whose thoughts and opinions seem to help her. At the same time, the story is spun into a scandal by right-wing news outlets, weaponising Orsolya’s Hungarian heritage against her, and adding another poisonous angle to the pile. Like Dracula, the result is a knotty web of competing ideas, each one loudly pushing this woman closer to the edge of exasperation as her moral crisis is met with either morbid curiosity, casual disinterest, or outward contempt. But, tellingly, never compassion. Nobody really cares about this man’s death, or Orsolya’s guilt. They’ve got other things to worry about. And all that matters to the people in charge is that they can move on with their project now that this man is out of their way. It doesn’t matter how. Progress stops for nobody. As if to consolidate this idea, Jude closes the film on a montage of construction sites. 

Similar crises echo through several other films in the programme. In Joel Alfonso Vargas’s Mad Bills To Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo), Rico, an aimless young man who sells homemade alcoholic drinks on a beach in The Bronx, is forced to grow up fast and find a job when his sixteen year-old girlfriend tells him she’s pregnant. He moves her into his cluttered childhood bedroom, filled with Pokémon plushies, baseball caps, and sneaker boxes, and holds onto dreams of better things that sit starkly at odds with his reality. Vargas keeps the camera static for the most part, anchoring Rico’s environment in place as he bounces against its edges, trying to do what he thinks is right while constantly hitting walls. There’s an Ulrich Seidl-like richness to these images, with their stillness underlining the detail hidden within cluttered frames, as well as the horrible sensation of watching a person’s actions inadvertently making their life worse at every turn. But Vargas is a much warmer filmmaker than Seidl, and Mad Bills To Pay builds to a bittersweet moment of reflection, and a hope that Rico can turn things around even if this is not how he imagined his life would be.

If Vargas’s film captures a sudden arrival at adulthood, then Nastia Korkia’s Short Summer is very much about the loss of childhood. The film opens oddly, with two children stopping a car on a country road, checking it for bombs and demanding its inhabitants pay up in order to pass through. The car doesn’t contain explosives, only a young girl and her parents, who are dropping her off to stay with her grandparents for the summer. She spends her days playing games and having fun with local kids, while, unbeknownst to them, the Second Chechen War is being fought nearby. Korkia contrasts the innocence of childhood with the horror of war, which is happening right on the edge of this girl’s perception. Fragments of news bulletins are overheard on the radio, injured soldiers roam around the town, and, in one extraordinary moment, a seemingly endless freight train, carrying tanks and weapons to the front line, passes through, dwarfing the kids as they play football beneath it. Korkia creates an uneasy tension between the war and this picture-perfect summer, slowly building a suffocating sense of how insidiously the world’s horrors can bleed into the innocence of a child.

Sho Miyake’s Two Seasons, Two Strangers, which won the top prize in Locarno this year, similarly situates a crisis in a backdrop of natural beauty, though in a more personal register. The film follows the creative stagnation of Li, a Korean screenwriter based in Japan, and continues Miyake’s long-held interest in people battling to become active participants in their own lives. In the first of two distinct parts, a lonely young woman visits a beautiful coastal town and meets a local man on a beach, and they spend a few long summer days together, before she has to go home. They walk around town, visit a museum, and swim in the ocean in a storm, until, suddenly, these images are revealed to be part of a screening of one of Li’s films. She and its director are taking part in a Q&A at a university, and when an old professor asks about her next project, she reveals that she’s struggling to make any headway with it. In Miyake’s cinema, the path forward is never where his characters are. There’s no point in standing still, waiting for something to change. It’s a matter of doing something to change things. And so, Li is inspired to take a wintry train-trip with her camera to a hot spring town in the north of Japan, where she drags herself through deep snow and ice and finds herself at an empty, run-down inn in the mountains. This journey echoes that of the female character in her own film, a film she wrote when she first moved to Japan, only now it’s a different season. Time has passed, but the impulse for new surroundings and new experiences remains. A change of scenery is sometimes all that it takes.

But not always. In the opening moments of Milagros Mumenthaler’s The Currents, Lina, an Argentinian woman in her early thirties, collects an award in Geneva, throws it into a bathroom bin, silently walks around a city, and jumps off a bridge into a freezing river. After she washes up on the shore, she returns to her husband and young daughter in Buenos Aires, neither of whom know that anything is amiss, and tries to go back to normal, only now with a debilitating fear of water and an emotional distance that seems not to have been present before. Mumenthaler isn’t interested in diagnosing what has happened to Lina, or what precipitated this sudden change, but rather in observing how she has to adapt her routine around it to maintain a facade of normalcy. She can no longer wash her hair, so to avoid awkward questions she asks a hairdresser friend to sedate her and wash it while she’s unconscious. She can’t empty the water from her daughter’s bath, so she pretends that she forgot to do it when her husband comes home. It takes more effort for Lina to do these once mundane things, and the toll of this effort threatens to unbalance her further. Imagined scenarios start to sneak into her perception. The deafening roar of traffic and power-drills from outside starts to overwhelm the soundtrack, and she sees her assistant jumping out a high window, only to realise that she’s been sitting right next to her the whole time. These breaks with reality never really go away, and culminate in a stunning moment in which Lina finds herself at the top of a lighthouse, imagining the lives of three women she knows as the light rotates around her. She isn’t as close to these women as these images suggest, so this sequence gives the impression of a projection on Lina’s part. How would she live if she lived as these women? And would her life be better if she was someone else?

The Currents is a film that asks more questions than it answers, and more and more this is the kind of cinema that I long to find at festivals. This sense of curiosity isn’t necessarily unique to the Viennale, but it’s a massive part of its success. In her introduction to the film, Mumenthaler said that this was a festival that filmmakers love to take their films to, and it’s easy to see why. You only need to look around after a screening, day or night, in the smoking areas outside the Metro or Gartenbaukino, or the cafés at Stadtkino or Urania, or the entrance of the Filmmuseum, just beneath the Albertina. People are always milling around, talking passionately about what they’ve just seen. And you can’t really ask for much more than that.

Ghostwatch | Leslie Manning, 1992

Ghostwatch | Leslie Manning, 1992

London Film Festival 2025

London Film Festival 2025

It’s been six years since I last went to the London Film Festival from start to finish. There’s just not as much here for me to get excited about as there used to be, so I tend to just dip in and out, catching the train into the city a couple of times to see one or two movies before heading home again. This has always been a festival that prioritises star-studded gala screenings over interesting and unusual cinema, but the pickings in that regard seem to get slimmer every year. I don’t really have it in me to pay three times the price of a normal ticket to see something like Ballad of a Small Player a week or two before it turns up on Netflix, and so my festival has become quite small. Having spent several years traipsing around central London for two weeks every October just to cram it all in, this year I managed to fit pretty much all of what I wanted to see into two Saturday afternoons. 

All of this is to say that I only really want to watch something at a festival if I’m going to struggle to see it outside of one. I can’t think of a film that fits into this philosophy more appropriately than Alexandre Koberidze’s Dry Leaf, a three-hour film shot on the 3.2 megapixel camera of a 2008 Sony Ericsson W595. A film of absences, in which a man, Irakli, searches in vain for his missing daughter, Lisa, across the vast expanses and abandoned football pitches of the Georgian countryside, accompanied by Levani, her best friend who, without explanation, happens to be invisible. Many of the people they meet are heard but not seen, with Koberidze framing empty reverse shots as if they’re filled with faces. This is one of several leaps of faith demanded by Dry Leaf. The heavily pixelated images are muddy and difficult to make sense of, much like this circuitous search, which keeps hitting dead ends. Koberidze builds an impressionistic patchwork of people and places that evokes the sensation of a dream. Remembered details, like cats and donkeys and apricots, empty village squares and acts of kindness, serve to emphasise the spaces left by the things he’s forgotten, like the faces of the people he meets, or the indistinguishable football pitches that seem to blend into one. But there’s a melancholic longing to fill these spaces. On the road, Irakli often sees kids wanting but unable to find anywhere to play football, while the pitches that serve as landmarks for his search remain overgrown and reclaimed by nature. At one such encounter, a child asks Irakli to help push a heavy goalpost into the ground so they can play. He does, and they do. Dry Leaf suggests that while some things may be gone, they don’t have to stay that way. The act of trying to find them is exactly what keeps them alive.

Claire Denis’s The Fence covers a similar kind of search, only its conclusion is already written. In an unnamed West African country, a man appears at a construction site in the dead of night to recover the body of his brother, only to be met with evasion and resistance from the white foreman and his volatile deputy. Based on a play, the theatricality of The Fence largely works in its favour. These two men stand in spotlights and perform to an audience that already sees through them, from the man himself, patiently asking the same questions, to the armed guards in lookouts above, to the men who work in the kitchen, and even the recently arrived wife of the foreman, whose red dress and high-heels clash awkwardly with the dusty terrain and chain-link fences around her. These loud voices echo across the silent yard and through paper-thin walls. There’s no privacy here, no secrets. Just a series of distractions, and the desperate hope that they can get rid of this man before his quiet insistence becomes a problem for them. 

This defensive impulse echoes through Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent, too, in which a university professor in Brazil in the late seventies is forced to run from corrupt political forces who will do anything to get him out of their way and siphon off his research funding. He’s given refuge in a small community while he waits for a chance to flee the country, but the threats against him, at first vague and unseen, gradually take concrete form. Mendonça Filho allows information to slowly coalesce over time, with scattered characters, contexts, and motivations eventually colliding in a single time and space. A film about hiding, or, more specifically, of being hidden, The Secret Agent continues Mendonça Filho’s interest in both the myriad pleasures of genre cinema and the communities that form when people stand up against political and bureaucratic aggression. But also, it builds upon the idea of the archive, of piecing together all the disparate angles of an event in an effort to make sense of it.

In Silent Friend, Ildikó Enyedi similarly presents fragments of information and asks that meaning be drawn from them. Not as a means of understanding specific events but as a way of finding parallels in the echoes of history. The film takes place in the same location, the botanical gardens of a German university, across three different time periods. In 2020, a neuroscientist from Hong Kong arrives to teach a course but is left marooned in the deserted university by the onset of the pandemic. In the 1970s, two students study how a geranium experiences and responds to its environment. And in the early 1900s, a young woman overcomes institutional and societal sexism and uses her skills as a photographer to study an assortment of plants. Enyedi cuts back and forth between these time periods on shared moments, like reading the same pages of a book in the library, or touching the bark of the same enormous tree in the gardens, focusing on the act of study and, more significantly, the connections that emerge from these studies. A neuroscientist reaching out to a French botanist over Zoom, a young woman helping an old photographer with his work between classes, and two students falling for one another via a shared interest in flowers. Enyedi has been exploring these kinds of awkward meetings in her work for decades, be it the reunion of separated twins in My Twentieth Century (1989), the frustrating missed connections in Tamas and Juli (1997), or the dreamed encounters in On Body and Soul (2017). In Silent Friend, it’s the simple fact that these people have been pulled together in the first place that’s most of interest. As long as there are spaces that encourage such things, there will always be people willing to devote themselves to solving the endless mysteries of the world, and work together to make sense of things they cannot explain on their own. Silent Friend is a gentle love letter to these spaces, to this quiet university garden, filled with rare plants and the enduring ginkgo tree that echoes through each time period, that has given those curious enough to do so the means of understanding the world for more than a century. For Enyedi, curiosity is natural.

Sho Miyake

The work of Sho Miyake has always seemed to be hiding from me. I’ve missed three of his films in Berlin over the years because their screenings happened either after I’d left or before I’d arrived, and whenever his work has played in London the timings have been awkward or unmanageable without either great expense or a very late night (often both). Most recently, I had the chance to see his newest film in Locarno thanks to a lucky piece of scheduling, but my trip fell apart for logistical reasons right at the last minute and I never even made it to Switzerland — of course, he went on to win the Golden Leopard. 

With this recent success, I’ve decided to take matters into my own hands and fill in the gaps myself. Well, not all of them, but as many as I can. As far as I can tell, there are (currently) no English subtitles available for any of his early features, which is a shame, and I just don’t have the stomach for his (somewhat inexplicable) Netflix miniseries Ju-on: Origins (2022), an endeavour I suspect will remain a curio for only the most ardent of auteurists in the years to come. That leaves me with three films to catch up on. An incomplete view, but a view nonetheless, and one that I hope will hold me in good stead when I eventually get another chance to see his latest. It’s certainly better than nothing.

And Your Bird Can Sing | 2018

In Hakodate, it rains in the summer. You always need an umbrella with you. Three aimless twenty-somethings, two men who share a bunk-bed in a tiny flat and an indecisive woman who falls into their orbit, spend all of their spare time together. Night after night they drink in bars, playing darts and pool and table-tennis, avoiding the responsibilities of adulthood while reveling in its freedoms. All three of them are at a crossroads. They drift through their lives, working part-time jobs they don’t care about or borrowing money from family members to keep the lights on, and they can’t seem to break the monotony. Empty time passes slowly. Miyake captures the mundanity of these long nights and bleary-eyed mornings with a gentle naturalism, quietly observing the minutiae of their interactions as this routine repeats itself over and over and over again. The only signs of clouds starting to form come through in brief gestures. A lingering glance across a room. A brief flash of recognition. The pretence of being asleep. They all tiptoe around their feelings, keeping things to themselves and hoping the rain will hold off a little longer. And yet their umbrellas are always close at hand, just in case. A warm film about how much you stand to lose from waiting. And how much you can gain by making something happen for yourself.

Small, Slow But Steady | 2022

In the first pandemic winter, boxing matches unfold to a few masked fans scattered around an empty arena. There’s no glory to be found here, but Keiko, a hearing-impaired young fighter, persists all the same. She trains every day at the boxing gym near the small home she shares with her brother, and works as a hotel cleaner to pay the bills. But the toll of fighting is becoming too much, and the gym’s finances have been decimated by Covid. This chapter of Keiko’s life is coming to an end, and as change approaches Miyake contrasts the comfort and familiarity of her routine with the unknowns and chaos away from it. The gym is a safe space for her, a precious one, where she’s surrounded by people who have found ways to communicate with her, whether by learning sign language, writing notes on little whiteboards, or miming the actions they want her to perform. But outside of it, she’s a small figure alone in the crowd, facing up to the challenges posed by a bustling city that has no time to make space for her. Masks make it impossible to read lips, and people loudly repeat their questions when she has no way to respond to them. Tokyo is a city filled with hurdles, but for Miyake all that can be gained from standing still is more of the same. However uncomfortable, moving forward is a question of embracing change and taking that leap into the unknown. Anything else is lost time.

All The Long Nights | 2024

Looking in and looking out. A haughty man, Yamazoe, whose panic attacks have forced him to leave behind a high-flying corporate career, and Fujisawa, a meek woman whose life-long struggle with severe PMS has made it hard for her to hold down a steady job, fall into each other’s orbit while working for a company building microscopes and telescopes for classrooms. The public manifestations of their conditions, be it outbursts of frustration or physical collapses, have drawn the concern of friends, families, and co-workers, much to their own embarrassment, but in this hilly suburb of Tokyo they’ve each found the space and the patience they need to rebuild their lives. They come together through connections made by others at a grief support group, where a former colleague of Yamazoe has built a friendship with Fujisawa’s boss, and it’s this idea of reaching out for help instead of suffering alone and keeping it all inside that Miyake seems most interested in. Apart, they endure their conditions as best as they can, but together, following the gradual development of their relationship, they help each other lay a foundation for a healthier life. Fujisawa gives Yamazoe her bike when she sees the difficulty he has using public transport, and he removes her from a potentially explosive situation at work before it becomes a problem. These moments of recognition can only happen in a safe space, with people looking out for one another. There will always be pain, but it doesn’t have to be endured alone. Given the right environment and the right people, there’s always a way to manage it. And then you can move forward.

Buffet Froid | Bertrand Blier, 1979

Buffet Froid | Bertrand Blier, 1979

Thick Skinned | Patricia Mazuy, 1989

Thick Skinned | Patricia Mazuy, 1989