In cinemas this weekend: Sydney Sweeney vs Benedetta Porcaroli

Reality, dir. Tina Satter ★★★★★

The Kafka-esque looms over Tina Satter’s debut film Reality, which follows the soft interrogation of NSA whistleblower Reality Winner (Euphoria’s Sydney Sweeney). But unlike Josef K in The Trial, Reality isn’t questioned for an unknown crime about which she’s made to feel guilty. She is guilty – guilty of leaking secret documents that exposed Russian interference in the 2016 US elections. The FBI, arriving 25 days later, know what she did – yet all of them are caught in this weird, uncomfortable artifice that constricts any explicitly stated truths or motivations.

Instead of a soundproofed interrogation room with clinical lights and a one-way mirror, Reality faces these trained smiles at her home in Georgia. They’re dressed like 40-year-old dads, playing it caszh while troops flood into and search her home.

None of the dialogue is fabricated; every line is taken verbatim from the interview transcript recorded by Agent Garrick (Josh Hamilton) and Agent Taylor (Marchánt Davis). The visuals are speculative but the words are real, a strange and disparate clash of the absurd and mundane – the ‘um’s and ‘ah’s left uncut. This is exacerbated in the redacted sections, for which Satter literally removes the characters from their shots and you’re left with a haunting, suspicious vacuum until they’re returned.

Masterfully, Sweeney embodies Reality’s conflicted subterfuge with strong perseverance and a semi-relaxed exterior. When the air changes, the deluded optimism exits like a rapid current across her face. It’s a career-shifting performance of a performance that surely deserves an Oscar nomination for its nuance and meticulousness, a grown-up transition from Sweeney’s usual penchant for Emotional Teen roles in TV. She’s finally found a screen big enough for her talents. A claustrophobic, housebound political thriller like Reality is dependent on the central performance, and Sweeney nails it.

Photo: Vertigo

Amanda, dir. Carolina Cavalli ★★★★★

One’s 20s are pulled apart by expectation and individuality. The gluey traditions of kids and marriage have come unstuck and the reward is ultimate freedom. But for the anxious Amanda (Benedetta Porcaroli), the titular 25-year-old loner of Carolina Cavalli’s quarter-life comedy, that liberation doesn’t help her progress in life. She avoids the standard rites of passage like employment and romance, but it's the lack of friends that especially irks her. ‘And how am I supposed to find them?’ she booms at her wealthy, successful family. ‘At school? In my scout troop? No!’

Much of the space that Amanda occupies is empty of others; even at peopled venues, there are wide gaps between other attendees. At times, you feel the scarceness of the budget in these scenes – this is clearly a first film – but that suits Cavalli's subjective style. Amanda finds making friends so elusive that her mother takes charge and sets up a playdate with her friend’s daughter Rebecca (Galatéa Bellugi), a former academic marvel who locks herself in her bedroom. With their clashing antisocial personalities, Amanda is determined to become her friend.

This 28-year-old critic related so hard, maybe too hard, to Amanda’s predicaments. ‘I know what it’s like to be alone in a place full of people who aren’t alone,' she says to Rebecca about an upcoming party. The character captures the confused detachment, restrictive isolation and fiery defensiveness of being that age and refusing maturity. Amanda is a funny comfort film for the introverted, the alienated and the lonely; for those without a plan or a determined sense of self.

Photo: Curzon

Master Gardener, dir. Paul Schrader ★★★★★

Paul Schrader is one of the great proprietors of solipsistic, existential cinema – reaching his zenith with Taxi Driver. He carried that atmosphere of ennui into 2017 with First Reformed, which initiated his Man in a Room trilogy. Preceded by The Card Counter, Master Gardener is the horticultural conclusion.

Like the previous men-in-rooms, Narvel (Joel Edgerton) writes a journal at night to keep himself grounded. The trauma of his past is buried, but threatens to resurrect itself in the present. During the day, he tends to majestic gardens belonging to the fusty, lonely dowager Norma Haverhill (a brilliantly seething Sigourney Weaver). She calls Narvel ‘sweet pea’ – patronising, dominating.

The weird class issues are transparent, but not as much as the racial ones (even if they cohabitate). Norma’s wayward great-niece Maya (Euphoria’s Quintessa Swindell) comes to work as Narvel’s apprentice in an attempt to reform her behaviour. He teaches her the practices, history, and biology behind gardening. Norma calls her ‘mixed-blood’ rather than mixed-race. The mansion that towers above the gardens resembles a plantation house. Even worse: Narvel is a former white supremacist, his torso carved with Nazi tattoos.

Master Gardener grows gradually, but its world of soil, flowers and dungarees entangles your attention – spiralling into unpredictable shapes. Narvel tumbles into an age-inappropriate tryst that bandies between friendly affection, surrogate father-daughter love, and shady erotic undertones. The third act drifts into quiet lunacy, but in an attractively somnambulant fashion like the spiritual (and, therefore, artificial) resolutions of First Reformed. Schrader repeats himself, but his uncomfortable curiosity in the alienated loses none of its potency.

Photo: Vertigo

Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, dir. Kelly Fremon Craig ★★★★★

Given the recent increase of school-book banning in the US, a fresh adaptation of Judy Blume’s popular and controversial novel Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret arrives at a perfect time. The Blume Hive had largely evaded this male, millennial critic, but the writer/director Kelly Fremon Craig (The Edge of Seventeen) provides a wonderful introduction to the author’s work.

The film even warrants more than its 100-minute runtime. When the end credits roll, you're bereft as much as moved by the story of 11-year-old Margaret Simon (Abby Ryder Fortson), who's gently tumbling over the spiky threshold into puberty and adolescence. A 10-part series would’ve been great, but the concept suits the chosen medium well.

Read our review

Photo: Lionsgate

Beau is Afraid, dir. Ari Aster ★★★★★

Completing Ari Aster's unofficial trilogy of anxiety – preceded by the unforgettably horrifying Hereditary and Midsommar – Beau is Afraid feels different. Sure, the common themes of grief, trauma and family issues still permeate this reality-blistering world, but Aster's clearly having a lot of fun. This is more of a twisted, comedic adventure than a horror movie.

Taking brutal subjectivity to a newer, more paranoid level, Aster pushes his middle-aged, mummy-obsessed hero Beau (Joaquin Phoenix) into a chaotic void. The cracked street outside his apartment, which sits above a sex shop, resembles a catastrophising obstacle course: loaded with people running and dancing and shooting and stabbing. Beau avoids the outside world as much as possible, but a compulsory journey to his mother's house makes him face those fears – leading him to a nostalgic resort, a grieving household, and a theatre in the forest.

Joaquin Phoenix succeeds again as an isolated protagonist but, unlike Joker, Beau doesn’t want to bother anyone. He’s quite lovely, bearing a high-pitched and childish voice, but almost everyone is against him. Although he's not as sympathetic as Aster wants him to be, you’re enraptured by his thrilling, surreal odyssey – wrapped in the detailed dream logic of Charlie Kaufman and the alienated atmospheres of Franz Kafka (the final scene is like a homage to the latter).

Like waking from a nightmare, disparate and disturbing images from the film superimpose themselves onto your reality when leaving the cinema. The outside world becomes more claustrophobic, more threatening. Owing to Pawel Pogorzelski’s hostile cinematography and Fiona Crombie's maximalist production design, Aster’s brilliantly dazed and confused filmmaking transcends the three-hour runtime into a fantastic, immersive experience.

Photo: A24

Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power, dir. Nina Menkes ★★★★★

People are easily absorbed and anaesthetised by moving images, especially if they’ve been crafted, over decades, by men with a patriarchal sense of film grammar. With its vivid deconstruction of the male gaze in cinema, Nina Menkes’ latest film Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power shakes you into consciousness. Despite the theories existing since the 70s with the feminist film scholar Laura Mulvey, who’s one of many women academics and directors interviewed for the film, Menkes provides them with a new cinematic urgency.

Delivered like a film studies lecture, Brainwashed takes a largely formalist approach. Menkes scrutinises shots from lauded films: analysing subject vs. object, framing, movement, lighting and narrative position. Fearlessly, she goes after the films of well-respected male directors like Paul Thomas Anderson, Jean-Luc Godard, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Spike Lee, David Lynch, Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino, as well as female filmmakers like Sofia Coppola. No one is safe.

The resulting film is thrilling, argumentative and confrontational – changing the way you watch screen stories. Menkes occasionally takes the formalist approach too far, often avoiding the narrative context in which these shots are composed. For instance, she uses an exotic dance scene from Julia Ducournau’s Titane to demonstrate the eroticism of women’s bodies as viewed by men – without acknowledging the character’s gender transition later in the story, which challenges that gaze.

However, the common cinematic structures that transform women into inferior objects – often fragmented into body parts – are thoroughly examined. Brainwashed dismantles the magic of male-geared moviemaking and reveals how these gendered compositions extend misogynistic attitudes.

Photo: BFI

The Eight Mountains, dir. Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch ★★★★★

The pandemic embraced plenty of existential crises in its 2020 heyday. The film industry struggled to return to its former ‘normal’, housebound couples struggled to stay together, and travelling extended only as far as the supermarket. No surprise, then, that The Eight Mountains was written (and eventually directed) by a couple during lockdown. Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch spent four months adapting and escaping into Paolo Cognetti’s original book, populated with the mountains and forests of the Italian Alps.

City-dweller Pietro (Luca Marinelli) and farmhand Bruno (Alessandro Borghi) spend their childhood summers together in the small mountain village of Gradin. Pietro soon faces an impatient adolescence and he escapes his middle-class family. But the memories of that friendship remained. Eventually, he comes back to the village and back to Bruno. After comparing beards, they decide to restore an isolated house together.

You can get lost in Ruben Impens' scenic cinematography: the sharpness of the mountains; the ripple effect of high-altitude wind skimming the grass; the vast slopes that the two friends climb. Van Groeningen and Vandermeersch also add an intensely personal and poetic quality. As characters climb to a nearby summit, a concerned camera follows them from behind like you’re hiking with them – providing an experience as natural as it is ethereal.

And like mountain climbing, the film is a gradual trek – one that catches you off-guard with precise and delicate emotions. When the 31-year-old Pietro – filled with existential anxiety – climbs again, this critic's eyes filled with tears. As well as a rites-of-passage film, one that’s a tad too long at 145 minutes, The Eight Mountains captures the kind of loneliness soothed only by a lifelong friend.

Photo: Picturehouse Entertainment

Return to Seoul, dir. Davy Chou ★★★★★

It’s a bleak state of affairs: being a mystery to yourself and to others. Is it worse in the modern world? These days, can you really settle on one hobby/career/partner when trudging through a digital infinity of possibilities? Paraphrasing Franz Kafka: in being free, you're often lost.

In Return to Seoul, Freddie (Park Ji-min) is one of these lost and fractured souls. She was born in South Korea, adopted in France, and now decides – apparently by accident – to visit her birth country. Freddie won’t or can’t admit that she’s wanting to find some kind of certainty with which to navigate her life. However, contrary to many second-generation character dramas about visiting a native land, Freddie feels more alienated than ever. She can't speak Korean, she disrespects the cultural norms, and she struggles to find her biological parents.

As Freddie progresses through her 20s and into her 30s, she enters different versions of herself – delivering an uncomfortably Lynchian doppelganger effect. She even becomes disconnected from France – hinted at the beginning as Korean revellers express surprise at her Frenchness, noting her ‘typically Korean face’. She’s sporadic, flighty, and unpredictable, opaque to everyone as everyone is opaque to her. And with that mystery comes a traumatic loneliness, depicted so beautifully and so tragically by writer/director Davy Chou.

To progress through life is to move through the illusion of goals and plans, but Return to Seoul reminds you of the innate chaos of existence and the crushing enigmas of other people. This is an excellent, upsetting, and surprising quarter-life crisis of identity, spanning continents and personalities.

Photo: MK2Films

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, dir. Hettie Macdonald ★★★★★

Maybe it’s because the genre is dominated by the United States and Middle-earth, but you don’t see many road movies based in Britain. Is it the weather? The size? Whatever the reason, cinema often loses the underrated sights found in this isle. That adoration fills The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry.

The elderly Harold Fry (Jim Broadbent) goes to post a letter to his terminally ill friend Queenie (Linda Bassett), but then decides to keep walking. And walking. And walking. Before long, he’s intending to walk from Devon to Northumberland – sleeping in B&Bs, washing in forest streams, and meeting plenty of eccentric characters along the way. This is in the belief that walking to Queenie’s hospice in Berwick-upon-Tweed will prevent her from dying.

The execution is a bit soppy, revelling in simplistic humanism that doesn’t feel completely convincing in a divided Britain. Rachel Joyce’s original book was published in 2012 – before Brexit, before the lockdown – and so the country presented is like a comforting fantasy of itself. But the film's charm and poignancy unfold in the second half, largely via Penelope Wilton’s performance as Harold’s internally tortured wife Maureen. And as well as the scenery, punctuated with accurate bouts of wind and rain, the touchingly beautiful close-ups by Normal People cinematographer Kate McCullough craft a connective artistry from a lacklustre screenplay.

Photo: eOne

Air, dir. Ben Affleck ★★★★★

With the Nike slogan being ‘Just Do It’, the Nike movie tagline should be ‘Just Don’t’ – especially if the film is as bland as Air. Even the title is uninspiring.

Despite the press, this isn’t a sports movie – it’s a shoe movie. The shoe in question, Air Jordan, will make a major company even richer. In 1984, Nike’s talent scout Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon) sees something special about basketball player Michael Jordan and directs all the budget to secure the player's own shoe line, fighting against strong competition from Adidas and Converse.

You’re watching a business doing what a business should do: secure deals. Worse still: screenwriter Alex Convery seems desperate to replicate Aaron Sorkin's whip-smart dialogue, taking hints from the baseball movie Moneyball. But Convery can’t reach that musicality, with only a few decent jokes. The worst scene is when Sonny tells Jordan’s future during a meeting, with a soppy monologue over an achingly constructed montage of the player’s upcoming misfortunes – as if Matt Damon is the world’s most tedious psychic. Ben Affleck's fifth film as director is embarrassing corporation porn.

Photo: Warner Bros.

John Wick: Chapter 4, dir. Chad Stahelski ★★★★★

Ordinarily, the fourth in a franchise of unabashedly violent action movies doesn’t inspire much excitement. But the hyper-real hitman drama John Wick is far from ordinary in an industry obese with tedious thrills and lethargic CGI. And although the series was becoming exhausting, Chapter 4 proves the best of the lot.

If you’ve watched every John Wick movie, you know everything about the suited assassin by now. And that's why outsourcing to new and gripping characters is key to Chapter 4's OTT brilliance. You’re gifted a blind hitman (Donnie Yen) who kills via sound and touch, a father/daughter pairing in Japan (Hiroyuki Sanada/Rina Sawayama), and a skilled mercenary type (Shamier Anderson) who’s determined to kill John for the rising bounty. And let’s not forget Bill Skarsgård – best known for playing Pennywise the Clown in the It movies – as the arch-villain, oozing exaggerated antagonism in glittery suits.

The action sequences wield a rousing, bloody balletic quality: choreographed like grand dances with thunderous sound design and colourfully ambitious cinematography. Although sometimes you think the film might’ve worked better as a video game, the cinematic experience shakes, excites and immerses you.

Photo: Lionsgate

Rye Lane, dir. Raine Allen-Miller ★★★★★

It’s hard to think of a film that’s more south London than Rye Lane, set mostly in the colourful corners of Peckham – embracing its markets, playgrounds, karaoke bars and art galleries. Director Raine Allen-Miller captures the eclectic flavours of a capital city filled with idiosyncratic peculiarities, extending to Brixton, Blackheath, Soho and the Millennium Bridge.

After being whisked through the various toilets dotted in the city, the film settles on an introverted accountant (David Jonsson) crying in a gender-neutral cubicle. He's overheard by an extroverted fashion designer (Vivian Oparah) with a zest for fun. Like a more energetic Before movie, Dom and Yas continue chatting outside the bathroom: discussing their breakups at length and making each other feel better. Initially, there’s a danger of Yas falling into a manic pixie dream engendered by Dom, but you soon realise she wields plenty of her own unique fears and nuances.

Rye Lane is surreal and spontaneous, much like London itself – resulting in a sporadically sweet romcom with culturally specific and hilarious dialogue that warms your heart and preps you for a good night out.

Photo: Searchlight Pictures