In cinemas this weekend: Anne Hathaway stars in dark Ottessa Moshfegh adaptation

Eileen, dir. William Oldroyd ★★★★★

If you're a single 20-something, there are two overlapping ways to experience winter. 1: you embrace the magical festivities and celebrations memorialised in childhood, driving toward a collective nostalgia. And 2: you endure the SAD snuggling into your soul, with cold air and skeletal trees permeating your everyday. Despite Eileen having sprinklings of the first (often barely noticed in the background), the film is an all-encompassing, spiky embrace of the second. And for a while, the latter mood of the titular character holds your attention.

This is an adaptation of the Booker-shortlisted novel by Ottessa Moshfegh, a provocative author who often shows the lives of transgressive people. It’s somewhat refreshing to see a woman behaving badly, considering the cinematic onslaught of angelic or morally balanced female characters. The opening features 24-year-old prison secretary Eileen (a perfectly cast Thomasin McKenzie) in her car, parked at a rainy beach, watching a couple snog nearby. She stares, clearly aroused… then sticks a lump of snow down her crotch. The film is filled with these strange little shocks, escalating to erotic fantasies. But more than a high sex drive, Eileen clearly just wants to be seen in a world that's reluctant to look in her direction. Not even her former cop father (Shea Wigham), who’s turned into an abusive alcoholic, is all that bothered about her existence.

That isolation lifts with the entrance of new prison psychiatrist Rebecca (Anne Hathaway, seductively magnetic), who gives Eileen the attention she craves. But following Eileen’s growing obsession with this Hitchcockian blonde, the story shifts into a nightmarish tone involving knives, guns and blood. But how much of what we’re seeing is really happening?

After vividly consuming the first half with a curious, psychosexual character piece, Eileen feels annoyingly obliged to insert a Coen Brothers-like plot to accelerate the tension. It’s weird and fun for a time, but concludes without the satisfying scaffold of a third act to bring those elements together. And yet, the icy, detached and infringing brain fog of the film continues to swarm after leaving the cinema.

Photo: Universal

Maestro, dir. Bradley Cooper ★★★★★

There are three prominent reasons you should be sceptical of Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein biopic Maestro. Cooper’s ‘Jewface’ prosthetic nose is currently dividing the Jewish community. The casting of white British actor Carey Mulligan as Bernstein’s Latin-American wife Felicia Montealegre has been seen as whitewashing. And Cooper’s previous film A Star is Born was an overrated melodrama, leaving little anticipation for his follow-up… Okay, that last one was just this critic’s experience, but the controversy remains.

However, as this spirited and curious examination of the legendary composer/conductor proceeds, you have to admit: Cooper does a decent job.

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The Eternal Daughter, dir. Joanna Hogg ★★★★★

Give Tilda Swinton an empty box and she’d make it fascinating. Two Tildas achieve even more in Joanna Hogg’s intriguing, if vacuous, character drama The Eternal Daughter – examining a parent-child relationship within a ghostly hotel, formerly a family home. Tense filmmaker Julie (Swinton) and her elderly mother Rosalind (also Swinton) spend a few nights here, the latter recalling loose memories of the interior during WWII.

Ed Rutherford’s eerie cinematography absorbs you in mist, darkness and intermittent viridescence: dreamy as much as spectral. The dialogue between the two Swintons tugs at the nostalgia between parent and child as well as the emotional disconnect separating their respective generations. Both are keen to understand the other – Julie is even writing a film about her mother – but neither of them succeeds entirely.

Hogg struggles with the ghost genre. She's well-tempered at first: melding the uneasy desolation and sharp winds of The Shining with the gradual phantasmagoria of the BBC’s Ghost Stories for Christmas. But you sense, quite quickly, Hogg losing interest in the novelty. She's known as an autobiographical filmmaker, and many genuine truths play out in The Eternal Daughter – even more evocative considering her real mother died during post-production. Perhaps that’s why the mother-daughter dynamic of the film exudes more pathos and curiosity than Julie hearing bangs in the night or seeing faces in the window. Fear is absent, and the dread is transparent.

The best scene – involving a cake – houses a decent (if easily foreseeable) twist that marries the real with the supernatural. Unfortunately, it’s one of only a few times when The Eternal Daughter engages your attention completely.

Photo: A24

Napoleon, dir. Ridley Scott ★★★★★

The risk you run with movies about historical titans is over-aggrandising the subject. To deify is to lobotomise any nuance or intrigue about the character. It’s jarring to imagine the French emperor and commander Napoleon Bonaparte as a character – he’s one of those ubiquitous names everyone knows, even if they understand little about the man. Regardless, Ridley Scott’s near-three-hour nominative biopic presents an unexpected portrait of the figure via Joaquin Phoenix, a good fit for the role considering his previous Roman collaboration with Scott on Gladiator.

The Napoleon of Napoleon is a great military strategist, like a choreographer of Imax-worthy battle scenes – complete with technological advances, perfectly timed attacks and genius diversions for his enemies. But his personal life is less victorious, the film delving into the funny and patriarchal inadequacies of his love life with Empress Josephine (a loving and loathing performance by Vanessa Kirby). He presents like an icky mother’s boy, bound in present-day red flags. But Josephine, despite a degree of garish agency, wants to fulfil Napoleon’s whims and wishes – mostly involving spontaneous sex and the heirs that’d hopefully result.

As well as catching you off-guard with this unflattering depiction – often brilliantly dismantling the fragile masculine ego – the tones of Napoleon are also surprising. All the ingredients for a cinematic epic are there: the armies of horses, the lavish period attire, the towering set designs ranging from a frozen Austerlitz to a burning Moscow. But often, instead of severity and honour, the film drops into comedy. It sometimes works, but often runs against the epic that was promised – occasionally looking like a $200 million version of a Monty Python movie or Blackadder special. Is Scott taking the subject matter seriously? Was he bored and felt a need to reinvigorate the story?

Thankfully, the clash makes the stretched runtime move quickly. And despite Scott’s public hatred of critical historicists ('get a life') and Francophobia ('The French don't like themselves'), he adeptly taps into the undying fascination about a man who led France into battle against the world.

Photo: Apple

Saltburn, dir. Emerald Fennell ★★★★★

Writer/director Emerald Fennell broke into filmmaking with the divisive and much-discussed Promising Young Woman in 2020. It was a dark, amusing and uncomfortable triumph for revenge thrillers and post-#MeToo dramas, revealing an audacious new voice in cinema.

Fennell transplants many of those qualities to her new project Saltburn, a second feature that not only matches her film debut but outgrows it. Returning to the shores of Great Britain, she tells a strange, gothic tale of extreme social climbing that straddles the funny, the satirical, the disturbing and the kinky.

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May December, dir. Todd Haynes ★★★★★

The privilege of cinema is in the lengths and possibilities. If a filmmaker chooses to stay in limited contours with the same characters over the entire movie, they have to make the claustrophobia visually and dialectically worth it – they’re duty-bound. Whereas Quentin Tarantino, Sidney Lumet and Alfred Hitchcock provide the zenith examples, Todd Haynes now emerges like a spotty novice who’s spent most of his student loans on a professional cinematographer. Largely set in a Californian mansion, Haynes' latest film May December gestates from a tedious, frustrating script by Samy Burch and Alex Mechanik – telling a story of entitled child exploitation perpetrated by characters not worth caring for or about.

Actress Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman) enters this enormous property, owned by the clearly deranged matriarch Gracie (Julianne Moore). Elizabeth is playing Gracie in a TV movie, and wants to capture the latter’s essence. Burch and Mechanik drip-feed you the backstory, which clearly involves the 23-year age gap between Gracie and her 30-something husband Joe (Charles Melton). It transpires that she seduced Joe when he was 13 and she was 36, subsequently marrying and having kids with him. The tabloid scandal follows them around, but they seem happy and Joe doesn’t see himself as a victim. Elizabeth tries to understand Gracie, using bizarre and unethical methods that make you hate her nearly as much as the woman she’s imitating.

Despite the transgressive attraction of the story and intriguing performances by Moore and Portman, May December crumbles under the melodramatic music, the stuffiness of the setting, and the unusually defective sound design – creating little more than a glorified soap opera. Even the ambiguities and potential nuances are left underexplored, especially across the generations. Why do you see little of the impact on the children of this revolting union? The film is also an example of weird gendered attitudes in this unwinnable arena. These days, would the story receive the same levels of acceptance if it were a barely teenage girl groomed by a man approaching 40? And although Joe is the most gripping character, he’s pushed aside to give Elizabeth and Gracie their undeserved limelight. It’s hard to summon enough curiosity either for a shameless actress or a guiltless paedophile.

Photo: Sky

Anatomy of a Fall, dir. Justine Triet ★★★★★

Nowadays, certainty is simultaneously elusive and everywhere. There are few genres that capture fractured realities as accurately as the true-crime drama, examples of which build hives of mystery – swarmed by infinite armchair detectives buzzing, analysing and obsessing. In a polarised world, filled with laborious disclaimers, this ambiguity is worth treasuring.

Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or-winner Anatomy of a Fall is a brilliant anomaly that will hopefully inspire a trend: maintaining the unknowability of a crime, but in a fictional framework. The fabricated crime drama tends to conclude with a clear answer, but Triet and co-writer Arthur Harari work only with debatable truths. They're unbounded from any provable reality and yet maintain a tangible uncertainty, crafting a thoughtful, loquacious and fascinating study of a novelist accused of murder.

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Photo: Picturehouse Entertainment

How to Have Sex, dir. Molly Manning Walker ★★★★★

'I can’t die a virgin,' says the teenage Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce) after landing in Malia with her besties Skye (Lara Peake) and Em (Enva Lewis). Like Ibiza and Magaluf, this sweaty place is a Mediterranean party town – seemingly designed for drunk tourists to cause havoc under high temperatures and heavy neon lights. In the summer after taking their GCSEs, these British girls venture into Malia’s hedonistic, all-consuming haze that barely allows for a decent night’s sleep.

For those of us who were never cool enough to embark on these trips, How to Have Sex resembles a confirmational guide to the rank and dank and filth of repulsive youth. And this is where the loud but clearly reluctant Tara wants to lose her virginity, or feels compelled to.

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Photo: MUBI

Killers of the Flower Moon, dir. Martin Scorsese ★★★★★

These days, consumed by the brilliance of television, films that surpass the three-hour mark are becoming harder to justify. Extended runtimes either sanctify the good films or turn the bad ones into instruments of torture.

But the gamble nevertheless results in a buzz; taking you back to the grand epics of old, minus the classical overtures and interludes. Even more so when it's a three-and-a-half-hour project directed and co-written by maestro filmmaker Martin Scorsese, one of a small number you can trust to create a decent long movie. Killers of the Flower Moon weaves a spacious, immersive world of wealthy Native Americans, greedy white men and quiet genocide that eats those hours away.

Admittedly, 206 minutes is too much and Scorsese’s lifetime editor Thelma Schoonmaker is strangely reluctant to trim the film around the edges. At the same time, the characters – deplorable and innocent – hold you by the collar and lift you to inescapable heights.

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Photo: Apple

Past Lives, dir. Celine Song ★★★★★

As we float through our lives, the impressions that people leave behind manifest like deep, traumatic scars or handprints on a frosty window.

Celine Song’s patient romance Past Lives absorbs this retrospective warmth and pain, observing the ambiguous relationship between Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) that spans decades and continents. It’s a perpetually considered connection, engendered by speechless stares rather than simple kisses. This love is complicated and nuanced, foaming from the confluent waves of their remembered selves.

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