The good thing about the London Film Festival is that while Q&As rarely allow time for more than one question—most often none—filmmakers are always kind enough to stick around and chat after the screenings. My second and final ticket for this year’s edition (people who find it hard to get tickets for Wimbledon make me laugh, try the LFF) gave me the chance to speak with one of the most important directors of our time, whose work I’ve admired enormously ever since I came across her magnificent Zama.
So there I was, all ears, the conventional host of congratulators—professional huggers and cheek-kissers—finally subsiding, the underground Q&A for certified disciples just superseding.
A good twenty minutes in, as a point was being made on the thematic parallel between Zama and Nuestra Tierra, I dropped a vaguely philosophical consideration that Lucrecia expanded upon, offering a key not only to her latest, but to her oeuvre as a whole. ‘El problema es de espacio,’ she said, her gaze piercing through the smoked lenses of her characteristic cat-eye frames, ‘ya no de tiempo.’ While time is liable to be manipulated—because it belongs to narration, and narration, technically, is a lie—space is where our identity both as individuals and as groups can still be sought. Perhaps the thread that binds the film, poder is a word she repeatedly used. From the opening view of planet Earth to the granularity of a crime trial, often gliding over the beauty of a seemingly unclaimed territory, Nuestra Tierra feels steeped in a vivid preoccupation with ownership, birthrights, and roots. I found her remark about how drones have come to resonate with military purposes quite chillingly spot-on, and timely. The arresting music that opens the film—as far as I could find, a composition by the Argentine composer Ariel Ramírez—introduces the subject with a sense of mournful sacrality and echoes unresolved, distant issues. The colonial problem, crucial in itself, is transfigured by Lucrecia’s poetics into the existential, reminding us that this is as much about la historia inscribed in the land as it is about the way its people perceive themselves through it. As her recent projects cry out loud, there is something profoundly human, ancestral, and yet pioneering in the urge to reclaim a scale that our era has shrunk to the domestic, the device, or even the virtual.
It was only a bit later, on my solitary walk from the station home, wrapped in the smell of dried leaves and a night not yet too cold, that I realised the question ‘what is land, really?’ was lingering in my mind, somehow intertwined with two images—Don Diego de Zama’s stare towards the end of the ocean and Nuestra Tierra’s breathtaking aerial views of the rural landscape—until a condor snatched the camera and carried it all away, leaving me with an exhilarating kind of meaning I can’t quite articulate, and yet still feels so vivid.
Insofar as a poster for a film can wield the same power as a title for an art installation, the inception and key to Eddington’s kaleidoscope may well lie in the enigmatic affiche unveiled at Cannes earlier this year. Depicting an arresting freeze-frame of three American bison plunging into the void from a cliff—an image with no obvious connection to the story itself—it instantly tuned the audience’s expectations to the right frequency and at the same time hinted at the film’s intellectual ambitions.
A serendipitous surprise for an Ari Aster novice like me, Eddington turns out to be a social satire which, beneath sparse and relatively tolerable genre clichés, unfolds as an intelligent reflection on the paranoid itches of our modern times, even bearing traits of fine literary maximalism.
Some sort of bento box in which Aster has laid out Covid, AI, and Black Lives Matter alongside other sensitive prompts, the film seems to essay upon our deepest human ineptitude and ultimate inability to communicate, exacerbated by the inadequacy of the very devices we have concocted to cope with recent critical circumstances. The fate awaiting sheriff Cross—his body deformed by that very aberration and his social faculties irreversibly dependent on technology—feels like a bleak joke, the atrocious irony designed to keep the debate alive once the end credits have sent us back into our own, non-dissimilar world.
Largely dismissed as self-indulgent on the Croisstte the year where a real palm fell revealing rotten roots to some preposterous metaphorical concurrence as self-indulgent and short-lived in British cinemas, Eddington is not the kind of film you can watch once and swipe up. Rather, its cinematic treatment of themes still scarcely reckoned with by our society—and art—renders one of the most genuinely original works I have encountered to date on the subject. The subtle threat Arister insinuates is hardly ever on screen, yet a strangely familiar—if cinematically unconventional—sense of horror is nonetheless palpable. Echoing Michelle Goldberg in her review for The New York Times1, the main villain remains an artificial-intelligence data centre, emerging ‘after a lot of blood and death, as a singular beneficiary of the town’s derangement, and a reminder our informational pandemic is just getting started.’
1.A Movie About the Year America Went Fully Berserk, Michelle Goldberg (The New York Times, 18 July 2025).
After at least a fortnight’s delay—during which the snobbish part of me pretended to be annoyed by the fact that this film had flooded every cinema in the country, as if assuming everyone wanted to see it—I finally had to accept that nothing else was either worth seeing or hadn’t already watched twice. So there I was, sheepishly asking for a ticket and a statutory double vodka—just neat please, which often helps, not much the neatness as the drink itself—in the beautiful concretes of the Curzon Bloomsbury.
Beneath his beige and amber chessboard—proving that stylistic quirks, however peculiar, are far from limiting—Wes Anderson devices one of the most adventurous intrigues in recent cinema as a benevolent satire on the present age. Infusing his Victorian patisserie shop-window aesthetics with subtle cinephile references, Zsa-Zsa Korda evokes the many Kanes of film history to parody the delusional omnipotence of today’s no less capricious tycoons. While on the surface his characters may appear to be mere pawns in an arithmetic plot, The Phoenician Scheme unfolds with unexpected depth and thematic richness. Where it falters, alas, is in relying too heavily on intellectual post-processing, ultimately yielding an often lukewarm entertainment.
Whilst it may lack the universality needed to make it accessible to those unfamiliar with the context it references, acting as a counterpoint in the attempt to process the unfathomable, Angelus Novus remains a riveting cinematic anomaly. Pasquale Misuraca’s language is at once laconic and lyrical. His Rome is eerie, almost empty—or rather, filled with a melancholic sense of dystopia. The marble of the churches, the stone of the newer constructions, the metal of the few cars that sparsely populate its streets—all running aimlessly, like a society that seems to have lost its paradigms within times where consumerism has established a subtler form of fascism. In this city, one he could have only imagined, wanders ten years after his death the tormented soul of Pasolini. Whether the anachronism is deliberate or dictated by production constraints, the persistence of the artist as a physical presence renders a vivid metaphor. He is often seen in silhouette, hard lights casting darkness across his inscrutable expressions, echoing distant, intermittent traces of Storaro’s visual language in Il conformista—quite the irony, for a figure who was the very antithesis of conformism. A sense of carnal violence, whose ultimate victim is a naked, vulnerable youth, becomes increasingly palpable as the story approaches its almost prophetic epilogue—that bloodied, mangled face, and the incredulous gaze. ‘Death lies not in the inability to communicate, but in no longer being understood.’
A beautiful pair of spectacles is usually enough to make me fall for a film—this one has two, though I doubt it will endure the passage of time as have the iconic frames whose stories it tells. If it will continue to be seen, it will likely be within the shadow of the oeuvre of one of the brightest directors of our time—an in-between title.
Yet, I don’t think that Pablo Larraín’s metaphysical tragedy is quite as bad as Mark Kermode described it in his scathing review1. While the script often feels contrived and affected, the aphoristic wit of its dialogues comes across more as a deliberate if questionable mannerism than a vain artifice—a literary gravity that somehow evokes Paolo Sorrentino’s criticised lyricism, whose influence on the Chilean director might perhaps extend beyond the writing.
Although Angelina Jolie’s rigorous preparation to sync with Maria Callas’s voice led to hardly believable results, her portrayal conveys a sense of aristocratic stoicism that I personally enjoyed. Rather than her performance, the real issue may lie in the casting—as it does for the entire leading ensemble.
What remains a moment of personal fascination in any of Larraín’s films, is his raw and instinctive directing method, apparent even in less convincing projects like this might ultimately be—no readings or rehearsals, no storyboards or shot lists, just a few takes per shot, and utter creative freedom on set. All this relying, of course, on the irreplaceable collaboration with a cinematographer of Ed Lachman’s uncommon stature.
In conclusion, flares of cinematic and thespian beauty do arise throughout the film, but, partly sharing Kermode’s disappointment, without giving the same exaltation and intoxication the stage used to give to Maria Callas (‘Sometimes I thought the stage itself would burn,’ makes her continue Steven Knight)—a feeling I kept on longing for, until the end credits ungracefully dashed my hopes.
It is hard a life, surrounded
by people who constantly
worry about you when
everything you need, is—
something
silence
help.
It is within the eerie prologue that Robert Eggers hints at what could have been his most valuable contributions to the much-frequented material. I say could, because establishing Ellen as the protagonist from the start and emphasising sexual repression as a central theme are intriguing premises which do remain somewhat unexplored. Despite flashes of striking imagery, and the ambitious work done on both the literary and the cinematic sources—to which the final act and its glorious ending give the most convincing expression—Eggers’s Nosferatu ultimately comes across as a rather disposable, over-produced bore. The nicely orchestrated narrative flow his earlier projects possessed, here feels stiffened by repeated sound and visual solutions, and often upstaged by contrived camerawork.
However inappropriate, it is difficult to elude comparison with Murnau’s original enactment or Werner Herzog’s Sturm und Drang reincarnation, of which Eggers’s is a convoluted contemporary rendition deprived of mood and humanity, and broadly dulled by mainstream sensitivity. If there’s a veiled irony about Hutter becoming increasingly worried about meeting Count Orlok over the decades—he was euphoric in the twenties, wary in the seventies, and so anxious in the latest Nosferatu that I wonder whether in the next adaptation he will finally have the good sense to cancel the trip—the Count himself goes through an even more significant evolution. Compared to Max Schreck’s relatively sober portrayal and Kinski’s unearthlier presence, Eggers externalises the lonely nobleman’s torments into a far more explicit form of monstrosity, seemingly reflecting the struggle of the modern audiences to use their imagination and the emphasis on appearance that is so idiosyncratic of our times. Just speculative reflections, or maybe not.
Regardless, this emphysemic Nosferatu and his copiously drooling adepts will hardly be redeemed by the production’s superb artistry, the many finely written and performed pages, or the palpable passion for the subject that permeates every single frame. So, for now, while I genuinely hope that a second round will make me reconsider these notes, I shall pretend that this and The Northman never happened, and look forward to Eggers’s next, his third after The Witch and The Lighthouse.
While The Apprentice may not be as unconventional a biopic as intended, it did exceed the expectations that my aversion to the genre, my reluctance to devote two hours to what seemed an irrelevant and unattractive subject, and—however marginally—the negative comments I had intercepted in the ether since its Cannes premiere had fed. On my second attempt after buying and returning the ticket within a few hours on the day of its release, both lead performances made me soon realise it had been worth giving it another chance. Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong imbue their roles with a disturbingly convincing sense of humanity without shying away from the most contemptible facets of their characters’ personae, nor yielding to the temptation of rendering farcical events even more so, thereby reducing the film to a redundant political scorn.
Splitting the story in two distinct parts, each identified by an iconic presidency and look—the first following a more structured narrative logic, the second being looser, messier, and slightly out of control, quite metaphorically so indeed—is per se a pretty interesting idea. It’s a shame, though, that technical impossibilities eventually led DP Kasper Tuxen to shoot digitally, faking both 16mm and analog video effects in post to largely perfectible results. A more stoic approach wouldn’t have changed the film, but would have at least added consistency to its aesthetics and artistic value to the project as such.
On another note—minor for most—the portrayal of Andy Warhol left me a little sceptical, but a clumsy young Trump not recognising him at a time when he was well into stardom, felt like a fairly paradoxical yet fitting touch of comedy.
The walls of the narrow corridor that leads to the loo at the Curzon Soho are papered with posters that have become not only familiar over the years but, insofar as filmgoing and urinating are two strictly connected biological needs, somehow part of the experience of watching a film there. Among those, the one of Les yeux sans visage has always made me linger and engage in fleeting contemplations. I just couldn’t avoid being hypnotised by that woeful gaze buried behind the mysterious white mask. Having finally watched the film, I now understand why it has earned its place as a classic, and such a coveted spot in a public bathroom. Franju’s famed horror serves as a brilliant case study of narrative exposition, both in terms of explicit versus implicit storytelling and timing. The opening is deliberately ambiguous. Hints of an eerie plot are hardly flashed, leaving us blind in the thrilling obscurity. Yet, only shortly thereafter, the conundrum is surprisingly unravelled, shifting the focus from the what to the how, and somehow elevating the genre from mystery to drama. The film cleverly paces its unfolding by using a measured approach to the most unsettling material. In the first part, any graphic depictions are ingeniously spared, allowing our imagination to conjure the most frightening images. Yet, just when we think we’re not in for a certain cinematic type of gruesome spectacle, we are plunged into a painstakingly long sequence of surgical horror that exposes us to everything we had hoped not to see. The misery of the unwilling protagonist is transfigured into the flesh of the unaware victim, imbuing both fates with a physical weight that persists as a dire shadow throughout the film, only to be revived in the horrific climax and ultimately resolved into a different, more poetic form of freedom.
As I get out of the screen I keep the door for an elderly lady so hunched that she doesn’t reach my hips. A tall gentleman in his nineties whom I assume to be her son, or perhaps her grandson, holds her hand. As they pass in front of me, she looks up, gives me a tender smile, and with an accent I can’t quite place, says thank you. While I slowly follow them down the corridor towards the exit, I hear them conversing—she is Polish. My heart sinks to an even deeper level than the film has taken it, and it continues to fall as I write this note on my way home. And if the chilly wind outside has got my eyes wet with shy tears, is not quite for any of the obvious reasons, but for the beauty that art and life just made experience.
By the way, the only thing that doesn’t work in Jonathan Glazer’s long-awaited The Zone of Interest is the green glow of the emergency exit. Everything else is a marvel—exclamation mark.
