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.