There are a couple of scenes in the first Don Camillo that make me cry all the times, be it from laughter or emotion. In one, Don Camillo is summoned by the Bishop for having taken part to a fight. He allegedly threw a big table into a bunch of ‘red’ civilians who were making fun of him, knocking all fifteen of them out barehanded. More incredulous than irate at the Reverend’s misconduct, the Bishop asks him to lift his desk to prove that what they say is true and that he acted alone. Almost effortlessly, Don Camillo grabs the bulky piece of furniture and raises it above his head. ‘Now throw it!’ Says the Bishop amazed. Don Camillo hesitates, then obeys. The desk crashes on the floor noisily, making a huge painting fall from the wall. A couple of assistants rush alarmed into room to check that His Excellency hasn’t been hurt. ‘Nothing happened, it was me,’ says candidly the old Bishop. ‘Don Camillo made me angry and I temporary lost my temper.’
Later in the film, the old teacher is on her deathbed. Knowing to have reached the end of her days, she has called Peppone and Don Camillo to make arrangements for her funeral. She has taught to everybody in the village and deserves a particular regard. On her coffin, she would like to have the Italian flag. Not the current republican one, but that of the recently deposed king. Confident she will have her final wish granted, she passes. The following day, the matter is discussed by the municipality. Most of the councillors are firmly against it. ‘As mayor,’ says Peppone, ‘I completely support your position. But in this town,’ he continues, ‘the communists rule, not the council, and as a communist I say that this dead is worth more than all of you alive. She will have the flag that she wanted.’ Then he turns towards Don Camillo, who’s silently enjoying the moment. ‘Unless the reverend has anything to add.’ ‘I will go with whatever the mayor decides!’
It might not be flawless from a strictly cinematographic point of view, but if there’s a film that more than others made me fall in love with cinema, it is right Don Camillo. Guareschi’s dissecting eye is so sharp and accurate to make the famed transpositions to his work resonate today as they did then.
Here is one of the few perks of having grown up in a remote time before streaming existed.

As an aside, I had never noticed that Don Camillo wears a pair of Doc Martens just like mine. Ante and post litteram skinheads, say.

Towards the end of a conference held at Cannes for the twentieth anniversary of Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino mentioned that as part of a personal periodic review of the state of cinema, he had recently asked a group of friends who, in their opinion, were the ten most exciting active filmmakers—with that meaning those whose best work they believed was yet to come. Intriguingly, Richard Linklater was on everyone’s list. If only for lack of familiarity with his work, I doubt he would have made it on mine—and yet, if one of his has ever brought me close to share the enthusiasm farsightedly expressed by Tarantino’s circle, it is certainly this. Apollo 10½ is one of those rare films that make me feel nostalgic for an age that I have not lived. Saudade is probably the word I am after—one I always loved.
Such a straight use of the rotoscope technique, to which I have been severely allergic since when I saw as a kid Bakshi’s The Lord of the Rings, seems for once perfectly placed and greatly synergic with the gorgeous postcard aesthetics.
Radiating a charming, if not literal, labour of love sense, Apollo 10½ is made to stay and grow—a cuddling dream whose memory can endlessly be revived, every time a little more palpably.

Struck. Alive. My scepticism shattered. Ninety percent of it. Maybe eighty.
Nonetheless excited. My thoughts in progress. My heart beating.

Two main things bug me of Titane. In scattered order, one is how it strives to make the audience cringe with images that are intrinsically cringing. This obsessive nipple business, the expository gruesomeness of a surgical intervention, a self inflicted fracture, an attempted abortion with a hairpin, or the needle of a syringe in the battered bruised skin. It feels a bit like a cheeky shortcut à la Dick Dastardly of Wacky Races. ‘Muttley, do something!’
The other is that it seems to juggle more themes than it can actually handle, ultimately looking like someone who moshes at a party and is too drunk to even rub somebody else’s shoulders.
And yet, enduring its unwelcoming scratchy surface is not an effort that doesn’t pay off. Titane is also full of highly inspired moments and scenes of sheer cinematic bravura. Alexia chasing down the stairs one of her unlucky victims at a house party, for instance. Her improvised dance on top of a fire brigade truck that causes the embarrassment of her agitated, masculine colleagues. Or when Vincent finds her hiding in a wardrobe, wearing, as it turns out, the same yellow female dress his real son used to steal from his mum. ‘They can’t tell me you’re not my son.’
I also didn’t mind Titane’s apparent holes, the unclear connections between its parts, whether of flesh or metal. I found it actually a good example of how narrative and visuals can synergically convey the perception of a vivid thread without necessarily giving all the explanations. It’s a very delicate balance that a few filmmakers know how to achieve without sounding pretentious or unfocused, but rather subtle, honest, and excitingly unpredictable.

Every time I watch Ben Whitley’s fungal revue, I get to a point—normally within the first ten minutes—where I wonder how is it possible that I liked it so much the last I saw it. With the same punctuality, an indefinite stretch further into the film, I always find myself completely enthralled.
However paced by a few attractive lines and scraps of dialogue—after being threatened that he will never leave the field, the mildly uncombed Whitehead says, ‘Then I shall become it! I shall consume all the ill fortune which you are set to unleash! I shall chew up all the selfish scheming and ill intentions that men like you force upon men like me and bury it in the stomach of this place!’—A Field in England doesn’t carry any particularly profound message and doesn’t indulge in pretentious ostentations of auteurism. Rendered more grey than monochrome by manifest digital vices, its tin-plated b/w never comes across as cinephile rhetoric but feels perfectly attuned to the narrative, besides offering a clever contrast to the garish imaginary of psychedelia.
One of the most intriguing collaborations between Wheatley and Amy Jump to date, A Field in England feels instead as a candid act of cinema whose uneducated instincts happen to feed a most genuine experimental attitude.
Whereas the prologue is occasionally spoiled by some awkward comedy attempts—like a soldier awakening from apparent death saying, ‘Did someone mention ale?’—the film puts soon itself together replacing the facetious with the witty and the ironic. Even preposterous moments—like a character materialising from a post pulled out of the ground in a sort of asymmetric tug of war—seem to find their place within the surreal context.
As for the entire psychedelic sequence, it’s nothing short of an intoxicating if raw work of visual bravura, which in my mind relates to the most energising piece of advice I’ve ever heard given. Speaking about the fear of not doing the right thing—or at least not what seems right in the eyes of someone in a hierarchical position to judge—Paul Thomas Anderson once said, ‘Just don’t give a fuck, that’s kind of the best thing to do.’ That, in many ways, is exactly the spirit A Field in England seems to be fuelled by. Bizarre, flawed, brazen, inspiring.

There is a rare creative lucidity to the defecatory madness of Hard to Be a God. I would be lying if I claimed to have fully grasped its essence, though cogency is hardly a quality the author appears to be after. What comes through clearly in his Bruegelian delusion is what he once declared, that he was interested in nothing but ‘the possibility of building a world, an entire civilisation from scratch.’
Converted from native colour stock to a strikingly grim b/w, Aleksei German’s apocalyptic orgy of rot and rain demands a certain degree of cinephile stamina—but not for nothing. Its exhaustingly slow pace and murky narrative convey a palpable sense of stillness, anguish and oppression, likely intended to evoke the dereliction of Stalinist Russia while stirring broader reflections on human nature.
What more than anything seems to shape the intellectual and metaphorical core of the film, are its visceral cinematographic idiosyncrasies—the camerawork, specifically. Crisp, spherical lenses wander through the delirious carnival like one-eyed, crooked creatures, seamlessly shifting in and out of POVs and seeking physical contact with props and bodies. Characters often emerge from behind the camera, à la Klaus Kinski in Herzog’s Aguirre—unexpected, unwelcome, occasionally staring straight at us, delivering sporadic, nonsensical fragments of lines or lovely guttural grunts. There is an almost uncomfortable sort of urgency to all this—one difficult to articulate in words yet strangely addictive.
However arcane and strenuous, Hard to Be a God is the monumental work of a master. It touched me like great art does, leaving me beguiled, inspired—and eager to take a long, warm shower.

A series of stunning views of the misted mountains. A chill air of cobalt, deer antlers in the distance. From the electric quietness, a nicely choreographed drone shot tracks an off-road vehicle, then a second, climbing up a dirt slope to join a bigger group on a plain. Hunters, or rather poachers, and the breathtaking sight of a majestic dawn in the valley.
The opening scene of Spoor is nothing I hadn’t seen before, but its beauty is arresting nonetheless. The same can’t be said about the rest of film, a pot of genres ranging from dark comedy to environmental drama with some nostalgic nods at Murder, She Wrote and a cringing touch of Mission: Impossible, leading up to a slightly preposterous bucolic utopia for a merry epilogue. Likewise, its narrative looks like that of a television drama in search of an identity, that constantly chases facts rather than letting its characters be, and breathe, outside of the self-contained world it sets.
Some directorial choices certainly show talent and skills that go beyond the box, but still won’t save the film from being utterly ordinary, and its ambitious contents from coming across hardly more profound than a sign at the zoo. Don’t touch the animals.

Pitch black in the woods. An amber glow sketches nervous lights and shadows on the leaves. Then trees bend and fall, light as ears of wheat. The trunks break without resistance producing painful crackles. A giant is walking through, a monster is devouring them. Not far from the images evoked, two enormous bulldozers are revealed as they aggressively make their way into the forest. Demented beasts of metal. An ambiguous opening scene of arresting beauty that turns for a moment this very world, and the film, into a fantastic place of scary creatures.
Suddenly switching to semi documentary telling, and more so as the story unfolds, Fire Will Come is somewhat stylistically and narratively incoherent. And yet there’s more to it than the unescapable nostalgic feeling aroused by the copious Galician rain and its gorgeous dark green mountains. It is a laconic rural tale of solitude and defeat, discreet like those who live silently, and silently take the fated blows of incomprehension, injustice, and nature.

Tropical vegetation on a bluish thunderous sky. Red peppers dry impassively on a tin roof. What seems to be a gunshot wakes up the birds, but is it? A couple of glasses are topped up with wine, red too, of a particularly garish tint. A woman’s hand clumsily drops some ice in one and picks it up, making the cubes clink insistingly, almost uncomfortably. Garden chairs are wearily dragged on the paving around a disused swimming pool. The putrid water. An awkwardly choreographed dance of aged tan bodies and abusive screechy sounds. Much hustle to go nowhere, not far. And then, definitely, another distant gunshot.
The opening sequence of La ciénaga, however annoyingly intercut with black title cards sporting a questionable graphic effect, is beyond description. A stroke of bravura, both narrative and directorial, not only acting as a proper ouverture to the story that is about to unfold, but also quietly hinting at the current sociopolitical state of the country. Argentina at last millennium sunset, that is.
Lucrecia Martel’s striking feature debut is wet and green and sweaty. It smells of swamp, it has its colours, and the carnal weight of the murky depth of a pond. It is a film soaked in muddled conflicts that moves at the pace of the adults’ compliant ineptitude, while the young are desperately urged to grow, if into a cynical disillusion. Formally mirroring the intro, in the final scene Momi noisily drags a chair to sit next to her sister Veronica, who’s placidly lying by the pool in the unbearable heat. ‘Adónde fuiste?’ asks the latter, seemingly resurrecting from a nap. ‘Fui donde se apareció la Virgen.’ Long pause. ‘No vi nada.’

Discerning a parallel between the feral creature masterly incarnated by Michel Piccoli and the figure of the film director is almost inescapable. He goes round the house like a sleuth, equally attracted by a seductive woman and a rusty old contraption. He experiences the surroundings with juvenile interest, showing the same cynical detachment while skilfully cooking, recording normal sounds, reviving memories on the wall, licking honey on a pearly skin, or building a functioning pistol to then make it an improbable work of art—like a tormented storyteller in search of subjects, and his own self, as tedium triggers creativity in the most unexpected ways. Dillinger è morto is at once a daring existentialist satire and a witty reflection on the nature of cinema. So, is Dillinger really dead?
In Marco Ferreri’s inspired vision, identity crumbles as things are progressively dispossessed, becoming an addictive object of curiosity for the senses. Seamlessly assuming the form of an apartment, or a playroom, the world is designed by a bored man that clashes with the impossibility of designing himself as a human being, and so as such fails. Gestures and interactions lose their meaning fed by an aimless intellectual need for exploration that fails too, eventually reverting to the trivial. Touching, watching, tasting, hearing—like a child, he acknowledges his being an alien to the world he created around himself, and fleets from the nonsense to the unknown, to experience the illusion of a new excitement while nothing will stop the setting of a sun also made of plastic.