Power Station (dir. Dan Edelstein & Hillary Powell)
News dooms on and on. It’s easy, then, to feel depleted and depressed. All the more reason to welcome this film which comes prefaced by a quote from the Scottish documentarian John Grierson: “The drama is on your doorstop.” In the middle of the lockdown, Edelstein and Powell decide to take the future into their hands and turn their Walthamstow street solar. To raise funds, they sleep on their roof for 23 nights during winter. They hold a sunflower festival. They fly a flag for the carers, allotment gardeners, immigrants in their neighbourhood. This celebration of DIY-ism—mostly DIY-funded—is an antidote to the actuarial joylessness of modern British politics.
Marty Supreme (dir. Josh Safdie)
Safdie’s first solo feature for over a decade gives Timothée Chalamet his best role to date: Marty Mauser, a fast-talking, unhindered-by-modesty, Jewish shoe salesman from the tenements of New York’s Lower East Side in the 1950s (“I’m like Hitler’s worst nightmare”) who fancies himself as a table tennis champion. Off he slaloms, all bullshit and bravura, an underdog who wangles his way to London’s Ritz hotel and Tokyo. The zip and dash of Safdie’s earlier films (Good Times, Uncut Gems) are still very much present here; the casting (Gwyneth Paltrow as an ageing film star Mauser beds, Tyler, The Creator, writer Pico Iyer, funambulist Philippe Petit) is imaginative; the eardrum buzz it generates marvellous.
One Battle After Another (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)
More is more in Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland: American history as black absurdism, paranoid fantasia, unholy terror. In Anderson’s adaptation: same. Leonardo DiCaprio has a ball as an ageing revolutionary who used to bust immigrants from detention centres near the Mexican border. His pot-smoking dotage is disrupted when he discovers he and his daughter are being hunted down by a white supremacist Christian played by Sean Penn (more energised than he’s been for years). There’s chaos here, roiling commotion. Resonances aplenty with Antifa panics and ICE-abduction video footage. A bonkers score by Jonny Greenwood. A standout performance by Teyana Taylor as a righteous rebel. Most of all, amid the kills and thrills, there’s a bedrock of familial emotions that rings true.
It Was Just An Accident (dir. Jafar Panahi)
Panahi’s run-ins with the Iranian authorities—he has been repeatedly jailed and held under house arrest; his films have been banned; just this month, his so-called “propaganda activities” earned him a travel ban—have sometimes obscured the quality his work. Not this time. It Was Just An Accident, which won him the Palme d’Or at Cannes, is an engrossing thriller in which a car mechanic kidnaps a man he suspects tortured him in prison. On the brink of burying him in the desert, he decides to contact other old inmates who may or may not vouchsafe his innocence. This is a road movie full of political ghosts, nods to Beckett, and the blackest of humour.
Blue Moon (dir. Richard Linklater)
Though Linklater and Ethan Hawke have been collaborating for decades—Dazed and Confused, the Before trilogy, Boyhood—there’s no creative cruise-control in this enthralling portrait of Lorenz Hart, the gay, midget-sized lyricist of timeless beauties such as “My Funny Valentine”. By 1943, he was losing the plot, drinking more than ever, unstable, leaving his partner Oscar Hammerstein to complete Oklahoma! with Richard Rodgers. Blue Moon takes place on the opening night of that musical. As the glowing reviews pour in, Hart is rueful, flirts with a delivery boy, is uselessly besotted with a female art student nearly 30 years his junior. Hawke’s talent for playing garrulous, slightly gauche characters is at its peak in this tender valentine to a complex genius.
Derek Bailey: New Sights, Old Sounds (dir. Ian Greaves)
“You’re on the BBC, right?” Stewart Lee reproached Matthew Parris, the presenter of Radio 4’s Great Lives. “You’ve got to meet the challenge of a culture that is failing artists—and failing the public.” The subject of the show was guitarist Derek Bailey whose music the ex-Conservative MP had likened to that of a chimpanzee. Bailey (1930–2005) was a singular improvisor, always in the moment, deconstructing and reconstructing jazz. This adeptly edited archive film, drawing on rare footage from across Europe and the States, captures his mesmerising technique, stand-up comedian delivery and bracing willingness to court confusion and rejection.
Black Atlas (dir. Edward George)
Edward George is best known as one of the original members of the pioneering Black Audio Film Collective and as the co-writer/presenter of their landmark Afrofuturist film The Last Angel of History. Here, just as he did in the early days of the BAFC, he swims through images associated with the colonial archive—in this case, those from a French-American collection held at the Warburg Library in Bloomsbury. His is a self-described “image essay” in which he mulls the black bodies in that archive. What could they mean? What visual motifs recur? What do they say to the present? There’s no finger-pointing here; just sonority, speculation, the poetry of deep thought.
Riefenstahl (dir. Andres Veiel)
German filmmaker Veiel has spent much of his career listening to cant and self-certainties—from bankers, terrorists, politicians. Here he listens to the self-convinced orations of Leni Riefenstahl, whose visually magnificent Triumph of the Will (1935) made her the cine-laureate of 1930s fascism. He shows how she used Roma prisoners from concentration camps as extras, knowing that they would be killed after filing was over. He also plays the effusive telephone messages her unrepentant fans left for her when they felt she’d been maligned by TV interviewers. The film makes one wonder: who are the cinematic enablers of fascism in 2025? How long will it take for history to prosecute them?
The Mastermind (dir. Kelly Reichardt)
Josh O’Connor was splendid as an art thief in Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera and—blow me down!—he’s splendid as an art thief here. It’s set in suburban Massachusetts in the early 1970s. War may be raging in Vietnam, but things are sleepier for JB Mooney (O’Connor), the son of a judge, an art-school dropout, father of two, an out-of-work carpenter. They get slightly livelier when he sets out to steal paintings from a local museum. The would-be heist is a failure, but—this being a Reichardt rather than a Michael Mann or Steven Soderbergh film—the drama, painted in muted colours, unfolds slowly, inviting unanswerable questions, drawing us in inexorably.
Peter Hujar’s Day (dir. Ira Sachs)
There are exceptions—Louis Malle’s My Dinner with Andre (1981), Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset (2004)—but all-talk films appear only rarely. This one is based on a 1974 conversation between photographer Hujar (played by Ben Whishaw) and his writer friend Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall) in which he recounted on tape everything he had done, from getting up to falling asleep, the previous day. Susan Sontag calls, there’s a visit to Allen Ginsberg’s apartment—but the tone is more twilight-pensive than name-droppingly theatrical. He talks about printing technique, about unpaid bills. This is a New York—post-Stonewall, pre-Aids—rarely evoked on the big screen. A version of “Downtown” culture that spotlights work more than “transgression”.
