Marching Band (2024)

I did not watch a lot of great movies on my long haul trips so far this year, but this is the winner. French film-maker Emmanuel Courcol has a nice touch with this dramedy. Benjamin Lavernhe plays Thibaut, a distinguished and sensitive orchestra conductor who collapses mid-rehearsal in Paris and is told he has leukaemia and needs a bone marrow transplant donor. Thibaut is adopted and this means tracking down his biological brother out in the boondocks: factory worker Jimmy, played by the formidable Pierre Lottin, whose gift for deadpan comedy really only gets free rein at the very beginning of the film. Thibaut has the tricky task of asking someone who is a total stranger if he wouldn’t mind donating his bone marrow. But this fraught situation reveals – a little programmatically, perhaps – that Jimmy has a real musical talent, like him, plays trombone in the raucous factory band and nurses a passion for jazz on vinyl. Thibault sees in Jimmy a vision of what his own life could have been without his adoptive mother’s comfortable middle-class background, and sees Jimmy and himself through the lens of class, politics and society, and not the supposed destiny of pure talent. It is a great story well told, and it has the subtext of what the affirmative action of class provledge affords those who are born into it.

I'm Still Here (2024)

I finally saw the last of the 2025 Best Picture nominations, and this was fantastic. It is also based on a real story, and the film recreates the settings and the time. It is 1970 in Rio de Janeiro, where Eunice and Rubens live with their five children by Leblon Beach. With white sand as soft as pillows and blue seas as clear as the sky, the idyllic locale should be a soft landing for the Paiva family. An architect and former congressman, Rubens has only recently returned to the country after a six-year self-exile due to the 1964 coup d’état. For the family, however, the dictatorship is never far from the foreground. Military helicopters fly over the beach, and trucks carrying additional troops occupy the streets. Television news stations cover the release of the German and Swiss ambassadors from anti-government factional custody. Rubens also takes secret phone calls in his office, coordinating pickups and drop-offs of packages. The collapse occurs when Rubens is taken for questioning by plain-clothed army officials, a catastrophe that takes the film to darker places and engenders many unanswerable questions. And while it’s not a spoiler to say Eunice and her children will never see Rubens again, those hopeless queries aren’t necessarily what the movie is about. Rather, this poignant film concerns the response to having neither a definitive answer nor final closure. Eventually, Eunice and Eliana will be taken in for questioning, psychologically tortured, and then released. Eunice will pick up the pieces and dig, becoming politically active in the process. We will follow her struggle through the decades—her career as a professor and supporter of Indigenous rights—leaping to São Paulo in 1996 before settling in 2014. She made a life after that was both all her own and honored the legacy of her husband.

The Girl With The Needle (2024)

This is the Oscar nominee for Best International movie, which is from Denmark. To say that it is on the dark side is to ill prepare the viewer for what is to come. This is a relentlessly grim movie, one that serves as a reminder that women on the fringe of the economic ladder have been marginalized for generations, around the world. I did not know this, but read in a review that it is based on the true story of a Danish serial killer named Dagmar Overbye, which only becomes apparent later. What is apparent is that the movie becomes almost numbing in its brutality. The main character is Karolina, who is being evicted from her apartment for non-payment of rent when the movie opens. Her husband is a soldier in WWI and she has not heard from him, and what she makes at her job as a seamstress. Things go from bad to worse when her husband returns severely disfigured as well as psychologically damaged from the war, and she is abandoned by her wealthy lover when she becomes pregnant and his mother doesn't approve. She meets up with a woman who offers to help her find a home for her baby. She never quite turns the corner to a better life, but her journey is unexpected.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig (2024)

The reason that this is Germany's submission for best international film and not Iran's is that the director, Mohammad Rasoulof, is a fugitive Iranian director and dissident wanted by the police in his own country, where he has received a long prison sentence and flogging. It is one of the five films nominated in that catagory for the 2025 Academy Award. The movie begins as what my kids would call a downbeat political and domestic drama in the familiar style of Iranian cinema, and then progressively escalates to something extravagantly crazy and traumatized. Iman is an ambitious lawyer who has just been promoted to state investigator – one step short of being a full judge in the revolutionary court. He gets a handsome pay raise and better accommodation for his family: which consists of his wife and two student-age daughters. But the promotion almost immediately brings disappointment and tension: Iman, a judicious man, is stunned to discover that he is expected to rubber-stamp death-penalty judgments without reading the evidence. He is told that he must now be secretive with friends and family who could be threatened and doxed by criminal elements as a way of pressuring him. There are a series of unfortunate events that co-occur in the midst of the widespread protests in 2022 (which are shown in the movie with actual footage taken at the time) and the situation quickly deteriorates fpr Iman's family.

Frida (2024)

This documentary of the artist Frida Kahlo is one that you will love or hate, and it might depend on how you feel about the subject herself. Creative, colourful, and predominantly told through the words of its subject as recorded in her illustrated diaries, this engaging documentary about the Mexican artist is a beguiling and rather beautiful tribute to her spirit and originality. Its deft blend of archive footage and what I found to be lovely, organic animation of her works of art marks the directorial debut of Carla Gutiérrez, who served as the editor on several documentaries about groundbreaking women including RBG, about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Julia, which looked at the legacy of television chef Julia Child. Kahlo’s life was full and eventful, but while the film doesn’t attempt to explore every aspect and every romantic connection, it does delve satisfyingly deeply into her interior life, explored through her artistic output. There is something wildly appealing about how Kahlo approaches art that has endured robustly, more so than her fragile body endured, and for me, it is captured in this imaginative telling of her life and her creative process. I saw an exhibit of her early work, some dating back to her childhood, and the consistency with which she applied magical realism to her art is breathtaking, and reflected throughout this documentary, which is short listed for the 2025 Feature Length Documentary Academy Award.

The Taste of Things (2023)

I cannot say what it is like to watch this movie if you do not like to cook or to eat, but as someone who loves to cook and also to eat it is immensely pleasurable. And you know it from the opening scene--why? Because it is 38 minutes long and it shows two people, and their two young assistants, preparing a meal in a big country kitchen. The meal is intricate, and multiple courses are being prepared simultaneously. The camera glides through the kitchen, following the characters as they bring a handful of vegetables to an already hot pan on the stove, circling back to the chopping on a nearby table. The camera never stops moving. What we are doing, for 38 minutes, is watching these people cook, and, naturally, drooling over the meal being prepared before our eyes. This scene is an amazing feat, so much so that there's satisfaction when you watch the guests in the dining room taste the food, savoring every bite, not even needing to say a word. The pleasure is palpable. It extends to the growing of the food as well--there is attention to detail at every step, from where the food starts to ending up on the table and being consumed. This is also a love affair between two people--Dodin and Eugénie have been companionably working side by side for twenty years. Their story unfolds in its own time, in its own way. Nothing is pushed. Nothing is heightened artificially. The devotion to food is both real and metaphor: how we prepare food, the care we take, indicates how we feel for each other. But it's also the thrill of the preparation in and of itself.The kitchen feels like a place you know, or at least a place you'd like to enter into. The details of cooking without electricity, without plugged-in appliances, is attended to in great detail. This is so so good, do not miss it. I see why France picked this as their International Film submission, it captures what I love about the French food culture.

Totem (2023)

This is a movie about culture in modern day Mexico, with one foot in the 21st century and one firmly in the land of their ancestors. It is also about family and anticipatory grief. The movie opens with a mother and daughter driving across a bridge. THe seven-year-old Sol and her mother engage in a rite of superstition, holding their breath and making a wish. Sol declares that her wish is for her father to live; her mother focuses on the road ahead. The movie goes on to follow a day in the life of Sol and her family as they prepare a birthday party for her sick father-—an event that’s gravity sets in as the hours pass—both a celebration of another year and a preemptive, heartfelt sending off. Presented largely from the point of view of two children, this film immerses the audience in a boisterous family gathering, where a handful of adult siblings have gathered to celebrate the birthday of their brother, a painter named Tonatiuh. Tona is barely seen for most of the movie, confined to a back room where he refuses visitors. Naturally, this confuses his daughter, who spends the day wandering the house alone, building a pillow fort in the living room or collecting snails in the garden, and wondering why her father doesn't love her. There are several things that sink in as you watch this calm and collected depiction of "A Day In The Live" of Sol. One is that this family will remember Toma after he is gone and his memory will be a blessing--but that Sol is not being prepared for the death of her father, and that will be a trauma to unpack later. The other is that a culture that revolves around food, family, and friends has a lot to recommend it. This is quietly lovely and well worth watching.

Fallen Leaves (2023)

This film has been submitted by Finland for the Best International Film category and was shortlisted for that back in December. I do not have a lot of experience with Finnish films, but this seems very much related to the Scandinavian film school, where even humor can be dark. I read a review which posited that this is a perfect film, which is defined as: A perfect film knows what it’s about, knows what it wants to say, and knows that even when what it has to say is unusually simple, what it says can’t be reduced to words or any form of description apart from the thing itself, and that a perfect film has to be seen in order for its perfection to be appreciated. There is a lot going on in this sparse movie, most of it without much in the way of dialogue. The movie is a muted romance that goes through conventional narrative paces. A man, Jussi, and woman, Ansa, both shrouded in loneliness, almost meet, then do meet, then can’t meet, then meet again, then come to an understanding that unites them. The complications are familiar ones. There’s booze, there are bad jobs, there’s an encroaching outside world full of troubles. This are a lot of socially conscious aspects of this, down to Ansa’s evening radio broadcasts delineating the Russian invasion of Mariupol deliberate bombing of civilians, ending with a report of the loss of life at a maternity hospital. I had just watched the documentary of this, and the radio reports accurately reflected those atrocities. Finland shares a 830 miles border, so it is quite relevant to them what their neighbors consider standard operating procedures if they think it is theirs to take.

Godzilla Minus One (2023)

Godzilla turns 70 next year, and to celebrate, his parent company Toho Studios released a very conventional Godzilla movie, one that won an academy award. The story is this: Set in 1946, “Godzilla Minus One” follows a spiritually depleted group of ex-military men as they rally to vanquish everyone’s favorite kaiju antihero. Here, Godzilla’s presence is a given, as it probably should be after dozens of movies and spinoff projects. If traumatized survivors like disgraced kamikaze pilot Koichi Shikishima can’t stop Godzilla, he will destroy Ginza and then stomp all over Tokyo. Koichi is motivated by survivor’s guilt. In an establishing scene on Odo Island, Koichi takes aim at Godzilla but can’t bring himself to shoot. As a result, several fellow army men die, leaving Koichi to bury their bodies. Reviving Koichi’s ultimately patriotic mojo takes priority since that sort of nationalistic passion is apparently essential to fighting Godzilla. I have to say, this was my last choice in the category that it won in, but I suspect that there is an element of nostalgia that propelled it forward in the voting. If you are a Godzilla fan, this will likely appeal, but if not, maybe not.

Godland (2023)

The attraction for me in this Icelandic film that was short listed for Best International Film is that it is filmed in an exceptionally stark and beautiful place. An inexperienced Danish priest is sent to Iceland to establish a new church, but it turns out that he is singularly unprepared in every way to accomplish this task. Set in the late 19th century, It tracks the priest, Lucas, as he sails to Iceland, where he insults the team that will be transporting him, and they bear with him as he trudges across by horse, foot and finally stretcher. Outwardly, his mission is familiar. The church will promote the faith and provide services to the coastal flock, a commission that he undertakes with confidence, a stack of heavy books and a large, cumbersome still camera that he straps to his back. He hopes to photograph the people that he meets during his expedition, a ludicrous, paradoxical idea for a man who proves wholly incapable of seeing the world around him. Early on the physical weight of what he brings leads to a death, yet he is unable to regroup. He is a strange and quite off putting character who not only doesn’t get it but doesn’t learn. The hero of the movie is the land itself, the rough beauty of the country is central to the appeal of the story.

Perfect Days (2023)

Wim Wenders, for me, the director of Paris, Texas fame, directs this Japanese movie, which was Japan's entry into the Oscars for consideration for Best International Film, and it made the final list of nominees. There is a Japanese word, “komorebi”, which was the original title of the film. Literally translated, it means “sunlight leaking through trees”, but there’s more to it than that. It speaks of a profound connection with nature, and the necessity to pause, to take the time to absorb and appreciate the perfection of tiny, seemingly insignificant details. This theme is visited throughout the movie in dreams. Every day is the same. Hirayama, a taciturn man in his 60s, wakes in his spartan apartment to the reluctant grey light of pre-dawn. He pulls on his overalls, takes a can of coffee from a street vending machine and sets out in his modest little van to start work, diligently cleaning the public toilets of Tokyo. It’s a solitary life. Hirayama can go days saying no more than a few cursory words. If members of the public notice him, they largely view him as an inconvenience. But mostly they don’t even see him. It should be the most soul-crushingly bleak film ever made – an endless and predictable grind with banality and urinal cakes. But the zen meditation on beauty, fulfilment and simplicity is quite the opposite: it’s an achingly lovely and unexpectedly life-affirming picture. It all depends – and this is central to the film’s gently profound message – on your way of looking at things. Hirayama looks at the world with his eyes, but sees with his heart. Hirayama has not only grasped komorebi, he has made it the keystone of his essence. He sees all things, all people, as equally important, with an equal capacity for transcendence. It is both a peaceful concept and a life lesson.

The Teacher's Lounge (2023)

This is a quiet yet an intense thriller about things that happen every day. It is very difficult to watch, but in the way that very uncomfortable things happen. The teacher at the center of this is Carla Nowak, a Polish emigre teaching math and physical education. She’s an idealist about education and the obligation of citizens to look out for each other. She’s a do-gooder, mostly in a constructive way. When one her kids gets hauled out of class to be accused of stealing, Carla has to sit in on a conference with the boy and his parents as they explain that they gave him the money so he could buy a videogame and suggest that it’s racism (they’re Turkish) that put them in this humiliating predicament. It seems like a convincing explanation. Carla believes it. But the event deepens her fear of theft. The next time she’s on break in the teachers’ lounge and has to leave it, she keeps her laptop open with the video camera secretly running. When she returns, she finds some cash missing from the wallet she left in her inside coat pocket. A check of the recording shows somebody taking money from her wallet while she was out of the room. Then things start to fall apart. Carla loses control in a lot of ways, most of which we can identify with, and the movie spirals in a very uncomfortable direction. It is a story of unintended consequences, where some have regrets and others are collateral damage.

El Conde (2023)

Pinochet, the blood thirsty past dictator of Chile, who ousted Allende in a U.S> backed coup, is at the center of this movie, and quite cleverly and successfully, is a vampire who has lived for centuries. His lust for blood and how he keeps it coming--a whole new meaning for a protein shake--is cinematically spectacular and gruesme at the same time. This is wild and weird and it will keep you thinking about it for days to come. Maybe months. An almost fairytale-like English-language voiceover (the reason for this choice will later be revealed) drives this grimly amusing account, first chronicling the malevolent escapades that Pinochet, then under a different name, enjoyed during the years leading up to the French Revolution. Moving along through history around the globe, always siding with the oppressive elite and actively destabilizing any left-leaning movements, he nourished not only his urge for blood but also his predilection for fascism. Pinochet has amassed a collection of morbid relics from his storied travels, including Napoleon’s hat and Marie Antoinette’s head. There comes a time when he decides that he is done with it, that he will cease to maraude and therefore die. News of this plan alarms Pinochet’s middle-aged children, a pack of greedy but listless individuals desperate to ensure their placid, entitled lifestyles remain undisturbed even if their patriarch wants to vanish. Concerned, they make the trek to Dad’s secret home to learn about his finances and future plans. The bulk of the movie is about this meet up, interspersed with flashbacks across his life. So good, no matter what you think about it based on this, it is well worth watching.

Zone of Interest (2023)

This is a harrowing movie. My spouse, who was reluctantly dragged to watch this with me in a theater, likened this to Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil. She described Adolph Eichmann as an ordinary, rather bland bureaucrat, who, in her words, was ‘neither perverted nor sadistic’ but ‘terrifyingly normal’ . She contends that he acted without any motive other than to diligently advance his career in the Nazi bureaucracy. This seems to fit this movie like a glove. We watch the Rudolf Hoss family go about their lives literally next door to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. Their back fence is the wall around the camp, and throughout the movie, the sounds of those who meet their death there provide the backdrop against which they live. And live they do—they go to school, horseback ride, entertain guests—all with the help of what are essentially enslaved Jews who will then be killed—but not only do they thrive in this environment, they feel lucky to have elevated themselves in such a way. It is thoroughly disgusting and terrifyingly obvious that this is what white supremacy looks like, both then and now.

I, Captain (2023)

This film from Italy chronicles the journey of two teenagers from Senegal trying to get to Europe to seek a better life for their their families. They are 16 years old and have not left their neighborhoods before they embark on the thousands of miles journey across Africa before they even get to the Mediterranean coast. The film opens outside of Dakar, Senegal’s capital, Seydou is first met waking up in the one-room house where he lives with his widowed mother and an uncountable number of little sisters, some of whom are seen dancing ecstatically in a local ceremony at which Seydou plays drums with his cousin Moussa. Seydou and Moussa have been secretly working on building sites for months to save money for a trip to Europe, where they hope to earn even more and perhaps become hip hop stars so famous that white people will want their autographs. Seydou is a largely obedient son, and so he tests the waters with his mother and asks what she’d think if he left for Europe, he says it would be to provide money for her and his sisters. Not that it matters to his mom. She flatly forbids him from going, warning that far too many people have died along the way, especially on the boats across the Mediterranean, words of warning that hang ominously in the air. Although Seydou will defy his mother’s wishes, he and Moussa take time before their departure to ask the local shaman to petition their ancestors for their leave to travel. Fortunately, permission is granted, and after paying a substantial amount of their savings to middlemen — thinking this should cover the whole journey to Europe — they set off on a bus headed west. They pass through Niger and at one point pick up fake passports. Their savings dwindle and the methods of transportation gradually get less comfortable and secure. The first sign of just how dangerous the journey will be, and how ruthless these traffickers are, comes when a man falls off the flatbed truck they’re all crammed into the back of as the driver races recklessly through the desert. There’s no chance that he’ll stop the truck to pick up the lost man, and it starts to dawn on Seydou that maybe his mother was right after all. Without giving too much away, she was right.

Society of the Snow (2023)

This is not the first attempt to the the story of the crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 in the Andes mountains on October 13, 1972. It has been told and re-told and re-told again, to varying degrees of success, although what "success" looks like is up to interpretation. This film, nominated for a number of Oscars this year, is the latest installment, an adaptation of Pablo Vierci’s 2009 book. This in itself is a new development--The standard text that has been used is Piers Paul Read's 1974 book Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors. The facts alone are terrifying. Most of the passengers onboard were killed instantly (the plane was, essentially, sliced in half by a mountain). After a number of days, the search was called off. The starving survivors resorted to cannibalism. They were buried under an avalanche at one point. Eventually, when the weather turned towards a thaw, two young members of the rugby team onboard set off west to try to reach Chile. They had no gear and no climbing experience. Against the odds, the two made it to civilization, and were able to guide rescue helicopters back to the crashed plane. Sixteen passengers were lifted out, alive. The story made international news. The take away message for me is about survival--it is a decision to survive, and once that decision has been reached, everything from then on flows from it. That alone is not enough, of course, and there is a miraculousness to the end result here, but the mental toughness the movie conveys as an essential ingredient is memorable as well as unsettling.

Anatomy Of A Fall (2023)

This is such an unusual film. It takes place in the French Alps, and while we do not see much of the relationship, we hear quite a lot about it as the film unfolds. It opens with Sandra in the midst of an interview about her life as a famous author. As the interview goes on and gets a bit flirtatious, loud music begins to pump from upstairs. It’s her husband Samuel, playing an instrumental version of 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.” On repeat. And it gets louder and louder. He’s aggressively trying to derail the interview, and he succeeds. The interviewer leaves, as does their son Daniel takes the dog Snoop for a long walk. When he returns, he finds Samuel in the snow, a bloody wound in his head. Did he fall from the attic in which he was working? Did he jump? Or was he pushed? The film goes through the investigation into what happened, which reveals a lot of detail about the couple’s marriage. So it starts with a traditional mystery but becomes an analysis of a different kind of fall than the literal one at its center. It’s about the decline of a partnership and how often these marital falls can happen in slow-motion, over years of resentments and betrayals. At its center is Sandra who finds herself in the middle of a nightmare when a French court indicts her for the murder of her husband. The court room drama is intense, entirely foreign to an American audience—there is a lot of supposition and hypothesis rather than entirely fact based prosecution. The Napoleonic Code introduced the assumption that any suspect was innocent until proven guilty, but the ways to be proven guilty are quite different than an American court room drama. And all through it, their son hears it all. This is intense and impressive movie, one of the Oscar nominees not to miss.

Four Daughters (2023)

This movie, along with 20 Days in Mariupol, were short listed for an Oscar in two categories: Best International Movie and Best Documentary. That means that Tunisia and Ukraine picked these movies as their submission for consideration, which is a great feat for a documentary to achieve. They both made the nomination, but only in the documentary category. They are competing against each other, along with three other documentaries from countries across the globe. This is an intimate attempt to unravel what attracts women to ISIS and radical Islam. Olfa Hamrouni has four daughters: Eya, Tayssir, Ghofrane, and Rahma. The two eldest, Ghofrane and Rahma, disappeared from their home years ago, radicalized to run away and join ISIS. As Olfa and her youngest two daughters recount the memories of their lives before and after they left, they are also describing the realities for women who live in rigid patriarchal societies. Olfa, Eya, and Tayssir are around to tell their side of the story. Ghofrane and Rahma are not, so two actresses fill their space in the film. Together they dissect the worlds and histories that have built them and bring to the forefront of their minds the subconscious yearning for all women to experience control over their lives. The thing most memorable to me is that these women experience abuse of the kind that is for certain not acceptable religiously, but is so commonly reported in restrictive patriarchal societies, regardless of the reigious framework.

Close (2022)

This movie depends on you not knowing too much about it when you watch it, making a review harder to write. This is a beautifully crafte dand overall remarkable film with exquisitely modulated performances by non-actors in the lead roles, and imagery that will make you want to spend a month in the Belgian countryside. The story is about two families and more specifically about two boys. Léo and Rémi both grew up on small farms worked by their families. They ride their bikes to and from school every day, and at the end of a workday, one will often go over to the other's house for dinner and to sleep over. They have an easy closeness that works well with their families, who are also close, but when one of them is bullied at school and the other becomes a bit more popular, the way of their closeness changes. It is inevitable and also sad--the way that toxic masculinity shapes the behavior of the next generation on playgrounds around the world. This one is a quiet handling of all of that, with very realistic lack of communication and exploration of feelings. I think all of the nominees in the best International Film catagory in 2023 were very good, this one included.

The Quiet Girl (2022)

This is indeed a movie about a very quiet girl. And it is an Irish language film, with 95% of the dialogue in Irish, and English words peppered in only occasionally (there are subtitles for both). "The Quiet Girl" (Irish title “An Cailín Ciúin”) is the first Irish-language film to be nominated for an Academy Award (this year's Best International Feature). It's a milestone for Irish-language film. Cáit, the girl is a wary and watchful figure. She has survived her chaotic neglectful home life—her drunken father, her harried mother, the crushing poverty, too many siblings and one on the way—by making herself as small and still as possible. The cinematograpy is gorgeous. The focus is on the details: the trees whirring by outside the car in a dizzying blur, the high-flung blue sky peeping through, the inky-black darkness of a bar’s interior at midday, the way shafts of sunlight pierce through still pools of water. Adults are seen from below, or the side. They are unknowable mysteries to Cáit. And she blossoms ever so slightly when she goes to stay with childless relatives who cherish her. It is simple and sparse and gorgeous to behold.