In the coming-of-age film Mid90s Johan Hill (making his feature film debut as a writer/director) beautifully captures the moment where young teenager Stevie (Sunny Suljic) embraces an identity attached to a friendship group as opposed to his family. Set at the height of the street skateboarding scene in Los Angeles in the 1990s, the film is less an exercise in nostalgia and more an empathetic portrait of a distinct subculture and its appeal for a somewhat lost soul who is seeking approval and a sense of belonging.
Burning is a film rich in ambiguity both in terms of what the lovesick working class protagonist Lee Jon-su (Yoo Ah-in) believes to be happening and the film’s subtext. On the surface it is a love-triangle drama that becomes a paranoid thriller, but throughout the film there are issues of sexual jealously, fragile masculinity, class exploitation and even questioning the perception of reality. While the film unfolds over a surprisingly long running-time there is still a sense of urgency that is completely captivating.
Woman at War is a wonderful blend of self-reflexive absurdity, touching family drama, and droll humour, and a gleefully defiant thriller about radical environmental activism. Filmmaker Benedikt Erlingsson and lead actor Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir have created a magnificent cinematic hero in Halla, a woman who conducts the local choir and is preparing to adopt an orphaned child, while carrying out missions to sabotage the pylons on the Icelandic highlands, blocking the electricity supply to an aluminium plant.
For his first English-language film, French filmmaker Jacques Audiard brings an off-kilter outsider’s perspective to the American western with The Sisters Brothers. As interested in character interaction as it is with plot, the film follows a pair of brother on a job as hired assassins. Like most post-classical Hollywood westerns, it challenges the conventions and ideals of the genre, but the most distinguishing characteristics of this continually surprising film are its moments of humour, melancholy and tenderness.
There are many interesting comparisons between 1985 and Xavier Dolan’s It’s Only the End of the World as they are both films about young men returning to the family home and struggling to reveal a secret. However, while Dolan’s film utilised the techniques of melodrama, 1985 is low key, subtle and shot on grainy black-and-white film, thematically and stylistically evoking many of the films associated with 1990s New Queer Cinema. It’s a work of great sincerity and huge emotional power.
With Gloria Bell Sebastián Lelio’s successfully adapts his 2013 Chilean film Gloria, about a divorced woman entering into a new relationship after a chance encounter in a nightclub. Relocating the action to Los Angeles and starring Julianne Moore in the titular role, this new version loses none of the original film’s blend of tenderness, high spirits and bittersweet tone in its portrayal of a woman battling feelings of loneliness and regret, but also fiercely determined to bounce back from whatever life throws at her.
Thomas Caldwell, 2019
CINEMA AUTOPSY 