Happening

Dir: Audrey Diwan
France 2021 | 100 minutes | Cert 15

Anne, a talented literature student with a bright academic future, finds herself pregnant in 1963 provincial France, before permissive society culture and abortion legislation and when even asking for an abortion risks a jail sentence. Anne’s mounting panic and private trauma play out as a harrowing and gripping drama, one that also offers a timely, urgent reminder of the constant threat to female reproductive rights. Adapted from celebrated French writer Anne Ernaux’s memoir, this is a sensitive, beautifully acted and sympathetic portrayal of an individual forced to take drastic measures to protect her own freedom and future. 

Columbus

Dir: Kogonada
USA 2018 | 104 minutes | Cert 12

Casey, who lives with her recovering addict mother, is an architecture buff who loves the many modernist buildings that the Indiana town is celebrated for, but whose obligations to her recovering addict mother hold her back from college, and escape. She strikes up a friendship with Jin, a visitor from the other side of the world who arrives to be at the hospital bedside of his famous architect father. A meticulously composed, gentle and poignant story about feelings and buildings.

Wildland

Dir: Jeanette Nordahl
Denmark 2020 | 75 minutes | Cert 15

Reeling from loss, softly spoken 17-year-old Ida comes to live with her cheerful, glamorous estranged aunt Bodil, owner of a nightclub and mother to three adult sons who do her bidding as loan sharks. Her initial warm welcome shifts to a sinister sense of Ida’s growing unease, as escalating hostility and glimpses of violent criminality reveal a very different world behind the tight-knit family façade. A restrained, absorbing and highly watchable psychodrama.

The Quiet Girl

Dir: Colm Bairéad
Ireland 2022 | 95 minutes | Cert 15

Cáit, a watchful, withdrawn child from a fractious and overcrowded family, is packed off by her exhausted pregnant mother and bullying father to spend the summer with farming relatives in rural Ireland. Cáit begins to blossom in their care, but finds it is a house with its own silent secrets. A gentle, lyrical film composed of small moments, and suffused in rich visual and powerful unspoken language.

“…deeply moving tale of rural Ireland already feels like a classic” Peter Bradshaw

Murina

Dir: Antoneta Alamat Kusijanovic
Croatia 2021 | 96 minutes | Cert 15

Beginning as an absorbing family drama set on the beautiful and rugged Croatian coast, the arrival of handsome and wealthy entrepreneur Javier challenges the fragile relationship between a bullying father, his detached wife and their defiant teenage daughter. A beautifully shot and crafted study of money, power and sexuality, and the bitter angst of a young woman trapped in a supposed paradise and yearning for freedom and independence.

“A superb study in sustained subliminal menace” Screen Daily

Paris, 13th District

Dir: Jacques Audiard
France 2021 | 105 minutes | Cert 18

A compelling, tender anthology of modern love involving the interlocking lives of four characters moving in and out of apartments, jobs and relationships in Les Olympiades, the high-rise apartment blocks in the 13th arrondissement on the southern rim of the city. A romantic celebration of physical human connection in the turbulent and at times alienating world of millennial dating culture.

“I think Marine Le Pen would hate this movie, which makes me love it even more” New York Times

There is no Evil

Dir: Mohammad Rasoulof,
Iran 2020 | 151 minutes | Cert 15

Unfolding across four interconnected stories set in contemporary Iran, the linking theme is the brutal impact of the death penalty and suppressed freedoms on ordinary Iranians.

Rasoulof, who like other directors is barred from filmmaking and has to find canny and covert ways around the ban, offers moral complexity to his suspenseful and moving mini dramas. Made ever more urgent by the recent and ongoing spate of death sentences handed out to young protestors, this is a powerful work of moral courage.

“Rasouluf’s outrage and nausea at the state-sanctioned murder gives the film passion” Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

Great Freedom

Dir: Sebastian Meise
Germany 2022 | 116 minutes | Cert 18

In post-war Germany, Hans is repeatedly jailed under Paragraph 175 of the German penal code which criminalises homosexuality. Over the subsequent decades, he returns to incarceration, defiant in the face of oppressive laws, befriending fellow inmate Viktor. A poignant love story and remarkable character study that finds hope in the humanity of its characters, while not flinching from showing what long-term imprisonment for a crime that is not a crime does to the soul.

“A portrait of a political journey, as well as that of a quietly fascinating hero” TimeOut

Aftersun

Dir: Charlotte Wells
UK 2022 | 101 minutes | Cert 12A

Eleven-year-old Sophie is spending a rare week with her loving and idealistic divorced dad Calum (Paul Mescal) in a fading Turkish resort in the 1990s. As her world of adolescence creeps into view, Calum struggles under the weight of life outside of fatherhood. Intricate, nuanced, gentle and stylistically daring, this is a brilliantly acted drama with emotional heft.

“[Charlotte Wells] has captured the uncapturable, finding the words and images to describe a feeling that always seems to sit just beyond our comprehension.” The Independent