Fascinating and repulsive in equal measure, director Albert Serra's Afternoons of Solitude is unwavering in its commitment to photographing Peruvian bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey, and really nothing else, as he goes about his business. Serra and cinematographer Artur Tort Pujol's camera locks in on the irritable matador, following him from his monogrammed mini-van to several successive bullrings where he dances around massive, bleeding beasts before packing himself back into his personalised cab for a mobile debrief with a sycophantic entourage. An adoring (but offscreen) public bangs on their windows, raising the odd, nodding grimace from Roca before he defaults back to an indignant glare aimed directly into the camera. Pointedly, there is no interview element to Afternoons - Roca is never jabbed for insight or some form of context regarding the blood sport that has elevated him.
Detailing then is teased out through the meaning that we, the audience, ascribe to image: Roca's blaring eyes and darting tongue as the moment of execution draws near or the visible frustration that ripples through this coterie when a bull's death throes are judged to be uncooperative. The unkind, invective-laden way in which these men describe the animals they have just killed is perhaps the documentary's most shocking disclosure. Their dissatisfaction, even anger, when a bull has knocked one of them off their feet, or even just failed to die exactly on cue, speaks to frustrations within a finely orchestrated performance that has been designed around sacrificial gesture and almost ceremonial movement, rather than a sporting contest between two warring parties. These torero don't see these genuinely impressive animals as equals; they are instead potentially recalcitrant props. In another life, Roca's ambular fluency might've made him a ballet dancer. In this one though he's found his niche in an ability to read the final, frothing efforts of livestock. Of knowing how to position himself so that these charging bulls jostle rather than pulverise him; marking his resplendent traje de luces with their life's blood, rather than his.
Although director Jia Zhangke's Caught by the Tides isn't unique in terms of photographing a lead actor over a prolonged period of time, what remains completely unrepeatable about this film is that we are often watching embedded, documentary-level footage of an entire country shifting on its axis; its people hurled into not just a modern but futuristic era. As is often the case in Zhangke's films, Zhao Tao plays a woman named Qiao who is love with a man named Bin who pales in comparison to her. Here Zhubin Li's Bin is an incompetent showbiz manager who leaves his protege-cum-girlfriend behind to pursue his fortune in unscrupulous construction projects.
Compiled from aimless (Zhangke's words) digital video experiments from the early 2000s and deleted elements from films such as Unknown Pleasures, Still Life, and Ash is Purest White, Caught by the Tides is a collage of pillarboxed pixelation and various grades of grainy, cigarette-burned celluloid that, as well as illustrating the upheaval caused by the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, charts China's path through the COVID-19 pandemic to the country's current position as a technological superpower. Zhangke's camera catalogues a near silent Qiao as she is catapulted from the chipped paint and crumbling brick of her home village to an oppressively lit mall staffed by precocious robots. A pulverising experience then, to live through many generations worth of progress in just a few short decades.
Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cloud dabbles in the mechanics of urban horror, specifically the shared kind of hypnosis that compels half a dozen men, of varying age, to break with their social programming to violently pursue Masaki Suda's Yoshii across the country. Although this gang's motivations vary wildly - from a workplace snub or unrequited crush to indirectly landing one dud in trouble with a criminal gang - they all willingly burn their lives down to intimidate another nonentity who posts out counterfeit handbags.
Everything creeps in director Lucile Hadžihalilović's The Ice Tower. Headlights worm along winding mountain roads, catching sight of scurrying figures; runaways tiptoe around draughty film studio sets, seizing treasures then nestling in piles of discarded costume; and tranquilised movie stars slowly encircle their prey, dangling material comfort in exchange for consumptive pact. Clara Pacini plays Jeanne, an orphaned teenager who has fled from a group home and made her way towards a nearby town, in the hopes of seeing an ice rink - a modest ambition. When she reaches her dream destination, Jeanne doesn't dare participate either. Instead she watches older girls twirling on their skates, drinking in this untouchable frivolity until darkness takes hold and everyone else departs.
Even at the outset, before any of the film's adults have attempted to manipulate this lonely child, The Ice Tower is crushing in how it portrays the brittle longing of Pacini's Jeanne. Hadžihalilović's film applies the dreamy caution of fairy tale storytelling - where curious, and frequently parentless, innocents slowly trespass into dangerous situations - to a seventies milieu that hovers somewhere between sunken French-Italian postcard and something starker and more Soviet. As The Ice Tower goes on, and this runaway is drawn into a deliberately overripe film shoot, Jeanne becomes involved with Marion Cotillard's capricious, predatory actress. The natural procession of information begins to crack then distend. Events and situations become unstuck from each other with Pacini's foundling trying desperately to apply desires based in a naïve, childlike yearning for affection to a truly evil Ice Queen who assumes that all are in her thrall.
Lee Byung-hun plays Yoo Man-su, a former big wheel at the paper factory who finds himself without a job and simmering in a prolonged, dispiriting unemployment. Struggling to pay his mortgage, even after his family have jettisoned every possible luxury up to and including Netflix, the thoughts of this perturbed paterfamilias begin to turn criminal. Man-su decides that, if he cannot eclipse the rivals in his field with a finely honed CV, he might as well begin eliminating them. Adapted from a Donald E Westlake novel, previously filmed by Costa-Gavras as The Axe, director Park Chan-wook's No Other Choice is a black comedy built around, on the face of it, a specific kind of middle-aged, lower-middle class malaise. The film is also, perhaps, indicative of a timely anxiety facing the entirety of the modern workforce though, what with corporations bound and determined to sneak automation into every (formerly) human process.
Lee, a pin-up who has built a certain notoriety based on his ability to disappear into highly-motivated assassin roles, plays against type here as a grinning and sometimes bumbling amateur. Man-su is slow to get to grips with the sticky business of murder, often behaving in ways premised on despairing human frailty rather than machine precision. In this sense, No Other Choice is (at least in its earliest passages) very much like an Ealing Studios comedy of manners, with Man-su stalking blaring personalities as they all struggle to navigate the same barren job market. We watch as Lee's salaryman creeps closer and closer to a decisive confrontation, slowly drinking in the routines and rhetoric of his targets, then repeating them back to his own puzzled wife. All too quickly though Man-su's thinking adjusts to the terrible task that he has set for himself. His actions becoming increasingly brazen and pitiless; eventually, even becoming outright cruel. That Man-su fights so hard for so little - really not even parity with the life he enjoyed before he lost his first job - is the (bitter) cherry on top.
This latest Nosferatu is clearly the work of, in writer-director Robert Eggers, someone re-examining a piece that wields a massive, totemic power in their imagination. Although a basic beat-for-beat structure remains in place from FW Murnau's silent shocker (and, of course Bram Stoker's Dracula, the novel it plagarised), the specific detailing or connective tissue are being reconfigured to please the current custodian. There's a fluency on display here, a piece stewarded by someone who has very clearly turned these ideas and images over in their mind until they have become innately enormous and striking. Nosferatu's emotional volume is cranked way up in this telling, attempting to simulate the pulverising electrical currents that were sent through Eggers when he was himself a young, receptive viewer.
Although it's Leonardo DiCaprio's Bob at the forefront of One Battle After Another's absurdist ad campaign, his character is more of a subordinate presence to both Teyana Taylor's Perfidia and later their daughter, Chase Infiniti's Willa. Bob, armed with a dressing gown and a pair of absolutely gigantic sunglasses, must fight through the depressive fog he has generated in the decade and a half since the mother of his child absconded. Quite unable to focus, Bob is buoyed by sympathetic parties, like Sergio, who guide him step-by-step through these events. Although clearly past his prime, Bob's former life does still inspire respect, with Willa's big cat fixated sensei even referring to him, in conversation with the skate crew about to guide him across burning roofs, as a 'Gringo Zapata'. Throughout the film's many, intersecting predator-and-prey chases, Bob is stuck trailing far behind his targets. The beleaguered father never quite arriving on-time to rescue his loved ones, often only able to offer a fleeting distraction or sobbing commiseration.
Writer-directors Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani's latest is a handsome, fracturing take on 60s Eurospy films that accounts for both the underlining cruelty of the gamesmanship explored in those pieces as well as the simmering damage that these covert agents have had to live with in the decades since. When Reflection in a Dead Diamond opens, Fabio Testi's John Diman is a sozzled seventy-something living by the sea in the present and making a pest of himself with the kind of women he used to sweep off their feet. Diman isn't exactly sprightly for his age, even his walking looks pained, but the former button man is still able to shuffle along after suspicious-looking goons. At least as much of Reflection is told from the paranoid perspective of Diman as a younger man though.
Played by Yannick Renier, this frothing policeman is hot on the trail of a diamond thief who conceals her identity under layers of leather and plastic skin. This Diman finds himself lost in contradictory accounts of his adventures that, variously, cast him as the former subject in a long-running movie series that has powered past him or frozen in still black and white snaps on the pages of Italian fumetti strips. Cattet and Forzani display a charming fluency in how they arrange their influences, collapsing concepts from Angela and Luciana Giussani's Diabolik comics or Patrick McGoohan's The Prisoner television series in on a curdled kind of Bondian brutality. Even the writer-directors' approach to this totemic misogynist is strange and singular: the young Diman accomplishes his various, violent interactions with the detached, manual montage that concealed a returning Sean Connery in the pre-credits sequence of Guy Hamilton's Diamonds Are Forever.
Despite a bleached post-processing that leaves the film looking like a lifestyle magazine that has been left to curl in Earth's yellow sun, James Gunn's Superman, in casting a net wide enough to include minor (or simply old-fashioned) DC characters like Bob Haney and Ramona Fradon's Metamorpho, betrays an adoring sort of fluency for this material. One that goes beyond the expected deification of Christopher Reeve's caped adventures or the violent, satirical comics that were published in the 1980s and put the zap on DC's previous phase.
28 Years Later concerns itself with the offspring who have been born in the ruins of the twentieth century; the innocents whose daily reality is a brutal and ever present reminder that the generations who came before them were not just unreliable but actively destructive when pursuing their own ends. Told almost entirely from the perspective of a child, Alfie Williams' Spike, Years allows itself to unfold around crucial absences - largely those associated with the basic transmission of information - that are themselves willfully elided by people who presume to play the role of parent.
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