"I always have a very strong feeling of what I don't want my films to be, but it's sometimes a little bit mysterious what I want them to be." - An Interview with Hlynur Pálmason.

Time is of the essence in Hlynur Pálmason’s films. For his extraordinary epic Godland (2022), the director spent two years photographing the decomposing remains of a horse; in the film, this is presented as a minute-long montage, evoking time’s inexorable passage. A few months before Godland premiered at Cannes, Pálmason screened Nest at the Berlin Film Festival, a 22-minute short that took 18 months to film. His latest feature The Love That Remains continues that trend, as Pálmason follows a single family over the course of a year, with the changing climate and landscapes being as integral to the film as any of the dramatic, humorous and surreal incidents that he captures during the course of the narrative. This is Pálmason's fourth feature and it further solidifies my belief that he is one of the most exciting filmmakers working today. I was delighted to have the opportunity to discuss the film with him shortly before its UK premiere at last year's London Film Festival. 

One of the things I really appreciate about your films is that every time it feels like you're pushing yourself in a new direction. Is that something that you're consciously striving for when you develop a new project?

I think you at least hope that it's a natural step forward, that you're not forcing anything. I mean, I never think, ‘OK, now I'm going to do something completely different,’ it's more like it's the process that dictates where we're going. When we moved back to Iceland, we bought a film camera because I had this idea of wanting to make films constantly. I didn't want to write and develop for four years and then shoot a film over two months, I wanted to shoot every week. It was more like a painter’s process, just like being a painter in a studio. I felt that if there was such a long time between filming, I didn't feel like a filmmaker, you know? When it came to filming, I was rusty.
 
I also felt that by filming every week, and by creating material and watching the material, I became much more stimulated by it and the ideas came more naturally. The process for the last couple of years has been working on parallel things rather than one thing, and I've found it very satisfying and very exciting. Of course, I’m interested in certain things, I'm always interested in how time passes and you can see that in my films, but I'm always trying – or we as a group of collaborators, we are trying – not to repeat ourselves. We're trying to make things that resonate with us, but hopefully also out there.
 
You work across a lot of different artistic practices. Do you see it all as part of a singular process?
 
More and more, I think it’s just the same. Sometimes it's like, you just work, you just create a daily routine and ritual so that you can be productive, and even that's hard sometimes, because you have to somehow support your family and you have to be part of the world. If you can create a daily routine that is kind of productive, then I have a very strong feeling that the ideas and projects kind of decipher themselves what they want to be and I just have to spend time with it and work on it. The project decides if it's a short film or if it's a little bit longer or and has a bigger narrative. I just try to allow them to decide what they want to be, and then I collaborate with others and try to get things financed if they feel very serious and they feel like they are feature films. But yeah, it's very much about allowing things to just emerge naturally for me now.
 
So, at what point did this story start to emerge and begin to announce itself as a feature?
 
It's a long time ago. I mean, the first image you see in the film was shot in 2017, so it's even before Godland. There are different kinds of triggers and different kinds of seeds that I've planted over the years, but I remember that being the first image that was created for the film. At that time I had the project The Love That Remains, but I didn't know that I was creating an image for The Love That Remains, that came later. I remember one of the most important places in the process was actually when I was shooting this short film called Nest, which was kind of like a COVID project. I was just filming my kids building a treehouse and I wanted the elements and animals and everything to be part of the film, so I had to build this kind of camera house around my camera so the animals wouldn't see me. I ended up spending a lot of time in this small shed, just sitting there and waiting, recording sound and reading and writing, and I started thinking about what the parents of these kids are doing. I was seeing these kids build a treehouse, so I started writing these narratives of the parents, and I think that was one of the places where it began to be serious.
 
We see a lot of movies that are about couples separating and going through a divorce, but generally, the movie is about that subject, and it's the driving force behind all the drama. In this film, it's not really about that. The separation is just one thing that's happening in the lives of these characters. Was that something you were very keen not to emphasise?
 
I always have a very strong feeling of what I don't want my films to be, but it's sometimes a little bit mysterious what I want them to be. You start by saying, “OK, I don't want this film to be another separation film where people are screaming at each other,” because I know people go through those processes, we all know that, and we don't need to always emphasise the most dramatic things. I think sometimes the more effortless things are just as important. They're a little bit trickier to capture, but I think if you really give yourself time, you can capture that also and create a film that is as strong as the more dramatic film.
 
I also felt that I hadn't seen it before. I was more interested in how you spend time with the people you love when a family is fractured and separated, because you still have these kids together. You see it too often in real life, the negative side of people not being able to spend time together anymore, but they still have this history of love and a relationship and all kinds of things that they went through. I just felt there was so much to explore there and it was a very open canvas for people to put in their own experiences, because I really like work that is open for interpretation. I felt like this was a really good concept and narrative that would allow people to put their own feelings into it, instead of telling you exactly what happened, because often when you create certain plots you tend to use a lot of time explaining these things, and that means less time to just experience it. I think I prioritised experience instead of explaining with this one.
 
Was it important to you to have a maternal figure at the centre of it? Your previous films have been following men and very much about male ego and tension and conflict.
 
I think it just happened very naturally because I was looking at a family, and in this family there's one female and one male and then the kids. Then if you look a little bit further there's also chickens and a dog and the horses, and if you go even further there's grandparents and there's friends, etc. So I didn't really decide anything, it was more like I was looking at this very typical nuclear family or this very normal family where both parents are working, which is kind of the norm today, and it was just about exploring them. I didn't have any preconceived thoughts about what this family was, but there were some things I knew. I knew that we would follow him and I knew that one of the threads was following her and one of the threads was following the kids, and I had this feeling that it would be interesting to see these threads weave into each other throughout the film.
 
Very early on, I knew that he was a fisherman. I had been documenting over three summers how you fish during these modern times because it's changing very fast. I was doing this for a company in my hometown, so I was spending a lot of time there and getting to know all these people and seeing a lot of possibilities in capturing this, because it was so beautiful, but it’s a very strange industrial world, not as romantic as a lot of people think it is. I really wanted to capture that, but then I also wanted to spend time with her. He's working the sea and I wanted her to sort of be working the earth, so I tried to find a process for her that could be a nice dialogue with what he was doing.
 
Her artworks are a metaphor for the filmmaking as well. It's about collaboration, it's about the passage of time, it involves the natural world, so it feels like a very fitting choice of process for her.
 
My idea was not to use that at first because this is a process that I've been doing for years. I've always found it to be a very visual and physical process, so I knew that I wanted her to have something similar. In the beginning, I did try to find an artist in Iceland that could be both the actress and the artist herself, and as we go through it we would get to know her work, but I couldn't find a process that fit. I found an actress that I really liked working with in Saga [Garðarsdóttir], so we decided that that she would collaborate with us and would go through what I call a winter process series. You harvest one series a year and you do it during the cold months. You make these sketches and then these sketches become big cutouts in metal, then you put them out during the cold months on top of linen or cotton, and it sort of eats itself into the cotton and makes these paintings or prints. It was so natural for me to do that because it's a process that I've done so many times, but also it's a process that I think fits with the core of the film and it helped to just lift the film.
 
Tell me about casting Saga Garðarsdóttir because she's not someone who does a lot of movies. I believe she's primarily a comedian, is that right?

 
Yeah, she wrote these TV sketches, and she was also directing them and acting in them. She was just so natural and funny, and she has a very striking look. I met her and we talked and I immediately felt I could write for her, so it was a very easy process with her. It took a little bit longer to find her husband, but I knew that I wanted someone that was different, you know, I didn't want them to be the same kind of type. It’s almost as if they met very early in their life and then maybe grew a little bit apart, but I wanted to feel it naturally without explaining it.
 
How do you cultivate that kind of intimacy between your actors? When you're watching these scenes of the family together they feel very comfortable and she has to interact with your kids like she's their mother. Do you create a rehearsal space and bring them together before shooting?
 
That was one of the keys for the film to work. I knew that this film was very playful and I knew that I wanted to push it into places where it was very close to the edge, you know? Close to catastrophic, close to not working, close to being too absurd or comical, but I knew that none of these things would work if the fundament wasn't strong. You needed to believe that this was a real family, that was the most important thing. I invited them to come to my hometown to stay over the weekend, and we made this scene on top of a car in a river. We made it almost like a short film where I just tested them together, and they played and they improvised a text that I wrote. I felt very quickly that this is going to work because they're interested in making the film together and they're okay with this very low-key way of making films. I mean, there's no catering, there's no screens anywhere, there's no chairs, it's just a couple of people making some things together, and they were up for it so I felt it would turn out fine.
 
How is it for you directing your children, because on set you have to be their director not their dad. Is that a different kind of relationship with them?
 
I've always been the same with them ever since they were born. I don't have many faces, it's just one, so it's very natural and easy for me to direct them. I'm kind of blunt, just very straightforward, and that's how I am with all of my actors and crew. I'm not trying to sugarcoat it or I'm not trying to be nasty or anything, I just try to be very clear. If something doesn't work I just say it doesn't work, and then we try to figure out why and if we can fix it or do something else. I'm also like that with my kids, and they have been doing it for so long they’re in all of my projects. Right now with this film the boys have a much larger role, but they're very used to a camera and they're very used to my friends, because it's basically a group of friends that we're making films with, so they know all of them and they love them. It's very easy for me to invite them into the process because it's a very homemade. All of my projects, even Godland, are extremely homemade and it's all very family oriented.
 
You need a considerable amount of time to make these projects that span the changing seasons. How do you factor that into the production schedule and a budget? Whenever you talk to independent filmmakers they are always talking about running out of money or racing against the clock because they don't have enough days.
 
I know. One of the hardest things is actually the finance. I'm not talking for everyone, but the problem of making films for me is always money, and we have to go from film to film just to be able to survive, because we're not getting enough money for making a film. I mean, we'll never get the right amount of money for the hours we use in our projects, that's never going to happen in my life, but we are enjoying ourselves and we're making things that we really love, so we have been trying to make a setup where we're always working on a couple of projects in parallel. I just made a book called Lament for a Horse, with the horse I photographed in the process of making Godland. This was a two-year process of photographing and now I have a book probably five years later, so there are these different processes, and for some of the projects there's no money that comes out of it, but I think I'm really lucky that I have a very solid crew of my editor, my sound designer and my producers and distributors. They're working with me not on only one project, but they're working with me on a body of work, so whatever we make they try to help us figure out how we make this so it's never about the one project, it's more about the body of work and the direction. We have a certain amount of time and we're going this direction, and then the projects kind of decide for themselves what project wants to be made now, because I think each project has its moment.
 
You're working without a cinematographer on this one How did that affect your process?
 
I've always worked very closely with Maria [von Hausswolff], who has filmed everything, but with this one I was beginning to stretch time so much and I was filming so much of the material, so it was strange to suddenly invite someone to come in a process where I already shot 30% of the film. It was impossible for her to move to my hometown, I mean it would be impossible for anyone to just move away from their family or bring their whole family there, so it just didn't fit this film. The next one is kind of like that too, but hopefully I'll collaborate with her soon because we still want to work together. Some of the projects don't allow that because the process is just so different, but it was quite natural for me. I've always been very into the process and it's always been a very much hands-on process for me to make films; I load the film, I do the technical stuff, I'm carrying a tripod. It's all very hands-on and homemade, and it feels natural, but of course miss Maria and I hope I'm going to work with her again.
 

You shot A White White Day in 2.40:1, but you've since gone back to Academy ratio in the last couple of features. The Nest was Academy ratio as well so is that your preferred format? How did you feel about shooting wide?

 
I didn't like it. It's a very strange thing because I really like to be excited about what I do, so when I'm setting up the camera and putting on the lens it's something that excites me, but with the wide lens – it was actually spherical lenses, it was only the opening scene of A White White Day that was anamorphic and then we changed it into spherical lenses the rest of the film – I was kind of annoyed the whole time. This wide format doesn't fit my temperament and right now I see the whole world through a lens like this 1.33 Academy aspect ratio, because both of my still cameras are also this format. Maybe this will change, I'm not saying this is going to be my format for the rest of the films, but it's like if you talk to people that write a lot in notebooks [he holds up and looks at his pencil] it's really important for them if it is a 0.7 or is 0.5. It's a huge difference for people that really work with something, these details are really important, because to enjoy the work you have to feel comfortable and you have to feel that it fits your temperament.
 
There are loads of unexpected comical moments in this film that I loved. My audience really enjoyed the guy on TV singing a song about his mother-in-law. It's a really funny bit.
 
I was born in 1984, and if you were born around that era these were kind of the comics that you really loved growing, they were really radical and funny. There was this character named Helgi the Troubadour and he had these sketches where he was singing about really brutal things but doing it in this funny manner like a troubadour. He was singing about his family, his parents, his ex-wife and his children, and he being brutally honest about these conflicts he had in life. When I was writing, one of these songs just kept repeating in my head and I had to have it. They allowed me to have it, thank God!

 
The other thing I wanted to ask you about is Joan of Arc. This is an hour-long film that's connected to the scenes involving the children in this film. Do you know how that's going to be available?

We just finished it and we only screened it in one place. We premiered it in San Sebastian so I have no idea of its future because it's an odd little thing, it's not that long, it's not that short, so it's kind of an in-between film. I'm trying to figure out what kind of distribution it's going to have, whether Curzon going to take it or if they find it a little bit too experimental. I don't know yet, but people are getting a chance to see it now, so we'll know soon what kind of life it will have. It will definitely come out but I don't know what format. I wanted to make a trilogy of short films, Nest was number one and the second one was supposed to be Joan of Arc, but it just became so big that it became a feature. We are actually working on the third one, it's called Blue, so the idea is that it's like a trilogy of films where we are working with time in that way, but each time it's a little different. It's been extremely fun to make these films, for me it's the most fun I have with films, and Joan of Arc was one of my highlights of the year. Just spending time with them and just spending time with the weather, it's something that I really enjoy.

The Love That Remains is in UK cinemas from March 13th

Frederick Wiseman Obituary

Stretching from 1967 to 2023, Frederick Wiseman’s filmmaking career was a model of consistency. From the unprepossessing titles onwards, Wiseman stripped his portraits of institutions and communities down to their essentials. There is no non-diegetic music in Wiseman films to help guide our emotions, there is no voiceover narration, there are no onscreen captions to add context to what we are seeing, and there are no interviews with the participants. It is documentary filmmaking in its purest form. “His movies are stylistically ur-vérité,” Errol Morris wrote in a Paris Review essay in 2011, before adding, “but Wiseman’s films prove a simple principle. Style does not determine content. Wiseman has never been a straight vérité ‘documentarian.’ He is a filmmaker and one of the greatest we have.”

Read the rest of my obituary on the BFI website.

Saipan Review

 

For Irish football fans of a certain age, the phrase “You can stick it up your bollocks” is etched in our collective memory. This was captain Roy Keane’s parting shot to manager Mick McCarthy as he left the Irish squad one week before the start of the 2002 World Cup. Anyone living in Ireland then will recall the hysteria that ensued as this issue divided the nation, a period that Saipan evokes with its opening montage of TV and radio soundbites. “This is like our Princess Diana,” one interviewee says, which didn’t feel like an overstatement at the time.

Read the rest of my review at Sight & Sound

Essay on Bernardo Bertolucci's Novecento

Written for the now-discontinued Eureka blu-ray edition in 2016.

In August 1974, Gideon Bachmann arrived in Italy to report on the production of Bernardo Bertolucci's Novecento for Sight & Sound. He had planned to spend one day on the set, but ended up staying for a whole week, with a diary of his experiences being published in the magazine a few months later. After a couple of days spent watching Bertolucci at work, taking note of the impressive scale (and spiralling cost) of everything, and growing frustrated at his failure to secure an interview with the director, he wrote, “What is it that makes film directors so sure of their value? Whence this presumption of being involved in an activity that must take precedence over other human obligations? Haven't we perhaps allowed them too much mythology, too much adoration?”

Cut to three years later. The fruits of Bertolucci's labours were finally presented to the paying American public in November 1977, but only after a long, acrimonious and very public battle between the director and his producer Alberto Grimaldi. The 315-minute version of Novecento shown at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival was whittled down to a relatively skimpy 195 minutes by Grimaldi, conscious of his contractual obligations to Paramount. Grimaldi had banned Bertolucci from the editing room, prompting the director to take legal action to protect his vision. “That isn't my film; that's a trailer, a travesty,” Bertolucci exclaimed in the press when asked about the new cut commissioned by his producer. “My friend is surrounded by sycophants who tell him he is God,” Grimaldi responded. “It started with Tango.”

The film made by a director after enjoying their first enormous success is a test. A few years before Michael Cimino went off the deep end and killed a studio with Heaven's Gate, Novecento was viewed as the prime example of a wunderkind being given his freedom and running for the hills with it. Last Tango in Paris was not only an astonishing critical and commercial hit in 1972, but a film that was instantly seen as a cinematic landmark, a breakthrough in adult artistic filmmaking. Following the more modest but still widely admired The Conformist and The Spider's Stratagem in the previous years, this was the kind of achievement that has other filmmakers heaping praise on the director (“How dare I make another film?” Robert Altman said, “My personal and artistic life will never be the same.”), has every actor lining up to work with him, and has studios throwing money in his direction in the hope of reaping the same artistic and financial rewards. Where does a young director go in that situation? Bertolucci decided to go big. Although his film is titled 1900 in many countries, a more accurate translation of Novecento is Twentieth Century, which immediately gives you a sense of the scale of his ambition.

Novecento was briefly mooted as a six-part series for Italian television, although what small screen in the mid-1970s could have contained the scope of Bertolucci’s images? This is self-consciously an epic work, large in every sense, and it’s no coincidence that Bertolucci begins his tale on January 27^th 1901, with the announcement of the death of Giuseppe Verdi. The director is taking his lead from Verdi and telling his story in an operatic register, demanding grand, emotive performances from his actors (compare the dignified restraint Burt Lancaster exhibited in Visconti’s The Leopard to his work here), and instead of finding a consistent rhythm or narrative flow throughout the film, he focuses on staging loosely connected individual sequences that each build to a crescendo and aim to enrapture the viewer with their swelling melodramatic fervour. No wonder Pauline Kael spent much of her famous New Yorker review marvelling in equal parts at Bertolucci’s brilliance and foolhardiness, before summing up the film’s appeal by stating that “Next to it, all the other new movies are like something you hold up at the end of a toothpick.”

But despite the gigantic size of Novecento, Bertolucci’s flirtation with the idea of presenting it on television is telling. He wanted his socialist epic to be a film that spoke directly to the masses, a film that bypassed intellectual analysis and worked on a level of pure emotion, through arresting images and rousing rhetoric, culminating in a climactic speech being delivered directly into the camera. The film can be blunt and even crude in its approach, with Bertolucci taking a broad strokes approach to his storytelling, and the people we see in the film are less characters than symbols. His two protagonists Alfredo Berlinghieri (Robert De Niro) and Olmo Dalcò (Gérard Depardieu) are born into different classes on the same day in 1901. Alfredo is the scion of a bourgeois landowning family while Olmo is the bastard son of a peasant, and as the film charts their fluctuating fortunes and enduring, if complicated, friendship over the subsequent half-century, it becomes clear that the weight of history rests heavily on their shoulders. Through these two characters – plus a third, Attila, who we meet a little later – Bertolucci’s microcosmic film aims to show us the changing face of Italian politics, industry and class across five decades. Novecento pits the proletariat against the bourgeoisie and the communists against the fascists in a struggle for the country’s soul, and there is no doubt whose side the director is on.

Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo’s 1901 painting The Fourth Estate, which is shown under the opening credits, sets the visual tone, with Bertolucci and Vittorio Storario shooting the communists and the peasant masses as heroic figures throughout Novecento. They are noble, dignified, the salt of the earth; they work, eat, sing and dance together; they are a community. When faced with superior force during the workers’ strike of 1908, they band together and lay down in the road against the armed soldiers on horseback. When four men are killed in a building burned by fascists, they carry the charred bodies through the streets in protest, unafraid of reprisals. When women working in the fields take up pitchforks against the fleeing fascists on Liberation Day in 1945, they sing, “Even though we are women, we are not afraid,” a song that became popular again among left-wing Italian women during the strikes and demonstrations of the 1970s – Bertolucci linking then and now.

Compare this with the way Bertolucci shoots the fascists. It’s hard to think of many more despicable characters in the history of cinema than Attila Mellanchini. Played with leering, eye-popping intensity by Donald Sutherland and egged on by his Lady Macbeth-like wife (Laura Betti), he’s a grotesque embodiment of fascist ideology; a sadist and pervert who gleefully attacks children, animals and old women and is responsible for the most violent and upsetting moments in the film. Attila is the only fascist who really exists as a character in Novecento and therefore he acts as a representative for the entire order. On the few occasions when Attila does get his comeuppance – his humiliation escalating from straw to horse shit to pitchforks – it’s always the collective that rounds on him, but Attila is not in fact acting alone, he has a whole support network behind him, and you could even argue that, despite his cartoonish villainy, he is not Novecento’s true villain.

A key scene in Novecento takes place inside a church, where the landowners meet to discuss the growing unrest among the peasants. They agree to employ a private army of Blackshirts to maintain control, and thus, the fascist movement in Italy is born, with the links between the church, the bourgeoisie and the fascists being explicitly made. When his father dies, Alfredo becomes the padrone, inheriting the increasingly violent Attila along with the land, but he can do nothing to curb his fascist attack dog. Right from the start of Novecento, when both Alfredo and Olmo are boys, Bertolucci keeps finding ways to show us Alfredo’s inferiority in contrast to his lower-class friend. From comparing their penises (Alfredo’s foreskin is too tight) to daring to lie on the tracks as a train passes overhead (Alfredo flees at the last minute), to the fact that Olmo leaves to fight in the war, returning as a man, while Alfredo dresses as a soldier but stays at home, having been kept out of harm’s way by his rich father. Alfredo is fundamentally weak, and it is this weakness that allows fascism to flourish on his watch.

On a number of occasions he is encouraged to take action against Attila and stand up for Olmo and the peasants, often by his wife Ada (Dominique Sanda, whom Angela Dalle-Vacche suggested only exists in the film to deflect attention from the homoerotic tension between Alfredo and Olmo), but all Alfredo can do is look away and withdraw. Even when Olmo is taking a vicious beating from the fascists, Alfredo hesitates, only stepping in when the danger has passed. When he finally dismisses Attila towards the end of the film, Alfredo knocks on the peasants' doors and proclaims his action as if expecting applause, but it is too little, too late. Alfredo is not a fascist, but as he is told throughout the film, he is something even worse; a landowner who pays lip service to the needs of those in his care but who ensures his own protection above all else. He is an enabler.

Bertolucci has spoken of Novecento as being a film partially born from a sense of guilt, the guilt of being a member of the Italian Communist party but hailing from bourgeois origins. Thus, for all of its sprawling and outsized ambitions, the character of Alfredo makes this a deeply personal epic for the director, and reminds us of an era when such films were possible. Even in the mid-1970s, however, it's hard to believe that a major American studio could invest millions of dollars in a five-hour Italian epic replete with shocking violence and full-frontal nudity, not to mention the explicit celebration of communist values that occurs at the end of the film. Novecento's finale led to accusations of political naïveté on the part of the filmmaker, with the fascists being run off and the peasants putting Alfredo on trial, but Bertolucci insisted this was less naïveté than hope. “In my film the trial of the landowners seems to be taking place in 1945, but in reality it is situated in the future. It is a dream,” he told Le cinéma italien in 1978. “This entire sequence is an anticipation; it is a dream of something yet to be”; but the utopian vision of the sequence is complicated in the film's closing moments.

Olmo steps in to save Alfredo from execution, insisting that the padrone, the cause of their ills, is now dead, and Alfredo Berlinghieri should be allowed to walk away as a living testament to the padrone's demise; the villagers celebrate with songs and the triumphant waving of red flags, cheering as if the country is now theirs, but this celebratory mood is short-lived. The provisional government arrives to confiscate their guns, and as Alfredo is rescued by Olmo, he tells his old friend with a wry smile, “The padrone is still alive,” before the two begin tussling once more in a futile, comical manner. The country does not yet belong to the people, there will always be a padrone, and the struggle continues.

The Best Films of 2025

25 – Here (Robert Zemeckis)

Here arrived in UK cinemas on a wave of hostile reviews, most of which struck me as very wide of the mark once I’d seen it. The film presents us with a single perspective, setting up an immobile camera that gazes at a fixed point in space, while in front of it time passes back and forth; we go from the age of the dinosaurs to the age of COVID, spending most of our time in the corner of one house where generations of a single family will grow up. Zemeckis has always tended to invite scorn and scepticism with his sentimentality and his fascination with technology, but I think the tools that he uses in Here serve to create a melancholy portrait of American life in the 20th century; it's a story about lost time, frustrated ambitions and foregone dreams. I found it to be an odd, endearing and sincerely moving film, one that – like his similarly lambasted Welcome to Marwen – deserved better than to be so flippantly dismissed.

24– Sirāt (Óliver Laxe)

If I was ranking these films purely in terms of the experience I had watching them, then Sirāt would be sitting comfortably in the top five. This is a movie that needs to be seen on the big screen, not just for the booming sound mix, but for the experience of watching it with a packed audience, all of whom gasped in unison at a couple of significant dramatic developments. After I had stepped away from the intensity of the cinema and began to contemplate Sirāt in the cold light of day, I felt less certain about it. Laxe does an incredible job of creating and sustaining a sense of tension, and he toys with our emotional state with sadistic glee, but does it ultimately amount to anything more than a few cheap tricks? I still harbour the suspicion that this is a skilled but hollow piece of showmanship, but I can’t deny that it was an exhilarating time at the movies and something I would unhesitatingly recommend to anyone, and that’s not something to be sniffed at.

23 – Twinless (James Sweeney)

In the first twenty minutes of Twinless, James Sweeney had already done enough to get me interested. I was intrigued by the film’s wry depiction of grief and friendship, by Sweeney’s confident framing and editing, and by his onscreen chemistry with Dylan O’Brien. Then Sweeney played his hand, revealing the true nature of his premise, and I was totally hooked. It’s one of the sharpest acts of rug-pulling that I’ve seen in a while, and Sweeney manages to keep delivering the laughs while developing an unsettling sense of tension. It’s a tight, intelligently directed film and O’Brien is outstanding in a variety of ways. Aisling Franciosi also deserves a mention, as a character who initially appears to be a one-note office bimbo before revealing herself to be the smartest and most perceptive person involved in this situation. Don’t read anything about Twinless, just watch it.

22 – Direct Action (Guillaume Cailleau and Ben Russell)

Direct Action is a film that was long in the making. For much of the past two decades, protestors have resisted attempts to build an airport in the French region of Notre-Dame-des-Landes, an action that was strongly opposed by local residents and farmers. Squatters have occupied the region and refused multiple attempts at eviction, finally triumphing in 2018. Direct Action explores what happens after such a victory has been achieved, following the day-to-day life of the community that has formed on this land. Shot on 16mm, the film immerses us into their activities, from mundane aspects of their work and leisure to ongoing attempts to maintain vigilance against incursions into their territory. Direct Action unfolds across four hours, and it offers an engrossing study of quotidian work that goes into keeping a protest movement alive.

21 – Marty Supreme (Josh Safdie)

This was the year of the Safdie separation. Benny made the Mark Kerr biopic The Smashing Machine with Dwayne Johnson, while Josh made Marty Supreme, which feels a lot closer in spirit to the Safdies’ previous works. Like Good Time and Uncut Gems, Marty Supreme is a portrait of a charismatic hustler desperately striving to keep his dreams alive while constantly running on the brink of total collapse. I don’t think it quite manages the sustained level of intensity that those films achieved, there are parts of this two-and-half-hour film that feel baggy and unfocused, but there are long stretches of phenomenal filmmaking. The table tennis scenes are electrifying, and there is no question that Chalamet’s swaggering lead performance is the best work of his career to date. Marty Supreme is definitely my preference from 2025’s two Safdie offerings, even if separately they both seem to lack the special sauce that made their movies tick.

20 – Henry Johnson (David Mamet)

The other night I watched Lindsay Anderson’s 1975 film In Celebration, and I wish it was common practice to make a film with the original cast of a play – not a filmed recording of the stage production, but an actual film. That’s what David Mamet did with the cast of his 2023 play Henry Johnson, and the result is one of his best films. Henry Johnson consists of four scenes, each of which is a two-hander, following Henry (Evan Jonigkeit) as he is arrested for fraud and goes to prison, where he falls under the spell of the cunningly manipulative and endlessly philosophising Gene (Shia LaBeouf). As always with Mamet, everything is a con game and a power struggle, and the dialogue here is so classically Mamet, which brings out the best from these actors. All four of the film’s conversations are compelling to watch, but the opening one between Jonigkeit and Chris Bauer is almost a perfect short film in itself, one that builds to a terrific punchline. It’s good to have Mamet back on film.

19 – Seven Veils (Atom Egoyan)

Another project that began life in the theatre, Seven Veils was sparked by Atom Egoyan’s commission to direct a production of Salome for the Canadian Opera Company in 2023; an opera he had first directed in 1996. He created this film while working on the opera, with Amanda Seyfried playing Jeanne, the young director developing a new Salome for the stage, while trying to get out from under the shadow of her mentor’s 1996 production of the same show. This story stands at the crossroads of so many of Egoyan’s familiar obsessions, particularly the themes of family, history, trauma and technology, which are touched upon through the home movie footage of Jeanne’s childhood and her Zoom conversations with her estranged husband. The experience of simultaneously making Salome and Seven Veils seems to have invigorated this director, who makes a number of interesting choices and finds arresting compositions throughout. Egoyan’s recent work has been erratic to say the least, but he’s close to something like his best form here. 

18 – Train Dreams (Clint Bentley)

Train Dreams tells the story of a man who lived from the late 19th century to the mid-20th century, and his life was unremarkable in most respects. Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) is a logger who spends months away from his young family as he clears the great forests and helps to build the railroads that will transform the nation. Edgerton’s finely judged performance beautifully captures the nature of this humble, hardworking man, whose life is blighted by a terrible tragedy but must find the strength to carry on. Grainier is a man of few words, but the silences are filled by Will Patton’s ruminative voiceover, or a marvellous cameo from a gregarious William H. Macy, who talks of the natural splendour of the world and wonders what mankind will do to it. Train Dreams can sometimes evoke better films – The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford comes to mind, as does the work of Terrence Malick – but Adolpho Veloso’s camera finds poetry in the images, and the film has a cumulative effect, with the small and apparently insignificant moments of Grainier’s life building to a powerful climax.

17 – The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendonça Filho)

The Secret Agent plunges us into a vividly realised depiction of 1970s Brazil, where corruption, death and paranoia are everywhere. Fleeing the big city, Marcelo (Wagner Moura, magnificent) finds refuge among other political dissidents hiding out in Recife, but the net – in the shape of hitmen despatched by a powerful enemy – is closing in. What I particularly relish in Filho’s films is the way he sustains a high degree of tension in the central narrative while allowing his film to sprawl casually in multiple directions. We get a surreal interlude involving a zombie leg, we spend a lot of time in and around the local cinema, and he gives ample time to an amazing ensemble of character actors, including the late Udo Kier in his final screen role. Filho has ambition, daring and talent to spare, and his films are exhilarating in their formal brilliance and eccentric touches. I hope the success of The Secret Agent drives people towards discovering his earlier work, especially the documentary Pictures of Ghosts, which feels like a companion piece.

16 – Oslo Stories: Dreams (Dag Johan Haugerud)

There were three films in Dag Johan Haugerud’s Oslo Stories series – Dreams, Love and Sex – and I loved them all. These films had no connective tissue aside from their setting and the fact that they each explored different aspects of relationships, but in each film Haugerud showed himself to be skilled and incisive writer, allowing his characters to articulate their insecurities and pain, and work through their problems together. If I had to pick one, then I’d select Dreams as my personal favourite, primarily for the way it captures a palpable sense of what unrequited longing feels like through its sensitively handled story of a schoolgirl falling in love with her teacher. There is real intelligence in the way Haugerud handles each of these films, directing with patience and with an eye for the way the surrounding city adds so much to these stories in terms of life and atmosphere.

15 – If I Had Legs I'd Kick You (Mary Bronstein)

If neither of the Safdie brothers’ individual films quite delivered that electric charge of anxiety and dread this year, we had Mary Bronstein (wife of the Safdies’ regular collaborator Ronald Bronstein) to deliver it in spades. Bronstein gets us uncomfortably close to a woman coming apart at the seems; the camera is thrust right into Rose Byrne’s face, and she responds with one of the year’s truly great acting performances. Her character Linda is described as “stretchable” by her daughter, but she is clearly at breaking point, having been left by her husband to cope alone with their daughter’s unspecified illness, and with the pair being forced to live out of a motel when the ceiling caves in and floods their home. The whole film teeters on a funny/nightmarish knife-edge and we are right there with Linda at every strenuous moment, with Byrne earning our empathy despite making no attempt to make to make her more sympathetic or soften her questionable behaviour. I was very disappointed with how little bite Nightbitch had when exploring similar themes last year, but If I Had Legs I'd Kick You doesn’t hold back and it's a bracing experience.

14 – Highest 2 Lowest (Spike Lee)

High and Low is probably my favourite Akira Kurosawa film, but the best compliment I can pay to Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest is that I hardly thought about the original film at all as I was engrossed in this one. Lee makes the material typically his own. It takes a while for the film to warm up, but it shifts gears magnificently in the ransom money switcheroo, which Lee stages against the backdrop of the Puerto Rican Day parade and with Yankees fans piling onto the train as another complicating factor. Highest 2 Lowest is reconfigured as a contemplation of what one sacrifices through success, when you're living in an ivory tower and losing touch with real life, and Washington is unsurprisingly tremendous as the mogul brought down to street level. His climactic face-off with A$AP Rocky (so good in both this and If I Had Legs I'd Kick You) is superbly acted and staged. I was fortunate enough to see Highest 2 Lowest on the big screen and it played brilliantly for a sold-out audience. Dumping it onto streaming was a joke.

13 – Roofman (Derek Cianfrance)

This is another film that should have been a bigger hit, and a few years ago it would have surely found an appreciative audience. It’s hard to think of many American studio releases this year that were as crowd-pleasing and satisfying as Roofman. Cianfrance directs a lighter touch than we’re used to seeing from him with this material, and he handles it all perfectly, finding plenty of knockabout humour in the absurdity of Channing Tatum hiding out in Toys R Us, but also locating a real emotional core in his growing relationship with Kirsten Dunst. There’s a genuine interest in the texture and nuance of people’s lives here in a way that reminded me of the work of Jonathan Demme, and I found myself completely involved in the final third, which builds to something that feels authentically emotional in a way that Cianfrance’s earlier movies have pushed too hard for. Tatum and Dunst are doing some of the best work of their careers in this film and I wish more people had seen it.

12 – Landmarks (Lucrecia Martel)

When I interviewed Lucrecia Martel in 2018, she told me she was finishing a documentary on the murder of Javier Chocobar. That ‘finishing’ apparently took the best part of seven years, but thankfully, a Lucrecia Martel film is always worth waiting for. Chocobar, a leader in Argentina’s indigenous Chuchagasta community, was killed in 2009, with footage of his murder subsequently being uploaded to YouTube. In Landmarks, Martel follows the murder trial and also explores the story of the Chuchagastas, digging deep into Argentina’s colonial history. As you would expect, this is a brilliantly edited film, with Martel skilfully weaving together courtroom footage, interviews with members of Chuchagasta community, archive footage, and photographs into a wholly absorbing and moving portrait of a shameful history. Landmarks is also notable for containing the finest use of drone footage that I’ve seen in a film since Michael Bay’s Ambulance. Martel’s first documentary is a film that deserves to stand alongside her already exceptional body of work.

11 – Silent Friend (Ildikó Enyedi)

Three stories taking place across the span of a century. In the first, set in the 1920s, an aspiring female student strives to make progress at the male-dominated University of Hamburg; in the 1970s, a young man with a crush on a fellow student is asked to look after her botanical project while she’s away; and finally, a visiting academic finds himself stuck on campus when COVID strikes, with only a grumpy security guard for company. Each of these tales explores means of communication in some way, not only between people, but between humanity and the natural world. These characters actively seek a way to understand and interact with the trees around this building, and Enyedi’s direction of these scenarios is simultaneously playful and thoughtful. Silent Friend is aesthetically rich (switching between 35mm, 16mm and digital for her three eras) and Enyedi cuts crisply between each narrative in a way that sustains our interest in each while letting them attain a cumulative resonance. An imaginative, consistently surprising and thoroughly engaging film.

10 – Young Mothers (Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne)

Do we take the Dardennes for granted these days? Once upon a time, the release of a new film from these Belgian brothers was a major event, but their last few films have had small releases and no fanfare, and Young Mothers is another that seemed to sneak out this year to collective shrugs. This is baffling to me, because I was floored by their latest picture and I remain in awe of what the Dardennes can achieve onscreen, which is the kind of empathetic filmmaking that so few other contemporary filmmakers appear to be capable of. Young Mothers is the brothers’ first true ensemble piece, and through the varying experiences of these teenage mothers and mothers-to-be, they tell stories of children failed by their parents and striving to avoid making the same mistakes. Their filmmaking is deceptively nondescript in its style – and Young Mothers lacks the urgent narrative drive and tension of their prior work – but the unaffected performances they draw from the young cast are so real, and the film had me in tears on multiple occasions.

9 – Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier)

I love the way Joachim Trier so swiftly gives us an understanding of these characters, the house they live in, and their shared history at the start of Sentimental Value. There is little that’s new in the themes that he is exploring here – strained familial relationships, the artist as a bad parent, attempts to find catharsis and healing through art – but it’s the execution of these notions that elevates everything. He and his co-writer Eskil Vogt create characters who feel authentic and nuanced, and each of the interactions between these individuals is superbly written and performed. It would have been easy for Trier to focus attention on the family’s drama and have the supporting role of a American actress act as some kind of comic relief, a cheap spoofing of Hollywood stardom, but Elle Fanning’s performance as Rachel, an earnest actress aware she’s out of her depth, is one that I found extremely touching. Trier draws first-rate performances from every member of his cast, and his style feels so intuitive and effortless at times. This is a wonderfully enjoyable and satisfying film.

8 – Afternoons of Solitude (Albert Serra)

After the screening of Afternoons of Solitude that I attended, Albert Serra took part in a Q&A (being a Serra Q&A, it was more of an extended monologue) where he discussed the way they stitched microphones into the matadors’ outfits for this documentary. But where, I wondered? When you see one of these matadors being hoisted and squeezed into his clothes by his team of helpers, there barely appears to be enough room for him. These backstage glimpses into the matadors’ world are fascinating and often comical (they resemble women from period dramas, being forced into corsets ahead of a ball, which rather undermines all the macho posturing) while the footage that Serra captures in the arena is simultaneously engrossing and repulsive. Serra doesn’t consider the ethics of this sport, he simply presents it to us and allows the matadors’ own words to highlight what ridiculous figures they are, with their endless self-aggrandising talk of their “big balls” and how courageous they are for slaying an animal already weakened by multiple blows. Afternoons of Solitude is a tough film to watch, but it's masterfully filmed and edited.

7 – Blue Heron (Sophy Romvari)

This is by far the best debut film I saw in 2025. I haven’t seen any of the short films that Sophy Romvari has made prior to this, but I’ll be seeking them out now as she shows incredible filmmaking instincts in this sensitively crafted feature. Blue Heron is clearly a deeply personal work, telling the story of a family dealing with their eldest son’s increasingly dangerous and unpredictable behaviour, and the first half of the film is seen from the perspective of this teenager’s eight-year-old sister. I was so completely drawn into this drama, I was thrown off balance a little by the sudden narrative switch that Romvari makes halfway through the picture, shifting the perspective to the now-adult Sasha, a documentary filmmaker, but this second half of the film finds fresh and equally intriguing ways of exploring these painful memories. Blue Heron is a beautifully directed film, with some astonishingly imaginative and expressive camerawork, and Romvari gradually adds layers of meaning and emotion into its carefully constructed framework, until it culminates in a place that is very moving and cathartic.

6 – It Was Just an Accident (Jafar Panahi)

Jafar Panahi’s body of work over the past 15 years has been one of the wonders of modern cinema. Having been arrested and received a twenty-year ban from making movies in 2010, he has responded with boundless determination, wit and imagination, producing a series of formally inventive and self-reflexive works. Panahi has tended to star in these films, but with It Was Just an Accident he stays behind the camera and shows his virtuoso directorial skills in crafting a riveting and morally complex thriller. A group of ex-prisoners discover the whereabouts of the jailer who used to torture them and they plot revenge, but do they have the right to take justice into their own hands? Can they really do this to a man who has a young family? Do they even have the right man? Panahi creates a scenario dripping with ambiguity and dread, but he also laces it with a tone of dry, dark humour. As is usually the case with Panahi, It Was Just an Accident was filmed in secret, but it doesn’t feel like a film shot on the fly. The shots are beautifully composed – the use of a car’s red lights in the finale is particularly potent – and the haunting ending is hard to shake.

5 – The Love That Remains (Hlynur Pálmason)

After making the magnificent period piece Godland, my favourite film of 2022, Hlynur Pálmason has returned with something more intimate and contemporary in The Love That Remains. What the two films have in common is a fascination with the capturing the passage of time; The Love That Remains was filmed across the span of a year, allowing us to see the seasons change during the film. A quick summary of this film would describe it as charting a year in the life of a family as the parents go through a separation, but while most filmmakers would make that split the dramatic thrust of the narrative, here it's simply something that is happening, and it's given no more or less importance that the mother’s artworks, the father’s work on a trawler, or the children’s construction of a model for target practice. This is a film assembled from fleeting moments – all caught in vibrant 35mm images – and everything about it feels incredibly lived-in, organic and real, but Pálmason is always ready to surprise us with unexpected comic interludes and surreal touches. It’s another wonderful and entirely fresh film from someone who is fast becoming one of my favourite working directors.

4 – Magellan (Lav Diaz)

Those Lav Diaz fans who feel short-changed by the fact that Magellan is a mere 160 minutes long may be heartened to hear the rumours that the director has an eight-hour version that he is currently tinkering with. In the meantime, this released version will certainly suffice as a masterful and completely involving portrait of the 16th century Portuguese explorer. The film captivates from its opening frame, in which an indigenous woman is suddenly startled and stares directly at the audience, aware of being watched by outsiders. Diaz depicts the invasive force of colonialism through a series of expeditions across two decades; towards the start of the film, we see the aftermath of a conquest, with bloodied bodies strewn across a beach, and the later scene in which Magellan’s men gather and destroy the villagers’ religious icons before making them worship the cross is one of the year’s most indelible sequences. Diaz has a recognisable star for the first time in Gael García Bernal, but there’s not a performance that feels out of place, and there’s no moment when you don’t feel fully transported to this time and place. The compositions created by Diaz and Artur Tort (who also shot Afternoons of Solitude this year) are endlessly striking. It’s a stunning film. 

3 – The Testament of Ann Lee (Mona Fastvold)

The team behind The Brutalist returns with another film about an immigrant arriving in America and trying to build something that lasts. I found The Testament of Ann Lee to be equally impressive and even more accomplished. The story of Ann Lee, who started the Shaker religious movement in England in the eighteenth century before taking it to the US, is a fascinating one, and Fastvold’s telling of it is bold and imaginative. Amanda Seyfried plays her with a fierce intensity – you completely believe in her religious fervour – but she also shows us how Ann’s development of faith and her renouncing of sex was rooted in the unbearable trauma of birthing and losing four children. Everything about The Testament of Ann Lee feels entirely so vivid and alive. It’s such a stunning recreation of this period, and the musical numbers – developed by Daniel Blumberg from traditional Shaker hymns – that are woven into the fabric of the film are completely rapturous. The Testament of Ann Lee is an astonishing, singular vision, and I felt like my whole body was vibrating when I emerged from the cinema after seeing its projected from 70mm. 

2 – Measures for a Funeral (Sofia Bohdanowicz)

Sofia Bohdanowicz and actress Deragh Campbell have collaborated on a series of films over the past decade featuring the character Audrey Benac. Measures for a Funeral is the climactic film in that cycle, and it’s their most ambitious and accomplished film to date, shooting in widescreen and telling a story that stretches across Canada and Europe. The film has elements of documentary and essay film as it reflects Bohdanowicz’s own investigation into the early 20th century violinist Kathleen Parlow, and her attempt to stage a production of Opus 28, a work written for her that was never performed, but she turns these real-life elements of research and inquiry into a compelling and inventive drama. Campbell is wonderful as the prickly, troubled protagonist, following the thread of this investigation in part as a means of avoiding dealing with her grief over her dying mother. The piece of music that Measures for a Funeral centres on is frequently described as a ‘minor’ work, but when we see it finally being performed in the film’s final stretch, having seen what went into making this moment a reality, it becomes something spine-tingling and transcendent. 

1 - One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson)

How thrilling it is to see Paul Thomas Anderson working on this scale, and working with such an exhilarating sense of freedom. One Battle After Another is unquestionably his most mainstream-friendly and crowd-pleasing film to date, but he hasn’t jettisoned any of his idiosyncrasies in the process. The film has an unusual, undulating rhythm, a willingness to fill out the frame with eccentric supporting characters, and a deep love of goofy humour. This is by some distance the funniest film of the year, but it’s also the most dynamic and exciting, and I’m staggered by Anderson’s control of pacing, which makes this 162-minute movie zip by even as he introduces languid stretches and digressions. One Battle After Another felt like a film alive to the current moment as soon as it was released, but at its core Anderson is moved by the story of a father desperately trying to protect his daughter, and Leonardo DiCaprio’s comical/tender performance is a career high from one of our greatest actors. I loved every twitch and grimace in Sean Pen’s blissfully funny performance; I loved the sense of community embodied by Benicio del Toro’s casually brilliant turn; I loved Teyana Taylor’s incredible screen presence, which reverberates through the movie long after she has left. Above all else, I loved seeing a filmmaker in full command of his material, giving us a feast of a movie that is constantly changing shape and springing surprises in a way that few filmmakers would even dream of. One Battle After Another was also the last film I watched in 2025, as I revisited it on a splendid 70mm print this week, and like most of Anderson’s films, it only improves on multiple viewings; this time, I found it even funnier and more moving than I did the first time. I have a feeling I’ll be re-watching this for many years to come.