Guy Lodge: Last News

Anna Tingley If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, Variety may receive an affiliate commission. A new documentary about Judy Blume sheds light on the profound impact that the beloved children’s book writer had on a whole generation of young girls.

Guy Lodge Film Critic It’s nearly 30 years since the global franchise of Body Worlds exhibitions — collections of dissected and plastinated human cadavers, equal parts science lesson and carnival attraction — racked up ticket sales and stoked controversy in multiple international markets. Anatomist (or ringmaster) Gunther von Hagens professed to display the body as it had never been publicly viewed before, and there was certainly a lurid fascination to Body Worlds’ vision of what we look like under the skin. That sense of revelation is recalled in Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s extraordinary new documentary “De Humani Corporis Fabrica,” which likewise delves dizzyingly beneath the flesh to show organs, systems and actions that we know are inside us, but tend to keep tidily out of mind.

Guy Lodge Film Critic On the face of it, “The Pope’s Exorcist” would have you believe that it’s rooted in the real-life experiences of the late Father Gabriele Amorth, the Catholic priest who served for 30 years as the head exorcist of the Diocese of Rome. Its screenwriting credits proclaim as much, for starters, while a surfeit of onscreen dates and locations in the early going lend proceedings the faintest of docudrama veneers; moreover, the film is backed by the non-profit production arm of the Jesuit research university Loyola Marymount, with Loyola rector Father Edward J. Siebert among its executive producers. Even Catholics in high places, it turns out, have a sense of humor: You needn’t wait for the “work of fiction” disclaimer in the closing credits to discern that “The Pope’s Exorcist” is ripely fantastical trash, inspired by Amorth’s work in much the same way that SunnyD is inspired by Florida oranges, and no less enjoyable for those liberties. Rather than the Bible or any of Amorth’s autobiographies, Julius Avery’s film instead swears by the trusty story template shaped by every demonic-possession horror film since “The Exorcist” a full half-century ago, as a hapless American teen is inhabited by an ancient minion of Satan with increasingly yucky, upchucky consequences, while a venerable priest is called upon to clear up the mess.

Guy Lodge Film Critic It was recently announced that ever-prolific online content factory Buzzfeed would begin using artificial intelligence technology to generate articles — so can A.I. screenwriting be far behind? Amid a surfeit of production company idents at the outset of “One True Loves,” the presence of Buzzfeed Studios’ logo brings that question to mind; the rigidly generic love story that ensues keeps it there. In fact, this adaptation of a 2016 bestseller by Taylor Jenkins Reid (“Daisy Jones & The Six”) was scripted by the author herself, in collaboration with her husband Alex. There’s scant evidence of personal investment, however, in this clean, anodyne drama of messy romantic conflicts, in which everyone from director Andy Fickman to stars Simu Liu, Phillipa Soo and Luke Bracey is working in strict get-the-job-done mode.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Doug and Kris Tompkins’ dream sounded like a fanciful one. Seduced by a region of ravishing South American wilderness in which they found particular sanctuary, and wishing to protect it from any insensitive or unseemly development, they landed on a solution both simple and absurd-sounding: Why not simply buy as much of it as possible? Backed by the fortune they’d collectively amassed from the clothing industry — Doug as the founder of Esprit and The North Face, Kris as the former CEO of Patagonia — the couple successfully parlayed business tycoon status into an unprecedented scale of eco-activism: As one talking head notes in “Wild Life,” Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s soaring documentary tribute to the Tompkins’ romance and shared conservationist mission, they “could do anything, and chose to do anything.”

Guy Lodge Film Critic Non-Londoners might think of the U.K. capital as a single city, the perceived interchangeability of its regions and locations evident in many a notionally London-set but geographically manic film where characters stroll from Chelsea Bridge to the heart of Soho in a matter of minutes. Residents know that its quadrants are so disparate as to be whole separate ecosystems, with the Thames River that separates north from south London a virtual equator running through the city. Those who have toured the Big Smoke via the movies — in particular, the idealized, exportable London of Working Title trifles and “Paddington” pictures — are largely familiar with the most leafy, genteel streets of the north and west, with the increasingly bourgeois east lately getting a look-in. But the diverse, dynamic neighborhoods of the south have received less than their due on screen, which is where Raine Allen-Miller’s delightful romantic comedy “Rye Lane” aims to set things right.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Chilean filmmaker Maite Alberdi’s documentary about love, memory and Alzheimer’s disease “The Eternal Memory” has scored a slew of international sales after making a splash at Sundance and Berlin. Dogwoof, the British sales company specialized in high-profile docs, has announced multiple deals on “Eternal Memory,” which won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for World Documentary in January and was a recent standout at the Berlinale where it had its European bow. The hot doc is screening later this week at the CPH:DOX documentary film festival in Copenhagen. Dogwoof partnered with MTV Documentary Films to represent “The Eternal Memory” for international sales soon after its Sundance premiere. They have now scored sales on the doc to: Edge Entertainment (Nordics); Madman (Australia and New Zealand); Sherry Media (Canada); I Wonder Pictures (Italy); BTeam Pictures (Spain); Periscoop (Benelux); Atnine Film (South Korea); Synca (Japan); LEV (Israel), and Restart (Former Yugoslavia).

Guy Lodge Film Critic Nearly 125 years after her assassination, the Empress Elisabeth of Austria — or Sisi to her enduring cultists — continues to inspire a veritable industry of portraiture in Europe: In the last year alone, a novel, two TV series (one of them a glossy Netflix affair) and two feature films have been dedicated to the tightly corseted royal icon. Viewers outside the Continental sphere of Sisi-mania may only have registered one of those films, Marie Kreutzer’s chic, subversive anti-biopic “Corsage,” which might make the second, German director Frauke Finsterwalder’s lush, irreverent “Sisi & I,” seem to them a too-soon spare — coincidentally repeating several tricks from Kreutzer’s anachronistic playbook with its modern feminist inflections, contemporary soundtrack cues and sensational fashions, albeit with plenty of its own panache.

Guy Lodge Film Critic It’s striking how often the word “removal” comes up in various governments’ official policies regarding refugees and asylum seekers — a pointedly chosen term that conjures images of inanimate refuse or clutter awaiting collection, rather than human lives in desperate limbo. Fail to make your case to officials and you’ll be “removed,” a near-literally humanizing threat that hangs over Milad Alami’s tense, bristling social thriller “Opponent” like a pounding migraine. Following an Iranian wrestler and father whose urgent reasons for fleeing his homeland emerge aren’t entirely what he claims them to be, this is a tightly wound affair that unravels an obscured past and an uncertain future neatly in tandem. Alami maintains suspense at both ends of his narrative without making a blank cypher of his protagonist, played with seething specificity by an electrifying Payman Maadi.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Early on in “What’s Love Got to Do With It?,” enterprising London-based filmmaker Zoe (Lily James) pitches a proposed documentary about Muslim arranged marriages to a pair of white male commissioners. They’re bored and disengaged until they realize how the topic can be dressed up in the tropes and lingo of Western romantic comedy to appeal to a general British audience: One suggests interview inserts in the style of “When Harry Met Sally,” the other name-drops “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” as a reference point. When Zoe suggests titling the doc “Love Contractually,” the deal is done. Sharper than anything else in Shekhar Kapur’s pleasant, easygoing comedy, the scene neatly satirizes how nuanced cross-cultural material can be blandly packaged and whitewashed for the mainstream — a point that would land harder if “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” didn’t proceed to do much the same thing. At a push, you could credit the film — a first feature screenwriting credit for producer and former journalist Jemima Khan — with some meta self-awareness as it tackles a thorny, divisive cultural institution in the sweetest, sunniest terms possible, down to its own recurring “When Harry Met Sally”-style inserts. But to what end, exactly? As strenuously as the film professes to give arranged marriages a fair shake, its whole cornball narrative is rigged against the very concept: “Love Contractually” may be the pitch, but “Love Actually” is the preferred outcome.

Guy Lodge Film Critic The official awards ceremony of this year’s Berlin Film Festival is under way, with Kristen Stewart’s jury set to announce their winners from the Competition selections. This post will be updated as they’re announced.Previously announced: AUDIENCE AWARDS Panorama Audience Award: “Sira,” Apolline TraoréSecond Prize: “The Burdened,” Amr GamalThird Prize: “Midwives,” Léa Fehner Panorama Documentary Audience Award: “Kokomo City,” D. SmithSecond Prize: “The Eternal Memory,” Maite AlberdiThird Prize: “The Cemetery of Cinema,” Thierno Souleymane Diallo

Guy Lodge Film Critic Veteran French docmaker Nicolas Philibert was the surprise winner of the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, taking the prize for his film “On the Adamant,” a poignant observational study of a Paris mental health care facility. He received the award from jury president Kristen Stewart, after the star offered an extended and plainly heartfelt ode to the film’s humanity and simplicity: “People have gone in circles for thousands of years trying to pin down what can be deemed art, who’s allowed to do it and what determines its value,” she said, citing the boundary-pushing nature of the festival, and namechecking such opposing philosophers on the matter as Aristotle, Barthes, Sontag and Beavis & Butthead, before concluding, “For all of us, you just know it when you see it.”

Guy Lodge Film Critic “Till the End of the Night” opens with what initially seems a Brechtian flourish: a nifty time-lapse shot of a bare shell of an apartment being painted, fitted, decorated and accessorized to an apparently lived-in state, as a vintage German torch song by Heidi Brühl crackles over the soundtrack. It’s not a film set being dressed, however, but a police one — the home base for an elaborate undercover investigation. It’s not the first time Christoph Hochhäusler’s romantic detective thriller will hint at subversive ambitions that turn out, upon closer investigation, to be rather conventional. Tossing a fraught transgender love story in the middle of an otherwise standard cop procedural, the film doesn’t much satisfy on either level, with superficial sexual politics and slack suspense. Despite a Berlinale competition slot, prospects beyond home turf appear limited.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Trends in documentary-making have shifted radically since Nicolas Philibert’s “Être et Avoir” was a surprise arthouse hit two decades ago: That sweetly observational little film, following the ins and outs of a village elementary school over the course of a year, seems a quaintly modest proposition beside today’s more slickly immersive and narrativized nonfiction breakouts. If times have changed, however, Philibert has not. “On the Adamant,” his first feature in 10 years, finds him once more examining the human workings of a care-based institution from a reserved but compassionate distance, avoiding commentary and editorialization in favor of real-life character portraiture. It turns out to be the right approach for the institution under scrutiny: The Adamant, a day-care center in central Paris for adults with a variety of mental disorders, offering its visitors a range of therapy, education and cultural activity. The human subjects here are both expressive and highly vulnerable, open to the low-key, non-invasive presence of Philibert’s camera, and the film is content to be an undulating patchwork of their everyday moods and moments, rather than anything more strenuously conceptual. Suited to specialist distributors and streaming platforms, “On the Adamant” might not achieve the crossover success Philibert has found in the past, but it’s a warm reminder of his perceptive gifts: A premiere slot in Berlin’s main competition, alongside much sleeker, more formally ambitious fiction fare, effectively welcomes him back to the auteur leagues.

Guy Lodge Film Critic There’s a parched austerity to the landscape of the Australian outback, along with an embedded history of conflict between Indigenous and invading occupants, that makes it irresistibly well-suited to screen westerns. But there’s a loneliness to it, too, a sense that its quiet vastness could swallow you whole and without trace, that lends itself as easily to moody, smoky mystery. Aboriginal filmmaker Ivan Sen has twice before dabbled in the harsh, dry space where those genre possibilities overlap, in his features “Goldstone” and “Mystery Road.” In his latest, most accomplished film “Limbo,” he once more surveys the region with a critical eye, finding a history of racial injustice in its sharp cracks and long shadows. But the genre styling this time has been pushed all the way to stark, monochromatic stylization. This is outback noir — oblique, secretive and as hard-boiled as the ground is hard-baked — and Sen wears it well.

Guy Lodge Film Critic In time, stories like “20,000 Species of Bees” will come to feel as commonplace within the coming-of-age genre as tales of first love or heartbreak: a young girl, unhappy in her skin and at odds with her family, finally recognizes her gender over the course of one pivotal summer, and persuades others to recognize it too. For now, Spanish writer-director Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren’s mellow, softly piercing debut feature joins the likes of Céline Sciamma’s “Tomboy” and Emanuele Crialese’s “L’Immensità” in a select but growing canon of trans or nonbinary childhood studies. Unassuming and meanderingly character-oriented, the film doesn’t assert itself as an issue drama — in large part because, as Solaguren presents her eight-year-old protagonist’s gradual steps toward self-realization, her film doesn’t see much of an issue to begin with.

Guy Lodge Film Critic If any writer has ever retreated to a remote, idyllic rural pad with the intention of getting some work done, and proceeded to have a productive and creatively fulfilling time, it has certainly never happened in the movies. Leon, the callow young novelist at the center of Christian Petzold’s canny, many-layered new film “Afire,” is the latest in a long line of onscreen scribes to learn that lesson. But over the course of a hot, rainless summer by the Baltic coastline, the elusiveness of his imagined masterwork turns out to be far from his greatest problem: Writer’s block spills over into bitter social paralysis, exposing every facet of life he doesn’t yet know how to live, let alone write about. All the while, the surrounding woodsy landscape wilts and scorches, the threat of natural disaster lending an urgent pull to this dry, elegant comedy of manners — so dry, in fact, it’s just a breath of wind away from tragedy.

Guy Lodge Film Critic On stage, drag artist Aphrodite Banks is a femme fatale: Caked in war paint, with a waterfall of braids whipping around her waist, she’s possessed of the white-hot glare and forthright confidence to match her Amazonian height and bearing. Off stage, as Jules, he’s simply femme: that term for gay men who present or express themselves in a more feminine way, too often used as a slur or a dismissal even by their community brethren. (Open up a cruising app like Grindr and see how frequently “no fems” comes up as a requirement.) The former identity connotes swaggering strength; the latter, to many, delicate weakness. How those associations and stigmas battle each other in one man’s body is the driving conflict in “Femme,” a tense, sometimes startling revenge drama from British freshmen Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Giacomo Abbruzzese’s debut feature is a hazily seductive, frequently dreamlike study of life in the French Foreign Legion, fixated on masculine bodies in synchronized and sometimes violently clashing motion. It is also called “Disco Boy.” You almost certainly wouldn’t choose that subject, tone and title for a film if you didn’t want viewers’ minds to immediately wander to “Beau Travail,” Claire Denis’ seminal Foreign Legion cine-ballet, with its climactic solo number set to a thumping Eurodance classic; even if you somehow made that error, you wouldn’t compound it with electro-scored terpsichorean interludes of your own. Choosing homage this direct for a first feature is a brazen move, but notwithstanding its openly derivative qualities, “Disco Boy” doesn’t want for boldness or surprise — Abbruzzese’s hot, fluxional command of sound and image keeps us curious.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Depending on the state of your own family network, the relationship between the trio of grown siblings at the center of “The Adults” may strike you as intensely, skin-crawlingly familiar or quite desolately alien. Either way, Dustin Guy Defa’s determinedly quiet family-reunion drama seeks to be discomfiting, gradually giving the viewer that hollow, lurching, pit-of-the-stomach feeling that either precedes a dreaded encounter or follows a disappointing one. That might not sounds like a good thing, but in the context of this small, expansively sad film, it is one: From that queasiness comes bristly tension, tautening and deepening what otherwise seems a low-key, low-stakes character study, and eventually a sweet, conciliatory sliver of hope too.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Last November, in a gesture that the actor himself described as “a symbolic, silly thing,” Sean Penn gifted one of his two Academy Awards to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, to mark his emotional investment in the country as they continue to fight Russia’s invasion — attracting widespread mockery from social media and the entertainment press in the process. That this moment is not included in Penn and co-director Aaron Kaufman’s “Superpower,” a disordered, distinctly Penn-centric account of recent Ukrainian history, counts as one of the film’s few moments of self-awareness. As far as the rest goes, anyone watching this doc right after emerging from a two-year coma could be forgiven for identifying the Hollywood veteran as a key player in the conflict.