Guy Lodge: Last News

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 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 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 “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.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Anyone who has spent much time on Film Twitter recently might know that there are two recurring subjects sure to instigate discourse wars between certain moralistic Zoomers and their befuddled elders: on-screen relationships marked by significant age gaps, and on-screen sex scenes between partners of any age, largely condemned by youthful detractors as gratuitous narrative roadblocks. That demographic won’t be seeking out Emily Atef’s film “Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything,” a brazenly sensual May-December romance between a teenage ingenue and a middle-aged social outcast, though beyond the festival circuit, this pretty but somewhat dreary mood piece is unlikely to end up on many people’s radars at all.

Guy Lodge Film Critic “The Echo” — or rather, El Eco — is the name of a tiny rural village in Mexico’s Puebla state that sufficiently captivated Mexican-Salvadorean filmmaker Tatiana Huezo into filming it over the course of 18 months, observing its changes in weather, fortune and the temperament of its few, tightly bonded residents in fine, fraught degrees. But there’s more to the title of Huezo’s return to documentary filmmaking — following the major success of her 2021 fiction debut “Prayers for the Stolen” — than a mere marker of place: Examining the unique ties that bind farming families, where everyone’s welfare hangs on the same unkind elements, this exquisitely textured film observes how children’s lives echo those of their parents, repeating for generations on the same constantly inconstant land, until somebody breaks the pattern.

Guy Lodge Film Critic The most rewarding moment of last year’s BAFTA ceremony came with the presentation of the lead actress award: As Joanna Scanlan was named the winner for her moving turn as a widow uncovering her husband’s double life in the British indie “After Love,” her visibly emotional reaction was matched by the palpable warmth of the applause. But a large part of the reason it was so memorable was because, in the long run of precursor awards and televised ceremonies that make up Oscar season, this moment belonged to BAFTA alone. Versions of Scanlan’s speech hadn’t been heard a dozen times before; she wasn’t even eligible for prizes Stateside. This was a case of the British Academy voters honoring one of their own with little regard for their place in the U.S. race. Scanlan’s unusual win, however, was only enabled because of a rarer occurrence still: Thanks partially to jury intervention in compiling the nominees, there was zero overlap between the BAFTA and Oscar slates for lead actress, essentially freeing the Brits to go their own way.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Even before last year’s Supreme Court overturning of Roe v. Wade, a recent international surge in films about abortion rights and the endangerment thereof — from period pieces like “Happening” to present-day portraits like “Never Rarely Sometimes Always” — almost seemed to anticipate such a devastating blow. In America in particular, where talk of abortion access has always been snarled up in extreme religious rhetoric and eternal red-blue division, it has never been a subject to be treated complacently. Urgent and unvarnished, Tracy Droz Tragos’ documentary “Plan C” is an early entry in what might be considered post-Roe cinema, focusing less on pro-choice ideology than on the practicalities of ensuring choice in a system increasingly stacked against the idea.

Angelique Jackson CAA has signed director Saim Sadiq, who helmed “Joyland,” Pakistan’s official entry for the 95th Academy Awards, for representation. Sadiq was named one of Variety’s “10 Directors to Watch” for 2023 in recognition of the film, which marks his debut feature. “Joyland” made its world premiere at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival — becoming the first Pakistani film to debut at the fest — where it was awarded the Un Certain Regard jury prize and the Queer Palm. The film has also been nominated for best international film at the 2023 Independent Spirit Awards and made history as Pakistan’s first film to be shortlisted for best international feature film at the Academy Awards.