FJORD

Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: A-
Cinematography: A-
Editing: B+

Fjord is quite the cinematic Rorschach test, making it quite easy to elicit empathy for different characters depending on your own cultural and religious background. Set in a village on the west coast of Norway, it all comes down to the cultural and legal judgment of a deeply conservative Christian family who immigrates from Romania, and the degree to which they may or may not be abusing their children. And this is really the crux of it: some might say the word “abusing” is being used loosely here, while others would say there is no other word for it.

Where might you side on this matter? Conservative Christians might easily side with the argument that Norwegian Child Protective Services involvement amounts to religious persecution. Progressives might easily side with the argument that authorities should intervene when parents get physical with their children at all.

The amazing feat of Fjord, written and directed by Cristian Mungiu, is that, so long as you don’t have particularly extreme views in any direction, it’s easy to empathize—if not necessarily agree with—all parties involved. There certainly is a subtle sense of xenophobia among some of the school staff who report the existence of bruises on one of the children, even though it’s never clear that she got them from her parents. Police interview records state that these parents admit to “repeatedly hitting” their children, when all they ever explicitly admit to is a swat on the butt or a slap on the hand.

But, in short order, CPS takes the children and places them in foster homes, and a criminal trial ensues. Many other complicating factors come into play, from the local school principal being a neighbor with whom the family has become friendly, to that family’s teenage girl who consistently convinces the two older children to disobey their parents. There is also the fact that these children seem perfectly well-adjusted, happy at home, and actually want to be reunited with their parents.

I find myself wondering how this film was received in Norway, where it is set. Was it very controversial? It seems there has been some controversy, but not a huge amount. Making the conservative family here Christian seems like a very deliberate choice. What if the family had been written as Muslim, its growing size in Scandinavian countries being a contentious issue (as everywhere)? That likely would have caused a far bigger stir, both in Norway and its surrounding countries as well as in the U.S.

I’m not judging the choice to make it a conservative Christian family, mind you, but one wonders if there is any sort of allegory at play, perhaps for other religions. Secular aversion to any kind of religious orthodoxy works in a story like this, however, and using Christianity was likely safer. And coming from a strictly Christian upbringing myself, I am by default inclined to judge this family—but, I always have great respect for films that portray Christian characters with the kind of dimensionality they do not often get in wide release films. Portraying them as wild fanatics is a trope that grew tired long ago.

In the story here, the situation is further complicated by the mother in this family being Norwegian, but who fell in love with and married a man in Romania. The husband, Mihai Gheorghiu, is played by Sebastian Stan, who happens to be Romanian by birth; still, his accent work and physical transformation here illustrates his stunning versatility as an actor. The wife, Lisbet Gheorghiu, is played by Renate Reinsve, in a performance so understatement you might wonder how good the acting is—until you see her ncredibly different performances in other films.

As the leads, Stan and Reinsve are incredibly compelling. It feels difficult to judge the rest of the cast, many of whom are Norwegian actors, with some who are either Romanian or of Romanian descent—such as the two eldest children, Elia (Vanessa Ceban) and Emmanuel (Jonathan Ciprian Breazu). The director, Cristian Mungiu, is himself Romanian, and as an American viewer with no experience in Scandinavia, it’s impossible to tell whether the uniformly stoic delivery of nearly every other person on camera is a reflection of the local culture or a specific artistic choice on the part of the filmmaker. I will say, I found the consistently deadpan delivery a bit distracting.

The deeply provocative story is another thing entirely. I wish I could have seen it with someone, so we could spend a great deal of time discussing the many questions it raises. Setting aside the actual scientific evidence to support the idea that physical punishment is broadly ineffective: where do you draw the line in terms of dictating what parents can or cannot do with their own children? There is a blurred line somewhere in there, between “discipline” and “abuse.” At what point does it justify removing children from their parents? Is it wrong to acknowledge that even when you disagree with certain behaviors, there are still degrees of severity? And when all of these questions are considered on a case by case basis, to what degree does xenophobia inform those decisions in one case versus another?

We never see Mihai or Lisbet physically discipline their children onscreen, which is the right choice, as otherwise too many of these questions would get—or seem to get—cut and dried answers. We do see them get disciplined, however, such as Elia and Emmanuel being forbidden from attending the birthday party of their neighbor friend Noora (Henrikke Lund-Olsen), after roughhousing dangerously around the baby. We see others use arguments against the Gheorghiu parents with debatable relevance, such as Elia stating to Noora her belief that being a lesbian is a sin, among other things. (Noora’s sexuality as a plot point, especially as she becomes closer friends with Elia, is a bit underdeveloped. It is never clear if the friendship makes Noora question her lesbianism at all, or if Noora’s influence in any way loosens Elia’s belief on the matter. Noora is clearly a bit smitten with Elia, but we never see any consequences of that.)

I have reached my own conclusions regarding how Mihai and Lisbet live their lives and raise their children, and it may not be exactly what you expect. I am eager for others to see the film and come to their own conclusions, which is the unique way in which Fjord is a must watch.

Should we just let them be happy in their own way?

Overall: B+

Tasveer Advance: ELEPHANTS IN THE FOG

Directing: A
Acting: A
Writing: A
Cinematography: A
Editing: A

It’s a challenge to find lived-in, stereotype-free representation of trans people in cinema broadly, but rarer still to find any kind of trans representation at all in international feature films. Enter director and co-writer Abinash Bikram Shah, with a truly stunning debut feature film Elephants in the Fog, starring Nepali trans activist Pushpa Thing Lama—also in her film debut. Several trans women actors are featured here, and this was the film debut for most of the cast; this is a big part of what makes the film such an extraordinary achievement.

The community depicted here is known as Kinnar, a legally recognized third gender in Nepal since 2007—the first country in South Asia to grant such recognition. (This community was given legal recognition in Pakistan in 2009; India in 2014; and Bangladesh in 2013.) In much of South Asia this community is known as Hijra, but in this film the Nepalese characters default to the evidently more respectful Kinnar—at least when the women in question are referring to each other.

Legal recognition or not, there remains cultural discrimination and oppression, as with anywhere on Earth. In South Asia, however, there is a sort of tenuous tolerance of this community, widely seen to be capable of either blessing or cursing. We see these characters in Elephants in the Fog clapping their hands together as part of this ritual, its intent contextualized by attitude and demeanor. In many scenes, one of these women is seen granting a blessing at weddings or to a pregnant woman. They are given often meager amounts of money for this service, and this is how they make a living, all the while living in a tightly structured community with a spiritual leader and a vow of celibacy.

It is within this framework that the story of Elephants in the Fog unfolds. I suppose I could give a trigger warning: this is indeed a tragic story—but not in anywhere near the typical way trans people have long been depicted in film. Pirati (Pushpa Thing Lama) is “mother” to several of the other trans women in this community, including the recklessly rebellious Apsara (Aliz Ghimire), who goes missing shortly after a confrontation between the two. These women share a house in a vollage bordering an area where dangerous wild elephants roam, and the immediate assumption is that Apsara may have been trampled in that adjacent forest.

The bulk of the story involves Pirati’s obsessive search for her, in the face of police indifference and building community resentment of this entire Kinnar community. This is all complicated by Pirati’s own hypocrisy, as she is engaged in an affair with a man who lives in the city of Birgunj, a little over 30 miles away. Pirati is all stoic resolve, but her refusal to give up even as she endangers her own standing among her “daughters” indicates a deep-seated guilt.

Apsara’s ultimate fate is not what we spend the movie expecting, and yet it’s deeply tragic in its own way. What makes Elephants in the Fog work so beautifully is how flawed all of these characters are—these are not magical heroines in the face of their oppression. They are simply surviving, and in this exceptionally well-written script, they are fallible and messy, just like all human beings. Rarely do trans characters come across as so well-drawn, their community and environment so authentically lived-in.

Elephants in the Fog is also beautifully shot, by cinematographer Noé Bach (in this case, far from a film debut: Bach has been working since 2012). The film’s budget does not appear to have been made public, but it’s probably safe to assume it was relatively small; I found myself wondering whether we would get to see any elephants at all, or if they would remain unseen and, to a degree, merely metaphors for partial truth. Never fear, though: elephants do get some screen time, but they are used so sparingly that their impact is incredible, and in the end almost overwhelming. The final shot of this film is one of the most powerful in any film released all year.

Indeed, Elephants in the Fog will easily be one of the best films I have seen all year, if not the best film I’ve seen this year—a bit of a frustration, in that I cannot tell you where to see it: there has not yet been any U.S. theatrical release date announced, and if there is one, it will not likely be until sometime in 2027. But I cannot ignore this film until then, because it simply cannot be ignored. I implore you to make a note of it, and see it as soon as it gets U.S. distribution.

Kinnar in the Fog: a beautifully painted portrait of a very specific community.

Overall: A

Tasveer Advance: LALI

Directing: B-
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B-

I am clearly not the target audience for Lali, which makes me patently unqualified to comment on it. I can’t even tell whether director and co-writer Sarmad Sultan Khoosat made it with the idea of general audiences worldwide watching it. One would presume so, but consider this user review on Letterboxd: Fucked with this hard and could smell the white people‘s confusion in the entire cinema heheheheh. It is perhaps relevant to note that I am married to a South Asian man, and when the movie ended he asked what I thought; I said: “I didn’t get it.” He said, no fewer than three times: “That was a crazy good movie!”

Context is everything, right? I saw this at the Tasveer Film Festival, which is specific to South Asian film, and that audience ate it up. This is pretty typical of festival audiences, regardless of the festival and regardless of how good the movie really is. I once saw a “documentary” called Orwell Rolls in His Grave at the Seattle International Film Festival, and it was one of the worst movies I had ever seen. There was a Q&A after the screening and the questions were shocking in how they revealed that the audience there clearly thought it was brilliant.

There is nothing so stark going on with Lali, which I kind of vibed with until the unhinged final act. There remains the context of cultural and ethnic experience, this film being dense with both, and which I have almost zero experience with. Even my husband grew up Hindu in India, so I have some broad knowledge of that cultural context—but, notwithstanding the obviously fair amount of cultural crossover, Lali is about a Muslim family in Pakistan. It opens with a wedding, and my husband did explain to me that green is a traditional color worn at Muslim wedding events. This was the first I had heard of that, and that would be the tip of the iceberg when it comes to cultural details densely packed into this narrative that I was unfamiliar with.

Even the experience of being one of only a handful of White people in the sold-out audience otherwise full of South Asians (or Americans of South Asian descent) was a somewhat peculiar experience. Lali is presented as a dark comedy, until the final act when it just slips into straight up (if not necessarily straightforward) darkness, but I was often baffled at what moments people in the audience laughed at. I laughed out loud a couple of times, but even my husband laughed a couple of times at moments when I thought: Is that supposed to be funny?

The basic premise of the film is that Zeba (Mamya Shajaffar) is finally getting married, to a man named Sajawal (Channan Hanif), or Sajju for short—after multiple previous engagements resulted in fiancés winding up dead. The community being convinced that Zeba is cursed is her cross to bear; Sajju’s is is huge birthmark on the left side of his face. The people in his family and community rarely use the word “birthmark,” though, in favor of the far more evocative word “scar”—an indicator of differing degrees of attitudes as compared to the West, perhaps. (Not to suggest that anyone in the West would have it easy with a giant birthmark on their face.)

It took me a while to understand why Sajju was so quiet and brooding. In the opening, wedding event sequence, he’s wearing a headdress with strings of flowers obstructing his face. Soon enough we see the birthmark, and we learn how it shaped him growing up. He has a comically overbearing mother (Farazeh Syed) and a father whose death he eventually reveals he blames on her. In the early scenes shortly after the wedding is finally over, with many people comically paranoid about Sajju’s fate with this supposedly cursed woman, it feels like we are meant to see that he’s deeply self-conscious but a good guy.

Much of Lali is very surreal, and it takes a turn when Sajju is suddenly prone to jealous rages. Maybe because of such deep-seeded self-loathing that he assumes Zeba must be looking elsewhere, despite all obvious evidence to the contrary? All I can say is, when a disturbing scene occurs in which Zeba comes home drunk, pours liquor over Zeba’s head, and the scene ends without depicting but unsubtly suggesting marital rape, it was a jarring narrative leap that felt a bit unearned, after we saw him making odd but still kind gestures toward her. This type of mystifying narrative turn only continues in the final act, in which I completely lost the plot and thought Lali went right off the rails, with both Zeba and Sajju having wild breakdowns that come out of nowhere.

Lal translates as “red” in Hindi and Urdu (this film is spoken in Punjabi but with sprinklings of Urdu). Lali is thus a pejorative nickname for Sajju and his “scar,” which he suddenly leans so far into in the final act that he wraps himself in a red blanket, covers himself with a red oil or paint of some kind, and otherwise starts hopping around and hanging from bars like a lunatic who thinks he’s a bat—all while referring to himself as a jinn, a dark spirit from Arabic mythology. The nickname is used exclusively by a neighbor woman who visits frequently and was much more kindly welcomed by Sajju’s mother than by Sajju himself; her condition is never specified but she is clearly mentally disabled in some way. If there is some symbolic meaning there, I completely missed it.

And therein lies the challenge in my experience with this film, which, while it left me baffled in the end, I did not hate—largely because the performances of both the leads were equally excellent. And I certainly cannot write it off the way I might have if it were made by an American director and writer and infused it with equivalent amounts of American or Western mythology. I read enough reviews and reactions to this film to know that I was certainly not alone in it losing me in the final act—what would be interesting but impossible to find out would be what the ethnic breakdown of these reactions were. It may be that it’s simply the audiences who are not of Muslim, Pakistani or South Asian background who do not get it. Lali is clearly dense with meaning that only a certain population can fully grasp. They get it, and I don’t, and I guess that’s okay.

Lali may surprise you, but who knows how much you’ll vibe with that surprise?

Overall: B

THE CYCLE OF LOVE

Directing: B+
Acting: B
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+

If The Cycle of Love isn’t the most earnestly romantic documentary ever made, then it must be close. Director Orlando von Einsiedel does fill about half of the film with narrative recreations of the two lead characters’ pasts, using very pretty young actors and blurring the line between documentary and narrative feature—but, in so doing, he actually intensifies the romance. Much of the literal narration comes from present-day interviews with PK Mahanandia and Lotta von Schedvin, who are also the subjects of the film.

This is the true story of a young man who traveled, in 1977, nearly 7,000 kilometers from Delhi, India to reunite with the traveling Swedish woman he’d fallen in love with in in India at her home in Borås, Sweden. The road distance between these two points is 7,355 km (4,570 miles), but PK was not able to make this trip as a straight shot—he had to bypass Pakistan altogether due to not having a passport, and endured a number of setbacks along the way. He was also offered very moving assistance from kind strangers along the way, allowing him to travel by train in certain segments. What makes his story so distinctive and unique is that he traveled more than half that distance by bicycle.

This couple’s relationship is a matter of public record, but Orlando von Einsiedel’s edit of their story is decidedly coy about their fates. We get present-day interviews with both of them, but we do not see them together. PK is seen in India, and Lotta is seen in a home presumably in Sweden. We see her reading some of the letters PK wrote her while making his journey that took him over four months, and she even comments, through tears, that she hasn’t read them since shortly after receiving them. You spend much of the film wondering if PK didn’t make it all the way there, or maybe he took so long that Lotta was forced to move on and wound up with someone else. It feels very much as though von Einsiedel intended this. The story of this guy riding a bike from India to Europe would be extraordinary no matter what, but amping the intrigue and raising the stakes is what great filmmaking is all about.

Now, is this movie great? I must admit to some ambivalence about it. There is a sort of plaintive tone to much of it, with a pacing that can generously be described as reserved. The Cycle of Love has a 98-minute runtime and it kind of feels like two and a half hours. And yet, by the end it had completely won me over, I was so moved by its purity of heart and uplifting sincerity. It’s extraordinarily rare to see something so completely uncynical.

We do get to see a smattering of film clips and photos from PK’s and Lotta’s youth, but mostly we see flashbacks recreated by actors, who are both decidedly prettier than the real people they are playing: Chirag Lobo as PK; and 24-year-old Norwegian actor Mina Dale as Lotta. We see them meet when Lotta is visiting Delhi after having traveled the so-called “Hippie Trail” for 22 days from Sweden, and she sits for one of PK’s portrait drawings. When Lotta returns to Sweden and PK eventually follows after her on his second-hand bicycle, these very impressive drawn portraits are largely how he supports himself along the way.

Orlando von Einsiedel takes yet another fascinating approach in the construction of this film: Chirag Lobo and Mina Dale are actors, but as we see depictions of PK in the flashback scenes encountering many people along his travels, who are clearly real people and not actors. This raises a lot of questions. Did these people know they were part of a recreation? Did they know Lobo was an actor and not really a guy traveling to Europe to be reunited with the woman he loves? I haven’t found answers yet with the specificity I desire, but it sounds like they simply took a camera crew on a road trip and had conversations with people met along the way, and then creatively and cleverly edited the ineractions into the film’s narrative. Von Einsiedel told The Movable Feast that the real PK traveled along with them, and was moved by experiences not exactly like this own but evidently similar enough.

These sorts of details leave me more impressed with The Cycle of Love as a cinematic accomplishment the more I consider it after the fact. This is a truly unique endeavor, using mostly real people even in recreations made with an actor for a documentary. There may be a solid helping of genuine performance in this film, but its sentiments are entirely genuine. There is even a brief moment of Lobo-as-PK chatting with a diverse array of young people going through letters at a post office, and one of them explains a tattoo to him, which turns out to be in solidarity with a queer friend struggling with the possibility of being disowned by his family. In plenty of other hands, this would come off as corny tokenism, but this is a film of such sincerity that I deeply appreciated it.

There is a quality to The Cycle of Love that might be best described as “you have to be in right mood for it.” And I don’t mean its jarring lack of cynicism and its unapologetic hope for humanity—I mean the somewhat labored way in which the story unfolds. An action movie, this is not; this is the kind of movie you want to quietly marinate in, should that be the vibe that you’re looking for. I must admit that, on this level, I wasn’t quite feeling it for a while. But again, that ending—truly contrived as it was—perfectly landed the plane. If you’ll pardon the discordant metaphor for a movie about a guy on a bike. I left misty-eyed in the best way, and any of the hopeless romantics out there are bound to be moved by PK and Lotta’s incredible story.

You might be taken aback by how charmed you are in the end.

Overall: B+

HOPE

Directing: C
Acting: B
Writing: C-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: C+
Special Effects: B-

I had such high hopes for . . . well, you know. I was genuinely excited to see this movie, and then walked away disappointed. At the ending, such as it was, I was completely baffled.

What does writer-director think this is, Dune Part One? Sort of, in a way: he reportedly has a script all ready to go for a sequel that he hopes to be part of a trilogy, depending on this film’s success. And what if there never is a sequel? Hope ends so abruptly that I actually said out loud, “What?” And this was after two and a half hours of non-stop armed pursuit of what gradually are revealed to be not just one, but multiple aliens in Hope Harbor, a small South Korean town very close to the Demiitarized Zone.

With a runtime this long, I expected Hope to take its time a bit—which it does, for the first twenty minutes or so, after which it’s fairly effective non-stop tension or action. Na Hong-jin employs a lot of economical filmmaking, clearly saving money on effects shots by having his characters pursue an unseen “monster” that is constantly on another block or out of frame. The many scenes with production design of massive destruction is impressively detailed, but I kept wondering why the town is so quiet and deserted. Apparently it’s mostly elderly people who live here, but you’d think there would still be a lot of panicked screaming and running in the streets. Instead, we get destroyed streets with dead and maimed bodies here and there, with no set pieces involving any more than just a handful of extras.

The camera follows police chief Ko Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min) as he follows the trail of an evident monster through the town, gun in hand and terrified. In the beginning, there is a dead cow found in the middle of a road, and the wounds indicate something very large having attacked it. There is speculation as to whether it’s a rogue tiger. But as Bum-seok and assorted others pursue it, at first there is some logic in the idea that whatever it is needs to be killed before it starts killing everyone in town. Never mind the fact that the whole population of the town seems to be gone already—something I could not stop thinking about—but the longer Bum-seok pursues this thing, the clearer it becomes that it is unnaturally gigantic, and he is no match for it. Neither are any of his cohorts, and nor really any of the guns or ammo they possess. And still they persist. Why? I would be thinking about was a place to hide.

Eventually this creature wreaking havoc on the town appears onscreen, and I can hardly convey the depths of my disappointment. It really just looks like a weirdly agile, gigantic cartoon man. I thought this was supposed to be an alien? Indeed it is, we discover soon enough, but another group of men is exploring the forest outside of town, and the more they discover the weirder everything gets. I’m okay with plot twists revealing more questions than answers, but Hope offers no answers whatsoever, just an Escher painting of endless questions, which I found very frustrating.

I really couldn’t tell if Na Hong-jin was just drawing inept characters with cliched mindsets for his own amusement, or if there was some kind of commentary going on. It’s clear to the viewers very quickly that fighting these aliens with guns is ineffective, and not once does it ever occur to a single one of them to try a different approach. Not even after the aliens pick them up and throw them against buildings or trees, or in some cases whack one of them with the hurled body of another. No matter what happens, even after Ko Bum-seok finds himself briefly feeling sorry for the first creature, it’s the same tactic: guns, guns, guns. Na Hong-jin must be going for something a little deeper here, because more than once a person is asked, “Where did you get all these guns?” and the reply is always a variation on “That’s not important right now!”

Over time we find out these aliens aren’t quite what they seem, although none of the characters register this deeply enough to interrogate things like, say, motivation. Actually, Ko Bum-seok thinks about this briefly, one time, and then never brings it up again. He’s too busy angrily shooting at aliens with ineffective bullets. Eventually the movie tells us way more about the aliens than the characters ever discover, but in a way that answers nothing and just leaves us bewildered.

Perhaps the sequel script is designed to dole out some of these deeply desired answers, but after sitting through Hope, I half expect another installment to be just another series of narrative rabbit holes. This movie feels like it’s trying to be some kind of thrilling setup, but instead it’s a series of set pieces that have their share of thrills but collectively amount to nothing more than “Huh?”

I also can’t decide whether I might have liked Hope better if it had better—or at the very least more consistent–special effects. The very first alien creature looks like cheap CGI. Later ones have some surprisingly impressive renderings but then look like they’re in an outdated video game as they move and run. There are some very different creature shapes seen, with some clues as to how they are related to each other but with other examples of differences that have no clear relationship to each other. Much of Hope feels like a lot of ideas thrown at the wall, by an author who is just hoping to come up with ways to make them click together later. For now, how about we just abruptly roll credits!

Very early in the film, we see a sign that references keeping out “infiltrators,” a clear reference to North Koreans. It feels like the suggestion of some kind of commentary, as does a lot in Hope, which are either never more than suggestions or are getting lost in translation. Is it possible that Hope somehow actually succeeds and I just don’t get it? Sure. Is this a movie that simply has no hope of working for me? Absolutely.

I really wanted to see what was around that corner, until I did.

Overall: C+

THE MARCHING BAND

Directing: B+
Acting: A-
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B
Editing: A-

I can just hear all the criticisms by film snobs of The Marching Band: it’s emotionally manipulative, it’s treacly, it’s occasionally contrived—you know, all the things that make a crowd-pleasing movie work. Well, this movie very much worked on me, and I’m happy to say I thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s practically the definition of a crowd-pleaser, and isn’t that precisely what the crowd wants?

It also has far more depth than it might seem at first glance, thanks to a tight script that was co-written by director Emmanuel Courcol. A ton of plot happens within just the first act: successful orchestra conductor Thibaut (Benjamin Lavernhe) discovers he has leukemia, and when his sister, Rose (Mathilde Courcol-Rozès, making the most of fairly little screen time), takes a DNA test to see if she is a match for a bone marrow transplant, it is revealed for the first time that Thibaut was adopted. He also discovers he had a brother he never knew he had, Jimmy Lecocq (Pierre Lottin), whose DNA is a match.

Most of The Marching Band is far less about Thibaut’s cancer than it is about the budding relationship between these two brothers who have only just learned of each other’s existence. This is one of the many surprising delights of The Marching Band, the title being a reference to Jimmy’s own extracurricular interests—something he keeps from Thibaut at first. It seems Jimmy, in spite of Thibaut’s discovery that he has perfect pitch, has a bit of an inferiority complex.

A whole lot of the story that unfolds here deals with class differences and the assumptions made by people born of privilege. Thibaut is understandably furious at his parents for not telling him he was adopted—”Lies kill!” he shouts at them—but takes a while to register the opportunities that would not have been available to him if not for his adoptive family. More than once the two brothers contemplate what their fates might have been had they actually grown up together: Thibaut in Jimmy’s working-class environment, or Jimmy in Thibaut’s world of comparative education and opportunity. (By way of brief explanation as to why Thibaut’s parents did not also adopt Jimmy, it is explained that they thought they were unable to have children, but then Rose was “a miracle” that left them ill-prepared to take on yet another child.)

The Marching Band also naturally brings up age-old questions of nature vs. nurture, at least when it comes to innate talent: Rose was not up to par with violin lessons in school; Jimmy is a natural musician. Jimmy is a divorced dad of a 13-year-old daughter he doesn’t get to see often enough, playing trombone in a community marching band in northern France. When the band’s conductor has no choice but to take a job in another region in order to pay off significant debts, the first suggestion is that Jimmy step in, but he has no confidence. Thibaut steps in to help him, with the encouragement of another band member, Sabrina (Sarah Suco), who Jimmy is too blind to see has a thing for him.

The whole cancer backstory seems to take a surprising backseat after the first half an hour or so, until it comes up again in a way that some may find surprising and some may find predictable—I was so taken with this movie, its characters, and particularly its performances, that I was happy just to go with the flow as the story went along. And in the end, all the story threads and the musical threads come together in a kind of emotional and musical crescendo that you’d have to be dead inside to resist. I was so moved by it, I really wish I had known to bring tissues.

It’s easy to see how The Marching Band became a smash hit in France, earning over $20 million in that country alone, and more than $30 million globally, before finally coming to the United States. This is happening, a bit inexplicably, nearly two years after it was first in wide release in France (November 2024). I’m a little baffled that this movie is not more well-known here; I only discovered it when checking to see what was playing in my local market at SIFF Cinemas. Time will tell whether France will enter this as their selection for the Best International Feature Oscar, but it is well deserving, and would give it greater exposure to American audiences. Otherwise, if you happen to see this review, and you enjoy deeply heartwarming dramas, then either check your local listings for this movie or make a note of it for eventual VOD or streaming options.

The orchestra conductor slums it with The Marching Band.

Overall: B+

TWO PROSECUTORS

Directing: B
Acting: B-
Writing: B
Cinematography: B-
Editing: B

I didn’t get too far into Two Prosecutors before I got a sense of where it was headed. This was hardly a surprise, or a spoiler; this film is about a man navigating the rampant corruption of 1937 Soviet Russia—or “Stalin’s Great Terror,” as the film puts it. It’s fascinating how many films we have gotten over the decades about Nazi Germany, and the comparatively few we have gotten about Stalinist Russia. It’s also ironic, given that Stalin’s regime killed more people than Hitler. Which is to say, in Two Prosecutors, the young prosecutor Kornyev, played by Alexander Kuznetsov, is headed nowhere good, as he investigates the treatment of prisoners in his district.

He only manages to meet with one such prisoner, a very old man named Stepniak (Aleksandr Filippenko) who has been falsely imprisoned and by some miracle managed to get a note out of the prison. Not having been provided any writing utensils, he wrote the note in his own blood. Come to think of it, he sure did manage neat and tidy writing in blood with no writing utensils.

Fully the first half of Two Prosecutors follows Kornyev as he is stalled at every turn, making his way through the maze of the prison where Stepniak is being held. He waits, and he waits—and so do we. I got the feeling that Ukranian director and co-writer Sergey Loznitsa’s intent was to make us quite literally feel Kornyev’s frustration. And I’ve got to say: it worked. Two Prosecutors has a glacial pace the likes of which I have not experienced in ages, and is sure to alienate any casual movie watcher.

Of course, this is not a film for the casual movie-goer. It exists to challenge, and force us to confront the dangers of fascism in the most mundane of environments—and how the mundane can be used to mask horrors. This is a movie about a man who is increasingly brave as he insists on doing the right thing, and following the letter of the law, and we know far before the end that he will only be punished for it. I was reminded of the end of the far more exciting All Quiet on the Western Front: all that effort, for this?

After Kornyev finally meets his prisoner and is a first-hand witness to how horribly the NKVD (the abbreviation for the agency that translates as People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs) treats the countless people they arrest without cause, the second half of Two Prosecutors has Kornyev traveling to Moscow to meet with the Prosecutor General—hence the film’s title. Here he walks the labyrinthine halls of government offices rather than those of a prison, but he is stalled in exactly the same way. And we once again spend what feels like an eternity, waiting with him.

It would be one thing if it were just the waiting, but nearly every character is ridiculously stoic. Neither Kornyev nor anyone whose path he crosses has any personality to speak of. The guy who finally grants him permission to visit Stepniak in prison does laugh at his own joke, with a sort of mirthless glee. Once Kornyev finally gets his meeting with the Prosector General, the Prosecutor General listens to Kornyev’s litany of allegations with nary a facial expression. Then he provides him with a train ticket ride home in a train car that’s quite the contrast to the crowded car he traveled to Moscow in. On his ride home, he meets two engineers already sharing the room he’s put in, and these guys are the only characters in the movie who exude a modicum of warmth. And you should know instantly not to trust that.

Two Prosecutors is drab, dull, and bleak—all with clear intentionality. I have a hard time deciding what to make of it, overall. It kind of won me over in the end, as I got a sense of what it was doing. Nevertheless, I do not recommend watching this when you haven’t had enough sleep. You’re guaranteed to nod off, just as Kornyev himself does on more than one occasion.

Yep, this movie has Two Prosecutors in it.

SIRĀT

Directing: B
Acting: B-
Writing: B
Cinematography: A
Editing: B+

As I consider Sirât, the Spanish nominee for Best International Feature, I keep thinking of the 2021 film from Mexico, New Order, which was so deeply nihilistic it left me baffled, bordering on angry. There is no question that Sirât is a better film, and yet I am not convinced there was any more of a point to it. Sirât is far more subtle with themes that New Order beat us over the head with, but I still could not in good conscience recommend it to anybody.

Some truly horrible things happen in Sirât. I went in already knowing the first horrible thing that happens; I just did not know exactly when or how it would occur. I can’t say knowing about it ahead of time made it any less horrible to witness, this scene alone left me deeply rattled, mostly because it comes out of nowhere during what is otherwise a perfectly normal scenario: people working together to change the tire on a traveling bus on fairly treacherous Moroccan desert mountain roads. What I was not prepared for was how things sort of settle a bit after that, only for things to get even worse.

This is a film clearly working in broad, existential and spiritual metaphor, even though on the surface everything is very grounded in reality. It is explained to us in an opening title card that Sirât refers to the Islamic theological idea of a bridge one must cross, “thinner than a hair and sharper than a sword,” over hell and into Paradise. The faithful will cross successfully and the sinful will descend into hell. Now, I know next to nothing about Islamic belief, so it’s not only conceivable but likely that my Western mind lacks a certain understanding of nuance here. (Although, side note: after reading a few other reactions to this film, it’s clear there are people from the region who feel director and co-writer Oliver Laxe is dabbling with real-life geopolitcal tensions he has no business playing with.)

All I know is, not only do the characters in Sirât have horrible things happen to them, but they happen at random and without any directed malice. These are all perfectly decent people, basically minding their own business and helping others in whatever ways they can, and tragedy befalls them out of nowhere. The only pattern to be found is the quick succession of sudden horrors befalling this one group of people.

I’m not eager to tell anyone else to sit through this movie, which I found compelling until I found it by turns horrifying and deeply stressful, but I still won’t spoil specifics. I’ll just say that it begins with Luis (Sergi López), a middle-aged man, and his son, Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona), milling about a desert rave in Morocco, handing out flyers and looking for Luis’s older child, Esteban’s sister. We never do find out how long she’s been missing (except that it’s been a long time) or why she’s apparently lost; these two only know that she frequents these desert raves.

The rave music figures prominently in the plot of Sirât. I haven’t been to a rave since college, so my impression of them is that they occur overnight in dark lofts or basements, packed with young people on relatively harmless drugs and surrendering to the beats. This was roughly thirty years ago, so clearly I don’t know what the fuck is going on now; a quick Google search indicates there is indeed a thriving desert rave scene in Morocco. It would seem these are still typically overnight affairs, but all of those seen in Sirât appear to be happening midday. This is the case during the opening credits identifying the principal characters other than Luis or Esteban, nonprofessional actors found for director Oliver Laxe and given the same character names as their real first names. After this, we don’t actually see the title, Sirât, until 30 minutes in.

By that point, Luis and Esteban, still desperate to find their lost family member, follow a small caravan of vehicles on their way to another rave after military has come and forced a rave to break up. We’ve already gotten very sporadic snippets on car radios about nations in the region descending into armed conflict, and it’s serious enough for citizens of the EU to be singled out for evacuation. The smaller group of ravers that Luis follows in his car have little interest in it, aside from a passing reference to “World War III” that doesn’t seem to be taking it very seriously, even though some of them appear to be seriously injured veterans themselves: one with a missing leg who walks on what looks like a repurposed crutch; another with a missing hand. There is another passing reference to them being “deserters” but with no further detail or contextualization.

I am reminded yet again of that other film, New Order, in which the narrative takes us into the thick of the violent chaos—in that case a senselessly violent overthrow of the elite by the underclass. In Sirât, we have a group of people who have deliberately separated themselves from the violent chaos, escaping into drugs and beats but otherwise pretty pacifistic. And unsettlingly terrible things happen to them anyway. And in the most straightforward sense, there is no rhyme or reason to it.

So this is where the intended takeaway is up for debate, I suppose. The final sequence in Sirât was so tense I could hardly handle it. They cross a lethally dangerous path, which some cross unscathed and others do not; presumably there is profound importance to the line, “I just crossed without thinking.” This is his response to how he made it work, while another did not succeed.

And in the end, this is all we know about any of these people: only that some of them have dedicated their lives to raves, and that Luis is looking for his daughter. We don’t hear anything about Esteban’s mother, or about any of the ravers’ lives up to this point, at least not beyond a vague reference to desertion. Earlier in the film, one of the ravers turns off the radio announcer detailing what’s going on in the country, presumably because all they want to do is shut out the realities of the wider world. Beyond that, Sirât simply follows a small group of people who either meet violent ends or barely miss violent ends. The image of the first incident is so simple in its horror, something we hear rather than see directly, is something I will not soon shake, even though it is only the shock of characters witnessing it that plays out onscreen.

There’s something doubly effective about the choice to use nonprofessional actors for this. Esteban in particular feels like just a regular, unremarkable kid who is naturally very well loved by his decent dad. Horrible shit can happen to any of us at any time. And yet, in the end I was still left with the question: okay, but why? It seems the absence of an answer to that question was the point of this movie, except the characters have no choice in the matter, but we do. My experience of Sirât was one of tension and stress that could have been avoided; watching this film was not a random thing that happened to me out of nowhere. Not putting yourself through it is also a choice you can make, and in spite of a lot of it being very well done—including a good amount of genuinely gorgeous cinematography—that’s the choice I would encourage.

Let’s all form a circle and talk about my deep ambivalence about this movie.

Overall: B

THE PRESIDENT'S CAKE

Directing: A-
Acting: B
Writing: A-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+

Sometimes it’s worth just checking out what’s playing at your local movie theater, and looking up a movie you’ve never heard of. I had certainly never heard of The President’s Cake before doing this, when I also learned this was Iraq’s 2025 submission for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film. It’s Iraq’s 14th submission, in fact; the country has never secured a nomination—although The President’s Cake, which made the short list, came the closest.

I’m not certain I have ever even seen an Iraqi film before. According to my extensive movie watching records over on Letterboxd.com, I have only seen 11 other films in the Arabic language; only eight of them feature length. None were from Iraq, although I have seen several excellent films from Iran. I’m used to seeing subversive storytellers using film to reflect and expose the oppressive regime in Iran, but seeing something from an Iraqi perspective is both novel and new.

Not only that, but the story in The President’s Cake centers around children—in particular a 3rd-grade girl, Lamia (Baneen Ahmad Nayyef), whose name is drawn in class as the school’s chosen student to bake a cake for the president’s birthday. This is set in 1990, so the president was Saddam Hussein, the year he turned 53. The opening title cards inform us that the country is subject to UN-backed sanctions which significantly exacerbates the population’s poverty. Nevertheless, the entire country is required to celebrate his birthday every year, and a student in every school is chosen to bake a cake. We see Lamia’s teacher pass around a box into which all students must enter their name written on paper; one kid, who arrives late, must enter his name five times as punishment. One student’s name is drawn who has to clean the school; another must bring fruit; Lamia’s name is drawn for baking the cake.

The actual capability of each kid and their family evidently does not matter. When Lamia’s classmate and friend, Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem), protests that he’ll be in the city with his father, the teacher notes that it is his “duty” to report anyone who disobeys, and mentions another family who was “dragged” for a similar infraction.

The President’s Cake is very impressively staged, as Lamia travels with Bibi (Waheed Thabet Khreibat), the grandmother who is taking care of her, to the city, ostensibly for ingredients. Lamia and Bibi live in a very rural area among marshes where Lamia commutes to school and back on what appear to be community canoes. Whether here or in the city they travel to, we see constant images of Saddam Hussein, in framed photos, paintings, even a wall mural pretty impressively rendered at the local school. The students are conditioned to shout things in their class like, “We sacrifice our blood and souls for you, Saddam!” In the city, the kids weave through both bazaars and crowded processions celebrating Hussein’s birthday.

Much of the film takes place in the city, where Lamia runs away after Bibi attempts to transfer custody of her to a friend, both due to her age and her inability to afford the cake ingredients. Lamia runs into Saeed, there pickpocketing with his disabled father. Both the marshes and the city are rendered in a way that feels deeply lived-in. In both environments the people are well aware of the state of the country but barely acknowledge it, just living their daily lives as they can. In one scene in the city, where the kids try everything from selling Lamia’s late father’s watch to offering labor to thievery in attempt to secure cake ingredients (eggs, flour, sugar, sugar, and baking powder), Lamia winds up in a coffee shop with a kind of jam band performing, the singer a young woman of some sophistication.

Lamia has a beloved rooster, which she has named Hindi, she’s brought with her. This seems like an unnecessary complication to a journey into the city, but I guess you can’t expect a 9-year-old to think logically. You might be right to worry about the fate of Hindi, who kind of has an adventure of his own. Lamia meets many people as she runs around the city, of course; sometimes they’re very kind and helpful, sometimes they’re clearly bad news. Sometimes you simply can’t tell.

There’s a few scenes in a hospital, and we meet people with injuries both their and elsewhere. There are casual references to being “bombed by the Americans.” Lamia and Saeed stick together for a while; they have conflict; they have resolution. All of this unfolds with the backdrop of everyday life in Iraq, with compulsory birthday celebrations happening and jets flying overhead. Lamia is too young to be concerned with geopolitics, or even war, until its effects come right up to her. All she knows is she wants to stay at home with her Bibi, and she needs ingredients to make a cake.

I don’t have a clue what life is like in Iraq today; it’s an entirely different universe from mine. But a film like The President’s Cake, even set 35 years ago, offers valuable insight into a culture and history that Americans were long encouraged to dismiss and dehumanize—to a large degree we still are. It doesn’t feel like writer-director Hasan Hadi made this film for that purpose, but rather to tell a deeply human story from the point of view of an average person who grew up in this historical context. It’s deeply affecting, and a truly impressive feature film debut.

The resilience of scrappy kids in The President’s Cake.

Overall: B+

ARCO

Directing: B+
Acting: B
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+
Animation: B+

I think I have finally pinpointed the primary reason I don’t care for anime. It’s the frame rate—or at least, the frame rate of moving objects. I prefer animation that looks more fluid, with a frame right high enough not to detect each individual frame with the naked eye. To be fair, anime covers a diverse array of visual styles, and some of it likely has higher frame rates; conversely, there are plenty of other animation styles that use lower frame rates. I don’t tend to care for those either. The key difference with a whole lot of anime is how it combines this style with stories that are either bonkers-weird or so culturally specific that I have no hope of understanding what’s going on.

You may be wondering why the hell I’m leading a review of a French animated feature that is definitively not anime with a paragraph about anime. Well, again: it’s the frame rate. We see our protagonist, the title character, picking fruit from a tree, and we see his arm in four positions as it raises up to the brand. Immediately I am thinking about how this was animated, rather than what the character is doing at this point in the story. I always find it a distraction.

At least this story is easy for me to follow. The closest this gets to bumping on cultural specificity is in the choice to release this film theatrically in the United States with American voice performances replacing the original French ones. This is the story of a preteen boy (Arco, voiced by Juliano Krue Valdi) who travels back in time from the year 2932 to 2075, and a trio of grown-men conspiracy theorists are sure they’ve discovered an alien in him, or some other equally mysterious entity, because of having seen a similar sight to Arco’s manner of arrival (with a streaking rainbow tail across the sky) twenty years earlier. In the American theatrical release, these men are voiced by Will Ferrell, Andy Samberg, and Flea. They have several lines that just come across as somewhere on the line between odd and stilted. It was the thing that most made me wish I could have just watched Arco in the original French with subtitles. There’s a sense that there’s some level of nuance lost in translation.

And they got some pretty big names for the America voice actors. In the year 2075, Arco meets a preteen girl named Iris, voiced by Romy Fay, who is fairly unknown—but, her parents, only ever seen in hologram form because they are stuck at their jobs in the city, are voiced by Mark Ruffalo, and Natalie Portman (who also co-produced the film). Arco’s mother is voiced by America Ferrera. Another major character is Iris’s live-in nanny robot, Mikki, whose voice is a blend of Ruffalo and Portman.

The distracting frame rate aside, the animation is drawn beautifully. When we meet Arco, we are in 2932, and he is jealous of his sister who is of age and thus can legally time-travel with their parents. It seems they travel back in time to bring back specimens of fauna they mean to replicate. They wear hoods that have a diamond embedded in the forehead as a tool for time travel, and rainbow colored hoods. This makes them look a little like futuristic clowns. Maybe it’s a French thing. In any case, they live on platforms that sit on the ends of giant white stilts somewhat like trees, among the clouds. Arco sneaks out in the middle of the night, snatches his sister’s clown outfit, and leaps off the edge of his family’s platform—you’d think they would have protective railings in the future but whatever. The momentum of falling is what triggers the time travel.

Arco wants nothing more than to travel back in time and see dinosaurs in person. I get it, that would be pretty awesome. But he makes a mistake and winds up in 2075, when houses are protected by automated glass domes from everything from gale force rainstorms to giant wildfires. Unlike in the distant future, the people of 2075 are integrated into a society with countless sorts of humanoid robots: the nannies are robots; all the teachers at school are robots; the police are robots; robots swarm to streets to work on repairs on damage from storms. I found myself amused by a pair of “insurance bots” that show up at Iris’s door with a very blue collar demeanor, and one of of them looks down at a tablet. Wouldn’t the robot already have the information from the tablet already stored in its memory? Younger audiences, of course, would not think to nitpick about this. Whew, good thing I’m here!

In any event, everywhere and any time between 2932 and 2075, every frame of Arco is beautiful to look at. Maybe that’s part of the point of the lower frame rate: it’s easier to soak in each frame. I still find it distracting. Lower frame rates are often a sort of cheat to save on production costs, and I can respect that. It doesn’t mean I have to have a preference for it.

Time travel stories are always tricky, and I am impressed when writers (in this case, Ugo Bienvenu, who also directed, and Félix de Givry) find a clever way to close the inevitable loop created by it. Arco does a pretty good job of it, both in terms of Iris’s attempts at helping Arco find his way back home, and of where Iris’s life leads after meeting him and how that influences the future. Having such a direct influence on how humanity lives 857 years later seems like a stretch, but I guess I’ll allow it.

It’s a fun premise, a fun story, and a compelling way to look at where society might be in 50 years versus centuries after that. Arco is the kind of movie that works very well as both surface entertainment and a treasure trove of themes when you dig deeper. I have mixed feelings about the three men who are chasing after the kids, who are quite easy to suspect as villains at first and then turn out to be something else. I can’t quite decide of that something else quite works, but if nothing else, even with the stilted dialog as performed in English, they are entertaining. Such is the case with Arco overall.

I guess that’s one way to look ahead.

Overall: B+