A look at 2024 in films

Since 2024 is now history – and since I watched more films then than in any previous year of my life – it seemed like a good idea to look back on what I appreciated most.

Most were seen in cinemas, but a few here I saw for the first time either on disc or by streaming.

So in no particular order, other than chronology of viewing …

The first big hitter of my viewing year was Poor Things (above). Given that I saw it twice in eight days, that’s probably a clue as to just how much of an impact it – not least for Emma Stone’s wow of a performance.

Next on this ‘best of’ list is The Holdovers (just watched again as part of the actual festive season).

In some ways, such a small film, but it’s a bittersweet heart-warmer, with three cracking performances at the heart of it.

Next up chronologically is Blue Velvet, which I had never seen before – indeed, I’d avoided it largely on the basis of how that iconic scene with Dennis Hopper made it look horrific. But my niece had given me a copy as a present, so I decided to give it a go – and was surprised to find it vastly better than I had been expecting.

Perfect Days (left) is an absolute gem from Wim Wenders, following a toilet cleaner in Tokyo (and thus giving the German auter, with an astonishing performance from Kôji Yakusho.

I am grateful to a friend, who is also a film reviewer, for inviting me to be his second ticket for a Soho preview.

As with Downfall, one viewing is enough, but Zone of Interest is a really important work that probes the attitudes of Nazis toward the industrial murder of the Holocaust. It's arguably interesting how we define cinematic horror. This wouldn't fit a conventional narrative of how we define a 'horror film', I don't think – it is generally very calm and avoids physical, on-screen violence (that's what you hear in the background) – but it is, without doubt, utterly horrific, and very important for that.

By complete contrast, I also watched My Neighbour Totoro for the first time (my third Ghibli after The Boy and the Heron on Boxing Day the previous year). It is an utter joy. Indeed, I saw it again, later in the year, at a cinema during an anniversary re-release.

A similar catch-up viewing came with Mädchen in Uniform, an extraordinary piece of Weimar cinema, where Prussianism meets lesbianism in a girls’ school. It was a fascinating discovery for LGBT+ History Month.

Another personal discovery came with Rashomon, having only ever previously seen Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai.

April brought the charm of Robot Dreams (left), the subtle, affecting and sensitive Monster, and the stranger than strange Evil Does Not Exist – the most enigmatic ending of all time? – all of which have stuck with me since.

Summer saw the taut sexiness of Rose Glass’s Love Lies Bleeding, Crossing, from Georgian-Swedish writer and director Levan Akin – a tale of a retired Georgian teacher who travels to Istanbul in search of her missing trans niece and, in complete contrast, Kensuke’s Kingdom, the hand-drawn adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s book.

Another piece of catch-up cinema that really grabbed me was A Taste of Honey, with Dora Bryan in majestic form as the horrifying mother and Rita Tushingham extraordinary on her screen debut.

Finally, my film viewing year was effectively bookended by another cinema outing that I repeated in short order, with Conclave (left), a cracking piece of entertainment, aimed squarely at an older audience, and one that has been very successful.

I made it past the 100 films in a year for the first time ever  – after re-totting and double-checking between a personal list and the Letterboxd app, it came in at 103.

It’s interesting to see how many of my choices have appeared in some of the lists I’ve seen in the last couple of weeks or so. Obviously, a lot of this is down to personal taste etc, but I was surprised that Monster didn't seem to be getting any mentioned – only to discover that was initially released in 2023 and appeared on a number of top 10 lists at the end of that year.

I also feel quite chuffed at the variety of films – not only in this list, but in my list for the whole year. I feel I’ve really taking my viewing habits to new levels. So here's to 2025’s viewing! 

Conclave is top-class, grown-up entertainment

Conclave, adapted from Robert Harris’s 2016 novel, is possibly not the sort of film I would usually think of watching – though I enjoyed The Two Popes when I streamed it in February. I might not have any faith left myself, but given my heavily religious background (very evangelical Methodist) I can still understand and appreciate Biblical debate, and almost inevitably find myself retaining an interest in religion in general.

I only really became aware of this film when seeing the trailer last week and, finding some of the rave reviews it’s been getting (including from the likes of Mark Kermode), decided to give it a go.

It opens with Cardinal-Dean Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) hurrying toward the Vatican to oversee arrangements after the pope has died. Aside from mourning his religiously progressive leader, it means that Lawrence will now have to organise and oversee the conclave of the world’s Catholic cardinals that elects the next pope.

The cardinals have been readying themselves for this – positioning themselves for possible election and campaigning among the rest of their number. The primary contenders are Aldo Cardinal Bellini, an American liberal (Stanley Tucci); Joseph Cardinal Tremblay, a Canadian moderate (John Lithgow); Goffredo Cardinal Tedesco, a right-wing Italian who wants the Mass to be said in Latin again (Sergio Castellitto); and Joshua Cardinal Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati), a popular Nigerian candidate with conservative social views.

But on the eve of the conclave, one Vincent Cardinal Benitez (Carlos Diehz) arrives in the Vatican – a Mexican archbishop apparently appointed by the late pope without anyone else knowing – and working as the cardinal of Kabul in Afghanistan. Suspicions are raised.

There were already whispers about the pope’s last hours and final meeting, and Benitez’s presence only adds to the suggestions of conspiracy and dodgy doings.

The scheming between the candidates and their supporters is barely hidden – though it involves noir whispered talks in quiet corners and comments that only a cardinal that didn't want to be pope would be a suitable one. But who doesn't, at some level, harbour the ambition?

In terms of the performances, it is a wonderful ensemble cast – and that absolutely includes not only all the actors named above, but also Isabella Rossellini as senior nun Sister Agnes, who gets to deliver a truth bomb that is magnificent – and conclude it with a gesture that has seen audiences laughing at screenings (not just the one I attended).

Edward Berger’s film is pretty much perfect as a piece of grown-up entertainment. It’s intelligent. It’s quite easy to see that the world of the Catholic church presented here could also be the corporate or political worlds, so this is not ‘about’ religion. It’s about ambition, power and the gaining and use of that by human beings who, even at their best, are not perfect.

I’ve tended to avoid films of much over 90 minutes in the last year: this comes in at two hours, but Berger’s direction means this doesn’t feel close to that. The pacing is spot on for the tension. Peter Straughan’s screenplay from Harris’s novel is superb: dryly witty, never condescending. It feels so timely, given what the world is seeing today in terms of regressive politics.

Similarly, Volker Bertelmann’s soundtrack is spot on. Stéphane Fontaine’s cinematography is a joy. The mostly muted colours – creamy marble, greys and whites – set against cardinal red – are stark. Some scenes have a feeling of having been choregraphed to almost Busby Berkley levels – cardinals in the rain with their uniform white umbrellas, shot from above, is just one, while the ceremonial aspects and rituals are superb, treated with complete seriousness and respect, yet also revealing the performance and theatre at the centre of church life.

A little personal note here for context (well, I did start this post with one!).

Until I stopped attending church altogether in my mid-twenties, I had drifted away from evangelical Methodism and toward high Anglicanism. I appreciated the theatricality, performance and ritual of services. And I continue to very much appreciate religious music – not the Gospel songs of Billy Graham-style crusade rallies, which haunt me unpleasantly, but works such as the requiems of Mozart, Fauré and Britten.

But let's get back to the review.

If I have any slight complaint, it's that the character of Tedesco is perhaps made to be overly obviously awful. He stands in the refectory vaping, yet refuses to stand for prayers in the Sistine Chapel – just two shows of contempt for most of his brother cardinals, despite he himself being the one that wants 'tradition' brought back. But perhaps that's being over sensitive when we live in a world full of real pantomime villains who are actually very dangerous.

As Lawrence, Fiennes is outstanding. For all the very carefully played camp of the film in general (it's a balancing act Berger gets spot on), his is a stunningly subtle performance. Acting with the eyes, as it were, is an absolute art and he is as good at it as Anthony Hopkins. His own inner struggle so often needs no words to be crystal clear. If he isn’t in the Oscar noms next spring, there’ll be something wrong with the film world.

And the ending – true to the book – is done with real class, even though it may not be quite what some would expect, given its extraordinary topicality.

I cannot recommend it highly enough. Seriously superior entertainment, with an actual ethical heart and message.

American Fiction: A funny satire on literary ghettos and dysfunctional families

Thelonious ‘Monk’ Ellison is a black Los Angeles-based professor and writer of acclaimed literary novels that sell poorly. Uptight and abrasive, his college decides he needs to take some enforced leave and spend time at a literary festival and with his family in Boston.

After presenting a poorly-attended seminar at the festival, Monk is horrified to find a packed event for a talk with fellow black author, Sintara Golden, whose bestselling novel, We's Lives in Da Ghetto, is full of tropes about the lives of black people – what he later describes to her as “black trauma porn”.

Sitting down to pen a satire on this kind of novel, My Pafology, Monk sends it to a publisher in contempt – and is stunned to be offered a huge advance. But with his elderly mother failing with Alzheimer’s, he has to take responsibility for finding a care home for her and, although the family is apparently well-off, that cash will be very welcome.

But when the book becomes a best seller – published under an alias, by a supposed fugitive on the run – and Monk gets a film deal, he has some heavy ethical decisions to make.

It’s a funny film, which has a benefit of not being hectoring in tone and also not being simplified in terms of themes. 

When Monk challenges Sintara over her own book, she has no time for his moralising, effectively shrugging and saying it’s “what the market wants”.

There are also attitudes within Monk’s own family life that send a message that they’re not without intolerances or problems or a lack of understanding. Having been raised in a middle-class, well-off home that produced three professional siblings, he seems to have little or no comprehension of the reality of some black lives for those much lower down the economic and social ladder.

His mother is homophobic and his late father would have probably disowned Monk’s brother, who has come out as gay after being in a straight marriage for some years. Indeed, all three siblings are recently divorced (a slightly odd note to presumably excuse why their professional incomes won’t cover mum’s care costs).

And then there is the central question of how Monk deals with his success coming as his ‘joke’ backfires and makes him into what he despises.

Director Cord Jefferson also adapted the screenplay from Percival Everett’s novel, Erasure, the latter earning him this year’s adapted screenplay Academy Award.

Making it as a comedy about a literary ghetto – and combining it with a story of a dysfunctional family – avoids it seeming too ‘preachy’.

Laura Karpman’s jazz-filled score deservedly won her a first Oscar nomination.

But it’s the performances that really make this film. Jeffrey Wright as Monk is superb in a roles that needs him to be many things – brusque to the point of rudeness, highly intelligent (except in emotional terms), yet also vulnerable in many ways.

Sterling K Brown as Cliff, Monk’s brother, Leslie Uggams as his mother, Erika Alexander as his girlfriend and Adam Brody as the film director and provide excellent support.

Worth watching and currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

A sweet look at ageing, loneliness, friendship and more

Milton Robinson is nearing 80, a widower living on his own, with an estranged son, and a daughter who, worried that her father is starting on a dementia pathway is naggin him to see a doctor.

One night, a UFO crash lands in his garden and a small alien appears. After his initial terror, Milton takes the nonverbal and apparently unthreatening alien inside and treats him as a guest.

He tries to tell the authorities, his daughter, a shop assistant and a local council meeting that he regularly attends, but all assume he’s imagining it. But then an acquaintance, Sandy, drops by and sees the alien, then names them Jules.

This is a really interesting and subtle point. All the characters assume – without any side – that the extra-terrestrial is male (they can pilot a spaceship, for instance), but we never find out, while Jules as a name is gender neutral.

Sandy warns Milton not to tell anyone else – before another acquaintance, Joyce, spots them and demands to be in on the action, though possibly from nefarious motives.

However, secret services monitoring knows that something has fallen to earth in the vicinity of the small town and the hunt is on.

Billed as a science fiction comedy-drama, it’s fairly slender in terms of the comedy aspect, but there is gentle humour. Watch out for the ET nods in Milton’s speeches to the local council and a running t-shirt gag later on.

Written by Gavin Steckler and directed by Marc Turtletaub, it is gentle and heart-warming, with themes of loneliness, friendship, kindness and family rifts played out sensitively, and over a pleasingly tight 87 minutes.

Jules themselves is very well done in terms of leaving plenty to the imagination throughout, with Jade Quon helping create and maintain the mystery around the character.

But it also relies on an excellent central trio. Ben Kingsley does a really lovely and delicate job with Milton, while Harriet Sansom Harris as Sandy and Jane Curtin as Joyce are also in very fine form.

Finally, Zöe Winters as Denise, Milton’s daughter, lends good support.

All in all, Jules was never going to set the cinematic world on fire, but it’s a sweet film, full of heart. Currently streaming on Sky Cinema, it’s well worth an hour and a half of your time.

A film about religious difference transcends religion

It’s early 2005 and Jorge Bergoglio, the archbishop of Buenos Aires, travels to the Vatican after the death of Pope John Paul II in order to elect a new pope. Joseph Ratzinger – arch-Catholic conservative and inheritor of the mantle of grand inquisitor – is elected.

He treats Bergoglio with disdain, but the religiously liberal – and certainly sharing many of the core ideas of liberation theology – Argentine is the only real challenger to the Bavarian’s ascent.

Some years later, Bergoglio travels to Rome to ask permission to resign as an archbishop and return to being a parish priest.

He is astonished to find that he had booked his flight before receiving a letter from Ratzinger – now Pope Benedict XVI – calling him to the Vatican.

They meet at the pope’s summer residence, the luxurious Palace of Castel Gandolfo, where they engage in theological debate, with Benedict tetchily disagreeing with every point that Bergoglio makes.

Yet in the evening, after dinner – which Benedict always takes alone – a thaw begins as they move away from the theological and into a more personal socialisation.

However, scandal – financial and in terms off sex abuse – has been hovering over the church. And the next day, after Benedict is called back to Rome as matters worsen, Bergoglio is told to meet him there the following morning.

The Two Popes is a 2019 film, written by Anthony McCarten, adapted from his own play, The Pope.

It’s been argued that it’s easy to see its theatrical origins, but Fernando Meirelles’s direction and Céasar Charlone’s cinematography ensure that it doesn’t feel static or stagebound.

Having come from a very conservatively religious background myself (albeit from a different Christian denomination), and having gone through a fundamentalist, evangelical religious period in my teens (embarrassingly, I tried to ‘convert’ fellow pupils in the lunch break), I don’t think this will upset anyone of faith, unless they are particularly unyielding in terms of a single perspective or interpretation.

Equally, I came to it today as someone who no longer has a faith and whose background was very much anti-Catholic – though my clergyman father loved nothing better than sharing whiskey with the local priest in our time in a Pennine mill town, a relationship that was far more friendly to him than any with an Anglican cleric.

It feels apt to say here that my own journey was slow. I drifted first from evangelical fervour to fairly high Anglicanism (I liked the theatre of it).

A few years further on, travelling on a train within the outer reaches of London and sporting badges on my jacket representing the Communist Party of Britain, a Christian fish symbol (ichthys) and a green star, I was challenged by another passenger as to what that all meant. I replied that I thought of myself as a “green, Christian communist”. So yes, I know what ‘liberation theology’ means.

He had an unopened can of beer and gave it to me, getting off at the next station.

Some years later, filling out the census, I realised, with a certain amount of surprise, that I had no faith left. Under no pressure, it had dissipated. Like the smoke from the extinguished candles in this film.

A period of Dawkinesque detestation of organised religion followed, but thankfully that too dissipated quickly. Now, I can happily visit churches (not – yet – a mosque, synagogue or temple) and always do so quietly and with respect. Apart from anything else, I actually take off the inevitable hat I will be wearing.

Though isn’t that strange? When my mother married my father, women going to church would be expected to wear a hat – and keep it on (an echo of the ‘modesty’ expected in the more conservative realms of Christianity’s fellow Abrahamic faiths, Judaism and Islam). Yet I always take mine off in a church – whether in the UK or abroad. It’s a very basic sign of respect for me.

As the protagonists of this film discuss, ‘times change’.

This is essentially an intellectual/theological two-hander conversation – and it’s really engaging as that. The time doesn’t feel strained.

Anthony Hopkins as Ratzinger/Benedict – as with so much work he has done late in his career – is nuanced and fantastic. There is also massive credit to be paid to Juan Minujín, who plays Bergoglio in earlier years.

However, Jonathon Pryce as Bergoglio (later, Pope Francis) arguably gives the finest film performance of his career. The pain, the guilt (over his own actions during the time of the Argentinian military junta) are clearly covered – and are very, very moving.

This really is an excellent film. Available on Netflix, it is very much worth a watch.

Perfect Perfect Days – an absolutely glorious new film from Wim Wenders

Perfect Days is the latest film from veteran German auteur Wim Wenders. It premiered at last year’s Cannes Festival, picking up two prizes, including best actor for Kôji Yakusho.

It has been nominated for best international feature at the forthcoming Academy Awards, becoming the first film not directed by a Japanese director to be nominated as the Japanese entry.

So ahead of the film opening in the UK on 23 of February, it’s easy to see why there are serious expectations.

Middle-aged Hirayama works cleaning public toilets in Tokyo – a job that he takes great care and pride in. His life is a simple and highly ritualised one. He hardly ever speaks, but is polite, respectful, helpful to – and concerned about – everyone he comes into contact with.

Beyond his job, he enjoys listening to music on old-fashioned cassettes, takes care of a small indoor garden of tiny, potted trees and reads literary books each night in his humble and simple home. He eats, bathes and takes his lunch in the same places – the latter, in a park, where he photographs the trees on a compact, non-digital camera that he buys a new roll of film for on his day off once a week. On that same day off, he visits the same small bar.

The first part of Wenders’s film shows us this is extraordinary detail, where it acts, in effect, as a meditation on meditation – a film about living as mindfully as possible and taking pleasure in the simple things in life. There is something of the monk’s life about Hirayama. But there is a constant of joy constantly found in the smallest things.

However, when Hirayama’s carefully structured life is disturbed, we start to learn – obliquely, leaving the viewer to draw conclusions and realise the pain that is present – that he must have had a previous life that was quite different to the one he’s living now.

The film had an extraordinary conception. Wenders was approached by the Tokyo Toilet project to visit a city he loves and to make small documentaries about the project, which had seen top architects design 17 public toilets in the Shibuya district of the city – architecture being another Wenders passion.

Visiting to see said toilets, Wenders decided a fictional feature film would be a better way to showcase the new conveniences – and he convinced the project leaders that he could make such on a small budget and film it in the same 16 days they’d factored in for the mini docs.

The result is quite extraordinary – hugely dependent on an astonishingly beautiful performance from Yakusho as Hirayama.

Wenders wrote the film alongside Takuma Takasaki, with Frank Lustig as cinematographer.

The toilets themselves are obviously crucial to this – and they are quite extraordinary pieces of civic architecture. Yet even as the camera explores them in detail – and although they were prime motivation for the film – they never threaten to overwhelm it.

And Wenders pays as much care and attention to the Tokyo urbanscape in general, so often coming back to focus on the city’s Skytree tower, which seems to be at the hub of a physical circle within which Hirayama lives and works. This is, in part, a love letter to the city and to its culture. And that culture is absolutely a working-class culture.

There is also a thread that runs through the film, between the days, of B&W images of Hirayama’s dreams, created by Donata Wenders.

And then there is the soundtrack, from The Animals to Patti Smith to Nina Simone – and a couple of Japanese tracks, including a Japanese cover of The House of the Rising Sun – and an absolute needle drop of Lou Reed’s Perfect Day.

It’s two hours long. You might think that, from my description here, it sounds a tad tedious. Funnily enough, I saw it last night at a press screening, courtesy of a friend, who before it started, was bemoaning a film they’d seen earlier that day by a favourite director, which was an example of slow cinema and had prompted the comment that perhaps that type of film was done for.

This, on the other hand, is mesmerising, beautiful cinema. Wenders has, one critic noted, made his “lifetime masterpiece”.

And I will reiterate: Yakusho’s performance is simply outstanding. And yes – that includes an incredible final shot. This is amazing filmmaking.

Interview with Wim Wenders

Guardian architecture feature about the Tokyo toilets

New Yorker interview with Wim Wenders

The Holdovers is a bittersweet symphony of life

When curmudgeonly New England classics teacher Paul Hunham makes the ‘mistake’ of honestly marking the work of a bad student at Barton Academy, with the consequence that the boy’s wealthy father backtracks on a donation to the school, he is punished by the headteacher (one of the first pupils he himself taught) by being forced to babysit the ‘holdovers’ – any boys who have to stay at the school over the Christmas holiday in 1970.

The five that do remain include troubled Angus Tully, whose mother and new stepfather have decided they don’t want him around for a delayed festive honeymoon.

Making up the film’s central trio is Mary Lamb, the head of the school’s cafeteria. A single black mother, she took the job so that her son could have an education as a ‘Barton Boy’. But a lack of funds meant he couldn’t go on to college and instead, was conscripted into the military and died in Vietnam earlier that year.

Initially antagonistic, the inevitable happens as relationships between the three slowly thaw. What avoids this all descending into chiché is David Hemingson’s excellent script and Alexander Payne’s excellent direction – both of which allow the audience to slowly come to understand and empathise with the protagonists – and the performances of the leading actors.

It also allows a commentary on racism, class, mental health, and the importance of education; in particular, that of history – both global and personal.

Making his film debut as Angus, Dominic Sessa has already picked up several best newcomer awards and is up for a Bafta later this year as supporting actor. It’s a remarkably assured performance, full of awkwardness and vulnerability, but shot through with a self-destructive anger.

Da’Vine Joy Randolph as Mary brings toughness and vulnerability to the role, and she and the film thankfully avoid tropes of a suffering black character. Having already picked up a Golden Globe, she’s nominated in the supporting actress category for both the Baftas and the Oscars.

And so to Paul Giamatti as the central grouch. He absolutely shines in the role of the misanthropic teacher. There are moments of great humour here – not least in terms of his pomposity – but as with the others, it’s a performance that slowly reveals the character’s vulnerabilities.

Giamatti too picked up a Golden Globe and has best actor nominations for both London and LA.

The Holdovers is proving an awards dark horse, threatening the juggernaut that is Oppenheimer. Having seen it, there’s no surprise to this. Indeed, the only shock is that it took until the second half of January for this to be released in the UK, given that it is a quintessential Christmas movie, which is already being lauded as one of the very best of that species.

A real bittersweet joy. Film making on an absolutely human scale, with story and dialogue taking the lead. Do see.

Blue Velvet: The dark underbelly of the American Dream

For the second day running, a birthday present from my niece gave me the opportunity to catch up on an iconic film that I’ve never quite got around to watching. In this case, David Lynch’s 1986 Blue Velvet – an “adult fairytale”, according to the BFI.

Why have I not seen it before? Largely, I think, because I’d wondered if I’d find it ‘too much’, such is its reputation and also, because inevitably, I’d seen fleeting clips of Dennis Hopper inhaling something that turns his character more psychotic and dangerous than ever.

Writer and director Lynch opens the film with surreal scenes of a sugar-sweet, small-town America; an immaculate white picket fence, red roses and a blue sky – redolent of the Stars and Stripes – and a fire truck moving down a street in slo-mo, with a fireman on the back waving directly toward the camera, a dalmatian sitting alongside him. Then a middle-aged man watering his lawn, while his wife inside the house watches a crime mystery on the TV.

So far, so good. But then the gardener has an accident with his hose (the implement seems almost to turn on him) and everything is spun on its head, as the film dives beneath the carefully manicured grass to find a churning mass of insects in the dark below.

The gardener is Tom Beaumont. Hospitalised, he’s visited by his son, Jeffrey, who has returned from college because of the accident. But on the way home after his visit, Jeffrey discovers a human ear in a field, which he takes to the police station, to a Detective John Williams, who’s also a family neighbour.

Later, after he’s called on Williams at home to see if there is any news, Sandy, the policeman’s daughter, stops him in the street to say she’s overheard that the ear somehow relates to a nightclub singer named Dorothy Vallens. Fascinated by the idea of a mystery, Jeffrey decides to investigate – and is drawn into the word of psychopathic gangster and drug dealer Frank Booth.

So the film moves from surrealism into noir. But this is no conventional noir. The hero, for instance, in no hard-boiled, cynical character – à la Bogart in The Big Sleep – but a boyish ingenu.

Likewise, neither the ‘good girl’ (Sandy; blonde) nor the ‘femme fatale’ (Dorothy; dark haired) fit simply into those cinematic cliches. Both are more complex.

And that’s before we get to Frank (left, with Dorothy), with all the suggestions that at least an element of his ultra-violence is down to self-loathing: is he straight, gay or bi?

It’s never a bigger question than in an extraordinary scene when Frank and his thugs have dragged Jeffrey and Dorothy to the den of fellow drug dealer Ben. There, the camp, made-up ‘Suave’ Ben lip-synchs to Roy Orbison’s In Dreams, right at Frank, as though in an act of seduction, moving him to tears of rage or something else.

Right after, before beating Jeffrey, Frank smears the young man’s lips with lipstick and savagely kisses him.

Is this about toxic masculinity and the pressures to conform to heteronormative stereotypes? It’s certainly about power relationships; Frank’s exercise of power over everyone in his orbit – except Ben, who seems to have the upper hand there – and Dorothy’s over Jeffery are both crucial, but there is also the question of who exercises the power in the relationship between Sandy and Jeffrey.

There are so many things to take in here. Sandy, in her blonde innocence, nods back to 1978’s Grease and the leading character of the same name. The naming of the ‘femme fatale’ begs the question: is Frank (who is obsessed with her) really a ‘friend of Dorothy’?

Then there’s the contrast between the darkness and violence of the film and the two big musical themes – Bobby Vinton’s cover of 1950 song Blue Velvet by Bernie Wayne and Lee Morris, and Orbison’s 1963 In Dreams – as if they hark back nostalgically to a gentler time and their use by Lynch is a subversion of that ‘gentler time’ – a time that was suggested by the opening shots.

It was far from universally acclaimed when it came out, but Lynch’s film has more than stood the test of time and well deserves its status as a classic.

The central cast is excellent. Isabella Rossellini as Dorothy is strong and vulnerable at the same time. Kyle MacLachlan is suitably innocent as Jeffrey, finding himself out of his depth when drawn toward a stranger world than he had previously imagined possible. Laura Dern makes Sandy both plausibly girlish, yet also with a tough core.

But it’s Hopper who dominates the film as Frank, in a performance that is absolutely riveting; even when you want to flinch and look away, you cannot.

The supporting cast are largely sketches – with one exception. Dean Stockwell’s Ben (left) – albeit a one-scene turn – is simply exceptional.

Lynch wraps it up with a ‘happily ever after’ finale, which returns us to the surreal openings, but with the addition of an animatronic robin, which reiterates the message that all this is really just artifice and wishful thinking. Indeed, the film it culminates with a repeat of those very first sequences.

But by now, we are well aware of the dark underbelly of such an American Dream. Brilliant.

• Femme is a 2023 film takes a deeper dive into the theme of sexuality-driven self loathing. 

One Life: Remembering the 'British Schindler'

How do you make a film about rescuing children from the Nazis in 1939, without succumbing to clichés or sentimentality, yet ensuring that it also makes a deeply important statement about refugees and war in 2024?

Well, director James Hawes, together with screenwriters Lucinda Coxon and Nick Drake, have done a pretty good job with One Life, a film about Sir Nicholas Winton and his central involvement in organising the evacuation of – predominantly, but not only – Jewish children from Prague in 1939.

I’ve seen the film condemned as “workmanlike”. And that it doesn’t engage enough with what happened to those who were rescued – or remember those involved in the rescues besides Winton.

But having now watched it, this is nonsense. Yes, it is a very straightforward take on the story. Nothing wrong with that – and it is very clear that Winton himself was not the only one involved in rescuing over 660 children. Yet he played an absolutely crucial role in that.

In terms of the later stories of the children rescued from the Prague refugee camps and those told, via That’s Life in 1988, we start to learn of these.

It’s important history and utterly relevant today – but what elevates this as a film are the performances. Johnny Flynn is superb as the young Winton. Helena Bonham Carter, as Winton’s mother, is in absolutely stonking form.

And then there are the recreations of the That's Life! episodes. As Winton's wife, Grete, observes, it's a 'silly' TV show. Yet it created an iconic British TV moment when bringing Winton's story to the wider public – and reuniting him with some of those he had been involved in saving, without any silliness and with all seriousness. Which itself helped propel the story.

Samantha Spiro, as the show's host Esther Rantzen, does an extraordinary job here, portraying a major media figure, who is still very much with us.

And then there is Anthony Hopkins as the older Winton. His performance really gives the film the gravitas and power it needs. He can say so much more in a silence than most actors can, and captures Winton’s sense of guilt at those who couldn’t be saved in a way that is quietly explosive.

Go see it. And, as I did, weep. For the past, for the present and for the future.

May December is uncomfortable viewing – rightly so

It would be all too easy to get the tone wrong in a film about grooming and child sex abuse, but Todd Haynes’s May December makes for uncomfortable viewing in just the right way.

Gracie Atherton-Yoo is a notorious woman after having groomed and seduced a 13-year-old boy, Joe, when she was 36. Discovered in flagrante delicto in the storeroom of the pet shop where they both worked, she was sent to prison, where she gave birth to a girl.

Fast forward 23 years. She and Joe are married and have three children. Honor is at college, while twins Mary and Charlie are set to graduate from school.

And Gracie’s story, which scandalised the nation, is set to be retold in an independent film, where she will be played by Julliard-educated Elizabeth, who is famous for a light TV role and is looking to push her career further.

Elizabeth is visiting Gracie and the family in preparation for the role, with the latter hoping that this movie will ‘set the record straight’, unlike the tacky tabloidesque TV film that we see in the background of one shot, and all the sensationalistic, gossipy magazine stories that the former has gathered as part of her research

Based on the real-life case of Mary Kay Letourneau, Samy Burch’s screenplay is at once high camp, in the fashion of All About Eve, for instance, but also deeply serious.

By the end, there is no obvious resolution to the story; when is Gracie lying/gaslighting and when not, for instance? How much can we trust her word? What will happen to her and Joe now that all their children are leaving the nest – and he is still only 36?

Yet we see, throughout the film, her microaggressions of bullying and control on all her family – including Joe. There’s a scene where she and Elizabeth are in a shop, as Mary is selecting a dress for her graduation, Gracie ‘compliments’ her daughter for having the ‘bravery’ to select a dress that shows off her upper arms. Result? Mary backs down and selects a different dress.

Late on, we learn that Gracie had been abused by her elder brothers – a classic path to becoming an abuser oneself and it is important that the film acknowledges this. Yet she denies it to Elizabeth – suggesting she is gaslighting her own son from her first marriage who gave Elizabeth this information in the first place.

Who – and what – do you believe? It’s a superb look at gaslighting and at personality disorder, and at the effects of abuse on all those around whom it happens.

Julienne Moore is superb as Gracie; brittle and vulnerable and threatening all at the same time.

Natalie Portman is equally good as Elizabeth. The theme here of performing roles – not least, our socially expected ones – are important throughout the film.

Charles Melton, as Joe, has already won a number of awards and it is no surprise why – he manages a poignant subtlety that acts as a stark and important contrast to the campness mentioned earlier. This is a painful performance for him.

And the ending should harrow, in terms of what it suggests – well, what you as the viewer decide to read into it.

It is a really very fine film.

Wonka is a (Paddington) bear hug of a movie

Paul King has found a formula – and it’s every bit the equal of any chocolate treat that Willy Wonka can confect.

Having hit the jackpot with the Paddington films (Paddington in Peru comes next year), King teamed up with Paddington 2 co-writer Paul Farnaby to create a Willy Wonka origin story. And it’s an absolute joy.

We meet our titular hero as he arrives by sea in an unnamed European city (hints of both France and Germany though mostly filmed in England), armed only with his magical abilities with the cocoa bean and the dreams that his mother, who steered a narrow boat up and down canals, told him were so important.

She herself made wondrous chocolate – this feels reminiscent of Joanne Harris’s iconic novel, Chocolat, not least in a sense of magic being involved – but died before she could impart the secrets to her son.

The problem for Willy though, is that the town he has chosen in which to launch his products on the world is effectively run by a cartel of three unscrupulous chocolatiers who want this threat to their power gone – and that follows having fallen prey to the dreadful Mrs Scrubitt and her henchman Bleacher, after the latter offers a homeless Willy a roof over his head, without mentioning the hidden costs that will drive him into captivity and forced labour.

Calah Lane as Noodle

But Willy makes new friends, including the orphan Noddle, and they all – eventually – engage with his plans of how to free themselves and defeat the cartel.

A few commentators have suggested that Willy is such a nice character, it’s hard to believe that, in his future lies a less charming approach.

But there are hints here that his inherent mischievousness could develop a darker side. And Timothée Chalamet captures both that and the naivety of the character in a completely convincing way.

He also has a very pleasing singing voice that does full justice to the great new songs from Neil ‘The Divine Comedy’ Hannon. It’s also a delight that the film includes new versions of Pure Imagination and The Oompa-Loompa Song from the classic 1971 Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley score.

I’ve already effectively said that Chalamet is very good indeed – he is utterly convincing and has charm by the bucketload, and can sing and hoof brilliantly. Teenager Calah Lane as Noodle is simply wonderful in what is sure to be her breakthrough role.

Everywhere else – as with the Paddington films – is a wonderful ensemble cast. Sally Hawkins as Willy’s mother, Jim Carter, Natasha Rothwell, Farnaby and Rakhee Thakrar as his new friends are all excellent.

Matt Lucas and Mathew John Baynton as two of the triumvirate of the chocolate cartel are also great, but do rather lose out to a wonderful turn from Paterson Joseph as the third of their corrupt number. And this is before we mention Rowan Atkinson as a dodgy priest, Olivia Colman as Mrs Scrubitt, Tom Davis as Bleacher and Keegan-Michael Key as a corrupt chief of police.

Ah… and then there’s Hugh Grant, who risks stealing the entire show with his Oompa-Loompa (left), as he did when playing Phoenix Buchanan in Paddington 2.

Anything else to add? It looks gorgeous. And after a really tough personal year, it was the hug of a movie that I needed. There is a scene involving flamingos and balloons that had me blubbing for sheer joy.

And that seems to be King’s great skill: he can create films like this, without a shred of cynicism, but always avoiding over sentimentality or mawkishness. A great big (Paddington bear) hug of a film!

A much-needed examination of gender identity

Given how much trans people have been weaponised for the sake of the culture wars, it feels like an extraordinarily brave thing for award-winning Basque director Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren to make her feature film debut with a story about a young trans girl exploring her gender identity.

Brave – and necessary. Solaguren – who also wrote the script for 20,000 Species of Bees – was inspired by the suicide of a 16-year-old trans boy Ekai Lersundi in 2018.

Here, we find a family that lives in the French Basque Country. The parents are on the cusp of splitting up and of the children (teenage Nerea, 10-year-old Eneko and eight-year-old Aitor) the boys seem to constantly fight, while Aitor – also known as the less gender specific Cocó – is clearly unhappy and constantly acting up.

Their mother Ane takes the children with her for an extended summer holiday in the Basque Country south of the Pyrenees, where they will stay with her mother, Lita. Gorka, their father, stays at home.

Ane has allowed Cocó to wear their hair long and use blue nail polish, and they are quietly pleased when the local old ladies congratulate Lita on having a lovely granddaughter, but the conservatively religious grandmother nags her daughter to go to a hairdresser and get Cocó a “boy cut”.

 

Wary of local children, Cocó increasingly spends their days with Aunt Lourdes – a local ‘wise’ women, who lives alone, keeps bees and uses them to cure neighbours of a variety of ailments. There, they start to open up, often describing themselves (unprompted) as behaving like a girl.

 

They question what went “wrong” with them in their mother’s womb and why they are “like this”.

 

But Lita is becoming more strident in her approach, trotting out tired clichés about Ane having over-indulged the child, and the great patriarchal one that the problem is that Cocó is surrounded by women (which doesn’t seem to have changed Eneko’s gender identity).

 

Ane is confused about the issue – but also hits back at her mother, who had done nothing to tackle a dirty little family secret about her late husband, a sculptor.

 

Cocó prays to become Lucía – and even asks her aunt if she can’t die and come back as a girl.

 

Essentially an all-female ensemble piece – it won an award for the best female ensemble cast at the Guadalajara International Film Festival – it’s moving, yet never mawkish or sentimental, and is tackled with great sensitivity and humanity.

 

To help ensure accuracy, Naizen, a regional association for the families of transgender children, worked with Solaguren and provided guidance for Sofía Otero, who plays Lucía.

 

Otero carries the film on her eight-year-old shoulders – a simply outstanding performance that saw her become the youngest ever winner of the Silver Bear for best leading performance at the 73^rd Berlin International Film Festival in February, just one of many awards that the piece has already garnered. In September, it was put forward for nomination for next year’s Academy Awards.

 

Patricia López Arnaiz as Ane and Ane Gabarain as Lourdes also turn in superb performances, while Gina Ferrer García’s cinematography is top notch.

 

If you can, do see it. It’s also on Curzon Home Cinema now. It is a film that will stay with you a very long time.

As Solaguren put it in an interview: "The girl does not transform. Throughout the film, she acquires the tools to express who she is. What is transformed is the family."