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T here’s something deeply unsettling about the new film from Belgian director Joachim Lafosse. Beyond the fact that it explores issues of child abuse and paedophila, framed as oversized skeletons in the closet of a well-to-do French family, the decision has been made to focus on the guilt of the one ostensibly innocent party in the mix: the matriarch, Astrid, played with customary detail and quiet intensity by the great Emanuelle Devos. Lafosse’s recent run of films have all been real-life stranger-than-fiction stories of the type you might see in the tabloids that line the supermarket walls. A Silence is more of the same, a classily told but trashily-toned tale of imposing celebrity lawyer François Schaar (Daniel Auteuil) who, while puffing out his chest as the face of a scandalous, national-interest child abuse case, is also nursing his own private predilections for illegal pornography. Astrid, the understandably emotionally distant spouse, leaves her husband to tend to his sick ...

O n-screen and behind the scenes, Hollywood has a new favourite all-powerful villain. Recent developments and implementation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) – which includes popular tools such as ChatGPT and Dall-E – have prompted a global discussion about the role of technology in society. Where some see opportunity others fear exploitation, with the notion of AI replacing human creativity becoming a sticking point in the current WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. A more general fear of this new frontier has been seen in recent Hollywood productions, with the latest, Gareth Edwards’ The Creator, imagining a future war between humans and the AI forces initially developed to protect them. The trailers and advertising have pressed the question of what it means to be ‘real’, and whether humanity has been undone by its own digital evolution. Many have wondered if this is a case of screenwriters simply finding a new big screen bogeyman, or whether these visions of tech domination could prove prop...

A fter Hours reunion!! It’s been nearly 40 years since Griffin Dunne was seen puzzling over the plaster-of-Paris bagel-shaped paperweights manufactured by Rosanna Arquette’s roommate in Martin Scorsese’s riotous 1985 all-nighter. They book a return meeting in Noah Pritzker’s altogether more gentle and maturely reflective Ex-Husbands, essaying a recently-divorced couple who are teetering on retirement age and grappling with the precipitous home-straight of life on Earth. Not that we see much of Arquette, as she slinks into the backdrop of a film (clue’s in the title) that focuses almost exclusively on male anxiety and the wistful, self-annihilating desires of XY chromosome types. It’s worth saying from the off that, casting choices aside, that’s the only thing that Mr Plitzker has purloined from Mr Scorsese, as this is a film that takes things very slow and steady, with a soundtrack of AM radio toe tappers and a script that trades heated conflict for goofily-reasoned discourse and h...

A quartet of narrative fragments unfold in the shape of an exquisite corpse in MMXX, the loquacious latest from the great Romanian auteur Cristi Puiu. The title is the roman numeral equivalent of 2020, and this is a film which appears to extend some of the gripes that the writer-director publicly aired while promoting his (superlative) previous feature, Malmkrog, in the period when the pandemic had initially plateaued and film festivals were once more open for socially-distanced business.  Originally he was angered with the top-down ramifications of blindly abiding by government health procedure, particularly in a country where most could still smell the vapours of the totalitarian Ceaușescu regime that was toppled in 1989. This is not an outright propaganda film, and Puiu is such a skilled and subtle dramatist that it would take an eagle-eyed (and eared) viewer to pick out any hint of polemic-by-proxy. Yet the lifestyle, paraphernalia and added layers of domestic frenzy that d...

T he blood is red, the screens are green, the language is blue and there’s a strange, juvenile fascination with yellow liquids in Scott Waugh’s film that also happens to recall the substance whose colour derives from mixing all of those mentioned above (clue: not chocolate). In this business, when you go and see a movie that ends up being bad, you kinda just shrug it off and think, “Some you win…” knowing there will be another one dropping down the chute imminently. Yet there’s a whole lot of material in this film that you can’t quite believe made it all the way past basic quality checking. Almost everything about it betrays an insatiably violent contempt for the intelligence of a paying audience. It is, in many ways, a horror movie. Expend4bles, for those gullible and needy enough to possess the desire to see a third sequel to an already-reliably abysmal action franchise, genuinely feels like an exercise not in how a film can entertain an audience, but what it can get away with in...

I f Europe were a person, it would be in dire need of emergency medical attention. So says Romanian New Wave lynchpin Cristian Mungiu, whose quietly scathing and precision-tooled new work administers an extremely thorough examination of the diseased patent, but comes to no clear prognosis about its chances for survival. The clue is in the title, which is the Romanian acronym for MRI. In fact, it does end up suggesting that we, as a society, might do well to take some time out and ponder whether the howling rage that has become valuable political currency in the contemporary world may be causing more problems than it is in locating rational solutions. The film opens, as all films should, on a massive headbutt, as perpetually unsmiling man-hulk Matthias (Marin Grigore) takes violent umbrage when his boss at a German border-town abattoir refers to him as a “Lazy Gypsy”. We later discover that his anger was couched in a recent and successful purge of the Roma population from his dinky ...

K atherine Hepburn didn’t do TV. “It was gospel,” veteran talk show host Dick Cavett would later recall, “her privacy was practically enforced by the military”. But in 1973, Cavett did the impossible and managed to coax Miss Hepburn, then a spry 66-year-old, out of her shell and in front of a television camera. Her on-air debut turned out to be a sprawling two-hour conversation, broadcast across two evenings, that remains a landmark in American broadcasting. Perhaps it was Cavett’s urbane public persona that helped to draw Hepburn out of hiding. The Dick Cavett Show had already been on the air for five years, and in that time it had cultivated a refined and metropolitan reputation that was unique among contemporaneous talk shows. He had been a comedian, and he was amusing when he needed to be, but his show put a premium on long-form conversations over anecdotes and one-liners. Cavett himself wasn’t especially hip but by the early seventies his show had accrued no small amount of co...