White Noise (2022)
Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide
The new film from Frances Ha (2012) and Marriage Story (2019) director Noah Baumbach is his first adaptation and he didn’t make it easy for himself: Don DeLillo’s postmodern 1985 novel White Noise had been thought unfilmable. But he’s shifted into new gears to tell the story of an American college professor (Adam Driver) and his family whose lives are uprooted after a chemical spill unleashes an ‘Airborne Toxic Event’. The results manage to be both cerebral black comedy and Spielbergian thrill ride, while its airborne apocalypse make this very 1980s property feel surprisingly resonant in 2022. Stay seated for the year’s finest end credits sequence.
Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)
Where’s it on? BFI Player
Did anyone else feel that earthquake? The shock new number one in Sight and Sound’s famous once-a-decade Greatest Films of All Time poll is Chantal Akerman’s feminist landmark Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Rising triumphantly from its place at number 35 in the 2012 poll, the film follows the daily toil of a Belgian housewife played by Delphine Seyrig: her domestic chores, her interactions with her young son, and her clandestine life as a sex worker. Its release in 1975 was one of those quantum-leap moments for the medium – a radical reframing of who and what great cinema could be about. It’s been a difficult film to see in the UK, so there’s cause for double celebration in that it’s now been added to BFI Player.
Tori and Lokita (2022)
Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide
Flying the flag for present-day Belgian cinema are the Dardennes brothers, whose latest now arrives in UK cinemas having premiered at Cannes earlier this year. Tori and Lokita is instantly recognisable as one of theirs: it’s another real-world quasi-thriller about lives on the margins of society, filmed with their characteristic clarity and humanity. The eponymous duo are two youngsters from Benin struggling to make ends meet as illegal arrivals in Belgium. Owing money, Lokita takes work on a secret cannabis farm where she’s locked in and effectively enslaved, while Tori desperately tries to find her.
Experiment in Terror (1962)
Where’s it on? Talking Pictures TV, Saturday, 9.05pm
In between Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) and his wrenching alcoholism drama Days of Wine and Roses (1962), Blake Edwards took a Hitchcockian turn with this noirish thriller about a bank teller (Lee Remick) being terrorised in her home by an asthmatic sadist. Seen today, Edwards’ film looks like an American forerunner of giallo or the Brian De Palma/John Carpenter breed of stylish stalker thriller. Glenn Ford plays the FBI agent assigned to investigate amid evocatively used San Francisco locations. Henry Mancini provides the sultry jazz score.
Fanny and Alexander (1982)
Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide, including BFI Southbank
Ingmar Bergman’s magic-realist family drama is his most bountiful work, an opulent evocation of upper-middle-class life in Uppsala in the early 20th century as seen through the eyes of 10-year-old Alexander (Bertil Guve). The warmth and glow of the opening sequences at a family Christmas are curtailed after tragedy strikes and the lives of Alexander and his sister are cruelly uprooted. Bergman’s last film before a 25-year hiatus as director, this three-hour epic (longer still in its serialised TV version) is steeped in the great Swedish auteur’s own memories of childhood. It’s great to have it in cinemas again.
