Saint Omer (2022)
Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide
This extraordinary fiction debut from French filmmaker Alice Diop draws much of its potency and originality from her instincts as a documentary maker. It’s a courtroom drama inspired by a real-life case and made with the patient, observational gaze of a Fred Wiseman film. A woman is standing trial for the death of her young daughter, who was apparently left to be swept away by incoming tide. Researching a new book, a novelist attends the hearings and is as gripped as we are by the defendant’s grave, unreadable demeanour (a remarkable performance by Guslagie Malanda), and the complexity of her apparent motives.
EO (2022)
Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide, including BFI Southbank
Robert Bresson’s classic donkey fable Au hasard Balthazar (1966) was a new release when Jerzy Skolimowski was starting out as a director. For this late-career victory lap, the 84-year-old Polish filmmaker, best known here for British-set films Deep End (1970), The Shout (1978) and Moonlighting (1982), has made an idiosyncratic remake. Like the Bresson film, EO follows the travails of a donkey as it passes from owner to owner, and from one scrape to the next, generating a panorama of human foibles and self-interest in the process. Unlike the Bresson, Skolimowski’s remodelling includes leaps of visionary surreality.
Roman Holiday (1953)
Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide
Perhaps more than any film except Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), the legend of Audrey Hepburn rests on this 1953 charmer in which an American reporter (Gregory Peck) hits it off with a European princess (Hepburn) during a brief encounter in Rome. William Wyler’s film was made during Hollywood’s great discovery of Europe as a giant film set in the postwar years. Its scenes of Peck and Hepburn vrooming around the Eternal City on a Vespa must have sold a million Italian holidays. Seventy years later, it still works – hence its re-release in cinemas this week (and in time for Valentine’s Day) only a decade since we last had it.
Skinamarink (2022)
Where’s it on? Shudder
Exceptionally creepy and distinctive, this experimental horror film from Canadian debutant Kyle Edward Ball reconciles the approaches of two seminal but poles apart Canadian features: Michael Snow’s avant-garde exploration of a room, Wavelength (1967), and Bob Clark’s foundational slasher-in-the-house movie Black Christmas (1974). The terrifying situation of two young children who awake in the night to find their father missing is dealt with obliquely via the film’s succession of abstracted, lo-fi images around the darkened house: a flickering television playing shrill cartoons, snatches of conversation, patches of wall, cracks of light on the carpet. It’s a radically off-centred genre film: patience-testing but conjuring profound frissons of dread.
El mar la mar (2017)
Where’s it on? Blu-ray
An inspired addition to Second Run’s catalogue of Blu-ray releases, El mar la mar is an immersive, poetic documentary about the Sonoran desert, but particularly the migrants who have endured the long trek across this vast and inhospitable stretch of the US-Mexico border. The work of filmmaking duo Joshua Bonnetta and J.P. Sniadecki, its grainy 16mm footage of the barren landscapes, together with audio recordings of testimonies from activists and locals, give the impression almost of a found object, or of a distant broadcast accidentally tuned into. Yet an urgent human story emerges.
