Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023)
Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide, including BFI Southbank
Nobody else is making films so pressed up against modern life as Romanian auteur Radu Jude. This latest satire is worlds away from the polished prestige of any of the films in this weekend’s Oscar race. Full of filthy jokes and topical digressions, it’s more like a compulsive doom-scroll through our 21st-century life. Zoom calls, influencers, social media, corporate exploitation, news from Ukraine, the gig economy and notorious bad-film director Uwe Boll (playing himself) are all part of the mix as we follow a put-upon but irrepressible video production assistant as she drives around the clogged-up streets of Bucharest helping out on an Austrian firm’s safety-at-work video.
Copa 71
Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide
Released in cinemas on International Women’s Day, this sports doc tells the buried history of the unofficial Women’s World Cup in Mexico City in 1971 – which took place 20 years before the first FIFA women’s competition. At a time when the sexist sporting establishment considered soccer very much a man’s game, teams of women from around the globe gathered in Mexico for a tournament which remains the most attended female football event in history. Yet players returning home were met with media indifference and FIFA bans, and the event was all but struck from the history books. James Erskine and Rachel Ramsay’s film convenes the ageing players, who’ve lived with feelings of gaslighting and disgrace, to bring this fascinating story to the screen.
One from the Heart (1982)
Where’s it on? 4K UHD and Blu-ray
With Francis Ford Coppola’s two-decades-in-the-making Megalopolis looking likely to screen at Cannes this year, here is a welcome 4K UHD and Blu-ray for the most notorious film on Coppola’s CV: the film whose box office failure torpedoed the fortunes of his studio Zoetrope and the wider New Hollywood movement alike. The dust has long since settled, and there are plenty who’d be willing to make great claims for this boldly anti-realistic musical – a Las Vegas love story which anachronistically attempts to reclaim the effervescent joys of old Hollywood musicals for the modern era, rather like the not unsuccessful La La Land (2016) would do 34 years later.
Rawhide (1951)
Where’s it on? Talking Pictures TV, Sunday, 12.20
Like High Noon (1952) or 3:10 to Yuma (1957), Rawhide is one of those 50s oaters that’s perched perfectly between the western and thriller genres. It’s a hostage drama in cowboy hats, as a gang of escaped convicts muscle their way into an Arizona town on the stagecoach route in order to await the arrival of a cargo of gold bullion. No relation to the cowboy TV series of the same name that made a star of Clint Eastwood, this one boasts Tyrone Power and Susan Hayward in the leads and taut direction courtesy of safe-hands Henry Hathaway, who’d later direct John Wayne to an Oscar in the original True Grit (1969). What Rawhide lacks in thematic complexity, it makes up for in thrillingly sustained tension.
Audition (1999)
Where’s it on? BFI Player
Takashi Miike’s symphony of shock has been causing nightmares for a quarter of a century now. Along with Cure (1997) and Ringu (1998), it was part of the wave of pre-millennial Japanese horror films that induced cold sweats around the globe. This is the one about the widower who holds a series of auditions to size up potential romantic partners and is immediately taken with a mysterious, long-haired applicant called Asami. Say no more, except that the arrival of Audition instantly made most Hollywood horrors of the time look tame – in fact, for better or worse, we may have Miike’s chiller to thank for the rush of torture porn films that came down the drainpipe in its aftermath.