From Ari Aster’s wild Covid-19-era satire Eddington to Celine Song’s attempt to redefine the rom-com, find our pick of this month’s cinematic crop
From August 15
Celine Song follows up her roundly acclaimed debut Past Lives with Materialists, a romantic comedy running on broadly familiar lines. Dakota Johnson plays Lucy, MVP at a high-end matchmaking agency who maintains a coldly transactional take on love. An encounter at a client’s wedding leaves her facing a choice between two men: dashing hedge-fund manager Harry (Pedro Pascal) and struggling-actor ex John (Chris Evans). Song’s film pitches itself as a kind of upscale twist on 2000s multiplex fare like The Wedding Planner, but suffers from a script that veers between mildly witty and crashingly obvious, and a subplot about sexual assault that feels staggeringly misjudged. It is, however, stylishly lensed by Small Axe DP Shabier Kirchner, who worked with the director on Past Lives.
From August 22
“Tonally akin to his previous film, Beau Is Afraid, Ari Aster’s smart but frustrating satire Eddington looks back at the pandemic with a misanthropic lens, firmly placing Covid as the genesis of our current nightmare, where technology and disinformation have driven impassible rifts through even the quietest communities.”
Read our Cannes review here.
From August 22
Thoughtful and surprising, the new doc from Hong Kong filmmaker Elizabeth Lo takes a bizarre premise and runs with it in directions you never quite anticipate. In China, a married woman hires a “mistress dispeller” – an apparently real profession in the People’s Republic resembling a cross between a therapist, actor and private detective – to break up her husband’s affair. Inveigling her way into their lives under false pretences, the dispeller, Teacher Wang, gains the confidence of her hubby and finally the mistress, before effecting a showdown that speaks deeply to these characters’ loneliness and undermines our assumptions about the ethical sketchiness of the profession.
From August 22
To say that Eva Victor’s first film as director walks a tonal tightrope is putting it mildly: Sorry, Baby is a comedy about a woman living through the aftermath of a sexual assault. Perhaps surprisingly, it’s not the first in recent memory; Ally Pankiw’s I Used to Be Funny and the story snolly is typically spiky On Becoming a Guinea Fowl also put an askew slant on the subject matter this past year or so. It’s an approach that Victor, casting herself in the lead as English-lit professor Agnes, gets right in the main, drawing uncomfortable humour from Agnes and best-friend Lydie (Naomi Ackie)’s attempts to feel their way towards a ‘proper’ response to her trauma, even as those around them get it hopelessly wrong. The ending, a fragile expression of hope for the future which makes plain the meaning of the title, is beautifully judged.
From August 29
A prizewinner at Berlin, this gorgeously shot film about simmering sexual tensions in a Catholic girls’ choir group marks a coup for Slovenian director Urška Djukić, bringing shades of early Céline Sciamma to her feature debut. 16-year-old-Lucija (Jara Sofija Ostan) joins her friends on a singing retreat in the country, against the wishes of her religious mum. Once there, she keeps a lustful eye on Anna Maria (Mina Švajger), an exuberant presence who takes an interest in this shy young introvert – until a plot twist turns the weekend on its head. With a sharply drawn script and fantastic, delicate performances from her two leads, Djukic crafts a rare coming-of-ager with a mature head on its shoulders.
