“... The first thing​ Estrella remembers being told about her father, in Victor Erice’s shadowy masterpiece The South, is that before she was born he predicted her sex and gave her a name. ‘It is a very intense image,’ she says in voiceover at the beginning of the film, ‘that in fact I made up.’ She made it up, but we have just witnessed the scene, the pregnant mother on the bed that is now the daughter’s, the father sitting there waving the pendant he uses to make his prophecies ...”

“... Much​ of what Pauline Kael had to say in ‘Raising Kane’ (1971), her long article in the New Yorker, got lost in the controversy it created. One of her aims was to draw attention to Herman Mankiewicz’s role in writing the screenplay for Citizen Kane (1941), and therefore in the success of the film. But, more interestingly, she was also evoking a whole school of New York writers, for whom Mankiewicz could be made to stand representative: a set of wisecracking, worldly figures supposedly attracted to Hollywood by the prospect of copious easy money, who created not a genre of film, but rather a style that prepared the way for Citizen Kane ...”

“... We​ have seen so many other worlds in movies recently that shabby domestic realism, showing the details of a marriage and its break-up, real streets and familiar furniture, can come as something of a shock. The shock is all the greater when the leading characters, like Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver in Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, come from those other worlds ...”

“... It’s​ not the main function of great fictional characters to provide platforms for the careers of others, but they do the job very well. In a new film, Sherlock Holmes walks into Inspector Lestrade’s office and announces that he has solved a particular case. Lestrade is pleased, and says he has two questions. The first is how did Holmes do it? Holmes offers a detailed answer ...”

“... It’s​ an old narrative device and a very effective one: to provide the day or month without mentioning the year. Garrett Bradley’s new feature-length documentary, Time (on Amazon Prime), begins with a woman telling the camera that it is 23 July and that she has been out of prison for a week and one day. On 24 May she says she is pregnant with twins and has been for 22 weeks ...”

“... The​ meaning of the word ‘foundling’ seems pretty clear, but there is an interesting slippage in its implications. Such children are not lost and found, they are picked up after being left somewhere. Or thrown away, as the subtitles of Kore-eda Hirokazu’s Broker keep reminding us. A middle-aged man – Ha Sang-hyun, played by Song Kang-ho – looks tenderly at a baby and asks: ‘How could anyone throw him away?’ This has been interpreted as a sentimental moment in a sentimental movie, and Kang-ho won the Best Actor award at Cannes for that tender look and others like it ...”

“... Wes Anderson’s​ new film, Asteroid City, is like a cartoon without the toons. It’s true that the alien who descends (twice) into the picture looks like a drawing of a long-legged human tadpole. Similarly, the desert where much of the film is set looks less like an actual landscape than a sketch of somebody’s idea of such a place, complete with squiggled humps serving as mesas ...”

“... The great​ Alasdair Gray novel on which Yorgos Lanthimos’s film Poor Things is based is clearly dated and located: the 1880s, Glasgow. The film is more oblique, offering a guessing game made up of costumes, travel by coach and horse, and a reference to Oscar Wilde. The last item is more informative than it sounds, more attentive to cinema and refraction, and a nice touch on the part of the screenwriter, Tony McNamara ...”

“... The bad year​ in Bertrand Bonello’s dizzying film The Beast is 2025. That’s when everything went wrong. By 2044, the latest date in the movie, the world is steady again and much improved. The bots are in charge and humans have only humble clerical jobs where their mistakes will not matter much. The bots are human in their fashion, a long way from being mere machines ...”

“... Towards the end​ of Levan Akin’s shape-shifting movie Crossing, a character says that she has begun to think of Istanbul as ‘a place where people come to disappear’. She has strong personal reasons for the thought, having travelled from Batumi in Georgia to look for her sister’s transgender child, who left home long ago, chased out by an angry father ...”

“... Rodrigo Moreno’s​ The Delinquents has taken a while to reach us. Its premiere was at Cannes in May 2023. The fate of the film imitates, in a way, its main theme. It’s about getting lost, or not getting lost enough. It has been described as a heist movie and a comedy. These labels are appropriate only if every bank robbery is a heist, and if we call films comedies when we can’t think of another word to describe them ...”

“... Everything​ talks in Brady Corbet’s films, especially the scenes and objects that are silent. A snowy Italian mountain face seems to be some sort of fable, the Statue of Liberty appears upside down in an empty sky, the world spins at the end of a French motorcade as if it had gone crazy. Corbet likes to shoot cars at night, where we see mainly a dark screen, and just a few moving lights ...”

“... The opening of​ Walter Salles’s haunting new film, I’m Still Here, places us a long way from its later concerns. The shots and action look like an energetic advertisement for Rio de Janeiro as a holiday destination, all beaches and volleyball and laughing children. When we move to a garden, the famous statue of Christ hangs like a blessing high in the air ...”

“... French moralists​ are not usually moralisers. They explore moral ground by turning its difficulties into aphorisms. They are because they think; they are frightened by the eternal silence of infinite space; they remind us that hell is other people. Or they make movies. Among the early works of Éric Rohmer are Six Moral Tales. Among his late works are Tales of the Four Seasons, which take the notion of moral experience for granted ...”

“... It’s​ tempting to think of Past Lives, Celine Song’s haunting (and haunted) first film, as a work in search of a story. In the end, though, it’s exactly the reverse. The story is there but the characters can’t live it. They can’t let it happen and they can’t let it go. ‘What a good story this is,’ one of them says at a certain point ...”