The Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda chose to make Broker in South Korea, with Parasite star, Song Kang-ho. He plays one of two dodgy chaps who make a living selling abandoned babies to desperate couples.
Another box-set from the BFI full of Bergman treasures, from core catalogue classics such as Fanny and Alexander (1982), Cries and Whispers (1972), Autumn Sonata (1978) and Scenes from a Marriage (1973) to less well-known films such as After the Rehearsal (1984) and From the Lives of Marionettes (1980).
We’ve now reached film 31 and Phase Five of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s increasingly baroque franchise. Four years after Avengers: Endgame’s false finale, Scott Lang aka Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) is still basking in his role in reversing Thanos’s genocidal Blip, and reacting to the MCU’s version of the pandemic by semi-retiring from Avenging for some Me time.
“He won’t get far on hot air and fantasy,” Jonathan Pryce’s cruel bureaucrat huffs, as Baron Munchausen (John Neville) bests besieged city walls in a balloon sewn from a half-ton of knickers. “I hope this movie expands people’s ideas of what is possible,” Terry Gilliam countered of this symptomatic creation, based on the absurdly tall tales of the titular, fictional 18th century nobleman.
“He’s my best friend, a brother,” says Felice Lasco (Pierfrancesco Favino) of his childhood buddy, Oreste Spasiano (Tomasso Ragno). After 40 years away, Felice, a successful, married businessman, has returned to Naples from Cairo to see his aged mother (Aurora Quattrocchi).
He hasn’t seen Oreste since he left at the age of 15. No letters, no phone calls. Nostalgia can be dangerous. A clue: Oreste is now known as Badman. Shades of Elena Ferrante’s Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay.
Marcel the Shell the Shoes On tells the story of a one-eyed little shell who lives with his grandmother Connie in a house that became an Airbnb after its former occupants divorced. The man inadvertently carried away Marcel’s extended family in a drawer when he left. Marcel pines for them, and he tugs at our heartstrings more relentlessly than should be allowed by a one-inch carapace animated by stop motion.
The Son is one of those movies where everyone is acting their socks off, exhibiting their range and sensitivity to the point where one can imagine there was a bucket on the set positioned to drop in the expected awards. It may well work for Florian Zeller’s theatre fans used to a lot of intense anguished dialogue, but it’s very claustrophobic as a film and lacks the tricksy double casting of key characters that made The Father intriguing.
If post-war baroque cinema had been a school or movement rather than a style, its male icon would have been Anton Walbrook. Before Max Ophüls cast the suavely menacing Austrian actor as the master of ceremonies in La Ronde (1950) and as King Ludwig I in Lola Montès (1955), he starred as a German soldier who sells his soul for success at cards in the chilling supernatural drama The Queen of Spades (1949).
Magic Mike began as a cautionary tale rooted in Channing Tatum’s spell as a teenage stripper, then morphed into a franchise of reality and theatre shows. Now this second sequel brings original director Steven Soderbergh back, and leaps into pure fantasy.
Women Talking is very powerful. It was adapted by writer-director Sarah Polley from the novel that Miriam Toews, raised a Mennonite in Canada, based on terrible events that took place in an isolated Mennonite community in Bolivia between 2005 and 2009.