‘Eight Postcards From Utopia’
The films of the Romanian trickster-auteur Radu Jude make cinema out of unlikely images — be it TikToks in “Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World,” pornography in “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn” or closed-circuit TV video in “Sleep #2.” In “Eight Postcards From Utopia,” Jude’s new archival-essay documentary directed with the philosopher Christian Ferencz-Flatz, gaudy television commercials from 1990s Romania get the lowbrow-to-highbrow treatment. The ads represent a kind of time capsule of the country in the immediate wake of the fall of the Iron Curtain and the end of Nicolae Ceausescu’s Communist regime. Western-style capitalism suddenly arrived in Romania, bringing with it glitzy brands, foreign T.V. channels and a new culture of consumerism.
The ads collected in “Eight Postcards From Utopia” hawk everything from Pepsi to new refrigerators to shampoo to mass privatization coupons; Jude and Ferencz-Flatz organize them into eight thematic chapters and edit them imaginatively, chopping them up, zooming in and out, amplifying or silencing the audio. As patterns become traceable, we see clearly the base impulses and desires — patriotism, progress, sex — that these marketing campaigns mined, with the film emerging as a kind of revelatory cultural X-ray of a historical moment.
‘Aavesham’
Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.
The tonal turns of Jithu Madhavan’s raucous action-comedy have to be seen to be believed. Each 10-minute set piece of “Aavesham,” a Malayalam-language film from South India, packs in more emotion — humor, awe, suspense, melancholy — than you’re likely to find in the entire running time of your average Hollywood drama.
As the film opens, three young men arrive in the city of Bangalore to study engineering. When they’re mercilessly hazed by older students, they decide to seek revenge by enlisting the help of Ranga (Fahadh Faasil), a local thug. It doesn’t take long for them to realize they’ve bitten off more than they can chew. With his comically thick mustache, sparkling white outfit, and stacks of gold chains, Ranga is a character. He is puny but commands incredible deference from a multicultural mob of sidekicks. He posts cringe Instagram reels, while also relating outlandish and bloody stories about his past. He has an unpredictable temper — all it takes to earn his ire is losing a game of charades — but delegates all his bloodletting to his minions, having promised his mother years ago that he would give up violence.
Faasil, a powerhouse actor-producer in Malayalam cinema, offers up an utterly committed turn as this caricaturish yet menacing character, whose erratic moods determine the fates of our three slackers and the delicious twists of this uproariously entertaining movie.
‘Let Me Go’
Stream it on Film Movement Plus or rent it on major platforms.
Jeanne Balibar stars in this exquisite and unusual Swiss drama about a single mother of a disabled young man pursuing desire in late middle age. We meet Claudine on one of her weekly trysts at a local hotel, where, with the help of the concierge, she picks up men for sex. It’s a gentle surprise when we realize that she does it not for pay but for pleasure. A rare sight in cinema: an older woman stridently, brazenly, seeking sexual fulfillment! A seamstress in a small town who has devoted her life to caring for her child, Claudine finds in these fleeting encounters a brief, safe reprieve: She only sleeps with men who are passing through the town, with no risk of any deeper entanglement. That is, until she runs into the charming and sensuous Michaël (Thomas Sarbacher), a German scientist and photographer who loosens something inside Claudine — long repressed dreams of a different, freer life. Directed by Maxime Rappaz, “Let Me Go” is a delicate and hushed film, in which little is said but much is felt, particularly in Balibar’s extraordinarily raw and tender performance.
‘The Girls Are Alright’
Stream it on Film Movement Plus.
The playful self-reflexivity of “The Girls Are Alright” is front and center from the start. The Spanish film, directed by Itsaso Arana, is about a theater director, played by Arana, who goes to a house in the country to workshop and rehearse a play with four actresses, played by Bárbara Lennie, Irene Escolar, Itziar Manero and Helena Ezquerro. All the characters are named after the actors who essay them. In gorgeous, sunlit scenes, the women, wearing Victorian dresses, gather to practice their lines and chat about their lives; when they reflect on acting, aging, death and more, it’s hard to tell if we’re watching fictional scenes or glimpsing documentary recordings of the actresses divulging their real-life thoughts. These blurred lines, emphasized in moments when one of the women speaks directly into the camera, lend the film a wonderful candor and charm. Watching the movie feels like hanging out with these women and partaking in their ebullient sorority, in no small part because of the radiantly natural screen presences of the actresses, who never allow the movie’s experiments with the fourth wall to tip into preciousness or gimmickry.
‘Lies We Tell’
This Irish period drama begins with what seems like a show of feminist defiance. The teenage Maud Ruthyn (Agnes O’Casey) has just lost her father and inherited his wealth and property, including the mansion, Knowl, where she lives with a few servants. She is, however, the ward of her uncle Silas (David Wilmot) until she comes of age. Silas was once accused of murder and has a bad reputation, as Maud’s trustees warn her in the movie’s opening scenes; she, with imperious self-assurance and curtness, tells them that she does not need their concern.
But Maud is soon proved wrong. Silas arrives with his cloying daughter and creepy son, and his scheme soon becomes clear: to get Maud married to his heir so they can take over her fortunes. What follows is a kind of psychological horror that makes excellent use of the mansion’s shadowy, labyrinthine interiors and pastoral exteriors. The walls slowly close in on Maud; when she doesn’t yield to pleas, threats or brutal violence, Silas plots to have her committed to a sanitarium for hysteria, pitting the two against each other in a battle of wits animated by Wilmot’s perfectly slimy turn and O’Casey’s steely, riveting face.
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