Portobello [2025]

 It’s quite astonishing that Marco Bellochhio, a (hopefully) soon-to-be nonagenarian who made his directorial debut six decades back, is still making films that’re bold, ambitious, caustic, rebellious, comprises of electrifying moments and filled with throbbing vitality. His second television miniseries – made four years after Exterior Night, a similarly vigorous and riveting recounting of a complex and sensational chapter from contemporary Italian history – Portobello flamboyantly glided through a real-life soap opera filled with kitsch, melodrama, scandal-mongering, lurid machinations, “theatre of the absurd” and a proto version of cancel culture. Enzo Tortora (Fabrizio Gifuni, in his third consecutive collaboration with Bellocchio and fourth overall) was at the peak of his popularity in the early-1980s when things took a spectacular nose-dive for him and he was plunged into a bizarre nightmare. He was the host of the enormously popular weekly TV show – a rather cheesy programme that was fervently devoured by 28 million viewers – when Giovanni Pandico (Lino Musella), a creepy and egotistic Comorra member who was obsessed with Tortora and turns into an informant for the Italian authorities, falsely alleges the latter of being a drug trafficker for the mafia out of sheer spite. Few of his fellow turncoats, too, join him in that, and as a result Tortora’s life comes crashing down, leading to a frustrating, traumatic and seemingly endless battle with an obsessed state prosecution. Bellocchio splendidly captured the zeitgeist through ambitiously mounted set-pieces and production designs, and the utterly farcical nature of the scenario through a mix of drama, bombast and sardonic humour, thereby making this a thrilling seriocomic ride. The firebrand Italian filmmaker’s pointed jabs at his country’s social, political, judicial, religious and criminal layers continue unabated.

Director: Marco Bellocchio

Genre: Drama/Legal Drama/Crime Drama/Biopic/TV Miniseries

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

Young Mothers [2025]

 Teenagers struggling to break free from the vicious cycle of marginalized existence, abandonment and abuse – a recurrent theme in the Dardenne brothers’ films – formed the underlying premise in their tender, poignant, compassionate and delicately weaved portrayal of teenage motherhood in Young Mothers. Marking a terrific return to form after a couple of strained efforts for the septuagenarian brothers – two years shy of completing 50 years of co-directing films – it emphatically underlined the radical empathy, bleak social realism and spare, documentary-style form that the Belgian duo has been identified with since their international breakout with the unforgettable La Promesse 3 decades back, while expanding their palette through a hyperlink film that traversed between the interweaved stories of four working-class teenagers housed in a state-run shelter in Liège. Soon-to-be-mother Jessica (Babette Verbeek), having always struggled with abandonment, is desperately seeking to establish contact with her biological mother (India Hair); Ariane (Janaïna Halloy Fokan), meanwhile, has an extremely complicated relationship with her volatile mom (Christelle Cornil), a recovering alcoholic who was in a toxic affair, and consequently wants to give up her baby for adoption to a grounded middle-class couple; the increasingly agitated Perla (Lucie Laruelle) wishes in futility to have a conventional life with the distant father of their child fresh out of institutionalization; former drug addict Julia (Elsa Houben), on the other hand, has a loving boyfriend and is on the verge of making it if only she can avoid sliding back. Ariana’s story stood out as the most complex and heartbreaking in these edgy, moving and outstandingly performed tales bereft of any moral grandstanding or contrivances, and where harsh socioeconomic realities fiercely combat for hope (howsoever fleeting and tenuous).

Directors: Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne

Genre: Drama/Social Drama/Urban Drama

Language: French

Country: Belgium

Kontinental '25 [2025]

 Coming on the back of his two provocative and coruscating stunners Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn and Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, Kontinental ’25 felt decidedly contemplative in comparison, even if a relatively toned-down Radu Jude film too leaves one with a pungent aftertaste through cutting satire, caustic jabs and gallows humour. This was a sharp assault – carried out using a disarmingly gentle-looking scalpel – on the crushing and callous apathy of post-Communist, neoliberal Romania, marked by dismantling of social safety nets for the marginalized and vulnerable, escalating housing crises, rabid gentrification, toxic ethno-nationalism, and perhaps most ironically, the outsourcing of guilt. The film’s deliberately cheesy protagonist, Orsolya (Eszter Tompa), a bailiff of Hungarian ethnicity, evicts a homeless man (Gabriel Spahiu) – displaying disingenuous sympathy while arriving with intimidating bouncer-cops – from the unused boiler room of a building that’s set to be turned into a boutique hotel by a German company. That, tragically, incites the man into committing suicide, and as a result she’s plagued by a heavy outpouring of guilt, which she sobbingly unloads – over a series of deadpan conversations – onto her husband, boss, friend, mom, punkish former student, and priest, while also clarifying each tine that she wasn’t legally culpable. Jude’s scalding portrayal of inbred racism was nonpartisan; Orsolya’s cantankerous mom curses Romanians for stealing Transylvania from Hungary and for being lazy, while her Romanian husband chuckle while reading through the brazenly bigoted trolling in social media targeting her ethnicity. The film, incidentally, opened with a 20-minute near-wordless montage where we follow the soon-to-be-dead “non-person” through the city, while scoffing at the over-abundance of urban kitsch, from robot dogs to plastic dinosaurs.

Director: Radu Jude

Genre: Black Comedy/Social Satire

Language: Romanian/Hungarian

Country: Romania

Resurrection [2025]

Resurrection – Bi Gan’s return 7 years after his hypnotic last film Long Day’s Journey into Night – was as much a work of epic thematic preoccupations and stylistic ambitions, as a mind-bending, hallucinogenic and baffling exercise. Euphoric in its formal audacity, and melancholic in its tone, this elegy to cinema was a classic example of a work that dazzles with its visual splendour and scale – especially in how it glides across diverse filmmaking eras and genres, and serves as a successor to Méliès and Lynch – but also exasperates by its elaborate fantasies, flamboyant flourishes and metaphor-filled conceit. Its premise is an alternate world where humanity has sacrificed dreams to live forever. “Deliriants”, consequently, exist as an anachronism, as they secretly dream, thereby gradually withering away by refusing to conform. Sandwiched between a prologue made as an expressionist, sci-fi, silent film revealing a grotesque and dying “deliriant” that’s an embodiment of movies, and an epilogue mourning its death and culminating with “fin de cinéma”, were four compulsively staged dreams. The convoluted first dream was a 1940s noir and espionage thriller about a tormented musician on the run in sin city; the bleakly beautiful second dream, shot in wintry images, was focused on a lost monk in a derelict monastery haunted by his dead father’s ghost; in the picaresque third dream, a con artist takes an orphan girl under his wings to swindle an ageing mob boss; and in the pulsating final dream – spectacularly filmed in a single take and techno colours, thus recalling his previous feature – a self-destructive hoodlum falls for a mysterious girl employed by a violent gangster. Jackson Yee played the mythical “deliriant” as well as its four manifestations.

Director: Bi Gan

Genre: Drama/Sci-Fi/Thriller/Mystery/Experimental Film

Language: Mandarin

Country: China

The Mastermind [2025]

 Kelly Reichardt’s minimalist “anti-genre” exercises – subversion of genre trappings, prioritizing inaction over actions, and leaving cine-goers without conventional payoffs – have produced anti-road movies (Wendy and Lucy, Certain Women), anti-Westerns (Meek’s Cutoff, First Cow), anti-political/legal thrillers (Night Moves, Certain Women), and anti-relationship/domestic dramas (Certain Women, Showing Up). She’s now made an absorbing anti-heist film with the beguiling and captivating The Mastermind. On that note, it recalled two other marvellous recent films – Rodrigo Moreno’s The Delinquents (especially how they glided through mischievous non-sequiturs) and Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera (both starred Josh O’Connor as roguish art thieves, though the similarities in their characters ended there). The protagonist here may well be the world’s worst art thief, giving a deliberately ironic ring to the film’s hyperbolic title. Aimless, unemployed, emotionally stunted, financially dependent on his well-off parents and working wife, and once considered very promising, JB (O’Connor) is the quintessential drifter. The Massachusetts resident hatches a foolhardy plot to steal four paintings – tellingly, by the American abstract painter Arthur Dove, thereby demonstrating his intellectual superiority over his material stupidity – by borrowing money from his mom, employing fellow losers and with no follow-through or backup plans. Significant portions of the film delved into the aftermaths of the robbery, as things go south right-away and JB is forced to go on the lam. The terrific jazz score complemented the improvisational form, and O’Connor embodied his character’s aloof, self-serving, hangdog charm, untouched by the era he’s living in, viz. the 1970s, anti-Vietnam War protests and counter-culture movements. The zeitgeist, incidentally, existed in the edges, bleeding in through the brilliant diagetic soundscape (TV programmes, radio bulletins, people speaking in the backgrounds), until JB inadvertently walks into it.

Director: Kelly Reichardt

Genre: Crime Drama/Heist Film/Road Movie

Language: English

Country: US