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Guy Lodge Film Critic The most rewarding moment of last year’s BAFTA ceremony came with the presentation of the lead actress award: As Joanna Scanlan was named the winner for her moving turn as a widow uncovering her husband’s double life in the British indie “After Love,” her visibly emotional reaction was matched by the palpable warmth of the applause. But a large part of the reason it was so memorable was because, in the long run of precursor awards and televised ceremonies that make up Oscar season, this moment belonged to BAFTA alone. Versions of Scanlan’s speech hadn’t been heard a dozen times before; she wasn’t even eligible for prizes Stateside. This was a case of the British Academy voters honoring one of their own with little regard for their place in the U.S. race. Scanlan’s unusual win, however, was only enabled because of a rarer occurrence still: Thanks partially to jury intervention in compiling the nominees, there was zero overlap between the BAFTA and Oscar slates for lead actress, essentially freeing the Brits to go their own way.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Even before last year’s Supreme Court overturning of Roe v. Wade, a recent international surge in films about abortion rights and the endangerment thereof — from period pieces like “Happening” to present-day portraits like “Never Rarely Sometimes Always” — almost seemed to anticipate such a devastating blow. In America in particular, where talk of abortion access has always been snarled up in extreme religious rhetoric and eternal red-blue division, it has never been a subject to be treated complacently. Urgent and unvarnished, Tracy Droz Tragos’ documentary “Plan C” is an early entry in what might be considered post-Roe cinema, focusing less on pro-choice ideology than on the practicalities of ensuring choice in a system increasingly stacked against the idea.

Angelique Jackson CAA has signed director Saim Sadiq, who helmed “Joyland,” Pakistan’s official entry for the 95th Academy Awards, for representation. Sadiq was named one of Variety’s “10 Directors to Watch” for 2023 in recognition of the film, which marks his debut feature. “Joyland” made its world premiere at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival — becoming the first Pakistani film to debut at the fest — where it was awarded the Un Certain Regard jury prize and the Queer Palm. The film has also been nominated for best international film at the 2023 Independent Spirit Awards and made history as Pakistan’s first film to be shortlisted for best international feature film at the Academy Awards.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Through films as varied as “The Father,” “Dick Johnson is Dead” and “Relic,” dementia and neurodegenerative disease have been extensively portrayed on screen in recent years — a subgenre that carries a trigger warning for anyone with off-screen experience of the subject. For those who think they cannot stomach one more, Maite Alberdi’s “The Eternal Memory” treats inexorably sad material with a lighter, more lyrical approach than most — focusing less on the day-to-day ravages of living with Alzheimer’s than on the slippery, transient concept of memory itself, as formed, held and lost both in the individual mind and a wider collective consciousness. Key to the film’s thesis is that its subject is Augusto Góngora, a veteran Chilean political journalist who labored through the 1970s and 1980s to bring the iniquities of the Pinochet regime to public attention — and later dedicated himself to conserving that national memory for future generations.

Guy Lodge Film Critic The possessive claim in the title “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio” is a gutsy one. There’s confidence — some would even say arrogance — in filming an oft-told story at least as old as the hills, and suddenly branding it as your own: Even two auteurs as ballsy as Francis Ford Coppola and Baz Luhrmann didn’t slap their own names on “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” and “William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet,” respectively. Still, you can hardly blame del Toro’s stop-motion spin on Carlo Collodi’s 19th-century chestnut “The Adventures of Pinocchio” for wanting to advertise its distinguishing vision up top: After umpteen tellings of the wooden-boy tale, and coming on the heels of Robert Zemeckis’ wretched Disney remake, Netflix’s rival adaptation has to announce itself as something different. That it is; it’s often delightful too.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Children’s literature loves few things as much as a mighty monster who remains, against all outward appearances, defiantly benign — one who sets out to soothe young nightmares after initially stoking them, ultimately proving that fears and anxieties aren’t limited to little folk. Boris, the cheerfully dorky title character in Ruth Stiles Gannett’s 1948 book “My Father’s Dragon,” is cut from the same soft felt as Frank L. Baum’s Cowardly Lion, Roald Dahl’s Big Friendly Giant or Jill Murphy’s Worst Witch. A would-be flying fire-breather who hasn’t yet found his wings or his flames, he has even more growing up to do than fearful 10-year-old hero Elmer, and their mutual guilelessness sets the tone for Irish animator Nora Twomey’s winningly sweet-natured, visually transporting adaptation.

Guy Lodge Film Critic What children love about Roald Dahl’s books is the very thing other writers tend to dodge when adapting them: that icy, unapologetic streak of misanthropy, so exhilarating to kids who have been instructed to see the good in everyone, opening their eyes to the nastier, more ironic adult world that awaits them. Even the craftiest, classiest Dahl adaptations tend to mollify that cruelty somewhat: Nicolas Roeg’s “The Witches” is viciously frightening but tacks on an unmitigatedly happy ending, while Wes Anderson’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox” muffles the violent survivalism of its source tale with its director’s more gently quirky world-building. Already based on one of his kindlier stories, “Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical” further softens matters by pruning the presence of its funniest adult grotesques to accommodate more child’s-eye exuberance. The long-late author probably would have grumbled; young viewers will be delighted nonetheless.

Guy Lodge Film Critic A total of 164 feature films will play at this year’s London Film Festival, alongside an abundance of shorts, TV series and an expanded program of XR (extended reality) works — and that’s in a comparatively slimmed-down era of curation for a public-facing festival that has long aimed to bring the best of the global festival circuit to non-traveling cinephiles. What has definitely grown is the LFF’s national reach: In what fest director Tricia Tuttle terms the festival’s “new normal” format after a few years of structural shifts and COVID-era adjustments, the capital-centered event will also be hosting screenings in 10 other cities around the U.K., from Manchester to Edinburgh to Belfast — sealing its status as the country’s preeminent film festival. A digital program of up to 20 titles will also be made available for online viewing, while short films and screen talks will be free to stream on the BFI Player platform: “It’s really important to us to get to those places we can’t reach with our venue partnerships,” says Tuttle, adding that their priority is “to give new audiences a taste of what the festival is like.”

Angelique Jackson Award-winning German actor Nina Hoss has signed with CAA for representation. Hoss stars opposite Cate Blanchett in Todd Field’s “Tár,” which will open theatrically on Oct. 7 via Focus Features. The film debuted to rave reviews at the Venice and Telluride film festivals, with Variety Senior Awards Editor Clayton Davis suggesting that Hoss could land her first Oscar nomination for her supporting performance as wife to Blanchett’s trailblazing composer, who becomes the first woman to conduct a major German orchestra. In his awards analysis, Davis described Hoss as the “heart and soul of the film.” Best known for her acclaimed performances in Christian Petzold’s films “Phoenix” and “Barbara,” as well as Anton Corbijn’s “A Most Wanted Man,” Hoss made her debut in 1996 with “A Girl Called Rosemary.” Additional credits include “Yella” and Petzold’s “Something to Remind Me” and “Wolfsburg.”

Guy Lodge Film Critic Colombian director Laura Mora’s coming-of-age drama “Kings of the World” has taken the Golden Shell for Best Film at the San Sebastian Film Festival, marking the third consecutive year that a female filmmaker has taken the top prize at the Spanish fest. Longer report to follow; full list of winners below. OFFICIAL SELECTION PRIZES Golden Shell for Best Film: “Kings of the World,” Laura Mora Special Jury Prize: “Runner,” Marian Mathias Silver Shell for Best Director: “A Hundred Flowers,” Genki Kawamura

Guy Lodge Film Critic It takes a village to raise a child, goes the old saying, and at least in the figurative sense, Spanish director Pilar Palomero’s tremendous sophomore feature “La Maternal” shows that to be true. Before that can happen, however, pregnant 14-year-old Carla needs to get out of the village and into the city — specifically, to a Barcelona shelter for teenage mothers where the troubled adolescent finds the community and empathy her life has been missing all along. Female solidarity drives Palomero’s follow-up to the celebrated, similarly sisterhood-themed “Schoolgirls,” but without any glib girl-power sloganeering: A tough, unsweetened work of social realism built around an astonishing screen debut by Carla Quílez, “La Maternal” sentimentalizes not one detail of juvenile motherhood, truly earning its flashes of hope and grace.

Guy Lodge Film Critic At the height of his career, Czech-born composer Josef Mysliveček was the most prolific and sought-after figure in Italian opera, bound for immortal celebrity. Nearly three centuries later, his name isn’t forgotten to classical music scholars, but neither does it have anything approaching household status; the facts and records of his personal life, meanwhile, have largely been lost to history. Via a blend of free narrative speculation and exacting musical presentation, Petr Vaclav’s stately, sumptuous biopic “Il Boemo” seeks to restore a degree of iconic status to a talent latterly overshadowed by relative 18th-century contemporaries, albeit not with much swagger or modernity of its own: This is costume drama of a traditional, ornately brocaded stripe, a classical music lesson for classicists.

Guy Lodge Film Critic In the little-remembered 1950 noir “The Damned Don’t Cry,” Joan Crawford plays a Texan housewife whose grief for her late son spurs her to make a new life for herself in the urban underworld. Fyzal Boulifa’s exquisite new film of the same title is named expressly for that Crawford vehicle, but is neither a remake nor a direct homage. Rather, it remixes the narrative components of that film and others of its ilk into the kind of new-school-old-school heart-tugger — one might say tearjerker if its characters weren’t, true to its title, stoically dry-eyed throughout — that might have been designed for the shoulder-padded diva were she alive in 2022 and, perhaps more crucially, of Moroccan heritage. 

Manori Ravindran International Editor Magnolia Pictures has acquired the North American rights to Venice Film Festival sensation “Blue Jean.” The directorial debut of Georgia Oakley, which just world-premiered in the Venice Days section of the Italian festival, is set in England in 1988, where Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government is about to pass a law stigmatizing gays and lesbians. The new legislation forces Jean (Rosy McEwen), a closeted gym teacher, to live a double life. But as pressure mounts from all sides, the arrival of a new student catalyzes a crisis that will challenge Jean to her core.

Guy Lodge Film Critic If you found yourself wide awake in the wee small hours with personal demons rattling in your brain, and you picked up the phone to share them with a patient, neutral stranger, Tessa Thompson’s measured, calming voice is more or less exactly what you’d hope to hear on the other end of the line. As Beth, a night-shift volunteer for a crisis helpline, the actor’s naturally gentle, benevolent presence is the chief asset of Steve Buscemi’s minor-key chamber drama “The Listener” — not that she has a host of elements to compete with in what amounts, on screen at least, to a one-woman show.  Thompson’s unforced credibility isn’t shared, however, by a flat, superficial script that treats an assortment of mental health ailments as quirky conversation fuel. Each anguished call that Beth takes, over the course of one long, dark night of assorted souls, is written less like a recognizable human exchange than as an actor’s heightened audition piece, and played out as such by a voice-only ensemble stacked with distractingly recognizable names. Though the global pandemic is only incidentally mentioned, “The Listener” plays in all aspects like a project conceived in the most self-searching and self-indulgent depths of the isolation era. It’s hard to imagine audiences wanting to enter that headspace now.

Guy Lodge Film Critic At the 1987 Conservative Party Conference in Britain, then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher issued one of the most grimly memorable quotes of her career: “Children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay.” For many of us, it’s a line that now sounds so archaically out of step with contemporary life as to be comical — that “inalienable right” wording ironically appropriated by many a queer-rights cause — though you need only look at Florida’s recent Don’t Say Gay bill to know that Thatcher’s sentiments live among us still. A frank, piercing debut from British writer-director Georgia Oakley, “Blue Jean” is a Thatcher-era period piece that crisply evokes that climate of politically propagated homophobia without preserving it in amber: It effectively puts the past in tacit dialogue with the present.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Not many films hit an emotional crescendo around the publication of a Pitchfork review, but Bill Pohlad’s “Dreamin’ Wild” is sufficiently sincere and embedded in musical nerdery to make it work. As onetime brother act Donnie and Joe Emerson huddle with their family around a 30-years-late evaluation of the album they recorded as teenagers, one particular critical reference sends them giddily reeling: “To twist a Brian Wilson phrase,” it reads, “[the album] is a godlike symphony to teenhood.” For fortysomething Donnie, who has spent his whole adult life scrambling for anyone to listen to his music — let alone love it — the mere mention of his musical hero in relation to his work is a crowning triumph: Donnie, as played by a typically disheveled, downcast Casey Affleck, looks briefly, guardedly happy for a moment, and this often melancholic film is suddenly suffused with well-being.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Gianni Amelio was in his late sixties when he came out as gay a few years ago. The announcement preceded the release of his documentary “Happy to Be Different,” which worked toward an overriding sunniness in contemplating the trials and challenges of being gay in Italy at various points in the 20th century. In turning to a gay-themed narrative project, Amelio narrows the focus and dims the mood: “Lord of the Ants” takes as its subject the gay Italian author Aldo Braibanti, and the social and legal opposition he faced over his sexuality in mid-1960s Rome. Solemn, stately and perhaps a little stifled, it’s the kind of queer statement you might expect from a veteran filmmaker who wasn’t until relatively recently out and proud, and is rather poignant for that.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Even the most solidly founded of marriages can be strained and shattered by the death of a child. For handsome, wholesome Japanese couple Taeko and Jiro, however, that tragedy shows up all the fault lines that were already in their young relationship, and that’s before living ghosts of the past show up for both partners. Koji Fukada’s “Love Life” unabashedly embraces melodramatic contrivance in its examination of modern middle-class love tested as much by social prejudices as by personal demons; it just does so with such pallid, polite reserve that its sentimentality never becomes transcendently moving. As such, this agreeable but overlong pic finds the Japanese writer-director still struggling to regain the form of his jolting 2016 Cannes prizewinner “Harmonium.”

Guy Lodge Film Critic Friendships can be as changeable and temperamental and outright dramatic as grand romances, though they tend to get a bland rap on screen — with friends, for most screenwriters, merely convenient constants, there to support protagonists through matters of supposedly more consequence. If substantial platonic relationship studies are rare, ones about men are rarer still. And if that comes down to a social convention rather than a cinematic one, that’s integral to the power and poignancy of Martin McDonagh’s searing “The Banshees of Inisherin,” a film that traces the tortured breakup between two best pals in remote rural Ireland with all the anguish and gravity of the most charged romantic melodrama — its high, unleashed emotions all the more startling in a world where men don’t speak their feelings.

Guy Lodge Film Critic “L’Immensità” is director Emanuele Crialese’s first feature film in 11 years, and only his fifth in a quarter-century: The gifted Italian, best known to international audiences for his splendid, richly felt Ellis Island immigrant saga “Golden Door,” has never been one for unconsidered or impersonal projects. At first glance, then, one might wonder what drew him out of hibernation for a film that, with its trim runtime and small-scale domestic narrative, belies a title that translates as “immensity.” This 1970s-set story of a 12-year-old navigating his gender identity while his mother battles mental health demons is too palpably pained and heartfelt to be called slight, but it’s sensitive and peculiar in ways that feel fragile — occasionally splintered and swamped by an elaborate setpiece, or the outsize star magnetism of arguably its secondary lead, one Penélope Cruz. 

Guy Lodge Film Critic While waiting to pick up five-year-old Leila from judo practice, personable 40-ish schoolteacher Rachel introduces herself to another parent as Leila’s stepmom, before backtracking to awkwardly correct herself. Later, when a kindly stranger on a train remarks on the resemblance between the two, Rachel doesn’t bother clarifying, merely accepting the benign compliment. Her relationship to Leila is both unremarkably simple and complicated by an absence of clear language for it: She’s dating the girl’s father, and the attachment between woman and child has grown perhaps stronger than the relationship on which it depends. It’s the kind of delicate everyday situation that rarely occupies the centre of a film, and in the superb “Other People’s Children,” writer-director Rebecca Zlotowski negotiates it with warm intelligence and compassion.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Rather like the arc of the moral universe, “Argentina, 1985” is long, but bends toward justice. Effectively dramatizing the country’s landmark Trial of the Juntas, history’s first instance of a civilian justice system convicting a military dictatorship, Santiago Mitre’s broad, sprawling, heart-on-sleeve courtroom saga may draw from the same nightmarish period of history that has informed much of Argentine cinema’s most essential, haunting works — from 1985’s Oscar-winning “The Official Story” to last year’s “Azor” — but eschews any subtle arthouse stylings for a storytelling sensibility as robustly populist as anything by Sorkin or Spielberg. Small wonder, then, that Amazon Studios has boarded a film clearly aiming to be both a domestic smash and an international crossover hit — buoyed by the reliable star power of Ricardo Darín, his signature suaveness tempered by a walrus mustache and boxy ‘80s frames as Julio Strassera, the dogged prosecutor who took on this charged, against-the-odds case. Though a warmly received premiere in competition at Venice will set it on the right path, “Argentina, 1985” is, appropriately enough, a people’s film about people’s justice, balancing tear-jerking historical catharsis with touches of droll domestic comedy, and set to draw crowds on enthusiastic word of mouth.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Six decades into a career of over 40 films, the last thing you might request of a new feature from 92-year-old documentarian Frederick Wiseman is that it surprise us. Yet after a run of expansive, richly process-oriented observations of mostly American institutions and communities, his new film, “A Couple,” upends expectations of his work in what feels an almost mirthfully perverse number of ways. For starters, it’s laser-focused on just one person, not a heaving collective of human labor and activity. It’s short — very much so, in fact, barely stretching past an hour. Also, lest we be burying the lede, it’s not a documentary. Wiseman’s first ever narrative feature sees him collaborating with French actor-writer Nathalie Boutefeu on a biopic of sorts: a portrait of Leo Tolstoy’s anguished wife Sophia, dramatizing her marital dissatisfaction and psychic pain with with a lyrical, literate ear.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Just before director Christopher Nolan’s upcoming “Oppenheimer” plants a fixed image of Ted Hall in the popular imagination, along comes Steve James’s sensitive, studious documentary “A Compassionate Spy” to preemptively set any records straight. Unpacking the life and work of the prodigious teenage Manhattan Project physicist who passed key information about the endeavor to the Soviet Union — cuing an adulthood dogged by suspicion and secrecy — the film demonstrates its director’s characteristic nose for strong material and knack for gripping, straightforward storytelling. If the filmmaking is more televisual than in James’s best work, with its flourishes limited to some unnecessary dramatized passages, that should be no impediment to “A Compassionate Spy” commanding a sizable audience on multiple platforms. 

Guy Lodge Film Critic The political activism of pop stars is, as a rule, on the restrained side. Those who make their allegiances clear still tend to keep all factions in their fanbases sweet by limiting divisive rhetoric, or filtering their politics through broadly palatable humanitarian causes; those who speak a little more frankly still risk the wrath of the public, the internet and their record labels alike. Yet for Ugandan singer Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu — better known to his adoring fans as Bobi Wine — there’s both everything and nothing to lose by getting a little more directly involved in national politics than most such celebrities would dare. Entering a presidential election against corrupt, long-ruling incumbent Yoweri Museveni is, he knows, both a folly and a necessary symbolic stand — a certain path to honorable defeat that “Bobi Wine: Ghetto President” documents with angry urgency and bitter gallows humor.

Guy Lodge Film Critic “Gigi & Nate” begins with two leaps. The first is out of terror, when Gigi, a capuchin monkey at a sad-sack roadside petting zoo, tries to steer clear of her “caretaker.” The second is the sweet leap of boy-joy that 17-year-old Nate Gibson takes off a rocky ledge and into a pond. In this amiable, if unnecessarily manipulative, movie about the human-animal bond — as well as the different forms resilience can take — that fateful second leap will lead the young man and the monkey to each other.Gigi is rescued by a woman who works for an organization that provides service animals to people with disabilities.

Black Lightning actress Charlbi Dean has died at the age of 32 following a sudden illness.The star died in New York on Monday 29 August, however an exact cause of death has not been confirmed.The up and coming star has a starring role in this year’s dark comedy The Triangle of Sadness, where she played Yaya, one half of a model couple who are invited on a trip on a yacht for the ultra-wealthy, before things head downhill. In a recent Instagram post, Charlbi’s partner Luke Volker wrote how “proud” he was of his girlfriend for the role in the Palme D’Or winning film.

Guy Lodge Film Critic“Rule 34,” a challenging and sexually explicit film from Brazilian director Julia Murat, has emerged as the surprise winner of the Golden Leopard award at this year’s Locarno Film Festival — an edition where typically audacious and formally ambitious work dominated the program.

Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentItaly’s True Colours has sold Mario Martone’s Naples-set Cannes competition drama “Nostalgia” to Curzon Film for the U.K. and Ireland, among other new territories.The deal, negotiated by True Colours sales manager Francesca Tiberi and Curzon acquisitions executive Eleonora Pesci, marks the first partnership between the companies.At the Italian Screenings market event recently held in Lecce, Southern Italy, the Rome-based sales company also sealed fresh deals on several other films, including pre-sales on upcoming Locarno title “Delta,” which is a revenge drama with a contemporary Western vibe.Martone’s “Nostalgia,” which has been praised by Variety critic Guy Lodge as the prolific Italian auteur’s “most rewarding film in years,” stars Pierfrancesco Favino as the middle-aged Felice Lasco, who returns to the bustling port city after having lived in Egypt for 40 years.

Guy Lodge Film Critic“America” is a burdensome title for Israeli director Ofir Raul Graizer’s bright, frangible new film, casting expectations of continent-sized import onto a more individual, interior study of immigrant unrest. Visually iridescent and unexpectedly buoyant even when dealing with matters of plunging personal tragedy, this study of a Chicago-based swimming coach returning to his native Israel after his father’s death — setting off a chain of both present-tense misfortunes and disinterred traumas — braids blunt melodramatic storytelling with a softer, more searching look at conflicted identity, both cultural and sexual.

IFC Films has nabbed North American rights to “Corsage,” Marie Kreutzer’s bold costume drama starring Vicky Krieps as the Empress Elisabeth of Austria known as Sissi. Represented in international markets by MK2 Films, the movie world premiered at Cannes’ Un Certain Regard and earned unanimous praises.

Guy Lodge Film Critic“One Fine Morning” sounds an innocuous title for a grownup relationship drama — destined, perhaps, to be confused on streaming menus with the George Clooney-Michelle Pfeiffer romcom “One Fine Day” — and in a sense, the mellow, melancholic cinema of French writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve is its own kind of comfort viewing. But as with many facets of her filmmaking, there’s a smarter, sadder, more literary undertow to the title’s sunny simplicity.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media ReporterNicolas Cage is back… not that he went anywhere.The actor’s latest movie “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent,” a meta comedy in which he plays a fictionalized version of himself, is one of several films opening nationwide over the weekend. It’ll compete against director Robert Eggers’ Viking epic “The Northman” and Universal and DreamWorks’ animated family film “The Bad Guys,” as well as last weekend’s champion “Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore.”Unless ticket sales crash in week two, “The Secrets of Dumbledore,” the third chapter in the “Harry Potter” spinoff series, should retain the domestic box office crown.

Guy Lodge Film Critic“Atlantide” is the Italian name for Atlantis, the fictional island utopia imagined by Plato, supposedly cursed by the gods and swallowed by the sea. It’s a pointed legend to evoke in a film about Venice, the sinking city that, real as it is, feels like a place we collectively dreamed into being, that could somehow be taken from us at any moment.

Guy Lodge Film Critic“Fire” begins in water: a wide, rippling expanse of Mediterranean blue under a cloudless sky, displaced and disrupted by two whirling human bodies. Sara (Juliette Binoche) and Jean (Vincent Lindon) tussle in the otherwise empty ocean as though they’ve just discovered weightlessness, while Eric Gautier’s camera lingers on skin touching skin under the shimmer.