Clocks have changed, scarves are out and critics are already being commissioned by antsy editors to compile best-of-2016 lists. Premature, yes, but I’ll be surprised and delighted if I see anything better than Things to Come (Curzon Artificial Eye, 12) in the next few weeks. Mia Hansen-Løve’s formally simple yet emotionally immense drama of midlife crisis and creation skates gracefully on the edge of perfection.
It’s easy to imagine many versions of a merely good sauvignon blanc drama in which Isabelle Huppert pristinely plays a Parisian intellectual handling a divorce with dry wit and elegant fury. Hansen-Løve’s voice, however, is extraordinary in its democratic compassion and detail-fixated honesty. She has made a life study in which everything and nothing that happens is remarkable and surprising: raucous humour is found where there should be none, while sudden heartbreak sneaks up out of nowhere. It’s evidently the fruit of a notably free collaboration with Huppert. The actress’s signature spiky intelligence permeates the film, yet she has absorbed her director’s crepe-paper tenderness and vulnerability. Each has brought out the other’s most acute, most generous expertise. The narrative comes to a close on Christmas Day; this gorgeous film may just be my new holiday standard.
Many are equally enraptured by Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery of Splendour (New Wave, 12), though my admiration for this immaculately formed life-and-death reverie remains theoretical rather than rooted in the heart. Set largely in a clinic – or a vision of one – for patients stricken with an enigmatic sleeping sickness, it has mood, sound and texture to shiver and swoon for, though like a dream, I didn’t retain everything when it was over.
Jonás Cuarón’s Desierto (Altitude, 18) is less elusive. It’s a bluntly schematic chase thriller for the Trump era, as a group of Mexican illegal immigrants is literally hunted down by a lone American bigot. Cuarón has a measure of his father (and co-producer) Alfonso’s flair for staging, but it’s a visceral idea rendered in such rudimentary moral terms that it doesn’t cut very deep.
Since seeing it at last month’s London film festival, however, I’ve found it hard to shake Park (Bounty Films, 15), gifted newcomer Sofia Exarchou’s piercing, astonishingly rigorous snapshot of impoverished, disaffected Greek youth. Vividly set in and around the disused Olympic park where a group of tussling, horny, angry kids have formed their own impenetrable community, the bristling socioeconomic metaphors paint themselves; Exarchou’s watchful camera doesn’t force them.
The glitziest release of the week is X-Men: Apocalypse (Fox, 12), though the shine is mostly limited to the packaging. Even the visuals look a bit murky in the latest episode of this mushrooming mutant franchise, which keeps adding stars as it loses character. Oscar Isaac, as a reawakened supervillain pursuing a new world order, doesn’t bring much to proceedings, which is rarely a true sentence.
Also keeping a lot of A-listers half-heartedly occupied: Now You See Me 2 (eOne, 12), another FBI-allied illusionist caper that doubles down on the quick, silly rug-pulling of its dorkily agreeable predecessor, but with a hefty shot of added smugness.
A standout from London’s LGBT Flare festival now making its Netflix debut, Stephen Cone’s Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party is at once ordinary and special: this story of a 17-year-old boy getting to grips with his sexuality in a suburban America of swimming pools and purity rings locates fresh pockets of curiosity and insight in his achingly familiar struggle. Unfolding with a natural eavesdropper’s deliberation over the course of his bumpy birthday party, Cone’s film finds room to observe and understand multiple factions of his conflicted hero’s equally confused community. In this fractious American election week, it makes a welcome case for understanding.
