The documentary market has, inevitably, been flooded of late by Syria-themed titles, almost all of them worthy in a broad sense, though some are more illuminating and cinematically vital than others. Matthew Heineman’s City of Ghosts (Dogwoof, 18) is among the most essential.
Taking as its subject the intrepid citizen journalists of Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently, a resistance website set up to expose Islamic State’s litany of atrocities and ensuing misinformation to the outside world, the film achieves remarkable intimacy with men and women whose self-exposure has, even post-exile, put them in mortal danger – fatal danger, in some cases, as Heineman observes with unblinking candour. (Be warned: Heineman has no interest in protecting viewers from the extremes of violence faced and documented by his subjects.)
Unstably sheltered in Turkey and Europe, they keep the site going with the aid of undercover contributors back in Raqqa – the “ghosts” of the title could refer equally to the living or the dead – but the film makes a powerful point of just how hard it can be for them to communicate their message even on notionally safe ground, with western Islamophobia their second, rising enemy.
Most films are going to look a little less harrowing after a viewing of City of Ghosts, so that might be a safer time to pop in Berlin Syndrome (Curzon Artificial Eye, 15), Australian director Cate Shortland’s sleek, skin-prickling abduction thriller, in which Teresa Palmer’s drifting, solitary backpacker is chatted up in Berlin by cute, hunky-dorky schoolteacher Andi (Max Riemelt), heads to his place for a night of no-strings fun and wakes to find herself deliberately and inescapably locked in his apartment. This is the stuff of lurid exploitation pictures, but Shortland, the intelligent sensualist behind Lore and Somersault, has more complex, conflicted horror in mind. As implied by the title, the push-pull sexual energy between captor and quarry is a constant here, though Palmer’s finely folded performance keeps her character’s real desires uncertain to the last.
Uncertainty is not an operative word in Pirates of the Caribbean: Salazar’s Revenge (Disney, 12). Fourteen years and five variously lumbering films into Disney’s high-kitsch, high-seas franchise, no room is left for surprise at the level of concept or execution. It seems a lifetime ago that Johnny Depp’s sticky, shticky, kohl-eyed Keith Richards impression was once deemed novel enough for an Oscar nomination. Even with dollar signs written in his dulled eyes, Depp is still the liveliest thing about this boilerplate entry, with its slimy digital brushwork slathered all over the canvas and a plot that takes a most convoluted of routes to nowhere of consequence. The series has had worse days, but is that a good enough reason to continue?
In cinemas, the perfectly circular aspect ratio of Feng Xiaogang’s jangling satirical melodrama I Am Not Madame Bovary (Thunderbird, 12) was a truly startling visual choice, the frame aptly pressing in on an already beleaguered protagonist: Fan Bingbing’s embittered provincial divorcee, battling her ex-husband and the bureaucratic patriarchy for what she sees as a fairer new start in life. On DVD, this funnel vision is rather less effective: distancing rather than mesmerically strange. That Flaubert-referencing title could be passed on to Belle de Jour (Studiocanal, 18), Luis Buñuel’s still-savoury study of bourgeois prostitution, here given a gorgeous restored reissue for its 50th anniversary. Fifty hardly seems the right age: this brisk, tart, perversely comic tale of a middle-class Parisian housewife amusing herself by day as a sex worker may be quintessentially clothed in mid-60s chic, but its cool sexual politics remain as fresh as a very fragrant daisy.
Also half a century old this year: Robert Redford and Jane Fonda’s winning romantic partnership in Barefoot in the Park, which is being marked not with a restoration but a reunion. In the unfortunately titled but engagingly mellow Our Souls at Night, a new Netflix exclusive, Fonda and Redford’s chemistry still proves frisky enough to lift this autumnal romance (another polite English-language venture from The Lunchbox director Ritesh Batra, following The Sense of an Ending) out of its beiger interludes.
They’re both widowed midwesterners who have lived across the street from each other for decades without exchanging more than a courteous greeting. When loneliness gets the better of her and she knocks on his door with a charmingly in-person booty call, life shifts subtly for them both. There are no harsh conflicts or unwelcome surprises here, just the pleasure of two great movie stars who have always gone well together, still going well together.
