In East Germany, where director Andreas Dresen grew up, Hilde and Hans Coppi were talked about with the kind of reverence normally reserved for saints. Members of a Communist German resistance group known as the Red Orchestra, which was working to aid the Soviet Union against the Nazis, Hilde and Hans were regarded more as symbols of heroism rather than real people who lived and died for their cause. From Hilde, With Love attempts to breathe life into the legend that Dresen was brought up with, but this handsomely crafted biopic is too staid to make a lasting impact.
Hilde, played with quiet resilience by Babylon Berlin’s Liv Lisa Fries, is picking strawberries when the Gestapo arrive to arrest her. The film begins as it goes on, with Hilde’s idyllic life with Hans (Johannes Hegemann), all kissing in sunlit gardens and harbouring Soviet spies, juxtaposed with the unmerciful reality of the Third Reich. As she languishes in prison, where she endures an agonising childbirth, flashbacks reveal her falling in with this group of young Communists for whom resistance is an adventure as well as a duty. For Hilde, however, it’s primarily an act of compassion; after hearing pleas from German POWs via illicit Soviet broadcasts she writes letters to their families, reassuring them that their sons and husbands are still alive. Discussion of politics is kept to a bare minimum.
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Every one of these flashbacks seems to take place on the most gorgeous summer’s day imaginable. At times it’s rather too beautiful, a “Visit Germany” logo threatening to appear at the end of another sequence of cavorting by a lake or speeding through the countryside on a motorbike. A much more significant problem is that these flashbacks play out in nonchronological order for no clear reason. If it’s a vague stab at shaking up the biopic formula it doesn’t work; in practice it’s needlessly confusing, and that the romance between reserved, slightly prudish Hilde and the dashing Hans feels genuine is in spite of this narrative device. One particularly affecting montage features Hans teaching Hilde Morse code by tapping his finger on her body, whether on her naked back after sex or on her knee on the bus, a secret language of love that’s also an act of rebellion.
To the film’s credit none of the Nazi characters are so cartoonishly abhorrent as to divorce them from reality. Some within this system, such as a prison guard who helps Hilde appeal her sentence, even show some humanity, making their active participation in the régime all the more unsettling. In the current climate rejecting complacency in the face of fascism is a more pertinent message than ever, so while its ending is a gut-punch it’s a shame that From Hilde, With Love isn’t the formally bold, politically radical film that the Coppis deserve.
After 30 years, fans can breathe a sigh of relief – Julie James and Ray Bronson are back! Now, “Who are Julie James and Ray Bronson…and what fans?” I hear you ask. These are minor quibbles in the bigger picture: for some reason they’ve put together a legacy sequel to Jim Gillespie’s 1997 slasher underdog, I Know What You Did Last Summer.
It’s difficult to grasp why this version of I Know What You Did Last Summer was made – the bubble for horror legacy sequels has effectively burst after endless, largely bad iterations. Had this been greenlit six months later, it would have likely been a hard reboot; instead, we get an odd, ungainly hybrid with an identity crisis. As in the original, here a new group of hot young people accidentally kill a man in a car accident on the Fourth of July and swear each other to secrecy. A year later, a masked fisherman rocks up in town wielding a big hook to exact his revenge… but this time the group can turn to the original 90s survivors, Julie James (Jennifer Love Hewitt) and Ray Bronson (Freddie Prinze Jr), for help.
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It is a strange, sporadically entertaining blend of far more ideas than you’d expect from, well, an I Know What You Did Last Summer legacy sequel. Director and writer Jennifer Kaytin Robinson grapples with wellness culture, gentrification, institutional misogyny and the life altering effects of trauma, all the while executing some of the most loyal fan service I’ve ever seen to two films from the late 90s and early 00s that not many people remember, let alone care about. Even as someone who adores the original film (to the point that one side character’s shared surname with the first film’s director did not go unnoticed) it is still mind-boggling that this strange not-quite-reboot made it to screen. This is Avengers: Endgame for a mostly unbeloved 90s slasher – there is quite literally a mid-credits scene with Jennifer Love Hewitt in Nick Fury drag teeing up a sequel. The target audience is me, a couple of my friends, and maybe 40 to 50 other people on planet Earth.
Since it makes so little sense to do a slavish legacy sequel for I Know What You Did Last Summer of all properties, it gives Robinson extensive wiggle room to do whatever she wants. Scream, its spoiled cousin, is a roundly beloved franchise and was too important to screw up or fundamentally meddle with when they brought it back in 2022. I Know What You Did Last Summer strikes out in far more compelling ways than that Scream sequel – which buckled under the weight of its ouroboric meta narrative – ever did.
If I Know What You Did Last Summer has loftier ambitions than the average slasher, these are fatally cramped by the limitations of the IP sandbox it’s playing in. The film violently seesaws between paying homage to the original and carving its own path, with Robinson taking some big swings and misses several of them for purely technical reasons. The featherweight script (co-written with Sam Lansky) is too unserious to sell the film’s absurd, intense finale, and the pair have a strong affinity for tin-eared ‘girls rule, boys drool’ feminism, peppering in baffling, entirely unironic lines about how the entire film’s bloodbath could have been avoided “if men just went to therapy.” This doesn’t cohere with any of the characters’ established personalities and creates tonal road bumps for the film. The direction leaves much to be desired too; when the film veers into horror territory, with frequent off-screen kills and often incoherent action, it offers little of the original’s gripping tension.
None of it really makes sense – both the plot when you think about it (a couple of scenes feel like active plot holes in light of the killer’s identity) and the sheer fact this film got made. The original film is remembered for being a refreshingly uncomplicated slasher about the era’s biggest stars hooking up and getting hooked to death, so there’s not much of a tone or a vibe to replicate. Yet Robinson, a diehard fan, does her damndest, and the cast, in particular Gabbriette and Madelyn Cline, nicely evoke the original cast’s charisma and preternatural good looks. The whole effort is admirable in a surrealist way – there’s one dream sequence that feels like you’ve huffed paint – but this level of fealty to an IP probably isn’t healthy in the long term.
There’s a kindness in the ability to forget. I myself constantly try and not remember the childhood streets I walked down a child in Khartoum, of eating fatoor at my grandmother’s home and of the hope that erupted on the back of revolution in Sudan in 2019. The place and its people now live in disarray, among the cruel remnants of a purposeless war. The optimism of that era feels ludicrous in retrospect so better to try and forget the things you once held dearest.
Yet that, of course is a privileged position, as unlike I, so much of the Sudanese diaspora could not speak of the horrors enacted by the genocidal militia leader known as Hemedti, and so work like this documentary from Hind Meddeb impresses upon us all to remember. There’s a quiet moment in Sudan, Remember Us where a young activist paints over a crumbling wall not far from my childhood home, her brush moving with a deliberateness that makes time stretch. It’s not just paint; it’s insistence, even if that wall likely has been now reduced to a pile of rubble. Meddeb’s documentary is full of such moments, of gestures weighed down by a history of violence, but simultaneously buoyed by a hope that refuses to die.
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Following the euphoria of the revolution, when Omar al-Bashir was ousted after three decades of authoritarian rule, Meddeb traces the fallout through the eyes of those who truly believed that something new might emerge from the blood strewn ashes. What makes this film extraordinary is its refusal to romanticise that belief. Instead, it sits with the disillusionment, the justified fear and the impossible resilience of young Sudanese artists and activists whose lives become quiet testaments to the revolutionary potential that was squandered.
Meddeb, a French-Tunisian journalist, employs a gonzo blend of handheld camerawork and vertical smartphone videos, and the film steps beyond the formalities of traditional filmmaking, just as a generation of Sudanese activists have broadened their horizons. If there’s a fault here, it’s not in the film’s ambition, but in its scope. Few people are aware of the hardships Sudan has endured over the past few decades, and the film doesn’t aim to educate them with an overabundance of context. Instead Meddeb commits to speaking directly to and with those who lived it. The result is something more intimate, more painful: a film that mourns the loss of collective innocence; laments the naivety of hope; but also insists on recording the bravery of bearing witness.
There is no false uplift here. No closing text promising a brighter future around the corner. Sudan, Remember Us ends with a silence that echoes across a cruel void of indifference. The title is less an appeal to the West than a message to the Sudanese diaspora who would rather compartmentalise, and to the disappeared and displaced, to those still fighting. It’s not an easy watch, and nor should it be. But in giving space to those who cannot and should not be erased, Sudan, Remember Us becomes not just a documentary. It is an act of resistance in itself.
The better moments are in the friction between M3GAN and her human companions; the eccentricities of her being programmed for children clashing with simmering anger from the first film. It’s better (and funnier) in building on the adversarial relationships made in the first film; the best callback sees her physically forcing Gemma to sit and listen to her belting out an insufferable radio song after a pep talk.
It’s better still when the comedy crosses with sincere questions about M3GAN’s personhood, and that she phyically feels this believable is a credit to the film’s animatronics team. It’s less charming, however, when M3GAN speaks like Bender from Futurama (“Alright, meat sacks”), or worse, a Deadpool-esque figure who yells things like, “Hold on to your vaginas!” before recklessly driving a supercar.
When Johnstone’s not aggressively expanding M3GAN lore, there’s some alignment between M3GAN’s (misguided and amusingly morbid) attempts at winning over her human companions, and M3GAN2.0’s own charm offensive. In all of its quips and surprisingly energetic action, it’s riffing on Mission Impossible and Terminator 2 plotting and it’s actively trying to be a crowd pleaser. But the filmmaker sometimes overextends: some of the fights do become a little numbing after a while.
Similarly, for a sequel where the main character is hounded by the mistakes of the their past, M3GAN2.0 runs back a few of the same sticking points — namely some laborious pacing which, here, is exacerbated by the sheer amount of story there is. It’s hard not to wish for a little more economy, especially when there are so many moments where the appeal of a sillier follow-up feel clearer. Despite occasionally indulging its worse instincts, there’s still a surprising amount of fun to be had with M3GAN2.0 – a bigger and funnier sequel which could stand to pull back on both of those elements.
Like the doddering sexagenarian at the centre of its plot, Chicken Town lumbers along, frequently mis-stepping and fluffing its lines. It’s a dull, eye-roll-inducing half-way house of a film, neither a biting, black comedy nor an uplifting, whimsical jaunt. British comedy royalty Graham Fellows stars as Kev, who teams up with teenagers, Paula (Amelie Davies) and Jayce (Ethaniel Davy) to sell the weed he’s accidentally grown in his allotment. The few sincere interactions between this central trio are the sole highlights of the film, as Fellows’ comedy talents are wasted in a flimsy script.
Chicken Town bites off more than it can chew as a small-town, crime caper quickly spirals into conflict with the powerful family at the heart of the town’s livelihood and a serious of increasingly ridiculous acts of violence. However, instead of pouring effort into providing any standout, laugh-out-loud gags, the writer/director overly relies on these sudden but brief moments of intensity to liven up his film. The less said about the racial prejudice levelled at Jayce’s friend, Lee Matthews Jr (Ramy Ben Fredj), the better. It’s tasteless, cruel, and painfully lazy. Come film’s end I was ready to hightail it out of Chicken Town as fast as I could.
Cinema Scholars reviews Ari Aster’s new thriller Eddington. The film stars Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone, and Austin Butler. A24 is releasing Eddington in theaters everywhere on July 18.
Introduction
Every so often, a director comes along whose singular visual style and storytelling acumen capture the attention of cinephiles. Of recent notoriety, writer/director Ari Aster has become one of the most revered filmmakers today. With his home run debut feature Hereditary and follow-up critic darling Midsommar, Aster’s artistic detail and masterful slow-burn style has earned the filmmaker legions of fans eager for his next project.
Though his often-maligned third effort, Beau Is Afraid, didn’t resonate with everyone, its creation enabled the beginning of a dynamic partnership with leading man Joaquin Phoenix. The duo teams up again for Eddington, with Aster again taking on writing and directing duties.
Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal star in “Eddington” (2025). Photo courtesy of A24.
Synopsis
In Eddington, Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) is the sheriff of the titular New Mexico town during the COVID-19 lockdown. People waiting in lines 6 feet apart, mask mandates, and take-out only at local restaurants transport the audience to a very specific era in our recent history. As a pandemic skeptic, Cross’s usual small-town logic doesn’t fly in the panic-stricken community, and he soon finds himself at odds with Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal).
As their beef escalates, so do tensions around Eddington. Social media and the 24-hour news cycle churn out stories of pandemic fatalities, the George Floyd tragedy and protests, and the multitude of conspiracy theories propagated by keyboard cowboys. On top of it all, a deal with a giant data company threatens to make the quaint community subject to new corporate overlords. As expected, this powder keg of personal vendettas and ego finally explodes. And like most Aster films, when things go sideways, they go big.
Discussion
Eddington is Ari Aster’s most mainstream-feeling movie to date. At times contemplative and emotional, a majority of the film feels like a fun, quirky crime thriller. Think of the Coen Brothers, but with that clear underpinning of dread that Aster so expertly weaves into the fabric of his projects. From the sheriff’s sidekicks to the clichéd woke mayor, a lot of Eddington has an uncharacteristically comical vibe.
Subnarratives interwoven between Cross and Garcia’s central riff give the film much of its emotional punch. Cross’s quarantined and depressed wife, Louise (Emma Stone), is persuaded by silver-tongued conspiracy theorist Vernon (Austin Butler). And Garcia’s son gives a glimpse into the adolescent perspective, examining privilege, virtue signaling, and the ubiquitous influence of social media on screenagers.
A tonal 180-degree turn in the third act nullifies all the dramatic buildup with a rash of violence and mayhem. While finding resolution in bloodshed is problematic, the release of the building tension works brilliantly nonetheless. Embracing the “quiet loud quiet” dogma, the eventual anticlimactic conclusion feels as appropriate as it is unsettling.
Performances
In the lead role as Sheriff Joe Cross, Phoenix delivers his singular brand of the tortured Everyman. Small town Sheriff edition. While he gets to throw around a good bit of bravado, Phoenix shines in Cross’s vulnerable moments. The sympathy Phoenix garners makes his character’s later actions all the more impactful.
Pedro Pascal plays Mayor Garcia with a subtle air of condescending entitlement. Though his character is mostly likable and seemingly defensible, Pascal keeps something smarmy right under the surface to keep everyone guessing.
Emma Stone wows as the troubled Louise. Stone’s performance captures the depression, isolation, and fear that many people experienced as shut-ins during the pandemic. Her plight makes it easy to see how people could be swept away or even radicalized so easily by the daily doom.
Though several other supporting performances stand out, Austin Butler continues his Hollywood domination with a captivating turn as cult-ish leader Vernon. With his intense gaze and pulpit-worthy cadence, Butler gives enigmatic prophet vibes without being completely insufferable. The cherry on top of a colorful cast of delightful characters.
Auston Butler stars in “Eddington” (2025). Photo courtesy of A24.
Further Analysis
Aster may be the first major director to fully realize a cohesive narrative in the context of COVID-19. While the central plot could be a standalone story, the way that the pandemic and the sensationalism of the time inform the arc of Eddington is fascinating and frighteningly familiar.
Literal teenage gossip that sows eventual chaos serves as a metaphor for the real-life rampant misinformation and ensuing fallout of the era. Aster even tackles dirty cops and shameful misconduct.
It could be argued that Aster packs too much commentary into one film. In addition to the above-mentioned issues, the movie tackles many more. From opposing pandemic opinions to Q Anon and the #metoo of the week, to more subtle observations like stockpiles of toilet paper or an Amazon truck trying to get through a crowd of protesters, Eddington covers a ton of ground. And true to form, there are creepy dolls.
Conclusion
Eddington is a compelling post-mortem on pandemic times amid a quirky small-town crime thriller. Ari Aster perfects the dramatic simmer, building intrigue and dread frame after frame. When the pressure valve is finally released, Aster, in usual fashion, leaves us with an oddly satisfying, albeit unnerving, conclusion.
A24 is releasing Eddington in theaters everywhere on July 18.
We started, in 2011, with the pop singer-songwriter Katy Perry stepping into the pearly-white high-heels of that most coveted role in the world of animated voice-acting: Smurfette. She managed to retain the role for the 2013 sequel, but then lost it to pop singer-songwriter Demi Lovato, who took the reins for 2017’s Smurfs: The Lost Village. And now, in 2025, we have yet another pop singer-songwriter lending their dulcet tones to essay the only female Smurf in existence.
Like the vaunted roster of famous actors who have played Hamlet, we will soon be able to namecheck that glorious lineage of actors who have tried their hand at Smurfette, with Rihanna stepping up to the plate for this latest incarnation. “I loved your Smufette,” people will call from the jostling throngs outside a gala première, or from the front rows of a stadium concert. We only have to imagine who next will be tapped up to play animation’s most iconic lone female?
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We mention this because the tagline “Rihanna is Smurfette” appears to be the sole marketing strategy for this new piece of familiar filler fodder, its distributors obviously convinced that this is the only piece of information that potential viewers will need to know in order to convert them from “Smurf curious” to “Smurf client”. It’s interesting to see that most of the reaction from her fans to this headline star casting is some variation of, “Rih-rih, why are you doing this instead of going back to the studio? It’s been nine years since the last record!”
Sad to say, however, that her voice acting in Smurfs is not going to scratch that particular itch, as she and her brethren head off on a standard-issue inter-dimensional journey to prevent a magic book from slipping into the hands of Gargamel’s even-more-evil brother, Razamel. The plot is slipshod, the jokes are weak and the animation style offers very little to lodge into the memory. It has all the characteristics of one of those movies – that have become quite a regular occurrence now – where the only reason for its existence is to fulfil a contractual obligation and justify further retention of IP rights.
Unlike the original Katy Perry-era films, which placed the animated Smurfs against live-action backdrops and alongside human actors, this one has occasional scenes of our lil’ blue pals wandering through the streets of Paris or London, but it all looks like anonymous stock footage. It’s such a strange and alienating creative decision, and almost lends the film an experimental edge.
Elsewhere we’ve got some weak, showtune-esque musical numbers, some wacky alternative animated inserts, and a “stop the bad guy from getting the thing” storyline that even the majority of its pre-teen audience will have seen a billion times before. This is so sub-par that it even had this reviewer secretly yearning for the Wildean-wit (relatively speaking) and toe-tapping musicality of the Trolls movies. And James Cordon, fittingly, gives his voice to a Smurf who has no purpose in the world.
Making friends is hard. It’s even harder as an adult – while the media laments the ongoing “male loneliness epidemic”, many men and women are still reckoning with hard truths unveiled during the sudden solitude of the Covid pandemic. The destruction of third spaces, widening gaps in lifestyle exacerbated by lack of disposable income and increasingly unsociable working hours, and the increasing inability to detach ourselves from screens have culminated in a cross-generational crisis whereby plenty of adults – from eighteen to eighty – are realising they just…don’t have friends. The protagonist of Andrew DeYoung’s Friendship is one such case: Craig Waterman (Tim Robinson) is a marketing executive with a beautiful wife (Kate Mara), nice house and affable teenage son (Jack Dylan Grazer) but no social circle beyond the occupants of his house, who seem distant from him.
This all changes when the Watermans mistakenly receive a package intended for their new neighbour. Craig drops it off and meets Austin: a handsome, charismatic TV weatherman with a fully-realised sense of self. (Naturally he’s played by Paul Rudd.) Craig is instantly smitten, and despite being the new guy, it’s Austin who welcomes his neighbour into his life, showing him his fossil collection, sharing his love of punk music, and confiding that he secretly yearns to do the morning weather instead of occupying the evening slot. A bromance is born – Craig seems to come alive, a better husband and father while basking in Austin’s light. Then a tragic reality comes to light: Craig can’t hang.
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This middle-aged middle American, who wants so desperately to be part of something, moves out of step with his peers. He’s assimilated a personality (liking Marvel movies, making crass jokes often at the expense of his wife) but can’t quite cover up the Travis Bickle-level entitled rot that lurks at his core. He parrots humanity but doesn’t exhibit it. There’s something deeply pathetic about Craig Waterman, but also something unfortunately true. This is Robinson’s great gift as a comedian – those familiar with his Netflix sketch show I Think You Should Leave will recognise his full-body-cringe-inducing style of comedy, which is, admittedly, something of an acquired taste. (Connor O’Malley, a similar cult breakout, delivers the film’s most baffling, brilliant non-sequitur during his short cameo in the film.) That’s not to say Friendship is punching down; Craig is an entirely ordinary villain who is absolutely convinced he’s the good guy. A nice guy, even. It’s evident from the film’s first scene, where – during her cancer survivors support group – he expresses confusion when his wife admits she hasn’t orgasmed since before treatment. “Plenty of orgasms over here!” he declares cheerily.
The same wildcard energy that made Robinson’s sketch series a cult classic is threaded through Friendship (DeYoung wrote the part with Robinson in mind). There’s a feeling that anything could happen at any moment, a strange pedestrian volatility to Craig that makes him just as likely to stew silently as to blow up in spectacular fashion, and the off-kilter sensation of something being not quite right is exacerbated by Keegan DeWitt’s oscillating score, which ramps up the tension with choral arrangements more typical of a horror film than a comedy. But Friendship arguably is a horror movie, evident in more than just its score and high wire tension between characters. The excruciating act of being vulnerable with another human being and the sweaty discomfort of realising a new friend is a bit off are mundane but relatable terrors, after all.
As much as British cinema loves a period drama, for whatever reason the trials and tribulations of peasants get a lot less screentime than the aristocracy. In fact, probably the most insightful piece of media created around the pre-industrial working class is the Constitutional Peasants scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, where King Arthur argues with local serf Dennis about the “anarcho-syndicalist commune” to which he belongs. Dennis would likely have some choice words about the happenings in the remote Scottish hamlet where Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Harvest takes place, as hundreds of years of humble farming are threatened by the unexpected arrival of a mysterious mapmaker.
The local folk are naturally suspicious of outsiders, and after a barn is set on fire, they capture a trio of strangers, stringing the men up in the stocks and cutting off the hair of the woman, who flees into the surrounding forest. Walter Thirsk (Caleb Landry Jones) looks on with his piercing blue eyes; he’s a man of few words, but nothing much escapes his gaze. Walter knows the lands like the back of his hand, having lived there his whole life, but not always among the peasants who work the land. Once the direct employee of the benevolent but meek Master Kent (Harry Melling), Walter gave up his comfortable life when he fell in love and chose to work the land with his wife, until she passed away, leaving him alone and melancholy. His joy comes now from the natural world; in the film’s gorgeous opening sequence, he is seen roaming the wild fields, pausing to gently admire a butterfly upon his hand.
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Walter favours a simple life, but he is decidedly not a simple man; when Kent introduces him to the talented mapmaker Philip Earle (Arinzé Kene) who is to complete a surveyance of the land, Walter regards him with a degree of suspicion. He is well aware that change need not be for the better, and despite how charming Earle is, immediately enamoured of the beauty of the countryside, Walt is right to be suspicious. Several days later, Kent’s decidedly less agreeable kinsman Edmund Jordan (Frank Dillane) arrives with grand plans to turn the land into sheep pastures, signalling the end of Walt’s rural idyll, and the beginning of rising tensions between the serfs and the gentry.
The most impressive aspect of Harvest is Sean Price Williams’ stunning cinematography, which does justice to the rugged beauty of the Scottish coast, capturing every blade of grass and patch of claggy mud in arresting detail. Williams, a mainstay of the hallowed New York indie scene, is every bit as skilled at capturing the blazing sunset of 18th-century Scotland as he is the gritty streets of the Big Apple, and great thought has been put into the sensory aspects of Harvest, from its sound design that emphasises the howling wind, the lazy buzz of bountiful insects and, of course, the jubilant celebrations that come with the event which gives the film its name.
In 2023’s Venice Film Festival, Landry Jones debuted his Scottish accent, remaining “in character” throughout the press conference for Luc Besson’s Dogman. The dedication has mostly paid off, although he does sometimes slide towards Irish – Walt is a softer character than he typically gets to play, an almost monastic figure as he endures both the ire of his peers and the sneering new overseer, seemingly with no way out of his difficult lot in life. Walt’s persistent inaction and hesitation indicate his reluctance to lead, and the man is most comfortable when roaming the wilderness, but his community looks to him for leadership and Edmund Jordan expects him to toe the line.
Perhaps the inferno which opens the film is an omen, the black smoke billowing into the sky like a signal fire, a warning of carnage yet to come. The kinship that develops between Philip Earle and Walt is the core of the film and perhaps its most tragic element, as they are good men placed in unfortunate positions. Yet sometimes the film’s subtlety is obfuscating, and Harvest could delve more into the almost instantaneous racism Earle faces as a Black man in an all-white community – his character suffers the most, and the film doesn’t have much interest in interrogating how systematic racism has its roots in early capitalism.
It’s a tragic film, but never a melodramatic one – tensions build slowly, and although the sense of impending collapse is present from the start, Tsangari’s sharp sensibilities compensate for any predictability, with the key performances of Landry Jones, Kene and Melling standing out (Melling, it must be said, it’s perhaps England’s greatest hope for the future of character acting, always a delight when he turns up in a part) and providing Harvest’s emotional heft. Those hoping for the satire of Chevalier or absurdism of Attenberg might be surprised by the solemn straight-forwardness of Harvest, but it’s a remarkably compelling work (and even sometimes a funny one!) that mourns a land lost, crushed underfoot by rot that masquerades as progress.
The Disappearance of Josef Mengele (Das Verschwinden des Josef Mengele) is the latest film directed by Kirill Serebrennikov. The director has become a staple at the Cannes Film Festival, with his last five films being presented there, including the previous four that competed for the Palme d’Or, among them Tchaikovsky’s Wife and Limonov: The Ballad. Surprisingly enough, the new work only made it to Cannes Première. Given its compelling narrative, visual flair, and other qualities, the story about the “Angel of Death” would have placed it in the higher echelon among the competition films. The film is an adaptation of a non-fiction novel by Olivier Guez, published in 2017, which won the Prix Renaudot.
The opening scene, set in 2023, depicts medical students analysing Josef Mengele’s skeleton. From there, the film follows Josef Mengele (August Diehl) as he evades justice after World War II, starting with his 1949 escape from Europe through the “ratlines”—networks of Nazi supporters and Catholic clergy aiding war criminals. Spanning three decades, the narrative highlights pivotal stages of his fugitive life in Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil, culminating in his 1979 drowning. The film employs a jigsaw narrative structure, effectively juggling timelines and locations. One thread follows Mengele’s son, Rolf (Max Bretschneider), as he travels to São Paulo in 1977.
The Disappearance of Josef Mengele
August Diehl in The Disappearance of Josef Mengele.
A Hidden Life of a different kind
The framing to present times might make the film sound like The Secret Agent. However, very little unites the two films, apart from their respective cinematic mastery. Serebrennikov has reunited with Vladislav Opelyants, and the stark, monochrome images, combined with his signature long takes, create a spellbinding effect. A much-discussed colour sequence is bound to be divisive, but it provides context in a manner that is less obvious than it might appear to be. August Diehl played a decisively different character in Terrence Malick’s masterful A Hidden Life (2019), and he is a towering presence in this role, bringing the proper qualities to the part. The Disappearance of Josef Mengele offers an impressively objective view of its main character.
However, that kind of perception doesn’t impress everyone. A bizarre, emotional review (I use the term loosely) in The Hollywood Reporter by someone called Jordan Mintzer, already in the first paragraph, spouts the question, “Why am I watching this?” Even more incomprehensibly, he claims that the film embellishes Mengele’s ignoble reputation. This is yet another sad yet illuminating example of what passes for film criticism nowadays. In my Sound of Falling review, I mentioned the podcast from an outlet that used to be one of the best in the world, but now has been toppled by DEI hiring. The THR review also rehashes the tired thought that “fascism is on the rise” today.
The titular character is caught from behind in The Disappearance of Josef Mengele.
The host of the aforementioned podcast initially sat down at my table. While trying to discuss the film, I posited that the cinematic aspects alone would make Sound of Falling worthwhile. The notion was harshly dismissed with the comment, “How would cinematic expression be enough?” Meanwhile, she refuted the notion that she was looking for a straight-out statement, even though that was literally what she said.
A comparison between The Disappearance of Josef Mengele and The Zone of Interestclearly results in the former’s favour. Not only because Ilya Demutsky’s score is vastly superior to Mica Levi’s soundscape, but more crucially, for the intellectual rigour missing in Glazer’s film, which clearly bit off more than it could chew.
Whether Mengele is hiding at a farm protected by a Hungarian couple or outsmarting people trying to catch him to bring him to justice, he is always a mesmerising personality, and even his most egregious statements manage to make a certain sense. The producer, Felix von Boehm, noted in a press release that the film aims to “precisely depict ideological narrowness”. That is, unfortunately, all too topical today and clearly visible in current conflicts, where people struggle to distinguish between democracy and dictatorship. With that in mind, the meaning of the word disappearance might not merely be about how seemingly effortless it was for Mengele to hide, but more wide-ranging current disappearances as well.
