SANATORIUM UNDER THE SIGN OF THE HOURGLASS*****

Think of the most sinister but beautiful surreal dream-like worlds created by early Lynch and now imagine that they are depicted mostly with intricately beautifully designed stop-motion puppets.  Imagine film-makers with the creativity and perfection and unspoken synchronicity of the Quay Brothers, working with the haunting, elegiac short stories of Bruno Schulz.  Imagine a world of pre-WW2 Central Europe, literature grappling with the new concepts of subconscious and science, but also treating with enduring emotional topics such as grief and the desire to somehow control time.

This is the world of SANATORIUM UNDER THE SIGN OF THE HOURGLASS - a mesmerising, haunting and truly beautiful piece of art created by the Quay Brothers. I watched it in IMAX - a bizarre format for such an intricate miniature world, and yet wonderful because it really allowed us to see the detail of it.

The film opens with a live action framing device - an auctioneer atop a roof advertising his surreal and unique wares. And then we see him with a particularly wonderful box of tricks - a retina that liquifies under moonlight and little apertures that allow us to see the dying thoughts of our protagonist.

And so we enter the stop-motion world and our protagonist Jozef, lightly modelled on Bruno Schulz himself. He is travelling on a near-abandoned and anachronistic trainline to a strange sanatorium where his father is both alive and dead.  Dr Gotard explains that time is strange here. And we will see events played and replayed amidst the dusty gothic corridors that could have come from Nosferatu or Gormenghast.  The film resists easy explanations and conventional narratives. It evokes mood and emotion with few hooks for the casual viewer to hang his hat on. But those who know the works and life of Schulz will see his iconography in the film, and most poignantly Jozef clutching a loaf of bread, foreshadowing Schulz' execution by the Gestapo.

SANATORIUM UNDER THE SIGN OF THE HOURGLASS has a running time of 75 minutes. It played Venice and London 2024 and Kinoteka 2025.

SALLY!***** - BFI Flare 2025

SALLY! is a superb documentary about "radical lesbian feminist" Sally Gearheart - a ridiculously intelligent, fiercely funny, and charismatic woman who argued for equality alongside Harvey Milk but has somehow been written out of history, not least via the Oscar-winning biopic.

Directed by Deborah Craig, Sylvia Turchin and Ondine Rarey, the film benefits from lots of archive footage of Sally addressing rallies and appearing in TV debates, as well as contemporary interviews with her and her fellow activists.

What emerges is a portrait of a well-educated woman in conservative Texas whose homosexuality threatened her career. So this outwardly conventional woman took the decision to give up tenure and went to San Francisco where she could finally be out and proud.  With her fellow academics she created the first ever women's history courses and with her fellow activists she lobbied against legislation that would restrict gay people's employment rights.  She even wrote a work of utopian fiction arguing for lesbian separatism! That ideal became a reality when she and her friends and lovers bought land in rural California and built their own cabins.  

But sooner or later these women left to rejoin mainstream society. Complex relationships started and ended. This clear-eyed documentary makes it clear that Sally could be challenging to be around: her charisma matched with bossy self-centredness.  But my goodness that charisma and good humour and love shines through as we see the older Sally interviewed, the last remaining commune dweller. It's evident how far she is loved in her local community and the goodwill that she has engendered.

I love documentaries like this - that take us into a part of the world or a slice of history that we should know about. It's education with a light touch, and with an importance beyond the LGBTQIA community given Sally Gearheart's importance to broader social history.  Sadly, the power of the film also lies in its relevance to contemporary battles that have to be fought once again against rising bigotry and prejudice.

SALLY! has a running time of 96 minutes.  The film is playing the festival circuit.

SANTOSH*****

British-Indian writer-director Sandhya Suri (I IS FOR INDIA) has created a beautifully nuanced, quiet and disturbing film in her debut feature SANTOSH.  The film stars Shanana Goswami (RA.ONE) as the eponymous protagonist. She is a young widow with few choices: live with the in-laws who resent her love marriage to their wealthier son, or return home to her parents to a life of domestic labour.  Improbably, but apparently this really exists, thanks to a government scheme that allows low-income widows to take their husband's old job, Santosh becomes a policewoman instead. Imagine the sudden transition from powerless to powerful, with your own house, a uniform and the ability to abuse power just as the men do.

There is little time for such contemplation as Santosh is soon investigating the rape and murder of a Dalit/low caste girl - the very same girl that her chauvinist and caste-superior fellow policemen refused to look for when she went missing. In the eyes of her boss, the girl was "asking for it".  It comes as no surprise that the investigation is similarly corrupt, scapegoating the girl's muslim boyfriend Saleem. For a moment we think there might be respite when Santosh is paired up with an older, more experienced, and deeply impressive female cop called Geeta (Sunita Rajwar).  But as a near-final scene in a  diner will show, whatever narratives Geeta spins for herself, she is as enmeshed in the corruption and bigotry as everyone else.   Case in point: is she being magnanimous and self-sacrificing in her final act, or merely preparing herself for the greater corruption of politics?

I love this film for its spare script, strong performances and avoidance of outrage and easy moralising.  The women take bigotry for granted.  There are no pure saviour characters.  We do solve our case. But we cannot solve personal or societal corruption. Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown.

SANTOSH is rated R and has a running time of 128 minutes. It was released in the USA over New Year and was released in the UK on Friday.

MICKEY 17*****

MICKEY 17 is Korean writer-director Bong Joon Ho's much anticipated follow-up to his Oscar-winning political satire, PARASITE. Once again, his concerns are with economic inequality and political hypocrisy, and as with PARASITE, MICKEY 17 contains moments of trenchant laughter.  But the mood here is lighter, zanier, looser, and altogether more.... gonzo than PARASITE.  The political satire is broad and crude, the violence is ultra, but at heart this is a gorgeous love story and a plea for humanity.

Robert Pattinson continues to make astonishingly good career choices and stars as the eponymous Mickey.  He's basically a harmless but feckless and aimless man in a near-future dystopia.  On the run from mafia loansharks, abetted by his supposed best mate Timo (Steven Yeun), Mickey stupidly signs up to be an Expendable.  He is basically an indentured slave to an exploitative space colonisation mission, put in harms way, killed again and again, and then just reprinted out.  As the film opens, we are on the seventeenth iteration.

Joy of joys! Feckless Mickey somehow falls in love and lust with Naomie Ackie's kickass space-cop Nasha and she loves him back! In fact, I would read this film as a love story most of all.  Improbable, hilarious, sexy, weird, but a love story nonetheless. But things get weird when Mickey 17 is somehow alive at the same time as his sassier, more mischievous reprint Mickey 18.  And both set out to rise up against the kleptocratic rule of a character clearly based on Trump, with a Macchiavellian wife modelled on Imelda Marcos.  Mark Ruffalo seems to be reprising his role in POOR THINGS here, but it's a no less fun turn for that.   But the star of the show is clearly Pattinson.  And the the Creepers. I won't say more for fear of spoiling the plot but I would pay a LOT of money for a plushy that looks like a baby creeper.

MICKEY 17 has a running time of 137 minutes and is rated R. It is on global release.

THE WEDDING BANQUET**** - BFI Flare Opening Night Gala

Writer-director Andrew Ahn (FIRE ISLAND) reimagines And Lee's THE WEDDING BANQUET in a contemporary Seattle setting.  With Ang and long-time collaborator James Schamus' blessing, Ahn has the freedom to truly update the film's central premise. In a world where gay people can now marry, the question is do they actually want to, and what should they decide about having kids? After all, as Ahn said as he introduced his new film at the BFI Flare film festival this week, they can't just oopsie-daisy a pregnancy - their choices have to have intentionality.  The result of these musings is a film that is hard to categorise, and that contains wild swings in mood, but that is ultimately rather moving and rewarding.  

The structure of the film is farce.  Min (Han Gi-Chan) is a Korean expat who needs a Green Card so he can avoid being yanked back to Korea by his super-wealthy but homophobic family. Min asks his commitment-phobic boyfriend Chis (SNL's Bowen Yang) to marry him, but once rejected moves on to his friend Angela (Kelly Marie Tran - STAR WARS).  She agrees to the sham marriage because Min will fund her girlfriend Lee (KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON's Lily Gladstone) in her IVF attempts.

So, two gay couples, two halves of each reluctant to commit, and two maternal figures.  We have Angela's mum (the ever-beautiful Joan Chen) who is making up for lost time and past hurt with her aggressive and somewhat narcissistic allyship. And we have Min's Korean grandma, whose surprise visit sets off the events of the film, and whose eventual softening ends it.  She comes to see that despite the foursome's stupid decisions, they truly are a wonderful found family.  Her wisdom is complemented by that of Chris' young cousin Angela (Bobo Lee in a really beautiful cameo).  Nobody is good enough to be a spouse or a parent alone, but our friends and lovers can make us good enough.

There are some hilariously funny moments in this film - and while I know Bowen Yang can be funny it was Han Gi-Chan that really made me crack up with his naive, sweet Min.  But the overwhelming tone of this film is one of contemplation, and grappling with really intense issues. I loved how deftly Ahn and Schamus' script balances all the different storylines.  Even smaller characters such as the grandma and Angela had depth and a story - even if only hinted at or lightly referred to. I also appreciated just seeing things on screen that I have never seen before - a woman's IVF journey, or a traditional Korean wedding ceremony. This film broadened my perspective.

More than anything, I feel this is a film from a rapidly vanishing America. Inclusive, sensitive, vulnerable, not scared of laughing at itself, but also dripping in humanity and love. It's a film that genuinely moved me, but also made me laugh and applaud.  That's a rare feat.  My only wish is that audiences meet it on its own terms and go with those genre or tonal shifts as they come.

THE WEDDING BANQUET is rated R and has a running time of 102 minutes. It played Sundance and opened BFI Flare 2025. It opens in the USA on April 18th.

IF I HAD LEGS I'D KICK YOU**** - Berlin Film Festival 2025

Rose Byrne finally gets the starring role worthy of her talent in writer-director Mary Bronstein's scabrous dramedy IF I HAD LEGS I'D KICK YOU.  It's the film that Marielle Heller's NIGHTBITCH could have been if it had only had the courage.

Byrne plays a woman struggling to reconcile herself to what is effectively single motherhood of a child with a severe eating disorder.  Her apartment has been flooded, she's living in a crappy motel, she is condescended to by her daughter's therapists, and pretty much every man she encounters is demanding that she "just handle it" because THEY have work to do. No matter that she herself works full time.  

Naturally, Byrne's character turns to self-medication and occasionally screaming into pillows to get through both day and night. But there are no easy answers. Even as we build to a dramatic spontaneous medical intervention we know that the daughter isn't suddenly cured, and just because the husband finally came home it doesn't mean that our protagonist is finally understood or supported.

There are many things to love about this movie.  The performances are uniformly superb, and Byrne deservedly won the Silver Bear at Berlin for hers.  In smaller roles I was genuinely surprised at how good both Conan O'Brien and A$AP Rocky were. Perhaps it's no coincidence that they both play the only men who show some empathy and put down boundaries.  Indeed A$AP Rocky's motel worker Jamie may well be the moral centre of the film, even as he's ordering a brick of cocaine.

Behind the lens I loved Mary Bronstein's script and most of her directorial choices. (She also plays the deliciously passive-aggressive Dr Spring.) She absolutely skewers the delusional myths that society pedals young girls and women.  The sick daughter hankers after a hamster because she has a vision of it being her fluffy best friend as is then horrified when it's as scared and anxious as she is.  One of Byrne's patients is a young mother who secretly started seeing a therapist when she fell pregnant and is petrified that she will do violence to her child.  And Byrne's character herself is a wide gaping hole of guilt and shame at her prior choices around motherhood and whether she is cut out to be a mother at all.  Society tells women that childbearing is inevitable and that the experience will be joyful. This film is about what happens when it isn't.

The only thing stopping me giving this film five starts is its running time. I think that when you have a film this deliberately claustrophobic in its concerns and shooting style - and so desperately, frustratingly, sad and angry - that there's a limit to what an audience can take.  If this film had been twenty minutes shorter it would have been perfect. That and taking out a final shot of the child which I found its only slight turn to mawkishness.

IF I HAD LEGS I'D KICK YOU has a running time of 113 minutes and is rated R. It played Sundance and Berlin 2025.