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“... It’s​ not the main function of great fictional characters to provide platforms for the careers of others, but they do the job very well. In a new film, Sherlock Holmes walks into Inspector Lestrade’s office and announces that he has solved a particular case. Lestrade is pleased, and says he has two questions. The first is how did Holmes do it? Holmes offers a detailed answer ...”

“... It’s​ an old narrative device and a very effective one: to provide the day or month without mentioning the year. Garrett Bradley’s new feature-length documentary, Time (on Amazon Prime), begins with a woman telling the camera that it is 23 July and that she has been out of prison for a week and one day. On 24 May she says she is pregnant with twins and has been for 22 weeks ...”

“... The​ meaning of the word ‘foundling’ seems pretty clear, but there is an interesting slippage in its implications. Such children are not lost and found, they are picked up after being left somewhere. Or thrown away, as the subtitles of Kore-eda Hirokazu’s Broker keep reminding us. A middle-aged man – Ha Sang-hyun, played by Song Kang-ho – looks tenderly at a baby and asks: ‘How could anyone throw him away?’ This has been interpreted as a sentimental moment in a sentimental movie, and Kang-ho won the Best Actor award at Cannes for that tender look and others like it ...”

“... Wes Anderson’s​ new film, Asteroid City, is like a cartoon without the toons. It’s true that the alien who descends (twice) into the picture looks like a drawing of a long-legged human tadpole. Similarly, the desert where much of the film is set looks less like an actual landscape than a sketch of somebody’s idea of such a place, complete with squiggled humps serving as mesas ...”

“... French moralists​ are not usually moralisers. They explore moral ground by turning its difficulties into aphorisms. They are because they think; they are frightened by the eternal silence of infinite space; they remind us that hell is other people. Or they make movies. Among the early works of Éric Rohmer are Six Moral Tales. Among his late works are Tales of the Four Seasons, which take the notion of moral experience for granted ...”

“... It’s​ tempting to think of Past Lives, Celine Song’s haunting (and haunted) first film, as a work in search of a story. In the end, though, it’s exactly the reverse. The story is there but the characters can’t live it. They can’t let it happen and they can’t let it go. ‘What a good story this is,’ one of them says at a certain point ...”

“... Jonathan Glazer’s​ Zone of Interest seems stately at first, even stolid, and a bit too restrained to raise real questions. Once it’s over we realise that its discretion is part of a careful, risky plan. ‘Based on the novel by Martin Amis’, as a credit line says, the film converts a cruel virtuoso performance of literary voices into a sort of belated act of espionage ...”

“... The great​ Alasdair Gray novel on which Yorgos Lanthimos’s film Poor Things is based is clearly dated and located: the 1880s, Glasgow. The film is more oblique, offering a guessing game made up of costumes, travel by coach and horse, and a reference to Oscar Wilde. The last item is more informative than it sounds, more attentive to cinema and refraction, and a nice touch on the part of the screenwriter, Tony McNamara ...”

“... The bad year​ in Bertrand Bonello’s dizzying film The Beast is 2025. That’s when everything went wrong. By 2044, the latest date in the movie, the world is steady again and much improved. The bots are in charge and humans have only humble clerical jobs where their mistakes will not matter much. The bots are human in their fashion, a long way from being mere machines ...”

“... Towards the end​ of Levan Akin’s shape-shifting movie Crossing, a character says that she has begun to think of Istanbul as ‘a place where people come to disappear’. She has strong personal reasons for the thought, having travelled from Batumi in Georgia to look for her sister’s transgender child, who left home long ago, chased out by an angry father ...”

“... Rodrigo Moreno’s​ The Delinquents has taken a while to reach us. Its premiere was at Cannes in May 2023. The fate of the film imitates, in a way, its main theme. It’s about getting lost, or not getting lost enough. It has been described as a heist movie and a comedy. These labels are appropriate only if every bank robbery is a heist, and if we call films comedies when we can’t think of another word to describe them ...”

“... Judge ye,’ Ezra Pound says of a character in one of his poems, ‘Have I dug him up again?’ One answer is obviously yes. In ‘Sestina: Altaforte’, the old troubadour Bertran de Born – with his ‘whoreson dogs’ and ‘hell blot black’ – is as alive as any written character can be, and more alive than many of Pound’s actual contemporaries ...”

“... not a mystery, because it doesn’t have a solution, only multiple, intimated causes. The plot of Michael Haneke’s Caché, on the other hand, is a mystery, because it has several solutions, all dull. The dullest is the one the director himself seems to prefer: there is no solution, and only unsophisticated viewers will worry about such things, instead of ...”

“... directly and by anagram to the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail: Richard Leigh and Michael Baigent, who recently sued Brown’s publisher for plagiarism and lost. The third author, Henry Lincoln, didn’t sue. The book itself is mentioned in large capitals, and Teabing comments on it pedantically (‘their fundamental premise is sound’). Of ...”

“... abnegation is too much to expect of any director with two expensive stars on his hands. Remember Michael Mann’s thriller Heat, where Robert de Niro and Al Pacino get together for a totally inconsequential conversation just so we can see them together before they return to their posts on opposite sides of the law. The stars have to share serious screen ...”