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Luis López Carrasco’s film is shot in a bustling workers’ café-bar in the city centre where it gathers the testimonies of people who lived through the period. The projected image of a country taking giant modernising strides was somewhat at odds with a cruel reality in certain areas, one such being the coastal city of Cartagena, which was decimated by deindustrialisation in the 90s. We said: The title of this fascinating exploration of the disastrous ground-level effects of the neoliberal turn refers to 1992, when Spain hosted the Seville Expo, marking the quincentenary of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas, and the Barcelona Olympics. In the end, this makes for a terrifying ride with an ambiguous, unsettling conclusion.” (Kim Newman, S&S, December) Weekes stages a number of stunning moments – a pull-back from Bol sat at an unfamiliar table to show a chunk of the wall of his house floating in a remembered night-sea and repeated manifestations by the formidable night witch and the skull-masked spectre of the lost girl. Grounded by nuanced, unhistrionic work from leads Sopé Dìrísù and Wunmi Mosaku as the married Majur couple, His House shifts focus from exterior threat to the cracks in the marriage, exacerbated by disagreements about assimilation – though at the heart of the horror is a particular, personal crime which must be atoned for.
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From the outset, this manages to inhabit both a Ken Loach-type drab urban space and an insidious netherworld. We said: “First-time director Remi Weekes, working from a story by Felicity Evans and Toby Venables, doesn’t take the comparatively standard approach of establishing a social-realistic context and then letting the supernatural seep in. Perhaps the only solution to a corrupt system is to burn the whole thing down.” (Catherine Wheatley) Perhaps it’s naive to cling to Les Misérables’ early vision of hope. So it’s jarring when, in its final moments, the film descends suddenly and steeply into the abyss, with a shockingly violent and nihilistic coda. Its depiction of the ways various individuals survive in a society lined with touchpaper is tremendously subtle and accessible. The very existence of this film – the product of the suburb, of racial and social solidarity – is something to be celebrated: a flower sprung from concrete. Unlike the directors of earlier works such as La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995) and Etat des lieux (JeanFrançois Richet, 1995), he offers an insider’s view of the social tensions that shape the lives of his characters. We said: “Developed from a 2017 short of the same title, Ly’s debut feature is ostensibly a banlieue film (a genre of the life of marginalised suburban, mostly male youth in French housing estates) – but with the difference that Ly himself grew up in Montfermeil. All four leads are excellent, but Florence Pugh quietly steals the show as Amy.” (Nikki Baughan) It is a fresh, dynamic approach that may seem spun from modern feminist thought, but actually makes explicit ideas that Alcott vocally espoused. Gerwig focuses on the novel’s key coming-of-age themes rather than individual moments: the loss of childhood, the importance of forging one’s own path, tentative steps towards female emancipation. Gerwig’s decision to rework the structure of the novel, bouncing back and forth in time from the girls being engaged together in the innocent pursuits of childhood to facing the realities of adult life separately – Jo as a writer in New York, Meg married with children, Amy on a claustrophobic European tour, Beth facing her own devastating fate – proves a masterstroke. It’s a commanding blend of the sweetly sentimental and the bitingly political. We said: “Gerwig presents a faithful adaptation of Alcott’s traditional tale, while also taking care to highlight its progressive views.