Monday new releases: 24 February 2025

In the open­ing sequences of Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here we see an upper-middle class Rio fam­ily enjoy­ing the best that life has to offer. They have a house on the beach, in the shad­ow of Sugarloaf Mountain. Father Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello) is a former politi­cian and now a pros­per­ous archi­tec­tur­al engin­eer. He’s build­ing the fam­ily a big­ger, more mod­ern house where each of the five chil­dren can have a room of their own.

It’s 1970 and Brazil is ruled by a mil­it­ary dic­tat­or­ship, but a decent, hard­work­ing fam­ily like the Paiva’s shouldn’t have any­thing to worry about, espe­cially as Rubens has left his polit­ic­al career far behind.

Except that he hasn’t and – like a lot of edu­cated and pro­gress­ive Brazilians – he is secretly doing what he can to sup­port the strug­gling res­ist­ance move­ment. The rest of the fam­ily is unaware of the mes­sages being passed among the vari­ous happy house­guests, until the police arrive unex­pec­tedly to take him away for questioning.

So begins a decades-long night­mare for the rest of the fam­ily, led by mat­ri­arch Eunice (Fernanda Torres), as they try and dis­cov­er the truth about Rubens’ dis­ap­pear­ance and build some kind of a life for those who are left behind.

Director Walter Salles (pos­sibly best-known for his ter­rif­ic adapt­a­tion of The Motorcycle Diaries twenty years ago) has cre­ated a soft-spoken mas­ter­piece here. Every aspect of the cine­mat­ic craft is first-rate and it all goes to sup­port a por­trait of a fam­ily that could have ended up his­tri­on­ic but instead is full of astute obser­va­tions and per­fectly cal­ib­rated characters.

It’s hard not to watch I’m Still Here through the lens of cur­rent events. In the film we see how it is that many people find it easy to sup­port author­it­ari­an­ism (espe­cially if it is a path out of poverty), but also it makes the risks of res­ist­ance abund­antly clear. Like Paul Lynch’s nov­el about a pos­sible rise of fas­cism in Ireland, Prophet Song, I’m Still Here is remind­ing us that this abso­lutely can hap­pen here or any­where but that dic­tat­or­ship also sows the seeds of its own destruction.

Tinā is a crowd pleas­ing loc­al film that takes as a start­ing point the deadly Christchurch earth­quake that occurred four­teen years ago, almost to the day. For many in the city, the trauma of that event is impossible to escape, but Miki Magasiva’s film (co-written with Mario Gaoa) sug­gests that, for some people at least, art and com­munity can be a way through it.

Anapela Polataivao plays ded­ic­ated teach­er Mareta whose daugh­ter is killed in the ter­rible col­lapse of the CTV build­ing. Three years later, still all-but para­lysed by grief, Mareta is offered a reliev­ing job at a pres­ti­gi­ous loc­al col­lege and redis­cov­ers her call­ing as both a teach­er and choir mas­ter – music is what will heal her and gif­ted but heart­broken sing­er Sophie (Antonia Robinson).

Tinā is a film of moments, many of which land but prob­ably just as many fall flat. The ground­ing in the real life tragedy of post-quake Christchurch isn’t matched by the almost fantasy por­tray­al of the edu­ca­tion sys­tem and the heavy-handed approach to social issues. Questions of class and race are drawn with a very broad brush, espe­cially the char­ac­ter of Deputy Principal Wadsworth (Jamie Irvine) whose car­toon bigotry feels plucked from a much less subtle film.

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

There’s also far too much plot. Everyone’s story seems to have over­whelm­ing stakes and it weighs the film down. The moments where the film truly takes flight are dur­ing the songs. It’s hard not to get swept up in the emo­tion of those voices and arrangements.

It’s hard to know quite what to make of Andrea Arnold’s Bird, a modern-day Dickensian fable about a young girl (Nykiya Adams) befriended by an odd stranger who calls him­self Bird and is look­ing for his family.

I say Dickensian because the film is set in the port of Gravesend in Kent, not far from where Dickens lived in the last years of his life, and where Pip in Great Expectations fam­ously meets the escaped con­vict Magwitch and helps him find pas­sage to Hamburg. Bird is played by the bril­liantly idio­syn­crat­ic German act­or Franz Rogowski (Transit) and his char­ac­ter is doing some­thing like the return journey.

While I appre­ci­ated the magic­al real­ism of Bird – and the por­trait of a child’s ima­gin­a­tion slowly com­ing to life – I was less enam­oured of the gritty poverty-porn of the situ­ation she comes from. Unlike earli­er films of Arnold’s – Fish Tank (2009) is a sim­il­ar story of a teen­age girl and a mys­ter­i­ous stranger – I’m not con­vinced that the bal­an­cing act of basic believab­il­ity has been brought off.

Contemporary French cinema remains obsessed with the ques­tion of what con­sti­tutes authen­t­ic French-ness. It used to be the con­test between the bour­geois city-dwellers and the salt-of-the-earth rur­al folk – is one more genu­inely French than the other?

Now the spot­light is on France’s migrant com­munit­ies. Can they become truly French and what would that look like if they did? Just in the last couple of years we’ve had films ask­ing: can a young North African man from the foster homes of Paris become a prizewin­ning pastry chef? Can two sis­ters from an Algerian immig­rant fam­ily make it in the rar­efied world of clas­sic­al music? And now, in Neneh Superstar, will a 12-year-old Black girl with an affin­ity for hip-hop be allowed to suc­ceed at the most pres­ti­gi­ous bal­let school in Paris.

All of those kids were from the “pro­jects”, the high rises in the inner-city sub­urbs, and all of them have to over­come pre­ju­dice from author­it­ies and class­mates and answer the ques­tion over and over again, “do I fit in?”

Ramzi Ben Sliman’s film has moments that are as heavy-handed as sim­il­ar scenes in Tinā, but the dan­cing isn’t as uplift­ing as the singing. There’s also a clunky ana­logy between the dir­ect­or of the school’s unwill­ing­ness to see Neneh’s poten­tial and her actu­al inab­il­ity to see a plate glass door right in front of her. The best thing in the film is young Oumy Bruni Garrel as the feisty and determ­ined Neneh.

While the gory aes­thet­ic of Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey remains not to my taste, I was sur­prised at how sen­ti­ment­al and – amaz­ingly – emo­tion­ally sat­is­fy­ing it ended up. Perhaps we can put that down to the Stephen King source mater­i­al, a short story about a demon­ic clock­work drum­ming mon­key with the power to kill people in the most bizarre and unex­pec­ted ways pos­sible whenev­er someone turns the key to wind it up.

Twin broth­ers Hal and Bill (as adults played by Theo James) inher­it the creature from the fath­er who aban­doned them, learn­ing that death is inev­it­able and arbit­rary (as well as messy) along the way. While I ended up lik­ing the fin­ished film more than I did while I was actu­ally watch­ing it, I’m sorry to say that it simply isn’t as funny as it thinks it is.