Tuesday new releases: 27 January 2026

The first three films this week are about men for whom rules do not apply and, because things in the out­side world are bleak, I’ll start with the most enjoy­able of them.

Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague is about the mak­ing of Jean-Luc Godard’s ground­break­ing Breathless1 (Á bout de soufflé) in 1959 and it’s much more fun than its inspir­a­tion. Choosing to ape Godard’s low budget, black and white, 1:.37:1 aes­thet­ic, but avoid­ing mim­ick­ing any spe­cif­ic shots (except in reverse, fea­tur­ing a mostly bemused crew) it’s as if a 25-year-old Godard is shoot­ing his own behind-the-scenes DVD featurette.

Guillaume Marbeck superbly plays Godard as a legend in his own lunch­time, smirk­ing behind sunglasses, refus­ing to reveal a mas­ter­plan that doesn’t exist, trust­ing his not-quite fully formed instincts but determ­ined to turn the world of cinema on its head regard­less. The scene where he’s forced to make a cameo appear­ance in his own film, reveal­ing his lack of con­fid­ence as an act­or, is a gem.

I’ve always thought of Godard in this peri­od as being like Dylan — grow­ing his revolu­tion­ary repu­ta­tion by nev­er explain­ing him­self, or delib­er­ately invent­ing false trails. Linklater’s film centres Godard but acknow­ledges the huge com­munity of Cahiers-aligned film­makers who were also smack­ing hard up against the bound­ar­ies but it was Godard that actu­ally broke them down.

The first act of Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent is so vir­tu­osic that I fount hard to believe it could be main­tained and it turns out I was right. But it settles down into some­thing deep­er, with more mel­an­choly, slowly build­ing to some­thing profound.

The great Wagner Moura is Armando, a former aca­dem­ic try­ing to stay one step ahead of the Brazilian mil­it­ary dic­tat­or­ship in the mid-1970s. Waiting on an urgent fake pass­port that will get him and his son Fernando out of the coun­try, he works in the Recife office pro­du­cing iden­tity cards while the cor­rupt loc­al cops are try­ing to dis­pose of a severed leg that might tie them to a polit­ic­al killing.

A lov­ing recre­ation of a spe­cif­ic Brazilian time and place, The Secret Agent is also a med­it­a­tion on how eas­ily the con­nec­tions between gen­er­a­tions can be broken, how eas­ily our stor­ies can be for­got­ten no mat­ter how hard we try and keep them alive.

The Secret Agent would make a great double fea­ture with Marty Supreme if that pro­gramme wouldn’t end up tak­ing almost a whole day of your life. They are both fine examples of dir­ect­ors exer­cising the full flour­ish­ing of their skill­set and they both fea­ture short scenes about the Holocaust, seem­ingly unre­lated to the film as a whole but actu­ally cru­cial to under­stand­ing their themes.

Until recently, Benny and Josh Safdie were a film­mak­ing team, most not­ably on Uncut Gems in 2019. This year they split to make com­pet­ing high anxi­ety sports-related films fea­tur­ing char­ac­ters scream­ing at each oth­er in con­fined spaces. Benny’s The Smashing Machine fell flat for this review­er but Josh’s Marty Supreme impressed me much more, des­pite not agree­ing with some of his choices.

Timothée Chalamet plays Marty Mauser, a tal­en­ted table ten­nis play­er in 1950s New York, a time when being a tal­en­ted table ten­nis play­er was not the path to wealth and fame that it clearly is now. But it was a pop­u­lar pas­time and Mauser makes some scratch hust­ling rubes like a skinny and bespec­tacled Paul Newman2 before head­ing to London to rep­res­ent the USA at the British Open.

But while Mauser’s ambi­tion is almost matched by his tal­ent it far exceeds his luck as every plan he makes to get to the top actu­ally sinks him even deep­er but his indefatig­able spir­it is why that close-up of a Marty Supreme table ten­nis ball at the begin­ning of the film is so import­ant — “Made in America” it says.

Marty Supreme is a film about des­per­a­tion. In that brief Holocaust story that we are told, we see how far someone might go to try and keep him­self and his fel­low con­cen­tra­tion camp inmates alive but Marty isn’t fight­ing for his life, he just thinks he is.

What did I like? The shoot­ing of the table ten­nis sequences are simply extraordin­ary. Veteran design­er Jack Fisk recre­ates New York in the early 1950s with a mar­vel­lous eye for details of char­ac­ter and class. And Chalamet is ter­rif­ic, even if his char­ac­ter is bor­der­line intolerable.

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

But I really could have done without the 80s pop needle drops. Not because they were ana­chron­ist­ic, I have enough ima­gin­a­tion to be able to work with those, but because they were so lit­er­al. The very first frames of the film are set to Tears for Fears’ Change and I imme­di­ately thought, “Oh, I expect that means he’ll change by the end of the pic­ture” and, read­er, I was not wrong.

Marty Supreme co-writer and reg­u­lar Safdie col­lab­or­at­or Ronald Bronstein’s wife Mary Bronstein is the writer and dir­ect­or of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, a sim­il­arly stress-inducing film that’s a superb show­case for the under­rated Rose Byrne.

She plays Linda, a ther­ap­ist and moth­er going through a series of tri­als that are test­ing her to the lim­it. Her daugh­ter has a feed­ing dis­order3 and has to be fed by a gast­ric tube. And the bath­room ceil­ing of her apart­ment falls in — anoth­er con­nec­tion with Marty Supreme — mean­ing she has to relo­cate to a motel. All the while, her absent hus­band bitches and moans over the telephone.

I really haven’t made my mind up about If I Had Legs I’d Kick You and it will prob­ably need anoth­er view­ing to really get my head around it — not that I’m in any par­tic­u­lar hurry to do that, mind you. If Marty Supreme is abut des­per­a­tion, If I Had Legs … is about guilt — mater­nal guilt spe­cific­ally — and I can appre­ci­ate how well it presents Linda’s unrav­el­ling but then, near the end, it offers up a new thing for her to feel guilty about, some­thing that’s the found­a­tion for all the oth­er guilts (an ur-guilt, if you will), at least that’s the way it’s presen­ted. But it stacks the deck even fur­ther and I’m not even sure that it’s actu­ally any­thing that she needs to feel ter­ribly guilty about in the first place. But she does, and I have to respect that.

If I still had a pod­cast, this is the kind of film I would get a spe­cial guest on to put me straight. There’s an awful lot to unpack and I don’t think I’m there yet.

Comments

Thanks to read­er NF for this com­ment on my recom­mend­a­tion from last week, The Films of Powell & Pressburger:

This is such a bril­laint recom­mend­a­tion. Scorsese’s will­ing­ness to cel­eb­rate tech­nic­al mas­tery along­side storytelling makes his film essays so value­able for any­one try­ing to under­stand cinema bey­ond sur­face level. I remem­ber watch­ing A Matter of Life and Death in film school and totally miss­ing the VistaVision craft­man­ship until a pro­fess­or poin­ted it out. Powell & Pressburger were dunno, maybe the most under­ap­pre­ci­ated innov­at­ors in British cinema.