Review: Reichardt takes on the heist movie in "The Mastermind"

by Cláudio Alves

Many of contemporary cinema's most celebrated auteurs have recently chosen to exercise their comedic muscles. Park Chan-wook leans on farcicalness and cartoon-like mugging as he's never done before in No Other Choice, while even something as palpably angry as Jafar Panahi's It Was Just An Accident often moves in the way of screwball escalation. One Battle After Another is as harrowing as it is hilarious, and the same could be said of The Secret Agent. Down in the arthouse weeds, we can find Guiraudie and Kurosawa probing the limits of absurdity. Marco Berger lovingly contemplates the romcom while, in the mainstream, Celine Song tries to subvert it. Pálmason is off in his own world, somehow turning child maiming into comedy gold in The Love That Remains. 

Which leads us to The Mastermind, Kelly Reichardt's take on a heist movie, starring the ever-fumbling and disheveled Josh O'Connor performing another rendition of the pathetic loser blues he's been perfecting for the best part of the last decade. Hardly a laugh riot in the traditional sense, I'd still call it one of 2025's funniest flicks…

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NYFF 63: Rose Byrne sinks her teeth into Mary Bronstein's "If I Had Legs I'd Kick You"

by Cláudio Alves

No mother is ever good enough. Not according to her children, nor to extended family, friends, nosy neighbors, presumptuous strangers. Not in the collective imagination of society at large and, above all else, herself. It might not seem like it, considering all the dubious looks and insulting concerns thrown her way, but she is her own worst critic. Others try their best, but there will never be a harshest judge than mother. Hell, she's prosecutor, accused and accuser, key witness and vengeful jury all wrapped into one in a trial that might sound like a pity party but is closer to a circus of fire and fury and self-loathing. 

Just ask Linda, the ever-aggrieved lead of Mary Bronstein's If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, played by Rose Byrne as a woman under the influence and on the verge of a nervous breakdown. And who can blame her for being such a mess? There's a hole in her daughter's stomach and a hole in her ceiling…

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Review: A mesmerizing Marion Cotillard reigns over Lucile Hadžihalilovic's "The Ice Tower"

by Cláudio Alves

The Ice Tower starts in the fashion of a trance-like fairytale, pulling you in through visions of refracted light, a snow globe landscape deconstructed by optical illusion. In the background, music twinkles, practically glistens as if singing the song one imagines a bauble would if it had a voice. And speaking of voices, a mellifluous woman sounds off, narrating and enchanting, beckoning closer in tones that feel like freshly fallen snow on a flushed cheek. It's Marion Cotillard, yet unseen but already magnetic as the Snow Queen and the actress who breathes life into her, a double role in a backstage melodrama with a Freudian spin.

Lucile Hadžihalilovic, one of contemporary cinema's most underrated masters, reunites with Cotillard, 21 years after Innocence, for a film that's both a free adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's classic story and its echo...

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TIFF 50: A star is born in "The Little Sister"

by Cláudio Alves

Like The Sun Rises on Us All in Venice, The Little Sister suffered quite a bit of backlash after its lead actress won Cannes' highest honor. And like Xin Zhilei, Nadia Melliti is an eminently deserving victor, unfairly maligned by the online badmouthing and stan nonsense that reached a boiling point as Jennifer Lawrence left the Croisette empty-handed. Indeed, hers is one of the year's most captivating performances, a complex and tender portrait that feels all the more special when one remembers this was Melliti's debut. As she did in previous efforts behind the camera, Hafsia Herzi has proven herself prodigious at directing actors, turning The Little Sister into a must-watch for anyone who values such artistry and the wonders of character-based drama…

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TIFF 50: Lucía Aleñar Iglesias wins the FIPRESCI Prize for "Forastera"

by Cláudio Alves

Light has character. In Lucía Aleñar Iglesias's feature debut, Forastera, it also has a soul, manifesting spirits intangible and far away. Through variable brightness and mysterious movements, it bridges times and places, the here and there, our commonplace existence and something that might not be the beyond but is closer to such abstractions than to matters of the flesh. You can feel it in your bones, even before a sage old woman looks at a flickering light and describes its inconsistency as proof of ghosts roaming around the house. It's right there, at the film's start, when Iglesias sets her camera on two sisters sunbathing during their Mallorcan vacation.

The eldest shares the tall tale of a dolphin sighting, daring the other girl to doubt her. As they talk, clouds pass over and the temperature of the tableau shifts from warmth to cold grey and back again. They flicker like the faint impression of a candle flame, a picture of serenity volatized. More than just its subject, the frame itself feels animated by an impossible life…

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