beguiling

Laura Citarella’s movie is a coolly unhurried four hours-plus, split into two parts of around two hours each; it is from the same producer, in fact, as Argentinian auteur Mariano Llinás’s legendary 13-and-a-half hour film La Flor. Compared with that, Trenque Lauquen – whose title means “round lake” and is a city in Buenos Aires province – is a mere cine-haiku; but it is still a domestic epic, a giant puzzle, a whopping solutionless mystery and a meandering shaggy dog story with a hint of Borges or AS Byatt’s Possession.…

French-Tunisian documentary maker Erige Sehiri makes a watchable fiction feature with this shrewd, sympathetic ensemble study, which takes place as promised in the title: over a single working day in a fig tree orchard in Kesra, north-western Tunisia. Every day a truck comes to pick up a crowd of people doing cash-in-hand work picking the fruit: largely women, young and old, and some men. The long working day unfolds as the shadows shorten, then lengthen and friendships, enmities, generational and political disputes and…

Steven Spielberg’s utterly beguiling fictionalised movie-memoir is his new adventure in Panglossian optimism, and offers us a stunning critical insight into his own work and how and why artists cauterise childhood pain and rewrite their youth. Movies are not exactly a matter of “escapism” – a lazy and misleading word – but all about intervening in real life, reordering the landscape, addressing frailty and vulnerability candidly, but from a position of strength.Young Spielberg is reborn as Sammy Fabelman, a little kid in…

On a wind-lashed afternoon a few miles from Land’s End, I spot Boswens to the west of the wild, bumpy track. She is a standing stone, more than 2.2m (7ft) tall, situated alone on hard bumps of grass: some think there is a Neolithic tomb beneath her. From different angles, she looks like a trig point on the top of a mountain, the head of an axe or – most peculiarly – a person in profile.Boswens’s looming presence is central to Enys Men (pronounced Ennis Mayne, meaning “stone island” in Cornish), the eagerly awaited film by…

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeDir: Sebastián Lelio. Starring: Florence Pugh, Tom Burke, Kíla Lord Cassidy, Elaine Cassidy, Caolán Byrne, Niamh Algar, Toby Jones, Ciarán Hinds. 15, 108 minutes.Watching The Wonder on Netflix, you’ll think you’ve clicked on the wrong film. The beguiling period drama starring Florence Pugh opens not in Ireland’s boglands as promised by the trailer, but in the harsh light of a film…

Featuring non-professional actors from the Indonesian island of Java, this beguiling – and occasionally muddled – debut from the Spanish director Álvaro Gurrea treads the line between fiction and ethnographic documentary. Suddenly abandoned by his wife Olive, Yono (Yono Aris Munandar), a sulphur miner at the Kawah Ijen volcano, struggles to win back his beloved. His efforts range from the spiritual to the capitalist: the forlorn husband is willing to dabble in shamanic spells as well as cryptocurrency.Moments of beauty…

It was a small clip, on YouTube. A young boy on an operating table. And he seemed to be … pregnant. What? The scene was velvety smooth, still, night time, yellowish. I was fascinated.I looked up the name of the film director: Lucile Hadžihalilović. French-Bosnian. A month later I got to see the whole film – Evolution – on a big screen. It was just as haunted, as obsessed by bodies and colour and mood, as the YouTube clip. I tracked down more of her work. Her debut feature, Innocence had girls, rivers, an old dark house…

Sam Gendel and Antonia Cytrynowicz are two of experimental pop music’s most unlikely creative partners. Gendel, 35, is the Los Angeles saxophonist who has lent his talents to records by Vampire Weekend, Maggie Rogers and Perfume Genius, all while maintaining a prolific solo practice that’s among the most appealingly unpredictable in modern jazz. Cytrynowicz is a classic multi-hyphenate – a singer-songwriter who produces her own tracks on GarageBand, dancer, visual artist and actor who’s also a fan of classic 70s rock…