mesmeric

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeGo back to your roots, we’re always told, and you’ll find your heart’s true home. But in Davy Chou’s daring and mesmeric Return to Seoul, an adoptee’s search for her birth parents tears open wounds and unearths neither meaning nor resolution. Freddie (Park Ji-Min) is in her mid-twenties, a French woman adopted from South Korea at birth. She finds herself in Seoul after a trip to Tokyo…

Here is a meditative documentary from Dutch film-maker Joke Olthaar that mostly consists of monochrome, long-held static shots, exquisitely filmed by cinematographer André Schreuders, of the mountains in Triglav National Park in Slovenia. It opens and closes with some airy voiceover musings about the abyss, solitude and all that jazz, and there are references to “the three of us” which chime with the three tiny, black, human-shaped blobs seen from time to time.But for the most part, there is no palpable story or shape to…

Whatever its flaws, this movie provides fans of French star Léa Seydoux with a treat. She is in closeup so much of the time: that mesmeric, feline beauty is cool in repose, a mask of indifference or mystery, but with a suggestion of late night indulgence in the faint lines under the eyes. She has something of Isabelle Huppert’s hauteur – although Huppert’s own faintly ironised blankness only came at a later life-stage. Seydoux’s hairstyling and maquillage are swoonworthy, particularly the arterial slash of lipstick. She…

A big hit domestically where the whole Dragon Ball Super manga book/TV series/movie franchise is immensely popular – but beyond Japan and its near neighbours this feature, the second after Dragon Ball Super: Broly, will appeal mainly to hardcore fans. Uninitiated viewers will probably be utterly baffled by the bewildering cast of brightly coloured characters: a mix of humans, androids, aliens and a couple of creatures that look like bipedal versions of a chubby house cat and hairless sphinx, but in the latter’s case with…