(First published by Headstuff.org)

 

To a Land Unknown (dir. Mahdi Fleifel, 2024)

 

From its opening scene, To a Land Unknown is filled and dominated by the striking presence of its protagonists: Chantila (Mahmood Bakri), a paragon of nervy intelligence, and his cousin Reda (Aram Sabbah), sorrowful and soft by comparison. Refugees from Palestine, the two men are subsisting in Athens on forged documents, resorting to petty crime and attempting, in Reda's case, to kick a heroin addiction, as they plan their continued migration north, to Germany, where a more liveable life might just be possible.

 

Mahdi Fleifel's parable has some of the toughness, not averse to sentimentality, that once characterised films like Bicycle Thieves (1948) or Umberto D (1952) by Vittorio De Sica. Even as it draws on contemporary crises – from the forced displacement of Palestinians, to the ruthlessness of the Mediterranean border regime dividing the global north from the suffering south, to the spectre of homelessness that stalks so many European cities – To a Land Unknown seems to hark back to a mid-century cinema that grappled with themes of thwarted individuality, shadowed by collective fears and failures. 

 

Part of what makes the hustling desperation (and increasing violence) of Chantila, Reda, and their circle so bleakly emblematic is the idealism they once held. When they're not stealing cash from tourists or mugging and scamming their fellow refugees, these would-be smugglers, locked in limbo, quote the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish to one another, and take pride in remembering the exploits of the now-defunct Palestine Liberation Organization. During a night-time call with his wife, herself trapped in a refugee camp in Lebanon, Chantila laments the nightmarish tenor of life in Athens, and the brutality of his own conduct. As here, the sheer loneliness of these men seems to generate an atmosphere of its own on-screen, a counter-force to the harsh spiral of the actions they take.

 

Like a novella of the Palestinian experience, To a Land Unknown is also the latest in a series of powerful cinematic depictions of the human consequences of the European Union's cruel and reactionary immigration policies, including Green Border (2023) and Io Capitano (2023). Unlike the latter, there's a dramatic neatness to the conclusion and a linear quality to the overall plot of Fleifel's movie that makes it ultimately a narrower and more conventional exercise than it perhaps needed to be. But the sad hunger of its central characters, and the mounting stress of their situation – barely surviving on the fringes of a society with little to offer to people without money, power, or papers – is never less than moving. Despite its limitations, To a Land Unknown feels like a necessary film: a tragic mirror, in a mean-hearted time.

 

 

Bring Them Down (dir. Christopher Andrews, 2024)

 

At once an outback thriller and a portrait of patriarchal masculinity in crisis, Bring Them Down concerns rival shepherding families in a neglected but unspecified nook of rural Ireland. Times are already hard – and life, it seems, is rather tough – for Christopher Abbott's Michael, when the rams from his ageing father's flock of sheep begin to die or go missing: a disturbing development, with financial implications. Long-standing resentments in the locale, and troubled secrets from Michael's own life, come to a head as the mystery unravels and redress, inevitably, is sought.

 

Written and directed by Christopher Andrews, at times the film runs like a Kevin Barry short story: a tale of social breakdown and weird transcendence as ancient rivalries erupt, and violence hovers over the land. The script lacks Barry's crackling verbosity, mostly opting instead for grunting exchanges between disaffected males, men who seem always to be building towards Cain-and-Abel-style duels. The plot in fact is filled with bone-breaking twists and queasy turns: knives lunge and bullets fly; heads roll and guts spill; animals are dismembered and buzzard-like birds circle the air above the woods. Anywhere west of Dublin, apparently, is a dangerous wilderness where grievances fester and savagery thrives. 

 

If all of this seems rather over-cooked, the film is elevated by the scenes with Nora-Jane Noone as Caroline, and sustained by the two main performances: in both Irish and English, Christopher Abbott conveys Michael's anger and unhappiness with naturalistic precision, while Barry Keoghan brings credible sensitivity and discomfort to the role of Jack, the errant, underestimated son of neighbouring farmer Gary (Paul Ready). The pivot to Barry's perspective mid-way through helps to puncture the pretensions of the plot and to ground the central drama in the domain of accident and human complication: a winning move.

 

In this last respect, Bring Them Down bears a family likeness to Rodrigo Sorogoyen's The Beasts (2022) – a more fully realized venture, which won deserved acclaim for its visceral and haunting parable of pent-up resentment in the Galician hills. The Wicklow mountains provide the stark, wind-levelled backdrop here, magnifying the emotions that drive the protagonists, however ham-fistedly, into further conflict and conflagration. For all its excesses, Andrews's film has tension a-plenty: if his script-writing currently feels encumbered by stereotypes, his controlled camera-work and persistent sense of atmosphere are assured and promising. He may even have the makings of a great director. Watch this space.

 

 

Blue Road: The Edna O'Brien Story (dir. Sinéad O'Shea, 2024)

 

For much of her early writing life, Edna O'Brien was persona non grata in her home country: her books were banned, and she herself was treated with “bile and odium and outrage” by a Catholic nation, which included her own parents, aggressively hostile to the self-expression (literary or sexual) of women. When she died in 2024, she was praised by President Michael D. Higgins for her “deeply insightful work, rich in humanity” and “moral courage”: the times, thankfully, had changed. Narrated by Jessie Buckley, Sinéad O'Shea's new documentary examines the transition, while attempting to pay tribute to O'Brien and her oeuvre.

 

Featuring late interviews with O'Brien herself, as well as a wealth of archive footage, Blue Road ultimately feels more like the biography of a celebrity than a literary portrait. In that sense, it's possible that Irish culture hasn't evolved quite so far as we might like. If, in our post-Repeal era, O'Brien has received her due acclaim as a feminist trail-blazer and an audacious novelist, we seem nevertheless to remain fixated on her supposed notoriety. The tendency is to condemn the (considerable) misogyny that she suffered at the hands of church, state, and her local community, only to proceed to trawl through, in this case, her diaries and private life, looking for the sensational details of what drugs she tried, what celebrities she had sex with, how long her romantic affairs lasted, etc. Here, Sinéad O'Shea quizzes the author and her sons about all of these issues, coaxing the ninety-three year-old to open up about the “trauma” of her childhood, and inquiring as to why she never chose to fall in love with “softer” men. This is an intrusive line of questioning. Frail though she is, O'Brien retains her dignified poise throughout. 

 

At one point her son Carlo, also a writer, reminds his interviewer of O'Brien's formidable work ethic, doggedly crafting book after book into life, despite the intense prejudices she faced and the preconceptions with which she continually grappled. This is a welcome interjection, and in general the documentary feels most compelling when we're allowed a glimpse of the writer in her creative element. We learn, for instance, from Walter Mosley, the celebrated crime fiction novelist, that Edna O'Brien was an inspiring teacher at City College, the “Harvard of Harlem”, encouraging him to pen his first novel at a time when he was uncertain of his own talents. Anne Enright and Andrew O'Hagan, among others, also show up to express their admiration for O'Brien's work.

 

Despite these segments, Blue Road is perhaps unhealthily concerned with O'Brien's personal notebooks – some of which were spitefully written over by her controlling and envious husband – at the expense of a more thorough-going survey of her many imaginative and intellectual achievements. This was a writer who, at ninety years of age, was sought out for her eloquent insights into the fiction of Ernest Hemingway, for Ken Burns's 2021 feature on the American master. A year earlier, she could be found delivering the T. S. Eliot lecture on the work of the Missouri-born modernist and James Joyce. In 2018 she was awarded the American PEN/Nabokov award for “the highest level of achievement in fiction” by a living author. The list of accolades could go on. Blue Road excels in investigating the troubled glamour of O'Brien's years in London, and acknowledging the patriarchal violence that shaped her upbringing as a young woman in Ireland. We get sparse insight, however, into her inner life as a writer (a documentary like The Writing in the Sky, about the poet Dermot Healy, might serve as an interesting comparison in this respect). For all its biographical intimacy, we come away from Blue Road with the creeping suspicion that the final tribute to O'Brien the artist has yet to be paid.

 

 

The Order (dir. Justin Kurzel, 2024)

 

Some day movie-goers will be treated to an accurate portrayal of the Federal Bureau of Investigation on-screen, including its lethal attempts to derail and disassemble civil rights, Black Panther, feminist and American Indian campaigns in the 1960s and after. In the meantime, the dogged FBI agent will remain a staple of our cinematic imaginary: a lone ranger-type, usually male, noble and ruthless, whiskey-dour and exhausted, whose service, relentlessly executed, draws out the contradictions in himself and his nation. 

 

Jude Law occupies that role in Justin Kurzel's new film, and he's never been better. To say so, of course, is to risk diminishing Law's gifts, which are manifold, as anyone who's been paying attention can attest. He combined shrewd intelligence and oleaginous charm as an ambitious financier in The Nest (2020); his performance as the stiff, stately Karenin in Anna Karenina (2012) exuded sobriety and sadness; and he ably filled the shoes of Michael Gambon and Richard Harris in the Fantastic Beasts trilogy, playing a younger version of the wise and kindly Albus Dumbledore. Like Matthew McConaughey, he has proven himself to be far more than just a handsome celebrity; he is a serious talent.

 

In The Order, he brings an air of fatigue and resigned fury to the part of Terry Husk, a war veteran and (it should be said, surprisingly athletic) federal law officer assigned to a desk job in Idaho, where he quickly develops an interest in the activities of a burgeoning terrorist group in the region. Following the trail of a number of local “White Power” activists, he begins forming a picture of a world that until then – the early 1980s – had been little investigated: one defined by racist conspiracy theories and blood-thirsty fantasies of insurrection and mass killing. A pattern of bank heists and gruesome assassinations sets the scene for what Husk and his team suspect will be a larger political eruption, as outlined in the Neo-Nazi novel, The Turner Diaries, which serves as a roadmap for the far-right insurrectionists. As the crime case builds, so does the tension. All the while, Kurzel shoots the Pacific Northwest in the same way that Nuri Bilge Ceylan depicts Anatolia: as a monumental landscape, forged and shaped by elemental forces, which heighten the human dramas that seethe across its surface. 

 

Among the supporting cast, Tye Sheridan stands out as Jamie, an observant young police officer who commits himself, with Terry, to the pummelling rituals of surveillance and pursuit. The soft earnestness of his character has traces of one of his earlier roles: Ellis in Jeff Nichols's Mud (2012). In general the country that Nichols portrays – in Take Shelter (2011), say, or The Bikeriders (2023) – can be sensed, however hazily, as background scenery to the sharper, harsher conflicts on which Kurzel fixes his attention. As is also true of his American contemporary, however, Kurzel is drawn to “shotgun stories”, tales of cornered hopes and paranoid aspirations, in which love and violence are entangled. Whereas Nichols brings warmth, and even humour, to his small-scale epics, Kurzel is possessed by dread: an appropriate mood, in this case, given the gravity and contemporary resonance of the themes examined.

 

The Order is a murder-haunted film, and the ultimate shoot-out, when it comes, reiterates the smoky, flame-coloured finish of Macbeth (2015) as well as the deathly, dream-like conclusion of True History of The Kelly Gang (2019). There are moments, in fact, when the Neo-Nazi, Bob Matthews (Nicholas Hoult), bears a resemblance to Ned Kelly, or an equivalent heroic outlaw: a charismatic “radical”, chased down and killed by officers of the state. This is a disturbing parallel, but it accounts for some of the visceral and unsettling power of Kurzel's film. The Order dares us to understand its central characters. We can only do so by travelling into America's own heart of darkness – the terror and resilience of white supremacy through history. Kurzel journeys into the storm, only to land us on the brink of our present moment. By the end, Terry Husk's grim features have become eerily legible: etched with anger, shadowed by fear.

 

 

Little Women (dir. Gillian Armstrong, 1994)

 

At a time of apocalyptic spiral and deepening toxicity in American politics, Louisa May Alcott's Little Women makes for salutary consumption. Written by a free-thinking transcendentalist (and former Union Army nurse) in 1868, the novel has never been out of print since then, and has had a rich and long cinematic life to bolster its cultural longevity. 

 

The plot, as many will know, centres on the shared home and sparking personalities of the March sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, as they attempt to support their mother (nicknamed “Marmee”) while their abolitionist father is away serving as a chaplain in the Civil War. With few financial resources at their disposal, but a great deal of vivacity and pluck between them, the young women of the March family have to use their wits and discover their true selves if they are to weather the various storms that history – and a patriarchal society – sends their way. 

 

Gillian Armstrong's 1994 adaptation captures much of the charm and a good deal, too, of the unostentatious smartness and progressivism that renders the book so appealing. The cast is also impressive, with admirable turns from a young Claire Danes and Kirsten Dunst. Susan Sarandon seems almost the embodiment of Marmee, genial and fierce, the wise matriarch who guides and encourages her daughters, rarely letting her exhaustion show. Likewise Christian Bale, flop-haired and boyish, is an amusingly awkward Laurie, and – to that extent – a comfortable fit for the role. Gabriel Byrne, sad-eyed as ever, may be on less certain ground as Jo's eventual love interest, Professor Bhaer, although true believers will find plenty of hallmark quirks to appreciate in his performance (and something similar may be said of Winona Ryder, as Jo).

 

Twenty-first-century viewers, of course, will have Greta Gerwig's more recent adaptation as a reference-point. Unlike Armstrong's, the 2019 version hop-skotches between the vibrancy of the family past and a harsher present, after Beth's tragedy, when the youthful dreams of each of the “little women” have given way to a new season of adulthood, when loneliness and poverty are palpable pressures, even as the affection that oxygenates the March household abides. The structure of the newer film makes it a roomier drama, allowing Mr Laurence (Chris Cooper) to emerge as a character in his own right: softly grieving his daughter – and later, Beth – even as he continues to cultivate values of courtesy and kindness in his neighbourly relations. By contrast, and for all its sincerity and warmth, Armstrong's linear narrative requires secondary characters to stick to their cues, appearing only when the plot demands their presence, so we never come to know them as fully as we might wish. 

 

By including disquisitions (from Jo) on the issue of women's rights and suffrage, however, Armstrong foregrounds a dimension of Louisa May Alcott's original that can easily be downplayed: its radical and insistent acknowledgement of women as agents and protagonists in a society that seems designed to deny any such subjectivity, as the constricted, real-life fates of Alice James and Emily Dickinson may suggest. The poise of Sarandon as Marmee – star of Thelma and Louise (1991) and herself a vocal activist for a range of radical causes – quietly amplifies this aspect of the film. 

 

In the final tally, Armstrong's is a loving recreation of Alcott's story, which, it should be said, lends itself to reinvention and rediscovery. One of the under-rated pleasures for movie buffs may be that every other generation gets to add its own Jo March to the list of previous portrayals: from the goofy glamour of Katherine Hepburn's whirlwind incarnation in 1933 to the soft intelligence of Saoirse Ronan in Gerwig's 2019 venture. Although it may lag in places, the 1994 adaptation holds its own among the rest: fine seasonal fare for anyone hoping to re-visit a classic work afresh.