On demand: "Maiden"

You could see it as a sign of skewed cinematic priorities that that accursed mariner Donald Crowhurst has inspired three (very different) films - 2006's Deep Water, 2017's Crowhurst and 2018's The Mercy - despite failing to achieve whatever it was he was trying to do. By way of a counterpoint, we might well consider 2018's Maiden, Alex Holmes's documentary tribute to Tracy Edwards MBE, skipper of the first all-female crew to compete in the Whitbread Round the World Yacht Race. Holmes's film takes a conventional form: its backbone is a long and frank interview with Edwards, supplemented by contributions from her crewmates and archive and race footage. Yet this is one of those stories that raises interesting questions and fascinating points (and, in passing, points up exactly where the solitary and morbidly self-sufficient Crowhurst took a wrong turn). It is, on some level, a more spectacular variant of the old yarn about a woman finding her place in the world; this woman has to circumnavigate it. Edwards, who by her own admission had been suspended from school no less than 26 times, entered her twenties as a dropout and a party girl. Pressganged by peers into stewardessing on holiday-resort charter boats, she began to learn the ropes, however, and eventually emerged as someone who might tackle the challenges involved in competitive sailing. Again, she got there the hard way: she completed her first Round the World race as a chef, catering for grizzled old seasalts who at best tolerated her presence, and at worst were openly condescending, often contemptuous. For her second go, in 1989, she was in charge - and, unlike Crowhurst, she wasn't alone.

It was a challenge nevertheless, as Holmes makes abundantly clear. Edwards had to seek out comparably experienced female sailors; their first task was patching up a fairly shonky-looking vessel, quite possibly the last ship in the shop; then she had to overcome both last-minute crewing issues and her own internalised reluctance to lead. That archive flags up Edwards' determination, her entrepreneurship (which included striking a sponsorship deal with King Hussein of Jordan) and her need to overturn the expectations of onlookers. (Intriguingly, her younger self appears militant in rejecting any attempt to dub the crew's efforts as feminist. More internalisation?) It also paints a fairly damning picture of the attitudes displayed by fellow competitors and the media covering this boat's progress. (The Guardian was among the sniggerers, its sailing correspondent Bob Fisher notoriously billing the boat as "the tinful of tarts".) Then there is the footage of the race itself, all the more spectacular for not being the sort of sporting event one sees much of outside of the Olympic cycle. We watch as the boats leave each port, landmasses disappearing in favour of all-enveloping ocean; reference points seem to disappear altogether once the flotilla reaches Antarctica; blurry onboard footage captures the ladies standing at crazy angles, being strafed by huge plumes of spray while trying to tack sails. Gradually, this story gathers in momentum and import: you see it most obviously in the swelling crowds gathering in every harbour to cheer this crew home. And by Maiden's final stretch, we number among those multitudes. They did it, we tell ourselves. Whatever the hardships they encountered, whether this achievement was feminist or not: they actually did it.

Maiden is now available to rent via Prime Video, YouTube and the BFI Player, and on DVD through Dogwoof.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of January 30-February 1, 2025):

1 (2) Hamnet (12A) **

2 (1) The Housemaid (15)

3 (new) Shelter (15)

4 (new) Iron Lung (15) **

5 (5) Zootropolis 2 (PG)

6 (4) Avatar: Fire and Ash (12A) ***

7 (6) Marty Supreme (15) ***

8 (new) Primate (18)

9 (3) 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (18) ****

10 (new) Is This Thing On? (15) **

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. R.E.M x Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr

2. Nouvelle Vague

3. No Other Choice

4. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

5. The History of Sound

 

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (new) Zootropolis 2 (PG)

2 (1) Sinners (15) ****

3 (7) One Battle After Another (15) ****

4 (2) 28 Years Later (15) ****

5 (3) Wicked: For Good (PG)

6 (9) Bugonia (15) **

7 (5) Predator: Badlands (12) **

8 (6) Dracula (15)

9 (13) Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale (PG)

10 (4) The Running Man (15) **

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. One Battle After Another

2. Roofman

3. Sketch

4. Keeper

5. Anemone

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. The Producers [above] (Saturday, BBC Two, 12.45am)

2. Deliverance (Monday, BBC Two, 11.50pm)

3. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (Sunday, BBC Two, 6.05am)

4. Woman at War (Thursday, Channel 4, 2.20am)

5. The Woman King (Saturday, Channel 4, 9.30pm)

"The Strangers: Chapter 3" (Guardian 06/02/26)

The Strangers: Chapter 3 **

Dir: Renny Harlin. With: Madelaine Petsch, Gabriel Basso, Richard Brake, Rachel Shenton. 91 mins. Cert: 15

If you’re wondering how this shrug-along horror series has got this far, Renny Harlin shot all three instalments back-to-back in Bratislava in late 2022; reshoots followed the indifferent response to 2024’s first chapter, which didn’t much alleviate the even more indifferent response to last year’s second. We were getting them whether we wanted them or not: the modest resources had been spent, one and two were cheap enough to make some sort of money, and so we now arrive at the last knockings and the year’s most dutiful carnage. The mistake was to expand a morally gloomy universe that was better off self-contained; the more light Harlin and collaborators let in, the more their set-up presented as generic runaround, hopelessly out of place amid the recent horror renaissance.

We’re deep into Strangers lore now, but last girl standing Maya (Riverdale graduate Madelaine Petsch, who surely hoped this was her Neve Campbell moment) continues to scurry about a devout woodland community like a bloodied fieldmouse with resting iPhone face; those masked thrill-killers – previously three, now two – have gained ulterior motives for pursuing her. Also present: tatted survivor Gregory (Gabriel Basso, who must have been hoping for more to do) and the ever-shifty Sheriff Rotter (Richard Brake), whose link to the killers is finally made explicit here. New blood arrives in the form of Maya’s sister Debbie (Hollyoaks alumna and recent short-film Oscar-winner Rachel Shenton) who comes to town seeking answers, only to be drawn into another round of humdrum stalk-and-slash.

Somewhere in the background is the unnerving (and not untimely) idea of an all-American community that tolerates killers in its midst so long as they prey on outsiders, protecting their own. Yet Harlin ties up his loose ends in characteristically leaden, workmanlike fashion. His scene pacing might have seemed antiquated circa Wes Craven’s Scream; a full thirty minutes of pregnant pauses hardly shake the suspicion there wasn’t enough plot in play for a trilogy. The 2008 original will probably endure as a solid, sleepover-ready example of American ordeal cinema – but this final chapter, like its immediate predecessors, falls somewhere between footnote and outright detritus, a plastic bag being propelled through the multiplex by a stiff breeze.

The Strangers: Chapter 3 is now showing in selected cinemas.

King of comedy: "R.E.M x Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr"

In the coming days, cinemas across the UK will bear witness to the second stage in an ongoing experiment with the presentation of silent films. Last Hallowe'en, Silents Synced [sic] - an Austin, Texas-based outfit rescoring and rereleasing classic silents paired with noteworthy modern albums - gave us Radiohead x Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horrors; this time round, it's R.E.M x Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr, where the Athens, Georgia band are represented by songs from 1994's Monster and 1996's New Adventures in Hi-Fi. We are not a million miles away here from the outrage provoked by Giorgio Moroder's pop-promo Metropolis, all told: before the main feature, Synced's resident DJ/director Josh Frank offers a version of Keaton's 1923 short The Balloonatic remixed to Amon Tobin, complete with superimposed ravey visuals and bass-bin pulses, during which you begin to understand why the BFI, for one, hasn't booked these titles. (The bagmen would have a collective coronary, trailing decades of screening notes in their wake.) Not too far, also, from that head at the social gathering who still insists on putting Dark Side of the Moon on at the same time as The Wizard of Oz; nor, indeed, from the visuals projected onto the walls of your nearest hipster drinking establishment. Here are disparate works of art, made in very different eras, pulling your attention in two separate directions; the Silents Synced experience can seem like a movie screening and a listening party happening simultaneously, inviting patrons to try rubbing their stomachs in circles while also patting their heads. In this Balloonatic, you begin to feel Tobin's pounding techno overpowering Buster's deft delicacy: only a few choice sight gags survive the barrage.

The main feature, thankfully, is happier: it serves up a good new print with inventive tinting, and R.E.M's dreamy Americana, even amid this grungier period of their discography, meshes more agreeably with Keaton's vision of life on and adjacent to Main Street. (Frank may have taken the film's epigraph to heart: "Don't try to do two things at once and expect to do justice to both".) It makes sense to lay "How The West Was Won and Where It Got Us" over the opening scenes of Buster's daily graft, and (duh) "I Don't Sleep, I Dream" over our hero's projection-box reveries. Less literal, but no less effective: when Buster first enters the film-within-the-film - only to be almost immediately turfed out again - it's to the squalling, feedback-heavy first minute of "Star 69", and the siren-like guitar effects of "Leave" add an extra dimension to the exploding pool ball business. (A further serendipity, or big break: UK viewers can use this sequence, with its tremendous trick shots, to pay tribute of sorts to the recently deceased John Virgo.) It's canny playlisting above all else: silent cinema brought to you in association with Spotify, heading towards an inspired musical cheat come the final reel. (By which I mean a song that features on neither of the billed albums: you'll know it when you hear it.) The truth is it's another opportunity to sit before - and marvel at - one of the most inventive film comedies of all time; you could probably even play an Olly Murs or Bruno Mars album over the top of Sherlock Jr, and it wouldn't lose any of its vim, vigour or lustre. At the public screening I attended this past Thursday night, it was clear this approach had drawn people out to their local independent cinema - in appalling weather, to boot - to chuckle en masse at a movie made over a century ago. Purists may cavil, but in this economy, that's not nothing.

R.E.M. x Sherlock Jr is now playing in selected cinemas.

On demand: "Menus-Plaisirs - Les Troisgros"

It takes as long as it takes, but you have to get it right would appear a credo shared by the veteran American documentarist Frederick Wiseman and the Michelin-starred chefs he films in his latest, typically meticulous four-hour project. Menus-Plaisirs is the latest in Wiseman's studies of how things run, its true subject revealed over time as the detail-ravenous preparation that goes into the blue-riband dining experience offered by a hotel and restaurant complex set deep in the leafy Loire countryside. It will be an hour before anybody takes their seats to eat in Wiseman's film; in the meantime, the filmmaker captures la famille Troisgros - head chef Michel and his two sons - visiting a nearby market to forage for freshness and flavour, then returns with them to their establishment to eavesdrop and pry. The specifics are key here: Wiseman sets out his stall (or, if you will, lays his table) with what would in any other circumstance seem a ridiculously attenuated discussion about menus (what's in season, what's available, what's desirable), but one supposes that's how nitpicky these professionals have to be. Then it's back to the kitchens, where a small army of artisans operate in librarian silence, conjuring the delicacies you'd expect to find on a Michelin-starred restaurant's menu: "pigeon gravy with vinegar" (non merci), lamb's brains and kidneys (absolument pas), handcrafted lemon meringue mousses (okay, now you have my interest) and what would appear the western world's grandest cheeseboard to finish. (No frites anywhere as far as I could see, and believe me these hungry eyes were looking.) Along the way, Menus-Plaisirs comes to explain why certain places charge the fees they do for these plaisirs: it isn't just the finely calibrated taste, it's that these dishes are vastly more labour-intensive than, say, serving up pie and mash.

The film's appeal is twofold. First, yes, the food, often glorious looking and sounding food. (The ultimate proof, of course, would be in the eating, and Les Troisgros' healthy turnover of regular patrons indicates appetites are very much sated by the ever-changing menus.) Around these plates, however: the stirring sight of passionate people making a very good fist of doing what they do for a living. The first is the more immediate pleasure: in spending so long detailing how this restaurant's elaborate confections are assembled, Wiseman affords the viewer ample time to weigh up whether or not we'd want to try them. Yet the scenes of Troisgros admin introduced as between-course palate cleansers - meetings with suppliers, discussions about winelists, front-of-house briefings - expand Wiseman's field of study, and allow his film to feed our mind with some idea of how the world works: now we're thinking about pricing, ethics, farming practises, inherited traits, perhaps even elite privilege. As Michel recognises, Les Troisgros doesn't operate in isolation: it's part of a regionally sprawling ecosystem of consumption. As ever, Wiseman lets it all play out without intervention or interruption: this is the restaurant - more specifically: this restaurant - as it is, as it goes, as it happens. Don't book expecting the conflict of The Bear or Boiling Point or anything Gordon Ramsay-related, because Wiseman knows that living and working in this world is complicated enough: it's clear that everyone who sits down to eat at these tables will have their own idea of what a good meal is. (Among the clientele, you will encounter some dreadful wine bores, and one weirdo who flatly tells his waiter "I don't like chocolate". Who are these people?) That makes for a lowish-stakes Wiseman doc, granted, and it's still possible you will emerge heading towards Greggs rather than your nearest four-peas-on-a-plate place. Yet I found myself looking on in the knowledge that if I ever did want four peas on a plate, Les Troisgros would furnish me with the tastiest four peas, immaculately presented. One reason these chefs invited Wiseman in to cook alongside them: they surely knew he'd provide them with the best advert the proprietors of any Michelin-starred restaurant could want.

Menus-Plaisirs - Les Troisgros is now available to rent via the BFI Player.

Grand illusions: "Nouvelle Vague"

December's Blue Moon was all about endings: of a partnership, of a career, of a life. Nouvelle Vague - Richard Linklater's second film of 2025, held over for a January release in the UK - concerns the beginnings of things, principally (as that title indicates) the French New Wave. The first of the many funny jokes the new film has to venture is that its protagonist - the young Jean-Luc Godard (played, rather brilliantly, by Guillaume Marbeck), embarking on the twenty-day shoot of his 1960 debut Breathless - believes himself to be yesterday's man: several of his fellow critics at Cahiers du cinéma, including the emergent toast of Cannes François Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard), have already graduated to making feature films, leaving him holding a mere short in his hands. So this guy has a point to prove. But he also has a funny way of making it: starting from a treatment he doesn't initially seem all that wild about, throwing out the rulebook that had governed how films get made for the best part of fifty years, alarming his American leading lady Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch) by making his script up as he goes, and eventually coming to blows with his own exasperated producer Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfürst). This Godard is a heedless punk who strides out into the world so as to conquer it, or at least to raise merry hell; it's amazing he returns with anything salvageable, let alone a modern classic. "We don't slow down!," he tells his actors as they're nudged and hustled and sometimes yanked from one impromptu set-up to the next. "Film is a revolutionary act!" As Linklater sees it, Breathless wasn't just a title, but an entire state of mind and being.

As with Lorenz Hart, so with Godard: this is a great character to hang a movie on. (To the extent I was initially a little nervous that the scenes where Godard isn't around - those covering the byplay between Seberg, her husband François Moreuil (Paolo Luka-Noé) and co-star Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin), for instance - weren't going to fizz and pop in quite the same way.) He is, to put it mildly, an awkward fucker: blessed with some vision and a gift for phrasemaking and sloganeering, cursed with a thick strain of contrarianism and the loftiness of a Swiss aristocrat. (On Day One, he launches the shoot by declaring "time to enter the pantheon".) The script - by Holly Gent and Vincent Palmo Jr., nimbly translated into French by Laetitia Masson and Michèle Pétin - has Godard down as a combination of pickpocket, pinball-playing delinquent and luck-pushing chancer; Linklater doesn't strain the suggestion you may well need elements of all three to become a filmmaker, but it's there nevertheless. Marbeck, for his part, plays him as simultaneously the Godard of film lore, a character in one of the director's own movies (self-mythology being some part of the Godard project) and Rushmore's Max Fischer - and Linklater does appear to be explicitly connecting one wave of independent filmmaking to another. The Academy frame is true to the moment of the New Wave, but also a neat shop window for Wes Anderson-like sight gags and jokes of framing: key personnel are frontally introduced with their names stamped across the image. More broadly, Nouvelle Vague is a film about thrusting young go-getters finding their eye and voice while attempting to communicate something through their art, a theme as applicable to the Paris of 1959 as it was to Austin, Texas thirty years later. This Breathless is rendered much as the films-within-a-film of Alexandre Rockwell's In the Soup or Tom DiCillo's Living in Oblivion were: as something tentative, piecemeal and defiantly DIY, made on the hoof if not on the lam with whatever these creatives found around them.

So where Blue Moon was necessarily bittersweet, Nouvelle Vague is optimistic by nature - indeed, it may well end up as the most optimistic feature any of us will see inside a cinema in 2026. Partly, it's that we know this tale turned out happily for all concerned: Breathless did enter the pantheon, and Godard the revolutionary succeeded in bringing about something new. (It would have been a very different feature had Linklater alighted upon Godard after his rupture from Truffaut and the collapse of his political project in the late 1970s: Nouvelle Vague returns us to Godard at a good time.) But it also captures exactly that life Godard set out to film; it films Paris as Godard filmed Paris. It says a lot about the devaluing of the cinematic art that - despite a Netflix push - neither the film's production design nor its costuming have been recognised during this awards season (where the olde-worlde theme park of Hamnet has repeatedly), and it was a particular feat of casting to assemble actors who, without lapsing into flat impersonation, summon the spirit of both these individuals and their moment. Linklater's footage really does look remarkably like Breathless, or as Breathless would have been shot at the time - but it pulls back appreciably from Godard's singleminded-bordering-on-monomaniacal worldview in favour of a more compassionate and all-embracing perspective. Linklater films Godard as Renoir would have filmed Godard: he sees the youthful visionary, while also acknowledging the giant pain in the arse he might have been from time to time and celebrating the enduring art that he and his comrades created. True, it's a little inside-baseball, or whatever the Parisian equivalent would be. (Inside boules?) But if you have any love for these films, these names, these people, Nouvelle Vague is pure delight: one to show any students about to take their own creative first steps - alors voilà, mes amis, ceci is 'ow you make du cinéma - and the single best trailer Breathless has had in 65-odd years, a film to send you gambolling back to the source. "History gets richer," Truffaut notes late on, in a characteristically gentler attempt to form a Godardian pensée. As these last two films have amply illustrated, it really does when Linklater gets a hold of it.

Nouvelle Vague is now playing in selected cinemas.

"Iron Lung" (Guardian 02/02/26)

Iron Lung **

Dir: Mark Fischbach [aka Markiplier]. With: Mark Fischbach, Caroline Kaplan, Troy Baker, Elsie Lovelock. 127 mins. Cert: 15

Things change, even as William Goldman’s old showbiz maxim continues to apply: nobody still knows anything. The surprise hit of the past weekend wasn’t the much-trumpeted Melania, but a different type of horror movie: the independently financed Iron Lung, smuggled without the usual promotional hoopla into multiplexes, where it was keenly awaited by the massed followers of its Hawaiian writer-director-star Mark Fischbach, better known as YouTube gaming legend Markiplier. Most of us have long sensed culture is making a decisive break with the analogue in favour of the (perhaps terminally) online. Fischbach’s film makes that paradigm shift not just visible but visceral: it feels not unlike spending twelve hours on Twitch with all the curtains closed.

Though Markiplier’s approaching the genre from a notionally fresh angle – in adapting Dave Szymanski’s titular space-submarine sim – he lands on the narratively rusty idea of an astronaut straying beyond his depth: it’s Moon in dimmer light. Beset by ominous rumbles and mounting doubts about the state of mankind, the begrimed and squalid craft singlehandedly piloted by Fischbach’s straggle-haired convict Simon is indistinguishable from the average teenage bedroom; our hero staggers round this intergalactic deathtrap completing vaguely specified missions – ram this, repair that, download something or other – like a harassed dad ticking off his Sunday to-do list. In this, Simon proves more proficient than Fischbach’s offscreen self, either stumped by or oblivious to the film’s fundamental issues.

Hopes of discovering a new Dark Star are soon sunk by the depressive tone, leaden pacing and near-total absence of spectacle; a radio-play script insistently has to tell, because this barebones production has nothing much to show. (The achievement, chiefly entrepreneurial, is almost admirably perverse: Markiplier has steered folks towards content that makes Solaris seem like Con Air.) Even if it takes major Main Character Syndrome to centre yourself for two-plus hours while relegating your co-stars to voices off, Fischbach holds steady before the camera: more money and bigger sets will doubtless come his way. But he can’t pull off the dramatic heavy lifting required here to convert a short’s worth of plot into a beneficial feature. At least Mr. Beast’s stunts get him some occasional fresh air.

Iron Lung is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

In memoriam: Jayasree Kabir (Guardian 29/01/26)

Few performers’ careers have encompassed both discovery by Satyajit Ray and working opposite sometime Likely Lad James Bolam. Yet this was the distinction the actress Jayasree Kabir, who has died aged 73, achieved while shifting between the southern and northern hemispheres as work and family commitments required. Launched while still a teenager in Ray’s 1970 film Pratidwandi/The Adversary, Kabir compiled a modest yet highly selective list of credits, including several key titles of the Bangladeshi cinema, before making her final screen appearance in a 2004 episode of the BBC’s primetime ratings winner New Tricks.

The Adversary – adapted from a Sunil Ganguly novel, and the first film in what became known as Ray’s Calcutta trilogy – found the revered Indian director pulling his cinema in a new direction and shape, seemingly under the influence of early Godard and New Hollywood films. Emerging in the same year as Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces, to which it suggested an Eastern equivalent, the drama pounded the city’s neon-lit streets in the company of Dhritiman Chatterjee’s Siddhartha, a disillusioned college dropout on a punishing quest for gainful employment and satisfaction besides.

The 17-year-old Kabir, then billed by her maiden name Jayasree Roy, was cast as Keya, the wide-eyed family friend who calls a passing Siddhartha into her family’s home to repair a blown fuse, briefly lifts the clouds from the protagonist’s head (“what is the point of seeing the darker side of everything?”) and offers him renewed reason to persist, even as he’s finally driven into exile. Her beguiling stillness contrasted with her swain’s restless agitation: as Kabir later told the writer Bulbul Hasan, Ray “expected precision, but he also made you feel that the camera would capture exactly what you offered — nothing more, nothing less.”

The film proved a success, winning three prizes at India’s National Film Awards, including Best Director and Screenplay for Ray. (It was also voted the second best Indian film of that year, after the Kannada social drama Samskara.) Yet Kabir admitted that this professional breakthrough owed a great deal to chance. 

She had been born in Calcutta on June 22, 1952; towards the end of her studies at the city’s South Point School, she entered the Miss Calcutta beauty pageant on a whim – “the event was being held in [the restaurant] Firpo’s, where my father had taken me for dinner” – and promptly won, catching Ray’s eye during his search for new faces.“Winning Miss Calcutta opened doors,” Kabir recalled, “but it was only a beginning. Cinema demanded something different — something deeper. I was fortunate to meet remarkable people early on.” 

In the wake of The Adversary, she continued to work in the Bengali-language cinema, appearing in Dinen Gupta’s Ajker Nayak/Today’s Hero (1972) and opposite local star Samit Bhanja in Ajit Lahiri’s Ek Bindu Sukh/One Point Happiness (1977). Yet her most important films of this period were made in conjunction with the Bangladeshi critic-turned-director Alamgir Kabir, whom she met through Ray and married in 1975. 

After collaborating on Surjo Konna/Daughter of the Sun (1975), a romantic fantasy about an artist looking for love, the pair began work on the enduring Shimana Periye/Across the Fringe (1977), a riff on Lina Wertmuller’s Marxist melodrama Swept Away (1974), which saw Jayasree’s privileged Tina wash up on a desert island opposite a lowly boatman in the wake of a cyclone. The film was a notable success, winning four awards at Bangladesh’s National Film Awards; Jayasree’s lipsynched performance of the keening love song “Bimurto Ei Ratri Amar” – written by Bhupen Hazarika, sung by Abida Sultana – passed into regional cinematic legend.  

A further success followed with the urban corruption drama Rupali Shaikate/The Loner (1979), yet the pair’s personal and professional bonds had begun to fray. Upon separating from her husband, Jayasree left Dhaka to return to Calcutta, before uprooting to East London with Shourov, her son by Kabir; in the UK, she initially supported herself by teaching English at a higher-education college and providing voiceover work for the BBC and Channel 4. It was while in England that she learnt of her husband’s death, after a 1989 accident in which his car was pushed off a ferry by a speeding truck.

Adapting to British life proved a challenge, as she recalled in a 2003 interview: “I had cut myself off from acting and the media… I was finding it difficult to juggle a demanding career [while] bringing up my son as a single parent. Now, with my son settled in his career, I can consider projects which have long been buried in my mind.” She went on to take two further supporting roles on British TV: in the BBC’s white-nationalism drama England Expects (2004) and in “Painting on Loan”, the second ever episode of New Tricks, where she appeared huddled and scarified – and speaking Bengali – as the victim of a racist firebombing.

Thereafter, Jayasree shied away from the spotlight, although she maintained a regular presence at and eventually became a patron of the Rainbow International Film Festival – held annually at the Genesis cinema in Mile End – where she kept a watchful and nurturing eye on cinematic developments in her former homeland; as late as a 2010 interview, she noted “it shouldn't be difficult to improve the standard of Bangladeshi films with the aid of technology. Young filmmakers need to take the initiative towards that end.”

She is survived by Shourov.

Jayasree Kabir, actress, born June 22, 1952, died January 12, 2026.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of January 23-25, 2025):

1 (2) The Housemaid (15)

2 (3) Hamnet (12A) **

3 (1) 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (18) ****

4 (4) Avatar: Fire and Ash (12A) ***

5 (6) Zootropolis 2 (PG)

6 (5) Marty Supreme (15) ***

7 (new) Saipan (15)

8 (new) No Other Choice (15) ****

9 (new) Mercy (12A)

10 (new) Return to Silent Hill (15)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Nouvelle Vague

2. No Other Choice

3. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

4. The History of Sound

5. The Voice of Hind Rajab

 

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (10) Sinners (15) ****

2 (4) 28 Years Later (15) ****

3 (1) Wicked: For Good (PG)

4 (2) The Running Man (15) **

5 (3) Predator: Badlands (12) **

6 (6) Dracula (15)

7 (9) One Battle After Another (15) ****

8 (17) Black Phone 2 (18)

9 (new) Bugonia (15) **

10 (8) Five Nights at Freddy's 2 (15)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. One Battle After Another

2. Roofman

3. Sketch

4. F1: The Movie

5. Cloud

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. A Matter of Life and Death (Saturday, BBC Two, 12.40pm)

2. Name Me Lawand (Thursday, Channel 4, 2.50am)

3. The Man Who Would Be King [above] (Saturday, BBC Two, 3.20pm)

4. Till (Wednesday, BBC Two, 11.30pm)

5. Shaun the Sheep Movie (Saturday, BBC One, 2.10pm)

One more chance: "Is This Thing On?"

The third and least persuasive of Bradley Cooper's films about performers and performance (after 2018's A Star is Born and 2023's Maestro), Is This Thing On? also serves, as you may be aware, as an origin story for the comedian John Bishop. This instantly poses a minor problem for British viewers, who may start to hear whatever jokes there are in this tale of an accidental stand-up both in star Will Arnett's wheedling baritone and Bishop's vibrant Scouse. (They may also recall Bishop once took a highish-profile acting gig himself in Ken Loach's semi-forgotten Route Irish.) The theme Cooper and Arnett (who co-writes, riffing on his friend Bishop's early career) are pursuing is how certain men express themselves. Arnett's protagonist Alex is a middle-aged sadsack - even his fringe seems aimless, set to "floppy masculinity" - who drifts into a New York comedy club upon separating from wife Tess (Laura Dern); he takes his first steps along the tightrope of open-mic comedy principally to avoid paying a steep cover charge. Earning the nickname "sad guy" from his peers on account of his heart-on-sleeve material, he fumbles his way towards something like proficiency, and eventually comes to have the conversations he should have had with his wife over the 25 years of their relationship, earning himself a second chance at love. If that sounds a little route-one even for a multiplex-bound romcom, well, it is: the tryhard Cooper of Maestro is here replaced by Cooper the people-pleaser, giving the audience the happy ending they might seek of a Friday or Saturday night. Is This Thing On? is ultimately to John Bishop what 2013's One Chance was to the Britain's Got Talent winner Paul Potts; this being Hollywood, however, Bishop gets his mate Will Arnett to play him, where Potts had to settle for James Bloody Corden.

It's on all right, in that Cooper is alert to passing comedy-club detail, and to how two grown-ups with a child to raise might fill their days and nights in the wake of a separation. But is it funny? Not as funny as Judd Apatow's underrated Funny People, for one, a film that approached the same milieu (and much the same male midlife crisis) with plentiful gags scribbled over its sweaty palms. Alex's routines are forever more heartfelt than fully hilarious, and Cooper has to resort to blundering on himself to try and up the laugh rate, playing a klutzy actor apparently going by the name Balls. His film subscribes to the same therapised idea of stand-up that resulted in Hannah Gadsby's Nanette, a comedy special that was funny only up to a point; though several real-life stand-ups appear alongside Alex, the film isn't especially interested in the comedy club as a place where jokes are told, rather as a community where people can find one another, maybe even themselves. This script makes that tricky process seem very easy, though; the appreciable complications of A Star Is Born and Maestro are notable by their absence here. Maybe Bishop's other half really did walk by chance into a club where the comic was pouring out his heart; in a movie, however, it comes over as purest Hollywood hokum. (Cooper might have got away with this once, but he later pulls the same trick with Alex's dad Ciaran Hinds: it's amazing how many people with no stated interest in comedy just happen to drop by this club and pay this cover charge at the exact moment Alex is onstage making amends.) Likewise, when Alex and Tess's twenty-five years of (minor) relationship grievances finally get addressed, it's in one neat and tidy conversation, the movie's own tight five. (At least Marriage Story had someone punch through a wall.) When Is This Thing On? isn't being blandly placid - two nice folks shruggingly call it a day, shruggingly try other things, then shruggingly reunite - it can seem pretty flimsy and trifling: a sweet little anecdote that hasn't quite been scaled up to become a satisfying movie. In 2026, no-one would expect a studio movie to align with the Louis CK view of comedy-cellar and divorced-dad life, but Arnett is more Lennie Bennett than Lenny Bruce; faced with this silly-haired sap, working through his woes without providing any substantial laughs in return, it's a miracle this New York crowd don't boo or bottle him off. Even they're too nice.

Is This Thing On? is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

On demand: "Devo"

You might expect Chris Smith's documentary on the wacky, borderline cartoonish New Wave funsters Devo to be all wacky, borderline cartoonish fun times. Not so: barely ten minutes have passed before we find founder members Gerald Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh recalling how their outlook was shaped by being on campus during the Kent State massacre of 1970. Like their fellow students, these were kids born into that post-War idyll, raised to believe the future was theirs, only to find themselves coming of age in an America where everything appeared to be going murderously backwards. (Heaven knows how today's kids are supposed to relate.) So the pals invented a philosophy of their own - de-evolution - collaged together from cult texts, old movies, cool images and odd sounds, intended either to meet the moment head-on or blow a giant raspberry in the moment's direction. Whether it made sense or not was a moot point: did Nixonism make any sense, or Vietnam, or Kent State? The whole endeavour was far out from the off. Smith has dug up footage of the group's first college gig, wherein Mothersbaugh proceeded to play a self-described "headache solo" for the first fifteen minutes, whittling a crowd of twenty down to just two; the tyre factory workers of their native Akron, Ohio soon chased Devo off the local bar scene, angered by their refusal to play conventional blues covers. (A later, skittering Stones deconstruction would be as far as they travelled in that direction.) They were arguably lucky to get a leg up into the business at the moment of punk and post-punk, when heads were being expanded and rulebooks ripped up. Suddenly anything was possible again - and yet, even then, Devo came to occupy a curious position in American pop culture.

They were anti-punk, for starters: thinkers rather than snarlers, more nerd than jock. The band's unlikely guest appearances on the late-night talkshow circuit, collated here, reveal they weren't burn-it-all-down nihilists but sometime poptimists who'd actually been given reason to believe in something: a better, brighter future for all. They bamboozled the industry's suits, at this point more accustomed to selling Boston and Bad Company records. But their fellow artists got them, which helped: illustrious boosters included Bowie, Iggy, Lennon, even the relatively straight-edged Neil Young, who cast the band in one of his fillums. The public, for their part, were largely perplexed, ignoring the subversive undercurrents of the musically irresistible "Whip It" to make it a big hit in the US (in the UK, it barely registered either on radio playlists or the charts), but then looking on somewhat askance, as if Devo were a joke they didn't entirely get. Sustained commercial success was therefore beyond them, but they found some sort of niche after the newfangled MTV revealed this merry band of pranksters as fully-formed visual artists; stumbled across on the outer reaches of the cable dial, they might have seemed like a new Spiders from Mars, aliens who'd landed at the right time in the right place to disrupt and otherwise undermine the heavily commercialised dumbness and reactionary nostalgia of Ronald Reagan's America. Smith now encourages the group's surviving contingent to interrupt the Netflix schedule of fear-sowing true crime, fatuous comedy specials and flimsy, instantly forgettable stunts in order to report back on the failure of their initial mission.

For a while, Devo were able to fold their own co-option by the mainstream back into their work: the closer they got to the heart of showbusiness, the more de-evolution they could identify, record and lampoon. The camera withdraws from an apparently fractious press call where the message is "we're not having any fun right now" to reveal the messengers of the band are, to a man, reclining on beanbags. Create your own world and your own logic, as Devo did, and you can either stand to the side of or hover above everybody else's. They remain a fascinating study for what they had to say about America: as the country passed all too rapidly from its civil rights era through deindustrialisation to adopt a new, wholesome corporate-lifestyle sheen, the music - all riddles and puns, slogans and sightgags, boneheaded riffs and banal repetitions - took on the air of a Dadaist commentary on the backwardness of things. (There was no immediate British equivalent: you'd have to mash up elements of Madness, the Art of Noise, Half Man Half Biscuit and the Fall - and a little of the KLF's self-mythologising - to get close.) Almost as interesting is what these refuseniks in silly hats have to say about pop itself: that it can be simultaneously smart and dumb, conceptual and lowbrow, that it often gets into your head by punching up from your gut. These now-seasoned musicians are better placed than their dorky former selves to evaluate the band's ambitions and ideas, and to express their disappointment at the way this project - and the world that went unchanged by it, de-evolving now for a full half-century - turned out. But it's not all bad news: Devo generated a whole archive's worth of funny, peculiar, provocative images and sounds, just waiting for the right filmmaker to raid it. Smith's very engaging retrospective ends with a Max Ernst quote that doesn't at all feel out of place, and it's also the only corner of Netflix where you're going to find trace remnants of a Bruce Conner film: 1978's Mongoloid, no less.

Devo is now streaming via Netflix.

Headhunters: "No Other Choice"

The new Park Chan-wook thriller No Other Choice is notable as a further development in East-West cinematic relations: it finds the director and his now-regular Canadian collaborator Don McKellar adapting the US author Donald E. Westlake's bloody job-market satire The Ax in ways that reflect local Korean customs while also chiming with international cinemagoers whose day jobs are threatened by the AI the powers-that-be are presently pushing down our throats. It's teachable in how it sets up the entire basis of its two hour twenty minute plot in two early sequences. Park opens with a portrait of a family: salaryman dad tending a barbecue on the rolling lawn outside his expensive-looking home, his wife delighting in the chi-chi shoes he's bought for her, two model children rhyming with the family's two adorable golden retrievers. Early autumn leaves confetti over a sunkissed scene of bliss that will never quite be the same again; when we return to it late on - Park remaining, as ever, a stickler for evocative visual symmetries - it will be pissing it down with rain, one of those children will have been exposed as a delinquent, and dad will have buried a corpse under that lawn. Sequence two is a study of a workplace characterised by threat above all else: heavy machinery encouraged to operate at giddying fairground speed in the pursuit of greater productivity and profits, perishable men in overalls - the most vulnerable part of the whole enterprise - standing round below, oblivious to the fact they're in the process of being laid off by this paper factory's American owners. You immediately know why Lee Byung-hun's just-fired Yoo Man-su embarks upon a kill-crazy rampage in a bid to protect the lifestyle (and, just perhaps, the people) he loves; cause, effect and stakes are all established inside ten minutes.

Getting the plot out of the way allows Park to start having fun; indeed, there are long stretches in No Other Choice where you may be persuaded that no-one in world cinema is currently having more fun doing their job than Park Chan-wook. After the romantic agonies of 2022's Decision to Leave, the new film is baroque in a different, distinct way: it's a deluxe snakes-and-ladders board, and this filmmaker is moving all the pieces around. Initially, there is humiliation and debasement, as Man-su tries, with little success, to re-enter the job market, only to see less worthy individuals promoted in his place. (Again, Park puts all this on screen with admirable economy: often it requires one scene, and sometimes merely one gesture, to set these rat bastards up.) Then there begins the blackly comic revenge, as Man-su adopts murder as his new nine-to-five, identifying and taking out all those who might now stand between himself and gainful employment. (Becoming, in effect, his own kind of headhunter.) In these setpieces, Park seems to have metabolised Frank Tashlin's live-action cartoons and many, many miles of comic strip, the better to tell this story in predominantly visual fashion. Take Man-su's plan to brain one rival using a pot plant dropped from the roof above: the pot plants get bigger and bigger, the weightiest among them drips water all over the protagonist's head and face, and it never gets dropped anyway because Man-su is interrupted, at his fullest extension, by the plants' greenfingered keeper, a disapproving old woman with a hall-of-fame disapproving old woman face. 

At times like these, we seem to be watching a high-functioning filmmaker amusing himself, making thrillers for the hell of it. Park cannot shoot two characters walking through the woods without introducing a third party blundering through the back of frame; he converts the humdrum sight of a car reversing out of a parking spot into a symphony of crunched gears; and he pulls off something both mischievous and mysterious with the idea of an apple tree planted in a fertiliser bed of human carcass and stolen iPhones. (You fear for the fruit, while also wondering whether this is just an elaborate dad gag involving the word apple.) It's all (just about) related to the plot; still, very few filmmakers would fill in this plot like this. Park, too, has no other choice: he's impelled to fashion rich, textured images, to set images atop images, or images within images, as when Man-su's wife (Son Ye-jin) Facetimes her husband at the exact moment a stranger is sucking the poison from a snakebite on his calf. (Again, it has something to do with the plot; it also confirms a suspicion, born while watching Decision to Leave, that no-one has thought more extensively and more rewardingly than Park about how to integrate cellphone technology into our movies.) No other filmmaker currently working is more committed to giving their audience more for their money on a frame-by-frame basis - I'm excluding James Cameron, currently trapped in a cycle (of his own making) of giving us more of the same - but the risk is that a film like this becomes clotted, that the mechanisms of the thriller get bunged up with such ebullient imagemaking. You will, in short, see many more streamlined thrillers in 2026. (Why, there's a new Jason Statham vehicle out this very Friday.)

There are points where No Other Choice begins to seem farcical, somewhat overblown: the first assassination sequence, set to deafening rock music, climaxes in three squabbling characters simultaneously reaching for the gun that's tumbled under a sideboard. (And also yields the image that best encapsulates Park's millefeuille of imagery: our assassin is wearing a plastic glove under a regular glove, with an oven glove on top of that.) At other times, it can seem surfacey, a mere doodle, where Decision to Leave layered up the mysteries of human desire. Yet this narrative does wind its way towards landing a serious and substantial point: Man-su finds out - the hard way - that those he's setting out to slaughter are really not so unlike him, being sadsacks and drunkards, unreliable providers who've spent much of their working lives being screwed over by a system that does not give a shit. If they banded together - as they threaten to in places - they could help each other out, whether to form a support group or the union we hear being discussed in the opening moments. But capitalism - with its mechanisms of need and greed - has conspired to set them against one another; these men end up as divided as Korea itself, or the US, or indeed the UK. The title is internalised rhetoric, passed down from management to labour along with the pink slip and the P45: you can, it seems, remove the man from the system, but you can only take the system out of the man in the same way you can extract a rotten wisdom tooth - with much effort and pain, and possibly a large pair of pliers. That's still quite a lot to pull out of a night at the movies, and it stems from the legibility of these images, both in terms of their framing (cf: one painterly shot of a curving, leaf-strewn path leading down to a getaway car) and in the narrative information Park has to impart to carry this twisted tale from A to B. No Other Choice probably won't linger as long in the mind as Decision to Leave, but it's a hell of a lot of fun while it lasts: a filmmaker operating close to the peak of his storytelling powers, elbowing his way back into our consciousness with a well-constructed, superlatively illustrated joke.

No Other Choice is now playing in selected cinemas.

Past lives: "The History of Sound"

When one thinks of the musicologist Alan Lomax, touring the American hinterlands in the middle decades of the 20th century to find, record and preserve the folk songs passed down from one generation to the next, one tends to imagine a somewhat solitary endeavour: a man, a knapsack, some doubtless rudimentary recording equipment. (In fact, documents show Lomax embarked on several such song-gathering missions in good company, including with his first and second wives.) The History of Sound, the latest film from the South African wanderer Oliver Hermanus (Beauty, Moffie, Living), proposes something more romantic - and tragic - yet: two queer men pursuing a similar path, who set out on their own expedition in post-WW1 America and find a connection through music that they struggle to maintain amid the more prosaic business of everyday life. David (Josh O'Connor) and Lionel (Paul Mescal) meet as students at the New England Conservatory of Music in 1917, bonding over an old song around the piano. (David plays, Lionel sings.) These are solitary-seeming men - when David invites Lionel back to his place, they have to share the one usable cup - who begin to plough an obscure furrow, determining to record American folk songs on wax cylinders for future study. That cup isn't the only thing the pair come to share over the two hours of Hermanus' film: as well as an interest, David and Lionel share a certain sensitivity, a tent, several nights together in the woods, and the burdens of passing into and hearing out a world at war. But this was early 20th century America, where sustained harmony between two gay men was difficult, if not impossible. Going solo, in this instance, may well have been the easier option.

Even before Hermanus - working from two short stories by the the author and nature boy Ben Shattuck - conspires to keep his leads apart for long stretches (like I said: solitary men), it's clear The History of Sound isn't the film the Internet's more excitable denizens would have wanted for their current boyfriends Mescal and O'Connor. Hermanus is once again trading in restraint, delicacy, in quiet, noble, dignified suffering; anybody coming this way in the hope of witnessing lusty bum fun would be more usefully rerouted towards the Heated Rivalry boxset. This is a film that knows but two seasons - autumn and winter, leaving the rending of garments unlikely at best - and where the soundtrack shuffles between two states: poignant silences and old, sad songs. (The more of the latter our boys collect together, the deeper in they get.) The key line actually isn't a lyric, rather the young David reminding Lionel early on in their courtship that everyone he knows will some day die: Shattuck and Hermanus immediately stamp this relationship with an expiration date - as Living did Bill Nighy's terminally ill functionary - while also raising the hope that some vibration, some trace, will live on into the present, much as these songs have done. You can understand why the Mescal and O'Connor fanbases have been far less vocal about History than they have about these newly ubiquitous actors' other awards-season contenders: Hermanus has taken two of the western world's notionally hotter male performers and tipped several pails of cold water over their heads. You come away from the film experiencing not the vapours, but a lingering chill of mortality.

And yet the film has virtues besides. As shot by Alexander Dynan (First Reformed), it's classically handsome - almost as notable an illustration of what can be done on an indie budget as The Brutalist was - if by definition muted. (At least as muted as the reaction.) Instead of happiness, we get melancholy; the palette consists of two shades, brown and beige. At its centre, there stand two men tamping down every feeling they have until it's too late, who remain on some level strangers to themselves; the music is a form of expression to which they personally don't seem to have access, so it's no surprise they covet these songs as they do. (Contemporary onlookers may well be reminded of those vinyl junkies who will go to the ends of the earth to track down a rare album, but who can't seem to talk to their immediate loved ones.) Mescal and O'Connor make for a pretty credible match here, offering distinct notes to the film much as Lionel and David sing in different keys on their walks through the woods, and Hadley Robinson - a new face to me - is mightily touching as the third party who fills in some of the narrative gaps as History pans out. The film can't reach the expressive heights of this decade's strongest period romance, Mona Fastvold's The World to Come, which opened up the possibility of queer joy and delight, to potential liberation; an extended coda, featuring an actor you may not have seen for some while and a more resonant Eighties needledrop than anything in Marty Supreme, suggests neither Shattuck nor Hermanus really knew how and where to end it. Still, it's largely absorbing and textured viewing, and the one Paul Mescal film this season where the abundant craft feels fully and attentively inhabited: this history is lived-in, just briefly and unhappily, as so many lives of this particular period surely would have been.

The History of Sound is now showing in selected cinemas.

Power out: "The Voice of Hind Rajab"

The Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania broke through via the festival circuit with her 2023 feature Four Daughters, a drama-documentary hybrid that sought to give a fuller picture of the circumstances whereby two young women were inspired to flee their family home and run off with ISIS. Glowing reports from first responders helped land it a theatrical run, where this viewer was mostly struck by the film's determination to tie itself and the viewer up in knots: it wasn't by any definition pure documentary, but neither did it make for especially satisfying fiction. (It did, in its roundabout fashion, get to some understanding of the muddle the world and its people are in nowadays.) In longshot, The Voice of Hind Rajab appears exactly the kind of commercially-minded consolidation emergent arthouse directors are now expected to make second time around. In its form, this is a command-room procedural drama-slash-thriller, with the call-centre operatives of the Palestinian Red Crescent's West Bank station racing against time to rescue a six-year-old girl trapped in a car that now contains the bodies of her just-deceased aunt, uncle and cousins, having been pinned down at a gas station by Israeli tank fire. There is, however, a formal complication that carries us back in the direction of Four Daughters: the cries for help we hear coming through the phone jockeys' headsets are those of the actual Hind Rajab, a real-life six-year-old who here serves as a representative of the estimated 20,000 children killed by Israeli forces in the march to reduce Gaza to rubble and then a Trump-endorsed holiday and tourism resort. Ben Hania obtained permission from Hind's mother to repurpose the call, and now - as that title indicates - the voice of Hind Rajab has been given renewed prominence over everything else around it; the now Oscar-nominated movie that bears this name, produced by Brad Pitt's Plan B shingle, is a loudhailer upgrade of the call centre's speaker systems, constructed to carry these particular cries and wails around the globe in extra-thumping, extra-damning Dolby surround.

It is, then, a tricky one to have to assess, think and write about: a film that is, in some essential respect, inseparable from a cause. The sense the usual rules of cinematic engagement don't apply is only heightened by the fact that, on its current UK release, The Voice of Hind Rajab is being preceded by a prerecorded message from Ben Hania herself, on the set of her next project, apologising for not being with us in person (were we expecting her?), thanking us for coming to see the film, and urging us to tell our friends and loved ones about it - an intervention that risks coming across as either special pleading or directorial insecurity that the film won't entirely speak for itself. (The last time we got an intro like this it was Spielberg ahead of The Fabelmans, apparently stricken by uncertainty around releasing a personal project in the aftermath of Covid.) In fact, Voice does succeed in carrying and projecting a certain amount of critical information. The film's procedural drama makes a point of how hard it was to get into and out of the Gaza of January 2024, and how hard it was for Gazans to communicate with the outside world. The initial call comes from a relative in Germany, alerting the Red Crescent to a possible tragedy in their midst; when they make contact with Hind, the line's prone to dropping out and not great at the best of times, because the Israeli army have jammed comms to some degree; and dispatching an ambulance proves a challenge in itself, given that the Red Crescent required Israeli clearance to proceed, and their drivers were navigating streets bombed beyond all previous recognition. Any urgency is further stymied by the need to nudge requests up the chain of command: here, Ben Hania begins to recreate within this humdrum office space the kind of asymmetrical warfare going on outside, pitting heroes who feel obliged to do the right thing - to follow the rulebook - against an enemy busy killing without compunction. The call-centre workers are in some way surrogates for those of us in the audience: they're hearing what we're hearing, trying to piece this situation together; they, too, are at a potentially fatal remove from the action; they too react with horror and tears. In the meantime, all they can do is discuss among themselves, and here again Voice circles back to the perilously talky Four Daughters.

To some extent, what we're being asked to review here isn't a film or a story, rather a tape. The tape is important, in that it holds both proof of life and evidence of possible, prosecutable war crimes; so long as it keeps running, we know Hind Rajab is still alive. But a transcript isn't a script, and here's where one might begin to question some of Ben Hania's methods and choices. The Red Crescent workers have time to talk, such was the on-the-ground impasse of Gaza at this point, yet once the initial scene-setting info has been obtained, there's very little more that the protagonists can say. They can keep Hind talking, which is proof of some humanity; they can ask her to describe developments (thereby putting images in our head that this largely deskbound film cannot show), say a prayer and carry out breathing exercises. But they can't, ultimately, keep her from harm; the satisfying progression of the command-room drama is here replaced by gridlock, snafu and circumlocution, recasting characters who'd conventionally be can-do heroes as passive, can't-do eavesdroppers. More problematic is how Ben Hania confirms our standing as mere observers. At the film's climax, one aid worker's hand is seen to puncture the frame, clutching cellphone footage of the scene in the actual call centre on January 29, 2024. I think it's been put there to underline the verisimilitude of Ben Hania's re-enactment - it's the pixellated equivalent of those photos she inserts in the closing credits to highlight the real aid workers - but as has so often been the case during this conflict, we're really just left looking at a phone and frowning. Voice is a simpler undertaking than Four Daughters: if you can't conceive of the tens of thousands killed in Gaza, Ben Hania proposes, here's one life, held in the balance over ninety minutes. And if you need your cinema to make you feel something for it to be considered successful, Voice is inarguably that. The primary feeling it instilled in me, however, was a very familiar powerlessness. Whether it was consoling invention or not, the hijacked passengers of Paul Greengrass's United 93 finally got to fight back against those who'd been terrorising them. The question Ben Hania's film trails in its wake is altogether more troubling, not to mention doomerist: if committed professionals not an hour away from the scene with connections coming out of their ears couldn't do anything to halt the Israeli war machine as it bore down on a defenceless innocent, what hope do you or I have?

The Voice of Hind Rajab is now showing in selected cinemas.