Anatomy of a murder: "The Unfaithful Wife/La Femme Infidèle"

The flagship film of the BFI's current Claude Chabrol season, 1969's La Femme Infidèle, lures us in: it opens in sundappled soft focus, before allowing the scrutiny of its characters to become harsher by the frame. Insurance broker Charles (Michel Bouquet) lives in apparent bliss on the outskirts of Paris with his wife Hélène (Stéphane Audran), the very model of a lady of leisure, and the couple's bright young son. Darker clouds blow in after Charles discovers Hélène has been spending her leisure time in the arms of another man, yet when he goes to confront her lover, Victor (Maurice Ronet), the conversation is initially very cordial (and decidedly French): the men bond over the body they've shared, and the husband - with a characteristic degree of condescension - blithely dismisses the affair as just another of his wife's so-called "adventures". It's cordial, that is, up until the point Charles feels compelled to take a marble bust to the other man's bonce. Now Chabrol begins to bear down and hone in, hunting something more psychologically revealing: Bouquet's extensive clean-up of the murder scene, undertaken in much the same committed silence as the heist in Rififi, serves to (further) feminise a protagonist already stricken by the nagging doubt he doesn't measure up as a man. Just when you think the film might develop outwards and explore the consequences of this rash act of violence, it instead folds inwards; a later interrogation of the chief suspect takes place over the dinner table, in the family's home and garden. (The sting, when it comes, is that those who slay together usually stay together.) Chabrol relies heavily on a discordant Pierre Jansen/Dominique Zardi score to draw out these characters' mounting mental unrest, but he also picks up on several subtly unsettling signifiers: a lost TV signal, a crucial jigsaw piece going AWOL. Audran's reptilian beauty holds up remarkably well under the duress, while Bouquet's thin-lipped, blandly amenable smile serves to conceal all manner of frustrations and insecurities. Adrian Lyne reheated the premise for the modern multiplex with 2002's Unfaithful, casting Richard Gere and Diane Lane as the husband and wife, but this forensic original remains genuinely fascinating in its froideur.

The Unfaithful Wife/La Femme Infidèle returns to selected cinemas from Friday; the BFI's Chabrol season runs until October 6.

"Knightfall" (Guardian 08/09/26)

Knightfall **

Dir: Ben Fortune. With: Jeanine Nerissa Sothcott, Ian Ogilvy, Nick Moran, Geoffrey Moore. 82 mins. Cert: 15

Proceeding from an old-school titling pun – yes, the heroine goes by the name Ros Knight – the latest from the resourceful microbudget producer Jonathan Sothcott surely has one optimistic eye on filling the void left by the withdrawal of 007 from public life. Here is that gender-flipped Bond some have been seeking: the adventures of a no-nonsense, tough-talking security operative (Jeanine Nerissa Sothcott) tasked with recovering a lethal bioweapon pilfered from a scaled-down Porton Down during the prologue. Everything, in truth, proves a bit reined-in. This austerity actioner spends less on its setpieces than the Broccolis typically have on keeping one Aston Martin refueled; the Sothcotts’ car of choice, emblematically, is the dinkiest of Minis.

So it’s Bond without the attendant glamour, hanging around drizzly marinas and parky-looking country lanes, in dim light that hopefully obscures some of the more obvious budgetary limitations. What money there is here has wisely been spent on human resources, faces who might still look good on the promotional material: a cameoing Michael Paré as a shady Felix Leiter type, Roger Moore’s son Geoffrey as our gal’s understandably worried-looking lover, Nick Moran giving cut-price Colin Firth as a meddling bureaucrat. The pick of the players is a spry, characterful Ian Ogilvy as Ros’s estranged father, helpfully identifying where the real power lies on a chessboard and generally steadying scenes whenever matters seem a bit too threadbare.

Despite the brassy parps of Logan Jones’s score, there’s nothing much to give Eon sleepless nights. Though director Ben Fortune keeps his careworn world-domination plot moving and just this side of coherent, those action scenes don’t build tension so much as deconstruct the very idea of it, setting Sothcott and Ogilvy to plodding around the garden in the dead of night, taking out the gunmen behind the polytunnel; the grand finale involves a Mexican standoff in someone’s front room. What would already have seemed antiquated circa Bourne risks redundancy in the Slow Horses era, where the tattiness is fully costed and integrated. Still, Knightfall holds onto a certain nostalgic charm: a bizarro-world vision of Bond in severely straitened circumstances, armed only with a licence to kill time.

Knightfall will be available to rent via Prime Video from September 11.

Endless poetry: "Late Fame"

Kent Jones' Late Fame puts some seasoning on that old, old "protagonist drawn into arcane society" plot; the twist is that its protagonist is no wide-eyed naif, rather a character who might conceivably be played by 71-year-old Willem Dafoe. Dafoe's Ed Saxburger was briefly acclaimed as a vital new voice in American poetry at the back end of the 1970s - a phase the film positions as just about the last time a poet might have enjoyed any substantial cultural recognition. A fleeting dayplayer in New York's literary avant-garde - someone whose life once brushed up against Burroughs and Ginsberg - Ed now works for the U.S. Post Office, sorting mail: a steady gig far from any limelight, from which he returns to a small, book-lined flat in the outer boroughs. For some viewers, I suspect, this will seem more than enough: Jones's early scene-setting is likely to induce bookshelf envy in devotees of physical media, who will also want to rifle through every copy of the Village Voice Ed has thought to archive. Yet one night Ed comes home to find an earnest, upright young man waiting for him on an adjacent stoop. Introducing himself as Meyers (Edmund Donovan), he claims to be the spokesperson for a group of latter-day bards who've rediscovered Ed's breakthrough anthology "Way Past Go" and now invite this craggy veteran to perform alongside them at an upcoming event. As Ed starts to sit in on this fresh-faced writing group - recalling Perry Benson among the youthful suedeheads of Shane Meadows' This is England - we're left wondering whether this is a second chance, a third act or merely a dead end. His hosts, after all, are dabblers - rich kids with the trust funds and time to play at being bohemian - whereas some part of Ed is, or maybe was, the real thing.

The source is an Arthur Schnitzler novella, relocated to modern-day Bushwick by Coyote vs. ACME screenwriter Samy Burch and critic-turned-director Jones, and this multitude of inputs and influences gives Late Fame an air of unfolding across several mediums simultaneously. It could be an indie film of a 1990s stripe (given Don Fleming's twangy guitar score, it could well be the most Hal Hartleyish indie not to have been directed by Hartley himself); it could also be a layered, detailed novel set at the intersection of culture and capital. At the very least, you can see why this material spoke to Dafoe, whose Wooster Group remain just about the last troupe standing amid the remnants of New York's countercultural fringe, almost impervious to the past five decades of gentrification. This feels like Dafoe's most fully-dimensional role in a while, allowing the actor to play bashful, bemused and flattered, gentlemanly around Ed's younger actress admirer Gloria (Greta Lee); upon re-entering the poetic fray, however, he betrays flashes of his younger self's arrogance and irascibility. He's realising he cannot possibly live up to his new billing; we come to realise how exposure sometimes exposes all the reasons you never made it in the first place. The all-new Ed Saxburger appears chastened by a world that doesn't really understand him, or that he doesn't really understand: a place of electric cars and influencers, where art seems at best a sidebar. In this nostalgists' bohemia, publishers solicit memoirs rather than new work, and even fervent fans react to you as they would a museum piece: the cruellest line in the picture is Gloria telling Ed "you must have been beautiful when you were young". Between them, Burch, Jones and Dafoe secure our sympathies for Saxburger the artist and Ed the man, even if the supporting characters seem less clearly defined, possibly even unknowable. The filmmakers' strengths reside in evoking a particular milieu: there's a lot of a swaddled Dafoe pounding the cold, hard streets, which may well be the making of an artist but doesn't entirely make for a satisfying narrative. What we're getting here are scenes from the art life, a haiku in film form: in its shrugging, self-effacing way, this handsome, cultured, lived-in miniature offers a few more lines of resistance against the book-burning barbarians now amassing elsewhere.

Late Fame is now playing in selected cinemas.

Island of daft souls: "The Incomer"

The Incomer feels like Universal and Focus Features angling for another The Ballad of Wallis Island - last year's biggest sleeper hit - and landing a very different kettle of fish. It, too, has an island at its centre, but it's a fairly remote one - some distance off the coast of Scotland - and it could scarcely seem less like the restorative safe space on which its notional predecessor unfolded. As we land, Auch Isle's sole residents are a pair of borderline feral siblings: the punningly named Isla (Gayle Rankin) and Sandy (Grant O'Rourke), grown adults who, after the passing of their parents and in the absence of others, have taken to dressing and behaving like little kids, conversing in their own shared language. "Bottom-mess" is their longhand for excrement; "incomers", barely fouler, is their word for arrivals from the mainland, whom the siblings have learnt to mistrust if not violently repel. It seems almost inevitable, then, that an incomer should eventually come in. His name is Daniel (Domhnall Gleeson, restyled with shaggy perm and tousled eyebrows), a council flunky who's been sent this way as the bearer of bad tidings, namely that the siblings are to be evicted and relocated in the name of progress. Our initial expectation is for some kind of culture-clash comedy - Ealing, updated for the age of Wes Anderson - about a buttoned-down normie and the wild-and-woolly weirdos he encounters. Except that Daniel - whose power-dressing boss (Michelle Gomez) takes one look at the action figures on his desk and describes him as a "funny wee onion" - is himself a bit of a weirdo. So it's really three weirdos on an island, then, which wasn't quite what was going down on Wallis Island, and automatically feels like a tougher sell. For those still attempting to get their bearings, we're not all that far away from the Isle of Quirk, but also - happily - within swimming distance of another reference point: the Island of Daft Souls.

What's promising here is that this is palpably the work of an emergent writer-director using finite resources to create their own world. Some part of The Incomer's world is weird itself, borderline horror-adjacent: consider the Wicker Man-like bird costumes the siblings don in a bid to ward off incomers, the selkie-like demon (played by a damp, barely recognisable John Hannah) trying to tempt Isla to follow her mother towards a watery grave, or the last-reel invocation of cannibalism. Yet these Billy No-Mateses, long left to their own devices, start to make sense in this world, and they make you laugh because they make sense in this world. (Perhaps only in this world.) Gleeson earns top billing as a reward for helping to piece the financing together, but The Incomer proves an even better showcase for its Scottish leads. With her naturally downtrodden mouth and disapproving demeanour, Rankin could be Shirley Henderson's little sister; she makes Isla a fiercely protective and proud soul, even as her total lack of worldliness leaves her vulnerable to the elements. (The question this performance poses: what if someone had dropped Emily Watson's Bess from Breaking the Waves into an all-out comedy?) O'Rourke may be even funnier, playing Sandy as essentially a toddler with a beard, delighted to have found, in the ginger weakling Daniel, a brand-new playmate. Paxton has a gift for briskly offbeam characterisation: as played by Emun Elliott, the hard man the council eventually sends in to extricate Daniel turns out to be this world's idea of Jason Statham, performatively rolling out of shot having just washed down some corned beef with a quart of his own piss. It is, granted, another cosy item of post-Brexit British cinema, nervily gesturing towards the stories we tell ourselves and the fraught relationship between small islands and the outsiders in our midst. (Paxton would rather throw in a Lord of the Rings reference, playing to a nerdy home crowd, than pursue that line too far.) It's also so idiosyncratic it can't fail to leave some cinemagoers nonplussed and grumpy. Even those of us beguiled by this disarming latter-day folktale may find it one of those comedies where we laugh and not quite know why we laugh. (Sometimes it's as niche as a specific line inflection: "He's shouting at the sea!") But you are beguiled, and you do laugh.

The Incomer is now showing in selected cinemas.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of August 28-30, 2026):

1 (1) Spider-Man: Brand New Day (12A) ***

2 (2) The Odyssey (15) ***

3 (3) Insidious: Out of the Further (15)

4 (new) Coyote vs. ACME (PG) ***

5 (new) The Dog Stars (15)

6 (4) The End of Oak Street (12A) ***

7 (re) Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (PG) ***

8 (6) Paw Patrol: The Dino Movie (U)

9 (new) One Night Only (15)

10 (9) Toy Story 5 (PG) **

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Shaun the Sheep: Farmageddon

2. Terminator 2: Judgment Day [above]

3. Late Fame

4. The Incomer

5. Fall

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Toy Story 5 (PG) **

2 (2) Obsession (18) *

3 (3) Minions & Monsters (U)

4 (4) Michael (12)

5 (new) jackass: best and last (18)

6 (7) The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (PG)

7 (new) Batman: Knightfall - Part 1: Knightfall (15)

8 (5) Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu (12)

9 (new) Evil Dead Burn (18)

10 (new) The Sheep Detectives (PG)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Power Ballad

2. Rose of Nevada

3. The Stranger

4. Tuner

5. Passenger

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Back to the Future (Sunday, BBC One, 2.45pm)

2. United 93 (Sunday, five, 11.05pm)

3. A Thousand and One (Monday, BBC Two, 11.05pm)

4. Gosford Park (Tuesday, BBC Two, 11.05pm)

5. Evil Does Not Exist (Saturday, BBC Two, 1.35am)

"Faces of Death" (Guardian 04/09/26)

Faces of Death **

Dir: Daniel Goldhaber. With: Barbie Ferreira, Dacre Montgomery, Jermaine Fowler, Charli xcx. 97 mins. Cert: 18

Emerging amid the home-rental boom, John Alan Schwartz’s 1978 film Faces of Death was an ultra-morbid extension of the so-called “mondo” genre, mashing up gruesome footage, much of it faked, some of it legit enough to provoke ghoulish chatter; after achieving sleepover notoriety, it received a further publicity boost upon making the DPP’s “video nasty” list. What follows here is less reboot than postmodern rethink. Daniel Goldhaber, who broke through with 2022’s tense social-activism thriller How to Blow Up a Pipeline, has patched some of the original’s images into a more conventional digital-age horror narrative that initially resembles an American equivalent of Prano Bailey-Bond’s Censor: a film worrying away about what our ravenous eyes now consume and how good it can really be for us.

A thoroughly committed Barbie Ferreira plays Margot, a pill-popping content regulator sequestered within a tech firm’s faceless HQ, attaching appropriate warnings to user-generated footage. Off the clock, she’s dogged by memories (and viral footage) of a horrendous train-track trauma; her workload, meanwhile, gets even more challenging after repurposed Faces of Death clips creep onto her watchlist in pristine HD. Her supervisor (Jermaine Fowler) insists she should wave these through, as DIY horror is doing excellent numbers, but the situation intensifies once it becomes clear a masked psycho (Dacre Montgomery) is staging his own remake, involving real victims. More bodies drop, more pills are popped; and the project’s underlying intelligence, alas, begins to turn against itself.

The stronger stretches gesture towards rigorous critique: consumers glued to bloodied screens, egging one another on, egged on in turn by conscience-free CEOs. Yet they’ve been packaged within a less rigorous commercial horror format, easier to digest and forget about: bog-standard kill scenes framed in Scream-like quotation marks, glib supporting characters mouthing dialogue like “the Internet… is fast”. Had he held his nerve, Goldhaber might have updated not just Faces of Death but 1986’s Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, that unblinking indictment of video-age voyeurism. Instead – perhaps steered by producers keen to keep the TikTokkers onside – he tips us reassuring winks, letting everyone off the hook. Whether real or fake, grim or goofy, everything gets flattened into content. 

Faces of Death will be available to stream via Shudder and Prime Video from Monday 7.

Little town: "Bethlehem Kudumba Unit"

We say "a star is born" without attaching a specific timeframe to the process. Turns out it can be as rapid as two weeks. It was, after all, a fortnight ago when the Tamil drama Vishwanath & Sons ushered Mamitha Baiju front and centre as the ultramodern medical student who brings a baby, then chaos into the upright hero's life; she shines brighter still in the Malayalam word-of-mouth hit Bethlehem Kudumba Unit. Although these films are separated geographically by several states and linguistically by two distinct tongues, they have one further element in common beyond Baiju: both dramatise that perilous attachment between an older man and a younger woman. We might wonder whether the Indian cinema now has any other means by which an actress can launch a career, yet what BKU demonstrates is that there are happier and more rewarding ways of depicting such attachments. Baiju's Ashley is a college student who, as we find her, is leaving old friends behind to relocate with her family to Angamaly, that small town with a disproportionately large cinematic footprint. If she's hoping for peace and quiet, she's all out of luck: the town is currently overrun with wedding celebrations, a neighbour's would-be Spielberg of a son is fractiously shooting an autobiographical short film, and there are some especially loud huffs and puffs coming from the direction of one Justin (Nivin Pauly), the grumpy local fixer and self-declared bachelor boy. The musically inclined Ashley is drawn to the latter after he reveals he once, in the Internet's early days, ripped tape recordings for the purposes of online file sharing. (She logs his phone number under his online alias of "MP3 King".) But she's barely twenty, and he's pushing forty: it's not so much complicated as awkward. The film, to its considerable credit, is very much aware of this.

In the grand scheme of what co-writer/director Girish A.D. lays out before us, that central relationship presents as no big thing. (Indeed, for much of the film, the characters are reliant on their neighbours failing to spot what's happening in their midst.) What cinemagoers seem to be responding to in BKU - and this seems a far bigger deal in the context of a mainstream Indian cinema that has of late been fanning the flames of factionalism - is its vibrant sense of community. (The title refers to the housing association Ashley's family have moved into.) Girish converts the characterful ensemble playing that has been a feature of recent Malayalam cinema into a rich tapestry of ordinary Indian life. Any one of the situations this camera alights on - the wedding, the chaotic short film shoot, the swelling schoolgirl crush - might have been the basis of an enjoyable film, given such attentive writing, playing and direction. This once, though, we're lucky; we get the lot. This, naturally, entails us spending some part of the first half puzzling out who's who and how everybody relates - but then fraught relationships form the film's core, and none prove more fraught than that between personal happiness and familial duty. (All those other links, bonds and connections are weaponised as potential trip hazards.) And sitting at the very centre of that core - at the movie's heart - is that May-September romance, the business of the summer holidays, which Girish and co-writer Kiran Josey approach seriously, without lapsing into the inevitabilities of those many star vehicles in which a manly man claims his virginal (or near-virginal) prize for being so manly. By contrast, this growing affection seems to startle both parties: I was surprised to be reminded of that barely seen, half-forgotten Josh Radnor vehicle Liberal Arts, with its antsy, anxious central pairing. Girish and Josey go one better, taking care to set Ashley and Justin in context; these aren't merely characters in a romcom but people in a society, faced with a finite pool of opportunities and the judgement of their peers and elders. BKU proves honest about all this, where Vishwanath & Sons came off as cringey and conflict-averse.

Both leads do smart work as folks who find themselves ever more bemused by their emotions and responses. (There's none of that claiming here, for starters: that would be too decisive.) This is a less showy role for Baiju than Vishwanath & Sons' sass merchant, but she comes back with a real girl, possessed of both high hopes and a beating, bruisable heart. Local superstar Pauly has fun playing the big man on campus - confidently single, a real man's man - but his best scenes here recast him as a fellow unsettled by the way Ashley undermines his prior certainties and ready routines. A terrific ensemble of new and less familiar faces flesh out the various subplots, and Girish weaves his A and B plots with the deftest of touches, culminating in what seems likely to count as one of the year's most satisfying endings: these writers know they have to earn their finale, to banish any residual audience scepticism, and they do. Should you require further evidence of the care and commitment involved in this particular creative process, the short film that Justin's younger brother Joel (Sangeeth Prathap) directs within the film has appeared online this week; it proves sharp-eyed and amusing indeed about the flaws and follies of first-time male filmmakers. Girish, in marked contrast to the greenhorn Joel, arms his players with sparkling dialogue, and with editor Akash Joseph Varghese bolsters his snappy montages with the fruits of an outstanding soundtrack album. BKU's second half takes a step back from the appealing naturalism of the first, playing broader and arguably even more crowdpleasing. Yet even as Joel's short film shoot triggers a minor turf war - a very funny idea in itself - Girish roots his setpieces in recognisable smalltown reality: boys enlisting their big brothers to beat people up, grown men razzing around the backstreets in humdrum Ford Fiestas. No film this summer has put a bigger smile on my face: these people come to feel like close family and friends. Even for those of us born thousands of miles away, Bethlehem Kudumba Unit starts to resemble home.

Bethlehem Kudumba Unit is now playing in selected cinemas.