The titular couple of Kazik Radwanski’s latest realist dramedy aren’t actually a couple – but when they get mistaken for one by a photographer taking their passport photos, Mara (Deragh Campbell) plays along. She’s actually married with a young daughter, while her friend Matt (Matt Johnson) is a caddish singleton with his eye seemingly on every bright young thing in the Greater Toronto area. The two went to college together, both with aspirations of being writers, but that was years ago and their paths have diverged somewhat.

While Matt has published a successful short story collection and spent time living in New York, Mara settled down with experimental musician Samir (Mounir Al Shami) and started teaching prose and poetry at a local college. Returning to Toronto, Matt barrels into Mara’s life again, turning up at one of her classes.

Despite the disruption, the pair fall back into an easy friendship, bickering like no time has passed at all. Radwanski’s charming, well-observed dialogue reflects the experience of plenty of elder millennials, caught between the unrealistic expectations of ageing parents and the realisation that creative possibility under the constraints of capitalism is harder and harder to achieve. Matt briefly represents the possibility of another life to Mara – one where she feels more creatively compatible with her partner. But while Matt is charismatic, he’s also selfish and patronising, stuck in a state of arrested development. Perhaps it isn’t so much Matt, but what he represents, that Mara finds enticing.

Radwanski’s frequent collaborators Campbell and Johnson (who both appeared in his previous work, including How Heavy This Hammer and Anne at 13,000 Feet) have an easy chemistry together, and their predicament is likely to strike a chord with anyone who’s ever contemplated the seven-year itch. It also might seem similar to Celine Song’s fabulously successful 2023 drama Past Lives, similarly about a female writer questioning her relationship once a figure from her past reappears, but Matt and Mara is more observational and lo-fi in methodology. The naturalistic camerawork and performances ground the film in realism, creating a wry dramedy that refuses to placate us with easy answers or condescension.

To save you a few unnecessary clicks, don’t bother heading to your search engine of choice to find out what the collective noun is for “Sasquatch”. Aside from a few speculative funnies (“a syndicate of Sasquatch”) you likely won’t discover anything concrete, as there was only ever thought to be a single incarnation of this mythic and patently American roving beast.

Nathan and David Zellner’s new film, Sasquatch Sunset, doesn’t deliver any further clarity on preferred grammar, but it does offer a dreamlike window on the lives of four modern-day Sasquatch subsisting like unbathed hippies out in the delectably lush wilderness. With their opposable thumbs and humanoid frames, it only takes a little narrowing of the eyes to see past the clotted fur, furrowed domes and flapping pencil winkies to understand that these Sasquatch are being used as avatars to tell a very earthy and human story.

The film covers a year in the life this tight-knit clan as they munch on the flora and fauna around them, engage in mating rituals that are only occasionally successful, build huts from branches and leaves, and intermittently sound a rhythmic call on the trees lest their be other members of their dwindling species in the environs. There’s no real rhyme or reason to their existence beyond present tense subsistence, but the Zellners have fun by charting some of their natural learning curve towards something like domesticity.

As our Sasquatch cousins don’t necessarily do much to fill their days, there’s lots of detail about bodily functions and, as such, there’s a whole rushing river of excrement, urine, vomit and even a bit of blood. Even as the film adopts a detached, faux-anthropological mode, you do end up forging a bond with this lovable lummoxes, and even though the film leans heavily on gross humour, it’s not at the expense of a bit of heart.

Eventually, as the year winds on and the Sasquatch roam ever deeper into their pristine Arcadia, they begin to see signs of human encroachment: a tent pitched with a full snack hamper and boom box (loaded with 80s club bangers); plumes of smoke rising up from a wildfire; and, most comically, a tarmac road harshly cutting through the tree-line. The Sasquatch’s reaction to the road will be the film’s comic highlight for those with the stomach for it.

Underneath the suits are Riley Keough, Jesse Eisenberg, Nathan Zellner and Christophe Zajac-Denek, and they all perform commendably due to never letting up on the joke. Yet what make Sasquatch Sunset a cut above what some might perceive to be an extended Funny or Die sketch is that it’s crafted with such care and with a sense of cinematic grandeur, achieved via Mike Gioulakis’ gorgeous, mussy cinematography and the gentle pastoral sounds of The Octopus Project on the soundtrack.

At the 2024 Berlin Festival, viewers have already been treated to one film in which a bunch of French actors walk around the landscape pretending to be alien interlopers (cf Bruno Dumont’s L’Empire). We now have another – say, “coucou!” to Hong Sang-soo’s A Traveller’s Needs, as Isabelle Huppert (the pair’s third collaboration after 2012’s In Another Country and 2017’s Claire’s Camera) heads back to Korea to play a very special and very odd type of language teacher that only she could pull off.

You get a slap on the wrist for describing each new Hong Sang-soo film as “more of the same” or complain that the director is someone who gets by from film to film by resting on his micro-minimalist laurels. And rightly so, as with each new work, Hong does employ subtle variation in not so much aesthetic and style but in the shape of what can be construed a cinematic work; more interested in presenting his artistry through modernist or freeform structure and characterisation than anything that might seem too gauche, suggestive or obvious.

For A Traveller’s Needs, there’s a slight return to the cyclical narrative motion he loves so much as Huppert’s Iris spends time with her various unwitting clients, ignores them, possibly patronises them and, finally attempts to dig the dormant emotion from their souls in what she describes as the unique (and completely unofficial) teaching technique she has somehow devised. When you see it, you might imagine it’s rather similar to how Hong makes movies (intended as a compliment!).

Iris wanders the landscape in a summer dress, a green cardie and a straw hat, blowing (badly) on a recorder in the park like some off-kilter siren, and then quaffing supermarket makgeolli in vast quantities. Hong’s early films all took an interest in how the consumption of alcohol alters our pillars of social perception, but what this film does is present a character who seems to become more demure and coherent the more she drinks.

It’s one of Hong’s most outwardly funny films, and he reminds us (once more) that while Huppert may be best known for her “straight” performances for the likes of Michael Haneke, Claude Chabrol, Paul Verhoeven et al, at her heart she is a titan of slapstick and cultivating screen awkwardness to an almost unbearable degree. Just the way she sips her makgeolli is a joy to behold.

In its third act, we discover that this alien being has placed a much younger man under his spell, and is forced to go on a long wander while he reveals to his mother the details of this unlikely new crush. Sadly, this removes the focus from Huppert, and the laugh quotient sags considerably as we have to witness a protracted and circular argument between mother and son.

But even the snippets of Iris on her little walk are a delight, particularly a moment where she walks onto a rooftop that is painted the same fetching shade of green as her cardigan. It’s a lovely film and not a particularly demanding one from this director (his last one, In Water, was purposefully filmed out of focus). But where the humour perhaps asks the viewer to not take the action too seriously, it’s also a perceptive film about the performative coping strategies of a stranger in a strange land.

Would it be unfair to see the new film by Olivier Assayas as the capper to his unofficial “Okay Boomer!” trilogy, which began with 2008’s Summer Hours and continued with 2018’s Non-Fiction? All three films offer a spry rumination on the ephemeral nature of material objects, from trinkets collected over the years, the art that you create and, in this instance, an inherited country property.

The reason behind that somewhat glib opener is that Assayas is, with each of these films that are subtly-laced with autobiography, extremely unselfconscious about the privileged life he leads, to the point where the work may, to some, come across as a case of petty bourgeois mithering. Yet at the same time, he is someone who remains unapologetic about both his interests and the rarified circles in which he and his characters run, but in the case of the film, that thankfully doesn’t preclude more universal insights.

Assayas avatar Vincent Macaigne plays grumble-fuss film director Paul, holed up in his rustic family stack with muso brother Etienne (Micha Lescot), radio producer girlfriend Morgane (Nine d’Urso) and his bro’s new partner Carole (Nora Hamzawi). This tight-knit squad are, it transpires, living in a museum/mausoleum whose walls, shelves and cupboards exists as shrines from a bygone era. Oh, and the reason they’re all there is because Hors de Temps (translated as “Suspended Time”) is set during the first Covid lockdown.

Yes, it is a little weird having to revisit the collective global trauma of lockdown, and you do wonder whether even someone as erudite and socially perceptive as Assayas will have anything new to add to the mountain of discourse. And in all honesty, there’s not much here that feels massively new or innovative, with Paul’s paranoia leading to a comic tranche of semi-crazed demands all sourced from “websites”.

The film ambles along in a very agreeable seriocomic fashion and does not concern itself with a contrived dramatic arc. Yet the highlights are a series of short documentary inserts intoned by Assayas himself in which he reveals memories of and anecdotes about the estate and his parents. It’s done in such a beautiful and understated fashion, that you do wonder if this could’ve made for a film in which the director didn’t need to hide his thesis behind the smokescreen of fiction.

Yet the film does remind us that Assayas is a completely natural filmmaker, and even while the script, with its focus on bickering and domestic micro-dramas (Paul spends a decent chunk of the film trying to scrub a layer of burnt strawberries from a new pot he purchased from Amazon) never coming across like a tossed-off TV sitcom. With a sudden pull back of the camera, a careful framing or a sudden emphasis away from the action, the director constantly reminds the viewer that it’s worth looking at the bigger picture suggested by this cosily intimate drama.

The author Christine Angot will likely be known to English-speaking audiences for her bluntly confessional auto-fictional 1999 novel simply titled, ‘Incest’, but also for having penned screenplays for two excellent films directed by Claire Denis: Let the Sunshine In and Both Sides of the Blade.

With her unbearably intense and, in many ways, unique debut documentary, A Family, she adopts both the brusquely challenging personal manner and inquisition-style mode of questioning seen by the great Claude Lanzmann in his film Shoah, in which the filmmaker is violently insistent with his on-camera subjects as they recount first-hand horrors of the Holocaust.

Lanzmann viewed the camera as a tool for live archiving, but was aware that any hard evidence gleaned from his interviews will inevitably be laden with emotion and subject to the ingrained survival instincts of the person bearing their soul. Angot’s strategy here is similarly inclined towards the normalising of discomfort, but it is the perfect strategy to her achieve her intended goals of finding out exactly why her family and friends remained silent while, from the age of 13, she was being raped by her (since deceased) father.

We understand that Angot’s trauma has metastasised from cowed incomprehension in her teens and younger-middle age to violent rage in the present, and she has reached a point in her life where she no longer sees her family as being innocent bystanders while she suffered this repeated pattern of abuse. The lightly fictionalised accounts from Incest did not give her the closure (or at least some vague answers) that she now demands, and so with A Family she doorsteps her relatives and says to them point blank: you knew it was happening so why didn’t you help? Angot shows no pretence for warmth and is definitely not looking for a reason to forgive, and in many ways this is a film about, if not so much administering punishment, then at least making sure that the extent of her trauma is both understood and possibly shared.

Two moments stand out, both bloodcurdling in their own way: the first sees Argot and her crew forcing entry into her estranged mother’s house and demanding a sit-down interview on camera. A yelling match ensues and the presence of the camera (which her mother protests) ends up being the reason why a dialogue is eventually reached. Yet we discover later that her mother was not happy about what she feels was a violent imposition, which undercuts any pretence towards sincerity in her testimony.

Another near-unwatchable sequence takes the form of some archive footage of a glossy TV debate show in which Angot is not just pilloried but insulted to her face for having written ‘Incest’. The presenters and members of the panel mock her for having directly channeled this experience into literature, and seem to completely overlook (or be unsympathetic towards) the fact that Angot tore out her own heart to write that novel.

This sequence emphasises, with a brutality of intent, the extreme gaslighting that Angot was subjected to where her trauma wasn’t merely rejected but she was made to feel like an accomplice in her own downfall. And it’s possibly the reason why this important film, which is very circumspect about the possibility of catharsis in such matters, exists.

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Splitting her working hours between acting and filmmaking, Mati Diop is a rare bird: a wonderful, intuitive and subtle screen performer who is also an incredible director and writer. Having cultivated her reputation via a series of rightly lauded short works, her feature debut, Atlantics, played in the competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 2019 and is now considered (again, rightly) to be one of the finest films of that decade.

She returns behind the camera for the extraordinary and lightly eccentric short non-fiction piece, Dahomey, something a little different formally but in many ways a companion pieces to Atlantics in that is, at its roots, about how things and people change when they move or are transplanted to foreign climes. Her lean, but extraordinarily detailed and carefully edited 67-minute film chronicles the return of 26 royal treasures to the kingdom of Dahomey in Benin that were plundered by French colonialists.

The film offers an implicit critique of museums as sites of inherent colonial celebration, but also stresses their importance when it comes to matters of education and disseminating national history and, by extension, a sense of civic pride. One of the many theories presented here, via a lively panel discussion by students of the University of Abomey-Calavi, is that working class oppression and low wages are the enemy of art and culture, and that theoretically they could and should operate with a more hand-in-glove approach.

But this is the mere tip of the iceberg when it comes to the relevance of this highly-symbolic journey, and the film avoids polemic and instead presents itself as informed and inquisitive blueprint for the ways in which we discuss anti-colonialist action.

Diop’s camera zeroes in on the minute details of how the treasures are transported and then eventually displayed in their rightful home. They are treated with the utmost care and attention, and there’s a tension that comes from seeing these precious objects being moved and placed in crates, lest they crumble before their homecoming is achieved.

Though Diop is measured when it comes to empathising with how people are reacting to this, seeing it as neither a full-bore triumph or humiliatingly superficial gesture considering that the 26 pieces here make up a tiny proportion of the 1000s that were forcibly removed from their place of origin. In the film’s final masterstroke, Diop gives a voice to the pieces themselves, a deep, God-like vocoder drawl in which hopes, woes and memories are intoned.

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This new film from French filmmaker Bruno Dumont is mad as a bag of spanners. In many ways it marks the sum total of a singular cinematic project which has traversed the spectrum of high seriousness in the past to high slapstick in the present. In fact, Dumont was often mocked for what many thought to be stern, depressive and calculatedly alienating studies of boredom and violence (1999’s L’Humanite being the breakthrough in that respect), but in light of a recent run of musicals, satires, and lunatic comedies, maybe he’s always been a joker at heart?

This duality of reason which sits inside the soul of every human makes for the subject matter of his madcap latest, L’Empire, a loosely-conceived and freeform science-fiction yarn set among the warring factions of two alien races hiding inside the bodies of various working class denizens of Northern France’s Opal Coast. Dumont has little time for basic narrative logic, instead imbuing his film with the feel of an improvised farce, where all aspects of character and setting are indistinct enough to allow for the story to be pushed into wild new directions at the drop of a hat.

Jony (newcomer Brandon Vlieghe) is a fisherman sporting dowdy overalls and is struggling to make much of a catch these days. He lives with his mother who tends for his toddler son, Freddie. Yet it is soon revealed that Freddie is in fact an apocalyptic demon lord sired by Jony who is himself alien royalty within an evil intergalactic sect called the Zeros who are intent on destroying the universe.

Jane (Anamaria Vartolomei, seen recently in the Golden Lion-winner, Happening) is a One, an ethereal warrior sentinel who also lives in a little house with her chain-smoking mother. She is an opposing force for all that is good and light, and she and her henchman scour the coastal paths and cul-de-sacs and strategically behead the evil Zeros with a triple-pronged light sabre. Their bodies melt away revealing the oily floating globules that are hidden inside.

The story, such as it is, sees Freddie kidnapped and returned numerous times via random home invasions; a few bouts of al fresco sex as the aliens deign to appreciate the physiological advantages of their fleshy disguises; and the occasional interruption from a pair of bumbling local cops (the tic-ridden captain and his naive lieutenant from Dumont’s Lil Quinquin films) who are entirely bemused by all the ongoing strangeness.

In its favour, L’Empire offers a completely unique take – both aesthetically and thematically – on the timeworn alien invasion genre, subverting and satirising much of its stock imagery to create a broad allegory about every human having the potential to be good and evil. The design studiously melds classicism and futurism, with the orbiting space stations taking the form of pristine cathedrals, and it’s a very clever and well-executed conceit.

But its stern insistence to avoid coherence also will make this one something of a challenge for those not attuned to Dumont’s freaky new wavelength. Character development or basic reasoning as to why one action leads to another are pointedly missing in action, but that, in many ways, is all part of the fun of this unabashedly personal cine-UFO.

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