The Substance ★★★★★
Directed by Coralie Fargeat. Starring Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, Dennis Quaid, Hugo Diego Garcia, Phillip Schurer, Joseph Balderrama, Oscar Lesage. 16, gen release, 141 min
Unhinged body horror featuring Moore as an ageing star who discovers an elixir that generates a younger version of herself. Whisps of Dorian Gray are everywhere about. But Snow White is at least as interesting a model. Here the wicked Queen delivers her own Snow — a breezy Qualley — from damp innards and sets out to live vicariously through that creation’s selfish youth. The Substance is an exercise in Grand Guignol of the most unforgiving school. A hugely entertaining spasm that favours full-frontal attack, rather than commando raids, on the targets of its incensed satire. Moore eats it up. Full review DC
Strange Darling ★★★★★
Directed by JT Mollner. Starring Willa Fitzgerald, Kyle Gallner, Barbara Hershey, Ed Begley Jr. 16 cert, limited release, 97 min
Actor and producer Giovanni Ribisi shot this fever-pitch dream of serial killers and Americana on 35mm, grafting a seedy sheen onto a trippy, downward spiral into the backwoods. Told in seven non-chronological chapters, writer-director JT Mollner’s second feature aims to mess with your head. Following an intriguing overture, in which a Final Girl runs toward the camera, a demented, twisty narrative takes shape. Horror aficionados will find much to admire, but everything about this wild project defies generic expectations. It’s a thriller: it’s a cat-and-mouse game; it’s a truly messed-up love story. Full review TB
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Sugarcane ★★★★☆
Directed by Julian Brave NoiseCat, Emily Kassie. Limited release, 107 min
This gripping Canadian documentary account of the abuse of First Nations children at Catholic residential schools quite rightly won a prize at Sundance and is an early Oscar favourite. The cruelty of forced assimilation is compounded by systemic physical and sexual abuse. Priests fathered children with girls in their charge. Survivor Larry Emile witnessed nuns disposing an unwanted baby in an incinerator. Countless children ran away or committed suicide. Headlines concerning the gruesome discovery of 200 unmarked graves of Indigenous children at another regional school precipitate a series of arson attacks. Tragically familiar. Full review TB
The Goldman Case/Le Procès Goldman ★★★★☆
Directed by Cédric Kahn. Starring Arieh Worthalter, Arthur Harari, Stéphan Guérin-Tillié, Nicolas Briançon. 12A cert, limited release, 116 min
Hugely tense courtroom drama following the trial of surly French radical Pierre Goldman for murder in 1976. There is here an implicit argument that the law does not — or should not — concern itself with any defendant’s manners. But that is just an aside in a drama that touches upon a huge array of French discontents from the last couple of centuries: lingering anti-Semitism, the aftermath of occupation, the significance of the 1968 disturbances. The screenplay, drawing from interviews, news reports and legal records, barely moves outside the court, but that focus lends its own claustrophobic tension to the piece. Full review DC
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