The “one actor /all the other characters are voices” type film is almost a genre of its own. Think Ryan Reynolds in Buried and Tom Hardy in Locke. Such films are great showcases for the actor but he or she has to be up to the job and fortunately Mélanie Laurent in Oxygen certainly is.
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Riz Ahmed stars as Ruben, a musician/drummer touring America with his girlfriend Lou (Olivia Cooke) on vocals with their own particular brand of heavy metal rock. And as we hear in the opening scenes, boy is it heavy. Enough to bust your ear drums.
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Based on writer-director Lee Isaac Chung’s childhood growing up on a farm in Arkansas, Minari is the story of a similar Korean immigrant family’s experience in the 1980s.
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This first feature film from Greek director Christos Nikou is about memory and how important our memories are to who we are, our essential humanity.
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American writers Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams were the creators of two of my favourite female characters: Holly Golightly in the novel Breakfast at Tiffany’s, later immortalised on film by Audrey Hepburn and one of Williams’ emotionally damaged heroines Blanche DuBois from A Streetcar named Desire.
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Director Justin John Doherty’s film has been compared to a Charlie Parker riff. I am not sufficiently jazz literate to confirm that but one of its two central characters, John (James Barnes) is a jazz musician (though we never actually see him playing) and there’s certainly a lot of jazz used on the soundtrack.
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The Mauritanian of the title is a real person, whose story is being told here. Mohamedou Ould Slahi (played in the film by Tahar Rahim) was abducted from his homeland in Mauritania two months after 9/11 by the Americans, because they believed he was involved in recruiting the team who perpetrated the atrocity.
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Héctor Abad Gómez was a much loved figure in Colombia in the seventies and eighties. A university lecturer, who campaigned for public health and was also an outspoken critic of the repressive government, he was shot dead in his home town of Medellín by far-right paramilitaries in 1987.
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And the title is nearly as long in Hungarian! It refers to the actions of Márta (Natasa Stork), a talented surgeon, who returns to her native Budapest after working for many years in America.
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As with Malcolm and Marie, released earlier this year, Locked Down was made entirely under lockdown conditions and features a couple at war with each other.
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