THE NORTHMAN ★★★★★
Directed by Robert Eggers. Starring Alexander Skarsgård, Nicole Kidman, Claes Bang, Anya Taylor-Joy, Ethan Hawke, Björk, Willem Dafoe. 16 cert, gen release, 137 min
Eggers follows up The Witch and The Lighthouse with a Viking drama that draws from Hamlet. Few arthouse directors get to expand their aesthetic with a budget twice that of the season's Michael Bay film. Yet Eggers really has been given $90 million, and The Northman, filmed largely in Ireland, is every bit as crunchy and awkward as his earlier films. The attention to historical detail is rigorous. The winding in of the supernatural with the bloodily hyper-real is gripping. Skarsgård shows off his physique. Kidman makes the best of a wronged mother. Full review DC
THE LOST CITY ★★★☆☆
Directed by Adam Nee, Aaron Nee. Starring Sandra Bullock, Channing Tatum, Daniel Radcliffe, Da'Vine Joy Randolph, Oscar Nuñez, Patti Harrison, Bowen Yang, Brad Pitt. 12A cert, gen release, 112 min
Consider the good will being mined here. Bullock (whom even the dead adore) plays a romance novelist stranded in the jungle with a dim-witted Channing Tatum (as welcome a presence as pickle on cheese). Who wouldn't like to see some redress for those hundreds of films in which an older male star repeatedly plucks a younger damsel from the jaws of a crocodile? Sadly, The Lost City is barely half as much fun as it thinks itself to be. The charming actors play off each other with manic enthusiasm but, alas, the screenplay is a tad short on screwball energy. Tolerable. DC
SMALL BODY/PICCOLO CORPO ★★★★★
Directed by Laura Samani. Starring Celeste Cescutti, Ondina Quadri. Limited release, 89 min
In 1900, expectant young mother Agata (the remarkable Cescutti) lets her own blood into the ocean – in accordance with local beliefs – to better protect her pregnancy. Tragically, the ritual proves ineffective. Her daughter is stillborn and, in accordance with contemporaneous Catholic beliefs, doomed to limbo. Whispers of a faraway church that will allow her child to take a breath, just long enough to perform baptismal rites, spur the grieving mother, against the wishes of her husband, to undertake a perilous journey. Beautifully made, brilliantly acted folk drama from before the "Italianisation" of Italy. TB
BENEDETTA ★★☆☆☆
Directed by Paul Verhoeven. Starring Virginie Efira, Lambert Wilson, Daphne Patakia, Olivier Rabourdin, Clotilde Courau, Charlotte Rampling, Hervé Pierre. Limited release/VoD, 132 min
Verhoeven adapts Judith Brown's 1986 biography Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy, a study of alleged mystic Benedetta Carlini. Holy splinters! Is that a Virgin Mary-shaped dildo tucked away in a vibrator-sized cutaway in a Bible? The ceremonial restraint that defines contemporary mainstream lesbian romances such as Carol and Disobedience is here abandoned with, well, abandon. It is difficult to convey this chasmic change in tone with which Benedetta leaps from kitsch to atrocity. To add to the viewer's distress, the picture is as deafeningly loud as it is tiresomely provocative. TB
