100 Nights of Hero (Julia Jackman, 2025)

Canadian filmmaker Julia Jackman's follow-up to her hugely likeable debut feature Bonus Track is a feminist fable based on Isabel Greenberg's near-namesake graphic novel.  The result is a visually striking, if somewhat underpowered, medieval romance.  It feels like a film that's striving desperately for cult status, yet it all seems a little too thin and brittle to endure—despite a great central performance from Maika Monroe and the stunt casting of Charli XCX in a supporting role.  As their titles suggest, both the film and its source material owe much to the tale of the vizier's daughter Scheherazade, that most expert of storytellers.

Here, the title character, played by Emma Corrin, serves as maid to Monroe's noblewoman Cherry.  It falls to Hero to spin the yarns that both hold the narrative together and stall the advances of the louche Manfred (Nicholas Galitzine), who has made a wager with his friend—and Cherry's husband—Jerome (Amir El-Masry) that he can seduce Cherry while Jerome is away for a hundred days, as per the title.  All this unfolds within an absurd patriarchal society that worships Birdman (Richard E. Grant), a god who forbids women from reading or writing, yet still allows them to tell stories—a right Hero weaponises as she fights the power.

Hero’s ongoing epic tale centres on three sisters, the most prominent of whom, Rosa, is played effectively by Charli XCX, whose presence proves as distracting as the nightly instalments are disruptive to the film’s overall flow (a late cameo from Felicity Jones, who also serves as a producer, is equally intrusive).  Rather than drawing us deeper into the narrative, the story-within-the-story tends to break the spell cast by the crepuscular fairytale world inhabited by Cherry and the others.  As the erudite Hero, Emma Corrin is so compelling that there is little need for the illustrative sequences accompanying her stories.

Given that 100 Nights of Hero is based on a work that is itself an adaptation of another, its second-hand nature should be one of its greatest strengths; yet the film is self-conscious when it should be self-reflexive, jarring when it should be seamless.  The ending feels as predictable as it does unearned, reinforcing the sense that this is little more than a fantasy pastiche lacking the guile of, say, Alain Resnais' Life Is a Bed of Roses.  Still, there are aspects to admire in this uneven 90 minutes, with the appealing performances and meticulous mise-en-scène going some way to compensating for the film's structural shortcomings.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

The Stranger (François Ozon, 2025)

The Stranger is the prolific François Ozon's 24th feature film—an impressive figure, given that his first full-length movie, the queasy Sitcom, was released just 27 years ago.  Ozon's next feature but one after Sitcom, the slightly less transgressive Water Drops on Burning Rocks, was an adaptation of a play by Bavarian bad boy Rainer Werner Fassbinder—a director who churned out films at a rate that makes Ozon look like Stanley Kubrick.  For his latest feature, Ozon again goes down the road of the literary adaptation, with The Stranger seeing the versatile filmmaker tackle an undisputed classic in the form of Albert Camus' eponymous 1942 novella, which was the first of its revered author's works to be published.

While Ozon has had some success adapting books by writers as varied as Joyce Carol Oates (Double Lover), Ruth Rendell (The New Girlfriend), Aidan Chambers (Summer of 85), and Elizabeth Taylor (Angel), there is the sense here that Ozon has set himself a stiffer challenge as he grapples with the murky existential abyss at the centre of Camus' most famous work.  Happily, Ozon's film of The Stranger is both a resounding success and one of its director's finest achievements.  The Stranger is one of several Ozon features to have been shot by the Belgian cinematographer Manu Dacosse, whose other recent work includes Fabrice du Welz's Maldoror and Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani's Reflection in a Dead Diamond.

After Maldoror's rather muted colour palette and Reflection in a Dead Diamond's kaleidoscopic visuals, The Stranger sees Dacosse shooting in crisp black and white—and it seems almost inconceivable that this tale, set in sun-drenched French Algeria, could be presented any other way.  For the main character, Meursault (Benjamin Voisin), is a man drained of all colour, and his indifference to life (and death) leads him to kill an unnamed Arab man.  While his girlfriend Marie (Rebecca Marder) hopes for no worse than a light custodial sentence, Meursault's reaction could be viewed as the ultimate Gallic shrug.  At his trial, he makes little effort to explain the mitigating circumstances that led to his actions.

Late in the film, Swann Arlaud appears as a priest who visits Meursault in his cell.  The prisoner’s nihilistic response to the clergyman’s pleas is all too predictable—but still fascinating.  Yet there’s something slightly off about the scene; it leaves the film feeling a little unbalanced, as though it exists largely to accommodate Arlaud—one of the finest actors of his generation.  One wonders whether a lesser-known performer might have served the film better, with the sequence shortened.  Still, this is of little consequence when the performances are this good.  The Stranger remains a riveting film and a rigorous adaptation—one that sees Ozon cut cleanly to the dark heart of Camus’ knotty, evasive text.

Darren Arnold

Images: Carole Bethuel

The Second Act (Quentin Dupieux, 2024)

The prolific filmmaker Quentin Dupieux, whose movies include Rubber, Smoking Causes Coughing, Daaaaaalí! and Deerskin, has developed a highly singular style; his work often blends black humour, absurdity and surrealism as it deals with thought-provoking themes.  Dupieux's films are known for their originality and often challenge conventional narrative storytelling, and his latest effort, the elaborately structured The Second Act, certainly upholds the director's reputation as a purveyor of quirky, offbeat fare.  Dupieux seemingly has no trouble attracting big-name actors, with his previous films featuring stars including Jean Dujardin, Anaïs Demoustier, Gilles Lellouche, and Adéles Haenel and Exarchopoulos.

True to form for Dupieux, The Second Act features a stellar cast, one led by Louis Garrel, Vincent Lindon and Léa Seydoux.  Garrel's David is first seen imploring his friend Willy (Raphaël Quenard, best known as the title character in Dupieux's Yannick) to make a play for the clingy Florence (Seydoux), who happens to be besotted with David.  David and Willy are heading to the restaurant of the title, where they plan to meet with Florence and her father Guillaume (Lindon); as they walk, David mentions that they're being filmed, and it seems that the pair are actors in a movie.  Upon arrival at The Second Act, David, Willy, Guillaume and Florence sit at a table where a jittery extra (Manuel Guillot) attempts to pour wine.

As the overwhelmed extra—whose name is Stéphane—persists with his lamentable efforts, the film's stars do their best to get him to relax, with little success, and the episode ends badly—very badly.  But just as we think we've got a grip on proceedings, Dupieux pulls the rug from under us again, and it's revealed that these scenes with Stéphane are also part of the film-within-a-film, which, in a world first, is being directed entirely by AI.  The Second Act is a film for which the label meta-textual is woefully insufficient; it ends much like it begins, with two men walking along a road, but by this stage we are even less sure of who or what we've been watching (in this sense, it recalls Leos Carax's confounding Holy Motors).

The self-reflexive The Second Act includes several statements concerning the ephemeral nature of cinema—although Florence vehemently argues in favour of what she sees as the essential service provided by actors—and the film itself deftly illustrates such claims.  While both Deerskin and Rubber also used the Droste effect conceit, The Second Act is much more pointed in this regard.  Dupieux's slippery film is as inconsequential as it is entertaining, a shaggy dog story in which the director and his game cast have a great deal of fun as they highlight the artifice of filmmaking; this wickedly clever divertissement stands as one of the most effective examples of mise en abyme cinema in recent years.

Darren Arnold

Images: Diaphana