Kontinental '25 (Radu Jude, 2025)

The prolific and daring Romanian director Radu Jude's previous film, the coruscating documentary Eight Postcards from Utopia, was a sideways look at his country's rocky economic transition of the 90s, and his examination of post-Ceauşescu Romania continues with his new feature, the Rossellini-referencing Kontinental '25.  While this Luxembourgish co-production isn't quite on a par with Jude's last narrative effort, the outstanding Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, it is nonetheless another clever and absorbing tale from a filmmaker whose trademark irreverent wit seeps into virtually every frame.

Kontinental '25 follows Orsolya (Eszter Tompa), a Cluj-based bailiff of Hungarian extraction, who is tasked with evicting former Olympian Ion (Gabriel Spahiu) from the dank basement of an apartment building earmarked for redevelopment as a luxury hotel.  While Orsolya hopes this will be a routine affair, the eviction takes a tragic turn when the desperate Ion kills himself.  From this point on, Orsolya is consumed by guilt as as she tries to ascertain the extent of her responsibility for Ion's demise; she's also worried that a backlash may occur on account of her ethnicity (anti-foreigner sentiment is a recurring theme in Jude's work).

Like its predecessor, Kontinental '25 manages to be at once specifically Romanian and universal as it considers the impact of capitalism on national cultural identity—in Romania's case, this has meant navigating the complex economy that has developed in the 35-plus years since Ceauşescu's death.  But whereas Eight Postcards from Utopia was more concerned with the consumer habits of the Romanian population, Kontinental '25 sees Jude turn his gaze towards the property market, with the repurposing of the building in which Ion dies serving as a symbol of post-communist Romania's newfound taste for real estate.

It is no coincidence that the film is set in Cluj-Napoca, the Transylvanian city that changed hands from Romania to Hungary, then back to Romania, during WW2; in a sly inversion of the widespread Romanian nationalism on display here, Orsolya's Hungarian mother (Annamária Biluska) froths her way through an anti-Romanian tirade while championing Hungary's leader—much to her daughter's dismay.  Radu Jude remained in Transylvania for his other 2025 effort, Dracula, which has already screened at several film festivals; one wonders what this singular social chronicler will bring to Bram Stoker's much-loved story.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

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