Father Mother Sister Brother

Father Mother Sister Brother

Writer & Director ~ Jim Jarmusch

2025, United States-United Kingdom-Italy-France-Ireland-Germany

Stars ~ Tom Waits, Adam Driver, Mayim Bialik, Charlotte Rampling, Cate Blanchett

Family reunions held together by water, mystery, Rolexes, driving in cars, irresolution and “Bob’s your uncle”. Jarmusch returns to his anthology style where the stories are bonded by slice-of-life, mood and amusement. This lets loose his interest in all different people and classes again, but without culture clash as its source of amusement but rather concentrating on the unknowable mysteries of families.

 

Tom Waits defines the first story, there’s an almost Wes Anderson crispness arrangement for the second and a tangible warmth to the last (my favourite). Typically and deceptively slight but meaningful in its open-ended observations on the performative nature of families. Not as brave and soul-cleansing as ‘Paterson’ in its celebration of trivialities and introversion, this is middling filler Jarmusch with great performances and a relaxed, humane atmosphere. Not quite as satisfyingly oddball as his best, although reliably life-affirming.  

 

DJ Ahmet

DJ AHMET
Writer & Director ~ Georgi M. Unkovski
2025, North Macedonia-Czech Republic-Serbia-Croatia
Stars ~ Arif Jakup, Agush Agushev, Dora Akan Zlatanova

One of those minor bildungsroman that leaves you life-affirmed and takes up a small corner in your affection whilst the mainstream is mostly bombast and performative emotions. Its worth is in showing a small far away community and highlighting that the emotional simularities between cultures aren’t so conflicted at core. Ahmet is a typical fifteen year-old, a Yuruk teen from a remote Macedonian village, trying to cope with the loss of his mother and a difficult father who takes him out of school to work sheperding, as well as looking out for a younger brother that hasn’t spoken since their loss. Ahmet isn’t even really an odd-one-out, an outsider, just coping with domestic and social circumstance and first love. The pink sheep may symbolise otherwise, but it just needs time to find its way back.  

What is perhaps enlightening is the portrayal of how the contemporary TikTok age reaches such a relatively isolated and traditional community. Indeed, if anything, it is almost conventional for these stories that the enemy here is tradition and the patriarchy. While the mosque is broadcasting prayers from a PC (some of the film’s best laughs come from this), the men are still trying to marry off teenage daughters to their adult sons. The location offers many, many gorgeous vistas, making this, as Daniel Eagan says, “both wildly exotic and completely down to earth.”  He also says that

Jakup, who's in almost every scene as Ahmet, gives a solid if occasionally stiff performance. He can be charming, especially with his younger brother, but his character is too withdrawn and hesitant for much of the movie.

Jakup’s performance offers an unpolished natural niceness and sudden expressions that charm in their spontaneity. But not everyone is a go-getter or fiery or a traumatised lover, and if there’s anything the coming-of-age genre is good at it is showing how the ordinary is extraordinary to someone, how dilemmas are melodrama. And how limitation inspires invention: with the right motivation – music and love – Ahmet turns his tractor into a sound-system, for example. There’s a maintained sense that he is just on the verge: of being music-obsessed, of defying his father, of falling in love. Incidentally, Arid Jakup comes from that very village. 

It is Dora Akan Zlatanova as Aya that steals the show, rightfully so to knock Ahmet off his feet, sparkling with a worldiness that this town has little idea about. Yes, there are secret festivals happening just outside, but the patriarch aren’t truly aware or consenting, so they are not about to agree to her dance routine with which she hopes to sabotage her arranged marriage. The music itself appropriately goes from EDM to traditional, bursting out and blurring in but never quite dominating the set-pieces until it needs to.

It is not a film that feels angry or unsympathetic to any of its characters, but one that broadcasts empathy and the generational struggle between what is coming and what is already happening. If its simple message is to be brave, that’s powerful enough for a little funny film. We know he’ll be okay.

Die My Love

Die My Love

Director ~ Lynne Ramsay

Writers ~ Enda Walsh, Lynne Ramsay, Alice Birch

2025 ~ United Kingdom, Canada, United States

Stars ~ Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Pattinson, Sissy Spacek

The title, packaging and trailer may mislead into expecting a noirish thriller, but it is not that. One of those films that equates mental illness with rebelliousness and romanticism. This means Jennifer Lawrence is always acting-up, crawling around on all fours like she’s auditioning for sexy ‘Cats’, or poking her tongue out at a mounted deer head and incapable of chewing gum or writing in a journal without it being in the most annoying manner. This is a character who can’t pass a piano alone without pressing a key, whose every social scene in public will be an embarrassment. It doesn’t help that a lot of the context is set at aggravating, to convey depression and assaulted senses, with a dog’s default as Constant Barking or Whining and the song choices leaning towards the twee, although the John Pine needledrop hits the mark.

Sissy Spacek serves as both unhinged by grief and then the sage of feminist empathy, although the inconsistency does fit with her belief that women experience phases of temporary madness. Pattinson must rage against the pretences, but he has no hope: the first images we see of the love of his life is her flopping to herself in an empty room and prowling with a knife on all fours from afar with passionate intent, so she is already coded as acting for herself. We don’t really get a sense of what’s at stake, just that she’s not right: we aren’t informed where we’ve come from and the temporal play doesn’t truly assist us with a starting point.

There is nothing to object to with Ramsay’s direction, dreamy and fragmented, slightly oblique, but it is arguably ill-fitting garb to the subject matter. Surely life experience relegates romanticising suffering to teenage inexperience. Reducing Jennifer Lawrence’s performance to constantly pointing to itself and mental illness to the vision of a forest fire offers no insight or help: we can fathom where this is going. These things are not romantic or poetic. 

Didi

 

Didi (弟弟)

Writer & Director ~ Sean Wang

2024, US

Stars ~ Izaac Wang, Joan Chen, Shirley Chen

 

Whereas many coming-of-age films centre on the precocious, the artistic, there are those like ‘Didi’ that extrapolate on the lives of unremarkable teens just trying to find themselves and get by. ‘Didi’ is more ‘Mid ‘90s’ or ‘Eight Grade’ than the nihilism of Clarks’ ‘Kids’ or forgotten outsiders of ‘Gummo’, or the sadness and socio-commentary of ‘War Pony’. The eponymous Chris is not necessarily likeable, being somewhat immature and seemingly unable to keep from saying inappropriate slurs from under his breath. He aspires to bro-ness. We laugh at and with his friends in painful recognition of their fumbling male bravado. But Chris’ attempt to ingratiate with girls and older skaters bring about the stress rather than the humour of awkward situations because we don’t know if he’ll be self-aware to do it. There’s not tremendous evidence that he is, that he has the skills.

 

Caught between two cultures and in a house full of women, Chris-Didi is somewhat torn, adrift, confused and clueless. How are you to meant to absorb your crush telling you “You’re pretty cute, for an Asian boy”? And then when watching Chris research and learn how to make new friends and, you know, talk to people, a lot of empathy and relatability is earned. In the adolescent context, every little thing, every little move is big with consequences. And you will be judged. The joy of the film is in seeing Chris take the first tentative baby-steps towards maturity, in learning how to talk to people and deciding what he cares about.

 

There is nothing new here, but that’s partly the point. Isaac Wang’s performance gathers more and more weight, and when the tears-and-speechifying comes, Joan Chen’s unaffectedness, her convincing genuine characterisation undermines any mawkish melodrama. ‘Didi’ is not as flashy or odd as, say, ‘I Saw the TV Glow’, but in its aching recognition of how hard it is to just grow up, ‘Didi’ is quite capable to leaving its mark.