Anora, Blitz and Emilia Perez: What’s coming to the Cambridge Arts Picturehouse in October and November 2024

Our film critic, Mark Walsh, looks forward to what’s coming to the big screen in the coming weeks, in this feature sponsored by the Cambridge Arts Picturehouse.

October events

You might need to put down your copy of this paper and immediately head to the Arts Picturehouse, as there are two events not to be missed this week.

The first is a Q&A screening of Endurance, the new film from husband and wife directing duo Chai Vaserhelyi and Jimmy Chin (Free Solo, Nyad).

Dr John Shears, who led the expedition to discover the wreck of explorer Ernest Shackleton ship, lost in 1915 and discovered over a century later and whose mission is documented in the film, will be in attendance at the screening. The film also features original expedition footage preserved by the BFI National Archive. The screening is on Wednesday, 16 October.

Then on Friday, 18 October, Radio 1’s Ali Plumb arrives with his Untitled Film Quiz project – teams of up to five people can challenge themselves against questions posed by one of the country’s top critics.

And don’t forget that the Cambridge Film Festival runs between the 24 and 31 October, but once it’s over there’s no shortage of great films to be watched…

Emilia Perez

I love directors who are unpredictable, who can swap genres seemingly at will and feel at home in any or all of them. Jacques Audiard often feels like he’s working in several simultaneously: the Parisian director has given us piano-themed crime drama The Beat That My Heart Skipped, killer whale-themed romance Rust and Bone, and offbeat Western The Sisters Brothers. So who better to bring us a film that covers everything from identity concerns to drug cartels in the fashion of an operatic musical?

Rita (Zoe Saldana) is a lawyer deferring to her less competent male colleagues, when she receives an unexpected offer from cartel leader Manitas.

He’s begun a gender transition but needs help to complete the process. Four years later, Rita meets Emilia (Karla Sofía Gascón), now relishing having found her true self, but who wants to stay close to her children so plays aunt instead, also forcing their mother Jessi (Selena Gomez) to move in, even though she has no idea that her former husband is now Emilia. Meanwhile Emilia becomes a crusader for justice and in the process develops feelings for Epifanía (Adriana Paz).

Audiard keeps a constant stream of music coming as the film ranges through genres, ranging from campy telenovela to a climactic stand-off that wouldn’t be out of place in a Sam Peckinpah movie.

Through it, he explores the true identities of these four women and their relationships, as they examine their own identity, their motivations and their ultimate destinies. It’s by turns funny, reflective and heartfelt, and defies conventions and expectations while remaining true to itself and deftly balancing its varied genres and tones, in another truly original and unpredictable Jacques Audiard film.

Emilia Perez is screening from Friday, 1 November.

Anora

Sean Baker has shown a fascination for examining the margins of American society, and in the process has delivered a succession of fascinating and deeply felt dramas full of sympathetic characters (Tangerine, The Florida Project, Red Rocket).

His latest is as good as any of them, although on paper it sounds as if it shouldn’t work: a young stripper of Russian extraction marries the son of an oligarch so he can avoid going home, but when his parents find out attempts to end the marriage descend into a literal farce.

That it won the Palme D’Or at Cannes this year is testament to Baker’s gifts for finding authenticity in even the most ridiculous situations.

The first part of the film has influences from Pretty Woman to Green Card: Ani (Mikey Madison) meets brash young Russian Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn) at her strip club, and hires her for the week. When he sees an opportunity to escape a return to Russia by putting a ring on her finger, but when his parents find out of his Vegas nuptials via social media, they send a selection of goons to put an end to the relationship via the courts. Ani, though, isn’t willing to give up her new husband without a fight, and she’s got plenty of fight to give.

It's a star-making performance from Mikey Madison, full of fire and passion but also showing flecks of a romantic side, and a refusal to let anyone disrespect her.

Her frustration as the situation disintegrates around her, having to practically marshal the henchmen of her new in-laws, feels authentic even as the chaos unfolds around her. Hilarious, uproarious but with a tender underbelly, Anora is another glorious slice of American life in the margins from Sean Baker, this time with a Russian twist.

Anora is screening from Friday, 1 November.

Blitz

There’s an argument to be made that Steve McQueen is possibly the most vital British filmmaker of our times: few, if any directors, can lay claim to an early body of work as significant and as outstanding as his, and after the artist-turned-director delivered us Hunger, Shame and 12 Years A Slave he then delivered one of the best TV series of the decade with his five-part anthology Small Axe.

He’s now returned to the big screen and embraced a cinematic scope for an examination of a crucial period of British history.

Rita (Saoirse Ronan) is raising her son George (debutant Elliott Heffernan) with the help of her father Gerald (Paul Weller) after George’s father was deported. When George is evacuated along with thousands of other children, he can’t bear the thought of separation, so jumps from the train to Somerset and weaves his way back through the chaos of London under constant threat from above.

It’s a melting pot of genres, ranging from a Railway Children-esque opening when George encounters other children also refusing their extradition, to a Dickensian chapter when a group of petty criminals (led by Stephen Graham and Kathy Burke) capture George and send him into bombed buildings to remove their lost treasures for their own gain.

McQueen reflects the same fractured society of our modern age through the prism of Hitler’s attacks, but balances the personal drama with a greater scale than his previous works as he shows the cost of nightly bombings on a fragile London. Ronan is typically excellent but it’s Heffernan’s resoluteness that’s likely to capture hearts.

Blitz is screening from Friday, 8 November.