Larry Oliver Film Reviews

  B ack in 2020, when the Polish film Never Gonna Snow Again ( Ś niegu ju ž nigdy nie bedzie ) debuted at film festivals, it resonated differently than it does now. Two years on, its Ukrainian protagonist is classified as belonging to a brave nation willing to defend its values to the point of annihilation against the paranoid ravings of a Russian President. Zhenia (Alec Utgoff, who projects the air of an East European Patrick Swayze, and looks good in a leotard too) is a masseur whose clients belong to a gated community of wealthy but troubled families who live just outside an unnamed city. Zhenia walks from his apartment, with its broken set of blinds, all the way to his place of work, symbolically passing through a traffic barrier. Here lies a community whose children are sent to the É cole Fran ç aise, not because the parents speak French but because they want their children to do so. Every doorbell is classically themed, every door decorated with a wreath. Director Ma ł gor...

Contains spoilers. Films do not have to mirror reality, but they ought to show possibilities. The Other Lamb , the first English language film from Polish director Małgorzata Szumowska, working from a script by Australian author Catherine S. McMullen, does exactly that. In this drama, a dubious contemporary John the Baptist known only as Shepherd (Michiel Hausman) surrounds himself with women – wives dressed in thick red dresses, daughters dressed in blue – all of whom love him. They live in a forest, the daughters in a caravan with Shepherd’s likeness painted on it, the wives in a small house. Only Shepherd is permitted to spin yarns; when the women congregate around him, they are literally surrounded by string, as if caught in a web. When a child asks her half-sister Selah (Raffey Cassidy) to tell her a bedtime story – the two girls live in the daughters’ caravan – the other sisters interject, ‘you’ll get Selah into trouble’. During an infrequent tête à tête with Shepherd, Selah ...