The Truth (La Vérité) (2019)

Individual moments are joys in themselves - Catherine Deneuve in a leopard-skin print and Audrey Hepburn sunglasses walking her dog down a tree-lined Paris street - but add the rustle of leaves in the trees, a dance of notes on a piccolo or a tinkle of piano keys and you'll feel like you are watching a Japanese anime of impossibly beautiful, painstakingly constructed handpainted images, and like the great animated dramas of Japan - the AMSR-inducing The Wind Rises, Grave of the Fireflies, and many, any others - this latest film from Kore-eda Hirokazu skips so lightly, so gracefully though its family drama, you can thoroughly enjoy it purely on a surface-level of image and sound without stopping to think about its deeply moving themes of truth, lies, story-telling, memory, childhood, motherhood, blame and forgiveness - the truth of this multi-layered delightful dance is that you can decide what you want to hear and enjoy!

★★★★★

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The Wait (L'Attesa) (2015)

As Easter festivities approach, a grieving French woman living in Italy is visited by her son's girlfriend, in this slight but mesmerising film clip about love and loss and suspending disbelief.

★★★★☆

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Code Unknown (Code Inconnu) (2000)

The miserable events of Babel, another everything-is-connected drama, were also sparked by a child's actions; here, in Michael Haneke's least grim but still dismaying film, the child's act is reprehensible, a truly callous moment that sparks not moribund events like in Babel, but human, compelling events and by movie's end, it is pretty clear the code referred to in the title is society's broken moral code and that the movie's loosely connected stories are commenting on the tendency of people to hide their "real faces" or mute their true feelings to rascist taunts overheard on a train, to the plight of refugees reported in the news, or to the bullish behaviour of the powerful.

★★★★☆

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