Everybody Knows (2019)

A joyous wedding celebration in a wine region of Spain turns bad when a guest, the teenaged girl of an Argentinian family, disappears, possibly kidnapped, in Asghar Farhadi's beautifully acted, beautiful-to-look-at, absorbing, but ultimately inconsequential crime drama that spends so long on its sumptuous set-up, there's no time for the mystery except for in a series of lurching scenes in the film's final third in which the plot doesn't so much develop as the audience is perfunctorily caught up on a situation everyone except the audience (and perhaps, unimportantly, one or two other characters) already knows.

★★★☆☆

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Nobody Knows (Dare Mo Shirenai) (誰も知らない) (2004)

A mother abandons her children for long periods with instructions that all but the eldest boy are to remain unseen and unheard inside her apartment, in Hirokazu Kore-eda's sanitised account of an actual 1988 news story; some of the blame for the tragedy that follows surely rests on the film's disconnected, apathetic Tokyo.

★★★★☆

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