Dear friend,

here are the films for the week. After watching all Best Picture nominees, for the record, my favourite was still Sinners.

Hoppers, directed by Daniel Chong, co-written with Jesse Andrews, US, 2026 - ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Sort of a return to form for Pixar, this is a really fun film with a message. It’s clunky at times, like when it has to explicitly say that ‘it’s nothing like Avatar’, or with the weird trajectory it reserves for its apparent villain.
The insistence on always looking for the good in people is, in general, good advice, but, in this day and age, it seems that being too open towards people with clearly bad intentions may not be the right recommendation.
My appreciation of this film was a bit tainted by Pixar’s Chief Creative Officer and, until recently, legend, making not the most enlightened declaration about the Studio’s recent choices (a link I found through the always excellent Chuck Jordan, who also has a very informative review of this film).

Keeper, directed by Osgood Perkins, written by Nick Lepard, Canada, 2025 - ⭐⭐⭐½

I’ve read so many negative reviews of Perkins’ latest film that I was expecting a real mess. Surprise, surprise, it’s a very unsettling and competent horror in the vein of Gretel and Hansel, set in a cabin-in-the-wood (well, more a proper house) where scary things happen and you don’t know why. Sure, the last act might have been more satisfying - or clearer - but that doesn’t make the rest of the film any less effective.
Tatiana Maslany is the cornerstone of the film: her acting, as always, feels so natural - a quality very few actors possess.
Too bad that both the French and the Italian versions, not knowing how to translate the title, add a subtitle that’s a bit too revealing.

O agente secreto / The Secret Agent, written and directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho, Brazil, 2025 - ⭐⭐⭐½

This was the last Best Picture nominee I needed to watch before the Academy Awards ceremony on Sunday (for no reason other than being able to have a preference and possibly complain the wrong film was rewarded), and I subscribed to (the quite expensive) MUBI just for this reason (not to mention a temporary relocation to Canada).
While adopting a very different tone, the substance was quite similar to last year’s I’m Still Here: clearly, Brazilian authors are worried that their country might forget the past (which I suspect is the whole point of the long and anticlimactic epilogue). The result is a tense depiction of life under fear, corruption, and censorship, although it can be confusing at times unless one knows or wants to know more about this period.

L’innocent / The Innocent, directed by Louis Garrel, co-written with Tanguy Viel and Naïla Guiguet, France, 2022 - ⭐⭐⭐

I was not familiar with French actor/writer/director Garrel, except for the fact that at some point he seemed to be very popular with Italian women (maybe around the time he appeared in Greta Gerwig’s Little Women).
Oh I’ve just learnt that he’s the one that is neither Eva Green nor Michael Pitt in Bertolucci’s The Dreamers (which I haven’t seen).
Anyway, this is his latest directorial effort, and it’s inspired by an autobiographical event: his mother marrying someone she met while working with prison inmates.
The lead character, Abel (played by Garrel himself) is very sceptical about this relationship, and doesn’t really trust the man’s (Roschdy Zem) declared intention to start a new, crime-free life. He then involves his late wife’s best friend Clémence (Noémie Merlant) to keep an eye on him.
I reasonably enjoyed the film, although it bounces a bit too irregularly between different tones (alternating very comedic moments with serious thriller scenes), and Garrel’s acting in my opinion doesn’t suit all of them equally.
I also spent some time wondering whether it was shot in Lyon (ten points for me for identifying a place I spent two days in).

Companion, written and directed by Drew Hancock, US, 2025 - ⭐⭐⭐⭐

I wasn’t 100% sure when I bought the Blu-ray, but now I can confirm that Companion is as fun to rewatch as it was when I watched it at the cinema. I think it will join Ready or Not in the ranks of ‘comfort films’ that are there for me to enjoy when I need something familiar to watch.