Night Stage (18)
Directed by Filipe Matzembacher and Marcio Reolon
★★☆☆☆

THE film opens in a wash of crimson: a stage drenched in red, bodies and props suspended between performance and artifice. From this striking beginning emerges Matias (Gabriel Faryas), a young black actor navigating Sao Paulo’s scene, whose ambitions intertwine with those of Camilo (Ivo Muller) and, more fatefully, Rafael (Cirillo Luna), a rising politician. Their clandestine affair, charged with erotic risk, unfolds across the city’s nocturnal landscapes, where desire and spectacle blur.

The film gestures toward a compelling idea that liberation might lie in escaping the strictures of capitalism and public image. Yet this provocative premise feels only lightly explored. Rafael, in particular, remains frustratingly opaque, his inner life eclipsed by familiar tropes of political secrecy and ambition. What might have emerged from a more subversive inversion — where queerness becomes a strategic, even public, force — remains tantalisingly out of reach.

Visually, however, the film excels. Luciana Baseggio’s cinematography renders Sao Paulo with a crisp, nocturnal allure, capturing a city alive with possibility, eroticism and danger. The music is also arresting, thanks to the brilliant composers Thiago Pethit, Arthur Decloedt and Charles Tixier. Still, the narrative struggles to match this intensity; its fixation on erotic escalation comes at the expense of emotional depth. By the film’s abrupt and perplexing conclusion, one is left less scandalised than curiously unmoved — admiring its surface, but longing for something more daring beneath it.
LB
In cinemas April 3

Two Women (15)
Directed by Chloe Robichaud
★★☆☆☆

IN 1975 Chantal Akerman made the film Jeanne Dielmann about a working-class single mother who sleeps with men for money and maintains rigorous control over every aspect of her life and environment. When the control slips, she murders the man.

In this French-Canadian study of two middle-class frustrated mothers, the artistic gaze is altogether more fuzzy. The women aren’t self-controlled but neurotic, frustrated nymphomaniacs. The answer to their loveless relationships is sex with a succession of handymen — joyous infidelities that the film revels in — and a dash of feminist theory.

“Why recycle shopping bags when you could be reading Simone De Beavoir?” demands Florence, the intellectual, played with calm intransigence by Karine Gonteur-Hyndman. She murders the hamster and leaves her wife and son, liberated — or possibly imprisoned — by an insatiable desire for casual sex. The other, played with wide-eyed innocence by Laurence Leboeuf, is the stupid one who collapses back into the sentimentality that substitutes for love (and every other kind of self understanding) in her suburban marriage.

The contrast provides some kind of dialectic, but Akerman it ain’t.
AR
In cinemas April 3

Kim Novak’s Vertigo (15A)
Directed by Alexandre O Philippe 
★★★☆☆

 

AT 93 Kim Novak is one of the last surviving stars from Hollywood’s golden age, who turned her back on the industry at the height of her career to live life on her own terms. 

In this compelling documentary by Alexandre O Philippe she opens up to him and explains why she walked away, and what her life is now. Blending rare archival footage with deeply personal reflections, the film paints an intimate portrait of a woman who refused to be remade and defined by Hollywood. 

She reveals the sexism she faced and discusses her most iconic role in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, but does not talk in great detail about what it was like to work with him, which is a great shame. 

You are shown glimpses of her reclusive life in Oregon and her passion as an artist as Philippe attempts to shed light on one of Hollywood’s most enduring enigmas. 
MD
In cinemas April 3

Fuze (15)
Directed by David Mackenzie
★★★☆☆

 

LONDON is thrown into panic when an unexploded WWII bomb is unearthed on a busy construction site in this gritty and tension filled race-against-time crime thriller, directed by David Mackenzie. 

It is the first film Mackenzie (Relay, Hell or High Water) has shot in the capital, and it is a fast paced, intense ride as the head of the bomb disposal team (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and the police chief (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) liaise to deal with the unfolding crisis in the ticking bomb as chaos ensues. Meanwhile an elaborate heist is taking place led by Theo James and Sam Worthington. 

While not trailblazing, this is still a decent and entertaining thriller driven by solid performances from the whole cast. 
MD
In cinemas April 3