(First published by Headstuff.org)

 

Holy Cow (dir. Louise Courvoisier, 2024)

 

Rooted in the Jura mountains, the home of Comté cheese and rebellious youths, Louise Courvoisier's Holy Cow tracks the fortunes of a truculent, wayward, but not unfeeling teenager, Totone (Clément Faveau). Desperate for cash after a series of family mishaps, he turns his hand to illicit, artisanal dairy-magic, with a little help from his friends and in the hope of getting rich quick. As might be expected, his plan swerves off-course when life intervenes. 

 

Such a potted summary does little justice to Courvoisier's film, which is intelligent and fluently realised, a cinematic place-poem that also thrums with the tenacity and daring of its baby-faced protagonists – as though Lola Quivoron had directed a re-make of The Grocer's Son (2007). Quivoron's brilliant debut, Rodeo (2022), also concerned the gusting thrills and gritty predicaments of semi-delinquent youths, whose bravery and ultimate good-heartedness take on a beguiling heroism as the story unfolds. Holy Cow is less noirish, and more inflected with the rhythms of its rural setting, but it shares with Rodeo a vaguely philosophical admiration for lost youngsters, who learn to live in the world by trusting their own (rather haywire) instincts. If this sounds like sentimentality, then perhaps it is – and perhaps we need more of it than we have. Courvoisier, in any case, is happy to deliver.

 

The hints of melodrama that tinge the plot – deaths occur, duels are declared, forbidden love affairs are conducted, crises of property and inheritance are evaded or embraced – are easily forgiven. This is mainly because of the two young leads, Faveau and Maïwene Barthelemy, who manage to bring both subtlety and intensity to the tough-talking, sensitive characters they play. Luna Garret also takes a memorable turn as Claire, Totone's sweet younger sister, whom he cares for – at first reluctantly, but then with increasing and genuine affection.

 

Holy Cow is packed with naturalistic detail, but sometimes feels like a fantastical romance or a recreated dream. Of course, this is France we're talking about. So the prospects apparently are never quite as terrible as they might seem at the outset. If the tale of Totone and his swaggering comrades is to be believed, your parents may die, you may have no money, you may have set fire to the remaining bridges in your personal life, but that's no reason to succumb to fear, sorrow, or any other extravagant emotions (bourgeois constructs, the lot) – there'll always be time to make love and cheese. Liberty lives! Vive la révolution! How heart-warming.

 

It's a fine film, not to be missed.

 

 

One to One: John and Yoko (dir. Kevin Macdonald, 2024)

 

In 1971, musician John Lennon and conceptual artist Yoko Ono moved from their seventy-acre estate outside London to a two-room apartment in New York, where their relationship and creativity both flourished, fed by the thriving radicalism of their newly adopted home-city. Kevin Macdonald's snapshot-reel of a documentary crackles with affection for its socially conscious subjects, even as it exposes the solipsism and contradiction that accompanied their celebrity lifestyle. Clips from the 1972 “One to One” concert are punctuated by recordings – Lennon had begun taping his telephone calls – of conversations with various personal assistants attempting to meet the “needs” and manage the public image of their famous employers. These segments are often hilarious, even amid the generally chaotic and violent maelstrom of U.S. history that Macdonald also depicts.

 

As the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s withered into memory or splintered under various pressures, Americans' television screens (John and Yoko apparently became semi-obsessive tv-watchers) were increasingly crowded with frenetic commercial advertisements and feverish news reports. From the curated snugness of their New York loft, the couple, like many others, tracked the progress of Nixon's merciless military campaigns in Vietnam and Cambodia, received news of the massacre of insurgent inmates at Attica Prison in September 1971, immersed themselves in a hit new show called The Waltons, and waited for word of Black Panther Angela Davis's release, as well as segregationist George Wallace's chances of survival (after an assassination attempt in May 1972), among other hot topics of the day. Meanwhile requests for political and financial support streamed in from around the world – including from dissident Republican groups in Ireland (prompting a gag from the incorrigibly boyish Lennon, that Yoko was in fact an Irish emigré, “Yoko O'No!”). 

 

If Macdonald may be said to have captured the idealism that persisted in certain corners of the post-60s counter-culture in New York, he also conveys the pretentiousness and privilege of John, Yoko, and their wider circle, for whom life and politics frequently resembled a kind of performance art, whimsical and self-ironizing under the glare of the tv cameras. For Yoko in particular, it seems, that was part of the point. Nevertheless, it's telling that one of their friends and most frequent collaborators in this period – and so, a central figure in the documentary – was the entrepeneurial Jerry Rubin, an anti-war and anti-establishment campaigner, who ultimately turned out to be more of a charismatic charlatan than an instigator of meaningful political change. Rubin, as it happens, proved too extreme for the titular duo, who instead of appearing at the protest he had called at the Republican Convention in Miami in 1972, opted to deliver a free concert in Madison Square Garden, in aid of children with special needs. 

 

The footage from the concert, Lennon's last full-length gig, is wild and inspiring. For all the hints of self-absorption and political confusion that coloured his life – including his life with Yoko – when on-stage we see all the ways in which the former Beatle was the real deal: an artist with a message, whose music somehow managed to transcend narcissism and offer love to the world, despite its many cruelties. As he sings “Mother”, or “Give Peace a Chance” (joined by a magnificent Stevie Wonder, among others), we can feel the spirit moving, as though the times they were a-changin', for the better, once again.

 

 

Ocean, with David Attenborough (dirs. Toby Nowlan, Colin Butfield, and Keith Scholey, 2025)

 

For a certain kind of cultural consumer, David Attenborough is both sage and icon, a paragon of decorum, erudition, and (indelibly English) common-sense, whose mellifluous presentations of the natural world – its woes and wonders – never fail to reassure, even when, as in his latest feature, the forecast objectively is less than promising. This time round, his concern, as the title indicates, is with the sea and its species, many of which are now suffering a prolonged bout of ill health, due to needless and preventable exploitation by our (i.e. global northerners') various marine industries.

 

In an era when the green screen apparently reigns supreme in the realm of the cinematic arts, there's something miraculous and awe-inspiring about the on-location, high-definition approach to filming nature's beauties here, a lavish, painstaking style long associated with the Attenborough genre of documentary-making. Gusting swells of symphonic music – prayerful or exhilarating, as the case may be – accompany footage of seals gliding through kelp forests, or coral jungles shimmering in sunlight, or once-teeming sea-beds razed and made deathly by commercial trawlers. 

 

Ocean is one of Attenborough's more politically forthright interventions, explicitly calling for the “neo-colonialism” of the world's wealthy fishing powers to be challenged and curbed by conscientious viewers, and for old-fashioned values of stewardship and communal care to govern international ocean policy, replacing the profit-hungry rapacity of current practices. “Sharks and turtles survived the extinction of the dinosaurs,” our narrator reminds us, “but they may not survive” the current, man-made crisis besetting the blue depths where they shelter, as rapidly rising temperatures and pitiless industrial fishing methods wreak potentially irreparable havoc on maritime habitats around the globe. The toxic enormity and long-term effects of plastic waste – the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch – are an added catastrophe that even the optimistic Attenborough chooses not to think or talk too much about, at least in this particular venture.

 

Overall, however, the emphasis is on what can be done, and why action matters now. After a shamelessly spectacular closing shot of Britain's ninety-nine-year-old national treasure standing (inevitably) on the cliffs of Dover, we're informed that the world's nations are on the cusp of enacting a last-ditch, long-overdue treaty to protect the high seas, ensuring effective protections for the ocean and its many endangered life-forms. By this point, any audience-members not yet resolved on scuppering every off-shore trawler in their marine vicinity – a course of action Attenborough and friends never quite advocate, although the logic of their argument tends in that general direction – also have the option of signing a petition. At any rate, in Ocean they'll have had an absorbing experience: a benevolent plea for conservation, in the hope of warding off the worst impacts of climate collapse and mending, against the odds, some of the damage already done.

 

 

The Salt Path (dir. Marianne Elliott, 2024)

 

After falling into debt and losing their home, Raynor (Gillian Anderson) and her husband Moth (Jason Isaacs) embark on a 600-mile walk from Minehead, Somerset, to Poole Harbour, Dorset, in the hope of recovering their sense of belonging. Adding to their shock and dislocation, Moth, before departure, is diagnosed with a terminal degenerative illness, rendering their trek more dangerous and also – as he sees it – more necessary than ever. The Salt Path accompanies the duo on their self-made pilgrimage, tracking the ups and (very occasional) downs of their relationship, while introducing the rest of us to some gusting coastal scenery along the way.  

 

Despite the heaviness of its premise, Marianne Elliott's film is an oddly easy watch. Although visibly “salted” and sun-kissed, Jason Isaacs and Gillian Anderson still resemble dazzling celebrities decamped to the rugged climes of the sunny south-west: they may be playing frumpy, frazzled mortals, but they retain the glamorous aura of Hollywood stars holidaying among the groundlings. They make for pleasant company throughout, and of course they are both fine actors. Even if she never appeared on-screen again, Anderson will be remembered for her focussed, commanding performance in The Fall (2013-16); Isaac's lethal, scene-stealing hilarity in The Death of Stalin (2017) offers similar proof, if any were needed, of his range and gravitas. Here, they form two halves of a handsome, ageing power-couple, who come to learn from Wild Nature – a kind of mysticism for the middle-classes – how to surmount life's challenges.

 

Based on Raynor Winn's memoir of the same name, The Salt Path is ultimately closer to Emilio Estevez's The Way (2010) – a likeably quaint jaunt with Martin Sheen along the Camino de Santiago – than to Ordinary Love (2019), which also examined the effect of a troubling medical diagnosis on the life of a long-married couple. With its superb central performances (from Lesley Manville and Liam Neeson), Ordinary Love succeeded in offering a complex, sometimes jolting depiction of love and its changes. The Salt Path is a slighter picture, opting for easily recyclable life-lessons over emotional realism. 

 

After almost two hours of watching Ray and Moth pinch every penny and ration every morsel, in the penultimate scene we learn that Moth, now weaned off his medication, would like to “get a loan” and return to university to study regenerative agriculture (or somesuch). The closing credits inform us that this is what he went on to do – suggesting, perhaps, that the trauma of poverty into which Ray and Moth had been plunged was not quite as drastic or inescapable as they repeatedly declare. Whether viewers find this social parable beautifully uplifting or bafflingly self-absorbed may well depend on the coziness of their own life-circumstances; certainly, it's difficult to imagine Andrea Arnold or Ken Loach directing such a fable.

 

What The Salt Path may lack in political consciousness it arguably makes up for by its sheer, visual sweep. If any film this year could instil in its audience a thirst for the sea, this is it.

 

 

The Encampments (dirs. Michael T. Workman and Kei Pritsker, 2025)

 

When the film Whose Streets? premiered at the Sundance Festival in 2017, it appeared to encapsulate in cinematic form the anger and promise of the Black Lives Matter moment, in the face of what seemed like an unending epidemic of police violence against black citizens in America. Offering a grassroots-oriented portrait of Ferguson, Missouri, in the long aftermath of the killing of the unarmed teenager Michael Brown, Sabaah Folayan's documentary paid tribute to racial justice activists in the embattled city, even as it exposed the relentless hostility of state and federal actors to reform or redress. 

 

Playing out against the backdrop of war crimes abroad and domestic repression at home, The Encampments arguably does in 2025 what Whose Streets? did eight years ago, presenting a vivid, sometimes gruelling, utterly courageous challenge to apathy and ignorance, in an attempt to reckon with an immense social crime. Grounded in the pro-Palestine encampment movement that began in Columbia university, New York, in April 2024, the film tracks the testimonies and experiences of student campaigners as they protest their universities' institutional connections to the Israeli state – a state described by Human Rights Watch as an “apartheid” regime, and alleged by South Africa (before the International Court of Justice) to be perpetrating the crime of “genocide” against Palestinians in Gaza.

 

Met with slander, sanctions, brute force from the NYPD and Zionist activists, as well as arrest and even deportation for their non-violent actions, the students – some of whom are Palestinian, others of whom are Jewish, with family connections to Israel – remain steadfast throughout, thus helping to spark a wider campus movement across the USA reminiscent of the anti-Vietnam War campaigns of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Footage from the Columbia occupation of 1968 – led largely by black students inspired by the late Malcolm X, among others – underscores this last connection, while also demonstrating once again the pattern (and severity) of condemnation with which social justice struggles have frequently been treated in the Land of the Free.

 

Importantly, the documentary features interviews with Palestinian journalist Bisan Owda – at least 217 of whose colleagues have been killed by Israeli forces since October 2023 – alongside civilians and school-children in Gaza, expressing their gratitude to campus protestors around the world. In one of the most powerfully affecting sequences, the heavy-handed eviction of activists from “Hind's Hall”, a university building they had temporarily occupied and re-named, is accompanied by an audio clip of the final conversation between Hind Rajab, the young Palestinian child the students had sought to honour, and her mother in January 2024. As readers may already know, the recording is heart-breaking to listen to; likewise, the subsequent murder of Hind and the Red Crescent medics dispatched to rescue her from Israeli fire has been described as “a war crime too many” by the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Watching The Encampments, we understand why.

 

Directors Michael T. Workman and Kei Pritsker seem to be not only documenting a movement, but protecting the conscience of the times – or what remains of it. Backed and produced by Macklemore, their film is a distillation of hope and humanity, at what otherwise feels like a horrific turning-point in twenty-first-century history.

 

 

The Flats (dir. Alessandra Celesia, 2024)

 

Directed by Alessandra Celesia, The Flats is set in the New Lodge housing estate in North Belfast, dominated physically by a number of dilapidated tower blocks, whose rooftops nevertheless boast flapping tri-colours and a panoramic view of the surrounding city. 

 

Front and centre throughout is Joe McNally, who threw his first petrol-bomb – so he tells his therapist, Rita – at age “nine and a half”, the same year, not coincidentally, that his seventeen-year-old “favourite uncle” was murdered by loyalist paramilitaries. If Celesia, in her quiet, observing manner, is offering a portrait of a particular (working-class, republican) place and predicament, Joe and his immediate circle of friends form the beating heart of the documentary. Even moreso than Mark Cousins's immersive I Am Belfast (2015), Celesia enters the slipstream of her chosen community: she explores the brokenness of the flats themselves, with their holy shrines and vibrant murals, but it's the people who fill the screen with life. Having watched this film, who could ever forget Joe (with his love of Tina Turner, and his visceral contempt for new-age drug-dealers doing business on the estate), or Angie (with her private sun-bed, and courageously honest reminiscences), or Jolene (who has the stage presence, when performing songs in her local pub, of a Belfast Adele)?

 

Portions of the film are dedicated to re-constructions and re-enactments by the cast themselves of some of the traumatic memories that have shaped their lives – from Joe's mostly blanked-out recollections of attending his uncle's wake, as a young child, to Angie's account of shooting her first, abusive husband with an IRA weapon that had been stashed for safe-keeping in her kitchen (a transgression that would have seen her executed, she was informed by a local commander, had “the hunger strike” not been underway at the time). In these scenes, and in her depiction of Rita's therapy sessions with Joe and Jolene, Celesia arguably takes a risk, ethically and dramatically, as the cast reveal and then revisit their most painful, vulnerable moments. Nobody, however, could accuse Celesia of insensitivity, and her compassionate portrayal of Joe and company manages to be full-on without spilling over into bathos or condescension.

 

The film's treatment of the long after-life of “The Troubles”, and the complexities of trauma as such, will no doubt resonate with many. Accepting the award for best actress at the 2025 IFTAs, Lola Petticrew heroically lambasted what might be called the political class in Stormount and Westminster: 

 

Gutless politicians kick about ideas like painting over murals while working-class people on both sides of the green-and-orange line cry out for investment in social housing, education, youth services, and mental health services. While both governments punish trans kids for existing, and legitimize war criminals with handshakes and shamrocks, my peers are dying by suicide. There is what feels like insurmountable intergenerational trauma, and insufficient services to deal with it.

 

She went on to advocate for “decent mental health services” and “a proper standard of living” to be provided in those areas – like New Lodge – that have suffered an epidemic of social neglect since the signing of the much-vaunted Belfast Agreement over a quarter-century ago. 

 

Whoever it was who said that “every great work of art should be an accusation of the world” will find vindication a-plenty in Celesia's film: doubtless much of the suffering her people have endured was exacerbated by the failures or indifference of government authorities. But The Flats is also a momentous tribute to Joe, Jolene, Angie, Rita, and their comrades, whose humanity and humour are everywhere apparent. This singular film is a must-see for anyone concerned with memory, history, and the meaning of community – on this island, and farther afield.

 

 

Lollipop (dir. Daisy-May Hudson)

 

Partly drawing on her own experiences as a young adult growing up in homeless accommodation, with Lollipop (2024) director Daisy-May Hudson has crafted an engaged family drama that also serves as a wrenching critique of Britain's social care system. Released from prison, and no longer entitled to council accommodation, Molly (Posy Sterling) attempts to regain custody of her two children, who have been living in foster care during her time behind bars. A range of frustrating, frequently contradictory bureaucratic imperatives and hurdles present themselves, leading to a prolonged period of stress and uncertainty – heightened by Molly's volatile relationship with her own mother, and of course by the poverty and isolation of her new circumstances.

 

Sterling is unfailingly vital on-screen; her every glance and gesture convey the intense mixture of panic, anger, and love (for her kids) that Molly experiences, feelings amplified by the forbidding surveillance of social workers, whose job is to assess her character and capabilities as a mother. The film, however, is ecumenical in its sympathies: the same social workers with whom Molly clashes are themselves poorly paid, and are mostly benevolent, even if their familial interventions feel intrusive and judgemental in the moment.

 

If the impression we receive of the so-called welfare state is often bleak, one of the pleasures of Hudson's picture is its knowing portrayal of female friendship and solidarity as an affirming, literally life-saving social force. As Molly's former schoolfriend Amina, now a trainee nurse (and also homeless), Idil Ahmed radiates kindness and understanding. The scenes of Amina and Molly comforting each other, but also dancing together and playing with their children, are among the most emotionally affecting. The child actors, it should be said, are amazingly natural in their interactions with their older co-stars: we forget that these are staged relationships, pieced together over multiple takes.

 

With its theme of embattled motherhood and crushing sense of societal exclusion, Lollipop explores similar terrain to Andrea Arnold's powerful Fish Tank (2009) – a more disturbing film – or any number of Ken Loach vehicles, from Cathy Come Home (1966) through Ladybird, Ladybird (1994) to I, Daniel Blake (2016). Hudson's movie likewise mounts a scathing exposé of state bureaucracy, but in the end feels more heart-warmed and hopeful than those prior ventures: with some good luck, good people around you, and a willingness to apply yourself, it seems to suggest, a single mum might escape homelessness and turn her life around. Stranger things have happened – and in any case it's a reassuring conclusion to what is, in many respects, a tense and harrowing story.

 

For its astonishing central performances alone, Lollipop is a film to be watched and applauded.