The Whistlers
Dir: Corneliu Porumboiu (1hr 38mins) (15)
★★★★
Corneliu Porumboiu is known for his bleak brand of black comedy satirising corruption in post-Ceausescu Romania, but with this “very watchable” suspense thriller he has ventured into new territory, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. The fabulously deadpan Vlad Ivanov stars as Cristi, a dirty Bucharest cop drawn into the drug-money laundering set-up he has been investigating. Under surveillance by his superiors (who are not “impervious to bribes” themselves), he travels to the island of La Gomera in the Canaries, where the bad guys are headquartered. There, he tangles with the drug lord’s girlfriend, femme fatale Gilda (Catrinel Marlon), and has to learn the (quite genuine) local tradition of – the art of communicating in a whistled version of Spanish, used by the mobsters as a code the police can’t crack.
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Its “sun-dazzled” setting lends the film a “candy brightness” that fans of Porumboiu’s “low-key oeuvre” will find surprising, said Danny Leigh in the FT. But it’s also a “playful tribute” to noir classics. Crosses are doubled; tables are “turned so often dinner is on the ceiling”; and there’s plenty of “stone-faced” gags. (At one point, the felons gather in a derelict warehouse “so cinematic it turns out to be, of course, a film set”.) It’s the “flickering of real feeling” between Cristi and Gilda that elevates this above “a traditional twisty crime caper”, said Kevin Maher in The Times. And the scenes (“gangsters whistling musical messages of criminal intent from tower block to tower block”) are “strangely beguiling”.
Available from Curzon Home Cinema.
feels polemical”, said Mark Kermode in
The Observer. Newcomer Sidney Flanigan is “superb” as Autumn, a 17-year-old who wants an abortion but in her Pennsylvania town can’t get one without parental consent. “Quietly desperate”, she confides in her more outgoing cousin, Skylar (“rising star” Talia Ryder), and they travel to a clinic in New York City together. The hurdles they face – from finding money to dodging creeps and even having to sleep on the streets while they wait for the procedure – are banal but maddening, and their deepening friendship is “perfectly observed”.
The film is as “funny and tender” as it is troubling, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph, engaging us so completely with the road trip narrative that we learn only gradually about the circumstances that led to Autumn’s plight. The first clue is in her “not-notably enthusiastic” turn at a school talent show, singing the old pop hit which “presumably sounded less creepy in 1963 than it does here”. But it’s only later on that her “innermost world” truly opens up, said Manohla Dargis in The New York Times, when Autumn is interviewed by a health worker, answering multiple-choice questions about her life using only the four words of the film’s title. It’s a “gut punch” of a scene, made more powerful by the director’s “unshowy” technique.
He’s Got the Power,
Available from Amazon Prime Video and other platforms.