Five of the best films to watch this February

1. Saint Omer

WHY would anyone kill their own baby? Alice Diop asked herself that question in 2016, when she was watching the trial of a French-Senegalese woman who had left her child on a beach to drown.

Having made a name for herself as a documentary lmmaker, Diop has turned her memories of the trial into a gripping drama, Saint Omer. Kayije Kagame plays Rama, a pregnant, Dioplike novelist who plans to use the case in her book on the Greek myth of the child-killing Medea. Guslagie Malanda plays Laurence Coly, the complex woman on trial. “Diop consciously uses the many tropes of true crime documentaries,” says Sheila O’Malley at RogerEbert. com, “while at the same time up-ending them. In doing so, Saint Omer becomes a much larger re ection on contemporary French life, the experience of immigrants, and the shadows we drag along with us as we move into a di erent space.”

2. Women Talking

Women Talking has just been nominated for best picture and best adapted screenplay at this year's Oscars. Written and directed by Sarah Polley, and drawing from Miriam Toew’s 2018 factbased novel, the lm features Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, Rooney Mara and a cameo-ing Frances McDormand as the residents of a remote religious community where the men have been drugging and raping the women for years. When the crimes nally come to light, the women have to decide what to do: forgive their attackers, ght for justice, or leave the community, even if that means, according to what they've been taught, that they will lose their chance of going to heaven. Lindsey Bahr at Associated Press says that Polley's “extraordinary” lm “is expressionistic and lyrical, biting and poetic. The conversations are messy, the feminism contradictory and the trauma complicated... It is astute and urgent and may just help those previously unable to nd words or even coherent feelings for their own traumatic experiences.”

3. Broker

Hirokazu Kore-Eda has written and directed a huge number of beautifully humane lms, including 2018’s awardwinning Shoplifters, but Broker could be his most delightful. Set in South Korea, its unlikely hero (Song Kang-ho, the star of Parasite) is a launderette owner with a shocking sideline: he takes infants from a church's “baby box”, a hatch where people can leave unwanted children, and then sells those infants to would-be adoptive parents. However, police detectives are watching him, and so is the young mother of the latest child he is selling. As dark as this premise may sound, Broker becomes a funny, big-hearted road movie about a group of loners becoming a family. “There's an astonishing sympathy for the unforgivable decisions we make, a patience for all the strange journeys you have to take in order to shake o the resentment passed down by generations,” says Ella Kemp at IndieWire.

“And, somehow, the lmmaker always

nds a way to see light in it all.”

4. Pamela, A Love Story

Last year's Disney+ drama series, Pam & Tommy, recounted how Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s honeymoon sex tape was stolen, copied, and distributed around the world. The series seemed to support Anderson, but it was made without her cooperation, and so on one level the producers were perpetuating the very exploitation they claimed to be condemning. As Laura Martin put it in her BBC Culture review: “It feels like grubby stu that, sadly, has facilitated the real-life victim being unwantedly pushed back into the headlines for an episode she'd likely rather forget.” Now, an intimate documentary from Ryan White, the director of Serena and Good Night Oppy, allows Anderson to present her life the way she wants to – as well as allowing Net ix to take the moral high ground from Disney+. “I blocked that stolen tape out of my life in order to survive, and now that it's all coming back again, I feel sick,” says Anderson in the trailer for Pamela, A Love Story. “I want to take control of the narrative for the rst time.”

5. Blue Jean

In 1988, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government introduced Clause 28 in the UK, a law banning local authorities from “promoting homosexuality” and schools from “teaching homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”. It's a nerve-racking time for Jean (Rosy McEwan), the heroine of Georgia Oakley's Bafta-nominated drama. A PE teacher in a happy same-sex relationship, Jean prefers to keep her sexuality secret at school. But when a new pupil, Lois (Lucy Halliday), spots her in a lesbian bar, she fears that the secret will come out.