Film

The first filmed version of Mary Shelley’s gothic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) was the silent short Frankenstein (1910). Since then, more than four hundred versions of Shelley’s sutured-together golem have bestridden both the large and small screen. The most well known remains Universal Pictures’ Frankenstein (1931) and its sequel, Bride of Frankenstein (1935), pre-Code gothic horrors which implanted Boris Karloff’s pitiable Monster in the collective imagination forever after.

Maura Delpero’s The Mountain Bride – Vermiglio was the winner of the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize at the 2024 Venice Film Festival. It is a film of austere beauty, as fragile as it is forceful. Set in the Trentino village of Vermiglio in 1944, it conjures a community perched on the edge – geographically at the border of Switzerland and Austria, historically at the close of World War II, and spiritually at the uneasy threshold between tradition and change.

Agnes (Eva Victor) is a high achiever. Barely out of her twenties, she is already a faculty member of the English department at a north-eastern US college. The red brick college sits with certainty in the landscape; so should Agnes, but something is off. The cottage where she lives – narrow and tall, just like she is – feels isolated. At night she hears the wind in the trees and checks the door, waiting for something. A reckoning never materialises.

Right now on the website for A24 – the reigning enfant terrible of indie American film distribution – you can buy a ‘Babygirl Milk Tee’ for $40, a T-shirt prominently featuring an image of a tall glass of milk. This is an allusion to one of the more memorable moments in Halina Reijn’s Babygirl, when upstart intern Samuel (Harris Dickinson) surreptitiously purchases a glass of milk for his much-older boss, Romy (Nicole Kidman), at a work function, then watches her drink it in a single gulp; a semi-public display of psychosexual domination. 

The Alliance Française French Film Festival, the world’s largest showcase of French cinema outside of France, returns in 2024 for its thirty-fifth edition, with its usual eclectic mix of films from arthouse to mainstream cinema. Francophiles and cinephiles alike can see films from a range of genres, including drama, romantic comedy, social comedy, thriller, and historical biopic – from renowned directors like Marcel Carné and Olivier Nakache and Éric Toledano, to newcomers like Marie Amachoukeli. This year’s festival features the usual big names in French cinema – Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Daniel Auteuil, Laure Calamy, and Mathieu Almaric – alongside some excellent début performances. Here are some of the highlights.