La Vérité (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2019)

Kore-eda, who achieved widespread international success with Shoplifters in 2018, directs a cast of European actors for the first time and seems to have bitten off more than he can chew. The French cast of The Truth, led by Catherine Deneuve as a vain, insecure, spiky ageing actress and Juliette Binoche as her resentful daughter, is as dependable as you can expect and they have a real chemistry, but Kore-eda seems to afraid to step outside the set conventions of the French middle-class family drama and really bring his own style to the piece. And so we watch them bicker for the whole duration, until the whole affair fizzles out without true resolution and I promise you that it will not stay in your mind the day after. And God knows what Ethan Hawke is doing there as Binoche's American, monoglot husband. Presumably it was enough for the director that he's been in enough films set in France before, but his presence is completely superfluous.
The best aspect of the film is probably the parallel storyline involving Deneuve shooting a sci-fi film as a old woman whose mother is stuck in space and agelessness and can only visit her daughter once every seven years through her whole life lest she die. But this never quite gels with the Deneuve-Binoche dynamic to give it added value.

5/10

Mrs Lowry & Son (Adrian Noble, 2019)

This is a very self-contained film, as easily happens with direct conversions from stage plays, particularly when they really only have two characters in a single room. It's simply the story of the idiosyncratic Lancastrian painter L.S. Lowry looking after his bed-ridden elderly mother as he struggles to get out from beneath her smothering yoke, and there is no relief for him just as there is no relief for the audience either: we are as trapped as he is in the never-ending cycle of his self-sacrifice to an insecure old woman who has always sought to crush his artistic dreams under her class-based notions of proper art and deportment. Thus the story keeps on revolving around the same ideas, and this would be an insurmountable hindrance, were it not for the casting of Timothy Spall and Vanessa Redgrave in the roles, who breathe such life into the fractious relationship that the obvious dramatic limitations of the script are surmounted.
You do find yourself thinking at times, though, now that Spall has been Turner and Lowry, which iconic English artist someone is still thinking about asking him to represent.

6/10

Mother! (Darren Aronofsky, 2017)

Aronofsky moves on to psychological horror and the result is somewhat of a mess. Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem star as a couple living in seclusion, Him (this is literally the name the character is given, with pretentions of universality) a poet with writer's block and Mother (likewise, that's her moniker) a younger woman who just wants a child to fill the void. Then creepy fans of his start turning up and imposing themselves to an intolerable degree on the couple, which Him is blithely unconcerned about while her mind starts to unravel, in the manner of Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion or, as still another obvious Polanski influence, Mia Farrow in Rosemary's Baby. The air of simmering menace and mystery sustain it for a while, but then it goes into the territory of The Purge in an orgiastically brutal manner and Lawrence is just left to weep and scream more and more. Aronofsky has proved with certain films, such as The Wrestler, that he can occasionally keep his auteurish excesses in check, but the lack of discipline here is more akin to that evidenced in his windbag sci-fi The Fountain.

5/10