Aftersun (Charlotte Wells, 2022)

At first there are only flashes of images and fragments of handheld video, and after a while, there's a creeping worry that there won't be much else. But then dialogue and story do make their entrance, and it's a young girl on holiday in Turkey with her dad, clearly some decades ago. Deliberately protracted and static shots still persist, and it becomes apparent that this and the use of colour in each frame are highly significant: these are just scattered recollections of a brief period that still matters to the adult recalling it, everything seen from the viewpoint of a child, too young to grasp her dad's underlying depression.

The director could have provided an earlier signal that what the viewer is about to witness is completely impressionistic, but persisting with it is worthwhile in that it provides something meaningful and real without the usual spoon-feeding. You get to live the memory instead.

7/10

American Fiction (Cord Jefferson, 2023)

The estimable Jeffrey Wright plays a literature professor whose highbrow novels aren't selling, sent on leave by his college for challenging his students' notions of political correctness. He duly goes to visit his family back in Boston.

It should be stated at this point that, as per the USA's one-drop rule, he's considered to be black, and his frustrations are largely due to the white-dominated publishing world only wanting black literature to conform to stereotypes of foul-mouthed rappers, gangstas with guns and drugs in the hood or proud, downtrodden individuals nobly suffering oppression, so that it sells to the majority white readership. Or, as he refers to it, 'black trauma porn'. So he sets out to write the very worst example of that genre for the purposes of ridiculing and undermining it, and is then dismayed when it's just taken at face value and becomes hugely popular instead.

What may strike non-American viewers as particularly surprising is finding an American film that combines a such subtle sense of ironic satire with a serious message. It doesn't consistently get the balance right, having to also somewhat needlessly incorporate the issues of other characters, mainly his mother with dementia, his intelligent-seeming new girlfriend and his reckless gay brother, but the point still gets through in the end, assuming that end isn't yet another fictional layer.

7/10