Rory O'Connor

To call With Hasan in Gaza a personal work would be an understatement, but its message is as clear as it is universal.

This is a film that lingers in the bloodstream, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.

A funny and formally adventurous adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway set in modern-day Nigeria.

The Man I Love is not the “musical” that promotional materials have suggested, but it’s more than worth seeing just the same.

With a wafer-thin plot and essentially non-existent characters, however, the one-time enfant terrible’s first feature in a decade has little to defend itself against the creeping sense of perfume-advert vapidity—or, worse still, AI slop. The extent to which you agree with that will come down to each viewer’s taste and sensibilities, of course, but I must say that after ten years away from the world’s biggest screens, I was hoping for a little more.

This is a movie that promises and delivers scenes of copious drug taking and gross-out comedy, but its third-act emotional payoff is as earned and devastating as the best of them.

I’ll admit that Camp Miasma‘s more winking moments . . . did more to break the movie’s spell than enhance it. When Schoenbrun does decide to stare back into the void, however, their ability to cast a dark spell on the viewer is surely unrivaled in contemporary cinema.

Butterfly Jam is usually at its best whenever Keough is in the room, and the rare moments in which her and Keoghan’s performances click perhaps offer a glimmer of what might have been.

The filmmakers allow their characters to bounce off each other—sometimes genially, usually not—in a series of dialogue-dense sequences that are either caustically funny or just downright caustic. Whether the video-game-cut-scene vibes outstay their welcome will depend on the viewer’s tastes.

Sossai’s movie (which is certainly not without sentiment) definitely follows through on the promise of its title. It might slip into Alexander Payne territory at times––there are a few moments when the trio drive in contented silence––yet if Last One is Sossai’s Sideways, it’s a version with two Jacks and no Miles.