SIRAT**

Frack me, SIRAT is a steaming pile of pretentious wank. I rarely agree with Peter Bradshaw's reviews in the Guardian but he was absolutely spot on in calling this the most over-rated film of 2025.  He wrote that the final part of this film descends into Monty-Python-esque absurdity and once you see that it's hard to unsee it. I felt that writer-director Oliver Laxe might have been trying to make some deep and meaningful point about the savagery of life but got lost up his own backside.  It's actually a real shame because Laxe clearly knows how to create a stunning visual and how to score it. Maybe he should just do music videos?

The movie opens in Morocco where middle-aged schlubby dad Luis (Sergi López) and his young son Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona) are derping around raves trying to find their missing daughter/sister.  They join up with a group of feckless hippies on a humbug and start journeying across a desert in a convoy of vans trying to find another rave that the daughter might be at. It all seems rather vague.  There are some soldiers - it's unsafe - there are landmines.  Anyways, bad stuff starts happening and keeps on happening - to the characters and to the viewers.  The movie lurches off-piste and then gives up all hopes of any kind of emotional impact or gravitas. 

SIRAT is rated R and has a running time of 115 minutes. It played Cannes 2025 where it won the Jury Prize. It also played the BFI London Film Festival. It went on release in the USA last November and will be released in the UK on February 27th.

Random DVD round-up 1 - LEAVING

Kristin Scott Thomas has a cool hard beauty that has seen her cast in many a film as, well, a cool hard beauty - emotionally repressed and stolidly dutiful. How wonderful then to see her madly, wide-smilingly in love - almost fey.

In Catherine Corsini's LEAVING, Scott Thomas plays Suzanne, a middle-aged middle-class woman married to a financially successful medic and living in a beautiful house. She is rather taken for granted by her husband (Yvan Attal) and kids, and is trying to reclaim her career as a physiotherapist. She is, in many ways, wandering through life on auto-pilot with occasional outbursts where the rage erupts - as in the powerful opening scene. Suzanne's life changes when she meets and pursues a Spanish builder called Ivan (Sergi López). Their attraction is physical - for sure - but not as singularly as her husband tries to portray it. She isn't just a middle-aged woman who has discovered sex but rather, as in Lady Chatterly's Lover - a kind of freedom and self-knowledge. The second half of the film sees the erotic character study move into a sort of procedural thriller as the two lovers are forced to live cut off from the husband's money and Suzanne's children. The surprise is that it isn't Ivan who drives the narrative - neither as seducer nor as breadwinner. Pretty soon Suzanne's girlie happiness turns into a more brutal, steely survival instinct.

By putting Suzanne firmly at the centre of the film, writers Catherine Corsini and Gaëlle Macé have given Kristin Scott Thomnas a role of the kind that is rarely seen in cinema. A middle-aged woman is allowed to be multi-faceted and the driving force of the action and emotional content of the film. Scott Thomas is completely up to the task and this is further evidence of an actress at the top of her game. I also appreciate that Corsini doesn't feel the need to spin this movie out beyond a 80 minute run-time. Too many films nowadays are unnecessarily baggy. But, there is a big problem with this film - and that's the final act. The closing action is too predictable, too crude relative to what has come before, and the final scenes over the end credits, while presumably trying to be ambiguous seem rather off-tone.

LEAVING played London and Toronto 2009 and was released last year in Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Spain and Brazil. It was released earlier this year in Germany, Italy, Portugal, the UK, Argentina, Denmark, Sweden and the US.