Wendy Ide’s pick of other films: The Love That Remains, Everybody to Kenmure Street, Reminders of Him and more

The Love That Remains

(109 mins, 15) Directed by Hlynur Pálmason; starring Saga Garðarsdóttir, Sverrir Gudnason, Ída Mekkín Hlynsdóttir 

There’s a raft of cinematic conventions for depictions of marriage breakdowns. We expect scenes of kitchen-based recriminations and circular arguments that go nowhere, lots of chest-beating and showily anguished acting, and a lacrimose score of minor key piano. But the Icelandic writer and director Hlynur Pálmason (best known for Godland) takes a novel approach.

This delicate, playfully experimental collage picture, set over a year in the lives of recently separated artist Anna (Saga Garðarsdóttir) and her trawler fisherman husband Magnús (Sverrir Gudnason), plus their three children, is a blend of the fatalistic and the fantastic. It’s a story that acknowledges the sadness of endings, but is simultaneously, as the title suggests, infused with the bittersweet affection that endures between the two. It’s also unexpectedly weird. The patchwork of glimpses of the quotidian – the family dog, Panda, rolling in something stinky and unmentionable, Anna helping her father replace fences on his land – is punctuated by moments of surreal fantasy: a giant rooster prowls through the house at one point.

While the film lacks the thematic scope of Godland, which told of a 19th-century Danish preacher’s futile battle against the inhospitable Icelandic landscape, it is rich with poetic visual symbolism. The Icelandic countryside is both an arrestingly photographed backdrop and a playground for the imaginations of the characters. It’s clearly a personal work for the director. While it is not his story or his marriage depicted, the film features his children, his earthy, organic artworks and his shamelessly scene-stealing dog.

Everybody to Kenmure Street

(95 mins, 12A) Directed by Felipe Bustos Sierra 

An ordinary day in May 2021. The Muslim community in Pollokshields, Glasgow, was preparing to celebrate Eid al-Fitr later that day; for their neighbours, it was business as usual. Then an immigration enforcement van pulled up on Kenmure Street. The plan was to snatch and potentially deport two men who lived in one of the tenement flats. But the local community resisted. One brave individual, identified as “Van Man” and here played Emma Thompson (who is also credited as a producer) to protect his anonymity, crawled under the vehicle to prevent it from moving. Neighbours, numbering up to a thousand by the end of the day, flooded into the street to block the exit of the immigration van and to peacefully confront the police.

In this documentary about the protest, the director Felipe Bustos Sierra (Nae Pasaran) threads in historical details of Glasgow’s tradition of civic uprisings and its economic roots in slavery. The rough-and-ready aesthetic of this account of a grassroots act of resistance – it is largely sourced from camera phone footage – belies the film’s dexterous editing and elegant interweaving of social history and ripped-from-the-headlines immediacy. Essential viewing.

Reminders of Him

(114 mins, 15) Directed by Vanessa Caswill; starring Maika Monroe, Tyriq Withers, Bradley Whitford

The third adaptation of a Colleen Hoover novel in as many years – the film follows the litigation-plagued box office success It Ends with Us and the insipid Regretting You – this film treads a remarkably similar path to its predecessors. Hoover’s oeuvre tends to hinge on plucky, thin blonde women suffering some form of man-related misfortune, then pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and finding romance with the convenient beefcake who was there all along. The plots have all the depth of a Jackie magazine photo story; the acting is of the lip-biting and passionate heavy-breathing school.

While not quite as brain-atrophying as Regretting You, Reminders of Him is still pretty dismal. Maika Monroe stars as Kenna: recently released from prison, she has returned to small-town Wyoming and is hoping to meet her four-year-old daughter for the first time. Her late boyfriend’s parents have other ideas. But thanks to a budding friendship with local bar owner Ledger (Tyriq Withers), her dead boyfriend’s best friend, Kenna starts to put her life back together. You can predict the rest.

The Tasters

(123 mins, 15) Directed by Silvio Soldini; starring Elisa Schlott, Max Riemelt, Alma Hasun

East Prussia, 1943. Rosa (Elisa Schlott) has fled Berlin to wait for her soldier husband’s return to his village. Then she finds herself summoned along with a group of other young women to Nazi headquarters. There they are forced, frequently at gunpoint, to taste the food that will later be served to Hitler, to check for poison.

Based on the Italian novel At the Wolf’s Table by Rosella Postorino, this is a handsome, richly detailed period piece that views the final year of second world war through the eyes of women pressed into the service of the Führer. The picture’s main strength, aside from the meticulous costume and production design, is its thoughtful depiction of the dynamics of female friendship at a time of crisis.

A Pale View of Hills

(123 mins, 12A) Directed by Kei Ishikawa; starring Suzu Hirose, Fumi Nikaidô, Yō Yoshida 

This adaptation of the debut novel by Kazuo Ishiguro weaves together dual timelines: the story unfolds in both 1950s Nagasaki, a city only just beginning to heal from the devastation of the atomic bomb, and a polite and unassuming corner of England in the 1980s.

The link between the two is Etsuko (played by Suzu Hirose as a young woman, Yō Yoshida in her older incarnation). Niki (Camilla Aiko), Etsuko’s daughter and an aspiring writer, interviews her mother about her past life in Japan – the memories are rendered with colour-saturated, hyper-real acuity. But it becomes clear that Etsuko is not a reliable narrator, and the threads of this story are knotted into an impenetrable tangle.

Photographs by Curzon/Hlynur Palmason/MetFilm Distribution. All Rights Reserved