Travels with my aunt…
★★★★★ OUT 28 JUNE CINEMAS, APPLE TV+
Acompanion piece of sorts to Killers of the Flower Moon, Erica Tremblay’s narrative feature debut finds its star Lily Gladstone in a contemporary yet familiar role: that of an Indigenous woman railing against prejudice, poverty and injustice.
Set on the Seneca-Cayuga reservation in north-east Oklahoma, its story of an aunt’s attempts to locate her feared-dead sister while raising her teenage niece flirts with road-movie and crime tropes before revealing its true subject: the female ties that bind communities in the face of masculine violence.
Jax (Gladstone) can’t get the authorities to give a fig about her missing sibling Tawi (Hauli Gray). But when it comes to Tawi’s unruly daughter Roki (Isabel Deroy-Olson), they can’t wait to hand over custody to her white grandfather Frank (Shea Whigham). Determined to attend a tribal gathering in Oklahoma City, Roki persuades Jax to smuggle her away from her guardians. Jax’s ‘borrowing’ of Frank’s car puts the cops on their tail in what becomes a quest to discover what happened to Tawi and a defiant affirmation of their Native heritage.
Like Thelma and Louise before them, Jax and Roki make an appealing duo. As engaging as Deroy-Olson is, though, Gladstone provides the emotional fulcrum for a film that’s as modest and self-contained as Scorsese’s multiple-Oscar-nominated epic was sprawling and operatic.
THE VERDICT Gladstone’s gutsy turn anchors a drama that doesn’t need to be fancy to be forceful.
NIGHTSIREN 18
FILM ★★★★★ OUT NOW ARROW, BD
EXTRAS ★★★★★
Commentary, Video essays,
Booklet, Poster
Witchy folk-horror drama gives way to more real-world terrors in Tereza Nvotová’s ferocious study of parochialism and patriarchal oppression, filtered through the lens of Slovakian folklore. Natália Germáni stars as Šarlota, a young woman returning to the village she fled decades earlier, haunted by memories of a tragic accident. Treated with suspicion by the locals, she befriends fellow outsider Mira (Eva Mores); but when two children go missing the pair get caught up in a gripping modern-day witch hunt.
TELL THAT TO THE WINTER SEA 15
★★★★★ OUT NOW CINEMAS
1 JULY DIGITAL
Saltburn vibes abound in this tale of a teacher reunited with her old girlfriend in a leafy country pile. Actor Jo (Greta Bellamacina) is about to get hitched, to a beau we never see. Yet having Scarlet (Amber Anderson) around inevitably evokes memories of their youthful fling, recreated in flashbacks that awkwardly require the 30-something leads to play their characters at school age. The hen do that follows sees Tamsin Egerton and others swell Jaclyn Bethany’s all-female ensemb
