The Girls review – poignant coming-of-age romance is an understated gem of Sri Lankan cinema

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Sumitra Peries’ 1978 film about teenage sisters and thwarted romance is laden with passions that can’t be spoken aloud Here is a gem of South Asian cinema from 1978, by the Sri Lankan director and editor Sumitra Peries. With its lucid monochrome cinematography and calm, natural, unselfconscious performances, there is a freshness and warmth to this film. It is often on the brink of melodrama or soap opera, many shots having a tendency to slow zoom into the actors’ faces, and yet The Girls is in fact rather understated. A great deal of its poignancy resides in this very suppression of emotion. We are in a world of passions that can’t be spoken aloud. It is a story through whose entire running time I wistfully hoped for a happy ending, but that is what Peries ruthlessly withholds from her audience. Kusum (Vasanthi Chathurani) is a studious, serious teen from a poor family with a scholarship to a very good school. Her father is seriously ill and her mother works hard to make ends meet. She...
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Killers of the Flower Moon review – Scorsese’s remarkable epic about the bloody birth of America

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Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro and Lily Gladstone star in this macabre western about serial murders among the Osage tribe in 1920s Oklahoma, which reflects the erasure of Native Americans from the US

Martin Scorsese’s western true-crime thriller is about the US’s Osage murders of the early 1920s, based on the nonfiction bestseller by David Grann. With co-writer Eric Roth, Scorsese crafts an epic of creeping, existential horror about the birth of the American century, a macabre tale of quasi-genocidal serial killings which mimic the larger erasure of Native Americans from the US. It places in the drama’s foreground a gaslit marriage of lies and poisoned love. It echoes Scorsese’s earlier work about mob violence, mob loyalty and the final, inevitable sellout to the federal authorities, whose own bad faith gradually emerges. But in the end, this film is about what all westerns are about, and perhaps all history: the brutal grab for land, resources and power.

Lily Gladstone gives a performance of tragic force as Mollie Burkhart, a Native American woman from the Osage tribe who, like all her people, has become unexpectedly wealthy because the apparently stony and unpromising land in Oklahoma on which the authorities allowed the Osage to settle turned out to have huge reserves of oil. But they are still subject to a racist and infantilising condition of “guardianship”: to claim the income and spend it, Osage individuals need a white co-signatory. And there is something else: Mollie and her family are deeply disturbed by mysterious illnesses which have been killing off Osage people, one by one. Later the bodies of Osage murder-victims are found, including Mollie’s wayward sister Anna (Cara Jade Myers), whose autopsy is bizarrely carried out in the open air, at the crime scene itself.

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