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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The Exorcist review – Friedkin’s head-swivelling horror is still diabolically inspired

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The 50th anniversary extended director’s cut of the 1973 tale of teenage possession still shocks

William Friedkin’s deadly serious contemporary horror, adapted for the screen from the bestseller by novelist William Peter Blatty, is back now in cinemas for its 50-year anniversary in the extended director’s cut. This is the film that whispered its evil into the ears of US audiences traumatised by political and generational upheaval. It is also the great ancestor of the entire horror genre: a 132-minute jump scare – with horribly malign slow sections – taking place in upper-middle class America rather than some exotic central European locale. (I have in the past suggested that it brought supernatural fear into the American suburbs; well, I should admit that Georgetown in DC is hardly a suburb, in fact the point is that it is very near the political centre of the free world.)

Ellen Burstyn plays movie actor Chris MacNeil, a single mother ordinarily resident in California but currently renting a handsome townhouse in Washington as she shoots a film called Crash Course; she is playing a liberal academic at odds with the student body who are violently possessed with revolutionary ideas. Her director is a louche and boozy Brit called Burke Dennings, whose persona is maybe inspired a bit by Ken Russell, who is played by veteran Irish stage actor Jack MacGowran and whose death shortly after shooting helped create the “cursed film” aura that surrounds The Exorcist.

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