Little Trouble Girls review – monstrous choirmaster spikes a sublime Catholic coming-of-age tale

Utterly absorbing Slovenian debut reinvents the cliched idea of a Catholic girl’s sexual awakening, and proves that no teacher can be as cruel as a music teacher This elegant and mysterious debut from Slovenian director Urška Djukić, with its superb musical score and sound design, reinvents the cliched idea of a Catholic girl’s sexual awakening. It’s also proof, if proof were needed, that no teacher in the world can be as cruel and abusive as a music teacher. We have already seen JK Simmons’ terrifying jazz instructor in Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash and Isabelle Huppert’s keyboard monster in Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher; now there is Slovenian actor and musician Saša Tabaković playing a demanding, yet insidious choirmaster in charge of a group of talented, vulnerable teenage girls. The film incidentally has a lesson for any teenage person watching: if a music teacher asks you to sit next to them on the piano stool with no one else in the room and murmurs “You can confide in me” … ...

Pigeons! Superheroes! Farts! The best movie moments of 2023

From angry confrontations to romantic reunions, Guardian writers pick the big-screen moments that have stayed with them the most

Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon is frequently enthralling over the course of its three-and-a-half-hour runtime, sinking into the depths of American shame as it follows William Hale (Robert De Niro) and his unofficial lieutenant Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) as they grasp for the money and land controlled by the Osage tribe in 1920s Oklahoma, which involves slowly poisoning Ernest’s wife Mollie (Lily Gladstone) as they kill off members of her family and community. But just when it seems like the story’s final dominoes are tumbling over with inevitability, Scorsese jumps ahead for his final scene – maybe the most audacious in American movies this year. Rather than a series of solemn title cards explaining what happened to the people whose lives we’ve seen dramatized, the movie cuts to a true-crime radio show in the 1940s, with major figures from the film reduced to cartoonish voiceovers and sound effects. And then, to detail Mollie’s post-narrative life, Scorsese himself appears. It’s not a Hitchcockian wink of a cameo, but a show of respect, as he steps from behind the camera to essentially read Mollie’s obituary; the mood changes from playful to stark in an instant. Seeing this master film-maker visibly grapple with the limits of artistic expression took my breath away. Jesse Hassenger

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