The King of Kings review – Charles Dickens retelling of the Jesus story does a serviceable job

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The famous author tells his son and their cat the story of Jesus in this mixed-bag family animation, voiced by an impressive cast This syrupy cartoon account of the life of Jesus (voiced by Oscar Isaac) is narrated, with consummate weirdness, by Charles Dickens (Kenneth Branagh). It’s in fact based on a story Dickens wrote for his children (and wasn’t published until 1934, decades after his death). The idea is that Dickens is telling the story of the New Testament to his young son Walter (Roman Griffin Davis) and Walter’s impish cat, explaining to the King Arthur-obsessed Walter how Jesus was the real King of Kings and all that. And so we see Walter and Charles, in their mid-19th-century garb, wandering through scenes of JC’s life nearly two thousand years earlier, from the nativity to the crucifixion – much like Scrooge and his spectral buddies in A Christmas Carol as they wander through past, present and future Christmases. It rather drags out what is already a pretty long running ...
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Vaychiletik review – beautifully-shot Mexican folk music study in the high arthouse style

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A tender film about the music of Mayan descendants is hampered by the alofty adherence to a documentary aesthetic where nothing is explained

This film about a flute player and farmer named José Pérez López from Zinacantán in Chiapas, Mexico, teems with beautifully shot images of folks playing music, embroidering, participating in days-long community rituals, and tending their crops of flowers in polytunnels – pretty normal everyday stuff. It feels a little more elevated because it affords a glimpse into the life of descendants of the Mayans who practice ancestor worship and polytheistic beliefs but also have shrines with Catholic saints. The film’s website has a handy chunk of text about Bats’i son ta Sots’leb, the traditional music of Zinacantán, described in fascinating musicological detail.

It’s a shame that kind of explanatory background can’t be found anywhere in the movie. In fact, the subtitles and dialogue never even give the names of the people we are observing for most of the running time. You can only work out that the old guy is named José, and the woman who laughingly scolds him for drinking so much is Elvia Pérez Suárez, presumably his wife, and that they also live with a hard-working younger man named Esteban Pérez Pérez (presumably José and Elvia’s son) and some even younger kids: Esteban’s children? Random kids from next door? Who knows, because this scrupulously verité-style film is determined to adhere to the high-arthouse documentary aesthetic wherein nothing is explained, nothing is contextualised, and there’s no sense of what point or purpose this all serves other than a little digital tourism to a far-flung corner of the globe.

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