The Triptych of Mondongo review – one part art documentary, two parts directorial megalomania

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What begins as a portrait of Argentinian art collective Mondongo snowballs into Mariano Llinás’s infuriatingly brilliant farrago of colour, conflict and existential crisis About as inside-baseball for visual arts as you can get, Mariano Llinás’s three-part portrait of Argentinian art collective Mondongo is knackering, infuriating and, infuriatingly, often brilliant – especially in its more sincere second instalment. The film nominally tries to document Mondongo’s 2021 Baptistery of Colours project , in which the artists catalogued the chromatic spectrum with plasticine blocks inside a dodecahedron chapel. But it quickly snowballs into Llinás’s own scattershot inquiry into colour and portraiture, a tone poem that ceaselessly interrogates its own tones, a crisis of faith about representation, and – as he falls out with artists Juliana Laffitte and Manuel Mendanha – a droll depiction of a director’s nervous breakdown. As Laffitte lets fly at him at one point, Llinás can never resist the...
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From Twister to Titanic: writers on their favourite disaster movies

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As the tornado-chasing sequel Twisters arrives, Guardian writers pick the films that have stuck with them the longest

While sadness is never too far from the frame in the disaster genre – the majority of films, after all, do involve the mass erasure of life – it’s rarely felt quite as heavy as it did in 1998’s other comet movie Deep Impact. It unfolds with the frightening urgency of a serious-minded political thriller, as Téa Leoni’s ambitious journalist realises her big scoop is far bigger than she had initially thought, a misunderstood acronym leading her to realise the world might be coming to an end. What always struck, and scared, me as a teenager was just how hopeless things then felt – an aborted mission to throw it off course, a limited and unjust lottery for some to stay safe in shelters, a host of horrible choices to be made – with so much of the film then haunted by the thoughts and fears of people truly facing their own mortality (James Horner’s crushing score is an added killer). It’s most painfully felt in Leoni’s fractured family, her parents played by the Julia co-stars Vanessa Redgrave and Maximilian Schell with far more punch and complexity than one expects in this territory. While the world might not ultimately end, it’s hit by devastation of an unfathomable scale, a reminder of how powerless and unprepared the world would be if such a day were to ever come. It still gives me a chill. Benjamin Lee

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