Masculinity Today

The Dardenne brothers, leading figures of social cinema, won Best Director at Cannes for this story of a thirteen-year-old in the grip of religious fanaticism. There’s no forgiveness here, no excuse and no condemnation, only a boy nobody is ready to give up on. — Thirteen-year-old Ahmed lives in Belgium and, under the influence of the local imam, starts reading the Koran in a fanatical way. The imam has convinced him that his teacher, Inès, is an apostate, and Ahmed has stopped questioning anything at all. He tries to kill her, fails, and ends up in a juvenile detention centre. — Best Director | Cannes Film Festival | 2019 Nominated for Best Foreign Film | César Awards | 2020

Sally Rooney’s novel became a pop-culture phenomenon on screen and made stars of Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones as Connell and Marianne, forever drawn together and pushed apart like magnets. One sentence could put things right between them, and neither can bring themselves to say it. — In a small town in the west of Ireland, Connell is the popular boy who plays football, while Marianne, in his year at school, has no friends and doesn’t seem to want any. When something sparks between them, they agree that nobody at school will ever know. The arrangement survives for years, through Dublin and through other relationships, and in all that time they never quite manage to say what it is.

Everyone deserves a shot at redemption, but nobody said it would come easily to the man Stephen Graham plays, wrecked by drink and caught up by everything he once ran from. For director Shane Meadows it’s a reckoning with his own trauma, and this series is what he made instead of taking revenge. — Joseph is drinking again. When his son leaves for Australia with his mother, nothing is left to hold him together, and on an impulse he sets off for the town he left as a child. His sister lives there, and they haven’t spoken in years.

This darkly comic Norwegian psychological thriller won three awards at Canneseries 2025. By day Tom runs his mother’s clothes shop and by night he poisons the internet with misogyny, until he’s exposed and hides in women’s clothes as Berit, which is also the show’s title in Norway. — Tom leads an ordinary life by day, but for years he has spent his nights trolling online, mostly feminists and above all one well-known comedian. She breaks down on stage and reads his messages out loud. After that his name comes out, and he has to live among people who have heard every word he wrote.

Conservatives called for strikes, but more than 46,000 French pupils still watched it at school. Before she made “Portrait of a Lady on Fire”, Céline Sciamma told the story of a ten-year-old girl who moves to a new neighbourhood and introduces herself to the kids there as a boy. — When a ten-year-old girl moves to the Paris suburbs with her parents and little sister, she sets out to make friends with the only girl in a gang of boys. Seeing the short hair, the clothes and the way she carries herself, the girl takes her for a boy. That will make things easier, so she introduces herself to the rest of the gang as a boy as well. — Teddy Jury Award | Berlin International Film Festival | 2011

Gabriel Mascaro (“The Blue Trail”) travelled with a Brazilian touring rodeo and won the Orizzonti Special Jury Prize in Venice for a film charged with erotic energy, as forceful as it is lyrical. In the dust of the rodeo, a cowboy sews sequinned costumes for the woman who drives a huge truck. — Iremar is a cowboy on the vaquejada, a travelling rodeo in Brazil, where he rubs chalk into the bulls’ tails so the riders can grab them more easily and bring the animal down onto the sand. He lives in a truck with Galega, who dances in nightclubs, and Cacá, her young daughter. In the evenings Iremar sits down at his sewing machine and makes Galega’s costumes. — Special Jury Prize | Venice Film Festival | 2015 Platform Prize - Honourable Mention | Toronto International Film Festival | 2015 Nominated for Platform Prize | Toronto International Film Festival | 2015

Emin Alper’s full-blooded thriller, which screened in Un Certain Regard at Cannes, sends a young prosecutor to an Anatolian town where the lack of water is stoking conflict and corruption. Part crime story, part politics, it caused such a stir that Turkey demanded its public funding back. — Newly appointed prosecutor Emre lands in a small town in Turkish Anatolia, where the mayor wants to keep drilling for water despite the sinkholes opening up and a local journalist is turning it into a scandal. Then a case lands on Emre’s desk: a Roma girl accuses two men of rape. Both of them are close allies of the mayor. — Nominated for Lux Audience Award | Lux Prize | 2023 Best European Editor | European Film Awards | 2022 Nominated for Un Certain Regard Prize | Cannes Film Festival | 2022

Ryan Gosling reunites with Derek Cianfrance after “Blue Valentine” as a motorcycle stuntman with a travelling fair who learns he has a son and starts robbing banks on his bike to support him. Eva Mendes co-stars and Bradley Cooper plays a young cop, as the story widens into one of fathers and sons. — A travelling fair rolls into Schenectady, New York, and with it Luke Glanton, who rides a motorcycle inside the globe of death. In town he looks up an old lover and finds out they have a son. He quits the fair to stay near the boy and takes a job with a mechanic, who shows him a faster way to make money: robbing banks.

Trier, the director of “Sentimental Value”, takes his cue from Kieślowski here, with Jesse Eisenberg and Isabelle Huppert at his side. He watches closely as memories of a painful past shape the lives of his characters, and as ever he finds light in the deepest dark. — Three years after the death of the renowned war photographer Isabelle Reed, her husband and two sons find themselves under one roof again. A retrospective of her photographs is being prepared, with an article about her to follow, so her husband Gene and their elder son Jonah sit down to go through the archive. Conrad, the younger son, has never been told the truth. — Official Selection | Cannes Film Festival | 2015 Bronze Horse for Best Film | Stockholm Film Festival | 2015

Hugh Grant plays a man who invents a son to chat up single mothers and ends up with a real twelve-year-old in his life, and it turns out both of them still need to grow up. It’s a touching film about helping each other along, and it comes, of all people, from the makers of “American Pie”. — Will has never had a job, because the one Christmas song his father wrote years ago still pays royalties. Marcus is twelve, dresses badly, has no friends and a mother going through a very hard time. Their paths cross after Will invents a son to get into a single parents’ group where he can pick up mothers, and Marcus sees through the lie straight away. — Nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay | Oscars | 2003 Nomination for Best Motion Picture - Comedy or Musical | Golden Globes | 2003 Nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay | BAFTA Awards | 2003 Nomination for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role (Toni Collette) | BAFTA Awards | 2003

Cannes winner Mads Mikkelsen plays a kindergarten teacher accused of something he didn’t do. Thomas Vinterberg drew on case files that a child psychiatrist brought him after “Festen”, and once the witch hunt starts, the truth stops mattering. — In a small Danish town where everyone knows everyone, Lucas is divorced, works at the local kindergarten and hopes his teenage son Marcus will soon come to live with him. His best friend’s little daughter adores him, and when he gently tells her off for kissing him on the lips, she angrily says something to the head of the kindergarten that the adults take as an accusation. The head believes her, and so does the rest of the town. — Nominated for Best Foreign Language Film | Oscars | 2014 Best Actor (Mads Mikkelsen) | Cannes Film Festival | 2012 Prize of the Ecumenical Jury | Cannes Film Festival | 2012

Who knew Jonah Hill’s debut would be this light and this grown-up? With real skaters in the cast, it goes back to growing up in the mid-90s, the best years of all, when the whole world fit inside a skatepark and nothing mattered more than your friends’ respect. You’ll remember exactly how it felt. — In Los Angeles in 1996, thirteen-year-old Stevie lives with his mother, Dabney, and his older brother, Ian. One day he comes across a skate shop on Motor Avenue and the older boys who hang around outside it, and the next day he goes back. By the middle of the summer, there’s nothing he wouldn’t do for them. — Nominated for Best Editing | Film Independent Spirit Awards | 2019

Hlynur Pálmason (“The Love That Remains”) opens with an Icelandic saying that on white days the dead can speak to the living, then lets a ghost story meet a study of masculinity and a virtuoso thriller. Ingvar Sigurðsson won an award at Cannes for playing the widower. — Ingimundur is the police chief in a small Icelandic town, but he hasn’t gone back to work since his wife died. Instead he builds a house for his daughter and looks after his granddaughter Salka, until a box of his wife’s belongings lands in his hands. Inside is a videotape, and he knows the man on it. — Nominated for Critics' Week Grand Prize | Cannes Film Festival | 2019 Nominated for Best European Actor (Ingvar Sigurdsson) | European Film Awards | 2019

Harris Dickinson and Lola Campbell make an unconventional father and daughter in this Sundance winner, and they’ll win you over. Twelve-year-old Georgie lives alone, tells social services someone is looking after her and is sure she doesn’t need grown-ups, until her father appears at the door. — Georgie is twelve and lives completely alone in a house in London. Her mother has died, but the authorities don’t know it, because whenever they check, she produces an adult who’ll swear she’s being looked after. The arrangement works perfectly until somebody knocks at the door: the father she has never met. — Grand Jury Prize | Sundance Film Festival | 2023

Five months after a rodeo horse crushed Brady Jandreau’s skull in April 2016, Chloé Zhao (“Hamnet”) was filming him and his family playing themselves. Through him, the film asks what a life can look like once the one thing you were truly good at is gone. — Brady wakes up on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota with staples in his skull, because a horse threw him at a rodeo, his foot caught in the stirrup and the animal stepped on his head. Another fall, the doctors warn, could kill him. He breaks in other people’s horses, works shifts at a supermarket and visits a friend who came off much worse, while every weekend there’s a rodeo an hour down the road. — C.I.C.A.E. Award | Cannes Film Festival | 2017 Best Picture | Athens International Film Festival | 2017 FIPRESCI Prize | Istanbul International Film Festival | 2018

Long before Barbie, Ryan Gosling had a doll for a leading lady. Nancy Oliver (“Six Feet Under”) came across the RealDoll.com website by chance and turned it into an Oscar-nominated screenplay, in which Lars orders himself a girlfriend online. She’s called Bianca. — Lars lives in the garage behind his brother’s house in a small town where everybody knows him, and even an ordinary conversation is hard work for him. Then one day he announces he’s met someone. Bianca, ordered online, arrives in a crate, and she’s a life-size sex doll. Lars asks his brother and sister-in-law to set a place for her at dinner. — Nomination for Best Original Screenplay | Oscars | 2008 Nomination for Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture (Ryan Gosling) | Golden Globes | 2008

Think “Trainspotting” for our times, set to wild Irish-language rap: three Belfast rappers realise the most provocative thing they can shout is their grandparents’ language. Michael Fassbender has a supporting role, it won an audience award at Sundance, and the tracks will stay with you for weeks. — Years after the Troubles, three young men in Belfast start rapping in Irish. The authorities would much rather not hear the language at all, but the city starts listening, and within a few months these provocative rappers have become a political symbol. Their own families would much prefer they hadn’t. — NEXT Audience Award | Sundance Film Festival | 2024

Perfectionism turns obsessive at a jazz school where Terence Fletcher (award-winning J.K. Simmons) thinks praise is the fastest way to ruin a musician. Miles Teller is a student who’ll do anything to keep up. Damien Chazelle (“La La Land”) directed, and it won three Oscars without missing a beat. — At the best music school in the country, in New York, nineteen-year-old Andrew practises the drums late into the night. One evening the conductor Terence Fletcher walks in and invites him to rehearse with his band, the one everybody wants to get into. At the first rehearsal Andrew can’t hold the tempo, so he practises for hours on end and breaks up with his girlfriend to make more time for the drums. He’s still waiting for someone to tell him he’s good. — Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role (J.K. Simmons) | Oscars | 2015 Best Editing | Oscars | 2015 Best Sound | Oscars | 2015 Nominated for Best Film | Oscars | 2015 Nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay | Oscars | 2015 Best Supporting Actor (J.K. Simmons) | Golden Globes | 2015 Grand Jury Prize | Sundance Film Festival | 2014 Audience Award | Sundance Film Festival | 2014

Mads Mikkelsen plays a history teacher who stopped speaking up long ago, both in class and at home, and decides to fix that with drink, on the theory that we’re all born with too little alcohol in our blood. Thomas Vinterberg takes an absurd premise and makes it a story about getting yourself back. — Martin teaches history in Copenhagen to a class that stopped listening to him long ago, and things aren’t much better at home. At a colleague’s fortieth birthday, he and three other teachers hear about a theory that people are born with an alcohol deficit, and that a steady level of 0.05 per cent brings courage and ease. They decide to test it during school hours, and for a few weeks it works. — Best International Feature Film | Oscars | 2021 Nominated for Best Director | Oscars | 2021 Silver Seashell | San Sebastián International Film Festival | 2020 Nominated for Best Non-English Language Film | Golden Globes | 2021 Best European Actor (Mads Mikkelsen) | European Film Awards | 2020 Best European Screenwriter | European Film Awards | 2020 Best European Film | European Film Awards | 2020 Best European Director | European Film Awards | 2020

Paul Thomas Anderson’s romantic comedy is a knockout: eccentric, and you’ll fall for it anyway. Adam Sandler, Emily Watson and Philip Seymour Hoffman star in the story of a man with uncontrollable rage who meets a woman who isn’t scared of him, and it won Anderson Best Director at Cannes. — Barry Egan sells novelty toilet plungers, suffers from bouts of panic and rage, and has seven sisters who never leave him alone. One morning a car flips over outside his warehouse and someone leaves a strange musical instrument on the pavement, and that same day Lena, a colleague of one of his sisters, turns up. Barry has already worked out that a pudding promotion will earn him more air miles than he could ever use. He just has nowhere to fly yet. — Best Director | Cannes Film Festival | 2002 Nominated for Best Actor - Musical or Comedy (Adam Sandler) | Golden Globes | 2003