Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig is a portrait of three women who live in the shadow of their family’s patriarch. The film opens with Iman (Missagh Zareh) being appointed as an investigating judge in the Revolutionary Court in Tehran; it's a role that will earn him a significantly higher salary and allow him to move his family to a bigger house in a better community. Iman has toiled as a lawyer for years and sees this as his overdue reward, but his more high-profile role comes with dangers. “You must be irreproachable,” his wife Najmeh (Soheila Golestani) warns their teenage daughters, Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki).
We’ve all had days when you wake up in a funk and feel like everyone was put on earth specifically to antagonise you, but that’s every day for Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), the protagonist in Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths.
I had the great pleasure of talking to Steven Soderbergh about his latest experiment Presence, a small-scale haunted house movie in which Soderbergh, as the camera operator, plays the role of the ghost. You can read my interview with him in the March 2025 issue of Sight & Sound, which is on sale now.
I was very happy to be asked by Indicator to write an essay for their forthcoming blu-ray release of Henry Hathaway's Spawn of the North, a gripping drama about two lifelong friends who come into conflict over salmon poaching in Alaska. The film boasts first-rate performances from Henry Fonda, George Raft and Dorothy Lamour (not to mention scene-stealing work from a seal named Slicker), and Hathaway blends evocative location footage with exceptional effects work to craft some vivid and exciting action set-pieces. It's a terrific and hugely underrated film, and I'm delighted that it's getting the blu-ray release it deserves. You can buy Spawn of the North from April 21st.
