Glasgow Film Festival reviews: Everybody to Kenmure Street | Our Hero, Balthazar | Erupcja

Everybody to Kenmure Street ★★★★

Our Hero, Balthazar ★★★★

Erupcja ★★★

Father Mother Sister Brother ★★★★

This year’s Glasgow Film Festival got off to a rousing start with the UK premiere on Wednesday of Everybody to Kenmure Street, Felipe Bustos Sierra’s documentary about the May 2021 stand-off between police and protesters over the Home Office’s provocative decision to launch a dawn raid on the first day of Eid in one of Glasgow’s most diverse communities. Though the peaceful and positive outcome has made the actions of the Pollokshields residents who turned out to support their neighbours that day a rarity in the long history of protest, that outcome was by no means inevitable and the film, which mixes together on-the-ground footage with talking-head interviews, historical analysis and a playful starring role for Emma Thompson, does a good job of capturing why it happened this way in this particular community in this particular city.

Everybody To Kenmure Street

A highlight of the festival’s first weekend, Our Hero, Balthazar has the distinction of featuring the worst onscreen date since Robert De Niro took Cybil Shepherd to a dirty movie in Taxi Driver. With the film built around a dysfunctional New York rich kid given to fake-crying on Instagram and TikTok to garner the attention he doesn’t receive at home, the scene in question features its titular teen protagonist (Jaeden Martell) hitting on a classmate while showing her unedited surveillance footage of a recent high-school shooting. Needless to say, she thinks he’s a psycho, but in his warped mind he takes her rejection as a cue to further demonstrate his worthiness. Befriending a fellow incel whose social media posts point towards a future atrocity (he’s played by Asa Butterfield), Balthazar travels to Texas in a deluded attempt to meet him in real life and instigate — so he can then stop — a mass shooting. Marking the directorial debut of Uncut Gems producer Oscar Boyson, its satirical portrait of the dark side of Gen Z makes for queasy but utterly compelling viewing.

Our Hero, Balthazar | Visit Films

There were more intense friendships and bad dates in Erupcja, a semi-improvised indie film from Poland starring the mercurial (and ubiquitous) British pop star Charlie XCX. She plays Bethany, a young woman who reconnects with a high-school friend (Lena Góra) while on a supposedly romantic trip to Warsaw with her boyfriend, only to find their oddball connection (it involves volcanoes) propelling them on an emotionally destructive, hedonistic trawl through the city’s hipster hangouts. What follows is an inventively breezy black comedy about the ongoing tussle between living for the moment and the encroaching responsibilities of being in your 30s. At just 71 minutes it’s pretty slight and rough around the edges, but like a French New Wave or New York No Wave film, it’s got a punky, vibrant energy.

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Speaking of the New York No Wave scene, it’s been nearly 50 years since Jim Jarmusch emerged from it and there are sly flickers of that rebellious spirit in his latest film Father Mother Sister Brother. A triptych of tales interlinked by a desire to explore the awkward relationship between parents and their grown-up children, it starts in upstate New York, with Tom Waits as a deceptively ramshackle father being visited by his straight-laced son and daughter (Adam Driver and Mayim Bialik). Then it’s over to Dublin, where Charlotte Rampling’s veteran novelist is having her dreaded annual visit from her daughters (Cate Blanchett and Vicky Krieps). Next is Paris, where Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat play twin siblings coming to terms with the recent death of their boho parents. In each segment the children turn out to be more conventional than their enigmatic elders — a joke that Jarmusch has a lot of fun with while surreptitiously building to a more profound understanding of the sometimes ephemeral nature of family.

Glasgow Film Festival runs until 8 March, www.glasgowfilm.com

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