‘Coconut Head Generation’
Stream it on Ovid.
A room, a dusty projector and a small screen mounted on the wall. That’s pretty much all there is to the Thursday Film Series, a movie club started by students at the prestigious University of Ibadan in Nigeria, which forms the focus of Alain Kassanda’s documentary. But from this modest setup, the students conjure something much bigger and richer: a space where young people use cinema to rigorously debate pressing political issues, from colonial reparations to housing justice to the state of public education in the country. The necessity of such forums becomes painfully evident halfway through “Coconut Head Generation”: The youth-led #EndSARS movement against police brutality breaks out, and culminates in a massacre of protesters in Lagos.
Kassanda’s skill here is how deftly he melds different modes. Slacker-movie sequences, on-the-ground glimpses of the protests, and moments of mourning and communion all come together in a movie that shows how the space for dissent has to be fought for in a society that forces students into the straitjackets of productive, law-abiding, conformist citizens. The significance of the film’s title is revealed at the end: “Coconut heads” is a term used to dismiss Nigerian youth as lazy and indifferent. In turning acts of leisure — watching, hanging out, talking — into tools of intellectual and political development, these students proudly reclaim that insult.
‘Black Dog’
Rent it on Apple TV.
The best performance I’ve seen in any 2024 film is by the wiry black dog at the heart of Guan Hu’s charming Chinese riff on the western — not for nothing did it win the Palm Dog Award at last year’s Cannes Film Festival. Lang (Eddie Peng) has just returned to his hometown in the Gobi Desert after a prison stint. He joins a dog-catching patrol (headed by a cafe owner played by the legendary Chinese auteur Jia Zhangke) that is tasked with cleaning up the area in the lead-up to the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. The tough, taciturn young man meets his match in a mongrel that displays an extraordinary intelligence: It keeps taunting and eluding Lang.
Then a violent confrontation ends with the two quarantining together to check for rabies, and a wordless rapport develops. They’re both lone rangers, feral and angry on the outside, and soft and loyal on the inside. This all may sound corny, but “Black Dog” is anything but. The film is stylish and serious, using the gorgeous setting — desolate fields overlooked by sparkling blue skies — for a kind of genre-inflected social realism. Lang cuts a rock star figure as he rides his motorcycle down winding roads and hangs out at the zoo that used to be run by his now-ailing father — but he’s also an Everyman, struggling to find his place in a rapidly transforming China, where global ambitions don’t match up with local realities.
‘The Nature of Love’
Stream it on Mubi.
The Quebecois director Monia Chokri has a unique style of filmmaking, with choppy editing, rapid-fire dialogue and campy humor that exposes the absurdist dimensions of everyday social relations. In her previous feature, “Babysitter,” she turned that classic male fantasy — a sexy nanny — into a hilarious dissection of aging, parenthood and heterosexual marriage. Her new film, “The Nature of Love,” flips the gender dynamics. The fantasy brought to satirical life here is a feminine one: Sophia (Magalie Lépine-Blondeau), a philosophy professor bored by her intellectual husband, has a torrid affair with the rugged handyman (Pierre-Yves Cardinal) whom she hires to fix up her country house.
Sylvain is a himbo — good with his hands but less so with words — and he doesn’t fit into Sophia’s bougie circles. Predictable comedy ensues, but Chokri never lets her characters slip into broad types, or allows the film to become a simple parody. Each character is delightfully particular, from Sophia’s blowhard artist brother to her lachrymose mother-in-law, and every scene is a swirl of contradictions and competing impulses. Even as Chokri skewers the confused, sometimes pathetic desires of her discontented heroine, there’s something tender and empathetic about her portrait of the quest, familiar to us all, for an elusive happiness.
‘Kishkindha Kaandam’
Stream it on Hulu.
This Malayalam-language thriller begins with a premise of Chekovian simplicity: A gun goes missing. The state elections are around the corner in Kerala, the South Indian province where the film is set, and with political violence anticipated, an order has been issued for all licensed gun owners to surrender their weapons to the local police office.
One morning, just as Ajayan (Asif Ali) is about to tie the knot with Aparna (Aparna Balamurali) in the courthouse, he receives an urgent phone call. His elderly father, Appu Pillai (Vijayaraghavan), cannot find his pistol. Where did the gun go? What if the wrong person got their hands on it? As these questions loom over the characters, Aparna notices that other things are off in their house, too. Appu Pillai’s behavior is erratic. Monkeys prowl the estate. There are strange fires at night. The police speak of militants hiding in the forests.
As Aparna begins to investigate, the director Dinjith Ayyathan slowly unravels his tightly coiled plot. Making atmospheric use of the woods that surround Ajayan’s villa, full of towering trees and sinister sounds, he crafts a mystery whose intricate twists and turns give way to a tragically simple story about grief, and the delusions that allow us to endure it.
In Diego Llorente’s sun-soaked feature, Marta (Katia Borlado), a scholar in Madrid, visits her hometown in Northern Spain for the summer before moving in with her boyfriend, and ends up reconnecting with someone from her past. It’s a classic love triangle — the sweetheart of youth versus the partner of adulthood — but “Notes on a Summer” doesn’t have the dramatic confrontations or suspenseful twists you’d expect from such a premise. This is a film as languid as an afternoon on the beach, following Marta with unhurried naturalism as she hangs out with friends, goes to weddings, has intense trysts with her lover and sends voice notes to her boyfriend. That she’s dealing with uncertainty about her upcoming life transition and retreating into nostalgia is never said out loud; Marta’s dilemmas unfold under the placid, pleasant surface of the film, only coming to a head at the end, where a decision is made with few words and quiet resolve. As a drama about a woman’s romantic (and existential) indecision that avoids either moralism or scandal, “Notes on a Summer” is a breath of fresh air.