This monthly feature offers an overview of what’s new on the big screen, spanning both mainstream and arthouse films across all genres while also revisiting titles from the archive of classic cinema.
Mistress Dispeller
Directed by: Elizabeth Lo
Written by: Charlotte Pingsteen, Elizabeth Lo
Country of production: China, United States
At first glance, the Chinese documentary Mistress Dispeller comes across as humorous, light-hearted, and charming, a film that effortlessly draws the viewer out of introspection and into a visually captivating world of swaying trees and birdsong among Beijing’s sleek, modern architecture. But it offers a lot more.
This is a portrait of a psychological consultant who understands the games played by men and their mistresses, and who knows how to guide wayward husbands back to the marital home, whether by befriending the wife, or becoming a confidante to the husband, and even by providing support to the mistress when she needs it most. Yet this is also a meditation on love in all its complexity.
There are no villains here. Not the bourgeois wife in her 50s, who is deeply attached to the safety of her domestic life and to her husband, and who is truly heartbroken upon discovering his affair. Not the husband, who sincerely loves both his wife and home, but who craves renewal. And not the young mistress, whose loneliness he eases.
The mistress seeks no financial gain, nor does she want to dismantle the man’s marriage. She understands, with remarkable empathy, the wife’s harsh words during a confrontation orchestrated by the counsellor. This pivotal meeting ends with the mistress stepping away of her own accord. “It’s the cycle of love,” she explains. “He gave me love, and I gave love to his wife.”
Remarkably, and unbelievably to some, this documentary is not scripted. China is a conservative society that honours the sanctity of family. The filmmakers spent years tracking similar stories before finally selecting this particular case for its emotional richness and the full access they secured to all sides.
The result is an intimate and unforgettable work, one that compels viewers to seek out director Elizabeth Lo’s earlier documentary, Stray, a lyrical observation of a stray dog navigating the streets of Istanbul.
The Amateur
Written by: Ken Nolan, Gary Spinelli (based on the novel by Robert Littell)
Directed by: James Hawes
Country of production: United States
The Amateur, starring and co-produced by Oscar-winning actor Rami Malek, appears to follow the familiar contours of a revenge thriller when CIA cryptographer Charlie Heller (Malek) is left shattered after his wife Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan) is killed during a terrorist attack on a London hotel by an international crime syndicate.
She is murdered because she is brave enough to resist, and they need “to make an example” of her. Charlie is expected to quietly absorb the trauma and return to his job, but instead uses his skills to identify the perpetrators.
Yet when he gives their names to his CIA superiors, he uncovers a more disturbing truth: that the agency is orchestrating similar acts of terror globally, then disavowing responsibility and assigning blame to fictitious organisations. So, he decides to blackmail his bosses: help him find his wife’s killers, or else he will expose them.
What unfolds is a familiar structure, rendered with surprising emotional depth. The screenplay invests heavily in Charlie’s grief, tracing his transformation not with spectacle but with psychological nuance. These early scenes, grounded in mourning and guilt, establish a character arc that goes beyond standard revenge fantasies.
Charlie is not an obvious hero. He is introspective, fastidious, eccentric, and ill-equipped for violence. With his glasses and backpack, he is more of a systems analyst than a field agent. “You’re not a killer by nature,” warns Henderson (Laurence Fishburne), his adversarial trainer and foil. “When the time comes, you won’t be able to pull the trigger.”
In the final act, the film breaks from convention to transcend vengeance to become a subtler meditation on moral clarity, personal transformation, and spiritual redemption in a world where justice is elusive and endings are rarely neat.
Mickey 17
Directed by: Bong Joon-ho
Written by: Bong Joon-ho
Country of production: United States, South Korea
South Korean director Bong Joon-ho was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2020, a year after his film Parasite became one of only four films ever to win Best Picture at both the Palme d’Or and the Academy Awards.
Now, he returns with Mickey 17, based on a book by the same name, Edward Ashton. It is a work that nominally belongs to science fiction but leans unmistakably toward black comedy, surrealist allegory, philosophical musings, and speculative imagination.
The Earth has become functionally uninhabitable, particularly for those trapped at the bottom of an unforgiving capitalist hierarchy. Their only means of escape is volunteering for scientific experiments that are banned on ethical grounds on Earth, but fair game in space.
As with much of Bong’s work, Mickey 17 explores themes such as the erosion of human connection, the randomness of suffering, and punishment for minor transgressions. It becomes an absurdist spectacle when humans start getting produced to serve on a spaceship on a colonisation mission, overseen by a megalomaniacal billionaire.
Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), a failed political-candidate-turned-interstellar despot, is a thinly veiled caricature of Donald Trump and the class of oligarchs who confuse money with moral authority, whereas the protagonist Mickey (Robert Pattinson) is one of the clones. To escape a loan shark back on Earth, he agreed to be replicated and killed again and again, across an infinite loop of deaths.
But even in space, deliverance remains elusive. His new life is defined by repetition, erasure, and disillusionment, until he meets Nasha (Naomi Ackie), who defies Marshall’s engineered society and fights not only for Mickey but for all those trapped in this synthetic hellscape. At times, Mickey 17 evokes Avatar, but with far more irony. It also revisits the thematic terrain of Snowpiercer, Bong’s earlier dystopia.
The film is let down in the second half. After an ambitious and compelling first hour, Mickey 17 drifts. Narrative momentum fades, and the film struggles to meet its early philosophical promise. Yet the relationship between Mickey and Nasha lingers. Theirs is a quiet bond that offers, if only briefly, a form of emotional reprieve in a world where even death has lost its meaning.
Beatles’ 64
Directed by: David Tedeschi
Country of production: United States
Co-produced by Martin Scorsese for Disney, Beatles’ 64 offers a visual and emotional journey through one of the most iconic cultural episodes of the 20th century, with Scorsese appearing in one scene reminiscing animatedly with a Beatles member.
The film focuses on the legendary British band’s 1964 visit to the United States, exploring how their music reshaped the lives of singers, writers, and fans, defining the soundscape of a generation. The trip was a cultural watershed for a nation in mourning, President John F. Kennedy having been assassinated in November 1963.
As the documentary suggests, the older generation projected their discomfort onto these four young men, whose exuberant music and style they saw as provocations. In contrast, the younger generation—captivated by their sound, energy, and charm—embraced them with euphoric fervour. In New York, the Beatles were besieged in their hotel for hours by screaming fans. This soon became known as ‘Beatlemania’.
Drawing from rare, intimate archival footage shot by documentary pioneers Albert and David Maysles, Beatles’ 64 captures the mood of that transformative tour, from playful hotel room banter to the band’s cautious movements through an America they once imagined as “the land of the free”—only to discover its contradictions first-hand.
The documentary seamlessly blends these historical images with new interviews, including conversations with surviving Beatles members and Black musicians who found echoes of their own experience in their music. The film honours the band’s candid acknowledgement of the deep influence they drew from Black rock n’ roll artists at a time when American music and culture remained deeply segregated.
The late filmmaker David Lynch, for instance, muses on the power of the band’s music. “Music is an astonishing art,” he says. “It’s like water, air, and fire.” Another admirer adds that music “has healing power... We were always searching for the source of the art The Beatles gave us”.
The Beatles were not universally beloved, even encountering hostility from staff at the British embassy during their tour, and despite all the interviews, reflections, and beautifully restored footage, the group’s true essence remains elusive, like the nature of great art itself. A rich and captivating documentary, Beatles’ 64 is both a gift to fans and an enthralling introduction to those just discovering the Fab Four.
Diaries From Lebanon
Directed by: Myriam El Hajj
Country of production: Lebanon
The documentary Diaries From Lebanon, which has just begun public screenings in Cairo, contrasts three distinct visions of Lebanon, filtered through the lives and memories of three individuals.
First is Georges Mfarrège, aka Abu El Leil (Father of the Night), a nickname earned during Lebanon’s civil war for his endurance on the battlefield. His story is of a generation defined by conflict, loyalty, and lingering silence.
Then there is writer and journalist Joumana Haddad, whose foray into politics—starting with her 2018 parliamentary campaign—took in the October 2019 protests and the devastating Beirut port explosion on 4 August 2020. Disillusioned, she turns to art and culture as tools of symbolic resistance.
Finally, there is Perla Joe Maalouli, a young radical artist who sings from rooftops and chants through demonstrations, oscillating between hope and disillusionment, mirroring the emotional turbulence of Lebanon’s post-war generation.
The film explores our emotional and psychological ties to the concept of homeland—to where we belong, by circumstance or by force, and where—with emotion and imagination—we place our deepest hopes.
Do these hopes differ depending on someone’s history, identity, and experience within that homeland? That is the question posed by director Myriam El Hajj, herself a child of the civil war, who appears from behind the camera as a quiet, probing presence.
Her own reckoning with the past only began in adulthood, when an inherited silence gave way to reflection and grief. Woven between public trauma and private sorrow, Diaries From Lebanon unfolds like a lyrical elegy, less a film than a whispered prayer.
