Gael Garcia Bernal

Clever Chilean director Pablo Larrain (who also directed Natalie Portman's Jackie) takes on the Nobel-winning poet Pablo Neruda in this inventive biopic, which playfully creates a cat-and-mouse adventure as it traces two years in which he was pursued by government officials who wanted to arrest him for his communist ideas. It's funny and emotional, and visually stunning as it criss-crosses Chile from the ocean to the ice-capped Andean peaks. And its originality makes it simply stunning.

In 1948, Pablo (Luis Gnecco) is a senator in Chile's parliament when right-wing President Gonzalez (the great Alfredo Castro) begins cracking down on communists. Pablo is famous for his movingly evocative poems, which champion the working classes even though he lives the life of a rock star. So he goes into hiding with his painter wife Delia (Mercedes Moran), abandoning their amazing art-filled home for a cramped apartment. As they wait for their handlers to figure a way to smuggle them out of the country to Europe, they learn that the government has assigned a top cop to track them down: Oscar (Gael Garcia Bernal) is a second-generation detective with serious daddy issues. He's also relentless in his pursuit, following Pablo and Delia around the country as Pablo leaves tantalising clues behind.

The film is structured like an extended chase sequence, as these two men try to outsmart each other. Along the way, the story traverses Chile both ideologically and geographically. Even with the quirky-arty tone, the perspective is remarkably internalised. The central idea is that these two men need each other to define who they are, fuelling each others' obsessions as they essentially create each others' stories. It's a complex idea that plays out with comedy and insight that's conveyed sharply by the two actors, who invest plenty of wit into the procedings.

Continue reading: Neruda Review

A harrowing true story infused with sharp humour and bristling intelligence, this riveting film is an auspicious writing-directing debut for TV news comic Jon Stewart. It's based on London-based journalist Maziar Bahari's book Then They Came for Me, a strikingly intimate memoir about being imprisoned in Iran. But the film never becomes a rant at an unjust society. Instead, it digs deep beneath the surface to find much more resonant, and more important, themes.

Maziar (Gael Garcia Bernal) left his pregnant wife (Claire Foy) at home in Britain to travel to Tehran to cover the contentious 2009 elections, after which the streets broke out in protests at what people saw as a rigged victory for Ahmadinejad. Maziar stays to report on this, and does a comical interview with a member of Stewart's team at The Daily Show. But the regime sees this as cooperation with an enemy, and arrests Maziar in his mother's (Shohreh Aghdashloo) home, charging him with espionage. While held in the notorious Evin Prison for nearly four months, Maziar is subjected to psychological torture at the hands of an interrogator (Kim Bodnia) he names "Rosewater" because of his scent. And the memories of similar experiences endured by his father and sister (Haluk Bilginer and Golshifteh Farahani) help Maziar survive his ordeal.

As a director, Stewart continually finds clever ways of revealing the inner workings of Maziar's mind, revealing his thoughts in inventive imagery and sounds. For example, one sequence beautifully weaves in Leonard Cohen's Dance Me to the Edge of Love, which holds a powerful memory for Maziar and also echoes the music and movies Iran's religious regime has strictly forbidden. Even the ghostly appearances of Maziar's father and sister are seamlessly integrated into the story. And the other significant achievement here is a refusal to make anyone a villain. As played by Bodnia, Rosewater is a man doing what he believes to be right, with pangs of conscience that eerily echo the news headlines about how American interrogators mistreated prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Bagram.

Continue reading: Rosewater Review

Actor-producer Gael Garcia Bernal takes a strikingly complex look at the timely issue of human migration from Central America to the United States, which is rarely depicted with such honest humanity. By exploring three sides of a single story, this artful film is an enlightening documentary, a moving drama and a riveting mystery. It also offers a glimmer of hope if politicians shake off party pressures and take some notice of what it has to say.

The film opens in Arizona's Sonora Desert, where more than 200 unidentified bodies are found every year. These are immigrants who desperately travel north seeking a better life for their loved ones back home, but end up as illegals struggling to survive in the harsh landscape. When police find a body with the name "Dayani Cristal" tattooed on it, experts (Bruce Anderson and Ivon Ton-Quevedo) begin the search to determine the man's identity. Meanwhile in Honduras, the missing Yohan is discussed by his parents, wife and children as a kind man who made the trip to the USA to fund treatment for his dying son. At the same time, Garcia Bernal retraces Yohan's difficult journey by rail through Mexico, seeking people who may have met him along the way.

All three strands of this film are so personal that they're impossible to dismiss on the usual political grounds: this isn't the story of an issue, it's about a real man with a family. And through various conversations with people on every side of the story, the true picture emerges of a badly broken system that has been tarnished with lies from American right-wing fanatics who portray migrants as criminals who just want to steal from the US government. The truth is that the economy needs immigrant workers to survive, and the vast majority of them are intelligent, conscientious workers who are genuinely trying to help their families survive. And the problems back home can be directly traced to US corporations that have stolen jobs and resources from their homelands.

Continue reading: Who Is Dayani Cristal? Review