Matthew d’Ancona’s culture: All We Imagine as Light is one of the best films of the year

Kapadia quickly narrows the frame to focus upon three characters: Prabha (Kani Kusruti), a nurse whose husband is absent working in Germany; her younger colleague and flatmate Anu (Divya Prabha); and a cook at their hospital Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), a widow who is facing eviction from her home, as avaricious property developers seek to rebuild under the banner: “Class Is a Privilege Reserved for the Privileged”.

All three are Hindu, but Anu has a young Muslim boyfriend Shiaz (Hridu Haroon) and, on one occasion, dons a burqa so she can see him. Prabha is sceptical about what she sees as romantic recklessness. In these scenes, the two women are like squabbling sisters in Jane Austen, transposed to 21^st-century India.

Meanwhile, Prabha’s husband sends her a fancy rice cooker, a soulless gift that feels like a farewell. In a heart-rending scene, she wraps herself around it, as though trying to squeeze out some final traces of intimacy from a kitchen device. She is wooed by a doctor, Manoj (Azeez Nedumangad), who gives her poetry and walks with her through the city. Their conversations are studies in loneliness, and the difficulty of escaping its confines.

In the movie’s final act, the two nurses help Parvaty move back to the coastal village that was once her home. Elegantly, the cinematic style shifts from neon vérité – Kapadia has a background in documentary-making – to a lyrical and, on occasion, magic realist aesthetic. It is a tribute to the actors and director alike that this transition feels quite natural.

Away from the city, with the sea lapping against the shore, the three women find different forms of resolution, not least in their affection for one another. With the gentlest of emotional brush strokes upon a beautiful cinematic canvas, All We Imagine as Light is one of the best films of the year.

From Under A Truck: A Memoir, by Josh Brolin (HarperCollins)

“It claws at me with its long, thin nails. I wince as I hear my parents inside the house fighting, but with the whinnying of the horses so loud, I can’t be sure it’s them or the dogs or the wolves, whose cages I’ll have to clean soon.”

From its first sentences, you know that Josh Brolin’s memoir is not going to be a standard-issue actor’s autobiography. For a start, it is structured as a series of short, non-linear vignettes, sketches and pensées jumping back and forth in time and experimenting with different styles of recollection. Imagine Cormac McCarthy (a friend of the author) but edited by Cyril Connolly.

Best-known for his break-out performance aged 16 in The Goonies (1985), and more recently for No Country for Old Men (2007), Milk (2008), and the Sicario movies (2015 and 2018), Brolin, now 56, would once have been categorised as a “hellraiser”, but does not claim any such phoney glamour in these candid pages. As he remarks of an altercation in Costa Rica when he was stabbed: “I wasn’t dead, so that was a good sign”.

The son of another famous actor, James Brolin, and Jane Cameron Agee, a casting director and wildlife activist, he writes that he was “born to drink… My mother drank exactly like I did, and I was raised to be a man and drink like the male equivalent of my mother”. Though he has been sober since 2013, Brolin is unsparing in his account of what booze cost him and those he loves.

In New York City in 1992, shoeless and shirtless, he runs into Philip Seymour Hoffman, who manages: “Hey, man”. The excruciating encounter makes him reflect upon everything: “There never was a plan. Maybe that was the problem. I never devised a plan or work, for life, or to be the best at anything. I was a wanderer. A vagabond looking more for experiences about life than about what might help my career. I didn’t even like acting that much. My interest was based more in curiosities and fears: What makes people tick, and why is everybody so fucking weird all the time?”

Brolin is a great raconteur: Marlon Brando, Joaquin Phoenix, Robert De Niro, Oliver Stone, Tommy Lee Jones, and Barbra Streisand all feature in his reminiscences. But the most striking character is the author himself and From Under the Truck marks the debut of an authentic writing talent.

Beatles ’64 (Disney+)

Philip Larkin famously identified 1963 as the year in which “Sexual intercourse began… Between the end of the Chatterley ban/ And the Beatles’ first LP”. But it was in 1964 that Beatlemania became a truly global phenomenon as the Fab Four headed for America. As Ringo Starr recalls in David Tedeschi’s terrific film: “I felt an octopus grabbing the plane and pulling me down” (it would be an octopus, wouldn’t it?).

Produced by Martin Scorsese, Beatles ’64 draws heavily and imaginatively upon the documentary footage of Albert and David Maysles, with the group’s first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in Manhattan on February 9, watched by 73 million, at its heart. Leonard Bernstein’s daughter, Jamie, recalls the television being wheeled into the dining room so that her family could watch it live. 

A thesis advanced in the film is that America’s youth, poleaxed by the assassination of John F Kennedy little more than two months before, was ready to be enraptured, consoled and healed. “It was like being in the eye of a hurricane,” John Lennon recalled in a subsequent interview with Tom Snyder. 

What is still remarkable – at 60 years’ distance – is how preternaturally good the Beatles were at being Beatles. In addition to the unique alchemy of their songs and performance, they were an always-on comedy troupe, never drying up as they responded with quickfire wit to the onslaught of media questions. And they were only 23 (Lennon and Starr) and 21 (Paul McCartney and George Harrison).

Why are we still so hungry for these memories, three years after Peter Jackson’s majestic Get Back (2021) and the welcome re-release earlier this year of Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s Let It Be (1970)? Because they are more than memories. 

More than any group in history, the Beatles embody the unexpected duality of truly great pop music: its ability to capture an ephemeral emotion and a burst of youth energy, matched by its survival over the decades to mean something more profound and enduring. 

In Lennon’s eyes, their significance was entangled with the end of national conscription: “We were the army that never was. And the music came out of that”. That joyful army marches to this day.

Cross (Prime Video)

James Patterson’s Alex Cross, forensic psychologist and Washington D.C. detective, has featured in more than 30 novels and been played by Morgan Freeman and Tyler Perry. In this eight-part drama – a second season has already been commissioned – it is the turn of Aldis Hodge, whose performance is the most compelling interpretation of Cross to date.

A year after the murder of his wife Maria (Chaunteé Schuler Irving), Cross is struggling with grief, trying to raise his children, Janelle (Melody Hurd) and Damon (Caleb Elijah) with the help of his grandmother Nana Mama (Juanita Jennings). When Black Lives Matter activist, Emir Goodspeed (Donovan Brown), is found dead, the top brass wants the case closed quickly, written up as an accidental overdose. But Cross and his partner John Sampson (Isaiah Mustafa) are not buying that and soon become convinced that a serial killer is at work.

Though Cross’s swagger and immaculate dress sense channel Shaft (1971), the series owes as much to the inspiration of The Silence of Lambs (1991) and Se7en (1995) – not least because the identity of the murderer, or “Fanboy”, is disclosed early in the plot. When aspiring art curator Shannon Witmer (Eloise Mumford) goes missing, Cross and Sampson face a race against time to save her from a grisly end.

The series, created by Ben Watkins, works well as an adept hybrid of police procedural and psychological thriller. Cross has some great lines as he confronts the Washington elite (“No games, no not today. I swear, Madame Speaker, I will expose you”) and Sampson is an excellent foil to his brilliant but flawed partner (“Stop! You had me at ‘motherfucker’”). The best US cop show since Bosch.

The Contestant (selected cinemas)

Before the Big Brother phenomenon and even The Truman Show – which was released later in the same year, 1998 – the Japanese television hit Susunu! Denpa Shōnen launched a truly diabolical segment called “A Life in Prizes”.

As choreographed by superstar-producer Toshio Tsuchiya, the idea was to confine a person to a room, leave them naked and without food, and make them fill in hundreds of entry postcards for magazine competitions.

In aspiring entertainer Tomoaki Hamatsu – nicknamed “Nasubi” (“eggplant”) because of his long face – the programme-makers found an ideal mark: a gentle, credulous young man, desperate to make a name for himself, and unlikely to quit (as he was notionally able to do whenever he wanted).

Clair Titley’s riveting documentary charts Nasubi’s degrading experience – alone for 15 months, first in Japan, then in Korea – and how it was turned into a national obsession. Though he was misled into believing that little of the footage would be used, his deranged antics and psychological deterioration were, in fact, being broadcast every week to 17 million viewers and then, in a portent of things to come, simulcast round-the-clock online. 

The prizes he received were completely arbitrary – car tyres, a live lobster, rice he could not cook, dog food, women’s underwear, soft toys – and his response to each arrival pitifully equidistant between euphoria and despair. The more feral he became, the more obsessed was the audience.

Though Nasubi had no idea of what was going on outside his den, his journals were being published and became best-sellers. The moment at which he was finally made aware of the grotesque stardom he had achieved – in an onstage stunt that reduced him to mortified silence – is almost unwatchably cruel.

The sadism, voyeurism and indifference to fundamental decency of “A Life in Prizes” are now, of course, mainstream in reality TV and social media. But, a quarter century ago, this was pioneering work, a new form of freak show in which the explicit objective was to strip a human being of all dignity in the name of entertainment. 

Since his ordeal, Nasubi has built a new life of adventure, generosity and public service which does him huge credit. But The Contestant is a chastening slice of cultural history that has much to say about how we got here – none of it good.