Film reviews: It Was Just An Accident | Cover-Up | Jay Kelly | Eternity

It Was Just An Accident (12A) ★★★★★

Cover-Up (15) ★★★★

Jay Kelly (15) ★★

Eternity (15) ★★

The arrival of Jafar Panahi’s Palme d’Or winning It Was Just An Accident this week coincides with the grim news that the perennially persecuted Iranian filmmaker has just been sentenced by his government to yet another prison term and travel ban for so-called “propaganda activities”. While that’s a depressingly appropriate reminder of the power cinema still has to open up the world and challenge authority, it also reinforces what makes Panahi’s films so great. Beyond the sheer guts it takes to make them (this one was shot covertly), he’s still able to infuse stories that otherwise chart horrifying acts of repression and violence with a sly wit that intensifies the humanity on display and his own humanity as a filmmaker.

That’s certainly the case with this tragicomic revenge film, which begins with a man called Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi) driving his pregnant wife and young daughter home at night. They seem like a pretty normal family, but when Eghbal accidentally hits a stray dog with the car, it sets in motion a series of increasingly unhinged events when the mechanic he subsequently visits becomes convinced Eghbal is the soldier who blindfolded and tortured him while he was in prison for defending workers’ rights. This is Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), and though he’s a mild-mannered guy, this unexpected encounter inspires him to kidnap Eghbal and hold him hostage in an attempt to force him to confront what he did to him.

If this set-up echoes Roman Polanski’s adaptation of Death and the Maiden, Panahi takes it down a more absurdist route as Vahid, suddenly unsure he’s got the right guy, seeks to further verify Eghbal’s identity by driving him around in his transit van while he connects with fellow victims, among them a wedding photographer and the bride and groom she’s in the process of shooting.

The result is a strange road movie, one that delves into the ethics of revenge while also functioning as a savage, sometimes funny, sometimes horrifying satire of a country broken by corruption, injustice and authoritarianism. An incredible piece of filmmaking.

More lies are laid bare in Cover-Up, Citizenfour director Laura Pointras’ documentary portrait of veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. Very much a kindred spirit, Hersh’s work as a reporter has been responsible for uncovering systemic abuses in American foreign policy and beyond for 60 years, starting with the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War. Nevertheless, he’s a prickly interviewee, his caginess a symptom of his need to protect sources and his reluctance to make himself part of the story.

That makes the strained efforts of Pointras and co-director Mark Obenhaus to tease out even the most basic biographical details weirdly compelling — and they challenge him on mistakes he’s made too. But the litany of major stories he’s uncovered (he also played an instrumental role in exposing Watergate and the US military’s abuse of prisoners in Guantanamo) serves as its own justification for why we’ll always need people who refuse to look the other way.

Starring George Clooney as a movie star in the midst of a late-life existential crisis, the new Noah Baumbach film Jay Kelly is a disappointingly smug, unexpectedly cringey ode to its star’s own affable screen presence. Clooney plays the eponymous Jay, whose youngest daughter’s imminent departure for college, together with the recent death of his mentor, inspires a reckoning with his fame-chasing past, which has left him rich, successful and beloved by the public, but also hated by his other daughter (Riley Keough) and starting to wonder who he really is away from the camera.

Journey-of-self-discovery theme duly established, the film sends Jay to Italy for a film festival tribute that he doesn’t really want, but which will give him an excuse to bump into his college-bound daughter (Grace Edwards) as she backpacks through Europe. It’s pretty shallow stuff, made worse by an extended comic set-piece on a train in which Jay encounters a sycophantic public who all seem to have answered a casting call for some kind of terrible Brits-abroad sitcom. As Jay’s harassed manager, Adam Sandler does his best to ground the whole endeavour in some kind of plausible reality, but it’s weak stuff.

READ MORE: Film reviews: Wake Up Dead Man | Christy | Blue Moon | Pillion

A high-concept romantic comedy with hipster aspirations, Eternity casts Elizabeth Olsen as a newly deceased woman forced to decide whether to spend the afterlife with the man she was married to for 65 years (played by Miles Teller) or the first husband (Calum Turner) she lost to the Korean War before their life together had a chance to start. That’s a decent starting point for a comedy about the concept of soulmates, so it’s too bad the film undermines its own fanciful conceit with an underwritten script and miscast stars who have no chemistry with each other.

It Was Just An Accident and Eternity are in cinemas from 5 December; Cover-Up is on selected release in cinemas from 5 December and streams on Netflix from 26 December; Jay Kelly is on selected release now and streams on Netflix from 5 December.

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