MAYER WAKEFIELD applauds Rosamund Pike’s punchy and tragic portrayal of a multi-tasking mother and high court judge

The Birdcatcher (15)
Directed by Ross Clarke
Inspired by true events, The Birdcatcher follows 14-year-old Norwegian-Jewish girl Esther (a phenomenal Sarah-Sofie Boussnina) who, on attempting to flee the nazi round-up in 1942, is forced to conceal her identity and her gender in order to escape detection.
She ends up at an isolated farm whose owners are nazi sympathisers. Their son Aksel (Arthur Hakalahti), a sufferer from acute cerebral palsy, finds a kindred spirit in Esther whom he decides to help by keeping her secret.
He tells her that his father Johann (Jakob Cedergren) hates the British but the Jews even more so. Esther, pretending to be a boy, tells him her name is Ola and her parents were killed by the Brits, when in fact it was at the hands of the Germans.

MARIA DUARTE recommends the intricate study of a high-performance and highly dysfuntional German family

MARIA DUARTE recommends the ambitious portrait of an agricultural community confronted by the trauma of enclosure

MARIA DUARTE recommends a chilling examination of the influence of Evangelical Christianity over the far right in Brazil

MARIA DUARTE recommends the creepy thrills of David Cronenburg’s provocative and macabre exploration of grief