Peter Schmeichel? A piano prodigy whose dad was a spy! 

I’m Still Here (15, 137 mins) 

Verdict: The other side of Brazil  

The first foreign-language film nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards was Jean Renoir’s masterpiece La Grande Illusion in 1938. Another 19 have followed but only one has won: Parasite in 2019.

There is next to no chance that the Brazilian contender I’m Still Here will follow suit in nine days’ time. If anything, the bookies have understated the 100/1 price. But it is a very good film.

It is set in Rio de Janeiro in 1970. Now, for those of us of a certain age who love sport, Brazil 1970 evokes only one thing: the extravagantly gifted football team that won the World Cup in Mexico that summer, inspired by magical players – above all, Pele – whose names still resound across the decades.

But I’m Still Here acts as a kind of rebuke to us for forgetting – or perhaps never even properly understanding – that even as Pele and his team-mates became footballing immortals, Brazil was being brutalised by a military dictatorship.

This film, by the eminent Brazilian director Walter Salles, sets the history books straight, or at least points us towards a much darker chapter. It tells the true story of the affluent, middle-class Paiva family (whom Salles knew, growing up in Rio), whose comfortable life was ripped apart following that ominous sound in all totalitarian countries: the knock on the door.

Until that point, Salles carefully builds up a sense of a gilded existence. The Paiva parents, Rubens (Selton Mello) and Eunice (Fernanda Torres), preside benignly over a joyful household. They have five bright, chatty kids, not to mention a loyal housekeeper. In some ways I was reminded of Alfonso Cuaron’s lovely 2018 film Roma, another foreign-language nominee for Best Picture at the Oscars.

The nearby beach symbolises the Paivas’ contentment. It is there that they play football and volleyball, and find a stray Jack Russell they are allowed to adopt.

I’m Still Here tells the true story of the affluent, middle-class Paiva family whose comfortable life was ripped apart following that sound in all totalitarian countries: the knock on the door

Torres gives a wonderful performance as Eunice, whose stoicism even after she and one of her daughters are carted off, whose pride in her idenтιтy and determination to protect her kids, drive the rest of the film

The nearby beach symbolises the Paivas’ contentment. It is there that they play football and volleyball, and find a stray Jack Russell they are allowed to adopt

But a cloud is encroaching on the sun. We see it in the pᴀssing trucks full of soldiers, and also, when the eldest daughter is packed off to live with family friends in London, in the suggestion that the rest of them should go, too.

It seems that Rubens, a former congressman, is engaged in low-level dissent against the regime. Soon, he is driven away to be interrogated.

Behind him, unsmiling men stay in the house ‘to keep an eye’ on the family, yet genteel Eunice (who tells her children they are from ‘pest control’) does not forget her manners, and insists they sit down for lunch.

Torres, incidentally, is also in the running for an Oscar. She is the second Brazilian to reach the Best Actress shortlist after her own mother, Fernanda Montenegro (who at the age of 95 has a small role in I’m Still Here), was honoured for the 1998 film Central Station, also directed by Salles. Which as a further aside makes them the first mother-and-daughter Best Actress nominees since Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli. That’s illustrious company.

Torres deserves her Oscar nod. She gives a wonderful performance as Eunice, whose stoicism even after she and one of her daughters are also carted off, whose pride in her idenтιтy and determination to protect her kids, drive the rest of the film.

The story winds forward 25 years and then another 15, but its focus throughout is on the events of 1970. And while Salles could easily have ramped up the violence, could have turned up the emotions from a simmer to a boil, it is a more powerful and memorable picture for his restraint.

The Monkey (15, 98 mins)

Verdict: Nuts

There is nothing restrained about The Monkey, Osgood Perkins’s darkly comic horror film based on a short story by Stephen King. A demonic toy monkey terrorises the lives of twins Hal and Bill, one amiable, the other a bully (both played as children by Christian Convery and as grown-ups by Theo James).

Basically, when the monkey bashes his drum it’s a cue for someone to die, and those deaths get ever more preposterously gory.

At times The Monkey brings to mind the TV show Six Feet Under, but that was done with infinitely more wit.

A demonic toy monkey terrorises the lives of twins Hal and Bill, one amiable, the other a bully

The problem here is that the scares aren’t terribly scary and the laughs aren’t wildly funny. All that really seems to matter is the blood and quite literally the guts, as in one scene when a shopkeeper’s intestines are dragged out of him.

Speaking of internal bits, director Perkins is all but umbilically linked to one of the most chilling films of all time, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), which starred his late father Anthony. He rose to the challenge of that heritage with his last film, Longlegs (2024). But The Monkey is just nuts, and not in a good way.

September Says (18, 100 mins)

Verdict: Creepy unsettling 

September Says is a creepier film about school-age siblings, September (Pascale Kann) and July (Mia Tharia). Again, one of them is much more dominant, and again their story gets ever more grim. But it is compellingly unsettling throughout.

For actress Ariane Labed – whose husband, Yorgos Lanthimos, made The Favourite (2018) and Poor Things (2023), both festooned with Oscar nominations – this is a promising directorial debut.

All three films in cinemas now.

Peter Schmeichel? A piano prodigy whose dad was a spy! 

Schemichel (15, 90 mins)

Schemichel is a must-watch for fans of Manchester United and (possibly a slightly smaller percentage of our readers) Denmark.

Even if you have different football affiliations, though, this is a very enjoyable documentary about one of the most influential goalkeepers of recent times: the great Dane Peter Schmeichel.

This is a very enjoyable documentary about one of the most influential goalkeepers of recent times: the great Dane Peter Schmeichel

His former teammates make some entertaining contributions. Gary Neville recalls that if you made a defensive error in front of the big man, he was as unforgiving as if you’d stolen his granny’s handbag. But a more surprising revelation is that his troubled Polish father, a musician (from whom Schmeichel has inherited a talent for playing the piano, putting his huge hands to another use entirely), was fleetingly a spy, indeed a double agent.

I am Martin Parr (12A, 68 mins) 

Another absorbing documentary, I Am Martin Parr sheds light on the work of one of our finest pH๏τographers, whose unerring eye for both the banalities and peculiarities of everyday British life has yielded a cherishable pictorial record of the past 50 years.

I especially love his pH๏τograph of three nuns eating ice creams in a park, shooing away a curious swan. It’s a small work of genius.

Schmeichel is on all digital platforms; I Am Martin Parr is in select cinemas.

Classic films on TV 

The Banshees of Inisherin (2022)

Will this be considered a classic a generation from now? I hope so. Martin McDonagh’s dark, offbeat comedy about two friends (Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell) who fall out in 1920s Ireland is just exquisite.

Saturday, 9.15pm, Channel 4.