HOT MILK ****

 The matter-of-factness of the relationship that springs up between Sofia, (Emma Mackey) and Ingrid, (Vicky Krieps), is what distinguishes first-time director Rebecca Lenkiewicz's feature "Hot Milk" from other recent LGBTQ+ films. It begins with the kind of casual pick-up that suggests both women's gaydars are working at full throttle. Sofia is in Spain, (though the film was shot in Greece), with her domineering mother Rose, (an absolutely superb Fiona Shaw), for a 'cure' at a clinic presided over by Gomez, (Vincent Perez), since Rose can't walk and Gomez believes her problems are psychosomatic.

Fundamentally Lenkiewicz's film is about women who have no control over their lives. Though clearly independent-minded Sofia can't break free of her mother just as Rose is unable to divest herself of her own past and while Ingrid would appear to be the film's free spirit she is also in a relationship with Matty, a black man she seems happy with but almost certainly doesn't love and the movie is a little gem. Sofia is studying Margaret Mead and like Mead, Lenkiewicz is allowing us access to these characters as if we are interlopers or just eavesdroppers in their lives.

Dramatically for a lot of the time not a lot happens. Ingrid admits to killing someone 'a long time ago' which makes her character the one most prone to melodrama and there are intimations that the unorthodox clinic and Gomez and his daughter/nurse, (Patsy Ferran), aren't quite what they seem but it's ultimately Sofia who begins to unravel, not surprising you might think given she is Rose's daughter, and the film begins to play out like a thriller you can't quite get your head around. In the end what is resolved? As Hitchcock said, it's only a movie but for at least nine-tenths of its length it's a very fine one.

THE SURFER no stars

 Are Australians really the least hospitable people on the planet or is that just in the movies? Or is just me who thinks every Australian film features nothing but psychos, serial killers and the kind of weirdos you certainly don't want to run into when you decide to go surfing at a local beauty spot which is what Nicholas Cage as "The Surfer" chooses to do in Lorcan Finnegan's movie of the same name.

Arriving at the beach with his surfboard and son in tow Cage very quickly finds that as an outsider he is not welcome but being beaten up and robbed, (of his surfboard, phone, watch and car), doesn't deter our Nick who perseveres until what, they take his life as well? As a thriller, Finnegan's film doesn't stand up because it's all too far-fetched to ring true but then is any of this true or, like in Frank Perry's "The Swimmer", is it all in Cage's imagination and if it is, do we really care?

Maybe what "The Surfer" needed was an actor less associated with being crazy on camera, something Cage has made his speciality. Maybe what this movie needed was a Ralph Fiennes, an actor we might more closely identify with, (even if I can't see Fiennes on a surfboard). Unfortunately as Cage suffers everything God and the world can throw at him he not only loses it but his audience as well. In the end this never amounts to anything other than another Crazy Cage movie, a little more original in the telling perhaps than your usual multiplex fare but also both pretentious and hard to swallow.

THE HOUSE ON CARROLL STREET **

 Enjoyable sub-Hitchcockian thriller that manages to combine Nazi war criminals with the HUAC hearings. Kelly McGillis is the uncooperative witness who starts playing amateur detective when she stumbles on some very unsavory Germans in league with one of the senate committee.  "The House on Carroll Street" was directed by Peter Yates who brings his customary level of professionalism to proceedings, (it's a period piece and the period detail is first-rate).

Of course, all amateur detectives need a professional in their corner and Kelly finds hers in Jeff Daniel's FBI man. It may fall well short of "Notorious" or indeed any other similarly themed Hitchcock movie but it's got a good plot and a fair quota of thrills and as well as Daniels and McGillis it's also got a splendidly sleazy villain in Mandy Patinkin, (the nasty committee guy) and Jessica Tandy doing her spunky old lady bit. The fine screenplay is by Walter Bernstein.