Children of Men

The ascendancy of Mexico’s “three amigos” — Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro, and Alejandro González Iñárritu — to international critical and commercial prominence was one of the signal stories in world cinema this past decade. Cuarón, director of Y tu mamá también (and of Love in the Time of Hysteria, screening in our Mexican retrospective in February), hit a high point with 2006’s Children of Men, a stunning adaptation of P. D. James’s apocalyptic novel, made with a major international cast. The film is set in a dire, dystopian near-future in which humans have lost the ability to reproduce, or to hope; it opens with breaking news of a tragedy: the senseless stabbing death of “Baby Diego,” the 18-year-old youth who was the last child born on the planet. Clive Owen plays a dispirited, alcoholic British bureaucrat drawn by anti-government rebels, including his ex-wife (Julianne Moore), into a dangerous plot to protect the safety of Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey), a young woman who harbours a sensational — and miraculous — secret. The film’s urgent vérité camerawork is often explosively violent, and includes several single-take sequence shots of jaw-dropping virtuosity. The watery finale recalls Bergman’s The Shame. “A superbly directed political thriller . . . The kind of glorious bummer that lifts you to the rafters, transported with the greatness of its filmmaking” (Manohla Dargis, New York Times). Colour, 35mm. 109 mins.