****1/2

An experienced and competent nurse in a hospital in the Western world endures a particularly gruelling night shift – out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 1st

There’s a moment of calm at the start of Late Shift… Scrubs going through a laundry system… Floria Lind (Leonie Benesch from September 5, Tim Fehlbaum, 2024; The Teachers’ Lounge, Ilker Çatak, 2023; The White Ribbon, Michael Haneke, 2009) on the night bus to her shift… She and a colleague making small talk whilst changing at the lockers… (The film ends similarly, with a reverse of this bookend, peace after the night shift is over.) And then, they’re on shift.

As soon as Mrs. Lind comes into the ward, the chaos starts. She helps a male colleague (bilingual in German and, for the patient, French) lift the demented Mrs Kuhn (Margherita Schoch) out of her wheelchair so Floria can change the lady’s underwear (and, quite literally, clean her shit off the floor). This evening, it’s Floria, one other nurse (Sonja Riesen), and Amelie (Selma Jamal Aldin), an inexperienced med student. Handing over, a colleague runs through by name the patients on the ward this shift and their various medical needs.… Read the rest

***1/2

An indigenous container port security man falls prey to a fever as a mysterious animal prowls the nearby Amazon rainforest – out in cinemas and on select online rental platforms including BFI Player and Curzon Home Cinema from Friday, July 30th

Justino (Regis Myrupu) works as the night watchman at a port in Manaus, a city on the edge of the Amazon rainforest, where huge containers are unloaded and loaded and stacked in perpendicular piles by huge mechanical rigs. At the lockers, he chats with a new colleague who used to supervise workers on a farm but got fed up with it.

After his shift, he takes the 324 bus then walks up the huge hill to his small shack where he lives with his grown up daughter Vanessa (Rosa Peixoto), his wife having died some years previously. Sometimes his son visits with or without daughter-in-law and child in tow. Sometimes his brother and wife visit.

There are news reports of a mysterious wild animal in the area attacking livestock. Sometimes, getting off the 324, Justino thinks her hears something in the undergrowth. But he finds nothing.… Read the rest