Brimstone

Liz, a mute midwife on the American frontier, starts running the moment she sees the new preacher. The film is in four parts and runs backwards in time: first the present, then Liz's past in a brothel, then her childhood, and finally where it all began. The connection between her and the preacher is only completed in the last chapter. Martin Koolhoven wrote and directed. Dakota Fanning plays Liz and Guy Pearce plays the Reverend, with Emilia Jones, Kit Harington and Carice van Houten in the cast. It is a Dutch western and takes its language from Europe: instead of the moral frame of the American genre it puts religious coercion and control over a woman's body at the centre. It competed at the 2016 Venice Film Festival and divided audiences from the first screening, with the level of violence and the length of what the central character endures the most argued-over points. Who it is for: viewers who like dark westerns and non-linear structure. Who it is not for: anyone who cannot take sexual violence and religious abuse. The film does not confine it to one scene but spreads it across the whole story.