Hope is as contemporary and vital a film as you’re likely to find in 2017, but it’s also one of the funniest and most classically (not to mention beautifully) cinematic too.

As a writer, Kaurismäki has a precious knack for jokes that work beautifully in any language.

Winsome, sweet, and often very funny, The Other Side of Hope is more of the same from Kaurismäki, and thank God for that.

Somehow one of the effects of our current state of topsy-turviness has been to bring us closer into alignment with Kaurismäki’s skewed vision; if his movies are all, in their way, like pictures hanging crooked on a wall, with The Other Side of Hope we don’t have to tilt our heads anymore: the whole house has moved around us.

While the film depicts a world seldom far removed from grim reality, the sly strain of humor keeps it buoyant, nowhere more so than in Kaurismaki’s deadpan dialogue, delivered with affectless aplomb by his marvelous cast.