Innholdsfortegnelse for May - June 2016 i Little White Lies

EXCLUSIVE! WHAT GUYS REALLY THINK ABOUT GIRLS FEEL CUTE AND CONFIDENT NICOLAS WINDING REFN ON The 16-YEAR-OLD GIRL INSIDE HIM ARE YOU BEAUTY OBSESSED? NEW! Elle’s RUNWAY TIPS PLUS THE HOTTEST SUMMER LOOKS! NICOLAS WINDING REFN’S ADVICE TO YOU! Nic’s Hot Line Is Nicolas Winding Refn a feminist? However you define that increasingly ambiguous term, it’s not an ideology that’s synonymous with the Danish writer/director/provocateur. Which is understandable, given that he tends to make visceral, fetishistic films about violent men. And yet the signs are all right there in his work. Take Valhalla Rising, which pits Mads Mikkelsen’s one-eyed Viking warrior against pagan crusaders in a primordial world conspicuously devoid of women. Or his best known film to date, Drive, where Ryan Gosling’s strong-silent antihero rescues Carey Mulligan’s abused single…

How could this be? Director Nicolas Winding Refn is Denmark’s dark lord of cinematic transgression, trading on skin-flailing violence, booming soundtracks and bruised machismo. How could he be making a film with Elle Fanning, a beaming byword for quaint femininity? Their disparate worlds collide in The Neon Demon, a surreal body horror set in the fashion industry in which Fanning stars as an up-an-coming model who is violently victimised by a jealous clique of rivals. She secured her first screen credit at the tender age of three in Sean Penn-starring tearjerker, I Am Sam, from 2001, and from then worked consistently across TV and film since. She stole Super 8 from under the snotty noses of its predominantly male pre-teen cast and its celebrity showman director, JJ Abrams, while later…

Directed by DANIEL BARBER Starring BRIT MARLING HAILEE STEINFELD SAM WORTHINGTON Released 17 JUNE 3 ANTICIPATION. A female-led Civil War yarn? We’re in. Directed by the guy who made Harry Brown? Erm… 3 ENJOYMENT. Effectively tense, but troubling. 3 IN RETROSPECT. A well-intentioned home invasion thriller that can’t quite address all the issues it raises. The Keeping Room begins with a scene of abrupt and terrible violence – and it is exacted against women. Capturing a precarious moment in American history, Daniel Barber’s film focuses on the ravaged losing side in the immediate aftermath of the American Civil War, and on the young inheritors of that destruction. Sitting somewhere between a western and a home invasion thriller, the film opens with a rogue Union soldier who commits a rape and covers his…

Cinematic delights are rarely as absolute as Love & Friendship, the latest from American writer/director Whit Stillman. Characters in his previous comedies, such as 1990’s Metropolitain or 1994’s Barcelona, all seemed to exist out of their own time, but with this latest movie, an adaptation of one of Jane Austen’s juvenile novellas, people, place and time achieve a sublime connection. LWLies: When you’re dealing with Jane Austen, do people immediately see dollar signs? Stillman: If there were dollar signs, there would’ve been a lot more Jane Austen movies. There was a bit of an Austen adaptation period around ’95, but not a lot since then. I’m particularly fond of Sense and Sensibility as the opposite of what we do. It’s very romantic and we’re very comic. I think the films…

Directed by JEREMY SAULNIER Starring IMOGEN POOTS ANTON YELCHIN PATRICK STEWART Released 13 MAY 3 ANTICIPATION. Saulnier’s Blue Ruin hinted at great things. 3 ENJOYMENT. Again, hints at greater things to come. 3 IN RETROSPECT. More to it that may meet the eye. Being in politics today isn’t about being a good person, it’s about convincing the world of that fact. This is achievable through time honoured grit and determination, or actually being a naturally enlightened soul who has ideas and is able to communicate them to a broad, appreciative audience. Otherwise, you can linger behind a smokescreen where selfimage and public perception will always trump real substance. Jeremy Saulnier’s determinately nasty Green Room is about the insane lengths that some political movements will go to preserve some semblance of credibility, even…

Directed by MAÏWENN Starring VINCENT CASSEL, EMMANUELLE BERCOT, LOUIS GARREL Released 27 MAY When you think about it, break ups are a lot like recovering from a cruciate ligament knee injury. In both instances, the process can be a long and painful one, but in the end you emerge stronger than before. This clumsily constructed analogy forms the basis of Mon Roi, the fourth feature from mono-monikered French actress and sometime director, Maïwenn. Emmanuelle Bercot stars as Tony, a criminal lawyer thrown into a state of midlife torpor after a nasty skiing accident. Before she has a chance to settle into her new surroundings at a physical rehabilitation clinic, her therapist seamlessly cues up a series of flashbacks by probing as to whether something other than fate might have contributed to her taking…

Directed by HIROMASA YONEBAYASHI Starring SARA TAKATSUKI KASUMI ARIMURA NANAKO MATSUSHIMA Released 10 JUNE 4 ANTICIPATION. Studio Ghibli’s final film, from the director behind the very lovely Arrietty. 3 ENJOYMENT. At times as awkward as its young protagonist, yet brimming with the familiar Ghibli magic. 4 IN RETROSPECT. Not so much an ending, as a new beginning. Talk about a tough act to follow. Trailing behind the dual release of Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises and Isao Takahata’s The Tale of the Princess Kaguya by less than a year, When Marnie Was There is tasked with turning off the lights and lowering the shutters at Japanese animation powerhouse Studio Ghibli. Its two predecessors were monolithic statements from old masters, both intent on breaking ground in the artform they helped define. Together, they…

Directed by JOHN CARNEY Starring FERDIA WALSH-PEELO LUCY BOYNTON AIDAN GILLEN Released 20 MAY 3 ANTICIPATION. John Carney’s latest has been acquiring super fans on the festival circuit. 3 ENJOYMENT. It’s a jolly old romp, but nothing more or nothing less than that. 2 IN RETROSPECT. Like a tie-in soundtrack album in search of a movie. If Bratpack deity John Hughes were alive today, you could well imagine him making a film like Sing Street, a jolly if ineffectual growing pains comedy that’s liberally festooned with electro-pop chart toppers and silly jokes. Such as it is, we’ll have to make do with this version by John Carney, the director who went nuclear after his hushed busking drama, Once, captured the heart of a nation back in 2007. Set in Dublin during the…

Cemetery of Splendour layers up dream states and ghostly realms – something that Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul does rather well. Here we talk about his formative inspirations and his deep love of genre cinema. LWLies: Do you remember the first film you saw? Apichatpong: Yes, I don’t remember the story, but I remember a shot. It was a Thai movie, an action movie with helicopters over the sea. The bad guys were on the helicopter, throwing a lot of bank notes into the sea. They looked like birds. Cinema can often become even more multisensory in the memory. Absolutely. It’s about freedom too, the freedom that comes with cinema. I felt suffocated in that little town, so films can be liberating, a way of opening up a space. Looking back…

Directed by EVA HUSSON Starring MARILYN LIMA, DAISY BROOM, FINNEGAN OLDFIELD Released 10 JUNE This first feature by French director Eva Husson attempts to offer an insider’s view of modern adolescence. And it partly succeeds for its first two acts. As term time ticks down to its final minutes, la saison des amours begins for a bunch of hopped-up high school students. Bored by the their middle class residential suburb, which is situated on the coast of Southwestern France, they start collecting one-night stands with one another. Matters notch up a level when George (Marilyn Lima) adapts the rules of the traditional party game Spin the Bottle to get one of the boys’ attention, transforming innocent frolics into a giant teens-only gang bang. There’s social pressure to enter the game, but consent is…

Directed by CIRO GUERRA Starring NILBIO TORRES JAN BIJVOET ANTONIO BOLIVAR Released 10 JUNE 4 ANTICIPATION. Ciro Guerra’s first two features were terrific. 4 ENJOYMENT. This was never going to win the Oscar. 4 IN RETROSPECT. An exquisitely rendered study of colonialism, memory and cultural erasure. Colonialism and memory serve as the twin forces steadily erasing an entire cultural heritage on this slow-burn journey down the Amazon. It’s a film pregnant with mystical symbolism. And its complex structure ends up being the key to deciphering its meaning. Director Ciro Guerra weaves together two narratives, one from the turn of the 20th century, the other taking place some 40 years later; each is a fictionalised account of a search by a pair of real-life German ethnographers for the film’s elusive MacGuffin, the yakruna…

Directed by DENIZ GAMZE ERGÜVEN Starring GÜNES SENSOY DOGA ZEYNEP DOGUSLU ILAYDA AKDOGAN Released 13 MAY 4 ANTICIPATION. Massive buzz, including a tweet from superfan Andie MacDowell. 4 ENJOYMENT. Rich with cinematic contradictions: joyful but tragic; gorgeous but ugly. A realistic fairy tale. 4 IN RETROSPECT. Urgently political and rapturously artistic. Before Mustang received an Academy Award nomination, when all anyone had to go on was an opaque title, the film was being sold as, ‘a Turkish Virgin Suicides.’ The logline is irresistible, for there are numerous surface similarities to Sofia Coppola’s 1999 debut feature. Both pivot around five sisters, all with long hair that glints in the sun. They are so close-knit that they appear as a five-headed mass of limbs and laughter. The darkness that slowly encroaches on youthful freedom…

Directed by JOE STEPHENSON Starring SCOTT CHAMBERS, YASMIN PAIGE MORGAN WATKINS Released 20 MAY Nature versus nurture is the name of the game in Joe Stephenson’s directorial debut, Chicken. Despite its idyllic, Essex countryside settings, the film’s characters are tethered to a machine hell bent on destruction, one that forever dredges up the putrid funk that abuse leaves behind. Stephenson eschews convention when presenting the constraints of living with learning difficulties, attempting to make a new and fresh statement. As the instantly loveable Richard, a boy who does not let his tumultuous past – or his present – hold him back, Scott Chambers delivers an inspired performance. He stuck with his tormented and abusive older brother, Polly (the brilliant Morgan Watson). Richard’s careful, though meagre meal preparations in their squalid caravan are heartbreaking…

Directed by CRISTI PUIU Starring ALEXANDRU PAPADOPOL DRAGOS BUCUR IOANA FLORA 2001 Released 30 MAY Blu-ray It’s supremely satisfying to discover that a great director was making quality movies before he was officially inducted into the hallowed halls of moviedom. Romania’s Cristi Puiu cemented his status as ‘one to watch’ when his 2006 film, The Death of Mr Lazarescu, which documented the final, undignified hours in the life of a dirt-poor pensioner, was lauded at the Cannes Film Festival. Roll back five years, and his spiky debut feature, Stuff and Dough, had already strongly hinted at his capabilities as a unblinking social observer, a darkly humorous satirist, and a showman capable of whipping up scenes of frazzled intensity from nothing. This film, liberated from the archives by the great Second Run DVD,…

Directed by ROY ROWLAND Starring TOMMY RETTIG HANS CONRIED MARY HEALY 1953 Released 7 JUNE Blu-ray A fascinating ’50s folly gets a deserved Blu-ray upgrade in Roy Rowland’s colourfully camp atomic-age musical, The 5,000 Fingers of Dr T. It’s a film that sits firmly in the, ‘how the sweet Jesus did this get made?’ file, an eccentric whatsit direct from the mellow-yellow brainpan of kiddie fabulist Dr Seuss. It tells of an apple-cheeked young scamp (Tommy Rettig) who finds his piano lessons boring and his flouncing teacher something of an pretentious irritant. He drifts into a featurelength daze which just happens to resemble MC Escher goes to day-glo storytown, and ends up dashing about gigantic, brightly lit sound stages trying to foil the nefarious plans of the evil Dr T (Hans Conried).…

Directed by JOSEPH SARGENT Starring WALTER MATTHAU ROBERT SHAW MARTIN BALSAM 1974 Released 5 JULY Blu-ray If the ’80s was the decade of now, then the ’70s was the decade of no. Films like The French Connection, The Conversation and Taxi Driver made the defiant claim that good endings didn’t need to be happy endings. It seems that director Joseph Sargent missed that memo when adapting John Godey’s hit novel ‘The Taking of Pelham One Two Three,’ barrelling full steam towards an air-punching endorsement of robust American law enforcement. From the outset, this looks to be one of those stories where, if the forces of evil don’t necessarily win out, then they at least brand their indelible mark onto the psyche of our valiant hero. A (fake) moustache-twirling Robert Shaw has devised…

Directed by MATTEO GARRONE Starring SALMA HAYEK VINCENT CASSEL TOBY JONES Released 17 JUNE 4 ANTICIPATION. From Gomorrah to the land of make-believe for director Garrone – we’re intrigued. 3 ENJOYMENT. The tales are charming and imaginative but fall away when it comes to the punchline. 3 IN RETROSPECT. We’re tickled, we’re charmed and we’re still wondering what the point was. He isn’t someone with the same recognition-factor as the Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Andersen, but the 16thcentury Neapolitan poet and collector of folk tales Giambattista Basile predated both with his famous compendium, ‘The Tale of Tales’. Traditionally, such cautionary narratives have been configured to turn young minds into well-behaved citizens – which is why the likes of Walt Disney have been so attracted to them. But the stuff here, which…

Directed by LAURIE ANDERSON Released 20 MAY 3 ANTICIPATION. An essay film about a dog? We’ll bite. 4 ENJOYMENT. Laurie Anderson’s requiem for many dreams… 4 IN RETROSPECT. …and the rebirth of so many more. Laurie Anderson’s voice has the quality of a meditative yoga instructor. During Heart of a Dog, she speaks precisely and calmly over a collage of expressionist images, as if to hypnotise the viewer into a perpetual dream state. The result is a moving essay film that lulls you into a sensory-laden trance. In this headspace, we are given the freedom to consider storytelling and memory in a new light. Call and response questions provide otherworldly assurance. ‘What are days for? To wake you up. What are nights for? To fall through time.’ Covering a lot of philosophical…

Jeremy Saulnier’s second feature, the self-financed, 2013 lo-fi revenge thriller, Blue Ruin, won him the FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes and a welter of critical plaudits. So when we met him during the 2015 London Film Festival, where he was promoting the ‘siegepunk’ thriller Green Room, we were curious to find out what this success has meant for his filmmaking. “Blue Ruin completely changed the horizon. I was doing corporate videos prior to that movie. Going all in, taking a gamble on that movie paid off in ways I never expected. Also, getting in to the Director's Fortnight [at Cannes], to launch that movie on that international platform – I had access to international financing companies and foreign sales agents. I would never call myself an auteur, but to be labelled…

Directed by JULIO MEDEM Starring PENÉLOPE CRUZ, ÀLEX BRENDEMÜHL, LUIS TOSAR Released 24 JUNE Everything that’s awful in the latest film by Julio Medem has nothing to do with its star and co-producer, Penélope Cruz. She is absolved of responsibility, purely for reminding us of her scintillating screen presence. Embarrassing, second-banana roles in big budget English-language comedies such as Grimsby and (pardon my French) Zoolander 2 required her to stand in a cat-suit and pout. They signalled that she’d all but thrown in the towel when it came to “serious” acting. But the first half of Ma Ma reminds us of the fiery star of Jamón, Jamón and Volver. She plays the headstrong Magda, a single mother who, in the film’s opening scene, chuckles defiantly when she is diagnosed with breast cancer. Though…

Hiromasa Yonebayashi’s When Marnie Was There is a study of teenage grief and anxiety that’s leavened by Studio Ghbili’s typical recourse to gentle whimsy and fantasy. The director talks to us about following up Arrietty, his 2010 take on ‘The Borrowers’, working with the great Hayao Miyazaki, and the value of close attention to detail. LWLies: How do you see When Marnie Was There as relating to your previous film Arrietty? Yonebayashi: With Arrietty, because Miyazaki created the concept on the screenplay, I was always conscious of Miyazaki and how he would feel, how he would receive it. But with Marnie, what I was conscious of was purely the enjoyment of the audience. At the end of Arrietty, the borrowers leave their nest and they fly away. So for the…

Directed by CHANTAL AKERMAN Released 24 JUNE 3 ANTICIPATION. Mixed reactions so far, but Chantal Akerman’s final work demands our attention. 4 ENJOYMENT. Challenging, intimate, moving. A worthy final film. 5 IN RETROSPECT. We’ll miss you, Chantal. No Home Movie is haunted by two ghosts. The subject of Chantal Akerman’s film is her mother, Natalia, who passed away in April 2014 at age of 86, and the director herself who died in 2015, shortly after the film’s world premiere. Akerman may not have originally intended for No Home Movie to be her swansong, but there is the inescapable feeling of a chapter being closed with this film. Akerman’s relationship with her mother was one of the themes that united her eclectic body of work, with Natalia being a key figure in many…

Directed by JAMES CRUMP Released 13 MAY How do you document someone else’s art in a way that does it justice? Art historian Germano Celant neatly sums up the paradox: “Photography never represents the object. It is yours, not the artist’s. But at the same time, you have to talk about [the art]. If you don’t, what will happen in 100 years?” Enter James Crump and his film Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art, which explores the Land Art movement that emerged in the US during the ’60s and ’70s. Celant has a point. Can works like Spiral Jetty, a 1,500-foot coil of rock jutting out into Utah’s Great Salt Lake, ever look as impressive on a screen? Editor Nick Tamburri’s splicing of archive footage and sweeping aerial video certainly comes close.…

Directed by STEFANO SOLLIMA Starring PIERFRANCESCO FAVINO, ELIO GERMANO, CLAUDIO AMENDOLA Released 24 JUNE Reheated gangster shenanigans in which we see lots of awful people being awful, Stefano Sollima’s Suburra strains very hard to offer a new twist on material that’s as old as mama’s ragu recipe. He mainly does this by throwing on the dreamy M83 track ‘Outro’ during the film’s quiet, reflective moments as a way to impose a sense of dreamy bombast. It’s an example of crass designer pessimism, where everything that can go wrong does so, and everything is shown as being relative to a forthcoming “apocalypse”. A crooked politician accidentally kills a prostitute during a drug orgy, but is only interested in disposing of the corpse and retaining his professional dignity. When petty hoods start bribing him, he…

Directed by GIANFRANCO ROSI Released 10 JUNE 4 ANTICIPATION. Gianfranco Rosi’s second festival winner on the trot. 4 ENJOYMENT. Mixes political and observational documentary to profound effect. 4 IN RETROSPECT. A major step-up from the quaint Sacro GRA. They say that when you’re purchasing a house, you should wait until the weather is neither rainy nor sunny. That way it won’t colour your assessment of the property before you hand over obscene amounts of money for it. In his 2013 Venice prize-winner, Sacro GRA, about the diversity of life concected by a Roman ring road, and this new film, about the sorry lot of African refugees passing through Italian waters, the skies – like the director – remain defiantly neutral. Fire at Sea takes place on the craggy, stepping-stone island of Lampedusa…

Directed by LUCILE HADZIHALILOVIC Starring MAX BREBANT ROXANE DURAN JULIE-MARIE PARMENTIER Released 6 MAY 4 ANTICIPATION. Comparisons to Under the Skin have been made. 4 ENJOYMENT. Too sensual for words. 5 IN RETROSPECT. A nightmare that looks like a dream. Evolution is sensual cinema. Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s second feature evokes the perspective of a child who cannot translate the strangeness of the world into words. Analysing this film with any sense of authority is a doomed endeavour. Better just to describe it. It is comparable to Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin in that everyone will interpret the ‘story’ in a different way. A more communal experience will be the appreciation of Manuel Dacosse’s sumptuous photography. The colours are almost too saturated to be real – and yet the settings evoke all that is…

Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s debut feature, Mustang, is a powerful critique of sexist Turkish cultural practices. Events are rooted in the director’s formative experiences. Her family emigrated to Paris when she was a baby but remained “an island of Turkey”. The film transcends the bleakness of its subject with beautiful and light-handed storytelling. LWLies: What is the source of the real stories that inform many of the film’s events? Ergüven: The little scandal that the girls trigger at the beginning of the film is something that we lived in my generation. The girls beaten in order of their ages happened in my mother’s generation. In the newspaper, you always read about virginity reports. I wanted to know what was behind the scenes so I spoke with a gynaecologist who told me…

Directed by MARC ABRAHAM Starring TOM HIDDLESTON, ELIZABETH OLSEN, BRADLEY WHITFORD Released 6 MAY Refusing to take a leaf out of the book of its workaholic, 11-million selling country troubadour subject, Marc Abraham’s I Saw the Light is a defiantly uncommercial take on the life a times of Hank Williams. He was a hellraiser with a glint in his eye who, if leading man Tom Hiddleston is to be believed, also had the broadest beaming smile on the circuit. At one point, Williams’ slide guitar player bemoans that the songs they play – three-chord ditties that exist to please the masses – are too basic, and what Abraham has done in response is produce a very simple, straight, three-chord biopic which (unlike Hank’s music) avoids sentimentality and trite romanticism. The film takes place…

Directed by JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER Starring VARIOUS 1996-2003 Released 27 JUNE DVD When, in 2012, The Act of Killing was dropped on an unsuspecting public, many were so dazzled by its revelatory mode of inquiry that few stopped to ask: where exactly did director Joshua Oppenheimer spring from? In true journalistic fashion, he had embedded himself in Indonesia in order to learn the language and customs which would result in a more comfortable connection with his violent subjects. This vital new DVD release helps to fill in some of the years prior to that, when Oppenheimer was feverishly experimenting with form and function. His militant instinct for social justice, however, appears fully formed. These Places We’ve Learned to Call Home from 1996 is an intriguing, medium-length work co-directed with Jacob Silber, which plants the…

Directed by NICHOLAS RAY Starring HUMPHREY BOGART GLORIA GRAHAME FRANK LOVEJOY 1950 Released 16 MAY Blu-ray The world has gone to all hell in Nicholas Ray’s noxious 1950 showbiz satire, In a Lonely Place. It’s a film in which the purportedly glamorous job of movie screenwriter is characterised by tedium, repetition and lots of late night drinking. Even a brutal roadside slaying is treated with a drowsy sigh rather than an astonished scream. Humphrey Bogart plays Dixon ‘Dix’ Steele, a punch-clock movie writer who calls on the coat check girl at his local bar to précis a doorstop novel he’s supposed to be adapting. She does her job and Dix sends her packing, but the next morning the police are on his doorstep and he’s the key suspect in an after-hours murder.…

Directed by JEAN RENOIR Starring MICHEL SIMON GEORGES FLAMANT JANIE MARÈSE 1931 Released 14 JUNE Blu-ray There’s a staggering amount of incident in Jean Renoir’s 1931 film La Chienne (translation: The Bitch), a story based on a novel by Georges de La Fouchardière and which was also adapted for the screen by Fritz Lang as Scarlet Street in 1945. Michel Simon is a paragon of the pathetic as Maurice Legrand, a sadsack post office clerk with a mound of centre-parted hair, tiny spectacles and a sexless marriage. He paints to kill the time, and he’s pretty good. One fateful night, he happens across Janie Marèse’s chiselling strumpet, Lucienne, and decides at that moment that he’s going to do everything in his power to win her heart, even though she’s going steady with…

- DIRECTED BY -  Michael Gottlieb - TRAILERS - The Tzar Wept Anew, Night of the War Tubas, Chess vs. Scrabble - STARRING - Andrew McCarthy Kim Cattrall James Spader - CHERRYPICK - “We humans are little more than an occasionally entertaining collection of nose hair and toejam.” - TAGLINE - ‘Making her move February 13th at theatres everywhere!’ - RELEASED - 1987 You may never have heard of Joe Farrell, but boy has he heard of you! Not you, with your strange and brittle dreams, unexceptional everyday tendernesses and mutinous sexual peccadilloes. But the You that makes up the big They. The great unwashed that PT Barnum had in mind when he threatened to ‘Give them what they want.’ The PayPal drones Steve Jobs salivated over as he steepled…

Exhibit A: Factory Girl (2006) Directed by George Hickenlooper This was supposed to be the film that launched Sienna Miller into the stratosphere. Instead, it courted damning reviews and a couple of lawsuits. It’s the story of Edie Sedgwick, the Warhol ‘Superstar’ who, for an intense period in the mid-’60s, became the focal point for the world’s cameras, before fame took its toll and drug addiction sent her to an early grave. LWLies: Factory Girl is about the life of Warhol ‘Superstar’ Edie Sedgwick. Was she a model? Manuela Lazic: She was more of a muse, and the type of work she was doing with Warhol was very experimental. It relied on her muse-ness and her fame. Elena Lazic: Factory Girl is pretty terrible, but interesting as a film about…

Directed by TERRENCE MALICK Starring CHRISTIAN BALE CATE BLANCHETT NATALIE PORTMAN Released 6 MAY 5 ANTICIPATION. It’s Terrence frickin’ Malick… Stand up and pay attention. 4 ENJOYMENT. It’s a toughie. Enjoyment not quite the word for it… 5 IN RETROSPECT. As with all of his films, blossoms into something unique and beautiful. Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups explores the difference in such terms as ‘change’, ‘regression’, ‘evolution’ and ‘rebirth’. Photo albums are obsolete, cultural relics, caked in the dust of time. Electronic media has seen to that by offering something new in their place. A photograph is now a jpeg or a Vine. It exists on a phone or a drive. One wrong flick of the thumb and it’s gone forever. Malick tries to find some valuable convergence in these ideas, whether…

Directed by OMER FAST Starring TOM STURRIDGE CUSH JUMBO ED SPELEERS Released 24 JUNE 3 ANTICIPATION. An ambitious project for a firsttime director. 4 ENJOYMENT. A head-spinning and often exhilarating mystery. 4 IN RETROSPECT. This one lingers in the memory. “Essentially, you’ve got to forget it ever happened,” the solicitor tells his client. “Put it behind you and start a new life, on your terms, with incredible resources.” That’s easier said than done. Tom (Tom Sturridge) has just received an £8.5 million payout as compensation for being severely injured in a freak accident – but how can a man move forward with his life when both his body and mind still bear such fresh scars? As he hobbles around his small flat, fragments of memories keep flashing into Tom’s ruptured brain, giving…

Directed by WHIT STILLMAN Starring KATE BECKINSALE CHLOË SEVIGNY XAVIER SAMUEL Released 27 MAY 4 ANTICIPATION. Whit Stillman can do no wrong. 4 ENJOYMENT. So, so good. Shows that literary adaptations can make good movies. 4 IN RETROSPECT. Like all of Stillman’s films, there’s major re-watch factor. Whit Stillman is a director fascinated by the idea of people gladly displaced from their own time: foppish debutantes abide by romantic era courting rituals in ’90s Manhattan in Metropolitan; a good old limbo contest trumps modern jazz in Barcelona; and lovers of disco music band together while boxes of wax platters are torched at baseball games in The Last Days of Disco. With his ebullient and scaldingly droll latest – a superlative screwball adaptation of Jane Austen’s novella ‘Lady Susan’ – Stillman may have…

Directed by SIMON STONE Starring PAUL SCHNEIDER ODESSA YOUNG GEOFFREY RUSH Released 27 MAY 3 ANTICIPATION. An acclaimed stage production makes its way to the big screen, with writer-director and some cast members along for the ride. 3 ENJOYMENT. Festen your seatbelts. 3 IN RETROSPECT. A solid debut feature, with strong hopes for Australian cinema both behind and in front of the camera. A brief glimpse of the credits and promotional material for Simon Stone’s The Daughter might cause red flags to pop up in the mind of certain viewers. But fear not, as any negative preconceptions you might harbour about theatre directors making the leap from stage to screen are dispelled pretty swiftly. Set in modern day Australia, the film is a reworking of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen’s ‘The Wild Duck’,…

Directed by ANDREW STEGGALL Starring JULIET STEVENSON, ALEX LAWTHER, PHÉNIX BROSSARD Released 20 MAY This is a film which searches for a definition of the word ‘departure.’ And it’s a good one by debut director Andrew Steggall. It sees Elliot (Alex Lawther) and his mother, Beatrice (Juliet Stevenson), clearing out their holiday home in the South of France prior to selling it off. A handsome teenager, Clément (Phénix Brossard), enters the fray – he is staying with his aunt while his mother is dying of cancer. Beatrice’s marriage is falling apart while Elliot is trying to discover what love really is. Over a single week, the pair review their memories and search for answers. “Do you think you can know something before you know it?” The film opens on this existential conundrum that…

Directed by ALEX BREWER, BENJAMIN BREWER Starring NICOLAS CAGE, ELIJAH WOOD, JERRY LEWIS Released 13 MAY Elijah Wood spends most of The Trust sporting a facial expression somewhere between bemused and horrified. Considering his co-star is Nicolas Cage, master of the fabled “nouveau shamanic” acting technique, this is understandable. Take an early scene at a bar when Cage steals a lemon slice from his colleague’s glass, covers it in Tabasco and chows it down. You can’t help but wonder, was this written in the screenplay? But where other directors might simply let the actor run ramshod for 90 minutes, newcomers Alex and Benjamin Brewer seem to have tried pointing him in a straight line. The result is a breezy heist movie not unlike its lead actor: it might veer off the straight and…

Directed by MICHAEL MOORE Released 10 JUNE 3 ANTICIPATION. Capitalism: A Love Story lacked the impact of Moore’s previous efforts. 4 ENJOYMENT. Relevant, cogent and funny. 3 IN RETROSPECT. A shade too scattershot to stick. “I’ve turned into this crazy optimist,” confesses inexhaustible rabble-rouser Michael Moore, nearing the end of his latest righteous quest. Despite the characteristically provocative title, the new film from the daddy of modern populist documentary is not about the business of war, rather it sees the globe-trotting American staging a series of mock invasions of countries where things actually work. He’s after their ideas and he’s not going home empty handed. Where to Invade Next largely focuses on the success stories of Europe, with the UK – whose NHS came in for praise in 2007’s Sicko – a…

Directed by APICHATPONG WEERASETHAKUL Starring JENJIRA PONGPAS BANLOP LOMNOI JARINPATTRA RUEANGRAM Released 17 JUNE 4 ANTICIPATION. The Thai maestro’s first full feature since his big Palme d’Or win in 2010. 4 ENJOYMENT. A vital addition to a cogent body of work. 4 IN RETROSPECT. More sedate than Uncle Boonmee, but no less radical, challenging or beguiling. Some directors would be political agitators no matter where and when they were born: lap of luxury or otherwise, they’d find out where they were needed and bring their magnifying lens there. Apichatpong Weerasethakul (aka Joe), though, doesn't seem like he’d necessarily take on the Haskell Wexler model of his own accord. He was trained at the Art Institute of Chicago, and some of his earliest (and indeed, most recent) shorts are works of pure…

Directed by ISABEL COIXET Starring PATRICIA CLARKSON, BEN KINGSLEY, GRACE GUMMER Released 10 JUNE There’s an argument to be made that Patricia Clarkson should be in every movie that drops off the production line. If not every movie, then at least more filmmakers should take advantage of her effortless on-screen magnetism and easy maternal charm. She is one of those actors who is best at playing Patricia Clarkson (or derivatives thereof ), but we give Bill Murray a pass for doing just that, so why not Patty? Here she plays a softly-spoken and somewhat jittery literary critic who arrives at a crossroads in her life when her husband decides to break off their marriage. Luckily for her, he announces his intentions while sat in the back of a cab being driven by Ben…

Directed by RICHARD LINKLATER Starring BLAKE JENNER TYLER HOECHLIN GLEN POWELL Released 13 MAY 4 ANTICIPATION. How could he possibly top Boyhood, one of the great films of the 21st century? 5 ENJOYMENT. A marvel. Conjures profound movie poetry out of the dust. 5 IN RETROSPECT. The race for ‘best film of 2016’ starts right here. What a beautiful notion it is that people can look up into the night sky and form pictures by joining together the stars. The kids these days are calling them constellations, but the process of training focus on the bounty of nature and forging an artwork in the mind is rather a cinematic gesture. The fact that Ursa Minor looks nothing like a little bear, or The Big Dipper bares scant resemblance to… whatever a big…

Directed by REBECCA MILLER Starring GRETA GERWIG ETHAN HAWKE JULIANNE MOORE Released 8 JULY 4 ANTICIPATION. What an excellent cast! 3 ENJOYMENT. Greta Gerwig and Julianne Moore are having the best time. 3 IN RETROSPECT. It’s fun in the moment, but too throwaway to last. Author and filmmaker Rebecca Miller reflects on relationships, parenthood and all the messy stuff that come with them in this light, fast-paced romantic comedy set in the world of high academia. She pits choice against fate on issues of the heart and the outcome is an enjoyably quirky though somewhat detached exploration of the many frustrations of modern love. Maggie (Greta Gerwig) declares to her best friend Tony (Bill Hader) that she wants to have a baby through artificial insemination as they stroll through a Brooklyn food…

Directed by JAMES SPINNEY, PETER MIDDLETON Starring JOHN HULL DAN SKINNER SIMONE KIRBY Released 1 JULY 3 ANTICIPATION. Britain jumps on the doc-fiction hybrid train. 3 ENJOYMENT. Technically accomplished, but dramatically a little lightweight. 3 IN RETROSPECT. A mature, respectable, gently moving discussion that lacks a killer hook. How to make a movie which amply articulates the physical experience of blindness? It’s a toughie, for sure, but directors James Spinney and Peter Middleton have had a damn good crack at it, their atmospheric feature debut bringing a taped confessional to life with suitably ambient visuals. Mild-mannered, bushy-bearded theologian and family man John Hull lost his sight after a lifetime of occular ailments. He documents his efforts to remain a working academic, a father, a son, a husband and a valuable member of…

Directed by SUSANNA WHITE Starring EWAN MCGREGOR, DAMIAN LEWIS, STELLAN SKARSGÅRD Released 13 MAY The petition to secure Susanna White directing duties on the next Bond movie starts right here. This slick John le Carré adaptation is an exemplary calling card – she even manages to make Ewan McGregor seem like an intriguing screen presence. He plays a university professor called Perry who, unlike archetypal university professors, is always up for some fisticuffs. He’s on holiday with his wife, Gail (Naomie Harris), and in the dog house for cheating with a student. But the healing process is interrupted when the pair are boozily thrown together with the charismatic Dima (Stellan Skarsgård) who just wants them to hand in an innocent flash drive to UK customs on their way back home. It turns out…

Directed by STEPHEN HOPKINS Starring STEPHAN JAMES, JEREMY IRONS CARICE VAN HOUTEN Released 3 JUNE During the 1936 Berlin Olympics, an African-American man named Jesse Owens won four gold medals, much to the chagrin of the Nazis sat in the stalls. With his film Race, director Stephen Hopkins wants us to believe that the unifying power of sport can overcome the divisiveness of politics, and so he places all subtlety to the side to force this sentimental notion down our throats. What Owens did was naturally spectacular. Drum rolls and confetti are not required. Hopkins captures Owens’ will of steel by plunging us into his pregame mindset: before the race, his coach tells him to disregard the crowd and concentrate on his inner self. The adrenaline spikes and, in a way, it feels…

Directed by SCOTT MCGEHEE, DAVID SIEGEL Starring DENNIS HAYSBERT MEL HARRIS SAB SHIMONO 1993 Released 20 JUNE Blu-ray When the annals of ’90s American indie film are finally written, it’s likely that Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s stylish 1993 neo-noir will get a namecheck rather than its own dedicated chapter. While you’re watching, you have to constantly jolt yourself into remembering that it was made in the pre-digital era, because it’s the type of movie that could only be allowed into the world today were it made on the slimmest of budgets. Back then, it’s tough to even imagine how this one was let out of the cage (apparently Steven Soderbergh saw an early cut and pulled some strings to secure completion funds). That’s absolutely not to say it’s a bad movie…

Directed by MARIO BAVA Starring CAMERON MITCHELL EVA BARTOK THOMAS REINER 1964 Released 5 JULY Blu-ray “I can think of at least two things wrong with that title.” This was Nelson Muntz’s pithy review of David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch, and it also applies to Mario Bava’s brutally violent proto-giallo, Blood and Black Lace, from 1964. There might be a few lace-lined skimpies if you searched hard enough, but blood? Not really. A couple of wounds, some suppurating scars, a few drops mixing with some bath water, but no actual, honest-to-goodness red stuff. Instead of going hard and strong on gory gloop, Bava builds a world around the iconography of blood, with his ensemble of lithe meat puppets metaphorically drowned in it as they flounder for survival. A dim external staircase has a…

ELLE FANNING: Hmm? What do I love about movies? I… love… that… when you watch movies… golly, the anxiety of answering this question! You can be with anybody when you watch films. You can enjoy them with your friends, you can enjoy them with your parents, you can enjoy them by yourself. It doesn’t matter, though, as the film impacts each person in a different way. When you walk out of a movie, you’re going to have seen a completely different thing from when I walk out of a movie. It’s personal. They’re personal. Movies are something that you’re free to have an opinion on. And films can change, too, depending on who you’re with. If you’re watching a film with friends and you’re giggling, you might enjoy it, but…