Innholdsfortegnelse for August - September 2016 i Little White Lies

Movie stardom is a fickle thing. You’re built up, you’re torn down, you’re papped, you’re slandered and you’re expected to accept it all. And if, sooner or later, you punch a photographer or jump on a couch or have a high profile fling, that’s all part of the deal too: the only bad publicity is no publicity. And yet: Denzel Washington. In between his movie roles and award podium appearances, where does he go? How has he achieved a 44 feature-strong career (a remake of The Magnificent Seven will be number 45), and maintained a nearunrivalled level of fame for decades, while remaining such an unknown quantity? There are some films in which he’s incandescent. He is still the only African-American to have won more than one acting Oscar (he…

BUCK JONES AND SILVER From beginning his career as a $5-a-day stuntman, Buck Jones quickly clambered up the ranks to become a regular rotation screen cowboy for Fox Film Corporation. He went on to star in over 200 western pictures. 50 of those were with his trusty steed Silver (himself with 73 movie credits). There’s a rumour that, when Jones died in 1942 (rescuing people from fire at Boston’s Cocoanut Grove club, no less), Silver was so upset by the loss of his master that he stopped eating and duly kicked the lunch pail in 1943. GENE AUTRY AND CHAMPION Buck Jones’ career tailed off when America gained a taste for singing cowboys, and this happened as Gene Autry’s career swooped into the ascent. Part of his appeal was down…

The western is often criticised for co-opting Native Americans as feather-plumed ghouls who exist as an exotic hinderance to the work of the honest cowboy. There are three key films which sought to overturn that belief. One was Delmer Daves’ Broken Arrow from 1950, in which James Stewart happens across a wounded Apache brave in the desert and, instead of finishing him off, nurses him to health and is eventually accepted by chief Cochise. The film is often considered one of the first to view Native American characters as rounded and empathetic – they have customs and rituals that, beyond the surface, aren’t so different from those of the pilgrim fathers but Stewart’s character discovers that the desire to perpetuate a land-war for reasons no-one can truly remember remains overwhelming…

Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain from 2005 was arguably the moment when the western finally moseyed out of the closet for all to see. Prior to that, man’s-man ruggedness and the mythic conception of cowboys as American world-builders suppressed anything that might be directly read as ‘fruity’. The recent sub-genre of the ‘bromance’ could be ascribed to the intense relationship between Jesse James and his eventual assassin, Robert Ford, especially as it has been depicted on film. A famous scene in Samuel Fuller’s ace 1949 feature debut, I Shot Jesse James, played on the near-erotic obsession John Ireland’s Ford had for his laconic mentor. An iconic scene sees Reed Hadley’s James naked in a bathtub, with Ford also in the room. “Well, go ahead, Bob,” he says. “What are you waiting…

In his (still) fantastic overview of American cinema from 1995, A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies, the hallowed auteur talks about how the best directors of genre films were a lot like jazz musicians. A basic template is formed, and it’s the job of the filmmaker to find new ways to express the same idea or motif. That being the case, Edwin S Porter’s seminal 1903 film, The Great Train Robbery can be see as the original twelve-bar riff on which all subsequent western movies have been based. Scorsese even emulated the film’s most iconic image, a haunting post script in which one of the outlaw robbers silently unloads his six-shooter directly into the lens. It can be seen during a montage in Goodfellas, where Joe Pesci…

Directed by DAVID MACKENZIE Starring CHRIS PINE BEN FOSTER JEFF BRIDGES Released 9 SEPTEMBER 3 ANTICIPATION. A great cast and the writer of Sicario working on a smaller production. 4 ENJOYMENT. Unexpected directions, sharp humour and powerful performances. 4 IN RETROSPECT. A timely addition to the antiwestern genre and a perfect summer movie. A slot in the experimentally inclined Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival seemed like a strange fit for this new film by David Mackenzie (Starred Up), with its starry cast and seemingly commercial intentions. It’s a story that simultaneously revels in crowd-pleasing gestures, but also subverts generic rules and absolutely requires strong leads to carry out the deed. Chris Pine and Ben Foster are up to the challenge, playing brothers Toby and Tanner who set out to…

Directed by NICOLAS ROEG Starring DAVID BOWIE, CANDY CLARK, RIP TORN Released 9 SEPTEMBER At time of writing, the world appears to be edging into a pretty volatile space. Capitalism is wavering. There’s violence in the streets. Rifts are expanding between the classes. The haves care little for the wellbeing of the have nots. It seems timely, then, that Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 masterpiece, The Man Who Fell To Earth, should return to our cinema screens on a new 4K restoration, as it offers a melancholy vision of a planet that has likely seen better days. David Bowie is beyond-perfect as Thomas Jerome Newton, an alien visitor on a secret mission to save his home planet. The story, adapted from Walter Tevis’ 1963 novel of the same name, sees Newton exploiting his access to…

Directed by PEDRO ALMODÓVAR Starring INMA CUESTA ADRIANA UGARTE EMMA SUÁREZ Released 26 AUGUST 3 ANTICIPATION. The director’s last couple of films have not quite hit the target. 4 ENJOYMENT. This one really does, but it takes a little while to notice just how cleanly and crisply. 5 IN RETROSPECT. Almodóvar back to his very best. If movies had cheeks, this one would be imprinted with a veritable roadmap of winding, mascara-caked tear stains. Pedro Almodóvar’s Julieta is a hot red swoon. Its lips pursed, its face unreadable until the devastating yet revelatory closing frames, it softly veers between a handselected inventory of themes and emotions, handling each with the utmost of care and caution. The film’s original title was Silencio (Silence), and it’s perhaps a more evocative encapsulation of its core conceit:…

Directed by MATHIEU AMALRIC Starring MATHIEU AMALRIC, LÉA DRUCKER, STÉPHANIE CLÉAU Released 9 SEPTEMBER This chilling miniature from actor and some-time director Mathieu Amalric, adapted from a 1964 novel by Georges Simenon, dispenses with the screw-turning mechanics of the traditional murder mystery to ask one question: what is it like to feel guilty? In fact, the question is more like, feeling guilty is awful, but how awful? Amalric’s Julien Gahyde, a goatee’d, apparently decent farming machinery rep, meets intoxicating, sexually voracious pharmacist’s wife, Esther (Stéphanie Cléau), in a hotel room whose walls are painted a calming shade of deep blue. A tacit pact to dispense with their current partners turns sour, as the idyll of the blue room is revealed as a flashback to happier times. In the present, Julien is being questioned…

Directed by WOODY ALLEN Starring JESSE EISENBERG, KRISTEN STEWART, STEVE CARELL Released 2 SEPTEMBER What if, at that crucial juncture in our lives, we had chosen one path instead of another? In movies, that alternative reality can be lived vicariously, and without experiencing the messy fallout. The cheerfully archaic Café Society pairs up Kristen Stewart and Jesse Eisenberg as lowlevel functionaries in 1930s Hollywood, and then follows on from the moment where their burgeoning romance suddenly, cruelly falls to pieces. The plot takes the form of a figure-8 pattern, two strands looping outwards, crossing in the middle and then meeting at the (heartbreaking) climax. As with much late Woody Allen, the philosophical idea nestled at the core of this sweet comedic runaround is far more interesting than the way in which it is…

Directed by JOHN MICHAEL MCDONAGH Starring ALEXANDER SKARSGÅRD, MICHAEL PEÑA STEPHANIE SIGMAN Released 30 SEPTEMBER 4 ANTICIPATION. John Michael McDonagh’s previous, The Guard and Calvary, were terrific. 4 ENJOYMENT. A different kind of animal. Peña and Skarsgård are a laugh-riot. 3 IN RETROSPECT. A very, very strange film… The unlikely pairing of Alexander Skarsgård and Michael Peña proves irresistible in this ramshackle crime caper from Irish writer/director John Michael McDonagh. They play Bob Bolaño and Terry Monroe, a couple of loosecannon detectives with an unorthodox approach to cleaning up the streets of Albuquerque – namely strewing them with broken beer bottles and bullets. “Let’s go fuck some scumbags,” is how Skarsgård’s Glen Campbell-loving cowboy copper reacts when handed their latest (and potentially last) assignment: prevent an impending race track robbery involving a couple…

Directed by BRADY CORBET Starring TOM SWEET BÉRÉNICE BEJO LIAM CUNNINGHAM Released 19 AUGUST 3 ANTICIPATION. We are avid followers of the Pattinsonasance. 3 ENJOYMENT. Works in spite of showy stylistic choices, not because of them. 4 IN RETROSPECT. Ambitious period fantasy that poses existential questions about those we call monsters. The title of a movie often sits out on its own. When a story starts, it drifts to the back of the mind. Not this one, though. This one imposes a forceful twist on every frame. Actor Brady Corbet’s directorial debut has been adapted from Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1939 short story of the same name. It is about a 10-year-old boy growing up in a loveless, authoritarian household. The boy’s future as a fascist leader is not the focus of the film. Were…

Directed by ZHAO LIANG Released 19 AUGUST 4 ANTICIPATION. Chinese documentarian Zhao Liang is little known, but his films are highly acclaimed. 4 ENJOYMENT. A poetic and disruptive look at modern manual labour. 4 IN RETROSPECT. Rich, deep and eventually very moving. This is a film which lambasts Chinese cultural imperialism in the harshest terms possible. It accuses a giant excavation project for fossil fuels of creating a literal hellscape on Earth. At one point a camera glides silently along an underground mineshaft before a sudden, terrifying explosion shakes it and the walls around it. After a moment of confusion, it becomes clear that a dynamite charge from the surface is the cause of the rumble, but it could just as well have been the Devil stamping his clawed feet. Director Zhao…

Directed by RACHEL LANG Starring SALOMÉ RICHARD, CLAUDE GENSAC, LAZARE GOUSSEAU Released 23 SEPTEMBER Despite what its title might suggest, Rachel Lang’s Baden Baden has little to do with the quaint German spa town. Instead, it is a pun on the word ‘bath’ – appropriate, as much of the film focuses on guileless free spirit Ana (Salome Richard) and her self-motivated mission to replace her grandmother’s tub with a shower. The film opens with Ana stealing a production company’s rented Porsche to drive back to Strasbourg, her hometown. From then on, her summer unfolds in a series of disjointed vignettes. The fragmentary structure requires patience. It’s fair to say that it fits the tone of the film, which evokes a languid, aimless summer. Plot elements are introduced with much fanfare, then fade out,…

Directed by TAIKA WAITITI Starring SAM NEILL JULIAN DENNISON RIMA TE WIATA Released 16 SEPTEMBER 4 ANTICIPATION. Loved What We Do in The Shadows. 3 ENJOYMENT. Sweetly subversive, if slight. 3 IN RETROSPECT. Waititi’s film-savvy book adaptation is a low-key winner. Before his death in 1996, Barry Crump had written 24 semi-autobiographical comic novels drawn from a life spent chiefly in the New Zealand bush. Now, Taika Waititi, the director of 2007’s Eagle Vs Shark and 2010’s Boy, has adapted one of those novels, ‘Wild Pork and Watercress’, for the big screen. The results are a charming merger of the literary and the cinematic. Hunt for the Wilderpeople tells the story of 10-year-old Maori orphan Ricky Baker (Julian Dennison) who, following the sudden death of his loving Auntie Bella Faulkner (Rima Te Wiata),…

Back in February 1998, Premiere magazine ran a cover story about commercial directors who had successfully moved into movies. A group shot of Michael Bay, David Fincher, Simon West, Dominic Sena and Antoine Fuqua was accompanied by the somewhat hyperbolic headline: ‘Do these men represent the future of Hollywood filmmaking – or the death of it?’ Linking them was the now defunct Propaganda Films, which produced, among other titles, Bay’s Armageddon, Fincher’s The Game, West’s Con Air, Sena’s Gone in Sixty Seconds and Fuqua’s The Replacement Killers. Some months later, Pauletta Washington remembered the magazine cover and showed it to her husband around the time he and screenwriter David Ayer were searching for someone to helm a project called Training Day. She had seen The Replacement Killers and recommended it…

The expansion of the railroad is often framed as a steamdriven death knell for the traditional cowpoke. At the same time, it represented the opening up of American society, connecting places and people and relegating western movie mainstays like the cattle drive to oblivion. It’s seen as a mighty innovation in John Ford’s silent adventure film, The Iron Horse, as engineers put themselves in mortal danger to lay track through disputed lands. In Delmer Daves’ 3:10 To Yuma, the eponymous locomotive is a symbol of justice served, as it becomes the responsibility of a nervy rancher to post a murderer off to his destiny. Perhaps the most symbolic incarnation of the train in westerns comes in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, in which the expansion of…

A CELEBRATION OF ‘ZAPATA WESTERNS’ WHOSE IDEOLOGY SWINGS A LITTLE MORE TO THE LEFT THAN NORMAL. American cinema doesn’t like to make too much of the fact that the country’s neighbour to the south experienced a successful revolution. Over a decade starting in 1910, a series of popular uprisings against landowners and the political establishment grew into a civil war which eventually ended autocratic rule and established land reform. Unsurprisingly, Hollywood generally preferred to present prerevolutionary Mexico as a lawless hellhole, where Yankees who did stray south could prove their mettle, as in the original Magnificent Seven. Even the most famous Hollywood account of the revolution, Elia Kazan’s 1952 Viva Zapata!, used its saga of the famed rebel leader to mount an anti-communist hatchet-job, assuring US audiences that such liberation…

If you want to know how the work of the time-honoured cowboy exists in the modern era, look no further than your dusty home computer monitor and the wildly popular early role-playing phenomenon of ‘The Oregon Trail’. 21-year-old student, Don Rawitsch, developed the game along with his college room mates with the help of a giant map of the American frontier circa 1800 and a pack of cards with various mishaps – snake bites, broken wagon wheels, etc… Gawp at the 8-bit wonderment of single-tone, Lincoln green prairies as this choose-you-own-adventure yarn takes you along the famous northern byway and throws up countless logistical conundrums to solve en route. The game was initially developed as a private teaching aid, but soon become all the rage among the big wheels in…

//LWLIES// HAS SCOURED THE WESTERN GENRE TO LOCATE A BAND OF ITS MOST FOUL, MOST DASTARDLY, MOST WRETCHED VILLAINS IN ORDER TO ASK THE QUESTION: WHAT IF THEY HAD THEIR OWN ED VILLAINS IN ORDER TO ASK THE QUESTION: WHAT IF THEY HAD THEIR OWN CEREAL BRAND? WE APPROACHED SEVEN MAGNIFICENT DESIGNERS TO OFFER UP WE APPROACHED SEVEN MAGNIFICENT DESIGNERS TO OFFER UP THEIR UNIQUE TAKE ON THE MOST IMPORTANT MEAL OF THE DAY AS REPRESENTED BY A VILE, NO-GOOD VARMINT. CALVIN CANDIE IN DJANGO UNCHAINED – PLAYED BY LEONARDO DICAPRIO ILLUSTRATED BY OLIVER STAFFORD BILLY THE KID IN YOUNG GUNS – PLAYED BY EMILIO ESTEVEZ ILLUSTRATED BY LOLA BELTRÁN JACK WILSON IN SHANE – PLAYED BY JACK PALANCE ILLUSTRATED BY ELLIOT KRUSZYNSKI LIBERTY VALANCE IN THE MAN WHO SHOT…

Directed by DAVID FARRIER, DYLAN REEVE Released 9 SEPTEMBER To best experience the pleasures of David Farrier and Dylan Reeve’s disquieting documentary, Tickled, you’d probably do best to read as little about it as possible. From the outset it appears to be a colourful, silly-season investigation into the fringe “sport” of competitive tickling. Discovered by Farrier during one of his regular click voyages in search of new material, an apparently innocent web video depicts young, ripped, enthusiastic men (always men) in branded sporting duds, manacled to a padded mat and then, for around an hour, tickling one another. The footage is never explicit, and the competition element is left worryingly vague. The catch is, the company pumping out these videos offers first class flights to LA, plush accommodation upon arrival and a…

Directed by JAUME COLLET-SERRA Starring BLAKE LIVELY ÓSCAR JAENADA BRETT CULLEN Released 12 AUGUST 4 ANTICIPATION. Jaume Collett-Serra is an excellent genre director and this shark movie looks fun. 4 ENJOYMENT. Jaume Collet-Serra is an excellent genre director and this shark movie is fun! 3 IN RETROSPECT. Is that all there is? For a certain subset of film critics, the Catalanborn Jaume Collet-Serra – director of such niftier-than-predicted genre fare as Orphan and Non-Stop – is something of a (figurative) great white hope. The Shallows, which is a movie literally about a Great White (and hope), fully vindicates his cheering section, and at the same time, disappoints on a deeper level. It’s just good enough that you only wish it was better. Collet-Serra’s great strength has always been his ability…

Directed by BRIAN OAKES Released 2 SEPTEMBER In 2014, American journalist James Foley was kidnapped by ISIS militants in Syria. After a period of imprisonment and torture, he was executed on camera. The image of Foley in an orange jumpsuit, a hooded figure looming over him, has become permanently etched in our collective consciousness. For many who had never heard of Foley prior to his death, his life was defined by that terrible act. Director Brian Oakes seeks to remedy that. Jim: The James Foley Story isn’t a hard-hitting piece of journalism. It doesn’t need to be. Although Foley’s reports from Libya and Syria are included throughout, much of the running time is devoted to interviews with Foley’s family and colleagues. They paint an intimate portrait of a restless figure, one who…

Directed by VICTOR ERICE Starring OMERO ANTONUTTI SONSOLES ARANGUREN ICÍAR BOLLAÍN Released 16 SEPTEMBER 4 ANTICIPATION. A revisit of Victor Erice’s little seen second film. 5 ENJOYMENT. Often called one of the great Spanish films, but may be time to lose that geographic qualifier. 5 IN RETROSPECT. Perfection. When you hear stories of overzealous producers interrupting or sometimes scuppering the pure vision of a film director, it’s rare that you’d be inclined to side with the callous businessman over the consumate artist. In the case of Victor Erice’s 1983 film, El Sur (The South), the battle lines are less clear cut. Erice had originally planned a three hour film, the first half set in northern Spain, the second in southern Spain, both amounting to a sombre reflection of the early years of the…

Directed by TODD SOLONDZ Starring CHARLIE TAHAN GRETA GERWIG DANNY DEVITO Released 12 AUGUST 4 ANTICIPATION. Todd Solondz’s films are often furry good. 3 ENJOYMENT. Woof! 3 IN RETROSPECT. Looking bark, some great tails in there. Nerd loser extraordinaire Dawn Wiener first appeared in Todd Solondz’ 1995 film, Welcome to the Dollhouse. Fortunately, her return in the director’s latest, Wiener-Dog, is no sentimental homage. Indeed, recently asked whether he was worried the new film would tarnish Dawn’s legacy, Solondz rejected the notion, explaining that Dawn is, ‘just a character’, and one towards whom he didn’t feel any great sense of responsibility. Greta Gerwig’s take on Dawn has more in common with her character from Frances Ha than it does with the original incarnation. Animated by an admirable and touching sense of moral duty…

Directed by OLIVIER DUCASTEL, JACQUES MARTINEAU Starring GEOFFREY COUËT, FRANÇOIS NAMBOT, MARIO FANFANI Released 9 SEPTEMBER How’s this for a meet cute: two young dudes, Theo (Geoffrey Couët) and Hugo (François Nambot), lock eyes, hearts and everything else besides while wandering around a dungeon-like confines of a gay sex club called L’Impact. When they realise that love might very well be in the air, the house lights flicker on for a brief moment and a bout of intense public lovemaking begins. It’s a wonderful opening episode, near-wordless in its execution and as dirty as it is swooningly romantic. The post-coital euphoria of riding hire bikes around the vacant Parisian suburbs at night is shattered when Theo boasts of having been so spellbound that he didn’t bother to use a condom. A nervous Hugo…

Directed by TOBIAS NÖLLE Starring GEORG FRIEDRICH, TILDE VON OVERBECK, KAMIL KREJCÍ Released 23 SEPTEMBER If sex lines are designed to fuel erotic fantasy for those who have problems with intimacy, then Aloys – a man near-permanently attached by an earpiece to mobile phone or digital recorder – is engaged in his own imaginative exercise of masturbatory indulgence. He is a loner who actively avoids other people. He never meets with either his clients or with the people he observes and records for his work as a detective. Although he does, behind the closed door of his flat, obsessively view the videos he has shot, and of his father, and of various animals. To Aloys, the outside world and other people are best kept at a remove, and the opening shots of Tobias…

Directed by IRA SACHS Starring GREG KINNEAR THEO TAPLITZ MICHAEL BARBIERI Released 23 SEPTEMBER 4 ANTICIPATION. Ira Sachs really found his voice with Love is Strange, hopefully it wasn’t a one-off. 5 ENJOYMENT. If anything, this is even better, turning everyday happenings into a micro-epic about the making of masculinity. 5 IN RETROSPECT. The film’s sheer delicacy exerts a continuing fascination. He’s been making features for 20 years, but it seemed that with Love is Strange, Memphisborn, New York-based writer-director Ira Sachs reached critical mass. Arthouse audiences really responded to lovely old gay couple John Lithgow and Alfred Molina as they were suddenly cast adrift on the Manhattan property market. Yet the film had so much more to offer, not least a tantalising portrait of friendship between two inseparable teenage boys. Parents, needless…

Roaring guns! Darting horses! Sizzling action! A IS FOR AMERICA A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AS SEEN IN THE FILMS OF JOHN FORD. John Ford made Westerns – and much else besides. He made a great many period films, not a single work that speculated on the future, and a few pictures that were about as contemporary as you could get, shooting documentary footage under fire during the Battle of Midway and re-enacting then-recent fighting in the Philippines with freshly-decommissioned Navy Elco PT boats in Key West Florida, for 1945’s They Were Expendable. His period pictures, as well as his contemporary subjects, are prismatic objects, reflecting something of their maker, something of the era they represent, and something of the time in which they were made.…

Perhaps the blood-splashed lore of living/working as a cowboy would leave a cool distance between the benign redemptive power of Our Lord Jesus Christ. A film like George Stevens’ Shane offers one of the western genre’s most blunt Jesus allegories, as Alan Ladd’s gentleman avenger moseys into town to take on the Devil and sacrifices his life in order to save humanity. Perhaps the most bizarre ‘Christ western’, however, is Peter Fonda’s 1971 chimera, The Hired Hand, in which the actor-director films himself, usually in a state of semi undress and with an unkempt proto-hipster beard, chopping up wood and then cooling himself off in the river and allowing the water droplets to sparkle in the midday sun. Though the film might not be directly inspired by the Bible, despite…

A bundant gun and crossbow injuries in western movies are essentially a given, but what can we learn about how to survive such injuries? Behold the trinity of C’s: cauterisation, compression and consumption (of whiskey). Cauterising the wound alleviates bleeding and infection, as we learn in Delmer Daves’ Broken Arrow, where Tom (James Stewart) creates a fire to cauterise the apache’s eight gunshot wounds. Henry Hathaway’s True Grit (and the Coen Brothers’ 2010 remake) addresses the importance of blood compression by immediately bandaging gunshot wounds after the bullet removal procedure, as does Howard Hawks’ El Dorado, through the handy use of a bandana. David Von Ancken’s Seraphim Falls shows whiskey acting as both a method of bracing oneself and an excruciatingly painful form of disinfectant, as a wounded Pierce Brosnan…

It’s the source of incredible sadness in cinema when we’re shown the dying remnants of American frontier life. Filmmakers from the classic era used the death of the cowboy as grist for the mill, often coming up with some of the richest, most reflective and philosophical oaters ever made. “Bloody” Sam Peckinpah is perhaps the post-western godhead, his onetwo punch of 1969’s The Wild Bunch and 1970’s The Ballad of Cable Hogue standing as two of the finest depictions of old men losing the race against modernity. By the time of 1972’s Junior Bonner, the cowboy was nothing more than a clown, as Steve McQueen’s Ace Bonner parlays his experience as a rugged outdoorsman into a tidy career as a rodeo rider. This set-up was taken to the levels of…

THE SPOILERS (1914) SELIG POLYSCOPE CO. Two years before the birth of the cinema, historian Frederick Jackson Turner claimed in an 1893 lecture that westward expansion of the frontier had ended. Movies, however, reincarnated the myth through one of its most iconic genres: the western. But the tundra of Alaska remained uncharted territory. Gold fever hit the territory in 1896, and the US only adopted it as a state in 1958. Hollywood films about Alaska often transported the western myth on to stories of the snowy expanse. One of the earliest surviving works of this time was The Spoilers, based on a Rex Beach novel about the Klondike Rush of 1914. This nine-reel epic follows a romance between William Farnum and Kathryn Williams alongside various political intrigues. There’s no snow…

Directed by MIA HANSEN-LØVE Starring ISABELLE HUPPERT ANDRÉ MARCON ROMAN KOLINKA Released 2 SEPTEMBER 5 ANTICIPATION. As a writer and director, MH-L is the best of the best. No question. 4 ENJOYMENT. Another stunner, though not quite up there with all her other stunners. 4 IN RETROSPECT. If you like Isabelle Huppert, you might want to block out a week in the diary for this one. Confirmation, were it needed, that Mia Hansen-Løve is one of the greatest filmmakers currently plying her trade on this green Earth. Things To Come is her exquisite follow-up to her 2015 masterpiece, Eden. It suggests that making movies comes as easy to her as speaking or breathing or reciting a line of verse. It’s a reflex action. Her latest wayward opus is, somewhat surprisingly, a film about…

Directed by ANDRZEJ ZULAWSKI Starring SABINE AZÉMA, JEAN-FRANÇOIS BALMER, JONATHAN GENET Released 19 AUGUST Someone has gone to the trouble of creating a little noose out of string and hanging a sparrow from a branch by its neck. Happening across this macabre sculpture, jittery lothario Witold (Jonathan Genet) and his fashion designer pal Fuchs (Johan Libéreau) decide to dedicate some of their spare time to cultivating an investigation. They take a room in a familyrun guest house, entering into a lop-sided bubble of surreal squabbles, experimental seafood suppers and erotically ingested cigarettes. Polish director Andrzej Zulawski died shortly after the premiere of Cosmos at the 2015 Locarno Film Festival, but he has left us with a giddy masterwork whose every frame positively heaves with stimulating ideas and incident. Adapted from the absurdist 1965…

Directed by ANDREW ROSSI Starring ANDREW BOLTON, ANNA WINTOUR, JOHN GALLIANO Released 30 SEPTEMBER Can fashion be viewed as art? That’s the question at the centre of Andrew Rossi’s documentary, the title of which refers to the annual event when New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art closes to host the Met Gala, a star-studded fundraiser celebrating the opening of a special exhibition by its Costume Institute. The exhibition in focus is ‘China: Through the Looking Glass’, which aims to explore the country’s influence on Western fashion designers. Its curator, Andrew Bolton, acknowledges that critics may disparage its engagement with China as “inauthentic”, but ultimately argues on behalf of the “extraordinary imagination” of the fashion industry. Yet, it’s this emphasis on imagination that makes the depiction of China so problematic. Instead of engaging with…

Directed by DANIEL RAGUSSIS Starring DANIEL RADCLIFFE, TONI COLLETTE, BURN GORMAN Released 23 SEPTEMBER There’s an old internet adage known as ‘Godwin’s Law’ which posits that the longer an online debate goes on, the greater the probability a comparison with Hitler and/or Nazism becomes. It’s what’s known more commonly, at least in offline parlance, as a conversation killer. It doesn’t bode well for writer/director Daniel Ragussis, therefore, that his debut feature opens with an extract from ‘Mein Kampf’; even less so that the full citation is agonisingly teased out for maximum shock value. Indeed, “words build bridges into unexplored regions” is the sort of quote you might expect to find in a clickbait listicle entitled ‘20 Surprisingly Inspirational Quotes from History’s Greatest Shitbags’, although the manner in which it is deployed here somehow…

Directed by PABLO TRAPERO Starring GUILLERMO FRANCELLA PETER LANZANI LILI POPOVICH Released 16 SEPTEMBER 3 ANTICIPATION. A dark crime saga from Argentinian auteur Pablo Trapero. 2 ENJOYMENT. Curiously inert for such purportedly thrilling subject matter. 2 IN RETROSPECT. The real-life story is remarkable; the film is disappointingly dull. As far as variations on a theme go, the twisted bourgeois crime family is a fairly familiar fixture. Pablo Trapero’s The Clan doesn’t stray too far from expectation, focusing on the activities of an infamous Argentinian family called the Puccios. In reality, they were freelance kidnappers, obtaining ransoms from wealthy families and then brutally murdering the hostages. Victims were chained in bathtubs or basements, while the teenagers inside claimed not to know or hear their cries for help. Yet in Trapero’s hands, this naturally dramatic…

Directed by MATT ROSS Starring VIGGO MORTENSEN FRANK LANGELLA KATHRYN HAHN Released 9 SEPTEMBER 4 ANTICIPATION. If Viggo gave it the seal of approval, that’s good enough for us. 3 ENJOYMENT. He’s better than the film he’s starring in 2 IN RETROSPECT. Lot’s of mixed messages, little in the way of excitement. This mildly eccentric cross-country caper is complicated by its attempts say something profound about life. Writer-director Matt Ross wants to show that the battle for moral superiority can only be won if everyone is open to deep and detailed criticism. We are all tainted and no-one is perfect, particularly those who believe they are. Viggo Mortensen plays log cabin liberal, Ben, a bearded Haight-Ahsbury throwback with an impressive wardrobe of vintage Democrat Party campaign tees who is out to prove that…

Directed by GARY ROSS Starring MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY KERI RUSSELL GUGU MBATHA-RAW Released 9 SEPTEMBER 3 ANTICIPATION. ‘From the director of The Blind Side...’ 2 ENJOYMENT. White Guilt: The Movie. 2 IN RETROSPECT. Easy enough to dismiss, but the deeper implications are a genuine cause for concern. Just as the American Civil War was not fought to end slavery (it was fought to defend it), nor was slavery resigned to the history books the moment General Robert E Lee surrendered to Ulysses S Grant at the Battle of Appomattox Court House. Any historian worth their salt will tell you this, and yet for too long and with very few exceptions, Hollywood has chosen to explore this dark chapter in US history in binary terms. The Free State of Jones is pitched as a more…

Directed by JERRY ROTHWELL, REUBEN ATLAS Starring LAURENT PONSOT, JAY MCINERNEY, JEF LEVY Released 16 SEPTEMBER Above a certain price point, they say, you’re not paying for the wine, you’re paying for the label. When that tag reaches thousands per bottle however, you can argue that rare wines offer a magical connection with terroir and history, but it’s still hard to dispel the suspicion it’s all an exercise in vinous bling for the super-rich – many of whom are unaware they’re shelling out big bucks for elaborate fakes. More fool them, you might think, but this investigative doc probes a little deeper and delivers up a fascinating real-life central character with the two-faced bonhomie and cunning of Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley. When dotcom-boom liquidity slooshed over the wine auction scene, no-one splashed more…

Directed by STIG BJÖRKMAN Released 12 AUGUST 3 ANTICIPATION. “When I look back on my life, what will I see?” 4 ENJOYMENT. “I was the shyest creature in the world but I had a lion inside me that wouldn’t keep quiet.” 4 IN RETROSPECT. “I belong to this make-believe world of film and theatre. I never want to leave it.” “Last night a man at dinner said to me, ‘You’ll never be an actress. You’re too tall’.” Ingrid Bergman wrote this in her diary in 1939. “I thought, he knows nothing about me.” Shortly after this disclosure in Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words, we see footage from her first screen test for David O Selznik. The young actress sits on a couch, looking relaxed as she glances around and smiles, and…