Innholdsfortegnelse for May - June 2015 i Little White Lies

What if there was a place – a secret place – where nothing is impossible?” This question, spoken in a hush of wonder by an unseen George Clooney, framed the world’s first proper introduction to Brad Bird’s Tomorrowland A World Beyond. Shrouded in mystery since news of its existence first contorted the blogosphere into rabid fits of baseless speculation, the project once known as “1952” has always enjoyed the mystique now afforded to any gargantuan studio tentpole that doesn’t have a number in its title or belong to a connected cinematic universe. Borrowing a tactic from JJ Abrams’ playbook (as well as screenwriter Damon Lindelof, the man who wrote so many of its pages), the very premise of Tomorrowland has been protected like a state secret, and those keen to…

The day after Pearl Harbor, Walt Disney’s studios were effectively converted into a full-time propaganda branch of the military. Storyboard man Bill Peet recalled in his memoirs the instant change: “army and navy brass paraded up and down the halls as authorities and supervisors on the various government projects, and Walt was no longer commander-in-chief.” Donald Duck and the rest of the gang went to work, battling the Nazis while reminding everyone else why they fought in a series of cranked-out shorts. Victory Through Air Power was different, a featurelength pet project. Major Alexander P de Seversky’s book of the same name was a bestseller when it was published the previous year. The film version interpolates to-thecamera lectures from Seversky with animated illustrations of his points regarding the necessity of…

As the people rose from the ashes of World War Two, they turned their heads towards the sky. Peace had made the future something no longer to be feared, but to be cherished, and it was among the stars that this perfect future seemed to nestle. It was all just frivolous fiction, comic strip heroes like Buck Rogers blasting their ray guns and rescuing damsels in deep space. All except in the minds of two men whose partnership would help secure the dawn of the American space age: Walt Disney and Wernher von Braun. Von Braun’s history is complicated: this was the man responsible for designing the deadly V-2 rocket in service of the Nazi Party, yet who was jailed for expressing the view that those efforts were a waste…

Released 15 MAY While recently Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist and Miguel Gomes’ Tabu have pastiched the mimetic motifs of Silent Era cinema, and other filmmakers (notably Aki Kaurismäki and Kim Ki-duk) have used their characters’ voicelessness as alienation symptom and effect, The Tribe finds an entirely naturalistic setting for its speechfree mode of filmmaking: a boarding school for deaf-mute children. Here all communication is through signing, and as Ukrainian writer/director Miroslav Slaboshpitsky provides no subtitles for these expressive gesticulations, there exists only a tiny niche viewership privileged to comprehend the dialogue fully. The rest are left to eavesdrop on this story from the outside, much as Valentyn Vasyanovych’s camera keeps its distance, whether through windows or across noisy streets, from the film’s few spoken lines, so that they remain tantalisingly…

Released 15 MAY Revered titans of rock excess don’t just appear out of thin air. Take time to inspect the dingy pre-history and you’ll likely locate a pair of cheeky chancers who thought to take a punt on some two-bit beat combo and help launch them into a world of stadium tours, unfettered property damage and concept album follies. Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp were two such chancers who channelled their nascent marketing energies and back-door business cunning to moulding pop-rock minnows The High Numbers into the band we now know as The Who. But the problem with James D Cooper’s documentary – as scrappy and sprawling as a ’70s Who platter – is that Lambert and Stamp themselves, despite pained efforts to paint them otherwise, just simply aren’t as…

Released 5 JUNE In this world, you can’t move for asshats. In fact, if you commissioned a far-reaching academic study, you’d likely find that the asshat to awesome ratio is 20:1, at the very least. Movies which run with this supposition can find themselves in the critical firing line, as people (asshats and awesomes) don’t enjoy spending their down time in the company of asshats. Coming across like the expressionistically haughty and biliously unhinged grandson of Llewyn Davis, Jason Schwartzman’s Philip Friedman is a budding novelist who is so certain of his own indisputable genius that he gravitates above friends, family and peers. Even though this pointedly excessive third feature by the talented Alex Ross Perry is ostensibly a comedy, the notion of hateful imperiousness is taken with dead-eyed seriousness,…

Released 22 MAY Japanese director Sion Sono is a major figure among fanboys and girls of hyperbolic, half-a-world-away pop, underground fetishes, and cult genres, with a filmography already encompassing teenage suicide cults, killer hair extensions, upskirt photography, Catholic guilt, and pet-shop serial killers. Tokyo Tribes, his biggest domestic hit to date, is a musical adaptation of a manga by artist and streetwear entrepreneur Inoue Santa, in which rapping gangs fight a turf war over the course of a single night. With its gonzo martial artistry, hip-hop performance, hyperstylised cinematography and production design, and brazenly dumb throwaway gags, the film is often almost as fun as it sounds. Right from the elaborate continuous crane shot that opens the film, Sion fills his mobile widescreen frame to its edges with graffiti, neon…

Released 29 MAY What hell hath Richard Curtis wrought? As the perennial chronicler of middle-class relationship trauma, the Blackadder scribe has practically defined the British rom-com since unleashing his masterpiece, Four Weddings and a Funeral, upon defenceless cinema-goers back in 1994. Since then, countless pretenders have sought to dethrone Curtis and lay claim to his unduly polite, slightly fumbling, floppy fringed crown. Films like Tamara Drewe, Chalet Girl, or last year’s distinctly dislikable Love, Rosie, they came and went like awkward kisses in the rain. Surely the time has come for the next big thing in homegrown sentimentalism to take on the Comic Relief guru at his own game and win? Man Up doesn’t quite capture Curtis’ castle, but it makes a half decent attempt of storming the ramparts. The…

Released 29 MAY Filmed on location entirely in rural Norfolk, The Goob ostensibly borrows heavily from the Andrea Arnold school of contemporary working class miserablism. Stylistically and tonally, however, it blends the codeine reverie of Harmony Korine’s Gummo with the cold-shower realism of early Ken Loach, although perhaps the film it best evokes is Shane Meadows’ 1999 drama, A Room for Romeo Brass. The story centres around a semiferal 16-year-old scamp nicknamed Goob (Liam Walpole), who spends a long, hot summer watching over the densely-knotted pumpkin fields owned by his reptilian stepfather Gene Womack (Sean Harris in typically menacing and mesmerising form). Gene fancies himself as something of a local racetrack lothario, and it’s clear from the outset that he has cast a dark spell over Goob’s poor, passive mother…

Released 15 MAY “I’m tired of acting on wires in front of a green screen,” carps star actress Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche) in Clouds of Sils Maria, a complaint that connects the protagonist to her obvious predecessor in Olivier Assayas’ oeuvre: Maggie Cheung in 1996’s Irma Vep. The similarities between these two films are instructive. Like Cheung, Binoche is playing a version of “herself”, and both films’ plots pivot on the production of a potentially problematic remake, a modernisation of a classic silent film in the former, and the mounting of an acclaimed stage play in the latter. Assayas’ screenplay here is a winding, serpentine creation. Not for nothing is the playwithin-the-film called Maloja Snake. As the film opens, Maria, who made her name in the original stage production of…

Released 15 MAY Death is a cloud that hangs low and heavy over the mountain outpost of Howard Hawks’ 1939 masterpiece; an impregnable fog that chokes its peaks, its unscrupulous claims defiantly answered with second-hand steaks and glasses raised to the strains of an old joanna. The town is Barranca, launch site of a dangerous mail run through the skies where troubled pasts take root in the dank air and lives come and go as fast as the liquor. It’s a far-flung breeding ground for the quintessence of the Hawksian value system: where men are only as good as the jobs they do, a stoically present-tense social order with its back squarely turned to nostalgia. Of course, we’ve been here before, if only in a dramatic sense. John Ford’s Air…

Released 12 JUNE By 1961, the pieces just didn’t fit anymore. Old Hollywood was slowly dying out yet still struggling to retain a last gasp of relevance. Younger powerhouses like Marilyn Monroe and Montgomery Clift represented new ways of seeing the world and conflicted representations of sexuality. John Huston’s The Misfits embodies this clash wholeheartedly, exhibiting all the messy and melancholic angst that one might expect from such a drastic changing of the guard. The deep wrinkles on Clark Gable’s face are proof enough. Beginning with the opening credits, Huston and screenwriter Arthur Miller attempt to mesh iconic archetypes from very different time periods. As their names grace the screen in giant bold letters, images of a jigsaw puzzle converge hoping to find a snug fit up against each other.…

Released 19 JUNE “I’m busy,” quips Slava Fetisov, defenseman, Soviet sporting legend and the subject of Gabe Polsky’s Red Army. He stares at his phone, lost in his emails (or perhaps taking a subtle selfie?). Fetisov’s ungainly attitude does nothing to undo tired stereotypes of Russian severity, his unshowy indifference playing into his veteran status. Fetisov proceeds by giving his interviewer (Polsky) the finger. Yet, there is a magnetism in his storytelling as he and his former teammates race through personal memories as players in postwar Russia. Hockey, the film claims, served as “a demonstration of Soviet superiority,” created by Stalin in order to dominate the West. In detailing the turmoil that the titular ‘Red Army’ underwent, from their traumatising experiences under coach Victor Tikhonov to the exhausting psychological training…

Released 22 MAY There are few creatures more charming than Moomins. The interplay between hippoish appearance and a genial, bohemian sociabiliity give Tove Jansson’s popular children’s characters an aura of innocence and the sense of having emigrated from a secret utopia. Finish author and illustrator Jansson debuted her family in 1945 with The Moomins and the Great Flood. She continued to chronicle their experiences in varying published forms, reaching new heights of popularity in the ’50s when London paper The Evening News began publishing her Moomins in a comic strip. Over 60 years later, how are the dear fellows faring in this French-Finnish coproduction? An early peak comes from sound design so sensual in its invocation of tranquility that a pleasurable shudder ripples through the body. Moomin Island, where the…

1989 Released 8 JUNE Blu-ray Famous for its shot of a dude’s head emerging from his own ass and then releasing an eerie belly laugh to camera, Brian Yuzna’s gloopily strange horror satire is the latest piece of classy schlock to receive the Arrow Films executive Blu-ray treatment. It’s a film in which braying blue bloods are presented as an alien cult looking to induct new members, and who feed upon the bodies and souls of the lower downs through sexualised ritual sacrifices. Despite its reputation as one of the sickest films ever laid onto celluloid, it’s probably one with which you could easily skip the first hour and just feast on the orgy of gore which takes up much of the final reel. Preceding that, you have Billy Warlock’s…

1952 Released 19 MAY Blu-ray The crucial yet unfailingly self-involved 1952 weepie that was designed (and perhaps destined) to serve as Chaplin’s swan song, Limelight comes to Blu-ray in a deluxe set that includes a video essay on the film, excerpts from Chaplin’s original novella, and new interviews with the surviving cast. Based on the life of actor Frank Tierney but still transparently autobiographical where it counts, Limelight was Chaplin’s final American film, and it punctuates his storied career with such a definitive farewell that all of his subsequent work inevitably felt unnecessary. Chaplin stars as Calvero, a washed-up clown whose liver has long outlived his celebrity. The story begins in a strikingly artificial London on the eve of World War One as Calvero prevents a dispirited dancer named Terry…

In an age where film festival programmes are routinely compartmentalised, spotting recurring topics and trends across the various tenuously collated strands can be a rewarding exercise. To that end, one of the more persistent themes of this year’s South By Southwest Film was space. There was the intriguing The Last Man on the Moon, which follows astronaut Eugene Cernan 40 years after he left his lunar footprint; The Visit, a studious exploration of man’s first extraterrestrial encounter; A Space Program, artist Tom Sachs’ handmade journey to the red planet; the visually stunning eco-doc Planetary; and the quirky-to-afault Disaster Playground, which introduces us to the scientists tasked with saving the planet from annihilation-by-asteroid. Most gratifying of all was Moonwalkers, a riotous action comedy from ad wunderkind Antoine Bardou-Jacquet that asks the…

Theme park rides based on popular entertainment, like the many that populate Walt Disney’s vast kingdom of artifice, are supposed to promote excitement and discovery in their customers, not horror. Troubling elements in the source material, however subtextual, are excised in favour of a glossy and enjoyable façade. But those familiar with the film that inspired Disney World’s Submarine Voyage ride (in operation from 1971-1994) might feel conflicted while basking in the glow of its underwater simulacrum. Jules Verne’s ‘20,000 Leagues Under the Sea’ and Richard Fleischer’s 1954 film adaptation revolve around the exploits of a vengeful mass murderer. Captain Nemo (James Mason), a genius scientist who has built a technologically advanced submarine called The Nautilus and taken refuge under the sea along with a close-knit group of conscripts, conducts…

It’s surprising to hear Britt Robertson’s somewhat louche attitude towards the craft that she got into before hitting her teens. Despite having been a mainstay of community theatre for much of her young life, she doesn’t see acting as something she’ll always do. Make no mistake – right now, it’s the big love of her life. It’s more that she doesn’t like to tether herself down, assign her whole life away before she’s lived it. Brought up in South Carolina where she was to become the eldest of seven siblings, Robertson took up residence in LA at the tender age of 16 because the back-and-forth air travel to get to acting auditions was becoming too much of a strain. Working mostly in TV, her cinema breakthrough came in 2007 on…

In the 1950s, Hollywood studios became obsessed with the so-called “lost audience.” This yearly decrease in domestic cinema attendance from 1946 to 1959 was linked with rises in suburban television usage and the baby boom. Numerous studios began outsourcing production and attempting to gain favour with international audiences, which often required co-production status in order to play locally. We’ve often thought of this in terms of European productions with British and Italian companies like Ben-Hur or Roman Holiday. However, what to make of The Littlest Outlaw, also known as El Pequeño Poscrito? This 1955 production used the major talents of the Mexican film industry to present an authentic depiction of native culture within the Disney framework. Was this Disney’s plan to attract Latino audiences, or simply a method to capitalise…

Released 15 MAY As Stone Roses fans know all too well, titling one’s creative product after the miraculous return of Jesus Christ is no guarantee of quality. Thankfully, playwright Debbie Tucker Green – making her screenwriting and directing debut after 15 years of international success on the stage – fares a great deal better with her own Second Coming, a muted and disturbing family drama laced with ineffable metaphysical qualities. The title refers to the central mystery upon which the sparse plot hinges. Welfare officer Jax (Nadine Marshall), who lives with her construction worker husband Mark (Idris Elba) and schoolboy son JJ (Kai Francis-Lewis) in a leafy south London suburb, discovers that she has fallen pregnant. Yet the identity of the father is a conundrum. It doesn’t seem to be…

Released 22 MAY Like a mosaic of shimmering fragments that do not compose a bigger picture, Ana Lily Amirpour’s debut feature brims with stylised qualities that have been prioritised over story and characters. We’re in ‘Bad City’, Iran, the black-and-white, filmed-in-California version. Automatons pump and steam billows in the background while archetypes walk deserted streets, footsteps echoing like those of cowboys heading towards pistols at dawn. Arash (Arash Marandi) looks like an Iranian James Dean, or maybe a Levi’s advert. He worked 2,191 days to buy a nice jalopy, only for it to be snatched by Saeed (Dominic Rains), a drug baron/ pimp with ‘SEX’ tattooed across his neck. Arash’s dad is a patriarch hollowed out by heroin but still endowed with a nasty edge. Streetwalker Atti (Mozhan Marnò) feels…

Released 8 MAY As far as the cinema incursions of iconic American light entertainment talkshow hosts go, Jon Stewart’s directorial debut, Rosewater, lands him directly in the upper tiers. Hot on his tail is David Letterman, boasting a hilarious cameo appearance as a toy monkey salesman in Adam Resnick’s Cabin Boy, a film in which he coins the term “fancy lad.” In the lower echelons of the table is Jay Leno who starred opposite Pat “Mr Miyagi” Morita in cheapjack 1989 buddy cop comedy Collision Course. Despite some first-timer cosmetic missteps and a tone which sometimes strays into an All The Feelstype earnestness, Stewart’s film is impressive for a number of reasons, chiefly that as outgoing host of political satire mainstay The Daily Show, we discover he wasn’t merely ensconced…

Released 1 MAY It’s easy to see what attracts modern filmmakers to Thomas Hardy’s heroine, Bathsheba Everdene. As she says herself, this West Country girl doesn’t need a husband to define her life, least of all when an inheritance makes her the lady of a modest manor. Yet if she doesn’t need a man and her economic welfare is pretty much sorted, then what’s her story? Her attitudes resonate with a nascent you-go-girl feminism – but is it enough to sustain two hours of screen time? It’s hard to be convinced that director Thomas Vinterberg and screenwriter David Nicholls (One Day) know the answer to that question, though what they do have is Carey Mulligan on top form as the alternately astute and impulsive Bathsheba. The likes of An Education…

Released 12 JUNE Children cheering in the rubble and scattered books on the site of a freshly bombed school in wartime London. It’s a familiar opening scene, and it should be, having been quite literally recycled from John Boorman’s semi-autobiographical Blitz charmer, Hope and Glory, from 1987. Queen and Country, an unofficial sequel, resumes the story of Bill Rohan, now preparing to join the army as a young man. With Her Majesty’s finest off fighting the Commie front in Korea, Bill (Callum Turner) and his fellow platoon mates are desperate for a taste of the action. But with their deployment indefinitely delayed, the boys grow increasingly disenfranchised with the monotony of regimental life, and thoughts quickly turn to matters on the homefront. Enter Ophelia (Tamsin Egerton), the striking posh slice…

Released 8 MAY If you’re the type of revolting pedant who flippantly chides Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo for being too full of gaping plot holes, you may want to take a giant swerve away from Christian Petzold’s classicallyinclined Phoenix, a traumatising postwar melodrama which puts a delicate strain on narrative credibility at the service of making daring and profound statements about the mysteries of humanity at large. The story it tells hinges on a character being unable to see what the audience can see plainly, almost like a luxuriant yet agonising Punch and Judy show. This character’s ignorance (or blindness?) is played with bracing earnestness, and one might detect deficiencies in Petzold’s writing before understanding that this master director is playing a longer game, revealing his Acestuffed hand only in the…

Released 29 MAY It’s a shame that Jean Dujardin’s 2012 Best Actor Oscar didn’t kick start an international career for the charismatic actor, small parts in The Wolf of Wall Street and The Monuments Men aside. But he continues to secure leading roles in his native France, and at first glance, The Connection, from director Cédric Jimenez, is his most promising effort since The Artist. Based on a true story and set in the ’70s and early ’80s, the film sees Dujardin play a tenacious magistrate fighting the war on drugs, who comes up against Gilles Lellouche’s seemingly untouchable criminal kingpin. Released in France under the confusingsounding moniker La French, both titles refer to The French Connection – the smuggling operation which saw Marseille become the key heroin manufacturing and…

Released 22 MAY The best films by François Ozon fall into two distinct categories: there are the arch deconstructions of dramatic forms, and the heady, unrestrained visions of human sexuality. His last two works serve as the purest expressions of these ideals. 2013’s In the House appropriated the Hitchcock arsenal to subvert narrative artifice, while Young and Beautiful found the director reveling in the uncouth salaciousness of his Sadean heroine. The New Girlfriend falls somewhere in between, but still finds Ozon self-consciously sabotaging middlebrow sensibilities from within. The film charts the relationship between Claire (Anaïs Demoustier) and her best friend’s widower, David (Romain Duris). The connection initially forged in mourning is immediately complicated when it transpires that David has taken to privately dressing in his deceased wife’s clothes. What begins…

Released 15 MAY A Royal Night Out director, Julian Jarrold, takes a tempting idea and creates a confused film. It’s understandable that a mortal man might lose focus with such a whirligig of juicy ingredients. The prime peach is a historical vignette. In 1945, British princesses Elizabeth and Margaret ducked out of the palace to celebrate VE day incognito among the capital city revellers. There are delectable casting coups too. Ethereal beauty and David Cronenberg muse Sarah Gadon brings poise to the role of the (then) future Queen of England. Her shoehorned-in love interest, Jack, is played by Jack Reynor, the clean-cut American-Irish actor who proved his flair for character nuance in the black and brilliant, What Richard Did. Finally there’s the setting: the incomparable street party that was VE…

1973 OUT NOW DVD & Blu-ray It’s not something that’s easily discernible from the outset of most movies, but Paper Moon looks like a work which its maker took great pleasure in putting together. Its story – add one part fast-talking knee-high with one part sliver-tongued huckster, stir in the Great Depression, bake on a low heat for 104 minutes, serve hot – is hardly the result of a filmmaker (in this case, Peter Bogdanovich) attempting to reinvent screen drama from its core constituents. On the contrary, this is a film which polishes up age-old archetypes, coming across as a fusion of two John Ford movies: his neglected 1937 Shirley Temple vehicle, Wee Willie Winkie, and his 1934 aria of collective economic anguish, The Grapes of Wrath. Moses Pray (Ryan…

2013 Released 25 MAY DVD For our money, Tsai Ming-liang’s magisterial slow opus (slopus?) Stray Dogs was the best film of 2013, though due to a general lack of willingness to officially open it in UK cinemas (a few one-offs aside), it never became eligible for official polls. It finally sidles up to these shores on DVD which, even though it’s a less-than-ideal format for a film like this, is a reason to be very cheerful indeed. And when we say, “a film like this,” what is meant is that to reap the best of what this unique, poetic and obliquely devastating film offers, one must enter into a space where the idle distractions of modern life are muted as best they can be. That’s not to say that cinema…

1971 Released 26 MAY Blu-ray It’s tough to be Hans (Hans Hirschmüller). When the pudgy everyman returns home from his years of service in the French Foreign Legion, his own mother is waiting for him with a warm greeting: “It’s always the same: the good die young, and people like you come back.” Women have always been a challenge for Hans, especially since his adolescent self-pity metastasised into a learned helplessness, making him the closest thing that West Germany had to a Men’s Rights Activist. Disdaining his low station in life, Hans is the kind of guy who resented his first love for not wanting to marry a fruit peddler, only to later resent his wife, the put upon Irmgard (Irm Hermann), for agreeing to marry a fruit peddler. Thinking…

If you were to present an atlas to any man, woman or child circa 1955 and ask them to locate the happiest place on Earth, their finger would invariably drop on Anaheim, CA. Built in just one year at an estimated cost of $17m, Disneyland first opened its gates at 2:30pm on Sunday 17 July, 1955. For the American people it was a day of celebration and ceremony not seen since the 1939 World’s Fair at Flushing Meadows. After being introduced to his adoring public by actor and future president “Ronnie” Reagan, with network television cameras poised to capture this momentous occasion, Walt took the mic: “To all who come to this happy place: welcome. Disneyland is your land. Here age relives fond memories of the past, and here youth…

Released 8 MAY As confident as the waves and as opaque as the ocean, Karim Aïnouz’s Futuro Beach is a film about the impermeable fog of what happens next. With an approach that’s strikingly sensual for such an intangible subject, Aïnouz begins with a fragment of a story and smears it across the length of a decade, pushing a trio of terse characters through a haze of unspoken pathos. Suicide’s ‘Ghost Rider’ blares over the sight of two men racing their motorcycles towards a sea that lies beyond the titular Brazilian beach. It isn’t long before they get there, and it isn’t much longer until one of them sinks to the bottom – his body will never be found. Konrad (Clemens Schick) is the German man who survived, and Donato…

Released 8 MAY Drawing on 20 years of experience living in south London, writer/director Rebecca Johnson’s debut feature is a bittersweet Brixtonset drama “based on true events”, making its subject matter by turns topical and troubling. The story centres around a 15-year-old Trinidadian-British girl named Layla (Jessica Sula) who, like so many young women her age, dreams of achieving fame and fortune just like her idol, Beyoncé. An impressionable, underprivileged but otherwise ordinary teenager, Layla’s route to stardom begins in haste when she’s cast in a music video (despite not really knowing how to dance) for local rapper Troy (Lucien Laviscount, himself a recording artist), who’s also a chief member of a notorious gang known as The 28s. This is no straightforward rags-to-riches story. After initially being seduced by Troy,…

Released 5 JUNE A major factor in the success of Paul Feig’s recent work – most notably 2011’s Bridesmaids and 2013’s The Heat – has been the writer/director’s knack for assembling exceptional comic ensembles. In Spy, Feig once again demonstrates his shrewd eye for mixing talent, finding a (mis)match made in action-comedy heaven in regular collaborator Melissa McCarthy and resident British hard man Jason Statham. The film charts the unlikely rise of Susan Cooper (McCarthy), a bottom rung CIA analyst who seizes an incredible career opportunity when her colleague and secret crush, a dashing double agent played by Jude Law, winds up MIA following a run in with Rose Byrne’s airheaded arms dealer. With their top man out of service and the identities of numerous other field agents compromised, Allison…

Released 8 MAY In a hired hotel room and a stolen dress, 16-year-old Marieme (first-timer Karidja Touré) proudly bears her new street name, ‘Vic’, dancing with borrowed moves and lip-syncing to someone else’s song in a language not her own. All this appropriation marks the aspirations and ambitions of young black French women unable to find what they crave from within their own immediate environment. Marieme’s need to look outwards for forms of self-expression is reflected in the fact than no other French film before Girlhood has ever focused on the experience of black girls. Even as Marieme enjoys this snatched moment with the three other members of her bande de filles (‘girl gang’, the film’s original title), she knows that her bubble of happiness will soon burst, and that…

Released 29 MAY Fans of blunt-force trauma to the cranium will not want to miss Toa Fraser’s The Dead Lands, a film in which quick-to-violence Maori braves roam the fields and forests during a time before civilization, whacking each other about the head with tiny femur-bone paddles or, if you’re slightly higher up the food chain, sharpened rowing boat oars. One of the selling points of the film is that it offers a rare glimpse into the bloody realities of Maori tribal warfare, even showcasing a form of primitive martial arts which imbues an animalistic theatricality to the standard punches, kicks and strangle-holds. The production design and costume, too, speculates on how these soldiers would have dressed for battle, each individually decked out in ornate period-specific costume which foreground local…

Released 5 JUNE No matter how you feel about the schlocky oeuvre of Cannon Films (who doesn’t have a special place in their heart for Over the Top?) this scrappy behind-the-scenes exposé superbly captures a moment in time while also revealing the ugly side of a studio whose business model saw them both emulate Hollywood action blockbusters and take risks with edgier projects. Mark Hartley’s documentary focuses on the booming period from 1979 to 1989, when the company was run by charismatic, Israeli-born cousins Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus. Nestled in between clips of trashy action vehicles for Chuck Norris, Charles Bronson, Sylvester Stallone and Dolph Lundgren, nostalgic anecdotes from crew members and archival footage lies the maddening reality of this testosterone fuelled enterprise for its female stars. “Some people…

Released 15 MAY A side from a brief introduction by director Samantha Fuller, every word spoken in A Fuller Life was written by its subject, her father Sam Fuller, the maverick director of such pulp classics as Pickup on South Street (1953) and Shock Corridor (1963). Samantha divides the film into 12 sections, each directly inspired by chapters of her father’s 2002 autobiography, ‘A Third Face’, each read by one of his ardent admirers. Samantha’s conceit is a bold one, and it comes with inherent limitations, a lack of critical perspective and the constant threat of hagiography among them. But it works beautifully as a glance into Sam Fuller’s creative imperatives and exciting life. One could argue that it forfeits Samantha’s own authorial voice, but transforming a nearly 600-page memoir…

Released 1 MAY Federico Fellini’s two biggest smash hits were both filmed in black-andwhite. But we recall La Dolce Vita as black – the chic night of the Via Veneto. And we recall 8½ as white – the clouds through which the film’s hero floats in the opening dream sequence; the steam room billowing at his spa; the blown-out sunshine blinding his stone courtyards. 8½ is the ethereal one. The context is always clear when this film’s action transitions from reality to dream to memory to fantasy. And the story is not difficult – Mastroianni drifts and dodges as Fellini’s alter ego Guido, a film director who struggles to calm his nerves, reach a breakthrough from creative block, fend off questions from colleagues and juggle a wife and a mistress…

Released 26 JUNE Thai filmmaker Lee Chatametikool is best known for being Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s editor, but his directorial debut seldom resembles Tropical Malady, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, or any of the other works he’s cut for his country’s most famous auteur. Instead, Concrete Clouds smacks of the Taiwanese films that Tsai Ming-liang made in the ’90s, the connection established by their shared interest in urban decay and made all the more striking by Chatametikool’s underdeveloped decision to set his first feature at the height of the 1997 Asian financial crash. Chatamtikool sets the stage with a quote from Milan Kundera’s novel ‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting’: “The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.” Needless to say,…

1970 OUT NOW DVD Fulfilling an informal remit to bring the best of Eastern-European cinema to the English-speaking world, SecondRun DVD release this excellent three-film box set whose broad, overarching theme is the absurd and often counterintuitive nature of living under communism – though its lessons probably stretch to all politically enforced ideologies. Things start gently with Marek Piowski’s The Cruise from 1970, a comic allegory exploring the cult of personality in which two rowdy upstarts encroach on a family river cruise and, through pure bluster and natural charisma, install themselves as the ship’s entertainment committee. Beloved in Poland to the point where it is considered the local equivalent of Withnail and I, its deeply colloquial nature does place a barrier in front of potential enjoyment, though it’s saved by…

1989 Released 5 MAY Blu-ray The black sheep of a directorial canon that includes 1941, Always may not be the most derided feature that Steven Spielberg ever made, but it’s certainly the most overlooked. Not sneered at so much as forgotten altogether, by now it almost seems like any criticism of the film is inherently charitable, as if acknowledging the very existence of such a misfire is to flatter it with attention. A remake of Victor Fleming’s A Guy Named Joe – supposedly one of the films that inspired Spielberg to become a filmmaker – Always relocates that high stakes ghost story about reckless World War Two pilots to the comparatively pedestrian world of aerial firefighting. The characters’ names have stayed the same, which explains why foolhardy pilot Pete Sandich…

1939 Released 21 MAY Blu-ray Alfred Hitchcock directed three films that were adapted from Daphne du Maurier’s writing – two are considered all-time classics, and the third is Jamaica Inn. Unlike Rebecca and The Birds, you’ll seldom find this Charles Laughton vehicle on a list of the greatest films ever made, and the fact that it’s languished in the public domain for so many decades has only contributed to the sense that it’s among the blackest sheep in cinema’s most vaunted body of work. Hitchcock was out of his comfort zone from the moment he agreed to this lightly fanciful period adventure about a group of bandits who steer ships towards the bluffs near their eponymous Cornwall inn and then sack whatever treasure they can find. A swashbuckler without any…

The good news from the 12th True/False Film Fest in Columbia, Missouri: a new name must be added to the pantheon of Greatest Living European Directors. The bad news: hardly anyone outside Poland will be able to pronounce it. Can it be that his multisyllable, consonant-car-crash moniker is a reason why 75-year-old Grzegorz Królikiewicz remains such a well-kept secret? Granted, a rare big-screen showing in a boundary-blurring sidebar of this documentary-oriented event, 1973’s Through and Through – along with 1978’s The Dancing Hawk – constitutes sufficient evidence that Królikiewicz deserves ranking alongside Polanski, Skolimowski, Kieslowski, Wajda and Borowczyk. A bracingly assaultive black-and-white chronicle of a ’30s murder case, Through and Through plays like a compulsively horrible fever dream experienced after watching Leonard Kastle’s The Honeymoon Killers and downing a dozen…