Innholdsfortegnelse for July - August 2015 i Little White Lies

Released 10 JULY 4 ANTICIPATION. A crowdfunding darling that promises to put race front and centre with humour and attitude. 4 ENJOYMENT. Empathetic, witty, socially aware and visually bright variation on a theme. 3 IN RETROSPECT. As enjoyable and refreshing as it is, there’s a certain bite lacking in the delivery. So long as American white people tiptoe around appropriating black people swagger, and blacks grit their teeth at insensitive microaggressions, so will the gravity of an unequal society be undermined by an implication that the black experience is a minstrelsy sideshow. And so will there be an audience wanting a release valve in the form of a movie like Dear White People, which set off an Indiegogo firestorm with its blithe, pointed concept trailer. “Dear white people,” its radio DJ…

Released 31 JULY From his short-form portraits of Marlon Brando and Muhammad Ali, to his feature-length studies of the Rolling Stones, the extended Kennedy-Onassis clan and door-to-door bible hawkers, eccentricity and performance have been constant bed-fellows in the work of the late Albert Maysles. His penultimate film – a tender, primary-coloured portrait of the fashion world’s favourite nonagenarian iconoclast – is cut from the same cloth, a fitting swansong for one of cinema’s foremost celebrators of curve-swerving individualism. “I don’t have rules because I’d always be breaking them,” could be a line pulled from any Maysles documentary. It’s spoken here by Iris Apfel, one the world’s foremost collectors of couture jewellery and fashion. With her shock of white hair, over-sized glasses and vivid slash of the pinkest lipstick, this 93-year-old force…

Released 10 JULY To paraphrase François Truffaut’s observations on Touch of Evil, Orson Welles created a character in corpulent Hank Quinlan who is so unrepentantly revolting that we end up falling in love with him. He also created a character in Mike Vargas (Charlton Heston) – a dude who shoots so straight it hurts – that we end up despising him. It’s a film which flips concepts of heroism and villainy on their respective heads, devious conduct is normalised in a world plagued by cruelty and injustice. Working on baseless hunches, sending people to the gallows with a certitude that comes nowhere near being beyond reasonable doubt, is how this crooked world turns. “He was some kind of a man... What does it matter what you say about people?” is the…

LWLIES: THERE’S BEEN A LOT OF TALK ABOUT THE PERSONAL OR AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NATURE OF THE WONDERS. Alice: I’m very keen to make that distinction. Yes, it’s very personal, but it’s not autobiographical. The narrative isn’t our story, but it’s one we know very well. The world that the film inhabits is one we’re very familiar with, but the events themselves are completely imagined. It’s reductive – both for me and for the audience – to define it as autobiography. TELEVISION PLAYS A BIG ROLE IN THE WONDERS. WHAT WAS YOUR RELATIONSHIP LIKE WITH TV WHEN YOU WERE GROWING UP? Alba: We had one, but we didn’t get to see much. It was a bit of a mystery. Alice: It was a mystery! It’s a bit like in Corpo Celeste, when…

Released 10 JULY 4 ANTICIPATION. Oscar-nominated animation from the team behind the great The Secret of Kells. 4 ENJOYMENT. A major step up. Tomm Moore confirms himself as an animation heavyweight. 4 IN RETROSPECT. You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll want to purchase a seal onesie. Japan’s Studio Ghibli currently sits at a strange creative impasse, the rumour being that no animator has been deemed worthy of carrying the torch first ignited by its two outgoing veterans, Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata. Hopefully, someone over there will soon catch sight of Tomm Moore’s Song of the Sea and realise that the magical spirit of their work lives on, even if not through their own official channels. Saying that Moore’s film is worthy of the Ghibi canon is high praise indeed, but it’s…

Released 3 JULY 4 ANTICIPATION. Asif Kapadia applying his post-Senna rep to a magnetic lost talent. 3 ENJOYMENT. It’s undeniable that this is meticulously researched and artfully put together. 2 IN RETROSPECT. Not sure whether the research goes deep enough or the art serves the truth. Amy Winehouse died an unnatural death aged 27 and her image is shrouded in a mythological mist. To call a film simply by her first name suggests a focus on her truest outline. No more romanticised tragedy, no more exaggerated sorrow, no more fixation on sex and drugs and jazz and soul. For heightened dramatisation, you need only have read the newspapers during the last five years of her life. Fans of her music are primed for an antidote. Disappointingly, puffed-up melodrama is something that…

LWLIES: THERE’S AN INTERVIEW WHERE YOU SAID THAT THIS MOVIE TOOK AROUND SEVEN YEARS TO COMPLETE. WAS THE ORIGINAL MOVIE IN YOUR HEAD THE SAME AS THE ONE YOU EVENTUALLY MADE? Heller: I think the completed version is better than the one I originally had in my head. The actors brought so much to the table. I feel like we got it to a place that I could never have dreamed of. They say that when you watch your first rough assembly that it’s going to be the worst moment of your life. It’s the worst your movie will ever look. For me, it was tough to watch as it wasn’t the right takes and there were all these problems, but I also recognised it. ’Yep, that’s my movie, it’s…

Released 14 AUGUST In a postcard-pretty Normandy village captured with a lens cannily in thrall to that breezily quaint French lifestyle, an amusing literary twist is being spun. Fabrice Luchini plays a role that is the romantic flipside to his cynically-driven English professor in François Ozon’s In The House. Therein, he encouraged a pupil to embed with a family in order to write about their personal life. In Gemma Bovery, his Martin Joubert is a Parisian-teacher-turned-provincial-baker who becomes obsessed with a married Englishwoman because she has (almost) the same name as Gustave Flaubert’s unhappy heroine. Gemma Arterton plays Gemma Bovery who has upped sticks from London with her husband Charles (Jason Flemyng) and absently befriends her besotted neighbour. “In one second that meaningless little wave signalled the end of 10 years…

2013 OUT NOW DVD Leave the weighty shackles of rational thought at the door when entering the playfully phantasmagoric world of Albert Serra’s sublime Story of My Death, a movie which sends an ageing Casanova for a wander in the countryside where he bumps into Dracula, himself just loitering in the bushes. Serra’s third feature picked up the Golden Leopard at the 2013 Locarno Film Festival and, during its subsequent meandering tour of world film festivals, managed to court lovers and loathers alike. The lovers affixed themselves to the lived-in, freewheeling majesty of a film just happy to consistently tantalise and tickle, while always retaining a loosely-defined sense of existential purpose. The loathers call it out as a random collage of scenes which its director has tacked together in the…

1 The Here After Cannes may primarily serve as a lavish battle arena for an elite batch of auteur powerhouses, but it’s also a great place for discovery – particularly in its Directors’ Fortnight and Critics’ Week sidebars. For our money the real find of this year’s festival was first-time writer/director Magnus von Horn’s The Here After, which centres around a rural Swedish community that’s plunged into crisis following the reintroduction of a juvenile offender. Pop star-turned-actor Ulrik Munther (think Sweden’s answer to Ed Sheeran) is quietly impressive as John, a troubled teen who returns home having served time for the manslaughter of a local girl. As well as providing a nuanced observation of inter-family relations in the wake of a traumatic event, the film explores the complex relationship between…

Released 28 AUGUST 4 ANTICIPATION. Will Andrew Haigh give older folks the naturalistic relationship drama they deserve?. 4 ENJOYMENT. Feels like a story that was whirring long before the film began. 4 IN RETROSPECT. Dense with insight and caution on how to live a long life with love. Andrew Haigh burst into the film world in 2011 with Weekend, a naturalistic chronicle of two twenty-something men whose one-night stand morphs into a meaningful connection. His follow up, adapted from ‘In Another Country’, a short story by David Constantine, is a deep-rooted depiction of intimacy that follows the everyday mechanics of love, laying bare its side-effect of vulnerability. This time the couple are, respectively, in their late sixties and seventies, creating the extra thematic layer of how the passing of time –…

Released 7 AUGUST There’s nifty bait-and-switch storytelling at play in debut director Sophie Hyde’s Boyhood-style, time-lapse drama. What seems to be a queer issue film morphs into a rich thematic brew depicting how family, sexuality and time are all bound up in defining one another. 52 Tuesdays was filmed for one day a week over the course of a year and then condensed into a 110 minute film. The narrative progresses only on Tuesdays as this is the designated evening that peppy 16-year-old Billie (Tilda Cobham-Hervey) spends with her mother, Jane (Del Herbert-Jane). The two have stopped living together to give Jane the space to adjust to the process of gender reassignment. Now living with her less strict father, Billie takes the opportunity to run wild. A stand-out scene shows her…

Released 7 AUGUST 3 ANTICIPATION. There’s been far too few Spanish ‘Southern noirs’ in these parts. 4 ENJOYMENT. Procedural and politics in Spain’s deep south, works a grim treat. 4 IN RETROSPECT. Allegory washes up against mystery in this superb period piece. Marshland opens with spectacular highangle aerials of the littoral spaces around the Guadalquivir River. Livestock are reduced to moving dots, birds fly across the screen between heaven and earth, and the colourful landscapes below, shot from a god’s eye view, take on the appearance of the capillaries, cataracts and cortices of a living organism. This beautiful, mysterious imagery, drawn from the photography of Héctor Garrido, reveals a strange borderland where water is in constant, symbiotic negotiation with more solid ground. It is an apt setting for Alberto Rodríguez’s film,…

Released 10 JULY 4 ANTICIPATION. The idea of Bruno Dumont making a comedy just sounds so deliciously improbable. 4 ENJOYMENT. Human remains stuffed inside a cow in a bunker. Funny… 4 IN RETROSPECT. A nation’s backward chauvinism wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma… Let’s roll! The declaration of bungling, twitching Commandant Van der Weyden (Bernard Pruvost) of the National Police, as he and his partner Lieutenant Carpentier (Philippe Jore) investigate the grisly discovery of human remains inside a dead cow laid out in an old, barely accessible war bunker. Yet with ever more corpses emerging, the mobility implicit in Van der Weyden's catchphrase contrasts with Carpentier’s habit of making seven-point turns or driving in circles. This undynamic duo, much like their enquiry, appears to be going nowhere – although the…

LWLIES: IN THE NICEST WAY POSSIBLE, THIS FILM FEELS LIKE A BIG STEP UP FROM YOUR FIRST FILM, THE SECRET OF KELLS. Moore: The Secret of Kells was, in a weird way, a 10-year training film. We were trying to get it made for so long that even when it was in production I was working on Song of the Sea. I just had all this stuff I knew I wanted to do better or do differently the next time. It really put the fire in me to take all the things I’d learned and apply them to this new one, and I’m so happy that, generally, people can see that. You’re always afraid with what they call ‘the difficult second album’. IT’S A BIGGER STATEMENT, BUT YOU’VE RETAINED A CERTAIN…

Released 17 JULY 3 ANTICIPATION. A documentary on such an accomplished visual artist should be ample material. 3 ENJOYMENT. A lifeless opening section can’t overshadow the majesty of its subject’s perspective. 4 IN RETROSPECT. The standout images should stay with viewers for the foreseeable future. The Salt of the Earth begins with two voiceovers. The first is from film’s codirector, Wim Wenders, pondering the true definition and role of a photographer by tracing the semantic origins of those two halves, “photo” and “grapher”. The second is from the film’s subject, Sebastião Salgado, and it recalls his experience documenting an excavation of Brazil’s massive gold mine, Serra Pelada. One is set to a screen that’s either pitch-black or marked only by abstract light schemes, the other is accompanied by photos that stun…

Released 24 JULY Since 2012’s The Expendables sequel Arnold Schwarzenegger has – for better or worse – stuck to making the kinds of macho popcorn movies that require him to mix it with combative drug cartels and cutthroat mercenaries. Maggie, then, marks his first proper dramatic role since, well, ever. He plays a taciturn Midwest farmer named Wade Vogel whose eponymous daughter from a previous marriage (Abigail Breslin) is slowly turning into a zombie. Wade’s new wife Caroline (Joely Richardson) is understandably less than impressed when he decides to rescue Maggie from quarantine, thereby putting the entire household – including their two young children – at risk. But, as anyone who’s familiar with Arnie’s oeuvre will attest to, sometimes poppa’s gotta do what a poppa’s gotta do. If you’re already buoyed…

Released 31 JULY Deploying a pair of hackneyed genre tropes for the opening shots of your movie is a bold move for a debut filmmaker. A bloodied girl running through a forest and a kid cycling through sun-kissed suburbia may serve as an economic statement of intent – Boy’s Own adventure meets summer camp slasher - but we’ve heard these records too many times not to notice if Jonas Govaerts’ remix fails to match the beats. Closer in acknowledgement to the child’s-eye horrors of Guillermo del Toro (not least in its ‘creature’ design) than the nostalgia-trip of Super 8 or the full-bloodied ordeals of fellow Belgian Fabrice du Welz, Govaerts hides his influences in plain sight. With its Carpenter synths, a cop called Franju and snarky put-down of Scream, Cub sets…

1991 OUT NOW Blu-ray & DVD Terry Gilliam has always excelled at conveying two things: madness and compassion. Therefore, it’s hardly a surprise that his muse led him towards a story about grief, any sincere depiction of which invites the former and requires the latter. The trouble with The Fisher King, which is both invaluable and interminable in equal measure, is that it ultimately uses grief as little more than a conduit for Gilliam to play with yet another protagonist who is so consumed by tragic visions that they disengage from the real world and chase at the windmills of their own demons. So much attention is paid to the Don Quixote movie that Gilliam is perpetually struggling to make, people take for granted the half-dozen that he already has.…

- TRAILERS - The Reality Inspectors, Murder by Suicide, Canteloupe Island, The Pensky File, Der Mannschlänger - CHERRYPICK - “Dogs barking can’t fly without umbrella!” - TAGLINE - ‘A man named Jack has got her Jumpin’ and the world may never be the same!’ - RELEASED - 1986 Some guy calling himself Jumping Jack Flash taps into my computer console and tells me I gotta go to his apartment, steal a frying pan and call Van Morrison.” Don’t worry, Whoopi – we’ve all had days like that. You accidentally get stuck chatting with the nutter on the bus. You leave your card in the machine. Your boss chews you out for coming to work smelling like “a brewery in a zoo.” Weekends sat on park benches waiting for the dim,…

Released 1 JULY 5 ANTICIPATION. Critics recently voted this the greatest documentary of all-time. No pressure then. 5 ENJOYMENT. Fascinating enough as a social document, but genuinely thrilling in how its multifarious technical trickery whips up an ecstatically cinematic delirium. 5 IN RETROSPECT. Wow! Now you can see what the fuss was all about – and it feels good. Check out that bra clasp! As a young woman prepares herself for the day, she hooks together the most decoratively embroidered fasteners, bringing that extra bit of beauty to everyday functionality. Even in 1929, Russian avant-gardist Denis Arkadievitch Kaufman knew that when you pointed a camera at something, people regarded the subject with heightened interest and concentration. So his hand-cranked equipment goes everywhere – on top of buildings, attached to trams and…

LWLIES: 45 YEARS SEEMS TO SUGGEST THAT THE DRAMA IS NEVER OVER BETWEEN COUPLES, LIKE YOU CAN GROW OLD TOGETHER AND RETIRE TO A BEAUTIFUL COTTAGE IN A REMOTE LOCATION, BUT PEACE AND HAPPINESS AREN’T REALLY A LONGTERM PLAN, EVEN IN A LOVING, LONGTERM RELATIONSHIP. WOULD YOU AGREE OR DISAGREE WITH THAT? Haigh: Such a negative opinion! That is part of it but it’s more like you can never truly know someone in a relationship. It’s always really hard to truly know someone. Relationships kind of get forged in their beginning period. You grow as a person and you change as a person but you’re not always honest with who you are as you’re developing within that relationship. For these two people, at this time in their life, they’ve stopped…

Released 21 AUGUST Families. Everyone thinks theirs is a little weird. But we sincerely doubt there are many that could rival the ostensible oddness of the Angulo tribe. That last word is particularly accurate in this instance, seeing as how the subject of Crystal Moselle’s fascinating documentary is a group of six brothers (and one sister) who have been raised in isolation from the outside world – in a cosy apartment situated in New York City. From that description you might expect The Wolfpack to resemble an anthropological exercise, a clinical study designed to stimulate the great nature versus nurture debate. Yet perhaps the most unusual thing about the Angulo brothers is how normal they appear. Far from being a dysfunctional, troublingly maladjusted bunch, Bhagavan, Govinda, Jagadisa, Krsna, Mukunda and Narayana…

Released 17 JULY 3 ANTICIPATION. Corpo Celeste established director Alice Rohrwacher as a bold new voice. 3 ENJOYMENT. A quirky coming-of-ager with a light dash of magical realism. 4 IN RETROSPECT. Alice and Alba Rohrwacher look set to play a major part in shaping the future of Italian cinema. Proving once again why she’s currently regarded as one of Italian cinema’s most exciting prospects, Alice Rohrwacher follows up her impressive 2011 debut, Corpo Celeste, with this semi-autobiographical tale of a colourful family’s struggle to keep its head above water against a changing tide. We’re in middle Italy, more specifically on a tumbledown farm owned and operated by gruff patriarch Wolfgang (Sam Louwyck) and his four young daughters. Beekeeping is their trade, the fiscal rewards of which are sweet but offer scant…

Released 7 AUGUST 4 ANTICIPATION. Really digging David Gordon Green’s subtle groove these days. 4 ENJOYMENT. This film makes for very fine company. A movie to sit at the bar with and share a beer. 3 IN RETROSPECT. Its pleasures are low-key, for sure, but Green just packs the screen with interesting things. Director David Gordon Green has come full circle. Manglehorn, his tenth feature, displays many of the rhapsodic qualities of his first feature, 2000’s George Washington, in that both are predominantly interested in cultivating texture and a sense of place. Both films possess only the most meagre thread of what you might term a narrative, but Green has reached a point in his career where he sees that examining the interplay between people and landscapes is more cinematic that…

Released 10 JULY 3 ANTICIPATION. Dano and Cusack and Banks and Giamatti, Oh my, this could be very interesting. 4 ENJOYMENT. Genuinely arresting, and a refreshingly original approach to pop biography. 4 IN RETROSPECT. It has a lasting effect, largely down to committed performances from all concerned. Oren Moverman, the writer behind Todd Haynes’ cubist Bob Dylan biopic from 2007, I’m Not There, scripts this screen biography of troubled Beach Boys leader/co-founder, Brian Wilson, with Bill Pohlad stepping out of his usual producer’s seat and moving over to directing. This is a more straightforward tale than Haynes’ film; it isn’t a surreal extrapolation of Wilson’s image, presented in the same teasing mythological manner. But Love & Mercy still employs techniques subtly to build an astounding sense of gravitas around the mysterious…

Released 7 AUGUST 2 ANTICIPATION. A 2015 Sundance sensation, written and directed by an actor. Uh-oh, Spaghetti-Os! 4 ENJOYMENT. Quite delightful, a film which hums with a rare honesty and empathy. 4 IN RETROSPECT. You watch it thinking, this is probably going to be a lot of people’s favourite movie. This boisterous teen sex movie by Marielle Heller is a paragon of enlightenment and poise. It talks about copulation – or, to adopt the parlance of the film, “fucking,” or actually even more apt, “fuckin’” – and human desire in frank but never alarmist terms, accepting young people as sexually liberated and thoughtful beings who are able to make sage decisions regarding those with whom they decide to share a bed (or a back-seat). It doesn’t, however, fall into the trap…

Released 24 JULY It’s interesting to ponder whether actors realise when they’re staring in bad movies. Here is a case of an actor (Robert Carlyle) shifting to the director’s chair and perhaps not realising that he’s made a quite terrible film. Okay, there are some basic technical passes to be allowed in The Legend of Barney Thomson, and there’s one or two appealingly off-kilter performances (cf Emma Thompson with OAP prosthetics and funny accent, aka “doing a Tilda”). But for the most part, this is a wretched film that’s overloaded with casual hatred passed off as ironic cynicism. It hates the young. It hates the old. It hates the poor. It hates women. It hates outsiders. It hates authority figures. It hates the police. It hates small businesses. It hates local…

1938 OUT NOW Blu-ray It’s up for debate as to whether we can now discount describing Citizen Kane as a debut feature, as there’s something about Orson Welles’ Too Much Johnson – made three years prior to Kane but thought to be lost until a print was discovered in a Pordenone warehouse in 2008 – that almost repels you from calling it proper movie. It’s more of a visual work-out, Welles sparring with the idea of cinema rather than stepping up for a title fight. It stars a man who would become one of Welles’ regular collaborators, Joseph Cotton, as a dandy caught frolicking with another man’s wife who is subsequently chased around town for the best part of an hour. The film was originally intended to work as an…

1985 Released 21 JULY Blu-ray & DVD A knowing immigrant story, a tender queer portrait of love rekindled in a hostile environment, and a crash course in Thatcherism all packed into a washer and tumbling over each other, Stephen Frears’ second film endures as one of the most beautiful and ungainly feel-good movies to ever emerge from the British film industry. My Beautiful Laundrette ostensibly centres around a young British Pakistani named Omar (Gordon Warnecke) whose meagre south London existence is devoted to caring for his invalid father. Omar’s uncle, on the other hand, has churned an entrepreneurial zeal into a string of successful businesses, becoming a valuable part of the local community as a result. When Omar is tasked with refurbishing his uncle’s dump of a laundromat, the ambitious kid…

MIA HANSEN-LØVE: What I love about movies is the feeling that… somebody made them. That's why I don't watch TV series, because I never get the feeling that it's one person speaking to me. What makes me want to see a film is the feeling that I'm meeting someone. Who is on the other side of this film? Who is talking to me? The question of style and form is part of it of course, but it's not too much about the surface for me. Ultimately what I enjoy about film is the idea of meeting somebody who is unique. The filmmakers who are important to me are the ones I can feel physically. When I don't feel the person… or when I feel the person but don't like the…