Innholdsfortegnelse for September - October 2015 i Little White Lies

Vol. 61 Single, Number, TORO AND ROBBINS, PUBLISHERS, No. 71A LEONARD STREET SHOREDITCH. LONDON. Price, Tenpence, No. 1 At the climax of Guillermo del Toro’s Hellboy 2: The Golden Army, the director conducts a prolonged fight scene atop a system of giant golden cogs. He is fascinated by cogs. And machinery. He says so in interviews. So, from this we can infer an attraction to the rational, a guy who is becalmed by mechanical logic. And yet, his movies are packed full of monsters, ghouls, apparitions and creatures of unspecified origin. From this we can also infer an attraction to the irrational, a man who sees a world that exists beyond the physical realm. This ideological conflict is what earns del Toro his status as one of the greats. His…

THE HAUNTING 1963 (UK) Per the film, the setting for Robert Wise’s classic horror film, Hill House is supposed to be in, ‘the most remote part of New England’, but is actually located about five miles southeast of Stratford-upon-Avon, in Warwickshire. The neo-Gothic estate is touted playing the host to many ghouls, including those of the Shirley family who owned the estate for centuries. Now a luxury hotel, it has become known as the most haunted house in Britain. THE SHINING 1980 (UK/USA) A great place for seclusion and scenic beauty. Even though Stanley Kubrick’s mind-frazzling masterpiece was shot at Elstree Studios in England, the exterior of the iconic Overlook Hotel is the Timberline Lodge, located in the Hood River Area of northern Oregon. Forty five miles east of Portland,…

Released 25 SEPTEMBER 3 ANTICIPATION. As the years pass by, the likelihood of Nanni Moretti returning to his early funny ones diminishes. 3 ENJOYMENT. Its scattershot approach lands some good moments. 3 IN RETROSPECT. Moretti is an old reliable, but he needs to be more than that. It’s hard not to at the very least admire Nanni Moretti’s self-imposed remit as a filmmaker who locates humour and levity in life’s dimmest corners. 1993’s beloved Dear Diary was the transitional work, the one that connected his more fancy-free, caustic and experimental early career with a second phase where he has gladly taken up the mantle of mass entertainer. In its melancholy and reflective tone, plus an interest in the emotional ripples caused by the death of a family member (crucially, one who was roundly adored),…

You can tell a lot about a celebrity from how they engage with social media. Some use it to boost their profile, others endorse brands or support worthy causes. Then there are people like Dane DeHaan, who prefer to treat it as a genuine extension of their personality, perhaps in the form of an as yet unanswered marriage proposal to @realDonaldTrump or sharing a photo of a particularly interesting snail. There’s a serious side to the 29-year-old actor, of course, as evident in Chronicle, Lawless, Kill Your Darlings and now Life, director Anton Corbijn’s behind-the-lens look at James Dean. LWLies spoke to DeHaan about playing Hollywood’s most enduring icon and why he’s happy doing things his own way. LWLIES: YOU’RE FAIRLY ACTIVE ON INSTAGRAM AND TWITTER. HOW DO YOU THINK…

Released 4 SEPTEMBER Anna Muylaert takes a clever and considered approach to social class in this sharply observed comedy of manners. Val (Regina Casé) has been the housekeeper for a wealthy family in Sao Paulo for as long as her teenage daughter Jessica (Camila Márdila) has been alive, but her decision to work in the city as a means of support has been a barrier towards their developing relationship. When Jessica organises a stay at the home of Val’s employers, she questions the way in which the family treat both her and her mother. Muylaert traces the passive aggressive lines of oppression between the two clans with wincing conviction. On meeting Jessica, wealthy matriarch Barbara inwardly scoffs at her ambition to become an architect. The film also touches upon elitist, chauvinistic…

Released 18 SEPTEMBER 2 ANTICIPATION. Baltasar Kormákur’s recent hack-for-hire work (Two Guns, Contaband) dulls the excitement somewhat. 4 ENJOYMENT. A remarkable mountaineering melodrama rather than a standard-issue disaster movie. 3 IN RETROSPECT. Pardon our French, but this could easily turn out to be an Oscar dark horse. It’s time we expunged all this hooey about the purported Jake Gyllenhaal renaissance from our minds. We refer to the recent phase of his acting career where he stars in films in which he appears to be straining way too hard for effect (cf Enemy, Prisoners, Nightcrawler, Southpaw). Baltasar Kormákur’s Everest is an ace, merrily archaic disaster movie that Gyllenhaal, in a weirdybeardy lovable rogue supporting role, appears to be treating as “one for them”. He’s more laid back than usual, unselfconsious, with no sign of deep…

Released 18 SEPTEMBER 3 ANTICIPATION. A hat-trick of Cannes 2014 nominations makes this an exciting prospect. 4 ENJOYMENT. Undeniably discomforting but brave, considered and rewarding. 4 IN RETROSPECT. A detective story with a satisfying social justice twist. Rural South Korea is the setting for July Jung’s courageous and quietly confrontational debut feature which boasts a pair of astonishingly nuanced performances. The film concerns itself with the rot that eats away at humanity both on a personal and societal level, with its depiction of a small, struggling community debased by corruption, prejudice and the moral contamination of an abused and neglected child. Eschewing sensationalism for a rigorously restrained approach to issues which become increasingly combustible, A Girl at My Door undulates between hope and despair. An initially unspecified scandal sees talented young police officer Young-nam…

Released 4 SEPTEMBER What good is courage without vision? It’s a question that narrative filmmakers rarely bother to ask of their heroes, and documentary makers almost never think to ask of themselves. Cartel Land, which finds Matthew Heineman venturing into the dark heart of the world’s most dangerous drug war and returning with little more than his life, is an unusually lucid self-portrait of someone who’s in so far over his head that it’s a shock he doesn’t lose it. Even though Heineman never appears as a character in his film, at no point in Cartel Land do you get the sense that he’s particularly safe behind the camera. The action begins in the dead of night, as the director shines a flashlight on a group of wearily armed men who…

Released 2 OCTOBER 4 ANTICIPATION. The original had a decent enough writer. 4 ENJOYMENT. Reinvented dynastic tragedy shows true grit. 4 IN RETROSPECT. The performances are astonishingly intense, their sound and fury signifying everything. Next time you catch yourself lamenting modern cinema’s unhealthy obsession with remakes and sequels, spare a thought for William Shakespeare, who ‘reimagined’ almost all his scripts from pre-existing sources, and followed one king’s tale with another, even sub-dividing them into parts to ‘cash in’ on their success. And those plays were not just performed once, but have been restaged, reinvented, even rewritten to suit different audiences at different times. Take the Scottish play, most famously turned to film by Orson Welles in 1948 and by Roman Polanski in 1971. Justin Kurzel may at first seem improbable as director of this…

Released 9 OCTOBER 3 ANTICIPATION. The latest from almost-but-not-quite man, Denis Villeneuve. 4 ENJOYMENT. A heady shot of technical pyrotechnics, a triumph of aesthetics over politics. 3 IN RETROSPECT. A visceral, in-the-moment ridealong more than a movie to chew over for any length of time. Prisoners, Denis Villeneuve’s first collaboration with the great DoP Roger Deakins, showed the Quebecois director could elicit sinister portent from just about any scenario without demonstrating any judgment about whether it was worth filming in the first place. Sicario, which reteams Villeneuve and Deakins, benefits immensely from not sliding into snakes-and-Satanists silliness, and is accordingly excruciatingly suspenseful for most of its running time. As recently depicted in Gerardo Naranjo’s Miss Bala, Amat Escalante’s Heli and Matthew Heineman’s Cartel Land, the disastrous War on Drugs is understood primarily as a…

Released 18 SEPTEMBER 5 ANTICIPATION. Buster Keaton restored and back on the big screen is always welcome. 5 ENJOYMENT. A master on prime form, and the accompanying short The Playhouse is ingenious too. 5 IN RETROSPECT. Keaton has lost none of his ability to entertain and astonish. The cameras were ready to roll, but most of the crew couldn’t bear to watch. Buster Keaton stepped onto his mark and waited for the wall of the house behind him to fall. If his measurements were correct – and they usually were – a window should land exactly where he stood, leaving him unscathed amid the wreckage. He had just two inches of clearance for his head and shoulders and the slightest miscalculation would be fatal, but Keaton later recalled feeling that he didn’t really care…

Released 16 OCTOBER 4 ANTICIPATION. Can maverick Lanthimos kick on with a marquee cast without losing his radical mojo? 3 ENJOYMENT. Lanthimos’ determination to drain the film of emotion leaves it feeling somewhat academic. 4 IN RETROSPECT. Appreciation for the sheer conceptual confidence of the film gathers momentum once you think back over it. For Yorgos Lanthimos, in life as in the movies, it’s all in the game. In his breakthrough 2009 feature, Dogtooth, a controlling father set out to constrain his three grown-up children within a cultural and linguistic alternative universe, while his 2011 follow-up, Alps, featured a mysterious coterie of hospital workers impersonating lost loved ones to heal grieving families. This time, to go with a bigger budget and English dialogue, he’s widened the scope considerably: now it’s an entire society setting…

1967 Out Now Blu-ray There’s a scene in Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers in which James Franco’s tin-pot gangster Alien boasts of owning a TV which plays Scarface on a loop all day, every day. You could imagine that if Quentin Tarantino ever succumbed to petit gangsterism, his TV would show King Hu’s 1967 martial arts epic, Dragon Inn. This is the simple tale of a demonic eunuch attempting to cleanse the country of a rival family – “you must not chop down the grass, but pull up the roots,” is his poetic way of justifying mass murder. Though his scouts are assigned to take care of this act of honour-driven butchery, the remnants of the family, all sons and daughters, manage to flee and hide out in the vicinity of…

2001 Out Now Blu-ray A minor film that shines light on why the Coen brothers are such major filmmakers, The Man Who Wasn’t There is a singularly droll neo-noir that looks at the genre through a funhouse mirror. Combining intimately familiar tropes with a protagonist so laconic that he frustrates them all, watching an unexceptional man find some perverse sense of purpose once the needle on his moral compass has been flicked so hard that it has no hope of ever finding true north again. The “action”, so to speak, is set in Santa Rosa, California during the summer of 1949. Billy Bob Thornton stars as Ed Crane, a barber by trade and a terse human doormat by nature. (“Me, I don’t talk much. I just cut the hair.”) As…

1987 Released 15 SEPT Blu-ray Of all the films to inspire a Gwyneth Paltrow rip-off… Krzysztof Kieslowski’s first fiction feature – shot in 1981, but suppressed until 1987 by the Communist regime that controlled Poland at the time – hinges on a brilliantly simple idea: a young man named Witek (Bogusław Linda) sprints to catch a train. Improbably, he grabs ahold of the last car and pulls himself aboard. He encounters a grizzled old Communist, who offers him a place to stay and encourages him to join the party. Witek happens upon his first love on the way to a meeting, and the two of them soon consummate their mutual crush. For more than an hour, the film powers on under the guise of a reasonably linear drama. And then, abruptly,…

#2 Two films inspired by Guillermo del Toro's Crimson Peak Mexican director Guillermo del Toro is outspoken when it comes to the classic movies that have directly inspired his artistic process. And when he does namedrop a Hitchcock here or a James Whale there, its generally quite easy to see how this inspiration has taken seed with his own rich and singular oeuvre. We have selected two films of which he regularly professes a great love: Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast from 1946 and Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face from 1960. This pair of romantic horror movies are to be viewed as a double bill, the former screening on MUBI for 30 days, the latter receiving a one-off event presentation at LWLies’ 71a gallery on Thursday 15 October…

Released 18 SEPTEMBER 5 ANTICIPATION. The Portuguese master’s first fiction feature in almost a decade. 5 ENJOYMENT. A beautiful and grotesque evocation of repressed cultural memory. 5 IN RETROSPECT. One of the most impressive accomplishments of Costa’s career. Pedro Costa’s Horse Money, the Portuguese filmmaker’s first fiction feature in over eight years, crescendos with an intensely cerebral 20-minute sequence set inside an elevator in which a flood of dialogue works to collapse an entire history’s worth of personal and political tragedy in one virtuoso display of accumulated aggression. Undeniably bracing, the scene – a slightly reworked version of Costa’s 2012 short Sweet Exorcism (originally featured in the Centro Histórico omnibus film) – is but the final and most violent example of the film’s foremost allegorical conceit, that of indoor space as physical manifestation of…

Released 4 SEPTEMBER 2 ANTICIPATION. Going by the trailer, it’s a saccharine TV movie for “cool” boomers. 3 ENJOYMENT. Cute and easygoing with some laughs, but weighed down at times by cliché. 3 IN RETROSPECT. Enjoyable in its slightness, but unlikely to get Streep yet another Oscar nomination. See it with your mum. Coco Chanel once said, “Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off.” This dictum comes to mind while watching Meryl Streep in Ricki and the Flash – here is a woman of a certain age who is aggressive in her piled-on accessories and wild, partly braided hair. If anyone asked Ricki to take off an accessory, she’d likely laugh in their face. Ricki embodies a certain type of woman not often given much time in…

Released 23 OCTOBER All things considered, there are times when we should all just fess up and agree that Robert Altman’s 1974 gambling picaresque, California Split, is the greatest movie ever made. Aside from its unhealthy charm quotient, there’s an alchemy to it that defies comprehension. The fact that it works without ever revealing how is a vital constituent of its beauty. Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck (of Half Nelson fame) attempt to reverse-engineer this secret formula for their latest feature, Mississippi Grind, a near remake of the Altman classic which doesn’t quite carry the transcendent cosmic weight of its forebear. The film earns major points for giving Ben Mendelsohn a proper, meaty character to tussle with, no longer psychotic second banana or madballs deus ex machina. In its opening act,…

Released 9 SEPTEMBER Preserving dreams of liberal idealism is a hard enough task at the best of times, but when that dream has to exist within a bureaucratic framework… well, good luck with that. Bob Hunter knows the score, a Canadian local newspaper columnist who went on to found Greenpeace and may possibly have coined our modern conception of environmental activism. The various marine-based protests he instigated in the early ’70s – from taking umbrage with Nixon testing subterranean nuclear payloads off the coast of Alaska to snatching footage of gore-caked Russian whaling vessels – were pure examples of a singularity of cause. The tie-dyed, pot-addled jolly boys who were involved in these missions, many of whom crop up as talking heads in Jerry Rothwell’s functional documentary, seemed wedded to a…

For almost half a century it’s been among the world’s most beloved pictures, whether in surveys of critics or of the ordinary, everyday folk for whom, let’s not forget, the magic of the silver screen was first called into being. Like many of its admirers, I first came to The Towering Inferno as a child. Back then I was more struck by the film’s spectacle than by its nuanced evocation of tall-tower life and fierceyet-gentle lessons in morality. Returning to the movie older and more experienced, I found, like so many others, inspiration in the character of Fire Chief Michael O’Hallorhan, whose quiet dignity and refusal to give in to mob rule are at the heart of the picture. Memorably played by Steve McQueen, he is one of cinema’s most…

Released 30 OCTOBER 5 ANTICIPATION. Jafar Panahi’s latest (and a Golden Bear winner to boot). 5 ENJOYMENT. A sly, subversive stand in favour of empathy.. 5 IN RETROSPECT. That smile… Jafar Panahi’s recent protest triptych – This Is Not a Film, Closed Curtain, Taxi – could be construed as criminal acts in the eyes of the Iranian government. Tethered to a lifetime filmmaking ban and extended house arrest, Panahi has nevertheless endured by creating innovative works that stand up to oppression through tenacious resolve. If the director is indeed an enemy of the state, the international film community has been his willing and vocal accomplice. Solidarity is a strong theme in Taxi, Panahi’s most playful and hopeful film in years. A seamless and subversive meshing of documentary and fiction, it finds Panahi driving around…

Released 2 OCTOBER 4 ANTICIPATION. The time is ripe for reflecting on why unarmed black men are being murdered across America… 3 ENJOYMENT. Access to the courtroom results in an objective indictment of the cold hard facts. 3 IN RETROSPECT. A report – not a reflection – that could’ve benefitted from more authored storytelling. Jordan Davis and three of his friends were sat in a parked car at a petrol station. As Davis’ father states, “It wasn’t a bad neighbourhood, he was five minutes from home, and it wasn’t late at night – it was 7.45pm.” The boys were listening to rap music, loudly – much to the chagrin of Michael Dunn, the white middle-aged man parked next to them. Dunn asked the boys to turn “that rap crap” down. Davis objected. Dunn pulled…

Released 25 SEPTEMBER Charity worker Jess (Drew Barrymore) and PR executive Milly (Toni Colette) have been friends since school, but when Milly is diagnosed with cancer, their relationship is placed under duress. Their favourite book growing up was ‘Wuthering Heights’, and its themes of cruelty and vengefulness are explored in the context of a cancer patient who is angry at the world. Opening in a similar bittersweet manner to Garry Marshall’s 1988 film, Beaches, itself an era-spanning drama focusing on a female-female friendship, the film introduces Jess as she’s about to give birth at the end of the story. She’s alone, and the only thing she wants is her best friend by her side. Despite the wealth of female talent involved, the core relationship between the two women rarely feels convincing,…

LWLIES: WERE YOU BOMBARDED WITH REQUESTS FOR WORK AFTER THE SUCCESS OF YOUR DEBUT, SNOWTOWN? Kurzel: Definitely by the time it played in London there was a real interest in the film for many reasons, the fact that it was quite a controversial was one of them. I started looking at scripts and talking to actors. That’s how I got to know Michael [Fassbender], which was really after him seeing a screening of it in London. It all happened after about 12 months rather than directly after its Cannes premiere. I happened to be in London. His agent and mine got in contact and we met. It was lovely to be sitting with someone and to be able to talk about each other’s work in in a mutually respectful way.…

Released 4 SEPTEMBER 3 ANTICIPATION. The Fault in Our Stars for the hipster set. 4 ENJOYMENT. Ask us again when we’re done quietly sobbing into our artisanal popcorn. 3 IN RETROSPECT. A gem from Gomez-Rejon. Intrigued to see what he does next. What’s the best way to treat someone with cancer? We’re not speaking in a medical sense: how are you supposed to behave around someone – a casual acquaintance, say – who’s been recently diagnosed with the disease? In director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s disarmingly sincere second feature, which is just about the most affecting teen cancer comedy you could ever hope to see, this moral conundrum provides the catalyst for a transformative journey as travelled by the film’s three chief protagonists. During an opening rundown of a familiar high school caste system, Greg…

Released 16 OCTOBER 3 ANTICIPATION. ‘The time is now’ scream the posters. 3 ENJOYMENT. Reels a familiar yarn, but unlike its subjects, is wholly risk averse. 2 IN RETROSPECT. This would’ve made for a great TV serial. For better and for worse, Sarah Gavron’s new film, Suffragette, is concerned with an anticlimax. On a literal, formal level, it presents history as agonisingly piecemeal, a series of loosely interconnected incidents which are undertaken at a moment’s notice and with only a cursory discussion as to their intentions and targets. It’s anticlimactic, too, in that here is a film concerning arguably the most eminent congregation of female activists fighting for acceptance and equality in modern history, and we know with the gift of hindsight that the spoils at the end of their violent campaign are meagre…

Ariane Labed is a Greek-born Frenchbased actress who trained in theatre and made her screen debut in 2010 as the star of Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Attenberg. While making that film she met Yorgos Lanthimos, who cast her in 2011’s Alps and now The Lobster. LWLIES: IN THE LOBSTER, THERE IS ONE GROUP OF PEOPLE WHO THINK THAT IT’S VERY IMPORTANT FOR HUMAN BEINGS TO BE IN A RELATIONSHIP AND ONE GROUP WHO THINK THAT IT’S VERY IMPORTANT FOR HUMAN BEINGS TO BE ALONE. WHICH OF THESE ABSOLUTE STANCES ARE YOU CLOSEST TO? Labed: I don’t really want to take this kind of position. I think that the point of the story is that the heroes are trying to find another way to be, out of these two worlds, and to…

1968 Out Now DVD Films like The Return of Martin Guerre and Sommersby cultivate a mystery by way of suggesting that the protagonist returning to his homestead after a lengthy time in exile could be harbouring some kind of dark intent. This fuggy Slovakian parable from 1968 by Eduard Grečner applies a similar rule, with the twist being that the main character, Dragon (the ultra-surly Radovan Lukavský), a potter who was forcibly deposed from his dirt-poor mountain hamlet, didn’t really do anything wrong. He re-enters the fray at the beginning of the film sporting a mean-looking eye-patch, a brilliant technical touch which suggests that Dragon is not a man to be meddled with. It’s a simple tale of parochial paranoia where Dragon is a walking symbol of civic misdeed whose…

2001 Out Now Blu-ray They say write what you know, and that’s a maxim Cameron Crowe has always taken to heart. As a follow-up to the vividly autobiographical Almost Famous, however, Crowe decided to remake a Spanish sci-fi film about cryogenic freezing. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t work out too hot. On the other hand, Vanilla Sky is also a vanity film about the perils of vanity, a story about a fall from grace that resulted from the collaboration between two men at the height of their careers. It’s an attempt to subvert the romantic comedy genre by a director who had all but perfected it in the ’90s, and it’s a collection of pop culture references – 428 of them, if Crowe’s ambiguous count is to be believed – that cohere…

It feels wrong to besmirch the good name of Bologna’s annual Il Cinema Ritrovato with the epithet of ‘film festival’, as it’s a term which has come to signify a commercially-driven gathering which has more in common with a country meat market than a celebration of the seventh art. A pass for entry into every screening costs a paltry sum (LWLies personal average price per film was €1.60), there’s no-one on the door checking bags or evoking an atmosphere of Cold War paranoia, most films are screened on 35mm prints, and – most vitally – everyone seems happy to be there. There is smiling and laughing. Imagine? The programme consists entirely of archive features, selected by a cadre of trusted cinephile lifers and overseen by the charismatic, novelty-spectacled Gian Luca…

Dear Clarisse, It’s going to be surreal being in touch with you on a daily basis. My communication style tends to go ’burst of something’ ’silence’ ’burst of something’ ’silence’. People, in all their wilfulness and complexity, exhaust me and I’m jealous of everyone who finds it such a breeze to be social all the time. A confession! And nothing to do with ghost stories either. I will need to switch up my reading in order to be on message. At the moment I am reading a book about the colour blue. At a stretch it could be called a ghost story because, insofar as it’s about anything other than the colour blue, it’s about the ghost of a relationship. It proceeds via numbered points. I opened it on a…

Released 25 SEPTEMBER 3 ANTICIPATION. Dare we hope for a good life? 4 ENJOYMENT. Life is clever and unusual. 3 IN RETROSPECT. Fun while it lasts. Life is the story of two men pursuing their individual artistic callings against the grain of industry norms. Both Dennis Stock and James Dean died as glittering names in photojournalism and acting. But in 1955, when this film is set, neither was established. “What do you see in him?” asks Dennis’ agent (Joel Edgerton). This drama takes place during the run-up to the premiere of East of Eden, the film that would make Dean a major-league movie star. Warner Brothers are hemming over casting him in Rebel Without a Cause, fearing that his quirks and honesty make him unsuitable for the studio’s star template treatment. “It’s an awkwardness,…

Released 23 OCTOBER In his 2005 memoir, ‘Marlon Brando: The Naked Actor’, George Englund recounts his relationship with the eponymous acting titan in great detail while offering little in the way of genuine insight – this despite he and “Mar” having apparently remained close from 1954 to the latter’s death in 2004. It’s not so much a failing on Englund’s part, more a reflection on the complex nature of this famously private iconoclast. Reading it, you get the sense that not even Brando’s best friend really knew him. Watching Listen to Me Marlon, you begin to understand why. At the beginning of Stevan Riley’s film, we’re greeted by Brando’s digitsed floating head. It’s a slightly haunting, hypnotic start to an unorthodox biography comprised of previously unreleased audio material in which Brando…

Released 11 SEPTEMBER 3 ANTICIPATION. Allen remains as reliable as migrating geese in delivering his annual missive. 3 ENJOYMENT. No great shakes, but a more tricksy and philosophically rich drama than expected. 3 IN RETROSPECT. Falls somewhere into the nebulous void between major and minor Woody. A dark comedy of the conscience, Irrational Man is effectively Woody Allen’s How Stella Got Her Groove Back, though – for alcoholic and recently impotent philosophy professor Abe Lucas (Joaquin Phoenix) – the process of groove recovery isn’t quite so innocent as flying to Jamaica for a fling with a local hunk named Winston Shakespeare. For Abe, whose potbelly alone is heftier than several of Allen’s recent films, reinvigorating his life might require ending someone else’s. For some time now, it’s been a self-evident truth that Woody Allen…

Released 9 SEPTEMBER 3 ANTICIPATION. Can’t be worse than the 1990 Kemp bros vehicle. Can it? 2 ENJOYMENT. It is.. 2 IN RETROSPECT. Might as well be prefixed with the words ‘Print the’. There’s no real evidence to suggest that Reggie Kray had a fancy for lemon sherbets. And yet writer/director Brian Helgeland has Tom Hardy routinely sucking on the sweets during early meet-cutes with Emily Browning’s Frances Shea, the wholesome 16-year-old club owner’s daughter who endured a tumultuous marriage to Reg. It’s the kind of clunky visual metaphor – he’s a tough bloke with a soft centre, you see – masquerading as a genuine character trait that reveals far more about Helgeland’s screenwriting ability (or lack thereof ) than his chosen subject. Come to think of it, that’s quite a handy metaphor after…

Released 25 SEPTEMBER 3 ANTICIPATION. It’s that kid who’s in all those films! 3 ENJOYMENT. All over the shop, but much about it is bold and lovable. 3 IN RETROSPECT. We’ve not seen the end of this Roberts character (in a good way). Beware of false idols – the unequivocal message behind the directorial debut by eye-wateringly young Welsh actor, Craig Roberts. Introduced to the world as a duffel coatwearing nebbish in Richard Ayoade’s cutesy-pie rom-com, Submarine, from 2010, Roberts has chosen to pay homage to his erstwhile collaborator while also adding something new and macabre into the mix. In Just Jim, exteriors are alienatingly pallid, the Welsh landscape sitting quietly underneath a floating gauze of dewy mist. The interiors are meshed with shadowy bars, like there’s been a town-wide power cut and no-one…

Released 4 SEPTEMBER It’s ironic that Iranian director Jafar Panahi went to the Caspian shoreline to make Closed Curtain. The status of the resource rich sea is still unresolved, due to disagreements over delimitation between Iran and the other four nations that share its coastline. And yet oil is drilled by all five countries. Panahi’s status mirrors that of the Sea. He’s been prohibited from making films by the Iranian government since 2010, but does so anyway. This is his second feature since 2011’s This Is Not a Film. Until his situation is resolved, he looks inwards for material, but Closed Curtain, made in 2013, represents a definite end to the ideas he can generate in isolation from the world. A writer (Kambuzia Partovi, who co-directed the film) comes to a…

Released 25 SEPTEMBER Elusive and haunting are descriptions that fit this documentary and its subject. Jimmy Ellis – the singer who sounded exactly like Elvis and never stepped out of his vocalganger’s shadow – isn’t here any more. His life is recounted in stages. Talking heads, footage of gaudily dressed, charismatic performances, his son’s memories and recordings of his own musings are organised thematically. The effect is of peeling back the layers of an onion. But instead of a core, there are still more layers. Jeanie Finlay’s investigative documentary is many things, but it is not an exposé. So, what is it? A eulogy for a man who wanted to be more than a bizarre footnote in the history of Elvis impersonators? Or a eulogy for a man with a sorrowful…

Released 11 SEPTEMBER 4 ANTICIPATION. Few combinations are so worthy of attention. 2 ENJOYMENT. Ferrara’s approach to the material is distinctly off-balance. 2 IN RETROSPECT. Some indelible moments can’t off-set a generally misjudged approach. Excepting whatever immediate associations its title might raise, those entering Abel Ferrara’s Pasolini with any expectations are bound to come away disappointed. The fourth collaboration between the director and Willem Dafoe defies all biopic categorisations, for the most part as concerned with the histories between people and places as it is the final day of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s life. In doing so, it truly lives up to the sui generis reputation that’s built since its premiere at the 2014 Venice Film Festival. Alas, something was miscalculated in the helmer-starsubject equation. Ferrara has evinced a knack for directorial subtlety and emotionally…

Alfonso Gomez-Rejon dedicated Me and Earl and the Dying Girl to his late father, who passed away shortly before production began. LWLies sat down with with the director for a personal conversation about life, death and how the movies can blur the line between the two. LWLIES: I’VE HAD AN INTERESTING RELATIONSHIP WITH THIS MOVIE. I FIRST SAW IT AT SUNDANCE. SHORTLY AFTER I CAME HOME, I LEARNED THAT MY DAD HAD A GRADE IV BRAIN TUMOUR. WHEN I REVISITED IT IN ADVANCE OF THIS INTERVIEW, I HAD A VERY DIFFERENT EXPERIENCE. I FOUND IT MUCH MORE HOPEFUL. Gomez-Rejon: You want to talk about that? SURE. I WAS STRUCK BY HOW OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH THE PEOPLE WE LOVE CAN CONTINUE – AND DEEPEN – EVEN IN THEIR ABSENCE. When I…

1915 Out Now Blu-ray One hundred years down the line from its inception seems like the perfect time to take another glimpse at DW Griffith’s “mighty spectacle”, a film whose breathtaking technical bravura runs in abject contradiction to its blunderbuss racial stereotyping which, through modern eyes, appears as almost comically regressive. The film takes great pains and almost 90 minutes to build its raft of conditions. The second half then explores the carpetbagging mayhem that ensued after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. As usual with Griffith, a romantic melodrama which develops through wild happenstance is thread through an histrionic epic in which two American families – one northern, one southern – become natural enemies when the civil war breaks out. Subtitled ‘Reconstruction’, the second half proposes a crude thesis regarding…

1960 Out Now Blu-ray There’s a scene in Nagisa Oshima’s second feature, Cruel Story of Youth, in which the youthful couple at the film’s centre are engaging in yet another petty argument. And much like previous arguments, it all ends up with one party repeatedly slapping the other party about the face. (Punching or more full-force pugilism is never preferable to this stinging and demeaning form of physical aggression.) Kawazu Yusuke’s delinquent drifter Kiyoshi beats his girlfriend, Makoto (Kuwano Miyuki), to the floor. She lays on a pile of sand in her checked sky blue summer dress, now desensitised to the splenetic beatings she receives. She stares up at Kiyoshi and he stares back down at her. Then there’s a cutaway shot of a cement mixer. We hold for about…

2002 Out Now Blu-ray There’s pretty much only one thing you need to know in order to live a happy life, and it’s this: never watch the English dub of a Japanese film (or anything else, for that matter). Of course, for every rule, there are always sublime exceptions. One of them is the beloved television series Cowboy Bebop, and the other is the dub that Disney oversaw for the Stateside release of Hiroyuki Morita’s The Cat Returns, in which Elliott Gould voices a stone raven and Tim Curry does his best John Goodman impression as a sociopathic feline king who rides a palanquin and rocks a giant grey moustache. As if that weren’t enough, Peter Boyle assumes the role of a morbidly obese cat named Renaldo Moon, who’s eventually…

It isn’t just the multi-faceted programming at New Horizons that makes it tempting to simply list a string of superlatives by way of description. Such is the cultivation of the ‘festival’ element – with gigs, outdoor screenings and parties every night – the emphasis on celebration proved infectious. Taking place over a sweltering 11 days at the end of July in Wrocław, Poland, it’s a remarkably inclusive and accessible (not to mention affordable) proposition for those keen to catch the Cannes heavy-hitters away from the Côte d’Azur scrum and months ahead of their London debuts. Audiences here take their cinema seriously – and take their serious cinema seriously – with 10am screenings of forgotten Soviet esoterica as packed as the midnight showings of the likes of Gaspar Noé’s Love. With…

- TRAILERS - Police Academy 8: Saddam or Bust! That Darn Cat’s Epcot Adventure, War & Pizza, The Dwindling Clairvoyant - CHERRYPICK - “Is that the sofa from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea you have in your Tiki Room?” - TAGLINE - ‘It has a living room . . . And a dying room.’ - RELEASED - 2003 The author would like to thank the IMDb User Reviews section, of whose entries this review is compiled. The Haunted Mansion, huh? Making rides into movies, huh? Only Disney, with its famous theme rides, could get away with this. Can you imagine making an entire film set on a ferris wheel in a shopping centre parking lot? Would have made a good Warhol film. The words cliché, predictable and tiresome don’t even…