Innholdsfortegnelse for November - December 2015 i Little White Lies

THE SOCIAL NETWORK (2010) WORDS BY SIMRAN HANS David Fincher is interested in men. He is fascinated by the idea of fraternity; his films look at how men relate to other men at home (The Game), at school (The Social Network), at work (Se7en, Zodiac, House of Cards), even after work (Fight Club). There’s an intelligent bro-ishness to Fincher’s filmography, which wades through the mulch of contemporary masculinity, trying to make sense of it all with forensic curiosity. Yes, he is interested in men. Aaron Sorkin’s script for 2010’s The Social Network states that Facebook (working title ‘Face Mash’) was born out of the bitter break-up between Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) and girlfriend Erica Albright (Rooney Mara). Yet, the film’s central break-up scene isn’t that famous, acerbic opening exchange. It’s…

Directed by TERENCE DAVIES, Starring AGYNESS DEYN, PETER MULLAN, KEVIN GUTHRIE Released 4 DECEMBER 5 ANTICIPATION. A new film by Britain’s greatest living director. Yes please. 5 ENJOYMENT. An emotional bolt to the heart. 5 IN RETROSPECT. Agyness Deyn’s performance is one for the ages. Agyness Deyn is the star of Terence Davies’ rhapsodic Sunset Song. As Chris Guthrie, she inhabits the soul of this beleaguered waif. It’s a sensational performance: generous, tender and discreetly controlled. It’s due to her ethereal presence that we are plausibly transported back to the rolling farmlands of early 20th century Scotland. She is Lilian Gish in The Wind or Way Down East, her captivating innocence made to stand firm while under heavy fire. As she weeps, we weep with her. As it should be. The film sees her rebuffing the torments…

Directed by FRANCESCO CLERICI Released 20 NOVEMBER One to file next to such wispy, ambient documentaries as Philip Gröning’s Into Great Silence and Gideon Koppel’s Sleep Furiously, this fascinating miniature by Francesco Clerici chronicles the creation of a life-sized bronze sculpture of a dog in tired repose. The twist is that the men (and one woman, that we see) employed by the Milanese workshop at which this “event” occurs strictly abide by a production process originally devised during the 4th century BC. Yes, there’s the odd air gun usage to remove loose debris, or a blow torch to attain a strong directional flame, but everything else is as it was. It begins with layers of red wax carefully manipulated by a sculptor into the shape of the mutt. Then an exoskeleton of…

Directed by ROB REINER, Starring MEG RYAN, BILLY CRYSTAL, CARRIE FISHER Released 11 DECEMBER 3 ANTICIPATION. Her: “You’ve never seen it?” Me: “Um…” 4 ENJOYMENT. Cynically lovely and a whip smart archetype for the modern rom-com. 4 IN RETROSPECT. Despite being copied countless times, it still feels fresh and brimming with spirit. We all have blind spots, both when it comes to cinema and love. After someone new enters your life, these omissions can be revealed in stunning fashion. So goes my experience with Nora Ephron and Rob Reiner’s wonderfully alive and breakneck rom-com When Harry Met Sally…. Much to the chagrin of my new person, I’d never seen this iconic, game-changing genre film. “How is that possible?” she asked with the same stalwart persistence as Meg Ryan’s Sally. I was speechless, very unlike Billy Crystal’s verbose…

Directed by PAUL WEITZ, Starring LILY TOMLIN, JULIA GARNER. MARCIA GAY HARDEN Released 11 DECEMBER 3 ANTICIPATION. The closing night film at Sundance – could be really good or really cutesy. 3 ENJOYMENT. Tomlin is very funny, and Garner has a sweet presence. The two work well together. 3 IN RETROSPECT. A fun way to spend an hour and 19 minutes, if not a major work. Grandma is an easy movie to like, running a fleet 79 minutes and providing a welldeserved showcase for Lily Tomlin. Yet despite its handling of potentially controversial material, it doesn’t leave much of an impression. The plot is simple: a journey from point A to point B with quirky stops along the way. Elle Reid (Tomlin) is the grandma, a brusque lesbian poet who doesn’t suffer fools gladly, and whose granddaughter,…

Directed by JOHN CROWLEY, Starring SAOIRSE RONAN, EMORY COHEN, DOMHNALL GLEESON Released 6 NOVEMBER 3 ANTICIPATION. Acclaimed novel, solid casting, safe pair of hands behind the camera. Looks decent, if not necessarily thrill-a-minute. 3 ENJOYMENT. Ronan is mesmerising and it’s a story worth telling, but where’s the passion? 3 IN RETROSPECT. There’s a basic emotional truth about the material which stays with you. On screen she’s been a vampire, a dead girl, a trained teenage killer, and possessed by an alien being. So is there anything normal about Saoirse Ronan? Right from the moment we first saw her at age 13 in Atonement as the worryingly precocious younger sister at the big house, she’s always seemed someone set apart, which makes playing an ordinary Irish village girl in this adaptation of Colm Tóibín’s noted novel the sort…

Directed by PHILLIP BARIBEAU, Starring BEN MASTERS, BEN THAMER, JONNY FITZSIMONS Released 27 NOVEMBER 4 ANTICIPATION. Wild wild horses, couldn’t drag me away. 2 ENJOYMENT. Like five hours of Discovery Channel shoehorned into a two-hour movie. 2 IN RETROSPECT. The gift shop DVD from an exciting horse farm. Ben Masters, Ben Thamer, Jonny Fitzsimons and Thomas Glover are the young men in the documentary Unbranded, who tell us proudly they will travel a pack of wild mustangs 3,000 miles from Mexico to the Canadian border. They’ll take these adopted horses through Texas, Arizona, Idaho and Montana: “mountains, deserts, canyons – gnarly country.” But what they don’t quite tell us is why. In a sense, it’s self-explanatory. The American frontiersman has always had a kinship with the horse, a subtext in countless westerns, occasionally foregrounded in something like…

Directed by DAVID EVANS, Starring PHILIPPE SANDS, NIKLAS FRANK, HORST VON WÄCHTER Released 20 NOVEMBER One thing that most sane people do if the subject comes up in serious conversation is distance themselves from the Nazis. That’s the default position. Nazis equals wrong. My Nazi Legacy studies a fascinating exception to this rule and in doing so explores the limits of rational debate, the binds of family loyalty and the network of subjective interpretations that create an individual’s viewpoint. Horst von Wächter and Niklas Frank are the sons of dead, high-ranking Nazi officials whose signatures are present on paperwork sentencing Jewish prisoners to death. Horst [son of Otto] has made a game out of finding logical loopholes that enable him to sympathise with and so excuse his father’s deeds. Niklas Frank [son of Hanz…

Directed by DANNY BOYLE, Starring MICHAEL FASSBENDER, KATE WINSLET, SETH ROGEN Released 13 NOVEMBER 3 ANTICIPATION. Gissa Jobs. Go on, gis it. 3 ENJOYMENT. Jobs’ job lot on jibber-jabber. 2 IN RETROSPECT. Jobs for the boys. Although the co-authors of Steve Jobs have worked across various genres in long careers, neither have monkeyed significantly with their signature moves. Director Boyle is known for his energetic, whiz-bang formal maximalism, generally appropriate for stories about drug-addled Scots (Trainspotting), or zombies marauding through London (28 Days Later…), but less so for depicting a trapped climber forced to snip off his own arm (127 Hours). In both television (The West Wing, The Newsroom) and film (The Social Network), screenwriter Aaron Sorkin has pioneered a brand of hyper-caffeinated, walk-andtalk ear-bending that’s left scores of American donkeys lamenting the loss of their hind…

Anovitiate in the rarified stable of directors who get to make a Pixar movie, Pete Sohn cut his teeth at the studio as maker of the delightful short feature, Partly Cloudy, which played at the top end of Pete Docter’s whimsical 2009 film, Up. With The Good Dinosaur, he steps up to the plate for his feature debut, telling the story of a young dino named Arlo who is separated from his family and has to navigate his way home. LWLIES: IS THE GOOD DINOSAUR PIXAR’S ANSWER TO THE CLASSIC AMERICAN WESTERN? Sohn: It’s almost like Old Yeller. It’s not a western, but it takes place in that frontier era. But, there’s voice work by Sam Elliott in there, and that’s a definite nod to cowboys of a certain time.…

Directed by GASPAR NOÉ, Starring AOMI MUYOCK, KARL GLUSMAN, KLARA KRISTIN Released 20 NOVEMBER 4 ANTICIPATION. French cinema’s most notorious provocateur returns with an inevitable foray into the realm of 3D sex. 3 ENJOYMENT. For better or worse, indulges in all the expected delights, but evinces a newfound sense of humor and humanity. 3 IN RETROSPECT. Surprisingly tender, Love finds Noé finally having a little fun at his own expense. Director Gaspar Noé’s reputation has been built on one what one might generously deem the less dignified aspects of the human condition. If the Argentine-born filmmaker is by this point a “name” in international cinema, it’s in the most literal sense, as a headline-generating, controversy-stoking star of his own conception. Having already pushed the boundaries of violence, misogyny, and drug abuse (among other delightful subjects) in such…

Directed by TOM BROWNE, Starring DANIEL CERQUEIRA, JULIA FORD, RICHARD JOHNSON Released 27 NOVEMBER 3 ANTICIPATION. It’s been a year since the film debuted, but it’s still very well liked. 4 ENJOYMENT. A conscientiously unsentimental tale of a man drifting away from his parents. 3 IN RETROSPECT. A superior Brit debut. Had, in some wackadoo alternative universe, Yasujiro Ozu directed a remake of Withnail & I, it might have looked a tiny bit like this impressive autobiographical debut feature from Tom Browne. Radiator sees Daniel (Daniel Cerqueira), a mild-mannered teacher from London, having to briefly decamp to Penrith to stay over with his daffy, screw-loose parents. Father Leonard (Richard Johnson) stubbornly barks order from a grubby sofa and wallows in a pit of his own filth. Meanwhile his doting doormat wife, Maria (Gemma Jones), cheerily tends to…

Directed by JOHN FORD, Starring JOHN WAYNE, MAUREEN O’HARA, VICTOR MCLAG'EN 1952 Released 23 NOV Blu-ray There are those who think that John Ford’s occasional cinematic forays outside of the USA resulted in heavily romanticised depictions of far-flung locales which muted even a light concession to realism in favour of embracing vulgar stereotypes. Looking on at the male voice choirs that crop up in his deserving 1941 Oscar-winner, How Green Was My Valley, it’s hard to argue against that observation. Yet this particular rendering of foreign cultures doesn’t preclude the films from being heart-racing marvels on their own terms. See also 1952’s roistering pastoral, The Quiet Man, in which John Wayne’s disgraced prizefighter, Sean Thornton, returns home to his Irish hometown after an exile in America to ingratiate himself once more into the quaint…

Directed by TED WILDE, Starring HAROLD LLOYD, ANN CHRISTY, BERT WOODRUFF 1928 Released 8 DEC DVD & Blu-ray Harold Lloyd’s final silent feature before he resigned to the pressures of the sound era, Speedy may not be capped with a sequence as epoch-defining as the clock climax from Safety Last!, but it endures as the bespectacled gagman’s most coherent and consistently creative piece of work, and perhaps also his most forward-thinking. “Jane Dillon, in love with life, her gran-daddy, and someone else.” So reads an early intertitle in a silent film that has a ton of fun with them throughout (Speedy is strangely quotable for a silent film). Jane’s gran-daddy happens to be the owner of the last horse-drawn streetcar in the city, a business that he’s constantly fighting to protect against the business…

Directed by WILLIAM FAIRMAN, MAX GOGARTY Released 4 DECEMBER For documentary makers, having subjects cry on camera must be some kind of theoretical Holy Grail. Actually being able to then build a cogent film around those tears – to actually supply them with ample and rigorous context, to explore their meaning – is another matter entirely. Directors William Fairman and Max Gogarty achieve this feat with gusto in their dynamic and powerful work, Chemsex, which explores a dangerous new fashion trend within certain sectors of the gay community. The title refers to a process by which gay men ingest hard drugs (often intravenously) prior to sexual trysts as a way to stimulate and prolong the orgasm. Though short-term gain is actually becoming long-term loss, as the entire subculture is revealed as one…

Directed by OWEN HARRIS, Starring NICHOLAS HOULT, ED SKREIN, ROSANNA ARQUETTE Released 6 NOVEMBER 3 ANTICIPATION. Never really shone to Nicholas Hoult, but he earned big points for Mad Max: Fury Road. 1 ENJOYMENT. A film that wants you to hate it and achieves that aim. 1 IN RETROSPECT. Will likely wear its one-star reviews as a badge of honour. Owen Harris’ Kill Your Friends is a film which dares the viewer to utterly despise its every frame. Its raison d’être is to evoke unadulterated contempt – of people, of places, of trends, of art, of business, of everyone and everything. Its cocksure cynicism is precision primed to alienate. It’s a film which scribbles a chalk penis on the back of your jacket, nudges you into a job interview and then Periscopes the event from the corridor.…

Directed by SEAN BAKER, Starring MYA TAYLOR, KITANA KIKI RODRIGUEZ, KARREN KARAGULIAN Released 13 NOVEMBER 4 ANTICIPATION. Word on the street is it’s as intense as Crank. 4 ENJOYMENT. A dazzling bauble of melodrama and fast paced merriment. 4 IN RETROSPECT. It’s a Christmas miracle! Sean Baker’s fifth feature film opens on two transgender sex workers sharing a doughnut on the morning of Christmas Eve in a shop on the intersection of Santa Monica and Highland in LA. It’s a beautifully judged moment that introduces these tempestuous characters in an intimate and energetic manner as they gossip and talk about their love lives. It is also the calm before the storm, with Alexandra (Mya Taylor) accidentally revealing to her best friend Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) that her boyfriend and pimp Chester (one of Baker’s regular players James…

Directed by GABRIEL CLARKE, JOHN MCKENNA Released 20 NOVEMBER Steve McQueen: The Man and Le Mans serves two purposes: it’s a love letter to a man the director clearly admires, and it is an examination of a failed vision, of an auteur who couldn’t get on the same page with the studios, and whose failure, like that of all ‘great men’, was noble. It’s a tricky balancing act, and the film fails to strike an even tone throughout. By this point, McQueen is a myth; shorthand for a type of masculinity that, depending on your gender politics, is either sadly lost or thankfully left behind. The film definitely belongs to the former camp, and McQueen is our hero in the beginning and he remains so to the end. However, it is not…

Directed by SANNA LENKEN, Starring REBECKA JOSEPHSON, AMY DEASISMONT, HENRIK NORLÉN Released 27 NOVEMBER This impressively detailed Swedish anorexia drama is told from the perspective of Stella (Rebecka Josephson) whose older sister Katja (Amy Deasismont) is a competitive figure skater. Young Stella is the picture of age-appropriate whimsy with her round face and mischevious tendencies. Through her eyes, Katjaʼs disordered symptoms at first seem like weird sisterly behaviour but they stack up until even this child can see that mental illness has snatched the body that once housed her flesh and blood. Lenken does not glamorise anorexia. Katja is beautiful and talented and the eating disorder erodes rather than enhances these qualities. We hear vomit pelting a toilet bowl and the panic that rises every meal-time. We see an affectionate tease of a sister…

Directed by NICHOLAS HYTNER, Starring ALEX JENNINGS, MAGGIE SMITH, JIM BROADBENT Released 13 NOVEMBER 2 ANTICIPATION. Looks like the cosy essence of middlebrow British cinema. 3 ENJOYMENT. A complex relationship drama dressed as a jolly biopic. 4 IN RETROSPECT. Bequeaths a respect for oddball muses and their secret stories. In the early 1970s, playwright Alan Bennett became acquainted with an ageing female hobo who parked her van on his posh Camden crescent and stayed there for 15 years. He channelled this experience into a comic memoir which became a play which has now become a film. The directorial style of National Theatre don, Nicholas Hytner, mimics Bennett’s cagey mode of being. On the surface, The Lady in the Van is mild to a fault but – like its author – it is powered by sharp observations about…

Directed by DAVID LEAN, Starring CELIA JOHNSON, TREVOR HOWARD, STANLEY HOLLOWAY Released 6 NOVEMBER 5 ANTICIPATION. It’s Brief Encounter for god’s sake. 5 ENJOYMENT. Perfect parts include: the script, the lead performances, the steam trains, the music, the supporting performances, those accents, the bloody Refreshment Room, the end, the beginning, the middle. 5 IN RETROSPECT. An irresistible romance with glorious old world values.v Brief Encounter is a majestic locomotive that steams deservedly among the immortals of cinema. For as long as people yearn for the incompatible goals of stable monogamy and spontaneous romance, David Lean’s black-and-white masterpiece will be as vital as tracks to the trains that roar across them. The plot and themes hardly need retracing. Brief Encounter is a set text for any cinephile, homaged implicitly in Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love,…

Directed by TOM HOOPER, Starring EDDIE REDMAYNE, ALICIA VIKANDER, AMBER HEARD Released 1 JANUARY, 2016 2 ANTICIPATION. They don’t call him Tom “The Antichrist” Hooper for nothing, but Vikander demands our attention. 4 ENJOYMENT. Hooper breaks through in spite of himself, telling a beautifully nuanced and humane story of love, loss, and gender identity. 4 IN RETROSPECT. Redmayne and Vikander, along with the film’s dusky flourishes, allow The Danish Girl to reach beyond the awards it was designed to win. The Danish Girl may play fast and loose with most of the facts, but Tom Hooper’s heavily fictionalised and uncharacteristically watchable film about Einar Wegener — one of the first people to undergo male to female sex reassignment surgery — is so powerful because it preserves the crucial truth that its protagonist was neither a guinea pig…

Directed by ANDRÉ DE TOTH, Starring ROBERT RYAN, BURL IVES, TINA LOUISE 1959 Released 7 DEC Blu-ray There’s a scene near the front end of André de Toth’s snowbound western, Day of the Outlaw, in which the man who is later revealed as the film’s hero, Blaise Starrett (Robert Ryan), sits quietly at a table. There are other people in the room – his soon-to-be soused riding partner (Nehemiah Persoff ) and other hangers on, as well as Helen Crane (Tina Louise), the gorgeous wife of Blaise’s enemy, Hal. As people talk among themselves, Ryan just sits and looks down at the table, his eyes locked on the wood, signalling to all around him that he has nothing to say to them, and that he’s (not-so) politely waiting for them to get the hell…

Directed by AKIRA KUROSAWA, Starring TAKASHI SHIMURA, NOBUO KANEKO, SHIN'ICHI HIMORI 1952 Released 23 NOV Blu-ray “Life is brief, fall in love, maidens, before the crimson bloom fades from your lips.” Simply put – and Ikiru is simplicity itself – no other film has so vividly articulated the essence of what it means to be alive, and it’s likely that no other film ever will. One of two features that Akira Kurosawa made between Rashomon and Seven Samurai, this potentially maudlin melodrama about a bureaucrat who learns that he has terminal stomach cancer is worth the legion of sentimental knockoffs it continues to inspire. Takashi Shimura, the only actor whose importance to Kurosawa’s legend is on par with that of Toshirô Mifune, stars as human cog Kanji Watanabe, a man whose life is as…

Directed by ALAIN RESNAIS, Starring CLAUDE RICH, OLGA GEORGES-PICOT, ANOUK FERJAC 1968 Released 10 NOV Blu-ray & DVD “With time, the hurt of separation loses its real limits. With time, the desired body will soon disappear, and if the desiring body has already ceased to exist for the other, then what remains is a wound, disembodied.” All too eager to escape the pain of his present, a man is lead inside a fleshy pink machine that resembles a brain (from the outside) and a womb (from the inside), undeterred by one scientist’s admission that a previous trial had been conducted with a mouse, but its success had been impossible to determine since the rodent suffered no obvious harm. Fresh off a failed suicide attempt, the otherwise unremarkable Claude Ridder (Claude Rich) is intercepted by…

There’s nothing better than when you sense that a film festival has consumed a city. And not in some crass blanket marketing campaign, like omnipresent, self-agrandising banners placed by a fascist dictator who is trying to force his brand down the collective gullet. But an ineffable sense that people are being turned on to this thing entirely of their own volition – that the take over is silently ideological. It gets under your skin. In my experience of the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival, the toughest screening to get into wasn’t one of the hulking Hollywood behemoths such as Ridley Scott’s The Martian or Jean-Marc Vallée’s delightful Demolition. Nor was it some white hot indie property such as Ben Wheatley’s feverishly anticipated JG Ballard adaptation, High-Rise, or the sensational return…

The words “I loveyou” burn like a fiery sun at the centre of Todd Haynes’ Carol, all other emotional matters orbiting around them like gorgeous debris. They are vital and finite, an acceptno-substitutes utterance which can as easily be the start as the end point for human relations. In cinema, “I love you” is used sparingly, but often innovatively by writers who play on its world-shaking ramifications. What does it mean to the person who dares speak this sanctified phrase? And what about those on the receiving end? It can be passionate. It can be hurtful. It can be humorous. It can be laced with sorrow. It is a giver of life and of death. It’s honesty and it’s lies. It’s pleasure and it’s pain. It’s character-building and embarrassing. This…

Directed by BARNEY DOUGLAS Released 13 NOVEMBER This nobly intentioned documentary from Barney Douglas combines the story of a group of progressive youngsters out to challenge pernicious customs in their Kenyan village, with a love letter to the game of cricket. Sonyonga is the conscientious young captain of the Maasai Warriors cricket team, who respects the elders of his village for their longstanding relationship with the land but disagrees with their practise of female genital mutilation (FGM). He believes cricket can play an important role in educating the elders, who are initially introduced arguing that a “Ntuppa” (uncircumcised girl) is harder to marry off. Their unenlightened claims on women’s rights are intercut throughout the first half of the film with insights sourced from other residents of the village who are opposed to…

Directed by CORIN HARDY, Starring JOSEPH MAWLE, BOJANA NOVAKOVIC, MICHAEL MCELHATTON Released 13 NOVEMBER Outside of the Leprechaun series, Irish mythology has been rather underserved by genre-inclined filmmakers. With his debut feature, backwoods horror The Hallow, director and co-writer Corin Hardy goes some way to trying to rectify this, even if the end result isn’t completely successful, nor as psychologically resonant as the best of legends. Moving his wife Clare (Bojana Novakovic) and baby son Finn from London to a remote mill house by Irish woodlands, Adam (Joseph Mawle) is tasked by his employers to survey the local forests for land clearance, much to the chagrin of the unfriendly locals (Mawle’s Game of Thrones alumni Michael McElhatton) and a one-scene policeman (Michael Smiley, delivering trailer-ready exposition with gusto). They think the family’s trespassing on…

Directed by S CRAIG ZAHLER, Starring KURT RUSSELL, RICHARD JENKINS, PATRICK WILSON Released 11 DECEMBER 3 ANTICIPATION. The Descent with cowboys. 3 ENJOYMENT. Tombstone with cannibals. 3 IN RETROSPECT. A precariously balanced, genre-literate oddity with something to say. The hook of Bone Tomahawk – Kurt Russell fighting cannibals in a frontier town – may suggest a comical romp, but novelist and first-time director S Craig Zahler’s ambitions are far loftier than low stakes revivalist exploitation. It’s an unpredictable, offbeat picture, which places the mythical notion of the West at the point of convergence between horror and the western. Zahler shows himself to be an adroit navigator of both genres, and Bone Tomahawk is at its best when it exploits the common ground between the two. The story concerns local sheriff Franklin Hunt (Russell) and his…

Directed by SCOTT COOPER, Starring JOHNNY DEPP, BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH, DAKOTA JOHNSON Released 27 NOVEMBER 3 ANTICIPATION. Is this the good Johnny Depp movie we’ve been promised for so long? 2 ENJOYMENT. Hells no. 2 IN RETROSPECT. A compendium of dull gangster shenanigans which shirks hard reality at every turn. James “Whitey” Bulger began his criminal career at the tender age of 14, when he was arrested and charged with larceny; Black Mass, Scott Cooper’s stultifyingly anaemic biopic, begins in 1975, well after the time he served in Alcatraz. We know that the film is set (and was, commendably, shot) in Boston, because the word “Southie” (Bulger’s neighbourhood terrain) is said approximately as many times as “fuck” is in The Big Lebowski – the film generally takes similarly clunky pains to convince us of its veracity. And yet…

Directed by DAVID SINGTON Released 13 NOVEMBER An American man of about 50, visible from about the shoulders upward, orates the story of his life. He does so with a theatrical flair, the words coming to him very naturally, as do fine descriptions of very specific moments. He can recall gestures, colours, sounds and smells from decades past. His particular skill for talking and telling makes you ponder as to whether this is a story that he’s told many times before. Or, maybe it’s a script that he’s memorised word for word, nuance for nuance, beat for beat. The man’s name is Nick Yarris and he is telling the story of spending 20 years on death row for a crime he did not commit. There’s the heartbreaking notion that this is a…

Directed by STEVEN SPIELBERG, Starring TOM HANKS, MARK RYLANCE, ALAN ALDA Released 27 NOVEMBER 4 ANTICIPATION. A new Spielberg film is always cause for celebration, but his last Tom Hanks joint was The Terminal. 4 ENJOYMENT. Part spy story, part chamber piece, all gripping. 4 IN RETROSPECT. As a Cold War film, it’s strong. As a window into Spielberg’s mind, it’s essential. If daddy issues were the unifying motif of Steven Spielberg’s early films, his later work has been defined by an obsessive preoccupation with the value of a single human life, the peerless populist greying into a more philosophical matrix of concerns. How many soldiers are worth putting in harm’s way in order to save Matt Damon? How many murdered Olympians are worth decades of escalating reprisals? How many Jews can a gold ring buy from…

Directed by LISA IMMORDINO VREELAND Released 11 DECEMBER 3 ANTICIPATION. This Guggenheim is ripe for a reappraisal. 4 ENJOYMENT. A hoot from start to finish. 4 IN RETROSPECT. Wonderfully warts and all. “Because of her lack of beauty she was never going to make it as a siren,” offers one bitchy (male) commentator when asked what made the late Peggy Guggenheim gravitate towards the accumulation of art. This outrageously entertaining, quick-fire film boasts the rat-a-tat rhythm and the lust for life of a screwball comedy, as it introduces us to a woman who rose above the sneering, and carved out a name for herself as a creative patron, voracious lover and bon vivant. Lisa Immordino Vreeland follows the fascinating Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel with a wellspun, energetically edited yarn that’s in part…

On Monday 5 October 2015, the world lost one its most remarkable film artists. The news of Chantal Akerman’s death sent melancholic ructions through the film community at large, as many were forced to accept that her most recent work – the brilliant, brusingly intimate No Home Movie – was to exist furthermore as her untimely swansong. Some might say that Akerman was one of the great Belgian directors. They might say that she was one of the great female directors. They might even say she was one of the key innovators of a brand of fastidious, slow-moving art cinema which bridged a gap between the world of conceptual art and film. She was all of those things, but most of all she was one of the great directors, someone…

Directed by GUY MADDIN, Starring UDO KIER, MATHIEU AMALRIC, ARIANE LABED Released 11 DECEMBER 4 ANTICIPATION. You know what you’re in for with Guy Maddin. The question is how crazy will it be. 4 ENJOYMENT. This is a whole bathtub full of crazy. In a good way. 4 IN RETROSPECT. A cinematic cleansing like no other. Hello, I’m Marv,” a white-haired, bespectacled man (Louis Negin) says direct to camera, his half-open robe hanging at a louche angle over his otherwise naked body, near the beginning of Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson’s The Forbidden Room. “Today we’re going to discuss baths.” They are worth discussing. For as we lie in the bathtub, there is a collision of grime and cleanliness, of expiatory purification and bare-assed sexuality. The natural stench of our body’s odours and emissions is gradually wiped…

Directed by JACQUES RIVETTE, Starring JEAN-PIERRE LÉAUD, BULLE OGIER, MICHAEL LONSDALE 1971-81 Released 30 NOV Blu-ray On the new US Blu-ray edition of Jacques Rivette’s 1971 cinematic monolith, Out 1, the distributors have included the line, “The Holy Grail of modern French cinema” on the box cover. For once, such sentiment cannot be discounted as hyperbole – this really is a movie that has, for too long, been nearly impossible to see. That might, in part, be down to its gigantic runtime of 12 hours and 55 minutes spread over eight episodes. Or, that the only print with English subtitles had recently gone walkies. But now the veil finally drops and we all have the opportunity to watch this peculiar, rambling masterwork from a true-blue visionary of cinema. The film is loosely inspired by…

Directed by VOJTECH JASNÝ, Starring VLASTIMIL BRODSKÝ, RADOSLAV BRZOBOHATÝ, VLADIMÍR MENSÍK 1969 Released 23 NOV DVD Laughter in the face of political ignominy is a broad conceit adopted by numerous members of the so-called “Czech New Wave”, as seen in films like Milos Forman’s 1967 satire of civic authority, The Firemen’s Ball, and Vera Chytilová’s kaleidoscopic howl of free-form anarchofeminism, Daisies, from 1966. Vojtech Jasný aggressively bittersweet All My Good Countrymen was produced during the “Prague Spring” of 1968 – the months preceding the Russian occupation of Czechoslovakia – and charts the seismic shifts in agrarian farming practices which were foisted upon a people who were happy with the old ways. From the off, it’s clear that, despite their faults and foibles, Jasný has a profound respect for the working classes of his country,…

Directed by CARLO LIZZANI, Starring ROBERT HOFFMANN, GIAN MARIA VOLONTÉ, CLAUDIO CAMASO 1966 Released 24 NOV Blu-ray & DVD The Black Mass of ’60s-era Milan, Carlo Lizzani’s schlocky truecrime saga about doomed gangster Luciano Lutring is hardly seen as a genre classic (or at all), but the good folk over at Arrow Video saw something in this unpolished gem, and have rescued it from the brink of oblivion with this rather lavish special edition. Most notable for its relatively subtle Ennio Morricone score (one of sixteen he wrote in 1966), the rough and rambunctious Wake Up and Kill is built around an anti-hero so unlikable he makes Whitey Bulger look like Donnie Brasco. As played by Austrian actor Robert Hoffman, Lutring is an unrepentant sociopath who’s addicted to a life of crime. Lizzani’s film…

“Fischiare” is the Italian word “to express vocal disapproval”. But the manner in which people do so (and by “people” we refer to a very small minority of critics at the Venice Film Festival) is with a rather less silvery “boo”. Fischiare sounds pleasant and sibilant, like something you might do for compliments or a cooking technique involving snapping butter in a saucepan; “boo” is the noise of a rude baby. And yet the world’s oldest Mostra del Cinema is famous for its booing, often due to the “wrong” films getting the treatment: Pierrot Le Fou, The Master, Under The Skin, Birth (Venice clearly does not heart Jonathan Glazer), to name a few. But I like those films. I’m not so much a fan of, say, To The Wonder, The…