Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 69 i Little White Lies

FILE NO: LWL/69 32-33 SUBJECT: SHARLTO ‘VERN’ COPLEY (DOB: 27 November, 1973) Location: Johannesburg, South Africa REFERENCE: Personally requested by Senior Detective David Jenkins (undercover), editorial development centre, London, UK DATE: 13 February, 1973 ADMINISTRATIVE DATA: THE IRISH STAR OF WHAT RICHARD DID AND SING STREET DESCRIBES THE UNIQUE CHARACTERISTICS OF HIS FREE FIRE CO-STAR, SOUTH AFRICAN ACTOR SHARLTO COPLEY. THE EXAMINATION: 1. [LWLies] Do you remember the first words you spoke upon meeting Sharlto Copley? [Reynor] That’s a fucking weird accent. No, those weren’t my first words... I think I said something along the lines of, err… I can’t really remember actually. You can keep the fucking weird accent thing. 2. When you first met Sharlto, did he compliment you on any of the films you’ve been in? I don’t think Sharlto had seen any…

Directed by JULIA DUCOURNAU Starring GARANCE MARILLIER ELLA RUMPF RABAH NAIT OUFELLA Released 7 APRIL 3 ANTICIPATION. Hmm, transparent shock-buzz from several festivals… 4 ENJOYMENT. …which makes the subtle coming-of-age allegory a pleasant surprise. 5 IN RETROSPECT. Director-to-watch Ducournau delivers horror with plenty of meat on the bone. “I t’s not me.” With nothing in her own wardrobe that conforms to the ‘night club’ dress code imposed by her university seniors, virginal student Justine (Garance Marillier) is trying on the party dress belonging to her older, more experienced sister Alexia (Ella Rumpf ) – but it does not feel like her. It is Justine’s first week at veterinary college, the alma mater of her overprotective parents (Laurent Lucas, Joana Preiss), and the current digs of wayward, rebellious Alexia. So Justine has several big shoes to fill, even…

Directed by ALEX TAYLOR Starring ALEXA DAVIES TALLULAH ROSE HADDON STEVEN ELDER Released 31 MARCH 3 ANTICIPATION. Are we still saying ‘cybergoth’? 2 ENJOYMENT. Tonight I’m gonna party like it’s 2009. On Tumblr. 1 IN RETROSPECT. Why? I f Spaceship was a social networking platform, it would be LiveJournal. Anguished teens with chipped nail polish whisper profound nonsense about rainbows and black holes, from the centrally heated, suburban comfort of their (parent’s) Surrey homes. This debut feature from Alex Taylor is hard to enjoy, least of all due to its prevalence of fluoro body-paint and blacklight. Forced, awkward and fuelled by faux-losophical hot air, Spaceship is superficial delusion as cinema. When ‘goth’ girl Lucidia (Alexa Davies) is seemingly abducted by aliens in a rave-mobile, her archaeologist father Gabriel (Antti Reini) becomes drawn to her beguiling outsider friends.…

Directed by MICHAEL O'SHEA Starring ERIC RUFFIN, CHLOE LEVINE, DANGELO BONNELI Released 21 APRIL T his is what you might call a revisionist vampire movie, in that it is very much like a normal vampire movie but without the eroticism or excitement. Purposefully so. Writer/director Michael O’Shea has chosen to transpose the classic bloodsucker yarn to an inner-city housing project, but there’s little more to it than that. Eric Ruffin’s latchkey teen loner Milo makes for a low-key central protagonist, one with whom you are urged to extend sympathy even while he’s engaging in all manner of extremely wicked business. He skulks around looking like he’s constantly on the verge of tears, and speaks with a soft, neutral pitch redolent of a tranqued-up guidance counsellor. You simply don’t expect him to spend his evenings…

Directed by PETE TRAVIS Starring RIZ AHMED BILLIE PIPER JAMES FLOYD Released 7 APRIL 4 ANTICIPATION. Riz Ahmed as a gumshoe on the streets of London, how could this possibly go wrong? 3 ENJOYMENT. Travis’ London looks and feels right but the story is disappointingly familiar. 3 IN RETROSPECT. The jagged parts of this noir puzzle don’t piece together to make a pleasing whole. T his film offers a depiction of London that looks to the past in order to teach valuable lessons about the future, with Ugandan-Indian gumshoe Tommy Akhtar (Riz Ahmed) as our fearless guide. With a hand-held camera, director Pete Travis pounds the streets of the bustling metropolis, gravitating towards neon lights and drinking in the pouring rain. These visual motifs match the sensibility of classic noir, itself channelled from a script written by…

Directed by LONE SCHERFIG Starring GEMMA ARTERTON SAM CLAFLIN BILL NIGHY Released 21 APRIL 3 ANTICIPATION. Lone Scherfig is a director who runs hot and cold. This one could go either way. 3 ENJOYMENT. The first half is worryingly light, but matters really pick up in the final hour. 4 IN RETROSPECT. Grows into something special, powered forward by Arterton’s charming central turn. D uring those unfortunate times when we are obliged to drop bombs on other countries, we tend to fire up the propaganda machine as a way to justify our aggressions to the home team. Lone Scherfig’s delightful Their Finest, adapted by Gaby Chiappe from Lissa Evans’ 2009 novel, initially appears to trade on the puckish, deceitful language employed by artists attempting to convey a message of hope, false or otherwise. It’s the early 1940s;…

Directed by WILLIAM OLDROYD Starring FLORENCE PUGH, CHRISTOPHER FAIRBANK, COSMO JARVIS Released 28 APRIL T he title of William Oldroyd’s striking debut feature does not refer directly to Shakespeare’s iconic anti-heroine but rather a (likeminded) character from Nikolai Leskov’s 1865 novella, ‘Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District’. Screenwriter Alice Birch relocates the story from Russia to 19th-century Somerset, but this idyllic setting is more stifling than it is relaxing. The film opens on the wedding night of young Katherine (beautifully played by Florence Pugh, the breakout star of Carol Morley’s The Falling), who quickly realises that she has married a man who harbours neither affection nor desire for her. Bored and insulted by his persistent refusal to sleep with her, she fills her long, empty days by acting wilfully sadistically towards the staff on…

Directed by ANNA BILLER Starring SAMANTHA ROBINSON JEFFREY VINCENT PARISE LAURA WADDELL Released 10 MARCH 4 ANTICIPATION. It’s usually a good sign when no one is too sure how to classify a film. 4 ENJOYMENT. The delights of this fully realised world are endless. 4 IN RETROSPECT. As enjoyable on a purely aesthetic level and as a feminist text, this film will be cherished for years to come. D o women make themselves pretty for their own pleasure? Or do they just want to please men, all the better to control them? It’s the former, of course. And yet the concept of female empowerment via self-objectification somehow continues to be confusing to commentators of all backgrounds and genders. Cinema too often has a hard time understanding that women’s desires aren’t always directly related to the concerns of…

P rolific American poet Emily Dickinson lived out her highly introverted life at her family estate in leafy Amherst, Massachusetts, where she died aged 55 following a lengthy battle with Bright’s disease. In a new biography by British director Terence Davies, a career-best Cynthia Nixon eloquently and powerfully conveys her character’s chronic mental and physical anguish – most notably in scenes that required her to act out increasingly violent, uncontrollable convulsions. We found out from Nixon how she drew from personal experience for the role, and why there’s never been a better time to be telling women’s stories. LWLies: Emily Dickinson endured a great deal of emotional and physical pain throughout her life. As an actor, how difficult is that to externalise? Nixon: She’s such a bundle of contradictions and she’s…

Directed by CLAUDE BARRAS Starring GASPARD SCHLATTER SIXTINE MURAT PAULIN JACCOUD Released 5 MAY 3 ANTICIPATION. What is up with that title? 5 ENJOYMENT. Okay, forget the title. 5 IN RETROSPECT. A superlative family film, and one that dares to be different. O h to have been a computer animated flyon- the-wall when the Hawaiian-shirted yo-yos down at the Pixar ranch caught sight of Claude Barras’ miniature stop-motion wonder, My Life as a Courgette. A family film. Animated. Contains an accidental murder within its opening three minutes. You can virtually hear the cocktail weenies falling out of their gaping mouths. This is a story that makes no bones about lunging directly for the jugular when it comes to broaching issues of tremendous social importance. There’s no elaborate metaphors or protective world building. This is animation that dares…

B razil’s Kleber Mendonça Filho used to be a film critic, but his move into the director’s chair has been specucularly successful. Aquarius, about an ageing female music journalist being terorised by property developers, is his follow-up to 2012’s aria of urban paranoia, Neighbouring Sounds. “Some things make you happy about the idea of cinema, and you remember them. Cinema creates fond memories, like when you first saw Raiders of the Lost Ark, for example. But Raiders never inspired me to make film. I didn’t see it at 13 and think, ‘Oh, I really want to be a filmmaker so I can do something like this!’ For me, Raiders is just a happy memory, and nothing more. But John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 is something that actually told me, ‘You…

Directed by MICHAEL CURTIZ Starring JOAN CRAWFORD ANN BLYTH JACK CARSON 1956 OUT NOW Blu-ray T hough director Michael Cutiz will be forever be known as The Dude Who Made Casablanca, this knotty, invigoratingly bleak women’s picture-noir hybrid from 1945, adapted from a novel by the great crime writer James M Cain, remains his masterpiece. Ostensibly a classical murder mystery, with the victim receiving four life-ending cartridges to the chest in the opening scene, the film switches back as suicidal single mother Mildred Pierce (Joan Crawford) offloads her earthly guilt into the friendly ear of a police detective. Despite the film’s rigorously engineered story mechanics, it’s packed with shocking swerves and surprises – to call them “twists” would belie their sensitivity and their believability. It’s a tight genre film that manages to account…

Directed by WALERIAN BOROWCZYK Starring GRAZYNA DLUGOLECKA JERZY ZELNIK OLGIERD LUKASZEWICZ 1975 Released 13 MARCH Blu-ray T here is no woodland-based sexual congress between a renaissanceera damsel and a horny man-beast. And the hoards of naked female clergy are notably absent. In fact, Walerian Borowczyk’s The Story of Sin is one of the director’s most restrained and quietly harrowing films, a last chance saloon before he went on to become a full-on erotic connoisseur with titles such as 1980’s Lulu and 1987’s Emmanuelle 5. The opening scene shows Grazyna Dlugolecka’s lovelorn Ewa in confession, complaining that she feels selfish when men on the street turn to ogle as she walks by. The priest instructs her to repent, before himself getting a good gawp at her backside as she scurries away. This is a story…

Directed by JOHN FORD Starring JAMES STEWART RICHARD WIDMARK LINDA CRISTAL 1961 Released 13 MARCH Blu-ray J ames “Jimmy” Stewart is the actor synonymous with demure, goodhumoured affability – a shining mantle that has been transferred over in modern times to Tom Hanks. It means that when he goes dark, even just a tiny amount, the noxious effect is emphasised ten fold. In this great, late-period John Ford film, he plays a complete bastard, but a lovable one. As docile town marshall Guthrie McCabe, who skims cash from locals for protection, he sits on his porch, supping a chalice of beer, happy as a clam. His old cavalry buddy Jim Gary (Richard Widmark) rides into town and convinces him to come and help with a diplomatic bind: rescuing kidnapped and indoctrinated children from the…

FILE NO: LWL/69 28-29 SUBJECT : ARMIE ‘ORD’ HAMMER (DOB: 28 August, 1986) Location: Los Angeles, California, USA REFERENCE: Personally requested by Senior Detective David Jenkins (undercover), editorial development centre, London, UK DATE: 13 February, 1973 ADMINISTRATIVE DATA: THE SOUTH AFRICAN STAR OF DISTRICT 9 AND CHAPPIE DISCUSSES THE MYRIAD ALPHA MALE MERITS OF HIS FREE FIRE CO-STAR, AMERICAN ACTOR ARMIE HAMMER. THE EXAMINATION: 1. [LWLies] Do you remember the first words you said to Armie when you first met him on the set of Free Fire? [Copley] Erm, I knew him from before, so I think… so it would have been something like, ‘Hey bro, how you doing?!’ 2. When did you meet him the first time? I think it was at a premiere for another film. I wanna say it was… the Danny Boyle film…

The Old School 1. PEDRO GONZALEZ-RUBIO Pedro graduated in 2003 with a PgDip in Filmmaking A mercurial talent born in Belgium to Mexican parents, this filmmaker shot to fame in 2008 with his stunning feature debut, Alamar. The film combines documentary and fiction to tell of a wayward father spending time in a remote fishing hut with his estranged son. Gonzalez-Rubio has gone on to produce an array of work that has visited festivals across the globe, and he has taken the skills learned at LFS and has forged a unique personal style. 2. OLIVER HERMANUS Oliver graduated in 2009 with an MA in Filmmaking This supremely talented South African director sprung fresh from the gates of the LFS with a feature (Shirley Adams) under his arms, which went on…

Directed by JUHO KUOSMANEN Starring JARKKO LAHTI, OONA AIROLA, EERO MILONOFF Released 21 APRIL T his handsome second feature from Juho Kuosmanen is based in part on the true story of a Finnish boxer who briefly achieved national celebrity in the 1960s following a World Featherweight title bout. That Olli Mäki lost the biggest fight of his career to a superior American opponent – and in pretty humiliating fashion at that – is of little interest to the director, and with good reason. Because while The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki could quite easily have been spun (albeit speciously) as a rousing underdog tale, it is more accurately an account of professional sacrifice made for the sake of personal fulfilment. Jarkko Lahti excels in the title role, subtly emphasising Mäki’s innate…

A mid the polite, foreign-language fare you usually catch at the Cannes Film Festival, there’s usually a rogue treat thrown in for genre fans. In 2016, it was Julia Durcournau’s teen body horror, Raw. Here this outspoken first-time director delves under her film’s thick skin. LWLies: If you enter the film’s title into Google, the first result that comes up is a story about someone having a heart attack at a screening. Durcournau: A heart attack? No, it was two people not feeling very well out of a room of 1200 people. It’s really funny that the emphasis was on two people who didn’t feel well when 1198 people were feeling good! But I understand that. It’s a disturbing movie, definitely. One interviewer referred to Raw as a horror film and…

Directed by PARK CHAN-WOOK Starring KIM MIN-HEE HA JUNG-WOO JO JIN-WOONG Released 14 APRIL 4 ANTICIPATION. An erotic thriller from a noted cinematic provocateur. 4 ENJOYMENT. The layers of the satisfying con artist plot keep us on our toes, and the acts are well structured and, yes, punctuated by eroticism. 4 IN RETROSPECT. A genuinely fun blend of sumptuous visuals and a perverse sense of humor. T he Handmaiden is the kind of film where stylised, sumptuous details are paramount to its success. Park Chan-wook’s thriller, is loosely adapted from the 2002 novel ‘Fingersmith’ by Sarah Waters and set in 1930s Japaneseoccupied Korea. It concerns the increasingly provocative and twisting relationship between Lady Hideko (Kim Min-hee), an heiress kept sequestered in a stately home by her pervy uncle, and Sook-hee (Kim Tae-ri), a crafty pickpocket assuming the…

Directed by NICOLAS PESCE Starring KIKA MAGALHAES, OLIVIA BOND, WILL BRILL Released 24 MARCH W hen genre maestro John Carpenter was asked what makes an effective horror film, he pithily answered, “It should be scary.” This may seem reductive, but watching Nicolas Pesce’s insipid The Eyes of My Mother, it’s clear that some directors should make sure they’ve mastered the basics before they try to do something new within the genre. This debut feature is about a girl, Francisca (played by Olivia Bond and Kika Magalhaes), who descends into a life of madness and gruesome violence after witnessing her mother butchered by a crazed travelling salesman (Will Brill). The film is shot in black-and-white and there are plenty of great macabre compositions, including a particularly striking one of a cow’s head on a table.…

Directed by CRISTIAN MUNGIU Starring ADRIAN TITIENI MARIA-VICTORIA DRAGUS LIA BUGNAR Released 17 MARCH 4 ANTICIPATION. A festival favourite with high quality-control, Cristian Mungiu is always one to watch. 3 ENJOYMENT. The low-key subject matter and over-familiar surroundings soften its impact. 4 IN RETROSPECT. The very ordinariness of the material leaves us productively pondering what we might have done in the same situation. W hen a stone hurled by persons unknown crashes through the front window of a respected local doctor’s home, you just know that all is not going to end well in this latest from much-lauded Romanian writer/director Cristian Mungiu. Then again, things always go badly in Romania, it’s one of the defining tenets of the country’s celluloid New Wave, which has made such an impact internationally over the past decade or so. They also…

Directed by SEAN FOLEY Starring JULIAN BARRATT SIMON FARNABY ANDREA RISEBOROUGH Released 5 MAY 3 ANTICIPATION. Low-key British comedies have a tendency to come and go. 4 ENJOYMENT. Just brilliant. Barratt delivers a comedy performance for the ages. 4 IN RETROSPECT. When can we see it again? C inema is littered with tortured true detectives and hard-boiled bad lieutenants, but there’s never been anyone quite like Bruce Mindhorn. The deranged brainchild of writer-stars Julian Barratt and Simon Farnaby, this sublimely silly mock biography of sorts follows washed-up British TV actor Richard Thorncroft (played by Barratt), who we’re introduced to via a crudely-packaged sizzle reel culled from the ’80s heyday of the titular light entertainment police procedural. To describe Mindhorn as Thorncroft’s alter ego is especially accurate because it’s not entirely obvious where one character ends and the…

Directed by MOHAMED DIAB Starring NELLY KARIM HANI ADEL EL SEBAII MOHAMED Released 21 APRIL 3 ANTICIPATION. Going in blind, but the setentirely- in-a-riot-van premise is interesting. 4 ENJOYMENT. Deeply involving and just as harrowing. 4 IN RETROSPECT. A compact thriller with real human consequences. T his film takes place two years after the Tahrir Square protests. The ousted Muslim Brotherhood and the military forces who removed them have taken to the streets, with ordinary citizens who support either side joining the melee. Authorities are finding it increasingly tough to retain a grasp on public order. Clash is the second feature by Egyptian director Mohamed Diab. It is set in the chaotic aftermath of President Morsi’s removal from the Egyptian government, and it takes place over the course of a day and night in 2013. This is…

Directed by ASGHAR FARHADI Starring TARANEH ALIDOOSTI SHAHAB HOSSEINI BABAK KARIMI Released 17 MARCH 5 ANTICIPATION. Solidifying his reputation with the nearly-perfect A Separation, Asghar Farhadi’s work is always worth a look. 3 ENJOYMENT. Can’t quite stick the landing, but a compelling build-up is buoyed by stand-out lead performances. 4 IN RETROSPECT. A thought-provoking relationship drama that lingers long after the credits roll. T he opening moments of Asghar Farhadi’s The Salesman are a salvo against film critics who accuse the director of cleaving too closely to conventional dramatic composition. Still shots of props, lighting, and multi-level stage arrangement of an in-film production of Death of a Salesman is suddenly disrupted by a two-minute tracking shot, breathlessly following middle-class couple Emad and Rana Etesami (Shahab Hosseini and Taraneh Alidoosti, both riveting) as they and their neighbours are…

Directed by THOMAS Q NAPPER Starring JOHNNY HARRIS RAY WINSTONE IAN MCSHANE Released 17 MARCH 3 ANTICIPATION. Another film about a boxing comeback. Surely we’ve seen it all before? 4 ENJOYMENT. Not your standard boxing film, this is a wrenching portrait of an addict. 4 IN RETROSPECT. Packs a surprisingly powerful punch. G reat boxing movies are often stories of broken dreams, missed opportunities and the long road back to redemption, and Jawbone adheres to this classic template. An amateur champion at 16, Jimmy McCabe (Johnny Harris) coulda been a contender, he coulda been somebody, instead of being, “just another boring drunk who had it all in the palm of his hand and pissed it up against a wall,” as his trainer Eddie bluntly puts it. When we’re introduced to Jimmy he is at his lowest ebb.…

Directed by LINO BROCKA Starring HILDA KORONEL BEMBOL ROCO LOU SALVADOR JR 1975-76 Released 20 MARCH Blu-ray I f there was any fibre in your being that thought Manila in the 1970s was a groovy place to hang out, you’d do well to catch this ultramaudlin twofer set in and around the decrepit, crud-caked Filipino capital. The late Lino Brocka was long heralded as one of the region’s foremost film auteurs, and he managed to punch out movies at a rate of about four a year. This vital BFI release contains two early titles: 1975’s Manila in the Claws of Light and 1976’s Insiang, both depressive tales of extreme poverty and both having received the restoration spitshine treatment care of Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation. The former concerns a displaced country boy just trying…

Directed by ROMAN POLANSKI Starring DONALD PLEASENCE FRANÇOISE DORLÉAC LIONEL STANDER 1966 OUT NOW Blu-ray P ick one of your all-time favourite directors, one whose films you tend to adore, and then go about selecting the one you would consider to be the worst. The flop. The runt. The stray piece of garbage. When it comes to the Polish director Roman Polanski, it would obviously be 1986’s unwatchable high seas atrocity, Pirates, but running a close second would be his self-consciously wacky 1966 “comedy”, Cul-de-sac which, as a film, is a purposely tough pill to swallow. Hairless ex-businessman Donald Pleasence and Françoise Dorléac, as a woman who looks like she’s trapped in a Serge Gainsbourg pop video, star as a mis-matched couple living in a renovated 11th century castle on the Northumberland coastline.…

- DIRECTED BY - Joseph Ruben - TRAILERS - Æroflot Blues, The Pollen Count, Shotgun Divorce, Mark Thatcher’s Revs, Technical College! - STARRING - Wesley Snipes Woody Harrelson Jennifer Lopez - CHERRYPICK - “ When I left home this morning I had a pocketful of crackers and asswhoopins. And I’m all out of crackers.” - TAGLINE - ‘If you’re a criminal, stay on the train!’ - RELEASED - 1995 D iscovered in the Stubbie Mountains of New Zealand during the 1760 South Seas expedition of Captain Daniel Bowskills, the Blue-ringed Chiffchaff (Falco ficticius) lives the strangest life known to nature. In its seventh year, the adult ‘chaff migrates not – as in previous years – to the lush wetlands of Bhutan, but to a remote Welsh cliff. There it attaches itself…

FILE NO: LWL/69 30-31 SUBJECT: JACK ‘HARR Y’ REYNOR (DOB: 23 January, 1992) Location: Longmont, Colorado, USA REFERENCE: Personally requested by Senior Detective David Jenkins (undercover), editorial development centre, London, UK DATE: 13 February, 1973 ADMINISTRATIVE DATA: THE AMERICAN STAR OF THE SOCIAL NETWORK AND THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. EXTOLS THE EASY, LAID BACK VIRTUES OF HIS FREE FIRE CO-STAR, IRISH ACTOR JACK REYNOR. THE EXAMINATION: 1. [LWLies] Do you remember the first time you met Jack and the first words you said to him? [Hammer] I met Jack, err... I think it was the first time, I hope it was the first time or else I’m going to be really embarrassed. I wish I could also tell you exactly what he was wearing but I can’t. I think we met at base camp, on the…

Directed by ONUR TUKEL Starring SANDRA OH, ANNE HECHE, ALICIA SILVERSTONE Released 10 MARCH I f this didn’t feel like it was shot in real-time during the cast and crew’s collective, curtailed lunch hour, you can’t help but feel that writer/ director Onur Tukel might have had something here. And yet, the quick, cheap and dirty vibe is fitting for a film that so heartily champions the vulgar expression of power, i.e. smashing someone’s face in as a form of personal therapy. Like an all-female Fight Club retooled as a cracked slapstick comedy, Catfight offers three variations on the same silly story. Wine-quaffing trophy wife Veronica (Sandra Oh) bumps into profoundly aloof artist Ashley (Anne Heche) at a part. Small talk is swiftly dispensed with, an old squabble from their college days is dredged…

Directed by PABLO LARRAÍN Starring GAEL GARCÍA BERNAL LUIS GNECCO PABLO DERQUI Released 7 APRIL 4 ANTICIPATION. I am not jealous / of what came before. 4 ENJOYMENT. Joyful, joyful, joyful / as only dogs know how to be happy. 4 IN RETROSPECT. I learned about life / from life itself, / love I learned in a single kiss W ith his films Tony Manero, Post Mortem and No, director Pablo Larraín mastered the art of talking about his country, Chile, while it was under the rule of Augusto Pinochet, while seldom speaking the despot’s name directly. In the same way that a black hole is an absence of light, only visible from the flickers that surround it, so too is Larraín’s Pinochet intangible but everpresent. The director has taken quite the opposite approach with his two…

“T he biggest studio in Korea green-lit The Handmaiden without any issues. For a Korean film, it’s quite a highbudget work. And it was able to attract three of the biggest stars in Korean cinema. I would say it didn’t come up against any trouble. Because of the film’s sex content, we tried to make it so it wouldn’t be released in a limited capacity. That’s the top censorship band in Korea – it means you don’t have any success. It’s like NC17 in the US. As long as I could make it R-rated or below, I had no restrictions. I didn’t work with censors codes. I made the film as I wanted, edited it as I wanted, then submitted it to the ratings board. Hitchcock used to like to engage…

Directed by JAMES GRAY Starring CHARLIE HUNNAM TOM HOLLAND SIENNA MILLER Released 24 MARCH 5 ANTICIPATION. James Gray goes epic. 3 ENJOYMENT. A work of eyeballmelting craftsmanship. 3 IN RETROSPECT. Beautiful, but skin-deep. A s recounted by David Grann in his devourable 2009 non-fiction bestseller, the story of Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett is one of the great unsolved mysteries in the annals of exploration. Single-minded in his pursuit of an elusive “lost” civilisation, and at odds with contemporary scientific reasoning, Fawcett led a three-man team deep into uncharted Amazon territory before disappearing without a trace in 1925. Grann frames the story as a mystery, positioning his subject as the latest in a long line of what today’s Royal Geographic Society dubs the “Fawcett freaks” – amateur adventurers who succumbed to the lure of an obsession that led…

Directed by KOJI FUKADA Starring TADANOBU ASANO MARIKO TSUTSUI KANJI FURUTACHI Released 5 MAY 4 ANTICIPATION. You had us at ‘Tadanobu Asano’. 4 ENJOYMENT. A quietly tense examination of a family in slow freefall. 4 IN RETROSPECT. Koji Fukada’s formal rhythms are interupted by narrative disharmonies. K oji Fukuda’s Harmonium opens with sounds of the eponymous instrument being played out of tune. Recognising her own shortcomings as a budding musician, young Hotaru (Momone Shinakawa), who is practising for a concert, turns on a metronome to impose a semblance of order on all those bum notes. This is also stands as a metaphor for Hotaru’s family life. Her mother Akie (Mariko Tsutsui), a Protestant, says grace before breakfast and then chats away with Hotaru. Her atheist husband Toshio (Kenji Furutachi), meanwhile, buries himself in his newspaper at the…

Directed by RITESH BATRA Starring JIM BROADBENT, BILLY HOWLE, CHARLOTTE RAMPLING Released 14 APRIL T ime will not allow us to forget our first true love, even if it wasn’t entirely reciprocal. In Ritesh Batra’s The Sense of an Ending, adapted from Julian Barnes’ 2011 novel, a figurative message in a bottle comes bobbing to the shore after decades lost at sea. It reminds irritating bourgeois malcontent Tony Webster (Jim Broadbent) of a girl he once knew, and he becomes obsessed with finding out what she’s up to now. Webster is the sort of guy who signs for a package and ignores the hopeful smiles of the postman. He likes to quaff Merlot with his ex-wife and bicker with his pregnant daughter. Someone has died and he has been left a mysterious document in…

Directed by KATELL QUILLÉVÉRÉ Starring TAHAR RAHIM EMMANUELLE SEIGNER ANNE DORVAL Released 28 APRIL 3 ANTICIPATION. Uh-oh, not another one of those ‘we are all connected’ movies 4 ENJOYMENT. Starts slowly and cautiously, builds into something sublime. 5 IN RETROSPECT. Quillévéré’s best film, and an early high-bar set for French cinema in 2017. T he bitter realities, the crushing contradictions and the euphoric pleasures of the human comedy is a subject that has dogged filmmakers since the youngest days of the medium. Many feel that the late, great French filmmaker Jean Renoir most successfully tapped into this notion of humanism, his poetic, discursive films often translating as earthy observational studies of people honestly reacting to their surroundings and situations. Katell Quillévéré’s superb Heal the Living harks back to this noble and transcendent form of screen storytelling. It…

Directed by TERENCE DAVIES Starring CYNTHIA NIXON JENNIFER EHLE KEITH CARRADINE Released 7 APRIL 5 ANTICIPATION. Our most eagerly-awaited film of the year. 4 ENJOYMENT. The soul is there but the body is sometimes weak. 4 IN RETROSPECT. By focusing on such an ambitious time-span, Davies sacrifices the opportunity to deliver an apt spiritual body blow. A quiet passion trickles through Terence Davies’ eighth feature, starting with the title, forming a tributary around a character, then pooling in the film’s centre, which is poetry itself. When John Goodman screamed, “I’ll show you the life of the mind!” in the Coen brothers’ 1991 film, Barton Fink, they could have been gesticulating towards a volume by Emily Dickinson. In this flighty biopic, the life of the overlooked-in-her-time 19th century American poet is drawn from six biographies and an examination…

Directed by RAOUL PECK Released 7 APRIL 4 ANTICIPATION. James Baldwin is worthy of many documentaries. Let’s hope this one captures the complexities of his life and work. 4 ENJOYMENT. Baldwin’s ideas are evidently understood by the director, who makes them moving and more urgent than ever. 4 IN RETROSPECT. “History is not the past, it is the present.” Essential viewing for our troubled times. I n the credits to Raoul Peck’s documentary I Am Not Your Negro, the words “written by James Baldwin” bring the author, who died in 1987, back to life. It’s as if he had communed with Peck and the pair had worked together on this vital film. In many ways, he truly has. Baldwin is the celebrated black writer and thinker whose work ranged from confrontational, poetic literary fiction to criticism…

Directed by KLEBER MENDONÇA FILHO Starring SONIA BRAGA MAEVE JINKINGS IRANDHIR SANTOS Released 24 MARCH 4 ANTICIPATION. Looking forward to fun-time larks. So clever, so witty, so true. So clever, 4 ENJOYMENT. Looking forward to fun-time larks. So clever, so witty, so true. 4 IN RETROSPECT. Looking forward to fun-time larks. So clever, so witty, so true. So clever, O n a beachside at night, a woman pops a cassette into a car stereo, and her face beams with the anticipation of her three friends’ reaction to Queen’s ‘Another One Bites the Dust’. The speaker-rattling bassline, instantly recognisable within a split second, offers a rude interruption to the peaceful sound of lapping waves. Slowly their heads start bobbing in awkward unison as they make nervous, slightly embarrassed glances at one another. Here, the best-selling single of one…

Directed by TOM HOLLAND Starring CHRIS SARANDON WILLIAM RAGSDALE AMANDA BEARSE 1985 Released 27 MARCH Blu-ray H e definitely didn’t make a big deal out of it, but actor Chris Sarandon featured in two of the greatest pantomime villain roles of the 1980s. The most well known was as gutless ninny Prince Humperdink in Rob Reiner’s The Princess Bride, a pouffyhaired exemplar of the vile fairytale monarch. In 1985, he tore up the neon screen in the highly enjoyable teen horror runaround, Fright Night, in which his character, Jerry Dandrige, answers the question, what would the Fonz have been like if he was a sexually voracious, conniving and irresistible vampire? William Ragsdale’s gawping highschool douchebag Charley Brewster spends too much time in his bedroom, attempting to get past first base with his chirpy girlfriend,…

Directed by LUCHINO VISCONTI Starring HELMUT BERGER ROMY SCHNEIDER TREVOR HOWARD 1973 Released 27 MARCH Blu-ray T he Italian director Luchino Visconti was entering into his ruminative twilight years when he came to make Ludwig, a film whose epic runtime and interest in the salacious court intrigues of Ludwig, the bisexual King of Bavaria, belie a bracing emotional intimacy. The no-expense-spared opulence of a film like The Leopard is still here, but it’s muted and muffled – there is no joy to be taken from physical trinkets, no tragic feeling that a way of life is being lost to the sands of time. Across nearly four hours, the actor Helmut Berger (in the role he’ll likely be remembered for) mutates from a whimsical dandy who exercises his total power with impunity, to a mad-eyed…

Directed by MARTIN SCORSESE Starring ELLEN BURSTYN KRIS KRISTOFFERSON ALFRED LUTTER III 1975 Released 20 MARCH DVD M artin Scorsese isn’t a director known for his love of light comedy. And it would perhaps be disingenuous to refer to Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore as such, even though it is lighter and definitely funnier than, say, Taxi Driver. His early days saw him studying at the Roger Corman school of the genre quickie, but this charming 1974 feature feels like his attempt to forge a bond with the more loose-heeled New Hollywood school. The story of a single mother deciding she wants to follow her dream of becoming a cabaret singer is built around the extraordinary central relationship between Ellen Burstyn’s Alice and her gawky screen son, Tommy, played by Alfred Lutter III. God…