Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 70 i Little White Lies

My late father Delton Anderson was a Vietnam platoon extra in Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 film Full Metal Jacket. Acting was always one of my father’s hobbies, but definitely a huge passion that stemmed from his love of film, and during his life he popped up as an extra in many independent titles including Stephen Frears’ My Beautiful Launderette. His day job as a London black cab driver led him to driving famous figures from the acting world, and he would often end up engaging in conversation about their acting work rather than their fame. He never once asked for an autograph. My father was already a huge fan of the cult and independent filmmakers of the time and would religiously watch their new works during release week. He was excited to get…

Directed by BRUNO DUMONT Starring FABRICE LUCHINI JULIETTE BINOCHE VALERIA BRUNI TEDESCHI Released 16 JUNE 3 ANTICIPATION. ‘A Bruno Dumont comedy’ still sounds odd… 4 ENJOYMENT. Pratfalls, cannibalism and levitation – there’s something for everyone. 4 IN RETROSPECT. Slack Bae. Whatever happened to Bruno Dumont? After seven films that established his reputation as one of the most uncompromising and provocative filmmakers on the arthouse circuit, his 2014 miniseries P’tit Quinquin was a bewildering change of pace. It still looked and felt like a Dumont film, but the dour tone of his previous work had shifted into a lighter mode, and he displayed an unexpected gift for eccentric comedy. P’tit Quinquin was something truly unique, a film that seemed to act as both a parody of his own ultra-serious work and an…

Directed by ALBERT SERRA Starring JEAN-PIERRE LÉAUD, PATRICK D'ASSUMÇAO, MARC SUSINI Released JULY TBC The sight of the legendary French actor Jean-Pierre Leaud puckering his lips, attempting to produce saliva in his dried-out gullet, really is something to behold. He resembles a gone-to-seed hound dog attempting to retain the vapours of life force, but perhaps knows that he’s not long for this Earth. Cocky spaniard Albert Serra returns with the wonderful The Death of Louis XIV and, to an almost comic degree, it abides by the promise of that morose title. Leaud himself dons a series of ever-more-outlandish and gravity defying poodle wigs as the venerated “Sun King”, waiting in his velvet-draped chambers to be enveloped by the infinite. But there is the suggestion that he is so accepting of his status as…

Directed by AKI KAURISMÄKI Starring SHERWAN HAJI SAKARI KUOSMANEN KATI OUTINEN Released 26 MAY 4 ANTICIPATION. Another slow-cooked treat from deadpan maestro, Aki Kaurismäki. 4 ENJOYMENT. Who knew that observing the life of a migrant on the streets of Helsinki could be so joyful? 4 IN RETROSPECT. Pure, unadulterated cinematic pleasure. Kaurismäki is one of the greats. This might just be the most drolly poetic response to what has been dubbed the ‘refugee crisis’ by journalists and political wags, and it comes as little surprise that Finland’s sardonic sage, Aki Kaurismäki, is the man behind the tiller. The Other Side of Hope traces the intersecting lives of two men: one a Syrian migrant named Khalid (Sherwan Haji) seeking temporary asylum in Helsinki; the other an impassive, older Finnish gentleman named Wikström (Sakari Kuosmanen) who ditches his alcoholic wife to open…

Directed by FENG XIAOGANG Starring FAN BINGBING, FAN WEI, DONG CHENGPENG Released 26 MAY There exists a fictional Chinese character known as ‘Pan Jinlian’, who was a woman who commited adultery and matricide, and was later killed by her dead husband’s brother. Flaubert’s novel ‘Madame Bovary’ and the concept of Pan Jinlian are strongly linked as they both refer to characters who cheated on their husbands to escape the monotony of their lives. Plus, they both died a tragic death. This sets the scene for Feng Xiaogang’s I Am Not Madame Bovary, which tells the story of Li Xuelian (Fan Bingbing), a woman from a small town in China who sues her ex-husband on the grounds that their divorce was fake. What should be an open and shut case rapidly evolves into a…

Directed by EDGAR WRIGHT Starring ANSEL ELGORT LILY JAMES JON HAMM Released 28 JUNE 4 ANTICIPATION. Movie geeks get their motors revving at the mere mention of Edgar Wright’s name. 4 ENJOYMENT. A glorious joyride, even if it threatens to run out of gas near the end of the road. 5 IN RETROSPECT. The adrenaline high of this clean getaway lasts for days. Pedal firmly pressed to the metal, Edgar Wright’s absurdly enjoyable thriller Baby Driver bursts out of the garage with tires squealing, radio cranked to maximum volume and guns blazing. After tackling an alien invasion with 2013’s The World’s End and getting himself pulled off of Marvel’s superhero factory floor, genre savant Wright has pivoted to a high-octane car caper in the tradition of Drive, which is to say in the tradition of Walter…

Directed by HIROKAZU KOREEDA Starring HIROSHI ABE YÔKO MAKI KIRIN KIKI Released 2 JUNE 4 ANTICIPATION. The elements are in place for a cinematic Koreeda coup, as long as he steers clear of soppiness. 4 ENJOYMENT. As entertaining as it is subtly moving, the director has truly returned to form. 5 IN RETROSPECT. Proof that the Japanese maestro deserves to be the metronome of all movie lovers’ hearts. Japanese director Hirokazu Koreeda is a master of crafting vivid, cinematic worlds. He transports you to a place where you’re as likely to burst into a laughter so hearty that it makes your ribs ache, as you are into tears so ferocious you feel like your lungs might drown. The premise of his new film, After the Storm, is nothing new. A family patriarch dies on the eve…

Directed by ANDREW KÖTTING Starring CLAUDIA BARTON, ANDREW KÖTTING, IAIN SINCLAIR Released 23 JUNE The future of humanity will be okay as long as artist, filmmaker and galavanting bohemian, Andrew Kötting, just keeps on keeping on. He’s Chaucer with an iPhone, capturing the bruised landscapes of Olde Albion and keeping record of his rambling, shambling pilgrimages, all in memory of fallen eccentrics. This latest pays homage to one Edith Swan Neck, a melancholic damsel who made the journey of 108 miles (as the crow flies) from Waltham Abbey in Essex to the southern coastal town of St Leonards-on-Sea. She was the wife of King Harold who, at the battle of Hastings in 1066, famously caught an arrow in his eye. Among his merry band of travellers are: Claudia Barton, a tattooed torch singer…

Directed by BEN YOUNG Starring EMMA BOOTH ASHLEIGH CUMMINGS STEPHEN CURRY Released 7 JULY 2 ANTICIPATION. A gory Australian serial killer drama by a first-time actorturned- director. Eep! 4 ENJOYMENT. Explores unexpected psychological depths and showcases some very strong performances. 4 IN RETROSPECT. Bleak, tight and unusual. A strong start for Ben Young. What makes a person kill another person? Attempting to answer that unanswerable question is a sport for film makers, as they impose pop-psychological motives on the sickminded murderers at the centre of their stories. With his directorial debut, Australian actor Ben Young chooses to tell that all-too-common tale from a different perspective, namely that of a killer’s complicit girlfriend. The results are murkier and more profound and more moving than expected. Opening with slow-motion shots of the peaceful, sun-drenched streets of Perth, Australia…

Directed by NICK BROOMFIELD, RUDI DOLEZAL Starring WHITNEY HOUSTON Released 10 JULY 2 ANTICIPATION. Who let Nick Broomfield at Whitney Houston’s legacy? 4 ENJOYMENT. Dodges pitfalls galore to tell a heartbreaking story with suitable solemnity. 3 IN RETROSPECT. The OED of docs – solid, reliable, sturdily bound. Whitney Houston’s face has a beauty that radiates serenity. She is serene in television interviews; she is serene when cameras pursue her at parties; she is serene when seen from afar socialising with loved ones. This image – at odds with her ghoulish death – is resurrected in Nick Broomfield and Rudi Dolezal’s respectful documentary about the late superstar singer. “How much has success changed you?” an off screen interviewer asks Whitney at the peak of her world domination, just after the release of 1992’s The Bodyguard. She pauses…

Directed by BILL FORSYTH Starring CHRISTINE LAHTI SARA WALKER ANDREA BURCHILL 1987 OUT NOW Blu-ray There’s something so poised and delicate about Bill Forsyth’s wistful 1987 comedy, Housekeeping, that it’s tough to imagine how it ever got made. Bittersweet down to its very marrow, the film offers a perceptive and poetic study in parental responsibility and what it really means to bring children into a harsh, unforgiving world. It also very cleverly looks at the idea of how personality traits, habits and even an outlook on existence, can be passed on down the gene pool. Ruth and Lucille are posted off with their grandmother while their mother meets with the infinite when merrily driving her car over a cliff. The girls don’t quite understand what’s happened, but when grandma soon keels over,…

Directed by SIDNEY J FURIE Starring BARBARA HERSHEY RON SILVER DAVID LABIOSA 1982 OUT NOW Blu-ray Had Sidney J Furie’s The Entity been made and released into cinemas circa 2017, it would’ve caused a right royal furore. The takes would’ve been hot and the outrage would’ve been extraordinary. The film is a supernatural rape-revenge film of sorts. Barbara Hershey’s single mom Carla comes home one night from her busy office job, and upon entering her bedroom is violently raped by an invisible spectre. It happens over and over again, and it seems there’s absolutely nothing she can do about it. Psychologists use cod terminology and every trick in the playbook to chalk this up as some kind of mania, or maybe just the result of Carla’s own voracious sexual appetite. It takes…

Imagine you’re standing on a beach. A cool, steady breeze makes ribbons in the sand as you watch a group of gulls floating idly on the water. The sun is out and all is calm. Now imagine you’re standing on a beach surrounded by hundreds of thousands of people. The wind is lashing at your face and the sky is thick with smoke and the stench of war. All around you there is panic and confusion. Surveying Dunkirk today, it’s hard to picture the scene as it looked 76 years ago, when some 400,000 men were sardined on the shoreline having been forced back by the advancing German army. With the Allied campaign hanging in the balance, a mass evacuation plan codenamed ‘Operation Dynamo’ was hastily formulated. Damage limitation was…

When LWLies judged the Best Animated Short category for the 2017 London Short Film Festival, FX Goby’s To Build a Fire immediately stood out. The French director’s adaptation of Jack London’s 1908 short story depicts man’s struggle for survival in a wintry tundra. Elegantly animated with a simple yet powerful aesthetic, we have big hopes for the 33-year-old director. We caught up with FX — who was originally François-Xavier, but “in France, people call you by the initials, and it just sticks” — to see what he’s up to next. LWLies: Why did you choose this story to adapt? FX: I first read the novel when I was 12 or 13 and thought it was incredible. I think the challenge was turning a literary work into image and sound, but…

Directed by ERMANNO OLMI Starring LUIGI ORNAGHI FRANCO PILENGA LUCIA PEZZOLI Released 7 JULY 4 ANTICIPATION. A restored print of this 1978 Palme d’Or winner. 5 ENJOYMENT Olmi’s humanist miracle is both epic and intimate. 5 IN RETROSPECT. Produces feelings of aching joy and melancholy in equal measure. In Ermanno Olmi’s humanist masterpiece The Tree of Wooden Clogs, a Catholic priest tells one of his peasant parishioners that “we wouldn’t be here without miracles.” The same could be said of the film itself, a rare epic that feels simultaneously intimate and grand in its exploration of Italian tenement farmers doing their best to survive at the end of the 19th century. Using a cast of nonprofessional actors – credited collectively as “the people of the Bergamo countryside” – Olmi taps…

Directed by CATE SHORTLAND Starring TERESA PALMER MAX RIEMELT LUCIE ARON Released 9 JUNE 3 ANTICIPATION. Cate Shortland thrives when exploring the subtleties of stories. Will a thriller ruin that? 4 ENJOYMENT. Edge-of-your-seat stuff for the majority of the film. 3 IN RETROSPECT. An intelligent tale with unusual undertones and a necessary fear factor. When it comes to screen depictions of predatory men, Australian director Cate Shortland has you covered. Somersault from 2004 is about an Aussie teen runaway discovering her sexuality, and 2012’s Lore, set during the fall of the Third Reich sees the eldest daughter of an SS officer protect her siblings on a journey across Germany. Both films share distinct themes with her latest, Berlin Syndrome. Independent yet troubled female lead? Check. Dangerous experiences with creepy guys? Double check. Adapted…

We met the great Finn Aki Karismäki on the top floor of a Berlin hotel as he supped chilled white wine at 10am. He has been directing films for 35 years, and with his latest, an immigration-themed fairytale called The Other Side of Hope, he confirms once more his status as one of the most vital and unique voices in world cinema. Instead of entering into a conventional conversation, we asked him to give us his thoughts on a range of subjects. AK on the state of Europe. Europe is in a mental crisis. I remember very well the millions of us smiling and shaking their hands. My smile was a bit like this [does scary fake smile]. It’s going worse, it’s going worse, it’s going worse. Bloody hell. It’s…

Directed by ANOCHA SUWICHAKORNPONG Starring ARAK AMORNSUPASIRI APINYA SAKULJAROENSUK, ACHTARA SUWAN Released 16 JUNE Young documentary maker Ann (Visra Vichit-Vadakan) interviews the ringleader of a real-life 1976 Thai student protest, which was suppressed with horrific brutality by the military. Ann struggles with her role in representing the movement, questioning her own work in the face of a woman she sees as ‘living history’. This is the deceptively simple premise of By the Time It Gets Dark, the experimental second feature from Thai director Anocha Suwichakornpong, but it doesn’t stay deceptively simple for long. Walking in a nearby forest, Ann has a strange, ‘Alice in Wonderland’- style encounter which shifts the narrative into a lucid dream state. Stylistically, the film rides the wave of recent Thai independent cinema as pioneered by the Palme d’Or-winning…

Directed by MICHAEL SHOWALTER Starring KUMAIL NANJIANI ZOE KAZAN HOLLY HUNTER Released 28 JULY 3 ANTICIPATION. A Judd Apatow production for a previously unheralded talent. 3 ENJOYMENT. Smart performances jolly us towards a wellearned happy ending. 3 IN RETROSPECT. Not quite life-or-death viewing, but as good a star vehicle as Nanjiani might have wished for. You’ll likely recognise Kumail Nanjiani’s face, if not his name: with credits on everything from Sex Tape to Broad City, the heavybrowed, Karachi-born supporting player has become increasingly prominent among that repertory of oddballs lending added value to the decade’s comedic endeavours. The Big Sick – directed by Michael Showalter, and produced by 21st century mogul of mirth Judd Apatow – feels like the kind of project designed to introduce a wider audience to a performer beloved among their peers but…

Directed by MICHAËL DUDOK DE WIT Released 28 MAY 4 ANTICIPATION. Ghibli! Michaël Dukok de Wit! Together!! 4 ENJOYMENT. A languorously paced, elegantly animated fable of life’s cyclicality. 4 IN RETROSPECT. One for the desert island films list. In Michaël Dudok de Wit’s The Red Turtle, a man shipwrecked and alone on a desert island conjures for himself a companion who falls somewhere between mortal reality and imagined fantasy, and the two go on adventures together that come to define life – and death. There must be something in the millennial waters. For the bare bones plot of de Wit’s minimalist animation (or minime) can also be discerned in recent, otherwise different, live-action films like Robert Zemeckis’ Cast Away and Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s Swiss Army Man, suggesting that here, stranded in our present…

Directed by JONATHAN TEPLITZKY Starring BRIAN COX MIRANDA RICHARDSON JOHN SLATTERY Released 16 JUNE 3 ANTICIPATION. The first of 2017’s two Churchill biopics. Can it tell us anything new? 2 ENJOYMENT. Some intriguing angles, but it all feels very conventional. 2 IN RETROSPECT. Two fingers up. Churchill. The stark one-word title immediately brings an iconic image to mind. A bulldoglike character resting on a cane, a Homburg hat on his head, a cigar jutting out from his mouth, his hand raised in a victorious two-fingered salute. It’s a figure so familiar we might feel we know everything there is to know about the man already, not least because Brian Cox’s decent impersonation is just the latest in a seemingly inexhaustible run of TV and film portrayals. Director Jonathan Teplitzky makes much use of this iconography in…

Directed by CRAIG JOHNSON Starring WOODY HARRELSON LAURA DERN ISABELLA AMARA Released 9 JUNE 4 ANTICIPATION. The great Daniel Clowes adapts his own graphic novel for the screen. Yeah, this could be big. 3 ENJOYMENT. A dream for Clowes superfans, but perhaps too slight and unfocused as a movie. 3 IN RETROSPECT. A charming performance from Harrelson keeps the disperate elements nicely congealed. To describe something as “shambling” is not necessarily derogatory. Yes, the term infers that this thing is unkempt, brash, probably not running on time and possibly has the end of its tie poking out from an unbuttoned fly. But there’s something reliable and careworn also, and maybe even a little surprising. Like a tie poking out from an unbuttoned fly. Craig Johnson’s Wilson is the very definition of a shambling movie, for better…

Directed by HOU HSIAO-HSIEN Starring LIN YANG JACK KAO CHEN SHU-FANG 1987 Released 22 MAY Blu-ray Hou Hsiao-hsien is one of the founding fathers of the Taiwanese New Wave, and the reality is he’s made more great movies than you’ve had hot dinners. That is assuming that you’ve had about 17 to 18 hot dinners. 1987’s dark pearl, Daughter of the Nile, arrives two years prior to his extraordinary, epic breakthrough feature, A City of Sadness, but there’s no reason why he shouldn’t have been embraced by the cinephile masses for this earlier film. Far from being a minor work tossed out into the world as a fragment of the puzzle, this is in fact one of the director’s most staggeringly beautiful and easily approachable films. The only constant in the life of…

Directed by MARLON BRANDO Starring MARLON BRANDO KARL MALDER PINA PELLICER 1961 Released 12 JUNE Blu-ray Forget The Wild One, forget Stanley Kowalski, and hell, even try to forget Don Corleone if you can – Rio, the star of kaleidoscopic 1961 western One-Eyed Jacks, was the character Marlon Brando was born to play, a snarling shitkicker who can bruise a man with his beady stare. This was also Brando’s sole directorial offering, a role he took on after Stanley Kubrick decided this one wasn’t for him. He plays a charismatic bank robber who’s left to rot in a Mexican jail by his duplicitous partner Dad Longworth (Karl Malden), who scarpers with their loot and begins a new, law-abiding life. Rio, of course, wants his pound of flesh, but is more than willing to…

Directed by TERRY GILLIAM Starring JEFF BRIDGES ROBIN WILLIAMS MERCEDES RUEHL 1991 Released 19 JUNE Blu-ray This remains Terry Gilliam’s sole shot at big ticket Hollywood respectability, and though it has its moments, it’s still as unwieldy and brash as everything else in his unique movie canon. Having already made his name directing a film about a bunch of prancing nincompoops searching for the Holy Grail (1975’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail) 1991’s The Fisher King plays like a hip urban remake that is less about the blind search for glory and more about why we’re driven to that search in the first place. He attempts to suppress his more whimsical and flamboyant directorial excesses, but they clamber in between the frames. Jeff Bridges’ pony-tailed gargoyle Jack gets a major reality check…

Directed by MARK COUSINS Starring NENEH CHERRY Released 16 JUNE Although the title professes adoration to the Swedish capital, Stockholm’s tourist board might not be entirely pleased with Mark Cousins’ latest offering. Stockholm My Love is an essay film-meets-city symphony-meets-poetic monologue, which sets the town as a grey-hued backdrop for a woman to explore her feelings of guilt among the prefab houses and suburban squares. The meandering film follows Swedish hip hop/dance pop artist Neneh Cherry as Alva Achebe, an fictional architect whose character seems only a lightly sketched version of the real-life Cherry. Achebe is plagued by depression after accidentally killing an elderly man with her car. On her path to forgiveness, she decides to listen in silence to the city, and then address it through song. As she seeks solace in…

Directed by SUNAO KATABUCHI Starring NON MEGUMI HAN YOSHIMASA HOSOYA Released 30 JUNE 4 ANTICIPATION. Recent winner of the Japanese Academy Award for Animation of the Year. 3 ENJOYMENT. Undeniably gorgeous, with a few elegant animated flourishes, but rather toothless in the telling. 2 IN RETROSPECT. A minor entry in the small canon of animated dramas set during the closing days of the War. Sunao Katabuchi, who early in his career served as Assistant Director on Hayao Miyazaki’s Kiki’s Delivery Service, finds himself standing on the toes of his former Studio Ghibli mentors in this crowd-pleasing, and crowdfunded, World War Two melodrama. Adapted from the manga by writer-artist Fumiyo K?no, In This Corner of the World begins in 1933, and follows the life of a young woman called Suzu as she grows up in rural Hiroshima, moves to Kure…

Directed by JULIE DASH Starring CORA LEE DAY, ALVA ROGERS, BARBARA O JONES, Released 2 JUNE It seems a small but unsurprising tragedy that American director, author and academic, Julie Dash, has not been able to make films at a frequency more in line with her white, male compatriots. Daughters of the Dust is her rhapsodic 1991 debut feature, and it exhibits a unique cinematic voice from the get go. It also hints at the future treasures she will forge, while being a mellifluous, meandering and heartfelt screen chimera in its own right. It’s the story of a small enclave of souls (the sprawling Peazant clan) waiting anxiously at a crossroads in their cultural history. Off the South Carolina-Georgia coastline is a small island paradise on which African slaves have settled. It stands…

Directed by EDUARDO WILLIAMS Released 7 JULY Sometimes you’ve just got to go with a movie, even when it appears to be gesturing that you jog off in the opposite direction. Resist those bodily impulses telling you to turn away from the screen and just keep questioning what you’re watching and why. Eduardo Williams’ The Human Surge is cinema as a double dare. He asks: if you can see what it is I’m doing, can you admit to be gleaning any pleasure from it? Spanning three disperate locales (Argentina, Mozambique, the Philippines), Williams captures the things that young people do when they have nothing to do. There’s lots of wandering, there’s some idle chatter, there’s a little bathing in a creek, and even some public urination. Technology offers a gentle respite from…

Directed by MATTHEW HEINEMAN Released 14 JULY 1 ANTICIPATION. A doc about ISIS in Syria? Can’t we just have the electrodes to the nipples instead? 3 ENJOYMENT. Understandably harrowing at times, but the film brings us that bit closer to real, relatable people caught up in the carnage. 4 IN RETROSPECT. A clearly significant document, bringing compassionate immediacy and personalised humanity to an unfolding catastrophe. Oh God, more carnage from Syria... Does it make you a bad person to feel somewhat daunted by this new feature doc? The ongoing geopolitical clusterfuck over there is so brutal, so intractable, so seemingly hopeless, that our compassion glands and outrage muscles are more or less worn out by now. That’s the major obstacle faced by any film maker trying to stimulate the conscience of an international audience. By…

Directed by JON NGUYEN, OLIVIA NEERGAARD-HOLM, RICK BARNES Starring DAVID LYNCH Released 14 JULY “Every time you do something like painting – or whatever – you go with ideas, and sometimes the past can conjure those ideas and colour them. Even if they’re new ideas, the past colours them.” The speaker is the Montana-born writer, director and artist David Lynch, and even though we can see him sitting, smoking furiously, before a condenser mic, he is silent, as the interview is presented in voiceover. That disconnect between what we see and what we hear is at the heart of the way this beautifully shot documentary has been constructed. Lynch, now a grey-haired old man, reminisces about his distant past, while family videos and old photographs are juxtaposed with his early and more recent…

When the script for The Red Turtle was approved I went to Tokyo, because the co-producers are Studio Ghibli. I asked them what they thought and they said, ‘We’ll tell you tomorrow’. And the next day they said, ‘Okay great, let’s go ahead’, and I thought, ‘hang on, what do you mean, “great?”.’ They said that there were some weak bits, but they will be solved at the next stage. It was that easy. I thought that the storyboard phase would be relatively quick, but I had to wake up. It was very quick when I did my eariler short films. I’m a natural storyboard artist, so it came to me very quickly, but with this one I went backwards, over and over again, and took scenes out and replaced…

Directed by MARC WEBB Starring CHRIS EVANS MCKENNA GRACE LINDSAY DUNCAN Released 16 JUNE 2 ANTICIPATION. A family drama about a young genius from the director of (500) Days of Summer. No. Thank. You. 4 ENJOYMENT. Unexpectedly hooked by these realistic characters. Tears are shed! 4 IN RETROSPECT. Films that are so good in so many ways do not come around very often. Lo-fi projects starring credibility-seeking actors do not traditionally inspire trust from audiences. Neither do movies about precocious geniuses. Gifted takes on these nefarious conventions to better challenge them, and makes doing so look easy. The key to the film’s success is its down-to-earth approach to a topic usually addressed for its larger scale implications. The idea that young prodigy Mary (Mckenna Grace) could use her abilities to advance science at large – let…

Directed by WARIS HUSSEIN Starring MARK LESTER TRACY HYDE JACK WILD 1971 OUT NOW Blu-ray The director Wes Anderson once said that he drew inspiration from Waris Hussein’s little-known Brit heart-melter, Melody, when it came to making of his own 2012 feature, Moonrise Kingdom. The reality is that the latter is virtually a remake of the former, with both films telling of pre-teen lovers who elope with the idea of getting hitched. Where Anderson’s film is devised as a breathless, cartoonish escapade, Hussein opts for grubby kitchen sink realism, his film serving as an indelible portrait of working class south London in the early 1970s. And fingers crossed that this new Blu-ray release will usher in Melody’s richly deserved modern classic status, as this really is a film which overwhelms in its…

Directed by JUZO ITAMI Starring NOBUKO MIYAMOTO TSUTOMU YAMAZAKI KEN WATANABE 1985 OUT NOW Blu-ray There is no better feeling than watching a movie and then developing an intense craving for the same food that you just saw up there on the screen. In 1985, the late Japanese director Juzo Itami made an entire movie which exists to service that craving. In its prologue two truckers are reading aloud a story about the best and most satisfying way to attack a pork ramen, decide that the gastronomic visions conjured in their heads are just too much, so park up and hit a pokey little restaurant in order to sate their desires. It’s there they meet Tampopo (Nobuko Miyamoto), a self-hating fussbudget who couldn’t knock together a decent ramen if she tried. When…

Directed by ALAN CLARKE Starring SIOBHAN FINNERAN MICHELLE HOLMES GEORGE COSTIGAN 1987 Released 22 MAY Blu-ray Alan Clarke’s Rita, Sue and Bob Too! is a film that is engineered for a giggle. Yet you could argue that it’s not strictly a comedy. We’re in Bradford, smack dab in the middle of Maggie Thatcher’s reign of terror. George Costigan’s randy sod Bob is a husband and father who’s very willing to gamble away a life of domestic ease for a quick wriggle in the back of his old banger with the two up-for-it schoolgirls he pays to babysit. The film’s opening passage is squirm-inducing in its sordid detail, which is all direct from the pen of the late council estate bard, Andrea Dunbar. The night-time encounter takes place in the seclusion of the moors,…

The Artistic Director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival, Mark Adams, divulges his favourite parts of the job, the challenge of diversity and how he’s able to build a programme from the giant pile of submissions he receives each year. LWLies: What is the hardest and easiest thing about being artistic director of the Edinburgh Film Festival? Adams: The hardest is simply making all the decisions of what to show, because you have hundreds of films. We have thousands of submissions, we have lots of sale agents and distributors coming to us and you have to kind of pare that down into a manageable amount. It’s all about trying to build a structure that works for all the audiences you have, it’s not just simply a case of having lots…