Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 77 i Little White Lies

That sound you can hear is the South Korean filmmaking boom, still echoing around the globe. For lovers of cinema that’s politically engaged, formally challenging and still in its relative infancy, the annual London Korean Film Festival offers a bounty of exciting options. This year’s celebration is the most expansive and diverse yet, folding sidebars on shorts, animation and artist film into the main core of new and archive feature work. Festivities kick off with the European premiere of Jeon Go-woon’s Microhabitat, about a woman on the cusp of penury who decides to reconnect with the members of her long-defunct band. Malene Choi’s The Return, looking at Korean diaspora while fusing elements of fact and fiction, closes out the festival, but here are some of the great things happening in…

For the truly expanded cinema experience, one simply must (re)visit Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant in bed. I issue this proclamation from a place of fully absorbed experience, having both watched and expounded on the 1972 psycho-melo-chamber drama from my own queen-sized mattress, surrounded – like Petra herself – by a phone, cosmetics and my beverage of choice. An unorthodox arrangement, but fitting nonetheless. Adapting his own play for the screen, Fassbinder’s caustic examination of toxic femininity situates the psychic reverse-ageing process of its protagonist in that most intimate of abodes: the ladies’ boudoir, where body and soul are stripped bare and reclad according to the whims of its occupant. Wiry and lithe, Margit Carstensen plays Petra to the hilt: as a fashion designer of…

Directed by DAVID LOWERY Starring ROBERT REDFORD SISSY SPACEK CASEY AFFLECK Released 7 DECEMBER Robert Redford’s raised a lot of hell. Prison breaks, audacious heists, train robberies – in a career spanning 50 years, he has left an indelible mark on Hollywood. David Lowery seems all too aware of this, and in casting Redford as gentleman bankrobber Forrest Tucker in The Old Man & the Gun, he’s created a rather lovely film in dialogue with everything its central star has done before. Based on a New Yorker article about a career criminal who just couldn’t stop doing the one thing he loved, Lowery’s film is a warm-hearted portrait of an exceptionally charming man who just happens to rob banks, and those that came to know him in the sparkling twilight years of his…

Directed by LARS VON TRIER Starring MATT DILLON BRUNO GANZ UMA THURMAN Released 14 DECEMBER There is something truly perverse about the idea that actors, as an essential part of their job, must be able to convincingly fabricate the process of dying. Some meet with a magnificent fate, while others might slip quietly into the night. And there are those who have their frontal lobe tenderised with a busted car jack. Maybe it’s no coincidence that we use the verb ‘to shoot’ when capturing images on camera. Lars von Trier certainly spots the connection. The House That Jack Built is the latest and possibly greatest film from Denmark’s merry prankster, and it poses the question: if actors have to die, then would that not, by proxy, make the director some kind of mass…

Directed by GÜRCAN KELTEK Released 7 DECEMBER “The grocery store is open. Yet no one can reach it. Everyone is scared of getting shot.” These are the words of writer Ebru Ojen from her book ‘The Vaccine’, used in this poetic commentary of Kurdish experiences under martial law. Meteors is Gürcan Keltek’s debut feature. It is a compilation of archival footage from local people in Eastern Anatolia, whose towns were raided by the Turkish army in July 2015. After a period of ceasefire and two-and-a-half years of negotiation, soldiers were sent by the government to defeat the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK). The few spoken sequences of this political documentary see Ojen conducting one-on-one interviews with Kurds now living under Turkish terror. Not much is explained over the film’s six parts. This mirrors…

Directed by LAURENT CANTET Starring MARINA FOIS MATTHIEU LUCCI WARDA RAMMACH Released 16 NOVEMBER This is the first film Laurent Cantet has made in France since his 2008 Cannes winner The Class, and a lot has changed since then. We’re post-Bataclan, post-Nice, and with support for Le Front National rising. Where his previous secondary school portrait took the country’s pulse in its day, to find him working again with the same French-Moroccan screenwriter Robin Campillo, and another bunch of teenage non-professionals in the cast, is certainly a promising prospect. However, it should be said that this is definitely not The Class 2, but shaped around a somewhat looser dramatic construct as a way of addressing the hopes and fears of young folk in an evidently divided nation. The set-up this time is a…

Directed by STEVE MCQUEEN Starring VIOLA DAVIS ELIZABETH DEBICKI COLIN FARRELL Released 6 NOVEMBER If you were to take bets on what Steve McQueen’s passion project would be, few would guess ‘a film based on an ’80s ITV drama about women carrying out a heist’. Over the past decade McQueen has made a name for himself directing harrowing dramatic features such as Shame and 12 Years a Slave – with Widows, he turns his considerable talent and deft understanding of the human condition to a new challenge and a new genre. Veronica Rawlings (Viola Davis) is bereft when her husband (Liam Neeson) dies along with his criminal crew in a job gone wrong, but has little time to mourn as it emerges Henry left a debt of $2 million behind. Menaced by the…

Directed by SEBASTIÁN LELIO Starring RACHEL WEISZ, RACHEL MCADAMS, ALESSANDRO NIVOLA Released 30 NOVEMBER If you chemically formulated the concept of middlebrow art, transported it to a lab and then attempted to discover what the very mid point of the middlebrow looked like, Sebastián Lelio’s unedifying sixth feature, Disobedience, would turn up in the test tube. It’s a hackneyed tale of forbidden love amid North London’s orthodox Jewish community, and it methodically tells you exactly what you’re supposed to feel, who you’re supposed to admire and who you’re supposed to despise with a grimly methodical rigour. As with his previous film, 2017’s A Fantastic Woman, Lelio seems convinced that those who don’t harbour a progressive worldview are evil incarnate, and so we are shown a raft of devoutly religious folk who think nothing…

Directed by MALGORZATA SZUMOWSKA Starring MATEUSZ KOSCIUKIEWICZ, AGNIESZKA PODSIADLIK, MALGORZATA GOROL Released 7 DECEMBER Director Małgorzata Szumowska doesn’t hold her home nation in particularly high regard. The Polish countryside she presents in Mug is a slate of muted greys and greens, home to bigoted village folk, perverted priests and a single black sheep. The latter is our protagonist, Jacek, a longhaired metalhead chugging along the landscape in a ramshackle car. He is an outcast from his small-minded family, he’s urged by his tough lovin’ sister to leave town as soon as possible. He doesn’t listen. Instead, after a headfirst tumble into his workplace’s hulking statue of Jesus, and subsequent face transplant, he’s reduced to the media’s plaything and his family’s elephant man in the room. Yet not enough has changed for his injury…

Directed by HIROKAZU KOREEDA Starring KIRIN KIKI LILY FRANKY MIYU SASAKI Released 23 NOVEMBER Lily Franky is the kind of grown-up you would have loved to have known as a child. Impish, infectiously energetic and with a killer giggle, he stars in Hirokazu Koreeda’s Palme d’Or winner as Osamu, a man who can turn any space into a playground and any scenario into a game. Not only is this ceaseless imagination a warm characteristic of this construction worker-cum-petty criminal, it’s also a trick to survive. Through secret signs and routines, Osama and his surrogate son Shota (Jyo Kairi) lift everyday items from their neighbouring stores. It’s a well-oiled collaboration pulled off with Danny Ocean-style slickness (minus the swagger, save for a modest fist bump). “Whatever’s in the store doesn’t belong to anyone yet,”…

Directed by YANN DEMANGE Starring MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY RICHIE MERRITT BEL POWLEY Released 7 DECEMBER Newcomer Richie Merritt stars as the titular White Boy Rick in a gritty and grimy account of the true events that saw his fall from grace as the youngest ever FBI informant to the longest-serving non-violent offender in the Michigan prison system. Director Yann Demange, known for 2014 feature ’71 and his work on television series Top Boy, delivers a well-rounded if occasionally mundane depiction of the life of reckless teenager Richard Wershe Jr. To keep his gun-toting father out of prison, 14-year-old Rick begins working for the FBI to infiltrate the drug circuits in his Detroit neighbourhood, endangering his own life in the process. Falling into the crowd of the Curry gang, a group of African-American drug dealers,…

Directed by JOEL COEN, ETHAN COEN Starring TIM BLAKE NELSON ZOE KAZAN LIAM NEESON Released 16 NOVEMBER It’s hard to imagine any other contemporary filmmaker(s) forging a path through such well-trodden terrain with this much verve and inventiveness – who else but the Coens could so confidently tip their hat to the past masters of the western genre while whistling their own inimitable tune? This isn’t their first rodeo, of course, but it should be noted that The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is an entirely different proposition to No Country for Old Men or True Grit. By turns darkly comic and deeply moving, this is the brothers’ personal ode to the Old West and the particular mode of storytelling that arose from it. Split into six chapters, the film is a slow-paced, sure-footed…

Directed by CRAIG WILLIAM MACNEILL Starring CHLOË SEVIGNY, KRISTEN STEWART, FIONA SHAW Released 14 DECEMBER ‘Lizzie Borden took an axe / And gave her mother 40 whacks / When she saw what she had done / She gave her father 41.’ This old jump-rope rhyme has reverberated around parks, schoolyards and residential streets for more than a century, adding to the grisly legend of one of the most infamous crimes in US history. But the rhyme misses out one important detail: officially the double homicide of Andrew and Abby Borden on 4 August, 1892 remains unsolved. An all-male jury acquitted Lizzie, the main suspect in the case, of killing her father and stepmother on the grounds that a woman of her social standing could never commit such a heinous and violent act. In…

Directed by PAUL DANO Starring CAREY MULLIGAN JAKE GYLLENHAAL ED OXENBOULD Released 9 NOVEMBER A sense of trepidation always hovers when a young actor announces their intention to chance their hand behind the camera rather than in front of it. If Wildlife is anything to go by, Paul Dano might be a case of an actor successfully transitioning to director without any trace of self-indulgence. His debut feature (which he adapted with wife Zoe Kazan from Richard Ford’s 1990 novel of the same name) is an engrossing portrait of familial fracture in 1950s Montana, with a remarkable performance from the incomparable Carey Mulligan. The story unfurls from Joe Brinson’s (Ed Oxenbould) point of view, a teenager uprooted from Washington due his parents’ financial problems, but optimistic about their new life. His mother Jeanette…

Directed by NATHANIEL KAHN Released 10 JULY This documentary by Nathaniel Kahn focuses on the vagaries and sometime cruelties of the art market right now. It deserves its title on the technicality that anything these days can be contemporary art. Cool and nominally neutral, there is nonetheless a genius use of one scene from Martin Scorsese’s grim and glossily-reproachful The Wolf of Wall Street that makes the director’s feelings on the subject crystal clear: intercut with an anecdote about Jeff Koons’ time on Wall Street, we see Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort closing an impossible deal as if it were no thing. There are other Wall Street movies that might have been used here, making it feel pointed, even barbed, that The Wolf of Wall Street is the one selected – an astounding…

Directed by JEAN-LUC GODARD Released 2 DECEMBER In a year of seemingly unmitigated horrors, there’s a perverse comfort to be had in the arrival of a new film by New Wave godhead turned cut-and-paste collage maestro, Jean-Luc Godard. And based on this evidence, the French master hasn’t mellowed in old age, still displaying a steadfast belief in cinema’s power as a tool for intelectual provocation. His newest offering, The Image Book, is a fitting companion to his previous feature from 2014, Goodbye to Language, which was filmed in 3D. In his winter years, it appears the auteur is working through the senses. The images contained within The Image Book are pulled largely from newsreels and cinematic history. Sometimes they dance atop one another, and sometimes they’ll appear in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it flash. It’s…

Directed by MIKE LEIGH Starring RORY KINNEAR MAXINE PEAKE NEIL BELL Released 2 NOVEMBER With the UK government locked in a self-perpetuating, seemingly endless dispute over Brexit, it’s fitting that Mike Leigh has chosen another calamitous political saga as the subject of his latest feature. Part history lesson, part establishment satire, the stalwart writer/director’s follow-up to 2014’s Mr Turner sees him return to a region close to his heart – the northwest of England – in order to tell the story of a tragic and entirely avoidable clash that fundamentally changed Britain. On 16 August, 1819, a peaceful pro-democracy rally was broken up by the Manchester Yeomanry, a local force of volunteer cavalrymen portrayed here as a booze-soaked mob. Dozens of innocent men, women and children lost their lives in the melee, brutally…

Directed by TOIA BONINO Released 23 NOVEMBER Don Orione is a Buenos Aires neighbourhood where crime and gang violence are aspects of everyday life. Toia Bonino’s documentary tells the story of Alejandro Robles, a young boy who became a gang member and was subsequently shot and killed by police after a friend turned him in. His life went on a downward spiral following a formative shift towards petty crime, and his tragic story is recounted through voiceover by his saddened mother. As we hear each harrowing anecdote, we watch as our narrator methodically bakes a cake in the design of a football pitch. Each stage of the cake’s development marks a new layer of Ale’s history, and we listen to her words as she lovingly prepares this elaborate treat. Juxtaposing banal domestic…

San Sebastián is a city for romance. I arrived shot through with anxiety Then went for a walk down the River Urumea and was flooded by the mysterious sensations that beauty excites. Follow the river for long enough and you reach the festival hub, which is flanked by beaches. Other cinemas are dotted around nearby away, on cobbled streets lined by pintxos bar, with the odd cathedral looming casually at the end of a narrow street. Pace of life is undisturbed by the festival which runs for nine days during the last gasps of summer. Rather than a calm city taking on a frantic energy, frantic journalists absorb its calmness, asking each other if they’ve been for a swim yet, and recommending trips up to Jesus Mountain. How curious in…

Directed by BOOTS RILEY Starring LAKEITH STANFIELD TESSA THOMPSON ARMIE HAMMER Released 7 DECEMBER Capitalism’s a bitch. Cassius ‘Cash’ Green (Lakeith Stanfield) knows this. Twentysomething, unemployed and living in his uncle’s garage, he’s ill-at-ease with the world. “I’m just out here surviving,” he laments to his girlfriend Detroit (Tessa Thompson). “What I do, it won’t even matter.” Things look grim for Cash, and in an attempt to dig himself out of a proverbial rut, he takes a job at a local telemarketing agency called RegalView, cold calling customers to sell them magazine subscriptions. There’s just one small problem: he’s not very good at it. When fellow employee Langston (Danny Glover) notices he’s struggling, he encourages Cash to use his “white voice” when speaking to customers. Cash is bemused but obliges – and almost…

Directed by NURI BILGE CEYLAN Starring DOGU DEMIRKOL MURAT CEMCIR BENNU YILDIRIMLAR Released 30 NOVEMBER Given that Nuri Bilge Ceylan is yet to celebrate his 60th birthday, it would be pre-emptive to describe The Wild Pear Tree as a late-period film in the director’s career. It certainly has the feel of one though; the kind of unfashionably heavyweight work of an old master that used to turn up a couple of times a decade from the likes of the late Greek doyen of ‘slow cinema’, Theo Angelopoulos. Ceylan’s first films, leading up to the name-making Uzak in 2002, dissect the social and generational chasms between rural and urban lives. A modern, derivative study in romantic ennui and an exercise in genre followed with Climates and Three Monkeys, before an expansive change of tack…

Directed by JOHN MCPHAIL Starring ELLA HUNT MALCOLM CUMMING SARAH SWIRE Released 30 NOVEMBER Nailing the tone for a zombie apocalypse high school Christmas musical was always set to be a tricky task. Anna and the Apocalypse, from Scottish director John McPhail, manages about as well as you would expect, which is to say awkwardly. In some ways that awkwardness – the dialogue, the performances, the songs – feels appropriate; these are teenagers, after all, stumbling toward the person they want to be or whomever they will ultimately become. And there is an argument to be made for the bleak, if resonant, allegory underpinning McPhail’s tale: What kind of world will these teenagers – their whole lives supposedly ahead of them – inherit? And when not utterly useless, how complicit are the adults…

Directed by YORGOS LANTHIMOS Starring OLIVIA COLMAN RACHEL WEISZ EMMA STONE Released 10 JULY Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos is an exorcist of cinema. He has the ability to remove the vapours of spirit from all those who dare step in front of his camera. Suddenly, dialogue is shorn of its emotional nuance. Bodily movement is no longer supple and natural. The soul has been extinguished in the filmmaker’s search for a purer form of human feeling. He has employed this trick over and over, and with diminishing returns. What appeared revolutionary in 2009’s Dogtooth came across as tired schtick by the time 2017’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer.came around. With The Favourite, Lanthimos presses down the ‘hard reset’ button just halfway, allowing at least some of the spirit back into the frame.…

Directed by LUCA GUADAGNINO Starring DAKOTA JOHNSON TILDA SWINTON CHLOË GRACE MORETZ Released 16 NOVEMBER ‘Simulacrum’ is the single word that elderly psychologist Dr Jozef Klemperer (played by one Lutz Ebersdorf, a pseudonym for Tilda Swinton) writes in his case notes as he listens to an unhinged Patricia Hingle (Chloë Grace Moretz) rave in his apartment cum consulting room. In this opening sequence to Luca Guadagnino’s long-gestating remake of Dario Argento’s baroque horror classic from 1977, the very scenario that Patricia is laying out – that the Helena Markos Tanzgruppe is in fact a coven of witches – makes it clear that we are watching a simulacrum, or imitation of the original. Yet no copy can ever be exactly the same as its original, and even if the ominous site of the Helena…

Directed by JIMMY CHIN, ELIZABETH CHAI VASARHELYI Released 10 JULY Alex Honnold is caught between a rock and a hard-on. He’s preparing to climb an egregious, 900-metre granite wall in Yosemite National Park, but his spoil-sport girlfriend, Sanni McCandless, won’t stop being emotionally invested in his health, safety and wellbeing. Or so goes the remit of Free Solo, a dizzying documentary about Honnold’s quest to become the first person to ever climb El Capitan sans safety gear. It’s a story of physical strength, emotional vulnerability (or a lack thereof) and the irrational exploits of humans hell-bent on conquering the existential futility of being. When Free Solo starts, van life has been working out fine for Honnold, a thirtysomething world traveller who looks like a ripped Nathan Fielder, and lives off canned chilli…

Directed by SAM LEVINSON Starring ODESSA YOUNG, HARI NEF, SUKI WATERHOUSE Released 23 NOVEMBER In some strange attempt to poke fun at the concept of basic human decency, Sam Levinson’s Assassination Nation is prefaced by a list of trigger warnings. Apathetic teenager Lily (Odessa Young) reels off a list of topics which will pop up over the film’s 110-minute runtime, including transphobia, attempted rape, gore and “fragile male egos”. Levinson makes his stance clear: ‘This movie isn’t for those who are easily offended, LOL!’ Billed as a ‘satirical teen thriller’, Levinson’s film focuses heavily on the texts, sexts and salacious selfies that – according to mass media – are integral parts of the teen experience. Black humour hints at Heathers as an inspiration, but the aesthetic seems closer to Zack Snyder’s misguided 2011…

There’s an escalator in the Scotiabank Theatre in downtown Toronto which seems to extend on indefinity. For two weeks in September it becomes the gateway to countless screenings located within the multiplex as the Toronto International Film Festival takes over the city. Critics talk about this escalator a lot. They grin and say, ‘Well, it’s not TIFF until the Scotiabank escalator breaks down!’ or grumpily queue up for it at 8am with a coffee from that venerable Canadian institution Tim Horton’s. This was my first year attending the festival. I’d been told by colleagues about the escalator, and the best hangouts, and the, er, madness of Midnight Madness, all of which give the festival its unique character. I could factor all of this into my extensive planning, but no notebook…

Illustrators Nuria Riaza (cover) is an illustrator based in Spain. She looks for inspiration in the cinema, tattoos, scientific illustrations, old photographs, antique objects and, above all, the women in her family. "I can talk about anything using a ballpoint pen and paper, setting my own rules, always changing. I draw with a pen because that way I learn to accept that each mistake is part of the process. For this project I had to change my omnipresent blue tones to black. It was quite an honor and a challenge making a cover about Roma, a Cuarón film that I want so much to see. It is a personal film which speaks about roots, women and family. And, it’s also a work in which all the details matter." nuriariaza.com Andrew Bastow…