Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 80 i Little White Lies

PRESENTED IN GLORIOUS KINERAMA! + EXHIBITION: 100 GREATEST BRITISH FILMS Why a special animated issue? “I discovered barrier grid animation six years ago while wandering around a book shop. I fell in love with the simplicity and magic of it. I love animation and gifs – this technique celebrates the recreation of movement and connects you back to a simple form of animation that doesn’t require a computer device and is surprising and very playful… even for adults.” Lauréne Boglio, Art Director LWLies YOUR DECODER On this page you will find your special LWLies image decoder. While browsing this magazine, whenever you spot the ‘KineRama’ emblem (as above), line-up the decoder horizontally on the page and watch as the illustrations come to life. #LWLies80 #KineRama If your decoder is missing…

Directed by QUENTIN TARANTINO Starring LEONARDO DICAPRIO BRAD PITT MARGOT ROBBIE Released 14 AUGUST When Quentin Tarantino announced his intention to make a film about the Manson Family’s exploits in the summer of ’69, the film world took a sharp intake of breath. Fair enough: it’s not as if QT is known for his nuanced approach to delicate subjects. Following the casting of Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood always had the potential to go up in flames. So it does, in a sense – but as the towering face of Shosanna Dreyfus in Inglourious Basterds proved, burning celluloid isn’t always a bad thing, and Tarantino’s ninth feature is his most pared back, thoughtful and seemingly personal work to date. Reuniting with a whole host of regulars,…

Directed by PETER STRICKLAND Starring MARIANNE JEAN-BAPTISTE GWENDOLINE CHRISTIE HAYLEY SQUIRES Released 28 JUNE Having set his previous features in Transylvania (Katalin Varga, 2009), Italy (Berberian Sound Studio, 2012) and a Middle-European Amazonia (The Duke of Burgundy, 2014), Peter Strickland returns to his native Britain for In Fabric. The location is the semi-fictitious ‘Thames Valley On Thames’, stuck in what appears to be a permanent 1970s – or perhaps that is just Peter Strickland’s sly comment on the state of England, both Middle and Little. On the periphery there are country walks and woodland backroads, but the town centre features Vlassos’ Greek restaurant, Waingel’s Bank, Staverton’s washing machine repair and Zimzam’s night club – and dominating everyone’s attention, especially during this time of the winter sales, is Dentley & Soper’s department store.…

Directed by CHRISTIAN PETZOLD Starring FRANZ ROGOWSKI PAULA BEER GODEHARD GIESE Released 16 AUGUST The guy at the bar looks anxious when French police vans scream by outside. It’s a not-unfamiliar scene across today’s Europe and beyond, yet as our presumed illegal migrant chats to the pal beside him, their shared news is that Paris is about to be sealed off, political fugitives are in danger, and the best bet is to head for Marseille and ship out across the Atlantic. How is it, then, that a story set in our own time appears to be stuck during World War Two? Look more closely, and the absence of smartphones, flatscreen TVs and current news media flag up writer/director Christian Petzold’s most daring stylistic gambit yet. His two previous offerings Barbara and Phoenix…

Directed by LILA AVILÉS Starring GABRIELA CARTOL, TERESA SÁNCHEZ Released 26 JULY Eve dreams of the 42nd floor. As a diligent chambermaid in one of Mexico City’s plushest hotels, she keeps herself to herself, all with a view to scoring a promotion that will allow her to tidy the temporary living spaces of the monied elite. Exactingly played as an anxiety-prone wallflower by Gabriela Cartol, Eve buddies up to her unnecessarily bossy line manager, breaking her back to fulfil even the most unreasonable of demands. There’s extra curricular activities too, as a dippy mother coerces Eve into looking after her newborn while she dashes into the shower, or there’s the strange guy who requests extra shampoo and toilet paper and just sits glaring at his laptop screen when they’re delivered. Lila Avilés’ debut…

Directed by ANDREW BUJALSKI Starring REGINA HALL HAYLEY LU RICHARDSON SHAYNA MCHALE Released 28 JUNE Bras are at once a symbol of femininity and an emblem of the misogyny inherent to capitalism. Supposed to provide support to girls, they are also uncomfortable cages restraining the movements of half of the population. The women working at sports bar Double Whammies in Andrew Bujalski’s Support the Girls wear push-up bras – as part of their uniform. They look good, but they are here to work, and they’re tired. Only the young new recruits, who are unexpectedly pressed into service straight after their job interviews, find their little red tops fun. But it’s only a matter of time before they too see their outfits as the stifling disguises they are. Double Whammies, however, prides itself…

Directed by CARLOS REYGADAS Starring CARLOS REYGADAS NATALIA LÓPEZ PHIL BURGERS Released 12 JULY here’s no real way to start a review of Carlos Reygadas’ remarkable Our Time without resorting to the Spanish term “cajones”. It could refer to numerous aspects of this languorous, bucolic drama which bristles with sexual tension and leans hard on raw emotional pressure points. The key aspect, however, is that Reygadas has stunt cast himself as a character who is so abjectly pathetic, so unremittingly feeble, that he gives Jack Lemmon in Glengarry Glen Ross a run for his meagre purse. It’s invigorating to watch an artist who is so content to project and embrace weakness, and to use cinema as a fantasy playground to express the most destructive impulses of the human heart. His Juan is…

Directed by HARRY WOOTLIFF Starring LAIA COSTA, JOSH O'CONNOR, PETER WIGHT Released 12 JULY An exceptional amount of fine detail and rigourous observation have gone into the making of Only You, a palatably sweet and flighty romantic drama with a neat contemporary twist. But all the groundwork in the world wouldn’t be worth a jot if it weren’t for the two leads – Leia Costa and Josh O’Connor – delivering supremely relaxed and intuitive performances as a loved-up couple who enter a surprising rocky patch. We often, when writing about movies, refer to “chemistry” when attempting to deduce whether a screen partnership works of flops, and here, there’s enough chemistry for ten films, to the point where it would be unsurprising to discover that we were watching a real twosome bounding through the…

Directed by MARK JENKIN Starring EDWARD ROWE, MARY WOODVINE, GILES KING Released 30 AUGUST With Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse and now Bait, 2019 is quickly becoming a banner year for experimental seafaring cinema. This half-mast monochrome gem from writer/director Mark Jenkin takes a somewhat trite and mundane subject – the gentrification of a Cornish fishing community – and spins it into a visually arresting expressionist mood piece that’s quite unlike anything you’ve seen before. Filmed on location using a 16mm Bolex camera with black-and-white Kodak stock, it’s a flinty requiem for a rapidly vanishing way of life and a vital shot in the arm for British social realism. Taciturn fisherman Martin (Edward Rowe) is quite literally rudderless, his brother Steven (Giles King) having turned their father’s trusty vessel into a pleasure boat for…

Peter Strickland’s darkly comic horror tale, In Fabric, concerns a possessed dress and the lives it affects. His previous film, The Duke of Burgundy, was an intriguingly strange and beautifully delivered study of desire and devotion. Once again he tackles sex and love from an unusual perspective and here explains how his very own phantom thread got made with inspiration from mannequins, Mel Gibson and TV’s The Office. LWLies: What inspired the idea of a film about a haunted dress? Strickland: I think this idea that all clothing is haunted by a human presence. People think you can’t make a film about an object but I can guarantee you can reduce anyone to tears if you gave them a dead relative’s clothing. How clothing can make you grieve, how clothing…

Directed by TODD DOUGLAS MILLER Starring BUZZ ALDRIN JOAN ANN ARCHER JANET ARMSTRONG Released 28 JUNE Fifty years on, what’s left to be said about the flight of Apollo 11? The eight-day mission that fulfilled President Kennedy’s eight-year-old pledge to place a man on the moon before the end of the decade is one of the most widely documented events in human history. We all have the fuzzy, black-and-white footage of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the lunar surface etched into our collective memories. We know their words by heart (“The eagle has landed…It’s one small step for man…”), and in 2018, Damien Chazelle recreated the journey from Armstrong’s perspective in the meticulously crafted First Man. So how can Todd Douglas Miller, the director of Apollo 11, offer us a new…

Directed by PHILIPPE FAUCON Starring MOUSTAPHA MBENGUE EMMANUELLE DEVOS MAREME N'DIAYE Released 21 JUNE While films about immigration tend to focus on the migrant’s experience in their new country, Philippe Faucon’s Amin centres on a man torn between two places and resisting the urge to settle in either. Amin (Moustapha Mbengue) has left his native Senegal for France, where construction work allows him to send money back to his wife and children. He departed from his birthplace nine years ago, and he has only been returning home once or twice a year ever since. Amin is not able to see his children grow up and, as such, they hardly know him. The family cannot help but feel a certain bitterness towards this absent husband and father who essentially lives in France, though…

Directed by PEDRO ALMODÓVAR Starring ANTONIO BANDERAS PENÉLOPE CRUZ LEONARDO SBARAGLIA Released 23 AUGUST Pedro Almodóvar is in an introspective mood. His 22nd feature follows a middle-aged Madrid-based filmmaker named Salvador Mallo (Antonio Banderas) as he reflects on his life choices: personal and professional; good and bad. Over the course of the film Almodóvar builds a complex picture of a gifted but fickle artist whose glory days look to be long behind him. We also discover that Salvador suffers from chronic back pain and occasional choking fits, which further explains his sudden urge to reconcile his former triumphs and tragedies. Early on, Salvador recalls how being promoted to the position of soloist in the school choir afforded him academic immunity. In lieu of a proper formal education, he describes acquiring knowledge by…

Directed by GURINDER CHADHA Starring VIVEIK KALRA KULVINDER GHIR MEERA GANATRA Released 9 AUGUST The notion of music as the ultimate universal language gets a good-natured going over in this upbeat but gushingly sentimental coming-of-age story. Plot-wise it’s essentially a wholesale reprise of director Gurinder Chadha’s own 2002 hit, Bend it Like Beckham, only replacing footie with fandom – in this case for The Boss himself, Bruce Springsteen, a seemingly unlikely fixation for a Pakistani teen in ’80s Britain. But Blinded by the Light isn’t a picky film, taking its cues from countless stories involving youthful ambition frustrated by old-fashioned parents, from Rebel Without a Cause through to Footloose. It’s just disappointing that Chadha and her cowriters Sarfraz Manzoor and Paul Mayeda Berges make so little effort to buck the formula. Adapted…

1. Parasite Emerging triumphant with top honours at the festival this year was Bong Joon-ho – incidentally, the first Korean filmmaker to ever win the Palme d’Or. His biting social satire Parasite was a more than worthy winner, taking him back to his native country after his considerably larger scale projects Snowpiecer and Okja. A down-on-their-luck family hatch a plot to take advantage of the much wealthier Park clan, but things rapidly spiral out of their control. Bong’s razor-sharp wit reaches its zenith as he takes on class warfare once again, and proves he’s a master of his craft. Curzon have the rights to UK distribution. HW 2. A Hidden Life Given the hefty runtime and ostensibly tough subject matter – a conscientious objector is sentenced to death during World…

There hasn’t been a whole lot to celebrate in the UK of late, unless you happen to harbour a profound fondness for tinpot totalitarian spud-fuckers and welocme the prospect of a future tinted in depressingly dim hues of red, white and blue. Joanna Hogg’s extraordinary fourth feature, The Souvenir – our inspiration for this issue – has moved us to try and quell the apathy and depression and, instead, gather up 30 of our brilliant, passionate contributors to celebrate a century-plus of mould-breaking cinematic innovation. Our self-determined remit was to limit our selections to one film per director, and in many cases we’ve opted for their debut. The films are sequenced in chronological order rather than subject to an arbitrary ranking system, because this way they tell a story when…

Directed by JIM JARMUSCH Starring BILL MURRAY ADAM DRIVER CHLOË SEVIGNY Released 12 JULY Jim Jarmusch has a bone to pick with America. By his own admission, his oeuvre has always viewed the so-called Land of Opportunity through a foreigners’ eyes, exploring immigrant stories and elements of European and Japanese filmmaking to create something that is distinctively, unmistakably Jarmuschian. After the soulful blue collar poetry of Paterson, he returns to the familiarity of an unremarkable American town for his unique take on the zombie comedy. But in true Jarmusch fashion, it’s not really about zombies, no more than Only Lovers Left Alive was about vampires. Rather, this is Jarmusch raging against the capitalist machine, and reckoning with the USA’s present state of decay. In nondescript Centerville a charmingly eccentric cast of characters…

Directed by SOPHIE HYDE Starring HOLLIDAY GRAINGER, ALIA SHAWKAT, FRA FEE Released 2 AUGUST From Desiree Akhavan’s Appropriate Behaviour to Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, it’s more acceptable than ever to be a nasty woman in popular culture. They sleep with whoever they want, they drink until they puke, they take mind-altering substances on a weeknight and down a Berocca in the morning while scrubbing their faces and legging it into work. For years women have been assured they can have it all, and for millenials, it’s less about having a husband, kids and career, it’s about living a little while we’re young. Certainly that’s the case in Sophie Hyde’s Animals, which follows two women-in-progress around Dublin. Laura (Holliday Grainger) and Tyler (Alia Shawkat) are roommates and best friends, existing in a mutual state of…

Directed by YANN GONZALEZ Starring VANESSA PARADIS NICOLAS MAURY KATE MORAN Released 5 JULY In the middle of Yann Gonzalez’s Knife + Heart, Anne (Vanessa Paradis) wanders into a gay bar, and watches a cabaret performance in which a she-wolf, in embracing her human beloved, also tears her apart. This performance of Liebestod reflects something essential about the destructive nature of its immediate audience's love. For porn producer Anne has been left utterly heartbroken by the end of a 10-year relationship, and now finds herself behaving in a predatory fashion towards her ex, the editor Lois (Kate Moran), spying on her, Psycho-like, through a peephole, stalking her in the streets, and at one point even sexually assaulting her. “You turned into a monster,” Lois will write to Anne. Set in 1979, and…

Directed by KIRILL SEREBRENNIKOV Starring TEO YOO, IRINA STARSHENBAUM, ROMAN BILYK Released 16 AUGUST The production of art becomes a political act when oppression rains down from above. It’s something that Russian filmmaker Kirill Serebrennikov knows all too well. As a vocal critic of Vladimir Putin, he was arrested on the final week of shooting Leto on charges of fraud and had to complete post-production while under house arrest. Government regimes that suppress independent voices are also the subject of this freewheeling slice of musical history, though politics are secondary to mullets, leather jackets and a deep love of rock’n’ roll. The Leningrad underground scene is the focus of this film about the friendship between its twin pioneers: Mike Naumenko (Roman Bilyk) of Zoopark; and Viktor Tsoi (Teo Yoo) of Kino. There’s less…

Emmanuelle Devos is what you might refer to as low-key royalty – one of those French actors who immediately lights up a film whether in a small supporting role or at centre stage, and boasting a career that will soon roll over into its fourth decade. Her most famous collaborators include Arnaud Despleschin (watch My Sex Life… and Kings and Queen) and Alain Resnais (watch Wild Grass), and now she stars opposite Moustapha Mbengue in Philippe Faucon’s moving immigration drama, Amin. LWLies: With a film like Amin, what's happens in that space between you receiving the script and accepting a part? Devos: Philippe Faucon sent the script to my agent. I have been a big fan of Philippe’s cinema since he started out. So before I even open the script,…

Directed by AGNES VARDA Starring AGNES VARDA SANDRINE BONNAIRE HERVÉ CHANDES Released 19 JULY Film is “a beautiful summer peach with a worm inside,” says Agnes Varda with characteristic sass. It’s one of many sensorial images conjured, then left to rest, across her final work. Just as the late auteur and artist described her primary medium – cinema – in myriad evocative ways, so too does Varda by Agnès defy any neat, fixed categorisation. Sure, it’s a documentary – a mode that the director toyed with across her eminent career. It’s also a lecture, a scrapbook, a clip show, a political missive, a billet-doux, an afternoon with an old friend and a self-penned eulogy. Varda passed in March of 2019, aged ninety, having directed more than 50 shorts and features since 1955.…

Directed by PENNY LANE Starring JEX BLACKMORE, CHALICE BLYTHE, NICHOLAS CROWE Released 23 AUGUST As the United States strains to appease deranged right-wing Evangelicals, Penny Lane’s latest documentary Hail Satan? couldn’t have come at a more opportune time. It documents the history and background of The Satanic Temple, a movement born from brash, tonguein-cheek activism, interviewing members of the church as they detail its evolution from religious sect into a full-fledged community. Known for its counter protests against right-wing Christian lobbyists, the group gained notoriety for demanding that a statue of Baphomet be erected next to a proposed statue of the Ten Commandments on government property. As Lane speaks to the leader of the Temple Lucien Greaves, as well as various other members of the church, it’s clear that she doesn’t need to…