Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 82 i Little White Lies

SELECTED BY THE SAFDIE BROS TITLE SuperBookie: Inside Las Vegas Sports Gambling AUTHOR Manteris, Art YEAR 1991 TEXT Senior Librarian Adam Woodward Forget everything you think you know about Sin City. In ‘SuperBookie: Inside Las Vegas Sports Gambling’, author Art Manteris, who at the time of publication held the highly influential position of vice president and director of Race and Sports Operations at the Last Vegas Hilton, unpacks the colourful history of Nevada’s gambling mecca across 234 absorbing pages. Offering an invaluable insider’s perspective on everything from point spreading to spot fixing, Manteris explains in jargon-heavy if uncomplicated and invariably snappy terms how legalised sports betting became a multi billion-dollar industry built around an intricate network of odds-setters and high-stakes bettors. At the heart of all this is “the house”,…

When you’re hot, you’re hot. When you’re not, you’re not. It is what it is and it was ever so. The moneycombed ventricles of the eternally-moribund Hollywood dreadnought constantly thirsts for young blood: starlets; hunks; film school rejects; wackadoo YouTube ninjas; and the downright delusional. If you happen to rock up with a fully-formed stand-up act, you get to skip to the front of the queue. ‘But I can’t act!’ Fuck that. ‘I’m not sure my comedy will translate to the big screen!’ Translate? Look, just turn up on time and do your schtick. We’ll take care of the rest… That’s how we get Good Morning, Vietnam. It’s also how Get Him to the Greek is born. It’s a system that usually works 100 per cent of the time. But…

Directed by RIAN JOHNSON Starring ANA DE ARMAS DANIEL CRAIG CHRISTOPHER PLUMMER Released 29 NOVEMBER There is a second hand book shop on London’s Charring Cross Road and adjacent to its front door is a shelf – some might call it a shrine – dedicated to the work of crime writing doyenne, Agatha Christie. There are, we assume, shrines just like this in shops and homes across the entire globe. Your hand moves in one direction, and before it reaches one of the many, early and vintage editions, it darts off in another. Where to begin with this gigantic and gigantically influential literary corpus? You could always take the fun option of going to see Rian Johnson’s sparkling fifth directorial feature, Knives Out, which is that rare beast: an exacting,…

Directed by SCOTT Z BURNS Starring ADAM DRIVER ANNETTE BENING JON HAMM Released 15 NOVEMBER On the face of it, the prospect of a knotty political drama about the US Senate’s 2012 investigation into the CIA’s ‘Enhanced Interrogation Techniques’ (or EITs) post 9/11 is a pretty tough sell. It’s highly fortunate, then, that the material surrounding the Senate’s ‘Torture Report’ is skilfully translated into a feature film by writer/director Scott Z Burns, who has been quietly on form for years as the man behind the scripts for Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant!, Contagion, Side Effects and The Laundromat. While Aaron Sorkin’s political scripts are motor-mouthed walking-and-talking affairs, and Adam McKay favours bombastic finger-jabbing, there’s something far more subtle at play in Burns’ more trenchant and damning film. The focus of the…

Directed by TAIKA WAITITI Starring ROMAN GRIFFIN DAVIS THOMASIN MCKENZIE TAIKA WAITITI Released 3 JANUARY Ludicrously billed as an “anti-hate satire”, Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit is so concerned with making its thematic intentions unmistakable that it neglects to be a satire of any kind. Its premise, of a young child indocrintated from birth with Nazi ideology, is fertile ground for commentary on how extremism can seem normal, but Jojo’s (Roman Griffin Davis) Panglossian view of the Third Reich lacks bite, with much of its bizarrely lackadaisacal rendering of Nazi Germany epitomised by the mewling giddiness of Jojo’s imaginary friend version of Adolf Hitler (Waititi). To the extent that the film has a visual grammar at all, it is rooted in bright, oversaturated colours that nominally mimic the stylings of Wes Anderson. Yet where…

Directed by WANG XIAOSHUAI Starring AI LIYA DU JIANG GUO-ZHANG ZHAO-YAN Released 6 DECEMBER This ambitious, epic melodrama from Chinese director Wang Xiaoshuai is delivered with historical richness and staggering emotional gravity. Across three hours, its story jumps back and forth between four decades and documents significant upheavals in modern Chinese life. Of particular interest to Wang is how the country’s one-child policy, designed to control the population size and finally eliminated in 2015, affects an ensemble of couples, their relatives and their children. He also explores how those ripples extend to years of rage and regret after two parents, Liyun (Yong Mei) and Yaojun (Wang Jingchun), fall foul of the rule. It brings the political reality and monumental societal shifts right down to a human level. The film’s opening half hour focuses…

Directed by NORA FINGSCHEIDT Starring HELENA ZENGEL, ALBRECHT SCHUCH, GABRIELA MARIA SCHMEIDE Released 6 DECEMBER This debut narrative feature by Nora Fingscheidt is as bold and confrontational as its subject. Coming from a documentary background, the director carried out considerable research into ‘system crashers,’ a label given to children who bounce from home to home and generally fall through the cracks of Germany’s foster system. Nine-year-old Benni (Helena Zengel) is one such child. The film is frenetic and visceral, with a score by John Gürtler that’s as intense and overflowing with energy as Benni – her screams often match the clashing cymbals on the soundtrack, resulting in a symphony of rage. When she lashes out, her violence is often jarring to witness, but Fingscheidt’s lens is never on the side of judgement. In…

Directed by JULIUS ONAH Starring KELVIN HARRISON JR, OCTAVIA SPENCER, NAOMI WATTS Released 8 NOVEMBER Track star, debate champion, honours student: Luce Edgar (Kelvin Harrison Jr) can seemingly do no wrong in the eyes of gushing high school administrators and his wealthy adoptive parents, Peter Tim Roth) and Amy (Naomi Watts). The academic laurels and sporting accomplishments are made all the more impressive considering Luce’s traumatic past growing up in war-torn Eritrea as a child soldier. Most of the adoring faces gazing at Luce are white. To them, this handsome, smart young black man is the American Dream personified. But more importantly, he’s a living validation of their liberal convictions about social justice and racial equality. Julius Onah’s Luce, a strikingly blunt Obama-era requiem, confronts the self-serving underbelly of white privilege and minority…

Jennifer Kent doesn’t think in terms of genre, even if everyone decided her 2014 sleeper hit The Babadook was a horror film on her behalf. Instead, a film is a film is a film to her – though she says The Nightingale, if you had to label it, is a myth about a horrific world. Her harrowing tale of systematic abuse against women and indigenous people in Australia is a bloody, bruising and utterly unrelenting account of a shameful history still barely acknowledged by those in power. LWLies: You filmed The Nightingale on location in Tasmania, right? Kent: Yeah, we were adamant we had to, even though it probably cost us almost twice as much as it would have otherwise. Because it’s an island about the size of Denmark, you…

Directed by ALMA HAR'EL Starring SHIA LABEOUF LUCAS HEDGES NOAH JUPE Released 6 DECEMBER Ask anyone who was a child in the early 2000s for the role they most closely associate with Shia LaBeouf, and odds are they’ll refer to Louis Stevens, the wacky preteen protagonist of tween sitcom Even Stevens, or Stanley Yelnats, the wrongfully-convicted hero in Andrew Davis’ comedy-adventure Holes. In recent years LaBeouf has become better known for his his off-screen antics and meme-generating ability than his acting, with the notable exception of his excellent performance in Andrea Arnold’s 2016 drama American Honey. When it was announced last year that LaBeouf was to write a screenplay based on his own experiences as a child star – and that he would be playing the role of his own father in said…

Directed by THOMAS HEISE Released 22 NOVEMBER “Why do we have to live through these times?” This question found in documents drawn from 1942 is one that is just as pertinent today. Constructed from correspondences plucked from the filmmaker’s own family archives, Heimat is a Space in Time works through a great number of questions over its near 100-year-long time span (and near four-hour runtime), many of which are unanswerable, too great, or else rhetorical by design. Heimat is the latest film by Thomas Heise, an East Berlin born filmmaker who has been living and making films long enough to have seen the times change – his first films, made in the early 1980s, were banned under the GDR. The central observation of Heimat is history’s propensity to repeat itself. The various…

Directed by EDWARD NORTON Starring EDWARD NORTON GUGU MBATHA-RAW ALEC BALDWIN Released 6 DECEMBER There’s an astonishing scene in Motherless Brooklyn where Edward Norton’s gumshoe narrator, who has Tourette syndrome, chases a lead in the case he’s working to a small, smoke-filled jazz club in Harlem. Pulling up a stool at the far end of the bar next to the cramped back-corner stage, he begins to twitch and scat in serendipitous harmony with the music, his every tic and yip matching the house band’s off-beat groove. For the first time in his life, Lionel Essrog’s neurological affliction suddenly makes sense. If only the same could be said of the film itself. Adapting Jonathan Lethem’s 1999 novel of the same name, this is Norton’s second directorial effort after 2000’s Nora Ephron-lite love triangle comedy…

Directed by SERGIO LEONE Starring ROD STEIGER JAMES COBURN ROMOLO VALLI 1971 Released 25 NOV Blu-ray In some ways the inverse of John Ford’s longevity and abundance, the directorial output of Sergio Leone is comparatively dense and brief; its peaks scarcely covered two decades and a pair of (circumstantial, one could say post facto) trilogies. This 1971 film is almost never mentioned when discussing the hit parade that stretches between A Fistful of Dollars and Once Upon a Time in America, but it’s not for a lack of his strengths: an eccentric, iconic Ennio Morricone score that breathes life even into the bankrupt term, “iconic”, a great, pungent sense of humor that will transition (with miraculous seamlessness) to operatic gravity, and an extraordinary control of complicated human movements against a large landscape, all…

Directed by KAZUO HARA 1987 Released 11 NOV Blu-ray It’s hard to know where to start with this deeply distressing 1987 film which seems to aggressively test the pliancy of the term “documentary”. The parameters are initially set as piece of ultra-subjecttive investigative journalism, in which director Kazuo Hara (little-known in the West, but a maker of many extraordinary and radical films) follows activist and outspoken World War Two veteran Kenzo Okuzaki. Like most men involved in overseas conflict, Okuzaki had seen some dark shit, and Hara’s camera becomes an access-all-areas pass (both physical and moral) for this increasingly cantankerous guy to dredge up some extremely unsavoury business that went down in a Japanese garrison in New Guinea. Where most conservative journalists will employ a carefully mounted rhetorical ambush to tease information…

The weather was glorious, and I was delighting in the company of a chaffinch who joined me for lunch every day. At peace, I looked at the details of my next screening, due to start in 30 minutes. The cinema was, according to Google, 40 minutes away. With scarcely time to pay the bill and say goodbye to my avian friend, I ran through the streets of San Sebastián with my laptop bag keeping rhythm at my side. I hadn’t yet seen the Basque coast, and as it passed me by, I knew I must return one evening. Dehydrated and sweating, I thrust my press pass at the steward and plonked myself down in the only remaining seat, right at the front next to a whirring subtitle projector. Céline Sciamma’s…

Josh and Benny Safdie are a couple of real Noo Yawkahs, so much so that they don’t even pronounce the term that way. They grew up ferried between Dad’s in Queens and Mom’s on the Upper West Side, developing an infatuation with Gotham’s grit and eccentricity that has informed their vivid body of work. The brothers’ world teems with crooks, addicts and sleazeballs — off-colour characters such as deluxe jeweller Howard Ratner, the antihero played by Adam Sandler at the heart of their latest and greatest film, Uncut Gems. Drawing from memories of their father’s work in the Diamond District, the legend of envelope-pushing Jew-Ubermensch Al Goldstein and a lifelong passion for pro basketball, they’ve made the rare Big Apple movie that feels as hectic and relentless as the city…

SELECTED BY THE SAFDIE BROS TITLE The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz AUTHOR Richler, Mordecai YEAR 1959 TEXT Asst Janitor David Jenkins This lesser known 1959 novel is a tight-rope walk of precarious character empathy. Its hero is a young rapscallion named Duddy Kravitz who is a combustible nucleus of charm, humour and ingenuity. When he’s terrorising his school teacher, whose wife has just died, we remain on his side because he is funny. When his paramour becomes annoyed with his underhand ploys, we remain on his side because he is exciting. When he does a bit of dodgy wheeler-dealing with some unsavoury customers, we still remain on side because he is daring. But Canadian author Mordecai Richler, in his compulsive and darkly comic fourth novel, just keeps nudging Duddy further…

Can comedy and activism combine to raise awareness of the climate emergency and foster action rather than apathy? A new short film by Jack Stimpson puts that theory to the test. Extinction features Emma Thompson and is set around the April 2018 uprising led by Extinction Rebellion. LWLies: Extinction is a film about the impossibility of creating a meaningful dialogue around issues of the climate crisis – do you think bargaining with politicians is the way forward? Thompson: No. This is no time for bargaining. In a crisis you have to convince people to take positive and immediate action. Your arguments must therefore be irrefutable and your solutions well articulated and possible. Neither can you retreat into the ‘all politicians are the same’ corner. Find the ones who are able…

Directed by MATI DIOP Starring MAME BINETA SANE AMADOU MBOW IBRAHIMA TRAORÉ Released 29 NOVEMBER t’s heartbreaking how casually the lively, goodhumoured Souleiman (Ibrahima Traoré) makes a decision that brings about the end of his young life. Mati Diop’s stunning debut feature Atlantics opens on a workers’ grievance at a building site in Dakar, as a phallic glass-and-steel edifice looms overhead. Souleiman and his colleagues have gone three months without pay, and they’re absolutely not going to allow that to roll over into a fourth. With a sense of resigned futility, he doesn’t even kick up a stink. Instead he just drifts off towards home and his secret love Ada (Mame Bineta Sane), a young, strong woman who is due to be married (against her wishes) to a monied entrepreneur she barely knows.…

Directed by FERNANDO MEIRELLES Starring JONATHAN PRYCE ANTHONY HOPKINS JUAN MINUJÍN Released 29 NOVEMBER Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce make for a study in opposites as the co-leads of Fernando Meirelles’ talky drama The Two Popes. They portray men on either end of the same ideological spectrum; Pope Benedict XVI (Hopkins) was severe, conservative and a great believer in the opulence of his post, while his successor Cardinal Bergoglio (Pryce) was humble, affable and a promoter of forward-thinking social reform. United in their unwavering faith yet divided on how best to express it, their exchange of power embodied a generational changing of the guard that could begin a new era for a Catholic church still marred by scandal. Meirelles’ film imagines the days leading up to this epochal moment in religious history as…

Directed by BENJAMIN BERMAN Starring THE AMAZING JOHNATHAN, ERIC ANDRÉ, BENJAMIN BERMAN Released 19 NOVEMBER “Can you trust anything that a magician does?” This is the crucial query posed to director Ben Berman midway through his film about one. It sets off a series of second-guesses that threaten to collapse his project. Doubting his own integrity as well as the honesty of his principal subject, he starts to question not just the direction that his own film is taking, but the validity of his entire professional field. What does it mean to adopt a way of working where the best outcome is often a bad one, and the fastest route to reaching results is rarely the most righteous? Berman’s focus is John Szeles, an American magician who made a lot of money off…

Directed by MARIELLE HELLER Starring MATTHEW RHYS TOM HANKS SUSAN KELECHI WATSON Released 6 DECEMBER Is there anyone else on the planet who could play the incomparable Fred Rogers besides Tom Hanks? There’s not much of a physical resemblance, yet the two share something more significant: a place in the hearts of Americans from all walks of life. Children raised on the television show Mr Rogers’ Neighborhood were taught the value of human kindness and self-expression, as demonstrated so eloquently in Morgan Neville’s 2018 documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor?. He touched the lives of countless individuals, and can be seen as a true force for good in a world of increasing instability. Hanks, be it as Woody the Cowboy or Josh Baskin or Sully Sullenberger, is a similar sort of specifically-American hero.…

Directed by MIRRAH FOULKES Starring MIA WASIKOWSKA DAMON HERRIMAN BENEDICT HARDIE Released 22 NOVEMBER Australian actor Mirrah Foulkes has performed for a clutch of her country’s most interesting exports, having appeared in Julia Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty and husband David Michôd’s Animal Kingdom, as well as Kiwi director Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake. She steps behind the camera for her first feature as writer/director in order to subvert a British cultural institution: the Punch and Judy puppet show. With its roots in Italy, Punch and Judy’s first iteration in the UK was documented in 1664 by the diarist Samuel Pepys and has endured to this day as a form of family entertainment, which is curious when you consider the basic premise: a deranged puppet beating other characters with a stick followed by the…

Directed by JOCELYN DEBOER, DAWN LUEBBE Starring JOCELYN DEBOER, DAWN LUEBBE, BECK BENNETT Released 22 NOVEMBER There’s something strange about this sunny, seemingly perfect American suburb. Adults wear braces on their teeth, drive golf carts and wear co-ordinated outfits of pink, purple and blue. Written, directed by and starring Jocelyn DeBoer and Dawn Luebbe, Greener Grass sits somewhere between satire and surrealism. The inciting incident comes as Jill (DeBoer) and Lisa (Luebbe) watch their children play soccer. After lamenting the murder of a local yoga teacher, Lisa admires Jill’s new baby. Eager to please, Jill impulsively hands over the baby as a gift. The intrigue and motor of Greener Grass comes from the question of how much these serene automatons have in common with actual humans. While The Stepford Wives is an obvious…

Directed by KIM LONGINOTTO Released 29 NOVEMBER Glancing back over the incredible career of British documentarian Kim Longinotto, one might generalise that she has, through her films, shown an abiding interest in the female victims of male violence. As far back as her meticulous and patient 1998 film Divorce Iranian Style, and through work such as 2005’s Sisters in Law, 2008’s Rough Aunties, 2010’s Pink Saris and 2015’s Dreamcatcher she has focused on oppressed women who have chosen to fight their corner. At first, her new feature Shooting the Mafia seems like something a bit different for a director who usually prefers a confessional, journalistic and observational mode. This time around we have reams of juicy archive footage, monochrome photography slathered in that Ken Burns-style slow directional zoom, and only a small…

Directed by ABE FORSYTHE Starring LUPITA NYONG'O ALEXANDER ENGLAND JOSH GAD Released 15 NOVEMBER “You’re being a child!”, remonstrates Sara (Nadia Townsend) with her soon-to-be ex-boyfriend Dave (Alexander England), at the beginning Little Monsters, written and directed by Abe Forsythe. She is not wrong. The film’s opening montage sees the couple endlessly arguing in public places, and includes cutaways to Dave inhaling a daytime bongload at home, masturbating with his VR headset on, or getting moved on by police while busking with his electric guitar. All this serves to show that, while Dave may be an adult, he is definitely arrested in his development. After he half-heartedly walks out on Sara and moves onto the sofa of his older sister Tess (Kat Stewart), he proves considerably less mature than his five-year-old nephew Felix…

Stepping behind the camera for only the second time was not a straightforward move for Edward Norton. The actor best known for playing dangerously deluded outsiders in American History X and Fight Club spent more than five years developing Motherless Brooklyn, transposing Jonathan Lethem’s 1999 detective novel to 1950s New York and casting himself as Tourette-suffering protagonist Lionel Essrog. Here he discusses his influences, the magic of collaboration, and overcoming nerves to play the most complex character of his career. LWLies: Thom Yorke wrote a song for this film. How did that come about? Norton: I met Thom some time around ’96. I was already friends with Michael Stipe and [Radiohead] were opening for REM. Michael said, ‘You gotta hear these guys, you’ll love ’em.’ Anyway, they had decided to…

Directed by PAUL VERHOEVEN Starring RENEE SOUTENDIJK RUTGER HAUER JEROEN KRABBÉ 1980 Released 2 DEC Blu-ray The rough and tumble of suburban Rotterdam’s amateur motocross scene is at the centre of this very weird and very enjoyable early missive from the Dutch maestro Paul Verhoeven. What begins as a bawdy teen movie, with all manner of japes, larks and monkeyshines, slowly evolves into a depressive and violent nightmare, encompassing gang rape, religious rage, crippling depression and a very public suicide. The director’s I-don’t-give-a-fuuuuuck attitude towards the conservative predilections of the local audience caused mass scandal in his home country, leading him to haul ass to Hollywood where such aggressive provocation would be welcomed with open arms. It sees three young studs attempting to hone their motocross skills so they can tread the same…

Directed by ANTHONY MANN Starring JAMES STEWART RUTH ROMAN WALTER BRENNAN 1954 Released 11 NOV Blu-ray Anthony Mann was already a great director, and James Stewart was already an established star actor, when the two made Winchester ‘73 in 1950, kicking off a collaboration that would see them make eight pictures, five of which were westerns, two of which were non-westerns that were still pretty good, and one of which was the story of Glenn Miller. The Far Country was made towards the end of that run; it’s the least of their westerns and, serendipitously, it preceded their greatest, The Man from Laramie. With a story and script by Borden Chase, The Far Country is a little clouded over by a nagging sense of once-more-around-the-block, or, dare I say it, a touch of…

SELECTED BY THE SAFDIE BROS TITLE What Makes Sammy Run? AUTHOR Schulberg, Budd YEAR 1941 TEXT Chief Archivist Christina Newland Budd Schulberg, the author of ‘What Makes Sammy Run?’, was born into movie royalty – the son of Paramount honcho and Hollywood pioneer BP Schulberg. The novelist was a princeling of Paramount Studios, dabbling as a newspaperman, sports journo and screenwriter which all ran in tandem with his literary aspirations. He had been furnished with the raw materials and experiences that writers thrive on – growing up surrounded by movie stars, prizefighters and other celebrities. It would make him a lively and often cynical observer of the movie enclave, never more so than in his first novel. Published in 1941, ‘What Makes Sammy Run?’ is a seminally spiky read on…

When the Safdie brothers’ Good Time played at the Cannes Film Festival in 2017, there were a flurry of complimentary tweets comparing the film to various classic movies. Through their own Twitter account, the brothers combed through the responses and confirmed or denied whether the titles mentioned had influenced or inspired them. In that spirit, we took down some notes while watching their new film, Uncut Gems, and jotted down a few classic titles that came to mind, such as Karel Reisz’s The Gambler, Jacques Demy’s Bay of Angels and Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets, among others. We then pulled together a team of our favourite illustrators and tasked them with creating an ostentatious piece of jewellery inspired by these movies. Welcome, friends, to the all-out bling explosion that is The…

Directed by JÉRÉMY CLAPIN Starring HAKIM FARIS VICTOIRE DU BOIS PATRICK D'ASSUMÇAO Released 22 NOVEMBER I’ve always been particularly fond of the hands of my loved ones. My mother’s – like my grandmother’s – are elegantly slender, while my father’s feel like the warmest place on earth. Hands tell stories. They carry the wear of the day or, if you’re so inclined to believe it, contain the path of your own future, lined with foreshadowings of children, marriage and a (hopefully) long life span. Gentle imagery of touch and feeling elevates Jérémy Clapin’s I Lost My Body to the level of a tender ode to the beauty of the human hand. This earnest emotion is woven into the fabric of the story of the young Naoufel who navigates life as…

How do you follow-up a coterie of excellent shorts which have travelled the globe and built your name as a director? If you’re French actor and filmmaker Mati Diop, you make one of the decade’s finest debut features, Atlantics, about youth and the spectre of capitalism in modern day Senegal. LWLies: You’re known for acting, but also the shorts you have made. How long have you had the desire to make a feature? Diop: I guess I wanted to experiment and to try different things. The writing process was long and difficult. Writing is not my first tool – I come from sound and image. Even before my shorts I was making art videos and soundscapes. It was first using sound, then image, then playing with the two, and then…

Directed by ALEX GIBNEY Released 13 DECEMBER Given his uneven output of recent years – the Rolling Stones, Fela Kuti and Lance Armstrong films being cases in point – it is something of a joy (and relief) to find Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney back firing on all cylinders and reconnecting with his political muse. Using the journey of fallen oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky as a lens through which to explore the current state of Russia and its faux democracy – and in turn, America’s and the UK’s – Gibney reasserts two of his most vital qualities: his impartiality and fastidious fact-checking. The result is easily his strongest work in years. Winning Khodorkovsky’s trust without compromising his own integrity, Gibney enlists the help of former BBC Moscow correspondent Martin Sixsmith in retracing the grim…

Robert De Niro and Al Pacino hopped over to London with Martin Scorsese’s new gangster epic, The Irishman. An audience with two of the most influential actors to ever rise up through the Hollywood ranks covered the pair’s long friendship, their remarkable collaborations in the gangster genre and De Niro’s pungently-worded thoughts on the current commander-in-chief. LWLies: What do you like most about working with each other? Pacino: We’ve known each other for a really long time. We met in 1968. And we were both young actors at that time. I think early on in our careers, we connected and we found we had similar things happening to us. That camaraderie, that symbiosis, that got us together. And we’ve been that way ever since. We don’t see each other much,…

Directed by SEAMUS MURPHY Starring PJ HARVEY, SEAMUS MURPHY Released 8 NOVEMBER Strip away all the celebrity tittle-tattle, gossip and innuendo, and when we talk to artists we’re primarily interested in how they go about making their art. What’s your inspiration? What’s your method? What’s your secret? Kudos to singer-songwriter PJ Harvey for being at the centre of a film which attempts to lay the creative process horrifyingly bare. The desire to exhibit the unseen bedrock of her songs takes its most literal form in a live installation at London’s Somerset House, where Harvey and her musical collaborators record the album ‘The Hope Six Demolition Project’ in a purpose-built, sound-proofed rock box where onlookers can spy on the recording session through one-way mirrors and monitor the evolution of each song. Footage of the…

Directed by JENNIFER KENT Starring AISLING FRANCIOSI SAM CLAFLIN BAYKALI GANAMBARR Released 29 NOVEMBER Following 2014’s maternally-oriented ghost story The Babadook, director Jennifer Kent’s second feature The Nightingale has proved far more divisive with critics, many of them decrying its representations of sexual violence as gratuitous. The film features scenes of rape and murder, centres on a character who is not entirely sympathetic, and does not make things right by the end. But none of these elements on their own are objectionable. Cinema is not a numbers game, and a film is not the sum of its parts. A director does not win feminist points by cancelling out a sexist element in their film with an engineered “clapback”. The Nightingale is a refreshing, necessary reminder that sexual violence isn’t just a trendy topic…

Directed by NOAH BAUMBACH Starring ADAM DRIVER SCARLETT JOHANSSON ALAN ALDA Released 15 NOVEMBER Having just been served his divorce papers, Charlie (Adam Driver) wanders across the first floor landing of his wife’s family home, looking at the framed pictures on the wall. One of them is a cut-out from a magazine, a feature about the couple’s successful theatre company titled ‘Scenes From a Marriage.’ It’s a nod from writer-director Noah Baumbach towards the ne plus ultra of marital-breakdown dramas, Ingmar Bergman’s 1973 miniseries of the same name; a let’s-just-get-this-out-of-the-way acknowledgement from a filmmaker who’s suffered comparisons to the Swedish maestro and his disciple, Woody Allen, throughout his career, a symptom of the superficially comparable well-to-do milieus that his characters tend to inhabit. If the title of Baumbach’s 11th dramatic feature shares a…

Directed by ANDREA LUKA ZIMMERMAN, ADRIAN JACKSON Starring JO GALBRAITH, JAKE GOODE, RICHARD HONEYGHAN Released 21 NOVEMBER Shoreditch in East London was one of the urban areas most impacted by the 2012 Summer Olympic games. Not surprisingly, all those renovations, improvements in infrastructure and newly minted amenities simply led to increased gentrification and spikes in house prices. As is often the case, the most vulnerable and underrepresented communities were pushed further to the fringes of society. Here for Life gives many of these people a dynamic platform, merging elements of documentary, confessional and poetry to put their voices centerstage. Members of the theatrical collective Cardboard Citizens, created in 1991 by the film’s co-director, Adrian Jackson, participate in fragmented live readings and intimate interviews stitched together with lo-fi footage of their everyday lives. Both…

Directed by JAMES MANGOLD Starring CHRISTIAN BALE MATT DAMON CAITRIONA BALFE Released 13 NOVEMBER In the year of our Lord 1977, the BBC launched a weekly motoring magazine show called Top Gear, which was essentally metal fetish pornography for petrol-heads of all ages. You could very well imagine the Brummie racing driver and mechanic Ken Miles being a diehard fan, if he hadn’t upped sticks and migrated to America in the early 1950s. He is brought to life by Christian Bale in this roistering, brassy historical drama based on the fallout of a petty professional rivalry between Henry Ford II and Enzo Ferrari. Where the former had perfected the bland, practical, affordable family saloon, the latter sunk every lira he made into producing sleek, speedy, erotically-desired racing cars. Then the demographics shifted: teen…

Directed by JACQUES DEMY Starring ANOUK AIMÉE GARY LOCKWOOD ALEXANDRA HAY 1969 Released 2 DEC Blu-ray Accidental connections between movies arrange themselves all the time. Model Shop, Jacques Demy’s first and only major motion picture for a Hollywood studio, seems to function as the crest of a wave representing that era’s consternation with, among other things, America’s deadly occupation in Vietnam. Not long afterward, movies would begin showing the boys coming home, and two very different films from the early 1970s, George A Romero’s There’s Always Vanilla and Bob Clark’s Deathdream, teased, via cosmic kinship, two possible fates for Demy’s lean, happy-go-lucky, sun-dappled loser George Matthews (Gary Lockwood): one a continuation of carefree, borrowed time, the other… not so much. Yet, regardless of George’s sunny temperamentand reluctance to take life too seriously, the…

Directed by JOSEPH LOSEY Starring ELIZABETH TAYLOR MIA FARROW ROBERT MITCHUM 1968 Released 25 NOV Blu-ray As historians have pointed out time and again, the beginning of the dissolution of the American studio system, which would ultimately take more than 20 years, coincided almost to the year with the poisonous surge of anti-Communism in the United States which, in its first decade of predatory prosecution and harassment, claimed the careers of dozens of Hollywood leftists. Chief among the star casualties was Wisconsin-born and New England-educated Joseph Losey, who remains one of the most worldly of all the great American directors who are still awaiting a level of appreciation commensurate with their extraordinary achievements. By the late ’60s, wandering the wilderness suited Losey just fine, and anyway, it was no longer wilderness: his affinity…

As I would say to anyone who would listen, this was my first visit to a film festival in 18 months. The reason for this self-imposed exile was that I had recently become a father and, frankly, subsisting on a diet of movies, carbs and coffee in a different country to my little one did not greatly appeal. The sting of waving off my colleagues as they headed to Cannes in May was intense but bearable. I wore a painted, nervous smile as the rave reviews came rolling in for new films by Terrence Malick, Quentin Tarantino and Bong Joon-ho. I waited for the FOMO to hit breaking point, but thankfully, it never really did. I was able to see the situation with a measure of detachment: it’s fine, I’ll…