Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 83: Jan/Feb 2020 i Little White Lies

Released 17 JANUARY “Live by the foma [harmless untruths] that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.”-The Book of Bokonon- This is the epigraph that author Kurt Vonnegut uses to launch his 1963 masterpiece ‘Cat’s Cradle’, hooked to the fictional religion of Bokonism. Terrence Malick is a Christian rather than a Bokonist, yet the faith he explores in A Hidden Life bears more relation to foma than the more dogmatic dictates of organised religion. This is a film about a man’s unwavering faith enabling him to rebel against the forces of evil, so it’s important to try to understand exactly what type of faith is being upheld. A searcher’s energy expressed through earnest philosophical voiceovers has been a trope of his work ever since his first film, Badlands. It’s…

Directed by BONG JOON-HO Starring SONG KANG-HO LEE SUN-KYUN CHO YEO-JEONG Released 7 FEBRUARY It’s often said by people who don’t have a lot of money that money is the root of all evil. In actuality, the Bible verse (Timothy 6:10, if you were wondering) is more specific: “The love of money is the root of all evil.” South Korean writer/director Bong Joon-ho certainly seems to agree with this sentiment, as most of his films reckon in some respect with elements of capitalism and class warfare. After two English-language films (2013’s Snowpiercer and Okja), Bong has returned to his homeland for another parable about the seductive nature of greed. Parasite is a tricky, scary little beast of a film; it burrows under your skin and settles in for the long haul. On the…

Directed by SHENGZE ZHU Released 24 JANUARY China’s live-streaming industry is booming. Expected to generate 75 billion yuan (approx £8bn) by the end of 2019, the live-streaming market is home to streamers specialising in just about every subject imaginable, and while some earn millions broadcasting their lives online, others do it just for fun. Shengze Zhu’s Present.Perfect., made entirely from online broadcasts, skews more towards the marginal side of this off-kilter industry. Rather than centring on celebrities, it features footage captured from the channels of various oddballs, cutting cyclically between footage from the broadcasts of 12 different ‘anchors’ with smaller audiences, drawing from 800 hours of raw recordings. The director’s choice of subject (including a man with disfigurements who streams while working as a street artist, and a 30-year-old with a high-pitched…

Being centred around a team of botanists, led by Emily Beecham’s Alice, who have developed a new strain of flower which emits an endorphin-boosting scent (with predictably unexpected results), Jessica Hausner’s Little Joe is, on the surface at least, a genre-inflected cautionary tale about the dangers of genetic engineering. But the seed for the film was planted when the Austrian writer/director became interested in exploring the idea of what it means to be a mother and a professional woman today. We sat down with her at the Cannes Film Festival to find out more. LWLies: This the first film you’ve made in English. What was the main decision behind that? Haunser: I wanted to make an English-language film because this story has a genre element to it and for me…

Directed by MELINA MATSOUKAS Starring DANIEL KALUUYA, JODIE TURNER-SMITH, BOKEEM WOODBINE Released 31 JANUARY One of the side characters in Queen & Slim describes the two outlaws of the title as “the black Bonnie and Clyde”. As with the film that kick started the so-called New Hollywood era, this promising directorial debut from Melina Matsoukas, based on a script by Lena Waithe, tangles with our emotional affiliation to a pair of ostensible criminals making a mad dash for freedom. Yet here, no guns blaze, very little blood is spilled, and our heroes do everything in their might not to tip over that precipice to become anti-heroes. Which is both a blessing and a curse, as a story about avowedly virtuous criminals by proxy only serves to negate any sense of danger or ambiguity…

Directed by JAY ROACH Starring MARGOT ROBBIE CHARLIZE THERON NICOLE KIDMAN Released 17 JANUARY As the theme of social justice has become sufficiently topical to bring audiences into cinemas, there has been a glut of films with a single issue as their hook which misrepresent every other political reality, and then hide behind that single issue’s gravity with a self-important shrug. Welcome to the most heinous of offenders, Bombshell, directed by Jay Roach of Meet the Fockers and Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery fame. Brandishing the narrative figleaf of ‘women standing up to a powerful sex offender,’ this piece of hot trash soft-pedals the racist, homophobic, Republican-propaganda-machine that is Fox News, airbrushing the politics of its female news anchors so that they can scan as straightforwad, ass-kicking heroes. The film is based…

Directed by TAKASHI MIIKE Starring BECKY SAKURAKO KONISHI MASATAKA KUBOTA Released 14 FEBRUARY “Things are getting complicated,” young, low-ranking yakuza Kase (Shōta Sometano) tells corruptible police detective Otomo (Nao Omori, who you may recognise as Ichi from Takashi Miike’s 2003 gore aria, Ichi the Killer) near the beginning of First Love. Gondo (Seiyo Uchino), the boss of Kase’s syndicate, returns from a stint in prison to reassume the reins, even though everyone is distracted by internecine strife with the Chinese Triads. Kase, meanwhile, is plotting to steal a bag of crystal meth from his own people, and to pin the blame on Monica (Sakurako Konishi), a traumatised young woman who has been drugged and forced into prostitution to pay off the debts of her abusive father. Things are about to become a whole…

Directed by SUHAIB GASMELBARI Released 31 JANUARY A blackout in Khartoum motivates a group of elderly ex-filmmakers to recreate a scene from Billy Wilder’s Sunset Blvd. in which Gloria Swanson saunters down some stairs. Through a joyfulness rooted in profound affection and knowledge, Ibrahim, Suleiman, Manar and Eltayeb demonstrate what it means to have filmmaking running through your veins in Suhain Gasmelbari’s Talking About Trees. Some context: after the Islamist government’s military coup of 1989 in Sudan, political restrictions led people to watch films at home, replacing the treasured cinema experience with a “new lover” (digital film). Decades later, enthusiasm for a potential rebirth of the physical, communal experience is clear, as some even admit to having never seen a film on the big screen. The director focuses on four forcibly retired…

Directed by RICHARD STANLEY Starring NICOLAS CAGE Q’ORIANKA KILCHER JOELY RICHARDSON Released 28 FEBRUARY There’s an inherent problem in trying to adapt the writing of HP Lovecraft. The very notion of something being ‘Lovecraftian’ connotes something that cannot be envisioned, that cannot be understood by the human eye. Richard Stanley’s adaptation of the short story ‘Color Out of Space’ – his first feature in over a decade – deftly sidesteps the customary roadblock that comes with Lovecraft adaptations. Instead of trying to overcome the contradiction of portraying something incomprehensible, Stanley focuses in on the madness induced by bearing witness to an unholy cosmic terror. He observes a family attempting to find reason, or comfort one another, through meaningless platitudes. The film relocates the story to the present day, charting the unspeakable horrors that…

Directed by TERRY GILLIAM Starring ADAM DRIVER JONATHAN PRYCE OLGA KURYLENKO Released 31 JANUARY If the release of Terry Gilliam’s long delayed and much ballyhooed fantasy satire The Man Who Killed Don Quixote proves anything, it’s that not all long delayed, much ballyhooed passion projects need come to fruition. The fates tried to stop the director from making this film for nearly 30 years, throwing down a gauntlet of natural disasters, bad luck and budget shortfalls that eventually halted each attempt at production. Maybe Gilliam should have listened. But the director persisted, and finally in June of 2017 his opus was in the can thanks to the participation of influential creative benefactors like Adam Driver. Despite such a long gestation period, the end result feels like it’s been created on the fly using…

Directed by TREY EDWARD SHULTS Starring TAYLOR RUSSELL KELVIN HARRISON JR ALEXA DEMIE Released 17 JANUARY Trey Edward Shults makes claustrophobic family dramas of Shakespearian proportions – films that thrust difficult individuals bound by blood into confined spaces and allow chaos to reign. Spiky, discordant music and close quarters camerawork add to that sinking feeling, and his latest, the tumultuous Waves, is no different, although it’s undoubtedly his most ambitious project yet. Against the backdrop of the Florida coast, high school senior Tyler Williams (Kelvin Harrison Jr) lives a seemingly charmed life. He has an adoring girlfriend, a spot on the school wrestling team and a comfortable middle-class lifestyle, despite his father Ronald’s stern and sometimes overbearing presence in his life. But success starts to slip out of Tyler’s grasp following a devastating…

Directed by GEORGE CUKOR Starring KATHARINE HEPBURN CARY GRANT DORIS NOLAN 1938 Released 13 JAN Blu-ray This crackling 1938 screwball comedy from George Cukor is not merely a paean to all the freaks out there; it slyly suggests that freaks make for pretty solid love matches too. Cary Grant barrels into the picture as championship rogue Johnny Case, announcing that he is to be wed to a woman with a vast fortune, Julia Seton (Doris Nolan), but that he’s in it for the love not the money. And so we follow the exhaustive vetting process he goes through, interrogated by his bride-to-be’s banking magnate father (Edward Seton), and her sister Linda (Katharine Hepburn), the family black sheep who is, of course, as smart as a nine-tailed whip. We know that Johnny’s aim is…

Directed by MICHAEL CRICHTON Starring TOM SELLECK GENE SIMMONS KIRSTIE ALLEY 1984 Released 17 FEB Blu-ray Have you ever, at any time in your life, yearned to see a film in which Tom Selleck plays a tech-savvy super cop who takes on Kiss frontman Gene Simmons and an army of killer robotic spiders? If so, then you absolutely must see Michael Crichton’s daft 1984 film Runaway. These killer spiders resemble an old fashioned roller skate that has been welded to a hand stapler – scary stuff. They leap up onto their victim’s chest, inject some kind of oleaginous poison via a protruding, head-mounted, retractable syringe, and then they explode in a ball of fire. Also in Simmons’ arsenal is a gun that fires bullets which are programmed to home-in on a predetermined victim…

Directed by DESTIN DANIEL CRETTON Starring BRIE LARSON, MICHAEL B JORDAN, JAMIE FOXX Released 17 JANUARY Walter McMillian spent six years on death row between 1988 and 1993 for a crime he did not commit. For almost the entire length of his sentence, attorney Bryan Stevenson worked on the case, trying to clear his client’s name, until finally securing his exoneration. As Destin Daniel Cretton’s Just Mercy points out, McMillian shares a hometown with Harper Lee, and there are certain parallels between his case and Lee’s novel ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’. Perhaps the most damning point about this piece of trivia is how little the times had changed back then, and even to this day. Injustice continues to plague the American legal system, particularly for black inmates. There’s no question that Stevenson, who…

Directed by ADAM EGYPT MORTIMER Starring MILES ROBBINS, PATRICK SCHWARZENEGGER, SASHA LANE Released 7 JANUARY It is all in the title. Lots of films – which won’t be named here to avoid spoiling – only reveal the imaginary nature of a character’s ‘invisible friend’ as a Big Twist™ right at the climax. Yet we know from the very outset of Adam Egypt Mortimer’s second feature (co-written, as with his 2015 debut Some Kind of Hate, with novelist Brian de Leeuw) that, well, Daniel isn’t real. Rather, he is conjured as a playmate, confidante and guide by the lonely young Luke (Griffin Robert Faulkner) at a moment when he is having to deal not only with the breakup of his parents and the breakdown of his schizophrenic mother Claire (Mary Stuart Masterson), but also…

Directed by CLINT EASTWOOD Starring PAUL WALTER HAUSER SAM ROCKWELL KATHY BATES Released 31 JANUARY In Atlanta’s Centennial Park, a roar rises from the crowd as they recognise the downbeat of the ‘Macarena’. Dressed in jorts and wide-striped shirts, Olympics fans move in unison to the rhythm of the summer’s other sensation. The song ends; they chant: “U! S! A! U! S! A!” It’s July, 1996, the midpoint of the End of History. President Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky is not yet public knowledge, and Survivor is not yet on screens, let alone YouTube – normal people are only ever on primetime by accident, on COPS or America’s Funniest Home Videos. Amid all this flyover complacency, Richard Jewell (Paul Walter Hauser) is trying to do his job, despite his diarrhoea. He takes being…

Directed by MAKOTO SHINKAI Starring KOTARO DAIGO, NANA MORI, SEI HIRAIZUMI Released 17 JANUARY Rain has always been a prominent natural force in the work of Japanese animation director Makoto Shinkai’s, emblematic of a sort of spiritual connection between Heavens and Earth. In Weathering with You, his follow up the acclaimed fantasy romance Your Name, this connection has been thrown out of balance, and the appearance of rain has shifted into something more oppressive and ominous. The film is set against the backdrop of catastrophic climate change and follows 16-year-old Hodaka Morishima, a runaway fending for himself in an alternate Tokyo where it hasn’t stopped raining for several months. While mileage may vary with Shinkai’s particular brand of melodrama, there’s no denying the pleasures of the film’s tactile, detailed and beautifully painted animation.…

Directed by CÉLINE SCIAMMA Starring NOÉMIE MERLANT ADÈLE HAENEL LUÀNA BAJRAMI Released 28 FEBRUARY One of the first things they teach in life-drawing classes is that you should look at your subject more than your paper. By looking, you learn the essentials: proportion; posture; the direction of the light. But maintain that gaze and, if you’re a good artist, you might just get beyond the surface, past all the mechanics, and catch a glimpse of the essence of your subject – the very spirit you hope to memorialise with your craft. Marianne (Noémie Merlant) is a painter and the main protagonist of Céline Sciamma’s fourth directorial feature, Portrait of a Lady on Fire. She is someone who understands the importance of looking. In the story’s 18th-century setting, she’s given that very task: to…

Directed by ARMANDO IANNUCCI Starring DEV PATEL HUGH LAURIE TILDA SWINTON Released 24 JANUARY On paper, yet another Charles Dickens screen adaption is an unedifying prospect. The Victorian author created some of Britain’s most memorable characters, but must we keep turning to him for our modern visual entertainment? Scottish comedy stalwart and avowed Dickens superfan Armando Iannucci has built up such a fine body of work, perhaps he should be afforded some leniency before viewers tackle The Personal History of David Copperfield. If anyone can breathe life into this dusty old tale, surely it’s the man who created The Thick of It and co-birthed Alan Partridge. Gladly, any leniency is rewarded with a fresh take on Dickens’ own favourite – and most personal – story. Dev Patel heads up a lively ensemble cast…

Directed by LUKE LORENTZEN Released 21 FEBRUARY A police radio reveals an incident. Seventeen-year-old ambulance driver Juan Ochoa’s eyes widen and, within seconds, he’s flicked the switch on his makeshift siren, slammed the ambulance’s gearstick into place, floored the gas pedal, and is hurtling into the night. As the title card of Midnight Family reveals, Mexico City has just 45 government-run ambulances catering for a population of nine million. As a result, an “informal industry” of commercially operated rescue vehicles has emerged to fill in. Competition for clients is stiff, which means acting fast is critical. But careering into crisis situations doesn’t leave much space for ethical consideration; things get messy when healthcare and business mix. “This ambulance feeds us, so stop fucking around,” Juan says to his father, Fer. Luke Lorentzen’s…

Directed by TODD HAYNES Starring MARK RUFFALO ANNE HATHAWAY TIM ROBBINS Released 28 FEBRUARY There’s a scene in Todd Haynes’ Dark Waters in which corporate defence attorney-turned-environmental lawyer Robert Bilott (Mark Ruffalo) and his wife Sarah (Anne Hathaway) have a tense conversation about the case he’s working on, proving that American chemicals giant DuPont has been knowingly poisoning the land of Parkersburg, West Virginia. In one telling shot, the pair stand alone in the night, illuminated beneath the garish neon signage of a Benihana steakhouse. The two small figures pale in comparison with the red colossus of capitalism looming over them, ugly and intrusive against the sleek darkness. It’s an exquisite moment of postmodern despair redolent of the haunting sensibility of Edward Hopper’s famous 1942 painting ‘Nighthawks’, itself an icon of American realism.…

Directed by HASSAN FAZILI Starring HASSAN FAZILI NARGIS FAZILI ZAHRA FAZILI Released 17 JANUARY A bug-bear of this writer is how frequently the term “humanising” is rolled out to distinguish a film about marginalised people – as if, until ‘X’ film, it was widely unclear as to whether refugees or the homeless or whomsoever else were human beings. Sometimes this fault is baked into a film when its creator’s only goal is to luxuriate in a subject’s woes under the guise of performing a public service. In any event, the refugee crisis is an ongoing fact of our world, and those on all sides of the industry should be past the point of marvelling that people forced to flee their homelands to survive are as worthy and complex as anyone else. Midnight Traveler…

Trey Edward Shults has only made three feature films so far, but they have all made their mark. A master of uncomfortable family melodrama, he’s part of an ultra-cool clique of young directors, alongside Robert Eggers and Ari Aster, though in real life he’s decidedly more chipper than his filmography would have us believe. His latest, Waves, is a turbulent exploration of adolescent love and loss, brimming with infectious energy and powered by a magnetic performance by Kelvin Harrison Jr, who first worked with Shults on 2017’s It Comes at Night. LWLies: There are some tough moments in Waves, yet it ultimately feels more positive than Krisha or It Comes at Night. Did you feel like you needed to bring some light in after two very dark films? Shults: I…

Directed by JAROMIL JIRES Starring JAROSLAVA SCHALLEROVÁ HELENA ANÝZOVÁ PETR KOPRIVA 1970 Released JAN Blu-ray Coming-of-age movies tend to focus on a character being forced to kick-start their inevitable transition into maturity, and with it comes the stock pearls of wisdom and a tacit, albeit bittersweet celebration of personal growth. Jaromil Jires’ 1970 film Valerie and her Week of Wonders is a coming-of-age movie of an altogether different stripe: opaque and suggestive; erotic and horrific; ethereal and earthy; symbolic and bracingly literal. It tells of flustered 13-year-old Valerie (Jaroslava Schallerová) who, at the beginning of the film, has a pair of jewelled earrings swiped from her by an older man named Eagle (Petr Kopriva), and then is forced to explain her loss to a black-masked monster referred to as Weasel. From there on…

Directed by CURTIS HARRINGTON Starring DENNIS HOPPER GAVIN MUIR LUANA ANDERS 1961 Released 27 JAN Blu-ray There’s an alternative, underground counter-history of Hollywood to be written in which Curtis Harrington is a name feted with the same rapture as that of Orson Welles. His career in cinema and television encompassed a series of misfortunes and downward spirals. He hobbled from one project to the next and often ended up taking work when it was offered to him in order to keep the wolf from the door. He is remembered chiefly for his wonderful debut, 1961’s ethereal mermaid horror, Night Tide, which is almost sits at a strange connection point between the poverty row quickies of classic-era Hollywood, and the burgeoning independent film scene of the 1960s. Filmed on the creaking boardwalks of Malibu’s…

Want to develop your skills as an editor, cinematographer or screenwriter? London Film School’s two-year MA Filmmaking course trains students to a professional level in a full range of filmmaking disciplines. It’s the perfect place to learn your craft and start on your way to a career in film and television. But don’t take our word for it. Here, recent LFS graduate rising star Koby Adom reflects on the invaluable experience he gained during his time at film school. “Going to the London Film School was the turning point in my life. It was the moment I started discovering purpose to my gifts and using them to tell meaningful stories and sharing experiences about my under-represented background. It was the place where I was able to start learning a craft…

Directed by ROBERT EGGERS Starring WILLEM DAFOE ROBERT PATTINSON VALERIIA KARAMAN Released 31 JANURARY While Robert Eggers’ 2017 film The Witch explored the insidious effect of fairy tales on a small God-fearing community, the writer/director’s follow-up shows how such stories can corrupt the mind of an individual. Here, as with the family in his New England folktale, our hero, Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson), is essentially exiled from civilisation. The film is set in the late 19th century and begins as he arrives on a remote island where he is to work as one of two lighthouse keepers. But while the family of The Witch had each other – at least for a while – Winslow and his colleague Thomas (Willem Dafoe) are essentially alone, together. The pair aren’t exactly friendly (what with Thomas’…

Directed by BENEDICT ANDREWS Starring KRISTEN STEWART, ANTHONY MACKIE, JACK O’CONNELL Released 10 JANUARY It brings us no pleasure whatsoever to deliver the news that Seberg, a stilted and slight biopic of the Iowa-born screen icon Jean Seberg, is something of a trainwreck. Part of the problem is the casting of Kristen Stewart in the title role – despite her best efforts, she is simply unable to capture the twinkle-eyed spirit of the soft-featured, imp-haired star of films like Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless and Otto Preminger’s Bonjour Tristesse. If feels like we’re watching Stewart attempting to insert her own persona into this story, and perhaps even pounce on the politically ripe material to air some of her own (entirely valid) grievances with regard to privacy and the political lives of celebrities. The timeline of…

Directed by JESSICA HAUSNER Starring EMILY BEECHAM BEN WHISHAW KERRY FOX Released 21 FEBRUARYA Actor Emily Beecham is styled to resemble an exotic flower in Jessica Hausner’s acetic paranoid psychodrama Little Joe. Her hair is formed into an opulent orange bouffant, and she scurries around her laboratory in an eerie mint-green lab coat which looks like a stamen. There’s a parallel between her confused and possibly depressed character, Alice, and “Little Joe”, the plant she and her cheery co-worker Chris (Ben Whishaw) have genetically engineered together, and which she has named after her teenage son. They both look outwardly harmless – some might say pleasantly beguiling – but deep down their attempts to make those around them happy are not entirely successful. Little Joe emits a happiness-inducing pheromone when you talk to it,…

Directed by MICHAEL WINTERBOTTOM Starring STEVE COOGAN ISLA FISHER ASA BUTTERFIELD Released 21 FEBRUARY Low prices exact a high cost in Greed, writer/director Michael Winterbottom’s satire of the fast fashion industry. Everything noxious about capitalistic practice today finds a human vessel in Richard McCreadie (Steve Coogan, outfitted with blinding white dentures that put Jonah Hill’s teeth in The Wolf of Wall Street to shame), known to the many that loathe him as ‘McGreedy’. He’s the dictionary definition of an upward failure, having driven business after business into the ground at a sideways profit to himself. His one truly successful enterprise, a high street competitor for the likes of H&M and Zara, only stays in the black through a combination of creative bookkeeping and soulless exploitation of Sri Lankan factory workers. He’s a blight…

The mere existence of Icelandic cinema is fascinating in and of itself, especially given the country’s tiny population of just over 360,000. Not only does this unique local cinema exist, but it does so on a relatively large scale, and on a level of quality that makes it worthy of wider celebration. Prior to the foundation of a national television station and the Association of Filmmakers in 1966, Icelandic cinema was constrained to shooting amateur 16mm films and documentaries about the natural beauty that we now see in the background of blockbusters such as Star Wars and Interstellar. The first purely Icelandic film came in 1923, named The Adventures of Jón and Gvendur and directed by Loftur Gudmundsson who went on to become one of the pioneers of native film…

Directed by SAM MENDES Starring GEORGE MCKAY DEAN-CHARLES CHAPMAN COLIN FIRTH Released 10 JANUARY Stories. Sometimes it’s simply the way you tell ’em. You could look to the hear-tin-mouth beach landing scene in Saving Private Ryan, or the chilling depiction of Russian roulette of The Deer Hunter, and take both a reminder as to how the overcrowded war genre often requires a dash of the different to stand out. Stepping away from the James Bond franchise for the first time in seven years, director Sam Mendes has turned to a story shared by his paternal grandfather from his time fighting in World War One. The upshot is 1917, a film of threadbare plot but audaciously and thrillingly realised. In the spring of 1917, the Germans initiated ‘Operation Alberich’, a plan to reinforce the…

Something a little different from director Todd Haynes, after the lavish romatic melodrama Carol and the whimsical journey to the past that was Wonderstruck. Dark Waters is the director’s first work in the realist mode, and tells of Robert Bilott (Mark Ruffalo), a lawyer to takes on American chemicals company DuPont for ecological violations. LWLies: How do you prepare the aesthetic of a film you’re about to make? Haynes: I always do an image book to begin pre-production for any project that we’re on; it’s initially a non-verbal communication to [DoP] Ed [Lachman]. And then it becomes useful to production designers and it becomes useful to actors, it becomes useful to sort of everybody involved in the film, we’re all looking for what the visual sensibility and temperament of the…

Directed by JUSTIN KURZEL Starring GEORGE MACKAY ESSIE DAVIS NICHOLAS HOULT Released 28 FEBRUARY There’s a moment early on in True History of the Kelly Gang where Russell Crowe’s gruff bushranger, Harry Power, manages to lasso Charlie Hunnam’s Sergeant O’Neil by his testicles, threatening to yank them off unless the compromised copper plays along with his sadistic game. It’s a situation you may well find yourself empathising with, as this is a film which is extremely painful to sit through. All you can do is keep taking deep breaths and wait for the aching sensation to pass. Having previously butchered Macbeth, director Justin Kurzel, onetime heir apparent of the austere Antipodean arthouse, offers a bold reimagining of the life and crimes of another fabled madman, Ned Kelly. The film opens with the alarm…

Directed by KING HU Starring FENG HSU YUEH SUN CHUN SHIH 1979 Released 28 FEB Blu-ray If, on a rainy Sunday afternoon, you ever decided to tot up a list of the finest action directors ever to set foot on this green earth, then Hong Kong maestro King Hu would and should be in a shout for the top spot. The way he shoots action sequences, as witnessed in 1979’s riotous Ming Dynasty crime caper, Raining in the Mountain, is an absolute joy to behold. He manages to inject scenes of people walking across the landscape with such flair, such dynamism, that you’re virtually lost for breath before anyone has even been moved to break out some Kung Fu. The Three Treasures Temple is a vast complex, and in a locked chamber is…

Directed by BRYAN FORBES Starring KIM STANLEY RICHARD ATTENBOROUGH JUDITH DONNER 1964 Released 13 JAN Blu-ray A biography of the actor Kim Stanley was published after her death in 2001 and the title refers to her as the “Female Brando”. While she may have had the chops, the range and the presence of the (male) actor often cited as being one of the all-time greats, she certainly doesn’t possess his renown. She was, admittedly, someone who worked mainly on the stage, and starred in barely a handful of features. She is most well-known for her role in 1964’s Seance on a Wet Afternoon, and on the back of the performance she delivers in this single screen credit, that biog title starts to make a whole lot of sense. Wracked by grief, manipulative, callous…

Illustrators Niall Grant (cover) is an illustrator from England creating intricate artwork inspired by folklore and symbolism. He has worked to create album covers, editorial and book illustrations. “It was important for the artwork to evoke the idea of martyrdom and comtemporary sainthood, which led to the stained glass treatment. The two different covers emphasise the separation of the characters and their yearning to be connected. I also wanted to express the quiet refuge in nature that both characters long for.” niallgrant.com Jamie Eke is a freelance illustrator and designer from Brighton. His work mostly combines typography and illustration, and it constantly explores and picks apart the relationship between the two. Iris Hatzfeld is a French illustrator living in Paris. She works with coloured inks and pencils. She worships nature,…