Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 86: September/October 2020 i Little White Lies

Directed by GARRETT BRADLEY Starring FOX RICH ROB RICH Released 9 OCTOBER ANTICIPATION. 4 Won plaudits at Sundance, and definitely intrigued by the pithiness of that title. ENJOYMENT. 4 A documentary that flows perfectly without ever cleaving to an obvious dramatic schema. IN RETROSPECT. 4 The soundtrack cloys in the later stretches, but there’s a musicality to the film that keeps things emotional. Does a person experience time, or does one simply travel through it as if it’s some kind of elongated underground tunnel through the earth? Fox Rich’s tunnel allows for a modicum of speed and is beset with dramatic twists and turns. The tunnel of her husband Rob, meanwhile, is a monotonous straight line that must be passed through with inconvenient lethargy. Back in 1997, the pair ran a hip-hop clothing…

Directed by CHRISTOPHER NOLAN Starring JOHN DAVID WASHINGTON ROBERT PATTINSON ELIZABETH DEBICKI Released 26 AUGUST ANTICIPATION.5 About time. ENJOYMENT. 3 A worthy successor to Inception. Make of that what you will. IN RETROSPECT. 3 Ask me again a few months ago. Christopher Nolan’s eleventh feature has certainly felt like a long time coming. Having initially been slated for release on 17 July, Warner Bros were forced to push it back three times due to the Covid-19 pandemic, meaning that it arrived in the UK 1133 days after Dunkirk. There has never been a bigger gap between Nolan films. Time, of course, is relative in the Nolanverse. In Tenet, the director’s long-standing obsession with this abstract concept reaches its logical apotheosis – although that palindromic title is something of a red herring, a quasi-mystical…

Directed by YEON SANG-HO Starring GANG DONG-WON LEE JUNG-HYUN LEE RE Released 6 NOVEMBER ANTICIPATION. 4 Train to Busan was the unexpected zombie smash of 2016. ENJOYMENT. 3 Peninsula doesn’t hit as hard but it’s knockaround fun. IN RETROSPECT. 3 If you don’t expect a Busan re-run, you should find something in this. Lightning never strikes twice, and when it comes to making movies, directors often count themselves lucky if they have managed to bottle a couple of bolts. The 2016 film Train to Busan became something of a sleeper hit when audiences around the globe succumbed to its tight plotting and breathless action sequences. A rambunctious, volatile genre blow-out, it nails the zombie tropes effectively coined by George A Romero back with Night of the Living Dead and subconsciously became a crystal…

Directed by PHYLLIDA LLOYD Starring CLARE DUNNE HARRIET WALTER CATHY BELTON Released 30 OCTOBER ANTICIPATION. 3 Sounds like a change of pace for Lloyd. ENJOYMENT. 4 Devastating but never manipulative in how it deploys its hard-hitting plot. IN RETROSPECT. 4 A story about human kindness and cruelty, powered by Dunne’s script and performance. Phyllida Lloyd’s latest feature feels smaller than her previous two big budget productions, 2008’s Mamma Mia! and 2011’s The Iron Lady, both of which starred Meryl Streep alongside an ensemble of familiar faces. In Herself, largely unknown performers take centre stage, led by Lloyd’s fearless co-writer Clare Dunne as the central character, Sandra. It might also just be the filmmaker’s finest work to date – an intimate portrait of one woman’s struggle to improve life for herself and her young…

When Zed (Riz Ahmed) raps, he does it “for the mosque and the mosh pit.” His sharp, feverish bars arrive with the tenacity of slam poetry and the weight of his world within them. His life is in his lyrics: the racism he’s faced; his struggles with identity; the enduring question of “where are you really from?” He finds space in his music to investigate these feelings, but Zed hasn’t been home to his own family in two years, choosing instead to hide out in the States to pursue his music career from afar. Only the chance to support another musician on a European tour, and a separation from his emotionally distant girlfriend Bina, sends him on a return trip to London. Back at his parents’ home, Zed is forced…

“Do we have any foreigners in the audience tonight? If so, please put up your hands. Wogs I mean, I’m looking at you […] Wherever you all are, I think you should all just leave. Not just leave the hall, leave our country.” That was Eric Clapton addressing his fans at a gig in Birmingham on 5 August, 1976. It was rock’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ moment; indeed the former Cream frontman urged the crowd that night to support Enoch Powell. Clapton’s racist tirade was as shocking 40 years ago as it is now, yet such rhetoric continues to be used by contemporary public figures, stoking racial tensions in a nation built on the falacy of white exceptionalism. The response in ’76 was swift. ‘Rock Against Racism’ had been conceived some…

There’s no such thing as A Perfectly Normal Family. Yet everyone in Malou Reymann’s directorial debut believes there is. Grandad thinks if he persists in deadnaming and misgendering his daughter-in-law, she’ll stop correcting him. Daughter Emma (Kaya Toft Lohalt) tries tying a scarf around her head to stop her parent wearing feminine clothing. Everyone lives in denial, and even when on the surface they start to accept things as they are, they never try to understand. Empathy rests with them, the cis family members, while the transitioning character is largely ignored and pushed into the sidelines. Reymann approaches her subject with good intentions – her own parent, who she still calls her ‘father’ despite being a woman, transitioned when she was a child. She indulges in her own perspective through…

Director Antonio Campos is obsessed with the dark, mysterious predelictions in the soul of Americans, as seen in his films Afterschool, Simon Killer, Christine, and now The Devil All the Time, a sprawling hardboiled thriller which takes a bone-chilling plunge into the dark heart of an Ohio community abandoned by God and whose denizens are looking for Him in all the wrong places. LWLies: With your previous works Afterschool, Simon Killer and The Sinner, it’s clear you’re interested in normal people who do horrible things. It seems logical you’d eventually make a film featuring serial killers. Campos: There’s this correlation between the birth of the highway system in this country and the rise of serial killers, between the end of World War Two and the 1960s. Roads are so important…

Directed by TSUI HARK Starring JEAN-CLAUDE VAN DAMME ROB SCHNEIDER LELA ROCHON, 1998 Released 28 SEPT Blu-ray While John Woo enjoyed major success transitioning to the US following the breakout international acclaim of 1989’s The Killer, and Johnnie To has in recent years amassed a cult following as one of the leading lights of Hong Kong action cinema, one of their contemporaries remains criminally underserved in the west. Tsui Hark is a genre polymath; a restlessly energetic director and producer of seemingly boundless invention and agility. From the new wave nihilism of Dangerous Encounters: 1st Kind to the genre and gender subversions of Peking Opera Blues, from the screwball blocking of Shanghai Blues to the formal blitzkrieg of The Blade, to see Tsui attack a set-piece is to witness a masterclass in wit…

Directed by TONY RICHARDSON Starring JEANNE MOREAU ETTORE MANNI KEITH SKINNER 1966 Released 21 SEPT Blu-ray “Ere look, it’s mademoiselle,” cries a boy as his schoolteacher (Jeanne Moreau) walks – windswept, wearied and somewhat wraithlike – out of the forest and back to the nearby town. Before there is a chance to question where she has been or who she might have been with, this teacher tells a mob of villagers that, “it was him”, before climbing into bed, bedraggled but hardly beaten. These three words are all it takes to send the town on a witch-hunt, condemning an innocent man for crimes she herself has committed. In Tony Richardson’s Mademoiselle, someone in this rural settlement (filmed in Le Rat, in Southwest France) has been poisoning animals, setting fire to houses and flooding…

LWLies.com A perfect digital companion to the magazine experience, our website is updated daily with new stories, reviews and features. Head over now to learn about Isabel Sandoval, the trans woman of colour chronicling life in America’s margins. Newsletter Bi-weekly missives direct to your inbox, each a personally-written mini essay from one of our staff writers. Recent mail-outs have included a essay on cooking inspired by movies, and an idea for taking a cinematic road trip from the comfort of your living room. Truth & Movies: A Little White Lies podcast Michael Leader hosts our weekly delve into new releases and discursive movie chatter. Recent episodes have included a deep dive into Samurai cinema, and a first impressions chat about Christopher Nolan’s Tenet. YouTube.com/LWLies Our hub for video work of…

Tamar-kali is a singer-songwriter and composer based in New York. She began writing film scores for director Dee Rees, including Pariah and Mudbound. They also collaborated on The Last Thing He Wanted, one of three scores by Tamar-kali which premiered at Sundance Film Festival in 2020, along with Kitty Green’s The Assistant and Josephine Decker’s Shirley. She’s currently working on a project with LA Opera and the score for Fisher Stevens’ Palmer. ON APPROACHING SHIRLEY “One of the things that struck me about the film once I initially began speaking with Josephine was that it had been kempt so uniquely. She had a very distinct taste in music – it’s very broad and open. And we talked about the female voice being a lead instrument in it, and because I’ve…

There are no useful maps or reference guides when it comes to exploring the treacherous terrain generated by the ruthlessly talented, LA-born screenwriter and director Charlie Kaufman. You just have to dash off in a direction of your choosing and see where it takes you. He entered the cinematic fray with awesome style, receiving an Oscar for his Being John Malkovich (1999) screenplay, and then produced something even more layered and surprising in its 2002 follow-up, Adaptation. With the Michel Gondrydirected Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind released in 2004, his name become synonymous with a kind of must-see indie event movie. And then came his move to directing, with 2008’s melancholic disquisition on the difficulty of making meaningful art, Synecdoche, New York, and 2015’s emotional stop-motion opus on the…

Directed by REMI WEEKES Starring SOPE DIRISU WUNMI MOSAKU MATT SMITH Released 30 OCTOBER ANTICIPATION. 4 Love Weekes’ short film Tickle Monster. ENJOYMENT. 5 Creepy and disorienting haunted house film. Superlative horror. IN RETROSPECT. 5 The trauma of survival, guilt and exile. Bol Majur (Sope Dirísu) walks, zombie-like with exhaustion, carrying his little girl Nyagak (Malaika Wakoli-Abigaba) down a dusty road in war-torn South Sudan. Then Bol, his wife Rial (Wunmi Mosaku) and Nyagak cram onto the back of a pick-up truck (“I’ll protect you,” Rial promises the girl). Last we see, the three aboard an overcrowded boat making the night crossing, until there is a bang, and suddenly everyone is in the water, including a terrified Nyagak, separated from the others and desperate to be saved. Opening writer/director Remi Weekes’ feature debut…

Directed by CRAIG ROBERTS Starring SALLY HAWKINS DAVID THEWLIS ALICE LOWE Released 2 OCTOBER ANTICIPATION. 3 A London Film Festival number that completely passed me by. ENJOYMENT. 3 Sally Hawkins’ humour and grace lifts the film wonderfully. IN RETROSPECT. 3 Low on originality, big on charm. The characters in Craig Roberts’ second directorial feature Eternal Beauty have a penchant for saying, “I’m in my oils.” To be in one’s “oils”, it appears, is to be at your best, resting comfortably in surroundings that nourish and soothe. A happy place, in other words. The phrase even acts as the title of a painting that appears in various locations throughout the film – yet its insistent repetition soon becomes more of a diktat than a truth. The search for such a state of being is…

Directed by NATALIE JOHNS Starring MAX RICHTER YULIA MAHR Released 11 SEPTEMBER ANTICIPATION. 3 The prospect of a documentary about an album designed to put people to sleep won’t make everybody purr. ENJOYMENT. 4 It’s easy to drop in and out of this doc yet that feels intentional given the subject matter, while the fascinating insights never let up. IN RETROSPECT. 4 A unique film about the healing nature of song. Max Richter’s work, even at its most expansive, is inward-looking and unafraid to operate from a place of vulnerability. This was personified by the influential contemporary classical composer’s 2015 record ‘Sleep’, an eight-hour concept album which is built around various tonal shifts that synch to the frequencies on which the human brain operates while we sleep. Richter even conferred with neuroscientist David…

Directed by HALINA DYRSCHKA Starring JOSIAH MCELHENY JULIA VOSS Released 9 OCTOBER ANTICIPATION. 3 Another art doc about a lost genius. Here we go again… ENJOYMENT. 4 Oh wow, this one was lost for a reason, and Hilma af Klint actually was a genius. IN RETROSPECT. 4 Af Klint’s story of repression and erasure resonates far beyond the triffling confines of art history. When I first saw the title for Halina Dyrschka’s superb artworld documentary Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint, I thought that “Hilma af Klint” was a Scandinavian translation of the title’s English-language version. That mistake is the reason why this film has been made, because Hilma af Klint was, in fact, one of the key proponents of abstract art in the West and may have been one of the first…

Directed by CHANNING GODFREY PEOPLES Starring NICOLE BEHARIE KENDRICK SAMPSON ALEXIS CHIKAEZE Released 25 SEPTEMBER ANTICIPATION. 4 The debut of a Black female filmmaker, with the incredible, underrated Nicole Beharie front and centre. ENJOYMENT. 4 A deeply affecting drama that delivers gut punches, as well as warmth. IN RETROSPECT. 4 A skillful, nuanced take on a traditional survival narrative. What is a ‘phenomenal woman’? In a towering performance, actor Nicole Beharie plays a former beauty queen preparing her rebellious daughter for the Miss Juneteenth pageant. This powerful directorial debut from Channing Godfrey Peoples explores themes of Black motherhood, womanhood and the meaning of freedom. Peoples, who also wrote the film, draws on her own experiences growing up in Fort Worth, Texas to tell a story that doubles as a love letter to Southern…

Directed by MAKGORZATA SZUMOWSKA Starring RAFFEY CASSIDY MICHIEL HUISMAN MALLORY ADAMS Released 16 OCTOBER ANTICIPATION. 3 Raffey Cassidy was terrific in The Killing of a Sacred Deer. ENJOYMENT. 2 Disturbing acts of violence to women and animals intercut with periods of excruciating silence. IN RETROSPECT. 2 Still waiting for female-directed horror films which break the genre’s misogynistic tropes. When The Other Lamb screened at the 2019 San Sebastián Film Festival, there was a young woman who watched the whole film through the lens of her iPhone. She wasn’t recording, just posting stills decorated with ‘OMG’ and ‘WOW’ on social media. Normally you’d tap them on the shoulder and politely ask them to stop, but that’s rather futile when most of the audience are also dipping their phones up and down to photograph the…

The formula of the ‘grey pound’ is well-established. Get some familiar (white British) faces, stir in enough saccharine to keep the oldies awake, and add some relatable geriatric humour. What’s often surprising about these films is just how bleak they can be – alleged ‘feel-good’ films like 2017’s Finding Your Feet and 2012’s Song for Marion killed off half their casts. Rather than offering uplift they just end up upsetting my old nan. It’s more than she bargains for when she rocks up to the cinema on a Thursday morning for her free cuppa and digestive biscuit. Nan would like 23 Walks – it’s light, sweet and mostly inoffensive. There’s a hint of xenophobia: Alison Steadman’s daughter has run off to the Canaries to marry “a Spaniard”, but she comes…

Directed by NATALIE ERIKA JAMES Starring EMILY MORTIMER ROBYN NEVIN BELLA HEATHCOTE Released 30 OCTOBER ANTICIPATION. 3 Hereditary 2: Aus-Gothic Boogaloo? ENJOYMENT. 4 That finale will live in my mind rent-free in perpetuity. IN RETROSPECT. 5 An earth-toned ghost story about the ravages of time. Matriarchy is a haunted house in this psychological horror about memory, aging and empathy. The debut feature from Japanese-Australian filmmaker Natalie Erika James, Relic explores the fear and shame allied to Alzheimer’s disease – an interior condition here rendered visible, visceral, in the form of a weatherboard house mottled with black mould. Inside, three generations of women exorcise their grief, tethered by familial bonds and the question of genetic destiny. When elderly widow Edna (Robyn Nevin, The Matrix franchise’s Councillor Dillard) vanishes in leafy regional Victoria, her tetchy…

Among the most influential figures in dance of the 20th century, Isadora Duncan faced a horrible tragedy in 1913 when her infant children both drowned while in the care of their nanny as their runaway car plunged into the Seine. During her grieving process, Duncan choreographed a threepart piece called ‘Mother’ as a means to express her heartbreak. Written and directed by former dancer and acrobat Damien Manivel (who won the Best Director prize at Locarno in 2019), the delicate and deliberately-paced Isadora’s Children is cut into three distinct parts, each exploring how the lives of three sets of women – all of different ages and backgrounds – are touched by ‘Mother’. In the first section, a pensive young choreographer (Agathe Bonitzer) feels her way through the piece’s movements and…

Deep Throat, the 1972 crossover pornographic film about a woman whose clitoris is located where her tonsils should be, was a sensation. It boasted sterling production values, a coherent plot, tip-top picture quality and scads of filthy bongo. It also made a fortune, ushered in an era of ‘porno chic’, was discussed in polite society and counted such groovy hipsters as Jack Nicholson, Frank Sinatra, Barbara Walters and US Vice President Spiro Agnew among its champions. Sadly for British sex-questers, the UK censors turned up to the party like an irate neighbour and banned the film from Her Majesty’s cinemas. As was the case for much of those bleak, blasted ’70s, Brits would have to simply make do and mend. Swingers, priapic teens and members of the dirty mac brigade…

Directed by CHARLIE KAUFMAN Starring JESSIE BUCKLEY JESSE PLEMONS DAVID THEWLIS Released 4 SEPTEMBER ANTICIPATION. 4 Kaufman! Buckley! Plemmons! So many great names! ENJOYMENT. 4 No log line could ever do this film justice. IN RETROSPECT. 5 A haunting highwire act that captures a feeling almost impossible to put into words. While browsing a website for a local mental health facility recently, I was struck by an interesting sentence: “It is rare for someone to think or say ‘I want to die’. More often, we hear, ‘I wish I wasn’t here any more,’ or, ‘I can’t carry on’.” Or perhaps, “I’m thinking of ending things.” These euphemisms paper over the bigger, scarier sentiment. Is it truly a desire not to die, or simply a reticence to voice such an ugly, taboo sentiment? This…

Directed by MIRANDA JULY Starring EVAN RACHEL WOOD RICHARD JENKINS DEBRA WINGER Released 8 OCTOBER ANTICIPATION 4 July’s third feature has been a long time coming. ENJOYMENT. 4 And it’s worth the wait for this silly, sweet delight. IN RETROSPECT. 4 A joyful burst of lite anarchy about parents, post, and love against the odds. It’s been 15 years since Miranda July’s debut feature, Me and You and Everyone We Know, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and nine since her follow-up film, The Future, did the same thing. This means fans of her work have hat to wait a long time for another hearty dose of her patented offbeat humour. It’s not as though July hasn’t been busy, though. She’s turned her considerable talent and imagination to a variety of other projects,…

Directed by ALBERT SERRA Starring HELMUT BERGER MARC SUSINI ILIANA ZABETH Released SEPTEMBER TBC ANTICIPATION. 4 Bombed at Cannes, but that’s its own strange endorsement. ENJOYMENT. 4 Beguiling treatise on voyeurism and revolution. More to it than just costumed dogging. IN RETROSPECT. 4 An exceptional, completely unique film, though like public orgies, definitely not for everyone. Describing a film that, from the outset, doesn’t appear to be a comedy, as a comedy, is a method sometimes used by critics as a form of deflection. Comedy tends to be primal and instinctual, maybe even a bit throwaway, and so to use it as a descriptor in this way serves to eliminate both a film’s complexities and your own need to take that film at its purported face value. To give an example, in 1997,…

Miss Juneteenth is the debut feature from writer/director Channing Godfrey Peoples. It focuses on the deferred dreams of former pageant queen Turquoise Jones (Nicole Beharie) and her plan to convince her daughter to secure the same crown and a university scholarship as she did. LWLies: Could I start by asking you to explain what the Juneteenth pageant is? Peoples: Juneteenth is a day to commemorate the fact that the enslaved people in Texas didn’t find out they were free until two-and-a-half years after everyone else. The emancipation proclamation happened in 1863, the enslaved people in Texas didn’t find out until 1865. Their freedom was kept hidden from them. As a kid it was the parades, the blues music, barbecue – I looked forward to the sense of community. As an…

The film Savage opens with a tattoo-faced man with nicknamed “Damage” smashing a fellow gang member’s hand with a claw hammer. One expects an unflinching exploitation romp but first-time director Sam Kelly instead offers a considered look at toxic masculinity in New Zealand. More brutality follows but there is also feeling and, eventually, growth. It’s 1989 and middle-aged Damage, née Danny, (Jake Ryan) is chief enforcer of the Savages, a crew run by best pal Moses (John Tui), a Māori gang president whose tenure looks increasingly uncertain as dissenting cohorts vie for his position. The Savages hang out in what looks like a decrepit scrapyard, far removed from the glam-trash sexiness and lucrative gun-running of, say, Sons of Anarchy. A flashback to 1965 shows how a scary, presumably violent father…

Directed by HONG KHAOU Starring HENRY GOLDING PARKER SAWYERS DAVID TRAN Released 25 SEPTEMBER ANTICIPATION. 4 Lilting is a gem and Khaou’s Cambodian-British perspective is one we were eager to revisit. ENJOYMENT. 4 Therapeutic to follow this breathtaking healing journey. IN RETROSPECT. 4 In under 90 minutes, this fleeting character study leaves a lasting, optimistic impression of love and friendship. Kit (Henry Golding) returns to Ho Chi Minh City after 30 years, having fled with his family during the Vietnam war. Despite his heritage, he is now almost a tourist in the city, easily lost in the pandemonium of traffic. His goal is to find a place to scatter his mother’s ashes, but as he wanders, bewildered and overwhelmed, he struggles to find any emotional connection to the places he once knew. As…

Directed by FRANCOIS OZON Starring FELIX LEFEBVRE BENJAMIN VOISIN PHILIPPINE VELGE Released 2 OCTOBER ANTICIPATION. 4 A love affair between two gorgeous boys? Set in the 1980s? Yes please. ENJOYMENT. 4 A strange and captivating mix of sincere emotions, passions and Rod Stewart. IN RETROSPECT. 4 An unassuming but potent look at the way young love bruises but forges identity. Prolific French auteur François Ozon is known for his strange and alluring cinematic cocktails of sex, passion and tragedy. His characters are pushed to destructive extremes of feeling. Summer of ’85 does not stray from that tradition, but centring on a love affair between two young men, it might be the director’s most explicitly gay film to date, which has a whole host of implications for the tone of the film. The queerness…

Directed by DON SHARP, JEREMY SUMMERS, JESUS FRANCO Starring CHRISTOPHER LEE 1965-69 Released 2O APRIL Blu-ray “He’s cruel, callous, brilliant and the most evil and dangerous man in the world.” He’s “insane for power… a fanatic in the east;” the Dr Mabuse of the ‘yellow peril’, a turn of the century racist construct that sought to stigmatise Asians as an existential threat to western culture. He’s an archetype in the annals of literary and cinematic villainy, the inspiration for Ian Fleming’s Dr No and custodian of the iconic moustache that bears his name. Introduced by English author Sax Rohmer across a series of pulp novels in the first few decades of the 20th century, Fu Manchu has remained a figure of extensive debate in Orientalist studies, one given further controversial charge by his…

Directed by BERNARD ROSE Starring DANNY HUSTON PETER WELLER ANGELA FEATHERSTONE 2000 Released 28 SEPT Blu-ray It’s a bold move to plant a thumbed Penguin Classic copy of Leo Tolstoy’s ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’ in the opening-credit drag to your contemporary, LA-set update of Leo Tolstoy’s ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’. And yet, this is certainly one of the more interesting and innovative literary adaptations of the new century, drawing out the essence of this dark, brooding, pessimistic novel and tossing it at a world of gaudy movie premiers, pool parties, sharkskin suits and all-night coke binges. Danny Huston, in what was arguably his breakthrough role, plays slick-as-shit Hollywood super agent Ivan Beckman who has just managed to bring Peter Weller’s obnoxious leading man Don West into the fold. Unfortunately, he’s been…

Directed by FRUIT CHAN Starring SAM LEE NEIKY YIM HUI-CHI WENDERS LI 1997 Released 21 SEPT Blu-ray For director Fruit Chan, his 1997 film Made in Hong Kong represents, “a kind of deadline, an end to a historical period.” The first in his ‘Handover Trilogy’, the film was released just after Britain passed Hong Kong over to Mainland China and has been largely out of circulation since. Watched now, as the Hong Kong pro-democracy protests continue and another historical period for the city looks likely to come to an end, the nihilistic resilience of the film’s characters, despite the grim situation they face, takes on a new resonance. The film was made on a minuscule budget with the help of many friends calling in industry favours, and the then long-serving assistant director Chan…