Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 88: March/April 2021 i Little White Lies

Released 19 MARCH It’s obvious but important to note that Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari is as American a film as it gets. Set in the 1980s, on the cusp of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, it is the autobiographical story of a Korean-American family adjusting to life in Arkansas after moving there from the West Coast. It is, above all else, a story of faith and resilience, but also resistance to cultural and social assimilation. Like the minari plants of the title, which are able to thrive on even the most unlikely terrain, the members of the family at the film’s centre grit their teeth and start again. The struggle of rebuilding from the ground up is embodied by the virgin soil on the tract of rural land the family have just purchased…

Released 26 FEBRUARY 4 ANTICIPATION. The first trailer looked incredible but director Shaka King remains an unknown quantity. 5 ENJOYMENT. I can’t breathe. 5 IN RETROSPECT. Electrifying, urgent, lifechanging cinema. Fred Hampton was 21 when the FBI murdered him. He had been betrayed by William O’Neal, an FBI informant who spent the final year of Fred’s life infiltrating his inner circle. Shaka King’s audacious biopic imagines this episode as both a neo-noir thriller and a parable of biblical tragedy. The dual roles of Judas and Messiah are assigned to LaKeith Stanfield and Daniel Kaluuya, who embody these archetypes in career-defining performances. The jutting angles of Stanfield’s face around his large, sorrowful eyes, as well as his long, lean limbs, evoke a haunted, conflicted, jittery energy unlike anything we’ve seen from him before. At times,…

Released 5 MARCH 4 ANTICIPATION. Fogel’s Icarus showed his promise, and an exposé on the murder of Jamal Khashoggi could be fascinating. 2 ENJOYMENT. Lengthy and formulaic, the film cares more about being a Hollywood thriller than a thought-provoking report. 2 IN RETROSPECT. Khashoggi’s story deserves better than this algorithmic documentary-by-numbers. There is some speculation around the lack of high-profile distribution opportunities for The Dissident, a film that documents Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s alleged sanctioning of the 2018 murder of outspoken Saudi journalist, Jamal Khashoggi. Perhaps, as director Bryan Fogel’s reported frustrations suggest, the streaming platform giants didn’t want to risk offending a growing Saudi market. Or perhaps they realised the film is a far less innovative and captivating documentary than his previous work, the Oscarwinning Russian doping exposé Icarus. In…

Released 16 APRIL 3 ANTICIPATION. Heard great things but always approach films depicting autism with trepidation. 4 ENJOYMENT. Viscerally compelling and stunningly accurate in its design. 4 IN RETROSPECT. Effective at conveying the sensory experience of neurodiversity while educating non-autistic viewers. Naoki Higashida’s 2007 memoir ‘The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism’ was embraced by parents of non-verbal neurodiverse children as a way of bridging the communication gap between them. This poetic documentary adaptation from director Jerry Rothwell acts as a visual accompaniment, a means of espousing the same ideas in a more widely accessible but still impressively crafted form. Excerpts from David Mitchell and KA Yoshida’s English translation of Higashida’s book (narrated by Jordan O’Donegan) are played, along with Mitchell’s talking head testimony as the parent of…

Released 5 MARCH 3 ANTICIPATION. Norton impressed in 2019’s Mr Jones. 3 ENJOYMENT. I’ve got something in my eye. 3 IN RETROSPECT. Uplifting in its own understated way. John (James Norton) spends his life looking through windows. He washes them for a living, which means that each day when he climbs his ladder, cloth and bucket in hand, he’s granted a brief glimpse into the lives of strangers – a cruel reminder of the security and stability he is soon to lose. The story of a hard-up single dad who tries to imagine a better future for his four-yearold son, Nowhere Special is a bittersweet drama about the perils of parenthood. More generally, it’s concerned with the finer points of social welfare, the adoption process, and the life-changing implications of rehoming a human being.…

Darius Marder’s grandmother Dorothy loved movies, and when she developed hearing loss and eventually became deaf she was devastated. Dorothy became a tireless campaigner for the inclusion of open captions, which would make a world of television and cinema accessible for the deaf and hard of hearing. Sound of Metal (out 16 March, tbc) is dedicated to her, and stars Riz Ahmed as a former addict and heavy metal drummer who loses his hearing and must adapt to a whole new way of life. LWLies: I feel fortunate that I was at the premiere of Sound of Metal, because the cinema experience is so essential to the film’s sound design, and being immersed within it. Marder: Y’know, I had a really interesting experience in Toronto. At that screening, we’d been…

Released 2 APRIL 4 ANTICIPATION. One of Europe’s most exciting filmmakers returns – with the first of a new trilogy no less. 4 ENJOYMENT. Simultaneously baffling and completely lucid. A head scratcher and a soul shaker. 4 IN RETROSPECT. It takes a while for Petzold’s crafty genius to truly sink in. Has there ever been a film in which a woman who also happens to be a hybrid water sprite gets really narked off when her boss bullies her into picking up some shift work for an absent colleague? In the transfixing latest from German filmmaker Christian Petzold, mythology and mundanity coexist in a drab contemporary Berlin as Paula Beer’s coyly mysterious Undine meets very cute with Franz Rogowski’s guileless romantic Christophe and a whirlwind love affair plays out both above and below the…

Released 9 APRIL In recent years there has been a raft of films about people living offgrid, from Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace to Matt Ross’ Captain Fantastic. But what’s behind this trend? Is it simply a desire to get back to nature? It certainly seems as though more and more of us are craving authentic, real-world experiences in these increasingly digitised times – a feeling no doubt calcified by the Covid pandemic. In the case of Land, though, it’s a little more complicated than that. Like those aforementioned films, Robin Wright’s first feature as a director is in essence a survival story. Yet the journey our protagonist goes on is motivated by a tragic loss. Wright plays Edee, a recently bereaved woman who can no longer stand to be around…

Released 16 APRIL 3 ANTICIPATION. Was set to play at the cancelled 2020 Cannes Film Festival. 4 ENJOYMENT. This story of an urban spaceman wrongfoots you at every turn. 3 IN RETROSPECT. A tad saccharine at times, but Liatard and Trouilh definitely have the right stuff. The central appeal of modern space travel is that it might just provide us with a means of escaping this awful rock once and for all. As well, the iconography of weightlessness – of being entirely free from the exertions of any pressure whatsoever – holds a dreamlike appeal that can be harnessed to make dull things seem wonderful by association. Take the Cité Gagarine, a brutalist housing tenement in the Parisian suburb of Ivry-sur-Seine, which was inaugurated by Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarine. It’s a textbook example of…

1947-48 Released 29 MARCH Blu-ray Prior to his Hollywood blacklisting and subsequent relocation to France, American writer, director, actor and producer Jules Dassin became known for a number of effectively-made film noirs. Among these were 1947’s The Naked City and 1948’s Brute Force, now presented as a pair in slick new 4K restorations. One film focuses on the police force, while the other goes inside the penitentiary. Both are entertaining, gently eccentric character-led procedurals. The interplay between the film is pleasing, and serves to expose the inner workings of their respective institutions The Naked City, as the newsreel-style voiceover narration which opens the film announces, “is a bit different from most films you would usually see.” Shot on location in New York, it is as much a city symphony as it…

1977 Released 15 FEBRUARY Blu-ray Filmmakers love to brag about how brutal their last shoot was – think of Coppola and crew ‘losing their minds’ on Apocalypse Now, or poor Leonardo DiCaprio facing ‘possible hypothermia’ on the set of The Revenant. Russian maestro Larisa Shapitko would’ve laughed in their faces, and with good reason. Her final film The Ascent, adapted from the novel ‘Sotnikov’ by Vasil Bykau, was scripted and planned while Shapitko was heavily pregnant and living in a sanitorium suffering from spinal damage, the after-effects of hepatitis and a bout of depression after her previous film You and I was severely censored by the Soviet authorities. The Ascent was shot outdoors in minus 40 degree temperatures, with a cast of unknowns and an increasingly ill director. It was criticised…

Released 10 JULY 3 ANTICIPATION. A hodgepodge cast tackles an out-there premise under a so-so director. 3 ENJOYMENT. Pfeiffer carries this transatlantic trifle. 3 IN RETROSPECT. Jacobs achieves a handful of indelible moments within an uneven whole. Michelle Pfeiffer moves through Azazel Jacobs’ new film French Exit like a snow leopard, prowling and snarling and glaring while inclement conditions rage all around her. She plays Frances Price, a recent widow left with a sum of money far too finite to sustain the uptown Manhattan lifestyle to which she’s grown accustomed. After a friend offers to put her up in a Parisian flat sitting unused – a windfall of privilege straight out of Nora Ephron, and an early hint to the tony pleasures in store – she collects her son Malcolm (Lucas Hedges) and sets…

Released 5 MARCH 4 ANTICIPATION. Rosi’s track record shows an exceptional facility for finding within observational locality a wider thematic resonance. 4 ENJOYMENT. Painful realities juxtapose with painterly expressiveness to disconcerting effect. 4 IN RETROSPECT. It’s about the steps towards healing, challenging Western viewers to allow images of beauty and normalcy to play a part in that journey. Ashaft of light from a window in a former prison somewhere in the Middle East cuts a dynamic diagonal along an adjoining wall, where a mother is doubled over in grief for the son who lost his life there. It’s an image of such composed poise it could be from a Caravaggio canvas. Yet just as we’re pondering whether such visual beauty has a place in this arena of pain, we cut to a close-up where…

Released 2 APRIL 3 ANTICIPATION. The latest in the evergrowing repressed-lesbian-perioddrama canon. 4 ENJOYMENT. It’s hard not to fall under Waterston and Kirby’s spell. 3 IN RETROSPECT. A poetic film about love and loss let down by its reliance on voiceover. Tuesday, 1 January, 1856. A woman scrubs potatoes in a sink, the water freezing as soon as it hits cold air. “With little pride, and less hope, we begin the new year,” she notes in her diary. The woman is Abigail (Katherine Waterston), young, downcast but faithful in her role as wife to farmer Dyer (Casey Affleck) in rural Upstate New York. The couple are mourning their infant daughter who has recently died of diphtheria, the emotional fallout from which Abigail records meticulously in her diary. The loss of her child is also…

Released APRIL TBC 4 ANTICIPATION. Exciting indie stars in a threehanded psychosexual thriller? Yes. Please. 4 ENJOYMENT. A brilliantly acted puzzle box brimming with ambition, ideas and wit. 3 IN RETROSPECT. The whole doesn’t quite equal the sum of its still highly enjoyable parts. An inciting incident is the plot point in a narrative that signals the disruption of the status quo and typically sends the protagonist hurtling into the main action of the story. In Lawrence Michael Levine’s new film, Black Bear, the inciting incident would seem to be the protagonist, and the pre-existing status quo is tricky to pin down. Plus, which character is even supposed to be the protagonist? This disorientation is highly apt for a film that trades in deconstruction, toying with the mechanics of filmmaking, and constantly rearranges the…

Released 12 MARCH 3 ANTICIPATION. Looks a bit stuffy, as stage-toscreen adaptations often are. 4 ENJOYMENT. Hopkins and Colman are superb in this claustrophobic chamber piece. 5 IN RETROSPECT. Haunting and credible, powered by some unshakable performances. Statistics from Alzeimer’s Research UK state that one in five people over the age of 85 have dementia, which means that almost every person during their lifetime will either experience the disease themselves or by proxy. There is no known cure, and little is understood about how to prevent the onset of this condition which causes sufferers to undergo progressive cognitive decline. In a 2019 study, 42 per cent of UK adults said that dementia was the health condition they feared developing the most, rising to 51 per cent in those over 65. But if we’re all…

Released 26 MARCH To encounter Cristi Puiu’s 200 minute, pointedly phlegmatic philosophical conversation piece, Malmkrog, is to embark on a voyage of dizzying intellectual discovery. Five pompous asses, each of varying ideological persuasions, hole up in a pastel-walled Transylvanian manor house circa 1900 and engage in genteel back-and-forth patter on subjects ranging from the morality of war, the value of culture, the mechanics of colonialism and, finally, the presence of a divine figure who can sweeten the bitter pill of death. The dialogue is delivered in a calculated monotone, and none of the attendees attempt to wreath their exchanges in high emotion lest it undermine the solemnity of their intent. This tampeddown approach helps to sustain a cut-glass intensity across the runtime, as well as forcing the viewer to mine for…

A longside her writing and directing copilot Jérémy Trouilh, Fanny Liatard has made a film in which crumbling tower blocks in the Parisian suburbs are reframed as spaceships. The pair’s film, Gagarine, tells of lone dreamer Youri (Alséni Bathily) and his cosmic art project inspired by the demolition of the housing block after which the film is named. LWLies: How did you initially hear that the Gagarine tower blocks were being torn down? Liatard: It came by us discovering the building. When we arrived in Paris six years ago, some architect friends were working on the demolition plans and they invited us to make a documentary portrait of the inhabitants, with the aim of finding out how they felt about the imminent demolition. When we arrived, we were really impressed…

1977 OUT NOW Blu-ray Yes, you read that title right, a succession of words that seem to make less sense the more you read them through. This howlin’ mad Czech comedy from 1977 is by the director Jindřich Polák who, in 1963, gifted the world with the highly prophetic and influential sci-fi space saga, Ikarie XB-1, which proposed ideas and motifs that would be mainstreamed by the likes of Stanley Kubrick and Andrei Tarkovsky. With Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea, Polák beats Robert Zemeckis’ Back to the Future series to the punch, as this is an eccentric time travel caper in which evildoers subvert the course of history in the past, while our hero must go back and correct their misbegotten deeds. The film is set…

1934 Released 22 MARCH Blu-ray Beloved actician Nicolas Cage has in his recent years become a beacon for a style of screen performance that is variously described as “batshit,” “whackadoo,” and, “like his whole body is packed full of cocaine”. Watching John Barrymore in Howard Hawks’ 1934 farce Twentieth Century, playing prize ham Oscar Jaffe, you can see a bit of a manic through-line to Big Nic’s scenery-gnawing pomp. This tableturning riff on ‘Pygmalion’ sees the celebrated Broadway wag make a star out of no-talent rube Mildred Plotka (Carole Lombard). They become lovers, and due to his chronic jealousy, she casts him off and decides to go it alone in Hollywood as Lily Garland. Jaffe’s luck changes, and he has to try and lure her back to find success once more,…

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 read all of our first-look reviews from the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, including Prano Bailey-Bond’s amazing Censor. 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 an essay on the difficulty of recommending movies to friends and family members while also working as a film journalist. 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 the world of David Lynch on occasion of the maestro’s 75th birthday. YouTube.com/LWLies Our hub for video work…

Released 26 MARCH 3 ANTICIPATION. Dogwoof distributing a dogumentary. 4 ENJOYMENT. An engrossing and unvarnished document of living on the margins. 4 IN RETROSPECT. A simple but effective sensory voyage that’s hard to shake. Acelebrated director of documentary shorts, Elizabeth Lo makes a compelling leap to features with Stray, a concise ethnographic film that’s presented from a nonhuman perspective. Filmed mostly in Istanbul between 2017 and 2019, with an occasional detour to slightly further afield, the film uses the city’s interesting and complicated history with stray dogs as a means to explore life on the peripheries of human society, free of status and security. The Turkish state has attempted widespread annihilation of stray dogs since the 1900s, resulting in mass killings of the street dog population. But while campaigns to drive non-pet dogs from…

Released 7 MAY 2 ANTICIPATION. This looks like the type of British film that comes out every month. 4 ENJOYMENT. It’s not that film. It is instead a self-styled “anti-rom-com” that is more clever and insightful than that descriptor would suggest. 4 IN RETROSPECT. Results may vary – I absolutely can’t wait to see it again. When we say a movie “gets under your skin”, is that a good or a bad thing? Is the sensation irritating? Does the expression intimate that personal space is being invaded? Or does it denote something that sticks with you – merges with you – and, scratch and claw as you might, you just can’t get rid of it? Billie Piper’s directorial debut, which she also wrote and stars in, is all of the above, a red-raw slab…

Released 2 APRIL 3 ANTICIPATION. Faith-based films haven’t had a great run recently (ever?). 2 ENJOYMENT. Difficult to remain engaged, despite a talented cast. 2 IN RETROSPECT. This isn’t a bad film. Just an overly sincere one with questionable tonal shifts that may undermine its intent to be accessible. In the US, there’s a big market for faith-based filmmaking, with low-rent titles such as God’s Not Dead and Saving Christmas pandering to the beliefs of answer-hungry conservative Christians. Marco Pontecorvo’s Fatima is a film which looks at faith through the lens of our connection to and definition of God, and instead of selling something to the audience, it offers a more objective exploration into the culture of spirituality, albeit one that has its own problems. It’s 1917, and in the small town of Fatima,…

Released 26 MARCH 3 ANTICIPATION. Not sure if this film will bring anything new to the table. 4 ENJOYMENT. The way the film moves builds a level of intrigue. So many meticulous moments catch the eye. 4 IN RETROSPECT. There’s something so “complete” about Ammonite, with a resonant ending that is poetic in its refusal to give us what we want. Ammonite is not a love story. And yet it has all the trappings of one: romantic beach strolls; longing looks; feverish spontaneous sex; and a quiet atmosphere that really allows you to get to know the characters through their facial expressions. This is perhaps why the film was immediately compared to the critically acclaimed French film Portrait of a Lady on Fire. But unlike that film, Ammonite is not a tale of great…

Released 26 FEBRUARY The problem with making films based on real-life dramas is that, nine times out of 10, we already know how they end. That hasn’t prevented Kevin Macdonald from making a film about an inmate of Guantanamo Bay – incarcerated on suspicion of having had a tenuous but incriminating link to the folks who masterminded the 9/11 attacks – who any village idiot could discern is innocent from the first second he crops up on screen. As soft-featured Mauritanian ex-soldier and soonto-be-family man Mohamedou Ould Salahi, Tahar Rahim unleashes a furtive charm offensive as he is brutally whisked away by US forces due to his brother’s connections to Osama Bin Laden, as well as his own possession of some dodgy text messages. Enter Jodie Foster’s gratingly righteous defense attorney…

Released 19 MARCH We’re yet to reach the peak of pandemic cinema, which is surely headed our way in the next few years, but at least Greek filmmaker Christos Nikou’s directorial debut offers something a little different from the usual fare about coughs and sneezes bringing about global ruin. Apples is set in a world where an inexplicable amnesia outbreak causes people to suddenly lose their memory, leaving those who cannot be identified by loved ones to be cared for by the state. One such unfortunate soul is Aris (Aris Servetalis) a quiet middle-aged man who is discovered on a bus with no idea who he is and no documents on him to provide clues as to his identity. Placed in a programme which aims to provide new identities to the…

In 2019, Mania Akbari and Rouzbeh Akhbari were two artists unknown to each other. Akbari, a filmmaker in exile from Iran, was connecting with younger filmmakers via social media who were keen to share their experiences with her. When she came across Akhbari’s work she reached out on Instagram and the pair became immediate friends, navigating the intersections of their ideas in a two-hour phone call. Akbari had been angered by the Iranian films she was seeing at film festivals, work that she describes as “commercial and attached to the Iranian government”, but the creativity she saw in Akhbari had a “political and poetic” sensibility she connected with. Akhbari, based in Canada, had been interested in returning to Iran to work. Then, in January 2020, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard shot…

1967 Released 15 MARCH Blu-ray “Acossack doesn’t fear anything in this world”, says Khoma, the hapless protagonist of Georgiy Kropachyov and Konstantin Ershov’s Viy, barely even convincing himself. Faced with something from the underworld though, this cossack is now quaking in his boots. Cited often as the first horror film produced in the Soviet Union, Viy has been under-seen outside of Russia despite being regarded as widely influential. In this folkloric Nikolai Gogol adaptation, Khoma, a student philosopher at a monastery in Kiev, discovers a witch while travelling on seminary business. After he beats her and she dies, she calls on him to read her last rites, ensuring he must spend three fateful nights in the company of her corpse. As may be expected, things do not go well for him.…

1985 Released 29 MARCH Blu-ray To UK audiences, the everyman actor Albert Brooks is perhaps best known as the unmistakable voice of sunny supervillain Hank Scorpio in The Simpsons. Yet aside from plying his trade as a top-tier comic character actor since the ’70s, he also wrote and directed a string of stinging satires on bourgeoise American life, a little like Woody Allen if more obviously in touch with the petty tribulations of the common man. His 1981 film Modern Romance is often thought of as his most accomplished work, though his third feature, 1985’s Lost In America, is perhaps his funniest and most vitriolic, even when it doesn’t always hang together. No-nonsense ad man David Howard (Brooks) has retained a laserfocus on his rise up the professional ladder. When he’s…