Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 89: May/June/July 2021 i Little White Lies

In the year of our Lord 2008, I was a victim of subtweeting before the term had entered into the popular lexicon. For those who remain blissfully unaware of the word’s origins, it’s essentially a form of stealth criticism whereby one is called out for an opinion or action taken, but remains unnamed, allowing for a level of “blind item” anonymity to those not in the know. As a wide-eyed journalistic lickspittle, I had been commissioned to review the film Wendy and Lucy by the director Kelly Reichardt for the pages of hallowed arts listing organ, Time Out London. At that time, and under the auspices of a, shall we say, “wacky” new editor-in-chief, Time Out no longer rated art out of the traditional five stars. Now things were out…

Released 25 JUNE ANTICIPATION. Robert Altman’s masterpiece gets the 4K restoration treatment. 5 ENJOYMENT. A stunning, epic layering of music and delusion. 5 IN RETROSPECT. Still a hauntingly relevant satire about America’s obsession with access. 5 “We must be doing something right to last 200 years.” Nashville opens with this bitterly ironic chorus sung by country music legend Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson), whose melodic championing of American democratic endurance purposefully ignores the cultural, political and racial tensions that at this point had been ripping the country apart for nearly two decades. This is, after all, a film almost entirely concerned with façades, and the ways in which art can be used as a smokescreen to hide humanity’s more complicated issues. Sprawling and meandering, Robert Altman’s 1975 musical mosaic never loses sight…

Released 30 JULY ANTICIPATION. A festival circuit favourite and a bold new voice on the British cinema scene. 4 ENJOYMENT. The first half is untouchable, though it loses its way a little on the home stretch. 3 IN RETROSPECT. Despite its use of humour, this is s a hard-hitting film about being punished for desiring freedom. 4 Cinema appears to have taken on a certain mantle when it comes to educating audiences about the dehumanising aspects that come from seeking asylum in a country that is not your own. A malevolent political wave, dead set on painting any/all incoming traffic as a blight on an already overburdened system, has managed to convince many that asylum seekers come to countries such as the UK on a carpet of rose petals and, upon…

Released 24 JULY Unable to get financing for any documentary that does not involve serial killers, and far more interested in “the everyday problems of human beings,” documentarian Marc Isaacs takes the advice of his producer Rachel (Rachel Wexler) to “just start filming, just do it,” and begins one day in his own bourgeois London home. Soon he is playing host not only to his cleaner Nery (Luz Nery Villada) and to racist builder Keith (Keith Martin) and his assistant Jed (Jed Thomas Isaacs), but also to cheerily needy Mikel (Mikel Novosad), a homeless Slovakian alcoholic who just will not leave. As this strange assortment of people from different classes, ethnicities, faiths and backgrounds all sit together for a lunch prepared by neighbour Zara (Zara Akram) – who is herself fasting…

Released 24 JULY “This vacation is far from idyllic,” remarks Frankie, a former film star and reluctant matriarch played by Isabelle Huppert. The narrative mainstay of the horrible holiday during which repressed middle class emotion threatens to overflow feels like a staple of European arthouse cinema. But in his first film set outside the US, actually inspired by Satyajit Ray’s 1962 family drama Kanchenjungha, director Ira Sachs borrows more from the lightly melancholic musings of Éric Rohmer than the chilliness of Joanna Hogg. Frankie has gathered her nearest and dearest to a hillside villa in Sintra, Portugal, as an early farewell: her cancer is terminal and she only has a few months left. She contemplates her mortality as her kin navigate their own struggles with love and money. She is informed…

Released 16 JULY Prolific French genre filmmaker Quentin Dupieux is one of cinema’s quintessential ‘almost-but-not-quite’ talents. On paper, his films always sound lip-smacking: A killer tyre is on the loose!; A retro cop comedy!; A filmmaker has 48 hours to find a realistic groaning sound to secure funding for his movie! Yet they rarely manage to transcend their logline. Deerskin is no different, a deadpan parable about extreme emotional detachment in which narcissistic and comically deranged drifter Georges (Jean Dujardin) falls under the spell of a tassled tan jacket and descends on to a murder spree so he can claim to be the owner of the world’s best jacket. A local barmaid with po-faced filmmaking aspirations (Adele Haenel) unknowingly assists with Georges’ criminal endeavours by editing amateur DV documentary footage of…

Released 9 JULY Sometimes, as a teenager looking for a meaningful connection in the Belgian countryside, you’ve got to take what you can get. Noémie Merlant’s bob-haired Jeanne, unable to find satisfaction among the rugged male specimens of her sleepy burg, instead decides to instigate a sexual relationship with a tilt-a-whirl ride at the local funfare which, she is surprised to discover, is passionately reciprocated. What plays out is a pastiche of teen movie clichés in which Jeanne’s tentative steps towards her new romantic ideal are stymied by the attitudes of her hot-blooded mother (Emmanuelle Bercot) and a string of unenlightened work colleagues. It’s a little like Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in which a person’s world is suddenly torn apart by an unexplained but intense attraction to…

Released SUMMER TBC Out of the blue, Kelly (Nika McGuigan) returns home to her sister Lauren (Nora-Jane Noone) after years of estrangement. Set on the fraught border between Ireland and Northern Ireland, Cathy Brady’s Wildfire operates in an atmosphere of deep repression and depicts the emotional fallout of this sudden reappearance. When the presumed-missing Kelly (Nika McGuigan) arrives on the doorstep of her big sister Lauren (Nora-Jane Noone), house and husband are welcoming, but an invisible atmosphere of repression is introduced, and it chips away at Lauren’s façade of normality. The lost time is never explained, only indicated through Kelly’s assortment of precious belongings, which includes a necklace that once belonged to her mother. This sentimental attachment spells chaos for Lauren who, old enough to remember but young enough to feel…

Released 18 JUNE ANTICIPATION. Starring one of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s regulars, Barbara Sukowa. 3 ENJOYMENT. Sturdily built and hits all its emotional notes bang on. Top-tier performances too. 4 IN RETROSPECT. Maybe pales against someone like Almodóvar, but director Filippo Meneghetti is going places. 3 This is a film about the double-edged sword of being lovers and neighbours. In the pros column, it’s very easy to pop next door and stay as long as you like – maybe all night if so inclined. It also means you have your own private space to fall back on, allowing for some of the emotional messiness of a traditional conjugal set-up to be sidelined. In the cons column, there’s the temptation to cloak the relationship in secrecy, which is exactly what Nina (Barbara Sukowa)…

Blu-ray/DVD Released 17 MAY Those who believe in the mantra that the journey is more important than the destination will find lots to like in Chris Petit’s Radio On, a stylish, self-serious psychogeographical film that is heavy on journeying and light on destinations. Those who don’t may find the film ponderous, sensing time dragging as the film’s radio DJ protagonist Robert (David Beames) drives meanderingly from London to Bristol, looking to source information about his brother’s recent suicide. Film critic and novelist Chris Petit received support from Wim Wenders for his first feature, and the film bears the influence of the German filmmaker’s road-trip trilogy, albeit with a British bent. Most of the budget seems to have been spent on music clearances, and the track-list of names like Kraftwerk, David Bowie…

Blu-ray/DVD Released 31 MAY Although to this day little-known outside of the circles of staunch horror fans, Joel Anderson’s 2008 film Lake Mungo is one of the best examples in recent years of a film making a virtue of its limited means. Shot and structured in the style of a talking-heads documentary, it centres on a family recounting the mysterious disappearance and death of teenage girl Alice, as well as the many strange events that followed and preceded this tragedy. And so, few things that are outright scary are actually shown, and most of the film’s runtime is dedicated to the calm recollections of absolutely terrifying events from the past, delivered by actors we sometimes wish could be a little less good at their job for the sake of our nerves.…

Twenty seven metres underground, beneath one of the world’s busiest urban centres, is not the place you would stop to listen to birds singing. It was November 2019 and I was in Tokyo producing a podcast about legendary animation house Studio Ghibli. While waiting for a train to take me out of the city and into nature, I could hear nature chirping its way into the depths of the infamously labyrinthine Shinjuku station. Studio Ghibli’s films compel us to recognise the everyday magic of the natural world – stories like Whisper of the Heart and Spirited Away weave together florid enchantment and banal reality, and here I was getting a warble of that magic while standing under thousands of tonnes of concrete. I spotted the speaker system from which the…

Forget John Wayne. The major touchstone of the cowboy for most people is a much more affable guy: Woody from Toy Story. The plucky Pixar protagonist, voiced by Tom Hanks, has a pull-string on his back and a series of catchphrases, one of which is the memorable line: “There’s a snake in my boot!” The cowboy boot is such a ubiquitous part of the ‘look’ of the heroes of the movie western that it often goes unnoticed, playing second fiddle around the campfire to the cowboy hat. But the tough leather cowbot boot has long been crucial to the cowpoke’s survival, whether old guard icons like Tom Mix or Gene Autry wearing them in the occasional full shot from head to toe, or Doris Day in Calamity Jane (1953) and…

In 1979, home video arrived – a new medium which briefly enjoyed a period beyond the legal purview of the British Board of Film Censors (as it was then known) whose influence was confined to public exhibition. For a time video stores – essentially cowboy operations – could rent anything to anyone, unexpurgated and unregulated, and the owners of these establishments were quick to realise that the films with lurid sleeve art and tawdry titles moved off the shelves fastest. This newfound freedom soon spawned a moral panic, spearheaded by a collection of sensation-seeking tabloids, god-bothering zealots, raid-happy coppers and pig-ignorant politicians. The police and Department of Public Prosecutions compiled an ever-changing list of titles deemed prosecutable, or at least potentially prosecutable, under the Obscene Publications Act 1964, for ‘tending…

Released 18 JUNE An odd bird, Ben Wheatley. Since his 2009 debut Down Terrace, he’s cemented his reputation as one of the most exciting British filmmakers of the 21st century. Yet his last film – a glossy adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s ‘Rebecca’, made for Netflix with an all-star cast – felt devoid of any identifying features; a Wheatley movie in name but not spirit. Even his big-name movies (High-Rise and Free Fire) felt a little watered down, lacking the glib eccentricity of his earlier work. It’s something of a relief, then, that his latest thriller – shot on location under Covid restrictions with a small cast and crew – feels like a return to the days of Kill List and A Field in England. Although the prospect of being inundated…

Released 7 MAY ANTICIPATION. Timely subject matter, and the great Steve Zahn taking the lead. 3 ENJOYMENT. Beautiful cinematography and a gentle westernflavoured score add much to this powerful story. 4 IN RETROSPECT. Sensitive and moving. Can’t wait to see what Kerrigan does next. 4 Beloved character actor Steve Zahn has had an eclectic career to date, switching between comedic and dramatic roles. You’re just as likely to find him in critically dubious slapstick fare like The Ridiculous 6 as you are an indie drama like Captain Fantastic, or voicing CG characters like Bad Ape in studio blockbuster War for the Planet of the Apes. As a father on the run across the Montana mountains with his trans child in Anna Kerrigan’s western-tinged drama Cowboys, Zahn is perfectly cast in a…

Released 24 JULY What am I doing with my life? If you’ve ever been kept up at nigh by this question, then Emma Seligman’s debut feature Shiva Baby will strike a chord. At a time when the traditional markers of adulthood feel more out of reach for young people than ever, the overwhelming pressure to have it all figured out remains. The film tackles these anxieties head on through its protagonist Danielle (Rachel Sennott), a college senior who is drifting, grasping for a sense of control over her life. Developed from Seligman’s short film of the same name, Shiva Baby takes place over the course of a single day, following Danielle from her sugar daddy Max’s (Danny Deferrari) apartment to her aunt Sheila’s (Cilda Shaur) house, where she joins her parents…

Released 4 JUNE ANTICIPATION. Aleem Khan’s excellent 2014 short Three Brothers bodes well for his feature debut.4 ENJOYMENT. Strikes a lovely balance between naturalism and melodrama. 4 IN RETROSPECT. Khan’s careful direction and Scanlan’s acting chops bring the best out in one another. 4 The White Cliffs of Dover, an enduring symbol of British nationalism, take on a different meaning in Aleem Kahn’s debut feature After Love. For Mary Hussein (Joanna Scanlan), the crumbling chalk façade represents her identity and sense of self, eroding away and growing ever distant. Mary is a British Muslim convert who is happily married to Ahmed (Nasser Memarzia). Fully integrated into his culture, she prays five times a day, wears traditional Pakistani dress, decorates her home with framed Islamic scripture and cooks aloo palak from scratch.…

Released 21 MAY This eye-opening – at times eye-rolling – documentary is essential viewing for anyone interested in learning about America’s role as self-appointed peacemaker in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict following the end of the Cold War in 1991. Director Dror Moreh interviews most of the major players on Team USA, asking tough questions and largely getting candid answers. Shrewdly, he gives everyone just enough rope – if nothing else, The Human Factor is a chronicle of American hubris, revealing how the world’s foremost superpower overreached in its attempts to broker a deal.. Of course, America has never really been a neutral party in all this. Former members of Bill Clinton’s administration recount how the President was determined to find an amicable solution to the decades-long Middle East dispute, and how profoundly…

Released 25 JUNE ANTICIPATION. Franco’s previous films were small yet harrowing. This is on a much bigger canvas. 4 ENJOYMENT. You’re not here to enjoy yourself, but you can admire the craft. 3 IN RETROSPECT. The refusal of hope is offset by a lack of platitudes, making this an antidote to complacency. 4 In this latest exercise in dread from Mexican provocateur Michel Franco an ultra-swish wedding unfolds behind security gates at a glass-and-steel modern mansion in Mexico City. Soon the unexpected arrival of a much-loved former family retainer pricks the conscience of the bride, who’s been showered with thick envelopes of cash by her guests all day. The ex-servant needs money to pay for his wife’s heart surgery, and since she was also previously employed at the house, the young…

Released JUNE (TBC) ANTICIPATION. Danish cop thriller with a BLM-ish theme? Could be good. 3 ENJOYMENT. The excitement rarely lets up and there’s plenty to think about, despite lapses in originality. 4 IN RETROSPECT. However you feel about the boys in blue, this is an action-packed, socially-conscious thriller. 4 Shorta, named for the Arabic word for police, is a lean cop thriller that explores the moral and physical aspects of urban conflict. Writer/director duo Anders Olholm and Frederik Louis Hviid’s debut feature has a sharp pace, impressive verisimilitude and sympathetic characters culled from across the racial divide and whose motivations are clear. Though primarily concerned with a harrowing extended shift for Copenhagen coppers Mike Andersen (Jacob Lohmann) and Jens Hoyer (Simon Sears), Shorta kicks off with a snapshot of the violent…

Blu-ray/DVD OUT NOW The new Indicator box set of Gaspar Noé’s infamous masterpiece Irreversible reintroduces UK audiences to a film which caused controversy at the time of its initial release almost 20 years ago, and which can reasonably be described as a cult film today. But importantly, this beautiful object also sets the record straight on both what the initial responses to the film actually were, and on what the film itself is – away from the idea of Noé as little more than a puerile filmmaker beloved by teenagers in search of intense sensations. A host of essays and case studies in the booklet help contextualise the film, which in turn proves useful when appreciating the meanings of the new, reversed cut of Irreversible: the Inversion Intégrale, known as…

Blu-ray/DVD Released 24 MAY Tsui Hark is one of the world’s best action directors, and Time and Tide features some of his greatest sequences. It follows a series of needlessly complicated segments that establish an overly complex plot in which young bruiser Tyler (Nicholas Tse) teams up with older pal Jack (Wu Bai), a butcher and former hitman, to take on a group of South American mercenaries. For some reason, both have pregnant partners they need to protect. While the story can be tricky to follow, the action never is – it is filmed and edited with a level of visual coherence that few other films manage to muster, while never sacrificing on scale, speed, ingenuity or flair. The camera moves constantly, darting through tunnels, whirling round corners or flying up…

Jon Raymond is fond of a tangent. At one point in our conversation, he tells me about the recent trend in the US of Sikh drivers taking up long-haul trucking and completely transforming the industry. “Sorry, I don’t know why I’m telling you all of this,” he laughs. “People don’t often ask!” The author and screenwriter from Portland, Oregon has rarely been interviewed in the years since his debut novel ‘The Half-Life’ was published in 2004, a book he followed with a short story collection and several screenplays written for – and with – the filmmaker Kelly Reichardt. Their stories are embedded in the Oregon landscape, attuned to the movements of the region (and the truckers passing through). From page to screen, the line at which Raymond’s work ends and…

Ajet blue colour block is split down the middle by two vapour trails; a canvas of cream-coloured clouds morph and mutate, swallowing up the edges of the frame; swollen rainy grey storm clouds slide by angrily, looking near ready to burst. These are the first three skies seen in James Benning’s 2004 film Ten Skies, after which seven more follow in a film that sees the famed avant-garde filmmaker select ten aerial views in areas around his Los Angeles home and filming them in static takes that run for exactly 10 minutes each – the length of a single 400ft roll of 16mm film. Having made films for more than five decades, James Benning is one of the most well-regarded avant-garde filmmakers of all time, known for his mostly slow,…

Released 2 JULY ANTICIPATION The word out of Sundance was very strong. A new horror talent incoming? 4 ENJOYMENT Sharp social commentary mixed with copious amounts of claret. 4 IN RETROSPECT RIP my ego. 5 With its claustrophobic, retro-styled opening, Prano Bailey-Bond’s Censor initially brings to mind Berberian Sound Studio, Peter Stickland’s giallo-inspired psychological horror from 2012. In this case, however, the immersive, metatextual action occurs not in a recording studio but a private screening room, where Enid (Niamh Algar in a star-making dual role of sorts) routinely watches gruesome low-rent genre flicks in her capacity as a film censor. The organisation she works for is a thinlyveiled proxy for the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) which, despite a public relations rebrand in 1984, historically functioned as a censorship body…

Released 28 MAY ANTICIPATION. Tales of Earthsea and From Up on Poppy Hill are criminally underrated. 4 ENJOYMENT. The CG animation creates a 3D world for Ghibli’s latest heroine to charm our hearts. 4 IN RETROSPECT. A perfect blend of old and new and a delightful update to the Ghibli formula. 4 In Mami Sunada’s insightful documentary The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, director GorŌ Miyazaki is shown discussing plans for From Up on Poppy Hill – his second directorial feature – and expressing a lack of enthusiasm to make another traditional Studio Ghibli feature. He’s less attached to the old ways of animating than his colleagues – his television series Ronja, the Robber’s Daughter used cel-shaded computer animation to cultivate a more expansive world. It makes sense that if anyone…

Released 18 JUNE ANTICIPATION. It’s been a decade since we last heard from Palestine’s most important filmmaker.. 4 ENJOYMENT. It’s funny and astute without ever compromising one for the other. 4 IN RETROSPECT. The more one learns about the film’s sociopolitical context, the more daring it seems. 5 “Nazareth” and “I am Palestinian” are the only words spoken aloud by ES, the Buster Keaton-ish alter ego portrayed by writerdirector Elia Suleiman in his latest film It Must Be Heaven, and they’re not chosen idly. Like Jesus Christ – another guy with big ideas and a humble way of expressing them through parable – he calls that region home, responding to an inquiry from a cabbie elated to be hosting a foreigner in his car. Suleiman is an exotic creature in New…

Released 24 JULY ANTICIPATION. Here’s a question: does God’s waiting room do drink specials? 4 ENJOYMENT Serving glorious, tropicana melancholy à la vintage Errol Morris. 5 IN RETROSPECT. A bottomless brunch of candycoloured heartache. 4 It’s five o’clock somewhere – in this case, America’s largest retirement community – when Lynn, a golf cart salesperson who’s nicknamed himself The Margarita Man, friendzones middle-aged Barbara in the minigolf carpark. He’s on his way to a hot date with another lady resident of The Villages: population 132,000 Baby Boomers and counting. “If you can’t enjoy your life now, you’re never gonna do it,” Lynn tells the widow, plainly. But this gated community, billed as ‘Disney World for seniors’, is far from the happiest place on Earth, even by Floridian standards. Some Kind of Heaven…

Released 11 JUNE ANTICIPATION. A new work from a reliably interesting filmmaker following a strong festival run. 4 ENJOYMENT. Kossakovsky and co-cinematographer Egil Håskjold Larson lens the film immaculately. 3 IN RETROSPECT. This doesn’t bring much new to the ethnographic animal doc format. 2 From Ceyda Torun’s Kedi, about stray cats in Istanbul, to Elizabeth Lo’s Stray, which follows dogs roaming the same city, documentaries featuring animals filmed at their own eyel evel have proven popular enough in recent years as to constitute a mini-wave. With Gunda, Russian filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky jumps on this trend, training his camera on a litter of pigs on a livestock farm in Norway. A passion project for the Russian documentarian, Gunda recalls the simplicity of his early features Hush! and Russia from My Window, both…

Released 28 MAY ANTICIPATION. Apparently not a Joker-esque portrait of Pokémon character Lt Surge, alas. 3 ENJOYMENT. Suggests that watching Michael McIntyre contributes to a mental collapse, so checks out. 3 IN RETROSPECT. A very uncomfortable watch that’s offers a bravura showcase for Ben Whishaw’s range. 3 Since early notices following its world premiere at Sundance 2020, Surge – the first feature from director Aneil Karia – has been labelled a British equivalent to Falling Down, Joel Schumacher’s 1993 thriller in which a disgruntled guy violently lashes out against “society”. It’s not a totally unfair comparison, particularly given that the bulk of the breakdown narratives and crime sprees in both films take place over the course of a single day. But there are some crucial differences. Surge isn’t an especially reactionary…

Released 24 JULY This simple and effective documentary acts as both an insight into the moral, ethical and emotional quandaries that come with having children, and a PSA into the challenging (and heartbreaking) realities of those who suffer from Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Two lively, inquisitive pre-teen boys frolic and play in gardens, playgrounds and at home, blind to the reality that they are suffering from a wasting disease which currently has no cure. By early teens they’ll very likely have to use wheelchairs. By early twenties they’ll likely have to live with special breathing apparatus. Their story is told from the perspective of the kids’ parents, co-director Nick Taussig and his wife, the Czech artist Klara Cecmanova, whose lives are beset by impossible dilemmas and the need to make tough decisions…

Released 21 MAY ANTICIPATION. Qualley’s very up-and-coming, Weaver’s an icon, so the potential is there. 3 ENJOYMENT. Perfectly pleasant, though refuses to do anything that might quicken the pulse. 3 IN RETROSPECT. Lacking in style and substance, would benefit from a major redraft. 2 The American author JD Sallinger opted to divorce himself from public life after an initial flurry of activity which produced such canonical classics of hair-trigger teen anxiety as ‘Catcher in the Rye’ and ‘Franny and Zooey’. Philippe Falardeau’s film My New York Year is an adaptation of Joanna Smith Rakoff’s 2014 memoir ‘My Salinger Year’ in which the fortuitous college grad, played here by Margaret Qualley, floats into an entry level position at a New York literary agency that counts the creatively dormant Sallinger as one its…

Released 11 JUNE In Ellie & Abbie (& Ellie’s Dead Aunt), the debut feature from writer/director Monica Zanetti, asking a girl to the formal is the most terrifying task Ellie (Sophie Hawkshaw) has ever faced. Flustered in the presence of fellow student Abbie (Zoe Terakes), Ellie’s infatuation drives this delightful Australian rom-com that interweaves coming-of-age sensibilities with a harmonising of intergenerational lesbianism. After coming out to her mother – a much easier task than asking Abbie out – Ellie’s Aunt Tara (Julia Billington) appears from the dead as her lesbian fairy godmother and provides unsolicited queer wisdom. Even though it’s an initially bizarre premise, the film offers a stirring reflection on Tara as a lesbian predecessor. Tara is only visible now Ellie has come out, underpinning Zanetti’s canny script with an…

Blu-ray/DVD Released 14 JUNE It’s strange that one of the most visually ravishing films ever made is also rather difficult in terms of compartmentalising its story elements in your mind. Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s extraordinary 1998 mood piece comprises a series of sinuous long takes inside a number of “Flower Houses” in Shanghai at the tail end of the 19th century. And what Kubrick did for candles with Barry Lyndon, Hou does for oil lamps here, as each shot glows in burnished yellow-gold hues liked we’re peeking into a lost treasure chest with each scene. It sees Tony Leung Chiu-wai’s aptly named Master Wang as the sombre, vauguely effete presence at the core of the film, as he drifts between the company of his courtesan-ofchoice, Crimson (Michiko Hada), and a new…

Blu-ray/DVD Released 17 MAY You can smell the fuggy vapours emanating from Richard Burton as the morally conflicted/emotionally detached spymaster Alec Leamas in Martin Ritt’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, still one of the great screen adaptaions of a John Le Carré source novel. In the film’s strange opening chapter, we see the one-time head of operations in Berlin fall from grace, descending to a life of booze-soaked prowling, menial labour and fisticuffs with the local greengrocer. The film harnesses Burton’s personal demons (and not to mention his physical deterioration) in an immense performance whose air of bitter melancholy is enhanced further by the small skin blemish under his right eye that resembles and omnipresent tear. Yet this wallow in the gutter is all a ruse, a masterful…