Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 95: September/October i Little White Lies

A woman barely on the threshold of her elder years wakes up in her sister’s flat in Seoul, the camera slowly pulling away from her face before a matching motion takes in the cityscape outside the window. The mirroring camera movements create an immediate hyperreality that calls attention to the movie as a movie, something exacerbated when the woman begins idly clutching at her stomach in the way that characters in old films used to announce an impending health crisis with only a slight cough. This scene opens In Front of Your Face, the 26th feature by South Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo (and only the second to receive theatrical distribution in the UK), and it provides a clear glimpse into the director’s deceptive simplicity. For the uninitiated, Hong’s films, on…

Released 23 SEPTEMBER He has a cinephile fanbase stretching from Seoul to Paris to New York, but Hong Sang-soo remains largely terra incognita to UK cinemagoers, since only two of his 28 features have ever been officially distributed in cinemas. Presumably, he just doesn’t tick the boxes for genre marketability, effects spectacle or upfront social satire. Instead, the Korean’s prolific outpouring of celluloid miniatures possibly seem too casual and compact to make an impact. Hong, though, characteristically packs these booze-sodden conversation pieces with myriad layers of emotional observation, philosophical musing and meta-textual significance. That’s certainly true of In Front of Your Face, which coincidentally proves a very fine place to start your Hong journey. It’s his first time working with Lee Hye-yeong, an actor who’d made her name in 1980s Korean…

Released 30 SEPTEMBER At a secluded manor house, an avant-garde sonic catering collective begin a new residency at the behest of prim benefactor Jan Stevens (Gwendoline Christie). This unconventional art form involves turning the sounds of food and cooking into performance via microphones and synthesisers – it’s all very White Cube. For anyone who has seen Peter Strickland’s 2012 feature Berberian Sound Studio, it all may sound a little familiar. Yet after the haunted dress diptych of 2018’s In Fabric, Strickland tells a more simple story, which nevertheless amounts to his strangest to date. The catering collective consists of visionary Elle di Elle (Strickland regular Fatma Mohamed) and her two technicians, the sulky Billy (Asa Butterfield) and near-silent Lamina (Ariane Labed). Their residency is to be documented by Greek journalist Stones…

Released 30 SEPTEMBER ANTICIPATION. Getting Booksmart vibes from this Finnish Sundance hit. 4 ENJOYMENT. Relatively low stakes make for a satisfying viewing experience. 3 IN RETROSPECT. A refreshing and truthful portrait of contemporary girlhood. 3 Three Finnish girls on the cusp of young adulthood have their lives intersect over three consecutive Fridays. Dividing a film about contemporary girlhood in this way makes perfect sense, as when you’re 17, the things that matter most only seem to happen over the weekend. Mimmi (Aamu Milonoff) is confident yet cynical and boisterous, letting on that she’s too cool to care about much. She and her endearing, curly-haired ride-or-die pal, Rönkkö (Eleonoora Kauhanen), both work part-time at a smoothie kiosk in the middle of a shopping centre, and invite themselves to popular kids’ house parties…

Some may remember him as the kid embracing puberty in Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale, but now Owen Kline is all grows up and making movies with the Safdie brothers. Here, he gives an account of his collecting habits, artistic inspirations and eccentric friendship circles. “I grew up going to flea markets in New York and it was just like, records by The Nutty Squirrels were as common as leaves falling on the ground. It sold a million records in the US during the ’50s. So when you see it, and it’s one dollar, even if you have it, you’re gonna get it again. There’s some great Nutty Squirrels albums that have all these jazzy beats covered with all the big scatting they do. I think they go…

Released 2 SEPTEMBER Sisters are doing it for themselves – that is, hijacking an underground pipeline, running a makeshift oil refinery, and selling gasoline on the black market to redistribute wealth to their community in Sol Nascente, one of the biggest favelas in South America. This is Brazil under the hostile administration of far-right president Jair Bolsonaro, a country marked by tremendous political polarisation, economic turmoil, and acute social disparity. It sees Léa (Léa Alves da Silva) join forces with her half-sister Chitara (Joana Darc Furtado), the resourceful and taciturn leader of a ring of gasolineras. They play fictionalised extensions of their real selves, and their riveting screen presence lies at the centre of Queirós and Pimenta’s docu-fiction hybrid. Long takes, discursive monologues, slow pans and stylistic shifts allow the directors…

Released 9 SEPTEMBER When we think about heist films, we conjour up images of fast car chases and men who think they are super hard. Scrap all that – apparently there’s a new way to do it. The Score, from writer and director Malachi Smyth, is a pandemic-made thriller that attempts to express its own meaning by disposing of the notion of palm-sweating tension and opts instead for some Mamma Mia-esque outbursts of folk rock to ease its protagonists into its storyline. The film stars Brit character stalwarts Will Poulter and Johnny Flynn as a pair of un-smooth criminals playing the waiting game at a roadside café. Their time is spent mixing hard-boiled bants with a number of musical interludes courtesy of Flynn himself, which lends the film a more theatrical…

Released 16 SEPTEMBER ANTICIPATION. A work by the great Chinese auteur arrives on screen, three years delayed. 3 ENJOYMENT. A rather spartan turn for Zhang, but compelling despite its muddiness. 3 IN RETROSPECT. A fascinating meta-narrative on film censorship then and now. 4 The name of fifth generation Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou’ summons certain unforgettable colours to mind: the syrupy crimson flooding Raise the Red Lantern; the verdant green of bamboo in House of Flying Daggers; the inky, yin-yang monochromatism of Shadow. Those accustomed to the celebrated director’s operatic aestheticism, however, may be initially disoriented by the austere visual palette of his latest, One Second. Depositing the viewer in the seemingly infinite sparseness of an unnamed Chinese desert, it quickly exiles us from any customary visions of palatial grandeur – yet…

In her first book, ‘Which as You Know Means Violence: On Self-Injury as Art and Entertainment’ culture critic and friend of LWLies Philippa Snow examines the fascinating, sometimes disturbing link between pain and performance, and deftly links together the likes of Jackass and Marina Abramović, exploring the compulsion to destroy in order to create. We spoke to her about high-low cultural interrogation and what makes Jackass art. LWLies: Self-harm and injury is still thought of as something very shocking, even though violence has become very mainstream in television and cinema. Self-harm as art seems to bridge the gap between those two worlds. What sparked your interest in this subject? Snow: I still haven’t figured it out yet. I think it’s probably quite psychologically revealing that I’ve chosen a subject that I…

Blu-ray/DVD Released 26 SEPT The late ’80s and early ’90s was a prime period for Hong Kong action films, and Righting Wrongs, an early work from director, producer, action choreographer and sometime actor Corey Yuen, is amongst the best made during the era. Though the bone-crunching fight scenes are what attract attention, the film’s narrative, which details corruption within Hong Kong’s criminal justice system, is also compelling, showing the stranglehold crime has over the city and the legal system’s inertia and complicity. Ha Ling-Ching (Yuen Biao) is a young prosecutor, still hopeful about the efficacy of his work. After he sees his mentor shot in front of him and learns that his family have also been gunned down in their home, he quickly realises his naivety, taking things quite literally into his…

Released 9 SEPTEMBER ANTICIPATION. An old master returns to his roots, let’s hope he’s still got it. 4 ENJOYMENT. Thoughtful, poignant, confusing, funny, sexy, gross – it’s a lot. 4 IN RETROSPECT. Long live the new flesh! 5 David Cronenberg belongs to that rarefied stratum of directors whose aesthetic could credibly be characterised as a genre unto itself. To this day, any filmmaker who wades into the slime and viscera of ‘body horror’ cannot evade one particular adjective: Cronenbergian. Yet since 1999’s eXistenZ, the director has been on sabbatical from his own icky brand, setting aside outré grotesquery in favour of more conventional (and conventionally legitimate) subject matter. But it would seem that the ever-undulating “New Flesh” of Videodrome (1983) and The Fly (1986) couldn’t be suppressed indefinitely. To watch it…

Released 9 SEPTEMBER ANTICIPATION. Enticing cast, festival buzz, let’s go, go, go. 4 ENJOYMENT. A little over-eager in hitting all of its slightly banal cultural touchstones. 3 IN RETROSPECT. Memo to Sennott and Pace: please work together again. 2 It is a truth universally acknowledged that any affluent American young person with an empty house for the weekend must organise a house party. Risky Business, Superbad, Project X, Booksmart… there’s a rich tradition in Hollywood of documenting kids letting loose, and no matter the genre, packing a hormone-heavy group of college grads into a confined space is a sure-fire recipe for chaos. So it goes in Halina Reijn’s slasher debut Bodies Bodies Bodies, from a screenplay by Sarah DeLappe, and based on a premise by Kristen Roupenian, whose short story Cat…

Released 2 SEPTEMBER ANTICIPATION. John Michael McDonagh returns with… Babel, but funny(-ish)? 3 ENJOYMENT. The question of how this messy situation will be resolved means it’s never dull. 3 IN RETROSPECT. Too muted and thinly written for its acerbic bite to really make a mark. 2 A logical point of comparison for John Michael McDonagh’s The Forgiven is Babel, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s sweeping 2006 narrative of interwoven stories. While this sticks to one country, and is less ambitious in its scope, the dramatic catalysts in both film concern tragic accidents involving white tourists and local young men colliding in the deserts Moroccan. Babel is a film which focuses on concepts of miscommunication and globalisation, while The Forgiven’s thematic meat is instead the recklessness of the condescending rich, alongside Western influence on the Arab…

Released 7 OCTOBER Patricio Guzmán’s introspective narration lingers over drone-mapped footage of the Andes, one of the world’s longest cordilleras (mountain ranges) as the shadow of their tectonic physicality envelops Santiago, Chile’s capital city. We’re told that if Santiago’s cobblestone streets – forged out of rocks from the cordillera – could speak, “they would speak of the blood that ran over them”, as the spectre of Augusto Pinochet’s 17-year long military dictatorship haunts polity and society. Poeticism segues into cutting political analysis as the end of Pinochet’s dictatorship led Chile to become the first testing grounds for a forceful implementation of neoliberal economic policy. The introduction of Santiago filmmaker Pablo Salas – who, unlike Guzman and many of his exiled contemporaries, stayed in Chile during the dictatorship – provides an astute…

Released OUT NOW ANTICIPATION. We enjoyed Indonesian director Edwin’s 2012 film, Postcards from the Zoo. 4 ENJOYMENT. Energising and original, even if it is hard to pin down tonally. 3 IN RETROSPECT. The late Suharto period as violent romance. 4 “Only a man who can’t get it up can face death without fear.” This line comes from near the beginning of Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash, just after we have seen the film’s young hero Ajo Kawir (Marthino Lio) win a dangerous game of chicken on his moped. A long way, both chronologically and geographically, from the amped-up hyperreality of the Fast and Furious films, this tournament takes place on a backroad of the Bojongsoang district in West Java, Indonesia, in 1989, and is presented with a dusty naturalism.…

Released 22 SEPTEMBER If Kogonada’s debut feature Columbus navigated the fertile ground of how people relate to places, his follow-up moves onto the slightly more ambitious question of how we relate to the world at large. What shapes our understanding of life, family, and our place within society? How is a memory formed? What does the brain choose to archive and forget? Adapted from the short story ‘Saying Goodbye to Yang’ about a family in the nearish future paying a long farewell to their robot companion, After Yang is an expansive yet intimate portrait of grief and identity, and cements its writer/director as one of the most exciting new voices in cinema. Jake (Colin Farrell), Kyra (Jodie Turner Smith), Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja) and Yang (Justin H Min) are a family.…

Blu-ray OUT NOW In the first scene of Frank Perry’s The Swimmer, the camera trails behind Burt Lancaster, fixing lustily on his big bronzed back as he lurches towards one of the many suburban swimming pools around which the film is set. On arrival, he hatches a quixotic sounding plan: he’ll “swim home”, crossing the length of every pool from here to his own house, walking in between. Taken from a John Cheever short story that Perry adapted into the film, this simple concept forms the entire basis of this psychologically probing satire. An ordinary journey slowly becomes an odyssey of self-discovery as the façade that this hulking, tanned man hides behind gradually crumbles away. Lancaster is at the centre of almost every scene, progressing along his route and attempting to…

Karen Han is the author of ‘Bong Joon Ho: Dissident Cinema’ published by Abrams New York and on sale at all good booksellers from November. We sent Karen a mini pop quiz on the writing process, gleaning a deeper appreciation for Bong’s cinema, and the Bong characters she’d like to go for food with. Author photo by Carly Hildebrant. LWLies: Tell us about your first encounter with the work of Bong Joon Ho? Han: Though I can’t recall exactly when I first saw one of Director Bong’s films, I clearly remember that it was The Host. My dad was a big cinephile – he’s definitely the main reason that I had an awareness of the Korean film world, let alone film as a whole – and he must have heard…

When you’re a film critic, people always ask, “What is your favourite film?”, and ever since 2013 I answer very quickly and easily: Don Hertzfeldt’s It’s Such A Beautiful Day. There are not many films that are shorthand for the genetic material of your soul. In my case, there’s only one. Although, technically, it’s three short films compiled into a single portmanteau feature animation, and it follows a hat-wearing stick figure named Bill who is trying to live his little life against the backdrop of some medical bad news that is rooted in his family history. Maybe this doesn’t sound like much on paper, but its svelte 62 minutes covers all of life: the silly embarrassments; the absurd humour; the inherited suffering; the desire for love; the isolation; the yearning;…

Released 16 SEPTEMBER ANTICIPATION. Always a sucker for a creature feature. 4 ENJOYMENT. Influencers stop having kids challenge. 3 IN RETROSPECT. Finds great middle ground between heavy metaphor and practical monster fun. 4 Twelve-year-old Tinja (Siiri Solalinna) is a young gymnast tirelessly training for an upcoming competition, but is mostly desperate to appease the impossibly high expectations placed on her by her perfectionist mother (Sophia Heikkilä). Her mother is an unhinged lifestyle influencer/vlogger who is comically irredeemable and turns their pastel-coloured abode into a manufactured nest for AV content. Nauseating bright hues and floral wallpaper coats the sterile interiors of their suburban fairy tale home, exuding a menacing and sinister aura aligned with the matriarch’s aggressively feminine, idyllic impression of Finnish middle-class artifice. Any and every moment is up for grabs…

Released 2 SEPTEMBER Do you believe in soulmates? When it comes to cinema, I do. There’s a perfect match out there somewhere for every film, a viewer just waiting to be transported by whatever it is their cinematic soulmate has to offer. Three Thousand Years of Longing, the latest from Aussie auteur George Miller, and co-written by Augusta Gore, is a film rendered via the brightest colours, the strongest flavours, the wildest rolls of the narrative dice. There will be some for whom it is love at first sight, and others in whom it provokes a wild allergic reaction. Imagine Wes Anderson had adapted Neil Gaiman’s American Gods – that’s the vibe here. Idris Elba plays a Djinn, an elemental being with the power to grant three wishes when you set…

Released OUT NOW ANTICIPATION. Anvari’s previous film, Wounds, was a bit of an eccentric misfire. 3 ENJOYMENT. Looks like trash, but this compelling story defies easy expectation. 3 IN RETROSPECT. There’s more to it than meets the eye, and its subtle boldness becomes apparent in retrospect. 4 One of the things that Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho is famous for is the way it subverts expectations, particularly when it comes to the relationships we forge with its main characters. Writer/director Babak Anvari takes a leaf out of that devilish book for his urban horror-thriller I Came By, and in doing so teases the viewer when it comes to the question of who the film’s hero will be. Its bold, triptychlike structure defies easy gratification, and in its race towards the narrative finish line,…

Released 9 SEPTEMBER Pity the fool who underestimates one of Claire Denis’ “small” films that she tends to make while waiting for the financing to come together on her bigger projects. We did it with the astonishing Let the Sunshine In, which she made ahead of existential sci-fi epic, High Life, and we did it again with Both Sides of the Blade, which was produced before her long-gestating Denis Johnson adaptation, The Stars at Noon. Both of these “small” films were made in collaboration with writer and novelist Christine Angot, and it’s hard to think of a more perfect merging of ideals and sensitivities than these two. The word “small” appears in scare quotes because it only refers to the scope of the production: this film was made during the pandemic…

The sense of quiet in Kogonada’s films is a heavy one: there is peace, but also a hushed sense of regret and grief, a contemplation of things lost you just have to sit with as time goes on. In 2017’s Columbus, that shines through in a conversation between an architecture scholar and a librarian about ambition and family. In the director’s latest feature, After Yang, we are welcomed into a family mourning the loss of Yang (Justin H. Min) – an android sibling, child, companion – holding onto the ambition to understand the love he gave to only child Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja) and what he leaves behind. LWLies: You’re working off the short story ‘Saying Goodbye to Yang’ by Alexander Weinstein; it’s interesting that you changed the title. The…

Blu-ray/DVD Released 31 OCT “The summer I killed my father I was 10 years old,” says Eve (Jurnee Smollett), in what is one of the first lines spoken aloud in the prelude of Kasi Lemmons’ Louisiana-set Eve’s Bayou. It’s a striking opening: What would make a child want to murder their father? When Eve catches him (Samuel L Jackson) cheating on her mother (Lynn Whitfield), she is so young that she doubts her interpretation of what she is seeing. Yet before long he has committed further transgressions against the family which are harder to process, even through the skewed prisms of memory and perspective. A melodrama about the flexibility and infallibility of memory, Eve’s Bayou is a singular coming-of-age story that, though loaded with trauma and sadness, is also colourful and exuberant.…

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 see our first-look reviews from the Locarno Film Festival, including Helena Wittman’s amazing Human Flowers of Flesh. LWLies on Discord Sign up to LWLies’ membership scheme to unlock the world of our Discord channel, where we’ll be sending live updates on magazine making and film viewing, plus weekly recommendations of books, films and much, much more. Truth & Movies: A Little White Lies podcast Leila Latif hosts our weekly delve into new releases and discursive movie chatter. Recent episodes have included an interview with the director of Fire of Love, and a Jordan Peele extravaganza. YouTube.com/LWLies Our hub for video work of all varieties, including bespoke…