Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 96: November/December i Little White Lies

Released 23 NOVEMBER There was a time when being called a “disruptor” was not a nice thing. If you talked too much in class, played your music too loud, or drunkenly tipped over cows while they slept, this was old school disruption of the unequivocally malign variety. Around the turn of the millennium, the term evolved into a beloved corporate buzzword and its core definition changed. Suddenly, it was no longer about simply making other people uncomfortable, it was about harnessing discomfort as a weapon, and shaking people out of stale habits – whether they liked it or not. Disruption became about enforced change, and was not only beneficial, but apparently a vital tenet in the apparatus of capitalism. Yet, if we look back at the modern “disruptor” personalities – you…

Released 16 SEPTEMBER ANTICIPATION. A respectable response from when it premiered at the 2022 Berlin Film Festival. 3 ENJOYMENT. Very slow and detailed, but comes together beautifully in the end. 3 IN RETROSPECT. It’s a film which is making the right people angry. 4 Draconian censorship laws in China mean that it’s rare to see films that criticise the pristine mother nation. Li Ruijun’s Return to Dust is an intriguing case, as it was initially deemed acceptable for cinemas, but was eventually pulled and banned for the crime of depicting rural life in China in a drastic and forbidding light. Acknowledging hardscrabble poverty, it seems, is a big no-no. It’s a sad state of affairs to have government mechanisms in place to suppress any form of art and expression, but in…

Released 25 NOVEMBER “Some people think football is a matter of life and death,” Bill Shankly, Liverpool’s famed former manager, once said. “I don’t like that attitude. I can assure them it is much more serious than that.” Football has long been a sport for dreamers and in Georgian filmmaker Alexandre Koberidze, Shankly may have found another ally. In What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?, set in the bustling city of Kutaisi on the Rioni River, the game is watched or played on every street corner. Even the local stray dogs, one named Vardy no less, have their favourite viewing spots. Koberidze’s second feature is a sweepingly romantic portrait of the Georgian city and the love – between people and for football – that is its lifeforce.…

Released OUT NOW ANTICIPATION. All aboard the good ship Östlund! 4 ENJOYMENT. Stomach-churning scenes abound. 4 IN RETROSPECT. A fun, but fairly smug, voyage. 4 There’s something about the idea of floating on the open sea with a bunch of strangers that feels vaguely ominous, and given the reputation cruises have as breeding grounds for stomach bugs and potential death traps, it’s surprising we don’t see more films that take place abroad them. Good news, then, for anyone who ever read David Foster Wallace’s ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again’ and felt seen – Ruben Östlund shares your apprehension about ocean-based holidays. The latest brash provocation from the director of Force Majeure and The Square concerns the passengers aboard a luxury cruise ship and charts the series of unfortunate…

Released 18 NOVEMBER ANTICIPATION. All we want to see is Paul Mescal in a dad role. 4 ENJOYMENT. Kleenex in hand, you’ll want to call your parents asap. 5 IN RETROSPECT. An ode to cinema as a machine for remembering. 5 How does one say goodbye to a memory? By unearthing its immense power, typically tucked away in a fragment of a whole, and letting the camera roll. Scottish director Charlotte Wells locates the answer somewhere in the expansive emotional world of Aftersun, her feature debut. The film transforms a week into an eternity as Calum (Paul Mescal) and his 11-year old daughter, Sophie (newcomer Frankie Corio) reunite for their annual package holiday on the Turkish coast, armed with a camcorder to capture it all. Between the bright blues skies and…

Released 4 NOVEMBER It’s hard to predict the climate into which a long-gestated story will be birthed. So, this, the year that saw Roe v Wade overruled by the American Supreme Court has dramatically altered the lens through the film Call Jane will be viewed. It’s about the Jane Collective who, during the late ’60s and early ’70s helped women in need of safe abortions. It’s directed by Phyllis Nagy, best known for writing 2015’s lesbian Christmas movie Carol, the film tells of the collective’s heroism through the fictional character glamorous suburban housewife Joy (Elizabeth Banks) who discovers that her second pregnancy will likely kill her. Unfortunately for Joy, the medical and legal establishment deems that her life is a sacrifice they are willing to make in the name of ideology.…

Released 25 NOVEMBER ANTICIPATION. Hollywood’s take on #MeToo has been patchy – let’s hope this isn’t another Bombshell. 3 ENJOYMENT. Pedestrian in style but compelling and deeply moving at times. 4 IN RETROSPECT. May not stand the test of time but engaging and never sensational. 3 She Said opens with a pale young woman with cropped hair walking along the Irish coast. To her astonishment an 18th century galleon is suddenly revealed, bustling with navy officers in tricorn hats. She’s stumbled onto a film set. Her awe is violently interrupted with a hard cut to her running full pelt down a city street stricken with terror. Nothing in She Said ever quite equals the sheer emotional power of this prologue, but it builds towards a moving conclusion without ever feeling manipulative.…

Blu-ray/DVD Released 3 JAN 2020 Long understood to be one of the most significant works of international animation, Marcell Jankovics’ The Son of the White Mare has not been easy to see in the 40 years since its completion. Now restored to 4K, its availability has been improved and it’s clear to see why it has such a hallowed reputation. Telling the folkloric story of a magical horse that gives birth to three sons who, in turn, become tasked with defending the planet from three rival multi-headed, hell-born dragons, the film is a visually resplendent showcase for the Hungarian animator’s striking style of hand painted animation. Each new scene seems to outdo the psychedelic intensity of the one that preceded it. With eye-catching character designs and richly realised landscapes throughout, the film…

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 Hannah Strong’s exclusive interview with the stars of The Banshees of Inishirin, Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell. 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 Leila Latif hosts our weekly delve into new releases and discursive movie chatter. Recent episodes have included a look back to 80s-tastic vampire hash, The Lost Boys, and Park Chan-wook’s hammer-happy Oldboy. YouTube.com/LWLies Our hub…

Released 25 NOVEMBER Noah Baumbach is – at least at first glance – a curious choice to adapt the work of American author Don DeLillo for the screen, as his stylised, complex and idiosyncratic prose seems vastly different from the realist dialogue that the filmmaker tends to favour in his portraits of contemporary American life. But the overarching theme of White Noise – an anxiety around the looming spectre of death – is familiar territory for for the writer/director, as is the psyche of the film’s middle-aged, middle-class white protagonist. This is his most ambitious project in both scale and provenance. This does seem apparent in the film’s opening sequence. After Don Cheadle’s cheerful academic Murray Siskind delivers a monologue on the optimistic overtones of the car crash in American cinema,…

Released 18 NOVEMBER In a 1980 interview on televangelist Jim Bakker’s network, then-presidential candidate Ronald Regan claimed, “We may be the generation that sees Armageddon.” He was referring to concerns over the threat of a nuclear war, but the phrase looms large in James Gray’s Armageddon Time (named for the Willie Williams’ reggae song of the same name) taking on meaning beyond the advent of political superpowers. For an 11-year-old boy growing up in New York City, armageddon is: conflict with a teacher; a father’s belt wielded as a weapon; and the declining health of a beloved grandfather. The end of the world is constantly on the horizon when you’re a child. Paul Graff (Michael Banks Repeta) is a stand-in for Gray, a sixth-grader with his head in the clouds, more…

Released 4 NOVEMBER A man should never be forced to underplay the final moments of his life. The news of sudden illness deserves the highest level of drama and despair, as time begins to slip through your fingers. Yet there is such piercing vulnerability in the delicacy with which Bill Nighy plays Mr Williams, a Big Smoke pencil pusher forced to reckon with what life means before he draws his final breath. He’s not the first nor will he be the last man to reckon with his mortality, and it’s a tall task to even consider retelling the story first put to screen by Akira Kurosawa in 1952 with Ikiru, itself based on Leo Tolstoy’s 1886 novella ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’. So Living, directed by South African filmmaker Oliver Hermanus…

Arch provocateur Ruben Östlund has made a name for himself by pushing buttons and presenting audiences with awkward, often paradoxical moral dilemmas. His new film, Triangle of Sadness, is a film about the transitory nature of money and fame, and also the power of sudden revolution. “I always want to ask people who watch my films: what is the political message? I’ve been completely uninterested in making films that support the left-wing socialist movement only. I think there’s a lot of great things with the market economy and there are great things with regulated capitalism. When I was doing the film, I almost wanted to go into the world we were dealing with in the 1980s, when we had a Western perspective of the world and we had an Eastern…

Released 18 NOVEMBER In a green, rural backwater of Costa Rica, middle-aged Clara (Wendy Chinchilla Araya) is in arrested development. She lives in a secluded forest with her hyper-religious family, yet her burgeoning sexuality is stimulated by everything from soap operas to soil. And all this is underscored by a hodgepodge of references to the Virgin Mary. It’s a film apt for current socio-political climes, as the verdant beauty of nature is framed as a cure-all for woes, and it’s where Clara finds solace. Nathalie Álvarez Mesén’s film remains slightly distanced throughout, raking back the sand of her imagery but never really digging deep. The film treats its subjects as Clara’s family do her – at arm’s length. And yet, the feverish and feral performanced by Araya drags the film back…

Released 2 DECEMBER The spectre of Victor Fleming’s 1939 The Wizard of Oz, in all its Technicolor glory, ceaselessly haunts the collective American psyche. Distilled into a pair of sequined red pumps, this staggeringly permanent cultural touchstone has become “public real estate”, and like a recurring hallucination, has left an indelible mark on David Lynch’s filmmaking, warping the porous veil between reality and imagination. Alexandre O. Philippe’s Lynch/Oz sees a cohort of six distinct and illuminating essays (each written and voiced by film critic Amy Nicholson, camp auteur John Waters, director duo Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, and filmmakers Karyn Kusama, Rodney Ascher and David Lowery) guiding us through the yellow brick road as they examine the how Oz’s influence and cultural vernacular is thoroughly embedded into the very core of…

Released 9 DECEMBER Jennifer and June Gibbons were identical twins who loved writing, art and had vivid imaginations which enabled them to create fantastical stories. They also refused to speak to anyone except each other, which earned them the moniker ‘The Silent Twins’ and resulted in ostracisation and bullying. After attempts to separate the girls resulted in them becoming catatonic, they were allowed to remain together, but later bouts of drug use and petty crime resulted in them being detained in Broadmoor Psychiatric Hospital, where they remained for 11 years. In 1993, when they were moved to a less restrictive clinic in Wales, Jennifer died during transit. The cause of her death has never been fully determined. This context is important for understanding Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s adaptation of Marjorie Wallace’s book about…

At the centre of Marie Kreuzer’s Corsage lies a spellbinding performance by Vicky Krieps as the Empress Elisabeth of Austria, who, upon turning 40, begins to unravel and rebel against her royal duties. The film marks a stunning run for the actor, following Phantom Thread and Bergman Island. LWLies: What were your first encounters with Empress Elisabeth? Krieps: I knew her from the movies with Romy Schneider, which I was not allowed to watch at my house because my mum was very emancipated. We didn’t have any princess stuff, but my neighbours did, so I would watch the movies there. They also had the biography, and I read it. As I got to the end of the book something started to feel very dark and sad, and I remember just…

Blu-ray/DVD Released 26 SEPT Many actors that turn to filmmaking show that going behind the camera isn’t the best choice for them and that their talents are instead best spent appearing on-screen. That isn’t the case with Gary Oldman, whose first and, to date, only feature, Nil by Mouth reveals him to be just as skilled a director as he is an actor, and also not the vainglorious sort who feels the need to place himself at the centre of his own creation. A grim portrait of a dysfunctional family that is punctuated by moments of insight and levity, Nil by Mouth was a personal film for Oldman. Set in New Cross, where Oldman grew up, the film is credited to his father, but considering it is a film about an abusive…

The European Film Academy is a body that provides tools for the promotion of and education about European filmmaking across 52 countries throughout the continent. Most may know the Academy for its annual award ceremony which celebrates the cream of filmmaking in Europe, but it is currently expanding its scope of work: the new “Month of European Film” is part of a more expansive project to spread a passion for European film as far and wide as possible. Here are just a few examples of the vital work the Academy is doing… 1 Hosting Europe’s most spectacular movie award ceremony This is the big one. A group of 40 pioneering European filmmakers, spearheaded by the Swedish maestro Ingmar Bergman, formed the European Film Academy in 1988, at the first ever…

Released 25 NOVEMBER ANTICIPATION. An interesting combo of director, stars and source material. Could go either way. 4 ENJOYMENT. Sex in film is back, baby. 4 IN RETROSPECT. One of the year’s best/horniest period dramas. 4 A successful adaptation of DH Lawrence’s scandal-courting 1928 novel, ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ requires a subtle alchemy. On paper this tale of untrammelled libido triumphing over 20th century class barriers seems easily achievable. The novel’s once-taboo nature – it was unpublished for three decades before being subject to a lengthy obscenity trial and bans around the world – has often worked against it, and adaptations of Lawrence’s gripping drama often reduce it to bodice-ripping smut. What distinguishes Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre’s newest interpretation from its predecessors is its deft, mature understanding of what makes both Lady Chatterley and…

Released 9 DECEMBER ANTICIPATION. A long gestating passion project backed by incredible craftspeople. 4 ENJOYMENT. Better to be a wooden boy than a fascist. 5 IN RETROSPECT. As strange and macabre as it is heartfelt. 5 Becoming a real boy isn’t something that crosses the mind of Pinocchio, in Guillermo del Toro’s new adaptation of Carlo Collodi’s books. This Pinocchio is only concerned with being a “good” boy. Del Toro – in his first animated film as director – along with co-director Mark Gustafson (animation director on Fantastic Mr Fox) and co-writer Patrick McHale (of Over the Garden Wall fame) explore this seemingly simple question over various adventures as Pinocchio wanders the country in search of the answer, and the story is updated to Mussolini’s Italy. A number of father figures…

Released 2 NOVEMBER The opening titles of The Wonder are superimposed over the exterior framework of a studio set. The camera pans across an empty warehouse while a narrator asks us to remember the artifice of cinema when we enter its worlds, before landing on the room in which the story begins. The device comes from Emma Donoghue’s 2016 novel of the same title, a far-cry from her 2010 claustrophobic thriller ‘Room’. Here that terrain is the Irish countryside to which we venture with Nurse Wright (Florence Pugh) to investigate a mysterious child called Anna (Kíla Lord Cassidy) who has supposedly gone without food for four months. The question of Anna’s health in spite of starvation has led a panel of village elders to canonise the 11-year-old as a saint, persisting…

Released 2 DECEMBER In 2009, writer Glenn Kurtz discovered a degraded 16mm film in the attic of his parents’ home. It belonged to his grandfather, David Kurtz, an amateur filmmaker who was born in the small Polish town of Nasielsk before migrating to America. Equipped with a Kodak camera during a trip to Europe in 1938, he would shoot 14 minutes of black and white and Kodachrome film, three of which would become one of the only known fragments of history left of the predominantly Jewish population in Nasielsk, one year before the Nazi invasion of Poland. Slowed down, freeze-framed and recontextualised, this fragment of found footage allows filmmaker Bianca Stigter to attempt the titular “lengthening” through fleshing out and delving deep into the vibrant world within the images. The result…

Released 4 NOVEMBER Shot in sumptuous and hazy 16mm film, Haitian-Canadian filmmaker Miryam Charles’ debut feature attempts a fluid journey in time and space – across Haiti, Connecticut and Quebec – that coalesces in an elusive reimagining of Black girlhood. Cette Maison takes the death of the filmmaker’s 14-year-old cousin and imaginatively reconstructs her memory through personal, generational and geographic remenisces. The storytelling leans into magical realism and evokes the qualities of what cultural historian Saidiya Hartman calls “critical fabulation” — a blend of fact and fiction through the use of imagination and empathy, where past, present and future are spatiotemporally intertwined with fantasy. Charles confidently constructs a counternarrative that elaborates on the gaps and conflicting details within police and autopsy reports, savouring unknowability by way of interrogating, recovering and restoring…

Released 25 NOVEMBER At the end of Maurice Sendak’s 1963 children’s book, ‘Where the Wild Things Are’, when Max must return home, the wild things cry out, “Please don’t go – we’ll eat you up – we love you so!” It’s an ominous threat, but what could be more romantic than someone – quite literally – becoming a part of you? This line of prose comes to mind after watching Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All, in which a pair of teenage cannibals find love in a hopeless place (rural Indiana) and set off on a road trip across the United States in search of belonging. Adapted by Guadagnino’s regular collaborator David Kajganich from Camille DeAngelis’ 2015 novel of the same name, it’s a love story with teeth that sees sheltered Maren…

Released 18 NOVEMBER ANTICIPATION. A new film by Iñárritu always warrants attention. 4 ENJOYMENT. The balanced mesh of melancholia goes on a little too long, but merits the indulgent runtime. 3 IN RETROSPECT. A confidently realised examination of cultural displacement. 4 “My homeland has many palm trees and the thrush-song fills its air; no bird here can sing as well as the birds sing over there” Brazilian poet Antônio Gonçalves Dias famously uttered in ‘Exile Song’, a poem written in 1983 during his time as a student in Portugal. The words are simple yet fitly communicate the burning ache that is homesickness – the romantic conviction that no feeling can ever be felt as deeply as when at home, no food can ever taste as good, and no music can ever…

Released 18 NOVEMBER For Ralph Fiennes’ character chef Slowik in Mark Mylod’s The Menu, revenge is a dish best served on a crescent of edible puce foam and with an air-fried chicory wafer balancing on top. We are bussed directly into a minimalist lifestyle world of elite fine dining where a gesticulating gaggle of one-dimensional nasties have managed to secure a table at the world-famous seat of experimental gastronomy – Hawthorne. Slowik acts as master of ceremonies for a sense-challenging, multi-course cavalcade of disruption and discord, as his fiendish concoctions come with built-in moral lessons and are intended to challenge any and all preconceptions we have about food. Unlike Slowik, whose murderous fixation with subtle flavour combinations has driven him to creative frenzy, Mylod, along with screenwriters Seth Reiss and Will…

Blu-ray/DVD Released 12 DECEMBER Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala starts with a nervy setup that suggests a different sort of film to the one that follows. It opens in Kampala as young Mina (Sahira Nair) is in danger, fleeing the country with her mother Kinnu (Sharmila Tagore) and father Jay (Roshan Seth) that, as Ugandan Indians, they had always called home. We then flash forward 17 years, and Mina (played brilliantly as an adult by Sarita Choudhury), now 24, is living with her wider family in Mississippi. This initial scene-setting proves shows how the trauma the family faced through their displacement travels with them across continents, causing repercussions that ripple through the generations. Mina starts a slow-developing but passionate secret romance with Demetrius (Denzel Washington), which is rumbled when Mina’s family catches them…