Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 97: January/February/March 2023 i Little White Lies

10 BERGMAN ISLAND DIRECTED BY Mia Hansen-Løve It’s hard to think of a better film about the process of creating art from a pointedly female perspective than Mia Hansen-Løve’s gently reflexive wonder, Bergman Island. Vicky Krieps – fast rising as one of the earmarks of quality moviemaking – stars as a loose MH-L avatar taking a writing retreat to the island of Fårö – a spartan idyll that Ingmar Bergman called home. It’s a work that exudes confidence and poetic insight from its every precisely-calculated frame. DAVID JENKINS 9 ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED DIRECTED BY Laura Poitras Laura Poitras offers a rambunctious treatise on art, politics, power and community in her portrait of renowned photographer and activist Nan Goldin, making history as the second documentary title to ever claim the…

Released 20 JANUARY ANTICIPATION. Love a big blow out ‘ode to cinema’ venture. 4 ENJOYMENT. Ambitious and occasionally dazzling, but unfocused, even down to the performances. 3 IN RETROSPECT. The film’s big finale delivers a moment of deep, unalloyed cringe. 2 Moviemaking can be a shitshow. Literally, if you’re Manuel ‘Manny’ Rayes (Diego Calva) who finds himself running errands for the rich and famous in 1920s Hollywood. When we first meet him in Damien Chazelle’s Babylon, this means transporting an elephant up hill to a fancy party – a task complicated when the elephant has violent bout of diarrhoea. It’s a slapstick sequence which feels more in line with Jackass than a film about the transition from silent films to talkies, and serves as something of a warning for what audiences are in…

Released 27 JANUARY ANTICIPATION. Spielberg on Spielberg! Finally! 4 ENJOYMENT. Movie magic meets a portrait of familial disintegration. 4 IN RETROSPECT. A sweet but never cloying jaunt down Mr Spielberg’s memory lane. 4 The pandemic seems to have been a period of introspection for some of our most revered filmmakers with the cine-memoir becoming a recurring theme. James Gray chose to make a film about his experience growing up in New York City during the turbulent 1970s in Armageddon Time, while Richard Linklater’s Houston childhood inspired his Rotoscope feature Apollo 10½. Now it’s the turn of Steven Spielberg, who charts his coming-of-age in Arizona and the dissolution of his parents’ marriage as counterpoint to his blossoming relationship with cinema. For a director whose entire career has engaged with the concept…

Released 6 JANUARY Peaches glow like tiny suns in the Catalan village of Alcarràs. They hang lush and ripe from the hundreds of trees that form the Solé family’s orchard, waiting to be picked by familiar hands. “Solid ground, beloved land,” sings the grandfather in praise of the earth that has fed and nurtured his household for decades, and in mourning for the devastation that looms on the horizon. In Alcarràs, the second feature from director Carla Simón, a farmland under threat causes a hardworking family unit to splinter. A man’s promise years before is now no longer enough to secure the Solés’ ownership of the orchards and the legal proprietor of the land wants to raze the fruit trees and install solar panels in their place. Brother Quimet (Jordi Pujol…

Released 10 MARCH There’s a very funny and provocative concept at the core of Kristoffer Borgli’s none-more-black relationship comedy, Sick of Myself, and it’s the question of whether we can control how our body reacts to extreme self-abuse. Signe (Kristine Kujath Thorp) is a charismatic layabout who is also a world champion narcissist. She is in a relationship with Eirik Sæther’s on-the-rise artist, Thomas, and their romance is framed as an index of caustic microaggressions and petty rivalries. Thomas’ fixation with a magazine cover shoot causes Signe to purchase some pills from the internet that she knows cause an adverse reaction in an attempt to curry sympathy with him, as well as the family and peers who have understandably shunned her over the years. The obvious flaws in her character prompt…

Released 17 FEBRUARY ANTICIPATION. Quirky YouTube shorts make the leap to the big screen 3 ENJOYMENT. An offbeat addition to 2022’s strong animation landscape. 4 IN RETROSPECT. Delicate, yet resonant. 4 It may seem like something of a backhanded comment to say that someone has a voice for animation, but for all of her achievements in the live-action world (from 2014 romcom Obvious Child on down), Jenny Slate’s undeniable gift is purely vocal. And despite sparky turns in cartoon series from Bob’s Burgers to Big Mouth, no project has captured that as well as her shoestring breakthrough, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On – a series of shorts released on YouTube between 2010 and 2014, created with Slate’s then-partner (and now ex-husband), director Dean Fleischer-Camp. Marcel is a small shell kitted…

Released 24 FEBRUARY Zoe (Mamma Mia darling Lily James), a documentary film-maker, is looking for her next project and is met with a wave of unenthusiasm from her investors. Suddenly, her neighbour Kazim (Shazad Latif) announces he is getting his parents to find a wife for him. As a successful doctor, a catch universally acknowledged by any mosque match-maker, his willingness to take the plunge and marry a woman with whom he has only video called and exchanged an awkward conversation, is jarring. Yet the stars align for Zoe: she has a new project, and she has an excuse to probe the alien concept of “assisted marriage” as they call it these days. As someone who always picks wrong’uns, the lens turns both ways, and Kazim questions her inability to commit…

Released 24 FEBRUARY ANTICIPATION. Will doc maker Asif Kapadia and choreographer Akram Khan work well together? 4 ENJOYMENT. There are moments when music, image, and movement combine to overwhelm the senses. 5 IN RETROSPECT. An immersive implosion of artistic forms out of which a new monster is born. 4 Michael Powell strived throughout his career towards a concept he called “composed cinema”: the bringing together of performance, music, and image into film as a singular whole. Powell wanted to make a ‘ballet film’, as opposed to a ‘filmed ballet’, in which the cinematographic techniques of cinema do not simply record but are worked into the choreography of the dance. Describing his new film Creature, Asif Kapadia calls it “pure cinema”: nothing more than performance, music and image. Powell often attempted to…

Released 9 JANUARY There’s no nice way of putting it, but for this writer, to see the words “Directed by Sam Mendes” in the vicinity of a movie title is about as appealing as a platter of expired offal. As one of Britain’s leading directorial lights and a perpetual securer of critical and commercial plaudits, I have felt it a duty to keep my hand in with Mendes’ perpetually-middlebrow output as a way to broaden my horizons and keep tabs on the ebbs and flows of The Current Cinema. It was with customary trepidation, then, that I hiked along to take in Empire of Light, a modern period drama also written by Mendes which takes in the domestic and emotional foibles of the staff at a sea-front picture palace on England’s…

Blu-ray/DVD Released 20 FEBRUARY As the director of Three Outlaw Samurai (1964) and Sword of the Beast (1965), Hideo Gosha made his name as a maker of “chambara” samurai sword-fighting films. With Violent Streets, he switched gears, but only a little, applying his talents for filming sophisticated, high-intensity action sequences to the ‘Yakuza’ genre, making a similarly stylish, kinetically directed drama about interwarring groups of gangsters engaging in a brutal turf war. At the film’s centre is the brooding, irresistibly cool Noboru Andô, who plays Egawa, a Yakuza boss turned nightclub owner who is tempted back into action by his former colleagues. Andô was himself a Yakuza boss in his youth and it shows: he is never not entirely believable in the role and his boundless, effortless charisma makes every scene he…

Released 27 JANUARY ANTICIPATION. The thrill of coming to something about which we have zero knowledge. 3 ENJOYMENT. Funny, strange cold, creeping horror. 4 IN RETROSPECT. Moody mystery of masculinity and mortality. 4 At the beginning of January, a porter (Samuel Finzi) and an Old Man (Iossif Surchadziev) while away their time eating walnuts and doing a crossword as they await the return of their boss Petar Motorov. The clues of the crossword concern world literature, global geography and international cuisine – in other words, about a whole universe beyond these men’s immediate, enclosed environment in a snowbound cabin near the woods. The porter only occasionally ventures to enter the adjacent, abandoned Soviet-era hotel, its ruins decorated with fallen portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Brezhnev. There he refuels the generator…

Released 10 FEBRUARY ANTICIPATION.  Tackling this moment on screen amid our present culture war is a worthwhile endeavour. 3 ENJOYMENT.  Well-intentioned but timid. 3 IN RETROSPECT.  This subject matter demands a more uncompromising approach. 2 We are in the midst of a moral panic. LGBTQ+ “groomers” are the right-wing boogieman du jour and vocal bigots the world over are compelling lawmakers to, please, think of the children. Georgia Oakley’s Blue Jean takes place in the shadow of a similar cultural moment, when Margaret Thatcher’s government enacted Section 28 – an infamous piece of anti-gay legislation that criminalised the “promotion” of homosexuality by local authorities and schools. The film follows Rosy McEwen as Jean, a closeted PE teacher working at a Tyneside comprehensive in 1988. By day she’s a (sort of) straight-passing…

Released 3 MARCH With the cinematic stock of Japanese author Haruki Murukami at an all-time high following the Oscar glory enjoyed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car, we now have another adaptation of a volume of short stories by the painter and filmmaker Pierre Földes. The eccentric, laconic Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is an pastel-hued animated patchwork of vignettes which draw together the ultra mundane art of the meandering one-on-one conversation with various fantastical flights of fantasy born out of dreams and interior projection. The story takes place in various Japanese locales, as its various lost soul characters ponder their social and sexual hang-ups in anticipation of a cataclysmic earthquake. A portly salaryman receives a visitation from a talking frog heading to battle with a giant work; the man’s colleague has…

Released 24 FEBRUARY ANTICIPATION. Can cinematic attempts to excoriate the patriarchal family transcend the didactic? 3 ENJOYMENT. Chameleonic, aching, sensuous, intimate. 4 IN RETROSPECT. A haunting, intricate rumination on desire, truth, and drowning. 3 Saim Sadiq’s Joyland begins with a game of tag: a man draped with a white bedsheet listens for his nieces’ suppressed giggles, his wandering arms outstretched as he attempts to catch them. Yet undercutting the tenderness of the way the pair eventually collapse together in raucous laughter, the camera hovers too close, and the sheet feels as much like an invisibility cloak as an innocent costume. We wonder why the first time we meet this man, Haider – brought to life with an extraordinarily sensitive performance by Ali Junejo – it’s as a ghost in his own…

Released 6 JANUARY Before the film Till was seen, the need for its existence was called into question. ‘Another exhausted Hollywood depiction of Black suffering,’ the online chorus sang, as though stamping the truth of our history into the mainstream consciousness is somehow shameful. Directed by Chinonye Chukwu, who follows up her brutal 2019 breakout film Clemency, Till is an expertly measured and respectful portrayal of the life of Mamie Till-Mobley after her 14-year-old son, Emmett Till, was murdered by white supremacists. For those unfamiliar with the story, young Emmett was raised in Chicago by his single-mother, and in the Summer of 1955 was sent down to Mississippi to visit his cousins. After whistling at a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, he was dragged from his bed by John Bryant and JW…

Released 3 FEBRUARY Based on Samuel D Hunter’s play of the same name, The Whale depicts the final week in the life of a morbidly obese man who has developed an eating disorder in the years following his boyfriend’s suicide. Charlie (Brendan Fraser) is confined to his apartment, subsisting on takeout and groceries delivered to him by his friend Liz (Hong Chau) while teaching online English classes. He keeps his laptop camera off, worried his students will be disgusted by his appearance. Realising his eating disorder is going to kill him, Charlie attempts to reconnect with his estranged daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink) who is still furious at him for leaving her and her mother Mary (Samantha Morton) years ago. Meanwhile, meek missionary Thomas (Ty Simpkins) comes across Charlie and begins visiting…

Released 13 JANUARY ANTICIPATION. Very excited for Todd Field’s first film since 2006’s Little Children. 4 ENJOYMENT. Unexpectedly funny and horrifying. Blanchett’s best performance in years. 4 IN RETROSPECT. An unforgettable character in contemporary cinema. 5 Meet Lydia Tár. She’s the chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, is soon to record Mahler’s 5th Symphony and is a fervent patron of the arts. So says New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik (playing himself), on stage with his subject and reading the carefully constructed biography penned by Tár’s assistant Francesca (Noémie Merlant) at the New Yorker Festival allowing Tár to promote upcoming book ‘Tár on Tár’. It’s clear that Lydia Tár takes herself very seriously, performing the perfect upper-middle-class artist to a room full of admirers. But it’s not all work. She lives…

Blu-ray/DVD Released 30 JANUARY With a score by Ennio Morricone, a star turn from Lee Van Cleef and a script by Sergio Donati, Sergio Sollima’s The Big Gundown, made at the height of the form’s popularity, has many of the key elements needed for a classic Spaghetti western. However, perhaps due to overfamiliarity with the genre and oversaturation of the market, the film was not a huge success on initial release. A half century later, the film fares well. A taut thriller about a bounty hunter who, when tracking down a wayward and wily criminal, starts to question the guilt of his target and the scruples of those he is working for, the film has a lot to like, not least Van Cleef’s considerable screen presence and Carlo Carlini’s sharp, striking cinematography.…

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Released 13 JANUARY There’s a cliché about being able to comprehend a person’s experience by looking at the topography of their hands. The crevices, folds and scars serve to indicate the toils and struggles of life. The same might be said of film stock, where the crisp, wipe-clean sheen of the digital image signifies a life of fancy-free charms, while the blemishes and imperfections of celluloid suggest a certain level of strain and durability. It’s easier to glean an added layer of texture from celluloid than it is for digital, like signs of history beyond the film’s creation. Which makes sense when discussing Mark Jenkin’s intoxicating second feature Enys Men, which has been shot on 16mm stock that looks like it has been festering in the dingy corner of a lab…

Released 3 FEBRUARY ANTICIPATION. The return of this Polish maverick who directs mad movies and stars in MCU bit parts. 4 ENJOYMENT. Vibe-heavy take on Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthzar, but very much it’s own eccentric thing. 4 IN RETROSPECT. A winding existential journey packed with emotional and political punch. 4 Named for the sound a donkey makes, EO (“Eee-ooo, eee-oo”) follows one such noble beast as it travels across the breadth of Poland and beyond, bearing mute witness to a carnival of humanity at its best, worst and weirdest. In its conception – as an existential musing on man’s inhumanity to man, endurance of suffering, and capacity for grace across the blink of a lifespan – as well as in the outline of several of its scenes, EO is an incredible…

Released 20 JANUARY ANTICIPATION.  Krieps and Ulliel make for an appealing pairing. 3 ENJOYMENT. Strong performances and beautifully shot, but not really much meat on the bone. 3 IN RETROSPECT. A perfectly pleasant experience to be almost immediately forgotten. 3 After a visit to the infamous beach in M Night Shyamalan’s Old and a trip to Fårö in Mia Hansen-Løve’s Bergman Island, Vicky Krieps this time searches for fulfilment in the ice-cold Norwegian fjords in Emily Atef’s More Than Ever. Female characters searching their soul while floating in water is a rather hackneyed staple of contemporary indie filmmaking, but it’s done beautifully here. Cinematographer Yves Cape keeps the camera so close to Krieps’ body that it is rendered abstract – its peaks and curves become a landscape, a shoulder transforms into…

Released 17 FEBRUARY Naples’ violent crime syndicate the Camorra casts a large shadow in the city’s literature – and Mario Martone’s Nostalgia, based on a 2016 novel by Ermanno Rea, is full of ruthless moped-riding spectres. Felice, played by Pierfrancesco Favino, returns to Naples after spending 40 years in in Lebanon and Egypt to find that his mother has grown old and his home has become alien to him. He stumbles with the volcanic gutturals of the Neapolitan dialect, forgetting words and struggling to explain himself. His displacement, and the danger that is crawling up from the past, is communicated beautifully both through Favino’s expressive face and Paolo Carnera’s cinematography. The camera dwells ominously and at disconcerting angles on the sallow light of stairwells, peeling walls and dodgy electrical wiring. The…

Released 20 JANUARY The Iran-born, Denmark-based filmmaker Ali Abbasi made waves in 2018 for his eccentric political fantasy romance, Border. He returns with something very different, an extremely graphic true crime saga whose persistent focus on squalor and degradation connect it to a certain tendency in hardcore horror films of the 1970s and ’80s. Working in an intriguing metaphor about religious fundamentalism employed as an excuse for fascistic social cleansing, it sees Rahimi (Zar Amir-Ebrahimi) rolling into the city of Mashhad to investigate a rash of sex worker murders. As she goes about her investigations, Abbasi allows us to monitor the parallel comings, goings and slayings of Saeed Hanaei (​Mehdi Bajestani), a hen-pecked family man nicknamed “Spider Killer” in the media. The film excels in nasty generic thrills, even if there…

Released 24 FEBRUARY Deep in Hirokazu Koreeda’s typically gentle yet piercing new-normal family drama Broker, one character listens to Aimee Mann’s hushed ballad ‘Wise Up’. Like any red-blooded citizen of the planet Earth, she immediately thinks of Paul Thomas Anderson using that cut for the emotional climax of his mosaic masterpiece Magnolia, referred to as “that movie” which didn’t totally make sense but nonetheless connected on a deeper level of personal resonance. There’s nothing so baroquely metaphorical as a rain of frogs in Koreeda’s latest, linked instead by the imperfect relationships between lonely people in search of someone to hold on to in a chaotic, indifferent world. The woman having a moment of introspection with Mann is Soo-jin (Bae Doona), a law enforcement official investigating a doozy of a moral thicket,…

Released 3 FEBRUARY ANTICIPATION. A major competition slot at a film festival confirmed that Alice Diop was a name to remember. 4 ENJOYMENT. An astonishing feat of ambigity and emotion. And visually, every shot lands a sucker punch. 4 IN RETROSPECT. The standard for ‘Best of 2023’ lists has already been set. 5 Cut-away reaction shots in cinema are employed as a crutch – a way for a director to keep an audience locked into a contrived emotional wave pattern. For the most part, they tend to be evil, a shortcut to manipulation and crass sentimentality. In her fiction feature debut, Saint Omer, French filmmaker Alice Diop elevates the humble reaction shot to the level of high art, drawing on a gallery of gaunt faces who are completely lost as to…

Blu-ray/DVD Released 26 SEPT Over the 21st century, Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, an academic institute intended to inspire the creation of new forms of ethnographic filmmaking. A key HSEL work is Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s Leviathan (2012), a film in which its makers generate a new visual language by hurling GoPros in every direction while aboard an industrial fishing tanker. But El Mar La Mar, filmed in the fractured landscapes of the Sonoran desert on the US-Mexico border parallel to the Trump presidency, is just as significant. Opening with a long take filmed through a border wall from a moving train, where the image of fence spokes flying past creates a flicker-film-like effect, the film has an immediate and striking sensibility. Each harshly beautiful 16mm image and its attendant spectral sound…

Stéphanie Sergeant is a French illustrator/animator living and working in Poland. She mostly works with watercolour and animates in 2D. She likes spaghetti and the dark, long process of animation. Ian Addison is a Brooklyn-based collage artist and photo-illustrator. When not cutting out paper scraps, he loves going to hardcore concerts and having pierogies. Lily Blakely is an illustrator and comic artist based in Norwich, UK. She works with brush and ink and digital colour. She likes weird horror and salty popcorn. Oliver Stafford is a London-based graphic designer and illustrator who uses a wide range of media to create an image. He likes to scuba. Feature writers Juan Barquin is a Miami-based writer, programmer, filmmaker, and co-creator of the queer film series Flaming Classics. They aspire to be Bridget…