Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 100: October/November 2023 i Little White Lies

YOU ARE NOW HOLDING ONE OF FOUR COLLECTIBLE COVERS FOR THIS SPECIAL 100TH ISSUE OF LITTLE WHITE LIES. WHEN COMBINED, THE COVERS CREATE A SINGLE IMAGE OF AN APARTMENT BLOCK, AND THERE’S A PARTY HAPPENING INSIDE. WITHIN EACH ARTWORK THERE ARE HIDDEN REFERENCES TO ALL 99 PREVIOUS COVER FILMS AND THEMES FOR YOU TO SPOT. PLEASE USE THE KEY BELOW TO DETERMINE WHICH COVER YOU HAVE. ARTIST BIOS AND DETAILS CAN BE FOUND ON PAGE 126. HOW MANY REFERENCES CAN YOU FIND? #LWLIES100 1 Zara Wilkins BOTTOM LEFT #1: THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU #2: SIN CITY #3: THE LAND OF THE DEAD #4: JARHEAD #5: ROMANCE AND CIGARETTES #6: AWESOME I F**KIN SHOT THAT #7: VOLVER #8: MARIE ANTOINETTE #9: BABEL #10: CHINESE FILM SPECIAL #11: THIS IS ENGLAND…

Since the earliest days of LWLies, we’ve been asking filmmakers to try to pinpoint the moment that they succumbed to the magnetic allure of moviemaking. For this 100th issue spectacular, join us on a journey through the formative years of 39 of our favourite directors from around the globe as they cast their minds back to the very beginning… 1. Lola Quivoron DIRECTOR Dreaming of Baltimore | 2016 Rodeo | 2022 When I was a child, I grew up in the suburbs. I would watch a lot of commercial movies, like Harry Potter and Spider-Man. I was not at all involved in any kind of cinephilia until I was about 17. My parents didn’t pass on to me a sense of patience. Nor did they give me what you’d call…

IN MOVIE LISTS LISTMAKER CREDITS Saiorse Byrne | SB Lillian Crawford | LC David Jenkins | DJ Saskia Lloyd-Gaiger | SLG Mike McCahill | MM Kat McLaughlin | KM  Rafa Sales Ross | RSR  Justine Smith | JS Hannah Strong | HS Adam Woodward | AW  Laura Venning | LV Josh Slater-Williams | JSW 1 Joy Division Grant Gee | 2007 2 A Late Quartet Yaron Zilberman | 2012 3 We Are the Best! Lukas Moodysson | 2013 4 The Punk Singer Sini Anderson | 2013 5 Nachom-ia Kumpasar Bardroy Barretto | 2014 6 Leto Kirill Serebrennikov | 2018 7 Bros: After the Screaming Stops Joe Pearlman, David Soutar | 2018 8 Summer of Soul (…or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) Questlove | 2021 9 The Velvet Underground Todd Haynes | 2021 10 In the Court of the Crimson King Toby Amies | 2022 MM 1 The Great Gatsby Baz Luhrmann | 2013 2 The Time Traveller’s Wife Robert Schwentke | 2009 3 Cloud Atlas The…

In a culture under siege by every variant of marketing tease, there is no cleaner high than stumbling on a film that enters one’s parched heart with no fanfare. The only time I’ve ever experienced this en masse was during the first press screening of Toni Erdmann at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival. In a competition line-up rammed with old-guard names, critics were puzzled about the inclusion of the third feature by a little-known German director named Maren Ade. Its poster cleared nothing up, seemingly two swirls of hair. We took our seats and as the film slowly began to show its hand, the revelation started at ‘This is good.. No, this is great… This is the greatest love of all!’ I heard my internal reactions externalised as ripples of…

Directed by ANNA HINTS Released 13 OCTOBER ANTICIPATION. A first foray into sauna media – not quite sure what I’m dipping my toe into. ENJOYMENT. Absorbing, but drags a little and so grows tepid. IN RETROSPECT. One to reflect on in the bath. Naked in the steam-filled darkness of the sauna, a group of women unlock unsettling memories and reveal their innermost thoughts. They remember their unfathomable mothers, and what it was like to become women – they talk about their lives, covering subjects from dissatisfaction with their bodies, to sexuality, illness, families, death, social pressures and the shame that comes with them. In Smoke Sauna Sisterhood, writer/director Anna Hint invites the viewer to be a fly on the wall as the (mostly unscripted) secrets shared in the sauna are spoken into…

Directed by TODD HAYNES Starring JULIANNE MOORE, NATALIE PORTMAN, CHARLES MELTON Released 17 NOVEMBER ANTICIPATION. Stellar cast, but a ripped-from-the-tabloids plot gives pause for thought. ENJOYMENT. A frothy psychodrama with a lurid bite, with a magnificent turn from Charles Melton. IN RETROSPECT. Keeps you guessing with its intentional camp edge. An actress tries to get under the skin of the strange woman she’s scheduled to play in an upcoming film biopic in Todd Haynes’ thorny, completely compelling feature based on Samy Burch’s acerbic script. Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman) is best known for her work on Norah’s Arc – a television show in which she plays a veterinarian. Even though she’s “so lucky to have the show,” she yearns for the legitimacy of a meaty feature film role and thinks it might exist in…

Conviction is something the British writer/director Carol Morley possesses in abundance – certainly on the evidence of her wild filmography. Determined to use film to rediscover or revisit lost places, or to create a sort of cine-shrine to those she feels have fallen through the cracks, hers is an excitingly idiosyncratic oeuvre. From lauded, confessional debut The Alcohol Years, to the haunting Dreams of a Life and The Falling, and the plain barmy mystic policier, Out of Blue, she returns with one of her finest films, possibly a quasi-autobiography which explores the latter years of the little-known northern artist, Audrey Amiss. LWLies: How did you thread the needle between getting this screenwriting bursary from the Wellcome Collection to discovering Audrey Amiss? Morley: I got the Wellcome screenwriting fellowship. First year…

Directed by MATT JOHNSON Starring GLENN HOWERTON, JAY BARUCHEL, MATT JOHNSON Released 6 OCTOBER ANTICIPATION. Do we really need another tech origin story? ENJOYMENT. Okay, maybe we do. IN RETROSPECT. Glenn Howerton is on top form, though the film lacks staying power. When the first iPhone was unveiled in 2007, it was the technological equivalent of crossing the Rubicon. Nothing was the same after Steve Jobs revealed his plan to combine the touch-screen capabilities of the then-ubiquitous iPod with a mobile phone. But before Apple, there was another fruit-based titan of the smartphone industry, who finally gets their dues in Matt Johnson’s offbeat comedy. When we meet tech experts Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) and Doug Fregin (Matt Johnson), they’re pitching a new phone to disinterested corporate bod Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton). The idea…

1980 Night of the Hunted Directed by JEAN ROLLIN Starring BRIGITTE LAHAIE, ALAIN DUCLOS, DOMINIQUE JOURNET Blu-ray/DVD Released OUT NOW French filmmaker Jean Rollin made at least one film for every year he was working, releasing more than 50 films in his half-century-long career. As such, only the most ardent purveyor of his particular style of slyly political, pornographic genre filmmaking will have a real handle on what made him unique in his entirety. The Night of the Hunted is an unusual and haunting film made at the end of a decade in which Rollin mainly focused on vampire-themed works. Shot on a shoestring budget, the cast was culled from his intermittent hardcore adult flicks. Set within a Ballardian tower block overlooking a looping motorway intersection, the film’s slimline story surrounds an environmental…

AARON DAVIES AARON LOCKWOOD AARON MANCZYK ABBEY BENDER ABI GLIDDON ABIGAIL LELLIOTT ADA BUCHHOLC ADAM BENZINE ADAM CHAPMAN ADAM CRUFT ADAM LEE DAVIES ADAM NAYMAN ADAM WOODWARD ADRIAN D’ENRICO ADRIAN MORRIS ADRIAN SANDIFORD ADRIANA BELLET AGNES ORGEZ AGNÈS RICART AILSA CAINE AIMEE KNIGHT ALAN MACK ALEESHA NANDHRA ALEX CAPES ALEX FINE ALEX GODFREY ALEX HEAD ALEX RITMAN ALEX STEWART ALEX WADE ALEXANDER PASHBY ALEXANDRA HELLER- NICHOLAS ALI MAC ALICE CARNEGIE ALICE LEVICK ALICIA MALONE ALLISON FILICE ALMAE HAFLIDASON ALMUDENA ESCOBAR LÓPEZ ALYSIA LIPIARSKI AMELIA GREGORY AMY BOWKER AMY BROWN AMY MOSS AMY SIMMONS ANA GALVAN ANA GODIS ANDREA HUBERT ANDREA KURLAND ANDRES LOZANO ANDREW BASTOW ANDREW BUJALSKI ANDREW DAVIDSON ANDREW KÖTTING ANDREW LOWRY ANDREW MALE ANDREW PIRELLI ANDREW RAYMOND ANDREW SCHENKER ANDREW SUTHERLAND ANDY DAVIDSON ANDY POTTS ANDY TWEDDLE ANDY…

Invest in the future of Little White Lies and help us to grow our community of film lovers through our magazine, website, podcast and video channels. A lot of love and passion go into each issue of Little White Lies. Yet part of the reason why we’re able to realise our ambition of making the best possible film magazine is the support we get from the members of Club LWLies. As a nod of appreciation for supporting our ambition, we’ve offered our members the exclusive opportunity to get their names featured on the pages of the big #100. For a full list of Club LWLies perks Thank you to our amazing members… Robert Abernethy Judith Allen Omar Almulla Ian Anderson Lennart Andersson Michael Andrews Gary Angelo Betsy Aron Clay Asbury…

This year, I went to the cinema and saw a film that has long held an earthshaking, talismanic, near-mystical place of importance in my life. It is nearly 70 years old. It was my first time seeing it on the big screen, although I could recite most of the dialogue off by heart; a film I first saw at 13 and never recovered from. It felt nourishingly full-circle, to finally see this film big when it had, in so many ways, been the genesis of my love of cinema and of vintage cinema in particular. The film is Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause. From the vantage of the second row at the inaugural BFI Film on Film Festival, which took place in June 2023, gazing up at the 35mm…

Directed by MOLLY MANNING WALKER Starrin MIA MCKENNA-BRUCE, LARA PEAKE, ENVA LEWIS Released 3 NOVEMBER ANTICIPATION. Great title, and a promising DoP-turneddirector’s debut. ENJOYMENT. A familiar but engaging tale of teenage rebellion and heartbreak. IN RETROSPECT. Mia McKenna-Bruce is a revelation, even if some of the plot beats are a mite familiar. For better or for worse, the post-exam group holiday is a rite of passage for countless teenagers in the United Kingdom. Every summer, in the wake of GCSEs and A-Levels, hoards of sun-seekers descend on various towns in Spain, Turkey and Greece, in search of cheap alcohol, loud music and peers looking to let loose in a warmer climate. Prior to Molly Manning Walker’s feature debut, such trips were depicted solely through the lens of The Inbetweeners Movie and BBC3 reality…

Directed by CRAIG GILLESPIE Starring PAUL DANO, AMERICA FERRERA, SETH ROGEN Released 22 SEPTEMBER ANTICIPATION. Didn’t this just happen? ENJOYMENT. Dano is rather charming, but otherwise this is decidedly lacking in epic lolz. IN RETROSPECT. Dare I say Adam McKay has already cornered this market? After coming to prominence with the lovable Ryan Gosling indie from 2007, Lars and the Real Girl, Australian filmmaker Craig Gillespie seems to have found his niche within Hollywood, creating ripped-from-the-headlines dramedies about underdogs and the unfairly villainised. First there was Million Dollar Arm, about sports agent JB Bernstein’s search for baseball greatness, then I, Tonya, his take on infamous ice skater Tonya Harding (which netted Margot Robbie her first Oscar nomination). In 2022 he had a stint in television with Pam & Tommy (about the Pamela Anderson…

Directed by MARTIN SCORSESE Starring LEONARDO DICAPRIO, LILY GLADSTONE, ROBERT DE NIRO Released 20 OCTOBER ANTICIPATION.  When Marty calls, we answer. ENJOYMENT. A big, fascinating, frustating, slightly lopsided, sporadically brilliant prestige epic. IN RETROSPECT. On first watch, maybe not vintage-level Scorsese. But boy, I can’t wait for round two with this one. This evocatively titled film is drawn from the pages of the disquieting non-fiction bestseller by New Yorker stringer David Gran. Adapted by Martin Scorsese and screenwriter Eric Roth, the story takes place in Osage County, Oklahoma, a place where you’re more likely to be arrested for “kicking a dog than you are shooting an Indian.” Land ceded to and consecrated by the Osage nation is revealed, in a somewhat hokey opening sequence, to be literally bursting with oil. The members of…

The old Tinseltown aphorism that “nobody knows anything,” coined by screenwriter William Goldman in his 1983 showbiz guidebook ‘Adventures in the Screen Trade’, once put a heartening worldview in shorthand. Because movies are an unruly commodity, their quality subject to unique and highly personal assessment of value from a fickle viewership, it’s impossible to predict what will or won’t work. For creative types, Goldman meant this as encouragement to stick by one’s artistic convictions in the face of bean-counters reluctant to take risks on a vision. And for studio suits at the decision-making level, he intended his words as a reminder that a hit cannot be engineered through gaming of market forces, but by investing capital and trust in collaborators with the skills to turn in a quality product. Forty…

It was summer in London – if you live within a certain radius of the centre, you learn quickly that the city never really gets dark in July, just slightly dimmer, as though someone has turned the brightness down. Walking around at night is like wading through television static, the particles of the atmosphere strange and charged. I was thinking about killing myself, as I often did around that time, with the regularity and nonchalance one might ponder a city break or buying a new vacuum cleaner. I came to the city already mad, but isolation and exhaustion from working two jobs exacerbated my condition. I didn’t really mind pervasive suicidal thoughts, but the insomnia was more inconvenient. My bedroom in a six-person flatshare was part refuge, part prison. At…

Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter, a ghost story set in a country house hotel, revels in cinematic in-jokes and the English Eerie. Yet the foggy pallor of the film, as filmmaker Julie struggles to write about her ailing mother, Rosalind (both played by Tilda Swinton), unintentionally captures the horror of a white culture of tote bags, vintage M R James Penguins and niceties at mealtimes. Notably, the spooky spell, as in Hogg’s earlier The Souvenir films, is broken by a Black man. LWLies: You’ve played with genre before: melodrama, musical, screwball. Even more relevantly, here, because Julie is a filmmaker. How did you judge how to pull back, not capsize the raw emotion? Hogg: I could have gone further, but it’s a story about this relationship. Plot can get in…

Directed by KEN LOACH Starring DAVE TURNER, EBLA MARI, CLAIRE RODGERSON Released 29 SEPTEMBER ANTICIPATION. Is Ken Loach modern cinema’s answer to John Steinbeck? Let’s see… ENJOYMENT. Another heavy-handed late work which trades largely on didacticism and sentimentality. IN RETROSPECT. Not without its moments, but you’d do best to visit some of Loach’s early, really angry ones. In Which Side Are You On?, his 1984 documentary on the miners’ strike, Ken Loach focuses on the public spaces where the miners and their family gathered, and the community culture they shared there. The filmmaker returns to one such space in The Old Oak, named for a local pub somewhere in North England. The place is atrophied with houses selling for four figures, the social safety net threadbare, and the remaining locals embittered; the film…

Directed by CAROL MORLEY Starring MONICA DOLAN, KELLY MACDONALD, GINA MCKEE Released 3 NOVEMBER ANTICIPATION. Carol Morley is a maverick who follows her storytelling instincts down some strange paths. ENJOYMENT. A delight, and a film which cleverly picks apart the clichés of the timeworn artist biopic. IN RETROSPECT. It’s Audrey Amiss’ world, etc… Let’s be frank: nine times out of 10, biographical films about artists are total, hagiographic pap. When you’re making a film about the life of a famous person, there’s so much baggage relating to legacy, image, historical record, and how to amply elicit the meaning of vital events in their lives in a way that’s both diplomatic and creative. To even up the odds, though, you can always spend a bit of time searching for a subject who feels truly…

Directed by CLEMENT VIRGO Starring LAMAR JOHNSON, AARON PIERRE, MARSHA STEPHANIE BLAKE Released 29 SEPTEMBER ANTICIPATION. A Sundance hit and, per the hype, the arrival of a hot new directorial talent. ENJOYMENT. Superb performances across the board in a tale that touches on a spectrum of pertinent issues. IN RETROSPECT. Not entirely original, but does what it does very well indeed. Climbing an electricity pylon is not an obvious metaphor for life. But, like life, scaling an electrical tower does present a certain level of risk. That’s what the opening scene of Clement Virgo’s adaptation of David Chariandy’s 2017 novel suggests, where we see two young, Black males gear up to make the ascent in what feels like an initiation task passed down from Francis (Aaron Pierre) to his younger brother Michael (Lamar…

Cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto has collected auteurs like Pokémon. Since he started out in the early nineties in his native México, he has worked with Alejandro González Iñárritu, Spike Lee, Oliver Stone, Ang Lee, Pedro Almodóvar, Greta Gerwig, and has forged a special collaboration with Martin Scorsese. Killers of the Flower Moon marks a decade of their creative collaboration and the fourth film they’ve made together. Set in 1920s Oklahoma, the crime epic looks at the calculated murders of people from the Osage Nation, the latest Scorsese epic had some significant hurdles to jump through: a total change in the script’s direction, and a pandemic. LWLies: Congratulations on making Barbie and Killers of the Flower Moon in one year. The films are wildly different from one another, but did the experience…

ON THE COVER 1 Kyle Platts is an illustrator working from my home in the Peak District. “I’ve been drawing for many years in a style characterised by bold colours and goofy characters. At some point along the way I picked up a habit of illustrating crowd scenes, so this brief fit me like a tailor-made glove. Creating an image like this with so much detail brings me closer to the feeling I used to get drawing as a child – I love to get lost in it.” ig: @kyleplatts 2 Murugiah is an interdimensional artist working in London, UK exploring identity, awe and everything in between. Born in England and raised in Wales with Sri Lankan heritage, he trained as an architect in London before choosing his current creative path,…