Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 102 i Little White Lies

Justin Kuritzkes hacked his way into the public consciousness with a god-tier viral YouTube video named Potion Seller which, if you haven’t seen it already then put this down and watch it now. He expanded his repertoire of dramatic writing and performance with the play, The Sensuality Party, and his 2019 novel, ‘Famous People’, offered an ironic commentary on the inner life of a pop sensation. Challengers is Kuritzkes’ first feature screenplay to make it to the screen, care of director Luca Guadagnino, and he’s also adapted William Burroughs’ ‘Queer’ which Guadagnino has also directed and we may see some time later in 2024. LWLies: How did you come upon writing a film set in the world of professional tennis? Kuritzkes: In the summer of 2018, I happened to turn…

Nestled next door to The Ritz hotel in London is The Wolseley – a British dining institution that opened its doors in 2003. Although it’s hardly the oldest restaurant in the capital, it’s certainly one that attracts a mighty share of celebrity clientele, with Kenneth Branagh, Jake Gyllenhaal, Bill Nighy and Keira Knightley among its famous patrons. And so, where better to have a leisurely breakfast and reflect on the concept of the modern movie star than at this London seat of celebritydom? Hannah Strong (who ordered pancakes, as it was Shrove Tuesday), brought together a suite of fellow bon vivants – Christina Newland, Douglas Greenwood and Rōgan Graham – on a centre table in The Wolseley’s opulent, bustling dining room to discuss whether the movie star as we know…

Directed by RAMATA TOULAYE-SY Starring KHADY MANE, MAMADOU DIALLO, BINTA RACINE SY Released 15 MARCH ANTICIPATION. Senegalese cinema is Mati Diop and Ousmane Sembène, not a bad impression to start with. ENJOYMENT.  A gorgeous experience that would gently blow you away on a big screen IN RETROSPECT. Felt like going through nigh endless cycles of unresolved fables, could have just been a short. Banel (Khady Mane) and Adama (Mamadou Diallo) are a beautiful couple, introduced on the arid plains of Senegal, clad in yellow and red respectively. They float through their day’s work of cow-herding in a harmonious, almost dreamlike state. Banel closes her eyes against the blistering sun, hiding from reality by finding meaning in the flashing lights, or phosphenes, left behind in her vision. In this opening sequence, the pair exist…

Directed by ANGELA SCHANELEC Starring ALIOCHA SCHNEIDER, AGATHE BONITZER, MARISHA TRIANTAFYLLIDOU Released 22 MARCH ANTICIPATION. Stratospheric: Schanelec is a giant of European art cinema. ENJOYMENT. Hair-shirt cinema: enjoyment barely an option. IN RETROSPECT. Angela Regina. Rocky, verdant hills at dusk; cloud encroaches, obscures; wind soughs, thunder rumbles; as seconds elapse, ominousness turns somnolent. Then CRASH!, the heavens explode, jarring us awake with near-comical abruptness. So kicks off German writer/director Angela Schanelec’s ninth feature-length opus Music – a radical gesamtkunstwerk that daringly juggles obfuscation, clarity, tedium and shocking surprise. The German-Serbian-French co-production would doubtless prove an exasperating, brain-fogging experience for any hapless soul stumbling in “blind”. The more you know of Schanelec’s oeuvre, her influences, and the source-material she’s updating and idiosyncratically revising here – Sophocles’ 2450-year-old tragedy ‘Oedipus Rex’ – the more you’ll…

Directed by CLAIRE DENIS Starring ISAACH DE BANKOLÉ, FRANÇOIS CLUZET, GIULIA BOSCHI Blu-ray/DVD Released 29 APRIL As far as debut features go, Claire Denis’ Chocolat is about as auspicious as they come. Packing in a number of themes and preoccupations that would reoccur in the films that followed, this semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story tells of a young girl growing up in Colonial French Cameroon and displays a blueprint of the vision for cinema that Claire Denis would subsequently refine. The plot is straightforward, expressed more through encounters and exchanges than narrative events. France (Mireille Perrier) returns to the colonial outpost of Mindif, recalling her childhood there during the last days of French rule. The film then depicts this upbringing, where she, played as a child by Cécile Ducasse, lives with her white parents (François Cluzet…

On the cover Petra Eriksson is a Swedish illustrator and visual artist currently based in Eindhoven. She loves drawing portraits and working with bold colours and graphic shapes which she got the chance to explore in this cover of Zendaya, Josh and Mike. She says: “Working with these overlapping faces is a bit like laying a puzzle, it takes a lot of adjustments and tests to find the best balance between the shapes and colours so that they all work together, it’s hard but also very satisfying.” ig: @petraerikssonstudio…

It’s 6.59am Pacific Standard Time, and Luca Guadagnino is sat in the passenger seat of a packed car, shades balanced on dome, and looking down into his smartphone to begin our chat. The last time I spoke to the director was on the occasion of Call Me by Your Name’s swift ascent to the deserving status of global sensation, and in the spirit of the film we conversed while Guadagnino did his morning walk around his one-time hometown of Crema, pausing occasionally to greet passers by. The subject now is Challengers, a skillfully-wrought romantic melodrama of the old school that’s set in the world of professional tennis, where the tense ebb and flow of a men’s singles match between Josh O’Connor’s Patrick and Mike Faist’s Art is compounded further by…

"The glib, over-articulate and amoral creatures force their lives into fantastic shapes and problems because they cannot help themselves.” Not exactly the most flattering portrait of bisexuals, but one which pervades their presence in cinema – so greedy in their obsession with sex, they do not care if they take a man or a woman to bed with them (sometimes they opt for both). Such insatiability can be both the bisexual’s tragedy, and their humour. Noël Coward’s description of his insouciant ménage à trois in the 1932 play Design for Living comes to its farcical conclusion at the end: the curtain falls on the threesome as they fall about with laughter. Despite being a Broadway success, the British censor banned the play from being staged in London until 1939. The…

In celebration of Challengers (a particular moment – you’ll know when you see it!) and our perpetual adoration for great illustration, we present to you five pieces reframing some of our favourite films by the maestro himself, Luca Guadagnino. For your pleasure……

After achieving critical acclaim for her breakout debut Saint Maud, Rose Glass teamed up with Kristen Stewart for a rough-n-ready romp in the New Mexico desert. The result is Love Lies Bleeding – a thriller about girls and guns, both the literal and metaphorical kind. LWLies: There’s a real ‘midnight movie’ feel to Love Lies Bleeding – like the sort of thing that you’d stumble across as a teenager on late-night television that would change your entire world. Are there any films that felt like that for you when you were younger? Glass: Yeah, loads, but they sort of fell into different categories – the films which made me go, ‘I think I want to make films,’ and then the ones which are more what you’re referring to, which are on…

Directed by PABLO BERGER Released 22 MARCH ANTICIPATION.  Oscar-nommed in a crowded year for top-tier animation. ENJOYMENT.  Rich in detail, with an unassuming emotional power. IN RETROSPECT. A wordless wonder that will live long in the memory. If androids dream of electric sheep, then what about robots? Judging from the fantasies presented in the Oscar-nominated French-Spanish animation Robot Dreams, they can be colourful, surreal and psychedelic. Mostly, though, the film’s hapless Robot protagonist dreams of being reunited with Dog, his owner and best pal, after they are separated by cruel circumstance and he is left, rusted and alone, on an out-of-season pleasure beach. The film’s source, Sara Varon’s 2007 graphic novel of the same name, is a delicate, wordless work that hinges solely on the relationship between the two friends with a…

Directed by VICTOR ERICE Starring MANOLO SOLO, JOSÉ CORONADO, ANA TORRENT Released 12 APRIL ANTICIPATION. The long, long, long, long, long-awaited fourth feature from filmmaker Victor Erice. ENJOYMENT. Though his oeuvre is small. Erice only deals in masterworks, and this one is no exception. IN RETROSPECT. The slow and detailed build-up is worth it to feel the full impact of its astounding final passage. The very idea that there now exists in the world a new feature film by the long-absent Spanish director Victor Erice is a cause for celebration in and of itself. That the feature, named Close Your Eyes, also happens to stand shoulder to shoulder with the works upon which he made his name, supremely-lyrical stories that explore the profound intersections between landscape, history and art, such as Spirit of…

Directed by ILKER ÇATAK Starring LEONIE BENESCH, LEONARD STETTNISCH, EVA LÖBAU Released 12 APRIL ANTICIPATION. Çatak’s thriller-drama drew comparisons to Uncut Gems and was nominated for an Oscar. ENJOYMENT. Strains credulity through relentless escalations that rarely push it past a didactic realm. IN RETROSPECT. Too in thrall to its fashionable dramatics to interrogate the questions its premise poses. In ‘Microcosmographia Academia’, his satirical treatise on university politics, Edwardian scholar F.M. Cornford proposed that, “there is only one argument for doing something; the rest are arguments for doing nothing. The argument for doing something is that it is the right thing to do. But then, of course, comes the difficulty of making sure it is right.” Such are the emphatically rhetorical principles, the rules of inaction, that impel İlker Çatak’s Oscar-nominated The Teachers’ Lounge,…

Illustrators Elise Hibberd is a Cornwall-based illustrator who works both digitally and traditionally, focusing on portraiture and wildlife. 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 long, dark process of animation. Eri Aikawa is a Japanese-Filipino illustrator based in Japan. Her style leans towards semi-realism with a focus on portraits, fashion, lifestyle, pop culture and nostalgia. In her free time she likes to watch horror films and create videos on her YouTube channel. Stephanie Monohan is an illustrator and writer from New York City. You can usually find her sipping coffee and watching midnight movies with her cat. Andrei Nicolescu is a Romanian-based illustrator and designer who works with high contrast colours and…

We hooked up with the hottest cast of the year to get their post-match analysis and insight on Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers. In the film, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist play tennis buddies-turned-arch rivals, Patrick and Art, while Zendaya, who also produced the film, plays Tashi, the would-be champion whose life and career takes an unexpected turn. LWLies: Can you tell us about your first meeting with Luca in person? Zendaya: My first encounter with Luca was at a Fendi fashion show in Rome. We sat next to each other at dinner. I could not speak a word of Italian and was having difficulty explaining that I needed the vegetarian option. He helped me. Josh O’Connor: My first encounter with Luca? I went for lunch with him and my friend Jonathan…

Though synthesisers as we recognise them today only came into existence in the late-1950s and early-’60s, electronic music has played a vital role in cinema almost since the invention of synchronised sound. Prototypical electroacoustic instruments like the ondes Martenot and the theremin found use in some of the earliest talkie scores; the transitional 1931 Russian sound film Alone, for example, featured theremin warbles as part of a larger orchestrated score composed by none other than Dmitri Shostakovich. As instruments began to evolve, the cost and space demands of early devices made studios one of the few places where one might have access to emerging technology. Thus film music anticipated later commercial electronic recordings and has remained in dialogue with the broader music industry, to the point that composers have shaped…

The idea for Drive-Away Dolls was born in a bar – it’s been a long time coming since. Husband-and-wife duo Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke realised their script together, about two lesbian best friends who embark on a road trip from Tallahassee to Florida that sees them inadvertently swept up in a lurid political conspiracy. LWLies: Drive-Away Dolls was a long time coming – it’s my understanding it developed out of a mutual appreciation for Russ Meyer. What is it about his films that stuck with you? Ethan Coen: Well, we both really do love Russ Meyer films in spite of the fact that neither of us has ever seen any. We like the idea of Russ Meyer films. Have you seen any? Tricia Cooke: Yes. EC: What did you…

Directed by BEN MULLINKOSSON  Released 15 MARCH ANTICIPATION. An outsider perspective on Chinese alternative youth culture. ENJOYMENT. A wild and unpredictable ride with insane amounts of vomit. IN RETROSPECT.  A gorgeous and bittersweet time capsule. It is obvious from the first frame of director Ben Mullinkosson’s documentary about the underground queer club Funky Town in Chengdu, China that the filmmaker has a deep affection for the punters who frequent this gloriously alive dive bar. They are indeed all friends with the US filmmaker who first visited China in 2011 and returned in 2017 to shoot this fascinating snapshot of 20-something self-discovery, boozing, tantrums, vomit (so much vomit!) and the rapidly changing face of the city over the course of five years. The club itself sits behind a construction site, hidden away and…

Directed by HIROKAZU KORE-EDA Starring SOYA KUROKAWA, SAKURA ANDO, EITA NAGAYAMA Released 15 MARCH ANTICIPATION. One of Japan’s greatest living filmmakers with his annual delivery. ENJOYMENT. Some wonderful stuff here, but too many contrived writerly tics to allow it to really soar. IN RETROSPECT. Not Kore-eda’s most cohesive film, but still a heartfelt and likably earnest one. With his narratively oblique yet emotionally legible new film, Hirokazu Kore-eda adds another entry to his scrapbook of fractured families and reconstituted makeshift substitutes. A woman grieves the child she accidentally killed, a sin claimed by her husband for public appearances’ sake; a mother and son celebrate a departed dad’s birthday with cake and one-sided conversations with his memory; a lonely kid finds the love his single father refuses to dole out in a blossoming friendship…

Directed by NEO SORA Starring RYUICHI SAKAMOTO Released 29 MARCH ANTICIPATION. This profile of the great, multi-discipline Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto is a must see. ENJOYMENT.  Neo Sora’s footage is movingly, respectfully captured as Sakamoto faces his mortality. IN RETROSPECT.  A gorgeous, moving document of a supreme artist, immortalised once more on film. Filmed over a week in September 2022, Ryuichi Sakamoto recorded a few songs a day at NHK 509 in Japan – a studio long beloved by the composer – straining against his ill health. The result is a stunning concert film directed by his son, Neo Sora, and captured in contemplative black-and-white by cinematographer Bill Kirstein. For what he knew might be his swansong, Sakamoto selected 20 pieces spanning his illustrious career. There’s ‘Lack of Love’, a part-electronic track here…

It has been 31 years since we last saw a feature film by the Spanish maestro Victor Erice, and that film was the transcendent documentary the ephemeral nature of art, The Quince Tree Sun. He remains most well know for his 1973 debut, The Spirit of the Beehive, about a young girl’s transformative encounter with cinema, and he followed it up in 1983 with a melancholy study of an emotionally estranged father and daughter in The South. Close Your Eyes is a scintillating and unspeakably powerful addition to this small but perfectly formed corpus of films, telling of a filmmaker attempting to find the missing actor who strayed from his incomplete final film. LWLies: When you started working on the script for this film, did the story derive from an…

A filmmaker fascinated by the intersection between natural words and human civilisation, Alice Rohrwacher concludes her decade-long inquiry into the question of “What to do with the past?” with La Chimera, a striking fairy tale about a young archaeologist (played by Josh O’Connor) who becomes entangled with a group of tomb raiders in 1980s Italy. LWLies: Where did your interest in the subject of tomb raiders begin? This topic has concerned my life forever, concerned my region, concerned the whole Mediterranean – but in particular where I live is a place where, in the ’80s and ’90s, many men went to dig up treasures and told stories about their adventures. So it’s always something that impressed me, but even scared me since I was a child, not so much because…

Directed by RYÛSUKE HAMAGUCHI Starring HITOSHI OMIKA, RYO NISHIKAWA, RYUJI KOSAKA Released 5 APRIL ANTICIPATION. The next act following the writer/director’s surprise Oscar success with Drive My Car. ENJOYMENT. An intimate, ethereal study on the ideological tensions between city and country. IN RETROSPECT.  Hamaguchi is a master craftsperson, and this beautifully strange film leaves its mark. Beneath a canopy of trees stripped bare by winter, we glide forward with our gaze fixed upwards at their grey and threadlike branches. We spend a lot of time looking, and so does Hana (a preternaturally grounded Ryo Nishikawa). Her father Takumi (Hitoshi Omika of Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy) is an unsmiling, quiet man who shares his daughter’s observational gaze and carries out odd jobs in Mizubiki village, two hours outside of Tokyo. This is what…

Directed by ROBERT ALTMAN Starring SANDY DENNIS, MICHAEL BURNS, SUSANNE BENTON Blu-ray/DVD Released 8 APRIL Within Robert Altman’s varied filmography is a strand of works in which women in interior spaces navigate their slow descent into states of psychological unrest. These unnerving films skirt between regular drama and something more sinister, never fully veering into familiar psychological horror territory. Before Images (1972) and 3 Women (1977) came That Cold Day in the Park (1969), based on a novel by Richard Miles. It is a small film, slow burning and strange. Because it is reluctant to reveal its genre, it is best left undetailed in terms of the contours of its plot, but the setup sees Sandy Dennis, portraying a repressed spinster socialite, take a mysterious deaf-mute teenager, played by Michael Burns, into her home.…

Directed by FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA Starring FREDERIC FORREST, TERI GARR, RAUL JULIA Blu-ray/DVD Released 4 MARCH Made after a run of successes for the director, One From the Heart (1982) was ruinous for Francis Ford Coppola. Difficult to finance and complex to create, the film, which cost $26 million and took $634,000 at the box office, was by all accounts a failure for Coppola, kickstarting a period of financial turmoil that saw him file for bankruptcy three times in one decade. For viewers, it was worth it. Met poorly in 1982, One From the Heart – which has been reworked and restored for re-release – is now rightfully lauded. Set in Las Vegas but shot on Coppola’s studio soundstages, the film, with its lavish production design, gorgeous matte-painted backdrops and endless practical special effects,…