Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 103 i Little White Lies

Directed by YORGOS LANTHIMOS Starring JESSE PLEMONS, EMMA STONE, WILLEM DAFOE Released 28 JUNE Some guy once said some words that resonated with some other guys, and those words were this: “God is dead”. I allude to that quotation because the Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos definitely has other ideas. It’s hard to see his work as being spiritual, or interested in matters of down-to-earth religious dogma. He merely believes that God is very much alive, because how else would He be able to torment humankind with every available resource in His considerable arsenal? The ironically titled Kinds of Kindness is a salacious, sun-bleached triptych in which various people have their lives violently upended by some variety of God-like presence. Each story comprises its own, fable-like enigma that’s not a million miles away from…

Directed by RICHARD LINKLATER Starring GLEN POWELL, ADRIA ARJONA, AUSTIN AMELIO Released 7 JUNE Every few years or so, an article pops up lamenting the death of the movie star. I go back and forth on whether or not I agree – certainly an uptick in social media usage has removed much of the mystique that once surrounded the rich and famous. But every so often someone comes along who gives me hope that the je ne sais quoi of the movie star is alive and well. The latest to do so is Glen Powell, who stole the show in 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick and now teams up with his good buddy Richard Linklater for a delightfully dark comedy, inspired (mostly) by a true story. Based on a 2001 Texas Monthly article (written…

Directed by SELMA VILHUNEN Starring ALMA PÖYSTI, EERO MILONOFF, OONA AIROLA Released 7 JUNE Can infidelity turn into polyamory? When Equality Party MP Juulia (Alma Pöysti) discovers that her vicar husband Matias (Eero Milonoff) has been having an affair, she begins to seriously grapple with this quandary, and ends up suggesting to him and his paramour, Enni (Oona Airola) that they should keep seeing each other. This comes early on in the film’s first half as an abrupt and overt impetus to drive Juulia towards the final puzzle piece to complete the quartet: Miska (Pietu Wikström). But this is fine! Maybe we’re in for some interesting politics in terms of how the decision to have multiple partners plays out in the married pairs’ professions? Well, not exactly… This is more an exploration of…

Directed by JASON YU Starring JUNG YU-MI, KIM KUK-HEE, LEE SUN-KYUN Released 24 JULY At the tail end of 2023, the untimely death of South Korean star Lee Sun-kyun shocked the world. Best known as one of the stars of Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite, Lee had been one of his generation’s most acclaimed actors, starring in local mainstream and arthouse films. Among the latter were several collaborations with director Hong Sang-soo, many of which paired him with actor Jung Yu-mi (Oki’s Movie, Our Sunhi). In what ended up being Lee’s final film to premiere while he was still alive, the two stars are reunited for a spooky tale that showcases both their respective talents. Sleep is the electric debut of writer-director Jason Yu. Lee plays Hyun-su, a jobbing actor stuck with two-line roles,…

Directed by LINA SOUALEM Released 24 JULY “I don’t know how to grieve a mother”, Hiam Abbass tells her daughter, director Lina Soualem, in this documentary/mediation on personal and geographical history. Hiam (the beloved Marcia in TV’s Succession), left her Palestinian village over 30 years ago to pursue her dream of becoming an actress, leaving behind her mother, grandmother and seven sisters. Soualem uses the stories of the women in her family to breathe life into the devastating history of their motherland, Palestine. Blending tender interviews with her mother, camcorder footage from her childhood and archive footage of Palestine before the devastating 1948 Nakba and its aftermath, Soualem draws a fractured map that illustrates the disorienting evolution of stolen and abandoned lands. There is a persistent tension in the film between the history…

Directed by NATHAN ZELLNER, DAVID ZELLNER Starring RILEY KEOUGH, JESSE EISENBERG, NATHAN ZELLNER Released 14 JUNE To save you a few unnecessary clicks, don’t bother heading to your search engine of choice to find out what the collective noun is for “Sasquatch”. Aside from a few speculative funnies (“a syndicate of Sasquatch”) you likely won’t discover anything concrete, as there was only ever thought to be a single incarnation of this mythic and patently-American roving beast. Nathan and David Zellner, the minds behind 2014’s great metafictional quest movie, Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter have a new film called Sasquatch Sunset, and it doesn’t deliver any further clarity on preferred grammar usage. It does, however, offer a dreamlike window on the lives of four modern-day Sasquatch subsisting like unbathed hippies out in the delectably lush…

Directed by BERTRAND BONELLO Starring LÉA SEYDOUX, GEORGE MACKAY, GUSLAGIE MALANDA Released 31 MAY Of the many pop culture assets that Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast calls to mind, perhaps the most obvious is Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, about a couple whose devastating break-up prompts them to erase all memory of each other. Despite this, the pair are destined to reunite, with the now-iconic instruction: “Meet me in Montauk.” Gondry’s countryman Bonello shares an interest in the cosmic nature of destiny and love – but takes a wildly different approach to it all. Based on Henry James’ novella ‘The Beast in the Jungle’, the film is a reflection on fate and emotion; what we choose to express and suppress. Across decades we witness Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) and Louis (George MacKay)…

Directed by STÉPHANIE DI GIUSTO Starring NADIA TERESZKIEWICZ, BENOÎT MAGIMEL, BENJAMIN BIOLAY Released 7 JUNE Beauty standards are continuously evolving. What remains is that, in some way, we will always find ourselves feeling self-conscious about some aspects of our appearance. Our insecurities at times can make us seek refuge, feeling ashamed instead of acknowledging the beauty of our uniqueness. Stephanie Di Gusto’s second feature Rosalie advocates for a woman whose own insecurity challenges society’s standards on what beauty really is. Set in 1870 Northern France, Rosalie (Nadia Tereszkiewicz) is living on a remote farm with her widowed father (Gustavo Kervern). Longing for a child and her happily ever after, her father sets up an arranged marriage to local tavern owner Abel (Benoît Magimel) who is drowning in debt and is desperate for his…

Directed by PAUL B. PRECIADO Released 24 JULY As trans people, we have always had to search to find ourselves. And not just in the obvious way. To see the traces of ourselves in a history that seldom gave us a name and often wiped us from its pages. We have to read between the lines. We have to look for fewer material connections, echoes and resonances left unexpressed in culture, whether that’s through Bugs Bunny, The Joker or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel ‘Orlando: A Biography’ offers something more tangible: it’s a story about gender transformation, and so countless trans people over the last century have seen themselves in its gender-transgressing hero. Spanish philosopher Paul B. Preciado considered naming himself Orlando at the start of his own…

I first met Virginia Woolf’s ‘Orlando’ as a young (and yes, admittedly pretentious) literature student looking for chance encounters with the most mummified of modern classic paperbacks. There’s so much to revel in and appreciate about the novel: as unorthodox biography; as feminist classic; as dreamlike satire; as one of the great love letters in English literature. But what struck me the most as an impressionable, aspiring writer, was how Woolf’s subject was as equally enchanting as her prose. Decades and centuries pass casually as the titular character moves through time and space – at first as an Elizabethan-era make aristocrat, through to a woman of letters in ’20s England – in search for meaning, shifting genders and having encounters with key literary figures. Naturally, the challenge of adapting, reimagining…

Back in 2009, two Greek writers caused quite a stir with their disturbing feature debut, Dogtooth, which focused on three teenagers isolated by their controlling father, pushing against the limits of his control. Since then, Yorgos Lanthimos and Efthimis Filippou have collaborated on a further three films: Alps, The Lobster, and The Killing of a Sacred Deer – each a devilishly dark treatise on the human condition. Their latest, Kinds of Kindness, sees them change structure a little, creating a triptych of loosely connected stories, each starring the same small cast of actors in different roles. As strange, brutal and abrupt as their previous collaborations, its meaning is slippery and shifting – and predictably, Lanthimos and Filippou themselves aren’t providing any easy answers. LWLies: The actors in Kinds of Kindness…

One is a veteran of the screen who’s been acting for over 40 years, the other’s career began to blossom after a starring role in Alexander Payne’s 2017 dramedy, Downsizing – Willem Dafoe and Hong Chau meet on-screen in Kinds of Kindness. For Dafoe it was a reunion having worked with Yorgos Lanthimos on Poor Things and playing the bubble-belching God, but for Chau, it was a call that came after her whirlwind year promoting Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale, which culminated in an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. They play various roles across each of the film’s shorts, but it is in the third and final segment, R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich, in which they play a pair of uber chill, free-loving cult leaders named Omi and Aka. LWLies: Do…

Directed by JEFF NICHOLS Starring JODIE COMER, AUSTIN BUTLER, TOM HARDY Released 21 JUNE Eight years since his last feature, Jeff Nichols returns with a wistful and contemplative depiction of a ’60s Chicago motorcycle club, The Vandals, inspired by the work of photographer Danny Lyon. Recent internet boyfriend Mike Faist (Challengers, West Side Story) takes on the role of Lyon, as a green student photographer following the motley crew around and conducting interviews that form the spine of the narrative. In the sea of denim and leather is Jodie Comer’s clear-eyed Kathy, the film’s dominant voice. With sometimes intrusive voiceover, Kathy’s perspective on the group – and her husband Benny (played with cool detachment by another recent internet boyfriend, Austin Butler) – allows Nichols to poke fun at the self-serious machismo of these…

Directed by NURI BILGE CEYLAN Starring DENIZ CELILOĞLU, MERVE DIZDAR, MUSAB EKICI Released 26 JULY Like a patient naturalist with his digital camera preprimed, Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan is adept at spotting dyed-in-the-wool male misanthropes out there wandering the snowswept Anatolian plains. About Dry Grasses, his thrilling, engrossing epic of no-hold-barred parochial intellectualism might be seen as the last chapter of a trilogy, following 2013’s Winter Sleep and 2018’s The Wild Pear Tree, about entrenched male malaise and the stifling social edicts of life in a small village. Deniz Celiloglu’s Samet is a primary school teacher who believes he’s wasting his potential in a sleepy burg where most of the population live in tin shacks and can barely afford clothes to keep them alive through the long and harsh winters. Yet he…

Directed by KAMAL LAZRAQ Starring AYOUB ELAID, ABDELLATIF MASSTOURI, MOHAMED HMIMSA Released 14 JUNE There’s only a limited amount of love you can extend to a film that spins out a yarn on the back of a tricky situation whose “solution” should be obvious to anyone with even the most basic foresight. Casablanca, modern day, and two petty hoods, father and son, become more than mere middlemen for a job involving a simple duffing up and kidnapping. When their influential mark, whose moral unscrupulousness in the illegal dog-fighting scene has been called into question, accidentally dies in transit, the two hapless men are charged with disposing of the corpse. For them, it’s not such a simple task, as every idea they come up with ends up with them being caught and locked up…

Directed by LEVAN AKIN Starring MZIA ARABULI, LUCAS KANKAVA, DENIZ DUMANLI Released 19 JULY The last promise that Lia (Mzia Arabuli) made to her sister before her death was that she would reunite with her niece, Tekla, after many years of estrangement. After gleaning from an old student that Tekla has left Georgia for neighbouring Turkey, Lia makes plans for a long journey to Istanbul. Sensing an opportunity to get away from his bullying half-brother and forge his path in a new country, cheeky chappie Achi (Lucas Kankava) begs Lia to let him come along for the ride, claiming he knows where her niece might be staying. A reluctant Lia permits Achi to accompany her, and together they set off on Tekla’s trail. Meanwhile, in Istanbul, Evrim (Deniz Dumanlı) is in the final…

Directed by MARIE AMACHOUKELI Starring LOUISE MAUROY-PANZANI, ILÇA MORENO ZEGO, ARNAUD REBOTINI Released 14 JUNE It’s with remarkable simplicity and tact that Marie Amachoukeli crafts her debut feature into a layered meditation on maternal love and a child’s experience with grief. She lends the point of view of her film entirely to six-year-old Cléo (Louise Mauroy-Panzani), a young, wide-eyed girl living in Paris with her widowed father (Arnaud Rebotini), while being raised mostly by her nanny, Gloria (Ilça Moreno Zego), in the absence of her late mother. There’s a lot here about belonging too: about class; power dynamics; and the colonial lingerings that continue to seep into the material realities of domestic labour and childcare – roles that women from the Global South have to rely on to provide for their families back…

Directed by BAS DEVOS Starring STEFAN GOTA, LIYO GONG, TEODOR CORBAN Released 7 JUNE There’s a sense of harmony between natural and urban landscapes in Here, Flemish director Bas Devos’ fourth feature which won the Encounters Award and the FIPRESCI prize at the Berlinale in 2023. The opening takes its time: the first lingering image is of a tower block under construction, framed by a gap in some trees. We move closer to find a group of builders in the skeleton of the building. Their faces are hidden, their voices are distant, and a lone figure in hi-vis and hard hat contemplates the view; a moment of peace amidst the industrial clanging. Here is, unsurprisingly, very much about a specific place (Brussels). But it’s also rooted in a sense of what it truly…

Directed by CHRISTOPHER MURRAY Starring VALENTINA VÉLIZ CAILEO, DANIEL ANTIVILO, SEBASTIAN HÜLK Released 14 JUNE “I don’t know who you are anymore,” says Agnes (Annick Durán) to Rosa (Valentina Véliz Caileo) a little way into Christopher Murray’s Sorcery (Brujería). Rosa is not so sure herself. A 13-year-old maid to German settlers on Chile’s Chiloé Island in 1881, Rosa has converted to Christianity, learnt German and become like her employers – the patriarch Stefan (Sebastian Hülk), his wife Agnes and their young boys Thorsten (Matías Bannister) and Franz (Iker Echevers) – whom she regards as her own family Yet when all the sheep on the property are stricken with a mysterious illness, Stefan suspects witchcraft, and sets his dogs on Rosa’s father Juan (Francisco Núñez), killing him. Unable to give Juan a Christian burial, and…

Directed by MONIA CHOKRI Starring FRANCIS-WILLIAM RHÉAUME, MAGALIE LÉPINE BLONDEAU, PIERRE-YVES CARDINAL Released 5 JULY While not all of Hollywood’s recent theatrically-released romantic comedies have performed well, the breakout commercial success of several – most notably, Ticket to Paradise (grossing nearly $169 million worldwide) and Anyone but You (almost $220 million) – does still suggest a renewed appetite for a type of movie that was formerly a reliable staple of the release calendar. Yet despite shooting in scenic locations, those cited success stories never actually look especially good. The world of a film being carefully lensed and feeling lived-in isn’t the sole reason why something like Rob Reiner’s When Harry Met Sally endures, but it’s a crucial ingredient in the mix. Writer/director Monia Chokri’s The Nature of Love taps into what so many…

Two of the finest actors of their generation pair up for the first time – one a Yorgos Lanthimos veteran, the other a newcomer to this world. When Emma Stone first partnered with Lanthimos on The Favourite in 2018, it was the beginning of a beautiful creative partnership, which has now produced three feature films (including Poor Things and now Kinds of Kindness) and one short (Bleat). Kinds of Kindness is Jesse Plemons’ first time working with both Stone and Lanthimos, and across the film, the pair play near strangers, a married couple, and devoted cult members, adding to their already impressive acting CVs. The trio will reunite on Lanthimos’ next project, Bugonia, a remake of Jang Joon-hwan’s 2003 sci-fi comedy Save the Green Planet! What is your read on…

Directed by VIGGO MORTENSEN Starring VICKY KRIEPS, VIGGO MORTENSEN, GARRET DILLAHUNT Released 7 JUNE Unlike some of his actor-turned-director peers, Viggo Mortensen doesn’t see filmmaking as a zeitgeist-connected popularity contest. With his wistful second feature, The Dead Don’t Hurt, he mines a seam of timeworn Americana, drawing on the sparsely striking, often deadly landscapes of the old west and a people whose collective moral compass has yet to find its true north. He plays lightly grizzled Danish immigrant Holger Olsen, who we join at the moment he sets his eyes upon the corpse of his recently-departed French-Canadian wife, Vivienne (a typically ethereal Vicky Krieps). Along with a young boy we understand to be his son, Holger dutifully buries his bride while keeping his true emotions hidden under his smockcoat – the actions of…

Directed by JULIO TORRES Starring JULIO TORRES, TILDA SWINTON, RZA Released 8 JULY It’s a joy to enter the surreal world of Julio Torres’ Problemista – a uniquely funny, delightfully whimsical, and endlessly smart odyssey through art, connection and perseverance. Best known as the creator of the Los Espookys TV show, Torres’ directorial debut follows Alejandro or Ale, a Salvadoran immigrant (also played by Torres) who dreams of designing toys for Hasbro. Aware of the failings of the American immigration system, it comes as no surprise that Ale’s work visa begins to run out before his dreams can be fully realised. So what’s an aspiring toy designer to do? His salvation seemingly comes in the form of an eccentric and brash art critic named Elizabeth (Tilda Swinton) who hires him for a job…

Directed by MATÍAS PIÑEIRO Starring MARIA INÊS GONÇALVES, AGUSTINA MUÑOZ, MARÍA VILLAR Released 7 JUNE Following an extended run of Shakespeare adaptations, director Matías Piñeiro turns to the work of Italian poet Cesare Pavese for his eighth feature, You Burn Me. Like his earlier literary riffs, the Argentine filmmaker’s latest – which is based on ‘Seafoam,’ a chapter from Pavese’s 1947 book ‘Dialoghi con Leucò’ – is less a transposition of its source material than a deconstruction of it, an especially apt approach to a text that is itself allusive and fragmentary A kind of essayistic montage film, You Burn Me features Piñeiro regulars Gabi Saidón and María Villar in the roles of Sappho and Britomartis, the Greek poet and mountain nymph at the centre of Pavese’s story. In voiceover, excerpts from the…

Directed by AGNIESZKA HOLLAND Starring JALAL ALTAWIL, MAJA OSTASZEWSKA, TOMASZ WŁOSOK Released 21 JUNE In Agnieszka Holland’s bruising, ultimately galvanising Green Border, those fleeing war in Syria find themselves trapped in a Kafkaesque cycle of state-sanctioned violence as they’re jettisoned back and forth across the Belarusian–Polish divide. With unflinching starkness, Holland traces a path along a new trail of tears fraught with danger for those forced to travel it, from natural hazards like quicksand and hypothermia to the omnipresent threat of the border patrol agents. In a racism-charged training session, they’re instructed not to kill anyone, but to swiftly dispose of any bodies in the event of a mishap. Most receive this as if learning about an incidental perk of the job. One of the recruits (Tomasz Włosok) doesn’t look so jazzed about…

Directed by TURNER ROSS, BILL ROSS IV Starring TONY ABURTO, MICAH BUNCH, NICHOLE DUKES Released 31 MAY The precariousness of youth, the excitement of discovery and the overwhelming truth that you have to be the master of your own destiny sits at the heart of the Ross brothers' latest experiment in hybrid filmmaking. Gasoline Rainbow is a fictional road trip movie that was seeded during lockdown. The pair came up with a set of scenarios and guided five high-school graduates from their hometown of Wiley, Oregon to the Pacific coast. Nathaly, Makai, Tony, Nichole and Micah are all on the cusp of adulthood and painfully aware that this short break from reality is a rare chance to grasp at pure freedom. Crammed into a dodgy campervan, the kids improvise their dialogue while the…

Directed by KEVIN COSTNER Starring KEVIN COSTNER, ABBEY LEE, LUKE WILSON Released 28 JUNE “We have to keep going,” intones Kevin Costner’s Hayes Ellison toward the end of Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1, as he rides on horseback across a vast, mountainous frontier, on the run and destined for parts unknown. The worn fortitude in Costner’s voice is right for his character, a taciturn gunslinger in the vein of John Wayne, and reflective of the bootstrap mentality with which he’s shepherded this widescreen saga to the screen. Costner directs, co-writes, produces, and stars in what he’s envisioned for over 30 years as an epic of Western expansion, told in four film chapters. To realise the project without compromise, Costner self-financed the $100 million production. Set in the 1860s, the film opens…

Iit was fitting that Greta Gerwig was the jury president at the Cannes Film Festival this year since the question, “Do you guys ever think about dying?” was a preoccupation throughout many of the festival’s most anticipated titles. Late-stage works from three masters – David Cronenberg, Paul Schrader and Francis Ford Coppola – were among the most highly anticipated premieres, and all three films display a clear reckoning with the relentless passage of time and grief that inevitably stems from it. Even beyond the main competition, death and its inevitable fallout was a preoccupation. Perhaps it’s just that this is one of the few truly universal elements of the human experience, but I can’t help but think it’s also a natural result of the generally bad vibes that haven’t improved…