Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 105 i Little White Lies

Directed by SEAN BAKER Starring MIKEY MADISON, MARK EIDELSTEIN, YURA BORISOV Released 1 NOVEMBER ANTICIPATION. Baker won the big one in Cannes for this. Strap yourselves in. 4 ENJOYMENT. Madison and Eidelstein make for a fascinating, car-crash romantic pairing. 4 IN RETROSPECT. A little narrative wheel-spinning in the mid-section, but comes good in the end. 4 One of life’s small pleasures involves following writer/director Sean Baker on the social media platform Letterboxd and tracking his highly esoteric viewing habits. Indeed, in the end credits to his latest, Palme d’Or-winning feature, Anora, he extends special thanks to the disreputable Spanish genre hack, Jesús Franco, whose films are reliably awash with female nudity and human entrails. This interest in what you might term the economic fringes of cinema – ie, the directors who were really making…

Directed by MILISUTHANDO BONGELA Released 18 OCTOBER ANTICIPATION. Invites us to be immersed into a past, present and future South Africa. 3 ENJOYMENT. The film’s second half shifts focus to white guilt, which doesn’t entirely work. 3 IN RETROSPECT. Such a strong cumulative impact – Bongela has poured her soul into this project. 4 Milisuthando Bongela’s sprawling, self-titled documentary is divided into five distinct parts, each with a unique sense of direction. Formally, the film as a whole circumvents the need for a structure to contain its constituent parts. Poetry, archive material, collective memory, spirituality, personal histories and memoir are combined to make up a striking cine-essay foregrounded by Bongela’s lived experience as a black South African woman, and a desire to interrogate the dialectic tension between “nation” and “self”. “The street I…

Directed by MARK COUSINS Starring TILDA SWINTON Released 18 OCTOBER ANTICIPATION. This artist bio doc won the KVIFF Crystal Globe after its world premiere. 4 ENJOYMENT. Cousins’ mode of inquiry is unique but can often come across as single-minded. 3 IN RETROSPECT. A lovely, effusive journey towards the artist’s visual imagination. 3 Mark Cousins documentaries always originate from a deeply subjective position. Poetic voiceovers and associative form shape his films as visual essays, articulating an inherent tension in documentary filmmaking: that of questioning the nature of getting to an “objective truth” and its proximity to a subjective projection. Cousins places this tension front and centre in his latest film, A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things, an artist portrait of Scottish modernist painter Wilhelmina (Willie) Barns-Graham. The film opens with a photograph of the…

Directed by FRANÇOIS OZON Starring NADIA TERESZKIEWICZ, REBECCA MARDER, ISABELLE HUPPERT Released 18 OCTOBER ANTICIPATION. Courtroom dramas are hot this year. 4 ENJOYMENT. An effervescent who[didn’t do] it with Ozon’s playful, stylistic flair. 4 IN RETROSPECT. A feminist crime comedy that needs more Isabelle Huppert! 3 In a high-profile legal case, the accused stands before two courts: the judgement of a jury and the court of public opinion. Though the first may rule unanimously, the second is a more complicated affair where permissible innocence can be branded guilty. Today, court cases have become a source of entertainment like a reality show that creates overnight celebrityhood. At this intersection of criminality and fame, François Ozon’s The Crime is Mine plays out as the prolific French director’s first foray into crime comedy. Set in a…

Directed by PETER MURIMI, DAPHNE MATZIARAKI Released 1 NOVEMBER ANTICIPATION Has done the rounds on the doc festival circuit. 3 ENJOYMENT The makers are the ground to capture this violent story as it happens. 3 IN RETROSPECT Formally very straight-laced, but powerful and educational nonetheless. 3 In central Kenya, insidious warfare is playing out on the arid plains of Laikipia County, as roving indigenous cow herders, referred to as “pastoralists”, are set upon by the rifle-toting white, western offspring of British settlers attempting to make their living as more market-focused cattle farmers. Surely there should be enough land for these two antithetical farming traditions to live harmoniously, side-by-side? Yes, but not if there’s a major drought and barely any grass to sustain the cattle. So rather than corral together and hatch a plan, the…

Directed by BASEL ADRA, HAMDAN BALLAL, YUVAL ABRAHAM, RACHEL SZOR Released 8 NOVEMBER ANTICIPATION. The occupation is decades long but this new friendship sparks much needed hope. 5 ENJOYMENT. A carefully curated microcosm of Palestinian resistance through family and community. 4 IN RETROSPECT. If you weren’t already radicalised… this is the film to watch. Free Palestine. 5 Art is political, and none more transparently so than documentary No More Land. Presented at the 2024 Berlin Film Festival, the film’s co-director Yuval Abraham explained its premise: “We stand before you together. I am Israeli; Basel [Adra] is Palestinian. […] In two days we will go back to a land where we are not equal. This apartheid has to end.” Abraham was not alone in protesting the Israeli occupation, but while this recent wave…

Directed by ALI ABBASI Starring SEBASTIAN STAN, JEREMY STRONG, MARTIN DONOVAN Released 18 OCTOBER ANTICIPATION. A biopic of one of the most heinous and ugly people on the planet. Okay, let’s see what you got. 3 ENJOYMENT. Breaking news: Donald Trump is awful. 2 IN RETROSPECT. An exceptionally unnecessary picture. 1 When Trump was elected President of the United States in 2016, so much of American culture became retrospectively seeded with Easter eggs foreshadowing his eventual ascent. Future generations, unlike mine, will have no trouble imagining how this could possibly have happened. For so long Trump was present within discourse on business, crime, race, and politics; he was in Home Alone 2 and had a show on NBC; he was a late-night talk-show punchline and appeared at WrestleMania. He was so ubiquitous, for…

Directed by MALCOLM WASHINGTON Starring SAMUEL L. JACKSON, JOHN DAVID WASHINGTON, RAY FISHER Released 8 NOVEMBER ANTICIPATION. There is awards buzz, but that is no indicator of quality. 3 ENJOYMENT. This is high-quality but low-impact work. 3 IN RETROSPECT. Much like a box of quality street, enough good stuff to sustain itself. 3 It’s no mean feat to adapt an acclaimed play for the screen. Stay too true to the source material, and it becomes claustrophobic and uncinematic. Veer too far away, and you lose the original’s magic. In many respects, Malcolm Washington’s adaptation of August Wilson’s 1987 Pulitzer Prize-winning play lands in the middle. Its stage roots are evident, but he has a handle on the filmmaking craft expands beyond what can be done in a theatrical space. It’s a handsome work,…

Directed by TSAI MING-LIANG Starring KANG-SHENG LEE, TSAI MING-LIANG, ANONG HOUNGHEUANGSY Blu-ray/DVD Released 21 OCTOBER With its finale in the form of a 20-minute stare, in 2014, Stray Dogs seemed the apotheosis of Tsai Ming liang’s work. As such, Tsai’s retirement from feature filmmaking made sense; his series of “walker” installations, in which star Lee Kang Sheng walks glacially across various landscapes, seemed to confirm that there was nothing left for the director to express via conventional narritive. But in 2020, he blessed the world with another fiction feature, Days, a work that builds upon his signature style, somehow finding still more to say through slowness, attention, atmosphere, and mood. The film is more of a refinement than a departure for Tsai: another rumination on forces of estrangement, connection and desire. Lee Kang Shang…

Before every screening that rolls out at the San Sebastián Film Festival, an ident plays introducing the various programming strands which includes some jaunty music over the top. Without fail, whether it’s a Spanish competition film, a retrospective title playing off of an archive print, or an experimental dirge, the audience will clap along in unison to this little ditty. This is a public festival, so not one solely for the cynical, snide members of the press corps who would never descend to such public displays of communal affection. Yet it’s an important reminder of the function of film festivals and that, when done right, they can become a beloved mainstay in people’s everyday lives. It’s probably deeply unexciting to have to read about another person having fun at a…

To better understand the cinema of Andrea Arnold – where she came from – we need to venture some small distance beyond the comfortable city limits of Greater London. We’re heading towards an area roughly defined by the Thames Estuary, Essex on the northern side and Arnold’s native Kent to the south, a region that has only been tentatively mapped on screen in the 50 years since British cinema left the soundstage. It is a place of marshland, stiff breezes and shifting sands, both literally and politically; a place where the Brexit vote was less an angry roar than a plea for attention or cry for help previously denied. Here be dragons and St. George’s flags. But also: here lies a specific idea of working- and middle-class life that the…

Directed by TODD PHILLIPS Starring JOAQUIN PHOENIX, LADY GAGA, HARRY LAWTEY Released 4 OCTOBER ANTICIPATION. It can’t possibly be worse than Joker… 1 ENJOYMENT. Surpasses its predecessor by virtue of show tunes. 2 IN RETROSPECT. Embarrassing for everyone involved. 2 Todd Phillips is quite insistent that Joker: Folie à Deux is not a musical. First at CinemaCon, then in an interview with Variety, the director explained, “Most of the music in the movie is really just dialogue. It’s just Arthur not having the words to say what he wants to say, so he sings them instead.” Perhaps Phillips is being obtuse, or maybe he truly believes he’s created something truly cinematically profound rather than a bastard version of The Band Wagon, but with no less than 12 musical numbers (including an original song…

Directed by MATI DIOP Released 25 OCTOBER ANTICIPATION. Deserving winner of the Golden Bear at the 2024 Berlin Film Festival. 4 ENJOYMENT. Diop is a cinematic force of nature, yet this new film is both tempered and outraged. 4 IN RETROSPECT. Diop’s film presents new and innovative ways to discuss the complex legacy of collonialism. 4 Splitting her working hours between acting and filmmaking, Mati Diop is a rare bird: an ethereal, intuitive and subtle screen performer who is also an incredible director and writer. And unlike many actors who cross the actor/director Rubicon, her work is only superficially interested in performance. Having cultivated her reputation via a series of rightly lauded short works, her haunting 2019 feature debut, Atlantics, played in the competition at the Cannes Film Festival and is now considered (again,…

Directed by JOHAN GRIMONPREZ Released 25 OCTOBER ANTICIPATION. Grimonprez is attempting something hugely ambitious here, can he pull it off ? 3 ENJOYMENT. Not since Oliver Stone’s JFK has an information overload been so riveting. 4 IN RETROSPECT. A deeply impressive feat of research, editing and storytelling. 4 1960 has been described as The Year of Africa, as a wave of political change spread across the continent and led to 17 nations declaring independence. Among the most contentious of these was the case of the Congo, which announced its determination to emerge as a free nation under the leadership of the charismatic Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba on June 30th. Three days before losing control of its colony, Belgium privatised the Union Minière mine, the prime source of the country’s enormous potential wealth,…

Directed by JACQUES AUDIARD Starring ZOE SALDAÑA, KARLA SOFÍA GASCÓN, SELENA GOMEZ Released 25 OCTOBER ANTICIPATION. Audiard can be good, but trans films that premiere at Cannes have a bad track record. 3 ENJOYMENT. A musical that barely wants to be a musical. 1 IN RETROSPECT. No one emerges unscathed from this bad telenovela. 1 Iin Jacques Audiard’s mysteriously lauded new musical-drama, a cartel boss (Karla Sofía Gascón) hires lawyer Rita (Zoe Saldaña) to help her fake her death and transition from “Manitas” into Emilia Pérez. Years later, she tries to navigate caring for her ex-wife (Selena Gomez), who believes Manitas is dead, and starting an organisation to help those whose loved ones have been kidnapped or murdered by cartels in Mexico. Audiard ignores the dilemmas faced by its title character, who has murdered…

Directed by PASCAL BERGAMIN Starring JEANY SPARK, TARA FITZGERALD, YASMIN MONET PRINCE Released 11 OCTOBER ANTICIPATION Female-focused Brit comedy with stalwart Tara Fitzgerald itscentre. Well, okay then. 3 ENJOYMENT Nice chemistry, few good one-liners, no wheels reinvented. 3 IN RETROSPECT Pleasant to a fault. 3 Camaraderie can come in many guises, and in Pascal Bergamin’s Home Counties runaround, Portraits of Dangerous Woman, it flourishes as the result of an accidental dog killing and subsequent hush-up woodland burial. This light, dry domestic comedy of manners draws in an ensemble cast to tell of three slightly-lost souls who become entangled in the aftermath of this grisly episode, giving one another a personal and professional leg-up as their lives spiral out of control. Jeany Spark’s Steph is a slightly daffy school teacher whose marriage is sliding off the…

Directed by TYLER TAORMINA Starring MICHAEL CERA, FRANCESCA SCORSESE MATILDA FLEMING Released 15 NOVEMBER ANTICIPATION. Taormina is a buzzy up-and-comer… 3 ENJOYMENT. Truly as frenetic, funny and lovely as Christmas with the family. 4 IN RETROSPECT. A lo-fi holiday classic in the making. 4 The holidays are a time for tenderness, togetherness, and falling asleep on the sofa after your third round of mince pies and sweet sherry. Most Christmas films reflect the pressure cooker atmosphere of the period, usually with some sort of disaster inevitably causing festive friction, but Tyler Taormina takes a slightly different approach, as the members of a large Italian-American family cram into their matriarch’s suburban home for dinner on Christmas Eve. Rather than following a traditional narrative structure, Taormina’s film is more observational, focusing on snippets of conversation and…

Directed by AARON SCHIMBERG Starring SEBASTIAN STAN, ADAM PEARSON, RENATE REINSVE Released 4 OCTOBER ANTICIPATION. Aaron Schimberg’s debut, Chained for Life, showed a lot of promise. 4 ENJOYMENT. Adam Pearson and Sebastian Stan are on fantastic form. 4 IN RETROSPECT. Macabre, unsettling and very, very funny. 4 Edward (Sebastian Stan) knows what everyone thinks when they look at him. Having developed neurofibromatosis, a condition which causes large benign tumours to grow on his face, his New York neighbours regard him with disgust, fear or amusement – rarely anything else. While his heart lies in performing, he struggles to book roles as people can’t look past his facial differences. He lives a lonely life in a one-bed apartment, which has recently developed an ominous stain on the ceiling. When a new neighbour moves in and introduces…

Directed by SHINYA TSUKAMOTO Starring TADANOBU ASANO, KIKI, NAMI TSUKAMOTO, KAZUYOSHI KUSHIDA Blu-ray/DVD Released 30 SEPTEMBER Having made his name as the metal fetishist filmmaker of choice with his iconic Tetsuo films, Japanese writer/director Shinya Tsukamoto is someone who could easily go toe-to-toe with a titan like David Cronenberg when it comes to a cinematic fascination with what really goes on inside the human body. The set-up of this 2004 feature is a bit of a doozy: lank-haired med student Hiroshi (Tadanobu Asano) is in a car accident which causes him to lose his memory, as well as the death of his girlfriend. During a period of self-motivated convalescence, he returns to school and eventually finds himself in dissection class with the cadaver of his late gf in front of him. Rather than go…

Directed by PEDRO ALMODÓVAR Starring TILDA SWINTON, JULIANNE MOORE, JOHN TURTURRO Released 25 OCTOBER ANTICIPATION. Pedro, Tilda and Julianne?! Say less… 5 ENJOYMENT. Oh dear. A disappointment given the talent on offer. 3 IN RETROSPECT. Noble aims and has its moments, but the script is dire. 3 “People want you to keep fighting,” Martha (Tilda Swinton) explains to Ingrid (Julianne Moore) as she reflects on her terminal cancer diagnosis. “If you win, you’re heroic, and if you lose… well, maybe you just didn’t fight hard enough.” The rhetoric around terminal illness is a source of much frustration for the war reporter, recently reunited with her novelist friend after falling out of touch; perhaps being surrounded by so much death, she’s come to accept that there are some battles that can’t be won – only…

Directed by CHRIS SANDERS Starring LUPITA NYONG’O, PEDRO PASCAL, KIT CONNOR Released 18 OCTOBER ANTICIPATION. A new film from the How To Train Your Dragon co-director? Sign me up. 4 ENJOYMENT. A heartwarming tale mixing environmental and parental anxiety. 4 IN RETROSPECT. …but it sometimes feels a little disjointed. 3 The filmography of animation director Chris Sanders is full of unlikely friendships between man and beast: Lilo & Stitch and How To Train Your Dragon, (both co-directed with Dean DeBlois) in particular, the latter using fantasy as an allegory for conservation. The Wild Robot plays like a little twist on this, in that it’s expressly concerned with the inevitable endpoint of human commercialism, by studying that from the viewpoint of animals. Ironically, those animals slowly humanise its eponymous character, a household server…

One of the supreme highlights of my 2024 Cannes experience was discovering the films of New York filmmaker Tyler Taormina. Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point is presented through its marketing as a cheesetastic holiday movie, but is in fact a wide-eyed paean to the dynamics of family and the suburbs as a place of ecstatic joy. It’s his feature follow-up to 2019’s Ham on Rye, a strange coming of age movie in which the suburbs is not painted in such a dewy-eyed light. LWLies: Your first feature, Ham on Rye, was a film that was critical of life in the suburbs. Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, is almost the opposite, framing it as this rapturous place. Taormina: I would say that there are thorns presented to that particular rose. Ham…

Directed by EDWARD BERGER Starring RALPH FIENNES, STANLEY TUCCI, JOHN LITHGOW Released 29 NOVEMBER ANTICIPATION. Edward Berger goes large after the Oscar love for All Quiet on the Western Front. 4 ENJOYMENT. A romp, but a romp with delusions of grandeur and sophistication. 3 IN RETROSPECT. Compelling, absorbing, but in the end doesn’t really say much about anything. 3 The view from outside of St Peter’s in Vatican City is just a humble little chimney pot that juts out from the roof. The world’s eyes are trained on this chimney during the rare occasion of a papal conclave – that is, the closed democratic process of electing a new Pope when the previous one either stands down or snuffs it. Edward Berger’s Conclave, his follow-up to surprise Oscar darling, All Quiet on the…

Directed by HARMONY KORINE Starring JACOB REYNOLDS, NICK SUTTON, CHLOË SEVIGNY Blu-ray/DVD Released 22 OCTOBER Half skate punk, half public intellectual, Harmony Korine emerged in the ’90s as a true iconoclast. He parses together influences and inspirations that range from Buster Keaton, TS Eliot and Tupac Shakur to create worlds that resemble America but actually reveal the warped insides of Korine’s own mind. In 1995, aged nineteen, Korine wrote the screenplay for Larry Clark’s Kids, lurching violently into Hollywood before his brain was fully formed. In 1997, at 21, he directed his first feature, Gummo, a remarkably realised vision that, 30 years on, is still comfortably his greatest film. Set in the town of Xenia, Ohio, Gummo is a simple, multi-character community portrait which mainly follows Solomon (Jacob Reynolds), a strange looking boy who…

Directed by MARTIN ROSEN Starring JOHN HURT, RICHARD BRIERS, RALPH RICHARDSON Blu-ray/DVD Released 11 NOVEMBER A1978 adaptation of Richard Adams’ novel about rabbits on the run from the violent threat of human encroachment, Watership Down is discussed more often for its disturbing nature than its artistic merits. It certainly has perturbed many young viewers with its distressing style and content. But it is also an inventive animated film that deals intelligently with themes such as environmentalism, community, oppression, violence, and war. It also features striking hand-drawn visuals, and employs a range of great British actors as vocal talents to bring the story to life. Set among a community of anthropomorphised rabbits in the Hampshire hills, the film begins when a clairvoyant rabbit called Fiver (Richard Briers) foresees coming destruction in an apocalyptic vision, convincing…

The heat was oppressive. It was all anyone could talk about; critics, publicists, filmmakers, stars – we all glistened under the baking sun, squinting even behind sunglasses as we tried to talk about what we were watching but inevitably drifted back to the weather. “It’s the humidity,” Someone would inevitably announce, as everyone else nodded in agreement. “It’s a sticky heat… it feels like it’s going to rain at any minute. But then it doesn’t.” Those blessed with foresight clutched electric portable fans that brought temporary respite; the less fortunate wafted traditional paper ones back and forth in desperate attempts to cool down. The beach clubs of the Venetian Lido, with their sprawling sunloungers and siren call of the Adriatic Sea, suddenly felt even more compelling than they do in…