Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 106 i Little White Lies

Directed by RAMELL ROSS Starring ETHAN HERISSE, BRANDON WILSON, AUNJANUE ELLIS-TAYLOR Released 3 JANUARY At one point in Nickel Boys, Elwood, a young Black boy in Civil Rights-era Florida, glimpses Martin Luther King Jr. in front of a supermarket and takes off, running across the middle of the street to greet him. Turner, his best friend, chases behind him. When he catches Elwood, he asks him what’s wrong. Elwood smiles, bashful. Turner looks over to see a cardboard cut-out of MLK. We’ve encountered the preacher multiple times in the film – on a vinyl record, through a window display of a dozen televisions, from teachers who misquote his sermons. Yet for a moment, to Elwood, it looked like he was really there, just a few feet away, next to the produce stand in…

Directed by STEPHEN SOUCY Released 6 DECEMBER Partners in film as well as in life, Indian producer Ismail Merchant and American writer/director James Ivory made 44 films together under the banner of their brainchild: Merchant Ivory Productions. Their impressive catalogue, made up mostly of literary adaptations, boasts some of cinema’s most acclaimed independent period dramas: A Room with a View, Maurice, Howards End and The Remains of the Day. Stephen Soucy’s affectionate yet scattershot documentary on this 40-year partnership explores the overlap between the two as lovers and as collaborators, offering a broad overview of their life’s work, and fondly detailing the lengths to which the duo would go to turn shoestring budgets into meticulously crafted, tasteful films. Right off the bat, we hear from about a dozen talking heads from the…

Directed by JOHN CROWLEY Starring ANDREW GARFIELD, FLORENCE PUGH, ADAM JAMES Released 1 JANUARY Every generation gets the cancer romance it deserves. In We Live in Time, terminal illness gives an extra sense of urgency to an echt-millennial story about the push-pull of professional ambition and family obligation – the desire to make the most of the time you have. Almut (Florence Pugh) is a chef who starts the film by whipping up a “Douglas fir parfait” and ends it tweezing microgreens onto a deconstructed seafood tower; in between, she earns a Michelin star for her “modern European takes on classic alpine dishes.” She and Tobias (Andrew Garfield) meet cute when she Meet Joe Blacks him with her car as he wanders out into traffic to pick up a piece of chocolate orange;…

Directed by PINNY GRYLLS, SAM CRANE Starring MARK OOSTERVEEN, SAM CRANE, PINNY GRYLLS Released 6 DECEMBER Whether through isolation, financial uncertainty, grief or trepidation over whether life would ever feel the same, the pandemic did a number on all of us. For many artists, there was the added challenge of losing access to the resources needed to make new work, but for some, seeing through their sudden and random bouts of creativity became a necessity. This was the case for Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen, two out-of-work actors who, during the UK’s third lockdown, decided to mount a production of Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’ entirely within the virtual world of Grand Theft Auto Online. We follow Crane and Oosterveen’s avatars, who are joined by Crane’s wife, filmmaker Pinny Grylls – her avatar documenting their pursuit…

Directed by MAURA DELPERO Starring GIUSEPPE DE DOMENICO, TOMMASO RAGNO, MARTINA SCRINZI Released 17 JANUARY The relationships we forge in life often aren’t always smooth-sailing. They can be both loving and heartbreaking at the same time. That being said, perhaps the most complex of relationships isn’t ones with romantic intrigue, but with our own families. Maura Delpero’s Vermiglio is an Italian drama that won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2024 Venice Film Festival, and went on to be a rich headliner on the year’s ensuing festival circuit. Set in the scenic yet remote Alpine village of Vermiglio in 1944, there isn’t much noise about World War Two that is happing just over the hilly horizon. The only noise comes from the unexpected arrival of Pietro (Giuseppe De Domenico), a Sicilian soldier who…

Directed by RUNGANO NYONI Starring SUSAN CHARDY, ELIZABETH CHISELA, HENRY BJ PHIRI Released 6 DECEMBER One evening, while driving home from a friend’s fancy dress party, Shula (Susan Chardy) discovers a dead boy in the middle of a deserted road. On closer inspection, she realises it’s her Uncle Fred. Being a level-headed young woman who is good in a crisis, Shula calls her father for advice. After asking her to send him money for rent, Dad assures her he’ll arrive at the scene shortly to assist (but she’ll need to pay for his taxi too). The tragicomic opening scene of Rungano Nyoni’s second feature is a microcosm of what will unfold during the film; Shula – restrained, efficient, mature – is saddled with the increasingly manic demands and expectations of her extended family,…

Directed by MARIELLE HELLER Starring AMY ADAMS, SCOOT MCNAIRY, JESSICA HARPER Released 6 DECEMBER Marielle Heller’s Nightbitch is the kind of sincere, mid-budget indie that was all the rage in the late ’90s and early ’00s. During the turn of the century, films began to deconstruct the traditional roles of the American family that were established as a luxury of post-war society. We all know the image; the father goes to work; the children go to school; while the mother stays at home and tends to the house, cooking and cleaning while always waiting for a return. To be a mother is to be occupied for the rest of your life. Even after the child has physically left your body, they remain a part of you, and as the mother, you, more than…

Directed by JAMES MANGOLD Starring TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET, EDWARD NORTON, ELLE FANNING Released 17 JANUARY The worst scene in the Coen brothers’ 2013 film Inside Llewyn Davis is vastly superior to the best scene in James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, an icky, fawning screen bio of Ebbing, Minnesota’s own barrowboy-capped minstrel, Robert Zimmerman. I state this for the simple reason that the Coens’ film is about something, and Mangold’s film isn’t. It’s been made for the sole purpose of visualising a short stretch of pop history and creating a glossy, unnecessary record of fact. There’s no arc; few compelling characters; no coherent drama or sense of lessons being learned, wisdom imparted and difficult emotions grappled with. The screenplay seems tactically averse to any kind of antagonism, always on Dylan’s side of things and often…

10 ON BECOMING A GUINEA FOWL DIRECTED BY Rungano Nyoni All the ingredients were there in Zambian-Welsh filmmaker Rungano Nyoni’s 2017 debut feature, I Am Not a Witch, and frankly it’s something of a travesty that we had to wait seven long years for a follow-up. But when this new one arrived, it expanded on that promise in new and exciting ways, telling of ritualised cycles of abuse within an extended family and one woman’s surreal and stifled attempts to hold the abusers to account. DJ 9 JANET PLANET DIRECTED BY Annie Baker There’s a high chance you blinked and missed the scintillating and confident debut feature from lauded playwright Annie Baker when it whisked through UK cinemas, but we wanted to give this wonderful film, about a disquieting mother-daughter…

Directed by VÁCLAV VORLÍCEK Starring LIBUSE SAFRÁNKOVÁ, PAVEL TRÁVNÍCEK, CAROLA BRAUNBOCK Blu-ray/DVD Released 16 DECEMBER Václav Vorlícek’s Three Wishes for Cinderella retells the Cinderella story in a way that is both recognisable and not. Taking place within various stunning, heavily snowcoated settings and featuring a variety of natural imagery, it is a version that’s deglamorised and decadent but more beautiful and mystical as a result. This rendition sees Cinderella (Libuse Safránková) as a small-town vagabond, bullied and punished by her stepmother. When seeking solace in the forest among the animals, she encounters the prince (Pavel Trávnícek). Far from impressed by him, she chastises him for his advances and then steals his horse. From this begins a journey that turns them from enemies to lovers, and Cinderella from outcast to folk hero, leading up…

Directed by HENRY HATHAWAY Starring GARY COOPER, FRANCHOT TONE, RICHARD CROMWELL Blu-ray/DVD Released 20 JANUARY Were Adolf Hitler still up, about and with us, he’d likely be smashing the pre-order button on this luxe new home ents release of Henry Hathaway’s 1935 adaptation of Francis Yeats-Brown’s 1930 novel, ‘The Lives of a Bengal Lancer.’ Apocryphally thought to be one of the Fuhrer’s Friday night faves, the film follows trigger-happy Canadian goombah, Ltn McGregor (Gary Cooper), as he and his pith-helmeted British cohorts scour the plains of northern India and blast away anyone who’s wearing a turban. It’s a fascinating, quaint relic of a bygone era when imperialist plunder was not believed to be such a bad thing, though director Hathaway retains a lightly whimsical tone, alternating the gun battles with various sporting contests…

Directed by LUCA GUADAGNINO Starring DANIEL CRAIG, DREW STARKEY, LESLEY MANVILLE Released 13 DECEMBER The first time that lascivious raconteur William Lee (Daniel Craig) notices Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), he’s watching a group of men bartering over a cockfight in the street. Allerton emerges from a bar, cleancut, moving in slow motion in the heat of the Mexican night – for Lee, it’s like the whole world just shifted on its axis. Luca Guadagnino’s anachronistic decision to set this pivotal moment in Queer to Nirvana’s ‘Come as You Are’ speaks to his provocative sensibilities, but the willful obliteration of period detail is not an empty gesture. The film features two other Nirvana songs and two Prince tracks – who better to soundtrack a film about the all-encompassing nature of desire than two men…

Directed by JUSTIN KURZEL Starring JUDE LAW, NICHOLAS HOULT, TYE SHERIDAN Released 26 DECEMBER Robert Jay Mathews was the founder of a white supremacist organisation that lends its name to Justin Kurzel’s cop procedural, The Order. In a 1984 letter, Mathews explained his desire to “quit being the hunted and become the hunter.” This notion sits at the heart of the film, a captivating cat and mouse chronicle of the rise of Nazi-inspired ideology in ’80s USA. A police procedural needs a tormented copper, and Jude Law fills this role as ageing agent Terry Husk. Initially investigating violent robberies, he ends up heading an operation to catch Nicholas Hoult’s Mathews, who plans to kickstart a race war in America. As an entry to this flinty genre, The Order proves a competently realised affair.…

Directed by JESSE EISENBERG Starring JESSE EISENBERG, KIERAN CULKIN, WILL SHARPE Released 8 JANUARY Trying to comprehend the root cause of pain and the depths of the human soul is an ambitious task. It’s one which writer, director and actor Jesse Eisenberg approaches with poignant reflection and laugh-out-loud humour as he traverses fractious political and personal history. Eisenberg’s third feature film as writer/director takes on the form of an elegantly-composed road trip movie complete with Frédéric Chopin soundtrack. It’s a deeply personal journey across Poland that follows two cousins, Benji (Kieran Culkin) and David (Jesse Eisenberg), who use an inheritance from their late grandmother to head on a group tour led by earnest guide James (Will Sharpe doing a fine Yorkshire accent). The rest of the group is made up of divorcee Marcia…

Directed by VICTOR KOSSAKOVSKY Released 10 JANUARY People tend to have a sixth sense when they’re standing inside a building that they know is not very robust. And it’s a sense that is leaned upon more and more regularly in a world where fast and cheap is the order of the day when it comes to urban planning and construction. Victor Kossakovsky’s new, sensually-inclined documentary, Architecton, takes aim at the modern age’s fetish for all things concrete and its embrace of the ephemeral, but in a way that prefers to show rather than tell. His camera glides across the mighty edifices of stone monuments from the days of antiquity, still standing after centuries of wear and tear. These images are juxtaposed with concrete monstrosities that tumble like matchstick sculptures at the lightest…

Directed by BRADY CORBET Starring ADRIEN BRODY, GUY PEARCE, FELICITY JONES Released 24 JANUARY Louis Kahn, one of the great American architects, adored the music of Bach. “All Bach cared about was the truth. Indefinable, unmeasurable truth. And so it is with architecture. It’s a search for the truth.” Kahn, who had immigrated to the United States with his family as a young boy, lived and worked in Philadelphia, where he would begin a career defined by geometric forms and a reverence for the ancient ruins of Europe. His work inspired generations of architects and artists to search for their own truth. Brady Corbet’s study of a fictional Hungarian-American architect named László Tóth (Adrien Brody) has an advantage over a building in that it can be both a fabrication and deconstruction at the…

Directed by MIKE LEIGH Starring MARIANNE JEAN-BAPTISTE, MICHELE AUSTIN, DAVID WEBBER Released 31 JANUARY Mike Leigh’s last film set in contemporary Britain, Another Year, had its world premiere on the fifth day of David Cameron’s Prime Ministership. The subsequent decade and a half of Tory Britain yielded Mr. Turner and Peterloo, while Hard Truths, which premiered a few weeks into the Starmer years, will have to stand as his comprehensive statement on the historical epoch in which the social contract that undergirds his collaborative methods and collectivist politics was thoroughly, perhaps permanently undermined. All that has built up in the last 15 years comes pouring out in a torrent from the mouth of Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), who is an amalgam of the small ways in which we’ve all been changed since the pandemic: haunted…

Directed by HALINA REIJN Starring NICOLE KIDMAN, HARRIS DICKINSON, ANTONIO BANDERAS Released 10 JANUARY While the internet continues to debate the “necessity” of sex scenes in cinema, the sickos and freaks among us are crying out for more carnal pleasure on screen. To deny the existence and power of desire is to deny a valuable (often fun!) part of the human experience – collectively we’ve been doing it since the beginning of time, but apparently it’s still considered more distasteful to simulate sex than to depict someone being violently murdered. In Halina Reijn’s Babygirl, corporate high-flier Romy (Nicole Kidman) knows all about the power of denial. Despite being adored by husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas), she’s never once orgasmed during sex with him in 19 years of marriage – she instead sneaks off to…

Directed by PABLO LARRAÍN Starring ANGELINA JOLIE, ALBA ROHRWACHER, PIERFRANCESCO FAVINO Released 10 JANUARY In a 1983 televised tribute to Maria Callas, Leonard Bernstein referred to the soprano as “the bible of opera”, such was her impact upon the art form. Before her death in 1977 at the age of 53, Callas had become one of the most revered and reviled figures in music, known for her distinctive voice and temperamental personality. In a 1955 newsreel of Callas rehearsing for a production of Bellini’s Norma, the narration cuttingly states, “If you want to hear Callas, don’t get all dressed up. Just go to a rehearsal; she usually stays to the end of those.” But for all her flaws, there’s a reason Callas earned the nickname ‘La Divina’ in life; her talent was transcendent.…

Directed by EIICHI KUDO Starring YÛSAKU MATSUDA, HYÔE ENOKI, MARI HENMI Blu-ray/DVD Released 16 DECEMBER Known for 1960s action classics like 13 Assassins (1963) and The Great Killing (1964), Eiichi Kudo spent large parts of the 1970s making television dramas prior to returning to the big screen with yakuza franchise film Aftermath of Battles Without Honor and Humanity in 1979. Then Yokohama BJ Blues, made two years later, took him in a different direction. The film’s slow burning detective plot sees BJ (Yusaku Matsuda), a blues bar musician who moonlights as a private detective, embroiled in a gangland drug deal after he witnesses the murder of his friend. Chasing down the culprit leads him to the centre of an underworld he had previously only glimpsed, and eventually something resembling a mystery narrative unfolds.…

Directed by ERMANNO OLMI Starring LOREDANA DETTO, SANDRO PANSERI, TULLIO KEZICH Blu-ray/DVD Released 27 JANUARY Arriving some years after the height of the Italian neorealist movement, Ermanno Olmi’s Il Posto (1961) follows Domenico (Sandro Panseri), a young man who leaves school to seek employment, navigating first the interview process for a company in Milan, and then the doldrums of life in the office. In the process, he meets Antonietta (Loredana Detto), also new to the working world. They explore a tentative flirtation, but, divided by departments and their differing lunch hours, the banality of bureaucracy keeps them distanced. Instead, Domenico dedicates himself to the office, sliding into the rhythms of the working world, sitting sullenly at his bottom of the rung desk, wondering what awaits him. The film blends the urban realism of…

Directed by KIM JEE-WOON Starring SONG KANG-HO, LEE BYUNG-HUN, JUNG WOO-SUNG Blu-ray/DVD Released 9 DECEMBER Fun with a capital F and repeated in triplicate for emphasis, Kim Jee-Woon’s full-throated steampunk homage to Sergio Leone’s “Dollars” trilogy supercharges its every frame to achieve a maximum enjoyment capacity. Even fairweather Korean cinema fans will instantly recognise the “weird” one: Song Kang-ho, who plays a pistol-popping chancer in flying goggles who manages to nab a much-sought-after treasure map during a routine train robbery. He quickly realises he’s hit paydirt when the whiskey-swilling ”bad” guy (Lee Byung-hun) rolls up with a hoard of minions and much artillery. But then if things weren’t screwed up enough, the “good” one (Jung Woosung), styled as a valorous, lantern-jawed gunslinger, hops aboard and starts taking potshots at the bad guy. This…

“THERE WAS ONE, THERE WERE HUNDREDS, HUNDREDS OF NICKELS AND WHITE HOUSES SCATTERED ACROSS THE LAND LIKE PAIN FACTORIES.”- COLSON WHITEHEAD, ‘THE NICKEL BOYS’ PART 1: WHAT WE DON’T SEE Pain factories, sites of atrocity where perpetrators commit violence against groups they revile as sub-human, remain in business in the 21st century. While modern classrooms teach children about historic horrors, new pain factories spring up, just never by name. There tends to be a sheen of mass improvement about these places. What can we even say about Arbeit macht frei (Work will set you free)? At the segregated reform school The Nickel Academy (a fictionalised version of Florida’s abusive Dozier School, which only closed its doors in 2011) Black boys are instructed that if they follow the rules they will…

Directed by RUTH BECKERMANN Released 6 DECEMBER The first words in Ruth Beckermann’s Favoriten, a documentary about a Viennese primary school class, are spoken not by any of the film’s subjects, but by its 72-year-old director. In voiceover, against a colourful backdrop of children’s drawings, Beckermann reads the names of the 25 students and one teacher she spent nearly three years filming from fall 2020 to spring 2023. Among other things, this quasiroll call is the first hint that the movie, despite being billed as a film by Ruth Beckermann, was made in full collaboration with the people we’ll see on screen – and further, that it will make no attempt to disguise the presence or perspective of the filmmaker. Shot at the Volksschule Bernhardtstalgasse, Vienna’s largest elementary school, the film follows…

Directed by MICHAEL GRACEY Starring ROBBIE WILLIAMS, JONNO DAVIES, STEVE PEMBERTON Released 26 DECEMBER If you had asked me at the top end of 2024 how excited I felt about seeing a biopic of Robbie Williams directed by the bloke who made The Greatest Showman, the answer would have been a swift “Not at all”. Now, as a fairly hodawful year draws to a close, I sit here with egg on my face, owing Michael Gracey an apology, because it turns out Better Man, the musical documenting the rise-and-fall-and-rise of British pop’s Cheekiest Chappy, is genuinely good. But in my defence, when this project was announced there was absolutely no mention of The Monkey. Because, unbeknownst to most prior to the film’s premiere, Robbie Williams would not be portrayed in his biopic by…

Directed by MAGNUS VON HORN Starring VIC CARMEN SONNE, TRINE DYRHOLM, BESIR ZECIRI Released 10 JANUARY It helps to have some vague stylistic or thematic justification for choosing to shoot your modern film in black and white. Magnus von Horn’s The Girl with the Needle thankfully has both, in its gothic, crepuscular depiction of World War One-era Copenhagen, as well as its rogues gallery of tortured miscreants who live by an aggressively binary and personally-ascribed form of morality. This is a story in which colour, radiance and vibrancy have purposefully been sapped from the menu, lest the resolute bleakness of the lives it captures be diluted in any way. We meet Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne), a ditsy but strong-willed seamstress, as she’s being tossed out of her single-room apartment for unpaid rent. It…

Directed by NAOKO YAMADA Starring AKARI TAKAISHI, SAYU SUZUKAWA, TAISEI KIDO Released 31 JANUARY The creation of music works especially well as a device for films about teenagers finding themselves. When performing, introverted youngsters come out of their shells, connecting to others in ways they couldn’t have imagined. In Naoko Yamada’s wonderful new animation, The Colors Within, connection is key. It’s all about characters drawn together through unusual circumstances, each unable to categorise their feelings but all persevering to express what seems intangible through songwriting. What they can’t say with words, they can at least convey with synths. Words prove tricky for describing the conceit at play with the film’s primary protagonist, Totsuko. A shy student at a Catholic girls’ school, she has the ability to see people as colours. Each person has…

Directed by TARSEM SINGH Starring JENNIFER LOPEZ, VINCE VAUGHN, VINCENT D'ONOFRIO Blu-ray/DVD Released 20 JANUARY Given his background in music videos, it is no surprise that the imagery in Tarsem Singh’s debut feature would be eye-catching. At the centre of 2000’s The Cell are a series of disturbing, dreamlike sequences that take place within the mind of a serial killer, wherein his warped subconscious is revealed. These images are among the most strange, surprising, and perversely beautiful that the filmmaker realised on screen. In the convoluted story, FBI agent Peter Novak (Vince Vaughn) is trailing Carl Stargher (Vincent D'Onofrio). When he catches Stargher, he finds him in a coma, meaning key information about a victim cannot be unlocked. That is until child therapist Dr Catherine Deane (Jennifer Lopez) uses an experimental virtual reality-like…

Directed by NOBORU TANAKA Starring JUNKO MIYASHITA, HIROSHI CHÔ, RENJI ISHIBASHI Blu-ray/DVD Released 16 DECEMBER As an entry in Japanese studio Nikkatsu’s famous Roman Porno series – wherein directors were granted a great degree of artistic freedom assuming they met the quota of four sex scenes per hour of the film – 1976’s Watcher in the Attic is a film where you know what you’re going to get. But as a “pink film” made by Noboru Tanaka, a director considered one of sexploitation’s foremost visionaries, the result will definitely surprise. Featuring multiple scenes in which a man dressed as a clown performs various sex acts, it is not exactly straightforward titillation but instead something that’s consistently bizarre. The film is set in 1920s Tokyo and circles around the activities of the tenants of…

I should start this dispatch with a confession of my bias: Tokyo is one of my favourite cities in the world. I first visited on a solo trip in 2019, and have spent every year since saving to go back. I was there for four days in April of this year with my sister on holiday, but when the kind folks at the Tokyo International Film Festival invited LWLies to visit for their 37th edition in November, no 14-hour plane journey was going to stand in my way. A dazzling metropolis that seems to dwarf London in scale, ambition, technology, and hospitality, Tokyo is a dream location for a film festival, particularly considering the impact of Japanese cinema on the global stage. Yet the Tokyo International Film Festival might not…

There will likely never be anyone like Chantal Akerman. Rarely has a filmmaker so radically and successfully challenged the formal boundaries of cinema, entirely negated narrative, militantly eschewed the need to conform, while at the same time, boasting an incredibly varied back catalogue. Although most commonly known for her contemplative, minimalist cinema, she also directed comedies, a musical, documentaries and literary adaptations. But her most celebrated work, 1975’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which catapulted to the top of the Sight & Sound’s decennial Greatest Films of All Time poll, has made the most noise as a watershed moment in structuralist and feminist cinema alike. The image of Delphine Seyrig as the titular character, sitting at a table and staring into nothing can never be banished from…