Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 107 i Little White Lies

Oscar Micheaux Years active: 1919 – 1948 Pioneering and prolific, Micheaux produced and directed more than 45 ‘race’ films – movies with African American casts, aimed at African American audiences, which challenged Hollywood’s negative portrayals of Black people. Micheaux’s Within Our Gates (1920), a silent, searing depiction of racial violence, is the earliest surviving film directed by an African American. Spencer Williams Jr Active: 1928 – 1962 Another pioneer of African American cinema. Williams’ The Blood of Jesus (1941), a modern morality play in which a Baptist woman is tempted by the devil in purgatory, was a commercial hit and, in 1991, was selected for preservation in the US National Film Registry. Gordon Parks Active: 1964 – 1987 Enter blaxploitation: Parks’ 1971 crime thriller Shaft was seminal, with its box…

Exemplary mid-century tailoring is a Ruth E Carter speciality, whether collaborating with Spike Lee on Malcolm X or Ava DuVernay on Selma. Carter is not bound by one era, having won two Oscars (making history as the first Black person to win for costume design in 2019) for her work with Ryan Coogler on Black Panther and its sequel. Now, Carter has turned her attention to late Prohibition-era Mississippi, reuniting with Coogler for Sinners, in a setting that combines the supernatural with grounded historical details like sweaty denim workwear. LWLies: Do you draw on past experiences when approaching a genre-bending project like Sinners? Carter: I always like to say I’m the sum of all my parts. Working with Spike Lee, Ava DuVernay and Ryan really taught me how to approach…

Two-time Oscar-winner Ludwig Göransson has collaborated with Ryan Coogler since college, so it was a no-brainer for the Swedish composer to hop aboard the Sinners train. Not only do the duo have a creative partnership going back more than 15 years, but the 1930s-set story centres on a musician and the genre born in the Mississippi Delta. Having long wanted to go on the Blues Trail, Göransson achieved this dream on a research trip accompanied by his guitar-teacher father – whose love of blues imprinted on his son at an early age. LWLies: Not only are you scoring music and composing songs, but you are also an executive producer on Sinners. What was it like being a daily presence on set? Göransson: Since it was new to me, I wasn’t…

Designing the Afro-Futurist Black Panther utopia led to a first Academy Award for production designer Hannah Beachler. In her fifth collaboration with director Ryan Coogler, Beachler takes on Black Southern history infused with the supernatural, drawing on myriad filmmakers for inspiration and researching building techniques to fit the late Prohibition-era setting. Music is everywhere in Sinners, including the architecture. Look closely within the sawmillturned-juke joint for references to characters, locations, and themes. Without revealing the precise wall, Beachler teases that an impression of the record player volume levels of Howlin’ Wolf’s song ‘Smokestack Lightning’ was rusted onto the side of the juke joint. “It’s like that chord we froze in time and put on the wall in a way that blends in,” Beachler says. Here, the production designer reveals other…

A note from the editor… There comes a time in the life of even the most hardened magazine editor to shed a salt tear or two in remembrance of those who have fallen on the field of battle (journalism). In researching this article on the sartorial dalliances of those referred to in popular fiction as “vampires”, veteran fashion stringer Kumari V succumbed to the allure of her seductive quarries and now lives in seclusion as a mysterious “child of the night” (her words). The article herewith was delivered to our offices by raven and inked in parchment that closely resembled some sort of tanned animal skin. Upon closer inspection, it was actually just water-damaged baking sheet. Still, we ask that you please enjoy this survey of vampire fashion in the…

Released 11 APRIL ANTICIPATION.  Another day, another Beatle doc. ENJOYMENT.  Stylishly made, but ultimately hamstrung in scope and theme. IN RETROSPECT.  All we are saying… is give Yoko a chance. One day, there’ll be a documentary for every footnote in the story of The Beatles. Bringing us one step closer to that eventuality is One to One: John & Yoko, a heady jaunt through Lennon and Ono’s first 18 months living in New York City in the early ’70s. The story goes that the couple spent much of this period in bed watching television, yet in reality they were feverishly active, lending their voice and fame to the political counterculture. Nevertheless, directors Kevin Macdonald and Sam Rice-Edwards use that bedbound image as the aesthetic north star, returning time and again to…

Starring  DEBA HEKMAT, NARGES RASHIDI, SOLLY MCLEOD Released 4 APRIL ANTICIPATION.  Hadn’t heard much going in, but always a sucker for a London-set film ENJOYMENT.  Deeply moving and organically funny. IN RETROSPECT. Fresh blood in British film! Hooray! Deba Hekmat leads Last Swim’s ensemble cast as Ziba, a second gen Iranian overachiever who’s love of astrophysics has her vying for a place at the prestigious UCL. Her friends, Tara (Lydia Fleming), Merf (Jay Lycurgo) and Shea (Solly McLeod) are less academically ambitious, ready to pursue adult life as dancers, models and car mechanics respectively. However, this doesn’t stop them from joining Ziba on her wild bucket list journey around the north side of the capital. Armed with Ziba’s printed itinerary, the loveable – and totally believable – crew of best friends don’t…

 Starring  RADHIKA APTE, ASHOK PATHAK, CHHAYA KADAM Released 14 MARCH ANTICIPATION. Went in blind, but comes with many festival plaudits from its journey around the circuit. ENJOYMENT.  Deadpan drollery. IN RETROSPECT.  Like its heroine, this flouts all convention. “What do normal people do on a Sunday?”, asks Uma (Radhika Apte), some way into writer/director Karan Kandhari’s Sister Midnight. “We’re not normal people,” her husband Gopal (Ashok Pathak) replies. Gopal is not wrong. For even though the film opens with the couple travelling by train from that most conventional of Indian practices, an arranged marriage, once they reach Gopal’s shack, he passes out, even though Uma understands, and is willing to perform, her conjugal duties. Uma is clueless, though, on how to prepare food or keep house while Gopal is at work, and…

 Starring ZHAO TAO, LI ZHUBIN, PAN JIANLIN Released 11 APRIL ANTICIPATION. Jia’s first narrative feature in six years. ENJOYMENT. Immerse yourself in the rolling tides of history (and Zhao Tao’s face). IN RETROSPECT. Moving, stirring, brilliant work from one of cinema’s great director/star partnerships. There have been a surfeit of films in recent years by older auteurs looking back, in one way or another, at their legacies. From Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman to Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans, the trend of the decade is for filmmakers of an advanced age to reckon with their filmographies. Jia Zhangke is only 54, but he breaks the mould with Caught by the Tides, a radical reconstruction of some of his earliest work. It follows lovers Qiao (Jia muse Zhao Tao) and Bin (Li Zhubin) across two…

1946 — 2025 I was on the bus when I found out, on my way home from work. The news trickled in on social media, circulated in group chats – at first everyone wanted to assume it was an unfortunate case of misinformation, but then the statements came through: David Lynch was gone. I cried, and felt weird for crying, because I don’t usually do that when famous people I had no material connection to pass away. Perhaps it was the suddenness. David Lynch was one of a select number of filmmakers who seemed ageless; even in photographs from his youth he looks mostly the same, albeit with fewer wrinkles and a swoop of hair that’s dark instead of brilliant bright white. His death felt like a shock to the…

Oakland-born director Ryan Coogler is always conscious of his roots. With a filmography in which each work threads the needle between franchise legacy and personal struggle, his characters are usually in some kind of communion between the past, or with a previous generation (or both). One of the most touching moments of 2015’s Creed sees Coogler employ editing to convey the spirit of the main character’s father reaching him for a brief moment. 2018’s Black Panther takes things a step further and features a tangible realm for the protagonist’s deceased ancestors. His new film, Sinners – technically a vampire movie, but one that chafes against simple categorisation – is a sort of communication with his own family, via its Mississippi setting. The director spoke about the film’s origins and how…

Featuring! MILES CATON RUTH E CARTER JACK O’CONNELL HAILEE STEINFELD WUNMI MOSAKU AUTUMN DURALD ARKAPAW LUDWIG GÖRANSSON HANNAH BEACHLER It comes as no surprise to hear that Sinners is a film that was ripped from the heart. Being able to count himself as one of the most reliable and resourceful directors in the world – and, more than that, a reliable hit-maker to boot – Ryan Coogler delivers an original story that’s steeped in arcane lore, cinematic references points and trenchant personal connections. It tells of two twins, Smoke and Stack, both played by Michael B Jordan, who return from Chicago to their homestead of Mississippi, start up a local juke joint and make some money. But forces stronger than that of capitalism make their task much tougher; a vampiric…

Via lauded early roles on British TV, Wunmi Mosaku has risen up to become one of the most reliable character actors on the block. She’s wowed in Remi Weekes 2020 thriller, His House, and became a perennial scene stealer in her various MCU escapades, including TV’s Loki and Deadpool & Wolverine. Here we get the details on her role as Hoodoo priestess Annie in Ryan Coogler’s Sinners. LWLies: I’d love to know a bit about your awareness of Ryan Coogler and his work, prior to coming on board this. Do you recall the first thing of his you saw, and the impact it had on you? Mosaku: Yeah, the first thing I saw was Black Panther, and it blew me away. I loved the way it presents all these arguments…

Ace cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw came up in this industry with writer-director Gia Coppola, having shot her 2013 debut feature, Palo Alto, and everything she made since, up to and including this year’s The Last Showgirl. She caught the eye of Ryan Coogler and was snapped up for the epic shoot of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and their partnership continues with Sinners, in which she was able to dabble with IMAX cameras for the first time. LWLies: From your vantage, what are the first conversations you are having with Ryan about the aesthetic, the look, how are you going to achieve a certain visual aspect of the film that he’s trying to make? Durald Arkapaw: I was working on another film, and he sent me the script and said, ‘Hey…

Among the legendary musicians of the American South’s Delta blues sound of the early 20th century, none has lapsed more into the realm of outright mythology than Robert Johnson. Neither the first nor last musician to have been supposedly granted supreme ability by a deal with the Devil, Johnson nonetheless has become most synonymous with the tale, having briefly disappeared from view around 1931 as a supposedly dismal guitarist only to reemerge months later as the most skilled player in Mississippi. Coupled with an early death purportedly at the hands of a lover’s jealous boyfriend that made him the inaugural member of the so-called 27 Club, Johnson was not merely ripe for rediscovery during the folk revival of the 1960s, but primed for romantic martyrdom by the British invasion rockers…

It’s been six long years since Parasite broke Bong Joon Ho through to the mainstream, netting him a Palme d’Or, four Academy Awards and a bumper box office of $250 million. In the interim he’s been hard at work on Mickey 17, an adaptation of Edward Asher’s novel ‘Mickey 7’, which Warner Bros and Plan B tapped Director Bong to direct hot on the success of Parasite. For his third English-language film, he collabs with Robert Pattinson (twice) and Naomi Ackie on a sci-fi spectacle with replicants, aliens, and a Trumpian politician. The results are as chaotic and charming as we’ve come to expect from South Korea’s favourite son. LWLies: The novel on which Mickey 17 is based has so much going on: alien creatures; human printing. Was there a…

 Starring ALONSO RUIZPALACIOS Released 28 MARCH ANTICIPATION.  Professional kitchens have become a saturated subject in pop culture. ENJOYMENT. Alonso Ruizpalacios breathes new life into Arnold Wesker’s play. IN RETROSPECT. Powered by Raúl Briones’ magnetic, manic performance. Pop culture is hardly lacking for examples of how stressful operating a professional kitchen can be – from Campbell Scott and Stanley Tucci’s classic Big Night to television smash hit The Bear. But there’s still room for more stories in this subgenre, as Alonso Ruizpalacios proves with La Cocina (The Kitchen), set in a Times Square chain restaurant during the lunchtime rush. Based on Arnold Wesker’s 1959 play of the same name, its intricate character relationships and intensely stressful yet balletic kitchen scenes make for compelling viewing, so much so that the 140-minute runtime flies by.…

Released 21 MARCH ANTICIPATION.  Can Flow live up to the festival hype? ENJOYMENT. Much more than a cute animal caper. IN RETROSPECT.  Gints Zilbalodis: remember that name! If there is a cat in your animated film, conventional wisdom dictates that it must be wisecracking, aloof, and preferably voiced by a B-list celebrity. Even the adorable moggies at the heart of many Studio Ghibli properties can’t escape the Cattitude Curse that has long plagued our feline friends in film – but there’s a disruptor in our midst. In his second feature film, which took five and a half years to make using open-source software Blender, Gints Zilbalodis centres a small grey cat who doesn’t utter a single word. Neither do his crew mates (a capybara, a dog, a secretarybird and a ring-tailed…

Starring TESSA VAN DEN BROECK, RUTH BECQUART, KOEN DE BOUW Released 25 APRIL ANTICIPATION. Premiered at the less-glamourous Critics’s Week sidebar at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. ENJOYMENT.  Leonardo Van Dijl demonstrates great poise and rigour in this slick, steely piece of storytelling. IN RETROSPECT. Not quite a rout, but a very impressive first film with more clearly to come. This is a #MeToo film that’s entirely focused on the experience of the victims, spending little-to-no time worrying about whether the obvious perpetrator has been “cancelled”. Leonardo Van Dijl’s promising film is about how difficult it is to speak up and tell your story, even when there are signs and signals coming from all angles saying that now is the right time to do so. But also, it empathises with and respects…

 Starring  MASAKI SUDA, KOTONE FURUKAWA, DAIKEN OKUDAIRA Released 25 APRIL ANTICIPATION. The first Kiyoshi Kurosawa film to recieve a UK theatrical distribution in nearly a decade. ENJOYMENT. The all-time bleakest episode of Only Fools and Horses. IN RETROSPECT. A striking genre film about the apocalyptic effects of late capitalism on human relations. Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 2001 film Pulse portrayed the still young internet as a means through which spirits of the dead could transmute themselves from the finite limits of limbo: breaking into the land of the living like static interference to exacerbate already widespread alienation and sow seeds of destruction. Nearly 25 years later, in the doomscrolling and enshittification era, the internet has since been confirmed as a portal to hell. Cloud is the Japanese master of dread’s latest rumination on this…

One of things that allows Hollywood to remain ahead of the game when it comes to the surfeit of visual media available to audiences now is that they have a monopoly on honest-togoodness movie stars. And it’s double your pleasure in Ryan Coogler’s Prohibition-era set Sinners, as AAA-lister, Michael B Jordan, takes on the dual role of twins Smoke and Stack, returning from a stretch in the big city to the Mississippi homestead where they discover some gnarly business going down. The Jordan/Coogler partnership began in 2013 with the multi-garlanded drama, Fruitvale Station, and has continued via Creed and a deuce of Black Panther movies. And as classic actor/director partnerships go, this one’s up there with the likes of De Niro and Scorsese, Wayne and Ford, and Mifune and Kurosawa.…

Casting the world’s biggest superstars in your movie is one thing, but then plucking the correct person for the correct role out of relative obscurity is also quite the fine art. Miles Caton, a celebrated young gospel-soul singer, was spotted on stage by Ryan Coogler and given his first bite of the apple in the vital role of Sammy in the new film, Sinners. Sammy is an upstart blues minstrel whose guitar is freighted with mystic powers. LWLies: What was your first encounter with Ryan Coogler’s cinema? Caton: Yeah, Black Panther has gotta be number one. I saw that movie when I was 13 years old. That movie was crazy because I love Marvel, so to see his take on the Black Panther and the way they just made that…

He gave us the ultimate lairy lad in his breakthrough role in TV’s Skins (a germination tank for most of Hollywood’s A-list now), and has, through films such as prison drama Starred Up and war survival movie ’71, proven himself to be a menacing, tenacious character actor par excellence. Having already developed a fine Mississippi accent while doing Tennessee Williams’ ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’ on the stage opposite Sienna Miller in 2017, he rolls it out a again for the beastly and seductive Remmick in Sinners. LWLies: Could you talk to me about your first encounter with Ryan Coogler? How did he talk about the film to you? O’Connell: Definitely, man. The way it was arranged, there was a meeting scheduled one evening. I got sent the script,…

From earning an Oscar nomination for her role in the Coen brothers’ True Grit at age 14 to juggling a music career, social media empire and proving to be one of the finest voice actors of her generation with the animated Spider-verse movies, Hailee Steinfeld decided to take on a big new challenge with the role of the ethereal gobetween in Ryan Coogler’s uncategorisable Sinners. LWLies: Tell us about the reaction you had when you first read the script for Sinners. Steinfeld: It’s always funny when you get a call from the team and they’re like, ‘There’s this movie and it sounds like it’s this, and these people might be involved,’ and it creates this image, this feeling, this story in your head of what it might be. And I’ve…

In 1972 – the same year that William Crain’s Blacula was made and released – Bill Gunn was approached by an independent production company to make his own Black vampire film. They offered him a budget of $350,000 and sent him on his way, expecting a conventional Blaxploitation film like Blacula, which turned out to be a box office success despite mixed reviews. Instead, Gunn took the money and made a Black vampire film unlike anything that cinema had seen before. Starring an all-Black cast and showing little interest in white people, Ganja & Hess broke through the boundaries of what Black American film could be in the early 1970s. Gunn crafts an experimental, moody look at a man unravelling and the woman who came to love him amid all…

 Starring  TILDA SWINTON, MICHAEL SHANNON, GEORGE MACKAY Released 28 MARCH ANTICIPATION.  Oppenheimer’s documentaries are great, but not hyped for a fictional post-apocalyptic musical. ENJOYMENT.  Oddly charming, even Tilda Swinton’s terrible singing is affecting. IN RETROSPECT. Melancholic and nicely observed but lacking a climactic bite. There are certain memorable dance sequences in Joshua Oppenheimer’s post-apocalyptic fiction debut that truly capture those joyful, living-in-the-moment experiences. At points, there’s an enthralling energy that unexpectedly bursts out of the screen. Michael Shannon and Tim McInnerny tap dancing together in the glowing warmth of a palatial bunker surrounded by priceless works of art exudes the uncanny magic of Spike Jonze directing Greta Gerwig in Arcade Fire’s Afterlife live performance or Christopher Walken in Fatboy Slim’s ‘Weapon of Choice’ music video. Taking its lead from Oppenheimer’s radical documentaries…

Starring JAMES MCARDLE, FIONNULA FLANAGAN, NIAMH CUSACK Released 4 APRIL ANTICIPATION. Slender source material, but it did win a London Film Festival Audience Award. ENJOYMENT. Broadly likeable, and the seasoned actors add a dash more pith and grit to what’s gone before. IN RETROSPECT. A Thorntons’ chocolate box – for mothers of every variety. Here’s an unexpected remake. Back in 2008, the Italian writer/director-star Gianni Di Gregorio – think Nanni Moretti, with fewer neuroses – enjoyed a pan-European matinee hit with Mid-August Lunch, a gentle-to-negligible comedy about a fiftysomething bachelor (played by Di Gregorio himself) obliged to attend not just his own aged mother but the mothers of several contemporaries. As its title hinted, this was a light repast of a film, though it took at least one twinklyeyed glance at a…

Quite possibly Latvia’s most famous son at time of writing, unassuming animator Gints Zilbalodis went on an extraordinary awards run for his latest feature, Flow, eventually returning home with an Oscar in his mitts for Best Animated Feature. And this digitally-rendered marvel, about a grey (not black!) cat fighting for survival in a geologically topsy turvy world, is more than deserving of its accolades. LWLies: I guess my first question to you is, do you have a cat? Zilbalodis: Not at the moment, but I had a cat growing up. So basically, the idea for this story came for me when I was in high school. I had a cat like that, and I made a short film about this cat and it’s not exactly the same story but it’s…

 Released 21 MARCH ANTICIPATION. Observational documentaries about autonomous communities can sometimes be tough going. ENJOYMENT.  This one is carefully considered and constructed, made with a real understanding of its world. IN RETROSPECT.  Lovely compositions, graceful camera movements, a perfectly crafted portrait of community life. Located in the outskirts of Nantes, the ZAD de Notre-Dames-des-Landes is a large, mostly agricultural area occupied, and defended by, an autonomous community of around 150 individuals. These people aim to cultivate a self-sufficient society free of interference from the state, and protect the land from development. In recent years, they have successfully resisted multiple eviction attempts and prevented an airport construction project, using the protest strategies suggested by the title of Ben Russell and Guillaume Cailleau’s portrait of the community, Direct Action. When making their film,…

On the cover Noa Denmon is a freelance illustrator who specialises in children’s books and editorial illustration. She predominately works with digital media but has been experimenting with watercolour and gouache in her illustrations as well. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with her partner and their dog, Bruce. This cover was such an exciting creative experience! It morphed with close collaboration from just one cover, to two! The process involved adding specific details to the twin brothers Micheal B Jordan plays in the Sinners: Smoke and Stack. Insta: @noadenmon…