Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 110 i Little White Lies

Heart on a Slab

Oscar Isaac first graced the cover of Little White Lies in January 2014 (issue #51) for Inside Llewyn Davis, where he delivered a remarkable performance as a rolling stone folk singer trying to return a missing cat. Eleven years later he’s done Star Wars, X-Men and Marvel, and gave a masterful turn in Paul Schrader’s The Card Counter that should have won him an Oscar if there was any justice in the world. At any rate, in Guillermo del Toro Isaac found a kindred spirit, and drew on his love of theatre and melodrama to bring Victor Frankenstein to life. LWLies: I asked Jacob this question too, but it would be great to start by talking about your experiences of Guillermo as a filmmaker before you two had any notion…

8 min

Weird science

When James Whale’s Frankenstein was unleashed in 1931, it set a cinematic template for Mary Shelley’s story that endures nearly a century later, while also departing radically from her original novel. The more than 400 feature-film adaptations (plus hundreds of shorts and TV shows) produced in its wake have displayed a push-pull relationship with the source material. Some, including Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 prestige pic and Guillermo del Toro’s new adaptation, have trumpeted their fidelity to the original text. Other filmmakers have used Shelley and/or Whale as mere jumping-off points for their wild imaginations. Here are 10 unusual adaptations from around the world that attest to the lasting influence of the story and its iconography… as well as its infinite flexibility. Frankenstein 1970 HOWARD W KOCH, 1958 Though the screen’s definitive…

5 min

Anatomy of Hell

One vital element that gives the oeuvre of the Mexican fabulist Guillermo del Toro a gratifying coherence is his love of otherworldly creatures – call them monsters, beings, experiments, chimeras or just evolutionary oddities out of step with the human world. Right back in his 1992 urtext, Cronos, we see a clockwork scarab that contains some unseen insectoid capable of administering earthly omnipotence to those that it stings. Its iconic design remains a masterpiece of memorable prop work and immaculate creativity, able to strike wonder and fear into the heart of the viewer, often at the same time. In our brief to the artist, illustrator and tattooist Sophie Mo, we asked her to imagine the world inside some of GDT’s most sensational creations. It is a hat tip to Victor…

Ballad of a Small Player

Directed by EDWARD BERGER Starring COLIN FARRELL, TILDA SWINTON, ALEX JENNINGS Released 17 OCTOBER There is not a singular aesthetic to decadency and yet all it takes is one brief sniff to feel it in the air. The first few minutes of Edward Berger’s Ballad of a Small Player broach decadence through its wealthier cousin: opulence. Colin Farrell’s Lord Doyle wakes up surrounded by empty champagne bottles and half-eaten plates of lobster in a suite that would easily house a large family and makes his way towards a grand entrance where limousines used to line up to give him a ride to the next casino. Still, there is a lingering foulness to all the luxury – the unshakeable stench of a dead man walking. Adapted from Lawrence Osborne’s quasi-biographical novel, Berger’s follow-up to…

Lynne Ramsay

Throughout her career, Lynne Ramsay has created some of the most searing character studies in modern cinema. From Ratcatcher to You Were Never Really Here, her work is defined by unflinching direction and fearless performances. In her new work, Die My Love, she teams up with Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson to create her take on Ariana Harwiczs’s seminal 2012 novel that’s as thorny, grotesque and fantastical as ever, anchored by two showstopping performances. Ramsay, it must be said, is also responsible for rewiring this writer’s brain at a crucial point in her life. LWLies: When I was 18, I was studying in Leeds and I went one January morning to see a film called We Need to Talk About Kevin. Ramsay: Just what you want in the morning. I…

7 min

Julia Ducournau

Julia Ducournau became the second woman ever to win the Palme d’Or in 2021 when Titane took top honours at a post-Covid Cannes Film Festival. Four years later she returned to the Croisette with Alpha, the story of a teenage girl reckoning with growing pains against the backdrop of a mysterious viral outbreak. LWLies: You said that you wanted to do something different after Titane and Raw, but watching Alpha, there’s an aspect of physical transformation that is also in those films. How did it feel different for you? Ducournau: That’s the thing, that’s how I think Alpha is different. I’m way more vulnerable with this film, in the sense that I feel way more exposed than I thought. I think I wanted that because my search is to try…

Urchin

Directed by HARRIS DICKINSON Starring FRANK DILLANE, MEGAN NORTHAM, KARYNA KHYMCHUK Released 3 OCTOBER It’s easy to feel invisible in a city of 8.9 million people – even more so if you’re one of London’s estimated 13,000 rough sleepers. Mike (Frank Dillane) seems to take it mostly in his stride; he’s figured out the best spot to hide his meagre possessions (behind two commercial bins) and only seems mildly irritated when he’s woken from his spot on the pavement by an overzealous street preacher with a PA system. But to the legions of fast-moving commuters in east London, he might as well be a ghost. Even when Mike does receive a small gesture of kindness from a stranger, desperate and distrusting as he is, his instinct is to do something cruel in response.…

Roofman

Directed by DEREK CIANFRANCE Starring CHANNING TATUM, KIRSTEN DUNST, BEN MENDELSOHN Released 17 OCTOBER ANTICIPATION Big fan of Channing Tatum since his hallowed Step Up days. 4 ENJOYMENT Tatum does naked slapstick! 4 IN RETROSPECT A lovely showcase for Tatum, but Kirsten Dunst’s character needed more oomph. 3 Nearly 10 years after his last film, The Light Between Oceans, dedicated sadboi writer/director Derek Cianfrance returns with a surprisingly light crowd-pleaser based on a true story. It follows the robber Jeffrey Manchester (Channing Tatum), who notoriously broke into McDonald’s, Blockbuster and Burger King stores via their rooftops in the 1990s. It’s an entertaining heist/jail-break comedy-drama that alludes to the capitalist folly of the American Dream without ever really interrogating it. The focus remains on its subject, whose childlike qualities and romantic notions of family…

Blue Moon

Directed by RICHARD LINKLATER Starring ETHAN HAWKE, MARGARET QUALLEY, BOBBY CANNAVALE Released 28 NOVEMBER ANTICIPATION Richard Linklater and Ethan Hawke usually bring the best out in each other. 4 ENJOYMENT Handsomely mounted, but slight, meandering and lacks for purpose. 3 IN RETROSPECT It’s hard to know what drew Linklater to this esoteric episode in musical theatre history. 3 In 2025 the writer/director Richard Linklater debuted two new features about revolutionary artists at vital junctures of their respective careers. Nouvelle Vague (which comes to these shores in early 2026) captures the irrepressible creative zeal of Jean-Luc Godard and his ragtag crew while making Breathless on the streets of Paris. Blue Moon, meanwhile, captures a giant of early-20th-century musical theatre en route to the gutter. It’s March 31, 1943, and the soon-to-be-canonical Broadway smash, ‘Oklahoma!’,…

Predators

Directed by DAVID OSIT Released 14 NOVEMBER Despite only running between 2004 and 2007, To Catch a Predator had an indelible impact on popular culture. Fronted by the journalist Chris Hansen, the 44-minute episodes became must-see TV, as law enforcement set up sting operations around the US to lure sex offenders into the open using actual minors as decoys. The series was also directly responsible for the suicide of a government official, who shot himself shortly after the production team arrived at his house. Soon after that, the show was cancelled, but the genie was out of the bottle. Such a fascinating and formative example of the True Crime Industrial Complex seems ripe for appraisal – in Predators, documentary filmmaker David Osit tracks down some of the people closest to the source,…

Palestine 36

Directed by ANNEMARIE JACIR Starring HIAM ABBAS, KAMEL EL BASHA, JEREMY IRONS Released 31 OCTOBER In a landscape of historical subversions and reinterpretations, Palestine 36 tells the story straight. Before revolution brings violent coherence as writer-director Annemarie Jacir’s cast of all-too-familiar archetypes juggle developments in Palestine over the course of 1936. There’s the introspective youth Yusuf (Karim Daoud Anaya), who moves from Palestinian villages ravaged by unhinged military man Captain Wingate (Robert Aramayo), and the quarrelling couple Khouloud and Amir (Yasmine Al Massri and Dhafer L’Abidine), who run a newspaper. The sympathetic but naive diplomat Thomas (Billy Howle), gives up his pretence of relevance and checks himself out early. A subtle execution tends to pick up where originality fails. A quiet, careful Anaya complements writing in which political disagreements feel modern, personal and…

Nia DaCosta

Few filmmakers have as mercurial a set of interests as Nia DaCosta. From the intimate indie Little Woods to the blood-soaked legacy of Candyman and the sprawl of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, she has navigated scale without losing her voice. Now she reimagines Ibsen’s ‘Hedda Gabler’ with Tessa Thompson in a lush, 1950s-set fever dream ahead of next year’s highly anticipated 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. LWLies: We spoke about Candyman when we were both new to this. What advice would you give to yourself looking back? That was my first big press run. I’d made Little Woods, but Candyman was the first time I was really on a bigger stage. It was so weird – the pandemic was happening and it felt like the whole industry was holding…

HOME ENTS

1969 Une Femme Douce Directed by ROBERT BRESSON Starring DOMINIQUE SANDA, GUY FRANGIN, JEANNE LOBRE Radiance Released 8 DECEMBER A Gentle Woman, Robert Bresson’s first film in colour, is probably also his least seen production. An adaptation of a Fyodor Dostoevsky short story, it opens by showing, through a cascade of careful compositions of the type the director was renowned for, a young woman (Dominique Sanda) jumping off a balcony. The film then traces events that lead up to this moment, charting the arrival of this young student to Paris and her meeting with an older man (Guy Frangin), a banker turned pawnbroker, to whom she will become unhappily married. Bresson transplants the story’s 19th-Century Saint Petersburg setting to 1969 Paris, with the events of May 1968, while not mentioned, adding a layer of ennui to…

9 min

San Sebastian

When I was very young, my grandparents lived in a beautiful house in a small village in York. Their garden backed onto a stretch of woodland with a creek flowing through it, and my grandmother had a pond full of frogs and tadpoles. This meant that we would frequently spot grey herons sitting by the water in the spring, treating the pond as a sort of frogspawn buffet. (There was a minor uproar in the village when the heron ate all the goldfish in a neighbour’s pond.) I remember being scared of these birds as a child owing to their imposing size; now I find them quite beautiful in an austere way, elegant and always alone as they gaze out across the wetlands. My grandparents don’t live in that house…

Illustrators

Ehren Barnard is a Stockport-born, London-based artist. With a practice rooted in drawing, he often works from observation and has a passion for printmaking. Misha Chernov is a Ukrainian illustrator who pays close attention to details. A majority of his work has historical, fantasy and mythological settings with gothic flair. Régina Dargère is a French artist based in Brussels. She likes to mix traditional and modern techniques and subjects. She’s also a tattoo artist and enjoys making weird sculptures. Vasilisa Gladysheva is a Russian illustrator. She experiments with various techniques: wood, cotton wool, ceramics, digital technology. Her work is inspired by theatre and dance. Eve MacMaster is an illustrator based in Derbyshire who combines pencil drawings and digital processes in stylised detail. She is also a trainee art teacher. Sophie…

Wildest Dreamer

Ever since he was a child, Guillermo del Toro has been fascinated by Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’. The story of a man who played God and his complicated creation has remained a constant influence for the filmmaker. Indeed, for much of his career he has been vocal in his yearning to adapt the novel for the screen, and the kernel of his desire can be seen in films such as Cronos, Blade II, Crimson Peak, The Shape of Water and Pinocchio. Finally, a dream 30 years in the making is being realised: del Toro’s operatic vision of Frankenstein brings together Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi and Mia Goth for a tour de force fairy tale about the human need to reach beyond the possible, and what makes a heart beat and break.…

12 min

The Quiet Woman

One weekday afternoon, Mia Goth picked up the phone. Guillermo del Toro, the renowned Mexican auteur, was on the other end of the line with an invitation for lunch. They met a week later and, just a few moments in, the director made her another proposition: he would like the Pearl breakout to play Elizabeth in his long-gestating dream project, Frankenstein. Goth knew the filmmaker would take the classic Mary Shelley novel and make it “his own”, but what she did not know was that del Toro was going to write his Elizabeth just for her. It is no wonder, then, that Elizabeth fits Goth like a glove. The Brit, whose daring creative instincts have led to her working with the likes of Lars von Trier and Claire Denis, imbues…

6 min

Blood & ink

Frankenstein represents a culmination of sorts for Guillermo del Toro, who drew heavy inspiration not only for this adaptation but his entire career from a special edition of Mary Shelley’s novel issued by comics publisher Dark Horse in 1983. Not a comic-book adaptation per se, Dark Horse’s version included the complete text of the novel with the addition of pen-and-ink drawings by comics legend Bernie Wrightson. Best known for co-creating DC’s ‘Swamp Thing’, Wrightson had long revered Shelley’s novel and its images of gothic horror and tragedy in his artwork. Indeed, Wrightson cared so deeply for the novel that he worked on illustrations for it on his own time and dime, growing it out of personalised portfolio drawings intended for sale into a full project he had began in 1976, long…

Jafar Panahi

Jafar Panahi has had to navigate the most challenging set of circumstances in order to make films. Censored and persecuted by an authoritarian regime that has imprisoned him, placed him under house arrest and subjected him to filmmaking and travel bans, Panahi has always proved resourceful enough to find a way. With his Cannes Palme d’Or winner, It Was Just an Accident, the auteur tensely grapples with the ethical dilemma of how much blame can – or should – fall on the individual cogs of a systemically violent machine, urgently examining the complexity and humanity at the heart of Iranian society. This interview was conducted with a translator and edited for clarity. LWLies: With this film you’ve moved on from the more introspective mode of the films you had to…

After the Hunt

Directed by LUCA GUADAGNINO Starring JULIA ROBERTS, AYO EDEBIRI, ANDREW GARFIELD Released 17 OCTOBER Desire is the lifeblood that runs through Luca Guadagnino’s filmography. Usually carnal or romantic desire – though through Bones and All, Challengers and Queer he explored cannibalism. In After the Hunt, from a script written by Nora Garrett, it’s the pursuit of power that initially seems to motivate the shrewd philosophy professor Alma Imhoff (Julia Roberts, welcome back!) as she vies for a tenure position at Yale University. Her competition is her friend and colleague Hank Gibson (Andrew Garfield), a rakish manchild who smokes indoors and never quite buttons his shirt correctly. Alma’s gently withering husband Frederik, a psychoanalyst, wonders whether it’s the chase rather than the spoils that thrills them. At any rate, a revelation from grad student…

Train Dreams

Directed by CLINT BENTLEY Starring JOEL EDGERTON, FELICITY JONES, CLIFTON COLLINS JR Released 7 NOVEMBER A conflicted elegy for an America poisoned by manifest destiny, Denis Johnson’s captivating 2011 novella spans most of a century, from the rapid expansion of the railways in the 1910s to the thundering highways of the 1960s. Adapting this much-lauded miniature epic might seem like a fool’s errand, but Clint Bentley and co-writer Greg Kwedar, who previously collaborated on Sing Sing, capture the grandeur, tragedy and intimacy of Johnson’s work without slipping into nostalgia for an idealised kind of West inhabited by John Wayne. Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton), a loner labourer going wherever the work takes him as industrialisation spreads westwards, epitomises strong but silent American masculinity. “There were once passageways to the old world,” narrator Will Patton intones…

The Ice Tower

Directed by LUCILE HADŽIHALILOVIĆ Starring MARION COTILLARD, CLARA PACINI, AUGUST DIEHL Released 21 NOVEMBER Like her short La Bouche De Jean-Pierre (1996) and her features Innocence (2004), Evolution (2015) and Earwig (2021), Lucile Hadžihalilović’s latest, The Ice Tower, offers an unnerving, surreal take on a young person’s coming of age. It begins with a female voiceover narrating part of Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Snow Queen’, accompanied by a fragmented kaleidoscope of snow-globe images (icy mountains, a tower) as though filtered through the distorting prisms of a crystal. Jeanne (Clara Pacini) not only knows ‘The Snow Queen’ by heart, she also lives in a wintry, Alpine village whose snow white sierra resembles the illustrations from the book, which she regularly reads to her much younger foster sister, Rose. Not as old as she claims…

Harris Dickinson

While Hollywood awaits his performance as John Lennon in Sam Mendes’ mammoth Beatles quadrilogy, Harris Dickinson has found the time to pop behind the camera. Urchin (which he wrote and directed) is his feature debut, starring a magnetic Frank Dillane as Mike, a drifter in London who can’t keep out of trouble. LWLies: Was directing always something you were interested in or did that come after you started acting? Dickinson: Actually, I probably wanted to be a filmmaker before acting became a real interest. I know that my fascination with films and cameras in general came very early – I was probably 9 or 10. I was making little things in the forest and I was making skate videos and I just loved filming, editing stuff. Then it turned to a…

I Only Rest in the Storm

Directed by PEDRO PINHO Starring SÉRGIO CORAGEM, CLEO DIÁRA, JONATHAN GUILHERME Released 6 DECEMBER Sérgio (Sérgio Coragem) is a Portuguese environmental engineer who is posted to Guinea-Bissau in West Africa to explore the viability of a new road. He’s a simple man who takes his job very seriously, and so instead of just heading out there with his tape measure and tools, he attempts to submerge himself in the local culture, befriend the radical, sexually open youth and find out what the locals really want when it comes to national infrastructure. Pedro Pinho’s often exhilarating four-hour opus follows Sérgio through protracted political debates, awkward sexual trysts, road trips alongside NGOs and boat trips out to remote farming villages as he is forced to second-guess the worth of this colonial endeavour. Everyone in the…

The Mastermind

Directed by KELLY REICHARDT Starring JOSH O’CONNOR, ALANA HAIM, STERLING THOMPSON Released 24 OCTOBER ANTICIPATION Kelly Reichardt and Josh O’Connor sounds like a dream. 4 ENJOYMENT A heist movie where the heist is the least interesting part. 4 IN RETROSPECT Another stunning O’Connor performance, another Reichardt dream. 4 It’s difficult to say what motivates James Blaine “JB” Mooney (Josh O’Connor) to blow up his own life. Frustration, perhaps, with an uninspired suburban existence with his wife Terri (Alana Haim) and their two rambunctious sons Tommy and Carl (Jasper and Sterling Thompson)? A juvenile desire to embarrass his county judge father? Perhaps it’s sheer, pig-headed hubris. Mooney’s an art school drop out relying on parental hand-outs meant to fund his bespoke furniture-making business while scheming to steal four Arthur Dove paintings from the small…

Zodiac Killer Project

Directed by CHARLIE SHACKLETON Released 28 NOVEMBER Agentle critique of crackpot conspiracy culture as much as a tactical dismantling of “true crime” serial fodder, Charlie Shackleton’s Zodiac Killer Project parlays a missed opportunity into a fruitful exploration of a retired traffic cop’s search for one of west coast America’s most notorious serial murderers. Shackleton claims (perhaps facetiously) that he set out to make a conventional streamer-ready adaptation of Lyndon E Lafferty’s 2012 investigative memoir, ‘The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: The Silenced Badge’, but when the Lafferty estate said “no bueno” to his request for rights, he decided to build a speculative, self-deconstructing work explaining what he would have made within the stringent bounds of copyright law. Shackleton leans into endearing Beavis and Butt-Head-lite snickering in his narration, which comes as a result of…

Pillion

Directed by HARRY LIGHTON Starring HARRY MELLING, ALEXANDER SKARSGÅRD, DOUGLAS HODGE Released 28 NOVEMBER Although based on the 2020 novel ‘Box Hill’ by Adam Mars-Jones, Harry Lighton’s Pillion is often unrecognisable from its source material, retaining only a few crucial details. Gone is the 1970s-Surrey setting, along with the first-person narration and reckoning with queer identity at the height of the Aids crisis. Retained are the names and the ties to the local BDSM biker community. But where Mars-Jones’ novel skewed heartbreaking, this loose adaptation is broadly buoyant, as the mild-mannered traffic warden Colin (Harry Melling) finds himself entangled in a dominant/submissive relationship with the near monosyllabic Ray (Alexander Skarsgård), a gorgeous unknowable alien who seems to get exactly what he wants every second of every day without ever having to ask for…

Plainclothes

Directed by CARMEN EMMI Starring TOM BLYTH, RUSSELL TOVEY, MARIA DIZZIA Released 10 OCTOBER Lucas (Tom Blyth) meets Andrew (Russell Tovey) in a bathroom stall somewhere in New York state, sometime in the 1990s. Lucas is an undercover cop, sicced regularly on this cruising spot to lure gay men into indecent-exposure charges. Andrew’s buried sexual curiosity comes brimming to the surface, and before this stranger can incriminate himself, Lucas leaves the stall, Andrew’s phone number tucked in his jacket pocket. Carmen Emmi’s fraught debut has the makings of a steamy, provocative thriller, but seems disinterested in grappling with the implications of its premise. Its protagonist is painted as a guilt-ridden outcast surrounded by cartoon coppers whose prurient passion for pinching perverts borders on the homoerotic. Meanwhile, Lucas’ harried perspective is laced with jarring…

Venice

What good is cinema when the world’s on fire? There’s something grotesque about swanning around in golden gowns drinking champagne while Rome burns. And this in itself is navel-gazing – no amount of hand-ringing by filmworkers changes the reality of our global present. At the Venice Film Festival this year there was a marked political atmosphere which was heartening to see, in sharp contrast from Berlin’s blanket ban on “political symbols” (ie open support for Palestine) and Cannes’ more laissez-faire attitude. Many filmmakers at this year’s edition of Venice chose to address the ongoing genocide of Palestinian in their speeches, and the subject was repeatedly brought up in press conferences, with stars mostly struggling to formulate a satisfactory answer. In the festival’s programming, a similar mismatch was evident: while Kaouther…

It’s alive!!

On the cover Laurène Boglio is a French art director and illustrator who lives and works in Easthampton, Massachusetts. She leads the creative helm of celebrated illustrated film magazine Little White Lies, and works independently across a diverse range of media, for an eclectic mix of clients – from The Guardian to Yungblud. This cover has been first shaped in a laser cut machine on wood and printed on paper with acrylic paint in the studio and with the help of Rebecca Staley, a bookbinder also living in Easthampton. ig: @boglio_boglio…

Feature writers

Jake Cole is a film critic based in the southeastern United States. His writing has appeared in publications such as Slant magazine and MTV News. Sophie Monks Kaufman has been a film journalist for over 10 years, working for British, American and Canadian publications from Little White Lies to IndieWire to Hazlitt. She is a co-founder of the collective fundraising space Cinema for Gaza and the author of two Wes Anderson books: ‘Close-Ups’ (2018, William Collins) and ‘A Wes Anderson Dictionary’ (2025, Hachette). Rafa Sales Ross is a Brazilian film journalist, critic and programmer living in Scotland. She contributes to Variety, The Playlist and Sight & Sound among others, and can often be seen writing about Latin American cinema and explorations of death and desire. Will Sloan is a writer…

Creature Comforts

After being catapulted to stardom with the teen-friendly combination of Netflix’s The Kissing Booth franchise and HBO’s racy drama Euphoria, Jacob Elordi has had a meteoric ascent to the A-list. He’s already got collaborations with Sofia Coppola (Priscilla) and Paul Schrader (Oh, Canada) under his belt, plus a second Emerald Fennell project (after Saltburn) on the horizon as he takes on the role of Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. But becoming Frankenstein’s Creature for Guillermo del Toro was Elordi’s biggest, most exciting challenge yet: a chance to become not someone, but something else entirely. LWLIES: What was your experience with Guillermo’s films before you started talking to him about Frankenstein? ELORDI: My mum used to take me to Blockbuster on Friday afternoons after school, and she let me watch the MA…

8 min

Building The Monster

THE PLAYERS TAMARA DEVERELL Production designer on Frankenstein, worked with Guillermo del Toro for the first time on his second feature, Mimic, and returned after a lengthy hiatus to make The Strain and Nightmare Alley. KATE HAWLEY Costume designer on Frankenstein, comes from the world of theatre and opera and has worked with Guillermo del Toro on multiple films, including the gothic horror romance Crimson Peak. ACT 1 In Dreams MEETING GUILLERMO Deverell: I first met Guillermo del Toro in 1995 on the film Mimic. And I was working as the art director at that point with Carol Spier, the production designer. It was a tough film for Guillermo, so I don’t remember the exact moment of meeting him, but I remember being struck by him being just such a…

7 min

Five Noteworthy Literary Graphic Adaptations

PARADISE LOST BY PABLO AULADELL The Spanish artist Pablo Auladell adopts a mock-charcoal sketch look for John Milton’s epic, a look befitting the poet’s depiction of hell as a realm of lightless fire and ash. Many of his panels clearly derive inspiration from Gustave Doré’s iconic engravings for the poem, mimicking their cosmic scale in depicting Lucifer’s, and later mankind’s, fall from grace. MOBY DICK BY BILL SIENKIEWICZ Reducing Herman Melville’s unwieldy, diversionary epic to 50 pages of its most distilled plot should be disastrous. But Bill Sienkiewicz’s surreal, oneiric, painterly art – a mix of the sea-spray impressionism of JMW Turner and the sick-soul caricature of Ralph Steadman – in many respects captures the hypertextual, almost Blakean qualities of Melville’s prose better than any other multimedia adaptation. AT THE…

It Was Just an Accident

Directed by JAFAR PANAHI Starring VAHID MOBASSERI, MARIAM AFSHARI, EBRAHIM AZIZI Released 5 DECEMBER You’d be right to want to exact cold, hard revenge on a person who tortured you and planted nightmare imagery of death and suffering in your mind for life. Yet would you go so far as to murder them for the greater good, as penance not only for your trauma, but for the many others who suffered as a result of this’s person’s horrendous, state-approved questioning methods? This is the pertinent hypothetical at the forefront of the Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi’s mind, as he was one of those people who was arrested, placed in custody under spurious charges and made to suffer the gross indignities of physical and psychological torture because he dared to resist the regime. His brilliant…

Die My Love

Directed by LYNNE RAMSAY Starring JENNIFER LAWRENCE, ROBERT PATTINSON, SISSY SPACEK Released 7 NOVEMBER If you haven’t lived it, it’s hard to explain, that gnawing discomfort that makes you want to do something capital-C loony-bin-admission Crazy. Walk into traffic or throw your body down the stairs or bite one of your fingers off like a baby carrot. It’s like a lot of things. Like bugs crawling under your skin. Like the hum of television static after programming stops for the night. Like going out of your fucking mind. So here are Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson), transplants from New York to Montana who take on the ruin of his dead uncle’s prairie home. He’s a musician, she’s a writer. They’re truly, madly, deeply in love, and baby makes three. Jackson goes…

Alpha

Directed by JULIA DUCOURNAU Starring MÉLISSA BOROS, TAHAR RAHIM, GOLSHIFTEH FARAHANI Released 14 NOVEMBER The stab of a needle sets Julia Ducournau’s Alpha into motion: when the eponymous teenager (Mélissa Boros) returns from a house party with a crude stick-n-poke tattoo of the letter A on her arm (not quite a scarlet letter but not far off), her mother (Golshifteh Farahani), a doctor, is angry. But more than that, she’s frightened, as a fatal blood-borne illness has swept through society, causing the sick to slowly, painfully turn to stone. Alpha’s cluelessness sends her mother into a tailspin, while her uncle Amin (Tahar Rahim) has already contracted the disease through his drug use. The unnamed virus is an obvious stand-in for Aids, perceived with the same hushed disgust by outsiders. In Alpha’s classroom, her…

Jay Kelly

Directed by NOAH BAUMBACH Starring GEORGE CLOONEY, ADAM SANDLER, LAURA DERN Released 14 NOVEMBER Jay Kelly – Noah Baumbach’s 13th fiction feature, co written with the actor Emily Mortimer – isn’t about George Clooney, but it’s not not about George Clooney. If their names sound similar, and they’re both corn-fed country boys who made it to the big leagues only to worry they’ve gone to seed in their twilight years, that’s… well. Maybe it’s not entirely a coincidence. Just as LA has played itself for decades, here one of Tinseltown’s golden boys gets his own 8½ moment, with Baumbach joining the league of filmmakers enamoured enough of the magic of movie-making to get all metatextual about it. With a short break between shooting films, the A-lister Jay Kelly finds himself at a loose…

Bugonia

Directed by YORGOS LANTHIMOS Starring EMMA STONE, JESSE PLEMONS, AIDAN DELBIS Released 31 OCTOBER ANTICIPATION Love Lanthimos, but we’re a little sceptical about a remake. 3 ENJOYMENT Fears unfounded – Bugonia is an absolute blast. 4 IN RETROSPECT Another feather in the cap for Lanthimos, Plemons and Stone. 4 In times of great societal upheaval, many reach for a scapegoat upon which all ills and injustice can be conveniently pinned. Some choose a minority based on race, gender, religion or sexuality; in the case of Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons), it’s an alien species known as Andromedons who are single-handedly bringing about the death of humanity. Teddy relays this to his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) with the patience and confidence one might explain the life cycle of a frog to a small child. Despite…

Kontinental ’25

Directed by RADU JUDE Starring ESZTER TOMPA, GABRIEL SPAHIU, ADONIS TANȚA Released 31 OCTOBER Radu Jude’s Hungarian protagonist Orsolya (Eszter Tompa) lives near the historic Transylvanian city of Cluj, which is being overrun by tech-driven gentrification. Orsolya means well, really, but her job as a bailiff requires her to evict a homeless man occupying the boiler room of a building set to be turned into a luxury hotel. In the 20-minute window he’s given to gather his belongings, the man commits suicide; and naturally, Orsolya is plagued with guilt. Struggling to atone and desperate to process a crisis of conscience, she seeks out religion, sex, philanthropy, zen philosophy… But is it her fault if she was just doing her job? Is it possible to be absolved in a world that sustains us by…

Kelly Reichardt

Kelly Reichardt is one of the greatest directors working in the world today. Her films such as Wendy and Lucy, Meek’s Cutoff, Certain Women and First Cow have grown into modern classics on the subject of people wrestling with the complex founding notions of America. Her excellent new film, The Mastermind, takes a similar tack: it’s a palm-sweating, 1970s-set anti-heist movie in which a would-be criminal genius (perfectly essayed by Josh O’Connor) finds out in the most spectacular and blackly comic way imaginable that crime does not pay. LWLies: I’d be interested to know what your take on heist cinema is. What are the things that have appealed to you about how those heists are depicted onscreen, and some of the conventions? Reichardt: Melville is probably the main fellow. I kind…

Omar and Cedric: If This Ever Gets Weird

Directed by NICOLAS JACK DAVIES Starring OMAR RODRÍGUEZ-LÓPEZ, CEDRIC BIXLER-ZAVALA Released 10 OCTOBER Rather than the usual commemorative victory lap that these toadying music doc profiles tend towards, Omar and Cedric: If This Ever Gets Weird opts to focus on two artists who are not only ruthlessly honest about the strange topography of their career, but they’re both critical and, sometimes, sincerely apologetic too. Omar Rodríguez-López and Cedric Bixler-Zavala are the lanky, bubble-permed twosome who formed the backbone of the post-hardcore band At the Drive-In who, at the height of their popularity, dissolved and became percussive prog band The Mars Volta. Nicolas Jack Davies’s compelling and surprising documentary splices together home footage captured by Rodríguez-López and lots of behind-the-scenes titbits while the two pass the baton back and forth when it comes to…

Hedda

Directed by NIA DACOSTA Starring TESSA THOMPSON, NINA HOSS, TOM BATEMAN Released 24 OCTOBER For a director’s project that would come in between an MCU sequel and the latest in the 28 Days… zombie horror series, Ibsen seems an unconventional choice. But in a world that tends to flatten complicated women and their myriad ambitions, it makes perfect sense that Nia DaCosta would turn to the tangled web of ‘Hedda Gabler’ and jolt the classic awake. It enters the 135-year-old canon with aplomb, reimagining a traditionally buttoned-up play as a feverish and sumptuous tale of desire, manipulation and hubris. At its heart is Tessa Thompson, giving a performance so commanding that it seems to reshape the molecules around her. Her Hedda is poised and sensual with a magnetism that affects virtually every interaction.…

Souleymane’s Story

Directed by BORIS LOJKINE Starring ABOU SANGARÉ, NINA MEURISSE, ALPHA OUMAR SOW Released 17 OCTOBER So far, the 2020s have proven that nationalist narratives are still powerful enough to rally the masses into treating those at the bottom of the social hierarchy with contempt, demonising those who flee their home countries to seek a more dignified life. Migrant workers working as delivery drivers are often the ones bearing the brunt of this. Convenience is king, and with the growing Uber Eats-ification of cities, delivery drivers have become a hyper-visible target and a convenient scapegoat for disillusioned Europeans. This is the contemporary reality that Boris Lojkine’s sobering work of social realism unfolds in, but where many such narratives feature migrants facing abuse at every turn, Souleymane Sangaré, an undocumented Guinean migrant living in Paris,…

Dinard

Dinard is a sleepy seaside resort in the northwesternmost part of France that, for five days in October, thrills to British and Irish cinema. Alfred Hitchcock used to holiday here and modelled the Bates motel on a lonely cliffside residence now known as “the Psycho house”. His distinctive rounded silhouette is given pride of place in the form of statues by The Grand Barriere Hôtel and overlooking the Emeraude Cinemas. The festival’s highest prize is the Golden Hitchcock. A permanent population of 10,000 swells to 40,000 over summer thanks to perfect beaches and casually stunning sea views waiting around twists in the roads. Set over the last days of autumn sunshine, the festival draws a final round of interlopers as film industry guests travel in from across the Channel. The…