Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 111 i Little White Lies

It’s the end of the year as we know it and I feel… tired. Not for cynical reasons, mind you, more that the bounty of cinema this year has been so plentiful, so rich, so full of goodness that even the most gluttonous of cine-gorgers would need a little lie-down and a slim cigarette. We don’t usually do the end-of-year wrap thing, and in previous issues we’ve settled for a little preview of our annual Top 10. Yet the thought occurred that it’s much nicer to showcase the immaculate tastes of our well-turned-out critical faculty than it is to gaze down at the ol’ navel once more. To keep things lively, we asked for a straight-up Top Five – no muss, no fuss, just the best things you’ve seen. Things…

Directed by HIKARI Starring BRENDAN FRASER, TAKEHIRO HIRA, MARI YAMAMOTO Released 16 JANUARY ANTICIPATION We knew nothing about the concept, but it looked intriguing. And the great Brendan Fraser’s in it. ➍ ENJOYMENT Heartwarming performances with gentle direction and a gorgeously fuzzy score. ➍ IN RETROSPECT An intriguing exploration of Japanese sensibilities with a predictably American plot. ➌ Since playing a toothpaste superhero in an advertisement, down-on-his-luck actor Phillip Vanderploeg (Brendan Fraser) has been living in Tokyo for several years and further opportunities have been thin on the ground. Accepting a day-long gig as “Sad American” at a funeral, where the dedicatee turns out to be alive in the coffin, he enters a whole world of for-hire make-believe for everyday people. Echoing a similar dynamic seen in Lulu Wang’s The Farewell, our American…

Directed by PHILIPPA LOWTHORPE Starring CLAIRE FOY, BRENDAN GLEESON, LINDSAY DUNCAN Released 23 JANUARY ANTICIPATION I’m concerned that this is going to be very treacly. ➋ ENJOYMENT Am I allowed to nominate the hawks they used for Breakthrough Performer awards? ➌ IN RETROSPECT It boasts one of the year’s most intense single-take set pieces. ➌ Grief never really goes away, but its initial impact takes many forms. Some people are paralysed for months on end. With others, it doesn’t properly hit them until later. For some, our self-medicated methods for processing loss in the early days involve pursuing complicated projects, designed to distract us from the overwhelming mental noise. Such a project is what the author Helen Macdonald threw themself into following the sudden death of their father, the renowned photojournalist Alisdair Macdonald,…

There is no middle ground when it comes to Óliver Laxe’s Cannes-errupting nomadic rave saga, Sirāt. In the Spanish filmmaker’s fourth feature he takes a step up in scope and scale from more intimate and lyrical dramas such as 2010’s You Are All Captains and 2016’s Mimosas, seeking to blow out cinema sound systems with a film intended to mess with consciousness, perception and the entire nature of being. LWLies: The audio-visual element of Sirāt is so important Laxe: Yes, it’s the same in all my films. For the colour correction, I didn't have to spend a lot of time on it, because Mauro [Herce], my DoP, is there for it. But for the sound and music I spent a lot of time. Each second of the record, I was…

Over the past 25 years Ben Whishaw has alternated between popular film series (Paddington, James Bond) and more indie-flavoured films with directors such as Jane Campion (Bright Star), Ira Sachs (Passages) and Sarah Polley (Women Talking), while earning acclaim for TV and theatre work. His latest, Peter Hujar’s Day, finds him taking on the title role, for Sachs again, in a film that painstakingly retraces a day in the photographer’s life, as told to his friend, the writer Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall). LWLies: What drew you to this project? Whishaw: When Ira and I were working together on Passages we both really enjoyed that experience. We must have started talking about Peter Hujar. And he said, there’s a book out that is him talking about his day. So I read it,…

Directed by AKINOLA DAVIES JR Starring SOPE DIRISU, GODWIN CHIEMERIE EGBO, CHIBUIKE MARVELLOUS EGBO Released 6 FEBRUARY The outskirts of Lagos, 1993: a harried father, Folarin (Sope Dirisu), returning to his tumbledown home, makes the snap decision to scoop up his two bored, young sons and take them on a road trip into central Lagos to collect wages owed to him. He has an ulterior motive – he wants them all be at ground zero when the results of a national election are announced and, all being well, MKO Abiola triumphs over the ruling military junta and brings democracy back to Nigeria. Folarin proceeds with an element of caution, knowing that he has for too long been an absent father, earning money from what he has been telling the boys is a far-flung…

Directed by HASAN HADI Starring BANIN AHMAD NAYYEF, WAHEED THABET KHREIBAT, SAJAD MOHAMAD QASEM Released 13 FEBRUARY After Saddam Hussein took power in 1979, every corner of Iraq was enveloped in a month-long period of celebration on the occasion of his birthday. One of the bizarre rituals enforced as part of the festivities was “draw day”, where schools would randomly select a student and bestow upon them the honour of bringing all the ingredients required to bake a cake for the president. The responsibility in Hasan Hadi’s feature debut falls on the nine-year-old Lamia (Banin Ahmad Nayyef) who lives in a beautifully captured Mesopotamian marshland community with her grandmother (Waheed Thabet Khreibat) and pet rooster. Lamia seems to fear no one more than her stern, ex-soldier teacher, so she embarks on a perilous…

Directed by TAKASHI MIIKE Starring KŌ SHIBASAKI, EBIZŌ ICHIKAWA, HIDEAKI ITŌ 88 Films Released 15 DECEMBER Takashi Miike is known primarily for two things: his proliferacy and his penchant for extremity. But this oversimplifies his oeuvre. He is certainly workmanlike, often releasing multiple films yearly, but what he makes is far from rushed or scrappy. Nor is it reducible to any given genre, spanning everything from comedy and drama to action and horror. Over Your Dead Body – one of three films he released in 2014 – is not among his most well-known works, but it is deserving of more recognition. In it, Miyuki (Kō Shibasaki) stars in a staging of the Japanese ghost story ‘Yotsuya Kaidan’, advocating for her real-life partner Kousuke (Ebizō Ichikawa) to act alongside her. As the play develops,…

Directed by RICHARD RUSH Starring PETER O’TOOLE, STEVE RAILSBACK, BARBARA HERSHEY Transmission Released 23 FEBRUARY War is hell, and so is making movies. The outlaw beatnik Cameron (Steve Railsback) manages to evade a local police dragnet by hiding out on the set of a prestige World War Two epic, directed by the perfectionist tyrant Eli Cross (Peter O’Toole). More specifically, Cameron accepts a dodgy role replacing a dead stunt man, and his past as a grunt in Vietnam – dodging bullets, falling from buildings, fist fights, derring-do – makes him perfect for the roughhousing required. Richard Rush’s 1980 cult item is one part First Blood, as it explores the way veterans are treated when they return from war, and one part Antonioni’s The Passenger, a more coolly intellectual study of what it means to…

The first thing I saw when I lugged my suitcase onto the train platform at Tokyo’s Narita Airport was a sign over the taped-shut rubbish bins, announcing that they would be out of service for the duration of President Trump’s visit to Japan over the next couple of days. I had not realised my trip to the Tokyo International Film Festival (TIFF) coincided with such an inauspicious event; it remains unclear to me if the bins were cordoned off as a security precaution or in an effort to make the American president feel at home. Lack of usable public bins aside, the state visit hullabaloo mercifully had little impact on my own travel plans, and as I arrived at the festival’s main hub in the Tokyo Midtown Hibiya mall, I…

Directed by RIAN JOHNSON Starring DANIEL CRAIG, JOSH O’CONNOR, GLENN CLOSE Released 12 DECEMBER (STREAMING) ANTICIPATION A Benoit Blanc outing that promises to be the darkest one yet is an exciting prospect. ➍ ENJOYMENT Well paced, witty and surprisingly heartfelt in places. Johnson goes 3/3 in storytelling. ➍ IN RETROSPECT This franchise may be one of the small few that actually deserve to keep going. ➍ It’s never easy to deliver a sequel to a successful whodunnit, much less a threequel. At this point, the amateur sleuths have begun to identify recurring patterns and misdirects, the characters have become archetypal and the audience is waiting for the surprise twist on top of the twist. The writer/director Rian Johnson shows a keen awareness of potential fatigue, and his Glass Onion follow-up, Wake Up Dead…

Directed by CHLOÉ ZHAO Starring PAUL MESCAL, JESSIE BUCKLEY, JACOBI JUPE Released 9 JANUARY ANTICIPATION Chloé Zhao’s return from her brief sojourn in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. ➌ ENJOYMENT A shiver-inducing piece of work in which all involved are at the top of their game. ➎ IN RETROSPECT Jessie Buckley could make a stone cry. ➎ This is a film about what it means to have children and the pulverising consequences that come from potentially losing them before they have had time to thrive. In terms of emotional trigger points and failsafe methods to make a cinema audience sob, the premature death of a child is equivalent to holding four aces – a surefire victory on those dark terms. In her new film Hamnet, the filmmaker Chloé Zhao does not soft-pedal the realities…

Directed by OLIVER HERMANUS Starring PAUL MESCAL, JOSH O’CONNOR, CHRIS COOPER Released 23 JANUARY When Lionel Worthing (Paul Mescal) and David White (Josh O’Connor) meet over the top of a piano in a Boston college bar, the spark between them is instant. One is a talented vocal student, the other a composition major preoccupied with recording and cataloguing the folk music of rural communities. Their shared passion for song is what brings them into each other’s orbit, and the onset of the First World War is what cruelly divides them for the first time. While David goes off to fight, Lionel returns to his family’s farm in Kentucky, where the work is hard and honest. By the time they meet again, they’re both a little worse for wear. A sojourn to rural Maine…

Directed by KAOUTHER BEN HANIA Starring AMER HLEHEL, CLARA KHOURY, MOTAZ MALHEES Released 16 JANUARY ANTICIPATION The filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania returns after her experimental documentary Four Daughters. ➌ ENJOYMENT Enjoy definitely not the right word. An utterly harrowing and affecting film. ➍ IN RETROSPECT Don’t feel scared to recommend this vital film to friends and relatives. ➎ This is a near impossible film to review. In a world flooded with propaganda and misinformation about the genocide in Gaza, Kaouther Ben Hania’s film speaks with radical honesty and its filmmaking merits feel of powerful consequence. Even setting aside its subject matter, it is an astounding feat of dramatising real events with an eye on the cinematic, yet it delivers such a punch to the heart that one hesitates to recommend it without qualification.…

Directed by JULIA JACKMAN Starring EMMA CORRIN, NICHOLAS GALITZINE, MAIKA MONROE Released 6 FEBRUARY ANTICIPATION Julia Jackman is an up-and-coming British talent, and… is that Charli XCX in the cast list? ➌ ENJOYMENT A cleverly executed and meanigful exploration of femininsm, sexuality and the whole bit. ➍ IN RETROSPECT Jackman whips up a whimsical expressionist world for mere peanuts. ➍ No one could accuse the writer/director Julia Jackman of having a lack of ambition. Her second feature, shot with the visual flair and deadpan drollery of Wes Anderson or Yorgos Lanthimos, is based on a graphic novel that reinterprets ‘One Thousand and One Nights’ as a queer fairy tale about a kingdom that suppresses women’s education in service of a cruel, birdlike deity, narrated by a personification of a violet moon… and it…

Directed by KRISTEN STEWART Starring IMOGEN POOTS, THORA BIRCH, SUSANNAH FLOOD Released 6 FEBRUARY ANTICIPATION K-Stew goes big with her feature debut, an adaptation of a lauded literary memoir. ➍ ENJOYMENT Loads to love here, even if it doesn’t all quite hang together. Poots carries the film. ➌ IN RETROSPECT A hugely impressive and adventurous debut. Roll on the next one. ➍ The transformative power of water lies at the heart of the American writer Lidia Yuknavitch’s 2011 memoir, ‘The Chronology of Water’, informed by her adolescent dreams of swimming being her escape from an unhappy childhood home. It tracks the tides of her life as she battles addiction, abuse and the lingering scars from a sexually violent upbringing. It’s heavy material, and Yukanvitch’s stylised prose doesn’t naturally lend itself to adaptation, but…

Directed by RICHARD LINKLATER Starring GUILLAUME MARBECK, ZOEY DEUTCH, AUBRY DULLIN Released 30 JANUARY ANTICIPATION A celebration of a canonical classic, and Linklater knows how to throw a film together. ➍ ENJOYMENT An in-joke that runs out of steam quite quickly, but with a few intriguing interludes. ➌ IN RETROSPECT Lacks purpose, and there are other, better “making a movie” movies out there. ➋ It is ironic that Richard Linklater has chosen to pay homage to a film carved out of spontaneous new techniques with one so mired in contrivances that it is impossible for it to breathe. To be fair, Breathless is the name of the game in this black and white reconstruction of the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s first film. The year is 1959 and Cahiers du Cinéma critic JLG is…

Directed by KIM SOO-YONG Starring YUN JEONG-HEE, LEE DAE-KUN Radiance OUT NOW The title of Soo-yong Kim’s Splendid Outing is ironic, acknowledged as such during a self-reflexive quip delivered late in the movie. Exhausted and facing mounting sociopolitical pressures, the high-flying Seoul executive Gong Do-hee (Yoon Jeong-hee) travels to South Korea’s seaside for a day out. There, she finds herself in a waking nightmare, kidnapped by a mad fisherman, transported to an island and enslaved as his captive under the guise that she is his long-lost wife. She is unable to escape or fight him. In this remote place, she is suppressed and silenced. Directed by the prolific filmmaker Kim towards the end of the 1970s, when South Korean cinema had become increasingly dark, the film is a sharp social satire in a…

Directed by FREDERICK WISEMAN BFI Released 26 JANUARY If UK audiences ever wanted to watch the (extraordinary) films of American documentary high priest Frederick Wiseman they’d have to shell out for DVD-Rs from the man’s own website, or wait until they turned up in a repertory or festival cinema slot. Praise be, then, that BFI are releasing a box set of five of his vital early works, giving a relatively small but piquant taster for a corpus of work that rivals any artist in any medium across the 20th and 21st centuries. First up is 1967’s Titicut Follies, a hellish peek behind the doors of Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Massachusetts, which very much sets the template for Wiseman’s observational MO. Then there’s the tonally lighter but perhaps intellectually more…

Directed by RINGO LAM Starring CHOW YUN-FAT, DANNY LEE, CARRIE NG Arrow Video OUT NOW Ringo Lam’s City on Fire contains many elements that make a recipe for success. An undercover cop potboiler made when Hong Kong action cinema was proving to have real global appeal, it stars Chow Yun-fat in his prime, showcasing the superstar’s clownish charm and effortless cool. It also has the city as setting, shot on location in a pre-handover Hong Kong, where the scrappy streets, crumbling towers and bustling markets make the perfect backdrop for the film’s gritty crime drama story, realistically violent set pieces and saxophone-soundtracked 1980s neon stylings. All this came together to make City on Fire Lam’s breakout, later cited by Quentin Tarantino as an overriding influence on Reservoir Dogs. City on Fire’s plot is…

Udo Kier is famed for many quotes, but “Fuck you! I made 200 movies! A hundred are bad, 50 you could watch, and 50 are good. I think as an actor if you can say you made 50 good films, amen,” is among the best ones. It was in that same 2014 interview that the inimitable German actor expressed his desire for a private and unpretentious life: “Stars are in the sky. I like cooking and gardening. I like to smell the earth.” The queer cinema legend would become a star in the sky on 23 November, 2025, leaving behind a formidable, rich body of work. He brought over 250 roles to life and mastered the art of the side character, often showing up out of the blue and instantly…

If you read our interview with the director Mona Fastvold, let us remind you of this quote related to a question about making and projecting film on film: “For me and Brady [Corbet], the reason we’re so on the soapbox about celluloid is to protect it. We don’t want to lose that tool from the toolbox. We need to make sure that all the tools are available.” In order for celluloid to continue as a viable medium, people need not only to keep using it, but to endorse it and understand the aesthetic pleasures that it has to offer. So here, in salute to Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee, we offer up an FAQ-style guide to all the 16mm, 35mm and 70mm wonders of the world. References The Cinema Museum…

Directed by PARK CHAN-WOOK Starring LEE BYUNG-HUN, SON YE-JIN, PARK HEE-SOON Released 23 JANUARY ANTICIPATION Park Chan-wook very rarely misses. ➍ ENJOYMENT Come for Lee Byung-hun’s wild central performance, stay for the scathing critique of AI. ➎ IN RETROSPECT A delectably enjoyable and violent satire on the competitiveness of the job market. ➎ In Donald Westlake’s 1997 horror novel ​‘The Ax’, a recently laid-off manager at a paper company decides to thin out the competition in the job pool by tracking down and taking out his potential competitors as he vies for a new job. Westlake’s book was written amid the corporate redundancies of ’90s America; it struck a chord with the Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook, who has been slowly working out his version of the story ever since. It arrives now –…

Directed by JOACHIM TRIER Starring RENATE REINSVE, STELLAN SKARSGÅRD, INGA IBSDOTTER LILLEAAS Released 26 DECEMBER ANTICIPATION How on earth do you follow up the eternally beloved hit The Worst Person in the World? ➍ ENJOYMENT By kinda doing some more of the same. It’s very, very good rather than great this time. ➍ IN RETROSPECT Offers moving insights into parental and sibling relationships, and birthday gifts for nine-year-olds. ➍ Nothing brings a family together like a funeral, and at the wake for Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes’ (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) mother, their estranged father Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård) strolls through the door as though nothing has changed. His reappearance in his daughters’ lives threatens to disturb the tentative peace they both have, particularly for Nora, a flighty actress suffering from a crisis of confidence.…

Directed by MARY BRONSTEIN Starring ROSE BYRNE, CONAN O’BRIEN, A$AP ROCKY Released 20 FEBRUARY ANTICIPATION The near two-decade-long wait has truly paid off. ➎ ENJOYMENT Pulse-racing to the point of being unwatchable… in the best sense possible. ➌ IN RETROSPECT Unlike anything else you’ll see this year – essential in-cinema viewing. ➎ The long-awaited second feature from Mary Bronstein, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, is an unyielding subversion of motherhood wrought by anxiety in its most cinematic form. Sitting in the crux between comedy and horror, it presents both a stark reappraisal of conditional acceptance and a needle precision critique of mental health awareness. Seventeen years on from her mumblecore hit Yeast, If I Had Legs… finally arrives on screens as an expansion in the best direction – Bronstein carries over…

Directed by IRA SACHS Starring BEN WHISHAW, REBECCA HALL Released 2 JANUARY ANTICIPATION A still-life art film composed of one long conversation between 1970s New York B-listers. ➋ ENJOYMENT At 76 minutes, what begins as a groan – “Wait… is this it? Ugh” – blossoms into a unique gift. ➍ IN RETROSPECT Wisdom, peculiarity, confidence, performance, history – a film it’s hard to stop thinking about. ➎ It’s only a matter of time before kids are doing the Peter (Hujar) Pilgrimage: a leisurely photographer’s stroll down New York’s 2nd Avenue on the Lower East Side of Manhattan from 14th to 10th that cuts east across 10th and lands at one of the apartments between Alphabet City’s Avenue C and Avenue D, where – in spirit for us, in the flesh for Hujar –…

Directed by SOFIA ALAOUI Starring OUMAÏMA BARID, MEHDI DEHBI, FOUAD OUGHAOU Released 12 DECEMBER Itto (Oumaïma Barid) is alienated. After a series of elegantly composed shots of a house’s opulent if empty interiors, she is shown in there but out of place. She goes to the kitchen to help the maids prepare dinner (“Like us, she sure is a Berber!” one of them comments), only to be regarded with contempt by Hajar (Souad Khouyi), who thinks it unbecoming for her new daughter-in-law to be mixing with the staff. Not only is Itto having to transition from her lowly Berber background (“a hick who’s nobody’s daughter”, as she herself puts it) to become part of this affluent, Francophone household, but, heavily pregnant, she is also going to be a mother. She barely recognises herself.…

Directed by LIANE-CHO HAN JIN KUANG, MAÏLYS VALLADE Starring LOÏSE CHARPENTIER, VICTORIA GROSBOIS Released 13 FEBRUARY A spirited Belgian moppet, indomitable in her curiosity and boasting eyes as green as a rolling summer meadow, learns about life, death and koi carp as she grows up with her family in the Japanese countryside in the 1970s. Maïlys Vallade and Liane-Cho Han Jin Kuang’s whimsical animation follows Amélie as the youngest of three children, but the only one to have spent the first few years of life in a vegetative state before being miraculously “cured” by an earthquake. When her pianist mother Danièle and diplomat father Patrick can’t quite juggle the new domestic routine, they bring in local home help Nishiosan, who forges a sweet bond with little Amélie. Stories are traded, life lessons are ingested…

Directed by KLEBER MENDONÇA FILHO Starring WAGNER MOURA, CARLOS FRANCISCO, TÂNIA MARIA Released 20 FEBRUARY ANTICIPATION Kleber Mendonça Filho is one of the most exciting and vital filmmakers in Latin America. ➎ ENJOYMENT An intimate epic that always delivers the unexpected. ➎ IN RETROSPECT The craft of this thing is head-spinning. How did he make a film this good-looking? ➎ When Marcelo (Wagner Moura) first arrives in Dona Sebastiana’s building, he is greeted by a curious cat whose head is split into two fully formed faces, each facing an opposite direction. In a way, Brazil is much like that cat, constantly looking at two realities at once: the past that has shaped it and the future it resiliently stumbles towards. Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent first finds Moura’s character arriving back in…

Directed by CHARLIE AHEARN Starring LEE QUIÑONES, FRED BRATHWAITE, PATTI ASTOR Arrow Video OUT NOW The filmmaker Charlie Ahearn has dined out on his 1982 film Wild Style for over 40 years, and goddamn he deserves it. This mellifluous hybrid of documentary and fiction offers a unique portrait of New York’s desolate Lower East Side during a moment of cultural rebirth. Lee “Zoro” Quiñones plays an introspective Puerto Rican graffiti artist named Raymond who sneaks into rail yards under cover of night and sprays grand frescoes onto the sides of parked subway carriages. As friends and colleagues try to push him towards the world of legitimate art, he also encounters the burgeoning hip-hop scene, which includes bustling dance parties, rap battles and kerbside breakdance showdowns. It’s an incredible right place/right time portrait of…

Directed by JOHN HUSTON Starring ANJELICA HUSTON, DONAL MCCANN, HELENA CARROLL Criterion Released 26 JANUARY Made at the very end of his career, John Huston produced his swansong The Dead while he was mortally ill. Directing the film through instructions given as he was seated in a wheelchair tethered to an oxygen tank, he died a week before the film had its premiere at the Venice Film Festival. This detail, accompanied by the fact that it stars the filmmaker’s daughter Anjelica Huston, lends the film a poignancy that lingers latently in the background. An adaptation of a short story by James Joyce set in turn-of-the-20th-century Ireland, The Dead captures a group of friends who have gathered for a Twelfth Night party. The film advances slowly as the guests talk, drink, dance and sing…

Directed by VERNON SEWELL Starring DERREN NESBITT, KEITH FAULKNER, W MORGAN SHEPPARD BFI Released 23 FEBRUARY Cinema as a short, sharp tyre iron to the cranium. The British journeyman filmmaker Vernon Sewell came up trumps (and then some) with this nifty, nerve-shredding parochial heist yarn in which a trio of amoral oiks foul up an apparently failsafe plan to rob a high-street bank on a sleepy bank holiday. Griff (Derren Nesbitt), Len (Keith Faulkner) and Alec (W Morgan Sheppard) are done with manual labour, and one quick in-and-out job will see them living the life of Riley. They do the deed and make it out with the loot, but due to an unforeseen interruption, end up having to lock the manager (Colin Gordon) and his secretary (Ann Lynn) in the air-tight basement vault, and…