Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 99: June/July 2023 i Little White Lies

Directed by WES ANDERSON Starring JASON SCHWARTZMAN, SCARLETT JOHANSSON, TOM HANKS Released 21 JUNE The last time Wes Anderson took us on a class trip to the theatre, optional safety glasses and earplugs were provided to all patrons. With his scintillating and archly metafictional new work, Asteroid City, he allows us to bask in the frivolous delights of a play, while also carefully dismantling the process of artistic creation in real time. It’s the type of film you might imagine the great Max Fischer himself might have directed had his scholastic brief encompassed a bells-and-whistles homage to mid-century pulp science fiction. For this one, with its telescopic sights set on the outer pockets of existence, travellers are loaded up with a goldfish bowl space helmet, a vintage SLR camera, a vending machine Martini…

Directed by ALICE WINOCOUR Starring VIRGINIE EFIRA, BENOÎT MAGIMEL, GRÉGOIRE COLIN Released 4 AUGUST It starts out as an ordinary day for Mia, a journalist and translator who works at a radio station in Paris. She takes her motorcycle to work; she meets her husband Vincent (Grégoire Colin) for dinner. When Vincent – a doctor at a local hospital – declares he has to leave early due to a work emergency, Mia is dejected, and decides to stop for a drink on her way home to avoid a sudden rainstorm. She sits in a booth and observes the strangers around her. Then all hell breaks loose. Months later, after surviving the terrorist attack, Mia is struggling to cope with her trauma. Physical wounds may have healed, but she struggles to recall details of…

Directed by RILEY KEOUGH, GINA GAMMELL Starring JOJO BAPTEISE WHITING LADAINIAN CRAZY THUNDER, JESSE SCHMOCKEL Released 9 JUNE Who has the right to play steward to someone else’s story? It’s an unavoidable question in the conversation surrounding War Pony, a slice-of-life work of neorealism set on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, performed by non-professional actors cribbed from the Oglala Lakota community, and intended to broadcast the realities of its milieu to a wider audience without sugarcoating or gawking at its coarser aspects. It’s a dicey undertaking for the tyro directorial team of Gina Gammell and Riley Keough, the latter weighing her lap-of-lux upbringing against her Cherokee and Creek heritage bequeathed via her maternal grandfather (Elvis Presley). But she’s appropriately self-conscious about the whiff of nepotism she gives off, and she’s done…

Directed by CAROLINA CAVALLI Starring BENEDETTA PORCAROLI, GALATÉA BELLUGI, MICHELE BRAVI Released 2 JUNE Cinemas are full of lonely people. They occupy both seats and screens – the stories we return to often focus on the daunting quest to find someone as strange as you with whom to share the peculiar inner workings of your mind. This mission to find a friend is the subject of Carolina Cavalli’s Amanda, as the eponymous protagonist determines to revive a childhood friendship with a girl named Rebecca who hasn’t left her bedroom for years, so she has someone to go to the cinema with. Amanda is introduced at a point where everyone has had enough of her shit. Her languid isolation is framed by luxury, and her redeeming features dwindle the longer she floats on her…

Composed of home videos created from 1972 to 1981, The Super 8 Years recalls the halcyon days of Annie Ernaux’s marriage, before she became the author who would go on to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022. Shot by her then-husband Philippe, the footage was edited into a film by their son David Ernaux-Briot, with his mother providing a narrative that reflects on personal and global history, at once intimate and expansive. LWLies: David, I understand that this film came about because your children wanted to see footage from when you were younger. I’d love to know what they thought about the videos when you showed them. Ernaux-Briot: Yeah, they are very young, 11, nine and four, so I can’t say that they thought much about it, but…

Directed by SHAMIRA RAPHAËLA Released 7 JULY Shamira Raphaëla originally set out to make a film about the aspirations of four teenagers living in Rotterdam’s De Peperklip social housing complex – a striking architectural feat with a sprawling cylindrical silhouette. When one of these four youngsters called to give her the news that he probably couldn’t participate as he took his grandmother’s car on a joyride and totalled it, Raphaëla saw her film’s trajectory laid out before her. Shabu opens with the larger-than-life teenager of the title being remotely scolded by his grandmother and physically nagged on by the rest of his family to come up with the sum of €1,200 to cover repair costs. On a quest to redeem himself before his grandmother returns from her sojourn in Suriname, he decides…

Directed by ROUBEN MAMOULIAN Starring MARLENE DIETRICH, BRIAN AHERNE, LIONEL ATWILL Blu-ray/DVD Released 3 JAN 2020 A figure like that will get you into trouble if you’re not careful,” is the first thing that Lily (Marlene Dietrich) is told in The Song of Songs, a surprisingly racy pre-Code romantic melodrama directed by Rouben Mamoulian. Arriving in Berlin naive and knowing no-one, Lily is met immediately by a suite of suitors, all of whom project onto her a personality that she is not initially able, or willing, to create for herself. Courted first by Richard (Brian Aherne), a sculptor that she is convinced to pose nude for, she instead marries Baron von Merzbach (Lionel Atwill), who is obsessed with her from the moment they meet. Richard loves her, but, as an artist, is scared…

Black-gloved killers; psychosexual stabbings; lashings of neon blood and plot twists built around retrograde understandings of sexuality and mental illness – that’s giallo, baby. Prompted by the BFI’s month-long season on Dario Argento’s films, my reacquaintance with the Italian horror auteur’s work has ushered in a new appreciation of his gialli. Beyond the outrageous camp sensibility of his stylish gore lie threads of destabilised gender and queerness that inform a lot the connective tissue between his films. In text and subtext, it’s striking how often his films engage with queer characters in ways generally atypical of cinema at the time. Cat O’ Nine Tails from 1971 features several queer characters and a visit to a gay bar, 1971’s Four Flies on Grey Velvet features a gay detective that, although ludicrously…

Hello Sophie Monks Kaufman, this is Wes.” In his slow, warm, contemplative drawl, my name sounds better than ever before. I am in seat 17C of easyjet flight K54K39S which is rolling down a runway at Nice Côte d’Azur Airport. I had switched my phone off flight mode in the hope of receiving a message that would stoke my excitement about being in the French Riviera for the 76th Cannes Film Festival. Even in this anticipatory state, a voice memo from Wes Anderson was beyond anything that it would occur to me to expect. His latest film, Asteroid City, is set during the 1950s in a fictional American desert town named Arid Plans that has drawn out-of-towners for the Junior Stargazers convention. The Stargazers, all precocious child geniuses, bring with…

Directed by THOMAS HARDIMAN Starring ANITA-JOY UWAJEH, CLARE PERKINS, DARRELL D'SILVA Released 9 JUNE For anyone old enough to remember the early 2000s BBC drama Cutting It, you’ll know that the only thing more dangerous than the sharp end of a pair of salon scissors is the rivalry amongst the stylists. Writer-director Thomas Hardiman’s debut feature Medusa Deluxe tackles this notion head-on by exploring the fallout after the frontrunner in a hairdressing competition is quite literally scalped backstage. Word of stylist Mosca’s untimely death arrives through fellow competitor Cleve (a scene-stealing Claire Perkins). The inconvenience of a building lockdown draws Cleve’s ire; her focus is more dedicated to the intricate Georgian Fontange atop her model’s head than whatever is missing from Mosca’s. Speculating on the murder with another competitor, Divine (Kayla Meikle), before…

Directed by BARNABY THOMPSON Starring RUPERT EVERETT, ALAN CUMMING Released 2 JUNE Releasing a documentary profile on a towering cultural figure to mark 50 years since their death feels perfunctory, and more often than not, yields predictable results. That’s not to say that there haven’t been many a filmmaker whose stylistic innovations have proven this thesis wrong. Alas, Mad About the Boy: The Noël Coward Story offers no such rebuttal. This documentary gets the job done in terms of giving a potted history on one of the most multifaceted artists of the 20th century, charting career highlights across his wide body of work that spans stage, page, screen, and cabaret, but doesn’t do much else in terms of delving into its fascinating subject’s processes. Director Barnaby Thompson deploys the usual set-up, minus the…

Directed by STEPHEN WILLIAMS Starring KELVIN HARRISON JR, SAMARA WEAVING, LUCY BOYNTON Released 9 JUNE The scientist Stephen Jay Gould once wrote, “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” Steven Williams’ biopic of Joseph Bologne, the son of an enslaved black woman and a white plantation owner, presents his talent akin to Mozart, who so impressed Marie Antoinette she knighted him Chevalier de Saint Georges. His story is tragic on two levels; first, with regard to the gilded cage that Bologne was trapped in and the deliberate steps to undermine his talents and erase his legacy; but secondly, in considering that all the music and art that we…

Directed by JEAN-PAUL SALOMÉ Starring ISABELLE HUPPERT, YVAN ATTAL, MARINA FOÏS Released 30 JUNE You’d be forgiven for thinking you’ve seen La Syndicaliste before. It is a murky-grey drama shot with corporate restraint, the sort of thriller vérité that gets a scattered UK release because Catherine Deneuve, Juliet Binoche or Isabelle Huppert is in it. In this case it’s the latter, with hair dyed blonde like the former, delivering her trademark turn as an enigmatic but fierce woman who can deliver monologues with a slight raise of her right eyebrow. Assured of her presence, everyone else seems to have taken the day off. It is peculiar to think of Huppert as The Sitting Duck, to give the film its English title. So powerful is her self-command that it is hard to find a…

Directed by DIONNE EDWARDS Starring NATEY JONES, ALEXANDRA BURKE, TEMILOLA OLATUNBOSUN Released 16 JUNE When it comes to the annals of visual culture, the roots of cross-dressing wend all the way back to classical stage farce, silent comedy and beyond. Debut writer/director Dionne Edwards softly tamps down rather than excises these formative influences with her film Pretty Red Dress, a compelling and original drama about Black ex-convict Travis (Natey Jones) who returns home to his wife and daughter having developed certain desires he doesn’t yet know how to deal with. Old muckers on the street see Travis’ incarceration as a badge of honour, while his slick-willy brother uses it as psychological leverage, opting to help Travis reintegrate into society, but on his own demeaning terms. Meanwhile, Travis’ wife Candice (Alexandra Burke) is in…

From the historically trenchant trilogy The Battle of Chile, commonly cited as one of the best political documentaries ever made, to the poetic depths of more recent films such as Nostalgia of the Light, Patricio Guzmán has remained a thorough chronicler and active witness of his home country. Now in his eighties, the veteran’s involvement in Chile’s modern social movement is less direct, yet he is no less admiring of the activists he centres in his latest film, My Imaginary Country, as he looks into the objectives, methods and hopes of the protests that gripped Chile between 2019 and 2021. LWLies: In the My Imaginary Country you bring in your own experience from the 1970s and the events of The Battle of Chile. They both document different historic moments for…

Directed by DANNY PHILIPPOU, MICHAEL PHILIPPOU Starring SOPHIE WILDE, ALEXANDRA JENSEN, MIRANDA OTTO Released 28 JULY Some may roll their eyes to the back of their head like Reagan in The Exorcist at Australian YouTubers RackRacka (aka Danny and Michael Philippou) making the leap to feature filmmaking, but their daring modern horror employs its central concept of teenagers using demonic possession to get high as a thrilling and emotionally engaging exploration of grief, peer pressure and teen life in the digital age. The twin brothers behind the film have spent years making DIY horror-comedy and their passion and knowledge of the genre is glaringly apparent in this thoroughly disturbing debut. The film hits the ground running with a violent prologue at a party all shot in one impressive and energetically paced take. The…

Directed by DAVID LYNCH Starring LAURA DERN, JEREMY IRONS, JUSTIN THEROUX Blu-ray/DVD Released 19 JUNE Inland Empire is in many ways the ultimate David Lynch film. As well as writing, directing, and editing, Lynch shot the film himself, using a digital handicam to create the film’s arresting and influential standard definition aesthetic. He also created much of the music, and even initially handled the film’s home entertainment distribution. As such, it is at once a difficult place to start for anyone unfamiliar with Lynch and perhaps also the best way to dive into the deepest end of the director’s distinctive brand of surrealism. A more unhinged flipside to Mulholland Drive, it explores many themes that Lynch has long been interested in, notably gender, identity, mental illness, and the self-mythologising nature of the filmmaking…

At the point of writing these words, the 2023 Cannes Film Festival has not come to an end. And yet, it feels safe to say that this year has been a classic vintage, particularly when it comes to the overall high quality of the competition films. Obvious highlight, and likely major cinephile talking point, is Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, a conceptual take on the horrors of Auschwitz which monitors the family life of a Commandant who lives in a plush house adjacent to the death camp. It makes for horrendously troubling and thought-provoking filmmaking. I loved Aki Kaurismäki’s big return with Fallen Leaves, a whimsical romantic fable festooned with film references and homages. It is another of his deadpan delights set in Helsinki, following a working class couple…

Members of the AFFILIATED SPACE FOUNDATION and PUDDING CLUB of Grand Prairie, TX have teamed up with TENACITY OIL and FREEDONIA DYNAMICS to launch an exploration pod beyond the Earth’s atmosphere in honour of local filmmaker Wes Anderson. Within the “WESPLORER 4” pod, a carefully curated selection of items will be placed in the hope that our extraterrestrial cousins, who have likely set up abode in one of the outer reaches of our solar system, may learn about Anderson and his work. He will live on in galactic infamy. 5 JUNE, 1955 FREE $5 DONATION ON THE GATE Grand Prairie Seed Bulletin “A seed neither fears light nor darkness, but uses both to grow.” CONFIRMED CARGO FLIGHT NO: #1 VESSEL NAME: "WESPLORER 4" PACKED DATE: 02 JUNE 1955 Scan here for…

Directed by JAMES MANGOLD Starring HARRISON FORD, MADS MIKKELSEN, PHOEBE WALLER-BRIDGE Released 28 JUNE A film about not being able to keep a good Nazi down feels very apposite in the current climate of rabid conservatism, and so that might go some way to justify the existence of a brand new caper involving Nazi-hater in chief, Henry “Indiana” Jones (Harrison Ford). Unfortunately, what we get is the pantomimic, hubristic, goose-stepping version of the Nazis, as Mads Mikkelsen’s slighted megalomaniacal scientist Jürgen Voller plans to use a time-shifting doohickey built by Archimedes (no less!) to correct the mistakes of Nazi high command and make sure that, this time, the Germans are triumphant in ’45. Following a strange prologue in which a (poorly) de-aged Ford makes a dashing and destructive escape from capture right at…

Directed by CLAIRE DENIS Starring MARGARET QUALLEY JOE ALWYN, BENNIE SAFDIE Released 24 JULY Soaked in sweat and bathed in orange light, Claire Denis’s second English language feature Stars at Noon is a film that seems to exist in a state of permanent dusk. Characters are introduced in a relaxed, matter-of-fact manner, with names and occupations intentionally obscured. It doesn’t help that our heroine, Trish, played by Margaret Qualley, is constantly in a rum-induced haze. Rail thin and running on alcohol and sex, Trish wears the disguise of a good time girl while quietly yearning to be saved from her situation. Stranded in Nicaragua after arriving on assignment as a journalist, Trish has basically given up on writing. All she seems to want to do is get out, with no choice but to…

Directed by TINA SATTER Starring SYDNEY SWEENEY, MARCHÁNT DAVIS, JOSH HAMILTON Released 2 JUNE When the unbelievably named Reality Winner printed out a classified intelligence report revealing Russian interference in the 2016 US election from her National Security Agency work computer and mailed it to the newsroom of The Intercept, she, “wasn’t trying to be a Snowden or anything,” she said. An American linguist who served in the Air Force before taking up a translating job with an NSA contractor, Winner merely wanted her employer to stop broadcasting Fox News in the office all day. And she wanted right wing politicians and commentators to stop lying to the American public. Tina Satter adapts her own play ‘Is This a Room’ for her feature film debut, a chamber drama that, as with its theatrical…

Directed by D. SMITH Released 24 JULY First-time filmmaker D Smith imbues her feature debut with a vibrant, immediate energy that feels incredibly unique. Clocking in at a tight 70 minutes, Kokomo City centres on four Black trans sex workers in New York and Atlanta, whose unfettered openness and charisma are given ample space to shine. They speak candidly about their lives and bodies, sharing their truth in ways both humorous and poignant. Even if relatively conventional in form, the film is sharp and stylised, the high-contrast black and white photography regularly punctuated with yellow typography lending the picture an artful yet DIY feel. Just a few months after the film’s festival run, Koko Da Doll, one of the women featured, was fatally shot. Her words, “We can do anything, we can…

Directed by ANNIE ERNAUX, DAVID ERNAUX-BRIOT Released 23 JUNE The French writer Annie Ernaux is having a moment: 2021’s Golden Lion winner Happening was adapted from her book recounting her illegal abortion in 1963. Many of Ernaux’s slender books, such as the gorgeous ‘A Woman’s Story’, about her mother’s life and death, take the form of quasi–third person memoir, mixing seemingly objective narration with oblique impressions never quite pinning down an elusive subjectivity still lingering somewhere in the past. Given Ernaux’s interest in the art of remembering, it is no surprise that she is in the possession of home movies. Nor is it surprising that The Super 8 Years, an hour-long autobiographical essay film made from her own family archives with her son David Ernaux-Briot, is a gorgeous and intellectually expansive film,…

Directed by CHARLOTTE REGAN Starring HARRIS DICKINSON, LOLA CAMPBELL, ALIN UZUN Released 25 AUGUST Charlotte Regan has long been a promising talent on the shorts and music video circuit, and makes the leap to features with Scrapper – a charming, effervescent story about grief set on a housing estate in East London that turns the kitchen sink genre on its head, crafting a brightly-coloured world of possibility and hope. 12-year-old Georgie (newcomer Lola Campbell) lives on her own, following the death of her mother. She’s crafted an elaborate ruse to fool social services into thinking she’s living with her uncle, and spends her time with best mate Ali (Alin Uzun) nicking bikes to sell as scrap in order to put food on the table. She’s hard as nails and doesn’t need any help…

Directed by LÉONOR SERRAILLE Starring ANNABELLE LENGRONNE, STÉPHANE BAK, KENZO SAMBIN Released 30 JUNE Léonor Serraille loves headstrong, emotional women. The French director burst onto the Cannes scene when, in 2017, she won the Camera d’Or (the prize for the best first feature) for her debut, Jeune Femme, starring Laetitia Dosch as a newly single redhead spreading chaos across Paris. This time, the charming whirlwind at the core is Annabelle Lengronne’s Rose, a single mother who arrives in Paris from the Ivory Coast in 1989 with two small boys under her arm and other sons back at home. Unlike the cautious relatives who offers the trio a temporary home, Rose is instantly open to the thrills available to the beautiful and vivacious woman she is, and, when not working as a hotel cleaner,…

Directed by QUENTIN DUPIEUX Starring GILLES LELLOUCHE, VINCENT LACOSTE, ANAÏS DEMOUSTIER Released 24 JULY Notably fond of deadpan dada and off-the-wall gore, director Quentin Dupieux (Rubber, Deerskin) delivers these by the bucketload in loony Super Sentai pisstake, Smoking Causes Coughing. Tobacco Force are a group of vigilantes who fight monsters by giving them cancer, and discourage the youth from smoking. They’re sent on a retreat to improve group cohesion by their boss Chief Didier, a talking rat puppet who drools green ooze but is somehow a sex god, irresistible to human females. On their getaway, Tobacco Force take turns telling scary stories. These vignettes make up the bulk of the film – one about a woman whose nephew gets stuck in a woodchipper is particularly funny and gruesome. Fairly disconnected and chaotic, though…

Directed by FYZAL BOULIFA Starring AÏCHA TEBBAE, ABDELLAH EL HAJJOUJI, ANTOINE REINARTZ Released 7 JULY In Vincent Sherman 1950 noir The Damned Don’t Cry, Joan Crawford plays a housewife trapped in a loveless marriage, when the tragic death of her young son becomes an impetus for her to claw her way out of poverty and into wealth as she becomes the glamorous wife of a gangster. British-Moroccan filmmaker Fyzal Boulifa’s second feature borrows the title of this Crawford vehicle and retains its melodrama, only to portray an otherwise entirely distinct, compassionately-crafted survivial tale. The film explores the depths of a complicated, dysfunctional family relationship between middle-aged single mother Fatima-Zahra (Aicha Tebbae) and her sullen son, Selim (Abdellah El Hajjouji), as they drift through urban Morocco, moving from one place to the next and…

Directed by VARIOUS Starring BRUCE LEE, BIAO YUEN, JAMES TIEN Blu-ray/DVD Released 17 JUNE Even the most avid of Bruce Lee-based merchandise hoarder will likely be slathering at the prospect of this chunky new set which presents the corpus of work Lee made in collaboration with iconic Hong Kong independent studio, Golden Harvest. Overlooking the fact that the films themselves are all rather iffy when it comes to raw quality (often a case of too much talking, not enough fighting), seeing them primped and packaged this way, in glistening 4K restorations, would arguably make this the definitive collection of Lee’s screen output. However, the cherry on the top is that much new footage has been located, so many of the films here are presented in versions seldom seen in previous home entertainment releases.…