Indholdsfortegnelse for Issue 74 i Little White Lies

Released 30 MARCH A small bronze statue of an Akita stands at one of the five entrances to Shibuya Station in Tokyo, serving as a popular meeting place and point of interest for the thousands of visitors who pass through each week. This particular Akita, who is immortalised in precious metal, has a name and a history – Hachikō, the dog who patiently waited nine years on this very spot for a master who would never return. He may have passed away some 80 years ago, but the tale of the dog who waited continues to enchant and inspire folk the world over. In his new film Isle of Dogs, it seems that Wes Anderson has spun a similarly wistful yarn about about the strangely transcendent power of canine companionship. Anderson…

Released 20 APRIL A white backdrop stapled to a floor, filmed from a high angle; on it crouches Isabelle (Juliette Binoche), a Paris-based abstract painter. Brush and palette in hand, she begins to move around, filling in the space beneath her feet. The shot ingeniously positions Isabelle as author and subject. The canvas pulls double duty as her frame and ours. It offers a glimpse of a creative process that is serenely yet maddeningly enigmatic. Are these slow, languorous, black-on-white strokes planned, or extemporaneous? Or, put another way: does Isabelle already see the bigger picture, or is she just making it up as she goes along? Let the Sunshine In is very much the proverbial portrait of the artist, as well as of an artistic community, marking the first time that…

Released 16 MARCH When The Square won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2017, director Ruben Östlund leapt onto the stage with a boundless energy not seen since Tom Cruise met Oprah Winfrey’s sofa. At one point, he instructed the press to turn their cameras to the crowd, and for the crowd to give out an almighty yell. Everyone did so obediently – the camera even panned to David Lynch joining in. It was a surreal, unruly moment at a ceremony identified for its unparalleled pomp and decorum, but perhaps entirely fitting given that The Square is itself a film comprised of bizarre non sequiturs. Loosely based on his own experiences working in the art world, Östlund’s fifth feature sees Claes Bang take on the role of Christian, a Stockholm gallery…

Released 6 APRIL “You really do live in a museum,” complains single mother Elaine (Michelle Williams) to her son Ben (Oakes Fegley), whose bedroom is festooned with the souvenirs, mementoes and detritus that he has curated over the 12 years of his life. Museums form key locations in Todd Haynes’ Wonderstruck, which lets its two quest narratives, set 50 years apart, unfold in cross-cutting parallel until they eventually merge into a single, complex cabinet of curiosities whose disparate exhibits all suddenly seem intimately interconnected. This is a film which offers the world in microcosm, and a cityscape filled with secrets and personal histories, so that all of New York City is revealed to be one giant, awe-inspiring museum where everyone, even if they do not quite realise it, belongs. In 1927,…

Released 6 APRIL Through the eyes of four men from very different walks of life, co-writers and directors Andy Nyman and Jeremy Dyson take us on a guided tour of bottled-up male anguish and a crumbling British society. This unnerving compendium has made the transition from a successful international stage show (whose fanbase includes the director John Landis) to the big screen and draws inspiration from a rich history of horror, recalling the chilling and nightmarish quality of films including the Amicus anthologies and 1945 portmanteau, Dead of Night. Nyman plays our pragmatic guide through three separate supernatural tales, Professor Goodman, an acadmic who has devoted his life to debunking myths and taking down fraudulent psychics. We first meet the adult Goodman snatching away comfort from a grieving mother at a…

Released 27 APRIL An imposing undercurrent of portent, of grand repercussions stemming from quiet beginnings, is apparent from the off in John Trengove’s delicate film about youth and sexuality. As Xolani, Nakhane Touré plays a caregiver for the young men attending a South African initiation who is forced to keep his sexual orientation under wraps. No-frills camerawork and sparse, ambient sound design add to the air of insularity endured by Xolani. Forced to hide from the conservatism of his peers, his assignations with Bongile Mantsai’s Vija seem a well-kept secret until the arrival of Niza Jay Ncoyini’s city-boy Kwanda. Seeing through their act, Kwanda comes under Xolani’s care as he sets upon the path to manhood, all the while posing a threat to the security of all three men. Within this…

Released 6 APRIL The story of a marginalised social group fighting to extract the means to survive against an indifferent establishment is nothing new. Yet what gives Robin Campillo’s 1990s-set 120 Beats Per Minute a compelling heft is its thoroughness. It is a dramatised slice of social history that runs on procedural details. Lesser films reduce such schemes to cliché and montage. You leave this film knowing how to make a bathful of fake blood, and how best to vandalise the offices of negligent pharmaceutical companies. The central location is the cosy lecture theatre where the Paris chapter of non-violent AIDS activist group Act Up conduct their weekly meetings. Campillo plunges us straight into the refined conflicts taking place within the organisation. Sophie (Adèle Haenel) is sickened that a recent stunt…

Released 10 JULY Don’t let that title mislead you: Valeska Grisebach’s third feature is much more than another attempt to modernise that most American of all cinematic traditions. With an honest simplicity this unassuming yet striking film uses the conventions of the genre to tell a Euro-specific story, revealing in the process the eternal power of these formal motifs. Meinhard (Meinhard Neumann) is a middle-aged construction worker who arrives in the Bulgarian countryside with a team of fellow Germans to alter the landscape. While his colleagues are unashamedly vocal about their disdain for the country they’re visiting, Meinhard doesn’t share their macho patriotism, which Grisebach makes clear through easy, precise framing and editing. A solitary man of the valley, he prefers to observe the natural surroundings with a discreet curiosity. Soon…

Released 13 APRIL This film opens with a disclaimer: ‘A true story based on rumor and hearsay.’ Briskly paced and cheeky, it offers a fun primer on a curious bit of Hollywood history, though some audiences may be left wanting. It details the final years of actress Jayne Mansfield and her relationship with Anton LaVey, the founder of the Church of Satan. While the famous photographs of LaVey and Mansfield together are indeed delightful, the film seeks to draw too much meaning from what was essentially a chance photo op, as it suggests the two eccentric figures may have had an affair and LaVey may have had some premonition of Mansfield’s untimely death in a car crash. Whether any of these theories carry weight is up for debate, but the mere…

Some films are radical by design, some are made radical by circumstance. Liu Jian’s freeform neo-noir Have a Nice Day is both. The first Chinese animated feature to screen in competition at the Berlin Film Festival, Have a Nice Day garnered favourable reviews back in early 2017. Further festival dates followed at the Holland Animation Film Festival and Animafest Zagreb, but it was after a spotlight selection by Annecy, one of the most prestigious entries in the animation industry’s calendar, that fate struck. The invitation was blocked by the Chinese authorities, who denied the film an exit visa for the festival, giving Jian and his work instant notoriety, and sharpening the social commentary that runs right through the film. Reminiscent of early Tarantino in its dark humour and roving point…

1971 Released 19 MARCH Blu-ray Did you know that, way, way back in an era all-but forgotten by mankind (the 1970s) director Stephen Frears used to make fantastic movies? None of this featherlight costume drama prestige nonsense he’s associated with now – proper, innovative, original, weird movies. How great would it be if he were able to channel the spirit of his 1971 debut feature, Gumshoe, once more and offer a humorous colloquial take on classic era noir? The film poses the intriguing question: what if small-time gangsters were kidnapped from from 1930s America and rehoused in modern day working class Liverpool? Albert Finney ladles on the charm like watery gravy as Eddie Ginley, a Chandler-loving bingo caller and aspirant stand-up comedian who decides to branch out as an after hours…

Is there a pleasure quite like listening to the soothing and amiable voice of Wes Anderson as he turns his mind towards answering questions on his own carefully-calibrated terms? The focus of this conversation with the master director is Isle of Dogs, a language-obsessed, political conspiracy-themed, stop-motion adventure concerning dogs exiled to a trash island in a near-future Japan. Midway through our chat, the line goes dead. Some painful moments pass. When we are back in touch, Wes reveals that he is on a train passing through Switzerland and just went through a tunnel. Unable to contain myself, I say, “Are you trying to act like a character in your film, it’s perfect?” He indulges me with a little laugh before explaining: “No I have to. I’m on my way…

Released 27 APRIL Not quite England and not quite France, the isle of Jersey occupies a unique space within Europe. While the picturesque idyll is primarily known for its temperate climate and history of cattle farming, in Michael Pearce’s Beast, it takes on the sinister identity of a suffocating enclave in a strange state of social flux. As much a character as the people inhabit its sweeping coastlines and dark crevices, it provides an ethereal, eerie setting for first love and last rites. Jersey makes for a beguiling setting at once familiar and strange, the contrast between dreamy summer holiday spot and sparse wilderness highlighted through smart cinematography (c/o Benjamin Kracun). A sense of literal and metaphorical isolation – the suggestion that life on the island trickles rather than flows –…

Released 6 APRIL Hollywood doesn’t really do nasty. On the rare occasions it does, there’s always some handy switch-back, or last minute reprieve or redemption or moralistic salve to help alleviate any potential suffering on the part of the viewer. Perhaps this is why Michael Haneke’s American remake of his own Funny Games, a scathingly ironic satire on the seductive nature of screen violence, crashed and burned. We like to see people torching insects with a well-placed magnifying glass, but we need to learn why they’re an awful person for doing so. Yet you spend the length of Cory Finley’s Thoroughbreds watching as the plane plummets into the ravine, waiting, waiting, waiting for it to pull up and for everyone on board to be saved. And it simply refuses to go…

Released 4 MAY With Japanese anime powerhouse Studio Ghibli having announced the end of an era, the producer/director team previously responsible for their striking teenage ghost story When Marnie Was There wisely decided to take their leave and set up their own anime operation. As with Marnie and Hirosma Yonebayashi’s debut feature Arrietty, the source is once more a highly-regarded English novel for children, Mary Stewart’s ‘The Little Broomstick’ – which Disney nearly adopted in the early 1980s. With its tale of a young girl rather surprised to find herself a star pupil at an exclusive academy for trainee witches, many viewers will feel there’s more than a hint of Hogwarts in the air, but since Stewart’s story dates from 1971, the chain of influence might possibly be running in the…

Released 23 MARCH Most normal people don’t have the time or resources to instigate a class action lawsuit against ageist employers, or to take down businesses which discriminate against their more mature employees. Sometimes, the only option is to roll with the humiliations and hope things all ends as well as they can. In I Got Life!, Agnès Jaoui slinks comfortably into the role of menopausal matriarch Aurore, a divorced parent-of-two who appears to be in the midst of a mid-life crisis foisted upon her by powers that are beyond her control and understanding. She forces a smile when the upstart proprietor of the cafe in which she works as a waitress imposes a set of awkward new rules. And she attempts to retain her cool when bumping into her ex…

The Parisian chapter of Act Up – a roistering anti-AIDS activist organisation – is the subject of 120 Beats Per Minute, the new film from writer/ director Robin Campillo and the follow-up to his lauded inter-generational gay drama, Eastern Boys. LWLies: In both your previous film, Eastern Boys and BPM, there’s a real devotion from the actors. Campillo: It’s because I trust them immensely. I spend a long time on casting. For me, it’s key, because there’s a moment when I forget the characters I’ve written and become more interested in the actors. I try to go towards them as much as they go towards me. Because they know they’re being observed for who they really are, they can be a lot more generous with me. I think we see…

Released 23 MARCH This poisonous little debut feature from French director Xavier Legrand is a long-fanged genre piece kitted out in sheep’s clothing. Its opening act offers a fan dance of subtle misdirection and teasing obfuscation, as a warring couple engage in a bitter custody battle overseen by a harried magistrate. In the red corner, there’s Léa Drucker’s cowering fawn Miriam, who wants nothing more than to be rid of her allegedly vile and overbearing husband. Unfortunately for her, she doesn’t quite have the courage to just say these words in a room full of lawyers. In the blue corner, there’s seething man-hulk Antoine (Denis Ménochet), who resembles a melancholic, gone-to-seed prizefighter. His tiny, piercing eyes and petit facial features serve to cloak any outward emotion, making it even tougher, initially,…

World War Two was fought with everything on hand – fleets and tanks and bayonets and kamikaze Zeros, yes, but cartoons, too, dedicated to winning the hearts and minds of the coming generation to whatever Great Struggle was being proposed. In Daffy the Commando, for instance, the famous Warner Bros duck drops into Deutschland to doink a rotoscoped, Mel Blanc-voiced Hitler over the noggin with a mallet, while Popeye the Sailor can be seen sending an entire Japanese battleship to the salvage yard singlehanded in You’re a Sap, Mr Jap. Even ’toons lacking in explicitly political content could send a message: Yasujiro Ozu, stationed in Singapore and screening contraband prints of captured Hollywood movies while in the employ of the censorship board, was gobsmacked by his first viewing of a…

1968 OUT NOW Blu-ray The question that hangs over this and many of the other early films by the late Hungarian director Miklós Janscó is: should I bone up on my modern eastern European military history before or after watching? Do these films stand as recreations of key episodes in one country’s tumultuous and violent past? Or are they more poetic and universal, standing in as broader investigations into the tyranny of man during times of war? Silence and Cry from 1968 arrived soon after the director’s most well-loved works: 1966’s The Round-up and 1967’s The Red and the White. In all three films Janscó takes advantage of his homeland’s eerily flat terrain which is so vast, open and empty that it serves as a kind of open prison. As…

2000 Released 5 MARCH Blu-ray In his seminal 1878 novel ‘Anna Karenina’, Leo Tolstoy theorised “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” This principle becomes manifest in Edward Yang’s Yi-Yi, an intimate portrait of a middle-class Taiwanese family in flux, which is lovingly presented in a new Criterion Collection edition. Set in Taipei over the course of a single year, the film opens with a wedding and closes with a funeral. The three-hour space in between these two bookend moments covers the vastness of the human experience, from the dizzy excitement of first love to the melancholy of watching a loved one slip away. Three narratives within the Yian family are meticulously interwoven, as the patriarch NJ struggles to cope with his wife’s desertion…

As most seasoned Euro travellers will know, Paris is a city which shuts up shop on Sundays and Mondays. For the uninspired tourist, this leaves tramping Haussmann’s resplendent, lavishly wide boulevards as the sole form of cultural nourishment. One old reliable on the Paris tourist trail, and usually open all hours, is its graveyards, which are always good for an introspective wander or some macabre celeb spotting. At the sprawling Cimetière du Père Lachaise, you can find Jim Morrison’s tombstone festooned with flowers and love notes. A little off the beaten track is the Cimetière de Picpus, final resting place of thousands guillotined during the French Revolution. But for a genuinely strange and strangely moving afternoon among the dearly departed, hop on the train to the northern suburb of Clichy…

QUESTION WHAT IS THE FUTURE OF ANIMATION? At the beginning of 2018, the field of movie animation appears to be in rude health, from the financial viability of the biggest blockbusters to the creative spark behind the most innovative of independent, home-brewed creations. Seven fully-animated films made it into the top 30 highest box office grossers of 2017, including family-friendly studio hits like Despicable Me 3, Coco and The Boss Baby. Taking a broader view, many of the highest grossing live-action films featured significant, cutting-edge digital animation wielded by visual effects professionals. This was most explicit in the creation of motion-captured characters in Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Beauty and the Beast, Kong: Skull Island and War for the Planet of the Apes. Where visual effects are concerned, we’re deep…

Released 23 MARCH On promotional duties for his 2017 comeback feature Logan Lucky, Steven Soderbergh proved slippery when it came to even acknowledging the existence of this new film, shot over ten days in June of that year. Headlines already abound dubbing Unsane his iPhone movie; the shrinking of high definition capture devices saw it shot and cut in the time it took Steven Spielberg to finish the Washington Post crossword. More exciting than any news of Unsane’s less-than-conventional technical toolkit is that it is the filmmaker’s first venture into the realm of psychological horror. The film’s trailer sells it as the claustrophobic progeny of Samuel Fuller’s 1963 psych ward bombshell, Shock Corridor, and Roman Polanski’s 1965 classic of female oppression, Repulsion. That’s basically the conceit, even if Unsane can’t bear…

Michael Pearce’s Beast is a dark romance set on the mysterious isle of Jersey. It is a film that subverts expectations – and at the heart of it all is star-on-the-rise Jessie Buckley, who delivers a mesmerising turn as Moll, a young woman who finds herself in a difficult situation when she falls for the black sheep of her community. LWLies: As someone who trained as a musician before acting, do you find yourself drawn to one over the other? Buckley: I’ve actually just finished a film called Country Music, which is about a girl who comes out of prison in Glasgow and wants to be a country music singer. So I’ve got the best of both worlds! I’m having a great time. Do you think you’ll ever go back…

Released 23 MARCH In 1976, drummer Paloma Romero – better known as Palmolive – had had enouhgh of the racist, bigoted shtick of then bandmate Sid Vicious. She peaced out of The Flowers of Romance, with guitarist Viv Albertine in tow, and set about forming the world’s first all-girl punk group. Only, The Slits’ incendiary story has largely been redacted from pop culture’s chronicles – so says New York University’s professor of punk and reggae, Vivien Goldman, in this edifying documentary. Here to Be Heard summons punk’s first feminist firecrackers: Romero, Albertine, bassist Tessa Pollitt and potent frontperson Ari Up. This self-made sorority sought to claim space, choice and new ways of being women, in step with second-wave feminism. Unsurprisingly, the era’s news media were mostly repulsed by the band’s perceived…

Released 6 APRIL There’s a scene towards the end of this retro-styled political thriller from José “RoboCop (2014)” Padilha where Rosamund Pike’s German freedom fighter dials up her distant lover from a payphone in a Ugandan airport terminal. The setting is Entebbe, 1976, and as she issues a weary yet defiant auf wiedersehen down the receiver, you can feel the weight of history bearing down on her. Then, in a twist that wouldn’t feel out of place in a Two Ronnies sketch, Padilha and screenwriter Gregory Burke torpedo the emotional centre of their movie by having a kindly airport security guard inform Pike’s character that the telephone she’s using – the one she’s just poured her heart out into for two straight minutes – is out of service, but she’s welcome…

Released 16 MARCH Unless explicitly targeted at the religious audiences who have turned the faith-driven God’s Not Dead series into a profitable franchise, films about biblical figures typically have to rely on more than just their storyline to seduce secular audiences. Sure enough, as suggested by the tagline, ‘Her story will be told,’ Garth Davis’ Mary Magdalene promises to give a voice to a character from the life of Jesus who is often ignored in favour of more famous male apostles and Christ himself. After all, Mary Magdalene was the first person to see Christ resurrected, and thus might deserve a film of her own. Because the details of her life are largely unknown – at least to mainstream audiences – the first part of this new film is the most…

Released 23 MARCH In his more recent work, writer/director Hirokazu Kore-eda, the reigning genius of Japanese observational cinema, has come down with a serious case of the warm and fuzzies. In 2011’s I Wish, a pair of plucky, adorable youngsters run away from home to see the bullet train; in 2015’s Our Little Sister, three women find themselves caring for their plucky, adorable sibling. Even his last film, the comparatively downbeat post-marital drama After the Storm, keeps the plucky, adorable child of divorce firmly in the centre of the frame. None of which is remotely intended as criticism: Koreeda deals with childhood more convincingly than any director this side of Shane Meadows, and I Wish is one of the most emotionally intelligent and intensely moving films of the past decade. But…

Released 23 MARCH Hair seems to be a big deal in the world of digital animation. Water too. Both stand as kind of final boss level for this rapidly-evolving visual form. The 2010 Disney film Tangled felt like a showpiece for immaculate individual hair strand rendering and 2013’s Frozen did the same for water and ice. But once you’ve perfected flowing locks and the mellifluous motion of liquid, then what next? Liu Jian’s Have a Nice Day proves that, in animation, the way forward might just be less rather than more. Not so much a move away from photorealism, but a chance to take stock at what makes the animated mode of communication unique. This deadpan noir roundelay does away with the detail that doesn’t matter – the skin, the texture,…

1993 Released 19 MARCH Blu-ray There is so much stifled yearning contained within Martin Scorsese’s rhapsodic adaptation of Edith Wharton’s 1920 novel that the celluloid positively shivers. Its screenplay, penned by the director’s regular creative wingman, Jay Cocks, is a model of careful adaptation, in that it laches onto the rich thematic essence of the story rather than attempting to forcibly extract a simple, easy-on-the-eye storyline. The drama is made up almost entirely of one-to-one interaction in which the plans of two people are often then altered or subverted by the interventions of a third. At the centre is Daniel Day-Lewis’ oversensitive lawyer Newland Archer and ‘fallen’ countess Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer), returned to New York circa 1870 having been scandalised by her Polish aristo husband. Archer is engaged to beaming…

1967 Released 23 APRIL Blu-ray A massively infuriating film, but joyfully so. Biting a thumb at construction-line, bourgeois filmmaking, Jean Luc-Godard passed through the red-tinted looking glass with 1967’s splenetic collage La Chinoise into a cinema which assumed the form of visual sloganeering. A group of leftist radical dissidents hole up in a Parisian apartment and attempt to forge an ideologically pure form of political activism from behind barricades made from Mao’s ‘Little Red Book’. The first hour of the film takes the form of a revolutionary cabaret spectacular as the likes of Anne Wiazemsky, Jean-Pierre Léaud and Juliet Berto engage in arguments, readings, sing-songs and study. Most entertaining is the little theatrical sketches they produce which express their vocal hatred of American imperialism, particularly in relation to the Vietnam war.…

1975 Released 19 MARCH Blu-ray There seems to be a modern formula when it comes to screen acting, especially when related to celebrity: make your millions through pop trash or the award circuit, then pick and chose work with a critically lauded maverick director in order to build a legacy. With Chinatown, Five Easy Pieces and The Last Detail under his belt, Jack Nicholson headed to Europe, with the help of MGM’s coin, to make a movie with the marble-eyed godhead of screen alienation: Michelangelo Antonioni. The result is close to a perfect match between star and director, as Nicholson assumes a guise of intense placidity and internalised confusion to play David Locke, a depressive journalist tooling around in northern Africa with little to show for his toil. He returns to…