Indholdsfortegnelse for Issue 75 i Little White Lies

I was watching the film Jupiter Ascending the way it was meant to be seen: via premium streaming service. It had something to do with Channing Tatum, rocket-powered rollerblades, Eddie Redmayne screaming while wearing a shower curtain, Sean Bean pretending to be half bee, and a breathless tussle to ensure the future of planet Earth. It was fun. But there was something odd about the experience, beyond the bee acting. This is a film in which, like so many before it, the fate of mankind hangs in the balance. Yet it was hard to suppress the thought: would it be so bad if we were all compacted and transformed into space crystals and ingested by intergalactic royalty to extend their lives? Maybe it’s what we deserve. On the occasion of…

It strikes me, looking at our present dystopian logjam, that the problem is one of across-theboard entrenchment. We’ve grown suspicious of giving valuable time to anything that doesn’t appear to conform to our pre-established beliefs; one can no more visualise Bernie Sanders sitting down with ‘The Fountainhead’ than one can Theresa May running in from the wheatfields to catch up with I, Daniel Blake. And can you imagine Vladimir Putin being won over by Paddington? ‘This is not a Russian bear.’ Increasingly there is an assumption that if it’s not made by and for Us, then it can only be for Them. Reaching past Lincoln, Steven Spielberg’s never-more-timely thesis on the need for the diplomatic communication that shapes leaders and pushes things forward, I’m going to defy Mr Putin and…

In the surface, 1986’s Short Circuit feels like a lackadaisical attempt to make the robot equivalent of E.T. Look a little deeper and it boldly shows viewers how artificial intelligence can be a force for good, subverting Hollywood’s lazy obsession with turning robots into sex slaves and soulless killing machines. Short Circuit opens at NOVA Laboratories, a shady research firm that boasts of creating five new military robots capable of blowing Moscow to smithereens. However, by good fortune, robot No. 5 is struck by lightning and malfunctions, which results in its escape from the laboratory and the start of its quest for knowledge. When it encounters hippie farmer Stephanie (Ally Sheedy), No. 5 repeatedly asks her for ‘input’, which it is given in the form of encyclopedias, novels and TV.…

It might have been easier to choose one of the many amazing documentaries that show us both the horrors and the wonders that humans have wrought on this planet, but as a believer in the power of fiction, I’ve gone for a drama. (After all, if we don’t have filmmakers with strongly held beliefs, this whole enterprise is pointless). Ken Loach’s Ladybird, Ladybird changed my life. It made me want to be a filmmaker; helped me to understand how the political affects the personal, how relationships and personalities are complex and how desperately we need a society based on love. It’s a devastating, heartbreaking film and anyone with any power needs to see it and, most of all, learn to feel the impact of their decisions Hope Dickson Leach is…

So for the important people, I’d show them the documentary Strong Island because they need to hear from people they pretend don’t exist or aren’t worthy of hearing–a black perspective, a trans perspective, a lower income perspective. And I want them to feel some empathy which seems to be drummed out of you once you become powerful–there aren’t many more empathic experiences than being immersed in this film. It also might benefit them to understand that documentaries can be works of art in case they fancy thinking about how culture can be both powerful and beautiful–if they understood that we might have a more compassionate and thoughtful world Charlie is head of documentaries at the Guardian.…

In Krzysztof Kieslowski’s metaphysical The Double Life of Veronique, two young women share the same face and the same soul. These two Veronicas, one living in Paris and the other in Poland, are separated by the imagined boundaries of politics. The politics of Kieslowski’s cinema lies in the implicit. Thus, at first glance, the film only vaguely exists in our modern world. Politics are often interpreted in the grand gestures of obstruction and liberation, yet most of our lives muddle on regardless of who holds power. Weronika in particular, who lives in Poland as a singer, seems passively limited by living under communist rule. In one crucial moment, there is a hint that the two women almost meet in Krakow Square during a protest. Weronika drops her sheet music and…

As eminent author and satirist Mark Twain once quipped, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” To wit: with the US beset by disastrous drug crises, record income inequality, rampant culture wars, and a senile television personality installed at the White House, now is the perfect time to revisit John Landis’ Trading Places; an ingenious, Reagan-era update of Mark Twain’s ‘The Prince and the Pauper’. Boasting career-making turns by Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd–as an inept Philadelphia street hustler and a tight-fisted Brahmin, respectively–it coats tough medicine about the tired “nature-versus-nurture” debate with a ribald candy shell. Although centred around the two stars and their life-altering swap on the economic ladder, veteran thespians Ralph Bellamy and Don Ameche–whose scheme to replace broker Aykroyd with Murphy’s opportunistic panhandler–are the veritable…

I would want our world leaders to be reminded of the fact that, while they take turns to play god, showcasing their weapons of mass destruction, humanity continues to suffer and we as individuals are left being ruled by fear. Toshiro Mifune gives a heartbreaking performance as a man so terrified by what he believes to be the imminent threat of nuclear war, that it ultimately destroys him. This feels especially relevant now during an increasingly tense nuclear stand off, and I hope the powerful and the super rich would open their eyes and see that their relentless pursuit of money and power can have a devastating effect on our everyday lives. The perpetual threat of catastrophic harm to human life can be as damaging to the mind as the…

There’s no mood lifter quite so potent as a Beatles movie. Help! is undeniably silly, finding the fab four embroiled in a slapstick plot that features ample opportunities for pop spectacle. The powerful decision-makers of the world, foul as many of them may be, should be forced to watch something fun, something pure–I don’t want to use cinema as a punishment. In moments of ennui, I often find myself thinking of The Beatles palling about in their colourful, ultra-’60s shared home, or frolicking through the snow together. Help! is filled with iconic proto-music videos of, essentially, The Beatles doing random fun stuff. I distrust anyone who doesn’t want to watch that. While I know this hypothetical screening wouldn’t necessarily bring about world peace, I do think it would lighten the…

Highlighted by recent events in the film industry, but a constant concern for women in any field, is the way we are set up to fail in the workplace due to our gender. When American Mary was released in the UK back in 2013 I made a knowing comment on Twitter asking, “Where are all the reviews written by women?” At the time of the film’s release, I checked Rotten Tomatoes and couldn’t find any. Checking now, out of 48 reviews, there are still only six penned by female writers. The tweet was meant as playful provocation and it felt great to be able to voice a nagging frustration so early on in my career. This wasn’t an outrageous feminist statement, but by simply pointing out a fact, I lost…

How better to inspire epiphany in an audience assured in its worldview(s) than screening a film that offers continual revelations and constantly challenges preconceptions? For me, that film is John Smith’s monochrome avant-garde short, The Girl Chewing Gum. The film opens with a shot of a busy intersection in Dalston, over which a traditionally omniscient voice-of-God narration (from Smith himself) directs the action seen on screen; “…and I want the little girl to run across…now.” The world as prescribed by its creator/controller. What quickly becomes apparent, however, is that the voice is not directing the scene at all. The visual is documentary observation of the junction in East London, the soundtrack descriptions are an intentional assertion of authorial control on a disorderly reality. As the unbroken shot continues for the…

In 1997, New Yorker correspondent Mark Singer rode on Donald Trump’s private plane, where the gold leaf-encrusted developer manqué set out to watch the 1996 John Travolta vehicle Michael. “But [after] 20 minutes,” Singer reported, Trump “got bored and switched to an old favorite […] Bloodsport, which he pronounced ‘An incredible, fantastic movie’.” One of his adolescent sons was stationed by the VCR to fast-forward through everything but the parts where Jean Claude Van Damme is kicking somebody in the balls. In so many ways, the Free World has precisely the leader it deserves. Trump, with his toilet-drinking dog’s attention span, is merely the grossest articulation of a modern way of life flinching with a furious, fearful, crass, dazed distraction we never asked for, yet choose over and over again.…

Ambiance is a 720-hour Swedish art film that I have absolutely no interest in seeing. I would like to lock all the police, political and business leaders in the world in a cinema with no food or water and make them watch this. As there is nothing more inspiring than a deadline, the 30 days to watch the film would be plenty of time for us plebs to redistribute all wealth, de-escalate climate change, destroy all military weapons, automate shit jobs, and still have lots of spare time to spend chilling and flirting with each other. This is a situation in which I can see movies possibly saving the world. Timothy is the director of the documentary Brexitannia.…

I’d like to help, but… the assumption underlying your thought experiment is that these people just need to be touched by the right art in order to be transformed, to have their eyes opened. But their eyes are open! And I’m sure many have shed tears listening to beautiful music or been profoundly moved by great cinema without it making the slightest difference to how they operate politically. All good art is compassionate, but there’s a limit to what it can do unless in sync with bigger forces. Of course I know I’m not supposed to take your request literally and that I’m a humourless git who’s entirely missing the point, but, given the general grimness of the news at the moment, I just can’t bring myself to join in…

It’s got to be Arrival. If our world leaders can’t learn their goddamn lesson from some seven-limbed alien squid, then they won’t learn it from anyone. The film delivers serious lessons about the importance of phrasing–some world powers interpret an alien word as ‘weapon’, some as ‘tool’ and it has major implications–as well as how countries can work together without being dicks (or weapons, or tools) to each other. Failing that, Grease 2, because it would give us almost two hours to barricade them all while they’re distracted by badly-written ensemble numbers. Holly is a freelance tech writer and editor of Gadgette.com…

My choice of film to show a group of gathered political leaders is, admittedly, a bit of a literal one: no lyrical metaphors or elegantly understated allegories for them. (After all, can you name many politicians with a flair for subtle poetic expression?) No, Camilla Nielsson’s lucid, fascinating 2014 documentary is directly and dynamically about the hard graft of forging democracy. If “forging” seems a loaded choice of verb, all its meanings apply in this study of the tortuous negotiations that led to Zimbabwe’s 2013 constitution, after Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change forced a coalition government with Robert Mugabe’s ruling ZANUPF leadership in an ugly 2008 election. Curdled, compacted layers of corruption at the top are laid bare, as is the human difficulty of bringing about change even when…

Movies can save the world, but we all know that real change comes from the bottom up. It’s naive to think that the key holders to our collective future could ever be steered in the same direction by a single galvanising viewing experience. There are simply too many vested interests undermining common sense decision-making these days, too many inflated egos blocking the path to progress. Besides, why waste a golden opportunity to troll those responsible for the sorry mess we’re in? Call me cynical/petty/both, but in the name of good clean schadenfreude I would gladly track down a copy of John Henry Timmis IV’s “lost” freeform epic from 1987–an 87-hour exercise in endurance cinema consisting of the poet Lee Groban reciting his own dense prose, randomly interspersed with stock footage…

It’s a beautiful day. The bright winter sun will eventually melt away the crimson-streaked snow up by Moose Lake. Marge Gunderson knows that. She knows that the world spins madly on, and men will always kill men for a little bit of money. “I just don’t understand it,” she glumly tells Gaear Grimsrud, who stares at her blankly from the back seat of her police cruiser. There’s so much that feels incomprehensible about the world in its current state. You can know the logical, technical reasons for global conflict, rising sea levels and the presence of a snarling tangerine megalomaniac as Leader of the Free World, but knowledge, as it turns out, isn’t power. The inherent goodness of police chief Marge Gunderson is the warm ray of light which breaks…

Lately in Hollywood, there has been a lot of talk about women. This comes as a relief for me, someone who has always been vocal about the low number of women in powerful positions and how this affects not only the people working in film, but all of us who love film. Now, people are finally listening. The Time’s Up and #MeToo movements have brought with them a wider conversation about the type of opportunities extended (or not extended) to women, and how female characters are treated on screen. I’m optimistic this conversation will lead to action, but Hollywood remains a boy’s club. If I had my way, I’d gather together some of the gatekeepers in the film industry and screen the 1940 film, Dance, Girl, Dance. It is directed…

I’d show this audience the Bhopal film by the Yes Men. I loved it. It shows that campaigning films can be fun, but also very sad. Also, I think they were incredibly brave. Plus they don’t seem to get embarrassed, which feels apt. Kim Longinotto is a maker of excellent documentaries, her most recent being 2015’s Dreamcatcher.…

It’s been nine long years since the release of The Headless Woman, the previous feature from one of the leading lights of the new wave of Argentine cinema, Lucrecia Martel. Having spent almost two years on an aborted adaptation of graphic novel, ‘El Eternauta’, she turned her attention to Antonio di Benedetto’s ‘Zama’, one of the key works of midcentury Argentine literature. Following a difficult, protracted production, the film finally premiered at the 2017 Venice Film Fesival. To say it’s been worth the wait would be underselling one of the great cinematic achievements of the decade. We sat down with the master filmmaker to talk adaptation, representation and cinema’s moral obligations. LWLies: What can you tell us about the aborted science fiction film you were working on before Zama? Martel:…

Directed by PAUL SCHRADER Starring KEN OGATA MASAYUKI SHIONOYA HIROSHI MIKAM 1985 Released 11 JUNE Blu-ray This is Paul Schrader’s visually ravishing revision of what appears as a personal obsession with grown men prone to destroying themselves. As screenwriter of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, and director of works such as American Gigolo and Hardcore, Schrader’s early career is littered with male martyrs who fall victim to their own hubris, or who yearn for the world to turn backwards on its axis. His 1985 curveball Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters is an innovative and intuitive take on the traditional biopic which is entirely fitting of its idiosyncratic subject: the ultra-nationalist Japanese author, poet, actor, model and auto-didact, Yukio Mishima, who is brought to life with till-I-die commitment by the great Ken Ogata.…

Dear friend, We contact you on the occasion of the 75th issue of Little White Lies. We are working on a project and we’d love to have you involved. We are looking at the subject of whether movies can save the world. Context: the world is fucked. If you had the most politically influential people in the world–politicians, CEOs, philanthropists, etc–as a captive audience in a cinema, what movie would you screen to them and why? All we would like is the name of the movie and your justification. Please interpret this question as you like. The aim of this feature is to produce an alternative canon of films, each hand-selected by a diverse array of collaborators. Thanks…

Can a film save the world? Highly unlikely. But a few films can amuse the world; inspire the world with their compassion while also poking fun at social order and puncture all that is overly self-important. A film like Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (or Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, as it was released in English), a gentle delight that mocks the pompous, the petty and the dilettantes and questions reliance on technology but without aggression or bitterness. Almost silent, it works for any audience and blends physical humour with astute lampooning of plenty of serious targets. Ultimately it calls for warmth, affection and compassion… which can never be a bad thing Mark is Artistic Director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival, which takes place from Wednesday 20 June to Sunday 1…

Grab’em by the heartstrings: John Ford’s adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel offers, in essence, a simple, honest and intensely emotional defence of socialism. Employing every trick in the Hollywood playbook, it aims to sell us the idea that everyone deserves a break, and if we all work together we can make this weary old world a better place for all. Subtle it ain’t; truthful it most assuredly is. Tom Huddleston is a film writer and author of the books ‘The Waking World’ and ‘Star Wars: Adventures in Wild Space’.…

Leaders shall observe radicalism in form as well as content, and this is the afrofuturist-feminist-punk bonfire to make it happen. A film packed full of ideas about resistance, revolution and freedom, and with a killer soundtrack. Leaders will bask in its pleasures and rethink everything they have thought. Behold Honey’s opening monologue: “For we have stood on the promises, far too long now, that we can all be equal under cover of a social democracy, where the rich get richer and the poor just wait on their dreams” Michelle Carey is artistic director of the Melbourne. International Film Festival (for the last time this year).…

It’s the end of the world as we know it, and Donald Trump feels fine. After months of political jockeying and threats of nuclear war, his much-ballyhooed meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is set for tomorrow. First though, some prep work: cabinet members, policy makers, and congressional Republicans gather for movie night. According to top advisors, tonight’s selection, 1977’s Twilight’s Last Gleaming by Robert Aldrich, will help to galvanise the proverbial troops. Trump is skeptical, though. He doesn’t watch old movies. And the runtime is 146 minutes. That’s just too long. At least McDonald’s have provided the catering. The lights dim, and a grainy still of the Statue of Liberty inspires applause, as does the familiar tune that plays over the image–“My Country Tis of Thee” performed by…

In the centre of a remote lake surrounded by mountains, there is a floating world: a temple that is also a microcosm, where, in chapters corresponding to the seasons in rotation, Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter… and Spring tracks a boy going through the stages of life, under the eyes of his Master, of Buddha, and (naturally) of us. Along this cyclical journey, the apprentice commits various wrongs - acts of cruelty, lust, murder and sacrilege. Though conventionally punished, the apprentice must also drag the burden (both a literal millstone and a more metaphorical weight) of his misdeeds for the rest of his life, on the steep, slippery path to becoming a Master himself. Kim Ki-duk’s film is a parable of sin, suffering and of wisdom acquired through misstep. Its broad…

No other political film in the last 50 years bears the same power to move you–and few remain as painfully relevant so many years later. A pinnacle of provocative cinema made strategically for social change. Director Gillo Pontecorvo radically redefines film’s capacity to speak to current events. Pontecorvo, along with actors Ali La Pointe (Brahim Haggiag), Colonel Mathieu (Jean Martin), El-hadi Djafar (Saadi Yacef), and composer Ennio Morricone, work together to create a dynamic, gripping tapestry that immediately puts me in 1950s Algiers. Watching it now, it still lays bare the many struggles writhing throughout the world today Efe Çakarel is the founder and CEO of MUBI.…

Roger Ebert said the movies are a machine to generate empathy, but I can’t imagine the dim, brutish people leading in state or industry being moved by the sort of art I find moving. (I’m partial to the colossally ambitious, life-affirming stuff, your Magnolias, your Dekalogs, what-haveyou). This hypothetical exercise sounds like it would devastate me with a reminder that most people who run the country operate on a different emotional frequency than I do. My only recourse would be to go cynical, and to go hard. In Tropic Thunder, Tom Cruise’s character says that actors aren’t adults and accordingly can't be reasoned with on a grown-up’s level, that all a person can do is pull their pants down and spank their arse. I believe a similar principle applies here–that…

When the fate of the world hangs in the balance, we don’t have time for epics. Directed with the propulsive energy of silent-era Soviet propaganda, Guy Maddin’s The Heart of the World presents a love triangle that’s set against a backdrop of impending destruction. For brothers Osip and Nikolai, the only thing on the agenda in their final 24 hours is to vie for love of Anna, the state scientist who has announced the apocalypse. While the two lovelorn young men compete to impress the object of their affections, and the rest of the citizens collapse into panic or indulge in drunken orgies, Anna sees the bigger picture, venturing to the core herself to save mankind. In the space of six frenzied, invigorating minutes, Maddin has drafted an apocalyptic scenario,…

I would screen Inglourious Bastards, so that when it gets to the scene where the captive cinema audience gets burned to death, it would make them panic that it’s all been an elaborate trick to do the same to them. When they leave the theatre still alive they might have a new appreciation for the precarious nature of their mortality, and from then on pull their heads out of their arses and start improving things Michael Sheen is a screen actor and activist.…

I think with the state of the world right now, everybody could do with some complete entertainment along with Carrie Fisher and probably one of the best car chases in cinematic history, all that and a good sing-along to all the amazing tunes. Nothing like singing and laughing to soothe and heal the soul. Comedy can be the best way to deal with distressing and difficult situations and subjects, so sit them down with Jake and Elwood and the brilliance of John Landis to solve all world problems. Edith is a broadcaster and host of the very great film/music podcast, Soundtracking.…

There’s a moment in Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 where an old man has a chainsaw forcibly inserted into his rectum–but that’s not why I’ve chosen to screen this film. If depictions in the modern media are anything to go by, it’s the story of a very average southern family who happen to be cannibals. They find solace and shelter under a Confederate flag whose very fibres are held together with blood. As drunken yahoos charge around Texas unloading their six-shooters into the landscape, the Sawyer clan are co-opting the spirit of their fallen southern brethren and cultivating a sense of downhome pride with the help of industrial power tools, and they make a tidy profit in the process with all the prime meat they collect along the…

I believe that the world could benefit from a bit of existential self-scrutiny, and few films have inspired a more desperate reassessment of my life to date than Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 1998 fantasy-drama After Life. Kore-eda is now primarily known for his cosy, yet profound domestic dramas–Still Walking, Our Little Sister, I Wish, et al–but After Life acts as the fulcrum for the director’s whole career, sitting squarely between his early documentaries and festival-favourite fiction features. It’s Monday, and a group of people are welcomed into a rundown administrative building. They’re all recently deceased, and must choose one memory from their lives to take with them into the hereafter, which will be recreated, captured on film and projected to the whole group at the end of the week. Across a series…

In the months following the release of James Cameron’s Avatar back in 2009, there were widely publicised accounts of certain audience members wishing they could relocate to Pandora, the film’s fictional planet. Not all of us, even those who would consider themselves fans, shared the sentiment, despite the admittedly strong selling-point of a solid wifi network. It does beg the question of which cinematic milieu we might choose to up sticks to in its place, though. I’d assume it wasn’t just the location that had fanatics pining for Pandora, but more the social and cultural traditions of the planet’s inhabitants that led to Avatar being singled out for impossible gap year daydreams. With similar criteria in mind, my fantasy Thomas Cook package would take me into the world of Howard…

Ondi Timoner began filming dot-com millionaire Josh Harris in 1999. He was famous in New York for his parties and dubbed “The Warhol of the Web”. She went on to capture his social experiments. Despite the scuzzy, lo-fi visuals they speak with biting clarity to the virtual manner in which we live how. An art project dubbed ‘Quiet’ ran as the new millennium loomed and saw participants living in a camera-covered bunker. “Everything is free except the video we capture of you. That we own,” smirked Harris who remained discreetly away from the primal anarchy within his reality TV-style setup. Not so for his next trick. We Live In Public involved surveilling a loft he shared with girlfriend, Tanya Corrin. There were cameras in the bathroom, cameras in the bedroom…

The film we would screen for this special audience is Mother India (1957) by Mehboob Khan. It was a family favourite of ours when our daughter was younger. It’s a full on epic family drama, while also keeping ideas of a newly independent nation, moving on from the oppressions and humiliations of colonialism. Yes, it’s long. Three hours long in fact. It has it all: slapstick comedy, great songs, sweeping storyline, archetypal characters (including a villainous moneylender), death in abundance, biblical floods, poverty beyond belief, and even filicide. The film puts you through the wringer and just when you think things can’t get any worse, they do. It can be read in many complex ways, but we would want the attendant audience to focus on the themes of social inequality…

The invites are out, the screens have been polished, the seats are awaiting the world’s biggest asses. Carrying clout over all to be demolished, all to be killed, and how to operate us–the masses. Tonight these seats shall constipate them, until the aches shall explode through piles of love and unity, the viewing’s harsh but they’ll comprehend, because, you see, I slipped ’ em some doves in their G&Ts. The bunnies are out, my Schmidt front and centre, aware of the impending apocalypse awaiting, guests roll up and pout on the blood red carpets, shameless eyes bright, oblivious to their fating. Tonight these screens shall tune them in to their own roles on Watership Down, a theatre full of Hazel’s descendants cuddled by General Woundwort’s human equivalents. Thank ye, ol’…

Half the world suffering from desperation or feeling cheated. The other half take advantage of that fact, for money, for fun or self relief. The rest probably ignore the whole thing. Picture yourself in the movie, let us know who you are. Careful, change the point of view, you may be on or off the dance floor. Laia Costa is an actor from Barcelona who played the lead in Sebastian Schipper’s one-take wonder, Victoria, and will soon be seen in Dan Fogelman’s Life Itself and Harry Wootliff’s Only You.…

Directed by LUCRECIA MARTEL Starring DANIEL GIMÉNEZ CACHO LOLA DUEÑAS MATHEUS NACHTERGAELE Released 25 MAY In 2016 the American publishing imprint New York Review Books released a timely translation of a 1956 Argentine novel named ‘Zama’ by the author Antonio di Benedetto. Timely in that at helpfully preceded the release of a much touted film adaptation by the staggeringly talented director Lucrecia Martel. Reading the book in anticipation of the film, two thoughts occurred: one, that this abrasive study of a disconsolate, cock-blocked political functionary trapped in the crumbling South American outpost of Asunción, Paraguay during the late 18th century, is surely, in the West, to be considered a lost literary classic; and two, that transforming it into a film is an impossible endeavour, as the text is largely formed of circuitous,…

Having first achieved cult reverence for her role as the awkward eponymous character in Muriel’s Wedding, Toni Collette has worked as a chameleonic character actor for 25 years and counting. She delivers a blistering performance as Annie Graham in the terrifying metaphysical ghost story, Hereditary (reviewed page 77). When she called from the LA set of her next feature (Dan Gilroy’s Velvet Buzzsaw), the Australian couldn’t have been less like her on-screen persona–but was only too happy to talk us through the process of making a modern horror classic. LWLies: What was your first response when you received the script for Hereditary? Colette: I really wasn’t looking to do anything like that, which my agent knew, and they sent it to me saying “We really think you should check it…

Those familiar with Little White Lies will know that we’re fans of Nicholas Winding Refn–the Danish provocateur who’s been subverting both genre and expectation since his 1996 debut feature, Pusher. Alongside his current Amazon-funded crime serial, Too Old to Die Young, he has another new project brewing. It’s not a movie this time, but a scheme to bring movies made by other, lesser-known artists to a wider audience. In his spare time, Refn is an avid collector of cinematic arcana. He owns a killer portfolio of exploitation movie posters, which were showcased in the gorgeous coffee table tome, ‘The Art of Seeing’. His interest then evolved to the films themselves, and he became driven to salvage as many of these obscure and incendiary artworks as possible, scouring archives and private…

Lenny Abrahamson Mark Adams Babak Anvari Mark Asch JA Bayona Abby Bender Anton Bitel Laurène Boglio Edith Bowman Charles Bramesco Holly Brockwell Efe Cakarel Michelle Carey Jaime Christley Phil Concannon Stephen Cone Laia Costa Adam Lee Davies Guillermo Del Toro Hope Dickson Leach Ella Donald Emma Fraser Marya E Gates Caroline Golum Glenn Heath Jr. Thomas Hobbs Tom Huddleston Pamela Hutchinson David Jenkins Timothy George Kelly Brodie Lancaster Joe Lawlor Elena Lazic Manuela Lazic Michael Leader Guy Lodge Kim Longinotto James Luxford Christine Malloy Alicia Malone Ian Mantgani Penny Martin Mike McCahill Katherine McLaughlin Tuppence Middleton Sophie Monks Kaufman Adam Nayman Jarod Neece Christina Newland Ben Nicholson Charlie Phillips Gina Prince-Blythewood Laurie Rose Benny Safdie Josh Safdie Carol Salter Roxanne Sancto Michael Sheen Josh Slater-Williams Michael Smiley Justine Smith Matt…

Once I was silver, now I am a fern. Conceived in a star, gestated beneath a mountain, I was born at the tip of a Peruvian mining axe and for a hundred years enjoyed life as a brooch, before being beaten into a goblet. Gemstones glittered around me as I watched Pizarro murdered and his conquistadors scatter for home. I was briefly a ring on the hand of King Ferdinand of Spain before being stolen by a desperate courtesan and used to buy passage on a Portuguese caravel set for the Spice Islands. But the ship’s captain was a sick fool and abandoned his cargo and crew for the madam of a Dandong brothel, and so it was that I was melted and moulded into a gleaming silver sex toy…

I would screen Pariah by Dee Rees. It’s a moving portrait of a young, artistic, queer black girl who comes of age, gets her heart broken, comes out to her family and finds the strength to live her truth and reach for her own happiness above everything else. When I think of strong women in film, Alike (Adepero Oduye) is the first character that comes to mind Marya works in social media by day and consumes and critiques culture by night.…

The Executioner (El Verdugo) from Luis García Berlanga is my bet. It is an overwhelming condemnation of the death penalty. The film is a miracle: a comedy about the death penalty made during Franco’s fierce Spanish dictatorship. The final shot shows two terrified men, one condemned to death and the other his executioner, both dragged away to find themselves sharing a terrible destiny. It is undoubtedly one of the most terrifying images cinema has ever produced JA Bayona is the director of A Monster Calls, The Impossible and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom which is released on 6 June, 2018.…

The humbling, unifying effects of a good meal can be pinned to one particular scene in Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott’s 1996 feature, Big Night; a mouth-watering crescendo where brothers Primo and Secondo (Tucci and Tony Shalhoub) lift a dull metal drum to reveal a golden, richly soaked timpano–a giant, pastabased pie. The way they pat its sides and listen closely to hear the density of the meat and handmade pasta, hugged tightly by a warm shell before they serve it up to friends and neighbours feels almost parental, like they’re nurturing this delicious product of their heritage and their craft. “To eat good food is to be close to God,” says Ian Holm’s wealthy restaurateur, and you don’t half notice it as patrons cast their eyes to the heavens,…

Perhaps it’s naïve to believe that the assembled world leaders and corporate chiefs would fully absorb Charlie Chaplin’s sublime, heartfelt plea for peace, humanity, compassion and unity, but we can hope. The world of The Great Dictator, like ours, is riven by prejudice and hate, and the vindictiveness and rivalries of politicians are about to precipitate global war. Chaplin shows that horror from the ground up–from the terror and violence in the Jewish ghetto, to the tyrant Hynkel, leader of Tomainia, callously deciding the fate of citizens on a whim, behind a desk in his gilded palace. The CEOs might take note that this is also a world in which great leaps forward in technology have been used for evil ends: for Chaplin it’s the aeroplane and the radio, for…

The prime movers of government and industry are people who already sit through many urgent presentations and conjure endless utopian schemes, so if they were my cinema audience, I think I’d like to give them transport to a time and a place, rather than explicitly obvious advocacy. A piece of direct cinema like Los Sures is a rooted and observational capsule of a movie, and a profoundly thought-provoking one about how citizens struggle to make humanity and society work. The documentary, funded by US public television and the National Endowment for the Arts, takes place in Williamsburg in the mid-1980s, when the now hipster mecca was the poorest neighbourhood in Brooklyn and predominantly occupied by Latinos. Among general street scenes are testimonies from Tito, who strips cars; Marta, a single…

The Wizard of Oz, every time. That intoxicating mix of jeopardy, childlike wonderment, high camp and nostalgia couldn’t fail to humble the most hardened of hearts. And is there another moment in cinema that comes as close to summing up the miracle of projected film as powerfully as the moment when black-and-white turns to colour? Penny is the editor-in-chief of The Gentlewoman.…

Mary (Kirsten Dunst) in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is armed with the perfect quotes to impress her crush. The crush that has already been consummated, erased from her memory and experienced once again. Quotes can be wielded in a number of ways–see Pinterest boards, Etsy and Instagram for ideas to frame, embroider or speak aloud–and they can be shaped to fit any narrative. For Mary she uses the words of Friedrich Nietzsche and Alexander Pope to reinforce the notion that erasing painful memories is a blessing, to be in the dark is illuminating. She uses these quotes as a way to impress, stumbling on the name “Pope Alexander” because she is nervous and stoned. A highly relatable flirting technique gone array. At the turn of the 20th century,…

When the highest-stationed people in the land know only to bash and gouge at enormous problems with heavy, stupid hands, characters who bear the weight of the world with an unwavering clarity as to the absurdity of it all must be our heroes. Robert Hamer’s 1949 film has two such people: detective Maubert (Eric Portman) and criminal Lodocq (Guy Rolfe). Lodocq is a gentleman thief not by pretense but by actuality–raised on old money, he despises his ancestry and prefers to live only on money extracted from impregnable bank vaults. Maubert knows he’s guilty of a string of robberies but can’t sort out how, or why. This premise, plus the girl (played by Romanian actress Nadia Gray) both men compete for, makes for a deceptively common, cozy policier that’s unique…

I would screen Grave of the Fireflies to show that the greatest casualty of war is always innocence. The film’s empathy and delicate balance of brutality and tenderness would strike deep. The enormous empathy and its ultimate belief in the possibility of love in the face of horror–these are things to be remembered now. Guillermo dell Toro is a maker of flms and winner of awards.…

As the title suggests, we are part of an increasingly uncompassionate society lead by governments who are removed and detached. Andrey Zvyagintsev’s haunting film Loveless is, for me, more than just a portrait of two parents’ lack of love for their unwanted child as they fight bitterly through a divorce, I see this film as an allegory of where we are heading–lacking compassion and kindness as we move into a self-interested society. Don’t let our world become a morally detached society without empathy. More love please! Carol is the director of Almost Heaven.…

Writer Mike White’s decade-long reckoning with what we owe to the world and each other began with Year of the Dog in 2007, continued with HBO’s Enlightened, and reached its peak in the sharp and brutally empathetic Beatriz at Dinner. The film is timely in its portrayal of a real estate tycoon who poaches animals for sport and assumes any brown person at a dinner party is there to serve him. But to frame a film like this and a character like Beatriz (Salma Hayek) only in the context of a Trump-y, Brexit-y world would be turning a blind eye to White’s dedication to painting delicate treehuggers as heroes. Beatriz at Dinner captures the feeling of struggling to find peace between the clashing ideologies of confronting idealists. And it ultimately…

An experimental masterpiece not-so-hidden behind a reality TV veneer, what more vital mortar-shot of a film to place within the view of world leaders than this heartbreaking 21st century expression of human rights, progress, liberation, repression, sadness and struggle. The melancholic strains of Howard Blake’s music for the British television classic The Snowman(!) accompany the most complex and moving fade to black in movies, bringing it home. Stephen is the director of the excellent film Princess Cyd which you should see.…

hat can transcend all language, cultural, and social barriers to deliver joy? Please reserve all answers, for they are meaningless–Joe Manganiello grinding against a gas station soft drink fridge in the American South to the Backstreet Boys is the only one that makes sense. Anticipation for Magic Mike XXL, the sequel to Steven Soderbergh’s 2012 male entertainer-focused drama that looked like a film ready for girls-night-out screenings but was actually about post-global financial crisis life, was initially shrug-worthy. But XXL is a Trojan of a different kind–one of the most glorious surprises of moviegoing in recent memory, that wasn’t just made for a girls-night-out label, but indeed reinvented what that means and what it can do. Audiences don’t just walk out of Magic Mike XXL, they emerge having been enlightened…

I find you cute and funny? Yes. Could you be the guy that I fall for and live with forever? Yes. But the point is you’re a corporate robot. And so it is with great pleasure that I say to you, go jump in a lake, meathead!” After this tirade, Amy Poehler’s Molly throws her glass (of water) at Paul Rudd’s Joel, and storms out of the room. Molly and Joel came together to this costume party, and although they’re both dressed like Founding Father Benjamin Franklin, the two Americas they represent couldn’t be further apart. David Wain’s rigorously political 2014 film They Came Together presents us with an unlikely couple trying to bridge the divide between their hearts and minds — a meet-cute in the shadow of late capitalism.…

It’s simply impossible to come away from Come and See unscathed. Portraying some of the Nazis’ worst crimes during the Second World War, the film is both a lyrical and grotesque rumination on the experiences of one young boy (Aleksei Kravchenko) who joins the Belarusian army in the hopes of defending his charred, ransacked homeland. It might be the most convincing anti-war film ever made, purely through its uncompromising portrayal of human degradation. There are elements of horror in the very fabric of the film; a knotted dread at what fresh atrocity will soon appear. Gather a group of eminent world leaders to see the transfixed, terrified face of young actor Kravchenko. He stares with vacant horror at an unseen–maybe nonexistent–object. His haunted, sunken eyes bulge from an almost supernaturally-aged…

Beside being one of the best submarine movies ever made, Tony Scott’s Crimson Tide also offers a succinct précis of the basic principles of nuclear deterrence. When a Russian nuclear missile installation is captured by a group of rebels, a US Navy nuclear submarine is sent to stand in position, ready for a pre-emptive strike. The belligerent captain, played by an impeccable Gene Hackman, has little regard for the world ending potential of any one nuclear missile being fired — if he could, he would just press the big red button and be done with it. To his great chagrin, such a button does not exist, and every decision needs the approval of the Lieutenant Commander, a young Denzel Washington in one of his more subdued roles. The old-school pride…

When the world has seemingly ‘gawn barmey’, a simple story of a plucky community coming together against ‘The Man’, setting out on their own but finally succumbing to the socialism that’s better for everyone. One of my mum’s favourite films so it must be good. A delightful romp. Laurie is Ben Wheatley’s regular cinematographer, but does work for other people too.…

Directed by YUEN WOO-PING Starring RONGGUANG YU DONNIE YEN JEAN WANG 1993 Directed by 1993 YUEN WOO-PING Blu-ray Following the release of The Matrix in 1999, there was a surge of interest in the work of Hong Kong director and martial-arts choreographer Yuen Woo-ping. Perhaps his crowning glory is the 1993 epic Iron Monkey, a fictionalised adventure in the life of Chinese folk hero Yang Tianchun. A mild-mannered doctor by day, by night Yang robs from the rich to give to the poor as The Iron Monkey, a beloved avenger with far more stylistic flare than his western counterpart Robin Hood. When fellow martial arts expert/healthcare professional Wong Kei-ying rocks up in town with his young son Wong Fei-hung he becomes accidentally implicated in the Iron Monkey’s antics, and Tianchun is forced to…