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56 Articles

THE LIMITS OF CONTROL

“I’m gonna send you home to your parents covered in cum,” says Adam Driver to Lena Dunham with endearing intensity in the first season of Girls, like he absolutely needs to get those exact words off his chest. Driver’s characters are not glib or sarcastic. Comedy comes at their expense not with their complicity. Remember how he startled Oscar Isaac with the vocal range channelled over the words ‘outer’ and ‘space’ in the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis. In Noah Baumbach’s While We're Young, Driver's serious edge gives grounding to Jamie, a “hipster” filmmaker who might otherwise seem flyaway and amoral. It beggars belief that this idiosyncratic, charming, indie performer will feature in Star Wars VII – The Force Awakens but this is what 2015 has in store, as well…

THE LIMITS OF CONTROL

The Tale of the Princess Kaguya

Released20 MARCH “Once upon a time, long long ago, there lived an old bamboo woodcutter...” Along with the exquisitely layered and painted parchments that we see at the beginning of Studio Ghibli's latest feature The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, these opening words, delivered by a reassuringly female voice, leave little doubt that we are entering the world of the fairy tale. The words also prime Japanese viewers to recognise the folk story known as ‘The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter’, written sufficiently ‘long ago’ to qualify as Japan’s oldest extant prose narrative. Yet even with the anime looking back so far, and with accompanying illustrations that evoke classical water colours more than voguish 3D CGI, director/co-writer Isao Takahata (Grave of the Fireflies) is also slyly bringing his materials forward. The key…

The Tale of the Princess Kaguya

Released20 MARCH Jerry (Ryan Reynolds) is one troubled soul,. Not that you’d know it from his cheesy suburban good manners – a veneer of cheer taken to the next level by the hot pink boiler suit that he wears to work at Milton Fixture & Faucet. His kindly therapist (Jacki Weaver) is happy that he has the social stake of employment, unlike his mother who, by letting go, became the most cacophonous of the personas that haunt her son. His doctor doesn’t know that Jerry has stopped taking his pills and is having nightly conversations with his cat, Mr Whiskers and dog, Bosco. An arrow spins on a colour wheel of humour ranging from the bright-white of hilarity to a dark shade of black. Reynolds voices both his pets. The evil Mr…

Released24 APRIL Every appendage on our body was crossed, and then wherever possible, the crossed appendages were crossed with one another, then we hung black cats above the door and tossed horseshoes under ladders, all in the hope that director Carol Morley’s follow-up to her meditative doc hit Dreams of a Life would be a thing of shimmering greatness. Alas, this time it wasn’t to be, as the director has delivered a very woolly, precious and nonsensical drama which flits and flails to its own off-tempo beat without a care in the world. In fact, a feeling of looseness, of casual naturalism is strained to the point where it looks as if the film is about to burst a blood vessel. It’s hard to talk about, not because it’s scattered with…

Released27 MARCH The name Christian Dior is so enshrined in glamour and history that fashion-watchers will naturally gravitate towards this behind-the scenes doc. But for the layperson, is there – to paraphrase the famous Linda Evangelista quote – anything to get out of bed for here? The answer is rooted in the glitzy trail that director Frédéric Tcheng’s debut, Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel, spun following its release in 2011. At a VIP screening in Paris, Tcheng met a Dior head honcho. He knew that the fashion house was in the process of replacing outgoing creative director, John Galliano, and that a Belgian chap named Raf Simons was leading the pack of contenders. “He’s a minimalist!” thought Tcheng at the time - a proclamation expressed early on in the film.…

1980 Released30 MAR Blu-ray Even though Tonino Valerii’s Day of Anger arrived in the before the gunsmoke had cleared from Sergio Leone’s spaghetti western lodestone, A Few Dollars More, you can already see the need to offer interesting variations on what is essentially a very limiting genre template. Yes, you still have the toothless huckster drenched in oily sweat, the well turned-out town tycoon who shows contempt for the town’s underclasses, the shadowy ace gunslinger with a grudge to bear and the downtrodden naif who evolves into killing machine. Yet the way in which these archetypes are built out relies more on small deposits of colourful camp, and Valerii walks a very thin line between sincerity and parody. The final showdown between Lee Van Cleef’s Talby and his one-time protégé Scott Mary (Giuliano…

Released3 APRIL How the heck do you condense the life’s work of one of America’s most prolific auteurs into a neat 90-minute documentary? Just ask director Ron Mann, who provides a rather adept solution in his new film, which offers a welcome refresher of a bona fide cinematic icon almost a decade on from his death. In Altman, Mann recruits various long-time admirers and collaborators, asking them to provide their personal definition of the phrase ‘Altmanesque.’ It’s a brilliantly simple approach, with each respondent’s interpretation contributing to a sequence of snapshots of this singular director. The responses range from droll (“Kicking Hollywood’s ass,” smiles Bruce Willis) to poignant (“Expecting the unexpected,” offers a wistful Robin Williams), and each feels as much a reflection of the interviewees’ personalities as Altman’s. But this is…

The casting of Peter Bogdanovich as a psychiatrist in The Sopranos was witty and suggestive in the best way. David Chase’s landmark series about a mama’s-boy capo Freudian slipping his way through life was filled with allusions to other gangster dramas from Scarface on down, and who better to play master analyst than the man who once literally wrote the book on Howard Hawks? Bogdanovich’s Dr Eliot Kupferburg was a relatively minor character – he was the psychiatrist for Dr Melfi (Lorraine Bracco), who got a lot more screen-time as Tony Soprano’s regular shrink – but his presence went a long way towards contextualising and clarifying Chase’s cinephilic project. He also got the last diagnostic word in edgewise about the series’ eponymous protagonist, explaining to Melfi once and for all…

PYJAMA PARTY: AN ORAL HISTORY OF KICKING AND SCREAMING

RANA JOY GLICKMAN - Line producer OLIVIA D’ABO - Plays the role of Jane JOSH HAMILTON - Plays the role of Grover JOHN LEHR - Plays the role of Louis CHRIS EIGEMAN - Plays the role of Max CARA BUONO - Plays the role of Kate MARY JANE FORT - Costume designer J KATHLEEN GIBSON - Editor In terms of relevant experience, Noah Baumbach’s CV consisted of a blank piece of A4 prior to his attempts to make the movie that was originally titled Fifth Year in the early ’90s. With money falling out on numerous occasions plus rewrites, extra characters and celebrity ballast required by funders during pre-production, the making of Kicking and Screaming actually comes across as something of a dream compared to the horror making-of narratives so prevalent during the period. Based on personal experiences…

THE Squid AND THE Whale

“Minor Dickens.” There’s an unsurprising tradition of notable writers despising the most presumably unassailable of their contemporaries and predecessors — George Bernard Shaw’s voluminous hatred for Shakespeare, Nabokov’s loathing of Dostoyevsky, etc. But in The Squid and the Whale, this verdict has a pettier charge coming from Bernard Berkman (Jeff Daniels), an American novelist gone to seed. At his Brooklyn dinner table, though, Bernard is still the great man to eldest son Walt (Jesse Eisenberg), who soaks up his dad’s succinct dismissal of ‘A Tale of Two Cities’; trying the posture on for himself later, he takes a blind stab at ‘This Side of Paradise’ as “minor Fitzgerald.” I’d heard this verdict in regards to this exact title before from my father, which gave me an uneasy stab of recognition when…

THE Squid AND THE Whale

There is little in the world more irritating than arriving at a party when everyone else in the room is already soused and engaged in insincere, feedback loop-like conversations and venal wars of intellectual attrition. 1997’s Highball, a film from which Noah Baumbach ended up removing his name (it’s credited to one “Ernie Fusco”) expands on this thesis, playing like the traffic-light shooter version of Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel. Three separate soirees take place in the dimly-lit Brooklyn apartment of Travis (Christopher Reed) and Diane (Lauren Katz), a comically ill-matched wannabe power couple desperate to present themselves as grand arbiters of waggish discourse and tipsy bon mots. What they in fact achieve is the perfect conditions for three different-but-similar evenings of private and public hell. It almost seems like a…

Released20 MARCH Xavier Dolan’s Mommy is not a dystopian film, but the one small tweak it makes to the present looms large, swinging in and out of focus like the Sword of Damocles hung with too much slack. The film begins with a series of title cards that introduce viewers to an alternate Canada in which a controversial new law has empowered parents to permanently forfeit custody of minors, institutionalising problem children who’ve become too difficult to raise. However cowardly and inhumane such a law might seem, Steve (Antoine-Olivier Pilon ) is the feral kind of youth who makes it sound like a good idea. Performed with the unchecked abandon previously reserved for Lars von Trier heroines, Steve is a mother’s worst nightmare – not because he’s such a terror, but…

FIRST PERSON… As a filmmaker, I absolutely wasn’t there in 1994 to make a movie like White Bird In a Blizzard. The difference between, say, The Doom Generation and this are a reflection of the differences in me then and me now. I’m older, hopefully wiser, technically I’m a much better filmmaker – every time you make a film you learn so much. Each movie is a snapshot of a certain time. The Doom Generation is where I was at in 1994. I don't spend time looking back at old movies. I was the subject of a retrospective in Toronto a few years back, so I was kinda forced to look at a bunch of clips. They’re all flawed, but to me they’re all perfect in their own way. Slowdive are one…

When the crowd at the Eccles Center (aka The House that Parker Posey Built) rose to its feet in rapturous applause following the premiere screening of Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s Me & Earl & the Dying Girl, the ovation wasn’t exclusively reserved for the filmmakers behind the immaculately made teen tearjerker. Although none of us in that sobbing Utah throng would have admitted it at the time, much of the applause was for ourselves, an acknowledgement of having the insight or blind luck to be there at the precise moment when a movie crystallised from idle buzz into a cinematic event. The Sundance Film Festival has always been a festival predicated on the rush of discovery, and it’s still a place where every attendee gets to play kingmaker for a day, despite a…

IN CONVERSATION… LWLies: There’s a lot of love in your characters but also a lot of viciousness. How have you come to such an aggressive vision of love? Dolan: I’ve almost never experienced love as something that was really calm and tender and peaceful and beautiful. It’s always been intense and emotional and aggressive, maybe even abusive. It’s always been these impossible stories of unrequited feelings and chasing people for years and I’m only 25 so my conception of love is very dramatical. I think that sort of love is also very cinematic. We could sit in front of people calmly — and I don’t want to say boringly because that would be contemptuous — loving each other without any form of problematic for two hours but what would be the movie?…

White Bird in a Blizzard

Released6 MARCH In a nostalgia driven coming-of-age tale that drips with all the suburban portent of a Gregory Crewdson photograph, Kat (Shailene Woodley) narrates the events surrounding the disappearance of her unbalanced mother, Eve (Eva Green). Based on the novel by American fiction writer Laura Kasischke, White Bird in a Blizzard is a poetic mystery, deeply entrenched itself in an ’80s aesthetic, boasting a sonorous soundtrack by the Cocteau Twins Robin Guthrie and superlative cinematography which takes its form in a series of simple suburban tableaux populated by boys-next-door, day-glo costumes and soulless shopping malls. But if this sounds like typical Araki fare you’ll quickly find yourself far from the narratively unconventional and provocative queer dramas of yore. White Bird isn’t retreading the subcultural kaleidoscope of the Teen Apocalypse Trilogy, instead…

White Bird in a Blizzard

Le Silence de la Mer

1949 Released 28 APR Blu-ray The French director Jean-Pierre Melville exists as a figure who placed the notion of process at the forefront of his cinematic storytelling technique. Cause and effect are important on a micro rather than macro level, and his style clearly influenced modern directors such as Steven Spielberg and David Fincher. Yet where his more famous work zeroed in on action and movement, this debut feature from 1949 is atypical in that it is a verbose psychological three-hander which explores the morality of war and questions relating to whether people exist as extensions of the countries they belong to and serve. It’s based on a novella by French resistance writer Jean Bruller who wrote under the pseudonym ‘Vercors’, and so personal was the story that Melville even decide to shoot…

Le Silence de la Mer

Released17 APRIL Without giving too much away, there’s a very satisfying synchronicity between one of the central characters in Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s Spring and the fact that the film itself is a shape-shifting beast which feels as if it has to adapt to survive. It’s as if the directors have taken on a dare to see how many different movie genres they can namecheck within a feature runtime, and while they carry out this task with a surfeit of verve, it does leave you with a feeling that you don’t really know what you’ve just seen. Perennial almost man Lou Taylor Pucci plays LA-based loser Evan who decides to flee to Italy. His clean slate is swiftly blotted when he spies mysterious lady-in-red Louise (Nadia Hilker) at a bar in…

Released27 MARCH With its exaggerated vision of societal tensions reaching boiling point, Damián Szifrón’s Wild Tales serves as a comically pessimistic barometer of the Argentine national mood, still defined by the nightmares of the economic depression at the turn of the century. In Pedro Almodóvar’s Pepi, Luci, Bom…, the post-Franco Spanish landscape became a hedonistic wonderland in which artists partied their way through the hangover of fascism. While Szifrón shares Almodóvar’s (on production duties here) unique strain of dark humour, his characters’ disenchantment manifests itself in a very different way, through the blunt force of violence. Imagine Jia Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin repurposed with an impish, bourgeois-baiting comedy streak. This is a sharp, tightly directed anthology film comprised of six standalone shorts, linked by a potent brand of rage against the…

FIRST PERSON… Kim Longinotto’s films provide enlightening portraits of female abuse survivors across the globe. She has documented life after female genital mutilation in Kenya (The Day I Will Never Forget) and the path from violent incarceration to liberation and poetry (Salma). She has captured woman in the judicial system in Iran (Divorce Iranian style), in Cameroon (Sisters in Law) and chronicled activism on the streets of India (Pink Saris). Her latest, Dreamcatcher, sees Longinotto embedded in the outreach work of Brenda, a saintly and charismatic former prostitute based in Chicago [See review opposite]. LWLies spoke to the director who explained what she is trying to do with her filmmaking, using the example of a film that greatly touched her, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s 2006 drama, The Lives of Others. “The Lives…

Released6 MARCH Statues Also Die, and so do icons: the death of Alain Resnais in March of 2014 at the jolly old age of 92 was akin to a giant toppling after seven decades (or so) of steady dominion. Where the director of Night and Fog, Last Year at Marienbad and Mon Oncle Amerique ranks in the global-historical canon is a question for the list makers (who better not get it wrong), but for several generations of cinephiles, the Brittany-born filmmaker was always a beacon of inventive, idiosyncratic artistry. Having done his part in the ’50s and ’60s to help rewrite the style book of cinematic language – Muriel, Hiroshima, Mon Amour – he proved content to spend his final years scribbling colour-fully in its margins. Like Robert Altman’s similarly valedictory A…

Released 6 MARCH “It feels like my brain is fucking dying,” says Dr Alice Howland (Julianne Moore), a world-renowned linguistics professor with a penchant for playing ‘Words with Friends.’ The foundation of Alice’s life and work begins to crumble when she is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease at the age of 50. An adaptation of Lisa Genova’s bestselling 2007 novel, the film chronicles Alice’s struggle as her memory slowly but steadily slips away from her. While Still Alice shares a number of uncanny similarities with the modern maudlin weepie (tragedy, beaches, an excess of emotion) it never lurches into the realm of Sparksian melodrama. What keeps the film from feeling cloying or manipulative is its insistence on exploring the dissolution of Alice’s interior intellectual rather than sentimental world. For Alice, who openly…

1999 Released23 MAR DVD Almost as a clarion call for the squeamish to up sticks and leave the room, Czech feminist filmmaker Vera Chytilová’s 1999 feature, Traps, opens on documentary footage of newly born piglets having their testicles removed with what looks to be a supermarket-bought razor blade. The small purple orbs are then discarded into a bucket as the animals scamper on with their business. It’s the narrative foreshadowing of nightmares, implanting the thought that this procedure will likely happen again later in the film. And it certainly does, albeit with more of an emphasis on the comic than the horrific. Following an opening salvo documenting the garish, almost Pythonesque onslaught of capitalism in late-’90s Czechoslovakia, the film hones its wild focus onto a pair of slick-suited corporate bastards. One, Dohnal (Miroslav…

Movers & Shakers

TRAILERS The Amish Assassin, Kinderghoulies, Spitting Image Goes Dutch, CHERRYPICK “Tip: never dine at an all-you-can eat buffet at a speedway track” TAGLINE ‘A new comedy about a movie that doesn’t get made and the people who don’t make it.’ 1985 When is a movie not a movie? When does a film break so completely with form and expectation as to repudiate its very existence? Other artistic disciplines have long pondered such a notion. Rene Magritte’s painting ‘The Treachery of Images’ (‘This is, like, totally not a pipe!’) reminded the art world that the map is not the territory. Music is replete with extreme examples, from Lou Reed’s futuristic feedback fudgepacket/contractually-obliged fuck you, ‘Metal Machine Music’, to John Cage’s silent composition ‘4’33’’’ (aka ‘Money for Nothing’). Even the joy-boys got in on the act:…

Movers & Shakers

Released10 APRIL Even those who encountered positive notices during John Wick’s US run can be justified in their skeptical. Notwithstanding how awful Keanu Reeves’ track record has been in recent years, the prospect of a hitman-seeking-revenge thriller directed by two stuntmen-cum-directors and written by someone whose only prior credits are tossed-off TV actioners is hardly “bright”. Sometimes, though, the consensus is spot-on. With its cut-to-the-bone visual style and derring-do to introduce an alternate universe (in which various high-concept edges are sanded-down into simple procedures), John Wick is probably the closest any action film has come to marrying Bresson and Bioshock. Better yet that it can show a bit of humility, too. Derek Kolstad’s script finds this seemingly impossible middle ground by starting with only the most essentially, readily identifiable pieces of character-building:…

1951 Released21 APR Blu-ray Jean Renoir’s The River is a sister film of sorts to Powell and Pressburger’s Black Narcissus from 1947. Both films were based on works by the English author Rumer Godden and both explore the effect of a rugged male interloper upon an enclosed, female-dominated idyll. Whereas the latter film famously took place on an enclosed mountain ledge high up in the Himalayas, the former is set on a lush encampment on the banks of the Ganges river. The other key difference is that where Black Narcissus cultivates a mood of palm-sweating claustrophobia, Renoir lavishes in poetic asides and philosophical digressions, contextualising moments of intense intimacy against the daunting and beautiful incomprehensibility of existence and our uneasy interactions with nature. It’s one of those masterpieces that it’s near impossible to…

Released10 APRIL Ruben Östlund’s ski-resort comedy of social/psychological unease tries to operate at high altitude in more ways than one, aiming somewhere between early Mike Leigh and middle Michael Haneke. In ski parlance, Double Black Diamond terrain: experts only. But this tale of a holidaying Swedish family’s escalating ordeal rife with mishap and dysfunction only intermittently soars – Blue Square stuff at best. It’s a shame, because Östlund promised so much with his second feature, 2008’s chillingly precise, quietly hilarious Involuntary. And while his 2011 follow-up Play fell disappointingly flat, Force Majeure was one of the critical hits of the 2014 Cannes Film Festival. The film shoots for the soft target of bourgeois complacency with focus on genial thirtysomething Tomas (Johannes Bah Kuhnke). Escaping work with wife Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli) and…

Kicking AND Screaming

The films of Noah Baumbach are of a distinct writerly persuasion. His characters talk, debate and bicker among themselves, throwing verbal darts at one another while tossing humourous asides to only the most attentive listeners. It’s the voluble nature of Baumbach’s work, coupled with the personal, small-scale ambition of his narratives, which has led many critics to easy and inevitable comparisons to the French filmmakers of the Nouvelle Vague – and particularly to one of the movement’s most enduring figures, François Truffaut. As such, Baumbach’s films don’t lend themselves particularly well to considerations of production or design elements, just as his dialogue and situational irony tend to convey much of the drama, rather than peripheral accoutrements such as music. By that same token, Baumbach is rather expert in his implementation of…

Kicking AND Screaming

A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence

Released24 APRIL The third and final instalment of Roy Andersson’s “trilogy about being a human being”, A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence is very much of a piece with Songs From the Second Floor from 2000 and its follow-up, 2007’s You, The Living. Each of the three films comprises a series a darkly comic vignettes captured by an unmoving camera with a focus so deep it borders on the infinite. Andersson’s spartan but immaculate sound stages are populated by non-professional actors, who are caked in pale makeup that makes them appear zombified and suspended between states of being. But if Andersson’s latest has an air of the familiar, the maturation of the film’s ideas, the indelibility of its images, and the fluency with it speaks to its maker’s previous…

A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence

The dictum “write what you know” is a double-edged sword, made even more dangerous because it’s so deceptively tenable. The sheer volume of middling movies about writers or actors fumbling through their twenties has reached a point beyond parody, which is why Frances Ha, in large part based on mumblecore regular Greta Gerwig’s own experiences, was such a welcome surprise. Aside from the photography and incisive portrayal of female friendship, dance – both in terms of how it is worked into the narrative and the performances themselves – has made the film distinctive and timeless, something more than an accurate snapshot of life in 2012. Frances (Gerwig) approaches dance with a seriousness that’s absent from every other aspect of her life, repeatedly rearranging her finances and location in order to pursue…

A Second Chance

Released20 MARCH The Dogme95 manifesto may now survive only as the hollow echo of last night’s party, but it’s far from an ancient relic in the heart of Danish filmmaker Susanne Bier. Though her latest is delivered with more Hollywood sheen than the raw bite of her own entry into the Dogme canon, 2002’s Open Hearts, she’s at least remained faithful in her own apparent directorial disdain for indulgence. Yet, restraint is (still) not a word in Bier’s lexicon, and it’s a strange sight to see her once more return to that playground of inauthenticity that constitutes melodrama. Long-time collaborator and screenwriter Ander Thomas Jensen centres his tale on a detective (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) who, after the sudden loss of his infant son, is driven to abduct the child he had fought to…

A Second Chance

1988 Released31 MAR Blu-ray Long overdue for a revival of interest, considering the worldwide success of Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat’s Sherlock, the most compelling mystery about this clever spoof of western literature’s most famous detective is why it’s been ignored for so long. Directed by Thom “Captain Ron” Eberhardt, the film begins in familiar territory, as two bumbling thieves try to steal a priceless artifact of some kind from a London museum. Unfortunately for these wannabe crooks, Sherlock Holmes (Michael Caine) and his faithful sidekick Dr Watson (Ben Kingsley) are one step ahead of them, waiting in the shadows with the police on standby. Without a Clue, it quickly becomes clear, is as much Shakespeare in Love as it is The Hound of the Baskervilles. In Eberhardt’s film, Sherlock is hardly the…

Released13 MARCH Morgan Matthews’ drama about maths, family and self-acceptance has been made using a balanced formula. Drawn from his 2007 documentary, Beautiful Young Minds, it deals in heavy emotional matters but with enough comedy to avoid sentimentality. Asa Butterfield, with his piercing blue eyes and convincing social awkwardness, says little as teenage maths whiz Nathan. His introversion stems from both biology and tragedy. Nathan struggles to decode people, perhaps due to his autism. He was also present when, as a young boy, his father died in a car crash. Flashbacks pepper the narrative – a disappointing, conventional touch in a film that is most powerful when flowing through gentle human interactions. Butterfield is a compelling young star of inestimable promise but the supporting cast are luminous. As Nathan’ mother Julie, Sally…

“I don’t own Brooklyn anymore.” It’s a hard thing for Noah Baumbach to admit, as it would be for anyone born and raised in one of the slanted brownstones that line the verdant hills of Park Slope. “I’m lost there. Going back the other day with Greta,” he confesses, volunteering a glimpse into his storied relationship with girlfriend and collaborator Greta Gerwig, “she was suggesting I take the R train, and I was like, ‘I can’t take the R to Park Slope! I have to take the 2/3 to Flatbush or the D to 7th Avenue.’ I can’t adjust to the new ways of these old neighbour hoods.” For Baumbach, change is the cause and solution to all of life’s problems, and the same holds true for the people he creates…

The Face of an Angel

Released27 MARCH There’s a line in Michael Winterbottom’s The Face of an Angel in which surly, divorced film director Thomas Lang (Daniel Brühl), in search of his next project, talks about how he wants to sweep aside the hatred and violence relating to a real-life murder case he’s tapping for narrative inspiration in order to make film about love. Taking heed of those words, we’ll refrain from going into too much detail of Michael Winterbottom’s fudged and self-consciously arty exploration into the case of Meredith Kercher, the British student murdered while studying in Perugia, Italy in 2007, and focus instead on the affirmative side of matters. It’s admirable that Winterbottom avoids scurrilous conjecture and a lowest-common-denominator whodunit structure, and he’s a director able to coax impressive performances from his actors that are…

The Face of an Angel

Appropriate Behaviour

Released6 MARCH A witheringly dry comedy about a young person trying to make sense of herself amidst the ridiculousness of modern Brooklyn, Appropriate Behaviour doesn’t just sound like a recent American indie, it sounds like all of them. But Desiree Akhavan’s warm, funny and honest feature debut – in which the writer/director essentially plays the person she used to be – towers above the crowd precisely because its maker seems to have vanquished the insecurities of her on-screen proxy. A low-budget movie made by someone graduating from a low-budget web series (Akhavan’s show, The Slope brought great honour to its format), Appropriate Behaviour has all the superficial hallmarks of a first film, and Scott Adsit (aka the bald guy from 30 Rock) is by far its biggest name. Nevertheless, it’s immediately clear…

Appropriate Behaviour

The Tattooed Swordswoman

1970 Released24 MAR Blu-ray Blind Woman’s Curse (or The Tattooed Swordswoman, as it’s sometimes known) opens with one of the single coolest things that has ever been staged in front of a movie camera. Gales of rain pour down on a turf war between rival Japanese gangs in the early 20th century. On one side is the ruthless Tachibana clan, who are led into battle by their young new leader, Akemi (the great Meiko Kaji, an actress and musician whose legend Quentin Tarantino fondly rekindled on the soundtrack of Kill Bill). On the other stands a gaggle of day players not long for this world. After declaring her gang’s violent intent, Akemi and the rest cast off their straw shawls and arrange themselves in formation, the tattoos that run along their backs completing…

The Tattooed Swordswoman

Released6 MARCH The time will arrive when documentary filmmaking is considered a legitimate form of artistic endeavour and not some two-bit funtime annex which is easy because it doesn’t require any imagination. Then, the lollygagging cultural gatekeepers of the British film industry will dust the canapé scrapings from their flapping dickies and finally recognise the sublime achievements of Kim Longinotto. Here is a director who, for over 30 years, has remained doggedly focused on the topic of modern feminism, its cultural variants and the callous strategies undertaken by (usually) male oppressors to undercut the status of women as equals. Her films don’t make money, they don’t produce spin-offs, they don’t snag industry awards, but their value transcends such sickly trifles. To call Dreamcatcher one of her finest films would be a lie,…

Far From the Madding Crowd

1967 Released27 APR DVD & Blu-ray Getting these grand literary adaptations right is no easy task. And when we say “right,” we don't mean just getting the dialogue, accents and tonal inflections correct or making sure important moments are weighted amply against those that may be deemed so. It’s more a matter of believability – when we can see a character we’d heretofore been forced to concoct in our own minds, it can sometimes make actions feel strained or, worse, contrived. The character of Bathsheba in Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd, as played by Julie Christie in John Schlesinger’s stately 1967 screen adaptation, is a strange one. In a certain light, she’s a regal, ruthlessly independent proto-feminist who knows her own mind and is surrounded by doting male farmhands all looking…

Far From the Madding Crowd

On Set… With Jacques Gites

When I took my seat at Comiskey Park Stadium on 12 July 1979, I thought I was ready for anything. It was the Baseball World Cup final between Chicago and Detroit, I was young and my chilli dog was firm and sauced to perfection. Little did I know that I’d soon be choking on both it and the acrid taste of prejudice. Why? Let me take you back a few years, to a more innocent age. I was in NYC visiting an old school pal from my Stowe days, a guy called Chevy Chase who you probably know best as star of Oh Heavenly Dog and Deal of the Century but who, back then, was a diehard theatre person. One night, I ducked out of his off-off-Broadway Othello – thrillingly reimagined…

On Set… With Jacques Gites

IN CONVERSATION… “I always put on plays growing up. I started writing scripts aged nine. But those were really silly. I had something called ‘Friday Night Live’, which was a sketch show I wrote when I was 10 and I had a fake advert for something called ‘vomlette’, the omelette made of vomit. I always made really stupid, sketchy things but then at 15, I had a teacher in my life who cast me as my first lead in a play. I did a lot of acting when I was a kid and she just listened to my stories and was always laughing at the funny parts and really encouraged me at a time when no one else wanted to hear me talk at all. She had a play and I…

Released6 MARCH If repeated real-life scandals have left the public mistrustful of the British police constabulary, then our TV and film industries have only exacerbated matters further. Depictions of the force have ranged from bumbling plods to maverick wrong’ uns fuelled by booze and plagued by a maelstrom of emotional issues. Gerard Johnson’s second feature as writer-director (after 2009’s moderately successful serial killer thriller, Tony) introduces us to a gang of coppers, bent double by their own corruption. And a gang is exactly what they are, with all of the intimidating implications. In more than just its beastly title, Hyena resembles David Michôd’s precision-executed Animal Kingdom, which captured a criminal family in violent freefall. This time it’s the police themselves who are going daahn. The chameleon-like character actor Peter Ferdinando (the cousin of…

The Strange Affair of Robert Siodmak

Robert Siodmak was an uneven director. This unevenness is the case against him, though it also might be as the case for him – he could manage to put across a set-piece that was so good that it would tower over the movie around it. A fine example is the opening of 1945’s The Spiral Staircase, one of the films made during the émigré Siodmak’s tenure in Hollywood, which lasted from 1939 to 1952. A tracking shot on the street establishes the scene as a small American town sometime in the years before the World War One. In a room adjacent to the lobby of the local hotel, an exhibition of ‘Motion Pictures – the wonder of the age’ is being advertised. (The film playing inside is billed as The Kiss,…

The Strange Affair of Robert Siodmak

Margot AT THE Wedding

Maybe if it wasn’t pink it wouldn’t scream ‘Me! Me! Me!’ quite so loudly. The hat, of course. The eye-catching number with the wide floppy brim pretty much sums up Nicole Kidman’s bitchqueen of a sister, one of the most ferocious creations in the entire Baumbach canon. Margot – for it is she – has pitched up at her chaotic younger sibling’s impending nuptials, but her singular headgear tells you that – familial sense of duty notwithstanding – she’s very much a woman apart. This is a hat that proclaims the wearer’s innate superiority. It’s somehow literary, artistic, grandiloquent. It hints at Manhattan but perhaps really means Paris, Woody Allen but really Eric Rohmer. It suggests adventure and fulfilment, anywhere but here in this slightly dowdy patch on Long Island. It…

Margot AT THE Wedding

1983 Released NOW DVD & Blu-ray Cinema is a language with which its users should be able to say anything, but there are certain words and terms so difficult to enunciate that it would be best left to the scholars. Accepting that no dramatic recreation could ever truly express the true horrors of the Nazi gas chambers and the all-encroaching brutality and humiliation suffered by the Jews of Europe, French filmmaker (although the term ‘filmmaker’ seems an inadequate description of what he does) Claude Lanzmann created an oral history of World War Two atrocities with his eight-and-a-half hour masterpiece from 1983, Shoah. Without meaning to sound crass, there is something highly cinematic in the old school showman sense of the term to relying on intimation and relying on the imagination of a viewer…

Released17 APRIL When it comes to depicting the agonising domestic ills of alcohol on screen, Gary Oldman pretty much sewed things up with his pulverising 1997 film Nil by Mouth. Still, props remain due to director Gerard Barrett for plumbing – if not quite transcending – the squalid depths of liquid self-harm with this minor-key drama about a young man left to tend to his trainwreck-of-a-mother. John (Jack Reynor) drives a taxi in a sleepy Dublin suburb, siphoning the scant fare money he makes into saving his ma Jean (Toni Collette) from chronic alcohol poisoning. Filmed in natural light so interiors are all made to look like dank, inhospitable prisons, the film offers a simple chronicle of a man who is torn between dedicating his life to solving the (possibly unsolvable)…

While We’re Young

Released 3 APRIL You know how it goes. One minute you’ve got the world at your feet, the next you’re knee-deep in mortgage bills and soiled nappies. The truism that life passes us by all too quickly has been articulated by countless filmmakers over the years, with comedy cinema in particular serving to reinforce commonly-held perceptions relating to the behaviour of men and women over 40. Yet of all the recent films that ruminate on the interminable crisis of middle-age — from Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation to Judd Apatow’s This Is 40 — few have managed to feel as relevant as Noah Baumbach’s disarmingly profound seventh feature, While We’re Young. True to form, Baumbach’s film calls upon the negative discourse of middle-agedom for comedic effect. (After all, where would the humour…

While We’re Young

Among the overwhelmingly large programme of International Film Festival Rotterdam’s 44th edition, the themed strands stood out for providing a robust curatorial context for the films on show. Due to its welcome popularity, one such strand focused on the varied interpretations of feminism – the “F-word” on which everyone is happy to have an opinion. According to programmer Bianca Taal, the strand entitled Signals: What the F?! aimed to present films that, “each from their own individual perspective, provide a vision of the position of women.” Surveying the programme, it proved to be as diverse as the myriad approaches to feminism today. It presented women as elderly lesbian benefactors, self–actualised killers, determined scientists and social activists, never defined in male terms. Or were they? There was a late entry, show-stopping performance from…

Released10 APRIL A man ambles across a largely barren landscape in search of some unknown destiny. This short description of Lisandro Alonso’s latest feature, Jauja, would also fill in for every one of his previous four, spanning from 2001’s La Libertad through to 2008’s Liverpool, suggesting an artist who is uniquely attracted to lone, primal struggles against the sublime indifference of the natural world. These intimate, inchoate journeys translate as cosmic allegories for the variety and mystery of human existence. They often tap anthropological depths, less celebrations of coarse manhood and more examinations of what it means to be a man. A teenage girl (Viilbjørk Malling Agger) asks that her father, Captain Dinesen (Viggo Mortensen), buy her a puppy, one that will follow her wherever she goes. He says he’ll consider it…

Released27 MARCH There’s an old adage that says when one sense is impaired, others will naturally strengthen in their place. With this extremely clever and perceptive debut feature, Eskil Vogt proposes that this apocryphal physiological quirk shouldn’t be limited to just the senses, but to imagination, intuition and philosophical perspective. For no medically calculable reason, Ingrid (Ellen Dorrit Petersen) one day begins to suffer from blurry vision in one eye. By the time she’s in front of a doctor, both eyes are fogged up and she’s told that she will soon be blind. Her husband, Morten (Henrik Rafaelsen), is an architect who appears to have naturally adapted to his wife's problems, though she suspects he may be cheating on her. She wouldn’t know for certain, having chosen to live out a…

Released24 APRIL This is the stuff that memes are made off. Composed as a series of increasingly abstract non sequiturs, Ryan Gosling’s directorial debut borrows the dirt-smudged suburban decay of Gummo, the macabre eroticism of Blue Velvet, the karaoke kitsch of Only God Forgives and the fuzzy Cajun colloquialism of Beasts of the Southern Wild and boils them down into a mind-boggling fantasia. The dystopian plot loosely concerns a teenager named Bones (Iain De Caestecker), who wears a grubby white tee and permanent confused-frown and strips copper from derelict buildings to support his dear ma (Christina Hendricks), all the while attempting to evade Cadillac-cruising gangland deviant, Bully (Matt Smith). Along the way, Bones discovers a hidden reservoir with a row of street lights penetrating the eerily calm surface. His neighbour (Saoirse Ronan)…

Roger Greenberg, as played by Ben Stiller, is an embodiment of the middle aged pseudo-hipster with unkempt hair and, often, a Steve Winwood shirt. He is an odd man. “Unlikeable” is the easiest way to dismiss him and, if one is so inclined, the film as a whole. The plot is a blank slate upon which complex relationship dynamics may be writ: lodging at his well-to-do brother’s Los Angeles house for six weeks while the family is on vacation, Greenberg succumbs to aimlessness having been recently released from a mental hospital. He soon meets Florence Marr (Greta Gerwig), the twenty-something personal assistant to his brother’s family, who becomes Greenberg’s romantic fling, emotional punching bag and source of wisdom. Throughout the film, Greenberg’s anger manifests itself in mannerisms: letters of complaint,…

Marjane Satrapi

IN CONVERSATION… After making her name internationally with 2007’s autobiographical comic book adaptation Persepolis, and follow-up Chicken With Plums from 2011, Iranian director Marjane Satrapi has embarked in a radical new direction with her first US-set film, The Voices. It stars a startling Ryan Reynolds as Jerry Hickfang, a chirpy psychopath whose cat instructs him to kill people. LWLies: What drew you to this script? Satrapi: After I’d made Persepolis and Chicken with Plums people started sending me scripts. First of all I was seen as the specialist with children… but these were boring stories for children. And then because I’m a chick they would send me scripts about women who buy expensive shoes and handbags, but they don’t work… and they’re not prostitutes. I don’t know these chicks! I didn’t like any…

Marjane Satrapi

IN CONVERSATION… Isao Takahata is the director behind such animated Japanese classics as Only Yesterday, Grave of the Fireflies and Pom Poko. He's been one of the top men at Studio Ghibli since the mid-’80s, and the last movie he put his name to was 1999’s comic strip-inspired family comedy, My Neighbours the Yamadas. His latest and possibly last film, The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, is an adaptation of the Meiji Era Japanese folktale, ‘The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter,’ concerning and mysterious young princess who’s life has been accelerated by forces from the spirit world. LWLies: You’ve been working on this project for a very long time. Why did it take so long to come to life? Takahata: This is a famous story that is well known in Japan. There have…

Released13 MARCH The idea of listing one’s top five hip-hop artists is a conversational meme that seems to come out of nowhere in Top Five. Apart from the fact that the work was coproduced by Kanye and Jay-Z, it’s there, we suppose, to represent a nostalgic harkening back to our formative cultural influences. Strange that in such a New York movie, nobody puts Wu Tang on their list – although Tracy Morgan’s character does have Ghostface. Who’s on your top five? This is a movie about reflection. Rock, as writer, director and leading man, casts himself as Andre Allen, a standup turned movie star, famous for blockbusting but artistically bankrupt Hammy-the-talking-bear flicks (“It’s Hammy time!”), now attempting to go serious with an artistically bankrupt and destined-to-flop Haitian revolution epic called Uprize! Breaking…

The Water Diviner

Released3 APRIL Russell Crowe has always been unpredictable, both onscreen and off. It should come as no surprise, then, that his directorial debut is a tonally seesawing movie mishmash. The Water Diviner is an earnest family drama, a bruising battle film, a haplessly executed romance, with culture clashes and international politics thrown in for bonus befuddlement. It’s a film that radiates with its director’s good intentions, from the sun-streaked outback opening – where an unassisted Crowe digs a well in a brazen feat of super-strength – to its attempt at a gently humorous, heart-warming finale. But Crowe and cinematographer Andrew Lesnie lay the glow on so thick it’s as if much of what we see is encased in amber. Set four years after World War One’s bloody Battle of Gallipoli, it follows Crowe's…

The Water Diviner

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