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48 Articles

Decision to Leave

Released 21 OCTOBER Invoking the words of the Chinese philosopher Confucius, Seo-rae – the femme fatale at the heart of Park Chanwook’s 11th narrative feature, Decision to Leave – issues a stark warning to Hae-joon (Park Hae-il), the earnest detective investigating her husband’s death during a hike: “Wise people admire the sea. Benevolent people admire the mountains. I am not benevolent.” Despite this cryptic caution – or perhaps owing to it – the steadfast, methodical Hae-joon is beguiled by the beautiful and mysterious Chinese immigrant Seo-rae (Tang Wei). But a question hangs over their dangerous liaison, which Hae-joon is duty-bound to answer: did her husband fall or was he pushed? Park credits a formative viewing of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo with sparking his ambition to make films, and throughout his career he has…

Decision to Leave

SHADOWS and FOG

Desire is the double-edged panacea for loneliness in the cinema of Korean director Park Chan-wook. It’s seen in Song Kang-ho’s vampire preacher in 2010’s Thirst and the fanciful, battery-eating patients/lovers of 2005’s I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK. It’s also in his new film, Decision to Leave, a measured and masterful romance cut from the same emotionally charged and desire-obsessed cloth as Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo – the very film that inspired Park to pick up the camera. Since breaking out internationally with his lauded Vengeance trilogy, Park’s distinctive brand of precisiontooled filmmaking has been marked by its bloody violence and jet black (sometimes very sick) humour. There’s also his love for puzzle-box plotlines that tell of the eternally wronged who are then driven by their own righteous code for some kind…

SHADOWS and FOG

ANIMAL INSTINCTS

The Chinese actor Tang Wei was catapulted to fame when she was selected from a massive casting process to play the lead in Ang Lee’s 2007 erotic period drama, Lust, Caution. The controversy caused by that film led her career down a few unexpected byways, and she triumphantly returns to vanguard of screen acting with her mesmerising role in Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave, where she plays the enigmatic widow and social carer, Seo-rae. LWLies: What was your first encounter with Park Chanwook’s cinema? As a filmmaker who tends to focus on extreme subject matter and extreme emotions, was he always someone who appealed to you as a potential collaborator? Tang: I remember the first time I watched a Park Chan-wook film was in college. During that period, I would play all…

ANIMAL INSTINCTS

It’s hard to imagine the clean-cut and kind-faced actor Park Hae-il being cast in a film by Park Chan-wook, whose work is so often populated by grotesques and monsters. And yet, in his role as a detective smitten by a sultry murder suspect (Tang Wei), he brings a new, more coolly existential energy to the director’s often-hystrionic dramas. Do you remember your first experience seeing Oldboy, and what your feelings were about the film? Yes, it definitely stood out from the crowd. There are many great Korean films, but that film is very unique. When I saw it I was shocked and I was in awe. And seeing this great performance by these really well known actors being directed by Park Chan-wook: it was so amazing. It was as if Director Park’s…

A SPACE ODYSSEY

The films of Korean writer-director Park Chan-wook are often inextricably linked with rooms as cages, prisons and spaces of physical and psychological torture. He sees the four-walled structure as a way to hide dirty secrets and violent acts, where characters can privately defile the laws of nature, or are left to stew in their own paranoid juices. Perhaps the defining cinematic image of Park’s estimable oeuvre is the urban prison at the beginning of 2003’s Oldboy, in which a hapless salaryman is locked for 15 long years before being forced to uncover the reasons for his incarceration. Rooms in his films signify a cold malevolence, but also serve as vital tools when it comes to the storytelling process. Here, five writers tell the story of five of Park’s most iconic…

1 THE BORDER HUT

There’s nothing we love to do more than impose retrospective reasoning on Quentin Tarantino’s public declarations of love for art. QT named Park Chan-wook’s breakthrough feature JSA as one of the top 20 films made during his career as writer/director, and you don’t have to be a fully-tenured psychology professor to see why. This politically combustible take on Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo details a secret detente between border guards patrolling the DMZ between North and South Korea. Imagine, also, a modern update on the famous no man’s land Christmas football match between British and German troops during World War One, but with focus divided between sentimental brotherhood and the systems of crushing oppression. With its many callbacks to classicera Hollywood, via mystery plotting, well-oiled drama and a set of tragic…

1 THE BORDER HUT

In Park Chan-wook’s seminal 2003 film Oldboy, its protagonist spends 15 years locked in a windowless room for reasons that are kept from him. Yet the director had explored the dramatic and psychological potential of domestic prisons to an even greater extent in his previous film, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), where all manner of rooms, confined spaces and outdoor environments become host to physical torments. There’s the unnamed woman (Im Ji-eun) screaming in agony on her living room floor and in desperate need of a kidney transplant with an appropriate blood match. There’s her deaf-mute brother, Ryu (Shin Ha-kyun), left naked and scarred in an unoccupied building, after black market organ dealers take his kidney but refuse to provide one his sister can use in exchange. Then there’s the kidnapped…

3 THE GRAND BOUDOIR

It’s a comically garish setup, primed for vampiric gashing: cerulean walls; plush European decor; a grand piano; chequered floors’ and hefty ornamental chess pieces to boot. This torture chamber-cum-film set represents the opulent milieu of Park Chan-wook’s Cut, a trim feature about a filmmaker and his wife who are kidnapped and brutalised by a vexed extra, forced into playing limb-hacking games to stay alive. Interposed between Fruit Chan’s chomp romp Dumplings and Takashi Miike’s circus twin phantasm Box, Cut is the middle segment of Three… Extremes, an East Asian horror anthology sequel to 2002’s Three. Cut is something of a Saw trap sendup, though where James Wan used a squalid bathroom as a site for caustic, glacial plot exposition, Park’s beautified set dressing lays everything out in the open. The extra,…

3 THE GRAND BOUDOIR

4 THE HOME CLINIC

Park Chan-wook adopted a heightened neo-noir aesthetic for 2009’s Thirst, adapted from Émile Zola’s 1868 novel ‘Thérèse Raquin’ about a woman who convinces her lover to murder her husband. Park added in a vampiric curse and transported that central conflict to contemporary Korea. When we first meet our protagonist Sang-hyun, he is a priest at a monastery which has a strangely ahistorical texture and nebulous location. He spends his days walking through the limestone walled gardens, pushing the infirm in wheelchairs and volunteering at a ward filled with those afflicted by the fatal Emmanuelle virus. His faith and dedication never wavers until he himself becomes infected – first by a virus and then by vampirism. Sang-hyun flees to the city where he falls in love with Tae-Ju, a young woman treated…

4 THE HOME CLINIC

5 THE MUSIC ROOM

In Stoker, Park Chan-wook shows us the erotic potential of objects. The unbuckling of a leather belt. A foot sliding into a snakeskin stiletto. Fingers intertwining as they dance over piano keys in duet. When we enter the House of Park, the door is opened to kink and fetish. Let this be a warning for what Stoker might unlock in you. Most depictions of heterosexual activity in cinema show mere bodies combined in motion without the aid of props. Contrast this to the sapphic acts of The Handmaiden, for example, wherein Lady and Maid explore the sensual power of corsets and silver Kegel-ball bells and corsets. Yet so much of real heterosexual desire revolves around the tools of domination and submission – an interplay in this film that is central to…

5 THE MUSIC ROOM

THE BALLAD OF Scottie AND Madeleine

1. MADELEINE WORDS BY MARK ASCH Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the greatest of all films, has a void at its centre. In this story of an obsessive private investigator’s quest to unlock the mystery of a woman who might not exist, there is no “Madeleine,” not really – we see her only once, in the same moment that James Stewart’s Scottie finally sees her, as she plummets past him, already dead. Judy Barton (Kim Novak), though she twice allows men to make her over in the image of Madeleine Elster, sees her only in that moment as well. Madeleine must be a vortex of fascination for Judy, as much as she is for Scottie, and this perhaps begins to resolve one of the film’s tormenting mysteries. Why does Judy do it? Why does this…

THE BALLAD OF Scottie AND Madeleine

MEET THE AUTHOR

Karen Han is the author of ‘Bong Joon Ho: Dissident Cinema’ published by Abrams New York and on sale at all good booksellers from November. We sent Karen a mini pop quiz on the writing process, gleaning a deeper appreciation for Bong’s cinema, and the Bong characters she’d like to go for food with. Author photo by Carly Hildebrant. LWLies: Tell us about your first encounter with the work of Bong Joon Ho? Han: Though I can’t recall exactly when I first saw one of Director Bong’s films, I clearly remember that it was The Host. My dad was a big cinephile – he’s definitely the main reason that I had an awareness of the Korean film world, let alone film as a whole – and he must have heard about The…

MEET THE AUTHOR

TEN green Bottles

A woman barely on the threshold of her elder years wakes up in her sister’s flat in Seoul, the camera slowly pulling away from her face before a matching motion takes in the cityscape outside the window. The mirroring camera movements create an immediate hyperreality that calls attention to the movie as a movie, something exacerbated when the woman begins idly clutching at her stomach in the way that characters in old films used to announce an impending health crisis with only a slight cough. This scene opens In Front of Your Face, the 26th feature by South Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo (and only the second to receive theatrical distribution in the UK), and it provides a clear glimpse into the director’s deceptive simplicity. For the uninitiated, Hong’s films, on an…

TEN green Bottles

#23 Threads The Plaster

Let’s face it: a bandage is hardly an accessory any of us want to wear. Jake (Jack Nicholson) in Chinatown, his nostril cut viciously from the inside with a knife, certainly doesn’t want to wear a plaster on his nose for the rest of the film. And the early 00s trend for wearing one on the upper cheekbone to look tough, is ill-advised to say the least. It goes without saying, right? A plaster denotes a (minor) injury, a cut, scrape, or tiny burn, perhaps, that caught us unawares in the toing and froing of everyday life. If someone arrives with one on their finger, it mars any elegant manicure or pretty piece of jewellery. If someone arrives with one on their face, the first question, inevitably, is: “What the fuck…

#23 Threads The Plaster

It’s Such a Beautiful Day at 10

When you’re a film critic, people always ask, “What is your favourite film?”, and ever since 2013 I answer very quickly and easily: Don Hertzfeldt’s It’s Such A Beautiful Day. There are not many films that are shorthand for the genetic material of your soul. In my case, there’s only one. Although, technically, it’s three short films compiled into a single portmanteau feature animation, and it follows a hat-wearing stick figure named Bill who is trying to live his little life against the backdrop of some medical bad news that is rooted in his family history. Maybe this doesn’t sound like much on paper, but its svelte 62 minutes covers all of life: the silly embarrassments; the absurd humour; the inherited suffering; the desire for love; the isolation; the yearning;…

It’s Such a Beautiful Day at 10

In Front of Your Face

Released 23 SEPTEMBER He has a cinephile fanbase stretching from Seoul to Paris to New York, but Hong Sang-soo remains largely terra incognita to UK cinemagoers, since only two of his 28 features have ever been officially distributed in cinemas. Presumably, he just doesn’t tick the boxes for genre marketability, effects spectacle or upfront social satire. Instead, the Korean’s prolific outpouring of celluloid miniatures possibly seem too casual and compact to make an impact. Hong, though, characteristically packs these booze-sodden conversation pieces with myriad layers of emotional observation, philosophical musing and meta-textual significance. That’s certainly true of In Front of Your Face, which coincidentally proves a very fine place to start your Hong journey. It’s his first time working with Lee Hye-yeong, an actor who’d made her name in 1980s Korean cinema…

In Front of Your Face

Crimes of the Future

Released 9 SEPTEMBER ANTICIPATION. An old master returns to his roots, let’s hope he’s still got it. 4 ENJOYMENT. Thoughtful, poignant, confusing, funny, sexy, gross – it’s a lot. 4 IN RETROSPECT. Long live the new flesh! 5 David Cronenberg belongs to that rarefied stratum of directors whose aesthetic could credibly be characterised as a genre unto itself. To this day, any filmmaker who wades into the slime and viscera of ‘body horror’ cannot evade one particular adjective: Cronenbergian. Yet since 1999’s eXistenZ, the director has been on sabbatical from his own icky brand, setting aside outré grotesquery in favour of more conventional (and conventionally legitimate) subject matter. But it would seem that the ever-undulating “New Flesh” of Videodrome (1983) and The Fly (1986) couldn’t be suppressed indefinitely. To watch it find new form and new purpose…

Crimes of the Future

Released 16 SEPTEMBER ANTICIPATION. Always a sucker for a creature feature. 4 ENJOYMENT. Influencers stop having kids challenge. 3 IN RETROSPECT. Finds great middle ground between heavy metaphor and practical monster fun. 4 Twelve-year-old Tinja (Siiri Solalinna) is a young gymnast tirelessly training for an upcoming competition, but is mostly desperate to appease the impossibly high expectations placed on her by her perfectionist mother (Sophia Heikkilä). Her mother is an unhinged lifestyle influencer/vlogger who is comically irredeemable and turns their pastel-coloured abode into a manufactured nest for AV content. Nauseating bright hues and floral wallpaper coats the sterile interiors of their suburban fairy tale home, exuding a menacing and sinister aura aligned with the matriarch’s aggressively feminine, idyllic impression of Finnish middle-class artifice. Any and every moment is up for grabs by her camera, as she captures a…

Released 30 SEPTEMBER At a secluded manor house, an avant-garde sonic catering collective begin a new residency at the behest of prim benefactor Jan Stevens (Gwendoline Christie). This unconventional art form involves turning the sounds of food and cooking into performance via microphones and synthesisers – it’s all very White Cube. For anyone who has seen Peter Strickland’s 2012 feature Berberian Sound Studio, it all may sound a little familiar. Yet after the haunted dress diptych of 2018’s In Fabric, Strickland tells a more simple story, which nevertheless amounts to his strangest to date. The catering collective consists of visionary Elle di Elle (Strickland regular Fatma Mohamed) and her two technicians, the sulky Billy (Asa Butterfield) and near-silent Lamina (Ariane Labed). Their residency is to be documented by Greek journalist Stones (Makis…

Peter Strickland

While our national cinema is dominated by ‘heritage’ stories, plucky underdog comedies and urban miserabilism, the films of writer/director Peter Strickland are eccentric outliers. In his latest, Flux Gourmet, he merges creative and digestive processes at an artists’ retreat for food-focused musicians. Idiosyncratic, obscure and also often absurdly funny, Strickland’s filmography offers an alternative model of what a more adventurous British cinema might and should be. LWLies: How do you go about securing funding for your outré productions? Strickland: It went from very difficult to very easy to very difficult again. I had a sweet spot around the time of The Duke of Burgundy when I could get a project into production with relative ease, but things change: fallouts, the nature of understandably having to make way for newer blood (when…

Peter Strickland

Three Thousand Years of Longing

Released 2 SEPTEMBER Do you believe in soulmates? When it comes to cinema, I do. There’s a perfect match out there somewhere for every film, a viewer just waiting to be transported by whatever it is their cinematic soulmate has to offer. Three Thousand Years of Longing, the latest from Aussie auteur George Miller, and co-written by Augusta Gore, is a film rendered via the brightest colours, the strongest flavours, the wildest rolls of the narrative dice. There will be some for whom it is love at first sight, and others in whom it provokes a wild allergic reaction. Imagine Wes Anderson had adapted Neil Gaiman’s American Gods – that’s the vibe here. Idris Elba plays a Djinn, an elemental being with the power to grant three wishes when you set him…

Three Thousand Years of Longing

Girls Girls Girls

Released 30 SEPTEMBER ANTICIPATION. Getting Booksmart vibes from this Finnish Sundance hit. 4 ENJOYMENT. Relatively low stakes make for a satisfying viewing experience. 3 IN RETROSPECT. A refreshing and truthful portrait of contemporary girlhood. 3 Three Finnish girls on the cusp of young adulthood have their lives intersect over three consecutive Fridays. Dividing a film about contemporary girlhood in this way makes perfect sense, as when you’re 17, the things that matter most only seem to happen over the weekend. Mimmi (Aamu Milonoff) is confident yet cynical and boisterous, letting on that she’s too cool to care about much. She and her endearing, curly-haired ride-or-die pal, Rönkkö (Eleonoora Kauhanen), both work part-time at a smoothie kiosk in the middle of a shopping centre, and invite themselves to popular kids’ house parties with a view to finding potential…

Girls Girls Girls

Bodies Bodies Bodies

Released 9 SEPTEMBER ANTICIPATION. Enticing cast, festival buzz, let’s go, go, go. 4 ENJOYMENT. A little over-eager in hitting all of its slightly banal cultural touchstones. 3 IN RETROSPECT. Memo to Sennott and Pace: please work together again. 2 It is a truth universally acknowledged that any affluent American young person with an empty house for the weekend must organise a house party. Risky Business, Superbad, Project X, Booksmart… there’s a rich tradition in Hollywood of documenting kids letting loose, and no matter the genre, packing a hormone-heavy group of college grads into a confined space is a sure-fire recipe for chaos. So it goes in Halina Reijn’s slasher debut Bodies Bodies Bodies, from a screenplay by Sarah DeLappe, and based on a premise by Kristen Roupenian, whose short story Cat Person became a global sensation when it…

Bodies Bodies Bodies

Released 16 SEPTEMBER ANTICIPATION. A debut from a Safdie acolyte? Yes please! 4 ENJOYMENT. This Kline kid is going places… 4 IN RETROSPECT. A delightfully grubby and shifty coming-of-ager. 4 Few things stifle creativity like suburbia, and teenage cartoonist Robert (Daniel Zolghadri) can’t stand it any longer. Dismissing his parents’ expectations that he go to college, he instead drops out of high school, moves out of his family plush home in Princeton, New Jersey, and rents a room in a grubby basement with two middle-aged men named Barry (Michael Townsend Wright) and Steven (Cleveland Thomas Jr). For Robert, this unprecedented liberation brings him one step closer to artistic authenticity, and potentially to releasing his dream of becoming a professional cartoonist – something his late teacher Mr Katano (Stephen Adly Guirgis) wholeheartedly encourages. He works part-time at a local…

Some may remember him as the kid embracing puberty in Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale, but now Owen Kline is all grows up and making movies with the Safdie brothers. Here, he gives an account of his collecting habits, artistic inspirations and eccentric friendship circles. “I grew up going to flea markets in New York and it was just like, records by The Nutty Squirrels were as common as leaves falling on the ground. It sold a million records in the US during the ’50s. So when you see it, and it’s one dollar, even if you have it, you’re gonna get it again. There’s some great Nutty Squirrels albums that have all these jazzy beats covered with all the big scatting they do. I think they go a…

Released 2 SEPTEMBER ANTICIPATION. John Michael McDonagh returns with… Babel, but funny(-ish)? 3 ENJOYMENT. The question of how this messy situation will be resolved means it’s never dull. 3 IN RETROSPECT. Too muted and thinly written for its acerbic bite to really make a mark. 2 A logical point of comparison for John Michael McDonagh’s The Forgiven is Babel, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s sweeping 2006 narrative of interwoven stories. While this sticks to one country, and is less ambitious in its scope, the dramatic catalysts in both film concern tragic accidents involving white tourists and local young men colliding in the deserts Moroccan. Babel is a film which focuses on concepts of miscommunication and globalisation, while The Forgiven’s thematic meat is instead the recklessness of the condescending rich, alongside Western influence on the Arab world. All with writer-director McDonagh’s…

Released OUT NOW ANTICIPATION. Anvari’s previous film, Wounds, was a bit of an eccentric misfire. 3 ENJOYMENT. Looks like trash, but this compelling story defies easy expectation. 3 IN RETROSPECT. There’s more to it than meets the eye, and its subtle boldness becomes apparent in retrospect. 4 One of the things that Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho is famous for is the way it subverts expectations, particularly when it comes to the relationships we forge with its main characters. Writer/director Babak Anvari takes a leaf out of that devilish book for his urban horror-thriller I Came By, and in doing so teases the viewer when it comes to the question of who the film’s hero will be. Its bold, triptychlike structure defies easy gratification, and in its race towards the narrative finish line, it adopts the structure of a…

In his award-winning debut feature, Under the Shadow, British-Iranian writer-director Babak Anvari explored the human cost of the Iran/Iraq conflict with a slow-burn supernatural horror set in 1980 Tehran. His follow-up, Wounds, a psychodrama set in New Orleans, summoned the spirit of David Lynch and J-horror. For his third feature, I Came By, the filmmaker uses contemporary London as the backdrop for a politically charged Hitchcockian neo-noir thriller. It stars George MacKay and Percelle Ascott as rebellious graffiti artists who break into the homes of the elite, leaving their tag as an anti-establishment statement. When their paths cross with a well-connected judge (Hugh Bonneville) things take a dark turn. LWLies: Toby, played by George MacKay, is a graffiti renegade who has ‘Nothing is true, Everything is Permissible’ spray-painted on his bedroom…

Released 28 SEPTEMBER “Guests are aways welcome in our town,” police chief Giuseppe (Claudio Bigagli) tells Anna (Agnieszka Żulewska) some way into Aga Woszczyńska’s Silent Land (Cicha Ziemia). Indeed, this small town on an Italian island is very accommodating to Anna and her husband Adam (Dobromir Dymecki), vacationing there and bringing much needed capital into the area. This community happily embraces affluent tourists like this Polish couple – obvious outsiders, given their blonde hair, pale skin and inability to speak the local tongue. Locals meet the privileged tourists’ every demand, and welcome them into local customs. At one point Anna is pulled – not entirely willingly – into a traditional dance in the town square. Fabio (Marcello Romolo), landlord of the luxuriously appointed villa that they have rented, even agrees to…

Both Sides of the Blade

Released 9 SEPTEMBER Pity the fool who underestimates one of Claire Denis’ “small” films that she tends to make while waiting for the financing to come together on her bigger projects. We did it with the astonishing Let the Sunshine In, which she made ahead of existential sci-fi epic, High Life, and we did it again with Both Sides of the Blade, which was produced before her long-gestating Denis Johnson adaptation, The Stars at Noon. Both of these “small” films were made in collaboration with writer and novelist Christine Angot, and it’s hard to think of a more perfect merging of ideals and sensitivities than these two. The word “small” appears in scare quotes because it only refers to the scope of the production: this film was made during the pandemic…

Both Sides of the Blade

Dry Ground Burning

Released 2 SEPTEMBER Sisters are doing it for themselves – that is, hijacking an underground pipeline, running a makeshift oil refinery, and selling gasoline on the black market to redistribute wealth to their community in Sol Nascente, one of the biggest favelas in South America. This is Brazil under the hostile administration of far-right president Jair Bolsonaro, a country marked by tremendous political polarisation, economic turmoil, and acute social disparity. It sees Léa (Léa Alves da Silva) join forces with her half-sister Chitara (Joana Darc Furtado), the resourceful and taciturn leader of a ring of gasolineras. They play fictionalised extensions of their real selves, and their riveting screen presence lies at the centre of Queirós and Pimenta’s docu-fiction hybrid. Long takes, discursive monologues, slow pans and stylistic shifts allow the directors to…

Dry Ground Burning

The Cordillera of Dreams

Released 7 OCTOBER Patricio Guzmán’s introspective narration lingers over drone-mapped footage of the Andes, one of the world’s longest cordilleras (mountain ranges) as the shadow of their tectonic physicality envelops Santiago, Chile’s capital city. We’re told that if Santiago’s cobblestone streets – forged out of rocks from the cordillera – could speak, “they would speak of the blood that ran over them”, as the spectre of Augusto Pinochet’s 17-year long military dictatorship haunts polity and society. Poeticism segues into cutting political analysis as the end of Pinochet’s dictatorship led Chile to become the first testing grounds for a forceful implementation of neoliberal economic policy. The introduction of Santiago filmmaker Pablo Salas – who, unlike Guzman and many of his exiled contemporaries, stayed in Chile during the dictatorship – provides an astute digression…

The Cordillera of Dreams

Gina Prince-Bythewood

After learning that the Dora Milaje in Marvel’s Black Panther were based on the real life Agojie warriors, director Gina Prince-Bythewood jumped at the chance to create an action epic that honours their legacy. The Woman King stars Viola Davis as the leader of an all-female warrior clan from the late 19th century and set in the fallen African kingdom of Dahomey, which would’ve stood in current day Benin. LWLies: How did your preparation process differ between making a contemporary film and one set in the past? Prince-Bythewood: It was an incredible deep dive of reading every book that was written on the subject – which is very few. What was really important was realising that the way these books were written was from a Western perspective, and then being able…

Gina Prince-Bythewood

Released 9 SEPTEMBER When we think about heist films, we conjour up images of fast car chases and men who think they are super hard. Scrap all that – apparently there’s a new way to do it. The Score, from writer and director Malachi Smyth, is a pandemic-made thriller that attempts to express its own meaning by disposing of the notion of palm-sweating tension and opts instead for some Mamma Mia-esque outbursts of folk rock to ease its protagonists into its storyline. The film stars Brit character stalwarts Will Poulter and Johnny Flynn as a pair of un-smooth criminals playing the waiting game at a roadside café. Their time is spent mixing hard-boiled bants with a number of musical interludes courtesy of Flynn himself, which lends the film a more theatrical…

Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash

Released OUT NOW ANTICIPATION. We enjoyed Indonesian director Edwin’s 2012 film, Postcards from the Zoo. 4 ENJOYMENT. Energising and original, even if it is hard to pin down tonally. 3 IN RETROSPECT. The late Suharto period as violent romance. 4 “Only a man who can’t get it up can face death without fear.” This line comes from near the beginning of Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash, just after we have seen the film’s young hero Ajo Kawir (Marthino Lio) win a dangerous game of chicken on his moped. A long way, both chronologically and geographically, from the amped-up hyperreality of the Fast and Furious films, this tournament takes place on a backroad of the Bojongsoang district in West Java, Indonesia, in 1989, and is presented with a dusty naturalism. Yet those opening words are delivered…

Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash

Lena Dunham made her directorial debut in 2010 with Tiny Furniture before going on to helm one of the defining TV shows of the last decade. Five years after her acclaimed series Girls concluded its six-season run, Dunham is back with two coming-of-age features, the Sundance 2022-premiering Sharp Stick, and the Medieval-era growing pains comedy, Catherine Called Birdy (released 23 September), an adaptation of Karen Cushman’s 1994 children’s novel. LWLies: Can you tell us about your history with Karen Cushman’s book? Dunham: It came out when I was 10 [and] I read it that year. It was one of those cult books – if you meet a girl who’s read it, she remembers it. Karen Cushman so beautifully shows the way that history changes, but also how it stays the same.…

Released 16 SEPTEMBER ANTICIPATION. A work by the great Chinese auteur arrives on screen, three years delayed. 3 ENJOYMENT. A rather spartan turn for Zhang, but compelling despite its muddiness. 3 IN RETROSPECT. A fascinating meta-narrative on film censorship then and now. 4 The name of fifth generation Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou’ summons certain unforgettable colours to mind: the syrupy crimson flooding Raise the Red Lantern; the verdant green of bamboo in House of Flying Daggers; the inky, yin-yang monochromatism of Shadow. Those accustomed to the celebrated director’s operatic aestheticism, however, may be initially disoriented by the austere visual palette of his latest, One Second. Depositing the viewer in the seemingly infinite sparseness of an unnamed Chinese desert, it quickly exiles us from any customary visions of palatial grandeur – yet this dusty, sandy film is also…

Released 22 SEPTEMBER If Kogonada’s debut feature Columbus navigated the fertile ground of how people relate to places, his follow-up moves onto the slightly more ambitious question of how we relate to the world at large. What shapes our understanding of life, family, and our place within society? How is a memory formed? What does the brain choose to archive and forget? Adapted from the short story ‘Saying Goodbye to Yang’ about a family in the nearish future paying a long farewell to their robot companion, After Yang is an expansive yet intimate portrait of grief and identity, and cements its writer/director as one of the most exciting new voices in cinema. Jake (Colin Farrell), Kyra (Jodie Turner Smith), Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja) and Yang (Justin H Min) are a family. They…

The sense of quiet in Kogonada’s films is a heavy one: there is peace, but also a hushed sense of regret and grief, a contemplation of things lost you just have to sit with as time goes on. In 2017’s Columbus, that shines through in a conversation between an architecture scholar and a librarian about ambition and family. In the director’s latest feature, After Yang, we are welcomed into a family mourning the loss of Yang (Justin H. Min) – an android sibling, child, companion – holding onto the ambition to understand the love he gave to only child Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja) and what he leaves behind. LWLies: You’re working off the short story ‘Saying Goodbye to Yang’ by Alexander Weinstein; it’s interesting that you changed the title. The former…

In her first book, ‘Which as You Know Means Violence: On Self-Injury as Art and Entertainment’ culture critic and friend of LWLies Philippa Snow examines the fascinating, sometimes disturbing link between pain and performance, and deftly links together the likes of Jackass and Marina Abramović, exploring the compulsion to destroy in order to create. We spoke to her about high-low cultural interrogation and what makes Jackass art. LWLies: Self-harm and injury is still thought of as something very shocking, even though violence has become very mainstream in television and cinema. Self-harm as art seems to bridge the gap between those two worlds. What sparked your interest in this subject? Snow: I still haven’t figured it out yet. I think it’s probably quite psychologically revealing that I’ve chosen a subject that I…

Blu-ray OUT NOW In the first scene of Frank Perry’s The Swimmer, the camera trails behind Burt Lancaster, fixing lustily on his big bronzed back as he lurches towards one of the many suburban swimming pools around which the film is set. On arrival, he hatches a quixotic sounding plan: he’ll “swim home”, crossing the length of every pool from here to his own house, walking in between. Taken from a John Cheever short story that Perry adapted into the film, this simple concept forms the entire basis of this psychologically probing satire. An ordinary journey slowly becomes an odyssey of self-discovery as the façade that this hulking, tanned man hides behind gradually crumbles away. Lancaster is at the centre of almost every scene, progressing along his route and attempting to charm…

Burning an Illusion

Blu-ray/DVD Released 19 SEPT Menelik Shabazz was the subject of much celebration after his premature death in 2021, but, as a pioneering figure in the development of Black British cinema and a prolific, politically-engaged maker of both fiction and non-fiction films, he still could have been appreciated more widely during his lifetime. The expertly-crafted, tremendously well-observed Burning an Illusion – his best-known work – offers the perfect entry point to the filmmaker’s oeuvre. At the time of its making, it was only the second feature film to be directed by a Black British director (coming a decade after Horace Ové’s Pressure in 1971), and also the first to focus on a Black woman. A social-realist film set in Thatcher-era Britain, the film is commendably low-key, focusing on the life of Pat Williams…

Burning an Illusion

Righting Wrongs

Blu-ray/DVD Released 26 SEPT The late ’80s and early ’90s was a prime period for Hong Kong action films, and Righting Wrongs, an early work from director, producer, action choreographer and sometime actor Corey Yuen, is amongst the best made during the era. Though the bone-crunching fight scenes are what attract attention, the film’s narrative, which details corruption within Hong Kong’s criminal justice system, is also compelling, showing the stranglehold crime has over the city and the legal system’s inertia and complicity. Ha Ling-Ching (Yuen Biao) is a young prosecutor, still hopeful about the efficacy of his work. After he sees his mentor shot in front of him and learns that his family have also been gunned down in their home, he quickly realises his naivety, taking things quite literally into his…

Righting Wrongs

Blu-ray/DVD Released OCT Read anything about György Fehér’s Twilight and you will invariably see it described as “Twin Peaks directed by Béla Tarr.” The description is apt as Fehér was a longtime collaborator of Tarr’s, working as a writer on Werckmeister Harmonies and a producer on Sátántangó. Twilight is one of two hard-to-see features the filmmaker made as a director, and heavily bears Tarr’s fingerprints. The Twin Peaks comparison comes from the film’s bleak subject matter, which, despite its plausibility, is presented as if it were a gloomy fairy tale, made to seem unreal and also out-of-time by its ethereal, nightmarish atmosphere. When several young girls are found dead in a forest, two detectives become obsessed with tracking down the culprit. Most roads lead to dead ends, especially when the most probable…

Blu-ray/DVD Released 31 OCT “The summer I killed my father I was 10 years old,” says Eve (Jurnee Smollett), in what is one of the first lines spoken aloud in the prelude of Kasi Lemmons’ Louisiana-set Eve’s Bayou. It’s a striking opening: What would make a child want to murder their father? When Eve catches him (Samuel L Jackson) cheating on her mother (Lynn Whitfield), she is so young that she doubts her interpretation of what she is seeing. Yet before long he has committed further transgressions against the family which are harder to process, even through the skewed prisms of memory and perspective. A melodrama about the flexibility and infallibility of memory, Eve’s Bayou is a singular coming-of-age story that, though loaded with trauma and sadness, is also colourful and exuberant.…

A Fugitive from the Past

Blu-ray/DVD Released 26 SEPT Made five decades into his career, A Fugitive from the Past is considered by many to be Tomu Uchida’s most significant work, in part because it is his most ambitious and epic. Adapted from Tsutomu Minakami’s 1,700 page novel, the film unfolds over multiple timelines and locations, unravelling a complexly plotted, 3-hour-long narrative following a man whose past crimes come back to haunt him long after he thought he had escaped them. Three men commit a robbery together, before one of them shoots the other two, escaping with the spoils. Some years later, a detective follows the trail of the missing man, landing on clues that point towards his whereabouts. A morally ambiguous procedural with several great central performances, Uchida’s film is a rich and layered story exploring…

A Fugitive from the Past

The World of Little White Lies

LWLies.com A perfect digital companion to the magazine experience, our website is updated daily with new stories, reviews and features. Head over now to see our first-look reviews from the Locarno Film Festival, including Helena Wittman’s amazing Human Flowers of Flesh. LWLies on Discord Sign up to LWLies’ membership scheme to unlock the world of our Discord channel, where we’ll be sending live updates on magazine making and film viewing, plus weekly recommendations of books, films and much, much more. Truth & Movies: A Little White Lies podcast Leila Latif hosts our weekly delve into new releases and discursive movie chatter. Recent episodes have included an interview with the director of Fire of Love, and a Jordan Peele extravaganza. YouTube.com/LWLies Our hub for video work of all varieties, including bespoke video essays, filmed interviews and the best…

The World of Little White Lies

Ben Giles is an artist and musician currently cutting and sticking in Norwich, UK. His artwork focuses primarily on collage. Jen Yoon is an illustrator currently based in Seoul. Her work specialises in both digital and traditional mediums, creating line works that arouse deep, strong emotions. Stéphanie Sergeant is a French illustrator/animator living and working in Poland. She mostly works with watercolour and animates in 2D. She likes spaghetti and the long, dark process of animation. Julia Plath is a freelance illustrator located in Hamburg who is known for her surreal and melancholic style. She is also a passionate D&D player. Ben Turner is a Bristol-based illustrator. Working mainly in portraiture, he uses limited, impactful colour palettes. He likes scary movies. HuanHuan Wang is a freelance illustrator based in Paris. Her work depicts invisible narratives…

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