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 pret

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

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 w

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 po

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 insta

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 t

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 th

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

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

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

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 Chewi

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 st

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 h

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

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

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 u

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 nu

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

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

Directed by JONAS CARPIGNANO Starring PIO AMATO, KOUDOUS SEIHON, DAMIANO AMATO Released 15 JUNE Director Jonas Carpignano broke through on the festival circuit in 2015 with Mediterranea, a tale of two refugees making their way from Africa to southern

Directed by ANGELA SCHANELEC Starring MIRIAM JAKOB, THORBJÖRN BJÖRNSSON, MAREN EGGERT Released 10 MAY The German director Angela Schanelec has the ability to make an innocuous shot of water being poured into a glass appear like a scorching nuclear ex

Directed by MICHAËL R ROSKAM Starring MATTHIAS SCHOENAERTS, ADÈLE EXARCHOPOULOS, ERIC DE STAERCKE Released 13 JULY In its native Belgian, Michaël R Roskam’s latest feature was titled Le Fidèle (The Faithful), which is fairly alright as far as movie n

Directed by CHRISTOPHER KELLY Released 18 MAY The residents of Boeung Kak, a lakeside suburb of Phnom Penh, sob as bulldozers demolish their houses. This scene, captured by the Irish director Chris Kelly in his documentary A Cambodian Spring, is typi

If some top level cat interactions were not enough, then you must see Léonor Serraille’s Jeune Femme for the breakout lead performance by the French actor Laetitia Dosch. We met her in Paris where she told us her theories about acting and offered det

The erudite French filmmaker explains his personalised working method, how he comes up with film titles and his new work, Ismael’s Ghosts, about a scatty film director named Ismael (Mathieu Amalric) who is visited by a ghost from his past. LWLies: In

Directed by SIMON HUNTER Starring SHEILA HANCOCK, KEVIN GUTHRIE, PAUL BRANNIGAN Released 25 MAY In Edie, the veteran actor Sheila Hancock is on career-best form as a woman–also named Edie–scorned by a suffocating marriage of thirty years, desperate t

Directed by SERGIO G SÁNCHEZ Starring GEORGE MACKAY, ANYA TAYLOR-JOY, CHARLIE HEATON Released 13 JULY Someone could make a lot of money by inventing a system which helps homeowners feel safe visiting their attic space. A dusty, dimly-lit attic plays

Directed by GÖRAN HUGO OLSSON Starring PETER BEARD, LEE RADZIWILL, EDITH BOUVIER BEALE Released 15 JUNE Swedish director Göran Hugo Olsson has formed a niche for himself out of editing found footage into documentary essays, kind of like adopting home

Directed by DEBORAH HAYWOOD Starring LILY NEWMARK, JOANNA SCANLAN, LORIS SCARPA Released 13 JULY Capricious teen Iona (Lily Newmark), and her smothering mother, Lyn (Joanna Scanlan), move to a small town for a fresh start in Deborah Haywood intriguin

Directed by PAUL WRIGHT Released 21 JUNE “It is a country which for centuries has enjoyed a special fame, and there’s nowhere like it on Earth!” Well, quite. These words, plucked from a tweedily patronising ’50s documentary and placed squarely at the

Directed by TONY ZIERRA Starring LEON VITALI, RYAN O'NEAL, DANNY LLOYD Released 18 MAY Whether it was making Tom Cruise do 95 takes of walking through the same door during the filming of Eyes Wide Shut or harshly bullying Shelley Duvall so she acted

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 choreograph

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 s

Directed by JAMES WHALE Starring BORIS KARLOFF MELVYN DOUGLAS CHARLES LAUGHTON 1932 Released 21 MAY Blu-ray If you had to locate the cinematic ur-text of haunted house movies, James Whale’s fruity bone-rattler from 1932, The Old Dark House, would lik