Little White Lies

Released 27 JANUARY Nan Goldin leaves no moment uncaptured. Hers is a world as intense as it is varied, as possessive as it is forgiving. It unravels and gains its texture in dimly-lit homes and nightclubs, on messy motel beds, in spaces shaped by an

Watching films all-day, every day at a film festival can mean they all blur into a carousel of images until – suddenly – one cuts through and you’re in a daze outside afterwards searching colleagues’ eyes for signs they are equally moved. So it was w

LWLies: How did you originally become involved in PAIN and connect with Nan Goldin? Kapler: A friend introduced me to Nan in 2018 when she was looking for help in her studio. She invited me to a PAIN meeting that week and I was immediately inspired b

“The truth must dazzle gradually or every man be blind,” wrote the poet Emily Dickinson. But then she did not live to see the work of Nan Goldin whose truth scorches like high-proof alcohol in your throat. A lifeforce, akin to warm skin touching warm

To experience one of Nan Goldin’s slideshows is to acquire a glimpse into another world. These images, slowly oscillating to a variety of evocative tunes, are their own kind of cinema. Take The Other Side: it is a work that offers a mere 16 minute gl

Bette Gordon grew up watching New York City in black-and-white movies. When she moved there in the late ’70s, she was a visual artist and filmmaker at one of the worst and best times to do those things in the city. Reaganite politics had just led to

The Saint Omer press tour has been intense for Alice Diop. “My first interview was a Black journalist who asked me just one question, then she started crying, and we fell apart together.” The writer/director nods toward my typed-out questions and smi

As an ageing yet indefatigable Nan Goldin reflects on a lifetime spent fighting the power in All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, another film prepares to take up the rabblerouser’s torch. The daring How to Blow Up a Pipeline ensconces the principles of

The Canadian filmmaker, author and actress, Sarah Polley, has been quietly creating an alternative value system to the patriarchal status quo through the way that she makes and talks about filmmaking. Her films – domestic epics – invest great feeling

It’s hard to think of a better film about the process of creating art from a pointedly female perspective than Mia Hansen-Løve’s gently reflexive wonder, Bergman Island. Vicky Krieps – fast rising as one of the earmarks of quality moviemaking – stars

Released 20 JANUARY Love a big blow out ‘ode to cinema’ venture. 4 Ambitious and occasionally dazzling, but unfocused, even down to the performances. 3 The film’s big finale delivers a moment of deep, unalloyed cringe. 2 Moviemaking can be a shitshow

Released 27 JANUARY The thrill of coming to something about which we have zero knowledge. 3 Funny, strange cold, creeping horror. 4 Moody mystery of masculinity and mortality. 4 At the beginning of January, a porter (Samuel Finzi) and an Old Man (Ios

Scoring the mother of all Brit sleeper hits with his 2019 BAFTA-netting Bait, Mark Jenkin doubled down on all the things that made that film unique – its rough-edged performances, expressive editing, textured 16mm photography – and came up with Enys

Released 13 JANUARY There’s a cliché about being able to comprehend a person’s experience by looking at the topography of their hands. The crevices, folds and scars serve to indicate the toils and struggles of life. The same might be said of film sto

Released 10 FEBRUARY  Tackling this moment on screen amid our present culture war is a worthwhile endeavour. 3  Well-intentioned but timid. 3  This subject matter demands a more uncompromising approach. 2 We are in the midst of a moral panic. LGBTQ+

Once he was American theatre’s leading light, now he’s Steven Spielberg’s valued collaborator, though Tony Kushner says, ‘I still think of myself as a playwright rather than a screenwriter’. The phantasmagorical AIDS-era six-hour theatrical epic, ‘An

Released 20 JANUARY  Krieps and Ulliel make for an appealing pairing. 3 Strong performances and beautifully shot, but not really much meat on the bone. 3 A perfectly pleasant experience to be almost immediately forgotten. 3 After a visit to the infam

Chronicling the final harvesting season of a picturesque peach farm in the titular Catalonian town where Carla Simón’s Golden Bear-winning feature takes place, Alcarràs is a sun-soaked portrait of a family whose own land is shifting from below their

Released 17 FEBRUARY Naples’ violent crime syndicate the Camorra casts a large shadow in the city’s literature – and Mario Martone’s Nostalgia, based on a 2016 novel by Ermanno Rea, is full of ruthless moped-riding spectres. Felice, played by Pierfra

Released 6 JANUARY Peaches glow like tiny suns in the Catalan village of Alcarràs. They hang lush and ripe from the hundreds of trees that form the Solé family’s orchard, waiting to be picked by familiar hands. “Solid ground, beloved land,” sings the

Released 17 FEBRUARY Quirky YouTube shorts make the leap to the big screen 3 An offbeat addition to 2022’s strong animation landscape. 4 Delicate, yet resonant. 4 It may seem like something of a backhanded comment to say that someone has a voice for

Released 24 FEBRUARY Can cinematic attempts to excoriate the patriarchal family transcend the didactic? 3 Chameleonic, aching, sensuous, intimate. 4 A haunting, intricate rumination on desire, truth, and drowning. 3 Saim Sadiq’s Joyland begins with a

Released 24 FEBRUARY Deep in Hirokazu Koreeda’s typically gentle yet piercing new-normal family drama Broker, one character listens to Aimee Mann’s hushed ballad ‘Wise Up’. Like any red-blooded citizen of the planet Earth, she immediately thinks of P

Released 24 FEBRUARY Zoe (Mamma Mia darling Lily James), a documentary film-maker, is looking for her next project and is met with a wave of unenthusiasm from her investors. Suddenly, her neighbour Kazim (Shazad Latif) announces he is getting his par

Chinonye Chukwu made considerable waves with her 2019 feature Clemency, and her second feature, Till, focuses on the true story of 14-year-old Emmett Till who was lynched in Mississippi in 1995. His mother Mamie Till, played expertly by Danielle Dead

Released 6 JANUARY Before the film Till was seen, the need for its existence was called into question. ‘Another exhausted Hollywood depiction of Black suffering,’ the online chorus sang, as though stamping the truth of our history into the mainstream

Released 3 FEBRUARY Based on Samuel D Hunter’s play of the same name, The Whale depicts the final week in the life of a morbidly obese man who has developed an eating disorder in the years following his boyfriend’s suicide. Charlie (Brendan Fraser) i

Released 9 JANUARY There’s no nice way of putting it, but for this writer, to see the words “Directed by Sam Mendes” in the vicinity of a movie title is about as appealing as a platter of expired offal. As one of Britain’s leading directorial lights

A lot can change in 16 years, but filmmaker Todd Field has lost of none of his emotional acuity in the decade-and-a-half since his last feature, the drama Little Children. His new film is Tár, an austere portrait of a self-destructive titan in the wo

Blu-ray/DVD Released 30 JANUARY With a score by Ennio Morricone, a star turn from Lee Van Cleef and a script by Sergio Donati, Sergio Sollima’s The Big Gundown, made at the height of the form’s popularity, has many of the key elements needed for a cl

Blu-ray/DVD Released 23 JANUARY Despite any of its other merits, The Juniper Tree – shot more than a decade before Lars von Trier’s grim musical Dancer in the Dark (2000) – will always be remembered primarily as the first film to feature the screen t

Blu-ray/DVD Released 20 FEBRUARY As the director of Three Outlaw Samurai (1964) and Sword of the Beast (1965), Hideo Gosha made his name as a maker of “chambara” samurai sword-fighting films. With Violent Streets, he switched gears, but only a little

Blu-ray/DVD Released 6 FEBRUARY “You know what the internet is?” asks Matheson (Huey Lewis), an FBI agent investigating a series of murders being broadcast online. “It’s a fuckin’ hall of mirrors.” A schlocky but very fun horror film focused on the d

Blu-ray/DVD Released 27 FEBRUARY ‘Imitation of Life’, a 1933 novel by Fannie Hurst, has been adapted twice for the screen, each time with a differing focus. The novel was only one year old when John M Stahl made his version during Hollywood’s pre-cod

A perfect digital companion to the magazine experience, our website is updated daily with new stories, reviews and features. Head over now to read Yasmin Omar’s piece on the importance of the “old Rose” scenes in James Cameron’s Titanic. Bi-weekly mi

Blu-ray/DVD Released 26 SEPT Over the 21st century, Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, an academic institute intended to inspire the creation of new forms of ethnographic filmmaking. A key HSEL work is Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s Levi

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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 dark, long process of animation. Ian Addison is a Brooklyn-based collage artist and ph