As long as it’s safe to use pandemic-related idioms again, we can safely say that Mank fever has swept the LWLies offices with a swiftness, leaving us all itching with anticipation for the new film from David Fincher. We’ve sprained our index fingers hitting replay on the full trailer unveiled earlier this week, and now Read More
Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins
A roistering doc profile of the late, liberal tub-thumper who worked at The New York Times. It’s a testimony to how unspeakably racist, sexist, incompetent and morally repugnant the Trump administration is that even the most liberal among us look back on George W Bush’s administration as the good ’ol days. And this documentary, a Read More
Tom Hanks hits the country roads in the News of the World trailer
Among the finest Tom Hanks performances of recent vintage came via Captain Phillips, in which the actor reconciled his warm, comforting presence as America’s dad with a steelier exterior brought on by crisis. He’s now set to reunite with director Paul Greengrass for the first time since, in another role that sees him striking a Read More
One Man and His Shoes
This intriguing documentary explores the intersection between African American culture and basketball sneakers. It is a truth universally acknowledged that Black people love trainers. This is something so pedestrian that to even examine it seems inane. However, Yemi Bamiro’s ingenious documentary is both a love letter and a cautionary tale about the African-American community’s complicated Read More
Cordelia
Sporadically absorbing psychodrama in which a traumatised woman has a fling with her mysterious neighbour. There have been some legendarily bad film posters in the past few years: the photoshopped monstrosity of The Heat; the inexplicable chaos of 6 Underground; the unintentionally adorable serial killer notes for The Snowman. Yet none were as strange as Read More
It’s Hollywood versus Hearst in the full trailer for Mank
In the event that you saw the teaser trailer for David Fincher‘s new film Mank earlier this month and thought to yourself, “Neat clip, but I wish it had that thing where a bunch of characters yell the protagonist’s name in different tones of voice,” then you’re in luck. Today brings the full trailer for Read More
Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm
Sacha Baron Cohen’s calamity-prone Kazakh reporter takes dead-aim at US conservatism in this rip-snorting sequel. Like Hemingway before him, Borat Sagdiyev has returned to America to find a nation changed. Sacha Baron Cohen saw fit to revive his most inspired comic creation, the calamity-prone Kazakh reporter with a taste for revealing swimwear and convivial anti-Semitism, Read More
How François Ozon navigates queer romance
As he’s being dragged through the halls of a police station, the young man at the centre of François Ozon’s Summer of 85 issues a warning right at the outset: “If death doesn’t interest you, if you don’t want to hear about a corpse I knew when it was alive, if you don’t want to Read More
Summer of ’85
François Ozon turns back the clock for a sun-kissed gay love story that’s shot through with tragedy. Prolific French auteur François Ozon is known for his strange and alluring cinematic cocktails of sex, passion and tragedy. His characters are pushed to destructive extremes of feeling. Summer of ’85 does not stray from that tradition, but Read More
Ardbeg & LWLies Present: The B-Movie Monsters That Time Forgot!
In 1950s Hollywood, horror movies all but turned their back on the genre’s classic Gothic creations. Instead of Dracula and Frankenstein’s Monster came new nightmares for the modern Atomic Age – in all manner of strange shapes and sizes. In The B-Movie Monsters That Time Forgot!, Leigh Singer explores the weird and wonderful creature features Read More
A journey to the past with François Ozon
Pastel colours, fresh-faced adolescents, tanned skin and sunsets by the beach: François Ozon’s latest film Summer of 85 brings together all the elements of the 1980s French teen movie in a nostalgic, fizzy mix, by turns bitter and sweet. The film sees Alexis (Felix Lefebvre, a talent to watch) recount the dramatic story of his Read More
The first trailer for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom strikes up the band
In this compromised year, as distributors opt to hold many of their biggest releases until greener pastures in an indefinite future, what was once known as “awards season” will be largely bereft of the glossy star vehicles and period pieces that often fill out the end of the year. With one marked exception in both Read More
Rebecca
Armie Hammer and Lily James are woefully miscast in this limp adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s classic novel. Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel ‘Rebecca’ has one of the best opening lines of all time: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” Forever immortalised by Joan Fontaine’s sunny voice in the 1940 Alfred Hitchcock Read More
The Secret Garden
Dixie Egerickx outshines her adult co-stars in this pleasant adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s novel. Marc Munden’s The Secret Garden, an adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1911 novel of the same name, is beautiful to look at. But while the film will charm your senses it won’t necessarily captivate your soul. One evening during the Read More
After Love – first-look review
After Love – first-look review Joanna Scanlan plays a Muslim convert who discovers a secret about her husband in Aleem Khan’s moving drama. The White Cliffs of Dover, an enduring symbol of British nationalism, take on a different meaning in After Love. For Mary Hussein (Joanna Scanlan), their crumbling chalk façade represents her identity and Read More
Mogul Mowgli
Riz Ahmed shines as a rapper who reconnects with his spiritual roots after suffering a chronic illness. When Zed (Riz Ahmed) raps, he does it “for the mosque and the mosh pit.” His sharp, feverish bars arrive with the tenacity of slam poetry and the weight of his world within them. His life is in Read More
William Greaves’ Nationtime and the Black National Convention of 2020
Between 10-12 March, 1972, Mayor Richard Hatcher hosted the National Black Political Convention in, not a convention centre in “progressive” cities like New York or Los Angeles, but a high school gymnasium in the “smokestack city” of Gary, Indiana. At the time, he and Carl Stokes were the only Black Mayors of cities with population Read More
His House
Generational trauma and a fear of the unknown power Remi Weekes’ bone-chilling haunted house horror. Bol Majur (Sope Dìrísù) walks, zombie-like with exhaustion, carrying his little girl Nyagak (Malaika Wakoli-Abigaba) down a dusty road in war-torn South Sudan. Then Bol, his wife Rial (Wunmi Mosaku) and Nyagak cram onto the back of a pick-up truck Read More
Sope Dìrísù: ‘Fear is a very difficult sensation to replicate’
Sope Dìrísù: ‘Fear is a very difficult sensation to replicate’ A decade of hard graft across stage, screen and TV has resulted in a bone-rattling lead turn in political horror, His House. You’ll have probably seen the actor Sope Dìrísù in something, as he’s cropped up here, there and everywhere across the last decade. His Read More
Transgressive femininity in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca
Alfred Hitchcock was obsessed with the state of womanhood. His preoccupation with beautiful, blonde leading ladies became a trademark, yet these casting choices ran deeper than good looks. His filmography reads as a man desperately trying to unlock the mystery of women. Hitchcock was definitely not a feminist, but to write off his work as Read More
African Apocalypse and the painful legacy of ‘Heart of Darkness’
African Apocalypse and the painful legacy of ‘Heart of Darkness’ A new documentary gives a voice to the silenced natives in Joseph Conrad’s colonialist novel. Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ is perhaps the best known and most widely debated novel about colonialism. The story follows the protagonist Marlow’s journey from London, the great imperial capital, Read More
Check out these postcards inspired by the art of Hilma af Klint
Like so many female artists of her generation, Swedish trailblazer Hilma af Klint was misjudged and largely ignored by the mainstream art establishment. Thankfully her legacy has now been reclaimed by a brilliant documentary called Beyond the Visible, which is out now via Modern Films. To celebrate the film’s release, we set a creative brief Read More
Body of Water
Lucy Brydon’s bold debut charts a woman’s struggle to rebuild her life while in recovery from an eating disorder. There is a moment of warmth in Body of Water you can’t help but anticipate. A moment of triumph. A rebuilding of family bonds. A blossoming romance perhaps? It’s unclear where it will come from but Read More
David Squires on… Mike Pence in The Fly
Published 16 Oct 2020 Share this
Bill Nighy will lead an English-language reworking of Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru
Smack dab in the prime of his career, the peerless Akira Kurosawa made the elegiac sort of masterpiece most artists save for their twilight years. Ikiru follows aging bureaucrat Kanji (played indelibly by Takashi Shimura) as he learns that he has life-threatening cancer on the eve of his retirement, leaving the man existentially adrift, in Read More
Being A Human Person
The fragile genius of Swedish director Roy Andersson is laid bare in this intriguing documentary profile. It’s perhaps hard to fathom, but some genius artists are not great fans of being showered in adulation by those who consume their art. It just makes them feel self-conscious and awkward, leading them to seek out private coping Read More
How we trained the cockroach in Saint Maud
Occupation: Bug Wrangler. Well, on this occasion anyway. I’ve worked with everything from tigers to camels and crocodiles, but these days I specialise in the smaller critters that most other people don’t like: bugs, reptiles and rodents. I joke that someone has to do it, but the truth is these animals have always been my Read More
Totally Under Control
The Trump administration’s catastrophic response to COVID-19 is laid bare in Alex Gibney’s timely exposé. Made in secret and with the utmost urgency, Totally Under Control sees Alex Gibney and co-directors Suzanne Hillinger and Ophelia Harunthanyan investigate America’s disastrous handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, which Donald Trump referred to on 28 February as a “hoax”. Read More
Dev Patel is starring in a film about the male striptease troupe Chippendales
Like so many elements of the all-male exotic dance revue Chippendales, the road to production on the film about it has been long and hard. A dramatization of the stripping empire’s unsavory founding has been languishing in development hell for no less than two decades as attached talent came and went, but it looks like Read More
Bong Joon-ho’s early shorts are coming to the UK for the first time
Though viral idioms may be a bit iffy right now, it’s still entirely accurate to say that the world has been swept up by Bong fever in the wake of the filmmaker’s underdog Best Picture win for Parasite. A spiffy 4K restoration of his Memories of Murder is on the way, and soon, Bong Joon-ho Read More