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The spectre of Victor Fleming’s 1939 The Wizard of Oz, in all its technicolour glory, seems to ceaselessly haunt the collective American psyche. Distilled into a pair of sequined red pumps, this staggeringly permanent cultural touchstone has become “public real estate”, and like a recurring hallucination, has left an indelible mark on David Lynch’s films, warping the porous veil between reality and imagination. Alexandre O. Philippe’s Lynch/Oz sees a cohort of six distinct and illuminating essays (each written and voiced by film critic Amy Nicholson, camp auteur John Waters, director duo Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, and filmmakers Karyn Kusama, Rodney Ascher and David Lowery) guiding us through the yellow brick road as they examine the how Oz’s influence and cultural vernacular is thoroughly embedded into the very core of Lynch’s cinematic oeuvre. The video essay format reigns supreme as the most popular form of online film criticism, largely due to the insight that can be gle...

C hristmas time in the late 1990s: a family and friends sit around the kitchen of a council flat somewhere in south London. Val, played by the great Kathy Burke , is talking about her incarcerated little brother Billy; he’s just had to move cells after being stabbed by another inmate wielding a toothbrush wrapped in razor blades. The screws have moved Billy to the “fraggle wing” — “with all the nonces and the rapists and that… poor sod,” sniggers spread around the room. Then Val drops the punchline: “Mind your backs!” And they’re pissing themselves. This is the final scene from Nil By Mouth , a 1997 film directed by Gary Oldman that deals in domestic abuse, drug addiction and poverty in working-class Britain. In its most chilling scene Ray Winstone’s alcoholic drug addict Raymond accuses Val, his partner, of behaving unfaithfully, then reacts with horrific violence when she denies it, while their infant daughter watches from the stairs. Yet despite its harrowing violence Nil By Mou...

W hen people think about Disney, the first things leaping to mind tend to be princesses, superheroes, or Jedi knights. But a corporate behemoth with such deep pockets can also afford to venture out beyond the safe realm of franchising to throw some money around where it goes a little further, and now they’re bringing a bit of their largesse to the lower-profile international market. The Italian-made short film Le Pupille will be available through Disney+ starting 16 December, an unlikely if widely accessible home for the latest work from arthouse favorite Alice Rohrwacher . Photographed with a combination of 16mm and 35mm formats, the 37-minute homage to Zero for Conduct and other unruly-child classics may seem an odd fit for the Mouse’s streaming platform, but the seasonal angle will nonetheless place it alongside the rest of their Yuletide-themed content. Le Pupille was conceived as part of a series of Christmastime shorts commissioned by Disney and produced through Alfonso Cuaró...

W riter/director Park Hoon-jung goes back before moving forward. The Witch: Part 2 – The Other One (Manyeo 2: Lo go) may begin with a little girl in a barn, covered in blood (though clearly not herself hurt), which is not so far removed from the opening of The Witch: Part 1 – The Subversion (2018), when little Koo Ja-yoon escaped a mysterious compound whose walls she had just painted in the blood of others. Ja-yoon had spent a decade thereafter on the farm of her adoptive family the Koos, like Kal-el hiding out and growing up with the wholesome farmers the Kents – until, unable to overcome a chronic illness, she came out of hiding and violently confronted her past. So the first film mixed adolescent rites of passage with a gender-inverted, genre-switched Super(wo)man who might just be more like the teen supervillain from David Yarovesky’s Brightburn (2019). Part 2 is not about Ja-yoon – although she will eventually return – but, as its subtitle suggests, about another, similar girl...

W hen famous singer Rachel Marron (Whitney Houston) asks her new bodyguard Frank Farmer (Kevin Costner) to accompany her on an evening out, he takes her to see his favourite film: Kurosawa’s 1961 samurai classic, Yojimbo. As they leave the cinema, Rachel asks Frank how many times he’s seen it. ‘Sixty-two times,’ he replies. I don’t think I’ve quite seen The Bodyguard sixty-two times, but it might be the film I’ve rewatched more than any other. Ever since my mum showed it to me in my mid-teens (one of her own countless rewatches), I’ve returned to the film time and time again for its unique – and uniquely ‘90s – blend of suspense, drama, action and romance. This is a film that does everything, the way Hollywood films aspired to back then, before scripts got thinner and genre boundaries became so rigidly defined. It’s the reason the film can withstand countless viewings – The Bodyguard is a movie for every moment, that satisfies on every level. But one glance at Rotten Tomatoes and i...

C oyness often gets in the way of people dying a good death. Few know how to talk about dying – this discomfort is reflected on a small scale in everyday discourse through limp euphemisms like ‘passing away’, and on a large scale in the legislation of most countries where any form of euthanasia remains illegal. For the most part death happens chaotically, initially around us and eventually to us – it is not typically within the control of a person or those close to them. We are not often properly braced. Ondi Timoner’s Last Flight Home confronts the emotional and practical realities of planned, assisted death. The film shows her father Eli and their family in the last 15 days of his life through fly-on-the-wall footage as he follows the California End of Life Option Act and says his goodbyes. Consequently, it’s a highly uncomfortable watch – it documents the countdown to death in a determined yet uneasy way. The law allows terminally ill California residents to request a drug from ...

W u Ma’s The Dead and the Deadly (Ren xia ren) opens abruptly. Having witnessed a man stealing into a woman’s home not a day after her husband has died, Brother Chu (Sammo Kam-bo Hung), known to everyone as Fat Boy, decides to engage in a kind of moral intervention. This will involve him disguising himself as the ghost of the dead husband, to shame the lovers from an impious act of adultery. Yet as Fat Boy carries out this macabre masquerade, the actual ghost of the husband will also appear, vengefully killing both his ex-wife and her new lover – and threatening to kill Fat Boy too. Fat Boy comes to in the forecourt of his home and workplace, uncertain whether he has just survived a supernatural confrontation or awoken from a nightmare – but either way, this prologue introduces several key motifs. For in a paranormal film that resurrects the comic spirit of Hung’s Encounters of the Spooky Kind (1980), mortal imposture, phantom revenge, the confusion of the living and the dead and th...

D omestic workers live at the fringes of other people’s realities, devoting their bodies and souls to rather thankless jobs. Often they are from developing nations, leaving their faraway homes just to make a living, and it is typical that they have children of their own too, whom they rarely see as they take care of their employer’s kids. In Nanny , first time feature filmmaker Nikyatu Jusu takes the spotlight and shines it on this unexplored sect of society, creating a beautiful yet chilling tale surrounding identity, love, and motherhood peppered along with terror, tension, and African mythology. Aisha (Anna Diop) is an undocumented Senegalese immigrant who starts a new job as the nanny for an affluent Manhattan family in hopes of saving up enough money to bring her own young son over to the United States. She then begins to experience supernatural disturbances that force her to deal with her guilt over leaving her son behind in pursuit of a better life for them.  Jusu’s cho...

I t’s approaching two decades since Rian Johnson announced himself as one of genre cinema’s most intriguing young talents. His debut feature, Brick, a high-stakes high school noir with a clockwork plot and killer script, set the tone for what was to come – not least its opening shot of a dead body lying face down in the dirt. Aside from a sojourn in a galaxy far, far away, Johnson’s film career has remained grounded in murder and mystery ever since, from the swizzling exploits of The Brothers Bloom, to the time-skipping thrills of Looper, to the yarn-spinning larks of Knives Out . Never one to repeat the same trick twice, Johnson is back with Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery , another slickly constructed whodunit that expands the world of his previous film while reacquainting us with Cajun crime solver extraordinaire, Benoit Blanc. LWLies: Glass Onion is not a direct continuation of Knives Out. You have Daniel Craig returning as Benoit Blanc, but it’s a new story, new cast. Was it...

T he young life of competitive swimmer Yusra Mardini feels custom wrapped for some canny director to waltz in and produce a glossy, inspirational film about her unlikely triumph over extreme adversity. Growing up as a regular teen on the outskirts of Damascus, Syria in 2011, she is coached to swim by her father whose own dreams of the big time faltered, and so he parlays his energy into helping his daughter to succeed where he did not. Yusra has enough of the right stuff to make people believe she has a chance to make it into the big leagues, but then the bombs begin to fall and one quite literally blocks her path to greatness. For this dream to expand and thrive, a new life is required, one outside of war-torn Syria and, unfortunately, without her beloved parents. Writer/director Sally El Hosaini made significant waves in 2012 with her forceful realist drama My Brother the Devil. In her belated follow-up, The Swimmers, she expands both scale and scope, and the results are largely ...

T here was a time when being called a “disruptor” was not a nice thing. If you talked too much in class, played your music too loud, or drunkenly tipped over cows while they slept, this was old school disruption of the unequivocally malign variety. Around the turn of the millennium, the term evolved into a beloved corporate buzzword and its core definition changed. Suddenly, it was no longer about simply making other people uncomfortable, it was about harnessing discomfort as a weapon, and shaking people out of stale habits – whether they liked it or not. Disruption became about enforced change, and was not only beneficial, but apparently a vital tenet in the apparatus of capitalism. Yet, if we look back at the modern “disruptor” personalities – you all know who they are, the windbag political populists; the tech scions playing hacky sack; the say-anything-for-a-dollar media personalities – it’s clear that their creed was hollow, their intentions were (still) malign, and the only th...

S he Said opens with a pale young woman with cropped hair walking along the Irish coast. To her astonishment an 18th century galleon is suddenly revealed, bustling with navy officers in tricorn hats. She’s stumbled onto a film set. Her awe is violently interrupted with a hard cut to her running full pelt down a city street stricken with terror. Nothing in She Said ever quite equals the sheer emotional power of this prologue, but it builds towards a moving conclusion without ever feeling manipulative. Starring Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan as real New York Times investigative reporters Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor, this is a classic journalism movie but one that turns its gaze to Hollywood itself. The film is a dramatisation of Twohey and Kantor’s book of the same name, published in 2019 and which details how they first broke the story of Harvey Weinstein’s decades of sexual abuse and the payouts that silenced his survivors. With compassion and determination, the pair pursue a whispe...

A successful adaptation of DH Lawrence’s scandal-courting 1928 novel, ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ requires a subtle alchemy. On paper this tale of untrammelled libido triumphing over 20th century class barriers seems easily achievable. The novel’s once-taboo nature – it was unpublished for three decades before being subject to a lengthy obscenity trial and bans around the world – has often worked against it, and adaptations of Lawrence’s gripping drama often reduce it to bodice-ripping smut. What distinguishes Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre’s newest interpretation from its predecessors is its deft, mature understanding of what makes both Lady Chatterley and her lover tick. The novel is built on the sexual tension between Lady Chatterley – an unhappy, newly-wed wife of a baronet – and Oliver Mellors, the rugged gamekeeper who stalks her husband’s isolated country estate. De Clermont-Tonnerre has found two excellent actors to ensure that the sexual tension is as taut as possible, even tho...

T he 17th London Korean Film Festival did not get off to the happiest start, not owing to anything with the event itself, but because of what had happened over 5000 miles away just a few days before. The horrific crowd crush at Itaewon, one of South Korea’s worst-ever disasters, weighed heavily over the opening night of an event meant to celebrate the best of the nation’s film industry. The post-screening reception had already been cancelled, and the audience were asked to join in a moment of silence for the tragedy’s victims. After this sombre beginning, festival-goers were badly in need of some escapism – the opening film, Alienoid, certainly delivered. With director Choi Dong-Hoon inspired by the likes of Back to the Future, laughter quickly filled the auditorium as viewers were plunged into a world of sci-fi, magic and slapstick comedy. The plot, which involved aliens being imprisoned in human bodies, was insane yet strangely enjoyable, and was made surprisingly heartwarming b...