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A mong his many crimes, Joss Whedon is responsible for a seismic change in the style of dialogue favoured in modern fantasy film and television. The quippy, “so, that just happened” speech patterns that have plagued the scripts of many a production can be traced back to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly – and while for a brief period this snappy sound was novel, when it became the  de rigueur  formula for Marvel movies and most Hollywood blockbusters, the result was a world where films failed to take their own conceits seriously. Gone were the days of the earnest fantasy yarn, with the likes of Lord of the Rings and Labyrinth – films which delivered strangeness with a straight face – but a distant memory. Everything was irony poisoned, and characters had to point out the absurdity of their situation every two minutes, in a way that was almost as jarring as an actor looking straight into the camera and saying “Hey, isn’t this weird ?!” The inability for modern fantasy ...

T his new comedy-drama film inspired by the popular Gameboy thumbworm, Tetris, is not a digitally-animated family adventure about how a plucky gang of geometric blocks of various sizes/shapes voiced by 2nd-string SNL members can fit together into a single satisfying whole if they all just work towards a common goal. It is, in fact, a poppy, ripped-from-Wiki legal procedural about how a canny American businessman was able to prize the highly-coveted Tetris IP from the clutches of the Russians, popularise the game throughout the world and foil a dastardly British business magnate in the process. What a time for a film to come out about western commercial capitalism attempting to locate economic loopholes deep in the black heart of Soviet-era Russia. Taron Egerton plays Henk Rogers, a sharkskin-suited entrepreneur with a chubby era-defining moustache in the gaming world of the 1980s who’s on the prowl for the next big hit. Laying his eyes on Tetris at a gaming expo and snapping up dod...

I t’s been nearly a decade and a half since Edgar Wright ‘s adaptation of the Scott Pilgrim graphic novel series first came to theaters, but the fandom has only grown larger and more passionate in the intervening years. Today, the faithful devotees of the mild-mannered, ex-lover-dueling Torontonian bassist can claim a big win, as the cult favorite will soon return for another adventure in awkwardness. This morning, Netflix pulled back the curtain on an upcoming anime miniseries take on the Scott Pilgrim books, executive-produced by Wright along with original creator Bryan Lee O’Malley and writer Ben-David Grabinski (creator of the recent Are You Afraid of the Dark? series). Wright’s film condensed the six volumes of the series’ original run to feature length, and so this new project will blaze a trail into original narrative, joining Scott and his many pals as he searches for a girlfriend — and, along the way, maybe a little self-respect. Wright’s film has gained in stature partial...

N ewlyweds Suze ( Andrea Riseborough ) and Arthur (Harry Melling) are an ostensibly straight, beatnik couple living in a bizarre, fever dream version of a 1950s Lower East Side. The night that they witness the murder of a man by a queer-coded, leather-clad greaser gang outside their apartment building, Arthur is struck with lust, and Suze, with gender envy. Their confounding queer awakening unfolds in an outlandish greaser tale of love and violence that confronts the unspoken battle between gender and expression in West Side Story by means of inversion. Steeped in the candy-coloured iconography of old Hollywood musicals, the film wears all of its many, many cinematic and theatrical influences proudly and manages to never come across as derivative. Yet not everything works in Kramer’s neon-lit, sleazy, narratively minimal look into the queer psyche. There is nothing subtle about the film’s exploration of the fluidity of gender and sexuality, which permeates every sequence, at times r...

A black sheep boy returns to the family nest and causes all manner of emotional ballyhoo in Saela Davis and Anna Rose Holmer’s atmospheric psychodrama, God’s Creatures, the welcome if low-key follow-up to Homer’s feisty 2015 debut, The Fits . Said son, Brian, is played by man-of-the-moment and 2023 award season darling, Paul Mescal , who slinks into the role of a dirty-rotten oyster farmer with a sideline in illegal salmon poaching, among other nefarious bits involving local songbird Sarah, played by Aisling Franciosi. While we’ve seen that Mescal can do impeccable sadboi in Aftersun , here the sheen of good cheer comes with an undertow of independence and violence. The film sees him expertly play on the doting affections of his saintly, community-minded mother, Aileen, who is beautifully realised by the always-great Emily Watson . What initially plays out as a grim social realist portrait of hardscrabble lives in a traditional Irish fishing village, soon segues into a disturbing f...

S ummer traditionally heralds the arrival of blockbuster season, but with it comes a counterpoint a little closer to the arthouse. While the superhero escapades and planet-obliterating CGI rage at peak decibel levels, the warm months also bring at least a couple releases from brand-name auteurs who wield a sense of can’t-miss occasion for a different subset of viewer. Though these films can do quite well for themselves at the box office, we may nonetheless think of it as anti-blockbuster season. This year, that slot will be occupied by Wes Anderson , whose latest film Asteroid City has been slated to crater cinemas in June. This morning brought the first trailer for the hotly anticipated new transmission from Planet Wes, and with a world premiere at Cannes all but guaranteed, what better time to take stock of all that’s currently known about this intergalactic hyperjump into whimsy? Anderson commenced shooting on the sprawling ensemble piece in August 2021, tired of sitting on his ...

T he practice of constructing languages harks back to the 12th century, but thanks to J.R.R. Tolkien’s fictional languages in the world of Middle-earth, many people took up the pastime in the 20th century. The release of The Lord of the Rings and the appendix that included Tolkien’s created language notes brought greater visibility to conlanging (the creation of constructed languages). David J. Peterson, the man who famously created the fictional languages Dothraki and Valyrian for Game of Thrones, spoke to LWLies about the art of language creation for film and television. LWLies: Did you always see conlanging as a viable career path?  Peterson: It’s not something you could have decided to do professionally in the past because the job didn’t exist. Before 2009, there had been a few instances where people had been paid to create a language, but that was it. I’d been creating languages on my own for ten years before getting into it professionally. When I spoke to other conlanger...

“I think it’s very important for our movements to be inclusive and collaborative, because divisiveness is taking away a lot of our power.” So says trailblazing author Jewelle Gomez in Jewelle: A Just Vision, Madeleine Lim’s documentary on the life, work and activism of the woman who gave us Black lesbian vampires long before sparkly straight ones came along. The film screened this March at BFI Flare 2023, the two-week LGBTQ+ film festival at BFI Southbank which couldn’t have come at a more prescient time. Anti-LGBTQ bills are clogging up the USA , Uganda just passed even more draconian anti-gay laws , and certain UK “feminists” (gay and otherwise) and literal neo-Nazis finally agree on one thing: their hatred of trans people . Flare 2023 was a refreshing antidote to this climate, with its usual Hearts, Bodies and Minds categories showcasing queer art in all its diverse glory. And from dramedy to horror, Brazil to South Korea and from shorts and features to VR and video games , ...

W ith the cinematic stock of Japanese author Haruki Murakami at an all-time high following the Oscar glory enjoyed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car , we now have another adaptation of a volume of short stories by the painter and filmmaker Pierre Földes. The eccentric, laconic Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is a pastel-hued animated patchwork of vignettes which draw together the ultra mundane art of the meandering one-on-one conversation with various fantastical flights of fantasy born out of dreams and interior projection. The story takes place in various Japanese locales, as its various lost soul characters ponder their social and sexual hang-ups in anticipation of a cataclysmic earthquake. A portly salaryman receives a visitation from a talking frog heading to battle with a giant work; the man’s colleague has been dumped by his wife and heads on a journey of self reflection; a woman tells rum sexual escapade in the great outdoors. The film does well to capture the probing liter...

W hile he’s a household name in the USA, quarterback Tom Brady hasn’t quite announced himself on the global stage, which is probably a lot to do with the fact that American football itself doesn’t have quite the same international draw as, say, ‘soccer’ or tennis. For the unaware, Brady is to American football what Pelé is to actual football – a player so preternaturally talented, he’s become all but synonymous with the sport. Since he was drafted to the NFL in 2002, Brady has gone on to break almost every major record, including winning seven Superbowls across his 21-year career, making him the most-awarded player of all time. He retired again in February, and will start his new job as lead commentator on Fox next year – but first, he’s got some spritely pensioners to delight in Kyle Marvin’s feel-good comedy (based on a true story!) . Best friends Lou (Lily Tomlin) Trish (Jane Fonda) Maura (Rita Moreno) and Betty (Sally Field) are die-hard New England Patriots fans, having devel...

T hose unfortunate souls masochistic enough to follow the doings of film critics professional and amateur on Twitter may have noticed a peculiar uptick in viewing micro-trends over the past couple of years. All of a sudden, it seems like everyone’s checking out Ken Russell’s reptilian freakshow The Lair of the White Worm, or Kathryn Bigelow’s future panic noir epic Strange Days, or the Hal Hartley/Isabelle Huppert team-up Amateur. It’s not in your head — the aforementioned films have all been thrust into the spotlight by their programming on the Criterion Channel, which has rapidly become one of the most influential shapers of cinephilic diets in North America (if you want to watch from anywhere else in the world, you’ll need, ahem, certain methods). The phenomenon can be explained simply enough, a digital update of the old-fashioned word of mouth that compels consumers to get in on the things they see their friends talking about. Back when we had a monoculture, this was how cult mo...

C hilean filmmaker Francisca Alegría heeds the call for environmental consciousness and action in her beguiling new feature The Cow Who Sang A Song Into The Future, a magical realist fable about what it means to protect the harmony of the natural world. As shoals of singing fish wash up on the shores of the Río Cruces, dying from the polluted water, a woman emerges from the deep, gasping for air. Elusively mute, Magdalena (Mía Maestro) was believed to have been dead for many years and returns to society where her presence has a strange effect on the objects and people around her; microwaves and mobile phones come to life when she passes, people fall into uncontrollable fits of laughter, and when her former husband catches sight of her, he collapses from the surprise. To take care of him, his daughter Cecilia (Leonor Varela) and her two children travel to the town where she and brother Bernardo (Marcial Tagle) grew up, while Bernardo takes over the care of their father’s dairy farm ...

P art of the great joy of cinema is that it seemingly has no limits – great films have the capacity to transport us to entirely different worlds, challenge our perceptions, and show us something we’ve never seen before. As such, this world of possibilities has the potential to strike a chord with anyone, no matter their identity or background. Cinema is, in short, for everyone. Unfortunately that’s not quite the reality, and there are still huge barriers to accessing film for many, including geography, finances, and consideration of how disability impacts the film-viewing experiences. From venues without wheelchair access to the continued difficulty in accessing captioned and audio-described screenings, for many people with disabilities, popping down to catch a film often is far more of a mission than it should be. Thankfully there are more people than ever before dedicated to changing this, championing better access across the film industry, for fans, filmmakers, exhibitors and di...

N o-one knew what planet she was flung in from when they first clapped eyes on Adèle Exarchopoulos. For me, like a lot of critics I imagine, it was the 2013 Cannes press screening of Blue is the Warmest Colour , for which the actor went on to share the Palme d’Or with the film’s director and her co-star, Léa Seydoux . Which was an unprecedented move at the time, but one for which commentators did not bat an eyelid, because it was so obviously deserved. By that I mean this was a film in which the dedication and intensity of the performances were so integral to its success that it would seem strange to direct the plaudits elsewhere, or to just a single point of that central creative triangle. And that year’s jury head Steven Spielberg was clearly aware of the fine alchemical balance the film achieves. Blue is the Warmest Colour might be remembered for its lengthy and graphic sex scenes, but in fact the abiding image that comes back to us over and over again is that of Exarchopoulos ...

A h, the things we do for love. As the hard-luck Allison, Florence Pugh really goes through it in the latest torrent of miscalculated uplift from cineaste Zach Braff , written and produced in the thick of their much-murmured-about romantic relationship: absent Dad, alcoholic Mom, a fateful car crash, grief, guilt, opioid addiction, foil-smoking heroin in an alley, puking herself awake in an unfamiliar stairwell, a couple abortive feints toward suicide, an inadvisable self-administered haircut. She shoulders one indignity after the next as the punching bag of a cruel, capricious god, though that higher authorial power also shoots her with long, unbroken closeups in worshipful thrall to her prowess as performer. (Not to mention the line from her character’s lover about his pronounced fondness for her exceptional derriere.) Pugh’s greatest tribulation of all is delivering the tin-eared dialogue torn between the emotional sadism it heaps onto its protagonist and the adulation it lavish...

I f there’s any doubt that John Wick: Chapter 4 could be more audacious than its storied predecessors, that’s wiped away almost immediately in the film’s first scene; Lawrence Fishburne’s Bowery King theatrically recites lines from Dante’s Inferno before blowing out a lit match to initiate a direct lift of that famous cut from Lawrence of Arabia. It’s a perfect encapsulation of how these films are: reverent to a cinematic history beyond its Hong Kong action inspirations, but not so self-serious about it. Chapter 4 picks up where the third entry, Parabellum , left off: having been betrayed and left for dead by confidante Winston (Ian McShane), who finally bowed to ‘The High Table’ who rule over John Wick’s world of assassins. John’s pissed, and ready to become an angel of death again for those who dared to wrong him – this time it’s high ranking “French” table member Marquis Vincent de Gramont, played by Bill Skarsgård. Keanu Reeves’ performance of Wick is primarily physical – betwe...

I f you already own sunglasses, go and put them on now. If you don’t, then go and buy some. That’s because LWLies issue 98 is one of the most brightly coloured issues we’ve ever made, and that’s saying something. Our cheerfully florid colour scheme forms a perfect match with cover film Polite Society, about an angry young woman whose dream of becoming a stuntwoman is put on hold when she has to prevent her sister from marrying a wealthy and possibly sinister bachelor. As paid-up fans of Nida Manzoor’s Channel 4 sitcom, We Are Lady Parts, anticipation levels were already unfeasibly high for the writer-director’s transition to the big screen. And with its gymnastic camera movements, snappy editing and numerous cinematic reference points, We Are Lady Parts perhaps concealed Manzoor’s desire to move in that direction. Polite Society sits comfortably in the rich continuum of films which explore the lives of South Asian families both adapting to the landscape of contemporary Britain, and ...