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“T en years ago I heard Lubomyr Melnyk perform for the first time. Playing 40 notes a second, the 74-year-old pianist conjures transcendental landscapes and imagistic visions – sonic waterfalls, cloudbursts, and rivers of sound…” It’s two minutes in and I’m sitting across from my first meeting of the day. The commissioner listens thoughtfully amidst a hum of animated conversations. A sense of possibility, excitement, and apprehension fills the air. Time speeds up and slows down. Hearts stir. Everyone here is looking to find that elusive spark. Welcome to the MeetMarket – speed dating for cinema. Sheffield Doc/Fest is an internationally renowned non-fiction film festival set in the heart of the Steel City. Its skyline is punctuated by chimneys reflecting the city’s industrial past, though today it’s been recast as a creative hub, a crucible for ideas. For six days Sheffield will play host to filmmakers, VR creators, investors, and enthusiasts from all over the world. There’s a great...

L éonor Serraille loves headstrong, emotional women. The French director burst onto the Cannes scene when, in 2017, she won the Camera d’Or (the prize for the best first feature) for her debut, Jeune Femme , starring Laetitia Dosch as a newly single redhead spreading chaos across Paris. This time, the charming whirlwind at the core is Annabelle Lengronne’s Rose, a single mother who arrives in Paris from the Ivory Coast in 1989 with two small boys under her arm and other sons back at home. Unlike the cautious relatives who offers the trio a temporary home, Rose is instantly open to the thrills available to the beautiful and vivacious woman she is, and, when not working as a hotel cleaner, she enjoys an abundant sex life. Mother and Son has a novelistic scope, with an opening voice-over from Rose’s youngest son, Ernest, creating a portent of the trials to come for this immigrant family. He is five when the film opens and 25 by the time the curtain falls. Their fortunes are dependent ...

“See the child,” Cormac McCarthy instructs us in the first line of his novel ‘Blood Meridian’. Similarly, in the opening scene of 2013’s The Counselor, McCarthy – through director Ridley Scott’s lens – commands the audience to witness the playful intimacy of the titular counselor (Michael Fassbender) and his love, Laura (Penélope Cruz). He puts desire in front of us from the beginning, and over the next two hours offers a powerful thesis on desire and the inevitability of its companion: consequence. As McCarthy’s only produced script for a feature film, The Counselor remains a fascinating and rich experiment from one of America’s most lauded novelists. In it, he pens a grim parable about greed and its repercussions. While the film overtly comments on its themes, there is something deeper at work, something that directs us, as McCarthy does in the opening scene, to peer more closely at the hidden motivations and logic driving the narrative. The unnamed Counselor has big dreams for a...

A few years back, Darius Marder’s Sound of Metal depicted the difficult adjustment of a drummer to life without hearing, leaving behind an artistic field so dependent on sound and sight working together in unison. A more modest offering in many respects, though similarly striking with its own amplified sound design and near-total lack of music, Japanese drama Small, Slow but Steady presents something of an athletic counterpart to that American movie: the story of someone born with a hearing impairment, operating within a sporting field where deafness might seem an inherent impediment to participation. Director Shô Miyake’s calm and collected film is rooted in some truth. It’s loosely based on ‘Makenaide’, the autobiography of Keiko Ogasawara, the first hearing-impaired professional woman boxer in Japan. One might expect the film to be a fairly standard adaptation of the book, but crucial artistic licenses are taken right off the bat. One is that the main character, beautifully pla...

S o many films that are considered essential queer cinema do not have happy endings. Brokeback Mountain, the love story between two cowboys in Wyoming based on a novella by Annie Proulx, certainly does not see Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar live happily ever after. The tragic real-life murder of transgender man Brandon Teena is shown in graphic detail in Kimberly Peirce’s Boys Don’t Cry, while Abdellatif Kechiche’s adaptation of Jul Maroh’s graphic novel Blue is the Warmest Colour has been criticised for depicting a sapphic romance through the lens of the male gaze. The threat of discovery and overt homophobia is a constant presence throughout countless queer releases, with LGBTQ+ characters presented as having tragic stories to be learned from, rather than love stories in their own right. The messy parts of queer relationships are left out in favour of harrowing social commentary. It is only recently that studios have started handing the reins over to LGBTQ+ creators, as seen in Ali...

A film about not being able to keep a good Nazi down feels very apposite in the current climate of rabid conservatism, and so that might go some way to justify the existence of a brand new caper involving Nazi-hater in chief, Henry “Indiana” Jones (Harrison Ford). Unfortunately, what we get is the pantomimic, hubristic, goose-stepping version of the Nazis, as Mads Mikkelsen’s slighted megalomaniacal scientist Jürgen Voller plans to use a time-shifting doohickey built by Archimedes (no less!) to correct the mistakes of Nazi high command and make sure that, this time, the Germans are triumphant in ’45. Following a strange prologue in which a (poorly) de-aged Ford makes a dashing and destructive escape from capture right at the pivot point of the war, we scoot forward to 1969 and America is celebrating the Moon landings. Our man Voller was brought in to help the Yanks achieve their space race goals, but now his sights are set on retrieving the Dial of Destiny and seeing through his ...

S oaked in sweat and bathed in orange light, Claire Denis’s second English language feature, Stars at Noon, is a film that seems to exist in a state of permanent dusk. Characters are introduced in a relaxed, matter-of-fact manner, with names and occupations intentionally obscured. It doesn’t help that our heroine, Trish, played by Margaret Qualley, is constantly in a rum-induced haze. Rail thin and running on alcohol and sex, Trish wears the disguise of a good time girl while quietly yearning to be saved from her situation. Stranded in Nicaragua after arriving on assignment as a journalist, Trish has basically given up on writing. All she seems to want to do is get out, with no choice but to bargain with the men around her for protection and survival. It’s a time of governmental and societal unrest in the country and no one seems to care about a wayward American woman in over her head. Complicating matters is Daniel (Joe Alwyn), a mysterious Englishman in Nicaragua on business. The...

I n 1998 Wes Anderson cast Jason Schwartzman as precocious high schooler Max Fischer in his breakout comedy Rushmore. Twenty-five years later, after remaining firm friends and constant collaborators, they reunite for Asteroid City, in which Schwartzman plays the dual role of Augie Steenbeck, a grieving husband and slightly harried father, and Jones Hall, a James Dean-esque young actor. LWLies: Wes wrote Asteroid City with you in mind. Can you tell me about the first time he told you he was working on it, and how the film developed from there? Schwartzman: It would’ve been July 2019 that he mentioned he was working on something with Roman [Coppola] that he had me in mind for. He didn’t say much about it at that point, but he was excited. Maybe a month or two later – I was reading a book about Elia Kazan, and he wrote me an email saying, ‘I can’t say much, but look into Kazan.’ And I said, ‘That’s crazy, I have a book about him right here next to my bed!’ And then I was in Chicago, r...

T he mid-budget studio comedy fall from grace has been tragic, to say the least. A beloved genre that used to commandeer both box office and home entertainment for decades, its humour guaranteed to penetrate mainstream consciousness, is now risky, mostly unprofitable business. Slapstick comedies, action comedies, screwball comedies, rom-coms – they’ve all been subject to the ebbs and flows of public taste, yet today’s most quotable and culturally resonant language finds itself less in Apatow-isms. When memes and TikTok trends can be spread faster and wider than any non-franchise movie, the future of the studio comedy’s appeal can only continue to seem bleak. Gene Stupinsky’s second directorial feature, No Hard Feelings, is a clear nostalgic throwback to the late ’00s humour of Superbad and The Hangover, and it does manage to hit a few of those notes, though it never really lives up to the promise of the raunchy R-rated comedy its trailers try to sell it as. Jennifer Lawrence, who is...

I magine your first credit as a costume designer for cinema was Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. And now imagine that you include Francis Ford Coppola and Wes Anderson as the names on your current client list. The Turin-born Milena Canonero is a legend in the industry, and has won four Oscars for her work over the decades, including most recently one for the costumes she designed for Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel. Her work in Asteroid City covers duelling timelines and disparate styles: a mid-century desert-bound jaunt with an explosion of pastels, and the formal monochrome threads of a dispossessed clique of urban theatre actors. We had a short, sharp chat with Canonero about her connections to Kubrick, Anderson’s specificity of vision and his own unique sartorial style. LWLies: Having worked with Stanley Kubrick, was it strange to have to create costumes for a character who was inspired by Stanley Kubrick? Canonero: No it was not strange. It was I would say...

A seventysomething man stands at his bookshop’s storefront, telling customers they cannot come in. Without the possibility of browsing, many of them sadly walk away. The man, after waving them off with a smile, stands quietly in an empty shop filled with books waiting to be read. This is the first scene we see in A.B. Zax’s debut feature documentary Hello, Bookstore. We all know that independent shops were one of the hardest hit industries during the pandemic, but the film provides a heartfelt case study of how these businesses struggled to stay afloat.  The 86-minute documentary depicts the small-town bookshop (aptly named The Bookstore) based in Lenox, Massachusetts run by Matt Tannenbaum. As the pandemic rears its ugly head, the friendly atmosphere of the shop is hit with mid-pandemic money troubles. The Bookstore faces closure, but the community takes the lead to save it. Zax sets up cameras around the bookshop to capture the everyday experience in the quaint business.The ...

H ello Sophie Monks Kaufman, this is Wes.” In his slow, warm, contemplative drawl, my name sounds better than ever before. I am in seat 17C of easyjet flight K54K39S which is rolling down a runway at Nice Côte d’Azur Airport. I had switched my phone off flight mode in the hope of receiving a message that would stoke my excitement about beingin the French Riviera for the 76th Cannes Film Festival. Even in this anticipatory state, a voice memo from Wes Anderson was beyond anything that it would occur to me to expect. His latest film, Asteroid City, is set during the 1950s in a fictional American desert town named Arid Plans that has drawn out-of-towners for the Junior Stargazers convention. The Stargazers, all precocious child geniuses, bring with them a more raggedy crew of adults with barely concealed emotional problems. Among them is war photographer Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman) who has yet to break the news to his four children that their mother is dead. There is another la...

In a new monthly column, Anton Bitel highlights a selection of must-haves, from re-releases to streaming premieres.  The Lighthouse, dir. Robert Eggers, 2018 “I’m probably a figment of your imagination,” observes Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe) some way into Robert Eggers’ cinematic shanty , set in the late nineteenth century. “This rock is probably a figment of your imagination too.” For a figment, Wake seems earthily real – a drunken, farting, cursing, peg-legged old timer insistently in charge of the lighthouse lamp. Yet as his four-week stint with a new assistant (Robert Pattinson) turns into a much longer stay, this tiny, remote New England island will become a staging ground for the two men’s haunting pasts and buried desires. There are unexpected, and possibly imagined, visits from a pesky seagull, a mermaid, a ghost, a corpse and a Lovecraftian monster, there are nightmares, delirium tremens and madness to unmoor our grip on the narrative – and as this ongoing maelstrom...

M idway through Greatest Days, based on the 2017 Take That jukebox musical The Band, a ‘Shine’ musical sequence takes place on an airport runway. The song was the band’s big 2007 comeback hit post-Robbie Williams, with vocals by Mark Owen who appears in the music video in a top hat and tails surrounded by chorus girls. The scene in the film takes its lead from the original video , replete with a shot through the bare legs of stewardesses imitating Busby Berkeley’s 42nd Street choreography. Words cannot do justice to how laughably flat-footed this number is, with Aisling Bea, Alice Lowe, Jayde Adams, and Amaka Okafor plodding about on the tarmac around an EasyJet plane. It’s more Butlins than Broadway. As with director Coky Giedroyć’s last film, How To Build a Girl based on the memoir of the same name by Caitlin Moran, Greatest Days rests solely on ‘90s nostalgia and Take That’s long-suffering fan base of British women. Amongst them is Rachel (Bea), a children’s nurse of the OG Take...

T he history of animation is checkered and complex, but the first name to come up is usually Walt Disney Studios – Mickey Mouse’s creator is more often than not heralded as the leading figure of the art form. One of the most well-known outings for the mouse overlord is Steamboat Willie which, in 1928, was one of the first pieces of animation to be synchronised to music. As the studio experimented with different stories and characters, they produced Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs , their first animated feature film. While it’s indisputable that Disney’s films were landmark achievements, there was a filmmaker who changed the game well before them. Enter Lotte Reiniger, the creator of the oldest surviving feature animation. As a child the German filmmaker was obsessed with puppets. She made paper figures of fairy tale characters, and cut out figures for hours to perform plays for her parents. Born in Berlin in 1899, Reiniger was part of the first generation to come of age with cinema,...