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S ince his impressive debut feature Weekend, Andrew Haigh has quietly built a fine body of work that positions him as one of the best British filmmakers working today. From the affecting 45 Years to the grim, graphic television series The North Water , he is seemingly capable of anything he puts his mind to – such as adapting Taichi Yamada’s 1987 novel ‘Strangers’ into a stunning drama that is anchored by a clutch of mesmerising performances and an intense emotional core. A sleek but cold skyscraper in Croydon is the primary setting for this Anglicised version of the source material. Screenwriter Adam (Andrew Scott) gazes out at the city’s orange skyline, touching from a distance; a representation of the barrier he’s put between himself and the rest of the world. He’s working on a script about his parents, who died in 1983 when he was 12, but despite mining the physical mementoes he keeps, the words just won’t come. A chance encounter with his mysterious, charming downstairs neigh...

M ichael Mann first floated the idea of creating a film about racing legend Enzo Ferrari over 20 years ago – back then it was an idea he discussed with Sydney Pollack. In 2015 it seemed to be taking shape, with Christian Bale attached to play the central role…until he dropped out in 2017 and was replaced by Hugh Jackman (Bale would go on to play maverick racer Ken Miles in James Mangold’s rival project Le Mans ’66 ). All this to say it’s been a long road to the screen for Mann’s twelfth feature, which is also his first since 2015’s Blackhat , and now Adam Driver is the actor in pole position. Notably this film covers a relatively short period of Ferrari’s life, save for a brief introductory clip of him racing in his youth. The year Mann really focuses on is 1957, which could be generously seen as Ferrari’s annus horribilis.  This was shortly after the death of his son Alfredo due to muscular dystrophy, and his marriage to Ferrari co-founder Laura Garello (played by Penélope Cruz...

T he shadow of Augusto Pinochet looms large in Chile. The dictator has now been dead for as long as he ruled the country, but his legacy informs every aspect of Chilean culture – a fact that filmmaker Pablo Larraín (himself the son of two politicians) has explored throughout his career, most explicitly in his trilogy of Tony Manero (2008), Post Mortem (2010) and No (2012). Yet for the past few years, his interests have skewed more Western, with heavily-lauded biopics of Jackie Kennedy and Princess Diana – though his underrated reggaeton drama Ema is worth a mention too. Still, Larraín returns to his homeland for his tenth feature as director and revisits Pinochet’s rule in a less-than-subtle political satire, which imagines the general as an immortal vampire. What if, Larraín and his co-writer Guillermo Calderón propose, Pinochet was not a man, but a monster? Born in France shortly before the Revolution of 1789, his perverse appetites would eventually lead him to South America, w...

T he BFI London Film Festival will be rolling into town on 4 October, and this 67th edition has the potential to be one of the most exciting yet. Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, a thriller about privilege, status and desire starring her trusty Promising Young Woman collaborator Carey Mulligan, as well as Barry Keoghan, Jacob Elordi, Rosamund Pike and Richard E Grant, has been given the shiny opening gala spot. Closing the festivities will be Daniel Kaluuya and Kibwe Tavares’ dystopian London-set directorial debut, The Kitchen. Fans of Chicken Run are in for a poultry-packed treat, as Sam Fell and Aardman studio’s belated sequel Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget will receive its world premiere on 14 October at one of the festival’s main venues, the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall. As is customary for LFF, the programme is brimming with arthouse sensations, genre gems, crowd-pleasers, immersive VR works and restored treasures from the BFI archive. This edition, the first delivered...

A s summer stretches onwards, basketball fans around the world hit the midpoint of the NBA’s torturously long offseason. Thankfully, The First Slam Dunk has arrived to fill that void. Directed by Takehiko Inoue, who also wrote the 1990s manga on which the film is based, the film has a keen sense not only of what makes basketball so fun to watch but also of what makes the sports drama such an enduring cinematic genre. Despite its title, The First Slam Dunk is something like a finale to the 90s anime, which ended before it could adapt the manga’s final arc which saw the protagonistic Shohoku High basketball team compete in a climactic national championship game. You’d never know this from going into the film blind. Inoue plays it more like a new beginning than an ending, interspersing the on-court action (the game takes the film’s entire runtime to play out) with flashbacks that explore the teammates’ melodramatic backstories and fraught relationships. The lead character, point guard ...

“W atching him is like watching a raccoon rummage through garbage cans. What is he gonna do now? Why look at anything else, while this is going on?” This was John C Reilly’s assessment of Joaquin Phoenix’s unique allure as a screen actor, and the same applies to Phoenix’s German look-a-like, Franz Rogowski. He is the star of Ira Sachs’ new Paris-set coupling drama, Passages, and there’s not a second he’s on screen where, in good conscience, you’d be able to tear your eyes away from his endlessly expressive face and body. As the louche but incisive film director Tomas, he is a ball of contradictions: explosively mellow; a hot, spectrum-traversing presence who, in this instance, constantly skirts the precipice of making a decision that’s likely going to ruin someone else’s life. Tomas appears to be based on the late German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder, himself known for his powers of manipulation and intoxication, playing lovers off one another and indulging in romantic power pl...

W e all know the story of how Steven Spielberg’s 1975 box office hit Jaws was the birth of the movie blockbuster, closely followed by George Lucas’ Star Wars in 1977. This narrative is a fictionalised history, because “blockbuster” had been used as early as the 1940s to describe big-budget productions with mass appeal. Popular lore, however, credits the Movie Brats of the New American Cinema as the fathers of the blockbuster film. It has become an accepted history, despite cinema having pursued high budget and lavish spectacles long before that. Jaws and Star Wars, however, were a turning point in the history of the blockbuster. The grainy aesthetic and raw sense of feeling of Jaws’ B-movie plot thrilled audiences, while Star Wars’ opening shot of Princess Leia’s ship fleeing the Imperial Star Destroyer captured the imagination of its audience – amongst them actor Samuel L. Jackson, who would go on to play Jedi Master Mace Windu in Lucas’ eventual prequel trilogy. 1975 – 1989: T...

L ouis Garrel no longer needs an introduction. Son of celebrated arthouse director Philippe and an established actor in his own right, he has been a constant presence on French cinema screens since even before his breakout role in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers 20 years ago. Fewer people may be aware of his career as a director, and his fourth feature film, The Innocent , might just be his best. We follow Louis’ alter ego Abel as he reckons with his mother’s new situation: an actress (Anouk Grinberb) teaching convicts in prison has fallen for and married Michel (the mesmerising Roschdy Zem), who is finishing a five-year sentence for robbery. When he gets out, the suspicious Abel joins forces with his best friend Clémence (Noémie Merlant) to tail his new stepfather. The film is partly based on reality: your mother was hosting acting workshops in prison, and met and married someone there when you were younger. But the film goes in a direction that is more outlandish, fanciful, ro...

W henever my mum complains about “all these new technologies” as she calls them or how she has to keep up with her phone all the time, I find myself reminding her that if it wasn’t for our phones, and all the inconveniences they admittedly bring us, we would not be able to stay in contact every day despite living in two different countries. This debate around technology and its role in our lives is surely familiar to many; most of our daily lives have been taken over by technology with its groundbreaking possibilities and elaborate challenges. Charlotte Regan’s Scrapper and Celine Song’s Past Lives touch on this ambivalent relationship with technology, which can be a blessing and a curse in the same breath. Scrapper and Past Lives may seemingly have little in common except for the fact that they both premiered at Sundance in 2023, attracting a healthy amount of buzz and critical acclaim. However, upon closer inspection, both films reflect on the ambivalent relationship with techno...

‘M om, Dad…I’m a thespian!’ reads Rebecca-Diane’s bumper sticker in Theater Camp, an ensemble production directed by Molly Gordon (pulling double duty as an actor too) and Nick Lieberman, who wrote the film along with lead actors Noah Galvin and Ben Platt. That unabashedly cheesy phrase gestures at the welcoming queerness of the theatre – its place as an oasis for flamboyant misfits. Alas, there’s something ill-fittingly exclusive about Theater Camp. Loosely a mockumentary but with no visible crew, narration or talking heads, just occasional explanatory text – the film follows the eccentric teachers and students of AdirondACTS, a theatre camp in upstate New York built on cardboard and chutzpah. When camp leader Joan (played all too fleetingly by Amy Sedaris) is struck down by a coma triggered by strobe lighting at a school performance of Bye Bye Birdie, her clueless finance bro son Troy (Jimmy Tatro) takes the reins. With bankruptcy looming, Troy must attempt to keep the ship afloat...

S ince bursting onto the scene in 2017 with his piercing turn in Eliza Hittman’s Beach Rats , Harris Dickinson has been carving out a career as one of the most promising young actors working today. From starring in blockbusters like The King’s Man and Where the Crawdads Sing to Palme d’Or winner Triangle of Sadness , he’s just as at ease working on big budget studio films as he is on the indie scene. Case in point: his turn as bleach blonde club promoter/absentee father Jason in Charlotte Regan’s Sundance prizewinner Scrapper , about an 11- year-old girl raising herself following the death of her mother. LWLies: You worked with Charlotte Regan before, on the short film Oats & Barley back in 2019. How would you describe her as a collaborator? Dickinson: When I first met Charlie, and I hope she won’t mind me saying this, but she was deeply shy. But clearly had a lot to say as a filmmaker and had a lot to say from an experience point of view. As a result, she was coming at it fro...

C harlotte Regan has long been a promising talent on the shorts and music video circuit, and makes the leap to features with Scrapper – a charming, effervescent story about grief and parenting set on a housing estate in East London that turns the kitchen sink genre on its head, crafting a brightly-coloured world of possibility and hope. 12-year-old Georgie (newcomer Lola Campbell) lives on her own, following the recent death of her mother. She’s crafted an elaborate ruse to fool social services into thinking she’s living with her non-existent uncle, and spends her time with best mate Ali (Alin Uzun) nicking bikes to sell as scrap in order to put food on the table. She’s hard as nails and doesn’t need any help from anyone – so when her estranged dad Jason (Harris Dickinson) turns up on her doorstep, fresh off the plane from Ibiza where he was working as a club rep, Georgie doesn’t want anything to do with him. She’s particularly resistant to the idea of Jason parenting her, arguing ...

O ne of the most anticipated titles from this year’s Berlin Film Festival competition slate came from German auteur Christian Petzold, who reunites with actress Paula Beer, following her Silver Bear-winning performance for her role as the titular water nymph in the director’s folk myth-driven romance, Undine . Afire is the second instalment of Petzold’s so-called “elemental trilogy”, and marks a welcome change of pace for the director, who returns with a film that’s much lighter and outwardly entertaining than what we’ve come to expect from him. Two friends – Leon (Thomas Schubert) and Felix (Langston Uibel) – plan on spending some time at a cottage on the Baltic coast when their car breaks down, causing them to make their way through the forest on foot. Leon, an irritable writer mulling over the schmaltzy manuscript on his second novel, is intent on repeating the fact that the purpose of this sojourn is for work, while the more agreeable Felix, assembling a portfolio for an art sch...

M ost of us purposefully ignore memories of our angsty teenage years, but some episodes are harder to forget than others. Released in 2003, Catherine Hardwicke’s Thirteen managed to capture the fiery chaos of young adulthood with a raw intensity that, much like its troubled protagonist, demanded our attention. At its core was a powerful performance from a 14-year-old Evan Rachel Wood, dramatising a story that was itself inspired by the turbulent real-life experiences of Hardwicke’s co-writer and Wood’s co-star, Nikki Reed. While fictionalised, the relatability of Thirteen’s story struck a chord with audiences that was so strong, it continues to resonate 20 years later. “I had the idea that this wouldn’t be shot like any high school movie; it would be shot like war photography – like you were in the middle of a battle,” says Hardwicke, remembering how she created the fly-on-the-wall feel that gives Thirteen’s argument scenes their painfully honest texture. “If somebody runs out of t...

T he word ‘quirky’, flung wantonly at things people consider a bit hokey but inoffensive, often seems like a veiled insult – generally I flee from it, hissing like a wronged cat, and use it with caution. But The Innocent, appealingly idiosyncratic, is quirky in the best and truest sense. Director and lead Louis Garrel’s latest feature follows Abel, a handsome but sulky widower who works in an aquarium, as he grows suspicious of his mum Sylvie’s fresh husband Michel (Roschdy Zem), one in a long line of criminals with lorry-back Rolexes who she’s fallen in love with whilst teaching theatre in prisons. Assisted by his fish-wrangling colleague and long-suffering best mate Clémence (Noémie Merlant), Abel attempts to investigate what dodgy activities Michel has gotten involved in to fund the flower shop he’s bought for his new bride to run. Abel reluctantly gets roped into the shady action, and starts to shed his fuddy-duddiness in the process. The melodramedy madness of the plot (prison...

W ith the release of Theatre Camp in cinemas, and Disney+ having just ended its longest-running show, High School Musical: The Musical: The Series (based on the beloved Disney film series), the current era of media is a haven for all those who were in their high school drama club. While the idea of a ‘theatre kid’ is understood by anyone whose school had an active drama department, its caricatures have been cemented in the cultural zeitgeist through their depiction on film and TV. One of the seminal films about teens in the arts ironically feels set apart from much of what followed. Alan Parker’s 1980 musical Fame follows a group of students at a performing arts school in New York. It secured two Academy Awards for Best Original Song and Best Score, as well as critical recognition for Barry Miller’s performance as Ralph. It’s a gritty film that seeks to be authentic in its portrayal of teenage life, with Roger Ebert praising its “sensitivity to real lives of real people that we don...