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E arlier this year, three ex-military officers presented testimony to U.S. Congress detailing sightings of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (“UAPs”, as UFOs are now called). Just like the one sparked by the Roswell incident in the 1950s, we could be about to see a surge in films about UFOs (let’s face it – it’s catchier than UAPs). Far from being pure escapist fantasy, science fiction has always been a way of talking about the times we live in – what might our enduring interest in the proposition of alien visitors reveal about ourselves? With Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) Spielberg gave the world one of the definitive UFO movies. What’s curious about this take – a working-class family man becoming obsessed with flying saucers – is the relative lack of military involvement. When we aren’t following electrician Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss), we’re watching scientists scrambling to investigate the phenomena, readying to greet the visitors in peace. This is a film about exci...

I n the 1975 musical A Chorus Line, auditionee Sheila says that she started dancing after seeing The Red Shoes as a girl before singing that “everything was beautiful at the ballet”. Sheila represents those for whom Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1948 ballet film was a seminal cinematic experience. Powell himself wrote in his 1992 autobiography, Million-Dollar Movie, “It is no longer a film; it is a legend.” Million Dollar Movie was also the title of an American TV series which broadcast curated films twice-nightly between 1955 and 1966. It was this series which introduced Martin Scorsese to many of the films that inspired his sensibility, including those of Powell and Pressburger. When I was a child I saw a DVD trailer about film restoration which featured Scorsese talking about how he had saved The Red Shoes through his passion project The Film Foundation. I remember the clips shown, with those delicious crimson pointe shoes popping off the screen. It ignited my passion f...

W hen it comes to the climate apocalypse, we’ve already passed about 20 predicted deadlines for the “point of no return”. And maybe we are. Could plans for the future be just part of a far-reaching denial, and we can’t actually save the planet by raising awareness, retweeting Greta Thunberg and re-using our water bottles? Just how clear would the writing on the wall have to be in order to accept that everything is well and truly fucked? This bone-chilling thought begets the best and funniest moment of Foe, set in 2065 when the majority of the world’s children have never seen rain. But not all hope is lost, and a Live Aid Style giant fundraiser aims to heal a planet clearly well past salvation. The concert is watched on a crackling television by Junior (Paul Mescal) and Hen (Saoirse Ronan) who live a quiet life in the now barren American Midwest, in the ramshackle farmhouse that has been in Junior’s family for generations. Hen works in a diner, Junior in a dystopian chicken factory t...

K illers of the Flower Moon, Martin Scorsese’s sorrowful epic of twisted love, genocide, and the evildoing of white America, hits cinemas this weekend to overwhelming acclaim. Adapted from journalist David Grann’s book about a rash of wealth-motivated murders of Osage people on their oil-rich Native American reservation back in the 1920s, it’s a film of devastating cumulative power. Scorsese brings in Lily Gladstone, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Robert DeNiro as the triumvirate of major players in a sprawling tapestry of conspiracy, greed, and racist betrayal. At the global press conference for the film, the veteran director spoke about the importance of historical accuracy, the power of his collaboration with actors, and…Leonardo Dicaprio’s love for the Criterion Channel. What steps did you and the production team take to ensure that the Osage community felt accurately represented? It was very important for me, as soon as they gave me the book. I had an experience in the ‘70s where I b...

F or those who have been pining with frantic excitement for the prospect of an NSYNC reunion, then Trolls Band Together is the movie for you. It is the second sequel in the staggeringly popular Trolls-based animated musical saga, and lest we forget, the first sequel, Trolls World Tour, became something of a film history benchmark as an example of a gigantic earner released directly to streaming during the Covid pandemic. This new one makes for more of the happy, clappy same, offering a light commentary on the state of ephemeral pop music and the need for artists to retain a sense of individuality. It’ll be interesting to see if a renewed gusto for “The Cinema Experience ” causes this new one to make even more cash and disprove the naysayers who, back then, were using World Tour as a case study to fire up the bulldozers and flatten every multiplex in town. I guess we’ll see… This new one sees chatterbox Poppy (Anna Kendrick) and sensitive Branch (Justin Timberlake) headed on a – you...

M artin Scorsese has firmly cemented his place as one of the greatest filmmakers of his generation – possibly all time. Killers of the Flower Moon , the first narrative feature in the seventh decade of his storied career, recounts a dark chapter in American history, taking place in 1920s Oklahoma. It’s a disturbing account of the violence perpetrated by white America against the prosperous Osage tribe. Once more Scorsese shows his unflinching willingness to chronicle the darker side of the American identity – a preoccupation which has seen him tackle series from the Civil War years through to modern-day financial corruption. The 1860s: Gangs of New York It was five decades into his career before Scorsese journeyed deep into New York City’s past, albeit he’d planned to adapt Herbert Asbury’s expose about the city’s 19th-century gangs as early as the 1980s. Scorsese and screenwriter Jay Cocks glimpse the hell that was The Five Points of New York, a hotbed of violence and poverty ...

I n the new Showtime series The Curse, spouses-cum-real-estate-disruptors Asher and Whitney Siegel (Nathan Fielder and Emma Stone) set out to save the environment with carbon-neutral “passive houses” that generate as much energy as they use. An entirely mirrored exterior captures sunlight and converts it to power — though a technician mentions that this could be accomplished with less conspicuous siding — while symbolically reflecting back the community of New Mexican border suburb Española, an idea Whitney insists she did not steal from an artist who did the same thing in the woods. Never mind that sticking gigantic mirrors in the desert redirects blinding beams of light toward all who pass them, or that birds keep killing themselves by flying into its hard-to-see walls. The prohibitive cost of this solution intended for low-income locals makes it impractical to anybody but the wealthy, which Ash and Whit offset using the budget from their in-development HGTV pilot Flipanthropy as ...

Anton Bitel provides a look at six titles heading to streaming and physical media releases this month that you should add to the top of your viewing list. The Others, dir. Alejandro Amenábar, 2001 It is 1945 and the war has ended, but on the contested ground of Jersey in the Channel Islands, only recently liberated from Nazi occupation, Catholic, neurotic Grace Stewart (Nicole Kidman) still feels “totally cut off from the world.” Her husband Charles (Christopher Eccleston) has not returned from the front, her staff have fled without warning, her large estate is shrouded in fog, and she cannot leave the property, or there would be no one to look after her young children Anne (Alakina Mann) and Nicholas (James Bentley). Their extreme photosensitivity requires that the house be kept in shadow, and Grace’s proclivity to migraines necessitates quiet – but the arrival of three replacement staff members (Fionnula Flanagan, Eric Sykes, Elaine Cassidy) will coincide with escalating para...

H ow do you make a biographical drama about somebody who doesn’t exist? If you’re Nicolas Winding Refn, the answer is: to great critical acclaim. Released fifteen years ago this week, the Danish filmmaker’s gritty, hard-hitting take on Britain’s most notorious prisoner not only helped introduce the world to Tom Hardy, but it also turned out to be a hugely personal movie for its director, one that kick-started his Hollywood career and remains close to his heart to this day. “I look back on Bronson with a lot of fondness,” Refn tells Little White Lies. “I was able to make a movie that was really about myself, at the right time of my life, using Charlie Bronson as catharsis because he himself is a made-up person. There was a kind of mutual opportunity to benefit from each other by making the film,” he reasons. “It was very fundamental in how it shaped me later on.” In Bronson, Refn served up a theatrical and dream-like ‘biopic’ of Charlie Bronson, the alter-ego of real-life criminal, ...

I n Martin Scorsese’s 2002 film Gangs of New York, America was born on the streets. In his new one, Killers of the Flower Moon, it dies a slow death out there on the prairie. With bracing echoes to contemporary political malaise, it’s a chronicle of early 20th century midwestern history that draws on Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “banality of evil”, in that it depicts the everyday genocidal tendencies beholden of Prohibition-era white prospectors of all economic stripes. In this film the crucible of modern civilisation is framed as little more than a gamified kill floor for the afflicted and rapacious. It is, in a strange way, a rueful, elegiac sister film to 2010’s lude-powered bacchanal, The Wolf of Wall Street , in that it offers a stinging critique of capitalist exploitation that’s operating at a sociopathic level, where the expenditure of human suffering most certainly justifies any long-game dividends, and the prescription meds are swapped out for moonshine. And in this case...

T helma Schoonmaker has been editing Martin Scorsese’s films since 1980, when they collaborated on Raging Bull. While working on that film, Scorsese introduced her to one of Britain’s greatest filmmakers, Michael Powell. His career with Emeric Pressburger had long since ended, and his marriage to Schoonmaker reinvigorated Powell until his death in 1990. Since then Schoonmaker has been the executor of Powell’s legacy, working with Scorsese both as editor, having just attended the premiere of Killers of the Flower Moon , and as a partner in restoring Powell’s films. With a major retrospective of Powell and Pressburger’s work about to open at the BFI, Schoonmaker reflects on the films, the man, and her enormous contribution to cinema. LWLies: How did you first meet Michael Powell? Schoonmaker: Marty went to the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1974 to collect an award for Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. They asked him who he wanted to present it to him, and he said Michael Powell. They had...

“S he is the light that gives meaning to each to all our lives [sic].” Paul Schrader’s 2018 praise for Taylor Swift was more gushing than he has ever been for Fellini or Welles. His quasi-religious words reflect the audience of 70,000 on screen at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California, and off in cinemas across the globe. As a parade of pastel butterflies promenade through the crowd, they reveal Swift out of nothingness to rapturous screams and applause. Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour is for the Swifties, make no mistake. Whether they have been here from her Nashville beginnings or only joined the cult during her dizzying pandemic productivity, it is a concert film Taylor-made for fans. It’s vocalised by Swift in her speech, and conveyed by heartstopping winks and sideways glances to camera. Director Sam Wrench and cinematographer Brett Turnball carry this communion with ease, often letting a close-up fall to a teary-eyed onlooker. We watch from every angle, from the vertigo-inducing c...

A businessman, played by the great David Oyelowo, is suddenly forced to experience the depths of human despair and is made to rebuild his life from scratch in the timely and soulful debut short feature by Misan Harriman. Yet The After is not necessarily about such dismal events, as it goes on to explore the ways in which people are able to step back from the abyss, recalibrate their inner-psyche and locate some semblance of balance in their lives. Harriman is a fêted stills photographer whose work captured the global mood in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. This natural transition into moving images sees Harriman chanelling pet themes of trauma and the surprising and unique ways that we both process and own it. LWLies: The After plays out like the realisation of a personal fear of losing family, status and a connection to other people. Where did the idea for the story arise and how personal is it? Harriman: After th...