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“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...

O nce he was American theatre’s leading light, now he’s Steven Spielberg’s valued collaborator, though Tony Kushner says, ‘I still think of myself as a playwright rather than a screenwriter’. The phantasmagorical AIDS-era six-hour theatrical epic, ‘Angels in America’, brought him a 1993 Pulitzer Prize, a wave of acclaim and placed him into Spielberg’s sightlines. He came on board as co-writer of 2005’s Munich, and also wrote 2012’s Lincoln and 2021’s West Side Story . Their latest venture however, is a genuine mould-breaker within the Spielberg oeuvre, an accessible, ruminative and affecting jointly-authored original titled The Fabelmans, which lightly fictionalises Spielberg’s whizz-kid youth as a tyro amateur moviemaker while his parents marriage is on the brink of dissolution. LWLies: There’s no historical context for this essentially domestic story, no genre trappings – it’s all about character and it’s Spielberg’s own story. Was that daunting for him? Kushner: Let me take yo...

W ith the Sundance Film Festival currently in full swing, the cinema world is oriented around Park City, Utah, for the moment. But with the next major date on the calendar fast approaching, the Berlin Film Festival has stolen a bit of the spotlight this morning as the programming committee has unveiled their Competition picks for this year’s festivities. President Kristen Stewart and her to-be-announced panel of jurors will pass judgement on a lineup well-stocked with esteemed fixtures of the international arthouse, a handful of high-profile key gets challenging the perception of the Berlinale as a less-glossy cousin of Cannes and Venice. The most eye-catching among them may be the German cinema’s latest pride and joy Angela Schanelec , returning to the festival with the incestuous family drama Music after her glowingly reviewed I Was At Home, But… netted her a Silver Bear award for Best Director in 2019. Also representing Deutschland’s interests in Competition will be feminist tra...

T he Washington Post’s Philip L. Graham has been widely credited with declaring journalism “the first rough draft of history,” though as first drafts go, it’s especially rough. If for no other reason than posterity’s sake, the human species compulsively documents each day from the blinkered vantage of real time, collections of events and data synthesized into instant reactions on the internet and pages of op-ed sections. The goal is to make sense of a hectic present, but that initial wave of chroniclers is handicapped by immediacy, the facts yet to cool into a narrative visible in full. As a form of collective public memory, history begins in earnest with the movies, which channel political and social realities with the benefit of perspective into what critic J. Hoberman termed the “dream-life.” Now nearly a quarter of the way into our young century, a sufficient amount of time has passed for a lucid notion of this moment to take shape through the cinema, in particular those films t...

E very year on 17 January, the young population of Naples pours out in the winding inner-neighbourhood streets, gathering dead Christmas trees and burning them on an enormous fire to mark San Antonio day. Over the years, these bonfires have lost their religious significance, and have been reincarnated into an urban ritual among working class youths competing to see which neighbourhood’s bonfire will stand tallest. It’s in this context that we’re introduced to the charismatic and mischievous young Entoni, a boy on the cusp of adolescence who falls into the protagonist’s role in Victoria Fiori’s debut documentary feature, Hide and Seek. Following Entoni and his family over the course of four years, Fiori eschews sensationalised representations of Naples and its relation to the mafia and organised crime, opting instead for a more intimate vantage point that grants access to the very depths of the locality’s psyche. Fiori casts an observational eye over her subjects that is all but det...

W hen it comes to cinemagoing, the island of Cyprus has long been dominated by multiplex juggernauts and big budget commercial motion pictures. Independent cinemas have largely faded into the shadows of the past – yet another set piece in the vast sea of abandoned, decaying and dilapidated buildings that, along with sandbags, barrels and barbed wire, make up the urban fabric of Nicosia’s city centre – meaning that, art house titles seldom reach the island’s shores. Yet despite the capital’s troubled history (a United Nations-patrolled buffer zone has been bisecting Nicosia for the past 49 years, dividing it right at its heart), radical politics and artistic expression have been thriving in both parts of the old city; Nicosia’s fluid and multifaceted artistic vitality is unquestionable. A new, dynamic wave of queer community is steadily being cemented within the capital, one that’s been spearheaded by the efforts of queer collectives throughout the island, and more prominently by Que...

L ucio (Juan Minjín) is unsettled from the off in Diego Lerman’s The Substitute: his new Buenos Aires flat is sparsely furnished; the class he has just become substitute teacher for a class that thinks literature is useless; and his daughter, who he shares custody of due to a fairly amicable divorce, is becoming a teenager too fast. On top of that his father, who is known as The Chilean and seemingly has a finger in every community pie, is sick, and one of his students is involved in some dark drug stuff. Shots through shower glass and half doorways hint at the fragmented nature of the plot – Wojciech Staron’s stormy cinematography also reflects the layer of middle-aged disillusionment that Lucio views occurrences through. Everything that happens in The Substitute is grounded in empathy built for Lucio– we see predominantly through his kind, watery eyes. Minjín’s performance is subtle and completely believable – ex-novelist Lucio is pragmatic but a bit downtrodden, teaching and ther...