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B ack issues of Little White Lies magazine are as rare as hen’s teeth. So we’re offering the chance for one lucky winner to pick up 15 back issues of their choice from our archive of the previous 51 issues (beginning with issue 50). Everything is on the table: including the super-hard-to-find Neon Demon issue which seems to have disappeared off of the face of the Earth. Or maybe you want an extra copy of our perennially out-of-stock Dune issue with Timothée Chalamet on the cover for your own private holdings. As they say, you have to be in it to win it. And the way to be “in it” is to sign up for an annual package to any one of our Club LWLies membership tiers, which itself comes with a plethora of amazing perks as well as helps us to give you the best LWLies experience possible across all of our channels. Our aim is to hit 300 members, and the prize draw will happen when we hit that target (as long as we hit that target no earlier than 5 January 2024, as we need a break too!)....

A nyone who has the temerity to write off Godzilla (fucking Godzilla!) as a spent force of franchise filmmaking will need to backtrack right now. On the evidence of Takashi Yamazaki’s rip-snorting historical action epic, Godzilla Minus One, there’s still some nuclear-powered juice in the lumbering metaphorical lizard yet. The industrious director, who also wrote the screenplay and collaborated on the (very slick) special effects work, strips the story back to basics, keeping context and exposition to a minimum and leaning on robust, timeworn plot mechanics that focus on delivering chunky thrills. The filmmaker has been open in interviews about his love of Steven Spielberg and Christopher Nolan, and the evidence is up there on screen. But he has not pilfered their stylistic tics, but more their supreme storytelling tactics and the slow, intense build-up to a big finale. It’s a “back to basics” film which replays the story with a very straight bat, and it seems that the weird variati...

I t was a busy night for Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or winner Anatomy of a Fall at the European Film Awards, which returned to Berlin for its 2023 ceremony. While snubbed by the French selection committee for the Best International Feature Oscar in favour of Trần Anh Hùng’s The Taste of Things , Anatomy of a Fall resonated more with the rest of the continent, and Triet has some nice new trophies for her cabinet. The film picked up Best Director for Justine Triet, Best Actress for Sandra Hüller (who was also nominated in the same category for The Zone of Interest ) Best Screenplay for Triet and her partner and co-writer Arthur Harari, and Best Editing for Laurene Sénéchal, and the big award of the night, Best Film, presented to the team by Stellan Skarsgård and Ariane Labed. A single film dominating the EFAs does tend to be the norm – last year it was Triangle of Sadness , and in 2020 it was Another Round . Speaking of Another Round – Mads Mikkelsen beat out Josh O’Connor , Thomas Sc...

A riane Labed says she “loves cinema”. The appreciation is no lip service or a line fed to the media. Her career reflects that: in the choices she makes, the roles she plays, the films she directs. From her debut short behind the camera, Olla, to the body-popping hotel maid she plays in absurdist black comedy The Lobster , she tends to gravitate towards challenging material as a creative choice And so it is with Adrien Beau’s The Vourdalak, a brilliantly counter-intuitive vampire story in which her character allows her face and body to do most of the talking.. The film also goes against the grain of VFX-heavy contemporary filmmaking – in The Vourdalak, you see, the vampire is actually played by a marionette. Little White Lies spoke to Ariane at the 2023 Thessaloniki Film Festival in early November. LWLies: How does The Vourdalak differ from traditional vampire films? Labed: It’s another way of treating the drive for a vampire. In this case, it’s love in the family circle, and I rea...

W hen it comes to profile documentaries, it’s always nice when a filmmaker opts to talk about their subject in terms that they would not only respect, but welcome. Wim Wenders dusts down his 3D cameras – the ones that served him so well for 2010’s Pina – and heads to Barjac in southern France to embed himself with German conceptual artist, Anselm Kiefer. With a bottom-spanking paddle caked with paint in one hand and a flame-thrower in the other (and a fat stogie between his teeth), Keifer is our unsmiling (albeit it playful) host on a a multi-dimensional behind-the-scenes tour of his own private Xanadu – the sprawling studio complex, storage facility and all-terrain gallery space, La Ribaute. The 3D aspect is often used to mesmerising effect, and dovetails perfectly with an artist whose work often demands the viewer inspect it from multiple angles and vantages. Wenders is also canny in his use of cross-dissolves and the layering of text over image to create multiple planes of percep...

T here’s one pleasure that this job never loses, and that’s the thrill of witnessing a new talent arrive on the scene fully-formed. On the evidence of the astonishingly-assured debut, Earth Mama, we’ll be seeing work from writer-director Savanah Leaf for many years to come. What this film does is tell a time-worn tale in the neorealist mould – here, of a woman working with and battling against a bureaucratic system that has forcibly partitioned her from her two children – and brings something completely fresh to the table in the mode of delivery. Leaf develops a series of interwoven tableaux which emphasises the crushingly familiar circles that the pregnant Gia (Tia Nomore) is being forced to run in. It picks a little at documentary too, in scenes of a support group that Gia attends whose members try and convince her to stay strong against the torrent of adversity. There’s a social-realist core to both the film’s dramatic and political concerns, yet many passages of Earth Mama come...

W hen the film Dogtooth played for the first time to press and public at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, it was clear to everyone in the room that its maker harboured a perverse fascination with how we develop as human beings, and how that development can be manipulated to make entertainingly transgressive movies. That filmmaker was Greece’s Yorgos Lanthimos, and over the intervening years he has assiduously ploughed this lively intellectual furrow with films like Alps, The Lobster , Killing of a Sacred Deer and The Favourite . This interest in brain function, learning techniques, and psychological power-plays has always remained present, and surfaces once more in his latest – and possibly greatest – work, Poor Things. This new film is the product of a connection that was made with the famous Scottish novel by the author Alasdair Gray, about a Frankenstein-like creator and the daughter he builds and then sends out into the world. That daughter is named Bella Baxter and she is playe...