2019 marks the 50th anniversary of the Manson Family Murders in Los Angeles, so it’s hardly surprising there’s a new film focused on the events surrounding the killings. Coming from Mary Harron and penned by her American Psycho collaborator Guinevere Turner, Charlie Says, however, offers a corrective of sorts to common portrayals of Charles Manson and his followers in film and television…
Monthly Archives: June 2019
The Vast of Night (Andrew Patterson, 2019)
Andrew Patterson’s incredible debut feature The Vast of Night feels like a spiritual successor to Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Set over the course of a single night in late 1950s New Mexico, it follows radio presenter Everett (Jake Horowitz) and switchboard operator Fay (Sierra McCormick), who begin to suspect that strange things are afoot when mysterious sounds disrupt lines and broadcasts. With the aid of callers describing sightings of UFOs, they embark on a scavenger hunt of sorts to get to the bottom of the town’s apparent alien activity…
Ever After (Carolina Hellsgård, 2018)
German cartoonist and author Olivia Vieweg adapts her own comic, Endzeit, for the screen with Ever After, directed by Swedish filmmaker Carolina Hellsgård…
Harry Wootliff and stars on Glasgow drama ‘Only You’
Take the captivating Spanish lead (Laia Costa) of the single-take German wonder Victoria, the breakout star of God’s Own Country (Josh O’Connor), and a BAFTA-nominated writer-director of acclaimed shorts (Harry Wootliff), and you have Only You, a romantic drama that makes some of the most vibrant use of Glasgow as a cinematic setting in recent memory.
Following a shared taxi-based meet cute, Elena and Jake start a passionate relationship that turns into something long-term. Ominous signs are afloat, though. Elena, nearing 40 and nine years older than Jake, is insecure about her age, and their romance struggles under pressure to have kids. Complications with conceiving and the ordeal of fertility treatments don’t always get the most nuanced explorations onscreen, if they’re depicted in depth at all, but Wootliff’s film is an intimate and touching exploration of an issue sometimes still considered taboo.
Ahead of Only You’s world premiere at last year’s London Film Festival, Wootliff and her stars spoke to us about their drama…
The great Leonard Cohen moments in film
With Nick Broomfield’s documentary Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love, an in-depth look at the relationship between Leonard Cohen and muse Marianne Ihlen, playing at the Edinburgh International Film Festival this month and on general release in July, we thought it an appropriate time to highlight some of our favourite Cohen needle drops in cinema.
Whether with his own voice or through cover versions, many films and TV shows have made stirring use of Cohen’s music, though there is no instance in which the songs in question were written with the intention of featuring in that movie or episode.
For inclusion in the small selection below, we’ve stuck to the following criteria: feature films only, one entry per song, and Cohen recordings only, not covers of his work…
10 to see at the 2019 Edinburgh International Film Festival
The Edinburgh International Film Festival, the world’s longest continuously-running film festival and now in its 73rd year, runs between 19 and 30 June. It opens with the European premiere of Boyz in the Wood (2019), which is not a tribute to the late John Singleton but rather a dark, folk horror-influenced comedy set in the Scottish Highlands, from writer-director Ninian Doff. The world premiere of Mrs. Lowry & Son (2019) closes the festival: Adrian Noble’s light-hearted biopic of L.S. Lowry (Timothy Spall) portrays the painter long before he was established as one of the 20th century’s greatest artists, devoted to but frustrated with his bitter mother, Elizabeth (Vanessa Redgrave).
Beyond the bookend galas, there are many premieres (including world-first screenings of 18 features), discoveries and retrospectives of note. Here are 10 highlights from the packed programme…
Halston (Frédéric Tcheng, 2019)
Following Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel and Dior and I, Halston completes a hat-trick of fashion-centric documentaries written, edited and directed by French-born filmmaker, Frédéric Tcheng…
Nicolas Winding Refn on curation and Americana
From Bronson and Valhalla Rising to Drive, Only God Forgives and The Neon Demon, Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn has a reputation for filtering all sorts of reference points, from cinema or other artforms, into movies that never quite feel like anything else out there, even if it might initially seem clear what you’re going to get from a surface glance.
The director’s passion for the idiosyncratic recently extended to the world of digital media with byNWR.com, where an exclusive film – a restored lost gem with little to no previous cultural legacy – is presented each month as a jumping off point to inspire creativity. Although film and the moving image takes up the bulk of the venture’s content right now, the site is moving into music. And not only music, but music festival collaborations.
As part of this year’s Black Deer Festival in Kent, a specially-curated trilogy of films will be presented for the first time in a new form, under the banner of byNWR Expressway. In keeping with the spirit of the Americana and country music-focused festival, each film harks back to America’s drive-in heyday…
‘Dirty God’: “I saw a young burn survivor at a music festival and I flinched. I saw everybody around her doing the same.”
The English-language debut of Dutch director Sacha Polak, Dirty God follows a young London mother, Jade (newcomer Vicky Knight), as she tries to reassemble her life after an acid attack leads to disfigurement and burns across her face and upper body – the unprovoked assault coming courtesy of her ex-boyfriend and father of her child. The injuries change the ways in which many people interact with her, altering her sense of self, driving her to pursue cheap plastic surgery in Morocco and fracturing her relationships with her mother, Lisa (Katherine Kelly), and infant daughter.
With co-writer Susie Farrell, Polak eschews common on-screen treatments of burn survivors, avoiding making Jade an object of pity and passivity but also not placing her on a pedestal. She is a complicated, well-rounded character who makes impulsive, sometimes disastrous decisions. Dirty God is a complex story of survival, not victimhood. Her trauma is not easy to boil down: there’s relatively little soul-searching or self-pity, and she has recurring sex dreams about her attacker…
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