In the 10 short months since I wrote my Madame Web review pondering the poisoned chalice of a superhero role in 2024, both Robert Downey Jr and Chris Evans – the pillars upon which the MCU was built – have announced their imminent return to Marvel movies. Perhaps it’s too early to judge whether this is yet another example of wheels frantically spinning in the blockbuster mud, but the lukewarm reception to every single superhero property since Spider-Man: No Way Home seems to suggest the centre cannot hold.

Sony, for their part, have been trying to work out how to make a successful superhero film for the past decade. Although they own the rights to Spider-Man, the complex nature of their licensing agreement with Marvel means there are certain characters (including Spidey himself) they can’t use without mutual sign-off. Now, Sony own the rights to 900 comic book characters – so what’s the issue? Well…most of those 900 characters are related in some way to Spider-Man. Exes, family members, classmates, colleagues, alternate reality versions, and of course, villains. Extracting them from Spider-Man is difficult when many exist purely within his orbit.

It did work, however, with the Venom franchise, which netted Sony over $1 billion at the box office despite a lukewarm critical response. A passion project of Tom Hardy, it’s undoubtedly his, erm, unique performance that gave the Venom films their spark – something very much not present in their other spin-off attempts, Morbius and Madame Web. But third time’s a charm, right? What could possibly go wrong with…Kraven the Hunter?

Most famous as the Spidey villain obsessed with pelts and poaching, Sergei ‘Kraven’ Kravinoff has a long history with the web slinger dating back to 1964 and is constantly causing him bother despite his lack of superpowers. His motivation is to be the world’s greatest hunter, which for some reason, makes him view Spider-Man as the ultimate prey. (Has he tried putting a glass over him and covering it with a postcard?)

Updated for a solo cinematic adventure, Kraven is played by Aaron Taylor Johnson – who Hollywood continually seem unable to work out what to do with – and now develops lion-related superpowers as a teenager after being attacked by a big cat during a hunting trip in North Ghana with his brother Dimitri and father Nikolai (Russell Crowe in a cravat doing a Russian accent). He’s saved by a young Calypso (played as an adult by Ariana DeBose) who gives him a potion her grandmother gifted her five minutes previously. After waking up with lion powers, Sergei swiftly rejects his father’s invitation to inherit his gangster empire and flees to the Russian countryside, where he appears to live unsupervised for the next 16 years in a Pinterest-worthy converted observation tower. Also, he can telepathically communicate with animals.

Meanwhile, geeky Aleksei Sytsevich (Alessandro Nivola, hammy) has been biding his time after a slight from Nikolai during that ill-fated hunting trip. He’s adopted the monicker of Rhino following a procedure which gave him impenetrable grey skin and wants to replace the Kravinoff at the top of the criminal food chain. He enlists the help of a mysterious assassin known as The Foreigner (Christopher Abbott, disassociating) who has his own personal beef with Kraven, and kidnaps his brother Dimitri (Fred Hechinger, having a weird 2024) in an attempt to make Nikolai look bad. It’s up to Kraven to hunt them down.

It’s all desperately silly. Perhaps that would be less of an issue if the film’s writers, stars and director leaned into it a little – as in the Venom films – but there’s an air of seriousness about Kraven the Hunter that makes it a slog that can’t be saved by a surprising number of violent executions, including one involving a bear trap. It doesn’t help that Kraven lacks a sense of purpose beyond hunting (“people” he clarifies; he’s an animal lover in this iteration) and the relationship between the Kravinoff brothers feels painfully undeveloped to the extent other characters have to explain how much they care about each other. Exposition isn’t so much clunky as it is violently hacked up onto the carpet like a hairball.

If there’s one thing to say in Kraven the Hunter’s defence, it’s that it isn’t quite as bad as Morbius or Madame Web. At least everyone here seems to be enjoying themselves a little rather than looking like they’re doing community service at a failing theatre. But professionalism can’t make up for a weak plot, comically bad animal CGI, cringy dialogue and the unfortunate truth that Aaron Taylor Johnson looks like the Nightman when he goes Beast Mode.

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While it was I who wrote ‘Junky’, I felt that I was being written in ‘Queer’,” William S. Burroughs reflected in 1985, when his novella was finally published some 33 years after it was written. A bracing, unfiltered, semi-autobiographical work inspired by his complex relationship with Adelbert Lewis Marker (a waifish twentysomething he met in Mexico City) ‘Queer’ – a slim 119 pages – was originally intended as an extension to ‘Junky’, but after it was rejected due to the explicit homosexual content, Burroughs lost interest. Even now ‘Queer’ has not achieved the fame of ‘Naked Lunch’ or ‘Junky’; a great shame, as its restless melancholy and transactional tenderness leave a mark on the soul like a brand, red and raw.

One person forever changed by Burroughs’ confessional account of desire and addiction was Luca Guadagnino, who first read ‘Queer’ when he was 17. “My teenage self must have been compelled by the beautiful writing – the way in which he was finding a language to tell a love story that felt classic, but his point of view was everything,” reflects Guadagnino, lounging on a sofa in a Claridge’s hotel room on a bright October afternoon. “I read everything in the Burroughs canon after that, which solidified my passion for ‘Queer’, because in that it felt like he was making love to the desire for a confession that he had inside himself, whereas in ‘Naked Lunch’ Burroughs becomes more guarded when it comes to him as a person.”

‘Queer’ stayed with Guadagnino. There was an attempted adaptation of the book in 2011 by Steve Buscemi that never came to fruition; the rights remained with the Burroughs estate. It wasn’t until the summer of 2022, while directing his tennis love triangle dramedy Challengers with screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes, that Guadagnino realised the timing was just right. “I said to him, ‘Listen, there’s this book I’ve wanted to make into a movie forever. Would you like to read it?’”

Guadagnino recalls with a smile. “I gave him the book in the morning, and by the evening, we were talking about it, and that conversation was very inspiring. I find Justin’s ambition inspiring – it’s not ambition to be famous or rich, but ambition to make beautiful things.”

The pair secured the rights to ‘Queer’, and as Kuritzkes began working on the script, Guadagnino set his sights on casting. But who could play an iconoclast like William Lee, so nakedly an avatar for Burroughs himself? In Guadagnino’s mind, it always had to be Daniel Craig, who was elated at the prospect. “I was already such a huge fan of his,” Craig explains over Zoom, in between wrangling his family’s new kittens into their carriers for a vet appointment. “We’d wanted to work together for many years. And when I read Justin’s script, I just saw within the character somebody who I kind of thought I recognised and I thought was incredibly interesting and complicated.” Although William Lee might share the loquacious drawl, inquisitive streak and queerness of Detective Benoit Blanc, Craig’s most famous role after Bond, the similarities end there.

In both Burroughs’ and Guadagnino’s versions of Queer, Lee is a shifty, philandering writer, laying low in Mexico and spending his time drinking, shooting heroin, or chancing it with whoever he can talk into bed. He is charismatic with an undercurrent of seediness, but mostly Lee is lonely – desperately reaching out in the sticky darkness, hoping someone might reach back.

That someone arrives in the form of Eugene Allerton, a young ex-serviceman and recent transfer to Mexico City, lithe and bright and completely enigmatic, who always holds Lee at a tantalising distance. He’s played by Drew Starkey, hitherto known to legions of teenagers as part of the Netflix adventure drama series, Outer Banks, where he plays a drug addict with anger issues. Allerton couldn’t be more different; a coquettish study in silences, he is a beguiling foil to Lee, who is smitten from the moment he first lays eyes on him. “Daniel I wanted, and Daniel I got,” Guadagnino recalls, “It was a long casting process to find Allerton. But I was in London two years ago, for Bones and All, and I watched a tape of Drew for another movie, and I thought he was great. I wanted him for Allerton immediately.”

Like Craig, Starkey was already an admirer of Guadagnino. “There’s something about my generation that strikes a chord. He leads with some type of truth,” he muses, in a room down the hall from the director, ahead of Queer’s UK premiere. Starkey has just asked me – politely, apologetically – if he can eat his lunch (an omelette) while we talk. “There’s this naked honesty that’s showing on screen, and I think with American film culture, that was lacking for so long. And I love the sense of reverie with his films,” Starkey adds. “It’s like watching a memory.”

With the heart and soul of Queer in place, Guadagnino rounded out the cast with his “dear friend” Leslie Manville, playing Doctor Cotter (a male role in the novel), an ayahuasca expert Lee and Allerton seek out in the depths of the Ecuadorian jungle, and Jason Schwartzman as Lee’s hapless, hilarious associate Joe Guidry. Starkey was star-struck, particularly by Schwartzman, who proved a balm for his nerves about his biggest role to date. “I’m on set and I’m riddled with anxiety. And he comes in the same way,” Starkey recalls brightly. “He also has
his insecurities, but he’s so excited to be there.”

But Allerton’s taciturn nature, combined with the reality that we only ever see him through the prism of Lee, provided a challenge to Starkey. How does one portray a man who exists through the lens of another? He levels with me, with a wry smile: “There’s always a sense of, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing and I don’t know who this person is,’ but Eugene was a much tougher code to crack. I watched a lot of movies for inspiration – Body Heat, Paris, Texas, some Fellini, Beau Travail… Sweaty movies. But really, it didn’t start to come together until the table read.”

If Starkey was worried about finding a way into Allerton, the pressure of going up against a pro like Daniel Craig never showed to the man himself. “Playing opposite him made things very easy,” Craig notes. “He’s incredibly hard-working and dedicated, but also has this lightness to him – on set you have to be able to remain as inventive and creative as possible, and open yourself up to what’s going on around you. Drew absolutely does that.”

And how does one get a grasp on a character as slippery and self-aggrandising as William Lee, an adept actor himself? “My key was Burroughs,” Craig explains. “What I found really fascinating was watching William Burroughs in interviews, this sort of façade that he had as a literary person and very serious,and then I’d see bits of footage occasionally that you get, which were more private moments of him relaxing at home, being high,in company with people. Those two things were my way in.”

Guadagnino is elusive about his own collaborative instincts. “Creative processes should be kept secret,” he decides grandly. “When I went to the Kubrick exhibition, I was so disappointed, because one of the last rooms is for the star child [from 2001: A Space Odyssey, which is referenced in Queer] and there is this plastic puppet, there in the nakedness of its own mortality, as a prop, and I thought, ‘Oh no, I cannot look at him like this, because my imagination will be perverted by this image when I watch the film.’ The magic of the movies should be kept as such.”

Magic is at the heart of Queer – and Burroughs’ work in general. His lifelong interest in the occult seeped into his writing, and Guadagnino translates this onto the screen via ghostly apparitions and a devastating final act, in which Lee envisions Allerton again, years after their revelatory trip to Ecuador. “I think fear eats the soul of Lee and Allerton,” Guadagnino reflects, referencing Fassbinder. “And the tragedy is the fear. For me, Queer is a love story – not a story of unrequited love, but a story of two characters being in love with each other at different times, and in different ways. The tragedy lies in those shifting moments. And certainly, in the line, ‘I’m not queer, I’m disembodied,’ which both Allerton and Lee say. Because at the end of the day, life is about the adherence between your self, your desires, your morality, your anguish and your body, and if you act them out together or if you repress all of this.”

Speaking of repression…Our conversation turns to David Cronenberg, who directed his own Burroughs adaptation, Naked Lunch, in 1991. Guadagnino is an admirer of Cronenberg’s, and has tried several times to cast him in a film. “The Fly is one of my top five movies of all time,” he enthuses. “It’s the most devastating love story ever made. It’s about what love makes you into.”

I mention the dichotomy between the warmth of his cinema, and the chilly, clinical strokes of Cronenberg. “It’s because he’s Canadian and I’m Sicilian,” Guadagnino grins. “But Cronenberg got it so right, in Naked Lunch,” he’s referring to the scene where Burroughs infamously kills his common-law wife, Joan Vollmer, during a drunken game of William Tell. “Burroughs shoots her, but Vollmer places the glass on her head. Why does she do that? It’s about unconscious desire. It’s about what love does to us.”

The gap between reality and fantasy is where so many of Luca Guadagnino’s films exist: the phantom of a hand on the small of your back; the feverish night terrors of a detoxing junkie. His films – which have their admirers and their detractors – exist in the fantastical realm. And for Starkey, whose ascent to stardom is just beginning, that translates into reality. He recalls a moment on set with Jason Schwartzman: “We were standing on this street that they built for Mexico City. It’s beautiful. And he kind of just looks over at me and he says, ‘Don’t you love this?’ And I was like, ‘What?’ Jason gestures all around, and says, ‘This! Look at where we’re at. Making movies! It’s incredible’.” Starkey laughs. “That little reminder… yeah, I do love this. This is magic.”

The first time that lascivious raconteur William Lee (Daniel Craig) notices Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), he’s watching a group of men bartering over a cockfight in the street. Allerton emerges from a bar, clean-cut, feline, moving in slow motion in the heat of the Mexican night – for Lee, it’s like the whole world just shifted on its axis. Luca Guadagnino’s anachronistic decision to set this pivotal moment in Queer to Nirvana’s ‘Come As You Are’ speaks to his perpetually provocative sensibilities, but the willful obliteration of period detail is not an empty gesture.

The film features two other Nirvana songs on its soundtrack (Marigold and Sinead O’Connor’s cover of All Apologies) as well as two Prince tracks (17 Days and Musicology). Who better to soundtrack a film about the all-encompassing nature of desire than two men who wrote some of the greatest music about it, and themselves were no strangers to constant speculation about their gender, sexuality and drug use?

While working with screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes on Challengers, Guadagnino tapped him to adapt Burroughs’ short novel about an American writer holding court down in Mexico who becomes obsessed with a beautiful young army veteran. The source material plays to both their strengths; Challengers was a film about obsession and wanting what you can’t have (recurring themes throughout Guadagnino’s filmography). Yet Burroughs is a tricky customer, and there are very few successful adaptations of his work; Beat work generally doesn’t tend to translate so well to screen (guilty as charged, On The Road and Howl).

Guadagnino certainly employs more fantastical devices in Queer than we’ve seen since Suspiria, the most successful of which is a double exposure effect that suggests phantom moments of touch between Lee and Allerton, the former’s desire pushing up against the boundaries of his restraint. A little harder to swallow is how the film handles the third-act trip to Ecuador, where the pair seek out the botanist Doctor Kotter (Lesley Manville as you have literally never seen her before) and trip on ayahuasca. Drugs indeed form a core part of Burroughs’ mythology, but it’s frustrating that the film concentrates so much on this when there is nothing as tediously repetitive as watching someone get high.

Even so the chemistry between Craig and Starkey smoulders, every ember threatening to turn into a spark, even if the shifting boundaries of their relationship feel squashed under the weight of the secondary plot about Ecuadorian hallucinogens. Craig puts in a stellar turn as the vain, neurotic avatar for Burroughs, while Starkey, a relative newcomer, possesses a stoic, compelling charisma as the object of his desire. Here Allerton is a little more tender than the manipulative youth of Burroughs’ book, and the sexual proclivities and anxieties so fully on display in the source material feel superseded here in favour of following a less interesting narrative thread.

Despite the weakness of Queer’s Ecuador chapter, it leads into a devastating epilogue that blurs the line between Burroughs the man and Burroughs the fabrication, and there are often flashes of the Guadagnino who so richly paints portraits of aching loneliness and fallible humans falling in and out of lust and love: when Lee gently runs his hands across Allerton’s bare chest; when he picks up a sad-eyed Mexican for a night at a seedy bar; even when he sits down at his table and methodically prepares to shoot heroin into his veins.

Although rumours of a 3-hour cut started by Venice festival head Alberto Barbera were shut down by Guadagnino, it’s a shame they’re untrue, because one longs to spend a little less time in the jungle and more navigating the transactional nature of Lee’s dalliance with Allerton in the facsimile of a Mexican city that the director has created – not a place that exists in reality, but rather in Lee’s mind, where the only things to do all day are drink and talk and fuck. It’s a less straightforward film than anything Guadagnino has made before, and certainly less obvious in its execution, but perhaps that’s in the spirit of Burroughs’ work, as uneven, ridiculous and unreliable as it was. Burroughs believed in magic, and watching Queer, one has an inkling that Guadagnino does too.

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It’s the season for peace and goodwill to all men – and for gift-giving. We’ve put together a round-up of some of ours favourite film-related present options for the cinephile of good taste. Feel free to print this page and stick it to the refrigerator if that helps get the hint across.

Books & Games

‘Lil Cinephile My First Movie Vol 3

Those fine folks at Cinephile are behind one of the most addictive film card games on the market, and in the years since launch they’re added expansions, as well as expanding into a range of kid’s books for the discerning parent. Perfect for that hard-to-buy toddler who’s really into Kubrick.

The Worlds of Wes Anderson

Our own Adam Woodward’s first book is a tribute to one of Little White Lies’ favourite filmmakers, and lovingly delves into the myriad inspirations behind Wes Anderson’s work. Pair with a red knit beanie for extra present points.

Miss May Does Not Exist

Carrie Courogen’s biography of Elaine May is a warm, witty take on a consistently underestimated and unappreciated comedic genius – required reading for any self-respecting cinephile. Particularly if they’re into Mike Nichols.

How Directors Dress

From Greta Gerwig’s pink jumpsuit on the Barbie set to Wim Wenders’ iconic eyewear, filmmakers aren’t just filmmakers anymore – they’re fashionistas. This lovingly crafted book from A24 is an object of beauty in itself, delving into the sartorial styling of our favourite directors across film history with plenty of first-hand insights.

Corpses, Fools and Monsters: The History and Future of Transness in Cinema

Written by Caden Mark Gardner and Willow Catelyn Maclay, this comprehensive guide to trans representation on screen is not only deeply informative but also a great read, written with style, humour, intelligence and heart by two extremely knowledgable critics.

…And if you don’t mind waiting until January – might we tempt you to David Cronenberg: Clinical Trials, our forthcoming collaboration with Violet Lucca on the Canadian auteur’s oeuvre?

Apparel

SCRT Wong Kar-Wai Jumper

East London streetwear company SCRT have become a mainstay of London’s film scene in the past few years, collabing with studios on totes, shirts and caps for releases including Kinds of Kindness, The Substance and Anatomy of a Fall. But we’re big fans of their in-house designs too, notably this natty jumper from their Fallen Angels collection – check their site for Donnie Darko-inspired merch too.

Haywood’s Hollywood Horses Long Sleeve Shirt

Rep for Jordan Peele’s sci-fi horror masterpiece Nope with this official shirt, which references OJ and Emerald’s family business. If anyone asks you about horses, you can just explain the plot of Nope to them, which they’ll definitely love.

Paris, Texas T-Shirt

There’s no shortage of cool indie clothing brands out there that celebrate film, but we especially like Copycat Video Press’s low-key, high-impact designs.

Janus Films Beanie

Show your love for an indie distribution legend while keeping your noggin snug with this woolly Janus Films beanie – perfect for traipsing to the cinema in the unforgiving winter weather.

Blu-rays

Nothing is Sacred: Three Heresies by Luis Buñuel

Radiance Cinema are doing some excellent work bringing underseen cinema to more eyes in gorgeously packaged editions, and their Luis Buñuel box set – featuring Viridiana, The Exterminating Angel and Simon of the Desert – is no exception.

The Mexico Trilogy: El Mariachi, Desperado & Once Upon a Time in Mexico Limited Edition 4K UHD + Blu-ray

Robert Rodriguez’s groundbreaking Mexico Trilogy gets a swanky 4K UHD upgrade thanks to Arrow, complete with an illustrated essay booklet and all new special features.

The Nude Vampire

Discover Jean Rollin’s second feature film courtesy of Indicator, featuring an essay written by Little White Lies’ own David Jenkins, and enjoy some vampire cult action this holiday season.

A Bittersweet Life 4K UHD and Blu-ray

Kim Jee-woon’s 2005 Korean neo-noir is yours to own in a brand new special edition, complete with collectible art cards and a 120-page book full of new writing on the film.

Magazines and Prints

Little White Lies Subscription

You can make our Christmas as well as a friend’s by signing up for a Little White Lies subscription. You’ll save a whopping 44% off the cover price with our annual 5 issue plan, and get the issue to your door every time – no more scrambling in the magazine aisle at WH Smith, hooray!

Grave Offerings Zine

Tom Humberstone designed our Kinds of Kindness cover earlier this year – here’s a wee zine he made celebrating horror films, perfect for the Scream fan on your Christmas list.

Dune Poster Designed by Murgiah

Class up the joint with this trippy poster from LWLies regular Sharm Murigah, celebrating Denis Villeneuve’s Dune.

John Waters Sticker Sheet

Let your freak flag fly with these cute John Waters stickers, perfect for customising your belongings while also letting everyone know you have faith in your own bad taste.

Cinema Membership Schemes

What better gift than free tickets and discounts at your loved one’s favourite cinema? In London you can support indie venues such as The Prince Charles, The Rio, Rich Mix, The Lexi and The Castle through their membership schemes. You can also find similar schemes for HOME in Manchester, Hyde Park Picturehouse in Leeds, Sheffield Showroom, and Queen’s Theatre Belfast.

Stocking Stuffers

Need something small for the office Secret Santa or a few bits and bobs for someone’s stocking? We’ve got your back. How about some Grand Budapest Hotel soap, or a David Lynch enamel pin? This Holdovers-inspired candle is perfect for the melancholy philosophy enthusiast, while this Mubi Notebook tote lets everyone know you’re a cinephile and a bibliophile. And if you must get someone socks, here – these ones feature The Worm from Labyrinth. Merry Christmas indeed.

One evening, while driving home from a friend’s fancy dress party, Shula (Susan Chardy) discovers a dead boy in the middle of a deserted road. On closer inspection, she realises it’s her Uncle Fred. Being a level-headed young woman who is good in a crisis, Shula calls her father for advice. After asking her to send him money for rent, Dad assures her he’ll arrive at the scene shortly to assist (but she’ll need to pay for his taxi too). The tragicomic opening scene of Rungano Nyoni’s second feature is a microcosm of what will unfold during the film; Shula – restrained, efficient, mature – is saddled with the increasingly manic demands and expectations of her extended family, who descend en-mass on her mother’s house to mourn…and stake their claim to Uncle Fred’s estate.

Part of Shula’s funeral duties includes wrangling two of her more volatile cousins, Nsansa (Elizabeth Chisela) and Bupe (Esther Singini). When Nsansa makes a shocking confession about Uncle Fred while drunk, she is quick to laugh it off, but as more and more family members descend on the home, it becomes a pressure cooker, with tensions between the elder and younger generations beginning to escalate, and animosity towards Fred’s young widow growing exponentially. There are many things that the family not only choose to not discuss, but actively buries for the sake of self-preservation; Fred’s death acts as a great flood, unearthing the bodies buried beneath. It’s only when the three cousins unite – along with Fred’s ostracised widow – that they are able to start piecing together some hard truths about the past.

Building on the explorations of mob mentality and what is gained and lost in the rigorous preservation of family and cultural tradition that she demonstrated in her debut feature I Am Not A Witch, Nyoni is fast establishing herself as a truly original storyteller, combining the fantastical and brutally grounded to create a film that feels uniquely disquieting. For it’s not so much that the rest of the family were unaware that one of their number was abusing young women, but rather that they conspired to cover it up, concerned with their own image and the preservation of reputation above the lives of others.

As her relatives tearily eulogise Uncle Fred with one eye on the inheritance, Shula’s concerns and growing anger are repeatedly waved away – even by her own father. Instead, she is expected to be a dutiful daughter. In one scene, as she frantically looks for Bupe, various oblivious male relatives repeatedly ask her to fetch plates of food for them. Shula, who has never known any different, cannot yet push back against how her family have always done things.

Anchored by Susan Chardy’s restrained performance, On Becoming A Guinea Fowl might touch on hot-button themes of sexual violence, misogyny and familial cycles of abuse, but Rungano Nyoni finds her own intriguing language to explore them. Consider, for example, the film’s fabulously odd title, the significance of which becomes clear through glimpses of a children’s television programme – Nyoni weaves allegory with realism in a manner that nods to her Zambian and Welsh heritage, both possessing a rich folklore history.

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In 2009 Jessica Hausner presented Lourdes at the Venice Film Festival – a film about the French town which has become a revered sight of pilgrimage for many Catholics after visions of the Virgin Mary supposedly appeared in 1858. For what it’s worth, my Catholic high school ran an annual trip there for the more devout students. I never went. It seems fair to suggest Hausner has returned to the overarching theme of faith in her sixth feature, albeit with the curious allegorical framing of a disordered eating club which is formed at an elite high school, where new teacher Miss Novak (Mia Wasikowska) is installed to teach the pupils about “conscious eating”.

While Novak claims the practice of conscious eating has myriad benefits – including reducing carbon emissions, improving general health, and kickstarting the body into auto-cleansing – the reality is that her students are being encouraged to restrict their diet, eventually to the point they cannot eat at all. A couple of pupils quickly bow out, but five stick around: Ragna (Florence Baker) wants to be better at trampoline, and her parents have already encouraged her to eat less; Elsa (Ksenia Devriendt) is inspired by her mother’s own eating disorder; Fred (Luke Barker) is a promising dancer whose absent parents find him perpetually disappointing, and Ben (Samuel D Anderson) can get extra credit by attending the class, which he needs for his scholarship.

This group are susceptible to Novak’s preaching, which frames not eating as a control issue. She tells them eventually they will reach a point where they no longer need to eat at all, thereby becoming a part of ‘Club Zero’. For whatever reason, the other adults and students in their orbit seem ambivalent, barely noticing the shrinking appearance of the already thin group, who start to appear gaunt and jaundiced.

Perhaps Hausner intends for Club Zero to be a comment on the susceptibility of young, vulnerable people into cults, whereby dangerous behaviour is the admission cost of feeling like they belong. Or perhaps the film is another mediation on faith – we see Novak praying to a small shrine, mumbling on about her mission, and the final act implies a sort of ascension for the students that truly commit to starvation. It’s a clumsy metaphor though, not least because thin has always been in, and it’s somewhat telling that all the students are already slim to begin with, which insidiously reenforces the idea that only thin people can have eating disorders – a suggestion which further stigmatises fat people. Here, thinness is next to Godliness.

Most insulting of all is the suggestion that the kinship these students find in their teacher – who also hints at a physical attraction to Fred – ultimately brings them the happiness they so crave, freeing them from their concerned parents. Novak is a sort of pied piper, leading the teenagers to ruin, though her motivations remain unclear even at the film’s close.

While it would be unfair to suggest Hausner is condoning Novak’s actions, there is a sort of nihilistic glibness about the film which leaves a sour taste. Teamed with the film’s distracting, over-the-top sound design and a gaggle of performances that shoot for the stylised stuntedness of Yorgos Lanthimos and never reach those heights, Club Zero fails to offer anything that its predecessors didn’t provide in more succinct and thoughtful ways.

Little White Lies is committed to championing great movies and the talented people who make them.

By becoming a member you can support our independent journalism and receive exclusive essays, prints, film recommendations and more.

The holidays are a time for tenderness, togetherness, and falling asleep on the sofa after your third round of mince pies and sweet sherry. Most Christmas films reflect the pressure cooker atmosphere of the period, usually with some sort of disaster inevitably causing festive friction, but Tyler Taormina takes a slightly different approach, as the members of a large Italian-American family cram into their matriarch’s suburban home for dinner on Christmas Eve. Rather than following a traditional narrative structure, Taormina’s film is more observational, focusing on snippets of conversation and exquisite visual details over the course of the evening. While the younger members of the family plot to sneak out with their friends, the adults discuss the matter of their ailing mother, and whether or not it’s time to consider a nursing home.

It’s tempting to ascribe the term ‘cinéma vérité’ to Taormina’s film, and there is absolutely a fly-on-the-wall quality to the intimate camerawork and lack of any major dramatic thrust. But Carson Lund’s vibrant cinematography – utilising coloured gels, light sources such as fairy lights and lamps and intricate close-ups of toy trains and plates piled high – gives Christmas at Miller’s Point a nostalgic, dream-like quality, at once authentic but as artificial as a fake fir tree or snow in a can.

This artificiality is the point, though – Taormina’s film reflects on the rituals that develop within family, and the tiresome notion of tradition for tradition’s sake. Although the family attempts to slap on smiles and keep things all perfectly pleasant, it’s only natural that tensions rise to the surface, and there’s an undercurrent of melancholy beneath the gaudy decorations and loud 1960s pop music which plays on an almost constant loop.

As the evening’s festivities progress, the teenage cousins Michelle (Francesca Scorsese) and Emily (Matilda Fleming) make a bid for freedom, congregating with their friends at a local bagel shop. It’s in the second half that the film loses focus a little bit, as the expansion out of the family home brings a direct divide between the adults and the teenagers. Michael Cera and Gregg Turkington have small roles as a pair of late-shift cops bored of their minds (and possibly harbouring secret feelings for each other) and Sawyer “son of Steven” Spielberg cameos as a local stoner named Splint, but the most compelling scenes are between the adult members of the family, as it’s revealed this is their last Christmas in the family home. Other smaller details come out in snippets and soundbites – occasionally we come into a conversation midway through – and in that manner, the film replicates the often disorienting experience of spending the holidays with family.

The vibes-based approach that Taormina takes likely won’t land with everyone, and the film’s meandering rhythms take a little while to adjust to. But Christmas Eve at Miller’s Point is perhaps the closest a holiday film has come to truly capturing the experience of coming together for the festive season – often there are no high theatrics, just petty squabbles, hushed gossip, and more food than anyone knows what to do with. To this end, there’s a timelessness to the setting, which is realistically somewhere in the mid-00s (flip phones and Call of Duty give it away) but could be much earlier judging by the decor and vibrant, fuzzy film stock. It’s a film with an affection for the past, but one that also acknowledges you can never go back to how things were when you were younger – and that while everything about the holidays seems perfectly exciting and straightforward as a kid, the older you get, the more the fault lines start to appear.

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Fifteen years after the script to Nick Cave’s proposed sequel to Gladiator leaked, an official follow-up finally rides into cinemas, courtesy of Sir Ridley and screenwriter David Scarpa (who also wrote All The Money in the World and Napoleon) and featuring considerably less Christ-killing that the Bad Seed intended. The coup of casting man-of-the-moment Paul Mescal as the heir to Russell Crowe’s Maximus Decimus Meridius all but ensures legions of Gen Z and Millenial fans will be flocking to cinemas, alongside folks for whom the Roman Empire is their Roman Empire. Johnny-Come-Lately sequels to Scott properties are nothing new (Blade Runner 2049 directed by Denis Villeneuve, Prometheus and Alien Covenant overseen by Scott) but a Gladiator follow-up seems like a particularly interesting proposition considering most of the main characters had died by the end of the first film.

This leaves Lucilla (Connie Nielsen), who has shacked up with General Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal) after sending her son Lucius – the blond moppet played by Spencer Treat Clark in Scott’s 2000 film – away for his own safety. Lucius, now a strapping 20-something, lives a simple life in Numidia with his wife, until the Roman army rocks up at the behest of twin emperors Caracalla and Geta (Fred Hechinger and Joseph Quinn) and start swinging swords. After losing his wife to one of General Acacius’s arrows, Lucius finds himself on a slave ship bound for Rome, where he is promptly bought by cheerful slaver Macrinus (Denzel Washington) who sees his potential as a gladiator.

Perhaps this all sounds a bit familiar to those who have seen Sir Rid’s original. A beardy bloke with a vaguely British accent wants revenge after his home and family are murdered at the hands of Rome; said beardy bloke ends up hacking his way to vengeance as a gladiator. The sequel does hit a lot of the same plot points as the original, with the unfortunate caveat that – with the exceptions of Washington and Nielsen – none of the cast are very good. The normally reliable Mescal is a pale imitation of Crowe, although it’s down to the uninspired script rather than his acting – Lucius has little emotional range beyond rage, and while this works to grand effect in the early gladiator battle between Lucius and a bunch of bloodthirsty baboons, the wind goes out of his sails quickly.

Much has been made of the scale in this sequel too, particularly the epic Colosseum naval battle featuring a load of sharks, but these setpieces are frustratingly short – there’s a lot of build-up to big moments that are over in a flash. Similarly, tension between characters seems to evaporate all too easily, meaning it’s hard to really see any weight in their words or actions. This, combined with the flimsy conceit that a fundamentally corrupt institution can be changed from the inside out with a few good men, means that Gladiator II lacks both the gravitas and simple but satisfying narrative arc which made its foundation such a refreshing epic.

It’s a case of throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks; Washington’s gleefully opportunistic villain is fun, but Quinn and Hechinger are giving two half impressions of a whole Joaquin Phoenix, and Pedro Pascal – imminently charming off-screen – has all the dramatic flair of a dull sword. Despite occasional flashes of inspiration – the baboon fight, some pleasingly visceral gore – this sequel lacks both the impact of its inspiration and the fresh ideas necessary to stand on its own two feet.

Grief is the spectre that haunts Andrea Arnold’s work like Catherine Earnshaw fated to forever roam the Yorkshire moors. Hauntings keep the past alive; this is not mere nostalgia, but a conscious carrying of the past with us into the present, for better or for worse. In Red Road, the devastated Jackie, still seeking justice for the death of her husband and daughter, is driven to make a heinous false accusation against their killer. Star, the teenage girl at the heart of American Honey, flees a life of poverty and abuse, only to find herself in a romance with an unstable drifter. Even Cow, Arnold’s 2021 documentary about the depressing daily life of a dairy cow named Luma, plays out with the same sadness, as we see Luma’s calf being taken away from her shortly after birth, and are confronted with the short, sharp shock of Luma’s death when she ceases to become profitable as an asset.

Continuing the animal theme that began with her short films Dog and Wasp and continued into features with Fish Tank, her sixth feature Bird is a continuation of ideas that have endured across her 23-year career. As in all her films, the lead is a young woman with a turbulent home life – 12-year-old Bailey (newcomer Nykiya Adams), who roams the vicinity of her squat with a sullen scowl and a jutted jaw, like she’s itching for a fight. Who can blame her?

There is harshness always lingering in the periphery, notably in the form of her absent mother’s violent boyfriend Skate (James Nelson-Joyce) and her charismatic but volatile father Bug (Barry Keoghan, covered in a biosphere’s worth of insect tattoos), but also in the gang her half-brother Hunter (Jason Buda) is a member of, who enact vigilante justice on locals they have deemed in need of a duffing up. Bailey, on the cusp of teendom, shows signs of internalising this, pestering Hunter to join his gang, and reacting with (admittedly justified) hostility when Bug announces he’s marrying his girlfriend of three months at the weekend.

Exhausted and angry, Bailey flees into the estuary fields, where she meets a strange man who introduces himself as Bird (Franz Rogowski, with his soft, lilting German accent and wide, bright eyes, imbued with a grace Bailey has not encountered much). She reacts – as any street-smart kid would – with suspicion, immediately whipping out her phone to film him and threatening to get her brother to beat him up if he “tries anything”. Bird, unconcerned, performs a small dance. He explains he’s looking for his people, and Bailey reluctantly gives him directions to the address scribbled on the back of a cigarette packet. Before he leaves, Bird looks up at the sunrise for a long moment. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ he remarks to Bailey. “What is?’’ she grouses, having had enough of this weirdo. He smiles gently. “The day.”

Despite her hostility (forged by a world which hasn’t given her much to be optimistic about so far), Bailey can’t shake a lingering curiosity about the odd Bird, and after covertly following him for a bit, she offers – again couched in a sort of reluctance – to help him find his family, despite, or perhaps owing to, the possible implosion of her own. Bird’s plight offers not only a distraction for Bailey but also a glimpse of kinship.

Bird, who takes all Bailey’s barbs on the chin, is more maternal than paternal, earnestly telling Bailey she’s beautiful after she denigrates her appearance (both her parents call her ugly after she shaves her hair in a fit of pre-teen rebellion) and proving a pro with her younger siblings on a day trip to the beach. It’s at the seaside that Bailey wades out into the gentle tide and floats on her back – a scene that mirrors the end of American Honey.

In both instances, Arnold communicates a sense of peace that comes from nature, but also the idea of a rebirth. For Star, the realisation has finally come that she can live life on her own terms, but for Bailey, it’s an indication of how comfortable she has become. For one brief moment, she’s a kid again, floating on her back, looking up at the sky, not burdened by her father’s madcap moneymaking ventures involving hallucinogenic toads, or her mother’s clearly abusive relationship and the threat that poses to her little sisters and brother

Perhaps unexpectedly, Bird calls to mind Spielberg’s seminal sci-fi E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, in which another child forms a friendship with a mysterious visitor looking for a home (Bird and Bailey, E.T. and Elliott). While Bird skews more “magical realism” than outright fantasy, it possesses the same self-serious young protagonist, dogged by a grief they are too young to formally articulate or process. Similarly, as Spielberg’s film was praised for its darker take on American suburbia, Arnold subverts the idea of the working-class estates of North Kent as pervasively grim.

The squat in which Bailey lives is run-down, but characterised by its sunlight and the personalised marks that make it home. Children laugh and shout and play in the streets. Over the credits, the cast, crew and locals lip-sync to Fontaines D.C.’s “Too Real” which is used in the film. This is no kitchen sink drama; those most marginalised by years of British austerity are making do, and they’re as entitled to magic as the rest.

Bailey’s feelings of rejection have led her to reject the world back in turn, but the arrival of Bird – and the slow unfurling of his own isolation – starts to change her perspective. Crucially, it isn’t one grand gesture that does it, but instead a patchwork of moments, not all of which come from Bird himself. The flawed parental figures of Bird are not monsters, but rather hopelessly human, able to grow and change along with Bailey herself, they in turn fucked up by circumstance. So there is grief here, yes, in the overcast skies and pavement cracks. It lingers for what was lost and what was never allowed to begin with. But a haunting doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Perhaps it can be a reminder that we’re never truly alone, even when we feel it the most.

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Still harbouring immense guilt from being the last person to see his younger brother Hinata prior to his disappearance 13 years ago, Keita (Sugita Rairu) leads a quiet life working in a supermarket and keeping himself to himself. He lives with his amiable school teacher roommate Tsukaka (Amon Hirai) who has issues of his own – namely his second sight, although he seems oddly serene about his ability to see ghosts. The pair’s companionable, easy-going lives are disrupted one day following two strange events: first, Keita finds a missing boy in a nearby forest, and then he receives a parcel from his estranged mother which contains a VHS tape he recorded as a child.

It is this tape that gives Kondo Ryota’s feature debut its title, as the footage shows the moment Hinata disappeared on Mount Mushiro, inside an abandoned building while playing hide and seek with Keita. The footage is suitably ominous in its simplicity; there are no jumpscares, or even anything overtly shocking. Instead, there’s just a pervasive feeling of dread as the young Keita becomes increasingly frantic when he cannot find his little brother. Angry with his mother for sending him the tape all these years later, Keita resolves to confront her.

Meanwhile, Mikoko (Sō Morita), a dogged cub reporter, is looking for Keita, having made the connection between his brother’s disappearance and the child he found recently. But as Mikoko tries to get an interview with Keita, she uncovers more and more odd details about the place where Hinata disappeared and becomes obsessed with the story much to her editor’s chagrin.

Kondo Ryota studied under Hiroshi Takahashi whose providence within J-Horror is strong; perhaps the plot device of a VHS tape is a nod to his mentor, but unlike the tape of the Ring franchise, the curse of Keita’s old family video is metaphorical rather than physical. Yet the film is undoubtedly a ghost story, with Tsukaka nonchalant about his ability to see dead people, and Hinata’s presence (or lack thereof) looming large in Keita’s life. A slow-burn mystery unfolds, imbued with the same unsettling atmosphere of Keita’s videotape, uncomfortable in its simplicity.

It is a tantalisingly restrained film, particularly compared to the ghost stories that loom large in cinema. Similarly, Ryota refuses to hold the audience’s hand, opting for ambiguity that leaves us unsure if we can trust our own eyes, let alone the protagonist who seems so remorseful about his brother’s disappearance. As a debut feature, it is particularly auspicious, remarkable in its simplicity – our human desire to fill in the blanks means the narrative doesn’t end when the credits roll.