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.

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.

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.

The worst scene in the Coen brothers’ 2013 film Inside Llewyn Davis is vastly superior to the best scene in James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, an icky, fawning screen bio of Ebbing, Minnesota’s own barrowboy-capped minstrel, Robert Zimmerman. I state this for the simple reason that the Coens’ film is about something, and Mangold’s film isn’t. It’s been made for the sole purpose of visualising a short stretch of pop history and creating a glossy, unnecessary record of fact. There’s no ark; few compelling characters; no coherent drama or sense of lessons being learned, wisdom imparted and difficult emotions grappled with.

The screenplay seems tactically averse to any kind of antagonism, always on Dylan’s side of things and often satisfied with saying that those who were angry with him eventually saw the error of their ways. It doesn’t shy away from saying that Dylan had the potential to be a wretched human being, but always within the context of, well wouldn’t you be a total ass if you were surrounded by backward-looking dolts?

The women in his life blow in and out on the wind, with Mangold keeping their own inner lives and artistic merits at bay so as not to dilute his worship of the central god-king. Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) is framed as a populist stick-in-the-mud who leapfrogged on Dylan’s songwriting, while Sylvie Russo (a name-swapped version of paramour Suze Rotolo, played by Elle Fanning) seems to be reacting to situations and behaviour that the audience aren’t party to.

There’s no point where you’re listening to Timothée Chalamet do his exemplary Dylan cosplay where you feel you’re being better served than had you stayed home and whacked on ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’. Indeed, the film has little interest in the music, instead it’s more intent to assure the audience that it’s good and important via an omnipresent phalanx of grotesque, beaming reaction shots.

It’s a hot-waxed shrine to its subject, an official version which drips with hollow trivia and is happy to namecheck that thing it knows you like rather than reveal something that you didn’t. It’s strange, also, how a film can paint a picture of a rebel poet who is so declassé, so boorish, so completely stripped of vulnerability. It leans too heavily on the idea that history revealed that Bob was right rather than to search for reasons why he might have been wrong. Dylan too often comes across as petulant and irritating, and his decision to amp-up for the militantly acoustic-only Newport Folk Festival in 1965 is very much not the epochal, sock-it-to-the-man type victory that it’s clearly intended to be.

Ed Norton’s aggressively avuncular take on folkways legend Pete Seger plays like a character from a gothic horror movie, where you’re waiting for him to switch into beast mode and give everyone what for with his long-necked banjo. Worst of all, it lazily stages the famous “Judas!” heckle at Newport rather than the Manchester Free Trade Hall where it actually happened. Sure, Bob Dylan was no stickler for the truth when it came to concocting his own mythos, but at least through his sublime poetry he was able to revel essential, obscure truths about the world. James Mangold has yet to earn that right.

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.

Picture the scene: a cold morning in London’s Soho. Film critics waddle towards the doors of a cinema with their gloves and coats on to waylay a sharp nip in the air. People are seated and relaxed. The lights go down. The film plays. The lights go up. Those same critics stagger breathless towards the exit, not sure how to amply contemplate what they’ve just seen. In the interim, the sun has risen and it’s a little warmer now, so words are shared in the street, words such as “masterpiece,” “what did I just see?” and “have we just witnessed an entirely new cinematic language unfold before us?”

This was a true account of when the LWLies team first clapped eyes on RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys, whose formal grace and emotional heft whacked us right on the solar plexus and left us in a daze. We’re so proud to be able to bring you an entire magazine dedicated to this wonderful film – one that we think ranks among 2024’s premium works of cinema. It is adapted from a 2019 novel by the double Pulitzer Prizewinner, Colson Whitehead, about the lives of two young Black men in 1960s Florida whose future has been placed into unnecessary jeopardy by the random pendulum swing of the Jim Crow laws. With aspirations of further education in his sights, Elwood (Ethan Herisse) is charged for the crime of car theft purely for being in the wrong place and the wrong time. He is sent to the Nickel Academy, a segregated reform school whose educational veneer masks an underside of sordid racist violence and oppression.

As a magazine made by movie lovers, we’re drawn towards examples of exceptional craft, and with its innovative POV cinematography and fluid use of documentary inserts, Nickel Boys very much ticks those boxes. We were turned on to Ross back in 2018 around the release of his stunning debut documentary, Hale County This Morning, This Evening, when he laid down for us a set of his own aesthetic principles, and he expands on that further for our in-depth interview inside this issue. Finally, it’s worth mentioning that as we were about to start work on this issue, the US electorate gave another pedestal to someone whose policies likely seek to perpetuate the grim desolation and abhorrent intolerance that’s plainly stated in this film. Yet we don’t just see Nickel Boys as a film for the moment, but one whose resonances and themes will echo through the ages.

On the cover

We were so proud to commission one of our long-term collaborators, Rumbidzai Savanhu aka marykeepsgoing, to create a special cover for us this issue. Our covers tend to feature portraits of protagonists within the film, and she has created a playful interpretation of this concept whereby we see the back of Elwood’s head, watching his life play-out on TV screens in a shop window – a reference to one of the film’s most affecting shots.

Also in the issue we have incredible new illustrated work from Ngadi Smart, Tomekah George, Joanna Blémont, Xia Gordon, Krystal Quiles and Stéphanie Sergeant.

In the issue

Lead review: Nickel Boys
Sam Bodrojan lauds a harrowing modern masterpiece for its boldness, humanity and formal poetics.

The Interior Self
Leila Latif discovers how filmmaker RaMell Ross made a Pulitzer Prize- winning novel his own.

The Invisible Man
Actor Ethan Herisse on the challenges of sculpting a performance and building a character from behind the camera.

Hard Labour
Leila Latif gets personal with the formidable actor and by-proxy activist, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor.

Ways of Seeing
Jourdain Searles discovers how cinematographer Jomo Fray refreshed traditional concepts of the camera eye.

Sacred Images
Sophie Monks Kaufman writes in praise of cinema that channels human brutality while rejecting its lurid visual nature.

Community Matters
Rōgan Graham celebrates the world of grassroots advocacy organisations built to promote diversity in cinema.

I See A Darkness
Cheyenne Bart-Stewart speaks to writer/ director Rungano Nyoni about her new film, On Becoming a Guinea Fowl.

In the back section

Magic and Loss: the making of Queer
Hannah Strong chats to Luca Guadagnino, Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey on how they tangled with the cryptic poetry of William Burroughs in this flighty and emotional new screen adaptation.

Jesse Eisenberg
Darren Richman shares stories of ancestral journeys to Eastern Europe with the writer/director/star of A Real Pain.

Brady Corbet
Keeping it real to the very last second was the main gambit of co-writer/director of The Brutalist, discovered Hannah Strong.

Halina Reijn
Rafa Sales Ross discovers that female desire can be both funny and sexy on screen in her conversation with the writer/director of Babygirl.

Pablo Larraín
The Chilean director lays out his opera credentials to Hannah Strong in this dialogue on his new film Maria, about Maria Callas.

In review

Luca Guadagnino’s Queer
Ruth Beckermann’s Favoriten
Steven Soucey’s Merchant Ivory
Justin Kurzel’s The Order
Michael Gracey’s Better Man
John Crowley’s We Live In Time
Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain
Pinny Grylls and Sam Crain’s Grand Theft Hamlet
Viktor Kossakovsky’s Architecton
Magnus von Horn’s The Girl with the Needle
Maura Delpero’s Vermiglio
Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist
Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths
Naoko Yamada’s The Colours Within
Marielle Heller’s Nightbitch
Halina Reijn’s Nightbitch
James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown
Pablo Larrain’s Maria

Plus – the LWLies top ten films of 2024!

Matt Turner and David Jenkins explore eight recent Home Ents gems, plus we have a postcard from the Tokyo International Film Festival via Hannah Strong, and Marina Ashioti writes in praise of Chantal Ackerman’s Je Tu Il Elle ahead of a major BFI retrospective.

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There’s something naggingly “not quite” about this retro-vibed piece of animated Tolkien arcana, an attempt to fill in some contextual gaps for the author’s celebrated later work while also straining to feel dramatic and relevant in its own right. One positive thing that must be said of Kenji Kamiyama’s The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim is that, as a female-fronted Rings spin-off, it is superior in its simplicity and passion to the recent TV serial, The Rings of Power, almost mocking that show’s convoluted desire to plug into and enhance the expansive lore of this world.

Yet it is inferior to another work with which it shares much DNA (in story, tone and aesthetic), and that is Hayao Miyazaki’s 1984 opus, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, in which a warrior maiden princess must saddle the pressures of a war instigated by men in a world on the precipice of destruction. The animation style might be best described as faux-Ghibli, and while there are certainly a few shots, sequences and characters that look like they may have been plucked out of the Ghibliverse, there’s a certain finesse and fluidity that’s lacking – almost like it’s been taken out of the oven a tad too early, or there are a few extra frames that went astray.

Set some two centuries before the events that unfurl in the Peter Jackson films, it is the story of Héra (voiced by Gaia Wise), a spirited, tomboyish minor royal of the Rohan region who is introduced attempting to tame a giant-sized bird of prey having galloped her horse to the top of a snow-capped mountain. Back home, her gruff papa, Helm Hammerhand, king of Rohan (Brian Cox), causes a bit of a diplomatic foul-up when resorting to a round of old school fisticuffs to settle a fairly mundane familial dispute. Under-estimating his own physical clout, he accidentally one-hits his opponent to death, courting the ire of the deceased’s son – emo tearaway Wulf (Luke Pasqualino), who at one point was a potential marriage match for Héra.

The incident is swept under the rug and Wulf is banished from the kingdom, but left to fester alone, he gathers his marbles and hatches a catastrophic, scorched-earth retribution plan to not only get back at the fast-fisted Helm, but also put an end to his entire bloodline. And, if possible, destroy all those over which he lorded. Following a fairly sedate set-up, the film leans into action/warfare mode pretty swiftly, and Kamiyama and his team do well to choreograph the battles and make sure an audience retains a certain level of geographical and spatial awareness.

The characters are certainly likable, and it’s easy to invest in the extremely binary good vs evil story, but it’s all a little too straight and risk averse, rarely opting to push the boat out with side-characters, subplots or even production design detail. The most interesting and unique character is Miranda Otto’s Éowyn (she reprises her role from the original trilogy), who has a single short scene to demonstrate her prowess with a little tiny shield. It’s predictably rousing, and Tolkien heads will probably enjoy many of the callbacks to the original trilogy, but as a film in its own right, it’s all a little overblown and unnecessary.

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Partners in film as well as in life, Indian producer Ismail Merchant and American writer/director James Ivory made 44 films together under the banner of their brainchild: Merchant Ivory Productions. Their impressive catalogue, made up mostly of literary adaptations, boasts some of cinema’s most acclaimed independent period dramas: A Room with a View, Maurice, Howard’s End and The Remains of the Day.

Stephen Soucy’s affectionate yet scattershot documentary on this 40-year partnership explores the overlap between the two as lovers and as collaborators, offering a broad overview of their life’s work, and fondly detailing the lengths to which the duo would go to turn shoestring budgets into meticulously crafted, tasteful films.

Right off the bat, we hear from about a dozen talking heads from the Merchant Ivory family, including Helena Bonham Carter, Emma Thompson and Hugh Grant, all affectionately sharing anecdotes about the duo’s creative synergy; the juxtaposition of Merchant’s relentless, chaotic hustling and Ivory’s calm artistic vision. Ivory is also interviewed rather extensively, recounting his tumultuous relationship with Merchant. The duo’s Indian collaborators are largely absent though, and it all comes together in a rather shallow, often frustrating attempt to bottle up a significant piece of late 20th century film history, devoid of that touch of Merchant Ivory movie magic.

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Judi Dench’s strength as an actor lies in the believability of the characters she portrays. She plays a part with such conviction that, whether the character is inherently likeable or not, you care about her and want to know her fate. In smaller roles where Dench’s screen time is more limited, her characters carry the overall narrative forward, even if she’s merely mentioned in passing, making her always memorable.

Our first look at Dench’s character – romance author Miss Eleanor Lavish – in James Ivory’s 1985 period drama A Room with a View is around the dinner table at a guest house in Florence. She has command of the conversation, discussing the topic of travel among a group of fellow lodgers and tourists. She comes off as a bit of a brazen swashbuckler, who’s travelled many places solo (an anomaly for women at that time) seeking inspiration for her next novel.

Dench is the embodiment of free spiritedness in this role. Observational and fastidious to the highest degree, Lavish is a character that truly savors life, from stopping to exult old statues, or sitting in a field to drink in the scenery. She takes much delight in finding romance in the smallest of details. This makes for some comical moments, such as when she enthusiastically inhales the city air and encourages her walking companion Charlotte Bartlett (played by Dench’s dear offscreen friend Dame Maggie Smith) to do the same who, in turn, does so and stifles a retch.

It’s easy to trace Dench’s path to the icon status she holds today. She had a long and storied career in the theatre in the sixties and seventies, performing a host of roles including (a lot of) Shakespeare and Sally Bowles in Cabaret. She had her first bit parts in films The Third Secret in 1964 and Four in the Morning in 1965, and made many TV show appearances before starring alongside her husband Michael Williams in the sitcom A Fine Romance, which ran from 1981 to 1984.

In Charles Sturridge’s 1988 film A Handful of Dust, Dench plays a mother to a home wrecking son. Like A Room with a View, A Handful of Dust is also based on a novel, but this time set in the early 1930s. As Mrs. Beaver, Dench is a stylish social climbing businesswoman. A bit of a busybody, Mrs. Beaver likes to organize things, from arranging for a flat rental to erecting a memorial for people she’s not particularly close with, though she claims to be. She lives well enough, but she does have to work, and it’s evident that she’d love to change her situation.

Mrs. Beaver appears generous and cheerful and dotes on her son, almost to a creepy degree. But she’s also cunning, ruthlessly shrewd, and practical. From the outset, she has her sights set on her son marrying a soon-to-be divorcée he’s been having an affair with, hoping that with some prodding she’ll coax her to demand a substantial alimony of £2000 a year instead of the more modest £500 her husband has offered. As soon as it’s clear this would-be daughter-in-law will not be flush in her settlement, Mrs. Beaver and her son lose interest and take off for America.

While Dench’s performances are always fun to watch, it’s her fluid adaptability that draws audiences to her films; and with every sort of character under her belt, Dench cannot be typecast. She delivers perfectly imperfect human qualities to her performances which make them believable, and can be as condescending and manipulative as she can be nurturing and fearless.

A completely different role saw Dench in David Jones’ 1987 feature 84 Charing Cross Road as the Irish Nora Doel, wife to Anthony Hopkins’ Frank Doel. Based on writer Helene Hanff’s epistolary memoir, this film tells the story of Hanff’s nearly 20-year correspondence with head buyer Frank for Marks & Co, an antiquarian bookshop in London, from 1949 to 1968. Nora is Frank’s second wife, after his first passed during the war.

Throughout the film, we get little glimpses into their marriage, watching Nora’s meals grow more ornate the more practiced she becomes, seeing the pair impulsively join a conga line on a date, and looking on as they decorate for Christmas or repaint the living room. While she’s not quick to smile, when she does you can tell it’s not for show. She takes great pride in her family, who are her world.

At the end of the film, Nora writes to Helene (Anne Bancroft) about the death of Frank, and her loss is palpable. In a grey sweater with her hair pulled back, crestfallen and worn out from grief, she writes “I miss him so, life was so interesting, he always explaining, and trying to teach me something of books.”

Dench’s film career really blossomed in the mid-nineties, with culturally iconic roles such as the laser-focused and exacting MI6 head M, starting with 1995’s GoldenEye, whom she would play in eight Bond films until her departure in 2012’s Skyfall, with a cameo in 2015’s Spectre. She won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for playing Queen Elizabeth I in 1998’s Shakespeare in Love and suddenly she was everywhere, with some of her most memorable characters yet to come.

They say everything happens in cycles – the past few years, millennials have started to experience a minor existential crisis at the sight of Y2k fashion plastered on the covers of Vogue and GQ, shivering at the realisation that Murder on the Dancefloor was 23 years old when it stormed back into the charts last year. Much like music or fashion, cinema too is cyclical – trends wax and wane with the years.

I remember sitting with my mum, one January night in 2006, Jaffa Cakes in hand, watching the first episode of the BBC’s sci-fi period drama Life on Mars. My mum, a child of the 1970s, couldn’t stop talking about how her first boyfriend had that exact haircut, how her sister had played that T. Rex album until the record was distorted. The 12-year-old me may as well have been watching The Age of Innocence.

Yet as I sat in my local cinema on a November evening in 2022 to watch Charlotte Wells’ blistering Aftersun, I wondered if the sound of the Macarena and the sight of men in bucket hats would play in much the same way to Gen Z viewers. Recent years have provided us with no shortage of films set in an era of flip phones and low-rise jeans: Saltburn, I Like Movies, Bad Education, BlackBerry, and Uncut Gems are just a few. But how, exactly, do you make a millennial period piece?

The Look

First thing’s first – you might want to think about shooting on film. The 2000s and early 2010s saw one of the biggest technological shifts in filmmaking since The Jazz Singer pioneered sync sound, with the likes of David Fincher, Michael Mann, and even Agnès Varda eschewing celluloid for the flexibility promised by digital cinematography. To Gen Z the HD images of Marvel films might be what defines the aesthetics of cinema, but to filmmakers whose adolescence was spent browsing the VHSs at their local Blockbuster, their cinema is defined by celluloid. It’s no wonder Saltburn and Bad Education were shot on 35mm – they emulate the texture of the films that shaped their formative movie-going experiences, all while giving No Fear t-shirts and brick phones a distinctly cinematic sheen.

However, film isn’t the only format at your disposal. Both Aftersun and Chandler Levack’s semi-autobiographical 2003-set I Like Movies, open with boxy camcorder footage shot by their protagonists. With so many millennial period pieces being exercises in autobiography, it seems VHS tapes, defined by their track marks and rewind wear, are perhaps the most tangible way to capture millennial youth. Using a medium that documented the holidays and school plays that made up our childhoods not only submerges audiences in a time and place, but creates an intimacy and tactility that the 8mm cameras of Spielberg’s youth predate and the sharp resolution of an iPhone camera postdate.

The Music

Much was made of Saltburn’s narrative similarities to Anthony Minghella’s adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley, but where Minghella time stamps the 1950s set tale with the sounds of Chet Baker and Dizzy Gillespie, Emerald Fennell plants us firmly in the 2000s with needle drops from Bloc Party and The Cheeky Girls. While the genre-defining work of jazz legends might not seem immediately comparable to Flo Rida’s Low, this blurring between what’s considered ‘high’ and ‘low’ art, is key to making a millennial period piece.

Fennel’s mining of our collective pop culture consciousness began in Promising Young Woman; despite its contemporary setting, her debut reclaims socialite and noughties tabloid regular, Paris Hilton’s Stars Are Blind (which featured in Complex’s 50 Awesome Guilty Pleasure Songs We’re Ashamed to Like (But Not Really)) in one of its most vibrant moments. Millennial period pieces are as much about reclamation as they are nostalgia. Saltburn’s use of Sounds of the Underground by Girls Aloud is less about recognition than it is a taking back of cultural artefacts previously deemed kitsch by Boomers and Gen X.

The Costumes

Much like the era’s music, the fashion of the ‘90s and ‘00s have, until recently, been widely considered as… regrettable. We may all cringe at the cap beanies and copious denim that once filled our wardrobes, but much like Howie Ratner embraces the tackiness of his bejewelled Furby in Uncut Gems, filmmakers and the wider culture have now embraced garish Y2K fashion.

To properly deploy a wardrobe of millennial throwbacks, it’s important to know your characters. Jacob Elordi’s eyebrow piercing and polo shirts tell us almost everything we need to know about a character that oozes indie sleaze, Paul Mescal’s Britpop-coded outfits in Aftersun go a long way to helping us understand a father old beyond his years, mourning a youth he feels he’s lost. Whether your characters listen to Britney or Avril Lavigne, understanding who needs a crop-top and who needs cargo trousers, can make your millennial period piece get to the root of its characters.

Cultural Moments

Music and formats aren’t the only way to ground your audience in an era, and weaving real life events within a fictional tapestry has long been used as a shortcut to place characters within a past its audience recognises. Whether that’s Mad Men centring an episode around the Kennedy assassination or the teens from Stranger Things walking past a cinema marquee advertising The Terminator (the closest equivalent for the Blockbuster generation is Saltburn’s aristocratic family gathered round to watch 2007’s Superbad). Millennial period pieces are no exception. The plot of Uncut Gems hinges on the 2012 NBA season, I Like Movies’ protagonist’s excitement for the release of Punch Drunk Love plays a key role in its character development, and Matt Johnson’s BlackBerry uses the smartphone race of the 2000s to trace an entire decade. Adding a kernel of truth to a fictional story can help to establish a sense of authenticity while also activating nostalgia sirens for the audience, but it can also serve as a convenient way of indicating a time period without resorting to irritating exposition.

Filmmakers have always been drawn to looking backwards at the eras and times that shaped their lives, and in these uncertain times it may be increasingly comforting to do so. As more millennials forge careers in the film industry, it’s likely we haven’t seen the last of these achingly unhip period pieces, immediately transporting us to a time before Instagram, where the jeans were baggy, the phones without touchscreens, and The Ketchup Song could sell over seven million copies.