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.

LWLies 105 is available to order now from our online shop. Become a Club LWLies Gold Member or subscribe today to make sure you never miss an issue.

Writer/director Andrea Arnold is an artist whose distinctive voice and arresting style have, rightfully so, established her as one of the greatest filmmakers in contemporary British cinema. For our latest print edition, we take inspiration from her sixth feature, Bird, an urban fable set in Kent about the burgeoning friendship between a rebellious girl on the cusp of teendom and a mysterious stranger searching for his roots.

Bird sees Arnold’s trademark, emotionally-heightened social realism slowly evolving into something a lot more surreal. Having only dipped her toes in the waters of myth and magical realism in the past, here she ambitiously saturates her work in the expansive field of the fantastical in more forceful ways, something that convincingly emerges through the ethereal allure of Franz Rogowski as the otherworldly titular figure. The film also features outstanding performances by newcomer Nykiya Adams as 12-year old protagonist Bailey, whose point of view grounds and shapes Arnold’s filmmaking, and Barry Keoghan as anarchist dad and psychedelic toad-whisperer, Bug.

This issue comes together as a wider celebration of Arnold’s craft, includes interviews with director and cast, as well as a dossier delving into and reappraising the filmmaker’s incredible back catalogue.

On the cover

Franz Rogowski graces our cover, illustrated in bold, vibrant colours by Paris-based artist Marie Mohanna. The concept for this cover came from the energy of Bird – the character – as an uplifting beacon of hope for Bailey’s waning capacity for childlike wonder.

Elsewhere in the issue, we have new illustration work from Rumbidzai Savanhu, Stephanie Jade, Zoé Maghamès Peters, John Scarratt, Snids and Stéphanie Sergeant.

In the issue

Lead review: Bird
Hannah Strong on the lyrical and earthy aspects of Andrea Arnold’s gorgeous new work.

The Sensual World
Nia Childs meets filmmaker Andrea Arnold who dissects her method and explains her love of ethereal textures.

Outsider Odysseys
The Andrea Arnold corpus – from her early shorts through to 2023’s Cow – examined via six punchy essays.

Between Two Worlds
Savina Petkova in conversation with the German actor Franz Rogowski, who picks apart his own screen image.

View from the Balcony
Gamer; motocross-lover; method actor (kinda). David Jenkins has a chat with Irish megastar, Barry Keoghan.

South by South-East
Mike McCahill takes a trainride along the southeast coast of England in search of Thames Estuary cinema.

In the back section

Mikey Madison and Sean Baker
The director and star of Palme d’Or-winner, Anora, speak to Iana Murray going deep into the world of sex work.

Mati Diop
Rōgan Graham meets the maker of the remarkable prizewinning docu-essay hybrid, Dahomey, who explains the film’s urgent anti-colonial message.

Steve McQueen
The British artist and filmmaker meets Rōgan Graham and talks the vital importance of primary research that went into making his new film, Blitz.

Tyler Taormina
Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point is a Yuletide classic in the making, and its director has a sincere fondness for the holiday season.

In review
Sean Baker’s Anora
Todd Phillips’ Joker: Folie á Deux
Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door
Milisuthando Bongela’s Milisuthando
Mati Diop’s Dahomey
Mark Cousins’ A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things
Johan Grimonprez’s Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat
Chris Sanders’ The Wild Robot
François Ozon’s The Crime is Mine
Jacques Audriard’s Emilia Pérez
Peter Murimi and Daphne Matziaraki’s The Battle For Laikipia
Pascal Bergamin’s Portraits of Dangerous Women
Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light
Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Hamdan Ballal and Rachel Szor’s No Other Land
Tyler Taormina’s Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point
Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice
Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man
Edward Berger’s Conclave
Malcolm Washington’s The Piano Lesson

Plus, Matt Turner selects six key home ents releases for your consideration; Hannah Strong sends a postcard from the Venice Film Festival; David Jenkins sends a postcard from the San Sebastián Film Festival, and Marina Ashioti assesses the queer impact of the iconic Buffy the Vampire Slayer in a Halloween-themed Sticky Gold Stars column.

LWLies 105 is available to order now from our online shop. Become a Club LWLies Gold Member or subscribe today to make sure you never miss an issue.

Zoë Kravitz’s Blink Twice is a sun-blissed party movie that has freshly mixed cocktails flowing through its bloodstream – until it’s not that at all, and the acrid taste of poison suddenly hits the palette. For issue 104 of LWLies, dedicated to and inspired by Blink Twice, we sought the inimitable skills of Leeds-based illustrator Sarah Madden to take on a portrait of the film’s star, Naomi Ackie, who stars as unwitting food service worker Frida who is suddenly swept off her feet by billionaire tech magnate Slater King (Channing Tatum) and whisked off to his private island in the sun.

LWLies: Paint us a picture of your work space. Do you feel it’s perfect, or do you have plans to enhance it?

Madden: I’m lucky to be able to work from home. My workspace is small, but it fits all of my essentials, plus plants. The best part is the view; my office overlooks the canal, so I get to watch the boats and dog walkers pass by throughout the day. It’s lovely, but it can be a little distracting at times! I’ve recently revamped my workspace, so I am really happy and comfortable with it now. I spend a lot of time there, so it’s important to make it an ergonomic space with the right balance of practicality and cosiness.

What’s the first practical thing you did for this LWLies cover commission?

I always read through the brief again before jumping in. I want to make sure I understand everything and have an accurate sense of what you want from me. This initial stage is mostly research, so I watched the trailer a lot, read the film synopsis, and gathered images of the film (posters, stills etc). I want to get a feel for the film’s art direction and find details I can incorporate into my work, like the recurring red flowers. Since it’s a new film, viewers may not be fully familiar with its visual language. So, it’s important to consider the references they have encountered, incorporate these elements into your work, and introduce something fresh and original.

LWLies covers always contain portraits – what’s your approach for drawing people / likeness?

I gather a lot of reference material to recreate the subject’s face for the piece I’m doing. For this piece, I looked for references of her face at the angle I wanted. I also watched interviews to see how her face moved as she smiled. Once I’m more familiar with the face, I feel more confident to get a likeness. I will tweak a lot as I go thinking, ‘her eyes are rounder than that,’ or ‘her nose should crease more here’. It isn’t always about being technically accurate but capturing unique moments on someone’s face.

What were the challenges of getting Naomi Ackie’s portrait just right?

It can be tough to do a portrait of an actor as their character. You want to ensure that people know what they’re looking at. For example, this is technically a portrait of Frida (Naomi’s character). The main challenge was getting the balance of Naomi and Frida. Naomi looks so different in every film I see her in and of course, she looks completely different as herself in interviews or on the red carpet. I can’t rely on familiar features like her long statement hair here.

For this cover, tell us how you worked with the colours and the layering to achieve such a vibrant effect?

Initially, I thought the colours could be darker to contrast with Naomi’s bright smile and continue the sunny-to-sinister narrative. But as the film is set on a sunny island, we went with brighter colours. I enjoy rich colours and adding moments of contrast in my palettes. The cover shows Frida with a false sense of security. To depict that Frida is unaware or unsure of the threats surrounding her, I use a mix of full-colour and linework when illustrating the snakes. I felt that the yellow was strong enough to grab attention in full-colour and was subtle enough to almost miss in line-work.

Is there someone you’ll show your early drafts to for instant, honest feedback?

I have friends that are designers and illustrators and I will show them work sometimes for feedback or a second opinion. I can get consumed in small details if I’ve been working on one thing for a while, so I find it really helpful to take a step back. I also ask for my partner’s opinion a lot. He’s not in the creative industry but I find his opinion equally important and usually the most eye-opening. I think creatives can get carried away in our technical knowledge and can miss some obvious points.

How do you know when one of your artworks is finished?

I guess it’s never really done. You can tweak and tweak. I sometimes look at work that I did years ago and feel tempted to revisit and ’make better’. I’m a bit of a perfectionist so I have to settle for ‘it’s good enough now’. Also, a client’s deadline is also very helpful for determining when artwork is finished, haha.

How can our readers support you and follow your work?

You can follow me on my Instagram @hello.sola. I also have a newsletter you can sign up for on my website sarahmadden.co.uk. The newsletters are very infrequent, but I’ll try to pop up with something interesting a couple of times a year.

LWLies 104: The Blink Twice issue is available now

The tone for the cover of our 103rd issue, dedicated to Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest, was initially inspired by Daniel Clowes’ illustrated poster for Todd Solondz’s 1998 dark ensemble comedy, Happiness. We shared this reference with Edinburgh-based illustrator Tom Humberstone, who has produced a group collage with all the characters who appear across Lanthimos’ triptych fable. We asked Humberstone to paint a portrait of his working life, and give some details on his approach for this project.

Paint us a picture of your work space. Do you feel it’s perfect, or do you have plans to enhance it?

Humberstone: I work from home from our flat in Leith, in a small box room. It’s the perfect size for fitting in a big drawing board, a computer with some monitors, and a chair – but not much else! We’ve had some bespoke shelving built into it to store reference books and inspiration, along with giving a home to art materials, comic stock and old artwork. It’s cosy. But it could do with some natural light. There are no windows! While being able to control light sources can be useful for colouring work, it can feel a little dispiriting not seeing the outside world at all. Especially on bright sunny days.

If we can afford it, one day it might be nice to have a window put in. But otherwise, I’m pretty happy with the set-up. It’s nice to be able to have a space at home where the work space is distinct from leisure space – not everyone gets to have that.

What’s the first practical thing you did for this LWLies cover commission?

The first thing was to gather as much reference material as possible. It’s a tricky thing drawing something about a film that hasn’t come out yet. There are so few glimpses of it available to draw upon for reference. None of the images have had a chance to be absorbed into the culture and become iconic. You have no sense of what will become the pervading images of the film that will stay with people. So it became a case of watching and rewatching the teaser trailer for as much information as possible.

Then, when we’d settled on the idea of an image that would include the multiple characters of each of the cast members – an overwhelming array of faces – it became key to just roughly sketch in a few faces and slowly figure out a rough composition.

LWLies covers always contain portraits – what’s your approach for drawing people / likeness?

I’ve always found likenesses quite difficult. Especially well-known celebrities where people already have a relationship with those faces. We’ve all seen Emma Stone over multiple films, we know what she should look like, and so, if your likeness is slightly off, people know it at a glance. It can be a small thing as well. As simple as a misjudged shadow that suggests a contour of the face that throws the whole likeness off.

I found Jesse Plemons an especially difficult likeness to capture for this cover. While he has a very recognisable face, he’s one of those character actors who somehow physically morphs with each role. I can never quite get a handle on him or his distinguishing features.

One of the things I do first with likenesses is gather as many photos of the person as I can, and try to figure out the common features that I want to draw focus to. It may take a couple of passes, but the key, I find, is a light touch. You want to keep the amount of lines you use as low as possible.

For this cover, tell us how you worked with the choreography of the multiple figures and how colour figured into the final piece?

I think the thing that we were trying to balance was fitting around 20 characters on the cover, while also making it look like everyone was in the same “photo”. It was important it didn’t look like a collage – that all of these characters were actually in the same place, just standing on a sloped platform.

To help with this, I drew everyone facing forward and pencilled hero versions of each actor that I could then “dress” with different costumes, makeup and hair. I was lucky enough to get to see an early screening of the film before I did this stage, so I took detailed notes about each character which I could then use later.

One of the delights of working with Little White Lies is you’re given a colour palette to work with. I love working with limited palettes and finding ways to push their limits. And this set of colours was a particular favourite to work with. I think we knew early on we wanted the yellow as the main background colour so it was mainly a case of making everything else pop off that in interesting ways.

Is there someone you’ll show your early drafts to for instant, honest feedback?

When it comes to my comics work, I like to show lettered pencil roughs to as many friends and peers as possible – to try and work out early on where things don’t make sense, what could be clearer, and generally try to figure out if anything isn’t working. When you’re dealing with storytelling across 200 pages or so, it’s important to catch structural issues early on before you get too far deep into the drawing.

With illustration, it’s a little different. Turnarounds are a little tighter and there’s less opportunity to get quick feedback on things. I usually share what I’m working on with my partner who is very honest about when things are working and when they’re not. I always need that honesty. But I also tend to trust the opinions and feedback of the editors and art directors I work with.

How do you know when one of your artworks is finished?

I suppose I agree with the “art is never finished, only abandoned” truism. In that, I could probably continue to tweak and improve anything I’m doing forever. But at a certain point, you start realising you’re not improving it anymore. Not really. Sometimes you even start making it worse. I try to avoid this by having a fairly routine workflow in place. Each stage is iterative and allows me to reconsider the whole piece holistically. But I have a general sense of how long each stage should take and I try to move from one to the other fairly swiftly.

Deadlines help too.

How can our readers support you and follow your work?

If you like my work for Little White Lies, you can find more of my work at tomhumberstone.com and find me on most social media platforms with the username @tomhumberstone. I also have a semi-regular illustrated newsletter where I tend to write about films. That can be found at tomhumberstone.com/newsletter.

My graphic novel – Suzanne: The Jazz Age Goddess of Tennis – is about Suzanne Lenglen, a French tennis player from the 1920s who reinvented the sport and revolutionised the way women dressed in the 20th Century. She drank cognac during matches, got into fights with line judges, and was so popular that Wimbledon had to change venues to accommodate the crowds who came to see her. And yet very few people know her name now. It might be of interest to anyone who enjoyed Challengers!

LWLies 103: The Kinds of Kindness issue is available now

In the first of a new series, we’re going to be shining a spotlight on the amazing illustrators and artists who help to make Little White Lies one of the best-looking magazines on the shelf. First up, we had a chat with Petra Eriksson who is responsible the cover of our 102nd issue, inspired by Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers. We asked her to paint a portrait of her working life and give some details on how she would approach such a project.

LWLies: Paint us a picture of your work space. Do you feel it’s perfect, or do you have plans to enhance it?

Eriksson: I have a studio in a big industrial building in Eindhoven that is shared with a lot of other creative people. I love my space, mostly because of the really big windows and all the light it lets in but I definitely need to give this place some more love. I want to get a proper book case to display some of the covers I have worked on but also to better organise the art and design books I have for inspiration. And at some point I also want to add a colourful comfortable armchair or sofa to make it a bit more cosy.

What’s the first practical thing you did for this LWLies cover commission?

I started the process by looking through all of the reference photos that had been shared with me, as well as gathering a few extra images on my own to make sure that I could see the three actors’ faces from different angles. I also watched the trailer a couple of times to try to pick up some details from it and the overall feeling of the film.

LWLies covers always contain portraits – what’s your approach for drawing people / likeness?

Getting the likeness right can be really tricky, especially in these overlapping portraits where a lot of things need to be simplified and where the overlapping shapes themselves can take away from the likeness of a person. To try to get it as good as possible I look at many photos of the people, ideally photos from different angles to find specific details in their facial features and expressions that will help. Specifically I’m looking at the shape of the eyes, nose, mouth, eyebrows and dimples or how their face changes when they smile etc. I find that if I get these things right that helps a lot with creating an overall likeness.

For this cover, tell us how you worked with the colours and the layering to achieve such a vibrant effect?

Creating these kinds of layered artworks is a bit of a puzzle so I tried a lot of different colour directions before I landed on a version that I was happy with. I wanted to incorporate as many of the brand colours as possible but I knew I wanted to add some more colours that would work well in their faces. I also really wanted to work with the light blue of the palette to pick up the colour of Zendaya’s jacket in one of the shots of the movie and I knew it would pair well with a warm and intense orange-red colour. Those two colours together with the off white and black became the foundation of the palette and the rest fell into place from that.

The layering is sometimes tricky because it needs to be done in a way where it doesn’t make the faces look weird. It’s always easier with the clothes that can be more graphic but the shapes that goes into the face often needs to be a bit more tuned down to not interfere too much with the facial details.

Is there someone you’ll show your early drafts to for instant, honest feedback?

It depends a lot from project to project, but sometimes I will share it with my partner Guillem, he’s not a designer but I know he will always be honest with me

How do you know when one of your artworks is finished?

Usually I decide that something is finished when I feel happy with the dynamic between colours and shapes over the whole image. During the process there are often the moments of feeling that something is a little bit off, maybe a shape doesn’t fit in with the other shapes or some colour is taking too much (or too little) focus and the process is a lot about tweaking these elements until I feel satisfied.

How can our readers support you and follow your work?

They can find me at instagram @petraerikssonstudio and also at my website www.petraeriksson.com. I’ve been on a social media break but I am planning to get back to it as I’m really enjoying the chance to connect with people and to be able to share a bit more of my process and thoughts there. I really appreciate people connecting to me and following me there as it helps me share my art with more people.

LWLies 102: The Challengers issue is available now