The enemy of romance is heartbreak, but both are reliably sharp tools for a writer as they craft a work of fiction from imaginative scenarios that may contain just inklings of reality. It is better to have love and lost than never loved at all, they say, but Lie With Me poses that a haunting romance may, in fact, never truly be over, and render a lover incapable of love. Olivier Peyon’s queer French drama, based on Phillippe Besson’s critically acclaimed autobiographical novel, is all about these musings on romance that are at once defining and devastating.

With rounded tortoiseshell glasses (identical to Besson’s) and a scarf perpetually wound around his neck, prolific romance writer Stéphane Belcourt (Guillaume De Tonquédec, abandoning his comedic sensibilities here) returns to his hometown of Cognac for the first time in 35 years. He’s been invited to promote a local distillery; the historical commune is known for its namesake beverage, which ironically Stéphane can’t stomach – the burning seems to slide from his throat to his heart with just one sip. These barrels of traditional cognac are piled high and left to rest for decades, ageing quietly as the world around them continues, just like Stéphane. Revisiting home, memories of his first love come pouring out with irrepressible power.

Lie With Me is told with two parallel narratives; the present day Stéphane as a local celebrity in Cognac, and his youth in 1984 as a 17-year-old adorably dorky student (played by Jérémy Gillet). Through flashbacks, the all-encompassing intensity of young love between Stéphane and Thomas Andrieu (Julien De Saint-Jean), an edgy student that girls fawn over, is unearthed. Their intoxicating affair, clandestine in nature and tainted with shame, is a formative but heartbreaking memory that Peyon anchors with vignettes of mounting headiness in private bedrooms, abandoned gymnasiums and hidden lakes.

After decades, hearing the surname “Andrieu” is a shock to his system that ignites a long-dormant part of Stéphane’s heart. It’s not Thomas he stumbles upon, but his lover’s son, Lucas (Victor Belmondo), who shares the same piercing, dismantling gaze. They’re drawn together, united in a shared intrigue about the man that abandoned them both. A cerebral exploration of infatuation with its reverberations begins to take centre stage but initial poeticism borders on sentimentality in the final act with a grand speech that feels all too neat, even for a writer.

Martin Rit’s stylish cinematography arrives with romanticism, but the choice to shoot conversations from metres away and set heated arguments in stark shadows disrupts the illumination that Lie With Me otherwise achieves. The film holds similarities to François Ozon’s sweltering mid-1980s romance Summer of 85, both novel adaptations that wrestle with gay male romance on the brink of the AIDS crisis and lust over a motorbike-riding lover. Where Ozon commits to tenderly unravelling the emotional enigma of young lovers, Peyon’s young characters aren’t afforded the same narrative space despite their crackling chemistry and exquisite performances. The heartache of wasted time and missed love is a familiar arena in queer drama and while Lie With Me rets on classic tropes, it still makes for a moving reflection on adolescent love.

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After his dystopian sci-fi THX 1138 failed at the box office, George Lucas was challenged by his friend Francis Ford Coppola to write a film that would appeal to mainstream audiences. Lucas leapt at the proposition, writing a coming-of-age story about four teenagers on the last day of summer in 1962. The script had autobiographical elements, with Lucas using his teenage experiences cruising the strip in his hometown of Modesto, California. He even based some of the characters on parts of his early life, from his street-racing years (John Milner) to his nerdy high school persona (Terry Fields).

Following a troubled pre-production process, Lucas made his film – American Graffiti – at Universal for less than a million dollars. Yet on its release in 1973, it was a massive hit with five Oscar nominations and over $140m earned at the box office. Not only did Lucas’s film meet Coppola’s challenge, but American Graffiti also redefined the teen coming-of-age genre and launched the careers of several stars (Richard Dreyfuss, Ron Howard and Harrison Ford). The commercial success also allowed Lucas to make his next project – a little sci-fi film called Star Wars. The rest was history.

All of these are reasons why, 50 years later, American Graffiti remains arguably one of the most influential American films ever. But the most important reason relates to its innovative use of something that has had a lasting impact on cinema to this day: nostalgia.

While nostalgia can refer to films that are looked up favourably because they were watched during childhood, here it is a force explicitly deployed by Lucas – gazing back towards a specific period and the music, fashion, movies and events that came from it. These tap into the fond memories and positive associations of those in the audience who lived through the era, using the viewer’s sentimental affection to bolster the film’s emotional impact.

Nostalgia is such a potent tool because it is a form of escapism from ageing or the bleak present. If you’re suddenly feeling rather old or unsettled by the modern world, why not watch a movie that captures your teenage years? It helps that the 1950s saw the arrival of popular culture as we know it – shaped by the youth and defined by film, television, celebrity and music. The baby boomers were the first generation to benefit and American Graffiti became the first film to capitalise on their affection for their teenage years.

Whilst there were movies geared towards the teenage market – Blackboard Jungle, Rebel Without a Cause, Beach Party (and the briefly popular beach party genre) – Lucas was going back in time instead of staying in the present.

One of the easiest ways a film can conjure nostalgia is through a soundtrack. In 1973 though, Lucas was going against the grain by loading his film with more than 40 rock and roll, Doo-wop and early R&B songs. ‘That’ll Be the Day’ by Buddy Holly. ‘Johnny B Goode’ by Chuck Berry. ‘Rock Around the Clock’ by Bill Haley and His Comets, set the stage (just like the latter did in Blackboard Jungle). The effect is akin to driving along and suddenly coming across the perfect song on the radio (in fact, in the film they are all diegetic too, with teenagers listening to them via the popular Wolfman Jack show).

Furthermore, Lucas’ passion for car culture shines as he lovingly shoots the scenes of characters cruising, depicting it as the most vital part of Modesto’s teenage life. As for the classic hot rods, Steve Bolander (Howard) has a 1956 Chevrolet Impala he lends to Terry (Charles Martin Smith). John (Paul Le Mat) drives a modified, bright yellow 1932 Ford Deuce Coupe. And then there is the ’56 Ford Thunderbird, driven by a mysterious blonde woman who Curt Henderson (Dreyfuss) attempts to find.

All of this is a director-specific nostalgia, with Lucas familiarising us with the sights and sounds of his youth. However, it has a reflective purpose too. As Cammila Collar wrote for Outtake, “The very word “nostalgia” denotes not just a fixation with the past, but also a poignant longing for it.” Here, Lucas is longing for a time of hope and innocence that vanished soon after. When Curt is with his ex-girlfriend, she divulges his dream to become a presidential aide and shake hands with John F Kennedy. A year after the events of this film, he was assassinated. By the end of the decade, Nixon was President, the British Invasion had completely changed music, and anti-Vietnam War movements violently clashed with police.

It’s easy then to see why American Graffiti appealed to the baby boomer generation in 1973. After the political strife and instability of the ‘60s, the film was indicative of a desire to return to a simpler time. Even the characters themselves are bittersweetly reminiscing. When John hears The Beach Boys on the radio, he turns it off and remarks that “rock and roll’s been going downhill ever since Buddy Holly died.”

The success of American Graffiti had an immediate impact. One year later, ABC created the hit ‘50s-set sitcom Happy Days (also featuring ‘Rock Around the Clock’ and Ron Howard). In the long term, it preceded a wave of Hollywood films relying heavily on nostalgia for America’s past. Stand by Me contained many references to 1959, from Western TV shows to classic songs from Buddy Holly and Ben E King. Meanwhile, Robert Zemeckis’ Back to the Future travelled to 1955 and depicted it nostalgically. Hill Valley in the mid-1950s is bright and booming; in 1985, it is a run-down shadow of its former self. The past is infinitely better than the present. Together with the 1963-set Dirty Dancing, these films became a defining part of ‘80s Hollywood cinema.

In the 1990s, Forrest Gump ran through the most recognisable events and culture of 20th-century America, from Elvis to the Vietnam War. The film starred Tom Hanks, who would go on to write and direct a tribute to the bygone era of ‘60s garage rock with 1996’s That Thing You Do! Additionally, Richard Linklater’s 1993 high school comedy Dazed and Confused could be considered a ‘70s version of Lucas’ film – set in Austin, Texas in 1976, it also features the director’s home state, a protagonist weighing up his future, and a soundtrack of contemporaneous rock and roll hits.

This penchant for nostalgia has continued well into the 2010s and 2020s. If anything, the digital age has led to an explosion of films looking to the past. In Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino replicated California in the summer of 1969 through production design, locations, costume design and soundtrack. But there is a bittersweetness too, with Charles Manson’s cult looming over this fading innocent time. Although Tarantino engages in some alternative history to save Sharon Tate, the whole film is filled with pathos for the people, places and things lost.

Paul Thomas Anderson looked to the ‘70s for Licorice Pizza. Netflix megahit Stranger Things drips with nostalgia for the ‘80s. Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird and Pixar’s Turning Red became the first major examples of cinema’s nostalgia for the early 2000s, and Lucas’ friend Steven Spielberg leaned into director-specific nostalgia with his autofiction The Fabelmans. Based on his adolescence, the film focuses on how a young Spielberg (renamed Sammy Fabelman) discovered his love for cinema and filmmaking.

The Fabelmans demonstrates how nostalgia has aided a trend from the last couple of years: semi-autobiographical projects. Examples of this include Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, Kenneth Branagh’s Troubles-set Belfast, and Linklater’s Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood. Set in his hometown of Houston in the summer of 1969, Linklater uses animation to take audiences back to his childhood. As a result, it feels like the film is throwing nostalgia at you, listing the boomer-specific music, TV shows and board games that made it, as an adult Stanley (a stand-in for Linklater) reflects in the film, “a great time and place to be a kid.” The semi-autobiographical elements in American Graffiti laid the groundwork for these movies.

Yet decades after American Graffiti’s release, nostalgia continues to be a well-used trait in cinema. Countless filmmakers have approached the past – sometimes their past – with a romanticised, retrospective attitude. Most have followed Lucas in using popular music. Some have even borrowed songs notably used in his film (Back to the Future reuses ‘Johnny B Goode’).

The irony is that American Graffiti ends with a message of looking forward, not back. Out of the film’s central quarter, the one who could be considered the protagonist is Curt, who Lucas said he identified with the most. At first, he’s unsure whether he will join Steve on the plane to a college out east. As he tries to find the blonde girl he saw in the T-Bird, Curt encounters the lives he could live if he stayed: He sees Mr Wolfe, a high school teacher who flunked out of college and now flirts with female students; he spends time with his ex, and he temporarily joins the Pharaoh gang. Most importantly, he meets Wolfman Jack, who tells Curt to move on (“It’s a great big beautiful world out there”).

In the end, Curt takes Wolfman Jack’s advice. He is the only one who gets on the plane to college (Steve remains in Modesto with his high school sweetheart). During the credits, ‘All Summer Long’ by The Beach Boys plays – the same band stuck-in-the-past John hates – as Curt flies to his future. His journey proves American Graffiti is ultimately a coming-of-age story about change over comfort, and choosing the wider world over your hometown. The yearning for what was fades into anticipation for what will be. Cinema may always have an eye on the past – rekindling past decades and childhood memories – but times inexorably change. You can’t stay 17 forever.

In the Internet age there has always been one universal truth: boys kissing will always be cute. Be it gifs, porn, or the chaste hand-holding of the Heartstopper boys, you put a boy in love with another boy front and centre, and the girls and the gays will come running. That is exactly what Red, White & Royal Blue – Matthew López’s adaptation of Casey McQuiston’s BookTok bestseller – is banking on. Before the main titles have even kicked in, Red, White & Royal Blue has essentially skipped the ‘enemies’ part of its enemies-to-lovers arc, and placed its lovesick twunks firmly on the path to romance.

Despite the twee title and the YA source material, it’s a fun time at the movies, and López, a playwright and unlikely choice for director (given his last major creative endeavour was the six-hour-long AIDS play ‘The Inheritance’), is in on the joke. McQuiston’s book is both prescient and deeply entrenched in the past – it’s a gay romance set against the backdrop of the election of the United States’ first female President while, in the same breath, jolly old England is a tea-and-crumpets land of castles, princes and polo. Red, White & Royal Blue is utterly divorced from any kind of recognisable reality, but it allows you to enjoy it as an immensely silly romcom, cut from the same cloth as those gay Hallmark Christmas movies.

The film follows the book’s goofy, Princess Diaries-esque set-up: Alex (Taylor Zakhar Perez), the confident, highly ambitious son of the first female POTUS (Uma Thurman!) finds himself in diplomatic hot water after a public brawl with Prince Henry (Nicholas Galitzine), the British royal family’s prim ‘spare’, and the pair are forced into feigning camaraderie to salvage the Special Relationship. It takes about ten seconds before the pair fall madly in love and start flying between nations on private jets funded by your hard-earned taxes to have sex.

Where McQuiston’s text relied on pure caricature, López and Malawer add a touch more depth to the characters. Zakhar Perez and Galitzine are better comic foils than they are love interests but it’s easy to buy into their uncomplicated romance. It’s clear that a gay man directed it too, as Alex and Henry’s sex life is handled sensitively – something a lot of other gay romcoms have had a surprising amount of trouble with.

Like those other gay romcoms – Happiest Season, Fire Island and most recently, Bros – Red, White & Royal Blue will have its haters and defenders. It’s still a glossy, cinematic version of queerness, and its weightier themes – that of celebrity and being trapped in a gilded cage on both sides of the Atlantic – never feel all that weighty because they’re just so fanciful. No one, perhaps with the exception of Meghan Markle or the Obama daughters, will be able to relate.

I am ultimately burying the lede because while the initial draw for Red, White & Royal Blue might be hot boys kissing, the real star of the show is Uma Thurman’s stratospherically high-camp performance as Alex’s mother. With a slurred Benoit Blanc-ish drawl to rival Sienna Miller’s and a weird, almost stoned lethargy, Thurman delivers some magnificent line readings. She looks checked out most of the time and her decision to play the US President with a kind of loose-limbed apathy is an incredible acting choice that reminds you that Uma Thurman needs to be cast in more things. The film’s energy flags when she isn’t on screen to ramble about election strategies or ask her son if he’s “bottoming”.

There is something strangely comforting about Red, White & Royal Blue, as imperfect as it is. It’s a romcom for the streaming era but it has a markedly different vibe to it because it’s fronted by two men. To draw on recent Hollywood history, it feels like an improved version of Love, Simon, with the same anodyne love-is-love politics but a little sluttier and a lot more romantic. I’m sceptical that Hollywood will ever be capable of making a gay romcom that isn’t twee or heavy-handed in some way, but Red, White & Royal Blue feels like a tentative step in the right direction.

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Freaky Friday means something. It has done since 1972, when Mary Rogers first published a children’s novel bearing the alliterative title, and the phrase was further lodged in the pop cultural vernacular when Walt Disney Pictures brought the story to cinemas in 1976 with Jodie Foster and Barbara Harris. But it was Disney’s second big screen adaptation of Rogers’ book in 2003 (there had also been a TV movie eight years earlier) that made “Freaky Friday” a synonym for supernatural body-swapping, at least for people of my generation.

Twenty years on, Mark Waters’ Freaky Friday remains a seemingly immovable touchstone – it’s perhaps the most well-loved and fondly remembered example of Disney’s live-action tween-targeted 00s output (its only real competition is The Princess Diaries). We can see its enduring impact in Lil Dicky and Chris Brown’s distressingly popular 2018 novelty song Freaky Friday and 2020 horror-comedy Freaky, both of which riff on the film’s central conceit as well as its title. On a more personal note, seeing Freaky Friday as a kid constituted a very important step in my cinephilic development. When I was about eight years old, long before I had any robust sense of what might constitute ‘good acting’, this film made one thing clear to me: Lindsay Lohan is a very good actor.

Anna (Lindsay Lohan) is the perpetually grumpy teenage daughter of Tess (Jamie Lee Curtis), a successful therapist. Anna and Tess can’t see eye-to-eye on much of anything, but a particular sticking point is Tess’s imminent marriage to silver fox Ryan (Mark Harmon) – Anna is still yet to fully process the sudden death of her father. As an olive branch, Ryan offers to treat the girls (along with Anna’s troublemaking little brother and Tess’s doddering father) to a meal at a family-favourite Chinese restaurant, only for the mother-daughter bickering to come to a head at the dinner table. It’s then that Anna and Tess each have an especially cryptic fortune cookie thrust in their direction by the restaurant’s meddling-but-good-natured owner (a frankly appalling racist stereotype).

The cookies were, of course, enchanted (described as “strange Asian voodoo”). The next day, Anna and Tess wake up in one another’s bodies. Now Anna (Jamie Lee Curtis) must learn to navigate the adult world and Tess (Lindsay Lohan) will have to hit the ground running as a high schooler. Naturally, shenanigans ensue – but will our heroines be able to learn a handful of lessons about empathy and mutual respect over the course of an especially freaky Friday?

Lohan made her film debut five years earlier in another Disney remake, The Parent Trap, which had presented the then 11-year-old with a formidable acting challenge – portraying two estranged twins who pose as one another. Roger Ebert’s glowing review noted Lohan’s remarkably sophisticated choices, like playing each twin with a “slightly flawed” version of the other’s accent. Lohan had already exhibited a subtlety and thoughtfulness beyond her years, and Freaky Friday’s premise would demand that the young actor (now 16 years old) pull off another magic trick – convincingly portray a 44-year-old woman. This conceit would allow Lohan to further demonstrate her maturity, but it would do just the opposite for Jamie Lee Curtis.

From her rise to stardom in the 1980s, there had always been a mischievous, self-deprecating side to Curtis’s persona, best exemplified in latter-day screwball comedies like Trading Places and A Fish Called Wanda. She seemed to relish any opportunity to undercut her sex symbol status with a bit of silliness – ‘aging gracefully’, in the traditional Hollywood sense, was never going to be her style. In the role of a teenage girl, trapped in the body of a middle-aged woman, Curtis could kill two birds with one stone – she could explicitly acknowledge the passage of time while also affirming that it had done nothing to diminish her sense of humour. Curtis makes these intentions plain in her very first scene as Anna – upon seeing her new reflection she exclaims, in her brattiest tone, “I look like the Crypt-Keeper!” Few leading ladies have been quite so fearless.

As a child, Freaky Friday was in heavy rotation in my household – it was one of a small handful of films that my younger sister and I both loved equally. The premise’s innate appeal to kids is self-evident, but it’s deceptively simple – the film deftly indulges several childhood fantasies at once. Wouldn’t it be fun to live as an adult, and do it better than they can? Wouldn’t it be nice to see your parent subjected to the indignities and frustrations you face every day at school, and have them concede that you’ve been treated unjustly, having seen things your way? But Freaky Friday provides children with more than just catharsis, it also gently encourages them to consider some terrifying realities: the inevitability of change, the onset of adulthood and, ultimately, mortality. It’s this kind of quality that separates the kids’ movies we remember fondly from the ones we cherish.

Revisiting it as an adult, I was relieved to it find it has remained a charming little film, though it’s become dated in ways that are hard to ignore – for instance, I was shocked to see Anna’s threat of suicide during a heated pre-swap argument with her mother played for laughs. The magic fortune cookie (which doesn’t appear in any previous version of the story) is also regrettable – in the 1976 film, the swap is simply induced by each party simultaneously wishing they could live as the other for a day. It’s a much more intuitive inciting incident, and one that could’ve spared us the wince-inducing scenes with Pei-Pei and her mother, played by Rosalind Chao and Lucille Soong respectively. But what struck me most upon my latest re-watch was, once again, quite how good Lindsay Lohan is.

As Anna, Lohan isn’t afraid to be genuinely prickly – she doesn’t read as the cheerleader-type in pop punk drag, instead making for a pretty convincing misfit (well, a Disney misfit anyway). As Tess, her speech patterns and physicality are brilliantly modulated, and she completely nails the rictus grin and wide-eyed desperation of a panicking mother. In terms of the body swap, Lohan’s turn has more nuance and specificity than Curtis’s. Both actors are good, but Curtis only really manages to play Anna as ‘a teenager’ – Lohan doesn’t play ‘a mother’ post-swap, rather she mirrors Curtis’s Tess from the earlier portion of the film. In a film of two performances, it’s hers that ultimately wins out.

Freaky Friday arrived at the perfect moment in two careers, its metatext essentially a passing of the torch from one generation of female star to the next. In the DVD’s behind-the-scenes featurette, Curtis, sitting in her makeup chair, puts it to Lohan thusly: “You’re my Padawan learner, and I’m the Obi-Wan Kenobi.” But, as I’m sure you’re aware, Lohan’s acting career is yet to live up to the promise of her early roles, largely due to personal factors we needn’t revisit here. Curtis, on the other hand, now has an Oscar.

If the film was a career forecast, it has so far proved inaccurate, at least in Lohan’s case. As of June 2023, she and Curtis are set to reprise their roles in a follow-up to Freaky Friday, due to shoot sometime next year. Aging will no doubt be a central theme once again, and it will be interesting to see if this new film will be able to acknowledge its stars’ wildly divergent paths, in one way or another. Regardless, I’ll be rooting for Lindsay Lohan. I always thought she was so cool.

Excuse the cliché, but for most romantics, the notion of ‘home’ tends to be tied to a person – be it a lover, friend, family member – rather than a place. This statement rings particularly true for the curly-haired protagonist of Leonor Teles’s Baan. L (Carolina Miragaia) is a young architect living and working in Lisbon, whose recent breakup with an unnamed ex causes the world to shift beneath her feet. Drifting aimlessly from one off licence to the next to source cigarettes and alcohol, she finds random parties to attend on her own with the sole purpose of getting black out wasted.

Teles, whose short film Batrachian’s Ballad won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale in 2016, takes all but a straightforward path to plunge her viewers into the depths of her protagonist’s emotional experience. A chance, transformative encounter outside an ice cream shop brings K (Meghna Lall) into L’s life, a young woman of Thai heritage who was brought up in Canada and has been floating from one city to the next – Toronto, London, Lisbon – hoping that she finds herself in the city that will finally click into place and bring that much sought-after sigh of relief, a submission to belonging: “I’m home”.

Undercutting Teles’s electrifying visual language and stylish cinematography is a subtle political urgency mainly concerning the primary site in which the film takes place. By now, Lisbon has famously become one of the most prominent “digital nomad” hubs in Europe. Foreign entrepreneurs and workers (who are relatively well off) have taken advantage of the pandemic-spurred rise in remote working to seek out new experiences abroad, and for governments, this could only mean one thing: “Ker-ching”!

The Portuguese state was quick to decorate their capital city’s welcome mat with tax breaks, dedicated visas, the promise of relatively cheap cost of living, sunshine and a “bohemian lifestyle”. These workers enjoy salaries significantly higher than those of the local population, and have formed an economic muscle that has caused housing prices to soar.

Teles treads carefully yet deliberately in depicting this phenomenon, as overheard conversations amongst the Silicon Valley bros L’s bosses meet with are juxtaposed with the treatment faced by migrants from less economically privileged backgrounds, working jobs in hospitality. These larger forces and the effects of global (and racial) capitalism lurk in the background as L and K reach for the impossible grasp of belonging.

We don’t spend long with K, but her presence provides Teles the corporeal bridge to attempt a blurring of lines between Lisbon and Bangkok as urban signifiers from these two alchemically disparate cities begin to meld. Dynamic needledrops, highly kinetic sequences and still moments of repose coalesce as we begin to traverse the spatiotemporal boundary between past and present, the effect of geographical shifting evoking a Kaufman-esque dreaminess. Some clunky dialogue choices slightly spoil this effect, but Teles demonstrates great confidence in crafting an artful, aptly disorienting and deeply relatable journey through her protagonist’s emotions.

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Anton Bitel provides a look at six titles heading to streaming and physical media releases this month that you should add to the top of your shopping list.

A Moment of Romance, dir. Benny Chan, 1990

Benny Chan’s feature merges crime flick and romance, while teasing out these genres’ differences. Its ‘meet-cute’ occurs when Triad driver Wah Dee (Andy Lau) takes 17-year-old heiress JoJo Huen (Jacklyn Wu) hostage during the getaway from a brutally violent jewellery heist. Yet even if their relationship improbably begins with such rough objectification, it is not Stockholm syndrome that keeps drawing JoJo back to Dee, but rather the genuine kindness and respect that she perceives beneath his criminality. Reared by three foster mothers after his real mother died for love, Dee comes, alone among his hypermasculine colleagues, with a feminine side to match all the cool bravado.

It is this conflict, as much internal as external, that propels the star-cross’d lovers, whose chaste assignations unfold in noisy love hotels, highlighting the contrast between vice and virtue. Dee may be doomed by the internecine power games of his adopted lifestyle, but he faces his fate still wearing the elegant wedding suit that he had put on for one last night of love (and death) with JoJo, even as she sports a similarly stolen bridal dress whose whiteness, emblematic of her innocence, is now stained not with her but his blood.

A Moment of Romance is released on Blu-ray, 21 August via Radiance Films

Weird Science, dir. John Hughes, 1985

At the beginning of John Hughes’ goofy coming-of-age comedy, friends Gary (Anthony Michael Wallace) and Wyatt (Ilan Mitchell-Smith) fantasise about what they would do with the girls they are watching work out in the school gym – yet despite their voyeuristic randiness, there is something peculiarly innocent about their expressly un-sexual intentions. Later, when they use Gary’s computer and a Frankenstein-inspired vision to create the woman of their dreams Lisa (Kelly LeBrock) who makes herself available to fulfil their every whim, the only sexual advantage that they take of her is to have a shower with her (while themselves clothed and terrified), or merely to watch her do gymnastics (like those girls at the beginning).

The premise here threatens puerile perversion, female exploitation, and an uncomfortable age gap (Wyatt seems young for 15, Lisa older than 23) – but in fact Hughes gives Lisa the confidence, agency and power that the boys lack, and makes her more fairy godmother than sex object. Lisa places the immature boys in scenarios where they learn to confront their parents, talk to girls and stand up for themselves, while – like the true fantasy that she is – erasing all evidence that she ever existed.

Weird Science is released on Limited Edition UHD, 21 August via Arrow

Time Bandits, dir. Terry Gilliam, 1981

While his parents obsess over the latest household consumerist items, little Kevin (Craig Warnock) reads books about the ancient world and is lost to his dreams. Perhaps a little too lost, given that at night he is visited in his room by a fugitive sextet of diminutive thieves (led by David Rappaport’s Randall) who whisk him away on a time-( and reality) hopping serial heist to plunder the past, even with the embodiment of Evil (David Warner) and God himself (Ralph Richardson) in pursuit.

The resulting adventures of Kevin and the Six Dwarves involve a whistle-stop tour of history and fantasy, taking in Napoleon (Ian Holm), Agamemnon (Sean Connery), Robin Hood (John Cleese), the Titanic, and Evil’s Lego-brick lair. This fairytale is reconstituted by a boy’s creative mind (during his sleeping hours) from the toys, books and posters in his bedroom – but with Terry Gilliam at the helm, and Michael Palin co-writing, it is also inflected with a Python-esque sense of absurdity that lampoons the childish adult characters here, big and small.

It is a funny, weird cameo-filled caper that finds value even in vice, and lets wild imagination ultimately win out over drab reality.

Time Bandits is released on Limited Edition UHD, 28 August via Arrow

Gregory’s Girl, dir. Bill Forsyth, 1980

“The nicest part is just before you taste it. Your mouth goes all tingly,” wise beyond her 10 years Madeline (Allison Forster) tells her teenage brother Gregory (John Gordon Sinclair). “But that can’t go on forever.”

Madeline is talking about the ginger beer float that she has just ordered – but this Abronhill-set microbudget romance is similarly focused on that sweet period of anticipation before adolescents come of age sexually. So while it may start with Gregory and his fellow footballers spying randily on a nurse as she undresses, these boys are in fact naïve virgins (one of whom faints at the mere sight of her breasts). Gregory’s expressed desire to take one girl “up the country park” turns out to be intended literally rather than as innuendo – and while the boys certainly objectify women, their sexism is confounded by the arrival of Dorothy (Dee Hepburn), whom they all fancy even as she outclasses them at football (which they regard as their male province).

What in other hands might have been a lustful low-brow comedy, writer/director Bill Forsyth makes a work of winning charm and surreal background detail, where everyone desires, but not everyone knows what – or who – they want.

Gregory’s Girl is released on Blu-ray and UHD, 21 Aug via BFI

Three Ages, dir. Buster Keaton, 1923

Although he had made a slew of successful shorts, and starred in Herbert Blaché and Winchell Smith’s The Saphead, this was the first feature that Buster Keaton would write, direct and star in. Though certainly parodying the multiple, time-hopping narratives of D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance, this film’s tripartite structure, as it cuts between stories set in the Stone, Roman and Modern Ages, was also an insurance policy: if it failed in its full-length form, it could be split up again into three separate shorts.

In fact, its three parts are closely intertwined, with the same cast repeating essentially the same story in three different time zones, all supposedly to prove a thesis delivered at the beginning by God Himself: “The only thing that has not changed since the World began is love. Love is the unchanging axis on which the World revolves.”

Yet as puny but perspicacious Keaton vies with the larger, cheating Wallace Beery for the hand of Margaret Leahy, it will turn out that the other constants in this non-evolving history are ingenious stunts, pratfalls and sight gags, which see Keaton always eventually outsmarting his bullying rival and tying the knot with Leahy.

Three Ages is released on Blu-ray, 21 August via Eureka!

The Last House On The Left, dir. Dennis Iliadis, 2009

Whether you think it is a harrowing indictment of a violent Vietnam-era America divided from itself, or just a tonal confusion of comedy cops, cringy music cues and human cruelty, everyone can agree that Wes Craven’s shocky, schlocky 1972 The Last House On The Left, loosely updating Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring, belongs to that most vilified subgenre of horror, rape-revenge.

This is what makes Denis Iliadis’ remake so interesting. For while it follows most of the original’s narrative beats, again pitting two families – one middle-class and mainstream, the other marginal and murderous – against each other, it is more a matter of rape-survival. Still grieving the recent loss of their son, Dr John (Tony Goldwyn) and Emma Collingwood (Monica Potter) will stop at nothing to keep their teen daughter Mari (Sara Paxton) alive, even as Krug (Garret Dillahunt) and his criminal gang, who abducted, raped and left Mari for dead, are now holed up in the nearby guest house.

Only in the final scene does Iliadis deliver the basic revenge, served microwave hot, that he has till now carefully withheld. It is a sordid conclusion, putting us right in our place for being drawn to this remake, and confronting us with the ugliness of what we expected – and desired – all along.

The Last House on the Left is released on Limited Edition UHD and Blu-ray, 28 August via Arrow

It’s been a hot minute since there’s been any UK sightings of films by the talented Italian director Emanuele Crialese. Certainly the last memorable one was way back in 2006 with his moving immigrant saga, Golden Door, which showcased a filmmaker who was able to mix a satisfying cocktail of romantic sentimentality and flinty realism. With his new film L’Immensità, which premiered at the 2022 Venice Film Festival to polite fanfare, he seems to be once again trying to pour that same cocktail, but this time, unfortunately, the measures are all off.

It’s 1970, which is a great excuse to have Penélope Cruz got a little hog wild in the costume department – and on the level of superficial sartorial pleasures, the film does not disappoint. She plays Clara, harried mother-of-three who is forced by her taciturn husband Felice (Vincenzo Amato) to accept her role as the stay-at-home matriarch, tend to the kids and make sure their plush Roman apartment is kept neat and tidy for her arrival back from the office.

It’s something of an open secret that Felice is canoodling with his secretary, and so Clara begins to subtly shift towards the children in terms of allyship and affection. Of the younglings, there’s quintessential tiny terror Gino (Patrizio Francioni), cute toddler Diana (Maria Chiara Goretti) and there’s also the gender-questioning Adriana/Andrea/Adri (Luana Giuliani) who refuses to wear the frilly dresses expected of them, and instead sports shirts, jeans, tracksuits and a short-cropped side-parting.

Though Clara is sympathetic towards Adri’s burgeoning sense of liberation and understanding, she knows that, as a mother, it’s her job to protect her child from the brickbats of social conservatism and the expectations of conformist family members who view Adri as little more than a rebel. Moments of blissful private escape are depicted via various retro musical interludes that are nimbly realised by Crialese.

It’s a very well meaning film, yet its exploration of gender dysphoria is very surface-level in comparison to reams of other, superior films on the subject. It feels as if Crialese wants to explore this subject matter without potentially alienating an audience who may disagree with the stance it takes, so everything political is soft edged, and Adri’s dilemma is nudged to the background in the film’s final act.

In many ways it’s an infuriating film that wastes a lot of good talent and good intentions. After an intriguing set-up, the film spins its wheels and opts for repeating scenes and motifs to both fill out the runtime and avoid putting its political money where its mouth is. Cruz is typically commanding in the lead, switching between brassy confidence and fragile melancholy, and her chemistry with Giuliani certainly helps things along. Yet, in all, L’Immensità is a bit of a half-hearted mess that reaches for originality but is nowhere near grabbing it.

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In a world where blood is being squeezed out of every IP stone, Disney Land’s Haunted Mansion ride being turned into a second live-action film barely raises an eyebrow. The first attempt, in 2003, starring Eddie Murphy was quickly (and rightfully) forgotten. 20 years later, after a long-teased version by Guillermo Del Toro that never came to fruition, the mansion is back, the keys now in the hands of Dear White People director Justin Simien.

Simien, to his credit, significantly improves upon his predecessor. His version sees single mother Gabbie (Rosario Dawson) and her son Travis (Chase Dillon) move to a ghost-ridden mansion on the outskirts of New Orleans, only to find that even if you leave the house, the ghosts will follow you wherever you flee and demand your return. Stuck in an impossible situation, they recruit a rag-tag team of a priest (Owen Wilson), a psychic medium (Tiffany Haddish), an academic (Danny DeVito), and an astrophysicist turned ghost tour guide (LaKeith Stanfield) to rid them of these spooks. The ensemble is an unsurprisingly fun one, with Wilson, Haddish and Devito delivering the exact schtick that they are best known for. But there’s also a real sweetness in the bond formed between Dillon and Stanfield’s characters, each feeling alone in the world and working through grief in their own way, slowly opening up to the potential of a new family.

While those elements surpass expectations and seem to be where Simien has placed most of his efforts, lingering on each glance and kind exchange between the two, the rest of the film is disquietingly at odds with their authenticity and packed filled with easter eggs, brazen product placement, and shonky computer graphics. The use of Jared Leto is particularly strange, appearing as “The Hatbox Ghost”, who is only in portraits, and his “character” is fully digital with an unrecognizably processed voice. After so many stories emerged about Leto’s acting methods, including needing a wheelchair to go the bathroom so he could stay in character during Morbius, one could see that employing a load of CGI would be a more palatable proposition than a film set with Leto going full Hatbox Ghost. But his presence, along with the blink-and-you-’ll-miss-it cameos from Winona Ryder and Dan Levy, beg the question…if we aren’t properly using these actors why have them here at all?

Stanfield has so much movie star charisma and a sweet soulfulness; in scenes where he confronts his past, grief pours out of giant wet eyes that are half Steve Buscemi half spaniel puppy. Every time we lose him to a confounding action set piece or his performance swallowed up in chaotic SFX, the film immediately feels more like a product than a story.

There is an unshakeable sense that Simien may have lost a little control in the edit, thanks to Chase Dillon’s growth spurt and voice deepening, its clear which scenes have been reshot, and certain plot elements appear that seem wholly untethered from what came before. It’s a shame since this gang of characters is a joy and the level of scares is perfectly pitched to be a younger generation’s entry into horror movie fandom. But ultimately, the wonderful family movie in here that’s screaming to get out is hopelessly trapped in Disney’s Haunted Mansion.

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Bette Gordon grew up watching New York City in black-and-white movies. When she moved there in the late ’70s, she was a visual artist and filmmaker at one of the worst and best times to do those things in the city. Reaganite politics had just led to major slashes in arts funding. Landlords kept buildings empty waiting for big-money buyers.

Gordon, who grew up in Boston and had studied in Paris after she fell in love with Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, would walk around the city looking for the underworld she had seen in films like Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street and Jules Dassin’s The Naked City. “This city is a city of film noir,” she recalls when thinking back to that initial love for New York. “It’s a city with streets that you’ve seen and imagined, and now I inhabit those streets.”

Artists, musicians, photographers, filmmakers (Gordon included), all lived in sprawling, empty Tribeca lofts, sharing both electricity and ideas. She had a 16mm projector and would throw parties, inviting people over to watch a movie: “It was a good time for making work without the heavy marketplace hanging over you,” she tells me over a phone call that was scheduled to be 30 minutes, but stretches to two hours.

This New York of lofts, creative mingling and pooling of resources is the environment which gave birth to Variety, her 1983 neon-noir feature about a woman who takes a job as a ticket seller at a porn theatre, equal parts repelled and fascinated by the milieu in which she is enveloped. Written by punk author Kathy Acker, shot by future Living in Oblivion director Tom DiCillo, with music by composer John Lurie, and starring Sandy McLeod, Will Patton, Luis Guzmán and Nan Goldin, Variety is a who’s-who of 1980s avant-garde cool.

Gordon was always attracted to the half-lit streets of film noir, the mystery and the darkness, but more so it was the genre’s “female characters who possessed a kind of dangerous and intriguing sexuality” that appealed to her. “In my process of loving these genres of cinema, I thought, ‘What about turning the thriller on its head?’,” she says. “What if the Kim Novak character [from Vertigo] became the investigator and the male character, the Jimmy Stewart one, became the enigmatic figure?”

Her vision of reversing the Hitchcockian thriller was deepened by her random discovery of the Variety Theatre during one of her night walks. “Its neon marquee was something out of the past because I was looking for the past,” she recalls. “I couldn’t stop thinking about this marquee, all lit up in red and green. It was calling me and I couldn’t look away.” A former horse stable turned vaudeville theatre turned nickelodeon in the East Village, the 450-seater went from hosting live action revues to playing porn movies before being turned into an unsuccessful Off-Broadway theatre and, eventually, being torn down in 2005. In the ’80s, it was a cruising spot for gay men. Author and cinema owner Jack Stevenson described it as, “a potent cocktail of old moviehouse karma and rampant sleaze.”

The cinema’s manager allowed her to have the cinema for six hours on a Sunday, and she made Anybody’s Woman for $75, a spoken word experimental short with her pals Spalding Gray and Nancy Reilly. In the film, which is a thematic precursor to Variety, the characters talk about their thoughts on pornography. It’s with this film that she began to sketch the backbone of Variety, and play around with the idea of the monologue. She began modelling her central character, without even realising it, on Kathy Acker.

At this point, the experimental novelist was known for appropriating and remixing the work of other writers such as Charles Dickens and Pierre Guyotat, and she would often perform her own work. Acker’s work is explicit and explosively subversive. Always focused on reimagining language as a feminist tool, her writing was sexually vivid – perfect for Variety. In the film, protagonist Christine’s deadpan description of explicit scenes while her boyfriend listens silently takes direct inspiration from Acker’s refashioning of pornographic language: “She subverted this kind of male language, remaking it for herself, inserting women in that language which she took as her own, as does Christine,” says Gordon.

The filmmaker was also heavily inspired by film theorist Laura Mulvey’s 1975 essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, which, “really opened me to being able to explore the subject of women and looking.” Variety, in Gordon’s own words, is a film about looking. Christine sits in the free-standing ticket booth all day, “where she can see and be seen.” It uses frames within frames, doorways, windows and reflections to capture the idea of looking and being looked at.

Gordon is fascinated with spaces, and how a woman operates when she infiltrates an intrinsically male space: the baseball game where an enigmatic patron of the cinema takes Christine on a date; and the Fulton Fish Market where she follows him, wandering around a sea of fishmongers and store owners with cardboard signs.

Variety is a document of a contradictory period, a dank New York which boasted a booming artistic underground. Cookie Mueller, artist, writer and one of John Waters’ Dreamlanders, appears in a bit part. And Nan Goldin, already heavily in the scene but not yet the grande dame of portrait photography that she would become, has a supporting role.

“I met Nan Goldin before I knew that I met Nan Goldin,” she says. Still, living in Boston, she was on her way to pick up a friend when she got a frantic call from a woman locked in his Tribeca loft. That woman was Goldin. Some time later, living in New York, she asked her friend and fellow filmmaker Vivienne Dick to shoot a scene for her film Empty Suitcases and was introduced to Nan, properly this time. In the scene Gordon wanted to shoot with her, two women would be exchanging clothes and taking pictures of each other. She asked Nan if she was interested: “Are you kidding? Changing clothes and photography are my passion,” replied Goldin, a relatable genius. Since then, they became close friends and occasional collaborators.

Gordon snuck the photographer into the delivery room when she had her daughter, and Goldin took a picture of her seconds after she was born. When the same daughter got married, Goldin was the wedding photographer. “Living downtown put us in constant contact,” Gordon remembers. There was “music, images and whatever else was going on” at places such as the Mudd Club, Club 57, Danceteria, Tier 3, where they screened each other’s films (and Nan would present her slideshows) in between the band sets. Goldin was photographing then but had not yet made her masterpiece, ‘The Ballad of Sexual Dependency’.

She was the one who introduced Gordon to Tin Pan Alley, the bar where she worked and which would become a major location for Variety: “It was the only place we went when we went uptown”. Gordon still relishes Goldin’s acting in the film Variety (“She was so good, I said, ‘now you’re gonna have a career as an actress!’”) and in 2009 she published a book of photographs from the set of Variety, which also became an exhibition. The book becomes a curious extension of the film, a tangible version of Variety: “My camera and her camera are very similar,” says Gordon, “but the process is very different.”

When they did the book together, Gordon, always driven by narrative, wanted to follow the story of the film; but “that’s not what drives Nan at all. She is driven by images that tell a story.” Grouping the images together, Goldin makes them “follow a visual logic, not a narrative logic. The real collaboration was the movie. It was Nan as a character, Nan as a force. Nan inviting me into her world, me inviting her into mine and the crossover between my lens and her lens.”

Though it is now the subject of many a beautiful essay by feminist cinephiles and screening regularly at film festivals worldwide, the film was originally received “with cheers and boos”. It premiered at the Director’s Fortnight strand in Cannes. The festival wouldn’t accept a 16mm print, so they had to blow it up to 35mm. This and the filmmakers’ trip was paid for by the New York premiere – they rented out Variety Cinema for a whole weekend to show Variety the Movie (“there were lines around the block!”) – and some money producer Renée Shafransky borrowed from a bookie she knew who sold lottery tickets for off-track betting.

“It was a controversial film from the start, more in America than in Europe,” recalls Gordon, trying to pinpoint what exactly riled up people so much. “The most disturbing thing to people was that the ending didn’t provide a conclusion.” Variety ends on a shot of a dark, empty street, the character’s fate left unknown: “Between female desire, which is what the film is about, and gratification lies an empty space, and that space is full of possibilities.”

Ena Sendijarević’s penchant for the idiosyncratic and absurd continues with her second feature, a thoroughly enjoyable period piece that deals with complex colonial dynamics without ever succumbing to oversimplification. Following her highly stylised and similarly offbeat feature debut, Take Me Somewhere Nice, the Bosnian-Dutch director now trains her eye on a remote Indonesian island in 1900 and the waning influence of the Dutch colonial regime.

The subject here concerns a composite of various people, rather than any particular historical figures. Dutch plantation and factory owners Jan (Hans Dagelet) and Agathe sit comfortably at the top of the food chain, and despite the fact that the native workers have been striking for over a year, the pair enjoy a lavish lifestyle in a bawdy colonial home that sticks out like a sore thumb amidst the island’s luscious nature.

We take it that their aloof housekeeper Siti (Hayati Azis), a complex, mysterious character through which the work’s more poignant symbolism is expressed, has been habitually subjected to the Dutch patriarch’s urges, as it’s a secret to no one in the vicinity that Jan is the father to her young son, Karel.

When Jan returns to his and Agathe’s bedroom after his nightly visit to Siti and shows obvious signs of struggling to breathe, Agathe takes the matter into her own hands and… does absolutely nothing about it. The day following her husband’s death, she writes to her son Cornelis (Florian Myjer) to give him some good news (“your father has died”) and some bad news (“you need to come quickly or the sugar factory will have to close”), and to threaten him by withholding his allowance if he does not make haste.

Cornelis and his very heavily pregnant wife Josefien (Lisa Zweerman) then embark on the long journey. When it’s revealed that Jan’s will names an unexpected heir to his estate, a demented game of cat and mouse ensues, heightened by an effective use of classical music and grandiose string arrangements that make the colonists’ schemes seem all the more farcical.

Cinematographer Emo Weemhoff along with production designer Myrte Beltman, who also collaborated with Sendijarević on her feature debut, create a gorgeous mood dominated by vibrant and muted colours alike. Deep browns and burnt ochres are illuminated by lamplight in the workers’ quarters and the factory, while jarring shades of red and emerald adorn the interiors of the colonial home. This is a self-contained microcosm replete with great attention to detail.

Sweet Dreams is gorgeously shot, masterfully composed and tightly framed within an Academy aspect ratio, its stylised storytelling never ceasing to captivate. Comparisons to films like The Favourite and last year’s Corsage are inevitable – these films have a great deal in common and sit neatly in the pantheon of great offbeat period pieces.