Last year, the runaway success story at a Toronto International Film Festival light on headline-making deals was How to Blow Up a Pipeline, a politically daring, ideologically uncompromised, and gratuitously entertaining thriller that secured a splashy distribution buy from Neon. Those not on site instantly started clamoring for a look of their own at the rare film that appeared to be worthy of its reputation as edgy, and after months of radio silence, they’re soon to get it.

Neon has just shared the first trailer for How to Blow Up a Pipeline, the sophomore feature from Cam director Daniel Goldhaber. (Cam’s co-creator Isa Mazzei is credited as a producer on the latest; on Pipeline, Goldhaber shares film-by honors with writer-producer-star Ariela Barer, co-writer Jordan Sjol, and editor Dan Garber, all of whom sat for an interview on activist cinema in our recent All the Beauty and the Bloodshed issue). Adapted into a fiction narrative from Andreas Malm’s controversy-stirring theory book of the same name, it raises some salient points about our collective responsibility to our planet, and the rationales for destruction implied therein. The time to do something has come.

The ticking-clock film tracks the tense planning and hair-trigger execution of a plan to safely, ethically destroy a length of oil transport pipe in west Texas, carried out by a cross-cultural coalition of alienated, principled subversives each with their own reasons to strike back against Big Energy. As they race to carry out their multi-front operation, flashbacks reveal the origin stories bringing them to these extreme measures, joining to form a cross-section of resentment for the institutions that exploit and capitalize on the suffering of powerless individuals.

Little White Lies’ own Mark Asch had plenty of good things to say about the film out of its TIFF premiere, praising the way it “channels the urgent fury, righteous impatience, confrontational attitude and pragmatic directness of the rising generation of climate activists.” In his review, he wrote: “A frankly rousing action movie, and an ultimately quite idealistic political screed, How to Blow Up a Pipeline seems primed to resonate with viewers who feel not just powerless to change the system, but powerless to even meaningfully change their own consumption patterns to live more ethically. This film won’t change the world, but it’s a romantic and hardly outrageous consideration of what it might mean to really try.”

Hard-wiring the strident intellectual foundations of La Chinoise to the ample heist-picture pleasures of Ocean’s 11, this raised fist of a film has already secured its position as one of 2023’s major releases. That it’s going to play in neighborhood cineplexes feels like a coup unto itself.

How to Blow Up a Pipeline comes to US cinemas on 7 April. A date for the UK is expected to be set for the spring as well.

Hong Sang-soo‘s vision may be deteriorating, but he intends on squeezing as much work out of his remaining years of sight as he possibly can. Today brings the first trailer for his next film Walk Up, another slice of quotidian life shot in digital black and white as quiet scenes of everyday doings open up to reveal deep wellsprings of choked emotion. It’s business as usual for Hong, and that’s welcome news to his limited yet passionately dedicated fandom.

The drama gradually works its way through the various floors of a mixed-use apartment building, from the office in the basement, up through the restaurant on the ground floor,  a cooking class space, a private residence, and an artist’s studio on the top. On a quiet, sunny afternoon, a filmmaker named Byungsoo (Kwon Haehyo) explores the various units as his daughter runs out to pick up more soju, finding a funhouse of regret, frustration, aspiration, and introspection.

Little White Lies’ own Weiting Liu covered Walk Up at last year’s New York Film Festival, praising the “chiaroscuro of light and shadow” that “captures the ambiguity of friendship and romance.” In her admiring review — pull-quoted in the very trailer embedded below — she wrote, “Hong takes a minimalistic, expressionistic approach to maneuvering space and time within the building. Combined with precise cinematography that accentuates its architectural varieties, his seamless edits piece together Byungsoo’s scattered life as a struggling artist and serial dater. The result is a grayscale scroll unfolding upwards on screen – and Byungsoo failing upwards in his personal and professional life.”

As one of the most pathologically prolific figures on the global arthouse circuit, Hong’s got multiple irons in the fire at any given time, Walk Up being just one. Since its world premiere at last year’s Berlinale, his roman à clef The Novelist’s Film has yet to see a proper theatrical run beyond scant engagements here and there, and no widely accessible video or streaming release to speak of; at this year’s Berlinale, he unveiled his latest work In Water, an entire film Hong chose to shoot slightly out of focus to mimic his fading eyesight.

While those outside of Hong’s following may bristle at his work as insular or repetitive, his extensive and consistent filmography also allows his faithful to finely track the various developments in his personal life through their onscreen analogues. (At the risk of signing myself up for public-enemy status from two fandoms, he’s a bit like Taylor Swift in this respect.) As the “Hong Sang-soo Multiverse” season at Lincoln Center last spring previously posited, all of the master’s films continue to develop a cohesive, lucid narrative of an artist endlessly wrestling with himself. We’re just lucky to have ringside seats.

Walk Up opens in the US on 24 March. A date for the UK has yet to be set.

It’s uncommon but not unheard of for a director to premiere two feature films in the space of a calendar year, but in the United States, Guy Ritchie‘s going to do the likes of Hong Sang-soo one better by releasing new films in consecutive months. Operation Fortune (which was supposed to be out in 2022, but was held due to studio anxieties about running a movie featuring Ukrainian villains while the country was under siege by Russia) is going to be in American cinemas come March, and a thriller in the midst of a different war will be along shortly afterward in April.

The first trailer for The Covenant arrived online today, putting Ritchie in a more straight-faced tone than we’ve seen from his recent string of laddish gangster pictures and IP jobs. Situating a fictional tale of heroism and revenge during the US occupation of Afghanistan, he strikes a political note not so familiar to his filmography of action-comedies safely ensconced within their genre.

Jake Gyllenhaal portrays Sgt. John Kinley, a soldier in the military’s anti-Taliban effort who narrowly survives an attack from enemy combatants, his life saved by the intervention of Afghan interpreter Ahmed (Dar Salim). He carries the wounded troop across miles of desert back to safety, but upon returning home to his wife (Emily Beecham), John then learns Ahmed has not been granted safe passage to America as promised for his service. A one-man extraction mission is his only hope, and John has a debt to pay.

As is the case with much of the Ritchie oeuvre, this is guy stuff, its focus on macho themes of honor, vengeance, and duty time-honored in the war-picture tradition. But as much as he’s placed himself in his own wheelhouse, it seems Ritchie’s also veered into testy territory in terms of subject matter, opening himself up to critiques about his film’s unavoidable stance-taking on race and international relations.

But because this is a Guy Ritchie film, the real draw is the gunplay and explosions, the butch melodrama in the character work balanced out with raw testosterone in the elaborately choreographed fight sequences. In between all his Taliban-smashing, Gyllenhaal even gets to do the tough-guy thing of running away from a detonation without looking behind him, every actor’s greatest dream.

The Covenant comes to cinemas in the US on 21 April. A date for the UK has yet to be set.

Even though we all have to do it, there’s no humiliation quite so acute as going through puberty, that magical time when rampant hormones and unexpected bodily changes render us unrecognizable to ourselves as we’re thrust into life’s first identity crisis. Trying on different personae, flitting around social groups at school, reckoning with the Cronenbergian horrors taking place between one’s legs — it’s such stuff as cringe comedy gold is made of.

Square one for this proud tradition of embarrassment is Judy Blume’s seminal coming-of-age novel Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, a widely-read classic the author has carefully guarded from generations of filmmakers hoping to adapt it. Until, that is, The Edge of Seventeen director Kelly Fremon Craig brought an impassioned pitch that Blume couldn’t deny, her from-the-heart earnestness evident in the first trailer posted just this morning.

Abby Ryder Fortson leads as plucky Margaret Simon, a sixth-grader uprooted from her life in New York as her family — goyische mom Rachel McAdams, Jewish dad Benny Safdie, and grandma Kathy Bates — relocate to suburban New Jersey in the summer of 1970. As she considers her split religious heritage, she and her gaggle of new friends go through such timeless milestones of early adulthood as mortifying sexual-health presentations at school, crushes on a carousel of interchangeably gangly boys, and the momentous purchase of the first training bra.

All the while, the adults have their own baggage to unpack: Mom’s in over her head with all the volunteer positions she’s taken just to fit in, Dad’s a lifelong city mouse suddenly forced to operate a lawnmower, and Grandma’s grieving her recently departed husband while looking for a renewed sense of purpose in life. Teenagers may believe that all of existence is conspiring against them, but at any age, we’re all still in a perpetual state of going-through-it-ness.

Ultimately, the trailer posits this take on Blume’s prose as a wholesome salute to girlhood in all its messy wonder, celebrating the humor and inner strength along with the awkward discomfort. A world premiere is soon to come at the Sundance Film Festival prior to a theatrical run later this year, at which time another wave of girls will experience the eternal story for the first time in a new form — and, one hopes, seek out the novel that inspired it.

Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret comes to cinemas in the UK and US on 28 April, 2023. 

Just as everyone prepares to tie a final ribbon on their personal list of 2022’s top films, already the process of compiling a watchlist for 2023 has begun. Today brings the first look at what’s sure to be one of next year’s standouts, and with it a reminder that despite the deluge of well-reviewed awards horses in the fall, the supposed dead zone of early spring also has a bounty of superb if less on-the-radar releases.

Kelly Reichardt‘s new feature Showing Up may have gotten a premiere slot at the tail end of last year’s Cannes Film Festival and cold-shouldered for any awards recognition from the jury, but the uniformly glowing reviews still marked the comedy as one to watch while it awaited a theatrical run. With the trailer uploaded by US distributor A24 this morning, the general public can start to see why its feather-light sense of humor and deeply accurate low-stakes frustrations have already won over a faction of ardent supporters.

Michelle Williams, star of such Reichardt films as Meek’s Cutoff and Wendy and Lucy, rejoins her trusty collaborator to portray artist Lizzy, a sculptor keeping her bills paid with work at a small arts college in Oregon. As she prepares for a show of her work that she hopes will put her one step closer to success, she must contend with a deadbeat landlord (Hong Chau) who won’t fix the hot water, her family of fellow artists at various degrees of eccentricity (including John Magaro and Judd Hirsch), the unexpected arrival of a cat she must care for, and a half-dozen other little crises. From this sedate sort of chaos — in this chilled-out pocket of the Pacific Northwest, perambulating about a field counts as a class — she finds inspiration for her own vision.

At the Cannes bow, LWL’s own Caitlin Quinlan praised the “levity and incisiveness” of Reichardt’s art-world satire. In her review, she wrote: “Showing Up is perhaps Reichardt’s funniest film to date, closest in tone and style to something like Old Joy, her second feature length, in its candid simplicity and dryly comic matter-of-factness. It’s also perhaps the closest to being an autobiographical project in her oeuvre, in the sense that Reichardt is both filmmaker and teacher within a university space and seems astutely aware here of the dynamic that pervades such a lifestyle.”

Reichardt gets at the small indignities in the life of a not-quite-starving artist, one who must still lug her own equipment around and shower at work and deal with the same insecure pettiness as anyone else in her field. The rare work about an artist not framing the subject as a genius, it’s a gem worth looking forward to as we soldier through the cold months to come.

Showing Up will come to cinemas in the UK and US in 2023.

With yesterday’s announcement of the Sundance Film Festival program comes the annual scrum for attention, as dozens of studios and sales agents race to drum up buzz for their titles prior to everyone’s arrival in Park City. One such on-the-radar selection is Infinity Pool, the new psycho-thriller from Brandon Cronenberg, which has already beaten the rush by rolling out its first trailer before the rest of the Sundance deluge.

The writer and director of the fiendish Possessor has readied another work of skin-crawling body horror, specifically rooted in the existential terror and titillation of finding one’s consciousness inhabiting an unfamiliar form. And it arrives at a surprisingly on-trend moment, set at a picturesque resort masking the moral grotesquerie of the wealthy, putting a darker spin on the same themes as Palme d’Or winner Triangle of Sadness or TV’s The White Lotus.

Alexander Skarsgård stars as James, a struggling writer come to bask in some adoration with a visit to his fan club, led by the enigmatic Gabi (Mia Goth, on a roll these days). He and wife Em (Cleopatra Coleman) are enjoying the resort and respect until one out-of-control night results in an accidental death that James, due to some rather draconian legal codes, must pay for with his own life — unless, that is, he’s willing to spend the money to have himself cloned and the double executed in his place.

As he takes this ominous deal, a seamy underbelly of indulgence and degeneracy is revealed beneath the placid surfaces of the resort, as violence and sex commingle in frightful new forms of private entertainment. Cronenberg has proven himself a distinctive enough filmmaker that he should be free from constant comparisons to his father David, but it’s hard not to see the connection to the recent Crimes of the Future, in which spectators also gathered to take in frightful spectacles of flesh and blood.

The film has been slated for a world premiere in Sundance’s Midnight section, which will hopefully give way to a theatrical run shocking some perverted life into the American spring movie calendar. (The Canadian debut has already been set for 27 January, though a UK distributor has yet to purchase the rights.) But with international press flooding Utah for the first look soon enough, we’ll see what nasty tricks Cronenberg has up his sleeve — though we’ll have to wait for the first round of interviews to find out what material had to be excised to get the film down from an NC-17 to an R.

It’s a hundred-million-dollar project, reserved for the releasing studio’s late-in-the-year awards slot and featuring two of today’s biggest-named talents in the leading roles. But Noah Baumbach‘s latest film White Noise, despite a starry cast including Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig, is closer to an anti-blockbuster than anything else; rather than offering big-screen popcorn excitement, it instead presents hyper-cerebral thought experiments fueled by anxiety, paranoia, and fear of death. The movies!

Today brings the first proper trailer for White Noise, and with it a taste of Baumbach’s vibrant, surreal, slavishly loyal interpretation of novelist Don DeLillo’s source prose. We’re ushered into a world saturated by brand names and divorced from authentic experience, where grocery shopping and graduate-seminar lectures numb us to the howling existential terror that stares us straight in the face daily — a world, as it turns out, on the brink of a highly conceptual apocalypse.

Professor Jack Gladney (Adam Driver), his wife Babette (Greta Gerwig), and their brood of children from an assortment of marriages (most notably including Vox Lux star Raffey Cassidy) must flee their home and way of life in the wake of a train crash that looses polluting chemicals into the atmosphere, referred to as the Airborne Toxic Event. As they scramble to whatever semblance of safety they might be able to find, reality itself starts to break down around them, the dividing line between ideas and real things blurring until it vanishes completely.

At the film’s Venice premiere, our critic on the scene Hannah Strong was stricken by Baumbach’s refreshing approach to DeLillo’s eternal themes of postmodernist dread. In her review, she wrote that “…the overarching theme of White Noise – an anxiety around one’s own mortality and the looming spectre of death – is familiar territory for Baumbach, as is the psyche of the middle-aged middle-class white protagonist. The success of Marriage Story has granted him a handsome budget care of Netflix, and White Noise represents his most ambitious project in both scale and providence.”

After the consumerist feeding frenzy of the Christmas season, Baumbach and DeLillo’s joint meditation on the corrosive forces of commercialism will have an especially sharpened bite. As we all cherish our new toys and playthings accrued during this December, let us stop a take a moment to consider whether our attachment to trademarks and plastic has estranged us from our truest human nature, and whether we’re all heading for a manmade armageddon the likes of which we can scarcely comprehend. Happy holidays to us all.

White Noise comes to select cinemas in the US on 25 November, then select cinemas in the UK on 2 December, and then to Netflix worldwide on 30 December.

Between the persisting pandemic, the hyperspeed death of Twitter, the annual return of the cold, and the constant political shake-ups that only seem to leave us worse off than before, global morale is at an all-time low. We need a hero, someone to inspire the public and remind us all of what makes life such a rich, spiritually nourishing journey. Luckily, Warner Bros. has put their best man on the job — yes, Magic Mike has returned.

Today brings the first trailer for Magic Mike’s Last Dance, the third and seemingly final installment of the male-stripper saga last amended with 2015’s superlative Magic Mike XXL. With the first film’s director Steven Soderbergh now back at the helm, the multi-part meditation on capital, performance, pleasure, and gender can be completed at long last. Also, there will be abs.

The spot below finds Channing Tatum‘s dancer extraordinaire Mike on his own, his cohort of lovable lunkheads — Joe Manganiello’s well-hung Richie, Gabriel Iglesias’ cut-up Tobias, the gang — nowhere to be found. He’s instead gone solo to pursue Salma Hayek overseas to London, where she’s giving him one last shot, both at love as well as the perfect stage show with an all-new cast of gyration experts.

From the looks of it, Soderbergh has embraced this unlikely franchise’s roots in the classic musical film to a greater extent than ever, one glimpse of a dance number on a double-decker bus suggesting another quotidian showstopper in the vein of the immortal “I Want It That Way” convenience store set piece. If Tatum feels that the connection to his idol Gene Kelly has not yet been fully cemented, taking to the UK for his An American in Paris could very well do the trick.

The film will arrive just in time for Valentine’s Day, restoring desire and romance to a world benumbed by months of cruel winter. For are we not all of us just bachelors looking for a partner, someone who knows how to ride without even falling off? Blessings be.

Magic Mike’s Last Dance comes to cinemas in the UK and US on 10 February, 2023.

The general premise of Darren Aronofsky‘s new film The Whale has been known for a while, the news that Brendan Fraser would portray a six-hundred-pound shut-in the earliest thing anyone heard about the still-gestating project. Some felt immediate misgivings about the subject material and its pairing with Aronofsky; others began to have their doubts when the first still depicting the heavily prosthetic-laden Fraser appeared online. Perhaps that will change upon seeing the trailer, released just this morning.

The polarizing psychodrama expends a lot of effort upending the assumptions baked into its own setup, a process that begins with the brief spot below. Seeing a transformed Fraser (inside and out) in action conveys something impossible to perceive from a photo, the gentle searching in his wet eyes alone telegraphing an empathy crucial to the functioning of this risky, potentially alienating character piece.

Fraser portrays Charlie, a suicidally depressed recluse introduced masturbating himself to the brink of a heart attack, his ventricles under as much strain as a soul carrying around years of grief and regret. As he mourns a past tragedy, he’s visited by a nurse (Hong Chau) urging him to take care of himself, a missionary (Ty Simpkins) trying to get him into heaven, and the long-estranged daughter (Sadie Sink) releasing a lifetime of built-up bile.

As expected, the film has drawn strong reactions in the positive and negative, though our own Hannah Strong was left with an ambivalent sort of admiration. In her review from the premiere at Venice, she wrote: “Aronofsky isn’t a particularly empathetic filmmaker (at times his work feels cruel, such as Requiem for a Dream) and there’s an austerity to the staging of The Whale, in the darkness of Charlie’s apartment and the harsh strings of Rob Simonsen’s score, but these pair well with the softness and occasional wry humour of Fraser’s performance, to create a film that – while not without flaws – reflects tenderly on shame, guilt, and the human impulse to care and be cared for.”

Aside from showing us the soft, vulnerable face of the made-up Fraser, the trailer doesn’t give viewers much to judge from, preferring whispery voiceover and beatific close-ups of the characters to anything that actually happens in the film. For more timid viewers, that could be the wisest course of action; though Fraser’s been tipped as a frontrunner in the Oscar race, there’s a lot of harsh, upsetting material liable to rankle the sensibilities. That’s the Aronofsky promise, after all.

The Whale comes to cinemas in the US on 9 December, and then to the UK on 3 February, 2023.

A couple years ago, somewhat lost in the shuffle as the entertainment industry reorganized itself around digital releasing during the first months of the pandemic, Sean Durkin‘s film The Nest offered a curious inflection on the horror film. The story of a deteriorating family took place in a cavernous English country mansion rich in menacing atmosphere, like a haunted house picture in which the ghosts are strictly metaphorical, the regrets of the past every bit as ominous as any phantom.

It was a clever and unsettling tack, its efficacy now re-proven by Johanna Hogg‘s latest film The Eternal Daughter, which likewise places a fraught familial drama in a handsome manor coursing with an ambient malevolent energy bordering on the supernatural. In the first trailer released today, distributor A24 sells it as a sort of non-horror movie, all eerie vibes with none of the messy bloodletting.

Though the grabbier focal point may be Tilda Swinton‘s double performance in the lead role, occupying almost the entirety of a film peopled by a scant number of additional characters. She plays the Julie character introduced as a Hogg stand-in for her Souvenir diptych of quasi-memoir films, now an adult woman with a career in place, as well as Julie’s fussy aging mother Rosalind. During what’s supposed to be a leisure outing to this beautiful locale, resentments and unfulfilled hopes bubble to the surface like so many specters, adding a Vertigo-ish air (reinforced by all the radioactive-looking green light) to their excavation of old feelings.

In her first-look review from the world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, our critic on the scene Catherine Bray was impressed with Hogg’s resourceful methods, writing: “The ability to effectively trap digital ghosts in our devices, as part of a longing to preserve some sense of connection, sits at the foremost frontier of modern anxieties about death and what we leave behind, while the double casting of Swinton underlines the fact that having children used to be the only way that we could leave behind partial copies of ourselves. There are as many potential ways to approach a parent-child relationship onscreen as there are parent-child relationships on the planet, but Hogg may have just discovered a new one.”

Hogg spent her two previous films in a state of unsparing introspection, breaking down the naïveté and privilege enjoyed by her younger self, but the director has opened her inquiries up with her latest work, focused now on how she fits into a longer continuum of yearning that stretches through generations. For viewers in the States this December, it’s the perfect wintertime watch, cozy in its luxe-holiday setting and frosty in its emotional outlay.

The Eternal Daughter comes to cinemas in the US on 2 December. A date for the UK has yet to be set.