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(London Film Festival, October 11th, 2018, Odeon Cinema, 20:45) "Mandy" Pacific Northwest. 1983 AD. Outsiders Red Miller (Nicolas Cage) and Mandy Bloom (Andrea Riseborough) lead a loving and peaceful existence. When their pine-scented haven is savagely destroyed by a cult led by the sadistic Jeremiah Sand (Linus Roache), Red is catapulted into a phantasmagoric journey filled with bloody vengeance and laced with fire. In a mountain-cabin idyll, lumberjack Red Miller lives in perfect harmony with his great love Mandy But the couple’s blissful utopia is cruelly shattered when a ragtag band of Satanic cultists invade their humble abode and claim Mandy for their own. And when this telekinetic bikie messiah Jeremiah tasks his dedicated followers with kidnapping Mandy, Red is spurred into frenzied action as he seeks retribution against 'Tthe Children Of The New Dawn'. Traumatised and distraught, Red is left with no option but to exact a bloody revenge. In his remarkable follow-up to cult hit 'Beyond The Black Rainbow', Panos Cosmatos gleefully demonstrates an audacious command of tone and atmosphere, conjuring an ethereal treat for the senses that begs to be seen on the big screen. Anyone who saw Cosmatos extraordinary debut, will know that describing his work is no mean feat. With "Mandy", he has once again crafted a film so singular, perverse and beguiling, it’s almost impossible to define. Awash in a sea of gloriously unhinged performances, carnage, lumberjack skills, and general sights and sounds, Cosmatos grinds up beloved genre tropes into a fine pulp and sculpts them into something altogether otherworldly and unforgettable. "Mandy" is a piece of naive art. A muscle memory evocation of revenge. The film deals with feelings of regret and guilt, with letting go of things we can never change. "Mandy" is about the feelings of rage and helplessness that followed. The film creates a very controlled and defined universe. If "Beyond The Black Rainbow" was an inhale, then "Mandy" is an exhale. Allows more of aesthetic fetishes and passions and personality to bloom more vividly within it's framework. Think of the most exquisitely nightmarish LSD trip imaginable, then multiply it by ten. That might give you some idea.

(Release Info London schedule; September 24th, 2018, Genesis Cinema, 19:30) "Skate Kitchen" Camille (Rachelle Vinberg) is an introverted teenage skateboarder from 'Long Island', meets and befriends an all-girl, New York City-based skateboarding crew called 'Skate Kitchen'. She falls in with the in-crowd, has a falling-out with her mother Lana (Elizabeth Rodriguez), and falls for mysterious skateboarder Jared (Jaden Smith), but a relationship with him proves to be trickier to navigate than a kickflip. It’s 2018 and never a more fitting time for a film that has been masterfully adapted from a popular Instagram account. Crystal Moselle’s "Skate Kitchen" is the groundbreaking story about a group of badass young women. Camille lives on 'Long Island' and spends most of her days skateboarding alone. When Camille injures herself skateboarding, her mum bans her from ever skating again. But skating is everything to Camille. But the pull is too strong and, after discovering 'The Skate Kitchen' on 'Instagram', Camille heads to New York City, board in hand. Seeing that the crew she follows on 'Instagram' are going to be at a 'Lower East Side Skate Park', she's there in a heartbeat, and not only proves her ability but quickly fits in with everyone. The diverse, staunchly independent group skate together and discuss life in bedroom hangouts, all the while carving out their own unique space at the park. There, the women quickly adopt her as their own and, before she knows it, she's living her dream skating and partying with her very own crew. But Camille comes to understand the complexities of the group dynamic when she befriends a boy from a rival group of skaters. When Jared attracts Camille’s attention, things get complicated in the group, and she finds herself in a male world, sleeping on a sofa while guys at the other end of the room flick between nature docos, skate videos and porn. "Skate Kitchen" is a real skateboarding collective, and the cast are real skateboarders. The girls are incredible actresses, and they've taken on these personas that are inspired by their own selves. That's a contrived storyline. The girls are all friends and they all hang out together. The boys are all friends. Everybody in the film is friends with each other. There's this kid Alex, he's like the honorary 'Skate Kitchen' boy. He's in the film as Charlie. The film hirings him as a cultural interpreter, because he literally sit and helps the skateboarders with their skater accent. They all have the craziest slang that nobody knows besides them. It's feels authentic to their world and the way they talk and stuff. All the locations are the actual places that they skateboard. It's a film about freedom and friendship, in which the real-life skaters play versions of themselves. This film is about a group of skateboarders in New York City that empowers people to skateboard. It's an authentic take on one young woman’s road to self-discovery as she learns the importance of female friendship and doing what you love. It's especially inspiring for women because it's pretty intimidating to get out in the park and actually learn. Because when you're learning you fall a lot, and it's inspiring to see these girls that just don't give a fuck and do their own thing. Also, they're not your traditional skateboarder chicks, not all of them are tomboys. They're very diverse, which is very cool. They're really just super open-minded. They're not mean girls at all, which to me is probably the coolest thing about them. The film hits a new stage with women where women are here to support each other rather than compete with each other. There's really not a competitive aspect of their world. There's is, because of the skateboarding, and every sport is to some extent. But, they're there to support each other.   There's darkness hanging around the edges of the film, but, while it does owe Larry Clark’s NYC classic a shoutout, this is definitely not Kids. The film’s best scenes, which resonate proudly with a sense of community and camaraderie, are when the crew are skating. The camera moves fluidly with the group as they take Manhattan, while Moselle’s documentary eye gives the film its grounded, observational realism. The film combines poetic, atmospheric filmmaking and hypnotic skating sequences. "Skate Kitchen" precisely captures the experience of women in male-dominated spaces and tells a story of a girl who learns the importance of camaraderie and self-discovery. Social media is something that's really big in their lives, and that's how they communicate with the skate world, and how they communicate with each other. It's a big part of bringing their world together. They're commenting on each other's clips and now that they've 'Skate Kitchen', which has a ton of followers. So they build their online presence, and they've a really huge community of people that follow them and everything they do. So, it's an important aspect of the film to include the world of 'Instagram'.

(Release Info London schedule; October 5th, 2018, Cineworld, Leicester Square) "Blindspotting" Collin (Daveed Diggs) must make it through his final three days of probation for a chance at a new beginning. He and his troublemaking childhood best friend, Miles (Rafael Casal), work as movers, and when Collin witnesses a police shooting, the two men’s friendship is tested as they grapple with identity and their changed realities in the rapidly-gentrifying neighborhood they grew up in. Collin and Miles are guys we know from the community, guys people probably know from their communities. We knew their voices because it’s a part of Oakland. The film sets out to forge a world that feels viscerally real, but where the most private thoughts and intense feelings can suddenly spill over into lyrical poetic meter. Following in the slam poetry tradition, the film is unflinching when it becomes confrontational. Yet that shift is also part of the point. Collin and Miles are laughing and ribbing with each other right up until the moment they hit a nerve of unspoken truth that has to be reckoned with. It's about putting our preconceived notions about other people, friends as much as foes, up for interrogation. The movie isn’t about the wide divide between black and white, it’s about the incredibly narrow divide between two people who grew up in the same circumstances with the same hostilities, attitudes and ideologies surrounding them, but one is black and one is white and they've to walk through the world differently. It’s not a canyon between them, it’s a hair splinter between them. But what’s a minor distance for Miles is cavernous for Collin. On the surface they’ve had a lot of the same experiences growing up in Oakland but inside they’ve learned very, very different things about the world. Collin, the parolee aiming at starting again as a free man if he can just hold it together for 3 more days, and mischief-making Miles, a wild card whose unpredictability threatens to blow up Collin’s chances. That Collin is black and Miles is working-class white allows them to dig deeper into the oft-unseen reality of everyday racial tensions. These tensions, which often go unremarked upon in daily life, become the underpinning of a story that also tackles more visible divides between police and African-American communities, between wealthy and blue-collar, between the way things were and the way things could potentially be. Underlining the differing stakes for the two friends, the story kicks off with Collin witnessing a police shooting just when he’s doing all he can to avoid the police, an even that not only imperils his parole but also haunts him. Collin drives away, but he can’t let it go. The guilt, confusion and anger at the disproportionate impact on the black community set off a slow-burning fuse inside Collin that will ultimately lead to a reckoning both with Miles and with his own bottled fury. There’s been ongoing police brutality in Oakland since before the 60s. Before Collin even sees a man get killed, he’s so used to the idea of police violence it feels normal to him. The fact of it doesn’t surprise him, it’s the personal way it hits him that surprises him. But he knows the history. And while Miles, as a white kid who grew up in a black and brown neighborhood is just as in tune with those hostilities, at the end of the day it just doesn’t affect him in the same way. Collin has grown up in a community of color so the idea of lots of white people moving into his neighborhood feels colonizing to him in a way it wouldn’t for Miles. Miles feels like his identity is being stripped from him, but Collin feels like his whole world is being undone. Miles is a poor white person and the system is not particularly sympathetic towards him either. But Collin has to fear a bigger monster and has always had to keep himself in line in a different way. The 9-minute climactic confrontation scene with two cameras is a single take all the way through, capturing the explosive back-and-forth between Collin and Miles in real time. Collin’s dream sequence looks like a modern music video, replete with flashing colors, choreography, and dollying cameras, while employing theater tech to time everything perfectly. The trick is to make it feel like it’s organically coming out of the drama. The pair carefully let the mechanism of inserting rhymes evolve in the film, so that the audience would go with the flow. The first time we hear Collin rap, it’s very literal. But as it goes on, it gets more subtle and you’re not entirely sure how much of it's in his head and how much is real, which is purposeful. Meanwhile when Miles gets his hustle on by selling junk left behind in for-sale houses, he displays his own talent for bombastic rhymes. Miles speaks in a slang-driven speech pattern that has dominated street culture in Oakland since the ‘70s, derived from pimp culture. This same braggadocious demeanor makes it's way into music and trickled down into the basic vernacular of the region. Val (Janina Gavankar) is Collin’s skeptical ex-girlfriend and co-worker, who wants Collin to demonstrate that he’s really changed since he returned home from prison. Ashley (Jasmine Cephas Jones) is Miles sharp girlfriend, who pushes him to be a better role model for their son. Molina (Ethan Embry) is the police officer Collin witnesses shoot an unarmed man. Rin (Utkarsh Ambudkar) is a local who has a riveting story to tell about Collin’s past, and young Sean (Ziggy Baitanger) is Miles and Ashley’s son, who absorbs so much of his environment. This is a story about a man trying to stay out of trouble for just three days in a rapidly changing, and charged, Oakland, "Blindspotting" walks a tightrope. From it's hilarious but hellaciously tense opening moments, the film pulses to the vibrant beat and energy of Oakland, yet bristles with urban fury and fears that can explode at any moment. From that incendiary mix of opposites comes something unexpected. The film is an excavation of race, class and manhood, and a rap-fueled story that at times busts out into its own rhymes. But more than all of that, "Blindspotting" is a reminder of what we miss when we look at one another without seeing the full picture. It's a timely and wildly entertaining story about the intersection of race and class set against the backdrop of a rapidly gentrifying Oakland. Bursting with energy, style, and humor, and infused with the spirit of rap, hip hop, and spoken word, "Blindspotting" is a provocative hometown love letter that glistens with humanity. When you talk about race in a movie it’s best to recognize that you’re not an authority on the subject. Set on the sunny, Eastern side of the San Francisco Bay, Oakland is a city that's right now experiencing seismic shifts. In the ‘40s and ‘50s it was renowned as 'The Harlem Of The West', a hotspot of booming African-American businesses and culture. But historical patterns of segregation and cycles of poverty took their toll. Amid the turbulence and civil rights movement of the ‘60s, Oakland became the epicenter of 'The Black Power' movement and 'Black Panther Party', and forged a progressive community spirit that would set the city on it's own course, unique in 'The United States'. Today it is one of the most diverse places in America, with a mosaic of white, black, Hispanic and Asian residents. Yet the new Oakland, the increasingly gentrified, high-rent Oakland, with it's hipster hangouts, vegan food trucks and high-toned art galleries, has not come without controversy or a high cost on long-established neighborhoods, traditions and social life. So is Oakland losing it's beautiful soul or finding new ways of bringing people together? That’s one of several core questions the film raises for audiences to debate. "Blindspotting" sees two Oaklands, one city steeped in a long, complicated history of oppression and defiance and another city of young newcomers forming atop the old one. For those who've long called it home, the fear is that if the town’s history is buried or ignored by the changes, it could cut off a community from it's most sustaining roots. An essential branch of those roots is the story of 'The Black Panther Party' (BPP), a group that emerged out of Oakland in 1966 to become a flashpoint in the national fight for civil rights. Though renown for their black leather jackets, dark berets and 'Black Power' ideology, the group’s impact went much further. They also helped to forge and nurture a sense of unbreakable community in Oakland that impacts every native for several generations. Everybody coming of age now in Oakland was raised on a well-balanced diet of historical context and that includes what 'The Black Panthers' did for the community and what happened to 'The Black Panthers', which led to a lot of distrust of the government but also an inclination towards progressivism, protest and community action. It might have been half a century ago, but the circumstances of the 'BPP’s' founding remain hauntingly familiar. Two young students at 'Oakland’s Merritt College', Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, formed the group for one reason; to help protect the black community from the police brutality and unequal treatment they saw devastating Oakland families. They chose the name 'Black Panther' because it's an animal that doesn’t strike first but will aggressively protect itself from attack. 'The BPP' embraced the incendiary idea of armed self-defense, which would soon bring them into violent conflict with the law. But that was just part of what they did. They also campaigned for full black employment, fair housing and access to healthcare and education. The 'BPP' became famed for their free breakfast program, which provided meals for impoverished Oakland youth. They ran free health education and sickle cell anemia testing programs, provided transportation for the elderly, conducted voter drives, sponsored candidates for office and monitored police stops long before the advent of video, let alone smart phones. Spreading across the nation, The 'BPP' was visible everywhere in the early 70s. But targeted by 'The FBI' and riven by shootouts with the police, controversial criminal charges as well as internal power struggles The 'BPP' began to collapse. More than 50 years after it's inception, debate still rages over 'The Black Panther Party' as a force in American history. But in Oakland, it's impact on the culture is undeniable. Oakland is a place of equal parts defiant grit and revelatory grace. The town changes so fast it makes our heads spin. Hipsters have invaded the boulevards, healthy foods and prices have hit the bodegas, and business is booming, but what's being erased in the process? "Blindspotting" becomes a tale of the two Oaklands, the old Oakland and the new Oakland, the white, working-class Oakland and the black Oakland, the slangy, arty, spirited Oakland and the violent, angry, rebellious Oakland, by exposing the hidden divides between two thick-as-thieves friends. The Oakland that the film depicts feels exhilaratingly specific and local. But also, it's a microcosm of what many American cities face in 2018; marked by youthful vitality, innovation and style to spare, but also reeling from the effects of inequity, unaffordable housing, gangs, crime, racial profiling, underemployment, police violence, structural injustice, and parents of color having to have the talk with their kids. "Blindspotting", traverses both sides of the morphing city, as some thrive and others scramble to stay afloat. The urban flows and word-play that are so woven into the fabric of Oakland culture had to be infused into the core of the script. After all, Oakland’s many paradoxes, as a city that can be sometimes playful, sometimes tragic, where ecstatic late-night dance parties and bloodshed are both part of the rolling cultural landscape, are a huge chunk of what make Collin and Miles who they're. A visceral sense of the city still hangs onto the legacies of it's historic past, while on the precipice of being remade, emanates from every frame of the film. The central hub of Oakland has just gone into this massive overhaul with an influx of people. With new people comes new perspectives, and with that, new commerce. But that turnover has felt violent, both economically and physically, to people who’ve lived there their whole lives, because they're suddenly treated very differently. Knowing where you’re from is so foundational for who you're as a human, and if that disappears, it might mean that you've no context anymore. Artists who are from Oakland are hell-bent on preserving our context, making sure there's an origin story. While N.Y.C. usually takes center stage in rap history, Oakland has long been a rap capital in it's own right, befitting the city’s history of urban artistry and social engagement. In fact a separate rap culture to the one on 'The East Coast' developed simultaneously in the city, drawing on a rich brew from Oakland’s soul and funk scenes of the past. Today, Oakland is home to a fittingly vast variety of styles, from alternative backpack rap to conscious rap, but much of it pays homage one way or another to the city’s long history of boldness and activism. In Oakland, music has always been a primary means for citizens, from all walks of life, to share their stories and express their realities. The film’s very title refers back to a scene in the film involving a common illusion; a picture that, at first, looks like a vase, but on second glance can instead look like two faces, if you shift your eyes in just the right way. "Blindspotting" is a potent metaphor not just for race relations but for all human communication. For all it's timely themes, and lens on how we perceive and sometimes blindly miss one another, "Blindspotting" is at it's heart a hometown adventure told through the friendship of two inseparable underdogs.

(London Film Festival, October 17th, 2018, ICA Cinema, 20:50) "Madeline’s Madeline" Madeline (Helena Howard) got the part! She’s going to play the lead in a theater piece! Except the lead wears sweatpants like Madeline’s. And has a cat like Madeline’s. And is holding a steaming hot iron next to her mother’s face, like Madeline is. Madeline has become an integral part of a prestigious physical theater troupe. When the workshop's ambitious director Evangeline (Molly Parker) pushes the teenager to weave her rich interior world and troubled history with her mother Regina (Miranda July) into their collective art, the lines between performance and reality begin to blur. The resulting battle between imagination and appropriation rips out of the rehearsal space and through all three women’s lives. Madeline is a biracial New Jersey teenager who wrestles with an often fraught relationship with her mother Regina. Madeline is deeply involved with an immersive, improvisatory theater production, whose director Evangeline becomes obsessed with her magnetic new star, and begins to adapt the production using personal revelations drawn from Madeline’s experiences. It’s obvious that Madeline is experiencing some sort of mental health issue, and dealing with things that are emotional and beyond anyone’s control but hers, and she doesn’t even know how to deal with it, and other people are trying to take control of her life. In any circumstance where it may seem like life, situations, and things are chaotic, it doesn’t help when people try to take control. You've to figure it out yourself. The film never labels a diagnosis for Madeline. As the audience, you get to put that in your own head. As life and art reflect and reframe each other, the film becomes a hallucinatory hall of mirrors; and a window into a consciousness in flux. Regina is a weird arty woman. She launched into a speech about fear, and how all of life is fear, and if you’re going to try to avoid it, why even do anything? She's a very erratic character. Early on, Regina developed a certain wariness around Madeline, which suited the testy, tug-of-war relationship between the film’s mother and daughter. Evangeline is a theater director who takes a close and complicated interest in Madeline. All these actors are in a troupe, in which the director is improvising a process to make a piece of work, and then becomes obsessed with this girl and write a piece about her. Evangeline is actually an incredibly loving, dedicated, compassionate woman who always makes ample and immediate time and space on set to discuss what's happening with cast and crew. There's a lot of processing people’s thoughts and feelings and politics. As a person who’s done loads of traditional film and television, to stop shooting for twenty minutes to make sure that everybody feels heard, it makes her kind of nervous. She’s whip smart. She can pull together a rap about what’s going on right in front of her in the moment, and it’s hilarious, brilliant, smart, cutting, witty. We're truly in a complicated life creating art situation. Set in contemporary New York City, and the volatile headspace of it's title character, the film explores the emotions, perceptions, and struggles of a brilliant and troubled young woman whose life becomes a performance. "Madeline’s Madeline" utilizes a welcome expressionistic approach that imbues her subjects with a vibrant sense of urgency. The film displays a rare sensitivity for capturing the messy struggles of discovering a sense of one's self that defies easy narrative categorization. Decker creates a poetic flow of images, as gauzy and impressionistic as dreams, set to choral susurrations and given to a sometimes jolting, always thrilling spontaneity. The scenario led to a dramatic exploration of the tensions faced by many families. The nature/nurture question around mental illness is really confusing. As a parent, are you contributing to your child’s mental illness, or are you mentally ill and creating an illness within the child? When a child is mentally ill, it can bring out some of the more destructive habits of the parent, so there’s something there. It's about responsibility in artmaking, about responsibility in this art we're making right now, were life-changing. They're honestly favorite parts of the process, and that’s why they became a climax of the film. If you’re going to make art this way, people are going to be mad. And that’s something you better get comfortable with. Obviously, not to say you want to exploit anyone or manipulate anyone, but you've to take the brutal life lessons that that offers. The feeling of playing with fire is tangible throughout the making. The film starts deep into that dangerous dark place of how to create without conforming to rigid, pre-packaged notions of where you’re headed. And we emerged from that abyss, creatively invigorated and alive. "Madeline's Madeline" is visionary, inspirational, and ingenious. In art you push the limit and in our society nowadays people are tiptoeing around actual art, actual creation. They're making things to make money. There’s no originality. They’re doing things to appeal to the mass media, the general public, and it’s crap most of the time. It’s remakes, or the same stuff that we saw last year, or two years ago with a different actor. But what about things that are pushing the boundaries? Because that’s what art is when you didn’t have a voice and that’s why theater was created to push boundaries, and show people what’s going on in the world.