Tale

“I write about families,” Natalia Ginzburg said, “because that is where everything starts, where the germs grow.” The French-born writer and musician Alba Arikha clearly agrees, and has set her brilliant third novel firmly within the crucible of two families: the one her narrator is born into and the one she makes herself as an adult. The narrator is Clara, who, at the start, is a 16-year-old living in Paris and shares some biographical details with her author. (But not the fact her godfather was Samuel Beckett and she…

We all know (and are largely complacent) about the limitless possibilities for digital surveillance and data collection by corporations intent on selling us things, or using our existence to sell advertising. Kate Stonehill’s film is about the more old-fashioned subject of state surveillance and specifically the existence of a disquieting new programme in the UK nicknamed “Phantom Parrot”: the practice of remote spying on mobile phone use.Stonehill’s film is also about schedule 7 of the 2000 Terrorism Act, which gives the…

When a character in a movie works, when it truly works, their little habits and traits pass on to the viewers. The way they talk, or stand, or even communicate- burn in our memory like an afterthought. Such is the case with Bella Baxter in Yorgos Lanthimos' Poor Things, played by Emma Stone with tremendous ferocity and feeling. She is an experiment: a woman with the brain of her own unborn child, that was cut off from her body after she tried to kill herself. In some ways she is her own mother and daughter, but also,…

Here is a dreamy, drifting film, directed by Lucy Cohen, set on the Cornish coast in the long distant pre-smartphone summer of 1991. It’s unevenly presented sometimes and not everything here works, yet it is interesting for its atmospheric use of location and images, its tonal shifts and a disconnect between the ostensible reality of what’s happening and the feeling that certain parts are a hallucination, a psychopathological symptom of trauma, or a remembered dream.The scene is a wild and rocky coastline where Yvonne…

io9 is proud to present fiction from LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE. Once a month, we feature a story from LIGHTSPEED’s current issue. This month’s selection is “Let the Star Explode” by Shingai Njeri Kagunda. You can read the story below or listen to the podcast. Enjoy!The Secret to Taika Waititi’s SuccessLet the Star ExplodeBeforeThe last picture that Karu has of her father alive is on the day of her graduation. She has this big smile that by the placing of her dimples makes it obvious that she is his daughter. He stands next…

The question of whether Luc Besson has got his groove back is only going to annoy those who dispute any former groove-ownership. Besson himself might contend that box office success is in any case the sole criterion for assessing groove. At all events, this bizarre and macabre drama-thriller is watchable and Caleb Landry Jones gives an oddly engaging performance as Douglas Munrow, a wheelchair-using “Dogman”, questioned by police psychologist Evelyn (Jojo T Gibbs) after being arrested in full drag gear, smeared with…

Here is Pixar’s charming, bewildering and beautiful new animation about life after death and life before death – and that title incidentally reminds you how we got the word “animation”. It’s a free-jazz fantasia about a sad and lonely musician, with globules of Frank Capra, 60s psychedelia, 80s body-swap and an old-fashioned stairway to heaven that put me in mind of Pressburger and Powell.But the keynote is pure Pixar: that intense, childlike, ever-renewing rapture that inside all of us, there is this secret existence and…

It is the misfortune of this waterlogged British indie to be a true-life drama about a female endurance swimmer, coming out when people are still talking about Annette Bening in the Hollywood underdog heartwarmer Nyad, also about a female endurance swimmer. Nyad cuts powerfully and confidently through the water. This film, sadly, seems as if it’s got cramp after picking up a dozen verrucas in the footbaths.Kirsten Callaghan plays Mercedes Gleitze, the young Brighton swimmer of German parentage in the 1920s on a mission to…

Cyrus Shams really doesn’t have much going for him. He is a barely recovering alcoholic and unpublished Iranian-American poet who scratches a living in Indiana by role-playing terminal patients for trainee doctors. His mother was blown out of the sky by the US navy – and even his name sounds like a criticism. Hardly surprising, then, that he would channel his search for meaning into a much-planned but largely unwritten book on martyrdom.His mother was one of the 290 on board Iran Air flight 655 when the USS Vincennes…

I remember this one assembly. I was seven, eight? And the headteacher was talking about what makes a book. I guess it must have been around whatever passed for World Book Day back then. No Harry Potter costumes for us in those days, no Elsa-from-Frozen (because-we-have-the-activity-book-actually), no, these were the days when we would take it in turns to read from the papyrus scroll, perhaps in a little pretend Shakespeare beard if our mums remembered to pluck the goat the night before.But I remember Mr Bainbridge’s…