Page 115 - Liverpool Philharmonic 22-23 Season Coverage Book

new work to another string quartet, this time by British-born but New York-based
composer Anna Clyne. With her thoughtful gift for bringing out the best in dancers and
her choreographic originality, it’s sure to be both beautiful and revealing (Linbury
theatre, Royal Opera House, 4-16 February). Sarah Crompton

Film

Justice-themed movies

Personal politics: Kayije Kagame in Saint Omer. Photograph: TCD/Alamy
At times of uncertainty – and are we not permanently in uncertain times? – there is
reassurance to be found in stories in which justice is seen to be done. The core idea of
wrongs addressed and crimes called to account links several of the new year’s strongest
film releases. Of these, Todd Field’s sublime morality tale Tár (13 January) is the
highest profile. Cate Blanchett deploys the full extent of her huge charisma as Lydia
Tár, a celebrated, world-class conductor who is gradually undone by her own predatory
narcissism.
Both Sarah Polley’s Women Talking (10 February) and Alice Diop’s Saint Omer (3
February) are, in a way, courtroom dramas, although only the latter actually takes place
in a court. Polley’s film unfolds, instead, in a hay loft, where a group of women debate
the path forward following the revelations of widespread sexual abuse within their
isolated Mennonite community. It’s utterly compelling, as is Diop’s very moving
account of a woman observing the trial of a mother accused of murdering her baby.
Real-life stories of justice have a particular potency: Laura Poitras’s galvanising
documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (27 January) weaves a portrait of the
photographer Nan Goldin with an account of her David v Goliath campaign against the
Sackler family’s art world reputation laundering. But justice is only as effective as the
society it serves, as Ali Abbasi’s fact-based Iranian serial killer picture Holy Spider (20
January) makes clear. A man is tried for the murders of a string of sex workers in the
city of Mashhad. But in the eyes of the religious ultra-conservatives, he is viewed as a
hero, guilty of nothing more than “cleansing the streets of sin”. WI

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