LFF 2013: ’12 Years a Slave’ review
★★★★★ A static shot of a group of fatigued and world-weary black slaves opens Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave (2013), the crowning triumph...
★★★★☆ A swift but singular filmmaking self-portrait, Leos Carax’s It’s Not Me reflects on the French auteur’s 40-year directorial career, as well as his many cinematic – and canine – influences.
★★★★☆ Ralph Fiennes approaches top form as a spiritually and morally-conflicted cardinal during a Vatican Conclave in Edward Berger’s gripping, oft-humorous follow-up to the multi-Oscar-winning All Quiet On the Western Front.
★★★★★ Theodor Adorno famously wrote that poetry was not possible after Auschwitz, but is cinema? Billy Wilder certainly thought so, getting footage from the camps as evidence as much as anything else. Steven Spielberg, Claude Lanzmann, Alain Resnais and Roberto Benigni have all with differing degrees of success tried their hands.
★★★★★ A static shot of a group of fatigued and world-weary black slaves opens Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave (2013), the crowning triumph...
★★★★★ Welshman Ivan Locke (Tom Hardy) is a site manager for a major building project; a family man with two young sons who’re waiting...
★★★☆☆ There was always going to be a tinge of sadness felt for the final on-screen performance of James Gandolfini, who passed away earlier...
★★★★☆ A hidden beach at the lapping edges of a glorious lake provides the sole setting for Alain Guiraudie’s exceptional, erotically-charged French thriller Stranger...
★★★★☆ Having worked under the tutelage of some of Hollywood’s finest directors in his twentysomething years in the industry, it would be safe to...
★★★☆☆ If you want to read about how former US president John F. Kennedy liked to have sex in the bath, then Palimpsest, the...
★★★☆☆ The Queen director Stephen Frears’ latest offering Philomena (2013), one of a plethora of Oscar hopefuls at this year’s BFI London Film Festival,...
★★★★☆ Jesse Eisenberg, Dakota Fanning and Peter Sarsgaard star in Kelly Reichardt’s Night Moves (2013), an eco-terrorism thriller that, whilst more accessible than her...