London Film Festival
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BFI London Film Festival 2012: ‘Kinshasa Kids’ review
★★★☆☆ Belgian director Marc-Henri Wajnberg brings to London his first feature film in almost twenty years. Kinshasa Kids (2012) is a fiction film shot in a documentary style which actually seems to veer across the fiction dividing line on more than one occasion and was initially conceived of by the director as a doc. Inspired,…
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BFI London Film Festival 2012: ‘Tall as the Baobab Tree’ review
★★★☆☆ American director Jeremy Teicher’s Tall as the Baobab Tree (Grand comme le Baobab, 2012) serves as a debut narrative follow up to a previous series of documentaries focusing on rural Senegalese communities, primarily concerned with the importance of tradition that can often come into conflict with the contemporary ideals which accompany education. Set amongst the rolling,…
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BFI London Film Festival 2012: ‘In the House’ review
★★★★☆ François Ozon follows up the camp charm of Potiche (2010) with In the House (2012) – a delightfully droll tale of suburban voyeurism with a dark comic twist. Germain (Fabrice Luchini in impeccable comic form) is a childless English teacher who has grown increasingly disenfranchised at the appalling literary skills of his students. That…
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BFI London Film Festival 2012: ‘The Repentant’ review
★★★☆☆ The latest offering from veteran Algerian director Merzak Allouache, The Repentant (El Taaib, 2012) plays in the ‘Debate’ strand of this year’s London Film Festival – and it’s easy to see why. In 1999, after eight years of civil war and an estimated 200,000 lost lives, the Algerian government offered an amnesty to the…
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BFI London Film Festival 2012: ‘Broken’ review
★★★☆☆ Rufus Norris’ debut Broken (2012), an adaptation of the Daniel Clay novel, presents a portrait of three families living in a British cul-de-sac as seen from the point of view of a young girl, Skunk (Eloise Laurence). British actor Tim Roth heads up the first family as Skunk’s father Archie, a gently-mannered attorney single-handedly…
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BFI London Film Festival 2012: ‘The Dream and the Silence’ review
★★★★☆ One of the most unique and inimitable inclusions at this year’s London Film Festival, Jaime Rosales’ The Dream and the Silence (Sueño y Silencio, 2012) is a fascinatingly opaque examination of grief on a tight knit family dynamic. A teacher and her architect husband live a serene life with their two young daughters. However,…
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BFI London Film Festival 2012: ‘Death of a Man in the Balkans’ review
★★★☆☆ A brief synopsis of director Miroslav Momcilovic’s satire, Death of a Man in the Balkans (2012) might not exactly bring the punters flooding into the cinema. A Serbian comedy about those arriving at the scene of a composer’s suicide, shot entirely from the point of view of a web-cam is unlikely to appeal to…
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BFI London Film Festival 2012: ‘Everybody in Our Family’ review
★★★★☆ From Radu Jude, the director of The Happiest Girl in the World (2009), comes London Film Festival entry Everybody in Our Family (2012). An almost unequivocal critical hit at this year’s Berlinale, this exhilarating Romanian comedy is one of this year’s most enjoyable and perfectly executed inclusions at the LFF. Jude’s film focuses on…
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BFI London Film Festival 2012: ‘The Samurai That Night’ review
★★★☆☆ Japanese arthouse drama The Samurai That Night (2012) is a compelling tale of a young, nervous man who, after losing his wife in a hit and run accident, collapses inward, failing to connect with the world that surrounds him and ultimately becoming consumed with revenge. Directed by Masaaki Akahori – who also wrote the…
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BFI London Film Festival 2012: ‘Beware of Mr. Baker’ review
★★★☆☆ The lifeblood of any great band is its drummer, with their percussive pulse acting as the beating heart behind a song’s memorable melody. Perhaps one of the greatest drummers to ever grace the stage was Cream’s Ginger Baker – the subject of Jay Bulgar’s award winning documentary Beware of Mr. Baker (2012) and one…