London Film Festival
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BFI London Film Festival 2012: ‘The We and the I’ review
★★★☆☆ Michel Gondry’s London Film Festival select The We and the I (2012) is the product of a recent after-school program the French filmmaker coordinated, taking the lessons learnt and ideas that were formed from these workshops to create a fascinatingly naturalistic insight into the lives of a varied cross section of Brooklyn teenagers. Set…
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BFI London Film Festival 2012: ‘Accession’ review
★★☆☆☆ Issue movies are always problematic. It is rare that the cause that they champion is not an important and worthy one, but their very nature mean that the art of storytelling and the creation of drama can often play second fiddle to making their point. This is absolutely the case with Michael J. Rix’s…
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BFI London Film Festival 2012: ‘Laurence Anyways’ review
★★★☆☆ LFF entry Laurence Anyways (2012) is Québécois director Xavier Dolan’s third full-length feature. Renowned for his exquisite visual style and sumptuous cinematography, there’s always been the feeling that Dolan is something of a cinematic narcissist, far more concerned with proving his technical ability than presenting a truly absorbing story – even going as far…
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BFI London Film Festival 2012: ‘Amour’ review
★★★★★ Winner of the coveted Palme d’Or prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Michael Haneke’s heartbreaking Amour (2012) makes its UK debut in LFF’s newly created ‘Love’ strand this week. A minimalistic masterpiece of quiet majesty, Haneke has once again confounded his naysayers by creating a film of genuine heartfelt warmth and unconditional affection,…
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BFI London Film Festival 2012: ‘The Hunt’ review
★★★☆☆ Back in 1998, Danish filmmaker Thomas Vinterberg (with the aid of an inflammatory script from enfant terrible Lars von Trier) shook up the cinematic establishment with Festen (The Celebration), an uncompromisingly raw depiction of a bourgeois dinner party gone horrendously wrong after a series of shocking, child abuse-related revelations. Fourteen years later – and…
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BFI London Film Festival 2012: ‘Room 237’ review
★★★★☆ Let’s assume for a moment that you’ve seen Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. A hauntingly, intense horror with stunning cinematography and a career defining performance by Jack Nicholson. But is this 1980 classic actually Kubrick’s admittance to directing the fake moon landing? Or is it born from his obsession with the holocaust? Or perhaps it’s…
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BFI London Film Festival 2012: ‘Reality’ review
★★★★☆ Matteo Garrone’s Palme d’Or nominated and Grand Prix winning Reality (2012) appears in the ‘Debate’ strand of this year’s London Film Festival, with this divisive, blackly comic parody about our celebrity obsessed milieu certain to divide audiences. The camera descends from the heavens and falls like a leaf, presenting the city of Naples as…
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BFI London Film Festival 2012: ‘Doomsday Book’ review
★★☆☆☆ Jee-woon Kim and Pil-Sung Yim’s portmanteau film Doomsday Book (2012) started production in 2006 when the first two segments of the piece were complete. Fortunately – or perhaps unfortunately – a year later the directors were able to raise funds for the third part of the anthology of shorts. All three shorts that make…
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BFI London Film Festival 2012: ‘Children of Sarajevo’ review
★★★☆☆ Winner of the Un Certain Regard award at the 65th Cannes Film Festival, Aida Begic’s Children of Sarajevo (Djeca, 2012) is a tightly-focused drama, portraying life in contemporary Bosnia from the point of view of the war orphans now reaching maturity. Marija Pikic plays Rahima, a 23-year-old woman who, after a misspent youth, has…
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BFI London Film Festival 2012: ‘Frankenweenie 3D’ review
★★☆☆☆ Given the relatively easy task of besting last year’s abysmal London Film Festival opener, Fernando Meirelles’ 360 (2011), Tim Burton unveils his latest effort to expectant fans and critics alike this week with the European Premiere of Frankenweenie 3D (2012). A feature length re-imagining of one of the director’s own live-action shorts, this stop-motion…