London Film Festival
-
#LFF 2019: Blackbird review
★★★★☆ Set around a vast estate on the northeast American coast, in Roger Michell’s Blackbird, a family comes together over one last weekend to say their goodbyes to matriarch Lily (Susan Sarandon). Lily has a terminal illness which causes such physical deterioration that her body will eventually shut down entirely, leaving her unable to even…
-
#LFF 2019: Leap of Faith review
★★★★☆ Alexandre O. Philippe continues his run of feature-length documentaries concentrated on classic genre movies, with a look at William Friedkin’s The Exorcist. Often described as “the Citizen Kane of horror”, this deep dive benefits from Friedkin serving as our personal guide. As a production, The Exorcist was virtually sui generis. In the history of…
-
#LFF 2018: Stan & Ollie review
★★★☆☆ Inspired by the book Laurel and Hardy: The British Tours by A.J. Marriot, who also featured as a consultant on the film, Jon S. Baird’s Stan & Ollie is part biography and part homage to Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, arguably the greatest stage and screen comedy performers of their time. Opening mid-shoot on a…
-
#LFF 2018: Can You Ever Forgive Me? review
★★★☆☆ In the 1990s, biographer Lee Israel (Melissa McCarthy), frustrated with lack of interest in a mooted project about vaudeville legend Fanny Brice, and struggling with money and alcohol issues, began a spree of literary forgery that amounted to over 400 faked letters. Melissa McCarthy has quietly been on a real bum streak of late…
-
#LFF 2018: Sew the Winter to My Skin review
★★★★☆ Hiding out in a cave for around a decade, legendary South African outlaw John Kepe (here played with unhinged momentum by Ezra Mabengeza) rustled sheep and terrorised white landowners until he was caught and hanged in 1952. In Sew the Winter to My Skin, writer-director Jahmil X. T. Qubeka uses western tropes to mythologise…
-
#LFF 2018: Assassination Nation review
★★★☆☆ Assassination Nation plugs America and the age of social media full of bullet holes until the gun goes click. The problem with this mode of cinematic attack is it leaves a lot of splatter and mess. A comic strip bat-shit crazy, Sam Levinson’s film is a declaration of war against the social and political…
-
#LFF 2018: All the Gods in the Sky review
★★★★☆ Things have been quiet on the French Extremity front in recent times, but fear not! A director calling himself ‘Quarxx’ has brought the controversial brand of European cinema back with a cosmic-horror bang via new film All the Gods in the Sky. From its opening shots of a factory floor manufacturing sheet metal and the…
-
#LFF 2018: The Nightshifter review
★★★☆☆ In Dennison Ramalho’s phantasmagorical morality tale The Nightshifter, a cuckolded coroner’s assistant with the ability to communicate with the recently departed takes revenge against his wife and her lover, in turn unleashing a living nightmare upon himself and his two kids. Stênio (Daniel de Oliveira) is an absent father and husband. In early scenes,…
-
#LFF 2018: Happy New Year, Colin Burstead review
★★★★☆ Down Terrace director Ben Wheatley returns to the horror of kinship with Happy New Year, Colin Burstead (working title Colin You Anus), which received its world premiere at this year’s London Film Festival. The film stars Wheatley regular Neil Maskell – in a career-best performance – as the titular Colin/anus, an unremarkable everyman desperate to unite…
-
#LFF 2017: Loveless review
★★★★★ In 1985, Sting sang: “Believe me when I say to you / I hope the Russians love their children too.” Andrey Zvyagintsev’s masterful Loveless concerns itself with the same question but there’s a hopelessness that Sting’s MOR hit couldn’t hope to come close to.Boris (Alexei Rozin) and Zhenya (Maryana Spivak) are a relatively young…