London Film Festival
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London 2015: ‘The Corpse of Anna Fritz’ review
★★★☆☆ Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the morgue. Having all feared for so long that you would never get the film about a cadaver that you’d been yearning for, two are released in quick succession. In September, Pablo Agüero’s Eva Doesn’t Sleep (2015) – a woozy odyssey following the…
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London 2015: ‘Ayanda’ review
★★★☆☆ Blurring the lines between documentary and fiction, South African director Sara Blecher’s Ayanda (2015) is, on the one hand, an energetic and intimate tale of one woman’s plight to save her family garage business. This personal thread serves as the cornerstone of a broader portrait of the whole continent by fictional photojournalist ‘The Expressionist’…
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London 2015: ‘Trumbo’ review
★★☆☆☆ Director Jay Roach turns his attention to legendary screenwriter Dalton Trumbo in the aptly named Trumbo (2015), based on the biography by Bruce Alexander Cook. A noted communist who tirelessly fought for the rights of blacklisted writers in Golden Era Hollywood, Trumbo is a fascinating figure who is so ingrained in the fabric of…
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London 2015: ‘Right Now, Wrong Then’ review
★★★☆☆ When the title-card for South Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo’s latest charming confection pops up with ‘Right Then, Wrong Now’ it’s not a mistake, or a symptom of the viewer going mad, but an earlier indicator as to the narrative playfulness of Right Now, Wrong Then (2015). Employing a structural gimmick to far more interesting…
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London 2015: ‘Hitchcock Truffaut’ review
★★★☆☆ Kent Jones – Director of Programming for the New York Film Festival – along with French critic and historian Serge Toubiana, have extrapolated segments of the now gospel book Hitchcock/Truffaut and combined its insights with talking head interviews of their own, exploring the influence its pages have had on countless filmmakers since publication in…
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London 2015: ‘Being Evel’ review
★★★★☆ Pop culture has forever promoted the image of a white knight riding into town on horseback as part of the American psyche. In the late 1960s – with President Nixon up to no good, the Vietnam War taking its toll and the Civil Rights Moment dividing a nation – a much-needed hero zoomed across…
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London 2015: Our LFF top picks
The BFI London Film Festival returns to the nation’s capital for its 59th edition this week (7 October), once again offering a host of filmic delights for casual cinemagoers and militant cinephiles alike. Kicking off this year’s programme is Sarah Gavron’s revolutionary period drama Suffragette, featuring an ensemble cast headed up by Carey Mulligan, Helena…
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London 2014: ‘A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night’ review
★★★★☆ For much of the past decade, creatures of the night have had to stand by and watch as their charisma was leeched by toothless tween angst franchises. Fortunately, attempts are now being made to give succubi their credibility back. First came the droll literary ennui of Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) and…
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London 2014: ‘Dear White People’ review
★★★★☆ Writing about Justin Simien’s barnstorming debut feature Dear White People (2014), critic Armond White drew a line between the film and the Hollywood gatekeepers’ usually self-congratulatory cinematic response to race in America: “Simien’s humorous sensibility must deal with the fact that the racial…attitudes of American film culture are controlled by a social class that…
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London 2014: ‘The Keeping Room’ review
★★★★☆ Contorting the standard gender expectations of its genre, Daniel Barber’s The Keeping Room (2014) arrives at the BFI London Film Festival on the back of considerable praise. Investigations of masculine identity regularly pass the time of day in traditional Westerns, yet this revisionist incarnation turns its attention away from the horrors of the Civil…