London Film Festival
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London 2014: ‘The World of Kanako’ review
★★☆☆☆ Tetsuya Nakashima’s icy drama Confessions (2010) took the hyper-stylised aesthetics of his early work Kamikaze Girls (2004) and Memories of Matsuko (2006) and refined their energy and exuberance into a tightly wound revenge drama. His latest, The World of Kanako (2014), releases the clutch, utilising a repulsive former detective as its protagonists in an…
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London 2014: ‘Dearest’ review
★★★★☆ The taking of a beloved child is the nightmarish scenario at the centre of Thai filmmaker Peter Chan’s effective melodrama, Dearest (2014), competing in the London Film Festival’s Official Competition. China is painfully stricken by people trafficking, a fact that’s at the forefront of Tian Wen-jun (Huang Bo) and Lu Xiao-juan (Hao Lei) minds…
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London 2014: ‘Free Fall’ review
★★★☆☆ György Pálfi’s wilfully sardonic Free Fall (2014) is an inflammatory anthology of satirical vignettes all set within the same Budapest housing block. A jovial take on contemporary Hungarian society, Pálfi’s latest places the former Soviet satellite state within a hall or mirrors, with each dovetailed yarn a revealing portrait of contemporary Hungary warped and…
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London 2014: ’71’ review
★★★☆☆ Setting your debut feature amidst the provocative milieu of sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland is a brave gambit, particularly placing it in a period as infamously tumultuous and bloody as Yann Demange’s ’71 (2014). Occurring in the year that the first British soldiers were killed by the IRA, it’s a pulsating chase through the…
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London 2014: Our guide to this year’s LFF programme
The BFI London Film Festival returns to the nation’s capital for its 58th edition this week (8 October), bringing with it the promise of ten days of cinematic delights for cineastes and casual movie fans alike. Opening this year’s festivities is Morten Tyldum’s The Imitation Game, one of several British biopics with serious award season…
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LFF 2013: ‘Taşkafa, Stories of the Street’ review
★★★☆☆ Our four-legged companion the dog is commonly seen as “Man’s best friend”. Yet in Turkey, canines are elevated far higher, seen as loyal protectors, valued confidants and more recently as public contemporaries. Andrea Luka Zimmerman’s Taşkafa, Stories of the Street (2013), a loose documentary about the street dogs of Istanbul, furthers her own work…
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LFF 2013: ‘Late at Night: Voices of Ordinary Madness’ review
★★☆☆☆ Writer-director Xiaolu Guo rose to prominence in the West after her sophomore feature She, a Chinese (2009) won the Golden Leopard prize at the Locarno Film Festival. Guo now arrives at the London Film Festival with Late at Night: Voices of Ordinary Madness (2013), the second in a proposed trilogy of documentaries giving a…
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LFF 2013: ‘The Witches’ review
★★★☆☆ Cyril Frankel’s The Witches (1966) has long been one of the overlooked works in Hammer’s horror stable. Though attention may be drawn by the presence of writer Nigel Kneale in adapting Norah Lofts’ novel The Devil’s Own for the big screen, the lack of the studio’s regular star talent (Cushing, Lee et al.) made…
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LFF 2013: ‘Trap Street’ review
★★★☆☆ Much like Ai Wei Wei’s recent Surveillance Camera sculpture, Vivian Qu takes on China’s aggressive panoptical policing in Trap Street (2013) with a sense of doomed inquiry. Nominated for the First Feature prize at this year’s London Film Festival, the film explores how information technology is both the target and perpetrator of State meddling…
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LFF 2013: ‘The Past’ review
★★★★☆ Master dramatist Asghar Farhadi this year returns with The Past (2013), a film that’s both identifiably Iranian yet delicately contorted thanks to its foreign environs. Whilst the setting of Farhadi’s latest morality tale has been transferred from Tehran to Paris, this remains very much an Iranian film played out within a more liberal European…