London Film Festival
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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…
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LFF 2013: ‘Luton’ review
★★★☆☆ Michalis Konstantatos’ debut feature and LFF contender Luton (2013) paints a disturbing portrait of contemporary Greece, whilst lacking little of the recent Weird Wave’s deadpan satire. The film begins with a sultry and incredibly uncomfortable close-up of a woman running on a treadmill. Her heavy breath is amplified by the camera’s perturbing proximity, evoking…
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LFF 2013: ‘Exhibition’ review
★★★★☆ Distinctive British filmmaker Joanna Hogg returns to London after holidaying in Tuscany (2007’s Unrelated) and the Isle of Sicily (2010’s Archipelago) with Exhibition (2013), a methodically constructed portrait of bourgeois self-loathing and middle-class paranoia told through an artistic couple whose lives have slowly begun to emulate their art. Hogg takes an intimate and supercilious…
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LFF 2013: ‘The Invisible Woman’ review
★★☆☆☆ Revered British actor and director Ralph Fiennes returns to the London Film Festival this year with his second feature, The Invisible Woman (2013). Telling the story of the ‘other woman’ in Charles Dickens’ life, Nelly Ternan, Fiennes appears to have improved his directing abilities little since Coriolanus (2011), offering up a tawdry biopic that’s…
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LFF 2013: ‘The Epic of Everest’ review
★★★★☆ The flagship restoration of this year’s London Film Festival Archive strand, Captain John Noel’s The Epic of Everest (1924) is both a spirited log of grand adventure and a sombre testament to the lives lost during a treacherous third attempt to scale the great Himalayan peak. Featuring a new score from Simon Fisher Turner…
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LFF 2013: ‘Captain Phillips’ review
★★★★☆ The first British director to open the London Film Festival since Kevin Macdonald back in 2006, Paul Greengrass shakes off the memories of Jason Bourne with new nail-biter Captain Phillips (2013), a true story of piracy and stoic heroism on the high seas off the African mainland. Starring Tom Hanks as the captain in…
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LFF 2013: ’12 Years a Slave’ review
★★★★★ A static shot of a group of fatigued and world-weary black slaves opens Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave (2013), the crowning triumph of this British filmmakers short but illustrious directorial career. A harrowing portrayal of one man’s fight for freedom in 18th century America, 12 Years a Slave sees McQueen move to a…
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LFF 2013: ‘Locke’ review
★★★★★ Welshman Ivan Locke (Tom Hardy) is a site manager for a major building project; a family man with two young sons who’re waiting for their father to return home to watch the big game. On the way back, Locke turns right instead of left and heads off the motorway. Having made a decision that…
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LFF 2013: ‘Enough Said’ review
★★★☆☆ There was always going to be a tinge of sadness felt for the final on-screen performance of James Gandolfini, who passed away earlier this year. Some may even allow this melancholy to taint their view of Nicole Holofcener’s indie rom-com Enough Said (2013). The passing of Gandolfini aside, Holofcener has assembled an impressive cast,…