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...
★★★★☆ A swift but singular filmmaking self-portrait, Leos Carax’s It’s Not Me reflects on the French auteur’s 40-year directorial career, as well as his many cinematic – and canine – influences.
★★★★☆ Ralph Fiennes approaches top form as a spiritually and morally-conflicted cardinal during a Vatican Conclave in Edward Berger’s gripping, oft-humorous follow-up to the multi-Oscar-winning All Quiet On the Western Front.
★★★★★ Theodor Adorno famously wrote that poetry was not possible after Auschwitz, but is cinema? Billy Wilder certainly thought so, getting footage from the camps as evidence as much as anything else. Steven Spielberg, Claude Lanzmann, Alain Resnais and Roberto Benigni have all with differing degrees of success tried their hands.
★★★☆☆ 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...
★★★☆☆ 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...
★★★★☆ Master dramatist Asghar Farhadi this year returns with The Past (2013), a film that’s both identifiably Iranian yet delicately contorted thanks to its...
★★★☆☆ Michalis Konstantatos’ debut feature and LFF contender Luton (2013) paints a disturbing portrait of contemporary Greece, whilst lacking little of the recent Weird...
★★★★☆ 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...
★★☆☆☆ Revered British actor and director Ralph Fiennes returns to the London Film Festival this year with his second feature, The Invisible Woman (2013)....
★★★★☆ 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...
★★★★☆ The first British director to open the London Film Festival since Kevin Macdonald back in 2006, Paul Greengrass shakes off the memories of...