Festivals
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BFI London Film Festival 2012: ‘Like Someone in Love’ review
★★☆☆☆ Following up on the Cannes success of his previous film – the award-winning, Juliette Binoche-starring Certified Copy (2010) – Iranian writer and director Abbas Kiarostami returns to the festival fray this year with Like Someone in Love (2012), his first film made in the sprawling Japanese capital of Tokyo. Featuring a largely unknown all-Japanese…
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BFI London Film Festival 2012: ‘Mekong Hotel’ review
★★★☆☆ When it comes to impenetrable arthouse fare, Thai indie auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul is widely regarded as something of a master. Two years ago, he arrived in London triumphantly with his Palme d’Or for the majestic Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) and has returned this year with the not-quite-feature-length oddity, Mekong Hotel…
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BFI London Film Festival 2012: ‘The Sapphires’ review
★★★☆☆ Wayne Blair’s musical comedy The Sapphires (2012), one of the Gala screenings at this year’s London Film Festival, tells the (apparently true) story of a group of four Australian Aboriginal girls (Deborah Mailman, Jessica Mauboy, Shari Sebbens and Miranda Tapsell) from a rural community who aspire to musical greatness. They sing together as a…
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BFI London Film Festival 2012: ‘In Another Country’ review
★★☆☆☆ In competition at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, South Korean director Hong Sang-soo returns with In Another Country (2012), a carefully crafted, slight whimsical comedy that isn’t particularly funny and has nothing new to say. A young girl is stuck with her mother at a seaside town as they have stood guarantor for an…
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BFI London Film Festival 2012: ‘Kinshasa Kids’ review
★★★☆☆ Belgian director Marc-Henri Wajnberg brings to London his first feature film in almost twenty years. Kinshasa Kids (2012) is a fiction film shot in a documentary style which actually seems to veer across the fiction dividing line on more than one occasion and was initially conceived of by the director as a doc. Inspired,…
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BFI London Film Festival 2012: ‘Tall as the Baobab Tree’ review
★★★☆☆ American director Jeremy Teicher’s Tall as the Baobab Tree (Grand comme le Baobab, 2012) serves as a debut narrative follow up to a previous series of documentaries focusing on rural Senegalese communities, primarily concerned with the importance of tradition that can often come into conflict with the contemporary ideals which accompany education. Set amongst the rolling,…
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BFI London Film Festival 2012: ‘In the House’ review
★★★★☆ François Ozon follows up the camp charm of Potiche (2010) with In the House (2012) – a delightfully droll tale of suburban voyeurism with a dark comic twist. Germain (Fabrice Luchini in impeccable comic form) is a childless English teacher who has grown increasingly disenfranchised at the appalling literary skills of his students. That…
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BFI London Film Festival 2012: ‘The Repentant’ review
★★★☆☆ The latest offering from veteran Algerian director Merzak Allouache, The Repentant (El Taaib, 2012) plays in the ‘Debate’ strand of this year’s London Film Festival – and it’s easy to see why. In 1999, after eight years of civil war and an estimated 200,000 lost lives, the Algerian government offered an amnesty to the…
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BFI London Film Festival 2012: ‘Broken’ review
★★★☆☆ Rufus Norris’ debut Broken (2012), an adaptation of the Daniel Clay novel, presents a portrait of three families living in a British cul-de-sac as seen from the point of view of a young girl, Skunk (Eloise Laurence). British actor Tim Roth heads up the first family as Skunk’s father Archie, a gently-mannered attorney single-handedly…
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BFI London Film Festival 2012: ‘The Dream and the Silence’ review
★★★★☆ One of the most unique and inimitable inclusions at this year’s London Film Festival, Jaime Rosales’ The Dream and the Silence (Sueño y Silencio, 2012) is a fascinatingly opaque examination of grief on a tight knit family dynamic. A teacher and her architect husband live a serene life with their two young daughters. However,…