Festivals
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BFI London Film Festival 2012: ‘The Hunt’ review
★★★☆☆ Back in 1998, Danish filmmaker Thomas Vinterberg (with the aid of an inflammatory script from enfant terrible Lars von Trier) shook up the cinematic establishment with Festen (The Celebration), an uncompromisingly raw depiction of a bourgeois dinner party gone horrendously wrong after a series of shocking, child abuse-related revelations. Fourteen years later – and…
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BFI London Film Festival 2012: ‘Room 237’ review
★★★★☆ Let’s assume for a moment that you’ve seen Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. A hauntingly, intense horror with stunning cinematography and a career defining performance by Jack Nicholson. But is this 1980 classic actually Kubrick’s admittance to directing the fake moon landing? Or is it born from his obsession with the holocaust? Or perhaps it’s…
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BFI London Film Festival 2012: ‘Reality’ review
★★★★☆ Matteo Garrone’s Palme d’Or nominated and Grand Prix winning Reality (2012) appears in the ‘Debate’ strand of this year’s London Film Festival, with this divisive, blackly comic parody about our celebrity obsessed milieu certain to divide audiences. The camera descends from the heavens and falls like a leaf, presenting the city of Naples as…
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BFI London Film Festival 2012: ‘Doomsday Book’ review
★★☆☆☆ Jee-woon Kim and Pil-Sung Yim’s portmanteau film Doomsday Book (2012) started production in 2006 when the first two segments of the piece were complete. Fortunately – or perhaps unfortunately – a year later the directors were able to raise funds for the third part of the anthology of shorts. All three shorts that make…
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BFI London Film Festival 2012: ‘Children of Sarajevo’ review
★★★☆☆ Winner of the Un Certain Regard award at the 65th Cannes Film Festival, Aida Begic’s Children of Sarajevo (Djeca, 2012) is a tightly-focused drama, portraying life in contemporary Bosnia from the point of view of the war orphans now reaching maturity. Marija Pikic plays Rahima, a 23-year-old woman who, after a misspent youth, has…
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BFI London Film Festival 2012: ‘Frankenweenie 3D’ review
★★☆☆☆ Given the relatively easy task of besting last year’s abysmal London Film Festival opener, Fernando Meirelles’ 360 (2011), Tim Burton unveils his latest effort to expectant fans and critics alike this week with the European Premiere of Frankenweenie 3D (2012). A feature length re-imagining of one of the director’s own live-action shorts, this stop-motion…
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BFI London Film Festival 2012: ‘Le Grand Soir’ review
★★★☆☆ Following last year’s underwhelming Mammuth (2010), directors Benoît Delépine and Gustave de Kervern present their latest oddball comedy Le Grand Soir (2012) in the ‘Laugh’ section of the 56th London Film Festival. Our protagonist is Not (Benoît Poelvoorde), “the oldest punk in Europe with a dog” as he describes himself. Despite his ostensible claims…
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BFI London Film Festival 2012: ‘Helter Skelter’ review
★★☆☆☆ Directed by former photographer Mika Ninagawa, Helter Skelter (2012) is based on the 2003 manga of the same name and tells the story of a model whose faultless beauty and doll like form ultimately becomes her downfall. Nurtured by vanity but driven by greed and success Ninagawa constantly keeps the spotlight on LiLiCo (Erika…
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BFI London Film Festival 2012: ‘Normal School’ review
★★★☆☆ LFF veteran Celina Murga returns to the festival this year (after previous appearances in 2003 and 2008) with non-fiction outing Normal School (Escuela Normal, 2012), a calm and non-intrusive documentary set in an Argentine state school. Whilst there’s nothing particularly new or innovative about Murga’s latest, the opportunity to witness the next generation showing…
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LFF 2012: Picks of the programme
With the 56th BFI London Film Festival just around the corner (beginning on 10 October), the team here at CineVue thought we’d save you the time and effort of trawling through the festival’s eclectic programme to bring you ten of the smaller, most promising titles to feature at this year’s festival. Whilst most have made…