fri 29/03/2024

London Film Festival

LFF 2019: The Irishman review - masterful, unsentimental gangster epic

Time passes slowly and remorselessly in The Irishman. Though its much remarked de-ageing technology lets us glimpse Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro) executing German POWs aged 24, none of the gangsters here ever seem young. Everyone is heavy with...

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LFF 2019: Marriage Story review – not a dry eye in the house

Marriage Story, shown at the London Film Festival, feels like an instant classic, that intimate, tangible, resonant kind of classic that touches a chord with almost anyone. It’s not just a film about a divorce, but that added nightmare of a divorce...

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LFF 2018: The Favourite review - Queen Anne's bizarre love triangle

Olivia Colman will in due course be appearing as Elizabeth II in The Crown, surely a role of a very different hue to her portrayal of Queen Anne in Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite (shown at LFF). It’s the beginning of the 18th Century, and England...

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LFF 2018: The Ballad of Buster Scruggs review - Wild West tales, and Redford and Jackman

The “portmanteau” form of film-making is almost guaranteed to deliver patchy results, and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, the Coen brothers’ six-pack of tall tales from the Old West (screened at London Film Festival), can’t quite avoid this age-old...

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LFF 2018: Colette review - zinging with zeitgeisty relevance

The story of French author and transgressor of social mores Colette has been told before on screen and in song, but this new film version (shown at London Film Festival) from director Wash Westmoreland not only zings with zeitgeisty relevance, but...

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DVD/Blu-ray: Shiraz

The subtitle of Franz Osten’s 1928 film, A Romance of India, says it all: this Indian silent film is a tremendous watch, a revelation of screen energy and visual delight. An epic love story-cum-weepie with lashings of action and intrigue thrown in,...

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Best of 2017: Film

It was the night Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty, those old robbers on the run, will want to forget. Thanks to a clerical error, the Oscar for Best Picture briefly ended up in the clutch of the overwhelming favourite. Then the mistake was spotted and...

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LFF 2017: Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool / Professor Marston and the Wonder Women reviews - stellar turns by Annette Bening and Rebecca Hall

Screen biographies are tricky things to pull off when the person portrayed has left behind an indelible screen presence. It was hard to love Michelle Williams dragging up for My Week with Marilyn; Grace of Monaco was far from Nicole Kidman...

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LFF 2017: Mindhunter / My Generation - Fincher comes to Netflix, Caine does Swinging London

They’re all going into TV nowadays, and here amid the cinematic runners and riders at the LFF is David Fincher directing Mindhunter. It's Netflix’s new series about the FBI in the Seventies, when the Bureau was slowly starting to realise that...

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LFF 2017: Blade of the Immortal / Redoubtable - Samurai slasher versus the Nouvelle Vague

This is the 100th feature film by Takashi Miike, Japan’s fabled maestro of sex, horror and ultra-violent Yakuza flicks, and here he has found his subject in Hiroake Samura’s Blade of the Immortal manga comics. Manji (Takuya Kimura) is a veteran...

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LFF 2017: Last Flag Flying review - anti-war film without a bite

Richard Linklater’s sort-of sequel to one of the great American films of the Seventies, shown at London Film Festival, stars Bryan Cranston, Steve Carell and Laurence Fishburne as old Vietnam buddies reunited as America is embroiled in another...

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LFF 2017: Good Time review - heist movie with standout performance by Robert Pattinson

This is not a movie to see in the front row – intrusive close-ups, hand-held camerawork, colour saturated night shots and a relentless synthesiser score all conspire to make Good Time, shown at London Film Festival, a wild ride. An unrecognisable...

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