Film
Helen Hawkins
When the Oscar-winning documentary-maker Errol Morris sat David Cornwell down before his Interrotron camera in 2019, the first salvo of the chat came, not from the interviewer, but from his subject: “Who are you?” By which Cornwell meant, who does Morris see as the audience for this interview and what are its ambitions? By the end of the film, it will also be clear that Cornwell’s question carried an even weightier payload than that. It was to be the last filmed interview by the author known as John le Carré, conducted over four days the year before he died, at 89. Even fans steeped Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The LFF's Best Film Award winner, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car follow-up Evil Does Not Exist, is a characteristic mix of extended takes and conversations, limpid beauty and dizzyingly intense dramatic incident, and just one of the festival's major auteur UK premieres.It begins with middle-aged Takumi (Hitoshi Omika) chopping wood in a snowy clearing, and expands into life in his Japanese mountain village, which centres on its pristine river. An ill-considered glamping development threatens to poison the water, a proposal dismantled by the villagers at a consultation meant as a formality. Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
In the current reappraisal of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, what to make of the depiction of women in their key films, that striking tribe of Isoldes with chestnut hair and passionate natures?Powell (1905-90), a man of Kent whose love for his actors was apparently without limits, could be a dictatorial director who, by his own admission, used shock tactics on set to get what he wanted. Whereas Pressburger (1902-88) was a conservative Hungarian who preferred women to be silent partners: “anti-feminist” was Powell’s term for him.Yet between them, and factoring in the upheavals of the Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Announcing “A Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger production” or, alternatively “A Production of the Archers”, an arrow thuds into the centre of a roundel. Whether in black and white or colour, that famous rubric not only conflates the auras of Robin Hood and the Royal Air Force, but issues a warning you’re about to get a shot in the eye. The critic Ian Christie, one of Powell and Pressburger’s earliest champions, wrote in “Arrows of Desire” (1985), his second book on the great writer-director-producer duo, that the logo (pictured below) was “a promise of ‘real film magic’ for forties Read more ...
graham.rickson
Brannigan begins in arresting fashion, Dominic Frontiere’s funky theme playing over leery close ups of the titular hero’s Colt revolver. Directed by Douglas Hickox and released in 1973, this was the only film starring John Wayne which wasn’t shot in the US.A brief prologue sets up the plot, with ageing maverick Lieutenant Jim Brannigan flying from Chicago to London to extradite gangster Ben Larkin (John Vernon), currently in the care of the Met. But the presence of Mel Ferrer’s slippery lawyer suggests that things won’t go to plan, and Larkin is subsequently kidnapped and held to ransom Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos’s follow-up to The Favourite, is an intoxicating achievement, a ravishing, twisted, very funny and even radical fable that must be a major contender in the awards season that gets into gear as the London Film Festival closes. The Favourite screenwriter Tony McNamara has adapted the late Scottish writer Alasdair Gray’s complex, multi-layered novel, removing the 1990s storyline, focussing on the Victorian section and shifting the point of view entirely to Gray’s fabulous heroine, Bella Baxter (Emma Stone). He’s also removed the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Martin Scorsese walks onstage to a hero’s welcome, shoulders a little hunched, with a touch of sideways shuffle or hustle, taking acclaim in his stride at 80. He has sold out London’s 2,700-capacity Royal Festival Hall for the BFI’s biggest Screen Talk by far, and the queue for returns stretches into the street, to see a director as big as any star.Fellow director Edgar Wright is here to interview him for 60 minutes about his 27-film career, but barely gets beyond 1980’s Raging Bull in 90. The coked-up motormouth familiar in Scorsese cameos from his backseat rant at Travis Bickle to his Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The Rolling Stones are winning plaudits for their Hackney Diamonds album, but Alexis Bloom and Svetlana Zill’s documentary Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg is a brilliant and sometimes painfully emotional portrait of the woman who helped inspire some of their finest work in their golden years, including “Gimme Shelter” and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”. Pallenberg’s heroin habit prompted Marianne Faithfull to write “Sister Morphine”.The German-Italian Pallenberg, fluent in four languages, had the bone structure of a supermodel and the physique of an athlete, and might have Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
It is 1864 and the lush green lawns of Knowl, the stately home in Ireland that Maud Ruthyn (Agnes O’Casey) will inherit when she reaches the age of 21, are beautifully kept. Everything is in its place. Maud expects deference, especially from the domestic staff.Maud is a steely character, so when the trustees of her late father’s estate advise her to go against the terms of his will and appoint them as trustees to her fortune, she instantly suspects them of being on the make. They are merely trying to warn her that her wily Uncle Silas (David Wilmot, pictured below), a suspected murderer Read more ...
Veronica Lee
If I had to condense the Catholic faith of my upbringing in one sentence, I would say that it essentially comes down to two things: we're all sinners, but we are all capable of redemption. (Theological experts may take a different view.) That boiled-down notion appears to be the takeaway of Thaddeus O'Sullivan's The Miracle Club, set in 1967 working-class Ballygar, just outside Dublin – the kind of place whose residents live there their entire life.It concerns three women who go to Lourdes “for the cure”. Anyone not au fait with the Marian devotion central to Irish Catholicism in that period Read more ...
James Saynor
The director Mary Harron is famous for staying classy while tackling blood-splashy topics – notably the attack on pop art’s leader in I Shot Andy Warhol (1996) and whatever the hell was going on in the Bret Easton Ellis novel that became Harron’s American Psycho (2000). Almost any male director would have gone Brian-De-Palma-berserk with the latter, but Harron’s film is more memorable for an OCD Christian Bale handing out his business cards than any ultra-violence. She’s got a cool eye and a steady hand when people are wielding guns and knives.Perhaps surprisingly, there’s none of that in Read more ...
Saskia Baron
The London Film Festival continues to pull in an eclectic selection of films from all over the world. And it’s from the countries not known for their movie industries that some of the most impressive and engaging films have emerged.Goodbye Julia is the first feature film to be made in Sudan to be submitted to Cannes (where it won the Prix de la Liberté award). It’s also been entered for an Academy Award, another first for Sudan. A beautifully shot drama, it gives Western audiences a glimpse of life in a country that we normally only see in news reports and documentaries. Writer- Read more ...