Film
Adam Sweeting
The title sequence of Bond number 24 is a bit of a nightmare, with Sam Smith's mawkishly insipid theme song playing over a queasy title sequence featuring a hideous giant octopus, but the traditional opening mini-movie is an explosive chain reaction which doesn't disappoint. This takes us to Mexico City on the Day of the Dead, where Daniel Craig's ghoulishly attired Bond is on a mission to take out a chap called Sciarra.He does this at some length, casually demolishing an entire city block and then engaging in an epic punch-up inside a loop-the-looping helicopter. But back in London, Bond, Read more ...
Ross Owen
I was born in 1968 which, for any Laurel and Hardy fan, was a great time to be around. By the early Seventies, at the age of three or four, I remember Laurel and Hardy films being on television during the day. My mum would put them on and I would be glued to the TV while she got on with her chores, although she would always end up sitting down and watching the film with me and cracking up laughing.Looking back now, I’m not entirely sure whether she put them on for my benefit or hers, but that’s how I was first introduced to Laurel & Hardy. At that time there were only three channels – BBC Read more ...
mark.kidel
Joshua Oppenheimer’s follow-up to his much-acclaimed The Act of Killing is a much more accomplished film. Once again, he is concerned with examining the large-scale, American-inspired massacre of Indonesian "Communists" in 1965.His first attempt – extraordinary and shocking – was in some ways undermined by the surreal reconstructions of killing and torture that the director filmed with the more-than-willing perpetrators. This time around, he has focused on one particular case of torture and murder, as a microcosm of the larger scale mass-slaughter. The film follows the optician Adi, as Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As a novice in the ways of the London Film Festival, I'm not only amazed by the scope and scale of the thing (350-odd films in just under a fortnight), but aghast at the thought of all the backroom work that goes into it. And on top of all that they have to be nice to all the journalists. As for dividing up the LFF films into categories – Love, Debate, Dare, Laugh, Thrill, Cult, Journey etc. – well, they had to do something, but unless you're dealing exclusively in genre movies (the Hangover flicks, or things with Jason Statham in them) you'll never find enough films prepared to slide Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Lance Armstrong's spectacular crash-and-burn makes for gripping stuff in The Program, the story of the sports legend-cum-druggie who cycled too close to the sun and went on to pay the hubris-laden price. And as a star vehicle for Ben Foster, Stephen Frears's latest film not only serves as a reminder of this director's singular way with actors (note the performances that have gone the Oscar route under his watch) but makes one wonder why his young American lead hasn't yet entered Hollywood's inner sanctum when he so clearly has the stuff.Armstrong's saga of disgrace-on-an-epic-scale isn't new Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Yorgos Lanthimos is the director who reinvigorated Greek cinema with his dark, absurdist films Dogtooth and Alps. His English-language debut is even more off the charts, yet also the most familiar; after all, it is essentially a love story. The proposition of The Lobster is a future society where being single is regarded as a crime. Those found to be alone, even if they’re newly widowed like our hero, John (Colin Farrell), are arrested and despatched to a rural hotel, where they have 45 days to find a partner amongst the other guests. Punishment, for those who fail, is to be transformed Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The first feature written and directed by John Maclean, the former Beta Band keyboardist, is a Western comprised of late-genre tropes and references – but one that’s fresh and sincere. It’s knowing and affecting, unlike Django Unchained.A tremulous aristocratic youth, Jay Cavendish (Kodi Smit-McPhee), is searching for the fellow Scot (Caren Pistorius) he loves in the hell of 1870 Colorado Territory. The terrified survivors of a burned Indian camp flee murderous bluecoats. Their officer is about to shoot Jay when bounty hunter Silas Selleck (Michael Fassbender) intervenes. After Silas hires Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Israeli director Mor Loushy's documentary Censored Voices grapples with the weight of history. It draws on interviews taken by the future writer Amos Oz with Israeli soldiers immediately after the end of the Six Day War in 1967 which were heavily censored at the time by the Israeli army, with only around 30% of the resulting material subsequently published in a book by Oz’s colleague Avraham Shapira, The Seventh Day.Censored Voices appears at first a deceptively simple work. Both Oz (main picture, with the original tape-recorder with which the two worked) and Shapira appear at the beginning Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Suffragette is exemplary in its attempt to depict the harrowing experiences of the British women who risked their lives to win the vote. It depicts the awakening of a reluctant recruit who becomes a militant, and graphically depicts the violence meted out to the protestors and hunger strikers in the critical years of 1912-13, potently drawing parallels with the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike and the 1981 Irish Republican hunger strikes. Yet it’s also a history lesson so worthy and dutiful that viewers might miss how unusual it is for a mainstream movie to endorse acts of anti-state terrorism, even Read more ...
Nick Hasted
How do you corral 250 films in a way which makes sense to potential viewers? Major releases – so far at this year’s LFF we've had Suffragette, Johnny Depp in Black Mass and Maggie Smith in The Lady in the Van – pretty much take care of themselves. For the mostly unknown rest, festival director Clare Stewart introduced themed strands in 2012 with the stated aim of making the festival “much easier to navigate”. Where the LFF had previously been divided by nation – New British Cinema, French Revolutions, then Europe, then everyone else – we now essentially have a choice of emotions: Dare, Thrill Read more ...
mark.kidel
Ousmane Sembene is one of the pioneers of African cinema. Black Girl, the film that brought him international renown, has been beautifully restored for this DVD release, so that it looks as sparkling as when it was released in 1966.The strength of this film is derived in large part from the potent creative forces that were unleashed when Senegal became independent, and was ruled by the visionary politican and poet Léopold Senghor.The simple but powerful story of a Senegalese woman who takes a job as a nanny in the South of France, in the hope of enjoying the promises of the former colonial Read more ...
emma.simmonds
"I just wanna know what I'm getting into," states FBI agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt), not unreasonably, as she heads blindly down the rabbit hole. She emerges into a lawless land where bad guys rule, police fearfully follow and her own side's principles have become unrecognisably warped, with their tactics questionable and objectives increasingly hard to grasp. Sicario is a nail-bitingly tense, precision-crafted and ferociously critical look at the US war on drugs from French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve (Enemy, Prisoners).After a disastrous raid on a cartel horror house in Chandler, Read more ...