film festivals
Justine Elias
Another day, another shooting: this is Florida, USA, where the "Stand Your Ground" self-defence law allows people to use lethal force when they perceive a threat to their lives. The idea may be shocking to Britons, but such laws have become prevalent in America, even though they may be providing cover for straight-up murder.In The Perfect Neighbor, which won the top documentary prize for director Geeta Gandhir at the Sundance Film Festival this year, a minor dispute turns deadly. The film unfolds through found footage, mostly through police body cam video and courtroom coverage, but this isn' Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
No Other ChoicePark Chan-wook’s outstanding black comedy is a rare treat, biting social satire delivered with immaculate slapstick touches. His everyman hero is Man-su (Lee Byung-hun), a jittery but deliriously happy man with a beautiful wife (superstar Son Ye-jin) and two children, one an accomplished cellist. Even his two dogs are handsome. And he loves his work at a paper manufacturer. Naturally, all comes crashing down when his company is taken over by Americans and a chunk of the workforce has to go, including him. As do his dogs, his nice car and many of his belongings. With his Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Is This Thing On? Bradley Cooper has previously directed A Star Is Born and Maestro, but they weren’t nearly as much fun as this. It’s a story of New Yorkers in the throes of mid-life crises, as Alex Novak (Will Arnett) separates from his wife Tess (Laura Dern) and finds himself floating in unfamiliar new waters. Their divorce also has a perverse knock-on effect on the lives of their close friends, Christine (Andra Day) and Balls (Cooper), who both start suffering from copycat syndrome.The joy of the piece (written by Cooper, Arnett and Mark Chappell and loosely based on the life of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out MysteryThe third of Rian Johnson’s Knives Out mysteries finds Daniel Craig reprising his role of the sly and knowing sleuth Benoit Blanc (now sporting a deeper-than-ever Deep South accent), as he probes the baffling case of the death of Monsignor Jefferson Wicks. Played with brio by Josh Brolin, the Monsignor presides over his little rural parish of Chimney Rock, in upstate New York, with an iron hand, raging from his pulpit like an Old Testament prophet. Raining down fire and brimstone on his small coterie of disciples, subjecting them to a kind of Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Grief takes unexpected turns over the course of a long Icelandic day in Rúnar Rúnarsson’s romantic tragedy, a Prix Un Certain Regard contender at last year’s Cannes.It starts with Una (Elín Hall) high on love with fellow Reykjavik art student Diddi (Baldur Einarsson), wandering the shoreline together at dusk then comfortably falling into bed. Diddi just has to head west the next morning to dump hometown girlfriend Klara (Katla Njálsdóttir), then life together can officially begin. When a catastrophic explosion destroys that future, Una is left secretly bereft as the nation and Klara mourn. Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
One of the most exciting new voices in Eastern European film, Déa Kulumbegashvili is not concerned with conventional shot lengths. She has been described as a director of "slow cinema", which she regards as a compliment.Kulumbegashvili's intention is to create an imaginative space that uncovers the truths behind patriarchal expectations and misogyny, without ever limiting the viewer's experience or agency. Characterized by carefully crafted but disorienting compositions, her storytelling is fiercely confrontational.Her second feature, April, combines revealing social realism with Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
"Julie's story takes place everywhere", says the writer-director Leonardo Van Dijl, whose psychological drama Julie Keeps Quiet has little to do with its sports milieu per se. "Uncovering systemic abuse often starts by listening to the silence and paying attention to the people who don't speak out."Star tennis academician Julie (played by newcomer Tessa Van den Broeck) is one of them. The teenager's life revolves around being out on court. Her coach, Jeremy (Laurent Caron), has pushed her hard to get her to an important qualifying tournament. But as the day of the competition approaches Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
It doesn't take much to get lost in a film by Miguel Gomes. In fact, it's required. Multiple layers, timelines, and perspectives unfold in his cinema is mysterious ways, allowing the Portuguese director to tackle the themes that interest him: great love, colonialism, chance, destiny, death, and a dreary Portuguese world that is by no means willing to let anyone take away its history – or its stories.From the African romance-cum-colonial critique Tabu (2012) to the folk fable allegory of Portugal's financial crisis in his Arabian Nights trilogy (2015), Gomes frequently challenges the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A year ago Guy Ritchie brought us the Netflix series The Gentlemen, and now here he is on Paramount+ with his latest romp through the verdant pastures of criminal low-lifery. It seems that top thespians are queueing up to bag a slice of Ritchie-world, and an impressive cast includes Pierce Brosnan, Tom Hardy and Helen Mirren.To add a bit of extra lustre, screenwriting duties have been handled by Ronan Top Boy Bennett, with a bit of help from Jez Butterworth in episode one.Ritchie, a bit of a posh boy who likes slumming it, remains fascinated by the underworld/highlife divide. Thus we have Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
Joshua Oppenheimer made his name directing two disturbing documentaries, The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014), that dealt with the aftermath of the brutal anti-communist massacres in Indonesia in 1965-66. Those films addressed how people lie to themselves in order to live with guilt and trauma. Oppenheimer's first fiction film, The End, is a radical continuation of the same idea.The End is a dystopian musical about a rich family that found refuge in a bunker 20 years after an environmental catastrophe. The parents (Tilda Swinton, Michael Shannon), their grownup son (George Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof is now an Oscar-nominated refugee, in a bittersweet harvest for his film The Seed of the Sacred Fig.The 52-year-old has previously probed the moral cost of his country’s dictatorship in Manuscripts Don’t Burn (2013), A Man of Integrity (2017) and There Is No Evil (2020), work where characters suffer and snap, or refuse to participate in repression at great cost. Routinely banned at home, work right up to Sacred Fig was shot in secret, brave guerilla cinema now necessarily common in Iran.Faced with eight years’ jail, flogging and seizure of property for Read more ...
Saskia Baron
One of the many pleasures of the London Film Festival is the chance to see high-quality documentaries on the big screen. If lucky, these films might get a brief, specialist cinema release, but all too often non-fiction features are destined for TV. Seeing them projected full-size in the dark with a live audience sharing the experience is a far better way of gauging their impact than watching them alone in a living room. Victoria Mapplebeck’s Motherboard (pictured above) got the warmest reception: its sold-out screenings were greeted with laughter and a standing ovation. It’s a Read more ...