London Film Festival
Adam Sweeting
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 is struggling with the increasing costs of war with the French. Colman’s infirm, mentally erratic queen quails at the prospect of decision-making as preening politicians screech and chatter around her. She’s also at the hub of a sex-and-power triangle as her close friend Lady Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz) and a newcomer to the court, Abigail Hill Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
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 trap. But it gives it a helluva good try, and even its less successful portions offer much to enjoy.Perhaps they shouldn’t have opened with the titular story of Buster Scruggs, because it’s so outrageously laugh-out-loud brilliant that the viewer is apt to suffer a kind of bereavement at the realisation that Scruggs won’t be reappearing in later Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
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 gives each of its stars, Keira Knightley and Dominic West, one of the meatiest roles of their respective careers. As Colette, Knightley grows before your eyes as she evolves rapidly from sheltered country girl (she was born Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette in Saint-Sauveur, Burgundy) to fearless denizen of the salons, boudoirs and stages of Belle Époque Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
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, it was an Indian-British-German coproduction (a curious strand of cinema history in itself) that was entirely filmed in India, and glories in having some of the country’s architectural wonders for locations: the Taj Mahal, central to the story, features primus inter pares.German director Osten – he worked in India for close on two decades, making Read more ...
theartsdesk
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 La La Land had to cede ground to Moonlight. This was a sweet moment for the considerable choir behind the backlash against Damien Chazelle's film. There's room for both, and plenty more, in theartsdesk film writers' picks of their favourite films. We also nominate a few stinkers because bad films deserve to be called out, too. Feel free to Read more ...
Saskia Baron
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’s finest hour. But Annette Bening is wholly mesmerising as Gloria Grahame, Oscar-winning femme fatale turned jobbing actress in late '70s England.Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool is based on actor Peter Turner’s slim, self-deprecating memoir of his love affair with Grahame, first published in 1986 some five years after her death. Turner met the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
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 catching criminals needed more than the old “just the facts, ma’am” approach. Society is changing and so is crime, with serial killers like Ted Bundy and David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz baffling the sleuthing community with their seemingly motiveless killings. Into this strange new world walks Agent Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff), who, despite his Joe College Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
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 Samurai haunted by the cruel murder of his sister Machi, but saved from death himself by the “bloodworms” which were fed to him by a mysterious veiled crone and have rendered him immortal. If he loses a hand or is hacked by a sword, the worms speedily patch him up again.Fifty years after Machi’s death, Manji embarks on a new quest to avenge the murder Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
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 futile war, in Iraq. On paper, it’s a timely and enticing prospect. Yet it’s not the impactful film it could have been.Directed by Hal Ashby, with Jack Nicholson in the spectacular early phase of his career, The Last Detail followed two Navy lifers as they escorted a younger seaman to military prison – determined to give him a good time on the way.It Read more ...
Saskia Baron
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 Robert Pattinson plays Connie Nikas, a nervy con artist who enlists his intellectually disabled brother Nick in a bank robbery. The heist goes horribly wrong and the camera clings to the brothers’ and their nightmarish fate over the next 24 hours. Directed by real life brothers Josh and Benny Safdie (the latter also plays Nick), Good Time is a homage Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There have been several film and TV versions of RC Sherriff’s World War One play since it debuted on the London stage in 1928, but Saul Dibb’s new incarnation, shown at London Film Festival, is testament to the lingering potency of the piece. Armed with a taut, uncluttered screenplay by Simon Reade and a splendid group of actors, Dibb evokes the terror and misery of the trenches without lapsing into preachiness or sentimentality.Front and centre is Sam Claflin as Captain Stanhope, the much-admired commanding officer of an infantry company waiting nervously for an expected German onslaught. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The curtain-raiser for the 61st London Film Festival was Breathe, not only Andy Serkis’s debut as a director, but also a film based on the family experiences of its producer, Jonathan Cavendish. It was the story of how his father Robin, a tea broker in Kenya in the late 1950s, met and married Diana but then contracted polio, which left him paralysed. The couple’s determined battle against his condition eventually brought about some revolutionary developments in the treatment of severely disabled patients.Serkis and screenwriter William Nicholson have approached the project with Read more ...