London Film Festival
Nick Hasted
Paul Verhoeven directing Isabelle Huppert as a woman seemingly unfazed by a violent rape sounds a recipe for outrage. Elle (★★★★) , though, provokes in subtle, lingering, sometimes comic ways. The rape of Michele (Huppert) mostly happens off-screen during the opening credits, though the ski-masked intruder’s violence in her plush, gated Paris house will be replayed as memory and fantasy. It’s what happens next that lurches right off the rails from the leering salaciousness, traumatised horror or rape revenge cinema usually gives us. Michele cleans up, and gets on with her day. She isn’t the 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 ...
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 ...
Demetrios Matheou
Director Sarah Gavron tends to make films with strong social content. Her TV movie This Little Life (2003) concerned a couple’s struggles after the premature birth of their son; her first feature film was an adaptation of Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane (2007) about two Bangladeshi sisters, one confined to an arranged marriage that takes her to London, the other eloping in a "love marriage" in Bangladesh. She followed that with a documentary, Village at the End of the World (2012), a year in the life of a remote Inuit fishing village in Greenland, whose 60 residents fear the closure of their Read more ...
Nick Hasted
When can Nazi Germany be humanised? Never, many German critics believed on Germany, Pale Mother’s 1980 release, when it was apparently despised for its “subjective” account of one woman and her daughter’s lives in that era and its aftermath. Director Helma Sanders-Brahms simply ignores the question, pouring her own mother’s experiences into the lust for life of glamorous Lene (Eva Mattes, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s one-time wife), whose proud, ironic smile lets her deal with family friends becoming Nazi bureaucrats, the air raid during her daughter’s birth, and being raped on rubble by US GIs Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Cannes Palme d’Or winner is an epic chamber piece by a contemporary great. From the moment a stone suddenly smashes the car window of landlord Aydin (Haluk Bilginer), physical threat darkens the corners of the remote Anatolian hotel-home he shares with his bitter, bored sister Necla (Demet Akbao) and young, emotionally dying wife Nihal (Melisa Sozen). But unlike Ceylan’s previous sagas, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia and Three Monkeys, the violence remains verbal.Aydin, an ex-actor who never quite made it, leads a comfortable, unchallenged life in a home that’s likened to a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Alan Rickman returns to film directing 17 years after he first stepped behind the camera with a film as pulpy and bodice-ripping as his debut feature, The Winter Guest, was chilly and austere. Visually enticing and packed with a blue-chip international array of actors, several of whom have precious little to do, A Little Chaos addresses a preferred English topic (gardens and gardening) displaced to some mighty elegant French environs. The result is pictorially ravishing if often pretty silly, though filmgoers of a certain disposition may be too dazzled by the scenery and frocks to care. Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
There is loud Oscar talk surrounding the stellar performance by Steve Carell in director Bennett Miller’s genuinely unsettling Foxcatcher. Miller (Capote) tackles yet another true crime drama, this time following the steps leading to the murder of David Schultz, an Olympic wrestling champion. Top athletes need patrons and Schultz’s brother Mark (a truly exquisite performance by Channing Tatum) thought he’d found his in John E. du Pont (Carell), the scion of the du Pont chemical fortune. This is the story of how two champion wrestlers and one very wealthy man end up on the road to tragedy. Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
Motherly love is stretched to its very limits in Xavier Dolan’s deeply affecting melodrama. It's pitched to perfection and shot in a claustrophobic 1:1 aspect ratio, which is occasionally opened up to evoke a rush of liberating joy. This stylish and emotionally charged cinematic experience marks out the maturing of one of the most exciting filmmakers working today.Set in a fictional Canada in 2015 where late Nineties and early Noughties music and fashion are all the rage, Diane Despres (Anne Dorval) picks up her son Steve (Antoine–Olivier Pilon) from the juvenile facility he has been Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Director Christian Petzold avoided Germany’s grim version of heritage cinema – the war, the Wall – until last year’s Cold War hit Barbara. His fascination with his country’s present suppressions, though, helps him peel away its past’s familiar veneer. Phoenix uses a melodramatic film noir plot – Hitchcock’s Vertigo, mostly – to make a stylistically and emotionally spare masterpiece about how it felt to still be alive in Germany just after the war.Cabaret singer Nelly (Nina Hoss) returns to Berlin with a bandaged face battered in a concentration camp. Plastic surgery almost restores her old Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
Indie actress Brit Marling takes aim at a rigid power structure in this tense and pared down female-led revisionist Western from British director Daniel Barber. Set towards the end of the American Civil war three women are grappling to survive and make sense of it all whilst the men battle it out and the world around them is burning to the ground.Louise (Hailee Steinfeld), Augusta (Brit Marling) and Mad (Muna Otaru) make up this brave brood, two sisters and their slave, who are forced to come together to fight against a couple of rogue soldiers intent on taking them down. All the women Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Few films this frightening are also so kind. David Robert Mitchell’s second feature starts with a pretty teenage girl suffering inexplicable, bone-snapping terror. He makes us wait to find out why, lingering in the lives of 19-year-old Jay (Maika Monroe) and her friends in their deliberately timeless, golden, Spielbergian suburbs. This is a world where the sun always shines, black-and-white science-fiction is usually showing on TV, and only Disasterpeace’s John Carpenter-esque electronic score reminds you something awful is looming. Mitchell’s sensitivity to teenage lives, and intimate Read more ...