London Film Festival
Karen Krizanovich
Go for the lesbian sex, leave knowing relationships are all the same: that's the nutshell of French-Tunisian director Abdellatif Kechiche's explicit, intimate and lengthy drama Blue Is the Warmest Color (aka Le Vie D’Adèle), the Palme d’Or winner at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Based on Julie Maroh’s 2010 graphic novel of the same name – itself akin to Pierre de Marivaux’s La Vie de Marianne (famous in French schools for the vivid voice of its female narrator, the unfinished novel is mentioned early in the film), Kechiche’s sympathetic feature stars Léa Seydoux and Adèle Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Rebecca Zlotowski catches the blue-collar underbelly of France at dangerous work and uneasy play in her second feature Grand Central. Tahar Rahim from A Prophet leads as Gary, rejected by his family and looking for any job going: it turns out to be maintaining the huge nuclear plant that dominates the film’s Rhône landscape (and provides its title). Camaraderie grows convincingly between veterans and newcomers, as they live together and bond in a caravan park.The drama of the hazardous decontamination work has its own rules: preconditions for workers include the fact that if their personal Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Awful crimes are being committed in an Australian outback town: young girls murdered, and dumped in culverts. But what makes it worse for Aboriginal detective Jay Swan (Aaron Pedersen), newly returned to his small hometown from the city, is the barely coded and bare-faced racism he encounters, from his cop colleagues most of all; the sense that these girls, because they’re Aboriginal too, don’t matter. They’re just expendable pawns in bigger, evil games being played out in eerie countryside, and the parched streets of an Aboriginal part of town which looks like it’s been left in the sun to Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Alexander Payne has never been one for flashy features and in his latest he tones things all the way down to monochrome, as if his intentions are more bittersweet than ever. It's a fittingly subdued aesthetic for a tale of a man on his last legs, reluctantly forced to confront his past.Bruce Dern plays Woody Grant, a man who's just won a million dollars - or so he thinks. When he receives postal notification of his big win it's an obvious scam but, still, he's itching to collect. While his credulity is met with irritation by his wife Kate (June Squibb), his son David (Will Forte) understands Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
As good as many films are, few have the “wow” factor that leaves you elated, high as a kite. Gravity is one of those. Alfonso Cuarón’s space drama is a cinematic tour-de-force, after which it takes quite a while to come back to Earth.A team of US astronauts are space walking outside their shuttle. Mission commander Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) calmly tells jokes while he enjoys the view; Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock), a scientist on her first mission, is a bag of nerves. Suddenly they receive a message from Houston that the debris from a destroyed Russian satellite is speeding towards them. Read more ...
emma.simmonds
A sultry Scarlett Johansson picks up hitchhikers with a nefarious agenda; an astronaut that looks suspiciously like Sandra Bullock is cast out into space; a monstrous Michael Fassbender beats the man he keeps as his slave; Joseph Gordon-Levitt struggles to tear himself away from his porn; and vampire lovers Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston are reunited. I think you'll agree that's quite a lot to take in on a Wednesday morning - and it's just for starters. These are some of the clips guests were treated to at the London Film Festival press launch, compered with genial elegance by Festival Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
What a year for great British institutions. Sixty years of Elizabeth II, 50 years of James Bond, and a half-century of the Rolling Stones. To recycle an even older cliche, we will never see the like of any of them again.Brett Morgen's Crossfire Hurricane is a chronicle of the Stones' career, assembled from a wealth of news, documentary and home-made footage stretching back to their earliest days as a scraggy west London blues band. The commentary, other than that supplied by various interviewers and TV anchormen glimpsed across the passing decades, is provided by the Stones themselves, who Read more ...
emma.simmonds
In the 1960s the Kiwi cartoonist Kim Casali started the comic strip Love is… which mawkishly defined love in a series of statements like, “Love is…being able to say you are sorry” - messages still printed on Valentine’s cards to this day. In Austrian auteur Michael Haneke’s Palme d’Or winning latest, however, love is measured and told in pain: amour means longevity, dedication and the willingness to make difficult decisions. Try putting that on a greetings card.Haneke’s twelfth cinematic feature is a triumph of both simplicity and daring. Amour tells the poignant story of Georges (Jean-Louis Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Considering that his last film was set in a prison, it’s perhaps appropriate to say that Jacques Audiard has an arresting track record. The French director has made a handful of very impressive features (Read My Lips, The Beat That My Heart Skipped) but it was when he donned a knuckle-duster for his unflinching tale of prison life, A Prophet, that Audiard really knocked many of us sideways. Expectations are then high for the film that follows. Whilst little could match the impact of his previous picture, by taking things down a notch Audiard has delivered something really quite strange and Read more ...
Nick Hasted
As the London Film Festival finishes for another year, this study of the strain an ageing father’s decline puts on his daughter’s love will stay with me as much as anything. It’s Uruguayan director Rodrigo Pla’s third time at the LFF, but only The Zone (2007), his thriller about a young working-class robber trapped in a Mexican gated community after a murder, has found any sort of UK audience. The Delay confirms he’s a major talent whose films demand automatic release.The first thing we see is Maria (Roxana Blanco) washing her naked father Agustin (Carlos Villarino) in the shower, a moment of Read more ...
Nick Hasted
It’s the suffocating inevitability of what is done to the girl that makes you keep grimly watching. Mexican director Michel Franco’s film is about people with nowhere to turn, expressed most brutally in the bullying of its teenage heroine Alejandra (Tessa Io). But the title refers to the death of her mother Lucia in a car crash Alejandra was also in, which has left her burly, loving father Roberto (Hernan Mendoza) floating close to the mental edge, moorings loose and numb with inexpressible pain. Off-limits for aid, then, for his quietly practical, persecuted daughter.The dangerously gaping Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Terence Stamp is rediscovered as a leading man once a decade. There was The Hit (1984), The Limey (1999), and now this. He reappears every time with his famous beauty weathered but more attractive, his masculine mystery deeper, steely dignity unruffled. Song for Marion pairs him with one of his great Sixties peers, Vanessa Redgrave, as long-married Arthur and Marion.Arthur’s hostility to expressing emotion has alienated son James (Christopher Eccleston), and he can’t change even as Marion suffers with cancer while singing in a choir he can’t bring himself to join, despite the entreaties of Read more ...