London Film Festival
London Film Festival 2022 - supermodels, juntas and toxic dust cloudsThursday, 13 October 2022
There were decidedly mixed, north-south emotions on the film festival circuit last week: just as the latest edition of the BFI London Film Festival opened, administrators announced the immediate closure of its illustrious UK cousin, the Edinburgh... Read more... |
LFF 2020: Nomadland review - Francis McDormand gives a career-defining performanceTuesday, 20 October 2020
Chloé Zhao’s The Rider was a film of rare honesty and beauty. Who would have thought she’d be able to top the power of that majestic docudrama? But with Nomadland she has.To call it a loose adaptation of Jessica Bruder’s Nomadland: Surviving America... Read more... |
LFF 2020: Another Round review – a glass half emptyFriday, 16 October 2020
In 2012, two great Danes, director Thomas Vinterberg and actor Mads Mikkelsen, teamed up for the powerhouse drama The Hunt, about a teacher victimised by his community when wrongly accused of abusing a pupil. For their reprise, Mikkelsen again... Read more... |
LFF 2020: Supernova review – Stanley Tucci and Colin Firth shine as couple on the roadThursday, 15 October 2020
Unsurprisingly, there’s a lot of pleasure to be had watching Stanley Tucci and Colin Firth as a mature couple pootling around the UK in their humble camper van. They bicker about the satnav voice, argue the merits of the shipping forecast, and both... Read more... |
LFF 2020: One Night in Miami review - Kemp Powers's play makes the leap to the big screenSunday, 11 October 2020
Set on February 25 1964, Kemp Powers’s 2013 play One Night in Miami put newly-crowned World Heavyweight Champion Cassius Clay in a motel room with soul singer Sam Cooke, superstar NFL footballer Jim Brown and spokesman for the Nation of Islam,... Read more... |
LFF 2019: The Irishman review - masterful, unsentimental gangster epicTuesday, 15 October 2019
Time passes slowly and remorselessly in The Irishman. Though its much remarked de-ageing technology lets us glimpse Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro) executing German POWs aged 24, none of the gangsters here ever seem young. Everyone is heavy with... Read more... |
LFF 2019: Marriage Story review – not a dry eye in the houseWednesday, 09 October 2019
Marriage Story, shown at the London Film Festival, feels like an instant classic, that intimate, tangible, resonant kind of classic that touches a chord with almost anyone. It’s not just a film about a divorce, but that added nightmare of a divorce... Read more... |
LFF 2018: The Favourite review - Queen Anne's bizarre love triangleSaturday, 20 October 2018
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... Read more... |
LFF 2018: The Ballad of Buster Scruggs review - Wild West tales, and Redford and JackmanWednesday, 17 October 2018
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... Read more... |
LFF 2018: Colette review - zinging with zeitgeisty relevanceFriday, 12 October 2018
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... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: ShirazTuesday, 13 March 2018
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,... Read more... |
Best of 2017: FilmFriday, 29 December 2017
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... Read more... |
