London Film Festival
LFF 2013: Programme LaunchThursday, 05 September 2013
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... Read more... |
Crossfire HurricaneSaturday, 17 November 2012
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... Read more... |
AmourMonday, 12 November 2012
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... Read more... |
Rust and BoneThursday, 01 November 2012
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... Read more... |
LFF 2012: The DelayMonday, 22 October 2012
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... Read more... |
LFF 2012: After LuciaSunday, 21 October 2012
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... Read more... |
LFF 2012: Song for MarionSaturday, 20 October 2012
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... Read more... |
LFF 2012: In the FogFriday, 19 October 2012
In the Fog, Russian director Sergei Loznitsa’s second feature, shows the wartime world of partisans and collaborators fraught with moral uncertainties. Set in 1942 in German-occupied Belorussia, it returns to a theme much explored by Soviet... Read more... |
LFF 2012: It Was the SonFriday, 19 October 2012
Italian cinema’s resurgence can be felt in the ghetto-operatic sweep of Daniele Cipri’s cautionary Sicilian tale. Like Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah follow-up Reality (also at the LFF), it shows an initially likeable working-class family unravelled by... Read more... |
Beasts of the Southern WildThursday, 18 October 2012
There’s more than a touch of the magic to come in Benh Zeitlin’s soaring 2008 short Glory at Sea, which sees a storm-ravaged community take to the sea to rescue their loved ones - who are anchored to the seabed in suspended animation. Zeitlin’s... Read more... |
LFF 2012: The SessionsWednesday, 17 October 2012
A sex comedy with a disabled hero involving frank sex scenes, a poignant drama about a man struggling to live a full life against the odds, and a love story prompted by the assertion “my penis speaks to me, Father Brendan.” The Sessions is all of... Read more... |
FrankenweenieWednesday, 17 October 2012
Who knew that Tim Burton remaking himself would, in effect, bring him back to creative life? Of three highly anticipated horror-based "family films" released this Halloween season, Burton’s Frankenweenie would seem like the rank outsider. A stop-... Read more... |
