mon 02/12/2024

London Film Festival

London Film Festival 2024 - Nickel Boys, crime and punishment and Ukraine

RaMell Ross’s feature debut follows his poetic documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018) in again observing black Southern teenage boys, this time in Sixties juvenile prison the Nickel Academy, where beatings and unmarked graves...

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London Film Festival 2024 - a shaman and sham

Justin Kurzel’s Australian film subjects are out on the malign edge, from Snowtown’s suburban serial killer and Nitram’s mass shooter to Ned Kelly. His debut documentary’s protagonist Warren Ellis is a contrastingly loving renegade, an escapee from...

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London Film Festival 2024 - Angelina Jolie does Maria Callas

MariaHow do you solve a problem like Maria? Pablo Larrain’s film picks up the daunting challenge of evoking the life but above all the myth of La Callas, one of a handful of opera legends who have broken the highbrow barrier to become truly...

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London Film Festival 2024 - Daniel Craig, Amy Adams, Twiggy, Christopher Reeve and some snails

QueerWilliam Burroughs’ eponymous novel was nearly filmed by Steve Buscemi in 2011, but it has finally reached the screen under the helmsmanship of Luca Guadagnino. It bombards the viewer from a variety of angles and leaves plenty of treacherous...

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London Film Festival 2024 - the Vatican, the Blitz, a trip to Poland and a surfin' nightmare

ConclaveDirector Edward Berger won an Oscar for his last feature, All Quiet on the Western Front (2022), but here he concerns himself with the more intimate and claustrophobic battlefield of the Vatican. The Pope (Bruno Novelli) has died, and under...

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London Film Festival 2023 - mixed fortunes for film masters

The LFF's Best Film Award winner, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car follow-up Evil Does Not Exist, is a characteristic mix of extended takes and conversations, limpid beauty and dizzyingly intense dramatic incident, and just one of the festival's...

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London Film Festival 2023 - monsters, ghosts and diabolical people

Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos’s follow-up to The Favourite, is an intoxicating achievement, a ravishing, twisted, very funny and even radical fable that must be a major contender in the awards season that gets into gear as the London Film...

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London Film Festival 2023 - Scorsese on Scorsese

Martin Scorsese walks onstage to a hero’s welcome, shoulders a little hunched, with a touch of sideways shuffle or hustle, taking acclaim in his stride at 80. He has sold out London’s 2,700-capacity Royal Festival Hall for the BFI’s biggest Screen...

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London Film Festival 2023 - movies in a musical vein

The Rolling Stones are winning plaudits for their Hackney Diamonds album, but Alexis Bloom and Svetlana Zill’s documentary Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg is a brilliant and sometimes painfully emotional portrait of the woman who helped...

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London Film Festival 2023 - a mixed bag of dramas and documentaries

The London Film Festival continues to pull in an eclectic selection of films from all over the world. And it’s from the countries not known for their movie industries that some of the most impressive and engaging films have emerged.Goodbye Julia...

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London Film Festival 2023 - provocation, celebration and film-buzzing community

When Kristy Matheson won the job of BFI London Film Festival director, she spoke of the chance afforded by festivals for filmmakers, artists and audiences “to commune on a grand scale – to experience ideas, ask big questions and celebrate together.”...

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London Film Festival 2022 - women's voices powerfully to the fore

Coming towards the end of the year, the London Film Festival generally has a “the best of the rest” feel to it, offering an excellent overview of the year’s releases. And what this edition shows is an encouraging, and very satisfying expression of...

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