London Film Festival
Nick Hasted
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 Talk by far, and the queue for returns stretches into the street, to see a director as big as any star.Fellow director Edgar Wright is here to interview him for 60 minutes about his 27-film career, but barely gets beyond 1980’s Raging Bull in 90. The coked-up motormouth familiar in Scorsese cameos from his backseat rant at Travis Bickle to his Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
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 inspire some of their finest work in their golden years, including “Gimme Shelter” and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”. Pallenberg’s heroin habit prompted Marianne Faithfull to write “Sister Morphine”.The German-Italian Pallenberg, fluent in four languages, had the bone structure of a supermodel and the physique of an athlete, and might have Read more ...
Saskia Baron
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 is the first feature film to be made in Sudan to be submitted to Cannes (where it won the Prix de la Liberté award). It’s also been entered for an Academy Award, another first for Sudan. A beautifully shot drama, it gives Western audiences a glimpse of life in a country that we normally only see in news reports and documentaries. Writer- Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
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.”Just three days into her first LFF, it’s clear that Matheson and her team are delivering on that vision. There is definitely a sense of provocation, celebration and film-buzzing community in the air. As ever, themes seem to have been percolated through the programming process, which reflect both current societal concerns and that unconscious Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
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 women’s growing empowerment outside and within cinema.The sense of voices being heard is even shared by the titles of two films made by and specifically about women, both of which must feature strongly in the upcoming awards season that leads to the Oscars. She Said concerns the exposure of Harvey Weinstein’s serial sexual abuse of Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
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 International Film Festival, along with two of Scotland’s most beloved cinemas. So just as one capital prepared to celebrate cinema – and cinemagoing – another was struggling to come to terms with a kick in the teeth to its cultural heritage, caused by the deadly combination of rising costs and declining, cash-strapped audiences. The Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
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 in the 21st Century, isn’t quite right. That book profiled many eccentric characters who have rejected capitalist America and hit the road to live a freer and perhaps more noble way of life. Free from the constraints of modern living they’ve adopted something that echoes the spirit of the first pioneers. In the film, Zhao mixes fact with Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
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 plays a teacher and is again phenomenal; though this time the film fails to deliver on its premise. Four male, middle-aged school teachers and friends are stuck in a rut: Martin (Mikkelsen) is the worst, so overcome by ennui that he barely speaks to his wife and kids, and has completely lost the trust of his history students; sports master Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
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 give such convincing performances that you’d think they’d been together for decades. While this might all sound as comfy as an old sweater, director/writer Harry Macqueen’s (Hinterland) sophomore feature is anything but, being a tender, heartfelt drama concerning love and loss, and tackling the tough subject of dementia. Tucci is Tusker, a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
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, Malcolm X. The four men were real-life friends, but Powers’s account was heavily fictionalised, depicting the foursome engaged in sometimes furious debate over issues of racism, black power, politics and personal responsibility.Putting it on film (showing at the BFI London Film Festival) was a big ask for first-time feature director Regina King, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
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 experience, bloated with spilt blood. The Scorsese gang’s all here for what is surely his last stand in the genre - the returning De Niro, Joe Pesci and Harvey Keitel, and a great Scorsese debut for Pacino. They’re assembled for the story of a gangster’s working life, from first killing to casket.Like Leone’s elegiac, De Niro-starring Once Upon a Time Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
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 with kids involved, and the yet more despairing experience of separating when there is still love. And it’s heart-breaking.It’s also funny, smart and, perhaps most significantly, balanced. As accomplished as the Oscar-laden Kramer v Kramer was, in 1979, one couldn’t help feeling that the cards were unfairly stacked against Meryl Streep’s Read more ...