BFI London Film Festival 2023

This year’s London Film Festival felt paradoxically both busier and quieter than usual. Busier because audience numbers just seem to grow and grow, with most screenings eventually selling out completely. (This was great news for the festival organisers, though rather less good for the legions of people battling to get tickets to the one screening of Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget.) Quieter because members of the acting union SAG-AFTRA are still on strike over wages and conditions, and few if any actors were to be seen on the red carpet.

The absence of actors meant a different sort of discussion at pre-film introductions and post-film Q+As. The emphasis was on screenwriting, directing, music, and visual style, rather than on character and performance. For someone who has always been more interested in the people behind the camera than those in front, this was a welcome shift, though I hope a temporary one. Many of the films I saw this year will be distributed by Netflix, which alongside other streaming companies has been a major cause of both the writers’ and actors’ strikes (largely because of their stingy remuneration policies and dabbling with AI). Indeed, while small production companies like Aardman incited warm cheers or nods of appreciation from the festival audience, the Netflix logo was met with stony silence and the occasional boo.

The streaming services do, of course, give directors a greater degree of freedom than many traditional production companies; it’s unlikely that Martin Scorsese could have made Killers of the Flower Moon, a festival hit running to three-and-a-half hours, without funding from Apple TV. But sometimes this comes at a cost: Netflix allows its new releases little more than a few weeks in cinemas before they become mere “content” on its platform, to be absorbed in whatever form the viewer wishes. This is farcical: if LFF 2023 taught me anything, it was the continuing vitality and importance of the big screen. Put simply, nothing compares to the shared experience of the cinema, and the festival’s growing popularity suggests that many still agree.

This year, I saw 16 films. Here’s what I thought of them.

“Yes, we are all individuals”

I kicked off the festival with David Fincher’s The Killer (★★★★★), one of many films portraying highly distinctive and unusual characters. The killer of the title is an assassin-for-hire, played by Michael Fassbender, who is fastidious about doing his job properly and leaving no trace. He lives by the motto “Stick to the plan. Anticipate, don’t improvise,” but when one of his assignments goes wrong, his tightly controlled world begins to unravel. The shadowy cinematography, pulsating music and increasingly frantic editing brilliantly evoke the killer’s vigilance and anxiety. It’s a real nerve-shredder, but with great wit and detachment: Fassbender’s character narrates the story in the manner of a classic film noir – knowing, ironic, wryly amused. While waiting for his targets to appear, he passes the time by listening to The Smiths and practising yoga. It’s a terrific, full-blooded performance, and Fincher’s best film since The Social Network.

A rather different sort of (non-)assassin is on display in Hit Man (★★★★☆), which is further evidence of director Richard Linklater’s talent for creating great characters. Star and co-writer Glen Powell plays Gary Johnson, a Philosophy professor at the University of New Orleans, who spends some of his time working for the city police. He begins posing as a gun-for-hire to lure unsuspecting would-be murderers into the hands of the cops. And then he falls in love… It’s partly based on a true story, though with a rather freewheeling approach to key details – all part of the fun – and balances moments of incredible tension with gasp-inducing comedy. I saw this on a Wednesday afternoon and I would happily have spent another hour in the company of its characters.

The same could be said for Molli and Max in the Future (★★★★★), one of the great discoveries of this year’s festival. The film takes place in a future universe which echoes the rainy, overbuilt, media-saturated cityscapes of Blade Runner and The Fifth Element. Its characters are sentient robots, demigods, and aliens. And yet they talk and behave like highly-strung New Yorkers who spend all their time philosophising in bars and complaining about their therapists. It’s essentially a sci-fi retelling of When Harry Met Sally, with the two main characters falling in and out of each other’s lives over the course of many years. Except, of course, one of the characters is a half-man-half-fish hybrid, and the other is able to fly. The joy and hilarity of the film come from how brilliantly it riffs on our messy modern lives. There are nods to social media, online dating, and even Donald Trump, while the attention to detail is astonishing: packages are delivered by Amazon Slime, while one of the characters keeps a book by Sally Rooney called Normal Aliens. I laughed uproariously but also gasped at its visual ambition: the film was made with a tiny budget and skeleton crew, but uses practical and visual effects to create a world that is just as stunningly realised as any contemporary blockbuster. But despite the intergalactic setting, the characters still feel down-to-earth: I found myself rooting for the central couple, sharing in their joys and pains, and hoping that they would end up together. It’s the debut feature of US filmmaker Michael Lukk Litwak and I thought it was magnificent.

Zosia Mamet and Aristotle Athari in *Molli and Max in the Future*

Another debut was rather less successful. Poolman (★☆☆☆☆) is Chris Pine’s attempt to capture the noirish atmosphere of The Big Lebowski and Chinatown, but without the skill, wit, or originality of either. It follows a lazy swimming pool technician who uncovers a trail of corruption linked to the local government of Los Angeles. The cast is promising, but they are wasted on a poorly-disciplined script, executed with no comic timing at all. I found it side-splittingly unfunny and a bizarre disappointment.

Filmception

As ever, I saw several films this year that reflected in some way the art of filmmaking. The best of these by some distance was Cobweb (★★★★☆), a South Korean farce about a director in the 1970s who tries to do two days of reshoots on his horror film. The director – engagingly played by Song Kang-ho – is convinced that he is creating a masterpiece, but he hasn’t reckoned on the simmering resentments emerging between his actors and crew. Moreover, he hasn’t told the government censors about the reshoots, which puts the whole studio in danger of being shut down. The film satirises the South Korean film industry in the 70s, and the ways in which the creative industries chafed under authoritarian rule. It’s also a wonderfully funny and tightly constructed farce, with more than a hint of Noises Off as the film crew’s foibles lead from one disaster to another. If that wasn’t enough, it’s also a stirring portrayal of creative passion and our collective love of cinema that left me grinning from ear to ear.

The crew look on quizzically in *Cobweb*

Creative passion was also at the heart of Croma Kid (★★★☆☆), surely the only offbeat sci-fi drama from the Dominican Republic I am likely to see this year. Set in the 90s, it follows a family who make eccentric public-access TV programmes using green-screen effects. It’s a vibrant and colourful evocation of the Dominican setting, but it takes a while to get going; its enigmatic and low-key style is most effective in the final third. Equally enigmatic and low-key was Close Your Eyes (★★★☆☆), only the fourth feature film made in fifty years by legendary Spanish director Victor Erice. I love Erice’s first two films, which are a beguiling combination of painterly cinematography, subtle, often near-silent sound design, and a keen sense of magical realism. His latest follows a former director who searches for an actor friend who went missing years ago – a wry comment, perhaps, on Erice’s own absence from filmmaking. The opening – part of an incomplete film-within-a-film – is Erice’s style at its best, and the ending is a hugely affecting paean to the interrelationship of cinema, time, and memory. Yet much of what happens in between is baggy, rambling, and comparatively pedestrian in style. At times I found myself wishing that I was watching the film-within-a-film, rather than the modern-day story. There are meaningful moments and ideas, but it could have been much more powerful if it were half an hour shorter.

Global Visions

The London Film Festival is always a great moment to opportunity to catch up on world cinema, especially from countries whose culture we may know little about. If Only I Could Hibernate (★★★★☆) is only the second film I have seen from Mongolia, but its story and milieu are quite some way from the vast plains and nomadic culture usually associated with the country. This is a decidedly urban film, one which takes place in the city’s impoverished suburbs. It follows a teenage boy who is trying desperately to provide for his family, who all live in a small yurt, while also attempting to succeed academically. The tension between his two goals only deepens as winter drags on and he struggles to afford coal and wood. The film explores the issue of air pollution with great subtlety and nuance – the characters suffer unexplained respiratory illnesses, and the camera brilliantly captures the thick smog that hangs over Ulaanbaatar like ethereal prison bars. There’s similar care taken in its portrayal of wealth disparities, and on the varying effects of extreme cold. But first-time director Zoljargal Purevdash also ensures that there’s something to root for: the central character’s pursuit of a National Physics competition is a wonderful paean to the transformative value of education. The film – beautifully shot, sincere, political – heralds a compelling new voice in world cinema.

The family share a tense moment in *If Only I Could Hibernate*

An equally misty setting pervades Only the River Flows (★★★☆☆), an enigmatic, slow-burn Chinese mystery about a detective investigating a set of interlinked murders in rural China in the 1990s. The 16mm cinematography emphasises the hazy, noirish atmosphere, much of which feels like a cigarette smoke-infused dream. The plotting is a little uneven, but I enjoyed getting lost in the darkness. Behind the Mountains (★★☆☆☆) also left me feeling rather lost, though in a much less positive sense. The film tells the story of a mentally unstable Tunisian man who takes his son into the mountains, for reasons which increasingly border on the magical. There are moments of transcendence, but it can’t quite decide on a particular mood or approach, and I found it a bit directionless.

Fun for all the family

For many at the festival, the main event was the world premiere of Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget (★★★★☆), a full 23 years after the release of the original film. Aardman rarely disappoint, and their painstaking attention to stop-motion detail and anarchic, very British sense of humour are on full display here. Where the first film was an escape movie, this is more of a heist film, with all the high-tech trappings of a James Bond film. The film follows the crew from the first film – albeit with several changes to the voice actors – as they seek to recover something stolen from them. It may not be as good as the first film, but it’s still streets ahead of the competition when it comes to animated children’s films. I found it joyful and uproariously funny, shot through with an uplifting feminist message; further evidence of Aardman’s position as an essential part of our cinematic heritage.

The original crew – plus some new additions – in *Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget*

Rather different in tone was the latest – and perhaps final – film by Hayao Miyazaki, the Japanese master director of some of the greatest animated films ever made, including Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke. The 82-year-old Miyazaki has threatened to retire on at least four separate occasions, but The Boy and the Heron (★★★★☆) further demonstrates his astonishing creative energy. Much like his other films, this one focuses on a child who learns to deal with traumatic events by an interaction with a fantastical world. The film is just as beautifully layered and elegantly enticing as ever, inhabited by strange magical creatures, and imbued with lyricism. The meaning of the film isn’t very easy to divine – additional viewings are surely necessary to unwrap its mysteries – and it didn’t feel quite as consistent as some of his other works. But as sheer experience, it immerses you in its world like a dazzling kaleidoscope.

Miyazaki’s last film? *The Boy and the Heron*

The word “dazzling” also came to mind during The Black Pirate (★★★★☆), a classic 1926 silent film which was part of LFF’s “Archive” strand. It’s an agreeably straightforward aquatic adventure, awash with swashbuckling, romance, and a range of rambunctious characters. The dashing Douglas Fairbanks pulls off some genuinely thrilling stunts, which on this occasion were accompanied on live piano by the supremely talented Neil Brand. What makes it more distinctive than other pirate-themed silent films is its very early use of technicolor cinematography. Following a new restoration by New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the colours really do pop out of the screen – I gasped as the first image came up.

Based on true events

The final three films I saw were all based to some extent on a true story, although with very different cinematic approaches. The rousing sports biopic Nyad (★★★★☆) has a winningly unconventional subject: a woman in her 60s who attempts to swim between Cuba and Florida, a distance of some 110 miles awash with sharks, box jellyfish, and potentially fatal weather. Swimming, happily, is one of the few sports in which age is not a significant barrier to achievement. Played by Annette Bening, Diana Nyad is a force of nature, single-minded in her pursuit of a successful swim, even if it alienates those she loves the most. There’s a remarkable verisimilitude in her performance, with her body and face convincingly reflecting the mental and physical privations of the swim. The filmmakers also made The Rescue, about the efforts to save a Thai children’s football team from a flooded cave system, and the editing here is similarly breathless, with real archive footage interwoven with fictional scenes. Some may feel that some scenes of trauma are too summarily dealt with, but it is the kind of film that makes you want to punch the air – and put on a swimming cap.

Where Nyad is a predominantly exterior film, The Goldman Case (★★★★☆) takes place almost exclusively inside a small courtroom. The film’s dialogue is based on transcripts from the 1976 trial of Pierre Goldman, a French left-wing activist and provocateur who was charged with several robberies and the murder of two pharmacists. Arieh Worthalter gives a magnetic performance as the charismatic Goldman, who insults the prosecution, taunts witnesses, and launches diatribes against police racism and corruption. It deals with big themes that are sadly still relevant in contemporary France, including antisemitism – Goldman was Jewish – and the gaps in France’s understanding of race and ethnicity. Despite the limitations of its setting, I found it absolutely riveting.

Just as riveting, though much less dialogue-heavy, was The Zone of Interest (★★★★★), the best film I saw at this year’s festival. It’s a masterwork of extraordinary power and ambition by the British director Jonathan Glazer – a film about the Holocaust, but with a very distinctive visual focus. It takes place in a house bordering the Auschwitz concentration camp, occupied by camp commandant Rudolf Höss and his wife and children. The Höss family lead an apparently bucolic existence of horse-riding, gardening, and swimming, largely oblivious – or indifferent – to the mass slaughter taking place mere metres away. We seldom, if ever, set foot inside the camp, but expressive wide shots and unsettling sound design remind us of its horrors. Auschwitz’s barbed-wire walls adjoin the family garden, and Höss’s wife blandly tells her mother that they have planted some bushes to make them prettier. The delighted screams of children playing intermingle with the faint roar of SS guards. Höss smokes a cigar at night, his back turned to one of Auschwitz’s chimneys shooting out smoke from a gas chamber. Formally Glazer keeps a cool distance from the characters – there are no close-ups – echoing the mechanistic detachment of Nazi guards. It is a film that reminds us that the monstrousness of the Holocaust was to be found not just inside the camps themselves, but in the dinner parties, lounges, and gardens of Nazi oppressors – in their relentless insistence on normality, unburdened by the bloody work of genocide. As an artistic statement on the banality of evil – and as an example of how events offscreen can be far more frightening than events onscreen – it is simply staggering, and unlike anything I have seen before.

Jonathan Glazer’s masterful *The Zone of Interest*

BFI London Film Festival 2022

The BFI London Film Festival made a rip-roaring return this year, extending its programming further and wider into film, television, and virtual reality. LFF has historically been seen as a second-order festival – simply picking up the best from Cannes, Venice, and elsewhere for British audiences. But under Festival Director Tricia Tuttle, who is stepping down at the end of this year, the festival’s international profile has been significantly boosted. This year there were an unprecedented 23 world premieres, including the latest from Guillermo Del Toro and Asif Kapadia.

But LFF is also a deeply public festival, which shuns the elitism and overwrought prestige of Cannes in favour of large public screenings, where people other than journalists, filmmakers and celebrities have access to tickets. It’s a festival where ordinary cineastes can walk on the red carpet – where friendly interactions between filmmakers and audience members are delightfully unremarkable. With a vast range of screenings across London, and some in cinemas across the UK, LFF broke its own box office records days before it had even finished. It was a joy to attend this year alongside such enthusiastic audiences, and LFF 2022 was probably my best festival yet.

This year, free from the shackles of COVID anxiety, I managed to see 20 films. Here are my thoughts on them.

Eco-cinema

Filmmakers have long drawn attention to issues of climate change and environmental harm, and this year I saw four films that tackled these themes full on. The Danish documentary Into the Ice (★★★★★) follows three scientists who work on the Greenland ice sheet, which covers a vast territory of 1.7 million square kilometres. One of their primary goals is to measure how quickly the ice is melting, which will provide insights into the scale of future sea level rises. Some of this work is extremely difficult to carry out, and the most striking sequences are when the director accompanies the British glaciologist Alan Hubbard in abseiling nearly 200 metres into a “moulin” – effectively a cathedral-sized hole in the ice, created by meltwater – in order to take measurements. What emerges from this is some of the most breathtaking footage of the natural world I have ever seen. The film succeeds in being both a powerful appreciation of the natural world and an urgent call for action to mitigate climate change.

Descending into a moulin in *Into the Ice*

Set on the other side of the world, in the Bolivian Chaco desert, the gentle and beautiful Utama (★★★★★) follows an elderly Quechua couple who are nearing the end of their lives. Their simple existence herding llamas in the desert is made increasingly difficult by the persistent lack of rain and their own old age. From a cast of entirely non-professional actors, director Alejandro Loayza Grisi obtains two utterly extraordinary performances from the actors playing the couple. There is a very real and moving sense of a husband and wife who have said so much to each other over the years that little more needs to be said. Glances, furrowed brows, and silence speak loudly enough. And the film perfectly balances the small-scale with the epic. Grisi shows minute attention to the details of clothes and possessions, while also harnessing the vast cinematic scale of the desert landscape; in the same way, a small story of an elderly couple acts as a powerful metaphor for the broader narrative of traditional ways of life coming under threat from globalisation and climate change.

Environmental harm is at the centre of two other films, including the French thriller The Blaze (★★★★☆), which follows a father and son in rural France who are trapped by a sudden and seemingly uncontrollable wildfire. Climate change is never actually mentioned in the film – instead, the increasing prevalence of wildfires is taken as a given, and the film focuses more fully on the father-son relationship. It’s incredibly technically well-done, giving the audience a visceral sense of the scorching heat, the sweat, the smoke, the dehydration. But the performances are also deeply convincing and nuanced, making the story all the more moving. Less successful is EO (★★★☆☆), a reimagining of Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar with the same central conceit: a donkey wanders through the world, seeing and experiencing both the goodness and evil of humanity. Both films explore animal cruelty as a form of environmental harm. But where Au Hasard Balthazar was a masterpiece of spare, black-and-white minimalism, EO goes in the opposite direction: the donkey wanders through a phantasmagorical series of events, awash with surreal colour and dramatic music. It’s visually stunning, but the score is overbearing in places, and its maximalist style is ultimately less effective than the quiet dignity of Bresson’s original.

Do you remember?

A number of films this year dealt with the subject of memory, though in very different ways. Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio (★★★★☆), which premiered at the festival, is an outstanding version of the familiar story with a significant change: the woodcutter Geppetto builds Pinocchio as a way of commemorating his recently deceased son. This alteration of the traditional narrative allows Del Toro to use the film as a way of meditating on death, and on how we remember those who have passed. It’s a darker, more complex telling of the story, which is thrillingly evoked through rich, textured stop-motion animation. Pinocchio has a courser, less polished appearance – he seems almost unfinished, with nails sticking out of his head – but his boyish enthusiasm shines through. And the settings are powerfully evoked by the animators, from the cold concrete of Italian fascism to the the gaudiness of the carnival. It is both immensely emotionally rich and astoundingly weird, but it is also an utter triumph.

David Bradley as Geppetto and Gregory Mann as Pinocchio

Memory is also a significant theme in Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter (★★★★☆), a chilling story of a middle-aged filmmaker who takes her mother to a hotel deep in the Welsh countryside. They are the only ones in the hotel, and she proves unable to shake the thought that there is some strange presence among them. I have been tepid on Hogg’s previous work, which is formally rigorous to the point of being a bit stilted. But here she takes on genre filmmaking to thrilling effect, drawing on the conventions of horror cinema while not giving in to cop-out or cliché. Through wispy, ethereal cinematography, she finds the gothic in the everyday – the slow creep of mist across the hotel grounds, the greenish glow of a fire exit sign, the distracted yet eerie humming of a bored receptionist. And she creates a ghostly, ambient soundscape, mixing an unnerving soundtrack with the discordant sounds of high-heeled footsteps and the clink of cutlery. It’s Hogg’s strongest and most distinctive work to date, with an extraordinary, multilayered performance by Tilda Swinton.

Also drawing on the conventions of horror was Enys Men (★★★☆☆), the latest from director Mark Jenkin. Jenkin is well known for rejecting the advances of the digital revolution by shooting on 16mm film and hand-processing the film in his sink. Enys Men follows a woman working on a remote island and experiencing strange visions – some of which seem to be memories of her past. The film has some astounding, hypnotic images, and audacious and frightening sound design, which give the 1970s folk horror atmosphere a modern twist. But I felt a lack of structure meant that it packed less of a punch than Bait, his previous film. A lack of structure was also an issue for Nayola (★★★☆☆), which through vivid animation explores the lives of contemporary Angolans and their memories of the civil war. There are some very striking sequences, including a late turn into magical realism, but it felt too much like a series of good shorts turned into a feature rather than its own thing.

Cinematic politics

Different types of politics were a feature of many of the films I saw this year, but were particularly prominent in four. No Bears (★★★★★) is not simply a film but the latest act of defiance from Jafar Panahi, an Iranian director who in 2011 was banned from making films for twenty years (he has since made at least five). Panahi plays a version of himself, renting a room in a small Iranian village in order to remotely direct a film being shot over the border in Turkey. He increasingly has to deal with social conflicts in the village, while struggling with his own internet connection and with the (unspoken) restrictions placed on him by the Iranian authorities. That the film was made at all is an achievement in itself, but how much more satisfying that it is a work of such humour, complexity, and emotional richness. The village, which metaphorically represents certain aspects of Iran, is portrayed in ways both gently amusing and quietly excoriating. But Panahi also betrays elements of self-doubt – by pursuing his artistic vision, the cinematic Panahi puts others at risk in addition to himself. Shortly prior to the film’s release, Panahi was arrested and sentenced to six years in prison. The film which remains is an extraordinary statement of Panahi’s commitment to staying in Iran and keeping his artistic voice.

A pivotal scene in Jafar Panahi’s *No Bears*

The politics of language and religion are explored in Godland (★★★★☆), which follows a Danish priest in the late nineteenth century as he journeys to a village in Iceland to build a church. Rather than simply sailing there, he decides to travel across the island on foot to capture some of it with his camera. As the journey progresses, tensions emerge with his Icelandic guide, who doesn’t speak Danish, while the priest simply refuses to learn Icelandic. The cinematography is completely stunning: the 1.33:1 aspect ratio and the rounded corners of the image mimic the priest’s photographic plates, while the film has a Kurosawa-esque command of the weather – the audience feels windswept, drenched, lost in the fog. The pace is fairly slow, but for those with the patience, its surreal visual landscapes and complex character dynamics are absolutely captivating.

Elsewhere, Super Eagles ’96 (★★★★☆) is a spirited documentary about the Nigerian national football team and their campaign to win the gold medal at the 1996 Olympic Games. Yet it is also a story of the political and military dictatorship of the 1990s, and of how the football team was one of very few things that gave hope to a struggling population. The film deftly weaves together interviews with the team, archive footage, and reconstructions of Nigerian living rooms and cafes as their supporters root for the super eagles. It’s a hugely stirring and satisfying watch. The Angolan film Our Lady of the Chinese Shop (★☆☆☆☆), however, is neither stirring nor satisfying in the slightest. The film attempts to reflect on the politics of the Angolan state, and on the increasing economic involvement of China in the African continent. Unfortunately, its glacial pace, lacklustre acting, and pretentious narration make it an inept and intensely boring experience. Several people actually walked out of the cinema, while up to half of the remaining audience were asleep at some point (including me). When the most exciting thing happening onscreen is the grammatical and spelling errors in the subtitles, you know that the film isn’t very good.

Dying with Laughter

It’s always a joy to see comedies at the London Film Festival, and this year I wasn’t short of options. The Banshees of Inisherin (★★★★★) is the latest film from Martin McDonagh, whose work features astoundingly dark comedy alongside deeper philosophical reflections on life and death. His newest film, set in 1923, reunites Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson as two friends living on the fictional island of Inisherin off the Irish coast. Gleeson’s character suddenly decides he doesn’t want to be friends with Farrell’s character anymore, leading to a series of unintended and violent consequences. I thought the film was an immensely powerful exploration of loneliness and the effect that it has on people; the characters are physically separated from the mainland, but also somewhat emotionally separated from each other. The cast give uniformly brilliant performances, but particularly Farrell, who ranges expertly from cocksure arrogance to vulnerability and fear. The period setting and remoteness of the landscape lends a certain poetry to the cinematography, but it’s punctuated as ever with scabrous dialogue and gasp-inducing humour. I thought it was an outstanding character study that ranks among McDonagh’s greatest works.

Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell in *The Banshees of Inisherin*

Also set on an island, though completely different in tone, was Chee$e (★★★☆☆), which focuses on Skimma, a cheesemaker turned weed-dealer living in Trinidad. Skimma hopes to evade the authorities and buy himself a ticket off the island by hiding clumps of marijuana in the cheese he manufactures; however, in doing so he unwittingly creates a new strain of drug that causes hallucinations. The film changes hue fairly frequently, sometimes mid-scene, like a sort of weed-induced multicoloured fantasy – so it was no surprise to hear in the post-film Q+A that director Damian Marcano was high while doing the colour correction. It’s a scrappy and dynamic film, but also structurally a bit of a mess, leaving the audience stumbling around in the smoke.

More structured was Klokkenluider (★★★★☆), the debut feature from Neil Maskell, who I know mostly as an actor who plays terrifying characters, especially assassins. He brings some of that intimidating energy to the story of a government employee and his wife who hide in the Belgian countryside after discovering a state secret and alerting a newspaper (the title is Dutch for “whistleblower”). Soon two men show up to guard them, causing tensions with the couple. It’s dark, very funny, and maintains a sense of mystery right to the end. A much brighter affair was Fast and Feel Love (★★★★☆), an utterly wonderful and hilarious Thai comedy. The film follows a professional cup-stacker and his attempts to sort out his life after his girlfriend leaves him. But it features a frenetic visual style and soundtrack which parodies modern blockbusters. I particularly enjoyed the references to Parasite and Star Wars memes, and the way in which the cinematography is itself the cause of many of the jokes (something surprisingly few comedies pull off successfully). It’s smart, inventive, and uproariously funny, and I can’t wait to see it again.

Whodunnit?

Mystery was at the heart of a number of films I saw, but four in particular. Medusa Deluxe (★★★★☆), a murder mystery set in a hairdressing competition, was an absolute riot, with Robbie Ryan’s dazzling cinematography presenting the story as if it takes place in one shot. The camera is restless, prowling around after various members of the ensemble cast, catching snatches of dialogue or glimpses of characters. It’s less of a straightforward whodunnit and more of a Robert Altman-style character study; indeed, the film succeeds in mocking the vanity and shallowness of the hairdressers while also celebrating their artistry. I did feel that certain characters were underdeveloped, and that the storytelling was actually slightly constrained by the one-shot conceit. Nonetheless, it’s a daring and technically virtuoso debut from a very talented young filmmaker, and I’m excited to see what comes next. Elsewhere, The Woman in the White Car (★★★☆☆) is a rare South Korean film with a mostly female crew and cast, weaving a compelling story of healing and empowerment into a dark, violent thriller. It’s quite a tough watch, and doesn’t have the levity of a Bong Joon-ho film, but it kept me guessing throughout.

It’s always hard to pick favourites at the festival, but in addition to Into the Ice and The Banshees of Inisherin, the two final films reviewed here were exceptional examples of the power of cinema to challenge, entertain, and overwhelm. As the closing film, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (★★★★★) provided a fitting and glamorous end to a glorious festival. Director Rian Johnson and Daniel Craig (as detective Benoit Blanc) return, but the wider cast have completely changed, as has the setting, from a New England mansion to a preposterously high-tech Greek island. This time Blanc’s investigation includes a tech entrepreneur and his acolytes, and is far more explosive (as one would expect from a sequel). It may not be quite as sharp or intelligent as the first film, but this is still streets ahead of the competition, with knowing, self-aware humour, a tightly-written plot, and a dazzling visual style. It’s probably the most purely entertaining film I saw at the festival this year.

Daniel Craig et al in *Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery*

Finally, Decision to Leave (★★★★★) is the most recent film from the Korean director Park Chan-wook, who is not normally known for his restraint: a teenage viewing of his dark and violent Oldboy left me completely staggered at the exquisite cruelty of the narrative – delivered nonetheless with cinematic panache. How intriguing, then, to see director Park toning down some of his impulses in this immensely accomplished, haunting, and unexpectedly hilarious mystery. The film follows a mild-mannered insomniac detective who gradually becomes closer and closer to the woman at the centre of a police case. To say any more would spoil the feverish, jigsaw-like plot. Suffice it to say that this is a film of outstanding performances, where glances, subtle expressions, and small details contain clues as to how the narrative will unfold. The score is lush and romantic, and the cinematography is immensely impressive, with a range of unusual angles (including, at one point, from the perspective of a corpse). It will surely reward repeated viewings, but I’m glad that my first viewing was at the festival – in the middle of a full cinema, gasping and laughing at every twist and turn of the plot.

Park Hae-il and Tang Wei in *Decision to Leave*

BFI London Film Festival 2021

After a disappointingly limited programme in 2020 – due, of course, to COVID-19 – the London Film Festival made a triumphant return in the first few weeks of October 2021. Once again, hundreds of films from around the world were on offer, screening in actual cinemas. And while it may not have been a vintage year – there were not enough archive films or comedies, two of my favourite categories – it was a huge joy to rifle through the festival programme once again, circling in pen the films that looked most exciting.

Most of this year’s festival took place on the South Bank, both at the BFI and at the enormous Royal Festival Hall, which played host to all the main gala screenings. The cinemas were at full capacity, and while we were informed before screenings that masks were “expected”, mask-wearing itself was very inconsistent. As such, with a nervous eye on my upcoming holiday, I saw fewer films than I normally would. Nonetheless, I experienced enough of the festival to gain a renewed enthusiasm for the diversity of contemporary cinema, and for the vision, talent, and drive of filmmakers from around the world.

This year I managed 11 films. Here are my thoughts on them.

The Pleasures of the Big Screen

A number of films stood out for their immense visual and sonic flair, functioning as spectacular reminders of the power of the big screen experience. Ironic, then, that the first of these, the explosive western The Harder They Fall (★★★★★), will probably be seen by most people on Netflix. Directed by the London-born Jeymes Samuel, who is mostly known as a musician, the film focuses on the cowboy Nat Love and his quest for revenge after his parents are murdered. With its largely black cast, including Idris Elba, Regina King, and Lakeith Stanfield, the film acts as a much-needed corrective to the whitewashed canon of the cinematic western. Historians estimate that as many as one in three cowboys in the old west were black, and yet classic westerns show little, if any, awareness or interest in this fact. Samuel’s riposte to this is to take a range of real historical figures – including Nat Love, Stagecoach Mary, and Cherokee Bill – and throw them all together in one film. Furthermore, the film is not really about race, or racism: instead, it is a tale of love and revenge where the characters just happen to be black. Samuel’s assured direction and some spectacular performances make this a western of rip-roaring swagger, with propulsive cinematography, stylised dialogue, a pulsating soundtrack (largely by Samuel himself) and a villain with golden pistols. It is outrageous, glorious fun, and I can’t wait to see it again on the big screen.

The main gang from the spectacular *The Harder They Fall*.

The visionary director Edgar Wright makes spectacular use of locations closer to home in Last Night in Soho (★★★★★), his first horror film. Thomas McKenzie is excellent as Eloise Turner, a sixties-obsessed young woman from Cornwall who travels to London to study at a fashion college. Eloise is motivated but shy, and McKenzie brilliantly portrays her sense of awkwardness and unease at university life in a big city. And then she suddenly finds herself transported to 1960s Soho, and the film takes a turn for the sinister. Wright has lived in Soho for over twenty years, and he fantastically captures both its garish glamour and its moral murkiness, both in the sixties and in the present day. The increasingly frenetic horror is handled with all the style, panache, and manic energy that we expect from him. Indeed, while Wright draws on the psychological horror of Roman Polanski and the baroque nastiness of Dario Argento, this is very much his own film – stylistically distinct in the bravura way it mixes past and present, dream and reality, in one intoxicating wallop. The addition of a nostalgic soundtrack, jokes about South London, and the appearances of some genuine British legends (particularly Terence Stamp and Diana Rigg) make this another wild classic from one of Britain’s most exciting directors.

A typically kaleidoscopic scene from Edgar Wright’s *Last Night In Soho.*

The rather more fanciful location of the French town Ennui-sur-Blasé is colourfully realised in Wes Anderson’s new film The French Dispatch (★★★☆☆). Located in this town is the French foreign bureau of a fictional newspaper, the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun. The newspaper’s team of foreign correspondents are in the process of producing their final issue, and each of the four main articles forms a separate storyline in the film. Anthology films often suffer from a lack of consistency and structure, and The French Dispatch is no exception. The student revolution story is much weaker than the others, and the brevity of each storyline often prevents meaningful emotional engagement. However, there are still some wonderful set-pieces, all shot through with the offbeat humour and exacting detail that we expect from Wes Anderson. Moreover, the visual style is Anderson at his most inventive: the film moves effortlessly between black-and-white and colour, wide-screen and academy ratio, and live-action and animation. Moreover, each shift of form is meaningful in some way. We burst from black-and-white into colour when Jeffrey Wright’s food journalist tastes some of the exquisite food of Lieutenant Nescaffier; elsewhere, when Adrien Brody’s art dealer is confronted by a gang of prisoners, the screen suddenly widens to wide-screen, as if the narrower academy ratio can’t pack all of them into the frame. As a tribute to journalism, it’s somewhat ramshackle, and hardly Anderson’s best film, but with enough enjoyable moments to justify seeing it on the big screen.

A scene from *The French Dispatch* in colour and the narrower “academy ratio”.

A scene from *The French Dispatch* in B/W and widescreen.

Funny Haha

I made a conscious effort this year, as I always do, to see at least a few films which reflect on the art of cinema itself. Humidity Alert (★★★☆☆) is an agreeably light comedy about a South Korean cinema putting on a screening and Q+A of a new film during the COVID-19 pandemic. As if the chaos of enforcing mask mandates wasn’t enough, the air conditioning malfunctions, one of the actors has a major argument with his fiancée, and almost no one turns up to the screening. I particularly enjoyed the scene with the post-film Q+A, a fixture of film festivals which (as in the film) occasionally does descend into pretentious over-analysis and audience members holding onto the microphone for too long. I felt the film could have had more laughs, but I loved how it ultimately presented cinema as a blissful balm for the soul in a confusing and difficult world.

An unexpected delight was Money has Four Legs (★★★★☆), a rare film from Myanmar, which focuses on a film crew trying to complete a project amidst the personal drama of the director and actors. The film transitions gradually, and not always smoothly, from wry social realism to increasingly madcap comedy, with some very well-performed set pieces, including a hilariously slow car chase. It’s also bold enough to satirise the (often severe) censorship of the Burmese film industry. At the start of the film, a humourless censor lists all the apparent ills of the fictional script – too much smoking, too much drinking, and not enough positive portrayals of the police – but each of these ills turn out to be features of the real film’s actual plot. I found it enormous fun, and enjoyed how it introduced me to the previously unknown world of Myanmar’s heavy metal scene.

A very meta sequence from *Money Has Four Legs*.

Let me take you on a journey

Several films this year focused on significant journeys or trials undertaken by their characters. Cannon Arm and the Arcade Quest (★★★★☆) is a documentary about a group of men in Denmark who love playing old arcade games. One of their number, Kim, attempts to play the game Gyruss for 100 hours straight. We follow his heroic efforts, complete with five-minute naps and strategic trips to the loo. The film makes us really root not just for Kim, but for all his supportive friends. Most of the arcade game group are hugely intelligent and high functioning, but somewhat on the margins of ordinary society: Kim himself rarely speaks. The philosophical narration can be a bit overbearing, but overall this is a fascinating film about an unusual subject.

A very different kind of trial is seen in Small Body (★★★★☆), which tells the story of a woman named Agata who gives birth to a stillborn child. We are in rural Catholic Italy in the late nineteenth century, and as the child was not baptised, the community believes that it is unable to enter heaven. Agata hears of a church in the mountains where the child might be briefly revived and baptised, and she sets out on her own to find it, with the baby’s coffin strapped to her back. These locations of miraculous revival – known as “respite sanctuaries” – genuinely existed across Western Europe from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries, and while Agata’s faith in them may seem strange to us, we still identify with her. Celeste Cescutti’s quiet, measured performance, and the intimate handheld camerawork, create a powerful sense of determination amidst horrifying loss. Moreover, the film’s tougher moments are balanced out by a dreamlike, mellow, often magical atmosphere and tone.

A similar sense of magic in the midst of a harrowing situation pervades the French animation The Crossing (★★★★★). The film follows two young refugee children who are forced to flee for the border after their parents’ arrest. The exact location, and the ethnicities of the characters, are fictional; as such, the story has a powerful sense of universality. The animation itself is groundbreaking: this is the first feature-length film created using oil paint on glass. The style privileges impressionistic textures and vibrant colours over exacting, photorealistic detail. But director Florence Miailhe transcends the limitations of the form by creating a genuine sense of depth. Her thrilling and vivid evocation of the environments of the story – combined with the evocative sound design and music – make the film a truly immersive experience, however experimental its visual style. Visually stunning throughout, and with a compassionate and involving narrative, this was one of the best films at the festival, and deserved a much wider audience than was permitted by its two late-night screenings.

The impressionistic yet immersive style of *The Crossing*.

Also groundbreaking and immersive, though in a very different way, was Il Buco (★★★★☆), which tells the story of a 1961 expedition into the Bifurto Abyss, a vast cave in the gentle pastoral landscape of Calabria, southern Italy. We observe the preparations of the team, and then descend with them deep into the cave. We occasionally come up for air to spend time with a group of local shepherds, who are unbothered by the expedition while they deal with the challenges of their own lives. This is a slow, meditative film with very little dialogue or dramatic conflict, and yet it is completely mesmerising throughout. The caving sequences in particular are technically masterful. Shooting on location in the actual cave, director Michelangelo Frammartino envelops us in complete darkness, with the cavers’ headlamps the only source of light. Moreover, he creates an extremely evocative soundscape, capturing everything from the sonorous echo of the cavers’ equipment to the almost imperceptible dripping of water. It’s a film that carries us along in its unhurried rhythm as it thrusts us into the heart of the earth.

Current affairs

Two final films were noteworthy for saying something vital about our current moment in time. The Neutral Ground (★★★★☆) is a politically charged and deeply personal documentary about America’s tortured relationship with its civil war past. In an unvarnished and blackly comic style, director CJ Hunt describes how, in response to the liberation and enfranchisement of African-American slaves, white southerners created a false history of their pre-civil war society known as the “lost cause mythology”. Central to this narrative were the fanciful ideas that slavery was largely benevolent rather than oppressive, and that the causes of the civil war had very little to do with slavery; indeed, Hunt interviews southerners today who blithely parrot these ridiculous views and celebrate their Confederate past. All of this is structured around the increasingly acrimonious debate over the persistence of statues of major Confederate figures that litter the southern states of the US. Although it’s an entertaining film, Hunt ultimately resists trivialising the issue, especially when he turns up in Charlottesville during the “Unite the Right” rally in 2017 – the one moment where our otherwise genial host seems to genuinely fear for his life. I thought this was a brilliant, brave, and amazingly assured debut film, which cuts to the heart of a major dividing line in American politics – not just between pro- and anti-statues, but between truth and falsehood. It should be required viewing.

Finally, there was the Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s A Hero (★★★★★), which was possibly the best film I saw at the festival this year. The film follows a man on leave from a prison sentence for debt who finds himself in possession of a bag of gold coins. Rather than use the money to pay off his debt, he seeks to return the bag to its owner, and unexpectedly becomes a social media star on account of his good deed. But then rumours begin to circulate that the story is made up. As in his other films, Farhadi uses a deceptively simple story to discuss broader issues in modern Iran: honour, family relationships, and class, amongst many others. In A Hero, he specifically examines social media as a relentless driver of public perceptions of right and wrong, with much of the plot revolving around online comments and the sharing of incriminating videos. Yet Farhadi is not interested in the visual landscape of the internet – instead, his camera is continually aimed at his characters, and the myriad ways in which they respond to the online drama. With some immensely convincing performances, A Hero is Farhadi at his best – a film which genuinely feels like a thriller despite its domestic setting.

The BFI London Film Festival 2020

Another year, another London Film Festival – except this time, it took place in another world.

Back in August, just as cinemas were beginning to reopen after months of lockdown, the BFI announced that this year’s festival would go ahead, but in a radically reimagined form. The number of features would be slashed from 250 to 50, and the majority of those would only be available online. Only 17 features could be seen at the cinema, and very few filmmakers would be able to attend the festival in person.

In the run-up to LFF 2020, I really struggled to get excited about it in the same way as previous years. The enormity and diversity of the programme is normally one of the festival’s main attractions, providing a rare opportunity to see films from countries that are underrepresented in global cinema, or films which are too experimental or obscure for mainstream release. Furthermore, so much of the joy of the festival lies in the moments in between – the mad dash across London to the next screening, the random chats in screenings rooms and lobbies, the last-minute tickets and fortuitous discoveries. None of this would be remotely possible in an environment of one-way systems, social distancing, and absent box offices.

It may not have been comparable to previous years in quality, range, or excitement. But then again, it never would have been. The fact that the festival happened at all this year, with proper in-person screenings, is something of a minor miracle. After months of cultural events being cancelled or postponed, it was a triumphant return, with the curators packing in as much diversity as possible in a scaled-back set of films.

This year, I saw nine films – all of them at the cinema. Here are my thoughts on them.

No Justice, No Peace

A number of films at LFF 2020 dealt with some kind of societal injustice. The issue of domestic abuse was confronted head on in Herself (★★★★☆), a superb drama written by and starring Clare Dunne. Dunne plays Sandra, a Dublin-based single mother who has just fled an abusive husband. After repeatedly failing to find decent housing for herself and her two daughters, she resolves to construct her own house in a friend’s garden. The premise of the film, and the fact it was made by the director of Mamma Mia, made me nervous that it might be a bit mawkish. In fact, it was far tougher than I expected. It rightly refuses to shy away from the horrors of domestic abuse – both in terms of the physical assault Sandra suffers, and the more insidious acts of intimidation by her ex-husband. But despite the difficult subject matter, the film portrays with great empathy Sandra’s tireless persistence as she works to provide for her children. With a tour-de-force performance by Clare Dunne, Herself is a film of immense emotional power.

The injustices of the United States prison system are laid bare in the exhilarating documentary Time (★★★☆☆). The film follows Fox Rich, an African-American business owner and mother of six, who is campaigning for the release from prison of her husband Rob, who is serving a sixty-year jail sentence for armed robbery. Rich, who herself spent three and a half years in prison for her part in the robbery, is a fascinating, strong, and extraordinarily patient figure: she deals with the delays and indifference in the judicial system with a persistent southern politeness, and only once gives way to open anger. The film is rapturously shot in black-and-white, and makes use of an amazing archive of home video footage captured by Fox Rich herself on old mini-DV cameras. This allows for an unprecedented depth and intimacy in the depiction of the family’s story. Indeed, in its exploration of the impact of mass incarceration on individuals and families, it can be seen as a companion piece to Ava Duvernay’s 13^th – a film which takes a macro-level view of the US prison system, with millions of untold narratives buried therein. However, there is a major flaw in Time, which is that it contains extremely little information on the background behind the original crime. All we are given is several vague allusions to a bank robbery and almost nothing at all on the trial. This unfortunately diminishes the power of its political critique.

^{Fox Rich and her husband Rob shortly before the beginning of their imprisonment.}

Islamocinema

Several other films in the festival centred on Islam or Islamic characters. Mogul Mowgli (★★★★☆) stars the irrepressible Riz Ahmed as Zed, a British-Pakistani rapper on the peak of mainstream success, who is suddenly struck down with a vicious autoimmune disease. The film deals with intergenerational cultural issues, tensions between different understandings of Islam, and the lasting trauma of Indian partition – but all of this is shot through a brazenly surreal visual style. As Zed’s body declines, so too does his grip on reality – the drab corridors of the hospital clash with the explosive colour of his dreams, which are at once bizarre and frightening. I suspect that its scrappy indie sensibilities may not be for everyone, but I found the film fierce and exhilarating.

^{Riz Ahmed gives an electrifying performance in Mogul Mowgli.}

After Love (★★★☆☆), meanwhile, focuses on an unusual character in British cinema: a white English woman who has converted to Islam. Joanna Scanlan plays Mary, who discovers after the death of her Muslim husband that he has been having an affair. The film is excellently plotted, and Scanlan’s performance brilliantly evokes the shellshock of a woman whose entire understanding of the world is in turmoil. Nevertheless, I questioned the wisdom of some of the directorial choices made. The decision to show the central character in a state of undress – something which could be problematic for a Muslim audience – leaves the film open to the charge of voyeurism, as if the audience were looking at the character as a curiosity and not as a coequal.

The more political aspect of Islam was a major theme of One Night in Miami (★★★☆☆). The directorial debut of Regina King, and based on a play by Kemp Powers, the film revolves around a meeting between Malcolm X, Sam Cooke, Jim Browne, and Muhammad Ali on the night of Ali’s victory over Sonny Liston in February 1964. Five months before the signing of the Civil Rights Act, the four contemplate and discuss each other’s place in American society, history, politics, and the civil rights movement. The film is driven by four magnetic performances, including the Londoner Kingsley Ben-Adir as Malcolm X, and it is a compassionate and empathetic evocation of a crucial moment in American history. Nevertheless, with a dialogue-heavy script, the film doesn’t do enough to escape its stage-bound origins; indeed, at times, I wished I was watching the play.

^{A superb ensemble cast features in One Night in Miami.}

Sonic horizons

One film which was more up-front about its stage origins is David Byrne’s American Utopia (★★★★☆), one of two films at the festival strongly centred on music. American Utopia is a filmed performance of the show of the same name which ran at New York’s Hudson Theatre in 2019. Byrne performs songs from his career, flanked onstage by two dancers and a host of untethered musicians, all of whom are exhilaratingly choreographed by Annie-B Parson. The film version is directed by Spike Lee, who captures the performance – and all of Byrne’s triumphant weirdness – with fluid, engaging camerawork. I did feel that it could have done with an interval, as the lack of narrative began to grate after a while – it is a more of an elaborate concert than a musical. But in a time when live music is firmly off the agenda, the film is a carnivalesque, vicarious joy.

^{David Byrne and band in the exuberant American Utopia.}

Music was a key theme of Soul (★★★★★), the new offering from Pixar, which for me was the second-best film of the festival this year. The film follows a New York schoolteacher and aspiring jazz musician, voiced by Jamie Foxx, who accidentally loses his soul. To say more of the plot would spoil its surprises – let it suffice to say that I continue to find it amazing how Pixar, and director Pete Docter in particular, have the confidence to deal with such complex metaphysical ideas for an audience substantially composed of children. The look of the film relies on a carefully thought-out distinction between the real world of New York City and the unreal spirit world, which Foxx’s soul wanders around in trying to get back to earth. New York City is captured in explosive colour, realistically capturing everything from the frenetic energy of the streets to the bemused facial expressions of subway riders. This colourful landscape is contrasted with the more washed-out look of the spirit world, a dreamy mix of ethereal and pellucid shapes. That contrast – sustained incredibly successfully – reminded me of It’s a Wonderful Life, which is not a comparison I invoke lightly. The music also reflects this balance: New York is all bubbly jazz melodies by Jon Batiste, while the spirit world is suffused with slow-moving electronic music by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. This is to say nothing of its exuberant sense of humour, which ranges from the usual Pixar slapstick to gags about Archimedes and the New York Knicks. The metaphysics may not be quite as airtight as Inside Out, but Soul is a warmer, funnier film, with altogether more presence in the real world. I thought it was flat-out brilliant, and well on-par with Pixar’s greatest work.

^{New York is evoked in startling colour in Pixar’s Soul.}

What does it all mean?

Two final films feature characters who are searching for some sort of meaning and purpose in their lives, which are in danger of become purposeless. Francis McDormand gives one of the most convincing performances of her career in Nomadland (★★★★☆), directed by Chloe Zhao. The film explores the lives of a number of Americans who lost much of their material wealth and prospects during the Great Recession; too poor to retire, some have resorted to living a nomadic existence in camper vans, travelling around the States to find temporary work. A number of real people who genuinely live a nomadic life appear in the film as versions of themselves; combined with the film’s understated tone, this gives it the earthy feel of a documentary, although it is formally a drama. The plot is meandering, much like the central character’s travels, and thereby underlines the fact that there are no easy solutions to the ongoing crisis of economic inequality in both the US and the western world at large. This is to say nothing of Zhao’s instinctive grasp of the aesthetics of the American wilderness, which is captured in all its vast beauty. Overall, it is a compassionate and thoroughly human drama.

^{Francis McDormand gives a performance of earthy naturalism in Nomadland.}

An entirely different search for meaning is manifested in Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round (★★★★★), which is surely the best film I saw at the festival this year. The film follows four Danish schoolteachers who all feel that something is missing in their lives – one lacks a meaningful connection with his wife, while the others perceive a lack of drive and energy in their teaching. They collectively decide to test the theory that their lives will be improved if they maintain a consistent level of alcohol in their blood. Thus ensues a hilarious set of sequences in which the four characters take illicit shots in toilet cubicles and supply cupboards. Over the course of the film, the experiment leads the characters to discover something about themselves and each other, for better and for worse. The premise is that of an outright comedy; but while it is a staggeringly funny film, it is also a profoundly human and warm portrayal of four brilliantly-written and complex characters. Indeed, alcohol both is and isn’t the central theme – it is deeply present in the film, but it also acts as a framing device for the hopes, aspirations, and disappointments of the four men. The performances – as much physical as emotional – are incredibly powerful, and Vinterberg captures the action with a wry cinematic eye.

I saw Another Round on the day it was announced that London would be moving into new “Tier 2” coronavirus restrictions. I trudged dejectedly into the cinema, weary at the state of the world. Two hours later, I emerged into the cold evening with an almost fanatical energy, invigorated by the humanity and unbridled joy of the film. Of all the films at the festival, Another Round gives the most potent reminder, were it ever needed, of the intoxicating power of cinema.

^{Mads Mikkelsen raises his alcohol level in the joyous Another Round.}

The BFI London Film Festival 2019

After a long and glorious summer, London has settled into a deadening pattern of grey skies and incessant rain. Yet there are rays of light amidst these birth-pangs of autumn – and the BFI London Film Festival is one of the brightest.

I look forward eagerly to the festival every year. It’s a wonderful chance to see new films from around the world, often from countries about which you know very little. Sometimes you see three or four in a day. And yet with 229 features screening this year, alongside short films, talks, and other special events, you can still only see a fraction of what is on offer.

This year, I managed 19 films. Here are some of my thoughts.

Fantastic films and where to find them

This year’s festival featured a range of films which drew to some extent on fantasy: films which transcended or embellished everyday life, presenting visions of the world that were surreal, fantastical, or horrifying. I Lost My Body (★★★★★), a spectacular French animation, had a particularly original and macabre concept: a recently severed hand, resting in a hospital, suddenly comes to life and hunts for its owner, a young man called Naoufel, amidst the feverish streets of Paris. Interspersed with this narrative are flashbacks which tell Naoufel’s story. What was really extraordinary about the film was the way in which the animators imbued the hand with emotion – it acts like a silent film character, expressing sorrow, guilt, and nostalgia through wordless movement. Combined with a powerful musical score and a deeply sympathetic tone, the film is utterly captivating, and one of the key cultural highlights of my year. It will eventually be out on Netflix and I urge everyone to see it.

I experienced an altogether darker atmosphere and setting in The Lighthouse (★★★★★). A deeply unconventional horror film, shot in stark black-and-white, it focuses on the relationship between two grizzled lighthouse-keepers – played by Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson – and how they are afflicted by nightmares, jealousy, and madness as they are trapped inside by a storm. Brooding, shadowy cinematography and a soundtrack filled with unearthly foghorns ratchets up the tension from the very beginning, while the size of the frame – a narrow 1.19:1, half as wide as conventional widescreen cinema – amplifies the claustrophobia of the characters. Dafoe and Pattinson give unbelievably visceral performances, grunting and bellowing through the unusually articulate script, which was heavily influenced by Herman Melville and nineteenth-century nautical slang. And the film masterfully privileges mood and ambiguity over plot development, rooting us so powerfully in its horror that you completely forget about being in a cinema. It’s a film that buffets you with gale-force wind, rain, and madness, and at the end I staggered out of the cinema astounded at what I had seen.

A film which matched The Lighthouse in terms of sheer “out-there” otherness was Color out of Space (★★★★☆). The first feature made by cult director Richard Stanley in almost thirty years, it’s an adaptation of an allegedly un-filmable H.P. Lovecraft story, in which a meteorite crashes into the earth, releasing a strange non-human colour which leads to madness or death in those who encounter it. Despite some slow parts and slightly corny dialogue, I thought the film worked exceptionally well, creating an intoxicating visual style that boldly evokes the horror and nastiness of the central malign force. And Nicolas Cage serves as one of the film’s most “out-there” elements, in a performance which varies wildly between tenderness, uncontrollable anger, and profane sassiness.

Colour Out of Space — The mad visual stylings of *Color Out of Space*

I also got a last minute ticket to the European premiere of Judy and Punch (★★★★☆), a sly feminist take on the traditional Punch and Judy show and unlike any film I have ever seen before. It depicts Punch and Judy as real-life puppeteers, living in the sixteenth-century (?) town of Seaside, which is nowhere near the sea, and where the town authorities routinely execute people accused of witchcraft or ungodliness. Through dramatising the main events of the Punch and Judy narrative, the film provocatively questions the violence at its core: Punch’s beating of his wife is transformed from a child-pleasing diversion to a horrifying act of domestic violence. But it’s also a film with a gleeful sense of fun. Indeed, the tonal shifts in the film are as violent as Punch’s stick, lurching between shocking depictions of child and domestic abuse to outlandish Pythonesque comedy. And yet, somehow, it all hangs together. I was a little disappointed by the acts of vengeance towards the end of the film, which I felt diluted its overall message. At the same time, I was impressed with its terrific performances, costume design, and music – and, of course, any film which humorously quotes Russell Crowe’s speech from Gladiator is always worth a look.

Two other films presented particularly singular visions. Scales (★★★★☆), a Saudi Arabian folk tale, was a deeply enigmatic piece of work with wonderful, hypnotic black-and-white cinematography, and quiet, restrained performances. Running at an efficient 75 minutes, it’s probably the only Saudi film ever made to feature mermaids. It could be seen as an allegory, but it also works on its own generic terms. I was under its spell throughout. I also enjoyed Paris Qui Dort (★★★★☆), a hugely inventive French film from the silent era in which a mad scientist freezes in motion most of Paris’s citizens. Directed by René Clair, and recently restored, it’s a delightful film with a fun and engaging concept.

Funny Ha Ha

A real pleasure of this year’s festival was being able to see comedies from four different countries. The best among these was The Unknown Saint (★★★★★), the most unexpectedly brilliant film I have seen this year. Set in Morocco’s desert south, it follows a criminal who, at the beginning of the film, buries his stolen loot at the top of a hill before surrendering to the police. Once out of prison, he returns to the hill, only to find that local villagers have built a shrine on it, mistakenly thinking that an “unknown saint” has been interred there. As the thief attempts to regain his loot, we meet a range of hilarious characters, from his ironically-named sidekick, “Ahmed the Brain”, to an alcoholic nurse and a charismatic barber who doubles up as a dentist. It’s a film with a deadpan, laconic style of humour, which also manages to make serious points about modern North African rural society. I found it uproarious and couldn’t recommend it highly enough.

The Unknown Saint.jpg — The unexpected shrine in *The Unknown Saint*

Similarly deadpan was It Must Be Heaven (★★★★☆), a charming and formally precise film by the Palestinian director Elia Suleiman. The film consists of a series of comic observations, with its themes of identity, exile, and Palestine worn very lightly. Suleiman, the nearly wordless central character, positions himself centrally in the frame, reacting (or not) to what happens before him. It’s a shame that it began with its very best joke, with the rest of the film not quite reaching the same comic heights; all the same, it was exciting and urgent cinema.

An entirely different style of humour was seen in The Dude in Me (★★★★☆), a flamboyant Korean body-swap comedy that was the perfect film for the Thursday afternoon on which I saw it. After a local mobster is involved in an accident with a shy, obese school student, he wakes up and realises that he has traded bodies with the student. With superb performances, well-timed slapstick and smart dialogue, it’s an outrageously enjoyable film. The same was true of Lucky Grandma (★★★★☆), a fabulous New York-set indie that happens to be mostly in Mandarin. After a chain-smoking pensioner comes into possession of a huge bag of money, she immediately goes out to buy expensive groceries and a chandelier. However, she is soon pursued by the local Chinese mafia, and is forced to hire a bodyguard called ‘Big Pong’. Anchored by a tremendous central performance from Tsai Chin, it’s a film which convincingly portrays Sinophone New York with authentic detail and an eye for the absurd. Even though the humour sags a little in the final act, I loved it.

Oh, the drama!

The festival also had its share of compelling dramas. The Report (★★★★☆) is a powerful depiction of how Senate staffer Daniel J. Jones, played here by Adam Driver, conducted an investigation into the U.S.’s use of torture in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The astonishing thing about this whole episode was that the CIA, which used the euphemistic term “enhanced interrogation techniques,” persisted with actions such as waterboarding despite internal knowledge that they were not effective in gaining information. It’s a film which is utterly uncompromising in so many respects – partly in its depictions of torture, from which I often had to avert my eyes – but also in its forensic level of detail. It’s very talky, with little exploration into its characters’ lives, and yet always engaging. What I liked about it was that despite the dark subject matter – and the fact that the CIA have rarely appeared more menacing onscreen – it’s fundamentally a hopeful film. A redacted summary of the report was published, after all: something that could not happen in many so-called “democracies.” The film is out on Amazon in a few months and is well worth a look.

The Report.jpg — Adam Driver in *The Report*

Far easier to watch was The House of Us (★★★★☆). A lovely Korean drama, it focuses on three young children and their responses to various difficulties, including the breakup of a marriage and the potential loss of a home. The director, Ga-eun Yoon, demonstrates a similar aptitude for capturing children’s experience as one of my favourite directors, Hirokazu Kore-eda. It’s compassionate, quietly observed, and deeply moving.

A similar compassion for her characters was shown by director Sarah Gavron in Rocks (★★★★☆), a vibrant portrayal of life among ethnic-minority London teenage girls. Many contemporary films about inner-city teenagers are incredibly cynical and nihilistic, filled with violence and sex for their own sake (I’m thinking especially of the atrocious Kidulthood). Rocks is different. Its young cast, who give amazing naturalistic performances, had a central role in building the script and shaping the dialogue. It shows: the characters are authentic, immersed in London slang, and have immense humanity and creativity. Moreover, though they are a group of people not usually seen on the big screen, their stories are truly compelling.

Thomas Clay’s Fanny Lye Deliver’d (★☆☆☆☆), on the other hand, ended up being the greatest disappointment of the festival. Modelled on 1970s British horror films, but with none of their campy charm, it’s exploitation trash masquerading as high art. In some respects it succeeds – the foggy, mud-soaked milieu of the film is engagingly realised. But I was put off by its bombastic and distracting musical score, its crude, frustrating characters, unfocused historical context, and its criminal lack of wit and restraint. Overall, I thought it was staggeringly misjudged.

Slowly but surely

Film festivals are always a great place for lovers of slow cinema – the kind of films with lengthy shots of faces and landscapes, and where ten minutes can feel like an hour. I had the patience to sit through three examples this year. The best of these was The Gold-Laden Sheep and the Sacred Mountain (★★★★☆). It’s a film which is profoundly shaped by the context in which it was made. Shot among the Gaddi community of shepherds in the Himalayan mountains, it uses members of that community as actors, while the narrative draws on their perspectives. Described by the director as an “ethno sci-fi”, it’s unhurried in pace but strangely mesmerising, with extraordinary use of cinematography to evoke the grandeur of the landscape.

the Gold-laden sheep — Arjun Pant in *The Gold-Laden Sheep and the Sacred Mountain*

Öndög (★★★☆☆), a Mongolian drama, also used nonprofessional actors in an offbeat tale of reproduction, police investigations, and camels. Despite brilliantly capturing the Mongolian plains in a way that invoked Lawrence of Arabia, I began to lose interest from the second half onwards. Particularly disappointing was Fire Will Come (★★☆☆☆), a film about a pyromaniac set in Galicia. Some films tell you absolutely everything through expository dialogue. By telling you virtually nothing at all, this film goes so far towards the opposite extreme that it fails to earn its slow pace and ambiguous tone. Despite some wonderfully filmed and edited sequences, it is just too oblique to be in any way engaging.

Cinéma du cinéma

Two final films were documentaries which reflected on filmmaking itself, but in very contrasting ways. Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound (★★★★☆) superbly outlines the history of sound in cinema, featuring interviews with such industry heavyweights as Ben Burtt, who created the sound effects for Star Wars, and Walter Murch, who is largely responsible for the “surround sound” in today’s cinemas. While it could have been a little less Hollywood-centric, I thought it was a very well-made film on an aspect of cinema, and a workforce, that are often overlooked.

The last film I will review here, Talking about Trees (★★★★★), was possibly the best one I saw. Shot in Sudan, it follows members of the “Sudanese Film Club”, a group of cinema enthusiasts and former filmmakers, as they attempt to reopen a local cinema. They want Sudanese people to embrace again the joys of the big screen: all cinemas in the country were closed 20 years ago for political reasons. As a portrait of artists who struggle against an authoritarian and culturally philistine state, it is wonderful and heart-breaking. Even if they are not destined to succeed, we are buoyed by their small victories: a small group of children laughing at Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times at a private film club screening; a member of the group finding a print of his graduation film after he thought it lost; another continuing to find cultural expression through films made with his digital camera. It’s also a very funny and moving portrait of friendship. The members of the club chat amiably late into the night, reflecting on their former lives as film students abroad. At one point, they joke about the loud calls to prayer from local mosques, suggesting that they might drown out the cinema they intend to open. It’s cinema to remind you of the power of cinema – a kind of panegyric to its own form – that made me swell with emotion.

The BFI London Film Festival 2018

Most of us primarily associate autumn with changes in the natural landscape: leaves falling thick and fast, rapidly shortening days, the last vestigial traces of summer heat. Yet it is also a great time for lovers of all things cultural. Many theatres, opera houses, and concert halls begin new seasons in autumn, stretching through to the following spring. Moreover, one of the most exciting cultural events happens in my home city: the BFI London Film Festival.

I love festival season. Hundreds of films from around the globe are shown across London. The films themselves run on time and without adverts. Directors, cinematographers, and actors give post-film Q+As, and even sometimes mingle in the bar afterwards. There’s a palpable enthusiasm in the air.

It’s my fourth time going to the festival this year, and it was undoubtedly my best yet. I started slowly, catching what I could after work; then, over the last weekend, I dashed around trying to see as much as I could. On Saturday I almost missed a film after jostling for space on the tube amidst crowds of Brexit demonstrators. Overall I managed to see fourteen films – eight of them over that last weekend. Here are my thoughts on what I saw.

Some highlights

One of my favourite films of the festival was The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, the latest from the Coen brothers. Originally envisioned as a television series, it’s an anthology film, formed of six different stories all set in the Old West. The stories vary wildly in tone and subject, and no character appears in more than one, but it’s a testament to the Coens’ endless creativity that it all coheres very effectively. So we have a brooding, sombre tale of a disabled theatre performer and his unscrupulous promoter; a determined Tom Waits searching for gold in a bucolic mountain valley; and a spooky carriage ride where all is not as it seems. But my favourite story was “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” itself – a barmy, guffaw-inducing, what-the-hell-just-happened triumph, with a white-suited Tim Blake Nelson singing on a horse and speaking directly to camera in a loquacious cowboy drawl. It’s the Coens at their most cartoonish, and I laughed uproariously. The film will be on Netflix in November, and is worth seeing just for that segment alone.

Buster Scruggs 1 — Tim Blake Nelson in the hilarious “*The Ballad of Buster Scruggs”*

Another highlight was Stan and Ollie. It’s based around a tour of Britain in the 1950s by Stan Laurel (played by Steve Coogan) and Oliver Hardy (played by John C. Reilly), and the personal and professional conflicts that arise as a result. I have loved Laurel and Hardy since I was a child, and this was a real treat. Steve Coogan is great, but John C. Reilly is astonishing, making it look as if Oliver Hardy has walked off one of his movies into his own biopic. The two constantly riff off each other in a compelling and believable way, and the film is an enjoyable testament to one of cinema’s most legendary partnerships.

John C. Reilly also appeared in The Sisters Brothers, a late addition to the festival programme. The film is a laid-back western which balances strong violence and coal-black humour with musing explorations of masculinity, fraternity, and parenthood. It’s brilliantly observed, and shot with piercing detail by Jacques Audiard – such as the moment when John C. Reilly shoots a load of goons sent to kill him without bothering to put his shoes on first.

I also managed to get tickets to the first UK screening of Terry Gilliam’s new film, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. Gilliam has been trying to get various versions of the film off the ground for about 29 years, and to finally see it in a cinema is an extraordinary achievement on the part of the director. It made me think of Goethe, whose poem Faust was only released towards the end of his life, the product of sixty years of work. It can certainly be said that both Gilliam and Goethe are astonishing in their pursuit of creative expression. But the film is not a Faust-like masterpiece – parts of it work better than others, and tonally it lurches around quite a bit. Nevertheless, it is very enjoyable, with some great laughs, and a solid injection of Gilliam’s usual woozy surrealism.

Global cinema

One of the best parts of the London Film Festival is the ability to see films from many different parts of the world – and to be thrust headlong into an entirely different sphere of experience. One of the best foreign films I saw was Birds of Passage, by the Colombian director Ciro Guerra. It’s not quite as good as Embrace of the Serpent, Guerra’s previous film, but it demonstrates again his remarkable skill as a storyteller and a visual stylist. The film is a brilliantly explosive story set among the desert-inhabiting Wayuu clan of northern Colombia. The film explores how the clan are affected by the rise of drugs smuggling from the 1960s onwards, and the consequences that this has for the families and society of the clan. The film works effectively as a gangster thriller, but also incorporates a number of different strands – such as family drama and surrealism – making the film seem both fully familiar and completely distant.

Ciro Guerra’s gripping “*Birds of Passage”*

The Austrian film Angelo was another highlight, focusing on the life of a young black slave in eighteenth-century Viennese court society. It’s a terrific and startling exploration of the European desire to possess black bodies, and ends in a truly shocking way. Five actors play the main character, and all are convincing enough to make the transition seem seamless. They all portray the character with an emotional detachment characteristic of the actors in the films of Robert Bresson: there are no great histrionics, but we are able to read into their blank faces a full range of anguish.

Very different in tone was The Prey, an impressively mounted Cambodian action film. It focuses on a corrupt prison governor who allows three rich people to hunt a group of prisoners in the middle of a forest. Of course, not all goes to plan. It’s an intriguing premise and the action sequences are pleasantly thrilling, especially given the country’s limited film production resources. A higher budget was visible in the Korean film The Spy Gone North, a slickly-done political thriller about espionage on the Korean peninsula. I knew virtually nothing about the story beforehand but found its exploration of North-South tensions very exciting. A gentler pace was seen in the Egyptian crowd-pleaser Yomeddine¸ which revolves around a leper who journeys across Egypt on a horse and cart in order to try and locate surviving members of his estranged family. It’s fairly conventional stuff, but humorous throughout, and intriguing in that the main actor actually has leprosy.

Show don’t tell

I saw a number of films this year that in visual terms were utterly spectacular. Chief among them was Shadow, the new film from the Chinese director Zhang Yimou, most known for the films Hero and House of Flying Daggers, and for choreographing the Beijing Olympic opening ceremony. Shadow is dazzlingly designed – the sets, locations, and costumes are cast in monochrome, with the only colour stemming from the warm hues of skin and the dark red splattering of blood. It’s more like a chamber piece than some of his former films, with court intrigue the main driver of the plot. That said, there’s a jaw-dropping scene in which knife-adorned umbrellas are used as weapons – I genuinely gasped out loud.

Shadow 2 — Zhang Yimou’s unforgettable “*Shadow”*

Another well-designed film was John Carpenter’s The Fog, restored and re-released as part of the festival. I really enjoyed this, and not just because I happened to be sitting in the same cinema as Edgar Wright. While I wasn’t massively frightened during the film, I was certainly creeped out. Carpenter is a master of creating horror images which endure in the mind long after the film has finished, and he certainly succeeds here – I have thought often of the clouds of fog enveloping the horizon, and the sudden appearance of ghostly figures, before I have gone to bed in subsequent days.

A different sort of weather phenomenon was on display in Arctic, in which a mysterious man stranded in the Arctic, played by Mads Mikkelsen, battles thick snow and icy winds in his attempt to find safety. It’s a visceral, physical, and unexpectedly assured debut from director Joe Penna, whose filmmaking background is on Youtube. There are great performances from Mikkelsen, and also from an enormous polar bear who almost mauls him to death.

A somewhat calmer experience was The Old Man and the Gun, which focuses on the real-life felon Forrest Tucker, a gentlemanly American who continued to rob banks well into his seventies. The film has a lovely aesthetic, shot on 16mm for a real vintage look, and has a great performance from Robert Redford in what is very likely his last film. But despite its sheen, the film lacks dramatic tension, and I wasn’t fully engaged by it.

And finally…

One festival experience in particular was utterly extraordinary, and unlike any other. This was The Great Victorian Moving Picture Show. Over the past few years the BFI has been restoring a number of “large-format” films produced between 1896 and 1901 by William Dickson, a pioneer of early cinema. While these films will be made available online next year, as part of the festival they were shown at the BFI IMAX with a live orchestra and introductions by Bryony Dixon, the BFI’s silent film curator.

The films – some mere fragments of a few seconds’ length, some as long as a minute and a half – provided an intriguing insight into the Victorian period. But the projection of the films on the biggest screen in Britain allowed the audience not just to see this period, but to be immersed in it. Huge ships careered towards the audience; Boer war soldiers stood tall; members of the royal family passed by large crowds; and “phantom rides” on trains and buses saw the landscape rush dizzyingly past. It was genuinely astonishing. Of all the films I saw at the London Film Festival this year – and there were many – it was The Great Victorian Moving Picture Show which was the greatest testament to the visceral power of cinema – not only in preserving a moment in time, but in thrusting an audience into an entirely different world.

Classic Movies – Ran

At a castle set in the mountains, an aged Lord and his small retinue of soldiers and advisers are viciously attacked by armies led by two of his three sons. As the Lord’s retinue is gradually annihilated, the violence is observed in detached fashion, through a series of distant wide shots. Arrows and bullets fly in quick succession, horses trample on scores of bodies, blood seeps into the earth. The Lord, trapped in a burning tower, looks steadfastly down at the ground, visibly descending into madness. What is more, for most of this scene, there is no diegetic sound. We hear no shouts of aggression or pain, no gunshots, no songs of steel. The shocked viewer is left only with Toru Takemitsu’s brilliant score, elaborating this terrifying visual distillation of chaos, in which its actors appear to be almost ghostly.

Ran 3 — **“this terrifying visual distillation of chaos”**

It was not all so long ago that the same Lord sat on the side of a mountain, amicably addressing each of his three sons. Akira Kurosawa’s fearsome epic Ran begins with a political problem. Lord Hidetora is reminded through a dream of his looming mortality, and decides to give up most of his power to each of his three sons, Taro, Jiro and Saburo – though Hidetora expects to maintain the title of ‘Great Lord’. While Taro and Jiro accept graciously, Saburo attacks these plans, asking why he thinks his sons will be loyal to him, given that Hidetora has previously used violent means to maintain his own power. Enraged by this, Hidetora banishes Saburo, but in doing so loses his greatest advocate; it is not long before his other sons begin to violently contest his authority, while both are in turn held in thrall by the Machiavellian siren, Lady Kaede.

Ran 4 — **“Akira Kurosawa’s fearsome epic *Ran* begins with a political problem”**

Those familiar with Shakespeare’s King Lear will immediately notice some parallels within the narrative. Shakespeare’s Lear also decides to relinquish most of his power to his (female) progeny, with disastrous consequences. King Lear inspires Ran with much of its story, but also with much of its visual landscape. There was a precedent to this. Back in 1957 Kurosawa had made Throne of Blood, based on Macbeth, which used almost no dialogue from the original text. Instead, the miasmic horror inherent in Shakespeare’s language was evoked through the cinematography. The ‘blasted heath’ was translated into copious amounts of rain and the thickest of fog, all filmed and controlled with precision by the director. In the case of Ran, the totalising language of chaos and disorder in King Lear is embedded within the initially wordless scene of violence already described, a masterpiece of visual scale and emotion.

Of course, that’s not to say that there aren’t many quieter moments in Ran; the overall pace is at times quite slow. In particular, the opening scenes of Hidetora with his sons are marked by leisurely formality, something accentuated by Kurosawa’s decision to use mostly wide shots rather than incorporating close-ups of faces and objects. This achieves a distancing effect – we observe the characters, safe in our seats, later to be horrified at the carnage of stormy ambition. But this apparently ‘slow’ style is consistent with his method at this point in time. Kurosawa made Ran late in his life, in his mid-70s, by which time he had lost almost all of his sight. He had spent a staggering ten years preparing every single shot in the film as a painting, from which those who worked on the film operated. While I wasn’t aware of this fact while watching the film, the painterly aesthetics of its wide shots were readily apparent. In one stunning sequence, Lord Hidetora emerges from the flaming building described above, walking slowly down a long flight of stone steps. He knows his soldiers and followers are all dead. He is flanked by the yellow-clad supporters of Jiro on the left, and the red-clad of Taro on the right. The placement of the soldiers forms a remarkable piece of symmetry which intentionally clashes with the unruly fire in the background; the lone Hidetora, his mind raging like the fire, meets the cold violent fact of military organisation. Framing is everything to Kurosawa, but also detail; 1,400 costumes and suits of armour were made for the film in a process spanning two years. It is difficult to imagine such effort being put into a film today.

Ran 1 part 2 — **“the painterly aesthetics of its wide shots are readily apparent”**

That said, it’s also commendable that Kurosawa achieves some exhilarating performances from his cast. Especially commendable are Tatsuya Nakadai as Lord Hidetora and Mieko Harada as the scheming, murderous Lady Kaede. Nakadai, partly with the help of prosthetics, achieves the transition from venerable septuagenarian Lord to tortured, damaged vagrant with the greatest of passion. Passion also marks out Harada, although of a different kind; as she coaxes Taro and then Jiro into following her commands, you are never quite sure whether she will continue to speak quietly or snap into high-pitched, knife-wielding threats.

Ran 6.jpg — **Mieko Harada as the “scheming, murderous Lady Kaede”**

There are some films that are recognisably great, but which fail to stick long in the memory. Ran is so utterly unforgettable in its depiction of a world in turmoil (Kurosawa thought it was a metaphor for nuclear warfare), that it has compelled me to try and verbalise my experiences watching it, and in doing so to revive a film blog that I haven’t written on for nearly two years. Ran is for showing for a short while in a number of cinemas across the UK. If you get the chance to see it, you simply cannot miss it. It is a masterpiece from a director at the very top of his form, an epic driven not by copious CGI or contrivance, but by the patience of those who made it and the strength of its nihilistic convictions.

ran 5.png — **“utterly unforgettable in its depiction of a world in turmoil”**

Review – The Riot Club

2014, 107 mins, 15, Dir. Lone Scherfig, starring Sam Claflin, Max Irons and Douglas Booth

The upper classes and their foibles have had a peculiar endurance though much of world cinema history. In La Regle du jeu (1939), Jean Renoir’s country-house gentry were potent allegories for the moral corruption of pre-WW2 French society; in turn many of Hitchcock’s characters were frustrated rich Americans with polished accents. There is something inexplicably fascinating in observing these financially empowered people and how they live, perhaps especially so when they behave in a way that is mortally, abominably offensive.

Lone Scherfig’s new film The Riot Club understands this fact. Drawing from the 2010 play Posh by Laura Wade, who also writes the screenplay, it depicts members of a fictionalised version of the Bullingdon Club, an infamous society at Oxford University known for its exclusive membership policy and drunken, ostentatious dinners. We quickly become acquainted with the ten impeccably-dressed members of the Riot Club, including two newly-inducted first-years, as they trash each other’s rooms and race around town in expensive cars. They use their parents’ money in profligate and unseemly ways and seem to have their futures planned out for them, as symbolised by Tom Hollander’s Jeremy, a Machiavellian MP. The club is not just for Oxford, Jeremy tells the boys, it is for life, as the political connections it offers can prove supremely useful to get out of any difficulties.

The film actually commences around the Georgian era, where we see a gloriously wigged Oxford don (hilariously referred to as that immortal student noun, ‘legend’) engaging in wild sexual acts worthy of A Rake’s Progress. He is stabbed by the unfortunate husband of one of his wenches, leading to the inauguration by his friends of the tradition-bound institution of the film’s title. These historical scenes only further underline the debauched behaviour of the modern-day club members; their elaborate drinking rituals, alcoholic snobbery and financial waste are as archaic as they are arcane. Scherfig assembles a sterling male cast that, combined with the consistently profane script, portray with great invention the views and traits of these characters. In particular, Sam Claflin proves deceptively destructive as Alistair Ryle, the first-year whose violent right-wing politics threaten to induce actual violence. Also impressive is Holliday Grainger as Lauren, the unpretentious Mancunian student who is caught up in the snobbish, machismo-heavy atmosphere of the richer male students.

This seems rather familiar... — This seems rather familiar…

The central set-piece is an agonisingly long dinner at a local pub, a scene of heavy drinking and rampant class and sexual tensions. It is here that the problems of the film begin to emerge. For all its filming on Oxford rooftops and in country mansions, The Riot Club never quite escapes its stage origins. The dinner scene, confined mostly to a single room, is arguably stretched to excess in terms of actual running time, its cinematic impact diminished. Moreover the behaviour of the Riot Club members seems, ironically, very exaggerated. Sam Claflin’s astonishing line ‘I’m sick to f—ing death of poor people!’ seems absurd even when his character is intoxicated; the final act of stupendous masculine violence, following attempted prostitution and cocaine usage, is equally inconceivable through lack of real precedent. The film is of course an obviously fictional work in which excess is part of the overall effect. Yet if it tries to portray a class that does exist in England, it must surely do so accurately. When the Oxford admissions department continues earnestly to disassociate itself from ideas of wealth and privilege, and a national press often misunderstands the Oxbridge student experience, one can’t help thinking that a subtler take on the story could have been assumed with wholly greater success.

The Riot Club is very well acted by a superb cast of young performers and portrays Oxford in all its Medieval splendour. Yet it is mired in both its stage origins and its own self-conscious shock value, which troubles attempts at plausibility and empathy.

6/10

Thoughts on my cinematic journey

Not so long ago I came to the intriguing realisation that, this year at the cinema, I have seen more classic films than new ones. To be exact, 13 classics and 10 contemporary films. Such a feat is easily accomplished in London, where the herculean BFI and the Prince Charles Cinema show thousands of classics year upon year, often in original, well-scratched 35mm prints. Yet it still seems a remarkably unusual thing to have discovered; one which suggests certain truths about my personal relationship with cinema and of the films I cherish in particular.

The BFI Southbank, a place of pilgrimage for lovers of cinema

What is a “classic”? The US Library of Congress, which selects up to twenty-five American films each year for preservation, claims that ‘culturally, aesthetically or historically significant” values are most important. American Graffiti (1973), Ben-Hur (1959), Groundhog Day (1993) and hundreds of others are thus granted an auspicious status that in many circles commands the use of the word “classic”. Or is a classic a far more subjective thing? To most who have seen it, the Russian film Andrei Rublev (1966) is an inevitable classic because of its masterful cinematography and compelling performances; a film that evokes Medieval spiritual life with astonishing panache. To a few dissenters, however, it is an episodic and loose monster in which not a lot happens at all, and so the honour of being a “classic” is disputed.

Andrei Rublev - classic or tragic? — Andrei Rublev – classic or tragic?

Shallow postmodern arguments aside, what does strike me is the fact that most of the films I’ve been seeing in cinemas this year are significantly old. The last screening I attended was The Wild Bunch, released in 1969. The film I’m most looking forward to this September is not something new; it’s Fritz Lang’s M, first shown in 1931 and about to be re-released. As my interest in cinema deepens, the further back my enquiries take me – back even to the early stages of the medium itself, with my recent discovery of George Méliès’ La Voyage Dans La Lune, a beautifully detailed science-fiction short released in 1902.

Many of my friends and peers who love cinema share this interest in “old” films, yet not many venture to the BFI or Prince Charles, preferring the ease of a DVD. This was evidenced frequently in my mid-teens, when I once found myself sitting in a screening of Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante (1934) as the youngest audience member by some thirty years. Perhaps that was just a bad day for youthful representation. But sometimes I do wonder if my friends could gain something from taking their interest in “old” films right into the heart of the very places they were first shown: in a hushed screening room, pitch dark, the screen the only light source – a place where cinematic sorcery is experienced at its most thrilling and palpable. If you try hard enough, you can really imagine what those first audience members must have thought and felt. Seeing old films in the cinema emphatically makes a difference, and broadens your view of the medium’s possibilities.

La Voyage Dans La Lune - recognise this? — La Voyage Dans La Lune – recognise this?

There’s also the question of the character of contemporary cinema. It’s singularly useless to argue that filmmakers like Michael Bay and the endless train of sequels and remakes have rendered cinema dead, although it’s easy to think so. In fact, nationwide festivals, especially the London Film Festival, continue to grow year upon year in exhibiting serious-minded, artistically precise films. The Curzon and Picturehouse chains are great places to find the latest arthouse dramas and comedies from all over the world; both are opening new cinemas across the UK. Yet my status as a soon-to-be History student has influenced my thinking; I’m convinced that in order to better understand contemporary cinema, I have to journey back into the past to see exactly where it has been. The roots of most modern science-fiction films with pretensions to artistic merit can be traced back to 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Black Swan (2010) seems all the less significant when compared to The Red Shoes, which accomplished much of what Aronofsky’s film did, only sixty-two years prior. Every film has a precursor, and I’m fascinated by trying to find such films and assessing their formidable influence over time.

Looking at it this way, the surprise at having seen more classics than contemporary films really shouldn’t really exist. What’s more, it could be said that the “old” films I’m growingly obsessed with, with all their vibrant and diverse cinematic qualities, are in fact profoundly new.

The Wild Bunch - a savage revisionist western. The opening and closing sequences are virtually indistinguishable from action scenes in modern blockbuster cinema. — The Wild Bunch – a savage revisionist western. The opening and closing sequences are virtually indistinguishable from action scenes in modern blockbuster cinema.

Secret Cinema presents Back to the Future

I first heard about Secret Cinema a long time ago. Stories of a mysterious organisation that exhibited films amidst participating actors, themed set design and live music – naturally, in a secret location – reverberated around the internet and in word of mouth. There had been a Secret Cinema production of Blade Runner, which featured acrobatic displays on vertical walls, mirroring the vertiginous struggle of Harrison Ford at the end of Ridley Scott’s masterpiece. With a similar level of creative energy had come Bugsy Malone, set in a Prohibition-era nightclub concealed behind an outwardly harmless bookcase. The Red Shoes, Lawrence of Arabia, Prometheus and The Grand Budapest Hotel had been given this dramatic treatment, amongst many others. The mere idea of ‘experiencing’ the world of some of the greatest films ever made – and Prometheus – seemed for a long time infinitely appealing to me.

I left it for a long time, but finally felt that Secret Cinema presents Back to the Future was the perfect way to experience Secret Cinema for the first time. I believe Back to the Future to be one of the greatest American films ever made, a tightly-scripted and magnificently entertaining piece with riffs on both the fifties and the eighties. The notion of wandering round a recreated Hill Valley, encountering small-town stereotypes and the characters from the film itself, did not seem kitsch by any stretch of the imagination; it was surely a necessity.

"Once this baby hits 88 miles an hour, you're gonna see some serious s-!" — “Once this baby hits 88 miles an hour, you’re gonna see some serious s-!”

When it finally came round to attending, there were a couple of worrying false starts; the first four events were cancelled due to “a number of issues that we have not experienced previously”. The backlash on social media was severe and, at times, somewhat overbearing; fans had come from as far as Cambodia, and a potential loss of trust in Secret Cinema wavered in the air.

It is thus all the more relieving and thrilling to announce that Secret Cinema presents Back to the Future is a stunning success. Theatre, cinema and music combine in a glorious celebration of the 1985 film, 1950s culture, and the sheer exultant joy of being alive.

Spot the actor... or is there one? — Spot the actor… or is there one?

At around 5.10pm on Friday, August 1, I exited the train at Hackney Wick station and waited for the rest of my family to arrive. We had been vigorously encouraged through email to dress in fifties clothing. This was easy enough for me – rolled-up jeans, converses and braces for the style, and the brownest shirt I could find for the rustic farmland feel of small-town America. Across the station platform spewed forth a wave of like-minded people; I glimpsed everything from Marlon Brando leather jackets to a profusion of great, voluminous, flowery dresses.

We soon began the long walk to the Back to the Future site. Though it would be unfair to ruin its exact location, I will say that it was somewhere within the 2012 Olympic village, and that several prominent landmarks – including the Orbit – were clearly visible. If you kept your head down, though, it was hard to believe that you were even in the twentieth century.

Secret Cinema have built in the heart of East London a bustling Hill Valley that is meticulous in its detail and filled to boiling point with gaiety. Buildings from 1950s America are painstakingly re-constructed. The one-room suburban houses are littered with comics, radios, pin-up posters and books from the period; the Hill Valley High school features iconic metal lockers and noticeboards; the movie theater is showing Cattle Queen of Montana, a 1954 American western featuring Ronald Reagan in one of his later roles. The site even features an old-style ferris wheel and a profusion of vintage cars, as well as a yellow school bus.

Just another day in Hill Valley... — Just another day in Hill Valley…

Yet it is really the eighty-five actors within Hill Valley who best bring the world of Back to the Future to life. I was approached by an impressive variety of people from car mechanics to television salesmen; all (well, most) spouting a chirpy Californian drawl, conversing to convince. But they do more than speak to you. They purposefully draw you into their fictional existence, whether that be by carrying tires, pushing a broken-down car or playing pool. It is evident Secret Cinema offers everything for those who prefer not to be mere sedentary spectators.

A full list of everything I did in the three-hours or so I spent wandering around the town would be exhaustive, but I’ve condensed my favourite parts, very unprofessionally, into bullet points:

Sat in on a talk outside a suburban house where two people dressed like Mormons taught us methods to protect ourselves against the “plague” of homosexuality affecting the town. Never was homophobia so hilariously conceived.
Joined in as a group to sing a song about a hair salon, led by an ominously bearded guitarist and his female companion, who I promptly fell hopelessly in love with (the companion, not the guitarist).
Took part in a “scientific” experiment led by Doc Brown himself – or at least a very convincing likeness – by rubbing shoulders in a circle to produce static electricity. Doc Brown then announced after the experiment: ‘I now have your combined discharge. No, it’s not funny.’
Before the event every attendee was given an alternative identity and workplace, and was encouraged to bring certain items for that workplace. I assumed the guise of Emanuel Mathews, Proof Reader for the Hill Valley Telegraph. I carried with me three copies of an article I had written for the obviously fictional newspaper, with the headline: “UNCOVERED – – THE REASON BEHIND THE DELAYS TO THE HILL VALLEY FAIR.” I handed in the article to Rita, the editor of the newspaper – who stood in front of old-fashioned printing presses – and was later pronounced “Mr. Telegraph” for the quality of my work. Rita spoke at great length on the importance of producing news by the people for the people, and also tried to convince me that Mayor “Red” Thomas was secretly a communist.
I also spotted Fabien Riggall, the Founder and Creative Director of Secret Cinema, and gave him one of my articles. He stayed completely in character despite this illusion to the insidious delays that had taken place the week before, and accepted my handshake graciously.

hill valley 5 — “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.’ – Samuel Johnson

Such listing is perhaps crude but it hopefully gives you a sense of my relentless enjoyment of what Hill Valley had to offer, and also a sense of the immersive kind of experience Secret Cinema strives for. If you really make an effort, you get so much out of it. You even get to a point when, wandering round, you cannot always make the distinction between actor and spectator; the lines between fiction and reality can blur irrevocably. I even found myself trying to ape an American accent, though my success on that matter is probably best left to the imagination.

For an event with so much hype, there are bound to be disappointments. It must be said that the exhibition of the film was something of a mixed affair. After two false starts owing to technical problems, Back to the Future finally began, observed by a vast lawn of ticket-holders. During some of the more exciting parts of the film we were greeted with live-action replications of what was happening on-screen. The fog-shrouded, mass-hysteria-inducing entrance of the Delorean was an evident highlight; another was the sight of an actor dressed at Marty Mcfly skateboarding whilst holding onto a car, whizzing round the town square. This sometimes took attention away from the film itself, particularly towards the end. But it was really a few isolated members of the audience who proved most disruptive; I happened to be sitting next to a drunk person who insisted on standing during parts of the film and yelling something akin to Yuuueueuueeeaaaaaaaahhh!’ Such unwarranted exhibitionism somewhat undermined the family atmosphere Secret Cinema were clearly aiming for, what with the minimum attendance age being only 5. It could perhaps be concluded, with a great deal of irony, that most of the problems that occurred on the evening were caused by the audience, not by the organisers themselves.

You can't quite see the drunk guy from here... — You can’t quite see the drunk guy from here…

Overall, however, it was a totally enchanting experience, a celebration of the best elements of 1950s culture and of Back to the Future. It is only when you experience it for yourself that you realise how much ambition Secret Cinema has, and how its events can very occasionally go wrong as it did the week before. I will undoubtedly be back for more, whatever the film. The possible challenge for Secret Cinema – as put by the BBC’s Newsnight – must surely be to preserve some of the mystery that it first started with, to continue to cherish the unexpected in the face of widespread media coverage and the incessant mobile phone culture that was so blissfully suspended for the one evening that I was there. If it can do that, its artistic future remains secure.

9/10

Footnote – here’s the article I wrote for the Hill Valley Telegraph:

jacobthehobnob

About film, not biscuits.