65th LONDON FILM FESTIVAL (6th - 17th October 2021) DAY 12
Every day (from October 6th to October 17th) I will be selecting the
London Film Festival choices you have a chance to get tickets for and
the movies you are unlikely to see in London very soon unless you go to
see them at the Festival. Here
is the LFF's main website for the general information you need. Don't
worry if some of the recommended films are sold out by the time you read
this as there are always some tickets on offer which go on sale 30
minutes before each screening. Here is all the information you need about the best way to get tickets.
This film also screens at Curzon Soho on October 16th. Full details here.
BFI review: Mr Bachmann and his pupils (aged between 12 and 14) live in Stadtallendorf, formerly the site of a secret Second World War munitions factory and now an industrial town that’s home to generations of economic migrants. The class is representative of this history, with several recent arrivals still struggling with the language of their new home. All the while, their sexagenarian, rock band T-shirt wearing teacher’s effortlessly egalitarian approach encourages students to develop empathy for one another through openness and listening. Shot over six months, Reinhold Vorschneider’s patient cinematography works with the spontaneity of the classroom environment to lend emotional weight to even the most fleeting moments. The pacing and observational method call to mind the work of Frederick Wiseman, yet Speth’s intimate approach creates an engaging and tender drama. Hyun Jin Cho
65th LONDON FILM FESTIVAL (6th - 17th October 2021) DAY 11
Every day (from October 6th to October 17th) I will be selecting the
London Film Festival choices you have a chance to get tickets for and
the movies you are unlikely to see in London very soon unless you go to
see them at the Festival. Here
is the LFF's main website for the general information you need. Don't
worry if some of the recommended films are sold out by the time you read
this as there are always some tickets on offer which go on sale 30
minutes before each screening. Here is all the information you need about the best way to get tickets.
This film also screens at Odeon Luxe West End on October 17th. Full details here.
BFI review: Like his title character, Paul Andrew Williams has been away from home turf for a while. But after the atypically gentle OAP drama Song for Marion, his latest is a fantastically violent return to his pulpy genre roots. Kill List’s Neil Maskell stars as Bull, a former gang enforcer who returns to his former hood on a mission to find his son. Bull is a man possessed, and no wonder; his ex-wife is a two-timing junkie and his father-in-law Norm (David Hayman) a psychopath gang boss whose firm has done Bull some serious wrongs. But Bull has a dark secret of his own, teased out in a kaleidoscopic timeframe as he single-handedly raises hell, in a horror-thriller that doesn’t flinch from strong bloody violence. Damon Wise
65th LONDON FILM FESTIVAL (6th - 17th October 2021) DAY 10
Every day (from October 6th to October 17th) I will be selecting the
London Film Festival choices you have a chance to get tickets for and
the movies you are unlikely to see in London very soon unless you go to
see them at the Festival. Here
is the LFF's main website for the general information you need. Don't
worry if some of the recommended films are sold out by the time you read
this as there are always some tickets on offer which go on sale 30
minutes before each screening. Here is all the information you need about the best way to get tickets.
This 35mm presentation also screens at BFI Soutbank on October 17th. Full details here.
BFI review: An immersive cinematic collage assembled from early 20th century cinema, The Afterlight documents the physical presence of over three hundred actors who are no longer alive and must reconcile themselves to a life lived solely through the performances they committed to celluloid. This ghostly atmosphere is reflected in the materiality of the work itself; as only a single 35mm print exists, each projection gradually yields itself to an organic cycle of deterioration and death. Celebrated filmmaker Charlie Shackleton has crafted an intricate and provocative piece of work which pays homage both to the affective power and the inherent fragility of cinema. Hyun Jin Cho
65th LONDON FILM FESTIVAL (6th - 17th October 2021) DAY 9
Every day (from October 6th to October 17th) I will be selecting the
London Film Festival choices you have a chance to get tickets for and
the movies you are unlikely to see in London very soon unless you go to
see them at the Festival. Here
is the LFF's main website for the general information you need. Don't
worry if some of the recommended films are sold out by the time you read
this as there are always some tickets on offer which go on sale 30
minutes before each screening. Here is all the information you need about the best way to get tickets.
This film also screens at BFI Soutbank on October 12th. Full details here.
BFI review: Set in the weeks leading up to the guerrilla war for independence, Sambizanga focuses on the plight of a young couple. Domingos (Domingos de Oliveira), a member of the liberation movement, is arrested, interrogated, brutally beaten and sent to the dreaded Luanda prison by Portuguese authorities. Not knowing of her husband’s fate, Maria (Elisa Andrade) and her child relentlessly search for him, from village to village and navigating a web of colonial bureaucracy. Sarah Maldoror’s early theatre work led her to study film with Ousmane Sembène and Sambizanga, based on a book by Portuguese-Angolan author and activist José Luandino Vieira, is a passionate dramatisation of a pivotal moment in Angola’s fight for freedom.
65th LONDON FILM FESTIVAL (6th - 17th October 2021) DAY 8
Every day (from October 6th to October 17th) I will be selecting the
London Film Festival choices you have a chance to get tickets for and
the movies you are unlikely to see in London very soon unless you go to
see them at the Festival. Here
is the LFF's main website for the general information you need. Don't
worry if some of the recommended films are sold out by the time you read
this as there are always some tickets on offer which go on sale 30
minutes before each screening. Here is all the information you need about the best way to get tickets.
This film also screens at Curzon Soho on October 13th. Full details here.
BFI review: Yvan De Wiel has recently arrived in Buenos Aires with his elegant wife Inés. It’s 1980 and the military dictatorship is consolidating its grip on the country through terror, intimidation and forced disappearances. His predecessor René is nowhere to be seen – perhaps himself disappeared – and Yvan must tread a careful path to balance the interests of his wealthy clients with a perilous political situation. Co-written with Mariano Llinás (La Flor), writer-director Andreas Fontana delivers a nuanced, atmospheric political thriller with a clear nod to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, capturing the murkiness and danger of the world Yvan does business in, where polished exteriors mask illicit and often deadly practices. Fabrizio Rongione excels as the elusive Yvan, a man who cannot afford to give too much away.
65th LONDON FILM FESTIVAL (6th - 17th October 2021) DAY 7
Every day (from October 6th to October 17th) I will be selecting the
London Film Festival choices you have a chance to get tickets for and
the movies you are unlikely to see in London very soon unless you go to
see them at the Festival. Here
is the LFF's main website for the general information you need. Don't
worry if some of the recommended films are sold out by the time you read
this as there are always some tickets on offer which go on sale 30
minutes before each screening. Here is all the information you need about the best way to get tickets.
This film also screens at BFI Southbank on October 11th. Full details here.
BFI review: The original title, meaning ‘a world’, suggests that a school is a self-enclosed universe with its own customs and abuses – and a microcosm of the injustices outside. Nora (mesmerising newcomer Maya Vanderbeque) arrives in a new school, nervous about leaving her dad and yearning for the protection of big brother Abel (Günter Duret). In fact, it’s Abel who faces bullying – and when Nora tries to help him, his ordeal only worsens. Laura Wandel’s extraordinary debut is a triumph in terms of focus and concision, with the action restricted to the school premises and the camera held exactly at Nora’s child’s-eye height. Arguably one of the best films ever made about childhood; without doubt, one of the most gripping, and lucidly truthful. Jonathan Romney
65th LONDON FILM FESTIVAL (6th - 17th October 2021) DAY 6
Every day (from October 6th to October 17th) I will be selecting the
London Film Festival choices you have a chance to get tickets for and
the movies you are unlikely to see in London very soon unless you go to
see them at the Festival. Here
is the LFF's main website for the general information you need. Don't
worry if some of the recommended films are sold out by the time you read
this as there are always some tickets on offer which go on sale 30
minutes before each screening. Here is all the information you need about the best way to get tickets.
This film also screens at BFI Southbank on October 12th. Full details here.
BFI preview: Hatzín has left Mexico City to pick up his father’s remains, on behalf of his grandmother, from a mass grave. However, on the bus back home he sees a man who looks unsettlingly similar to his father. He impulsively leaves the bus to pursue the man, with surprising consequences; none more so than the emotional journey Hatzín undertakes, beautifully mapped across the social landscape he navigates, in a symbolic attempt at finally gaining his father’s love. As in his award-winning first film, From Afar (LFF 2015), Lorenzo Vigas crafts complex characters faced with difficult moral choices. Hatzín Navarrete and Hernán Mendoza excel as the son and the man he pursues, in a tale where the personal and the political are skillfully interwoven and nothing is quite what it first seems. Maria Delgado
65th LONDON FILM FESTIVAL (6th - 17th October 2021) DAY 5
Every day (from October 6th to October 17th) I will be selecting the
London Film Festival choices you have a chance to get tickets for and
the movies you are unlikely to see in London very soon unless you go to
see them at the Festival. Here
is the LFF's main website for the general information you need. Don't
worry if some of the recommended films are sold out by the time you read
this as there are always some tickets on offer which go on sale 30
minutes before each screening. Here is all the information you need about the best way to get tickets.
BFI review: Coppola’s inspired adaptation of SE Hinton’s classic novel captures how it feels to be caught between childhood innocence and adulthood’s disillusionment, and he assembled an impressive and talented young cast: Dillon, Cruise, Estevez, Howell, Lane, Swayze, Lowe and Macchio. Set in a divided Tulsa, where teenage life is either experienced as the ‘socs’, who go to college, have cars and a future, and the ‘greasers’, who come from the wrong side of the tracks. When a soc is knifed, three greasers go on the run before returning home to negotiate a tenuous truce. The collaborative work of the young cast serves as a testament to the Coppola’s skill as director, making their struggle engaging and unforgettable. Julie Pearce
65th LONDON FILM FESTIVAL (6th - 17th October 2021) DAY4
Every day (from October 6th to October 17th) I will be selecting the
London Film Festival choices you have a chance to get tickets for and
the movies you are unlikely to see in London very soon unless you go to
see them at the Festival. Here
is the LFF's main website for the general information you need. Don't
worry if some of the recommended films are sold out by the time you read
this as there are always some tickets on offer which go on sale 30
minutes before each screening. Here is all the information you need about the best way to get tickets.
This film also screens at BFI Southbank (October 8th). Full details here.
BFI review: Meet tenacious Maria Teresa Hernández Cañas and her partner Montoya, two lowly police officers trying to maintain law and order in Mexico City. Each narrates and re-enacts the highs and lows of the job in this slick, 1970s-style action movie. With its immersive action sequences and coded language A Cop Movie takes the viewer to the very heart of what policing means in an expansive urban metropolis. A socially insightful and brilliantly corrosive study of institutional corruption, Ruizpalacios (Guëros, Museo) exposes the near impossibility of following the letter of the law when bribery and nepotism is a way of life. Bold, adventurous and ingenious, this genre-defying feature navigates the complexities of roleplay when the viewer cannot be entirely sure of the boundaries between the real and the fictitious. Maria Delgado
65th LONDON FILM FESTIVAL (6th - 17th October 2021) DAY 3
Every day (from October 6th to October 17th) I will be selecting the
London Film Festival choices you have a chance to get tickets for and
the movies you are unlikely to see in London very soon unless you go to
see them at the Festival. Here
is the LFF's main website for the general information you need. Don't
worry if some of the recommended films are sold out by the time you read
this as there are always some tickets on offer which go on sale 30
minutes before each screening. Here is all the information you need about the best way to get tickets.
This film also screens at the Prince Charles Cinema (October 9th) BFI Southbank (October 13th). You can find the full details here.
BFI review: Produced under conditions of lockdown, Jude’s uncompromising satire is a relentless attack on prejudice and hypocrisy. Divided into three parts, Jude describes it as a ‘sketch for a popular film’. The first follows Emi as she walks through the COVID-emptied streets of Bucharest. The second – a dictionary of ‘anecdotes, signs, and wonders’ – embraces the construction of Ceausescu’s palace, Church support for dictatorships and other excesses. In the third, Emi faces a parents’ tribunal that becomes an exercise in misogyny and racism, with extensive recourse to the internet. Hardcore images disturb, but are also demystified by their context. Coming from the director of Aferim! and Scarred Hearts, it’s a striking antidote to complacency. Peter Hames
65th LONDON FILM FESTIVAL (6th - 17th October 2021) DAY 2
Every day (from October 6th to October 17th) I will be selecting the
London Film Festival choices you have a chance to get tickets for and
the movies you are unlikely to see in London very soon unless you go to
see them at the Festival. Here
is the LFF's main website for the general information you need. Don't
worry if some of the recommended films are sold out by the time you read
this as there are always some tickets on offer which go on sale 30
minutes before each screening. Here is all the information you need about the best way to get tickets.
This film also screens at BFI Southbank on October 8th at 2.40pm. Full details here.
BFI review: Winner of the FIPRESCI Prize at the Berlin Film Festival, Alexandre Koberidze’s second feature is set in the ancient and atmospheric Georgian town of Kutaisi. After its fairy-tale opening, various mini-narratives develop, including the setting up of an ice cream stall, the football World Cup viewed on TV in various cafes (with dogs among the appreciative fans) and the making of a film about six couples. Koberidze’s poetic assembling of images focuses on the magic of the everyday: hidden rhythms, the absurd, the unnoticed and the unexpected. The chaos around us is, he suggests, only apparent. A cinematic gem, the film’s relaxed pace and friendly atmosphere give it a charm that casts quite a spell. Peter Hames
65th LONDON FILM FESTIVAL (6th - 17th October 2021) DAY 1
Every day (from October 6th to October 17th) I will be selecting the London Film Festival choices you have a chance to get tickets for and the movies you are unlikely to see in London very soon unless you go to see them at the Festival. Here is the LFF's main website for the general information you need. Don't worry if some of the recommended films are sold out by the time you read this as there are always some tickets on offer which go on sale 30 minutes before each screening. Here is all the information you need about the best way to get tickets.
Chicago Reader review: Michael Powell’s 1945 film resists easy classification: it opens as a screwball comedy, grows into a mystical, Flaherty-like study of man against the elements, and concludes as a warm romance. Wendy Hiller, in one of the best roles the movies gave her, is a toughened, materialistic young woman on her way to meet her millionaire fiance in the Hebrides; Roger Livesey is the young man she meets when a storm blows up and prevents her crossing to the islands. Funny and stirring, in quite unpredictable ways, with the usual Powellian flair for drawing the universal out of the screamingly eccentric. Dave Kehr
Time Out review: Once upon a time, young Rosaleen was dreaming of an Arcadian past when Granny would tell grim tales of once upon a time when little girls should beware of men whose eyebrows meet in the middle and who are hairy on the inside... And in those dark days, fear accompanied desire and beauty was wed with the beast... The characters in Neil Jordan's film ofAngela Carter's story inhabit a magical, mysterious world of cruelty and wonder, rarely seen in cinema. In tales within tales within tales, dream is reality, wolves are human, and vice-versa. Rarely has this Gothic landscape of the imagination been so perfectly conveyed by film; there is simply a precise, resonant portrayal of a young girl's immersion in fantasies where sexuality is both fearful and seductive. Like all the best fairy-tales, the film is purely sensual, irrational, fuelled by an immense joy in story-telling, and totally lucid. It's also a true original, with the most beautiful visual effects to emerge from Britain in years. Geoff Andrew
This screening is part of the Female of the Species is More Deadlier Than the Male season curated by Sophie Determan and presented in partnership with the National Film and Television School. Full details here.
Baron Frankenstein’s lab assistant Hans is wrongly sentenced to the guillotine for the murder of an innkeeper that was in fact conducted by three drunken libertines. Frankenstein has been conducting a series of experiments that allow him to preserve the soul of a person after death. His opportunity comes when Hans’s girlfriend, the innkeeper’s disfigured daughter Christina, throws herself into the river in anguish. Frankenstein then successfully transfers Hans’s soul into Christina’s body. What he does not see is that Hans now uses Christina’s body to obtain revenge on the three youths who were responsible for the murder.
“It’s a heady brew, rather as if it were written by the Brothers Grimm with ‘additional dialogue’ by Sigmund Freud […] One of Hammer’s most complex scenarios concludes with perhaps the most downbeat ending in all horror films.” Jonathan Rigby,English Gothic
This screening of the BAFTA-nominated 1960s drama, plus very special guest, will also include a conversation with star Hayley Mills on the 60th anniversary of the film's release.
Radio Times review: In this daring allegory, Alan Bates plays a dishevelled murderer on the run who's confronted by three Lancashire children who think he's the persecuted Jesus Christ deserving of their protection. First-time director Bryan Forbes treats his material with heart-touching gravity and delicacy, and the symbolism only starts to come to pieces when the grown-up need for justice intrudes. Young Hayley Mills - her mother wrote the novel on which this film is based - is wonderfully wide-eyed, while Bates, as the ambiguous stranger, gives one of his most involving performances. Tom Hutchinson
This great documentary will be followed by a Q&A with director Terence Davies.
Chicago Reader review: Terence Davies, England’s greatest living filmmaker, has released only six features, and this one is his first documentary, a mesmerizing and eloquent essay about his native Liverpool. As autobiographical and intensely personal asDistant Voices, Still Lives(1988) andThe Long Day Closes(1992), it encompasses his working-class background, his loss of faith in Catholicism (and, more generally, religion), and his evolution as a homosexual, as well as his taste in music and cinema. The film is made up chiefly of found footage and therefore lacks the mise en scene of its predecessors, but it has the added benefit of Davies’s voice-over narration, which, thanks to his training and experience as an actor, is enormously powerful. (Check out the witty way he conveys his disdain for the Beatles through his delivery of one of their best-known refrains.) Jonathan Rosenbaum
It's rare for Capital Celluloid to swerve away from repertory cinema territory but there is only one film that matters this month and that's the long-awaited and much-delayed new entry in the James Bond franchise. Regular readers will know of our love for the films in the 007 series and, unlike other outlets, we have always promoted the screenings of the classic Bond films when they have surfaced in the capital. For that reason we are recommending a trip to your nearest cinema (everywhere will be showing the movie) to see No Time to Die, a film that will be crucial in getting people back into our picturehouses and guaranteeing their survival after what has been a wretched period for the industry.
I have been completing a chronological viewing of every Eon Bond movie in the post-classic period from The Man With the Golden Gun onwards and you can read my verdicts here via my Twitter account. Meanwhile, I went to see No Time to Die on press night at the same hour as the world premiere. My verdict: it’s a must-see three-star film.
A REVIEW: Death pervades the Bond universe. The fear of mortality and the tension that haunts the character in Ian Fleming’s still ripely readable original novels and the various cinematic creations of agent 007 are what create the finest moments in the long series of books and subsequent blockbuster films. It’s why the Roger Moore era, which reached its nadir with the rampant jokiness of Octopussy (1983), began to flounder well before it was killed off. The reboot with the commendably hard-edged Timothy Dalton at the end of the 80s was not able to be sustained at the time but did lay the ground for Daniel Craig and the spectacular relaunch that was Casino Royale (2006), still the finest amalgam of action, series tropes, psychological and sexual drama in the history of Bond on film. The heroine Vesper Lynd’s death in Casino Royale echoed that of the betrothed Tracy di Vicenzo’s in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, genuinely moving and one which again got under the steel-toughened skin of our normally unflappable hero, either in the bed or out of it.
OHMSS is the guiding reference, in Bond and Dr Madeleine Swann’s honeymoon car journey in the superbly crafted and long pre-credits sequence at the beginning of No Time to Die and at the end when Craig references the Louis Armstrong song 'We have all the time in the world' from the earlier film and the tune is reprised as the audience departs. The thrilling opening and the shocking denouement are the highlights. While there are other pleasures as always along the way, the much-trailed new female 007 (Craig’s character is ‘retired’) and the drafting in of co-writer Phoebe Waller-Bridge are only partially successful because they seem half-hearted and add-ons. What of the villains, normally such a rich source of the aforementioned tension? Christopher Waltz as Blofeld is as woefully underused as in Spectre (2015) given his two-hander with Craig in Belmarsh Prison, riffing on Silence of the Lambs, provides a thrillingly electric encounter, while the big baddy of this movie, Safin (Rami Malek) is simply plain underwritten.
In a new twist for the series, it’s the melodrama that is turned up to 11 for a Bond film in this, the long-signposted swan song for Craig in the role, and while it strives too hard for the resonance of the earlier incarnations in OHMSS and Casino Royale there is a single moment which tops both and is the most jaw-dropping in the 59-year history of 007 on celluloid. It left this critic both stirred and very much shaken and I can honestly say I’m yet to come to terms with it. The world, and the Bond universe, is turned upside down and that’s why this film, the 25th in the series, is a must-see. Tony Paley
