REVIEW: London Film Festival 2022 Roundup

White Noise

With White Noise, Noah Baumbach has managed to make a compelling and remarkably coherent dramedy from Don DeLillo’s postmodern epic of optimism and catastrophe.

Jack Gladney (Adam Driver; winningly ungainly with long limbs and beer belly) is a renowned professor of “Hitler studies”, who works at a fictional American college sometime in the 1980s.…

PODCAST: LFF 2021 – The Tragedy of Macbeth [Movie Robcast]

This is our final London Film Festival wrap-up episode, and thank you to all those listeners who stuck with us on a review of this year’s LFF.

To end, we look at Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, starring Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand.…

PODCAST: LFF 2021 – The Power of the Dog, Nitram, The Lost Daughter, Dashcam, Benediction, Petite Maman, Benedetta, & King Richard [Movie Robcast]

Episode 131 is our penultimate London Film Festival wrap-up episode, and it’s a bumper one.

At 2:55 we review the new Benedict Cumberbatch film The Power of the Dog.

At 11.20 we give our thoughts on the Cannes award-winning and hard-hitting drama Nitram.…

PODCAST: LFF 2021 – Last Night in Soho & Titane [Movie Robcast]

Episode 130 of The Movie Robcast continues our coverage from The London Film Festival.

We go to the darker side of the capital with Last Night in Soho, starring Thomasin Mckenzie, Anya-Taylor Joy, and Matt Smith.

What do we think of Edgar Wright’s latest movie?…

PODCAST: LFF 2021 – The Harder They Fall & Spencer [Movie Robcast]

Episode 129 of The Movie Robcast is the first instalment of our London Film Festival review.

To keep it to a manageable length we’ve decided to break it down into multiple episodes this year.

Kicking off proceedings is Jeymes Samuel’s lively Western, The Harder They Fall, starring Jonathan Majors, Idris Elba, Regina King, Lakeith Stanfield, Zazie Beetz, and Delroy Lindo.…

REVIEW: Petite Maman (London Film Festival 2021)

Celine Sciamma’s latest is a magical realist fable, the beauty of which lies in its simplicity.

Nelly (Joséphine Sanz) is an eight year-old girl whose grandmother has just died after many years in a care home. Nelly’s mother (Nina Meurisse) is quietly grief-stricken and so, after a first night together, leaves her husband (Stéphane Varupenne) and Nelly to empty the home where she lived as a kid.…

REVIEW: King Richard (London Film Festival 2021)

King Richard is an unconventional biopic about an unlikely sporting figure.

Having received his first Oscar nomination in Michael Mann’s Ali back in 2002, Will Smith may finally walk away with the little gold man for his performance as Richard Williams, father to Venus and Serena Williams.…

REVIEW: The Tragedy of Macbeth (London Film Festival 2021)

In his first single-handed filmmaking venture, Joel Coen (best known as one half of the Coen Bros.) takes on Shakespeare in The Tragedy of Macbeth.

Shot entirely on set, with sharp, black-&-white cinematography courtesy of Bruce Delbonnel, the film’s striking, otherworldly visuals, inky shadows and slanting light, owe a debt to German Expressionism.…

REVIEW: The Lost Daughter (London Film Festival 2021)

The Lost Daughter is an honest and assured psychological study of what it means to be, or not to be, a parent.

Leda (Olivia Colman) is a middle-aged literary professor on a solitary summer holiday in Italy. Her contentment, lying on the beach, marking her papers, is disrupted by the arrival of a large, brash American family, who lay their claim to the beach.…

REVIEW: Last Night in Soho (London Film Festival 2021)

Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho is both a love letter to the allure of the Swinging Sixties and a cautionary tale about the corruption beneath.

When Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie) moves to London to pursue her dream of becoming a fashion designer, she’s unprepared for life in student accommodation.…