London Film Festival 2017 – A Rundown (Part 2)

So, here goes it: Part 2 of my three-part rundown of my 2017 London Film Festival experience. Part 1 is available here.

 

Call Me By Your Name

A story of sex, sculpture, and self-discovery, Call Me By Your Name is the latest in a recent trend of achingly sensitive LGBT romantic dramas that seem to hold such an allure for me.…

REVIEW: The Shape of Water & Brawl in Cell Block 99 (LFF Day 6)

Okay, so I may have skipped a few days, but both of these films were fresh in my mind and my thoughts on them actually seem to have made it onto the page in semi-presentable form.

 

The Shape of Water

With The Shape of Water, Guillermo Del Toro has delivered a film that is at once a luminous love letter to ‘50s sci-fi and a pricking commentary on prejudice.

REVIEW: Battle of the Sexes & The Meyerowitz Stories (LFF Days 2-3)

Battle of the Sexes

The real-life Battle of the Sexes, the 1973 tennis match between women’s world champion Billie Rae King and former men’s champion Bobby Riggs, is an event that might well have been conceived with dramatisation in mind.

To say that the film version, co-directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (Little Miss Sunshine), in a populist, mainstream sports biopic takes nothing away from it.…

REVIEW: Mudbound & Wonderstruck (LFF Day 2)

Mudbound

“Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of sorrow.”

It’s misery and anguish that are the heart of Mudbound, Dee Rees’ Netflix-bound period drama about farmers in early 20th Century Mississippi.…

REVIEW: Breathe (LFF Day 1)

Breathe is a film about which it’s easy to be cynical.

The directorial debut of Andy Serkis, the film was commissioned by Serkis’ Imaginarium Studios co-founder John Cavendish as a tribute to his father, disability advocate Robin. As such, it seems designed to squeeze every breath of uplift you from Robin’s already inspirational story.…

RETROSPECTIVE: Key Largo [Big screen classics @ The BFI]

This piece comes to you courtesy of my podcasting partner, the esteemed Mr. Rob Daniel of www.electric-shadows.com, who was kind of enough to go along to a screening of this in my stead.

Bogart and Bacall’s fourth and final film together, Key Largo is a claustrophobic chamber piece shot with threatening camera angles and aggressive lighting.

RETROSPECTIVE: Carrie (1976), The Shining, & IT [Stephen King On Screen @ The BFI]

Nightmares come in many forms, and it seems like most of our collective ones emanated from the subconscious of a seventy-year-old Mainiac.

With his central themes of small-town corruption and loss of innocence, Stephen King he might well have become a latter-day Shirley Jackson, beloved of the literati, had he simply stayed around from pulp.…