Tag: LFF

Youth captures some of the mixed magnificence of life

 

One of the few statements you can make about life as a whole is that it’s much of a muchness— and that it ends.

The counter-intuitively titled Youth sees two older gentlemen, a retired composer and Stravinsky pupil, Frank (Michael Caine), and still-working director (Harvey Keitel), Mick, both coming to terms with this while on holiday at a Swiss spa; a spa inhabited by red-robed Buddhist monks, a Middle Eastern woman in a hijab, a morbidly obese celebrity with a Karl Marx back tattoo and Maradona hair.…

The Lobster is a blackly heartfelt chimera of a romcom

 

You wait for one comedy about men being transformed into animals then two come along at once — a non-mating pair, if you will.

But where Kevin Smith’s Tusk was about a vicious comic forcibly losing his humanity due to a mad experiment, Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster is altogether more social and universal.…

Partisan is a film with allegory issues

 

A grey curve of mountain road. A forested valley overshadowed by dilapidated tower blocks. A dog howls, off.

Nonspecific in its exact time and place, though vaguely Baltic in its devastation, the inhospitable landscape into which Partisan immerses us makes a strong case for any sort of alternative, as offered by Vincent Cassel’s Gregori.…

Steve Jobs is a near perfect fusion of functionality and artistry

 

What is the current fascination with technology entrepreneurs?

From The Social Network to AMC’s Halt and Catch Fire, key figures in the PC movement, real or imagined, have grown to legendary status in the public consciousness. Perhaps it’s because they are ambitious dreamers, mavericks who shape the way we interact with the world — by way of example, this review was drafted on an iPhone and written up on a Macbook — or perhaps because they provide an point of entrance into the digital realm, which is otherwise so hard to dramatize.…

Carol is a transcendent plea for kindness and beauty

With sapphic romantic drama Carol, Todd Haynes confirms himself as a master of forbidden love.

In 2002’s Far From Heaven, stylized as a Sirkian ‘50s melodrama, he doubled down on issues of race and sexuality. Here, however, it all comes down to a single relationship between black-bobbed shop-girl Therese (Rooney Mara) and reluctant socialite Carol (Cate Blanchett), whose eyes meet across a crowded store one busy December morning.…

Is this the (Brothers) Quay to Nolan’s whole oeuvre?

 

As arguably the foremost director of high-brow cinematic entertainment on the planet, it seems reasonable that Christopher Nolan might want to take a breather between blockbusters.

After the $165 million universe-spanning epic that was Interstellar you can’t get much more palette cleanser-y than an eight-minute behind-the-scenes of the magical junk shop-workshop of a pair of stop-motion animators.…

11 Minutes has too many lines and too few hooks

 

The fundamental question any film must ask itself is, “Why tell this story?”

In the case of 11 Minutes, the twenty-fifth film from Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski, the problem is exacerbated: why tell these stories, any of them?

Why tell the story of ambivalent blonde actress (Paulina Chapko), the intense, insinuating casting agent (Richard Dormer) looking to bed her, or her wounded husband (Wojciech Mecwaldowski), who spends the film stalking stylized hotel corridors in search of her?…

Suffragette is a worthy but overly respectable

 

As with The Imitation Game, which kicked off last year’s London Film Festival, Suffragette — another period drama — is a quintessential work of British cinema. It too tells an important story.

Instead of the huts of Bletchley Park, we find ourselves at an East End laundry circa 1913, the workplace of Maud Watts (Carey Mulligan) and dozens of other industrious women.…

The Tribe envelops you in a world of silence

 

What makes a film “brave”? Is it telling a type of story that hasn’t been told before? Is it doing something innovative technically? By either definition, The Tribe is brave film-making.

The feature debut of Ukrainian writer-director Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy, it takes place in a time and place where sound is, by and large, irrelevant, and features “No translation, no subtitles, no voice-over”, only sign language.…