REVIEW: Poor Things [London Film Festival 2023]

A mashup Victorian melodrama with a sting in the tale, Poor Things’ greatest trick is hiding the seams.

Yorgos Lanthimos’ first film since 2018’s The Favourite, Poor Things is a female Bildungsroman in which a still-developing young woman goes into the world to find herself.…

BFI London Film Festival 2023: The best of the rest

Capsule reviews for all the rest of films I’ve seen during this year’s LFF, usually via the Press & Industry Digital Viewing Library.

Apolonia, Apolonia

Apolonia, Apolonia is a portrait of the artist as a young woman. Filmmaker Léa Glob first met Apolonia Sokol as a 21-year-old aspiring painter.…

REVIEW: The Zone of Interest [London Film Festival 2023]

With The Zone of Interest, his first film since 2013’s Under the Skin, Jonathan Glazer has created another masterpiece, a monstrously mundane meditation on the banality of evil.

Based on the novel by Martin Amis, the film focuses on the Höss family, Rudolph (Christian Friedel), Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), and their children.…

REVIEW: Foe [London Film Festival 2023]

There is perhaps no genre as primed for grand explorations of the human condition as science fiction.

Not constrained by the limits of the world as it is, it’s free to pose questions and imagine scenarios by which we might better understand ourselves.…

REVIEW: May December [London Film Festival 2023]

The latest film from director Todd Haynes, May December is a misleadingly sunny exploration of uncomfortable truths.

Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman) is a popular actor who has travelled to Savannah, Georgia, to spend some time with Gracie (Julianne Moore), who she is due to play in an upcoming TV movie.…

REVIEW: The Killer (2023) [London Film Festival 2023]

Three years on from the roaring historical drama of Mank, David Fincher returns with The Killer, a chilly, methodical thriller very much rooted in the present.

The Killer (Michael Fassbender, coolly compelling) is a professional.

His working life is meticulous, based on a routine designed to help him perform with maximum efficiency.…

REVIEW: The Bikeriders [London Film Festival 2023]

Everyone looks cool in leathers.

This would seem to be the main ethos behind Jeff Nichols’ The Bikeriders.

Based loosely on Danny Lyon’s photo-book of the same name, compiled from 1963-’67, the film follows the Vandals, a fictionalized Midwest motorcycle club composed mostly, in this telling, of movie stars and characters actors.…

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.…