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.…

CINEMATIC GRAB-BAG: Beauty And The Beast (2017) & Get Out

Beauty And The Beast (2017)

Obligatory “tale as old as time” reference.

Disney’s original Beauty And The Beast holds a special place in my heart: it was, according to my parents, the first film I ever saw in the cinema; aged just eighteen months.

High-Rise is the cinema of concrete and chaos

 

There’s something about the technology-driven dystopias of JG Ballard that appeal to a certain breed of director.

Steven Spielberg’s mainstream adaptation of Empire of the Sun is ironically something of an oddity of an oeuvre encapsulated by the steely paraphilia of David Cronenberg’s Crash.…

The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies is a decent enough end to the Middle Earth saga

 

Thirteen years (and several billion dollars) after it first appeared on our screens, Peter Jackson’s Middle Earth saga has seemingly come to an end.

It may offend the more delicate among us to discuss Film in terms of grosses and bums on seats, but even in the age of The Avengers: Age of Ultron, The Lord of the Rings trilogy was still a financial force to be reckoned with.…

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug loses its treasures amid ersatz

 

Like a winged beast from the North, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug is upon us.

Its predecessor, An Unexpected Journey – Peter Jackson’s first film as director since 2009’s The Lovely Bones and our first return to Middle-Earth in nine years – was notably not one of my favorite films of the previous year.…