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Showing posts from October, 2016

LFF 2016:Manchester By The Sea / The Ghoul /Mascots / My Life As A Courgette

Well that's that for another year. The 60th London Film Festival is over, and so is my all-encompassing coverage of 4.9% of all the films it had to offer. Join me again next year when we hope to break the magic 5% barrier! Manchester By The Sea Kenneth Lonergan's long-awaited follow-up to the epic Margaret lacks that film's scope and scale, hewing closer to his excellent debut You Can

LFF 2016: Prevenge

Shift over Marge Gunderson, budge up Juno MacGuff: the small world of films with lead characters whose ovens are home to a sizeable bun just got even less roomy. In fact Prevenge straddles two subgenres like a mighty, tender-breasted colossus, and both the pregnancy comedy and the vengeance thriller are about to get a new champion in Alice Lowe's homicidal, hormonally imbalanced heroine Ruth.

LFF 2016: Free Fire

I realise I'm in the minority here, but I'm afraid I still don't get Ben Wheatley. I look forward to each of his films, and every one - on paper, at least - seems like it's going to be The One that grabs me and shows me that the emperor is, indeed, fully clothed. But to me, all six of his admirably original features have felt like promising debuts; calling cards that give notice of a developing

LFF 2016: Have You Seen My Movie?

If there's one thing the movies love, it's the movies. Movie maker Paul Anton Smith loves the movies' love of the movies, so he's made a movie about it from bits of movies set at the movies, and it's a real movies movie. Raiding hundreds of films from An Affair To Remember to Zodiac for their cinema-based scenes, Smith has constructed an almost-narrative built entirely from breathtakingly

LFF 2016: Christine

Rebecca Hall anchors Antonio Campos' refreshingly objective biopic of troubled '70s newscaster Christine Chubbuck with such understated grace and control that if this film doesn't put her on the A List, nothing will. Front and centre throughout, Hall is mesmerising as the committed, idealist newshound constantly up against the powers that be at her ratings-chasing local news station. Campos

LFF 2016: La La Land

Watching Damien Chazelle's La La Land in 2016 - a year which, both inside and outside the cinema, has been caked in some of the most feculent matter to spurt from the world's rancid arsehole - is like being slapped in the face with a bright yellow cartoon hand that bursts into stars on impact with your chops, showering you with music and joy and laughter and love and all the things that have

LFF 2016: Arrival

Denis Villeneuve's second film to hover menacingly over cinema audiences in the space of twelve months is light years away from the grounded, nail-troubling thrills of 2015's Sicario, just as that film was nothing like his Enemy, or Prisoners, or Incendies before it. If Villeneuve - master of the one-word title - has spent his career thus far on an eclectic jaunt through a selection of genres,

LFF 2016:A Monster Calls / The Handmaiden /The Red Turtle

Well bugger me with a candlestick and call me Karen if it isn't that time of year again: it's the London Film Festival, a whole entire festival of films about London Records, the label that was home to such stellar talent as The Rolling Stones, ZZ Top and Gay Dad. What's that? Oh, right. Ignore me. Here are some film reviews! A Monster Calls Juan Antonio Bayona's fantasy-drama is heavy

The Girl On The Train

If the number of girls on trains reading The Girl On The Train over the last couple of years is anything to go by, then the film of the book of the girl on the train is already on the fast track to box office success. Which is a shame really, because despite a first class performance from Emily Blunt, it really is a load of derivative, mediocre and frequently lazy old rubbish; if Southern Rail