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Showing posts from October, 2018

LFF 2018: The Favourite & Stan & Ollie

The Favourite dir. Yorgos Lanthimos, Ireland / UK / USA, 2018 Yorgos Lanthimos is back back back, and he's brought the triple threat of Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone with him for this sumptuous and irreverent telling of the true rivalry between Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough (Weisz) and Abigail Hill (Stone) for the affections of Queen Anne (Colman). The often-troublingly

LFF 2018: In Fabric & Suspiria

In Fabric dir. Peter Strickland, UK, 2018 Ground floor, perfumery, homicidal evening gowns, mannequins with pubic hair, masturbating boss. Going up! Peter Strickland's own brand of movie Marmite hits new heights of oddballery with his fourth and maddest feature, a freaky mash-up of Are You Being Served? and Tales Of The Unexpected, as directed by Mike Leigh after fourteen straight days

LFF 2018: Roma & The Green Fog

Roma dir. Alfonso Cuarón, Mexico, 2018 Alfonso Cuarón's semi-autobiographical love letter to the women he grew up with in Mexico in the early 1970s will hit your TV screens, courtesy of Netflix, very soon. I feel it's only fair to warn you that if you watch it on your telly, unless your telly is sixty feet wide and there isn't a single thing in the room to distract you, then I will come

LFF 2018: The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs & The Old Man & The Gun

The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs dir. Joel Coen & Ethan Coen, USA, 2018 For the first twenty minutes or so of The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs - the Coen brothers' anthology film of six tales of the American frontier (with colour plates) - I was in absolute heaven. Tim Blake Nelson's titular cowboy, as adept at singin' as he is at gunslingin', rattles off the kind of classic Coens dialogue that

LFF 2018: Sorry To Bother You & Happy New Year, Colin Burstead

Sorry To Bother You dir. Boots Riley, USA, 2018 Sorry To Bother You is rapper Boots Riley's first film, and you have to wonder if he thought it might also be his last, because it feels like he's lobbed every idea he ever had at the screen in case he never gets the chance to use any of them again. It's a wild ride, and much of the madness lands, but it really needs to calm down a bit and

LFF 2018: Widows: A matter of wife and death

dir. Steve McQueen, UK / USA, 2018 The very first shot of Widows sees Viola Davis and Liam Neeson in a moment so intimate that it's almost uncomfortably intrusive to watch. So it comes as some relief when director Steve McQueen cuts away, throwing us instead into the back of a getaway van being driven at high speed and shot at by persons unknown. It's a pulsating, stress-inducing, noisy,

LFF 2018: Mandy & Border

You're not going to believe this but they've only gone and made another London Film Festival. In a world of never-ending franchises, Episode 62 of the BFI's tentpole event is the 2018est yet, although whether you'll get the most out of it without having seen the first 61 remains to be seen. Fear not though, dear reader, I'll be on hand to mutter inconsequentially about a tiny percentage of the