LFF: Chin up

While it's packed to the brim with an astonishing array of high-profile movies and small gems from all over the world, the 65th BFI London Film Festival will probably be remembered just as much for all of the queuing involved. Today I got caught in a brief rainshower standing in a urine-soaked alleyway outside a cinema waiting to get into a press screening - which is something I've had to do for two to three hours each day between films. The things we do to watch movies we've read about but haven't had a chance to see yet! And in most but not all cases, it's well worth the effort...

The French Dispatch
dir-scr Wes Anderson; with Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand 21/Fr ****.
Wes Anderson creates yet another offbeat, fully realised universe in this witty homage to old-school journalism. With a fabulous cast of hundreds, including at least two dozen A-list stars, the film has a sprawling feel to it but remains engagingly intimate as it traces a series of contained stories. Mainly set in the 1970s, it's even more gorgeously designed than expected, packed with hilarious touches and audaciously inventive storytelling... FULL REVIEW >

Ron's Gone Wrong
dir Sarah Smith, Jean-Philippe Vine; voices Zach Galifianakis, Jack Dylan Grazer 21/US ***.
Lashings of goofy charm, wildly coloured imagery and frantic action make this resolutely silly animated romp enjoyable. And it even has a decent message buried under all the usual guff about the importance of family and friends. The filmmakers perhaps try a bit too hard to keep the jokes firing throughout the slapstick narrative. But it's ultimately impossible to resist a movie that's this warm and funny... FULL REVIEW >

Last Night in Soho
dir Edgar Wright; with Thomasin McKenzie, Anya Taylor-Joy 21/UK ***
A luridly over-the-top sensibility makes this crazed London drama compulsively watchable. And while it looks terrific, the film becomes rather exhausting in the way it depicts a young woman's struggle with madness. Filmmaker Edgar Wright pours style into each scene, skilfully using real locations to playfully mirror the present day with the swinging '60s. And the superb ensemble is fully committed to even the most outrageous moments... FULL REVIEW >

True Things
dir Harry Wootliff; with Ruth Wilson, Tom Burke 21/UK **
Like an indulgent autobiographical first film, this British drama is so insular that that it becomes increasingly difficult to identify with the characters. Director-cowriter Harry Woodliff is actually adapting a novel, which adds an odd sense of distance to the material. It looks gorgeous with its swirly cinematography and dreamy editing, and Ruth Wilson gives a tremendous central performance. But the pushy filmmaking leaves it feeling empty.

Costa Brava, Lebanon
dir-scr Mounia Akl; with Nadine Labaki, Saleh Bakri 21/Leb ***.
With an earthy pace, this film set on the outskirts of Beirut is both a sparky family drama and a lament for a nation engulfed in corruption. It's skilfully shot in a terrific location, with a few surreal touches that reveal the characters' internal journeys. And its universal themes about justice, regret and expectation carry a nice kick, as the politics are deliberately drowned out by the personal story... FULL REVIEW >

Full reviews of festival films will be published as possible and linked at Shadows' LFF HOMEPAGE 
For full information, visit BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 

Raindance: Get distracted

The 28th Raindance Film Festival kicked off last night with a very small gala screening of the David Bowie biopic Stardust, starring Johnny Flynn (it's not showing to the press until the end of the festival). This year's event will include some live screenings plus a lot of virtual ones. Like the recent London Film Fest, I'll be watching everything at home and writing regular updates here. Here are the first two, plus my usual report on the past week...

A Dim Valley

dir-scr Brandon Colvin; with Zach Weintraub, Whitmer Thomas 20/US 1h32 ***.

There's a loose stoner vibe to this wilderness-set comedy, a gently loping film that generates lots of smiles and a few solid laughs. While nothing much seems to be happening, the way the characters so aimlessly interact is often amusing, as they simply neglect to express what they want, either personally or professionally. It's deliberately quirky, like a joke that's funnier when you're inebriated. But it runs deep.

This Is Cristina [Ella Es Cristina]

dir-scr Gonzalo Maza; with Mariana Derderiaan, Paloma Salas 19/Chile 1h22 ****

With a series of seemingly random scenes shot in a striking monochrome, this clever Chilean comedy-drama traces the rollercoaster trajectory of a friendship between two women who seem unwilling to grow up and take responsibility for their lives. With his directing debut, gifted writer-producer Gonzalo Meza (A Fantastic Woman) cleverly weaves together a coming-of-age story that hinges on this connection. It feels crisp and light, but carries a strong kick.

NB. My anchor page for Raindance is HERE and full reviews will appear in between these daily blog entries. Much more to come...

~~~~~~~ ~~ ~~~ ~~~~

C R I T I C A L   W E E K

BEST OUT THIS WEEK: 

Song Without a Name 

Wolfwalkers • African Apocalypse

The Painter and the Thief

FULL REVIEWS >

I finally caught up with Sofia Coppola's On the Rocks this week, one of my favourite films of the year, a deceptively simple comedy with the perfect double act of Bill Murray and Rashida Jones. I was less excited to catch Ben Wheatley's remake of Rebecca with Armie Hammer, Lily James and Kristin Scott Thomas. It's beautifully made, but adds little to Hitchcock's iconic classic. The Secret Garden is a better remake, with a great cast and artful touches. And there were two guilty pleasures: Dylan O'Brian in the surprisingly fresh zombie romp Love and Monsters and Omari Hardwick in the horror freak-out Spell. This past week I also saw: Claes Bang in the intriguing The Burnt Orange Heresy; Jaeden Martell in the cleverly involving The True Adventures of Wolfboy; the artful British drama Philophobia; the action-packed Train to Busan sequel Peninsula; the absolutely stunning Peruvian drama Song Without a Name; the provocative Argentine drama Young Hunter; and the superbly observed doc Boys State.

Aside from Raindance films, This coming week I'll be watching the London street-cat sequel A Christmas Gift From Bob, Eva Green in Proxima, Andrea Riseborough in Luxor, the rom-com Call Me Brother, Jack Lowden in Kindred, Iranian refugee drama Love Child and the Filipino drama 2 Cool 2 Be 4 Gotten.

Critical Week: Who you gonna call?

It's been a strange summer at the cinema, without a break-out hit. Disney and Marvel continue to rake up most of the box office cash, but nothing particularly outstanding has emerged quite yet. Meanwhile, it's been another eclectic week at the movies for me. Jim Jarmusch's wry zombie thriller The Dead Don't Die has his usual all-star cast, including Adam Driver, Chloe Sevigny and Bill Murray (above), plus a particularly hilarious Tilda Swinton. It's charming, dryly funny and too sardonic for mainstream audiences. And then there's the studio action-comedy Stuber, starring Kumail Nanjiani and Dave Bautista, who provide some charisma to help paper over the fact that the movie isn't particularly funny or thrilling.

Gurinder Chadha is back with her British feel-good drama Blinded by the Light, a scrappy but likeable movie set in the late-80s with a Bruce Springsteen song score. Summer Night is an equally loose American comedy-drama about a small townful of entangled characters. Even more independent, the twisty British-Dutch thriller AMS Secrets heavily channels Hitchcock's Psycho in its luridly stylised plot. From Mexico, Always Say Yes is an inventive odyssey about a young country boy in the big city. It's seriously explicit, but also insightful and disarmingly sweet. There was also the shorts collection The Male Gaze: The Heat of the Night, featuring six rather dark dramas about masculine sexuality from around the world. And I had a chance to see one of my all-time Top 5 films on the big screen in a new edit. Every edit of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now has been a masterpiece, and he says that this summer's pristinely digitised release is his "Final Cut".

Coming up this next week, we have Disney's remake of The Lion King, the animated adventure Playmobil: The Movie, Willem Dafoe in Opus Zero, the British immigrant drama My Friend the Polish Girl, the Mexican drama The Chambermaid, and the French drama Hidden Kisses.

Critical Week: Watch the screen

I finally caught up with a press screening last week for Eye in the Sky, starring Helen Mirren (above) as a British military officer coordinating a drone strike in Nairobi with pilots in America and operatives on the ground in Kenya. Remarkably timely and gripping. There was also a gala press screening for The Jungle Book, Jon Favreau's remake of the 1967 animated classic. This one is also animated, but in a remarkably photorealistic style. It looks so cool that we don't mind the simplistic adaptation of Kipling's stories.

Off the beaten path, Colonia stars Emma Watson and Daniel Bruhl in a gripping true-life thriller set amid the militaristic horrors of 1973 Chile. Adult Life Skills is a quirky British comedy-drama starring Jodie Whittaker as a rather annoying young woman trying not to grow up. Fan is a Bollywood action thriller starring megastar Shah Rukh Khan as a massively famous movie actor (no stretch) and also as his 20-years-younger stalker fan (impressive). And the entertaining documentary Weiner follows former Congressman Anthony Weiner as he tries in vain to steer his New York mayoral campaign away from his sexting scandal.

In the busy week ahead, we have screenings of the next Avengers extravaganza Captain America: Civil War, Julianne Moore in Maggie's Plan, Nicolas Cage in The Trust, the British dance sequel Streetdance Family, the Canadian drama What We Have, the German drama You and I, the first in the Portuguese trilogy Arabian Nights Volume 1: The Restless One and Chantal Akerman's No Home Movie. I'll also be attending Secret Cinema: 28 Days Later this weekend - watch for the review early next week.

Critical Week: A time for reflection

Press screenings always go slightly bonkers at this time of year as critics try desperately to catch up with everything before casting votes in year-end awards. I vote in three awards - the Online Film Critics Society released its nominees this week (the nominations deadline was last Saturday), the London Critics' Circle Film Awards (of which I'm the chair again) has its nominations deadline this Friday, and Galeca's Dorian Awards nominations are due next month. Anyway, in this flurry of screenings, I've seen what just might end up as my favourite film of the year, Charlie Kaufman's Anomalisa, an inventively animated and staggeringly personal exploration of self-image and human interaction.

Other awards screenings included The Revenant, Alejandro Inarritu's bravura and thoroughly harrowing survival tale starring Leonardo Di Caprio; Joy, the nutty and rather wonderful biopic reuniting Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper, Robert De Niro and writer-director David O Russell; and The Danish Girl, a rather too-pretty biopic but strongly pointed starring the excellent Eddie Redmayne and Alicia Vikander.

Regular releases screened this week included Tina Fey and Amy Poehler's goofy comedy Sisters, Brad and Angelina Jolie Pitt's handsome but stilted drama By the Sea, Jackie Chan and John Cusack's splintered Chinese action epic Dragon Blade, the charming British holiday romance Sparks and Embers, the rightly acclaimed Everest doc Sherpa,  the introspective American indie drama The Surface, and the offbeat Italian micro-budget drama Water Boys. I also took the time to delight in the starry joys of Sofia Coppola and Bill Murray's holiday extravaganza A Very Murray Christmas.

This coming week, the only movie anyone is talking about is Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which I'll get to see on Tuesday the 15th, a couple of days before it opens. Also screening: Ron Howard's seafaring epic In the Heart of the Sea, the British Winter Olympics biopic Eddie the Eagle, Mark Wahlberg and Will Ferrell squaring off in Daddy's Home, and Stephen Dorff in American Hero.

Critical Week: Everybody wants to be a star

Two high-profile press screenings in London this past week were for buzzy festival hits. Nightcrawler is the blackly comical thriller starring Jake Gyllenhaal as an ambitions crime-scene photographer. It's a stunner. And the crowd-pleasing St Vincent gives Bill Murray his best role ever as a grouchy old man who takes a young boy under his wing.

We also caught up with the next teen dystopia franchise launcher, the nicely made and well-acted but slightly thin thriller The Maze Runner; the wonderfully atmospheric and slightly undercooked 1970s British drama Northern Soul; the slick and unsettling drama A Good Marriage, starring Joan Allen and Anthony LaPaglia; and the documentary Corpus Christi: Playing With Redemption, about how the controversy surrounding the notorious play is largely misplaced.

I took it a bit easier on London Film Festival screenings this past week - just three: the searing British drama Bypass with George MacKay; the haunting American ghost story Jamie Marks Is Dead; and the Australian aboriginal drama Charlie's Country with David Gulpilil. And I got away from screening rooms for music (my first Kylie concert), theatre (a fringe comedy) and a set visit with Drew Barrymore. I was also elected vice chair of the London Film Critics' Circle, and had a power cut for 16 hours on Wednesday. Quite a week.

Films this coming week include the all-star ensemble comedy-drama This Is Where I Leave You and Robert Downey Jr and Robert Duvall in The Judge. As for London Film Festival, screenings in my diary over the first six days include: The Imitation Game, Rosewater, Wild, The Drop, My Old Lady, Kung Fu Jungle, The Falling, Return to Ithaca, Pasolini, The Salvation, Silent Storm, 1001 Grams, Second Chance and The Goob. Daily blog entries start on Thursday...

Critical Week: But is it art?

The week's big film was George Clooney's The Monuments Men, which quickly answered questions about why its release was shifted outside awards contention and why it wasn't screened for the press until just a few days before release: it's only ok. The story it tells is certainly essential, but it's mainly watchable because the strong cast inserts engaging detail into thinly written characters. Speaking of whom, the gang descended on London for Tuesday's press junket and premiere: Clooney, Matt Damon, Bill Murray, John Goodman, Jean Dujardin, Bob Balaban and Dmitri Leonidas, plus author Robert Edsel and surviving Monuments Man Harry Ettlinger. Alas, no Cate Blanchett or Hugh Bonneville.

Another very late screening was for the remake of RoboCop, screened the night before it opened. It's not half bad, thanks to a solid performance from Gary Oldman. There was also the tepid remake of another 1980s movie, the romance Endless Love. And we also caught up with Craig Fairbrass in the rather clunky LA thriller The Outsider as well as the latest in Peccadillo's shorts collections, Boys on Film 11: We Are Animals. But the film of the week, hands down, was The Lego Movie, a hilariously inventive animated romp that landed atop the box office in America and is likely to do the same thing in Britain this weekend.

This coming week we've got Scarlett Johansson as a sexy alien in Under the Skin, Wes Anderson's all-star The Grand Budapest Hotel, the British workplace comedy 8 Minutes Idle, the designer biopic Yves Saint Laurent and the cinema doc A Story of Children and Film. And the British Academy Film Awards hands out the Baftas on Sunday night.

LFF 7: Jumping Jack Flash

The Rolling Stones - Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts and Ronny Woods - were on the red carpet tonight for the world premiere of their new film Crossfire Hurricane at the 56th BFI London Film Festival. People had started lining up by noon for a glimpse of them, as well as premiere guests like Liam Gallagher, Anita Pallenberg, Jeff Beck, Bryan Ferry and Bill Wyman. (I'll try to get a photo for tomorrow.) I had four movies today, so am feeling a bit blurry tonight. Thankfully tomorrow is my last early morning screening, and then this weekend is just catch-up time for me. Here are some more highlights...

Crossfire Hurricane
dir Brett Morgen; with Mick Jagger, Keith Richards 12/UK ***
The Rolling Stones commissioned this film for their 50th anniversary, so it's probably not surprising that it never delves too far beneath the surface. What's really surprising, though, is that it only covers the first two decades before stopping abruptly, leaving us waiting for Part 2. But until then, it's a fast-paced, entertaining trip backstage with the bad-boy band. From the 60s to the 80s, we see the Stones largely through home movies (often shot on Jagger's own camera), cavorting back stage and indulging in the rock-n-roll lifestyle, complete with plenty of sex and drugs. On stage footage is equally intimate, and there's also a collection of vintage TV interviews that show us the bandmates growing up through the years. All of this is overlaid with a recently recorded audio track that's like a DVD commentary, as the surviving musicians offer present-day observations on the events. It's certainly a lot of fun, and covers momentous events like the chaotic free concert in Altamont and Richards' life-changing heroin arrest in Canada. Plus of course the death of Brian Jones. But it never touches on their life outside the band. Perhaps that isn't the point, but it leaves the film feeling incomplete.

Hyde Park on Hudson
dir Roger Michell; with Bill Murray, Laura Linney 12/UK ***
This entertaining film takes us on a breezy journey through a pivotal point in 20th century history without any real sense of perspective. And while some of the characters seem oddly uninteresting, a couple of terrific performances make it worth a look... REVIEW >

The Reluctant Fundamentalist
dir Mira Nair; with Riz Ahmed, Kate Hudson 12/US ***
Riz Ahmed stars in another complex, provocative film about terrorism, but this one isn't remotely as funny as Four Lions. No, this is a dead-serious drama that holds us gripped by its characters and situations until the story starts to sag under its own weight. And in the end, it feels oddly unsatisfying, simply because the film's structure undermines the point it's making. Ahmed plays Changez, a young Pakistani who attends Princeton in America and becomes a high-flying Wall Street analyst. But a series of events shake him, including 9/11 and subsequent harassment by police, immigration officials and security agents. Returning to Lahore, he becomes a lecturer specialising in violent uprisings. But is he a terrorist? The film frames this story as Changez narrates it to a journalist (Liev Shreiber) before a tense situation breaks out in Pakistan. But the script never quite connects the dots properly, abandoning characters along the way (such as Changez's parents) or distracting us with roles unnecessarily beefed-up for American actors (Hudson as his artist girlfriend, Keifer Sutherland as his boss). Fortunately, Ahmed is so good in the central role that his journey is both compelling and thought-provoking. But it should have been much punchier than this.

~~~~~~~ ~~ ~~~ ~~~~

CRITICAL WEEK: Festival schmestival. In addition to all of the movies I've seen at the LFF, I've had to keep up with all the usual movies coming out in cinemas. In the past week, London critics have had a chance to catch up with Cloud Atlas, the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer's ambitious multi-strand epic in which their cast members play six roles each. It's such a wildly huge undertaking that the high points outweigh the low ones. We saw the new James Bond movie Skyfall, which is startlingly personal, with great action and no main villainous plot; the incomprehensibly frantic Chinese 3D action epic Flying Swords of Dragon Gate, starring Jet Li; and the rather slow-paced American drama The Seminarian. I also got to see the 1954 classic Creature From the Black Lagoon in a sparkling new 3D digital projection - it looked pretty amazing, and wasn't nearly as cheesy as I remember.

Back to normal this coming week, I have screenings of Bradley Cooper in Silver Linings Playbook, Vanessa Redgrave in Song for Marion and Michelle Pfeiffer in Love Crime, plus a variety of other things I can't recall in my LFF haze.