LFF: Tell your story

Aside from watching everything online, another major difference in this year's London Film Festival is that there isn't that usual nagging feeling that somewhere else in the city there are parties and filmmakers and actors hanging out having fun without you. This year everyone's joining in from home, aside from a precious few actual screenings. Here are two more highlights, plus this week's non-festival roundup...

Shirley

dir Josephine Decker; with Elisabeth Moss, Michael Stuhlbarg 20/US **.

A fictional story involving iconic author Shirley Jackson is told with inventive style by director Josephine Decker, who infuses the screen with imagery and sounds that play on Jackson's work, using wildly colourful flourishes and nods to murky horror tropes. The actors are superb as people who become twisted around each other. But the story never quite clicks into gear, so it's only the creepy tension that keeps us watching.

The Painter and the Thief

dir Benjamin Ree; with Barbora Kysilkova, Karl-Bertil Nordland 20/Nor ****

Playing out as a fascinating dramatic narrative, this documentary unfolds its story using found footage, surveillance cameras and remarkably intimate fly-on-the-wall sequences. Filmmaker Benjamin Ree is following the extraordinary story of an unexpected friendship, two people who shouldn't be able to see each other with such remarkable clarity. Perhaps they recognise that they're both survivors of difficult situations. And in many ways they're still struggling to get through.

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C R I T I C A L   W E E K

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
Black Box • Kajillionaire
Song Lang • Yes 
PERHAPS AVOID:
The War With Grandpa 
FULL REVIEWS >

In between the festival films, I managed to watch the amusing but badly underpowered slapstick comedy The War With Grandpa, the guilty pleasure twisty sci-fi thriller Black Box, the provocative black comedy Yes, the warm midlife crisis comedy From the Vine, the scruffy road movie Making Tracks, the bonkers Turkish parable The Antenna, the meandering French odyssey The Wanderings of Ivan, and the moving Vietnamese drama Song Lang.

And this coming week I need to fit these in around LFF screenings: Paul Bettany in Uncle Frank, the horror films Evil Eye and Nocturne, the mystery Don't Look Back, and a doc called JR "Bob" Dobbs and the Church of the SubGenius.