LFF: Find inspiration

More disappointment today, as long queues meant that I missed another film's press screening. The BFI is putting on about 300 seats for more than 2000 accredited journalists, so even arriving an hour early isn't a guarantee of getting in. It certainly makes properly covering their festival almost impossible. But we critics forge ahead, see what we can see, and work around the system by speaking to distributors about seeing their films in another way. Maybe next year I'll save the accreditation fee and simply stop standing in queues all day! In the meantime, there are great movies to see...

The Souvenir Part II
dir-scr Joanna Hogg; with Honor Swinton Byrne, Tilda Swinton 21/UK ****
Incisive filmmaker Joanna Hogg continues to mine her own backstory in this astonishing sequel to 2019's The Souvenir. It continues the narrative in the same short, sharp scenes, but expands to be funnier, darker and much more boldly inventive. And since much of it takes place on a movie set, it features some gorgeously surreal touches as well, all while maintaining that middle-class effort to bury anything unpleasant... FULL REVIEW >

Encounter
dir Michael Pearce; with Riz Ahmed, Octavia Spencer 21/US ***
An inventive visual approach and strong performances make this somewhat under-plotted thriller far more involving than it should be. Filmmaker Michael Pearce wisely hones in on the complex characters rather than the standard action story points, which have an odd flattening effect on the film's more intriguingly ambiguous elements. But it looks terrific, especially in the clever ways it nods to classic alien invasion adventures.

Titane
winner: Cannes Palme d'Or
dir-scr Julia Ducournau; with Vincent Lindon, Agathe Rousselle 21/Fr ***.
An intense, Cronenberg-style provocation, this French odyssey pushes several buttons in its bracingly complex depictions of female empowerment and toxic masculinity, and vice versa. It's relentlessly pungent, as filmmaker Julia Ducournau challenges the audience to invest in the characters and consider seemingly random things that are happening in the context of a much bigger picture. It's too scattered and loose to narrow its target, but thoughts it raises are haunting... FULL REVIEW >

Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn
winner: Berlin Golden Bear
dir-scr Radu Jude; with Katia Pascariu, Claudia Ieremia 21/Rom ****
Fiendishly clever and endlessly provocative as it explores the messiness of humanity at this point in history, this satirical Romanian comedy starts with an explicit sex tape then proceeds to unpack and then challenge our reactions to it. Writer-director Rade Jude's approach is endlessly playful and also very pointed, rummaging around in culture and history while allowing a wide range of opinions to surge within the narrative... 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 

Critical Week: Creation in isolation

With all film releases being online at the moment, studios are taking a few chances. Made in 2017, the JD Salinger biopic Rebel in the Rye has finally come out in the UK. The delay is surprising considering that it stars Nicholas Hoult (above), even if feels a bit lacklustre. Even more surprising, Bong Joon Ho's 2013 sci-fi action thriller Snowpiercer has never been released in Britain but is finally arriving this month, no doubt due to Bong's Oscar triumph (the delay was a Weinstein debacle). It was fun to revisit this bonkers classic. And Warner Bros released its animated blockbuster Scoob! straight to streaming, which is a shame for audiences who like to see high-quality animation on a big screen. It's a rather contrived corporate product, but fun too.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
Boys on Film 20 • The County
Cassandro the Exotico!
ONLY OK:
Scoob! • Frankie
Rebel in the Rye

Lower profile films include the cheesy horror anthology Evil Little Things, which centres on three very creepy dolls; the apocalyptic epic Edge of Extinction is gripping, even if it reveals both the ambition and inexperience of its filmmakers; the Spanish romcom I Love You, Stupid is predictable but pointed and engaging; the hugely involving Mexican drama I'm No Longer Here has a strikingly well-observed sense of style and music; the beautifully made Icelandic drama The County expertly stirs up some righteous rage at corruption; and Peccadillo's 20th short film collection is released to celebrate the distributor's 20th anniversary. Boys on Film 20: Heaven Can Wait is an essential set of LGBT-themed shorts, even if the 11 clips are a mixed bag.

The next movies on my to-watch list are: Issa Rae in The Lovebirds, John Hawkes in End of Sentence, Denis Menochet in Only the Animals, the Argentine thriller Intuition, the Korean thriller The Man Standing Next, and the Thai documentary Krabi 2562.

Contenders: Four dramas

I've been catching up with movies released earlier in the year that are eligible in the upcoming awards season. Whether they're worthy of consideration is another thing...

The Laundromat
dir Steven Soderbergh
scr Scott Z Burns
with Meryl Streep, Gary Oldman, Antonio Banderas, Jeffrey Wright, Melissa Rauch, Nonso Anozie, Matthias Schoenaerts, Rosalind Chao, David Schwimmer, Robert Patrick, James Cromwell, Sharon Stone
release US/UK 18.Oct.19 • 19/US Netflix 1h35 **

Weaving together a series of true stories, this financial comedy-drama seeks to explore the secret life of money. It's ambitious, silly and deliberately absurd, narrated by two dandy lawyers (Banderas and Oldman) in Panama. But the script follows so many threads and delivers so much information that it never comes to meaningful life. The themes are vitally important, the film makes some very strong points, and the performances are excellent, but the wildly flailing barrage of detail is numbing.

After a personal tragedy, Ellen (Streep) begins looking into the fraudulent insurance company in Nevis that has shortchanged her. She discovers it's linked to a Panama law firm helping the world's wealthiest people hide their money in shell companies. Their globe-spanning clients include murderous drug kingpins, an African billionaire (Anozie) who knows he can buy anything, and a British businessman (Schoenaerts) who arrogantly challenges his contact (Chao) in China. And the story is about to break, implicating everyone from movie stars to governments.

The film is essentially about the astonishingly thin line between illegal tax evasion and legal tax avoidance. But it's very difficult to care, or even to pay attention, amid endless conversations about finance, insurance, lawsuits, and so on, especially when the tone is so glib. The cast tries to spice things up with personality, screenwriter Burns keeps the words sparky, and director Soderbergh keeps things visually whizzy. But it still feels dull and unfocussed. There's too much effort to create witty cause-and-effect metaphors and colourful explanations, when a coherent, involving central story would have done this much more efficiently.

29.Oct.19

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The Man Who Killed Don Quixote
dir Terry Gilliam
with Adam Driver, Jonathan Pryce 18/Sp ***. 
Terry Gilliam spent more than 25 years working on this project (a previous attempt to film it was documented in Lost in La Mancha), and getting the film released wasn't easy either. The plot is wacky and meandering, but Gilliam infuses it with a gleefully freewheeling tone, taking flights of fancy at every turn. So even if its defiantly original style can be challenging, it's both raucous good fun and sharply pointed... FULL REVIEW >

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The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
dir-scr Chiwetel Ejiofor
with Chiwetel Ejiofor, Maxwell Simba, Aissa Maiga, Lily Banda, Lemogang Tsipa, Philbert Falakeza, Noma Dumezweni, Rophium Banda, Raymond Ofula, Joseph Marcell
release UK/US 1.Mar.19 • 18/UK BBC 1h53 ***.

For his writing-directing debut, Chiwetel Ejiofor ambitiously takes on a true story from rural Malawi. Beautifully shot in the actual locations, the narrative unfolds in a relatively straightforward way, which doesn't allow for a lot of subtext. But it's a thoroughly involving tale, populated by lively characters. And it's also seriously inspirational as it follows a young teen whose curiosity changed his world.

In a small farming village plagued by cycles of drought and flooding, it's getting more and more difficult to manage the grain harvest. Farming a small plot of land, Trywell (Ejiofor) finds his crops either over-soaked or parched. His wife Agnes (Maiga) is an educated woman who wants the best for their teen children Annie (Banda) and William (Simba). Annie hopes to go to university and is secretly seeing a schoolteacher (Tsipa), while William is a voracious student worried because his parents can no longer afford his school fees. So keeping access to the school library becomes a problem as he begins to figure out a way to solve their irrigation problems using wind-power.

The dramatic conflicts in this story feel a little contrived, as they pit the observant, inventive William against his pointlessly stubborn father. Surely Trywell would understand by now that his son might have ideas beyond his age. But he digs his feet in, flails against nature and prays for rain, while ignoring the solution right in front of him. On the other hand, this provides some meaty conversations, and terrific scenes between Ejiofor, Simba and Maiga, who flesh out their characters beautifully. So in the end, it's a skilful retelling of an important story, and aspects of the film are impressive, such as how Ejiofor learned the local language. It also looks gorgeous, and its emotional kick is very strong, as is the way it encourages us to seek outside-the-box solutions to things like political corruption and natural disasters.

23.Oct.19

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Ma
dir Tate Taylor
scr Scotty Landes
with Octavia Spencer, Diana Silvers, Juliette Lewis, McKaley Miller,  Corey Fogelmanis, Gianni Paolo, Dante Brown, Luke Evans, Allison Janney, Missi Pyle
release US/UK 31.May.19 • 19/US Universal 1h39 **.

Starting as a rather typical slickly made smalltown comedy-drama, director Tate Taylor begins from the start to undermine the usual forced Hollywood-style levity with elements from horror movies. But while Octavia Spencer keeps it watchable, the script and production are far too smoothed out to actually generate any suspense, including the way the screenplay uses important topics to offer simple explanations for the nastiness that erupts later on.

Erica (Lewis) and her teen daughter Maggie (Silvers) are settling into life in a new town. Trying to fit in at high school, Maggie hangs out with a group of cool kids including popular girl Haley (Miller), nice guy Andy (Fogelmanis) and jocks Chaz and Darrell (Brown and Waivers). After friendly Sue Ann (Spencer) buys booze for them, she stalks them online and befriends them ("Call me Ma!"), turning her basement into party central. But is she only pretending to be a cool adult?

There are interesting layers to the story, such as Ma's insecurities, which date back to her school days, when her classmates included Maggie, Andy's dad Ben (Evans) and his mean-girl girlfriend Mercedes (Pyle). Taylor overstates these themes loudly, making each wrinkle in the story so painfully obvious that the actual surprises seem anticlimactic. And many sequences feel badly compromised (surely Ma did something else to Ben in the first draft, and her own teen humiliation is botched in a pitch-black gloom). Thankfully, Spencer is skilled at believably navigating Ma's whiplash tonal changes from sweet to party girl to psychopath. But even she can't sell the hyper-grisly climax.

31.Oct.19

Critical Week: Heat and dust

Screenings are only just starting up in the new year, so I've only seen a few things this week. Although much of the attention for film critics centred around reacting to Sunday's rather odd line-up of Golden Globe winners and Wednesday's just as bizarre collection of Bafta nominations. Meanwhile, I saw Love Sonia, a powerful Indian drama about a 17-year-old (Mrunal Thakur, above) who is trafficked from her small village to Mumbai and beyond. It's pretty harrowing, but strikingly well made and urgently important. Instant Family is a rare comedy with a more serious, meaty theme, as Mark Wahlberg and Rose Byrne play a couple that fosters three siblings. It's played for laughs, but also remembers that the events carry weight as well.

Jellyfish is a small British drama about a feisty 15-year-old (the amazing Liv Hill) who takes care of her two younger siblings as well as her clearly unwell mother. It's superbly well written and directed, with a bracing realism that brings out the deeper themes. Robert Guedigian's ensemble drama The House by the Sea is very French: lots of people sitting around agonising about their lives, relationships, the changing world. But it's beautifully assembled and full of moving moments.

The screening schedule is picking up now, and over the next week I have M Night Shyamalan's Glass, Tom Everett Scott in I Hate Kids, the sinkhole horror The Hole in the Ground, the acclaimed Italian drama Happy as Lazzaro, and the coming-of-age drama Pond Life. I'm also in the final week of prep as chair and chief organiser of the 39th London Critics' Circle Film Awards. So it'll be a busy one!

Venezia74: Come swim with me on Day 2

It's hot and sticky in Venice at the moment, and the forecast is for thunderstorms over the next few days. Still hot and sticky, but extra wet. And hopefully not flu-inducing as I dart in and out of air conditioned screening rooms. Here's what I saw on Thursday...

The Shape of Water
dir Guillermo del Toro; with Sally Hawkins, Richard Jenkins 17/US ****
Guillermo del Toro lets his imagination run wild with this engaging and also rather dark romantic adventure. It's a riot of clever production design, witty dialog and heartfelt emotion that carries the audience on a journey along with the vivid characters. The whimsical family-movie tone sits a bit oddly alongside the film's resolutely adult-oriented touches, but for grown-ups this is a fairy tale full of wonder.

Zama
dir-scr Lucrecia Martel; with Daniel Gimenez Cacho, Lola Duenas 17/Arg **.
This is a fairly difficult movie even by the standards of adventurous Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel. An existential odyssey based on the 1956 novel by Antonio Di Benedetto, it simply refuses to coalesce into any kind of sensible narrative as the title character's life becomes a swirling nightmare of bureaucracy and cross-cultural messiness. And that's actually the point. At least it's fascinating, beautifully shot and acted, and packed with witty satire.

The Insult
dir Ziad Doueiri; with Adel Karam, Kamel El Basha 17/Leb ***
A terrific personal Lebanese drama is somewhat swamped by much bigger issues, as filmmaker Ziad Doueiri floods the story with the complexities of the nation's history and politics. Everything in this film is important, but when they're all overlaid on top of a courtroom drama, it tips the balance away from the more resonant story of two men having a face-off over a deeply personal clash.

Human Flow
dir Ai Weiwei; with Ai Weiwei, Boris Cheshirkov 17/Ger ***.
At an epic two and a half hours, this documentary is a little exhausting to sit through. But the topic is hugely compelling for anyone who feels compassion about other people. It's a film about refugees, and Chinese artist Ai Weiwei cleverly uses a variety of cameras to visit camps around the world, capturing both the individual impact in specific stories and the global scale as millions are displaced around the world. Even without using voiceover narration, the amount of information in here is astonishing.

> Tomorrow's screening schedule includes Jane Fonda and Robert Redford in Our Souls at Night, Vince Vaughn in Brawl in Cell Block 99, Andrew Haigh's Lean on Pete and Samuel Maoz's Foxtrot.

Critical Week: What's the point

London critics caught up with the next tentpole this week, namely Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (aka Salazar's Revenge), the fifth in the swashbuckling franchise starring Johnny Depp. While I enjoyed the previous four romps, this one felt overstuffed in every way (too many people, too many rambling plotlines, too many digital effects). I was happy when it finally ended.

Everything else was a bit smaller. Chris Evans is excellent in the sharply well-made drama Gifted, which manages to remain emotionally resonant without tipping into sentimentality. Tommy's Honour is a terrific story of the Scottish father and son who created the modern game of golf, nicely played by Peter Mullan and rising star Jack Lowden. Although the film is a bit uneven. The soapy Spanish comedy Wild Awakenings wins us over with its ridiculous tale of lust on a horse ranch. And the documentary Dying Laughing is a fascinating look at the life of a stand-up comic, as told by rather a lot of people who became very successful at it.

And finally, I revisited the early 1990s cult series Twin Peaks and rewatched the 1992 movie Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me before diving into the two-hour pilot episode for this 25-years-later sequel series. It's all rather bonkers, but sublimely so. And I look forward to the next 16 episodes.

Coming up this week is a very late press screening of Wonder Woman (buzz has been good but for some reason they are holding this one close to their chest), plus a number of films that will be screened at the forthcoming Sundance Film Festival London - watch this space. Meanwhile in France, the Cannes Film Festival winds up with its awards over the weekend. Expect controversy as usual.

Critical Week: Fly away

It's been another eclectic collection of screenings this week for London-based critics. My Life as a Courgette is the wonderful, resonant Oscar-nominated French animated drama. Going in Style is a fluffy comical remake starring Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Alan Arkin and Ann-Margret. The Sense of an Ending is a thoughtful, enjoyable British drama with Jim Broadbent, Charlotte Rampling, Harriet Walter and Michelle Dockery.

And then there was the far too sunshiny and simplistic Christian parable The Shack with Sam Worthington and Octavia Spencer; the far too gloomy but provocative post-tragedy drama Aftermath with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Scoot McNairy; the nihilistic and point-free murder-fest of The Belko Experiment; the gripping, nasty kidnapped-tourist thriller Berlin Syndrome with Teresa Palmer; and the awkward, goofy British Muslim rom-com Finding Fatimah.

This coming week we have The Fate of the Furious, A Dog's Purpose, The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Maki, Slack Bay, Suntan and the doc Whitney: Can I Be Me.