Since squatting himself somewhere in the basement of Vue to participate in our London Film Festival podcast, Paddy Mulholland, like so many other LFFers down in the capital, must have oblong shaped eyes with all the movies he has seen. Of course, with the viewings come the reactions to it all, and here we have a rundown of his reviews which can all be found on his website Screen on Screen.
Little Joe
A slowly spinning overhead shot clues in the clued-in viewer – Jessica Hausner is branching out with Little Joe, but is she blooming? Central Europe’s most playfully odd filmmaker crosses the English Channel for a British sci-fi-tinged quasi-comedy, and if the lulling whirl of the opening shot is anything to go by, she’s crossed into new territory, though without jettisoning her artistic signatures. Rather than a rough, clumsy mish-mash of genres, including monster-movie horror, deadpan comedy, and paranoia thriller, Little Joe is a typically lean, exacting showcase of Hausner’s technical abilities, drawing from said genres to fashion a new genre, unique to itself. Full Review Here.
Desrances
I’m not fond of bashing movies in keen need of an audience, and loathe to report that one of the ridiculously rare movies from a female African filmmaker to cross beyond the continent’s borders is a dud, but facts are facts, America! You take a chance on an unknown quantity, and chance isn’t always in your favour – I relish the opportunity to seek out obscure works each year at the London Film Festival, though that relish can be short-lived. I’ll keep this brief, as I sincerely wish those involved in this well-intentioned Burkinabe feature the very best, but this overwrought melodrama squanders those intentions on a pitifully cliched story of the traumatic effects of war on an immigrant family in 2010 Cote d’Ivoire. Full Review Here
Atlantics
Mati Diop’s Atlantics is my first masterpiece of the 2019 London Film Festival, a vivid and startling confluence of sensible social realism and senseless magic realism, a vision of genuine innovation enriched by Diop’s marvellous union of concept and form. It concerns Ada, a young woman less than a fortnight from her wedding, whose secret lover ditches their Dakar surroundings to brave the Atlantic in search of a better life in Portugal; his disappearance along with many other young men from their coastal neighbourhood engenders bizarre changes in the lives of those left behind, and the atmosphere begins to fill with new, strange figures. What a beautiful, memorable movie, one sure to reap boundless rewards upon repeat viewings. Mati Diop, to whom the future belongs! Full Review Here
Waves
Only in America, perhaps, could one legitimately imagine a lifestyle like that depicted in Trey Edward Shults’ Waves, one of a kind of bacchanalian teen existence that I still believe only truly exists in the movies, but insofar as it does exist here, legitimate imagination may then be granted legitimate consideration. Give into Waves, either in spite of or due to its curious inconsistencies, its unfettered audacity, its quintessentially American enthusiasm for nought but itself, and consider how brilliantly alive American cinema can be. Full Review Here
Seberg
Think good thoughts! Here’s a good thought: Kristen Stewart as Jean Seberg. It makes sense – each one of their generation’s most interesting performers, each first receiving a level of acclaim befitting their abilities in France, despite commencing their respective careers in the U.S. Here’s a not-so-good thought: Benedict Andrews’ biopic Seberg, with Stewart playing the fascinating 1960s cross-cultural icon, doesn’t make much sense. It’s a sensitive portrait of a complex character butting heads with a tense political thriller, crammed full of famous faces and sumptuous sets, a prime example of prime Hollywood gloss, so glossy it slicks away all the substance from what is, indeed, a most substantial story. Full Review Here
Krabi, 2562
From the outset, this promises to be a subtly strange, slippery movie, casually folding together uniformity with disorder, dutifulness with flippancy, forceful formal discipline with playful indifference. It’s an experimental work, though not aggressively so, sourcing its innovation from its conceptual diversity and its reluctance to signal any clear path for the viewer through its collage of creative impulses; in the diegetic material of each scene, it’s a work of simple pleasures, laid out in a relaxed, informal manner that seems to utterly erase the boundary separating documentary from fiction. Full Review Here
The Lighthouse
The texture of this movie, its perfect period detail, its refusal to aestheticize the grim mundanity and thus its fabulous aesthetic quality! The ferocious power of its deranged monologues, the brutality of its crass sense of humour, the ruthlessness of its whip-crack editing! Just when you think you’ve gotten a handle on its bleak Tarr Bela atmosphere, it whirls you around a few times and lands you in daffy Guy Maddin territory, absurd and absurdly indifferent to whether you can make sense of it or not, and then it chews you up too, spits you out, plies you with mechanical oil, buries an axe in your shoulder then tells you it’s fond of your lobster. Full Review Here
Luce
The gateway to Luce’s moral maze is, of all people, Frantz Fanon, the 20th Century revolutionary philosopher who participated in the Algerian War of Independence as a member of the FLN. In a most unexpected development for this staunch bibliophobe, I’ve actually read Fanon, and this is where my qualms kicked off with this movie. A specific reading of Fanon’s political views is central to instigating the action that ensues, and to my mind it’s a regrettable misreading, yet the movie never addresses this detail, nor seeks to critique the content of the misreading. Full Review Here
The House of Us
Through fine, stable handling of simple, trustworthy dramaturgical technique, Yoon constructs a scenario that feels freshly hewn from the very fabric of reality and puts it to an ideal purpose. She’s exploring the life of an average child here, as before in The World of Us, and effectively setting out her explorations as a standard for depictions of childhood on screen. It’s that radical, despite its apparently conservative style and accessible tone – rarely if ever before has any filmmaker achieved something as successful in its unpretentious earnestness on such a topic. Full Review Here
Babyteeth
Baby steps for fledgling filmmakers! Hurling itself at the audience like a drunken fresher after a This Is Us binge, debut director Shannon Murphy’s Babyteeth is an excruciating Aussie melodrama, full to the brim and fuller still of cringeworthy cliches across narrative, dialogue, character and style, practically falling over itself to announce each and every new affectation with a brash, unmistakably Antipodean obnoxiousness. Full Review Here
Saint Maud
The portentousness is not only leavened by the occasional, but generous, comedic aspects, it’s complemented by it, and the pair combine the callous and the profane with the supposedly divine in a manner that better suggests the fundamentals of Christian faith than the majority of conventional cinematic depictions. Agony becomes sublime, joy becomes sinful, and Maud’s inverted vision of life is rendered horribly, delectably real. Full Review Here
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