Posted in Festival Review

‘Treasures’ Section of the London Film Festival

In addition to the number of exciting new screenings at the BFI London Film Festival this year, are three ‘Treasures’. Meticulous restorations of older works…

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Wolfwalkers
Posted in Festival Review

LFF Review: Wolfwalkers (Tomm Moore, Ross Stewart)

One can easily imagine the turning heads of Disney and Pixar, for instance, as the batwing doors swing open and a new pretender to the…

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Posted in Festival Interview

LFF Interview: Arie and Chuko Esiri talk about their startling emigration story Eyimofe (This Is My Desire)

Arie and Chuko Esiri’s debut feature Eyimofe (This Is My Desire) is a bold, superbly directed diptych of two Nigerians planning to emigrate from Lagos….

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Posted in Festival Review

LFF Review: Possessor (Brandon Cronenberg)

In a world where the sordid inhumanity of corporate dealings has become literalised in transactions of murder and blood, Tasya Vos (Andrea Riseborough) is a…

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Posted in Festival Review

LFF Review: Zanka Contact (Ismaël El Iraki)

Zanka Contact is a film deliberately built upon clichés. Its protagonists, Rajaes (Khansa Batma) and Larsen (Ahmed Hammoud) are a prostitute and a faded, drug-addicted guitarist…

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Posted in Festival Review

LFF Review: David Byrne’s American Utopia (Spike Lee)

I had a few thoughts after the first song of American Utopia finished. The first was a sort of awe at Spike Lee’s direction, which…

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Shadow Country
Posted in Festival Review

LFF Review: Shadow Country / Krajina ve stínu (Bohdan Sláma)

The harrowing, unimaginable consequences of war might well be a sub-genre of its own. Personal trauma, physical injuries, a life-long toll. While fuzzing helicopter propellers…

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Druk
Posted in Festival Review

LFF Review: Another Round / Druk (Thomas Vinterberg)

Mads Mikkelsen and Thomas Vinterberg seem made for each other. Building from the dizzyingly visceral realism of his early masterpiece Festen (1998), Vinterberg has always…

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Relic
Posted in Festival Horror Review

LFF Review: Relic (Natalie Erika James)

In 2018, at our very own Femme Filmmakers Festival, a spooky film of just 9 minutes captured chilling themes of aging isolation and childhood relics….

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Bloody Nose
Posted in Festival Review

LFF Review: Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets (Bill Ross IV, Turner Ross)

It is often said that hanging out with drunk people is unbearable when you’re sober. Drunkenness is  a different state of being: it permits things…

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Eyimofe
Posted in Festival Review

LFF Review: This Is My Desire [Eyimofe] (Arie Esiri, Chuko Esiri)

Arie and Chuko Esiri‘s first feature is a uniquely elegant one. It signals the start, I hope, of two brilliant careers. Indeed, the sheer artfulness…

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Posted in Festival Review

LFF Review: Honeymood (Talya Lavie)

Sometimes there’s nothing like a guitar strumming to set the scene and envisage a sense of humour. Talya Lavie‘s Israeli film, Honeymood, has enough organic…

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Herself
Posted in Festival Review

LFF Review: Herself (Phyllida Lloyd)

Herself is a tale of the highs and lows in the life of Dublin based mother Sandra, who is a domestic abuse victim who finds…

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The Disciple
Posted in Festival Review

LFF Review: The Disciple (Chaitanya Tamhane)

Indian filmmaker Chaitanya Tamhane‘s second feature to return to the London Film Festival, The Disciple, opens with a classical vocal chorus inter-cutting between two men…

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