Tag: LFF

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…

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…

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…

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….

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…

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…

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…

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…

Farnoosh Samadi’s feature debut is a chilling, quietly brutal drama that examines the real-life tensions caused by patriarchal society. Set in and around Tehran, Iran’s…

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…

Many great film titles dilute their characters into basic descriptors: Stalker, The Graduate, Bicycle Thieves, The Passenger. All these examples attempt to define human lives…

In Bassam Tariq‘s first fiction feature film, Mogul Mowgli, his central character comes alive during his rap battles with other like-minded, energised young men. In…

Set deep in the heart of rural Ireland, Douglas ‘Arm’ Armstrong (Cosmo Jarvis) is a lapdog and personal nose-buster for The Devers, a notorious drug-dealing…

The Deathless Woman Crimes buried in the shallow graves of the recent past rise to the surface of the poisoned earth, carrying with them the…