London Film Festival 2018

This year, I was able to spend more time than previously at London Film Festival, and my thoughts on the films I saw can be read over at The Movie Isle. You can also see my ranked list of the films at Letterboxd - I managed 17, and if I lived in London I would …

The White Girl (2017)

I had a meeting at relatively short notice in London last week and, knowing it would mean an overnight stay, headed straight to the London Film Festival website to see what options were still available for the evening in question. Well, The White Girl had me at Christopher Doyle. The master of cinematography has co-directed …

Columbus (2017)

I was wondering how to start writing about this film, so I turned to the IMDb blurb for inspiration. It says: A Korean-born man finds himself stuck in Columbus, Indiana, where his architect father is in a coma. The man meets a young woman who wants to stay in Columbus with her mother, a recovering …

Le Fidèle – Racer and the Jailbird (2017)

This is a strange one. I thought it had finished twice before it finally got there and found it a little all over the place in clarifying which strand of the narrative was important for plot and which was supposed to be exposition. And yet it was still very enjoyable. I could hear some perplexed …

Stronger (2017)

Cards on the table - I was anticipating this was going to be a 'trauma victim overcomes the odds to become a hero' story, and the only reason I chose to see it was because Jake Gyllenhaal, whose films I don't avoid. The fact that this is a very different survivor story is not only …

Mudbound (2017)

Absolutely no denying that this film, once it reached its climax, was emotional, brutal, devastating. It did take a while to get there though. So many strands, lots of characters, all introduced to us at the very start, so that it felt like it took a long while to get going. I'm not the biggest …

Tigre (2017)

Viewed at TIFF '17 A collection of women of different generations find themselves sharing space in a run-down house on the Argentine delta. The men around them (sons, boyfriends) appear to lack the strength of conviction and personality that the women possess - it makes for some really interesting scenes between the women, and a couple …

The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)

Viewed at TIFF '17 The man waiting in line for tickets next to me confided that he'd been told this is Yorgos Lanthimos' darkest film. My immediate thought was that it would have to go some to live up to that statement. And to be honest, it's not far off. It's certainly as dark as …

Cocote (2017)

Viewed at TIFF '17 Alberto has a job at a rich family's mansion and is a man of few words. He returns to his rural home for a few days on learning of his father's death. Apart from the opening and closing scenes at the mansion (a static wide-shot of the swimming pool), the rest of …

Arrebato – Rapture

I've just about picked my jaw up off the floor. I was not expecting anything like that! That's what happens when you book tickets weeks in advance, then don't check up on what you're going to see. In the pre-screening introduction, I learned that Arrebato was a movie which had immense difficulties in filming, had …