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BFI 53rd London Film Festival | John Lennon biopic Nowhere Boy ends a vintage year

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on October 30, 2009

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The 53^rd BFI London Film Festival came to a resounding rock ‘n’ roll close last night with the world premiere of Nowhere Boy, artist-turned-director Sam Taylor-Wood’s impressive biopic about John Lennon’s teenage years.

I thought Taylor-Wood looked every inch the star in a glittering gold dress slashed to the thigh as she introduced the film on stage at the Odeon Leicester Square. Speaking of the film’s origins, she fought back tears at the mention of her mentor, the late Anthony Minghella, the man who had encouraged her to move into directing. But if this is all beginning to make her sound like a lightweight (or an Oscar winner), then there’s clearly a core of steely determination beneath the dress and the tears, as she revealed when she described her resolve to land the gig of directing Control author Matt Greenhalgh’s script about Lennon.

“When I read the script I became an Exocet missile,” she admitted, and you could easily imagine that the film’s producers, Robert Bernstein, Kevin Loader and Douglas Rae, had no option but to surrender.

They joined Taylor-Wood on stage, as did what seemed to be the entire cast, including the actors playing the members of the strange Oedipal triangle at the film’s heart - Aaron Johnson (who plays Lennon), Anne-Marie Duff (who plays his mother, Julia) and Kristen Scott Thomas (Lennon’s Aunt Mimi).

An inspired choice for the closing night gala, Nowhere Boy topped off a great year for the festival - audience numbers hit an all-time high (over 124,00; almost 10,000 up on last year), and filmmakers and actors from all around the globe (some 553 of them) turned out in force too.

It remains to be seen what sort of impact the festival’s new Star of London awards will register in the movie world at large, but the festival’s first ever Best Film gong went to a thoroughly deserving winner – French director Jacques Audiard’s brilliant prison drama A Prophet.

A Prophet was one of my own personal highlights of the festival fortnight. Looking back over some of the other ones made me realise just what a good year this has been for European cinema, with Austrian director Michael Haneke’s chilling period drama The White Ribbon, Italian Marco Bellocchio’s Vincere (the long-suppressed story of Mussolini’s relationship with his first wife) and Basque drama Ander proving particularly strong. Roll on next year.

BFI 53rd London Film Festival | Comic turn from Boris shines on Bright Star gala

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Jason Best

on October 20, 2009

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Mayor of London Boris Johnson provided a waggish warm-up act for the London Film Festival’s Centrepiece Gala screening of Bright Star last night. After confirming his £5 million backing for the BFI’s new film centre, he declared his relief that certain alternative films hadn’t been chosen instead for the festival’s mayoral gala. In different circumstances, he might have found himself on stage at the Odeon Leicester Square introducing Up (potentially a swipe at his fares policy) or Fantastic Mr Fox (possibly a dig at the Tory position on hunting). Instead, festival director Sandra Hebron’s choice of Jane Campion’s ravishing drama about the love affair between John Keats and Fanny Brawne, gave Boris the opportunity to show off his poetry reciting skills, reeling off Keats’s ‘On first looking into Chapman’s Homer’, before bigging up the film industry’s role in London’s economy (“up 31%”) by means of the jocular inquiry “How much does a Grecian Urn?”

After Boris’s “opening drum roll”, however, it was left to Campion to introduce the film itself. Confessing her former terror of poetry, she thanked Andrew Motion (sitting in the audience), whose biography of Keats had encouraged her to make the film. “This film transformed me more than any other of my films,” she revealed. “I came out less terrified.” And Motion’s book gave her an incredibly inspiring subject. For Campion, the love affair at her film’s heart is “as powerful as Romeo and Juliet. But it’s true! And we have the love letters.”

Bright Star is on general release from 6th November.

BFI 53rd London Film Festival - Dapper George Clooney and Fantastic Mr Fox

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Jason Best

on October 15, 2009

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A dapper George Clooney was at the forefront of the sizeable Hollywood contingent trooping down the red carpet in Leicester Square last night for the world premiere of Wes Anderson’s animated screen version of Roald Dahl’s children’s classic Fantastic Mr Fox.

Joining Clooney and director Anderson on stage before the screening at the Odeon Leicester Square were their compatriots Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman, Wally Wolodarsky and Anderson’s brother Eric (all members of the film’s voice cast). In the nick of time, however, Anderson was able to introduce “two people who do have British passports” - “national treasure” Jarvis Cocker (who has a small role and sings a song) and Felicity Dahl, the writer’s widow and “the woman who brought the spirit of Roald Dahl to the film”.

This Transatlantic crossover runs into the movie itself, a quirky stop-motion animated tale relating the efforts of Clooney’s Mr Fox to outwit a trio of farmers. The good guys, the heroic, quick-witted, dashing animals are all American, while the bad guys, the grasping, trigger-happy farmers (headed by Michael Gambon’s mean Mr Bean), are all English. Make of that what you will.

BFI 53rd London Film Festival - Opening night… and the pick of the rest

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Jason Best

on October 14, 2009

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The Times BFI London Film Festival opens tonight with the world premiere of Fantastic Mr Fox, Wes Anderson’s screen version of Roald Dahl’s much-loved children’s story. Hollywood royalty will be turning out in force at the gala screening in Leicester Square, with George Clooney, Meryl Streep and Bill Murray joining director Anderson on the red carpet. Jarvis Cocker, multi-tasking as a member of the festival’s jury and of the film’s voice cast, will be there too.

The next fortnight promises a cornucopia of movies: 191 features and 113 shorts in total, including 15 world premieres, 23 European premieres and 146 UK premieres, Of the films I’ve been lucky enough to see already, here are half a dozen I can strongly recommend, in the order in which they appear during the festival. And, if you can’t get to see them at the LFF, don’t worry; they all have UK release dates lined up.

1. Cold Souls

With a surreal storyline and a famous actor playing himself, this playful existential comedy unavoidably draws comparisons with Being John Malkovich, yet first-time writer-director Sophie Barthes’s assured feature film debut has a deadpan wit and gentle pathos all its own. In New York, Paul Giamatti is agonising over the rehearsals for his forthcoming production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, so he enlists the services of a company that offers to lighten his burden by temporarily storing his soul. Unfortunately, despite the soothing assurances of David Strathairn’s smooth-talking doctor, the transaction doesn’t quite go to plan and Giamatti finds himself mixed up in the murky world of soul trafficking in the company of Dina Kurzon’s world-weary Russian mule.

Read full review.
Festival: Sat 17, Sun 18 & Mon 19 Oct
Cinema release: 4 Dec

2. Bright Star

Jane Campion’s ravishing costume drama tells the story of the tragically short love affair between romantic poet John Keats and his young neighbour Fanny Brawne, a relationship that inspired some of Keats’s most beautiful poetry and letters. Ben Whishaw and Abbie Cornish play the lovers, whose first encounter was far from auspicious: Keats thought Brawne a fashion-obsessed minx, while she found his poems a strain. Yet, as Campion movingly shows, an intense bond soon formed between the two that was only broken by Keats early death at the age of 25 in 1821. Without being in any way anachronistic, Whishaw and Cornish bring a freshness and conviction to their roles, while Campion shakes off costume drama frippery to deliver real lyricism and emotional depth.

Read full review.
Festival: Mon 19, Tue 20 & Wed 21 Oct
Cinema release: 6 Nov
Jane Campion screen talk, NFT1 Tue 20 Oct

3. An Education

Journalist Lynn Barber, known as Demon Barber for her razor-witted interviews, caused quite a stir when the memoir of her teenage years in early-60s London appeared in Granta magazine in 2003 and revealed her seduction as a 16 year old by a conman in his 30s. Now Nick Hornby has turned the memoir into the film An Education. Newcomer Carey Mulligan captivates as bright 16-year-old Twickenham schoolgirl Jenny, whose mix of worldliness and naivety allows her to be charmed by Peter Sarsgaard’s louche older man and swept up into his glamorous but rackety world. You could argue that the central relationship ought to seem sleazier, but the performances are spot on (with impressive support from Alfred Molina, Olivia Williams and Rosamund Pike, who very nearly steals the film) and director Lone Scherfig perfectly captures the look and mood of drab, pre-swinging 1961 London.
Festival: Wed 21 Oct & Thu 22 Oct
Cinema release: 13 Nov

4. The White Ribbon

Austrian director Michael Haneke (Funny Games, Hidden) has a knack of getting under the viewer’s skin and his new movie, a period drama filmed in austere black and white, is another chilling, unsettling tale. This year’s Palme d’Or winner, The White Ribbon is set in a small Protestant village in northern Germany in the months leading up to the outbreak of the First World War. Seemingly tranquil, the village witnesses a series of troubling events. Malicious hands would seem to be at work, but whose? Haneke is typically elusive, but he does create an indelible portrait of a repressed, authoritarian society in which the sins of the fathers are being laid upon the children. Some see here the breeding ground for Hitler and the Nazis. I’m not convinced, but whatever you read into the film, it remains a gripping and thought-provoking drama.
Festival: Wed 21, Thu 22 & Fri 23 Oct
Cinema release: 22 Jan 2010

5. The Boys Are Back

Shine director Scott Hicks returns to Australia after his decade-long Hollywood sojourn for this funny, touching drama based on the best-selling memoir by The Independent’s parliamentary sketch writer Simon Carr about his efforts to raise two sons after the death of his second wife from cancer. In the film, Carr becomes sportswriter Joe Warr and the book’s New Zealand setting becomes Australia, but the account of his unorthodox, sometimes chaotic, “least resistance” parenting is the same. Holding the film together as the flawed yet likeable father, Clive Owen shows sides we’ve not seen on screen before, while Nicholas McNulty and George MacKay give appealingly unaffected performances as his sons.
Festival: Wed 21, Thu 22 & Fri 23 Oct
Cinema release: 22 Jan 2010
Clive Owen screen talk, NFT1, Thu 22 Oct

6. Cracks

Imagine a heady mix of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Lord of the Flies, with a dash of Maidens in Uniform, and you’ll have some idea of the febrile mood of this sensual boarding school melodrama set in 1930s England, the confident directing debut of Jordan Scott (daughter of Ridley). Eva Green (best known as Casino Royale’s Vesper Lynd) stars as the charismatic Miss G, the dashing teacher who coaches the school’s swimming team, a self-appointed elite headed by Juno Temple’s Di. Miss G spellbinds her teenage charges with her tales of exotic travel, wilfully encouraging their crushes, but her poise is shaken when an outsider, beautiful aristocratic Spanish pupil Fiamma (María Valverde), joins the school and upsets the fragile status quo.

Read full review.
Festival: Sun 25 & Wed 28 Oct
Cinema release: 4 Dec

53rd BFI London Film Festival | The Star of London awards

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Jason Best

on October 6, 2009

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Cannes has the Palme d’Or, Berlin has the Silver Bear and Venice has the Golden Lion, now the London Film Festival has its own prestigious gong to bestow – the Star of London.

The first ever Star of London awards (designed by sculptor Almuth Tebbenhoff) will be handed out at a dedicated awards ceremony – another Festival first – at London’s Inner Temple on 28th October. Hosted by Paul Gambaccini, the ceremony will see the presentation of two new awards– the Best Film Award and the Best British Newcomer – alongside existing Festival accolades the Sutherland Trophy (awarded to the most original and imaginative first feature) and the Grierson Award (for best documentary). Two BFI Fellowships, to British actor John Hurt and Malian filmmaker Souleymane Cissé, will also be bestowed at the ceremony.

The new ceremony and the new awards are unmistakable signs that the London Film Festival wants to gain a higher and more glitzy profile in the world’s film calendar. In the past, the LFF has never sought to vie with the likes of Cannes, Berlin and Venice, but the Festival is clearly getting more ambitious.

Here’s the shortlist for this year’s Best Film Award, to be decided by a jury chaired by Anjelica Huston and comprising John Akomfrah, Jarvis Cocker, Matthieu Kassovitz, Charlotte Rampling and Iain Softley.

Balibo
Bright Star
Fantastic Mr Fox
Micmacs
Nowhere Boy
A Prophet
The Road
A Serious Man
The White Ribbon

This year’s festival kicks off on 14th October with the world premiere of one of the shortlisted titles - Wes Anderson’s animated screen version of Roald Dahl’s children’s classic Fantastic Mr Fox.

53rd Times BFI London Film Festival - First look at this year’s lineup

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Jason Best

on September 9, 2009

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I’m just back from the press launch of this year’s Times BFI London Film Festival and I’m still reeling from the dizzying lineup of films. Festival director Sandra Hebron unveiled the programme this morning, revealing the astonishingly diverse selection of world and international premieres that are going to be showcased in cinemas across London from 14th – 29th October. With a total of 191 features and 113 shorts in the schedule, including 15 world premieres, 23 European premieres and 146 UK premieres, it’s going to take me a while to digest the treasures in store. In the coming weeks I’ll be endeavouring to get to grips with the full range of what the festival has to offer, but in the meantime here are some of the films that caught my eye during the 30-minute clip reel shown at the Odeon Leicester Square this morning.

Fantastic Mr Fox - the world premiere of Wes Anderson’s animated screen version of Roald Dahl’s children’s classic is the festival Opening Night Gala. (Wed 14, Thu 14 & Sat 17 Oct)

Bright Star - Ben Whishaw and Abbie Cornish star in the Centrepiece Gala, Jane Campion’s costume pic about the love of romantic poet John Keats for Fanny Brawne. (Mon 19, Tue 20 & Wed 21 Oct)

An Education - Peter Sarsgaard & Carey Mulligan star in the period movie based on journalist Lynn Barber’s memoir of her teenage years in early 60s London - and her seduction by an older man. (Tue 20, Wed 21 & Thu 22 Oct)

A Serious Man - The Coen Brothers are back with a playful black comedy starring Michael Stuhlbarg as a Midwestern university professor whose life starts to unravel. (Tue 27 & Wed 28 Oct)

Nowhere Boy - Sam Taylor-Wood’s hotly anticipated movie about John Lennon’s early years is the Closing Night Gala. (Thu 29 Oct)

The Best view | Harrowing film portrait of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands - Hunger

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Jason Best

on October 31, 2008

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Artist Steve McQueen (no relation to the screen legend) ventures out of the art gallery and into the cinema with Hunger, a controversial movie about IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands that’s been praised to the heights and damned to the depths in equal measure. It scooped the Camera d’Or award for best first-time director at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, was shown recently to great acclaim at the London Film Festival, and has predictably left the tabloid press frothing with fury.

Ostensibly, McQueen’s movie doesn’t take sides. A winner of the Turner Prize in 1999 (beating Tracey Emin, no less), he made his name in the art world with a series of austere and minimal short films, and austerity and minimalism is what he delivers here with a succession of long takes, sparse dialogue and static, near abstract shots. This is art-house cinema at its most rigorous. As far as McQueen is concerned, Hollywood is on another planet entirely.

He begins his film with wordless scenes of a prison officer in 1981 Northern Ireland starting his day: soaking his bloodied knuckles in the bathroom sink, silently eating his breakfast and then routinely checking beneath his car for explosive devices before he leaves home, while his wife watches anxiously from behind the net curtains.

Then McQueen plunges the viewer into the heart of the notorious H-Blocks of Belfast’s Maze Prison, where IRA prisoners are staging their so-called ‘dirty protest’ in a bid to win political status, spilling their urine into the corridors and smearing their cells with excrement – a gesture that acquires an almost abstract-art quality. (As McQueen’s camera lingered on the shit-bedaubed walls, I couldn’t help thinking of McQueen’s fellow Turner Prize winner Chris Ofili and his ‘elephant dung’ paintings).

We also get an unflinchingly view of the violence meted out by the guards, and as the batons rain down on the naked bodies of the prisoners (naked because they wrap themselves in blankets rather than wear prison uniform), McQueen is clearly inviting us to draw comparisons with the brutal treatment of prisoners in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay.

All this unfolds with minimal dialogue until a remarkable 22-minute scene in which Michael Fassbender’s Bobby Sands debates with a Catholic priest played by Liam Cunningham about his decision to go on hunger strike. The episode is an astonishing tour-de-force, filmed in a nearly unbroken take by an unmoving camera as the pair thrash out the ethics of Sands’ decision to starve himself to death. McQueen’s lens may not budge, but the scene is as gripping as anything in Quantum of Solace with its rapid-fire editing.

Then we get an equally unblinking view of Sands’ physical decline, as his body breaks down and his mind drifts in and out of consciousness (conveyed with method acting conviction by Fassbender, who lost 14kg for the role). Sands’ eventual death comes on the 66th day of his fast, on 5th May 1981.

McQueen’s stance is supposedly even-handed, but it’s clear where his sympathies lie – firmly with Sands and his fellow prisoners. We witness the brutality of the state, as represented by the prison guards, but not the atrocities carried out by the IRA. Admittedly, the film does show a single act of republican violence and it is horrifyingly savage, but in the course of the film’s narrative it comes across as an act of payback. Similarly, the film’s only dissenting voice is that of Cunningham’s priest, and while he objects to Sands’ strategy he is sympathetic to his cause.

Not that you would learn anything about the Troubles from Hunger: McQueen deliberately withholds any context to the events he portrays. So you won’t discover the background to the IRA’s campaign, nor the cause of Sands’ imprisonment. And as the Sands of this portrayal takes on more and more of the attributes of a religious martyr, you have to step back from the film to remind yourself that his struggle was to legitimise political violence.

None of this detracts from Hunger’s power as a film. McQueen is clearly a major talent and he has produced a work that is emotionally harrowing and artistically audacious. A ‘balanced’ film wouldn’t have been nearly so effective, but for all Hunger’s strengths, its veiled romanticising of Sands and the IRA left me distinctly uneasy.

BFI 52nd London Film Festival - Highlights so far

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Jason Best

on October 23, 2008

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This year’s London Film Festival has reached the halfway stage, so I thought I would pause from my moviegoing to take stock of what I’ve seen to date and select some of my personal highlights.

Genova

Boris Johnson was in inimitably bumbling comic form last night, introducing the Mayor of London gala screening of Michael Winterbottom’s family drama Genova. In a jocular speech threaded with movie references (the hero of Jaws is the mayor, according to Boris), he couldn’t help noting that Genova’s star, Colin Firth, had not been an enthusiastic supporter of his mayoral candidature. Likening himself to Pride and Prejudice’s Elizabeth Bennet, however, he vowed to soldier on in defiance of Mr Darcy’s cold indifference. “Boris isn’t going to win me over, you know,” was Firth’s retort. “He can flirt all he wants.” (Genova goes on general release in March 2009)

Vicky Cristina Barcelona

When Penélope Cruz appeared on stage before the start of Tuesday night’s screening of Woody Allen’s latest comedy drama, the question on everyone’s lips was: “What was it like to snog Scarlett Johansson?” In the movie, Cruz plays the tempestuous ex-wife of Javier Bardem’s amorous Spanish painter, who becomes romantically involved with a pair of American tourists played by Johansson and Rebecca Hall. And, yes, Cruz and Johansson do lock lips in the course of the story. On Tuesday night, however, Cruz’s only disclosure was to reveal that on the day they shot the lesbian clinch, Allen was so preoccupied with a new “stain” that had appeared overnight on his hand that he halted filming to visit his doctor. The film itself, I’m happy to report, is a return to form for the hypochondriac director; not quite vintage Woody, perhaps, but Cruz is hilarious and sexy in her role. (Vicky Cristina Barcelona goes on general release on 6th March 2009)

Rachel Getting Married

If your image of Anne Hathaway is still that of the cute ingénue of The Princess Diaries and The Devil Wears Prada, then you’ll be shocked by her blistering performance as a wayward junkie emerging from rehab to attend her sister’s wedding in Jonathan Demme’s documentary-style family drama. Hathaway was in good form too during the Q&A that accompanied Monday night’s screening. Lining up alongside several of the film’s creators, she was fluently witty and smart, though it was left to Demme to reveal to the LFF audience the zinger that Hathaway came up with in Toronto last month when a journalist likened watching her insufferable character in the movie to undergoing a two-hour colonoscopy. Without missing a beat, Hathway responded: “With or without anaesthesia?” (Rachel Getting Married goes on general release in January 2009)

Quiet Chaos

This gently humorous and moving Italian film about coming to terms with loss stars writer, director and actor Nanni Moretti (best known, probably, for such films as Dear Diary and The Son’s Room) as a successful executive who puts his life on hold as he comes to terms his wife’s sudden death. Taking his 10-year-old daughter to school on the first day of term, he decides spontaneously to wait for her rather than going to work. He does the same the following day, and the days after that, simply hanging out in a nearby park. Rather than cutting himself off, however, his odd regime actually opens him up to life, as he strikes up tentative rapports with some of the park’s regular passers-by and receives visits from a stream of family members and work colleagues. Below the surface, he is working through his grief. Quiet Chaos is a good deal less intense than The Son’s Room, which also dealt with bereavement, but in its own way it’s perceptive and quietly touching. (Quiet Chaos goes on general release on 24th October) Read the full review.

Hunger

A harrowing and highly controversial account of the 1981 IRA hunger strike led by Bobby Sands, this is the first feature film from Turner prize-winning artist Steve McQueen (yes, I did a double take too when I first came across him, back in the 1990s). McQueen made his name in the art world with a series of austere and minimal gallery films, and austerity and minimalism is what you get in spades with his first work for the cinema. The film won’t go down well with everyone, and not just because of the long takes, sparse dialogue and static, near abstract shots. Plunging the viewer into the heart of the notorious H-Blocks of Belfast’s Maze Prison, McQueen unflinchingly depicts the brutality inflicted on the IRA prisoners (viewers will inevitably draw comparisons with Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay) but deliberately withholds any context to the events he portrays. His film is audacious, startling and formally bold, but its romanticising of Sands and the IRA left me distinctly uneasy. (Hunger goes on general release on 31st October)

BFI 52nd London Film Festival - The Best view from the red carpet at the Frost/Nixon World Premiere

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Jason Best

on October 16, 2008

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If you are a ‘civilian’, to use Liz Hurley’s notorious description of the non-famous, then attending a movie premiere is a strange experience. At last night’s gala screening of Frost/Nixon, the London Film Festival’s opening film, I rolled along the red carpet in the footsteps of director Ron Howard, producer Brian Grazer, and the film’s stars, Michael Sheen, Frank Langella, Kevin Bacon, Oliver Platt, Matthew Macfadyen and Toby Jones, as well as Sir David Frost himself and a throng of black-tie wearing VIPs.

As a non-celeb, however, you feel weirdly invisible as you walk the gauntlet between the screaming fans on one side and the clicking paparazzi on the other. Digital cameras flash every which way, but the lens is never pointed at you.

“Keeley! Keeley!’ they yell on one side.

‘This way, Mariella, this way,’ is the refrain on the other.

‘Hey Oliver! Hey Kevin!’ echoes on both.

A civilian, though, isn’t seen, still less shouted at. You’re not a blip on the radar, unless someone with poor eyesight mistakes you for a D-lister. ‘Wasn’t he in an episode of Midsomer Murders?’

(In passing, I am, apparently, the spit of an English stage director, as I discovered when an actress enthusiastically came up to greet me at a post-show party once.)

So the cameras click and everyone yells, and you glide past invisibly, thinking to yourself, if this is weird for me, how freaky must all this be for the celebs?

Then we get to the film itself, the point of the whole circus, and it goes down a treat with the premiere audience. With good cause. The film’s excellent.

Howard has skilfully opened out Peter Morgan’s hit play based on the historic 1977 TV interview by British TV personality Frost and disgraced former US president Richard Nixon, but he’s preserved – possibly even intensified – the intimacy of the stage drama.

The battle of wits between the two is gripping, even if, like me, you saw the original play. We know the outcome, anyway. Frost famously wrung an apology out of Nixon for the Watergate scandal that had sunk his presidency three years earlier. Yet it’s still enthralling to watch the pair jockeying for the upper hand as their encounter unfolds.

Sheen and Langella are brilliant in the roles, even if some of the people I spoke to at the party afterwards felt that they couldn’t get the image of Sheen’s Tony Blair out of their heads (Sheen played the ex-PM, of course, in both The Deal and The Queen). It’s true that the cinema screen is far less forgiving of actors impersonating the famous than is the view from the theatre stalls, but I managed to banish all thoughts of Blair and appreciate Sheen’s portrayal, the way he gradually conveys the grit that lies beneath Frost’s jet-set charm, the unexpected steeliness behind the catchphrases and mannerisms.

In Morgan’s version of events, however, Langella’s Nixon clearly underestimates his opponent. It’s the reason he and his camp (including Bacon’s straight-arrow aide) have agreed to the interview in the first place. They reckon that the seasoned politician will outfox the superficial chat-show host and rehabilitate his reputation.

Yet in the end, it’s Frost, the lightweight, the celebrity, who triumphs, and he does so because he understands the power of the camera; the power of a close-up: the power of the image.

Postscript: I believe my left ear may feature in a shot somewhere of Oliver Platt and Kevin Bacon goofing around on the red carpet for the cameras.

BFI 52nd London Film Festival - Opening night… and the pick of the rest

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Jason Best

on October 15, 2008

in London Film Festival and News

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The Times BFI London Film Festival opens tonight with the world premiere of Frost/Nixon, Ron Howard’s screen version of Peter Morgan’s hit play. Over the past few weeks I’ve been dashing hither and thither, from Leicester Square to, er, Leicester, to catch preview screenings of some of the festival’s films. Of the ones that I’ve been lucky enough to see already, here are half a dozen I warmly recommend, in the order in which they appear during the festival. And, if you can’t get to see them at the LFF, don’t worry; most of them have UK release dates already lined up.

1. The Class

A truly inspirational documentary-style drama from France based on a book by writer and and former teacher François Bégaudeau chronicling a year in the life of a class in a middle school in inner city Paris. Bégaudeau himself plays the class’s committed teacher and a multi-ethnic cast of non-professional teenagers are his tough, lippy, all too vulnerable pupils. A worthy winner of the Cannes film festival’s top award this year, the Palme d’Or.
Festival: Sat 18 & Mon 20 Oct
Cinema release: Feb 2009

2. Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist

An American teen movie that manages to be cool and smart and also sweet, this is the tale of a pair of teenagers - slightly dorky Nick (played by Juno’s Michael Cera) and insecure Norah (Kat Dennings, impressive in Charlie Bartlett earlier this year; she even has her own blog) - who unexpectedly hook up in the course of one long New York night. Peter Sollett’s film is a bit too laid-back for its own good, perhaps, but it does have some witty bickering banter between the leads plus a cool soundtrack from a bunch of achingly hip indie bands including Vampire Weekend, We Are Scientists and Band of Horses.
Festival: Sun 19 & Wed 22 Oct
Cinema release: 30 Jan 2009

3. Anvil! The Story of Anvil

‘Are we watching another Spinal Tap?’ I scribbled in my notes at the start of this documentary about the middle-aged members of a failed Canadian heavy metal band. I’d never heard of Anvil, the ‘demigods of Canadian metal’, and it took me a moment to reassure myself that this film from Sacha Gervasi (writer of Spielberg’s The Terminal) wasn’t a spoof, but the story of the attempt by old school friends Steve ‘Lips’ Kudlow and Robb Reiner to resurrect their band’s musical career in their 50s is touchingly true. And, yes, there is a real dial in the movie that goes up to 11! Read full review here.
Festival: Tue 21 & Thu 23 Oct
Cinema release: 20 February 2009.

4. The Baader Meinhof Complex

Producer and screenwriter Bernd Eichinger (Downfall) and director Uli Edel (Christiane F, Last Exit to Brooklyn) have come up with a gripping but dispassionate account of the violent left-wing militant group led by Andreas Baader (Moritz Bleibtreu), Ulrike Meinhof (Martina Gedeck) and Gudrun Ensslin (Johanna Wokalek) that waged a terrorist war against the West German state during the 1970s. Painstakingly accurate, down to the number of bullets fired in the gang’s raids (it’s based on the authoritative book by Stefan Aust), the movie perfectly captures the mood of the era – and provides ample food for thought for today’s War on Terror. Read full review here.
Festival: Sun 26 & Tue 28 Oct
Cinema release: 14 Nov

5. Easy Virtue

Australian director Stephan Elliott, maker of The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, has come up with a sparkling adaptation of Noël Coward’s 1920s social comedy about the culture clash that ensues after the young son (Prince Caspian’s Ben Barnes) from a cash-strapped English landed family impulsively marries an American widow-with-a-past (a gorgeous and surprisingly good Jessica Biel). Elliott keeps the period setting but gives a deft modern touch to the proceedings, mixing the songs of Coward and Porter with jazzy cover versions of the likes of Prince on the soundtrack. There are splendid performances, too, from Colin Firth and Kristin Scott Thomas, plus a deliciously droll, scene-stealing turn from Kris Marshall as the family’s louche butler.
Festival: Tue 28 & Wed 29 Oct
Cinema release: 7 Nov

6. Slumdog Millionaire

Shallow Grave, Trainspotting, 28 Days Later…, Millions, Sunshine… Danny Boyle demonstrates his astonishing versatility once again with this gem of a movie about an 18-year-old orphan from the Mumbai slums (Skins star Dev Patel) who is just one question away from winning 20 million rupees on India’s version of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire. Flash back to the contestant’s early years, then, to show how he got there – and how he knows the answers. Boyle’s dynamic, vibrant, beautifully shot film is a great choice for the festival’s closing night gala. Read full review here.
Festival: Thu 30 Oct
Cinema release: 23 Jan 2009

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