Tagged LFF 2019

This film was previously reviewed in October 2019 as part of our London Film Festival coverage. County Lines is an impressive feature debut for director Henry Blake, who based the story on real incidents...

This film was previously reviewed in October 2019 as part of our London Film Festival coverage. If you’re going to make a movie about modern youth, you have to consult with modern youth. Too many films...

This film was previously reviewed in October 2019 as part of our coverage for London Film Festival. A film like The Painted Bird does not want to be ‘liked’. It wants to shock, to disgust, to viscerally...

This film was previously reviewed in October 2019 for our London Film Festival coverage. No two Pablo Larraín films are quite the same but, even so, Ema marks a departure. An opaque story told mainly...

This film was previously reviewed in October 2019 as part of our London Film Festival coverage. It isn’t easy to imagine oneself feeling much sympathy for the characters of a film about the Apartheid-era...

Originally reviewed as part of our London Film Festival coverage in October 2019. With a rollout soured by director Michael Winterbottom being pressured by Sony to make its end credits less political, Greed...

Though Martin Scorsese’s mooted upcoming films sound exciting, it’s hard to believe that they’re ever coming out at all. The Irishman has such an air of emphatic finality about it, and serves as such a...

Piranhas is at once a thoroughly conventional gangster movie and a fresh take on the genre. If you’ve seen a mob flick made since The Public Enemy you can guess most of the plot, but director Claudio...

Few films commit to their titles like Ordinary Love. This is a movie of calm, contemplative realism that never falsely raises its stakes as it studies the effect of a cancer diagnosis on a retired couple in...

Originally published as part of our London Film Festival coverage in October 2019 As much as American cinema is based in LA, it’s New York that has always been the country’s most iconic on-screen...

Nelly Ben Hayoun has a Hannah Arendt fixation. The stated point of the charismatic designer/director’s new documentary is to use Arendt’s philosophy as a springboard to find “the origin of knowledge”....

The summary of Lingua Franca below could mislead you into expecting some sort of topical melodrama, featuring the big issues of today blown up to cinema scale. Instead, the film is a slow-paced, slice-of-life...

Anthony McCarten has, in recent years, made his name as one of the premier screenwriters of mass appeal but mediocre historical films like Darkest Hour and Bohemian Rhapsody. His latest, The Two Popes, teams...

‘Gravity, but Victorian’, is an intriguing pitch and, visually, The Aeronauts delivers on this strange, exciting promise. As Felicity Jones and Eddie Redmayne journey through the skies in a giant hot air...

It is hard to explain exactly what Luce is. Initially a serious look at the pressure put on high-achieving black students in US schools, it shifts so many times – even into trashy thriller territory – that...