Tagged London Film Festival

Journeyman is a film waiting ringside to deliver a heavy, gut-wrenching blow; it’s not a sucker punch – you know it’s coming from the film’s traditional structure and triumphant opening act – but...

Why isn't John Hawkes in more films? He is mesmerising here as hopeless, selfish, drunk ex-copper Mike Kendall, whose life fell apart 17 months ago – and who still hasn't managed to piece it back together...

AlphaGo is an ostensibly dry and rather niche documentary on DeepMind’s efforts – from an idea 20 years in the making – to teach its AI to master the ancient Chinese board game Go. This game is...

Professor Marston and the Wonder Women ensures you’ll never look at Wonder Woman the same way again. Not only was she ahead of her time at her creation as a feminist icon in 1941, but the overtly sexualised...

It’s surprising that it took so long for 6 Days’ subject matter to receive the onscreen treatment, as it depicts the famous 1980 Iranian Embassy siege and the SAS’s response, seen as “an almost...

Funny Cow is literally Maxine Peake’s show, as she narrates her tough life – and the film – from a later point of success through a televised monologue. Her no-nonsense honesty is reminiscent of a...

Pablo Berger’s latest is the playful madcap comedy Abracadabra. The director doesn’t stay still for long at all. His previous features include the 2012 hit black-and-white silent film Blancanieves which...

Seriously, who doesn’t want to learn to dance on roller skates? Luckily for all you wannabe gliders, director Kate Hickey has put together this little number that follows some of the finest roller dancers in...

Given recent events, Angels Wear White couldn’t be more timely. Vivian Qu’s latest is an uncannily prescient depiction of the enormous cover-up of child sexual assault and the bravery it takes to be the...

As the title of a film, Carlos Marques-Marcet’s Anchor and Hope raises all sorts of bleak expectations of a film entering maudlin rom-com territory. Fortunately, it is just the name of the East London pub...

Before Summer Ends is a road trip movie, but quite unlike most others. Three 30-something friends decide to finally holiday together in the South of France before one of their number returns home to...

It seems that in horror or particularly dark dramas surrounding teenage girls, the visual metaphor of hunting (normally, with one’s father) is a particularly popular trope. Just look at Stoker and Split,...

Song of Granite is a difficult film to enjoy. Presented in a loose, arty structure of disordered scenes and stock footage, anything after the first 20 minutes or so is extremely hard to get a handle on. A...

Perhaps the most exciting thing about Lynne Ramsay’s long-awaited thriller You Were Never Really Here is just how full of surprises it is. The film begins in rather dark circumstances, as Joaquin...

Although ostensibly a children’s animation, just as its source material was a children’s novel, The Breadwinner confronts the brutal reality of living in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan as a female –...