Category: Films

La Belle Epoque is a high-concept romantic comedy with a top-notch cast.   Daniel Auteil is Victor, an aging cartoonist who’s newspaper has gone online only and no longer needs him. As a result, he feels lost and left behind. His wife Marianne (Fanny Ardant) is trying to keep up. She’s a psychiatrist who gets excited by the digital possibilities of things…

Official Secrets could easily be paired with The Report, in that it tells the true story of someone who helped reveal state wrongdoings in the wake of 9/11. In The Report, it was torturing prisoners captured by US forces, and in Official Secrets, it’s about the legality of going to war in Iraq in 2003.    Keira Knightly plays Katharine Gun, a GCHQ translator who…

The Earthquake Bird of this film’s title is said to be the bird sound you hear after an earthquake, when all is still and aside from car alarms, the only thing you can hear are the birds.   We are in Tokyo of the later 1980s, where Lucy Fly (Alicia Vikander) is working as a translator. We realise…

The London Film Festival has a tradition of showing a surprise film each year. They normally frame it as something they’d have liked to have shown, but which was only settled upon too late in the day. The fact that they hold screenings in just about the biggest cinema at their disposal also means that…

Luce is a really interesting piece. Luce (Kevin Harrison Jr) is a High School superstar. He gets great grades, gives speeches to his school, and is captain of the track team as their star 200m runner.   But he was once a child soldier in Eritrea, and has been adopted two middle class white parents (Naomi Watts and Tim…

The Report is a film that tells the story of how Daniel J Jones and the US Senate Intelligence Committee examined the CIA’s programme of torture – or “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” as they came to be known.   Adam Driver plays Jones, and we get to see his early life in DC as he works his way…

The Lighthouse feels like it’s one of the more important films in the London Film Festival. I went into, as with most of the films in the festival, completely blind. Beyond the two-line summary in the programme, I’d not watched a trailer, and nor had I read anything about it.  The film is basically a two-hander folk horror…

To The Ends Of The Earth is a delightful little film from director and director Kiyoshi Kurosawa  that really examines loneliness. Atsuko Maeda plays Yoko, a presenter on a Japanese TV travel show. She’s on location in Uzbekistan where her and her small crew are trying to shoot an episode exploring the country.  The travel they’re making mostly seems to consist of…

OK – I confess that I bought tickets for the The Climb on the basis that it probably had some kind of cycling theme about it. The film has grown out of the first scene which is indeed set on a pair of bikes. Mike and Kyle (Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin who co-wrote the film, with Corvino directing)…

Note: The next few entries will be devoted to the recent London Film Festival. Normal service will follow afterwards! Like many people, I really don’t know an awful lot about Jean Seberg beyond her scintillating performance in A Bout De Souffle (Breathless). That was a film I first discovered when I won a VHS copy of it…