Tag: films

  • LFF: Official Secrets

    LFF: Official Secrets

    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…

  • LFF: Earthquake Bird

    LFF: Earthquake Bird

    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…

  • LFF: Uncut Gems

    LFF: Uncut Gems

    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…

  • LFF: Luce

    LFF: Luce

    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…

  • LFF: The Report

    LFF: The Report

    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…

  • LFF: The Lighthouse

    LFF: The Lighthouse

    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…

  • Joker

    Joker

    Breaking up the run of London Film Festival titles, Joker is a new film from Todd Phillips and has been anticipated for a while, since it departs from the now usual super-hero “universe” fare. This is a film that takes place in the Gotham City of Batman – we get an origin story of sorts for Batman…

  • LFF: To The Ends Of The Earth

    LFF: To The Ends Of The Earth

    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…

  • LFF: The Climb

    LFF: The Climb

    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)…

  • LFF: Seberg

    LFF: Seberg

    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…

  • Flixster Transition to Google Play

    Flixster Transition to Google Play

    A few weeks back I noted that Flixster would be closing soon and had written to me to say that my film collection would transition to Google Play. Well last week, that time finally came to pass. The Flixster website is shutting down in December, and I’d need to migrate my digital collection to Google.…

  • Digital Movie Libraries in the UK

    Buying a digital movie or TV series in the UK is an utter mess. You can buy movies or TV series from a number of sites including: iTunes, Google Play Movies, Amazon, Sky Store and Rakuten. But if you buy something in one of those places, you can only watch it via that company’s app…