With the London Film Festival 2018 now over, here follows the second half of my round-up of the films to look out for in the coming months.
Fahrenheit 11/9:
the latest Michael Moore documentary looks at how the hell Donald Trump became
the US President. It’s typical Moore: too long, too many targets, but it is
never less than compelling and informing; it’s an urgent call to arms to
liberals everywhere to get off their backsides and get in the political fight
and protect ‘democracy’ being abused.
ROMA:
master director Alfonso Cuaron finally follows up Gravity with something
completely different, something of a personal passion project (he produced,
directed, wrote, shot and edited). In beautiful, crisp black and white
photography, ROMA tells the very simple story of a few months in the life of a
maid living with a well-to-do Mexican family in 1970: nothing much happens and
yet everything happens. As well as the gorgeous cinematography, this intimate
epic is buoyed by impressive and immersive sound design that is best
experienced in a cinema.
Sunset:
Hungarian director Laszlo Nemes follows up his successful debut Son Of Saul
with this fever dream. Set in the dying days of the Austro-Hungarian just
before WWI, the film focuses on Irisz Leiter, a young woman with a mysterious
past returning to Budapest whose true motivations may not be clear even to
herself. The narrative is deliberately dream-like. The sumptuous cinematography
apes Son Of Saul, the camera closely following Juli Jakab as Irisz. Needs to be
seen in a cinema.
Duplicate:
excellent meditation on mental health via a small helping of sci-fi. Ansel Elgort
(Baby Driver himself) wakes every day and watches a video message from an
almost identical man (his twin brother?); he concludes every day with a video
message of his own, detailing the day’s apparently banal facts. Why are they
leaving messages for each other? Why the boring facts of their days? As
thoughtful a slice of sci-fi as we’ve seen in a while.
They Shall Not Grow Old:
Peter Jackson’s Weta crew have colourised and added audio to black and white
footage from WWI to stunning effect. With the aid of the recordings of
veterans’ recollections, the film tells the story of war from the Army
soldier’s point of view, from war being declared, through enlisting, training,
being sent to the front line, experiencing the battlefields and finally
returning home. The film may cause you to muse on many things, few of them
positive, but at least a copy of the film has been sent to every school in the
UK so that every teenager has the opportunity to learn from the mistakes of the
past.
The Raft:
excellent documentary about a human behaviour experiment carried out on a raft
sailing across the Atlantic in 1973. A renowned anthropology professor gathers
together 10 volunteers to sail across the Atlantic, their skills a mixture of
those necessary to survive the trip, their personalities likely to cause
internal conflict; he joins them on the raft to ‘observe’ in the hope that the
10, in the battle to survive the elements, will find a way to avoid or resolve
conflict and that their method can be used to end international conflict.
However, things do not go as the professor planned…
The Man Who Killed Don Quixote:
Terry Gilliam finally delivers his passion project with Jonathan Pryce in the
lead role. By some margin, this is Gilliam’s most straight-forwardly
entertaining film since Twelve Monkeys. It has strong echoes of Brazil: better
to excel in your dreams and be deemed mad, than to be sane and live in
mediocrity.
The White Crow:
Ralph Fiennes directs this retelling of Rudolf Nureyev’s defection to the West.
Cross-cutting with key moments in Nureyev’s life that lead him to the biggest
decision of his life, the film evokes the impact that Paris (and the great
works he saw there) had on him. Ukranian dancer Oleg Ivenko is astonishing as
Nureyev: not only is he convincing as Nureyev the dancer, but also as Rudolf
the artist, the free spirit, a young man coming to terms with who he is and
what he could be.
The Favourite: hugely
entertaining, blackly comic period romp from Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster, and
The Killing of a Sacred Deer) that will garner multiple nominations from every
major awards body, in particular for its trio of leading ladies: Olivia Colman,
Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone. Colman channels Miranda Richardson’s Queenie as Queen
Anne in the early 18th Century, struggling with her health and to
lead England in the war against France. In both matters, she relies heavily on
her friend and right-hand woman, Weisz’s Duchess of Marlborough. Their
sympatico is rent asunder by the arrival of Stone’s Abigail and a battle of
wits ensues. Nicholas Hoult lends excellent support as a leading Whig. Be
warned this is not a traditional British period piece: the language is fairly
salty with a number of delicious deployments of the c-word.
Opens 1 January
Assassination Nation:
this year’s gender war incendiary grenade in which the Salem witch trials are
reconfigured for the modern age.
Perhaps guilty of trying to have its cake and eat it, the
film features four attractive, barely-dressed teenage girls, engaged in social
media, chasing boys and abusing booze, who end up being hunted down by their
townsfolk (in Purge-like scenes). Partly a warning about what you say and how
much you reveal about yourself on social media, and partly a rallying cry to
women everywhere to not take any shit from any man.
Opens 23 November
