 |
| Familiar Touch Photo: Courtesy of Venice Film Festival |
London Film Festival starts on October 9 and there are plenty of eye-catching films in the line-up, from
Cannes winners
Anora and
All We Imagine As Light to celebrated
Sundance film
Sujo and
Berlin Golden Bear winner
Dahomey. When it came to selecting these films to catch, we've chosen some of those which, at the time of writing, still have tickets remaining, so you have the opportunity to judge for yourself. The festival runs until October 20 - and you can see all the films that still have ticket availability left
here.
Familiar Touch
As populations age globally, memory loss continues to provide a rich seam for filmmakers and Sarah Friedland's quietly observational and moving drama is one of the best from recent years. Veteran star Kathleen Chalfant has arguably never been better as she takes centrestage as Ruth. Once a cookbook author - and still a lover of whipping things up - we meet her as her son Steve (H Jon Benjamin) - who she poignantly mistakes for a gentleman caller - is coaxing her out of the house in order to join a retirement community. Once there, we follow the ups and downs, confusion and small joys of her transition to her new home. Friedland keeps us firmly with Ruth as she tries to navigate her confusion, crafting a film of textures, from cloth to skin, and exploring ideas of "different truths" that can be lived in the same moment and the notion of "home" in the physical and more psychological sense. Tickets available on Wednesday, October 9, 8.50pm and Thursday, October 10, 4pm.
Emilia Perez
 |
| Emilia Perez |
More tickets have been released for Jacques Audiard's audacious musical, which won the Jury Prize in Cannes. His tale of drug lord Manitas (Karla Sofia Gascón) who enlists the help of a lawyer (Zoe Saldana) to help him secretly complete his transition to a new life as Emilia is an impressively staged full-blown musical. Colourful and melodramatic, it marries its themes of liberation to questions of redemption that stem from Manitas' criminal past. All the cast are excellent vocalists, including Selena Gomez as the wife who is kept in the dark about her husband's new life. This is coming to Netflix in November but its terrific score and eye-catching visuals deserve to be seen on the big screen. Read what
Jacques Audillard and Karla Sofia Gascón said about the film in Cannes.
Tickets available on Monday, October 14, 2.40pm.
Hard Truths
 |
| Marianne Jean-Baptiste in Mike Leigh's Hard Truths Photo: Courtesy of San Sebastian Film Festival |
In a year of great performances, Marianne Jean-Baptiste's is up there with the best. She plays Pansy in Mike Leigh's latest, a middle-aged mum whose fragile mental health has left her raging at the world. Unfolding over a handful of days, Leigh crafts a tragicomic gem, as we see Pansy go off on tirades about everything from sofas to babies, in between berating her husband (David Webber) and withdrawn young adult son (Tuwaine Barrett). Offering support - and a good deal of poignancy - is Pansy's sister Chantelle (Michele Austin, matching Jean-Baptiste step for step), who provides a bright spot of hopefulness in the sea of Pansy's sorrow. There is a hardness to the message of this film - about the way we treat mental ill-health in this country - but there is also a lot of humour in this sharply observed portrait of a modern family. As Mike Leigh put it in
San Sebastian: "Life is a comedy. Life is ridiculous. I think its very sad and I think it’s very funny because that’s what life is."
Tickets available on Monday, October 14, 6pm and Wednesday, October 16, 2.30pm.
Kamay
 |
| Kamay Photo: Kamay Film |
Ilyas Yourish and Shahrokh Bikara's melancholic and moving documentary charts the fight for justice of a family in rural Afghanistan following the death of their daughter Zahra at university. The family's fight is made more complex because they are Hazara, an ethnic group who have faced persecution historically and still come up against prejudice. Our guide to the family's wrenching experience is Zahra's sister Freshta, whose voice paints a picture of their grief and of Zahra's fight with an unjust system that was stacked against her. An intimate study of loss and resilience in the face of fundamentalism. "I couldn't stay indifferent",
Ilya Yourish told us.
Tickets available on Tuesday, October 15, 1.30pm.
Julie Keeps Quiet
 |
| Julie Keeps Quiet Photo: Nicolas Karakastanis |
Leonardo van Dijl's intense character study focuses on young tennis player Julie (Tessa Van den Broeck, who is a talented young player in her own right) in the aftermath of a scandal involving the suspension of her coach following a fellow player's suicide. Van Dijl keeps us close to Julie as she finds herself simultaneously cut adrift and under scrutiny as the coach's "favourite". He carefully explores the toxic power dynamic that can exist between adults and their proteges while exploring questions of why silence might seem, to Julie, like the best option under the circumstances. An intense drama that isn't afraid to ask difficult questions.
Tickets available on Friday, October 18 at 9pm.
Bird
 |
| Bird Photo: Atsushi Nishijima, House Bird Limited, Ad Vitam Production, British Broadcasting Corporation, The British Film Institute, Pinky Promise Film Fund II Holdings LLC, FirstGen Content LLC and Bird Film LLC |
"Is it too real for ya?" asks the recurrent punk track Fontaines D.C. in the latest from Andrea Bird which is often in your face but which also takes flight into more fantastical hyper-reality. It stars impressive first-time actor Nykiya Adams as 12-year-old Bailey, living a sketchy existence in a squat with her nice-but-chaotic dad Bug (Barry Keoghan) and older brother Hunter (Jason Edward Buda). Her siblings, who live with their mum Peyton (Jasmine Jobson) and her violent boyfriend (James Nelson-Joyce) are not so lucky and, after Bailey meets the mysterious Bird (Franz Rogowski), things begin to shift in her life. A fable full of sparky energy that marries the all-too-gritty world to something more magical, though perhaps no less dangerous, it proves surprisingly uplifting given the grimness of some of its themes. "I had to let go on a big level and open to doing things differently,"
Andrea Arnold said in Cannes.
Tickets available on Saturday, October 19, 8.45pm.
Maldoror
 |
| Maldoror Photo: Sofie Gheysens |
A real-life crimes of serial killer Marc Dutroux and the scandal that surrounded the case form the heart of this thriller from Belgian director Fabrice du Welz. As a kidnapping case plays out against a turf war between various arms of the police force, his focus is on new Gendarmarie recruit Paul Chartier (Anthony Bajon), who becomes obsessed with the case. Although the case dates from the Nineties, there's a Seventies feel to the action, with du Welz taking time to embed us within Paul's world as things start to go south. Bajon is the trump card here, putting in a volatile performance that never quite goes where you think it will. "It's impossible to escape memory,"
Fabrice du Welz, told us.
Tickets available on Wednesday, October 16, 8pm and Friday, October 18, 8pm.
