LFF 2013: Stranger By The Lake
The film with the most walkouts I’ve seen in Cannes Film Festival this year (counted at about eight, including the fiftysomething woman beside me who seemed to be having a…
Share
LFF 2013: Don Jon
In an era when romantic comedies have become a cussing arena for anyone whose tolerance for the genre is proportionate to tantrum-inducing levels, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, the indie-kid-turned-Hollywood-lovechild, attempts at reviving…
Share
LFF 2013: 12 Years A Slave
Any film with an opening assertion ‘Based on a True Story’ can hold a mighty thrall on audience expectations that questioning the film’s credibility is often considered a veritable historical…
Share
LFF 2013: Kill Your Darlings
How far has Daniel Radcliffe distanced himself from the bespectacled boy wizard? Let me count the ways – 1) by stripping naked on top of a horse in Equus, 2)…
Share
LFF 2013: Blue is the Warmest Colour
First love, when it grabs hold and takes over, is a maddening, all-consuming, intoxicating surrender of the senses. Cinema has plumbed all manners of depths to this topic, but perhaps…
Share
LFF 2013: Tom at the Farm
The label ‘wunderkind’ seems to be thrown around quite lightly these days, but it doesn’t quite achieve its full meaning as when appropriated to a certain 24-year old Québécois filmmaker.…
Share
LFF 2013: Inside Llewyn Davis
The Coen brothers’ new one has something deceptive up its sleeve. It’s a film about disappointments, tribulations, lousy friends, irritant ex-lovers, hitchhiking on snow, endless couch-surfing,being perpetually skint and failing at…
Share
LFF 2013: Under The Skin
Nothing will prepare you for Jonathan Glazer’s Under The Skin. In a curious extreme left turn, he follows 2004’s Birth with this mind-meltingly abstract, defiantly unconventional feature, as if he’s spent…
Share
LFF 2013: The Double
Richard Ayoade is a man of many talents, most of which were unquestionably proven in his wonderfully left-field debut film Submarine, perhaps the coming-of-age movie to end all coming-of-age movies.…
Share
LFF 2013: Gravity
Since when was the last time mainstream filmmaking became legitimately convincing, awe-inspiring and goddamn beautiful as this? All your Avatars, Dark Knights and Avengers can go suck Hollywood’s rectum, as…
Share
LFF 2013: Camille Claudel 1915
I challenge anyone to find a quieter, more sorrowful film this year than Bruno Dumont’s micro-portrait of the existentially-troubled sculptress Camille Claudel 1915. Dumont, rigorously eschewing melodrama, loony-bin movie trappings…
Share
LFF 2013: Nebraska
Anybody familiar with Alexander Payne’s canon would know that this man doesn’t belt out loud, grandstanding cinematic statements but rather offers microcosm of human misanthropy through the hybrid of drama…
Share
LFF 2013: Child’s Pose
Trust Romania for delivering bleak, methodical yet savagely compelling dramas. The last decade has seen the Romanian New Wave moving from strength to strength – from the caustic, satirical barbs…
Share
LFF 2013: Captain Phillips
The 57th London Film Festival is off to an impressive and nerve-wracking start with cargo-ship siege thriller Captain Phillips, which – like the effect the Somalian piracy incident had on Tom…
Share
LFF 2013: Adore
Anne Fontaine’s first English-language film Adore, to put it crudely, is about two mothers fucking each others’ sons. Both grown-up men, of course. What were you thinking? Decry/indulge whatever perversions…
Share
LFF 2013: The Congress
One film I completely ignored missed during my exploits in Cannes Film Festival earlier this year was Ari Folman’s The Congress, relegated in the Director’s Fortnight where films apparently unworthy…
Share
LFF 2013: Nobody’s Daughter Haewon
Hong Sang-soo’s quiet treatment of a romantic comedy has gained an almost universal admiration, but has curiously left me unaffected and umoved by its whimsical circular structure and its blatantly…
Share
London Film Festival, 2013 Edition
For those who have followed this blog over the course of the last twelve months, you may remember that the month of October marks the first anniversary of The Moviejerk‘s…
Share
LFF 2013: Afternoon Delight
The moral lesson Afternoon Delight seems to thrust upon us is to never let a prostitute in your home. They’ll fuck you up – your husband, your kids, your wealthy…
Share
LFF 2013: Jeune et Jolie
François Ozon, the bad boy of French cinema, follows last year’s adroit and engaging Dans la Maison with this honest, provocative, affecting and darkly comic coming-out-of-a-sexually-charged-teenage-phase drama of a beautiful bourgeois 17-year…
Share