Berlin, Cannes, Locarno, Venice, Toronto – these are some of the world’s premier film showcases. Although we can’t claim to play host to anything quite so glamorous here in London, we’re lucky to have the BFI London Film Festival. This festival of festivals runs from today (5th October) through to Sunday 16th October, taking place in venues across London including a gorgeous, purpose-built pop-up cinema that sits in Victoria Embankment Gardens. Um, yes please.
For movie lovers, the LFF is a chance to catch up on some of the festival circuit's most talked about indie, arthouse and foreign language films – as well as preview a bunch of glitzy future Oscar nominees. With 245 features (not to mention 144 short films) in the programme, it’s hard to know where to start. Here are some of the very best of the bunch.
After Love
Bérénice Bejo ( The Artist) stars in this raw and realistic relationship drama about a couple’s struggle to co-parent their 11 year-old twin daughters while still living together after their separation. Think a Nancy Meyers movie (complete with a massive, gorgeous house), only sadder and Belgian. Split up with someone recently or have divorced parents? Consider yourself warned – this child of divorce sobbed her heart out during a scene featuring an otherwise innocent family dance-off to a French pop song.
American Honey
Andrea Arnold ( Fish Tank, Wuthering Heights) is one of Britain’s most important directors. Her latest sees her take on the American road movie, following a ‘mag crew’ – a group of scruffy teenagers that peddle magazine subscriptions across the country, led by a rat-tailed Shia LeBeouf. A bold, sprawling, romantic look at working class America, it’s messy and imperfect – but it hums with life (and a thumping hip-hop soundtrack).
Certain Women
Heard the phrase 'emotional labour' bandied about recently? It seems to be the very subject of director Kelly Reichardt’s meditative adaptation of Maile Meloy’s short story collection Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It. The certain women in question are Laura Dern, Michelle Williams and Kristen Stewart, who live in and around the small city of Livingston, Montana. The film picks up the working lives of these three sets of women – and the extra emotional heavy lifting required in their relationships. Especially luminous here is Native American actress Lily Gladstone, whose performance as a lovestruck rancher who finds herself taken with K-Stew’s fidgety night class teacher is overflowing with simmering emotion.
Chi-Raq
Nick Cannon, Samuel L. Jackson and Angela Bassett star in this bombastic, Chicago-set Greek tragedy turned hip-hop musical – and Spike Lee’s liveliest, most forceful film in years. In protest of Chicago’s black-on-black gun crime epidemic, the city’s women lead a sex-strike with the battle cry: “No peace, no pussy.” Its politics might be suspect, but Lee’s latest is the most fun I’ve had in ages – and it’s not so easy to see, given it’s slipped through the fingers of UK distributors. Catch it while you can.
Divines
If you liked Celiné Sciamma’s Girlhood, you might be into Houda Benyamina’s French teen drama - the central female friendship here feels similarly lived in. Dounia and Maimouna are your typical ride-or-die BFFs – shit-talking their teachers, rolling their eyes in the mosque and spying on sexy security guards-turned-dancers until they get sucked into a world of dodgy dealings in order to make some extra cash.
Free Fire
Ben Wheatley’s funnest film yet is closing the festival. Set in Boston circa 1970 and starring an excellent ensemble cast that includes Brie Larson, Armie Hammer, Cillian Murphy and Sam Riley – all dressed in ‘70s getup – all you need to know about the film is that it plays out as one extended, comedic shootout in an abandoned warehouse. Expect plenty of stray bullets – and quick fire wit to go with them.
The Handmaiden
Korean director Park Chan-wook ( Oldboy, Stoker) swaps the setting of Victorian England for Japanese-occupied Korea circa 1930 in his playful, blackly comic twist on Sarah Waters’ novel Fingersmith. Korean trickster thief Sookee (Kim Tae-ri) has been sent to serve as Lady Hideko (Kim Min-hee)’s handmaiden, who is held hostage by her pervy uncle in his lavish gothic manor. Sookee is under strict instruction to make Hideko fall in love with Count Fujiwara (Ha Jung-woo) but an erotic frisson begins to bloom between the two women instead.
La La Land
Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone are reunited in the new film from Whiplash director Damien Chazelle. Set in a sunset-hued Los Angeles and played out in the style of an Old-Hollywood musical (set pieces, songs and all), it follows the romance that unfolds between Stone’s barista slash actress and Gosling’s failing jazz pianist. It’s fizzy and sweet, and should have musical lovers swooning and skipping out of the cinema.
Moonlight
This is the film that everyone is talking about. Based on the play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue by Tarell Alvin McCraney, it’s the intimate story of Chiron, a fatherless African-American boy grappling with his burgeoning homosexuality in childhood, adolescence and adulthood. This description of its basic plot doesn’t do the film’s wrenching, emotional core justice – director Barry Jenkins tells the story with the kind of tenderness that has to be seen to be believed.
Nocturnal Animals
The new film from Tom Ford (yep, that Tom Ford) is a twisty thriller wrapped up inside a relationship drama. When Amy Adams’ art gallery owner receives her ex’s (Jake Gyllenhaal) pulpy new novel in the post, she starts reminiscing about their past relationship as she reads. It’s trashy but exquisitely so – and Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Michael Shannon are enjoyably cartoonish as storybook villains.
Personal Shopper
The weirdest Kristen Stewart-starring feature in the festival is part ghost story, part psychosexual thriller. K-Stew plays a personal shopper and part-time medium (that’d be a person who can chat with ghosts) who starts receiving creepy anonymous iMessages. It’s a zany premise but her performance is quietly captivating – plus, watching one of Hollywood’s most fashionable A-list celebrities ride around on a motorcycle, shopping for other people’s Chanel and Cartier, is a bizarre thrill.
A United Kingdom
It means something that the LFF has chosen a film by Amma Asante ( Belle) – a black woman – to open the festival. Her latest period piece is based on the true story of the political ramifications that trailed the interracial marriage between a prince from Bechuanaland (which would later become Botswana) and a clerk from South London. Leads David Oyelewo and Rosamund Pike have old-school chemistry – and Pike has the best 1940s costumes. Good news too, that this is one of 114 films in the festival directed or co-directed by a woman (that’s 24% overall - a 2% increase from last year’s selection!).
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