BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2024: 9–20 October 2024
span style=”color:#D1A316″>★★★★☆
BFI London Film Festival 2024
On Demand
Heart of an Oak (2022) (Le Chêne)
★★★☆☆
The Heart of an Oak, directed by Laurent Charbonnier and Michel Seydoux, edited by Sylvie Lager, is a year of magnificent photography in the life of the creatures – animals, birds and insects – that live in or around a huge 200-year-old oak tree in a forest in France.
Good Boy (2023)
★★★☆☆
The ironically titled Good Boy, a semi-comic short written and directed by Tom Stuart, demonstrates once again what a good actor Ben Whishaw is.
Casablanca Beats (2021)
★★★★☆
In Casablanca Beats, director Nabil Ayouch blurs the line between fiction and documentary in the exhilarating story of a charismatic group of young would-be rappers in Morocco.
The Collini Case (2019)
★★★☆☆
The Collini Case by Marco Kreuzpaintner is a slickly made German legal drama that hinges on postwar European history.
The Man with the Answers (2020)
★★★☆☆
A burgeoning connection with a stranger may deeply affect the life of an ex-diving champion in writer/director Stelios Kammitsis’s charming but slight The Man with the Answers.
FÁTIMA (2020)
★★★☆☆
Fátima is a fascinating glimpse of Catholic faith, respectfully translated to the screen by Marco Pontecorvo.
Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman streams all his films for free
★★★★☆
Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman to stream all his films for free from 21 to 30 May.
Sound of Metal (2019)
★★★★☆
Sound of Metal by Darius Marder, starring Riz Ahmed, is the sensitively told and brilliantly acted story of every musician’s worst nightmare – going deaf.
The Mauritanian (2021) – on digital
★★★★☆
The Mauritanian, directed by Kevin MacDonald, brings a legal drama to devastating life on screen from the New York Times acclaimed best-selling memoir Guantánamo Diary by Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who was tortured and detained without charge in Guantánamo for 14 years.
Apples (2020) – on demand
★★★★☆
Apples, Christos Nikou’s assured debut as a director, is a disturbing, opaque fable about the relationship between memory, identity, grief and the selfie culture, set in Athens during an allegorical pandemic.
Truman and Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation (2020) – on demand
★★★★☆
Truman and Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation is a fascinating documentary by Lisa Immordino Vreeland about two groundbreaking giants of contemporary literature and the creative process.
The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020) – on demand
★★★★☆
The Trial of the Chicago 7‘s all-star cast enlivens and sharpens the points of Aaron Sorkin‘s docudrama of a historic court case intended to destroy the ’60s counterculture.
Judas and the Black Messiah (2021) – on demand – Oscar winner
★★★★☆
Oscar-winning Judas and the Black Messiah directed by Shaka King, a tragic true story of a brutal state assassination in the US starring LaKeith Stanfield and Daniel Kaluuya, is gripping, heart-wrenching and sadly still topical.