French Film Festival UK: Slack Bay (Ma Loute) (2016)
★★★★☆
Divided into stalwarts of French cinema and non-professional actors, Bruno Dumont’s crime caper Slack Bay exposes the grotesque in everyone.
Cannes
London East Asia Film Festival: Before We Vanish (2017)
★★★★☆
Before We Vanish by Kiyoshi Kurosawa is a genre-bending Japanese bodysnatchers movie that provokes an alien apocalypse on Earth.
BFI LFF: The Florida Project (2017)
★★★☆☆
Sean Baker’s The Florida Project is a gorgeous sugar-rush adventure and a sobering study of poverty, though it leans too much on the former for the latter to leave its sting.
BFI LFF: You Were Never Really Here (2017)
★★★★☆
You Were Never Really Here, Lynne Ramsay’s latest film is a dark, disturbing odyssey into the mind of a brutal yet tender hitman.
BFI LFF: I Am Not a Witch (2017)
★★★★☆
Rungano Nyoni’s I Am Not a Witch is a surreal deadpan satire.
BFI LFF: Let the Sunshine in (2017)
★★★★☆
Juliette Binoche stars in a rom-com departure for Claire Denis in Bright Sunshine In (Un Beau Soleil Interior).
BFI LFF: The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)
★★★★☆
In The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Yorgos Lanthimos creates a disturbingly strange and brutal dilemma.
BFI LFF: 24 Frames (2017)
★★★★☆
Abbas Kiarostami’s experimental, posthumous 24 Frames is a meditative insight into a great filmmaker’s creative process.
BFI LFF: Happy End (2017)
★★★★☆
Michael Haneke’s Happy End deconstructs a wealthy bourgeois family living a life oblivious to the human beings around them with chilling results.
BFI LFF: L’Amant Double (The Double Lover) (2017)
★★★☆☆
François Ozon is on quirky erotic form in L’Amant Double, a mystery of psychoanalysis and seduction.
BFI LFF: Loveless (2017)
★★★★☆
Shown through a couple’s reactions to the disappearance of their son, Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Loveless (Nelyubov) is a crushing comment on a loveless society and its people.
BFI LFF: The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) (2017)
★★★★☆
Noah Baumbach’s verbose comedy-drama The Meyerowitz Stories for Netflix is solid mainstream entertainment with a wry taste.
BFI LFF: Ava (2017)
★★★★☆
In Ava, the increasing darkness of Léa Mysius’ direction echoes the encroaching blindness of its young heroine in a strikingly original coming-of-age story.
BFI LFF: Wonderstruck (2017)
★★★★☆
In Wonderstruck Todd Haynes opens a cabinet of cinematic wonders as two deaf children’s stories interlink 50 years apart in the magic of New York.