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.
Cannes
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.
BFI LFF: The Summit (La Cordillera) (2017)
★★★★☆
Santiago Mitre’s political thriller The Summit is a prescient tale of high-level corruption.
In Between (2016)
★★★★☆
Mayasaloun Hamoud debut feature In Between is a vibrant, pacey Sex and the City look for the first time at the contemporary pressures on three young Arab women when the ‘city’ is Tel Aviv.
Wind River (2017)
★★★★☆
Taylor Sheridan’s heart is on his sleeve in his directorial debut in gripping, atmospheric Native American thriller Wind River.
Bushwick (2017)
★★★★☆
Bushwick by Cary Murnion and Jonathan Milott is an action-filled dark imagining of civil war in the streets of Brooklyn.
The Beguiled (2017)
★★★★☆
Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled is compelling Southern Gothic, richly textured and deeply feminine.
The Death of Louis XIV (2016)
★★★★☆
Albert Serra’s compelling film about the slow death of the Sun King features an extraordinary performance by the legendary Jean-Pierre Léaud.
Okja (2017)
★★★★☆
Netflix’s Okja is Bong Joon-ho’s and Jon Ronson’s satire-cum-expose of the genetically modified food industry through the adventures of a delightful Korean girl and an outsize giant pig.
Slack Bay (2016)
★★★★☆
Divided into stalwarts of French cinema and non-professional actors, Bruno Dumont’s crime caper Slack Bay exposes the grotesque in everyone.