★★★★☆
US festival favourite I’m Fine (Thanks for Asking) is a touching, positive indie movie, female written and directed, made during Los Angeles’ lockdown (see the mask use) focusing on the struggles to be independent of a widowed mother who happens to be homeless, black and female – and beautiful.
★★★☆☆
Neptune Frost, a visionary collaboration between poet/artist Saul Williams and actress and playwright Anisia Uzeyman, is a unique Afro-futurist political musical filmed in Rwanda.
★★☆☆☆
All is Vanity directed by Marcos Mereles is a ‘Marmite’ feature debut.
★★★☆☆
Screen legend Charlotte Rampling is magnificently ferocious as a reluctant invalid, estranged bad grandma Ruth in Matthew J Saville’s debut Juniper.
★★★★☆
Everything Went Fine by François Ozon is a tender, surprisingly darkly humorous look at euthanasia and family relationships.
★★★★★
strong>Drive My Car, directed with a delicate, luminous touch by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, deservedly won the Oscar this week for Best Film International Feature, the first Japanese film ever to do so.
★★★★☆
Petrov’s Flu by Kirill Serebrennikov is hallucinogenic, violent and disturbing – a post-apocalyptic vision of present or future applicable in any country where politics trumps people.
★★★★☆
Award-winning Mexican director Alonso Ruizpalacio with A Cop Movie has made a brilliant, intriguing and innovative – and startlingly genre-unclassifiable – film, starring Mónica Del Carmen and Raúl Briones.
★★★★☆
Azor, Andra Fontana’s subtle, sophisticated feature debut, unsettles with an increasing sense of dread as a Swiss banker is enveloped in the Argentinian junta’s heart of darkness.
★★★★☆
Drive My Car is directed with a delicate, luminous touch by Ryusuke Hamaguchi.
★★★★☆
BFI LFF 2021: Roundup
★★★★☆
Boiling Point, directed in an amazing single take by Philip Barantini, stars a wonderful performance by Stephen Graham as a chef in a pressure-cooker kitchen.
★★★★☆
Azor, Andra Fontana’s subtle, sophisticated feature debut, unsettles with an increasing sense of dread as a Swiss banker is enveloped in the Argentinian junta’s heart of darkness.
★★★★☆
BFI LFF 2021: Programme