London Film Festival

It is difficult to discuss Evolution without giving away a lot of its surprises. Needless-to-say, Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s masterful film (only her second in a decade) is disturbing, beautiful and restrained. Mysterious from beginning to end, the film challenges and intrigues, reaching down inside to grab hold of something within us all that is ancient and primordial, engaging on a level that exists within not only a collective imagination but our collective biology

One often wonders what they would be capable of if their life depended on it. Would you take charge, delegate responsibility but do your part, or would you completely break down and cower in the corner? Would you be able to think clearly enough to find a solution to the problem or would your emotions be too overpowering?

In 2013, renowned Russian filmmaker Alexey German died before he could complete his astonishing final film Hard to Be a God which, after being completed by his wife, screenwriter Svetlana Karmalita, and his son Alexey German Jnr, screened at last year’s London Film Festival.

A quick search of the film Ruined Heart: Another Love Story between a Criminal and a Whore reveals that it is an expanded version of a 2012 short by Filipino poet Khavn De La Cruz (known simply as KHAVN) and that pretty much explains the feature’s shortcomings in a nutshell.

Director Pablo Larraín is known for his extremely fascinating social commentaries about his native Chile. Most famously, he tackled the Pinochet regime and its legacy with his trilogy comprising Tony Manero, Post-Mortem­ and ­No. With The Club, Larraín looks at Catholicism, another major Chilean institution, and the abuses of power that can occur within the priesthood.

The objectification of women and the ravenous consumption of celebrity culture are some of the very clear themes that inform the narrative of The Corpse of Anna Fritz, the debut feature of Spanish director Hèctor Hernández Vicens.

Following the brilliant A Touch of Sin, auteur and Chinese master Jia Zhangke returns with a similarly structured, yet more narratively linked, portrait of China in the new millennium. Mountains May Depart is two-thirds of a gripping relationship drama that captures not only a China in constant flux, but also the universality of human experience.

To describe Bone Tomahawk as a “horror-Western” is good shorthand, but could be a little misleading. The film indeed has horror elements but novelist turned screenwriter/director S. Craig Zahler seems more interested in spending time with his four main protagonists as they travel across country, letting their different personalities and world views, and the harshness of the terrain, challenge them on their journey

Assassination is pure entertainment. Director Choi Dong-hoon pulls together an astonishing group of talent both in front and behind the camera to portray a story close to South Korea’s heart with humour, pathos, gorgeous cinematography and a series of impressively bombastic action scenes to create one of the most exciting adventure films in recent years.

Stories about slavery can be a tricky proposition, especially if your story is from the Caucasian point of view, because there is a delicate balance to be struck when considering the protagonist’s actions and motivations.

The Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky has been well served by cinema, especially his major works Crime & Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, and The Idiot, all of which have received numerous adaptations throughout the decades. The latter was lavished with a recent Estonian take, after receiving a Japanese decoding by Kurosawa no less, as well as Indian and (naturally) Soviet versions. It has taken until 2013 for a filmmaker brave enough to approach Dostoyevsky’s binary second novel; there is a certain numerical sense of doubling, since Richard Ayoade has decided to allocate his second film as The Double, an ambitiously promising plea following Submarine back in 2010.

Venerable Woody Grant (a grizzled Bruce Dern) has a singular purpose in mind, to get from his adopted Montana home to neighbouring Nebraska to collect a million-dollar cheque that a suspiciously speculative postal disclaimer has promised to honour. Elderly and suffering with decaying mental functions, Woody clearly can’t see through the marketing scam, and his wife Kate (June Squibb) and son David (Will Forte) grow increasingly exasperated at his dangerous footbound expeditions before arriving at a mutual solution:

A Serious Man Directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen Written by Joel and Ethan Coen 2009, USA The Coens are getting positively prolific these days, treating their hardcore fans with a movie a year, and with their latest release, A Serious Man they have taken the comedic strand of their work into uncharted waters …

The Informant! Directed by Steven Soderbergh You can’t keep a good executive down. After ENRON, after Lehman Brothers and the continuing fury at executive bonuses  it was quite a change to see the corporate executive class as brimming with ineffective buffoons rather than coldly calculated capitalist psychopaths, in The Informant! Matt Damon stars as the …

The Limits of Control Directed by Jim Jarmusch The Exploding Girl Directed by Bradley Rust In the early 1990s, slacker cinema was all the rage in American independent cinema, with wacky, mumbling characters, slow pacing and the mundanity of everyday life replacing traditional plots, characterisations and drama. Which brings us to these two Amerindie offerings. …

Cold Souls Directed by Sophie Barthes Charlie Kaufman’s attorneys must be pleased. The first phrase one grasps at to describe Sophie Barthes debut feature, Cold Souls, is ‘Kaufmanesque’: a metaphysical comedy with an absurd, fantastical central proposition, be it a machine that erases memories of a failed love affair or a puppet master accessing the …

Burning Down the House Directed by Mandy Stein No One Knows About Persian Cats Directed by Bahman Ghobadi Teheran, Iran and New York aren’t obvious kindred spirits and unlikely to be twinned in any civic program any time soon, but two music-related films at the festival point out how underground culture can act as the …

London Film Festival: Lessons in Love Dear Lemon Lima, dir Suzi Yoonessi Wah Do Dem dir Sam Fleischner/Ben Chace A Thing Called Love (shorts programme) Today’s lesson is all about love: the things we we do, etc. Poor Vanessa Lemor (l’amour—get it?). All she wanted when she entered Nichols High School was to maintain the …

Enter The Void Directed by Gasper Noé Ever since the notorious Irreversible prompted the dubious honor of causing the largest walkout in Cannes history back in 2002, Gallic maverick Gasper Noé appears to have been paying the rent with a couple of music videos, an advert (appropriately enough) for condoms and a contributing entry to …