Bfi London film festival Archives

Peter Hujar’s Day (2025)

Dir: Ira Sachs. 2025. 76 mins. 2025

Reviewed by Peter Herbert

Peter Hujar’s Day continues director Ira Sachs’ adventures in film style, form and genre with a filmed recreation of rediscovered tapes documenting a day in the life of a gay photographer.

Peter Hujar was born in America in 1934 of Ukrainian parents and only recently has been recognised for images capturing key elements of time and place in New York during the 1970/80s.

He moved to New York in the 1960s where he became not only one of Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys for a visual compilation by Andy Warhol but also an accomplished portrait photographer of cultural zeitgeists from the late 60s. Hujar also photographed male nude erotica, urban nature, animals and images of early 1970s gay liberation front protests. Along with other photographers including Georges Platt Lynes (the subject of Hidden Masters) his acknowledged “difficult” personality added to a body of work little appreciated during his life time before death from AIDS in 1987.

Ira Sachs’ film should help reverse this with a structurally daring film that on one level recounts a day in Hujar’s life on 19/12/74 while also providing an observant character study.

The monologue by Hujar was recorded a few days later on tape, as an interview for writer Linda Rosenkranz. It was intended for publication in a series of articles reflecting the minutiae detail of a day in the lives of a group of New York artists. The article never materialised, recorded tapes were lost although by chance a written transcription of the Hujar interview survived.

Sachs films the tape-recorded interview in 73 minutes (with few changes) and has created a mesmerising film that is not only about a period of time but also a subtle exploration of how a bond develops between photographer and interviewer.

The result builds on built-on remarkable performances by Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall. Whishaw is one of our key contemporary British actors of stage, film and television and brings the same sensitive nervousness and self-doubt from other films including This Is Going to Hurt (2022) to this portrayal of an ego driven creative.

The day Hujar describes includes fascinating mundane descriptions of interaction with icons of the time including Susan Sontag, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. It is clear though that this singular day in his life is very much described through his eyes only.

Whishaw captures physical movement in a confined space but it is the actor’s voice that eventually overrides with mellifluous rhythms which command the ear as much as the eye.

Rebecca Hall recreates the writer author. While appearing to be little more than an enquiring, observant listener, Hall compliments Whishaw as she comes into her own with concerns revealing growing bonds of mutual friendship. This is the kind of rapport between people consistent with the way Sachs explores relationships in Passages 2023, Little Men 2016 and Love is Strange 2014. The result is a remarkable masterclass from a filmmaker and actors worthy of closer inspection and study.

The film is made with 1970s film stock by cameraman Alex Ashe that captures natural light from day to night and is also a love letter to a New York, seen and felt on the edges as a tangible presence in itself.

The other recent film comparable to Peter Hujar’s Day is Claire Simon’s I Want to Talk about Duras (2021). This also involved a filmed recreation of an audio monologue interview given to a female journalist by a young gay man Yann Andrea recalling his unlikely 1980s relationship with the filmmaker and literary icon Marguerite Duras. Both films fascinate for the way they also cross reference the changing natures of media as a way to preserve archival values of time and place. Peter Herbert

BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL | ON RELEASE IN EARLY JANUARY 2026

Kim Novak’s Vertigo (2025)

Dir: Alexandre O. Philippe | Biopic 2025 76 min

Reviewed by Peter Herbert

Kim Novak’s Vertigo might also be described as Kim Novak’s Eyes as the film opens and closes with a look into the eyes of an enduring and resilient legend.

More a love letter to an American beauty rather than a traditional biopic of a Hollywood actress, Kim Novak’s Vertigo is a mirror held up to the heart and mind of Kim Novak, gaining depth from a bond created between Kim Novak and filmmaker Alexandre O. Philippe who has explored the craft of film directors including David Lynch and William Freidkin.

The focus here is on the actress as a tool for the filmmaker.Transcribed from a filmed interview, the film begins with a general sketch of early family life and how Marilyn Novak was first seen in a chorus line in the Jane Russell musical The French Line in 1954. Her meteoric rise the following year as Kim Novak also triggered her reaction against Columbia Picture’s superficial projection of Novak as a conveyor belt blonde bombshell which was a market place for Hollywood and the media in the 1950’s.

What the actress wanted, very early on, was respect as a woman in charge of her own destiny or captain of her own ship, as she describes in the interview. She would soon get this by receiving key roles in a group of important films in the mid to late 50s including Hitchcock’s Vertigo in 1958. The constant fight particularly in the 1960s between her star power and the machine that fuels this resulted in Novak choosing to walk away from Hollywood on her own terms.

This happened to Greta Garbo decades earlier and the parallel between Garbo and Novak as survivors of the Hollywood system are beautifully and sensitively explored by O. Philippe with film extract montages exploring how the passive nature of ethereal beauty is created for the camera eye.

The film does not go into documented incidents including an interracial relationship with Sammy Davis Jnr during the racism of 1950s America or the clashes with Columbia mogul Harry Cohn who was quoted as telling Novak she was ‘nothing but a piece of meat’.

There is very little about marriages, relationships with key directors (Billy Wilder, Joshua Logan, Otto Preminger) or reported clashes with directors Henry Hathaway (Of Human Bondage 1964) and Mike Figgis (her final film Liebestraum in 1991).

There are more references to working with Hitchcock, although no specific mention of her most empathetic director George Sidney who could see a troubled feeling of passive alienation beneath the swan like beauty. Novak admits that she loved director Richard Quine for whom she would shine in both Bell Book and Candle (1957) and Strangers When We Meet (1960). As with Novak, Quine suffered from depression which would end his life in 1989.

The film is effective focusing on the inner turmoil of performances with a beautiful extract from Delbert Mann’s Middle Of The Night (1959) revealing her self-doubt and confusions. Robert Aldrich’s The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968) provides a scathing mock parody of Novak’s fight with stardom and most striking are extracts from the uncompromising Jeanne Eagles (1957).

In this far from conventional bio pic, George Sidney coaxed out of Novak the sublime moods of another troubled soul from the back pages of the late silent and early sound days of Hollywood. Sidney will also film Novak using an overhead camera as she moves across a room after overdosing on drugs, with a sense of the graceful physical movement Cukor captured while filming Garbo in Camille.

Novak was also a survivor, like Garbo, and in this late life documentary essay there is much to enjoy. This includes Novak’s skill as a painter with artwork that frequently portrays a colour filled vortex of movement which echo visual motifs linked to Vertigo.

There is a beautiful reference to how she felt about James Stewart’s naked feet in Bell Book and Candle and after unpacking a box from her loft, Novak lovingly remembers, touches and smells the suited dress jacket she once wore in Vertigo. A private letter from her father reveals more fatherly love than she remembered, while photos of her love of animals, riding horses and a life far away from the madding crowd are all offset by an admission that growing old is not easy.

Aged 92 when the interview was filmed, and lit by Robert Muratore with sensitive care, Novak admits she is near the end of her time. A writer once commented If you are blind to or have no time for the 1001 beauties of George Sidney’s Jeanne Eagles then don’t even bother to look any further. It might be useful to add that a look into the eyes of Kim Novak as provided by this delightful film could well be the answer. Peter Herbert

NOW SCREENING AT BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2025

Hedda (2025)

Dir/Wri: Nia DaCosta | Cast: Tessa Thompson, Nina Hoss, Imogen Poots, Tom Bateman, Nicholas Pinnock, Finbar Lynch | US Drama 107’ 2025

Hedda Gabler is an 1890 play by Norway’s Henrik Ibsen. Here, in her third literary adaptation, a witty chamber piece set over the course of an evening in a splendid Arts and Crafts mansion in the English countryside, Nia DaCosta puts the focus on three women who are trapped by various societal constraints.

The heroine Hedda (a game Thompson) has just acquired her dream house and returned, newly pregnant, from a long honeymoon with her diffident husband George (Bateman) who is struggling to pay for it all.

Hedda is like Moliere’s Celimene, adoring the limelight as she revels in her machiavellian manoeuvres the witty dialogue tripping lightly from her voluptuous red lips. And Thompson is a real master of seduction as she reels in her victims. Her schtick is an in-depth knowledge of firearms garnered from her father, a general, and this all comes in handy in the fizzing finale. On the one hand, she is fending off Judge Brack (a magnetic Pinnock) and is also recovering from an affair with writer Eileen (a feisty Hoss with a boosted embonpoint) who is set to publish a novel co-written by her current lover the rather bedraggled Thea (Poots) who has recently left her husband and also desperately needs money. Like a beautiful wounded bird that she is, Hedda can’t quite resign herself to the dull marital bed ‘after the hurly-burly of the chaise longue’.

Although slightly overstaying its welcome in the final stretch as the characters unravel overwrought by too much alcohol that

only serves to heighten their predicaments, this is a lively costume drama sparkling with spicy repartee ricocheting around the lavish domestic settings that vibrate in Sean Bobbitt’s camerawork, all enlivened by Hildur Gudnadottir’s jazzy score. @MeredithTaylor

BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2025

Moss & Freud (2025)

Wri/Dir James Lucas

Top model Kate Moss clearly loves her look as much as the cameras do in this gloriously unapologetic biopic about the turbulent time when she sat for one of the most significant figurative painters of the 20th century, Lucien Freud.

The two massive egos, he was 80 she was 28, come head to head in a sun-dappled drama making its world premiere at this year’s Bfi London Film Festival. And Kate, who helped produce the film, comes across as a business woman through and through. Elie Bamber plays her with fierce self-possession but Derek Jacobi carries the film, and is by spades the finer actor here. Beautifully coiffed yet bohemian he imbues Freud with a grace and gravitas that is simply astonishing, mastering a fine Germanic accent. Lost in creative thought his Freud is not only a titan of the art world but also an erudite intellectual who manages to be cuddly and vulnerable but waspish when piqued: Moss is perpetually late for their sittings, and cannot abide her sloppy time-keeping.

‘The Naked Portrait’ began in 2002, after a rendezvous in the National Gallery arranged by Bella, a close friend of the model. The two icons capitalise on each other’s success, but that’s par for the course, and this frisson gives this film its dramatic heft, Jacobi endowing his Freud with a humanity that Bamber never conveys in Kate, whether it exists or not in real life, we certainly never get that impression.

Bamber has the body and the face for the part but her Moss comes across as shallow as a puddle. Moss, a Croydon girl made good, clearly gave her the film her blessing and helped cast Ellie Bamber whose accent is more Dagenham than Croydon.

But the voyage of discovery that Kate claims to have made during the meetings with Freud never emerges in this one note performance that showcases her hedonistic lifestyle spurred on by alcohol and fast cars: a bland bombshell driving too fast and cavorting around the fleshpots of Berlin, drunk and self-entitled, but clearly having the time of her life, and supremely able to handle Freud, an ageing lothario who is as committed to his craft as she is to making a financial success of modelling. There is a faint whiff of eroticism to their pairing which evaporates when Moss announces her pregnancy, Freud rapidly morphing into kindly old uncle mode.

The vacant look on Kate’s face when she finally sees the finished picture says it all. Not the beautiful photographic image the new mother was waiting for, but something quite different, unimaginable in her eyes, with its roughly-hewn physicality that flies in the face of her expectations. A watchable but chocolate-boxy biopic. @MeredithTaylor

BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2025

Miroirs No. 3

Wri/Dir: Christian Petzold | Germany, Drama 2025

In his latest psychological drama Christian Petzold once again explores the female experience with his usual acute perception.

Miroirs is a story of two women linked by trauma. One is haunted by the past, the other is struggling with an unsettling present. Early on in the film the unlikely pair find themselves thrown together in unusual circumstances and, on the surface, this seems to be just what they both need. But that plot resolution would be the simple way out, and Petzold is not one for easy solutions dramas. The rather early reveal that follows gives this a less weighty conclusion than his previous outings although Miroirs is nevertheless enjoyable thanks to its nuanced performances, the standout being his current muse Paula Beer, in their fourth collaboration.

Betty (Barbara Auer) is coping with a tragic loss, and music student Laura (Paula Beer) is dealing with an existential crisis due to an unsatisfactory relationship with her musician boyfriend Jakob (Philip Froissant), who seems more interested is his friends and the impression he gives to the outside world than focusing on his partner. This all comes out in an awkward confrontation between the two when Laura gets home late to meet up with another couple Roger (Marcel Heuperman), a producer, and Debbi (Victoire Laly), who are joining them for the weekend. It seems Jacob is out to impress Roger, possibly hoping for a job.

On the drive out of town in Roger’s flashy red sports car Laura seems lost in thought and then claims she feels unwell and wants to go home. Jacob seems more annoyed than sympathetic, Roger lending Jacob his car suggesting he drive Laura to the nearest station, but, as the tone drifts into darker territory, Jakob’s erratic driving causes a collision witnessed by Betty who then takes Laura to her house, to wait for the emergency services to arrive. Laura, who is only mildly injured, then asks if she can stay at Betty’s place to recover. At first the two seem to get along well comforting each other in their time of need. But as details emerge about Betty and her family life it transpires that this woman is not all she seems. @MeredithTaylor

NOW SCREENING AT LONDON FILM FESTIVAL | WORLD PREMIERE CANNES 2025

Romeria (2025)

Dir: Carla Simon | 2025 116’ Spain

Reviewed by Peter Herbert

Romeria is a word used to describe a trip for which this beguiling new indie Spanish film poses the question: “does sharing the same blood make you part of the same family?”.

There will be answers, as director Carla Simon continues her familial obsessions after the 2017 debut Summer 1993 involving the relationship of a child and her mother, followed by Alcarras in 2022 exploring concerns about family and land ownership. Romeria delves further into more complex adult relationships, mixing elements of fiction andautobiography.

The centre of the film is 18-year-old Marina, played by Llucia Garcia, who arrives in the coastal town of Spain’s Galicia with the intention of obtaining a certificate of her father’s death to claim a bursary for a film study scholarship. Adopted from an early age, she meets members of an extended, remote family she barely knows.

Alongside playful scenes involving younger relatives and growing romantic interest in a young lad, there will be other more challenging discoveries relating to uncomfortable family truths involving secrets, lies and guilt. These are linked to her affluent maternal grandparents who covered up the deaths of Marina’s parents from drug addiction and AIDS. In one of the film’s most powerful sequences, involving patriarchal grandparents, the young girl will make a decision that is a reflection of Carla Simon’s moral gravity at the heart of the film.

Romeria offers a sensitive feminine visual eye for the journey of a young girl into adulthood, often inserting moody visual doodles of the sound of glass chimes blowing in the wind. These sometimes-languid slow sequences evoke memory as much as the mix of film stock and Cam Corder-recordings reflect a film seamlessly time travelling between 1984 and 2004.

The final chapter of the film involves a bold shift of tone into magical realism. As the young girl embraces imagined memories of wildly hedonistic parents, Romeria may feel like stoned outtakes from Barbet Schroeder’s 1969 film More. They are however grounded by the filmmaker with deeper underlying intentions as happens with another Spanish indie filmmaker Eva Libertad during the startling shift in tone of the final scenes in Deaf. Both films have parallel points of interest worth exploring further.

The final sequences in Romeria may be the catalyst for a young woman confronting an imagined past in order to embrace her own future, blood and lifeline. They also reflect not only confident growth of a young girl but also the vibrant support of contemporary Spanish film culture for women filmmakers such as Carla Simon and Eva Libertad. @PeterHerbert

SCREENING DURING BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2025

Two Prosecutors (2025)

Dir: Sergei Loznitsa | Drama ,2025 118′

Reviewed by Peter Herbert

Sergei Loznitsa’s Two Prosecutors ends as it begins, with the feel of a surreal M C Escher drawing of doors and stairways that appear to lead everywhere, without actually getting anywhere.

Divided into chapters, the film opens with images of women waiting outside a prison gate. Like a silent Greek chorus they say nothing but can see what is happening to husbands, sons and fathers behind prison walls enduring a debilitating lack of basic human rights.

The setting is 1937 during the authoritarian rule of Stalin and his reign of terror when former and loyalist members of the communist party were subject to brutal treatment as political prisoners. The first chapter focuses on an ill elderly prisoner (played by Aleksander Filppenko) who is forced to burn letters written by inmates sent to governors about prison conditions.

One note, written in blood, is tucked into his pocket and will be smuggled out to be seen by an idealistic young prosecutor who takes up the case of the dying prisoner. The prosecutor (played by the striking broken-nosed Alexander Kuznetsky) is a young man ill-prepared for the uncaring nature of totalitarian authoritarianism which has the power to corrupt and suppress anyone who steps out of line.

In the second chapter, the prosecutor is given a railway ticket and during several train journeys encounters a range of eccentric characters who question his sexuality and youthful idealism. The final chapter is a form of black comedy, with no laughter, as the gates that once opened for the prosecutor may well be closing as if in the cyclical drawings of Escher.

The film is rich in detail with sensitively observed sequences. These include the way the prosecutor neatly folds his coat, arranges his hat, and buttons up a case to reveal a man in control of himself – if not of others. A scene on a busy stairway where the prosecutor helps a woman gather papers spilled out of a folder happens alongside a flurry of indifference and lack of gratitude.

Faces of prison warders betray a sense of collusion with authorities as if moral justice has been supressed or erased in order to survive. The elderly prisoner describing his life as an idealistic young communist feels like a foreboding mirror image of the young prosecutor and confirms Loznitsa’s sensitive skill with actors.

The film may not always be an easy watch with often heavy dialogue-laden exchanges revealing a rich sense of literary references. These writings include Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Soul, and Franz Kafka’s The Trial although the key source are stories written by the physicist Georgy Demidov who spent 14 years incarcerated in notorious Siberian gulag labour camps. Written in 1969, they were published in 2009 after the writer’s death in 1987.

Visually the framing of the 1:1.33 format used by cameraman Oleg Mutu recalls compositions from Robert Bresson’s prison film A Man Escaped with colour film stock stripped of primary colours, providing instead a pallet of beautiful light and evocative visual detail. There is sparse use of Christiaan Verbeek’s music, highlighting the film’s beautiful sense of naturalistic sound while the linear narrative provides Loznitsa with a sense of control and structure making Two Prosecutors his most accessible film so far. The film feels like it could be the third panel of a trilogy of life and death with intriguing links to two previous Loznitsa films screened at the LFF.

With Babi Yar. Context in 2021, the filmmaker assembled an archival reconstruction from newsreel footage of the Nazi massacre in Russia of over 33,771 Jews during three days in September 1941. The archive footage concluded with contemporary documentary shots of present-day landscapes harbouring memories of a terrible genocide.

With The Invasion in 2024, Loznitza developed the same film’s documentary coda into another visual tableau filmed over four seasons for a chronicle of everyday Ukrainian life. Although sounds of warfare and destruction are heard and felt, very little is seen of Ukraine’s Russian invaders.

Two Prosecutors returns Loznitsa to earlier fiction films that include A Gentle Creature 2017 and Donbass 2018. Intervening years have enriched and emboldened both the filmmaker’s mix of film genre and cynical view of the ugly power of authoritarianism. As if on a mission, he shows no sign of resting and Two Prosecutors serves up a powerful case to set before the prosecutor. @PBH V3

TWO PROSECUTORS had its world premiere at this year’s CANNES FILM FESTIVAL and will screen during BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2025 before a general release courtesy of CURZON Film in November 2025

Queer (2024)

Dir: Luca Guadagnino | Cast: Daniel Craig, Daan de Wit, Jason Schwartzman, Drew Starkey, Henrique Zaga | US Drama 135′

Luca Guadagnino’s Queer is a study of a defeated American man living in exile in 1950’s Mexico, unsure of himself and in need of human love and contact. His fragile state will lead him into a relationship with a younger man.

Based on the semi-autobiographical life of William S Burroughs, the novella ‘Queer’ was troubled after the success of his 1951 debut ‘Junkie 1951’ as Burroughs battled withdrawal symptoms from heroin addiction linked to his resurgent libido. ‘Queer’ would be shelved and dismissed by its author until after the success of ‘Naked Lunch’ in 1959. Rewritten from discarded fragments and published in 1985, the financial success of Queer would support the writer until his death in 1997.

Given the troubled nature of the book, Guadagnino and scriptwriter collaborator Justin Kuritzkes have bravely tackled source material although problems have not entirely escaped the filmmakers.

Guadagnino is at his most effective drawing sensitive performances from actors involving focused material. Arguably his best film so far is Challengers (2024) with its focus on doomed relationships resulting from wrong decisions at the heart of a three-way relationship.

Queer establishes a vivid first half in the sensuous stylised recreation of a seedy Mexican City inhabited by a coterie of restless, rootless characters with visible on-screen references to both Cocteau’s Orphee and Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano as another study of a doomed man struggling with addiction.

The second half of Queer moves to Ecuador in South America where the American continues to not only search for his inner self-worth but also the drug Yage with powers to bring enlightenment. These were sparse references in Burrough’s writing which are fleshed out by Guadagnino as a mish-mash of frenzied hallucinations involving a witchcraft doctor in a jungle where the queer relationship with his lover starts to collapse. The film begins to resemble The Spiral Road (1962) in which Rock Hudson and Burl Ives sweat it out with black magic and hallucinations on an Indonesian jungle-based 1961 studio set.

Guadagnino confirms his skill with sensitive character relationships and uniformly fine acting from an ensemble cast including Drew Starkey as the male lover, Jason Schwartzman reviving his career as an ageing camp man, and a startling cameo by Lesley Manville. It is however the central performance of Daniel Craig that holds Queer together and brings the disjointed meandering structure of the film together.

Playing William Lee, a washed-up exiled American forced to live for legal problems in downtown Mexican City, he wastes away his time frequenting sleazy bars with coded 1950s gay networks. Craig is fearless as he continues to shake off his James Bond persona with a sensitive edgy performance, much as Sean Connery took on with films like The Hill and The Offence.

As in the novel, Queer never finally resolved the central characters’ troubled battles with desire and obsession. It is Craig who provides the film with a beautiful final coda focusing on the face of a defeated lost soul, accepting the inevitability of death which equals the haunting final close-up of Julie Christie as a junkie adrift in Robert Altman’s 1971 McCabe and Mrs Miller. These two final closeups make for beautiful, sublime connections. Peter Herbert

QUEER premiered at Venice Film Festival and screened during the London Film Festival 2024

Manji (1964)

Dir: Yasuzo Masumura | Japan, Drama 1964

Manji was screened in the reduced but vital archive section of this year’s BFI London Film Festival and received a masterly well informed, passionate introduction from Robin Baker, the BFI head of Cultural Partnerships, and Miki Zeze from Japanese distribution company Kadokawa who plan to restore and release other films from the 50 plus films made by Masumara (1924-1986).

Manji (alternative title All Mixed Up) is a stylish semi comic melodrama bristling with wide screen colour elegance as it unfolds the wayward obsessions and perverse game playing between two couples making this treatment of a foursome daring for its time.

Masumura worked from a script by established film maker Kaneto Shindo in what was to be the first of his three films based on the novels of Jun’ichiro Tanizaki. Reflecting influences that the director learnt from working with Kon Ichikawa, films like Ichikawa’s 1959 feature Odd Obsession act as a kind of strange bedfellow companion piece to Manji.

Masumura was deeply fascinated by Yukio Mishima and suicide pacts involving poison and blood are weaved into the film’s beguiling chess board game of dangerous games that lovers play. The beauty of the 4k restoration invites interest to explore more of his work which is always one of the pleasures gained from archive screenings. Peter Herbert

SCREENING DURING LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2024

Blitz (2024)

Dir: Steve McQueen | Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Paul Weller, Elliot Heffernan | UK Drama 2024

Blitz Steve McQueen’s Blitz opens with powerful emotional scenes of mother love set against the carnage of the bombing of London during the blitz of WW2. The ‘blitz’ of London and other parts of England by Nazi Germany killed over forty three thousand people and damaged two million houses during a short but intense blitz during 1940/1941 – although for McQueen this serve as background to foreground personal stories of various characters impacted by the upheaval of war.

Saoirse Ronan is a mother living with her father (Paul Weller) and mixed-race child (Elliot Heffernan) on a Stepney Green council estate in London’s East End. Many of these sequences, held together by a lyrical fast moving camera ducking and diving with sharp editing, build up vivid scenes of families living together, the women working in ammunition factories with life constantly interrupted by sirens prefiguring bombs forcing evacuation into underground train stations.

As the film progresses it shifts tone with the child’s evacuation into the countryside. This upheaval of the mother/son relationship allows McQueen to explore well-known interests including the importance of popular music as barometers of cultural identity.

There are a number of powerful sequences about racism involving black and marginal communities as they were in England during this of time. The film also provides a mixed bag of sequences that veer between Dickens’ Oliver Twist with a glimmer of Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress as the boy navigates his dangerous journey through London, encountering a range of grotesque old school vaudeville villains played by Stephen Graham and Kathy Burke. The film brings back memories of Children Film Foundation films of the 1970s with children pitted against often adult social problems, and a sequence of child abuse exploitation recalling Freda Jackson as a menacing cruel wartime landlady in Daniel Birt’s No Room at the Inn (1948).

The trouble here is that it is difficult to decide whether McQueen is playing these scenes with sense and sensibility – or sentimentality. The skill with his actors is undeniable, as is his visual storytelling with intriguing moments that recall Mc Queens original gallery installation period. This includes a visual reference to Dead Pan 1997 where McQueen stands avoiding a collapsing wall, as well as static screen shots of light and bombs creating textured wallpaper patterns.

At its best, Blitz recalls another film about the loss of childhood viewed through adult eyes. This is Alexander McKendrick’s thoughtful journey film Sammy Going South (1964) about a boy travelling across Africa during the 1956 Suez crisis in a picturesque journey where he is reunited with a remotely-remembered Aunt. Unfortunately, McQueen’s content is less controlled than McKendrick’s and by the time it reaches its final redemption scene of mother and child love, Blitz feels more mannered than moving. Peter Herbert

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LONDON FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW 2024 | In UK Cinemas November 2024

EMILIA PÉREZ (2024)

Dir: Jacques Audiard | Wris: Jacques Audiard, Thomas Bidegain, Léa Mysius | Cast: Edgar Ramirez, Selena Gomez, Zoë Saldana, Adriana Paz | France, Musical thriller 129′

It’s hard to imagine someone as dapper and debonair as auteur Jacques Audiard creating rip-roaring films that travel to the badlands of France, India and now Mexico. But beauty and sensitivity is always there a core of his work and this is particularly so in his latest, a vibrant musical thriller, EMILIA PÉREZ.

Zoe Saldaña is Rita, a hard-working Mexico City lawyer held back by her gender and Latino background not to mention a demanding mother and a long-held desire to have a family herself. Despite all this she keeps singing and smiling (in dazzling dance routines) until an offer she can’t refuse comes along that will ultimately lead to salvation of sorts in the shape of frightening cartel boss Manitas del Monte (Gascon).

The mission is well -paid but perilous: to organise the crime lord’s disappearance, relocate his wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and family safely to Switzerland and make him the woman of his desiring. Enter Israeli plastic surgeon Dr Wasserman (Mark Ivanir), the man for the job.

Karla Sofia Gascón is a knockout in a brilliant transgender role that sees her morph from macho Manitas (with gold teeth) to steely but vulnerable EMILIA PÉREZ in a range of bold and boosterish Saint Laurent outfits and a set of pearly white nashers.

This timely tale is often a bit fuzzy around the edges in a script co-written with Lea Mysius and Thomas Bidegain. But Audiard brings all the strands together in a tense adrenaline fuelled denouement that certainly packs a punch despite setbacks along the way. Emilia Perez makes it clear that blood is still thicker than water, even though the water element is all about our need to be loved and find meaning in life even if that means pushing the boundaries out. Emotions run high for all the characters and the heat is palpable with a lush spectrum of dazzling colours in the desert setting.

Exuberant musical interludes somehow add zest to this raunchy ride through Mexico (entirely filmed in a studio) driving the story forward in a similar vein to Annette although here the score is from French vocalist Camille and composer Clement Ducol. @MeredithTaylor

Now in cinemas in France, and the UK from October 25. Streaming on Netflix Nov 13, 2024.

Look into my Eyes (2024)

Dir: Lana Wilson | US Doc

This observational documentary about psychics doesn’t make any judgements. Simply, it offers the audience a chance to make up their own minds about whether those who seek insight or guidance are disillusioned, lonely – or even bored – and are looking for solace and inspiration.

Choppy excerpts of seven New York ‘unconventional healers’ talking to their clients flash before our eyes: A medic shares her deep anxiety over witnessing the death of a child; a film creative has chosen to combine his psychic power with his screenwriting; another was inspired to develop her spiritual gift by the films of John Waters. For the most part the clients are looking for direction in their careers, their family relationships or their love lives.

While being a genuine source of comfort and fascination for some – seeking psychic help to understand an animal seems bizarre: one woman is keen to known why her Boston Terrier hates being on a lead. The psychic’s answer is banal: “Dottie (the dog) says there’s a lot of anxiety to it”. Spending money to to scope out your dog is clearly a ‘thing’ in New York.

Most people take their sessions really seriously, yet the questions they ask often come across as faintly absurd or even facile in the scheme of things. There are few ‘life or death’ concerns, although one man does want to find out about a connection with his dead father.

When someone has died in tragic circumstances there’s an understandable need to try and find answers beyond the grave, but few interviewed seemed really distraught or desperate for clues. One client wants clarity about the feelings of a young man who killed himself. The psychic asks whether the cause of death involved breathing. And when the client reveals the man hung himself, the response is almost ridiculous: “Well, that would be a breathing issue,” It’s difficult not find this vaguely hilarious. But is Wilson (best known for her Taylor Swift outing Miss Americana) really seeking to amuse. It seems so with this funny but often rather moving film.

Through personal experience I can testify to the powers of a particular psychic: their insight was remarkable and invaluable, so I’m no sceptic. In the UK psychic services are considered an ‘entertainment’ in line with the Fraudulent Mediums Act of 1951. @MeredithTaylor

AT THE BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL from 10 OCTOBER 2024

Seven Films to watch at BFI London Film Festival 2024

The 68th BFI London Film Festival runs from between October 9 and October 20 in London and other major UK cities.

Over 12 days from October 9 to October 20 London’s iconic cinemas, including the BFI’s own South Bank cinemas, the Prince Charles Cinema, the ICA, Curzon Soho and Mayfair and Vue West End expect to see award contenders along with a selection of this year’s premieres from the international festival circuit.

This year’s festival will open with BLITZ an Second World War drama starring Saoirse Ronan and Stephen Graham – along with newcomer Elliot Heffernan as a 12-year-old boy who goes missing amid the Nazi bombing campaign on London.

Also screening:

ENDURANCE (2024) UK/US

The actual voices of British Polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton and his crew come alive in thanks to AI techniques in this new documentary charting their remarkable journey to Antarctica in 1914

MEMOIR OF A SNAIL (2024) Australia

Oscar-winning director Adam Elliot’s tale of separated twins in 1970s Australia is a funny and poignant stop-motion story seen from a woman’s perspective and suffused with all the anguish of modern life. This tender tale of loss and alienation it soon branches out into a relatable stop meditation with appeal for all ages.

MY EVERYTHING (2024) France, Anne-Sophie Bailly

Laure Calamy is the star of this amusing family drama that centres on a mother and her disabled son. Their uplifting relationship and two terrific central performances makes this a positive pleasure despite the tricky issues involved.

MALDORDOR (2024) Belgium

In his second film of the season thriller supremo Fabrice du Welz (Adoration, Alleluia, Calvaire) gets together with regulars: Laurent Lucas and Beatrice Dalle in a gritty thriller that explores an episode of institutional dysfunction and police corruption so parlous some claimed they were ‘ashamed to be Belgian’.

ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT India

Unfolding in two parts and shifting deftly from realism to reverie this Cannes-awarded first feature from Payal Kapadia is about two women caught in impossible love stories in modern day Mumbai.

THE BRUTALIST (2024) US (main photo)

Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones shine in Brady Corbet’s wartime epic that tells the story of the American Dream through the lives of visionary architect Laszlo Toth and his wife Erzsebet.

MANJI (1964) Japan

Directed by the Japanese auteur Yasuzo Masumura and based on the novel ‘Quicksand’ by Juinichiro Taniziki this stylishly sensual ‘folie a deux’ sees a married woman (Kyoko Kishida from Woman of the Dunes and a ruthless young girl (Ayako Wake) engaged in a doomed love affair. Remade many times but never living up to the original).

BFI LONDON FLIM FESTIVAL 2024

Endurance (2024)

Dirs: Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, Jimmy Chin, Natalie Hewit | UK-USA 2024. Doc, 100min

The actual voices of British Polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton and his crew come alive in thanks to AI techniques in this new documentary charting their remarkable journey to Antarctica in 1914.

The Endurance, his boat, would sink without trace but the crew diaries and original expedition footage and photos kept by team member Frank Hurley survive to tell the tragic tale for the first time ever, restored by the BFI National Archive,

Interweaving past and present in a tense step by step expose, a team of current day explorers reveal how the ship was located over a century later in the Spring of 2022, some 3000m beneath the icy depths of the treacherous Weddell Sea. It was intact.

Crucially Shackleton’s indomitable spirit, perseverance and courage was key to the survival of his 27-strong crew after the Endurance went down after being locked in solid pack-ice. Shackleton had continuously boosted the morale of his men and their trusty pack of dogs for an entire year.

The Endurance22 expedition team, onboard the South African icebreaker S.A. Agulhas II, made use of state of the art search technology to find the Endurance led by their Dr John Shears, expedition subsea manager Nico Vincent, director of exploration Mensun Bound and historian and broadcaster Dan Snow (son of ‘swingometer’ supremo John Snow).

Keeping alive the memory of Sir Ernest Shackleton the documentary serves as both a gripping slice of history and a tribute to all those who risk their lives in courageous endeavour. @MeredithTaylor

SCREENING DURING THE BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2024

Mother Vera (2024)

Dirs: Cécile Embleton & Alys Tomlinson | UK, 2024, 91′

An ascetic life of prayer and devotion is not for everyone. But Mother Vera (birth name Olga) has chosen the path and shares her turbulent past and uncertain future in this sepia-tinted monochrome meditation that follows the ex-druggie nun through her first year in a monastery that starts in a snowbound Belarusian forest and culminates in sun-baked flatlands of the French Camargue.

After contracting HIV from her partner Oleg, Olga’s life of parties and secular pleasures came to an end and was replaced by daily prayer, devotion and animal husbandry in the remote monastery. We first meet Mother Vera prone on the stone floor of the religious establishment where she will live a life of asceticism, shoeing horses, bell ringing.

Wearing a black headdress and floor length robes,

The monastery is also home to ex convicts – in the eyes of the Lord Christians both saints and sinners are all equal – and the nuns seem to exert a certain power over the men, who regard them with respect, the fact that ‘good and evil’ coexist in the world and in each of us – is transformative, one tempering the other, and providing the film with its spiritual message that good can conquer bad and this is acutely felt during the Easter celebrations when incense is burnt to purify the air and welcome the rebirth of spring.

Vera then goes back to her family in the wooded countryside – two brothers and a mother along with a bevy of farm animals. Two donkeys and a sheep and later some horses and she has a particular affinity with horses – one amazing scene sees her riding through a snowy landscape on a white horse. They provide the healing that Vera needs along with close love of her mother as they go through the anxiety of her drug addition. And she repents our her sins in leading others into threat world. Love perseveres

Revealed through spellbinding visual language echoing the rigid discipline of monastic life, we enter the enclosed, shadowy spaces of a convent outside Minsk. Sound and silence submerge us in the rhythm of the community. After twenty years of monastic service and faced with a life-changing decision, Vera must confront her troubled past to find the freedom she desires.

MOTHER VERA will be released to UK audiences on 29th August | World Premiere VISIONS DU REEL | NYON SWITZERLAND

Bfi London Film Festival 2023

Arts curator Peter Herbert reports from year’s Bfi London Film Festival on London’s South Bank:

THE ZONE OF INTEREST (2023) has a kind of ponderous beauty drawing parallels between the consumerism of living and that of death as perceived during the horrors of war. It feels like it’s source novel by Martin Amis but is unmistakably the work of one of our most important UK directors and adds to Jonathan Glazer’s small but striking body of films.

I wasn’t a massive fan of BOOK OF CLARENCE (2023) and thought the director was more vivacious than his film which is radical at its best with a very amusing use of Benedict Cumberbatch.

RED ISLAND (2023) has lots of good elements but seemed drawn out by the end and as directed by Robin Campillo became a bit unfocused beyond the central child’s eye view. It’s perfect Curzon fare.

James Benning’s ALLENSWORTH (2022) (above) may be one of his best. 12 chapters representing 12 months of the year.. It could be screened as an ongoing cycle like THE CLOCK and contains some of his key ideas and images in the context of a memory of a town scarred by a historical memory of racial horror. The use of Nina Simone’s song Blackbird is very haunting and moving in one sequence.

THE STRANGER AND THE FOG (above) had a very passionate introduction from a key person involved with its restoration. He described a film that on its release in 1974 was met with baffled indifference by audiences and critics at festivals, and was effectively buried by Iranian authorities. Looking at it now. it still feels largely impenetrable without knowledge of intense religious cultural motifs. Filmed by writer and director Bahram Beyzaie on locations used by Pasolini as sets for his final ARABIAN NIGHTS film, it lacks for me the homoerotic potential of Pasolini that it fleetingly contains and doesn’t develop the beautiful visual surrealism of the comparable Paradjanov . It’s a long 145 minutes with plenty of rain,fog,mud and symbolism but is a unique one off for sure. Let’s see how its reputation develops once this restoration is released.

THE ANIMAL KINGDOM (2023) (above) may not be perfect but the rich fertile imagination of director Thomas Cailley gets under the skin with its idea of people mutating into animals with authorities struggling to often violently suppress what’s happening. There are curious parallels with Ray Bradbury and the sequence in the forest revealing a community of mutants living a positive new life reminded me of the end of FAHRENHEIT 451 with the forest of people keeping forbidden books alive. After the film I could see people around me with a range of facial features suggesting the animal world, much as years ago the work of Cindy Sherman altered visual perceptions for days after experiencing an exhibition of her face shifting photography. This is a good sign of successful art altering the way you can look at life around you One for a film distributor to consider acquiring. The film with the strong combination of Romain Duris, Paul Kircher and the possibly underused but ascending actress Adele Exarchopoulos could be commercially successful?

THE BLACK PIRATE from 1926 looked splendid in its 2 strip technicolor glory highlighting the wooden timbre set design. It felt a bit stolid as directed by Albert Parker until the exuberance of the last 30 mins which has more of the emotional power and beauty associated with Dwan or Walsh. There is a surprising lack of closeups of the charismatic Fairbanks as its largely filmed long /medium camera range. Neil Brand was as exuberant as we expect from the best of the current silent film pianists.

ALL OF US STRANGERS (2023) (main pic) may be the standout so far and the more I think about comparisons between the growing body of work by Andrew Haigh and the parallel of Terence Davies in terms of literary adaptations and gay identity may be well worth exploring further.

POOR THINGS (2023) – last but not least – its visual originality, set design and ideas seem to overflow the confines of the screen. I was reminded at times of Cacoyannis’ similarly imaginative and internationally funded but failed Sci-fi hellzapoppin THE DAY THE FISH CAME OUT from 1967, though this shows how far creative Greek cinema has evolved on every level. The cast led by Emma Stone don’t hold back on anything realising the intricate female- dominated and designed energy of Tony McNamara’s script. It is possibly Lanthimos’ most fully developed work so far. A riveting finale to this years LFF.

PETER HERBERT is CURATOR MANAGER

THE ARTS PROJECT in North London’s Kentish Town

Posts Tagged ‘Bfi London film festival’

The 68th BFI London Film Festival runs from between October 9 and October 20 in London and other major UK cities.