Skip to main content

My London Film Festival in Tweets

So another London Film Festival is over. Even if this one didn't seem a vintage edition, for me at least, the experience was as enjoyable as ever and there were still some spectacularly good films on offer. Here's what I made of the ones I saw through the medium of immediate tweets with the usual scoring out of 10 ....

Score 9

The Keeping Room 


Far From Men



Score 8

The Falling 






The Duke of Burgundy

 Score 7

Foxcatcher



Wild



If You Don't, I Will



Pasolini



The New Girlfriend

Didn't Tweet about this one but if I had it would have been along the following lines:

'Playful, slightly perplexing, a relatively minor Ozon but one doubly fine performance'


Score 6

Serena


Eden



Leopardi

Didn't Tweet about this one but if I had maybe something like this:

'Earnest, beautifully framed but oh so dull. Why was I meant to care? Perhaps if Vesuvius had gone off at the start ...'


Score 3

Black Coal, Thin Ice


Mommy

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Best Films of 2024

  My Letterboxd account confidently provided a detailed thematic breakdown of the 225 films viewed this year: Quite what to make of this is somewhat less clear. Either I broke the algorithm or my ideal film is a low key, droll, genre hopping, weird, relationship drama with philosophical pretensions. Which might actually stand as a description of my favourite film of the year.  Certainly, on review, 2024 turns out, slightly surprisingly, to have been a strong year. So even before reaching the top 10 there are another ten films very worthy of note: On Becoming A Guinea Fowl   The Dead Don't Hurt   Green Border    The Outrun   Good One Showing Up   The Holdovers   Femme   The Settlers   Blackbird, Blackbird, Blackberry   Then the top ten in traditional reverse order: 10.  Janet Planet  Wonderfully understated, subtle examination of our perception of connection to others seen most profoundly in the determination of a teen...

Anni Albers: Sculpting With Thread

Wandering around this kaleidoscopic  exhibition  at the Tate put me in mind of so many other artists that I began to wonder whether Albers was a conduit for their influence or whether I was simply engaged in a procession of imagined serendipity. It may seem strange to begin with a sculptor given that Albers primarily worked with textiles but I was constantly reminded of Brancusi. The wonder of Brancusi is that he aims to reveal and develop the inherent nature of the material whether stone, wood or metal. The form that he finds is therefore perfectly suited to the stuff with which he is working. What is striking with Albers is that she does exactly this with the techniques applied to different types of material. Development In Rose (one of my favourite pieces in the exhibition) is made from linen and the impurities and imperfections in the thread are used in essence as highlights. The slightly muted colour also captures the often slightly faded nature of t...

Pourquoi J'Aime 'Les Amants'

It has Jeanne Moreau. It has the most exquisite andante from Brahms String Sextet. It has extended sequences that involve both Jeanne Moreau and the (exquisite) andante from Brahms string sextet. It  is directed by one of the most fabulous French film makers, Louis Malle, and probably ranks alongside Smiles Of A Summer Night as amongst the most swooning meditations on romantic love (albeit on this occasion without Russian roulette). Did I mention, it has Jeanne Moreau. It has a sequence in which a very a la mode Parisienne wakes up with a groomed daschund already in the crook of her arm. It has the most extraordinary sequence of laughter in any film in which the laughter is both such a release and a realisation of how much laughter has simply been missing for so long that it is delirious and painful in equal measure. It is a beautifully observed portrait of Paris and the provinces with all the droll superficiality that implies. But above all it is the utte...