BFI LFF Review: The White Crow (2018)
★★★☆☆
Art and politics are uneasy bedfellows in The White Crow, David Hare’s story of ballet and defection, a directorial debut for Ralph Fiennes.
★★★☆☆
Art and politics are uneasy bedfellows in The White Crow, David Hare’s story of ballet and defection, a directorial debut for Ralph Fiennes.
★★★★☆
Possum by Matthew Holness is a suffocating, dark, very British psychological horror.
★★★★☆
The irony of Mike Leigh’s latest film Peterloo about demanding political representation is that almost 200 years later, this week people are marching for practically the same reasons – to demand a people’s vote, this time on Brexit.
★★★★☆
They Shall Not Grow Old, Peter Jackson’s homage to his grandfather, is a technically brilliant remastering, colouring and voicing of First World War footage into 3D to show the horror and futility of war for its ordinary foot soldiers.
★★★★☆
Keira Knightley dons a corset again to portray France’s greatest woman author Colette from country girlhood to scandalous adulthood in Wash Westmoreland’s Colette.
★★★★☆
Joe Martin’s Us and Them is a violent riff on the inequalities of contemporary British society that incense articulate young working-class Danny (Jack Roth, channelling his father Tim) and what he does about it.
★★★☆☆
On Chesil Beach is a well-acted, sensitive adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novella.
★★★★☆
Andrew Haigh’s Lean on Pete is coming-of-age road movie grounded in the all-American setting of quarter-horse racing.
★★★★☆
Michael Pearce’s assured feature debut Beast is a clever, feral psychological horror that constantly surprises.
★★★★☆
Funny Cow showcases Maxine Peake’s versatility when she stars as a ground-breaking female comedian surviving in the misogynistic Seventies.
★★★★☆
The Islands and the Whales is a stunningly beautiful, unobtrusively shot documentary by Mike Day with a narrative that takes us into the lives of real people caught between tradition and global environmental change in the remote Faroe Islands.
★★★★☆
Paddy Considine directs and stars in Journeyman, a melodrama about the hidden toll of boxing.
★★★☆☆
Mitra Tabrizian’s Gholam stars Shabab Hosseini in an intense story of a lonely exiles alienation from two cultures.
★★★★☆
You Were Never Really Here by Lynne Ramsay is a dark, disturbing odyssey into the mind of a brutal yet tender hitman.