BFI LFF: Wajib (2017)
★★★★☆
Wajib translates as ‘duty’ and Annemarie Jacir’s film focuses on a beautifully observed father-son relationship as they take a road trip around Nazareth amid the confines of being an Arab in Israel.
London Film Festival
BFI LFF: Happy End (2017)
★★★★☆
Michael Haneke’s Happy End deconstructs a wealthy bourgeois family living a life oblivious to the human beings around them with chilling results.
BFI LFF: Journey’s End (2017)
★★☆☆☆
Journey’s End, director Sam Dibbs’ adaptation of R.C.Sherriff’s stage play, struggles to entrench itself in WWI.
BFI LFF: GEMINI (2017)
★★★☆☆
Gemini is Aaron Katz’s pacy nouveau noir murder mystery set in the filmmaking community around Los Angeles.
BFI LFF: Félicité (2017)
★★★★☆
The (African) portrait of a lady, Alain Gomis’ Félicité is a dazzling, vibrant depiction of Africa, womanhood and dreams of a life.
BFI LFF: L’Amant Double (The Double Lover) (2017)
★★★☆☆
François Ozon is on quirky erotic form in L’Amant Double, a mystery of psychoanalysis and seduction.
BFI LFF: The Hungry (2017)
★★☆☆☆
The Hungry updates Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus to India’s modern-day elite.
BFI LFF: Battle of the Sexes (2017)
★★★★☆
Serving well-rounded feminist statements while expertly juggling three intertwining stories, Battle of the Sexes is an outwardly reaching argument encapsulated in a tennis match.
BFI LFF: Loveless (2017)
★★★★☆
Shown through a couple’s reactions to the disappearance of their son, Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Loveless (Nelyubov) is a crushing comment on a loveless society and its people.
BFI LFF: How to talk to girls at parties (2017)
★★★★☆
John Cameron Mitchell’s How To Talk To Girls At Parties is a weird mixture of punk and aliens in the British suburbs – and it works.
BFI LFF: The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) (2017)
★★★★☆
Noah Baumbach’s verbose comedy-drama The Meyerowitz Stories for Netflix is solid mainstream entertainment with a wry taste.
BFI LFF: Wrath of Silence (Bao Lie Wu Sheng) (2017)
★★★★☆
Doling out as many bare-knuckle blows to its characters as it does to China’s corrupt political system, Wrath of Silence is A Touch of Sin that’s not afraid to be dramatic.
BFI LFF: Spoor (2017)
★★☆☆☆
A clarion call against the mistreatment of animals and the hunting confederacy of men, against Agnieszka Holland’s Spoor loses its way in the snowy mountains.
BFI LFF: Stronger (2017)
★★★★☆
Stronger, directed by David Gordon Green, stars Jake Gyllenhaal in a gruelling but inspirational portrait of a man rebuilding his life after the Boston Marathon bombing.