I’ve been going as a punter to the BFI London Film Festival, the biggest and most high-profile in the UK, since 2002. I’ve been covering it for The Playlist since 2009. But I’ve never seen it with a line-up as stacked as it was with the festival that came to an end yesterday, with virtually every major movie from every other festival across the year, plus a bunch of gems and discoveries too, appearing on the slate.
The line up, about 250 films strong, is expansive enough that you could never see everything, but even so, festival scheduling or life intervened and so I missed quite a few hot ticket items — “La La Land,” “Elle,” “Paterson” and prize-winners “Raw” and “Certain Women,” to name but a few. Nevertheless, I got to a good number of films, and saw a heap of great ones.
You can read my full coverage of the festival here, but to give you an overview, I’ve picked out my five faves from the last few weeks below. Were you at the festival? Let us know your favorites in the comments.
5. “The Levelling”
Sometimes, a premiere at a big festival like TIFF can actually be counter-productive to a film: if you’re a tiny indie without big names, it’s easy to get lost in the mix. LFF is just as big, but at least a film like “The Levelling,” the debut of British director Hope Dickson Leach, had the home advantage, and it was one of the most talked about UK films of the festival, and rightly so. Following the return home of a young woman (Ellie Kendrick, in one of the best performances of the festival) to her family farm after her brother’s suicide, it’s a tiny, intimate little film, but one with giant emotions. Leach is fully in control of the film’s tone and storytelling, and the result was one of the most striking first films I’ve seen in a long while, from Britain or elsewhere. Read my full review here.
4. “Arrival”
Up until now, I’ve appreciated Denis Villeneuve’s work without ever quite loving his work, bar the pleasing oddness of “Enemy.” But “Arrival” was the film that made me a believer, the first time that the Canadian helmer has had a movie that fully matched his prodigious talents, thanks to a phenomenal script by Eric Heisserer. As intellectually ambitious a studio movie as has been seen in recent years, the film tracks Amy Adams’ linguistic professor as she attempts to make first contact with alien visitors, the headiness of its ideas proving positively thrilling even as it leads to a stealthy emotional gut-punch that’s nevertheless curiously uplifting. And while the temptation could have been to make something bombastic, Villeneuve brings visual grandeur without making it pompous. All of that and it somehow gets a warm, charming performance out of Jeremy Renner too.
3. “The Wailing”
It feels a bit odd to have a film that opened in the U.S (albeit only in a handful of theaters) nearly six months ago on this list. But I just had an extraordinary amount of fun with “The Wailing.” From “The Yellow Sea” director Na Hong-jin, it’s a film with more story than most of the festival put together, detailing an inept policeman (Kwak Do-won)’s attempts to solve a series of horrific deaths in a small lakeside village that may be connected to a Japanese stranger who’s recently arrived. More even than most, this sums up the crazy genre collisions that makes Korean cinema so exciting — it’s like Ben Wheatley doing “Memories Of Murder” by way of “The Exorcist,” but if Paul Blart: Mall Cop was the main character — and Na drives it along with a furious energy that never remotely bores after two and a half hours. A total thrill.
