We’ve just gotten back from the launch of (deep breath…) The Times BFI 53rd London Film Festival, and it’s looking like a banner year. We’ve previously reported on the opening and closing night films, the world premieres of Wes Anderson’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox” and Sam Taylor-Wood’s John Lennon biopic “Nowhere Boy,” but the full line-up has now been revealed, and while there’s some crossover with Cannes and Toronto, there’s plenty of gems further down the line-up to make up for it.
George Clooney appears to be pretty much sponsoring the festival: aside from his voice-over duties in “Fantastic Mr Fox”; “The Men Who Stare At Goats” and “Up In The Air” will both be showing, while other festival favorites from 2009 including “The Informant!,” “Bright Star,” “An Education,” Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s “Micmacs” and “The Road” will all be making appearances, alongside Clive Owen vehicle “The Boys Are Back” and Atom Egoyan’s “Chloe.” Similarly, big Cannes movies like “The White Ribbon,” “A Prophet,” “Mother” and “Enter The Void” get their U.K. premieres (all of which we’re dying to catch).
Most, if not all, of these films, have already received great notices, but it’s in the U.K. and the world cinema strands that we see are of some of the unknown quantities, which have the potential to really surprise. “44 Inch Chest,” from the writers of “Sexy Beast,” features an outstanding cast including Ray Winstone, John Hurt, Ian McShane and Tom Wilkinson, and the brief preview clip we saw earlier looked great — Winstone, on the brink of consciousness in a wrecked room, as Harry Nilsson’s “Without You” played out. There’s also cult-movie-in-waiting “Bunny & The Bull,” from “Mighty Boosh” director Paul King, which the producers describe as ” ‘Withnail & I’ for the mentally ill”, coming-of-age picture “The Scouting Book For Boys”, from hotly tipped shorts director Tom Harper, and documentary “American: The Bill Hicks Story.”
There’s over 150 films in the line-up, and we’ve barely scratched the surface, so we’ll come back and do a most anticipated list, like our Toronto piece, in a couple of days. But other stuff that has caught our eye include “Oil City Confidential,” a new Julien Temple documentary on pub-rock bands, “No One Knows about Persian Cats,” from Iranian director Bhaman Ghobadi (“Turtles Can Fly”), about a band in Tehran, and new films from Claire Denis (“White Material”), Patric Chereau, Jacques Rivette and Cristian Mungiu. You can have a look over the line-up for yourself here, and if you’ve seen anything you reckon we should check out, let us know — if all goes well, we’ll be covering the festival for the first time.
The downsides? Many of the screenings have moved from the traditional home of the Odeon West End, to the much smaller Vue cinema, and the (very) brief clip we saw of “Nowhere Boy” didn’t really fill us with confidence. But we’ve got faith in Sam-Taylor Wood, after her ace short “Love You More,” so fingers crossed…