Once again the BFI LFF managed to pull together (most of) the best of the year’s festival highlights into one accessible package. Sure, as a late-cycle entrant this is n’t the place for huge numbers of global premieres, but very few festivals deliver as much concentrated quality as the LFF. With that in mind, let’s run through our top 20 films from the festival, and then discuss a few quality also-rans.
Top of the pile is Evil Does not Exist, another wonderful offering from one of the most intriguing directors working in cinema today. Some considered it slight – we disagree, this touches on a universe of important issues, a world of implications and possibilities. Hamaguchi sets himself free from the more obvious festival-pleasing gestures of his previous work. The light touch that comes from working fast from a mote of inspiration (a music video project led quickly to this feature idea) lets the material breathe and live. Hurrah!
LFF 2023 Top 20
1. Evil Does Not Exist (dir: Hamaguchi)
Transcendent, funny, enigmatic, sublime.
2. The Zone of Interest (Glazer)
Roy Andersson meets Hannah Arendt in Jonathan Glazer’s crisp, clipped observation of a well-ordered nightmare of evil. Incredible sound design. Monsters in plain sight; their monstrosities peeking at you from the edge of the frame.
3. Poor Things (Lanthimos)
This sci-fi-fantasy-horror-satire of self-realisation is even better a second time around. (And Ruffalo should do more comedy, he’s such a hoot.)
4. Do Not Expect Too Much From The End Of The World (Jude)
That’s Doctor Uwe Boll to you.
5. Killers of the Flower Moon (Scorsese)
Loved so much of this, but to pick out one thing… what an incredible choice of coda. Also… Lily Gladstone supremacy.
6. Red Rooms (Plante)
Scratching that Girl In The Spider’s Web itch very nicely. Such assured direction…. c’est cinema. Tres disturbing.
7. All Of Us Strangers (Haigh)
Much open weeping at the festival screening. Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal incredible. Jamie Bell and Claire Foy wonderful. Destroyed.
8. May December (Haynes)
Wry, sleazy drama with some definite DePalma and late-period Verhoeven DNA in there. Feels like the Julianne Moore of Maps To The Stars, too.
9. The Boy And The Heron (Miyazaki)
Very entertaining moment-by-moment, but it really started to hit home right at the end when I realised it was a parable of postwar Japanese reconstruction and buried guilt,
10. How To Have Sex (Manning-Walker)
It’s so incredible, but too rare, to see working class British teens portrayed so freshly, and not trapped in some well-meaning 1990s terrace-house child services drama, or sitcom-level comedy, or whatnot. This reminded me more of Girlhood. Real life, sensitively told.
11. Late Night with The Devil (Cairnes & Cairnes)
Playful, ominous, funny live broadcast/found footage horror with a GREAT climax. Aside from lead actor Dastmalchian, the MVP is Ingrid Torelli as the possessed girl brought out as the broadcast’s centrepiece. Spooky & hilarious, all the film’s best aspects distilled into one performance.
12. The Holdovers (Payne)
Holds its own against Payne’s Sideways, and very recommendable to various people I know who, for example, read the New Yorker and whatnot.
13. Saltburn (Fennell)
An enjoyably superficial remix of The Talented Mr Ripley. I can see why they cast Barry Keoghan as the Joker.
14. Monster (Hamaguchi)
The real monster was the friends we made along the way.
15. Birth/Rebirth (Moss)
A single mother’s mourning for her dead daughter is complicated with a rogue morgue technician steals her body. But for what end? A great approach on the mad doctor trope, which so rarely gets a female spin as it does here.
16. The Killer (Fincher)
Fincher’s new thriller takes a stripped back, propulsive narrative, adds a steely performance from Fassbender (present in every scene, often on his own) and tight smart use of framing, blocking, editing and sound design to deliver a technical masterclass in focused genre craftsmanship. it also has the best one-on-one brawl of the year.
17. Hitman (Linklater)
A lot of fun, sexy, playful… just a good time in the cinema. And with Jungian themes, too! Psychologically and philosophically, I approve.
18. Cobweb (Kim)
A total love letter to Korean genre cinema of the 60s & 70s (especially The Housemaid (1960) and Woman of Fire (1972), plus The Devil’s Stairway (1964)). Your patience for the sometimes broad backstage farce elements may vary, but I had a rum old time. (Also, one of the actors is described as having had an affair with “Kim Jin-hee”. That was last year, he grumbles.)
19. Shayda (Niasari)
Superb performances across the board, but particularly from Zar Amir Ebrahimi. This post-divorce drama/thriller, in which a woman and her child are threatened by her ex-husband, orchestrates its tension very well.
20. Animalia (Alaoui)
If you see one 2023 movie about religious faith in the face of an apocalypse, see this – not Knock At The Cabin.
Other recommended films:
20,000 Species of Bees, Anselm, Apolonia Apolonia, Eileen, Europa, Fallen Leaves, Fancy Dance, Ferrari, Fingernails, Hoard, Lost In The Night, Maestro, Nyad, Perfect Days, Priscilla, Robot Dreams, The Royal Hotel, Scala!, Sky Peals, Tiger Stripes, Vincent Must Die.
(Biggest Disappointment: Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast. A huge misfire – a collection of half-baked themes and knock-off ideas that utterly failed to cohere. Being the guy behind Nocturama and Zombi Child, Bonello can’t help but be intermittently interesting – but this scattershot mess is emphatically Not It. If you’re going to close with a rip-off of Twin Peaks The Return, you have to do better than this.)
The London Film Festival ran from October 4 to 15.
Whitlock&Pope 