LFF2018

PiggyI’ve always been a fan of films and TV series’ that depict the experience of being a teenager through the lens of horror. Being a teenager often sucks, and horror has always existed, at least in part, to help us parse and process parts of our lives we don’t like or don’t want to confront. Piggy starts in this place, with an overweight teenage girl going for a swim, only to be spotted and targeted for some pretty vicious bullying...

CatcallsAfter flashing a couple of teenage girls, a man gets more than he bargained for in this well made horror from Kate Dolan. Like a lot of shorts, Catcalls feels a bit more like a scene from a feature that might be in its director’s future than a truly self-contained eight minute story, but that’s no bad thing in this case. Catcalls fits right in with not just the rising tide of female, and indeed feminist, driven horror but with...

When his beloved wife Mandy (Andrea Riseborough) is murdered in front of him by a gang of ‘Jesus freak’ bikers on industrial strength LSD, Red Miller (Nicolas Cage) goes on a rage, booze and drug fuelled rampage of bloody revenge. Just look at that summary. How cool does that sound? I should love this. I should be shouting from the rooftops that it’s a hallucinatory new exploitation classic that can stand with the best of the recent tributes to the...

The Guilty A few years ago, I said that the acclaimed Locke was essentially radio. Set entirely in a car, with its protagonist having telephone conversations as he drives on into the night, it struck me as something that, whatever its other qualities, imparted nothing extra to us by being presented in a visual format. The Guilty is set entirely in an emergency call centre as Asger Holm (Jakob Cedergren), bored by being tied to a desk job, is finally...

True crime is big business at the moment. Documentaries like Making a Murderer, Casting Jonbenet and The Staircase and podcasts like Sword and Scale, Generation Why and Casefile generate large audiences and discussion. There are though certain crimes that transcend the regular true crime audience and pass into the wider pop culture consciousness. The murder of Abby and Andrew Borden, allegedly by Andrew’s daughter Lizzie, is one of those crimes. Since her trial ended in acquittal in 1892 there have...

Set in the town of Salem, Assassination Nation is a dystopian fantasy about the consequences for four high school girls when their town goes into meltdown, after half of its residents have their text messages and emails hacked and released on to the internet. Because everything is terrible now, we don’t have to look far into fantasy for our dystopian nightmares. The hacking a few years ago of private celebrity photos and the monitoring of prominent people’s phone messages by,...

Bisbee ‘17Reality, in any sense wider than the confines of the frame, is something cinema can never truly capture. Even in the purest of non-fiction films, there is a starting and stopping point and the question of how the very presence of a camera alters the reality it observes. Robert Greene is a documentarian who isn’t particularly interested in the purity of reality, rather, with Kate Plays Christine and now with Bisbee ‘17, he likes to look at how replaying...

ShadowZhang Yimou’s three previous martial arts films have been explosions of both colour and action. Whatever else you thought of them, they were retina-searing spectacles of the highest order. Shadow sees Yimou returning to martial arts cinema, but with a very different aesthetic. The story manages to be simple yet convoluted, revolving round the town of Jing, which the kingdom of Pei also claims the right to. The King of Pei (Ryan Zheng) is outraged that his top military commander...

To kick off this year's London Film Festival coverage, we're trying something new for TLE. In this audio preview, I sat down with lapsed critic, fellow film fanatic and my friend Timothy E Raw. We went through the programme and picked one film each from every section to discuss (and sometimes argue about). Over these couple of hours we discussed 32 of the more than 200 films that will be showing across London venues from the 10th to the 21st...