Festival Coverage

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As part for the BFI’s London Film Festival, The London Economic had the chance to catch up with directors Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz to talk to us about their upcoming film The Peanut Butter Falcon.

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★★★★☆ Taiwanese director Midi Z’s Nina Wu tackles the theme of predatory male behaviour and exploitation of female bodies in the film industry. The screenplay, co-written with lead actress Ke-Xi Wu, does not pull any punches. Going soft on the audience would hinder the uncompromising message at the heart of the story. Make no mistake, this is a difficult watch. Yet disturbing art can educate and inform, as much as shock our sensibilities. Midi Z and Ke-Xi Wu, though, are...

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Xavier Dolan is known as a child of Cannes. He is feted at the world’s leading film festival like few directors have ever known. 2014’s Mommy earned him the Jury Prize (which he shared with Jean-Luc Godard) and It’s Only the End of the World picked up 2016’s Grand Prix, from George Miller’s controversial jury, despite it being savaged by critics on the Croisette. His follow-up, The Life and Death of John F. Donovan, which...

★★★★☆ Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho) is long-term unemployed and festering at home. He makes a bit of money folding pizza boxes for a local restaurant, helped by his two teenaged kids and wife, but their living conditions are dire and the future looks decidedly bleak. Rough and uncouth this family might be, but when Ki-taek’s son, Ki-woo (Woo Shik Choi) lands a well-paid gig, fraudulently posing as a qualified English tutor to a high school girl from a posh family, things...

★★★★★ Two young women – sisters – are walking in a woodland. One loses track of the other. She calls out, hoping to find her. Karim Aïnouz’s Brazilian melodrama begins with a mood of ill-ease beautifully complemented by high-contrast, soft focus, 16mm cinematography, lending the opening scene a dreamlike sense of portent or bad omen. If your Spidey senses are tingling, in this regard, they’re accurate enough. Set in 1950s Rio de Janeiro, Euridice (Carol Duarte) and Guida (Julia Stockler)...

★★★★☆ Kantemir Balagov returns to Festival de Cannes’ Un Certain Regard programme for a second time with Beanpole (2019), a haunting post-WW2 drama where two former soldiers who served on the front in a female combat unit are reunited. The young cineaste portrays, with deft skill, themes of submission and domination, repressed desires and manipulative tendencies underpinning acts of friendship. It’s 1946 and Mother Russia is getting back on her feet, after years fighting the Nazis. At a hospital in...