London Film Festival 2023: top 10 highlights
It was a packed year for the London Film Festival 2023, which embraced Emerald Fennell, Martin Scorsese, Sofia Coppola and David Fincher. Here's our top 10 favourites from the festival
10. The Beast, dir. Bertrand Bonello (Cult Strand) [STAR:3]
It’s important to express straight away: this critic is so happy that films like The Beast exist. They challenge your clarity, your perception, and your ideas of how a story can and should proceed. Director Bertrand Bonello roars with a volume of alienation usually present in the best artists and the worst imitators. With this film, Bonello is neither the best nor the worst – he's somewhere in between.
He draws on the mysterious dystopian spaces of David Cronenberg and throws them into the dream-logic spasms of David Lynch. It's a disparate mould of a continuum that doesn’t quite work, never matching the zenith qualities of either David, but Bonello lunges forward with gripping fervency and self-belief. Eventually, you’re eager (if exhausted) to take this bizarre journey with him.
Photo: LFF
9. The Killer, dir. David Fincher (Headline Gala) [STAR:4]
David Fincher has often looked away from his bloody and macabre lens on humanity. Examples like The Social Network and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button proved to be more than side experiments; they're even lauded as some of his best work. But as with a lot of established auteurs, there’s a certain salivation for what made Fincher famous: i.e., the insurgents and murderers that have bled across his oeuvre via Seven, Fight Club, Zodiac and Gone Girl.
Strangely, despite his latest film The Killer slaking that cinematic thirst for blood, it's hardly a competitor. The Netflix revenge-thriller about a disillusioned hitman feels more like a side project than any of his side projects. But don’t fret: whisked into his usual grey/yellow colour palette, Fincher’s gross, bleak and detailed storytelling remains untarnished.
Photo: Netflix
8. How to Have Sex, dir. Molly Manning Walker (Journey Strand) [STAR:4]
'I can’t die a virgin,' says the teenage Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce) after landing in Malia with her besties Skye (Lara Peake) and Em (Enva Lewis). Like Ibiza and Magaluf, this sweaty place is a Mediterranean party town – seemingly designed for drunk tourists to cause havoc under high temperatures and heavy neon lights. In the summer after taking their GCSEs, these British girls venture into Malia’s hedonistic, all-consuming haze that barely allows for a decent night’s sleep.
For those of us who were never cool enough to embark on these trips, How to Have Sex resembles a confirmational guide to the rank and dank and filth of repulsive youth. And this is where the loud but clearly reluctant Tara wants to lose her virginity, or feels compelled to.
Photo: MUBI
7. Maestro, dir. Bradley Cooper (Headline Gala) [STAR:4]
There are three prominent reasons you should be sceptical of Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein biopic Maestro. Cooper’s ‘Jewface’ prosthetic nose is currently dividing the Jewish community. The casting of white British actor Carey Mulligan as Bernstein’s Latin-American wife Felicia Montealegre has been seen as whitewashing. And Cooper’s previous film A Star is Born was an overrated melodrama, leaving little anticipation for his follow-up… Okay, that last one was just this critic’s experience, but the controversy remains.
However, as this spirited and curious examination of the legendary composer/conductor proceeds, you have to admit: Cooper does a decent job.
Photo: Netflix
6. Priscilla, dir. Sofia Coppola (Special Presentation) [STAR:4]
There's a certain fear and hesitancy when considering the story of Elvis and Priscilla Presley. Because they met when she was 14 and he was 24, the debate of historical contexts versus modern sensibilities always disrupts the nuances of what really happened. It's a tricky tale to tell in a post-#MeToo landscape. That's why Sofia Coppola's ambitious biopic Priscilla feels daring.
Coppola is too intelligent a filmmaker to opt for black-and-white portrayals that make abused women into helpless damsels and abusive men into ogres of toxicity. Instead, she observes from Priscilla's mindset – how she felt, how she saw things – shaving away the retrospective right and wrong. Dangling in this difficult territory, in which the King of rock 'n' roll has big groomer energy, the film provides a delicate, honest and empowering portrait of Priscilla’s journey from naïve girl to independent woman.
Photo: Apple
5. The Zone of Interest, dir. Jonathan Glazer (Special Presentation) [STAR:4]
Imagine a house, two storeys high. It has a large garden, populated with sunflowers and vegetables. An ostensibly idyllic family lives there: father, mother, kids, a baby and a dog. If they weren’t speaking German, you might mistake the sight for picture-postcard American suburbia. And then: the father, Commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Heidel), emerges in his Nazi uniform. Instead of a white picket fence, the property is bordered by a tall grey wall – beyond which stand the brick buildings of Auschwitz.
This is the tangible absurdity of Jonathan Glazer’s new film The Zone of Interest, loosely based on the 2014 novel by Martin Amis. The environment is almost Lynchian in its disparity: strolling across the threshold of the worst horror in human history. You can hear the screams and shouts of disorder. Kids play as gunshots snap in the distance. Smoke and flames erupt from a crematorium chimney, visible from the garden.
The film relaxes into this eerie liminal space that isn’t properly acknowledged by the characters, like a 100-minute act of amoral disassociation.
Photo: A24
4. Killers of the Flower Moon, dir. Martin Scorsese (Headline Gala) [STAR:4]
These days, consumed by the brilliance of television, films that surpass the three-hour mark are becoming harder to justify. Extended runtimes either sanctify the good films or turn the bad ones into instruments of torture.
But the gamble nevertheless results in a buzz; taking you back to the grand epics of old, minus the classical overtures and interludes. Even more so when it's a three-and-a-half-hour project directed and co-written by maestro filmmaker Martin Scorsese, one of a small number you can trust to create a decent long movie. Killers of the Flower Moon weaves a spacious, immersive world of wealthy Native Americans, greedy white men and quiet genocide that eats those hours away.
Admittedly, 206 minutes is too much and Scorsese’s lifetime editor Thelma Schoonmaker is strangely reluctant to trim the film around the edges. At the same time, the characters – deplorable and innocent – hold you by the collar and lift you to inescapable heights.
Photo: Apple
3. Poor Things, dir. Yorgos Lanthimos (Headline Gala) [STAR:4]
The weird, the freaky and the fantastical are some of the most vital properties in art. They make you look at the real world with sliced vision, vivifying the pixie dust between tarmac and concrete. Even if you’re left speechless by the end of Yorgos Lanthimos’s adult, anatomical fairytale Poor Things, its shapes and colours and spectacular syntax superimpose themselves on your reality and enrich it.
Since emerging from the Greek Weird Wave film movement, Lanthimos has earned cult status with his surrealist English-language films The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer before turning down the bafflement (if only a little) for The Favourite. Poor Things returns the volume to where it was, but with a larger studio budget usually unthinkable for a film so bizarre and sexual.
The film tells of a dead woman brought back to life with a child’s brain, transplanted by the physically scarred Dr Godwin ‘God’ Baxter (Willem Dafoe) who’s openly derided by the ableist Victorian society. With a developed body and an infantile mind, Bella Baxter (an electrifying Emma Stone, perhaps her best role to date) lives among hybrid creatures like chicken-dogs in the doctor’s vast, scientific abode.
Photo: Searchlight Pictures
2. Saltburn, dir. Emerald Fennell (Opening Night Gala) [STAR:5]
Writer/director Emerald Fennell broke into filmmaking with the divisive and much-discussed Promising Young Woman in 2020. It was a dark, amusing and uncomfortable triumph for revenge thrillers and post-#MeToo dramas, revealing an audacious new voice in cinema.
Fennell transplants many of those qualities to her new project Saltburn, a second feature that not only matches her film debut but outgrows it. Returning to the shores of Great Britain, she tells a strange, gothic tale of extreme social climbing that straddles the funny, the satirical, the disturbing and the kinky.
Barry Keoghan wields a gripping, mysterious face as the lead character Oliver Quick, in the Oxford University Class of '06. At first, he's shy, alienated from the aristocratic elite. Voyeuristically, he stares at them from afar but doesn’t engage. Even his lecturer (Reece Shearsmith) dislikes him because he has no nepotistic advantages. As the film continues, the contradictions start to flow: Oliver is awkward but firm; innocent yet duplicitous; humble and desirous; virginal and sexually assertive.
Photo: Amazon
1. All of Us Strangers, dir. Andrew Haigh (Headline Gala) [STAR:5]
The concept of ghosts summarises two unanswerable conditions of human nature: the fear of death and the desire for immortality. These are devices favoured by horror movies and stories by torchlight, telling of phantoms that bump into and scream at and prey on the living. But in Andrew Haigh’s seductively somnambulant All of Us Strangers, the ghosts are kind, concerned and inviting.
They’re the dead parents of Adam (Andrew Scott), a lonely 40-something screenwriter working on a new project that dives into his own past. This process inspires a visit to his family home. After a walk through the park, he meets with his dad (Jamie Bell) and, later, his mum (Claire Foy). They’re not smothered in blood, they don’t whisper his name down narrow corridors, and they harbour no ill will in the slightest. They just have a chat.
Such is the moving, nostalgic unreality of the film, reaching into autobiography as much as metaphysics. Haigh modifies the original novel by Taichi Yamada, inserting his own personal story – even the house is the filmmaker's actual family home. Scenes proceed as if in the thrum of a deep dream: elliptical, impossible and persuasive. Jamie Ramsay’s beautifully expressionistic cinematography moves through a labyrinth of psychological pictures, drifting between the real and the fabricated. By the end, you wonder if there’s a difference.
Photo: Searchlight Pictures