12 films to look out for at the London Film Festival
The London Film Festival is back for 2021 and, now that we can finally return to the cinema after a long hiatus, there's no better time to rediscover your love of the silver screen.
From October 6 to 17, cinemas around London (and, for many films, in cities across the UK and on BFI Player), will play host to some of the most-lauded and highly anticipated films of the year. This year’s festival will screen 159 feature films, deliberately less that the 220-plus of previous years. Most of the red carpet galas and special presentations will take place at the Royal Festival Hall, which boasts an 18-metre-screen.
This year, there are also more female filmmakers represented in the gala than ever before. From Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut with The Lost Daughter to Julie Diarcanau’s body-horror Titane, we're excited to see more diverse and often sidelined voices take centre stage.
Here, we round up the movies we are most anticipating from the film festival schedule this year, ranging from lesbian nun thrillers to modern Westerns and biopics of the world’s most cherished figures. The 2021 London Film Festival truly has something for all tastes.
1/ Spencer
The Chilean Director Pablo Larraín has always been fascinated by women restrained by societal institutions and their acts of defiance in the face of oppression. He brought us the spectacular portrayal of First Lady Kennedy by Natalie Portman in the eponymous Jackie, where it is impossible to forget the image of Portman’s tear-stained face and bloodstained hosiery. Spencer, Larraín’s poetic exposition on Princess Diana, shares a common theme with Jackie: they both highlight the unbearable demands made on famous women to perform an illusion of austere, wifely perfection. In the public eye, they appear to have it all, yet Larraín exposes their opulent homes to be nothing more than golden cages. Kristen Stewart delivers a fantastic portrait of a woman struggling to gather all the pieces of herself together, agonised and claustrophobic in her royal home. Infused with dream sequences and ghostly visions of Anne Boleyn, Spencer defies the expectations of the biopic genre with staccato bursts of surrealism, blurring fiction and fact to empathise with its enigmatic and tragic subject, Diana Spencer. Kristen Stewart is already rumoured to be an Oscar contender for her unforgettable performance.
2/ Titane
Only the second film directed by a woman to ever win the Palme D’Or, Julia Ducournau’s Titane is serving us a juicy dish of feminist body-horror. Following her debut cannibal-coming-of-age horror, Raw, her second film further uses the human body as a vessel to deconstruct traditional concepts of gender, sexuality and kinship. From the beginning it’s difficult to ascertain what kind of film Titane is; it is not only genre-bending but gender-bending as we follow Alexia, our gender fluid anti-hero who goes from being a female stripper gyrating atop sports cars, to pretending to be the long-lost son of firefighter captain Vincent (Vincent Lindon). Despite the blood and gore of the film, there is also surprisingly, an underlying tenderness. Ducournau considers the fundamental questions concerning human connection through her portrayal of two complex and damaged people, who, despite their misgivings, form a bond akin to father and son, transcending familial bonds for a unique form of kinship.
3/ King Richard
Most sports films document the raw talent of its stars. King Richard is instead about the phenomenal determination of one man, Richard Williams, the father of Venus and Serena Williams. Will Smith gives a brilliant performance as a controlling and meticulous man fighting to take his daughters from the streets of Compton to the global stage as legendary tennis icons. The power of the film lies in its consideration of where the Williams family came from, and how Richard grovelled to achieve recognition for his two daughters, a dream for himself as much as for them. King Richard rethinks the sports movie clichés and plays against our expectations.
4/ The Power of the Dog
In 1993, Jane Campion made history as the first woman to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes Film Festival for her haunting period drama, The Piano. She is now back with her eighth feature, The Power of the Dog, shot in her native New Zealand. A slow-burning psychodrama and a modernist Western in equal measure, Campion transcends a definitive genre and instead focuses on the simmering tensions between brothers Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch) and George (Jesse Plemons) who vie for the affections of the beautiful Rose (Kirsten Dunst). It is the year 1925 and the brothers have spent their whole lives with each other, in the wild mountains of Montana, presiding over a sprawling property on which they are successful ranchers raising livestock. Yet, they could not be more different. Cumberbatch takes on the task of playing the brilliant antihero, a force of nature, a man who has carefully curated a persona of intimidation, demanding the attention of all those around him. Campion’s study of toxic masculinity eschews the loud and the brash and instead focuses on the ever-tightening lasso of fear that a single man can hold. Campion’s film is a striking meditation on a tense period of change, of a world fighting against modernity. Here, men grasp futilely at the Western dream, while the world keeps moving forward into modernity.
5/ The Lost Daughter
Elena Ferrante took the world of literature by storm with her classic novel My Brilliant Friend which was then adapted beautifully into a series in 2018, becoming an excellent show in its own right. Now, Maggie Gyllenhaal makes her directorial debut with another Ferrante novel, The Lost Daughter. Remember when Gyllenhaal was told that she was too old to play the love interest of a 55-year-old man at 37? Well, with this film, 47-year-old Olivia Colman is front and centre as Gyllenhaal’s star. Colman portrays a divorced academic, who goes on a solo Italian holiday after her children move away. Although she enjoys the tranquillity of her sunny solitude, she slowly becomes enraptured by the lives of another family, drawing comparisons with her own experiences of motherhood. Gyllenhaal was lauded for her directorial feature at the Venice Film Festival - she really can do it all.
6/ The Harder They Fall
Opening the London Film Festival is the highly anticipated Western The Harder They Fall, featuring a predominantly Black cast (a star-studded line-up consisting of Idris Elba, Zazie Beetz, Lakeith Stanfield, Regina King and Da 5 Bloods duo Jonathan Majors and Delroy Lindo), directed by Londoner Jeymes Samuel and produced by Shawn Carter (otherwise known as Jay-Z). The Harder They Fall nods to the past yet comes with a new perspective altogether as it chronicles the blood feud between two rival gangs. Jeymes Samuel looks to the heritage of Black westerns which have always existed on the margins of mainstream (predominantly white) Westerns. Race movies and indie films made for Black audiences during the Jim Crow era were often Westerns, and Samuel reconsiders this crucial aspect of film history to give recognition and unearth a true cinematic representation of the Old West.
7/ Benedetta
A ‘lesbian nun thriller’ is right up director Paul Verhoeven’s street following his taboo-breaking films, Basic Instinct and Elle. Benedetta was inspired by the true story of a 17th-century mystic Abbess, Benedetta Calini, who was chastised for having visions of Jesus and for being a lesbian. This taboo affair became one of modern Western civilisation’s earliest documented instances of lesbianism after a parish scrivener documented it in his diary with curiously meticulous detail. Throughout Benedetta, Verhoeven interweaves a titillating combination of camp catholic iconoclasm (what a Met Gala throwback), unabashed erotic visions and masochism, all emphasising the significance of the female body which constantly occupies the central position of power.
8/ Last Night in Soho
An Edgar Wright film is not to be missed and in 2021, he brings us two of them. Wright’s wonderful music documentary The Sparks Brothers graced our screens earlier this year and now, his highly anticipated psychological thriller is arriving on the big screen in London this October. Last Night in Soho is a paean to both the kitchen sink dramas and Italian giallo horror movies of the 1960s, combining the chaotic, the comic and the creepy. Aspiring fashion student Ellie (Thomasin McKenzie) moves to London's Soho from Cornwall hoping to make it in the city. Yet, as she explores the nightlife, the city is transported back in time to the swinging sixties where we meet the beautiful, charismatic Sandy (Anya Taylor-Joy). Moving between two timelines, from the past to the present, Wright unveils a darker side of London, lit by lurid colours and accompanied by a nostalgia-infused '60s soundtrack. It is not to be missed.
9/ Faya Dayi
Jessica Beshir’s documentary is a lyrical exposition of an Ethiopia in flux, searching for escape, whether it be through the spiritual high of khat, the country’s most lucrative produce, or a look across the seas to search for new possibilities away from home. Historically, Sufi Imams chewed the khat leaf in pursuit of eternity. Recently, the stimulant has surpassed coffee as the biggest export of Ethiopia, consumed for its chemical high. Shot in black and white, Faya Dadi envelops its viewers in a slow-moving, trance-like motion, almost like the effects of khat itself. The director renders the complexities of life with the gentlest strokes composed from a monochromatic palette.
10/ The Tragedy of Macbeth
A tale as old as time, a tragedy of ambition and cunning, Shakespeare’s play Macbeth is a study of the human condition. Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand star in Joel Coen’s fierce adaptation - the first film directed by one of the Coen brothers without the other involved. McDormand, of course, is Joel Coen’s wife, and she takes centre stage as Lady Macbeth, fresh off her best actress Oscar win for Nomadland. In an Instagram Live discussion last year, the actress stressed the importance of this adaptation where the Macbeths are older: “We’re postmenopausal, we’re past childbearing age. So that puts a pressure on their ambition to have the crown. I think the most important distinction is that it is their last chance for glory.” This adaptation delivers a nuanced reconsideration of Lady Macbeth’s personal ambitions, considering the burden of legacy as a woman.
11/ The Worst Person in the World
Joachim Trier is known for his chilling thriller Thelma and dark drama Oslo, August 31st, so it came as something of a surprise when he turned his hand to a heart-warming comedy with touches of Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach. An anti-romcom of sorts, The Worst Person in the World follows Julie (Renate Reinsve), a twentysomething woman trying to figure out her life, terrified by the seemingly endless and increasingly irreversible choices that come with adulthood. At first, she is determined to be a doctor, then she decides to change to psychology, before switching once more to become a photographer. She meets men, dates them, dumps them, meets more and so the cycle goes. The film is a paean to the unrest and indecision which accompany these fundamentally unanswerable questions: who should you fall in love with? Does ‘the one’ exist? Who am I? Profound yet hilarious, Trier’s film encapsulates an experience that is seemingly so singular yet universal all at once.
12/ Succession
It is almost unheard of for a film festival to premiere a TV show, yet Succession finds itself unveiling the first two episodes of Season 3 on the big screen this year - a clear indication of how highly regarded the series is. Logan Roy is back, playing an even more twisted power game with his offspring in the award-winning series about our favourite dysfunctional family. Here, the line between TV and film becomes even more blurred as we see the series unfurl cinematically, screened with hundreds of other people in the audience.
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