Kirese Narinesingh reviews Robert Eggers’ acclaimed new film. 

This review contains minor spoilers.

At one point in The Lighthouse, Robert Pattinson’s forlorn, spiritually exhausted character finally kills a bothersome seagull in an outburst of fury and violence, smashing it against the ground vigorously until nothing remains but its feathers and a broken body. The scene leaves the audience visually arrested, unable to move; a type of paralysis only achieved by the work of a director who knows what true horror is, and whose films actively reinvent the genre.

The Lighthouse takes place in 19th-century Maine, set against a harsh landscape of fog and interminable waves that crash onto the lighthouse’s rocks. The endless stream of noise deeply perturbs Pattinson’s Ephraim, while Willem Defoe’s rugged veteran lighthouse keeper, Thomas Wake, is humorously unaffected. Wake seems to have walked straight out of Moby Dick, possessing the nonsensical speech and ridiculous antics of a nineteenth century seaman. The dynamic first appears as no more than “gloomy, quiet youngster meets swashbuckling pirate,” but slowly develops into much more, as the unlikely pair are fated to spend four weeks together in isolation. The film’s premise immediately evokes Bergman’s Persona, with its similar feature of two protagonists on a deserted landscape, one of who becomes increasingly neurotic.

Director Robert Eggers seems to realize this particular situation can go anyway he wants; all creative directions are explored, culminating in a genre-defying blend of horror, comedy and psychological drama. 

The film slowly devolves into a dance of unadulterated madness. As both characters learn to coexist, with Ephraim admittedly bearing the brunt of this encounter—he is forced to put up with Wake’s endless stream of farting—they seem to grow increasingly mad. Ephraim’s madness is more pronounced, as he spends his days tormented by a certain seagull, constantly sexually frustrated and masturbating to a small relic of a mermaid. The pitiful performance is masterfully executed, with Pattinson managing to hold his own against an actor of Willem Defoe’s stature.

Defoe’s character Wake, however, may be the key to the film’s madness; he certainly incites it.  It’s not that evident at first (or maybe it is, in retrospect) that he might be slightly off, but this slowly changes. Defoe plays the role brilliantly, crafting a madness comprised of bursts of clarity amidst the insanity. He ironically warns Ephraim of the dangers of teetering madness, encouraging him to drink to stave it off, yet simultaneously imposes one unbreakable rule that causes the tension to turn into madness: the lamp at the top of the lighthouse is off-limits. It seems such a trivial thing, but for Ephraim, the lamp becomes a feverish, infectious obsession that Wake passes on to his apprentice. Eggers’ most interesting scenes come forth in these interactions, where the madness of each man seems to intersect and merge, their circumstances producing depravity, dramatic outbursts, and creative insults laced with deep frustration.

Can you blame them for going mad? They’re the only two real characters in the whole movie.  Yet it still begs the question of what exactly causes this madness to escalate—is it the barren landscape of the lighthouse, with its burning light and deafening foghorn, or the intense claustrophobia? The film is shot in black and white, allowing Eggers to ironically expand his palette by playing with and revitalizing the nuances of early horror cinema. Similar to films like Persona and The Innocents, the director uses the subtle greyness to explore a descent into the abyss of psycho-sexual neuroses.

Can we consider this a horror film? If so, this is Robert Eggers’ second foray into the genre. His first film, The Witch, was just as grounded in authenticity, with characters left to their own devices. But this film is evidently a different beast. The source of horror is left completely unseen and only hinted at throughout the film: is it the ominous, ubiquitous seagull, or the dream/nightmare of the mermaid, who tantalizingly and mockingly haunts Pattinson’s sexuality?

The Lighthouse has all the exciting suspense and whiplash thrills of horror, but I am still hesitant at the idea of firmly rooting it within the genre. The film feels like more than conventional horror, comprising a mixture of drama and psychological thrills, its protagonists proving more terrifying than any external force. There is no true supernatural entity; only two lonely men on a deserted island left to their own devices.

Once again, I watched Robert Eggers not only exceed but obliterate the expectations that come with making and releasing a horror film, and I enjoyed every minute of it.

The Lighthouse will be released in the United Kingdom on 31 January 2020 and is also showing at CINECITY 2019 in Brighton this November. Check out the trailer below: 

Editor KC Wingert reviews Michael Caton-Jones’ female-led film at BFI LFF 2019. 

The Scottish comedy Our Ladies made its world premiere on Friday, 4^th October, as part of the BFI London Film Festival. Given the popularity and critical success of the Alan Warner novel on which Our Ladies is based—which also spawned a West End musical adaptation from Lee Hall (Rocketman, Billy Elliot)—the film bills itself as a hilariously entertaining romp, documenting a day in the lives of five schoolgirls from the Scottish Highlands. Set in the mid-‘90s, Our Ladies could be an ode to navigating raging hormones and desperate crushes similar to Ten Things I Hate About You or a touching coming-of-age story á la Lady Bird. Unfortunately, Our Ladies is not on par with these nostalgic genre classics, missing a few of the key features that make its mid-‘90s teen comedy companions so great.

Orla, Fionnula, Kylah, Rachell, and Amanda are the self-proclaimed “partiers” of their Catholic school’s choir. They’re all completely obsessed with sex, gossiping about who’s shagged whom the entire bus ride down to a choir competition in Edinburgh. The girls make plans to spend the day drinking, shopping, and finding men to sleep with before their big performance that evening. However, as tensions among them unexpectedly begin to rise, they split off from each other, embarking on their own Edinburgh adventures.

Not all of these girls are as experienced as their open attitudes towards sex imply. Orla (Tallulah Greive), for instance, begins the film praying to a portrait of Jesus hung in her room that she might have sex that evening because, unlike Jesus’ mother, she “doesn’t want to be a virgin her whole life.” Fionnula (Abigail Lawrie), on the other hand, has slept with plenty of guys, but what she’d really like is to sleep with a girl—one of the few secrets she keeps from her friends. With womanhood fast approaching, the girls are forced to think hard about their futures perhaps for the first time, and the conclusions to which they begin to come make them realise they may have less in common with each other than they thought. For some of them, the thought of being a teen mum and staying in their small Highland town forever is the dream—while others in the group look upon that attitude with derision.

Though these characters’ separate journeys are entertaining to watch and elicit several genuine laughs, they get in the way of a cohesive plot. In fact, a lot of the characters’ actions feel less like they have narrative purpose and more like they’ve been shoved in as a punchline. The narrative structure of Our Ladies feels awkward and ham-fisted right down to the corny, character-by-character epilogues.

(Can I please take a brief moment to say how much I hate epilogues in fiction films? If this character’s future isn’t important enough to merit a sequel, it’s not important enough to show an inspirational music-backed freezeframe of that fictional character’s face with some text telling us where they fictionally moved after leaving their fictional hometown and what kind of fictional job they have, in this work of FICTION).

Our Ladies’ queer subplot ends on a triumphant note that feels wholly unearned, and the entire main conflict of the film is ameliorated with a hackneyed kumbaya moment after which everyone just carries on as usual. There’s even a random, inexplicable musical number written in, which feels out of place in a film that otherwise seems to be making an attempt at gritty realism. The final act simply devolves into a bunch of jokey bits that are meant to be funny but because of the subject matter—underage girls getting involved with older men—are actually just very uncomfortable to watch.

A good coming-of-age film should be one that almost anyone can see a little bit of themselves in. Unfortunately, Our Ladies doles out characters that are unlikable and unrealistic. It deals with the hormonally-charged boy-craziness of a group of teenage girls in a way that doesn’t highlight the hilarity and awkwardness of exploring one’s sexuality in the way so many great teen comedies do. Rather, it feels exploitative; the cast of young girls is depictd as gladly flirting with unbelievably creepy older men, having sex while completely wasted and then casually laughing it off later, and reacting nonchalantly when a man exposes himself to them and proposes an orgy.

Perhaps this exploration of teenage girls’ sexualities misses the mark because, despite the fact that the main cast is entirely female, neither the writer nor the director of this film a woman. In fact, Our Ladies’ unequivocally odd choice of writer/director is Michael Caton-Jones – otherwise best known for directing the 2002 feature Basic Instinct 2, which Wikipedia describes as an “erotic crime thriller” and Rotten Tomatoes describes as “bad.”

Our Ladies comes to us at a time when ‘90s nostalgia is in high demand and women’s stories are being celebrated in film more often than ever. The film has an incredibly talented young cast and a promising pitch, but potential alone cannot make a film good. Our Ladies lacks authenticity in its hollow attempt at sex-positivity, and because it deals with the stories of teenage girls, that failure comes across as not only sexist but also as downright creepy. I’m not going to say conclusively that men can’t tell girls’ coming-of-age stories—Bo Burnham proves they can with his 2018 feature Eighth Grade, for instance. However, Caton-Jones (who, again, DIRECTED BASIC INSTINCT 2) demonstrates that he does not possess the insight into the mind of a teenage girl necessary to tell this story well.

Our Ladies has not been issued a UK release date yet.

Milo Garner reviews Werner Herzog’s intimate new film at BFI LFF 2019.

Werner Herzog has a penchant for representing the alienated. His great films of the ’70s and ’80s have always centred on those who have lost touch – or who have never been in touch – with the world around them:  the raving king Aguirre stumbling on his forsaken raft; the vampire Nosferatu, reduced to a lovelorn welp; the wandering, ever-lost Stroszek drifting through the hinterlands of America. Even in his more conventional output – not least the Nicholas Cage vehicle Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans – his protagonists seem a step removed from their reality. Herzog himself might be described similarly. He is by no means a loner, nor a reject – few rejects nab a guest spot in The Simpsons, let alone a role in the latest Star Wars project – but nonetheless he seems to share something of the errant madness that infects many of his leading players.

His latest film Family Romance, LLC considers alienation from its inverse. It concerns Ishii Yuchii, the founder of the eponymous company, which provides a rental service for family members and friends. Though much like something pulled from a Charlie Kaufman script, this company is genuine, and while the incidents in the film are largely scripted, they often drift into the realm of documentary – a realm in which Herzog is, of course, immersed. The Japan of his film, and, by extension, the Japan of reality, is a country wherein alienation has become the norm – a country in which a company like Family Romance not only exists, but feels much at home. This film is sci-fi, dystopian, but not with much need to invent or fabricate.

The aesthetic of the film is notable in this respect. Shot on a handheld digital camera (operated by Herzog himself, with additional footage from producer Roc Morin), a visual style reminiscent of low-budget filmmaking techniques pervades throughout. The privilege of Herzog’s name is difficult to ignore; had a new director submitted a film of this technical quality, there is little chance his film would feature at such a prestigious festival as LFF.

However, this low-quality style – the rollicking, imprecise camerawork of an aging director using a relatively cheap camera – suggests a distinctly relevant aesthetic question. Considering the fictional premise, the imprecision implies an artificiality, as though the means of this film’s making are constantly revealed and thus a constant reminder of its untruth. This artificiality is then complemented by its opposite:  much of what takes place in the film is inescapably real. An extended scene of children playing with and petting a hedgehog is essentially documentary, as is the sequence of crowds gathering around a certain stunt pulled in the middle of the film. In these moments the ramshackle production no longer suggests falsity, as though the film exists on a thin line between an unconvincing fiction and an uncomfortable reality. No doubt much of the amateurism is a result of inexpert hands and low budget, but the effect suggested by these choices synthesises with the film otherwise closely and consistently.

The narrative of the film follows Ishii Yuchii – played, naturally, by himself – as he completes various jobs for his company. The most significant is to fill in as someone’s ex-husband, acting as a returned father to a young Mahiro (too young to recognize true- from false-dad). The ethics here are obviously sketchy, but more distinctly interesting is the question of affect. The happiness Mahiro experiences with her faux-father is no less ‘real’ than it would have been with her actual (and still absent) father.

This conclusion leads to the further observation that so much of the modern world is constructed through falsehood. Instagram is briefly mentioned (though not with the dismissive grimace of an angsty boomer; Herzog’s interest in burgeoning tech has aged him well). In this increasingly pervasive online sphere, reality and unreality are becoming more indistinct. In a chemical sense – the sense of dopamine and serotonin – the actions of Ishii Yuchi and his company could be considered noble. They are providing happiness where it would otherwise not exist. They are perhaps not a symptom of an increasingly isolated world, but its cure – the first step towards a future where artificiality and authenticity are intertwined and indistinguishable. This idea is not far from Kiarostami’s Certified Copy, a film that considers a similar ground to Family Romance, LLC, if more elegantly.

This sentiment, however, does suggest an unease – perhaps an orientalist, exotic discomfort for a Western observer. This burgeoning culture peals like a cheap sci-fi novel, and not one of the utopic bent. Herzog, while generally reserved in his judgement, seems to sympathise with this assessment; his inclusion of ‘LLC’ in the title, as noted by Peter Debruge for Variety, seems an ironic undermining of the two words prior. Eric Kohn, writing for Indiewire, further suggests that the film engages in a subtle critique of such widespread and all-consuming capitalism as Family Romance requires, in which commerce now encompasses friends, family, and love – all things that money supposedly cannot buy.

For Herzog, though, love is the problem. To quote the late Daniel Johnston, ‘true love will find us in the end,’ and this film proves no different. The dramatic crux – late in arrival but no less affective – concerns Ishii Yuchii and the realisation that he has begun to develop a genuine affection for his surrogate daughter. This is calamitous for his work. The ghost in the machine is just that – the artificiality of this new world can only function so long as its purveyors remain genuinely detached and unaffected. This, Herzog supposes, quite contradicts the human spirit.

While this is the lasting impression, it is not a conclusion entirely. Earlier in the film, Herzog follows Ishii Yuchii into a ‘robot hotel’ – a gimmick establishment in which the hotel staff and even its fish are robots. Herzog here suggests a cyborg future in which capitalist service might circumvent the foibles of human limitation. Even then, the director is wont to consider beyond this bleak premonition. Speaking a line that can be read in no voice but Herzog’s, Ishii asks the hotel’s (human) proprietor whether robots can dream – a throwaway ‘shower thought,’ for the moment. More so, however, this is Herzog thinking beyond the gimmickry of contemporary robotics. True love will find us in the end, sure – but perhaps it’ll find them, too. A scrappy, micro-budgeted, and inconsistent docu-drama, Family Romance, LLC rests far from Herzog’s most compelling output, but it is nonetheless a cogent, even affecting investigation of concepts central to humankind’s present and future.

7/10

Family Romance, LLC is showing in select cinemas. Check out the trailer below:

Milo Garner meets Orçun Behram’s horror debut, The Antenna, at BFI LFF 2019.

I met The Antenna at a party and he wouldn’t shut the fuck up. I was in the kitchen when he approached me, and initially, I’ll say it, I wasn’t unimpressed. He had a sort of stylish way about him. Not exactly well-dressed, no, but he’d thought it through. Nearly postmodern, angular, almost smart but not quite. He spoke to me first – of course he would, I would later think – something about an anecdote he’d heard about a man who fell off the roof of a tower block. The whole thing was very bizarre, very deadpan.

The music was quiet at this point – someone had put on one of Aphex Twin’s slow tunes – and The Antenna seemed to be in his element, talking in that kind of husky whisper that suits certain men. But soon after, things started to devolve. I wasn’t entirely sure what he was drinking – for some reason he’d poured whatever beer it was into a clear tumbler – but he had told me it was a lot like Kronenbourg. But not quite. Watered down maybe? Or, as I later came to suspect, his own imitation brew. He offered it to me enough, assuming – for a reason quite beyond me – that it’d be in some way to my taste. And sure, I do like Kronenbourg. I’d go so far as to say I really like Kronenbourg, in the right situation. But this diluted swill only got worse the closer I got to the dregs. And The Antenna seemed intent on not letting me leave the kitchen, that much seemed clear.

After telling me about the man who fell off the roof he segued – quite incoherently, I should add – into what would become an endless rant about television. Nothing particular, mind, just that TV was bad, and rotting our brains, and whatever the fuck else cliché you could pull out of a ’90s WhiteDot screed. He grabbed my shoulder emphatically more than once, only to let go with a theatrical raising of both arms at some sort of climatic ‘revelation’. I was meant to be wowed. I was not wowed.

Eventually, someone else was pulled into his gust of garrulous vapidity. The music had by this point degraded to an assault of ’80s pop hits. This girl, the new arrival, did not allow me the quick exit I was hoping for. Instead I was caught in a strange crossfire of The Antenna hitting on her, all the while keeping up his desperately trite narrative of TV-brain-rot with me. This would result in lengthy asides (during which the emphatic shoulder grab would reappear) where he would try and amuse her with what I assume were his best recollections of various true crime headlines. None of them were very entertaining, and in all honesty, I quite wished he could get to the end of his tirade sooner rather than later. The girl did leave, finally (what I’d do for that confidence, lady), but only after she and The Antenna shared a good minute or two of silent eye contact.

‘Dancing in the Moonlight’ was playing. His hand gripped my shoulder tightly. Christ. It was a little before this that his bullshit had outdone itself. He had begun to tie in a variety of statist conspiracies into his TV narrative – they’re behind it, he said loudly. They’re the ones making sure we all have a working set, he said even more loudly. His endgame was a kind of drone army of TV-infected slaves doing the government’s bidding or something. He even said something about them being faceless, but not like in a literary sense – literally faceless. Like in that episode of Doctor Who. On reflection, a lot like that episode of Doctor Who. I asked him if he’s seen it. Stupid question, no TV. That one’s on me. Then something truly inexplicable happened. Rodger Waters’ ‘Amused to Death’ blasted from the next room.

‘Finally, some real music.’ He skipped away, completely satisfied with how that conversation played out.

I finished the remnants of his fake-Kronenbourg and regretted it. What a waste of fucking time.

The Antenna has yet to get himself a UK release date, but you can watch the trailer below:

Editor KC Wingert reviews Chinonye Chukwu’s powerful debut.

With her sophomore feature Clemency, writer-director Chinonye Chukwu made history as the first black woman to win the Grand Jury prize at Sundance—and in its turn at the London Film Festival, the film proves to overseas viewers to be more than worthy of its acclaim. A stunning exploration of the American death penalty, Clemency is easily one of the most beautifully-told stories and most socially important films of the last decade.

Alfre Woodard leads the cast as Bernadine Williams, a career-driven prison warden who has overseen 12 executions over the course of her tenure. A harrowing opening sequence portraying the execution of convict Victor Jimenez illustrates for viewers the emotional toll that witnessing a man’s death can have on a person. The tension of the scene is palpable, and we see the effects of this in Bernadine’s personal life. She struggles to sleep at night and drinks heavily to cope. Her marriage to her husband Jonathan (Wendell Pierce) struggles as Bernadine reckons with the horrors to which she bears witness; her husband cannot understand the way her job affects her. While teacher Jonathan educates the next generation and gives them hope of a bright future, Bernadine is complicit in stealing the future away from countless men. She is not a sadist, but she is forced by the nature of her profession to carry out sadistic practices—and in the interest of appearing professional as a black woman in a position of power, she must do so unsentimentally. But her robotic demeanor is not necessarily a reflection of her true feelings toward the practice of execution, and viewers follow Bernadine as she struggles to mask her own humanity with professionalism.

Though the film explores Bernadine’s character most thoroughly, viewers are also given detailed glimpses of the emotional states of everyone involved in these executions, from the prison officers, to the prison chaplain, to the men on death row themselves. Aldis Hodge gives an incredibly moving performance as Anthony Woods, a prisoner awaiting execution who may be innocent of the murder of which he was convicted fourteen years ago. We see him slip between moments of desolation and glimmers of hope as he navigates the existential dread of being sentenced to death for a crime he maintains he did not commit and as he awaits any news on the painstakingly bureaucratic decision on his appeal, which determines whether he lives or dies. Hodge’s performance is complicated, heartbreaking, and totally affective. When Anthony feels hope, we feel hope; when he despairs, so do we.

Similarly, Richard Schiff gives a nuanced performance as Anthony’s lawyer Marty, a man whose career has been dedicated to appealing the death penalty and to fighting for clemency on behalf of his clients. Marty, having worked on such cases for 30 years, is downtrodden, resigned, and ready to retire. A man who was once passionate about the cause, Marty is tasked with finding hope and keeping spirits high for Anthony despite the almost futile odds of winning. In a visit to his client, he looks thoughtfully on as demonstrators outside the prison shout their support for Anthony, not as a man who is inspired by their words, but as a man who fears their protestations may be in vain. In a glum conversation with Bernadette, Marty poignantly explains the overwhelming stakes of being a death row inmate’s lawyer:  “When I win, my client gets to not die.”

This film is disturbing and horrifying, to be sure, but in the way that 12 Years A Slave is. The doleful tone of Clemency is real—it reflects the experiences of people whose lives are affected by the inhumanity of the death penalty. It does not rely on gore and jump scares to disturb its viewers; rather, it forces viewers to confront the undignified reality of state-sanctioned murder. It is one thing to acknowledge the horrors of the world, to want to learn from tragedy and strive for betterness. But it is another thing entirely—a wholly more affective experience—to witness these horrors brought to life before your eyes. For this reason, Clemency should be required viewing for Americans at least, and for anyone who thinks they have an opinion on the death penalty.

Find Clemency in theatres this December and check out the trailer below:

KC Wingert reviews the buzzed-about dark comedy at LFF 2019. 

With her debut feature Lucky Grandma, a film about an elderly Chinese-American woman with a rebellious streak, writer-director Sasie Sealy contributes equal parts humour and suspense to this year’s London Film Festival. Tsai Chin plays the titular role of Grandma Wong, a gruff, chain-smoking loner whose expressionless indifference and grumpy demeanour has led me to dub her the Clint Eastwood of Grandmas. Grandma Wong lives alone in the small, outdated Chinatown apartment she and her late husband once shared. Though her daily schedule is monotonous—practising tai chi, lighting incense for her in-home Buddhist altar, evading her adult son’s requests that she move in with him and his family—Grandma Wong receives a reinvigorating jolt of excitement while visiting a fortune teller, a sequence which visually references the opening tarot scene of Agnès Varda’s Cleo from 5 to 7. The fortune teller presents to Grandma Wong a series of cards written in Chinese script and tells the old woman that she will have an incredible amount of luck on October 28^th (admittedly a very different fate than the one predicted for Cleo).

With fortune on her side, Grandma Wong empties her bank account on the 28^th and hops on a Chinatown bus headed straight to the casino. At first, it seems like the stars really have aligned for her; she beats incredible odds and wins at craps and roulette so many times that her tokens double, then triple, and then quadruple. Her lucky streak comes to an end eventually, though, and she returns to the Chinatown bus downtrodden, having lost all her savings in one bet.

Grandma Wong’s good luck seems to take a different form, however, when money literally falls into her lap on the bus ride home. The man in the seat next to her suddenly dies of a heart attack while everyone else on the bus is asleep. When the bus hits a bump and a duffel bag filled with money falls from the luggage carriers overhead, Grandma Wong realises that her deceased seatmate is in fact a gang member transporting money for the Red Dragon gang. Already panicked about her casino losses, Grandma Wong absconds with the money, inadvertently placing herself at the centre of a violent gang conflict over the cash.

The strength of this film is not necessarily the narrative, which at times feels muddled and confusing amidst its portrayal of New York gang politics and reaches a hasty conclusion in its third act. Rather, Lucky Grandma’s greatest asset is its characters, all fully realized through the little details which make up each person’s unique and entertaining personality. Grandma Wong’s lanky grandson David, for example, may play a relatively small role in the film. However, in the approximately 10 total minutes of screen time he has, viewers learn that he is a one half of a dance duo, making goofy, low-quality hip-hop music videos in his grandmother’s apartment with his chubby, twerk-happy friend Nomi. This small, endearing personality detail raises the emotional stakes later in the film when the Red Dragons demand Grandma Wong pay a ransom to spare David’s life. The same goes for the character Big Pong (Hsiao-Yuan Ha), the man Grandma Wong hires as a bodyguard after dopey Red Dragon gangsters Pock-Mark (Woody Fu) and Little Handsome (Michael Tow) show up at her apartment. Big Pong first appears to be quiet and intimidating, but viewers will find a tender sweetness in his character when he talks about being a vegetarian, describes the girl he loves who still lives in China, and scolds Grandma Wong’s grumpy neighbour for disrespecting an elder.

The main figures in any film are only as strong as the actors who play them, and the cast of Lucky Grandma brings these characters to life with quirk and charm. As the socially isolated Grandma Wong, Tsai Chin is often the only actor onscreen. The character requires an actor who can subtly convey large emotions with her facial expressions and body language, and Tsai Chin is more than fit for the challenge. She brings laughs just by widening her eyes, furrowing her brow, or turning her head—no dialogue required. As gangster hitman Little Handsome, actor Michael Tow somehow manages to be simultaneously terrifying and hilarious, sending chills down one’s spine with his threatening stare one moment and highlighting his character’s sheer absurdity with a goofy smile in the next. The talent in this cast alone could dispel any excuses Hollywood may make for whitewashing Asian or Asian-American roles (I’m looking at you, Scarlett Johansson).

Though it is not a life-changing or particularly profound film, Lucky Grandma is sure to make viewers chuckle heartily, scoot to the edge of their seats in suspense, and stare in wonderment at each creatively-framed shot. The plot leaves room for confusion and questions, but the dramatic achievements of the cast alone are enough to make this film a success among audiences. The film deftly combines humorous and whimsical moments with darker undertones. Considering the film centres on the identity crisis of an elderly Chinese-American woman—a demographic I can safely say is sorely underrepresented in American film—Lucky Grandma is a breath of fresh air and a new perspective in the comedy genre.

Lucky Grandma is still showing in select cinemas. Check out what influenced the film below:

The London Film Festival has come to town! For the next two weeks, over 300 films will be screened all over central London. UCL Film & TV Society has five members who will be reviewing the festival.

A film festival may seem more appropriate for industry professionals and film journalists. However, the London Film Festival is incredibly open to the public. Most importantly, it is generous to young students with the 25 & Under scheme. You can get £5 tickets to select screenings at the festival. In addition, the BFI has committed to providing over 100 free events as part of their LFF for Free scheme, which include talks, panels, Q&As and even DJ Nights. Some can be booked in advance, but don’t be afraid to turn up and see what you can do!

Faced with an enormous catalogue, how do you even consider what to see? The curators behind LFF have kindly split the programme into strands. You can see the whole selection on the BFI’s website or pick up their hardcopy catalogues all around London.

To get you started, our LFF Blog team has put together a few recommendations and why the festival is worth checking out:

---

A Marriage Story

• Good for lovers of Adam Driver’s face, people whose favourite movie is Kramer vs. Kramer, and those who crave intimate narratives on screen.
• Why?: The family drama from Noah Baumbach (Frances Ha, The Meyerowitz Stories, The Squid and the Whale) opened to rave reviews at Venice Film Festival and has garnered lots of award season buzz.

Get tickets for showings on the 6th, 7th and 11th of October

The Peanut Butter Falcon

• Recommended for when you want to laugh and leave the cinema smiling, fans of Mark Twain and frontier fables.
• Why?: The dramedy packs great performances from Shia LeBeouf and Zack Gottsagen and sets the benchmark for providing non-tokenistic representation for differently-abled folks in film.

Get tickets for showings on the 3rd and 4th of October

Circus of Books

• Recommended for documentary lovers, frequenters of Gay’s The Word, and those who want to watch weird and wonderful parents.  
• Why?: Apart from the opportunity to discover the social and cultural history of the gay community in Los Angeles and the history of pornography, the documentary has a personal touch as the director turns the camera onto her parents. 

Get tickets for showings on the 12th and 13th of October

A Pleasure, Comrades! (Prazer, Camaradas!)

• Recommended for vicariously living in the Mediterranean countryside, fans of Pride (2014), or those just want to see a cute goat or two amongst cultural and generational clashes.
• Why?: Long live the proletariat, long live the sexual revolution! Amusing misunderstandings and charming moments are abundant, based on real stories from post-Carnation Revolution rural Portugal. 

Get tickets for showings on the 3rd and 4th of October

Bombay Rose

• Recommended for Bollywood fans, dreamy romantics rooting for star-crossed lovers, those who want to see non-family-oriented animation. 
• Why?: The film is directed by Gitanjali Rao, whose animation shorts screened at Cannes Film Festival to critical acclaim. A romantic feature film set in Mumbai, the film possesses a vibrant brush-stroke painting style and immersive sound design. 

Get tickets for showings on the 12th and 13th of October

County Lines

• Recommended for fans of kitchen sink realism, Ken Loach stans, those who liked Beach Rats. Or maybe you’ve just binged Top Boy: Summerhouse and want something more introspective.
• Why?: Vulnerable boys being groomed by county lines drug trafficking gangs is a massive topical issue in Britain. 

Get tickets for a showing on the 13th of October

---

Covering the festival is an immense challenge. The UCL Film Society Blog will be reviewing whatever screenings our correspondents can schedule in. What makes it worth it for those who are going? Keep an eye out for the names below. 

Alex Dewing
Not only are the films screened at LFF wide in their variety (with romance, thriller, comedies and cult classics to be) but they’re available to see at such good prices (only £5) and in some great cinemas. Little Monsters, a zombie focused horror-comedy, or zom-com as I like to call it, is definitely worth a watch and you can catch it at the BFI Southbank or Vue West End.

Emma Davis
I think the festival is great for catching movies you’re unlikely to see in regular programming in your nearest cinema, or movies before their official wide release date! I had the opportunity to watch Axone, and it is having its world premiere at the Festival. LFF is a great opportunity to see movies from countries, genres and directors you wouldn’t consider otherwise.

KC Wingert 
The LFF is a really great opportunity for students to catch a wide range of new, internationally-acclaimed films in Central London. No matter what genre you’re looking for, you’re likely to find it showing at the LFF. This year’s lineup features stunning examples of what happens when women of color are put in the director’s chair – see the quirky comedy Lucky Grandma or the harrowing human rights drama Clemency. If that weren’t enough, people who purchase tickets to some of the bigger screenings may catch the odd star in attendance; last year I saw Melissa McCarthy, Richard E. Grant, and director Michael Moore, and this year I’m on the lookout for Shia LaBeouf!

Louis Stall
I love the whole vibe of the LFF; being surrounded by other people that are also passionate about film is by itself a totally valid reason to attend. This year I got to see a preview of The Peanut Butter Falcon, I won’t spoil much but it was unbelievably wholesome and definitely worth a watch. I’d definitely recommend not sleeping on the range of documentaries and shorts at LFF this year as I’ve had the opportunity to view so and they are rather spectacular.

Maria Düster
This year, the BFI have really expanded opportunities for students and I recommend going to as much as you can. I’m excited to see independent documentaries – Coup 53, The Orphanage, Give Me Liberty – and headlining films as well, such as Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the relationship between truth and fiction in film, specifically documentary, and I’m interested to see how filmmakers are tackling that this year.

The BFI London Film Festival runs 2 – 13 October 2019. For more information, visit the festival website.