London Film Festival 2025

London Film Festival 2025

It’s been six years since I last went to the London Film Festival from start to finish. There’s just not as much here for me to get excited about as there used to be, so I tend to just dip in and out, catching the train into the city a couple of times to see one or two movies before heading home again. This has always been a festival that prioritises star-studded gala screenings over interesting and unusual cinema, but the pickings in that regard seem to get slimmer every year. I don’t really have it in me to pay three times the price of a normal ticket to see something like Ballad of a Small Player a week or two before it turns up on Netflix, and so my festival has become quite small. Having spent several years traipsing around central London for two weeks every October just to cram it all in, this year I managed to fit pretty much all of what I wanted to see into two Saturday afternoons. 

All of this is to say that I only really want to watch something at a festival if I’m going to struggle to see it outside of one. I can’t think of a film that fits into this philosophy more appropriately than Alexandre Koberidze’s Dry Leaf, a three-hour film shot on the 3.2 megapixel camera of a 2008 Sony Ericsson W595. A film of absences, in which a man, Irakli, searches in vain for his missing daughter, Lisa, across the vast expanses and abandoned football pitches of the Georgian countryside, accompanied by Levani, her best friend who, without explanation, happens to be invisible. Many of the people they meet are heard but not seen, with Koberidze framing empty reverse shots as if they’re filled with faces. This is one of several leaps of faith demanded by Dry Leaf. The heavily pixelated images are muddy and difficult to make sense of, much like this circuitous search, which keeps hitting dead ends. Koberidze builds an impressionistic patchwork of people and places that evokes the sensation of a dream. Remembered details, like cats and donkeys and apricots, empty village squares and acts of kindness, serve to emphasise the spaces left by the things he’s forgotten, like the faces of the people he meets, or the indistinguishable football pitches that seem to blend into one. But there’s a melancholic longing to fill these spaces. On the road, Irakli often sees kids wanting but unable to find anywhere to play football, while the pitches that serve as landmarks for his search remain overgrown and reclaimed by nature. At one such encounter, a child asks Irakli to help push a heavy goalpost into the ground so they can play. He does, and they do. Dry Leaf suggests that while some things may be gone, they don’t have to stay that way. The act of trying to find them is exactly what keeps them alive.

Claire Denis’s The Fence covers a similar kind of search, only its conclusion is already written. In an unnamed West African country, a man appears at a construction site in the dead of night to recover the body of his brother, only to be met with evasion and resistance from the white foreman and his volatile deputy. Based on a play, the theatricality of The Fence largely works in its favour. These two men stand in spotlights and perform to an audience that already sees through them, from the man himself, patiently asking the same questions, to the armed guards in lookouts above, to the men who work in the kitchen, and even the recently arrived wife of the foreman, whose red dress and high-heels clash awkwardly with the dusty terrain and chain-link fences around her. These loud voices echo across the silent yard and through paper-thin walls. There’s no privacy here, no secrets. Just a series of distractions, and the desperate hope that they can get rid of this man before his quiet insistence becomes a problem for them. 

This defensive impulse echoes through Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent, too, in which a university professor in Brazil in the late seventies is forced to run from corrupt political forces who will do anything to get him out of their way and siphon off his research funding. He’s given refuge in a small community while he waits for a chance to flee the country, but the threats against him, at first vague and unseen, gradually take concrete form. Mendonça Filho allows information to slowly coalesce over time, with scattered characters, contexts, and motivations eventually colliding in a single time and space. A film about hiding, or, more specifically, of being hidden, The Secret Agent continues Mendonça Filho’s interest in both the myriad pleasures of genre cinema and the communities that form when people stand up against political and bureaucratic aggression. But also, it builds upon the idea of the archive, of piecing together all the disparate angles of an event in an effort to make sense of it.

In Silent Friend, Ildikó Enyedi similarly presents fragments of information and asks that meaning be drawn from them. Not as a means of understanding specific events but as a way of finding parallels in the echoes of history. The film takes place in the same location, the botanical gardens of a German university, across three different time periods. In 2020, a neuroscientist from Hong Kong arrives to teach a course but is left marooned in the deserted university by the onset of the pandemic. In the 1970s, two students study how a geranium experiences and responds to its environment. And in the early 1900s, a young woman overcomes institutional and societal sexism and uses her skills as a photographer to study an assortment of plants. Enyedi cuts back and forth between these time periods on shared moments, like reading the same pages of a book in the library, or touching the bark of the same enormous tree in the gardens, focusing on the act of study and, more significantly, the connections that emerge from these studies. A neuroscientist reaching out to a French botanist over Zoom, a young woman helping an old photographer with his work between classes, and two students falling for one another via a shared interest in flowers. Enyedi has been exploring these kinds of awkward meetings in her work for decades, be it the reunion of separated twins in My Twentieth Century (1989), the frustrating missed connections in Tamas and Juli (1997), or the dreamed encounters in On Body and Soul (2017). In Silent Friend, it’s the simple fact that these people have been pulled together in the first place that’s most of interest. As long as there are spaces that encourage such things, there will always be people willing to devote themselves to solving the endless mysteries of the world, and work together to make sense of things they cannot explain on their own. Silent Friend is a gentle love letter to these spaces, to this quiet university garden, filled with rare plants and the enduring ginkgo tree that echoes through each time period, that has given those curious enough to do so the means of understanding the world for more than a century. For Enyedi, curiosity is natural.

Sho Miyake | Patience and Change

The work of Sho Miyake has always seemed to be hiding from me. I’ve missed three of his films in Berlin over the years because their screenings happened either after I’d left or before I’d arrived, and whenever his work has played in London the timings have been awkward or unmanageable without either great expense or a very late night (often both). Most recently, I had the chance to see his newest film in Locarno thanks to a lucky piece of scheduling, but my trip fell apart for logistical reasons right at the last minute and I never even made it to Switzerland — of course, he went on to win the Golden Leopard. 

With this recent success, I’ve decided to take matters into my own hands and fill in the gaps myself. Well, not all of them, but as many as I can. As far as I can tell, there are (currently) no English subtitles available for any of his early features, which is a shame, and I just don’t have the stomach for his (somewhat inexplicable) Netflix miniseries Ju-on: Origins (2022), an endeavour I suspect will remain a curio for only the most ardent of auteurists in the years to come. That leaves me with three films to catch up on. An incomplete view, but a view nonetheless, and one that I hope will hold me in good stead when I eventually get another chance to see his latest. It’s certainly better than nothing.

And Your Bird Can Sing | 2018

In Hakodate, it rains in the summer. You always need an umbrella with you. Three aimless twenty-somethings, two men who share a bunk-bed in a tiny flat and an indecisive woman who falls into their orbit, spend all of their spare time together. Night after night they drink in bars, playing darts and pool and table-tennis, avoiding the responsibilities of adulthood while reveling in its freedoms. All three of them are at a crossroads. They drift through their lives, working part-time jobs they don’t care about or borrowing money from family members to keep the lights on, and they can’t seem to break the monotony. Empty time passes slowly. Miyake captures the mundanity of these long nights and bleary-eyed mornings with a gentle naturalism, quietly observing the minutiae of their interactions as this routine repeats itself over and over and over again. The only signs of clouds starting to form come through in brief gestures. A lingering glance across a room. A brief flash of recognition. The pretence of being asleep. They all tiptoe around their feelings, keeping things to themselves and hoping the rain will hold off a little longer. And yet their umbrellas are always close at hand, just in case. A warm film about how much you stand to lose from waiting. And how much you can gain by making something happen for yourself.

Small, Slow But Steady | 2022

In the first pandemic winter, boxing matches unfold to a few masked fans scattered around an empty arena. There’s no glory to be found here, but Keiko, a hearing-impaired young fighter, persists all the same. She trains every day at the boxing gym near the small home she shares with her brother, and works as a hotel cleaner to pay the bills. But the toll of fighting is becoming too much, and the gym’s finances have been decimated by Covid. This chapter of Keiko’s life is coming to an end, and as change approaches Miyake contrasts the comfort and familiarity of her routine with the unknowns and chaos away from it. The gym is a safe space for her, a precious one, where she’s surrounded by people who have found ways to communicate with her, whether by learning sign language, writing notes on little whiteboards, or miming the actions they want her to perform. But outside of it, she’s a small figure alone in the crowd, facing up to the challenges posed by a bustling city that has no time to make space for her. Masks make it impossible to read lips, and people loudly repeat their questions when she has no way to respond to them. Tokyo is a city filled with hurdles, but for Miyake all that can be gained from standing still is more of the same. However uncomfortable, moving forward is a question of embracing change and taking that leap into the unknown. Anything else is lost time.

All The Long Nights | 2024

Looking in and looking out. A haughty man, Yamazoe, whose panic attacks have forced him to leave behind a high-flying corporate career, and Fujisawa, a meek woman whose life-long struggle with severe PMS has made it hard for her to hold down a steady job, fall into each other’s orbit while working for a company building microscopes and telescopes for classrooms. The public manifestations of their conditions, be it outbursts of frustration or physical collapses, have drawn the concern of friends, families, and co-workers, much to their own embarrassment, but in this hilly suburb of Tokyo they’ve each found the space and the patience they need to rebuild their lives. They come together through connections made by others at a grief support group, where a former colleague of Yamazoe has built a friendship with Fujisawa’s boss, and it’s this idea of reaching out for help instead of suffering alone and keeping it all inside that Miyake seems most interested in. Apart, they endure their conditions as best as they can, but together, following the gradual development of their relationship, they help each other lay a foundation for a healthier life. Fujisawa gives Yamazoe her bike when she sees the difficulty he has using public transport, and he removes her from a potentially explosive situation at work before it becomes a problem. These moments of recognition can only happen in a safe space, with people looking out for one another. There will always be pain, but it doesn’t have to be endured alone. Given the right environment and the right people, there’s always a way to manage it. And then you can move forward.

Buffet Froid | Bertrand Blier, 1979

Buffet Froid | Bertrand Blier, 1979

Thick Skinned | Patricia Mazuy, 1989

Thick Skinned | Patricia Mazuy, 1989

I Saw The TV Glow | Jane Schoenbrun, 2024

I Saw The TV Glow | Jane Schoenbrun, 2024

One of the first images in Jane Schoenbrun’s second film is of a young boy walking beneath a billowing, multi-coloured parachute in a school hall. A film of vivid interiors, in which the light from outside changes the shape of the inside. A cult late-night TV show leaves an indelible mark on those who find it, and its images linger even as life moves on. TV offers a way to escape reality, but its glow illuminates parts of yourself that would otherwise remain unknowable. Time passes, the show becomes a memory, and the once-vibrant interiors become confusing and oppressive. The softness of the sun-kissed parachute gives way to the harsh neon lights of an arcade as it becomes clear that running away from the things you were once afraid of may have been a mistake. Now, there’s no monster of the week, nothing left to fight. It’s all been buried and lost to time. But the emptiness remains. The sadness, the fear, the discomfort in your own skin. And now it’s too late to change it.

Good One | India Donaldson, 2024

Good One | India Donaldson, 2024

The tide is always going out. A tranquil surface receding to reveal sharp and jagged rocks just beneath. Unspoken pains and anxieties waiting for a moment to surface, but they never do. The subject changes, the conversation is interrupted. Everyone is left alone together, walking silently through the woods. That is, until a single sentence breaks through, and poisons everything. A film about men who let you down, and women forced to endure those letdowns. A teenage girl, silenced and disappointed by two pathetic men, finds quiet ways to rebel against them, while the men shrink in contrition, as if their meekness might absolve them. But nothing can balance the scales, and so her pain remains. "Will you please drive?"

Tokyo Drifter | Seijun Suzuki, 1966

Tokyo Drifter | Seijun Suzuki, 1966

Illusions of freedom. Narrow paths for drifters to prowl as they're dragged back into the old ways, or behind bars or fences or glass. Confusing and meaningless conflicts are fought out of tired obligation more than anything else, with no way out and no way back. As the battlegrounds become more abstract, the stakes become more psychological. Battles for the soul: money and power, or honour and freedom. A man walks alone into a shadowy unknown, with no idea how narrow the path ahead may be.

In The Shadows | Thomas Arslan, 2010

In The Shadows | Thomas Arslan, 2010

All cars, no public transport. Everyone is in their own space, separated from the world by glass and metal, fully in control but reliant on things running smoothly out of it. Bad traffic, other drivers, closed roads. You can’t account for everything. Best laid plans can be uprooted by the unforeseeable. And so it goes, with a heist, planned and executed meticulously, silently co-opted from the shadows by external forces beyond anyone’s control. The camera jumps from first to third person. The hunter becomes the hunted.

Kitano on Kitano

Following a wildly successful run of distinctive, genre-bending films, stretching from the late-eighties into the early-2000s, Takeshi Kitano turned his camera inwards with a trilogy of semi-autobiographical metadramas designed to interrogate his work, his life, and his public persona. I’ve long been a fan of Kitano, but I’ve never, for whatever reason, been able to muster much enthusiasm to seek these ones out. Having recently watched Broken Rage, a film that riffs on Kitano’s history in gritty crime dramas and slapstick comedies, it feels as if now is a good time to look back at the films he made about himself, or at least a version of himself, and try to make sense of them. As always with Kitano, it’s impossible to know who or what you’re going to get.

Takeshis' | 2005

A successful actor and a failed one, doppelgängers of one another, briefly come face-to-face in the back room of a TV studio before parting ways. Noting the similarity, they each imagine the life of the other to such an extent that reality folds in on itself. Scenes are repeated in new contexts, actors appear in different roles, and the same images return again and again as these two lives start to converge: a sad clown, a bloodied gangster, a caterpillar in a bouquet of flowers. Each man dreams of the other, and then the dreams dream too. But they all end in disappointment. Kitano uses this dovetailing structure to imagine another life, free of the violence that made his name, but it always manages to creep back in. He's a product of that violence and cannot imagine a world without it, as much as he wants to escape from it. A film of artistic exhaustion from a filmmaker in crisis. An attempt by Kitano to make sense of it all by plunging into himself and bouncing back out again. And so, it starts and ends with a gunfight. 

Glory To The Filmmaker! | 2007

Anything but glory. An imagined Kitano, dragging around a perpetually arch-browed dummy of himself, is scrambling for ideas for what to do next: Ozu sells, so let’s do that. Or J-horror, or science-fiction, or martial arts, or a nostalgic ode to childhood. Anything for the market, just not the gangster films he’s vowed to leave behind. He’s good at that. He’s done it for years, and audiences want to see them. Kitano presents fragments of these films and they all feel somehow wrong. Parodic. Insincere. Tired. Nothing works. He fails, again and again, struggling to connect to material that doesn’t suit him. And so, in exasperation, he throws everything into a bizarre, high-concept slapstick comedy that blends it all into one movie. That movie, in the end, is this one. An absurd, freewheeling work of self-deprecation and frustration, but equally a film in which an artist eventually stops aiming for success and follows his instincts, just to see what happens. And if what happens is anything to go by, filmmaking for Kitano is an act of total madness. At the film’s end, he asks his doctor how his brain is. The doctor simply replies: “Broken.”

Achilles and the Tortoise | 2008

At first, a simple portrait of the artist as a young man, with tragedy and adversity forging in him a resolute commitment to art as a means of survival. And all signs point to a major talent on the verge of breaking through. Time passes. He keeps painting, but nothing changes. His work doesn’t sell. He tries again, and that doesn’t sell either. Again and again. Kitano, whose own paintings are used in the film, frames this Sisyphean pursuit of financial success as an increasingly desperate and destructive one. The more he studies art, the further he gets from it, and the more he listens to the critiques of an art dealer, the more derivative his work becomes. Even as his failures tear his family apart, he keeps trying. The next one will be the big one, and then all of this neglect will have been worth it. A film about escaping reality while striving to capture it in art, as well as a lacerating portrait of a man who can no longer tell the difference between artistic expression and the ephemeral whims of the market.

Letterboxd Reviews #4

It’s been a while since I published a compendium of Letterboxd reviews so, of course, here are two at once. In the past couple of years, I’ve been writing more and more on Letterboxd, Mostly just brief snippets and short texts, but I like them all, however small, however fragmented they may be, and I’m keen to keep a record of them here. So here we go. Part two of a bumper crop. In case you missed it, here's part one. The texts in this post were written between September 2024 and February 2025, and are presented in alphabetical order. I hope you enjoy reading them. 

Bad Day at Black Rock | John Sturges, 1955

A nation scarred by war: the men who fight come back with a pain that drives compassion; the men who can't are left with nothing but hate and anger, and nowhere to aim but home. Flowers grow through the dust of the desert from unmarked graves, but nobody picks them. There's no place for beauty in Black Rock, but there can be. A film about rebuilding America by rooting out the darkness. The flowers are there, it's just a matter of finding them.

The Conformist | Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970

A man trying again and again to assimilate into whichever crowd will have him, only he doesn't fit anywhere, never able to flow with the currents of anything beyond self-preservation and stuck in a spiral of people dancing around him, enjoying a rhythm he can't find. A spare part of a man at best, and, when it comes down to it, an impotent one. Lacerating in its depiction of how fascism serves as the most appealing shortcut to power for worthless men like this, men who crave a feeling of importance without having to do anything to earn it. Men who have meetings in large offices in marble buildings, their voices reverberating loudly to no one. It's so easy to sound important in a cavernously empty room.

Cloud | Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2024

An online world of slippery motivations and directionless anger brought into reality by the shattering of the illusion of anonymity. A lack of culpability dragging everyone closer to hell. Kurosawa fills it with frosted glass, dirty polythene, tattered curtains; obscured windows into other worlds. Usernames and aliases, lies and scams. The shift to violence comes when the fog clears and the masks slip, and one true fact brings the whole thing down. All that's left is a void of money where love used to be, and the only thing that sparks a smile is a symbol on a screen changing from "for sale" to "sold".

Golem | Piotr Szulkin, 1979

Shadows and blindness, and a total lack of information. A fake man's desire to understand a world in which everyone knows more than he does, as he's pushed deeper into a maze by the lure of learning something. Fix this watch, carry this oven, poison those birds. But no questions, just demands. No choices, no alternatives. A lot of narrow staircases, thin corridors, grey concrete streets. One path laid out for him. Blunt, bleak, crushing. Everyone has cataracts but the eye doctor is dead.

Hard Truths | Mike Leigh, 2024

Leigh has always had a thing about potted plants, and flowers in vases, and here they are again. Life without life, separated from nature and reliant on human care and attention. A big, empty house, all light but no air, and no decoration. Just sanitised surfaces and people tiptoeing between them, scared to leave a mark or make a sound. Everyone exists in the orbit of Pansy (another flower). Her defeated husband, who fixes radiators in other people’s homes, and her son, always wearing headphones, who wants to fly. Elsewhere, her sister and her nieces are always warm, always out in the world, enjoying life. For Leigh, it’s impossible to be happy without letting life in. When Moses buys his mother flowers, she anxiously puts them in a vase, only for Curtley to throw them into the overgrown garden when she leaves the room. This home is no place for flowers. And so it goes on.

In The Wake | Takahisa Zeze, 2021

A police procedural, with a murder investigation framed as a search for justice of a different kind. Zeze spends very little time on the police work, focusing instead on building all these characters from the horrors of the 2011 tsunami, and the pain they have had to endure in the nine years after. Everyone has lost something, and so everyone understands the impulses that drive such murders. Choices in context, and Zeze exhaustively draws that context for everyone involved. A bit too contrived in its linking of all these people, but an immensely powerful study of corruption and inhumanity all the same — visualised beautifully by the fully dressed but faceless mannequin decorating the office of a politician running for office on a ticket of welfare reform.

Pale Flower | Masahiro Shinoda, 1964

Blank faces, slumped shoulders. Life as a succession of larger and larger bets, and searching for thrills within the rigid systems and protocols of high-stakes card games and yakuza turf wars. A film about playing games to feel alive, and playing with nothing to lose. Prison is just time spent somewhere else. Financial losses mean nothing. And so everyone hurtles towards oblivion, trying to feel something in the process before there's nothing left to feel.

Rancho Notorious | Fritz Lang, 1952

A quest for revenge borne from tragedy. A film that opens with a kiss and ends with a death, all loaded with emotion, but Lang muddies the waters by having it all play out under the fake skies of a different kind of world. Corrupt politicians held in custody on election day by the men set to take their place. A rigged game in a makeshift casino designed to make winners feel lucky. Everything is predetermined. Even this man's revenge becomes an obligation, something that he will achieve simply because he has nothing else to do but achieve it. And so the seasons pass. Summer comes round again and the chase continues in perpetuity. He thinks he's acting out of love but that's long since rotted away. He can only gesture towards it, faking and weaponising it as he moves further and further away from the man he used to be. His only propulsion is revenge. And once that's gone, there's nowhere left to go.

Suzhou River | Lou Ye, 2000

Stories as mythical creatures, their allure stemming from an unquashable mystery. Mermaids probably aren't real, but maybe they are. Maybe doppelgängers are, too. A wounded man tells a story of lost love, first through his own eyes, and then through someone else's. Imagined events, told perhaps as self-deception, perhaps as a way to make a painful reality less banal, or perhaps because this is how things really happened. It’s impossible to know anything with certainty. A glimpse of a mermaid in a muddy river, flowing endlessly past the shells of derelict buildings and seen through the imprecise lens of a handheld camera. Everything is true and nothing is. All there is to do is find a glimmer of something to hold on to in the mystery. And isn’t that why we tell stories?

Tausend Augen | Hans-Christoph Blumenberg, 1984

Surveillance and voyeurism as routes to hell, numbing all feeling from life and pushing people towards a catatonic pursuit of money but nothing to spend it on. Only engaging with the world with curiosity brings happiness, be it watching movies or sketching people or going to zoos or dancing. Also features Jean-Marie Straub delivering a lecture on marine biology, and Wim Wenders stealing a VHS copy of Dr Mabuse the Gambler from a video store. A truly alien object.