Film

To kick off this year's London Film Festival coverage, we're trying something new for TLE. In this audio preview, I sat down with lapsed critic, fellow film fanatic and my friend Timothy E Raw. We went through the programme and picked one film each from every section to discuss (and sometimes argue about). Over these couple of hours we discussed 32 of the more than 200 films that will be showing across London venues from the 10th to the 21st...

Hermann Vaske attempts to tackle why we are creative in his newest documentary of the same name. Beneath the thin veneer this documentary, helmed by a director who believes he has cast off into the waters of the great thinkers in his pursuit of a single truth to an unanswerable question, is a film clearly dreamt up by advertising exec.  Slick, stylised, but ultimately lacking in imaginative energy, it is the kind of “creative content,” that has been perfected by marketers,...

Eric Jaskolka, from USA has collected over 20,000 X-Men items

For my money, one of the major new cinematic talents discovered in recent years was not an actor, a director or a screenwriter but 37-year-old cinematographer Lukasz Zal, who was camera operator on Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida. Zal stepped in as DP just after just a few days when Ryszard Lenczewski left the film. It could have been said that Lenczewski laid the foundation for that gorgeous film but with this, his second collaboration with Pawlikowski, I think a solid argument...

Adapted from Victor Headley’s novel of the same name, Yardie is set predominately in the 1980s and opens in Jamaica. It is here that we find Dennis (Aml Ameen), a young man who runs errands for mob boss King Fox (Sheldon Shepherd). Dennis spends his days stumbling his way through small jobs while plotting revenge on his brother Jerry’s (Everaldo Creary) killer. Believing he can trust him, Fox asks Dennis to deliver a package of cocaine to his distributor in...

The Happytime Murders is the first feature film presentation from the production company, Henson Alternative, a relatively new arm of the Henson Company and it is a shame that the first feature length film to come from them is a woefully unfunny, cold picture where the initial humour wears off within a matter of minutes. The film stars Melissa McCarthy as Detective Connie Edwards in the human role as she and a hardboiled ex-Muppet cop Phil, voiced and manipulated by...

Okay, what do I write here? So far, Flashbacks To 93 has consisted of a mix of movies I’ve seen and love, ones I’m revisiting after a long time away from them and a few that I’d never seen before. I think it’s been going well. Even when I’ve not been wild about the films, there’s been something interesting to say, whether looking back at my childhood love of the characters for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III or gawping in...

So far this series has been about horror films, a theme that will continue through most of the entries, but there are other kinds of films that the BBFC, historically, has had issues with. Martial arts and other action films sometimes struggled with the board under James Ferman, not least because of his dislike of certain weapons. Throwing stars came under great scrutiny and nunchucks were completely prohibited, to such an extreme that a scene was cut from the Tom...

Whether it is the overtly racist Birth of a Nation – a film that President Woodrow Wilson screened at the White House – or Gone with the Wind which denies the truth about slavery,cinema for a long time failed in its depictions of race. 1989 was a monumental year on the global stage but it also saw a young black director called Spike Lee cover the topic of race with the intricacies and understanding that it deserved. Do the Right...