Lff

News, Reviews & Features

Review: Cam teases a great premise but just can’t deliver the goods

Movie Review | Matt Looker | 19th October 2018

The internet is wonderful. Just the other day I traced my family history, recovered a lost set of IKEA assembly instructions and watched a monkey fuck a frog in the mouth. But there’s a dark side. There are areas of the internet that encourage horrible behaviour, such as giving racists a platform for their hate speech, or letting nerds have a place to argue about Transformers or whatever. And then there’s the murky morals of online sex stuff, which this film sheds a light on. It’s a thriller set in the world of ‘cam girls’, who are participants in ‘pornographic’ materials. These are images and videos of ‘nudity’ and ‘sexual acts’, none of which I knew existed online before, and I have several blank Incognito windows open on my computer to prove it.

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Review: Happy New Year, Colin Burstead is all drama, no fireworks

Movie Review | Matt Looker | 18th October 2018

No one has ever had a good New Year's Eve party. It has never happened. Not once in the entire history of years ending has anyone ever satisfyingly celebrated this annual acknowledgement of time's passage. You might think you had a great NYE party once, but really it was just you having a good night with friends that just happened to occur on 31st December and coincidentally ended with some backwards counting. New Year's Eve did nothing to contribute to your fun. New Year’s Eve parties are always, to some degree, crushing disappointments, because the occasion itself is too much pressure for our species to handle; we are fundamentally ill-equipped to properly mark it with the right sense of importance. We are all too bogged down in stupid, normal human shit to ever go wild to the degree that NYE deserves. We still end up spending half the night in the kitchen, munching on hula hoops and taking it in turns to ask each other "So how's work?". We're all too pedestrian for New Year's Eve. And now Ben Wheatley has captured this exact feeling of rote celebration, but through the eyes of a dysfunctional family. A dysfunctional family that also happen to be a bunch of complete and utter Bursteads.

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Review: Widows delivers an effective, grief-stricken social drama with thrills

Movie Review | Matt Looker | 16th October 2018

Steve McQueen’s dramatically weighty take on the heist movie genre starts with a blistering opening scene. We see masked robbers fleeing their crime mid-pursuit, but only from inside the back of their getaway van. With a fixed position looking out through the transit’s rear, its broken doors scraping and sparking on the road as police cars and traffic crash and pile-up in the trail of the gang’s escape, we cut to each of the members in moments of domesticity from earlier that day - Liam Neeson passionately kissing Viola Davis in bed, Jon Bernthal prodding at the black eye adorning Elizabeth Debicki’s face, kisses goodbye, arguments in stores - until finally a chaotic shootout leaves the gang and their van exploded in flames. McQueen’s intent is clear: from the physical chaos on the roads to the emotional distress at home, these robbers are leaving a lot of devastation in their wake.

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Review: Mandy is a hypnotic nightmare of blood, drugs and damnation

Movie Review | Matt Looker | 10th October 2018

Another year, another London Film Festival, another annual peruse of the festival programme choosing films that sound fascinating in theory without really knowing what to expect in practice. Take Mandy, for example, which the programme describes as “a film so singular, perverse and beguiling, it’s almost impossible to define”. Ok... maybe try though? “Think of the most exquisitely nightmarish LSD trip imaginable, then multiply it by ten”. Hmm, I have no idea how to do that, but it sounds interesting. Ok fine, I’ll see it. “Don’t just see Mandy, experience it”. WHAT IS THIS IS IT EVEN A FILM.

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LFF 2016: Free Fire

Movie Review | Matt Looker | 16th October 2016

Remember that sequence in Spaced, where Tim gets out of a bind by initiating a pretend shootout with finger guns, safe in the knowledge that no one in the near vicinity can resist joining in? Ben Wheatley's new trigger-happy triumph plays out exactly like that, complete with stylised slow-mo, only with real guns, real bullet wounds and with it all carrying on for a real long time.

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LFF 2016: A Monster Calls

Movie Review | Matt Looker | 8th October 2016

It's a tricky thing to underpin the emotional core of your movie with a giant CGI monster. Hypothetically speaking, you could have a massive tree creature offering support to a little boy coping with his mother's terminal illness and, every time he walks away, some members of the audience might get distracted by the behemoth's huge bark-buttocks chafing with every step. Hypothetically speaking.

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LFF 2016: Into The Forest

Movie Review | Matt Looker | 6th October 2016

There's nothing like starting your annual London Film Festival experience with a French movie about a small boy who sees visions of a terrifying man-monster while being held captive in the woods by his increasingly erratic and abusive father. Happy LFF, everyone! (*dons subtitle glasses*)

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LFF 2015: Suffragette

Movie Review | Matt Looker | 14th October 2015

The gender-discriminated world of Suffragette is so far removed from my everyday life as to be completely unrecognisable, much less relatable. Which means that I should either a) credit how far we have come as a society since then, or b) immediately own up to the fact that I am a 30-something white male who has never had to contend with any prejudices or glass ceilings in his life. Either way, join me as I nervously criticise a film about the kind of tragic societal injustice of which I am entirely unqualified to discuss thanks to my having a penis.

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What to watch: Your guide to this year's BFI London Film Festival

Movie Feature | Matt Looker | 2nd September 2015

The full programme of the 2015 BFI London Film Festival has finally been released and you may be left wondering "What are all these films I haven't heard of?", or "How come so many of them are foreign? This is the LONDON Film Festival", or indeed "When's the next Hunger Games movie out again?". Well, fear not - we have all the answers right here. Well, all except for the ones to those three specific questions.

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LFF 2014: Foxcatcher

Movie Review | Ali Gray | 20th October 2014

There is a subtle moment in the first few minutes of Foxcatcher - a moment between moments, really - that I just couldn't shake. Gold medal-winning wrestler Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum) sits down alone at his table in an apartment that seems almost comically small for a man of his size. He has prepared himself some ramen noodles, presumably for his evening meal. Sitting in silence, framed against blank, beige walls, Schultz raises the spoonful to his lips but pauses for several seconds, staring intently at the noodles before putting them in his mouth. There is so much unsaid in that arresting pause; even this basic act of nourishment seems to be a struggle. It's a moment indicative of Foxcatcher as a whole; a glacial, passive drama where true emotions seethe beneath a surface of calm - until they can be contained no more.

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