Lff 2018

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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.