London Film Festival 2016: The Highlights

1. Moonlight

Dir. Barry Jenkins

At a Q&A session following one of Moonlight’s public screenings at this year’s London Film Festival, director Barry Jenkins cited two particularly interesting films as major stylistic influences on his sophomore feature: Chinese filmmaker Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together, an Argentina-set queer classic, and Taiwanese film Three Times from director Hou Hsiao-Hsien, a decade-hopping portrait of strained relationships. One might be inclined to think these strange reference points for a Miami-set coming-of-age film (of sorts), but part of what makes Moonlight so special is how it shakes up preconceptions of what American cinema can address and how.

It’s not only a rare portrait of black homosexuality, but also an authentic, operatic, boldly expressive meditation on identity and love in all its forms, and all the magic and danger that come entwined. [Josh Slater-Williams]

2. Elle

Dir. Paul Verhoeven

The implacable, inimitable Isabelle Huppert stars as a Parisian businesswoman dealing with rape, the legacy of a brutal family history and the plate-spinning of a series of complex relationships. And, it’s a black comedy. Paul Verhoeven’s film, adapted from a novel by Betty Blue author Philippe Djian, is a pulp delight that’s deeply absorbing and defies categorisation. [Ian Mantgani]

3. Sieranevada

Dir. Cristi Puiu

“Brevity is the soul of wit,” we are told in Cristi Puiu’s Sieranevada, a line which comes across as a sly in-joke on the part of the director, given the way this film sprawls casually across three hours and manages to be consistently funny throughout. Set almost entirely within a single apartment, where an extended family has gathered to mourn their recently deceased patriarch, the film should be unbearably noisy and chaotic.

Characters come and go, the bickering – across a range of subjects – is relentless. But Puiu’s grip on this material is absolute, and his orchestration of the large, rotating cast within this confined space is masterful. Few films this year have felt so stunningly immersive. [Philip Concannon]

4. Aquarius

Dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho

On the surface, Kleber Mendonça Filho's follow up to 2012’s Neighbouring Sounds is a humorous tale of the defiant struggle of a 65-year old woman to save her home from the clutches of a property development company. Yet Filho's innovative style and intelligent sound design alludes to the world outside the frame, one bristling with anxiety and political anger, turning this story of individual resistance into a broader study of inherited guilt, social inequality and the distinction between house and home.

Brimming with formal invention and a knockout performance from Sonia Braga, Aquarius is a triumph of socially conscious filmmaking; a bold and electrifying film that's grand in scope, but intimate in its execution. [Patrick Gamble]

5. Personal Shopper

Dir. Olivier Assayas

Olivier Assayas tells an off-kilter ghost story for the iPhone generation in the exceptional Personal Shopper. As much as it is the story of the grief of its protagonist, Maureen (a career-best Kristen Stewart), it is a meditation on the identity crises and isolation of millennial malaise and the implicit horrors of the technological age.

This is explored in Maureen’s dislocation from those around her – a long-distance Skype relationship with her boyfriend, email communications from her boss, and even when she finally seems to make contact with the spectre she’s seeking, it is not through an Ouija board but spine-tingling text messages. [Ben Nicholson]

6. Certain Women

Dir. Kelly Reichardt

Director Kelly Reichardt assembles a powerhouse cast including Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, Kristen Stewart and Lily Gladstone for this sombre triptych set in the icy pine heartland of Montana. With a cinematic sense of place and a literary sense of storytelling, we discover women who are survivors in a world where some live and others lose – there are no easy answers, messages or connections, rather a vivid, powerful sense of human character. [IM]

7. Manchester by the Sea

Dir. Kenneth Lonergan

Kenneth Lonergan’s latest centres on a fine-grained performance from Casey Affleck, who looks bulked up and sturdy. He needs to be, because this tale of trauma and guilt set within a blue collar Irish-American family is bruising. Lonergan films the New England town of the title like it’s a Caspar David Friedrich seascape, cold and distant but swelling with emotion. It’s a film about despair, but Lonergan's cast – who also include Michelle Williams and Kyle Chandler – bring such warmth and humanity that it’ll make your heart soar in moments too. [Jamie Dunn]

8. Raw

Dir. Julia Ducournau

Justine, an idealistic vegetarian, is following in her sister Alexia’s footsteps by starting out at veterinary school. During Justine’s gruelling “rookie” week of hazing and hedonistic partying she's forced to eat a rabbit kidney, which results in a insatiable hunger for raw flesh rousing in her gut.

A no-brainer for this year's LFF First Feature Prize, Julia Ducournau’s intelligent and brutal Raw – a bone crunching, gory Gallic feminist horror – is defiantly self-assured. Enjoyable purely as a genre piece, it nonetheless is dripping with as much subtext as blood, making Raw’s social commentary as biting as its cannibal anti-heroines. [Rachel Bowles]

9. Graduation

Dir. Cristian Mungiu

If asked to name one recurrent concept in the films of Cristian Mungiu, the arguable poster boy for the so-called Romanian New Wave of the last decade, one might be inclined to go with compromises. Though his past features like Beyond the Hills and 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days are rooted in the specificities of the institutions they concern, they are all broadly concerned with how you can never come away clean when dealing with broken systems.

Graduation, his latest great work, offers another suspenseful web of compromises, with an achingly sad figure at its centre; a man trying to secure a future for his daughter in terrible circumstances, while only serving to set off a proverbial ticking time bomb for his own life and so many others. [JS-W]

10. The Handmaiden

Dir. Park Chan-wook

Park Chan-wook’s polyglot tale of intrigue and sapphic romance, based on Sarah Waters' Fingersmith, is both darkly comic and affecting, realised in sumptuous detail by production designer Ryu Seong-hie, who so richly crafts period Japanese, English and Korean styles. Nothing less than a gothic masterpiece, Chan-wook brings his trademark humour to this chinese box narrative, making a wealth of the genre’s conceits – inauthenticity, imprisonment and perversity – seem fresh and urgent. [RB]

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London Film Festival ran 5-16 Oct. For more on London Film Festival, go to theskinny.co.uk/festivals/uk-festivals/film

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Writers' individual top fives:

Rachel Bowles
1. Raw
2. Creepy
3. Wild
4. The Handmaiden
5. Brimstone

Philip Concannon
1. Certain Women
2. Dawson City: Frozen Time
3. Sieranevada
4. Elle
5. Aquarius

Jamie Dunn
1. Manchester by the Sea
2. Elle
3. Frantz
4. Arrival
5. Personal Shopper

Patrick Gamble
1. Sieranevada
2. Aquarius
3. Moonlight
4. Le Fils du Joseph
5. Personal Shopper

Ian Mantgani
1. Voyage of Time
2. Elle
3. Certain Women
4. Dog Eat Dog
5. Moonlight

Ben Nicholson
1. Moonlight
2. The Illinois Parables
3. Aquarius
4. Personal Shopper
5. Kate Plays Christine

Josh Slater-Williams
(unranked)
Manchester by the Sea
Moonlight
All This Panic
Sieranevada
Graduation