The Best Films at London Film Festival 2018

London Film Festival is a bit like a tasty cinematic version of those disgusting global food buffets, where a lamb bhuna can share a plate with spring rolls and garlic bread. Here, some of the auteur-driven titles from Cannes (Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s The Wild Pear Tree, Jia Zhangke’s Ash Is Purest White) share programme space with the recent hits from Venice (the Coen brothers with portmanteau western The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma) and Toronto film festivals (Steve McQueen’s Widows, Timothée Chalamet vehicle Beautiful Boy). It’s quite a smorgasbord. 

The screenings for the above festival favourites have already sold out, as too have many of LFF’s other hot tickets like Lee Chang-dong’s slow-burn thriller Burning, Barry Jenkins’ artful James Baldwin adaptation If Beale Street Could Talk, Mamoru Hosoda’s beguiling time-travel anime Mirai, intriguing 3D noir Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Alonso Ruizpalacios' inventive heist thriller Museum with Gael García Bernal, and Mike Leigh’s return with historical drama Peterloo (which actually has its UK premiere in Manchester just a few hundred feet from where the Peterloo Massacre took place). Other splashy titles like Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite and Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria have a few tickets left, but they’re like gold dust.

Fear not, though. So bursting at the seams is LFF’s programme that there are still plenty of tickets for great films up for grabs. Here are ten we'd heartily recommend.

1. Happy as Lazzaro

Dir. Alice Rohrwacher

Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher’s Happy as Lazzaro – winner of Best Screenplay at Cannes – is a dreamy, magic-realist fable about her changing homeland and a worthy follow up to her sweet drama The Wonders. The less you know about its beguiling story going in, the more magical its audacious narrative turns will feel. 16 & 17 Oct, more info here

2. Madeline's Madeline

Dir. Josephine Decker

The gifted Josephine Decker (Thou Wast Mild And Lovely, Butter on the Latch) is back with another dazzling feature. A coming-of-age film with a thrillingly experimental aesthetic, it follows a mentally unstable teen (a barnstorming Helena Howard) who’s encouraged by her theatre teacher (Molly Parker) to channel her fractured inner-life into her art. 17, 19 & 21 Oct, more info here

3. Support the Girls

Dir. Andrew Bujalski

Andrew Bujalski (Funny Ha Ha, Results) only makes great films. His latest is about the friendship between a bunch of women who work in a tacky, Hooters-style restaurant. It’s a comic gem full of heart, with sharp things to say about blue collar America, and it’s the perfect antidote to Trump’s vision of greed and division. 17, 20 & 21 Oct, more info here

4. The Green Fog

Dirs. Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, Galen Johnson

Working again with Galen and Evan Johnson, with whom he made The Forbidden Room, Guy Maddin's latest piece of playful experimentation sees the Canadian filmmaker splice clips from the various movies that have been shot in and around San Francisco to create a meta-remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. 16 & 18 Oct, here

5. Make Me Up

Dir. Rachel Maclean

Video artist Rachel Maclean specialises in taking pop-culture imagery and twisting it to create darkly surreal computer generated worlds that act as grotesque, candy-coloured allegories to our own. Her first feature-length work is a blistering satire set in a dystopian world in which a young woman named Siri is trapped with a group of women in a cruel reality TV-style competition. Lording over proceedings is the Figurehead (played by Maclean), a sadistic diva who, curiously, speaks entirely in quotations taken from stuffy Kenneth Clark series Civilization. 12 & 14 Oct, more info here

6. The Flower

Dir. Mariano Llinás

This epic from Argentinian filmmaker Mariano Llinás sounds absolutely wild. Covering a bun-numbing 14 hours and split into three parts, this mosaic film follows four actresses and blithely moves across different genres and styles, from the B-movie, musical and spy thriller to the film-within-a-film, silent movie and quest narrative. And at just £21 for all 800-plus minutes, you won’t find better bang for your buck at LFF. 15, 16, 17 & 19, 20, 21 Oct, more info here

7. Outlaw King

Dir. David Mackenzie

David Mackenzie’s historical drama about how Robert the Bruce took on the might of King Edward’s English army in the early 14th century got a cool reception when it opened Toronto Film Festival, but word is this talented Scottish filmmaker has been hard at work on a brisker, more lively edit that shaves the film from 137 minutes to a more compact length of just under two hours, and this new cut will have its world premiere at London Film Festival. “It’s worth another look, and I encourage critics who saw it [at Toronto] and didn’t connect with it to see it again,” Mackenzie says. “It has a different sense since it’s under two hours, but it’s still very much an epic.” 17, 18 & 19 Oct, more info here

8. Can You Forgive Me?

Dir. Marielle Heller

Not content with being the funniest comic actor in Hollywood right now, Melissa McCarthy gives a reportedly knockout dramatic performance as audacious literary forger and caustic wit Lee Israel in this darkly humorous biopic directed by Marielle Heller, following up the brilliant The Diary of a Teenage Girl, with a script from Nicole Holofcener. 19, 20 & 21 Oct, more info here

9. Diamantino

Dirs. Gabriel Abrantes, Daniel Schmidt

A sharp critique of the rise of the far right in Europe disguised as a demented B-movie about Diamantino – a beautiful, talented, dumb-as-a-box-of-rocks footballer (who’s clearly based on Ronaldo), who’s being cloned by a mad scientist with a dastardly plan to create a World Cup-winning Portuguese squad to instil national pride and “Make Portugal Great Again.” If that wasn't gonzo enough, Diamantino’s also growing breasts and falling in love with his adopted son, who’s actually a adult female spy disguised as a 13-year-old refugee. 19 & 20 Oct, more info here

10. “I Do Not Care if We Go Down in History as Barbarians”

Dir. Radu Jude

We’ve heard great things about the latest from Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude (Aferim!, Scarred Hearts), a darkly comic, politically timely meta-drama about an idealistic theatre director preparing to stage a grand outdoor historical pageant based on a notorious wartime massacre. There iss actually a Jean-Luc Godard film screening at LFF (The Image Book), but if you’re looking for a film that resembles Godard in his prime, Jude’s signature punky irreverence, absurdist humour and Brechtian flourishes should be just the ticket. 13 & 14 Oct – more info here

---

BFI London Film Festival 2018, 10-21 Oct, tickets and programme info at bfi.org.uk