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The films

Sorry to Bother You (Boots Riley) 🇺🇸 [Opening film]
It has a comedy layer, a social and racial politics layer, and a horror layer, so one is inevitably tempted to compare it with Get Out, which it’s not as good as. ★★★

Shoplifters / 万引き家族 (Hirokazu Kore-eda) 🇯🇵 [Closing film]
Gentle, kind, funny, moving film about how the family you choose is more important than the family you’re born with. For a film containing so much lawbreaking, it’s surprisingly adorable. ★★★★

All Is Well / All Good / Alles ist gut (Eva Trobisch) 🇩🇪
Janne’s “Are you serious?” is the line of dialogue that will stick with me the most from this festival. I knew nothing about this before watching it, but apparently it’s coming to Netflix soon. ★★★★

El Ángel (Luis Ortega) 🇦🇷
It’s OK, but it’s not Carlos. There were moments I was getting a little sleepy, but this was my fourth film of the day and the cinema was very warm. ★★★

Arctic (Joe Penna) 🇮🇸
If I’m ever trapped in the Arctic, I want Mads Mikkelsen to look after me. ★★★

Beautiful Boy (Felix van Groeningen) 🇺🇸
This is almost very good, but doesn’t quite stick it. The (nondiagetic) music is far too much, the occasional line of dialogue is clunky and obvious, and there was really no need for a car chase in the third act. ★★★

Birds of Passage / Pájaros de verano (Ciro Guerra & Cristina Gallego) 🇨🇴
Like The Godfather if The Godfather was set among the Wayuu people of northern Colombia during the drug wars of the late 60s-early 70s (and had more beautiful cinematography and greater interest in its female characters). ★★★★★

Border / Gräns (Ali Abbasi) 🇸🇪
Odd, but in a good way. ★★★

Burning / 버닝 (Lee Chang-dong) 🇰🇷
It has the simmering atmosphere, latent tension and moody cinematography of an old-fashioned film noir, although I occasionally wished it had the cut-to-the-chase snappiness too. I think there’s a good chance this is a total masterpiece and that I only partly got it. ★★★★

Capernaum / Capharnaüm / كفرناحوم‎ (Nadine Labaki) 🇱🇧
Astonishing acting from the kid, and very cute acting from the baby. Won the audience award, which no one could begrudge it. ★★★

Can You Ever Forgive Me? (Marielle Heller) 🇺🇸
This is well filmed, the story’s interesting, and Melissa McCarthy and Richard E Grant are excellent. It didn’t totally land for me at the time, but I now look back on it more fondly. ★★★

Colette (Wash Westmoreland) 🇬🇧🇺🇸
Delightful and charming and witty, then very gently subversive. Plus there’s a scene where Keira Knightley wears a suit. ★★★★ [Later update: I’m baffled this didn’t become a big hit – what gives?]

Girl (Lukas Dhont) 🇧🇪
I’m not sure how this holds up analytically, but I was pulled in to the character and desperately wanted things to be OK for her. ★★★

The Guilty / Den skyldige (Gustav Möller) 🇩🇰
It’s a man-on-the-phone thriller, which is the sort of thing I like. (This is not as good as Locke, because it’s about conventional filmy things like murder and kidnapping, whereas Locke had the courage to be a thriller about pouring concrete.) ★★★

Happy as Lazzaro / Lazzaro felice (Alice Rohrwacher) 🇮🇹
It’s an amiable if rather old-fashioned drama for about the first 60%, and then there’s a turn, and it becomes more interesting but also more slippery to keep hold of. ★★★

Happy New Year, Colin Burstead (Ben Wheatley) 🇬🇧
The characters seem unpleasant, but by the end you realise Ben Wheatley is actually a big softie. ★★★

I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians / Îmi este indiferent dacă în istorie vom intra ca barbari (Radu Jude) 🇷🇴
Imagine Hannah Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem” directed by Jean-Luc Godard. ★★★

I Feel Good (Benoît Delépine & Gustave Kervern) 🇫🇷
Passable French comedy. ★★

In Fabric (Peter Strickland) 🇬🇧
Possibly the maddest film I’ve ever seen. ★★★★

The Kindergarten Teacher (Sara Colangelo) 🇺🇸
A first half is rather irritating, but Maggie Gyllenhaal saves it in the second half. ★★★

Loveling / Benzinho (Gustavo Pizzi) 🇧🇷
Amiable and rather lovely drama/comedy about a Brazilian family. ★★★

The Old Man & the Gun (David Lowery) 🇺🇸
Charming and feather-light, with the most romantic kiss in film this year. ★★★

One Cut of the Dead (Shin’ichirō Ueda) 🇯🇵
In the opening shot, a zombie thriller is being filmed, when some actual zombies turn up! This opening shot lasts for 37 minutes. What happens next? You’ll have to watch it to find out (and you must not read any more about this film before you do). ★★★★

The Parting Glass (Stephen Moyer) 🇺🇸
A rare example of a film I wish I’d known more about before seeing it. After finding out that it’s very closely based on the true experiences of the writer, who also acts in the part of himself, the film seemed post-facto so much warmer and more moving than when I was watching it. ★★★

Peterloo (Mike Leigh) 🇬🇧
It’s an likeable character-based period comedy, but it also has the Peterloo massacre at the end. ★★★

Pity / Oίκτος (Babis Makridis) 🇬🇷
I was expecting full-on Lanthimosian weirdness, so was a little disappointed to get a competently-done cringe-comedy. ★★★

The Raft (Marcus Lindeen) 🇸🇪
In 1973, a raft carrying 11 strangers floated from Europe to America, in a sort of proto-reality-TV experiment, and this is what happened. ★★★★

Roma (Alfonso Cuarón) 🇲🇽
There are many remarkable scenes, and it looks beautiful, and yet somehow I never really got into this. Sorry for my philistinism, but I think it would have been better in colour. ★★★

Sauvage (Camille Vidal-Naquet) 🇫🇷
There’s the sweet, gentle personal bits, and then there’s the eye-watering sex bits. ★★

Suspiria (Luca Guadagnino) 🇺🇸🇮🇹
With a couple of exceptions (the first Volk dance scene; the use of Thom Yorke’s “Unmade” near the end), this largely doesn’t work – it’s too chilly and too leaden. ★★★

Widows (Steve McQueen) 🇺🇸
There’s lots good about this, but in the end I was a bit disappointed. The original miniseries was 5 hours long, and, squashed down to 2, there isn’t really enough time for everyone. ★★★

Utøya – July 22 / U – July 22 / Utøya 22. juli (Erik Poppe) 🇳🇴
I’m a bit queasy about the idea of making a film about a fictionalized version of a real-life massacre. It’s well-made and believably acted, but the ending did not sit well with me. ★★

The Wild Pear Tree / Ahlat Ağacı (Nuri Bilge Ceylan) 🇹🇷
No film at this festival looked as gorgeous as the Turkish autumn looks here. Plus, despite being over three hours long, there’s only one scene where I was bored (the religion discussion under the apple tree). But I’m not sure what it really all adds up to in the end. ★★★

Leeds Short Film Award: The Winners
My favourite was the surreal stop-motion animation Raymonde, or the Vertical Escape / Raymonde, ou l’évasion verticale (Sarah Van Den Boom) 🇫🇷. I also liked Afterword (Boris Seewald) 🇩🇪.

Retrospective: Time Frames

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Daughters of the Dust (Julie Dash, 1991) 🇺🇸
An astonishing visual feast – there’s no other film that looks like this. ★★★★★

Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989) 🇺🇸
On of the all-time greatest films – and played really loudly in a busy cinema, it’s even better. ★★★★★

My awards

Best film:
🥇 Birds of Passage
🥈 Shoplifters
🥉 Burning

Best director: Shin’ichirō Ueda, One Cut of the Dead

Best actor: Richard E Grant, Can You Ever Forgive Me?

Best actress: Aenne Schwarz, All is Well

Best screenplay: Colette (Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland & Rebecca Lenkiewicz)

Best doc: The Raft