- guardian.co.uk, Sunday October 14 2007 15.07 BST
- The Observer, Sunday October 14 2007
The avalanche of images that is the 51st London Film Festival begins on Wednesday with David Cronenberg's London-set, grit-filled Russian gangster movie Eastern Promises, and finishes 16 days and 182 films later with Wes Anderson's latest piece of familial whimsy, an India-set train movie, The Darjeeling Limited
There's a lot of war about, what with Tom Cruise and Meryl Streep in Robert Redford's Afghanistan-set Lions for Lambs and Iraq dramas from Brian De Palma's Redacted and Nick Broomfield's Battle for Haditha, so the Baftas and Oscars next year will be like a military parade. Obviously it's important that film festivals can reflect the social and political concerns of a wider world but films on this subject do tend to verge on the self-important.
I'm looking forward to Michael Haneke's remake of his own 1997 film Funny Games, switching the action from Austria to America and putting Naomi Watts and Tim Roth as the couple under threat from Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet. Haneke's too clever a film-maker to not do something interesting with this, and I'm intrigued as to what kind of intellectual funny game he'll devise.
There's also a Brazilian film called City of Men that has taken me by surprise. I thought that was the name of the TV series inspired by Fernando Meirelles's brilliant film City of God (Meirelles opened the LFF two years ago with The Constant Gardener), a series that became one of the most popular shows on Brazilian television. The spin-off TV series has now inspired its own spin-off movie (is that a first?), a tale of favela friends tested by rival drug gangs and the past actions of their fathers.
One thing I've never understood about the LFF is why there are more French movies programmed than British ones. I've already written in these pages about the lack of new Brit talent showcased (although I do recommend Asif Kapadia's Far North and I'm looking forward to Brick Lane), but a bit of entente cordiale never hurt.
Check out Celine Sciamma's Water Lilies about teen crushes on the girls' synchronised swimming team, and Substitute, a football documentary partly shot by French international player Vikash Dhorasoo, a film which, contrary to last year's one from Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno about Zidane in the constant spotlight, shows life from the shadow of the subs' bench during the last World Cup. Don't forget my favourite of the year so far, too - Abdellatif Kechiche's La Graine et le mulet, a life metaphor set in a fish restaurant.
Thankfully there's plenty of juicy-looking world cinema. I hear good things about two Nigerian films, Redemption and Ezra; there are some blessedly non-Bollywood Indian offerings (The Last Lear - starring Amitabh Bachchan as a Shakespeare obsessive - and The Voyeurs); Chinese Berlin festival winner Tuya's Marriage is a must; and Secret Sunshine from Korea and the artful-sounding Japanese film The Mourning Forest, from director Naomi Kawase, are certainly on my list. What's on yours?
· For full programme and screening details go to bfi.org.uk/whatson/lff
High five: Films with a buzz
Things We Lost In The Fire
Halle Berry is finally back to proper acting in a grief-stricken drama by Danish director Susanne Bier, co-starring the ever-watchable Benicio del Toro.
4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days
Cristian Mungiu's well-deserved Cannes winner is a piledriving thriller well worth catching before its release in January.
Jetsam
Hopefully, the best of new British, a low-budget amnesiac thriller set on the Kent coast from debut director Simon Welsford.
Jar City
Based on a bestselling novel. A detective investigates a gruesome crime in Iceland. Moody, existential procedural stuff from Baltasar Kormakur, director of 101 Reykjavik.
El Camino de los ingleses (Summer Rain)
Antonio Banderas directs a tale of young love set in his native Malaga during the 1970s.
