Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 12/10/2018)

Rather than breaking down the films by geography, as in past years, we shall follow the festival's own groupings and pick out some of the highlights to look out for on each slate. 

HEADLINE GALAS. 

Opening proceedings at LFF 2019 is Tom Harper's Wild Rose, which follows the efforts of 23 year-old Glaswegian single mother Jessie Buckley to fulfil her dream of singing country in Nashville. With Julie Walters as her grounded working-class mum and Sophie Okonedo as a benefactor who believes in Buckley, despite the fact she has just come out of prison, this takes a very different view of performance to Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria, which harks back to 1977 to put a feminist spin on Dario Argento's classic giallo. Tilda Swinton has high hopes that Dakota Johnson is the star she has been searching for when she auditions for her Berlin dance company. But, while Johnson strives to seize her opportunity, a number of her classmates start disappearing. 

Biopics dominate this section of the programme, with David Mackenzie's Outlaw King returning to the Scotland of 1304, as ruler in waiting Robert the Bruce (Chris Pine) draws on the support of his English wife, Elizabeth de Burgh (Florence Pugh) in preparing to resist the tyranny of Edward, Prince of Wales (Billy Howle). Contrasting with the blood and guts of this bold recreation of Anglo-Scottish enmity is the court intrigue that moils to amusing effect in Yorgos Lanthimos's The Favourite. As Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) struggles with ill health and the ongoing war against Louis XIV's France, she relies heavily on her favourite, Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz), who is married to her leading general, John, Duke of Marlborough (Mark Gatiss). However, when Sarah invites cousin Abigail Masham (Emma Stone) to the palace, she quickly realises that she can exploit her proximity to the throne to repair the damage done by her father's gambling.

Another fond relationship turns into a fierce rivalry in Wash Westmoreland's Colette, as Sidonie-GabrielleColette (Keira Knightley) comes to resent the fact that husband Henry Gauthier-Villars (Dominic West) is publishing her racy fin-de-siècle stories about a schoolgirl named Claudine under his own nom de plume, Willy. However, the free-thinking country girl is determined to enjoy her literary celebrity, as well as her newfound sexual freedom with American in Paris, Georgie Raoul-Duval (Eleanor Tomlinson) and cross-dressing aristocrat Mathilde de Morny (Denise Gough). Colette caused a sensation when she and De Morny (aka Missy) engaged in the first documented same-sex kiss in stage history. But there's nothing scandalous about the 1953 British theatre tour undertaken by the beloved slapstick duo of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. However, as Jon S. Baird reveals in Stan & Ollie, things didn't quite go according to plan and the rising tensions between Laurel (Steve Coogan) and Hardy (John C. Reilly) are heightened when they are joined by their respective wives, Ida (Nina Arianda) and Lucille (Shirley Henderson).   

Completing the biographical roster are Marielle Heller's Can You Ever Forgive Me?, which stars Nicole Holofcener as literary forger Lee Israel; Matthew Heineman's A Private War, which features Rosamund Pike as legendary Sunday Times journalist Marie Colvin on her last assignment in Syria; and Jason Reitman's The Front Runner, which sees Hugh Jackman take on the role of Gary Hart, the favourite to land the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988 when news leaked of his betrayal of his wife Lee (Vera Farmiga) with Donna Rice (Sara Paxton). 

Also in this part of the programme are Joel and Ethan Coen's Western anthology The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Felix Van Groeningen's Beautiful Boy (in which Steve Carell tries to wean son Timothée Chalamet off drugs); Dan Fogelman's Life Itself (which reveals how a single incident has cross-generational ramifications for couples in America and Spain); and Steve McQueen's Widows, which transfers Laura La Plante's hard-hitting 1980s TV series Stateside to explore how Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, Elizabeth Debicki and Cynthia Erivo handle Irish gangsters Robert Duvall and Colin Farrell after their husbands are killed in the heist that was planned to repay a debt. 

SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS.

An estimated 18 people were killed and in excess of 500 more were wounded when the 15th Hussars charged the crowd that had assembled at St Peter's Fields in Manchester on 16 August 1819 to hear radical activist Henry Hunt. Rory Kinnear plays Orator Hunt in Mike Leigh's Peterloo, which recreates the infamous quelling of revolutionary fervour through the eyes of Mancunian mill worker Maxine Peake and the son left shell-shocked by the Napoleonic Wars, as well those of Prime Minister Lord Liverpool (Robert Wilfort), Home Secretary Lord Sidmouth (Karl Johnson) and the Prince Regent (Tim McInnerny). Suppression is also the theme of Rachel Maclean's Make Me Up, which marks the centenary of female suffrage with a stylised satire (which is reviewed in full in this week's In Cinemas column) on society's efforts to keep women in their place. 

Martin Amis's Night Train is the inspiration for Carol Morley's Out of Blue, which follows New Orleans detective and recovering alcoholic Patricia Clarkson in her bid to discover who shot a black holes expert at close range at the city observatory. Among her suspects are victim's colonel father (James Caan), her eccentric mother (Jacki Weaver), her hunky boyfriend (Jonathan Majors) and the observatory manager (Toby Jones). But each fresh clue reminds Clarkson of an unsolved case and seems to take her further away from the truth. A shooting also drives the action in George Tillman, Jr.'s adaptation of Angie Thomas's Young Adult novel, The Hate U Give, as black teenager Amanda Stenberg begins to find fitting in at home with parents Russell Hornsby and Regina Hall and at her mostly white prep school increasingly difficult after she witnesses a cop gunning down childhood friend, Algee Smith. 

The price of conformity is also the theme of Wanuri Kahiu's Rafiki, an adaptation of `Jambula Tree', a short story by Ugandan writer Monica Arac de Nyeko that centres on the burgeoning passion between best pals Samantha Mugatsia and Sheila Munyiva in a conservative part of the Kenyan capital, Nairobi. And another potentially dangerous liaison lies at the heart of Tinge Krishnan's Been So Long, as single mother Michaela Coel enjoys a night out in Camden and falls for the shifty lothario Arinzé Kene in this livewire adaptation of the acclaimed Ché Walker stage musical, with songs by Arthur Darvill. 

Also on view under this banner are three documentaries: Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 11/9, a provocative assessment of how America came to elect Donald Trump; Victor Kossakovsky's Aquarela, a globe-trotting treatise on humanity's dependence on water; and Peter Jackson's They Shall Not Grow Old, which marks the centenary of the Armistice that ended the Great War on 11 November 1918 with an intimate account of life on the front line that uses hand-coloured and 3-D digitised footage from the BBC and Imperial War Museum archives.

OFFICIAL COMPETITION.

For much of its existence, the London Film Festival was a non-competitive event. But a clutch of prizes have been introduced in recent times and some big names find themselves in the running for this particular category. Indeed, there are few bigger than Zhang Yimou, who returns to the wuxia genre with Shadow, which draws on the saga of the Three Kingdoms to show how relations between the realms of Pei and Jing are jeopardised by a stand-in for Commander Yu, who has gone into hiding with the connivance of his wife and left a bodyguard from an impoverished background (Deng Chao) to impersonate him in a duel against the leader of the invading forces, General Yang (Hu Jun). 

Ben Wheatley gives social realism a shot of Dogme immediacy in Happy New Year, Colin Burstead, which was filmed in two weeks and is essentially a feature pilot for a series the director is currently developing for the BBC. Less abrasive than some of Wheatley's recent outings, this nevertheless punchy drama centres on the family gathering organised in a rented stately home by Neil Maskell. However, as parents Bill Paterson and Doon Mackichan, ailing uncle Charles Dance, suicidal buddy Asim Chaudhry and bumbling toff Richard Glover prepare to raise a glass, Maskell's sister, Hayley Squires, throws a spanner in the works by inviting their estranged sibling, Sam Riley, and his new partner, Alexandra Maria Lara. Meanwhile, the TV ads for the January sale at the Dentley & Soper department store prove too much for Marianne Jean-Baptiste to resist, as she seeks something special to wear for her first date in eons in Peter Strickland's giallo homage, In Fabric. But in entrusting herself to shop assistant Fatma Mohamed, Baptiste soon wishes she was back home with brattish son Jaygann Ayeh and his kinky girlfriend, Gwendoline Christie, or at work with her passive-aggressive gay bosses, Steve Oram and Julian Barratt.

The focus falls on the Budapest millinery shop that was once owned by Juli Jakab's parents in László Nemes's Sunset. However, since the fire that claimed her parents and caused her to move in with relatives in Vienna, Jakab has always wondered what happened to her brother and, when she returns to her homeland in 1913 to meet new owner Vlad Ivanov, she receives a clue about her sibling's whereabouts from mysterious coachman, Levente Molnár. And there's more intrigue in Alice Rohrwacher's Happy As Lazzaro, which shared the Best Screenplay prize at Cannes for its twisting magic realist tale about the bond forged in a 1980s central Italian neverland between trusting peasant Adriano Tardiolo and Luca Chikovani, the son of exploitative marquesa Nicoletta Braschi, who needs his new friend to help him stage his own abduction. 

Eighty-two year-old Robert Redford is set to quit acting after his starring role in David Lowery's The Old Man & the Gun and he goes out on a high as Forrest Tucker, a 70 year-old San Quentin escapee who conducts a string of unconventional robberies with a couple of silver sidekicks (Tom Waits and Danny Glover) and, in the process, wins the admiration of pursuing cop John Hunt (Casey Affleck) and a lonely widow (Sissy Spacek), who becomes his partner in crime. Karyn Kusama settles on the flipside of the law and order coin in Destroyer, which sees LAPD detective Nicole Kidman confront her demons when rumours begin to circulate about the reappearance of Toby Kebbell, the ruthless villain she had gone undercover to investigate with partner Sebastian Stan.

Rounding off this slate are Dominga Sotomayor Castillo's Too Late to Die Young, which joins three Chilean teenagers on a summer stay in a rural shantytown as the country deals with the transition to democracy after the fall of General Augusto Pinochet; Ciro Guerra and Cristina Gallego's Birds of Passage, which chronicles how a Wayuu family from northern Colombia becomes involved in the drug trade in the late 1960s; and Sudabeh Mortezai's Joy, which follows the misfortunes of Joy Alphonsus, a Nigerian prostitute who has been trafficked to Austria and placed in charge of the rebellious Mariam Precious Sanusi.

FIRST FEATURE & DOCUMENTARY COMPETITIONS.

Actor Paul Dano is the only familiar name in contention for the First Feaure prize, as he debuts behind the camera with Wildlife. Adapted by Zoe Kazan from a novel by Richard Ford, the story centres on Jake Gyllenhaal and Carey Mulligan, as they move to rural Montana in search of a fresh start with teenage son, Ed Oxenbould. However, he is increasingly left alone with his stressed mother when his short-fused father starts working away from home. Coming closer to home, writer-director Richard Billingham surveys more domestic dysfunction in Ray & Liz, as he returns to the Birmingham of his Thatcherite youth (and the 1996 photo book, Ray's a Laugh) to chart how two brothers cope in a high-rise flat with their mismatched parents, Justin Salinger and Ella Smith (who are played in later life by Patrick Romer and Deirdre Kelly).

Conception is more the issue for Laia Costa and Josh O'Connor after they decide to start a family after being thrown together at a Glasgow Hogmany bash in Harry Wootliff's Only You. Having earned a BAFTA nomination for Nits (2003), the Leeds-born Wootliff is one of several female debutants under consideration. Among the others is Swede Isabella Eklöf, who travels to the Turkish riviera port of Bodrum for Holiday, a ménage saga that sees gangster Lai Yde take a dim view of trophy girlfriend Victoria Carmen Sonne's flirting with Dutch tourist, Thijs Römer. Spaniard Celia Rico Clavellino eavesdrops on another controlling relationship in Journey to a Mother's Room, as Anna Castillo tries to find an easy way of telling recently widowed mother Lola Dueñas that she wants to leave their sleepy southern backwater and begin again in London.

Taking the next step also proves a problem for Victor Polster in Belgian first-timer Lukas Dhont's Girl, as the transgender teenager struggles to cope with the pressures of asserting her identity and succeeding at a prestigious ballet academy. Coming to terms with harsh reality is also the theme of Soudade Kaadan's The Day I Lost My Shadow, which sees single mother Sawsan Erchied discover the true nature of suffering when she ventures to the outskirts of Damascus in search of fuel for cooking and meets a group of women whose families face death on a daily basis. 

Gabriela Cartol also gets to see how the other half lives while working in a luxury hotel in Mexico City in actress-turned-director Lia Avilés's debut, The Chambermaid. While Cartol does everything in her power to earn a promotion, undercover New Delhi cop Geetika Vidya Ohlyan finds herself being thwarted at every turn in Ivan Ayr's Soni, as boss Saloni Batra can't prevent superintendent husband Mohit Chauhan from assigning her to a phone response unit after Ohlyan takes the law into her own hands while investigating a spate of violent crimes against women. The tone is markedly more comic in Cathy Yan's Dead Pigs, a satire on the clash between progress and poverty that brings pig farmer's sister, a waiter posing as a businessman, a feisty café owner and an American architect to Shanghai.  

One name leaps out from the actualities in competition, as Julien Faraut profiles a tennis legend in John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection. The other American entrants are much grittier, however, as Robert Greene's Bisbee `17 marks the centenary of the day 1200 migrant miners were deported from a town on the Arizona-Mexico border, while Roberto Minervini's What You Gonna Do When the World's on Fire? reflects on the impact that the police shooting of unarmed 37 year-old Alton Sterling had on the African-American community of Baton Rouge, Louisiana during the summer of 2017.  

Elsewhere, Lola Arias's Theatre of War examines the legacy of the battle for the Falklands Islands on its British and Argentinian combatants; Vitaly Mansky's Putin's Witnesses assesses Vladimir Putin's time in office; Marouan Omara and Johanna Domke's Dream Away ponders the impact of the Arab Spring on the Red Sea resort of Sharm El Sheikh; Orlando von Einsiedel's Evelyn follows a family's attempts to mark the 10th anniversary of the suicide of the film-maker's brother; Steve Sprung's The Plan That Came From the Bottom Up catches up with the workers at the Lucas Aerospace factory who sought to manufacture socially-useful products; Matthieu Bareyre's Young and Alive accompanies some young Parisians on a night out; and Marcus Lindeen's The Raft revisits the five men and six women who were set adrift on the Atlantic in 1973, as part of a sociological study of human aggression and sexuality conducted by anthropologist Santiago Genovés.

EXPERIMENTA & TREASURES.

Viewers of a certain age will be drawn towards Ian Mark's Doozy in the Experimenta segment of the LFF 62 programme, as it traces the career of Paul Lynde, the American actor who voiced a number of villains for Hanna-Barbera cartoons (including Sylvester Sneekly, aka The Hooded Claw in The Perils of Penelope Pitstop) and inspired the character of Roger in Seth McFarlane's Family Guy. Accompanying this documentary is Jour de Fete, John Smith's three-minute animated tribute to Jacques Tati, and another giant of French counterculture comes to the fore in Bouchra Khalili's Twenty-Two Hours, which recalls Jean Genet' secret visit to the United States in 1970 to meet with members of the Black Panther Party.

Among the other titles in this strand are Ross Lipman's Between Two Cinemas (a meditation on experimental cinema and the archiving of films); Margaret Salmon's Cladach (a snapshot of daily life in a small Scottish coastal town); Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt's Diamantino (which sees Portugal's finest footballer undergo a crisis of conscience after meeting some refugees and deciding to adopt an orphan); and Dora García's Second Time Around (an appreciation of the work of Argentinian avant-gardist Oscar Masotta).

The Treasures from the Archive strand is usually one of the glories of the LFF. But it has to be said that inspiration is in rather short supply where the 2018 selection is concerned. The notable exceptions are the three silents on show. Updating Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper, Monta Bell's Lights of Old Broadway (1925) stars the undervalued Marion Davies in a dual role, as twins who were separated at birth and have wound up on opposite sides of the tracks. This newly restored print will look a picture, as it contains sequences in two-strip Technicolor, as well as those that have been tinted and hand-coloured using the Handschiegel process.

Based on a play by Austin Strong, Frank Borzage's 7th Heaven (1927) is less of a rarity. But always worth revisiting, as it provided Janet Gaynor with one of the three roles that led to her being named Best Actress at the inaugural Academy Awards. Here, she plays a Parisian streetwalker who is saved from clutches of the police by sewer worker Charles Farrell, who returns to her arms after fighting in the Great War. Another combatant, Feodor Nikitin, loses his memory while fighting for the Tsar in Friedrich Ermler's Fragment of an Empire (1929). By the time he regains his wits, however, the Communists have been in power for a decade and he has to adjust to life in the Soviet Union.

Little needs to be said about Alexander Korda's The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933) apart from the fact that it enabled Charles Laughton to become the first Brit to win the Oscar for Best Actor. Edward F. Cline's My Little Chickadee (1940) is also familiar, as it unites Mae West and WC Fields for the one and only time as Flower Belle Lee and Cuthbert J. Twillie, who contract a marriage of convenience and begin a new life in Greaswood City after she is run out of Little Bend for being a bit too co-operative during a robbery by a masked bandit.

Worthier of reviving is André De Toth's None Shall Escape (1944), which was filmed shortly after the Hungarian exile arrived in Hollywood. Co-scripted by Lester Cole, who would become one of the Hollywood Ten persecuted during the postwar hunt for Communists in the film industry, the story flashes back from the trial of SS officer Wilhelm Grimm (Alexander Knox), who had once been a schoolmaster in the small Polish town whose Jewish population he is ordered to deport to a nearby camp. A conflict of interests also arises in Emilio Fernández's Enamorada (1946), a classic of Mexican cinema that was photographed in shimmering monochrome by Gabriel Figueroa and matches Pedro Armendáriz and María Félix, as the revolutionary looting the town of Cholula and the daughter of one of its wealthiest residents. 

The mood is much lighter in René Clair's Silence Is Golden (1947), which harks back to 1905 to reveal how pioneering film-maker Maurice Chevalier comes to regret teaching timid assistant François Périer the art of seduction, as he uses his new skills on Marcelle Derrien, the daughter of an old friend who has just started work at his studio. And the laughs keep coming in Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot (1959), which should surely have been held back until its 60th anniversary next year. But who needs an excuse to watch Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon don drag and join Marilyn Monroe's all-girl band in order to escape the mobsters they disturbed in the middle of a massacre?

It's odd that Ingmar Bergman's sole espionage thriller should have been chosen for restoration to mark his centenary when he detested High Treason (aka This Can't Happen Here, 1950), which was adapted from Norwegian writer Peter Valentin's novel, Within 12 Hours. Very much a hack for hire, Bergman was unhappy throughout the shoot. But Gunnar Fischer's noirish photography is splendidly atmospheric and the leads commit to the convoluted story about cop Alf Kjellin try to help chemist Signe Hasso confound her treacherous husband, Ulf Palme, and rescue both her parents and some important scientists from the authoritarian state of Liquidatzia. 

Clashes of temperament and approach set rival officers John Mills and Alec Guinness at each other's throats in Ronald Neame's Tunes of Glory (1960), which earned Mills the Volpi Cup at the Venice Film Festival for his performance in a role that Guinness had rejected to play a maverick Scotsman. However, Dennis Hopper received more brickbats than plaudits when he followed Easy Rider (1969) with The Last Movie (1971), in which he plays a stunt co-ordinator who remains in Peru after losing faith in cinema after an actor is killed on set. But his hopes of having found paradise are quickly dashed when the locals enlist his help to make afilm of their own. Edited with the assistance of Alejandro Jodorowsky after Hopper returned form the notoriously dissolute shoot with miles of footage, this has become a cult classic. As has John Carpenter's The Fog (1980), in which the Californian coastal town of Antonio Bay is targeted by the spirits of shipwrecked sailors. 

Much more brutal is Hector Babenco's Pixote (1981), a masterly example of latterday neo-realism that follows 11 year-old Fernando Ramos da Silva, as he leaves reform school and seeks solace on the streets of São Paulo with protective buddy Jorge Julião and prostitute Marilia Pêra. Working from an autobiographical novel by Joseph Zobel, Euzhan Palcy sets her coming-of-age tale, Sugar Cane Alley (1983), on the Caribbean island of Martinique in the 1930s, as mischievous orphan Garry Cadenat comes to live in a shack with grandmother Darling Legitimus and learns from village elder Douta Seck about the plight of the African slaves who were transported to the plantations. Finally, there's a chance to catch up with Philip Kaufman's take on Milan Kundera's masterpiece, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), which was made to mark the 20th anniversary of the Prague Spring and turns on the relationships between womanising surgeon Daniel Day-Lewis and waitress Juliette Binoche and artist Lena Olin.