Fresh from acclaim on the international circuit, Koreeda Hirokazu’s Still Walking (Aruitemo aruitemo) comes to the LA Film Festival. It takes place over one hot summer’s day as a family reunion of three generations leisurely unfolds through eating, chatting and taking a stroll. Much food is prepared, nothing very striking actually takes place, and none of the characters is especially out of the ordinary. This is well-worn territory, both in Japan and abroad, but what distinguishes this film is the skillful and natural way in which relationships, resentments and regrets are revealed, gradually and gently.

Continue Reading

Twenty-something East London comes to the LA Film Festival, via acclaim at Sundance and San Francisco, with Alex dos Santos’s Unmade Beds. We’re introduced first to footloose Axl (Fernando Tielve) , looking like a younger, sweeter Jack White under a mop of unruly black hair, who’s come to London from Madrid to seek out the father he never knew. In between drunken evenings he cannot remember, he thinks he finds him in an estate agent’s (a finely relaxed performance Richard Lintern) and builds a cautiously friendly relationship whilst remaining ambivalent about revealing his identity. Meanwhile, Vera from Belgium (Déborah François) and a young Dutchman (Michiel Huisman) start a hesitant relationship in which they retreat to hotel rooms and fix their meetings time by time, without exchanging phone numbers or even names. Continue Reading

This year’s LA Film Festival is proud to host selections from Ambulante, the traveling film initiative established by Diego Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal to promote documentary culture from across Mexico. I tend to avoid documentaries in favour of features, but even if it meant a mad dash from the Landmark to Westwood thanks to a previous late-start screening, I was not going to miss Nacido Sin.

The subject is José Flores, born into extreme rural poverty without arms (and some toes) and standing about 3 feet tall. My interest in him came about due to his role as the id of the Christ-figure in Alexandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain (1973), and he went on to have a fairly extensive screen career; quite aside from his arresting appearance, self-possession and strength of personality made him a pretty good actor. But he has now returned to his first profession as a street musician, playing the harmonica and the rubbing the “guiro” with a road attached to his foot (he also has rather a nice singing voice).

Continue Reading

Film festivals can be pretty serious affairs, and the LAFF is no exception, so it’s nice to take a break now and then for something more lighthearted. Glenn McQuaid’s I Sell The Dead is a rollicking comedy about a pair of 18th-century grave-robbers, affectionately evoking the parochial camp of Hammer Horror, with a dash of Monty Python silliness.

The cartoonish tone extends from the extravagantly grotesque rival gang up against which Grimes and Blake (Larry Fessenden and Dominic Monaghan) repeatedly butt, via occasional dissolves to comic book graphics, to the central conceit, whereby selling the undead proves more lucrative than robbing regular corpses. It’s told in flashback from Blake’s execution cell, the episodes related to cheerfully hammy priest Ron Perlman over a bottle of whiskey.

Continue Reading

The LA Film Festival brings us a bold local product (from Mexico), Los Bastardos. Jesús and his younger friend Fausto (estimable first-timers Jesus Moises Rodriguez and Rubén Sosa) are Mexican day labourers in LA. They wait with the others outside the downtown Home Depot, go on a job, drink beer in the park. So far so usual. Except they’ve a sawn-off shotgun in their backpack and they were picked up already that morning for a “quick and easy” job about which they’ve agree not to blab. Something is afoot.

Continue Reading

Already a circuit hit at locations from Thessaloniki to Toronto, via Karlovy Vary and Venice, Claire Denis’s latest comes to the LA Film Festival. 35 Rhums is a quiet film of little incident but deep emotion; that it was inspired by Ozu’s similarly restrained film of a familial bond, Late Spring, comes as no surprise. Joséphine and her father Lionel live together in the Parisian apartment where she grew up, forming a family with neighbour Gabrielle, who carries a torch for Lionel, and Noé, whose easy relationship with Jo seems to have been prevented from blossoming into partnership by his inaction and the comfort of familiarity.

Continue Reading

The first thing to know about Historias Extraordinarias is that it is four hours long. The second thing to know is that it is fantastic; but despite protagonists named X, Z and H and next to no dialogue, this is no meditative long-take art-house endurance test; until the gentle wind-down ending it doesn’t flag for a moment. The dialogue replaced by an almost non-stop voiceover narration and from the opening line, it’s like one long shaggy dog story; or rather, as the title states, several stories. The Grand Prize winner at Buenos Aires and now a stand-out favourite at the LA Film Festival, it has been likened by some commentators to Out 1, presumably for its duration and for the plot motor of text-bound mysteries that fizzle out to loose ends; others cite Borges and his labyrinths but it’s more basic and humanistic than either, glancing off the Chinese box structure of The Saragossa Manuscript to reach back to The Thousand and One Nights and the pure pleasure of tall tale-telling as an enjoyably exaggerated distraction from real life.

Continue Reading

Coffin Joe comes to the LA Film Festival! For those unacquainted with this legend, Encarnação do Demônio may prove something of a bafflement, though longterm fans will be well used to that. Briefly, José Mojica Marins was once the most famous man in Brazil thanks to his creation and alter ego Zé de Caixão, star of film, comic books and even a limited edition Volkswagen. Clad in top hat, black cloak and wicked 4-inch fingernails (Mojica’s own), Joe is beyond good, evil, God and the Devil (though he tends to the last), the embodiment of amoral existentialism with a strong streak of sadism, railing against the oppressions of society (chiefly drugs and the police) whilst merrily beating, raping and murdering in pursuit of a suitable mate to perpetuate his bloodline.

Continue Reading

My first feature proper at the LA Film Festival was a rather nice if safe trip back to 1970s Paris: Stella is eleven years old and starting a new term at a new, posh school. How she got there we do not know – her parents run a café and boarding house for welfare cases and cheerful lowlifes – and she is out of her depth socially and academically: she has no friends and no interest in or understanding of her schoolwork, though she can beat the café patrons at cards and knows all about football. Gradually, however, friendship grows with a round little redhead, Gladys, top of the class, and Stella finds she enjoys reading, devouring Balzac and rather touchingly moved by Duras.

Continue Reading