la film festival Reviews, Interviews & More

There's something about Texas and independent filmmaking, I don't know what's in the water over there, but something seems to be giving them an edge. They seem to be able make films without giving into the system that slows and destroys many Hollywood productions. An Ordinary Family is the perfect example of a team of filmmakers that still have a love for the...

The 2010 LA Film Fest had another success with the North American premiere for the Japanese gone Hollywood film, Golden Slumber - an intentional reference to the classic Beatles song which is sung multiple times over in the film. The funny thing about this film is that it felt very much like an American action film with a bit more edge and better characters. The...

The 2010 LA Film Festiva is over, the awards have been given out and Downtown LA will once again be the dirty area of the city it once was. Below we list all the main awards, the first of which are the most important (I think) the Audience Awards. Everyone attending the film is handed a piece of paper and able to rate the films 1-4 (one being the lowest and then the highest) while walking out...

Monsters, is a pleasant surprise from the LA Film Festival this year and reminder that quality doesn't always come with money. The film is reminiscent of many monster/horror films gone by, but brought together in an organic way that makes it an entirely new beast. The film truly abides by the indie spirit -- it cost what most studio films would spend on Starbucks in a...

It's clear that the LA Film Festival is feeling the budget cuts. Aside from the lack of food and beverages at the venue, they moved the festivals from the clean streets of Westwood to Downtown LA, a notoriously conspicuous part of the city. For the most part the festival is rather safe, you park in one big structure and stay within the safe walls filled with mainly only filmmakers and the...

The LA Film Festival wrapped up on Sunday night with the closing gala of Ponyo, Miyazaki Hayao's latest. Not being a great fan of animation, Miyazaki, or twee children's dross I gave it a miss, although I may just be a curmudgeonly old cinephile with no soul. But if I'd seen that I'd have missed the sole screening of United Red Army, which was...

Ready to laugh your ass off and cry your eyes out? Probably one of the most honest, heartfelt, and feel good movies of the LA Film Festival is After the Storm directed by Hilla Medalia. The film follows a group of legendary New York Broadway actors Gerry McIntyre, James Lecesne, Randy Redd, who were inspired to help the youth of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina....

Wakamatsu Kôji's United Red Army - the Path to Asama Mountain Lodge was the the final installment of the "films that got away" at this year's LA Film Festival. Its Japanese premiere was in Yufuin back in 2007 and it has since played to great acclaim in Berlin, London and Turin, finally making its way to the US last night. The film divides...

In association with the estimable Film Foundation, the LA Film Festival presents a spanking new restored print of LA favourite Curtis Harrington's debut feature, Night Tide (1961). It kicks off like a seaside noir, with sailor Dennis Hopper tooling around the night-time Venice promenade before wandering into the scene at a basement jazz club. Amidst the hipsters and...

The retrospective strand of this year's LA Film Festival focuses on hot rod movies, one each from the fifties, sixties and seventies. I caught cult favourite Hot Rods From Hell (1967), a fairly standard representation of the genre, with cross-generational conflict - "these kids have nowhere to go and they want to get there at 150 miles an hour" - and bargain basement...

One of the films I was most keen to catch at this year's LA Film Festival was the Portuguese hit of the European circuit, Aquele Querido Mês de Agosto. I nearly didn't make it for, in an incomprehensibly idiotic bit of programming, there was less than twenty minutes to get from The Silence Before Bach in Westwood to the Landmark on Pico; it...

One of the best strands of the LA Film Festival is the "Films That Got Away", featuring titles of recent vintage whose chance for US theatrical distribution seems to have passed. Particularly valuable this year is the presentation of European festival success Die Stille vor Bach, not least since aged Catalan director Pere Portabella has declared that...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...