Tag Archives: The Souvenir

Ten Must-See Films from This Year’s London Film Festival

Although presenting a smaller programme than found in any recent pre-pandemic instalment, the 65th London Film Festival still offered up hundreds of new features and shorts, panels, restorations of classics, VR works, and big screen previews of prestige TV series (e.g., season 3 of Succession). It was a relative return to normalcy, made most evident by the plentiful red-carpet ceremonies and almost every programmed feature getting screened across the central London venues. That said, the increased accessibility of last year’s smaller, largely digital edition wasn’t completely abandoned: a decent amount of the features could be rented digitally from anywhere in the UK. And select cinemas in other British cities had their own screenings of some of the higher-profile titles.

In alphabetical order, here are ten of the best titles from LFF 2021 worth looking out for; some on their way to screens big and small soon…

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10 to see at the 2019 Edinburgh International Film Festival

The Edinburgh International Film Festival, the world’s longest continuously-running film festival and now in its 73rd year, runs between 19 and 30 June. It opens with the European premiere of Boyz in the Wood (2019), which is not a tribute to the late John Singleton but rather a dark, folk horror-influenced comedy set in the Scottish Highlands, from writer-director Ninian Doff. The world premiere of Mrs. Lowry & Son (2019) closes the festival: Adrian Noble’s light-hearted biopic of L.S. Lowry (Timothy Spall) portrays the painter long before he was established as one of the 20th century’s greatest artists, devoted to but frustrated with his bitter mother, Elizabeth (Vanessa Redgrave).

Beyond the bookend galas, there are many premieres (including world-first screenings of 18 features), discoveries and retrospectives of note. Here are 10 highlights from the packed programme…

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