LA GRAZIA**** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Day 12

Writer-director Paolo Sorrentino (IL DIVO) and actor Toni Servillo reunite for the seventh time for LA GRAZIA - a patient, melancholy drama about love and grief. Servillo plays an Italian President called Mariano.  His character is grappling with whether to sign a Bill legalising euthanasia. He must also sign whether to give a presidential pardon to a woman and a man serving sentences for murdering their respective spouses.  The first was escaping from a violent marriage, the second claims he was committing an act of mercy as his wife was suffering from Alzheimers.   It feels as though the President, a Catholic and a Jurist, is playing for time and running down the clock as he is in the final months of his term, much to the chagrin of his devoted daughter and fellow Jurist Dorotea. Meanwhile in his personal life, Mariano is grieving his wife Aurora, but gripped with suspicions that she had an affair forty years prior with his fellow cabinet minister.

The film takes a leisurely pace as Mariano derps around the Quirinale, pondering what to do, or distracting himself by listening to rap music. This creates a patient meditative feel that I enjoyed but I still feel that it was around 20-30 minutes too long. But to compensate, the film contains flashes of profound hilarity, such as the awards ceremony roughly half way through the film, and builds to a deeply moving and profound conclusion. Much is made of the fact that the Italian phrase La Grazia can mean religious grace, but also a pardon, and also compassion.  

The true joy of the film is just watching Toni Servillo give a masterclass performance full of warmth, compassion and occasionally mischief.  He won the Volpi Cup at Venice for the performance, and rightly so. He can convey more with a single eyebrow raise than most actors with a full fireworks show of histrionics.  Servillo is well matched in the first half of the film by Anna Ferzetti who plays his daughter, and also by Milvia Marigliano as the art critic and lifelong friend Coco Valori.  Coco is a fascinating character. Comic relief in the first half of the film but building toward something more profound and deeply moving. 

LA GRAZIA has a running time of 131 minutes. It played Venice, where Toni Servillo won the Volpi Cup, Telluride and London.  It opens in the US on December 5th.

100 NIGHTS OF HERO* - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Closing Night Gala

100 NIGHTS OF HERO is a wonderful graphic novel by Isabel Greenberg whose themes are feminist and queer and sex positive. In layered and echoing stories she tells us about a world created by a wonderful young woman called Kiddo until her dad, Birdman, turns into a tyrannical patriarchy. We hear about a beautiful young woman who gets pregnant by a man but transcends into a moon. We hear of a young bride abused by her husband - her washed bones made into a lyrical harp. Of beautiful sisters who secretly read and write and are murdered for this crime, their graves marked with stones. Again and again these layered stories recast well-known fairy-tales, biblical tales and myths and speak to a world in which bright women are subjugated and killed. 

And then we focus in on the story of Cherry and Hero. Cherry is an aristocrat and Hero is her maid but they are secret lovers. Cherry’s husband sets her up by making a despicable wager. His mate Manfred will have 100 nights to seduce her and prove that all women are harlots. This dastardly man tells her plainly he is going to rape her. So every night Hero tells Manfred a story so exciting that he forgets to rape Cherry, and leaves him on a cliffhanger. She is our Sheherezade for 100 nights. And not only for Manfred but the guards and the people of the town who also become hooked on the stories. So when at last our lovers are arrested and thrown from a tower in punishment, the town rises up and overthrows the patriarchy.  

The story is funny, profound, refreshingly sex positive and unnervingly relevant in these increasingly bigoted times. I love that Cherry and Hero feel no shame in their love. They both have intelligence and agency. Yes Hero is the more self-assured and infinitely resourceful but Cherry isn’t some passive whiny pathetic woman either. 

So imagine my horror at Julia Jackman’s new feature length adaptation of the novel, in which Cherry becomes a weedy pathetic simpering fool and there’s no sex, and half the stories are omitted or garbled, there’s no threat of rape, far from being hooked on the stories, the seducer is bored to sleep by them, and … and … it just all makes no sense. It’s all so milquetoast. Where’s the audacity and wonder and excitement? 

I also hate to rag on a film that presumably had a micro-budget but it just looks cheap. This should be a film set mostly at night in which the moon and stars are major characters. A film in which a big city full of people rises up in revolt. But no. This is all broad daylight and harshly reflective electric candles and aaargh! I am so frustrated at this milquetoast under-funded attempt at turning this wonderful book into a film. Pretty much the only thing it got right was the deadpan wit thanks to Emma Corrin’s hilarious reaction shots and Nicholas Galitzine’s line-readings as Hero and Manfred respectively.

100 NIGHTS OF HERO is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 90 minutes. It played Venice and London and opens in the US on December 5th.

THE HISTORY OF SOUND* - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Day 11

THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE failed as a film because director Mona Fastvold had no interest in the interiority of her characters. By contrast, THE HISTORY OF SOUND fails as a film because the characters are so deeply closeted that their interiority is deliberately withheld to a mere bat-squeak of emotion amidst a tediously attenuated 2hr plus running time.

Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor star as Lionel and David, two students at the Boston Conservatoire whose affair is interrupted by World War One.  Bespectacled Lionel returns home to his Kentucky farm to await David’s return from France, upon which they derp around New England recording folk music on wax cylinders. Soon after, the urbane David throws off Lionel and retreats to academia. A brokenhearted Lionel becomes a chorister in Rome and then Oxford, breaking the heart of a boyfriend and girlfriend in turn, before seeking out David once more. All of that is simple enough, but takes the better part of 100 minutes. 

Mescal and O’Connor are, of course, superb actors, and do the best they can with material that asks them to constrain their emotions.  Director Oliver Hermanus and screenwriter Ben Shattuck take the same attitude with the context in which the characters exist.  We think the film might interrogate racism in post-reconstruction America with what might have been a more menacing and significant scene recording some black singers, but no, the film retreats.  We think the film might interrogate class prejudice toward Lionel with his intellectual girlfriend’s minted English family, but once again the film retreats. 

The result is a film about two closeted men that itself feels closeted and afraid. I think it was aiming at profound emotion and catharsis in its epilogue, but instead I was just bored and alienated.  The folk music is rather lovely, as recompense. But if you find that sort of thing enchanting you would be better off watching Bernard MacMahon’s AMERICAN EPIC.

THE HISTORY OF SOUND is rated R and has a running time of 127 minutes. It played Cannes, Telluride and London. It opened in the USA on September 12th.

NOUVELLE VAGUE***** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Day 11

NOUVELLE VAGUE is a film made by a film lover for film lovers about a film lover who made an iconic film that all film lovers love. So if you love film you will love this film.

Okay, so let’s be a little more descriptive here. Richard Linklater - whose superb BLUE MOON is also playing in this year's fest - has made a film about the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s iconic French New Wave film BREATHLESS, starring Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo.  Filmed in black-and-white and in French, the film uses the rich historic record to recreate the chaotic, crazy but somehow genius creation of the cinema classic. The first forty minutes takes us through pre-production. All of Godard’s fellow critics at Cahiers du Cinema have made the leap to directing their own films, to great acclaim.  Godard is confident in his mission to make free, spontaneous cinema, but now’s the time to screw his courage to the sticking place and get on with it.  

The problems begin on the first day of filming when the cast and crew realise there is no script and that Godard does not care about such foundational concepts as continuity.  Jean Seberg, used to slick Hollywood productions, finds the whole thing ridiculous. Jean-Paul Belmondo, excited to be in his first film, is happier to go with the flow.  The producer, “Beau Beau” is pulling his hair out. And the two female editors complain that Godard won’t lose a single scene, but wants to micro-edit every scene in a manner that will seem choppy.

But somehow, somehow, as the inner team and Godard’s closest Cahier friends watch the Final Cut, they know it’s something special, even as they take the piss out of it.  And we cut to the closing credits, and the news that the film became iconic, and that this period of French cinema was ludicrously fecund - with over 130 directors making their first features in a three-year period.

There is nothing not to love about this scrupulous recreation of a moment of cinema history. Linklater’s film oozes love for the source material.  He uses the real locations and even the technical equipment that Godard actually used!  There’s also a lot of care taken to find good actors who look like the people they are playing - not just in the main roles but a massive cast of all the Cahier and Left Bank gang. Each gets a straight to camera shot, almost like a photograph, with a subtitle showing their name.  And this is a film that assumes you will know why they are important to cinema.  NOUVELLE VAGUE is kinetic, funny, voyeuristic and makes you fall in love with the act of film-making.  I love that Linklater will bring a whole new generation to the New Wave, especially as Netflix has bought the rights.

NOUVELLE VAGUE has a running time of 106 minutes. It played Cannes, Telluride, Busan, Toronto and London. It goes on limited release in the USA on October 31st and on the internet on November 14th.

DIE MY LOVE**** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Day 11

Lynne Ramsay (YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE) creates a claustrophobic, deeply unsettling, occasionally mordantly funny drama about a mentally fragile woman suffering severely from post-partum depression. It stars Jennifer Lawrence in a raw, vulnerable role as the dangerously unboundaried mother in question. She cannot write, her sex life has gone to shit, she has lost her tolerance for the banal bullshit people say to mothers. Some of her rude interjections are funny.  But as the film goes on it becomes more and more frightening. We realise that while post-partum is definitely a factor, Grace was not well from the start.  And we ratchet up to a finale that’s both poetic and devastating.  It’s a bravura performance from Lawrence, and shows us just what she is capable of when she makes the right choice of material - something that has been sadly lacking for pretty much the last decade.  Robert Pattinson is also good in the smaller role of Grace’s husband Jackson. It’s a tricky role because he could so easily be played as unfeeling or feckless but he’s just a young man out of his depth.

This is a film that is slippery and refuses easy answers.  We are never really sure if things are happening for real or in Grace’s fevered imagination.  Does she really sleep with a mysterious neighbour (LaKeith Stanfield) or is he just a man she meets in a supermarket and then projects her sexual frustration upon.  Most importantly, when Grace finally says “enough” is she leaving the baby that she clearly loves, in spite of everything, or is she going to take her own life?  Even the attitude of the people around her is tricky to parse.  How far was Grace’s mother-in-law (Sissy Spacek) aware of her mental instability from the start? Her attitude at the wedding appears to be one of suppressed shock. And at a social gathering later on in the film, one of covering up and enablement.

My only criticism of the film is that when you make something that claustrophobic and intense then the running time of probably needs to be shorter.  I think 100 minutes would have been ideal. But I loved the way Ramsay traps us in a world that threatens to suffocate us, most notably by using a 4:3 aspect ratio and essentially one location.

DIE MY LOVE has a running time of 118 minutes.  It played Cannes and London. It will be released in the USA on November 7th and in the UK on November 24th.

FRANKENSTEIN (2025)*** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Day 10

Guillermo Del Toro has been waiting all his life to bring FRANKENSTEIN to the screen, and as a result this film almost feels derivative of works that he made in preparation for this, such as CRIMSON PEAK.  The resulting film is wonderful to look at - a true spectacle - and worth seeing on the big screen rather than Netflix.  But other than a handful of moments, it isn’t a film that ripped my heart out, as this story should.

Oscar Isaac (STAR WARS’ Poe Dameron) stars as Victor Frankenstein, the spoiled rich aristocrat who studies medicine precisely to succeed where his hated father failed, in restoring the dead to life.  He walks around 19th Century Europe like Marc Bolan, all Cuban heels and flared trousers and a coquettishly angled fedora.  He creates a lab with the help of his guileless but practical little brother William (Felix Kammerer - ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT) and the unending funding of Christoph Waltz’ oleaginous and slippery Harlander. Frankenstein’s problem is that he is unimpressed with the mental capacity of his monster and so accords it no humanity. He cannot see that it’s just a child in need of patience and education.  He becomes as brutal and unyielding a parent as his own father was to him.  The monster and castle are torched, but as we know, the monster is unkillable.

In the second half of the film we see the story from the monster’s eyes. Jacob Elordi plays him as a gentle and melancholy giant, with an odd Yorkshire accent that presumably reflects Elordi’s preparation to play Heathcliff in Emerald Fennell’s forthcoming WUTHERING HEIGHTS.  The monster is a hurt brooding emo teenager, brought to literacy by a kindly blind man, and lonely in his eternal purgatory.  He seeks out Victor to make him a mate and in doing so rekindles the mutual attraction with Victor’s compassionate sister-in-law to be, Elizabeth (Mia Goth). It’s a mutual attraction that makes Victor jealous.

As the film ends we are back on the Danish polar explorer marooned in ice, and we have a reconciliation of sorts between hard-hearted father and hurt son.  In an adaptation worth its salt this should have moved me to tears. It did not.  Even the scenes with David  Bradley’s old man, while sweet, didn’t truly get to me.  Only the scenes between Goth and Elordi carried any emotional weight. 

And so, while this film looked absolutely stunning, I didn’t capture my heart. I loved watching it and luxuriating in its beautiful sets and costumes but it won’t stay with me. I think the problem may well be that the exaggerated costumes and production design actually got in the way of me connecting with it emotionally. I think the beautiful and brilliant artifice was the problem.

FRANKENSTEIN has a running time of 149 minutes and is rated R. It played Venice, Busan, Toronto and London. It will be released on the internet on November 7th.