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.

CHRISTY**** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Day 10

Writer-director David Michod (THE KING) returns to our screens with a crisply told and powerful biopic of the first female boxing star in America, Christy Martin.  The directorial style is unflashy but we feel every punch and blow of the boxing matches. But the point here isn’t so much the drama inside the ring as the peril outside of it.  Because in her early twenties, Christy confirms to the expectations of bigoted early 90s West Virginia and marries a man who coercively controls her. He is a man 25 years her senior, her boxing trainer, and a total sleazebag. He lures her into the relationship with false promises of meeting Don King, and the offer of cover. They both know she is gay, and that the world won’t accept her for being gay.  This makes Christy uniquely vulnerable to Jim Martin’s predation. 

Over the course of the film we see Christy train and win, usually with a knock-out punch. When she finally does get that meeting with King she starts earning big and can afford a flashy lifestyle.  The film captures the awful haircuts and shoulder pads brilliantly.  But the pressure from her husband is unrelenting, and while I won’t say more at the risk of spoiling the story if you do not know it, the final half hour of this film is harrowing.

This is a film centred on two superb performances. The first is by Ben Foster, who I have always admired, and last saw in the London Film Festival playing the psychopath Lance Armstrong in THE PROGRAM. If anything, he is even more chilling here. But the performance than really anchors the film is that of Sydney Sweeney. I was first truly impressed by her acting in REALITY, and she announces herself as an actor of real intelligence and sensitivity in this film.  She bulks up with 35 pounds of muscle and is utterly convincing in the ring. More importantly, she manages to capture both Christy’s vulnerability and bravado.  I truly hope the prejudice against Sweeney does not preclude her from awards contention as this is a monumental performance. In the supporting roles, I really liked Merritt Weaver (The Bombing of Pan Am 103) as Christy’s bigoted, insidious mother, and Katy O’Brian as Christy’s boxing rival turned love interest Lisa Holewyne.

CHRISTY has a running time of 135 minutes. It played Toronto and London and will be released in the USA on November 7th.

NO OTHER CHOICE***** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Day 9

Pantheon director Park Chan Wook returns to our screens with the darkest of black comedies and social satires. It’s hilarious and occasionally deeply moving and sends a dire warning to all of us wage-slaves. And all with his trademark audacious and assured visual and aural style. The film is the third that I have seen in as many days where a family patriarch is so ashamed at being unable to financially provide for his wife and kids that he turns to a life of crime. After the feckless and self-involved JB Mooney (Josh O’Connor) in THE MASTERMIND and the charming but rogueish Jeffrey Manchester (Channing Tatum) in ROOFMAN we now get Man Soo (Lee Byung-Hun) in NO OTHER CHOICE. After decades working in a paper factory, itself an obsolete industry, he is laid off by the new American owners who use the platitude that they had “no other choice”. A year later and his house is about to be foreclosed, his wife is supporting the family, and his daughter can’t have cello lessons. They’ve even had to give up the dogs! Every job opening has a bevy of over-qualified men applying. So Man-Soo grabs his father’s old service revolver and takes a KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS approach to his problems. 

There is nothing that I didn’t love about this film. Its 2hr20 min running time went by in a flash. I loved its clear-eyed, heartbreaking depiction of middle-aged men discarded by society and its dire warning of what a fully automated AI-powered factory would look like. I loved its clear depiction of the social pressures on men in a misogynistic patriarchal society, whether young or old. I loved all of the acting performances. Both Lee Byung-Hun (JOINT SECURITY AREA) and Son Ye-Jin as his wife are superb. But most of all this film works because of how Director Park handles comedy - especially absurdist physical comedy - and uses music. The first truly violent scene goes on forever and is set to overloud schmaltzy Korean pop music. It’s funny but it also tells us so much about the emotional psychodrama in the marriage it is depicting. This is cinema at its finest, its most complex, and its most entertaining.  

NO OTHER CHOICE has a running time of 139 minutes. It played Venice, Busan, Toronto and London. It does not yet have a commercial release date in the USA or UK but was released in South Korea in September.

RENTAL FAMILY**** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Day 9

RENTAL FAMILY is a delightful, heartwarming and laugh-out-loud funny film that flirts with a social critique of contemporary Japanese society but is ultimately uninterested in anything gritty. Its message is rather trite: kindness and empathy matter and the families we make are sometimes more fulfilling than those we are born with. But if the message is simple and obvious, it still hits home, especially in such dark and divisive times. 

Brendan Fraser, last seen at the London Film Festival in a devastating performance in THE WHALE, now plays Phillip, an American out-of-work actor in Tokyo. Finally he finds a steadily paying gig being rented out to customers as a husband or father or friend. These rental families are apparently big business in Japan, affording lonely people solace, but also papering over social bigotry. A lesbian pretends to marry Phillip so she can leave Japan with her actual lover. A single-mother hires Phillip to be father to her child for an admissions interview at a snooty school. Neither would be necessary in a more liberal society but the movie is only glancingly interested in this. The film also draws a parallel between the actors providing emotional release and Phillip using a sex worker for physical release, and even goes so far as to humanise her. But it’s interesting that she’s the only character with whom Phillip has no resolution. Perhaps that would have been a little too much reality. 

As Phillip, Brendan plays to his public persona as a kind, sweet, charming, schlubby middle-aged man. In fact pretty much every character in this film is kind, sweet and charming. The exception might be legendary Japanese actor Akira Emoto who plays an old and retired actor suffering from dementia. That guy has a rogueish swagger all of his own and earns both the biggest belly laugh and creates the most emotional scene of the movie. 

Writer-director Hikari (Beef) and her co-writer Stephen Blahut do a serviceable job with plot and direction although most viewers will guess the plot twists. The whole point of this film is NOT to shock and awe but to delight, and in that end it succeeds. It’s just a shame it hadn’t dared to be a little spikier.

RENTAL FAMILY is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 103 minutes. It played Toronto and London. It opens the US on November 21st and in the UK on January 9th.