Film festival season is in full swing. We recently presented you with the highlights of the 2024 Venice Film Festival, which led to the 2024 Toronto Film Festival and the 2024 Telluride Film Festival.
We now arrive at the 2024 BFI London Film Festival (or LFF for short). Here are some review highlights of buzzed-about titles that could be spearheading the forthcoming Oscars award season.
1. The Wild Robot (released October 18th)
Potential Oscar nomination Best Animated Feature
Peter Brown's bestselling book series is adapted into a visually luscious and emotionally resonant animated adventure from the DreamWorks stable. How To Train Your Dragon and Lilo & Stitch helmer Chris Sanders fashions the delicate tale of an outcast, marooned robot who finds herself stranded on a remote island where bonds with a young gosling.
Critics have lauded the movie for its trenchant insights on nature, mortality and sentience while the all-star voice cast helps bring added dynamism to the arresting visuals. Lupita Nyong'o voices the eponymous robot Roz while the ensemble also includes Kit Connor, Pedro Pascal, Catherine O'Hara and Mark Hamill.
2. Anora (released November 1st)
Potential Oscar nominations Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Original Screenplay
Rising star Mikey Madison (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood; Scream) delivers her best performance yet in the latest piercing drama from Sean Baker. The director has already distinguished himself with his acute studies of ground-level, blue-collar life, including the acclaimed Tangerine (2015) and The Florida Project (2017). Now, he presents us with the passionate story of the titular sex worker Anora whose romance with, and subsequent marriage to, the son of a wealthy Russian oligarch takes several shocking twists.
Critics have lauded the movie, in particular Madison's star turn. The film stands at 98% on Rotten Tomatoes with Mashable critic Kristy Puchko declaring: "Altogether, Anora is a visceral experience, making its audience not voyeurs but one of the crew. Thus embedded, our pulses race, our eyes grow wide, our hearts dance as our heroes do. Anora offers a glorious thrill, as bold as it is brilliant."
3. Blitz (released November 1st)
Potential Oscar nominations Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress
Steve McQueen is one of the UK's finest directors, capable of fusing his fine art background with profoundly truthful, and often viscerally uncomfortable, insights into human nature. His films Hunger (2008), Shame (2012) and the multi-Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave (2013) all showcased memorable performances from Michael Fassbender while variously touching on complex notions of racial identity, sexuality and ideologically endorsed violence.
His latest movie, which opens LFF 2024, is a stirring World War II period piece that plunges the audience into the UK's darkest hour. Saoirse Ronan, who can currently be seen in the critical hit The Outrun, continues her purple patch and stars as London woman Rita. Separated from her black son George (newcomer Elliott Heffernan) during the Luftwaffe's aerial blitz of London, Rita's life and that of her child change forever.
4. Conclave (released November 29th)
Potential Oscar nominations Best Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay
Ralph Fiennes is one of cinema's finest practitioners of stony-faced authority figures. Fiennes' latest drama casts him as a Papal emissary who is tasked with electing the new Pope. However, his character Cardinal Lawrence soon discovers shocking secrets about the recently deceased Pontiff that threaten to plunge the entire conclave into chaos.
It's the latest film from Edward Berger whose visceral World War I drama All Quiet on the West Front, adapted from the book of the same name, was hailed for its visceral sense of horror. Conclave, adapted from Robert Harris' novel, is set to be quieter and more dialogue-driven but no less engrossing.
Maureen Lee Lenker of Entertainment Weekly writes: "Conclave is packed with unexpected twists and its final reveal is one viewers will never see coming, an increasingly rare occurrence in modern movie-making and the mark of an impeccably crafted thriller."
5. Nightbitch (released December 6th)
Potential Oscar nominations Best Actress
Rachel Yoder's memorably outrageous and satirical novel Nightbitch is the story of a worn-out suburban mother who finds herself transforming into a dog. That tail-wagging conceit is now translated into a feature film with the always-excellent Amy Adams in the titular role of Mother whose feral instincts soon get the better of her.
Behind the camera is Marielle Heller who has delivered several critical successes including the Melissa McCarthy drama Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2019) Rest assured, Nightbitch is going to be far less well-behaved than Heller's previous films – in the best possible way. If you ever wanted to see Oscar nominee Adams chow down on dog food and howl at the moon, this is your chance.
6. Maria (released January 1st, 2025)
Potential Oscar nominations Best Actress
Angelina Jolie transforms into the operatic diva Maria Callas in the latest psychological character study from director Pablo Larrain. The latter has distinguished himself with his studies of Jackie Kennedy in the film Jackie (2016) and Princess Diana in Spencer (2016). Now, Larrain completes a hat trick of movies exploring the tenuous, often dangerous relationship between celebrity, privacy and the pressures of being a woman in the public eye.
Maria meshes Jolie’s singing voice with archival recordings of Callas to further immerse us in the late icon's life. It was a life marked by equal amounts of triumph and tragedy and critics say that Jolie, often overlooked for her acting abilities, plays the role to the hilt. Little White Lies critic Hannah Strong writes: "There’s an ethereal quality to Jolie’s performance that matches Callas’ legendary persona, and despite the deep sense of melancholy that pervades the film like a ghostly veil, this is still a love story – and one where the heroine lives forever."
7. We Live in Time (released January 1st, 2025)
Potential Oscar nominations Best Actor, Best Actress
British stars Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh light up the screen in this swoon-worthy romantic drama. They play two strangers who are thrown together by circumstance, and whose subsequent romance unspools in a non-linear fashion scrambling happiness and sadness together on an intimate yet grandiose scale.
Brooklyn helmer John Crowley directs and the script is an original creation from playwright Edward Payne. Viewers starved of romantic material are advised not to miss this truthful story of the unexpected connections that throw our lives for a loop.
8. Queer (release date TBC)
Potential Oscar nominations Best Director, Best Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay
Daniel Craig returns to his pre-Bond, indie-inflected roots (Love is the Devil et al) in this surrealistic and passionate account of Beat author William S. Burroughs' memoir. Craig plays Burroughs' onscreen surrogate Lee, an expat outcast in 1940s Mexico City who finds himself infatuated with a much younger man (played by Drew Starkey). An intense relationship soon develops but is beset by Lee's turbulent vices and excesses.
Craig collaborates with director Luca Guadagnino who is on a hot streak following his critically heralded tennis drama Challengers (2024). Critics have once again noted Guadagnino's ability to elicit a palpably tactile and physical atmosphere while Craig is said to give his best performance in years. "This complex churn of emotions demands much from Craig," writes Raphael Abraham for Financial Times, "and he proves equal to the task. It is a pleasure to see him so loosey-goosey after his tightly controlled 15-year turn as 007 and he gives possibly his finest performance to date."
9. Nickel Boys (released January 3rd, 2025)
Potential Oscar nominations Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay
Colson Whitehead's lacerating novel The Nickel Boys is the uncompromising study of the racial disparity and institutionalised violence that occurs within a Florida reform school. The acclaimed novel is now turned into an experimental and hard-hitting drama from director RaMell Ross that is filmed entirely from the first-person point-of-view of one of its central characters.
Nickel Boys stars Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson as two African-American boys who cement their friendship amid the horrific surroundings of the Nickel Academy in 1960s Jim Crow-era America. David Canfield of Vanity Fair says the film's "Avant-garde approach is cannily balanced by its moral urgency and aesthetic rigor. Like last year's The Zone of Interest, it all but reinvents the language for movies about a particular, dark historical chapter, and seems primed to spark conversations about both its content and its form."
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