Anemone, After The Hunt, Is This Thing On? and much more: the best of London Film Festival, and when to catch these films in cinemas
No Other Choice
Dir. Park Chan-wook
No Other Choice is a sprawling, pitch-black farce that starts out as a corporate satire and morphs into something so singular and distinct I’m not sure we have a name for it.
It follows Yoo Man-soo, a manager at a Korean paper company that’s just been bought by an American conglomerate. We meet him and his family as they’re barbecuing an eel – a symbol of virility – that his new overlords have sent him. “I’ve got it all,” he sighs, blissfully unaware the eel is essentially a severance present.
He soon realises the market for middle-aged middle managers isn’t exactly booming, with the same equally-qualified candidates applying for the same ever-diminishing pool of jobs. If only there were some way to eliminate the competition…
It’s hard not to draw parallels with Bong Joon Ho’s 2019 Oscar winning Parasite, a pin-sharp satire of the Korean class system. But while there are similarities – both aesthetic and thematic – No Other Choice is less focused, more free-flowing, content to simply observe its characters once the dominoes have been set up and the first one tipped.
It’s an exquisite piece of filmmaking, every frame drenched in colour, every shot a visual feast. It’s also hilarious, a feat of physical comedy that extends throughout the whole cast, with scenes that branch into outright slapstick. In the Academy’s 98 years it has honoured exactly one foreign film with the Best Picture gong: Parasite. No Other Choice is in the running to double that. (SD) Read the full No Other Choice review from London Film Festival.
Anemone
Dir. Daniel Day-Lewis
After starring in some of the most iconic movies of the last 40 years Daniel Day-Lewis retired after 2017’s Phantom Thread. So it was with some surprise – and a few raised eyebrows – that he announced his return last year, to co-write and star in Anemone, directed by none other than his son, Ronan Day-Lewis. Is this another masterclass from one of the finest actors of his generation or a cynical exercise in nepotism? It is, in truth, a bit of both.
Day-Lewis Sr plays Ray Stoker, a former soldier living in self-imposed exile – not unlike the actor playing him – in a cabin somewhere in a Yorkshire forest. His life of self-sufficient solitude is interrupted when his brother Jem (Sean Bean) hikes through the wilderness armed with only coordinates and a message to deliver: the son Ray has never met needs his help.
Given this is Ronan’s first feature, he displays a keen directorial eye. Not much happens and not much is said, so Anemone relies upon its visuals and there are some strikingly beautiful sequences. Would Day-Lewis have taken this gig were his son not at the helm? Not in a million years. Is it great to see him back regardless? It sure is. (SD) Read the full Anemone review from London Film Festival.
The best of London Film Festival: Giant puts Pierce Brosnan back in action
After the Hunt
Dir. Luca Guadagnino
This post-post-MeToo parable has the dubious honour of capturing the cultural crossroads at which we find ourselves, where social gains made over the last decade are under threat by a resurgent American right. One of these is the MeToo mantra “believe women” – that when an accusation of sexual assault is made, the default position should be to trust the accuser.
Guadagnino’s film follows the head of Yale’s philosophy department Alma (Julia Roberts), her dashing younger colleague Hank (Andrew Garfield) and Alma’s favourite student Maggie (Ayo Edebiri).
Things go awry when, after a drunken night out, Maggie claims to have been raped by Hank. Is she telling the truth or does she have ulterior motives? Should we believe women? Guadagnino, increasingly a love-him-or-hate-him kind of director, plays his cards close to his chest. Maggie, the precocious, performatively woke daughter of a billionaire, is certainly unlikable, while Hank has a louche, hangdog sort of charm. Of course, charming people are capable of raping unlikable people but I suspect Guadagnino is trying to say something less prosaic. What, exactly, I’m not entirely sure. (SD)
Naseem and Ingle fell out over money and, in 2018 when Ingle died, Naseem wrote a heartbroken post on social media about how they never reconciled. Without being too undiplomatic, Naseem became a bit of a dick, goading audiences and opponents, and writer-director Rowan Athale gives us plenty of the uncomfy bits. Egyptian-British actor Amir El-Masry is fantastic as professional-age Naseem; you’re cheering him on at one minute and fearful of him the next when he starts backchatting Ingle as the pair’s relationship frays.
Athale’s plot is occasionally too neat, but not so much that Giant couldn’t compete with the other great boxing films of late. Oh, and you’re missing a cast-iron reason to watch: Brosnan spars in the ring with a man less than a third his age. Who was it that mentioned that Bond return? (AB) Read the full After The Hunt review from London Film festival.
Is This Thing On?
Dir. Bradley Cooper
Bradley Cooper directs a biopic inspired by the life of Liverpudlian comedian John Bishop in Is This Thing On? That may sound rather absurd but it’s a touching comedy about a divorcing couple who get back together after wife Tess, played by Laura Dern, accidentally watches her husband Alex, played by Will Arnett, savage her in a stand-up routine to help him get over their marriage.
Mark Chappell, Bradley Cooper and Will Arnett’s script is as hilarious as a blistering stand-up routine. It is both a touching story of comedy as therapy and a surprisingly nuanced examination of marriage. Inspired by John Bishop’s real-life experience with his own wife, there are plenty of lines that have clearly been extracted from the real world, and stick in the mind, like when Arnett’s charismatic Alex says: “I wasn’t unhappy with our marriage, I was unhappy in our marriage.”
We follow Alex trialling new material in grungy New York comedy clubs and the pair negotiating on childcare while separating their lives into different houses. Arnett and Dern’s chemistry pops, and it’s a less is more approach from Cooper, who only appears for 15 minutes or so but gets the most side-splitting lines as Alex’s insufferable best friend Arnie, an out of work actor with an inflated ego. It can err toward the sentimental but that doesn’t derail the comedy, which – both in stand-up skits and within the story – is hilarious and truthful. (AB) Read the full Is This Thing On? review from London Film Festival.
Saipan
Dirs. G Leyburn and L Barros D’Sa
Even by football fan standards, the feud between former Republic of Ireland manager Mick McCarthy and captain Roy Keane during the 2002 World Cup is little more than a distant memory.
In fact, football barely gets a look in: directors Glenn Leyburn and Lisa Barros D’Sa want you to experience the fascinating psychology of stress, as Roy Keane has a blistering fall out with McCarthy during a week spent on the island of Saipan a fortnight before the World Cup, where they went to acclimatise to Japanese time and the weather.
Caged in a crappy hotel with bad food, no air conditioning and no footballs, Steve Coogan and Éanna Hardwicke are blisteringly good as the warring duo. Coogan has the gravitas to pull off McCarthy’s complexity; his passivity, confidence and down-to-earth nature, but Irish actor Hardwicke is excellent as Keane, presenting a sympathetic portrait that is one fifth blistering anger but mostly a fascinating deep dive into a man who is just totally overwhelmed.
Saipan is also super-stylish: in one scene, Hardwicke’s Keane sits in an elaborate rattan chair looking totally wrecked as he watches three lizards fighting with the island of Saipan unfolding behind him. You leave with buckets of empathy for McCarthy and Keane, despite their objective muck-ups. An unmissable nostalgia fest for a certain few, but a fascinating character study for the rest. Read the full Saipan film review from London Film Festival.
Ballad of a Small Player
Dir. Edward Berger
Conclave director Edward Berger is a long way from the hallowed halls of the Vatican in his new film, a surreal neon noir following a down-and-out gambler through the casinos of Macau.
Ballad of a Small Player tells the story of Lord Doyle, a dapper aristocrat who seems to have misplaced his silver spoon. When we meet him, the walls are already closing in: the hotel is demanding he pays his astronomical bill, his lines of credit have been cut and he can’t even use the in-house limo anymore.
Doyle is an addict in the broadest sense, a man with a hole at the centre of his being that he’s forever trying to fill. He sucks on bottles of stolen champagne, devours obscene amounts of food and hustles for money to fund the one big bet that just might change his fortunes. Colin Farrell is magnetic at the heart of it all, putting in a performance that feels restrained despite its frequent absurdity, keeping you on side despite his unforgivable sins. It’s the most challenging and opaque of Berger’s films to date but also, perhaps, the most beautiful. (SD) Read the full Ballad of Small Player review from London Film Festival.
Moss & Freud
Dir. James Lucas
It’s often a red flag when famous people executive produce their own biopics. Elton John’s Rocketman was too sympathetic to its subject, and Kate Moss has certainly been too close to this saccharine but not meritless portrait of the artist and his muse.
James Lucas’ script scurries past the detail, presenting instead a whistle-stop tour through Moss and Freud’s friendship. She 29 and him in his mid-eighties, the film takes as its muse the real life occasion when, over nine months, Kate Moss sat for Freud who painted her naked (the work sold for nearly four million at auction in 2005).
Derek Jacobi is phenomenal as Freud. He has the gravitas and octogenarian perspective to land a giant like this; he’s forever twitching his eyebrows and folding up his mouth. Some of the best scenes involve Jacobi and Kate Moss actor Ellie Bamber taking drugs together or dancing in nightclubs. They fizz together, but on screen alone Bamber struggles to find Moss’ grit. (AB) Read the full Moss & Freud review from London Film Festival.
The London Film Festival returns for its 70th edition in 2026