[title]
If you live in, near or within a plane ride of London and you love movies, you’ve probably already got October 10-21 ring-fenced in your diary. That’s when the BFI London Film Festival will be bringing an array of exciting new (and the odd old) movies to audiences of expectant film fans. How exciting? Well, the full line-up has just been announced and there are new films from Yorgos Lanthimos, Carol Morley, Luca Guadagnino, Nadine Labaki, Alfonso Cuarón and Mike Leigh.
Most excitingly of all – and only partly for selfish reasons – is the news that Time Out will be presenting Barry Jenkins’s new film, ‘If Beale Street Could Talk’, as its LFF gala. The Oscar nominee’s eagerly anticipated follow-up to ‘Moonlight’ is the centrepiece of the fest’s Love strand.
Other gala movies include ‘Wild Rose’, a musical showcase for the seriously talented Jessie Buckley, the culty-sounding ‘Assassination Nation’, Swedish love story ‘Border’, Guadagnino’s reinterpretation of giallo classic ‘Suspiria’, and Lee Chang-dong’s Cannes-endorsed ‘Burning’. Of course, the opening and closing night movies have already been announced: they’re Steve McQueen’s dark thriller ‘Widows’ (October 10) and Jon Baird’s real-life comic biopic ‘Stan & Ollie’ (October 21).
If that little lot isn’t enough to get your down to Leicester Square and/or the specially built Embankment Garden Cinema, Lanthimos’s ‘The Favourite’, starring Emma Stone and Olivia Colman, might do the trick. If you like your period dramas to be nothing like any other period dramas, October 18 is the date of the gala. The Coen brothers’ ‘The Ballad of Buster Scruggs’ and David Mackenzie’s Robert the Bruce drama ‘Outlaw King’ are two others to look out for.
And if you’re under 25, this year’s fest has an innovation with your name on it: you can pick up advance tickets to the ‘The Hate U Give’ with Amandla Stenberg and Camden-set musical ‘Been So Long’ starring Michaela Coel for only a fiver.
The 62nd BFI London Film Festival runs from Oct 10-21. Tickets go on sale to the public on Sep 13. Head here for the line-up in full.