London Film Festival 2015 Report -- Distinctive Voices

Even if you didn’t know that Steve Jobs has been scripted by Aaron Sorkin, it wouldn’t take you long to figure it out. Danny Boyle’s film features a number of hyper-articulate and intelligent characters trading zingers and cultural (both classical and pop) references as they race against various looming deadlines, with characters usually walking as they talk. The film could also be seen as a loose sequel to The Social Network, the film David Fincher directed from Sorkin’s screenplay in 2010, as it focuses on the other genius asshole whose innovations have changed the way we live today. The difference is that The Social Network felt like a David Fincher film, with the director maintaining a firm sense of control on the material, while Steve Jobs feels like a much more explicitly written film. In fact, it wouldn’t be out of place on the stage, with the drama unfolding in a very theatrical three-act structure that takes us behind the scenes of three product launches presented by its subject.

It’s a refreshingly non-traditional approach to a film biopic, and the first third of the film is exhilarating. The rat-a-tat verbosity is at fever pitch as Jobs and his team attempt to iron out flaws ahead of the public launch of the Macintosh in 1984, with his engineer Andy Hertzfeldt (Michael Stuhlbarg) being on the receiving end of his anger when the machine refuses to say "Hello" on command. Fassbender's charismatic, shark-like performance as Jobs details his obsession with dominating every aspect of his environment, from making a last-minute demand of his long-suffering assistant Joanna (Kate Winslet) to conjure a white shirt with a breast pocket to insisting that the Exit lights all be switched off to facilitate a blackout ahead of the product reveal. It's dizzying stuff, tightly scripted and perfectly played, and only a few lulls in momentum occur: Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen) begs Jobs to give his team the credit they deserve, John Scully (Jeff Daniels) turns up to discuss Steve's adopted parents, and Steve's daughter - whom he refuses to recognise as his own - is present as a constant reminder of his personal failings.

All of this is fine, but when Wozniak, Scully and young Lisa return in the subsequent two chapters - set in the countdown to the 1988 NeXT Cube (the what?) and the 1998 iMac launch events - to do and say the exactly the same things, the contrivances of Sorkin's structure start to look a bit rickety, and attempts at psychoanalysis begin to grate by the time Winslet's Joanna tearfully calls Jobs out on his poor parenting. Steve Jobs is so much more engaging, imaginative and alive when it is simply focusing on the products and the business that went into developing and promoting them, and I'd argue that those portions of the film paint a more revealing portrait of the man than any of Sorkin's attempts to make Daddy Issues the real story here. Sorkin drops the ball badly in the climactic stretch of the film, which labours in an ungainly fashion to give the drama a pat redemptive ending.

Still, there are frequent flashes of greatness within the film. Boyle doesn't have Fincher's mastery but he's a whizz at developing and sustaining momentum, and he orchestrates a number of dialogue-heavy sequences brilliantly here. It's also a hard to pick a weak link among the cast, all of whom relish the opportunity to deliver Sorkin's sharp dialogue. The film offers so many pleasures and such grandstanding entertainment, the more poorly judged moments stand out even more starkly, and on the whole Steve Jobs encapsulates Sorkin at both his best and his worst. By the time it's over I was left wondering if I'd been sold anything more than a empty box that doesn't serve any real purpose. Maybe, but it is a really nice-looking box.

Anomalisa is another film in which the voice of the filmmaker is immediately apparent. Charlie Kaufman has been away from cinema for seven years and Anomalisa finds him working in the medium of stop-motion animation for the first time, but this is still unmistakably a Kaufman film, as he again explores the neuroses of an insecure and miserable character whose experience takes on surreal qualities even as it remains rooted in everyday mundanities. Anomalisa begins on a plane descending towards Cincinnati, which is where Michael Stone (voiced by David Thewlis) – a customer service guru – is going to give a speech on the importance of treating every customer as an individual. The joke here is that Michael can't see individuals, and everybody he comes into contact with – man, woman or child – bears the same facial features and speaks in the same voice (Tom Noonan). Kaufman's development of the idea that Michael's complete lack of empathy has turned the world around him into an amorphous mass is inspired and brilliantly realised, but a glimmer of hope appears in the guise of Lisa, a fan who has come to Cincinnati to attend his conference and miraculously speaks with the voice of Jennifer Jason Leigh.

Michael clings to Lisa like a drowning man clinging to a raft and there is a powerful sense of unresolved pain in their interactions, with Lisa suffering from unexplained scarring on her face and admitting that her last sexual encounter was eight years ago. The stop-motion sex in Anomalisa is certainly a lot more intimate and touching than it was in Team America: World Police, and the animation work in general, created by co-director Duke Johnson and his team, is attentive to the hesitant gestures and awkwardness of lonely middle-aged people reaching out for each other. After they go to bed together, Anomalisa begins its most inspired sequence, but that also proves to be the high point of the whole film, which subsequently starts to narrow towards an ending that I anticipated in advance – how often can you say that about a Charlie Kaufman script?

Anomalisa started life as a staged radio play for Carter Burwell's Theatre of the New Ear, and it sometimes feels a little stretched at feature length, without the gravity of Kaufman's Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Synecdoche, New York. He remains a unique and invaluable voice, however, and the film is full of cherishable details – the way the hotel clerk maintains eye contact while typing, the constant chatter of the cab driver, Michael's ill-advised visit to a 'toy store'. In a year with a variety of extraordinary animation films, it's also another reminder of how rich, ambitious and adult animated films can be, and how they can be a showcase for outstanding acting. The performance David Thewlis gives here is probably his best since Naked, Jennifer Jason Leigh's vocal work is deeply affecting, while Tom Noonan's delivery as 'Everyone Else' is amusing, unsettling and perfect. It is good to have Charlie Kaufman back, even if it is only a slight return.

Athina Rachel Tsangari may not be as recognisable a name yet as Sorkin or Kaufman, but she has already established a distinctive filmmaking identity. In her feature debut Attenberg and her short The Capsule, she revealed a fascination with games, rituals, group psychology and the movement of female bodies, but in Chevalier she shifts that gaze towards men – and the gaze is withering. A group of six men are on a boating holiday together and, bored one evening, some games are suggested. Instantly, the ultra-competitiveness of the men begins to be glimpsed, as they start to argue over the most trivial points of order. A kind of ultimate game is proposed, to decide who is “the best in general” and should therefore get to wear the Chevalier ring. They each agree to award or subtract points from each other based on everything: the way they look, how physically fit they are, the way they dress, sleep, eat; the ring tone on their phones.

The stakes and the challenges quickly escalate, encompassing an erection-measuring competition that puts enormous pressure on a couple of the men in particular, to a race to build some (very phallic) IKEA bookshelves as quickly as possible. The characters all strive to affect a carefree attitude towards this competition but their hunger for victory and their deep-rooted insecurity of being somehow seen as a 'lesser' man is increasingly evident. Chevalier is essentially Fragile Masculinity: The Movie and Tsangari's detached observation of this behaviour highlights the absurdity of their posturing, with the film undoubtedly proving to be the most frequently hilarious entry in the festival. Her actors are tremendous, particularly Efthymis Papadimitriou as the most apparently vulnerable member of the group who is in attendance with his older brother and really wants nothing more than to collect pebbles and sing karaoke.

Chevalier escalates up to a point but the ending of the film is played in a quiet register, without any sense of an epiphany or satisfying conclusion to be drawn from all of these ridiculous games. Perhaps that's the point; are any of these men likely to have a moment of introspection, and to question their competitive natures or their burning need to prove their masculinity and to maintain status as the Alpha in the pack? Probably not.

Finally, any random five minutes of Cemetery of Splendour would surely be enough to reveal that it is a film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. His films look and sound like nothing else, and for me at least, they feel like nothing else too. Watching Cemetery of Splendour almost felt like having an out-of-body experience, as the stillness and the steady rhythms of Joe's filmmaking calmed my body and transported my soul. It's hard to describe in words just what the experience of watching this film is like, but I should say it's also beautifully crafted, very involving and funny, and movingly performed by the director's regular actress Jenjira Pongpas. She plays a Jen, a nurse tending to soldiers afflicted by some kind of sleeping sickness, who forms a particularly close bond with one of them, played by Banlop Lomnoi. We are told that this makeshift hospital is built upon the site of a graveyard, allowing the dead to draw upon the spirits of these sleeping soldiers and make them fight battles in the afterlife.

As usual with Apichatpong's films, such announcements are delivered straight and taken at face value. We are invited to believe, just as Jen does when her psychic colleague,while inhabited by another spirit, takes her through the forest to describe the glorious palace that once stood on this site, when two women appear to her and calmly explain that they are long-dead princesses come back to life.  Apichatpong's films create a sense of the magic in the everyday and through the most simple means he can create a genuine sense of enchantment and wonder. Some sequences in Cemetery of Splendour reminded me of previous Apichatpong films – notably Syndromes and a Century and Tropical Malady – but every one of his films also offers a unique experience, and the use of colour therapy in treating the sleeping soldiers almost lulls the audience into a state of somnambulance.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul has suggested that Cemetery of Splendour will be the last film that he makes in Thailand, at least for the foreseeable future. His films have frequently been denied a release in his home country and he has spoken out about his frustration at Thai artists having to self-censor their work, so it looks like he will be bringing his unique perspective to South America or elsewhere. I hope this doesn't mean it's the last we'll see of  Jenjira Pongpas, whose performance here is her best and most emotionally wrenching yet, with the leg injury that has left her with a lopsided gait taking centre stage in one of the film's many unforgettable sequences. If this is to be the last film this director makes at home, and this is to be our last sighting of his favourite actress, then they have said goodbye with a masterpiece.

London Film Festival 2015 Report -- Love Hurts

Therese (Rooney Mara) and Carol (Cate Blanchett) first lock eyes across the floor of a busy department store, and something intangible passes between them. The climax of the film again rests on these two characters gazing silently across a room at each other, with our knowledge of what has occurred in the intervening two hours filling the space between them with emotion and significance. Carol is a film built on looks, glances, gestures and touches, and the choices made by director Todd Haynes, his actors and his crew contribute to a film in which barely a frame seems out of place. This is the second time that Haynes has made a film about a forbidden love set in the 1950s, but while Far From Heaven was made as an overt homage to the films of Douglas Sirk, this time he has moved beyond pastiche to make a film that feels grounded in reality and is distinguished by a muted palette and quietly powerful underplaying.

The film is an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt, which might be seen as a rare non-crime novel from the author but in fact the two women falling in love here are made to feel like criminals. Both have ‘normal’ lives that they are expected to obediently follow: Carol is married with a daughter, but that marriage is a sham and a divorce is looming, with her preference for women being an open secret. The younger woman Therese has plenty of boys always hovering around her, including one who has made plans for them to travel to Europe together, but she hasn’t figured out what she wants or who she wants to be yet, and Carol opens her eyes to new possibilities. The pair take a road trip together in an attempt to find some peace and freedom elsewhere, but the suffocating realities of mid-twentieth century American society aren’t so easy to escape.

Haynes is, of course, so acute in his depiction of the way his characters feel hemmed in by the constraints of the time and place they live in. He doesn’t cast any characters as villains, and Kyle Chandler’s performance as Carol’s husband Harge foregrounds the sense of humiliation that he feels in front of his family and peers as the key motivator behind his treatment of his wife. Haynes’ direction is so sensitive to the emotions of his characters and every detail seems to be imbued with a weight and meaning that gradually accumulates force over the course of the film, and the performances – as usual in a Haynes film – are perfectly judged. Blanchett is as commanding as you would expect but it’s Rooney Mara who really impresses here, bringing a painful authenticity to her quiet emotional breakdowns and skilfully charting Therese’s progress as this insecure girl emerges into a woman ready to make some bold choices about her future.

Arnaud Desplechin, is need of a boost after the frustratingly underpowered Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian, is another director reaching into the past for inspiration. His new film My Golden Days mostly takes place in the 1980s and it revisits territory that the director has successfully mined before, being a loose prequel to his 1996 film My Sex Life… or How I Got Into an Argument. Desplechin’s go-to actor Mathieu Amalric reprises the role of Paul Dedalus, now a well-travelled diplomat who is stopped at the airport upon his return to France and questioned about the existence of another Paul Dedalus who shares the same date and place of birth. What follows is a long, discursive series of flashbacks that take in Paul’s troubled childhood with a mentally ill mother and mostly absent father, his teenage adventure assisting in an undercover operation in the Soviet Union, and finally his meeting with Esther, his great love, who was embodied in My Sex Life… by Emmanuelle Devos.

Here she is played by Lou Roy-Lecollinet, a first-time actress whose work alongside Quentin Dolmaire (as the young Paul) is wonderfully confident and alive, and they share a chemistry that holds the centre while Desplechin’s storytelling whirls around them. This is a very oddly structured and paced film, consisting of three uneven chapters and bookended by modern-day sequences, and the disparate elements never quite coalesce into a satisfying whole in the way that films like Kings and Queen or A Christmas Tale did. Still, on a moment-by-moment basis the film is gloriously enjoyable, boasting a number of intimate encounters that cut to the heart – notably in Paul’s relationship with his university mentor (Eve Doe-Bruce) and a lovely scene in which his insecure sister Delphine (Lily Taieb) is comforted by their father – and this director still has an uncanny ability to derive an emotional burst from a simple zoom or close-up. My Golden Days might not be peak Desplechin, but it is a film that feels uniquely Desplechin – a film following its own restless spirit and littering the path with split-screens, irises and characters reading letters directly to the camera. That last trope is a particular pleasure when the actor in question is Lou Roy-Lecollinet. She's a natural movie star.

Another star is born in Sunset Song, Terence Davies’ long-gestating adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s iconic Scottish novel. Agyness Deyn has appeared in a handful of films in her young career but this role marks the sternest test of her abilities, as she has to carry an epic romantic tragedy in a role that puts her through the emotional ringer. She is Chris Guthrie, a bookish young woman from a farming family in the fictional estate of Kinraddie, Scotland. Over the course of the film she survives living with a tyrannical father (Peter Mullan, recalling the Pete Postlethwaite of Distant Voices, Still Lives in his unpredictable explosions of violent rage), she takes control of the estate when he is hit by a stroke, she falls in love and starts a family and then – just when she can see happiness on the horizon – the advent of the First World War tears her life apart once more. It’s a demanding role but Deyn handles everything that Davies throws at her with grace, subtlety and emotional dexterity, her character gradually growing in tenacity and resilience as life takes its toll on her. In fact, from the moment she appears in a golden field of wheat in the film’s opening shot I felt like we were in good hands.

That opening shot is something of a surprise, though. When I think of Terence Davies’ films I always think of interiors, and yet much of Sunset Song takes place outdoors, a move that seems to have breathed new life into Davies’ already magnificent filmmaking. There’s a sweep and vibrancy to Sunset Song that I’ve never seen in his work before, with Michael McDonough’s lush cinematography making the most of the surroundings, particularly when shooting in 65mm. Davies’ films always seem to exist out in their own time, being defiantly out of step with contemporary fashions, and this film is no exception. At times it has the look and feel of a Hollywood studio production from the 1940s – Scotland’s answer to Gone With the Wind – but there’s a real darkness and anger present here too. Sunset Song is not only the story of a young woman making her way in an unforgiving world, it’s a lament for the entire communities that were torn apart by the First World War and an attack against the idea that fighting and dying for one’s country is a noble act. One shot in which the camera floats across the mud, barbed wire and pieces of clothing in No Man’s Land speaks a thousand words.

Of course, Terence Davies’ eloquence with a camera has never been in question, but even so his command of visual storytelling here is frequently breathtaking. The way a simple camera movement can denote the passage of time; the way light fills a church, suggesting the presence of God; the way a man must face his end at the hands of boys barely old enough to hold a gun. He also draws performances of great intimacy and emotional complexity from every member of his cast – notably Kevin Guthrie and Ian Pirie as Chris’s husband and his best friend respectively, who share a late scene together that I found unbearably moving. Sunset Song is a masterpiece in which one of the greatest filmmakers this country has ever produced brings his already astonishing artistry to new heights, and delivers a story that simultaneously moves the viewer to tears while making one’s spirit soar. “He could fair play, that piper. He tore at our hearts.”

London Film Festival 2015 Report -- A Vision of Hell

How do you film the Holocaust? It is a question that has troubled many filmmakers over the past 70 years and has often sewn discord among them, from Jacques Rivette's criticism of the tracking shot in Gillo Pontecorvo's Kapo to Claude Lanzmann's disdain for Schindler's List: “I fail to see how actors could convey deported people who had suffered months, years of agony, misery, humiliation and who died for fear,” Lanzmann wrote of Spielberg's film. How does a filmmaker depict the horrors of the camps without softening, reducing and trivialising them? Lanzmann believed that the way he dealt with the subject in Shoah, using interviews with survivors and no archive footage from the camps, was the only ethical approach, and yet he has come out in favour of Son of Saul, the feature debut from Hungarian director László Nemes.

Son of Saul opens with a blurred image, in which figures slowly take shape. Saul Auslander (Géza Röhrig) steps into the centre of the 4:3 frame, and that is pretty much how the rest of the film unfolds, with Saul being a fixed point around which nightmarish images are glimpsed and obscured. This Hungarian-born Jew is a sonderkommando in Auschwitz, a position that means he assists in the preparation of fellow prisoners for the gas chambers and then cleans up afterwards, disposing of the bodies and retrieving whatever valuables they may have been concealing in their clothes. This first sequence of the film is in itself a stunning achievement, placing us inside a shockingly convincing recreation of the gas chambers and forcing us to go through the motions along with Saul. As the camera follows him from a close distance – often focusing on the big red X on the back of his uniform – we only briefly catch sight of terrified prisoners undressing and being shepherded through to their deaths, and then we only see shapes of motionless flesh as the bodies are dragged across the room, piled up and transported to the ovens. But what we see is more than enough, especially when those images are combined with the astonishingly evocative and immersive sound mix that surrounds us with the piercing noise of fear, confusion, hatred and death. As the screams and the banging on the door of the gas chamber echoes around the room, Saul stares blankly at the floor.

Röhrig's impassive lead performance suggests that the only way a person could get through this experience is to keep his head down and try to block out the pain, but the emotional toll is still evident in his haggard features and dark eyes. In making Saul a sonderkommando, Nemes and co-screenwriter Clara Royer have a lead character who has a greater license to roam than the average prisoner, and as such we see the functions of the camp from multiple perspectives. We see bodies being loaded into the furnaces, we see a thriving black market, we see a prisoner uprising being plotted, we see Jews being shot and collapsing into a pit, we even see the women's camp – we see, we hear, we experience. It's easy to call Son of Saul a contrived and neatly constructed film but it is clearly a means to an end, with the filmmakers using Saul's roaming to create as rounded and fully detailed a portrait of the camps as possible.

Question marks will also be raised over the central thrust of the plot, with Saul discovering a young boy among the dead bodies retrieved from the gas chamber and insisting that he must have a proper Jewish burial. How can we get behind a protagonist who puts so many lives at risk for the sake of one dead child? How can we believe in the lengths he goes to in his attempt to secure the services of a Rabbi? You can either buy into this or not, but I found it very easy to believe that this man was desperately trying to hold on to his humanity by doing the one decent thing he can do, the one thing in this world of chaos that he may be able to exert some control over. The ambiguity over whether this really is Saul's child or if he has lost his senses adds to the sense that this is something he simply must do and that he is being driven by an overwhelming moral urgency that defies all other considerations. The whole narrative trajectory plays as a variation on the line, “He who saves one life, saves the world entire.”

Son of Saul, like any cinematic depiction of the Holocaust, will draw praise and criticism from all quarters and there is ultimately no clear answer to the the rights and wrongs of portraying this subject on screen. What is beyond dispute is that this is the work of a filmmaker in full command of the story he wants to tell and somebody who has utilised all of the tools at his disposal to create a unique and uncompromising work of art. It feels like he is being driven by the same kind of moral purpose that is pushing Saul onwards, and the need to document this part of history actually forms part of his film, with one of Saul's fellow prisoner's using a hidden camera to capture the atrocities being committed behind the barbed wire, to make the world see. Son of Saul makes us see it, hear it and feel it, and we won't easily forget it.

London Film Festival 2015 Report -- Acting Their Age

Benjamin August's screenplay for Remember must have seemed tailor-made for Atom Egoyan. Throughout his career he has been fascinated by characters who face a reckoning with the past, and has continually returned to the themes of obsession, memory and the search for truth. Egoyan's standing has fallen somewhat over the past two decades, however, and while it's tantalising to imagine the filmmaker telling this story when he was on peak form and constructing his complex narrative structures with elegance and precision, those qualities have largely deserted him in recent times. Remember is stodgy in its direction and visually flat, with Paul Sarossy's harsh and overly bright lighting making the whole thing look very cheap, but it's a film that still exerted an unexpected pull on my attention.

A strong lead performance from Christopher Plummer certainly helps in that regard. He plays Zev, an ageing nursing home resident suffering from dementia whose wife recently passed away. Remember follows Zev on an unlikely mission of revenge, as he sets off across the United States and Canada to find the SS officer responsible for killing both his family and those belonging to Max (Martin Landau), the wheelchair-bound friend who has planned Zev's mission. As incongruous as Zev appears in his avenging angel guise – he has to re-read Max's detailed instructions every day to remember the purpose of his journey – Plummer invests the character with a dignity that makes him an utterly compelling protagonist. While the film's pacing is uneven, the individual encounters that Zev has with each 'Rudy Kurlander' (the assumed name his Nazi is living under) has a haunting power, with Egoyan still proving to be adept at teasing out the conflicting emotions that strike when the past pours into the present.

The most gripping scene in the film actually occurs between Zev and a younger Kurlander, with Dean Norris making a disturbing impression as the son of a target who recently passed away. This whole unbearably tense and creepy sequence is masterfully handled and played, and while nothing else in the film can quite match up to it, Remember does possess a very strong and surprising closing scene. In these moments we can see flashes of the younger Egoyan, a director who is only 55 years old and still hopefully has plenty of time to rediscover the keen insight and distinctive touch that made his films in the 1980s and '90s such transfixing and provocative experiences. Until then, enjoyably off-kilter potboilers like this will have to do.

If one geriatric killer isn't enough for you, how about eight of them? The latest film from Takeshi Kitano presents us with a gang of ageing yakuza, reunited and ready to teach today's hoodlums how the streets should be run. The main tension here exists between the old-school code of ethics that the yakuza lives by and the more unscrupulous younger generation of crooks, who think nothing of running scams and extortion schemes aimed at swindling pensioners out of their money – but essentially the premise is nothing more than an excuse for a series of very silly gags. Ryuzo and His Seven Henchmen is often very funny, particularly at the start of the film when each gangster is introduced with a reference to their fearsome past before we see them in their current state. Ichizo (Ben Hiura), for example, was once notorious for the damage he could do with the sword concealed in his walking stick, but he now uses that stick to pick up cigarette butts.

Ryuzo and His Seven Henchmen's narrative is too flimsy to sustain its running time and the momentum stalls badly about halfway through, but it has enough flashes of humour and invention to keep the picture alive. There are a couple of very good jokes involving Ryuzo's (Tatsuya Fuji) missing fingers, a daft cross-dressing scene, and a Weekend at Bernie's-style climactic battle that significantly ups the tempo after the mid-film sag. On the whole the film is extremely broad and puerile and far from Takeshi Kitano's most accomplished work, but it delivers pretty much what its director set out to do. The only slight disappointment is that Takeshi himself doesn't make more of an impression. He has a supporting role as a policeman and he does get to punch somebody in the face, but I was expecting a bit more than that from one of cinema's unique screen presences. Maybe he's just getting too old for this shit.

Jerzy Skolimowski is 77 years old but 11 Minutes is the kind of film that usually has critics marvelling that it 'feels like a young man's film'. That's not to say it's any good, unfortunately. For all of its dynamic camerawork and frenetic cutting, the film is a baffling and stupendously dull high-concept thriller in which multiple characters from across Warsaw are brought together in the specific time frame indicated by the title. The film itself runs for 80 minutes, and Skolimowski spends that duration repeatedly cutting back in time to replay scenes from different perspectives, as every character gradually inches towards a climax that will presumably involve them all. Hints are dropped throughout that there is some kind of grand plan at work here, some sort of divine will that is drawing these characters together, but all of these indicators are apparently red herrings, or simply threads left dangling by a catastrophically inept screenplay.

This might not matter so much if the characters in question were worth spending time with but they barely exist as anything more than pawns in Skolimowski's confounding game. An aspiring actress finds herself locked in a hotel room with a sleazy producer (a terrible Richard Dormer), resulting in the world's slowest and most badly acted seduction, while her husband angrily paces around outside. A couple watches porn together until a bird flies through their window (an incident Skolimowski deems worthy of multiple depictions), and a motorbike courier delivers drugs to some mysterious figures. Elsewhere, a girl walks her dog – which results in a series of pointless dog POV shots – and buys a hotdog from a vendor who we understand to be a paedophile. This revelation made me think that we were watching characters who were going to be punished for their past sins, but no, the paedophile aspect of the story is dumped as summarily as everything else. It's hard to know how Skolimowski could produce a film that is so nihilistic, incomprehensible and amateurish – his last feature Essential Killing wasn't perfect, but it had a sense of purpose and integrity that is entirely absent here. The last five minutes of the film are astonishing, and not in a good way, as any hopes we might have of a conclusion that makes sense of it all go (literally) out of the window. A young man's film? Perhaps that's true, but I never imagined Skolimowski would produce something so juvenile.

London Film Festival 2015 Report -- Cheap Thrills

Deepa Mehta came to prominence in the 1990s with her trilogy Fire, Earth and Water; three films that explored taboo issues and challenged complex traditions in Indian culture. The director seems to think that she is making the same kind of penetrative commentary with her new film Beeba Boys, which closes with an onscreen graphic that states: “We did not make this maelstrom up. There have been 173 gang-related deaths in British Columbia in the past 10 years.” This line might have carried a little more weight if what we had watched for the preceding 90 minutes hadn’t been such a ludicrously unconvincing, incompetently staged and dismally acted cartoon. The Beeba Boys of the title are a gang of Indian Sikhs in Vancouver led by the reputedly fearsome Jeet Johar (Randeep Hooda), who we first meet as he gets his chest waxed and boasts about his crimes live on TV. He and his flamboyantly dressed boys are engaged in a turf war with a rival gang led by kingpin Grewal (Gulshan Grover). All of the gangster movie clichés are here – an undercover cop with divided loyalties; a mobster struggling to balance work and family life; gang members with colourful nicknames; money, drugs, guns and girls – but all of it is botched in the execution.

Beeba Boys opens with a cold-blooded murder but even as people are frequently despatched there’s never a sense that any of this matters. The characters strut around in their sharp suits and talk tough but only the recognisable Waris Ahluwalia and a bizarrely coiffed Paul Gross make any impression at all, with the quality of acting among the large cast being one of the film’s biggest problems (Ali Momen struggles most notably in the pivotal role of Nep). Mehta’s direction is brash and energised but consistently clumsy. In a courtroom scene she swings the camera from one side of the room to the other for no apparent reason other than to try and spice the scene up visually, but it only serves to distract, and the loud score also feels oppressive more often than it serves the action. I just have no idea what story Mehta is trying to tell here, she veers wildly from one plot point to another without ever digging into any of them, and I don’t know what tone she’s trying to establish either; the film almost feels like some kind of Goodness Gracious Me-style spoof, but then any attempts to make us grieve for murdered characters fall embarrassingly flat. Any hopes that Mehta might allow her female characters to have a bit more depth than the average gangster film are also doomed – Sarah Allen is excruciating as Jeet's girlfriend, who seems to be transformed into a drug addict after one line of coke – while the cultural specificity that might have been a fresh angle on the genre amounts to nothing (and is bizarrely blended with frequent references to Transformers). In a recent interview, Deepa Mehta described Beeba Boys as "ultra-tragic". I guess we can agree on that, at least.

Most of the time, Beeba Boys just reminds us of the films that it is trying and failing to emulate – Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Scarface, Casino, etc. – and it was probably a mistake to give the film a name that can be loosely translated as “Good Fellas”. Of course, a genre film always runs the risk of bringing to mind previous and superior films and suffering in comparison, but all a film can do is tell its own story while embracing and having a little fun with its influences. The Ones Below opens with the sonogram image of a baby while an unsettling distorted lullaby theme plays on the soundtrack, and we immediately suspect that we are in for a Rosemary’s Baby-style horror, but that’s not what we get. The Polanski comparison is appropriate, though, as the film plays out almost entirely within the confines of a London flat and focuses on a woman’s fragile sanity. Kate and Justin (Clémence Poésy and Stephen Campbell Moore) are a young couple expecting a baby who discover that their new neighbours in the downstairs flat are in the same situation. They become friends with Jon and Theresa (David Morrissey and Laura Birn), even though something about them seems a little...off. When an unkind twist of fate destroys their new friendship, Kate soon becomes convinced that the couple downstairs poses a threat to her and her new baby.

As well as the Polanski vibes, The Ones Below recalls daft-but-fun '90s domestic thrillers like The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, and there's more than a hint of Gaslight in the suggestion that all of the things making Kate suspicious of her neighbours may the product of her frazzled mind. Writer-director David Farr touches on notions of maternal instinct and the pressures that a new mother faces as well as the jealousy that pregnancy can inspire in others, but the film doesn't do a lot with these ideas and it works best as a straightforward thriller. Farr's filmmaking is unambitious but satisfyingly lean and unfussy, and he orchestrates a couple of tense moments as well as being smart enough to acknowledge some of the film's more credulity-stretching moments with a humorous touch (one picture-swapping bit here had me unexpectedly in stitches). The film works fine as a solid thriller, but what really elevates it and lends it vital nuance and depth is the quality of the two female performances. The imaginatively cast Poesy gives a superbly understated portrayal of a woman gradually cracking under the strain while Laura Birn's revelatory work hints at levels of cunning and malevolence behind an open, innocent demeanour. There's real heat in the interactions between these two, which occasionally gives this entertaining 90 minutes a welcome edge.

Single-location thrillers have an inbuilt sense of tension, particularly when you're trapped with a bunch of people that you have absolutely no desire to be with. The Invitation begins with characters arriving at a secluded house high in the Hollywood hills for a reunion that is fraught with anxiety for a couple of them in particular. It will be the first time that Will (Logan Marshall-Green) will have seen his ex-wife Eden (Tammy Blanchard) in two years, the pair having separated after the death of their son, a grief that Will is still struggling to cope with. Things feel suspect for Will from the start, but the alarm bells really start to go off when Eden and her new man David (Michiel Huisman) begin telling their guests all about The Invitation; a healing process that has helped them turn their lives around, but which looks and sounds suspiciously like a cult to everyone else – is this dinner a cover for some kind of induction? Things go downhill rapidly when David’s mysterious pal Pruitt (a supremely creepy John Carroll Lynch) shows up and at this point most of the audience will find themselves sharing Will’s belief that, like most dinner parties, there’s no way this night can end well.

Even if the denouement may feel inevitable, the most refreshing thing about The Invitation is the patience that the filmmakers show in taking us there. The screenplay by co-authors Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi contains plenty of red herrings, which are deployed in a timely fashion to continually upend our expectations of how the film is going to develop, and I appreciated how long we spent just experiencing the awkward silences, the strain and the weirdness of the party, with the sense of discomfort building with every passing minute. It has been a long time since I saw a film that was so efficient and skilful in the way it gradually bumped up the tension and sneakily exerted its grip over the audience, and Karyn Kusama’s direction never allows that process to stall. There are some terrific heart-stopping and sweat-inducing scenes dotted throughout, and when things eventually do go haywire, Kusama proves to be just as adept at handling the bloodshed in a clever and gripping way. From the unsettling prologue to the clever punchline, this is a stunningly effective exercise in thriller filmmaking.

While The Invitation had me in its grip from start to finish, I can pinpoint the exact moment when Thierry Poiraud's dismal horror Don't Grow Up started to lose me. It happens early in the film, as a group of six teenagers explore a seemingly abandoned town, and one of them discovers a little girl in the arms of her bloodied mother. Just as he beckons the girl to come to him, she mutters “The grown-ups...they're all bad” before the mother awakens and snaps the girl's neck. Frankly, if you're going start to killing children like that in a movie then you need to justify it more than Don't Grow Up ever comes close to doing. This is an appallingly half-assed piece of shit that runs for a shade over 80 minutes but still feels padded with an awful lot of extraneous material. The idea is that all of the grown-ups on this particular island have been infected by some kind of virus that turns them into bloodthirsty zombies, but we never learn (a) what caused this (b) why it only affects adults and (c) why a couple of our non-adult leads arbitrarily start to turn during the course of the film. Without such rules in place the whole film feels as if it is being made up by the filmmakers as they go along, and it's impossible to care about any of the teens getting gruesomely murdered as only one of them is given any kind of character development, in the form of hackneyed flashbacks to a traumatic childhood. The quality of the acting is largely very poor, it's full of dumb and predictable plotting, and the whole thing feels significantly longer than it is. I see plenty of bad films in the London Film Festival, but it's not often I see something that would feel like a rip-off it was released straight to DVD.

London Film Festival 2015 Report -- Short Cuts

There is a clear hierarchy to films in the London Film Festival. The features chosen as the main galas are shown to press in the biggest screens, which are usually filled to capacity, while others are slotted into smaller screens according to the expected interest. This week we had a morning screening of the very high-profile Suffragette in the Odeon Leicester Square, which was unsurprisingly very well-attended, but later that afternoon when two programmes of short films were scheduled in a comparatively small screen at the BFI Southbank, both screenings were shockingly underpopulated. There were no competing screenings at the same time, and the shorts being shown were the twelve that have been nominated for the festival's Short Film Award, so we could expect the quality to be high. So what happened?

Someone suggested to me that the fact that these shorts are available on the Festival's online viewing platform affected the attendance, but as the vast majority of people who have mentioned Cinando (the festival's online platform of choice) have commented on how utterly useless it is, I don't know if that's true. In any case, shorts work in the same way as features, with great filmmaking always benefiting from being experienced on a big screen and with an audience – and there really is some great filmmaking evident in this collection.

They aren't all winners by any means, and there are some pretty awful shorts here – the less said about unbearable Red Moon Rising and the polished but tiresome Dissonance the better – but I found five that I would recommend as exemplary pieces of economic storytelling that can stand alongside anything in the festival.

For example, Caroline Bartleet's Operator manages to create an incredible amount of drama in six minutes with just two actors, only one of whom is seen on screen. Kate Dickie is Laura, a London Fire Service operator who answers a 999 call from Gemma (Vicky McClure), a mother calling from a burning house with her son trapped upstairs. The camera stays tightly on Laura's face as she gets the information required to despatch engines and then does everything within her power to calm the panicked Gemma and ensure she does nothing to put herself or her son in danger. Dickie's controlled delivery is perfectly pitched and Bartleet uses the sounds on the other end of the phone line to ratchet up the tension. But the writer-director's real masterstroke comes right at the end when, in contrast to last year's sentimental and undeservedly Oscar-winning short The Phone Call, she makes it clear that these isolated instances of high drama and unbearable tension are faced by emergency services operators every single day.

Another British film that packs unexpected layers of depth and emotion into a scant running time is Nina Gantz's remarkable Edmond. This nine-minute animation begins with a man dragging a rock towards a lake, and then taking a moment to sit and reflect upon key moments in his life thus far. He dives into his memories as Gantz takes us further back in time and locates instances of great pain, embarrassment and confusion that have left their mark on Edmond ever since he was a child. There's a wonderful tactility about Gantz's puppets, which have been made out of felt with 2D facial expressions being animated onto them, and she has has an appealingly dark and bizarre sense of humour. Each of the stops on Edmond's journey made me laugh out loud and gasp in surprise, while I was also deeply affected by the melancholy undertones that grow stronger throughout. It's a beautifully crafted piece of work.

It was a strong showing all round for UK-based filmmakers in this collection. Jörn Threlfall's Over is a film that takes a long time to reveal its purpose, but it gets its hooks into the viewer almost imperceptibly and when Threlfall played his hand the impact knocked the wind out of me. It begins in a quiet London residential street at 11:45pm and then it gradually takes us back through time, stopping every couple of hours to watch what is happening in the same spot. We realise that we are being shown unfolding of a crime scene in reverse, with the clean-up operation occurring first, and then the police cordoning off the area to investigate, before we finally see the body lying motionless in the street at 6:45am. But how did it get there? The answer to that is surprising and brilliantly staged, and Threlfall's clinical approach adds to its power. I was left contemplating just how quickly a shocking incident can be pushed out of our minds to allow life to go on as normal, and how a person's entire existence can be reduced to just a few items in police evidence bags.

Looking further afield, the French short Maman(s) also had an incredible emotional impact on me. This is the story of a divided family told from the perspective of 8 year-old Aida, who doesn't fully understand what is happening inside her home when her father returns from a visit to Dakar with a second wife and a new baby in tow. All Aida knows is that she can't sit idly by while her mother is heartbroken – one shot of Aifa crying silently as she listens to her mother's sobs is devastating – and she begins rebelling against this new presence in their lives. Maïmouna Doucouré creates a real sense of a family in a few brief strokes before she begins turning the emotional screw, and her storytelling is consistently sensitive, perceptive and involving. The film quietly accumulates a power that culminates in a twist that had me holding my breath and fighting back the tears. A hugely accomplished film on multiple levels.

While these films are all examples of bold and skilful storytelling there was only one short in this selection that genuinely felt like something I've never seen before. Peter Tscherkassky's The Exquisite Corpus is an exhilarating 19 minutes that begins in a deceptively sedate way, with a naked couple taking a small boat out to some kind of naturist island, but when they disembark and find an unconscious woman on the beach the film suddenly begins to splinter, flipping between positive and negative images and suddenly incorporating different types of sexual images. Tscherkassky has taken all of the footage in The Exquisite Corpus from a variety of adult films through the ages, and he has cut them together in a way that is thrilling to behold – a dazzling piece of visual and aural montage that plays like a feverish erotic dream. The way pulls all of these disparate elements into a cohesive and satisfying whole is nothing short of astonishing, and he caps it with a quiet punchline that is as inspired and affecting as Chris Marker's La Jetée. On a brilliance-per-minute basis, there's probably not much in the London Film Festival programme that can match The Exquisite Corpus.

How many people will see it, though? How many people will see any of these films? The apparent lack of interest from the press corps was particularly disheartening, and I've long felt that the London Film Festival doesn't do these films any favours by ghettoising them in a separate short film programme apart from the main features. Wouldn't it be better to show one of these shorts before each feature film screening in addition to having the shorts programmes? It would instantly increase the number of viewers that these films can expect to receive and, when a tickets are expensive as they are at the LFF, I think people deserve a little added value. Of course, I can only pity the feature that has to follow The Exquisite Corpus, but there is some wonderful work being done here that demands greater exposure.

London Film Festival 2015 Report -- Three Divisive Auteurs

Sometimes a film festival recommendation comes with a qualification attached. I often want to push people towards movies that I've seen and loved, but the distinctive style of the filmmakers behind them gives me pause, as a person's enjoyment of the film will probably depend on their fondness/tolerance for that filmmaker's particular idiosyncrasies. In the case of The Forbidden Room, anyone who has yet to experience the singular vision of Guy Maddin may find this a particularly challenging place to start. In some ways it feels like the most Guy Maddin-ish film that Maddin has ever made, with every wild idea in the Canadian auteur's head finding its way into a very antic and eventful two hours. It's the longest and most densely packed feature film of his career, and watching it is an exhausting experience, but if you are on Maddin's wavelength then it's also a truly exhilarating one.

The Forbidden Room has grown out of Maddin's Séances project, in which he reimagines a number of lost silent films using only their titles as inspiration. As a result, the film is an eclectic compendium of ideas, subplots and incidents with actors reappearing in multiple roles and one tale rapidly blurring into another as Maddin sets up an intricate structure of stories within stories and dreams within dreams. From an instructional video detailing the correct method of taking a bath we quickly find ourselves trapped in a submarine (with characters gaining sustenance from the air pockets in flapjacks), before the action movies to a forest, a volcano, a nightclub and other locations that involve poisonous skeleton leotards, Geraldine Chaplin wielding a whip and Udo Kier getting a lobotomy to cure his obsession with female derrieres.

All of this is depicted in Maddin's trademark frenzied silent-film style with some hilariously daft intertitles (“FEMALE SKELETONS! ASWANG BANANA!”) and personalised introduction cards for every cast member, and you're never more than a few minutes from something hilarious, beautiful or mind-boggling. As well as being an extraordinarily sustained feat of invention and wit, the film is a visual feast, with Maddin utilising digital techniques to bring the aesthetic of aged celluloid to the fore like never before – the textures and colours of every shot are seared onto the eyeballs. Is it all too much? For some people it surely will be, but I found it to be consistently hilarious, stimulating and beautiful, and a film I was more than happy to be overwhelmed by.

The Forbidden Room's London Film Festival screening takes place in the BFI IMAX and the very idea of Maddin's delirious images filling that vast screen is a tantalising one. Another filmmaker whose work might reach a wider audience than ever before in this festival is Yorgos Lanthimos, who is working with a bigger budget and a much higher-profile cast than ever before in The Lobster, but who hasn't allowed this elevated status to blunt his edge or change his style. This film is certainly recognisable as being the same work of the man who directed Dogtooth and Alps, with the actors' performances adhering to his favoured deadpan, affectless delivery and expressive body language, and with the blend of arch comedy and outbursts of violence being as potent as ever. It's also another film set in a world defined by its rules and codes of behaviour, where the drama arises from the consequences faced by those who dare to step outside the lines.

In this case, the Logan's Run-style twist is that nobody is allowed to be single, and any person who finds themselves alone and fails to find a date within 45 days will be transformed into the animal of their choice. “A wolf and a penguin can't be together, or a camel and a hippo. That would be absurd,” Colin Farrell's David is told near the start of the film, but ruling things out on the basis of absurdity seems incongruous in the context of this picture. The first half of The Lobster finds Lanthimos and his regular co-writer Efthymis Filippou devising a series of very funny interactions in the hotel that hosts these lonely hearts, as desperation pushes some of them to drastic measures – one bashes his face against a wall to attract a girl who suffers from nosebleeds, while Farrell's attempt to feign heartlessness to win over an apparently emotionless woman (a tremendous Angeliki Papoulia) is a brilliant comic interlude with a tragic punchline.

The Lobster is a film of two halves and when Lanthimos moves into that second half the film almost loses its way. Escaping this world of rigid rules only leads David into another community controlled by a very different – but equally strange and restrictive – set of rules, and there's a worrying sag right in the middle of the film as we have to sit through even more exposition and get used to a whole new environment and group of characters. However, what emerges from this portion of the film is a surprisingly sincere and poignant love story, and even if the allegorical intention gradually gets a little fuzzier over the course of the film, it still feels like a film with a lot of intriguing and perceptive ideas about contemporary relationships and society, and like everything this director has made, it stays with you.

Your appreciation for Entertainment might rest not only on your reaction to the films of Rick Alverson – whose 2012 film The Comedy seemed to be admired and loathed in equal measure – but also on how you react to the comedy style of Neil Hamburger. He's the alter-ego of Gregg Turkington and he takes centre stage in Alverson's new film; a movie about a comedian that is described in the LFF programme as an “anti-comedy” – you have been warned. We follow Turkington as he performs in a series of miserable bars and clubs through the Mojave Desert, with jokes like “Why does E.T. The Extra Terrestrial like Reese's Pieces so much? Because they have the same taste that cum has on his home planet” delivered in his rasping, strained voice and prompting a mixture of embarrassed chuckles, uncomfortable silences and outright hostility. As his audiences dwindle the comedian starts to lose his grip, leaving a series of unreturned phone messages for his daughter and wandering around his desolate surroundings, where he has a number of strange and unsettling encounters.

Alverson is clearly a filmmaking who wants to provoke any kind of reaction from his viewers, and Entertainment is rife with moments of discomfort and awkwardness, but I also found it to be an involving and unexpectedly moving film, which boasts some brilliant images. Alverson and cinematographer Lorenzo Hagerman use the 2:35 frame superbly, frequently isolating Turkington in the centre of the shot against an unusual backdrop, and they begin the film working with a very washed-out palette, so when they do introduce colour later on the images pop in a very effective way. Cameos from John C. Reilly, Michael Cera and Amy Seimetz slip right into Alverson’s bleak world while Tye Sheridan is superb as Hamburger's support act, but it's Turkington who commands our attention. As Entertainment peels back the layers of its protagonist’s lonely existence, Turkington brings a tangible sense of despair to his performance, making this not only a more formally accomplished piece of work than The Comedy, but also a more powerful and resonant one.

London Film Festival 2015 Report -- Opening Night

I'm used to films warping my perception of time, but even so I was taken aback when the words “A Film by Jia Zhang-ke – Mountains May Depart” appeared on screen after what had felt like half an hour of the Chinese director's new film. It turned out to be a very late title card rather than a very early cut to the end credits, and it only brought an end to the first segment of Jia's triptych, with the director again taking a structurally bold approaching to exploring life in contemporary China. While A Touch of Sin told three distinct stories, Mountains May Depart tells one story over the course of three decades, beginning in 1999 and focusing on a love triangle between singer Tao Shen (Zhao Tao), wealthy and arrogant capitalist Jinsheng (Yi Zhang) and humble mine worker Liangzi (Liang Jin Dong). The second segment picks up the story in 2014, when we see that Tao's choice of husband hasn't worked out very well for anyone, and then Jia jumps ahead to Australia in 2025, where the narrative shifts to her son.

As the years go by the screen gets wider, from 1.33 in 1999 to 1.85 in 2014 and finally 2.35 for the futuristic third segment, an aesthetic approach that reflects the gradual widening of the film's scope and the growing distance (emotional and literal) between the characters. It's a daring approach that will prove to be a stumbling block for some viewers, as the film definitely loses something the further it gets from the intimacy of the love triangle that it starts with. There is a lot in Mountains May Depart that the viewer could find fault with, from the way Liangzi is abruptly written out of the film, leaving it feeling frustratingly lopsided, to the climactic section of the film, which admittedly suffers from some stiff performances and clumsy line readings that betray Jia's inexperience at directing in English.

It would be easy to focus on these flaws, but instead I was struck by the ambition and sweep of Jia’s vision. This is a film about family and freedom, about culture and capital, about history and the future, and he doesn’t let the allegorical nature of his story structure overwhelm the personal stakes for the characters. As ever, his filmmaking is elegant and full of resonant images – a wedding invite left on a table; a mother sharing a bittersweet meal with her son; an angry man isolated behind a language barrier of his own making who owns dozens of guns but “has nobody to fire them at.” Above all else, the film is a fantastic showcase for Jia’s wife Zhao Tao, who gives her finest performance here. She is the film’s emotional anchor, and while her absence from the third act is disappointing (despite a good performance from Sylvia Chang in a kind of surrogate role), her return contributes to a deeply moving closing scene that is every bit as memorable as the dazzling opening. Go West, indeed.

Jia Zhang-ke came to the London Film Festival to present his new film, but he was here for another reason too, being the subject of a documentary by Walter Salles. Jia Zhang-ke: A Guy From Fenyang follows the director as he revisits his old haunts and the places where he shot his films, bumps into old friends and acquaintances and contemplates his career and his fractious relationship with the Chinese authorities. Salles doesn’t bring much of a directorial perspective to the film, but it does benefit from some judiciously chosen clips and an elegant rhythm, as well as a sense of intimacy that distinguishes it from most other recent filmmaker documentaries. It’s a thoroughly engaging picture with Jia proving to be an affable and humble guide, and it occasionally provides some interesting insights. A fascinating portion of the film is devoted to the filming of his remarkable 2006 film Still Life against a backdrop that was changing even as they shot, while the most compelling portion comes late in the film as Jia discusses his father and the devastating legacy of the Cultural Revolution, which meant his father’s pride in his son’s work was always mixed with a fear of the consequences that he might face. A Guy From Fenyang was filmed in the build-up to the release of A Touch of Sin and it ends on a disconsolate note, as the denial of a commercial release for the film in China leaves him wondering if he can even continue. Of course, we’ve already seen his subsequent film, and watching this documentary there’s little doubt that Jia Zhang-ke will continue to make provocative, revealing films about contemporary China and the lives of ordinary people living in it for as long as he possibly can.

Another filmmaker being honoured in documentary form this year is Ousmane Sembène, with Sembene!, a film by Samba Gadjigo and Jason Silverman, accompanying the new restoration of the African director’s superb 1966 film Black Girl in the programme. Black Girl is one of three Sembene films that I’ve seen, along with Xala and Moolaadé, and I know very little about his body of work beyond those films, so I was keen to learn more about the father of African cinema. Sembene! mostly sticks to the established director biography template – chronological details, clips, talking heads – and as a result feels a little staid, but it is given a personal slant by being co-directed and narrated by Gadjigo, a friend and collaborator of Sembene's for the last 20 years of his life, who has now taken on the task of looking after the director's legacy. The portrait of Sembene that emerges through the film is a rebellious and independent man who was fiercely devoted to his craft, often to the detriment of his family and friendships. “I would sleep with The Devil to make a film” we see him saying during the film, but the film can only touch upon this aspect of his personality in a shallow and fleeting way. There are some interesting revelations, such as the fact that he was almost blind when he made his great Moolaadé (which I still found deeply upsetting and potent in just the couple of extracts featured here), but my biggest takeaway from Sembene! was an overwhelming desire to see the rest of this man's films. There is currently an major project underway to restore and re-release all of his films – badly needed, as Sembene! opens with the horrifying sight of decaying film cans – and hopefully there will be a full season of his films coming soon. Even better, how about a celebration of African cinema in general? It still feels like an area of the world that I am disappointingly ignorant of in terms of its cinematic output, and I'd love to have the opportunity to change that.

And I suppose I should make some mention of the festival’s official opening night film while I’m here. I’ve heard a lot of talk in recent weeks about how Suffragette is an important film and a story that deserves to be heard – “The Time is Now,” etc. – but I always get a little suspicious when I’m repeatedly told that a film is ‘good for you’ rather than simply: ‘it’s good’.  Suffragette is not a particularly good film or a particularly bad one – it's just determinedly average throughout, and the most frustrating thing about a film telling such an emotive story is that it feels too often like screenwriter Abi Morgan and director Sarah Gavron are going through the motions rather than really being driven by a sense of fire and urgency. The film follows the gradual emboldening and political awakening of Maud (Carey Mulligan) as she suffers through increasing degrees of drudgery, misery and pain, but the film's deck-stacking – leading to a dreadful scene involving Maud's son – works against it, and Mulligan's committed but unimaginative work doesn't give us a lot to connect with. Things pick up a little when the film moves the action to Epsom late on and Emily Wilding Davison takes centre stage, not least because she is played by the perennially undervalued Natalie Press, an actress who can't help but bring a sharpness, interest and texture to anything she plays. I sat there wishing that she was our protagonist instead. Suffragette is this year's The Imitation Game; a watered-down and inoffensive film that will elicit a combination of moderately appreciative reviews and shrugs in the build-up to the Oscars. Shouldn't we expect and demand more than this? Something that feels just a little bit dynamic, bold and dangerous? A film that defies convention rather than meekly surrendering to it? Yes, we can take satisfaction that a film written, produced, directed by and starring women is being given a platform like this, but I hope people dig deeper into the London Film Festival programme to discover and celebrate female-directed films with genuine vision and artistry.

Chantal Akerman: 1950-2015

Until a couple of years ago the only Chantal Akerman film I had seen, and the only one I'd really heard people talk about, was her 1975 masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Sometimes a filmmaker, even a great one, makes one picture that towers over the rest of their career, and that certainly seemed to be the case with Akerman. My opportunity to explore the rest of her work came in 2013, when A Nos Amours, the repertory film collective run by Adam Roberts and Joanna Hogg, ambitiously announced plans to screen an entire retrospective, including every feature film as well as her documentaries and television work, much of which had never been shown before in the UK. It's hard to imagine a better way to discover a filmmaker.

Akerman was just 25 years old when Jeanne Dielman was released – the same age as Welles when he made Citizen Kane, a comparable achievement – but what struck me about viewing her early works was how different they all felt. It's as if she spent the years prior to her breakthrough film trying on different styles and finding her voice, which suddenly solidified in the intimidating shape of Jeanne Dielman. The early pictures are bold, surprising, funny and haunting, and they provided one of the best cinema experiences I've ever had. 1972's Hôtel Monterey consists of a series of silent tracking shots through hotel corridors, and it was shown at the ICA on a 16mm print. When the ICA screens a film on 16mm they have to position the projector inside the theatre, as it's too big for the booth, and so we could hear only the whirring of this projector and the crackle of the print as Akerman's camera ghosted throughout the building. It's as close to an feeling of hypnosis as I have ever experienced (although her 1993 film D'Est came close to emulating it).

The other revelation that emerged from these early Akerman screenings is that she preceded Jeanne Dielman with a debut narrative feature that is every bit as formally bold and conceptually brilliant as her most acclaimed film. Je, tu, il, elle stars Akerman as an anxious young woman who we first meet alone in her apartment, frantically writing letters and – in an unforgettable image – eating handfuls of sugar straight from the bag. When she finally escapes from this location, she hits the road with a random truck driver (a Brando-esque Niels Arestrup) before hooking up with an ex-girlfriend for one of the most extraordinary and memorable sex scenes ever filmed. It's a genuine masterpiece, and for Akerman, just the first of many.

To watch Chantal Akerman's films in chronological order was to watch a filmmaker continually reinventing herself. Each film seemed simultaneously a natural development as well as a radical departure from what had come previously. Her brilliant 1978 film Les Rendez-vous d’Anna feels just as formally rigorous as Hôtel Monterey or Jeanne Dielman, but it possesses a markedly different rhythm, humour and emotional weight. In the 1980s her work became even more adventurous and surprising, culminating in the vivid and witty Demy-esque musical Golden Eighties that was preceded by a preparatory film called Les années 80, which was made as a rehearsal and features Akerman and her actors repeatedly going over their lines and choreography. It may be little more than a making-of film – a DVD extra these days – but in Akerman's hands it becomes something entrancingly creative, thoughtful and funny.

Perhaps that's the biggest misconception people have of Chantal Akerman's work if it is only represented by a challenging monument like Jeanne Dielman – her films on the whole are incredibly amusing and playful. There are rich comic moments in so many of her films from Je, tu, il, elle and Golden Eighties to Toute une nuit and Nuit et jour, and in the 1990s she even made a mainstream romantic comedy, with the beautifully shot A Couch in New York having a distinctively unusual comic rhythm, which she then one-upped with the screwball farce Tomorrow We Move in 2004. At times it's hard to look at the variety in this body of work and pin down what exactly a Chantal Akerman film is, but there are constants throughout every film – the fluid takes, the masterful use of space, the movement of bodies within the frame, the striking use of colour, the sheer boldness of the vision.

It's fair to say that this ongoing retrospective of Chantal Akerman's films has been one of the most valuable cinemagoing experiences of my life. Over the course of two years I have discovered a unique and multi-faceted artist whose work is boundary-pushing, deeply personal, warm and funny, and endlessly revealing. The retrospective is set to end late this month with the UK premiere of her final film No Home Movie and the opening of an Akerman gallery installation. I will still attend both of these events, albeit now with a heavy heart, but I am devastated that we won't get the masterclass that was scheduled for the afternoon before the screening. I wanted to be there to show Chantal Akerman how loved and respected her work is here in London, and to hopefully tell her what a formative, eye-opening experience discovering her films has been for me. This retrospective won't have the ending that any of us imagined or hoped for, but like all great artists, the work will live on. Earlier this year in Bologna a new restoration of Jeanne Dielman was shown. I can only envy anyone who sees that film and is inspired to embark on the same exhilarating journey of discovery that has almost come to an end for me.

No Home Movie will receive its UK premiere at the Regent Street Cinema on October 30th.

Chantal Akerman Now will be open at Ambika P3 from October 30th to December 6th.