Hello, and welcome to our -rather late, but still great- live blog here at the Times BFI 53rd London Film Festival (from now on to be known as LFF, to save headaches). This year the all-important event is screening films from around the world, fans can watch premieres of Hollywood blockbusters, retrospective classic greats, Asian, African and European cinema, new and old, on several big screens around London. In addition to all the film goodness, there are q&as with stars, press conferences, interviews, panels and so much more. It’s all held between 14th – 29th October and we’re there to report on the highlights. So let’s get started. Everything we’ve reviewed below will be reviewed in more detail at a later date.

Thursday 29th October

Nowhere Boy - As fans will know, John Lennon’s otherwise average teenage troubles were amplified by the huge gap in his life that his estranged parents left. Sheltered from the world by his uptight Aunt Mimi (mirrored rather excellently in Kristen Scott Thomas’ performance), once he hit adolescence he broke out in two major ways: he tracked down his mother and he picked up a guitar. And so these are the two strands that hold this slightly clumsy film together.
The reason it falls apart, however, mostly leans on newcomer Aaron Johnson’s rather unconvincing portrayal of Lennon. His awfully strained Liverpudlian accent is irritating, sure. But primarily he’s just not engaging enough; he gives the character far more sensitivity and nervousness than I think John ever had, paints him out to be so breakable under the mask of his Elvis hairdo and up collar. He doesn’t have John’s slightly cruel sneer. But then who am I to judge whether John was actually like that? This is why a fan of The Beatles should probably not review this film, we all have preconceived notions of what their lives were like, what the culture was like, and anything that doesn’t match it is just dismissed.

Other than Scott-Thomas, performances in Nowhere Boy that really stood out included Anne-Marie Duff as John’s mentally ill and devastatingly unhappy mother Julia and Josh Bolt as one of the Quarrymen’s founding members, Pete Shotton. In fact, really, apart from John, the cast was quite excellently chosen. The 50s set designs and costumes are convincing and aesthetically very pleasing; the use of colour on each character’s costume is well-placed to meet their personalities. But the film overall is quite, well, dull. In focusing on John’s rather simplistic view of his relationship with his aunt and mother, the script hasn’t done justice to other more exciting things going on in his life. In trying to be original with her take on such a notorious talent, Sam Taylor-Wood has directed a mediocre picture about an otherwise indistinguishable boy with a relatively troubled home life.

Monday 26th October

We Live In Public - We Live in Public begins with statistics, engineered presumably to prove that Josh Harris was a pioneer of the internet.  Listening to Harris spout inane utterances along the lines of “I love my mother virtually, not physicallyâ€�, you would be quite right in concluding that he has all the personality of a flea. “The internet is haute coutureâ€� he bellows. Hmm, not sure if the fashion world would concur. Or anyone in the real world in fact.  He decides to launch a ‘social experiment’. In return for abandoning their lives for a month the prisoners (for once you are in, you are not allowed to leave) are granted free food and drink. There’s a cereal bar! And an arms room bursting with all manner of guns, rifles and weaponry! It doesn’t take long for events to spiral out of control…. by Doireann Ronayne

Surprise Film: Capitalism: A Love Story - “Where The Wild Things Are!”, “Iron Man 2!”, “New Moon!”, “Amelia!”; as the crowd at this year’s London Film Festival excitedly shouted out guesses as to what Sunday’s highly-anticipated ‘surprise film’ might be, none dreamed that BFI would stray as far from Hollywood as you could possibly get, with the latest documentary by Bowling for Columbine director Michael Moore. Tthe reaction was very underwhelming and sadly so was the film itself. Ignoring the fact that it had – wrongly – been chosen as the secret film, Michael Moore’s insipid one-eyed view of corporate America is both ignorant and irritating. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not pro-capitalism at all, but his woe-is-me approach isn’t helpful to his cause. As he pretended to wrap banks and building societies in police tape and declared civil arrests of those working inside, claiming that they have “stolen all taxpayers’ money”, Michael went about things entirely the wrong way, showing himself to be a man incapable of constructively arguing against something he doesn’t believe in. But the message, however badly it was conveyed, was clear and very timely, and hopefully people will take something from it. It’s just annoying that Moore’s mannerisms, which pepper the film like unwanted dandruff, might spoil it for anyone willing to pay to be educated by the belief he’s trying to convey.

Cracks - In a kind of Jane Austin-meets-St-Trinians, Cracks focuses on the way young girls cope with being sent away to a private all-girls boarding school in the 1960s. Among the group are ringleader Di Radfield (Juno Temple), a bossy cow secretly wanting love and affection her parents no doubt never gave her, ‘Fuzzy’ (Clemmie Dugdale), an awkward social misfit who tends to let down the group on a regular basis, and Fiamma (Maria Valverde), Di’s right-hand bitch. All seems well until a beautiful Spaniard, Poppy (Imogen Poots), enrolls at the school and captures the attention of the girls’ most beloved teacher, Miss G (played rather excellently by Eva Green). What follows is a rather unexpected, twisted tale of events involving blackmail, abuse, sexuality, shame and regret.Cracks is wonderfully costumed and shot in an incredibly mood-affecting way, and Eva Green is incredible as the wrought, unstable and possibly schizophrenic Miss G.

Saturday 24th October

A Prophet – Superficially A Prophet follows the well set prison-gangster film formula, depicting the six years in a Parisian prison and subsequent rising through the mafiosa ranks of 19 year old Malik played by debutant Tahar Rahim. The French production set for UK release early in 2010 even appears to directly crib from its American counterparts in transplanting a controlling Sicilian mafia with Corsican, and a racially maligned, black criminal underclass with Algerian. But while the film doesn’t break any boundaries it does a more than effective job of keeping the edges trim, mixing gritty realism in the bleak concrete prison sets and moments of unflinching violence, and offsetting these with brief flights of fancy in the form of the imagined counselling Malik receives from Reyeb, an inmate he killed, in one scene drolly requesting that deceased refrain from smoking through the wound he put in his neck. The film is set apart from its contemporaries by the intimately naive moments extracted from Malik by director Jacques Audiard, be it his gawping first journey on a plane while on day release or the innocent/juvenile excitement he shows to receiving a DVD player and porn. Overall, this is an excellent film which can expect to gain a similar notoriety to other foreign language films of the genre such as City of God or Gomorrah. By David Ellis

Friday 23rd October

Starsuckers – While Taking Liberties was a hit with the critics as well as being a commercial success, it seems that this time documentary-maker Chris Atkins focused on increasing the mass appeal of his film to its detriment. There are some laugh out loud moments such as when Rebekah Wade and Paul Dacre staunchly defend the “Editor’s Code” of the Press Complaints Commission, the inclusion of which was particularly apt in light of recent press and media scandals…. Some of the film’s most amusing moments were when the producer of ‘Wife Swap’ pronounces that she was “raised by TV” and the trend of the tabloid press to print wildly untrue rumours from Girls Aloud’s Sarah Harding’s passion for quantum physics to Amy Winehouse’s ‘barnet’ catching fire when her fuses blew. While it does dip into more serious matter, the overall effect is one of humour and taking into consideration the lack of mention that media law receives, this documentary does not come off as dark as Atkins intended.

Wednesday 21st October

Press Conference: The Boys Are Back - Things start off a little serious until a phone causes a disruption to the mics and Owen finally cracks into a sincere laugh and pretends to check if it’s his. As questions hit the floor, it’s clear the only person on the panel journalists want to ask questions to is Owen, who seems as confident and self-assured off screen as he does on. Owen talks about relating to the role as he himself is a father, once probed about this and his role in the home, he declares, rather unconvincingly  “I do the washing up”. Asked whether he was worried about the characters likability, he states: “[I] never care about being liked” and clearly he doesn’t! Conversation soon moved back to his two daughters, particularly the eldest one who’s, he says, new favourite line at the moment is: “if only they could see what you’re like at home!”, indeed wouldn’t that be interesting… By Heidi Vella

Press Conference: The White Ribbon - Micheal Haneke, via a translator, tells his audience how he searched through an astonishing 7000 children before he found his cast. Clearly a vastly intelligent man, he has the look of a masterful wizard who instantly commands respect. When asked about his directing style, he firmly states: “improvisation you can do in the theatre, but not in film. I have a story board and stick to it’. When a journalist cheekily questions if he is a control freak, Haneke, without hesitation, answers: “yes, of courseâ€� and judging by the quality of his films, with good reason! Finally, he informs us of his next project, he has yet to write, which is a story about “the humiliation of the elderly bodyâ€�. Hmm… that shall certainly be interesting! By Heidi Vella

Burning Down The House: The Story of CBGB’s - If you claim to be a fan of punk rock, you’ll know exactly how vital CBGB’s on Bowery, New York, was in the 70s to underground American punk scenes. Blondie, The Lemonheads, Black Flag, Patti Smith, Ramones, Talking Heads, many of them played here, many of them borne out of scenes created in the very venue. As dirty, dank and disgusting as it was and no matter how many obscene things were done, heard and witnessed within the underground venue, CBGB’s was notorious for letting bands deemed too ‘dangerous’ to play elsewhere take the stage and rock the f’ck out.
This wonderful documentary captures a lot of what it was once like on film. Live snippets from shows way back when and interviews with artists that played at and loved the venue – including Blondie, Sonic Youth and Guns N’ Roses – create a backstory, a sympathy and love for something we never saw but understand the importance of. Watching owner Hilly Krystal who, at the time of filming in 2007, was 74 years old, bend and break his back day in day out to try and save his livelihood, his religion in a way -which he’d been running for 33 years – is so sad. But music moved on and the scenes faded away and so his beloved venue became a treasured memory rather than a consistent arena for new music. It was dedicated to one scene, one era, one time and, no matter what watered-down dafties like Green Day tell us, punk rock is pretty much dead. And so, unfortunately, is CBGB’s.

Tuesday 20th October

The White Ribbon - Michael Haneke’s Palme D’or winner, The White Ribbon, is a black and white visual feast tracing unexpected events that happen in a small dysfunctional town. Set in Protestant north Germany, just before the first world war, a local doctor is injured in a seemingly engineered accident. As the town consider what happened, the audience are introduced to it residents. Soon it becomes apparent these acts of violence, though isolated events, are not entirely unrelated from the town’s community, but in fact, a symptom of the repression, rebellion, mental, physical and sexual abuse that happens every day to its children and women.Events behind closed doors are brilliantly unravelled in front of our hungry eyes and the two and half hour running time flies by. Haneke manages to get flawless performances from all his cast, especially the many children. At times situations on screen are so uncomfortable, it creates a kind of strange black humour and laughs weren’t uncommon in the auditorium despite the controversial subject matter. Don’t let the lack of colour put you off, as this adds a much fitting eerie atmosphere without disadvantaging any of the spectacular scenery.Not unusual for a Haneke film, the audience came away slightly puzzled, with questions unanswered, but that’s half the fun of watching. By Heidi Vella

The Boys Are Back – Scott Hicks adaptation of Simon Carr’s memoir, The Boys Are Back, is an emotional look at single parenthood from the largely underserved point of view of a struggling father. Clive Owen plays sports journalist Joe Warr, who, due to the sudden loss of his wife to cancer, is now responsible for bringing up their small child.
Warr’s questionable parenting techniques will undoubtedly have many parents cringing in their seats; he lets his son jump from the bathroom window into the tub, several times. It’s soon revealed this isn’t Warr’s first attempt at fatherhood. He has another son in London, who he promptly abandoned years ago when he got his Ozzy mistress pregnant. Watching Warr juggle a resentful teenager and bereaved son is both interesting and amusing.
Events throughout are poignantly punctuated by a heart tugging score and Hicks clearly tries to get his audiences eyes watering. However, largely due to Owens acting retaining its innate toughness and Hicks subtle and honest handling of death; The Boys Are Back manages never to stray into over melodramatic territory. It is certainly not the best film of the festival. However, it does over great advertising for Australia, with spectacular scenic shots juxtaposed with grey and gloomy London, and there’s no doubt Clive Owen fans will find it a treat. By Heidi Vella

Monday 19th October

The Informant! – This is Matt Damon as you’ve never seen him before – borderline unattractive. Steven Soderbergh’s (Traffic, the Oceans trilogy) latest is a plot to confuse even the Mensaheads among us. Mark Whitaker (Damon) is a slightly overweight high-flying business guy with a lot of money and a happy family life. Then he decides to risk it all in a brash decision to expose his company ADM’s illegal secret dealings to the FBI, and so unravels a story so huge, convoluted and worst of all, mostly untrue. It’s suits vs. suits as the FBI and ADM try to make sense of the yarns Whitaker has spun and is somehow, almost addictively, still spinning, even when it endangers himself.
This is, possibly, the most confusing film you will ever see that’s actually based on a culture you know and understand (90s white, middle-class America). As it becomes apparent that Matt Damon’s character has some sort of bipolarism that causes him to lie, embellish and storytell his way in and out of every situation, it’s almost impossible to separate fact from fiction. And the weird thing is, this is a comedy – even though it’s based on real life events.
Damon is fantastic as the quirky, odd and naively innocent Whitaker, while Melanie Lynsky plays his adorable doting wife. But the film misses exactly why or how the character came to be such a pathological liar, something that would have given the story more of a backbone. The scene isn’t set well enough from the outset and it caused my attention to drift, thereby losing me mid-plot. I didn’t really believe Whitaker’s relationship with his wife and son, there was nothing mentioned of his background, so it’s hard to feel any empathy towards the character – hard to care enough to watch two hours of him lying through his teeth and try to muster enough interest to wonder why. It’s disappointing, especially for Soderbergh.

Sunday 18th October

Micmacs - It’s really great that the public screening for this film is packed out given its small scale compared to others showing at the same time. This delightful French movie is a quirky tale starring Dany Boon as Bazil, a man who has been down on his luck. Made an orphan by a landmine and then nearly dying at the hands of a stray bullet lodged in his brain, Bazil leaves hospital homeless, jobless and friendless. But then he is taken in by Ali Baba and his friends, all of whom have extraordinary talents (e.g. Elastic Girl, who has a habit of twisting herself into refrigerator compartments). When Bazil accidentally comes across the two buildings belonging to the manufacturers of the landmine and bullet that caused him so much grief, he and his friends plot revenge of the sweetest, wackiest and most entertaining kind. It’s such a happy little film. The cinematography is erratic at times, switching between methods like split-screen, fast-motion, even employing some puppeteering towards the end. But it keeps the pace well, attention on focus and plus, Boon’s character’s nonsensical, awkward innocence is really just a joy to watch.

Press Conference: Up In The Air – It’s clear every journalist in the room is aware that Clooney is missing from today’s proceedings, namely because there are no bigwig journos in the room. Of course that means little people like us are able to get in a question or two, and I kick off by asking the bashful Anna Kendrick – much less confident in person than her characters, it seems – what it’s like to go from playing a minor role in Twilight to starring as a lead opposite George Clooney. She tells us she was shocked, she didn’t think George was actually attached for a long time, had convinced herself that Jason Reitman (director, Juno) hated her. And now she’s pretty much just living a dream. Good on ‘er.

Up In The Air – Ah, Clooney’s finale, bright and early on a Sunday morning too. Up In The Air is about a high-flying (geddit?) business exec whose job it is to fire people on behalf of companies run by people too pussy to do it themselves. As a result our protagonist, Ryan Bingham (Clooney), is constantly travelling to and fro corporations all over North America to deliver the bad news. But things are about to change with the arrival of Natalie (Anna Kendrick), a 20-something graduate who introduces a way to make sure that Bingham is forced to work from an actual office. Only then does he realise that with all the time he spends up in the air, Ryan has been missing out on life down below. It’s quite charming and doesn’t end in that fairytale fluffy way you might anticipate, but it lacks a bit of substance. Maybe it’s Clooney’s old age or summat, but he’s just getting a bit too cheesy for me. Kendrick, in her first major role, is fantastic though – a bright spark, defiant and self-assured. Vera Farmiga, who plays Clooney’s love interest, is also great.

Friday 16th October

A Single Man – we managed to sneak into a screening of Tom Ford’s A Single Man, starring Colin Firth, Nicholas Holt and Julianne Moore. We bumped into Firth and Holt on the red carpet too, but that’s a whole other story…
A Single Man follows Firth, a gay man whose lover has suddenly and unexpectedly died, and the way Firth’s character copes with this and tries to move on in a 1960s LA. Firth’s character George Falconer is a professor at a university, where he meets Holt, his student currently exploring/trying to understand his own sexuality. It’s a tender film, intentionally slow and full of grief, though most is masked over to save face in a society that still demoralises gay relationships. Firth translates well as an awkward man of society not entirely happy in his own skin, and Julianne Moore plays his ravishing friend Charly who is constantly trying to make Firth’s character fall in love with her – to no avail. It’s sentimental cinema but not life-changing, it’s been done before and more directly to a point.

Afternoon Tea: Paper Heart – we had the absolute pleasure of sharing cakes and scones with Charlyne Yi and Nicholas Jasenovec, star and director of Paper Heart. We got to grill Charlyn on the making of her documentary, how she met Nick and Michael Cera and how the whole process evolved into a film shown at the LFF. Stay tuned for the full interview at a later date but for now let’s just say it was lovely to meet two talented individuals who had a simple relatively small goal and are really surprised, thrilled and thankful that it’s got them this far.

Press Conference: The Road – it’s a shame most journalists haven’t bothered to turn up; this is the best film that’s been screened so far. Viggo, John Hillcoat (director) and Joe Penhall (screenwriter) speak frankly about their involvement in their film, their passion for it, the wonderful acting of ‘the boy’ Kodi and Theron, the way they tried to stay very true to the book. It’s great to see the talent being honest and upfront; it’s clear they are proud of their work and if it doesn’t grab a couple of Oscar nods I’ll be very disappointed.

The Road - this one we’ve been excited about as the  novel, penned by Cormac Mccarthy, is a favourite. Incredibly the film, which stars Viggo Mortensen as ‘the man’, Kodi Smitt-McPhee as his son ‘the boy’, and Charlize Theron as ‘wife’, is the most true book-to-film adaptation we’ve ever seen and it’s so relieving the filmmakers haven’t “Hollywood-ised” it. The film follows the man and the boy on a journey to find a means for survival post-apocalyptic world disaster, which wipes out most humanity and all growing life forms. Starved, hopeless, tired and dirty, the man takes the boy down ‘the Road’ to the coast, letting them both believe that life will be okay once they reach it. Along the way the father and son encounter hungry cannibals, a world starved of life and littered with dead corpses, a world that’s endlessly gloomy.  The man is constantly pained by memories of his dear wife, played by Charlize, in a world before disaster. The relationship between the man and boy becomes strained and strengthens again as they switch roles, both having to be the “adult” at certain points. The script is so well-adapted for cinema and I’m thrilled that Viggo and Kodi are not just convincing as these two characters, they make us believe that the world could really be like this. It’s a devastating wake-up call.

Thursday 15th October

Paper Heart - this is the first ‘public’ screening we’ve been to as we missed the press one, and it’s interesting to see the unreserved reactions of the audience, who laugh a lot at this charming little film. Paper Heart is a “hybrid-documentary”, i.e. a lot of it is just truth, following Charlyne Yi (played by herself) who travels around America finding out what random people believe love means. That part is true enough, but then her director and friend Nicholas Jasenovec decides it would be fun to bring in a fictional relationship for Charlyne during filming, with her actual ex-boyfriend Michael Cera (Superbad, Arrested Development). As the two naturally nervous and awkward young adults grow closer they find themselves wanting less and less to be on camera and a lot of their relationship, we are led to believe, happens when the cameras are shut off. It might be scripted (though by Charlyn herself) but it seems so real and unrehearsed because what we’re seeing is clearly Charlyne and Michael’s real personalities, no pretense. Though a quite cute look at a young relationship, interspersed with snippets from Charlyne’s interviews with couples, you do end up wondering what the point of it is.

Press Conference: The Men Who Stare At Goats - phew, considerably less journalists here, so we’re hoping no-one is planning on accosting Clooney. But hark, what larks, the same two journalists from the day before. Apparently they have no shame and, as Kevin Spacey later notes, “have no point – tabloid writers are not real journalists”. Hear hear! Clooney and Spacey, the only two of the cast that made it for the conference along with director Grant Heslov, have great chemistry and it’s clear they got along while filming. Grant recalls a moment where he walked into the room and Clooney, Spacey, Bridges and McGregor were all flinging rubber bands at each other. We hope he got a picture.

The Men Who Stare At Goats - ah, Clooney’s second film to show at the festival and boasting an equally as impressive cast as the last one: Ewan McGregor, Kevin Spacey, Stephen Lang and “the Dude”Jeff Bridges. Clooney plays a hippie at war in Iraq, McGregor plays a journalist looking for a unique story. Well he’s certainly got one in Clooney, a special forces operative trained with ‘magical’ powers as taught to him by the legendary Bridges – who basically plays the Dude again because it’s the only character he can pull off – who believes that by staring at a goat he can kill it. McGregor, of course, thinks Clooney is mad, but might be onto something. And so follows a humourous satire capturing a rather more light-hearted view on the war still taking place than we might be used to. Clooney is quite unconvincing as a hippie but Lang, Spacey and McGregor provide just as many laughs.

Wednesday 14th October

Taking Woodstock - though this screening wasn’t technically part of the film festival, the film is featured later in the schedule so as we saw it early, we’ll let you in on a little secret: Emile Hirsch gets completely naked. There, I said it. Now the film itself I don’t want to give away, but for anyone that loves music, music communities, getting lost in sound and who is unafraid of meeting strangers, having a great time, taking risks; this film is for you. Taking Woodstock captures everything that was good about such a legendary music festival – things we now struggle to find in the crass commercialist, ‘safe’ non-specific music-playing festivals of present day.

Press Conference: Fantastic Mr Fox - “GEORGE, CAN YOU POSE FOR A PICTURE FOR MY SON??” My oh my, journalists behaving unprofessionally, who would’ve thought it? Well, with the amount of talent in the room – Wes Anderson, Clooney, Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, Jarvis Cocker and some others people didn’t really care about, we must admit we went a bit goo-eyed too. But it’s sad to me that these actors will have left England with a bad taste in their mouths thanks to the unprofessionalism of certain journalists, who persisted in asking mundane questions, most inappropriate and some offensive, bordering on subtexts of “George, why do you not have a wife or kids, is something wrong with you?”. Hey guys, how about we don’t scare Clooney off forever, and just talk about the film? That’d be novel, eh? Unfortunately because of this we didn’t glean much information about the film, except that they all spent a few days in a cabin to get to know each other before recording their voices and Bill Murray ran around like a wolf to get in character (he plays a badger). He’s always been a bit odd.

Fantastic Mr Fox – kicking things off in style with the world premiere, no less, of Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr Fox, fans and journalists alike waited with baited breath to see how Anderson would bring his unique cinematographic style to an animated structure. Filmed entirely in stop-motion (whatever that means), the film gave way to erraticisms and jaunted movement, something Anderson loves playing on, for example when Mr Fox – voiced by George Clooney – runs, he does so in a very awkward way.
The film itself will probably appeal to older children and adults, just because of its darker content and language. The premise is that Mr Fox is a daredevil and he makes several local businessmen very angry when he tries to steal their goods for consumption. The businessmen then try to get even, by killing all the animals that live around. Cue a wild chase, good vs evil, animals vs humans; an amusing and very engaging battle but one that projects a sense of depression and angst rather than fear or relief. It’s a fantastic film visually, the fur on the animals is distinctive and the yellowed shot structure makes it stand out from others of its kind, but perhaps don’t take your five year old to see it.

• For more information on the Times BFI London Film Festival or to book tickets visit www.bfi.org.uk/lff

By Cathy Reay (unless indicated otherwise)