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9 September 2013updated 05 Oct 2023 8:51am

Preview: Ten of the best at this year’s London Film Festival

Tickets for LFF 2013 go on sale on this Thursday (12 Sept). Our film critic Ryan Gilbey picks ten of the most promising films from this year's line up.

By Ryan Gilbey

With booking for this year’s London Film Festival opening to BFI members on Thursday 12 September (and to the public on Friday 20 September), it’s time for the customary lucky-dip round-up of some of the most promising titles in the programme. As usual, I’ve tried to exclude the big, headline-grabbing movies that will doubtless be sold out within seconds, or which go on release anyway within a few days or weeks of being unveiled at the festival.

The opening film, Paul Greengrass’s factually-based Captain Phillips, which puts Tom Hanks at the helm of a US container ship hijacked by Somali pirates in 2009, will be hitting cinemas nationwide a week later, where you can see it for a fraction of its £32 Opening Night Gala price. Similarly, why grab a two- or three-week jump on Stephen Frears’s Philomena (which won Venice’s Best Screenplay award for Jeff Pope and star/co-writer Steve Coogan, and opens on 1 November) Alfonso Cuarón’s admittedly long-awaited Gravity (8 November), this year’s Palme d’Or winner Blue is the Warmest Colour (15 November) or The Selfish Giant (25 November), the Oscar Wilde-inspired new film from Clio Barnard, director of the visionary semi-documentary The Arbor? Go digging instead.

Surprisingly, neither of the films which took the top prizes last weekend at the Venice Film Festival are currently to be found on the LFF horizon—Golden Lion winner Gianfranco Rosi’s Sacro GRA, a documentary set on and around the Grande Raccordo Anulare (Rome’s ring road), and the runner-up, Tsai Ming-liang’s Jiaoyou (Stray Dogs), which Nigel Andrews of the Financial Times described as “a kind of madly lyricised Lear of the Taipei underworld.” But there is always time for last-minute additions, even outside the Surprise Film category (which tends to be reserved for something English-language and broadly audience-pleasing: last year the slot was taken by Silver Linings Playbook). Below are ten try-your-luck picks, some big, some small, taken from those titles already confirmed for the 57th London Film Festival:

At Berkeley

Master documentary-maker Frederick Wiseman takes four hours to explore life at Berkeley University as it is shaped and threatened by budgetary cuts of more than 50 per cent.

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Computer Chess

Andrew Bujalski is one of the progenitors of the US indie “Mumblecore” movement (along with Greta Gerwig and director Joe Swanberg, whose new film Drinking Buddies is also in the LFF). I’ve heard great claims made for his 1980s-set study of chess geeks developing a computer program that can trounce a human opponent at the game.

Eastern Boys

Writer-director Robin Campilo usually co-writes and edits with Laurent Cantet, branching out every now and then with his own work. He made Les Revenants, which inspired the recent hit TV series The Returned, and now he has directed this drama about the relationship between a middle-aged French man and a Ukrainian teenager.

Exhibition

The only title on this list that I’m not recommending sight unseen is this creepy but compassionate third feature from Joanna Hogg (Unrelated, Archipelago), about an artist couple preparing to sell the spectacular Modernist home in west London that has been their protective shell.

Great Passage

The compiling of a new dictionary over 14 years is the starting point for this humorous tale from Japan. The LFF brochure calls it “Dickensian.” That’s enticing enough for me.

Kon-Tiki

The incredible story of Norwegian explorer and anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl, who set out in 1947 on a hazardous raft-trip from Peru. A Canadian friend said of one CGI-enabled sequence in the film: “For a moment, I felt the way I did seeing movies as a tyke, awestruck at the cheap thrills movies can provide.”

Night Moves

Kelly Reichardt frustrated as many viewers as she impressed with her doggedly realistic western Meek’s Cutoff (for the record, I was in the latter camp). Her new film is a thriller about environmental activists played by Jesse Eisenberg (who can also be seen in the LFF in Richard Ayoade’s The Double) and Dakota Fanning.

12 Years a Slave

Rave reviews have flooded in from the Toronto Film Festival for the third film from British artist and director Steve McQueen (Hunger, Shame). This reportedly powerful slavery drama stars Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, Brad Pitt and Benedict Cumberbatch.

Under the Skin

An obvious pick, perhaps—I selected it at the start of this year as one of the films I was most looking forward to in 2013—but the polarised reaction from Venice to Jonathan Glazer’s adaptation of Michel Faber’s novel about a predatory alien (Scarlett Johansson) has surely only inflamed the sense of anticipation.

We Are the Best!

There was relief at the festival press launch when a trailer for this comedy-drama about a female, teenage punk band in 1980s Stockholm indicated that the filmmaker Lukas Moodysson, here adapting a graphic novel by his daughter Coco, had returned to the wit and energy of his early features (Show Me Love—aka Fucking Amal—and Together).

The London Film Festival runs 9—20 October.

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