Breaking Baz at London Film Festival: Jeymes Samuel Says Hot Biblical Era Epic ‘The Book Of Clarence’ Is His ‘Ben-Hur’; And He’s Laid An Easter Egg Trail To His Next Movie

Anna Marie de la Fuente Mexico’s official entry to the Best International Feature Oscar race, Lila Aviles’ “Totem,” and Tatiana Huezo’s documentary “The Echo” (“El Eco”) snagged three prizes a piece at the Morelia International Film Festival (FICM), which wrapped Sunday, Oct. 29. The awards doled out Saturday capped a busy 21st edition that saw a constellation of luminaries in town, including Jodie Foster, Jessica Chastain, Peter Saarsgard, Viggo Mortensen, Danny Huston, James Ivory, Irène Jacob and producing partners Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy.

There’s a soaring ambition but only a modest intent in Kibwe Tavares and Daniel Kaluuya’s sober debut The Kitchen, a visually impressive depiction of things to come that simmers with all manner of protest but never hits boiling point. On the one hand, it’s a shame, ending on a quiet moment of understanding just as all hell is about to break loose. But on the other, it’s refreshing to see two young filmmakers trying to hone their storytelling skills rather than pour everything into a spectacular calling card. If Attack the Block hadn’t been so slavish in trying to siphon inspiration from much better cult movies to become a cult movie in its own right, it might have looked like this: a genuine vision of a nightmarish, dystopian future that will ring alarm bells for any city-dweller familiar with the depressing effects of gentrification.

EXCLUSIVE: The Golden Globes has added Shivani Pandya Malhotra, Managing Director of the Red Sea International Film Festival (RSIFF), as the ninth and final member of its newly formed Membership Board of Directors.

Between the Rains and The Echo are among the big winners at the prestigious Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival in Arkansas.

Ellise Shafer Daniel Kaluuya world premiered his feature directorial debut, “The Kitchen,” at the BFI London Film Festival on Sunday night, calling it “one of the best days of my life.” Kaluuya was on hand alongside his co-director Kibwe Tavares, producer Daniel Emmerson and several of the film’s actors, including “Top Boy” star Kane Robinson and newcomer Jedaiah Bannerman. Set in a dystopian London where all social housing has been banned, the film follows the residents of a community called the Kitchen who must fight to save their home. Speaking before the premiere, Kaluuya and Tavares explained that it’s taken nearly a decade to bring the Netflix film to the screen.

Ellise Shafer Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “Evil Does Not Exist” was named the best film in the official competition at this year’s BFI London Film Festival Awards. “Paradise Is Burning” by Mika Gustafson received the Sutherland Award in the first feature competition, while Lina Soualem’s “Bye Bye Tiberias” took home the Grierson Award in the documentary competition and “The Archive: Queer Nigerians” directed by Simisolaoluwa Akande won the short film competition. The jury presidents for this year’s awards included Amat Escalante (official competition), Raine Allen-Miller (first feature competition), Rubika Shah (documentary competition) and Charlotte Regan (short film competition).

Japanese filmmaker Ryusuke Hamaguchi has clinched the best film award in the main official competition of the 67th London Film Festival with his latest feature, Evil Does Not Exist. 

EXCLUSIVE: The BFI London Film Festival closes Sunday with the world premiere of The Kitchen, a movie set in a dystopian London where an impoverished community is forced to fend for themselves in ramshackle apartment blocks. It marks the feature directorial debut of Oscar- winning actor Daniel Kaluuya and architect-turned-filmmaker Kibwe Tavares.

Kit Connor is enjoying a movie screening in London!

By any metric, 23 years is a long time to wait for a sequel to Chicken Run, even when you factor in the fiendishly slow gestation of Aardman Animations’ meticulous stop-motion process. Surprisingly, it still feels fresh, not just because of the spring-clean of the core voice cast — Mel Gibson being the highest-profile casualty, lopped off as the “lone free-ranger” Rocky — but because, in the hands of director Sam Fell and his writing team, Dawn of The Nugget delivers a cleverly modern kind of family entertainment that, while it works to a formula, never feels written by committee.

Todd Haynes tells me that May December, his gripping melodrama starring Oscar winners Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore, “aggressively disturbs our moral moorings.”

Guy Lodge Film Critic The grand-scale Biblical epics that midcentury Hollywood churned out to roaring box-office returns had many drawcards as (so to speak) mass entertainment — brawny action, transporting spectacle, then jaw-dropping effects — but a sense of humor, by and large, wasn’t one of them. That’s something British musician-turned-filmmaker Jeymes Samuel attempts to rectify in his offbeat messiah story “The Book of Clarence,” a newly invented tale that runs parallel to the life and death of Jesus in ways both blithely blasphemous and sincerely Christian.

Cailee Spaeny dazzles while promoting her new film Priscilla at the 2023 BFI London Film Festival on Monday (October 9).

Dear Jassi arrives with echoes of Madonna’s 1989 hit “Dear Jessie” and its sugary promise of pink elephants and lemonade, but none of that turns out to be forthcoming in Tarsem Singh Dhandwar’s beautiful and brutal sixth feature. Instead, we have perhaps the most disturbing bait-and-switch since George Sluizer’s original iteration of The Vanishing, a Punjabi Juliet-meets-Romeo story that’s much harsher that any so-far-filmed version of West Side Story and a whole lot funnier. This dissonance takes a while to reveal itself, but when it does, the shock is visceral. The fact that almost everything is true is the killer blow, and the shockwave of that reverberates through the poignant final credits, a static shot that forces the audience, or maybe just simply dares them, to think about what they’ve just seen.  

The first week of the British Film Institute’s (BFI) London Film Festival wrapped this evening with a rapturous onstage Q&A session with writer-director Greta Gerwig.

Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall irrupted into a flurry of cheers this afternoon as filmmaker Martin Scorsese strolled on stage to take part in a career Q&A at the London Film Festival. 

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Egypt’s El Gouna Film Festival is back after a one-year hiatus with a rich mix of Arabic and international titles launching into the Middle East and plenty of promising projects from Arab countries set to be unveiled to prospective partners at its CineGouna industry side. The event launched in 2017 by Egyptian telecom billionaire Naguib Sawiris – whose brother Samih built the El Gouna resort in a swathe of desert near the tourist town of Hurghada 250 miles south of Cairo – was put on pause in 2022 ostensibly due to the country’s economic crisis following five editions during which fest co-founder Amr Mansi and chief Intishal Al Timimi had managed to rapidly put El Gouna on the international festival map while also making it a favourite with the local crowd.

Jennifer Lee, Chief Creative Officer at Disney Animation, confirmed this afternoon that work has quietly begun on a third edition in the company’s Frozen film franchise during a keynote session at the London Film Festival (LFF). 

“Theatres and streamers need to coexist,” Bill Kramer, CEO of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts, concluded during a keynote this morning in London when quizzed on his opinions about the future of cinema.   

EXCLUSIVE: Oscar-winning writer-director Emerald Fennell says that “if you’re prodding at something uncomfortable, that’s what movies are for.”