Martin Scorsese, Greta Gerwig, Emerald Fennell to Deliver Screen Talks at BFI London Film Festival

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.”

It’s not every day that a filmmaker will rise up during an interview and recite Old Testament tales and sing out their favorite hymn. Well, hallelujah, brother Jeymes Samuel for spreading the gospel’s good news.

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

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Martin Scorsese has not seen Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” or Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer,” but that didn’t stop him from celebrating the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon during a recent interview with the Hindustan Times. Scorsese himself has ties to “Barbie,” as it stars and was produced by his “Wolf of Wall Street” breakout Margot Robbie and shot by his longtime cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto. The latter filmed “Barbie” after wrapping up work on Scorsese’s own “Killers of the Flower Moon.” “I do think that the combination of ‘Oppenheimer’ and ‘Barbie’ was something special,” Scorsese said.

Barbie.During a Screen Talk conversation at the BFI London Film Festival on Sunday (October 8), Gerwig said she was asked whether the sequence led by Ryan Gosling’s Ken was necessary during a “big meeting”.“It just said in the script, ‘And then it becomes a dream ballet and they work it out through dance,’” Gerwig told Succession creator Jesse Armstrong at the event (via Variety). “There was a big meeting that was like, ‘Do you need this?’ And I was like, ‘Everything in me needs this.’“They were like, ‘What do you even mean? What is a dream ballet?’ And I was like, ‘A dream ballet? Where do I begin!’”Gerwig said the sequence, which is soundtracked by the song ‘I’m Just Ken’ written by Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt, was inspired by 1952’s Singin’ In The Rain which featured a “dream ballet inside of a dream ballet”.“I was like, if people could follow that in Singin’ In The Rain, I think we’ll be fine,” Gerwig said.

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 events of the last couple of days have been quite difficult for everybody,” said filmmaker Jonathan Glazer as his film about a Nazi commander at Auschwitz screened Sunday at the New York Film Festival.

Greta Gerwig wears a see-through skirt while stepping out for her Screen Talks conversation during the 2023 BFI London Film Festival on Sunday (October 8) held at the BFI Southbank in London.

Ellise Shafer “Barbie” director Greta Gerwig discussed how Ryan Gosling’s “I’m Just Ken” dance sequence came to be during her Screen Talk at the BFI London Film Festival on Sunday, revealing that she was asked in a “big meeting” if the scene was necessary. “It just said in the script, ‘And then it becomes a dream ballet and they work it out through dance,'” Gerwig said in conversation with “Succession” creator Jesse Armstrong.

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.

Ellise Shafer Martin Scorsese said the entertainment industry is in a “period of reinventing” cinema during his Screen Talk at the BFI London Film Festival on Saturday, urging young filmmakers to use new technology for good as opposed to making “content.” When asked by director Edgar Wright about becoming somewhat of a spokesperson for the current state of cinema, Scorsese laughed and said, “I didn’t want to be the last line of defense.” “I honestly think it’s thrown back now with all of you. And I really mean this: I don’t know where cinema is going to go,” Scorsese continued.

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. 

With just fifteen days to go before it hits theaters, Apple Original Films wants to drum up as much hype as possible for “Killers Of The Flower Moon.” As if the film doesn’t have enough hype already: Martin Scorsese‘s first film since 2019’s “The Irishman” won unanimous praise from critics at its world premiere at Cannes in May. And the film sees the director work with two long-time collaborators: Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert DeNiro.

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.”

K.J. Yossman Kristy Matheson had big shoes to fill when she took over from Tricia Tuttle as director of the BFI London Film Festival (LFF) earlier this year. Over the course of a decade, Tuttle transformed LFF into a highlight of the fall festival calendar, drawing some of the biggest names in entertainment to the English capital each October including, memorably, Ted Sarandos and Beyoncé, who flew in to celebrate the world premiere of “The Harder They Fall” in 2021.