the times | Monday October 5 2020 1GT 9
Supernova
Two more big-name actors playing a
same-sex couple. This time it’s Colin
Firth and Stanley Tucci as Sam and
Tusker, together for 20 years and
wrestling with Tusker’s early-onset
dementia. Directed by the actor-
turned-director Harry Macqueen, this
is a two-handed road movie like his
2014 debut, Hinterland. As Sam, a
musician, and Tusker, a novelist, set
off to the north of England in their
camper van, the stage is set for a
beautifully restrained comedy-drama
about love, stargazing and encroaching
mortality. No, you’ve got something
in your eye. October 11One Night in Miami
Regina King, the star of Watchmen,
turns director for another potent
dissection of American racial politics.
It’s based on a real-life encounter in a
Miami hotel room on the evening of
February 25, 1964, when the black
American icons Cassius Clay, Sam
Cooke, Malcolm X and American
footballer Jim Brown met to celebrate
Clay’s victory over Sonny Liston. The
conversations are imagined, but ping
spectacularly around subjects as varied
as the true path of black activism,
Brown’s decision to abandon sport for
movies and Clay’s imminent
conversion to Islam. Performances are
indecently strong, with the London
actor Kingsley Ben-Adir a standout as
Malcolm X, and Hamilton’s Leslie
Odom Jr stealing scenes and singing
tunes as Cooke. October 11Another Round
Imagine the Keanu Reeves action
movie Speed, but with a drunken
Danish twist. Instead of driving a bus
that must stay at 50 miles per hour,
this gorgeous and heartfelt comedy
from Thomas Vinterberg (Festen) is
about four jaded, middle-aged male
teachers in Copenhagen who decide,on a whim, to maintain at all times a
blood-alcohol level of exactly 0.05 per
cent. They sneak vodka into the
school toilets and monitor themselves
with breathalysers. Comedy, naturally,
ensues but it’s also serious and sad,
about lives passing in loneliness. Mads
Mikkelsen stars. October 14Nomadland
A chance to witness this year’s best
actress Oscar front-runner in full
flight. Frances McDormand stars
as Fern, a transient worker (bit of
harvesting, bit of cleaning, bit of
Amazon warehouse work) who zig-
zags across the US, grieving for her
husband, living out of her van and
bonding in trailer parks with groups of
other self-described “nomads”, mostly
played by non-professionals. Other
actresses might have struggled with
the loose perambulatory structure, but
McDormand makes every scene
urgent, and every feeling real. It’s
a flawless turn. October 16Ammonite
Francis Lee’s first feature, God’s Own
Country, was one of the most striking
debuts of the last decade,
a mud-caked tale of gay love on a
Yorkshire sheep farm. All eyes, then,
are on the director’s follow-up, which
closes the festival, another same-sex
romance, but this time playing out in
the 1840s. Kate Winslet plays a
grieving palaeontologist working alone
in another bleak British setting, the
rain-lashed coastal town of Lyme
Regis, and Saoirse Ronan is the
delicate geologist who crosses her
path. It’s a good time for repressed
lesbian period dramas, with Portrait
of a Lady on Fire and the forthcoming
The World to Come, and this is a
dream-team combination: a director
as sensitive as Lee and actresses as
emotionally fluent as Winslet and
Ronan. October 17Films will be shown at
various cinemas in
London, Belfast,
Bristol, Cardiff,
Glasgow, Manchester,
Nottingham and
Sheffield, and all except
Mangrove and
Ammonite will stream
on the BFI Player.
There are additional
screenings of some
films at London
cinemas. bfi.org.uk/
london-film-festival
October 7-10 best films from the festival
Kevin Maher
and Ed Potton
raise a bottle to
this year’s London
Film Festival
Mangrove
Opening the festival is the next
instalment in Small Axe, the five-part
film anthology series from the Oscar-
winning Steve McQueen (12 Years
a Slave, Widows). Mangrove is a
passionate account of the trial of the
“Mangrove Nine”, a group of black
activists who were prosecuted in 1970,
on shaky grounds, for allegedly
inciting a riot. The Mangrove
restaurant in Notting Hill, west
London was a hub for black people
that had been repeatedly raided by
the police, and the trial is often seen
to have presented the first judicial
evidence of racism within the
Metropolitan Police. Shaun Parkes
(Human Traffic) heads a stonking cast
as Frank Crichlow, who goes from
happy-go-lucky boss of the Mangrove
to avenger. Malachi Kirby (Roots) and
Letitia Wright (Black Panther),
co-star as the activists Darcus Howe
and Altheia Jones-LeCointe. October 7
Kajillionaire
Miranda July, the film-maker behind
the wonderful Me and You and
Everyone We Know (2005), returns
with this strange, hilarious and heavy
comedy-drama. Evan Rachel Wood
stars as Old Dolio, a sullen, scuzzy
young woman who is stuck in a rut of
petty crime in Los Angeles with her
unloving parents (they called her Old
Dolio, for heaven’s sake). They are
played by Debra Winger and Richard
Jenkins, while Gina Rodriguez
threatens to steal the show as the
bubbly Melanie, who becomes
fascinated by this decidedly non-
conformist nuclear family. October 7
Shirley
This biopic of the horror writer Shirley
Jackson stars a brilliantly deranged
Elisabeth Moss in the title role and
is essentially a portrait of Jackson’s
dysfunctional marriage to the literary
critic Stanley Edgar Hyman (Michael
Stuhlbarg). They drink a lot, shout and
scream, while Hyman has affairs and
is borderline abusive. And yet the film,
boldly directed by Josephine Decker,
ultimately makes a strange and
compelling case for the compatibility
of this hugely destructive couple.
Bound to be a conversation starter.
October 9
Mogul Mowgli
The rapper, activist and Star Wars
actor Riz Ahmed delivers
a powerhouse turn in this story of a
hip-hop artist called Zed
who is on the cusp of global
superstardom when he’s
struck down with a debilitating
autoimmune disorder. The disease
is never named, but it seems to have
sprung from Zed’s self-hatred —
he’s torn between the values of his
traditional Pakistani heritage and the
thrilling allure of commercial success.
Much of the film is about a search
for the “right” identity in modern
Britain. Zed’s vivid live performances,
however, are where the movie
comes alive. Ahmed is an incendiary
presence. October 10Soul
Pixar films, as rightly praised
as they often are, have been
pretty woeful on the diversity
front. Soul is a step in the right
direction, featuring the studio’s
first black protagonist, a music
teacher and wannabe jazz
musician called Joe, voiced
by Jamie Foxx. Joe’s soul is
separated from his body, setting
up an existential adventure with
nods to Powell and Pressburger’s
A Matter of Life and Death.
Tina Fey co-stars as another soul
trapped in The Great Before, a
cosmic holding pen where souls
develop personalities before being
sent to Earth. It was directed by
Pete Docter, who has made some
of Pixar’s deepest movies, including
Up and Inside Out, so expect a
side order of pop philosophy.
October 11HENRIK OHSTENMads Mikkelsen in Another Round. Above: Michael Stuhlbarg
and Elizabeth Moss in Shirley. Below: Letitia Wright in MangroveD
arts