For the next two weeks London goes film mad with the London Film Festival taking over the capital.
We are proud to have the much anticipated new film from Jim Jarmusch, THE LIMITS OF CONTROL, and ADRIFT which stars actor of the moment Vincent Cassel, both playing in the coveted Film On The Square Section.

 

Adrift

Showing at:

Wed 21 | 18:15 | Vue Screen 7
Fri 23 | 15:30 | Vue Screen 5
Sat 24 | 13:30 | Vue Screen 6
 

Set on Brazil's Buzios beaches in the early 1980s, the story of one girl's coming of age is a sophisticated, handsome melodrama of considerable class.
One glorious summer in the early 1980s, a family leave Rio for a holiday on the Buzios beaches. Fourteen-year-old Filipa (Laura Neiva), the oldest of three children, is pretty and popular with her teenage pals, spending her time gossiping with the girls and innocently flirting with the boys. She seems content enough, until she gradually discovers her parents have ulterior motives in being away from home. Her father Matias (Vincent Cassel) is a writer struggling to finish his latest novel and is prone to lengthy, unexplained afternoon disappearances, while her mother Clarice (Débora Bloch) is hitting the bottle heavily, and begins to pick fights with Matias given the slightest opportunity.

The holiday starts to look like it's been set up as a distraction from their marriage falling apart, and Filipa struggles to comprehend how and why this is the case, while also coming to terms with her own burgeoning sexuality. Heitor Dhalia is a Brazilian filmmaker with a couple of low-budget, award-winning features to his name; Adrift confirms his reputation as one of the brightest talents emerging from South America. A sophisticated, handsome melodrama of considerable class, in which the finely drawn characters and outstanding performances resonate. Newcomer Neiva marks her arrival with a striking turn, and she's ably supported by the more established cast around her.

 

The Limits of Control

 Showing at:

Mon 19 | 20:30 | Vue Screen 5
Mon 19 | 20:45 | Vue Screen 7
Tue 20 | 13:30 | Vue Screen 6
Wed 21 | 13:15 | Vue Screen 7
 

Jarmusch's audacious latest is a poetic, allusive, visually stunning variation on the conventional hitman movie, with Isaach De Bankolé heading a thrilling cast.
Jim Jarmusch's latest brave, bizarre and very beautiful film (it was shot by Chris Doyle) takes the conventions of the hitman movie and, through a theme-and-variations structure, turns them into both a wry meditation on the malignancy of power and a poetic celebration of the power of the imagination. Isaach de Bankolé, cool as hell in Point Blank suits, is perfect as a taciturn, solitary agent sent to Spain, where a string of coded café encounters with various mysterious eccentrics (Tilda Swinton, John Hurt, Gael García Bernal et al) eventually leads to a deadly assignation.

Jarmusch's deliciously dry humour inflects the play with movie clichés, while the picaresque narrative – packed with literary, artistic, musical and cinematic allusions ranging from Cubism to Kaurismäki, Le Samourai to Schubert – muses on all manner of loosely linked subjects even as it slowly but surely closes in on its target: American neo-con thinking!

The film's freewheeling, subtly iconoclastic form reflects its fascination with imaginative freedom and the relationship between life and art, while also allowing for individual scenes of quite startling force, notably a flamenco bar sequence reminding us of our own limits, and the final encounter. Jarmusch is inviting us to take a trip; full of richly rewarding surprises and revelations, it's well worth climbing on board.

.