London Film Festival - from paranoia in Brazil and Iran, to light relief in New York and Tuscany

Film festivals are a bran tub: what you find in them may be unexpected, and not always in a good way. Here are six I pulled out in my first week (minus one of my favourites, The Mastermind, which I will review when it goes on general release next week).

Jay Kelly 

If the indie supremo Noah Baumbach hadn’t popped up in person in his new Netflix-produced film, as the director of a sex scene between the younger version of his protagonist and a lead actress who discreetly farts, I don’t think I would have guessed who made Jay Kelly. He seems at times to be channelling Richard Curtis. There are flashes of his signature dark, dry wit here and there, but the story is weirdly uneven in tone, often swathed in a soupy, piano-heavy score that blurs its genre outlines. At one point, a still from Marcello Mastroianni in Fellini’s 8 1/2 wistfully appears, as if to show us what we won’t be getting in this similarly themed story of a Hollywood creative going through a serious wobble at the fag end of his career. Our hero is still handsome, but he’s played by George Clooney, who can do many moods on the lighter side of the acting spectrum, but not corrosive complexity and deep-seated malaise. (Only perhaps in Michael Clayton and Up in the Air have there been glimpses of the darker side of his otherwise jaunty persona.)

So Baumbach has given himself a mighty mountain to climb: how to make us commiserate with a male lead whose major whine is that he has no friends, has been too busy to stay in touch with his family and only has a paid entourage, poor luv, to sustain him and cater to his every whim. Chief among these is his manager, Ron (Adam Sandler), whose attempts at being a family man are regularly thwarted by the latest demand from his client. A running gag is that every time Jay complains that he is always alone, a staffer called Solvano steps in to hand him a beverage or a snack. He has people to tend to every activity in his day, even his eyebrow-dyeing.

But after a last-minute volte-face that finds him in Standard class on a crowded train to Tuscany, where he is to be given a tribute, his people start to leave him one by one. Never mind, he seems to be enjoying “real life” and the "real people” in the carriage with him, whom he condescendingly finds nice and endearing. Even the German cyclist (Lars Eidinger) he chases to retrieve the handbag the German has stolen from an elderly English lady (Janine Duvitski). (That’s one of Germany’s finest actors and the peerless Duvitski, stalwart of Abigail’s Party, both turning in cameos.) Also in the same carriage are Patsy Ferran and Jamie Demetriou, delivering ludicrous, unfunny lines. It’s like the clown version of Murder on the Orient Express.

Jolting Jay out of his routine of wrap-a-film-then-start-the-next is his encounter with an old acting class pal, Tim (Billy Crudup), who has given up and become a child therapist. Tim has nursed a bitter hatred of Jay since the audition he was too nervous to do well at, a fact Jay was too ruthlessly ambitious to let pass by, stealing Tim’s characterisation and extemporised lines. And his girlfriend. That day Jay met the director who put him on the road to stretch limos and private planes, Peter Schneider (Jim Broadbent). But he lost touch with Schneider after the director’s films began to flop; we see Jay turning his old friend down when he comes to him for an endorsement. Soon after, we learn Schneider has died, penniless, in Encino. (The horror, the horror…)

Can Jay discover who he really is? A Sylvia Plath quote at the beginning tells us this is the hardest part of all to play. Are the small glimmers of recognition he has about his behaviour enough to fuel his enlightenment? Do we care? The only relatable character is Sandler’s Ron, who tries hard to make his personal life, and the film, hold together. It’s a lovely warm portrait, drawing on Sadler’s ability to convey pathos. When he too seems to be calling time on Jay, there is genuine emotional content in his behaviour.

By the end Baumbach (and co-writer Emily Mortimer, who also plays Jay’s hair stylist) doesn’t seem sure whether he is satirising Jay’s hollow profession or excusing it, because look at all these great movies Jay made! Cue a montage of bits and bobs from Clooney’s back catalogue, from baby-faced ER intern onwards, including his barking captain in The Thin Red Line. Are we supposed to find the closeups of Jay’s grey sideburns and brows being treated with touches of black dye rather poignant, and consider Clooney “brave” to submit to this? I do hope not. A muddled misfire. (Netflix, Nov 14)

Father Mother Sister Brother

Jim Jarmusch turns his attention to sampling the middle classes of three different countries, in an anthology work featuring forms of Nowheresville.

In the US, Tom Waits plays up to his children’s notion that he is an eccentric, dirt-poor loner: he has become a cause to be aided (and thereby make them feel good) rather than a dependent relative. He fuels their vision by messing up his house in the backwoods, driving a wreck of a car, strewing clothes and books around his house and offering his guests mismatched jelly jars for their water. Adam Driver and Mayim Bialik play his children with a barely suppressed ferocity: what did Dad do to upset them, are they as pleasant as they seem? We never find out.

In Dublin, Charlotte Rampling also puts on a show, of possessing a very English gentility (though sorry, Jim, she would not be drinking PG Tips unless it was her ironic nod to “builder’s tea”, but that term is never used). She has one “normal” daughter (Cate Blanchett) who probably isn’t faking anything, and one (Vicky Krieps, pictured left with Blanchett) who’s her exact opposite, hiding her girlfriend, her relative poverty, her joblessness. She is an online vintage clothes trader and self-styled “influencer” who sports a fake Rolex. Nobody seems to have any genuine affection for anyone else, but that seems to be the deal here: stay within the boundaries Mother has laid down, don’t upset her empty applecart. 

In Paris mixed race twins (one wearing a real Rolex but with the face on the inside of his wrist) are mourning their parents, killed in a plane crash. The brother has cleared their apartment. He and his sister genuinely like each other and seem to have loved their parents, even though their boho lives were mysterious (they marvel at the old documents the brother has found, including a fake marriage licence. This segment in particular begs to be amplified into a feature film, leaving so much unexplored. 

As with the Baumbach, there are flashes of bone-dry humour here and there, especially in the “Father” section, but it’s hard to identify this as a classic Jarmusch film. It feels like a low-budget way, upgraded by its star casting, to make a movie that isn’t called on to do more than take quick potshots at its characters. Three side dishes but no main course.

The Son and the Sea 

A strong first feature from director Stroma Cairns, about a pair of likely lads who travel to Scotland to make a film about fishing but arrive at a different emotional destination. The two young men are party animals, drifting through a metropolitan life of late nights and recreational drugs where they chat about projects they’d like to embark on, but don’t seem to. In Fraserburgh, on the east coast of Scotland, they make unexpected new friends, twin deaf brothers and their young friend Sandy, whose mother is an accomplished folk singer. One of the men from London, Jonah (Jonah West), takes over his aunt’s rudimentary little cottage (she is in a care home, lost to dementia); the other, Lee (Stanley Brock), looks for ways to recover from being dumped by email. 

In hearing-impaired “Charlie” (Connor Tompkins), named for his Chaplin walk, they find an unexpected mate, who becomes closer to them when his twin Luke is arrested and taken into custody. (Cairns herself has hearing issues and inserts a couple of stretches of total silence into noisy scenes to represent Charlie’s experience.) Jonah and Lee are forced to work at communicating with Charlie, learning some BSL and teaching him how to say “spectacular”. It’s an experience that, by extension, represents their time in Scotland, as they are obliged to leave their friendship bubble and engage with others.

In the village, they find kindness and openness: a farmer lends them a boat for their filming and even supplies Jonah with a good walking stick. When Jonah strips off and swims in a cove they sail to, he attracts seals and finally smiles, seeming genuinely at home in this new milieu. Cairns charts his re-entry into his own life with a careful tenderness, never overblowing the emotional content of each scene. Underpinning the action is its astutely chosen soundtrack, using songs with pertinent lyrics; even the traditional ballad “The False Knight on the Road” gains emotional ballast here, delivered with great heft by Sandy’s mum. A quietly poignant debut. 

The Secret Agent

For almost two thirds of its running length, this Brazilian political drama from writer-director Kleber Mendonça Filho plays a lot like Walter Salles’s I’m Still Here, set a few years earlier featuring the same paranoia and repression. It’s 1977, and Marcelo (Wagner Moura, pictured below), an electronics professor who led resistance to a grotesque racist industrialist’s attempt to close his department, has fled to his home town, Recife. Despite the carnival being celebrated in town, the air is thick with menace. Before he even arrives, Marcelo witnesses a corpse left to moulder at a service station; a corrupt buffoon of a police chief passes by but leaves the dead man lying there; a carnival straw-man harasses him in his car. Meanwhile a shark has turned up with a man’s leg in its stomach, a motif that will be picked up when Marcelo’s son Fernando becomes a fan of all things shark, including new movie Jaws.Marcelo moves into a block where a battle-hardened activist shelters people on the run from the regime, Angolans as well as Brazilians; while he waits there for a fake passport, she finds him work that will enable him to trace his mother’s identity. Two hit men are on his trail. As we watch them home in on him, we see that the local police are useless, except as cannon fodder.

Into this tense cat-and-mouse setup are spliced scenes of two young women in the current day listening to recordings of phone calls between the people in the resistance building and investigating what happened to Marcelo. Eventually this time zone wins out, and we stay with one of the two women as she tracks down the protagonist’s son (also played by Moura) in Recife. In the 50 years that have passed he has become a gynaecologist, content with his life.

This is an often engrossing, atmospheric film, its bright sunniness adding to its intensity, though its storytelling is sometimes elliptical, as if sections have been cut. Why, for example, is Marcelo so keen to trace his mother, at the risk to his own safety? There's a welcome cameo from Udo Kier as a Jewish German tailor, and its set pieces are thrillingly handled. Ultimately, it delivers a sad warning against letting memories of the painful past lapse into complacency.

Peter Hujar’s Day

A curio, set in an era when people phoned each other daily and, in the US, local calls were often free and frequently lengthy. It’s a snapshot, appropriately, of NYC boho life on December 18, 1974, as experienced by photographer Peter Hujar (a pitch-perfect Ben Whishaw). We follow him as, the following day, he recounts the minutiae of that day for the little tape deck of his close friend Linda Rosencrantz (Rebecca Hall), part of a larger project to record the daily lives of her friends, never fully realised. (The dialogue here is adapted from a 2019 transcription of her tape, published as Peter Hujar’s Day.) His apartment is in the East Village, with the usual construction racket outside; at night the sounds come from prostitutes talking about their day. Inside, a bright orange fondue set, raw silk covered walls, wooden Scandi furniture and crocheted cushion covers announce the era.

As does the overall look of the film, which simulates an indie number from that era, down to the shaky black and white credits in a now unfashionable font. There are meta touches – we see the film crew at work at the beginning and end – and only natural light is used. Some of the music is “organic”, too, coming from Hujar's hifi set, though Mozart’s Requiem also swells up unannounced.

Hujar, who became the leading capturer of gay New York life, already has an impressive roster of big-name friends and clients. He had called Susan Sontag that morning; Fran Leibowitz later called him. He had done a job for the New York Times that day, a shoot with Allen Ginsberg at his cruddy tenement on the Lower East Side, where Peter Orlovsky opened the door and Hujar became fixated on his two whiskery facial moles. Ginsberg was prickly, especially when he talked about William Burroughs, whose portrait Hujar would also be taking for the NYT project. Later Hujar looked at his developed shots and said he doesn’t like them – they are “ordinary’, reflective of the lack of rapport between snapper and subject.

The tone throughout is light, often bitchy, even oddly humdrum. Hujar is outraged about price rises – 56c for a pack of cigarettes, 95c for a roll of braunschweiger liver sausage, $7.50 for two Chinese meals. He and Rosencrantz tut-tut about all this like two maiden aunts living on a pension. It’s an apparently casual limning of a man's daily routine, but one whose cast list features the people who will create the cultural fabric of the time. Some are lesser known than Ginsberg and Sontag, such as the New Yorker critic Vince Aletti, who had come round for a shower. Hujar also toys with the idea of “Frank” (O’Hara?) writing an intro to a photo book he would like to create, if Sontag won’t – she had told him, when he asked her on behalf of a friend, that she rarely wrote intros, only for close friends. A photo collection Hujar made before his death from Aids in 1987 did appear with an intro by Sontag. Recommended to all fans of old New York City (Jan 2, 2026)

It Was Just an Accident 

Jafar Panahi’s latest is another sparky morality tale made with the slimmest of means, and a deserving Palme d’Or winner this year. Its French title, Un simple accident, is what we see in the first scene: a couple driving at night running over a stray dog. From this incident, events and connections spool out that lead to the very heart of modern Iran’s current nightmares.

Panahi is an acute, angry observer of life in modern Iran for those who aren’t loyal to the regime, but he uses a soft pedal judiciously to project his subjects. One victim, Vahid, is asked to assist the driver who hit the dog, his car now in need of repair. Vahid leaves a coworker to fix it, spying on the driver as he limps around the workshop. He follows him home, then the next day kidnaps him, hits him with a shovel, trusses him up and drives him to a deserted place, where he starts digging a large grave… Thus begins an often farcical quest to establish the man’s identity. Is he the dreaded foe of Vahid and his fellow dissidents, who were tortured by him in prison, nicknaming him Peg Leg? They recruit others to help ID the man, handicapped by the fact that all the prisoners encountered him blindfolded. One, Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr, pictured below, left, with Hadis Pakbaten and Majid Panahi), is exceptionally belligerent and wants to kill him, whereas the others believe descending to violence makes them as bad as their persecutors. Meanwhile, the driver’s heavily pregnant wife goes into labour.

This is an often humorous film, targeting a wide swathe of Iranian society, from radical hotheads to corrupt security guards. With comic incongruity, Vahid’s mother insists on going to the hospital with him and catering for the well wishers who will come to congratulate the new parents (even though Vahid isn’t one of them), receiving tea and pastries for their trouble. The nurse who delivered the driver’s baby is more blatant, demanding a tip, which Vahid dutifully pays. Panahi also lightens the mood with the almost farcical nature of the group itself – two of them are dressed up as a bride and groom (Hadis Pakbaten and Majid Panahi), approached by Vahid while having wedding pictures taken by the bride’s sister, Shiva, who is also Hamid’s ex. These old connections are ripe for flaring up into well rehearsed arguments, and the five years since they were imprisoned have not cooled the disputants’ ferocity.

Where Panahi excels is in insisting on the humanity of his characters, even the obnoxious and downright dangerous ones. Vahid is the linchpin of this moral merry-go-round, an amiable, simple man who has been physically debilitated since his incarceration. Vahid Mobasseri, who plays him, invests him with a decency that was never wholly tortured out of him. The group’s verbal assaults on their captive are a way for Panahi to reveal the terrible things that have happened to people like them – and him – under the regime: chilling mock executions, vicious beatings, threats to their friends and relatives. Tellingly, Hamid says he recognises his former torturer by feeling the scars on his leg, as he had been made to do by the man, determined to establish his heroism in Syria, where he had lost his other leg altogether.  

The final scene is masterly, performed by Mobasseri with his back to the camera. No words are spoken but you know the sounds Vahid hears will haunt him for the rest of his life. The scene adds a grim coda to the moral debate the characters have been thrashing out. (Dec 5)

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