Whew. A fortnight and 60-odd films later, I have reached the end of the London Film Festival. It came to a rousing close today with “Slumdog Millionaire,” a film for which I can only echo the enthusiasm that has been expressed nearly everywhere else — a fresh, thrilling, beautiful marriage of classical (even fairytale-style) storytelling and edgy stylistic verve. Plenty will be written about this beguiling work in the months to come, but for now, I’ll just say that it satisfies and surprises on just about every level.
I’ve tried to keep up with the pace with my review roundups, but inevitably, I’ve wound up with a backlog of films I haven’t mentioned yet. So what follows is a quick catch-up effort, looking over some of the lower-profile hits and misses in 100 words or less.
I will get into some bigger films in due course — Steve McQueen’s harrowing “Hunger” and Rian Johnson’s undervalued if occasionally precious “The Brothers Bloom” are two titles that merit more detailed discussion. And, as I’ve said before, there’s no need for me to discuss films that are already old news in the US (though I will say I finally caught up with “Frozen River” and was impressed by its tight construction and Melissa Leo’s deeply felt lead turn), or have already been covered on these pages. (I have similar sentiments to Kris on Ari Folman’s exquisite but overly distancing “Waltz With Bashir.”)
So here’s a rundown of the littler guys, ranging from (to filch from the title of one of my favourite festival pics) the good to the bad to the weird:
SUGAR (***1/2): One of the strongest American entries in the festival, Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s worthy follow-up to “Half Nelson” shares that film’s lyricism and humanism, but paints on a broader social canvas. The story of a young baseball pitcher from the Dominican Republic embarking on his Stateside career, it adds new textures to the sports-movie genre — no other baseball film has conveyed the knife-edge stakes of league politics more effectively. A rare portrait of the American Dream that skirts sentimentality, it benefits from the brooding, vulnerable presence of lead actor Algenis Perez Soto, and the hazy, summery tones of Michael Brooks’s cinematography.