The beautiful, terrifying domestic drama โWe Need to Talk About Kevinโ won the London Film Festivalโs best-picture prize Wednesday.
Lynne Ramsayโs film stars Tilda Swinton as a mother grappling with grief and guilt after her teenage son carries out a high-school massacre.
โShakespeare in Loveโ director John Madden, who chaired the judging panel, called it โa sublime, uncompromising tale of the torment that can stand in the place of love.โ
The 55-year-old London festival introduced a best-film prize two years ago as part of a bid to boost its profile and compete with better-known events in Berlin, Venice and Toronto.
โKevinโ beat eight other finalists, including French silent movie โThe Artist,โ Aleksandr Sokurovโs Venice Film festival winner โFaustโ and British director Steve McQueenโs body- and soul-baring โShame.โ
Nineteen-year-old actress Candese Reid was named best British newcomer for her role in gritty drama โJunkhearts,โ her first professional acting role.
Argentinean director Pablo Giorgelli won the festivalโs best first feature prize for his Latin American road movie โLas Acacias,โ which picked up the same award at this yearโs Cannes Film Festival. The best documentary trophy went to German auteur Werner Herzog for his death row portrait โInto the Abyss.โ
Actor Ralph Fiennes and director David Cronenberg received lifetime achievement awards during the black-tie ceremony at the 18th-century St. Lukeโs church in London.
Fiennes was awarded a British Film Institute Fellowship in recognition of โa singular careerโ that has blended arthouse dramas and mainstream hits.
Cronenberg, the director of โVideodrome,โ โThe Flyโ and โCrash,โ received the same honor for a body of films โexploring the darker impulses and inner lives of his characters.โ
Both men had films in the two-week festival of more than 300 features and shorts from 55 countries โ Fiennesโ directorial debut โCoriolanusโ and Cronenbergโs psychoanalytic drama โA Dangerous Method.โ
Review: Director Pedro Almodรณvar Makes English-Language Feature Debut With โThe Room Next Doorโ
Films that are straightforwardly about death are rare, but movies that are about both death and sex are rarer, still.
In Pedro Almodรณvar's "The Room Next Door," the Spanish director's first English-language feature film, Julianne Moore plays Ingrid, a celebrated author who's just written a book about death. She's at a book signing in New York when she hears that an old friend, a war correspondent named Martha Hunt ( Tilda Swinton ), has been diagnosed with cancer.
Ingrid rushes to Martha in the hospital, and the two friends, who haven't seen each other in years, quickly get reacquainted. Soon, Martha's cancer worsens and she asks Ingrid to assist her in self-euthanasia. "The cancer can't get me if I get the cancer first," she says.
Why not ask someone she's closer with? Well, she has, Martha says, but for various reasons none of them are willing. With an illegal pill bought from, as she says, "the dark web" and a slight conspiratorial vibe that they're committing a crime together, they travel to a modernist house in upstate New York where Martha plans to end her life. She'll be comforted, she believes, having Ingrid just down the hall. Martha doesn't want any fuss, just a nice time. "As if we were on vacation," she says.
"The Room Next Door," the title of which plays off Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own," is about finding dignity and contentment with death as a natural part of life, and, perhaps, the mystery of the relationships that end up mattering the most. The one thing Martha and Ingrid share is a former lover (played by John Turturro ), who turns up again in clandestine meetings with Ingrid. He's preoccupied with environmental disaster and the death of the planet, but fondly recalls sleeping with Martha as "like having sex... Read More