London Film Festival 2012

Gathering more momentum with every passing year than a Jamaican relay team, the London Film Festival returns with a fine selection of domestic and international cinema for its 56th edition, and, based on the announcement of the 2012 programme this week, expect nothing more than an impressive array of global film.

Gathering more
momentum with every passing year than a Jamaican relay team, the London Film
Festival returns with a fine selection of domestic and international cinema for
its 56^th edition, and, based on the announcement of the 2012
programme this week, expect nothing more than an impressive array of global
film.

Instalments from 68 different countries make up the 2012
programme, including 14 world premieres, 15 international premieres and 34
European. Strong contenders from this year’s international film festivals will
be making their British debut, including Palm d’Or winner Amour. Claiming the festival favourite for many in attendance of
Cannes, the depiction of an elderly husband coping with his wife suffering a
series of strokes is directed by Michael
Haneke, who received the top prize for the second time after The White Ribbon in 2009, and is part
of the festival’s Love Gala.

Another foreign hit showing on the 13^th and 14^th
of October is Jacques Audiard’s Rust and Bone. The director of A Prophet is sending rumours of strong
results at next year’s award season, namely for Marion Cotillard’s central performance as woman who is left without
legs following an accident with a killer whale at a sea life centre.

On the British front one of the most exciting offerings will
be the much anticipated follow up to Ben
Wheatley’s stunning Kill List.
Sightseers stars co writers Steve Oram
and Alice Lowe as newly romantically
involved tourist that develop a taste for violence upon strangers and will be
shown at Odeon West End on the 20^th and Hackney Picturehouse on the
21^st of October.

Whereas the festival opens with Tim Burton’s stop motion model horror Frankenweenie, the closing film is about as British as it gets with
Mike Newell’s latest adaptation of Great Expectations (Main Picture). War Horse heart throb Jeremy Irvine fills the troubled frame
of Pip, with Holiday Grainger
playing his Estella. A no doubt scene robbing Helena Bonham Carter plays Mrs Haversham, and with the Ralph Fiennes, Sally Hawkins and David
Walliams also present expect a fitting end to the event.

Other notable names on the programme include Seven Psychopaths, which sees Colin Farrell reunited with In Bruges writer and director Martin McDonagh, Argo, a true story directed by and starring Ben Affleck as a CIA agent posing as a movie producer in a plan to
rescue American hostages in Iran, and Benh
Zeitlin’s visually splendid Beasts
Of The Southern Wild, showing on the 12^th, 13^th and
14^th of October.

The festival runs from the 10^th to the 21^st
of October, for full details on the films, venues and to book tickets head to
the Festival homepage HERE