#LIFF2025 Best new-to-me films of the festival: Sirât Holiday Bye Bye Brazil Pixote It Was Just an Accident Dandelion's Odyssey Sentimental Value A Useful Ghost Sholay The Secret Agent Fwends Perla Chronicle of the Years of Fire A Poet

#LIFF2025 Film 69* - The Love that Remains: A real poetic feel, and a good way to round out the festival. *Nice

#LIFF2025 Film 68 - Nouvelle Vague: It's very charming, but that's really my problem with it. It's a very cosy and safe film, and never gives a proper impression of how dangerous and risky that era of filmmaking was. It's like getting Rev Richard Coles to do an account of the making of Fitzcarraldo

#LIFF2025 Film 67 - We Believe You: The main body of the film is very powerful, and the use of Academy ratio really made the witness testimonies stand out. I felt the ending slightly undermined the film though.

#LIFF2025 Film 66 - If I Had Legs I'd Kick You: Creates a brilliant sense of claustrophobia, and I really liked the interactions with bureaucratic officiousness disguised as help. I didn't feel the ending quite worked though, which was a shame.

#LIFF2025 Film 65 - A Poet: A definite festival highlight. I loved the sense of melancholy, and the way that the lead was a schmuck in such an interesting way. Never went for the obvious.

#LIFF2025 Film 64 - Chronicle of the Years of Fire: Great sweeping epic. I found it interesting given the revolutionary content that it modelled itself traditional historical epics (though this is not a criticism).

#LIFF2025 Film 63 - Ghost Elephants: Herzog's subjects are extremes: dragging a ship over an Amazonian mountain, a volcano about to explode or the fastest talking auctioneers. This film is supposedly about looking for the largest elephants, but as with all his docs, it's really about people

#LIFF2025 Film 62 - Mirrors No. 3: I was worried about following what was going on since I hadn't seen the first or second in the series, but that wasn't a problem. A still, quiet film, but always with a sense of unease.

#LIFF2025 Film 61 - Love Letters: Engrossing, I was impressed by the way that the setup lends itself to being episodic, but instead the film had a smooth, continuous narrative. I also liked that Noémie Lvovsky is clearly playing a version of Martha Argerich.

#LIFF2025 Film 60 - Perla: What's going happen is clear from a long way out, but that doesn't make the film boring, rather it gives it a real sense of impending doom. Definitely recommended.

#LIFF2025 Film 58 - Out of Love: Good, solid drama without being spectacular.

#LIFF2025 Film 57 - Game: A man crashes his car and is stuck in the wreck. Tedium ensues. There's an Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode with a similar premise, directed by Hitch himself and starring Joseph Cotton, that's much more worth watching.

#LIFF2025 Film 56 - All You Need Is Kill: Named after Mark Chapman's favourite Beatles song. No substance, but an engaging and entertaining watch, at least until the end when it ran out of impetus.

#LIFF2025 Film 55 - The Virgin of the Quarry Lake: Decent, but ultimately a bit bland, and the payoff wasn't really worth it.

#LIFF2025 Film 54 - Blue Heron: Good solid film. I found the structure really interesting, with straight drama merging into faux documentary and then a dreamlike section at the end.

#LIFF2025 Film 54 - The Green Ray: Absolutely magical film, another one from this festival that I've seen before but is great to see on the big screen.

#LIFF2025 Film 53 - Sirens Call: Started fine, great shots and a meditative road movie feel. But then interminable faux-doc interviews started with tedious new age American naval-gazers. The only thing that could've made it bearable was Louis Theroux showing up to say that these people are all nuts

#LIFF2025 Film 52 - ChaO: I liked the animation style a lot, interesting without trying to hard to be overly stylised. A couple of narrative mis-steps, but still well worth watching.

#LIFF2025 Film 51 - Follies: Probably the most I've laughed at any film this festival. I was most impressed about how it walked a tightrope between falling on the one side of being just silly, and on the other side of being overly sentimental and preachy.

#LIFF2025 Film 50 - Vagabond: A real masterpiece. Something I noticed this time is that there's a series of slow tracking shots following the main character throughout the film. They're almost always from right to left, the opposite of Lawrence of Arabia where Peter O'Toole is almost always...

#LIFF2025 Film 49 - Fwends: A really impressive two-hander, the sort of film that's very difficult to pull off, but this managed it with ease. If they make a sequel, I presume it'll be called Fwasier.

#LIFF2025 Film 48 - Touki Bouki: A surrealist gem, and great to see it on the big screen. Feels like a garish nightmare most of the time.

#LIFF2025 Film 47 - Wanda: A very neorealist film, I like how it drifts into being a crime film for a bit, then undramatically drifts out of it.

#LIFF2025 Film 46 - Dog of God: Sometimes gratuitous, and I'm not sure there's much beyond the surface, but still visually arresting and atmospheric.

#LIFF2025 Film 45 - The Secret Agent: I really liked this, the worldbuilding is seriously impressive and immersive. And always nice to see Leeds Uni get namechecked.

#LIFF2025 Film 44 - Calle Málenga: Nice sweet comedy drama, underpinned by a great central performance.

#LIFF2025 Film 43 - Sholay: I've seen a fair amount of Indian cinema, but typically towards the arty end (e.g. Ray), so it was good to see something more mainstream. This was rollicking good fun!

#LIFF2025 Film 42 - The Girl Who Stole Time: The film equivalent of someone jangling keys in front of your face for 110 minutes. Just relentlessly throws one thing after another at you with no attempt at pacing. The ending took ages as well, I felt like it lasted longer than Satantango

#LIFF2025 Film 41 - A Useful Ghost: Probably the most profound film ever made featuring vacuum cleaner sex. Starts as a neat farce, but quickly evolves to be much more than that.

#LIFF2025 Film 40 - Alpha: Not as demented (or quite as good) as Titane, but still very arresting. Really looking forward to what Julia Ducournau does over the next few years.

#LIFF2025 Film 39 - The Holy Boy: Although this seriously dragged in places, I liked a lot about this film, it felt like it was consciously following in an Italian horror tradition.

#LIFF2025 Film 38 - Happy Birthday: Tackles some of the same subject matter as Sembene's La noire de..., but takes a much gentler approach. I appreciated the subtlety.

#LIFF2025 Film 37 - Cotton Queen: Not bad, but I never felt it really got going or properly went into the issues it raised.

#LIFF2025 Film 36 - Fucktoys: Pretty fun, I thought the film was at its best when it wasn't trying to hard to be weird and quirky.

#LIFF2025 Film 35 - Our Heavenly Bodies: As a historical artefact it's fascinating. As a film, it takes a while to get to the sci-fi sections, which are the more interesting parts.

#LIFF2025 Film 34 - Night Stage: I really enjoyed the noir atmosphere, but it goes off the rails at the end. Also I didn't believe that one character was really running for mayor. Where was his campaign manager? Where was the press? Why did he have so much free time in the middle of a campaign?

#LIFF2025 Film 33 - Silent Friend: I found it fascinating how it moved between three different, more or less unconnected timelines so seamlessly. Was slow but didn't feel like it dragged even though it was nearly 2 and a half hours.

#LIFF2025 Film 32 - Omaha: Nothing much of a film really, apparently based on a quickly fixed legislative cockup in Nebraska 17 years ago, and it's about as interesting as that sounds.

#LIFF2025 Film 31 - That Summer In Paris: I liked this a lot more than I expected. I was anticipating something frothy and light, but this is a surprisingly moving study on loneliness.

#LIFF2025 Film 30 - Sentimental Value: A real full meal of a film. Great performances, well rounded and complex characters, doesn't feel like 133 minutes at all. Highly recommended.

#LIFF2025 Film 29 - Pinch: Okay, but I felt the wild shifts in tone undermined the message a bit, and the ending was very rabbit out of a hat. Also this is apparently a "trauma comedy". I thought that meant stuff like Police Academy 6. You'll definitely get trauma from watching that.

#LIFF2025 Film 28 - Rains Over Babel: Very entertaining, though there might have been one or two plot strands too many.

#LIFF2025 Film 27 - Dandelion's Odyssey: Absolutely extraordinary film, very glad I saw this on the big screen. I loved how it treated perspective, scale, and especially time fluidly.

#LIFF2025 Film 26 - Roqia: Nice idea, poor execution. The plot is all over the place which means no tension ever has a chance to develop.

#LIFF2025 Film 25 - Currents: More alternating than direct.* A film about looking at details. Would probably benefit from a second watch. *I know this doesn't really make sense, but it sounds good.

#LIFF2025 Film 24 - Tinsman Road: I liked this, but I'm not sure why... I suppose I was sort of hypnotised by it, helped by the film not engaging in typical found footage gimmickry, instead being somewhat meditative. Was still about 20 minutes too long though.

#LIFF2025 Film 23 - Black Hole: I really liked the off-kilter feeling of this film, although it never seemed to get any momentum going. That may be my general dislike of anthology films though.

#LIFF2025 Film 22 - The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo: A lot of really interesting stuff in this film, but in the end if felt a bit meandering.

#LIFF2025 Film 21 - The Voice of Hind Rajab: The original recordings were powerful, but I felt the film surrounding them detracted from, rather than adding to that power. A bit overwrought and cliched, with the maverick who doesn't follow the rules clashing with Da Chief who does things by the book