The LFF Blog: Day Six

Tongues have been wagging all week - but we can exclusively reveal the Surprise Film at this year's London Film Festival...

Ssshh. Can you hear it? With just days of the festival left to run, excited speculation about Sunday's Surprise Film is building to a near-continuous ambient rumble. Critics are asking. Organisers aren't talking. Festival director Sandra Hebron has been predictably tight-lipped. The result of 'a random conversation with an LA industry friend', she says; it's apparently wonderful. Would have been a Gala. And definitely not a romantic comedy. Well, that at least rules out 'Daddy Day Camp'.

Here at Time Out, we've been listening to the gossip and asking some questions of our own. Sure enough, there are clues to follow… Last year's rabbit-out-of-the-hat was Christopher Nolan's fantastic conjurer's trick 'The Prestige', a big film set for general release just a week later. Same deal with previous Surprise Film 'School of Rock'. And a look at the cinema release schedule reveals just two major releases in the next couple of weeks that haven't screened during the festival. The first is computer game-based actioner, 'Hitman'... We jest.

The first is 'Beowulf', Robert Zemeckis' digitised epic fable starring Ray Winstone, Anthony Hopkins, John Malkovich and a formidably underdressed Angelina Jolie. The second – and way more likely – is 'The Golden Compass', the first blockbusting adaptation of Philip Pullman's massively popular fantasy novels and packing major star wattage in Daniel Craig, Nicole Kidman and Eva Green.

The other big talk grinding the rumour mill? 'The Kite Runner', Marc Forster's reworking of Khaled Hosseini's sweeping bestseller, apparently manages to push the right buttons, and Michel Gondry's new 'Be Kind Rewind' would be a fantastic wild-card pick, although some critics have been lukewarm. There's a print in town, we've seen it and 'wonderful' fits the bill: it's an inventive, glorious love-letter to films and filmmaking to shelve next to 'Cinema Paradiso'.

There is just one more rumour. And it's a big rumour: Paul Thomas Anderson's 'There Will Be Blood', the first film in five years from the wunderkind behind 'Magnolia' and 'Punch-Drunk Love'. Starring Daniel Day-Lewis as a turn-of-the-century Texan prospector, it's pitched as Anderson's 'Treasure of Sierra Madre' and is guaranteed to be one of the Big Films of 2008. Will There Be Blood? When asked yesterday, someone very close to the film responded categorically: 'Hmmm.' Remember: you heard it here first – even if we lied a little when we said we knew exactly what the Surprise Film will be...

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