The 48th London Film Festival

The London Film Festival kicks off with Mike Leigh’s latest, Vera Drake, about an abortionist operating in the 1950s.

Oct 20 2004

The 48th London Film Festival kicks off tonight with a screening of Vera Drake, Mike Leigh’s latest film about the cheery working-class family of a titular kindly abortionist in the 1950s.

From today until November 4 the festival will screen an incredible 280 feature length, short, animated, experimental and archive films from 60 countries.

Eight new British films will be shown including ‘Bullet Boy’ - a timely and distinctly credible look at our city’s illegal gun culture, starring Ashley Walters – better known as So Solid Crew’s Asher D, ‘Frozen' – Shirley Henderson plays Kath, a woman whose sister has disappeared from her home town amid the fishing industries and morbid seascapes of Morecambe Bay, and ‘Top Spot', Tracey Emin’s first foray into (almost) full-length feature filmmaking.

The ‘Treasures from the Archive’ programme includes four Chaplin keystones, 'Getting Acquainted’, ‘Kid Auto Races’, ‘Mabel at the Wheel’ (aka ‘A Hot Finish’) and ‘Mabel’s Married Life’. Other highlights from the archives include two new prints: ‘On the Waterfront’, released to celebrate its 50th anniversary and ‘Paths of Glory’, Kubrick's first 'prestige' movie which bitterly attacks the role of the French military authorities in World War I through an account of the court-martial and execution of three blameless privates.

Our critics’ choices from the first week are ‘Whisky’, a decidedly droll, subdued comedy from the Uruguayan duo behind '25 Watts', whose slacker comedy here jumps a generation to permeate the story of a greying trio of sock-makers (Fri 22, Odeon West End). Jessica Yu's entrancing documentary ‘In the Realms of the Unreal’, which tells both, outsider artist, Darger's stories - his life and his art - in tandem, relating the harshness of an adolescence spent in the Lincoln Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children, and its sublimation in obsessive writings and watercolours of naive and gruesome wonder (Mon 25 & Tue 26, ICA1). Fans of the inimitable chronicler of Marseilles life, Robert GuÎdiguian, will be touched by ‘My Father is an Engineer’, perhaps his most heartfelt movie to date (Mon 25, Ciné Lumière; Wed 27, Croydon Clocktower).

Full reviews of these films are available online and in Time Out London's (October 20-27) nine-page London Film Festival special, headed up by Ziyi Zhang, 'Crouching Tiger's' gorgeous, high-flying geisha girl. With the Time Out Gala film, US politics in 'The Manchurian Candidate' and So Solid's Asher D in 'Bullet Boy'. Plus every film at the festival reviewed. Also, get a two-for-one movie ticket voucher - FREE.

LFF runs from Oct 20 October to November 4.

Check listings for film times and venues.

[More information about the festival]