London Film Festival: our picks for Monday October 12

Nick Roddick chooses his highlights of the London Film Festival
Stand out: Brooklyn is worth the price of a ticket for Saoirse Ronan alone
Bfi20 January 2016

The stars come together in Brooklyn: a best-selling novel (by Irish writer Colm Tóibín); a screenplay by another established novelist and screenwriter (Nick Hornby); a rising young actress (Saoirse Ronan) with a role she can really sink her teeth into; a sensitive director (John Crowley, whose credits include Boy A and Closed Circuit); and a theme to which anyone with the slightest connection to Ireland can relate – emigration.

Tóibín’s novel is in the great tradition of Irish works established by the late Brian Friel: how to balance off the opportunities of the New World with a deep personal connection to the Old. Eilis (Ronan) flees rural Ireland for the NY Borough of the title in the late 1940s, when Europe was still recovering from the war and the US represented the dream of freedom and opportunity. She finds it all but it was never going to be as simple as that – a dilemma which Tóibín, Hornby and Crowley tease out for all it is emotionally worth.

Brooklyn is worth the price of a ticket for Ronan alone, about whom the Standard has been banging on since (at least) Atonement.

Nostalgia of a different kind lies behind today’s first back-up pick, a 1960 film that has the same combination of top director (Carol Reed), source (a novel by Graham Greene) and star (Alec Guinness). Like the earlier Greene/Read collaboration The Third Man, it’s a spy story, but the similarity stops there. Our Man in Havana is a Cold War comedy (not many of those) with Guinness as the hapless Wormold, a vacuum-cleaner salesman who becomes MI6’s man in Castro’s Cuba (the film was shot three months after the revolution).

Or, for humour of a different kind (deadpan with the emphasis on dead), try Radu Muntean’s Romanian drama One Floor Below – a classic of slow-burn ambiguity like only the Romanians can make ‘em.

Brooklyn: Odeon Leicester Square, 19:15; Tuesday, Odeon Leicester Square, 14:15; and Wednesday, Curzon Mayfair, 21:15.

Our Man in Havana: 18:15, NFT1; Thursday, 15:30, NFT3.

One Floor Below: 21:00. Ciné Lumière; Tuesday, 12:45, NFT2.

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