McQueen’s Widows opens London Film Festival
The London Film Festival kicked off Wednesday with the European premiere of British director Steve McQueen’s whip-smart heist thriller Widows.
The film stars Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez and Elizabeth Debicki as women who band together after their husbands are killed in a robbery gone wrong. The Chicago-set movie by the Academy Award-winning, Londonborn director of 12 Years a Slave weaves insights about race, money and class in America into a twisting thriller plot.
The 62nd London festival includes the event’s biggest-ever batch of films by women. Organisers say 38 percent of all films and 30 per cent of the 225 features in the lineup have female directors, an increase on 24 percent of features in 2017.
Films directed by women include Sudabeh Mortezai’s drama Joy; Karyn Kusama’s police thriller Destroyer starring Nicole Kidman; and Sara Colangelo’s drama The Kindergarten
Teacher with Maggie Gyllenhaal. The schedule also includes David Mackenzie’s kilts-and-carnage Scottish epic Outlaw King; Joel and Ethan Coen’s Western anthology film The Ballad of Buster Scruggs; Alfonso Cuaron’s Mexico-set Roma; Mike Leigh’s historical saga Peterloo; and Peter
Jackson’s documentary They Shall Not
Grow Old, which transforms grainy footage from World War I into colour.
Jackson’s film was having its premiere weeks before the centenary of
the end of the 1914-18 war in which 20 million people died.
The festival closes October 21 with John S. Baird’s Laurel and Hardy biopic Stan & Ollie.