LONDON CALLING 2011 PART ONE

The London Film Festival is in full swing and, as with every year, I have been cherry picking the odd film that appeals to me. The first film I caught was 360, directed by Brazilian Fernando Meireilles (City of God, The Constant Gardener). It's a drama in a similar vein to something like Babel: we see a number of stories and protagonists in cities around the world (Vienna, London, Bratislava, Paris, Rio and Denver) and, as the film progresses, we see the connections made between the seemingly-disconnected cast of characters. Screenwriter Peter Morgan (The Queen, Frost/ Nixon) has also admitted that it owes something to Arthur Schnitzler's La Ronde. 360 does have a lot of central characters (from English businessman played by Jude Law to prostitute Mirkha (Lucia Siposova), Anthony Hopkins as the man searching for his lost daughter and Valentina (Dinara Drukarova), the wife of Russian thug Sergei) but unlike Contagion, this film is finely balanced so Meireilles and the excellent ensemble cast have the opportunity to give 360's creations enough life so that the viewer can get caught up in their world. Even Jude Law isn't half-bad here. Come back for another LFF review, this time of The Descendants directed by Alexander Payne with George Clooney…