Film: London Film Festival: weekend highlights

Chris Darke
Friday 21 November 1997 00:02 GMT
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Sally Potter, director of Orlando, shows her new film The Tango Lesson tomorrow (NFT1 8.45pm) and it sounds like a terpsichorean remake of Godard's Passion. A film-maker attempts to get a Hollywood project off the ground and ends up making a different movie, where she plays herself in the throes of a passionate hoofing relationship with glowering tango supreme, Pablo Veron.

The sexual politics of the American white-collar male come under dissection in Neil Labute's Sundance prize winner, In the Company of Men (tomorrow, 1.30pm and 9pm Odeon WE1), which promises a Mamet-like excursion into corporate masculinity as two emotionally stressed execs take a holiday in misogyny.

The conventions of screen violence receive disturbing deconstructive treatment in Michael Haneke's Funny Games, which screens at the ICA as part of a day-long series of events and talks on "Violence and the Arts"; expect much gruesomeness with a Cultural Studies alibi (ICA, tomorrow, 11am).

The late additions to the festival's closing weekend include Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights, an exhilarating excursion into the Seventies hardcore porn scene (tonight, Odeon WE1, 8.45pm). Zhang Yimou, the master of lush Chinese historical epics such as Raise the Red Lantern, changes style in his new film Keep Cool (today, NFT1 and Sunday 2.15pm Odeon WE2), in which he treats his story of romantic urban misadventures with the frenetic handheld stylistics more usually associated with the cult Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai.

The closing night gala screening is Mike Figgis's new film, One Night Stand, an adult study of rediscovered emotions and mourning, starring Wesley Snipes and Nastassia Kinski. The success of Leaving Las Vegas appears to have won Figgis the freedom to make an intimate, personal film his own way. The director will no doubt reveal all the details of his tussles with Hollywood in his Script Factory Masterclass tonight, 8.45, NFT.

Chris Darke

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