The success of the London Film Festival’s annual Surprise Film screening isn’t exactly dependent on the surprise element: more often than not, the film’s identity can be pinpointed in advance simply by asking yourself which title you most expected to find in the festival lineup, and then didn’t.
But even if pretty much everyone sitting in the Leicester Square theater three years ago knew they were about to see “No Country for Old Men,” that didn’t stop the keen applause, peppered with whoops of approval, when the title finally flashed on screen. Ditto the equally predictable-but-welcome selection of “The Wrestler” the following year. It’s a bit like actually getting what you asked for on Christmas morning: the unwrapping is a mere formality, but the result satisfies nonetheless.
Festival director Sandra Hebron did pull a genuine surprise last year, when the consensus expectation of “Where the Wild Things Are” was dashed by the PSA-style opening of Michael Moore’s “Capitalism: A Love Story.” Still, by last night, Twitter-abetted speculation had narrowed so conclusively around Rowan Joffe’s “Brighton Rock” — it being the most conspicuously absent Britfilm at a British festival, after all — that anything else would have been a jaw-dropper. (To Hebron’s evident vexation, it was the first title shouted out when she played her annual “guess-the-movie” game with the audience.)
Of the so-called “tech” categories, Best Cinematography is one of the most popular, certainly for me. The invention of the camera took us beyond radio and literature and set modern art on a path aimed toward the moving picture, and this field recognizes those behind the lens.