BFI London Film Festival pick of the day – Jabberwocky

Nick Roddick picks his lesser known must-see for tomorrow, Wednesday October 4 
Lovingly restored: the BFI and the George Lucas Foundation have brought this classic comedy back to life
Nick Roddick3 October 2017

The London Film Festival opens tonight with Andy Serkis’s impressive, deeply moving directorial debut, Breathe. Tickets for the Odeon Leicester Square, like those for Wimbledon, are allocated by ballot so if you don’t already have one, forget it. Anyway, you can see it with a lot less fuss when it opens at the end of the month.

Meanwhile, away from the red carpet, there are a few gems for which you might still get a ticket, ranging from the swoony romantic thriller Racer and the Jailbird to the austerely beautiful Maersk Opera. The latter, made by the Danish collective Superflex, whose Turbine Hall installation opened yesterday at Tate Modern, is a luminous black-and-white art film accompanied by haunting music which richly repays the demands it places on you.

But if you want it all in one film – fear and laughter, surrealism and parody, dragons and mud, plus any number of somethings completely different – our pick for today is the 1977 classic Jabberwocky. Not so much an oldie-but-goody, more an oldie-but-a-lot-better-than-anyone-realised-at-the-time, Terry Gilliam’s solo directorial debut, lovingly restored by the BFI and the George Lucas Foundation (and soon to come out on Blu-Ray), is a medieval quest movie that proves that comedy works best when taken seriously.

Pure silliness: what better way to start a 12-day cinematic odyssey?

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