London Film Festival Films You Should See 'Footnote'

Ahead of the BFI London Film Festival, Asylum is taking a sneak peek at all the films suitable for menfolk and bringing you the low down on them.

We don't just mean gross out comedies and action flicks (though there are a few of those coming up) but some of the more cerebral offerings too. To kick us off, here's Footnote, a father and son drama set in Jerusalem.

Like Zadie Smith's 2005 novel 'On Beauty', Footnote takes the insular world of academia and somehow makes it the setting for a gripping (and occasionally very funny) drama in which pride and envy threaten to destroy family ties.

If the comparison with literature feels redundant it shouldn't -- with his fourth film, Israeli writer and director Joseph Cedar has produced something with the depth and pace of a great novel, aided by a script that deservedly won the Best Screenplay Award at this year's Cannes.

At the heart of the tale are Eliezer and Uriel Shkolnik (played by Shlomo Bar Ava and Lior Ashkenazi), a father and son both working as professors in Talmudic studies at a Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Locked in a bitter academic rivalry, their relationship appears to be entirely loveless -- until they are accidentally both awarded a prestigious honour for their work.

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of Footnote is the way in which, despite its subject matter, the story rarely seems to lag. Eliezer is a silent, bitter older man whose relationships are stifled beneath the weight of his intellectual ambitions and sense of personal failure, and yet the strength of Cedar's writing means you're never more than a moment away from a powerful moment played out against the staid backdrop of university libraries, private studies and books. Lots of books.

What could have been a thoughtful but dry story of a life lost to obsession is instead beautifully paced, occasionally tense and full of surprises. When Uriel is confronted with a terrible dilemma, it is genuinely hard to tell which way he will go, and what the consequences of his actions will be. Other dramas –- Uriel's rejection of his own son, a bitter fellow academic with a grudge -– orbit the film's core relationship but still manage to feel equally engrossing.

If anything feels unsatisfactory about the story it is the role of Yehudit, the wife and mother caught in between the two warring men whose feelings we never truly understand, but it's a testament to how well we come to know the other characters that this is a consideration at all.

Footnote is a rare blend of a beautiful script married to sure-handed direction, a film that knows when to pause, when to speed up, when crank up the drama and when to play it subtle. And like a good novel, the ending leaves you itching to know more.