London Film Festival reviews: Breathe | Battle of the Sexes | A Fantastic Woman | Ingrid Goes West

If this year’s BFI London Film Festival got off to a conventional start earlier this week with true-life tear-jerker Breathe (***), Andy Serkis’s directorial debut also showcased something that has been self-evident from his pioneering motion-capture work as an actor in The Lord of the Rings films, King Kong and the recent Planet of the Apes series: his talent for getting to the truth of a character regardless of their physical presentation on screen. Breathe tells the the story of Robin Cavendish, a polio sufferer paralysed from the neck-down by the disease at a time (the 1950s) when being being hooked up to a ventilator and effectively imprisoned on a hospital ward was the best most sufferers could hope for. Yet in focusing on the way he refused to be constrained by the condition — inventing technology to get him mobile and inventing a future for himself in the process — the film gets beyond the standard inspirational biopic template in interesting ways.