Film
Graham Fuller
The hefty Essex builder Keith Martin, who plays a version of himself, as do most of the non-professional actors in Mark Isaacs' comic docufiction This Blessed Plot, is no Olivier or Branagh. But he puts brio and a touch of bombast into the dying John of Gaunt’s famous monologue lauding his ailing England in Richard II.Keith (also a fence builder in Isaacs’ 2020 The Filmmaker’s House) performs the speech before the camera held by the protagonist Lori (Lori Yingge Yang), a young Chinese documentarist who has come to Thaxted to improvise a film.A former anthropology student of Isaac, Lori Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
In Présages, Joanna Hogg talks about ghosts. This short film from 2023, commissioned by the Pompidou Centre, is included as one of the special features in the new BFI Blu-ray release of Hogg's intensely atmospheric The Eternal Daughter, with its virtuoso performance from Tilda Swinton in a dual role. Other special features include a Q&A with Hogg, Swinton and Francine Stock.In LA, Hogg says, where she’s shooting Présages in preparation for a film she’s planning there, the constant regeneration of the city “creates the layers of ghosts, the reverberations of the past.” And she recounts an Read more ...
Matt Wolf
How many re-tellings can Alice Walker's The Color Purple take? A helluva lot, as the candid Sofia, one of the work's seminal characters, might put it.Adapted by Steven Spielberg for the screen in 1985, and then as a Broadway musical that had two entirely different (and lauded) runs, the story of a Southern Black woman's self-empowerment across nearly 40 years is a movie once again, this time drawing on the stage musical and carrying over several alumnae from that show – leading lady Fantasia Barrino included. Fantasia, as the then single-monikered talent was known at the time, took over Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Andrew Haigh’s films come at you like stealth bombers, presenting everyday scenes in a spare narrative style, and then using them to blitz you with unexpected emotions. His latest is no exception. It starts with the familiar sight of a thirtysomething writer, Adam (Andrew Scott), in a modish high-rise flat, staring at his laptop screen, thoughts and typing fingers frozen, with the lights of London spread out below him. Then an alarm sounds, and he wearily makes his way down to the tower block’s designated meeting point outside. Where there is nobody to meet. Eerily, he seems to be the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Wax lyrical about the contents of a British Transport Films short and you might start sounding like a Daily Mail columnist, railing about things being better back in the day. On the evidence of this 15th volume in the BFI’s anthology series, many things clearly were. Take 1969’s Multiple Aspects, which shows engineers remodelling the lines leading into Paddington Station, the work completed on time, and presumably on budget, in exactly five weeks. Though it’s disconcerting to watch the workers slaving away without hi-vis jackets or protective headgear, just inches away from passing trains, as Read more ...
Saskia Baron
The End We Start From couldn’t be more timely, opening in cinemas after weeks of heavy rain and flooding dominated UK news. But the film’s release has also coincided with the ITV police drama After the Flood and it’s too tempting to compare the two. Both feature pregnant women dealing with the traumas of delivery for the first time; the waters break both in macro and microcosm. After the Flood has too much plot – it’s one of those crime dramas in a small Yorkshire town where everyone, from the pregnant police officer (Sophie Rundle) to her activist mum ( Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Twenty years ago Alexander Payne put Paul Giamatti on the map in Sideways; here he is again, as another punctilious expert, this time not in the field of viniculture but plain old culture, of the old-fashioned classical kind. And his adversary is not a roguish friend but a spiky pupil at the boys’ school in New England where he teaches classics. It’s a masterclass in meshing screenwriting, acting, cinematography and music direction in a seamless blend. The script, by David Hemingson, takes an old trope – the curmudgeonly teacher versus the bright but wayward student – and gives Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“It’s an injustice of nature that I haven’t become an athlete and it’s an injustice of nature that we do not have wings,” says German director Werner Herzog, aged 81, sounding characteristically intense.Who else, muses Wim Wenders, one of the many talking heads in Thomas von Steinaeker’s exhilarating documentary, has succeeded in “inventing” their own accent in a way that the whole world imitates and enjoys? Herzog is a “truly mythological creature” and has, he says, shaped the American perception of Germans like no one else. Though no one else is quite like Herzog.His films – he’s the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
When it was published in 1976, “The Hite Report” caused such a sensation that it was translated into 19 languages and flew off the shelves in 36 countries to become the 30th best selling book of all time. Yet it’s author, Shere Hite was treated as Public Enemy Number One.Her crime? To reveal truths about female sexuality that American men didn’t want to hear. So they conspired to vilify and silence her. They were so successful in their mission and her fall from grace so complete that, fast forward 20 odd years, and not a single New York publisher would give her a book deal.Nicole Newnham’s Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Seabiscuit, Creed, Rocky, The Full Monty, Chariots of Fire… George Clooney’s latest directorial project is in the same vein as these earlier films, but swap Seabiscuit et al for a rowing eight. All have a format film-makers love because they know it will jerk a tear from anybody who loves a saga about an underdog, especially if it’s true. The Boys in the Boat is based on a 2013 bestselling account by David James Brown (co-writer on the film) of the US rowing eight’s bid for glory at the Berlin Olympics in 1936. The date is significant because the historical context allows the boys in the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Following their award-scooping collaboration on 2018’s The Favourite, Emma Stone and director Yorgos Lanthimos return with this mind-bending adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s eponymous novel. Also on board is screenwriter Tony McNamara, who wrote (with Deborah Davis) The Favourite’s screenplay. You might say lightning has struck twice, with Stone collecting the Best Female Actor award at the recent Golden Globes and the film winning for Best Musical or Comedy. More mantelpiece-adornments seem certain to follow.But while it’s not a musical (though it has music in it), is it a comedy? It’s Read more ...
graham.rickson
Margaret Thatcher’s witless assertion that “there is no such thing as society” dates back to 1987; Ken Loach’s The Old Oak offers a belated but powerful rebuttal.His film highlights several discrete societies coexisting in a depressed Durham mining village. We meet a group of ex-miners who eke out pints in the titular pub, frustrated that the terraced houses they struggled to buy are now being bought up for a pittance by property companies. And there’s the coachload of Syrians who pitch up in the opening scenes, greeted with a mixture of bewilderment and open hostility. In between are people Read more ...