British film
James Saynor
Given that the film industry is a fairly vain business, it follows that every movie is to some extent a vanity project. So it seems churlish to describe this new Daniel Day-Lewis picture, which he co-wrote with his son, Ronan, for Ronan to direct and himself to star in, as other than a welcome return for the superman actor.
It’s eight years since Day-Lewis père was last seen on the screen (in Phantom Thread), or frankly seen anywhere else, and here the celebrated recluse plays an inland Robinson Crusoe coming to terms with the sins of the past. The film appears to be set about 20 years ago Read more ...
graham.rickson
The best Ealing comedies are surely the three darkest: specifically Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Ladykillers and The Man in the White Suit. The latter pair were helmed by Alexander Mackendrick, a cosmopolitan director who’d arrived at the studios with a thorough understanding of trends in mainstream European and American cinema.Take the final act of The Man in the White Suit: watched with the sound turned down: it’s an expressionist noir thriller, Alec Guinness’s naïve scientist Sidney Stratton pursued through the streets at night by a vengeful mob, cinematographer Douglas Slocombe making Read more ...
James Saynor
People sometimes go to the movies for the violence and maybe even for the sex. Until recently they didn’t particularly buy a ticket for the bad language, but lately, British cinema has been making this a selling point. In Wicked Little Letters (2023), profanity-laced correspondence circulated among buttoned-up Brits; now we have I Swear, based on the life of John Davidson, who almost single-handedly taught Britain about the perils and inspirations of those with Tourette syndrome (or “Tourette’s”).Where Wicked Little Letters tried to elicit a tee-hee response to a rather boring chain of Read more ...
graham.rickson
The years between 1955’s The Ladykillers and 1964’s Dr Strangelove were the years of what Sanjeev Bhaskar recently described as "peak Sellers", a period when the great comic actor rarely seemed to put a foot wrong. Two Way Stretch and Heavens Above! succeed largely because both films feature Peter Sellers alongside talented supporting casts, his performances by necessity subtler and more nuanced. Two Way Stretch (★★★★★) stands up brilliantly, Robert Day’s compact prison-set comedy, released in 1960, prefiguring La Frenais and Clement’s 70s sitcom Porridge. We first see Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
Emma Mackey might have had her breakthrough role as a teenage tough cookie in Netflix's hit Series Sex Education (2019-20223), but there is also a disarming softness in her; a balanced mix of femininity and subtly fierce determination that made her the perfect choice as Emily Brontë in Frances O'Connor's 2022 biopic about the author’s journey to womanhood.In the same year, the French-British actor starred in Death on the Nile, the second of Kenneth Branagh’s Hercule Poirot mysteries. She is currently filming a fantasy drama with JJ Abrams. But what pushes Mackey back into the centre of Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
A look at Darling on its 60th anniversary offers a sobering reality check on the "Swinging Sixties", a reminder of the fallacy of the decade’s gaiety and supposed liberation, especially for women. This attractive 4K restoration reveals the film to be a very complicated animal indeed – both in its own time and through the prism of today’s very different political correctness and gender ethics. While John Schlesinger’s "classic" plays like a scathing satire of the period, I’m not convinced that this was entirely intentional at the time, which of course makes it even more Read more ...
Graham Fuller
On leaving prison, Lollipop’s thirtyish single mum Molly discovers that reclaiming her kids from social care is akin to doing lengths in a shark-infested swimming pool teeming with naval mines. Thanks to Posy Sterling’s technically astounding performance – a whirligig of fluctuating, gut-level emotions – audience sympathy with Molly never flags. Despite her Cockney toughness, she’s a woman under the influence (of traumas galore), on the verge of a nervous breakdown, at the end of her tether.But as a frantic, flailing woman constantly going off the deep end, she harms her cause. More Read more ...
John Carvill
What constitutes a “lost classic”? I guess we can’t say it’s an oxymoron, since we readily accept the concept of “instant classic”? Either way, the “classic” aspect may be in the eye of the beholder, but “lost" is more easily quantified. Simon Perry’s slippery 1977 psychological thriller Eclipse certainly fits the bill, having languished unseen in the BFI vaults for nigh on half a century.Tom Conti plays Tom, twin brother to the deceased Geoffrey (also played by Conti), or “Big G” as he was known to everyone, including his son. Tom was present when Geoffrey died in mysterious circumstances, Read more ...
Anthony Cecil
I think The Ballad of Wallis Island is the best British romcom since I Know Where I’m Going! (1945), which it closely resembles.In the earlier film, an unexpected love affair develops on a remote Scottish island that is cut off by stormy weather. The fictional Wallis Island is off the coast of Wales, not Scotland, yet director James Griffiths makes the same poetic use of landscape that characterises the Powell and Pressburger classic. Both movies are about love and nostalgia, but whereas the primary conflict of I Know Where I’m Going! is class, the corresponding fault line in The Ballad off Read more ...
Sarah Kent
I thought I might never be able to say it’s been a great year for women artists, so forgive me for focusing solely on them.Things were kickstarted with a retrospective of Barbara Kruger (Serpentine Gallery) who uses words and images to illuminate the way language is (mis)used to cajole, bully, manipulate and lie. Having explored similar territory for 50 some years, you’d have thought the American artist would have run out of ideas. Not a bit of it. Dominating the central space was a huge screen showing Untitled (No Comment) (main picture) which explores the Orwellian soup of Read more ...
graham.rickson
That Juggernaut is as good as it is seems in hindsight to have been a happy accident. Inspired by a bomb hoax on the QE2 in 1972, the producers fired two directors (Bryan Forbes and Don Taylor) in succession before hiring Richard Lester in desperation. His quest to salvage Juggernaut in a just a few weeks mirrors events in the film, its protagonists attempting to defuse a set of bombs planted in the bowels of a transatlantic liner.Lester’s masterstroke was to call in Alan Plater to help him rewrite the original script, the end result as much a political thriller as a disaster movie, following Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Oblong Box is a phantom 1969 follow-up to Michael Reeves’ Witchfinder General, sharing star Vincent Price and much cast and crew, after the brilliant young British director’s OD forced his dismissal days before shooting. It also began replacement Gordon Hessler and co-writer Christopher Wicking’s own Price-starring horror sequence, notably the bizarre, Mod anti-fascist Scream and Scream Again (1970), placing this obscure film at a packed cult crossroads.Witchfinder General’s savage account of Matthew Hopkins’ 17th century East Anglian rampage had been dragooned into AIP’s Poe-Price cycle Read more ...