British film
Matt Wolf
A splendid cast struggle to make something coherent out of Wicked Little Letters, the latest film from Thea Sharrock who not that long ago was one of the hottest theatre directors in town.Sharrock's proven skill onstage with thesps ranging from Benedict Cumberbatch to Kevin Spacey may explain the starry assemblage on view down the line, but no amount of Olivier and Oscar winners - or, in Eileen Atkins, a Dame - can concoct a satisfying whole that often plays like an Alan Bennett caprice run amok: an enquiry into Englishness that trades more than it really needs to in affixing potty-mouthed Read more ...
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 ...
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 ...
James Saynor
You don’t have to be a casting director to know that Britain has a remarkable reservoir of unstarry middle-aged actors who might, just occasionally, get top spot in a movie – Joanna Scanlon in the wondrous After Love (2020) being an excellent example. Now we have Maggie O’Neill, veteran of TV shows like Shameless, Peak Practice and EastEnders, who takes the lead in this equally likeable effort by writer-director Leo Leigh.It’s an ambling, facetious character-piece about hopeless classless numpties going round in circles, a film with surprisingly zero dud notes for a first-time moviemaker. Read more ...
Kristin M Jones
“Nothing is stronger than true love,” a young laird says to a headstrong young woman in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s I Know Where I’m Going! (1945), his voice heard above the sounds of wind and waves. She replies, “No, nothing.”Even as they are in danger of drowning in the same way, he is recounting a legend in which a prince is doomed to death in the whirlpool Corryvreckan. Mystical forces are woven through the film, and all conspire to help love conquer materialism.Powell and Pressburger began work on I Know Where I’m Going! after they postponed making A Matter of Life and Death Read more ...
Nick Hasted
There’s a thread of bright magic running through British cinema, from Powell and Pressburger through Nic Roeg, Derek Jarman and Lynne Ramsay, and it’s wrapped around Jarman’s last home like fisherman’s rope.His friend and collaborator Tilda Swinton called Prospect Cottage a charged place, acting as a battery for artists. It is particularly so this weekend, as the BFI’s Powell and Pressburger season sparks the first art made here since Jarman’s death in 1994. Powell + Pressburger: In Prospero’s Room draws on an obscure but profound connection. Jarman adapted Shakespeare’s The Tempest in 1979, Read more ...
James Saynor
This seems to be a season for films majoring on bisexuality, with the awards round encompassing Ira Sachs’s Passages, Bradley Cooper’s Maestro and Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, a story of high-class high jinks in a modern twist on Evelyn’s Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.Saltburn describes the bad education of an awkward young man, played by the electric Irish actor Barry Keoghan, at an English stately home, and follows in the path of those other two films in not giving bisexuality an especially good name. At least in Brideshead it was allowed a subtle nod and presented as a rite of passage, but Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Molly Manning Walker surprised herself by winning the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes this year with her rites-of-passage feature, How to Have Sex. Why the surprise? It’s a compelling debut.For the first five minutes, you might decide you won’t stay the course without earplugs, or a lobotomy. Before we see anything, the soundtrack is of a landing announcement that’s struggling against the din of a plane-load of raucous young partygoers, ready for the off. Walker deployed a huge cast to populate the hotel pools and clubs of Malia in Crete, but we are trapped at first in a taxi with three Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Alfred Hitchcock and Michael Powell are, almost certainly, Britain’s greatest directors. Hitchcock was slightly older, and entered the film business earlier; in fact, Powell worked as a stills photographer on Hitchcock’s Champagne and Blackmail, in the late Twenties, shortly before making his own films.And by the time Powell had entered his partnership with Emeric Pressburger, with The Spy in Black, in 1939, "Hitch" was on his way to Hollywood; while his career became international, Powell’s would, with the more English than the English émigré Pressburger by his side, Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Michael Powell fell in love with his celluloid mistress in 1921 when he was 16. It’s a love affair that he’s conducted for 65 years. At 81, he’s not stopped dreaming of getting behind the camera again. At Cannes this year he hinted at plans to make a silent horror film, but he’s reluctant to talk about it.I met Powell in his club, accompanied by his son Columba. It’s quite an uncanny experience seeing the two of them together in real life, so clearly warm and comfortable with each other. I’m familiar with them onscreen in Peeping Tom, made in 1960 when Columba was a child. He took Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
Nobody ever forgets The Red Shoes (1948) because it’s a movie that seems to change the way an audience experiences cinema. A story about a diverse group of individuals collaborating to make art, the film is itself a wonderful example of the process.With the help of the painter Hein Heckroth and the composer Brian Easland, both of whom won Oscars for their work on the film – not to mention Robert Helpmann’s almost Freudian choreography – Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger combined words and images and music and movement to produce a “total artwork” that illuminates the unconscious as well Read more ...