British film
emma.simmonds
Although I Give It a Year seems to have more than a whiff of a Richard Curtis rom-com about it, don’t be fooled as this is the debut of British writer-director Dan Mazer, the co-writer of the emphatically more outré Brüno and Borat, along with various incarnations of Ali G. Furthermore he’s lobbed Scary Movie's Anna Faris and Bridemaids' Rose Byrne into the mix. The message is thus: while it's certainly not averse to plundering the fridge for cheese, for the most part I Give It a Year puts the emphasis on broad, bawdy comedy.Hastening through the schmaltz, the film begins with a courtship Read more ...
mark.kidel
The director James Marsh has made his name as a documentarian who brilliantly blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction. Both Man on Wire and Project Nim seamlessly wove together archive and reconstruction. Although Shadow Dancer, an IRA thriller set in the early Nineties, is in many ways very stylised, it is not as needlessly overwrought as Marsh’s TV drama Red Riding, but nevertheless characterised by a cool absence of cliff-hanging narrative tension that is typical of documentary.With a script by former ITN newsman Tom Bradby, Marsh tells the grim story of Colette (Andrea Riseborough) Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Ben Wheatley’s last film Kill List was unmistakable in its moniker, aggressively advertising its deadly subject matter. Taken on title alone Sightseers suggests something more far more innocuous. Depending on your capacity for twisted thrills, you’ll get a nasty or nice surprise; the name may give no hint of the macabre but Wheatley’s third film is hardly less violent than its predecessor. It is, however, a lot funnier. Behind the façade of beauty spots and parochial quirkiness lurk “a ginger-faced man and an angry woman” - two cold-hearted killers primed to pounce. This couple don’t get mad Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Like several of Bill Naughton’s plays, Lighthearted Intercourse started life as a BBC Third Programme drama. When it was broadcast, in 1963, its title was, less provocatively, November Day. Subsequently, it was rejected for the stage by producer Binkie Beaumont, who apparently tried to get Michael Caine or Albert Finney for the lead role of Joe, considered an “Alfie-size” part by the author. “The setting might be poor, but the characters are rich, at least, so I think,” he wrote to Binkie. “A sort of high comedy in low places, yes, genuine kitchen mink.” Even Sir Bernard Miles, who was Read more ...
emma.simmonds
If in space no one can hear you scream, that’s certainly not a problem you’ll experience in a giallo sound studio. Known for their high anxiety and buckets of blood, the Italian giallos of the Sixties and Seventies gave us heinous horror, drenched in style. Directors such as Lucio Fulci, Mario Bava and Dario Argento enjoyed a reign of terror with their handsome barbarism benefitting from fantastically histrionic sounds and scores. In Berberian Sound Studio writer-director Peter Strickland takes this phenomenon as a mere starting point, following his self-financed debut Katalin Varga with Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Aside from the platinum hair and the porcelain beauty, there is no identikit Hitchcock blonde. She can be an ice-hearted femme fatale or a traumatised hysteric, or she can be Grace Kelly, a peachy embodiment of femininity whom the director enjoyed throwing in harm’s way. He would memorably do it in Rear Window, a film which he talked about to his leading lady throughout the making of Dial M for Murder.Hitchcock first saw Kelly in the same 1950 screen test which persuaded Fred Zinnemann to cast her in High Noon (1952). Whatever he saw, he deemed her ideal for Dial M for Murder (1954), a film Read more ...
Matt Wolf
There's not exactly an excess of colour in Shadow Dancer, the IRA-themed thriller that unfolds amid a bleached-out landscape of browns and greys, windswept waterfronts and drab, unwelcoming enclosures. But amid the drear, the director James Marsh (Man on Wire) has fashioned the most psychologically intricate and exciting film of the year so far and the first in a long time to restore the violent bequest of the Troubles to the cinematic primacy we associate with the likes of Cal or The Crying Game. Made all the more urgent by its gift for understatement, the movie is almost unbearably tense. Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Grace Kelly, Eva Marie Saint, Ingrid Bergman, Kim Novak, Tippi Hedren, Janet Leigh – these are only the best-known of that special breed, the Hitchcock blonde. For some reason, whether he wanted a femme fatale or a romantic accomplice or a tragic victim, Hitch liked them blonde, and preferably glacial.Like so many of the great director's traits and predilections, one can trace the template for his heroine right back to his silent movies. In 1929 Hitch made two versions of Blackmail – it is at once his first talkie and his greatest silent, and in the Czech actress Anny Ondra it features his Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Hitchcock’s penultimate film was the grubby, squirm-inducing Frenzy, and Barry Foster's depiction of the grim killer Robert Rusk is central to the disquieting aura it casts. The film’s production was problematic enough, having been cut by the BBFC before release. It also had casting problems – Michael Caine turned down the lead role. Hitchcock dismissed composer Henry Mancini from soundtrack duties after having commissioned him. Hitchcock’s first British production for two decades wasn’t an easy ride for the director or audiences.Students of London history can look to Frenzy as a time capsule Read more ...
Graham Fuller
It’s always a thrill watching The 39 Steps’ Richard Hannay (Robert Donat) doing daredevil feats on the Flying Scotsman as it speeds across the Forth Bridge, kissing a Scottish crofter’s jealously guarded wife, and bringing down the house with an inane extemporized speech at a constituency meeting.A passive ex-Canadian rancher in London, Hannay must extricate himself from a murder rap and expose a spy ring by revealing unexpected daring, physical agility, and mental resourcefulness. Wrongly suspected of murdering a Mata Hari type (Lucie Mannheim) he thought was a prostitute but had no interest Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The premiere of the newly restored version of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1929 silent classic Blackmail, outdoors at the British Museum, will go down as one of the defining moments of the London 2012 cultural extravaganza. This was a thrilling, beguiling, resonant celebration of the city and its greatest film-maker.Of the four screenings of restored Hitchcock silents in marquee venues this summer, this will be the most singular, due to Blackmail’s climactic sequence – the director’s first major set piece – taking place at the museum itself. As the glowing building loomed over the forecourt screen Read more ...
Graham Fuller
It’s impossible to think of a contemporary British director or writer-director team making six consecutive masterpieces as did Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger when they followed The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) with A Canterbury Tale (1944), I Know Where I’m Going! (1945), A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948). Not only does the industry no longer have the means to support such an iconoclastic partnership – there has never been a writer working in the mainstream national cinema as imaginative or as fertile as Pressburger and a Read more ...