British film
Jasper Rees
Chocolat, a film about chocolate addiction, was extremely sweet. Trainspotting, a film about drug addiction, was wired and hip. Shame, a film about sex addiction, assaults you with wave upon wave of tristesse.When Sarah Kent reviewed the theatrical release for theartsdesk, she found in it a stereotypical joyride secretly in love with the thing it deplores. Those aren’t the colours this male reviewer takes away from the fractured relationship between sex addict Brandon (Michael Fassbender), a pump-action Adonis running on emptiness, and his sister Sissy, a brittle, wandering chanteuse (Carey Read more ...
emma.simmonds
If you’re game for a galling statistic, here’s one that’s guaranteed to stun: at present, only 14 per cent of British films released in the UK are directed by women. If that seems oddly as well as infuriatingly low, it’s probably because so many of the brightest and boldest British film-makers of recent years, from Lynne Ramsay to Lucy Walker, are women – women who it seems are exceptions as well as being exceptional. These towering talents, it could be said, give the impression that opportunities for women behind the camera are at a high, rather than being persistently paltry. And so it’s Read more ...
emma.simmonds
The poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow once wrote, “It is difficult to know at what moment love begins; it is less difficult to know that it has begun.” Andrew Haigh’s superb second feature may or may not give us the precise moment but it certainly does capture the thrill of forging a soulful connection, alongside the apprehension and difficulty of allowing oneself to fall. In Weekend, the focal romance is shown to be both ordinary and extraordinary as it rises from the ashes of a one-night stand.Based in Nottingham and taking place (as the title suggests) over a single weekend, it’s a semi- Read more ...
emma.simmonds
With its near-simultaneous cinema and DVD release ringing alarm bells to rival Big Ben, The Decoy Bride takes talent and stuffs it into a GM turkey of a film. This insincere romantic comedy from director Sheree Folkson is replete with wobbly accents, head-slapping clichés, cardboard characters, preposterous plot developments, all flanked by a distractingly dire TV movie score. That it’s such a shambles will be a particular disappointment to (the innumerable) fans of David Tennant, for whom this represents his first filmic foray as romantic lead.Writers Sally Phillips and Neil Jaworski give us Read more ...
emma.simmonds
In Susan Hill’s 1982 novel The Woman in Black, the protagonist Arthur Kipps concludes his narration with petulant certainty: “They asked for my story. I have told it. Enough.” With this film adaptation (an exercise in hair-raising horror, in contrast to the book’s chill grandeur and the play’s postmodern whimsy), director James Watkins clearly feels there is more to say and, though he often says it with style, it’s a film that sometimes lacks guts. As its daring do-gooder, it features boy wonder Daniel Radcliffe, now a man and here a father who, in his continued battle against evil, is hardly Read more ...
Graham Fuller
My Top 10 movies of 2011, in order, are: Mysteries of Lisbon, Melancholia, Meek’s Cutoff, A Dangerous Method, Aurora, Hugo, The Princess of Montpensier, City of Life and Death, The Descendants, Midnight in Paris.While I couldn't sneak a British title onto that list, it seems to me that UK film is flourishing for the first time since the false dawn of the 1980s. It would be folly to suggest a renaissance is afoot, but it's clearly an exciting time. Lynne Ramsey, who should be making a movie annually, returned after a nine-year hiatus with Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Many have dismissed 2011 as cinematically something of a disappointment, but while close inspection may have identified more cubic zirconia than bona fide diamonds, the year glittered nevertheless. The showstopping Mysteries of Lisbon was undoubtedly the real deal - what a teasing, sumptuous and gorgeously strange film that was (even with a running time in excess of four hours). Iranian domestic drama, A Separation, was similarly sublime - if less grand - and French silent (yes, silent) comedy The Artist (pictured below right) had hard-faced movie scribes grinning idiotically at the year’s Read more ...
Jasper Rees
British film-makers tend towards bipolarity. Where French cinema is broadly speaking about the middle classes, we tend to get films about one thing or the other. The national fixation with the past supplies stories about how the nabobs of yore lived (and, as importantly, dressed). But from Ken Loach onwards, British directors of another cadre have always had a real feel for the street, for that tranche of society which bumps along with nothing, where substance abuse is the rule rather than the exception. Such a film, more or less, is Junkhearts.Tinge Krishnan’s big-screen debut as a director Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Chris New’s nervy intensity is the big news in Weekend, an intermittently affecting British film that ought to bring this terrific theatre actor (he played Alan Cumming's lover in his breakthrough role in Bent) to a larger audience on screen. Playing one half of an incipient duo who are busy negotiating what this still-fledgling couple might mean both to one another and to themselves, New offers up a study in restlessness shot through with charisma that is astonishingly complete – so much so that you want to know far more about his character, Glen, than a contrastingly Read more ...
Jasper Rees
This is the kind of film you would very much like to like. It’s a low-budget British effort with a perfectly decent cast who are all easy on the eye. It makes the most of the windswept Isle of Man, where so many films just take advantage of tax breaks while pretending they’re in Barbados. You would like to like it. Unfortunately, as with so many low-budget British films, it just doesn’t come up to the mark.Years ago, when single dramas still proliferated on terrestrial television, Albatross would have been a perfectly acceptable, slightly lightweight Screen Two. With that door now slammed Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Because Humphrey Jennings was a director of documentaries, he is never spoken of in the same breath as the greatest British directors of the past - Chaplin, Hitchcock, Powell, Lean and Reed. Another reason is that his career was short, compressed into the 16 years before his death at 43 in 1950 from a cliff fall in Poros, Greece, where he was scouting locations for a film about postwar healthcare in Europe. Yet Jennings was a visionary whose best films were touched with oddness and poetry - he was a poet and a painter, a champion of Surrealism - and chronicled more movingly than any Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Treacle Jr is a cautionary tale of the fragility of UK film careers. Writer-director Jamie Thraves’s debut The Low Down (2000) is still regarded as a minor classic, but he took nine years to follow it up, then remortgaged his house to make this third film.He surely risked his home from a need to bring the film’s odd couple to life. Tom (Tom Fisher) is one of those men who walk out for the paper and don’t come back, nameless anxiety driving him from his young family and comfortable Birmingham home. Taking the train to London, he feels free for a while in a sunny park. He becomes homeless in Read more ...