British film
Helen Hawkins
In the current reappraisal of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, what to make of the depiction of women in their key films, that striking tribe of Isoldes with chestnut hair and passionate natures?Powell (1905-90), a man of Kent whose love for his actors was apparently without limits, could be a dictatorial director who, by his own admission, used shock tactics on set to get what he wanted. Whereas Pressburger (1902-88) was a conservative Hungarian who preferred women to be silent partners: “anti-feminist” was Powell’s term for him.Yet between them, and factoring in the upheavals of the Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Announcing “A Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger production” or, alternatively “A Production of the Archers”, an arrow thuds into the centre of a roundel. Whether in black and white or colour, that famous rubric not only conflates the auras of Robin Hood and the Royal Air Force, but issues a warning you’re about to get a shot in the eye. The critic Ian Christie, one of Powell and Pressburger’s earliest champions, wrote in “Arrows of Desire” (1985), his second book on the great writer-director-producer duo, that the logo (pictured below) was “a promise of ‘real film magic’ for forties Read more ...
graham.rickson
Gregory’s Girl stands alongside Kes as one of the few films offering a realistic depiction of state school life. Director Bill Forsyth’s surreal flourishes delight without getting in the way: think of the penguin waddling along the corridors, or the young lad glimpsed smoking a pipe in the boys’ toilets.That Gregory’s Girl exists at all feels like a happy accident; Forsyth’s background was in making low-key documentaries on Scottish subjects and his friendship with John Baraldi, founder of the Glasgow Youth Theatre, prompted him to write the script. When a BFI funding application was rejected Read more ...
James Saynor
This modest British dramedy is billed as a “heart-warming story of friendship and survival set against the backdrop of the 2001 Foot and Mouth outbreak”. That’s perhaps not the first catastrophe we associate with that fateful year, but it was a grim event in its own way: a livestock epidemic that led to the culling of countless farm animals across Britain.The film wears its over-warm heart on a rather thin sleeve but seems to have an intrepid background: it’s adapted from a play that won a writing competition at a small Battersea theatre in 2014 And it’s hard to be critical of first-time Read more ...
Saskia Baron
It’s the summer holidays, and though Georgie (Lola Campbell) is only 12, she’s managing to keep her council house looking just the way her mum liked it. There may be a few spiders hanging around but they have names and personalities and there’s food in the cupboard, even if it’s been paid for from the proceeds of selling the bikes Georgie has stolen. Though her mother died recently, social services aren’t too fussed as they believe her uncle is looking after her. They don’t think it’s odd that he’s called Winston Churchill, or that when they phone to check up, he answers their Read more ...
Justine Elias
Medusa is having a moment. From Natalie Haynes’ feminist novel to the recent Brazilian horror movie, the beleaguered, beheaded, snake-haired monstress of Greek myth rises again, and again, as a symbol of female rage and resistance.Now comes Medusa Deluxe, a stylish, comedic murder mystery set at a hairdressing competition. Keep a close eye on those scissors: the struggle to control hair (real and fake), “the crown you never take off”, has already turned deadly as the film begins.Though one of the top contenders, the never-seen Mosca, has turned up dead – scalped! – at his stylist’s chair, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Fridtjof Ryder’s debut feature made a strong impression at last year’s London Film Festival, and its cinema release ought to give the Gloucester-born director’s career a hefty shove in the right direction. Although that doesn’t mean that Inland is an especially easy-viewing experience.Ryder, who was only 20 when he shot the film in 2020, deals in silences and absences. There isn’t much of a narrative, more of a cracked mosaic of memories, impressions and lurking anxiety, but Inland builds a powerful atmosphere of loss and brokenness. The photography is ominous and watchful. Events seem to Read more ...
mark.kidel
The recently-departed director Mike Hodges was one of our most underrated filmmakers. Along with Get Carter (1971), a dark story of revenge starring Michael Caine, Croupier (1998) – newly released on 4K Ultra HD – is one of the most fascinating and superbly crafted films of late 20th century British cinema. It’s so good, at many different levels, that it bears watching over and over again.Written by the British-born Hollywood screenwriter Paul Mayersberg, it tells the story of an aspiring novelist who uses his background in casino work and his engagement as a dealer in a London gambling house Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Greg Urbanski, Gary Oldman’s long-term producing partner, tells us on the commentary track that no film company wanted to touch the script of Nil by Mouth. Oldman was riding high as an actor in 1996, renowned for his shape-shifting performances as Sid Vicious and Joe Orton in the UK, and Lee Harvey Oswald, Beethoven and Dracula in the US. But moving into the director’s seat was seen as career suicide, especially with Oldman’s highly personal screenplay about working class family life in South London lacking star names. Luc Besson, who had had a big hit with Oldman in Leon Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Give Them Wings is the biopic of Paul Hodgson, who seven months after he was born in 1965 was diagnosed with meningococcal meningitis. If that wasn’t bad enough, he survived his precarious childhood to become a devout fan of Durham’s hapless Darlington FC – it’s criminal that this low-budget British indie wasn’t titled Give Them Wingers.An ex-civil servant and now a screenwriter and producer, Hodgson has spent his life confined to a wheelchair and hampered by a speech impediment. Directed by onetime Bond heavy Sean Cronin (who cast himself as a football thug), the film version of Hodgson’s Read more ...
mark.kidel
Director Mike Hodges's Get Carter (1971) has been praised as the best British gangster film. I would go even further, and put it up against the best gangster films of all time, on the same level as Lang’s The Big Heat (1953), Melville’s Le deuxième souffle (1966), Boorman’s Point Blank (1967), Polanski’s Chinatown (1974) and Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990).Watching it again after many years, I was struck by how it continues to feel fresh and original Indeed, still ahead of its time, not least because of Wolfgang Suschitzky’s documentary-style location shooting and intimacy with the action Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A birthday weekend in Devon goes rather badly wrong in All My Friends Hate Me, the new film co-written by its leading man, Tom Stourton, that looks guaranteed to make shut-ins of us all.The antithesis of the warm-and-fuzzy gatherings proffered onscreen over the years by the likes of Kenneth Branagh and Richard Curtis, Andrew Gaynord's film directing debut is compulsively watchable, in an increasingly grim way. But I'm sure I wasn't the only one wondering somewhere past the midway point why the likeable-enough Pete (Stourton) doesn't just cut his losses and drive away.The character's name can' Read more ...