British film
Adam Sweeting
Guy Ritchie enjoyed his greatest commercial success with 2019’s live-action fantasy Aladdin, the most atypical project of his career, but The Gentlemen finds him back on his best-known turf as a purveyor of mouthy, ultra-violent geezerism. It’s 21 years since his debut hit with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, but its shaggy-dog story-telling and spirit of high-wire anarchy resurface intact.In time-honoured fashion, Ritchie has assembled a cast which looks a bit weird on paper but pays handsome dividends. Matthew McConaughey’s arrival in Ritchie-land is announced by him striding into the Read more ...
Graham Fuller
British cinema has done so badly by Christmas that the revival of a film that parses the nature of the festival while mining its potential for sparking family strife is cause for celebration. Long neglected, The Holly and the Ivy (1952) has been handsomely restored by StudioCanal and deserves to become a seasonal staple alongside Scrooge (1951), Comfort and Joy (1984), and the BBC adaptation of Alan Ayckbourn’s Season’s Greetings (1986), which is currently available on YouTube only. The Holly and the Ivy was adapted by Anatole de Grunwald from Wynyard Brown’s West End hit. Set on Read more ...
Owen Richards
For an actor, there are few bigger risks than writing and directing your own film. Securing funding is pretty easy if you’re a household name, like Karen Gillan is, but that doesn’t mean your script is any good or your vision holds water. At their worst, these films can be vain and embarrassing affairs. At their best, you’re left wondering if there’s anything their star can’t do. The Party’s Just Beginning puts Gillan very firmly in the latter camp.Set in her hometown of Inverness, Gillan stars as Liusaidh (pronounced Lucy for the non-Gaelic readers), a supermarket cheesemonger haunted by Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Game of Thrones’ Emilia Clarke stars in this awkward but sweet Yuletide romcom as Kate, a chaotic, George Michael obsessed twenty-something in London who’s lost her way following a serious illness. A failed singer, she works in an all-year Christmas shop dressed as an elf, while alienating family, friends and long-suffering boss (Michelle Yeoh) with her boorish behaviour. The clouds lift with the appearance of bicycle courier Tom (Henry Golding, of Crazy Rich Asians), who begins to soften her cynical, self-loathing shell. But is he too good to be true? Given that this is co- Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Wild Rose director Tom Harper blends fact with fiction in a charming Victorian ballooning adventure that reunites Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones for the first time since The Theory of Everything.Redmayne gives an earnest performance as the real-life James Glaisher, an aspiring aeronaut who aims to vie with the mutton-chopped scientific community by soaring higher than anyone has ever gone before. However, Jones steals the show as Amelia Wren, Glaisher’s derring-do pilot. A fictional wealthy widow, she has little interest in petticoats and doilies, preferring to soar through the heavens, Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
If the recent period of British history that has involved recession, austerity, the hostile environment and Brexit is to have chroniclers, who better than Ken Loach and his trusty screenwriter Paul Laverty. Their blend of carefully researched social realism and nail-biting melodrama is angry, shaming, essential. Only the coldest-hearted bureaucrat or corporate heel could leave the cinema dry-eyed.Having exposed a merciless welfare system in I, Daniel Blake, they now turn their attention to the gig economy, that nefarious conceit that sounds funky yet allows public services to be Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Putting a radical spin on a fish-out-of-water story, The Last Tree explores troubling aspects of the African diaspora experience in an England riddled with xenophobia and black-on-black racism. Shola Amoo’s semi-autobiographical second feature is distanced from Brexit by its early 2000s time frame, but its young protagonist’s identity issues speak to the current moment.The film begins with a sunlit idyll in the Lincolnshire countryside. An 11-year-old British Nigerian, Femi (Tai Golding) runs around outdoors and gets “all over mud” with his three schoolmates – but for the colour of his skin Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Seeing post-war London in vibrant colour is a delicious surprise, and the opening seconds of A Kid for Two Farthings follow a pigeon flying east from Trafalgar Square, eventually settling on a pub sign in Petticoat Lane. The location footage in Carol Reed’s first colour film, from 1955, is eye-popping, his cast mixing seamlessly with everyday market folk. Matthew Coniam’s booklet notes to this handsome BFI reissue reveal that a fake camera crew was deployed to distract from the real shooting. Reed mixes reality with nicely stylised studio sets: look out for the miniature tube train trundling Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Don’t Look Now is beautiful in its dankness – an eldritch psychological thriller that follows a grieving father’s stream-of-consciousness as it flows into deadly waters. Time Out 's critics have been magnanimous in twice voting Nicolas Roeg's 1973 film Britain's greatest, but it sustains its power as a modernist conundrum. Spiffed up in 4K and Ultra HD for the four-disc set, it's one of 2019's homevideo treats.Allan Scott and Chris Bryant adapted the screenplay from a short story published as part of a Daphne du Maurier collection in 1971. Wearing a shiny red plastic mac, Christine, the Read more ...
Saskia Baron
This gothic yarn set in 1850s Snowdonia stars Maxine Peake as Elen. She’s left alone with two young daughters to manage an isolated farm when her husband goes off to war. Mysterious omens – a sheep’s heart filled with nails festoons the farm door – and ghostly shadows in the night all conspire to alarm her older daughter. Gwen (Eleanor Worthington-Cox) begins to doubt that her strict mother has the ability to keep her children safe, especially when Elen starts to have seizures. There’s no help from neighbours or the church and it becomes clear that the local slate mine owner is Read more ...
Ewa Banaszkiewicz and Mateusz Dymek
Spoiler alert: About sixty-four minutes into our debut feature film, one of the main female characters undresses for the camera. Alicja is being filmed by the other protagonist, a young American documentarian named Katie. As the sexually charged long take progresses, it becomes apparent that what started out as an erotic provocation (catering to Katie’s palpable attraction to her) gradually descends into Alicja’s traumatic memory of sexual abuse. Despite the disturbing situation unfolding in front of her, Katie continues recording, and we – as the audience watching through her lens – become Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The price of fame and the value of artistic truth are among the topics probed in Danny Boyle’s irresistible comedy, a beguiling magical mystery tour of an upside-down world where The Beatles suddenly never existed. Richard Curtis’s screenplay features some of his characteristic trademarks, not least the protagonist’s slapstick sidekick Rocky the roadie, but it’s illuminated by his fascination with popular music and the emotional resonance it carries.The premise (Jack Barth gets a credit for “story”) is that the entire world has suffered a mysterious power blackout for 12 seconds, and when the Read more ...