England
Matt Wolf
"Get out!" The order, spoken some way into the third and final episode of Channel 5's entry into the Tudor drama sweepstakes, Anne Boleyn, certainly seizes one's attention. Not only is our doomed heroine snapping under pressure on the way to one of history's most-chronicled deaths, but her command to Thomas Cromwell marks one of the very few times across nearly three largely prosaic hours that Jodie Turner-Smith, in the title role, raises her voice. For most of the rest of the director Lynsey Miller's retread of this time-honoured story, Turner-Smith speaks in an often coy, whispery purr Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“The Changingman” came to sound a little rich in the years after it introduced Stanley Road, as Weller settled into a style which grew atrophied enough to define “Dadrock”. The alias fits these days, though, as the man who pulled the plug on The Jam with a brace of Surrey soul anthems then blew up The Style Council with a house album again exemplifies the Mod aesthetic. Productively sober since 2010, he’s looking sharp in every sense, alert and precise, and turning his Black Barn studio into a pop artisan’s workshop, producing crafted English pop almost round the clock.Fat Pop (Volume 1) is Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Nancy Mitford's 1945 literary sensation looks poised to be the TV talking point of the season, assuming the first episode of The Pursuit of Love sustains its utterly infectious energy through two hours still to come. Adapted and directed by the actress Emily Mortimer, who has given herself a plum supporting role as an errant mother known as "the Bolter", the between-the-war three-parter is off to a galloping and giddy start, as if taking its cue from the breathless Linda (Lily James) at its ever-pulsating heart. The course of true love may not run smooth, to co-opt a line from a Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Enid Bagnold’s 1955 English play The Chalk Garden, a Broadway hit before it opened in the West End, is usually described as a comedy because of Bagnold’s acerbic dialogue and droll appreciation of intricate employer-servant dynamics. If most of the wit was polished out of the 1964 version, directed by Ronald Neame and scored by Malcolm Arnold in a high-blown romantic style, that only served to emphasize the psychological complexity of the relationships between its three strong women characters. No one could accuse Neame's film of modishness. An Anglo-American melodrama produced by Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
The website of the National Crime Agency offers the following definition of County Lines: “[it is] where illegal drugs are transported from one area to another, often across police and local authority boundaries (although not exclusively), usually by children or vulnerable people who are coerced into it by gangs. The ‘County Line’ is the mobile phone line used to take the orders of drugs.” This definition does not feature in County Lines (2019), Henry Blake’s first film of feature-length, newly released on Blu-ray and DVD. Nevertheless, it does hold a conceptual relevance for this Read more ...
Tom Baily
The Drifters remakes the romance crime genre by placing the main themes of rebellion and freedom in the context of the race and migration divisions of present day Britain. It is a noble mission for a debut by British director Benjamin Bond. Sadly, this film never gets close to succeeding in either developing a unique aesthetic, or engaging robustly in politics.We begin in an English language class in London, where the Parisian waitress Fanny (Lucie Bourdeu) and African migrant Koffee (Jonathan Ajayi) meet and quickly fall in love. They are both escaping pasts of suffering. Fanny has a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It can't be easy maintaining dignity when everyone in your vicinity is losing theirs. But that's the position in which the inimitable Judi Dench finds herself in Six Minutes to Midnight, a bewildering movie in which star and co-author, Eddie Izzard, spends a lot of time running hither and yon even as the film itself refuses to budge.Based on the tantalising existence of an English finishing school for daughters of German higher-ups and the like that shut its doors in 1939 just prior to England's entry into World War Two, the director Andy Goddard's quasi-thriller suggests The Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Nick Broomfield made his first film 50 years ago, and his career over those five decades (and some three dozen works) has been as distinctive, and distinguished as that of any British documentary maker. It has ranged from early films on British social themes, through overseas journeys, often around America and more extreme subjects such as penal incarceration (1982’s Tattooed Tears, his first work outside England, and his studies of serial killer Aileen Wuornos on death row) but also his including his remarkable 1991 The Leader, His Driver and the Driver’s Wife about the white South African Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
“They think it’s all drugs and sex up here, Mrs H.” “Bless me.” The reality, at Kitchenly Mill Race, runs more to a nice pot of Tetley’s and a plate of Gypsy Creams. But “people are funny around famous folk”. At this Tudor manor house in Sussex – boldly enhanced in the 1930s by an Arts-and-Crafts wing – resides none other than Marko Morrell, lead guitarist of prog-rock legends Fear Taker. Or rather, he doesn’t, save for the odd impromptu overnighter with his lofty Danish consort Auralie and little daughter Molly, being otherwise engaged with his Chelsea townhouse, his Manhattan recording Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Man’s strange relationship with other species haunts this freaky simian horror film from Psycho II director Richard Franklin. Terence Stamp is Dr Phillips, an archetypal, lab-coated mad scientist, grumpily testing the limits of ape intelligence, and Elisabeth Shue zoology student Jane, unwisely offering help at his remote Gothic mansion, where the most developed ape, Link, is his besuited butler and begrudging factotum.There’s something of The Island of Dr Moreau in Phillips’ arrogant, eventually overthrown genetic tyranny. “He’s missed the bus by a lousy 1%!” he rails at the apes’ shortfall Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Sure, Roald Dahl wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory but is that any excuse for a film quite so saccharine? He of all challenging and complex men, with a temperament to match, seems an odd subject for the sort of weightless, paint-by-numbers biopic that would be hard-pressed to muster much attention even as TV filler on a particularly dead night.As it is, made for the screen on what would appear to be astonishingly modest means (let's just say that Hollywood has rarely looked less convincing), this reckoning of Dahl's stormy first marriage to the Oscar-winning American actress Patricia Read more ...
Joe Muggs
It’s odd that there’s still no name for the wave of genre-agnostic British bands of the '00s. Not manic enough to be nu rave, way too interesting for the retro-guitar nu rock revolution / landfill indie tsunami, the likes of Hot Chip, Metronomy, Friendly Fires, Simian and the super-louche Wild Beasts between them mapped out a new area of psychedelic pop. And into this in 2009 came the Scottish / Northern Irish / English band Django Django, a perfect fit into this unnamed movement with their winsome melodies and ability to fold everything from psyche-folk to acid house to rockabilly into their Read more ...