England
James Saynor
Life in Tudor times is a gift that keeps giving to film and TV people, even if the history has to be bent a little for things to make sense to contemporary audiences – Elizabeth (1998) and A Man for All Seasons (1966) being two of the more successful examples of such retrofitting of the past.Filmmakers usually try to frame someone back then as a modern protagonist with a modern agenda, even though few of those old-timers can be photoshopped into that. So here comes Katherine Parr, the sixth wife of Henry VIII, presented as something of a pre-potato feminist icon in Firebrand, a movie from Read more ...
graham.rickson
Though among the most successful film comedians of the early sound era, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy’s cinematic partnership had actually started in the early 1920s. It’s easy to overlook their silent short films, 15 of which are collected here.The oldest, 1921’s Lucky Dog, is an entertaining curio, a starring vehicle for Laurel’s Keatonesque naif with Ollie in a subordinate role as a hapless thug. Stan’s athleticism is impressive, whether he’s being struck by a streetcar or sneaking into a dog show on all fours, and there’s a winning turn from the titular canine. Both actors signed contracts Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
I had been softened up for the Medicine Festival by a recent visit to the global music extravaganza WOMAD – a trio of us met a guy called Paul aka SpriITman – an ex-IT expert who after a health crisis realised he was a healer. Bear with me on this.All three of us, no spring chickens, had health issues. I had been hospitalised for a couple of nights after a bad bike crash and couldn’t sleep on my shoulder, one of us had bad skin problems on her hands, and other had a damaged knee. After some magic from SpirITman, all three of us were essentially cured. Sleeping was ok again, hand more or less Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Before a word is spoken, a pause held, we hear the seagulls squawking outside, see the (let’s say brown) walls that remind you of the H-Block protests of the 1980s, witness the pitifully small portions for breakfast. If you were in any doubt that we were anywhere other than submerged beneath the fag end of the post-war years of austerity, the clothes confirm it. And a thought surfaces and will jab throughout the two hours runtime: “How different are things today in, say, Clacton?”But Ultz’s design work has grounded Harold Pinter’s second play firmly in pre-Beatles England, where even Elvis Read more ...
Mark Kidel
We’re in deepest Dorset, on the edge of the village of Cranborne. The sun has just set. A cluster of thatched rooves, ancient looking barns and outhouses.It could be a set for Game of Thrones, a reconstruction of pre-industrial times. Groups of people huddle together, in festive mood. At the heart of this cluster of age-old looking structures, there’s a large round house, with an earth and turf roof, covered in grass and weeds. This is one of the most weird and wonderful performance venues in the UK, as iconic in its small way as the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury.Twice a year, the Earth House Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Peter Kennard: Archive of Dissent at the Whitechapel Gallery includes many of the artists’s most iconic political photomontages. Beginning in the 1970s, Kennard created images that by speaking truth to power, gave protest movements like CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament), the Anti-Apartheid Movement and Stop the War Coalition the visual equivalent of marching songs.Influenced by John Heartfield who, in 1930s Germany, used his scissors to create lacerating images denouncing Nazism, Kennard has similarly gone on the attack to reveal the hypocrisy of politicians, his revulsion at war Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
A stark end-title at the end of this collection of short films sums up the dire situation the UK is in: one in five people,14 million Britons, are now living in poverty. This shocking statistic is one the enterprising people of the Cardboard Citizens company, with The Big Issue as producer-hosts, are shining an unforgiving light on. They have created an impressive collection of nine simply shot but effective monologues about homelessness, poverty and inequity that will appear weekly on bigissue.com. The sting in the tail here is that this is work created by writers, directors and actors Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
It's a bold move by Regent's Park Open Air Theatre to tackle Frances Hodgson Burnett's children's classic, a story that's been notably adapted into films that pile on the visual beauty of its magical settings. This enterprising venue may be surrounded by trees and foliage, but it offers essentially a big bare stage with few frills.So it's no surprise that the story's main location, Misselthwaite Manor, is going to be represented by a tall blank wall, in which niches hold lights. There's no sign of ivied walls hiding the little door of a secret garden. It soon becomes clear that feats of Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Forty years later, they have haggard faces, grey hair if any, and sorrowful expressions tinged with incredulity at the outrages perpetrated against them. At one point, the burliest of them cries. One who struggled with drink and drugs says four of his colleagues committed suicide.To different degrees these British men, interviewees in the latest documentary by Hillsborough director Daniel Gordon, are suffering from PTSD. Most were born into the generation that fought in the Falklands War – one, in fact, served in Northern Ireland. It’s not as ex-servicemen that they tell their stories to the Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
A number of films in recent years have added a distinctly local flavour to the folk-horror genre. Mark Jenkin was inspired by Cornish superstitions in the ghostly Enys Men and Kate Dolan’s underrated You Are Not My Mother was ripe with Irish pagan practices and folk tales. The Moor, the directorial debut of Yorkshire-native Chris Cronin, continues in this lineage of imagining local folklore through the eyes of genre cinema. Moorland is a distinctly British habitat and has been the swampy canvas we have projected fears onto for millenia. It’s the home of Grendel-like creatures, Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Imagine you’ve inherited a castle in West Sussex plus five square miles of farmland. You continue the family tradition of mixed arable and dairy farming, but the soil is so depleted that yields decrease, year on year. Even with the help of government subsidies, after 17 years you are £1.5 million in debt. So what to do?In 2000, faced with these dire circumstances, Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell took a risky decision. Inspired by the nature reserve set up in Flevoland, Holland by Dutch ecologist Franz Vera, they abandoned farming, tore down the fences, introduced herds of Exmoor ponies, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
One of Shakespeare's longest plays gets gets served up fast and filleted courtesy the director of the moment Jamie Lloyd, who is second to none when it comes to revealing the hidden performance strengths of various (and very varied) stars.Last year, his shivery Doll's House on Broadway brought Jessica Chastain a deserved Tony nod (she should have won), and his furiously dystopian Sunset Boulevard, starring an entirely revelatory Nicole Scherzinger, rightly swept the Olivier Awards last month, and will hit New York in the autumn. If Lloyd's alchemy doesn't work quite the same magic on the Read more ...