tue 19/03/2024

Film reviews, news & interviews

Blu-ray: Beautiful Thing

Graham Rickson

Beautiful Thing’s opening scene plays out like a sweary take on Bill Forsyth’s Gregory’s Girl, Meera Syal’s potty-mouthed PE teacher lambasting her Year 11 pupils with language that would now have her hauled up in front of a professional conduct panel.

The New Boy review - a mystical take on Australia's treatment of its First Peoples

Adam Sweeting

This is writer-director Warwick Thornton’s third feature film, his first since 2017's excellent Sweet Country, and it took him 18 years to bring it to the screen. He describes it as “a really special one” with “a lot to say”, though viewers may find themselves having to ponder long and hard to figure out The New Boy’s layers of meaning.

Monster review - superbly elliptical tale of a...

Saskia Baron

Monster is one of those films that you really shouldn’t read too much about before you see it, and if you are anything like me, you’ll want to watch...

Drive-Away Dolls review - larky lesbian road...

Helen Hawkins

There’s a Coen brother directing, plus a cast that includes Matt Damon, Pedro Pascal, Oscar nominee Colman Domingo and Margaret Qualley, the standout...

Janey review - fitting punchline for a...

Helen Hawkins

The Glaswegian comedian Janey Godley, the woman who put the punch in punchline, has what she would call a “mooth” on her. It delivers pith and grit...

The Last Year of Darkness review - a loving portrait of a Chengdu gay bar

Sarah Kent

Disaffected Chinese youth find a safe haven in a venue that is under threat

Oscars 2024: politics aplenty but few surprises as 'Oppenheimer' dominates

Matt Wolf

Christopher Nolan biopic wins big in a ceremony defined by a pink-clad Ryan Gosling and Donald Trump seeing red

High & Low: John Galliano review - Kevin Macdonald charts the fashion designer's rise and fall

Markie Robson-Scott

Galliano's latest show has been widely acclaimed but can he be redeemed after his racist outburst in 2011?

Origin review - bursts of brilliance in an unwieldy frame

Helen Hawkins

Ava DuVernay loads her passionate adaptation of bestseller 'Caste' with too many stories

Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World review - bonkers in Bucharest

James Saynor

A mad, punkish tale of soul-destroying Romanian life

Dune: Part 2 review - sombre space opera

Nick Hasted

A timely Sixties sci-fi classic realised with poetic spectacle and grim irony

Lisa Frankenstein review - a bitchy trawl through the high-school horror movie back catalogue

Helen Hawkins

Diablo Cody delivers a comic but gory pastiche of 1980s pop culture

Red Island review - Madagascar miniatures

James Saynor

An undemanding study of the post-colonial French

Driving Mum review - a dark comedy that has you laughing out loud

Sarah Kent

A son fulfils his mother’s wishes and stifles his own

Wicked Little Letters review - sweary, starry film is mostly strange

Matt Wolf

Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley re-team, this time as warring neighbours

Memory review - love, dementia and truth

Markie Robson-Scott

Michel Franco directs Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard in a complex, painful love story

theartsdesk Q&A: Wim Wenders on 'Perfect Days'

Graham Fuller

The German director explains why he made a drama about a Tokyo toilet cleaner

Zineb Sedira: Dreams Have No Titles, Whitechapel Gallery review - a disorientating mix of fact and fiction

Sarah Kent

An exhibition that begs the question 'What and where is home?'

Blu-ray: Jerzy Skolimowski - Walkower, Bariera, Dialóg 20-40-60

Graham Rickson

Visually striking early works from an iconoclastic Polish director

Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind, Tate Modern review - a fitting celebration of the early years

Sarah Kent

Acknowledgement as a major avant garde artist comes at 90

Eureka review - not enough to shout about

Demetrios Matheou

Lisandro Alonso’s latest foray into slow cinema may test even his fanbase

Bob Marley: One Love review - sanitised official version of the Jamaican icon's story

Adam Sweeting

The real Bob fails to get up, stand up

The Promised Land review - gripping Danish Western

Graham Fuller

A pioneering potato farmer and a sadistic aristocrat fight for Jutland's heath

The Taste of Things review - a gentle love letter to haute cuisine

Helen Hawkins

Anh Hung Tran's Cannes winner delicately crafts the contours of passion

Occupied City review - unquiet Nazi crimes

Nick Hasted

Steve McQueen’s cool double-portrait of Amsterdam trauma

Blu-ray: Werner Herzog - Radical Dreamer

Nick Hasted

Conventional doc brings Herzog back home to his roots, hinting at myth and magic

The Iron Claw review - pancakes and beefcakes

James Saynor

A wrestling saga that keeps things too tight to the chest

The Settlers review - a western populated only by anti-heroes

Sarah Kent

No-one comes out well in this film based on Chile’s bloody past

10 Questions for 'The Settlers' film director Felipe Gálvez Haberle

Graham Fuller

Why he made a Western to condemn the Chileans responsible for the Selk'nam genocide

Footnote: a brief history of British film

England was movie-mad long before the US. Contrary to appearances in a Hollywood-dominated world, the celluloid film process was patented in London in 1890 and by 1905 minute-long films of news and horse-racing were being made and shown widely in purpose-built cinemas, with added sound. The race to set up a film industry, though, was swiftly won by the entrepreneurial Americans, attracting eager new UK talents like Charlie Chaplin. However, it was a British film that in 1925 was the world's first in-flight movie, and soon the arrival of young suspense genius Alfred Hitchcock and a new legal requirement for a "quota" of British film in cinemas assisted a golden age for UK film. Under the leadership of Alexander Korda's London Films, Hitchcock's Blackmail (1929) is considered the first true sound movie, documentary techniques developed and the first Technicolor movies were made.

Brief_EncounterWhen war intervened, British filmmakers turned effectively to lean, effective propaganda documentaries and heroic, studio-based war-films. After Hitchcock too left for Hollywood, David Lean launched into an epic career with Brief Encounter (pictured), Powell and Pressburger took up the fantasy mantle with The Red Shoes, while Carol Reed created Anglo films noirs such as The Third Man. Fifties tastes were more domestic, with Ealing comedies succeeded by Hammer horror and Carry-Ons; and more challenging in the Sixties, with New Wave films about sex and class by Lindsay Anderson, Joseph Losey and Tony Richardson. But it was Sixties British escapism which finally went global: the Bond films, Lean's Dr Zhivago, Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music made Sean Connery, Julie Christie and Julie Andrews Hollywood's top stars.

In the 1970s, recession and the TV boom undermined cinema-going and censorship changes brought controversy: a British porn boom and scandals over The Devils, Straw Dogs and A Clockwork Orange. While Hollywood fielded Spielberg, Coppola and Scorsese epics, Britain riposted with The Killing Fields, Chariots of Fire and Gandhi, but 1980s recession dealt a sharp blow to British cinema, and the Rank Organisation closed, after more than half a century. However more recently social comedies such as Four Weddings and a Funeral and The Full Monty, and royal dramas such as The Queen and The King's Speech have enhanced British reputation for wit, social observation and character acting.

As more films are globally co-produced, the success of British individual talents has come to outweigh the modest showing of the industry itself. Every week The Arts Desk reviews latest releases as well as leading international film festivals, and features in-depth career interviews with leading stars. Its writers include Jasper Rees, Graham Fuller, Anne Billson, Nick Hasted, Alexandra Coghlan, Veronica Lee, Emma Simmonds, Adam Sweeting and Matt Wolf

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