Film
ash.smyth
Next week sees the release of Shimon Peres, the second instalment in Spirit Level Film’s The Price of Kings series. A president of Israel who refers to leadership as “not a very happy engagement,” a Nobel Peace Prize-winner who says he has never slept easy, Peres is about as good a subject for a political doco as you’re likely to get. He’s the world’s oldest elected head of state (his political career having begun in the early Fifties!) and the only Israeli PM (two-and-a-half times) to have made it to the top step in their political pantheon. Most famously, though, he shares his Nobel laurels Read more ...
Jasper Rees
This one sounds like a hard sell: a muted, taciturn, cautious film from Austria about a friendless boy in a young offenders’ institution who takes a job working for the municipal undertakers. Breathing (original title: Atmen) would appear at first glance modest in scope and gloomy in outlook. But whatever the odds stacked against it, this quiet, observational debut from Karl Markovics turns out to pack a discreetly powerful punch.The name may not be familiar, but the face will be: a few years back Markovics was the poker-faced lead in The Counterfeiters, which won the best foreign film at the Read more ...
ash.smyth
Footage of wiry East African men and women breaking the tape in marathons and distance track-events is now more or less synonymous with the highest achievements in top-level sport, and it won’t come as a surprise to those who’ve lived through more than a couple of cycles of the Olympic Games to be reminded that the medal-winners in the long-distance running events are no longer, generally speaking, from “round here”. The headline of Jerry Rothwell’s grass-roots feature documentary, though, is that, actually – at least for the last two decades or so – a disproportionate number of them don’t Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There'll be no avoiding Chariots of Fire this summer. The Olympics being shortly upon us, Hampstead Theatre are soon to launch a stage verison of the Oscar-winning 1981 film. The success of Hugh Hudson's epic account of the British athletes at the 1924 Olympiad in Paris famously prompted scriptwriter Colin Welland to yell from the Academy Award podium, "The British are coming!" As the British film industry went on to collapse in on itself throughout the 1980s, it turns out he was largely wrong about that. But 30 years on, Chariots is having its moment again.There is a general air of doom in Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In the golden age of the movies that was 1952, The Bad and the Beautiful must have seemed quite a radical attack on the industry. A gorgeous opening sequence suggests that we are to be treated to an unadulterated love letter to the pictures: the camera moves in on a director perched on a huge boom (pictured below) as he swoops down on an intimate scene featuring a prone young actress in a lowcut gown. Then comes a phone call which, when he hears the name, the director refuses to take. The caller, we learn, is Tinseltown’s hottest hotshot producer, now fallen on lean times. A director needs a Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Launched to the press today with an hour-long presentation and Hitchcockian lunch, the British Film Institute proudly unveiled a fittingly hefty programme of screenings, events, exhibitions and publications celebrating the work of Alfred Hitchcock - inarguably Britain’s most iconic and influential film director. Hailing from London’s East End, Hitchcock worked in the British film industry for two decades before signing a deal with David O. Selznick and decamping to Hollywood, where he continued to go from strength to strength with films such as Psycho, Rear Window and Vertigo.The BFI’s Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
A couple of years ago a retrospective season for the BFI sought to reflect the filmmaking renaissance across South America that started at the end of the 1990s, and simply hasn’t stopped. Freed from the shackles of dictatorship and economic hardship, a young generation of directors were producing some of the best films in the world. It was never going to be easy to choose just 20 to reflect that, but our task as curators would have been a lot easier if one country, Argentina, wasn’t producing quite so many wonderful films.The Argentine Film Festival, at London’s Ritzy this weekend, is a first Read more ...