Film Features
The Micro Golden Age of Mid Eighties Fantasy FilmsSaturday, 03 August 2024
“When we hear the formula ‘once upon a time,’ or any of its variants,” wrote Angela Carter in her introduction to her Book of Fairy Tales, “we know in advance that what we are about to hear isn’t going to pretend to be true. We say to children: Don’t tell fairy tales!’ Yet children’s fibs, like old wives’ tales, tend to be over-generous with the truth rather than economical with it.” Read more... |
Best of 2023: FilmTuesday, 26 December 2023
Numbers indicate if entries are listed in order of preference
Anatomy of a Fall Broker Fallen Leaves Joyland Killers of the Flower Moon Otto Baxter: Not a F**ing Horror Story Return to Seoul St Omer Scrapper A Thousand and One Read more... |
Powell and Pressburger: The ComposersFriday, 22 December 2023
Unlike, say, Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann, Michael Powell’s working relationships with musicians were cordial, particularly his collaborations with composers Allan Gray and Brian Easdale. Read more... |
Powell and Pressburger: A Celtic storm brewingWednesday, 20 December 2023
“Nothing is stronger than true love,” a young laird says to a headstrong young woman in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s I Know Where I’m Going! (1945), his voice heard above the sounds of wind and waves. She replies, “No, nothing.” Read more... |
Michael Powell: a happy time with Bartók’s BluebeardTuesday, 19 December 2023
In his final years Michael Powell mooted the possibility of a Bartók trilogy. He wanted to add to the growing popularity of his work on Bluebeard’s Castle, the deepest of one-act operas, an idea he had previously rejected of filming the lurid "pantomime" The Miraculous Mandarin and, as third instalment, not the earlier ballet The Wooden Prince but a film about the composer’s time in America and his return, after death, to Hungary. Read more... |
Powell and Pressburger: In Prospero's RoomSaturday, 02 December 2023
There’s a thread of bright magic running through British cinema, from Powell and Pressburger through Nic Roeg, Derek Jarman and Lynne Ramsay, and it’s wrapped around Jarman’s last home like fisherman’s rope. Read more... |
Powell and Pressburger: the glueman comethSaturday, 11 November 2023
The shop assistant turned World War Two Land Army girl Alison Smith, clad in a summer dress on the sabbath, steps through a glade onto a hilltop track above the village of Chillingbourne in Kent. It’s the same road once taken by medieval pilgrims riding to seek blessings or do penance at Thomas Becket’s shrine in Canterbury Cathedral. Read more... |
Powell and Pressburger: Spy mastersTuesday, 31 October 2023
Alfred Hitchcock and Michael Powell are, almost certainly, Britain’s greatest directors. Hitchcock was slightly older, and entered the film business earlier; in fact, Powell worked as a stills photographer on Hitchcock’s Champagne and Blackmail, in the late Twenties, shortly before making his own films. Read more... |
Powell and Pressburger: Battleships and ByronSaturday, 28 October 2023
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger made a glorious run of movies from The Spy in Black (1939) to The Small Back Room (1949). Yet the duo’s reputation went into steep decline in the 1950s, and they began to encounter difficulty in securing finance for projects. Read more... |
Michael Powell interview - 'I had no idea that critics were so innocent'Tuesday, 24 October 2023
Michael Powell fell in love with his celluloid mistress in 1921 when he was 16. It’s a love affair that he’s conducted for 65 years. At 81, he’s not stopped dreaming of getting behind the camera again. At Cannes this year he hinted at plans to make a silent horror film, but he’s reluctant to talk about it. Read more... |
Martin Scorsese's 'Mean Streets' - a triumph of personal filmmakingMonday, 23 October 2023
Ask someone to pick their favourite moment from a film by Martin Scorsese, something defining. Read more... |
Powell and Pressburger's 'The Red Shoes' - art and nothing butSaturday, 21 October 2023
Nobody ever forgets The Red Shoes (1948) because it’s a movie that seems to change the way an audience experiences cinema. A story about a diverse group of individuals collaborating to make art, the film is itself a wonderful example of the process. Read more... |
They had a good war: Powell and Pressburger's no-nonsense heroinesWednesday, 18 October 2023
In the current reappraisal of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, what to make of the depiction of women in their key films, that striking tribe of Isoldes with chestnut hair and passionate natures? Read more... |
'Glorious, isn't it?' Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's Subversive CinemaWednesday, 18 October 2023
Announcing “A Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger production” or, alternatively “A Production of the Archers”, an arrow thuds into the centre of a roundel. Whether in black and white or colour, that famous rubric not only conflates the auras of Robin Hood and the Royal Air Force, but issues a warning you’re about to get a shot in the eye. Read more... |
London Film Festival 2023 - Scorsese on ScorseseSunday, 15 October 2023
Martin Scorsese walks onstage to a hero’s welcome, shoulders a little hunched, with a touch of sideways shuffle or hustle, taking acclaim in his stride at 80. He has sold out London’s 2,700-capacity Royal Festival Hall for the BFI’s biggest Screen Talk by far, and the queue for returns stretches into the street, to see a director as big as any star. Read more... |
Side By Side Ukrainian Film Festival, Curzon Soho - cameras of courage and resistanceWednesday, 20 September 2023
François Truffaut said that there is no such thing as an anti-war film because cinema inevitably glorifies the horror of conflict. The premise was robustly challenged over the weekend at the Ukrainian Institute London’s fourth annual film festival, Side By Side, which screened a handful of films, documentary and narrative, feature-length and short, that compelled the audience to reflect deeply on war’s horrific nature. Read more... |
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