British film

Best of 2024: Visual Arts

Monday, 30 December 2024

I thought I might never be able to say it’s been a great year for women artists, so forgive me for focusing solely on them.Things were kickstarted with a retrospective of Barbara Kruger (Serpentine Gallery) who uses words and images to illuminate...

Blu-ray: Juggernaut

Tuesday, 03 December 2024

That Juggernaut is as good as it is seems in hindsight to have been a happy accident. Inspired by a bomb hoax on the QE2 in 1972, the producers fired two directors (Bryan Forbes and Don Taylor) in succession before hiring Richard Lester in...

Blu-ray: The Oblong Box

Tuesday, 12 November 2024

The Oblong Box is a phantom 1969 follow-up to Michael Reeves’ Witchfinder General, sharing star Vincent Price and much cast and crew, after the brilliant young British director’s OD forced his dismissal days before shooting. It also began...

Blu-ray: Michael Powell - Early Works

Tuesday, 22 October 2024

The missing element is magic, the swooning sense of the romantic, spiritual and supernal which Michael Powell’s partnership with Emeric Pressburger found in the British and especially English soul, sharpened by Hungarian Pressburger’s fascinated...

London Film Festival 2024 - the Vatican, the Blitz, a trip to Poland and a surfin' nightmare

Saturday, 12 October 2024

ConclaveDirector Edward Berger won an Oscar for his last feature, All Quiet on the Western Front (2022), but here he concerns himself with the more intimate and claustrophobic battlefield of the Vatican. The Pope (Bruno Novelli) has died, and under...

The Old Man and the Land review - dark secrets of a farming family

Thursday, 03 October 2024

The Old Man and the Land depicts a worn-out sheep farmer going about his dreary business as the seasons pass, darkly and dankly. He does it because he’s always done it, and because he doesn’t trust his 42-year-old daughter, Laura, despite her...

Starve Acre review - unearthing the unearthly in a fine folk horror film

Monday, 09 September 2024

Blame the high cost of city housing, or killer smog. What else can explain a bright young couple’s move from 1970s Leeds to Starve Acre, an isolated, near-derelict farm in rural Yorkshire that has to be the spookiest back-to-the-land setting since...

theartsdesk Q&A: David Morrissey on (among other things) the return of 'Sherwood' and 'Daddy Issues'

Wednesday, 28 August 2024

Without ever getting embroiled in tabloid mayhem, even if he has confessed that he’d like to have a go on Strictly, David Morrissey has patiently turned himself into a quiet superstar.Having cut his acting teeth as a teenager at the Everyman Theatre...

Blu-ray: The Small Back Room

Tuesday, 18 June 2024

Powell and Pressburger’s least remembered Forties film is shrouded in Blitz darkness, deepening in the warped flat where alcoholic weapons expert Sammy (David Farrar) stares at a whisky bottle as if it’s a bomb. Following the vivid English fantasias...

A House in Jerusalem review - a haunted house and country

Sunday, 02 June 2024

The Israel-Palestine conflict aptly infuses a haunted house in Muayad Alayan’s story of layered loss. The Shapiro family home in Jerusalem which grieving British-Jewish husband Michael (Johnny Harris) and daughter Rebecca (Rebecca Calder) retreat to...

Hoard review - not any old rubbish

Wednesday, 15 May 2024

A visually dazzling, fiercely acted psychological drama with a manic comic edge, Hoard channels an 18-year-old South Londoner’s quest to lay the ghost – or reclaim the spirit – of her long dead mentally ill mother through her sexual pursuit of the...

Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger review - the Archers up close

Friday, 10 May 2024

This long, fascinating documentary was apparently intended as the centrepiece of last autumn’s BFI celebration of the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. But Made in England was delayed while Martin Scorsese (executive producer,...

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