BFI
mark.kidel
The much-respected visual artist Isaac Julien made his name as one of the first great black British filmmakers, not least with Looking for Langston (1989) and Young Soul Rebels (1991). While Steve McQueen moved from gallery art and installations to big-budget fiction movies, Julien has gone the other way, leaving narrative behind and finding his vocation as an artist rather than a story-teller.His BFI film on Frantz Fanon, made in 1995, co-written and directed with Mark Nash, focuses on the story of the psychiatrist from Martinique who made his name as a vivid and penetrating theoretician of Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Screen biographies are tricky things to pull off when the person portrayed has left behind an indelible screen presence. It was hard to love Michelle Williams dragging up for My Week with Marilyn; Grace of Monaco was far from Nicole Kidman’s finest hour. But Annette Bening is wholly mesmerising as Gloria Grahame, Oscar-winning femme fatale turned jobbing actress in late '70s England.Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool is based on actor Peter Turner’s slim, self-deprecating memoir of his love affair with Grahame, first published in 1986 some five years after her death. Turner met the Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Richard Linklater’s sort-of sequel to one of the great American films of the Seventies, shown at London Film Festival, stars Bryan Cranston, Steve Carell and Laurence Fishburne as old Vietnam buddies reunited as America is embroiled in another futile war, in Iraq. On paper, it’s a timely and enticing prospect. Yet it’s not the impactful film it could have been.Directed by Hal Ashby, with Jack Nicholson in the spectacular early phase of his career, The Last Detail followed two Navy lifers as they escorted a younger seaman to military prison – determined to give him a good time on the way.It Read more ...
graham.rickson
Sweet isn’t the right word; in Mike Leigh’s 1990 film, life is unfair, frustrating and confusing by turns. Though, despite the darkness, Life Is Sweet exudes positivity and remains one of Leigh’s funniest, most quotable features.Many of the best lines are mumbled by Timothy Spall’s grotesque would-be restauranteur Aubrey, especially when he’s talking us through the menu for his Edith Piath-themed restaurant. Anyone for prune quiche? Saveloy on a bed of lychees? Or liver in lager? Spall here is a brilliant physical comedian, whether he’s capsizing a caravan or tumbling off an expensive Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
James Scott’s filmography is wide-ranging, including the 1982 short film A Shocking Accident, based on the Graham Greene story, which won an Academy Award the following year, and other works on social questions. But these documentaries, several supported or commissioned by the Arts Council, concentrate on the visual arts.The longest, Every Picture Tells a Story, is a 1983 biopic based on the early life of his northern Irish father, William Scott (1913-1989) who moved from Scotland to Enniskillen as a teenager, studied art in Belfast, then went on to London and a vastly successful career. The Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There are many outstanding things in writer-director Francis Lee’s remarkable first feature, and prime among them is the sense that nature herself has a distinct presence in the story. It brings home how rarely we see life on the land depicted in British cinema with any credibility. God's Own Country is a gloriously naturalistic depiction of the harsh life of farming, of an existence based on close connection to animals and to the earth, set in the Yorkshire countryside in which the director grew up. For a comparable sense of connection to the rural environment, and of the sheer back-breaking Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
This rerelease of Stephen Frears’ My Beautiful Laundrette comes as part of the wider BFI programme marking the 50th anniversary of the passing of the Sexual Offences Act 1967, and its presence in that strand, as one of the foremost works of its time to engage with gay issues, is a given. But watching it again today brings home just how much broader the film’s concerns are, how writer Hanif Kureishi approached the issue of British identity, his insight coming via the perspective of the country's Pakistani immigrant community. “Could anyone in their right mind call this silly little island off Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s a rare combination of the sacred and the secular in Shubhashish Bhutiani’s debut feature Hotel Salvation (Mukti Bhawan). The young Indian director developed the film through a Venice festival production support programme awarded on the strength of his short film Kush, a prize-winner in 2013, and the combination of different worlds and talents that development process must have involved has worked very well indeed. There’s a rich and moving sense of atmosphere to Bhutiani’s tale of life and death – or, more exactly, the moment when life comes to an end, and a different dimension opens Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Abel Gance’s remake of his 1919 classic was a worthy but overwrought attempt to avert World War II, which by 1938 was already a fait accompli. In their comparative sombreness, King Vidor’s The Big Parade (1925) and Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) are greater anti-war films, but then Vidor and Milestone couldn’t possibly have feared, as did Gance, the coming conflagration.Gance’s sardonic dedication to those viewers who would become “the Dead of tomorrow’s war” sets the tone of the second J’Accuse as an awful mirror of death. Transactions between the living and the dead Read more ...
Tom Birchenough and Nick Hasted
It’s fitting that the first name on The Hospital Club's h.Club 100 film list for 2017 is that of Ken Loach. But though the director has a cinema career of more than half a century behind him – and had even officially retired before he came back to make I, Daniel Blake – his presence here is in no sense a Lifetime Achievement award. If you follow the adage, “You’re only as good as your last film”, this was Loach at his urgent best. Worldwide critical acclaim was matched, encouragingly, by box office success, not least in the UK where I, Daniel Blake touched a nerve in society.Loach certainly Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Victim was released in 1961. Six years would pass before the passing of the Sexual Offences Act cautiously exempted from prosecution men over 20 who had consensual sex in private. Yet the Basil Dearden suspenser probably played an equally important part in de-stigmatising homosexuality by highlighting the ugliness of homophobia.Dirk Bogarde is needle-sharp as Melville Farr, a sophisticated London barrister with a successful practice who is about to become a QC - and whose tamping down of his homosexuality has filled him with angst. He lives peaceably, however, with his wife Laura (Sylvia Syms Read more ...
mark.kidel
Julie Dash’s remarkable 1991 film tells the story of the Peazant family, the descendants of freed slaves who live on the Georgia Sea Islands, an isolated community on the South-Eastern seaboard of the USA, more in touch with African traditions than other black Americans.The three generations depicted in the film are at a crossroads: the younger Peazants are about to move to the North, leaving the elders behind in the South. Th film's dialogue is in Gullah, a vivid and poetic patois reminiscent of street Jamaican. Dash and her cinematographer, her then husband Arthur Jafa, have achieved a Read more ...