BFI
Tom Birchenough
Maurice Hatton’s 1978 Long Shot comes with the subtitle “A film about filmmaking”, a nod at what has practically become a cinematic sub-category in itself. But while other directors have used the genre for philosophical or aesthetic rumination, Hatton’s subject is far more immediate and down-to-earth – the perilous business of just trying to get a movie made.Specifically, an independent movie: Long Shot is a glorious satire on the sheer rigmarole of attempting to stitch a deal together. It’s set against the backdrop of the 1977 Edinburgh Film Festival, which gives rich extra atmosphere, and Read more ...
graham.rickson
F Percy Smith was a maverick film-maker whose most important work was created in a house in suburban Southgate, North London. Born in Islington in 1880, he joined the Quekett Microscopical Club as a teenager, all the better to pursue a healthy interest in “those members of the animal kingdom which have been for one reason or another neglected.” Initially, Smith used his microscope to create exquisite glass slides, moving into film making at the behest of Charles Urban, the influential producer of 1903’s still terrifying Cheese Mites short.Several of Smith’s early films feature on this BFI Read more ...
graham.rickson
Memory plays funny tricks; Alan Clarke’s Rita, Sue and Bob Too is fondly remembered as a cheeky 80s sex comedy. It’s not. There’s a fair bit of sex, and the laughs do come thick and fast, but the film leaves the bitterest of aftertastes. And, viewed 30 years after its cinematic release, what’s alarming is how little has changed since the late 1980s (the original tagline was "Thatcher’s Britain with her knickers down"). Andrea Dunbar’s screenplay, based on two plays she’d written as a teenager living on Bradford’s Buttershaw Estate, is a rambling, discursive affair, centring on the priapic Bob Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
With some re-releases, the fascination is not only discovering the work of a director, but also the environment and context in which he or she worked. This immaculate BFI restoration of two films by the Filipino master Lino Brocka (1939-1991) is a case in point: Isiang and Manila in the Claws of Light are from the mid-Seventies, when his native land was under Ferdinand Marcos-imposed martial law. The key player in both is the city of Manila itself, in particular its slums where life is hard, and human life cheap.With Isiang, Brocka may have been the first director from the Philippines to Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Initially, Madame de… feels as if it might wear out its welcome. What seems a wearisome exposition on how privileged people with too much time on their hands fill their hours with vacuity gradually turns into an incisive discourse on the power of the emotions behind the facades fashioned for polite society. Towards the end, it’s clear that even the most seemingly shallow of people can be swayed by unexpected passions. And at the end: blam, an astonishingly powerful pay-off.Reviewing Madame de… in 1954, when it was released in the UK as The Earrings of Madame de…, Lindsay Anderson (whose Read more ...
Saskia Baron
This is an impeccably restored presentation of the 1945 feature-length documentary that was intended to be shown in German cinemas in order to counter any remaining support for Nazism. Backed by the British Ministry of Information, it was overseen by Sidney Bernstein and involved commissioning or gathering footage from army cameraman (American, British and Soviet) present at the liberation of the concentration camps, as well as from newsreel cameramen.The assembled film, shot in over 14 locations including Bergen-Belsen and Dachau, did not spare viewers’ sensitivities. Forty-three cameramen Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Letter to Brezhnev, released in 1985, was a delightful curio with sharp edges. A trans-cultural riff on Romeo and Juliet, it told of the sudden romance that erupts between a Kirkby girl and a visiting Soviet sailor one night on the tiles in Liverpool. I have a strong memory from 32 years ago of feeling overwhelmed by the film’s iconic image, of the lovers' last kiss through a chain-link fence before his ship sails back to the USSR.Peter Firth, who played Peter the sailor, was the closest the cast came to a star. As is explained in the abundant supply of extras of this re-release, like many Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More was Ellen Burstyn’s baby. Determined to use her clout after The Exorcist to make a film from a woman’s viewpoint, she offered Robert Getchell’s script to a director who confessed he knew nothing about women. “But,” Martin Scorsese told her, “I’d like to know.”Alice is the odd one out between Mean Streets (1973) and Taxi Driver (1976): Scorsese’s game attempt at both a studio film and a “women’s picture”. But its first five minutes couldn’t be anyone else then: a prologue in a Technicolor-red, Wizard of Oz dream of childhood, where eight-year-old Alice scuffs Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Does a review of a 25-year-old film need a spoiler alert? Much of the success of The Crying Game – its 1992 release earned both six Oscar nominations and huge box office returns (although not enough to save its producers from bankruptcy) – is due to its mid-narrative revelation that one of its central characters is not quite as they first appeared.The story centres on the Troubles in Northern Ireland, with Miranda Richardson as an icy IRA operative. She seduces a British soldier, Jody (Forest Whitaker, superb despite struggling with a British accent), who is then held prisoner at a run- Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s rich irony in the timelining of 1940s Chinese blockbuster The Spring River Flows East. Cai Chusheng and Zheng Junli’s melodrama dates its 14-year timespan – events unroll from 1931 to the end of the war in 1945 – with reference to the Chinese revolution of 1911 (titles read, “20 years after” etc), but the film’s social commentary is so acute that it’s no surprise that another, more far-reaching turmoil would hit the country, transforming it into the Communist People's Republic, just two years after the film's 1947 release. With hindsight, they should have been dating it in terms of “ Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Charles Burnett is one of the neglected pioneers of African-American film-making. He first won attention back in 1978 with his poetic, powerful debut film, Killer of Sheep. Acclaimed by critics and respected by his fellow directors, Burnett has always struggled to get his scripts on screen, focusing as they do on the reality of black American lives.The Glass Shield, made in 1994, was his best-funded movie and doubtless the film’s producers thought their investment would pay off if they highlighted rapper Ice Cube’s name (he’s a minor character) and sold it as a racy cop drama off the back of Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Robert Wise directed the 1959 bank heist thriller Odds Against Tomorrow after the classic film noir cycle had ended, but it's an exemplary noir nonetheless. In its day it was an important transitional work – a race-relations allegory, less well-known or hopeful than Stanley Kramer's 1958 The Defiant Ones, that played its part in the burgeoning Civil Rights movement. Harry Belafonte initiated the project for his production company and hired the blacklisted screenwriter Abraham Polonsky to adapt the novel by William P. McGivern (author, too, of The Big Heat). The loot Read more ...