BFI
Nick Hasted
How do you corral 250 films in a way which makes sense to potential viewers? Major releases – so far at this year’s LFF we've had Suffragette, Johnny Depp in Black Mass and Maggie Smith in The Lady in the Van – pretty much take care of themselves. For the mostly unknown rest, festival director Clare Stewart introduced themed strands in 2012 with the stated aim of making the festival “much easier to navigate”. Where the LFF had previously been divided by nation – New British Cinema, French Revolutions, then Europe, then everyone else – we now essentially have a choice of emotions: Dare, Thrill Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Director Sarah Gavron tends to make films with strong social content. Her TV movie This Little Life (2003) concerned a couple’s struggles after the premature birth of their son; her first feature film was an adaptation of Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane (2007) about two Bangladeshi sisters, one confined to an arranged marriage that takes her to London, the other eloping in a "love marriage" in Bangladesh. She followed that with a documentary, Village at the End of the World (2012), a year in the life of a remote Inuit fishing village in Greenland, whose 60 residents fear the closure of their Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It’s somehow unsettling that, while the physical resemblance between Willem Dafoe and Italian writer and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini is remarkable to the point of being almost uncanny, Abel Ferrara’s Pasolini almost consciously avoids elucidating the character of its hero in any traditional sense.This is as far away from the usual biopic format as can be. Ferrara’s previous film Welcome to New York may also have hedged certain details on its (purported) subject, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, but that was for completely different reasons. If the French financier-politician and the influential Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Orson Welles was commissioned by ITV in 1955 to make a 26-part series of travelogues. Always in search of money to fund his independent projects, he was initially enthused by the plan - though predictably he didn’t see it through. Only six episodes were broadcast – none of which stray out of Welles’ favourite European destinations.They’re full of artifice; sequences are repeated, and stock footage is used liberally. Welles is frequently seen posing with his handheld camera, though it’s obviously not his film that we’re watching. Some of the interview sequences seem stilted – largely because Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Improbably described by the French archivist and critic Henri Langlois as “the greatest technician and the greatest poet of British cinema”, it seems incredible that Richard Massingham isn't better known. A doctor by training, his first shorts were made in the early 1930s as a weekend hobby, and he began shooting promotional and training films to make a living. Twenty two of them are collected here: they’re all highly watchable, the best combining rare technical skill with sardonic humour. Massingham‘s bumbling, childlike everyman stars in many of them, with a series of one-minute 1940s Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
No-one could joke about the tragic aspect of Orson Welles’s career, the fact that his inestimable promise had only been partially realised, better than Welles himself. Once, when asked about the outrage following his panic-inducing radio adaptation of War of the Worlds, the director quipped, “I didn’t go to jail. I went to Hollywood.” And that was punishment enough.Welles, the boy wonder turned studio pariah, who nevertheless has more truly great films to his name than most filmmakers, was born 100 years ago: the BFI is marking the centenary with the retrospective Orson Welles: The Great Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Michael Keaton – like Cary Grant, Bill Murray, and George Clooney – is one of those stars who frequently convey their awareness that the situations they’re in are preposterous. He tautens his jaw muscles; his eyes express a mix of incredulity and suffering. That look is one of the many pleasures of Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), 2014’s Best Picture Oscar-winner and Keaton’s crowning achievement as a mature actor.Alejandro González Iñárritu's heavy dramas (Amoros Perros, 21 Grams, Babel, Biutiful) tend to the portentous. Turning to blackish comedy has rejuvented him. He didn’ Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Among contemporary British documentarists Kim Longinotto has surely travelled the furthest afield internationally – Iran, Japan, Africa – to find her subjects. Love Is All brings her resoundingly back home to Britain, across a timeline that stretches from the very end of the 19th century when the moving image was born, right up to the present day. It’s a fluid anthology about human relations in every form you can imagine, drawn from both more formal feature and documentary films and informal footage from the archives of the British Film Institute and Yorkshire Film. Black and white material Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Cynical writer Macaulay Connor (Jimmy Stewart) and pragmatic photographer Elizabeth Imbrie (Ruth Hussey) are the tabloid team charged with getting the undercover scoop on the society wedding of the year, between old-moneyed Tracy Lord (Katharine Hepburn) and a self-made industrialist. Their way into the party: Tracy’s ex-husband, CK Dexter Haven (Cary Grant). Will Tracy actually marry a social-climbing stiff, or fall for the angry young reporter with an unnatural capacity for champagne? Will Dexter be able to turn the tables on Spy magazine’s diabolical editor? And why can’t we all dress like Read more ...
Jasper Rees
When people talk about the Heroic Age of exploration, the heroes are generally agreed to be the explorers. But we’d know a great deal less about Edwardian chaps pluckily struggling through far-flung snowscapes if there weren’t images of them in situ. And the men who caught those images can be counted heroes too. Herbert Ponting pioneered cold-weather photographic techniques in Antarctica with Scott. Frank Hurley hurled himself into a freezing flooded cabin to retrieve now iconic photographic plates from Shackleton’s sinking ship Endurance. And then there is Captain John Noel.It is no Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
More than once in André Singer’s documentary Holocaust: Night Will Fall – marking in advance the 70th anniversary, on 27th January, of the liberation of Auschwitz, having added that explanatory first word to the title with which the film was released in cinemas last year – his interviewees describe their experience as like “looking into hell”. We hear phrases like “world of nightmare”, “utter shock”, “beyond describing” repeatedly, uttered by the first Allied soldiers to enter the German concentration camps at the end of World War Two.We, the general viewer, have had seven decades to Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
French actress Marie Rivière had a specially close relationship with director Eric Rohmer. After seeing his work for the first time in the early 1970s, Rivière expressed her admiration in a letter, which led to a succession of parts and culminated with her appearing as heroine Delphine in Rohmer’s 1986 The Green Ray (Le rayon vert): the part was in some way centred on the experiences of the actress, who was allowed to develop the story through almost total improvisation. Rivière herself went on to make a documentary about the director which was finished shortly before Rohmer's death in 2010. Read more ...