BFI
graham.rickson
Brannigan begins in arresting fashion, Dominic Frontiere’s funky theme playing over leery close ups of the titular hero’s Colt revolver. Directed by Douglas Hickox and released in 1973, this was the only film starring John Wayne which wasn’t shot in the US.A brief prologue sets up the plot, with ageing maverick Lieutenant Jim Brannigan flying from Chicago to London to extradite gangster Ben Larkin (John Vernon), currently in the care of the Met. But the presence of Mel Ferrer’s slippery lawyer suggests that things won’t go to plan, and Larkin is subsequently kidnapped and held to ransom Read more ...
Saskia Baron
The London Film Festival continues to pull in an eclectic selection of films from all over the world. And it’s from the countries not known for their movie industries that some of the most impressive and engaging films have emerged.Goodbye Julia is the first feature film to be made in Sudan to be submitted to Cannes (where it won the Prix de la Liberté award). It’s also been entered for an Academy Award, another first for Sudan. A beautifully shot drama, it gives Western audiences a glimpse of life in a country that we normally only see in news reports and documentaries. Writer- Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Targets (1968), Peter Bogdanovich’s first feature is generally regarded as a great film. And yet, it came out of a mixture of false starts and opportunism. Could it be that its unique quality, the elements which make it stand out in the history of cinema, owed as much as anything else to the randomness that accompanied the movie’s creation?Bodganovich, a cinephile and writer for the magazine Esquire, had come to the attention of Roger Corman, the genius of low-budget horror and sleaze. After assisting him on a feature, Corman asked the eager young man to make a film with Boris Karloff, who Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The problem facing any chef series is that its daily dramas are essentially rooted in the same small, sweaty space. It’s like one of the reductions prepared there, all the flavours compressed into an intense spoonful of sauce.As in Disney+’s riveting The Bear, the cast can take trips outside – that Chicago restaurant’s patissier even travelled as far as Copenhagen – but the triggers of the drama will most likely be in the pass and the pot-washing. Even so, taking a leaf out of the Shane Meadows film-to-TV-drama playbook, Stephen Graham’s production company has created a terrific series Read more ...
graham.rickson
Gregory’s Girl stands alongside Kes as one of the few films offering a realistic depiction of state school life. Director Bill Forsyth’s surreal flourishes delight without getting in the way: think of the penguin waddling along the corridors, or the young lad glimpsed smoking a pipe in the boys’ toilets.That Gregory’s Girl exists at all feels like a happy accident; Forsyth’s background was in making low-key documentaries on Scottish subjects and his friendship with John Baraldi, founder of the Glasgow Youth Theatre, prompted him to write the script. When a BFI funding application was rejected Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Ken Russell’s horror comedy Gothic (1986) compresses into one nightmarish night the fabled three days in June 1816 when Lord Byron (Gabriel Byrne) entertained at his retreat Villa Diodati near Lake Geneva his fellow Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (Julian Sands), Shelley’s partner Mary Godwin (Natasha Richardson), and her half-sister Claire Clairmont (Miriam Cyr).Already in situ, Byron’s friend and physician John William Polidori, played by Timothy Spall as a sycophantic worm enamoured of his host but capable of kindness to Mary, made up the party.Both women are 18 and in Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Liz Taylor’s blowsy late-period persona is finessed to its finest point in this 1974 Muriel Spark adaptation, boldly plugging into the mains of her fragile talent.Lise (Taylor) travels from Hamburg to Rome after a mental breakdown, sporting black Medusa hair and a coat of many colours. Arriving onset a day after divorce from Richard Burton, who had dragged his own latest production to Italy to attempt a boozy rapprochement, Taylor makes Lise imperious and damaged, moving in somnolent reverie then stirring to hostilely engage with the world. Moments alone are spent in masturbatory fugues, or Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Writer-director Pat Jackson’s Western Approaches (1944), a Technicolor tour de force partly shot in turbulent seas by Jack Cardiff, is a stirring World War II story documentary that demonstrates the bravery, resilience, selflessness, and collective spirit of men of the British Merchant Navy during the Battle of the Atlantic. The merchantman Jason having been torpedoed by a U-boat, its 22 survivors (including one seriously wounded) struggles towards Ireland’s west coast – 18 days away if the rate of 60 miles in 24 hours is maintained, though neither its rations nor its radio will hold out Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Fridtjof Ryder’s debut feature made a strong impression at last year’s London Film Festival, and its cinema release ought to give the Gloucester-born director’s career a hefty shove in the right direction. Although that doesn’t mean that Inland is an especially easy-viewing experience.Ryder, who was only 20 when he shot the film in 2020, deals in silences and absences. There isn’t much of a narrative, more of a cracked mosaic of memories, impressions and lurking anxiety, but Inland builds a powerful atmosphere of loss and brokenness. The photography is ominous and watchful. Events seem to Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The phrase “male gaze” was coined by the British film theorist Laura Mulvey in 1975 and has become a standard tool for analysing a film’s gendered content. What director Nina Menkes has set out to show in Brainwashed is that the techniques that create the male gaze have entered cinema’s DNA and become standard across the genders, for makers and watchers alike. “It’s like a law,” she says. This is bad news for us all, she argues, not just cineastes.The documentary uses as its framework a 2018 lecture Menkes gave to her film production students at CalArts in Los Angeles. We cut to and from it Read more ...
Nick Hasted
In Mark Jenkin’s haunted Cornwall, time warps and bends. He is a child of Nic Roeg’s Seventies masterworks (Walkabout, Don’t Look Now, The Man Who Fell To Earth), whose kaleidoscopic slivering of time expressed an elliptical, sensual mind. Jenkin too has built his own time and space with self-described “seemingly crazy” antique techniques, limiting him to clockwork, 16mm film and post-synch sound.In this follow-up to his debut, Bait, a ship sunk in 1897's flotsam bobs into 1973, premonitory of a new sinking, remembered on a crackling radio report from now. The otherwise Read more ...
graham.rickson
I can still (just) remember Saturday morning cinema being a thing, only because my big brother was old enough to attend weekly sessions at the local ABC and I was too young to go. He would presumably have watched several of the films in this latest BFI collection, all produced by the Children’s Film Foundation.This state institution produced 55-minute features designed for Saturday screenings from 1950 up until the late 1980s, when dwindling audiences and the popularity of Tiswas rendered it obsolete. Funding came from the Eady Levy, a 5% tax on box office receipts intended to support Read more ...