The fourth feature made by writer-director partners Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, One of Our Aircraft Is Missing is not as celebrated as the six consecutive masterworks with which they followed it. It’s nonetheless a remarkably atmospheric film that outlined the shape of things to come.It was inspired by the sacrifice of five farmworkers of the hamlet of Greup (near Oud Beijerland in South Holland), who were executed by the Germans on 19 September 1941 for attempting to spirit away the crew of an RAF Wellington bomber downed by flak. The six British airmen became POWs.Since this Read more ...

The cinema fan in your life is going to thank you for this one. The BFI’s new two-disc Blu-ray version of Jean Renoir’s 1951 The River, filmed in India, is absolutely packed with extras: no fewer than six other offerings, including a 90-minute "documentary film-fiction hybrid" by Roberto Rossellini, an hour-long documentary, and even some early 20th century footage from India.There are interviews and essays, including an important and beautifully written one by Satyajit Ray, whose own film-making career was kickstarted by his involvement in the filming of The River. All this fascinating Read more ...

A fun film about finance – really? From the very first frame I was hooked on this can-do documentary; it’s that good. A young family – parents, Dan Edelstyn and Hilary Powell, two kids and two dogs – gather at the front door of their Victorian terraced house in Walthamstow and grin sheepishly to camera. “This is what acting is”, Dan tells his daughter Esme, “it’s cold, it’s embarrassing… Hello, we’re the Edelstyn family.”Esme might not get the hang of it, but her parents are naturals. Wearing a cricket jumper and deerstalker hat, Dan looks like an ad for the local charity shop. He’s a Read more ...

Chris Petit's Radio On, his 1979 debut as writer-director, should be regarded as the first British psychogeography film. Though its protagonist, Robert B (David Beames), a DJ for the United Biscuits Network, drives from London to Bristol in his two-tone Rover to investigate why his brother has killed himself, his journey extends beyond his half-hearted sleuthing and carries him into as many liminal spaces in his psyche as the real ones in which he lingers during his journey. Unfolding over a few wintry days centred on Saturday, 10 March 1979, Radio On is often painted as bleak, Read more ...

Released in 1970, David Greene’s I Start Counting is as much an examination of childhood innocence as a psychological thriller. Fans of 1960s architecture will also find plenty to enjoy - never has Bracknell looked so good on film, with starring roles given to the town’s Point Royal flats and St Joseph’s Church. Adapted from Audrey Erskine Lindop’s novel, the plot reads like a Home Counties retread of Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt. Here, 15-year-old Wynne (Jenny Agutter, in an early starring role), has a crush on her older stepbrother George (Bryan Marshall), who she comes to suspect of being Read more ...

Can one use the term autofiction about a film? If so, Mogul Mowgli would be a perfect example. Riz Ahmed, the actor who came to fame with Four Lions, has in recent years appeared in a Star Wars spin-off and a Marvel film; he also raps as Riz MC with the transatlantic duo Swet Shop Boys. No stranger to racial stereotyping and the existential questions that beset successful second-generation Asians, Ahmed has now written and produced a formidable portrait of a British-Pakistani performer struggling with his identity when he returns to Wembley after two years Read more ...

This BFI compilation looks back to an age when an evening at the cinema was a proper night out, the main attraction preceded by a short supporting feature. Nine spooky and macabre examples are included here, though the set earns its four stars by dint of excellent documentation and historical significance rather than cinematic brilliance.Disc one’s chills are very mild indeed, opening with a pair of shorts from 1949 starring and narrated by Algernon Blackwood, a one-time male model, violin teacher, hotel manager and journalist who found fame writing ghost stories. Both films feature Blackwood Read more ...

The French Canadian director Denis Villeneuve is best known for mainstream films like Sicario, Arrival, and Blade Runner 2049, stylishly expressive in their harnessing of alienating terrains, notably deserts and plains. Their claustrophobic equivalent in Polytechnique (2009), the eerily quiet 77-minute indie Villeneuve made before his 2010 breakthrough Incendies, is a college campus and its environs during a blizzard – the brutalist architecture and freezing temperature redolent of the feelings of the lone shooter who matter-of-factly fires his semi-automatic rifle at women in a classroom, a Read more ...

The cheaply made experimental exploitation indie Dementia (1955) is one of those footnotes in movie history that makes cultists salivate. And with good reason – it’s a wry blend of film noir and horror that makes you wonder if it was a touchstone for Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1957) and David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997) and Mulholland Dr. (2001).The 61-minute movie – which features sound effects but no dialogue – unfolds in real time. In her room in a seedy Hollywood hotel, a psychotic woman (Adrienne Barrett) – called "The Gamin" in the credits – clenches her sheets as she lies in Read more ...

After Bassam Tariq's feature debut These Birds Walk was released at SXSW 2013, things seemed to slow down. The documentary about a runaway boy in Pakistan garnered strong reviews, but soon Tariq was working in a New York butchers pondering his career. However, the film did catch the eye of someone: Hollywood star Riz Ahmed. The two began talking, and realised they shared the same interests in heritage and generational relationships. And thus, Mogul Mowgli was born.In the film, Ahmed plays Zed, a rapper on the brink of international success. During a flying visit to his family home in Read more ...

If you’re after a relaxing Sunday watch, Fyzal Boulifa’s Lynn + Lucy is not the one. It begins as a story of old friends in a small town and ends as a complex and uncomfortable tragedy. The banality of the everyday is stripped away throughout the film to reveal the resentments and tensions that underlie even the quietist of communities. The town itself (Harlow New Town) becomes a character in its own right, and is celebrated in a 1956 documentary in one of the extras on this BFI release. Lynn + Lucy is a very powerful film, told well, but the moralistic overtones can sometimes feel a bit much Read more ...

Unsurprisingly, there’s a lot of pleasure to be had watching Stanley Tucci and Colin Firth as a mature couple pootling around the UK in their humble camper van. They bicker about the satnav voice, argue the merits of the shipping forecast, and both give such convincing performances that you’d think they’d been together for decades. While this might all sound as comfy as an old sweater, director/writer Harry Macqueen’s (Hinterland) sophomore feature is anything but, being a tender, heartfelt drama concerning love and loss, and tackling the tough subject of dementia. Tucci is Tusker, a Read more ...