British film
DVD/Blu-ray: PulpThursday, 21 December 2017
Get Carter’s imitators tried to recapture the laconic violence of a very local gangster film. Get Carter’s makers swapped Newcastle for Malta, and a sunny, absurdist farce which is among British cinema’s unclassifiable one-offs.Writer-director Mike... Read more... |
Paddington 2 review - Hugh Grant’s superior baddie boosts sequelThursday, 09 November 2017
Paddington 2 is that rare thing, a sequel that is more engaging than the original by dint of having a far better baddie. In the first film Nicole Kidman’s villainess was a bleached rehash of Cruella De Ville or Morticia – and it was far from her... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: Life Is SweetFriday, 29 September 2017
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... Read more... |
God's Own Country review - a raw, rural masterpieceFriday, 01 September 2017
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... Read more... |
The Limehouse Golem review - horrible history with a twistWednesday, 30 August 2017
How many more throats must be slit in 19th-century London before the river of blood starts to clot? The Limehouse Golem follows the gory footprints of Sweeney Todd and various riffs on the Ripper legend. Based on Peter Ackroyd’s 1994 novel Dan Leno... Read more... |
h.Club 100 Awards: Film - in a blockbuster world, originality thrivesTuesday, 22 August 2017
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... Read more... |
Coming soon: trailers to the next big filmsFriday, 11 August 2017
Summer's here, which can only mean Hollywood blockbusters. But it's not all Spider-Man, talking apes and World War Two with platoons of thespians fighting on the beaches. There's comedy, a saucy menage-à-trois, a film about golf and even a ghost... Read more... |
'It was appealing to make a thriller about mental illness': Gareth Tunley and Alice Lowe on 'The Ghoul'Saturday, 05 August 2017
Gareth Tunley, director of the psychological drama The Ghoul, and Alice Lowe, one of its stars, are a duo with eclectic tastes. They share a background in comedy, but cite everything from punk to surrealism and the occult as influences on Tunley’s... Read more... |
The Ghoul review - quietly unhinged British horrorWednesday, 02 August 2017
The Ghoul is an occult British thriller about depression, with a bleakly poetic view of London, and a seedy sadness at its core. This sensibility is greatly helped by its star Tom Meeten, who as police detective Chris is haggard and run-down, ready... Read more... |
Victim review - timely re-release for attack on homophobiaSunday, 23 July 2017
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... Read more... |
Dunkirk review - old-fashioned filmmaking on the grandest scaleThursday, 20 July 2017
What is the Dunkirk spirit? It has been so thoroughly internalised by the national psyche that, 77 years on, it’s as much a brand, a meme or a slogan as the product of a historical fact: that at the start of World War Two 330,000 soldiers of the... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: Stormy MondayFriday, 07 July 2017
Using Hollywood stars to prop up British crime thrillers is an ignoble tradition. Guy Ritchie’s Snatch misused Brad Pitt, but John Wayne’s execrable Brannigan is probably the worst example. So one’s hopes aren’t high for Stormy Monday, a 1987 noir... Read more... |
