British film
The Hitchcock Players: Robert Donat, The 39 StepsWednesday, 01 August 2012
It’s always a thrill watching The 39 Steps’ Richard Hannay (Robert Donat) doing daredevil feats on the Flying Scotsman as it speeds across the Forth Bridge, kissing a Scottish crofter’s jealously guarded wife, and bringing down the house with an... Read more... |
BlackmailSaturday, 07 July 2012
The premiere of the newly restored version of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1929 silent classic Blackmail, outdoors at the British Museum, will go down as one of the defining moments of the London 2012 cultural extravaganza. This was a thrilling,... Read more... |
The Life and Death of Colonel BlimpFriday, 18 May 2012
It’s impossible to think of a contemporary British director or writer-director team making six consecutive masterpieces as did Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger when they followed The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) with A Canterbury Tale... Read more... |
DVD: ShameFriday, 18 May 2012
Chocolat, a film about chocolate addiction, was extremely sweet. Trainspotting, a film about drug addiction, was wired and hip. Shame, a film about sex addiction, assaults you with wave upon wave of tristesse.When Sarah Kent reviewed the theatrical... Read more... |
BFI Southbank Preview: Made in BritainSaturday, 31 March 2012
If you’re game for a galling statistic, here’s one that’s guaranteed to stun: at present, only 14 per cent of British films released in the UK are directed by women. If that seems oddly as well as infuriatingly low, it’s probably because so many of... Read more... |
DVD: WeekendTuesday, 20 March 2012
The poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow once wrote, “It is difficult to know at what moment love begins; it is less difficult to know that it has begun.” Andrew Haigh’s superb second feature may or may not give us the precise moment but it certainly... Read more... |
The Decoy BrideTuesday, 06 March 2012
With its near-simultaneous cinema and DVD release ringing alarm bells to rival Big Ben, The Decoy Bride takes talent and stuffs it into a GM turkey of a film. This insincere romantic comedy from director Sheree Folkson is replete with wobbly accents... Read more... |
The Woman in BlackFriday, 10 February 2012
In Susan Hill’s 1982 novel The Woman in Black, the protagonist Arthur Kipps concludes his narration with petulant certainty: “They asked for my story. I have told it. Enough.” With this film adaptation (an exercise in hair-raising horror, in... Read more... |
2011: The British Are ClimbingSaturday, 31 December 2011
My Top 10 movies of 2011, in order, are: Mysteries of Lisbon, Melancholia, Meek’s Cutoff, A Dangerous Method, Aurora, Hugo, The Princess of Montpensier, City of Life and Death, The Descendants, ... Read more... |
2011: Mysteries, Mayhem and MargaretWednesday, 28 December 2011
Many have dismissed 2011 as cinematically something of a disappointment, but while close inspection may have identified more cubic zirconia than bona fide diamonds, the year glittered nevertheless. The showstopping Mysteries of Lisbon was... Read more... |
JunkheartsThursday, 03 November 2011
British film-makers tend towards bipolarity. Where French cinema is broadly speaking about the middle classes, we tend to get films about one thing or the other. The national fixation with the past supplies stories about how the nabobs of yore lived... Read more... |
WeekendWednesday, 02 November 2011
Chris New’s nervy intensity is the big news in Weekend, an intermittently affecting British film that ought to bring this terrific theatre actor (he played Alan Cumming's lover in his breakthrough role in Bent) to a larger audience on screen.... Read more... |
