Tag: british film
My Old Ass & The Critic
Friday, September 27th, 2024 Film Reviews,Margo Robbie is one of the biggest names in Hollywood today, so when she decides her company will produce the second feature by young Canadian director, Megan Park, it’s a huge endorsement. It might have been even better had Robbie acted in this movie, as a little star power would have added to its box […]
I Know Where I’m Going
Monday, May 6th, 2024 Blog,I Know Where I’m Going, made during the last year of World War Two, was a film between films. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger had been working together since 1939, when the Hungarian emigré was asked to help with rewrites for Powell’s The Spy in Black. Four years and three films later, Pressburger would be […]
The Old Oak
Friday, December 8th, 2023 Film Reviews,Ken Loach, a grammar-school boy with a law degree from Oxford, has long been British cinema’s voice of the working classes. From films such as Poor Cow (1967) and Kes (1969), to The Old Oak, Loach has delivered a consistent brand of social realism steeped in compassion and anger. At the age of 87, the […]
Scrapper
Friday, September 22nd, 2023 Film Reviews,It’s no surprise that Charlotte Regan’s Scrapper should be drawing comparisons with Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun (2022): two debut features by young British directors, featuring dysfunctional fathers trying to bond with early teenage daughters. For reasons that remain mysterious to me, Aftersunhas generated an inordinate amount of gush from critics who seem to believe that vagueness, […]
Quant
Friday, May 19th, 2023 Film Reviews,Fashion is a frightening business to be in. Mary Quant Having just seen the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Karl Lagerfeld exhibition, I’m […]
Polite Society
Saturday, April 29th, 2023 Film Reviews,Anglo-subcontinental filmmaking has come a long way since Bend it Like Beckham (2002). That “heartwarming” tale of a young girl from an Indian migrant family who wants to be a soccer star, has been superceded by a story of a teen from a Pakistani family with ambitions to be a stuntwoman. Once again, the cultural […]
Living
Friday, March 17th, 2023 Film Reviews,Bill Nighy has been in so many frivolous films I had begun to think of him as a lightweight, mannered actor, forever striking poses and talking in a languid drawl. Maybe we got off on the wrong foot with Love, Actually (2003), a movie I loathed at first sight. Whatever the reason, Living has forced […]
Empire of Light
Saturday, March 4th, 2023 Film Reviews,Looking at the Rotten Tomatoes listings this week, I was amazed to see that Charlotte Wells’s debut film, Aftersun, scores a 95% approval rating from the critics, while Sam Mendes’s Empire of Light clocks in at 45%. This suggests that Wells has given us a masterpiece and Mendes has made a dud. Despite this apparent […]
Triangle of Sadness & The Lost King
Friday, December 23rd, 2022 Film Reviews,There’s a kind of shameful pleasure in seeing one’s own prejudices played out on screen, and this is precisely what we get from the films of Ruben Östlund. The Swedish director has struck the right note at Cannes, where his two most recent features – The Square in 2017, and this year, Triangle of Sadness, […]
Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris
Friday, October 28th, 2022 Film Reviews,One wonders what the late Jean-Luc Godard would have made of Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris. When the famous avant-garde director died last month, the tributes were predictably fulsome, but I can’t believe anyone actually enjoyed sitting through anything Godard made after about 1965. For the vast majority of people there is only one reason […]