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Features Live Action Movies Music

The History of Sound

Director – Oliver Hermanus – 2025 – UK, US – Cert. 15 – 128m

****

A Kentucky man falls for a music professor in Boston and accompanies him on a field trip recording folk songs – out in UK cinemas on Friday, January 23rd

In 1917, having grown up on a farmstead in rural Kentucky and his remarkable singing voice being noticed by a local schoolteacher, Lionel Worthing (Paul Mescal from Hamnet, Chloé Zhao, 2025; Gladiator II, Ridley Scott, 2024; All of Us Strangers, Andrew Haigh, 2023) gets a student scholarship to Boston’s New England Conservatory of Music. One Saturday evening in a Boston pub with friends, he makes the acquaintance of David White (Josh O’Connor from  La Chimera, Alice Rohrwacher, 2023; Mothering Sunday, Eva Husson, 2021; The Crown, TV series, 2019-20; God’s Own Country, Francis Lee, 2017) who is playing folk songs on the piano and, it turns out, is a tenured academic with an obsessive hobby: travelling around the country collecting, recording and cataloguing folk songs. David has what Lionel describes as the sound equivalent of a photographic memory: he can remember word for word and note for note, any song sung in his presence.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

The Old Man
and the Land

Director – Nicholas Parish – 2023 – UK – Cert. 15 – 100m

*****

As he works on the land, an aging farmer hears his two adult children argue about the future of the family farm – plays UK cinemas from Friday, September 20th 2024, with previews from Monday, September 16th following its premiere in the Critics’ Picks Competition at the 27th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, where it was the best film out of a superb lot

Movies. You think everything’s been done, then along comes something you’ve never seen before. Or, in this case, seen or heard before.

The Old Man in question is an English farmer (Roger Marten) whose family have worked the land for generations. He’s getting on in years, so won’t be around forever. His wife died a while ago, so he’s now running the farm on his own. He has two children who have long since grown up and left home: a son (voice: Rory Kinnear) and a daughter (voice: Emily Beecham), and the big question is, when he dies, will they take over – or will they get rid of the farm?

In recent years, the UK has produced a number of rural movies that stand in stark contrast to the urban- (often London-) based films produced.… Read the rest

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Animation Features Movies

Song of the Sea

Director – Tomm Moore – 2014 – Ireland – Cert. PG – 93m

*****

A family is torn apart after the mother returns to the sea as a selkie – reviewed for Third Way, July 2015

Tomm Moore picked up an Oscar nomination for his medieval Irish animated fantasy The Secret Of Kells (2009). Like that earlier work, his equally impressive Song Of The Sea eschews Hollywood’s headlong rush towards 3D in favour of traditional 2D animation with an emphasis on drawing and visual design – and it’s a real pleasure to watch. A family movie in the best sense – there’s nothing here parents wouldn’t want children to see – it explores difficult issues about parents and children, being set in a family where, effectively, the mother has walked out leaving dad to look after the two kids. The plot employs Celtic folklorish figures of selkies – creatures who periodically change from female seals to human girls or women and back again.

Thus, the reason for the departure of Bronach (voice: Lisa Hannigan) a few minutes into the proceedings is that the sea is calling her to become a seal once again. She leaves behind her lighthouse keeper husband Conor (voice: Brendan Gleeson) and kids Ben (voice: David Rawle) & Saoirse (voice: Lucy O’Connell) to fend for themselves and their beloved dog Cu.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

The Small Back Room

Directors – Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger – 1949 – UK – Cert. PG – 106m

*****

In London during World War Two, a back room boffin and bomb disposal man struggles with alcoholism – 4K restoration played at BFI Southbank on Tuesday, May 28th prior to release on Blu-ray, DVD and Digital on Monday, June 3rd

This black and white, post-war era drama isn’t the first film that comes to mind when people think about Powell and Pressburger – it was made immediately after what today are regarded as three of their best colour features – A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Black Narcissus (1947) and their arguable masterpiece The Red Shoes (1948). And that was preceded by one of their finest black and white works, “i know where i’m going!” (1945).

In many ways, The Small Back Room couldn’t be more different. There’s a marvellous sense of whimsy about those films, even if the later ones are intense and savage in places. Like Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes – and, for that matter, Powell’s late solo masterpiece Peeping Tom (1960), an intensity lies at the heart of The Small Back Room.

Gone are the light, airy spaces of the earlier films, their sense of the outdoors expanse (and, in The Red Shoes, the expanded landscapes of the eponymous ballet sequence within the film).… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

The Wicker Man:
The Final Cut

Director – Robin Hardy – 1973 – UK – Cert. 15 – 94m

*****

A Christian police sergeant investigating a missing child on a remote Scottish island meets a terrible fate – out as a Collector’s Edition UHD / Blu-ray /DVD from Monday, September 25th following its release in UK cinemas in a 4K restoration from Wednesday, June 21st, 2023

(Originally reviewed for cinema release in a 2K restoration on Friday, September 27th, 2013)

Originally released forty years ago in the UK in a cut down version its director disliked, The Wicker Man now reaches our cinema screens in a longer, restored version which he says fulfils his original vision. Its plot is deceptively simple. A Christian police sergeant flies to a remote Scottish island in response to a letter about a missing child. But when he arrives on Summerisle, no-one seems to have heard of that child. It gradually emerges that the policeman has stumbled into an intricate web of lies and deceit wherein a terrible fate awaits him….

Using material from a recently discovered, longer US release print – rechristened The Final Cut by Hardy who assembled this cut in 1979 – it’s a provocative work on a number of levels.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Breaking The Waves

Director – Lars von Trier – 1996 – Denmark, Sweden, France, Norway, Finland, Italy, Germany, US – Cert. 18 – 160m

*****

NSFW.

A mentally vulnerable, young woman in an austere Scots religious community marries an outsider only for her husband to be severely injured working on an oil rig – out in a 4K restoration in UK cinemas on Friday, Aug 4th

Divided into a series of chapter headings in which locked off camera shots are accompanied by popular 1970s rock songs which cut off or fade out before they reach their end, like much of von Trier’s work this is not a film for the faint-hearted.

Young woman Bess McNeill (Emily Watson) is questioned by the priest (Jonathan Hackett) of the local, austere Calvinist community before its elders as to her understanding of matrimony and warned against entering into that institution with an outsider. Nevertheless, she proceeds to marry non-religious oil rig worker Jan Nyman (Stellan Skarsgård). Their relationship is extremely carnal and she is deliriously happy until the time comes, as it must, for Jan to return to work on the rig. She finds his absence almost unbearable.

Then disaster strikes, with Jan seriously injured in a rig accident whilst trying to help an injured fellow worker.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

See How They Run

Director – Tom George – 2022 – UK – Cert. 12a – 98m

**

A barely competent Inspector and a trainee WPC investigate a backstage murder at The Mousetrap in 1950s London’s theatreland – out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 9th

London West End, 1953. Following his involvement in a fight at a party to celebrate the hundredth performance of The Mousetrap at The Ambassadors Theatre, blacklisted Hollywood film director Leo Kopernick (Adrien Brody), hired by John Woolf (Reece Shearsmith) to make a film of the play, gets into fisticuffs with the play’s leading man Richard “Dickie” Attenborough (Harris Dickinson) over the latter’s wife and co-star Sheila Sim (Pearl Shanda).

Later, Kopernick is murdered backstage by a mystery assailant. Perhaps it’s pertinent that Kopernick has ruffled numerous feathers in and around the production, not least foppish, English literary figure Mervyn Cocker Norris (David Oyelowo) who has been hired to write the script and despises everything Kopernick stands for, a feeling which proves in flashback to be mutual.

Thus begins a whodunit based around the world’s longest running play. The police are called in, with Commissioner Harold Scott (Tim Key) assigning alcoholic Inspector Stoppard (Sam Rockwell) and film buff and over-enthusiastic trainee WPC Stalker (Saoirse Ronan) to the case.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

All My Friends Hate Me

Director – Andrew Gaynord – 2021 – UK – Cert. 15 – 93m

***

A thirtysomething charity worker’s birthday weekend at the country house of rich friends from his student days turns into a nightmare – out in cinemas on Friday, June 10th

Pete (Tom Stourton, who co-wrote this with Tom Palmer, with both of them producers here) heads off to the house of rich friends in Devon he hasn’t seen since university days for a weekend celebrating his 31st birthday. He doesn’t know the area well and gets lost en route. He’s a bit shocked to find a dog tied up in a field and far more shocked when he disturbs a man sleeping in a parked car who goes berserk and pursues him like a madman, causing the panicking Pete to rapidly flee in his car.

He parks by a gate and a local comes over. “Do you know the way to the manor?”, he asks. “Yes,” comes the reply. “Could you tell it me then,” he asks again. “Yes, I can,” comes the reply. Eventually, he gets the address out of the man. He later relays this story to his friends at the manor, unaware that the man, Norman (Christopher Fairbank), the local who looks after the grounds, has just come in the door behind him.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Il Buco

Director – Michelangelo Frammartino – 2021 – Italy – Cert. U – 93m

**1/2

A Calabrian cowherd nears the end of his life while a group of explorers journey down a deep hole to find out how deep into the ground it descends – out in cinemas on Friday, June 10th

Literally, ‘The Hole’. Frammartino again brings to the cinema the style that made his earlier Le Quattro Volte (2010) so special. He sets up the camera, often at a great distance from the action, then leaves it there to record whatever happens. The narrative of Il Buco is actually pretty simple, a recreation of an expedition by a group of young, amateur speleologists into a hole in the ground in Calabria. (Speleology is the branch of science involved in mapping and measuring the interiors of caves, natural underground systems, and the like.)

It’s 1961. We’re first introduced to the place in a shot looking out of the ground at the edge of the hole as, eventually, the heads of two bulls come into view over the ridge. An elderly cowherd watches over the grazing cattle from a position halfway up a forty degree incline hillside. As the bus leaves the rich, urban developments of Northern Italy for the still unspoiled Southern region of Calabria, we watch it slowly make its way along rounds, through a small rural town where the party stops for the night to bed down in sleeping bags in the local, Catholic Church alongside statues of monks and the crucified Christ lying on his back, across open country until it arrives at the vast plain where the explorers will set up camp.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Men

Director – Alex Garland – 2022 – UK – Cert. 15 – 100m

***

An urban woman dealing with separation and bereavement encounters several men with the same face in an English village – out in cinemas on Wednesday, June 1st

A face passes before the eyes of Harper (Jessie Buckley) as her husband James (Paapa Essiedu) falls to his death from the balcony above their London flat. It’s the Spring. She drives to a house in the country – strictly speaking, in a small rural village – which she’s rented for two weeks to get away from it all.

There, she meets well-to-do landlord Geoffrey (Rory Kinnear) who shows her round the property and hands over the keys. He’s an affable and chivalrous sort of chap who insists of bringing her bags in from the car and can’t stop talking; he might have walked straight in from the previous century or even the one before. He mentions that the TV reception can be a bit iffy, especially when it’s raining, and also recommends a visit to the village pub.

She’s glad when he’s left and promptly calls her partner Riley (Gayle Rankin), who she will be in touch with this way on and off throughout the narrative and who will eventually drive over to see her, the only time we ever see Riley in the flesh.… Read the rest