Tag: British

Categories
Dance Features Live Action Movies Music

Take It or Leave It
starring Madness

Take It or Leave It, starring Madness

Director – Dave Robinson – 1981 – UK – Cert. 12a – 86m

*****

Struggling with their day jobs, some friends get together and form a band, which becomes the ascendant ska / dance band Madness – previews on Wednesday, September 30th, out in cinemas in the UK on Thursday, October 1st, and on Blu-ray from Monday, October 19th

The band Madness occupy a unique place in British pop music history. They first appeared In the brief space following the punk and new wave movements of the late 1970s which embodied the idea that anyone could learn to play a musical instrument from scratch and any group of people could put together a band. It was very much a DIY aesthetic.

What Madness had is different, however. Like the title of their debut album One Step Beyond and its iconic cover photograph capturing the seven band members one pressed behind the other walking forward in a synchronised movement, they embodied, as their promotional catchphrase would have it, “that nutty sound”.

Very much a dance band, albeit one unlike any previous combo that had coined that term, they built their songs on ska rhythms and incorporated saxophones into the overall sound.… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Palimpsest
The story of a name
(隱蹟之書：重寫自我)

Palimpsest: The story of a name (隱蹟之書：重寫自我)

Director – Mary Stephen – 2025 – France – Cert. – 108m

*****

Exploring her family history, Hong Kong-born Mary Stephen delves into the mystery behind her surname being British rather than Chinese – plays at the Barbican as is the opening film of the UK’s Hong Kong Film Festival which runs from Friday, September 25th to Sunday, 4th October at various venues

The director narrates her film in the first person, talking about the fact of her father’s name being Henry Stephen on his birth certificate, while her mother retained her Chinese name on the document. Mary Stephen herself was born in Hong Kong in 1953, the same year as Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation in Britain. Archive images of Hong Kong from that year show a strange dislocation, with images of the new English monarch jostling side by side with Chinese words on buildings. A British built clock tower looks strangely out of place.

She worked for years with celebrated New Wave director Eric Rohmer as his editor. His name, too, was a palimpsest.

Her father died and was buried in Canada in 1979, alongside her mother. When the family first moved there, she was a teenager.… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Boorman
and the Devil

Boorman and the Devil

Director – David Kittredge – 2025 – US – Cert. 15 – 112m

*****

How director John Boorman’s sequel (or not) to The Exorcist became one of the biggest Hollywood flops of all time – out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 25th

This quite understandably takes a while to get around to its subject, talking both about where Hollywood found itself in the 1960s and looking at Boorman’s directorial career before settling on the production that nearly destroyed his career. Once it gets there though, a considerable amount of time is allotted to a production which starts to sound like one of the most amazing spectacles ever filmed. Yet this comes alongside a feeling that, on the most fundamental level, something is going to go or perhaps has already gone horribly wrong before the director has even signed on.

By the early 1960s, Hollywood was making big budget epics like Cleopatra (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1963) or The Fall of the Roman Empire (Anthony Mann, 1964). When such movies started to fail at the box office, it turned to younger directors in the hope that they might understand what audiences wanted. The result was movies like Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969) or The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967).… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

De Gaulle
Part 2
Liberté
(La Bataille de Gaulle
J’écris ton Nom)

De Gaulle: Part 2 – Liberté

(La Bataille de Gaulle: J’écris ton Nom)

Director – Antonin Baudry – 2025 – France – Cert. 15 – 160m

*****

Second part of a two-part movie continues the story of De Gaulle up to and including the Liberation of Paris in 1944 – out in UK cinemas on out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 18th

Somewhat surprisingly, the second part of Baudry’s epic doesn’t begin where its predecessor left off, but instead jumps forward to 1943. with exiled French General De Gaulle (Simon Abkarian) in London both sticking to his guns and an increasingly isolated figure on the international stage. Polish plumber turned assistant Blazej (Karim Leklou) carries on offering him encouragement.

Still, De Gaulle continues to inspire the Free French forces in North Africa, with General LeClerc (Nils Schneider) taking on a German tank division at Ksar Ghilane with only infantry and the odd anti-tank gun. Impossible odds, but as with the first part’s Bir Hakeim siege story, the Free French’s selfless actions, vowing never to surrender and fight ‘til the last man, help the Allied war effort a great deal.

In Lyon, France and separated from her boyfriend, Livia (Anamaria Vartolomei) works for the Resistance, who face a major political challenge: to unite the various different groups that want to stand against the Vichy government and the Nazis, but don’t necessarily share the same aims in terms of any post-war settlement.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Landship

Landship

Director – Callum Burn – 2026 – UK – Cert. 15 – 89m

****

A British tank crew on the offensive on WW1’s Western Front becomes stranded behind enemy lines when their vehicle is immobilised – out on DVD, Blu-ray and Digital in the UK and Ireland on Monday August 10th

Doom-laden music. Historial WW1 footage. 1917. Captions explain the situation. The Allies, surrounded on three sides near Ypres, France, push forward, sustaining heavy casualties. Visuals: a lone British officer – you can tell by his revolver and moustache – moves around in the murk near a barbed wire barricade. One hesitates to say “advances” because he appears to be going back and forth. Possibly, he’s lost. A German knocks him out with a rifle butt.

Half-way through the movie, we’ll realise this sequence was a flash-forward. Perhaps the screenplay could have delivered a better oening (this one feels like it came out of the editing).

August 22nd 1917. Four privates inside an industrial metal structure, playing cards, argueing. One of them, Ernest (Ernest Hans Braedy – Nadav Burstein) is sketching a bird from memory. Their C.O., who we’ll later learn is Lieutenant Hill (David Dobson from Spitfire Over Berlin, 2022; Lancaster Skies, 2019; Fray Bentos, short, 2014, all Callum Burn), introduces a senior officer Captain Richardson (Vin Hawke from Battle Over Britain, Callum Burn, 2023) who is joining them today.… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Operation Hurricane

Operation Hurricane

Director – Ronald Stark – 1952 – UK – Cert. U – 33m

**

Britain’s first A-bomb test takes place in the Monte Bello islands – included as an extra on the BFI Blu-ray of
On the Beach (Stanley Kramer, 1959)

The overly serious, half-hour British Ministry of Supply short Operation Hurricane documents the first A-bomb test in the Monte Bello islands 60 miles off the coast of Australia. There’s something terrifying about the way it presents the bomb as a good thing made to help the British people.

Those interested in soundtracks will want to know it has music composed by John Addison (from Torn Curtain, Alfred Hitchcock, 1966; The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, Tony Richardson, 1962; Reach for the Sky, Lewis Gilbert, 1956) and the Musical Director was the prolific Muir Mathieson (Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock, 1958; Henry V, Laurence Olivier, 1944; Things to Come, William Cameron Menzies, 1936).

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

The Balloonists

Director – John Dower – 2025 – UK, Austria, US – Cert. PG – 86m

****

The Balloonists

The story of balloonist Bertrand Piccard’s three attempts to circumnavigate the globe in a balloon – out in UK cinemas on Friday, May 22nd

Bertrand Piccard’s house, as his astonished interviewer notes, is a museum, a personal collection of memorabilia from the history of aviation. It grew in a mere 66 years from the Wright Brothers’ pioneering efforts to the Apollo 11 moon landing. His family was in Florida at the time of the Apollo 7-12 launches which he witnessed. Five days before the moon landing, he vowed to become an explorer himself, but then when Armstrong walked on the moon Piccard felt everything had been done. He got depressed.

And then he saw a balloon and discovered that no-one had ever flown round the world in one.

In 1997, His first attempt, the Breitling Orbiter, ditched in the Mediterranean after six hours. Many others tried, including Richard Branson, who knew how to do publicity: in Morocco, Branson’s balloon blew away before it could be launched.

Enter British engineer Andy Elson. But the film switches back to Piccard, whose grandfather was a pioneering balloonist and whose father designed submarines and made a record-breaking dive to the Mariana Trench.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Brides

Director – Nadia Fall – 2025 – UK – Cert. 15 – 93m

***

Two radicalised British, teenage girls run away from home intending to become brides for Islamic State – out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 26th

When they meet at the local school, Doe (Ebada Hassan) and Muna (Safiyya Ingar) strike up an unlikely friendship. In a way, they’re like chalk and cheese – Doe is the quiet one, always observing, while Muna is brash, loud and outgoing. Both come from Muslim backgrounds, and both feel alienated from their classmates, their school and wider British culture. Muna sticks up for herself against school bullies, and effectively gets vilified by the school authorities, and as a result her father, for doing so.

So, without their parents’ permission, they fly off to Turkey to meet up with a man who has groomed them online as brides for Islamic State. When their contact never shows up at the airport, they resolve to find their own way into Syria. As well as following their journey, the narrative frequently lapses into often confusing flashbacks about their home and school lives. And infuriatingly, it never explores how they fare when their their rose-tinted idealism collides with the harsh reality of becoming jihadist brides.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Two Way Stretch

Director – Robert Day – 1960 – UK – Cert. U – 78m

****

Three prisoners plot a heist with the perfect alibi… that they are incarcerated in prison at the time – classic British prison comedy is out on UK Blu-ray on Monday, August 4th

Very much of its time, this British prison comedy concerns three convicts and an outside contact who sets them up with the perfect job. The top-billed performer is Peter Sellers, a British household name by this time thanks to radio’s long-running comedy series The Goon Show TIMES, but far from being a straightforward vehicle for Sellers’ indisputable comic talents, the film is very much an ensemble piece, with a main cast that reads like a who’s who of British comedy acting talent of the time.

Prisoner Dodger Lane (Peter Sellers) and his two cellmates Jelly Knight (David Lodge) and Lennie Price (Bernard Cribbins) have engineered themselves a cushy existence in one of H.M. Prisons where every morning at 7 a.m. sharp, groceries are delivered by van via a rope through their cell window and their beloved cat Strangeways is periodically taken out for a walk by friendly Chief Prison Officer Jenkins (George Woodbridge). The latter is due to retire shortly, and soon after that, the three men’s sentence (for the same crime) is due to end.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Movies Shorts

Phil Mulloy
Extreme Animation

Director – Phil Mulloy – 2001 – UK – Cert. 18 – shorts of various lengths, total running time 2 hr 33 mins – Original Aspect Ratios (various) – Dolby Digital 5.1

*****

To mark the recent passing of Phil Mulloy (29 August 1948 – 10 July 2025), my review from 2001 of the BFI DVD of his work.

About as far from Disney animation as it’s possible to get, British animator Phil Mulloy’s short films, produced on a shoestring, employ crude paint brushstrokes on paper with violent, sexual and explicit subject matter. But far from being sensationalist, Mulloy is a brilliant satirist, deluging us with graphic imagery to hit his targets with a vengeance, underscored by voice-over, occasional words of dialogue, and background music by one or two musicians (among them pianist Keith Tippett, Angels & Insects composer Alex Bălănescu and Taiko drummer Joji Hirota).

He first came to prominence with six Cowboys shorts (1991) featuring gunfights, lynchings, bestiality (with horses) and much more. In Outrage, a man and woman are pilloried for having sex outdoors. For ten long years, The Conformist captures and tames a stallion, only to be ridiculed on his return as the only man whose horse has freestanding legs not a wheeled trolley base.… Read the rest