Tag: UK

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Art Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Exhibition on Screen
Van Gogh
Poets & Lovers

Director – David Bickerstaff – 2024 – UK – Cert. 12a – 90m

*****

Fascinating journey through Van Gogh’s two plus years in Arles and Saint-Rémy in the South of France through his paintings of 1888-90 (collected in the current National Gallery exhibition) and readings from his letters – out in UK cinemas from Wednesday, November 6th

This is the latest offering in Exhibition on Screen’s excellent series of films about art, which usually tie in with some current, recent or upcoming art exhibition. In this case, the tie-in is with the National Gallery’s current offering Van Gogh – Poets & Lovers, and on one level the film follows EoS’ tried and tested template of shooting footage of the exhibition and paintings along with interviews with exhibition curators (in this instance, Cornelia Homburg and Christopher Riopelle) and assorted artists, critics or other biographers.

It also incorporates footage of actor Jamie de Courcey playing Vincent van Gogh – more as shots from moving visual tableaux than anything else (a form of filmic illustration, if you will) – the actor isn’t required to speak dialogue – to break up the whole and make it more manageable by the viewer.

Vincent van Gogh who, as Homburg notes early on, had within 25 years of his death become the best known artist in the world, is something of a gift to anyone making a film about him.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Blitz
(2024)

Directed by Steve McQueen
Certificate 12a
120 minutes
Released 1 November

People just getting on with life in dire circumstances, doing what they have to do. A mother searches for her lost son. An 11-year-old embraces his black identity. Women work in munitions factories. Thieves take advantage of death and devastation to turn a profit. And, unexpectedly, a spiritually dark place produces an impassioned plea for the virtues of Christianity.

This is London during the Nazi bombings of the Second World War. Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave, the Small Axe TV series) and his collaborators have done remarkable historical and visual research, so that the historical situation seeps into you. McQueen’s way in was a photograph of a young black boy, around whom he has woven a story of an evacuee jumping from the train to return to his mum.

In a remarkable performance, 11-year-old Elliot Heffernan plays the boy… [Read the rest at Reform magazine]

Read my longer review on this site here.

Trailer:

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Watership Down
(new 4K restoration)

Directed by Martin Rosen
Certificate PG
92 minutes
Released 25 October

Reviewed for Reform magazine.

Now fully restored in a new 4K restoration, this 1978 tale of rabbits on the run proved that an animated film need be neither made by Disney nor sugar-coated for children. Watership Down, although a children’s film, came from the producer of the Oscar-winning DH Lawrence adaptation Women in Love (1969), Martin Rosen. He ended up directing it too.

A prologue details the relationship between the creator-god Frith – represented as the sun – and rabbitkind. As with most creation myths outside the Judeo-Christian, there’s quite a bit of sex and violence. The rabbits breed furiously; hitherto non-carnivorous animals are given teeth to keep the rabbit numbers down. The rabbits are given powerful hind legs to outrun their predators.

Having established rabbits as intelligent creatures possessing a mythology and a world view, the main story… [Read the rest at Reform magazine]

[Read my alternative, longer review for this site.]

Trailer:

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Rebellious

Director – Alex Tsitsilin – 2023 – UK, Cyprus – Cert. PG – 94m

***

Her true love must rescue the princess before three rival princes after a dragon abducts her on behalf of an evil wizard – fairy tale animation is out in UK cinemas on Friday, October 25th

A dad reads his small daughter a bedtime story, a fairytale about a kingdom where an evil dragon carries off innocent princesses, sometimes as they are about to be married. I’d never stand for that, intones young Mina (voice: Alyson Leigh Rosenfeld), who is herself a princess, and her father a king (voice: David Wills).

Jump forward to her as a young woman hanging out with architecture graduate boyfriend Ronan (voice: Dan Edwards), despite the fact that her more traditional father thinks she ought to marry a foreign prince for political reasons. As Ronan points out, he can handle all the design stuff like strategy, construction and weaponry while she is better at hands on combat, so they make a good pair to rule the kingdom.

There are three princely candidates in the offing: strong but brutish Eastern European Rogdai (voice: Matt Giroveanu), vain Indian ladies’ man Kezabor (voice: Pete Zarustica), and overeating, obese, Oriental Fa Chan (voice: Brian Kim) who is in thrall to his Mommy Dearest (voice: Jennifer Sun Bell).… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Starve Acre

Director – Daniel Kokotajlo – 2023 – UK – Cert. 15 – 98m

***

As a couple become mired in grief following the death of their son, their behaviour turns increasingly obsessive, erratic and violent – terrifying and unsettling folk horror is out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 6th and on Blu-ray, DVD and BFI Player from Monday, October 21st

Thinking the fresh air of the countryside will benefit their son’s health, the family of Richard (Matt Smith), Juliette (Morfydd Clark), and their young son Owen (Arthur Shaw) move from their urban home to the wilds of the Yorkshire countryside and the house, named Starve Acre, in which Richard grew up. Owen doesn’t respond too well to the new environment. An unfortunate incident occurs offscreen at a village event, in which an animal gets stabbed in the eye and Owen’s clothing is stained with blood.

His understandably concerned parents take him to Dr. Monk (Roger Barclay) for advice. It isn’t immediately obvious as to what exactly is wrong, and the situation is set to worsen for the couple.

In Richard’s opinion, it doesn’t help that their hardened, elderly neighbour Gordon (Sean Gilder) visits quite often to fill the boy’s head with tales of a mysterious Jack Grey.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Documentary Features Live Action Movies

A Sudden Glimpse
to Deeper Things

Director – Mark Cousins – 2024 – UK – Cert. PG – 88m

*****

A look at Scots artist and painter Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, who had synaesthesia – out in UK cinemas on Friday, October 18th

I am someone who frequents art galleries, yet I have to confess that before seeing this film, I had never heard of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham. Cousins starts his film off assuming we know nothing about her.

He starts with images. Who is this old woman on a verandah with palm trees in the background? Or peering down at rocky ground wearing an all-weather coat?

In later years, she frequently wore a necklace she had made resembling, in Cousins’ words, Concorde with droplets.

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, a woman to whom all men were attracted (“she’d have flirted with you”, a woman who knew her tells Marc) was fascinated by order and disorder. Her arresting 1967 abstract painting Pilgrimage consists of Vermillion squares on brown, jostling as if in a procession across the picture surface.

Her father (and here Cousins cuts in the moving image of Joseph Cotten giving his “if you rip the sides off houses you’ll find swine” speech from Shadow of a Doubt, Alfred Hitchcock, 1943) never wanted her to be an artist.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Watership Down
(new 4K restoration)

Director – Martin Rosen – 1978 – UK – Cert. PG – 92m

*****

When a young rabbit visionary foresees doom for those who remain, some of the rabbits leave their warren in search of a safer home, encountering many life-threatening perils along the way – new 4K restoration of animated feature is out in UK cinemas on Friday, October 25th, following its World Premiere in the London Film Festival on Saturday, October 12th

LFF: Sat 12 Oct 12:20 World Premiere, Tues 15 Oct 12:15,
both BFI Southbank NFT1.

This opens with a mythological segment involving a powerful God, represented as the sun, and rabbitkind, specifically the archetypal rabbit El-ahrairah. It’s drawn and painted in an arresting, non-naturalistic style involving coloured lines animated against a white background to create the impression of moving, primitive drawings, due in large part to uncredited director John Hubley, whose vision for the film was at odds with that of producer Martin Rosen. The latter ended up firing the former as he wanted something grittier and less lightweight.

It’s arguable this has worked to the film’s advantage: the fable sequence works as otherworldly rabbit mythology, suggesting a race of intelligent creatures capable of constructing creation myths about their species much as human beings do.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Timestalker

Director – Alice Lowe – 2024 – UK – Cert. 15 – 90m

*****

A reincarnated woman falls for the same man in different, historical time periods – hilarious romantic comedy of errors is out in UK cinemas on Friday, October 11th

Agnes (Alice Lowe) is a woman falling madly in love. Sadly, the object of her affection Alex (Aneurin Barnard from Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan, 2017) isn’t really interested. And her attempts at forming relationships seem to always end badly. Although not in the way you might expect – for instance, with her head being lopped off. Yet all is not lost: in the world of the Karmic cycle: you die one day only to be reborn in another time the next. However, Agnes seems destined to make the same mistakes over and over again, consistently falling for Alex the wrong man in each of her different lives at different times in history.

The whole thing plays out like a series of repeated cycles by the same characters in different generations. In that sense, it’s not entirely unlike The Beast (Bertrand Bonello, 2023), a serious art house science fiction costume drama mashup. Timestalker isn’t necessarily in the same league as that film, but then again, The Beast isn’t a comedy and Timestalker is really, really funny.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Blitz
(2024)

Director – Steve McQueen – 2024 – UK, US – Cert. 12a – 120m

*****

As the Germans bomb London in WW2’s Blitz, a boy evacuated by his mother as per government instructions refuses to stay on the train and finds his way back to London – from the BFI London Film Festival 2024 which runs from Wednesday, October 9th to Sunday, October 20th in cinemas and on BFI Player and then out in UK cinemas on Friday, November 1st

(This review is a piece of writing currently in progress. Please bookmark and return to this page to see the whole review in due course.)

A five-star review (and I’m unrepentant) for a film that’s less than perfect. It gets the five stars because of the incredible things it gets right.

Blitz promises two things: one, an immersive experience of the London Blitz, and two, the mother and son story of a woman sending her son out of London in the mass child evacuation and the child’s refusal to follow the plan, complicated with the racial tension of the child’s having a black father (who is absent) and a white mother.

Writing these lines, the film’s potential problem is evident; the immersive experience is probably a movie in itself, and this side of things is brilliantly realised without the need for narrative coherence.… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Harder Than The Rock
The Cimarons Story

Director – Mark Warmington – 2024 – UK – Cert. 12a – 100m

****

The story of Cimarons, the first British reggae band, who were formed in 1967 – out in UK cinemas on Thursday, October 3rd

As teenagers, they came from sun-soaked Jamaica to the UK to be confronted with a climate that was “rain, dull and gray.” In the 1960s, one of the areas that Jamaican immigrants came to in London was Harlesden, in Brent, and it was at Harlesden Methodist Church Youth Club in 1967 where Losely Guichy (guitar), Franklin Dunn (bass), Maurice Ellis (drums), and Carl Levi (organ) first met up and started playing music together, a site today commemorated with a blue plaque. They went through s number of singers over the years, notably Winston Reedy between 1974 and 1983.

By 1968 they were gigging as Cimarons. A performance at Paddington’s Q Club saw an A&R rep from Trojan Records in attendance, which led to a recording contract, their first album appearing in 1974, recorded in part as the Jamaican studio of the legendary Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry. Before that, they worked mainly as session musicians, appearing uncredited on numerous singles by black British reggae artists. The film isn’t particularly clear on the matter, but it’s mentioned that they lacked management and got hardly any royalties out of all this.… Read the rest