Tag: UK

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Art Features Live Action Movies

The Christophers

Director – Steven Soderbergh – 2025 – US, UK – Cert. 15 – 100m

**

Two siblings hire a young art restorer to forge some of their famous artist father’s unfinished paintings before he dies so they can collect on their posthumous sale – out in UK cinemas on Friday, May 15th

Professional art restorer Lori Butler (Michaela Coel) runs a London fast food stall between painting restoration gigs. Then she gets a phone call and meets in a pub with Barnaby (James Corden) and Sallie (Jessica Guning), the son and daughter of ageing artist Julian Sklar (Ian McKellen) who, worried that their father is about to die imminently from a medical condition, want to ensure he (for which read Lori) ‘completes’ (for which read ‘forges’) the third, unfinished series of paintings known as the Christophers after the model Julian used.

Against her better judgement, she accepts the gig, and finds herself playing the ruse of working as Julian’s assistant, basically an excuse for getting into his studio and forging the completed works on canvas as a nest egg for his children who, it later transpires, have already sold the as yet unpainted works to a buyer for a tidy sum.… Read the rest

Categories
Dance Features Live Action Movies Music

The Testament
of Ann Lee

Director – Mona Fastvold – 2025 – US, UK – Cert. 15 – 130m

****

In the mid-eighteenth century, wishing to preach her unique take on the Christian Gospel, Ann Lee crosses the Atlantic with a small party from from Manchester, England, to establish a Shaker community in America – unlikely religious musical is on Disney+ from Wednesday, March 13th

This review is written after seeing this film for a second time. On my first viewing, I went in cold, knowing a great deal about both Christian history and the Quakers, but nothing about the Shakers (‘the Shaking Quakers’) around whom the historical side of this film is based. As far as I can tell, the historical portrayals of the Shakers here, and their leader Mother Ann Lee (Amanda Seyfried in a career-defining role), are pretty accurate.

This is to leave aside the fact that this is also a musical, the genre in which people suddenly burst into song, and we somehow accept it. In real life, people generally don’t burst into song in the ordinary run of things. And yet, it’s a genre convention we accept, and as a genre the musical has a perfectly respectable history. That said, if you’ve been brought up within any sort of English protestant Christian church tradition, from C of E to house churches, you’ll be familiar with people singing hymns as part of their religious worship.… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies Music

Billie Eilish
Hit Me
Hard and Soft
The Tour
Live in 3D

Billie Eilish in Paramount Pictures Presents A Lightstorm Earth Production / The Darkroom / Interscope Films Production of “BILLIE EILISH HIT ME HARD AND SOFT: THE TOUR (LIVE IN 3D)”

Directors – James Cameron, Billie Eilish – 2026 – US, UK – Cert. 12a – 114m

*****

One night of the singer’s latest world tour is captured up close and personal using specially developed, 3D camera technology – out in UK cinemas on Friday, May 8th

Disclaimer. Yes, I listen to a great deal of music. No, I don’t know the first thing about Billie Eilish. However, I have a huge admiration for James Cameron, who might reasonably be described as the R&D wing of the movie business.

I have also, in my time, seen a good few concert movies, but never anything quite like this. That’s in part because the contemporary music concert has come a long way, and Billie Eilish typifies a performer who is the act, performing on custom built stages in large stadium-sized venues, even though she has working with her a band and two backup singers, not to mention a vast array of lighting, stage and sound technicians. 

And, in her case, James Cameron.

Who insisted that she be given equal director / producer credit on the film. At least, that’s how he puts it in one of many of the more intimate backstage / offstage / on tour sequences inserted into the footage of the one concert which forms the backbone of the film. … Read the rest

Categories
Animation Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Our Land

Director – Orban Wallace – 2025 – UK – Cert. 12a – 90m

***

An exploration as to why the English people only have the ‘right to roam’ over some eight per cent of their countryside – out in UK cinemas on Friday, May 8th, with previews Tuesday, May 5th, Wednesday May 6th

This sets out its stall with a bold move: an arresting animated sequence by May Kindred Boothby in the style of woodcut prints accompanies a brief, verbal historical overview by Robert MacFarlane (the nature and geography writer whose book of the same name was recently turned into the documentary Underland, Rob Petit, 2025) of English land ownership. It goes back to the 1066 Norman invasion by William the Conqueror who declared land the property of the Crown (!) and then doled that land out to the barons that had helped him become King of England. Prior to this, any English person had the right to go anywhere within the countryside.

What follows after that visually inventive and historically informative introduction admirably manages to avoid one of the common pitfalls that far too often beset documentaries whose subject is one specific issue. Namely, presenting one point of view as the irrefutable final word on the matter.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Coup 53

Director – Taghi Amirani – 2019 – UK – Cert. 15 – 120m

*****

The officially unacknowledged British role in the 1953 coup overthrowing the Iranian government – more timely than ever, and now back out in UK cinemas from Friday, May 5th 2026; more dates added daily at https://coup53.com/
Originally in UK cinemas from Friday, August 21st 2020

A documentary begun in 2009 interviewing many people who died before the film’s completion some ten years later, this covers the 1953 coup in Iran backed by President Eisenhower in the US and Prime Minister Churchill in the UK which replaced Iran’s democratically elected, left-wing Prime Minister Mossadegh with the Shah. The UK has never officially acknowledged its role in this coup.

Amirani’s researches lead him to a basement of documents held by Mossadech’s grandson in Paris comprising archive material from the Granada TV 1985 End Of Empire documentary series, for which he gets access to the rushes from the BFI. Iran was included because it had been controlled by British interests for so long (because of its oil reserves). Amirani’s editor, helping pull all this together, is the legendary Walter Murch (Gimme Shelter / 1970, The Conversation / 1974, Apocalypse Now / 1979, The English Patient / 1996).… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

London’s Last Wilderness

Director – Pablo Behrens – 2026 – UK – Cert. 12a – 61m

*****

London’s Thames Estuary filmed and edited from the point of view of an alien – out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 24th

A genre bender of a documentary, this owes a great deal to Petropolis (Peter Mettler, 2009) which comprises aerial cinematography of the environmental wreck of Canada’s Alberta Tar sands. The subject of London’s Last Wilderness, however, is not an ecological catastrophe, however much its narration by intertitle might (mis)interpret it as the aftermath of a war zone. It is rather the estuary of the Thames, the river that further inland flows through London, which city puts in a brief appearance towards the end. Indeed, insofar as this has a narrative spine, it is of a journey from the largely uninhabited estuary inland to the metropolis itself.

Where Petropolis was shot largely from a helicopter by a cameraman, the results recalling nothing so much as the aerial footage that opens The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980) and closes (because they bought the rights to it) Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), aerial photography has moved on considerably in the last fifteen of so years with the evolution of drones, today a major part of the filmmaker / cinematographer’s arsenal.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Rose of Nevada

Director – Mark Jenkin – 2025 – UK – Cert. 12a – 114m

****1/2

A fisherman joins the crew of a mysteriously reappeared fishing vessel and finds himself inexplicably trapped 30 years in the past when it originally disappeared – out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 24th

30 years ago, the Rose of Nevada, a small fishing vessel, set sail from a small, Cornish coastal village and never returned. Now, suddenly, it reappears in the harbour with its captain looking for crew. Nick (George Mackay) and Liam (Callum Turner), but on their return after their first fishing trip, they arrive back not in the present but 30 years ago.

Apart from this peculiar slippage of time, everyone behaves as if nothing unusual is going on. Nick misses his partner and child. Liam finds himself with a new partner and child, and plays along, taking advantage of what circumstances have offered to him, which doesn’t seem so bad. 

Nick, however, feels increasingly isolated and uneasy in this situation.

Jenkin’s film plays out as a strange, enigmatic mystery.

Working as is his wont as director, cameraman and editor, not to mention sound designer and musician, Jenkin takes real pleasure in building up his story from a series of tiny details, necessitated to some extent by his use of a clockwork Bolex camera which can’t shoot a take longer than 27 seconds.… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Kinaesthesia

Director – Gerald Fox – 2026 – UK – Cert. 15 – 97m

**1/2

A journey through the dream imagery of silent cinema and its cinematographic effects, augmented by present day stagings before the camera – out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 17th

Long fascinated by dream imagery in cinema, director Fox attended the Harvard course run by its Professor of Film Studies Vlada Petrić (1928-2019) to which this documentary essay is dedicated, being based on and quoting intensely from the latter’s theories.

Additionally, it just about works as a useful primer in silent cinema for the uninitiated provided you’re aware of its inherent biases and limitations. These may well be linked to the films (or film libraries) for which producer-director Fox secured rights, because there’s a far greater amount of French movies than you might expect. Or, these may may simply reflect Petrić’s theories and tastes.

Either way, the selection of movies here also leans towards the avant-garde in not only France but also the US. Then it throws in specific films from Griffifth (Edgar Allan Poe, 1909; The Avenging Conscience / Thou Shalt Not Kill, 1915) and Hitchcock (The Ring, 1927), China’s Romance of the Western Chamber (Hou Yau, 1927) and Japan’s A Page of Madness (Teinosuke Kinugasa, 1926).… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Documentary Features Live Action Movies

D is for Distance

Director – Chris Petit, Emma Mathews – 2025 – Finland – Cert. 12A – 88m

****

A diary film about a boy with epilepsy, his interior world, and parenting – out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 3rd

Opening and closing, more or less, with one of the quieter themes from Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, composer: Ennio Morricone, 1968), and images first of a boy / young man clambering over coastal rocks and finally of the same young man and his father looking out from atop rock formations near “the top of the world”, this fits into the personal diary school of documentary filmmaking.

The two co-directors are life partners Chris Petit (Radio On, 1979) and Emma Matthews; the subject their son Louis, who started having epileptic fits around age 12. Following various NHS misdiagnoses, the family moved to the Netherlands where they could legally get hold of medical cannabis which, it turned out, cured Louis as long as he kept taking it. 

In former times, notes the unseen narrator (Jodhi May from Dune: Prophecy, TV series, 2024; The Last of the Mohicans, Michael Mann, 1992, A World Apart, Chris Menges, 1988), people with this condition would be taken as demon-possessed and burned at the stake, or (under the Nazis) forcibly exterminated.… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Underland

Director – Rob Petit – 2025 – US, UK – Cert. 12a – 79m

***

Three separate journeys beneath the Earth’s surface in the company of an archaeologist, a particle physicist and an urban explorer – had its sold out UK Premiere at the Barbican on Tuesday, March 24th and is out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 27th

Why do we seek the void, asks a narrator (Sandra Hüller from Project Hail Mary, Phil Lord, Christopher Miller, 2026; The Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer, 2023; Anatomy of a Fall, Justine Triet, 2023) as the camera descends into an Academy 4:3 image of an orifice within an ash tree, a portal to the world below. In a letterboxed image, we’re in a car passing the garish lists of Las Vegas entertainments, then on to breach a wire fence on the outskirts of that city. Then with a group of women cavers in a jungle, possibly South America somewhere, near a tree on the edge of a vast hole in the ground. Another group of cavers stand around in a room in readiness. A further caver walks down an urban street and starts to lift a manhole cover.

In terms of following what’s going on, apart from the idea of people in different places possessed of a desire to penetrate the Earth’s surface, and exciting, pulsating music by Hannah Peel, all this is really hard to follow; the viewer’s brain is overloaded.… Read the rest