Tag: UK

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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…

2026 Update: Back out in cinemas until August and early September; to mark the 73rd anniversary of the MI6 / CIA coup in Iran on August 19th, there will be a special anniversary screening + discussion on Wednesday, August 19th at Curzon, Bloomsbury

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).… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

The Summer Book

Director – Charlie McDowell – 2024 – UK, Norway, Sweden, Finland – Cert. PG – 90m

*****

A young girl spends the Summer on a small island with her grandmother – adaptation of Tove Jansson’s novel is out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 7th

Young Sophia (Emily Matthews) wanders around the short, rocky coastline. Elsewhere, her grandmother (Glenn Close) uses her walking stick to tap loose pieces of moss into place on the huge boulder on which she stands. The young girl’s father (Anders Danielsen Lie from Bergman Island, Mia Hansen-Løve, 2021; The Worst Person in the World, Joachim Trier, 2021; 22 July, Paul Greengrass, 2018) has planted an apple tree in the hope that it will thrive on the island.

Tove Jansson’s novel is, to all intents and purposes, a series of short stories about the girl and her gran on the island over a summer. That makes it a tough job to adapt into a feature without making it feel episodic, but screenwriter Robert Jones has captured its essence admirably. What you get is the story of their relationship with lots of beautifully observed details about life on the island thrown in.

Sophia is like any child; curious about the world around her.… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

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
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 exclusively on digital platforms from Monday, 20th July

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
Animation Features Movies

Rogue Trooper

Director – Duncan Jones – 2026 – UK – Cert. 15 tbc – 90 m

*****

In the ongoing war between the North and the South, a small elite fighting unit is dropped onto the planet to clear the way for advancing forces – premieres in the Annecy International Animation Festival 2026 which runs from Sunday, 21st June to Saturday 27th June

To the uninitiated, Rogue Trooper was one of the staple strips of groundbreaking British comic 2000 A.D. I mention this because to a critic coming in cold to the script, where main characters are confusingly named as numbers like 19 or 27, it’s a near-impossible film to synopsise.

Which is not to say that there isn’t a plot – there most definitely is one – more that it’s difficult to sort out what’s going on from the get-go. Although this is essentially science-fiction, it may also represent one of the strongest, on-the-ground portrayals of the fog of war the cinema has given us, with much of the battlefield action quite literally shrouded in a permanent haze of smoke from gunfire and explosions.

In addition, wider shots of views of the planet deliver impressive vistas which hark back to background painting effects in movies Forbidden Planet (Fred M.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Ghost In The Shell
(Kokaku Kidotai,
攻殻機動隊)
(1995)

Director – Mamoru Oshii – 1995 – Japan, UK, US – Cert. 15 – 83m

****1/2

A cybernetically rebuilt, female, government agent and her male sidekick pursue a mysterious computer hacker known as The Puppet Master through Hong Kong – plays in the Annecy International Animation Festival 2026 which runs from Sunday, 21st June to Saturday 27th June.

Review originally published in What’s On In London in 1996.

Ghost In The Shell is the first (and hopefully not the last) anime feature to be jointly financed by America, Japan and Britain (our very own Manga Entertainment). Although superficially pigeonholeable as teenage boy’s market material (nothing wrong with that per se), Ghost is considerably more intelligent than that implies. Its plot is highly complex: suffice it to say that cybernetically rebuilt female agent Kusanagi and male sidekick Bateau are pursuing a mysterious computer hacker known as The Puppet Master through Hong Kong.

Kusanagi, who makes her first appearance stripping off her clothing, jumping off a skyscraper roof and crashing through a window below to riddle a criminal pleading “diplomatic immunity” with bullets, employs thermoptic camouflage which renders her invisible to the naked eye in a matter of seconds. It’s an impressive touch, additionally furnishing such great moments as a fugitive ankle-deep in an urban canal suddenly finding himself hit, gripped and thrown around by an invisible assailant.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Princess Mononoke
(Mononoke-hime,
もののけ姫)

Director – Hayao Miyazaki – 1997 – Japan – Cert. PG – 134m

*****

Groundbreaking, mythological, Japanese, animated epic –  plays in the Annecy International Animation Festival 2026 which runs from Sunday, 21st June to Saturday 27th June

Originally reviewed for What’s On in London when the film appeared in the Barbican’s 2001 Studio Ghibli season. It never got a proper theatrical release in the UK at the time. The review presents a fascinating snapshot of the cinema landscape in the UK from the time when, outside of anime fandom, film journalists, and industry insiders, Studio Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki were largely unknown.

Film critics are occasionally privileged to see incredible films that, for one reason or another, never receive proper UK release. The Barbican is currently hosting a season of 11 films by Japan’s legendary Studio Ghibli (Jib-Lee), an animation company as familiar in Japan as Disney is here, that fall into exactly this category. They include Ghibli director Hayao Miyazaki’s legendary masterpiece My Neighbour Totoro (1988) and his imaginative fantasy epic Princess Mononoke (1997). Both took the Japanese box office by storm, the latter topping $150m putting it second only to Titanic (James Cameron, 1997). Miyazaki’s latest Spirited Away (2001) has topped the Japanese box office for weeks.… Read the rest

Categories
Art Features Live Action Movies

Leonora
in the Morning Light
(Leonora
im Morgenlicht)

©Mirjam Kluka, Dragonfly films, Alamode Film

Directors – Thor Klein, Lena Vurma – 2025 – Germany, Romania, Mexico, UK – Cert. 15 – 103m

**

In Mexico, France, Spain and the England of her childhood, Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington must confront her personal demons – out in UK and Ireland cinemas on Friday, May 29th

Deserted hillsides, a sliver of a road, eventually a tiny red car moving along it, to the accompaniment of a pulsating electronic score suggesting the present day. Another stretch of road: the car drops off the woman, in stylish trousers and blouse, who smokes observing the landscape. The driver gets out to photograph her, much to her displeasure, but he’s run out of film.

An illustrated title card: Death. Xilitla, Mexico, 1951. The man takes her to the rooming house of Edward (Ryan Gage), leaving her as he promises to look after their son. Outside the window, she can hear the two men discuss all that has happened to her. Her madness.

©Mirjam Kluka, Dragonfly films, Alamode Film

She and Edward are riding with others in the back of a lorry on a road. In Spanish, she asks a woman on the lorry (Yasmira Escárrega) about her amulet – “a sacred stone that illuminated the path through the underworld”.… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

The Balloonists

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

****

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
Art Documentary Exhibitions Features Live Action Movies

Exhibition on Screen
Frida Kahlo
Special Edition
with new material from
The making of an icon

Frida Kahlo, The Two Fridas, 1939 © EXHIBITION ON SCREEN

Director – Ali Ray – 2020, 2026 – UK – Cert. U – 93m, 101m

*****

The tragic yet resonant life of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, and her transformation into a modern, cultural icon – out in UK cinemas from Tuesday, May 19th

As dour piano chords play, a title announces that Frida Kahlo held only three solo exhibitions in her lifetime. This is contrasted with an auction where “one of her most complex self portraits” The Dream (The Bed) / El Sueño (La Cama) (1940) auctions for a starting price of $22m and selling for $47m. As of November 2025, this was the highest ever value for a work by a female artist achieved at an auction.

Now, in 2026, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Tate Modern, London collaborate on a major exhibition entitled Frida: the making of an icon, opening on Friday, June 19th at the Tate. Exhibition on Screen’s Special Edition of their 2020 film concludes with ten minutes of newly shot footage of that exhibition.

Frida works at a writing desk as she (voice: Diana Bermudez) reads the latter she is composing. You notice the ornate rings on her fingers, her lavish earrings, the green and yellow jungle design of her print dress as she talks about “too much pain… It will take me years to get out of this mess I have in my head.… Read the rest