Tag: UK

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Shaun the Sheep
The Beast
of Mossy Bottom

Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom

Directors – Steve Cox, Matthew Walker – 2026 – UK – Cert. U – 80m

*****

When the sheep’s pumpkin patch is damaged, Shaun invents a regenerative potion, which the farmer later uses as hair restorer by mistake… – out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 18th

As Halloween approaches iin Mossy Bottom, the farmer (non-verbal voice: John Sparkes) would like nothing more than to invite the lady vet (non-verbal voice: Nina Sosanya) to the Halloween Hoedown, for which his two tickets have just arrived in the post. When she turns up to give injections to the sheep, who are hiding ineffectively in the barn, he keeps getting prevented from asking her by being draged around the farm by Bitzer his dog (non-verbal voice: also John Sparkes). It later turns out she too has two tickets and plans to invite him, but is similarly prevented by various incidents.

Meanwhile, unearthly apparitions – mysterious eyes appearing on a signpost – are revealed as Shaun (non-verbal voice: Justin Fletcher) and fellow sheep having put up a false background of the rural view behind the sign, to keep the farmer’s prying eyes away from their prized, secret Halloween pumpkin patch.… Read the rest

Categories
Art Exhibitions Features Live Action Movies

Exhibition on Screen
James McNeill Whistler

Courtesy of Exhibition on Screen

Exhibition on Screen: James McNeill Whistler

Director – David Bickerstaff – 2026 – UK – Cert. U – 90m

*****

A look at the work of 19th Century painter Whistler, seen through the lens of the 2026 Tate Britain exhibition – out in UK cinemas from Tuesday, 15th September

Before watching this latest Exhibition on Screen feature, I was able to visit Tate Britain’s stunning James McNeill Whistler show, which sits very much at the film’s core. The film had the effect of making me want to go back for further visits.

It opens with shots of a Victorian concert hall interior where the unseen Whistler (voice: Bret Jones) is addressing the room with his spoken lecture on art, something the film will return to towards its close. After a montage of brushes, painting surfaces and palettes, establishing shots of Tate Britain take us straight into the current Whistler show. “People sometimes think of Whistler as being based in French art, and sometimes as being based in British art,” explains Carol Jacobi, Curator of British Art 1850-1915, Tate Britain, “whereas…he was very much an independent…and very much leading the avant-garde in both those countries.”

Susan Grace Galassi, Curator Emeritas, The Frick Collection, New York, who considers Whistler one of the greatest American artists, notes that he didn’t distinguish between fine or applied art, that he was as great a painter as he was a printmaker.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

This is England

This is England

Director – Shane Meadows – 2006 – UK – Cert. 18 – 101m

*****

A young, pre-teenage lad falls in with a gang of skinheads in Post-Falklands War, Thatcherite Britain – screens as part of Film Tottenham presents Rebel Party! on Sunday, September 12th 2026, 6.30 for 7pm start

The above one line synopsis, although accurate, doesn’t even begin to convey the piece’s considerable strengths. (Note: Meadows would subsequently develop this into a series of TV dramas in the UK using many of the same cast and characters: This is England ‘86, This is England ‘88 and This is England ‘90 in 2010, 2011 and 2015 respectively.)

Meadows is a unique and powerful voice, a teenage school dropout who kicked off his career in features with 1996’s 60-minute feature Small Time and went on to greater things TwentyFourSeven (1997) and critical favourite A Room For Romeo Brass (1999). His highest profile effort is the less impressive Once Upon A Time In The Midlands (2002), which suffers from trying to make an epic with an all-star British cast. Meadows is not about big movies (not yet, anyway) – he began shooting movies with mates as actors and has an uncanny ability to draw incredible performances out of actors and non-actors alike, based as much on the people concerned as on their acting ability.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies Music

Everybody Digs Bill Evans

Everybody Digs Bill Evans

Director – Grant Gee – 2025 – UK / Ireland – Cert. 15 – 102m

*****

Following the unexpected death of his trio’s bass player in a car crash, jazz pianist Bill Evans finds himself incapable of playing – out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 11th

Director Gee has a clear empathy for the worlds of music and musicians, with documentaries Meeting People is Easy (1998), about Radiohead touring to promote their album OK Computer, and Joy Division (2007). The current film represents his first foray into the narrative feature.

It opens with a recreation of a number from Evans’ 1961 New York Village Vanguard gig – the Bill Evans Trio with Evans (Anders Danielsen Lie from The Summer Book, Charlie McDowell, 2024; Bergman Island, Mia Hansen-Løve, 2021; The Worst Person in the World, Joachim Trier, 2021) on piano, Scott LeFaro (Will Sach) on bass, and Paul Motian (Boz Martin-Jones) on drums – two recordings of which were released as the highly regarded LPs Sunday at the Vialllage Vanguard and Waltz for Debby. As reel to reel spools rotate, so too do car wheels, specifically those carrying LeFaro to his death in a car crash 11 days later.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Pressure

Pressure

Director – Anthony Maras – 2026 – UK, France – Cert. 12a – 100m

*****

Days before the proposed Allied D-Day landings in 1944, the Scots meteorologist in charge becomes convinced that it should be postponed due to impending bad weather – out in UK cinemas on Wednesday, September 9th

Taking leave from his heavily pregnant wife Liz (Tamsin Topolski), due in hospital imminently for the birth, Scots meteorologist RAF Gp Capt. James Stagg (Andrew Scott) travels by military car to Southwick House, the stately home requisitioned for the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) under General Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser), where he meets his own liaison officer Andrew Carter (Jojo Macari) and, in what is to be his office, MTC First Lt. Kay Summersby (a nicely understated Kerry Condon), Eisenhower’s private secretary. All communications with the General go through her.

From their first encounter – three days from the proposed D-Day landing on Monday morning, when USAAF Col. Krick (Chris Messina) and his weather room staff are improvising a version of The Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy from Company B with a piano – Stagg is less than impressed with his American counterpart. Krick boasts that he not only correctly predicted the weather for Eisenhower ahead of various military battles in North Africa and elsewhere, but also did the same for David O.… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Super Nature

Super Nature

Director – Ed Sayers – 2025 – UK – Cert. PG – 82m

*****

The process of shooting the natural world on the Super 8 amateur home movie format of the 1970s brings a participating community of people closer to nature – out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 4th

This starts and ends with the image zooming in to and zooming out from Super 8 footage. The Kodak Super 8 system was the premier format for home movies in the late1960s through the 1970s before it was replaced for the most part by videotape in the 1980s.

For some years, Ed Sayers was involved in a Super 8 film competition wherein punters would enter their films, and most of the material was much the same – family memories or holiday footage. Some of it extremely wild. As he puts it, the medium “painted our memories on film.”

One year, a very different submission turned up from a Frenchman named Roger. Roger had shot footage of flamingoes. 

The nature of Super 8 was that the film came on little cartridges of reversal film inserted into the camera. In terms of footage, the cartridges didn’t run that long. You’d shoot by squeezing the trigger, which would stop filming when released. … Read the rest

Categories
Animation Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Coup 53

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

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.… 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
Art Features Live Action Movies

The Christophers

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