Tag: UK

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Features Live Action Movies

Peeping Tom

Director – Michael Powell – 1960 – UK – Cert. 15 – 101m

*****

“It’s just a film – isn’t it?” The obsessive home moviemaker who lives in the attic is photographing women as he kills them, leaving an inexplicable look of abject terror on his victims’ faces as they die – plays one night only, Sunday, October 26th, 7.30pm, as part of Film Tottenham celebrates 100 years of community cinema, which runs until Sunday, December 7th 2025, now extended to Sunday, December 21st

More on Film Tottenham’s two current seasons below review.

Review originally written for 2023 UK cinema reissue on Friday, October 27th 2023 alongside major BFI season Cinema Unbound: The Creative Worlds Of Powell + Pressburger in late 2023

(Warning: may contain spoilers.)

What would have happened to Michael Powell if he and Emeric Pressburger had never met each other? Powell cut his teeth making ‘quota quickies’ in the 1930s British film industry: low budget films whose function was to ensure British talent got a chance in an international industry dominated by product from Hollywood. His final film before he and Pressburger began working together is the impressive The Edge Of The World (1937) about a remote Scottish island.… Read the rest

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Animation Features Movies

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

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

*****

The groundbreaking, mythological Japanese animated epic returns to UK cinemas from Friday, 17th October 2025

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

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Features Live Action Movies

Steve

Director – Tim Mielants – 2025 – UK – Cert. 15 – 93m

****1/2

In 1996, the head, his staff and their students struggle to get through a particularly difficult day at a school for troubled teenage boys – out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 19th, and worldwide on Netflix on Friday, October 3rd

Steve (a burned out, visually unrecognisable Cillian Murphy, also the producer) is asked if he’s ready to do an interview to camera. He isn’t, but now is as good a time as any. He drives into work across a vast estate and spots teenager Shy (Jay Lycurgo) dancing to drum and bass music on his Walkman cassette player and smoking a spliff. Steve disciplines his pupil in a friendly manner, then returns to his car after being reminded that today is the day a TV film crew is coming to the school to film a segment for the local TV news magazine programme. Shy attempts, playfully, to ride on the bonnet of Steve’s car. Steve, talks him out of it.

Most of what follows, which covers the next 24 hours, takes place within the school buildings themselves, although the action occasionally wanders (or flies drone-shot style) out into and around the wider grounds of the school estate.… Read the rest

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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

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Features Live Action Movies

The Regulars

Director – Fil Freitas – 2025 – UK – Cert. 12 tbc – 105m

***1/2

A single day shift in the working life of the staff at London’s legendary Prince Charles Cinema – out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 22nd

2019, that halcyon time before the global pandemic. Independent repertory cinemas struggle on, their poorly paid staff a hotbed of frustrated creativity. This is as true of London’s Prince Charles Cinema (the PCC) as anywhere. Fil Freitas (playing himself, also the writer-director) can’t seem to get out of bed in time for his PCC shifts, scarcely helped by his sharing it (and his life in rented flat hell) with fellow PCC worker Dusty Keeney (playing herself, also the producer). Then, to compound his lateness for work, is the small matter of his inability to open the front door due to someone having dumped an oven outside it, a smartphone photo of which helps on this occasion to provide him with an excuse for being late. Still, his unflustered boss Sam (Ricardo Freitas) makes him sign the late book. (“Really?”)

Despite this start which feels very much like a start, there’s no real plot to speak of here beyond the (perfectly good) idea of portraying a day in the workinglife of the staff at the PCC, so the film ends at the close of day as everyone clocks off after their shift.… Read the rest

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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

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Features Live Action Movies

Darling

Director – John Schlesinger – 1965 – UK – Cert. 15 – 128m

*****

A young woman abandons her dull marriage to navigate life and love in 1960s swinging London – back out in UK cinemas on Friday, May 30th, and on 4K UHD & Blu-ray on Monday, 16th June

Today, this stands as a testament to the 1960s, when social class in Britain began to break down and people began experimenting with lifestyle and morality in hitherto unthinkable ways. It plays as a fascinating snapshot of its contemporary time and mores, providing a glimpse into the sixties, the decade of Swinging London when, for a brief moment, this city was the coolest in the world.

Yet, for Darling’s characters, London is just where they happen to live. In a loose framing device, Diana Scott (Julie Christie) recounts her memories into a tape recorder, presumably for an unseen interviewer or biographer, although while this dramatic device anchors the narrative charting of the young woman’s life and career, it does little beyond ease the viewer into her story and allow her to interject pertinent comments at various points.

As a child in the school play, people are already referring to Diana as Darling.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Live Action Movies

Sister Midnight

Director – Karan Kandhari – 2024 – UK, Sweden, India – Cert. 15 – 110m

***1/2

A young woman in an arranged marriage discovers herself to be a creature of the night… and one of the undead – genre-bender is out on UK digital from Wednesday, June 18th

A young woman travels cross-country by train, face veiled by beaded hangings, to join the arranged marriage husband she has (presumably) never met in their new, urban home. Uma (Radikha Apte) and Gopal (Ashok Pathak best known here from The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, John Madden, 2015) don’t seem to know what to do with each other. Certainly not any sort of sexual congress as they unveil sitting beside one another for the first time. As the tale proceeds, sleeping with him comes to consist of curling up on her own on the other side of the bed from him. Later, her sleeping patterns will start to shift…

Theirs is a pretty basic home – a room with a mattress and a door out onto the bustling, main street outside. Her husband has a job, so goes out in the morning and comes back in the evening, although sometimes he goes out drinking after work and comes back later.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Tornado

Director – John Maclean – 2025 – UK – Cert. 15 – 91m

*****

A bereaved Japanese in Britain in 1790 must prove herself as a samurai to survive – unique coming of age historical drama is out in UK cinemas on Friday, June 13th

A 16-year-old Japanese girl (Koki) flees over the moors, through the wood, towards a large mansion. So does a young boy. Their male pursuers walk relentlessly in her direction, but they haven’t seen her. Woe betide her if they do, because their leader (Tim Roth from Pulp Fiction, 1994; Reservoir Dogs, 1992, both Quentin Tarantino; The Hit, Stephen Frears, 1984) addresses one of their number by name then slits his throat. She gets to the house, opens the door, the sudden draught inside causing papers to blow around, but she shuts it pretty fast, sensing the woman inside. A little later, she opens the door, gingerly enters the house. A hiding place, but she must be sure the occupants don’t spot her.

No such hesitancy for the gang following her; they step inside confidently as if they own the place, pushing over and kicking the male occupant while he’s down. They spread out, and a younger man in the party, who we will later come to know as Little Sugar (Jack Lowden frrom Benediction, Terence Davies, 2021; Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan, 2017; ’71, Yann Demange, 2014), son of the gang leader Sugarman (Roth), finds her at the end of an upper corridor whose floor has given way beneath another gang member.… Read the rest