Film
Graham Fuller
The powers at Hammer Films were right if they thought they were getting a horror flick to titillate straight men when they made The Vampire Lovers. Ingrid Pitt and Madeline Smith agreed to do partially nude scenes and wore décolletage gowns throughout. However, the movie’s reputation as conventionally exploitative isn’t justified. The British censor withdrew objections to the screenplay when he learned that the lesbian content originated in Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, which imparted a veneer of literary cred to the project. The adaptation by Tudor Gates, Harry Fine, and Michael Styne – Read more ...
David Farr
I’ve been working on two projects over the last four years and like buses they’ve arrived on British screens at the same time. On the surface they seem very different. My adaptation of John Le Carré’s The Night Manager is a huge epic sprawling espionage drama that spans six episodes and several years, moving from the Egypt of the Arab Spring to London, Spain, Turkey and beyond. My suspense movie The Ones Below, starring Clémence Poésy and David Morrissey, is 90 minutes long and set almost entirely in a house in north-east London. It’s claustrophobic and compressed, telling the unnerving tale Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Perhaps if you are in a sufficiently patient state, this slowburn of a Swedish art house film will suit your mood, but if fast cutting and rapid crossfire dialogue is your thing, it may be best to steer clear of The Here After. The debut feature of writer-director Magnus van Horn has done well at overseas film festivals, but may be a harder sell as a night out in a UK cinema on a chilly March evening. We first meet John (played by heart-throb pop star Ulrik Munther) as he’s packing up to leave the young offenders’ detention centre where he’s been for an undisclosed time, for an Read more ...
Holly O'Mahony
In case anyone hasn’t guessed from the flauntingly obvious title, Fifty Shades of Black is a parody of 2012’s favourite piece of trash lit: EL James’s Fifty Shades of Grey, which was adapted for film by director Sam Taylor-Johnson in time to underwhelm audiences on Valentine’s Day 2015. Created by some of the team behind the A Haunted House series, including writers Marlon Wayans and Rick Alvarez, and director Mike Tiddes, Fifty Shades of Black sets out to spoof the already ridiculed piece of fiction, itself based on Stephenie Meyer’s popular but poorly acclaimed novel-cum-film series, the Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Twenty-five-year-old Anthony Asquith didn’t call the shots on the silent movie that launched his distinguished directorial career, but the screenplay he co-wrote with JOC Orton included elaborate scenarist notes that told his designated co-director, AV Bramble, exactly what he intended. It was a gamble that paid off – 1927’s Shooting Stars proved a dazzling combination of tragicomedy and early docudrama, its subject being life in a film studio (Cricklewood in North London).The essays that accompany the British Film Institute’s dual-format release of the restored film emphasise that it Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The expectation that late means great is one embedded deeply in our culture: that the consummation of creative endeavour finds its peak towards life’s conclusion, with experience assimilated into a rich finale. These two films from the very start of the career of the eminent Czech director Věra Chytilová (1929-2014), and the beginning of the remarkable movement that became the Czech New Wave, are a salutary reminder of the opposite, showing just what happens when youth bursts out with supreme energy.The Czech New Wave was a young movement, emerging directly out of the Prague Film School. Read more ...
Graham Fuller
As a title, Hail, Caesar! is as delightfully self-conscious and “inside Hollywood” as The Hudsucker Proxy and O, Brother Where Are Thou? An alternative might have been It’s a Wonderful Lie.Set in 1951, Joel and Ethan Coen’s satirical fantasy, a companion piece to Barton Fink, stars Josh Brolin as a fictional studio boss who doubles as a gumshoe to protect his company’s image from scandals. Among the stars who test his resolve are a dim matinee idol (George Clooney) kidnapped by a Communist cell modelled on the Hollywood Ten while playing a Roman officer in the eponymous biblical epic, a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Richard Gere is a quiet knockout in Time Out of Mind, the Oren Moverman film that has for some reason remained as below the radar as its invisible (to the rest of society anyway) central character. Why wasn't this performance in the Oscar mix for the seasonal gongs just gone? He'd have had my vote, that's for sure, though it's doubtless part of its Israeli-American writer-director's game plan that this star turn remain unshowy and self-effacing in keeping with the sorrowful terrain that it traverses with unforced ease.Not that there's anything easy about the life Gere's George Hammond is Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The get-the-President movie, a genre we might term "POTUS in Peril", has had a chequered history, from The President's Plane Is Missing, Air Force One and Escape from New York to White House Down and Olympus Has Fallen. Now here's London Has Fallen, which is the sequel to the last of these, but adds almost nothing in the way of innovation or inspiration.However, fans of Gerard Butler, the bookmaker's son from Paisley who has risen to become the new Chuck Norris as well as an ambassador for Boss Bottled ("a truly masculine fragrance for men"), will be rewarded with copious helpings of his Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bill Forsyth’s slice of Glasgow noir never received the praise showered upon its predecessors Local Hero and Gregory’s Girl. The bonus interviews included on this disc hint at the reasons why: Forsyth admits that his script could have been tightened up, and Claire Grogan suggests that the film’s payoff doesn’t feel like a proper ending.Comfort and Joy is still a treat, though, its dry humour a return to the style of Forsyth’s zero-budget debut. Bill Paterson’s Alan "Dickie" Bird is a Partridgesque local radio DJ whose life starts to unravel when his kleptomaniac girlfriend leaves him. Buying Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The causes kept coming – diversity, of course, but also climate change, sexual abuse, LGBT rights and more – at the 88th annual Academy Awards, which surely ranked as the most politically charged Oscars in years. And that’s not only because one of the warmest welcomes of the night went to the American vice president, Joseph Biden, in an evening during which Donald Trump’s name – surprisingly or mercifully, or maybe both – was heard only once.As expected, and ever since this year’s nominations were first announced, the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag promised a provocative evening, and host Chris Rock Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although Audition was released in 1999, seeing it again reveals it as neither dated or blunted by subsequent, more alarming horror films whether Japanese or otherwise. As it was then, Takashi Miike’s study of a romantic relationship gone wrong remains out there on its own. Audition is arguably ground-zero for torture porn and would go on to influence films like Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005: in which Miike made a brief appearance) but the films made in its wake have none of its subtlety or flair with shockingly juxtaposing the day-to-day and the horrifying.Audition is a landmark film, and if it Read more ...