India
Jasper Rees
The Partition of India is vast and unexplored terrain in modern cinema. It triggered the migration of 14 million people: Muslims moved from an India reduced in size overnight to the new homeland of Pakistan, and non-Muslims made the opposite journey. It was what we’ve seen in Syria but multiplied by sheer volume of numbers, and squeezed into a much smaller timeframe. The border squiggled on the map was arbitrary and conjured up in haste. So a film about this seismic subcontinental shift is long overdue. It has fallen to Gurinder Chadha, a British filmmaker of Indian origin brought up in Kenya Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Gurinder Chadha is still best-known for directing a low-budget comedy set in Hounslow about two girls who just want to play football. Bend It Like Beckham (2002) introduced Keira Knightley and in 2015 became a stage musical that lured Asian audiences to the West End. While she also explored British Asian culture in Bride and Prejudice (2004) and It’s a Wonderful Afterlife (2010), in her new film she abandons light comedy to address the biggest and most decisive moment in Britain’s relationship with India.Viceroy’s House is set in 1947 at the moment Lord Mountbatten arrived in Delhi to oversee Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There's nothing like a tale set in a warm, exotic climate to lure in the viewers in damp and wintry northern Europe. Send the Nonnatus House midwives to South Africa for Christmas! Shoot a ridiculous detective drama in Guadeloupe! Go back to the Raj with Channel 4's Indian Summers!It's an old trick and it always works, and it probably will here as well. The title of The Good Karma Hospital makes it sound like The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel with added doctors and nurses, but thanks to a crisp and often witty script by Dan Sefton, it stands a good chance of establishing a distinctive identity Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
From India, here is a hoard of what really looks like treasure, much of it emerging into the light of day after decades, if not a century. Jewellery, sculpture, textiles, paintings, carvings, architectural fragments, domestic interiors, metalwork, drawings, books, furniture, toys, photographs, plasterwork – all are gathered together in a glittering display in galleries unified under the name of Lockwood Kipling.Who was he – other than an evocative name seemingly out of Trollope or Dickens? John Lockwood Kipling (1837-1911) is far better known as the father of Rudyard, than as a pioneering Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The homecoming narrative is one of the most elemental ones we know, playing on the most primal human emotions. Stories of separation and reunion have been handed down from time immemorial, varying in their specifics but dominated by their intricate connection to feelings of origin and identity. Lion may be inextricably linked to the details of contemporary life in one sense, but its final scenes have a power that goes far beyond it. In director Garth Davis’s hands the story is told with a sensitivity that avoids the lure of sensationalism.Adapted from Saroo Brierley’s memoir A Long Way Home, Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Cities, the fastest growing habitats in the history of the world, provided the subject for the sixth and final programme in Planet Earth II, the series that came a decade after the original Planet Earth programmes set new standards for television coverage of wildlife and nature.The follow-up confirmed that they are still being set, even though we have become accustomed to intrepid cameramen getting close to subjects never seen before, and tight narrative editing that gives us both visible and verbal comprehensible sequences, all anchored by the comforting familiarity of David Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Among the myriad global offerings at the LFF, the resoundingly British Their Finest ★★★★★ , about a group of film-makers working for the Ministry of Information in London in 1940, is surely among the most sheerly enjoyable. Okay, it was directed by Denmark's Lone Scherfig (of The Riot Club and An Education), but the way it catches the Blitz-era mood of terror and uncertainty mixed with a determination to band together and carry on feels almost miraculous.Adapting Lissa Evans's novel Their Finest Hour and a Half, Scherfig and screenwriter Gaby Chiappe have created a hilarious but beadily Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The indefatigable Victorian spinster Marianne North (1830-1890) is the most interesting artist you've never heard of. The upper-middle-class Ms North thought marriage a terrible experiment, and with her single state allowing her control of her fortune, she took to cultural and physical independence. Her rich landowner father, Frederick, MP for Hastings, knew everyone who was everyone, including Sir William Hooker, director of Kew. It was a visit to the gardens that turned his daughter’s eyes to the world of plants. She was 25 and had found her vocation. Marianne deserted the drawing room Read more ...
John Martin
The raising of a temporary structure theatre in the middle of the “Jungle” refugee camp in Calais (pictured below) has brought the issue of arts in situations of crisis into sharp focus. This big brave act by two young Brits, opening a creative space to some of the most miserable and traumatised people in Europe, in some of the most squalid conditions and in sight of the English coast, has hit a nerve which we cannot ignore.People sat up, journalists sat up, activists sat up and realised that this is embarrassingly close to home but that, where governments, international bodies and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Debashish Bhattacharya (b 1963) is India’s leading lap steel guitar player. Equally happy in the worlds of Indian classical and West-leaning fusion music, it’s no exaggeration to say he changed the way his instrument is regarded, at home and abroad. Born in Kolkata (AKA Calcutta) to parents who were both classical singers in the gwailor tradition, he embraced both sitar and western guitar as a young child, then spent most of his twenties studying with Pandit Brij Bhushan Kabra, a master of raga slide guitar. His career since has seen him push raga slide into whole new areas, including Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The extraordinary workings of an unusual mind are reduced to TV-movie proportions in The Man Who Knew Infinity, the latest and least re-telling of the too-short life of the self-taught Indian mathematician, Srinivasa Ramanujan, whose tale has previously been told in novel form (David Leavitt's The Indian Clerk) and as an Olivier Award-winning play (A Disappearing Number). Now along comes American writer-director Matthew Brown with a tentative take on the intriguingly knotted story of the Madras-born Ramanujan (played this time out by Dev Patel) and the eventual acclaim and renown Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Legendary director Peter Brook makes theatre that teaches audiences to be human. Now 90 years old, he brings his latest project to London from Paris, where he has been based at the Bouffes du Nord since quitting the UK more than 40 years ago. Called Battlefield, it is a 65-minute distillation of part of his 1985 11-hour epic, The Mahabharata, and revisits the ancient Sanskrit myth of the Kurukshetra War, and the struggle between the two warring families of the Kauravas and the Pandavas.Co-created with his long-term collaborators Jean-Claude Carrière and Marie-Hélène Estienne, Battlefield is Read more ...