Azur et Asmar is beautiful. Inspired, in part, by the work of Lotte Reiniger, and sitting perfectly alongside Ocelot’s earlier work, Kirikou and the Sorceress, it’s a fairy tale adventure with a global resonance, centring on relations between races and cultures. T...
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Azur et Asmar is beautiful. Inspired, in part, by the work of Lotte Reiniger, and sitting perfectly alongside Ocelot’s earlier work, Kirikou and the Sorceress, it’s a fairy tale adventure with a global resonance, centring on relations between races and cultures. The fantastical story centres on the adventures of a young man who sets out to find a fabled fairy princess. His adventures test heart, mind and body and it’s thrilling to watch unfold. It reminds us how powerfully a film can use all the attractions of entertainment to explore the bigger picture. The film is sumptuously designed and a little unexpected in its animation style. As such, it is totally compelling. Ocelot has explained how his childhood relates to his filmmaking: “I knew nothing but happiness in Africa …there were Catholics, Protestants, Animists, Muslims. It was natural and I internalised this relaxedness … I have memories of jubilation from gazing at passers-by ... I became conscious of beauty – of people, of clothing, of lanscapes…”
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Water Lilies, by first time director Céline Sciamma, is a skilfully crafted portrayal of two girls’ sexual awakening. Late developer Marie becomes infatuated with the head of the synchronised swimming club, Floriane, who in contrast to the slight and boyish girl, ...
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Water Lilies, by first time director Céline Sciamma, is a skilfully crafted portrayal of two girls’ sexual awakening. Late developer Marie becomes infatuated with the head of the synchronised swimming club, Floriane, who in contrast to the slight and boyish girl, oozes sexuality. The pair begin a complex relationship centred around Floriane’s quest to gain sexual experience. Envy, passion, obsession and insecurity all rage beneath the surface as the two struggle with their feelings for each other. The film captures the confusion and turmoil of adolescence through its subtle observational camerawork, visuals which delicately insinuate the throbbing sexual undertones and a loosely defined soundtrack. Restrained dialogue allows for uncomfortable emotions to develop and adds to the claustrophobic tension which pervades the film. There is also no role for adults; its complete focus is the isolating, all-encompassing significance of adolescent pain. This is a beautifully directed and empathetic film which tells its story with confident sophistication.
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n black/white, widescreen 1:1,66, original soundtrack, shot in 11 weeks, between July 1st and October 31st, 1975, between Lüneburg and Hof, along the frontier with East Germany.” So begins this multi-layered and marvellously meandering movie which carries you eff...
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n black/white, widescreen 1:1,66, original soundtrack, shot in 11 weeks, between July 1st and October 31st, 1975, between Lüneburg and Hof, along the frontier with East Germany.” So begins this multi-layered and marvellously meandering movie which carries you effortlessly across three hours of beautiful cinema.
Its main characters are two men. The dungareed Bruno Winter (Rüdiger Vogler, familiar from Alice in the Cities), spends his time mending and maintaining projection equipment in small town picture houses. He lives in his truck and has learned to live with loneliness, turning a ready smile into a mask. One fine morning as he is shaving he watches a man speed by in his Beetle – right to the end of the road and on into the Elbe. He’s gained a travelling companion. Sometime during that day, or maybe the next – exact chronology isn’t so important here – they introduce themselves to each other and Bruno goes about his business, with Robert in tow.
Kings of the Road (or In the Course of Time in its original German title) works on a number of levels. It’s a film about male friendship, loneliness and its consolations, but it’s also a reflection on the state of cinema in Germany and the influence of American culture on the European imagination. And it’s also, of course, a road movie (in a MAN removals truck), beautifully photographed in silvery monochrome by Robbie Müller and Martin Schäfer, who make sublime visual poetry of the dusk.
In an essay Wenders wrote about Robert Altman’s film Nashville in 1976, the year after he made Kings of the Road, he bemoaned the fact that there was little serious film criticism being written in Germany. Maybe that is why his film seems such a fresh statement of intent. Nothwithstanding that it is a leisurely road movie, there’s an attitude here, an excitement of stating principles and marking out territory for a new way of making movies, of finding a way to meld European sensibilities with American film language. At the end of his essay Wenders wrote, ‘I feel at ease and open and I am delighted at everything I see’. I felt the same way after watching this film. It leaves you in a good place.
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From the opening credits, when details of objects and textures of a house are delineated with a near-hallucinatory clarity against a soundtrack of a menacing bowed drone, there is a dark sense of unease in Rat-Trap, which takes place wholly in and surrounding a la...
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From the opening credits, when details of objects and textures of a house are delineated with a near-hallucinatory clarity against a soundtrack of a menacing bowed drone, there is a dark sense of unease in Rat-Trap, which takes place wholly in and surrounding a landlord's house in Kerala. The house belongs to another age, as does Unni, the lazy, taciturn ‘young master’ and the sole surviving heir of a decaying feudal family surviving on the increasingly meagre resources of its estate produce. His older sister Rajamma waits on him hand and foot; Sridevi, the younger, is studying at school and is drawn only reluctantly into his service. Barring occasional visits from relations and incursions into the courtyard with produce from the estate, the house is isolated. Within the house too, siblings have little meaningful contact with each other, leaving each in their own world – of ennui, of servitude, of study. Dialogue is spare and details accrue through the character’s actions, carefully rendered surroundings and personal effects. Even when characters depart from the house, their absence haunts the screen. Relationships between people are deliberately uncertain. At the centre of it all is Unni, bloated from keeping everything for himself.

One night, Unni is apparently bitten by a rat. Sridevi fetches the large wooden trap down from the attic, removes the cobwebs, greases it and primes it with coconut. “Watch a rat being trapped” she tells her older sister in a line that serves for the film as a whole. As the days pass, Unni withdraws completely from meaningful relations with others. His world contracts from village to estate, to veranda, to chair, to bed, his listlessness sours to psychosis and he becomes an unshaven, red-eyed, cowering wreck. By the end, the dissonant, jarring swipes of sound that accompany Sridevi’s trips to the pond with the contents of the trap have gained dark retrospective significance.

This is the first release in the UK of a film by one of India's pre-eminent filmmakers. With its assured direction and concept, Rat-Trap was awarded the BFI’s prestigious Sutherland Trophy for ‘the most original and imaginative film’ of 1982; it leaves you wanting to see much more from this unique director.


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In this shrewd family drama, Isabelle Huppert plays a weary middle-aged divorcee who longs to break away from family life with her two sons, both in their early twenties but who act like bullish teenagers, continually fighting each other and failing to get jobs. W...
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In this shrewd family drama, Isabelle Huppert plays a weary middle-aged divorcee who longs to break away from family life with her two sons, both in their early twenties but who act like bullish teenagers, continually fighting each other and failing to get jobs. When she flirts with the idea of selling the house to finance a B&B with her lover, her sons rebel and the family dynamic alters radically.
Any film that opens with a dedication à nos limites suggests that boundaries are about to be broken, and so it proves in the opening scene, in which Huppert tries on sexy lingerie in front of a mirror whilst her two sons make inappropriate innuendo in the background. As the latest entry in the recent rise of Belgian realism (Private Property breathes the same air as the work of the Dardenne brothers), this captures some uncanny moments of human fallibility, such as the many fraught dinner scenes. Huppert is marvellous as always, and special mention should go to Jérémie Renier, so promising in The Child, who makes his thuggish character surprisingly sympathetic.
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Any director who makes a film that switches scenario without explanation half way through and guest stars a talking monkey has some chutzpah, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, arguably the most exciting director at work today, has already garnered a reputation for au...
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Any director who makes a film that switches scenario without explanation half way through and guest stars a talking monkey has some chutzpah, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, arguably the most exciting director at work today, has already garnered a reputation for audacity (his masterly Syndromes and a Century was released on DVD last month). In Tropical Malady, the first half deals with the gradual romance between a male soldier and a country boy in the Thai jungle. In a haunting, underplayed interlude the boy is spirited away. In the second half the soldier is on the trail of an apparently shape-shifting entity which may or may not be his departed lover. The plot sounds far-fetched, but Apichatpong makes it work incredibly well, conveying the sensuality and mystique of the jungle. A shot of a tree lit up by fireflies is astonishing, as is the hypnotic final encounter between the hero and a tiger. Film critic Peter Bradshaw wrote that “it may turn out to be a masterpiece or just barking mad”. A barking mad masterpiece just about sums it up.
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F ollowing the rapturous reception accorded to his pop opera The Umbrellas of Cherbourg in 1964, Jacques Demy continued in the same vein with Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, which encapsulated his passion for the Hollywood musical, while also revealing him to be eve...
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F ollowing the rapturous reception accorded to his pop opera The Umbrellas of Cherbourg in 1964, Jacques Demy continued in the same vein with Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, which encapsulated his passion for the Hollywood musical, while also revealing him to be every bit as cinematically subversive as Truffaut and Godard. Indeed, this candy-coloured confection could easily be considered the last great film of the nouvelle vague.
For all its complexities, the plot is almost an irrelevance. Danielle Darrieux owns a café on the square in the coastal town of Rochefort, where twin daughters Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac teach music and dance to local kids while dreaming of making it big in Paris and finding the ideal man. Deneuve has a crush on artist Jacques Perrin (whom she has never met), while Darrieux loves the father of her young son, Michel Piccoli, who runs a nearby music store and is friends with celebrated American composer Gene Kelly – who falls for Dorleac.
The various romantic contrivances provide a convenient dramatic structure. But Demy is more interested in the bustle of life outside Darrieux’s window that centres on the fair that brings likely lads George Chakiris and Grover Dale to town. Consequently, peripheral characters break into dance steps as well as the principals, and this sense of spontaneity spills over into the songs, which Demy and Michel Legrand composed in the manner of Rodgers and Hart to flow naturally from the dialogue, so that speaking and singing became interchangeable.
The influence of Mamoulian’s Love Me Tonight and Minnelli’s An American in Paris is readily apparent, but this sly satire on Franco-American relations also shares a fondness for action on the edge of the frame with Jacques Tati’s Playtime. Far from being an outdated throwback, this is every bit as modern and audacious as 1967’s other major musical event, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
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Roy Andersson’s fourth feature confirms what Songs from the Second Floor already suggested: that this dryly melancholic Swede is one of the cinema’s true originals. A perfectionist on the order of Fellini or Tati (You, the Living looks a little like Tati’s Playtim...
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Roy Andersson’s fourth feature confirms what Songs from the Second Floor already suggested: that this dryly melancholic Swede is one of the cinema’s true originals. A perfectionist on the order of Fellini or Tati (You, the Living looks a little like Tati’s Playtime populated by the cast of a Kaurismäki film), Andersson marshals huge sets and hundreds of extras to create something as quirkily personal as the most humbly-resourced indie film. Formally, it’s a series of fifty short tableaux, virtually all shot with an immobile camera, and each presenting a more or less bizarre scenario. A Dixieland trio performs against an electrical storm, boorish judges swig beer before pronouncing a capital sentence, a wedding night takes place in a house that doubles as a sleeping car – and, to emphasise that Andersson’s underlying purpose is wholly serious, an elderly woman refuses to leave a church until she has accounted for all the modern world’s sins. The many laughs come straight out of left field, though the punchline to the hoary old tablecloth gag is especially delicious.
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Angel Face is one of a string of superb film noirs that Otto Preminger made throughout the 1940s and 50s. Though the brilliance of Laura tends to overshadow the others, Angel Face is one of his very best, and is a complex, clever picture with two great stars on to...
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Angel Face is one of a string of superb film noirs that Otto Preminger made throughout the 1940s and 50s. Though the brilliance of Laura tends to overshadow the others, Angel Face is one of his very best, and is a complex, clever picture with two great stars on top form.
The plot is tinged with melodrama; ambulance driver Frank (Robert Mitchum) falls for a pretty heiress, Diane (Jean Simmons), realising too late that she is dangerously disturbed and may be plotting to kill her mother. When a murder inevitably takes place, in one of the best death scenes captured on celluloid, Frank finds himself in too deep, and risks being dragged down by his psychotic paramour.
Mitchum played this type of role several times, and he injects his anti-hero with customary wit and cynicism; but he also permits a degree of pathos, such as when he smugly returns to his former lover (Mona Freeman), expecting her to forgive his infidelity, only to find she has found someone else. Simmons has rarely been better, putting a very interesting spin on what could have been a stock femme fatale. Recalling Gene Tierney’s ruthless protagonist in Leave Her to Heaven, she portrays Diane as a damaged daughter, yet her natural malevolence makes her more than a victim of circumstance.
There are set pieces here worthy of classic status and some marvellous cat and mouse interplay between Simmons and Freeman. The former invites the latter to lunch to assure her she is not attracted to Frank. The latter sees through this blatant lie, and so begins a cracking dialogue loaded with tension. Simmons’ reaction when Mitchum slaps her to control her hysteria is beautifully played too. Preminger ordered numerous takes of this scene, until Simmons lost her patience, turned round and slapped the director!
Cited by Jean-Luc Godard as one of the top ten best American sound films ever made, Angel Face richly deserves rediscovery.
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Four Years after Brief Encounter, David Lean made another film about a married woman contemplating a fling with Trevor Howard. Too often overshadowed by its illustrious predecessor, The Passionate Friends is one of the hidden treasures of Lean's career.

A...
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Four Years after Brief Encounter, David Lean made another film about a married woman contemplating a fling with Trevor Howard. Too often overshadowed by its illustrious predecessor, The Passionate Friends is one of the hidden treasures of Lean's career.

Ann Todd plays Mary; as a younger woman she nearly eloped with Steven (Howard). But she chose respectability instead, staying with her husband. Now, by chance, she meets Steven again and the torments of duty and desire resurface.

Much more than a thin retread of an earlier triumph, The Passionate Friends offers a darker vision than Brief Encounter. It's a triangle, rather than a two hander, and there is anger to balance the love . The husband – played by Claude Rains, cinema's greatest cuckold (see also: Notorious) – is a much more significant figure; his destructive jealousy is made all too understandable.

It's not Lean's most polished work – the film suffered a troubled production history – but its sheer emotional clout makes it amongst his richest. A valuable companion piece to Brief Encounter, it deserves to be better known.
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The last successful starring vehicle for producer-actor Stanley Baker, Robbery is better remembered now for the being the film that propelled director Peter Yates on to Hollywood to make Steve McQueen’s Bullitt in 1968. McQueen, well known as a petrol head, saw Ro...
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The last successful starring vehicle for producer-actor Stanley Baker, Robbery is better remembered now for the being the film that propelled director Peter Yates on to Hollywood to make Steve McQueen’s Bullitt in 1968. McQueen, well known as a petrol head, saw Robbery and was completely bowled over by its high-octane car chase; he wanted one like it in his film. (And Yates, of course, went on to deliver it.) But Robbery still holds its own as the kind of thick-ear crime feature that Britain – and particularly Stanley Baker – used to do very well on the big screen. Sharply photographed by Douglas Slocombe and loosely based on the Great Train Robbery of 1963, it teams Baker’s criminal mastermind Paul Clifton with some solid bad boy actors of the period — Frank Finlay, James Booth, Barry Foster, George Sewell — and throws in some terrific London locations to boot. Having said that, the magnificent opening car chase is what will linger longest in the memory: it is something akin to a tyre-screeching, eight-cylinder Odessa Steps sequence.
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Rudyard Kipling has been well served by filmmakers. His writing goes in and out of favour with the literary establishment but adaptations like Gunga Din (George Stevens, 1939) and The Man Who Would Be King (John Huston, 1975) are authentic movie classics. Like tho...
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Rudyard Kipling has been well served by filmmakers. His writing goes in and out of favour with the literary establishment but adaptations like Gunga Din (George Stevens, 1939) and The Man Who Would Be King (John Huston, 1975) are authentic movie classics. Like those distinguished counterparts, Kim is a rip-roaring adventure and a whole lot of fun.
Kim (Dean Stockwell) is a young street urchin with a good heart. When it’s discovered that the little ragamuffin is the son of a British officer, the imperial authorities enrol him in a suitable school. Too free spirited for the strictures of formal education, Kim soon gets into trouble. But while his preference for Indian street life puts him at odds with British society, it means he’s perfect for undercover work and the lad is dispatched on a very dangerous mission...
Anyone who has ever been eleven years old will understand just how irresistible this is: escaping the tiresome obligations of school and responsibility AND proving yourself a hero along the way? Where do I sign up? It’s worth noting the similarities to Harry Potter – everyday kid discovers he has a special heritage which he struggles to live up to. Anthropologists can probably explain all this as ‘archetypes’ and ‘mythos’: the rest of us should just enjoy it as a rattling good adventure.
Especially when it’s a well told as this. Victor Saville paces the yarn beautifully and carefully evokes Kipling’s India (not quite the real thing). It’s a shame that the Indian actor Sabu was too old to play Kim but Dean Stockwell is suitably street-smart and inquisitive in the title role. Errol Flynn gets top billing for a comparatively small part. Those wicked, wicked ways had evidently taken their toll but the famous charisma was intact: he was still the most charming sonofabitch around.
This film was made in another age, of course, and one with rather different values. Contemporary audiences will wince at Europeans blacking up to play Indians (although, in mitigation, India – its culture and people – is treated with respect and dignity). It would be a shame for the film to be condemned for such attitudes because, excepting those, it really is gloriously entertaining.

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Unlike Ken Russell's better-known Elgar, which tried to encapsulate the composer's entire life, this Nigel Gearing-scripted TV film from 1996 focuses on a single brief but crucial period from 1919. A weary Sir Edward Elgar (James Fox), triply shattered by war, th...
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Unlike Ken Russell's better-known Elgar, which tried to encapsulate the composer's entire life, this Nigel Gearing-scripted TV film from 1996 focuses on a single brief but crucial period from 1919. A weary Sir Edward Elgar (James Fox), triply shattered by war, the strain of caring for his dying wife Alice (Faith Brook) and the feeling that his music has become an increasing irrelevance in the age of Schoenberg and Bartók, potters around his country home and its fog-soaked grounds. His thoughts are constantly interrupted by daydreams of the great Cello Concerto, but he can't find the energy to write it down. But then he becomes besotted twice over by what calls his "tenth muse": not just the Hungarian violinist Jelly d'Aranyi's uniquely empathetic interpretation of his work, but also, increasingly, the woman herself (Selma Alispahic). However, it's a romance that's doomed from the start, the age and cultural gaps unbridgable except through music, the latter given superb performances by Maxim Vengerov (violin), Natalie Clein (cello), and the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Andrew Davis.
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Son of Rambow is one of those fresh, inventive coming-of-age films that, whatever you may have read about it already, you’ll be pleasantly surprised by what you find has actually wound up on screen.
The film revolves around the unlikely alliance of two boys, ...
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Son of Rambow is one of those fresh, inventive coming-of-age films that, whatever you may have read about it already, you’ll be pleasantly surprised by what you find has actually wound up on screen.
The film revolves around the unlikely alliance of two boys, and their attempts to remake, or rather, reimagine Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo: First Blood. But, like all great British movies stretching all the way back to Ealing, there’s so much more to it than that. Aside from the relationship between the two boys themselves (Bill Milner and Neil Dudgeon delivering tremendous, finely nuanced performances), there are subplots involving a supercool French exchange student (Jules Sitrek’s scene-stealing Didier Revol), a curious religious sect and a little bit of sibling bonhomie. All told, with its nostalgic recreation of the 1980s and the experience of growing up in the age of the video, Son of Rambow is like the flipside of This is England: one to file somewhere between the riches of Kes and the dreaminess of Billy Eliot.
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To borrow a phrase from Preston Sturges, the long-awaited release of Terence Davies’s masterpiece is ‘Christmas in July’. The film is a glorious, exultant hymn to the cinema that doubles as a coming of age drama, hinging on the sexual awakening of Davies’ 11-year-...
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To borrow a phrase from Preston Sturges, the long-awaited release of Terence Davies’s masterpiece is ‘Christmas in July’. The film is a glorious, exultant hymn to the cinema that doubles as a coming of age drama, hinging on the sexual awakening of Davies’ 11-year-old screen self, Bud. Wracked with guilt at his homosexuality, brutalised at school and trapped within the drabness of 1950s Liverpool, Bud finds solace and release in the movies and music of the period, which provide the soundtrack to Davies’ meticulously constructed film. At times the film itself offers that same escapism, carrying the viewer on wings. Those fantasy sequences and moments of unfettered joy are mixed with stretches of loneliness and misery. It’s that meshing of melancholia and magic that makes The Long Day Closes something unique, as Davies delivers one emotional wallop after another. This is one of the finest films in British post-war cinema.
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These three BFI-sponsored shorts announced the arrival of a major talent. Brazen, unpolished and utterly dazzling, they introduced the concerns that have dominated Terence Davies’ work ever since – sexuality, drudgery, memory, misery and the redemptive power of fi...
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These three BFI-sponsored shorts announced the arrival of a major talent. Brazen, unpolished and utterly dazzling, they introduced the concerns that have dominated Terence Davies’ work ever since – sexuality, drudgery, memory, misery and the redemptive power of film and song. But while the Trilogy – which toured European festivals in this combined form in 1984 – served as a launchpad for one of the most singular careers in modern cinema, it is also a major work in its own right.
The semi-autobiographical triptych follows Davies’ alter-ego, Robert Tucker, from cradle to grave. Children (1976) is a sobering account of Davies’ difficult Liverpool childhood, intercut with sequences showing the artist as a deeply unhappy young man. Torn from life, the scenes of playground bullying centre on the “Who’s queer, then?” calling card later heard in The Long Day Closes. Madonna and Child (1980) juxtaposes scenes from Davies/Tucker’s public and private lives, with the middle-aged office worker waist-deep in self-loathing, trying to reconcile his Catholic upbringing and his homosexuality. And in Death and Transfiguration (1983), we see the elderly Tucker (Wilfred Brambell) on a hospital ward, coughing himself to death.
The joy, needless to say, is in the execution. As in Distant Voices, Still Lives, Davies uses music to send the action into sharp relief. He scores his mother’s funeral procession to Doris Day’s ‘It All Depends on You’, an act of inspiration that sends a shiver down the spine. His remarkable visual sense is also in evidence, with much of Death and Transfiguration comprising unflinching, hypnotic close-ups of the ailing Tucker. And Davies’ mastery of both sound and image informs Madonna and Child’s bravura centrepiece: a reverentially shot tour of the stations of the Cross accompanied by Tucker’s nervous, anonymous call to a tattooist, asking him to draw on his balls.
Displaying his usual contempt for commerciality, Davies shows mental illness up close and ugly, stripped of the fashionable mania and humour of so many big screen fairy tales. A long, lingering shot of his mother sobbing quietly to herself on a bus is simple, eloquent and desperately moving.
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When Michael Haneke said that he was going to do an American version of his brilliant 1997 film Funny Games there was bafflement, which was compounded when it transpired that it would be a shot-for-shot remake of the original, albeit with slightly higher productio...
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When Michael Haneke said that he was going to do an American version of his brilliant 1997 film Funny Games there was bafflement, which was compounded when it transpired that it would be a shot-for-shot remake of the original, albeit with slightly higher production values and the presence of Tim Roth and Naomi Watts. So how does it look? Well, what this remake does do is to serve to remind you what an absolute horror-shock of a movie this is. If you’re new to its premise, all you really need to know is that a nice middle class family have their home invaded by two polite but thoroughly sadistic young men who proceed to torture them physically (nearly all violence is off-screen) and psychologically, treating the whole thing as a game and implicating the viewer along the way.
There is no film quite like this. It’s vicious, cruel and intelligent and certainly not for the faint-hearted, but whether you’re a fan of the original or just in the mood for having your head seriously messed with, Funny Games (US) is a must-see.
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When the drab greyness of Britain got him down, Peter Mayles moved to France with the idea of writing a novel. When he found he was getting nowhere because of the distractions, his agent had a brilliant idea. “Write about them” he said. He did, the book was a runa...
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When the drab greyness of Britain got him down, Peter Mayles moved to France with the idea of writing a novel. When he found he was getting nowhere because of the distractions, his agent had a brilliant idea. “Write about them” he said. He did, the book was a runaway success and led to this 1993 BBC mini-series, which anyone with a fondness for France in general and Provence in particular will relish.
John Thaw and Lindsay Duncan take the roles of Mayles and his wife as they spend a year fixing up their 200-year-old farmhouse in the shadow of the Luberon mountains. The series takes us through the seasons, from mistral winds, a cold house and frozen water pipes in the winter to a constantly distracting stream of guests in the summer. There are consolations to be found though, not least in the wonderful food and the wine of the region. Then there’s the truffle hunting...
With plenty of local characters, abundant humour and a lovely atmosphere, this is a light and enjoyable series which will bring a little Provençal light into your lives.

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A set of three films marking the 40th anniversary of the last steam journey on Britain’s mainline railways. Black Five is a nostalgic tribute to the engine of the same name, with railwaymen’s reminiscenses accompanying evocative scenes of its craftsmanship and eng...
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A set of three films marking the 40th anniversary of the last steam journey on Britain’s mainline railways. Black Five is a nostalgic tribute to the engine of the same name, with railwaymen’s reminiscenses accompanying evocative scenes of its craftsmanship and engineering in action. The Painter and the Engines is even more atmospheric, as painter David Shepherd, known for his scenes of African wildlife, goes down to the Nine Elms locomotive sheds to capture the last days of steam on the southern railways. The soot and grime of the sheds makes it into his paintings, and as Shepherd races to record what he can on canvas of the “simmering, sooted giants”, the editing gets sharper and the film greedily fills its last frames with as many steam trains as it can. The final film, King George V, tells the history of that celebrated locomotive, from clips of it at 1927 Fair of the Iron Horse in America to its 1970 home on Bulmers’ sidings in Hereford, “waiting for the day that BR’s policy may change, to permit steam to return to the tracks.”
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China’s ambitious Three Gorges Dam has long been a symbol of the country’s extraordinary economic growth. It is also indicative of the ruthless lengths it is prepared to go to in order to further development and international standing. Around two million people wi...
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China’s ambitious Three Gorges Dam has long been a symbol of the country’s extraordinary economic growth. It is also indicative of the ruthless lengths it is prepared to go to in order to further development and international standing. Around two million people will lose their homes and 1,200 towns and villages will be sucked into the destructive rising waters.
Up the Yangtze is a compelling documentary revealing the social impact of the controversial project. Set against the epic backdrop of the formidable river, the film lays bare the reality of the Chinese dream.
The Yu family are among those who will lose their home to the project. Having lost their livelihood they have been forced to send their daughter Shui to work. In a cruel twist of irony, she is hired into the tourist trade that provides boat rides for westerners, offering a glimpse of the life which has been stolen from her before it disappears forever.
Up the Yangtze astutely juxtaposes Yu Shui’s plight against the unstoppable drive for development which surges on with such poignant proximity all around her.
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Professor Willingdon has had enough. Britain’s most eminent atomic scientist has gone into hiding, having first written to inform the prime minister of his demands. Unless research into The Bomb is swiftly abandoned, the professor will use the nuclear device he h...
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Professor Willingdon has had enough. Britain’s most eminent atomic scientist has gone into hiding, having first written to inform the prime minister of his demands. Unless research into The Bomb is swiftly abandoned, the professor will use the nuclear device he has stolen to blow London off the map.
Seven Days... was among the first films to directly address the subject of nuclear weapons and does so in a way that remains uncomfortable. Willingdon is not some b-movie nutter: he’s a good man driven mad by the consequences of his work. The film creates a tension between our desire to see him caught and our sympathy for his cause.
Not that it’s heavy-handed: it stands up as a solid ticking-clock thriller. And, as you’d expect from the directors of Brighton Rock, it’s a film that revels in the seedy side of the capital, the squalid B&B’s and brassy ‘theatricals’. While these external trappings may date the film, the central questions remain regrettably pertinent.
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Taking a hiatus from Hollywood, Dustin Hoffman chose to spend most of 1984 playing Willy Loman in a Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s definitive study of the soured American Dream. The spectre of Lee J. Cobb loomed large; could the short, Method-acting film star...
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Taking a hiatus from Hollywood, Dustin Hoffman chose to spend most of 1984 playing Willy Loman in a Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s definitive study of the soured American Dream. The spectre of Lee J. Cobb loomed large; could the short, Method-acting film star compete? We needn’t have worried: Hoffman managed to redefine Loman, bringing a new perspective to his pathetic vulnerability, something that seemed a world away from Cobb, with his huge frame and thunderous, baritone voice. Cobb, of course, had excelled as the proud patriot, the gently powerful patriarch, being slowly broken down by his unachieved dreams, but Hoffman evokes a different kind of sympathy. His once-ambitious sales terrier is a loser from the start: a (literally) small man trying to be noticed, dreaming only of modest material and familial success (as if Ratso Rizzo had gone legitimate), which he still fails to achieve. Favouring a straight, stage-to-screen transfer of the production, Volker Schlondorff’s TV film provides a subtle magnification of Hoffman’s intense stage performance, and stands as a valuable record of a great American actor tackling a great American role.
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