wed 11/06/2025

Film Features

Powell and Pressburger's 'The Red Shoes' - art and nothing but

Hugh Barnes

Nobody ever forgets The Red Shoes (1948) because it’s a movie that seems to change the way an audience experiences cinema. A story about a diverse group of individuals collaborating to make art, the film is itself a wonderful example of the process.

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They had a good war: Powell and Pressburger's no-nonsense heroines

Helen Hawkins

In the current reappraisal of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, what to make of the depiction of women in their key films, that striking tribe of Isoldes with chestnut hair and passionate natures?

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'Glorious, isn't it?' Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's Subversive Cinema

Graham Fuller

Announcing “A Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger production” or, alternatively “A Production of the Archers”, an arrow thuds into the centre of a roundel. Whether in black and white or colour, that famous rubric not only conflates the auras of Robin Hood and the Royal Air Force, but issues a warning you’re about to get a shot in the eye. 

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London Film Festival 2023 - Scorsese on Scorsese

Nick Hasted

Martin Scorsese walks onstage to a hero’s welcome, shoulders a little hunched, with a touch of sideways shuffle or hustle, taking acclaim in his stride at 80. He has sold out London’s 2,700-capacity Royal Festival Hall for the BFI’s biggest Screen Talk by far, and the queue for returns stretches into the street, to see a director as big as any star.

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Side By Side Ukrainian Film Festival, Curzon Soho - cameras of courage and resistance

Hugh Barnes

François Truffaut said that there is no such thing as an anti-war film because cinema inevitably glorifies the horror of conflict. The premise was robustly challenged over the weekend at the Ukrainian Institute London’s fourth annual film festival, Side By Side, which screened a handful of films, documentary and narrative, feature-length and short, that compelled the audience to reflect deeply on war’s horrific nature.

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Top 10 Films of 2022: Conclusion

Graham Fuller

The Arts Desk’s movie reviewers voted The Banshees of Inisherin the best film released in the UK in 2022. Here are our choices for the top 10 with the names of their directors:

 

1. The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonough)

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Adam Sweeting's Top 10 Films of 2022

Adam Sweeting

1. Nightmare Alley

It’s the late 1930s, and the America depicted here is still lost in the purgatory of the Great Depression. Director Guillermo del Toro has described it as “a straight, really dark story”, but it grips like a sinister, spectral visitation.

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Sebastian Scotney's Top 10 Films of 2022

Sebastian Scotney

Movie-watchers are wallowing in the back catalogues. I hunted down theartsdesk's readership stats for the film reviews I’d written this year. Top of the list was not a new release at all, but the new extras-loaded Blu-ray version of Bertrand Tavernier’s 'Round Midnight (1986).

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Markie Robson-Scott's Top 10 Films of 2022

Markie Robson-Scott

Madness, introspection, and childhood trauma all feature in the best films of 2022: a good year for delving deep. Triangle of Sadness is over-the-top, cathartic lunacy – don’t see it before going on a cruise – while The Banshees of Inisherin and Nope are marvellously mad in their own ways.

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Demetrios Matheou's Top 10 Films of 2022

Demetrios Matheou

I’m struck by how many of my 2022 picks deal with relationships in extremis: a love story disguised as a Hitchcockian murder mystery, a long friendship gone suddenly surreally awry, an unlikely romance that unfolds on a sub-zero train journey, a married couple whose shared obsession with mortality is piqued by a toxic dust cloud, a father-daughter bond that’s finally understood through the prism of bitter-sweet memory.

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Veronica Lee's Top 10 Films of 2022

Veronica Lee

In what feels like a less than stellar year for cinema, some films stand out. In some instances it was because I stepped a little outside my normal fare of blockbusters or star-driven vehicles and saw some films I might have thought a little too arthouse for my tastes. I'm very glad I did because otherwise I might not have seen a couple on this list.

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Nick Hasted's Top 10 Films of 2022

Nick Hasted

Audrey Diwan’s French abortion drama Happening was the year’s hardest but most luminescent watch, as a fiercely intelligent young woman fights for her future survival as an artist in 1963, when illegal abortion requires wartime subterfuge and bloody violence to female bodies.

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Graham Fuller's Top 10 Films of 2022

Graham Fuller

Empires rise and fall; every dog has its day. The increased awareness of and need for diverse voices – together with the series-driven streaming revolution – has made Hollywood less relevant now than it has been at any time since the industry colonised Southern California's orange groves. Even stars have become an endangered species.

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Saskia Baron's Top 10 Films of 2022

Saskia Baron

I struggled to find enough features this year for a top 10, probably because Covid’s long shadow made it harder for filmmakers to get interesting work on screen.

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'We needed to find the perfect sound of vibranium, an alien metal specific to the Marvel Universe': Foley artist Shelley Roden on creating audible movie miracles

Shelley Roden

The projection screen reflects light onto the Foley stage. I can just make out the edges of the built-in cement and metal surfaces around the floor’s perimeter and the large dirt pit centre stage. Bamboo poles, a hockey stick, and a shovel poke out from storage bins to my right. The corner of a car hood winks from underneath a furniture blanket. These tools wait their turn to become something other than what they were originally designed for. 

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Leslie Phillips: 'I can be recognised by my voice alone'

Jasper Rees

Leslie Phillips would have known for half a century that at his death, which was announced yesterday, the obituaries would lead with one thing only. However much serious work he did in the theatre and on screen, he is forever handcuffed to the skirt-chaser he gave us in sundry Carry Ons and Doctor films and London bus movies.

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