BFI
London Film Festival 2015: Who Dares Wins?Tuesday, 13 October 2015
How do you corral 250 films in a way which makes sense to potential viewers? Major releases – so far at this year’s LFF we've had Suffragette, Johnny Depp in Black Mass and Maggie Smith in The Lady in the Van – pretty much take care of themselves.... Read more... |
10 Questions for Director Sarah GavronWednesday, 07 October 2015
Director Sarah Gavron tends to make films with strong social content. Her TV movie This Little Life (2003) concerned a couple’s struggles after the premature birth of their son; her first feature film was an adaptation of Monica Ali’s novel Brick... Read more... |
PasoliniWednesday, 09 September 2015
It’s somehow unsettling that, while the physical resemblance between Willem Dafoe and Italian writer and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini is remarkable to the point of being almost uncanny, Abel Ferrara’s Pasolini almost consciously avoids elucidating... Read more... |
DVD: Around the World with Orson WellesTuesday, 25 August 2015
Orson Welles was commissioned by ITV in 1955 to make a 26-part series of travelogues. Always in search of money to fund his independent projects, he was initially enthused by the plan - though predictably he didn’t see it through. Only six episodes... Read more... |
DVD: How to be Eccentric - The Essential Richard MassinghamTuesday, 28 July 2015
Improbably described by the French archivist and critic Henri Langlois as “the greatest technician and the greatest poet of British cinema”, it seems incredible that Richard Massingham isn't better known. A doctor by training, his first shorts were... Read more... |
Orson Welles: The Great DisruptorThursday, 02 July 2015
No-one could joke about the tragic aspect of Orson Welles’s career, the fact that his inestimable promise had only been partially realised, better than Welles himself. Once, when asked about the outrage following his panic-inducing radio adaptation... Read more... |
DVD: BirdmanThursday, 21 May 2015
Michael Keaton – like Cary Grant, Bill Murray, and George Clooney – is one of those stars who frequently convey their awareness that the situations they’re in are preposterous. He tautens his jaw muscles; his eyes express a mix of incredulity and... Read more... |
Love Is AllFriday, 13 February 2015
Among contemporary British documentarists Kim Longinotto has surely travelled the furthest afield internationally – Iran, Japan, Africa – to find her subjects. Love Is All brings her resoundingly back home to Britain, across a timeline that... Read more... |
The Philadelphia StoryTuesday, 10 February 2015
Cynical writer Macaulay Connor (Jimmy Stewart) and pragmatic photographer Elizabeth Imbrie (Ruth Hussey) are the tabloid team charged with getting the undercover scoop on the society wedding of the year, between old-moneyed Tracy Lord (Katharine... Read more... |
Timeshift: Battle for the Himalayas, BBC FourFriday, 30 January 2015
When people talk about the Heroic Age of exploration, the heroes are generally agreed to be the explorers. But we’d know a great deal less about Edwardian chaps pluckily struggling through far-flung snowscapes if there weren’t images of them in situ... Read more... |
Holocaust: Night Will Fall, Channel 4Sunday, 25 January 2015
More than once in André Singer’s documentary Holocaust: Night Will Fall – marking in advance the 70th anniversary, on 27th January, of the liberation of Auschwitz, having added that explanatory first word to the title with which the film was... Read more... |
The Green RayFriday, 02 January 2015
French actress Marie Rivière had a specially close relationship with director Eric Rohmer. After seeing his work for the first time in the early 1970s, Rivière expressed her admiration in a letter, which led to a succession of parts and culminated... Read more... |
