United Kingdom
Thought the buddy cop movie formula was tired? Well, it is a cinematic breath of fresh air in comparison to the “bad cop” movie. These movies are tiresome depictions of lawmen (and make no mistake, they are always men) who break every rule in the book whilst trying to enforce it – and even though there have been solid entries into the genre in recent years, it can’t help but feel worn out.
When we think of documentaries about North Korea, it is usually with an eye toward illuminating what to this day remains cloaked in self-imposed mystery. As it has always been an excessively reclusive nation, this state of unknowing has been the primary trait most of the West associates with the DPRK. As a young country, that means most of its brief history is known only to itself, and even then there are probably only a few at the government’s upper echelons that are privy to details not disseminated to a populace fed on propaganda.
You won’t find out much about Louise Osmond if you look online. She is an Oxford history graduate who joined ITN as a news journalism trainee, and that’s all I or probably any other writer could know about her. But the personal details are irrelevant in the face of such a sturdy, and increasingly successful career as a documentary maker.
Straight off a win from the 2016 Drunken Film Festival in Bradford, West Yorkshire, England, comes a quirky, well written short. Though bleak and serious in its setting, there are definitely lots of laughs here. Polterheist, written by David Gilbank and Paul Renhard, is an entertaining watch, with a nicely planned plot.
‘So Bad They’re Good’ movies are a thing now. Movie list websites are awash with them. Troll 2 is often the high-watermark, and it appears that most of these no-budget horrors tend to be of American origin.
Chicken is a British drama directed by Joe Stephenson, which debuted last year in the UK at the Edinburgh Film Festival. It follows Richard and his older brother Polly, who find themselves continuously travelling in their caravan for a place to call home. Richard, younger and more optimistic in his view, seeks stability, but Polly’s ever-increasing abusive behaviour seems to be getting the better of him.
I was lucky enough to get the chance to interview The Hard Stop’s director, George Amponsah, producer, Dionne Walker and co-star Marcus Knox-Hooke, recently, before watching a screening of the film followed by an audience Q&A with Amponsah, Walker, Knox-Hooke and co-star Kurtis Henville. It was one of the most moving and insightful experiences I’ve had for a long time, and I’m still unravelling the many thoughts and feelings both the film and our conversation inspired. The IMDB description of the film The Hard Stop explains:
This little gem of a film won the Nora Ephron Prize at this year’s Tribeca film festival, which is awarded to recognise the work of female writers or directors whose film is making its North American premiere at the festival, and it’s easy to see why. Adult Life Skills is based on writer/director Rachel Tunnard’s short film Emotional Fuse Box and centres on the character of Anna (Jodie Whittaker). Anna is approaching her 30th birthday and struggling to cope with recent life events, which are gently revealed to us throughout the film via flashbacks and Anna’s visual manifestations of the past as she attempts to live in the here and now.
Ewan McGregor stars across Stellan Skarsgård, with Naomie Harris and Damian Lewis, in this film adaptation of the John le Carré (who is also on board as executive producer) novel of the same name, with a screenplay penned by Hossein Amini, helmed by British director Susanna White. With neo-noir ingredients, this thriller falls somewhere between slow-burn and slow-going. At times, we’re left to wonder why there isn’t more action, or twists (I felt similarly during Jack Ryan:
I first saw My Brief Eternity at the Wales International Documentary Festival, and such was its impact on me that after meeting the director Clare Sturges, and after writing up the festival itself, I resolved to review it so that others would come to know of it. The short documentary is a joint project between Maggie’s and Brightest Films, the former being a cancer charity, the latter Sturges’ production company. The film is about the Welsh artist; Osi Rhys Osmond.
Usually I will have heard about a film before it is released. It’s odd when that doesn’t happen. It’s even odder when the film was originally released almost a year ago and I still haven’t heard about it.
This year saw the very first Wales International Documentary Festival, which ran from 12th-14th May in the valleys of South Wales. Blackwood, to be more specific, north of Cardiff, and the home of the band Manic Street Preachers, the boxer Joe Calzaghe and the Dream Alliance race horse syndicate. They are, in fact, the very reason why the WIDF has found its home here.
It’s very easy for the media to get overexcited about a new Meryl Streep film, and one costarring Hugh Grant and directed by Stephen Frears at that, but this time there’s something different. I think maybe, what with the recent success of The Iron Lady and the confusion over Suffragette (where she was on screen for only a few moments), the media and filmgoers are suffering from a little overindulgence when it comes to one of the world’s greatest actresses. So although Florence Foster Jenkins has been promoted widely, it hasn’t been the film on everyone’s lips.
On Belle’s original release, I was intrigued by the film but felt no real urge to watch it. It almost seemed to sell itself on the back of its unusual story: a biracial woman born to aristocracy during the time of the slave trade.
In the brilliant and insightful documentary A History of Horror, British writer and actor Mark Gatiss explores the horror genre throughout many countries. While discussing British horror cinema of the 1960’s, Gatiss uses the term ‘folk horror’ to describe a short but very curious subgenre. The films that make up this genre are unmistakably British and owe a large debt to the trail blazers of horror cinema in Britain: