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Empire's List of the Best British Films of All Time.
The 10 Best British Films of Alfred Hitchcock
Reviews
London 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony: Isles of Wonder (2012)
An iconic national moment and one that reinvents Olympic Opening Ceremonies
Just as Los Angeles in 1984 invented the Olympic Opening Ceremony, then Danny Boyle's London 2012 reinvented it in so many ways. The first to have an all-star cast (Kenneth Branagh, Daniel Craig, Mike Oldfield, JK Rowling, Rowan Atkinson, Dizzy Rascal, Tim Berners Lee, the Arctic Monkeys, David Beckham, Paul MaCartney). The first to have filmed sequences (the thrilling opening journey up the Thames, James Bond meets the Queen at Buckingham Palace, Mr Bean dreams he's in Chariots of Fire, David Beckham delivers the Olympic torch by speedboat). The first to tell a story (the industrial revolution, the founding of the NHS, the digital revolution).
Like the Coronation in 1953, the World Cup Final in 1966, Live Aid in 1985 and Diana's funeral in 1997, it is one of those iconic British national moments that's likely to be remembered for decades to come.
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)
The best Le Carre adaptation since Smiley's People.
The period of 1973/1974 is very much Britain's darkest post war days: IRA terrorism, inflation, strikes, football hooliganism, police corruption. And on top of all this the Cold War cast its dark nuclear shadow over everything. It was the age of decline and pessimism. John Le Carre's 1974 novel TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY is a book very much reflective of the nation's post-war decline.
Now, the novel has been turned into a major British film by Thomas Alfredson and is the best Le Carre adaptation since the BBC's SMILEY'S PEOPLE back in 1982. Central to the film's success is quite wonderful production design which evokes the era of 73/74 with remarkable precision, particularly the low-tech London HQ of the Circus (Le Carre's name for MI6)- a pre-digital world of dial telephones, shelves full of paper files, reel to reel tape recorders, cine film all housed in a large warehouse type building where the main conference room is a sound proofed portakabin.
Head of the Circus is Control (John Hurt). When a mission in Budapest to uncover a Soviet mole in the Circus is blown and the agent Jim Prideaux (Mark Strong) shot and captured, Control and his aide George Smiley (Gary Oldman) are forced into retirement. However, the months pass and Smiley is called upon by the Home Office - there really is a Mole in British Intelligence. They now know this via an AWOL Circus operative called Ricky Tarr (Tom Hardy) whose affair with Irina - the wife of a Russian agent in Istanbul - leads to him learning about the Soviet infiltration. However, as soon as he alerts London his message is intercepted, his senior murdered and Irina kidnapped and shipped to Moscow and killed.
The film is very complex and key events told through a series of flashbacks. Yet it's full of 'moments' which lodge in the mind. We see something I've not seen on screen before - a British Intelligence Christmas party with all the key personnel attending. It's also full of wonderful performances such as Kathy Bates in a marvellous scene as ex- intelligence analyst Connie Sachs and Benedict Cumberbatch as Peter Guillame, Smiley's man on the inside. However, they key role of Bill Haydon (Colin Firth) is surprisingly underwritten. The end of the movie feels rushed.
At the centre of it all is a commanding piece of screen acting by Gary Oldman as Smiley. He never speaks for the first 15 minutes of so of the film and it's a quiet and restrained performance. At one point he delivers a monologue to Guillame about how he once met his Russian opposite number and nemesis Karla and it holds your attention for the sheer force of acting. This is Oldman's tour-de-force confirming him as one of the great British actors of our generation.
The Shining (1980)
Brilliant cinematography and production design
American exile in England Stanley Kubrick shot all of his films in England from LOLITA in 1962 to EYES WIDE SHUT in 1998. Here was a man who created New York on a Pinewood back-lot (EYES WIDE SHUT), 1970 Vietnam on the Isle of Dogs (FULL METAL JACKET), the Pentagon War Room at Shepperton Studios (DR STRANGELOVE) and prehistoric Earth and the solar system at MGM Borehamwood (2001).
The Overlook Hotel exists nowhere other than on the sound stages of Elstree between 1978 and 1979, where Kubrick filmed the whole movie. It's to this remote and very large American hotel that husband and wife Jack Nicholson and Shelly Duvall (and son) arrive to caretake for the winter shutdown. Jack goes mad, sees ghosts and eventually tries to murder his wife and child - only to end up frozen in the snow covered outdoor maze.
Whilst everyone eulogises Kubrick's fine direction, the real strengths of the film are Roy Walker's production design and John Alcott's remarkable cinematography. All of the sets are huge and empty - the corridors, the lounge, the ballroom suggesting a hotel in winter hibernation. They're all brightly lit by Alcott, forgoing the cliché that horror best works in darkness.
Nicholson's overacting in the later scenes and the lack of much humanity in Kubrick's screenplay are perhaps the two flaws in a film which still stands up well 31 years after its release. Two scenes stand out: the haunting image of Nicholson striding across the ballroom floor and it's full of the ghosts of 1921; and the final chase through the eerie and beautiful snow-covered floodlit maze.
David Thomson, in his Biographical Dictionary of Film, calls THE SHINING "Kubrick's one great film". Nowadays regarded as a classic of its kind, back in 1980 it failed to receive a single Oscar or BAFTA nomination.
Nil by Mouth (1997)
London working class life at its bleakest
English actor Gary Oldman sunk $1.5 million of his own money into NIL BY MOUTH, a film he wrote and directed. It is an noncommercial film set in and around the London of his youth - a South London council estate where the sun never shines (these films always work best when shot in winter) and everything has a grey, washed out look to it.
There's no real plot in NIL BY MOUTH. It focuses on villain Ray (Ray Winstone), his wife (Kathy Burke) and her brother (Charlie Creed Mills). The film often seems to consist of long scenes of people boozing, swearing and shooting up heroin. Much of the dialogue consists of the 'F' word used over and over again. Oldman does have an acute ear for discomforting dialogue (one character says of a woman he saw "getting a severe portion right up the f**king Gary") - it never sounds scripted and the whole film seems to happening spontaneously in front of the camera.
Winstone delivers a career-best performance as the drunk Ray and Kathy Burke (who won the Best Actress prize at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival for this role) wears an expression of down-trodden weariness on her face in every scene. When Ray beats her up in a drunken rage (she is pregnant at the time), it's a wince inducing scene complete with moans of pain from Burke. It's an astonishing moment that stays with you days, months, even years after you witness it. This is the underclass at its rawest and filmmaking at its rawest. It's grimness and imagery burns into your mind and once seen you'll find it difficult to shake or forget, a distinction it shares with Alan Clarke's SCUM - and Clarke was one of Oldman's stated influences when shooting the movie.
Murder on the Orient Express (1974)
The first really good Agatha Christie screen adaptation
Albert Finney is one of the greatest of English screen actors, achieving the ability to be different in every role he plays: Arthur Seaton, Tom Jones, Scrooge, 'Sir' (in THE DRESSER), Winston Churchill. His Hercule Piorot in 1974 earned him an Oscar nomination as Best Actor, though it's a far more shouty and loud performance (completed with oily black hair and rich Belgian accent) than subsequent interpretations of the role by Peter Ustinov and David Suchet.
When Sidney Lumet's MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS appeared in British and American cinemas at the end of 1974,audiences were not yet accustomed to the numerous Agatha Christie adaptations which are now part of ITV peak-time schedule. The film must have seemed fresh and sparkling and different in a cinematic landscape filled that year with disaster movies, cop thrillers and sex comedies. Here was a British- made film bursting with movie stars (Lauren Bacall, Sean Connery, Ingrid Bergman, Vanessa Redgrave, Richard Widmark, Jacquline Bisset, Anthony Perkins etc) all cast as various American and European murder suspects marooned a snow-bound Orient Express somewhere in the Balkans in 1935. Poirot - another traveller on the train - has to deduce which of them knifed multi-millionaire gangster Rachett (Widmark) to death.
The film is technically very impressive.It has a fondness for the people, look and manners of the 1930s. Geoffrey Unsworth makes marvellous use of light and colour in a confined setting. Tony Walton's costumes have an exaggerated 1930s chic. Richard Rodney Bennett's music score is as lush as a Viennese waltz. Their contribution is in every scene. Paul Dehn's screenplay is packed with good dialogue and makes a relatively claustrophobic mystery highly watchable, especially when much of the second half comprises of Poirot interviewing suspects.
The follow-up in 1978 - DEATH ON THE NILE - is even better.
The History Boys (2006)
Witty observation on the English education system
The English duo of Nicholas Hytner and Alan Bennett last collaborated on 1994's Oscar and BAFTA winning THE MADNESS OF KING GEORGE. This 2006 collaboration abbreviates Bennett's own 2004 Royal National Theatre play into a fast- moving account of how a group of Yorkshire teenagers from a state school pass the now defunct Oxford/Cambridge entrance exam. This is England in 1983. It's the zenith of Thatcherism. It was also the year of the film EDUCATING RITA, in which a working class housewife betters herself through an Open University degree. Things have obviously changed in the country since the Victorian times of Thomas Hardy's JUDE THE OBSCURE, where university is not a thing for the working class.
But the social, political and cultural milieu of the era is kept in the background (it's much less evocative than THIS IS ENGLAND, made the same year and also set in 1983). This is as much a fantasy of education as DEAD POET'S SOCIETY. These are classes full of the expectational, bright and articulate. Bennett never really finds the authentic voice of the 18-year olds - they speak the words of older, wiser men. But the performances - Richard Griffiths, Stephen Campbell Moore and Frances De La Tour as the teachers tutoring them in various ways towards university and, amongst other a pre-stardom Domonic Cooper and James Corden as the students - are uniformly excellent. The dialogue is witty in its observations on the education system and the purpose of education. Bennett's own adaptation wisely drops the two flashes forward which opened the play's first and second acts (Campbell Moore's character as a TV historian in the present day).
Made in Dagenham (2010)
Excellent account of British working life in the late-1960s.
It's rare nowadays to find a movie that is actually about something. A lot of movies THINK they're about something but aren't - after all, isn't THE SOCIAL NETWORK really only rich kids squabbling over the ownership of Facebook?
Several recent English movies have thrown light on lesser-known aspects of 20th century English life such as the teenage John Lennon in NOWHERE BOY, Brian's Clough's time as manager of Leeds United in THE DAMNED UNITED and the speech impediment of King George VIth in THE KING'S SPEECH. Joining this group is MADE IN DAGENHAM - directed by Nigel Cole and written by William Ivory - which illuminates a forgotten corner of British working history that changed the lives of millions of people. The opening sequence (a 1968 Ford promotional film about Dagenham) recalls the opening of THE FULL MONTY. It's set in the English Detriot of 1968 - Dagenham in Essex, a car making town where 55,000 people work at Ford's, of which only 187 are women.
The film focuses on three women. Rita (Sally Hawkins), a wife, mother of three and worker in the Ford car plant who brings the women out on strike for equal pay. Lisa (Rosamund Pike), the beautiful Cambridge- educated wife of the factory's manager and supporter of Rita; and Labour cabinet minister Barabra Castle (Miranda Richardson), who champions the strikers' cause. All three are women in a men-dominated world (in Castle's case, women cabinet ministers were very rare in the 1960s). All three actresses deliver excellent and credible performances.
Cole's film shows the struggle for equal pay isn't being carried out by the unions, but by ordinary women who want to be treated as equals. The film is as unsympathetic to union officials as I'M ALRIGHT JACK was back in 1959 - the trade union leader Monty Taylor (Kenneth Cranham) is shown to be duplicitous and two-faced and uninterested in helping the women's cause.
The supporting cast are all superb. Bob Hoskins as the sympathetic foreman and union rep Albert. Daniel Mays as Rita's good natured husband (who seems very 'new man' for 1960s Essex). Richard Schiff as a very nasty Ford executive from the US who gets his way by bullying and intimidation, including threatening Castle. Andrea Riseborough, Geraldine James and Jamie Winstone are Rita's comrades-in-arms. There's even a terrific two scene cameo from the always brilliant John Sessions as Prime Minister Harold Wilson, complete with pipe and labrador.
But the film belongs to Sally Hawkins as Rita - who is a composite of several real characters. She isn't political or militant. She's inspired to take a stand after being patronised and dressed down by her son's grammar school teacher and by being ignored and patronised by Monty Taylor.
In the end the women achieve their goal and it's such an uplifting moment, a feeling that something worthwhile has been achieved. A simply excellent film and one that easily stands alongside BILLY ELLIOT and THE FULL MONTY as films about the working classes bettering themselves by one way or another.
Brassed Off (1996)
One of the final nails in the coffin of the outgoing (1997) Conservative government
BRASSED OFF is a 1996 movie from England - written and directed by Mark Herman - in that tradition of those movies about the working classes attempting to better themselves: THE FULLY MONTY, BILLY ELLIOT and MADE IN DAGENHAM being other prominent examples. At the time it seemed like one of the last nails in the coffin of the outgoing Tory government.
It's set in a real-looking Yorkshire mining town a few years after the 1984/85 miners strike, where the local coal mine is about to be closed. The miners (Ewan McGregor, Jim Carter, Stephen Tompkinson and others) find solidarity in their brass band under their conductor - retired miner Danny (the late Pete Postlewaite in his finest screen role), a man for whom music matters above all else.
The pit closes, but the band makes it to the national brass band competition final at the Albert Hall. On winning, you expect Danny to make some sentimental speech about how - in spite of everything - music holds the band together. Instead, he delivers probably the explicit political diatribe against the then Conservative government and the devastation unemployment inflicts on people. It's a superb moment in a film with its heart and soul in the dying working class communities of Yorkshire. This isn't a piece of Ken Loach-like realism - it's prettified and sentimentalised for a mainstream audience, yet the movie looses nothing for it.
At the close, the brass band play Elgar's Pomp and Circumstace March Number 1 as they pass the Houses of Parliament. It's meant to be ironic but it's also very touching.
Hamlet (1996)
One of the most remarkable adaptations of Shakespeare on screen
This 1996 film, directed and adapted by Kenneth Branagh, is Hamlet re-imagined as a 1960s epic: 4 hours long (complete with intermission), shot in 70mm widescreen and featuring star names in small roles. But whereas the 60s epics always looked to exotic climates, this remains anglo-centric in filling its panavision lens - shot at Shepperton Studios with some exteriors at Blenheim Place in Oxfordshire. Production designer Tim Harvey creates an Elsinore which is a huge and brightly lit 19th century palace with a central hall surrounded by mirrored doors and a chessboard floor. This isn't the usual darkly lit medieval castle of previous versions.
The unabridged 4 hour text means this is often a very talkative film, but is also gives greater weight to supporting characters and Claudius's role is considerable larger than in either the 1948 or 1990 versions. And yet the film never feels over-long.
Branagh is fine as Hamlet, supported by an excellent cast of English actors including Julie Christie as Gertrude, Kate Winslet as Ophelia, Derek Jacobi as Claudius and Richard Briers as Polonius. Jacobi is outstanding, speaking every line with crystal clarity.
But what will attract most people to the movie is the all-star supporting cast in minor roles: Jack Lemmon as a guard, Billy Crystal as the grave digger, Charlton Heston as the Player King, as well as Gerard Depardieu, Robin Williams and Judi Dench. There's even John Gielgud and Ken Dodd in non-speaking roles.
A remarkable achievement and amongst the finest Shakespearian adaptations ever committed to film.
Un tè con Mussolini (1999)
The English in Italy
The Italian Anglophile Franco Zefferelli's endearing account of Englishness in 1930s/40s Italy is amongst his finest films. He co-wrote it with the English writer John Mortimer. It begins in Italy in 1935 at Elizabeth Barret Browning's grave - a symbol which bonds England and Italy. The English expatriates are represented by Judi Dench, Joan Plowright and a compelling Maggie Smith (winning the 1999 Bafta for Best Supporting Actress). Plowright is secretary to an Italian businessman who wants his young son Lucca to grow up to be a proper English gent - so Plowright teaches him Shakespeare and feeds him bacon and eggs. Then the rise of fascism means Lucca must be sent off to Austria. There follows a quite touching scene where the English ladies say goodbye by reciting the St Crispin Day's speech from Henry V at the railway station.
The remainder of the drama follows the ladies' fortunes under the dictatorship of Mussolini. Smith's character, Lady Hester, is the widow of a former British ambassador, and does indeed take afternoon tea with Il Duce. The English ladies end up being in-turned but their Englishness remains defiant. During the Allied invasion of Italy, they are liberated by a Scottish regiment. Lady Hester declares: "The Germans and the Italians couldn't get rid of us, so there's no reason why we should surrender to the Scots."
East Is East (1999)
Great recreation of 1970s England
At 90 minutes, East is East doesn't outstay it's welcome. The film won the 1999 BAFTA for Best British Film and began life as a play at London's Royal Court two years earlier. It's a comedy drama set in Salford in the very grim North of England 1971. And if you're in a working class Anglo-Pakistani household it's doubly so. The Khans live in a back-to-back terrace house with an outdoor toilet (the production design here is terrific, it really does make the past a foreign country)and run the family chip shop.
The film recalls another English movie from 1969 called 'Spring and Port Wine' - the northern working class family, the children wanting to break away from the grip of a tyrannical father. The father is George, played splendidly by Om Puri, the Pakistani father of a family who he doesn't realise are English: they're sausage and bacon eating English, with sons who booze and go to discos and one of whom has a white girlfriend and responds to the prospect of an arranged marriage with "I'm not marrying a f**king Paki".
The whole cast is excellent - especially Archie Punjabi and Jimi Mistry - with Linda Bassett quite outstanding as Ella, George's English wife. She looks as if she's had 7 children. She's beaten up by George at one point, but remains devoted to her family throughout. She's a gem.
Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999)
Why is the young Darth Vader an all American moppet called Ani
First of the Star Wars prequels released in 1999 with much anticipation and a resulting chorus of disappointment.
THE PHANTOM MENACE isn't an awful movie (ATTACK OF THE CLONES is much worse) - it's perfectly watchable, but cold and unemotional. George Lucas can't really write an interesting story or dialogue or create mood and tension or direct actors. Lucas's forte is visual effects. The film suffers from too many computer generated characters - including Jar Jar Binks, of whom I couldn't understand a word of what he said. And why is the young Darth Vader an all-American child moppet called 'Ani' rather than a dysfunctional delinquent?
The film has three climaxes all going on simultaneously, the result being like flicking between TV channels at random. It's as noisy, destructive and uninvolving as a computer game. When the villain Darth Maul is killed, the emotional response is zero since he barely registered as a character.
On a positive note, the film is spectacular and technically wonderful, especially during the Ben Hur-like race around Tatooine. I only wish those effects had been put to better use.
Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon (1998)
I don't know much about art films, but know what I like.
Rarely seen English film from 1998 about which I can can only say I don't know much about art films, but I know what I like. This one is is set in a drab and austere not very swinging 1960s London where crook George Dyer (Daniel Craig) goes from burglary to buggery with artist Francis Bacon (a wonderful Derek Jacobi).
No real drama here, just consistently imaginative camera-work (blurred around the edges when the characters are getting drunk at the colony club), or the odd standout moment such as Bacon brushing his teeth with Vim (a white powdery bath cleaner). I like his line: "We all have nightmares, but they can't be as horrific as life". It's the sort of drama the late Derek Jarman used to make - only more watchable.
The Dresser (1983)
One of Albert Finney's best performances
Directed by Peter Yates and shot at Pinewood studios, THE DRESSER is an English drama from 1983 which picked up a quintet of Oscar nominations for Picture, Director, two Actors and Screenplay.
The world of THE DRESSER is the drab world of touring theatre folk doing their best to keep Northern England's mind off the 1940s Blitz by occupying it with the Bard. Sir (a near unrecognisable Albert Finney) is about to embark on his 227th performance as King Lear in a career spent too long on the road and too often in character. The strain of feigning insanity for a living has resulted in the on-stage madness becoming a characteristic of his off-stage personality. Sir's homosexual dresser Norman (Tom Courtenay) is only concerned with getting the old ham ready and onto the stage and excludes most other members of the company from entering their dressing room domain.
In the preliminary scenes, screenwriter Ronald Harwood does expand his own 1980 play beyond it's theatrical boundaries, especially in a sequence at a provincial railway station where Sir shouts a missed connecting train to a halt. Other than this, THE DRESSER is relentlessly a talking picture rather than a moving one (no bad thing). Here is the observance of theatrical behaviour, lives and ethics in a gloomy world a long way from the glamour of London's West End. Sir is is a haunted thespian who has been reduced to "old men, cripples and nancy boys" for his company. Finney's performance is one of unnerving agony, with a face suggesting a man who is near physical and mental collapse. He's backed up by some wonderful theatrical anecdotes, such as the recollection of seeing a rival's Lear: "I was pleasantly disappointed".
I found Courtenay's Norman too unrestrained, too overtly camp, but he is harrowing when grieving over the dead body of Sir - who has gone a performance too many. Norman's grief is that he's been omitted from Sir's memoirs.
V for Vendetta (2005)
England Prevails
'V for Vendetta' is set a near future London which, in appearance, is not so different from today - except this is a brutal totalitarian dictatorship where the secret police break down doors in the middle of the night, put black bags over their suspects' heads and then drag them off - never to be seen again.
This society is ruled over by the grim ageing face of High Chancellor Strutter (John Hurt), who is only ever seen on giant TV screens. The nemesis of this regime is an anonymous terrorist called V (Hugo Weaving), who wears a Guy Fawkes mask and begins the film by blowing up the Old Bailey, then declares he will do the same to Parliament on November 5th. Unwittingly involved with him are the TV PA Evy (Natalie Portman) - who V saves from being raped by two police thugs - and pursuing him is the downbeat but decent police inspector Finch (Stephen Rea).
The movie has its origins as an Alan Moore graphic novel, but it also recalls those other dystopian classics like 1984, BRAZIL and FATHERLAND, especially the latter with Finch uncovering a dark secret hidden by the state - the germ warfare attack which lead to Strutter's rise was engineered by Strutter's party and that V was the only survivor of the same biological experiments.
As well as being scary and creepy, satirical elements feature prominently. I like Roger Allam's manic right-wing TV pundit who ends his nightly rants with the blessing "England prevails". Also Stephen Fry as a gay chat show host who satirises Strutter in a Benny Hill-type sketch and subsequently disappears after a visit by the secret police.
Amidst the bleakness, there is hope. V turns Strutter's own Police Chief (a nasty Tim Piggot Smith) against the Chancellor, followed by a mass public uprising on November 5th with the citizens of London descending on Parliament wearing Guy Fawkes masks. V dies, but Evy places his body in a tube train loaded with explosives and sends it hurtling towards Parliament.
If 1984 was a projection of 1940s fears, then V FOR VENDETTA is a projection onto an imagined future of early 21st century fears about the erosion of civil liberties. Curiously - like CHILDREN OF MEN - in this future England has survived but the United States has ceased to exist (it's now the world's biggest leper colony).
A Clockwork Orange (1971)
A very British grimness
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE was made by Stanley Kubrick in England during1970/71. It debuted in the USA in December 1971 and in Britain the following month. After over a year on release, it was eventually withdrawn from UK distribution by Kubrick and was never re-issued or shown on TV or released on video.
Not until March 2000 did A CLOCKWORK ORANGE reappear on British screens (following Kubrick's death), released from it's cinematic exile and glowing in bright colours as good as it had been in 1971. However, the film's futuristic vision nowadays resembles an alternative version of the 1970s (something British viewers of a certain age will recognise). It's a very British grimness with it's drab flats, ugly prisons and concrete housing estates.
The film's depiction of sex and violence seems restrained compared to those other two notorious British films of 1971 - THE DEVILS and GET CARTER. In fact, there is only one on screen death and that's committed by Malcolm Macdowell as Alex wearing a large rubber nose, a bowler hat, a white boiler suit and a cod piece (his murder weapon is a giant penis sculpture).
The look and sound of this film never diminish, with its claustrophobic interiors and a startling use of music: listen to Purcell's Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary over the titles or Rossini's Thieving Magpie used to accompany a night of gang fights and joy riding.
The film is set in a London terrorised by hooligans like the surprisingly articulate Alex and his idiot droogs. The opening half hour comprises of the beating up of a tramp, a gang fight, a joy ride, a burglary and a rape. When Alex later gets his comeuppance for murder, the route out of prison is a new form of aversion therapy advocated by the Home Secretary (Anthony Sharp, every inch the suave upper class 1970s Tory). With his eyes prized open Alex is forced to watch endless sex and violence on screen, having being injected so that he feels nauseous and near to death whenever the impulse to sex and violence kicks in. In the end, his 'cure' is a reversion to a helpless state which means on the outside he becomes a victim of the various people he has wronged.
But the films concludes with Alex being readjusted back to his normal state, a moment brilliantly realised with Beethoven's Ninth on the soundtrack and a fantasy of Alex having sex in public: "I was cured alright" he says. Cue Gene Kelly's 'Singing in the Rain'.
Today, the other thing which will distress a viewer is Patrick Magee's very bad acting but you'll be exhilarated on so many levels. It's a film far from everyone's taste and I'm not altogether how seriously we're meant to take it.
Evita (1996)
Superb and epic screen musical
EVITA began life in Britain as a concept album by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber in 1976. In 1978, it became a stage musical in London's West End. Early in the 1980s, English director Ken Russell was hired to make the movie version - which never got off the ground. Finally, in 1996, another English director - Alan Parker - brought the story of Eva Peron to the screen with a budget of $55 million. The resulting film won 3 Golden Globes and an Oscar for Best Song.
Despite thousands of extras and the use of authentic locations in Argentina and Hungary (as well as Shepperton Studios in England for the interiors), the whole film is captivated by the stars and score. Madonna as Eva - from teenage girl to Christian-Diored saint and first lady of the Argentine - never reminds you of Madonna the pop star. This Eva is her own creation, a genuine actress performance. Antonio Banderas is Che - well, not the Che Guevara in beard and beret of the stage show, but a representative of the Argentinian people; he drifts through the action variously as a protesting worker, waiter, barman, reporter, projectionist, aristocrat, all the time providing a sardonic narration.
The film opens in a cinema in Buenos Aires 1952. The manager interrupts the performance to tell the audience that Eva Peron has died. There is much weeping and outpouring of grief - except the unmoved Che. At her state funeral he's the one objecting voice: "Instead of government/we had a stage/instead of ideas/a prima dona's rage", he sings before taking us on a guided tour of her life. It stretches from the bed of travelling singer Magaldi (Jimmy Nail) to the balcony of the Presidential Palace alongside Juan Peron (Jonathan Pryce).
Parker's direction creates a credible Argentina of the 1940s and 1950s (the cinematography has the pale look of vintage photos). He handles the big numbers well: 'Don't Cry for Me, Argentina' is a speech sung on the balcony of the Presidential Place on Peron's inauguration day. 'High Flying Adored' is sung by Che wandering through the victory ball - it's an intimate number placed in a big scene. 'We're Having a Ball' was originally 'The Lady's Got Potential' on the album, dropped from the stage show and here used to describe Peron's rapid rise to power. One of the best numbers, 'Waltz for Eva and Che' has become a dream sequence, with the two characters waltzing around a deserted ballroom, through a meat packers' shed, through the back streets of Buenos Aires and back to the ballroom.
There's never a static moment in the film: countless big scenes of riots and protesting workers. This musical feels 'epic' and in the manner of 'Lawrence of Arabia' and 'Gandhi' it begins with an epilogue. The production design (by Brian Morris) and costumes (by Penny Rose) are a standout.
Parker's approach to the musical - which is all song - is realistic rather than the stylised and studio bound approach Rob Marshall took to 'Chicago'. Fabulous score by Lloyd Webber and Rice's cynical lyrics are amongst the best ever written for a musical.
Notting Hill (1999)
The least interesting of the Richard Curtis/Hugh Grant trilogy.
In its day (1999), the most successful British film ever. NOTTING HILL arrived in cinemas and on video in 1999 as the follow up to FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL: it featuring the same star (Hugh Grant), producers and screenwriter (Richard Curtis). The director this time is Roger Michell. It's the weakest of Curtis's trilogy of Hugh Grant/London comedies (the other being LOVE ACTUALLY).
Grant plays William, a modest London bookseller who falls in love with Hollywood goddess Anna (Julia Roberts, really playing a version of herself) currently working in the capital. A better movie might have been made about the relationship between Grant his scruffy lodger Spike (Rhys Ifans) - a sort of contemporary odd couple since Spike steals every scene he appears in. Instead, we get a predictably clean, summertime and glossy London that is purged of any parochial references the Americans might not understand. When the film fails to interest us, it is kept alive by a good supporting cast including Gina Mckee, Emma Chambers and Hugh Bonneville. Best moment is a coup-de-cinema where the passage of six months is evoked by a single tracking shot of William walking through a street market whilst the climate turns from sun to rain to snow to sun and a pregnant woman at the start of the shot is a mother at the end of it. It's a quite wonderful and utterly cinematic moment in a film which is never more than acceptable from a screenplay designed to appeal and charm.
Little Voice (1998)
Michael Caine's best performance.
'Little Voice' began as a play at London's National Theatre in the summer of 1992, directed by Sam Mendes and featuring Jane Horrocks and Alison Steadman.
At 95 minutes in length, there isn't a wasted scene in Mark Herman's 1998 film version. It's rare to find a film which doesn't outstay its welcome and is uniformly well-acted by an impossible to better cast.
The 'Little Voice' (LV) of the title is Jane Horrocks, a shy girl in a Yorkshire coastal town. She's often mute and introverted to the point of rarely leaving her room. Since the death of her father, she's had no real conversation with anyone - her only company being the show tunes from her father's LP collection of(Judy Garland, mostly). Horrocks sounds astonishingly like the real things - she belts out 'Big Spender' as if Shirley Bassey was there on the soundtrack. Her blank look is touching. If she rarely speaks it's because she can't get a word in edge ways because of her loud and monstrous mother played by Brenda Blethyn - who is best described as a pantomime dame crossed with a tart.
Then there's Michael Caine as Ray Say, the has-been agent who puts LV on the stage of Boo's Nightclub for one-night only. He begins as a boozy and lovable rouge - manipulative and not without charm. But he's ultimately self-serving and unpleasant. At the end of the movie he's on stage giving a drunken, foul-mouthed and aggressive rendering of the Roy Orbison song 'It's Over' (a song about his showbiz career) whilst his creditors wait in the wings.
In the end, LV speaks, is saved from a house fire by a BT engineer (a charming Ewan McGregor) and finds a life outside of vinyl and her mother. We even get to know her real name - it's Laura.
Everyone in this film is terrific (especially Jom Broadbent as nightclub owner Boo whose acts include the sumo-like tribute band Take Fat). But the film belongs to Caine, in a Golden-Globe winning performance that I think is a career-best. Just watch the scene where he gently coaxes LV into performing live on stage -he even takes us in.
Topsy-Turvy (1999)
A movie filled to the brim with girlish glee
Like most Mike Leigh movies, this one appeared award-laden in 1999 (Best Actor for Jim Broadbent at the Venice Film Festival, Oscars for Make-Up and Costume Design). Unlike other Leigh movies, this isn't a slice of contemporary London social realism but an account of the English comic opera writers (and, arguably, fathers of the modern musical) WS Gilbert (Broadbent) and Arthur Sullivan (Allan Corduner), from the first night of 'Princess Ida' in January 1884 to the triumphant return to form at the first night of 'The Mikado' a year later.
Their successful musical partnership appears to have come to a halt when 'Princess Ida' is unsatisfactory to Sullivan and it closes after running into a heatwave. Gilbert is inspired to write the lyrics for a Japan-set opera after visiting a Japanese exhibition in London. This re-energises the partnership.
But the plot isn't really the thing here. TOPSY-TURVY has layer upon layer of good acting. Every character is distinct or odd or larger than life. There's not a dull or uninteresting performance from a supporting cast which numbers Lesley Manville (Mrs Gilbert), Timothy Spall, Kevin McKidd, Martin Savage, Shirley Henderson (as members of the D'Oly Carte opera), Andy Serkis (as the choreographer) and Ron Cook (as D'Oly Carte, the opera impresario - a sort of Victorian Cameron Mackintosh). But top honours do go the two outstanding leads: Corduner is suave and laid back as Sullivan and Broadbent's WS Gilbert is, by contrast, grumpy, critical and loud.
Leigh triumphs in the evocation of life in London in 1884/85: there are the latest inventions such as the fountain pen and the telephone; over oysters actors discuss the news of the death of General Gordon at Khartoum; Gilbert's painful visit to the dentist; the staff at the Savoy Theatre overdressed in Victorian finery during a summer heatwave.
A corpulent (it's around two-and-a-half hours long) film but one full of things to enjoy. Highlight has to be Spall singing 'A More Humane Mikado' (which Gilbert cuts).
Secrets & Lies (1996)
Scenes from a summer in mid-1990s London.
English writer/director Mike Leigh's most successful film. Back in 1996 it won the Palm D'Or and Best Actress prizes at the Cannes Film Festival and three BAFTAs (Best British Film, Best Actress and Best Screenplay).
SECRETS AND LIES features Brenda Blethyn as Cynitha, a permanently emotional, low intellect and anxious single mother in her late 40s living with her 21 year old daughter Roxanne (Claire Rushbrook). Cynthia is down-trodden, smokes and bursts into tears a lot. This happens a great deal because her long lost daughter Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) appears from nowhere. She's a likable and easy-to-relate to 27-year old optician. Hortense's adoptive mother had died, so she set off to find her biological one. But Hortense is black and Cynthia is white.
Leigh's strength is the roundedness of his characters. His film is a pithy observation of mid-1990s London life - part heartwarming and part tragic. In his previous film NAKED, London was shot in washed out and drab colours during winter. Here, everything seems bright and drenched in summer sunshine to reflect the more humane mood.
The other principle character is Maurice (Timothy Spall), Cynthia's bearded bear of a brother who is a successful photographer. The best scenes are of his clients posing for the camera (including Alison Steadman - Leigh's ex-wife - as a dog owner). Other memorable moments include an encounter between Maurice and the person he bought the business from (Ron Peck), who is now an embittered drunk. Also, a lengthy unbroken single take of almost 8 minutes as Hortense and Cynthia meet for the first time at a café in Holborn.
The interiors of the houses speak volumes about the social divisions in 1990s England. Maurice and his wife live in colour-scheme luxury (three bedrooms, a four-poster bed); Cynthia and her daughter live in a dilapidated hovel still with an outdoor toilet.
The climax takes place at Maurice's house on Roxanne's 21st birthday. Cynthia reveals Hortense's identity to everyone. This is a shock for Roxanne and Maurice, then Maurice - previously calmly understated - makes a passionate speech about how much better everyone would be if they didn't keep secrets from each other. Hortense was determined to discover the truth and take the consequences. There is much tears and hugging before the happy resolution with Cynthia, Hortense and Roxanne all sitting together reconciled in Cynthia's back yard.
The details of the acting, camera work and art direction in this film demand a second viewing for full appreciation of its excellence.
Sexy Beast (2000)
Infuriatingly brilliant crime thriller
Released to superlative reviews in 2001, SEXY BEAST is an infuriatingly brilliant crime thriller set in Spain and London. Infuriating in that the dream sequences don't work, the underwater robbery feels rushed and the whole film probably needs an extra act.
But, on the plus side, the film is a very English mix of Nicholas Roeg-like directing, Harold Pinter-like dialogue and Guy Ritchie-like cinematography and editing.
Three scenes are an absolute standout. Firstly, a mountain top boulder tumbling and crashing into the Spanish villa swimming pool of expat cockney bank robber Gal (Ray Winstone), an event which sets in motion his reluctant return to crime. Second, a sensational Ben Kingsley as psycho Don Logan refusing to extinguish his cigarette on an air flight. And thirdly the sight of frogmen robbers cracking open the safety deposit boxes inside the London bank vault they've just flooded.
Ray Winstone has never been more low-key before or since as the mellowed hard man who just wants to live in the sun quietly with his wife (Amanda Redman) and Kingsley is extraordinary in an Oscar-nominated role as a man incapable of restraining his rage - yet he is also very funny at one and the same time.
Get Carter (1971)
A film full of unforgettable moments
I watched GET CARTER again this week, exactly 40 years since it debuted in British cinemas. Initially neglected at the time – it received a single BAFTA nomination (Ian Hendry as Supporting Actor which he didn't win) – nowadays it makes legitimate claim to be one of the all-time great British movies. Its influence is still felt in British drama: on the DVD of the BBC's LIFE ON MARS, they cite GET CARTER as one of the influences for the look and tone of the series and the 1974 segment of RED RIDING owes everything to CARTER.
Written and directed by Mike Hodges, the film centres on Carter (Michael Caine), a London gangster who – against his employer's wishes – travels home to North East England in order to get to the bottom of his brother's sudden death. Everything is linked to the local chief criminal Kinnear (playwright and screenwriter John Osborne), a porn film in which Carter's niece has been coerced to appear and assorted villains determined to stand in Carter's way. There isn't a dull or wasted scene in the entire movie. It's not just a gangster revenge thriller – it's a film of details and social observations of working class and criminal life from the early 1970s. The details of the long train journey up North which accompany the opening credits. The details of life in the bleak and drab Newcastle of 1971 which the affluence of the Swinging sixties has passed by. It's a film in which everyone is either a villain or victim. These characters have little sense of life beyond their limited horizons. Carter is getting out of it all – he's about to flee to South America with his boss's mistress.
It's social realism at its most piercing. Check out the scene in which the hitherto hard as nails Carter sees his niece being abused in a porn film and he starts crying - one of Caine's most memorable and harrowing screen moments. And the final moment on a grey desolate beach early on a Sunday morning under a leaden sky, Carter casting his shotgun into the sea having killed all of the people linked to his brother's death – only to be shot dead by a sniper. This is is a film full of unforgettable moments too numerous to mention here. Superb is every way.
Another Year (2010)
Scenes from the four seasons
Mike Leigh's latest BAFTA and Oscar-nominated slice of suburban London life feels like a cast reunion from previous movies: Jim Broadbent, Ruth Sheen, Lesley Manville, Peter Wright, Imelda Staunton, Phil Davis. I've been watching his films since the early 1990s and this follows the usual pattern - there's no storyline as such, just incidents from characters' lives.
Another title for the movie could be Scenes from the Four Seasons (spring, summer, autumn, winter), as it eavesdrops on the cosy London home life of Tom (Broadbent) and Geri (Sheen), a professional middle class couple approaching retirement age whose home is always open to various friends. Chief amongst these is boozy divorcée Mary (scene stealing Manville).
There's a warmth and good nature about these characters. Leigh's films are always about people not plot. Take a scene right at the beginning of the film in which a depressed and downtrodden London housewife (Staunton) sees her GP because she's suffering from insomnia. A whole back story and other movie is hinted at in this person - yet she's not seen again. That's what makes Leigh's film so appealing - every character, no matter how minor, has a lived in life.
The film works best during the winter sequence which involves a trip to Tom's sister-in-law's funeral where we meet the deadpan brother (David Bradley) and his sociopath son Carl (Martin Savage). I loved the details of the funeral: the poor attendance, Carl arriving later, the family row. It's a film which always feels real in character and emotion, something true of very few other contemporary filmmakers.
Highly recommended.
Brideshead Revisited (2008)
Highlights from Brideshead Revisited
'Brideshead Revisitied' originally aired on Britain's ITV network between October and December 1981 and then on Public television in the United States from January 1982. At the time Britain was beset by 3 million unemployed, race riots and the IRA bombing campaign. The series was tonic for a grim nation, providing a window on a halcyon pre-war England and a lifestyle of excessive extravagance that served as a kind of escapism for the middle class and literate viewer.
In 2008, with a similar economic recession afflicting Britain and the Western world, there appears a new 'Brideshead Revisited' - glossily shot, designed and costumed, full of golden pre-war summers, vintage cars, stately homes and, at the centre, the sort of privileged upper class family who were already in decline. The best way to approach this new version of the Evelyn Waugh novel is as highlights from 'Brideshead Revisited' rather than a definitive version. Director Julian Jarrold and writers Jeremy Block and Andrew Davies have produced a work which feels like it's rushing through the highlights of the story. Unlike the television series, they do not have eleven and a half hours to play with. It starts confusingly - first a shot of middle-aged army captain Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode) billeted at Brideshead stately home in wartime England, then we flashback to him abroad a transatlantic liner, before settling down to Charles arriving at Oxford sometime in the 1920s.
Charles becomes involved with a flamboyant homosexual aristocratic student called Sebastian Flyte (Ben Wishaw), first seen vomiting through Charles' room window. Their relationship draws Charles into the world of the Flyte family - his beautiful sister Julia (Hayley Atwell), his manipulative mother Lady Marchmain (Emma Thompson) and his lapsed Catholic father Lord Marchmain (Michael Gambon), now living in sin in Venice. Charles grows more and more attached to Julia, Sebastian succumbs to alcoholism and ends up an alcoholic wreck in North Africa. Charles and Julia are reunited a decade later when Charles is now a painter and she now a divorcée.
There are so many themes at the core of 'Brideshead Revisited' - the last days of the English upper classes, Catholicism, alcoholism and homosexuality - that the film can only touch on them. In that sense it makes for an unsatisfactory experience. The first half works fine, helped enormously by the cast. Hayley Atwell is a surprisingly sexy and gorgeous Julia; Emma Thompson dominates all of her scenes as Lady Matchmain and Goode and Wishaw inhabit their roles in a way which never reminded me of Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews in the TV series. Sebastian is such a fascinating character and his descent into alcoholism so tragic that once he vanishes from the film, it's sorely felt. Also, the role of his sister Cordelia - the most enchanting and likable character in the original - has been trimmed to just 3 scenes, though Patrick Malahide makes the most of his role as Charles's droll and comical father.
Beautifully shot by Jesse Hall, the real star is Castle Howard again reprising its role as Bridheshead. A commendable film which somehow fails to sustain interest for its entire running time.