For all that James Scott’s name is on the cover, the main selling point of the BFI’s new archive collection Every Picture Tells a Story is the remarkable range of artists he filmed. There’s David Hockney, arguably the only living British painter whose name means something to the general public. […]
Graham Williamson
Senior Contributor
Lord of the Flies (1963) Literature Classic lives and dies on the shoulder of its child actors (Review)
Among those of us who value books as discrete physical objects – which is slightly more of us than is comfortable for Amazon’s share price – film tie-in editions are a wearying necessity, a crude imposition of a completely different style of art for crass commercial reasons. There are some […]
Joe Orton: Loot (1970) & Entertaining Mr. Sloane (1970) (Review)
“I was plunged into the dumps for weeks after seeing Entertaining Mr. Sloane”, wrote Mrs. Edna Welthorpe of the late Joe Orton’s most famous play. She was even less fond of its follow-up: “I saw Loot with my young niece. We both fled from the theatre in horror and amazement […]
Touchez Pas au Grisbi (1954) Jean Gabin and Jacques Becker’s Radical Chic (Review)
There’s an anecdote Martin Scorsese often tells about his childhood that turns up in some variant or other in most of his gangster films. It concerns the future director walking around Little Italy with his mother, noticing that some people seemed to be wearing better clothes and driving better cars […]
J’Accuse (1938) World War I Historical Epic with Silent Film and Grindhouse Brio (Review)
In literature, the phrase J’accuse is most associated with Émile Zola, who used it for the title of an essay accusing the French government of corruption and anti-Semitism in the case of Alfred Dreyfus. (Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery officer, was charged with treason in a clumsy attempt to cover up […]
The Levelling (2016) An incredible, sympathetic film to the plight of the modern farmer (Review)
It would be wrong to say British film hasn’t dealt with the countryside, but it certainly hasn’t dealt with it in any depth. For the first half-century or so of British cinema it might as well have been a painted backdrop, just some pretty, quintessentially British scenery against which melodramas […]
Stormy Monday (1988) Mike Figgis’s Anti-American moody noir (Review)
It would probably be impossible to make a genuinely anti-American film; as with rock and roll, the USA has contributed so much to the history of the art form that any political stance has to be tempered by the sheer cultural debt. Mike Figgis’s debut film Stormy Monday, now reissued […]
Daughters of the Dust (1991) recalls Tarkovsky, Resnais or any other sanctified European arthouse auteur you might care to name (Review)
Julie Dash’s debut film turned 25 last year, but even without the anniversary, this sumptuous BFI restoration would still probably exist. In the late 2010s, the film has become more relevant than ever. It is an inspiration for a new generation of African-American directors – Ava DuVernay has repeatedly cited […]
Stockholm, My Love (2016) The audacity that marks out the best documentary-fiction hybrids is missing (Review)
It’s not unknown for film directors to start their career as critics, but Mark Cousins is one of the rare breed who practice both disciplines at the same time. As such, it can be hard to avoid looking for connections, seeing the criticism and films as the left hemisphere and […]
Minute Bodies: The Intimate World of F. Percy Smith (2016) it’s a tribute to life, in all its messy glory (Review)
Now here’s a real curio, and one you might be utterly beguiled by. Minute Bodies is a compilation of work by the British biologist and pioneering filmmaker F. Percy Smith and his colleague and editor Mary Field. Smith was quite a celebrity in his day, cultivating an eccentric domestic-boffin image […]