The story sees Miss Giddens (Deborah Kerr) become governess to two children who live in a sprawling country pile and are the wards of an absent uncle (Michael Redgrave) who lives in London. Bill Douglas Trilogy: My Childhood (1972), My Ain Folk (1973) and My Way Home (1978), 22. It’s rare that experimental filmmaking is this humane and enjoyable. DA, Director Jerzy Skolimowski Cast Jane Asher, John Moulder-Brown, Diana DorsOne of the all-time great London movies, the splendidly sleazy ‘Deep End’ definitively proves that it takes an outsider’s eye to really capture the true textures of a city. DC, Director Alfred Hitchcock Cast Oscar Homolka, Sylvia Sidney, John Loder, ‘Sand! Wrecking!’ are the terse first words of Hitchcock’s atmospheric, exciting and sometimes funny, 1936 London-based suspenser, adapted from Joseph Conrad’s ‘The Secret Agent’. The trick and power of Powell and Pressburger’s film is that, by first giving us the Blimp we expect – loud, angry, stuck in his ways – and then flashing back and recounting events in his life from 1902 to 1943, including a lifelong friendship with a German officer, a lost love and time spent serving in three wars, they give us an entirely different character: a complex, rounded and sympathetic man. Director: Robert Altman | Stars: Maggie Smith, Ryan Phillippe, Michael Gambon, Kristin Scott Thomas. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), 14. Still, you could judge that our contributors were merely hedging their bets by voting for Ealing’s finest: ‘Kind Hearts and Coronets’. Period drama? This is down to the multitude of tricks that Kubrick hoists in (slo-mo, fast-forward, cartoon inserts, back projection) to encapsulate the total autonomy these characters have and why they see their behaviour as thrilling. The film is full of scenes and performances to treasure, though perhaps the best remembered is the arrival at the isolated well of Sherif Ali (Omar Sharif) and the long shot of his ride across the shimmering sand. Does the fanciful madcap of ‘The Lavender Hill Mob’ now just feel empty? Cut to 28 days later and Cillian Murphy’s cycle courier awakens from a hospitalised coma to find a near deserted, dystopian London populated by violent rage victims. When violence erupts, it’s swift and brutal, but the film’s main pleasure is its pragmatic handling of the central romance. But, as Tony Rayns has argued, it’s also of interest for its intriguing narrative structure, shifting from a straightforward, rather detached police procedural to something altogether more intimate and messily involving, while the set pieces also display the level of expertise Hitchcock had attained during the silent era as a manipulator of audience emotions and a showman entertainer: the British Museum climax remains a classic sequence. No sooner have they disembarked from the train than one of their number is stung by a night-time prowler who’s getting his jollies by putting glue in women’s hair (and no, this isn’t a foresight into ‘Peeping Tom’). It marks the debut screen appearance of Paddy Considine, and though it’s easy (and probably appropriate) to refer to him as our De Niro, it took Bob five years to get to Johnny Boy, while Paddy knocked it flat first time in the ring. Since then, she has made two features, ‘Red Road’ and ‘Fish Tank’, both of which triumphed at Cannes. Ignominious doesn’t begin to cover it. Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) Film Comedy Director Mike Newell. And discipline is an alien word to him. This was Meadows’s second film, his trickiest, his loosest and perhaps his best. In retrospect, it’s the location shooting, especially around the docks – post-industry but pre-development – that resonates the most, as well as writer Barrie Keefe’s capturing of the Thatcherite zeitgeist in the person of gangster Harry Shand (Hoskins), who declares ‘I’m not a politician: I’m a businessman with a sense of history, and I’m also a Londoner’ from the back of a yacht cruising under Tower Bridge. Tom Courtenay is unforgettable in the title role, and Julie Christie’s fleeting, flitting presence is as convincing a ‘star is born’ moment as British film has to offer. “The British are coming,” trumpeted Chariots Of Fire screenwriter Colin Welland infamously at the 1982 Oscars. Bob Hoskins wandering in close-up through Heathrow! Highest quality canvas print. Set in the 1930s, this movie brings a group of pretentious rich and famous together for a weekend of relaxation at a hunting resort. If the country had fallen, ‘Listen to Britain’ would have made a perfect epitaph. It was dumped initially by MGM because of its supposed ‘difficulty’ but was subsequently the winner of the Cannes Palme d’Or and a box-office and critical success in the US. DJ, Director Carol Reed Cast Ralph Richardson, Michèle Morgan, Bobby Henrey, Given his reputation as a novelist, it’s easy to forget how major a force Graham Greene became in post-war British cinema, and how many key aspects of national life became cemented in the public consciousness as a result of his extraordinary run of work between ‘Confidential Agent’ in 1945 and ‘Our Man in Havana’ in 1959. Like ‘Red Road’, ‘Fish Tank’ intimately explores the life of one female character on a housing estate, this time potty-mouthed teen Mia (Katie Jarvis), who falls into a relationship with her mum’s new boyfriend (Michael Fassbender). ALD, Director John Schlesinger Cast Tom Courtenay, Julie Christie, Wilfred PicklesFew films exemplify the fearsome contradictions inherent in British filmmaking better than ‘Billy Liar’. Certainly, at the time it marked a departure for Leigh into more mythical, less domestic territory, and in retrospect marked a new maturity in his filmmaking. Yet, his film has a more cynical edge than only being about the sensations of a city. Mostly, though, it’s Davies’s love for cinema that is apparent in every single frame of this beautiful film. WH, Directors Michael Powell and Emeric PressburgerCast Roger Livesey, Deborah Kerr, Two things are well known about Powell and Pressburger’s 1943 epic about the life of an old-fashioned ex-army officer serving in the Home Guard during World War II: Churchill disliked the whole idea of it, and may have thought it was about him, and the Blimp character, over-fed and irascible, was inspired by David Low’s cartoon character of the same name in the Evening Standard. TH, Director David Lean Cast Alec Guinness, William Holden, Jack HawkinsNot even the breeze coming off his twirling moral compass can keep Alec Guinness’s stiff upper lip from wilting in the maddening Burmese heat during David Lean’s truly epic – as opposed to simply lengthy – meditation on the possibilities of humane behaviour in wartime. While both films feature the farming of sheep and two men who, while camping in the hinterland, share an intense sexual and romantic bond, the similarities end there. Alas… DJ, Buy, rent or watch ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’, Director Gary Oldman Cast Kathy Burke, Ray Winstone, What a pity Gary Oldman has never been able to fulfil his dream of following up this, his directorial debut! A student (Dominique Swain) will do anything to become part of the 'in-crowd' at the exclusive school she attends in New York. The Warrior is a 2001 film by British-Indian filmmaker Asif Kapadia.It stars Bollywood actor Irrfan Khan as Lafcadia, a warrior in feudal Rajasthan who attempts to give up the sword. But there remains a small handful of crowd-pleasers guaranteed to tickle the toes of the most hardened cynic, and ‘Local Hero’ is a prime example. When talking about the impossibility of a successful military occupation, how long before someone mentions what the Romans did for us? A complete list of Romance movies in 2001. Horror? TH, Director EA Dupont Cast Anna May Wong, Gilda Gray, Jameson ThomasThe oldest movie on our list – pipping at the post-Hitchcock’s ‘Blackmail’ by less than a month – is this glorious silent-era melodrama set mainly in London’s West End in the late 1920s but which takes detours to the slums of Limehouse and to the showbiz world’s less glamorous nooks and crannies. While both films feature the farming of sheep and two men who, while camping in the hinterland, share an intense sexual and romantic bond, the similarities end there. Soused or not, Chapman is superb in his tailor-made role of a slightly effeminate King Arthur, and who could forget John Cleese’s neatly carved Black Knight (‘It’s just a flesh wound’) or his similarly hilarious abusive French guard (‘You don’t frighten us, English pig-dogs. The people of a small village in Victorian India stake their future on a game of cricket against their ruthless British … When discussing religion in general, and cults in particular, how long before someone pipes up, ‘Yes, we’re all individuals’? Cast Albert Finney, Rachel … It all looks scarily familiar. So why is a film which should, by rights, be too dated to watch still gaining traction well into its fourth decade? ... Thu 18 Oct 2001 … A complete list of War movies in 2001. TH, Director Stanley Kubrick Cast Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester, Okay, so the director, money and most of the cast are American, but it was shot here, dammit, so we’re claiming ‘2001’ as our own. At that point, the ‘Withnail & I’ fan club was at its bibulous height, with its ardent admirers, word-perfect in Robinson’s semi-autobiographical script, meeting in Camden pubs to swap quotes and play the DVD-extra drinking games (though, more properly, they should have frequented tea shops, demanding ‘the finest wines available to humanity!’). (It may not be accidental that our quotidian earthly existence is shown in colour while the fanciful realm of the hereafter is consigned to the monochrome favoured by Grierson et al.) ‘Brief Encounter’ is a tragedy, not just for two mismatched lovers but for an entire class of people, trapped in empty suburban existences ruled by propriety and that desperate, heartbreaking, terribly British desire to remain anonymous, to avoid offence, to blend in. The film is not merely about the strictures of gender through the ages, but also an essay on the nature of evolution (the Godardian final shot even switches from film to video) and it scores points through knowing casting (Quentin Crisp as Queen Elizabeth I!) It’s a chilling conundrum that rings with truth and despair, and one of which politicians, businessmen and, well, everyone, should continually be wary. It remains one of Loach’s most ambitious and important films both for its raw combat scenes and for the way it shines a light on a crucial moment in twentieth-century history. Taking his inspiration from Powell and Pressburger, notably ‘I Know Where I’m Going!’ (see no. The film may bear little relation to Gerald Kersh’s far nastier (and more grimly believable) source novel, but Jules Dassin’s stark, unforgiving direction, Max Greene’s oppressive monochrome cinematography and Richard Widmark’s twitchy central performance give the movie a paranoid power all of its own. 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