My Cousin Rachel

The reviews for this film were excellent and I was looking forward to seeing it at the cinema, but unfortunately it disappeared from general release pretty quickly.

I finally saw it on DVD over the Christmas holidays and suggested we screen it, but the curse of the best films that you didn't see seems to have struck again: our screening clashed with the arrival of the Beast from the East and we had an audience of just seven - and three of us were committee members.


My Cousin Rachel

UK 2017          106 minutes

Director:          Roger Michell

Starring:            Rachel Weisz, Sam Clafin, Iain Glen and Holliday Grainger

Awards and Nominations

• Nomination for Best Actress (Rachel Weisz) at the Evening Standard British Film Awards
• One win and three further nominations

“My Cousin Rachel is a highly enjoyable mystery thriller of the sort that modern communication and the internet have made impossible to set in the present day. Based on the 1951 novel by Daphne du Maurier and adapted and directed by Roger Michell, it is a fantastically preposterous psychological drama featuring a lush score from Rael Jones and a tremendous lead performance from Rachel Weisz – who is mean, minxy and manipulative. Her sheer charisma persuades you to overlook one or two plot glitches. I can only describe this film as the roistering missing link between The Talented Mr Ripley and Far from the Madding Crowd.”

Peter Bradshaw

Philip (Sam Clafin) plots revenge against his late cousin’s mysterious wife Rachel (Rachel Weisz), as he feels that she is responsible for his death while he is recuperating in Italy after an illness. However when Rachel returns to the family estate in Cornwall Philip finds himself falling for her charms.

The film appeared at number fifty in The Guardian’s list of the Best Films of 2017 as well as featuring in its list of the Best Films of 2017 That You Didn’t See.  In this latter list Benjamin Lee was particularly impressed by Rachel Weisz’s performance:

“If this were a just world, and 2017 has proved that it most definitely is not, then Rachel Weisz’s name would be frequently heard throughout this year’s awards season. Her performance in Roger Michell’s curiously ignored My Cousin Rachel, the second adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s 1951 novel, is one of her best: a compelling, fiery take on a spell-bindingly unknowable literary femme fatale, disarming and enigmatic, charming and bewitching.”

Daphne du Maurier’s novel was published in 1951 although the story is set in a Hardy-esque nineteenth century. The novel was an international success and this led in 1952 to a film adaptation directed by Henry Koster and starring Olivia de Havilland and Richard Burton, his first role in a US film. George Cukor had originally intended to direct the film but both he and du Maurier found the screenplay unfaithful to the novel, although on its release critics felt it was a worthy adaptation. Many of du Maurier’s other novels and short stories have also adapted well to the cinema: Hitchcock filmed Jamaica Inn (1939) and, far more successfully, Rebecca (1940) as well as the short story The Birds (1963), while Nicholas Roeg adapted another short story for his classic Don’t Look Now (1973).

Roger Michell began his career as a stage director working at the Royal Court and the Royal Shakespeare Company. His first work for TV was an adaptation Hanif Kureishi’s autobiographical novel The Buddha of Suburbia. His first film as director for cinema was Notting Hill (1999), and his cinema films since then have included The Mother (2003) written by Hanif Kureishi and starring Daniel Craig, Enduring Love (2004) and Venus (2006) once again from a script by Hanif Kureishi. In 2006 Michell was in negotiations in 2006 to direct Daniel Craig as James Bond in A Quantum of Solace, but the talks fell through.

Here's a link to the trailer:

Victoria and Abdul

We knew that we'd need to screen this film even before it was released and the reviews were in: the combination of Judi Dench and period drama meant that we were bound to get a good audience.

I'd seen the film at the cinema and enjoyed it: it was genuinely good but did not have the story or impact of the same team's Philomena. It was a good evening and, as they say, a good time was had by all.

Here are my notes:


Victoria and Abdul

UK 2017          111 minutes

Director:          Stephen Frears

Starring:            Judi Dench, Ali Fazal, Tim Piggott-Smith, Eddie Izzard and Adeel Akhtar

Awards and Nominations

• Nominated for two Oscars (Makeup and Hairstyling, and Costume Design)
• Nominated for Best Actress - Musical or Comedy (Judi Dench) at the Golden Globes
• A further two wins and 10 nominations

“Victoria & Abdul is worth seeing for Dench's magisterial performance and for Frears's light but sure directorial touch. Just don't mistake it for actual history.”

Christopher Orr

Abdul Karim (Ali Fazal) travels from India to participate in Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. When he meets the Queen (Judi Dench) they strike up an unlikely alliance. As their friendship develops the Prince of Wales (Eddie Izzard), Sir Henry Ponsonby (Tim Piggott-Smith) and members of her household do their best to destroy it.

It is possible to see the film as an unofficial sequel to Mrs Brown (1997) in which Dench’s portrayal of the widowed Queen Victoria won her an Oscar nomination for Best Actress and launched her Hollywood career. The main characters of the film were real people, but the opening credits (“based on true events… mostly”) confirm that what follows is a historical fantasy.

The subject of the film is quintessentially English, and the production involves a creative team that developed their careers at the BBC before moving into cinema where they have been involved in a significant number of the best British films over the past few decades while subsequently garnering an international reputation for their work in Hollywood. The screenplay is by Lee Hall whose early work included plays for BBC Radio before making his name with Billy Elliot (2000) and later writing the screenplay for Stephen Spielberg’s War Horse (2011). Stephen Frears’s early TV work included A Day Out (1972), Alan Bennett’s debut play for TV, and My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), made for TV but released cinematically, before he moved to Hollywood where his films included Dangerous Liaisons (1988), The Grifters (1990) and High Fidelity (2000).

Meanwhile Judi Dench followed an illustrious stage career with a numerous TV roles with the BBC before being cast as Queen Victoria in Mrs Brown. She first worked with Stephen Frears in the TV movie Saigon - Year of the Cat (1983) and subsequently starred in his films of Mrs Henderson Presents (2005) and the Oscar nominated Philomena (2015). Since completing this film she has also starred in Murder on the Orient Express (2017) and has recently completed filming Red Joan, with Trevor Nunn as director.

Here's a link to the trailer:

About Time

As we were due to screen a film the day after Valentine's day we decided to select a rom com. there do not seem to have been too many recent such films, certainly none that would appeal to our audiences, so we went back in time to choose this one.

I had missed it at the cinema and remembered the positive reviews, and the combination of director and stars promised an enjoyable film. I enjoyed it, although it was not in the same league as the films that Curtis had written for Hugh Grant, but any film with a ginger-haired hero called Tim has to be worth watching.

Here are my notes:

About Time

UK 2013          123 minutes

Director:          Richard Curtis

Starring:            Domhnall Gleeson, Rachel McAdams and Bill Nighy

Awards and Nominations

• Three wins and ten nominations

“As far as we know, Richard Curtis cannot travel through time. But the kingpin of the Britcom can get a huge movie off the ground. And, along with the possible, Curtis has managed to achieve the impossible. Specifically: he has gone back to 1993 and remade Groundhog Day with a ginger Hugh Grant.”

Catherine Shoard

At the age of 21 Tim (Domhnall Gleeson) learns from his father (Bill Nighy) that the adult men in his family have the ability to travel back in time: they cannot change history, but they can change what has happened in their own lives. When Tim falls in love with Mary (Rachel McAdams) he uses his powers to woo her successfully, but inevitably the subsequent use of his powers has other unforeseen consequences for their future lives together.

In the immortal words of the Tenth Doctor (David Tennant) in Blink time is “a big ball of wibbly, wobbly, timey wimey stuff”; as such stories about time travel are popular with scriptwriters as it gives them so much flexibility with their plots. About Time is Richard Curtis’s first foray into what could be called science fantasy rom com and follows in the tracks of the classic Groundhog Day (1993) as well as Sliding Doors (1998) and more recently The Time Traveler’s Wife (2009) (which also starred Rachel McAdams). However Curtis manages to infuse the concept with his own brand of a particularly English type of rom com that produced the classic screenplays for Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), Notting Hill (1999) and Love Actually (2003), and the film builds on these thematic links by the casting of Bill Nighy, who was a member of the large ensemble cast for Love Actually, and Domhnall Gleeson, described by one critic as a ginger replicant Hugh Grant, the star of the earlier films that Curtis had written.

The film was well reviewed despite several gaping plot holes relating to the rules governing time travel: Doctor Who always manages to skirt such inconsistencies by allowing the Doctor to claim, depending on the exigencies of the plot, either that time can be rewritten or that a particular event is a fixed point in time that cannot under any circumstances be changed. Nonetheless the film was a commercial success, especially in South Korea where it became a surprise hit.

Richard Curtis announced that this film, his third that he has directed, is likely to be his last as director, although he would continue to work in the film industry. He is currently working on the story for the film to Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, which will be released later in 2018. In parallel with his film work Curtis has worked extensively for television where he has written scripts for Blackadder, Mr Bean, The Vicar of Dibley and The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency. Somewhat unexpectedly, although in the circumstances quite relevant for this film, in 2010 he even wrote a story for Doctor Who, which ended with the Doctor bringing Vincent van Gogh to present day Paris to see his work in the Musée d'Orsay (with Bill Nighy playing an uncredited role as a bowtie-wearing art curator).

Here's a link to the trailer:

A United Kigdom

We screened Belle towards the end of last year and I thought that it was superb, so I was really looking forward to seeing A United Kingdom as I'd missed it in the cinema.

I was not in the least disappointed: it was just as good as I'd hoped and truly epic in its scope without losing focus on the loving relationship at its core.

Here are my notes:

A United Kingdom

UK 2016          111 minutes

Director:          Amma Asante

Starring:            David Oyelowo, Rosamund Pike, Terry Pheto, Jack Davenport and Tom Felton

Awards and Nominations

• Best Supporting Actress nomination for Terry Pheto at the British Independent Film Awards
• A further four nominations

“With terrific warmth and idealism – and irresistible storytelling relish – director Amma Asante gives us a romantic true story from our dowdy postwar past. And with some style and wit, she even revives the spirit and showmanship of Richard Attenborough, who I think would have really enjoyed this gutsy movie.”

Peter Bradshaw

Seretse Khama (David Oyelowo) is studying law in London after the Second World War when he meets and falls in love with Ruth Williams (Rosamund Pike), whom he marries despite the protests of both families. Khama is the heir to the throne of Bechuanaland and their return to his home country plunges the kingdom into political and diplomatic turmoil.

The film is a true story based on the book Colour Bar by Susan Williams, and is a co-production with David Oyelowo’s independent production company which he set up to produce films for him to star in.  Although he is now based in the USA he was born in the UK to Nigerian parents and began his screen career with a leading role in the TV series Spooks (2002-2004); prior to this he was an established stage actor and played numerous major roles with the Royal Shakespeare Company where his roles included the king in Henry VI, the first time a black actor had played an English king in a major Shakespeare production. In cinema he has played supporting roles in Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), Lincoln (2013), The Butler (2013) and Queen of Katwe (2016) Before his starring role in this film his most acclaimed cinema performance was as Martin Luther King in Selma (2014); he received many nominations and awards for this performance, although controversially not an Oscar nomination.

Amma Asante trained as an actress and dancer where her early appearances include a role as a regular character in Grange Hill. She made her name as a director with the acclaimed Belle (2013), her second feature film, which Mark Kermode named as his fourth favourite film of 2014. A United Kingdom received its premier when it opened the London Film Festival in October 2016 and was also linked to the BFI’s Black Star season, a programme “celebrating the range, versatility and power of black actors”.

Here's a link to the trailer: