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:

Dunkirk

We started the New Year with Dunkirk: not really a seasonal film, but it is new to DVD and we attracted a reasonable audience.

I'd seen the film at the cinema and had been impressed and was looking forward to seeing it again. The structure is complex but it looks very simple: as ever the art is in concealing the art.

One of my main recollections from the first film was Mark Rylance's superb performance, and I was equally impressed on this second viewing. I assume that his character would have been old enough to have taken part in WW1: he does not mention this but you can sense it from his heroic weariness as he decides to take his boat to Dunkirk rather than merely handing it over to the Navy.

Here are my notes:

Dunkirk

UK 2017          106 minutes

Director:          Christopher Nolan

Starring:            Fionn Whitehead, Barry Keoghan, Mark Rylance, Tom Hardy and Kenneth Branagh

Awards and Nominations to date

• Number 13 in The Guardian’s list of the Best Films of 2017
• Nominated for Golden Globe for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Score
• Nominated by the London Critics Circle Film Awards for Best Film, Best British/Irish Film, Best Director and three other categories
• A further 18 wins and 86 nominations

“This is a powerful, superbly crafted film with a story to tell, avoiding war porn in favour of something desolate and apocalyptic, a beachscape of shame, littered with soldiers zombified by defeat, a grimly male world with hardly any women on screen. It is Nolan’s best film so far. It also has Hans Zimmer’s best musical score: an eerie, keening, groaning accompaniment to a nightmare, switching finally to quasi-Elgar variations for the deliverance itself.”

Peter Bradshaw

 During the fall of France in the Spring of 1940 Allied soldiers have retreated to the coast at Dunkirk. As the troops wait for evacuation the Royal Navy requisitions small civilian vessels that can sail in the shallow waters close to the beaches, while in the air Spitfires try to save British ships from attack by Nazi planes.

Nolan directed the film from his own script which tells the story of the evacuation from the perspectives of land, sea and air. Each story develops over different timescales so that although they are edited together it is only towards the climax of the film that the different narratives coincide. He had initially conceived the idea for the film in the mid-1990s but had postponed the project until he had enough experience of directing large scale action films. His aim was to tell the story solely from the perspective of the soldiers on the beaches: thus the invading Nazi forces do not appear. Additionally Nolan avoided any scenes with Churchill who had become Prime Minister only on10^th May 1940 in order to prevent the complexity of the domestic political situation undermining the story of the evacuation. The circumstances of Churchill’s assumption of power and subsequent wartime premiership are a major story themselves and are the subject of Joe Wright’s forthcoming film Darkest Hour (2017) with Gary Oldman starring as Churchill.

The major events in the film are based on the historical record and Nolan worked closely with a historical consultant to ensure the accuracy of the film; similarly although the characters are all fictional some of them are based in part on Dunkirk veterans whose stories Nolan encountered during his research. The evacuation at Dunkirk itself was a major turning point in the Second World War and appeared on screen as early as 1942 as part of the plot of Mrs Miniver. In 1958 Leslie Norman, father of Barry, directed Dunkirk which starred John Mills, Richard Attenborough and Bernard Lee; the film became the second most popular production of the year in the UK. The evacuation also featured in a key sequence in Joe Wright’s Atonement (2007) and more recently Their Finest (2016) depicted the making of a wartime propaganda film about Dunkirk to raise morale in a war-ravaged Britain. 

On its release in 2017 Dunkirk received praise for its screenplay, direction, soundtrack and photography, with some critics acclaiming it as one of the greatest war films ever made. Somewhat inevitably Nigel Farage attempted to use the film to promote his own blinkered perspective of history by circulating a photograph of himself in front of a poster for the film with the patronising exhortation: “I urge every youngster to go out and watch #Dunkirk”. Clearly he had forgotten that Britain did not stand alone against Nazi Germany and that Churchill himself, a lifelong patriot, amateur historian and arguably the greatest British Prime Minister of the twentieth century, had actually favoured an “indissoluble” union with a France. In an era of fake news it is vital to remember the following words of wisdom: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts”.

Here is a link to the trailer:

Sully: Miracle on the Hudson

Somehow this film had passed me by, and when we decided to screen it I was interested to see it but did not expect anything special: I was wrong...

When I started researching the film for my notes I realised who the director was, and then I read the full details of the landing (not a crash) and, more importantly, the subsequent events.

I enjoyed the film very much, and even though you know right from the beginning that the plane will land safely, the script is structured in such a way as to keep you on the edge of your seat all the way through. Needless to say the performances are excellent, with Tom Hanks in particular deserving all the credit for what could have been seen as a two dimensional character.

Here are my notes:

USA 2016        96 minutes

Director:          Clint Eastwood

Starring:            Tom Hanks, Aaron Eckhart and Laura Linney

Awards and Nominations

• Oscar Nomination for Sound Editing
• A further 12 wins and 32 nominations

“Sully is a beautifully balanced, classily nuanced and hugely engaging film that avoids all the clichéd pitfalls it could have slipped into. Tom Hanks gives one of the best performances of his career and Clint Eastwood's direction is beautiful and rich. It's not just a great movie, Sully is one of the best pieces of cinema that a major Hollywood studio has released this year.”

Simon Thompson

When his Airbus A320 strikes a flock of birds Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger (Tom Hanks) loses power in both engines. He judges that it will be impossible to reach nearby airports safely and so ditches the aircraft in the Hudson River. The passengers and crew are evacuated without casualty and a subsequent enquiry by the National Transportation Safety Board finally confirms that Sully’s decision to ditch in the river was the best option open to him.

The film is based on Sully’s autobiography Highest Duty which the producers of the film purchased and then developed a screenplay with Todd Komarnicki. Sullenberger’s stated desire was the film should incorporate “that sense of our common humanity” and noted that the event had occurred shortly after the 2008 Recession. He explained:

“People were wondering if everything was about self-interest and greed. They were doubting human nature. Then all these people acted together, selflessly, to get something really important done. In a way, I think it gave everyone a chance to have hope, at a time when we all needed it.”

For Kormanicki the main challenge faced in writing his screenplay was not the known outcome of the actual landing, but rather the investigation that followed:

“It wasn't really a challenge of what to do with the event since that is the thing everyone knows about, it was more about how you parse out the information about the man slowly falling apart and becoming a hero in the eyes of the world when internally and with the investigators it was actually seemingly going the other way.”

The film received its premier at the 2016 Telluride Film Festival and then went on general release on 9^th September. Warner Bros. had initially been hesitant about releasing the film on the fifteenth Anniversary of the September 11 attacks, but nonetheless went ahead with this release date and explained its reasoning on the grounds that “Sully is a story of hope and a real hero who did his job.”

The film was well reviewed on its release, with both Hanks and Eastwood being singled out for their work. Peter Debruge gave the film a positive review as well as specifically praising Hanks:

 "This is Hanks' show, and he delivers a typically strong performance, quickly allowing us to forget that we're watching an actor. With his snowy white hair and moustache to match, Hanks conveys a man confident in his abilities, yet humble in his actions, which could also be said of Eastwood as a director."

The American Film Institute selected Sully as one of its ten Movies of the Year.

Several major airlines decided not to include the film within their on-board entertainment systems, although Virgin has shown the film.

Here is the trailer:

Jackie

I'm a little out of sequence, as we screened this before Their Finest. I'd read the reviews and wanted to see this very much, so I was delighted when we decided to screen this and in no way disappointed when I saw it.

Here are my notes:

Jackie

USA 2016        100 minutes

Director:          Pablo Larrain

Starring:            Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard, Greta Gerwig, Billy Crudup and John Hurt

Awards and Nominations

• Three Oscar Nominations including Natalie Portman (Best Actress) and Mica Levi (Best Original Music)
• Three BAFTA Nominations including Natalie Portman (Best Actress) and Mica Levi (Best Original Music)
• A further 39 wins and 146 nominations

“…an astonishing, inside-out revision of the Kennedy mythos that can instantly be filed among the greatest of all White House biopics. Examining and cross-examining Jacqueline Kennedy in the days following JFK’s assassination, it’s at once a skin-grazingly intimate study of a glittering facade’s wrecked interior, and a wider, more searching consideration of how historical legacies are built, maintained and potentially dismantled. Assisted by the icy, stealthy gaze of Larrain’s camera and the eerie, keening strings of Mica Levi’s score, Portman’s unabashedly heightened portrayal redesigns an icon as an alien.”

Guy Lodge

 

In a series of interviews with an unnamed journalist (Billy Crudup) Jackie Kennedy (Natalie Portman) tells of her experiences of life in the White House with President Kennedy, the events of his assassination in Dallas, and the subsequent period as Lyndon B Johnson took over the presidency.

The film was initially conceived as TV mini-series covering the four days between Kennedy’s assassination and burial, with Steven Spielberg as producer. When this fell through the script was reworked screenplay for a feature film with Rachel Weisz in the title role and Darren Aronofsky as director. This lapsed when the two ended their relationship, and it finally went into production with Aronofsky as producer, Natalie Portman (who had won an Oscar for her performance in Aronofsky’s Black Swan) as Jackie Kennedy, and Pablo Larrain as director after Aronofsky had admired his award-winning Spanish film The Club (2015).

Pablo Larrain is an award-winning Chilean film maker whose work has included both TV series and feature films; among the latter Tony Manero (2008) was screened at the Cannes Film Festival to rave reviews, No (2012) received an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, and El Club (2015) won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. Jackie is Larrain’s first English-language film, and although he had no experience of directing a biopic and did not have any history or knowledge of President Kennedy’s assassination he stated that he had connected with Jacqueline Kennedy. To him her life after the assassination “had all the elements that you need for a movie: rage, curiosity and love”.

The film received its world premiere at the 2016 Venice Film Festival and was subsequently also screened at the Toronto Film Festival. After it was released in the US to positive reviews it was nominated for three Oscars, including Best Actress and Best Original Score.

John Hurt’s role of the Priest in this film was his last performance released before his death in January 2017.

Here's the trailer:

 

Their Finest

The less "official" work I have to do, the more my day seems to fill up with other urgent matters: hence there is less time for me to keep this blog up to date.

Thus although we have finished our screenings for the Christmas period I am behind with posting my notes, so here we go with the first catch-up session.

Their Finest was my recommendation after having seen it at the cinema. It was good to see that it went down well, I enjoyed it even more at a second viewing and I was delighted to see that Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian has nominated the screenplay as one of the best of the year.

Here are my notes:

Their Finest

UK 2016          117 minutes

Director:          Lone Scherfig

Starring:            Gemma Arterton, Sam Clafin, Bill Nighy, Jack Huston and Paul Ritter

Awards and Nominations

• Nominations for Best Debut Screenplay (Gaby Chiappe) and Best Effects at the British Independent Film Awards
• One other win and one other nomination

“You’d need a heart of stone and a funny bone of porridge not to enjoy this sweet-natured and eminently lovable British film – a 1940s adventure, with moments of brashness and poignancy. It’s all about the love that flowers in the ruins of blitz-hit London and in the dusty offices of the Ministry of Information’s film unit as various high-minded creative types use the magic of cinema to keep the nation’s pecker up.”

Peter Bradshaw

 

During the London Blitz Catrin Cole (Gemma Arterton) is recruited by the Ministry of Information to write scripts for propaganda films that the public will like, and investigates a story of two young girls who supposedly piloted a boat to help with the evacuation at Dunkirk. The story turns out to be not entirely true but it provides the basis of a feature film that the MoI team decide to make. They cast veteran actor Ambrose Hilliard (Bill Nighy) in a supporting role and as the film goes into production they constantly have to revise the script to meet government requirements, including the unexpected addition of an American character to the beaches of Dunkirk so that the film will help the appeal to the US to join the war on the Allied side.

The film is one of several recent releases – Dad’s Army (2016), Darkest Hour (2017), Dunkirk (2017) and Churchill (2017) – that cover an earlier period in British history which involved certain difficulties relating to events in mainland Europe. Perhaps this focus on Europe reflects current political pre-occupations, although the government’s approach to the Brexit negotiations seems to be far closer to the Home Guard of Walmington-on-Sea rather than to Churchill, as depicted in Darkest Hour, who as a newly appointed Prime Minister in the summer of 1940 used his eloquence to persuade the Cabinet to continue to fighting Hitler and the Nazis rather than seek some form of negotiated settlement; this was the decisive event which saved the country and which Simon Schama has rightly described as “the first great battle of the Second World War”.

In his enthusiastic review of the film Peter Bradshaw focuses on the filmmaking part of the story rather than its historical context and compares the film with Truffaut’s La Nuit Americaine (1973):

“It’s a film unashamedly and cheerfully in love with the conjuring tricks and artifice of cinema. There’s a showstopping matte shot of massed troops on the Dunkirk beach, painted on to glass, and a demonstration of how dubbing and editing can create an illusion of physical presence. Truffaut talked about la nuit americaine – here’s a film about la nuit britannique, a very British kind of film magic. In an earlier scene, Amanda Root plays an actress wearing a hat that recalls Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter, and later there’s a scene next to a mocked-up third-class railway carriage.”

Lone Scherfig began her career in Denmark before making her name internationally with the Oscar-nominated An Education (2009). Her subsequent work has included One Day (2011), an adaptation of the novel by David Nicholls, and The Riot Club (2014), a filmed version of Laura Wade’s play Posh.

 Here's a link to the trailer:

 

 

 

August: Osage County

We take it in turns to propose the films that we screen and then the rest of the committee gives its consent - sort of. The only definite rule is that someone has to have seen the film...

I'd not seen this film, although what I'd read made me add it to my "interesting film to see sometime" mental list, and so was looking forward to the screening.

The whole cast gave good performance, and I can see why the ensemble got such good reviews, but somehow the whole film was less than the sum of its parts. the film was based on a successful stage play and that came across in the adaptation: a series of set pieces set in and around the family house with no opportunity to broaden the location. I'm not sure if a better director could have handled it better, although I think the structure of the screenplay added this constraint.

It was good to see for the performances, but it's definitely not a classic and not one that I'd like to watch again.

Here are my notes

August: Osage County

USA 2013        121 minutes

Director:          John Wells

Starring:            Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Ewan McGregor, Chris Cooper, Abigail Breslin and Benedict Cumberbatch

Awards and Nominations

• Oscar nominations for Best Actress (Meryl Streep) and Best Supporting Actress (Julia Roberts)
• BAFTA nomination for Best Supporting Actress (Julia Roberts)
• A further 15 wins and 61 nominations

“…Wells's adaptation is notable primarily for its A-list ensemble cast, all of whom relish the chance to sink their teeth into Letts's bilious dialogue. Top of the heap is Meryl Streep, as the poisonous (and poisoned) matriarch Violet Weston, whose scattered clan descend upon her godforsaken home when her alcoholic poet husband mysteriously goes missing. It turns out he's the lucky one; after a few days of incestuous infighting and bloody backstabbing, it's easy to see why anyone trapped in this domestic hell-hole would rather drown themselves than sit down to family dinner.”

Mark Kermode

The film is an adaptation by Tracy Letts of his Pulitzer Prize winning play of the same which ran on Broadway for over a year and was also staged briefly at the National Theatre in London. The film reduces the running time of the play by about an hour, which results in the adaptation offering a series of theatrical set pieces rather than opening the story out by rethinking the play in cinematic terms. Nonetheless the A-list ensemble cast work well together, with particular praise being given to Meryl Streep as the matriarch and Julia Roberts as her daughter who while being the only person strong enough to face her is terrified of turning into her.

Letts trained as an actor but has also made his name as a writer for both stage and screen: two of his earlier plays have been successfully filmed from his own screenplays and a third has been adapted into a TV series. As a TV actor he played a supporting role in two seasons of Homeland as well as appearing in minor roles in many other programmes, while as a stage actor he has appeared in many US productions, with his most notable role being George, in a production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf on Broadway, for which he received the Tony Award for Best Actor.

John Wells made his name as executive producer and showrunner of a number of high profile US TV series including ER, The West Wing, and Shameless. He made his debut as a director of feature films with The Company of Men (2010) for which he also wrote the screenplay. He subsequently produced and co-wrote the screenplay for Love & Mercy (2014), a biographical drama about the Beach Boys, and has since directed Burnt (2016) a drama about a chef which despite its award-winning cast received mixed reviews.

 Here's a link to the trailer:

 

 

Hidden Figures

Several of the committee had seen this film an were unanimous in scheduling it.

While researching it to produce my notes I discovered how low budget it was, and that for a weekend its takings even overtook those from Rogue One.

Having watched it again I retained my original enthusiasm for a film which manages to cover so many complex issues so well. It's a shame it did not too well at the Oscars.

Here are my notes:

Hidden Figures

USA 2016        127 minutes

Director:          Theodore Melfi

Starring:            Taraji P Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monae, Kevin Costner and Kirsten Dunst

Awards and Nominations

·         Nominated for three Oscars (Best Film, Best Supporting Actress (Octavia Spencer) and Best Adapted Screenplay)

·         Nominated for two Golden Globes including Best Supporting Actress (Octavia Spencer)

·         Nominated for BAFTA for Best Adapted Screenplay

·         Won Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture

·         A further 35 wins and 74 nominations

“The genius of Theodore Melfi’s film is not in the originality of the script – as far as prestige pictures go, its dramatic and comedic beats are easy to anticipate – but in the novelty of the story and the liveliness of the performances.”

Simran Hans

The film tells the hitherto untold story of Katherine Johnson (Taraji P Henson), Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monae), three African-American women who worked at NASA and were involved with early stages of the US/USSR space race, culminating in the launch into orbit of the astronaut John Glenn.

The women’s story first came to national attention in Margot Lee Shetterly’s 2016 book Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold story of the Black Women Who Helped Win the Space Race which reached the top of the New York Times Non-Fiction Best Sellers list. The subject had clear cinematic potential but for the purposes of the film the script had to simplify the complex history.

In an interview Shetterly confirmed her understanding of this requirement:

“For better or for worse, there is history, there is the book and then there's the movie. Timelines had to be conflated and [there were] composite characters, and most people [who have seen the movie] have already taken that as the literal fact. ... You might get the indication in the movie that these were the only people doing those jobs, when in reality we know they worked in teams, and those teams had other teams. … Even though Katherine Johnson, in this role, was a hero, there were so many others that were required to do other kinds of tests and checks to make [Glenn's] mission come to fruition. But I understand you can't make a movie with 300 characters. It is simply not possible.”

The production budget of the film was USD 25 million and initially it received only a limited release in the US.  This was subsequently expanded to 2,471 screens and for its nationwide opening weekend the film’s takings exceeded those of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016). Based on its gross US takings the film was the highest grossing Best Picture Nominee at the 2017 Academy Awards as well as being in the top twenty of the most profitable releases of 2016.

Here's a link to the trailer: