Reviews on the Best UK Movies of All Time
Top British Films
Director: Paul Wright 12A 19, 75m June (UK) RATING: ★★★★☆ I’m a sucker for film essays that repurpose old archive footage, and that is exactly what BAFTA-winner Paul Wright’s Arcadia is. Scouring 100 years of British film archives and deploying footage non-chronologically, Wright constructs a surreal study of the British people’s shifting — and contradictory […]
Director: Fatih Akin 18 | 1h 46min | Crime, Drama | 22 June 2018 (UK) Rating: ★★★☆☆ Star Diane Kruger certainly delivers the acting goods in Fatih Akin’s In The Fade; she walked away from Cannes with the Best Actress prize last year for her turn as a woman who works as her Turkish expat […]
Vertigo, voted the greatest movie of all time in the 2012 Sight and Sound magazine film poll, reaches its 60th anniversary this year. Appropriately, there’s a “Presenting Alfred Hitchcock” season in the works for the summer season. Vertigo, and highlights from the rest of the “master of suspense’s” career, will return to selected cinemas in London and worldwide. […]
The #MeToo and #TimesUp movements have sparked an industry wide conversation and actions in response to widespread harassment and abuse of power. Not a bad time for the BFI to be hosting a summit titled “Woman with a Movie Camera” then. The Smoke Screen dipped into one of the panel discussions – “Before and After […]
Director: Rupert Everett 15 | 1h 45min | Drama, History | 15 June 2018 (UK) RATING: ★★★☆☆ I know very little about the famous writer, socialite and wit-bomb dropper Oscar Wilde, beyond the basic rise-and-fall arc of his life that takes in his rise to fame in Britain as the mind behind The Picture of […]
Courtesy of a preview screening at Curzon Mayfair, attended by the Ida and My Summer of Love director himself, the Smoke Screen can bring you an advance look at Pawel Pawlikowski’s new drama Cold War, hot from a Best Director prize win at Cannes. The film hits UK cinemas and digital VOD 31 August. Director: Pawel […]
Director: G.W.Pabst Germany 1929| 129m| U RATING: ★★★★★ Find out more about the reissue at the BFI website. Here we have a sumptuously shot and deliriously melodramatic Weimar-era silent film from G.W. Pabst, that is a superb showcase for the luminous 22-year old star Louise Brooks, who plays a call girl and chanteuse called Lulu […]
Director: J.A. Bayona 12A | 2h 8min | Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi | 6 June 2018 (UK) Rating: ★★☆☆☆ Like the very genetically engineered dinosaurs that populate the plots, the Jurassic Park series refuses to bow to extinction, returning with a follow-up to 2015’s smash-hit, franchise-restarter Jurassic World. Colin Trevorrow has bowed out of direction duties […]
Director: Paul Schrader R | 1h 53min | Drama, Thriller | 13 July 2018 (UK) Rating: ★★★★☆ Playing Sundance London 2018 Ethan Hawke cuts a looming, flinty-eyed and tormented figure as a disillusioned and possibly unstable upstate New York Reverend, in Paul Schrader’s austere but ultimately mesmerising character study. First Reformed, which refers to the […]
Picturehouse Central 31 May-3 June. See Picturehouse Central Sundance website for details