Reviews on the Best UK Movies of All Time
Top British Films
Director: James Ivory 15 | 2h 20min | Drama, Romance | 18 September 1987 (USA) RATING: ★★★★☆ Merchant Ivory’s award-winning adaptation of E.M. Forster’s autobiographical novel, will open at BFI Southbank and selected cinemas UK-wide from 27 July 2018. This handsome-looking Merchant Ivory British drama is getting a 4K digital re-release this August courtesy of […]
Director: Deborah Haywood 15 | 1h 22min | Drama | 13 July 2018 (UK) RATING: I’m usually drawn to films that showcase a truly unique and compelling world. I’m also drawn to screenplays that have the guts to go through with a merciless conclusion to a character’s arc (even when its a franchise I care […]
Director: Kevin Brownlow PG | 1h 33min | Drama, Fantasy, War | 12 May 1966 (UK) Screening at the BFI 23 July and out now on remastered bluray This week the Smoke Screen caught a special BFI re-release of the chilling and provocative counterfactual WWII Brit thriller It Happened Here, the work of director Kevin […]
Director: Michaël R. Roskam 15 | 2h 10min | Crime, Drama | 13 July 2018 (UK) RATING: ★★★☆ This stylish and sexy crime epic from Oscar nominated director Michael R. Roskam (Bullhead, The Drop), is quite a strange beast. With a plot set against the backdrop of high-speed racing and high-stakes heists France, and featuring […]
Director: Brad Bird PG | 1h 58min | Animation, Action, Adventure | 13 July 2018 (UK) RATING: ★★★★☆ Picking up right where the last movie left off and acting like the 14 years in between films hadn’t seen superheroes morph into shared universe juggernaut franchise machines, Incredibles 2 just gets on with doing much of […]
The Smoke Screen is often out and about soaking up film knowledge through Q&As and pre-film lectures, so the Lexi’s Cinema’s ‘Film School’ series of screenings preceded by prominent film speakers is right up the proverbial alley. Last week The Lexi’s LSF screening was a milestone in the documentary genre: Grey Gardens. Directed by the quartet […]
Director: Kevin MacDonald 15 | 2h | Documentary, Biography, Music | 5 July 2018 (UK) RATING: ★★★★☆ Who was Whitney Houston? Nick Broomfield and Rudi Dolezal tackled this question in last year’s Whitney: Can I Be Me?, now director Kevin MacDonald has the Houston family-sanctioned Whitney to have another go. In truth, both films have […]
Director: Debra Granik PG | 1h 49min | Drama | 29 June 2018 (UK) Rating: ★★★★☆ Winter’s Bone director Debra Granik returns to feature films with another look at American outsiders operating either on the fringes or outside the modern, interconnected world. Leave No Trace is, like Bone, a small-scale, atmospheric character-driven piece with a young woman at […]
Director: Stefano Sollima 15 | 2h 2min | Action, Crime, Drama | 29 June 2018 (UK) RATING: ★★★☆☆ Sicario 2 is certainly an unusual sequel to behold in a year filled with Marvel, Star Wars and Pixar follow-ups. But although Taylor Sheridan is back on writing duties here to expand on the 2015 predecessor, director Denis […]
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 […]