The Queen transforms the morbid spectacle surrounding Diana’s tragic death in the summer of 1997 into a trenchant, elegant, and compelling exposition into the nefarious role of the media as both creator (and self-generator) of news and manipulator of public sentiment. By juxtaposing Diana’s death within the framework of Tony Blair’s recent election to the […]
In the poor, working class coal mining town of Barnsley, an adolescent boy named Billy (David Bradley) sharing a cramped bed with his older brother Jud (Freddie Fletcher) is jarred awake by the sound of his Jud’s alarm clock. Prodding his soporific brother to rise, he seizes the opportunity to comfortably stretch out on the […]
The opening sequence of the film shows the titular heroine (in an exquisitely complex performance by Imelda Staunton), a cheerful and diligent middle-aged woman working as a maid for several affluent homes in postwar London, visiting an invalid man at a tenement complex in order to help with household chores, reposition his feet onto his […]
Secrets and Lies is a funny, compelling, and affectionate story of family and reconciliation. At the heart of the film is the profoundly simple idea: that human suffering is universal, and that the only comfort lies in our ability to share the pain with those we love. The story opens with Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), a […]
Naked is a harrowing portrait of self-destruction and victimization. It is the story of a drifter named Johnny (David Thewlis) who, fleeing from certain retaliation over a violent tryst, runs away from Manchester to find his ex-girlfriend, Louise (Lynda Steadman). Instead, he meets her roommate, Sophie (Katrin Cartlidge), an attractive, spaced-out, and unemployed woman, and […]
Filmed in 1968 at the height of the counterculture movement, as the escalation of the Cold War and a seemingly interminable Vietnam War pervaded the collective consciousness of the entire international community, Tony Richardson’s sumptuous, confrontational, and acutely rendered magnum opus, The Charge of the Light Brigade is a scathing indictment, not only of the […]