British Films

The industry is used to stories about UK cinema­going being in decline since the pandemic and younger viewers finding other ways to spend their leisure time. But a number of independent exhibitors counter that narrative based on their own experiences. While none downplay the struggles that arthouse cinema releases still face at the UK box office, many also highlight reasons for optimism.

“We are seeing a flourishing of young cinephile audiences,” says Jake Garriock, director of publicity at leading UK arthouse distributor/exhibitor Curzon.

David Sin, head of cinemas at the Independent Cinema Office (ICO), echoes that view. “A number of the highest-grossing films in that [arthouse] space in the post-­pandemic era have been films that are aimed at a younger audience than traditional arthouse cinema,” he says, citing titles such as Decision To Leave, Triangle Of Sadness and “a slew of British independent films like Scrapper and Saint Maud, aimed primarily at millennial and Gen Z audiences”.

Sin believes UK arthouse distributors have been slanting their slates toward younger spectators, realising older audiences were initially reluctant post-Covid to come back to cinemas. Over the last two years, independent releases including Anatomy Of A Fall, La Chimera, Aftersun and The Zone Of Interest have played well with a younger demographic. More mainstream indie titles such as Saltburn and Challengers have played extremely well in university towns.

“This younger audience has replaced the more traditional arthouse audience as the core supporter of independent and arthouse cinemas in the UK,” Sin suggests.

The UK's newest film and TV studios have fully opened.

The site in Shinfield, near Reading, boasts 18 sound stages, including two of the biggest in the country at 43,000 sq ft and has already attracted major feature films and TV series.

Situated alongside the M4 motorway, the site was given the go-ahead by planners in 2021 and has opened in stages over the past two years. It is part of a boom in British film and TV production, much of it working to meet the demands of global streaming services.

Its US owners say the studios should provide an economic boost with major films typically requiring productions crews of three to 500, including skilled technicians and craftspeople.

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Its first four sound stages were built to host the latest Disney+ Star Wars series, The Acolyte, which began screening on the streaming service earlier this month.

Bosses at Shinfield say they managed to open the first part of the site "just in time" for the production to move in.

The studios have already played host to the latest Ghostbusters film where one of the sound stages was turned into a New York street, complete with the iconic firehouse.

But it has also been providing a site for home grown productions.

Occupying one of the sound stages at the moment is a film of the Enid Blyton's The Magic Faraway Tree, which has been adapted by writer Simon Farnaby, who helped bring Paddington to the cinema and starring Clare Foy, who played the young Queen Elizabeth in Netflix's The Crown.

This time last summer, British cinemas were holding their collective breath, looking forward to the biggest box office weekend of the year. “Barbenheimer” came to the rescue, with the doubleheader of blockbusters jointly chalking up an initial total of £30m when released in mid-July.

This summer is a different story. There may be no lucrative Barbie or Oppenheimer at hand, but the holiday months at the cinema look potentially more interesting, if not downright weird – at least when it comes to Sasquatch Sunset, this weekend’s new, grunting, wordless tale of mythical Bigfoot folk, starring Jesse Eisenberg and Elvis Presley’s granddaughter Riley Keough.

As the impact of last year’s Hollywood talent strikes combines with streaming habits formed during Covid lockdowns, a window of opportunity has been created for film-makers’ wilder imaginings; for smaller-scale, arthouse fare. The franchise machine has slowed down and more original, risky features have slipped in. “I feel quite positive about the moment we’re in,” said Isabel Stevens, managing editor of the film magazine Sight and Sound, “although I do appreciate it’s still a very difficult for cinemas.”

So far, 2024 has seen a box office slump, but is being brightened by breakthrough independent productions that dodge commercial templates and are often in foreign languages (that aren’t Sasquatch). Prominent among them is Italian film La Chimera starring British actor Josh O’Connor. Out for over a month now, it is still drawing audiences and has taken over £700,000 at the British and Irish box office. Director Alice Rohrwacher’s film is pulling off a trick that big-budget title The Fall Guy could not manage: it has become a hit beyond its own ambitions. It must also be quite a surprise to Rohrwacher herself, since her last film, Happy as Lazzaro, brought in just a fifth of that.

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Phil Clapp, head of the UK Cinema Association, recently told Screen International that a “slightly thinner slate of the familiar franchises” had created an intriguing opportunity. “Stories that are something the audience hasn’t seen before, and makes them want to go back to the cinema, are vital for us,” he said.

In the relatively quiet period before the next action juggernauts trundle in, British cinephiles can celebrate the joys of a film such as Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days, the tale of a Tokyo toilet cleaner that has taken more than £1.3m in receipts. Or The Taste of Things, a quiet, kitchen-based French love story with Juliette Binoche, which took just under £700,000. And now there is the sentimental appeal of There’s Still Tomorrow, a black-and-white melo­drama that trounced Barbie at the box office in its native Italy and is distributed here by Vue Cinemas. It has taken more than £300,000.

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An early sign of a fresh thirst for originality came with the foreign-language hits of the latest award season, Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest, the latter made in German by British director Jonathan Glazer.

Charles Gant, box office editor at Screen International, points out that these apparently niche films are attracting a wide audience. Glazer’s film took £3.4m – a healthy figure in comparison with his 2013 cult horror film Under the Skin, despite that film’s A-list star, Scarlett Johansson. “When I watched the premiere of Zone of Interest in Cannes, I thought it was going to be a hard sell, but it went on to take quite a lot of money,” he said. “And you really have to see it in the cinema.”

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Still more heartening for Britain is the success of the homegrown films Aftersun, How to Have Sex, Rye Lane and All of Us Strangers, especially in the face of reports that UK independent production has been falling off a cliff. Only in February, Mike Goodridge, producer of the recent Palme d’Or-winning satire Triangle of Sadness, told BBC’s Today programme that it was “essentially on its knees”, with skilled actors and crews all working for big American companies.

Since then, the impact of enhanced tax reliefs for British productions has been felt. That is a measure that might encourage the kind of shake-up spelled out for the Oscar crowd in March by the award-winning screenwriter Cord Jefferson, when he pointedly called on film backers to think smaller. “Instead of making one $200m movie, try making 20 $10m movies. Or 50 $4m movies,” he urged.

As far as Gant can tell, there is no big shift in Hollywood as yet, where franchises still rule the roost. “But studios do now understand they need a mix. Just look at a surprise, smaller-scale hit like the romcom Anyone But You, which has cut through.”

cross-posted from: https://reddthat.com/post/20727695

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Europe’s largest privately owned cinema operator Vue International is moving into film distribution following a lack of supply after the Hollywood strikes.

The company set up a distribution arm in the UK last month with the goal of rolling out British, foreign and independent films on its own screens and those of rivals. Vue also announced during the Cannes Film Festival last month that it would team up with UK producers Andy Paterson and Annalise Davis, and virtual production company Dimension Studio, in a project to distribute films they produce. “Because of the Hollywood strikes, we are suffering this year with a number of movies, [as] we have a supply issue,” chief executive Tim Richards told the Financial Times. “As a consequence, we thought it was a very opportune time to start bringing our own movies in.”

He added that Vue would eventually expand its distribution business to continental Europe and that it was hiring for the business.

Moving into distribution is a relatively unusual move for a cinema chain, but the new arm will allow Vue to gain greater control of films after a period of limited supply.

British schoolchildren are taught that the last full-scale military engagement on their soil was the battle of Culloden in 1746. But this should change: on 18 June 1984 the battle of Orgreave, the subject of Daniel Gordon’s documentary, was the bitterest moment of the miners’ strike of 1984-85. It was the last stand for both sides, a brutal and chaotic confrontation of about 5,000 pickets determined not to let trucks get through to pick up coke for the Scunthorpe steelworks, versus about 6,000 police officers, some mounted, and armed with new shields and batons.

The police were effectively directed by Downing Street, which was determined that the force should not be overwhelmed by force of numbers as they had been during a comparable situation in the 1972 miners’ strike. A paramilitary strategy developed to suppress colonial disorder was deployed, laid out in a strategy document never shown to parliament.

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Gordon speaks to pickets who are still clearly traumatised by the events of Orgreave and by the strike in general. Perhaps therapy has never been on the cards for men of that generation and it could actually be that this film has been the first time that they have ever really spoken or thought deeply about the strike and its long term emotional effects. What emerges is the enduring bitterness that some felt towards those who returned to work; I flinched when one miner tells Gordon that his union-stalwart dad never forgave him for going back. When a reporter at the time asked whether he wouldn’t mind his son going to his funeral, he replies: “I’d rather go to his.”

Police officers recount being instructed by their seniors to fabricate witness statements. BBC reporter Nick Jones is interviewed, rueful about the way things went down. No Tories appear on camera, though, Sir John Redwood, who was director of No 10’s policy unit during the strike, is thanked in the credits.

This is a tough, valuable, forthright film about one of the nastiest, ugliest moments in postwar British history. Since 1985, the debate about fossil fuels has, of course, changed. But it is still staggering that a government planned wholesale mine closures with no thought for and no interest in what would happen to the communities affected.

• Strike: An Uncivil War screened at the Sheffield documentary festival on 16 June, and is in UK and Irish cinemas from 21 June.

The portrayal of a former university official in Steve Coogan’s film about the discovery of the remains of Richard III is defamatory, a high court judge has ruled.

Richard Taylor, a former deputy registrar at the University of Leicester, is suing Coogan, the production company Baby Cow and the distributors Pathe.

He claims the 2022 movie The Lost King shows his character, played by Lee Ingleby, behaving in an “abominable way” towards the amateur historian Philippa Langley, played by Sally Hawkins, who spearheaded the dig.

Taylor claims the film shows him taking credit for himself and the university that was rightfully Langley’s for the 2012 discovery of Richard III’s remains in a Leicester car park more than 500 years after the king’s death.

The defendants denied that the film portrayed such a “saint and sinner” narrative but, in a judgment published on Friday, Judge Lewis said its portrayal of the former university employee was defamatory.

Hollywood bigwigs have been called on to look north to stage their latest box office hits after the UK film industry was dealt another major blow recently as £750m plans for a new film studio in Buckinghamshire were quashed.

Already home to Pinewood and Shepperton studios, planners at Buckinghamshire Council rejected proposals for a 36-hectare production site despite being backed by the likes of Avatar director James Cameron and actor and filmmaker Andy Serkis.

In the aftermath of the decision West Yorkshire Mayor Tracy Brabin took to X (formerly Twitter) to call on film supremos to consider investing in Yorkshire instead of always defaulting to the South East.

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But while it appears the South might be falling out of love with Hollywood, the North is poised and ready to capitalise.

Last December work started on a film studio on the site of the former Littlewoods pools business in Liverpool, which when finished will create 40,000 sq ft of production space.

The recently approved Crown Works Studios in Sunderland, part-funded by the production company behind The Kardashians, will pave the way to create thousands of jobs across the north of England.

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The vast majority of the UK’s large-scale film studios – categorised by the British Film Commission as having at least one stage over 15,000 sq ft – are clustered around London, with production facilities in the south outnumbering the rest of the country 25 to five.

The financial implications of this are huge.

Every 100,000 sq ft of stage space contributes between £60m and £80m to the surrounding economy, according to a 2024 study commissioned by Hounslow Borough Council.

The sector has already added £2bn to West Yorkshire’s economy alone, and employs 50,000 local people.

Is Britain leading the way in protecting young people and children from the potential traumas of working on a film set, or has it all gone far too far? Two of the most prominent European stars attending the Cannes film festival, both with high-profile premieres, have very different views.

Franz Rogowski, the acclaimed German actor who plays a key role in Bird, British director Andrea Arnold’s contender for the top Palme d’Or prize, said this weekend that the proliferation of chaperones and intimacy coordinators that had been required on the shoot on location in Kent qualified as well-intended “madness”.

Speaking after the premiere of the hard-hitting drama on Friday night, the 38-year-old actor said the high number of handlers employed to ensure the wellbeing of all the underage and child actors in the film had felt excessive to him.

“It feels a bit off-balance,” said Rogowski, who went on to point out that children already have many other damaging freedoms online where they are more exposed to danger and not protected.

But Judith Godrèche, the French actor and director who has shaken up the Croisette in the opening days of the festival with her personal crusade against abuse in the French film industry, said she believed that Britain, and in particular the BBC, was at the forefront of improvements in the way young people and children employed in film-making are looked after. She has made her own recent accusations that she was abused while working as an underage actor, allegations that are denied.

Speaking at a public event staged above the famous red carpet of the Palais du Festival, Godrèche said: “It has been interesting to compare the reactions to #MeToo in the United States and in the UK. The BBC, I believe, have very serious and rigid rules protecting minors on set.” The French government and members of the National Assembly need to take note, she added: “They cannot continue to turn a blind eye to this.

A forgotten film canister discovered in a South Yorkshire loft has been found to contain an original 35mm copy of Ken Loach's 1969 film Kes.

It is thought to be one of only two original copies still in existence, the other held by British Film Institute.

Rob Younger, who will screen the movie at his Barnsley Parkway Cinema next month, said the film was in "amazingly good condition for its age".

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Based on Barnsley author Barry Hines' novel A Kestrel for a Knave, the film won two Bafta awards and was nominated for a further three.

Mr Younger said: "To find something that's over 50 years old and the print hasn't run in most of that time, it's fantastic.

"And the fact it's a Barnsley-based film, it's Kes, everyone in Barnsley loves Kes."

Contained on seven separate reels of film the recently discovered version is thought to have been put into storage after being was shown on the big screen in 1970.

The reels had sat undiscovered for decades before being passed to Ronnie Steele from a local fan group - the Kes Group.

Mr Steele said he then approached Mr Younger to ask about showing it in the town.

"[The film] made me feel proud, that not only did I belong to Barnsley, but I knew the author of the book, Mr Barry Hines. He taught me in secondary school," Mr Steele said.

"[It is] a snapshot of Barnsley as it really was at that time. People were really proud that the characters were ordinary, working-class people, but at the same time, they were clever, smart, witty."

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/11277564

A Frenchman who also worked in the United Kingdom and the United States, Le Prince's motion-picture experiments culminated in 1888 in Leeds, England. In October of that year, he filmed moving-picture sequences of family members in Roundhay Garden and his son playing the accordion, using his single-lens camera and Eastman's paper negative film. At some point in the following eighteen months he also made a film of Leeds Bridge. This work may have been slightly in advance of the inventions of contemporaneous moving-picture pioneers, such as the British inventors William Friese-Greene and Wordsworth Donisthorpe, and was years in advance of that of Auguste and Louis Lumière and William Kennedy Dickson (who did the moving image work for Thomas Edison).

Wikipedia

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/11262504

Matt Smith and Morfydd Clark's folk horror Starve Acre has confirmed its UK release date.

The film, which premiered at last year's BFI London Film Festival to critical acclaim, will arrive in cinemas in the UK and Ireland on September 6.

Set in rural England in the 1970s, Starve Acre stars Smith and Clark as Richard and Juliette, respectively. Their idyllic family life is turned upside down when their young son starts acting out of character.

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Discussing the film in a press statement, director Daniel Kokotajlo (Apostasy) said he’s a "sucker" for English folk tales like Starve Acre, which are able to "put a spell" on viewers with their "attitudes and strange sensibilities".

The filmmaker continued: "It's not just horror; it ends up in a weird, off-kilter place. It can be uncomfortably quiet and sensitive, then suddenly it slaps you in your face with its oddballness. That was the aim of this film: to create a mood of nervousness.

"Making an audience nervous results in a whole range of reactions: tears, screams or giggles. It's my idea of cathartic fun.

"Starve Acre also taps into a timeless fear that feels more relevant than ever: the idea that returning home, to nature, and regressing into childhood, is a big mistake.

"The film removes the nostalgic, rose-tinted glasses and shows us that there are dark things, long-buried superstitions, awaiting our return."

cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/movies/t/993157

Mike Leigh, the veteran director of “Vera Drake,” “Another Year” and “Happy-Go-Lucky,” will be honored at Malta’s Mediterrane Film Festival with its Career Achievement Golden Bee Award.

Leigh will also host a masterclass at the festival, the second edition of which is taking place June 22 to 30 in Malta’s capital city of Valletta. The director, who has earned seven Oscar nominations and won the Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or for 1993’s “Naked,” will be in conversation with Adrian Wootton, chief executive of Film London and the British Film Commission.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/10934427

EXCLUSIVE: The new 28 Years Later trilogy from director Danny Boyle and Sony Pictures is gaining momentum, and some serious star power. Sources tell Deadline that Jodie Comer, Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Ralph Fiennes have boarded the first pic, a sequel to the original 28 Days Later.

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Deadline recently broke the news that the studio has already tapped Candyman director Nia DaCosta to helm the second part of the trilogy, and that the plan is to shoot both films back to back. As for the three newest cast members, the studio is clearly showing it means business, adding star power instead of going the lesser-known-actor route like in previous installments

Avatar and Titanic director James Cameron has backed proposals for a new film studio.

In a letter to Buckinghamshire Council the Oscar winner told the authority he was impressed by the plans for Marlow Film Studios, which propose that the premises be built on the site of a former quarry.

Mr Cameron said the studio could be a base for his company Lightstorm3D and potentially host a training centre for creatives working with 3D technology.

In October councillors deferred their decision on the studio to 2024, despite the site being recommended for refusal by planning officers.

The committee said it wanted more time to further consider greenbelt and highways issues linked to the A404.

When you consider the pantheon of comedies with exclamation marks in the title, the quality quotient runs from the sublime Safety Last! and — all hail the king — Airplane! to the piss-poor Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes! and Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot. Curtis Vowell’s Seize Them! sits somewhere in the middle of the pack, a sweary, enjoyable medieval romp that hits and misses in equal measure but gets by on appealing actors and its unapologetically puerile spirit.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/10503609

Alex Garland is expected to write the scripts for all three of the 28 Years Later movies, but apparently didn’t want to direct them. Danny Boyle will only be directing the first one. For the second film, possibly titled 28 Years Later Part 2, he’ll be passing the helm over to Candyman and The Marvels director Nia DaCosta. Production on DaCosta’s sequel will begin immediately after Boyle wraps filming on his. They wanted to have the sequel director signed on before filming on the first movie begins, as they want to “make sure each director is on the same page in regard to the story while also having time to bring their own vision to life.”

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While doing the press rounds for Oppenheimer last year, Murphy told Collider, “I was talking to Danny Boyle recently, and I said, ‘Danny, we shot the movie at the end of 2000.’ So I think we’re definitely approaching the 28 Years Later. But like I’ve always said, I’m up for it. I’d love to do it. If Alex [Garland] thinks there’s a script in it and Danny wants to do it, I’d love to do it.“ Despite the fact that Murphy is willing to reprise the role of Jim and is on board 28 Years Later as an executive producer, we still haven’t heard confirmation that he’ll actually be in the movie. While talking to Josh Horowitz on the Happy Sad Confused podcast a couple months ago, Murphy said (with thanks to Coming Soon for the transcription), “It’s for (Danny Boyle and Alex Garland) to speak about, I suppose, but I think it’s been brewing for a while. The first movie was so important for me, as an actor. I love working with those guys. Alex has an idea. And Danny directing is just huge. Watch this space.”

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While we wait to hear for sure if Cillian Murphy is or isn’t in the movie, other casting rumors have been floating around. According to industry scooper Daniel Richtman, Jodie Comer (Killing Eve) and Charlie Hunnam (Sons of Anarchy) are in talks to play the lead roles. Details on the characters they might be playing are, of course, being kept under wraps.

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There was a bidding war over the distribution rights to the 28 Years Later trilogy, with Warner Bros. and Sony emerging as the final competitors – and Sony taking the win in the end. According to The Hollywood Reporter, “Each movie will have a budget in the $60 million range but it’s unclear how goalposts or compensation may have changed during the high-stakes negotiations. A theatrical release was of great import to the filmmakers.” Sony had an edge in this race due to the fact that it’s headed up by Tom Rothman, who used to be at Fox and worked with Boyle on eight different movies there. Release dates have not yet been announced.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/10284037

Shaun Of The Dead will return to cinemas later this year to mark the 20th anniversary of the iconic British comedy.

The iconic comedy – which starred Simon Pegg and Nick Frost as two no-hopers navigating a zombie apocalypse in Britain – arrived in cinemas 20 years ago today (April 9).

Now, it’s been confirmed that Universal will treat audiences to another slice of fried gold when the film returns to cinemas at an unconfirmed date later this week.

Hello, I'm looking to purchase this film. Unfortunately, it looks to be unobtainium. Does anyone know where one may get a copy?

The BBFC has carried out its first major audience research for five years.

Viewers now want "a more cautious approach" to sex scenes that are on the border of a 12/12A and a 15, it said.

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The research also indicated that audiences were happy for classification to be more lenient towards some sex references at the border of 15 and 18, especially in comic contexts

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The organisation also found that people are now more concerned about depictions of violence on screen.

It said that in future, a higher rating may be required for violence across all age ratings.

When it comes to drugs, the research suggested that audiences have become more relaxed about depictions of cannabis use and solvent misuse than before.

The BBFC said it would therefore take a less restrictive approach to such content.

Conversely, the survey suggested parents are concerned about the normalisation of bad language, especially terms with sexual or misogynistic connotations. Such language may now also require a higher age rating.

Two new features show a Britain in the throes of social fissures that feel both uncanny and emblematic of existential threat. There’s The Kitchen, directed by Kibwe Tavares and Daniel Kaluuya, which takes gentrification to its logical conclusion as London’s final social housing estate struggles to survive. And The End We Start From, directed by Mahalia Belo, showing a single mother’s quest to raise her child while the nation is overcome by biblical flooding, uneasily reminding audiences of Britain’s dilapidated and dangerous infrastructure. But the modern cinematic benchmark for this apocalyptic turn remains Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006).

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As the years have passed since Children of Men’s release in 2006, it has only felt more real. Cuarón said that he simply looked at the visible trends in Britain at the beginning of the 21st century and predicted where they would go. While it hardly disturbed the box office upon release, almost 20 years later, Children of Men is widely cited as one of the best films of the Noughties. With its themes of ecological collapse and pandemic disease, the film became a cultural touchpoint during the Covid lockdowns, as scores of online commentaries declared: “It’s like living in Children of Men.” Were they wrong?

“The truth was,” writes Danny Dorling in Shattered Nation: Inequality and the Geography of a Failing State (2022), “the state was falling apart, with rising resentment in the ‘peripheral regions and nations’, a fall in Conservative support in the Home Counties, a tacit acceptance of huge levels of inequality as normal, and a general floundering about in the dark as one crisis morphed into the next.” Dorling, a geographer, applies his deceptively simple (but revealing) mode of analysis to Britain’s national decline, drawing on empirical studies to argue that the nation “shatters” when it fails to realise its full, messy existence. For Dorling, Britain’s high point of equality was 1973, and the country has been in free-fall ever since.

Speaking to Dorling, you sense his hope that things have to get better despite the observable reality around us. “I actually think it’s quite likely, because, historically, when a state in Europe does this badly and gets to this point, normally things do turn around. Unfortunately, it’s very slowly, so it could take 20 or 30 years, so it could feel quite bad for some time to come.

The Zone of Interest has won the best international film Oscar at the Academy Awards, which are currently taking place in Los Angeles.

An adaptation of Martin Amis’ novel of the same title, and directed by British film-maker Jonathan Glazer, The Zone of Interest has largely German and Polish dialogue and therefore qualified for the award. It was the third British film to be nominated in the category (following the predominantly Welsh-language films Hedd Wyn in 1993 and Solomon & Gaenor in 2000), and the first to win.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/8721810

Yet the Wonka experience may yet enjoy its moment in the cinematic sun. A new movie from Kaledonia Pictures is being rushed into production to capitalise on the global infamy enjoyed by the story.

The horror film will focus on The Unknown, a character devised – possibly not by a human – for the Glasgow show. Actor Paul Connell, who played Wonka in the experience, said the script was “15 pages of AI-generated gibberish,” and introduced the “Unknown [who] is an evil chocolate maker who lives in the walls.”

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The Kaledonia movie follows an illustrator and his wife who are haunted by the death of their son, Charlie. They attempt to escape their grief in the Scottish Highlands where “an unknowable evil awaits them”.

Warner Bros, which owns the film rights to Roald Dahl’s character – but not to The Unknown – has yet to comment.

Recent horror versions of children’s classics such as Winnie-the-Pooh have not met with positive notices.