Tag Archives: Feature

Curzon Journal, Features, Film

Festival Report: Glasgow 2023

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In October 2022, the British film world was rocked by news that the Centre for the Moving Image – a registered charity comprising Edinburgh International Film Festival, the Edinburgh Filmhouse cinema and the Belmont Filmhouse in Aberdeen – was suddenly going into administration, with immediate closure of its various operations. At the time of writing, a shorter reincarnation of the film festival for 2023 has just been announced for August, through the support of the month-long Edinburgh International Festival, but the fate of the two major Scottish exhibition hubs is still in question.

That cloud looming in the east must surely have affected the organisation of Scotland’s other big film festival over in the west to some extent. That said, it’s hard to gauge just how much of this year’s Glasgow Film Festival programming may have been directly influenced by increased desire to showcase up-and-coming independent talent – whose films don’t necessarily have wider distribution lined up as of yet – in light of the abrupt closure of another crucial launching pad. Until an acquisition announcement mere days before the festival started, this was the status for director Adura Onashile’s opening-night film Girl, fresh out of Sundance for its UK premiere, which also happens to be a Glasgow-shot production…

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BFI, Features, Film

Borderlines Film Festival: 10 to watch

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Returning to 22 venues across Herefordshire, Shropshire, Malvern and the Welsh Marches, this year’s Borderlines Film Festivalpresents over 250 screenings of 65 feature films and events between 3 and 19 March: a mix of recently released gems, previews of upcoming titles and retrospective gems, including several silent films.

Here are 10 to look out for during the remainder of this year’s festival…

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BFI, Features, Film

10 to see at Glasgow Film Festival 2023

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Back for its 19th edition, the 2023 Glasgow Film Festival– taking place from 1 to 12 March – will host 70 UK premieres, six world premieres, 16 European or international premieres, and six Scottish premieres at Glasgow Film Theatre, the city’s giant Cineworld and other venues across the city.

The festival opens and closes with the UK premieres of two debut features that just launched to considerable acclaim at Sundance. The opening night gala is dedicated to Girl, Adura Onashile’s Glasgow-shot story about a mother-daughter bond becoming fraught in a new environment, influenced by the matriarch’s struggle with a legacy of violence. Onashile recently made waves with BAFTA-nominated short Expensive Shit (2020).

Closing the festival is action-comedy Polite Society, directed by We Are Lady Parts creator Nida Manzoor. In it, British Pakistani schoolgirl Ria (Priya Kansara) dreams of a career as a stuntwoman, while also being suspicious of her big sister’s abrupt abandoning of her dreams to marry someone she barely knows. Something doesn’t add up… but is kidnapping your sister on her wedding day the right move?

Minus the two bookending films, here are 10 further festival highlights on our radar. As always, this isn’t an exhaustive selection and there’s plenty of films to discover in the festival’s full programme…

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Features, Film, Little White Lies

Why ‘Decision to Leave’ deserves the Best Costume Design Oscar

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hen it comes to costume design prizes and the Academy Awards, the choice will almost always be between history or fantasy. The Oscar nominations generally favour period pieces, or the odd ‘prestige’ genre movie that’s also found love in other categories – Mad Max: Fury Road or Black Panther, for example.

On very rare occasions where non-fantastical features set in the present enter Oscar conversations for costuming, it’s usually for films where contemporary fashion is explicitly prominent in the story, such as The Devil Wears Prada. Luca Guadagnino’s I Am Love, set just a few years before its 2011 nomination, also falls under this umbrella, in following very wealthy characters who can afford runway fashion on the regular.

With this in mind, there’s a far less showy contemporary contender that was overlooked with this year’s nominees, but is no less crucial in reflecting the characters and narrative of the respective film. The tale of a married Busan-based detective getting too close to a suspect under his surveillance, Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave most immediately stands out in costuming terms with the sumptuous outfits worn by Song Seo-rae (Tang Wei), the wife of a murdered man, who’s being interrogated by inspector Jang Hae-joon (Park Hae-il)…

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Curzon Journal, Features, Film

Estate Agency: The Authorised Music Biopic Debate

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Directed by Kasi Lemmons (Eve’s Bayou [1997], Harriet [2019]) and written by Anthony McCarten (Bohemian Rhapsody [2018]), I Wanna Dance with Somebody (2022) follows the life of late American pop icon Whitney Houston, played by Naomi Ackie. Among the film’s executive producers is Clive Davis, the record producer who discovered Houston, while close involvement from Houston’s estate has reportedly come through representative Pat Houston, Whitney’s sister-in-law and long-time intermediary.

Much like print tome biographies, an authorised music biopic presents a veneer of authenticity. Consultation with living artists, or their family members and close confidantes if they have passed, would seem to ensure a certain degree of verisimilitude, rather than solely depending on unsubstantiated hearsay. When it comes to films, it’s also a considerable benefit to have access to the artists’ actual recordings (the 2020 David Bowie biopic Stardust suffered in this regard). Clive Davis, speaking to Variety about the Houston movie, said, ‘For me, it was important for the film to answer all questions honestly, authentically, about who Whitney was. Whether it was her sexuality, whether it was her addiction, whether it was how she and I worked together… We wanted to get it right. We wanted to get the music right, above all.’

And yet, despite such seemingly honourable intentions, authorised biopics still manage to inspire heated debate among both film and music critics, as well as the fanbases of the respective artists; the more famous and beloved the artist, the more passionate the debate. The genre can so often be defined by the things left out of a story, as opposed to the effective adaptation of what’s kept in…

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BFI, Features, Film

Where to begin with James Cameron

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It may seem silly to construct a guide to exploring a filmmaker who directed two of the three highest-grossing movies ever made, and also created one of the most successful science-fiction media franchises of the last 40 years. When it comes to James Cameron, it seems much of the globe has already begun. Yet since his real-life-disaster-inspired romantic melodrama Titanic conquered the world a quarter of a century ago, his directing jobs have been rare. An 18-year-old today would have been five when the last Cameron film – 2009’s alien planet war-epic Avatar – came out…

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Features, Film, i-D

7 romantic horrors to watch after ‘Bones and All’

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Reuniting Call Me by Your Name pair Timothée Chalamet and director Luca Guadagnino, Bones and All is many things. It’s a horror movie. (It’s more specifically a cannibal horror movie.) It’s a road movie. It’s a coming-of-age tale. But perhaps most crucially, it’s an empathetic portrait of romance rooted in unsavoury origins.

Bones and All sees young Maren (Taylor Russell) embark on an American odyssey to track down her roots, after her latest cannibalistic outburst sees her finally abandoned by her father (André Holland) and left to fend for herself. Encountering other ‘eaters’ like herself, she forms a connection with drifter Lee (Timothée Chalamet), and the two fall in love while navigating their need for human flesh.

Your typical love story, then. If Bones and All has you salivating for more romances wrapped in bloodlust, here are seven horror gems (in chronological order) that have love or infatuation at their centre. Given the genre involved, it should be no surprise that few of these films end on a happy note. And since they are romances in horror movies, their inclusions here don’t necessarily reflect healthy relationships or advice to follow. i-D accepts no responsibility if you watch these films and then attempt to reanimate your deceased partner in a suspicious laboratory…

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Features, Film, i-D

The 10 weirdest, most powerful arthouse movies of 2022

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The 66th London Film Festival is in full swing this October, presenting over 160 new features and shorts, VR works and previews of prestige TV on the big screen – with a few films also available nationwide on streaming service BFI Player after the festival’s close.

There are plentiful red carpet ceremonies, career talks with legends and screaming Timothée Chalamet fans. But what of the films themselves? In alphabetical order, here are ten of the best features from this year’s LFF…

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BFI, Features, Film

10 great films with DIY special effects

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Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney’s Strawberry Mansion is set in the near-distant future, where a surveillance state conducts audits of people’s dreams in order to collect taxes on the populace’s unconscious existence. One government agent (Audley himself) heads to a remote farmhouse to audit an eccentric elderly artist’s lifetime of dreaming. Made on a scant budget, it’s an independent film heavily reliant on a DIY aesthetic: a virtual reality helmet resembles a bin lid, VHS tape recurs throughout, and its masks and stop-motion animation have an appealingly crude quality to them.

Given the limited budgets usually involved, independent genre fare and experimental cinema are often host to creative effects, both practical and digital. You can still get professional makeup artists and special effects wizards to help your dream project reach fruition, but when it comes to achieving that key visual component lingering in the back of your mind, there’s something to be said for giving it a go on your own: be it depicting a journey to outer space or turning yourself into a metallic monstrosity.

To mark the UK release of Strawberry Mansion, here are 10 key films that rely on what we’ll broadly label ‘DIY effects’. With one notable exception, this list sticks to films with no major-studio-backing during initial production, and, where budget information is available, nothing with a reported production budget exceeding $1 million…

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BFI, Features, Film

10 great British films of 2002

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Looking back on a nation’s output for any artform 20 years removed, there’s a risk of rose-tinted glasses misrepresenting the quality or wider health of the medium at the time. But while certain contemporary commercial successes should perhaps remain left in the past (Ali G Indahouse and The Guru, to name two), a not insignificant portion of the British films of 2002 have endured with audiences in the decades since.

In terms of acting talent, 2002 saw the release of breakthrough films for actors who are still major names 20 years later, including Chiwetel Ejiofor, Keira Knightley, Naomie Harris, Sean Harris, Benedict Wong, Nicholas Hoult and Martin Compston. Regarding early career directors, Lynne Ramsay proved Ratcatcher (1999) was no fluke with her second feature, Morvern Callar. Another key Scottish filmmaker of the last few decades, David Mackenzie (Young Adam, Starred Up, Hell or High Water), also had his debut feature as director – the thriller The Last Great Wilderness – premiere this year. And actor-director Peter Mullan won the Golden Lion prize at Venice for his second feature, The Magdalene Sisters, which explores three teenage girls’ experiences of Ireland’s infamous ‘Magdalene laundries’. 2002 also saw premieres of key films in the careers of Ken Loach, Danny Boyle, Stephen Frears and Michael Winterbottom.

While not all of the same quality as Boyle’s 28 Days Later…, 2002 was a particularly interesting year for British genre cinema. Neil Marshall’s ambitious debut feature Dog Soldiers transplanted the formula of James Cameron’s Aliens (1986) to the werewolf movie; Jamie Bell followed up Billy Elliott (2000) with First World War supernatural tale Deathwatch; westerns influenced Shane Meadows’ Once upon a Time in the Midlands; and ouija board horror Long Time Dead made solid earnings worldwide. The American-set British thriller My Little Eye is very dated in some ways, yet its story of an online reality show experiment with a deadly twist makes it a crucial text for how internet-rooted horror would later develop.

With a new restoration of Dog Soldiers surfacing on physical media, here – in the order they premiered – are 10 of the best films made in Britain that fertile year…

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