The Deep Blue Sea (2011)
★★★★☆
With a career redefining performance from Rachel Weisz, Terence Davies’ The Deep Blue Sea is a tour de force of classic filmmaking and nostalgia.
★★★★☆
With a career redefining performance from Rachel Weisz, Terence Davies’ The Deep Blue Sea is a tour de force of classic filmmaking and nostalgia.
★★★☆☆
“Heathcliff, it’s me, Cathy come home,” Andrea Arnold drops the high drama of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights in return for an opulence of visual treats.
★★★★☆
A Nottingham-set gay love story, Andrew Haigh’s Weekend is love in the real lane – tender, confusing and painful. It’s funny, but it ain’t no hom-com.
★★★★★
With Tilda Swinton’s soul-splintering performance as the mother of a high-school psychopath, Lynne Ramsay’s We Need To Talk About Kevin is killing me. Softly.
★★★★☆
David Mackenzie’s Perfect Sense is a twist on both thriller and love story as a couple find each other while the world around them crumbles, sense by sense.
★★☆☆☆
With its noble African spirit and picturesque, violent savannah, Justin Chadwick’s The First Grader may be historical tourism, but it’s cine-colonialism with a good heart.
★★★☆☆
Based on JR Ackerley’s doggy romance and hand-drawn and painted by Paul and Sandra Feininger, My Dog Tulip is a labour of love twice over.
★★★☆☆
Based on the novel by Jane Rogers, Elizabeth Mitchell and Brek Taylor’s debut Island throws hateful young Nikki into an enchanted isle of folklore and revenge.
★★★☆☆
Based on Kazuo Ishiguro’s retro-fiction novel, Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go basks in a very British nowhereland of clones, existential moans and unrequited love.
★★★★☆
From bumbling hesitancy to majestic articulacy, Tom Hooper’s The King’s Speech exuberantly charts the rise of the man who would be king.
★★★★☆
A symbiosis of fixed landscapes and illuminating narration, Patrick Keiller’s Robinson In Ruins is a bracing journey through the Oxfordshire countryside.
★★★☆☆
A four seasons symphony of age-worn contentment and unhappy boozers, Mike Leigh’s Another Year conquers and divides into haves and have-nots.
★★★☆☆
Roving the labyrinthine world of artist Anselm Kiefer, there’s more to Sophie Fiennes’ documentary Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow than just watching paint dry.
★★★☆☆
Biting into the forbidden apple of incest, Andrew Kötting’s Ivul charts the fall of civilisation in a Russian émigré family. Or is he barking up the wrong tree?