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Inevitably it’s going to be compared to Mark Herman’s Brassed Off, the British comedy-drama about colliery bands, but this French contribution to what could become a “genre” if there’s any more of them, has a beating emotional pulse all of its own.

To be sure it’s feel-good and sentimental but none the worse for any of that. Emmanuel Courcol on his third directorial outing after Ceasefire (Cessez-le-feu) in 2016 and The Big Hit (Un triomphe) in 2020 treads the tightrope between tearjerker, social upheaval, and family dynamics with skilful aplomb.

The focus here is on the relationship between two brothers - Thibaut (Benjamin Lavernhe) and Jimmy (Pierre Lottin) who share a love of music. At the start of the film they are unaware of each other’s existence because they have grown up separately having been adopted by different families.

They seem to be worlds apart. Thibaut is a rather solitary internationally renowned.

Scottish star Ewan McGregor will receive this year’s Honorary Dragon Award, a lifetime achievement honor, at Sweden’s Göteborg Film Festival.

McGregor will attend the Göteborg event, which runs from Jan. 26 to Feb. 4, and will present the Nordic premiere screening of his latest feature, Mother, Couch. McGregor stars alongside Rhys Ifans and Lara Flynn Boyle as three siblings bought together when their eccentric mother, played by Ellen Burstyn, sits herself down on a couch in a vintage furniture store and refuses to get up. Directed by Swedish filmmaker Niclas Larsson, Mother, Couch is adapted from Swedish author Jerker Virdborg’s novel Mamma i soffa. The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last year.

McGregor will receive his Dragon Award following a screening of his 1996 breakthrough Trainspotting, after which he will participate in an onstage conversation.

“Ewan McGregor is an androgynous symbol of the Cool Britannia era, a...

Aisling Bea And Matthew Lewis Join Romesh Ranganathan Comedy ‘Avoidance’

Aisling Bea and Matthew Lewis are among the cast who have joined the upcoming season of Romesh Ranganathan’s BBC comedy Avoidance. Filming started this week, and the returning cast includes Jessica Knappett (Drifters), Kieran Logendra, Mandeep Dhillon (Afterlife), Lisa McGrillis (Mum), and Bruce Mackinnon (The Catherine Tate Show). Also joining the show are Louise Ford (The Windsors), Olive Tennant (Belfast), Alex Ranganathan, Jessica Ransom (Horrible Histories), Paula Wilcox (Upstart Crow), Philip Jackson (Brassed Off), Ed Kear (Here We Go), Colin Hoult (Murder in Successville), Michael Spicer (The Room Next Door) and Brona C Titley (The Outlaws). “I’m delighted to be back on set with this amazing cast, so much so it almost makes up for the crushing agony of my recent spandex-filled wardrobe fitting,” said Ranganathan.

Afua Hirsch And Peter Frankopan To Lead History Podcast

Afua Hirsch and...

The actor on playing trouser billiards with Hugh Grant, bonding with the flugelhorn in Brassed Off, and the magic of working with Peter O’Toole

Hello Tara! Loved you in Hear My Song and Frenchmen’s Creek. Were there anything resembling intimacy coordinators for nude scenes back in the 90s? repoman71

No is the short answer. Everyone was very “respectful”. That word was used a lot: we’ll all be very “respectful”. I used to slightly dread those days on set. People poised with towels and dressing gowns is what I remember the most.

Has your attitude to nudity changed? Splutterer

I think it probably has. I’m older, so people don’t ask me to take my clothes off any more. I would look at some of the scripts I read in my 20s in terms of how much nudity there was, and what would be called for. I was...

Got something you’d like to ask the flugelhorn-tooting forensic scientist and all-round star of stage and screen? Send it our way and we’ll put it to her

You might think of her as forensic scientist Eve Lockhart from BBC series Waking the Dead, or as Queen Selyse Baratheon in Game of Thrones, but Tara Fitzgerald is a long-termer when it comes to film. Her first big role was in Peter Chelsom’s 1991 nightclub comedy Hear My Song, after which she went on to a couple of roles opposite Hugh Grant: Sirens in 1994 and The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain in 1995. In between the two she was in A Man of No Importance with Albert Finney. Then came the flugelhorn-tooting Brassed Off, and the Czech war film Dark Blue World. More recently she played Miriam in Ridley Scott’s biblical epic Exodus: Gods and Kings.

British actor Stephen Tompkinson, best known for his roles in Ballykissangel and Dci Banks, has been charged with grievous bodily harm (GBH) and will appear to stand trial in an English crown court.

Tompkinson has been accused of inflicting harm on another man, beating him and leaving him with a double skull fracture during an altercation that took place in May 2021, The Times reports. The actor appeared in North Tyneside magistrates’ court earlier this month where he denied the charge against him, and the case has now been referred to the higher crown court, where he will be represented by a barrister next month.

Tompkinson has been one of the UK’s most successful TV actors for decades, after getting his big break in early 1990s comedy Drop the Dead Donkey, winning a British Comedy Award for best TV actor in 1994.

He went on to appear in the film Brassed Off,...

Jane Alsobrook, a marketing and publicity specialist who coordinated the U.S. campaigns for numerous successful independent and foreign films in the 1970s and 1980s, has died. She was 78.

It was revealed today that Alsobrook died December 13 at her home in Sedona, Az on after a lengthy battle with breast cancer.

While doing post-graduate work at USC in the early 1970s, Alsobrook joined Gary Essert and Gary Abrahams to help launch the Los Angeles Film Exposition, aka Filmex, the city’s first film festival.

She then joined Roger Corman’s New World Pictures to handle marketing and publicity, notably for Fellini’s Amarcord, which won the Foreign Language Film Oscar in 1975. The following year she shifted gears to become national publicity director for ABC Records, and in the late ’70s she helped engineer the launch of Rock ‘n’ Roll High School, starring The Ramones, which Corman released.

In the early 1980s,...

Joan Washington, a veteran dialect and voice coach and the wife of Oscar nominee Richard E. Grant, died Wednesday. Grant posted the news on social media Friday morning but did not provide details.

“Only You Joan – Love of my Life & Giver of Life to our daughter Olivia,” Grant wrote in a tweet that includes a video of the couple dancing and smiling (see it below). “Our hearts are broken with the loss of your life last night. 35 years married and 38 together. To be truly known and seen by you is your immeasurable gift. Do not forget us, sweet Monkee-mine.”

Washington began her career working as a dialect coach on Barbra Streisand’s 1983 movie Yentl. She had worked steadily in film and TV since then, contribution voice and/or dialect instruction on such titles as The Dressmaker, Highlander, Brassed Off, 101 Dalmatians and its sequel, Elizabeth, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou,...

‘Freaky’, ‘French Exit’ also in cinemas.

Studiocanal’s Another Round will finally make its UK-Ireland bow this weekend, as the box office looks to continue its strong performance since cinemas reopened in the territory.

Thomas Vinterberg’s drinking comedy-drama will play in 131 locations from today (July 2). It was originally scheduled for release on November 27, before being put on hold due to the second lockdown. Its date was set for June 25 in March, before being moved back a week to its final spot.

Another Round was selected for the Cannes 2020 label of titles that would have played at last year’s...

Exclusive: Film4 is partnering with film distributor Park Circus on a campaign to entice Brits back to the cinema. Under the deal, the duo will offer UK cinemas a season of six classic features from the Film4 library, including Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting and Jonathan Glazer’s Sexy Beast.

The films will initially screen in Picturehouse, Everyman, Odeon, Vue, and Showcase theaters across the country from the start of July, with other venues joining the initiative in the coming weeks. It follows cinemas reopening in the UK on May 17 after the most recent coronavirus lockdown.

The four other films in the Film4 season are Mark Herman’s Brassed Off, Stephen Frears’ rom-com My Beautiful Launderette, Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero, and Bhaji on the Beach, from director Gurinder Chadha.

Film4’s parent Channel 4 will support the season with an advertising campaign across its TV channels, as well as online.

There was a time, in the 1990s and early 2000s, in which Miramax and Fox Searchlight pumped out feel-good, British comedy-dramas on a yearly basis. Films like The Full Monty, Brassed Off, and Billy Elliott had the format down to a science. These days are not over; the production companies have changed, but 2019’s Military Wives and Fisherman’s Friends had the same combination of crowd-pleasing warmth, kitchen-sink drama, and ultimate triumph––not to mention real-life source material. The documentary Alien On Stage checks almost every one of those boxes, so it is likely only a matter of time before the doc earns a fictional retelling.

Mind you, that is not a criticism. Alien On Stage, which is screening at the 2021 South by Southwest Festival, is a modest pleasure. Directed by Lucy Harvey, it is the rather delightful story of a group of bus drivers and crew in Dorset, England, who...

Mark Addy stars alongside Molly Windsor (‘Make Up’).

Gravitas Ventures has acquired North America rights to Richard Heap’s UK drama The Runaways, starring 2016 Screen Star of Tomorrow Molly Windsor.

The US distributor has set a provisional release of November 2020 for the title, which it acquired from UK-based sales agent Moviehouse Entertainment.

The Runaways follows the adventures of three children and their donkeys in a chase across the North York Moors. Mark Addy (The Full Monty) and Tara Fitzgerald (Brassed Off) star alongside Windsor, who recently lead Claire Oakley’s Make Up.

Heap wrote, directed and produced the film for Sheffield-based Slackjaw Film.

Garnett also worked on Earth Girls Are Easy and seminal TV drama Cathy Come Home.

Tony Garnett, the film and television producer behind Ken Loach’s breakthrough features, has died aged 83.

The British producer collaborated with Loach from 1965 to 1979 on films including Kes, Family Life and Black Jack as well as seminal TV drama Cathy Come Home.

World Productions, the company he co-founded in 1990, said in a statement: “After a short illness, Tony Garnett, the legendary TV and film producer… died around midday on January 12. Tony was a great man and an inspirational producer who will be sorely missed by everyone who knew him.

Ewan McGregor may be picking up his lightsaber again. The 48-year-old Scottish actor is in talks about reprising his role as the heartfelt but headstrong Jedi master known as Obi-Wan Kenobi in a yet-to-be-titled Disney+ series, Deadline has confirmed.

Details about the series following the Jedi master are being kept under wraps. McGregor played the younger version of the wise but irascible Star Wars icon in the three prequel films: The Phantom Menace (1999), Attack of the Clones (2002) and Revenge of the Sith (2005). McGregor also revisited the role to make a voice-only cameo in the Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015).

Plans to produce a stand-alone Kenobi feature film morphed into the current plan for a big-budget series for Disney+, just as the discussion of a Boba Fett film gave way to the similarly spirited The Mandalorian series.

It may sound like a demotion in status and priority (and a reaction to...

In the 1990s, she was everywhere – on film and TV and in the theatre – but then she almost disappeared. She talks about eschewing Hollywood – and being close to Harvey Weinstein

Although 1990s British pop culture is now generally discussed through the prism of Britpop, there was another equally pervasive storyline: the rise of young British female actors. Everyone from Kate Winslet to Sadie Frost was eagerly pitched as the next big thing, and the general assumption was that Hollywood was the focus and eternal fame the reward. But of the many young, posh and pretty female faces that smiled from the magazine covers then, few seemed as much of a sure thing as Tara Fitzgerald.

One 1996 interview described her as falling “somewhere in between established British actresses like Helena Bonham Carter and Emma Thompson and young upstarts like Winslet and Minnie Driver”, which was right, but underestimated how ubiquitous Fitzgerald was.

‘I knew we wouldn’t be able to show any genitals. I realised I should shoot from the back, with a row of bums’

Film4 and Miramax passed on The Full Monty because they thought it was too similar to Brassed Off. Then, after our film became a huge hit, Harvey Weinstein reportedly said: “I had two films about British unemployed guys who put on a show. In one of them, they took their clothes off – the others blew trumpets. And I chose the fucking trumpets.” Fox Searchlight ended up financing it very low-budget, for almost £3m.

In this likably daft Britcom, a motley group of blokes stave of their midlife crises by forming a synchronised swimming team

There are some very non-Love Island male bodies on display in this likably daft British comedy with echoes of The Full Monty and Brassed Off. We get refreshingly unselfconscious moobs and guts, sagging thighs and fading tattoos, belonging to guys sporting unsexy swimming caps and goggles. All that’s lacking is a verruca plaster floating in the foot baths.

It’s about a group of miscellaneous middle-aged blokes who form a deeply unlikely male synchronised swimming team, revolving around the local pool in various interlinked formations to musical accompaniment. But they’re making no creative progress. That’s until accountant Eric (Rob Brydon), suffering from a midlife crisis and bobbing disconsolately in the shallow end, joins their ranks. His numeric training tells him they need an extra man to...

The swimming is synchronized in “Sink or Swim,” and so is the scripting: Gilles Lellouche’s feelgood buddy comedy so painstakingly mimics the rhythms and motions of assorted men-in-quirky-crisis farces from across the Channel that it may as well have been titled “The Pool Monty.” Gathering an A-team of French thesps to play a decidedly less well-qualified squad of million-dollar mermen, this story of disenfranchised middle-aged schmoes who decide — for reasons barely clear to them, much less the viewer — to find renewed purpose in water ballet is as harmless as it is silly, but dampened by idle gags, empty characterization and an inordinate two-hour runtime. The reliably charismatic work of its players, notably ringleader Mathieu Amalric, keeps this somewhat soggy macaron diverting, but it’s hard to see audiences showing much interest outside France, where it should do, well, swimmingly.

A chirpily commercial enterprise through and through, “Sink or Swim...

Simon Brew Aug 14, 2017

Brassed Off! heads to the stage later this month, along with a full brass band...

We’ve no shortage of love for the wonderful Brassed Off! around these parts, Mark Herman’s superb film about a miners’ colliery band and how its future is threatened when the coal mine itself comes under threat of closure. The film is now 20 years old, but still feels relevant and fresh. And now, it’s the latest movie to make the jump from the big screen to the stage.

See related Deadpool: Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick interview Deadpool: Ryan Reynolds on channeling the character

Interestingly, this isn’t a massive West End endeavour, either. Rather, it’s the first time in nearly 40 years that the Wolverhampton Grand Theatre is putting together its own full scale production itself.

Gareth Tudor Prince is directing the new production, and Paul Allen has...

Exclusive: Stephen Graham, Dave Johns, Jill Halfpenny star in wrestling comedy; first look.

Stephen Graham (Boardwalk Empire), Dave Johns (I, Daniel Blake) and Jill Halfpenny (Humans) have been set for comedy Walk Like A Panther, which is now underway in the Yorkshire, England for Fox International Productions.

Screen can reveal the first look at the project, on which British director Dan Cadan makes his feature debut from his own original screenplay.

The ensemble British cast also includes Sue Johnston (Downton Abbey), Lindsey Coulson (EastEnders), Julian Sands (The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo), Jason Flemyng (Snatch), Stephen Tompkinson (Wild At Heart), Michael Socha (This Is England) and hip hop artist/poet Scroobius Pip (Taboo).

The story revolves around a group of ‘80s wrestlers who are forced to don the lycra one last time when their beloved local pub is threatened by closure.

Led by father-son duo, Mark (Graham) and Trevor Bolton (Johns), the unlikely bunch of underdog heroes...

Author: Emily Breen

This Easter weekend, two years on from the audacious robbery which inspired it, The Hatton Garden Job is released. The bold faced cheek of this crime captured the nation’s collective imaginations. Primarily because 4/5ths of the criminal gang behind the caper ought to have been at home with a pipe and slippers. Ronnie Thompson’s partially true, fancifully embellished, feature continues our great British tradition of championing the underdog. Even when those underdogs are being very naughty indeed!

Pitched as Oap’s 11 The Hatton Garden Job shines a light on the faces and places of a vanishing London. With that ‘one last shot’ theme lending the comic caper a poignancy closer to The Full Monty or Brassed off. Deep beneath the streets of Hatton Garden, we discussed those parallels with director Ronnie Thompson and the film’s star Phil Daniels (Quadrophenia). The interview took place in...

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It's funny, it's moving, it's brilliant: we look back at Brassed Off, starring the late, great Pete Postlethwaite...

This article contains spoilers for Brassed Off and The Full Monty.

“If this lot were seals or whales, you'd all be up in bloody arms. But they're not, are they? No, no they're not. They're just ordinary common-or-garden honest, decent human beings. And not one of them with an ounce of bloody hope left”. – Danny, Brassed Off

One of the things that I love about a certain subset of contemporary British comedies is their core of steel. That, hiding underneath some often very hefty belly laughs, there’s a political story, a foundation of social outrage, and a desire to address through cinema issues that often get swept under the carpet. It’s what keeps such films in my mind, long after the latest R-rated comedy screen filler has...

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Director Richard Bracewell chats to us about Bill, and the behind the scenes struggle to bring it to the screen.

Regular readers of Den Of Geek will well know that we're sizeable fans of the comedy Bill. It's available on DVD now, and we can't recommend it highly enough.

What wasn't so well known at the time of its release was that Bill went through a distributor change last year, which at one stage looked like it might derail a wide cinema release, and thus keep the movie away from many people's eyeballs. We thus spoke to director Richard Bracewell about the film, and the behind the scenes story of just what was going on...

Can we dig into the untold story underpinning Bill? In particular, the problems that most didn't see, about simply getting the film released? Can you take us through what happened? Because we...

David Stratton is the curator and patron of the inaugural Great Britain Retro Film Festival. Nineteen classic British films, rarely seen on the big screen, will feature in the festival from August 6-19 at the Hayden Orpheum Cremorne, Melbourne's Cinema Nova and the Windsor in Perth. Stratton says there will be many highlights, not least the opportunity to see some of these classic films painstakingly digitally restored and presented for the first time in Australia in the 4K format. .I.m really excited about this retrospective film festival, particularly as I spent my first twenty years in Britain and have always been very fond of British movies. To see this collection of films, on the big screen, as they were intended to be seen, is indeed a rare pleasure," he says. Highlights of the inaugural Great Britain Retro Film Festival include:

. Australian premiere screenings of The Tales of Hoffmann (1951), the...

From Muppet Treasure Island to Speed, we take a look at the 90s soundtracks that deserve another listen...

Ah, the 1990s. The decade that brought us The Lion King. Titanic. Quentin Tarantino. That wordless bathroom scene in Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet. Angelo Badalamenti's Twin Peaks. Duel of the Fates from Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. In the Mood for Love.

It was a good 10 years for film music, no doubt.

But scratch the surface of 1991 through 1999 and there are tons of good scores ready to spring a surprise on your ears. Some were attached to sorely underrated movies, others were overshadowed by wildly successful ones, and some have simply been forgotten in the passage of time.

Here, in no particular order, are the top 25 underappreciated film soundtracks from the 1990s.

1. Chaplin - John Barry

Okay, let's start with a big one. Richard Attenborough. Robert Downey Jr. John Barry.

The National Film Development Corporation (Nfdc) has announced the nine scripts selected for the second edition of the National Script Lab to be held from October 2014 – March 2015.

Actor Konkona Sensharma and editor Ranjeet Bahadur are among the nine writers whose scripts have been selected.

The first screenwriting workshop will be held from October 12 – 17, 2014 at the Courtyard Marriott, Chakan, Pune, followed by two more workshops and one-to-one consultation sessions over the next six months.

Marten Rabarts (Senior Consultant, Training and Development, Nfdc), Olivia Stewart (Producer of The House of Mirth, Brassed Off, and script consultant on The Lunchbox), and Rajat Kapoor, writer-director of Ankhon Dekhi will mentor these scriptwriters.

Also as part of the National Script Lab program, the screenwriters will also attend Nfdc Film Bazaar 2014 (Nov 20–24) to network and introduce their upcoming projects to both the Indian and international film industry delegates attending the market.

This year the Script Lab...

Here is a picture of a woman holding a pencil.

Finally arriving in cinemas today is the wonderful Pride, a film with a serious core, yet surrounded by some of the best laughs you'll have in a multiplex all year. Firmly in the tradition of films such as Brassed Off and The Full Monty, it's a cert for BAFTA nominations, and we wouldn't rule out a few Oscar nods either. You can read our review of the film right here. Please do go and support the film.

Anyway, here's another fairly shitty picture from the Fifty Shades Of Grey film. Never has a Hb pencil looked less erotic.

Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.

Movies News Simon Brew Fifty Shades Of Grey 12 Sep 2014 - 05:57 Pride...

Gay and lesbian activists and South Wales miners makes the unlikeliest of allies in this feelgood movie focused around the 1984 coal strike. After politically motivated Mark (Ben Schnetzer) forms Lesbian and Gays Support the Miners group he fails to persuade the National Union of Mineworkers so heads off to the Welsh Dulais colliery and wins over their leader Dai (Paddy Considine) and poetry-loving ex miner (Bill Nighy). Sharp, sassy and very funny, this joins that revered company of industrial British movies Brassed Off and The Full Monty.

Why a British film about the 1984 miners' strike, and a lesbian and gay support group, is the comedy of the year to date...

The truth, goes the saying, is often stranger than fiction.

Pride, for instance, is set in 1984, and tells the story of a small group called Lsgm, or Lesbians And Gays Support The Miners. Said group sparks into life in the midst of a Gay Pride march in London, when a 20-year old by the name of Mark Ashton (Ben Schnetzer) argues that miners have been as badly treated by the establishment as they have, and thus starts collecting money. As it turns out, quite a bit of money.

The problem? Once that money is raised, finding a community of miners willing to accept the cash is easier said than done. Manly miners taking money off a gay support group, in a period when prejudice - as the...

Cannes – In socially conscious Brit comedy-dramas of the late 1990s like The Full Monty, Brassed Off and Billy Elliot, exuberant self-expression provided at least a temporary antidote to the death of industries and the suffocation of the working-class communities that depended on them for their livelihood. A crowd-pleasing throwback to those films that pushes every formulaic button but is no less entertaining for it, Pride chronicles the reluctant romance between the workers and families involved in the bitter 1984 miners’ strike and a group of London gay and lesbian activists who were among their biggest

read more...

The director's new film is an elegy for pit workers, while up in the north-east the theme of this year's Av is 'extraction'. Together they explore the legacy of a hammer blow to workers' power

Film-maker Bill Morrison is feeling a little rueful. "Striking was once an effective means of leveraging power. Today's striking worker may feel fortunate to wake up and still have a job." He's reflecting on his film The Miners' Hymns, a collaboration with Icelandic musician Jóhann Jóhannsson, which trawls through hundreds of hours of archival footage of mines in the north-east of England to fashion an elegy for the workers, brass bands, local communities and unions that sustained the region throughout much of the 20th century. This month there will be many articles, radio programmes and TV documentaries marking the 30th anniversary of the beginning of the miners' strike: few will be as beautiful or as...

Odd List Ryan Lambie Simon Brew 13 Feb 2014 - 06:39

Our voyage through history's underappreciated films arrives at the year 2008 - another great year for lesser-seen gems...

For some, 2008 will be memorable as the year of The Dark Knight, with its astonishingly unhinged turn from the late Heath Ledger. Alternatively, it could be remembered as the year a legion Indiana Jones fans left cinemas glum-faced, having sat through Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull.

Elsewhere, Meryl Streep and Pierce Brosnan sang and danced on a Greek island in Mamma Mia!, while Will Smith played an alcoholic superhero in Hancock. But as usual, 2008 offered plenty of watchable movies outside the top 10, which is where we swoop in - like Hancock after a bottle of gin.

So as usual, here's our selection of 25 underappreciated films from the year 2008 - starting with a British horror film starring Michael Fassbender...

25. Eden Lake

James Watkins had written...

Odd List Ryan Lambie Simon Brew 14 Nov 2013 - 06:19

The overlooked greats of the year 1998 come under the spotlight in our list of its 25 underappreciated movies...

Dominated as it was by the financial success of two giant killer asteroid movies, gross-out comedy hit There's Something About Mary and Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, 1998 proved to be an extraordinary year for cinema.

Okay, so history doesn't look back too fondly on Roland Emmerich's mishandled Godzilla remake, and Lethal Weapon 4 was hardly the best buddy-cop flick ever made, despite its handsome profit. But search outside the top-10 grossing films of that year, and you'll find all kinds of spectacular modern classics: Peter Weir's wonderful The Truman Show, John Frankenheimer's rock-solid thriller Ronin, and Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line.

Then there was The Big Lebowski, the Coen brothers' sublime comedy that has since become a deserved and oft-quoted cult favourite.

News Simon Brew 13 Nov 2013 - 06:44

Officer And A Gentleman a romcom? The Full Monty a comedy? The Fox And The Hound all cute and cuddly? Er...

A couple of weekends back, three films converged on my eyeballs. I watched the apparent uplifting love story, An Officer And A Gentleman. The Spielbergian family adventure Batteries Not Included. And I caught a bit of Disney's The Fox And The Hound for the first time in a decade or so.

Each of these films, and the others I'm about to discuss, has a reputation of being something warm, cuddly, friendly and easy. But is that the minds of the consensus playing tricks? Because the truth is that there are films that we tend to remember as being one thing, that turn out to be far, far darker. Some of that is down how the film was originally marketed. Some down to how...

Odd List Ryan Lambie Simon Brew 31 Oct 2013 - 07:01

We train our sights on the year 1996, and the 25 underappreciated films it has to offer...

Independence Day managed to revive both the alien invasion movie and the disaster flick in 1996, and just about every other mainstream picture released that year lived in its saucer-shaped shadow.

Yet beyond the aerial battles of Independence Day, the flying cows in Twister, and the high-wire antics of Tom Cruise in Brian De Palma's Mission: Impossible, there sat an entire library of lesser-known and underappreciated movies.

As part of our attempts to highlight the unsung greats of the 90s, here's our selection of 25 such films from 1996 - the year chess champion Garry Kasparov lost to the might of the computer Deep Blue, and the year comedy star Jim Carrey starred in an unexpectedly dark tale of obsession...

25. The Cable Guy

We can't sit here and...

Review Aliya Whiteley 15 Oct 2013 - 06:26

Aliya finds that this selection of classic Ealing movies from the '30s and '40s provides a surprisingly solid few hours of entertainment

Ealing Studios has been around since 1902 and their Rarities Collection is proving to be a fascinating visit to their vaults. Sitting down to watch these DVDs has the feeling of stepping back in time: buying a cinema ticket for 1/ 6, planning to have an ice cream during the interval, looking for a bit of excitement or entertainment, and perhaps not expecting too much from the feature except to be transported away for a few hours. I’m probably seriously over-romanticising the whole experience, but I do recommend watching these films with the curtains drawn and a Lyons Maid lolly. I’m a big fan of the Strawberry Mivvi myself.

The first film in Volume Seven certainly does transport you. Eureka Stockade...

Before British cop drama Harrigan hits our cinema screens on September 20, we had the great pleasure of speaking to the lead role, Detective Harrigan himself, Stephen Tompkinson.

Harrigan – which is director Vince Woods debut feature film, is set in a bleak, 1970s North East, where a close-to-retirement cop Barry Harrigan returns to his hometown with a score to settle. Tompkinson, who has made a name for himself in films such as Brassed Off and TV shows such as In Deep, speaks of his own experience in Britain from the time this film is set, and what attracted him to the role – while he reflects on what has been a triumphant, and certainly expansive career.

So what first attracted you to the role of Harrigan?

Vincent Woods, the film’s director, came to see me the year before we started shooting. I was doing live theatre in Newcastle in a play by my friend Shaun Prendergast,...

Feature Simon Brew 28 Jun 2013 - 07:11

Ever watched a big movie, and stopped with a jolt when a star of a British sitcom pops up? Us too...

This feature is all the fault of the late Richard Marner. As the incompetent Colonel in 'Allo 'Allo, he built a performance that was indelible in our eyes. Thus, when he turned up in a big Hollywood thriller as the President of Russia, we unsuccessfully stifled a guffaw. A big guffaw.

And it got us thinking: what other times has a British sitcom star appeared out of the blue in a big movie, causing a sedentary double take from the comfort of our local Odeon? Glad you asked.

Two things. Firstly, this isn't designed to be a complete list, and also, we've covered films made after the actor or actress confirmed rose to prominence in a sitcom. Oh, and another thing: none of...

In 1982, the then archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, infuriated Mrs Thatcher by striking a note of reconciliation at the Falklands war memorial service, asking the congregation to pray for families on both sides of the conflict who had lost loved ones. Is it too much to hope that a similar note of reconciliation might be struck at Mrs Thatcher's funeral in the same cathedral? In our deeply divided country, many communities hold Margaret Thatcher and her government responsible for enormous suffering.

Whatever views are held, surely here is an opportunity for the established church to once more ask the nation to remember in prayer all who now suffer from the blight of poverty and unemployment. The listeners can make up their minds as to its cause and Mrs Thatcher will have to plead her case to a greater judge.

Rev Canon Adrian Alker

Wetherby, West Yorkshire

• With reference to your...

Former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who died Monday at 87, had a much greater impact on the world of film than just inspiring an Oscar-winning role for Meryl Streep in 2011's "The Iron Lady." The woman who led Great Britain from 1979 to 1990 cast a long shadow over filmmaking in her country during her time in office, inspiring much reaction (pro and con) among filmmakers, inspiring some classic movies, and unwittingly giving major career boosts to some of our era's greatest movie talents. The conventional wisdom about Thatcher's impact on pop culture was that performing artists, being a lefty, proletarian bunch, hated her with a passion. Certainly the British musicians of the '80s, from Billy Bragg to Pink Floyd, composed numerous bitter protest anthems condemning her as a war-mongering tyrant who was strangling the working class. But the movies British filmmakers created during her three terms in office were a lot more ambivalent,...

Paul Andrew Williams made an impressive debut in 2006 with London to Brighton, a brutally realistic crime movie that he followed with a couple of less good but still enjoyable thrillers. With Song for Marion he changes direction, pulling together into a crowd-pleasing, tear-jerking package some elements of Brassed Off, Calendar Girls, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Quartet and TV's The Choir. Shot around Tyneside and Durham, but with no particular regional feeling, it focuses on the long-married lower-middle-class couple, Marion and Arthur, both well played by Vanessa Redgrave and Terence Stamp.

She's ebullient, outgoing and terminally ill. He's gruff, laconic, alienated from their son and incapable of showing his feelings. Moreover, he refuses to join the choir of chirpy, eccentric old folk called the "OAPz", being organised by a patronising young music teacher (Gemma Arterton). Marion represents the life force (working-class division), Arthur the embodiment of British emotional repression. Everything that follows is as predictable,...

Paul Andrew Williams made an impressive debut in 2006 with London to Brighton, a brutally realistic crime movie that he followed with a couple of less good but still enjoyable thrillers. With Song for Marion he changes direction, pulling together into a crowd-pleasing, tear-jerking package some elements of Brassed Off, Calendar Girls, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Quartet and TV's The Choir. Shot around Tyneside and Durham, but with no particular regional feeling, it focuses on the long-married lower-middle-class couple, Marion and Arthur, both well played by Vanessa Redgrave and Terence Stamp.

She's ebullient, outgoing and terminally ill. He's gruff, laconic, alienated from their son and incapable of showing his feelings. Moreover, he refuses to join the choir of chirpy, eccentric old folk called the "OAPz", being organised by a patronising young music teacher (Gemma Arterton). Marion represents the life force (working-class division), Arthur the embodiment of British emotional repression. Everything that follows is as predictable,...

The success of last year’s Oap fish-out-of-water yarn The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel was solid proof that the cinema was more than capable of enticing a demographic outside of those flocking to witness the latest superhero firework displays.

As studios and filmmakers are coming around to catering for the grey pound (and let’s face it, cinema should be there to tell stories which straddle age barriers anyway), Song for Marion arrives with an emotional wallop and an enjoyably feel-good vibe which should see a fair share of wrinkled bottoms on seats for the next couple of weeks.

Using the world explored in the 2007 documentary Young @ Heart as a basis, this somewhat radical departure from London to Brighton and Cherrytree Lane director Paul Andrew Williams is a heartfelt and surprisingly touching look at loss and love, buoyed by two stunning performances from its elderly leads.

Vanessa Redgrave is the titular character,...

Director: Paul Andrew Williams; Screenwriter: Paul Andrew Williams; Starring: Terence Stamp, Gemma Arterton, Vanessa Redgrave; Christopher Eccleston, Anne Reid; Running time: 93 mins; Certificate: PG

Growing old gracefully is easier said than done for Terence Stamp and Vanessa Redgrave, especially in a film that borders on patronising the elderly. Tears of sadness and laughter are quite forcefully jerked by writer/director Paul Andrew Williams; thankfully his leads are able to rise above, playing an old married couple whose life together is rocked by cancer and choir lessons.

Initially, Stamp keeps his emotions bottled up as Arthur, except when he's lashing out at his son (Christopher Eccleston) and members of the local old folks' choir presided over by a young teacher, Elizabeth (a rosy-cheeked Gemma Arterton). Arthur is angry most of the time, but even more so when wife Marion (Redgrave) is diagnosed with terminal cancer.

Though Marion is dying, she lives...

'What does love feel like? I can't remember'

Sue Johnston, 69, grew up on Merseyside and had various jobs before training as an actor. Between 1982 and 1990, she played Sheila Grant in the TV soap Brookside. More recently, she has starred in BBC1's Waking The Dead and The Royle Family. Her films include Brassed Off. Johnston's new comedy, Lapland, begins on 1 February on BBC1.

When were you happiest?

At the birth of my son, Joel, and then equally, last June, when my first grandchild, Rory, was born.

What is your earliest memory?

When I was two and on holiday with my parents at Butlins in Filey. Two girls were playing with me one day and swinging me round by my arms. One came out of the socket and I had to go to hospital to have it put back in.

What was your most embarrassing moment?

Wetting my knickers in junior school laughing at a joke.

To accompany the first teaser poster released late last week, HBO have unveiled a date-centric first promo trailer for the upcoming third season of "Game of Thrones".

It's only graphics, but there's also a bit of voiceover that sounds like "Brassed Off" and "Waking the Dead" actress Tara Fitzgerald, who will play Stannis' wife Selyse Baratheon. The quote: "The great war is between life and death, ice and fire. If we lose, the night will never end."...

Game Of Thrones resumes filming for its third season this month in Belfast, and we have a couple of new names that might be joining them: British actors Mackenzie Crook - who most American fans will know from the Pirates Of The Carribean movies, and most Brit fans from tv's The Office - and Tara Fitzgerald (Brassed Off, Rancid Aliminium). According to Iftn.. Crook, best known for his role as Gareth Keenan in ‘The Office’, is reportedly set to play Vargo ‘The Goat’ Hoat in the HBO series, while Fitzgerald, a regular on BBC series ‘Waking the Dead’, is rumoured to play Selyse Florent, the wife of Stannis Baratheon, played by Stephen Dillane ). Representatives of both Crook and Fitzgerald were unable to comment on the casting news, but it is expected all will be revealed when the casting announcements are made official at Comic-Con in California on Friday July 13.

So here is a slight change of pace – I'll be branching out into other areas apart from Doctor Who, including film franchises, TV shows and comedies. How's about kicking off with a scary movie series then? Newbies be warned – there are so many spoilers in this article, that Doctor Who's River Song would explode with smug rage.

By the middle of the 1990s, the horror film had seemingly died for good. Just like Dracula slowly rotting away to a skeleton, the horror genre had slowly ebbed away for the past decade or so. Hammer Horror classics from the 1960s and 1970s had given way to popular horror franchises in the 1980s such as Friday The 13th and A Nightmare On Elm Street, but even by the mid-1990s, these had seemingly vanished into the ether. However, acclaimed director Wes Craven along with Kevin Williamson were to breathe new life into the rotting genre.

'At my first audition, they asked me things like: How are you? It didn't seem hard enough'

What got you started?

An uncle I loved got me into Fred Astaire when I was young. We had a scratchy old album of the Top Hat musical. I'd pretend I could tap-dance and my uncle would say: "Go, Tara, go!"

What was your big breakthrough?

My first job: a film called Hear My Song. I was still at Drama Centre, an intense, method-based school in London, and after three years of that, I couldn't believe the audition. It involved things like people saying: "Hello, how are you?" It didn't seem hard enough.

Are women in theatre and film under excessive pressure to look good?

Everybody's under pressure to look good – men and women. People want to see beauty, something above the ordinary. Think of what the Hollywood greats put themselves through: corsetry,...

Hang around in Calderdale, and you could well end up in a movie. Our Hebden Bridge outpost, Jill Robinson, reels off some the greats

Last year saw the premiere at the Hebden Bridge Picture House of the film A Calder Valley Christmas, with local people (including this outpost of the Northerner) queuing around the block to be among the first to see it. Directed by local film-maker Nick Wilding, the piece combines archive material, reminiscences about bad winters, carols, poems, scenes of local Mummers and other traditions, and monologues by the incomparable Ian Dewhirst MBE. (He actually lives in Keighley, but he tells such a good tale that he is often invited over the hill.) Like all the best films, there is an accompanying song, Christmas in Hebden Bridge, performed by children from local schools.

However, this is by no means the only film to have used the dramatic natural...