British Cinema - vo.rs

A Field in England: Wheatley's Monochrome Bad Trip

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 12:00:00 +0000

Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England (2013) is the film he made when nobody could stop him, and you can feel that freedom in every frame. Shot in twelve days, in black and white, for very little money, released the same day across cinemas, television, DVD and video-on-demand in a distribution stunt that Film4 dressed up as an experiment, it is the most purely formal thing Wheatley has done. There is a hedge, a field, a rope, some mushrooms, and five men in seventeenth-century clothes who walk into the frame sane and stagger out of it wrecked. That is nearly the whole plot. The film is a machine for turning an English meadow into hell.

Get Carter (1971): Caine, Concrete, and No Redemption

Fri, 23 Feb 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Michael Caine spent the 1960s playing charmers — the cheeky spy, the cockney lothario, the working-class boy with a twinkle. In 1971 he walked into Get Carter and turned all of that inside out. Jack Carter is charm weaponised: the same smooth voice, the same crisp suit, aimed now at hurting people. It is the best performance of Caine’s career, and it anchors what has a strong claim to be the coldest, hardest crime film Britain has ever produced.

The Long Good Friday: The British Gangster Film That Saw Thatcher Coming

Wed, 10 Jan 2024 11:00:00 +0000

There is a moment near the start of The Long Good Friday when Harold Shand, London gangster, stands on the deck of his yacht on the Thames and gestures at the derelict docklands around him. He talks about a great city reborn, foreign money pouring in, the wasteland transformed into gleaming towers. He is pitching American mobsters on a property deal. Watching it now, made in 1979 and released in 1980, the scene is uncanny. Harold is describing, almost to the letter, the Docklands redevelopment that Margaret Thatcher’s governments would push through across the following decade. A gangster film accidentally became a prophecy.