United Kingdom

  • Peter Greenaway – The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989)

    1981-1990ArthousePeter GreenawayUnited Kingdom

    Quote:
    The wife of a barbaric crime boss engages in a secretive romance with a gentle bookseller between meals at her husband’s restaurant. Food, colour coding, sex, murder, torture and cannibalism are the exotic fare in this beautifully filmed but brutally uncompromising modern fable which has been interpreted as an allegory for Thatcherism.Read More »

  • Roy Ward Baker – Asylum (1972)

    1971-1980HorrorRoy Ward BakerSci-FiUnited Kingdom

    Synopsis:
    A young psychiatrist interviews four inmates in a mental asylum to satisfy a requirement for employment. He hears stories about 1) the revenge of a murdered wife, 2) a tailor who makes a suit with some highly unusual qualities, 3) a woman who questions her sanity when it appears that her brother is conspiring against her, and 4) a man who builds tiny toy robots with lifelike human heads.Read More »

  • Peter Greenaway – The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982)

    1981-1990ArthousePeter GreenawayUnited Kingdom

    Quote:
    Mr. Neville, a cocksure young artist is contracted by Mrs. Herbert, the wife of a wealthy landowner, to produce a set of twelve drawings of her husband’s estate, a contract which extends much further than either the purse or the sketchpad. The sketches themselves prove of an even greater significance than supposed upon the discovery of the body of Mr. Herbert.Read More »

  • Peter Greenaway – The Belly of an Architect (1987)

    1981-1990ArchitectureArthousePeter GreenawayUnited Kingdom

    Quote:
    STOURLEY KRACKLITE (Brian Dennehy), the central figure in Peter Greenaway’s ”Belly of an Architect,” is at one point seen reflected in the central panel of a triptych mirror in his Rome apartment, wearing a blood-red robe and flanked by multiple Xerox copies of classically sculpted abdomens, copies he has made from photographs of Roman statuary. It’s a perfect moment, or at least the kind of perfect moment Mr. Greenaway favors: orderly, symmetrical and obscure, offering great compositional beauty but no compelling reason why its riddles require solution.Read More »

  • Lindsay Anderson – Free Cinema, 1956 – ? An Essay on Film by Lindsay Anderson (1985)

    1981-1990DocumentaryLindsay AndersonUnited Kingdom


    A documentary about the history of the Free Cinema movement, made by one of it’s greatest proponents, Lindsay Anderson, to commemorate British Film Year in 1985.

    Produced by Kevin Brownlow and David Gill.

    Unlike Richard Attenborough’s celebratory episode of the same series, or Alan Parker’s more aggressive show, which was balanced between celebrating the greats and attacking Parker’s bugbears, Greenaway and Jarman and the BFI, Anderson’s show accentuates the negative, painting an image of a British cinema in terminal artistic decline and trashing the ambitions and approach of British Film Year itself. It’s mordantly funny and very savage.Read More »

  • Peter Greenaway – A Zed & Two Noughts (1985)

    1981-1990ArthousePeter GreenawayUnited Kingdom

    Quote:
    I know one fact about this didactic director, Peter Greenaway—that he is a painter—and that is all I need to know. Everything falls in to place. He composes every frame, meticulously, based on the fundamentals of classical design and structure as if any frame could be snatched from the reel and hung at the Tate. This is the art of cinematography, and he is a master.

    A summary of A Zed and Two Noughts, or most any Greenaway film would be like briefly describing the Sistine Chapel—and it takes the Big Book to do that. This film is a lesson in dichotomy: life/death, birth/decay, everything and nothing. He reminds us that our own redemption lies in the cyclical aspect of nature and the blending of these universal opposites into the dizzying blur of existence.Read More »

  • Ralph Thomas – Quest for Love (1971)

    1971-1980DramaRalph ThomasSci-FiUnited Kingdom

    After a scientific experiment goes horribly wrong during a demonstration, a scientist finds himself trapped in an alternate reality that bears some similarities to our own, but also has some striking differences. In this other reality the Second World War had never occurred, mankind had not yet traveled into Space and Mt. Everest had not yet been conquered, just to name a few things. Also in this other reality he is no longer a scientist but rather a well known author. He also finds that he is married to a beautiful woman who he instantly falls in love with but who his alternate self never cared for.Read More »

  • Gillian Wearing – Arena: Everything is Connected – George Eliot’s Life (2019)

    2011-2020BBCDocumentaryGillian WearingUnited Kingdom


    Gillian Wearing’s Arena documentary Everything is Connected (BBC Four) is a quietly innovative biography of an author whose works still resonate with their readers and the country within which she wrote. Wearing and George Eliot are a sympathetic match, both playing with a multiplicity of voices, delighting in the layman’s opinion as well as that of the expert. We see Eliot’s intellectuals, but also the modern version of her farmers, priests, and wayward sons. Wearing puts her words in their mouths, allowing them at times to slip into one another, blurring the boundaries between the speakers, their subjects, and their surroundings.Read More »

  • Paul McGuigan – Searching for Sam: Adrian Dunbar on Samuel Beckett (2019)

    2011-2020BBCDocumentaryPaul McGuiganUnited Kingdom

    “If the work Adrian Dunbar is best known for – the police drama Line of Duty – left us with the tantalising riddle about the identity of the master criminal H, his new documentary tries to unmask an even more evasive man: Samuel Beckett. In Searching for Sam: Adrian Dunbar on Samuel Beckett (BBC Four), the actor we know and love as Superintendent Ted Hastings follows the reportedly too-small-shoe’d footsteps of his great hero.Read More »

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